• 2 Posts
  • 46 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: September 7th, 2023

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  • They’ll lose a bunch of good workers, but they bought VMware for the customer base, not the workers.

    Yeah, vmware has a pretty good stranglehold on companies using on-premises hardware.

    My last job was like this. We had basically 2 sysadmins (now 1) that managed hundreds of servers for about 30+ research scientists. There was no way in hell that people were going to adopt kubernetes (nobody in the entire team had any expertise in containerization, let alone k8s), IaaS was too expensive for their meager budgets, and it’s not like anyone is going to switch virtualization vendors.

    So anyway, the writing is clearly on the wall for them. Pretty soon, you can be sure that the prices are going to get cranked waayyyy up. Current vmware customers will likely find themselves in a pretty unfortunate position soon.

    Oh well. But this is what happens when you depend too much on commercial vendors.





  • Normally, you’d run a cluster of multiple servers to host such workloads, but imagine if all those resources were available on one physical hosts - it’d be a lot more effecient, since at the very least, you’d be avoiding all that network overhead and delays.

    Exactly! Imagine you have two services in a data center. If they have to communicate a lot with each other, then you would prefer them as close to each other as possible. Why? Well it’s because of the difference between sending a request over a network vs. just sending it to another process on the same host. It’s much more efficient in terms of latency and bandwidth. There are, of course, downsides and other other costs (like the fact that the cores that are handling the requests themselves are much less powerful), so you have to tailor your hardware allocation to your workloads. In general, if you’re CPU-bound, you would want more powerful CPUs (necessitating fewer cores per host for power reasons), and if you’re I/O bound, you want to reduce network latency as much as possible.

    Now imagine you have thousands of services. The network I/O can get pretty extreme. Plus, occasionally, you have requirements like the fact that any data traveling from one host to another must be encrypted. So if you can keep as many services as possible on a single host, you reduce a lot of that overhead as well.

    tl;dr: everything comes down to trade-offs and understanding the needs of your workloads, but in general, running 300 low power cores is probably indicative of an I/O-bound application and could hypothetically be much more efficient and cost-effective.


  • I’m not the guy you responded to, nor am I a kernel expert, but I have a few suggestions:

    1. Sites like phoronix and lwn will go into pretty low-level kernel details like this from time to time. You could consider subscribing to their RSS feeds or something like that

    2. Review a few open university courses on either Operating Systems or Computer Architecture. Short of that, you can also just browse wikipedia for articles on these kinds of topics. I find it enjoyable to read them from time to time

    3. Subscribe to the LKML (which is probably a lot more information than any single person can process, but sites like lwn and phoronix highlight/summarize from time to time)

    I would also say that there are a lot of people out there who have made contributions to the Linux kernel, including this specific portion of the Linux kernel. The person you’re responding to may even do it as a part of his/her day job (and it certainly reads like he does). It’s not that uncommon.

    And the last thing to keep in mind is that learning knowledge like this doesn’t happen overnight. You learn a lot more by learning small things over several years, compared to learning a lot in a short time. Don’t make it a goal to learn things like this - instead, try to make it something you enjoy doing, so you keep doing it over the years and learning more and more small bits of knowledge over time. Eventually, all the different pieces start fitting together and you too could mash out an excellent post like GP’s!


  • at least if Microsoft wants to be in compliance with EU rules on tracking

    “if” doing a lot of work in that sentence. Even if the EU comes down on them for this, the fines usually end up being less than the cost of doing business. And it’s not easy to prove in a court in the first place.

    I think companies know and understand this, so they just end up doing it anyway and pay the inevitable fine. And that assumes that the fine comes at all - even if they pay a fine for this practice, there are probably so many others that they’re not being punished for that it still makes sense for them to ignore it.

    I really hope this is something that gets addressed though, as things are getting absurdly out of hand by this point.



  • First thing is to not mount it at all. Any writes to the overwritten partition will corrupt your data.

    Second thing: install system rescue cd to a live usb and boot it. Look into testdisk and photorec. It’s been a while since I’ve had to use these tools, but I believe testdisk can restore the partition and photorec can find files in a file system that has been deleted. I would try running photorec first to save the recovered files to an external hard disk, and then testdisk to try restoring them. But disclaimer: it’s been a while since I’ve had to do this, so my memory is foggy here.

    Good luck!


  • Yup, he’s the absolute worst. I can’t think of a single product that Google has even improved during his tenure as CEO… let alone a product that he successfully launched on his own. All he can do is make existing products more expensive.

    Look at how he completely lost his shit when chatgpt was released - probably a huge part of the reason he lost it is cause he realized he’d have to actually do something useful instead of just squeezing more blood from the collective stone of all Google’s existing products. His claim to fame is creating Chrome. What fucking good is that? Web browsers have existed since the time he was born. There’s nothing to innovate there, and there never has been. It’s clear: he’s not an innovator.

    Whoever takes over after he’s gone is going to be in for a hell of a time. The only thing he’s created for Google is a shit-ton of anti-trust lawsuits. The company is an empty husk at this point. There’s nothing left for them to become.




  • You’re absolutely right, but we haven’t even touched on the worst part of ads, which is how they utterly poison your brain with annoying jingles, annoying colors, and stupid catch-phrases, all psychologically engineered to get stuck in your head.

    And let’s not even go into how they prey on your fears and insecurities, or deceive you into thinking you need things that you actually don’t. How they prey on vulnerable children, or the elderly, or brainwash small children into manipulating their parents against their best interests. Or how privacy has been shredded since the advent of behavioral tracking.

    I’m not exaggerating at all when I say that advertising is one of the world’s biggest psychological hazards. I would rather sit in an empty room with no stimulation whatsoever than let that poison into my brain.


  • The inevitable fate of any useful software that’s not GPL.

    When will people learn???

    Edit: Ironically, KHTML was originally LGPL. So modifications to KHTML were required to be open source by the license, but Chrome itself isn’t required to be open source (at least as far as I understand it, I am not an expert here). Nevertheless, if it were stronger GPL, then it probably wouldn’t have been impossible to write features like DRM in chrome. So I would have been a bit of an idiot to say that KHTML isn’t GPL (because LGPL is a weaker version of GPL), but in effect, the outcome is the same - all because of that big fat L at the beginning.



  • I’d really like to do some personal projects, both to learn new stuff and scratch my digital itches.

    Likewise. There are so many things I’d love to do. Hell, I’d even love to just practice and improve at things that I do in my day job. My current job requires golang and while I’m competent, I’m nowhere near the level of comfort that I want to be. And that’s just the language, there are other libraries, technologies, etc. where I’d like to improve too.

    But unfortunately, I have to pace myself. And that basically means I can never do anything computer-related in my spare time. A part of me hopes that some day, I can reduce my hours, or just find a very chill job that still pays decently so I can do more important things in my spare time. But for now, this is the choice that I’ve made.