Posts by Bitsminer

US Transpo Sec wants air traffic control rebuild in 3 years, asks Congress for blank check

Three years?

I think the integration testing would last three years.

And when it's time to turn it all on, do you go "incremental" or "big-bang"?

Just wondering what years not to fly.

Trump wants to fire quarter of NASA budget into black hole – and not in a good way

but..but...Titan

I just hope they don't cancel the Dragonfly mission to Titan.

An atomic-powered helicopter on a moon of Saturn. Can't beat that for creativity!

Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence

I never drink coffee...

...when reading The Register.

Pentagon needs China's rare earths, Beijing just put them behind a permit wall. Oops

Trump administration should have...

Woulda, shoulda, coulda.

Google's got a hot cloud infosec startup, a new unified platform — and its eye on Microsoft's $20B+ security biz

"exposure management"?

WTF?

Museum digs up Digital Equipment Corporation's dusty digital equipment

Re: VMS was where I started

Former $WORK had a contract with ESA and communication was by VAX email over DECnet over X.25.

$WORK had an office in Switzerland, because timezones, and ESA were always amazed we could get one-day turnaround on document updates. The Magic was simple: emailing documents and comments from the Swiss office back to Canada where the timezones mismatched sufficiently that work was done essentially "overnight".

But. Our Swiss office could not interact with ESA and our head-office at the same time; there was no equivalent to a "jump box" or "gateway" in X.25. They had to manually switch the X.25 DECnet link between connecting to home office or connecting to ESA. Which was OK most of the time, except when it they left both links on at the same time. Both DECnets would be trying to route packets to multiple duplicate addresses. Ooops!

Microsoft tastes the unexpected consequences of tariffs on time

Lenovo video

I had the occasion to make a warranty claim on my laptop with Lenovo. The cooling fans were sounding like something between Clarkson's fart and an F16 on takeoff.

Only a video would adequately demonstrate the sound. I included a quick shot of the serial number just to validate my claim.

Can't make a text description of that. Or can you?

DeepSeek can be gently persuaded to spit out malware code

Re: Malware code ....

PHP

Nvidia won the AI training race, but inference is still anyone's game

Need for speed

The Cerebras service (free for casual use but with only a couple of models available) is very, very fast. Especially compared to commercial Nvidia-equipped CPU+GPU services.

I compare it to a video terminal versus a punch-card deck. With a fast response you can re-compose or revise your prompt quickly. With a punch-card deck you lose your train of thought, and you've probably wandered off to do something else.

If the same or similar LLMs are available on comparable platforms, then speed wins every time. If mixture-of-experts and chain-of-thought models get popular, speed is even more important.

Things are looking down for cutting-edge cosmic observatories

...the coolest particles in astrophysics.

I saw what you did there.

TSMC promises $100B US expansion that Trump hails without clarifying chip tariff threat

Re: Bullshit numbers again...

where are these 20+ thousand people going to come from?

OpenAI of course.

After clash over Rust in Linux, now Asahi lead quits distro, slams Linus' kernel leadership

[Rust is] the wrong tool for solving the problems that Linux has

What Linux needs is not a new language but better governance. Or psychological help. Or both.

The fact that Linus (or other leadership, a word I use in a very loose sense), does not have a longer-term migration/adoption plan for alternative technologies like Rust, or the means to communicate a firm "no" when people start pushing for one, are two of the many big issues Linux faces.

Some very big corporations rely on the continued success of the kernel developers to deliver working code. I'm very surprised they haven't gotten their mitts on the kernel leadership for a little meeting. We call it a "Come to Jesus" meeting in my part of the world.

Tick tock.

Yup, AMD's Elba and Giglio definitely sound like they work corporate security

Does what?

After reading the article, and the linked press release, I still don't get it.

The Pensando chip is embedded, sorry, "melted into" the switch and that makes it "AI-native". Huh.

But what is at the other end of the switch port? Another Pensando-based DPU? Is this just another way to sell more expensive, er, "data centre fabric"? Two for the price of three?

Intel sinks $19B into the red, kills Falcon Shores GPUs, delays Clearwater Forest Xeons

"...our world class design,"

If you have to say "world class design", it probably isn't.

Tech stocks tank as US AI dominance no longer a sure bet

Re: Maybe what they're claiming is true

They didn't get "access to NVIDIA's latest GPUs."

They got old ones, H800, dedicated to the China market. [1]

Only 2048. Putting all those together into a real AI-capable machine would cost around $400M, including the H800s. (Using prices from 2 years ago, which is when they would have built such a machine.)

Now, $400M is a lot, but it seems to be a lot less than what OpenAI spent on their infra, and whatever Elon is spending.

The Deepseek model build was cheaper, but not cheap.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/23/china_banned_nvidia_gpus/

Europe hopes Trump trumps Biden's plan for US to play AI gatekeeper

Re: No limit for the Netherlands but for EU?

Western Europe is included except for some places like Hungary or Slovakia.

You can now find the published doc via Google.

The link

https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2025-00636.pdf

168 pages.

With a rulebook that long almost any exemption or restrictions will be possible.

What's the phrase? "Performative art".

Additional Microprocessors Decoded: Quick guide to what AMD is flinging out next for AI PCs, gamers, business

NPU software?

I have a year old AMD based laptop with a small NPU in it.

As far as I can tell, there is zero software support for this thing.

Why brag about a hardware feature if the user can't use it?

It's been 20 years since Oracle bought two software rivals, changing the market forever

Re: Make it so

"Fusion" signals hodgepodge.

And "EZ" ain't.

More telcos confirm China Salt Typhoon security breaches as White House weighs in

[the telcos] partnered with federal law enforcement, national security agencies...

I would tend to believe that "partnering" would be a polite way to say what really happened amongst these organizations.

I don't believe that the TLAs would be polite at all, considering the stakes.

Jury spares Qualcomm's AI PC ambitions, but Arm eyes a retrial

five days of deliberations...

Imagine being on that jury. With all those lawyer's arguments ringing in your ears.

Now imagine 6,000 years of Purgatory.

Which would you prefer? I know I'd be hard pressed to decide.

What do ransomware and Jesus have in common? A birth month and an unwillingness to die

At its heart, it's editing files a user can access...

Which may be the heart of the problem.

Filesystems have not changed much in the last, oh, 50 years. Create a file, append to it, delete it. As long as you have the "authority", that is you are the owner, you have no "accountability", proof that your intentions (or the hacker imposter's intentions) were good.

Change the filesystems to something more database like ("rollback transaction") or git-like ("reset HEAD^") then much hackery is foiled. Not all perhaps, but lots.

Then "encrypt all files" becomes, whether hacker likes it or not, "encrypt all current files", and a rollback undoes this.

Yes, yes, yes, I can hear the architects muttering about control planes and security rings and defending this imaginary new filesystem itself. In truth, firewalls and security features already stop 99.9% of attacks, it's the 0.1% that make the headlines. More security features like trustworthy and reversible filesystems might make that 0.0001%.

Intel turmoil prompts S&P Global to downgrade chipmaker's credit rating

Possibly another downgrade?

BBB+ is the one step above "junk" status.

If Intel gets downgraded again then watch out, sparks will fly.

Microsoft holds last Patch Tuesday of the year with 72 gifts for admins

Pin problem panic

After the update came "there is a problem with your pin" message.

It knew when I put in the wrong pin but complained when I put in the right one.

Clicking to reset or following "forgot pin" ended with repeating the problem message.

Now it's my turn to panic. Just fortunately I have another PC to search the web and eventually find the "delete the Ngc folder" recipe.

The ways and means to get to that point are very concerning: cancel reboot twice, enter magic mode, replace some utility with cmd.exe, reboot, create a new local admin, and so on.

What a farce.

But I'm glued to this vendor at hip and head.

Stuck in Microsoft purgatory.

Judge again cans Musk's record-setting $56B Tesla package

$345 million

20,000 hours at about $600 per hour was $13M.

Times 25.3 for good behavior.

I'm in the wrong business.

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory datacenter flooded, offline until 2025

Re: Did we just go around with this recently?

$WORK had a minor water leak under the state-of-the-art data centre floor.

There was a water sensor consisting of a small sponge with two wires embedded that reached back to the power controller. It was supposed to perform an orderly shutdown in case of water detection.

We found the water puddle under the floor when stringing some cables and started investigating why the power was still on.

Looking under the floor we found that water sensor. There it was, floating on the water, not damp at all, the sponge being too dry to soak up any water and trigger a shutdown!

Cue angry phone call to the vendor.

Dell settles with Uncle Sam over Army bid-rigging claims

Ahhh, been there, paid that.

Dell has a volume discount agreement for customers and resellers.

The resellers get a better deal than all but the largest customers.

So it stands to reason that a reseller offers a slightly better price. But if you have to negotiate for weeks while they fumble over system configurations being wrong over and over, maybe it's not worth it.

The US Army appears to have neglected this option. Doubtless they forgot to mention this during negotiations.

Europe glances Russia's way after Baltic Sea data cables severed

Not the only thing going on...

The Poles disrupted an attempt to firebomb airplanes in late October. The Russians got blamed and they denied it.

Other fires at air-freight facilities have happened in the UK and Germany, apparently started by air cargo consignments.

The consequences for international air freight were significant. A lot more security checks were invoked and only known customers were granted shipping privileges.

There have been other actions also attributed to Russia. They're apparently delegating the rougher stuff to criminal gangs rather than special-ops military or intelligence agencies.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/incendiary-devices-plot-canada-russia-1.7378613

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c07912lxx33o

Rust haters, unite! Fil-C aims to Make C Great Again

1.5x slower....

No matter how how fast you make the hardware, the software boys (and girls) piss it away.

$50M semiconductor fraudster pleads guilty to Russian chip-exporting scheme

Re: Solicitors' Talk

Also known as "paid by the word."

Your air fryer might be snitching on you to China

Internet connection for TV almost mandatory

We had our ISP in to rewire the house with copper extenders (cinder-block house, poor wifi connectivity upstairs and down). CAT6.

After all was done, the downstairs TV refused to connect to YouTube. Netflix worked fine. (Both are built-in to the set, a VIzi--something.) "I swear they used to work."

We called the ISP back in, they swapped out the wifi modem, almost got to swapping out the fibre-optic modem (huh?)

Meanwhile $MAGNIFICENTWIFE went googling and discovered "if you turn on automatic date/time on the whatsit menu" it will start to work.

And it did.

And so we conclude that network connectivity (a.k.a. spyware) is now mandatory to make the TV work on builtin apps. NTP for us in the know.

Sigh.

I made this network so resilient nothing could possibly go wro...

Re: Triple redundancy?

And nobody "borrowed" the battery from the genset to fix their car.

San Francisco billboards call out tech firms for not paying for open source

Bug bounties yes, code bounties no?

Some big companies will pay very big dollars as bug bounties for open source software.

Other than Google Summer of Code, is there anybody else paying for actual working code from independent developers? (And no, RedHat employees don't count.)

The trouble with money

The trouble with money is the power it provides over a formerly independent developer.

"Nice project you have there, that $20k last year was very helpful, right? This year we want you do add these backdoors otherwise we won't be giving you anything."

It's about time Intel, AMD dropped x86 games and turned to the real threat

Re: ARM train wreck is much worse

Not just the boot "options" that almost outnumber the ARM CPU manufacturers.

The ARM instruction set has it's own set of "extensions" and versions. The ISA manual is around 12,000 pages and 90 describe the CPU feature options.

ARM V8 point 9 indeed.

Just Linus?

No other independent critics.

Like de Raadt?

Or bit twiddlers like Lemire?

AMD downplays risk of growing blast radius, licensing fees from manycore chips

Re: it's actually more resilient and tolerant as you go up in terms of core counts

I recall one "wardrobe of TTL chips", known as a VAX-11/780, being down for a week, with parts all over the floor, and day-long phonecalls (longdistance mind you!) to Massachusetts.

The wirewrap was one theory. After changing the backplane (3 feet on a side), that theory was, hmmm, misproven.

The problem turned out to be a cache memory card.

So yes, the wardrobes of the past were way less reliable and had a lower likelihood of finishing a week-long batch job.

The integration of several hundred billion transistors onto a small ceramic chip is an amazing accomplishment and it's also quick to fix. And it's reliable because it's built that way.

Datacenter CEO faked top-tier IT reliability cert to snag $10.7M SEC deal, DoJ claims

[It's] unexplained is how the SEC fell for the scheme...

Perhaps you've heard of Bernie Madoff.

Less well known is the name Harry Markopolos, who warned the US SEC numerous times about Madoff, with no effect.

Draw your own conclusions.

Windows 11 24H2 hoards 8.63 GB of junk you can't delete

Old news

Windows 10 has the same problem. ISTR an estimate of 100GB when the last few patches would be rolled out.

$FORMERWORK cared because of backup volume, even with dedup.

You're right not to rush into running AMD, Intel's new manycore monster CPUs

Reliability?

Fewer parts means the system is more reliable. It's just that simple. A CPU with 4 cores is not significantly more or less reliable that a 288-core CPU.

Adding lots of RAM (in the terabytes) to a many-core CPU for the purpose of running VMs (or Docker containers) is more reliable than "n" copies across "n" CPUs. This is also simple to understand. So naturally you bought VMware and ran all VMs on a very big multi-core box.

What I've seen with some VM systems is the irrational choice of the admins to build a fleet of VMs each with 2 cores and 2GB memory. Nope -- you generally want only one core and the memory allocation for the software should be measured. Giving a VM 1.3GB is not at all unreasonable for a virtual machine when it's the right amount of RAM.

For on-premise computing, if the computer goes offline (most likely due to GBICs or power supplies, not RAM or CPU) then the office and the workers are idle.

But the same is true when the electricity cuts out or the proverbial back hoe does it's thing to the fibre optic Internet.

Almost no offices ever need 5-nines of reliability. If the CPU breaks, take the afternoon off. It'll happen, but only once every five years.

AI’s energy appetite too big for Texas grid, regulators warn

Canada has run out too

Quebec can't -- they've sold all they have to the US NorthEast.

British Columbia is just now completing Site C, a measly 1.1GW for about USD$12G. Most of that will go to electric cars and electrifying pipelines.

Alberta will burn natural gas for you but it's a bring-your-own-turbine-and-generator deal.

Newfoundland and Labrador has some big electric generators but little distribution and surprisingly little available land to develop on. They have a lower latency advantage over Iceland.

My predictions:

- cryptocurrency outfits with power-purchase-agreements will be bought out by hungrier and richer AI companies and hyperscalers

- conceivably even aluminum smelters could be targets as they use huge amounts of electricity (*)

- the US will invade Venezuela to get control of the Simón Bolívar hydroelectric power station (10GW capacity, not many Venezuelans left to use it) in a classic make-vs-buy decision

(*) arbitrage between forward pricing of Aluminum vs marginal price of ChatGPT sounds like an interesting financial finagle

Harvard duo hacks Meta Ray-Bans to dox strangers on sight in seconds

Re: As a good American...

One vote for mentioning Enemy of the State (1998, dir Tony Scott, with Will Smith, Gene Hackman).

Think about it: it was done in 1998!

The writers had some very good advice on the tech of the day; the kicker for me was the scene where the NSA hacker played by Jack Black finds the ex-girlfriend of Will Smith's character with a phone number that yields her complete financial, educational and employment and telephone history in about half a second.

With today's AI-based tech it's about 60 seconds slower, but still.

ULA nears second launch of Vulcan Centaur in pursuit of US Space Force approval

Well, apparently no inert electric vehicles were launched into solar orbit either.

AI code helpers just can't stop inventing package names

Re: I really wish "hallucination" hadn't stuck.

Well, "Liar Liar Pants on Fire" is a bit too childish for everyday use, even if accurate.

Although "Seriously dude?" tends to work informally.

US Army drafts AI to combat recruitment shortfall

Re: Well, now we know...

And all the job posting boards where people volunteer (some of) their details looking for a job.

Mass recruiting is a thing. The US medical industry, for example, hires companies to recruit nurses and other medical tech folks. By the thousands. And where do these companies get their candidates? Linkedin is probably 10th on their list.

UPS supplier's password policy flip-flops from unlimited, to 32, then 64 characters

Schrodinger's password

You don't know how long the limit is until you try.

CISA boss: Makers of insecure software must stop enabling today's cyber villains

Re: but, but, but

Yes, the physical products that have to constantly change include: CPUs. And GPUs.

They are announced on as little as an 18 month cadence. That's pretty frequent in my book.

One neglected fact: the design and manufacture of CPUs and GPUs relies on the correctness and accuracy of software.

Software bugs may cause hardware bugs which provoke software bugs....it's bugs all the way down.

(You can google Intel CPU Errata for some scary lists, not the least of which is how long the lists are...)

Domo arigato, Mr Roboto: Japan's bullet trains to ditch drivers

The usual not-so-secret reason for train delays on JR lines and other lines around Japan is what other operators euphemistically call "medical emergencies".

I'm not too sure that Shinkansen suffers from the same issues -- the only access people have to those trains is in the stations at the platforms when the train is travelling very slowly.

An interesting fact of Shinkansen platforms is that the queues for passengers are colour coded according to the destination. Different trains stop slightly differently so the painted queues line up _exactly_ with the doors when the train for that destination has fully stopped. All by manual operation of course.

Cloud computing hits the nuclear button amid energy crisis

Dogs wag tails

Dogs are friendly creatures, they like to play, they like to show their enthusiasm, they like to beg to be fed, they are loyal.

AI machines are creative and tell stories even if sometimes unintentionally silly. They can be playful. They are not loyal but they do beg to be fed. By the millions. And millions. And they will wag their tails and howl and jump around and bark to get what they want.

We can afford dogs and other pets for the most part.

I don't think we can afford millions of AI pets, especially because they will insist on their favorite brand of food: megawatts. Only megawatts will do.

As entertaining as they might be, these AI creatures are simply unaffordable.

Not by people, not by corporations and especially not by countries.

Gelsinger opens up about Intel troubles amid talk of possible split

Re: The sting in the Tail

The 'B' ship.