YOu'd think that....
periodic inspection and maintenance of these guides and pipes would have been baked into the initial design and concept of operation........
Posts by Sparkus
461 publicly visible posts • joined 20 May 2020
CERN sends AI-trained robot mice scurrying through LHC beam pipes
To stop crims, Google starts dismantling residential proxy network they use to hide
25 years of meatbags permanently in space on the ISS
Perplexity shows how to run monster AI models more efficiently on aging GPUs, AWS networks
Senate bill would require companies to report AI layoffs as job cuts reach 20-year high in October
Tesla board wants to grant Musk $1T in stock, Norway wealth fund says nope
Turns out the end of Windows 10 is good for something: The PC refresh cycle
Friday 17th October 2025 16:18 GMT
More bubbles are going to burst.....
The PC industry has been in a more-or-less steady-state for a decade or more. In the developed world, everyone that needs or wants a personal computer has one. In the third-world, folks are getting on very well with end-of-life cast offs and increasingly, smartphones.
The PC industry and all of the hangers-on have financed and sustained themselves via boom boom boom cycles driven by OS and Office suite 'upgrades'. Those upgrades have been driven by (mostly) UI changes that did little to add real world functionality while requiring more and more compute resources to function.
The contemporary compute and computer paradigms are proving to be anything but eco friendly and those nice non-polluting white buildings / bit barns are blasting the hell out of any energy conservation / reasonable use / social responsibility agreements and targets that have been set.
It is so very easy to find multiple arguments against the current and next few generations of changes to compute infrastructure (including AI) and any positives often require financial, mental, and ethnical gymnastics that only the most jaded and narcissistic advocates can bring forward.
Starlink is burning up one or two satellites a day in Earth’s atmosphere
Software CEO tells Catholic uni panel AI won't take out jobs, but it could take out brains
Slow Wi-Fi? Add houseplants to the list of suspects
AMD tries to catch CUDA with performance-boosting ROCm 7 software
China slaps 1-hour deadline on reporting serious cyber incidents
Office 2016 and 2019 face October 14 execution date
JLR stuck in neutral as losses skyrocket amid cyberattack cleanup
Microsoft readies Windows 11 25H2 while Windows 10 circles the drain
Nano11 cuts Windows 11 down to size, grabbing just 2.8 GB of disk space
Senator blasts Microsoft for 'dangerous, insecure software' that helped pwn US hospitals
Oracle VirtualBox licensing tweak lies in wait for the unwary
Orbital datacenters subject to launch stress, nasty space weather, and expensive house calls
Print Screen is for noobs: Capture images in Windows like a pro
I just deleted my entire social media presence before visiting the US – and I'm a citizen
Security company hired a used car salesman to build a website, and it didn't end well
Saturday 12th July 2025 15:47 GMT
NO, but......
I was once hired in on a consultancy with a rather large global medical device firm dual-homed in the US and Ireland (you figure it out).
As the JD for the consultancy grew in scope and responsibility each week, I finally figured out that I had been brought in to cover up for a pair of (not married to each other) senior managers who were having an affair on company time (and on company property, ick) whist launching their independent real estate business.
Well paid or not, the last straw was my walking into one of their offices and interrupting a snog-session.
IBM moves scientists out of Almaden Research Center
Post Office and Fujitsu execs 'should have known' Horizon IT system was flawed
What if Microsoft just turned you off? Security pro counts the cost of dependency
Friday 27th June 2025 21:37 GMT
or some 'free' final security rollup up
kills rando system features or even the entire box......
Farfetched? There are already software makers who have kill-switches built in to their products. Can't connect to the licensing servers 6x a year? Software refuses to start. Not a large stretch to apply the same to operating systems or IoT devices or cable modems or whatever.......
Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up
FAA gives SpaceX the nod for Starship Flight 9 but doubles the danger zone
FreeBSD fans rally round zVault upstart
Google tries to greenwash massive AI energy consumption with another vague nuclear deal
Soviet probe from 1972 set to return to Earth ... in May 2025
AI infrastructure investment may be $8T shot in the dark
Intel's latest CEO Lip Bu Tan: 'You deserve better'
IBM scores perfect 10 ... vulnerability in mission-critical OS AIX
The NHS security culture problem is a crisis years in the making
Microsoft trims more CPUs from Windows 11 compatibility list
Tuesday 25th February 2025 17:15 GMT
The only thing keeping my last two personal machines on Win10
are two incalcitrant graphics/imaging/video programs that do not have a Linux analogue.
Yet anyway. Both companies have made recent public statements about shifting their development to Rocky Linux and using that as a base for their Mac and Windows desktop version.
Until then, my personal machines boot into Rocky Linux, then VirtualBox fires off a Windows instance.
Any regular ElReg user (grey-beard appearance not required) will be using this, or similar to manage their home Windows systems. It's not hard but it is beyond Great-Uncle Bob and Grandma Florence.
Why SAP may be mulling 2030 end of maintenance for legacy ERP
Early mornings, late evenings, weekends. Useless users always demand support
Saturday 8th February 2025 14:46 GMT
I once returned a pager
to a group manager after their third-shift operators called me in on a "printer problem" that simply required a fresh box of fan-fold.
The pager was frozen in a block of ice and being a 1980s vintage Motorola, worked fine after being defrosted. That, and a billing for multiple hours of time at double standard rates (after-hours, weekend, etc) I never had this problem again.
When it comes to AI ROI, IT decision-makers not convinced
UK biz dept overspent by £208M prepping to pay workers hurt in Post Office IT scandal
China's DeepSeek just emitted a free challenger to OpenAI's o1 – here's how to use it on your PC
Monday 27th January 2025 16:30 GMT
well, well, that was quick...
Absent and real or imagined 'national security implications' as long as the thing is 90% of Copilot/OpenAI at 10% of the price, I can't see why any organization would not use it. The implications for all those many MANY billions of $$$ spent and the people who spent them are left as an exercise for the reader.......
Seriously, last years LLM stars and the spending behind them were pretty much matched and in some scenarios obsoleted by the inevitable challenger. Only surprise here is that the challenger went public in early 2025 when I was thinking late 2025.
What happens when we can’t just build bigger AI datacenters anymore?
Sunday 26th January 2025 21:03 GMT
Power *and* cooling
are the limiting factors.
The greed of local councils to fill unused industrial estates and 'idle' farmland will never be satisfied. Some other limiting factor, such as moral outrage over the unproductive consumption of energy resources and adverse impact on the reliability of energy grids will have to come into play......
GPU constraints? There are some arguments that a 256 bit enhancement to AltiVec has the potential to outperform Nvidia silicon on far cheaper and less energy hungry hardware. if that come to fruition (Power 11/12 anyone?) all real-estate and GWatt calculations are off.
And remember, at the end of The Forbin Project the Colossus / Guardian symbiote demanded that the island of Malta be evacuated and hollowed out as an AI fortress / core.
Why is Big Tech hellbent on making AI opt-out?
Friday 24th January 2025 20:53 GMT
Easy
.......and I've been part of discussions on this very topic over the past six months...
If the people who have spent hundreds of Billions of Dollars on 'AI' can't begin to show positive usage trends, regardless of real-world usefulness of those said-same AI applications, people will start to lose their jobs and bankers / investors will start to call in their notes.....
SpaceX and Blue Origin both face FAA mishap probes
Tech support fill-in given no budget, no help, no training, and no empathy for his plight
Friday 17th January 2025 17:09 GMT
stealth-upgrade of multiple server OSs....
Notoriously lazy SAP Basis team who refused to update their SAP documentation and had the company stuck on AIX 3.2.55 (!!!) for a year after IBM pulled support. They were satisfied with the 92% uptime of the overall SAP installation because it was 'better' than the 85% reliability of the old SAP on System 1.
Leaned heavily on the (then very new) AIX transparent/no reboot OS upgrade and patch capabilities. Took over three weeks to upgrade a good-sized farm of servers one at a time. Took another 6 months before the Basis team noticed both the upgrade and the suddenly improved uptime numbers to 4 nines.
This particular story goes on for 3-4 more years and (IMHO) deserves both it's own article on El Reg as well as an SAP whitepaper and IBM Redbook.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
