Posts by C 7 32 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Oct 2012
But, how much verification is done in the real world? And, are these parts serialized in some manner?
Perhaps they are... the closest I've come to buying commercial aircraft parts is shopping at the Boeing Surplus Store as a kid (may it RIP). That was mostly tools, old test equipment, and the random solenoid valve here and there.
What's to prevent Aeroflop maintenance folks driving over to Kazakhstan or Xiostan and coming back with a truck full of parts from someone who *is* allowed to buy them under the current sanctions? Who in those countries is going to report it? Obviously they would have to spread out the purchases a bit so it's less obvious, but if all of the brands of "Make Great Airways for Glory of Dear Leader and CCP" increased their parts orders by 5% and shuffled off the extra parts to Comrade Vlad, it could probably fly under the radar better than anything Russia has used in Ukraine.
There are pretty significant differences between the 3 vendors you mention, particularly where things like RDMA is concerned; Mellanox has done a good job at ROCEv2 for some time; Intel focused on iWARP which no one really used much, and just finally came out with a ROCEv2 NIC (the E810) recently. Broadcom completely sucks when it comes to RDMA, but has broad driver support across a lot of platforms (and claims to have a new NIC that can compete with Mellanox/Intel on ROCEv2 support).
Then there are things like crypto offload engines, TCP offload, ability to channelize a QSFP28 port into 2x50 or 4x25 (Intel can do this, Mellanox can't), ability to support 100Gb in 2x50Gb-PAM4 in addition to 4x25Gb-NRZ, ability to support different types and power levels of optics, etc.
And then, a lot of the 2x 100Gb NICs are only 100Gb NICs, but with 2 ports for redundancy. That's not a failure of design, it's written right in the spec sheets for the NIC. So it can push 100Gb on one port or the other, or 50Gb (maybe 60+, but not 100) on both ports simultaneously (even though the link speed is 100Gb). So you have to understand the use case and the hardware when choosing a NIC, and a lot of people don't. A lot of people just say "I need a 100Gb NIC, let me grab this Broadcom because it's cheaper" and it really might not work well for their use case.
The fact Microsoft is acknowledging this and addressing it should probably be considered a good thing.
1980s cars in general being the exception. They were exceptionally bad, nearly all of them, and in the mid '90s finally started to get better again. One can find a number of '70s and earlier cars on the used market in decent running shape, and a number from the '90s forward, but not a lot from the '80s. Besides, even if they did run, who really wants a Ford mustang-that-looks-like-an-escort, or a K car, or any of the other hideous machines that were built in that era?
True. But we also know that:
1) Chinese businesses are heavily influenced by the Chinese government (and in many cases at least partially owned by the government).
2) The Chinese government has a propensity to lie about a great many things (even more than the average government, which is already not overly trustworthy).
Ergo, it stands to reason that their numbers may be an outright lie, not because of their ethnicity or race, but because of influence from the Chinese government.
I read that comment as "They're [being heavily influenced by the] Chinese [government] and they're lying." I can't say for sure that was the intent, but with all the industrial espionage and similar issues coming from China (and likely attributable to the Chinese government) it would make sense.
This was what I had to do, and though it would've been nice if my employer reimbursed me for it, the $40 or $50 increase in ISP costs and increase in electric/heating costs was probably about a wash with my fuel savings, not even taking into account my time. Getting 2-2.5 hours/day of my life back AND saving the fuel costs more than made up for my increased spend on internet/power/gas service.
My previous 200Mbps plan would've been fine, except it's Comcast so uploads were limited to something like 10Mbps. To get to 25Mbps upload speeds, I had to upgrade to their 1Gbps plan for $100/month.
Exactly this. Water conducts heat much more readily than air, and can hold a lot more of it, requiring significantly less flow of the cooling medium (in this case water vs. air). So instead of using 100W/server or more on spinning fans (which are also contributing to the heat load), you can spend 4.3kW to move warm water for an entire row of cabinets (using something like the CoolIT CHx750 CDU, which claims to handle up to 750kW heat load). So, if you figure 4.3kW to cool 750kW of server load, that's about 0.06% of power going to cooling, vs. 100W of fans to cool a 600W server, being about 16.7% of power going toward cooling. This is only looking at the server side of things; the facility side is similar as they only have to pump water through mostly-passive coolers, vs. moving around a lot of air through active chillers. Due to the thermal characteristics of water it can operate as a sufficient coolant at much higher starting temperatures than air, adding to the efficiency. I believe something like up to 45C is allowed on the *inlet* side of the server, outlet side can go up significantly from there, which means a passive cooling tower in outdoor ambient air can bring it back down to useful temp in most climates (maybe not in Arizona in the summer, but in most northern climates it's perfectly reasonable).
I know someone who ran their diesel pickup on A-1 for a while... It runs just fine, but long term it's terrible for the engine. That engine and the injectors experienced all sorts of accelerated wear; I think the A-1 provides less lubrication than standard Diesel #2, and burns somewhat hotter.
So, it will get you where you need to go in a pinch, but I wouldn't run it in an automotive diesel engine long-term.
Fortunately, those countries without socialised healthcare also have militaries with the brains to say "hell no we're not letting an old guy with no training ride in our shiny without making certain he's dressed and strapped in properly and the bang button is disabled."
So, no healthcare needed.
Monster Cables. 'Nuff said.
In the long-ago times, I worked for a musical instrument retail store, and I repaired a lot of cables for customers, because guitar players are hard on their cables. I once had a Monster instrument cable cross my path; it had fairly poor shielding, and at the cable end it was all bunched together and the signal wire and shield were both very poorly soldered to their respective connectors. It was one of the worst constructed cables I had ever seen. We also sold a couple brands of low-cost instrument cables, for about $10/ea. Those were built more like a user-serviceable F-type connector, with a nice tightly-woven shield folded back over the cable jacket, and the signal wire stripped and inserted into the 1/4" plug. The whole thing was tightened down (and could be tightened by hand), and attached to the cable by compression. They made a nice solid connection, and had no solder joints to break (and a lifetime warranty to boot). I kept the Monster cable under the counter and would show my customers the difference when they came in asking for "better-sounding" cables.
The problem I saw most frequently was people using a speaker cable (unshielded) in place of an instrument cable; the buzz one can pick up that way is pretty incredible.
I use the Wireless Desktop 3050 with AES... a great feeling keyboard, a blue-track mouse that's big enough to hold on to, AES encryption, and only $35 (USD) for the set on Amazon. My old 3050 without AES has lasted around 10 years, and still going strong, I just decided to upgrade since I'm stuck working at home until this coronavirus thing blows over.
I do use it with a Mac, but it's SO much better than the built-in keyboard. There's actual key travel you can feel, the keys are all in the right places, complete with Home and End and Backspace AND Delete, and PageUp/PageDown, all those keys that some idiot designer at Apple apparent'y thought were as unimportant as the right button on a mouse.
Updated fine. I miss them. I now have an Android phone, and an Android table, and they're both crap. And they're both out of date. And there's nothing I can do about it unless I want to futz around for hours with unlocking them and installing some other flavor of Android. While I'm perfectly capable of that, I have better things to do with my time than waste it on computers in my un-paid hours. I'm getting old, dammit, and I want certain things to "just work." My phone is definitely one of those things, along with my tablet which I pretty much only own for watching movies on airplanes, but no longer does that (without a bit of useragent trickery in Dolphin) because it's stuck on Android 7.0 and GoGo Inflight now mandates 7.1.
Google/Android sucks. Windows Phone was 10x better, despite all its flaws and the total b0rkery of its Redmond overlords.
...the company has such a great success rate with acquisitions under Ballmer. Maybe it could be as successful as Aquantive, or destroy its own revenue stream like Skype. Fantastic. Microsoft can burn up more cash reserves while running a couple once great companies the rest of the way into the ground... What could go wrong?
And assuming they tapped in between battery and phone to measure I, E should be 3.7v for all of them, as that's standard for a LiIon phone battery. Granted that's making a few assumptions given the sketchy details of the testing, but they'd have to be real amateurs (or sheisters) to use I as their benchmark if E wasn't consistent across the board.
What is it with trying to re-define the kilogram? Every sane person knows it's 2.2 pounds, so what's all the fuss about? If the damned frogs would just get with the program already and quit fussing around, we could get some serious work done, but no, it's all "kilo this" and "meter that." I mean, who the hell decided we needed a smaller unit of measure, which would be approximately 0.3937 inches? How the hell are reasonable people supposed to remember this drivel? Now we have wings that don't fit the airplanes they were built for, and spacecraft that miss their targets, all because some frogs can't figure out how to convert their dark-ages base-10 system into Real Units. Give me an inch and I'll take a mile, but leave the damn meters out of it unless we're talking cab fare.
Since the whole of China seems to be without the slightest shred of sysadmin talent, it's no wonder they want to bring people in from other countries.
I've yet to figure out how a country so adept at counterfeiting everything from shoes to routers seems completely unable to follow simple documentation with screenshots. Perhaps that's only the people they allow to leave for the US, and they keep all the intelligentsia safely locked away at home.
No one is asking Google to provide a YouTube app for Windows Phone, Microsoft is only asking them to allow the same access to metadata that apps on other platforms have, so that they (Microsoft) can provide the app. It's like if Microsoft provided specs on their office document formats to all competing office suites, except Google and whatever their craptastic online pile of vomit office suite is called. Microsoft may have its share of antitrust skeletons in the closet, but for the most part they're a decade or more in the past. Google, it seems, is just ramping up their antitrust schemes.
Salty, yes, perhaps. Cremated? 90% lard? Cardboard? I'm not sure who cooked the bacon you tried, but it must have been a combination of a) cheap bacon and b) someone incredibly bad at cooking bacon. Bacon is actually fairly easy to mess up, and many people cook it over too high of a temperature and for too long, ruining the flavor and texture. But done correctly, over medium to low heat, and using a high-quality starting product, it can be quite tasty.
One thing they left out of 2012 which really, really pisses me off... the freaking start button! I want the damned thing back, and I want to meet the moron who decided it shouldn't be there, so I can slap the stupid out of him or her. I don't mind it on a desktop OS, but "live corners" or whatever they're called are impossible to use with nested RDP sessions. Oh yeah, and hotkeys don't work in that scenario either. The only redeeming factor is there's a powershell icon right on the taskbar, by default.
...who really wants a phone this size with the feature of the high-end behemoths? I don't want a 4.5 or 5 inch screen, I want something I can comfortably hold and use with one hand. I also want the fancy camera and wireless charging of the 920, more like a 920 mini. I'm sure battery capacity is a limiting factor here, but seriously... I don't want to carry a damn near-tablet in my pocket, I just want a phone that happens to be able to do email and web and gps stuff if I want.
...limited by statute to the lowest price the work can be commonly found selling for, if the result isn't sold commercially. And, if the copy has been re-shared, perhaps treble damages may be in order. So, if songs are commonly available for $1/each, and someone downloads ten of them, their damages would be limited to $10. If it could be proven that all ten were redistributed, then a max of $30 would be in order.
For commercial pirating operations, I say throw the book at them.
Unfortunately, abusive employment practices are rampant in many so-called civilized countries too. When I worked retail, 100-hour weeks happened several times per year, with 60 being the norm. Now that I'm in IT, I know many working over 60/week, with occasional 80+ hour weeks, for no additional compensation (salary). While it may be shocking to our European cousins, the US has very little in the way of laws protecting workers from excessive overtime, no mandated vacation, weekends or holidays. More and more, it's becoming the norm for companies here to drive people until they absolutely burn out or, as was the case with one of my coworkers, die. But, the hourly jobs don't pay the bills, so we keep at it.
China has just announced a clever new solid-fuel rocket design, which may be ready for a test flight as early as next summer. Rumor has it the rocket may be used to launch the C-II cargo vehicle which has also just recently been revealed. The Chinese civil space agency, named redarmii, said it had been inspired by early success of the technology during test firings.
Rather a simple abbreviation perhaps, but dumb people will assume it's 4 generations ahead of their current TV, and smart people will know the '4' refers to 4k. It's also future-proof for a while, though eventually even the dumbest people may wonder why we're jumping straight from HD64 to HD128, and somewhere down the road it'll become a mouthful with HD8192 and HD16384.
Whatever though, as long as it results in something better than the current crap displays shipping for PCs and laptops, I'll be thrilled. Might even finally replace my old IBM CRTs at that point, beautiful though they are.
...when they can't even seem to hire enough people to support their current customer base? Sprint used to be a great carrier, but has made so many unbelievably bad decisions the last few years, I'm surprised they're still number 3. They've lost their early dominance in data rates, gone chasing after technologies bound for the scrap heap (wiMax), saddled themselves with the profit-munching iPhone, and let their once-great support slip away to be replaced by script-monkeys.
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