Tuesday February 13th, 2024 NCLUG Meeting

[Bob Proulx]

j dewitt wrote:
> What: Tuesday February 13th, 2024 NCLUG Meeting

As has become typical we did not have a specific topic for tonight's
meeting.  We had ad-hoc talks.

We started with a discussion of the recent mailing list topics which
included ZFS caching.  Phil was not present however.

Bob reacted to some questions and gave a stream of conciousness talk
which I swear was a James Burke Connections worthy presentation of how
we got here for HP-UX, SunOS, Apollo computers, Mentor turnkey design
stations, math chips, product delivery, synchronous I/O operation,
implementation of SIGWINCH, and other fascinating things.

Mory talked about x86-64 v2 and x86-64 v3 and how IBM Red Hat has
declared they are going to compile everything, the entire userland,
using the v3 instruction set.  Meaning that all older hardware will be
unable to run IBM Red Hat compiled programs.  This is an intentional
decision to purposefully scrape off the older machines from their
support matrix.  With the underlying being AI applications will need
all new hardware and data centers will be all about AI applications
moving forward.  Also increasing density allows more compute resources
to be packed into data center area.

This became a discussion of municipal fiber installations here in Fort
Collins, in Longmont, and other less well thought out installations
such as the Google city fiber installations.

There was more but 7:30 had arrived and so we adjourned to continue
the discussions at Slyce Pizza.