* Posts by Kevin McMurtrie

3525 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jun 2007

Meta sues ex infra VP for allegedly stealing top-secret datacenter blueprints

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Facepalm

Through the first half of the article I'm thinking that maybe he just wanted a personal copy. I've done that. It's interesting to look back and see your progress.

Then "...uploaded numerous of these documents into folders bearing the name of his new employer."

Now I want the worst outcome for him if that's true. How many good people were laid off to pay his salary and bonuses?

Trump, who tried kicking TikTok out of the US, says boo to latest ban effort

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Re: US politics is basically

Move fast and break things. Let the next one try to put things back together.

US wants ASML to stop servicing China-owned chip equipment

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Re: Prevent Beijing from advancing its chipmaking efforts Lo

True, just as China cutting tech-related mineral exports to the US will encourage the US to diig their own. Maybe it's better if all of these complex trade relationships are about opportunities rather than needs.

Side note about Taiwan - don't forget that people live there. The people should be more important than politics.

Logitech MX Brio 705 – where Ultra HD meets Ultra AI

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Re: 4K?

Face tracking is typically dynamic crop. The extra pixels eliminate a motorized gimbal.

LinkedIn's turn to fall over: Outage hits thinkfluencer hub

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Re: "An error has occurred."

Don't forget, "Temporarily down for maintenance" to make it sound like it's not a failure, but instead absolutely terrible service scheduling.

Fidelity customers' financial info feared stolen in suspected ransomware attack

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Is there some way to hold identification info offline?

I put all my sensitive information on paper because nothing could be safer. They're all right here... they were there. Maybe over here..., no. Maybe I have backups in the photocopier buffer or its shread bin. I could ask everyone to FAX back copies. No problem. All safe.

Dell exec reveals Nvidia has a 1,000-watt GPU in the works

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

I thought modern CMOS was in the 1 Volt ballpark. 12 or 5 Volts is what the synchronous buck converters take in.

HDMI Forum 'blocks AMD open sourcing its 2.1 drivers'

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Another obsolete cable in the junk box

HDMI has too many features that it doesn't do well at. There's power, Ethernet, audio, return audio, and remote control. You can assemble a home theater system with mid to high range components and be certain that HDMI interoperability is terrible. Now the HDMI forum is adding video to the list of things it can't do well.

Goodbye, HDMI.

Companies flush money down the drain with overfed Kubernetes cloud clusters

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Crap code too

I've worked at places where pushing a server near its limit crashed it. Race conditions happened, threads deadlocked, errors caused resource leaks, and excessive buffering ate memory. The study goes along with what they were doing - running at 20% capacity because everything immediately dropped dead at 100%.

I think some in management still believe that "computers are cheaper than engineers." They need to check their hosting costs again.

Hold up world, HP's all-in-one print subscription's about to land, and don't forget AI PCs

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Facepalm

Investors must be rolling their eyes

Subscriptions are great for delivering a continuous stream of new and interesting things. I'll subscribe for maps, news, movies, music, and entertainment. I'll subscribe to things that need external upkeep, like my fiber optic line.

Subscriptions for mundane features that never change after purchase? That proven plan for failure is so old that no investors should still be buying into it. Customers don't.

The Who’s Who of AI just chipped in to fund humanoid robot startup Figure

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Robots are coming for the dirty jobs

It would last longer than I would.

New solvent might end winter charging blues for EV owners

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Fluoroacetonitrile

It's normally going to be sealed up tight. What really matters is what it turns into after it burns. It looks like LiF is very toxic and it puts on a good show while it's being created.

Apple Vision Pro rentals take China by storm ahead of official release

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3 month ROI on rentals

Hopefully the hype lasts that long. Apple might decide to screw developers with enough restrictions that it becomes a dead product.

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be coders, Jensen Huang warns

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What about CEOs?

Now that's a job title for AI to take over. Sit through meetings, nod, decide what others should work on, and say things that make investors happy.

Some Intel Core chips keep crashing, game devs complain

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Golem.de looked closer than ElReg...

The only thing sillier than 4095 Watts is trying to do that at 1 Volt, 4095 Amps.

Web archive user's $14k BigQuery bill shock after running queries on 'free' dataset

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

According to my calcs, you could build this for $14000. You'd have a much higher drive:CPU ratio than Google, but it would work with patience.

China breakthrough promises optical discs that store hundreds of terabytes

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

100 layers?

How many times can you spin-coat before it gets too lumpy? Probably not 100 and still be flat enough for such a high areal density.

If the real-world density ends up in the 10 TB ballpark it might be superior density, but not by enough to become a new product. These days it's not too hard to keep SSD and HDD arrays powered up and running scrubs. I've had my storage server running in various forms since the Blue & White G3 Mac came out. As long as its powered up enough to error correct (RAID or manual backup), it's pretty safe. I've only lost a few files total, thanks to the infamous IBM Deskstar 75GXP failing and incredibly fast rates.

Amazon hopes to avoid labor regulation by simply abolishing national watchdogs

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Another "too big to fail" company?

Amazon's only advantage is everything being in one place. If Amazon keeps sucking more, I doubt people would be too bothered by having to open a couple more browser windows to shop. Amazon is not like supermarkets saving you from driving all over town.

At least for me, all the games going on at Amazon are way more trouble than buying directly from manufacturers and specialty stores.

Rivian decimates staff to put a brake on spending

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Re: There may be trouble ahead.

When somebody runs a red light and hits your car, you will find this to not be true even for current ICE cars.

Ubuntu, Kubuntu, openSUSE to get better installation

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

I didn't know that installer was maintained. Subiquity for 23.10 just crashes for me.

Rice isn't nice for drying your iPhone, according to Apple

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Put it in nothing

A vacuum chamber is perfect for drying out electronics.

I'm not sure what the vapor pressure of a LiPo pouch cell is. Maybe set a couple of bricks on top of the phone to hold it together...

Google releases Gemma – LLMs small enough to run on your computer

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"open"

I think The Reg put that in quotes because Google has a web of product pages seemingly never reaching anything that's available to use. I wonder if an AI wrote it all.

Apple promises to protect iMessage chats from quantum computers

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Do they bruise?

https://xkcd.com/538/

Strong end-to-end encryption doesn't mean much if an attacker can still perform a mass attack by compromising a single codebase that is forcefully pushed to all clients.

Persistent memory to replace DRAM, but it could take a decade

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: "Bring the popcorn" issues.

It would be excellent for power savings. DRAM bits are just charges in a tiny capacitor. Ii has to constantly refresh all the bits or they fade away.

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Its gonna be hard to supplant DRAM

The idea of combining storage and execution has been around for a while. Applications would be GPU and AI operations, but not so much general computing.

Staff say Dell's return to office mandate is a stealth layoff, especially for women

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Reverse Jean-Luc Picard management

Picard hears a good solution from his crew then says, "Make it so!"

Management comes up with a dumb idea then says the same. Staff is left to figure out how, and wonder if they should still proceed against all common sense.

Also called an "executive order" if you're The Florida Man.

Space nukes: The unbelievably bad idea that's exactly that ... unbelievable

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: There's no way there aren't already nukes in space

Nobody needs to have them. You just need everybody to think you do so they blow their GDP trying to play catch-up. Even if you're the only country without them, you still don't need them. Again, convince the other countries that they need to detonate their space nukes as a preemptive defensive move. No need to waste your own money destroying all the sats in orbit.

Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Not *everything* is a file

"Everything is a file" has similar problems to "Everything is a URL path" in REST.

The file representation only works with tree-like data and simple concurrency requirements. It already starts to get a little weird with some devices having a hardware GUID, and assigned GUID, and a name all at the same time. What if you need to perform an atomic operation but the data is split into multiple paths? COW the base path? That wouldn't work at all.

I'm thankful that the abstractions aren't taken too far.

HP CEO pay for 2023 = 270,315 printer cartridges

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Ink a deal

Can execs get their bonus in ink cartridges rather than lesser-valued stock?

Tesla's Cybertruck may not be so stainless after all

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Re: Denatured alcohol?

You can buy industrial anhydrous isopropanol. I use it for cleaning small hobby projects and repairs. Wiping down a whole Cybertruck with that might cost around $80. There's a pretty good chance you'd set your arm on fire in the process, so reserve another $60000 dollars for 'Merican medical bills too.

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Screw the lemonade stand

Kids can get rich selling Cybertruck stainless steel passivation washes. Stops rust and leaves the car smelling lemon fresh.

Crooks hook hundreds of exec accounts after phishing in Azure C-suite pond

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

It's the CF gang

It's the phishing gang that hangs out on a certain crime-friendly site with the initials "C.F." It's high quality phishing that buys clever domain names and has good site cloning. The gang has been refining their techniques on CF, AWS, and Google for years.

I emailed Microsoft security a few times in November when phishing and attacks were suddenly flooding in from Microsoft business accounts. Nothing happened so I blocked Microsoft on my personal server. That fixed it for me.

I checked my server logs now and it looks like Microsoft is mostly, but not entirely, cleaned up.

(CF because The Reg sometimes deletes posts with the full name.)

With $1B to burn on green tech, HSBC seeks Google’s help

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Skepticism-packed opening paragraph

Good work, Reg!

In its tantrum with Europe, Apple broke web apps in iOS 17 beta, still hasn't fixed them

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Tried and true strategy

Piss off developers until they leave. Make OS X repeat the MacOS 9 extinction.

Who creates MacOS 11 to save Apple with a fresh embrace of open standards and interoperability?

IPv4 address rentals to mint millions of dollars for AWS

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Holdout

Pretty much everything has great IPv6 support except Docker. Docker tolerates IPv6 but you're on your own to get the packets routed.

Save the Mars Sample Return mission, plead Congresscritters

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Trollface

The soil

The soil there is a strong orange color, a beautiful orange, maybe the second most beautiful orange on Earth. There's nothing quite like it, but you know, just the other day, I was talking to an astronaut at lunch, and the sandwiches were the best. Not just any sandwich, but...

Tesla power steering probe upgraded after thousands more incidents reported

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Lucky for them...

Old cars were light weight, had narrow tires, and they had a lower steering gear ratio. Parking without assistance was difficult but they were drivable. I imagine it would take incredible strength to control a Tesla without power assistance. And the steering wheel would have to be bolted on correctly.

Cloudflare sheds more light on Thanksgiving security breach in which tokens, source code accessed by suspected spies

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

"This attack was performed by a nation-state attacker"

Probably a long-term customer too.

Alphabet just banked $3B by stretching life of its servers

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

You typically replace servers when they don't get enough work done relative to how much energy, maintenance, and space they consume. Suddenly being able to keep servers 30% longer makes me wonder if Google has less work, if they're not able to make more efficient servers, and/or if they were never calculating costs correctly in the past.

Linus Torvalds flames Google kernel contributor over filesystem suggestion

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

inodes are a leaky abstraction

Distributed reliable filesystems might be absolutely incapable of meeting the requirements of an inode. The big flaw is that the inode, if it exists, may unpredictably change as hosts are added and removed. It would be a mistake to assume inodes exist as a basic feature.

Google is also not to be trusted. They're 1990s Microsoft levels of evil.

That runaway datacenter power grab is the best news for net zero this century

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: A fine idea but...

People fear human greed.

Silicon Valley remembers all the chip fab toxins illegally dumped. There are still extraction machines and dead zones here and there. It wouldn't have cost much to recycle those chemicals but it there was money saved dumping it.

Repeat convicted felon and annihilator of cities, PG&E, has new permission to raise rates to maintain investor profits during equipment safety upgrades. That money really is super-honest going to fix infrastructure problems this time, unlike the last few decades where maintenance records were falsified and the money was pocketed.

Japanese government finally bids sayonara to the 3.5" floppy disk

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Less "connected" means less likely to be hacked and randsomed.

I'm not sure about that. Floppy disk hacks have been around longer than the Internet. Those device drivers were written long before there were spare resources for luxuries like bounds checking.

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

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Computer science is the study of computers. Most security vulnerabilities should be covered by understanding how computers and their algorithms work. Command injection, XSS, exploitable race conditions, MITM, sabotaging handshakes, replay attacks, extra/inconsistent states, ... That's all computer science.

There are exceptions, of course. There's a category of security measures about having a second layer of protection for people that have been tricked.

We put salt in our tea so you don't have to

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Coat

None of the above (please specify)

Are you sure?

Throw a peeled banana into a large cup, scoop some almond butter on to a butter knife and blend into the banana. Sprinkle 70% cocoa chips on top. Pour a bit of very hot coffee on top. Mix well. Top off with whole milk. Stir well.

Google's AI-fueled IDE Project IDX tries to show you how your app runs on Android, iOS

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

What is old is new again

I just got Android 14 and it wouldn't surprise me if an AI worked on it. We're entering a new era where complex systems are full of weird bugs yet they never crash. They have machine level perfection even as they are unfit for their purpose.

Just like good old 8 bit computers. They never crashed because they didn't know how to.

Telco giants show it's tough selling 5G kit right now

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Telcos already bought what they need

Telcos had no plans to replace all LTE everywhere. If the LTE tower in a rural town burns out they're going to replace it with leftover LTE hardware from a big city that's on 5G.

There are still some spots with 2G. Upgrading everything to 5G will take time.

Apple has botched 3D for decades. So good luck with the Vision Pro, Tim

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Not OS stuff

Apple likes grandiose operating system features, not modular libraries with well defined abstraction layers. QuickDraw, QuickDraw 3D, QuickTime, Quartz, Core Image, Core Animation, Metal, AVKit, etc. These systems tie heavily into the operating system so they can't be maintained for long. VR/AR is not easy. The time it takes Apple to finish the system is longer than they can maintain the system. The Vision Pro will be ready just as the hardware that can run it is obsolete.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/technologies for the vast array of aging, starting, and overlapping APIs.

A bunch of other developers will build modular libraries that get VR/AR running on Windows and Linux. Those libraries might initially crude compared to Apple's but they'll live on and evolve.

What Microsoft's latest email breach says about this IT security heavyweight

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Devil

Microsoft e-mails?

Microsoft is aware that a large quantity of e-mails were stolen from leadership team, cybersecurity, and legal employees in a breach. This is a serious incident and work has already begun to prevent this from happening again. Surviving of Midnight Blizzard who read through these e-mails are being offered counselling for the trauma, depression, and overwhelming despair now afflicting them. Sincerest condolences go out to these hackers, their friends, and their families who suffered losses as a result of being exposed to this breach.

eBay tells 1,000 employees their days at company are numbered

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RSUs

Blackouts on restricted stock end the day your employment is over. You can also get advance permission to sell as soon as layoffs are publicly announced. If some greedy people are laying you off to bump up the stock for a moment, you might as well take some of their cut.

Tech billionaires ask Californians to give new utopian city their blessing

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

It won't even get started

We all know they'll move farther East after getting in trouble with labor laws and saying how lazy their workers are.

Plenty of rich people have few skills beyond screaming at people, without remorse, to work harder.