qupada

It also gives you no clue whether those prices are one-off purchases or monthly subscriptions, making them entirely useless.

$3.99, sounds like a dea… per month… YOU BASTARDS.

At work we use the NexDock for that purpose (for anything that doesn’t have proper Ethernet remote management, at least). It’s relatively convenient that it’s self-powered and self-contained, basically a laptop minus the computer part.

(Conveniently, I see this is also a new model that replaces the awkward mini-HDMI port with a proper full-size one)

If you need VGA, you will have to buy an active VGA-to-HDMI dongle. They’re cheap (down to about $10-15 these days) and seem to work just fine.

Should the preference be to use a laptop you already own, you’ve got a few options. Either an IP KVM like the JetKVM, GL.iNet Comet, NanoKVM, etc, or a USB one such as the Openterface.

(Note that a couple of those links are pre-orders or otherwise not immediately available, make sure you do your research)

All of these things are fairly comprehensively reviewed by tech-focused Youtube channels, just gotta pick your favourite form factor.

For what it’s worth, you can have your very own 4U rack-mount chassis with a dozen of these in it for around a grand.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/186249007611 https://www.ebay.com/itm/357827557706

Less than a hundred bucks each, and no need to rig up janky power and cooling.

Not that I think you necessarily should, but the option is always there.

I sometimes feel like the only option left with HP is to buy used.

There’s a great (but admittedly narrow) window in which they are a safe option; the cut-off is approximately that if it has a colour LCD, it’s too new. You need to look for one that has the good old 2x16 character LCD with green backlight.

The trick is you then have to find one where toner and parts are still readily available, with some of the older models it is becoming difficult.

The CP5225dn (2012 designed, but 2017 built) I rescued from the e-waste at work is doing me nicely, and it looks like I should have no trouble getting the parts for a few years to come.

Cat6 cable also has the admirable quality of being able to carry power as well as data.

Fibre… not so much.

was born at some point

I take offense to this. I was clearly hatched, and I think you know that.

A great thought on the thumbnails, but the behavior exhibits even when using command-line tools.

Indexing is off for the entire drive, I can’t even begin to imagine what kind of mess that would make if it was on.

For anyone - including, apparently, this article’s author’s - who is confused about the form factor, this is the next generation to follow the Grace Blackwell “GB300-NVL72”, their full rack interconnected system.

It’s the same technology as the matching 8-GPU “HGX” board that is built into larger individual servers - which in this generation’s case is just called “B300” as it has the “Blackwell” GPU but not the “Grace” CPU - but not sold in smaller units than an entire rack.

Here are some pictures and a video of that NVL72 version (you can buy these from Dell and others, as well as direct from Nvidia):

https://www.servethehome.com/dell-and-coreweave-show-off-first-nvidia-gb300-nvl72-rack/ https://www.ingrasys.com/solutions/NVIDIA/nvidia_gb300_nvl72/

The full rack has 18 compute trays, each with 2 of the pictured board inside (for a total of 36 CPUs and 72 GPUs), and 9 NVLink switch trays that connect every GPU together. PSUs and networking make up the rest.

“Fun” fact: if you think it’s slow normally (and to be fair, it is), NTFS seems to have a pathological performance regression when a directory contains more than 10,000 children, any operations on files in that directory slow down by around 95%.

I discovered this on our CCTV system at work (that runs on Windows Server 2022), which creates an inordinate number of small files (each containing at most a few seconds of video). It was causing some of its periodic maintenance tasks to fail, as they’d take longer to run than than the configured interval between them.

Windows also really doesn’t like dealing with half-petabyte filesystems, just like… at all.

Mine (also Ubuntu, also Intel, but Sony earbuds) also works great.

Almost the only time in recent memory it hasn’t is when I’d accidentally kicked the cable out of the WiFi access point closest to the couch. My laptop was connected to one at the other end of the house, and it turns out that trying to stream video over 2.4GHz WiFi while listening on (also 2.4GHz) Bluetooth headphones isn’t a match made in heaven.

Now Windows on the other hand. My work laptop (also Intel Bluetooth adapter) starts out fine after a reboot, but over the course of a week will go from taking 2-3 seconds for the headphones to connect once powered on, to 30-40 seconds. Sometimes the headphones will connect, disconnect, and then connect again before actually making any sound.

The one thing the two OSes have in common is switching between 2-way voice (HFP) and high-quality music (A2DP) modes is a problem. In Linux it’s fairly reliable, but completely manual. In Windows it’s “automatic”, but frequently gets stuck in the wrong mode, or disconnects entirely when switching.

I know WoW used bittorrent for game updates, it was built in and was the “standard” download mechanism.

https://worldofwarcraft.fandom.com/et/wiki/Blizzard_Downloader

I’m sure it’s far from the only game that did.

And don’t even get me started on getting back from the Mun, when if you do survive the landing.

Sorry Jebediah, that was a one-way trip.

Alternate panel 4: “I want to dill myself”

Old-timey doctors had a word for that procedure… “lobotomy”. Cleaned your mind right out.

Would you also like some heroin or cocaine?

Per the video though, the problem clearly is Windows’ ability to enumerate the serial devices and assign COM* port numbers to them. Linux might do a bit better there, although looking at my Ubuntu systems the hard-coded maximum serial port count is 64 (adjustable by recompiling the kernel, at least).

In any case, that is only an attempt (as they say themselves) to maintain period accuracy. If you ignore that, you’d probably have a much easier time with USB modems connected to either a bunch of hubs, or a handful of multi-port PCI(e) USB cards.

Also - and we are getting extremely off-topic here - individual Epyc CPUs allow 128 PCIe lanes, but 48 or 64 are used for the inter-socket link in a 2S system, leaving a maximum 128 or 160 available as external connectivity. A moot point anyway as PCIe switches exist, and can be found in all manner of hilarious expansion chassis that could allow hundreds of PCIe cards even on a desktop system: https://shop.bressner.de/en/products/hpc-solutions/gpu-computers/gpu-expansions/gen5-4u-pro-16-slot/

This video made me wonder what is the most PCI slots ever found in a single system.

During the dialup era, the most reliable modem I ever used was the 3Com 3CP5610A, which to be fair is probably much the same hardware as in these external models (just packed onto a PCI card).

It’s just an awful lot harder to cram a dozen into a single PC when it’s one modem per PCI slot.

(It was a great modem because it appeared to the system as a hardware serial port, so was 100% Linux compatible without crazy driver hacks unlike most “winmodem” devices of the day)

It would be the other way around, if at all.

“First-surface” mirrors where the reflective layer is on the front of the glass are quite fragile, so wouldn’t typically used for residential applications (you’d remove the reflective coating by cleaning it).

A regular mirror has the reflective surface on the back of the glass (which is then is further coated with a protective paint), leading to the effect you describe.

I don’t however know enough to say one way or the other whether a surveillance mirror would becessarily be a first-surface mirror.

The mod makes the repairable thin-and-light laptop significantly thicker

While I love every bit of what’s going on here, “significantly thicker” doesn’t even begin to describe things 😆

Yes and no.

Taking advantage of the very real waterproofing of the phones I have owned (past and present), I will just wash the damn thing off under the kitchen tap if it gets dirty, which I have with one of my previous phones done with a high-pressure restaurant-sink-style spray nozzle (I was making beer, and boiling the wort kicks a lot of sticky crap into the air).

That phone was fine afterward, and continued to work for several years after.

Also at a more basic level, it is (at least in theory) an assurance that they actually tested the damn thing, and didn’t just slap a largely meaningless (and as already noted, “bigger number better”) rating on the thing, as is largely the style of our times because consumer protection is dead and regulations are meaningless.

This is exactly the kind of should be done properly, or just not at all. Test it and rate it for the people who do care, or STFU, put the unqualified but perfectly reasonable label of “water resistant” on it, and the bulk of people who indeed do not care (or will be confused) will be no worse off than they are now.

Anything else is just annoying.

Yes, but I also get into a rage about manufacturers being dicks about it. People by and large don’t seem to understand the IP rating scale is in fact two largely-unrelated scales, and companies slapping IP ratings on their products use that in what I feel are underhanded ways.

The values IPx1-IPx6 correspond to varying levels of resistance against directed streams of water. IPx7-IPx9 are degrees of resistance to submersion. The latter does not imply the former, not even a little bit.

It is in theory entirely possible to build a device that could withstanding being put in the bottom of a swimming pool that’s being slowly filled with water, but failed from the higher pressure of a small amount of water falling on it from a certain direction.

But you still see phones listed just as “IP68”, which tells you nothing. The better manufacturers will explicitly write the likes of “IP65/IP68”; showing that it reaches the 5 rating of “water jets 12.5litre/minute” but not the 6 rating of “powerful water jets 100litre/minute”, but also IP67 “immersion <1 metre / <30 minutes” and IP68 “immersion >1 metre / >30 minutes”.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_code#Second_digit:_Liquid_ingress_protection)