Posts by Sparkus

NASA delays already-late $1B Psyche probe's visit to metal-rich asteroid

Issues with the spacecraft bus and flight software?

still.........

Facing a 30% price rise to park servers in a colo? Blame AI

The rise in colo and cloud prices

are going to change the OpEx and CapEx calculations for company-owned data centers................

Microsoft admits slim staff and broken automation contributed to Azure outage

whew...

At least it wasn't expired certificates......

Microsoft hiring a nuclear power program manager, because AI needs lots of 'leccy

Predicted in comments here.....

just a few weeks ago.

The amount of power datacenters are sucking up just begs for local installations of SMR tech.

Any 'extra' power can be sold off to the proles. Indeed, the installation of self-contained datacenters with SMR would be another 'selling point' in areas that are struggling to get similar tech through the political bureaucracy.

Now IBM sued for age discrim by its own HR veterans

If anyone has a stash of incriminating email chains.........

It's going to be senior HR staffers with legal complaints.

37 Signals says cloud repatriation plan has already saved it $1 million

The Emperor Has No Clothes

It takes someone with the security and authority of working in the C suite to challenge anything regarding The Cloud (hallowed be it's name).

At any other level, individuals re potentially committing Career Suicide if/when they point problems with spend, pace, and not-so-recent 'discovery' of not just repatriation costs, but storage 'per-click' access costs for data a company once believed it owned.

Western Digital sued over claims of data-trashing SanDisk, My Passport SSDs

I still mirror my flash drives within a NAS.....

.....and back them up to spinning metal every two weeks or so. The flash array stays at home office while the spinning metal gets exchanged to a closet shelf at the bro in laws house.

Primary backup software are the community editions of Veeam running a set of three backup media plus the primary/on-line storage. Checksums all around.

I 'trust' the longevity of spinning metal. You can pretty much put it on the shelf and walk away from it. The long-term shelf-stability of flash drives is yet to be proven to my satisfaction.

NB; on the conventional drives, I go out of my way to get non-SMR stuff. That's serious black magic there........

Man arrested in Northern Ireland police data leak as more incidents come to light

accountability?

So which hallucinating AI (sorry, human being) posted the information in the first place?

Virginia industrial park wants to power DCs with mini nuclear reactors, clean hydrogen

Hydrogen wells

are common in Virginia then?

Can you raise $100M+ from AI investors with no product? SEC says yes

Re: generative AI right now

non-sequitur word-salad. Reads as though it's been copied from a badly translated Microsoft / Intel / Nvidia talking-points internal document that's been handed around globally the past 8 weeks. Unfortunately, that document was focused in AI creation of gameplay imagery, not so much on useful human-centric knowledge and decision making.

Look, I've been working in AI and LLMs from time to time over the past 30 years. The legitimate big players have very comprehensive research and incremental implementation programs they've been successfully executing on the past 30 years. Not what's now considered to be old-school algorithm analysis and rollout work, but legit AI learning and inference model implementation.

Those legit players have been very very quiet, protecting their considerable intellectual property and industry position / client base / reputation. One of their key design and rollout points has been accountability and accuracy. Those two key points have been pushed to the background by the current rush for blind funding and copy-paste of "AI-based" into marketing materials and web sites.

generative AI right now

is in fact a 'pyramid' scheme being hyped by 2-3 industry players along with about 10 'partners' who are implementing/integrating their tech waaaaaaaaay before it and regulation/accountability is ready to absorb it. I actually don't care about the regulatory piece; the courts will take care of that. But accountability, as in who is liable for AI-induced 'hallucinations', etc.

But those players and their partners were rushed to market by the public 'release' of a cute conversation bot. I have a low opinion of the CTO/Product Managers in those partners who are playing along with this madness out of FOMO.

Foxconn to spend billions bulking its Indian operations – just for starters

Samsung as well....

Samsung has quietly begun a huge program to move ALL flat panel production, from phone screens to home theater screens, OUT of China and to India. All of it.

Final assembly of devices will be moved to the US as first choice with India assemble for local market only.

Cumbrian Police accidentally publish all officers' details online

Presumably........

the 'human error' has a human name........

NASA to test potential 400Mbps laser link for Mars

Has Maxar solved....

their years-long problems with hardware quality control and flight software?

AWS is running a 96-core, 192-thread, custom Xeon server

speculation......

On what the host chipset might be.........

White House: Losing Section 702 spy powers would be among 'worst intelligence failures of our time'

You want public confidence in the FISA and court?

How about jailing (SuperMax preferred) and seizing the pensions of civil servants who misuse and lie on their wiretap applications?

IBM to build biometrics system for UK cops and immigration services

So no 'lessons learned' studies....

....regarding the abandonment of a national biometrics database in Afghanistan and how the Taliban are using the data and field identification terminal equipment............

AI maybe on everyone's lips, but it's not what's driving IT spending

Just wound up a long-term engagement at an 'information company'......

....that has a 30 year history of creating and integrating ever more sophisticated and accurate 'AI' into their product lines.

I believe that the sudden public access to OpenAI and ChatGPT.v.xx LLMs caught them off-guard and panicked them. Drove them crazy. In the space of 90 days, the firm has spent about 1.5 billion Euro on a few rapid-fire acquisitions, not so much to gain additional tech and competence, but to keep their competition from buying said smaller companies. That spending was top-Dollar/Euro/Yen and has nearly drained the M&A coffers.

How else are they paying for the needed integration? By clipping every non-AI tech group in the company by 10% and directing those headcount 'funds' into support for the new acquisitions.

I give them 3 chances in 5 of pulling all his off without causing serious harm to the overall health and reputation of the firm.

Want to feel old? Ethernet just celebrated its 50th birthday

https://www.amazon.com/Fumbling-Future-Invented-Personal-Computer/dp/1583482660

https://archive.org/details/XeroxViewPointSoftware

https://digibarn.com/collections/systems/xerox6085/

Why do cloud titans keep building datacenters in America's hottest city?

Re: 4 cents?

You're getting fleeced on power because of how you've voted the past 40 years.

Elections have consequences.

Investing in SMR

sized in the 60-100MWe range.......... Sell the excess back to the proles.

NASA to store pair of probes it's built but can’t send to target asteroids

More flight delays...

That can be traced back to Maxar and their years-long problems with flight software........

Intel patches buggy Sapphire Rapids Xeons, resumes shipments

Aaaaaand

what's the performance hit of the patch?

Australia's 'great example of government using technology' found to be 'crude and cruel'. And literally lethal to citizens

version 2.0

of the Royal Mails / Fujitsu scandal.......

A mix-and-match chiplet marketplace for processor makers is still a long way off

Sounds like a job for....

Infiniband. At the substrate level anyway..........

Out with the old, in with the new – Accenture declares AI is 'mature and delivers value'

Look, Squirrel!

Company motto of both Accenture and Atos.......

Microsoft remembers it was going to bring Windows 11 to HoloLens

Interesting that Hololens.......

meets the silly hardware requirements for Windows 11

Kinder, gentler Oracle says it's changed, and now wants you to succeed

Nope...

The old joke of "Larry needs a new sailboat" has never been repudiated by Oracle.......

Intel says AI is overwhelming CPUs, GPUs, even clouds – so all Meteor Lakes get a VPU

cool (if a bit late)

IBM Power has delivered on-board discrete vector processors since Power6 (2005 or so, finally implementing the AltiVec/VMS instruction set in hardware).......

ARM VPUs (using NEON) has had ever capable dedicated hardware available on-spec (implementation depending on the end-user and build foundry) for 7-8 years too.

The Intel solution using SSEwhatevergenerationyouwant has depended on and been a slave to various features (inconsistently) baked directly into the CPU.

Fed up with slammed servers, IT replaced iTunes backups with a cow of a file

again, a classic (network) capacity eater from the 1990s was...

PointCast on every desktop in the company.......

This typo sparked a Microsoft Azure outage

I still have some muscle memory for...

rm -r *

Leaked Kyndryl files show 55 was average age of laid-off US workers

Watch their ServiceNow practice closely.....

The 'average age' of the top-15 people ramping up this new division inside of Kyndryl is well over 55.......

Nearly 1 in 5 academics admit close encounters of the anomalous kind

As with so much in these Troubled Times...

Stop Normalizing Mental Illness.......

Rigorous dev courageously lied about exec's NSFW printouts – and survived long enough to quit with dignity

Re: Endgame?

Arrogant Entitlement doesn't require a cogent 'endgame'......

A CFO who has personal ties to EMC

In the mid-90s, around Boston, it was common for EMC to take CFOs, CEOs, just about anyone who wasn't in IT, on excursions and trips. Lavish stuff.

Then we found that our CFO had inked a really large purchase deal with EMC with no involvement from IT. None at all. Of course at the time, EMC has no connectivity to Novell or the very standard SCSI-2 ports that 3d and 3d generation RS/6000/AIX boxen used. Even their mainframe connectivity used non-standard channel adapters which required patches to the IBM source including modifying block-device byte counts.

Gear was delivered. And sat on the dock for six months (paid for of course) because of this 'problem'. Started looking for the door when in their death throws, the Pyramid Unix sales guy started buying large screen TV sets for people.

My last act going out the door was to out the CFO to the board of directors.

Company was absorbed into a smaller competitor (!!) a few months later and remained a Novell shop until Y2K and an AIX shop until around 2015. As far as I could tell, the EMC gear was never put into production.

Is there anything tape can’t fix? This techie used it to defeat the Sun

Re: Chaos Manor

two thumbs up for the chaos manor reference......

Two Microsoft Windows bugs under attack, one in Secure Boot with a manual fix

sooooo

Does msft also intend to re-release updated media for current versions of win 10/11/server-whatever?

Working from home could kill career advancement, says IBM CEO

wondering if fellow travellers are working together

Similar messages are coming out from other firms, worded in very similar ways, on the same subject.

One might think that HR staff or the c-suite droids are coordinating their messaging on this.........

Techies all GUI-eyed as Xerox says goodbye to Palo Alto Research Center

currently on sale at amazon (kindle)

Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0791LWDG3

Proliferation of AI weapons among non-state actors 'could be impossible to stop'

as forseen in the ancient writings.....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(franchise)#The_Butlerian_Jihad

Germany to examine China-made kit in its 5G networks over security concerns

that's about right for Germany

make a determination about something critical

study it for a year, determine a course of action

shelf the determination as politically untenable

wait for a change in government

let the prior determination slip back out into the public awareness

bury the action needed in some other legacy program as risk reduction

implement 30% of the original determination, issue a report to the Bundestag, let attached and associated bureaucrats retire

To improve security, consider how the aviation world stopped blaming pilots

The Big Difference....

When/If pilots eff-up, they themselves can die.

When a CIO/CISO eff-up, well, no personal or professional accountability means they can just move on and keep making the same dumb/criminal mistakes.

Why Microsoft is really abandoning evaporative coolers at its Phoenix DCs

MSFT

is going to have to get into the SMR business pretty quickly......

IBM, Kyndryl cut jobs even after cutting ties

Kyndryl has started up a dedicated ServiceNow practice

and coaxed a very well respected ex-SN executive out of retirement to get the thing launched properly.........

Ex-politico turned Meta hype man brands Metaverse 'new heart of computing'

after spending $40 billion

with nothing to show for it, a certain "shareholder" and Chairman-for-life in the company needs to save face.......

How Arm aims to squeeze device makers for cash rather than pocket pennies for cores

This is exactly what

the RISC-V consortium needs. With the ease of which emulation and cross-compilers work together these days, there isn't much besides inertia that will keep users/makers on Arm in the face of missteps like this.

IT phone home: How to run up a $20K bill in two days and get away with it by blaming Cisco

PointCast in the late 1990s

on every desktop in the company.

'nuf said.....

Techie fired for inventing an acronym – and accidentally applying it to the boss

Who has to retire...

so that we can get some work done around here?

Often thought in passing, spoken exactly once in anger........

The Stonehenge of PC design, Xerox Alto, appeared 50 years ago this month

There is a Star emulator available

on github. It's functional and only slightly rough around the edges.

https://github.com/livingcomputermuseum/Darkstar

Techie wiped a server, nobody noticed, so a customer kept paying for six months

one had an ancient JDE instance on AS/400

................that was powered on once a year for 10 days to support end of year tax calculations and reporting.

No one could be bothered to actually extract the data, even to Excel. Was easier for them to continue to pay the JDE, then Oracle, support contract than to staff and manage a data capture/migration project.

And as could be predicted by everyone here at el Reg, one year the system refused to power on. Deadder than door nails. Not even clicks or heterodyne whines from the power supplies.

Oops, too late!