Posts by orly_andico

AI can improve on code it writes, but you have to know how to ask

Why is it that all stories on AI are either mindless boosting or doom and gloom.

Like all things, the reality lies somewhere in between.

Code generation / coding assistants are one of the most useful use case for LLMs, because (1) there's a lot of decent code e.g. on Github, Linux kernel, that can be used for training; and (2) it's fairly easy to measure success - the code works, or it doesn't. And it runs fast, or it doesn't. Will there be subtle bugs? possible, hence the danger of blindly accepting generated code.

But human coders can also introduce subtle bugs. The difference is that the LLM's can generate significant amounts of code quickly and so there's the temptation to just accept it, and not adequately review it.

But any programmer or developer who dismisses LLM's as stochastic parrots or BS generators... will get left behind. The productivity benefits are significant enough that an experienced developer with these tools, will outperform an equally competent developer who doesn't use LLM's.

Here's a very good read from a credible and realistic (i.e. not AI-hyping) author (may be paywalled) - https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-tooling-2024

Microsoft arms Azure VMs with Ampere Altra chips

AWS Graviton2 is similar

AWS says up to 40% better price-performance for Graviton2 versus Intel.

They are comparing vCPU to vCPU, so indeed comparing say an 8 core Intel, with a 16 core ARM64.

BUT: that 16 core ARM64 is still **CHEAPER** than the 8 core Intel. So it is a valid comparison.

Power draw is also much less (even with twice the cores) so sustainability wise ARM is a win.

It's basically the same story with Apple M1. Core to core the M1 is actually slower than Intel but at half the power draw. If you run coremark on the M1, the raw CPU performance is significantly less than Intel: the performance parity is from the on-module RAM.

Ghost of Christmas past haunts Oracle despite impressive revenue growth

That's because the litigation is tied up with Oracle's sunsetting of support for Itanium

.. it's not just about Hurd's employment.

https://www.nextplatform.com/2021/12/01/the-ghost-of-itanium-and-hpc-give-hpe-long-sought-profits/

El Reg talks to Azure Data veep as Microsoft flicks the switch on Azure Arc for SQL Managed Instances

CosmosDB with MongoDB API supports BSON data types which includes dates.

See "Data Types" - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/mongodb/feature-support-36

Customers warn Gartner of AWS's high-pressure sales tactics in latest verdict on public cloud providers

If you were for example Wallmart and just starting an online purchasing system, would you really want to run it on AWS where AWS would have access to your data and might be using it to their advantage with their competing Amazon online retail services?

This is a complete red herring and FUD. No hyperscale provider would be able to pass ISO27K (or survive as a business) if they were accessing customer data.

Walmart uses Azure.

That said, all the hyperscalers state that they WILL turn over your data to law enforcement in the presence of a valid warrant. So you really should be encrypting your data anyway.

HP Inc slurps Teradici to get better at delivering remote PCs

Teradici performs much better than VNC or RDP over high latency links

Subject says it all, having used all of them.

Whether Teradici performs better than Citrix or VMware Horizon, I can’t tell, but there are large customers using it. For example Pfizer is a major (10’s of Ks of seats) Amazon Workspaces customer. (Workspaces uses PCoIP as the underlying transport)

‘Staggering’ cost of vintage Sun workstations sees OpenSolaris-fork Illumos drop SPARC support

I alway associate Adafruit with Arduino boards, but...

https://learn.adafruit.com/build-your-own-sparc-with-qemu-and-solaris?view=all

Getting ancient applications off old SPARC hardware is trivial - just use Charon-SSP.

https://www.stromasys.com/solutions/charon-ssp/

I've benchmarked this and on a modern processor (AWS C5 instance) you get core performance equivalent to a 1.5 GHz UltraSparc III (I got some old SPARC boxes from ebay for the purpose of doing this comparison, also because I was nostalgic for the old days).

Charon-SSP is not as fast as a SPARC64, M5/T5, etc. but those ancient applications aren't running SPARC64/M5/T5 (which can't boot Solaris <11 anyway) - and any application running on a SPARC64, M5/T5 etc. can run on the latest Oracle hardware.

Migration is generally done using ufsdump/ufsrestore (you'd need to install a fresh Solaris OS on the Charon-SSP emulated hardware first.. so finding an old Solaris 8 ISO is going to be hard, but not impossible.. I found a Solaris 2.5.1 install disk on an abandonware site).

Re: ebay, I managed to get a v210 and a T4-1 for fairly cheap recently. The 32-bit SPARC's (SS5, SS10, SS20) are hideously expensive, although an Ultra 5 can be had for $200 and with the NVRAM fixed. Too bad, I'd have liked an SS10 or SS20, I learned Unix on Solaris 2.3 on an SS10.

Compared to DEC, IBM, or SGI hardware, Sun hardware is actually the cheapest you can get on ebay. I'd get an M4000 but the shipping costs would kill.

Amazon.com just became a 90,000-seat Azure case study

Re: Don't go Windows, and if you do, keep your options open

AWS offers a fully-managed Microsoft AD for its own customers.

https://aws.amazon.com/directoryservice/details/

Donald Trump dumps on Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg

The vast majority of H1B's are obtained by the Indian outsourcing body shops.

http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2014-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx

1 Infosys 32,379 $76,494

2 Tata Consultancy Services 8,785 $66,113

3 Wipro 6,733 $69,953

4 Deloitte Consulting 6,123 $99,062

5 IBM 5,839 $87,789

6 Accenture 5,099 $70,878

7 Larsen & Toubro Infotech 4,380 $59,933

8 Microsoft 3,911 $113,408

9 Hcl America 3,012 $81,376

10 Satyam Computer Services 2,249 $73,374

There's something really wrong when Infosys snaps up fully a third of the H1B allocation. And 6 of the top 10 sponsors are Indian body shops.

AMD's new Carrizo: The x86 notebook processor that thinks it's a GPU

Re: Don't go Windows, and if you do, keep your options open

Probably not fabbed in Taiwan, considering that GlobalFoundries is based in Singapore.

Attack of the clones: Oracle's latest Red Hat Linux lookalike arrives

You do get patches with OL for free. Just configure your yum.conf to connect to Oracle's public yum repository. Or perhaps it's already by default.

I used Red Hat in the old days (still have a moldering RHCE) but I exclusively use OL (and Ubuntu) now. The main differences really are KSplice and support for the very large engineered systems (e.g. optimized IB drivers, optimizations for very-large-memory and very-large-CPU-count machines).

Now if I was running a little startup, I'd still run OL and use their public yum. Do I get anything over say CentOS? probably not, except the warm fuzzy feeling of having "enterprise grade support" for $500 per server per year (or free if I have on Sun/Oracle hardware with a support contract) if I needed it.

I know of large telecoms customers who have switched from RHEL to OL simply because RH charges a per-box fee, which these customers intensely disliked. Of course said customer also had a $$millions$$ Oracle ULA.

Singapore rides to rescue of local cabs by out-Ubering Uber

"High local prices" = $100K USD for a Toyota Corolla. That alone would damage the business model of private cars moonlighting for Uber. Also, Singapore regulations bar anyone who's not a citizen (and has a taxi license, analogous to a hackney license) from operating a taxi.

I did use Uber several times in Singapore - and frankly I got jalopies. The official cabs (there are only 3 or 4 cab companies, and the largest - ComfortDelGro - has 16000 cabs) were actually in generally better shape than the Ubers I took.

Comfort also has a booking app, though it's nowhere as slick as Uber's app. But it gets the job done. And because Comfort has about 70% of the cabs on the road, the government / LTA app isn't really needed so much (it only adds another 30% coverage).

Too 4K-ing expensive? Five full HD laptops for work and play

If the Dell Inspiron 17 7000 is anything like my Inspiron 13 7000 (full HD IPS touchscreen) then beware..

http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/t/19607216

Ghost touch problems on the touch screen, but also reported with very many other Dell products including the unlamented Streak.

All ABOARD! Furious Facebook bus drivers join Teamsters union

Taxes

California income tax on a $100K annual salary is 9.3% - and federal tax is 26%

So I don't know where that 50% tax figure quoted above is coming from...

Words to put dread in a sysadmin's heart: 'We are moving our cloud from Windows to Linux'

Re: Don't go Windows, and if you do, keep your options open

Oracle Enterprise Linux.

Free download - you can still download patches from Oracle's Public Yum repository even if you don't pay support - and contrary to the popular belief that it is simply a Red Hat / CentOS respin, it has significant enhancements around high-scale architectures such as RDMA for Infiniband (basically the stuff that is needed to support the large Exadata engineered systems).

Support is pretty cheap - $500/year or so. And optional. If you don't pay for support, you are not entitled to file SR's on support.oracle.com