@onepict the mental gymnastics I have seen done to justify *not* using Nextcloud (for example) is truly something.

@rysiek years ago the overall corporate org of the place I interned at wanted to get rid of a bespoke Oracle system for one department to Opentext.

The department kept resisting and persuaded the new leader of the project to switch them back. I'm still amazed that they persuaded him given the fact it pretty much was a mandate from Head Office in the US.

Competence has never entered these discussions, its vibes and a lack of , or aversion to training.

@Curator Thank you so much for taking the action (and the flak) to back up your principles. We all need to be doing this, but I'm aware that for mods the burden of that can be a lot. Being anti-racist for the accolades is both gross and wildly misinformed, and it's clear (*gestures to some comments*), that wasn't your goal. Thank you, anyway.

@globalmuseum if you bring a librarian home and have this in your office, you're having sex

@alx It felt miscast, and I’m *really* sensitive to janky production design (too-obvious mattes/bad CGI/etc.).

The urge to keep all the tabs open is not a recent thing.
Pictured: a 300-year-old library tool that enabled a researcher to have seven books open at once, yet conveniently nearby (Palafoxiana Library, Puebla)
@unmlawlibrary #globalmuseum #library #libraries #reading #history

Just a tabby taking over the cat shelves.
#cats

> Coles said threatening situations across the nation have increased by 65 per cent over the same period.

It should be noted that Coles made 44 billion in revenue last year, tested facial tracking, implemented all those stupid barriers, a bazillion cameras, prompts on self checkouts make you feel like a thief. They use abusive techniques to rort your data and money from the moment you enter the store. Basically treating everyone like shit and making common groceries more expensive than they need to be.

But you know who the problem is? The people stealing to get by. Fuck Coles. Pitty piece to get the police to do their security job for them, which they wouldn't need if they didn't shit in everyone's face.

@otte_homan @ifixcoinops actually have been doing that over the past few weeks, I live in Canberra and my parents have been in Broken Hill. So the phone chats have been mostly about the weather.

@krono @whitequark

SPARC had an open ISA. Leon was a series of 32-bit SPARC backed by ESA. Sun also opened the UltraSPARC T1. Both were fairly low-end cores (the T1 was okay in aggregate but pretty slow per core).

SPARC had a bunch of interesting ideas. Register windows are one of those ideas that was good on simple cores, annoying on more complex ones, but I think would actually be nice on a very high-end core if you nicely integrate it with register rename and asynchronous spill, but not quite the way SPARC specifies it. SPARC had a simple SIMD extension, but it was roughly comparable to MMX, nothing newer.

SPARC at Sun / Oracle stagnated because the Rock team (building high-per-thread performance cores) and the Niagara team (building massively multithreaded systems) hated each other. To add anything new to the architecture required both to agree, but if one agreed the other would disagree on principle. So the architecture is quite a nice '90s design that hasn't evolved.

After the Oracle acquisition, everyone got quite nervous that Oracle probably had some patents on things that might be necessary for good SPARC implementations and would be very aggressive about enforcing them.

POWER is more fun. When I was at Microsoft, we had a choice for first-party cores for Azure (later cancelled in favour of first-party SoCs using Arm-licensed cores) of:

• Buy AMD and do x86. AMD's market cap was $30 B, so easily affordable (Microsofts' was around $850 B), but probably impossible to get past the regulators. They were already tested at-scale in Azure and Xbox, not clear what would be useful differentiation.
• An in-house ISA. We went a really long way along this and concluded that we could do 0-20% (depending on workload) better performance than AArch64 by learning from their experience. The cost of this would be huge for the software ecosystem and most customers weren't willing to pay for performance so the business case wasn't there.
• AArch64 is a nice mature ecosystem (not as mature as x86-64 but well supported by a bunch of things), a well-designed ISA, and Arm has nice agreements with architecture licensees that mean you can collaborate on designing a feature and be first to market with it, but also know that other people will adopt it so your customers will use it knowing that there's no long-term potential for lock-in.
• RISC-V. Discounted because the number of extensions you'd need to turn it into a competitive server architecture was close to designing a custom architecture. The ecosystem was immature and so this had no real benefits relative to a custom architecture.
• POWER. Visual Studio could target PowerPC and Windows could run on it because of the Xbox 360. IBM supported Linux and so a fairly good ecosystem. OpenPOWER was, apparently, an open-source ISA, so this gave us the benefits of RISC-V but with a mature server architecture (and not just the ISA, all of the RAS things for POWER were mature because IBM knows how to build mainframes).

The problem with POWER was that we never got IBM to say what 'open source' meant. Is there a license for all patents required to implement the ISA? If so, does this apply if we made changes? Is there a process for extending the architecture in a way that won't conflict with other vendors (or, at least, is discoverable)?

I suspect we'd have gone with POWER if IBM's lawyers had been willing to give Microsoft's lawyers a straight answer to pretty much any question.

The patent issue is also a problem for RISC-V. Members of RVI have to disclose IP for extensions that they participate in designing, but that's it. There's no defensive patent portfolio for RISC-V and there are a lot of patents in techniques for implementing high-performance microarchitectures.

Arm has the Arm Partner Agreement that gives some quite impressive protection. It not only gives all partners access to all patents owned by other partners that are required to implement the architecture (not necessarily with the most efficient implementation), it also gives Arm the ability to use any of those patents to sue anyone who sues any Arm partner for anything necessary to implement the architecture.

A former colleague pointed out that Arm gets to specify what their patent shield covers, which gives them a fairly easy path to coopting the RISC-V ecosystem: they could bless a set of extensions and say 'Any Arm partner implementing this is covered by patent shield'. Anyone who isn't an Arm licensee is screwed.

🥹 Watching this monarch butterfly pollinating Tithonias was probably the highlight of my week!

🌱 I ordered native milkweed to help support these beauties.

#bloomscrolling #tithonia

Report: Francesca Albanese says it is “absolutely urgent to establish an international protection presence in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem & Gaza."

"Third states have an obligation, per the ICJ, to act to end Israel’s unlawful occupation."

The UN's 'Uniting for Peace' mechanism allows the General Assembly to step in "when the Security Council is unable to act due to a lack of unanimity."

https://aje.news/rucung?update=4879182

#USPol #EUPol #UnitingForPeace #UN #ICJ #Palestine #Gaza #news .

I can’t really explain this but ghost dubs records taste like concrete #LunchtimeListening https://ghostdubs.bandcamp.com/album/damaged

@nileane le vieux est responsable d l etat ds lequel est la France et pire dela misère à Madagascar ou lorsque j y vais ier fois tous les voyants sont aux verts pour les mes alter&go malgaches
On taf🤑
Fin 95 alors ke mes 3 tites tonnes dgeodes remplies parfois d1 sable bien sympatik😉😁😊j'y crois pas qd la mafia bi natio me dit ke c la dernière fois ke j exporte sans eux " deba" va revenir et effectivement avril 96 la cogema caisse noire du parti socialiste à le monopole d exports
Le vieux pige

Huh, I don't think I've ever seen this recommendation called out in a switching power supply IC datasheet before?

"Ideally, the saturation current rating of the inductor is at least as large as the high-side switch current limit,
IHS_LIMIT (see Section 8.5). This ensures that the inductor does not saturate even during a short circuit on the output. When the inductor core material saturates, the inductance falls to a very low value, causing the inductor current to rise very rapidly. Although the valley current limit, ILS_LIMIT, is designed to reduce the risk of current runaway, a saturated inductor can cause the current to rise to high values very rapidly, this can lead to component damage, so do not allow the inductor to saturate”

When I first woke up, I heard a warbler through the window. Not sure which one, it was a quiet murmuring that my brain just immediately categorized as "warbler". But by the time I got outside, all I could see or hear were starlings, grackles, blue jays and crows...

@adamgreenfield interesting, what was that you didn’t like about Silo?

@catsalad sorry is for logging out

Monday Morning value sketches.

#drawing #marker #sketch