Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B - <AUTHOR> https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-to-acquire-mellanox-for-6-9-billion <comment><USER2> This is interesting.

Mellanox has apparently been under activist investor pressure to reduce their R&D expenses and pay more dividends. And then there was the rumors that Intel were interested, but apparently Nvidia in the end offered more.

From a HPC perspective I think it's good Nvidia got the deal, Intel is already a quite dominating force in that market, and if they'd have gotten the deal it wouldn't have surprised me if they would just have sunsetted it in favor of their own Omni-Path (which they could then develop at a leisurely pace due to lack of competition).

Though as I have mentioned before, I do wonder about the long-term prospects for Infiniband as a technology. Modern high-end ethernet does many of the same things with RDMA (RoCE), though I believe IB still has a latency advantage. And multipathing with ethernet is weird, seems both Trill and SPB are kind of dead, and most players seem to do multipathing at the L3 level (which might not be good for latency?). And in contrast to ethernet, IB is pretty much a single-player technology nowadays, so is the market big enough to bear the R&D costs to keep developing it?

<comment><USER3> We have been moving away from IB for our platform (algorithmic trading) since Ethernet now has almost comparable latency and is a lot easier to understand and manage.

<comment><USER4> May I ask what's IB?

<comment><USER5> infiniband - The high performance interconnect by Mellanox

<comment><USER6> Infiniband is actually a standard and Mellanox became the go to supplier. However in the early stages there were many more suppliers.

<comment><USER7> Intel bought one of the IB players and for all I know killed it.

<comment><USER2> Intel bought Qlogic, made some proprietary enhancements to their IB tech, which they now sell under the omni-path brand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I had great respect for Mellanox when I came to know that they invented InfiniBand.

Again, I am suprisied it's valued at only $6.9Bn.

Pardon my ignorance, but how come mobile apps and websites get valued for 10+ or 20+ Bn dollars , while someone who creates real technology is valued at only $6.9Bn

<comment><USER8> > Pardon my ignorance, but how come mobile apps and websites get valued for > 10+ or 20+ Bn dollars , while someone who creates real technology is valued > at only $6.9Bn

Imagine a building, say a shopping center, airport, or a city main square, that gets the same amount of visitors per day as some of those apps, and it might start to make more sense. Take Clash of Clans for example, valued at $10 billion. It has around 100 million daily active players. One of the busiest airports, the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, has 104 million passengers annually. NY Times square receives about fifty million visitors per year.

If something, anything, gets 100 million visitors PER DAY, the value of such a real estate, even if digital, is immense.

<comment><USER9> It is worth adding that the margin out of an app tends to be A LOT higher than shopping centers, airport, etc while the initial capital tends to be a fraction of it.

There are also different ways in which you can use the data to help you create another app with high daily active players. An app can have the whole world as their oyster, unlike shopping centers, etc.

<comment><USER10> It's worth adding, too, that the airport and building take much larger capital expenditures to build and are far less reproducible as a result... and will probably have decades or centuries of future revenue. For a given game, that's probably a few years of peak popularity and comparatively easy to replicate by competitors.

To the point of this article, it's kind of surprising to me at least that licensing companies like ARM and Qualcomm have been so much more successful than Mellanox.

<comment><USER11> A facility like an airport has a monopoly position, geographically and due to regulation, and the capital cost of competition, and as you say will likely be earning for many decades. ARM also has a long term monopoly, think of the sheer weight of code for ARM devices. It takes huge capital to produce a new from scratch CPU arch, esp due to patent problems (which makes RISC V all the more amazing), and deep pockets to start producing chips at scale, build a developer ecosystem etc. Games titles can produce a lot of cash for low CAPEX, but I don't think we'll be hearing about Fortnite in 5 years, let alone 50.

In contrast, Mellanox produces a niche product. It is critical to HPC and some deep pocketed finance people, but it is never going to be at the volume of e.g. ethernet.

The long term aspect is that, as Moore's law scaling becomes harder and harder, distributed computation becomes more essential. Right now we are in a dip in peak compute rate requirements, because we have invented battery powered computers and 4G, and hence cloud. But the work done in the cloud isn't very taxing, mainly single threaded. But I'm confident we'll soon be seeing a lot heavier parallel computation in the cloud soon, and stuff that won't fit into one or four GPUs. The tradeoffs between PCIe and IB after 4*16x start to favour IB, especially if the IB silicon is on the NVLink switch complex. So from the perspective of integration bringing much greater IB volume, the acquisition multiples the worth of MLNX by an order of magnitude -- if nVidia can execute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting. Since Mellanox is a big player in the HPC world, this means Nvidia wants to get more serious there. Due to Nvidia's bad Linux support and pricing (compared to AMD), I know quite a number of academic computing centers which like Mellanox hardware but avoid Nvidia hardware like the plague.

<comment><USER13> My GTX 1080 works flawlessly with Linux, as has any other NVIDIA graphics card I've ever owned (GTX 680, 480). The only time I tried an AMD card it was a complete dumpster fire, nothing worked (the open source driver at the time sucked and the proprietary driver wouldn't install properly). I bought the AMD card based on the myth that AMD has better linux support...

<comment><USER14> Ahh what are you talking about? That "myth" didn't exist until the open source drivers really started working.

Biggest issue with AMD on Linux right now is that they sometimes seem to forget to fully enable support in patches before release. Like the RX 590 had to have firmware updates post release because they forgot to do everything I guess.

nVidia GPUs were always recommended over AMD because their support was significantly better before the mainoine Radeon/Radeon si/amdgpu drivers really started being great. nVidia will still run better now, but the benefit of the open source driver ecosystem out weighs that for me.

<comment><USER15> I am still waiting that benefit to provide the missing OpenGL and hardware video acceleration features that were never ported from fxglr.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I did not see that coming.

At NetApp we were an early customer of Mellanox (I told the founder that their name sounded like a poison gas :-)) which Steve Kleiman claimed implemnted Infiniband in anger. It was a good technology for the clustering team. Later as they grew and diversified into ethernet switches we bought a couple of their big core switches at Blekko. And at the current company we use their 40g network adapters to connect to high speed SDR hardware.

So now they are going to be part of Nvidia.

I get that this helps Nvidia in being more data center centric, but does it help them build better machine learning architectures? It does seem to be the only system that benefits from custom hardware more than the cost of that hardware. It seems that loosely coupled shared nothing clusters are not good machine learning back ends.

<comment><USER17> State of the art deep learning models are becoming larger and larger and at some point it makes sense to distribute them over multiple GPUs because they would not fit into a single GPU's memory. At the same time training can be sped up dramatically by blowing up the mini batch size in a synchronized training regime, again requiring multiple GPUs. So the trend is towards "model parallelism" and "data parallelism" at the same time. Once you need more GPUs than you can put on a single PCI Express bus, you need a fast interconnect between servers. Infiniband seems to be the best solution at this time. Nvidia GPUs can already communicate ridiculously fast with remote GPUs via RDMA if there is an Infiniband connection. It makes a lot of sense for Nvidia to push into this direction to provide integrated solutions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > .. NVIDIA's invention of the GPU in 1999 ..

Well.. "almost every important company in the 3D area filed lawsuits against NVIDIA" :)

[https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia,87.html](https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia,87.html)

<comment><USER19> Thanks. Today I learned people could play 3D games (Quake2) at 25 fps at 1152x864 resolution (Nvidia TNT GPU, K6-2 300 Mhz CPU).

It would be interesting to know how other computing technologies looked like 20 years ago. Is there any good place to find that online?

<comment><USER20> Don't know the fps, but remember the graphics where awesome after getting a Voodoo2 card in '98 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3dfx_Interactive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3dfx_Interactive)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I only know of Mellanox for their 10 gigabit ethernet cards. Does anybody know if this is a good or bad thing for Mellanox?

<comment><USER22> One out of only 2 vendors for InfiniBand which is quite important for HPC especially in the Top 500.

They also have some sort of a parallel VLIW CPU architecture that they've been trying to get off the ground for a while now called TILE/TILE64 so that might also play into things.

However since NVIDIA opened their offices in Israel a while ago they might simply be looking for an acquihire since Mellanox is a fabless semi chip maker it kinda fits that also.

<comment><USER23> The last new TILE architecture chip shipped over 5 years ago and Linux dropped support for the architecture completely last year.

<comment><USER24> TILE64 got squeezed at both ends, with GPUs becoming more capable on one side and CPUs getting lots of cores (Threadripper) on the other. The niche just closed up on them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> With nVidia's poor kernel record, I hope this does not adversely affect switchdev [1]. Hopefully one day we can run the same OS on servers and switches

[1] [http://www.mellanox.com/page/products_dyn?product_family=262...](http://www.mellanox.com/page/products_dyn?product_family=262&mtag=switchdev)

<comment><USER26> switchdev is currently dormant. None of the silicon vendors seem to be willing to put the work in, so there's no adoption from the SDN/NOS space. We are still stuck with HALs.

Also, there are multiple solutions to run Linux on switches, most notably Cumulus Linux and VyOS

<comment><USER27> switchdev doesn't look too dormant: [https://github.com/mellanox/mlxsw/wiki](https://github.com/mellanox/mlxsw/wiki)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Mellanox are also known for their excellent support on FreeBSD. And Nvidia is not known for anything related to "Open" or "Free".

I just hope Nvidia would not change much to the company. For example Netflix's Open Appliance, if I remember correctly were running on FreeBSD + Mellanox 100Gb NIC. All because of their top notch FreeBSD Drivers.

</comment><comment><USER29> As and outsider, can someone explain the "synergy" (god I hate that word) for the companies? It looks like Mellanox is primarily a network equipment company. What is the "fit" for that within a graphics/AI chip producer?

<comment><USER30> Communication is a key bottleneck. Modern supercomputers budget roughly half to interconnect. Nvidia invested heavily in developing NVLINK to be able to make GPUs communicate at the bandwidth necessary to make multi-GPU boxes more practical (e.g. DGX-1). To make it scale out across multiple boxes, you need a high bandwidth, low latency interconnect, which is where IB comes in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Been using second-hand, old-gen Infiniband (ransacked from eBay) for many years now, instead of the more expensive 10GigE products (both at home and client businesses). Absolutely love 'em. Their latency and simplicity rock.

</comment><comment><USER32> Commentary on where this might be going: [https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/nvidia- to-...](https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/nvidia-to-acquire- mellanox-a-potential-prelude-to-servers.23792/#post-221554)

The answer: GPUoF like NVMeoF

</comment><comment><USER33> This seems like way too much for Mellanox. I remember talking to the Nvidia guys at Supercomputing 2008 about Remote Direct Memory Acess on their cards. Huge to have their cards direct connected to the network.

</comment><comment><USER34> So, intel took over qlogic, now fabless(!) nvidia takes over mellanox /o\\. Is there some real "normal" manufacturer of fast cards like IB, 40+geth left? By normal I mean manufacturer without management doing stunt tricks and pissing off own customers (like intel and nvidia does). Please please, tell me this isn't HBA appocalypse :D (i do own 2 IB cards from "intel", guess what - it's almost completely unsupported so i just cant use them)

<comment><USER27> Broadcom? Chelsio? Marvell FastLinQ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> How bad is it that Intel didn't win?

<comment><USER35> There were only ever two major Infiniband vendors: QLogic and Mellanox. Intel already bought QLogic back in 2012.

I'm not sure it would be in anyone's interest for both to be acquired by Intel, even if IB isn't very relevant anymore outside of supercomputing.

<comment><USER36> Intel bought QLogic's Infiniband assets in 2012, not everything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The market for HPC is consolidating.

</comment><comment><USER38> I can't wait for Mellanox RDMA to only work with Nvidia GPUs /s

</comment><comment><USER39> Interesting fact, Mellanox is an employer of Palestinian programmers in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Sort of a mixed blessing, cheap labor without other options because of the occupation, but real opportunities and a more educated and well off population will be more effective at advocating for its rights:

[https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/business/palestinian- hig...](https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/business/palestinian-high-tech- workers-plugging-shortage-of-israeli-tech-staff-1.6243852)

<comment><USER40> I love the spin you put on it. Palestinian programmers make no less than Israeli programmers in the Israeli high technology sector. In fact, that goes for all jobs in the Israeli high-tech sector, from PMs to HR, CTOs.

Furthermore, Palestinians in the West bank regularly talk to me about their situation, because I'm what you would call a "settler" and I buy in their towns, and I pick them up hitchhiking, and I talk to them with no borders. They all have family in Jordan and will happily tell you how much better their "occupied" life is than their Jordanian family. And yes, I've been to Jordan and I've been to Egypt and I've been to Lebanon (albeit in uniform on that one).

Dislike Israel's policies as much as you want, I'm unhappy with many of them as well. Hate our PM, you'll find good reason to. But there is no need to lie or put spin on the fact that 99% of Israelis have no qualm with Palestinians or pay them less for equal labour. Likewise, 99% of Palestinians have no qualm with Israel or Israelis, and want (like us) to work hard, come home and love our children, and live in peace with our neighbours.

<comment><USER41> That and the fact that while Israel is blamed for everything, nobody ever mentions how Palestinian children are poisoned with anti-israel rhetoric.

<comment><USER42> And Israeli children aren't? Both sides use outrageous claims to fuel the fire, so to speak.

<comment><USER41> how on earth can you compare children toting guns and shouting `death to israel` with whatever the israeli kids are taught? (I doubt they are even told about Palestinians, tbh)

<comment><USER42> > I doubt they are even told about Palestinians, tbh

Assuming this were true, how exactly is it a good thing?

<comment><USER43> I don't think parent claimed it was a good thing, more like "yeah Israeli children are not taught to shout death chants at Palestinians, in fact I'd venture they are not even taught about Palestinians". Not better, not worse, just a different stroke of bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Why would a company that shells out ~7 _billion_ dollars need advertising cookies on its website?

<comment><USER45> Nvidia is in a pretty shitty situation at the moment. Stocks down almost 50% after the crypto-bubble popped (or deflated I guess is the better word).

<comment><USER46> That's a very short term perspective, considering they were $20 a share just a couple of years ago and are $150 a share now. Any shareholders other than people that bought in the last 18 months or so are going to be very happy with them.</comment></comment></comment>


Donate to help a MySQler - <AUTHOR> http://www.mysql.com/about/help-ivan.html

<comment><USER2> Does anyone else find it a little disheartening that despite being hosted on a MySQL / SUN site, and despite this meaning that they're obviously not providing his family with health insurance, that they're not even offering to do any contribution matching? I'd hope for a little more from a small-ish company that just got bought for a billion dollars.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I admit I had the same thought. I would imagine if I was the CEO, I would maybe just pay the bill. But who knows what other things there are, maybe that kind of approach is not feasible.

<comment><USER4> The biggest issue with that is that if you pay this bill, when someone else wife gets cancer, do you pay that bill too?

I do agree though that they should be doing something other than asking everyone else to fork over cash.

<comment><USER5> But MySQL/SUN is willing to host a donation page at their official site. Does this mean they have this same ask-everyone-else-to-fork-over-cash strategy in place for all contributors? With billions in hand, if they are willing to host a page, shouldn't they pay the bill atleast to look 'non evil'?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _"... Donations are requested to help Andrii Nikitin, a MySQL support engineer in Ukraine, provide for his son Ivan who requires a bone marrow transplant operation. The cost of this operation is expected to be between €150,000 - €250,000 ($235,000 - $400,000). Please help us provide Ivan a chance to live ..."_

I know this could be seen as a heartless gesture but has anyone verified with MySql that Andrii Nikitin is who the page claims? I know this is shown off the mysql site but that's just a webpage. Does anyone personally/professionally know Andrii? Does anyone know Andrii at MySql?

It would help greatly Anreii's cause if MySql "officially" set up an MySql postal account allowing non paypal money orders, cheques etc to be passed on if they use MySql by name.

<comment><USER7> His name is on some MySQL bug reports.(<http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=32930>)

There's also an address for postal mail, and info for wire transfers (<http://www.theopenforce.com/2008/07/andrii-nikitin.html>)

I agree, they should perhaps add this information to the main MySQL site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I will tweet and maybe blog about this. I really can't help him much with the money part, but the least i can do is show it to people who have money.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure why you are getting down-voted. I think some people find the idea of being poor inconceivable. Perhaps some people think that if you can post on the Internet, you should be giving money away.

In any case, I know from whence you are coming. I'm sure the family would appreciate your efforts regardless. Advertising for the cause is absolutely helpful, as most Hacker News posters should know.

<comment><USER8> I really don't know why i am getting voted down. I am curious actually. I told a logical thing, I didn't have any money in my paypal because i had withdrawn almost all of it. But i also wanted to help him, so said will tweet and blog about it. Doesn't mean when i get funds in my paypal in a day or two, i wouldn't give him.

<comment><USER10> Since you're curious.. I didn't vote you down (the post is too old now) but if I were to have, it'd have been because your post didn't say anything; it just stated the obvious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The price quoted sounds high even for the USA.

[http://ezinearticles.com/?Bone-Marrow-Transplant-Costs--- For...](http://ezinearticles.com/?Bone-Marrow-Transplant-Costs---For- Around-$30,000-and-World-Class-Surgery&id=167381)

says it can be done much cheaper in India.

This is not leading-edge medicine today (it was perhaps 10 years ago). But medical centers still try to charge leading-edge prices.

Yet another reason we need a national health care in the USA - to get doctors out of their Mercedes, off the golf courses and back into medicine for medicine's sake.

<comment><USER12> "medicine for medicine's sake."

Point 1: What do you think doctors are? Saints? They are human like the rest of us and would rather work for cash. They would probably also do better work if they were doing so for their own good. Case in point: Who had more food during the 1950-1980s. The US or the USSR?

Point 2: What makes you think that national health care will make doctors magnanimous? Just switching the payer from individuals to the govt. (which gets its cash from individuals anyway) doesn't magically change people. If we get national health care, doctors will probably start doing exactly what government unions have done: invest in lobbyists.

PS. The patient is in Ukraine. How will changing the US health care system help him?

<comment><USER11> Let's talk about the US only for argument's sake.

Point 1: Today's doctors are for the most part motivated by $. This was not so even as early as 50 years ago. We need more doctors and need to pay them less. Part of the solution: increased specialization, reduced time in medical school and a different form of health care system. This is a complex problem. The best short summary I have found is available at [http://www.strategy- business.com/press/article/07110?gko=564...](http://www.strategy- business.com/press/article/07110?gko=56480&tid=230&pg=all)

Scroll down and read especially "Redefining Competition" about Porter and Teisberg's ideas.

Point 2: By reducing the income of doctors, we'll rid the system of the greedheads currently running the HMOs, the medical centers and the cancer institutes. People who enter medicine will be people more interested in medicine and less in accumulating a fortune. The financial motivation to get into medical school is simply too tempting currently in the US. Pre-med students are the only group in whom I have seen intentional sabotage of other (pre-med) students' work. Even worse, most pre-meds expect such behavior as normal. And consider Senator Bill Frist, M.D. repeatedly strangling kittens he obtained from the local Adopt-A-Pet in the bathroom sink to get an edge in medical school. Is this normal behavior? For today's pre-med or medical student it apparently is.

Once MDs are knocked down a notch (both in pay scale and consequently in social status), PhDs will once again be able to dominate laboratory research, where they are far, far better than are MDs (who unfortunately currently dominate). We may finally get decent medical research for our government dollars. Doctors are bad researchers: their training is as scholars (i.e., they read and memorize books, books and more books) and they are good at spitting back what they've read. Training as a doctor usually destroys the ability to think independently and do good research.

PS: The original article says treatment could be in the US. I took the opportunity to make a statement about the US health care system and how expensive it is. But FWIW certain changes to the US health care system would make it cheaper for anyone who could use that system.

<comment><USER13> > Today's doctors are for the most part motivated by $.

Not any more so than any other field. Me - I want a doctor who is smart enough to have done something else and smart enough to say "pay me what I'm worth".

> We need more doctors and need to pay them less.

Unless you're going to break the monopoly on services that can only be performed by doctors or the medical school monopoly, you're not going to reduce income without introducing more scarcity (they'll do something else and won't be replaced).

The "universal health care" advocates never mention that the federal, state, and local govts directly control about half of the US healthcare spending and cover about half of the covered people. If you're going to argue that govt healthcare can be better/cheaper, that can be done today with those resources.

As it is, they're arguing that they'll be able to cover more than twice as many people for about 50% more money. How about demonstrating that and opening up the govt system to outsiders for cost? If you're right, the private system will either become as good or die.

<comment><USER11> I cannot address complaints about your imagined concept of universal health care. Perhaps next time you'll respond to my post, rather than your imagination.

Such methods as training doctors less and allowing specialization earlier, eliminating situations where doctors are currently required, tracking and publishing doctors' success rates, allowing pharmacists to write prescriptions, etc. all would reduce doctors' income and weaken the medical school monopoly. Many more students would enter medicine since, while it wouldn't pay as much, it would pay well, and the requirements and time needed to enter the field would be significantly reduced.

And please read [http://www.strategy- business.com/press/article/07110?gko=564...](http://www.strategy- business.com/press/article/07110?gko=56480&tid=230&pg=all)

Scroll down and read especially "Redefining Competition" about Porter and Teisberg's ideas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Serious question: why should I donate for this cause when I can donate for vaccines or famine relief and literally save orders of magnitude more people?

<comment><USER15> You could help a lot if you just called or emailed Sun and told them.

There are a lot of email addresses and phone numbers for Sun PR people here, I'm sure they would like to know about this story. <http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/contacts/index.jsp>

<comment><USER10> They'd like to know about a story from their own company?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If I had money I would donate, I don't like PayPal and don't like using them unless I have to, they should setup alternate payment methods so people have a choice on which one they prefer to use.

</comment><comment><USER17> Its possible to do bone marrow transplantation for approx. $10000 here in Kerala(South India). The service is world class. Can someone close to MySQL/SUN pass this information?

Here is a press report : <http://www.hindu.com/2005/08/04/stories/2005080411550300.htm>

The hospital: <http://lakeshorehospital.com>

</comment><comment><USER3> Wish they wouldn't use Paypal.

<comment><USER9> I will admit to having added incentive _because_ they were using PayPal. I know there are drawbacks, but I had funds readily available in PayPal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hmm donated via paypal but get this after reaching mysql's site:

Checkout Cannot checkout because you have no items in your cart

<comment><USER19> I got the same, probably just because they've hooked it up using their default paypal options.. Got the receipt for the donation though so it goes through fine.

<comment><USER20> Same happened to me. Got the message but still got the receipt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Once again HN proves that its community is not only made of smart individuals, but caring and thoughtful individuals. I am glad I am here.

</comment><comment><USER22> Increases in guaranteed human rights _must_ keep pace with technological and moral development.

<comment><USER23> Guaranteed human rights reduce the speed of technological and moral development.

<comment><USER4> Moral Development isn't moral if it infringes on human rights. Therefore you are incorrect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Huh. That site repeatedly made my Firefox (V3) crash. 5 times in a row. Weird...

<comment><USER25> Confirmed (as weird), it works fine for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> its a good thing that doctors accept payment in tweets

</comment><comment><USER27> Wow, that picture is really manipulative.

<comment><USER28> The child we are being asked to help is on immuno-suppressants, and is, of course, required to be shielded from germs as much as possible. You're just not going to get a stock photo of baby hugging a goat.

<comment><USER27> So you're saying they didn't intentionally compose this picture in such a way as to increase the likelihood that people will donate?

This is not hacker news. There are lots of kids out there who are in just as much need of help. This one just happens to have a father who works on an open source product.

<comment><USER29> > _So you're saying they didn't intentionally compose this picture in such a > way as to increase the likelihood that people will donate?_

If it was your kid, wouldn't you?

<comment><USER27> Of course. I was merely making the point that it's manipulative. Not that it shouldn't be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I submitted this to Reddit. Vote up: <http://www.reddit.com/info/6sclv/comments></comment>


Microsoft: Skimpy schoolgirls dancing for nerds at an Xbox party - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/18/microsoft_gdc_sexy_schoolgirl_dancers/ <comment><USER2> It seems we're going to go through with the Kabuki Dance version of this HN thread, with the attendant gaslighting comments wondering how anyone could have a problem with this, &c.

In reality, this happened a week ago, and Microsoft got a small avalanche of bad press despite apologizing immediately (the event was handled by an event planning contractor, not the company itself). There is not in fact a live controversy about whether what happened was OK for a conference event: outside of venues like HN and Reddit, we're all pretty clear that it is not.

<comment><USER3> I just feel bad for the event planning company:

"They didn't like the dancers?"

"Nope"

"But the vacuum guys like them, so did insurance guys, hell even the mortician convention liked them. Are these the same dancers?"

"Yep, but this is...technology. These people consider themselves different than everyone else in the world. They get offended when someone wears a suit to meet with them."

"OK, give me the heads up next time we deal with these people, I'll get them some wookies to walk around their party, or whatever the hell they like"

<comment><USER4> I am sure some people at those companies would not like them as well, but they are not one of the biggest and most well know companies in the world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm a guy, and you want to appeal to me?

The best you can come up with is _this_? Scantily clad girls? Really?

It's just so insulting - like, the only _possibly_ worthwhile aspect of my personality comes about through strippers, well thanks for that.

Let alone the other, multiple issues to take with this.

</comment><comment><USER6> Shit, I'm an engineer who moonlights in the porn industry, and even I think this was in poor taste. Not everything has to be about sex, especially what appears to be a tech conference in an industry that admits to having a problem with being open towards women/trans/etc.

</comment><comment><USER7> HN appears to be just about the only place on the internet where a majority (or at least a very vocal minority) thinks this was OK and feels the need to defend it. I think that's telling about our industry and the startup portion of it in particular.

<comment><USER8> > HN appears to be just about the only place on the internet where a majority > (or at least a very vocal minority) thinks this was OK and feels the need to > defend it. I think that's telling about our industry and the startup portion > of it in particular.

Nobody's defending anything. The faux outrage on the other hand is just ridiculous. Most people outraged by that weren't even at the event. On the other hand given how packed the venue was, clearly people enjoyed it. Good for them.

<comment><USER2> Nobody's defending anything... except you, just a couple sentences later, in the same paragraph. Not only that, but your defense is: "clearly people enjoyed it". _That 's_ what you came up with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I sort of think this is overblown. I suspect that they booked the dance club for the after party and the dance club just always has dancers there. That's sort of standard for a lot of clubs like that. It's definitely gross for a business event, but I don't think Microsoft went out of their way to have dancing school girls there.

<comment><USER10> That looks like DNA lounge, which definitely does not have go-go dancers by default. If so, it's pretty likely the Microsoft event organizers specifically requested/hired them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Previous discussion

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11318461](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11318461)

<comment><USER2> Best part of that discussion was the dude saying that the dancers were dressed like schoolgirls because dancing is hard work and that was just athletic wear. Like, if they wore turtlenecks, they'd get all sweaty!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Would people's reaction be different if the dancers were dressed differently?

</comment><comment><USER13> > Slutwalk

> How dare you tell me how to dress!

> Some party

> How dare these women dress the way I don't like!

Please make up your minds.

<comment><USER6> There's a difference between accepting that other people dress in "slutty" outfits and making it ok, and not wanting sexuality jammed down your throat at a technology event.

<comment><USER13> > not wanting sexuality jammed down your throat

How is a couple go-go dancers are 'jamming down your throat'? Really, if they are the first thing you see at a party and can't focus, maybe the problem is with you?

> a technology event

It was an afterparty, nothing to do with the main event.</comment></comment></comment>


Sega Mega Drive / Genesis Hardware Notes - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ST9GbFfPnIjLT5loytFCm3pB0kWQ1Oe34DCBBV8saY8/pub <comment><USER2> I'm one of the coders who worked on the Overdrive 2 demo (although not on the reverse engineering that resulted in this document). We're going to release more follow-ups about the development of the demo.

I'm currently working on a write-up of the polygon to tile drawing routine used for the fullscreen 3D scenes.

I'm not sure about the time frame yet, but they will be posted at [http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=69648](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=69648) and/or [http://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=11035](http://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=11035).

<comment><USER3> That's really exciting to hear! The fullscreen 3D bits were some of the ones that really caught my attention.

I know with X on the Game Boy [1], lookup tables were used to speed up the arithmetic. I'd be curious to see if the Genesis used similar techniques, or if specific things were done with the hardware.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbtmBQIKTh8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbtmBQIKTh8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Context from ShonumiGBE+ at /r/emulation :

Might help to explain some context for people who don't know what Overdrive 2 is, or why it's important.

TiTAN is a pretty prominent group in the demo scene. They do a lot of crazy demos, basically coding consoles to their limit while making cool audio-visual presentations. Overdrive 2 is the follow up to the original Overdrive demo[1], and once again TiTAN have pulled off a bunch of insane effects on the Mega Drive.

Overdrive 2 is relevant to /r/emulation because it can't be emulated (yet). From what I understand, it's doing a bunch of tricks (described in the write- up on Google Docs) that emulators currently can't handle. That's right, even in 2017, Genesis/MD emulation has a ways to go, which is kind of exciting to me. I'd love to see emulators like Blastem, Exodus, and higan step up to the plate. Then maybe the demo scene can come up with even more torture tests ;)

Anyway, you guys can catch Overdrive 2 over on YouTube.[2] This stuff is sick.

[1] [http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=61724](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=61724)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeGdJk5zb6c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeGdJk5zb6c)

<comment><USER5> I was surprised to discover that MAME can emulate the Genesis, because a small number of arcade games actually used Genesis hardware internally.

It's my understanding (which could easily be wrong) that MAME uses near- circuit-level emulation of hardware in order to be as accurate as possible. This is why it is so resource intensive.

Could the MAME Genesis emulator run this demo?

<comment><USER6> MAME nowadays is a general machine emulator, so everything from arcades, calculators, consoles, fruit machines, computers, etc. are within the scope of the project.

This happened when MAME and MESS merged a few years ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What a fantastic demo! Thanks for sharing your in-depth notes about reverse- engineering the hardware's behavior.

I admit, previously I didn't understand why some emulators promoted so heavily the fact that they did more hardware-accurate emulation.

My relationship with old consoles is one of casual nostalgia, and a crash-free experience was all I asked for, one devoid of glaring visual glitches or inopportune jerkiness as you're being attacked by a boss.

That's a decent goal too, but just like the demoscene attempts to push the hardware and software to the ultimate edge of the envelope, I now better appreciate the developers who have taken extra care to mimic the exact operating quirks of the original. Resources like these help build the body of knowledge for new and existing developers, and help raise the bar of what the community desires as well.

</comment><comment><USER8> Love it! I've written a hopefully accurate Genesis emulator ([https://github.com/rasky/genemu](https://github.com/rasky/genemu)) and Overdrive is one of the holy grails of perfect emulation :)

<comment><USER9> I've found a video of Overdrive 2 demo running on an emulator [1]. It is curious/interesting how different/broken is in the emulation vs the real hardware.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ3AsZp- yTA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ3AsZp-yTA)

<comment><AUTHOR> For reference, here's a capture from an actual Genesis: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWVmPtr9O0g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWVmPtr9O0g)

And a live capture from the demoparty it premiered at: [https://www.twitch.tv/videos/135854774?t=03h45m11s](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/135854774?t=03h45m11s) It's interesting to hear the crowd's live reactions.

<comment><USER10> Thank you for the links. Simply amazing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a phenomenal demo.

Do the 3D bits implement the additional SVP chip used in (AFAIK only) Virtua Racing?

I used to do some interesting stuff with the MD / Genesis back in the day (like when I was 10-12 years old) - first with ROM hacking and moving into small bits of 68k ASM before getting into GBA and DS homebrew development, which was loads of fun (especially with an R4! screw commercial ROMs, this was a dream come true for me for homebrew! :D)

I was really involved in the Sonic Homebrew and fangaming scene and ended up sticking around on Sonic Retro (formerly SWS2B) since 2001 but haven't been active in ages...this makes me miss it! (I mostly do VR stuff these days :3)

<comment><USER2> No. Apart from the mapper chip used to address 8MB of ROM this demo requires no additional chips on the cartridge. Everything is done by the 68k CPU (running the effects) and the z80 CPU (running the sound engine).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was hoping it would go into detail about the Blast processing tricks.

<comment><USER13> Was the blast processing marketting only in America? Since I had never heard of blast processing until I got on the web years later.

<comment><USER14> It was coined by Sega of America's marketing team, according to this wikia: [https://segaretro.org/Blast_processing](https://segaretro.org/Blast_processing)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I guess I'll have to get that everdrive flash cart after all!

<comment><USER2> Not all everdrive flash carts support the mapper/rom size our demo uses (the SSF2 mapper with an 8MB rom). The included nfo file lists some supported flash carts.

<comment><USER15> I didn't know that. Thanks for info. I had set up a sweet broadcast CRT and Mega Drive with RGB, along with a 50/60Hz switch on it. Looking forward to enjoying demo on real hardware. I'm looking into Mega EverDrive X7.</comment></comment></comment>