The Postgres treatment in this article would have been improved by noting that it has some revenue-facing manifestations: EnterpriseDB and some vendors' db-as-a-service offerings with things like AWS Aurora that do figure in the Gartner chart.
Posts by JLV
2853 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013
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The spaghettified DBMS chart that shows Oracle's crown is slowly slipping
Claude Opus wrote a Chrome exploit for $2,283
Saturday 18th April 2026 15:46 GMT 
Re: Unlimited liabilities
No, members of the security community, such as Bruce Scheier has stated that it might very well end up strengthening security, by finding existing holes and then getting them patched. There are pros and cons, it is not a one way street.
However their sentiment is also that the transition period might very well be messy.
Friday 17th April 2026 18:52 GMT
One thing Risky Biz podcast was saying in their coverage of Mythos: when regular economics come back and LLM usage isn’t so VC-subsidized anymore, some of the stupider low hanging poison fruits shrivel, such as for example pointless AI slop. And some actors doing some forms of LLM-driven malwaring.
Not a fix per se, but something to consider.
Orbital datacenter startup CEO admits launch economics don't fly, presses ahead regardless
Wednesday 15th April 2026 16:13 GMT
Re: $/kg
I read a business article about those things’ economics. The numbers don’t make sense, in terms of cost to orbit, cooling efficiency, projected chip deterioration rate from radiation, etc…
That’s been plugged into a rough ballpark simulator where you can tweak each variable.
However they are not off by orders of magnitude. A $500/kg might very well make it work. Whether that’s a good idea or not is an entirely different question…
Wednesday 15th April 2026 16:05 GMT
No one would have believed in the early years of the 21st century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied…
FrSker71 to Zorgar22: “Are all those new satellites an obstacle to our cunning plan? What are they for?”
Zorgar22 to FrSker71: “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you. These Earthlings are getting stupider by the minute.”
Investors are going nuclear to keep UK's AI datacenters fed
Thursday 9th April 2026 02:40 GMT
Re: The Beginning Before the AI Money
Yeah, as just a baseload backup they don’t make much sense since they don’t like being turned on and off, unlike natural gas plants. You might as well leave them running if you’re trying to fully cover renewables and then you don’t need the renewables.
But I think that’s a bit of a simplistic view and abundant nuclear could be part of the mix. For example, use them as backup to renewable drops but make green hydrogen when renewables suffice. Or suck atmospheric CO2 out since we’ll probably have to do that at some point. Or desal plants in dry coastal regions.
Bill Gates’s book has a pretty bit about the sizing issues of grid-scale batteries for more than a few days. He’s big on nukes. So was Lovelock.
Thursday 9th April 2026 02:18 GMT
Re: The Beginning Before the AI Money
Ah, BCer here. I was aware that Canada had historical reactors (Candus) but unaware that Ontario is building new ones. As to BC, at least near the coast, they’re a lousy idea due to earthquake risks. Put them elsewhere and pipe the power in.
(and God knows if we were building any in BC I’d have heard about it. 25 years of Greens whining about our new Site C hydro dam)
Wrt wind there is a bit of under deployment - 4 sites only IIRC, possibly due to overreliance on hydro - our provincial utility is BC Hydro. I worry a bit about the change to rainfall patterns and loss of glaciers when it comes to betting all on hydro.
We also ought to think more about tidal generation, but I am sure environmentalists would have a fit.
Sheepish and I stand corrected. txs.
LLMs or no LLMs the way forward has to be through more non-emitting power generation.
Wednesday 8th April 2026 15:53 GMT
Re: The Beginning Before the AI Money
I hear you, but color me a bit skeptical that Canada will actually get reactors built here. We have developed such a culture of NIMBYism and cost overruns on public construction projects that I see us taking the lead in deployments as a very low probability. Our Greens don't win many elections, but are influential to some extent and would be dead set against it. Whereas our Conservatives do like nuclear but also generally deny global warming and like pumping gas out.
Wednesday 8th April 2026 15:46 GMT
Anyone else feeling rather sad that the renewed push for nuclear energy, and especially fusion research, isn't due to more important reasons - say global warming or energy security - than feeding our friendly neighborhood stochastic parrots? Even if the renewed interest predated LLMs, its high profile and public awareness is only coming in now.
Amazon rewards loyal Kindle devotees by closing the book on old e-readers
US cybercrime losses pass $20B for first time as AI boosts online fraud
Netflix – yes, Netflix – jumps on the AI bandwagon with video editor
Country that put backdoors into Cisco routers to spy on world bans foreign routers
Wednesday 25th March 2026 14:57 GMT
Re: Quick Router
… and if you were to use a Kill-a-Watt meter in your household and do some math you’d find that a bog standard old PC, run 24/7, is probably one of the biggest leccy guzzler in a small, energy-efficient, apartment. Just because it is running 24/7. Probably come in right after your 100-200W efficient fridge.
While an efficient router might make do in the sub-10W range.
What that translates to in annual costs depends on your local electricity prices, but I’d wager a router would pay for itself in a few years, doubly so if you need to run AC in the summer.
Tuesday 24th March 2026 17:17 GMT
Yes, I agree. Nevertheless mass sourcing directly from a potential adversary is not really a good idea.
We've seen that with everyone offshoring rare earths to China. We've seen that with what happened to Russian military supply chains of Western electronics after sanctions were levied on them.
This? Looks like another attack surface, pretty much maximized at this current point in time.
I get that a sane and productive approach would take something rarely on display from your average politician wrt tech policy: thorough, knowledgeable, analysis. And I get that's the last thing we'll get from this administration. But a more deliberate, slower, reasoned decoupling from China on some critical domains seems desirable to me. Let's trade more among each other, less with China. And (Canadian here) possibly less with the USA as well, if 2028 doesn't bring sanity back.
Tuesday 24th March 2026 16:27 GMT
Re: Don't worry, pay the Trump family 20% of your profits...
Oh, look, what a surprise; BBC: Oil traders bet millions ahead of Trump's Iran talks post
>Traders bet hundreds of millions of dollars on oil contracts just minutes before US President Donald Trump announced on Monday that the US would postpone strikes against Iranian energy infrastructure.
> Market data reviewed by the BBC shows the volume of trade spiked around fifteen minutes before a social media post by the president announcing the move
Sure, there are the obvious commission fees, or mysterious go-aheads for Trump family development deals. But there are just so many more ways Trump n pals are profiteering...
Tuesday 24th March 2026 16:10 GMT 
At the risk of drawing the ire of people who - like me - don't like Trump, this kind of policy, done correctly, i.e. not the way it is being done here, might worth looking into. Bit like has been done with the Huawei gear, really.
What do we know in 2026?
- lots of consumer electronics come from China
- communication electronics can be hacked for nation-state benefit. Look no further than Hizbollah's pagers and walkie-talkies. Or the exploitation of traffic CCTV cameras in the current Iranian war.
- There is some speculative literature on that. Ghostfleet was written by 2 military analysts as fiction, with the express intent to sensitize American military planners to this type of risk (most of it has to do with backdoors in combat chippery). Zero Day Code by John Birmingham has not such lofty intents, it is just a well-written thriller speculating on a collapse of US food and energy supply chains initiated from China.
Yes, speculative both. But Mossad's pagers would have seemed very far-fetched a few years back.
Now, what is wrong with this Trump approach:
- the US could specifically ban Chinese router imports while not playing its usual Amerika uber Alles. i.e. Taiwanese or Japanese made routers wouldn't present that type of risk.
- as usual with the Trump administration, there is no planning involved. It will take years to develop capacity.
- since existing models are good to go, their firmware is still open season
- it is very hard, after 14 long months of this chaos, to NOT see this as somehow being used for grift by Trump.
- ... Trump ...
Yes, no doubt, having more secure supply chains between friendly Western and Western-leaning countries will come at an extra cost for businesses and consumers compared to reliance on China's manufacturing powerhouse. And no doubt that Trump will screw this up somehow. Doesn't mean that this type of policy competently planned and executed is not worth thinking about.
NASA sets 'impossible' ground rules for relocation of 'flown space vehicle'
Microsoft: Removing some Copilots will improve Windows 11
Monday 23rd March 2026 15:42 GMT
Back in the days when I used to care, MS always sicced some semi-senior exec before a new release shipped, to explain, in great details, how complaints about this and that subsystem that had been annoying techies had been heard. Might be the registry’s foibles, sleep modes, whatever.
The exec seemed, well, frank and knowledgeable about the need for improvement.
Being a sweet summer child, and a Windows user, I would dutifully purchase the new Windows and open box the fixed components.
Guess what. The registry never improved much and the list of acknowledged niggles or deep flaws never saw much improvement (improving the throughput on displaying text in terminals being an exception) . Nothing changed, except my low usage of Windows 10 and my disinterest in using Windows 11 at all.
This could be a sea change driving real improvements, but past history, under far more competent MS Windows teams doesn’t really bode well. Occasionally they fix the UI and stability of a new release, out of sheer necessity: successor to Win ME, Windows 7 after Vista, Windows 10 after 8.
What’s left of the dev, and QA, team under Satnad just doesn't seem to have the oomph. There’s too much of a telemetry, upsell and ads culture and the consumer facing Windows is just not a core MS concern.
Gates and co IIRC understood that youngsters would become MS ambassadors in the enterprise, having been brought up on Windows. This team is focused on LLMs and growing market cap and doesn’t understand the impact of negative ambassadors.
Starship may chauffeur Orion to the Moon, as NASA mulls ditching SLS after Artemis V
Payment biz pulls plug on open source charity after KYC spat
Sunday 22nd March 2026 16:42 GMT
Re: percentages and counts, and counters
Typical things KYC Canada:
- government IDs/biz registrations to be presented
- EFTs > $10cad have special reporting reqs
- multiple EFTs < $10k looking to fall under above limits: suspicious
- large unusual cash deposits: suspicious
- asking too much about KYC limits…
Everyone - not “auditors” - customer facing is supposed to be watchful. Then there are compliance people who will look more closely and reporting mechanisms to liaise with authorities. Not cutting off customers, no. That would be counterproductive to catching actual criminals.
I understand cynicism, to an extent, but we have so much damage here from hard drugs (no, weed doesn’t count) that a bit of inconvenience can be put up with. And, honestly, the patterns looked for are NOT typical money flows: that is the point. If you have a pizza stand you’re still expected to bring in tons of low denomination cash. Not regularly so if you sell new cars.
The emphasis is on cash or foreign EFTs getting in, not tracking regular cheques or deposits emanating from actors already in the banking system. Scale matters: if you had $1M in $20 bills, how can you put them into sellable goods or “clean” bank accounts?
As a normal individual, you can reasonably be expected to hit nominal flags from time to time, without tripping alarms. The teller will ask you some questions, at most. As a professional “mule”, you’re only worthwhile if you do this a lot more frequently.
In any case internationally Chinese triads are undercutting laundering these days, charging 2-3%, instead of the usual 8-10%.
Saturday 21st March 2026 15:28 GMT
Re: percentages and counts, and counters
At least in Canada, where I had to take the test 3 years running due to working in a bank's IT, that is really not how KYC works. It's not a percentage of customers, it's 100% of transactions and situations that meet some very specific concern patterns. If you are in a regulated industry for it and you test 90% of your customers, but are found willfully ignoring a small number of recurring events they stated should be a red flag, you could be in trouble.
Saturday 21st March 2026 15:20 GMT
It doesn't have to be all that well known to the general public to fall well with the "known" parameters of KYC laws. A bank isn't expected to have deep expertise of its customers with them, merely report strange happenings and sudden unexplained increases of cash flow that could relate to money laundering to the appropriate authorities.
The only thing that would make sense in a KYC context is if FSFE spent a good deal of its money financing dud consultancies that do little actual work, i.e. money in, money out. But that, again, isn't really something the bank / payment providers, at the entry end, would be looking into, that's more something law enforcement would have flagged, possibly through FSFE's accountants raising KYC concerns from exit side of things. And even then, a non-crypto donation coming in through credit cards and regular financial instruments looks like pretty clean money already, so not typically what KYC is concerned with.
Saturday 21st March 2026 14:57 GMT
KYC Know your customers laws make sense, but not in this context.
They’re mostly in the banking and money-in,valuables/ money-out businesses, like casinos. You know, the mom and pop jewelry store that suddenly 3x their weekly intake and the extra is mostly badly used low denomination bills. Watching for money laundering, though they may look for spying and terrorism as well.
It’s unclear what that type of overwatch would be looking for wrt donations to charities. And asking for passwords is not KYC stuff, IF that happens legally that will be law enforcement.
Now FSF itself could be being checked out, but, errr, that’s just kinda bizarre due to it being so well known.
Turns out your coffee addiction may be doing your brain a favor
Sunday 22nd March 2026 00:51 GMT
Re: Specificity
Cups of liquids, powders or granulates are easy to eyeball when cooking. Even without a measuring cup.
Not everyone has a scale in their kitchen. And it would be hard to eyeball weight reliably across coffee, noodles, sugar, etc…
When baking you do have to be a lot more precise and that’s why you have standard graduated cups, often in ml and cup fractions.
Same reasoning applies to table/tea spoons.
Meanwhile meats and fish typically are sold with exact weight labelled. And veggies/fruits are specced in numbers in recipes.
It's not a binary choice. Independent boffin builds a ternary CPU on an FPGA
Microsoft breaks Microsoft account sign-ins in Windows 11 with latest update
West Sussex's Oracle rollout pushed back again as costs balloon 15 times
Tuesday 17th March 2026 15:46 GMT
Re: regarding paying the workers
A council is in the biz of providing services to residents. That’s its core biz and they may have special ways to do it.
A payroll is a means to an end: paying employees who work for that council. It’s very important that they get paid correctly, but how it happens is not a unique business feature of that council.
No one’s claiming paying employees is not important. Phoenix federal ERP in Canada $1.2B fiasco had people getting mispaid for months/years. That’s unacceptable.
But a working payroll, as long as it works, is not core to govt business. It is to say a payroll as a service provider.
Not going broke and screwing residents - cough, Birmingham, cough, IS a core function of those councils as well.
Tuesday 17th March 2026 15:32 GMT
At these cost levels, besides using a public sector implementation team rotating through councils I would also strongly consider putting in place go-live/no customization bonuses for the users.
It’s, to an extent, a stress to change some habits. Although I question how much the worker bees care as long as it works and is fit for purpose. As opposed to users - typically mid/low management, not say payroll clerks - sitting in those meetings and claiming they need something special.
Anyway, put aside a training budget and a bonus for a job well done and a Birmingham narrowly averted.
One gig I started out doing (got canned for refusing to falsify acceptance tests) had the consultants trying to rewrite a legacy AS400 paysheet in the new ERP to be a pixel-perfect match. For 200 unionized employees. Much easier, IMHO, to come clean: “same numbers, different looks, here’s $500 bonus at go live!”.
Put peer pressure in place to stop these pointless dick-waving examples of “I am an important thinker in payroll business process theory, have never run a payroll and our council can’t possibly use the same scheme as the others”.
Reality is the business processes for non-core functions like HR and payroll are probably driven by a) unions and b) whatever the previous IT system mandated. There are probably some things the worker bees really don’t like and if you can improve their life there, they will be happy too. If not: bonuses. Just make sure your replacement actually works for them, tho!
Monday 16th March 2026 17:35 GMT
My thoughts as well. Best ERP implementations I’ve worked on were small, focussed, affairs with a drive to go live with as little customizations as possible. Same product with less user focus? typically drawn out messes.
What these, fascinating, ERP articles should delve more into is the exact composition of the cost components.
If the overrun is due to vendor invoices - upfront and maintenance fees - then maybe change vendors & products (as some suggest here).
If on the contrary the bulk of invoices are from the implementation team (as seems likely here) then look at product fit, implementation team competence and user specification processes.
If the cost accrues because product demonstrably needs workarounds and customization to what’s in its core functionality, ban its use for govt until it matures.
That all said £2.6M for 19k employees seems like a massive underestimation to start with, so bad planning is also part of this.
Monday 16th March 2026 15:32 GMT
They should start looking into contractual mechanisms where 3x implementation cost overruns should result in consequences:
- void vendor support fees until it goes back under 3x
- fire top decision makers for project at council: project director, project manager. audit specs for needless bikeshedding and stakeholdering and fire those who wrote them. and those who undersized the training budget.
- blocklist implementation consulting firm from govt gigs.
This is £2k implementation per employee. What on Earth could justify that, unless the product was a bad fit to start with?
p.s. Yeah, all about as likely as The Donald getting a clue, becoming an empathetic leader and not asking those he insulted to get his chestnuts out the fire. Or streaming services becoming good value. Still, I dream, therefore I am.
Prince of PDFs, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, to step down after 18 years
Sunday 15th March 2026 01:14 GMT
Re: subscription version where he receives a new pox variant every year
Ebola-as-a-service regrettably suffers from a quite low Customer Lifetime Revenue, due to the small value of the lifetime component of the equation.
This is the flip side of the curing-vs-managing revenue model for Big Pharma.
As far as this dude and his paychecks go, everyone’s increased costs were Adobe’s increased revenue. He did a lot to kickstart our current subscription everything mania, when Adobe first started it, people were skeptical of that biz model. Now it’s common wisdom - well at least until customers rebel.
Personally, I am effin fed up with being told subscriptions are a benefit to me and avoid buying anything non-news/entertainment with them and review products accordingly.
RAM is getting expensive, so squeeze the most from it
So much for power to the people – AI datacenters could jump UK grid queue
Ig Nobel Prize flees US for Switzerland after 35 years over safety concerns
Wednesday 11th March 2026 15:18 GMT
Re: He is in a uniquely powerful position, akin, yes, to a Roman emperor.
The problem is that killing Trump - as was attempted - would only cement his legacy through martyrdom. Nor is political violence good to democracy.
The only realistic way out for America is for him to so obviously and publicly screw the pooch somehow that most of his devoted followers disown him and the country loses its taste for his kind of politics.
A “you can’t handle the truth” Jack Nicholson moment. Or a Joe McCarthy overreach and meltdown? Invading Canada or Greenland?
5 years of this circus later, I really, really, wonder what it would take.
Wednesday 11th March 2026 14:55 GMT
Re: America's reputational loss will be long lasting
Yeah, I regret that I won’t be around when the history books gell down to a collective verdict but I expect he will be one of the very worst most ineffectual leaders ever:
( obviously there have been worse though, but… )
- He is in a uniquely powerful position, akin, yes, to a Roman emperor. So it matters, and he will track more than worse ruler in Lichenstein. and this happening at a time when the USA is facing massive multi-generational challenges ( China, budget)
- Unlike say Hitler or Genghis Khan, his deeds are not driven by the logic of pure calculated evil, merely by narcissism and petulance. Nor is he completely insane or retarded like some kings. Merely narcissistic and petulant. Like a 12 year old running the most powerful nation on Earth.
- It’s not ( I hope ) going defined by massive military reverses, which happen in wars to half their participants. No, it’s a slow motion of obvious bad decisions because making them makes his “tribe” fawn over him.
- Once gone, it’s not like pulling a tooth. The impact of his decisions will go on for decades in squandered alliances, festering ignored crises, the nurturing of anti-reason, bigotry and deliberately turning the US’s back to science. Not to mention deficit and debt. Empowering religious extremism. Waste of blood and treasure. Lying has always been a (small) part of the
political landscape, but - in democracies- it often disqualified those caught out. Now it has been normalized. Ditto grift. Sexual crimes and affairs.
- He took away customs of good behavior thst papered over the - inevitable - flaws in most democracies’ constitutional frameworks.
Iran is the first out-loud cyberwar the US has fought
Monday 9th March 2026 19:49 GMT
Re: israel?
Perhaps, but I also get the impression that CCTV hacks are a known risk vector to everyone and his dog already. If only they were easy to patch...
While the likes of Hegseth are utter nitwits, I doubt the US military itself has become as unmoored from operational security as their boss.
Meanwhile, there can be advantages to generating a heightened sense of paranoia in one's opponents: you are being watched!
And, even, if one is Machiavellian enough, would you want to be a Basij (regime thugs) executing civilians in full view of, possibly recording, street cams?
Fascinating developments overall, but let's not jump to too many conclusions about why and how information is leaking. Some of it may be accidental, some of it may be just good detective work and some of it may be intentional. What we do know is that Mossad is uncommonly clever as we saw with poor Hezbo's pagers :-(
Monday 9th March 2026 15:41 GMT
Latest Risky Business podcast says that hacking CCTV and traffic cams is a major emerging cyberwar nexus: battle damage assessment on the spot. They also claim that hitting Khamenei was enabled by following his tos-and-fros for days on traffic cams, building up knowledge of his habits and foregoing the need for human sources.
( the conspiracy minded - not me - would also note that misdirection in these cases is not uncommon to protect valuable sources )
LibreOffice learns to speak Markdown in version 26.2
Monday 9th March 2026 15:28 GMT
Markdown’s other big advantage is lack of choice. You can’t spend hours tweaking the styling to get it “just right” to best get your message across or “optimize corporate branding”.
You have to either spend that time improving the content itself. Or, even better, moving on to your next real-world task.
Son of government contractor arrested after alleged $46M crypto heist from US Marshals
Sunday 8th March 2026 02:28 GMT
local news says…
A surprisingly thorough writeup, with pix
https://smn-news.com/index.php/st-maarten-st-martin-news/50140-u-s-marshals-probe-insider-link-in-25m-crypto-heist.html
https://smn-news.com/index.php/st-maarten-st-martin-news/50137-gign-and-fbi-unite-to-bust-46m-crypto-heist.html
Used to live there so I figured that would be big news locally
;-)
