I've got to jump in and say the only thing OVH can compete with Amazon on is the crappiness of their support. They absolutely are not a "hyperscaler" as anyone would expect one to be.

However... in my meagre experience, government IT is one of two things. It's either vibe-coded bullshit made up by some cool bros, or it's old school VMs running in rows 24x7. For all that latter work, OVH could be doing that very adequately. Most governments get some eye watering discounts from Amazon, but even still, my guess is OVH could compete on price for (fairly) static VMs. They can't supply the message queues, lambdas, managed databases, observability and IAM controls etc, they can't even do auto-scaling to anywhere like the same sort of level, and they don't really do containers beyond a bit of semi-managed kubernetes.

But again... a lot of government work doesn't need any of the "cool" stuff - it just needs fleets of VMs that run 24x7. OVH could absolutely do that. You've just got to convince all the people working on government IT that they should get familiar with OVH instead of ever-more AWS. That's harder than you might imagine - AWS is very entrenched at this point.

Many moons ago *80s, early 90s), Ford got the UK fleet market, and so you saw Fords absolutely everywhere. Because of that, people bought them, and so they were successful. Then along came the Japanese, and the reputation of "Buy a Ford, you'll never be bored" and "Fix or Repair Daily" sunk in - suddenly people could drive a car without having to think about it (and for less than it cost to buy a Ford). Ford lost the fleet market to Vauxhall (Opal), and then it was broadly speaking all over for them.

These days, Fleet is dominated by electric, although not from any specific brand. The VW Group brands are clinging on quite well, but otherwise just about all the legacy manufacturers are lagging behind the challengers. The jury's out on Tesla, they're still very common, but I can't see a lot of repeat sales happening - even with the crazy good deals on them at the moment. The chinese native brands are still pretty small potatoes here, although the Chinese are investing big in dealer and servicing networks, so they perhaps think they can turn it around. If they could find an Italian to style their cars, they might be on a winner, but until then, they're generally the "cheap alternative" rather than the one you really want.

Either way, Ford is on a downward trajectory right now. They could turn it around, but they probably won't, given what's happening at home.

(Side note: We were watching Race Across the World as they crossed Uzbekistan - not that it's a car show by any means and not at all trying to show a representative slice of life, but every single car we saw was a Chevrolet)

> Lots of stuff that nobody fucking cares about.

Says you, IMHO, companies do need to give a shit about the environmental impact of the software they create (not to mention power consumption). If your reach is 10 people, then maybe don't worry too much, but if your reach is *billions*, then yes, you definitely do need to think about it. Just because we've suffered Microsoft's incompetently inefficient crap for decades is no reason to perpetuate it. If an oil company can be hit with the carbon cost of what people do after they've bought the product, Google sure as shit can have the carbon cost of their software lumped into their numbers too.

So yes, being this is slashdot, some details about file paths, GPO settings and whatnot would definitely have been helpful. But the environmental impact is also of interest because it affects us all.

> However, nobody in their right mind will store a password by simply storing the MD5 sum of the password.

True, but that doesn't mean people aren't doing exactly that. Even salting doesn't defend against the attack as described, although it does mean they have to crack each password in turn.

I've lost count of the number of places I've seen SHA used to hash passwords - likely because "Oh, MD5 is bad, let's use SHA instead", rather than actually thinking about the requirement (say nothing of the bajillions of wrong articles on the subject online). My point being, if people are left to make these decisions on their own, there seem to be an enormous number of them who get it wrong. Delegating passwords and authentication to an IDP of some sort at least means the really stupid stuff is engineered out. It gives you options for throttles or lock outs or whatever else you want too. For me, one of the main selling points is that if either the IDP or your app have some sort of vulnerability in them, the attacker gets a load of your data, but they don't get *all* of your data. You get to say "they only got ...", which has to be a better story to tell than "they got everything".

> "Design choices in this area involve balancing performance, usability, and security, and we continue to review it against evolving threats,"

Versus: "Prioritising Security above all else" (https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/05/03/prioritizing-security-above-all-else/)

This whole thing is an absolute joke - they didn't prioritise security at all, they didn't really even think about about at all either. They just put in a paswword manager feature because otherwise Edge looks like a toytown browser. They did it quickly, didn't review it and didn't fix it up later either.

There are no "evolving threats" here - this is just old school security from decades ago. Their development and design is crap, and even their "smooth it over" PR waffle is crap too.

> I see google firing them all before anything else.

That won't be happening, unless Google wants a whole load of UK-based law suits (which it will almost certainly lose). If the employees have published their intent to unionise, then trying to fire them looks a lot like you're trying to do some "union busting" - guess what? The unions are all over that already, there's plenty of legal president that shows it'll cost Google dearly.

The employees play here pretty simple:
1) Unionise to get enhanced employment protections, possibly at the cost of bonuses and raises in the future (although there's room for debate if that's really true or not).
2) Tell Google they're not working on stuff for weapons
3) See how that goes down

In the UK, you can't really be fired "just because". Instead, you get paid off. If you're just one employee, or even one of a team, you each negotiate separately, so truthfully you don't have a lot of leverage. If you've unionised, then you have a *lot* of leverage. Firstly, the union is negotiating for all of you, so it's possible some may lose out a bit, while others gain, but since most payouts would be calculated on your salary, they'll do fine. The union can also threaten Google a whole lot more - they've got plenty of lawyers who've all spent a lifetime "fighting the power" in favour of the workers, so they know exactly what works and what to do. They're paid for by the union too - so are well out of the reach of an individual employee trying to get back at Google for a poor personal payout.

As for China... yes, I agree, they're just ploughing on with their AI research and weapons as much as they like, with very little to slow them down.

The government's changing guidance into law to ban mobile phones during the school day. They're not sewing the kids mouths shut, nor are they giving kids kung fu lessons. Kids are just as free to report violence as they ever were.

To be clear - this meat of this was already "guidance", and nearly all schools had some *something* in place already. This now makes it law that they *have* to do something, but that something can be as little as "keep your phone in your bag, on silent or switched off", although most tend to encourage phones kept in lockers or in reception or whatever during the school day (some offer exceptions at breaks, some don't).

Not one kid will be harmed by this. Not one emergency call won't be made, not one fight in the playground won't be reported. We don't really have mass shootings in schools, and those that we have had have not been solved by the easy access to mobile phones, so whenever the next one is, I wouldn't imagine there'll be much "of only the kids had had phones" coming out as a result.

I'm learning French, and I have to say, it's a generally good experience, and it seems to actually be teaching me something. I've also noticed a few problems with the app, no idea if they're new problems or old, or just 'load' or whatever. I've noticed that sometimes, no matter how I say I word, it'll just never accept it. It asks again a couple more times, so I try some variations, but it just refuses (whereas you can stammer your way through some of the sentences and it says it's okay!?). I've also found some of the listening exercises don't make any sound - which makes them pretty tricky. My also wife tells me it turns a bit nasty if you stop doing it every day - to the point that she's not gone back to it for weeks (where ironically, it's starting to be nicer to her again).

However, as for the leaderboards, I sort of assume that they're made up. I mean, I'm always 2-3 away from the top, even though I don't think I'm trying that hard. I'm only on the free tier, so my earning ability is very limited, and yet somehow I can be position 2-3 most of the time? Seems unlikely to me. I'm not especially motivated by the leader boards though, so it doesn't really matter if it's made up or not. I'm just running at my own pace, and I'm doing just fine, thanks very much.

You have to think that they must be pretty damn confident in Avengers: Doomsday. I mean, my first thought was "nope, never gonna see it", but I'm probably not a big concern for them.

Next up, they're launching a whole new type of cinema? IMAX hasn't exactly been making it super well over the years, which sort of suggests there's not that much market for such a thing. Disney can, I suppose, order all their film makers to shoot in this new format, which gives them a chance at some content which IMAX won't have, but still, it's gotta be a big gamble. They're also deliberately going up against Dune 3 too - I don't know what crossover there is in viewership, but I doubt many will watch both at launch.

Then of course there's Disney+ - not exactly taking the world by storm either. I don't know if it's actually making any money yet, but it can't be much if it is. One wonders if the "walled garden" of content model that Disney seems to favour is such a bright one to be doubling-down on.

We'll see I guess... it's gonna go one of two ways, and will probably take about 2 years to decide ;-)

I'm gonna put my faith in the Scandinavians. Firstly, they live quite far North, and whilst close to (say) Russia, aren't a direct target of very much. As such, I'd say their odds of getting directly hit are small, and even smaller if you consider the sizes of their countries and population centres etc.

Also, the Scandinavian nations are generally pretty quiet on the world stage. They don't go picking fights, but they do what they need to when the time comes. This all keeps on reducing the likelihood of being directly destroyed.

Next, they're all beautiful. If any aesthetics were gonna make it, you'd hope it would the theirs. They're often counted as some of the happiest in the world too. Their systems of government tend to be "for the people" more than most, and whilst they might tax highly, people seem to get good rewards for paying those taxes.

They're also really lovely people, very community minded, very social and welcoming. It seems unlikely they'll be putting up walls and whatnot to protect their little lot when refugees come knocking.

Lastly, because they've already figured out how to endure long dark winters, it seems likely they'll find nifty ways to live through a nuclear winter. Sure, they're not used to some of the 'old ways', and I'm sure for a long time food is going to seem very boring, but they'll survive. They'll naturally try to keep their societal norms going as much as they can, which likely would have to change here and there, but it feels like their core values would persist.

So yes, a lot of societies around the world would be lost, but I'd like to think at least a few of the better ones will survive. Cut-throat capitalism...? Yeah, not so much, I don't imagine.

Saying your pipeline for chips is full, when all you have is an internal market is pretty easy. You go around asking how many people would like, then produce that many, and poof! Your pipeline is 100% full.

Having a full pipeline with external customers is harder - you can't ask them all before you start and those you do ask may change their order quantities before you start production. You don't want to under-produce because you want to meet the demand, but you don't want unsold inventory either. As a result, you either have to keep people waiting, or else you have to take a hit on over-production. Either results in a pipeline which is not 100% full.

That aside, anyone selling "AI chips" that isn't nvidia strikes me as a good thing. There's a slim chance that if a few start doing this, the price of ordinary computing might come down to a sensible level again.

Joke's on you, America - it can't possibly have been Russia, big bad Don said so: https://www.theguardian.com/us...

You couldn't make this stuff up :-(

The question is... can you build a body without a brain? I'll bet you actually can't, but our victorian way of thinking about the body doesn't yet know that. What I'm getting at is that our bodies are far more interconnected than we really give them credit. Things that happen in our guts, for example, can have a profound effect on our brains - and quite likely the opposite too. I'll bet that from your head to your toes, your brain is involved in the development, maintenance and operation of all those body parts.

As you point out, our bodies aren't static either - they need to move and work in order to grow or maintain themselves. It's unclear, for example, if you could artificially grow bone that has the requisite density in all the right places to actually be usable. Our bones are subjected to vibrations from all of our movements, and that is the mechanism through which they develop. I'll bet you can't synthesise that sufficiently well (or at least, not easily). Likewise muscle growth - we'd all like to think you could just stick a few needles in and electric-shock them all the grow nicely, but attempts to do that so far have been rather lack lustre to say the least. After that, there are a whole load of things I can't even name which will need doing too. One wonders if it's ever likely to be possible?

FWIW, I suspect more likely would be to rapidly create some of the required tissue for a repair. If you get liver cancer, then they go off and make a load of your liver cells, presumably wash out the cancer and then graft them in place of the old cancerous liver cells. Once they get that working, they might be able to make an entire liver - maybe. But I suspect by the time they want to get that far, they'll either be growing the replacement liver inside another living thing, or else will have worked out if it is ever possible to build body parts without a brain being present.

I saw this come by today... I can't vouch for its absolute correctness as I haven't checked the data they claim to have scraped, but it's a pretty damning indictment on MS's stewardship of Github. From near 100% uptime to quite a lot less than that - I mean, probably not bad enough that you can't rely on it, but you definitely don't want to be in a "I need it back up right now or else I'm screwed" type situation (so don't engineer yourself into such a position).

https://damrnelson.github.io/g...

Microsoft Windows (just Windows, not all the other stuff) is a massive bloat-fest. It's a whole load of interconnected mess, so it's likely impossible to fully test one bit without also testing a load of other stuff too. Then Microsoft also has to test their stuff on a whole room full of different hardware, just to cover their partners, never mind all the other vendors that matter.

There's no way Microsoft can test everything, all the time. It's likely just too big a problem for anything other than maybe a big launch or service pack or something. As such, they likely have to cut down from "fully test everything" to "quick test everything", to "quick test the main bits and call it good".

If there'a any similarity between MS and Oracle here, it's that they've spent decades lumping ever more features into places they don't belong. If (for example), MS had taken a far more modular approach to Windows, then right now, a whole raft of people would be unaffected by this bug because they didn't adopt some lump of services that contains the issue. What's more, MS would be able to internally segregate the problem and so likely would be able to get closer to "test everything, every time" than they can currently, so the likelihood of the bug even getting out would be reduced.

So yeah, there's a wider issue: Far too much legacy software is just too bloated and poorly architected. That poor engineering leads to problem after problem.

(As an aside, I'm reminded of Qnap NASes, as something of an example of "microsoftism". Bear in mind a NAS is supposed to be a "hands off" sort of device - it's an "appliance", so shouldn't demand much of your time.

I now use OpenMediaVault on my Qnap nas because I got fed up of Qnap having severe issues with some bullshit service they'd shoe-horned into their Nas product, which didn't need to be there. Now I have a NAS, and that part of it works really well and doesn't need update after update. I also run some of the "higher level" stuff Qnap offer, like my home CCTV runs on it - but that's entirely separate and so has a completely different update schedule and can be updated without affecting the NAS. I've gone from "shove everything you can possibly fit into it" to "lean, modular and well architected", and have a lot less hassle as a result)