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Comment Re:RISC-V laptops are sorely needed (Score 2) 47

I develop embedded systems for a living. I'm not sure why I'd need GPIO and I2S pins on my laptop directly when I can buy a simple USB to GPIO or I2S adapter. Heck, I have both hooked to my docking station so when I'm at the office I can work on them, but not sure why I'd ever need GPIO sitting at a coffee shop or on an airplane unless I feel like getting arrested for being mistaken for a terrorist building a bomb.

Comment Re:Nice stunt (Score 2) 47

Not sure I fully agree with that; there have been some incredible performance increases in laptops in the last few years, and incredible efficiency improvements as well. I went from a Dell Latitude with a 9th gen i7 to a Framework with an AMD 7840U and I've been completely blown away with the performance and efficiency compared to that ~6 year old Dell. CPU and GPU performance are incredible and yes will allow me to do stuff on them that I found taxing on the Dell. For the record I do a lot of CAD and CAM work on my laptop, as well as circuit board design for embedded systems.

I'm also delighted that GPU performance improved to the point that I can happily play a huge number of even pretty recent games. Sure, not the super demanding AAA titles on ultra quality, but even some premium titles I can play quite happily at medium settings and they look and play just fine. This in a slimline 13" laptop is really quite impressive and I've been really happy with the Framework.

Comment Re:CCS, Tesla, GB-T (Score 1) 194

J1772 is typically used for 11 or 22kw stations, otherwise known as "destination chargers". These are AC and not DC chargers and are typically only running at household voltages (110 or 220 in the US) and are the same as people use to charge their cars in their garages.

The standards everyone is talking about here are for DC fast charging which are distinct from the AC chargers. Tesla's NACS adapter can carry both AC and DC voltages depending on what it's connected to; in a home or destination charger it's usually AC while at a DC fast charging station it's at home.

Adapters exist for all of these and work well. They are also easy enough to store in your car so it's not like it's a huge issue. J1772 is more common because it was a standard long before NACS, but new installations of destination chargers at hotels and the like are typically using the NACS connector so you'll see the older standards phase out over time.

My car has CCS and recently got access to Tesla Superchargers (Polestar 2). I keep a NACS-J1772 and a NACS-CCS adapter in the trunk of my car. The former allows me to use NACS destination chargers while the latter should allow me to use NACS superchargers... though because I just received it yesterday I haven't had a chance to test it. I will probably test it this weekend as there's a Tesla Supercharger about 20 miles from my house.

Comment Re:What are the alternatives for enterprise scale? (Score 1) 125

A lot of my old clients (I am out of the systems engineering business but still meet up with my old clients periodically) are taking the opportunity to refactor many of their applications to cloud-native solutions, both private and public clouds. It's a pretty large lift-and-shift and usually requires some staffing changes or training for the new server stacks, but it's an easy sell to the C-suite when you're looking at such a significant price hike. This is especially true for those clients with perpetual licenses who thought they had a cost-controlled infrastructure stack and now clearly don't.

Where legacy apps are still required in virtual machines I've seen a lot of them go to Hyper-V but on a much smaller scale than their previous VMware stacks due to the above migrations. In some cases, they're also shifting these VM's up to Azure or AWS as stop-gap solutions while they identify new products or migrate... I have always said there's nothing more permanent than a temporary solution but in the cost analysis moving 100 VM's out of a 2000 VM stack to Azure is still cheaper than paying VMware for the licensing.

I've also seen a big uptick in interest in Proxmox, particularly using Ceph as the "VSAN" environment. It's a VERY solid alternative and the transition for the admins is actually very little as administration is very similar to managing a VMware cluster.

I've also seen a few who have decided that monolithic solutions are dead on arrival because they decide that the companies behind those solutions can pull a Broadcom at any time. These companies have started or have already finished rolling their own solutions using OSS. Ceph as a clustered filesystem, KVM as the virtualization layer and pick your poising for administration... there's tons of solutions out there and what you need depends greatly on the complexity of your environment, the skill set of your staff and how much you expect to be caring and feeding for the infrastructure. Set up properly these solutions should mostly get out of the way to allow your organization to do actual work and just require administration when something breaks.

Comment Re:Automate better (Score 1) 293

I'd posit that most enterprises should actually get rid of anything that doesn't support some method of automating stuff. Ansible has been a thing in the enterprise for a LONG time, SSH even longer than that. If a device doesn't support automation of any kind it seems time to pressure the vendor for one or to switch to a better product.

Comment Re: Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease (Score 1) 293

Can't speak for A10, but I used to manage a fleet of F5's and they have a well documented, scripted method for updating certificates using SSH with some scripting. If you can't do SSH then they also support the same process over a serial console. At least they used to a decade ago when that was my job... seems likely they still have that functionality.

Any device on your network should have a well documented method of doing remote administration, and that includes certs. If it doesn't then it's not Enterprise ready in the first place and should be nowhere near your network. I have also worked with Kemp load balancers and the manual contains a well documented API for updating certificates.

Comment Re:LetsEncrypt users are used to short cert lifeti (Score 1) 293

If you can manage certs via SSH or serial console, you can update certs by a script. If your device doesn't support either of these then it probably has a certificate update API that is documented in the manual (that you probably haven't read) that can be scripted. If your device has none of these then it's a shit device that was built for hobbyists, not enterprises.

Comment Re:LetsEncrypt users are used to short cert lifeti (Score 1) 293

You realize that even for isolated network devices there's such a thing as a console? Serial consoles have been the way to manage secure network devices for decades as even when isolated they still need SOME way of administering them. So even if you aren't allowed to attach your machine to the secure network, you can connect to the serial console and update certs from there. If your device doesn't support that then you DO need a new device.

I don't disagree there is a level of burden here but in a secure network environment wouldn't you WANT the better security of shorter cert times?

Besides, in my experience most secure networks use self-signed certs and the client and server devices in that network have the root cert installed on them for trust.

Comment Wrong! (Score 1) 36

Google's grip on search slipped as their search results became nearly fucking useless.

Literally just last night I had to Google "2010 audi a4 fuse box" because I was working on a car. I got FOUR FUCKING PAGES of YouTube links... as a test I hit IMAGES and still got four fucking pages of YouTube links. I don't want to watch a fucking 20 minute video about some douchebag's cat and some TV dinner by mail bullshit ad just to find out what fuses are where and even then have to pause the video at just the right moment to be able to see it. I want a fucking diagram of the fucking fusebox along with labels.

This is not a unique situation either.. the enshittification of Google search has been going on for a long time and now they're just deliberately surfacing all their own content first instead of actually surfacing relevant content.

Comment Re:Unfair sentence (Score 1) 75

In this case though he didn't get this long of a sentence for one charge; this was multiple crimes each with their own charge and own sentence. The 24 years is literally just the aggregate of the sentence for each charge.

Now that the judgment has been passed down the lawyers begin the negotiation. While what this guy did was heinous he won't serve these sentences consecutively but more likely some mix of serving his sentences simultaneously with some additions for the number of crimes and some "no early release" caveats that mean he will probably serve exactly the 7-10 years you're suggesting here.

This isn't TV or a movie where there's only one single "guilty" verdict and the judge hands down a sentence where the defendant is dragged off screaming about how he was framed. Sentencing is the start of the negotiation phase, not the end.

Comment Re:Pi price point (Score 1) 41

If you're doing digital signage why aren't you custom-building boards that carry the Pi Zero, Pico or Compute Module and doing it all inside your own case? Or are you saying that you were looking for a computer to connect to an HDMI screen to just display something? Even then the cost is minimal if you're doing it right.

Even if you needed built-in networking then a Zero 2 W would probably have been far more than sufficient, has HDMI output and more than enough power for what you were looking for. I make the Pi Zero 2W to be about $15... most screens designed for "always on use" usually have a powered USB port that you can use to power it so you don't need a power supply... a 32GB SD card is what $6 and a case is going to run you like $15 for a really cheap one or you can 3D print one for about 50c worth of material. So let's nominally say $40 for each unit and you don't have to deal with the support issues of "The screen's on but is the PC on?"... when the screen's on the Pi is on so the problem just vanishes.

Yes, I've done digital signage exactly this way. We created our own custom case with a 3D printer that attached neatly to the back of the screens. Oh, and if you're doing digital signage on TV's you got on special from Wal Mart then boy howdy are you in for a shock when they start failing and the manufacturer won't honour the warranty because you're using them well outside their design limits. Digital signage needs to be always-on and with saturation, brightness and the like cranked WAY high... then there are burn-in problems with a lot of screens. If you're doing digital signage correctly then you're using screens designed and warrantied for that use case and in that case your $40 compute cost cited above is below the noise level of actual cost.

Comment Re:$50? (Score 1) 41

You realize of course that the original Raspberry Pi was $25 (about $35 in today's money) and had 256 MB of RAM and a processor that was far slower than the ones in the Raspberry Pi 5? So $15 more for a processor that's (according to the summary) 150 times faster and has 4x the RAM? Seems like a bargain to me.

Also of note that the Pi 5 is not your only option as you can still pick up the Pi 4 which is about half the speed or the Pi 3 which is slower still but still perfectly functional and still in that $25 price bracket (ish). I think they still make the Pi 2 as well. Not to mention the Pi Pico and Pi Zero that provide all the core functionality of their comparable full-size Pi's but without the broad I/O that are on the big Pi's for a lot less money.

The Pi 5 is a new "flagship" device in the line and if it's overkill for your use case, don't buy it. I just bought two of the 4GB Pi 5's a couple of weeks ago for some projects that needed heavy compute and decent memory space and I couldn't be happier with them.

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