Do you just source these from eBay? Any guidelines for what's a good used enterprise SSD? I had considered this route after I built my ZFS array based on consumer SSDs. The endurance numbers on the enterprise drives are just so much higher.
> Any guidelines for what's a good used enterprise SSD
Micron, Samsung and Intel (enterprise, branded DCxxxx) / SK Hynix / Solidigm (Intel sold it's SSD business to SK which they merged into Solidigm) are the go to's for brands. HGST can also be good.
The best guideline is buying from reputable sellers with a decent volume of business (eg, >1000 sales with high ratings on ebay) that focus on enterprise hardware and have a decent return/DOA policy.
You should expect these drives to be partially worn (regardless of the SMART data, that often gets wiped) if for no other reason than the secure erasure process mandated by a lot of org's data security policies resulting in multiple intensive disk writes, but also due to actually having been used. Drives that have recently been released (within 12 months, eg Micron 7600) are suspect as that implies there was a bad batch or that they were misused - especially if they aren't write focused drives. Not uncommon for a medium to smaller-end large business pinching pennies and buying the wrong drives and then wrecking them and their vendor/VAR rejecting warranty claims. That said, that's not always the case, it's entirely possible to get perfectly good recently made drives from reputable 2nd hand market sellers, just don't expect a massive discount in that case.
Otherwise best advice I can give you, is redundancy is your friend. If you can't afford buy at least 2 drives for an array, you should probably stick to buying new. I've had a few lemons over the years, but since availability on the second hand market for any given model can be variable and you tend to want to build arrays from like-devices, you should purchase them with the expectation that at least 1 per batch will be bad just to be safe. Worst case scenario you end up with an extra drive/hotspare.
Disagree. You should never trust SMART data from second hand drives, full stop. No matter if it's wiped or not.
If you're US domestic market, then yeah, you can usually avoid Chinese vendors. If you're EU or elsewhere, China can often be the main/only source of affordable drives vs domestic market. Really depends (I don't shop for international buds/clients, but I constantly hear about how the homelabbers across the pond have significantly higher prices/lower availability for surplus enterprise gear in general)
Stick to the rules on reliable vendors with a return policy, buy in bulk with the expectation that some will be bad (not a given, but good to be prepared), and the only issue from buying from china is delayed shipping times.
It's not about the numbers as much as it is the LIE. There's no legitimate reason to take the extra steps to wipe a drives internal state clean. Like rolling odometers back, it has one purpose: fraud.
Oh I agree, but worrying about that in my opinion is stressing over things beyond my control as I can't verify that data is accurate before or after taking receipt of it, and it's kind of a moot point when buying a second hand consumable device as it's pretty much guaranteed to be used/worn. Also, devices can change hands multiple times before it ends up on the second hand market, with anyone in that chain potentially being responsible for fudging the numbers. It's why I start from the zero-trust assumption that the data is unreliable, always buy in quantity and always assume a non-zero failure rate of some kind (thus the reputable vendor with a return/refund policy). The failure rate is rarely actually that high in my experience, but it does happen from time to time and it sucks if you're trying to deploy for example a 4 device array, and you buy 4 devices but 1 doesn't work and as a result now the whole array can't be deployed.
It really is a huge service not just to the developed world that needs to decarbonize but also a huge service to the developing world. Solar can be put up quickly and cheaply and is good for about 2 decades and can be paired with cheap LiFo batteries to give round the clock electricity. Both of these are relatively portable. It can really bootstrap the economies of local communities where infrastructure hasn't been built out. Then combined that with portable Internet connection via something like Starlink or one of the competitor networks, we can really enable the available human capital in developing nations to realize their potential.
I think India is a bad example. It's very densely populated, with high density in most of the country, and as such it's not a good target market for Starlink.
Density, generally, makes service provision easier.
Contrarywise, Starlink (or other broadcast-based services) perform poorly in high-density areas, where there's high bandwidth contention. Building out to serve such locations, which are by definition few and fairly sparsely distributed, as your map indicates, increases total system costs markedly.
Starlink at scale is optimised for sparse, low-income populations, rather than dense, high-income ones. That's probably a significant liability eventually, though for now I'll have to note I'm impressed with the technical accomplishments, regardless of reservations on persons involved.
I checked a random Kenyan address on starlink.com, and it would be around 386 USD for the dish there (with service for 50 USD/mo), so not cheap. In Poland I see that they're giving the dish for free with some 1-year contract (58 USD/mo). Maybe it'll become cheaper, they're making millions of them. And you could share it with neighbors - if you can get 300 Mb/s, you could connect like 5 families if the alternative is nothing.
Anyway, Starlink is mostly for places where you have no ISPs or cell service (or they are very bad), so not for 95% of Europe, and probably not for most of India, especially in the future.
I witnessed this traveling through smaller islands in the Philippines. They have cell service without connection to an electric grid in some places. The children with solar charging now have access to education materials and there is access to banking and payments systems.
The effects of this are going to massive and huge in 10 years.
All those unfortunate children will be introduced to the toxic, horrid internet.
They'll be addicted, have no attention span, have their own data used against them to exploit and track them, and end up with their political system reeling under manipulative AI and generic bots.
Far better to just give them books for their educarional system, and leave the evil Internet out of it.
So how many books have you given to kids in remote places in the 3rd world?
This sort of arrogance where suddenly everyone remembers all reasons why some technology is bad once the "poor masses" get it (while they themselves had the technology for years), is hypocritical and frustrating.
The reality is that getting online makes a massive difference for someone in some remote poor area. Not just in terms of education but also economically.
Wow. Everything in life has good and bad consequences. It is important that we remember to look towards the light.
What you describe at its worst is still better than the exploitation many of the children in the Philippines endure today by westerners. Hopefully, being able to communicate on the 'evil Internet', the rest of the world, like you, can truly understand what they endure.
> Starlink isn't necessary. In India you can get 1GB/day of cell phone data for $4/month, and other developing nations aren't far behind.
There is a huge swath of Australia that does not have good internet access and/or very poor cell phone coverage.
And I am not talking about about people living in the middle of the desert, I am talking about people who are 10 to 15 minutes away by car from a small town.
So yes Starlink or it's local equivalent are necessary.
My parent's in law live on small farm 10 minutes out of a small town in NSW and on the best days, when the sky is clear, they get 1 bar of phone reception on their cell phone and they have to stay within a 10 sqm perimeter within their house in order to make phone calls otherwise calls drop out.
Video chat is basically out of the question unless you want to talk to pixelated blobs on a screen.
After waiting 10 years for the NBN to be rolled out to their property, they decided to bite the bullet and bought a Starlink terminal and now we can have normal conversations on the phone and they can use streaming services whereas that would have been impossible before.
But it is not just them that have issues. When I was living in Brisbane many moons ago, I remember how pitiful the internet speed was so much so that I ditched my home internet and started hot-spotting from my phone instead.
Things have improved in the cities since then I am sure, but for the people out there living in the country side, not much as changed.
Not literally no signal/service, right? More likely “I have a few bars but data doesn’t seem to work… calls often won’t initiate unless 911?” thing you get when there’s too many devices connecting to an overburdened tower, in a network that needs more cells or something, and QoS/qci says no?
If it’s a population center someone would probably have put up a tower on their land ll
Come to Munich, go into any of the large old buildings, the central stairwells usually are phone dead zones. Truly dead.
Or try to go and hike in the Alps. Shit service, but as soon as you walk into Austrian territory, you'll suddenly have service.
Or try taking a train from Munich to, say, Landshut. You'll lose signal about 5 minutes after the train passes through the outskirts of Feldmoching.
Or try driving a car on the A8 highway to Salzburg in Austria. You'll lose signal about 5-10 minutes after passing Holzkirchen.
Or try taking a train from Passau to Wels in Austria. Passau is directly near the border. You will have a shit service right until the train passes the national border and Austrian towers take over.
The reason isn't technical. The Passau and Alps example shows it - identical geography, identical mountainous areas with about zero population... but wildly different attitudes in regulation.
> If it’s a population center someone would probably have put up a tower on their land ll
Here, you get death threats if you even propose putting up a tower on your land [1], in the UK nutjobs set a 5G tower ablaze [2].
I stand corrected. I didn’t realize you could be a MIMBY for cell towers and also not currently have service.
Any organized resistance I’ve witnessed myself in the US has been something like an HOA saying no not tucked right here where our home values could take a hit or a view obstructed, please put it down the street or … anywhere else.
But if you had no cell service and your call dropped as you backed out of your garage or you tried to sell your house and the buyers phones suddenly had no service or they couldn’t get on the Internet at the open house, that’d feel like pretty concerning missing infrastructure.
> I don’t think anti-5G wackos have dented a thing.
They have, at least here in Germany. We have a shitload of what we call "weiße Flecken", zones with zero service, of about the size of half of Schleswig-Holstein [1]. While a lot of these is in forests and mountainous areas, the zones in settlements are mostly due to the whackos and their organized campaigns.
I have no phone signal in my village, a few miles from a major town. I have to use WiFi calling to talk on the phone. Our local politician campaigns against it, it is such an issue. Especially since analogue phone lines are due to be turned off soon. We still have a working red phone box though!
I travel around a bit in the area and blackspots are very common
In the context of “cheap mobile data devices are widely accessible” I don’t think the distinction matters. If you’re relying on your £1 sim to trigger your solar battery charger and it doesn’t, then it doesn’t matter if you technically had signal or not.
Communications and electricity aren't just luxury goods, they're also critical inputs to work. There are lots of anecdotes of one or both of these increasing income by substantially more than their costs.
The biggest bottle neck to really solving the energy problem is now the price and fragility of high voltage DC long haul connections. Between those and solar you can have energy anywhere any time.
That they carry massive amounts of power so they'll help you to destruct themselves once the barrier is penetrated, are actually quite complex and can be sabotaged easily.
If only there was a way to deploy solar production at the point of consumption so power didn’t need to be transferred.
We’d need large chunks of unused flat surface pointing towards the sky, preferably at an angle. Oh wait we have that on top of every home (coincidentally the south or west face of every roof provides about enough surface area to power most homes). Now we need some cheap way of storing energy produced during the day for use at night. Humm. Got that too. Government don’t even need to pay the full price for this resilience and climate mitigation. Programs offering fractional tax credits have shown great success in increasing deployments of rooftop solar and distributed battery storage.
Flash was a poorly written piece of software. It had numerous bad memory leaks and a CPU hog. It was never allowed on the iPhone probably because it would have drained the batteries really quickly. On top of that HTML5 was starting to catch on and could eventually do everything Flash could and do it better without the memory leaks and poor CPU usage. I have the very unfortunate claim to the title of being an engineer on the world's biggest Flash/Flex app. The memory leaks were so bad that Adobe advised us to just restart the app periodically -- despite Adobe marketing Flex as enterprise ready. We found compiler bugs for Adobe. Adobe and Jobs didn't set out to destroy it. Macromedia wrote bad code that performed poorly and it wasn't worth the effort for Adobe fix it once HTML5 won.
None of that matters for the kind of creative work the grand parent likely had in mind.
Perhaps there was a memory leak in Unidentified Flying Assholes or the endless line of punch-a-celeb games or the thousands of stick fight productions and so on, but no one cared and enjoyed them immensely anyway. You could do something cool without ever learning about things like memory leaks or vulnerabilities in the underlying platform.
> None of that matters for the kind of creative work the grand parent likely had in mind.
Some of that did, at least for how that creative work was almost exclusively delivered to the world. Those bugs were not just excessive resource usage and instability, they were incredibly often exploitable security flaws that were regularly weaponized against a huge swath of internet users. The ubiquity of the Flash browser plugin was simultaneously one of the greatest strengths of Flash as a creative platform and one of the greatest risks to the average person browsing the web in the 2000s.
The plugin needed to die. Unfortunately the Flash community was so firmly built around the web plugin as their distribution method of choice (presumably because many of us were browsing animations and playing games at work/school where we couldn't necessarily download and run arbitrary .exes) that the plugin was more or less a diseased conjoined twin, and when it died the community didn't have long left.
Compare this to Java where the death of the browser plugin caused a number of badly designed banking sites to have to be redesigned in a less stupid (but quite often still very stupid) way but the community as a whole continued on without huge disruption. The browser plugin was just one of many places Java existed, it wasn't the dominant focus of the community.
Yeah, it's kinda crazy people are brushing over the security issues. The nostalgia is huge, I get it, but Flash was terrible for browsing the internet at the time.
I think they’re referring to the flash plugin itself. It enabled a vast amount of creative work and it enabled vast exploitation of users’ browsers. I worked as a tech at a consumer-focused computer store from about 1999-2005. It was a wild wild world back then. The vast majority of our time was spent removing viruses, browser toolbars, Bonzi Buddy and friends, and helping people understand how their online banking passwords got stolen by the shady porn site they like so much.
It was not a CPU hog - this is a myth that needs to die The flash runtime was pretty modest.
Now, the code people wrote was CPU hogs, because lots of non coders were writing code and they would do anything to make it work. The Flash runtime was not causing the Punch the Monkey and to peg your CPU, it was because the punch the monkey ad was fucking awful code.
All those Flash programmer went on to write the first wave of HTML5 stuff which, shock horror, where vastly CPU inefficient.
It's really interesting because that's something they definitely don't teach you when you first learn to drive. Growing up in Florida, I learned to pull over and turn on emergency blinkers if the rain gets bad enough. The reason I know to do this is because I saw other drivers do this on the highway and realized that's pretty wise. It's tempting to imagine that a younger version of me would have been smart enough to realize this on my own but I think most of us learn a lot by observing the behavior of others. Or maybe I would have learned eventually after a few close calls with skidding. Or maybe I would have never learned until it's too late. I wonder if the different responses to averse conditions you've observed is a function of the different experiences we've had as drivers. You might be a more experienced driver than some of those around you.
And pulling off through a patch of heavy rain is one thing. There are a lot of issues with pulling off in heavy snow unless you can really navigate off the highway to a safe location. Sometimes there aren't great solutions.
Hazard lights are almost never used by folks when driving, when you really should turn them on anytime the conditions are forcing you to not go the speed limit, IMO. The other lizard brains will see blinky lights and hopefully put down their phones so they don't rear end you.
People mostly only turn on their hazards when they're a hazard to other traffic (which is the whole point, IMO) Even if you're the slow guy on the road your speed still probably doesn't warrant this hence why you mostly only see it when people are going a speed of zero.
I would hope the other folks would recognize that conditions are such that you're slowing down rather than have a bunch of arbitrary blinking lights on the road.
It's funny because when I lived in Texas, we just turn on windshield wipers on full blast, put the hazard lights on and drive around at 15mph. (This would have to be an epic downpour though.)
The only time people stopped was when it was hailing.. and then they would hide under bridges if they could.
I remember driving past Charles de Gaulle Airport when it rained so hard we couldn't see past the end of the bonnet (hood). Everybody just stopped until it passed.
> The reason I know to do this is because I saw other drivers do this on the highway and realized that's pretty wise. It's tempting to imagine that a younger version of me would have been smart enough to realize this on my own but I think most of us learn a lot by observing the behavior of others.
Did you ever hydroplane in a car, even ever so slightly? That experience teaches you to slow down or stop and wait for the rain to be over pretty quickly.
China didn't issue birth certificates until 1996. Because I was born there before 1996, I do not have a birth certificate. In addition, I was also birthed at home instead of a hospital. That said, it's never been a hindrance. My parents managed to obtain Hong Kong permanent residency for all of us and I guess that sort of rooted my birthday and birth place and it's been a continuous line of documentation since then -- green card and finally US passport. I think this was helped by the fact HK probably dealt with this issue a lot during the latter half of the 20th century.
Yea not birth certificates from the hospital, but there is documentation. Well, there was for awhile. My grandpa definitely didn't have a birth certificate back in the 1930s (or 1920s? lol) in Taishan, but also no docs of any sort whatsoever..
But my MIL from Mao era has docs from the local officials that's all notarized, as does my wife. The dates might be... you know, not exactly right, but they're close, and importantly they're accepted by both the Chinese government and also other foreign governments for official purposes (immigration, etc).
I think I the article here we're talking about something fundamentally different from the last 70-ish in China. They're talking about people with like no official docs whatsoever, can't get healthcare, national ID card, anything. Very different from China 70 years ago, and very different from even pre civil war China.
> I think I the article here we're talking about something fundamentally different from the last 70-ish in China
黑孩子 and 黑户 were fairly common until the last 5-6 years.
The issues mentioned in the article were prominent in rural China and the lower tier of migrant workers before e-governance innovations along with a relaxing on the one-child policy started a decade ago.
Furthermore, the township mentioned in the article is itself one of those migrant areas in Cape Town, similar to what urban villages are in Beijing and other cities in China.
you may not have had a birth certificate, but for sure you must have had a hukou, which establishes your birthday and who your parents are. that's pretty much all that is needed in most cases.
I wonder how that might look once you factor in Apple TV devices. They're pretty weak devices now but future ones can come with M-class CPUs. That's a huge source of potential revenue for Apple.
The current Apple TV is, in many respects, unbelievably bad, and it has nothing to do with the CPU.
Open up the YouTube app and try to navigate the UI. It’s okay but not really up to the Apple standard. Now try to enter text in the search bar. A nearby iPhone will helpfully offer to let you use it like a keyboard. You get a text field, and you can type, and keystrokes are slowly and not entirely reliably propagated to the TV, but text does not stay in sync. And after a few seconds, in the middle of typing, the TV will decide you’re done typing and move focus to a search result, and the phone won’t notice, and it gets completely desynchronized.
The YouTube app has never been good and never felt like a native app -- it's a wrapper around web tech.
More importantly for games, though, is the awful storage architecture around the TV boxes. Games have to slice themselves up into 2GB storage chunks, which can be purged from the system whenever the game isn't actively running. The game has to be aware of missing chunks and download them on-demand.
It makes open-world games nearly impossible, and it makes anything with significant storage requirements effectively impossible. As much as Apple likes to push the iOS port of Death Stranding, that game cannot run on tvOS as currently architected for that reason.
And the Tesla factory in Shanghai also gets Chinese subsidies.
The subsidies to Chinese EV companies isn't direct anymore. Most of it is in the form of tax refunds. The biggest "subsidy", though, is the incredible pipeline China has built to feed the industry. Their industrial policy has created an huge ecosystem capable of feeding batteries and components into their EV industry at a price point and scale that no other country can compete with. It's been an incredibly effective industrial policy.
I get what the OP means about the destruction of our auto industry but we can only hide behind that for so long. An ineffective and noncompetitive auto industry won't be able to scale up during a war either. I hope our industrial leaders and politicians are using tariffs and other trade barriers to the US car industry only as a temporary reprieve while we scale up our ecosystem too. Otherwise we run the risk of becoming one of those countries that keeps outdated domestic companies alive just to say we have those companies. Without export discipline and the ability to compete effectively on the global stage, domestic companies are just zombies kept alive by domestic subsidies. They won't be able to help us in the event of a war with a peer adversary.
The architecture and evaluation approach seem broadly similar.