* Posts by GuldenNL

105 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Mar 2022

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

GuldenNL

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

GuldenNL

Re: floppies

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

GuldenNL

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.

GuldenNL

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

GuldenNL

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

GuldenNL

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

GuldenNL

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.

GuldenNL

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

GuldenNL

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

GuldenNL

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

GuldenNL

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?

GuldenNL

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

GuldenNL

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

GuldenNL

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!

Palo Alto Networks execs apologize for 'hostesses' dressed as lamps at Black Hat booth

GuldenNL

The LinkedIn pile on was predictable Normal people shake their heads and move on.

If these were two social media "influencers" in even more revealing clothing, they would have been cheered by the same women tsk tsking on LinkedIn and those LI Karens would be criticizing any men who dared speech out about their attire.

It struck me as a dumb retro move straight out of Mad Men. And yes, shades of "A Christmas Story."

Report slams Boeing and NASA over shoddy quality that's delayed SLS blastoff

GuldenNL

Re: IOW.....

New Orleans is in Louisiana, not Alabama.

Boeing's facility is in New Orleans.

The Marshall Space Flight Center is in Huntsville, AL but they has nothing to do with Boeing.

Louisiana's Senators are Bill Cassidy and John Kennedy.

And I agree with the premise of an aerospace manufacturing facility in New Orleans to be a true"WTF?!?" decision.

It's more suited to hurricanes and Hurricanes with bead necklaces and bare breasts. Certainly not known for highly skilled employees.

Tesla that killed motorcyclist was in Full Self-Driving mode

GuldenNL

Re: Lack of due care

Like losing your head over a Harry Potter movie?

https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/2016/07/01/tesla-driver-harry-potter-crash/86596856/

GuldenNL

Throw the book at him!

I'm hoping for a sentence that grabs the attention of the lunatics who believe the rich lunatic.

25 years should do it.

It is 60 years since a US spacecraft first took a close-up of the Moon

GuldenNL

Lived it up close

I could have spit out numbers and facts like a Program Director back then. My father headed up Quality at one of the top NASA vendors.

I'll be honest, I barely think back on purpose. The hope and the feeling of "We're living in the future!" was so positive. Nothing like it these days for we Space freaks.

Somehow my view of spending a good part of my life on the moon, helping the next leap to Mars died out in the mid-80s.

These days I spend my focus on Hubble and other views of the greater universe as I approach seeing them on the astral plane.

An arc welder in the datacenter: What could possibly go wrong?

GuldenNL

Re: Soldering vs. Welding (was: Blame-shifting gone mad)

You are describing "forge welding"

GuldenNL
Flame

Re: Blame-shifting gone mad

Unfortunately the original post leaves out the "test of the story."

Weld and solder have the same base word, "soldadura," but add more description that also includes brazing, "fuerte/blanda."

I have MIG/TIG/Arc electric welders, & Oxy acetylene welding equipment and even have a small plastic welder, as well as various soldering irons. We all use specific words when discussing "welding" in English, as do Spanish speakers.

For specific examples, see: https://es.airliquide.com/soluciones/soldadura-industrial/cual-es-la-diferencia-entre-la-soldadura-fuerte-y-la-soldadura-blanda

Admin took out a call center – and almost their career – with a cut and paste error

GuldenNL

Re: It would of course not do ...

He couldn't pin it on anyone else, he was the sole guy.

I know this dipshiesse and this is the least of his "mistakes."

Biden bans Kaspersky: No more sales, updates in US

GuldenNL

Re: ¡¡¡COOL!!! ¡Cheaper Karspesky for us!

As long as you're not in an industry targeted by Ruzzian cyberthiefs strewing ramsomware about, you can be fat, dumb and happy.

Until dear Abuela dies because her hospital's systems are shut down because of those Ruzzian friends of Putin.

US faith-based healthcare org Ascension says 'cybersecurity event' disrupted clinical ops

GuldenNL

Re: I fear this is just the start

An Orc reduction action would be very helpful to the other billions on this planet.

MGM says FTC can't possibly probe its ransomware downfall – watchdog chief Lina Khan was a guest at the time

GuldenNL

Re: Methinks the lady doth protest too much, methinks....

No offshore for customer service at MGM. Very strong union presence.

I would LOVE to provide color, this one would make for a Gary Larson Far Side strip.

Ahem...someone was pitching them to implement voice bio authentication, and suggested the helpdesk would be a perfect place to start since it would only affect internal customers and would be a relatively small and quick deployment.

Several months later... Help Desk social engineering from a "Sr Mgr."

US insurers use drone photos to deny home insurance policies

GuldenNL

Re: State Farm are the worst

Yep! Had an October microburst in 2005 that took down two very large Mesquite trees that caused damage to our roof. I flew out at 5:00am the next day. Adjuster was there in the morning in my absence, approved up to $12,000 with whoever we wanted to use.

Got it done same week and they billed $7,600. Couldn't have been easier.

GuldenNL

Re: State Farm are the worst

I've had State Farm for exactly 50 years. Never once had a problem with them, and my home and auto prices are so low I've never looked at their competitors.

20 years in Michigan and 30 years in Arizona. Had great coverage while living in the Netherlands for 5 years from Aegon.

GuldenNL

Re: A physical visit is a lot more reliable

Those of us who grew up in Tornado Alley say to everyone in Hurricane country, "Hold my beer."

I survived an F4 tornado and if you think the movie Twister was asking the lines of Wizard of Oz, count yourself fortunate not to have witnessed one in person.

Professor Fujita (for whom the F - Fujita scale is named after) came to make measurements, and at my place of work (which I had just left 10 minutes prior) he measured the speeds after the fact at 260MPH or 418KPH. My two college roommates were inside, one was credited with saving a family of 4 from collapsing shelving and a dropping roof. What shocked me on my return 15 mins after the hit was the upside down car across the street with a 12 yr old girl strapped in, sitting on top of a large pick up truck.

Out of shear luck, I happened to be wearing a pair of wooden clogs that day. Perfect for walking across millions of glass shards everywhere I went.

Hands up if you want to volunteer for layoffs, IBM tells staff

GuldenNL

IBM - A Leader in RIFs

I remember hearing about RIFs at IBM going back to the 80s. I've always wondered why anyone in their right mind would every consider working for IBM.

Thereby causing my latest question, are there any sane people left at IBM?

AT&T's apology for Thursday's outage should stretch to a cup of coffee

GuldenNL
WTF?

Re: Unable to do banking - text message MFA

Discussed using the latest and greatest voice bioauthentication with the CISO and his right hand minion of one of the largest Healthcare payer corporations in the USA.

So called expert right hand minion goes on to immediately kill any discussion of voice bio because "In the mid-70s my coworker impersonated me so well, he could fool all voice bioauth systems." DUHHHH! So mobile phone MFA was deemed the most secure method.

After waiting a reasonable amount of time, and with the help of an internal ally/co-conspirator, Mr. Minion suddenly had several Help Desk tickets per day opened in their name for almost a month. "How are they getting thru our MFA?"

CEO arranged his own cybersecurity, with predictable results

GuldenNL

Re: Customers are the security liability

Not two weeks before one of 2023's most sensational malware events started, I pitched voice bioauthentication to the customer. And as I tend to do, suggested a PoC using their Help Desk since it involves only internal customers and the numbers are much lower.

"Too expensive! Yes, the PoC is very cheap, but who needs this for their Help Desk?"

I immediately moved on given the dysfunctional management at said customer. The rest is history. They still grumble about the cost (which really isn't that much) even though they are very well aware of the cost of leaving themselves unprotected.

Amazon confirms it locked Microsoft engineer out of his Echo gear over false claim

GuldenNL

I'm guessing he was listening to Rap and heard the lyrics rather than the doorbell.

GuldenNL

Re: They're not supposed to

"Scheduled so tightly they only have time to dump in the street after ringing your doorbell."

https://www.wtrf.com/pennsylvania/pennsylvania-man-says-amazon-driver-pooped-in-front-of-his-house/amp/

GuldenNL

Re: Smart device

In the USA you can't have one that goes "dingaling" anymore because somebody complained it was making fun of people with mental health issues.

GuldenNL

Sticks and Stones...

To me, the worst bit it's that this about "someone said something." Short of a threat of violence, it should not matter. But being a Boomer, I grew up with "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me."

Now it seems that everyone is a snowflake and a snide comment from a demented old uncle is enough to shut off your services.

I'll make sure to shout out "Hey Google, quit listening while I read my electric utility bill."

Why ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI – and be destroyed

GuldenNL

Re: Seems quite a few of you are either not reading the entire article or are missing the point...

Sadly there are many who somehow make money by claiming to be experts of LLMs yet are chattering like chimps about ChstGPT in multiple forums such as LinkedIn. When I make a rare comment questioning why they didn't discuss that the Chat-GPT models are non-deterministic, they either delete my comment or their original post.

Heaven forbid if I mention the massive compute power that will be required if this useless crap (currently it is in my opinion) is deployed as it is currently designed. The proposed CALM framework is a start, but they don't want to discuss this important facet of widespread deployment of applications reliant on LLMs because, "Yawn, it's boring and I can't show it off to my friends to demonstrate how smart I am by working with this stuff."

I can't wait for the end of the hype and the silencing of the chimps' chattering.

Linux Mint 21.2 and Cinnamon 5.8 desktop take shape

GuldenNL

Cinnamon Mint is my Choice

My company managed tens of thousands of RHEL servers so for desktop I went to Debian just for something different. After I sold my company, I landed on Mint (around 2008 or so) and just have stuck with it. I no longer had any interest in different OS or distros about then, so haven't ventured out to anything else. Mint Cinnamon just works, upgrades are seamless so all is good.

Plenty of other distros that I've heard good things about, just no interest in checking them out.'

Amazon mandates return to office for 300,000 corporate staff

GuldenNL

Re: Change if it's that bad

Mmmm hmmm. Been in a modern office lately? People in cubicles on the phone or Teams meetings with coworkers and customers outside of the office.

Just brilliant.

GuldenNL

Re: Change if it's that bad

"It's also not unreasonable that a company would want you in the office for a couple of days a week if you were full time in the office before the pandemic."

Why?

"Because it was stupid before, we should keep doing stupid!"

What's up with IT, Doc? Rabbit hole reveals cause of outage

GuldenNL

Obviously Not An Aerosmith Fan

Hunny Bunny never did like Steven Tyler…

Sweet emotion

Sweet emotion

I pulled into town in a police car

Your daddy said I took it just a little too far

You're telling her things but your girlfriend lied

You can't catch me 'cause the rabbit done died

Yes it did

Southwest promotes internal IT executive to CIO in wake of that Christmas meltdown

GuldenNL

Re: Well, now.

If you know the current Southwest regime, it is.

Microsoft Office 365 Cloud has a secret lining

GuldenNL

Re: Is that not an oxymoron ...

To be fair, Microsoft promises to hide them behind a Corvette.

Smart ovens do really dumb stuff to check for Wi-Fi

GuldenNL

I tried to have a microwave, but my cheap microscope melted on top of my woodfired stove.

IBM top brass accused again of using mainframes to prop up Watson, cloud sales

GuldenNL

Well we all know that Watson isn't right much of the time.

GuldenNL

According to Watson Health, the fiber benefits outweigh the extra carbohydrates. Just skip the butter.

CES Worst in Show slams gummi gouging, money-wasting mugs, and other dubious kit

GuldenNL

Re: Circling the toilet bowl

The new AI has anal recognition. One drawback is that it can't be used wherever there are many politicians. Apparently the AI believes that in their case, one asshole looks and sounds just like the others.

Cybercrooks are telling ChatGPT to create malicious code

GuldenNL

Re: It's just a tool

The hilarious bit about this that many don't realize is that Microsoft owns the propriety GPT3 model. Users are accessing it visa APIs and don't know what's behind them.

It won't be long until Clippy is back in some form with GPT4 behind it. Bing will incorporate GPT3 and be available too the general public in the next few weeks.

GuldenNL

NOT a database

ChatGPT is the interface to the Large Language Model GPT3 which is NOT a database.

Look for info on LLMs, you'll soon see the difference.

Alphabet reshuffles to meet ChatGPT threat

GuldenNL

Re: The sooner Google is kicked in the nuts

The hilarious thing about ChatGPT is that OpenAI used to be open. But three years ago they complained that the original $1B that Musk, Theil, etc. invested in them to be open source wasn't enough, so they spun up a for profit vehicle and Microsoft invested another $1B and has sole license to the model behind GPT-3. The stuff available to others is via API and the model isn't open.

I'm no fan of Google, but they just proposed CALM which brings the capability of Large Language Models into the realm of reasonable compute power. So they are adding a lot to AI.

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