Posts by Sparkus

The memory crisis is getting so bad that even retro RAM prices are going to the Moon

And here I am....

Having bought a 64Gb lpcamm2-9400 module on speculation because my expected laptop purchase next month will be able to use it......

Microsoft has mostly repaired a flaw in Surface hardware that allowed unprotected devices to be bricked by a single packet

One wonders.....

what other hardware-level threats / design defects / deliberate choices lurk elsewhere in Surface hardware........

Intel Diamond Rapids to boost core counts to 192, but RIP Hyperthreading

Not just AMD as a pacing competitor...

Intel has to keep pace with IBM Power/Tellum and keep an eye on both Arm and RISC-V..........

'Workforce rebalancing' comes for Kyndryl, and delivery teams are in the firing line

This is a regular occurance with ex-IBM entities....

So much so that I'm beginning to suspect that it's a deliberate strategy; spin off an undesired business line so that future layoffs don't lie (directly) at the feet and doorstep of IBM. Shift the blame and lawsuits to another, different entity.

Kyndryl was a best a well-funded paper tiger, now we know why......

Europe wants out from under US tech – but first it has to find the exits

with a grain of salt...

I would take pause at any wisdom or pronouncements made by ATOS alumni, most particularly those from the executive ranks........

Intel gets trapped in Elon’s reality distortion field as it joins in megafab delusions

says the guy who.....

has his car company use non-auto rated displays and electronics resulting in vehicles that have a pretty short useful life.......

Starmer's digital ID reboot raises same old questions as its Blair-era ancestor

safeguards.....

Without strict, some might say Draconian safeguards and penalties against the abuse or disclosure of national ID data including that derived from the Digital ID schemes, this is a horrible idea.

Western 'liberal democracies' need to consider carefully protecting citizens privacy and self-sovereign determination and stop protecting bad actors in legislatures, civil service, unions, or police agencies from acting on their on and in their own interests.

Nanny state discovers Linux, demands it check kids' IDs before booting

I smell the evil hands of

Meta, Alphabet, and Microsoft behind all this..........

Ig Nobel Prize flees US for Switzerland after 35 years over safety concerns

"look at Meeeeeee!"

I have a safety concern!

CERN sends AI-trained robot mice scurrying through LHC beam pipes

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........

To stop crims, Google starts dismantling residential proxy network they use to hide

The competetion

doesn't rest....

https://decodo.com/lp/ethical-proxy-switch

25 years of meatbags permanently in space on the ISS

No love for....

Tiangong?

Perplexity shows how to run monster AI models more efficiently on aging GPUs, AWS networks

There is a local reseller

of salvage and surplus data center equipment that now has H100 systems and racks available.

Senate bill would require companies to report AI layoffs as job cuts reach 20-year high in October

Good

First step in accountability is transparency and data.

Tesla board wants to grant Musk $1T in stock, Norway wealth fund says nope

Fixed the first paragraph for you

......which the carmaker's board says retaining him is unnecessary.......

Turns out the end of Windows 10 is good for something: The PC refresh cycle

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

cue the grant funding requests......

to study the air pollution effects of so much orbital debris vaporizing in the upper atmosphere.

Software CEO tells Catholic uni panel AI won't take out jobs, but it could take out brains

Cant think of a bettter time for..

a real-world Butlerian Jihad.......

"thou shalt not make a machine in the image of a human mind"

Slow Wi-Fi? Add houseplants to the list of suspects

oh and...

That place in the basement up between the water heater and hvac plant, surrounded by water-filled pipes. You know the one.

Don't use that spot either.

Powerline adapters with a phase-bridge-coupler at the breaker panel still function and function well.

AMD tries to catch CUDA with performance-boosting ROCm 7 software

Patiently waiting....

for gpu performance enhancements to filter down to the consumer level for photo / image processing.

China slaps 1-hour deadline on reporting serious cyber incidents

As is should be.....

it's useful to remember that China has their 'social credit' scheme backed up by the classic 9mm headache to keep their citizenry in-line and compliant with CCP directives.

However rapid and accurate reporting of vulns is important.........

Office 2016 and 2019 face October 14 execution date

welll

LibreOffice.....

JLR stuck in neutral as losses skyrocket amid cyberattack cleanup

well...

are the executives still being paid?

Microsoft readies Windows 11 25H2 while Windows 10 circles the drain

patiently waiting.....

for refreshed ISOs......

Nano11 cuts Windows 11 down to size, grabbing just 2.8 GB of disk space

NTLite

'nuf said.......

Senator blasts Microsoft for 'dangerous, insecure software' that helped pwn US hospitals

Well....

He's not wrong......

Oracle VirtualBox licensing tweak lies in wait for the unwary

Is vbox known to phone-home...

and alert Larrys new sailboat that another user needs an audit?

Orbital datacenters subject to launch stress, nasty space weather, and expensive house calls

Re: cooling using the emptiness of space

Yes.

There is no 'cooling' in space, just heat transfer using highly volatile and hazardous fluids and gasses, all of which have a tendency to corrode whatever mechanisms are pumping them around.

Print Screen is for noobs: Capture images in Windows like a pro

Worth noting

That Vivaldi has native screen shot and snip capability OOTB.

I just deleted my entire social media presence before visiting the US – and I'm a citizen

Hyperbole much?

Someone has a lot of experience in clutching pearls......

Security company hired a used car salesman to build a website, and it didn't end well

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

Prefictible next step....

in the dismantling, dismembering, and sell off of IBM.

Post Office and Fujitsu execs 'should have known' Horizon IT system was flawed

Time to Name the Names...

"All of these people are properly to be regarded as victims of wholly unacceptable behavior perpetrated by a number of individuals employed by and/or associated with the Post Office and Fujitsu"

What if Microsoft just turned you off? Security pro counts the cost of dependency

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

I expect that....

the Tor project is looking for a new browser base codeset............

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

Sounds like Max-Q

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

FreeBSD fans rally round zVault upstart

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

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

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

Dear 'Executives'

Told ya so.

Sincerely, Everyone

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

Power

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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.