SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
For most people, hardware problems and slow deliveries are annoying. But if you're the person behind the operating system that underpins much of the cloud, Android and IoT, your problems could easily become a big issue for lots of other people too.
Linux creator Linus Torvalds told a kernel contributor on Sunday that he's doing merges "very slowly" from one of his laptops as he waits for "new ECC memory DIMMS to arrive".
[...] "It was literally a DIMM going bad in my machine randomly after 2.5 years of it being perfectly stable. Go figure. Verified first by booting an old kernel, and then with memtest86+ overnight," he explains in a Linux kernel developer mailing list spotted by The Register.
[...] In early 2020, during the first wave of pandemic restrictions, Torvalds switched his main 'frankenbox' PC from one with an i9-9900k to one equipped with a monster 32-core AMD Threadripper 3970x-based processor. It was, as he said then, the first time in 15 years that his desktop wasn't Intel-based. As a consequence of moving off Intel, his 'allmodconfig' test builds accelerated by a factor of three.
[...] Torvalds last year took a swipe at Intel for its ECC memory policies. "Intel has been detrimental to the whole industry and to users because of their bad and misguided policies wrt [with regards to] ECC. Seriously," he wrote.
Torvalds has also been using an Apple M1 silicon laptop for some development work, thanks to the Asahi Linux project, which has been working on bringnig the Arch Linux distro to Apple's M1 architecture.
(Score: 1) by liquibyte on Friday October 14 2022, @06:11PM (1 child)
Those self same people will also justify the need for a thousand dollar phone to look at tik tok videos. My comment stands, all memory should by default be error checking regardless of the price differential.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday October 14 2022, @08:02PM
>Those self same people will also justify the need for a thousand dollar phone to look at tik tok videos.
Hey, I resemble that remark (a little)... my phone before last was a Motorola G Power ($149 - no contract), and something happened to the ($8) case so I started using it without the case and after a month I dropped it and cracked the screen. Would have just gotten another but they weren't conveniently available somehow, so I "cheaped out" and got the Moto G Play ($99 NC) and... damn, I've never had a slow phone before, but this one is just a dog - IMO completely without reason looking at the hardware specs, but something about it just really brings on the lag. Then it also has no Macro camera, which actually makes a difference to me a few dozen times a year... so, after 6-8 months of suffering with this dog, I found unlocked 2021 Moto G Powers on sale for: $149... and so, I'm actually replacing my phone before the last one died for the first time ever in my life. Now, what can I do with the G Play after it's not a daily driver....? I wonder if the Google Fi data only SIMs support hot spot... probably not.
Anyway, everybody has their priorities, and those thousand dollar tik tok scrollers gotta flash the fruit to keep up with their friends - the majority of them wouldn't want to know what ECC is or what it does, it would make them look smart in bad ways for their social standing. Would they pay an extra $50 to get the phone with ECC memory? Probably not. Marketing wonks have decided that they probably won't pay an extra $5 - either that, or they figure that by the time normal RAM goes flaky they'll be selling them a replacement phone, so: win win, lower costs up front AND faster replacement cycle.
Yes, I wish that ECC was at least an option, if not standard, on everything that uses RAM. Not holding my breath, though. We'll be lucky if USB-C actually gets standardized as the charging cord for the majority of our gadgets, before USB-D comes along.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end