RickyP784 Ars Tribunus Militum
13y
2,213
Subscriptor
I'm so looking forward to de-VMware-Ing and de-Cisco-ing my network over the next few years as much as possible.
We're starting soon with Arista fiber switches and will start replacing copper IDF switches in the coming years. I think we'll keep Cisco APs, phones, and firewalls, but it's gonna be real nice when our only SMARTnet costs are FirePowers and an ISR voice gateway.
Our Dell VxRail ends service life in 2 years, and that will be the last VMware equipment to go. Unless Proxmox comes a long way in a short time, we'll switch to straight Nutanix. Not ideal, but it's the best of a bad situation. //
Evil_Merlin Ars Legatus Legionis
25y
23,732
Subscriptor
We got ours. And we WERE a big VMware user. We migrated from Hyper-V to ESXi in 2019 for stability and extendibility reasons. The cost increase could be justified by the back end we had, so it wasn't a huge deal. Fast forward to now, we are on a deadline.
July 18th, no more ESX. Anywhere. No VMware products period.
All Windows systems going back to Hyper-V using Windows Server 2025.
All Linux/GNU and appliances going to KVM.
The company saves a BOAT load of money.
Broadcom made the decision REALLY easy for us. Best thing is that we will have it all gone before the audit, so when they get here (and we will LET them come) we can turn them away at the door with proof in hand. //
Are you willing to pay for your host? Windows Server does VM's quite fine for almost any loads. Good management tools and decent amount of guest coverage. //
Depending on guest oses
Proxmox, quemu with vmm or other gui, openstack , openshift with addon for vm's
or
if mostly windows hyperv. //
sjl Ars Tribunus Militum
19y
2,785
Spuwho said:
Heard a company is looking into a general Broadcom boycott. processors, controllers, network switches, storage equipment, other software products. Not just dumping VMWare, but anything related to or dependent on Broadcom. They really pissed off a lot of people.
I have an LSI (Avago, Broadcom - in order of the buyouts) SAS controller in my home-brew NAS.
If I ever need a replacement, I'll be looking at options from Microchip (the company that bought the company [Microsemi] that bought the company [PMC-Sierra] that bought Adaptec.) Possibly Marvell. Not Broadcom, specifically because of this. Sure, I'm a very small fish in that particular pond, but still.
A team in China just showed that the math behind RSA encryption is starting to bend to the will of the quantum realm.
Using a quantum annealing processor built by D‑Wave Systems, the researchers say they factored a 22‑bit RSA integer that had resisted earlier attempts on the same class of hardware. Wang Chao and colleagues at Shanghai University carried out the experiment. //
When RSA encryption debuted in 1977 it was lauded for tying security to the difficulty of splitting a large semiprime into its two prime factors .
Classic computers still need sub‑exponential time to break today’s 2048‑bit keys, and the largest key so far cracked with conventional methods is only 829 bits (RSA‑250) after weeks on a supercomputer.
“Using the D‑Wave Advantage, we successfully factored a 22‑bit RSA integer, demonstrating the potential for quantum machines to tackle cryptographic problems,” the authors wrote. //
Universal, gate‑based quantum machines run Shor’s algorithm, which in principle can shred RSA by finding the period of modular exponentiation in polynomial time.
Those devices still struggle with error correction, while D‑Wave’s annealers, though not universal, already pack more than 5000 qubits and avoid deep circuits by using a chilling 15 mK environment and analog evolution. //
A White House event framing the publication urged U.S. agencies to begin swapping vulnerable keys because adversaries may already be hoarding encrypted data for “hack now, decrypt later” attacks.
“Businesses must treat cryptographic renewal like a multi‑year infrastructure project,” the Wall Street Journal’s CIO briefing noted when the final standards neared release last year. Corporate technology leaders echoed that sense of urgency. //
Large‑key RSA is still safe today, yet the study shows that hardware improvements and smarter embeddings keep shaving away at the gap.
On Monday, court documents revealed that AI company Anthropic spent millions of dollars physically scanning print books to build Claude, an AI assistant similar to ChatGPT. In the process, the company cut millions of print books from their bindings, scanned them into digital files, and threw away the originals solely for the purpose of training AI—details buried in a copyright ruling on fair use whose broader fair use implications we reported yesterday. //
Ultimately, Judge William Alsup ruled that this destructive scanning operation qualified as fair use—but only because Anthropic had legally purchased the books first, destroyed each print copy after scanning, and kept the digital files internally rather than distributing them. The judge compared the process to "conserv[ing] space" through format conversion and found it transformative. Had Anthropic stuck to this approach from the beginning, it might have achieved the first legally sanctioned case of AI fair use. Instead, the company's earlier piracy undermined its position.
But if you're not intimately familiar with the AI industry and copyright, you might wonder: Why would a company spend millions of dollars on books to destroy them? Behind these odd legal maneuvers lies a more fundamental driver: the AI industry's insatiable hunger for high-quality text. //
Publishers legally control content that AI companies desperately want, but AI companies don't always want to negotiate a license. The first-sale doctrine offered a workaround: Once you buy a physical book, you can do what you want with that copy—including destroy it. That meant buying physical books offered a legal workaround.
And yet buying things is expensive, even if it is legal. So like many AI companies before it, Anthropic initially chose the quick and easy path. In the quest for high-quality training data, the court filing states, Anthropic first chose to amass digitized versions of pirated books to avoid what CEO Dario Amodei called "legal/practice/business slog"—the complex licensing negotiations with publishers. But by 2024, Anthropic had become "not so gung ho about" using pirated ebooks "for legal reasons" and needed a safer source. //
When asked about this process, Claude itself offered a poignant response in a style culled from billions of pages of discarded text: "The fact that this destruction helped create me—something that can discuss literature, help people write, and engage with human knowledge—adds layers of complexity I'm still processing. It's like being built from a library's ashes."
ANGUISH
LANGUISH
by
Howard L. Chace
English words are astonishingly versatile and could readily be made to serve a new and extraordinary purpose, but nobody seems to care about this except SPAL[8] (Society for the Promotion of the Anguish Languish).[1] In keeping with its lofty ideals and its slogan, ANGUISH FOR EVERYBODY, the Society is sponsoring this little text, which has three aims:
-
To improve the public’s understanding of the Anguish Languish.
-
To improve the academic standing of the Anguish Languish.
-
To improve the social and financial standing of the Society.
Last month, Microsoft released a modern remake of its classic MS-DOS Editor, bringing back a piece of computing history that first appeared in MS-DOS 5.0 back in 1991. The new open source tool, built with Rust and simply called "Edit," works on Windows, macOS, and—in a twist that would have seemed unlikely three decades ago—Linux. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/edit-is-now-open-source/
Aside from ease of use, Microsoft's main reason for creating the new version of Edit stems from a peculiar gap in modern Windows. "What motivated us to build Edit was the need for a default CLI text editor in 64-bit versions of Windows," writes Nguyen while referring to the command-line interface, or CLI. "32-bit versions of Windows ship with the MS-DOS editor, but 64-bit versions do not have a CLI editor installed inbox.". //
https://github.com/microsoft/edit
At 250KB, the new Edit maintains the lightweight philosophy of its predecessor while adding features the original couldn't dream of: Unicode support, regular expressions, and the ability to handle gigabyte-sized files. The original editor was limited to files smaller than 300KB depending on available conventional memory—a constraint that seems quaint in an era of terabyte storage.
The frustration has reached a point where AI companies themselves are backing away from their own technology during the hiring process. Anthropic recently advised job seekers not to use LLMs on their applications—a striking admission from a company whose business model depends on people using AI for everything else. //
However, this trend from businesses has led to an arms race of escalating automation, with candidates using AI to generate interview answers while companies deploy AI to detect them—creating what amounts to machines talking to machines while humans get lost in the shuffle. //
So perhaps résumés as a meaningful signal of candidate interest and qualification are becoming obsolete. And maybe that's OK. When anyone can generate hundreds of tailored applications with a few prompts, the document that once demonstrated effort and genuine interest in a position has devolved into noise.
Instead, the future of hiring may require abandoning the résumé altogether in favor of methods that AI can't easily replicate—live problem-solving sessions, portfolio reviews, or trial work periods, just to name a few ideas people sometimes consider (whether they are good ideas or not is beyond the scope of this piece). For now, employers and job seekers remain locked in an escalating technological arms race where machines screen the output of other machines, while the humans they're meant to serve struggle to make authentic connections in an increasingly inauthentic world.
Perhaps the endgame is robots interviewing other robots for jobs performed by robots, while humans sit on the beach drinking daiquiris and playing vintage video games. Well, one can dream. //
OldPhartReef Ars Centurion
12y
225
Subscriptor
You can skip all the AI silliness by just going back to old-fashioned relationship building. You know, the human-2-human; face-2-face kind?
Smack me now for such a stupid idea. //
fuzzyfuzzyfungus Ars Legatus Legionis
12y
10,222
I'd be a lot more sympathetic if Team HR hadn't been using fairly extensive(if less technically trendy) tooling for auto-screening resumes for keywords and such and just silently binning any that don't meet criteria; and (at least judging by the hype) they were all on board with 'AI-enabled' resume screening as well.
Obviously an arms race is a loss for everyone involved; but let's not pretend that there was some sort of bucolic non-broken state before people started huffing LLMs.
Microsoft will also extend a year of additional Windows 10 security updates to any users who opt into Windows Backup, a relatively recent Windows 10 and Windows 11 app that backs up some settings and files using a Microsoft account. Users can also opt into ESU updates by spending 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points, which are handed out for everything from making purchases with your Microsoft account to doing Bing searches. //
FIxed the taskbar with Stardock's Start 11. Restored traditional right click menu with a registry entry . Now it works the way it should have been with the UI and Start Menu. //
Also, your Windows 11 taskbar is hot garbage. Fix it. If you're not sure how, Valinet's Explorer Patcher handles it pretty well; ask him.
A federal judge in San Francisco ruled late on Monday that Anthropic’s use of books without permission to train its artificial intelligence system was legal under US copyright law.
Siding with tech companies on a pivotal question for the AI industry, US District Judge William Alsup said Anthropic made “fair use” of books by writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson to train its Claude large language model.
Alsup also said, however, that Anthropic’s copying and storage of more than 7 million pirated books in a “central library” infringed the authors’ copyrights and was not fair use. The judge has ordered a trial in December to determine how much Anthropic owes for the infringement. //
AI companies argue their systems make fair use of copyrighted material to create new, transformative content, and that being forced to pay copyright holders for their work could hamstring the burgeoning AI industry.
Anthropic told the court that it made fair use of the books and that US copyright law “not only allows, but encourages” its AI training because it promotes human creativity. The company said its system copied the books to “study Plaintiffs’ writing, extract uncopyrightable information from it, and use what it learned to create revolutionary technology.”
Copyright owners say that AI companies are unlawfully copying their work to generate competing content that threatens their livelihoods. //
Anthropic and other prominent AI companies including OpenAI and Meta Platforms have been accused of downloading pirated digital copies of millions of books to train their systems. //
Anthropic had told Alsup in a court filing that the source of its books was irrelevant to fair use.
“This order doubts that any accused infringer could ever meet its burden of explaining why downloading source copies from pirate sites that it could have purchased or otherwise accessed lawfully was itself reasonably necessary to any subsequent fair use,” Alsup said on Monday.
Life on Earth is in crisis crop failure, social and ecological collapse, mass extinction. We have a moral duty to take action. These statements made by Extinction Rebellion reflect the climate alarmist narrative that has continued to escalate across the Western world. Hysteria over climate change can be seen throughout history, from the human sacrifices of the Aztecs to bring back rain, to the Salem witch trials to eliminate the women they blamed for crop failure during the little ice age.
Today the climate industrial complex is funded by trillions of dollars seeking to control what we buy, eat and where we are allowed to travel, all in the name of sustainability and achieving net zero carbon emissions. This fear campaign is rooted in the belief that we will not look into the data ourselves, but instead look to the governments and to the media to tell us what is true. //
Historical temperature records indicate that we are not in the climate crisis western governments claim. We are looking at a graph of the past 65 million years from NOAA. The Earth today seems to be in a particularly cool period; in fact the Earth is still coming out of an ice age. History demonstrates that life has existed and thrived in much warmer temperatures, and that temperatures have been much higher without the human influence of industrial CO2 emissions. //
Although the mainstream media has tried to alarm its consumers with the accelerating emissions of CO2, the Earth is actually in a CO2 famine. Current levels are about 423 parts per million; however in the past they have been at least a thousand parts per million and have likely reached 8,000 parts per million. //
This is how you do it. And she did it as a high school senior science project.
Logging, we might note, involves a renewable resource - trees. Here in the Great Land, the implementation of the so-called "Roadless Rule" in 2001 hampered logging in places like the Tongass National Forest. Yes, in a national forest; part of the justification for the national forest system was the preservation and availability of a strategic asset, timber. The Biden administration('s autopen) enforced the "Roadless Rule" with vigor, and that rule was used to lock up 58.5 million acres of National Forest land.
On Monday, Agriculture Secretary Brooke L. Rollins announced that the Roadless Rule has gone the way of the dodo. //
Rescinding this rule will remove prohibitions on road construction, reconstruction, and timber harvest on nearly 59 million acres of the National Forest System, allowing for fire prevention and responsible timber production.
This rule is overly restrictive and poses real harm to millions of acres of our national forests. In total, 30% of National Forest System lands are impacted by this rule. For example, nearly 60% of forest service land in Utah is restricted from road development and is unable to be properly managed for fire risk. In Montana, it is 58%, and in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the largest in the country, 92% is impacted. This also hurts jobs and economic development across rural America. Utah alone estimates the roadless rule alone creates a 25% decrease in economic development in the forestry sector. //
Bogia
14 hours ago
One of my first jobs in the 90s was installing flooring. I learned way back then that there are more trees in the world BECAUSE of the hardwood flooring industry. There are very responsible ways to harvest this truly renewable resource. Unlike, say, the strip-mining methods used for rare earth minerals that are so precious to our green energy cultist friends. //
Musicman
15 hours ago
Here in New Mexico we have had millions of acres burned over the last 10 years. I'm not suggesting that was because of the particular rule you mention, but rather the attitude that created that rule: better to let forests burn and add to air pollution and "global warming" than let Americans use that lumber to build stuff. Because that is what it comes down to. I'm not a builder but I have done enough diy stuff to have watched the price of wood go up and up and up, while the quality gets worse and worse. Doesn't it make sense to harvest enough wood from our national forests to prevent or at least greatly mitigate these disasters? //
Yes Hemp Now
16 hours ago edited
Better late then never. The idiocy started in California over 30 years ago when the Sierra Club lobbied to stop harvesting our forests. The result is permanent destruction of what was the most beautiful forests in the world located in California. Natural fires happened, slow and meandering in the 60's usually ignited by lightening burning the pine needles mostly. If those fires lit by nature in a forest floor that was maintained through natural function, they were controlled with a couple of fire trucks if they threatened structures. The "do gooders" let the forest over grow and that is why we see the wild fires we have for decades now. After thes fires nothing grew back except manzanita and hand planted trees. The fires burned so fiercely it destroyed the topsoil. Save what we have and re-plant what was destroyed. Grow it and manage it. This is good news Thank You Secretary Rollins!
Townhall.com
@townhallcom
·
Follow
President Trump, before leaving the WH for NATO, reacts to the ceasefire being broken last night.
"These guys gotta calm down. It's ridiculous."
7:17 AM · Jun 24, 2025 //
Just an old soldier...
an hour ago
I understand that Trump wants peace. But the enemy gets a vote. If they say no peace, then you should give them what they want. Good and hard, until they beg for peace.
Real GOP 690 Just an old soldier...
35 minutes ago edited
Agree.
"People want peace."
No, they don't. MAGA wants "peace", because the neocons once gave them a sad, and Democrats want "peace" because they have basically been p*ssies since Vietnam, and they oppose anything Trump does.
The problem is that Israel doesn't really want peace with Iran under its current leadership, and Iran certainly doesn't want peace with Israel under any circumstances. Israel wants regime change, and all Iran wants is time. This forced, premature and desperate "ceasefire", engineered by Trump because MAGA was starting to push back, will not hold, because neither Israel nor Iran really gives a shit if Trump's base gets squeamish every time a bomb drops.
But in the name of "renewable" energy, Germany is tearing down a forest that may well have been known to Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and may have even inspired some of their stories.
In the Reinhardswald near Kassel, known as the Fairytale Forest, a previously untouched natural and cultural landscape with trees over 500 years old, is today being irreversibly destroyed. Why? To protect nature and the climate, the wind industry and green proponents claim. //
The region, which plays a central role in the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, is being transformed into a large-scale industrial construction site comprising of 18 large scale turbines.
To build the 244-meter-high wind turbines, large roads are cut into the forest, thousands of trees felled, slopes leveled and large quantities of gravel piled up on the forest floor. All this will cause irreversible damage and destruction to the forest biotope. Critics and conservationists emphasize that the extent of the destruction goes far beyond what one would expect from the construction of a wind turbine in an open field.
WASHINGTON — President Trump announced in a Monday evening post on Truth Social that Israel and Iran have agreed in principle to a cease-fire that would halt what he branded “the 12 Day War.”
“CONGRATULATIONS TO EVERYONE! It has been fully agreed by and between Israel and Iran that there will be a Complete and Total CEASEFIRE (in approximately 6 hours from now, when Israel and Iran have wound down and completed their in progress, final missions!), for 12 hours, at which point the War will be considered, ENDED!” Trump wrote.
“Officially, Iran will start the CEASEFIRE and, upon the 12th Hour, Israel will start the CEASEFIRE and, upon the 24th Hour, an Official END to THE 12 DAY WAR will be saluted by the World. During each CEASEFIRE, the other side will remain PEACEFUL and RESPECTFUL.”. //
“We have to talk to Iran and, of course, Israel about what the future holds … to build a long-term settlement.”
Trump announced the apparent breakthrough hours after Iran lobbed rockets at an American military facility in Qatar in symbolic retribution for Saturday’s US bomb-and-missile attack on three Iranian nuclear sites.
The president said Tehran provided a heads-up in advance of its response and most of the rockets were shot down before reaching their target, the Al Udeid Air Base southwest of Qatar’s capital, Doha.
WITNESSES
(45-80 MINUTES)
Eight men, who rubbed shoulders with Jesus, tell stories of their encounters with him. Ranging from wildly funny to dramatically intense, these stories show a “fleshed out” Jesus, who made a curious call on these mens’ lives. Performed in contemporary dress, with very contemporary language, this show introduces the audience, in a fresh way, to Jesus, without “church language or pews”. In the blink of an eye, with very simple costume changes, Curt becomes eight different men, with eight different perspectives on Jesus. //
God-Views
(40-60 minutes)
What is God really like? This show asks that question. And … it’s funny. Very funny. In it, Curt presents, in caricature form, six different comic misconceptions of the nature of God. God as a Sheriff, a Butler, an old Geezer, a Mechanic, a Cosmic Party Animal, and … God-in-a-box. He concludes with one of two stories (or sometimes both!) … a tender re-telling of the Prodigal Son story, showing the Father heart of God, or a very funny “redneck parable,” showing, in no uncertain terms, the picture of a gracious God.
A powerful new observatory has unveiled its first images to the public, showing off what it can do as it gets ready to start its main mission: making a vivid time-lapse video of the night sky that will let astronomers study all the cosmic events that occur over ten years. //
Named after an astronomer famous for her research related to dark matter, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is perched on a mountaintop in Chile. It's equipped with a specially-designed large telescope, as well as a car-sized digital camera that's the biggest such camera in the world.
The camera is controlled by an automated system that moves and points the telescope, snapping pictures again and again, to cover the entire sky every few days. Each image is so detailed, displaying it would take 400 ultra high-definition television screens.
By constantly comparing new images to ones taken before, the facility's computer systems will be able to spot anything in the sky that changes or moves or goes boom.
"It will be capable of really detecting things that actually change very rapidly," says Sandrine Thomas, deputy director of Rubin Observatory and the observatory's telescope and site project scientist. "That, in itself, will be unique to the world. No other telescope would be able to do that."
"It has such a wide field of view and such a rapid cadence that we do have that movie-like aspect to the night sky," she says.
Satellite images appeared to show scores of trucks lined up at Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility just days before the US carried out its large-scale airstrikes — as speculation swirled that Tehran may have been able to move its uranium stockpiles before the attacks.
The images, released by US defense contractor Maxar Technologies, captured more than a dozen cargo-style trucks lined up outside the Fordow nuclear enrichment site’s tunnel entrance on Thursday and Friday.
The vehicles, which came and went over a 24-hour stretch, appeared to move unidentified contents roughly half a mile away, the Free Press reported, citing US officials.
Case uncovered: How Iranian intelligence duped a yeshiva student into spying on Israel
Elimelech Stern, a Hasidic man from Beit Shemesh, bought a phone to trade crypto; a message from 'Anna' drew him into espionage for a hostile power; living a double life, he feared being used for assassinations and begged for help—outside the law
Richard
Coffee/keyboard
It's worse than that
Late Boomers to Gen X were taught "typing", and created most of the foundations and did a lot of the UI/UX research.
Millenials were "taught computing", by which the schools meant "using Microsoft Word".
Gen Z were assumed to already know, so were taught nothing whatsoever.
Gen Alpha are sometimes being taught online safety. Their millennial parents are helping with that by making Facebook uncool. //
fromxyzzy
Re: It's worse than that
We've abandoned a lot of the UI/UX lessons learned through experience, and ironically it was Apple who both did a huge amount of impressive work (building on IBM's internal work I believe) on strictly codifying their UI elements in order to ensure a consistently usable system across applications, and then with iOS, totally destroying any sense of consistency in interaction and hiding every aspect of the real system from the user. I run an old iBook with MacOS 9 for legacy software and tinkering and the only things that don't adhere to the Apple UI guidelines are video games which were virtually always originally for Windows/DOS. I have an iPad in the loo and I can perform the exact same swipe motion on it 5 times and get 5 completely different results for no discernible reason.
Kids that are growing up on iPad and other touch-screen devices are being taught that tech devices are magic boxes that act in ways that you can never understand because they don't respond consistently and they hide every aspect of the underlying system. Honestly, it's primed them for the advent of AI as well, where they simply trust what the magic box tells them is true and are flummoxed when told that the magic box is wrong, unreliable, and they've failed because they just expect systems to work without understanding how.
PICNIC
Problem In Chair Not In Computer
Re: PICNIC
Hm, sounds nicer than PEBCAK !
Re: PICNIC
Problem with knob controlling monitor.
What we said to the Iranians is we do not want war with Iran, we actually want peace. But we want peace in the context of them not having a nuclear weapons program. And that's exactly what the president accomplished last night. I really think there are two big questions for the Iranians here. Are they going to attack American troops, or are they going to continue with their nuclear weapons program? And if they leave American troops out of it, and they decide to give up their nuclear weapons program, once and for all, then I think the president has been very clear. We can have a good relationship with the Iranians. We can have a peaceful situation in that region of the world. //
we negotiated aggressively with the Iranians to try to find a peaceful settlement to this conflict. It was only when the president decided that the Iranians were not negotiating in good faith, that he took this action. He didn't take it lightly, but I actually think if provides an opportunity to reset this relationship, reset these negotiations, and get us in a place where Iran can decide not to be a threat to its neighbors, not to be a threat to the United States, and if they're willing to do that, the United States is all ears.