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Comment Re:Just shows he does not really understand hardwa (Score 1) 75

One major difference, assuming you've got full platform support(should be the case on any server or workstation that isn't an utter joke; but can be a problem with some desktop boards that 'support' ECC in the sense that AMD didn't laser it off the way Intel does; but don't really care); is that ECC RAM can (and should) report even correctable errors; so you get considerably more warning than you do with non-ECC RAM.

If you pay no attention to error reports ECC or non-ECC are both rolling the dice; though ECC has better odds; but 'proper' ECC and Linux-EDAC support will allow you to keep an eye on worrisome events(normally with something like rasdaemon, not sure what other options and preferences there are in terms of aggregating the kernel-provided data) and, unless the RAM fails particularly dramatically and thoroughly, will give you much better odds of knowing that you have a hardware problem while that problem is still at correctable levels; so you can take appropriate action(either replacement, or on the really fancy server systems, some 'chipkill'-like arrangement where the specific piece of DRAM that is failing gets cut out of use when deeemed unreliable without having to bring the system down.

Comment Re:BSoD was an indicator (Score 1) 75

Sometimes you'd get a BSOD that was a fairly clear call to action; when the error called out something recognizable as the name of part of a driver; but that is mostly just a special case of the "did you change any hardware or update any drivers recently?" troubleshooting steps that people have been doing more or less blind since forever; admittedly slightly more helpful in cases where as far as you know the answer to those questions is 'no'; but windows update did slip you a driver update; or a change in OS behavior means that a driver that used to work is now troublesome.

Realistically, as long as the OS provides suitable support for being configured to collect actual crash dump material if you want it; it's hard to object too strongly to the idea that just rebooting fairly quickly is probably the better choice vs. trying to make the BSOD a genuinely useful debugging resource; especially given how rare it is for the person with useful debugging ability to happen to be at the console at the time of crash(rather than just an end user who is ill equipped to make sense of it; or a system that mostly does server stuff, quite likely not on actual physical hardware, where nobody has even touched the physical console in months or years; and it's more or less entirely useless to display a message there; rather than rebooting and hoping that things come up enough that management software can grab the dump files; or giving up and leaving the system in EMS so that someone can attach to that console.

Comment long time coming (Score 1, Funny) 71

As I said https://slashdot.org/comments....
AFAIC ruzzia can and needs to go to hell. I hire people, I won't hire a ruzzian, the world needs to get its act together and start using space without them.

They are a scourge, always were, always will be. The American scientists, that passed information to the USSR about nuclear weapon design and manufacturing were not just traitors, they made a gigantic mistake, they truly made the world a much worse place to live. Preferably the soviets and by extension the Chinese and then the Iraqies, Iranians, North Koreans and who knows who else should not have nukes, at least not immediately after the Americans designed and built them.

Americans are exceptionally good at delivering innovation, but they are also exceptionally naive about the rest of the world. All Americans, their scientists incorrectly believe in basic good human nature, their politicians incorrectly believe that others are just like them and want to do business. Ha! Business is the last thing on the minds of foreign despots. The first thing is to make sure their population are controllable so that nothing can dethrone them, this means the status quo must be maintained, business does not help to maintain status quo, on the contrary, it may provide extra resources to the population. Once the population has more resources than the absolute minimum and once the population does not depend on the State to provide this bare minimum, once the population can provide for itself it starts demanding change and this is unaaceptable. The change is a political demand, population must be dependent and ready to die for a few scraps off the table of the rulers, business interferes with this. Americans think putin or whatever other dictator wants to do business, what a stupid notion.

American people believe they can just keep to themselves, nothing concerns them about the rest of the world, they do not need to try and control the outcomes. They are the naive wealthy mark, walking carelessly through a foreign open market, there are enough eyes on their pockets and there is a guy with a knife in a dark alley waiting for them specifically. This is a metaphore. Americans need to build alliances with the Europeans, not break them, they need to understand that ruzzians are not friends or business partners. They also need to understand that global caliphate is a real thing, it is the goal and if Americans care about their way of life even a little, Israel and Ukraine are their lines of defence right now and must be supported as if the war was already in the USA, bevause it is.

Comment Re:Much as I enjoy mocking Russia... (Score 1) 77

I know, it is true, the front lines have 50+ year olds, no doubt. Ukraine hasn't dipped into the pool yonger than 25 yet, this is the conscription age while orcs have sent 18 year olds to die for their tsar already. Ukraine also allowed 18 to 22 year old males to exit the country, over 45 thousand left to Poland. None of this changes what I said.

Comment Just shoddy... (Score 4, Interesting) 95

What seems most depressing about this isn't the fact that the bot is stupid; but that something about 'AI' seems to have caused people who should have known better to just ignore precautions that are old, simple, and relatively obvious.

It remains unclear whether you can solve the bots being stupid problem even in principle; but it's not like computing has never dealt with actors that either need to be saved from themselves or are likely malicious before; and between running more than a few web servers, building a browser, and slapping together an OS it's not like Google doesn't have people who know that stuff on payroll who know about that sort of thing.

In this case, the bot being a moron would have been a non-issue if it had simply been confined to running shell commands inside the project directory(which is presumably under version control, so worst case you just roll back); not above it where it can hose the entire drive.

There just seems to be something cursed about 'AI' products, not sure if it's the rush to market or if mediocre people are most fascinated with the tool, that invites really sloppy, heedless, lazy, failure to care about useful, mature, relatively simple mitigations for the well known(if not particularly well understood) faults of the 'AI' behavior itself.

Comment comments (Score 1) 21

Read through the comments in that telegram post, the amount of denial is staggering, the amount of cheerful propaganda is even greater, but there were some worried notes gleaming through all that cheerleading, where someone hoped they would still have a job later on. Someone thinks that the things may not turn out so well, they think that out of all of the options they may end up with the option I listed as number one here https://slashdot.org/comments....

what I can tell you from the very tone of this cheerful post, they do not have all of the necessary components and it will not be simple at all. Obviously they will try to launch Proton in December as scheduled by trying to do it without the service cabin, there is maybe a way, a bunch of wooden planks and ropes, who knows. The number of ways this may end up disasterous for the launch are too many to be listed here.

Comment Re:unattainable tech (Score 1) 77

you understand that the war that was supposed to last for maybe a week or two is now closing on 4 years, right? That all of the western powers were absolutely certain that prior to 2022 ruzzia was a world level super power with the military that was somewhere in the top 2 or 3 maybe, right? That this supposed super power was stopped by a country with 1/3 to 1/4 of the population, with 1/28 of size, with no oil or gas mining to speak of. Today ruzzia is occupying significantly less territory than at the end of 2022 as well because Ukraine got some of the territory back, for example the city of Kherson and most of Kharkhiv region.

More than that, Ukraine was able to enter ruzzian territory for whatever purpose and was able to hold some of it for about 6 months.

Currently ruzzia is actually a much more dangerous enemy than it was in 2022 to the rest of Europe, it gained enough knowledge, learned new tactics and is capable of taking out any European army in a conventional fight, I am certain of it. Should Ukraine fail and fall, putin will attack Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and then will go further and nobody will stop him without nuclear weapons if the USA decides to retreat, the Europeans are not in a fighting mood and will not be dying for their homes, they will be enslaved by putin if nuclear weapons are not used, this is certain. Europe's best chance at preventing this is seriously helping Ukraine, at this point with some man power as well.

As to the story we are talking about, ruzzia does not have factory capacity to build a new 8U216 service cabin and this has nothing to do with 'brilliance of people they are attacking', you are not reading me correctly. I am saying they do not have the capacity, they do not have the resources to manufacture this cabin unless they actually stop the war, retreat and restart normal manufacturing. It is also unclear that this type of a cabin can be built at any of their plants, maybe at the Cherepovets metallurgical plant. There is a reason why the USSR was manufacturing this thing in Kramatorsk and it wasn't about brilliance, it was about capacity, ability to handle a task of this magnitude. What, do you think you can just turn any factory into something that can manufacture a structure of this size and complexity? You are the one living in a fantasy world.

Comment Re:Only part of the story... (Score 1) 126

What always puzzled me about Intel's...more peripheral...activities is that they seemed to fall into a weird, unhelpful, gap between 'doing some VC with the Xeon money; rather than just parking it in investments one notch riskier than savings accounts' and 'strategic additions to the core product'; which normally meant that the non-core stuff had limited synergies with intel systems; and had the risks associated with being a relatively minor program at a big company with a more profitable division; and thus subject to being coopted or killed at any time.

Seemed to happen both with internal projects and with acquisitions. Intel buys Altera because, um, FPGAs are cool and useful and it will 'accelerate innovation' if Intel is putting the PCIe-connected FPGA on the CPU's PCIe root complex rather than a 3rd party vendor doing it? Or something? Even at the tech demo level I'm not sure we even saw a single instance of an FPGA being put on the same package as a CPU(despite 'foveros' also being the advanced-packaging hotness that Intel assured us would make gluing IP blocks together easy and awesome). They just sort of bought them and churned them without any apparent integration. No 'FPGA with big fuck-off memory controller or PCIe root we borrowed from a xeon' type part. No 'Intel QuickAssist Technology now includes programmable FPGA blocks on select parts' CPUs or NICs. Just sort of Intel sells Altera stuff now.

On the network side, Intel just kind of did nothing with and then killed off both the internal Omni-path(good thing it didn't turn out that having an HPC focused interconnect you could run straight from your compute die would have been handy in the future...luckily NVlink never amounted to much...) and the stuff they bought from Barefoot; and at this point barely seems to ship NICs without fairly serious issues. I'm not even counting Lantiq; which they seem to have basically just spent 5 years passing on to Maxlinear with minimal effect; unless that one was somehow related to that period where they sold cable modem chipsets that really sucked. It's honestly downright weird how bad the news seems to be for anything that intel dabbles in that isn't the core business.

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