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    Posted on 20-09-14, 08:39
    Custom title here

    Post: #929 of 1150
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 6 days
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    I will be REALLY interested in seeing what the regulatory agencies have to say about this.

    And FUCK YEAH! OPENSPARC MASTER RACE!

    --- In UTF-16, where available. ---
    Posted on 20-09-14, 14:16 (revision 2)
    Dinosaur

    Post: #775 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 4 days
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    Posted by Screwtape
    Is NVIDIA's announcement enough?

    I believe Apple, Qualcomm and maybe Samsung have perpetual licences, so it doesn't matter what NVIDIA does, they can noodle around and do their own thing. However, one of the big advantages of ARM is its popularity - if NVIDIA screws up and the low end of the market moves over to RISC-V or OpenSPARC or something, those companies might want to shift over as well.

    The official NVDA press release

    I see too much "AI" buzzword bingo BS, but aside of that... welp, it's official. Masayoshi Son, thanks for ruining computers and fucking the UK pride!. Yeah, gotta grab some popcorn to watch the regulatory shitshow unfold, particularly at the EU and China. Fun fact, a lot of people believe nVidia is a Chinese corporation, a-la Huawei. But nope, it's American - its founder is half-Taiwanese (y'know, from the original China, fuck PRC's "One China" BS), but yeah, people can't even read these days.

    > RISC-V
    And now I can see the huge smile at Western Digital SoC designers when they told Marvell that they were going all-in with this newfangled RISC-V thing. Now I guess there must be a huge party going up there celebrating "the death of ARM" or something :D
    Can't wait for those $50 RISC-V Android phones if nVidia screws it up this acquisition.

    There IS a possitive side of all this mess: the faster nVidia kills Mali, the better. Or maybe will they finally have a half-decent binary blob driver, at least?

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 20-10-09, 07:06 (revision 2)

    Post: #295 of 449
    Since: 10-29-18

    Last post: 9 days
    Last view: 12 hours
    Absolutely disgusting.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yE9n_llJOVQ


    EDIT: Paper launch after all? Look at those "underway" numbers...

    My current setup: Super Famicom ("2/1/3" SNS-CPU-1CHIP-02) → SCART → OSSC → StarTech USB3HDCAP → AmaRecTV 3.10
    Posted on 20-10-09, 23:31
    Dinosaur

    Post: #790 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 4 days
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    Remember when Intel bought Altera five years ago, and my initial answer on the old bBoard was "AMD, Xilinx, your move"? And then some of you guys said that AMD couldn't afford to add some FPGAs to their product lineups, blah blah blah...

    Well, we're in Weirdest 2020 Ever, and AMD finally thought that buying Xilinx is actually a good idea:
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24725689

    Nope, they can't still afford it (Zen and Navi are hot, but while those Ryzens are money printers, their finances are still a bit on the "careful!" side), so this $30 BILLION purchase will be funded with fake money stocks and debt. Hope this doesn't spell doom for then, instead of becoming another solid revenue source. But then, I've heard that Intel has done absolutely NOTHING with their Altera purchase, quality of software has dropped massively, and those FPGA-infused Xeons have been failures so far.

    So the $30 billion question would then be: "Why!?"

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 20-10-10, 02:46

    Post: #94 of 105
    Since: 11-13-19

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    Huh, I thought that was just a rumor.
    Posted on 20-10-10, 03:39
    Custom title here

    Post: #937 of 1150
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 6 days
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    Posted by "tomman"
    But then, I've heard that Intel has done absolutely NOTHING with their Altera purchase, quality of software has dropped massively, and those FPGA-infused Xeons have been failures so far.

    Sounds about right for Intel.


    So the $30 billion question would then be: "Why!?"
    Because Intel essentially took Xilinx's biggest competitor out of the market and it will be a nice reliable profit stream.

    --- In UTF-16, where available. ---
    Posted on 20-10-10, 14:40
    Dinosaur

    Post: #791 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 4 days
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    Apparently this purchase has been in the works for years, but the negotiations have stalled more times than certain aircrafts. In fact, this latest try is all but confirmed yet. But then, apparently AMD recently hired former Altera's CEO (which led the Intel transition), so...

    In the meanwhile, remember IBM? For IBMers, it now means "I've Been Moved", as they're hellbent on becoming a cloudy cloud, with blockchains but no booze or hookers. They kept divesting division over division:

    - Printers went to Ricoh
    - PCs (and later, low/mid-tier x86 servers) went to Lenovo
    - Displays went (mostly) to Lenovo (some of their later post-Lenovo stuff was outsourced to AOC)
    - PoS terminals went to Toshiba
    - ATMs went to Diebold (initially the "InterBold" joint venture, now Diebold-Nixdorf)
    - HDDs went to Hitachi GST (now WD)
    - Basically, it isn't POWER Big Iron, it has been (or is being) sold (or stripped for parts, THEN sold)
    - Nobody really wants to know who owns Token Ring nowadays!

    Now they're doing the same crap to their former big-money divisions ("nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"), their services arm:
    https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/08/ibm_splits_off_services_division/
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24720556
    Think something like HP (shitty printers and consumer PCs) / HPE (servers and other big iron), except that the "former" IBM still gets to keep their mainframes. But then, the new cloudy IBM really doesn't want you to physically rent whatever is the latest iteration of "IBM Big Mama" big iron for doing your payroll or handling all those zeroes on your bank accounts. No, instead they want to pretend they're AWS/Azure (or their smaller and somewhat irrelevant rivals, Alphabet's GCE / Orrible® Cloud) and have you instead to lease time on computers Not In Your Premises™. The people that really wants cloudy clouds are too happy with AWS/Azure anyway, now that hipsters (and not old men in very expensive suits) rule the roost.

    In the meanwhile, my Mexican-built 2003-vintage IBM ThinkCentre still refuses to die, despite all the warranty-voiding abuse, like a Ford Ranger or Toyota Corolla from the same generation. I've read that recent Think hardware fully embraced the "soldered/glued-everything" way of Mac :/

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 20-10-20, 12:29
    Dinosaur

    Post: #797 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 4 days
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    The saga of "WHYYYYYY!?!?!?" sales, mergers and acquisitions in this forgettable 2020 don't seem to have brakes: today, at the chopping board we got Intel's flash memory division, which has now been sold to SK Hynix:
    https://news.skhynix.com/sk-hynix-to-acquire-intel-nand-memory-business/

    $9 BILLION, which for a component so vital to our modern computerizers seem to be a firesale, an absolute steal for the Korean chaebol SK Group (which already owns one of the Big 3 in flash memory), and a complete fuckup by Intel management, which is too busy trying to not implode after lagging behind the competition in nearly everything but marketshare. Go 'murica!

    Prior to this disaster, things weren't going that great with Intel flash: they used to had a joint-venture with Micron (the second one from the Big 3; the other one is another chaebol, the always-lovely Samsung), but they parted ways two years ago for reasons I still don't really understand.

    Intel does get to keep Optane (their fancy brand name for "totally not-RAM not-Flash" 3D XPoint), a technology unlikely to become mass-market anytime soon :/

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 20-11-10, 18:43 (revision 1)
    Dinosaur

    Post: #815 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 4 days
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    PSA: If you have an HP printer (no matter the tech), immediately disconnect it, destroy it physically with extreme violence, then incinerate the remnants. If possible, call an exorcist afterwards:

    https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/06/horrible-products/ (injket: "Ink as a Service/IaaS", or when "lifetime" stops being "for as long as the device works")
    https://kevin.deldycke.com/2020/11/revert-hp-printer-ban-on-third-party-ink-cartridges/ (laser: Nintendo-style toner lockouts, but worse)

    I've had nothing but trouble with printers, but HP are Hell itself. AVOID.

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 20-11-10, 20:15
    Post: #178 of 202
    Since: 11-01-18

    Last post: 422 days
    Last view: 54 days
    you do need to proactively enroll in the program...
    Posted on 20-11-10, 21:25

    Post: #103 of 105
    Since: 11-13-19

    Last post: 1223 days
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    Who's excited about Apple Silly Macs?
    Posted on 20-11-10, 21:33
    Custom title here

    Post: #955 of 1150
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 6 days
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    Posted by funkyass
    you do need to proactively enroll in the program...

    Yes. The program offering free ink for life that killed everyone two years later.

    --- In UTF-16, where available. ---
    Posted on 20-11-10, 22:42 (revision 1)
    Dinosaur

    Post: #816 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 4 days
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    Posted by CaptainJistuce
    Posted by funkyass
    you do need to proactively enroll in the program...

    Yes. The program offering free ink for life that killed everyone two years later.

    To be more precise: the ink was free if you printed up to 15 pages a month. Go over that pagecount and you're automatically moved to the next tier, which is not free but still supposedly cheap. Now that HP killed your printer, your <=15 page/month plan is "upgraded" to $0.99/mo.

    The whole "ink leasing" program makes sense... for corporations, where said plans also include other consumables (even paper!), and more importantly, on-premises tech support (if your printer breaks your biz starts losing money, so you would expect that $OEM dispatch a technician with a fix real fast). For those of us at home? Just buy laser, people. Toners don't dry, and they last pretty much forever. The higher upfront cost is well worth the trouble. Buy laser from anyone BUT HP, and ensure your printer NEVER reaches the wide open Internet (there is no good reason for it, unless you want gratuitous DRM, or West Elbonian script kiddies mining buttcoins and printing actual butts on your laserjet)

    Having said that, my laser printer (a Konica-Minolta magicolor 1600W AKA Delcop CL3005W) has been out of service since the replacement toners not only were garbage (all but the black toner leak - these are supposedly original "Delcop" supplies, but in fact they're refurbished crap as Delcop are actually nothing but a reseller that rebrands everything they sell), they even managed to kill the chip on the cyan toner, TWICE! (It's always the cyan cartridge for some reason!) Now the printer refuses to print, even in B/W. In the meanwhile I'm using a borrowed monochrome Dell 1110 (a rebadged Samsung ML1610, also sold as a Xerox Phaser something), which is yet another turd: it refuses to recognize the toner sometimes (these use glass fuses instead of actual chips), and it rejects any print job that it's even moderately complex (despite being a shittyass GDI raster printer!). Still, they're not at the same level of HP hell I had endured in the last years when I still was part of the local workforce (never forget the CP1025nw that not even HP wanted it back when it broke, they instead sent a replacement that also broke!)

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 20-11-11, 01:21
    Custom title here

    Post: #956 of 1150
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 6 days
    Last view: 1 day
    they even managed to kill the chip on the cyan toner, TWICE! (It's always the cyan cartridge for some reason!)


    I blame Dr. Wily.


    We've got a pair of Kodak inkjets. They've been well-behaved every time we've asked anything of them, and the ink's been this side of reasonably-priced.
    ...
    This is probably why Kodak shut the entire printer division down. Can't turn mad profit doing honest business.

    --- In UTF-16, where available. ---
    Posted on 20-11-30, 15:08 (revision 1)
    Dinosaur

    Post: #833 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 4 days
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    Posted by kode54
    Who's excited about Apple Silly Macs?


    Apparently nearly everyone at Silly Valley, because the orgasms are yet to end.

    Long short story: Someone finally made an ARM CPU that genuinely does NOT suck. Unfortunately, it's on an Apple device :/

    To recap:

    - Benchmarks are absolutely mindblowing. The M1 not only is on par with the old Intel Macs, it can even give a decent show against Ryzens!
    - Rosetta 2 has managed to achieve what Microsoft/Qualcomm are still struggling: good performance on a x86-on-ARM emulator! If benchmarks are to be believed, emulated AMD64 binaries have almost native performance most of the times, and in some corner cases Rosetta 2 can mop the floor with those Intels. Unbelievable. All at a fraction of the power envelope!
    - Speaking of power, M1 MacBook Air is fanless, all other M1 machines have smallish fans. Unlike Intel Macs (where performance is compromised by design due to shitty thermals), those ARMacs don't seem to downthrottle that much when pushed to the max.
    - The M1 has been dubbed "Black Magic Fuckery" for that "alien tech like" performance.
    - CPU and RAM are soldered on the same multi-chip module, as expected. This guarantees crazy-fast performance at the cost of giving up memory expansions of any kind (and current specimens are limited to 8 and 16GB of RAM, so choose wisely when purchasing!). Nothing yet on iMacs (last Intel iMacs had to be completely disassembled just to upgrade RAM!), or cheesegrater towers (I hope Apple have learned their lesson from the trashcan Mac Pro... AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA who am I kidding?!)
    - While those ARMacs still have Thunderbolt ports, forget about plugging external GPUs for now. No ARM AMD exist yet, and it's very very VERY unlikely nVidia is going to port their blob to ARMacs, and I don't know what kind of security theater you would go through just to install potentially unsigned 3rd-party drivers on those (remember: ARMacs won't run unsigned software AT ALL - it must be self-signed at the very least for userspace apps)
    - People have already gotten Windows for ARM64 and current flavors of Ubuntu running under QEMU. No word yet on "wipe macOS and install Debian", although supposedly the bootloader is unlocked on those computer-like devices, and even Torvalds himself is on record saying that he personally wants an ARMac running Linux. Driver development would be a new dimension in hell considering that I don't see Apple releasing documentations over the gory bits of their silicon - good luck coming up with GPU drivers for this thing, for example. But then, who buys a Mac just to run Linux? "macOS is Unix", they say...
    - "Virtualization" you say? Current virtualization products won't work under Rosetta 2 due to the latter not supporting their kernel mode bits (and even if it worked, performance would suck because Rosetta is an ahead-of-time translator - JIT workloads are its Achiles' heel due to its very nature). For ARM-on-ARM, expect usable QEMU soon. Parallels and VMWare already have announced that their strategy is Work In Progress, although I'm not sure if those will be ARM-on-ARM only or emulated x86. As for VirtualBox... well, Orrible® does not care for now, as expected. The product is x86-only by design, so it seems the Mac port will die the day Apple sells the last Intel Mac. Sadly, Virtualbox is already doomed anyway no matter the platform :/
    - On the FOSS camp, a lot of people is hard at work with ARMac ports. Moz://a already has announced that Firefux for Apple Silicon is coming Soon™. The Javascript frat boys are also working hard to bring their bloatfest too! I'm unable to find information about things like VLC, or emulators (Dolphin already has an ARM64 JIT, so half the work is already done there, at least)

    Nice computerizers, but calling them "a game-changer"? Too far fetched for now, IMO.
    x86 is here to stay, despite Intel attempts to kill it. On the flip side, maybe an ARM Ryzen would not be a bad idea...
    For as long as there are no PC-like defacto standards for ARM computers (yes, there are ACPI and UEFI for ARM, but no market forces mandating their use), there will be no x86 killer. Leave the lockdown for appliances, please.

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 20-12-01, 20:49 (revision 1)

    Post: #175 of 175
    Since: 10-30-18

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    Posted by tomman

    Nice computerizers, but calling them "a game-changer"? Too far fetched for now, IMO.

    I see a lot of comments elsewhere saying stuff like "wait till this gets into desktops/servers!"

    They're overlooking the fact that the M1 is only fast because it omits a lot of important and hard-to-implement stuff.

    First, let's look at that 16GB RAM. That's the limit because that's the technological limit. No SoC uses more than that because RAM can't get any smaller to fit in PoP tech. What happens if you need more and have to go off chip? Performance loss.

    Second, GPUs. Once again, they're in the same chip and current physical limits prevent anything better. Heat is a significant problem. Once they go external, they lose the shared RAM, coherency, and a huge performance advantage.

    Third, servers. They absolutely need more than 16GB of RAM. They need to communicate with other CPUs. The M1 has no bus, because everything is on-chip. Apple has to invent a new bus protocol or interconnect and somehow outperform the existing ones. And because this is external, the communications physically can't be as fast.

    Fourth, let's consider the competition:

    AMD: The Zen 2 laptop chips match performance at the same wattage. Apple has a significant space advantage because they monopolized TSMC 5nm. Zen 3 has a 20% increased IPC over Zen 2, and 5nm will benefit power consumption further.

    Other ARM: Surprise! Other companies already have ARM server chips like this that perform well, and they've already got solutions to the external infrastructure problem.

    TLDR, Apple has an embedded processor that's faster by virtue of being less general-purpose--it's perfectly made to fit the use case of a small personal device. It can only maintain its advantage and get faster by switching to smaller manufacturing nodes. Ironically, Apple once again has a product that has to get smaller every year to appease marketing.
    Posted on 20-12-20, 16:06 (revision 2)
    Dinosaur

    Post: #844 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 4 days
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    Wintendo Diez is eating your files. AGAIN.

    https://borncity.com/win/2020/12/18/windows-10-20h2-chkdsk-damages-file-system-on-ssds-with-update-kb4592438-installed/
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25482883

    Apparently CHKDSK trashes your filesystem if you choose to run it after installing a specific update, but so far the issue has been reported to happen on SSDs only. Supposedly the damage can be fixed if you run CHKDSK offline (from recovery media, perharps?).

    Assume that if your computer runs W10, your files are already lost. BACKUP YO' SHIT, PEOPLE!


    In other news, shingled HDDs are absolutely terrible for running VMs. I had to setup a minimal Debian VM over here (no X, no nada - just something that boots to a console), and oh boy... I/O performance tanked HARD during the package install phase which breezes over on any non-SMR drive (we're talking about sub-megabyte speeds!). Either my WD Palmer firmware I/O strategies are terrible (that 128MB cache is certainly not helping that much), VirtualBox is playing stupid and its specific disk I/O patterns are ill suited for shingles (not that unlikely), or shingled drives on consumer hardware is something that should never have happened in first place (likely!). I also deleted my W10 insider VM that loved to thrash HDD every time it gets booted on an standard non-SMR drive, as if I even dared to boot it on this WD, it would quickly render my machine unusable. No tears were shed during the process, and it was nice to claim those 40GB back~

    Also: don't neglect your weekly TRIMs - for dual boot users this can become a hassle as if you miss your weekly scheduled fstrim because you were running Wintendo, your next boot will be infuriatingly SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWW...

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 20-12-20, 16:24
    Snapped
    Post: #6 of 48
    Since: 12-19-20

    Last post: 1177 days
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    CHKDSK trashes your filesystem

    >implying NTFS works in the first place
    :lawl:

    Windows 10 on bare metal on a HDD is unbearable, not just a VM, lol. 98% HDD usage on a constant rate with 4GB RAM, presumably because it's hitting the page file constantly, which to me screams lack of optimisation and also shady shit going on in the background.

    In comparison, 8.1 and 7 SP1 both have this problem after installing post-2015 updates (particularly happens once you install updates that came after around early 2015, so around the GWX and Telemetry backporting/implementations), while 8.0 and Vista SP2 don't have this problem whatsoever (likely due to the lack of GWX and telemetry extensions), though later updates on the latter seem to bring the RAM usage up by about 100MB for no reason I could easily work out.

    Yes, Vista SP2 and 8.0 are actually the lightest of the NT 6.0 series, 8.1 is third, 7 SP1 is fourth and 10 is dead last by far and away... says a lot about Microsoft's marketing, huh. I never liked the way MS literally resold Vista as Windows 7 once the hardware was 'right', and besides, if you look at the actual kernel functions (as MSFN user 'win32' has been for Vista) there's been almost nothing added since Vista except pointless stub functions in 8.1/10 which are there seemingly only to aid towards artificially blocking out anything below those two systems, particularly 10.
    Posted on 20-12-21, 01:49
    Dinosaur

    Post: #845 of 1282
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 4 days
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    Windows still survives on my PCs due to games... I no longer play. For me, it's very slowly becoming a thing of the past, like television (I'm glad I gave up with TV for life).

    As for NTFS reliability... maybe I'm weird, but I've yet to lose a single file on any filesystem due to OS bugs. Except maybe on cellphones using FAT, because older dumbphones rarely (if ever) got any kind of QC on their firmwares, and filesystem-murdering glitches happened on every blue moon (I did recovered from mild filesystem corruption on my old RAZRs about once every few years or so, but I had to bring the heavy weapons to do so)

    However, I've lost files on NTFS/FAT/EXT/UDF due to good ol' hardware failures. The entire Western Digital Blue line and anything ever made by Suckgate after they switched from their highly reliable ST-10 architecture to their Ez-Break™ F3 arch of doom (or in laymen terms: anything up to 7200.10 on desktop drives was rock solid - starting with 7200.11, they switched to butter platters and firmware made out of pixie dust and broken Maxtor drives) are excellent for causing massive filesystem damage out of the blue (no pun intended, WD). And then, when my 1TB laptop Toshiba failed, I had to get used to repair considerable EXT4 FS damage every month, until I could replace the drive :/

    Protip: on a failing drive, never ever ever ever EVAR EVUR! run CHKDSK/fsck unless you want to lose your stuff forever! CLONE THAT SHIT ASAP, then clone the clone, and work on the clone's clone. This ensures you not only a safety net, but also maximizes your chances for a successful recovery.

    Oh, I can't say this enough:
    BACKUP YO' SHIT, PEOPLE!
    No matter the filesystem, OS, storage media, application, cloud, or phase of the moon, data loss is ALWAYS a possibility if you aren't careful!

    Note to myself: do my final round of HDD images for 2020 sometime before New Year's Eve.

    Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
    Posted on 20-12-21, 22:53
    Custom title here

    Post: #962 of 1150
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 6 days
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    Yeah, there's nothing really wrong with NTFS, aside from Linux users accessing it with glitchy drivers and then blaming NTFS when everything goes wrong.
    ...
    Or Linux users making feature comparisons between their newest incompatible file system and versions of NTFS from the 90s when there was time for Klax. And if we're going to do that... well, Windows doesn't use a file system developed by and named after a murderer.

    --- In UTF-16, where available. ---
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