HN user

throwawayish

804 karma
Posts1
Comments262
View on HN

I have a Linux-based router/firewall, but it's all configuration files and stuff. Something with fancy graphs and statistics would be nice :)

But I guess the money you saved on buying the CPU will outweigh the electricity costs even in countries where electricity is expensive.

Unless he's running 24/7 and paying way too much, yeah, by a large margin. Even these older Xeons weren't that bad at energy saving.

I had a similar chip since 2011 and only recently upgraded. For thread-heavy workloads even one of the fastest E3 Xeons is only like 40-50 % faster (if no special insns like AES can be used).

Safe to say it had superb price/performance (IIRC paid like 150 € for it).

Is there a router/firewall distro or administration tool for OpenBSD that's recommendable (e.g. like pfsense without all the enterprisey bloat, or like securityrouter without the licensing stuff)?

I recently powered an old Acer laptop on that I didn't use for a while. It informed me that "/dev/sda2 has gone 941 days without being checked", after it finished that and booting fully up (a quick affair, even on that machine with no SSD), the i3 status bar further informed me, that the battery still holds a 57 % charge :)

Intel probably intentionally advertises with their weirdo socket names (1156 -> 1155 -> 1150 -> 1151) just to confuse people more. Heck, they probably choose the pin counts in such a strange order just to be more confusing. It's not like they have usable names (Socket H, H2, ...).

Intel's quad cores are only really required for the pro Counter-Strike players who want 600fps at 1080p just to get the absolute latest frame.

The source engine isn't exactly the pinnacle of engine development.

It doesn't really know what to with more than 2ish cores, so you probably get more FPS by using a dual core instead of a quad core, which tend to go farther in terms of overclocking.

Or when Intel HT first appeared. Or when Intel HT reappeared. Or when the first dual core appeared. Every time Windows needed updates to perform properly; Linux also needed patches to adjust scheduling for Zen and also received patches in many other instances.

This is nothing new or outstanding at all.

The bigger E7 scratch the 200 W mark pretty hard and IBM already had POWER chips go beyond 200 W. However, cooling and power density are ... problematic. The same goes for accelerators. Supermicro will happily deliver you a 1U box with four pascals and two Xeon sockets, but there is no datacenter in the world were you can stuff 42 of those in a cabinet. [Which doesn't mean that these don't make sense]

However, high end systems don't lend themselves well to mass-deployment (i.e. scale out).

I think Naples is a very exciting development, because:

- 1S/2S is obviously where the pie is. Few servers are 4S.

- 8 DDR4 channels per socket is twice the memory bandwidth of 2011, and still more than LGA-36712312whateverthenumberwas

- First x86 server platform with SHA1/2 acceleration

- 128 PCIe lanes in a 1S system is unprecedented

All in all Naples seems like a very interesting platform for throughput-intensive applications. Overall it seems that Sun with it's Niagara-approach (massive number of threads, lots of I/O on-chip) was just a few years too early (and likely a few thousands / system to expensive ;)

Actually Windows can and does use NTFS transactions (TxF) in the Installer and Updater code, so the probability of non-recoverable damage should be lower (which is also my experience; power off a Linux machine during updates and you are pretty much guaranteed to have many packages with empty files, partial file trees and so on; power off a Windows machine and it probably is still fine, but sometimes you get weird issues where it can't properly reinstall/deinstall some updates to try again).

I don't see the "does at length argue about the health risks of X-Rays emitted" in the article. It discusses them and concludes that they are widely considered safe.

CRTs can emit a small amount of X-ray radiation as a result of the electron beam's bombardment of the shadow mask/aperture grille and phosphors. The amount of radiation escaping the front of the monitor is widely considered not to be harmful. The Food and Drug Administration regulations in 21 C.F.R. 1020.10 are used to strictly limit, for instance, television receivers to 0.5 milliroentgens per hour (mR/h) (0.13 µC/(kg·h) or 36 pA/kg) at a distance of 5 cm (2 in) from any external surface; since 2007, most CRTs have emissions that fall well below this limit.

A PC (yes, true, technically Macs are now PCs, but they're still special PCs, or at least Apple says that) has mainly the advantage that it's cheaper while being faster. Now, to be fair, I don't like to use laptops (they're slow, limited and annoying), so I mostly refer to desktop hardware (best bang/buck ratio, easy to make very, very silent, very fast, easily extended).

Quarrel over operating systems is pretty pointless, if it doesn't run natively, slap a hypervisor on it and run whatever you like in a VM; for me that'd be a Linux or BSD, I'm not really opinionated there (although certain things run faster in Linux due to experience).

(Obviously I don't grok the laptop lifestyle, I don't understand the "work everywhere" mentality, in fact, I don't want it at all. It's called work place for a reason - at least for me. I do have a laptop (or half a dozen, who has time to keep record?), the mainly used one is a Getac unit with a carrying handle that weights ~3 kilos or so; at least it's silent, has a superbright screen and a battery that's larger than most ultrabooks by volume ;)