throwawaylinux

It's not really solving the problem though, is it? The bad neighborhoods and bad schools are still there. And the idea that if you can't equalize it to rich neighborhods (when they can and will never be equal anyway even with this bussig) then there's no point, is exactly the kind of thing I find absurd about it.

I don't deny that it might help some kids some amount. Although now I'm curious -- what kind of improvement does the evidence actually show? Anything close to "equalized"?

> Because it’s an intellectually dishonest, manipulative, and frankly… stupid, comment to make.

I disagree with your unsubstantiated assertions.

> You’re either a troll or a fool, you appear to be conceding you’re the former.

This violates the sites rules, no name calling. Please try to do better.

> If you were 70+ then COVID was far more likely to kill your than driving.

I know, because I had some understanding of the risks. All without being terrified! In fact there may even have been some correlation there.

> But most of us weren’t 70+ and couldn’t really empathize with those that were.

Speak for yourself.

We are most certainly not in agreement. You implied that one had to live in fear of covid in order to make rational choices about it.

I mean it's okay that you were, you don't have to do the macho act to save face or anything. It's a very common response even irrational fear (and is unfortunately exploited). I was not saying that's the "wrong" way to feel or live, just that it saddens me to think of people feeling like that.

Not living in terror and despair of things that are largely outside my control = extremist? Maybe it is you who is the extremist.

Living in fear, anger, a strange frothing hatred for people who are different. If anybody would appreciate why someone would not want to live their life that way, I'd think it would be you.

Fear has nothing to do with it, you can make a rational assessment of risks and reasonable decisions to mitigate them without living in terror.

I sometimes drive my automobile for non-essential reasons too despite that being one of my largest risk factors, much larger than covid.

That is not why we would need such a thing. It's not necessary or sufficient to prevent terrified people living in perpetual fear of things politicians and experts tell them to be afraid of.

Rational and level headed efforts to tackle problems like climate change would be welcome. A great first step would be to vote out all politicians who use it for political games by riling up panic and then actually doing very little about it.

Such a weird concept, I could never understand it. Why not spend effort making their local neighborhoods and schools better?

Everybody grew up with richer and "better" schools and areas, I would have hated being sent out to those.

Sad to go through your life living in fear though, for covid or climate change.

First 64-bit CPU, second CPU of course after 386. Which I guess you mean.

> It's the same reason why porting to obscure CPUs can be useful: DEC Alpha was never popular, but supporting it kind of forced Linux to be 64-bit clean in some ways, so when amd64 came along there was already a bunch of infrastructure in place.

Nitpick (and you didn't necessarily imply otherwise), but x86-64 was a latecomer to 64-bit ports in Linux. SPARC I think was next after Alpha, and MIPS, PARISC, IA64, PowerPC at least all came before x86-64 was merged.

Yep. If they believe these platforms are cost-effective ways to advertise, then actually choosing not to use them for public funded advertising would be an abuse of public funds, unless they can explain how it is different, which I'm sure they can't.

Going by volumes of commits and posts on most mailing list, it has been in a long slow decline since probably early-mid 00's. I'll leave others to speculate on the reasons, but it is a pity. I'm a Linux user and developer and hardly meddled with the BSDs, but I think competition in the open source OS space is a great benefit. I certainly remember the competition used to spur ideas and development in days past.

One thing that has amazed me is that despite the weight of development and investment in Linux far outstripping FreeBSD since around that time if not earlier, FreeBSD still managed to hold its own in performance, at least in some workloads and situations. Is there something about the people, community, methodologies, or technology that provide advantages to help achieve this? It would have been nice to know what could have been with a more even split of resources.

Although I will say in my experience by far the most capable people have been those with passion who would have been working on a project as a hobby anyway (if not so many hours), and often the best results come from those people attacking problems that interest or concern them as opposed to ones that go through committees and executives and project managers, etc. The latter often serve to crapify things in the long run by being driven by short-term and selfish thinking (not necessarily by any one developer or person, just the nature of the whole beast). Linux kernel has been doing as well as can be expected in avoiding that corporate crapification, but it certainly is not immune. I could easily believe the average developer-hour invested in FreeBSD has a far greater value to the project in general than that in Linux (yes I'm aware many FreeBSD developers do get paid to work on it, and many Linux ones don't).

(References)

https://marc.info/?l=freebsd-commits-all https://marc.info/?l=freebsd-hackers https://marc.info/?l=freebsd-current

What do you think about spending $1k on a phone?

My question is why it's $1000 and not $999.

Yes, and the question I am asking is how much better are they doing than competition there. For compute density, the real cloud racks are pushing 30-40kW per rack so even if they were 20% and oxide 0%, they don't seem to have a compute density advantage there.

Norway really should have their ill gotten carbon profiteering assets stripped away and redistributed to less advantaged nations. Hopefully that will come soon, and this rock deposit could help pay for some of the interest.

> Perhaps you could educate me

Doesn't seem to be taking. The issue is that there are not a couple of watts there. There are a couple here, and that's all.

> I don't think anyone has asserted that there's "huge amount"s to be won from the simplified hardware?

They did. In this thread you are participating in even. Perhaps you didn't really read the post of mine that you first replied to, or its context?

This is a cluster of commodity machines, a mainframe is one machine.

The mainframe is optimized for reliability and compatibility foremost and does things that are quite unlike most other classes of machines even "high end servers", including RAIM (RAID for memory), and the ability to stop a failed processor and move its checkpointed state to another processor and resume it transparently from software point of view, and generally employing quite hardened circuits and strong error detection and correction throughout the system.

There are some guesses at $500k for this Oxide rack, not sure if that even gets your phone call returned for a low end mainframe with much less compute power and memory installed. High end configurations rumored to be many millions.

This thing is more a competitor to "scale-out" / "cloud" / "webscale" / etc., at least on the hardware front (they seem to do a lot more on software/firmware side than typical such hardware vendors).

> A couple of watts here, and a couple of watts there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money! >

Not with the current state of the art.

> If it didn't matter, then there'd be no interest in blades, or OCP, and all the cloud vendors would use standard rackmount whitebox servers.

I'm talking about it mattering from the starting point of blades, OCP, "cloud" systems!

The thread is about where the oxide niche is and what advantages it has over competition. The idea there is huge amount to be won on southbridge chipset and IO ports in large scale systems is simply not true. Quite amazing that people who don't understand this are posting in this thread as though they are experts in the matter.

> To be clear, the problem is in how the power budget is being spent (most enterprise DCs don't even have 15 kW going to the rack).

I thought you were going for cloud DCs rather than enterprise. Seems like a big uphill battle to get software certified to run on your platform. Are any of the major Linux distros or Windows certified to run on your hypervisor platform? Any ISVs?

> The question on density is: how can you get the most compute elements into the space/power that you've got, and cramming towards highest possible density (i.e., 1U) actually decreases density because you spend so much of that power budget cranking fans and ramming air.

The question really is how much compute power, and electrical/thermal power ~= compute power. Sure you could fit more CPUs and run them at a lower frequency or duty cycle.

> And the challenge with OCP is: those systems aren't for sale (we tried to buy one!) and even if you got one, it has no software.

OCP is a set of standards. They certainly are systems sold. I guess the nature of the beast is that buyers of one probably don't get taken very seriously, particularly not a competitor.

Well the first OCP specification more than 10 years ago specced 13kW per rack. ORv3 is up to 30kW now, some vendors are pushing 40 and more. So maybe I'm missing something, didn't really seem like density was a major point of difference there.

And not one in particular, there's just a bunch that have sprung up around OCP over the past decade. None that I'm aware of that are doing everything that Oxide does, but we were talking more about the mechanical, electrical, and cooling side of it there -- they do seem to do okay with power density.

> So, we have found that that really IS correct, though perhaps not in the ways you might think.

I was replying more to the idea there's all this costly legacy IO.

I guess you aren't the first to try different geometries or power delivery or cabling either. There's been lots of little opencompute-type efforts and startups come and go. I'm skeptical there's a lot in it in a significant niche that does not already do these things, but you don't need to convince me. Although if you did want to you could show some comparative density numbers. What can you fit, 2048 cores, 32TB, and push 15kW through a rack?

I know it might seem like it, but there's just not that much in it. All video, USB, "console ports" can be driven from a small chip using a couple of watts. Some do all that on their BMC SoC, even. And if your requirements include redundant power supplies, then that's what you get, and if they don't you get something without them. And the boot and runtime firmware might be complicated and have its own issues, but there are not large runtime performance overheads in that either that you can just "rewrite it all" and get a big speedup.

Proof of the pudding will be in the eating I guess. Does Oxide talk about performance advantages at all, or have numbers?

> When you cut out all that fat, you can fit a lot more muscle in its place. Then you can arrange everything on a rack scale for airflow, power, redundancy, etc.

This is not really true. Data center servers are highly optimized for density already. Like tens of thousands of hours on airflow CFD, tweaking cases and fans and internal layout, heatsink design, etc. chasing the 0.1%s. There are many significant tradeoffs to be made, but there is not a large factor improvement just sitting on the shelf due to a bunch of unused legacy leftovers.

> Indeed, for the social aspect, everyone is already fully aware it's not needed, and that they can have fun socialization without it, because of their childhoods.

Huh. I don't think I would have seen OP's point about people being strangely dismissive to the idea of alcohol as a social lubricant until you provided an example.

Saying alcohol is not needed for socializing is like saying everybody is fully aware that alcoholis not needed to numb bad feelings because they were happy when they were children.

Wrong.

> worthless

> money

There appears to be some fundamental misunderstanding here.

Yes you would now that I told you. Glad to have been able to help, you're welcome.

No I haven't, and "easy" is not a well defined term here. What I said is that it's not a matter of being ready or not, it's a matter of choosing to or not. And lots of companies can and actually did choose to do that at very short order when covid was causing shutdowns, so if you want to make extraordinary claims to the contrary then you'll need to bring a lot of evidence.

And sometimes pointing out the obvious gets you slandered as a racist.