Posts by BillG

Million GPU clusters, gigawatts of power – the scale of AI defies logic

Re: "the entire industry is chasing the AI dragon"

Colossus? You mean the AI supercomputer designed by Dr. Charles Forbin that successfully took over the world?

Sorry, but the ROI on enterprise AI is abysmal

Gold Rush

AI is the new gold rush. And who really got rich during the gold rush? Not the prospectors looking for gold, but the people selling the shovels.

AI may not be turning a profit, but those of us selling the shovels (semiconductors) are doing great.

Indian bank’s IT is so shabby it’s been banned from opening new accounts

Re: The next superpower ?

@Terje, your post reminds me of something a business mentor once told me - "Nobody gets promoted for stopping screwing-up".

Not only do you not get promoted for stopping screwing-up, but the people (there are always more than one) responsible for the screw-up will deeply resent you, either for embarrassing them or for making them do more work to fix the problem. In a static status-quo culture it can end your career.

Wait, security courses aren't a requirement to graduate with a computer science degree?

Engineering Ethics

When I got my Engineering degree, classes in Engineering Ethics (including security) were mandatory and a passing grade in each ethics class was required for graduation.

Boeing goes boing: 757 loses a wheel while taxiing down the runway

Re: click bait

I saw this event discussed on an airplane forum, and the consensus was that the cause was that the wheel/tyre was not torqued to the proper specs. So it's not a mechanical problem, it's a maintenance crew problem.

What if Microsoft had given us Windows XP 2024?

Windows XP was the last real desktop OS Microsoft ever made. The user commanded, the OS obeyed. XP did not "helpfully" turn options back on "for a better user experience".

Since XP with each succeeding OS Microsoft has taken more and more control away from the user until we have Windows 10 where it's a constant battle to wrestle control of your computer from Microsoft, and now Windows 11 where the user is a helpless pawn.

When it comes to personal data, we're on a highway to hell

Re: complete map of driving from his Tesla

AC, I don't think you've been paying attention. Everything you just wrote - sending literally everything you do with your car to the manufacturer, bricking your car remotely, collecting journey data - every manufacturer can do this today. And if you are financing/leasing your car it's worse, the bank/agency that holds your loan/lease has its own module (independent of the manufacturer) installed on your car that also knows your location at any given moment, and if you miss a payment can brick your car without due process.

Don't buy/lease or rent a connected car if you care about privacy.

Time running out for crew of missing Titanic tourist submarine

Re: Where’s Dirk Pitt when you need him?

This video is a very good explanation of the design flaws in the sub:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dka29FSZac

In short, the Titan was not designed by submarine Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), you'll have to watch the video to see why SMEs were deliberately excluded because if I posted it nobody would believe me. It never had an unmanned pressure test at the Titanic's depth. Instead of the reliability and simplicity of a wired control system, the sub is controlled by a COMMERCIAL-GRADE BLUETOOTH game controller (Why? How far can the pilot walk in the sub?) and as far as anyone knows there's no backup if the controller fails. There are multiple single-point of failures. There is also no voice communications and worst of all, loss of communications is considered normal.

The most damning bit of information is that in 2018 OceanGate's Director of Marine Operations, David Lochridge, was fired for failing to sign off on the safety of the hull at the depth of the Titanic's wreck. The hull is wound carbon-fiber which under pressure does not crack (which can still hold pressure) but shatters (the end comes quickly).

Linux Foundation and pals – including Intel – back software ecosystem around RISC-V

Re: This article is 4 years late.

But the attraction of RISC-V is that it is not only royalty-free, but also under the governance of its member organizations rather than a single proprietor that the architecture can be extended with custom extensions.

I've already been involved with several RISC-V core design projects, 1) royalty-free and 2) custom instruction extensions are the two main technical reasons for it's growth. Who owns the architecture is less important than the first two. It's also a true RISC architecture and only has one ISA (each Arm core has two internal ISAs, a second ISA is dedicated for Thumb instructions). The list of technical advantages over Arm is extensive, the closer I look at the RISC-V internal architecture the more impressed I am.

In my career I've never seen a CPU architecture gain acceptance so fast. This isn't a marathon, this is a sprint, the internal schedules for RISC-V to replace Arm are extremely aggressive. RISC-V is inevitable.

Thanks for fixing the computer lab. Now tell us why we shouldn’t expel you?

Never, ever own up to fixing anything.

> Never, ever own up to fixing anything. You either get a bollocking or you have to do it again next time.

Reminds me of a rule that a business mentor once told me: Nobody gets promoted for "stopping screwing-up".

It's a truism. Again and again I've seen careers come to a screeching halt for not knowing this rule.

School laptop auction devolves into extortion allegation

Investigating RDA? I'm Not Certain.

We are not sure that the Texas AG is actually "investigating" anything.

After the San Benito CISD told what appears to be a series of lies about RDA already detailed in this article, Superintendent Theresa Servellon issued a statement saying "The District is providing information to the Texas Attorney General to aid representatives from the Texas Attorney General's office in their future inspection of RDA Technologies."

Note she doesn't actually claim there is presently an investigation, but an "inspection", and not an active one, but maybe sometime in the future. I'm willing to bet all the school district did was send the Texas AG an email. If the Texas AG bothered to respond in any meaningful way the ISD would claim they are "in communication" or "having a discussion". I'm pretty sure its against the law to claim someone is being investigated when they are not, and I'm also pretty sure lying about anything a state's AG is up to is very stupid if you expect their future cooperation.

Home Depot sent my email, details of stuff I bought to Meta, customer complains

Re: Annnnnnnd...

I'm the same way - I pay with cash. It's not only about privacy, it's about not having my credit card slurped. It's also about sticking to a budget.

But even when I pay with cash, many retailers will ask for a mobile phone number. Well, they don't really ask, while staring at the register they intone "What's your mobile number?" in a demanding tone of voice that assumes compliance. I've noticed that people automatically comply. But when I respond "No", there's usually a bit of comic relief when they hesitate, frown at me, and say it's for their rewards program or something like that. After a brief argument they give up.

When it comes to privacy and data security, most people are frogs and let themselves be slowly boiled.

Parody Elon Musk Twitter accounts will be suspended immediately, says Elon Musk

This Is My Only Account

How many times have we seen someone with a blue check-mark tweet "This is my only Twitter account. I do not have any other Twitter accounts. Anyone else claiming to be me is not me" with some adding "If you paid for something sold by a Twitter account claiming to be me, it was not me".

Yes, this is a thing, often the same person has to tweet, then re-tweet, then re-re-tweet this using capitals when they get tweet replies accusing the blue-check of scamming them.

IT blamed after HR forgets to install sockets in new office

Re: Watch Your Backs

@ThatOne wrote "It's the mediocre ones who are dangerous,"

There's a phrase for that, "The tyranny of the mediocre".

Re: I worked in companies where HR actually run the business.

Today, the purpose of H.R. is to protect management from the employees.

Lenovo pops up tips on its tablets. And by tips, Lenovo means: Unacceptable ads

Can you give examples? Yep.

When Lenovo was caught stuffing Superfish adware in the BIOS:

SuperFish cram scandal: Lenovo must now ask nicely before stuffing new PCs with crapware

Going back to 2014, the Chinese computer goliath was found to have been bundling new Windows PCs it sold in the US with an application called VisualDiscovery that was presented as a "search assistant" tool to help users find similar products to those shown in images. In reality, VisualDiscovery was just a modified version of SuperFish, a piece of adware that injected targeted marketing links into webpages whenever the user hovered over an image. In addition to being annoying and invasive, researchers found that SuperFish's use of self-signed certificates also introduced security holes to machines it was installed on.

Because it was loaded from the BIOS the adware could be reloaded into a fresh install of Windows. I don't know if this also infected Linux as well.

Everyone cites that 'bugs are 100x more expensive to fix in production' research, but the study might not even exist

Re: For the love of God, stop saying "methodology" - these are all *methods*

Upvoted because sesquipedalian is my favorite word. Also, sesquipedalian is sesquipedalian.

Audacity is a poster child for what can be achieved with open-source software

Re: Calm down, people

...what is optional today will be mandatory tomorrow...

The mantra of Microsoft, Google, etc. We've seen this before. They don't take away all your privacy all at once, it's done in steps, like boiling a frog.

New mystery AWS product 'Infinidash' goes viral — despite being entirely fictional

Re: To Infinidash --

My Interocitor runs Infinidash 1.31 beta. I use it to make hot chocolate while I play fizzbin with my coworkers.

IBM President and former Red Hat boss Jim Whitehurst quits

re: Titanic news

It's not the rats that are the first to desert a sinking ship, it's the best swimmers.

John McAfee dead: Antivirus tycoon killed himself in prison after court OK'd extradition, says lawyer

John McAfee Tweet From Prison Oct 15, 2020

John McAfee @officialmcafee Tweet Date: Oct 15, 2020 -

I am content in here. I have friends.

The food is good. All is well.

Know that if I hang myself, a la Epstein, it will be no fault of mine.

https://twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/1316801215083225096

Toyota reveals its work on an honest-to-goodness cloak of invisibility

Re: I remember a SciFi book about this.

Invisibility is theoretically possible, with selective bending of light. But the power cost is enormous.

Audacity's new management hits rewind on telemetry plans following community outrage

Re: Audacity have announced a U-turn on plans to introduce "basic telemetry" into the product.

He went on: "The response to PR #835 has brought about a realisation at Muse that the convenience of using Yandex and Google is at odds with the public perception of trustworthiness, so we will be self-hosting instead."

FIFY

It's too late and Muse has already publicly announced their intentions. I've got Audacity 3.0.2 installed, the last version before Muse assimilated the software into their anti-privacy collective, and I have no intention of ever upgrading.

Ex Netflix IT ops boss pocketed $500k+ in bribes before awarding millions in tech contracts

Obvious Evidence of Fraud

And September 2013, while getting paid as an advisor at Platfora, he signed a $250,000 annual contract to have Platfora provide software to Netflix. He then urged employees to find a use for the software, despite their objections and the fact that Netflix was already using and paying for a competing product.

Anyone who has been in the corporate world long enough knows if you already have a working product, and if you are being pushed to use a competing and inferior product, then there's either money or connections involved.

The real issue here is why wasn't this flagged and caught much earlier? Why wasn't this exposed during an audit? You don't get away with this type of open and obvious fraud unless more executives are involved.

Docking £500k commission from top SAS salesman was perfectly legal, rules judge

Satisfaction

Many years ago I was an FAE and had brought in some significant semiconductor business where I was owed a sizable bonus. My U.K. boss just flat-out told me over the phone, very coldly "I know you're owed this bonus, but I'm just not going to pay you."

I didn't not have the experience or the resources to fight the situation in court. Within a month I had secured a new job with a competitor which caused a panic with my boss who vaguely attacked me with non-specific threats. See, I had gotten those design-wins based on my personal relationships with the customer engineers who knew me from a previous employer. They knew I kept my promises and never once tried to B.S. them about the product's capabilities.

Without me, my previous employer lost the business I had secured. It gave me some small satisfaction, but I would have much rather had the commission.

Alexa, swap out this code that Amazon approved for malware... Installed Skills can double-cross their users

Re: There are so many reasons I won't let one of these in my house.

Finally, the researchers found that almost a quarter (24.2 per cent) of Alexa Skills don't fully disclose the data they collect.

They collect EVERYTHING!

Only suckers believe privacy statements.

Texas blacks out, freezes, and even stops sending juice to semiconductor plants. During a global silicon shortage

Re: @BillG

Snake, you made it sound like this was a Texas-specific problem in 2011. But the Wiki page you linked to starts out:

"The 2011 Groundhog Day Blizzard was a powerful and historic winter storm that affected large swaths of the United States and Canada from January 31 to February 2, 2011"

So while you tried very hard to make 2011 look like a Texas-specific problem, this was really a powerful weather system that affected over 100 million people in North America, including overwhelming locations up north used to dealing with extreme winter weather. It was not the same as today. You really should read what you link to.

Re: The Real Story from Texas

Snake wrote According to the news reports, about a decade ago Texas had a partial freezeover

"News reports"?

"About a decade ago"?

What exactly is a "partial freezeover" and what effect did it have?

[sarcasm=on] Thanks for the detailed information snake, you've certainly, uh, made a point [sarcasm=off] while proving mine.

Re: @BillG - The Real Story from Texas

A. Coward wrote As far as I can see, according to your post the Texas power grid is great and all Texans should be fine so why are they complaining.

I don't think you read my post correctly.

The Real Story from Texas

Lots of misinformation here. I actually had a client two years ago involved with the Texas power grid. Most of the news & info on the internets, to put it politely, is just repeating "inaccurate" or "horribly biased" information.

First, Texas has a state of the art power grid and gets a lot of its power from renewables like solar and wind, up to 11% (not 7% as publicly stated), most of it wind. Despite performing all the recommended cold weather maintenance on the windmills most of the blades are iced over. If there is sufficient weight on the blades the wind turbine safeties will not permit the blades to turn. It's reported that only 10% of wind turbines are operational.

Second, a lot of Texas power comes from natural gas and a lot of the equipment has freezed up. If just the natural gas or wind had problems everything would be fine, but with both wind and gas curtailed it creates a power shortage.

The Texas power grid is CAPABLE of being completely independent, but despite what you've read online Texas regularly buys and sells electricity to surrounding states and anyone who tells you differently is repeating false information. In times of heavy summer demand Texas has purchased up to 15% of its power from nearby states and regularly sells power to other states. However, the news even in Texas has been incorrectly reporting that the Texas power grid is not connected to the rest of the USA. The reason for this deliberate misinformation is complicated and has nothing to do with the power outage, but today the CEO of ERCOT, Bill Magness, came clean and enigmatically said that electricity from surrounding states is "restricted", claiming that they also have frozen power delivery issues. This unusual restriction of neighboring states to supply power is now the subject of investigations, and in response these states might find power they buy from Texas to be more expensive in the coming months.

One thing Texas is great at doing is not repeating mistakes. Two or three years ago we had winter weather that caused frozen trees & branches to take down power lines. In response ONCOR waited until spring to examine all the trees near power lines (by helicopter & drone) and trimmed everything. Took almost a year to do it right. So I don't see a repeat of the present situation in coming years.

So the remaining questions are, 1) Why is Texas gas production really down, and 2) Why are neighboring states not supplying power to Texas? Once again, like the past year, I see what's really happening & then I see the news and internet report a fictitious account of reality.

Dev creeped out after he fired up Ubuntu VM on Azure, was immediately approached by Canonical sales rep

Privacy Statements are for the Suckers

@thames wrote: The whole point of social media is to mine your personal information

Exactly. A social media website will do whatever it wants with your data and the law be damned. Privacy statements are for naive suckers.

Nearly 70 years after America made einsteinium in its first full-scale thermo-nuke experiment, mystery element yields secrets of its chemistry

Engieering

Science is divided into two categories - 1) Engineering, and 2) Hobbies

The GIMP turns 25 and promises to carry on being the FOSS not-Photoshop

Re: I found the learning curve

I agree, IrfanView is great for fast and moderately complex image edits. It's one of my most useful programs.

Down the Swanny: '2020 has been the most challenging year in my career' says Intel CEO as profit plunges 30%

History Repeats Itself

Intel shares dived today after it revealed a steep slump in enterprise and government sales of its server chips – and delays to its latest Xeons.

Isn't this what always happens when you replace experienced professionals with cheap college grads? This is not a surprise, this is history.

US Supreme Court Justice flames lower courts for giving 'sweeping immunity' to Facebook, YouTube, etc when it comes to harmful content

Do It Right

Yes it is a warning shot. It's a message to the lower courts to start interpreting Section 230 correctly or the Supreme Court will do it for you. Section 230 is meant to provide online content providers like Facebook & Twitter legal immunity from member's posted content & actions. Section 230 does not provide the same protection to content & actions taken by the content provider itself, including posts by officers of the company posting on their own website as well as moderation actions. The lower courts have been providing broad immunity by misinterpreting Section 230 to include all actions taken by the content providers. What Judge Thomas is doing is warning the lower courts to interpret Section 230 properly, as it is written, and not play textual words games to grant corporate immunity where it does not belong.

The reason for the warning & not ruling from the bench is nowadays it's not good for a judge's reputation to have the Supreme's overturn your decision - for example, it gives ammunition to defense attorneys. They're probably teased by their fellow judges too ("Hey, Walter! Wanna overturn those pancakes for me? Hahahaha!").

It also affects the stocks of the affected companies if the Supreme's are forced to set a hard precedent by interpreting Section 230 correctly, as opposed to having an appellate court rule against the same company.

Bad boys bad boys, what you gonna do? Los Angeles Police Department found fibbing about facial recognition use

Fibbing about facial recognition use?

I got news for you - EVERYBODY fibs about facial recognition use. Police departments, department stores, many restaurant chains - you name it.

It's easy and cheap using off-the-shelf turnkey solutions.

Take your pick: 'Hack-proof' blockchain-powered padlock defeated by Bluetooth replay attack or 1kg lump hammer

Groucho

You can fool some of the people all of the time

And all of the people some of the time

And from that you can make a pretty good living.

COVID-19 tracing without an app? There's an iOS and Android update for that

Repeat

This is not, repeat not, pervasive Bluetooth surveillance

This is not, repeat not, an El Reg comment.

Impersonating users of 'protest' app Bridgefy was as simple as sniffing Bluetooth handshakes for identifiers

Barn Doors and Horses

Just because an app says it's secure doesn't mean it is. In my experience if it isn't secure from the beginning, it can never be trusted again.

Trucking hell: Kid leaves dad in monster debt after buying oversized vehicle on eBay

"Suscicious Activity"?

A few years ago, I had a credit card I typically used for the usual household items and computer equipment. One day I used it at a household appliance store for a purchase much larger than I'd even used it for. The store got a notice back that the card wasn't declined, but I had to call a number to verify the purchase. The reason was the purchase was so many thousands of $$$ more than I'd normally used the card for it counted as "suspicious activity".

I'm surprised PayPal doesn't have a similar system for fraud prevention.

Twitter admits 130 A-lister accounts compromised to promote Bitcoin scam after 'social engineering' attack

Re: A foolish move

This reminds me of a line from the TV show Law & Order, "Never attack people with virtually unlimited money, for they can afford to be vindictive and indulge their whims."

SoftBank: Oi, we paid $32bn for you, when are you going to strong-Arm some more money out of your customers?

Re: SoftBank bought a goose that lays golden eggs...

When investment firms that don't understand semiconductor companies buy a semiconductor company, it never works out well for the semiconductor company.

I'm thinking of multiple examples here, including a company that had a batwings symbol.

Lawsuit klaxon: HP, HPE accused of coordinated plan to oust older staff in favor of cheaper, compliant youngsters

Re: This Is About As Shocking As The News That Bears Shit In The Woods.

Young people with limited experience don't understand that modern business consists mostly of 1) Fixing projects that go wrong, and 2) Preventing things that potentially go wrong. They end up doing lots of (1) because they don't have the experience to see (2).

Their main weakness is not understanding unintended consequences of their actions. That leads to mistakes which the experienced competition can gleefully take advantage of.

Das reboot: That's the only thing to do when the screenshot, er, freezes

Re: Funny that

Nothing matches the lazy manager and his sheer panic and desperation trying to coax support out of a company tech because I deleted all the games (solitaire, minesweeper, etc) off his computer - games he spent more time playing than clearing his backlog.

The longest card game in the world: Microsoft Solitaire is 30

Microsoft Solitaire has done more to reduce worker productivity than any virus or hack.

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

Re: I'll give it a go...

Microslurp.

Any name for MS should have some passing reference to the data slurping of Windows 10.

Atlassian to offensively price itself through the post-pandemic patch

Re: I wanted to adopt their Hip chat server a few years back...

It's bad enough we have to endure COVID19, but it is morally wrong to force anyone to have to endure the horror that is Jira.

Florida man might just stick it to HP for injecting sneaky DRM update into his printers that rejected non-HP ink

HP Printers are a Virus

My first and only experience with an HP printer is a familiar one. Back in the days of Windows XP I installed an HP printer "driver" that had a 65M installation file. Of course it slowed the entire computer.

And of course the HP uninstall programs were incomplete (remember?). It took me days to remove all the additional files, hooks into the system, and registry entries. The entire time I repeated in my head the invocation "I will never buy another HP printer again." I was pretty good at IT back then but no expert. The computer ran better but still had glitches. It eventually took an OS reinstall to finally restore it to it's pre-HP glory. I also learned the value of system & registry backup programs and installed one on every computer I was responsible for.

I kept my promise - I never bought another HP printer - or HP anything - again.

CFOs are crossing fingers and hoping a second wave of COVID-19 does not appear, says Gartner

Re: Gartner Goop

Yeah, Gartner - these are the people that used to double- and triple-count their survey responses. I didn't think anyone believed them anymore.