Ambient Irony

Tuesday, March 25

Daily News Stuff 25 March 2025

Beanz Meanz Newz Edition

Top Story

Oracle says intruders definitely did not break into an Oracle cloud login server and steal details of six million customers. Security experts press F to doubt. (The Register)

Not only are six million records claimed to be from Oracle Cloud up for sale on the dark corners of the internet, but the hacker left an identifying file on the server and it was picked up by the Wayback Machine.

Oracle claims that Oracle Cloud was never breached, but someone planted that file on that server. Unless the Wayback Machine itself was breached, which... They also deny.

Tech News

Latency numbers every programmer should know, and some ridiculous lessons drawn from them. (Medium)

"Reading from RAM is 1000x faster than an SSD!" The example doesn't even measure SSD performance, or latency. It measures bandwidth, and a desktop PC might have 100GBps of main memory bandwidth and 10GBps from the SSD.

"HDDs are 30x slower than SSDs." Again measuring bandwidth and not latency. An SSD can not only produce latency hundreds of times lower than a hard drive; it can perform multiple operations at once, for a total performance thousands of times greater.
The Pentagon has axed an HR system upgrade that was six years behind schedule and 800% over budget. (The Register)

I can only dream of coasting for that long without encountering a short sharp shock.
The Ninkear MBOX 8 Pro is a mini-PC that slots into a dock that turns it into a mini-PC. (Liliputing)

Why?
The HP EliteBook Ultra G1i 14 is only about 300% overpriced. (Notebook Check)

And lacks the Four Essential Keys. And you can't upgrade the memory, though at least it has 32GB of it.

But at $3849 that's a big thumbs down from me.

Does HP still make anything worthwhile?

Hmm. The Pavilion Plus 14 actually looks good. Four Essential Keys, same 2880x1800 OLED display, same 32GB of soldered RAM, 16 core rather than 8 core CPU, and a much more reasonable $1249.

Musical Interlude

Disclaimer: Yes, I know what it sounds like.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:55 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 351 words, total size 4 kb.

1 Six years behind? 800% cost overrun? Those pikers at the Pentagon need to visit California for a remedial course in grifting from the managers of the high speed Iron Horse project.

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Wednesday, March 26 2025 03:21 AM (KOtXO)

2 "Does HP still make anything worthwhile?"

Just remember that if anything goes wrong with your HP product, you run the risk of them wasting your time until your warranty runs out.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 26 2025 09:03 AM (NEIix)

3 My experience with HP is rather negative. My wife bought an HP laptop at Costco, primarily because of its large screen. The whatever storage it had was glacially slow. The CPU wasn't anything amazing either.
The funny part, she consulted me about it, but I could not offer any significant objections aside from a vague unease about the brand.
We also have a fairly unpleasant HP inkjet AIO and regularly pay the cartridge tax. The built-in UI is barely usable, requires scrolling on a 4cm wide screen. The most annoying part about it is that it cannot be switched off. If there's power failure overnight, it goes through its usually loud clicking and clacking start-up routine. The only answer is an add-on physical power switch.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Friday, March 28 2025 01:03 AM (LZ7Bg)

4 Yeah, I'm not eager to buy a new laptop. I'm on my fourth one in five years, though admittedly one of those got beaten to death when I was travelling back and forth while moving house.

The two models that simply failed were both from HP.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, March 28 2025 05:45 PM (PiXy!)

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