* Posts by Sparkus

435 publicly visible posts • joined 20 May 2020

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FAA gives SpaceX the nod for Starship Flight 9 but doubles the danger zone

Sparkus

Sounds like Max-Q

happening as a higher speed and lower altitude than expected (or built for).

FreeBSD fans rally round zVault upstart

Sparkus

I can see (and hope for)...

a merge of the Xigma and zVault projects....

Google tries to greenwash massive AI energy consumption with another vague nuclear deal

Sparkus

The worm has turned....

'greenwashing' energy pigs now involves attaching them to nuclear generation projects.......

Soviet probe from 1972 set to return to Earth ... in May 2025

Sparkus

I predict

....the Glorious Return of Nikita Khrushchev having been sustained in frozen stasis these past 50 years.

His reported death in 1971 was but a distraction.

AI infrastructure investment may be $8T shot in the dark

Sparkus

Dear 'Executives'

Told ya so.

Sincerely, Everyone

Intel's latest CEO Lip Bu Tan: 'You deserve better'

Sparkus

Power

7, 8, 9, 10, Tellum......

IBM scores perfect 10 ... vulnerability in mission-critical OS AIX

Sparkus

So much for....

forcibly retiring the US based AIX brain trust and outsourcing everything AIX-related overseas.......

The NHS security culture problem is a crisis years in the making

Sparkus

The magic word is.....

Accountability. Right now this is an anonymous bucket into which are tosses study after study. Need to humanize this and make it more impactful

Until Managing Directors and CIO/CISOs start losing their jobs and pay packets, not much will improve or change.

Microsoft trims more CPUs from Windows 11 compatibility list

Sparkus

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

Sparkus

One sales-droids claim of sluggish

is an Enterprise Director / VPs view of stable, cost-effective, predictable, secure, and reliable..

Early mornings, late evenings, weekends. Useless users always demand support

Sparkus

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

Sparkus

How much capital and market liquidity

is going to be consumed / destroyed by this bubble?

UK biz dept overspent by £208M prepping to pay workers hurt in Post Office IT scandal

Sparkus

If true....

Recover the funds from HM employees, managers, and directors salaries and pension plans. I 'suspect' that a list of those responsible for the persecution of Royal Mail employees is locked up, yet easily at hand.

China's DeepSeek just emitted a free challenger to OpenAI's o1 – here's how to use it on your PC

Sparkus

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?

Sparkus

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?

Sparkus

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

Sparkus

Pieces of Starwhip

in particular heat tiles, are appearing for sale on FB and ebay. legit or not?

Tech support fill-in given no budget, no help, no training, and no empathy for his plight

Sparkus

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.

Apple solves broken news alerts by turning off the AI

Sparkus

Anyone remember...

The first 18 months of Apple Maps?

Enterprises in for a shock when they realize power and cooling demands of AI

Sparkus

Dear "enterprises"

Told ya so....

Respectfully,

Everyone

Intel debuts laptop silicon that doesn't qualify for Microsoft's 'Copilot+ PC' badge

Sparkus

Patiently waiting for......

OpenCL and DirectX performance numbers for Xe2.

Eight things that should not have happened last year, but did

Sparkus

No mention of....

multiple outages **and** breaches from Optum?

A New Year's gift from Microsoft: Surprise, your scanners don't work

Sparkus

VueScan....

Continues to work for both USB and ethernet-connected scanners.

Those of who who are in anguish because there are no current driver sets for your older scanners will want to check out VueScan.......

Even Netflix struggles to identify and understand the cost of its AWS estate

Sparkus

Even Amazon Prime Video....

has reportedly abandoned the AWS micro-services model as unworkable at scale.....

US airspace closures, lack of answers deepen East Coast drone mystery

Sparkus

Buzzfeed.....

Even in its' death throws, Buzzfeed occasionally gets something right/funny.......

https://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/new-jersey-drone-reactions

Altman to Musk: Don't go full supervillain – that's so un-American

Sparkus

The only competition so far....

Is who can spend the most money.

Day after nuclear power vow, Meta announces largest-ever datacenter powered by fossil fuels

Sparkus

Data centers are not capital investments for teh local economy

After construction and build out completes, the only taxes paid are those via payroll tax.

Massive data centers are often attracted to tax-exempt property and 'value' agreements with local authorities. Over the 10-15 year life of a data center, this can save more money that low cost land, construction, and utilities.

Asda hits the brakes on tech tweaks to avoid festive fiasco

Sparkus

How is this news?

One of the banks I consult for has their end-of-year freeze running from 01 Dec to 15 Jan every year.

Retailers in general freeze the state of their systems, excepting critical system-outage kind of work, during similar time frames.

This practice has been a known 'feature' of IT work for decades.

Kyndryl insiders say there's little new business

Sparkus

It Gets Worse...

Kyndryl is spending large $$$ on 'pundits' and PR-focused 'executives' to keep clients happy and fed. K knows deep down that their client base is no longer beholden or loyal to an ex-IBM structure; as soon as the winds or tides change, clients will be off looking for pricing and performance guarantees from other players.

SpaceX Dragon gives ISS a helping hand with altitude

Sparkus

plenty of power available on ISS

time to hook up some of those fancy-new Xenon-electric ion thrusters?

Satya Nadella asked for 50% cut in his incentive payout over security failures

Sparkus

Ban insurance companies

from writing cover for incompetent and/or criminal CxO and BoD people.......

Vulcan Centaur avoids FAA scrutiny after losing solid rocket booster nozzle

Sparkus

The nozzle failed at srb ignition

A pending burn through was apparent even at that point.

A year after taking on Intel's NUC mini-PCs, Asus says it's ready to improve them

Sparkus

The AlderLake N100 compute sticks from MeLe are very nice.

I have three of them running around the house on non-smart TVs.

Post-CrowdStrike catastrophe, Microsoft figures moving antivirus out of Windows kernel mode is a good idea

Sparkus

I'm imaging one mess

will transition to another.

Think Kerberos, action tickets, and ticket-granting-tickets all mixed in with master certs and programmed and managed by existing Microsoft care and attention to detail.

Admins wonder if the cloud was such a good idea after all

Sparkus

No Sympathy

The ever-upward creep of cloud pricing, both in real terms and in relative comparison to on-prem costs, was openly predicted by quite a few people.

Intel's 120 TOPS Lunar Lake AI PC chips have landed

Sparkus

Desperately seeking.......

CUDA performance numbers for Adobe, DxO, and Davinci Studio.,.........

Microsoft PC accessories rise from the grave just in time for Christmas

Sparkus

Bring Back......

the Thumball......

France charges Telegram CEO with multiple crimes

Sparkus

I for one hope

that this sets a much-needed global precedent for responsibility and accountability.

This and insurance companies refusing to write cover for CxO suite malfeasance and stupidity.........

Tech support chap solved knotty disk failure problem by staring at the floor

Sparkus

Customer with a passion for clean floors......

.......which extended into mopping the computer center and then using a motorized floor buffer / polisher to finish up..........

Equinix pilots use of fuel cell in 'shipping container' outside datacenter

Sparkus

So.....

hydrogen wells are plentiful in Ireland then?

Microsoft tweaks fine print to warn everyone not to take its AI seriously

Sparkus

This will be news to.....

firms like Thomson-Reuters who have invested huge amounts of financial capital and corporate reputation in their deployment of msft AI tools within their own products.......

Gas pipeline players in talks to fuel AI datacenter demand

Sparkus

I've written it before...

Get a utilities map of the US (or UK for that matter) showing high-pressure gas pipelines, cable backbones, and high-voltage/capacity power lines. Plot the intersections with a 20-50 km circle.

There's your potential siting for new data centers.

Icelandic group demos private cloud powered by renewables

Sparkus

Don't forget....

the awesome amount of connectivity, availability, redundancy, and sheer bandwidth available in Iceland. They're a hub for a large number of trans-Atlantic fiber cable systems.......

NASA mulls using SpaceX in 2025 to rescue Starliner pilots stuck on space station

Sparkus

Re: Momentary Lapse of Reason.

In the absence of a hot stick and active control inputs during flight, meatbags are indeed 'cargo'.

WordStar 7, the last ever DOS version, is re-released for free

Sparkus

Re: DOS WordPerfect 5.1 spellchecker

Ipaq // Iraq

Sparkus

speaking of the olden days of yore and fable............

wondering whatever happened to pc-write?

Another law firm piles on Intel for Raptor Lake CPU failures as complaints grow louder

Sparkus

unclear if

the 'problem' includes mobile as well as desktop CPUs.

Anyone?

Delta Air Lines dials up Microsoft's legal nemesis over CrowdStrike losses

Sparkus

SolarWinds seems to be dodging responsibility / accountability for their failings......

Sparkus

The CS event was....

.....enabled by a combination of bad build and testing on the part of CS **and** (don't forget) deliberate design decision by msft to hide a set of API calls that set their own internal AV solution (Defender) at a significant performance advantage compared to third-party tools.

When msft was caught with their design pants down, the decision was made to open those APIs up to everyone and anyone when the rational/good design decision should have been to kill off the calls.

And that's how we got here.

The court case that needs to be settled is if msft and their managers/executives are liable for global user damages caused by poor design and implementation of their products.

Inquiry hears UK government misled MPs over Post Office IT scandal

Sparkus

at what point does....

"misleading information" become "intentional lies"?

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