Posts by Morten Bjoernsvik

Intel slaps forehead, says I got it: AI PCs. Sell them AI PCs

orthography

7nm, Apple A17pro is 3nm, Intel still has a wafer problem.

Fed-up Torvalds suggests disabling AMD’s 'stupid' performance-killing fTPM RNG

window11

I have an old windows10 laptop I use frequently for testing It now asks me to upgrade to windows11 every time I log in. It is from 2010 and do not meet the requirements. Where TPM is one. but even if it fails It still ask. Every time.

Telcos need another $3B in Uncle Sam's cash to remove Chinese network kit, says FCC

Re: And here we are...

US can just print more money, they have the benefit of being the worlds default currency. and All the major lenders have all the interest in keeping the Dollar stable.

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/debt-to-the-penny/debt-to-the-penny

march 2023 = $31,459,291,842,710.78 total debt / 334,721,373 population = $93986.50 per capita,

Poor lenders that will never see their money:

https://ticdata.treasury.gov/Publish/mfh.txt

What happens if China just stop to lend US more money? if the Yuan becomes the world currency?

Ramping up US inland production with Chinese financing that seem to be the answer. More Debth, more p#### of lenders.

Fed up with Python setup and packaging? Try a shot of Rye

what we need another package bloat

I've done java maven and node npm and they are terrible and bloated.

a maven pom under 300 lines are seldom. and you need a artifactory or nexus local repo to build fast. and all the plugins.

npm a bit better but the directory stucture completely messy. typescrip ,

EDB offers 'risk-free' migration to lure Oracle users to the PostgreSQL side

dont forget the audit

And this stupid audit every time you try to reduce the Oracle footprint.

Is there no license manager that takes care of this so you only run what you have license for?

I've used the free version Oracle Express 1core/4GB ram/16GB disk for porting away from oracle.

I had a hard time with the native blobs format, different from DB2 and MSSQL the blob format seems to be some oracle internal.

Since then I always store binaries as raw strings in cblobs. Someone says it has a performance penalty, but it makes oracle way more portable.

Oracle give you Golden Gate for free. So my DBA love it and cant it praise it enough. But it is a major part of the lockin strategy.

The nodes have it in the Great DB debate: Reg readers pick graph

Re: It does help.......

>Excel is great.

I hated programming in rows and columns. I used this module: https://metacpan.org/pod/Excel::Writer::XLSX

Banking people got nice html reports from their data-warehouse and payed me to convert it to excel.

A customer had a >1TB database with financial data, they wanted extracts in excel, so I created a script that every morning created around 15000 spreadsheet.

After some time they wanted a way to import changes from the excel spreadsheeds back into the database. That was really hard. Worked a long time on it.

Ended up with adding alter transactions operations we feed into the transaction system.

They were wizards in excel, but learning a few lines of splunk, perl or python were no option.

Nowadays I program in dataframes in R and Python and present it in jupyter workbooks on a website. A dataframe is just a simplified CSV version of a excel spreadsheet.

Unix is dead. Long live Unix!

Re: About 15 years ago...

hm 16 year agos SGI discontinued Irix, the best unix Ever,

still have a green 2xR10K 175MHz/2GBmem Octane/MXI in the attic,

It doesnt power up, So I'm not sure whats wrong It was last powered-up around 2010.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRIX

- xfs now the default filesystem on redhat

- CXFS - clustered filesystem long before Lustre or ZFS

- Geometry Engine and Open GL

- openMP - shared mem MPI

- 4DWM - Still miss the minimize into icon, you could easily have 100 windows arranged on a 1024x1280 screen.

- 4DWM also had backing store so, for the first time you could drag full video windows around.

- smake - sgis parallel version of make, when you had 4+ processors it was very nice

Google's Dart language soon won't take null for an answer

boyce codd normal form

Databases with lots of nulls often have a lot less meaning than ones where the designer thought of the problem and fixed the representation of the data so they would not need null. When I see a null in a row, what does that mean?

You describe a perfect excample for boyce codd normalization. Perfect normalization results in a missed table row and no nulls. In my previous job I had this normalization wizard that fixed our 17Tb 120 tables 25 year legacy into a 12Tb 320 tables a with 300% query performance. Developers over the years had just added collumns to existing tables in stead of making new tables with foreign keys. Joining tales with loose connections and lots of ORs kills performance and waste memory.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyce%E2%80%93Codd_normal_form

openSUSE makes baseline CPU requirements a little friendlier than feared

Re: missing the point

>The whole point of x86 is backward compatibility.

Dropping archaic hardware means less code to maintain.

I agree with Linus: https://news.itsfoss.com/linux-kernel-i486/ Havent used a 486 in decades.

Britain has likely missed the boat for having a semiconductor industry

Still opportunities

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Zeloof is already at 300nm in his parents garage with its 2nd hand 90ies tech and homegrown equipment.

Most universities should be able to jumpstart this.

You can also do a lot similar to xilinx with massive FPGAs, I think they are at 7nm with Versal.

I bet there are lots of ways to improve still.

Google and Microsoft add more renewable energy for datacenters

greenwashing b*******

Microsoft did not disclose the suppliers for its renewable energy agreements, but other sources have identified Norwegian energy company Statkraft and Ireland's Energia Group as two that are involved, with the energy coming from a mix of wind and solar projects.

Unfotunately this is hydropower draining our dams in areas with little line capacity to import energy from middle and north.. Norway used to have a healthy surplus of water based electricity but all the greenwashing projects have exhausted it. The worst project is to electify europes largest fertilizer plant in Porsgrunn. It will need 4TWh yearly. Another idiocy is to electrify the oil platforms where they have today have gas turbines using excess gas from drilling for all their energy requirements. In north and middle Norway we have built lots of wind turbines and little capacity to export to south where we have megawatt cables to uk,germany,denmark and sweden. here the price per kwh is below hydropower maintenance rate so they let the dams flod over. while in the south is is 15 times higher rates and danger or rationalization. The result is a terrible poll for the ruling parties and massive small businesses layoffs. Our inflation is 90 percent energy related. Nothing you can solve with higher interests rates. Lots of talks to tax the powerlords and energy-companies but not much will because it is mostly owned by local counties which love the extra money for healthcare and social spending. hope they wake up before the last local business shuts down.

World's richest man posts memes as $44b Twitter acquisition veers off course

Re: Waah

I loved Dabbs, every friday he had something great. but nothing for 3months:

https://www.theregister.com/Author/Alistair-Dabbs

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

Let him brag

He has $44bill reasons to brag,

How do you protect your online systems? Cultivate an insider threat

Re: "it boils down to the first rule of cybersecurity: people are the problem"

So it is much better to let it loose and let some strangers do it.

Exploit your own before some strangers do it.

Too little, too late: Intel's legacy is eroding

Re: Ambitious?

itanic was a HP design. followup to pa-risc. Not much intel there e cept for the fabbing.

UK Parliament bins its TikTok account over China surveillance fears

Re: social media service probably sends data about its users back to Beijing

You give your name and phone number and location data and taste of videos and friends to a chinese company. This is a nice starting point for further data probing.

Nothing more than Google, Apple, M$ or Meta is doing, but sending it to Beijing.

Linux may soon lose support for the DECnet protocol

metrics please

Are there any metric gathering entity that can back up the decision?

There is nothing as good as showing numbers for management to contradict their decision.

And it happens a lot. in the IoT space there are lots of protocols and hardware now outdated, but still being used.

When you see 10% of your customer-base still using a dead protocol with old hardware, it will cause riots to abandon it.

Battle of the retro Unix desktops: NsCDE versus CDE

4dwm

Anyone knows where to get a 4dwm for Ubuntu distros. I especially loved how it had this window of running apps. Or you could stach each running app as icons when minimized and no launcher. I had 4 1280*1024 heads on my indigo2 maximum impact back in 1997.

Ampere: Cloud biz buy-ins prove our Arm server CPUs are the real deal

Real benchmarks please

Larger L1 and L2 caches and high core density and 5nm taping sound expensive. Price/performance benchmarks please. Arm risc may be easier to optimize than cisc, so it would be nice to see.

Atlassian: Unpatched years-old flaw under attack right now to hijack Confluence

no problem here

We're still on premise v6.2 from 2017. we do not have this feature :-)

To get to the cloud we need to upgrade to some versions, but there are lots of database issues.

You have to take each update step by step every version, will take forever.

Feature maturity and terrible administration made atlassian drop on premise, just managing atlassian products are a full sys-admin/uber dba expert skill position, no one can afford.

If you're using the ctx Python package, bad news: Vandal added info-stealing code

private pypi

We use private nexus3 pypi repos where we add packages when safety or snyk complains about outdated packages.

You can also simply create a parser for https://www.cvedetails.com on python. I'm pretty sure pypi is already full of them. The main drawback of cve is the long delay from it is being discovered until a cve is issued. but this can be solved by only using popular packages and wait some time until upgrading.

Heresy: Hare programming language an alternative to C

just what we need

Another programming language - not

I already dabble in python, c, go, javascript, powershell, bash, java and perl5.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS arrives on everything from a 2GB Pi to AWS Graviton

jobs?

>110,000 job applications fielded by Canonical in 2021,

Are they job recruiters now?

Nvidia outlines subscription-fueled journey to $1tr revenue

Hardware subscriptions exists

Oracle Exadata

IBM mainframes

Any cloud provider

Lockbit wins ransomware speed test, encrypts 25,000 files per minute

invest in backups

Just device a backup and restoration recovery plan. and test it. Store all data on servers encrypted and only allow access via certain applications running in containers as standard users.

Just today I logged in as admin on a windows server and found the history in powershell holding anything needed to log in to a critical oracle database, leftover from last person being root on the system.

Coding in a war zone: A Ruby developer's life in Kharkiv

Ukranian keyboard Heroes

I've had the pleasure of working with brilliant people from https://www.infopulse.com/ since 2015. We have been i Kyiv and they come to Norway 4 times a year for planning, social events and knowledge sharing. Most of the people have been with us for years, and even during war they work and deliver. They are real heroes. Infopulse have helped relocate their employees and their families out of Kyiv to more secure parts in the west. I'm really impressed by their morale, discipline and how they care for each other.

Україна назавжди

Cyberwarfare looms as Russia shells, invades Ukraine

Re: I disagree with the rationale here

Only Putin wants this war. Even his Chief of Intelligence was humiliated on public television when he had to confirm to the invasion. Another impact will be Finland and Sweden applying for Nato membership.

Ukraine blames Belarus for PC-wiping 'ransomware' that has no recovery method and nukes target boxen

Re: Professional Basketcases?

NS2 will be ready next year, then Putin can circumvent Ukraina, and pick pocket his friends for cheap gas.

But Europe have themselves to blame, especially Germany decommissioning and neglecting nuclear power-plants. Now full of solar and windmills, but what do they do then there is no sun or no winds (like most of the autumn and winter), they have to buy expensive power from elsewhere. In Norway we usually have a a 15% (10TWh) surplus of ACER-friendly generated electric power from waterfalls. And we have -10C and belov lots of the winter.

This winter the high prices in Europe tempted the incompetent leadership of StatsKraft to sell all they had emptying the water-magazines and viola, we have to set the power price higher than all of Europe to prevent export. resulting in a on average 600% increase this winter.

The fallout are unemployment and shitload of bad publicity for the ruling parties. they show a 40% decrease in the polls.

We have two new cables to UK and Germany with 600GWh capacity each, 10 fold the old cable capacity, On top of it we also have the Nettleie, a charge on top because of impedance in the cables, because of all this export we need to pay based on our max utilization day of the month to promote freezing and cold dinners (This was luckily avoided and turned down in the last hour).

We get some refunds via the goverment a 20%, but my powerbill for december was still NOK5000, it uses to be NOK1500. This refund does not yet cover small businesses and flat complex.

Now they talk of electrifying a 4TWh Ammonium plant and all the 50+ oil platforms in the North Sea around 10TWh, Statskraft earned around 64Bill NOK (£6.4Bill) into the government koffers last year and the government is giving back around 6Bill NOK in support.

Norway the battery of Europe, while its population is freezing.

Db2, where are you? Big Blue is oddly reluctant to discuss recent enhancements to its flagship database

Re: IBM always did a shitty job when it came to DB2 marketing

IBM also have another kick ass database - https://www.ibm.com/products/informix/editions

The latest v14.10 patch was releases just a few weeks ago, it has nosql and json and great python drivers frequently updated with https://github.com/ibmdb/python-ibmdb (same driver as for DB2)

I use the embedded C version on a raspberry pi and the developer version is free for personal use. I have 1.4TB of data in the largest one.

Meg Whitman – former HP and eBay CEO – nominated as US ambassador to Kenya

Oh Ginny Rommety

>>Hey give Biden credit, he's protecting American companies! If Whitman is off acting as an Ambassador

>>in Africa (Ambassadors dont actually do much except attend parties and sign documents written by

>>their staff), then she cant destroy any more American companies by being appointed as their CEO!

She got the job because Ginny is still busy Consulting IBM.

AI algorithms can help erase bright streaks of internet satellites – but they cannot save astronomy

move north

According to: https://www.starlinkinternetbroadband.com/starlink-satellite-internet-coverage-map/, there are few satellites if you move above the 55 latitude. I know it is optimal to be around equator because of the viewrange. but we call Tromsoe the Paris of the North :-), And you have taxfree in Svalbard :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Satellite_Station

Red Hat forced to hire cheaper, less senior engineers amid budget freeze

We all saw this comming

$32bill borrowed and Mrs Romettys fallouts take their tolls. Rometty reigns in declining market cap. IBM used to have money in the bank, but now it is all debt. Stock buybacks to keep the value bloated emptied the coffers. Those interest rates could have payrolled the seniors.

UK's competition regulator fires red flare over Nvidia's $40bn Arm takeover deal

Re: British Politicians Now Look East

China goes for riscv. Their numerous universities work on riscv designs. Arm is more desirable than Intel because they can do production themselves. One thing holding china back is wafer printing https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-wants-a-chip-machine-from-the-dutch-the-u-s-said-no-11626514513

The top 3 supercomputer in the world the Chinese Sunway uses riscv, the cpumesh is quite impressive assuming it is 28nm from 2016. So when they shrink this to 3nm?

Eight-year-old bug in Microsoft's 64-bit VBA prompts complaints of neglect

Re: "[Microsoft felt] the 32-bit version a safer choice for most users"

default console in win10 is no longer cmd.exe it is powershell.exe,

Now that China has all but banned cryptocurrencies, GPU prices are falling like Bitcoin

Re: Phew that was close!

Interestingly, Bitcoin, and some other "cryptocurrencies" are designed to be cryptographically secure in a way that controls the supply (there will only ever be a finite number of Bitcoins, Ether is another matter), and prevents "forgery"

The weighting used by BTC where you get your fraction of a BTC based on your fraction of the summed compute power spent is an environmental disaster. They could instead used this power to fold DNAs or Seti analyzing or something, just not heat you need to cool down.

Have you tried turning server cores off and on again? HPE wants to do it for you from GreenLake

Maybe new on intel

IBM calls it Capacity On Demand:

https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/capacity-demand-users-guide

Same with oracle Exadata:

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E80920_01/DBMLI/exadata-capacity-on-demand.htm#DBMLI147

And Azure,GC,AWS,Facebook etc surely have this in their datacenters.

But this is becomming commodity:

Days Gone PC: Melting pot of open-world influences makes for one of the more immersive zombie slayers out there

Re: Average is as average does

|I played this on the PlayStation. It's the epitomy of average - if you've played any open world action

|game you've played this one.

And if you buy a $50 500GB SSD and replace the HD in PS4, you reduce the loadtimes. Due to the crappy old controller you can go fine with the cheapest slowest ssd there is and still halve the load times. And it the fan does not run that much.

Nasdaq's 32-bit code can't handle Berkshire Hathaway's monster share price

python to the rescue

python is actually very much used in banking nowadays mainly because it has arbitrary numbers builtin without any fuzz:

>>> int64bit = 2**63-1

>>> bigger = int64bit**10

>>> type(bigger)

<class 'int'>

>>> bigger

4455508415646675013373597242420117818453694838130159772560668808816707086990958982033203334310070688731662890013605553436739351074980172000127431349940128178077122187317837794167991459381249

SpaceX's Starlink: Overhyped and underpowered to meet broadband needs of Rural America, say analysts

Re: Current user here

"So ask yourself this question. Why are SpaceX/Starlink launching, if it's not economical/profitable in the long run?"

They can always fell back to use it as network for all the Teslas.

Over a decade on, and millions in legal fees, Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle in Java API legal war

fair use of apis

We can relax, there will not be a patent-troll suing you on use of a token anytime soon.

Official: IBM to gobble Red Hat for $34bn – yes, the enterprise Linux biz

Re: If IBM buys Redhat then what will happen to CentOS?

2years later we know they killed it. made an inferior stream version.

IBM's CEO and outgoing exec chairman take home $38m in total for 2020 despite revenue shrinking by billions

One of the worst CEOs in history lost $134Billion in marked cap in 9 years

Mrs Rometty reign started with a shareprice of $182/Market cap $211B (01/2012) and ended $128/$114B (12/2020). The stock has only lost 35% (due to heavy buybacks), but marked cap has lost ~$100B. Also add the RedHat acquisition of horrendously $34B on top of it. IBM now has net debt of $52B. In 2012 they had $25B in net debt.

Ken Lay of Enron is often called the worst CEO in history loosing $65Billion, and Carly Fiorina managed to halve the value of HP in just 5 years. But they are just geniuses compared to Mrs Rometty.

Huge if true: If you show people articles saying that Firefox is faster than Chrome, they'll believe it

Re: A Go Faster Stripe for Software.

its all about market cap and testing. we only test our software on Chrome nowadays because 80% of the userbase has it. the rest is ios and mac and that is a separate ballgame.

Perl.com theft blamed on social engineering attack: Registrar 'convinced' to alter DNS records by miscreants

whois

So nobody did monitor the `whois perl.com`

Ghost of Microsoft's Legacy Edge browser will linger as the default on Surface Hubs after April execution for desktops

We now have Chromium Edge on linux

A year ago my team changed their frontends, making Firefoxs geckodriver crash or not picking up code when using psedoelements in selenium. So we were stuck with Chrome. But 6months ago Chromium Edge was annonced for linux, so we atleast have 2 options. the MSEdgedriver was crappy to begin with (until v80 it was all chromedriver) but now our code works fine there aswell. I use 3 microsoft products on linux: Visual Studio Code, ChromeEdge and MS SQL server, they are all good.

Happy birthday, Python, you're 30 years old this week: Easy to learn, and the right tool at the right time

pip is part of all python distributions now

I recall the time when I had to install lots of modules and base python to get pip or easy_install, but those days are long gone. pip is packaged with the base language since 3.5:

"Whereas a Rust programmer can just download the language and use the integrated rustup+cargo tools for everything, Python programmers need to juggle many different tools to accomplish something similar but those tools are not developed in unison," Ronacher explained. "Unlike all other modern languages, Python also can only load one version of a dependency. This means that your entire software project needs to agree on a compatible version, which becomes harder the larger the ecosystem grows and the faster it moves."

And the requirements.txt withg the modulename==version is just as good as anything I've used anywhere, you can juggle installs with pip uninstall module; pip install module==version.

Surface Laptop Go: Premium feel for a mid-range price, but Microsoft's Apple-like range once meant more than this

Surface power supplies

Worth to mention it the stupid power supplies, they are unique and not that easy to get hold of. In my case it was cheaper to upgrade to a more recent 2nd hand surface pro 3

Red Hat defends its CentOS decision, claims Stream version can cover '95% of current user workloads'

Re: The RedHat corporate spinners won't fix this

Problem with stream is that it is always upfront. It is like Fedora which I always hated for all the new stuff breaking backward compliance. I just want things to be compliant and work with monitoring software and sysadmin procedures already in place.

About $15m in advertising booked to appear on millions of smart TVs was never seen by anyone, says Oracle

Re: Wait...

|I'd just buy a monitor if I would be in the market for one.

I take the HDMI out from the cablebox into a nvidia 1060 card and convert it into H264 video. And put it into a Synology NAS and use the synology Videostation app on Chromecast on a monitor.

Microsoft is designing its own Arm-based data-center server, PC chips – report

Re: MS take a look at the Apple design

And what is Intel doing?

When amd64 surfaced with Opteron it took a few months and Intel was out with X86_64. (even though they tried pushing Itanic for the 64bit). They had a team in Israel already preparing this for years. Atoms take on Arm has been a failure, Unable to match performance with power consumption. Intels dreadful Iris graphics. North/South Bridge etc. Why they do not have a SOC with lots of onchip cache is beyond me. The only rocket science about apple M1 is its 5Micron process. and we all know Intel still have problems with yield on 10Micron. Becoming to fat and lazy over the year with little competition. Maybe Intel will become the Nokia of the 2020'ies. It is well deserved.