Thanks - I just replied elsewhere in a similar vein, as I had not seen your post yet. I agree completely.

But not due to any Slashdotter's fault. I think the problem is with the original article focusing solely on the term "RISC-V". I believe the Commerce department is looking at export of American chip designs like SiFive (though they do have at least one South Korean major shareholder). Chip designs can be considered "RISC-V" chip intellectual property, but it is not the instruction set architecture that is of concern. It is the art of making a high speed competitive chip that happens to interpret the RISC-V instruction set.

I think if this were clear, much of the fuss in this discussion would be seen as off-topic. I blame it on the original article.

I think I finally recall where I've seen this. It's from an episode of The IT Crowd - right?

Respironics made a great product (I've owned three and continue to use the latest). Perhaps patients could have tolerated a little more noise? Oh well.

Thank you for posting this detailed article. This is the stuff I read Slashdot for. You aren't getting many comments (heady stuff here, and no politics), so I wanted to tick your counter +1 at least.

I will never get close to the knowledge and experience you demonstrate here, but I am fascinated all the same. I have tinkered with Ceph just a little in my home lab, using ProxMox, and was mightily impressed. To hear what you and your client have accomplished is thrilling! Oh, and kudos for Dell and AMD - I built a small datacenter on my last job (just before I retired) and took a few jeers for choosing AMD. But the Dell servers and EPYC processors have performed admirably, and from what I hear, continue to do so today.

Also note that rifle bullets (except for lowest power .22 rimfire) create a sonic boom too. It sounds like a "crack" (assuming the muzzle blast doesn't obscure it). This is why suppressed tactical rifles usually use subsonic loads.

And while this sub-thread is interesting, I'm really feeling my age that nobody noticed (or commented on) "whop" and "foop", which is the sounds the Krikitt robots made in the Douglas Adams novel "Life, The Universe, and Everything". The acronym HG2G is for "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". It's about a 5 book series and I highly recommend it if you like offbeat satirical comedy. Adams was a genius.

Oh, so they make a sound like "whop" or "foop" when the break the sound barrier

HG2G fans will get the reference...

Hear hear!

I've only ever been able to tinker in C++ as all my work has been in C and assembler (many variants). But C++ always felt to me like the metaphorical equivalent of handing an M60 machine gun to a rank recruit and saying "push this lever with your finger and it go bang!" - then stand back and observe the results.

My gut has always told me that C++ is SO expressive that any professional development needs strict guardrails of coding standards and careful team review to be successful. Maybe that just shows my primitive roots, but I can't avoid feeling that just telling someone to "write it in C++" is way too loose a specification to result in readable and maintanable code.

Are there well developed coding standards that drive to general competence in C++? I'd love to know.

I don't believe even the US Congress is trying to put the genie (of the RISC-V ISA) back in the bottle. Just reading the summary at the top, I come across this:

have discussed extending restrictions to stop U.S. citizens from aiding China on RISC-V, according to congressional staff members.

I believe what they are focused on is limiting companies like Sifive and other design houses from selling advanced CPU designs that happen to execute the RISC-V ISA to Chinese customers. That does fall under export control. But as others have said, this will have the consequence of driving advanced CPU design houses targeting RISC-V out of the United States. So in the end I don't see that it will make much difference what they do.

IMHO, systemd is "make" for system service management - and a shitload of other stuff once the ball got rolling.

On "predictive typing"... I was recently working with Arduino and typing long block comments. I found that every time I entered a period at the end of a sentence, the editor "helpfully" chose what it thought was the best "object method" to complete my syntax --- in a comment!

I didn't catch on immediately, so had to go back and remove a number of spurious "helpful additions" the editor inserted for me. Oh yeah and (not completely in the same category), when I would add something like a "while (condition {" block, the editor automatically adds a closing curly brace, which I do not notice until I get a compiler error. I'm a vi bigot and I'll close my own braces, brackets and parentheses, TYVM.

My wife's favorite "auto-correct" annoyance. Type HSA (health savings account) and Word will always "help you" by making it into "HAS". At least it doesn't lower-case it in the process.

Having played this stupid game for a long time, I can confidently say I would rather my work go out with the typos I created than to have the editor generate new errors of its own.

Yeah yeah, I know you can mostly (maybe totally?) turn that shit off. But it's no small task to find all the ways to do that in all the different software package one uses.

Oh and one more thing-- "smart" quotes (note that Slashdot didn't help me with them here, which I truly appreciate). Microsoft Word loves to take the double quote characters I type and make them "smart". OK that's fine - so long as I'm not writing technical documents where "smart" - isn't. Back to Arduino - while Arduino doesn't do that, one has to be careful when yanking sample code from articles. I, and a couple of my classmates, got bitten by smart quotes in sample code we obtained from web articles. At least the compiler knows it doesn't know WTF they are and complains. But what a PITA!

I really like that metaphor. So appropriate!

There may never be enough engineers but older engineers are more susceptible to layoff, from what I've seen. With experience comes higher pay. With higher pay comes higher likelihood of being "released" when a downturn or a merger comes along.

Have you seen the price of cat food? It seems more like the problem than the solution.

Would that be Oliver Douglas?