"I mean, to really learn what's going on underneath the surface, a lot has to be explained." This is not limited to assembly. My C++ book for beginners to programming, "C++: A Dialog", doesn't show the first line of C++ until about page 75 because I start by explaining hardware concepts like memory and registers, and there is a lot more such explanation before we get to anything complicated in C++. Of course a lot of C++ books don't go into this detail but I think it is necessary to be a good programmer. How can you write good code without understanding what is going on underneath the C++ syntax?

It depends on how intense my concentration has to be. For reasonably routine coding, I listen to my usual music playlist, which happens to include things like Switched On Bach. When it gets more intense, I'll switch to new age (e.g., Diane Arkenstone). But if it's really at the limit of what I can do, I need absolute silence. That doesn't happen very often but it does happen.

Congratulations! I'm "only" 75 but I'm right there with your question about where the time goes...

Only if there is a specific reason to do so. One use case is that there are a lot of friends of the main class but I want tighter control over users of the embedded class.

All generalities are false.

Of course RAID-5 has terrible write performance. That's practically its purpose. I've seen SQL Server installations that had one gigantic (by the standards of the day) RAID-5 volume to hold everything. I was able to improve performance by a significant amount (2x?) just by fixing that stupid configuration. This was 20+ years ago so some of the details are a bit hazy.

I love the Pro Intellimouse. So much so that when they were briefly available at the Microsoft company store for $30(?) each (Microsoft alum price) I bought 4 of them. One got here smashed as though it had been run over by a truck. I sent that one back for a replacement. So far the I've been using two of them for about a year and they're still fine. I still also have a "wheel mouse optical" that must be at least 5 years old that is still working.

Hyper-V is mostly okay. The only problem I've had recently is that enhanced session mode stopped working on Ubuntu VMs. I think that was caused by a Windows update but I'm not sure.

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It's been several days and the server seems considerably more stable. I haven't had any of those crashes.

Yes, that is certainly the most important question for me. :) However, even if it doesn't fix the problem, I'm sure if I have to call the server vendor, or Intel for that matter, the first thing they are going to ask is whether my firmware is up to date. So it's not wasted effort even in that case.

Does the documentation specify the wording of the prayer?

Thanks for asking. Yes, I finally have updated to the latest firmware revision. The last update, to version 9, took three tries. 1. The "normal" way from the uefi built-in shell: Claimed to work but after rebooting ended up running very limited fallback firmware. 2. From the BMC remote console using a web browser: "OOB firmware update not supported on this platform." 3. Using the Windows exe, which amazingly worked correctly. Another complication is that while trying to update the firmware, each reboot took minutes rather than a few second during the memory initialization phase. In the last update phase I finally figured out that was probably because of the 16 Optane DCPMM DIMMs (8 TB memory/storage) in the server, so I took out those DIMMs until the updates were over. I was right about that; the reboot was much faster with them out. One of the good things about this server is that it's pretty easy to insert and remove DIMMs but it still took awhile because the server is on the floor in my guest bedroom, not the most ergonomic position to work in.

I did it one at a time for exactly the reason you give; could they have tested all those different possibilities with all the different possible configurations? Probably not, and that's also what the vendor's tech support person recommended. I have a whole house UPS and a generator to keep the batteries charged if there is an outage. I'm supposedly on the last step now, having made it up to the next to the last one without bricking the server. Hopefully I'll be back to actual useful work pretty soon.

My main machine, the one I'm using to post here, is 5 years old and I've never updated the firmware. One reason is that it has a non-standard memory configuration and I'm afraid that a newer firmware revision would prohibit me from using it. Also, so far I haven't found any problems that I thought meant I needed to update the firmware.

A few days ago my big Intel 1U server shut down a couple of times due to thermal trip events. I did a search on the web and found a support discussion indicating that updating the firmware to the latest version might help. I was 6 revisions behind the current version. I've spent 18 hours on getting up to date and I'm not there yet. Of course the server spends a lot of time apparently doing nothing but there are BIG BOLD WARNINGS saying not to interrupt the process or I might end up with a very expensive 1U brick. Anyone else have this experience?

Software is hard. Good software is harder. Good parallel software is harder than that. If you want high CPU loads that mostly represent useful work, you have to do a lot of work to figure out how to avoid system calls, memory allocation, and even random accesses into gigantic memory maps, as well as efficient communication among the threads. Any inefficiency in any of these factors can slow down processing to the extent that the multiple threads don't proceed much faster than a single thread would.

https://www.reddit.com/r/architecture/comments/urvmw8/steven_wright_i_have_a_map_of_the_world_its/[^]

Another example is going to bed with a performance problem on a gigantic persistent hash table and waking up with a solution that doesn't require a multi-hour table rebuild, because the hashing doesn't change.

I actually installed it without difficulty. I guess the warning message is just so they don't get support questions for it in that configuration?