Posts by David G from Visalia

The Automattic vs WP Engine WordPress wars are getting really annoying

Another potential source of income is Gravatar

Automattic bought Gravatar in 2007. Automattic does not say if they make any money from selling user profile connection data. So there is no evidence one way or the other whether this is a profit center. But _man_ having that Gravatar link on half the sites on the Internet probably makes a few people in the monetization-of-user-profile-data department salivating. I would be surprised if they _didn't_ sell this data, to help bolster that $7.5 billion number.

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine

Re: You can even sign in...

I actually deleted my Google account a few weeks ago, no _I_ cannot. ;-)

I wouldn't mind paying them for their Pro option, but $20 per month is too high. I think I would be willing to pay $5 per month, though, if it turns out well. My very first query was _of course_ "How do I add Perplexity AI as my Firefox search engine?"

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

Re: Upgraded SMTP servers

I didn't have enough time this morning to explain where I thought this might go, so I will expand on the idea here. The end result is that your elderly uncle who goes into an office supply store to buy a fax machine will actually be sold his very own local mail server appliance. It will of course come with an App. That app will suck down his entire contacts list and stuff that into the friendly touch display on the "fax" machine. He'll get to recreate the halcyon days when he used to email you funny comics, but it's much easier now because the fax scans directly to your contact entry. Your uncle will tell all his friends, your aunts, parents, grandparents, somewhat dim nephews and nieces. Within months, nearly a four million units will be sold.

In a cruel turn highlighting the risks of open source software without sufficient security checks, a bored teenager will use AI to re-write a very small portion of the code: the "reply" button will invoke the process to Reply All to everyone in the address book. They will update the source tree, and over a holiday weekend, four million boxen will download and update their software. The resulting reply allpocalypse of Andy Capp mooching for Christmas money will take out 60% of Internet traffic for several days, and will result in legislation being passed. (The legislation will be passed, but it will do nothing).

Upgraded SMTP servers

I predict that in 2024, Wietse Venema starts playing around with AI software and figures out a scheme to re-write all SMTP mail transport agents to also handle facsimile transmission. He publishes an RFC to extend RFC2633, which passes IETF adoption easily. By the end of 2024, if you have an email address (and an RFC <future> compliant mail server), you can now send and receive faxes, which print to paper automatically.

It's a win-win for everybody.

Why the end of Optane is bad news for all IT

Agreed. I had high hopes for Optane for exactly the reasons explained by the author.

Algorithm can predict pancreatic cancer from CT scans well before diagnosis

Early detection of pancreatic cancer is huge

I agree that it would be good for these doctors to work with programmers to enhance the ML system to show the "why" of it's conclusion. But on the other hand, pancreatic cancer is devastating. Although the article says 9 out of 10 people are dead within five years, it's much worse than that. Pancreatic cancer develops to Stage 4 with NO symptoms. When you finally do have symptoms, you are 30 days or less away from death. The doctor can only tell you to wrap up your affairs and say goodbye to your loved ones.

The thing is, IF some random accident causes your pancreatic cancer to be found early, it's actually a well treatable cancer. It doesn't have to be a life sentence - if it's found early. But it almost never is.

I'm glad these doctors are working on this problem, and hope they can further their work well. Sure, I'd like ML systems to be developed to where they can point out the differences between noise and information that caused the conclusion; but even without that, I welcome anything that produces early detection of pancreatic cancer.

Microsoft introduces pay-as-you-go tier for Power Apps

I think this is a good move for Microsoft

In a larger organization, say 5000 employees, adding a single Power App to the tenant would up the annual bill by $300,000. Zero people are going to go to their management and say "could we please spend an extra $300,000 this year to try it out and see if Power Apps are any good?" This eliminates that hurdle.

Now, I'm not sure Power Apps are actually any good; Microsoft's programmers are mediocre at best, and their management is all about the next new thing instead of high quality and customer satisfaction. But this move does make it possible for people to try out the new thing, whether it plays out in their favor or not.

AWS power failure in US-EAST-1 region killed some hardware and instances

Re: Ever heard of a UPS?

So, my organization has several UPS and we had a surprise (hard) power outage about a month ago. There is a guy in the Building Maintenance department who has the job of going to the various UPS installations (once per month) and simulating a power outage to fire up the UPS. They run the UPS for ten minutes to let it get nice and warmed up before turning it off. On this one UPS he forgot the last step "flip the switch back to monitor street power".

By not following a checklist, he caused multiple thousands of dollars in damage, and several hundred people lost half a days wages as we had to send them home because their computers were not going to be back up until the following day.

It's easy to imagine that AWS don't have a UPS and then call them clowns, but its much more likely that they do have a UPS and suffered some sort of unexpected failure.