Re: But where are the "cheap" chips?
Fab demand is extremely high, so now is not the time to shop for a deal. Also, inflation is hitting prices everywhere, so £100 could well be the new normal for budget CPUs.
562 posts • joined 22 Aug 2018
you need to pay to cool that 3MWH/yr also
With traditional refrigeration air conditioning systems, that only adds 1/3 to the power budget. But big cloud providers don't use traditional air conditioning, they run at high temperatures (so often need to HEAT-UP outside air they pull in), and often use evaporative cooling instead of refrigeration where needed.
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZUX3n2yAzY
maybe Microsofts spreadsheet needs to factor in this week's meter readings ....
Servers are expensive... around the price of an automobile. Their power consumption is relatively moderate these days. The purchase price of the server can far outstrip the cost of electricity to operate it, particularly if you can choose to locate your data centre somewhere with inexpensive electricity and moderate cooling needs.
Dell estimates 3MWH/yr on a heavy workload for their fully kitted-out R740 servers:
* https://corporate.delltechnologies.com/content/dam/digitalassets/active/en/unauth/data-sheets/products/servers/Full_LCA_Dell_R740.pdf
Even using the UK average of £0.28 per kWh, that would be just £840/yr. At 5 years, that's £4200. You'll find that a fully populated new server costs considerably more than that, and that's not even accounting for the much lower electrical rate Microsoft pays. Locating close to cheap electricity is a trick Aluminum smelters have been doing for decades.
No amount of caching can speed up that final step.
Sure it can. Your RAID controller with the battery backup just needs to lie to your database, telling it the write was completed to disk the moment it went into the cache.
Somewhere along the way you have to decide that a certain storage method is reliable enough, and that could be battery backed RAM (cache) just as easily as the SSDs its connected to.
You need to decide your trade-off. Others might decide that writing to a single RAID array isn't reliable enough, and force the database to wait until the write has been replicated to a second, remote storage array.
You never needed Optane memory for that use case. In the old days, you could just design-in a battery backup system, and use RAM as your persistent storage.
These days, you can just go out and buy NVDIMMs off the shelf. It's a use case fully supported by common server boards. You don't hear about it because there just isn't a killer app where a non-trivial number of workloads see real benefits from it.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVDIMM
* https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-us/poweredge-r740/nvdimm-n_ug_pub/introduction
the ability to access small files with magnitude lower latency than regular SSDs.
File systems already use un-allocated RAM space as cache. So you're talking about a very specialized case of lots of access to very small files (that can't be converted into larger files, like fields in a database) and also so huge a number of these files that there isn't enough RAM to cache them for higher performance access.
It's a difficult problem, since airports need to be as close as possible to big cities, but cities don't want to be anywhere near airports...
Not difficult, really. Put the entry point in the city and have a tram every minute that moves people a few miles to the actual terminal near the runway.
Alternately, I'd certainly enjoy seeing a kilometers-long autowalk moving at 100km/h.
A typical budget extension cord is not fit to power anything other than a lamp, phone charger or laptop but there's absolutely nothing stopping you plugging in something that will draw the full circuit current and -- literally -- melting wiring or sockets.
Actually, the earthing pin usually prevents it. Extension cords that can't handle the full 15A of a standard NEMA 5-15R are two-pole, no earth affairs (NEMA 1-15R) so you can't plug-in MOST high-power devices, which usually has/needs that third pin.
Those terrible extension cords aren't very common. Just a hold-over from the pre-1960 electrical standards, and only available in fairly short lengths. Still purchased these days as a cheap option for some low power needs like Christmas lights, but far less common a sight than the (orange) 3-pin extension cords which are quite safe, and rendered pretty uncommon by the rise of power strips/surge protectors (starting in 1970).
"its only 110 volts"
Also a hold-over from the 1960s. The US grid has been 120V for many decades.
makes people who don't live in those places, complacent.
There's a corollary, however, that people who engage in token actions are less likely to take substantive actions to actually resolve the problem.
Reducing plastic pollution in the oceans can be most effectively done by spending money at the source of most of the plastic, not trying to prevent that last 1% from relative non-polluters.
I wonder who DOES dump all of that plastic?
As of 2019, "Asia accounts for 81% of global plastic inputs to the ocean." * They frequently lack the sanitation infrastructure the western world has, as well as environmental laws. Dumping trash into rivers, where it gets flushed out to sea, is not just an occasional happening but the standard method of disposal.
* source: ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics
It doesn't need to be all in the browser. I've put together Linux systems with locked-down Kiosk desktops, and also had no problems at all.
One of those icons is a web browser, but native programs are better where available. Much less bandwidth used, and performs very well on even old slow hardware. Still a locked-down, unprivileged user experience with no way to install programs, or even run anything they haven't been given access to.
Of course it's easier to get started when someone did the work for you, but more difficult when you find you need to do something more than the lowest-common-denominator use-case.
"And if you do bring your own commerce engine, you keep 100 per cent of your revenue, we keep zero."
24th June, 2021. Keep the date. This is the kind of promise that will get slowly watered down a bit at a time, until nobody makes a fuss when it is reversed entirely. At least, assuming they're successful in driving more developers to use their "Store". This sounds like Microsoft from the old days, promising vendors everything, then doing the opposite.
One has to wonder if the sauna-like temperatures Google and Facebook are increasingly running their datacenters at, is contributing to the increased rate of CPU-core glitches.
They may be monitoring CPU temperatures to ensure they don't exceed the spec sheet maximums, but any real-world device doesn't have a vertical cliff dropoff, and the more extreme conditions it operates in, the sooner some kind of failure can be expected. The speedometer in my car goes significantly into the tripple-digits, but I wouldn't be shocked if driving it like a race car would result in mechanical problems rather sooner in its life-cycle.
Similarly, high temperatures are frequently used to simulate years of ageing with various equipment.
worst-case rely on character recognition techniques to scrape the text into an easier format.
Well that's not a fair comparison. Somebody could scan a piece of paper and insert it as an image into an DOCX file just as easily. PDFs (that aren't just images of scanned pages) are trivially easy to extract to images and text.
I am also getting bored with everything depending on evermore outrageous CGI
It was the improving technology of special effects which gave us the blockbuster (and predominantly sci-fi) film boom of the 80s & 90s.
CGI has the potential to make it cheaper and easier to make better, more imaginative films. That reality hasn't worked out that ways is not the fault of the technology, but unrelated studio issues.
State income tax is fairly insignificant next to federal income taxes (and related federal withholdings).
A quick lookup seems to show New York state income tax rate at 5.99%, while Colorado is 4.63%. Not a huge difference. Worth paying if you can negotiate a 2% higher salary out of it (higher cost of living area).
Plus you could move shortly after getting the job. You'd probably have to pay income taxes in both states for the period that you are faking your mailing address, to ensure neither state can arrest you for tax fraud... They NEVER object to getting MORE in taxes than they're owed.
Those other identities / personas won't be "trusted" by the kernel developers, so there's no reason to worry about them. They were only successful because they were associated with a group that has been reliable and trustworthy in the past. Unless they have similar connections to other organizations, it's a non-issue.
If you gave Linux to your typical office desktop users, you'd have as many, if not more, of the same security breaches.
We have an office full of Linux systems, and never had a single breach. A big part of that is that users are just that. Locked-down user, no privileges to install anything.
With Windows, you can't even set-up two users on the local system to be able to access the same set of files, without making them administrators. Search for "unable to take ownership". You'll see lots of resolutions options like disabling UAC, which is both a terrible idea, and still doesn't work. You can set all the ACLs on the files and folders correctly to allow two users full access to them, but Windows only recognizes one owner, and won't let you open and modify those files until you're the owner, which you can't make happen unless you're also an administrator...
Linux is designed to be a sane, multi-user operating system. Windows has only just the basics of multi-user operation tacked-on, poorly.
And if users were allowed to install software, they would only be doing it from the repos... Careful use of sudo can allow them to do that, without giving them full root permissions. And those Linux software repos are still curated and extremely, without being locked-down with onerous restrictions and fee demands like Apple does with their store. Whereas the very model for Windows software installation has for decades been "download binaries from websites on the internet and run them, and say yes when asked if they should be allowed to do absolutely anything to your system" which is the real security nightmare.
Linux doesn't let you run exe's or other binaries from files attached to e-mails with a click. Linux doesn't hide (crucially important on Windows) file extensions from you, allowing attackers to mask executable code as innocuous images or other documents.
And should we talk about auto-run?
This is just scratching the surface. The list of ways in which Windows is inherently insecure is legion.
Converting an analog medium into a digital representation and then back to analog again is, to put it mildly, less than ideal
On the contrary, converting to digital is the only way to ensure you can perfectly reproduce the analogue signal.
If you are doing digital sampling above the Nyquist rate (right about double the sound's highest frequency), the digitizing process is provably perfect. What the ADC input picks up will be the exact same waveform the CD spits back out. It's math.
Digital media formats have error checking and correcting codes, which are not possible in the analogue realm. Analogue media just wears out imperceptible until it progressively becomes impossible to ignore.
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But in practice, the reason you weren't developing it yourself in the first place is likely because you lack the ability to actually do so.
Unlikely. The #1 reason is because somebody is doing it (for free) for you already, so why put any time/effort/money into it when it needs none? When the project dies, that calculus changes.
Also, if you can't afford to fund a few modifications to an open source project, what are the chances you could have afforded the license cost for the proprietary version in the first place?
I know of MANY small companies that have gone out of business when a proprietary piece of software (which they relied on) changed its license terms or greatly increased the price. I can't think of ANY cases where an open source project being abandoned resulted in the same... When its open source you have so many options, where with proprietary software you have just the one choice.
Schools typically issue student IDs to everyone, which are rather universally accepted as valid ID for minors.
Adults (old enough to drive) can get a cheap state photo ID without the driving test, typically through the same process, if desired.
So a keyboard is now two accessories?
No, that's just one. But if you're not holding the iPad, you probably need something to stand it up, too.
if you're going to be doing serious typing then a real keyboard is required, but that's the same on all devices.
Which is why all other devices include a keyboard.
as for the dumb terminal... what exactly are you connecting to?
Local/offline mode. Just echoes what you type to screen. Hit the Print Screen button to output it to the connected printer.
The idea is to have a low distraction environment. The WiFi was often switched off
That works well on a laptop, too. Also see typewriter and dumb terminal comment above.
“Verizon Media has done an incredible job turning the business around over the past two and a half years and the growth potential is enormous,” Hans Vestberg said in a statement.
When Verizon bought Yahoo in 2016, it had a search market share of about 3%. Now they're around 1.5%. That's an impressive turnaround, no question. Source: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/worldwide/2016
With low numbers like that, there is certainly growth potential, but also death-spiral potential.
The ISS doesn't have long left, it's likely to be decommissioned within 10 years
Perhaps China can get a good price on it... They certainly don't mind making copies. I know they won't take our used electronics any more, but maybe they can make an exception.
Maybe the next ISS will be made by Foxcomm.
After a few 1TB venv's for a bunch of simple apps, you might start to question the logic of this deployment method. Not to mention the logistics of updating package X in every venv when you find out there's a vulnerability that needs patching.
I guess it's better than a docker container for /bin/true, but it's still pretty inefficient.
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