Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

HP Unveils Mini Workstation

www8.hp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 238 posts

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#221

Post by heyNeato »

SwellJoe wrote: post #141
Tempest1981 wrote: post #25

Tangent: I'm curious about HP's hostname taxonomy. I.e. What products or content live under www8 vs www2 or www7. http://www8.hp.com/.. .

I did some caching/content distribution/load balancing work for HP many years ago (maybe 10 years ago, now). The names are (or were) geographic and divisional. Their infrastructure is (or was) pretty old school. While they do have load balancing and such, it is often of the form of redirects based on locality or other information. People in Hong Kong or China starting on HP.com in the US would find themselves bounced…

I don't know why I find that explanation so much more reassuring than my assumption that it was simply a really sloppy version control hack, to denote upgraded deployments.

Even though there are a bazillion other ways to codify DNS subdomains by region, including some sort of reasonable vernacular for the region, I'm glad it's about locales, regions and perhaps even content delivery or timezones maybe, moreso than version numbers.

Every time I get redirected to something like www2.example.com, I've often wondered which obstinate jerk would refuse to move whatever's on www proper, forcing the entire world to suffer eternity in a purgatory named www2.

Hopefully, all those times, it just turned out that I was in North America, region #2, and maybe region #1 was Antarctica for some reason.

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#222

Post by Sanddancer »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #43
detaro wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and ECC RAM!

As someone who has purchased ECC SO-DIMM form factor RAM in the past, it is very much not cheap. (it was basically 4x the cost of ECC DIMM sticks)

That seems to have gotten better of late, as more systems use ECC sodimms. Poking around seems to suggest a price difference of $5-$10 a stick, and that's pretty constant regardless of memory size.

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#223

Post by thirdsun »

hueving wrote: post #218
thirdsun wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely - my main computer is an iMac, which will soon be replaced by another iMac (5K), however as someone who builds and upgrades a gaming rig as well, I always look with envy towards the very affordable world of PCs. I'd love to be able to slap macOS on custom build computers for a fraction of the price that is attached to Apple hardware.

Are hackintoshes still feasible?

I'm not sure, but I think it's not for me. It always sounded like an option with lots of compromises and obstacles and I'm not really interested in that.

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#224

Post by Sanddancer »

Bud wrote: post #90
xlayn wrote: post #61

HP Mac Mini. This is actually interesting, when Apple switched to max 16 Gb of ram on their PRO line, HP throws something with PRO graphics and Xeon.

Apples and oranges. Intel's mobile Skylake processors don't support more than 16GB of low-power RAM; Apple didn't have anything to do with that limitation. This is a boxy desktop, not a mobile machine.

Intel's mobile processors like the ones in the Macbook Pro support up to 64 megs of ram. Their ultra low power cpus only support 16 gigs, but the line in question goes up to 64, even with ddr3l ram.

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#225

Post by unwind »

wmf wrote: post #190
effie wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you able to "see" the single bit errors? I had an ECC machine but I couldn't find any indication that ECC was working or that any bit errors happened. Reading this I thought the best I could do is to believe that workstation with ECC modules and Xeon will have functioning ECC: "Unfortunately, we have found that there is no consistent, conclusive way to determine if ECC RAM is working properly. ...We've actual…

Linux has drivers that receive ECC notifications from the hardware and the edac-util command should display them. You can cause bit errors with a hair dryer and see if Linux recognizes them: http://bluesmoke.sourceforge.net/heat_gun.html

If you think that link is about hairdryers, I really suggest you do some shopping.

You'll find less smoldering, better smell, and less pain if you use an actual hair dryer to dry your hair (rather than a heat gun, which the page is about).

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#226

Post by pYQAJ6Zm »

Tomte wrote: post #212
Declanomous wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm putting money on something to do with ZFS. Turns out bit flips are significantly more common than had been thought in the past, which makes a error-correcting file system somewhat risky to use with normal non-ecc ram.

In the safety industry everyone knows that bit flips (SEUs) are way more common than laypeople believe. And that's for embedded microcontrollers and RAM that aren't nearly pushing it to extremely small processes. Let me just quote IEC 61508, where "FIT" means 10e-9 h: Causes of soft errors are: (1) Alpha particles from package decay, (2) Neutrons, (3) external EMI noise, (4) Internal cross-talk. External EMI noise is…

So, for let’s say 1 TB, if my calculations follow this correctly, that would be between ~6 and ~10 SEU/h.

I am worried about my personal backups now.

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#227

Post by Tomte »

pYQAJ6Zm wrote: post #226
Tomte wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the safety industry everyone knows that bit flips (SEUs) are way more common than laypeople believe. And that's for embedded microcontrollers and RAM that aren't nearly pushing it to extremely small processes. Let me just quote IEC 61508, where "FIT" means 10e-9 h: Causes of soft errors are: (1) Alpha particles from package decay, (2) Neutrons, (3) external EMI noise, (4) Internal cross-talk. External EMI noise is…

So, for let’s say 1 TB, if my calculations follow this correctly, that would be between ~6 and ~10 SEU/h. I am worried about my personal backups now.

This is for (S)RAM. I don't know the event rates for flash off the top of my head, but I'd expect them to be at least an order of magnitude lower.

But take 16GB. With 1000 FIT you get pretty much \pi events in one day.

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#229

Post by homarp »

jpt4 wrote: post #219
bzbarsky wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The #1 consumer use case that would benefit from error-correction would be not having remote exploits due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer

Thank you, that is a compelling argument.

the wikipedia page says: " Tests show that simple ECC solutions, providing single-error correction and double-error detection (SECDED) capabilities, are not able to correct or detect all observed disturbance errors because some of them include more than two flipped bits per memory word."

http://serverfault.com/questions/674214/what-is-the-rowhamme... adds "ECC effectively turns the Row Hammer exploit into a DOS attack. 1bit errors will be corrected by ECC, and as soon as a non-correctable 2bit error is detected the system will halt (assuming SECDED ECC)."

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#230

Post by anentropic »

digler999 wrote: post #83
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #15

Seeing stuff like this on HN brings excitement back into tech for me. New hardware and debatably a challenger to the Mac mini and Intel NUC? Very cool stuff.

Mac mini ? How come nobody has mentioned the mac pro[1] (aka the traschcan-shaped mac workstation) which is much more closely related to this [1] http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/

except the price
Post reply on HN