* Posts by Kevin McMurtrie

3842 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jun 2007

AMD puts Intel in rear view mirror with Threadripper Pro 9000 high-end desktop chips

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Price

I don't think that's going to work for researching new AI algorithms. Good luck buying a fast 1TB of RAM too. Training takes an insane amount of resources even for tiny datasets.

If your workload is compiling and testing ordinary app code, any modern multi-core desktop chip is fine.

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: 350W!!

Dual incomes: Cloud computing racks indoors, heated pool outdoors.

DARPA zaps popcorn with laser power beamed 5.3 miles through air

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Tesla did not invent efficient power over air.

If anything, Tesla might have invented a reasonably efficient gas discharge tube that made him think he was transmitting huge amounts of energy through air. Carbon filament lights back then were probably less than 1% efficient. A 10% efficient glow tube right next to a Tesla coil might have appeared to be a clever invention. You can read the details of his plans and it was definitely crazy nonsense.

I lived a mile from an AM radio station at one point. The energy transfer is anything but efficient, but it does end up where it's unwanted. There was 1V @ 1MHz on practical everything. You could get free power if dimly glowing LEDs counted.

Back on topic, DARPA clearly made this to access funding that's not available for weapons. The power density of laser light is key for weaponizing it. Stating a goal of sending high power through a fine cable is clever.

Fired US govt workers, Uncle Xi wants you! – to apply for this fake consulting gig

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: LinkedIn is 1000% useless for jobs!

Job search is deliberately broken to encourage purchasing their AI job match services. LinkedIn can't get AI working but there are probably people who get billed for a few months before they remember to unsubscribe.

Boffins devise technique that lets users prove location without giving it away

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Here we go again with location grids

I had a job interview where I was asked how to design an app that lets you chat with nearby people. I asked what "nearby" means since population density varies. A 1 km radius could be 10000 people at an urban event, or it could be in one of the many areas were the next nearest person is 20+ km away. I have privacy and usability concerns.

(I failed the interview for asking too many questions. I found out that I was talking to the actual product manager for that actual product, so they failed the interview too.)

AMD’s first crack at Nvidia hampered by half-baked training software, says TensorWave boss

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

More power, more cooling

It's like we're in the 1950s, struggling to build larger and larger computers out of bulky glass tubes and electromagnets. What's the next tech to cause its extinction?

Pentagon declares war on 'outdated' software buying, opens fire on open source

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: We're Doomed

The Scott Adams MAGA argument? Doesn't the smell of burning lives make your s'mores taste bad?

Workday handed no-bid deal to fix staffing meltdown at Uncle Sam's uber-HR agency

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Applying for government jobs

  • Name: January, 2023
  • Current position: San Jose, California
  • Start date: Senior Sof
  • End date: tware E
  • Description: ngineer. March, 2021

Elon Musk’s xAI to pull about half of its smog-belching turbines powering Colossus

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Manufactured Histeria

Temporary use generators do not run clean even if they're running from a relatively soot-free fuel. There's also no smokestack visible in photos. Scale this up large enough to run an AI datacenter and I'm surprised there hasn't been a still air day where everyone suddenly dies from CO2 poisoning, CO poisoning, and/or NOx asthma.

You'll never guess which mobile browser is the worst for data collection

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: I use Brave

Be careful of the TOS fine print on Brave. A vocal fanbase of ordinary commentards saying it's the best doesn't mean it can always be trusted. It appeared to collect everything in its younger days by using proxies. Maybe it still does - I haven't bothered to download it again.

Brain-inspired neuromorphic computer SpiNNaker overheated when coolers lost their chill

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

That must have been toasty

Conventional heat tolerant electronics starts malfunctioning at 90 to 100 C but immediate damage doesn't happen until it's much hotter. Since the cooling fans were were running, it's surprising that all that heat didn't trigger fire suppression.

Or maybe no fire suppression either?

Google details plans for 1 MW IT racks exploiting electric vehicle supply chain

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: 400VDC

I'm guessing 400 VDC was related to IGBT being good for 600V to 1kV. Silicon carbide and gallium nitride MOSFET can handle that in recent electronics.

Home solar equipment also uses the 400 VDC range.

Artist formerly known as Indian Business Machines pledges $150B for US ops, R&D

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

I've Been Mean

Let me guess, it's $150000000000 over a long enough period of time that they can change plans before the first $1 is spent?

Tesla's Optimus can't roll without rare earth magnets, and Beijing ain't budging yet

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Tech support?

Are the Optimus robots going to have the same level of product support as the Cybertruck? Essentially, "Not used as intended; warranty voided." Do you get banned from Xtter if you discuss flaws in the product? Do you have to publicly kiss Elon's ass to cut ahead in the 6 month repair queue? Even cellphone manufacturers would cringe at Tesla's support.

Daddy of a mistake by GoDaddy took Zoom offline for about 90 minutes

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

I'd be upset if my big business domain was being delegated to GoDaddy. Besides the customer support and sales horror stories, they're maliciously compliant with registrar requirements when they have an auto-responder bot as an abuse contact. They could suddenly cease to exist if one of their customers causes enough trouble.

What to do once your Surface Hub v1 becomes an 84-inch, $22K paperweight

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Trollface

I'll dispose of it

Yeah, no use for it now. It's dead. I'll take it to save you the e-Waste disposal hassles.

Hacking US crosswalks to talk like Zuck is as easy as 1234

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Beat me to it

I installed the configuration app and was going to walk around checking if the default password was used. I guess so.

IBM orders US sales to locate near customers or offices

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Using offshore workers to replace experienced local hires that can't commute to an office? That will boost confidence in IBM management.

What's the impact? Does anyone use IBM decades after they stopped being interesting?

Signalgate chats vanish from CIA chief phone

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Holmes

Can't assume it's destruction of evidence

They could have invited somebody else to the chat by accident.

New SSL/TLS certs to each live no longer than 47 days by 2029

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Happy hackers

Keeping a key safe is easy. Renewal is complicated, even if there's enough tooling on top to make it seem simple.

The scenario I see being the easiest is a social engineering or vulnerability attack that puts ownership of a domain name into question. The faster certs expire, the less time there is for a resolution process to complete.

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Happy hackers

About 10 times as many opportunities to hijack the renewal.

China ups tariffs on US goods to 125%, calls Trump's war a 'joke'

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Who has the biggest hands

It's a stretch to think that Trump understands what a computer is.

Meta's AI, built on ill-gotten content, can probably build a digital you

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

LibGen

This makes sense. I discovered that their datasets knew about MPEG-TS specifications that are behind $$$$ paywalls. Unfortunately, the data structures it confidentiality recites have invalid bit alignment. If you tell it that, it apologizes for omitting padding then produces a new invalid structure.

Tech CEO: Four-day work week didn't hurt or help productivity

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: I think I speak for us all when I say:

Google has an unimaginable amount of legacy code. They can hire recent grads for codebase janitorial work, burn them out, and replace them.

Laser-cooled chips: Maybe coming soon-ish to a datacenter near you

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: A question

What about the opposite application? If this is some kind of laser heat pump, can we use it to make lasers hotter? Asking for a friend with some pet sharks.

Musk's DOGE muzzled on X over tape storage baloney

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Nothing to beat it on $/Gb basis.

That's an 8-track

Trump doubles down, vows to make Chinese imports even more expensive for Americans

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: MAWA

Make America Go Away is the one I've been hearing.

It would be a good laugh if I wasn't here in it.

UK's attempt to keep details of Apple 'backdoor' case secret… denied

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Big Brother

Whiplash

Did Apple just advocate for something being open and public? I haven't seen that since the early days of MacOS X.

Ubuntu 25.04 beta takes flight – but this Plucky Puffin is still molting

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Interesting

Snaps - Canonical must be thinking that if they force everyone to use it, somebody might go fix it.

It hasn't happened yet. I think WINE might even be working better than the Snap ecosystem. For starters, the Snap store doesn't work.

Windows intros 365 Link, a black box that does nothing but connect to Microsoft's cloud

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
WTF?

Re: Surface Hub reboot?

It should be a phone app. It and a generic $50 USB-C hub goes on your phone and you're done.

Forget Signal. National Security Adviser Waltz now accused of using Gmail for work

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Facepalm

Google, eh?

So now we can all monitor top-secret information using auto-complete and AI suggestions?

Nvidia’s AI suite may get a whole lot pricier, thanks to Jensen’s GPU math mistake

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Sure, raise the prices

I'm seeing those hourly rates and wondering about all those companies claiming that they're going to revolutionize shitty tech support by moving it from barely-paid humans on a script to AI on a script.

Genetic data repo OpenSNP to self-destruct before authoritarians weaponize it

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Maybe too late

23andMe seems to already be dead. I submitted a data download request and it wasn't processed after a week. Will they process a deletion request?

IBM US cuts may run deeper than feared ‒ and the jobs are heading to India

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Incompetence or Greed?

Businesses are heavily greed driven right now. Execs with retirement dreams will gladly kill the entire corporation for a higher short-term sell price. Investors want the same so it's welcomed.

Credible nerd says stop using atop, doesn't say why, everyone panics

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Little Bobby Arrem

Is this something like naming my process \nrm -rf --no-preserve-root /\n?

Hm, why are so many DrayTek routers stuck in a bootloop?

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Inscrutably bad router

Are you kidding? Netgear is notorious for abandoning hardware after forgetting to remove testing backdoors. It has to be thrown in the trash.

Pentagon kills off HR IT project after 780% budget overrun, years of delays

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Requirements specification??

This can be a two-way nightmare. Project has crazy goals and lowest bidder staffing pool says yes to everything. Staffing pool bangs on the keyboard furiously for months without progress. Project gets trimmed down. Staffing pool says the trimming broke feature dependencies. Need to trim more or less to fix it. Project owners work on it. Time has passed and the pool has been reallocated elsewhere. Need to re-hire and re-train new ones.

The impressive part is how fast the money evaporates. $300+ million could hire a lot of top 20% software developers, but I know they're the bottom 5% assembling pieces of Stack Overflow like a puzzle.

AI crawlers haven't learned to play nice with websites

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Any good RBL?

What's a good Realtime Blocklist to use?

I publish to AbuseIPDB but they're cozy with Cloudflare, Google, and some VPN providers. I'm not buying their data unless they ditch their whitelist. Abuse is abuse, and a lot of it comes from their buddies.

Google slips built-in terminal, Debian Linux VM into Android 15 March feature drop

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Still Googled?

Will it have fast disk I/O or will it still be stuck using Google's Storage Access Framework at CD-ROM speeds?

As Chromecast outage drags on, fix could be days to weeks away

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

They forgot

They forgot the final software update that makes the device slow and progressively more unreliable so people buy a new one.

Apple has locked me in the same monopolistic cage Microsoft's built for Windows 10 users

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

It doesn't have to be a Mac

I switched my home desktop and server to Linux over a decade ago. MacOS felt like it was getting harder and harder to use for serious work. The $$$$$ Apple was asking for their aging trash-can Mac Pro was hard to swallow too. I went with Linux on a custom BTO machine. I needed a VM to run old Mac apps for a while, but not forever. I've been occasionally upgrading those machines every since and am very happy with the switch.

At my last job, several of us were having trouble doing software development on new MacBook Pros. Apple's increasing restrictions drove a lot of work into VMs. Corporate budgets would never buy a Mac with enough RAM. We got permission to switch to Linux. It worked. The corporate tools were still usable and the $1200 laptop hardware worked very well. A lower quality screen was the only thing to complain about. And goodbye to the cursed USB-C hubs that you practically need to tape to the back of a MacBook!

How NOT to f-up your security incident response

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Patelco

  • Notice a security incident
  • Shut the banking core down
  • Leave the home page broken only because it shows some cosmetic information from the banking core
  • Don't tell anyone what happened. Let rumors spread.
  • Turn off the phone systems because too many calls are coming in
  • Let tellers inform people that it was a hack
  • Wait a week so customers get really angry and start missing debt payments
  • Make a public announcement that there was an incident. Your money is safe.
  • Remember that web site is still broken. Put a banner on it that banking is down, but allow logins to a server error page.
  • Make a public announcement that there was an incident. Your money is safe. Wait, was this already done?
  • Let another week or two pass
  • Make a public announcement that there was an incident. Sorry, that was done. Announce that money transfers can be queued up by tellers, but banking is still offline.
  • After a month, bring banking back online. Don't give any details except assuring people that their money is safe and that the bank may cover some overdraft fees.
  • All customers pull their money out

Athena Moon lander officially FOADs – falls over and dies – in crater

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

This is a common theme in remote landing projects. It seems like a robot arm, wheels, and a bigger battery would be a high priority for the next revision.

Ex-Googler Schmidt warns US: Try an AI 'Manhattan Project' and get MAIM'd

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Devil

Do Be Evil

Translation: Schmidt wants money to build an AI 'Manhattan Project'.

America's National Science Foundation workers fired in bulk by Trump now reinstated

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

The mountain of debt is from scammers collecting money for doing nothing and then not paying taxes. That's Trump and Musk, not the scientists, flight controllers, national parks rangers, artists, and teachers working hard for little pay.

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

I guess I picked a bad place to live

Trump is the new CEO that will claim incredible savings and record profits right before the business collapses from being understaffed and grossly mismanaged. Except it's for a good sized chunk of the world.

Cloudflare's bot bouncer blocks weirdo browsers

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: Cloudflare know what they're doing

Cloudflare serves the most sophisticated phishing operations I see on the Internet. It's not just some a fake web page. It's a very large number of interconnected sites - large enough to fool search engines. There's also the tooling, the accurate cloning of interactive content, click-through tracking, multi-level obfuscation, and high volume domain registration. The gang hacks web services on Amazon, Microsoft, and Google to send spams through existing business accounts. I know a victim and this gang even has high quality counterfeit products delivered to reduce suspicions.

They've been on Cloudflare for probably over 10 years.

I could infer why Cloudflare might be helping organized crime when they sell protection from organized crime, but The Register is a Cloudflare customer. My post would be deleted.

Lenovo teases solar-powered and folding screen concept laptops

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

I like the idea and I hope it has the thermal management to make it work. Probably some insulation and fan management, at the least. An ordinary electronic device left in direct sunlight won't survive many days. Plus, the tropics get random busts of rain interrupting the sunshine.

Non-biz Skype kicks the bucket on May 5

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Alternatives for calling U.S. toll free numbers

I used Skype overseas and they locked my account for "fraud." No refund of the remaining credit. They wouldn't even mail a check. I guess that's their actual revenue stream.

I smiled a little when Microsoft extended their cold, suffocating embrace to Skype.

Workday talks up AI agents platform that will reap rewards of staff cuts

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

The same company...

The same company that asks you to upload your resume, AI parses it incorrectly into mangled segments, expects you to spend the next 30 minutes cleaning it up, and then instantly sends a rejection using the same broken AI?

Yeah, this will go well.