Posts by GuldenNL

6,000 execs struggle to find the AI productivity boom

Re: remember six sigma ?

Nevertheless...

HP CEO prints final page after six years, moves to PayPal

Hoo boy! Turnover Redeux

Take a look at Broussard's reign at Humana, in the short time that they were my customer, no less than nine VPs were flipped in and out of their IT mgmt stack over customer facing tech.

It reminded me of the Leo/Meg days of HP. Has it returned?

Welcome to Wendy's! Before your order can be taken, you must first reset this kiosk

Indeed, Wendy's has returned to the UK as of 2021. But they don't plan to over-franchise this time around which caused them to shut down in 2000.

Happen to know this because I was connected to them by knowing the Founder Dave Thomas and the guy who was the largest Wendy's franchiser in the USA before going on to found the burger chain Hot 'n Now. They went to school with my mother and loved the square burgers of Kewpee Burgers back in the early 1940s across the street from their school.

MAGA cognoscenti warn feds away from shielding AI infringers

Re: But is it fair use?

I think you're going where this will end up - there will be negotiated payments for access (quite low for LLM training access) with caveats to force purchase links while listing sources. Perhaps a new secondary business in providing LLMs with a single URL which spreads the retailing love fairly across online purveyors instead of just the "jungle bookstore."

De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now

Re: Keep dreaming

I dumped Ubuntu back around 2010 when they went to Unity as the desktop default. They were looking toward touch/phones & dumbed down the UI.

Yes, this flexible tech guy immediately threw it out the window (ouch!) not because it was so different, it was so dumb.

And yes, I could have changed the desktop out and stayed with Ubuntu, but like many, I did that by moving to Mint.

I have a laptop with KDE, specifically Fedora Kinoite. Just to stay on top of Plasma developments, but rely on Mint to get stuff done. So I'm like non-techies in that I just want to get stuff done and not have to have multiple little struggles every day adapting to a new interface.

Re: A design that originated in Window?

Almost right, but not quite. While working at *** in the early 90s I met with Apple as they were a customer and we were trying to do some things they had failed at (speech recognition.)

Long story short, Xerox Alto and its Smalltalk OS did have overlapping windows that could be moved and resized. (Will come back to this.)

Xerox Star which was a later, commercial product was exactly like what you said.

Bill Atkinson at Apple thought Alto had refreshing and self repairing windows (it didn't, you had to click the window you bright to the front to refresh it.) so he invented QuickDraw and the concept of Regions as the basis of the Macintosh Window Manager.

He had just left Apple when I met with them & was spoken about in hushed voices, much more admired than Steve Jobs at that time, at least by the Engineering team that is.

Amazon brain drain finally sent AWS down the spout

Multi Region for a Reason

Took a call from the CEO of a consulting firm in Europe who I provided some assistance to a couple of years ago due to the customer industry in the USA.

I demanded that this customer's CTO sign a disclaimer that they were offered a multiple AWS region solution and they turned it down. I also was loud about going with West if they refused to go with multiregion. The consulting firm was nervous because I was assessment about it all, without being nasty or putting anyone down. Yes, I was the "know it all" but that's why I was there.

Apparently someone at the customer called the account mgr today and accused them of not warning the customer of a single region. No idea who, nor if they were there at the time I made a stink, but likely not. Acct Mgr calls Project Mgr while customer is still on the line, PM shoots the doc over, Acct Mgr provides it with glee. Immediately informs the C-Level execs that this saved them and recommended using it every time.

This know it all can't understand why large enterprises do not go multiregion, given they need Five Nines up time. The cost just isn't enough to rule it out.

Techies tossed appliance that had no power cord, but turned out to power their company

ZERO documentation of what they planned to pull, and ZERO documentaion of they actually pulled told me all I need to know.

Even waaaay back in the 1990s we had all data center changed well documented, including digital photos of before and after each physical change.

It seem as that there are as few people here whose fee fees are hurt because these two jackasses (again, no idea about Steve's experience, so will placed it on his boss,) were acting like school kids digging through an abandoned house and paid the price.

I'm not a fan of generational blame placing, but find it difficult to believe that anyone who hasbworked in IT more than 10 years would believe this was completely rational and above reproach. This seriously is about as awful behaviour as it gets.

"Good intentions" have started many a war. And yes, as an exec over data centers supporting billions of revenue (this story is about a financial company, regardless of revenue,) I was judgemental. That was my job, and These two were reckless beyond any measurement.

If your fee fees got hurt because I would not have two (ok, no idea about Steve's level of experience, but certainly his boss) idiots playing with critical corporate assets, then you're not living in reality and haven't had much responsibility placed on you.

Re: Sounds like they were reckless

ABSOLUTELY correct answer!

Regarding the alarm line, the analog PBX connection has power over cabling (talk battery,) and someone didn't program the PBX very well, and sadly, all too common.

I headed up IT a global transportation company across the 1990s. I would have fired them before they exited the CoLo.

However, they wouldn't have had access in the first place. And they would have been legacy people that I hadn't hired because I didn't hire blithering idiots like this.

ZERO defense for these two, and it's telling about those here trying too do so.

Workers: Yes, RTO makes sense. No, we’re not going to do it

Re: "gives people the freedom¹ to live² happier³, more fulfilling lives²."

Work output including quality in a given timeframe.

Return on investment for Copilot? Microsoft has work to do

Bad timing for example name

“The most difficult thing about that is it's tough to drive ROI on saying Kash is 30 percent more productive"

Especially when he's being grilled by Congress and responding like a clown while attempting to run cover for his Pedo boss.

‘IT manager’ needed tech support because they had never heard of a command line

This sexist pig says

The tip off was that she came from telephony. I've managed telephony (and a whole lot more) for 32 years. Every single female that I inherited when moved over a telephony team knew next to nothing about hands on technical details. They all came from carrier backgrounds and were focused on "relationships."

I eliminated every one of them. Some moving to other roles and responsibilities, some moving on to other employers.

My back fill employees were always close to 50/50 between genders, with many of the females coming from roles like desktop support, who we cross-trained in telephony. Every single one of them knew CLI in both MSFT DOS/Windows and/or HPUX, Solaris or BSD.

A couple of them are still working and are seller in telephony.

The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

I'm one of the most dismissive about "AI" in media and the general vernacular.

However, you're dead right.

Those "bi-cycles" gents are pushing around with their feet whilst sitting on them won't change the world. Nor will the steam powered, tiller steered buggies.

Not pumping any stock here, but the AI clown show's final curtain isn't going to kill off Nvidia or their ilk. Real work is being done and will grow by data churning and self learning software.

And yes, Nvifia's current value is in a clown show balloon state, but may be a good one to watch long term after the balloon shriveles to imitate Trump's manhood.

Linux is about to lose a feature – over a personality clash

I'm still laughing at a manical volume from your statement, "Many people, especially from an American cultural background, are very uncomfortable with bare open criticism like that. Well, tough. It is needed."

I've lived in Windsor, Naarden NL, Weinheim DL, Launceston TAS Oz, Singapore, several places in the USA.

Your statement really means that Americans (and neither do the Dutch or Aussies) don't suck it up and not speak up when 'bare open criticism' is directed their way. If you ask anyone from these countries who does suck it up and instead sulks off, you might be suprised.

As someone who adopted Linux back in '93 while living in Naarden and saw Linus' hilarious nearly daily tirades, it's my observation that the planet of Linux has held many citizens of the Kingdom of Butthurt over the past three plus decades, and they originated from virtually every country on Earth.

Tata Consultancy enforces return-to-office mandate for all US staff, effective immediately

Re: Issuing hollow offers to new hires

Plenty of us working hard to get OPT & H1B outlawed as 30 years. But tech is a major corruptiion partner to Congress along with the pharmaceutical and medical professions.

Re: Issuing hollow offers to new hires

'cept those aren't Americans they're doing that to. It's H1B & OPT visa holders. Tata throws them in like having 10 fishing poles going and hoping to get a bite on one of them.

I'm seeing little cracks of daylight finally showing thru at several massive financial and banking companies. One global firm has cut approximately 200 H1B holders locally and word is all of them were unable to find other jobs, so they returned home.

PUTTY.ORG nothing to do with PuTTY – and now it's spouting pandemic piffle

Re: Vaccines

I think whoever shared it with me knew Simon. It hit me that it was Windows because I was at work and there I used Windows and HPUX, For some reason I was thinking Linux which I used at home since 1993.

Vaccines

I know two virologists who are concerned about the safety of some vaccines, primarily not because of the antigens, but because of the excipient (delivery chemicals in layman's terms.)

Both (one American, one Dutch) have reservations about the speed of releasing several mRNA antigens, but they are not vocal about this concern.

Neither are kooks, both are respected. I'm not an anti-vaxxer, but there's a knee jerk reaction to calling me one when there's a discussion and I mention their educated concerns.

I've been using PuTTY since sometime in the 90s, and it certainly was before 1999. I have the true site bookmarked in my short list of Linux Must Have sites.

Looks like 1,300 Indeed and Glassdoor staffers will need their former employer's websites

Glassdoor is Useless

I took a look for the first time in five years just this past week. Wrong CEO was listed and all means to provide feedback for correction are now absent.

I have no idea why anyone would spend 30 seconds on the site these days.

Tesla Robotaxi videos show Elon's way behind Waymo

Re: Maybe not drugs

Hitler did a shit load of drugs, but he didn't toke, nor was he known to possess any funny version of those new Haribo Tanzbären gummi bears.

But knowing Musk, he probably thought it was a funny double entendre.

IBM Watson zombie brand shuffles forward with new AI lab in NYC

Re: Only IBM

You mean the 95 year-old ladies who hold onto the stock because they are "Big Blue chip stocks?"

No joke, my wife has a handful of these folks as clients. One passed away recently and they are still going through all of the stock certificates and getting information for the approximately $6 million worth of these old blue chip stocks.

Microsoft dumps AI into Notepad as 'Copilot all the things' mania takes hold in Redmond

Shocked by the number of users here

I haven't used Notepad for 20++ years. Since Notepad++ was introduced by "Tiny Bubbles" - Don Ho

I even delete the executible in every Windows I use so there isn't any mixup and I have to kill the buggy one.

That's on Windows, I spend 90% of my time in Linux where I use Geany.

Why are all of you still using Redmond's junk?

Computacenter IT guy let girlfriend into Deutsche Bank server rooms, says fired whistleblower

He should have known better. Picking her up from a number on a bathroom wall. 867-5309

Google, AWS say it's too hard for customers to use Linux to swerve Azure

Re: Hmmm

So you're conflating enterprise server databases and their supporting OS with desktop?

Nice way to tell us that you're not far off the Help Desk and don't understand enterprise architecture and business use of IT systems.

Tesla fudged odometer to screw me out of warranty, Model Y owner claims

Easy, they're in Robotaxi mode picking up MAGA at alternative lifestyle events after dark. And depositing their welfare funds into bot accounts buying Tesla stock.

Re: Subsidies in NL ending.

Down votes for the obvious? Must be from the very high number of Anonymous commenters in this news article.

Odd

When even Microsoft can’t understand its own Outlook, big tech is stuck in a swamp of its own making

Re: Hand

My biggest complaint of many about New Outlook is the browser style UI cannot show me how many new emails are in each account. I have 5 accounts and now have to physically open and expand each account to see if there are new emails.

So instead, I use my Linux laptop and Thunderbird or one of my phones to stay on top of incoming communications.

That raspy, ragged breathing is Outlook on its death bed. M$FT isn't far behind.

Re: Hand

When I was a Director at EDS, M$FT was a customer. I visited one of teams for a few days to see how they were doing and check if there was any way to help. I could not believe the amount of loud, nasty in-hall arguments every couple of hours.

After trying to understand what was behind these distractions, one of my team told me that it was the Office team fighting with a subgroup of the Longhorn (future Vista) team. It was at that point when I understood that the IBM sickness was entrenched in Redmond.

It has gotten much worse in the past twenty years and makes me wonder if it is now in the terminal phase.

Re: Stop Talking to Each Other...

Proton VPN blocks in app adverts extremely well. Run out on all our mobile devices.

Microsoft walking away from datacenter leases (probably) isn't a sign the AI bubble is bursting

Re: Another Interpretation?

Hey, AI is just a troll. Like Trump. Like Musk.

Credible nerd says stop using atop, doesn't say why, everyone panics

Re: I'm removing it...

You can thank yourself. You or the admin before you turned on those "useless logs"

Self pwned yourself there.

You can thank yourself

You installed it, so thank yourself. It is NOT a default Mint package.

DXC paid 50% more than original contract value for disastrous public sector Oracle project

Re: Other People’s Money

Starting with the dullards on the government side.

Capital One two-day outage leaves customers in free-fall

I was a king with an unlimited budget

Back in the late 80s I was a regional VP of Sales for a global transportation company. One of our competitors centralized their customer service and only a few days in, their national toll free number went to a dead end.

I mobilized our sales team and we picked off nearly $100M annual revenue that never went back to them.

Years go by, I move back to the USA and take a role with them heading up IT for their customer service and sales. (Long story moving from biz to IT) Six weeks in I meet with the exec committee over IT expenditures. I have a long wish list for redundancy that is breathtaking in $$$.

To their credit, nobody asked if I was sane. I was somewhat infamous in the industry for nothing related to sales or IT, so I had their respect. When questioned about the need for all of this NOW! I pulled out my old sales reports and passed them around. I informed them this was all of the new business that I had stolen from them from their call center outage those years ago. 100% approved, and I never once had to justify any of my budget requests after that.

How the OS/2 flop went on to shape modern software

Re: floppies

You didn't like the jazzy Win95 bumper car game?

Re: Even now, Windows 11 won't run on a perfectly serviceable kit.

Heck, my primary personal system is a 2012 Asus that's faster than every other high end laptop I've used from customers. I haven't gamed in 15 years, but just fired up a few over the holiday break & felt like I was running them on a dedicated 2024 gaming tower.

Re: Summary....from way back then......

I banned Token Ring from a global transportation company in 1994. IBM threw $1 million of free consulting at the unstable LANs and still got their backsides handed to them when I implemented an extremely stable Ethernet LAN for 250 users at pennies on the dollar compared to Token Ring.

I knew absolutely nothing about networking back then & relied on a very small network team. I wish that I knew then what I know now to better understand what went so wrong.

I'll add that OS/2's GUI perplexed everyone, including my significant Unix team who were working with 3 different GUIs.

I had to rely on an app vendor to install their excellent native OS\2 app. Fine with the app, just cursed a lot at the OS GUI.

Telco security is a dumpster fire and everyone's getting burned

Re: Pathetic anti-China hit piece

Aha, we've all been wondering when Chairman Xi was going to circle back to The Register to exclaim his hatred of the United States of America.

Episode 62 of "我實在是太羨慕那些賤人了！"

Fore-get about privacy, golf tech biz leaves 32M data records on the fairway

Got them by their balls!

Those pros are feeling light in their bags, and it really tees them off.

It didn't take an Eagle eye to see their anger, especially when a little birdie told them just as they were at the ladies tournament and they hoped to to shag a few afterward.

Torvalds weighs in on 'nasty' Rust vs C for Linux debate

Re: Hard truths

Visioning his head next to Dick Nixon's in a jar on Futurama.

They could spend their time arguing with each other.

Re: Hard truths

But I've heard that all the cool kids are already coding in elominnowpee.

HPE to pursue $4B claim against estate of Mike Lynch over Autonomy acquisition

True Fraud

I was there as a Director in CRM technology. The idiots never once consulted with us. Autonomy's offerings were garbage and I would have advised against taking them on even for free.

We had landed 3-4 customers that threw Autonomy out in favor of our hosted offerings. Meg Whitman and Leo Apotheker were completely clueless, but what really irked me was that I found out that Marc Andreessen was pushing them to do the deal in a hurry. I never discovered I'd be made anything out of the deal.

Larry Ellison and (UGH!) Mark Hurd caught Lynch's fraud and called HP & Lynch out on it by posting the PowerPoint that Lynch & cohorts presented to Oracle when they were trying to peddle Autonomy to them.

Lynch was scum, but who have I mentioned that isn't?

Starliner's not-so-grand finale is a thump in the desert next week

Re: Flatliner

Hopefully it lands safely since its flight path is right over our heads on the way down.

Yelp accuses Google of being a local search bully in antitrust lawsuit

Yelp sales person, "Nice little business you have there. It would be a shame if something bad would happen to it."

Have we stopped to think about what LLMs actually model?

Re: The linguists clearly having kittens...

"Eleven!" "Try it in American" "Ee-lev-in!"

Bargain-hunting boss saw his bonus go up in a puff of self-inflicted smoke

Placename, bigger placename

You're conveniently forgetting counties in the UK.

Or the extra baggage of adding in smaller areas that mean nothing unless you live within 100 yards of them; e.g., Frogmore Edge, Windsor, Berkshire. Ask someone on the High Street about dear Frogmore Edge and you're going to feel like you're speaking Dutch.

Stargazing with the Beaverlab Finder TW2

Re: Ask an astronomer

One of the benefits of living in a Dark Sky Community is that my telescope is used several nights each week.

And our town is opening the International Dark Sky Discovery Center next year! Woo hoo!