johnklos

> Would you expect Microsoft to ship Windows 12

There's the issue. You think that Windows is normal and an example of stuff that's relevant to open source software.

If people write AVX-512 and don't want to target anything else, then fine. But then it's simply not portable software.

Software that's supposed to be portable should be, you know, portable.

The implication is that you can decide to not support 20 year old CPUs and still have portable software. People who think that are just ignorant because if software is portable, it'll work on 20 year old CPUs. The "20 year old CPUs" part is a red herring, since it has nothing to do with anything aside from the fact that portable software will also run on 20 year old CPUs as well as different CPUs.

As an aside, instead of making up excuses for bad programmers, you might be interested to learn that software compiled with optimizations for newer amd64 didn't show any significant improvement over software compiled for all amd64.

Also, you have things backwards: code written and compiled today and run on 2005 CPUs wouldn't be "pretty much non-functional, as performance would be dire" unless you're talking about Windows. This is a problem with programmers and with Windows, and targetting the newest "features" of amd64 doesn't fix that. Those things aren't even related.

It's interesting how many people who either don't understand programming or who intentionally pretend not to want to make excuses for software like Windows.

The article says, "ARM-based chips are found in nearly 60 percent of the world’s mobile devices".

Does this 60% number include laptops? If not, I'd wager that number is greater than 95%.

"SSO is too dang expensive for a furry convention, so I wrote my own."

I'm planning to help several friends with this very thing.

Too often solar companies want to "calculate" how much capacity you should buy. I've learned the hard way that you can't just buy what you want.

For instance, a family member likes having the shade of a tree. Several solar companies say they can't and won't install panels unless the tree gets cut. Forget about the fact that the shade means less A/C is needed in the summer and the extra power is needed more in the winter, when there are no leaves. They don't care.

So instead, it's easier to just install it myself.

Likewise, what if you want to buy all the panels you can afford and an inverter that can handle twice the number, then add more when you've got money? Not a single one of those solar "installers" will do that.

Single or pairs of panels with tie-in inverters are an excellent idea and neatly get around all of the things that "installers" refuse to do.

> It makes no sense for developers to keep maintaining software for 20 year old CPUs when they can't test it.

This is horribly inaccurate. You can compile software for 20 year old CPUs and run that software on a modern CPU. You can run that software inside of qemu.

FYI, there are plenty of methods of selecting code at run time, too.

If we take what you're saying at face value, then we should give up on portable software, because nobody can possibly test code on all those non-x86 and/or non-modern processors. A bit ridiculous, don't you think?

Are you SURE that nobody has figured out how to have code that uses SIMD if you have it, and not use it if you don't?

Your suggestion falls flat on its face when you look at software where performance REALLY matters: ffmpeg. Guess what? It'll use SIMD, but can compile and run just fine without.

I don't understand people who make things up when it comes to telling others why something shouldn't be done. What's it to you?

> If they're running hardware that old [...] then we can infer that their infrastructure is unmaintained

You lost me there. One thing has nothing to do with the other.

People have reasons for running the hardware they run. Do you know their reasons? If you do, please share. If not, there's no connection whatsoever between old hardware and unmaintained infrastructure.

Is my AlphaServer DS25 unmaintained? It's very old server hardware.

Is my 1981 Chevette unmantained? It's REALLY old. Can you infer that the fact that I have a car from 1981 means it's unmaintained? I'd say that reasonable people can infer that it's definitely maintained, since it would most likely not still be running if it weren't.

> It's not impossible to retrofit such a server with SSDs, but doing that without upgrading to a more recent platform would be a weird choice.

I don't know where you learned about servers, but no, it's not a weird choice to use newer storage in older servers. Not at all. Not even a little bit. Maybe you've worked somewhere that bought Dell servers with storage and trashed the servers when storage needing upgrading, but that's definitely not normal.

If they're relying on binaries from Google, then it's already compromised.

How is it that if hardware is old, that means it's unmaintained, or that if it's old, it can't have SSDs? Neither of those things are typically inferred from age.

I still maintain old servers, and even my Amiga server has an SSD.

That's not really fair to Bulldozer CPUs.

The AMD Bulldozers put a lot of new, untested ideas in to practice. Some of them paid off, while many did not, at least not in the short term. There were, however, many good ideas, and many of those lived on and helped make Ryzen what it is.

Over time, Bulldozer performance has matched and exceeded contemporary Intel performance, both because compiler optimizations have made better use of the CPU and because of the slowdowns from Spectre / Meltdown affecting Intel much more than AMD. I still run an FX-8150 server and have compared it with an Intel 2600K system in many tasks.

Do we think that Intel is going to use their current shitshow to make a golden age of Intel CPUs, like how Bulldozer led to Ryzen? I personally don't think so. They've put all their cheap tricks in to their CPUs, tricks which require huge slowdowns when flaws are found, and unless / until they start caring about actually doing things correctly rather than playing fast and loose with hundreds of watts, they'll keep trying to game the benchmarks, will keep having flaws and problems, and will keep losing market share.

Their reaction reminds me of when the Raspberry Pi Foundation tried gaslighting us.

RPi Foundation hires a cop and brags about how cop used RPis to spy on people. People got upset. RPi Foundation acts clueless and says vegetarians and vegans were upset because they posted a picture of meat.

Now Debian is less concerned with their core tenets and more concerned with winning popularity contests, as can be evidenced by their dropping of i386 support, for instance.

Instead of seeing an issue like this and raising an alarm, examining how this possibly happened, and discussing ways of making sure it doesn't happen again, they're like, "eh, so what?"

Debian, which for ages was the last big holdout of Linuxes becoming corporate, seems to have a bleak future.

No reasonable person expects privacy when using Google and/or Google provided products / software.

When you use Debian, you have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

People who handwave that away or say it's not as bad as something else either have an agenda or are ignorant about the history of Debian.

I don't understand what makes this Linux specific. Does it upload binaries or something? I'm failing to see the bigger picture here.

This isn't about CT scanning, but about the chip itself.

Since the bond wires are just hanging out in air, does this mean that a chip like this could be ruined by dropping it which might cause the bond wires to move enough to short something?

Thanks for all your hard work!

It's a little bit nitpicky, but I really wish technical people wouldn't generalize incorrectly:

"...maximizing the life of the MMRTG for more science and exploration down the road"

Will the MMRTG's plutonium decay more slowly if more electricity is used? No. So where's the value in generalizing poorly?

I was there last week and was amazed at how little traffic there is everywhere. Sure, many people are off for the summer, but even at the more touristy places and even at the airport you weren't waiting for cars.

Public transit was simple and quick, even with tram lines closed for construction. The whole experiece shows what's possible when you make public transit actually usable. I'd love to live in a city that does this.

I wasn't aware that there are only two options: completely self-hosted or Gmail.

I bet if someone made something in between, it might become at least a little popular.

Gmail is a cesspool, and Google couldn't give the slightest bit of a shit. So does it really surprise you that people who share free services might not want to give those free services to people who use the cesspool service that doesn't care about abuse?

A stock Amiga 3000 with a 25 MHz m68030 can browse modern sites using modern SSL [0] without much fuss. Granted, some m68k optimizations have been done, but if an '030 can do it, an '040 can, and a PowerPC 601 absolutely can.

[0] https://www.ibrowse-dev.net/amissl/

It makes sense, if one considers them the evolution of the Apple II and the IBM PC.

The IBM had the motherboard on the left, along with the expansion cards, and the drives and power supply on the right. The AT continued this.

Clones wanted mostly compatible cases, and motherboards wanted to be mostly compatible with IBM cases and clone cases.

Then we had Amigas like the Amiga 3000, which had a similar layout but a riser to take horizontal expansion cards.

While some more bespoke PCs had vertical risers, most PC cases in the early to mid '90s were large. It was the machines we paid a bit more for that made being smaller in to something a bit premium.

While taking apart my Amiga 3000 is a bit of work, the design is absolutely wonderful, and more than once I thought about the design of it compared with later machines like the Sun Ultra 5, the Motorola StarMax (PowerPC Mac clone) and others.

This seems wrong for several reasons:

* Collecting all sorts of telemetry has never been done for altruistic reasons by large tech companies.

* The value of an HP over an Apple is that the HP are supposed to be upgradable, so will HP start monitoring all the replaced parts of machines, too?

* HP has a multi-decade history of not being able to maintain a single URL for long term. I bet the only URL that hasn't changed from the '90s is "http://www.hp.com/". We're suppoed to believe that HP will maintain a customer facing system for more than a couple of machine lifecycles?

This is just an attempt to exfiltrate all sorts of data.

Amiga is still going, while Clear Linux, Itanic, 32 bit x86, and macOS on x86 are dying.

Intel really needs to focus on fixing their CPUs. CPUs that degrade, that are unstable, that take literally 200 plus watts, that have security issues are not appreciated.

Having no network card makes this especially challenging!

I just posted a short video of my Amiga 4000, also running NetBSD 10.1, running nanotodon:

https://zia.io/notice/AvdU1G2MhtkTCCNehk

Lovely machines, really :)

You actually believe that this is how it works?

It seems we have a lot of Cloudflare fanbois and apologists here. This is not unexpected. But is anything I'm writing untrue, or just unpopular? Does anyone who's downvoting me care to point out any inaccuracies about what I've written?

I don't know much about OpenDNS, but yes, I wouldn't trust Cisco to do anything that didn't somehow push money in their direction. I was just offering relevant information about Cloudflare.

If you're already running Pi-hole, wny not just run your own recursive, caching resolver?

Read their TOS.

Personally, I'd consider any Docker image that does its own DNS resolution outside of the OS a Trojan.

They are not all in the US.