Posts by Sparkus

Thanks, boss. The accidental creation of a lights-out data centre – what a fun surprise

Same exact story

bigwig, showing off, etc, etc.......

Put a Full Stop to the tours though.

Oracle hits UK reseller with lawsuit for allegedly reselling grey market Sun hardware

Re: Out IBM'ing IBM

IBM only did that after loosing a series of similar lawsuits including the PCM battles with Gene Amdahl..............

Seagate finds sets of two heads are cheaper than one in its new and very fast MACH.2 dual-actuator hard disks

Re: dual actuator drives have been long in coming

Seagate publishes a chart showing which of their drive models do and do not use SMR.

https://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/cmr-smr-list/

dual actuator drives have been long in coming

but please tell me that Seagate is NOT going to use SMR on these drives........

The policy of truth: As ransomware claims rise, what's a cyber insurer to do?

Stop indemnifying incompetent management

for their deliberate decisions..........

Wyoming powers ahead with Bill Gates-backed sodium-cooled nuclear generation plant

Fusion has been 15-20 years away

for the past 50-60 years.......

The ah-ha! engineering moment that will enable controlled sustainable fusion reactions has yet to occur.........

Bribery charges against Apple's global security boss dismissed in iPads-for-gun-permits case

A "chief of security"

is not necessarily a Personal Protection Officer.

Is this executive/manager using his concealed carry permit as a status symbol vs being a working PPO?

Remember those wacky cyberpunk costumes in Hackers? They're on display in London this week

alt-anything

can be considered era-authentic cyber-whatever............

Ganja believe it? Police make hash of suspected weed farm raid, pot Bitcoin mine instead

Seized based on what?

are the Police qualified electricians to be able to judge to correctness of cabling, etc?

Intel finds a couple more 11th-gen Core chips, one hits 5.0GHz in laptops

Plenty of models

and very little supply. Keep scrounging those reject bins.......

Unfixable Apple M1 chip bug enables cross-process chatter, breaking OS security model

Good thing the M1X

is waiting in the wings to obsolete the first-gen M1 gear..........

Arm freezes hiring until Nvidia takeover, cancels everyone's 'wellbeing' allowance

This unfortunately tells me

that Nvidias plan is to push their own tech into ARM at the expense of what there is now............

For good or bad, that may be the path they are on.

Europe gives SK Hynix the nod to gobble up Intel's NAND flash and solid-state drive biz

new word

recycle, as in the many millions of gallons of water you worry about will be cleaned, filtered, and reused.

Any other objections?

Singapore orders social media to correct Indian politician’s allegation of local COVID-19 variant

Considering that the Coronavirii

superpower are rapid change/mutation, it's wholly conceivable that local and geo-specific mutations can and will arise.

It's how the 'common cold' and yearly flu virii make the rounds so fast and easily. And it's why, just as we have to do with yearly flu shots, we may have to get yearly coronavirus shots for years/decades......

It took 'over 80 different developers' to review and fix 'mess' made by students who sneaked bad code into Linux

not just umn.edu

the suspect students and their faculty advisors list multiple affiliations, and most likely multiple email addresses and personae.

Given the 'open' activity from their umn.edu accounts, it's likely prudent to look at potential submissions from ALL of their IDs and persona, those that can be identified anyway.......

Space Force's data must flow: Microsoft Azure and Ball Aerospace demo satellite to battlefield linkup

Re: What would impress me...

Visio, SharePoint.....

There all kinds of uses for tech, not all of them lead directly to the Big Launch Button......

Cisco discloses self-sabotaging SSD bug that causes rolling outages for some Firepower appliances

the old unsigned 32 bit integer problem...

is going to cause all of us more problems than Y2K ever could.....

At work, we're in the middle of evaluating every bit of code and coding practice for 32bit integers and rolling out changes as part of our usual release schedule.

It's pretty horrific........

Audacity's new management hits rewind on telemetry plans following community outrage

Re: The one good thing to come from this

There's more than 10 that I could find.

But GNU-anything rings a bell with a lot of folk.....

The one good thing to come from this

is to open the door for a hypothetical GNU-DAW project.......

Elon Musk hits the brakes on taking Bitcoin for Tesla purchases

Fake excuse

and about as lame as you can get.

Performance Activism or worries that a potential BTC crash will leave Tesla over-exposed??

UK's competition watchdog sniffs around AMD's proposed $35bn all-stock buy of Xilinx

AMD need Xilinx not just because of Intel

but to match Nvidia/ARM as well.

So what if I pay peanuts for my home broadband? I demand you fix it NOW!

This is very US-specific but.....

there is something of a unity moment in seeing a Spectrum cable service truck doing half-speed on a trunk road, blocking everyone behind them.......

UK government resists pressure to hold statutory inquiry into Post Office Horizon scandal

Best way to start speeding this up

would be to presumptively jailing a large number of 'suspects' as flight risks.

There aren't a lot of hidden names here. We know the people at the PO and Fujitsu who made statements in earlier trials. Even the prosecutors who failed to do their job are known.

Don't cross the team tasked with policing the surfing habits of California's teens

I have as standard question

that gets asked during difficult engagements;

"who has to retire so that we can get this job done"?

Sometimes it works, sometimes it signals the end of an engagement.

39 Post Office convictions quashed after Fujitsu evidence about Horizon IT platform called into question

The question of compensation

as well as sanctions including total forfeiture of any pension or retirement savings from individuals at Fujitsu, the PO, as well as the complicit lawyers and solicitors needs to be settled.

Quickly

University duo thought it would be cool to sneak bad code into Linux as an experiment. Of course, it absolutely backfired

Place your bets...

that this was a CCP sponsored/encouraged attempt at "supply chain' code repository compromise?

You want a reboot? I'll give you a reboot! Happy now?

'twas ever thus...

rm -r *

Elon Musk's SpaceX bags $3bn NASA contract to, fingers crossed, land first woman on the Moon

NASA Astronauts are already retiring

rather than ride on Boeings capsule, how many will do the same rather than risk a ride on the SpaceX Bottle Rocket?

To have one floppy failure is unlucky. To have 20 implies evil magic or a very silly user

There is always the near-apocryphal story of

Users who insist that their cd-rom tray is a cup holder.

Often told, never proven, still funny/horrifying.........

It was Russia wot did it: SolarWinds hack was done by Kremlin's APT29 crew, say UK and US

no

"wot did it" was a CEO who refused to allow or fund essential infrastructure updates and coding effort to find and fix holes in their own products.

The event itself was a target of opportunity. Easily predictable given the malfeasance in the C-suite.

Scientists stumped by strange X-rays from Uranus

There is the general theory that gas giants

are just proto-stars that failed to reach ignition mass/density.

with this in mind, perhaps we're simply waiting for the next opportunity to blow sunshine out of Uranus......

(I'll show myself out now)

Google vows to build its own server system-on-chips, hires Intel veteran

it all depends on improving the efficiency of growing silicon

something that Intel, and it's veteran engineers, have been having problems with the past 5 years or so.

Is SKH a member of either OpenPower or RISC-V? They along with TMSC would certainly be in the position to enable Google to dump the billion-transistor X86 architecture for OpenPower or RISC-V.

High enough yield on the big silicon this will require, and you've a future for next-gen integrated SoCs.

OVH flames scorched cloud customers with pledge to build data centre fire simulation lab

Re: "server fires and electrical fires need different dousing tech"

It all depends on the recover/restart philosophy.

If the intent/need/promise is to recover kit and recommission it, then yes, you want different fire control chemicals and procedures than a simple 'flood the place and hope for the best' approach.

If the approach is to just put the damned fire out and who cares about the aftermath, well, a couple of hundred thousand deca-liters of water will do the job.

OVH may want to retire the name SBG1

in the spirit of airlines that retire flight numbers the meet unfortunate endings.......

SAP exec reminds the world that Microsoft is a customer

in an Inception moment

one wonders if SolarWinds used their own kit...........

OVH writes off another data centre – SBG1 – and reveals new smoking battery incident

OVH is going to have to

be vary transparent about who supplies the batteries and maintenance for their power systems......

From Maidenhead to Morocco: In a change to the scheduled programming, we bring you The On Call of Dreams

Re: Client Reviews

Depending on the time of year and expense allowances, I think I'd be pleased with Helsinki......

Had a similar experience

hand-carrying a huge load of specialized electronics to the Philippines for the benefit of the US Military. The local 'fixer' never showed up at the airport so import duties/bribes were payable, immediately, and in cash (no receipt offered).

I was so royally pissed-off that I expensed the lot on a paper expense form. Postal services being what they were in the 80s, it took a while for the form and claim to make it to my boss and then his boss.

Understand, this was immediately after the Lockheed international bribery scandal and at the beginning of the Marcos' rise to power in the PI.

Was politely asked by my then third-level boss to resubmit my expenses to him directly and "not be a smart ass about it" (direct quote). He promised to personally reimburse me for the loss of cash (which he did) and to look into the missing local fixer who was apparently paid a large retainer to prevent this sort of thing.

After that, I got my self a fixed-base assignment in Hong Kong where, at the time, local officials were almost pathologically honest.

I'm saving the story about importing a Xerox 9700 laser printer beast to South Africa for use at a remote astronomical observatory. The local trucking firm managed to roll off the mountain access road and dumped the million dollar asset down about 700 meters of rock.

Staff and students at Victoria University of Wellington learn the most important lesson of all: Keep your files backed up

I don't even keep my user Libraries on C:

There is always a second physical drive, usually lettered L: and use windows folder redirection to move my 'known folders' (except for Desktop) to L:. Which in turn mirrors to an encrypted & compressed partition back on C: And occasionally mirrors to rando space on the home NAS.

I suppose I could go full belts and braces and further mirror to OneDrive.

YMMV, but this works for me.

ICYMI: A mom is accused of harassing daughter's cheerleader rivals with humiliating deepfake vids

The use of 'AI'

did not extend to trying to use even the most basic of identity / location obfuscation.

Not an off-by-one error: Java 16 brings 17 enhancements to Oracle's JDK. We chat to Big Red about what's new

I note that....

it's near impossible to download the offline (full) installers for the current JREs unless you cough up all of your personal details via an Oracle user account......

Starlink's latent China crisis could spark a whole new world of warcraft

the CCP will be in the position to undercut Starlink prices

All the way down to Zero. Imagine China offering 'free' CCP-sponsored internet access to every African country.

A borked bit of code sent the Hubble Space Telescope into safe mode, revealing a bunch of other glitches

Re: alternate servicing..

Might be a good what-if exercise for NASA or SpaceX to work on; what would it take in terms of a combined Crew Dragon & Cargo Dragon mission to perform a possible next round of service on Hubble?

What kind of 3 or 4 port mission support docking module could be developed, quickly, to ease the task?

alternate servicing..

Could a pair of Orions, or Dragons reach the HST?

A Code War has replaced The Cold War. And right now we’re losing it

William Gibson might have started it all, John Brunner pushed it forward brilliantly, and Neil Stephenson put a contemporary face to it

https://www.amazon.com/Cryptonomicon-Neal-Stephenson-ebook/dp/B000FC11A6/

SpaceX wants to slap Starlink internet terminals on planes, trucks, and boats – but Tesla owners need not apply

Intelsat

needs to get their antiquated act together......

GPS jamming around Cyprus gives our air traffic controllers a headache, says Eurocontrol

stop depending on a single system

for safety of life and safety of flight..........

Google says once third-party cookies are toast, Chrome won't help ad networks track individuals around the web

The unasked questions is

what has Google cooked up to replace cookie tracking to sustain their own ad business?

Citibank accidentally wired $500m back to lenders in user-interface super-gaffe – and judge says it can't be undone

NASA calls this 'go-fever'

'nuf said.

Nvidia cripples Ethereum mining on GeForce RTX 3060 to deter crypto bods from nabbing all the kit at launch

Cue the...

open source third party drivers.......