* Posts by hammarbtyp

1384 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Nov 2007

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Broadcom boss Hock Tan acknowledges 'some unease' among VMware community

hammarbtyp

Re: Way to go : Tan

We moved to virtualbox. It wasn't so much cost, more the obscure configuration of vmware player which does not seem to be documented anywhere

the difficulties of configuring TPM and secure boot was particularly challenging

Starting over: Rebooting the OS stack for fun and profit

hammarbtyp

Re: Ah, LISP

It was similar story with Erlang development. It was originally developed in prolog (the 3rd leg of the holy trinity of languages everyone should try, but virtually no one does)

However performance was so bad, it had to be ported to C.

For that reason I have doubts whether there is a language that can do it all, without bloating it out of existence

Microsoft Publisher books its retirement party for 2026

hammarbtyp

I have a particular hate of Publisher from when my kids local schools would always publish the newsletter in publisher format.

Publisher, unlike word did not have a viewer, meaning unless you had publisher installed on your PC, you could not access it

Every parent evening I would suggest to the teacher responsible to generate a PDF, but they always failed to do this (the teacher was the IT teacher. He was originally the chemistry teacher, and I think he was promoted to the area where he could do least damage, since It in those days consisted of powerpoint generation, but I was not convinced he could even do that)

Venus has a quasi-moon and it's just been named 'Zoozve' for a sweet reason

hammarbtyp

It is worth reading this twitter thread on how Zoozve got its name due to an artists misreading the defined name

Its a great detective

https://twitter.com/latifnasser/status/1754607479651274757

Dell said to be preparing broad Return To Office order this Monday

hammarbtyp

Of course the irony is that older workers with most to lose in this dictat are the ones with the least interest in career advancement.

Most of them have achieved their career goals, and have come to the conclusion that life quality is a more important metric than some meaningless job title

This feels like a policy invented by a 30 year old hr exec trying to climb the corporate ladder who has no understanding of value over cost

Return to Office mandates boost company profits? Nope

hammarbtyp

No WFH - WTF

I noticed that spokesman for technology progress, 76 year old , Sir Alan Sugar was complaining recently about the move to working from home (So multiple office owner Alan Sugar, what 1st made you think that people should not work from home?)

The thing that many of the people pushing to a return to offices miss is that rather than some revolution, WFH was just really a natural evolution of work culture. This is evidenced by the fact when lockdown occurred the infrastructure was already there to support it. High speed internet was the norm, and companies had already transitioned to teams and installed VPNs. In fact if lockdown had occurred 5 years earlier, I would of been buggered, but as it was the transition was relatively painless. So I contend that rather than WFH being some sort of sudden break in business convention, Covid only hastened the transfer. If there is a problem it was instead of a slow transition, the move was made fast, and the processes to best support it have not had time to catch up

In fact you only have to look at how the workspace had already changed. Work was being distributed and tools like Skype were replacing face to face meetings. Still today I find myself in the office but in wall to wall meetings, all on teams, where the value of the 1 hour commute is all but lost.

The hold up pre-covid was just the inertia of managers who were afraid that they would lose control over there minions. There was a belief (and still is) that employees not in the office will spend there time watching TV or playing games unless there line manager can overlook them. Strangely enough it was often the same managers who often found excuses to WFH while denying other requests

Also the advantages to companies of WFH are rarely highlighted. I would bet that sick pay has been severely curtailed. Companies have a wider pool of talent they can try and attract.

As someone who is at an age where I still naively think that a mobile phones primary purpose is to make phone calls, I also see that the generation far younger than Sir Alan is much better equipped for the transitory work life. Both my daughter's live in the rectangular confines of there mobile screens, so working in a virtual world is far more natural than for me, and they have the skills to make best use of it

Of course with any change there are issues. I still think there is value in gaining that face to face trust relationship. Saying that I have never met 1/2 my team across the world, so it is not insurmountable. The other problem is that I'm lucky in owning my own house with space for a dedicated office space. My colleague during lockdown was not so lucky and had to share the dining room table. However the future generation are lucky if they can afford a shared flat never mind a house of their own, which means there maybe whole generations where the benefits of a WFH culture will be unavailable

'Birthplace of Amazon' on the market for $2.28M

hammarbtyp

Heritage

Is the fence where they first practiced throwing your parcel over still there?

The Post Office systems scandal demands a critical response

hammarbtyp

Re: It's still happening

"Coding skills they should of hired from LINKEDIN, there are thousands of "QUALIFIED" Professionals on there who have the skills, come to think of it I have zero experience but i will add it to my Linkedin profile to increase my chances of getting a coding job"

err, the Horizon project was deployed in 1999, a full 3 years before limkedin came about.

People forget that the software industry was very different then. Jobs were found at the back of magazines, or via agencies who pushed candidates for profit.

Knowledge and experience was limited and very compartmentalized. No Stack Overflow, no Github. You read books, and generally learnt on the job. It was hard to determine best practice or code quality because you had no other examples.

Should they have done better. Yes, but the blame goes in not who wrote the code, but the spineless managers who would not raise their hands up when issues were found to protect the companies bottom line

For a moment there, Lotus Notes appeared to do everything a company needed

hammarbtyp
FAIL

Open all hours

So my best story about Lotus notes...

We were transitioning away from Notes due to a company takeover. As such all the email history had to be ported to another system.

I was working on a company information system and i was using notes as the backend. During my experimentation it seemed that when IT ported the emails, they had not reset the access settings and i could access everyone's emails from the lowest engineer to the CEO.

...

The temptation to delve was strong, but i decided to be a good boy and send an email to the IT head telling them they had a big security hole...

3 months later, i tried again. i could still access. Repeated the email in stronger language

Again it was ignored. In the end I had to show my boss, who had to take it direct to the CEO before it was fixed.

It was a long time to resist furtilling....

hammarbtyp

A mixed bag

The great thing about notes was that it could do everything

The bad new was that it could do everything, so became a morass of data stores, impossible to navigate.

and lets not forget the user interface, especially email, which was seemingly designed with the GEM desktop environment in the 70's and never updated, which made doing even simple functions a nightmare

When our company split off, we moved from Notes to the Google cloud infrastructure. Suddenly we had email that we could "gasp" easily search

We still run a domino server somewhere on the off chance that someone may wish to access 20 year old info. Good luck on that

Why do IT projects like the UK's scandal-hit Post Office Horizon end in disaster?

hammarbtyp

Re: Building software is hard...

I live 5 miles from Long Eaton. A viaduct would be vast improvement

Eben Upton on Sinclair, Acorn, and the Raspberry Pi

hammarbtyp

The tube

"Suppose you'd taken the Tube out. Would anybody have really cared?"

He is basically describing the Acorn electron. Problem is by removing what made the Beeb special just meant you were competing with other low end computers, most of which had a larger software catalogue

In my day, the rich got a beeb, the well off got a commodore 64, while the rest got a spectrum. In the end however whichever one you bought was enough to give you a glimpse of the world ahead

DARPA's air-steered X-65 jet heads into production with goal of flying by 2025

hammarbtyp

Re: F-104 experience

The Blackburn Buccaneer also had blown flaps and greatly increased take off and landing performance from carriers

The downside was that the engines had to be run high speed to generate the air flow, meaning a huge air brake was required

However this was only flight augmentation. The difference being the Bucc could take off and land when the system failed, albeit with decreased performance

Not sure i would want to rely on such a system for total control. While no doubt it would work, my question would be how it would deal with input output blockage, danger of asymmetrical control due to partial failure and whether the engine would have to run at extended speeds for longer to increasing fuel burn and reduce engine life

However its an interesting project

US fusion energy dreams edge closer to reality, Congress permitting

hammarbtyp

Re: Only twenty years..

No. The laser based system is a dead end in terms of power generation. It is not designed to be a practical power station, it is purely a research tool. No one is planning to make a laser based power station in the next 10, 15, 30 or ever

'The computer was sitting in a puddle of mud, with water up to the motherboard'

hammarbtyp

PLC's by there very definition end up often in filthy areas, and I've seen a few in coal mines, chemical works etc which were caked in various solid products

The worst was Tate and Lyle in Silvertown, London. Its was where the raw sugar was offloaded to be processed. we had a couple of NT servers, we had to maintain and the entire site was caked in a sort of mucky brown layer of sugar, so much that your fillings would start to spontaneously explode after about 30 minutes

Horrible place, I felt really sorry for anyone who had to work there, but it probably put you off sugar for life

How to deorbit the Chromebook... and repurpose it for innovators

hammarbtyp

Re: Re-purposing Already Happening

What about just getting a USB Wi-Fi Dongle?

Uncle Sam probes cyberattack on Pennsylvania water system by suspected Iranian crew

hammarbtyp

Pay peanuts...

I am a bit surprised. The US has very stringent Cyber security standards for critical infrastructure via the NIST framework.

However this sort of things shows the issues of implementation especially with the high fragmentation of the market with independent water companies per state

It is a stretch to expect each small company to have the correct level of expertise to maintain cyber standards. Although I work in the PLC industry, I had never heard of the model indicated

My guess was the job was done at lowest cost fixed price and corners were cut. In cyber security you definitely get what you pay for

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

hammarbtyp

Brain the size of a planet, and all you ask me is to generate more cat pictures. Call that job satisfaction, 'cause I don't.

You think you've got problems? What are you supposed to do if you are a manically depressed AI? No, don't try to answer that. I'm fifty thousand times more intelligent than you and even I don't know the answer. It gives me a headache just trying to think down to your level

Life, don't talk to me about life

Pfzzzzz...

hammarbtyp

Re: I predict that AI will calculate the next Mersenne Prime...

AI discovers the last Mersenne Prime...

it also finds a pattern hidden in PI, written in base 11, indicating that all reality is just beta of the next version of Duke Nukem, so solving the mystery why it was never released

hammarbtyp

Elon Musk finds a new funding stream for the site formerly known as twitter

With the latest tranche of launches, the starlink satellite now forms 97% of the night sky. For a fee, groups like star gazers, or beach goers can now pay for the satellites orbits to be shifted to allow a few hours of uninterrupted sky access.

Alternatively a fee can be paid to allow the adverts generated via the high powered lasers on each satellite to be turned off as it transits a region

Antarctica, the last remaining place on earth with out 24 hour starlink coverage becomes the most popular holiday location

hammarbtyp

The 2023 US Elections is won by ChatGPT-10 when it wipes the floor with the other candidates during presidential debate

Later it turns out that Trump was actually run by a AI Beta version developed by Elon Musk. Its model was based on Elon's physical mind download, combined with a secretly recovered Nazi wartime program to prolong the life of Germany's wartime leader.

It was further revealed that other countries had also been experimenting with replacing leaders with AI, with the UK revealing their homegrown A.I program. Unfortunately the Johnson and Truss models proved to be deficient, if not downright dangerous and the UK was only saved by hitting the emergency shutdown (hidden in Larry the cat). The latest model, Rishi 1.0 was deficient in that it could not pass the Turing test

the new ChatGPT president proved how prescient Elon Musk was, by introducing an new era of peace and ensuring that no one would ever again need to work by converting all humans into the equivalent of 24V batteries to power the new AI data centers.

While irritating, it was agreed that that it was a better outcome that another 5 years of a Trump administration

Inside Denmark’s hell week as critical infrastructure orgs faced cyberattacks

hammarbtyp

The 1990's are calling and want there comment back.

There are many good reasons for a powerplant to be on the internet. For example you may want to combine power predictions with weather data

The issue is not that it is connected to the internet, it is how it is connected and how the control system is isolated from say the enterprise system. For example you may want to connect a data diode to ensure data is only going outwards.

The problem tends not to be the internet, but the fact that organizations get lazy. The original Sandworm attack on Ukraine infrastructure was due to someone decided to bypass the firewall with a dedicated link (I'm guessing because all the security stuff was getting in the way of their day job)

Musk thinks X marks the spot for Grok AI engine based on social network

hammarbtyp

1st against the wall when the revolution comes

modeled after the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Surely Marvin would be a better name and rename twitter Sirius cybernetics

Based on the majority of Twixxer's input nowadays, i will be impressed if any AI model won't become manically depressive and paranoid in about a week

World leaders ink AI safety pacts while Musk and Sunak engage in awkward bromance

hammarbtyp
Terminator

Remember the 70's promise's

When I was growing up, we were promised that robotics would free us from drudgery, and by the time I became an adult, we would all live a life of leisure while our robotics slaves did the work for us.

The reality was that it increased the gap between the have and have nots, forcing people into jobs that were not worth investing in Robotics, while the profits went to an increasingly small mega billionaires, who used there cash to wield soft power to protect their status

I have no confidence, AI is not going down the same route

Lenovo’s phantom ThinkPad X1 foldable laptop finally materializes

hammarbtyp

That's a lot of folding...

dosh

Intel's PC chip ship is sinking with Arm-ada on the horizon

hammarbtyp

DEc Alpha

You forgot to mention the DEC Alpha ship, which I don't think ran like a 3 legged dog to the extent that Intel made sure it put some cyanide in its eating bowl

Word turns 40: From 'new kid on the block' to 'I can't believe it's not bloatware'

hammarbtyp

Bait and switch

We were a happy Wordperfect Dos team. It did everything we wanted, however when these new fangled windows PC's came in we upgraded to wordperfect to windows

It ran like a 1 legged dog. It was slow bloated, and get pausing

Another team had got old of a pirate copy of word. It ran smoothly and gave a great Wysiwyg experience. It also opened are old WP files. Despite WP for windows being official company policy, the large number of floppies were copied multiple times and it became the de-facto standard.

Despite what MS says today, it is remarkable how much there present domination relied on their software being copied and shared, and becoming the standard

Later it was told that at the same time MS was encouraging companies like word perfect to windows, they were hiding some of the more efficient API's from them so that their application teams had advantage.

Again it is always worth remembering that it was not technology excellence that made MS the bemouth it is today, but some very dodgy business practices

curl vulnerabilities ironed out with patches after week-long tease

hammarbtyp

Re: Static Code Analysis

Problem with static code analyzers is that it can lull developers into a false sense of security and less attention is paid to good development practices like code reviews, unit tests etc.

Static code analyzers are great, but they often only catch the low hanging fruit, but they can seem like a magic bullet to those with less experience

Intel offers $179 Arc A580 GPU to gamers on a budget

hammarbtyp

Yes, but gamers are not "realistic" people. They are the kind of people who max out their gaming rigs to get the total experience

While Intel execs may see this as realistic, I think they don't really understand the end user

US lawmakers want China export bans to include open tech like RISC-V

hammarbtyp

export bans to include open source

Well that worked well the last time it was tried with encryption technology.

In fact i spent too much of my life ensuring that products are not exported to places like China with the crypto technology that anyone can get via openSSL etc

The best way to control things like RISC is the technology that is used to manufacture the chips using the latest and greatest Fab tech, not by making rules that no one will follow

Nukes, schmukes – fuel cells could power future datacenters

hammarbtyp

There is already a solution for smoothing out renewable peak and troughs and that is rotating stabilizers. They are already running in Scotland and Australia.

They are basically large motors/generators that can quickly be run up and then switched to generate mode.

The fuel cell idea may work in small scale, but it is untested technology and there maybe scaling issues. On the other hand they may provide an option for longer term storage so I could see a combination approach. Rotating stabilsers providing short term smoothing and hydrogen cells storing medium term excess

Human knocks down woman in hit-and-run. Then driverless Cruise car parks on top of her

hammarbtyp

Ai Dillema

well that's the troley problem solved then

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

hammarbtyp

Did the senior DBA go on to have a long career at NATS?

CERN experiment proves gravity pulls antimatter the way Einstein predicted

hammarbtyp

If you get enough anti-matter together everything goes up eventually, often with a large flash of light and the destruction of a large area centered around the storage site

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

hammarbtyp

Best bit

You missed the most exciting development - a power switch....

Getty delivers text-to-image service it says won't get you sued, may get you paid

hammarbtyp

Re: Whose images?

I guess they have been doing the job for a long time, enjoy it, but seen there margins diminish as outlets slowly turn to agencies, who eventually monopolize the industry meaning there is little competition.

There advantage is with a strong body of work behind them, there are other outlets for their work which pay better. The individual photo become advertising and loss leaders. The issue is more up and coming photographers who don't have the benefit of the background forced to make a living on these rates. Of course there will always be someone willing to do it, but it disciminates against people who parents aren't willing to bankroll them (did I hear someone say Brooklyn Beckham). Then talent is lost in an industry

Unfortunately in creative industries there is always someone willing to undercut you for "exposure", not realizing they are cutting there own throat as well.

Recently there was a big storm in Ireland when RTE offered the job of a on-site photographer for 60K and a minister saying that anyone could do that job. Attitudes like that and the fact that artists tend to be independent means that change is hard, but the writers strike in the US which has basically shutdown billion dollar behemoths shows that the power is in the artists hand if the collectively use it and we as the consumer should not facilitate the diminishment of the creators

hammarbtyp

Whose images?

We had a talk by a commercial sport photographer recently. They showed there spreadsheet where they sold an image made at a major sporting event to Getty. That image will be used by newspapers and social media around the world driving profits to both the user and Getty.

How much did they get paid?

A one off 40p, that included transfer of copyright to Getty

Getty may make a big thing of only using their stock images, but those images are collected on the basis of virtual a monopoly that has allowed them to force the amount they pay the creators to virtual chicken feed

What is required is image makers to realise that Getty cannot exist without them and there expertise and refuse to sell their images at such ludicrous prices. AI is just another way companies like Getty will monetise other peoples skills and work without feeding any of the benefits back

How TCP's congestion control saved the internet

hammarbtyp

Re: Every dog has his day!

Ditto Ericsson AXD series. However it did help spawn Erlang, so not all was lost

hammarbtyp

In real time systems where predictability is often more important than delivery guarantee, we avoid TCP like the plague. MODBUS TCP has been largely superseded by MODBUS UDP because when you are controlling large machines the last thing you want is for the protocol to decide to delay sending packets for a while

hammarbtyp

TSN

It's interesting that the big issue was the need to actively define the congestion requirements rather than allow each link to manage its own congestion control.

We had a similar issue with TSN, which sounded great until we found we needed to map the network requirements 1st. This is fine on a static system (like a car), but more difficult in a more dynamic system

hammarbtyp

Re: Ah, ATM

The reason ATM was put forward was because the 48 byte packet could be switched very quickly by the hardware of the day, meaning it could support many channels.

What changed was that hardware got faster and cheaper, meaning the need for hardware optimised data flows went away. So there was no need for a dedicated switch infrastructure

Portable Large Language Models – not the iPhone 15 – are the future of the smartphone

hammarbtyp

Hype Curve 2.0

My gut feeling is that all the hype of AI will turn out to be another SIRI, Cortana, or google assist. Fantastic in theory, but in practice never achieving the promises put forward by the early adopters

Microsoft's Surface Duo phone hangs up, drops out of support

hammarbtyp

Is it really 17 years since Microsoft announced the origami project that was supposed to be the future of mobile computing. How time flies

https://www.engadget.com/2006-02-24-microsofts-origami-project.html

Arm's lawyers want to check assembly expert's book for trademark missteps

hammarbtyp

Streisand effect

While unnecessary and painful, (and yes ARM are being dicks here), it has to be said it's pretty good publicity for both the sites and the book...

Microsoft admits slim staff and broken automation contributed to Azure outage

hammarbtyp

A.i

I thought it was all run by chatgpt nowadays in this brave new world

Getting meshy: BAE scores £89m deal with MoD to build new battlefield network

hammarbtyp

A network by another name would be as lucrative

"a series of nodes that maintain operational resilience by being able to take over for other nodes that are damaged or destroyed"

and we will call it Transitional Combat Protocol ... thats 89 mill thanks

IBM shows off its sense of humor in not-so-funny letter leak

hammarbtyp

Internal jokes is like helium. Eventually they will escape

You have to be careful with in jokes.

I once created a fake product release notice for April fools because we were being taken over and it celebrated the supposed merging of the two company product lines.

Despite being total bullshit, every couple of years I get an email asking when it will be released

Meta to use work badge and Status Tool to snoop on staff

hammarbtyp

The office

Soooo many questions..

Firstly what sort of metrics do you use to show someone performs better in work than at home? Since everyone has an infinite variable set of circumstances, I can't think of an easy way to measure it.

For example if you a women with 3 kids, are you more productive being dragged into the office to do a job you are quite capable of doing just as well at home?

There are however other metrics that can be measured such as the number of sick days taken. These are rarely mentioned in these arguments, but the fact it is easier to work from home when feeling slightly ropey and you are not a walking virus cloud in the office would suggest that sickness leave would be reduced. Then there is productivity. People working from home will start earlier and work later because they don't have the daily commute, never mind they can integrate there life around work rather than sneaking off because their kids are sick and all holiday has been used.

Yes the argument about creating connections is an important one, but not everyone is the same. People of a certain generation are quite happy with virtual links, and can adapt well (You would of thought a social media site would understand this)

However the main thing we find with hybrid working rules is how unevenly the rules are applied. Workers are told to get back into the office, while managers will always find an excuse to work from home (important call, etc)

At the end of day, the problem is not productivity it is the sight of empty expensive real estate that is the primary driver. Only time will fix that

hammarbtyp
Joke

Re: As our technology improves

What do you mean hasn't improved. I mean did you have a app 15 years ago, that could not be killed and continually nagged you to restart it like Skype for Business does. If that's not progress, I am not sure what is

US shovels cash into supercomputers hoping to stoke fusion future

hammarbtyp

On the road to no where

As exciting as the LLNL is, it is a dead end as far as a practical fusion reactor is concerned.

great for headlines, but the way forward is still probably in tokamaks and their ilk, still hopefully the engineering results will allow a better understanding of the process

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