It seems more than a trifle odd to see this move at the same time they are getting rid of the free tier of ESXi.

Broadcom's interest is in the big customers who are locked in enough to support juicy margins, sure; but the crippled version of ESXi was not a meaningful substitute for the VMware stuff that those customers depend on; and (unlike workstation) it could draw directly on the engineering effort that they needed to expend anyway to keep ESX up to date to support the customers they really cared about and its existence helped provide a supply of IT people who were at least reasonably familiar with small ESX environments.

Workstation seems like it falls in a similar bucket in terms of being no serious threat to the high margin product lines, but providing a general warm fuzzy feeling of familiarity; but seems like it would involve more work to maintain(things like the guest OS components are reused; and I assume that things like the emulated peripherals are shared with ESX; but it's considerably more distinct software than just ESX with low core count and memory limits baked in).

Makes me wonder if it will even survive; or if this is just what them squeezing some goodwill out of however much time their obligations to people with fancy support contracts require them to keep it alive.

It seems...not at all...self-interested that he dismisses the idea of doing UBI by just giving people money with which they can buy whatever products or services they deem most useful to them(including; but far from limited to, chatbot time) as an ineffective old-and-busted idea; but hails the potential of providing a universal chatbot ration as an exciting way forward; despite the fact that someone with money can always just go and buy chatbot; while someone with chatbot had better have a problem that chatbot can be applied to or be ready to go to the trouble of finding a buyer in order to cash out and reach the state that the UBI guy starts in.

One can certainly see why a supplier of chatbot would be enthusiastic about a new guaranteed market for it(in much the same way that the agricultural lobby is very interested indeed in welfare programs as a means of getting money spent on their products); but that's quite different from it being a credible or respectable view.

The trick is that what counts as an 'undue' advantage or roadblock is not really an objective measure; and is open to potential inconsistency:

Is protecting a given technology from 'undue roadblocks' in the form of lawsuits not an 'exemption'; for instance? Then there's something like 'subsidies' which is pretty obvious if you are talking the "we just outright cut them a check" flavor; but gets a lot more fiddly when less direct things like "we allow them to impose particular negative externalities at no, or heavily discounted, cost to themselves".

It's easy and attractive to call for fair evaluation; but once you get into the weeds the situation usually gets messier: is getting to proceed in the face of mass protest a protection from undue roadblocks; or an undue advantage? Both getting to pretend that coal is super cheap because the extraction guys have been effective at stalling regulations of their activity and getting to pretend that nuclear waste disposal is a solved problem are essentially subsidies in-kind; how big is each?

Aside from the physics and engineering constraints, the argument for SMRs seems to rely in no small part on some(pretty optimistic) assumptions about large reactor projects necessarily being embroiled in the most dire planning and project management hell and always ending up as more or less unique products of dysfunctional and expensive processes; and SMRs definitely not falling prey to any of that, reaping all the rewards of mass production, and definitely ending up in a regulatory category where anyone with a reasonably flat concrete pad that has a chain link fence around it will be allowed to plop some modules down with basically zero review.

There may be a weak sort of truth to this; in the sense that small scale projects that get mired in project management hell typically don't have enough inertia to avoid just getting killed; while very large ones can often trundle on under their own weight for quite some time because nobody wants to be the sunk cost scapegoat; but if you are just casually postulating that planning permission will be trivial to plunk SMRs down wherever it's not clear why proponents of the large-plant solution don't get to posit a standardized medium to large reactor design that you'll be able to plunk down with expedited approval as long as you specifically don't deviate from the validated design.

This is a PR flack we are talking about. Her entire job is to create a deceptively positive impression of the company. Being honest in an unpopular way, in public, is basically being as bad at that job as it is possible to be.

She said she had tried to do a good job but had been too impatient and hadn't adopted "a proper approach."

To quote her: "I only care about your results."

It is possible that excoriating people for being fuckups is one place where fucking up is uniquely unsympathetic.

I think this might be the first time I've heard "felt understaffed" as a reason for layoffs.

I have no idea what Dell specifically is doing; but normally when always-on VPN is either allowed or mandatory it's configured so that either the VPN client detects whether it is inside or outside the network and acts accordingly; or so that whatever endpoint it is set to point to resolves differently if you are on public DNS than it does when you are on internal DNS.

Not something you'd bother with for attendance tracking; just because it's perverse for someone on the LAN to bounce out to the public facing VPN gateway just to get tunneled back in. Sometimes the VPN client just does nothing if it detects that is on LAN; sometimes it hits a different gateway(especially common if VPN is being used to do some level of identity-based control of access to various bits of the network and you still need a VPN link to actually access much of interest when on the LAN).

I suspect that IT isn't thrilled at being roped into this whole stupid exercise; but it would be a real surprise if they couldn't distinguish between VPN clients onsite and those on the outside.

These are likely to be 'exempt' category salaried workers, so you don't need to fudge the numbers to not pay overtime; but it probably is the case that(along with their association with blue collar wage labor) management isn't really keen on the very obvious, very overt, "on clock/off clock" situation that timeclocks embody.

They are considered the lesser evil when the objective is keeping manual labor and service sector proles you suspect of being shirkers in line; but they aren't really on-message when you are trying to cultivate a work environment where it's treated as a matter of course that anyone whose a team player will jump at any random work messages their phone spits at them well into the evening.

It seems awfully charitable to describe that as a 'mistake'; rather than a cynical recognition that they have the opportunity to impose negative externalities for their own convenience.

It might rise to the level of 'mistake' if the neighbors manage to get a suitably punchy judgement and some combination of damages and being forced to modify or terminate operations ends up costing more than it would have to just put the drone site off in the sticks somewhere originally; but it's not like Bezos cares whether these people live or die; so as long as he can make them absorb some of the costs of Amazon doing business it's coming up roses for him.

It was less than a year ago that KB5026372 was breaking VPN connections; and now they've broken them again?

We're taking pious lectures about excessive attack surface and too many features from the systemd guy?

I'm a little confused by who is supposed to be caving to the threat here. It's a paid database, so I assume that Thompson-Reuters/Refinitiv aren't thrilled; but it was apparently stolen from one of their customers, not directly from them, so their reputation for security competence isn't really affected; and I suspect that most of the people paying for access to this sort of database need something authoritative that ticks the "I'm really trying to know my customer, really" box when feds or auditors come around; so even a reasonably fresh and reasonably large leak is still of limited value("So, you decided to reduce costs by basing your compliance efforts on data of unknown completeness, potentially subject to unknown modifications, sourced from unknown criminals? Very interesting...") as an alternative to continuing to subscribe.

If anything, it seems like its release would be largely positive: probably lots of interesting leads to be followed up, both with regard to what the creepy data broker types know and the things they know about the people they consider relevant, by people who are in no position to afford access normally(if it's even something you can just purchase if your money is green enough; rather than being offered specifically to potential customers known to be in financial services; not just anyone with a checkbook).

Heâ(TM)s arguably not wrong that VMwareâ(TM)s offerings outside of their core product are kind of inchoate(though, in fairness, itâ(TM)s not like the âhyperscale cloudâ(TM) guys donâ(TM)t all have a stable of shit thrown at the wall to see what sticks that surrounds the core of services that people actually care about or trust); but that seems like a pretty shabby excuse in this context; where it would have been trivial to just not fuck with what people were using and liked while making the alleged investments in glorious future VMware; then letting the value proposition of that help sell it.

As it is, itâ(TM)s hard to read this as anything other than an awkward(and almost certainly temporary, nobody ever genuinely stops trying to boil the frog once they start); climbdown after recklessly spooking more customers, harder, than intended.

If you are trying to explain why we haven't detected any aliens, how is "they were massacred by even more advanced aliens" a remotely adequate answer? That just leaves you with "why haven't we detected the even more advanced aliens?". The question was never "why do we detect so many deathbots and so few little green men?"

If anything, superintelligences are presumably more capable of doing high-visibility things(if they want to) by virtue of being more advanced; and, while they could all be carefully hiding because they're paranoid that same explanation would hold for standard aliens as well.

Seems like an awful lot of hypothesis to explain nothing.