rbanffy

I'd pay more than the recycler.

Does anyone have access to an HPC cluster with thousands of Zen2 chips? We might want to check 64-bit ones with that - should take just a couple years depending on the size of the machine.

Anyone from the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart willing to play on the 720,320 Zen2 cores?

I have a couple questions:

Looks like they tried 16-bit numbers. Does the odd behavior happen also on 32 and 64 (might take a long time to check - I'd start scratching my head after a couple hundred years of no zeroes) ones? Is the zero masking as some other fixed number, increasing its output count? Is RDRAND implemented as multiple reads of an internal state so that a larger random number takes longer?

Even if you reproduce the issue, it is not a proof it can't generate a zero - just that it's very unlikely.

To prove it, we'd need to examine the chip and its microcode.

I always think of https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/5yhl93/ran...

> zones, dtrace, smf, iscsi and zfs were very well integrated together and lightyears beyond what was available in the Linux space at the time.

True, but did you need that? These are all high-end (therefore low-volume) server stuff. I loved that, and their high-end systems with dozens of SPARCs, but I had one customer who had one, and everyone in my company knew they made a terrible decision - they needed a web server, and you could do more with a rack of Dell boxes for a fraction of the Ultra Enterprise [very large number] price tag. They also decided they should run an enterprise application server (they went with Dynamo) instead of Tomcat, so, again, they made a stack (maybe a directed acyclic graph) of bad decisions. I think I facepalmed so much that is the point my hair started falling.

> other portions of it go into an industrial shredder/recycling process.

This is just criminal. Reusing is much better than recycling.

> but I feel like you could level the same criticism.

Exactly. Oxide builds machines for the few companies that won't go with Azure or AWS, or that got so big Azure and AWS are no longer competitive (and it takes A LOT to be in that space, because pricing is ridiculously flexible). This is a niche market.

The question I always ask is "why would I deploy my software on your platform?". The answer is, most of the time, I wouldn't. I don't want to play platform bingo with company money.

> I probably don't have much incentive to pick up.

This is what Dell got right - for their sales team, this was an easy process - the product line was simple and easy to customise. Their sales reps wouldn't spend much time creating the proposals and could spend the remaining time building relationships with a lot more customers, some of which wouldn't fail.

> curious why sales didn't pick up the phone. Were they "bored?"

Unless you create incentives for bringing new customers, they'll leave the new names for last.

> The open compute platform stuff that's been publicly shown is like the tip of an iceberg.

I find it a real shame it's not easier to get OCP hardware for our homelabs. Would be so much easier to operate, upgrade, and so on. And where would you even get decommissioned OCP gear?

I think the most important thing Sun got wrong was having no credible onboarding path for new clients. Why would someone invest in SPARC and Solaris when a generic x86 with Linux would do 99% of what the SPARC box would do, for far less? Why would someone who is developing their software on an x86 box with Linux care about deploying it to SPARC+Solaris? Or SPARC+Linux? Or x86+Solaris? There is a huge advantage in deploying to the same platform you develop for, which means, not having a credible desktop will hurt you in the long run.

The same applies to IBM's POWER and Z - how many green field projects are being built for them? Apart from weirdos (such as myself) who is even interested in that? And even then, I will not suggest building anything new on AIX or z/OS, or Linux on either, unless there is a really compelling (such as "we got the hardware for free", or "we really need instruction-cycle latencies to run inference and we can't match that with any other NPU") reason.

Don't get me wrong - I love using uncommon hardware with uncommon OSs (which expose bugs that are affected by endianness, or Linuxisms, or blindly assuming a string is ASCII, or that a file stays put while you use it).

We start yelling if we are not fed on time?

Unless humans understand them, can we trust such formalisations? We can prove the formalisation is correct, but we can't prove it accurately reflects what we are trying to prove.

I knew it was possible to run CP/M programs (and CP/M itself) on my PC with its V20, but I never found out how.

> I can't imagine why anyone would choose to run System Vr4

With X, using an Amiga 3000/4000 as a daily driver is possible. I did use an IBM PowerPC 43P as a daily driver under AIX 3.1 for a long while (until I gave up on having ssh working on it).

The 43P was, however, paired to a humongous Intergraph CRT that I can't move across a national border because of the amount of rare earths used to make it, and was a very ample desktop for the 2010s. Until the advent of 4K monitors, I didn't have anything beating that - on a VGA connection. The Amiga is far more limited than that.

In terms of vintage Unix desktops, it's hard to beat Acorn's RISC/iX with its IXI desktop. I believe Atari Unix also had something similarly cool.

> feels like congratulating a tech savvy manager

Never underestimate the impact of a good, tech savvy, manager.

> US Government to secure the US “backyard” in the Western Hemisphere as an exclusive zone of interest

Is this what the US came to represent? A colonial power sponsoring friendly dictators and treating half of the planet as its plaything?

If that’s true, is it even worth fixing?

> You cannot rule the Middle East with an iron fist, only by soft power

You can’t rule anywhere with an iron fist and still be considered a shining beacon of democracy. Or even a role model. And you mentioned genocide on an unprecedented scale.

The fact the US manages to elect increasingly bad presidents doesn’t really make one feel it can self-heal.

It took two turns of one excellent president. Kind of a miracle, really.

The moment the US can no longer rely on the Dollar being the most popular reserve currency to finance its internal debt, it risks ceasing to be A superpower. Its military might was built on debt and that’s not sustainable.

Between going to hell and standing still, I’d prefer the latter.

> Its unique power of self-healing

Extraordinary claims require an extraordinary proof. So far, I am not sure it’s either unique or even there.

When was the last time the US needed “self-healing”?

> I'll just say that we'll overcome, like we always did, our problems

This is true, until you don’t. Past evidence is not a guarantee of future performance. Whether the US can live up to its idealised version remains to be seen.

Recently I have upgraded for memory capacity.

Speaking of rumours, Apple is reportedly developing a server box with multiple top of the line chips.

I would love to see macOS replacing Windows in virtual desktop environments.

Has anyone tried to run Geekbench on POWER11 or a Telum II?

That might be tempting if the techbros achieve their post-democracy ideal... ;-)

> but I see cops at the range often enough.

If it's not legal, I'm sure the cops don't know.

AFAIK, Trump used investor money and rented his brand - he would have upside if the business succeeded, but had no downside for him - he was paid anyway.

As for the suckˆHˆHˆHˆHinvestors, they had a bad day.

We should always study what we think obvious, because we are often wrong.

> So when we disagree with the computer, we doubt ourselves.

I rarely disagree with my calculator, but I often ask LLMs to explain why they did something, and I sometimes need to correct them, adjust their assumptions and nudge the goals they stated. These things are a lot more like us than my trusty TI-59 (still going strong, BTW).