Also, if you check some of the citations that he lists for dangers of microwave-range radiation (you can click through to the full text of the article), they are things like studies of naval ships, in which the microwave radiation would be at much higher power levels than that which your Wi-Fi router is emitting.
Where I work, we have several dozen repos, on for each component, and are thinking about merging it into a monorepo soon. That will end up giving us a repo with several different root commits.
In fact, for at least one of our components, we've already done this. We had something that solved the same problem for a couple of different permutations of software versions and platforms. The person who had originally written it had used separate repos, with common code copied and pasted between them, and later on we merged the repos together and factored out the common code so that could be shared. So we already have at least one repo which has 4 root commits, I believe.
Actually, I just checked and it has 7 root commits. I'd forgotten that we had also had similar problems that needed to be solved for some other software, and had some interns who had done those in separate repos as well, which also eventually got merged in to share all of the common code:
I quit coffee for a year or two a while back. It didn't seem that hard to kick; a week or two of headaches and irritability, and then it was fine.
I picked up the habit again just because it's nice to have that warm, tasty beverage to start the day, and decaf just isn't the same. As long as you keep it to one in the morning and maybe one in the early afternoon, it's fine.
Yes, they selected the relevant license for pretty much all reasonable desired uses except for this one. I really appreciate that they list just MIT, Apache 2.0, and GPLv3 on the front page.
The Unlicense sometimes causes issues with software being accepted into larger collections. CC0 is much more thoroughly drafted, and more widely accepted.
You notice that Apple supported OpenGL while they were making most of their money from desktop and laptop sales; but once iOS became so profitable, they decided to go their own way and start pushing Metal.
Lock in, or at least getting people to do more iOS first development (helped by lower profits on app store sales on Android, Android fragmentation, etc), helps Apple out a lot. You get the first version of apps and games, or more polished versions of apps and games, on iOS this way.
Maybe.... why would you assume they continue developing for macs at all? Small studios might not have the resources, and the market is tiny for many apps, eg indie games, modeling software, and ML (to be fair, apple has repeatedly emphasized they don’t care about ML on the desktop by not offering nvidia cards...).
And again, I don’t see the benefit for apple over supporting cross platform apis to encourage development. It seems like a net loss for everyone but some line in their budget on driver maintenance.
They do make some money on Macs, and Mac software, but not nearly as much as on iOS.
Providing macOS gives a developer and designer platform for iOS. That is really important for them. So Metal being available on macOS is important for that reason. But it's also important in that the Mac platform is still important, just not nearly as important as iOS.
OpenGL doesn't really have much of a future. Everyone is moving towards the next generation frameworks. It just happens that there was a lot of uncertainty about whether OpenGL could adapt or whether there would be a successor, and during that time Apple decided to invest in developing Metal. It wasn't until a couple of years later than Vulkan was released.
In the meantime, Apple has built up quite a lot of tooling around Metal.
And it's not like it's that difficult to write cross platform apps that target the Mac. If you write against major engines, they will already have support for the different backends. If you are writing your own software, you can still target OpenGL, or you can target Vulkan and use MoltenVK to run it on macOS.
And for the next several years, people writing portable software are going to have to either just target OpenGL, for compatibility with older graphics cards, or maintain at least two backends, OpenGL and Vulkan. Given that lots of games target DirectX first, and consider any of the cross-platform frameworks a porting effort, Apple probably doesn't consider it a big loss to add one more platform that needs to be ported to.
It’s a given that the more GitHub features you use, the more difficult it is to move away from GitHub. It’s also a given that you can reasonably limit the extent to which you use GitHub and thereby limit the difficulty in transitioning to another solution.
The idea that it’s GitHub locking you in rather than you locking yourself in to GitHub is the argument I take issue with. But no quarrel at all with Gnome choosing GitLab, because GitLab is genuinely great.
The whole reason GNOME wanted to switch is because they wanted to have all the extra features (issues, etc) in a single place, as is provided by Github and Gitlab. Their old cgit interface already did a good job at hosting their git repositories.
Well, some people do. I don't, apparently you don't, probably most people don't. But you could and some people do. I've seen a few projects on github with notes to the effect of "don't bother submitting issues/PRs here, do it through our [mailing list/etc]"
It's logical of course, but I see the irony. Or maybe it's not irony, nobody really knows what irony is, but it's mildly.. amusing? It makes half my face smile in a manner similar to but not quite like a smirk.
Definitely not 'expected'. I like the mailing list bug tracking more than having that on git{hub,lab,whatever}.
git makes it even possible to host a repo on multiple git* hostings, but apparently nobody came up with a successful distributed pullreq/issue tracker yet.
I don't think this can really be blamed on CSS. I mean, yes, a new CSS feature allowed a timing attack that could extract information, but these kinds of issues keep on coming up time and time again, meaning that it's not this particular CSS feature that should be blamed.
The issue is the ability to interact in any way with cross site resources which contain any kind of potentially sensitive information. This leads to things like clickjacking attacks, CSRF, information leaks like this, and so on.
The things that could be done to fix it:
1. Don't allow any kind of cross-site embedding (yeah, this isn't going to happen)
2. Treat any kind of cross-site embedding like private browsing mode; don't ever send any credentials along with it
3. Don't allow the embedding site to interact in any way with embedded content. Treat it like an entirely separate, opaque layer above everything else, not subject to layering anything over it
Of course, I don't think any of these are actually going to happen, because they'd break too much. But otherwise, it's going to be a game of whack-a-mole with information leaks, new kinds of clickjacking and CSRF, and so on.
> 3. Don't allow the embedding site to interact in any way with embedded content. Treat it like an entirely separate, opaque layer above everything else, not subject to layering anything over it
I'm actually surprised to hear that this is not the fix here. Instead, they optimized the rendering code, which might not preclude more sophisticated attacks on that side channel.
As noted elsewhere, this would cause sites with models or menus to appear broken, when the menus or models are stuck behind the iframe.
Yes I know, don’t make sited with iframes and litghtboxes or whatever then, but people do, and the option they chose won’t break those people.
That's similar to what Kaminsky proposed with Iron Frame[0], but obviously it'd have to be opt-in. Applying Iron Frame-like rendering to all iframes would break a lot of content.
It is quite unlikely that Intel was actually inspired by Linus of LinusTechTips. He's exaggerating for dramatic effect, just like the fake drama of not being able to find his RAM.
Persistent memory is something that Intel has been working on for at least 5 years (https://github.com/pmem), and given that that's the public face of the software side of it, they were likely starting to develop the hardware even earlier.
Seems like IBM is really increasing its investment in open source software and hardware for PowerPC recently. I've noticed them offering bounties for PowerPC related work on Rust, there's this recent work on Mono, and OpenPOWER has led to the development of truly open servers and workstations like the Talos II.
Really? Wow. I just assumed it was paid because I wouldn't have expected a hobbyist endeavor to port software to a proprietary Unix and mainframe OS running on expensive hardware.
Do you develop for AIX and IBM i for work and have access to hardware and inspiration to do this for that reason? If not, how did you wind up picking this as a hobbyist endeavor?
Hardware-wise, IBM i can scale up from basically a thick pizza box to something relatively monstrous in size. The architecture and OS are still relatively advanced, too, even by today's standards. Those of us who know its history sometimes think of it as "IBM: The Next Generation", since it was based at least in part on the Future Systems project, a replacement computer architecture that never quite came to complete fruition. IBM has never marketed it as a mainframe-class system, though.
I'm more impressed that you were able to acquire the unobtanium that is AIX on POWER, let alone System i (the real iOS, not the one from the fruit company)
I thought the real IOS was from company with the bridge logo that rhymes with Crisco lard, especially since IBM iSeries is just a renamed AS/400 - OS/400 from 2006.
Keep in mind that almost all that work will be Linux-based. This announcement was regarding AIX & i, which is off in la-la land compared to what you expect with a Linux-based system.
It's all POWER though, and I seem to be seeing more of it around recently. I had thought that it was going to just keep on shrinking into a more niche market once Macs, Xboxes, and Playstations stopped using POWER/PowerPC processors, and Intel was dominating in the cloud, but it seems like they're actually investing again in trying to get out of the relatively small niche they're in now.
Maybe it's just my perception though; I happen to have noticed POWER related things happening in a couple of different areas recently. I haven't been following it very closely.
IBM has been doing more lately with open source, but not really to a level that matches the endeavors of others. OpenPOWER may be gathering some real momentum, though, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if we start hearing more about it in the future.
As for Mono itself, this particular implementation isn't an IBM project, and when I personally discussed the matter with them some ten or so years ago they said they had discussed it internally but had no particular desire to pursue it at the time. They gave me some good reasons for this but I don't remember the details.
It does seem kind of odd though. The price/performance of PowerPC compared to Intel is still quite bad. To me it seems they’d be better off giving up on this term and focusing on other things. Maybe they could start with making Watson an actual thing instead of just a marketing term for consulting services.
The $1300 18-core / 72-thread Power9 seems like a good deal IMO. That's severely undercutting Intel's i9-7980XE (18-core / 36-thread), and offering grossly superior specs to boot, like wtf 90MB L3 cache, 8x DDR4 controllers, and dual-socket support.
In contrast, the i9-7980XE is MSRP of $2000, only has 4x DDR4 controllers and is single-socket only.
The 18-core Xeon Gold 6140 is $2400. Only 6x DDR4 controllers (although it seems to go up to quad-socket for what its worth).
AMD EPYC offers the single-socket 24c / 48t 7401p in and around $1300 (I'm seeing it ~$1100 and $1200). 8x DDR4, so its far more comparable to the Power9 machine. But Power9 is likely faster on a single-core basis, has a unified mesh instead of the 4x NUMA configuration of EPYC. EPYC doesn't have a unified L3 cache: tasks only effectively have 8MB of L3 (but there are lots of 8MB L3 caches scattered throughout EPYC).
So EPYC vs Power9 is a fair comparison at ~$1300, but Intel is severely overpriced in comparison. Actually, I'm not liking any of Intel's higher end options this generation, EPYC and Power9 seem superior on paper... as long as you don't need AVX-512.
I think the main problem is that there are no low-cost POWER systems for people to tinker with like there are for x86 and ARM. You are limited to expensive high-end servers, and that leads to a lack of software support.
Power certainly exists, its just less popular. The above board is under $250 and seems to be good enough for tinkering usage.
Software support is certainly weaker. I think Power9 primarily exists for people who are planning to write their own application servers, or otherwise are willing to spend time recompiling OSS over to the Power9 architecture (Gentoo style or similar).
A "real" server application will want to buy a Talos II Workstation, for $3000+. If you're worried about performance, you have to develop and test on the big stuff.
If you're planning on a high-performance database optimizations (ie: lets say you wanted to improve PostgreSQL's performance), you wouldn't test on a Rasp. Pi or Intel i7. You'd buy a Thunderx2 ARM, Intel Gold, or AMD EPYC to test on. The architecture of "big boy" chips is grossly different than the smaller scale stuff.
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And the way you "test" on big-boy machines, is through cloud services. You don't necessarily have to buy a full machine if you're testing (although local access is certainly useful).
That is starting to approach the price point where it's worth it if you want to tinker, but with something that is a lot closer to a real machine than a $250 embedded board.
I tried taking a look for cloud services that offer POWER machines, but couldn't find anything that I could just sign up for and try for relatively cheap. There are a couple of universities that have free POWER clusters that you can request access to, but for tinkering I'd actually rather be able to pay for what I'd need rather than having to manually request access.
Do you have references to cloud services that would allow you to easily get access to POWER9 systems by the hour? IBM's own cloud services only seem to offer bare-metal POWER8 servers by the month; as far as I can tell (from their fairly confusing pricing page and docs), all of their virtual servers or hourly servers are Intel.
But that's not really helpful. Hmm, I guess Power8 / Power9 cloud systems seem to have disappeared. IBM really needs to work on getting cloud-instances ready for tinkering.
Oh, yeah, looks like you also have to add the CPU, that's not included in the base price.
Although, for RAM and storage you can purchase that separately at cheaper prices.
I just tried to sign up for IBM's cloud, to see if I could use the limited free trial or $200 credit to try out one of the bare-metal systems.
Nope. The limited free trial only seems to apply to a few of their SaaS offerings; and the $200 credit also doesn't apply to their "infrastructure services" like VMs, bare metals servers, storage, etc.
Additionally, it looks like you need to get manual approval for you account to be able to use the VMs; even once I added my credit card info, they tell me my account needs to be reviewed by someone before I can actually rent server time.
On AWS or GCS, you just sign up and spin up VMs. I've used that many times for quick compat testing against different operating systems, some quick extra CPU cycles, deploying test servers, and so on.
But on IBM's cloud, you need someone to actually manually approve your account before you can do anything but use their SaaS offerings.
They really don't seem to want to attract people casually trying things out.
edit: after a bit, they did approve my account for infrastructure access. But the bare-metal POWER servers can't be rented by the hour, only by the month, and they start at $1000 per month. Still not really helpful for casual exploration. They also have such wonderful usability features as requiring you to allow popups in order to configure and order servers or VMs.
Yes, but they require you to fill out a long, detailed form about what project you're affiliated with, exactly what resources you need and for how long, an IBM advocate (?), and so on.
This is quite inconvenient for someone just wanting to do a little bit of experimentation before committing.
For instance, I was interested in experimenting with AltiVec on POWER for the Rust bug bounty. I wanted to get an idea of the scope of the problem, see how things work in C and C++, do a little bit of quick microbenchmarking in C and C++ to see how it compares to SSE.
If it turns out that it was something I was interested in pursuing further, I might try to work with the Rust project to apply for this kind of access officially for a CI system for the Power architecture. But that's a lot of trouble to go through if I just want to do some quick experimentation before deciding on whether the scope of the project is worth it.
QorIQ is moving to ARM though, so don't expect that segment to continue. Also there's a pretty big difference between embedded PPC that has lost to ARM and POWER9.
And the Rasp. Pi 3 uses a small 4-core in-order ARM-A53 instead of the out-of-order bigger core ARM-A57 that's behind the ThunderX2.
Point being: if you want to really develop for big things (like ThunderX2 or Power9), you buy the big thing. I'm not entirely sure if the "small embedded" stuff, like Rasp. Pi, really help.
It really isn't very bad; Intel is very overpriced relatively if you're talking about e.g. $/core or $/thread at a similar TDP. The bandwidth in P9 chips is pretty high, and they have huge amounts of L3 cache compared to any price-comparable Intel purchase. They also have a significantly higher thread count (SMT4), and comparable PCIe lane count for peripherials vs up-to $8,000 xeons. The individual cores are also very fast: it's not like those ARM64 servers that tried to win by having many slow cores. The cores are fast, and there are a lot of them. Things like COTS networking blades and big-ass database servers are going to be their prime turf, I think.
I actually have an Excel spreadsheet open right now with some preliminary numbers (evaluating some random specs from a recent Anandtech article, along with Sforza CPUs, out of curiosity), and in terms of $/thread, the Sforza CP9M06, an 8-core 4SMT chip for $600, is only beaten in $/thread by a Cavium ThunderX2 9980-2200, at $18.5/core vs $14.02/core, thanks to 128 threads. But, at a price of $1,800, with a significantly lower base/turbo clock frequency (3.5GHz+ vs 2.2+) and less than 1/2th the L3 cache.
Granted, these numbers are more or less impossible to verify at this moment and unbelievably fuzzy, and it's incomplete without filling in all the data on a wider array of Xeons, EPYC machines, and real benchmarks. But the back of the envelope numbers come off as pretty solid, and my experience with POWER8 makes me think these machines will perform very well.
There is also the fact that IBM is quite open about POWER this time around, all the way to making all their firmware/boot/BMC code open, and encouraging patches, under FOSS licenses, and making all the architecture/firmware documentation freely available. Might not matter for hyperscale data centers that negotiate themselves, but certainly a nice bonus.
The biggest price-related barrier at the low end is really the cost of the mobos, though. That's where most of the TALOS II's price goes to. The CPUs are relatively cheap in comparison.
Yes, price/performance for small systems is bad. But vertical scaling is relatively cheap/goes farther. If your database can't run in a cluster, you might need a very beefy machine to run it. That is what you use Power9 for.
I looked into doing this briefly, and a couple blockers were that I couldn't find any easy cloud services offering POWER that I could use for testing, the cheapest dev system I could find, the Talos II Development System, is itself $5000 once you add RAM and storage (https://www.raptorcs.com/content/TL2DS1/intro.html, they do have a cheaper system available in pre-order: https://www.raptorcs.com/content/TL1BC1/intro.html), and the C intrinsics that they offer work with special overloaded functions with a vector type extension to C, making it a lot harder to use the approach of just offering wrappers for basic intrinsics and then working on higher-level support on top of that.
Well there’s free as in beer, free as in speech, and free as in working for IBM without getting paid.
They just laid off thousands of people from their Healthcare group. On top of thousands and thousands more in other groups recently. Couldn’t some of them have been reassigned to work on this stuff if it’s of value to IBM?
Are or were any of them experts on the things that IBM wants done? Are the involved in the communities that IBM wants work done in? If not, then they're still a net drain while they come up to speed, and engaging these communities and spreading out some money in the form of bounties makes sense.
they're still a net drain while they come up to speed
And we wonder why companies expect candidates to have years of experience in the exact stack they use and don’t offer training to anyone with other experience, just not buzzword-compliant.
All these people were smart enough to get hired in the first place remember.
Yes, but you need to look at the ROI. If it costs more to keep these people on and train them than it would to get the community to do these things then IBM is rationally externalizing these costs. They're not a charity.
That said, I agree that if they need support for these things internally, long term, and consistently, then it makes more sense to train up staff internally.
Healthcare tech is quite different from porting software to AIX/IBM i. I would be surprised if 1% of the people let go were actually willing to transfer into that sort of work.
This is full-on crank territory here.