SomeoneSomewhere

@SomeoneSomewhere@lemmy.nz
0 Post – 118 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

Any hard drive can fail at any time with or without warning. Worrying too much about individual drive families' reliability isn't worth it if you're dealing with few drives. Worry instead about backups and recovery plans in case it does happen.

Bigger drives have significantly lower power usage per TB, and cost per TB is lowest around 12-16TB. Bigger drives also lets you fit more storage in a given box. Drives 12TB and up are all currently helium filled which run significantly cooler.

Two preferred options in the data hoarder communities are shucking (external drives are cheaper than internal, so remove the case) and buying refurb or grey market drives from vendors like Server Supply or Water Panther. In both cases, the savings are usually big enough that you can simply buy an extra drive to make up for any loss of warranty.

Under US$15/TB is typically a 'good' price.

For media serving and deep storage, HDDs are still fine and cheap. For general file storage, consider SSDs to improve IOPS.

From article:

He said the term “coconut” was a “well-known racial slur which has a very clear meaning” to the effect that “you may be brown on the outside, but you’re white on the inside. In other words, you’re a race traitor – you’re less brown or black than you should be.”

That's a different definition of 'coconut' than I hear here in NZ. Here it's usually just a (derogatory) term for any Pacific Islander, because they come from where coconuts come from.

Gotta love slang/slurs.

Musk said last week: “I disagree with the idea of unions. I just don’t like anything which creates a lords-and-peasants kind of thing.”

Isn't he the world's richest person currently?

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It's not clear, but I think they were referring to the version 1 Pi - the newer ones are much much much faster.

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Being an SUV, it'll weigh 50% more than necessary. That outweighs almost any other sustainability considerations.

I'll take 'Violations of the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act'.

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Exercising eminent domain can mean a long and expensive legal and media process. I'm not sure about Texas (or the rest of the US, for that matter), but many projects in the first world do everything possible to avoid using it.

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Hate speech and cancel culture are usually considered somewhat opposites - cancelling is usually a 'weapon in the toolkit' against hate speech or whatever else you don't like.

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In cloudy conditions, the team estimates the range could be 50 kilometers less.

In other words, the solar only adds about 50-60km/day to the battery.

Another case of putting solar panels on specific things not being a great idea. Chuck the panels on a convenient surface pointing at the sun and connect them to the grid. Connect your load to the grid. Job done.

We can talk about solar windows/roads/cars/rivers/canopies when we've run out of space on houses and commercial roofs. They already have grid connections, structure, and are protected from damage.

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FYI: This has been going on for about a month. If you still see warnings, update your ad blocker, switch to UBlock Origin, and/or check their FAQs.

It appears that the door design is unchanged from the previous generation.

The problem is not with any specific part of the design or any model of plane. Grounding the Max again will not help past fixing this specific fault.

It is the fundamental corporate culture. The same poor QA, both in design and production, affects all current Boeing aircraft.

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Boeing and Microsoft: same shit, different cloud.

No, I think that one's fairly common. So is just "Republican gets pregnant, now supports abortion - but only for her specific circumstances".

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When you download a torrent, you're downloading it from someone else's computer. That 'someone else' is usually an individual, not some file sharing site with redundant servers.

When you download a torrent, someone had to send it. It's a small cost for individual torrents, but they had to pay for energy, internet connection, hard drives etc. If more people seed the torrent, you get a small bit of it from each seed, spreading the burden.

If no-one with the torrent has their computer on and seeding it, you cannot download the file, because there is no-one to download it from. If there are several seeds with the torrent, then you can still download it even if one or more seeds turn the computer off at night, delete the file, or are overloaded.

Not all seeds are online 24/7. Sometimes leaving the torrent running for hours or days can allow you to download it when that PC/server gets switched on.

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If the cost per TB is the same and they're buying tens of PBs anyway, large commercial customers want fewer, bigger drives. That means fewer slots in servers, fewer storage controllers, and possibly even fewer servers.

Onboard storage on cellphones is all about how much they can charge and how many they can sell. 256GB extra for $200 is about 10x higher than the $100/TB flash storage can be gotten for.

Not sure if sarcastic...

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The point of eradication is that once a disease is gone, you don't need to vaccinate against it any more. You've probably never been vaccinated against smallpox, for example.

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Fibre optics can be used to measure a remarkable number of properties.

The electrical transmission industry makes significant use of fibreoptic current sensors, and distributed fibreoptic temperature sensors.

The latter is particularly useful as you can measure the temperature at any point along the fibre's length, allowing you to detect hot-spots in cables.

Cicadas are pretty loud; I'm sure you can pick up much quieter things with a fibreoptic microphone.

'Fair use' is a thing. It varies by country, and I'm not certain on where the US falls.

Selling copies on merchandise would definitely not be fair use.

Using it in news articles may be fair use under some circumstances, but probably only if you were commenting specifically on the mugshot.

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Got it in two. Both, per the article:

It can be illegal to use company funds for personal expenses — especially when dealing with a publicly traded company. If a public company were found to have used company funds for an executive's personal use it could lead to an IRS investigation and lawsuits from shareholders.

Elon doesn't own all of Tesla. It's a publicly traded company whose shares are held by millions(?) of people. The board and CEO are generally required to act in those owners' best interests, not their own. They have leeway, but building the CEO a house is a lot closer to embezzlement (taking company funds for personal gain) than say a PR stunt. Board/CEO remuneration is fairly carefully controlled to avoid this kind of thing.

As for tax, it looks like the US is a bit more lax with fringe benefit tax than other jurisdictions, but it could nonetheless apply.

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I didn't realise it was possible to hate every side of an argument this strongly.

Things might be different in the US, but here in NZ the first meter or two off the road is usually road reserve, which is council property. That's where footpaths/sidewalks, street trees, and utilities are run.

The bit of your driveway that is actually yours doesn't start until about where your front fence is, if you have one.

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Most Fediverse stuff has web front ends so that any modern browser will work.

My concern would be that Chrome is about to neuter ad blockers, and you can't use a different browser without replacing the OS.

Both are also heavily privacy destroying.

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Bear in mind also that the extra weight and possibly aerodynamic compromises actually reduce range. In some cases, particularly at night, in poor weather, and at high speed, the panels would be a net negative.

They would only be useful if your car sat around in the sun for long periods without access to a charger.

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But how do you determine what's just 'fixing poor wording' and what's actively hiding major bias or retcons of history?

Radio NZ got caught a year or so ago with a staffer who was editing articles syndicated from Reuters to be more pro-Russian. Should they be able to sweep that under the rug and claim it was only ever the one article they got caught on?

Likewise, bin Laden was originally hailed as an anti-Soviet freedom fighter. The articles relating to that are part of the historical record and kinda important.

Allowing the historical record to be retconned with impunity was probably the defining trait of 1984. It's really not a path you want to go down.

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PV inverters often have around 1-2% losses. This is not very significant. You also need to convert the voltage anyway because PV output voltage varies with light level.

Buck/boost converters work by converting the DC current to (messy) AC, then back to DC. If you want an isolating converter (necessary for most applications for safety reasons) that converter needs to handle the full power. If it's non isolating, then it's proportional to the voltage step.

Frequency provides a somewhat convenient method for all parties to know whether the grid is over- or under- supplied on a sub-second basis. Operating solely on voltage is more prone to oscillation and requires compensation for voltage drop, plus the information is typically lost at buck/boost sites. A DC grid would likely require much more robust and faster real-time comms.

The AC grid relies on significant (>10x overcurrent) short-term (<5s) overload capability. Inrush and motor starting requires small/short overloads (though still significant). Faults are detected and cleared primarily through the excess current drawn. Fuses/breakers in series will all see the same current from the same fault, but we want only the device closest to the fault to operate to minimise disruption. That's achieved (called discrimination, coordination, or selectivity) by having each device take progressively more time to trip on a fault of a given size, and progressively higher fault current so that the devices upstream still rapidly detect a fault.

RCDs/GFCIs don't coordinate well because there isn't enough room between the smallest fault required to be detected and the maximum disconnection time to fit increasingly less sensitive devices.

Generators are perfectly able to provide this extra fault current through short term temperature rise and inertia. Inverters cannot provide 5-fold overcurrent without being significantly oversized. We even install synchronous condensers (a generator without any actual energy source) in areas far from actual generators to provide local inertia.

AC arcs inherently self-extinguish in most cases. DC arcs do not.

This means that breakers and expulsion type fuses have to be significantly, significantly larger and more expensive. It also means more protection is needed against arcs caused by poor connection, cable clashes, and insulation damage.

Solid state breakers alleviate this somewhat, but it's going to take 20+ years to improve cost, size, and power loss to acceptable levels.

I expect that any 'next generation' system is likely to demand a step increase in safety, not merely matching the existing performance. I suspect that's going to require a 100% coverage fibre comms network parallel to the power conductors, and in accessible areas possibly fully screened cable and isolated supply.

EVs and PV arrays get away with DC networks because they're willing to shut down the whole system in the event of a fault. You don't want a whole neighborhood to go dark because your neighbour's cat gnawed on a laptop charger.

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The issue is acronyms; there's millions of products, schematics, datasheets, and manuals that refer to them as MISO and MOSI with no further explanation. Any new standard that doesn't fit runs into the 15-competing-standards problem, and ought to be followed by an "AKA MISO" every time it's used.

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Laser pointer?

NO!

WATER POINTER!

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I'm not sure that there is any point in a fediverse platform. That implies you want interaction (e.g. comments) from other locations, and therefore need moderation etc. A local blog site with 'share to Mastodon' buttons (if they exist) is probably all that's needed.

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Likely a combination of past posts and a formulaic username. Watch this space.

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Yup. Expect that everything lasts exactly as long as you don't want it to.

You rapidly end up with a freeloader issue.

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Incidentally, there's a reasonably wide range of connectors that don't fit traditional identities. Some, like most USB connectors, have a situation where there's a male prong in the middle of a 'female' connector.

Others, like Anderson Powerpole, are fully self-mating.

There's been various desktop-grade plans regarding use of nuclear rockets, both in the atmosphere and not. Never underestimate what engineers can come up with.

I think what they were trying to argue is that the mercury emitted would be no worse than the mercury already emitted as a byproduct of power plants.

Most rocket operators/manufacturers run on razor thin margins or at a loss, sustained by state subsidies or wishful venture capitalists.

Here in NZ they do a factory reset on your calculator at the start of every exam.

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Starlink plugs the rural coverage gaps, but in urban areas it's still more expensive than either conventional fixed-line connections or wireless (4G/5G) broadband. Even in rural areas, while it's the best option, it's rarely the cheapest, at least in the NZ market I'm familiar with.

It also doesn't have the bandwidth per square kilometre/mile to serve urban areas well, and it's probably never going to work in apartment buildings.

This is a funding/subsidisation issue, not so much a technical one. I imagine Starlink connections are eligible for the current subsidy, but in most cases it's probably going to conventional DSL/cable/fibre/4G connections.

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The issue is the amount of energy produced (minuscule) and the requirement for very humid air. It's also likely that the device needs to be colder than ambient temperature if I've got my thermodynamics right, so removing heat might be necessary, obliterating any gains and turning it into a dehumidifier that produces a small amount of waste electricity.

It might be another option in the pile of 'energy harvesting' solutions, where you need microwatts to miliwatts to power devices like remote temperature sensors, to avoid fitting ten-year lithium batteries. It doesn't seem likely to go beyond that.

Secondhand stuff can be really cheap if you know where to look, but the drawbacks are usually power and noise.

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Blackadder: Would that be the plan to continue with total slaughter until everyone's dead except for Field Marshall Haig, Lady Haig and their tortoise, Alan?