Posts by talk_is_cheap

UK wants more homes heated by waste heat from datacenters

Re: Tha's only one side of the equation

If you know of a way to viably produce electricty from a heat source that is at around 95 °C, you should get down to the patent office.

AMD's Threadripper Halo is a local-AI workstation for researchers with deep pockets

Re: Tasty (Meep meep!)

At just 10 kW, it may need a very different cooling solution.

AI agents get their own phone directory built atop DNS

Re: Does not sound that new...

A long time ago there were a lot ideas around service registries, which resulted in a number of public services and solutions to deploy in-house.

One major one was SLP (Service Location Protocol) from SUN, Novell then built around it for the needs of their solutions - a very nice dynamic name resolution system for Novell-oriented sites, while Microsoft was doing the same thing for their sites.

All in all, it should be fun to watch a world where DNS records are created with TTLs of seconds, as the overall DNS lookup traffic is going to jump. Before vendors like Cloudflare, to handle the requests this was a disaster waiting to happen.

YouTuber lands on Moon using a ZX Spectrum. Conditions apply

Considering the Z80 has many times the processing power of what was available at the time of the lunar landings it would not be hard. The one requirement would be to track down a Z80 hardened to handle cosmic rays.

Re: C64

They copied the solution used on the ZX80 and ZX81 :)

Now the real fun on the ZX Spectrum was all the fast loader solutions that made the built-in solution seem slow.

Atlassian to shed ten percent of staff, because AI

Re: A $1,000 “technology stipend”

It's a bribe to get the company laptops back, and so an indication of just how bad those laptops are in terms of age and features.

Intel welcomes memory apocalypse with Xeon workstation refresh

Oh the old days

"Four terabytes of 6,400 MT/s DDR5 RDIMMs will currently set you back more than $70,000."

Back in 1990 I had 192MB (yes MB) of memory for the Compaq servers I was upgrading and that had just cost us £72,000.

Everybody has a theory about why Nvidia dropped $20B on Groq - they're mostly wrong

Re: 100GW in space!

The size of the required array is just an issue of logistics, but the fact that a 100GW heat source is planned to be placed in a near-perfect vacuum is an issue of physics.

Galactic Brain space datacenter coming in 2027, pledges startup Aetherflux

Re: Novelty?

Nothing gentle about trying to get a large mass out of Earth's orbit. Try pointing it at the earth instead.

Unofficial IETF draft calls for grant of five nonillion IPv6 addresses to ham radio operators

Re: The Birds

IPoAC has been successfully implemented, but for only nine packets of data, with a packet loss ratio of 55% (due to operator error), and a response time ranging from 3,000 seconds (50 min) to over 6,000 seconds (100 min). Thus, this technology suffers from extremely high latency.

HSBC spies $207B crater in OpenAI's expansion goals

"HSBC predicts that OpenAI's ChatGPT consumer products will attract 3 billion regular users by 2030, up from 800 million last month, and equivalent to 44 percent of the world's population over 15 years old."

I wonder which AI system they asked to come up with that prediction? What is even better is that just 300 million of those regular users are expected to be paying for the service.........

Rideshare giant moves 200 Macs out of the cloud, saves $2.4 million

Re: ...unless you have no other option

It may just mean that they do integration testing well. I've seen large systems complete all their tests within a few hours and only once a day for the whole development team based on just the merged branches, while other systems have run the whole CI suite for each developer every night for each branch they are working on. Guess which approach costs a lot more in CPU cycles and development time, but far less overall for the business long term.

Re: Multi-user?

It is best described as UNIX like rather than UNIX based as its original base was FreeBSD. The development cycle of FreeBSD means that by 1994 it was free of any UNIX code from the original AT&T code base.

Meta to sell $30B in bonds to build AI datacenters

There will be no sinking fund; instead, a plan will be implemented to issue additional bonds in the future, allowing the old ones to be repaid.

AI startup Augment scraps 'unsustainable' pricing, users say new model is 10x worse

And so the cycle starts

Now, with this price increase, all the other offerings can start the process of raising their prices to get nearer to their true running costs.

At some point, the cost is going to reach $4,000+ pm per person for an all-you-can-use solution, but before then, the solution is going to really have to enhance a developer's performance.

Panther Lake sets stage for Intel's 2 nm comeback, but many details still TBD

The NPU is part of the compute tile.

Germany slams brakes on EU's Chat Control device-scanning snoopfest

Re: Who's Afraid Of The STASI Doing Decryption???

"Clearly MUST be up to something suspicious", no, they would just introduce a law that states that such people are doing something illegal.

Re: Thank you Germany!

So what you are saying is that someone should take charge and direct Germany to do things without the need for a democratic process! So all hail the overlord elsergiovolador.

Qualcomm in the dock over 'patent tax' on smartphones

Odd claims

There are no laws that state that a patent holder must share their patent or at what price they must sell products that use the patent.

No, patent law itself is fundamentally flawed, as it was written well before the advent of 3-year product cycles, but that is a very different issue.

Blockchain just became an utterly mainstream part of the global financial system

Re: It's not Krikkit

It will depend, if talking about Blockchain is positive to their share price, they will at least start an internal project.

Slack threatened to delete nonprofit coding club’s data if it didn’t pay $50k in a week

Re: Slack should ..

If you feel you can offer a platform for $10 a month, consider giving them a call. It is reported that Hack Club provide a service to more than 1,000 high school clubs and 80,000 students.

AI pricing is currently in a state of ‘pandemonium’ says Gartner

Sounds like the job for an AI system :)

Make the system so complex that you have to subscribe to another system to help you understand it.

End well, this won't: UK commissioner suggests govt stops kids from using VPNs

They just don't have a clue.

So they age-strict VPNs, they will then have to age-strict VPS servers, which someone could use to set up their own VPN. They will then have to age-restrict the use of debit cards as few VPN or VPS vendors with systems based outside of the UK are going to worry about any UK based laws.

Oracle VirtualBox licensing tweak lies in wait for the unwary

LOL, if download and be liable was even inforceable the real killer is to be found in the FAQ

"To purchase Oracle VirtualBox Extension Pack Enterprise Licenses, ​visit the Oracle Store, or ​contact your local sales office. Oracle VirtualBox Extension Pack Enterprise Named Workstation User Perpetual licenses must be purchased in an initial quantity of at least 100."

So the post boy goes to Oracle's site and downloads VirtualBox with the extension pack onto their company PC, and somehow the business becomes liable to purchase 100 copies.

The real world does not work like that.

Fresh UK postcode tool points out best mobile network in your area

You may be wrong on that as their website FAQ's state

These coverage predictions are processed into a 50 meter by 50 meter grid matrix that covers the entire UK land mass. This data is then uploaded into the Ofcom Coverage Map.

European consumers are mostly saying 'non' to trading in their old phones

Why upgrade quickly?

My cheap Android phone came with 48 months of security updates from the date of its release and 3 OS updates. Unless some show-stopping new feature is added to mobile phones, there is little need to upgrade until the updates stop, and who would then want a phone without such updates?

Nextcloud cries foul over Google Play Store app rejection

Re: But will the companies that benefit put back in ?

I guess you have no idea who Nextcloud is, how long they have been around or who was involved in its formation.

Apple exec sends Google shares plunging as he calls AI the new search

So another person who does not understand the engines that marketing people call AI.

AI is not the 'new search' as it does not record everything it discovers at the time it is found. The core data set of an AI system is a highly refined subset of a snapshot of data that was made before the training process was started.

He seems to think that an AI system can, in real time, learn the internet and stay up to date as changes are found. AI systems learn real time information by filling their very limited context window during an interaction with an end client, often by calling out to things like search engines.

Toyota picks Huawei’s Android-killer HarmonyOS for its Chinese electric sedan

Odd title

"Toyota picks Huawei’s Android-killer HarmonyOS for its Chinese electric sedan".

HarmonyOS on phones is reportedly built on Android 10, while larger target devices may just use linux as the foundation OS. Not really an Android-killer if it's just an out-of-date version of a mainstream OS.

VMware revives its free ESXi hypervisor in an utterly obscure way

WOW, a free version of ESXi, shame about the lack of licenses available via VMUG membership or any sane small business Essentials licenses.

Broadcom gifted whole market segments to other players and does not want to fight to get them back.

Mapping legend Ordnance Survey releases blocky Britain in Minecraft – again

Re: Meanwhile, Ordnance Survey...

But the OS is not a tax‑funded map agency. It is a government-owned profit center that happens to make maps. If you expect that to change, you need to fight parliament.

DIMM techies weren’t allowed to leave the building until proven to not be pilferers

In 1991 I was purchasing 32MB modules for Compaq servers at just £11,000 a module as they were made by Kingston rather than Compaq. At one point I had 7 of them sitting on my desk.

In 1996 I was purchasing 32MB modules for HP Servers at £800 a module.

Today I just install 32GB modules without caring into any desktop that is short on memory and use hosted servers with 256GB+.

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

Re: Bonkers

The UK does not have free speech rights, it has protected freedom of expression for certain things, and oddly easy access to porn is not on the list.

'Savvy' shortcuts produce near-instant speech-to-speech translation of 36 languages

Because the encryption takes place at the end device, Meta would have to insert the largest backdoor known to man to access the communications at the end device, which would get noticed rather quickly.

Euro-cloud Anexia moves 12,000 VMs off VMware to homebrew KVM platform

Re: Will this make Broadcomm think again?

Their share price is linked to the AI bubble, not the VMware sideshow.

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

A race to nowhere

All this work to get to the point of a real AI that can say no to the type of destructive questions that humans ask.

Australia moves to drop some cryptography by 2030 – before quantum carves it up

Re: What an enigma

Enigma was not 'cracked', instead the British were able to exploit major weaknesses within its use at a scale that no one at the time considered possible.

The weaknesses were first spotted by Polish cryptographers who passed their work on to the British.

Huawei handed 2,596,148,429,267,413,
814,265,248,164,610,048 IPv6 addresses

People are missing EUI-64

With IPv6, it is common to use the Extended Unique Identifier (RFC2373) solution to provide a unique local address for a network device. This is a unique 64-bit value often created by expanding the 48-bit Mac Address to 64 bits.

The result is that every subnet becomes rather large but things like DHCP or manual address assignment can be dropped from the system design, which at scale for grand IoT networks is key.

So, for the old hands here, the IPv6 address starts to look very much like the old Novell IPX address structure, which was, in turn, based on the older Xerox IDP protocol.

Broadcom loses another big VMware customer: UK fintech cloud Beeks Group, and most of its 20,000 VMs

Re: Not that big a customer

The biggest IT battles in many of those financial services customers will be over which open-source products will be used next.

Microsoft goes thin client with $349 Windows 365 Link mini PC

Re: We used to have these in the 90s

"so what's with the brouhaha", it provides a one-stop shop to keep the customer's bean counters happy.

Australia tells tots: No TikTok till you're 16... or X, Instagram and Facebook

I guess the next step will be the banning of access to proxes and VPNs.

41-million-digit prime crunched by datacenter GPUs

Re: Sometimes, Mathematics may depend on one's point of view/training/interpretation (perhaps)...

And it is clear that none of them understand the task at hand as they all missed out 2 :)

IPv6 may already be irrelevant – but so is moving off IPv4, argues APNIC's chief scientist

Re: ipv6 is a mess and ipv4 will not die anytime soon

IPv6 may still needs NAT for reasons like the one you have provided if devices can not handle a dynamic local name service, they key thing is that it does not need the service provider to roll out things like carrier-grade NAT which may be OK for phones, but is a right pain for other tasks.

Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

So the school rules would ban all students from using google.

So the school has not kept up with what is going on around it in the world. AI, well what we currently call AI is now a standard feature of much of the internet. Google search even answers now with an "AI Overview" as the first entry.

Sysadmins rage over Apple’s ‘nightmarish’ SSL/TLS cert lifespan cuts plot

> The nodes of my database clusters talk to each other using TLS. That obviously can't use a CNAME.

Why would your database cluster endpoints care what TTL browsers use for certs?

Microsoft veteran ditches Team Tabs, blaming storage trauma of yesteryear

It has to be spaces

There is no defined 'length' for a tab as the original concept comes from manually set 'tabs' on a typewriter. So while one person's IDE may be set to 3 spaces per tab it does not mean that the same indentation will be shown across all the tools that access/process the file with the tabs included.

If you want to use the tab key, just select an IDE that can convert the tab into spaces for you.

SpaceX accuses 'meme-stock' rival of 'misinformation' over Starlink signals waiver

Re: Exemption not required

It is not so much about relevant IP, but more about the fact that the AST satellites are built to do the job, within the limitations set by the regulator.

LinkedIn started harvesting people's posts for training AI without asking for opt-in

Well the good news is

The UK also seems to be on the list of locations where the AI does not data mine as when you try and opt out it states "This setting is not available where you are located because we do not currently use your data to train generative AI models for content creation. "

Oracle brews Java 23 for just-in-time delivery

Re: Also in this release

Any sane Java user just uses one of the other released JDKs and runtimes. Oracle's licensing is just a way to get business that do not have a clue to pay for the development of Java :)

Desktop hypervisors are like buses: None for ages, then four at once

vmrun allows you to do tasks against a VM rather than control the VMWare Workstation application/environment. So you use vmrun to create a snapshot of a VM or have it execute a command within the VM, but it does not allow you to create a new VM.