* Posts by Kevin McMurtrie

3538 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jun 2007

New SI prefixes clear the way for quettabytes of storage

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Quettabytes

According to my quick internet search, a few quettabytes of storage would be non-trivial even if you had molecular encoding. We'd hit the AI singularity first, and our new overlords probably won't need the units.

Regardless, "quettascale" should be appearing in job postings and resumes any time now.

AWS gives older EC2 instances a legacy lifeline

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What's the goal?

I'm confused. It's extremely unlikely that any software is going to notice a basic x86 instance upgrade. If anything is stuck on a very old instance type, it's likely because it's using the "Launch Configuration" instance descriptor that's no longer supported. The last thing you want to do is test your luck adding a Nitro mount to an old template that will likely self-destruct when touched.

The modern "Launch Configuration" self-destructs too, but at least it has versioning.

NASA's meteor avoidance plan for James Webb Space Telescope: Turn it around

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Coat

Turn around

Bright eye

Twitter set for more layoffs as Musk mulls next move

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Speaking of hardcore

The weekend was like Usenet binary groups turned into hashtags. No, not the software piracy ones.

Biden administration earmarks $13b to modernize electric grid

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Re: Socialism

PG&E is on a whole different level. Musk would have to launch a rocket into a city, be convicted, do it a few more times, and then ask for government money to support investor dividends during hard times.

Google looking outside the usual channels to fix security skills gap

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
WTF?

Google security?

Google has a long history of allowing, maybe even encouraging, service abuses that hurt competition. They obliterated Usenet competitors with gigabytes per hour of spam, they flood e-mail competitors with phishing mails, and now Google Cloud has started hosting botnets. Google Ads has a history of browser hacks to bypass user security. Android is pretty much spyware in a pocket. RCS, WiFi whitespace database, Bluetooth beacons, Google Assist, on and on...

So yeah, it takes a very specific kind of person to hold a security role at Google. I wouldn't expect diversity.

Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to 11 years in prison

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Re: Regrets

She might be the classic psycho CEO stereotype and not understand any of this. It's a mental defect that some people interpret as genius leadership.

Theranos overlapped with Magic Leap and all the companies claiming to almost have fully self-driving cars. Lots of hype with no verification and no analytical thinking of what's possible. Investors should have seen a bad pattern coming but, instead, reached out with fists of money. Now we're in another dot-com bubble.

iFixit stabs batteries – for science – so you don't have to

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Re: One thing that was totally glossed over

Single pouch cells extinguish easily as long as they weren't overcharged. You're thinking of multi-cell packs where thermal runaway hops from cell to cell for potentially days.

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Mushroom

100% is playing it safe

The rated capacity of a LiPo is for electrical storage but it's not yet at full energy capacity. Charge it with no protection circuit. There's no heat, no puffing, just soaking up the charge. The true 100% is revealed when the battery suddenly explodes and the metal plates burn.

(I've read that this is lithium electrolysis - a very bad thing)

Worried about your datacenter carbon footprint? Why not put it in orbit?

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Easier

More efficient designs would be far more effective. Elon Musk has the right idea here, even if his train of thought is 500 rail cars of epically bad solutions.

Investor tells Google: Cut costs now and stop paying staff so much

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Loss of efficiency

Loss of efficiency is often rooted in the corporation and it's attitude. The systems having the most revenue generation are usually the oldest, least understood, and most difficult to maintain. These same systems can dictate which technologies the company can use because they must be kept running. I'm betting a lot of new products die when it's time to bring them in line with corporate technology standards.

I witnessed my coolest job ever disintegrate when Google bought the company and tried to rewrite it to Googley (antiquated & opinionated) standards. It had to be done but couldn't be done, so that was the end of it.

Qualcomm pushes latest Arm-powered Snapdragon chip amid bitter license fight

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Yawn

How many people would pay $1400 (typical flagship price) for a small increase in speed and the next round of whatever features are being cut by the maker?

I thought that cellphones could eventually be like always-online personal computers in your pocket that could be customized to do anything you want them to. Instead they're turning into web browsers in a glass slab.

Country that still uses fax machines wants to lead the world on data standards at G7

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: "still uses fax machines" - off the high horse, please

I haven't seen anything in the US, even government agencies, request a fax. It has all been replaced by Microsoft corporate accounts that lose critical emails forever into a maze of antiquated IT hygiene rules. It's a good solid 5 years more advanced than fax machines.

Waymo turns its driverless cars into roving weather stations

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Redefining success

Self-driving cars didn't work out but we have billions of dollars of on-the-scene weather reporters now. Can they operate SF's parking meters while they're collecting fog?

Amazon reportedly considers laying off 10k employees

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Dump & swap

From what I see, the layoffs for self-driving cars, Twits, and Metaverse are real. Everything else is purging highly paid staff to make room for cheap and desperate hires. Layoffs in Q4, sell on brief stock surge, hire back for cheap next year.

The flaw in this plan is that companies are rushing it and making too many mistakes.

Twitter engineer calls out Elon Musk for technical BS in unusual career move

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Boffin

Twit sized sound bytes

Unless it's a freshly rebuilt system, I'm sure that the correct and concise answer to every question is, "It's complicated."

How many RPCs for the home page?

- At which point or points in the system do you want them counted? What is or isn't an RPC? Tell me what number you want to hear.

Walk me through exactly what happens when...

- Are we talking about shapes and arrows on a whiteboard or stepping through source code spanning multiple systems?

How much resources are wasted?

- A lot, but the easy stuff is already fixed.

How long will it take to fix everything?

- Do you mean replace everything?

Republican senators tell FTC to back off data security, surveillance rules

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: U.S. separation of powers

It could be argued that the FTC is enforcing rights to privacy and a fair trial. A 'little harmless marketing data collection' causing people great harm hasn't been hypothetical for a long time. Some states have enacted radical anti-abortion laws and they will cobble together marketing data as evidence of a crime. Police are using it to trace peoples' steps to past crimes. It's virtually impossible to stop your phone from leaking that data.

Do the right-wing radicals and local police departments have experts that can correlate collected data correctly? Hell, no. I bet 99.9% of typical Software Engineers can't either. They're more likely to get the wrong person that the right one. Say a criminal hits stores A, N, and then X. You visited the same stores in that order so you must be guilty, right? Maybe store A is home theater electronics, N is home theater furniture, and X is a supermarket. You were just some innocent sucker doing nothing except researching a home theater upgrade, buying dinner, and having your phone's factory weather app installed.

Twitter CISO flies the coop

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Re: Socially distanced

It's clear that Musk is more interested in being "The Boss." No sane person looking for money would buy a delicate company like Twitter then blow it to pieces.

Twitter, Musk, and a week of bad decisions

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Publicity isn't always good

The surge of traffic is to watch Twitter fail. Now it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If it doesn't immediately fail, everyone will lose interest and it will fail.

The $8 blue mark was Musk not understanding how the site works. You don't charge fees to your content producers. Most blue tick buyers were just buying one for kicks. They won't buy another one.

Tesla rival Rivian posts losses of $1.7b, with worse to come

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"administrative costs also grew considerably"

Cars are insanely difficult to sell. There are costly destructive tests, certifications, warranties, recall tracking, parts suppliers, repair manuals, service centers, deliveries, showrooms, test drives, financing, advertising, configuration and customization, ...

It all makes software seem easy. My crashes, stalls, and destructive tests cost nothing while they're in a development environment.

Mythic bet big on analog AI but has run out of cash

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Maybe not critical mass

The barrier to adoption would be that it's different. Assuming they're using flash cells, the precision is going to be low and it can drift over time. It may have more than enough precision for AI, but it's not going to match digital models and it's not going to have exactly reproducible results. It might need a feedback loop to keep it trained.

On the flip side, an analog calculator is exactly what you'd want to take the 'A' out of 'AI' in the future.

Wells Fargo, Zelle slammed by Liz Warren over rampant online banking fraud

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Stockholm syndrome

I don't understand how BoA, Wells Fargo, and Chase keep existing. They take away your money and tell you it's your fault for being such a crappy customer, then demand you sign up for more because they're trying to help. You lend them $50000 and you're still deep into a negative annual yield.

There are so many credit unions and small banks that are a pleasure to do business with.

LG debuts thin malleable screens made from contact lens material

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Re: Now, if they really want to impress

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Light_Processing

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Thumb Up

3 in 1 win

Inorganic LEDs aren't just more efficient than OLED. They can run efficiently at retina-searing brightness for tens of thousands of hours. UV-A chips can incinerate pretty much anything at close range except optical silicone.

It looks like LG figured out how make micro-LEDs, mount them, and prevent thermal stress all in one demo.

Experian, T-Mobile US settle data spills for mere $16m

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Re: Maybe 1 penny per spam

Plenty of scammers have large, long-running infrastructures. This specific scammer had REST services at https://safety-links.com/ that was used to pre-populate web forms and downstream trackers. You could query it with parameter 'phone' from 0000000000 to 9999999999 and get back JSON describing all customers' names, addresses, gender, age, various PI, successful scams, and the origin of the data. It was quite fun to explore. The scammer eventually caught on and switched to using identifier codes rather than plain text.

The scammer is rotating domain names but still alive and well on the same infrastructure. Have your browser impersonate an iPhone and load http://meszd.com/86qhp5Ys while recording requests.

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Mushroom

Maybe 1 penny per spam

I've received maybe 200 SMS spams for fake stores hosted by a gang with a consistent hosting combination of Namecheap, Salesforce, Amazon, Cloudflare, High Speed Web, and Google. Some of those systems have trivial APIs that can be browsed to examine the database. My information source was listed as T-Mobile.

I'd like to give a special F-U to T-Mo for leaking my data and the lawyers for making sure there's no meaningful compensation. That's on top of the ongoing F-U to Namecheap, Salesforce, Amazon, Cloudflare, High Speed Web, and Google for playing dumb (or being authentically dumb) when they receive an abuse complaint.

Microsoft feels the need, the need for speed in Teams

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Skype#

I remember cancelling some job interviews because they required MS Skype and it just wouldn't run reliably on a modern Linux home computer. The jobs required Linux skills so I imagined the office being a living hell of Linux apps using Excel files as transport layer.

One nice thing about Google App Suite offices is that there's no Google file format. They also use Zoom because nobody can remember which Google video conferencing app is the right one.

After spate of delays, Intel promises Sapphire Rapids Xeons for early 2023

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The question is

How fast will the chips still be in two years when vulnerability mitigations are in place?

International summit agrees crack down on crypto to combat ransomware

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Regulating the fashionable crimes

RETN.net looks like it just reconnected every single hostile network in Russia to the Internet. Constant app attacks, brute force login attempts, and not a single working network contact in sight. None of that is blockchain, so whatevs.

NFT vending machine appears in London

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The only right thing to do

Time to set up a Premium NFT vending machine next to it that charges more money. If the goal is spending money on nothing, it's clearly the better value.

Version 252 of systemd, as expected, locks down the Linux boot process

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Boot security

All that but not everything is secured. Has Apple made their OS more secure by locking the boot volume? Not really - there are still plenty of targets. Even antivirus software that's in the read-only partition has a mutable configuration file somewhere in memory or disk.

Microsoft mulls cheap PCs supported by ads, subs

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What's on the local TV station?

Nobody knows because the commercials are intolerable.

Linux world gains ability to repair exFAT drives

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Yea!

I don't think FAT32 would like me.

$ ls -lh Kiwix/

total 182G

-rwxrwx--- 1 media_rw media_rw 68G Aug 4 01:36 gutenberg_en_all_2022-07.zim

-rwxrwx--- 1 media_rw media_rw 13M Aug 3 23:01 gutenberg_ja_all_2022-07.zim

-rwxrwx--- 1 media_rw media_rw 89G Jun 6 00:46 wikipedia_en_all_maxi_2022-05.zim

-rwxrwx--- 1 media_rw media_rw 20G Feb 17 2022 wikipedia_ja_all_maxi_2021-03.zim

-rwxrwx--- 1 media_rw media_rw 6.2G Feb 17 2022 wiktionary_en_all_maxi_2022-01.zim

-rwxrwx--- 1 media_rw media_rw 293M Feb 17 2022 wiktionary_ja_all_maxi_2022-02.zim

PS - Reg, your pre and code tag rendering is full of paragraph tags!

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Yea!

My Sony phone only accepts exFAT for it's microSd card and it leaks free space like mad. My current workaround is to update my backup, erase, and restore using my Linux desktop. It all takes a few hours for a 1TB card. Repairing would be a welcome feature.

PS - I hate you, Sony

Crowds not allowed to leave Shanghai Disneyland without a negative COVID test

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Facepalm

Re: The virus spreads quickly

Doh! I didn't see it somehow reading it on a cellphone.

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Trollface

The virus spreads quickly

Because it's a small world after all.

Porsche wants to sell you a rusty tailpipe soundbar for $12k

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Automotive audio specifications

I presume that 300W means, "rail-to-rail output swing against a speaker cone moving in the opposite direction during an overvoltage condition, then rounded up to the nearest 100."

And made of thin stamped rusty stainless steel, the rare but preferred material of the very finest speakers, combined with audiophile Bluetooth transport.

Elon Musk shows what being Chief Twit is all about across weird weekend

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Re: Quality Review

That's Spring's magic autowiring framework, not Java. Yes, it scales and ages very poorly.

Russia says Starlink satellites could become military targets

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Re: Russia is bluffing

LEO means it needs a whole lot of nearby ground stations as uplinks.

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Stairs are your best defense

I know Musk is a bit pro-Russia but he's also an uncontrolled impulsive prick. He could autopilot some Russian Teslas into enormous LiPo missiles, and it would be more for giggles than retaliation.

Party like it's 2014, if you can – that's the last time smartphone sales were this low

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Stagnant

The latest fad is cutting features and raising the price, so duh. No headphone jack, no microSd slot, no FM, no SA 5G, stagnant camera tech, stagnant display tech, stagnant or even rotting OS, no third party ROM support, no variation in form factors, and storage has regressed to only 256 GB. Almost every phone is indistinguishable from all the other phones made in the last 2-4 years.

Elon Musk jettisons Twitter leadership, says takeover was 'to try to help humanity'

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Replaceable

I've never had any interest in investing in Twitter because their service is so simple. It's pub/sub WORM of very limited data types. An AI/ML engine categorizes pubs and subs to provide recommendations. No calculations are critical or highly time sensitive. It's all a classic example of an easily scalable system. Anyone can implement it. Most startups can probably make up the operational logistics as they grow.

Twitter's only unique product is their brand and Musk will burn it to the ground.

If you think 5G is overhyped, wait till you meet 5.5G

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Still barely works

There are only a few permutations where 5G is really working. Most phones show "5G" even when they are not capable of using it. My Xperia 1 III will show 5G even though it is kicked off the network for trying to use a SA 5G band without having any working SA support.

Nvidia RTX 4090: So hot they're melting power cables

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Re: Not surprised

Unless it's a gold plated connector. They don't oxidize and must only be cleaned by solvent. Scratch through the gold plating just once and and it develops a festering blister of corrosion that's eventually fatal.

It's 2023, let's check in with the metaverse... Nope, still doesn't exist

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

It's the Zuck

I'm betting most of the world would like to experience an immersive virtual world, but not from Meta. An immersive world is an intimate environment - sensors that know your emotional state at every moment. We all know Meta plans to leverage that information for profit, even to potentially hostile clients. Imagine a Metaverse entity probing you for secrets and watching your biometrics. What's far worse than the truth is an incorrect inference.

Nope.

Luxury smartphone brand returns with $41,500 device

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Premium boring slab

I applaud them for breaking the unwritten rule that Android phones can't store more than 256 GB, but a phone claiming premium security and performance needs a headphone jack. Bluetooth might only enable difficult attacks, but the prize is bigger here.

Linus Torvalds suggests the 80486 architecture belongs in a museum, not the Linux kernel

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: <raised eyebrow>

I recall people running 256 MB and 512MB in Mac IIfx computers. It was possible with enough money and system extensions. (To be fair, the IIfx ran faster than many Gil Amelio era computers that followed)

Shareholders slam Zuckerberg's 'terrifying' $100b+ Metaverse experiment

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Holmes

Important expenditures

Gotta buy this mansion and spend all my time scanning it into the Metaverse. You won't even notice it in that budget.

Google says slap some GUAC on your software supply chain

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Endless brute force attacks from GCP

One think Google's policy is "Always Not Us Security"