They forked PHP as HHVM, optimized the hell of it, and do some recompilation to C++, yeah. But you can optimize it only so much.
PHP is a shithouse -- and I don't mean a building you defecate in, I mean one whose structural material is dried excrement (as still done by some tribes). It might have been adequate for a literal "Personal Home Page" with little traffic, but trying to throw more hardware at it to get it to scale to modern Facebook workloads is a fool's errand. It's kind of like banks running unmanageable COBOL code from 1960 on emulators.
"sob story"?!? "anecdotes"?!? How exactly do you expect the system to work if, in the middle of Europe (rather than an autarchic place like Cuba) you pay doctors $7.3k/year, and provide a similar level of funding to stuff other than wages? It's only work ethic of some heroic doctors thanks to which _some_ of them didn't emigrate to saner parts of Europe yet.
Such "anecdotes" can be shared by anyone around me who also tried going to the govt doctors our taxes paid for.
I'm in a single payer system too and have had vastly better experiences than you. What does that prove?
That your system is not mature yet? It inevitably will (it's a cost center than can be raided both for other projects and for graft). Just wait a couple of government changes more...
Tax means, someone else has the money and can spent it now. Inflation means, the money is gone.
Nope -- there's no inflation without an increase of the money supply to economy size ratio. The economy expands at a very fast rate (increases of productivity due to automation, effectiveness, population size, education, etc) yet inflation keeps going.
And that's because our rulers keep printing money. The government does so literally, the Big Finance does so by fractional reserve, but the result is the same. $100 in old money is worth exactly as much as $100 in newly minted money or $100 in credit, yet only the first was actually earned. The second and third extract value from honest workers/scientists/merchants/managers/servicers without providing any benefit to the society. The actual gain (be it from directly producing widget X, getting it to a customer, organizing work, or providing for the workers) is still $100 yet it is suddenly declared to be worth "$300". And only $33 goes to people who produced/invented/distributed/organized/bartendered, while the rest gets taxed. Taxes that go to the government at least can be argued to pay for govt spending, some of which you actually want -- but that doesn't mean the money extracted from you differs in any real way from you'd pay as an explicit tax.
A better question would be: "if productivity increased immensely since 1970s, yet real wages have decreased, where has all that value gone to?".
Find a way to dislodge the value diverted to High Frequency Fraud, financial schemes, and other legally allowed graft, and you'll have not only money to fund UBI, but even a comfortable life for everyone.
Current proposals extract yet more money from the middle class. That's not going to work. They're only a scheme to placate plebs with a dole while diverting attention from the real cause.
Money created without limit benefits 2 groups: the source of the money (who gets to buy with it without significant cost)
This. This is why the Big Finance fights so hard to have fractional reserve lending not only legal but even preferred. Money that's produced from thin air still works same as any other money.
and net debtors (who see their debt inflated into less real value.)
This has a significant effect only on long-term debt.
Whether money that comes from the government is printed or acquired by theft, makes very little difference in the amount of damage it causes.
Printing money works exactly same as a tax on holding any assets denominated as money -- only paperwork differs. If inflation is 5%, you just got taxed 5% on the whole value of all your savings.
Look around you at the next NYE party and you will see just how wrong you are. Most people queue them up ahead of time and lots of people are hitting Send as the ball drops...
Ouch. At least there are no "smart"phone zombies so bad anywhere near me, neither among low-tech nor high-tech friends.
hint to devs, if someone has typed a partial message transmit that to the server in case they come back and hit send later
And that'll speed up that 14 words message... how?
On a *normal* day, Messenger and Whats App process over 60 billion messages a day
Thanks for the correction, I based my estimates on numbers in the article's summary.
Come on man, you know that modern web API's are not that compact, and we are talking Facebook here. You are off by an order of magnitude at least, way more when you stop to think that on NYE way more people are sending images also... One single response to a post on Facebook I just did with 14 words had a 9.5kb body going out, and a 21.2 k response.
I'm talking about the problem to solve not their implementation. Of course Facebook runs a PHP script that runs a bunch of NPM modules to produce a 1.5MB response, but after you cut down that bloat, you can get the same result with orders of magnitude less resources.
I mean, we have massive amounts of data that single payer healthcare would be infinitely superior.
As a means to let every random government's official's nephews live a comfortable life, perhaps. Not for people who would have to suffer it, and have to pay a second time to actually go to doctor.
We do have single payer healthcare in Poland. A couple of years in June I had something bad with a foot, with pain so bad that pretty much prevented me from walking more than ~50 meters. Can't read the doc's handwriting but it was something something acute inflammation and swelling of tendons. The government-run fully-paid-in-taxes clinic had me register, wait a week then spend most of the day sitting in a queue for the first-contact doctor. Who was not even allowed to schedule actual diagnostics, but could write a referral to a real doctor. With closest available appointments in January. After which, as I got told, waiting times for physiotherapy are 18-24 months. Thus, I visited a commercial doctor -- who needed just a pill, an ointment and a few days of 30-minute physiotherapy sessions to get my foot back into perfect health.
Another time a neurologist had me sent to MRI, with a suspicion of something urgent. With such an adnotation, the waiting time was only 10 months. Or the next day if you pay -- on the very same machine, staffed by the same personnel, who stay idle the vast majority of the time. The govt has a limit for every hospital for the number of procedures it pays for -- no matter that the machines have already been bought for massive amounts of taxpayers' money.
I heard some specialists like cardiologists had even worse waiting times than that.
But, that was a few years ago, before the public health care pretty much collapsed. With the new government, healthcare funds got raided so badly that a doctor after studies, internship and a few years of experience (so called "resident") earns 2300PLN/month =~ $7300/year. No, I did not make a mistake by two orders of magnitude -- that's the yearly pay in Poland. No wonder most doctors left the country, while ordinary people have to pay twice -- once for govt health"care" then for commercial service. At least most decent employers include commercial medical coverage among benefits you get -- no one will refund you the taxes, though.
So if you want to have the same in your country, please, go ahead. Or don't, I don't wish your compatriots ill.
The vast majority of messages avoid that peak: hardly anyone waits for the exact midnight to send a message. So the load gets smeared onto quite a chunk of time.
The engineering problem boils down to: send short messages between pairs of arbitrary sources and destinations (although usually the source and destination are close to each other), with message size usually within 50-100 bytes. Let's be generous and say that with metadata they fit within 1500 bytes. Hmm... I wonder, have we seen such a problem before?
Let's estimate the flow: after everyone raises the toast, exchanges hugs and kisses, says greetings, then sits down with the phone -- sending, let's say, 10 messages. This should take around half an hour. You get 300K messages per second. Not so impressive...
And, if your guests disregard parties being explicitly disallowed by rules they signed, and the party gets rowdy, what you expect is a few empty bottles in the garden, cigarette butts in a flowerpot and an used condom in the bedroom. Not a commercial enterprise that organizes the party and charges admission for entry.
Counterpoint: since May 2016, a French hosting company called OVH has been offering ARM-based servers under the brand Scaleway.
Yeah, but both the CPU speed and I/O are atrocious compared to what one would expect. I'm still paying for one but use it solely as secondary DNS -- it can't deliver more than ~30Mbps of static content, and CPU-wise my Odroid-U2 from 2012 runs circles around it.
Likewise, Graviton is laughably slow even for the oomph-to-price ratio Amazon touts. Sorry but there's no datacenter-type ARM worth even looking at today. Kind of like x86 phones... The split around use cases is pretty entrenched, with only realistic battle going around lowest-end laptops.
I'd rather blame it on pesky smelly Millenials instead. They're the cause of anything that's bad.
Just yesterday, I had a talk with a co-worker. We agreed on that wholeheartly, we just had a difference in opinions about the threshold: I say Millenials start at year 1979, he claims it's 1985+. But yeah, the Earth would be better without that generation.
. . . so what are your thoughts on how to fix the patent system . . . ?
The system I have in mind provides no way for a Big Patent industry to abuse and exploit. It would also work wonders when applied to copyright. Or blasphemy laws.
Nope, at least nothing people actually use. You see, writing a web page in a Javascript framework that'll go out of support in 3 months is considered acceptable by companies' oh-so-wise decision makers as 1. they'll make another project to replace the website again in a year or two, with big marketing fanfare, 2. other popular web platforms (PHP, etc) suffer from the same problem. Not so for actual programs (as opposed to "apps") where the concept of "software engineering" is not only known but teached on most universities.
Might still be better than gmail. I'm so happy keeping mail servers working is no longer a part of my work duties -- "can't send mail to site X" had X = gmail in at least 80% cases, as they invent a standards-defying policy once than a couple of months. And tossing ham into a spam box without a reject to the sender makes gmail unfit for your kid's kindergarten invites, much less some important stuff.
Nor for nVidia -- they have already dropped drivers for any generation up to Geforce 500. And nouveau works adequately only for some cards. With nVidia's hostility to independent driver writers, it's a wonder nouveau is even in this state.
At least we know the drivers will be ok from day one. It's not humanly possible to suck more than current GPU makers.
nVidia not only doesn't provide documentation for its cards, but even actively interferes with nouveau on its new cards (encrypting and signing crap). On every card, it's random whether either their proprietary drivers or nouveau will work without crashing. The proprietary drivers are useless if you even dabble in kernel development -- they get ported to current kernels 0-6 months after a.0 release; some of us would want -rc or next. Oh, and support gets dropped within 5 years of a cards's launch. For this reason, Debian keeps forks of a number of discontinued drivers, but perhaps you'd want to run them with current kernels or X, ha ha? And, "drivers exist" doen't mean they actually work. Even basic crap like enabling xfce's compositor causes a crash, while there's that random crash from time to time. Oh, and even physically the cards suck. Out of 3 nVidia cards I went through recently, the middle one went out in flames. Literally. With thick smoke covering the entire room.
Compare Intel. At the family home I visit on weekends, I recently had to bring out an ancient machine (monitor problems -- none of 1864518746 SoCs I own want to talk to either my new monitor nor any (ancient) backups), with an Intel 910GL. Despite the card's age, it worked perfectly, including compositing and stuff. So does the integrated card in a spanking new machine at work. No need to think about drivers, everything is in the current kernel and X.
I haven't tried ATI/AMD in a decade. Their drivers used to suck -- I'm told AMD very recently (as in, a year ago) rewrote their driver stack so it's actually usable. I seriously hope so as I urgently need to rebuild my rig, and I'm not waiting till 2020. So it'll be AMD for me.
Because the article describes writing to a "folder" and disabling antivirus, it's clear it's not about exploiting a regular distro. My guess is that it's WSL-only, requiring an usual Windows security hole of the hour as the initial vector.
Alas, GNOME. It's not reasonable to expect Windows users to learn a completely different interface type, especially if there's no direct benefit from doing so. Such users also don't yet know they can switch the user interface.
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They forked PHP as HHVM, optimized the hell of it, and do some recompilation to C++, yeah. But you can optimize it only so much.
PHP is a shithouse -- and I don't mean a building you defecate in, I mean one whose structural material is dried excrement (as still done by some tribes). It might have been adequate for a literal "Personal Home Page" with little traffic, but trying to throw more hardware at it to get it to scale to modern Facebook workloads is a fool's errand. It's kind of like banks running unmanageable COBOL code from 1960 on emulators.
"sob story"?!? "anecdotes"?!? How exactly do you expect the system to work if, in the middle of Europe (rather than an autarchic place like Cuba) you pay doctors $7.3k/year, and provide a similar level of funding to stuff other than wages? It's only work ethic of some heroic doctors thanks to which _some_ of them didn't emigrate to saner parts of Europe yet.
Such "anecdotes" can be shared by anyone around me who also tried going to the govt doctors our taxes paid for.
I'm in a single payer system too and have had vastly better experiences than you. What does that prove?
That your system is not mature yet? It inevitably will (it's a cost center than can be raided both for other projects and for graft). Just wait a couple of government changes more...
Tax means, someone else has the money and can spent it now. Inflation means, the money is gone.
Nope -- there's no inflation without an increase of the money supply to economy size ratio. The economy expands at a very fast rate (increases of productivity due to automation, effectiveness, population size, education, etc) yet inflation keeps going.
And that's because our rulers keep printing money. The government does so literally, the Big Finance does so by fractional reserve, but the result is the same. $100 in old money is worth exactly as much as $100 in newly minted money or $100 in credit, yet only the first was actually earned. The second and third extract value from honest workers/scientists/merchants/managers/servicers without providing any benefit to the society. The actual gain (be it from directly producing widget X, getting it to a customer, organizing work, or providing for the workers) is still $100 yet it is suddenly declared to be worth "$300". And only $33 goes to people who produced/invented/distributed/organized/bartendered, while the rest gets taxed. Taxes that go to the government at least can be argued to pay for govt spending, some of which you actually want -- but that doesn't mean the money extracted from you differs in any real way from you'd pay as an explicit tax.
A better question would be: "if productivity increased immensely since 1970s, yet real wages have decreased, where has all that value gone to?".
Find a way to dislodge the value diverted to High Frequency Fraud, financial schemes, and other legally allowed graft, and you'll have not only money to fund UBI, but even a comfortable life for everyone.
Current proposals extract yet more money from the middle class. That's not going to work. They're only a scheme to placate plebs with a dole while diverting attention from the real cause.
Money created without limit benefits 2 groups: the source of the money (who gets to buy with it without significant cost)
This. This is why the Big Finance fights so hard to have fractional reserve lending not only legal but even preferred. Money that's produced from thin air still works same as any other money.
and net debtors (who see their debt inflated into less real value.)
This has a significant effect only on long-term debt.
Whether money that comes from the government is printed or acquired by theft, makes very little difference in the amount of damage it causes.
Printing money works exactly same as a tax on holding any assets denominated as money -- only paperwork differs. If inflation is 5%, you just got taxed 5% on the whole value of all your savings.
Look around you at the next NYE party and you will see just how wrong you are. Most people queue them up ahead of time and lots of people are hitting Send as the ball drops...
Ouch. At least there are no "smart"phone zombies so bad anywhere near me, neither among low-tech nor high-tech friends.
hint to devs, if someone has typed a partial message transmit that to the server in case they come back and hit send later
And that'll speed up that 14 words message... how?
On a *normal* day, Messenger and Whats App process over 60 billion messages a day
Thanks for the correction, I based my estimates on numbers in the article's summary.
Come on man, you know that modern web API's are not that compact, and we are talking Facebook here. You are off by an order of magnitude at least, way more when you stop to think that on NYE way more people are sending images also... One single response to a post on Facebook I just did with 14 words had a 9.5kb body going out, and a 21.2 k response.
I'm talking about the problem to solve not their implementation. Of course Facebook runs a PHP script that runs a bunch of NPM modules to produce a 1.5MB response, but after you cut down that bloat, you can get the same result with orders of magnitude less resources.
I mean, we have massive amounts of data that single payer healthcare would be infinitely superior.
As a means to let every random government's official's nephews live a comfortable life, perhaps. Not for people who would have to suffer it, and have to pay a second time to actually go to doctor.
We do have single payer healthcare in Poland. A couple of years in June I had something bad with a foot, with pain so bad that pretty much prevented me from walking more than ~50 meters. Can't read the doc's handwriting but it was something something acute inflammation and swelling of tendons. The government-run fully-paid-in-taxes clinic had me register, wait a week then spend most of the day sitting in a queue for the first-contact doctor. Who was not even allowed to schedule actual diagnostics, but could write a referral to a real doctor. With closest available appointments in January. After which, as I got told, waiting times for physiotherapy are 18-24 months. Thus, I visited a commercial doctor -- who needed just a pill, an ointment and a few days of 30-minute physiotherapy sessions to get my foot back into perfect health.
Another time a neurologist had me sent to MRI, with a suspicion of something urgent. With such an adnotation, the waiting time was only 10 months. Or the next day if you pay -- on the very same machine, staffed by the same personnel, who stay idle the vast majority of the time. The govt has a limit for every hospital for the number of procedures it pays for -- no matter that the machines have already been bought for massive amounts of taxpayers' money.
I heard some specialists like cardiologists had even worse waiting times than that.
But, that was a few years ago, before the public health care pretty much collapsed. With the new government, healthcare funds got raided so badly that a doctor after studies, internship and a few years of experience (so called "resident") earns 2300PLN/month =~ $7300/year. No, I did not make a mistake by two orders of magnitude -- that's the yearly pay in Poland. No wonder most doctors left the country, while ordinary people have to pay twice -- once for govt health"care" then for commercial service. At least most decent employers include commercial medical coverage among benefits you get -- no one will refund you the taxes, though.
So if you want to have the same in your country, please, go ahead. Or don't, I don't wish your compatriots ill.
No amount of "studies" or "data" can solve the tiny little detail that the money has to come from somewhere.
The vast majority of messages avoid that peak: hardly anyone waits for the exact midnight to send a message. So the load gets smeared onto quite a chunk of time.
The engineering problem boils down to: send short messages between pairs of arbitrary sources and destinations (although usually the source and destination are close to each other), with message size usually within 50-100 bytes. Let's be generous and say that with metadata they fit within 1500 bytes. Hmm... I wonder, have we seen such a problem before?
Let's estimate the flow: after everyone raises the toast, exchanges hugs and kisses, says greetings, then sits down with the phone -- sending, let's say, 10 messages. This should take around half an hour. You get 300K messages per second. Not so impressive...
Simple, do awful things that will make people avoid using any of your services.
Facebook has been trying that for years; doesn't help.
Not all 20 years olds are criminal fuckwits.
And, if your guests disregard parties being explicitly disallowed by rules they signed, and the party gets rowdy, what you expect is a few empty bottles in the garden, cigarette butts in a flowerpot and an used condom in the bedroom. Not a commercial enterprise that organizes the party and charges admission for entry.
No implant? No food, no travel.
Placing the implant on the right hand or the forehead would be a nice touch.
Counterpoint: since May 2016, a French hosting company called OVH has been offering ARM-based servers under the brand Scaleway.
Yeah, but both the CPU speed and I/O are atrocious compared to what one would expect. I'm still paying for one but use it solely as secondary DNS -- it can't deliver more than ~30Mbps of static content, and CPU-wise my Odroid-U2 from 2012 runs circles around it.
Likewise, Graviton is laughably slow even for the oomph-to-price ratio Amazon touts. Sorry but there's no datacenter-type ARM worth even looking at today. Kind of like x86 phones... The split around use cases is pretty entrenched, with only realistic battle going around lowest-end laptops.
I'd rather blame it on pesky smelly Millenials instead. They're the cause of anything that's bad.
Just yesterday, I had a talk with a co-worker. We agreed on that wholeheartly, we just had a difference in opinions about the threshold: I say Millenials start at year 1979, he claims it's 1985+. But yeah, the Earth would be better without that generation.
As much as it sucks, I guess it still has better uptime than Office 359. But don't worry, Microsoft innovates, so that'll change too.
. . . so what are your thoughts on how to fix the patent system . . . ?
The system I have in mind provides no way for a Big Patent industry to abuse and exploit. It would also work wonders when applied to copyright. Or blasphemy laws.
Nope, at least nothing people actually use. You see, writing a web page in a Javascript framework that'll go out of support in 3 months is considered acceptable by companies' oh-so-wise decision makers as 1. they'll make another project to replace the website again in a year or two, with big marketing fanfare, 2. other popular web platforms (PHP, etc) suffer from the same problem. Not so for actual programs (as opposed to "apps") where the concept of "software engineering" is not only known but teached on most universities.
Might still be better than gmail. I'm so happy keeping mail servers working is no longer a part of my work duties -- "can't send mail to site X" had X = gmail in at least 80% cases, as they invent a standards-defying policy once than a couple of months. And tossing ham into a spam box without a reject to the sender makes gmail unfit for your kid's kindergarten invites, much less some important stuff.
It's not that they are particularly malicious (as Microsoft proveably was)
Uhm, Google of a few years ago wasn't malicious. They're getting to Monsanto levels these days.
Nor for nVidia -- they have already dropped drivers for any generation up to Geforce 500. And nouveau works adequately only for some cards. With nVidia's hostility to independent driver writers, it's a wonder nouveau is even in this state.
At least we know the drivers will be ok from day one. It's not humanly possible to suck more than current GPU makers.
nVidia not only doesn't provide documentation for its cards, but even actively interferes with nouveau on its new cards (encrypting and signing crap). On every card, it's random whether either their proprietary drivers or nouveau will work without crashing. The proprietary drivers are useless if you even dabble in kernel development -- they get ported to current kernels 0-6 months after a .0 release; some of us would want -rc or next. Oh, and support gets dropped within 5 years of a cards's launch. For this reason, Debian keeps forks of a number of discontinued drivers, but perhaps you'd want to run them with current kernels or X, ha ha? And, "drivers exist" doen't mean they actually work. Even basic crap like enabling xfce's compositor causes a crash, while there's that random crash from time to time. Oh, and even physically the cards suck. Out of 3 nVidia cards I went through recently, the middle one went out in flames. Literally. With thick smoke covering the entire room.
Compare Intel. At the family home I visit on weekends, I recently had to bring out an ancient machine (monitor problems -- none of 1864518746 SoCs I own want to talk to either my new monitor nor any (ancient) backups), with an Intel 910GL. Despite the card's age, it worked perfectly, including compositing and stuff. So does the integrated card in a spanking new machine at work. No need to think about drivers, everything is in the current kernel and X.
I haven't tried ATI/AMD in a decade. Their drivers used to suck -- I'm told AMD very recently (as in, a year ago) rewrote their driver stack so it's actually usable. I seriously hope so as I urgently need to rebuild my rig, and I'm not waiting till 2020. So it'll be AMD for me.
Because the article describes writing to a "folder" and disabling antivirus, it's clear it's not about exploiting a regular distro. My guess is that it's WSL-only, requiring an usual Windows security hole of the hour as the initial vector.
If the WiFi disallows it, I disconnect.
You may want to try iodine (tunnelling over DNS). Handles bogus WiFi pretty well.
Windows recently insisted their users all learn a completely different interface type.
And backpedaled so fast it was halfway neutered by the next point release, and almost back to normal by the next major version?
Alas, GNOME. It's not reasonable to expect Windows users to learn a completely different interface type, especially if there's no direct benefit from doing so. Such users also don't yet know they can switch the user interface.