Posts by Pierre 1970

It's fun making Studio Ghibli-style images with ChatGPT – but intellectual property is no laughing matter

Ahh, sweet revenge

I really love your last paragrah... instead of the classical legal eagles, an smart move using your own tooling.

Anyway, I have a doubt: Which is going to take more, a lawsuit or a 7 years hand made animation plot ;-)

Privacy died last century, the only way to go is off-grid

Re: There is no such thing as off-grid nowadays

Interesting list you've made... I assume that it is almost impossible to make a complete one, but this is a good starting point.

And regarding the last part of your comment, I always say: "the best way to hide an elephant is inside a herd of them"

Linus Torvalds forgot to release Linux 6.14 for a whole day

Re: We are human ...

Perfection always smells fishy..... except when you eat a Boga fish from the Parana River in a barbacue :-)

'Once in a lifetime' IT outage at city council hit datacenter, but no files lost

Re: Looks like it affected their DR site too?

Fail to plan is planning to fail.

Shirley either they don't have a proper DR site or more porbable, they just don't have a DR plan..... or they do have one with RTO of above 1 week :-)

Google’s broadband balloon laser comms tech floated out as independent company

The Elon version of the solution

Must be an antenna with the shape of a shark with a laser beam on top.

Linus Torvalds declares war on the passive voice

When I write english text in MS Word, the corrector always warn of the passive voice.... how could I imagina that was Linus behind that!

As my mother language is Spanish, I can only say: My overcraft is full of eels

MongoDB rebuts claims it's not ready for business critical workloads

Re: Just a humble BI developer

I was partime DBA of a shop with RDBMS and MongoDB mix.... the developers choose Mongo for the Catalog of a web agro retail because of the very broad set of the products and their atributes that they sold, it was a very complex task for a relational model to get that data into de DB. But all the transactional part of the the site was left to the RDBMS because it just works.

As a DBA, is complex get the control of a NoSQL db, mainly because the data structure is very lax and under full control of the developers.

Alibaba Cloud waiting for hardware to dry out before trying to restore customer data

Re: water from above?

Yeah, at least a rain cloud...

Muppet broke the datacenter every day, in its own weighty way

Reward

I know that solving this type of technological puzzle is almost always a painin the rear, but when we finally reach a solution—through an unknown mix of knowledge, experience, and luck—the rewards to the spirit are unparalleled.

Of course, if you’re only after the money...

Japan's Astroscale wins contract for space junk harvesting robotic arm

Re: Ilustration

Agree about the Spaceball merits/humour.... And thanks for the reference to Quarks, I'm going to check that.

SIde note: Talking about the old Mel, until you very comment I was sad that "Jews in Space" from the last bits of the "History of the World Part I" will never be released.....and then I found that there is a Part II in episodes including it (thanks imdb)

From this part the world, down under but to the west (Argentina) is was almost imposible to reach that type of material in the pre internet era.

Ilustration

Seriously dissapointed....I was expecting the Mega Maid (or a giant sweeper if there is a copyright issue) ilustrating the article.

https://spaceballs.fandom.com/wiki/Mega_Maid

GitHub rolls back database change after breaking itself

Re: Take your bets!

Love this recursive jokes (sort of)... I would have said that far fingers usually are not allow to make these mistakes taken into account the distance to the keyboard.

How a cheap barcode scanner helped fix CrowdStrike'd Windows PCs in a flash

Re: Working Smarter Not Harder

I thought of the "phone" alternative...but so far I couldn't find any app that turns your mobile into a really USB device.... all the solutions on a quick search needed some sort of program in the PC, so the solution is not suitable for this boot tasks.

CrowdStrike shares sink as global IT outage savages systems worldwide

Re: "including using paper patient records"

Iron Mountain fires is a premium service to selected clients... Here in Argentina they managed to get rid of a lot of evidence killing about 10 people that were trying to put down the fire.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/1517192/iron-mountain-fire-in-buenos-aires-kills-9-destroys-corporate-records.html

(the Wikipedia entry is only in Spanish).

GNOME head honcho Holly Million steps down

Re: Holly Million

My english is not good enough but at first sight the name looked like an old Robin line for the TV series ....and obviously I was close to assume that that must be a joke.

Holy millions, Batman!

Codd almighty! Has it been half a century of SQL already?

Lecture material

I'm sincerelly overwhelmed by the quality of this kind of Reg articles

I think I'll borrow(TM) it (wink, wink) for my RDBMS classes! (with the mandatory reference to the original publishing)

US Army doubles down on laser tag with $95M for prototyping

P & A

Now they already have the laser, they need a little extra cash in order to find a reasonable sized megalodon to hold it in its back

Voltron Data revs up hyper-speed analytics, leaves Snowflake in the dust

Re: Also, what kind of database query returns a 100TB result??

Sorry, and forgive me if i'm wrong, but I think that 100TB data mark refers to the amount of data that those queries consume in order to get a result.

Open source PostgreSQL named DBMS of the year by DB-Engines

Re: shame about pgAdmin

Generally speaking (and with a grain of salt since MS SQL Server fill my fridge) I've found that the achilles heel in this GPL DBs is the official Admin client. Lack of features, lack of consistent look and feel, slow.

I do disagree when the solution to that is the use a 3rd party tool as the Admin interface.

You're so worried about AWS reliability, the cloud giant now lets you simulate major outages

The regular outages are business as usual... in AWS you usually architect your solution base on that. And for the big ones...they are so creative and original in nature that I cannot see a way to simulate that.

Six pack of sub-Neptune exoplanets hang tight around nearby star

Re: Music of the spheres

That is what I like to call an educated guess...with far more enfasis in the guessing part

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

Oracle will open source its database

Because they realized that they've already made a lot of money and enough is enough

You get a Copilot, and you get a Copilot – Microsoft now the Copilot company

Clippilot (tm)

See above

Introducing the tech that keeps the lights on

Re: No requests, no retry, that’s why it takes ...

An asimetric data pipeline, data cuasi-diode, etc.... I definitively like this idea more than the one for the article.

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

Re: "supposed expert who turned out to be anything but"

A real computer wizzard should also know that your computer at work is a part of a bigger structure that need to be maintained, supported and upgraded. So, even if he always knew the solution it must report it because:

1) Is part of the rules

2) Can retrofeed or spot a more general problem

3) Somebody else is being paid for that

4) etc

Of course, being empathetic implies that if you have the required knowledge, you should help isolating the issue, gather extra information to help the diagnose, even change something and test the porpose solution, and so on.

Sorry Pat, but it's looking like Arm PCs are inevitable

Re: Strategy

That's my definition of cutting edge technology

Lost your luggage? That's nothing – we just lost your whole flight!

Crash course on DBA duties

I'd been working as a senior BI consultant but made redundant. Decided to live and work in my home city (pre remote working days), could only fine jobs as a DBA (semi senior because of my age)... I got a job and I assumed that I'll be joining a DBA team so I was confident that I coul cop with the new role. But what I found was that the previous DBA almost died in a car accident and the replacement was anxious to leave the position, so after the first 2 days he went on vacations and never returned, so I was left alone with all the duties and of course nobody in IT knows a thing about DBs except installing them....first think I tried to discover was how the heck the backup system was working and if I have a way to restore something in case of a disaster.

Google wants to take a byte out of Oracle workloads with PostgreSQL migration service

Yeah, right!

The problem with this is that the suppliers of such "cheap" services trivializes the migration and operation efforts, as the changes that developers must take into account when switching RDBMS technologies. And all of the managers buy that without the slightest shade of doubt and the risks involved.

In the short term they all look almost the same (all of them can manage a SELECT * FROM TABLE and adhere to the ANSI standards ) but then the issues arise and the lack of proper skills in the "free" DBs is enormous when you get into troubles.

Samsung realizes behaving ethically is good for business, says compliance boss

Why is "obvious"?

"Mega-corp has mastered the complexity of numerous technologies but it took several scandals to impart this obvious lesson".

If this is so obvious, why on earth the same happens again and again and again...

Official science: People do less, make more mistakes on Friday afternoons

Tempted

Publishing the article on a Friday is almost an order to just avoid making any mistake so I'm going to stop working for the rest of the day.

If you want a big brain, make a habit out of daytime naps

Re: Cause and Effect

or penguins!!! https://youtu.be/s-TNpI0Lrjc?t=73

The ZX81 finally gets the keyboard it deserves

Wooden keyboard

As a teenager, after three broken membranes of a ZX Spectrum clone, I'd decided (and of course due to the lack of budget) to construct my own wooden keyboard made of wood, a bunch of screws and a sheet of bronze in order to make the key contacts.

Worked like a charm except for an strange flickering of my black and white TV set. At that moment I didn't know too much about electronics, filters, capacitors and things like that.

As an extra embellishment I made two DB9 ports connected in parallel with certain keys of the matrix in order to resembled a Cursor joystick and connect an old Atari joytick to it.

Unluckily I've lost it and have no photos.... I sincerely hope that as a last homage it made part of a barbecue in my parents house.

Andrés

PS: Since I'm from Argentina, the barbecue is the correct way to incinerate old memories :-)

AI weapons need a safe back door for human control

Re: AII upgrades?

Artificial Systematic Stupidity.... I think you are missing an extra "S"

Re: AII upgrades?

Nice acronym ...but I still prefer Skynet

Hey Siri, use this ultrasound attack to disarm a smart-home system

iDog

Apple has already patented an iDog, which is a device in the shape of a classic dog (with rounded corners, of course) in order to detect the attack and alert the owner with iBarks . Until now they couldn't manage to solve the issues with Siri ordering tonnes of dog food with each complain of the puppy.

Bank rewrote ads for infosec jobs to stop scaring away women

Calamity Jen

After reading the first 5 o 6 lines of the article, I automatically though of the way that Jen was hired as IT Manager in Reynholm Industries.

AWS strains to make Simple Storage Service not so simple to screw up

AWS won't resist too much time before saying: "You are all holding the bucket the wrong way"

US Dept of Energy set to reveal fusion breakthrough

Re: Imagine what this might mean for the people of the world:

Just imagine all the world talking and singing in high pitched voices for centuries .... In you face, Maria Carey!

What's up with WhatsApp? Messaging platform suffers outage in the UK

Re: I'm taking a guess:

You didn't miss any permutation.....and is even in ANSi coding

Liz Truss ousted as UK prime minister, outlived by online lettuce

Yeap...just forget the hand of god

As an argie, joining Monty Python and Borges in one sentence made my day, if not the week, month or even the whole year.

Darth Vader voice actor James Earl Jones allows AI to take over the role

"Rouge one"... yeah, the indiscriminade use of lipstick in that fake animation was disturbing....

Open source databases: What are they and why do they matter?

Re: Tooling for devs

AFAK, there is no management and administrive tooling as the one for SQL Server Databases. I'm working also with MySQL, Redshift, MongoDB and no client get no even close to that.

I've to agree that in this new days of Devops methodologies the way to go is go back to scripting all, but for certain task, having the managements tools, both graphical and text, provided by the main vendor should be a must.

(and yes, I'm old enough and definitively not fond of this new shiny web consoles)

SpaceX demonstrates that it too can shower the Earth with debris

Re: Raising the odds?

C'ommon, don't be shy, Why not adding a lightning strike to the recipe?

Scientists use dead spider as gripper for robot arm, label it a 'Necrobot'

Re: Syringe & Liquid

Obviously glue is for cheating all of us in order to get the legs sticks to the objects.

How a botched kernel patch broke Ubuntu – and why it may happen again

Re: Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now...

Ouch...my bad...I've thought that the reference was to Panic of The Smiths.... Pure music iliteracy

What's next? "This charming man" when they borked the help pages?

Three Twilio developers charged with insider trading

Re: Profitable development

I'll prefer the plot of "Office Space" specially the part that they made a mistake with dot and commas (as far as I remember)