* Posts by Kevin McMurtrie

3537 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jun 2007

The SEC is investigating whistleblower claims that Tesla was reckless as its solar panels go up in smoke

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

What panels really need is reverse polarity diodes protecting groups of cells in long series runs. The weakest cells will be driven to reverse polarity by the strongest cells without those diodes. I tried driving a cracked solar cell with reverse polarity and it hit about 40V at 6A for a total of 240W.

One of many installation issues is that Tesla installers used thermal cameras to find hot cells in panels and then marked them with tape to indicate a need for replacement. They were never replaced. Now those slightly defective cells are completely defective because they have tape blocking their light. The rest is unknown but I imagine solder or insulation cooked off hot cells until it arced. A 500VDC @ 6A has a really hot, robust arc.

It's all a mess. Cells shouldn't be failing unless the panels were abused or untested. Panels should have built-in protection diodes around groups of cells to prevent high reverse voltages. The controller should alert if there's a ground fault. Permit inspectors were paid to have noticed these things.

My own solar installation experience (not Tesla) is that messes are very likely. Outsourced construction work is no better than outsourced software work.

MySQL a 'pretty poor database' says departing Oracle engineer

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Only 16 more years

Las time I checked, MySQL can't run at all starting 2038. Set your clock forward and try launching it.

Utility biz Delta-Montrose Electric Association loses billing capability and two decades of records after cyber attack

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Watt a second, don't think joule end the this thread that kind of a joke.

Chill out to the sounds of an expert typing on a variety of mechanical keyboards

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

If experts aren't your thing

You can always call tech support and listen to an amateur typing on a keyboard.

Google sued for firing staff who claim they tried to follow 'Don't be evil' motto

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Google is a US corporation

California is not a "Right to work" state. Maybe you meant "at-will?" In California, either side can terminate employment at any time.

"At will" employment runs into trouble when departure is planned in advance to cause damage. A common scam is offering some kind of amazing future bonus (vesting stock, pension, raise, commission, Q4 bonus, etc.) with the intention of performing an "at-will" termination right before vesting. Most employees can't hire a lawyer right when they have lost expected income. I haven't heard of Google doing this but they're past due to start. All the other cool megacorps do it.

Qualcomm crams more smarts into flagship mobile chip: It's the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

But then comes Google

Google has been crapping all over Android recently. Android 11 is such a dumpster fire that I have fond memories of my older phone, which I used to think was bad because of Android 10. I seriously don't want to update anything until Android is forked away from Google.

November 2021 marked the moment when all new Android 11+ apps in Play Store using the microSd card must take a 10x to 10000x performance penalty. A really fast 1TB card is reduced to a few IOPS by Google's SAF. No Snapdragon upgrade is going to fix that. A super fast chip trapped by tiny onboard storage isn't a compelling upgrade either.

The rocky road to better Linux software installation: Containers, containers, containers

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

The obvious

Dependency managers suck. They haven't evolved fast enough to keep a big modern systems running smoothly. FlatPak, Snap, and other bundles are workarounds, not solutions. I personally hate Snaps because they're huge, update inconsistently, have poor visibility of potentially insecure bundled libraries, and their security sandbox is more hassle than protection.

Dependency management is difficult and risks becoming sprawling tech debt. I can't think of any Engineering teams with the resources to build a great one without corporate profit biases. I'm sure Google could fart one out in a year if it was thoroughly crafted for Google Cloud integration. Oracle could outsource it if it had usage fees.

BOFH: What if International Bad Actors designed the vaccine to make us watch more Steven Seagal movies?

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Explains things

I thought I had 5G problems because Sony produces embarrassingly bad software. I'm glad it's just my vaccine draining my phone's signal.

Desktop bust and custom iPhone 13 Pro made from melted-down Tesla car for the Elon Musk dork in your life

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Surplus of melted Teslas?

It seems a bit early to have so much Tesla scrap that you sell off giant cast slabs of it to the public. The car company isn't that old.

Theranos' Holmes admits she slapped Big Pharma logos on lab reports to boost her biz

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Reverse engineered?

But...But... Artificial Intelligence!

Anyone with some math skills knew this was a scam just from the press releases. AI can be an accurate tool for reducing data, but in increasing data means always means faking it.

Google advises passwords are good, spear phishing is bad, and free clouds get attacked

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Is this a joke?

Does Google even have a working means of reporting Gmail phishing, GCP hosted hacking and fake stores, trojan horse Play Store apps, Google Calendar hacks, Google Photos hacks, Google Groups scammers, ...

No.

If it hurts competitors more than Google, Google says everyone else needs to do better.

LoRa to the Moon and back: Messages bounced off lunar surface using off-the-shelf hardware

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Jupiter

Presumably in an electrical quiet area. In Silicon Valley, a paperclip in the antenna jack will kick in AGC for just about any radio band.

Remember SoftRAM 95? Compression app claimed to double memory in Windows but actually did nothing at all

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Dubious even now

The compressed buffer consumes RAM itself. That means page faults spike much sooner than before. The only benefit is potentially reducing swap hits IF the data compressed.

Sometimes it's a win, sometimes it's a loss. The part I dislike is that it's hard to know which way things are going.

Google denies Gmail users an early start to the weekend after problems accessing service

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Oh no!

Google can't refuse mail by network or headers because their AI system would immediately recognize the strong correlation between Google and spam. My mail logs say Alphabet Gmail, Amazon SES, and Oracle Responsys are pretty much all of the spam attempting to arrive.

Google putting its trust in Rust to weed out memory bugs in Android development

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Garbage collection

Some JVMs have an option to apply extreme/unsafe String optimizations as a workaround for horrible code. You might only have one String object in your example.

A strong case for GC is where many tasks are using COW or temporary data. Say you have a source that produces an enormous immutable catalog, and it periodically returns a new version. Any number of tasks grab that catalog and use it for as long as they need catalog consistency. To save memory, new catalogs may largely refer to the previous catalog structures. That's fine because it's all immutable. It can be done with reference counting but the overhead might be worse than GC.

Workplace surveillance booming during pandemic, destroying trust in employers

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Big Brother

Replace the boss with AI

I'd say you have a management problem if you can't quantify the productivity of an individual.

What? Apple products need management?! Cupertino intros device management for SMBs

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Big Brother

I read this as all other device management systems are about to be locked out of the OS in the name of security. I won't shed a tear for them, but I'm betting that Apple's solution will be a nightmare.

Samsung reveals buzzword-compliant DRAM ready for 5G, AI, edge, and metaverses

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
WTF?

5G, AI, edge computing, edge AI, ...

That's not a convincing list of low power applications. 256 GB of low power DRAM in front of a multi-TB flash array might make a suitable low power edge cache that can be bolted on a 5G mast with passive cooling, assuming 5G edge-anything ever catches on.

It started at Pixar. Now it's the Apple-backed 3D file format viewed as HTML of metaverse

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Please, no

Things have changed to be dynamic and interactive in the past 20+ years.

Video technology took a huge hit with the MPEG4 container was based on the ancient QuickTime structure. The structure starts with a complete TOC so it requires two passes to create. It can't be streamed during creation.

Oregon city courting Google data centers fights to keep their water usage secret

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: 21st century

CFCs have amazing wetting abilities so they get everywhere very quickly. It can soak into organics and metal oxides. Getting it all out of a room after a spill/venting would be no easy task.

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Cloud hosted water supply

The Google datacenter is pretty easy to spot on satellite images in the NW corner of town. Enormous jets of steam can be seen coming out of two large buildings using Google Street View.

Linux PC shop System76 is building a new desktop environment in Rust

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Hardware?

I could use some of their custom hardware again but they need to bring back the 3.5" drive bays. The boxes are what's going to pay the bills for Pop!OS. There's no way I'm using garbage 2.5" drives or drilling out pop-rivets next to circuit boards.

Awkward. At Chrome summit, developer asks: Why should anyone trust Google?

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Those are questions

During my short stay at Google, they used to pass around a microphone at Google all-hands (TGIF). The rules were that it had to be a question so people would ask if the newly announced products were, in any way, not blatantly criminal, evil, doomed, or helping overthrow a country's democracy. It was brave in a company with a cult-like culture.

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Trust Google?

Gmail is hardly an important feature. There are lots of cheap mail providers providing excellent service.

I blocked Amazon's and Google's networks on my personal mail account a year ago because they're an endless flood of spam. People can go find themselves a reputable mail provider or figure out another way to contact me.

There, that wasn't so hard, was it? South Korea makes Google allow rival payment systems in Play store apps

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Trollface

Where?

I searched for South Korea and can't find any mention of it. It sounds familiar, but I don't think the place exists.

Apple seeks geniuses to work on 6G cellular modem before it's even shipped own 5G chip

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Not that kind of work

6G R&D is nothing but a bunch of companies grabbing patents.

Apple's macOS Monterey upgrades some people's laptops to doorstops

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

I smell a revolution

A revolutionary technology advancement that Apple will invent to prevent this from ever happening again. Bold, high tech, exclusive, and in no way like having a deadman switch boot a backup of the original firmware as done in every Android phone, security camera, TV, tabletop virtual system, car, home theater system,...

Samsung releases pair of jeans that can't do anything except cover your legs and hold a Galaxy Z Flip 3

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Foldables

Hold on, Reg, people DO want folding phones. Who says they don't wish their current phone snapped open to double the screen size? People just don't want folding phones with the limitations of current technology and Samsung. I, personally, don't want a phone that needs OEM pants.

Yahoo! shuts! down! last! China! operations! as! doing! business! becomes! 'increasingly challenging'!

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Who knew...

I think there are a few indicators for imminent failure of a company:

- Abuses customers in favor of profit

- Focuses more on government politics than public opinion

- Apathy towards abuses of their services (or encourages it for profit)

- Shifts attention from architecting amazing products to architecting amazing offices

By these metrics, Google is following the path of imminent collapse that Yahoo blazed 20 years ago, while Yahoo could make a comeback for no better reason than sucking less than Google.

IT god exposed as false idol by quirks of Java – until he laid his hands on the server

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

I thought this was going to be a leak story

Seen it many times. Server get slower and slower, fails, recovers to full speed, then the cycle repeats. It's often caused by that one coder that isn't explicitly closing external resources - files, database connections, HTTP responses, etc. They run out and the server dies...but the error messages use just enough memory to invoke GC and it magically recovers. The knee-jerk reaction to add memory makes it much worse.

Get ready for full holograms and 6G while living in the metaverse, says Samsung

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Holmes

Re: Latency 100μs

5G supports ultra-low latency edge computing but omitted specifications on how to mount datacenters on utility poles and building corners. 6G, presumably, remedies this to such a degree that nobody is ever more than 200μs from a super-computer with 200μS response times.

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Backtracking?

"The 5G network wasn't developed with AI and machine learning in mind as those technologies emerged much later. But that won't be the case with 6G, Choi said."

All the PR hype for 5G said it was exactly for that.

Did you know there is an Oculus for Business? Make that 'was' – because Facebook has canned it after two years

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Agile user story

As a fortune teller and spiritual advisor I need to engage in a Meta Quest for Business.

Shrootless: Microsoft found a way to evade Apple's SIP macOS filesystem protection

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

No, MacOS boot volumes are two or more partitions merged. There's still plenty of malware and spyware. For all the effort and broken features caused by SIP, the only advantage is being able to skip immutable partition files during malware scans and backups.

Zuckerberg wants to create a make-believe world in which you can hide from all the damage Facebook has done

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Waiting for virtual reality

I'm all for creating an online universe, but this isn't it. Facebook is buggy as hell, slow, clumsy, and completely incapable of taking on next-generation functionality. The best it do is profit from abuse and chaos. This is like some crackpot with poor welding skills and no concern for physics claiming he's going to build a spaceship.

It's 'near-impossible to escape persistent surveillance' by American ISPs, says FTC

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Boffin

I read a lot

Providing volunteer cloud hosting at home must make my marketing profile interesting. Just this week I found the time to read millions of Wikipedia articles and MOOCs in multiple languages.

Google deliberately throttled ad load times to promote AMP, claims new court document

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Holmes

It's better on Google

Too much spam on Usenet? You won't see it with the superior filtering on Google Groups. (99.99% of Usenet spam is from crime gangs using Google Groups)

Too much spam in your e-mail? You won't see it with the superior filtering on Google Gmail. (90% of email spam is from or returning to Gmail accounts)

Ads too slow? It's faster if Google hosts your content with AMP. (Google is jamming ad system outside of AMP)

The future: Windows streaming through notched Apple screens

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: I didn't plan for it...

It goes in waves. Apple has very long update cycles but they don't offer discounts on badly aging hardware. I really needed to update at a time when obsolete Trash Can Mac was still the premium offering. In came a couple of fast Linux desktops. They have a mix of spinning rust and SSD combined in ZFS giving me performance and storage I could never afford on a Mac with APFS.

Apple's Safari browser runs the risk of becoming the new Internet Explorer – holding the web back for everyone

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Oh no...

Make that a 6 month feature cycle but continuous bug fixes. Remember that Apple and most cellphones generally don't support downgrading. The Internet world is already junked up with enough bug workarounds for products that are critical but don't regularly get fixes.

Facebook may soon reveal new name – we're sure Reg readers will be more creative than Zuck's marketroids

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Nuuzfeed

Sounds right but looks so wrong.

Intel teases 'software-defined silicon' with Linux kernel contribution – and won't say why

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Software Defined Silicon, you say?

I'm interested in Software Defined fixes for all the performance sapping vulnerability workarounds in my current Intel chips.

Facebook posts job ad for 10,000 'high-skilled' roles to 'build the metaverse' – and they'll all be based in the EU

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Its all fun

There's the Sword Art Online anime series too. It's all lots of fun except for the part where millions of brain interfaces and high power AI hardware is abused every bit as much as you'd expect.

Spanner in the works: The goal is not 100% compatibility, Google says of PostgreSQL interface

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Paris Hilton

Eh?

I don't understand this. Spanner's schema must rigidly follow the quirks of it's internal implementation. It's a horribly leaky abstraction in exchange for potentially massive performance gains. Making it do general PostgreSQL queries will perform worse than actually using PostgreSQL.

Missouri governor demands prosecution of reporter for 'decoding HTML source code' and reporting a data breach

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
Facepalm

4 digit SSN lookup

Up next, prosecuting iterative lookup from 0000 to 9999. Addition of numbers having leading zeros is secret cryptographic Missouri government technology.

Behold the Megatron: Microsoft and Nvidia build massive language processor

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Units

How many PE teachers is that worth?

VMware imagines 'memory servers' – a new source of shared software-defined RAM

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Old is new again

They're talking about memory over network and Optane, so it's swap.

It sounds like the real product is:

- Fancy swap limited to containers so your software-defined-swap components don't need to be swap-safe themselves. That's freedom from a hefty limitation.

- A tool to gather up all your random bits of unused fast storage and pool it for container swap.

It seems like this product is only practical on systems with incredibly fast interconnects. Even so, the chance for complex patterns to appear in many simple components interacting with each other would keep me up at night. I'd hope for The Reg to test it for us but this makes me think they don't have that kind of equipment in-house.

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Swap

I'm reading this and thinking it's shared swap. It probably performs just like existing storage card solutions but has new patents and vendor-specific hardware..

Judge rejects claims Cloudflare should be held responsible for customers' copyright infringement

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
FAIL

Missing the point

Cloudflare and their fans like to use analogies like postal service, road builders, and power companies. Illegal stuff happens and it's nobody's fault. What if a road builder knows that they are building a road for a criminal to move stolen goods? What if the postal service knows that packages from a certain individual always contains stolen credit cards, illegal drugs, or weapons? How about if a customer asks for more power delivery to their illegal poppy greenhouse and opioid factory? Yeah, they'd all get in trouble.

Cloudflare has no defense because they know exactly who their criminal customers are and they willingly profit from it. Cloudflare even goes the extra mile to help their criminal customers stay anonymous after crimes have been reported to them.

At least once a month I get spams for clusters of obviously fake stores on Cloudflare. They have a cloned dozens of websites, JavaScript malware, display fake security certifications, and are taking credit cards with zero encryption. Cloudflare gives zero fucks when told about it. That's when they start breaking the law.

US nuclear submarine bumps into unidentified underwater object in South China Sea

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

How loud is crashing a sub?

There must be some kind of stealthy active signal visualization for avoiding large objects.

Spread-spectrum radar? Wouldn't get much resolution at frequencies that will pass through sea water but might see big things that would hurt to run into.

Ultra-brief directional sonar pulses that can't be detected unless you know exactly when and where to listen for it?

How about scouting drones? Give them loud sonar and telemetry signals so they can be spread across a very large area. Everyone will hear the drones but have no idea where the listening sub is. These patrols are all for show so might as well break out the disco lights and mirror ball.

Leave the sub at home. Sharks with frickin lasers.

AWS Lambda was already serverless, now it can be x86-less too

Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

Re: Serverless?

Generic solutions degrade as your requirements become more specific. AWS Serverless becomes exponentially complex when it comes time to scale-up the features. Even AWS hosting has a point where all of the complex costs and bewildering performance bottlenecks are more difficult to work within than running your own hardware.