Posts by KSM-AZ

Huawei proudly shows off an entirely un-American chip

Is it RSCI-V?

No adoption unless the ISA is RISC-V. MIPS is dead, Alpha is dead. 360 is dead. Maybe ITANIC?

The only thing that matters is the ISA. Build a bunch of custom stuff, it will never make it out of your domain. ARM is JUST NOW starting to get traction in the GP arena, spurred by RPi's and some standardization around U-boot that chipmakers and boardmakers can adopt. Re-inventing that every chip mask will fail to get any traction.

If it's just RISC-V then BFD. Anybody can make it, Fab war is fine.

Cinnamon 6.8 will support Wayland – if you want it

If I had a dime ...

For everytime the lack of security in X11 has caused me issues, I would ... not have much money.

OTOH that same dime every time wayland failed to do something I desired....

The independent screen scaling is nice. Breaks so much I work with, I just mangle monitor settings as a compromise.

T-Mobile appears to be quitting VMware – and fighting a very familiar battle for support rights on the way out

Broadcom 'stoopidity'

They are cutting their own throat. Their move has created a lot of pressure for alternatives to improve quickly. We've been migrating to Proxmox, 8.x to 9.x was significant, adding in backup and dcmanager I see a lot of potential if it just keeps getting better. I doubt they are the only ones. As money starts to flow for support on these other virtualization products, the pace of improvement should increase for the ones who don't get greedy and hire the right people.

They basically are killing the proverbial goose. Most of the smaller players are not wedded to all the fancy knobs and switches of VMware, they will be moving off in droves. There will be a snowball effect, within 3 years everyone will have alternative solutions in their environments, and there will be a cascade turning VMware into a very small niche market.

Europe built sovereign clouds to escape US control. Then forgot about the processors

Risc-V will not be dramatically less expensive than the competition.

Not happening. In fact Risc-V is currently more expensive not less. Somehow you think the cost of a chip is primarily around the IP of the instruction set. This is silly because if it were true AMD or ARM would be dramatically less expensive ("A Fraction of the price") than INTEL, but it's not. It costs money to Fab chips. The cost of the IP inside is a relatively low percentage of the overall cost.

Veteran network architect proposes IPv8 – to improve IPv4, not leapfrog v6

Re: 32 < x < 128

Reverse DNS for most ISP's giving out /29 or /28,7 etc is generally done in a portal or with a ticket. This is just not generally a huge deal anymore, as no one really looks at that much any more.

Hex sucks for non-geeks. I learned straight octal in the early days, and dotted quads are pretty easy to deal with. dotted hexes would also be reasonably easy. Arcane colon'ed hexes are annoying

Re: Heath Robinson

Not to mention randomized mac addresses...

Re: IP wait!

IPv6 is arcane and complex. It is difficult to firewall, and is founded on the premise that all your security will reside in your endpoint device, and that every single device on the internet can freely talk to every other device on the internet directly. This, coupled with the outrageous number of symbols to define a single address that tends to be randomly scoped in a network at /64 and larger is why there is such pushback.

'who has' abcd:1234:5678::9876:64ab in a /48 no sweat the 0000:0000:0000 is implied but talks directly to abcd:1234:5678::ef00:9876:64ab and abcd:1234:5678::1dc0 since they share the /48. It's just goofy. There are some weird caveats with some of the ff... addresses I forget, and then you have the local broadcast stuff that just gets added as an extra address that broadcasts on the network, and after you've hunted down why you can't get to google to do a search, you just disable IPv6 and call it a day. It sucks.

Make the IP 6 - 8 octets for auto-detection 0.0.127.0.0.1 That's my loopback, keep the reserved space reserved across the zone/area code space 5.6.127.0.0.1 is still loopback. 6 octets will last well into the future since the vast majority of addressable gear only needs to be accessed locally, nat is fine. CGNAT gets pointless since you have real space moving forward. Reality is if you got rid of some of the IP hoarding we'd probably be fine with IPv4 for a very long time. I digress.

Re: IP wait!

*I* understand hex. IPv6 hex on the other hand... I'm going to ask for a /64, no make it a /48, well, it may fail if you don't match what your ISP wants to give you, and then we will create a bunch of private nets that don't actually route, but if asked, we will give out an address block anyway, and now that the address resolves via DNS with IPv6 let's just use that IP address, except it doesn't actually route, so it doesn't work, so...

It's totally arcane bullsh-t. You *CAN* make it work, but it's fragile as hell Three different ways to give out addresses, none of which work well, and are difficult to firewall, since they are random across the space.

I've been saying pretty much this, since day1

KISS. Pretty simple, you map 0 into the current space, simply add 2 32 bit source/dest fields to the packet. Without digging up my dog-eared O'Reilly book, Use the version field or something, and literally add 8 bytes that can be trivially stripped off for compatibility/translation for older stack gear. For now allow abbreviated notation, using six octets (likely plenty for a long time to come), let stuff like DHCP only work within the zone/area code. Stack modifications are then very simple. Version field match, simply strip and go locally, or recognize and route for anything that supports it.

I never did understand why we decided to solve all the worlds problems and switch to obscene 128-bit hex notations to expand address space. 99% of used IP space is already port overloaded at the TCP layer, and/or routed via 443 using a name.

IPV4 "ran out" a long time ago, and we kinda figured out we really didn't need that many descrete IP's to handle services after all. IPv6 has not reached wide adoption because it is seriously arcane.

Server-room lock was nothing but a crock

Re: I have a lockpick set in my laptop bag

No--- just move all your stuff every few hours so it's behind a different door!

Iran has something America can only dream of: cheap broadband

Broad or Narrow?

"Broadband" with "narrow" access to content.

After years of being stood up, ARM64 Linux users finally get Chrome date

Thorium

Thorium does X.265

Linux PC vendor System76 tries to talk Colorado down over OS age checks

Pure ignorance. Let's make the landlord responsible for keeping underage college kids from drinking in an apartment their parents rented for them?

AI datacenters may gulp a New York City's worth of water on hot days

This is stupid. Really stupid. Water cooling is generally part of a closed loop system. Worst case would be some evaporation out of a retention pond. Who comes up with this ignorant stuff?

INTEL and TMSC have giant fabs here, 'They' pulled the same crap 'It will need millions of acre-feet of water, blah blah'. It uses some water, but reality is they PROCESS a lot of water, they don't USE a lot of water. There is a bit of waste, fairly minor in the grand scheme with modern processes.

Propaganda. There is a closed loop water system downtown Phoenix, that cools not only all the buildings including a data center, but the baseball stadium. it takes a LOT of water to run the loop, and it MOVES a lot of water around, but it doesn't USE that much.

Whoever set this up was being disingenuous.

Musk admits Starship V3 launch date has slipped as Super Heavy booster rolls into place

Timelines

Has anyone actually been all that close on their timelines? How have SpaceX's actual accomplishments compared to any other competitor in terms of getting something actually working?

Bezos/Blue Origin

Back to the post, Umm, ... Did I miss Bezo's multiple orbital launches somewhere that are going to compete with SpaceX? You don't have to like someone to respect their contributions to society. The vitriol gets rather obtuse. It seems people are somewhat over-focused on hurling insults these days. Sad really.

Re: Hoping Musk's rocket goes kaboom

One was happily exploiting Jews from concentration camps to bulld rockets, the other is ... Gotcha. Must be some AI Bot.

Re: Hoping Musk's rocket goes kaboom

Good plan. Call someone obviously brilliant names because they do something you don't like. It always moves the technology needle forward bad-mouthing someone productive... insults are always such a good call.

KDE Plasma 6.6 beta ships a login manager that won't log in without systemd

I just wish Firefox and Chrome didn't lock up the Desktop from time to time. And hibernate is broken again. Wayland seems to mostly work now. I'd prefer concentration on stability over feature. Considering LXQT to see where the library is at.

Server virtualization market heats up as VMware rivals try to create alluring alternatives

Re: Ditch the emotion

Underpriced? You are out of your mind. Nobody minds paying for a superior product, but added functionality is getting a bit scarce, and very few people need much of it. The core functionality has not changed significantly, but is now somehow 3 times as valuable. They have shot themselves in the foot this time.

Broadcom's answer to VMware pricing outrage: You're using it wrong

VMware Tax

People will pay it once. I don't care for Proxmox, I despise the LVM silliness it sets up by default, I want a qcow2. You can do all of this manually, but I've been using qemu/kvm directly on linux with virtual manager, and it's just more straightforward. All that being said, we just migrated 32 branch machines from VMware -> Proxmox to avoid the new vmware tax. We are leaving our primary loads on VMW short term, but next move is the lower performance web facing stuff in our data center, that will probably drop behind an NFS or Gluster cluster.

Proxmox Data Center manager is kind of silly, the local web interface is pretty good, a little clunky on the nav side. Then again VMware is not the most intuitive interface either.

VMware just shot itself in the foot. It will maintain market dominance for a few more years, but without changing it;s licensing the myriad small players are all going to jump ship. 15% this year and every year after as people figure it out and migrate their workloads:

1. Create Ventoy boot on a large USB drive/stick

2. Re-format data partition as ext4, copy proxmox iso to it

3. Create NFS share via USB passthru device on a linux virtual guest

4. Mount share on VMware

5. Clone or move all your guests to the new USB storage

6. Reboot the box on the USB & install proxmox

7. Reboot, mount USB stick under proxmox

8. Build VM stubs for the guests

9 Import the guest vmdk's with 'qm' and attach to machines

10. Fire them up.

I scripted most of it

Windows versions we use only likes the older virtio driveres .182 or something .2xx doesn't fly. I added the VIRTIO driver disk to the data partiton with the proxmox iso, and imported it as well via script. Linux boxes just work.

Networking can get a little arcane, but if you need a trunk run the apprpriate 'qm' command on the guest interface.

Openvswitch is still a little unfriendly

Migrating to Libvirt/kvm/emu is equally easy, just use qemu-img to convert the vmdk's instead of proxmox's 'qm'.

OpenStack delivers ‘Epoxy’ release, which it hopes will unglue more VMware customers

We started moving.

All our non-core is moving to proxmox, we are at 25%. Depends on how deep you are in the ecosystem. I would expect other companies with similar needs are already paring down. We just can't justify the licencing for a local branch system running 3-5 cookie cutter guests. You wanna shoot yourself in the foot Broadcom have fun. For fractional vs significant cost differences at scale, you can hire more expertise to handle additional manual workloads, and work around any deficiencies.

Los Alamos boffins whip up a speedometer for satellites

Relative to what?

Since all 'motion' is relative in space . . .

Hisense QLED TVs are just LED TVs, lawsuit claims

Re: Some weird doublethink here

If you bought a 'Hi-Sense' TV, you didn't pay 'Top-Dollar'. Be real.

Intel sinks $19B into the red, kills Falcon Shores GPUs, delays Clearwater Forest Xeons

The problem with ARM is the lack of standardized boot/bios. Same with 90% of the rest of the failed CPU's. Intel and IBM created a Basic Input Output System (BIOS) that standardized the hardware used to boot up the systems, allowing for basic interaction with the system without loading an OS. Even to this day, most ARM systems cannot turn on a monitor and accept keyboard input without jumping through some unique hoop, and JTAG sucks. Once ARM systems are capable of having a common BIOS with defined entry points for talking to known hardware (keyboard, mouse, display) the game may change. We shall see.

German state ditches Windows, Microsoft Office for Linux and LibreOffice

Re: Outlook/Exchange ?

Calendar is built-in now.

davmail supports bridge to O365.

Calendar is still weak, MS likes to play games.

Thunderbird is fine, I use it all the time.

US border cops really must get a warrant in NY before searching your phones, devices

Re: Unfortunately

I love reading comments like this because the current Supreme Court has not been activist, rather more literal on constitutional interpretation. Thus I think you might find SCOTUS would tend to agree with the idea we need a warrant to search a phone, which frankly should not be an undue burden. FISA is the bigger issue likely at the core of this crap, but generally only stupid people put things on their computer and phone that might be embarrassing much less incriminating. Real threat actors are gonna have a burner phone anyway. Thus this comment is just inflammatory, without any hint of substance. Please vote with your feet if you are not happy in the US.

Tesla slams advisors for not loving Musk's $44.9B payout

Any agreement should be terminated if it works out differently than my expectation.

I'm pursuaded to stay on. We agree on a compensation package based on various performance metrics of the company over the next 5 years. All the metrics are exceeded. Now I'm not going to pay you because I don't think you deserve it because I think you are a wacko and do things I don't like.

Sounds OK to me. Since in hindsight you managed to reach the goals I thought were grotesquely unobtainable, I need to be able weasel out of the deal somehow.

Why RISC-V must get its messaging right on open standard vs open source

Re: .. open source-standard, free world's tech from US

There are things I'm afraid of, but rapidly improving technology from a foreign source is not one of them. Fear like this is what starts wars. My fear is the generation of fear by the media and government about things like this will lead to physical responses. This will be bad. People are stupid, and want to tell other people how to live.

What in the world are we teaching children in school.

The fact that someone would make this statement, and seven people would agree should scare you. William Shakespeare wrote plays in the 1500's the concepts of which still are still relevant today. Sam Clemens aka Mark Twain wrote books articles and such that are as relevant today as they were in the 19th century.

The US constitution is the gold standard, at least the words should be. It defines limits to government, and simple to understand rights. Dismissing it because it "was written in the 18th century" is like dismissing the evil 10 commandments because they were written before Christ was born. I keep forgetting how concepts like "Thou shall not kill" and "Thou shall not steal" are antiquated and should be ignored because everything is relative these days.

People better wake the f*ck up or these dystopian futures of Sci-Fi hollywood are going to be a reality. There are groups of people pushing society to a breaking point so they can "fix" it and take over every aspect of your life. I'll be dead by the time it matters but you young people out there should spend a little more time reading some of the documents created in the 18th century and earlier, before before you talk your way into an enslavement you were not expecting.

Risc-V is the tip of the iceberg. Groups of people that are in, and around governments around the world are pushing very hard to control everything you, the unwashed masses, want to do.

AMD's CFO Jean Hu talks CPUs, GPUs and the road ahead

No laptops/desktops

With the abject insanity of INTEL hardware and drivers, I'm still struggling with why more manufacturers don't roll to AMD and just use alternatives. What I need is an AMD Wifi/BT/Sound/Ethernet chip where I don't have to find firmware and run the latest bloated driver that is full of tables containing work-arounds for for the errata associated with each production run of the same model chip.

Look our chip performs like this . . . Well if it was manufactured between 2023-10 and 2023-12 series 1234 you have to turn off X, 2024-01 turn on X turn off Y, . . .

Google guru roasts useless phishing tests, calls for fire drill-style overhaul

Let your network admin know . . .

Security team at my old gig tossed out a test phish to everyone without telling anyone. I was the Senior Engineer, and not notified of the test. I got the E-mail, logged into the PA and blocked the site. The next day the director wanders over and starts asking why this url is blocked . . . brilliant move dude! Apparently I was really fast, nobody had clicked the link.

In Debian, APT 3 gains features – but KeepassXC loses them

I run keepassxc on dozens of machines in a variety of environments. It loads quickly on every single platform.

KeePassXC change was backwards . . .

You should not change functionality of a package by splitting it and taking things out and putting them in a new package, that was abjectly ignorant. The 'keepassxc' package should have been changed to a dependency package, dependent on keepassxc-core, keepassxc-plugins or something.

Research finds electric cars are silent but violent for pedestrians

It's called a VESS. They do make artificial noises, which makes this article even more bogus that it appears on the surface.

This whole premise "sounds good", but upon closer inspection falls apart. We all know heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones, it just makes sense!

I call BS! This research is anecdotal at best, intentionally slanted at worst

** This is total BS **. People have been spewing this garbage since the Prius/Hybrid days. A normal modern ICE vehicle isn't loud enough to hear either. If you are in a parking lot there is enough background noise around you are not going to hear a small 4 cyl ICE with a reasonable muffer. If you have an F250 Diesel, that is one thing, but it's totally ridiculous. They started with the backup beep shit on BIG GIANT DUMP TRUCKS! because people didn't hear them coming. If you can't hear a loud ass dump truck, why are we obsessing over an EV?

There are plenty of very quiet vehicles on the road. If you are not looking walking thru a parking lot it's on you.

VMware takes a swing at Nutanix, Red Hat with KVM conversion tool

MS Azure Hypervisor

Microsoft has some fairly generous licensing for it's hyper-v based on-prem solution. Azure Hypervisor or something. MS licenses included in the core. I think it's going to probably take over just because.

Microsoft touts migration to Windows 11 as painless, though wallets may disagree

Non-Windows desktops

It's getting to the point that upgrading Windows really isn't buying anything new. It really hasn't since Windows 7. I've been running KDE Plasma on Debian stable for the last several years, and I'm not finding any real downsides, except.

It seems INTEL cannot create any new hardware platform without requiring brand new drivers for every bit of chippery in the box, from the GPU, to the NIC, to the Wifi, to the sound system, to the CPU, to the USB chips to the ... Sadly for a modicum of stability on a platform this seems to require the latest version of Windows, and a slew of bleeding edge drivers, or experimental kernel's on various linux platforms. If AMD can ever get any market share their compatibility seems to be much better.

Further this obscene need to have "firmware" built into a device driver is pathetic. ANY chip that leaves the factory should have a rom with a basic firmware that is modestly functional and can act as a default. This doesn't mean you cant have dynamically loadable more up-to-date "firmware", but the chip should at least operate without some customized upload code feeding it bits at boot. It is pathetic and stupid.

NASA engineers scratch heads as Voyager 1 starts spouting cosmic gibberish

Re: Excelent design - aliens must be proud

(Off Topic)

Systemd is growing on me. Early implementations were abysmal. The general network configuration stuff is pretty bad, and I would say the state of network configuration in Linux in general went from simple to abysmal starting with 'predictable' interface names, which are just the opposite, solving a problem that did not exist. net.ifnames=0. RH variants with /etc/sysconfig, and slackware with its script file, debian and ifup-down, netplan.io. . . Networkmanager solved a problem for mobile / desktop, but I find it a tad arcane. I figured out how to create a portable bond/bridge/vlan configuration with systemd after getting rid of the bizarre 'predictable' names. Want to talk complicated, from a single file with a handful of stanza's with ifup-down to a bowl of vegetable soup. Then and upgrade broke it, I fixed it, and an upgrade broke it, and I fixed it.

To configure 4 interfaces bonded with 5 vlans on bridges to run with KVM/QEMU you'll need to build this stupidity, we won't even go into the contents of the files:

<304>lf

bond1.1099.netdev bond1.1101.network bond1.4001.netdev br0.1099.netdev br0.1101.network br0.4001.netdev

bond1.1099.network bond1.1102.netdev bond1.4001.network br0.1099.network br0.1102.netdev br0.4001.network

bond1.1100.netdev bond1.1102.network bond1.br0.network br0.1100.netdev br0.1102.network br0.netdev

bond1.1100.network bond1.3001.netdev bond1.netdev br0.1100.network br0.3001.netdev br0.network

bond1.1101.netdev bond1.3001.network bond1.network br0.1101.netdev br0.3001.network

OTOH, It did actually solve existing problems, and they took a somewhat modular if rather complex approach with it. Not thrilled with the journald logging either. Systemd-resolved/resolvectl is very good, hopefully they won't break it. I try and use the parts that work the best, but the biggest problem I have is they keep breaking things. 'systemctl edit' is a nice idea, but we keep changing how the overrides work, and at the moment I'm not sure if it adds on to a section or completely replaces it. It has done both in the past.

1 in 5 VMware customers plan to jump off its stack next year

What comes around goes round and round

The problem is VMware is alienating smaller customers. Over time smaller customers become larger customers who are not using their products, over time the free and less expensive products become more robust, and then larger customers start looking at the less expensive alternatives. Microsoft did this to the IBM, Sun, SVR4, mini-midrange-mainframe market, and we are going to see another cycle probably much faster with VMware, since the core of technology stack (Virtualization) is a pure software play.

World checks it's not April 1 as Apple signals support for full US right-to-repair rule

"Under the rules, any electronic device priced between $50 and $99.99 would need to have parts available for five years, and devices that cost in excess of that would have to have parts available for seven years. "

Any electronic device priced between $50 and $100 should be E-wasted if it breaks. It's not worth $50 to crack it open.

Core blimey, Intel's answer to AMD and Ampere's cloudy chips has 288 of them

But I need memory not cores

For the AI world it might be about compute. I stopped running out of compute a while back. It's more about memory and I/O for my worloads. YMMV, but I don't need 300 cores.

Toyota servers ran out of storage, crashed production at 14 plants in Japan

Re: Out of space

The geek that was the DBA was fired or moved on. His assistant didn't really have a handle on everything but took over at 1/2 the Salary cost, management was happy. A year or so later the new guy realizes he's grossly underpaid, asks for more money, is denied, and finds another gig elsewhere. Clerk who always wanted to be in IT takes over, fortunately everything is in good shape so things continue to run smoothly even though there is not a good understanding of all the processes. Over time, minor changes cause a disruption, nobody with the skills to notice, and it blows up.

Or maybe, new DBA was hired to replace the guy who left, but has no idea the process exists, and nobody is complaining, and the error messages were being sent to an email address that no longer exists. . .

Or it was outsourced to India, and we are in the process of training up a 4th set of contractor folk who are going to leave in a year or so. . .

This crap happens all the time. Welcome to IT.

Linux lover consumed a quarter of the network

Re: NFS, worst protocol ever

"NFS is probably the only protocol in the unix world, that is worst that its Microsoft counter part.

It's always been shite, performance and reliability wise."

--Flame Bait--

If your trying to say NFS is worse than SMB/CIFS I beg to differ. NFSv3 performance is very good albeit single threaded. NFSv3 also works reasonably well over higher latency connections. SMB/CIFS falls over. That being said, Microsoft's NFS implementation is abysmal. If you are running a *nix box run NFS, If you are running Windows run CIFS, though both can be abysmal under windows. I've used NFS extensively since

I note NetApp still uses NFS as the core protocol for VMware storage connectivity, and it routinely out-performed iSCSI in years past. I know more recently they support multi-threaded NFSv4, though I haven't followed the benchmarks recently.

TSMC says Arizona fab behind schedule, blames chip geek shortage

--

TSMC's Central Taiwan Science Park, for example, uses 3.3% of its daily allocation, or around 4.9 acre-feet of water per year. The Southern Taiwan Science Park and the Hsinchu Science Park use 5 acre-feet of water and 5.7 acre-feet of water daily, respectively.

The reason behind the minimal consumption is thanks to recycled water.

--

Intel to rebrand client chips once Meteor Lake splashes down

Don't forget the sockets

Don't forget the sockets. Intel has pretty much comes up with an incompatible socket every 6 months. Some even have the same pin-count/name, but the chip does not work. One of the main reasons I avoid INTEL motherboards.

Biden: I want standard EV chargers made in America by 2024 – get on it

CCS DC cables are awful

I own an EV. Generally charge at home. Traveling ocasionally, I have to charge with these sorry ccs cables. It was 30F outside and I had to wrestle that BOA constrictor into the socket. I'm stunned I did't crack the plastic. My friend has a Tesla. The tesla cable is vastly superior. I would convert my socket on my Niro EV to a tesla socket if I could.

What's up with IT, Doc? Rabbit hole reveals cause of outage

Junction Boxes

The only limit I know of on circuits in a junction box is based on the size if the box, not the number of independent circuits.

You there, boffins and tech giants, take this $50m and figure out better chips

Where's the beef? Er Fab?

Running a RISC V core? ARM? GPU specs? Vector specs? Gallium Arsenide stuff has been around since the 80's. Fast and hot, but fabbing chips with a new process with the densities of today's cpu's would mean billion dollar fabs and esoteric processes, nobody has ever seen or heard about in Can-aid-i-a. We'll believe it when we see it. In the mean time TSMC is building a "Multi-Billion Dollar Fab" up the road a piece, that should usher in some 3 & 4nm parts from Arizona in a year or two.

Re: A pretty good way to choke real innovation

"ICs weren't developed because the authorities considered discrete components too cumbersome."

Yes they were. (V)SLIC and component hardening was funded in large part by DARPA. As was the internet. It's always been both. NASA also funded tons of research into materials and such. Don't be silly.

Now if you want to make an efficiency argument . . .