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All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

zdnet.com

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Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

#191

Post by njarboe »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #140
greymeister wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So let's accept as a hypothetical we do cap wealth. We all get to vote how much people are allowed to have. Yay. The people who have more have to do what exactly? They have to leave the country with the fear of extradition at some point? They have to give away their excess, but who gets/takes the money? They go to jail? Who enforces/regulates that people are only earning/saving what they are allowed? It's sounds virt…

> who gets/takes the money? The default option is putting it in the government budget. Seems obvious to me. If we reach the point where this cap-tax is able to pay for the entire government by itself, and we still have extra, then we can worry about where the rest goes. > Who enforces/regulates that people are only earning/saving what they are allowed? The IRS.

We don't have a tax on wealth in the US at the moment. Implement a tax on wealth with a 100% take over say 1 million? This would just be basically the nationalization of most of the companies and much of the real estate in the US. We could try communism/socialism at this scale, but it has not worked out well in other places it was tried.

Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

#192

Post by njarboe »

yequalsx wrote: post #123
greymeister wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So let's accept as a hypothetical we do cap wealth. We all get to vote how much people are allowed to have. Yay. The people who have more have to do what exactly? They have to leave the country with the fear of extradition at some point? They have to give away their excess, but who gets/takes the money? They go to jail? Who enforces/regulates that people are only earning/saving what they are allowed? It's sounds virt…

It doesn't get ugly fast. The tax rate for the wealthy used to be 90%. There was a time in the country where it was recognized that robber barons were not in our collective interest. This is not an unsolvable problem.

90% tax on income not wealth. Our current system already punishes income earning over wealth growth and much gaming goes on by the rich to keep wealth growing while keeping taxable income low.

Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

#193

Post by greymeister »

zanny wrote: post #135
foxylad wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, it's just too hard. We'll leave it to the billionaires to solve - I know one who says he's the only one who can fix it. Sorry, my cynicism is showing. But we already have the organisation (IRS) in place to regulate people's income, and they already do exactly this job. Yes, we do need to find an impartial way to redistribute the wealth, but we have working models of an array of options around the world.…

This hints at the ideological chicken and egg problem here - wealth centralization breeds power centralization which breeds state corruption. The corruption of power through centralized wealth is presented as defenders of such wealth as an indicator of the states inability to impartially control such corruption. The trick is the corruption already happened. The money was already too centralized, and has already done…

Reducing power centralization is the key issue. Lobbying is cost-effective, and it shouldn't be.

Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

#194

Post by astrodust »

mschuster91 wrote: post #65
astrodust wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Cray and SGI were still in the game there was a lot more operating system diversity. Apple's Xserve cluster was an interesting experiment but it never really went anywhere.

> Apple's Xserve cluster was an interesting experiment but it never really went anywhere. A pity Apple does not manufacture real servers any more. With the old cheesegrater-mac-pros, which were the last thing available after the Xserve death, you at least have the option to put in 4 disks and do a RAID setup, but no remote power/console management or a serial port...

They've acknowledged the "trash can" design was a mis-step and they're working to correct it, so there's that.

Competing in the server market was very difficult for Apple, their needs are often radically different from consumer or even "pro"-consumer. They realized the couldn't "win" at servers, so backing out was the best bet for them.

Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

#195

Post by greymeister »

njarboe wrote: post #191
Dylan16807 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> who gets/takes the money? The default option is putting it in the government budget. Seems obvious to me. If we reach the point where this cap-tax is able to pay for the entire government by itself, and we still have extra, then we can worry about where the rest goes. > Who enforces/regulates that people are only earning/saving what they are allowed? The IRS.

We don't have a tax on wealth in the US at the moment. Implement a tax on wealth with a 100% take over say 1 million? This would just be basically the nationalization of most of the companies and much of the real estate in the US. We could try communism/socialism at this scale, but it has not worked out well in other places it was tried.

> This would just be basically the nationalization of most of the companies and much of the real estate in the US. We could try communism/socialism at this scale, but it has not worked out well in other places it was tried.

That's the "ugly" part. And it gets really ugly.

Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

#196

Post by astrodust »

rootbear wrote: post #186
astrodust wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Cray and SGI were still in the game there was a lot more operating system diversity. Apple's Xserve cluster was an interesting experiment but it never really went anywhere.

Both Cray and SGI (now HPE) are both still very much in the game. Their systems all run Linux.

I mean with their respective UNIX-like operating systems.

There was a time when you'd find server rooms with a mix of AIX, HPUX, IRIX, SunOS, VMS, A/UX, and Netware and that was considered normal. In an academic environment you'd have someone running Plan9 or BSD some other quirky thing as well just because.

Then Windows and Linux came along and started to kill off this diversity one system at a time.

Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

#197

Post by yequalsx »

njarboe wrote: post #192
yequalsx wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't get ugly fast. The tax rate for the wealthy used to be 90%. There was a time in the country where it was recognized that robber barons were not in our collective interest. This is not an unsolvable problem.

90% tax on income not wealth. Our current system already punishes income earning over wealth growth and much gaming goes on by the rich to keep wealth growing while keeping taxable income low.

Generally when talking about tax rates in this context it's about the income tax. There is no wealth tax in the U.S. I don't think there ever has been one either. Reagan believed the tax on labor should be less than the tax on capital. I agree with him on this but the current Republican party has deviated quite far from where even Reagan stood.

Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

#198

Post by mschuster91 »

astrodust wrote: post #194
mschuster91 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple's Xserve cluster was an interesting experiment but it never really went anywhere. A pity Apple does not manufacture real servers any more. With the old cheesegrater-mac-pros, which were the last thing available after the Xserve death, you at least have the option to put in 4 disks and do a RAID setup, but no remote power/console management or a serial port...

They've acknowledged the "trash can" design was a mis-step and they're working to correct it, so there's that. Competing in the server market was very difficult for Apple, their needs are often radically different from consumer or even "pro"-consumer. They realized the couldn't "win" at servers, so backing out was the best bet for them.

> They realized the couldn't "win" at servers, so backing out was the best bet for them.

The need for servers is there, or otherwise the "macOS Server" would not be in the App Store. It actually is really nice, it provides everything needed for a business: LDAP, file server, mail, calendar, webserver, TimeMachine centralized, print server, ... - but how am I supposed to recommend this to a customer when Apple does not have any kind of HA ensurance (dual power supply, remote management, auto power on after AC loss, proper SNMP support, Wake On LAN), a way to attach more than 4 disks (or a real RAID, not a software one like CoreStorage does, and they cut out RAID management of diskutil anyway) or actually hardware that I can mount in a rack without wasting immense amounts of (expensive) space?

For the small-business scale, Microsoft actually has the SBS Server licenses, which are not tied to any specific vendor and are exactly the same tools used at big companies so a company can hire any competent consultant/admin for management.

Hell, they could simply ask Dell, HP or whomever to sell a specific server as "macOS Server compatible", charge a bit of money for the OS and that's it - people would rush to buy it, and if only to run a CI/CD environment for mobile app building without having to run it on non-DC-grade hardware!

Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

#199

Post by Dylan16807 »

greymeister wrote: post #195
njarboe wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't have a tax on wealth in the US at the moment. Implement a tax on wealth with a 100% take over say 1 million? This would just be basically the nationalization of most of the companies and much of the real estate in the US. We could try communism/socialism at this scale, but it has not worked out well in other places it was tried.

> This would just be basically the nationalization of most of the companies and much of the real estate in the US. We could try communism/socialism at this scale, but it has not worked out well in other places it was tried. That's the "ugly" part. And it gets really ugly.

Yeah, nationalizing all companies would be ugly.

And has nothing to do with taxing personal wealth over 10 million (or other arbitrary big number).

Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

#200

Post by zanny »

derefr wrote: post #109
Sevii wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor people are allowed to legally gamble away their money in situations where its 100% known that they will lose it all.

This is kind of why commercial casinos are illegal in 30 states, why racetrack betting is illegal in 29 states, why online gambling is illegal in 46(!) states, and why the only legal (non-charitable) lotteries are state-run. It's not leftover morality laws; it's that monitoring commercial gambling to protect against exploitation of the poor is a really hard problem, one we haven't really solved. Some states choose to…

Meanwhile, buying loot chests in Android games is perfectly legal and lets people spend thousands of dollars in a gambling stupor and get nothing for it.
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