* Posts by Alpharious

45 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Aug 2021

Return-to-office mandates boost company profits? Nope

Alpharious

The overhead savings alone would make up for loss of productivity.

Offices are expensive. Without even considering rent and leases you have: utilities, you have cleaning, you have security and you have other risks that come with people being in close contact with each other.

Then there is the expansion of the labor pool. You go from the region of the office, to THE ENTIRE WORLD. the challenge goes from finding the right fit from a few candidates to finding the right fit from a lot of candidates. You can hire a person who needs accommodations, without any extra work on your part because they have taken care of that themselves at home.

Then there is the kaisen: fewer steps to the toilet, fewer steps to get water, fewer steps to go to meetings, less production loss from meetings.

It is really telling that management is NOT seeing these benefits.

Remote work wipes $453b off office real estate

Alpharious

It's only going to snowball

The other driving force is that smarter companies have expanded their talent pool to incorporate WFH remote workers. So not only are they avoiding costly overhead but they are also getting talent they would not have traditionally. For cities this is extremely bad news, on multiple levels.

When we look at the big picture, at the police shortage, we see that this loss of tax revenue is going to make it harder to recruit police, meaning fewer police, meaning the offices will not be renting as much due to safety concerns. a feedback loop is starting. It's not just police either, but other infrastructure as well. This is going to make business much harder in cities.

Demand for software experts pushes tech salaries higher in UK

Alpharious

Re: Over in the US, analysts at RBC Capital Markets!?

They are a separate country, FOR NOW. All we have to do is move the border 10 miles north and BLAMO most of the population is American.

Biden administration prepares to bring hammer down on Chinese chipmakers

Alpharious

Isn't this going to make the chip shortage worse?

Correct me if i am wrong or misinformed, but is there not a chip shortage? If so then wouldn't this worsen it?

Amazon drivers unionize after AI sends them on 'impossible' routes

Alpharious

I am flabberghasted.

It must have been extremely bad if Japanese delivery drivers had to unionize. Those guys are solid steel and already put up with nasty working hours, extreme regulations (NO! alcohol allowed the night before work), and some of the most insane traffic i have seen in my life. It is not the work for the faint of heart. They also try to soldier on as much as they can. So for them to unionize, tells me that this was a serious problem.

DoE digs up molten salt nuclear reactor tech, taps Los Alamos to lead the way back

Alpharious

Re: REstart?

That's a good question. Toshiba makes a mini one called the 4S, and i have often wondered how many of those would be needed to power a datacenter.

Experts warn transition to private space stations won't happen anytime soon

Alpharious

In space, no one can hear you tax evade

Are you sure about that? See it's all fun and games until corporate America realizes that there is no jurisdiction or income tax in space, then BLAMO you have the General dynamics orbital office complex and infant medical research facility. Free from labor laws, taxes, and ethics.

Cheap cellular data list is out: And US doesn't make top 200

Alpharious

Re: How??

I am curious as well. Very rarely do i see articles mention the methodology involved in these studies, they only cite studies.

You're not wrong. The scope for quantum computers remains small

Alpharious

Re: On the Other Hand...

i remember this too, and you beat me to it. "The market for computers will be 5" man that exploded in their face like an airbag filled with spiders. In 30 years they will probably be everywhere and will turn insane feats into mundane tasks.

Elon Musk considering 'drastic action' as Twitter takeover in 'jeopardy'

Alpharious

Re: Burn

I disagree. If twitter takes this to court then they are epically stupid. This will end in regulation for social media if that happens. This is not an IT or tech issue, but a financial regulation issue. The meat and potatoes of this is that twitter did not have a satisfactory answer as to what their user engagement really is. They have data that they sell to corporations, but the main allegation that Musk has made, that the journalists are NOT addressing, is that this data is doctored and not scientifically valid.

They would have to explain to the courts, why they use such a small sample size for determining bots, they will have to explain to the courts how they differentiate between Russian bots and legitimate bots. They will have to explain to the court how their methods followed ethical business guidelines and how they came to their methodology.

I really want to see the outcome of this. I do not believe twitter has ever been forthcoming with honest data. There was this laissez faire mentality that the public had with them that to me was too reminiscent of the dot.com bubble and enron. when you have the cable news screeching about Russian bots on twitter yet nothing comes out of it, something is clearly wrong. No other industry seems to have these issues, so why do we accept it on social media?

FBI warning: Crooks are using deepfake videos in interviews for remote gigs

Alpharious

Re: What role does the deep fake play?

It's to pass the blame on the companies not vetting their employees hard enough. If these positions are that sensitive, then they need to be doing background checks, which apparently, they are not doing.

Google engineer suspended for violating confidentiality policies over 'sentient' AI

Alpharious

Is this the bot that was on 4chan the other day, and they figured out it was a bot because it seemed to have more empathy and concern for people?

Supply chain attacks will get worse: Microsoft Security Response Center boss

Alpharious

>"The reason we will have a continuation of these supply chain attacks is our reliance on third party software and open source software is only growing," she said. "It's not going to come down anytime soon."

And there is the sales pitch. "Live in the microsoft shop or else"

Tech hiring freeze doesn't mean people won't leave

Alpharious

Re: Spot On

I am waiting for when the productivity dies off, because they now sit around and fuck around in the office. Never underestimate how stupid the business planners are. Not only are they going to disrupt the current productivity with returns to office, they are going to piss money away on overhead, instead of cutting costs, they are going to shrink their labor pool, instead of expanding it, and they are going to be destroyed by the recovery, instead of recovering. Andrew Melon was a big fan of stupid companies paying for their stupidity. He is probably laughing from his grave as I type this up.

Watch out for phishing emails that inject spyware trio

Alpharious

Re: National Security, if it is not just a slogan

Powerpoint should also be banned, it's a dangerous neve agent that puts people to sleep and causes brain damage.

Former NHS AI leader joins US spy-tech firm Palantir

Alpharious

Re: The silence of the MPs

If your MP's are cut from the same cloth as American Politicians, then they will probably be tech illiterate lawyers who need help desk to set up zoom for them. So they will not know who or what palantair is, who peter thiel is. Hell they probably don't even know the lord of the rings reference.

Amazon to spend 11 days of annual profit developing robot warehouse workers

Alpharious

Was the Wagie Cagie not cost effective?

What happened to the wagie cage? They patented it. They had researchers and engineers design a mobile cage to entomb workers in for their 8-to-10-hour shifts. Did they change their minds or did meme magic scare them away??

Growing US chip output an 'expensive exercise in futility', warns TSMC founder

Alpharious

Re: To paraphrase

>and make a long term investment in training them

Not gonna happen. That would involve investing their money and not giving themselves bonuses or wasting it on stupid pet projects.

The sad bit, is we can't protect taiwan as long as it is such a high valued target, and being the predominant country for chips makes them a very high value, strategic target.

Immersion-cooled colo is coming to Ohio... via a crypto-mining datacenter

Alpharious

Re: Minimal impact my arse

>So, who's for precooked catfish?

Chinese carp. Americanized Chinese carp, which have this weird mutation that makes them jump out of the water if they hear a noise. The flip side is that they have just ravaged the ecosystem, so killing them off would fix some problems.

Alpharious

An Amish datacenter.

They built it in Amish country. They built a crypto mining data center, in Amish country.

I'd make jokes about the cheap pie and getting lifestyle diseases from the cheap food, but frankly that's a great place for a datacenter. The cost of living there is very nice and it's just hours' drive away from Columbus. I mean there is akron, but that place is a dump. That's a very good place for a datacenter. You have a good talent pool from the state university nearby, and you are an hour away from one of the tech hubs in the state; so they have talent near by. If you want quiet then that would be a great gig.

The only issue might be infrastructure, but 5g broadband seems to be cheaper to implement than fiber.

As for the environmental impact, that's Ohio. The state that was so polluted they had a river catch fire, for a week, which forced "ultra liberal, ultra progressive" Richard Nixion to create the EPA.

Twitter faces existential threat from world's richest techbro

Alpharious

Same old trick?

A long time ago, back in the dark ages of the 80s and the 90s, General Electric bought a network so that they could prevent the news from talking about all the GE product flaws, and the illegal things GE had done. I wonder if Elon is doing something similar: buying a social media platform then forcing them to squash any bad publicity for his brands? Or maybe he does not want people talking about emerald mines?

Then again i often wonder how many of those tweets are organic. 4chan will have threads from time to time of a bunch of politicians or random "people" saying the exact same thing, and then there is that meme of "russian bots" all over the platform. So is it really a social media platform or a bot net masquerading as one?

Tomorrow Water thinks we should colocate datacenters and sewage plants

Alpharious

Re: Water companies in England

You are not thinking outside of the box. Why knock down the buildings, when you can integrate the solar panels into the windows of skyscrapers or cover the roofs with solar panels? Why destroy farmland, a limited resource that naturally process carbon, when we can be more efficient? Right now, solar is not as viable as the fossil fuels, but we are still working on it. Even after hundreds of years we are still hard pressed to find a better alternative to steam. That's the sad joke of it all, that the modern world still depends on boiling water to make its power.

Dems propose privacy-respecting digital dollar

Alpharious

Re: what's it for?

I suspect they are feeling threatened by crypto and nfts. They should be. What happens when one of the big tech companies makes a nft backed with a share of stock? you have something that is less volatile, and something more easily adopted. If other large companies were to adopt this, you would have a legitimate currency market that is outside of the realm of governments. It's a step closer to syndication. I mean right now it sounds like crazy pulp sci fi but that seems to be the direction that the tech sector wants to go. They want to live in a cyberpunk world.

File Explorer fiasco: Window to Microsoft's mixed-up motivations

Alpharious

They need to stop readding Phillip K Dick over there.

I understand that with the death of TV the advertisements had to go somewhere, but file explorer? really? Or is this a scheme to force people to learn powershell because powershell scripts seem to be the only damn way to remove microsoft problems? Or are the advertisements there to cover NSA malware? What next, cortona robots that kick the door down, give us a sales pitch, and an involuntary 30 day free trial?

The right to repairable broadband befits a supposedly critical utility

Alpharious

Re: Human factor

Is it capitalism's fault or societies? This is not the same as repairing a dryer where the heating element design has been unchanged for the last 30 years. There are too many people out there that i do not trust to remove batteries safely. They have safety caps on my AC unit to keep kids from huffing the refrigerant. During the dark transition time in my life I encountered people who had "car problems" and when the other maintenance mechanic who did repair work as a side hustle went to fix it, he identified the cause of failure as the car being out of gas. We take for granted that everything is repairable by the average person, but at the same time we forget that there are hostile end users, or there are end users who do not have the technical skill.

Now, the capitalism solution to this broad band problem would be a 5G box/cylinder. Those things are great. They not only do they have a battery so you can use your laptop when the power goes out, but they have an ups port as well. No more cable company, which really does not care to retain your account anyway.

IT blamed after HR forgets to install sockets in new office

Alpharious

Re: I worked in companies where HR actually run the business.

What do you do when it's HR doing the racism? or when it's HR doing the harassment? What do you do when HR is getting kickbacks from managed services providers and staffing firms to block hiring?

I have stories.

UK's VoIP Unlimited hit by DDoSes again, weeks after ransom-linked attacks KO'd it

Alpharious

viral marketing is going too far

REvil ransomware gang? How far will these advertisers go to hype up new games and tv shows? what next a real zombie outbreak?

Motivated by commerce, not conscience, Google bans ads for climate change consensus contradictors

Alpharious

Re: I have one question

My first thought is that it's just a pr stunt. I rarely see ads, let alone one that is saying global warming is fake. So unless there is something going on in the non-English speaking net; then this is just a publicity stunt.

Then again, this could be a sneaky way to curate their advertisers anymore. "you have to be google approved to pay us to show ads on our network"

Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram deplatform themselves: Services down globally

Alpharious

Re: Facebook down..... side benefits?

Only old people use facebook. The hip kids are either on tiktok or are being jerks to each other on 4chan.

Facebook overpaid FTC fine by up to $4.9bn to protect Zuckerberg, lawsuits allege

Alpharious

Re: "transparency is essential for social media platforms"

I think the market will do that. I stopped using facebook, because to be frank it was making me a terrible person. I find much more enjoyment using linkedin. There I police myself, but still try to maintain my opinions. It's a better experience because when someone disagrees with me, they bring valid points and are polite, and i do the same with others. It's honestly a better social media platform.

But lets be real, facebook started off as a site to rank women's faces, while linkedin was made from the ground up to be a professional networking platform. Facebook only took off because of the shady palantir money. Nasty people figured out that there was government involvement, so of course they have to troll the place. My understanding is that the kids are not signing up unless the schools force them to, and that the only growing demographic is the 65+ crowed.

JEDI contract might be no more, but case should live on, says Oracle: DoD only wants Amazon, Microsoft for new cloud deal

Alpharious

Re: Big Red

DOD procurement is not just based on merit and cost. there are other issues as well, such as who has the most veterans working for them. I suspect that is why oracle is having these issues, as they do not have the dedicated veteran recruitment that amazon and Microsoft have. This also explains the insidious nature of Amazon, because those vets who work in the distribution centers, count toward government contracts. AWS will always have an advantage over the other groups because of this.

We knock on the soviet union for having stupid policies, but when we look at the red tape in the US, it's far, far, far worse.

Navigating without GPS is one thing – so let's jam it and see what happens to our warship

Alpharious

Laughs in SPS-55

It's not the GPS that they care about during a sea and anchor, it's the navigation radars. THOSE are far more important then the gps. Also the radar indicators as well.

Chinese prosecutors end investigation into rape claim against Alibaba manager

Alpharious

Forget it Jake, this is china

This is probably not the worst thing they have done and gotten away with.

Cops responding to ShotSpotter's AI alerts rarely find evidence of gun crime, says Chicago watchdog

Alpharious

Re: "as it no longer had sufficient evidence"

This is chicago. It's not about evidence or justice, it's about gaslighting the public. Homan square was a direct violation of the constitution and it was memory holed after 2016. They didn't care if shotspotter was accurate, they only cared if it held up in court. Now we have to review other cases in which that was evidence and determine if justice was done.

but that won't happen. people will forget about this in a week. Forget it Jake, this is chirak.

Japan's bullet trains replace smoking rooms with Zooming rooms

Alpharious

Re: Fast WiFi, Zoom Booth, 300km/h train Tokaido to Sanyo

I think a ticket from Tokyo to Osaka is like 300 dollars? It's been a long time since i rode it. My father in law was in a wheelchair after his stroke, so it was a far more comfortable, and accessible option for him then flying.

Japans a weird place, it walks a razors edge between being a Utopia and a Dystopia.

Alpharious

I assumed that it was so that they can harass you with work while you are on vacation abroad, but then it occurs to me that if i am fully remote then i can become a IT nomad, and travel the world while still keeping my job so long as i have wifi.

IT nomads sound like a future i want to be a part of.

In 2006, Amazon debuted EC2. 15 years on, HashiCorp says firms blowing their cloud budgets is all part of the fun

Alpharious

Re: Amazon Cloud Services are like 'Hotel California'

Well you see, if the parasite kills the host, then the parasite dies. Cloud service providers know this, so they make sure not to charge too much. They want to kill off the smaller companies, but keep the whales alive. I bet a coke, a Mexican coke made of real sugar because it's the Lexus of coke, that the managers of the cloud services use their sales metrics to determine which companies to invest in, so they have some fat portfolios of tech stocks that they know are doing well.

European Commission airs out new IoT device security draft law – interested parties have a week to weigh in

Alpharious

Long overdue: a stupid prize for the stupid games these marketers were playing

No one asked for toys to be connected to the internet. This was just an excuse to: spy on kids, put drm in toys, and force dlc down parents throats. I hope this permanently kills the iot market. If regulation does not destroy the consumer IOT market, it will be a psychopath user who does.

WhatsApp pulls plug on Taliban helpline, shuts down official-looking accounts

Alpharious

Re: Russian Gov sourced info being repeated without attribution

Considering that the warlord had a gold tea set in an immaculate palace, odds are he did have a helo full of cash. Then there is the billions in missing cash that "disappeared" over there.

Taiwan president pokes the bear by saying the nation needs to lessen its supply chain dependency on China

Alpharious

Everyone needs to lessen their supply chain with China, even China

The world is too dependent on Chinese manufacturing. Sure, there are quality control issues, "chabuduo" mentality, but when we really look at things, they produce a lot for the world. This has caused strain on their infrastructure, and global shipping infrastructure. All it takes is for one bad flood, one bad season, or a dock workers strike and the world will feel the pinch. The supply chain is too inflexible and it's going to burn us sooner or later if we don't correct this overdependence.

Samsung's foldables fall to more realistic prices and harden up

Alpharious

right now they are outrageous, but when that hyper inflation hits....

Russian Arm SoC now shipping in Russian PCs running Russian Linux

Alpharious

Re: ambition comes at a price on the desktop

the specs do not sound that bad to be honest. Also consider that they are running linux too, so odds are real good that the software will be a little better optimized. It sounds like a solid work machine, which harkens back to the commie days...

US 'dropped the ball' on security by going it alone claims Huawei US CSO

Alpharious

The US does not want security standards, they want back doors. All the five eyes countries want back doors. The issue now is that governments are sloppy, and now dangerous people are aware of the backdoors.

'$6 in every $10' spent on cloud infrastructure is with AWS, Microsoft, or Google

Alpharious

Re: Project Fear

They don't care about security, they care about liability. If the cloud gets the blame for the problems then all the better.

Alpharious

Re: Project Fear

I disagree. The issue i have observed, is that there is a talent shortage. Companies want entry level people to have decade of experience, and as a result they either have hyper desperate people who needed a job or underqualified liars, or in most cases the position is unfilled. So most of the infrastructure will be unmaintained. This is why hacking is such a problem, because there is so much unmaintained infrastructure that the vulns outweigh the patches. No one wants to train, but no one wants to pay to retain people. People knock pensions, but Grandpa's generation did not offered a pension out of social justice and compassion, they offered it because they needed to retain talent.

The nightmarish scenario that is our reality, is that companies don't have the talent for the infrastructure, and will have to pay these premium prices for cloud services, until the cloud services become expensive.