Makers went away from the jumpers and allowed the drive to be reprogarmmed to report smaller capacities directly. This is covered in the latest versions of hdparm.
vs the level of Quality Control on USA-made products? (Hint, I live in the EU and see more problems with USA produced devices than chinese ones.)
Fake products aren't a new thing. 20 years ago a friend of mine was very lucky to discover that the fully certified blades he'd imported from the USA for his Huey helicoptor had in fact been end-of-lifed and pulled/refurbed from a junkyard with fake paperwork. The guys writing them off had even blasted a few shotgun holes in the things, but that's nothing some bondo and paint can't cover up, is it?
(lucky, as in the blades were in use on the machine and he noticed something odd so he took them off and checked them, instead of having them fail in flight. Many places which write off rotary wings now shred the things as a direct result of this kind of incident.)
Chinese manufacturers are very diligent about doing what they're told. If you tell them not to cut corners, they won't. The issue is that there are as many unscrupulous businessmen outside the PRC willing to commission/buy dodgy kit as there are businessmen in the PRC willing to produce/sell it to them.
" if that argument wouldn't keep a fence out of prison why should Amazon get to use it to profit from fake goods?"
If you're in the EU and get a fake via Amazon, you can be assured that trading standards officers will be all over it like a badly fitting shirt.
Ironically it's easier to get refunds on fakes from ebay than from Amazon, because ebay's policies on reporting counterfeits is much more weighted in the consumer's favour.
We're putting systems on desktops with near-silent PSU, chassis and CPU fans along with SSDs for booting, but can't quite justify the spend required to put 4Tb (local scratch space for scientific computing) on SSD (you can only do so much inside a $2k/system budget.)
As a result we've had a couple of people complain about "electrical arcing noise" from their computers, which turned out to be headseek noise when they're grinding on large datasets. In previous generations of equipment that noise was drowned out by other sources (including the fans on older equipment in the same room, or even the AC blowers), but because we've managed to eliminate case drumming the noise manifests as a faint ticking.
"but the seemingly obvious solution is just to pot the magnetics in an adequately thermally conductive epoxy or other encapsulant."
As another poster noted, this can make things worse, especially if the epoxy is rigid.
Some of the best methods involve potting _part_ of the coil (wax drops) or using rubber o-rings to absorb the motion/sound. The issue then becomes that those parts have to pass thermal energy in order to avoid melting.
Acoustic noise control in switchmode circuitry is an engineering discipline all of its own, however I'm willing to bet than in the next 5-6 years it will be as normal to see acoustic issues processed as part of board production engineering as RFI issues are now.
"When you name your movement after a bunch of guys who didn't want to pay taxes,"
History lesson: The Boston Tea Party was almost entirely composed of smugglers who'd been making out like bandits due to high import taxes on tea and had suddenly had their livelihoods demolished by that tax being reduced to nearly zero.
The "taxed tea" they dumped into the harbour was substantially cheaper than the smuggled stuff they'd been selling up to that point.
When you realise that, you start possibly realising the real intent of the Tea Party.
A modern analogy would be recreational drugs being legalised & made available via dispensaries at low prices and a bunch of narco-gangs going around destroying legally imported supplies of the items in question in order to keep the price up.
A properly tuned 1950s (or even a 1930s) engine has similar emissions to a current engine. The issue is that they don't stay in tune for very long because all the controls are mechanical and the emissions only stay low over a narrow speed/power band.
All the extra gubbins on auto engines are because they have to operate at a stupidly wide range of power and speed settings. A properly-specified constant-speed, constant-power engine (ie, driving a generator) can dispense with a lot of that stuff and still be more efficient/emit lower pollution levels.
Even with all the extra stuff on a modern engine, they emit a LOT of VOCs whilst warming up - they're intentionally run rich for the first few minutes to light the catalytic converter, resulting in far higher VOC outputs than a non-catalyst-fitted engine. As at least half the automotive fleet in urban environments is only used for short runs which don't give the cat a chance to start up properly, this aggravates pollution issues in many areas.
FWIW: IC engines are _only_ fully efficient (about 35%) at near full load/wide open throttle. At normal operational speeds/loads they're closer to 2-3% efficiency and all that anti-pollution stuff has its own parasitic penalties. We vastly overspecify car engines for day-to-day usage in order to have more power on demand and pay a heavy penalty for doing so.
Pet idea: A stirling motor driving a generator to feed the batteries in an electric vehicle. Electric motors can be run at considerable "overload" for short periods - the issue is getting rid of heat before they melt/burnout.
Toyota's working on 10hp "power units" (essentially a single-cylinder motor-generator) which can be multiply-installed and individually started up as required to provide power in their hybrid range. This is a good way of increasing efficiency and reducing pollution.
On topic: The Berlin wall _was_ an ugly edifice with no redeeming values. Having said that it's worth remembering why it was there and why similar walls have been erected since then in the middle east.
" You don't need to know how to configure your toaster."
Actually, you do, but you picked that up so long ago that you didn't think about it.
Using your stove analogy, anyone using mine (gas) needs to know to push the button which fires the igniter and I've seen plenty of people without experience of gas appliances stand there wondering why it isn't working.
"I'm sure a lot of people said that very thing when cars were new."
My wife actually said it yesterday - she's from one of those countries where there's no driving license requirement.
And this is despite her past comments about how bad drivers are in in that country (imagine being a passenger in a taxi driven by someone with less than a week behind the wheel. Been there, done that, screamed in horror as he pulled a sharp turn in front of an oncoming 18 wheeler....)
"People want their computers to be like their cars. They don't want to know what is happening under the hood. They just want to drive it."
Even if you don't know what's happening under the hood, you still know you have to add fuel, not run red lights and keep right (or left), etc etc.
Driving licenses are supposed to be there to ensure you know the basic road rules and won't be a menace. I've spent time in countries which don't require a test to get one and unsurprisingly they have death/injury rates 10-50 times higher than countries which do. In countries where cars have recently become affordable those rates are higher still.
I'd argue that setting up a webcam is promoting yourself from "driver" to "technical/DIY/mechanic" status and as such you'd better understand what you're doing or there WILL be painful consequences.
"voyeurism laws that apply to staring into someones window for an extended period"
Such laws usually require that the observation position be either
1: Not in a public space 2: Concealed
Or that the observer is using a visual aid (binoculars, telescope, telephoto camera)
This depends on the jurisdiction of course but an "expectation of privacy" does not give anyone carte blanche to wander around naked inside their house when one wall is a picture window facing the street with the curtains open (I've seen prosecutions for exactly this behaviour and judges heavily slammed defences based on "if it's indoors, it's private")
"a crapload of administrative/dependent territories that are inconsistently applied"
Historically, ccTLds have only been allocated when someone applies for them(*). The more likely explanation for Canada's territories not having ccTLDs is simply that noone's asked for one.
(*) Several of the allocations have been fairly dubious. Christmas Island (australian territory) being one example, where the custodian wasn't resident on the island and noone on the island knew anything about the.cx allocation. Tuvaalu (.tv) was another. The government there had to go to court to retrieve their ccTLD from a predatory registration made by a company resident in the UK.
Officially the allocations are the property of the area's government, delegated to XYZ entity as a matter of trust. In most cases the relevant govt is utterly unaware of this and whoever controls the ccTLD acts as if they are not accountable.
You use "is" if referring to the entity (Microsoft is an evil company) or "are" if referring to the members of the entity (Microsoft are a bunch of evil bastards)
Note however that the "are" is qualified by "a bunch of" in order to make it clear you're referring to the set members.
Qualification may be implied ("United States is" vs "Red states are") - english is wonderfully inconsistent.
As one commentator put it "Even if there were gold bars stacked at the landing site ready for collection, it still wouldn't be worthwhile making the flight to collect them"
The issue was that the space race was about militaristic chest-thumping and was promoted as such. Because of that, interest was lost as soon as Apollo 11 landed. The USA had won, why bother with anything more?
There were plenty of opportunities to keep interest up but the media had other priorities and exo-geology still doesn't feature highly on their radar.
Just to clarify: The "gas generator" is the part of the engine which drives the turbopumps which supply fuel+oxidiser to the main combustion chamber. It's analogous in some ways to the high pressure injector pump in a diesel engine.
Not just the financial will. Even with an unlimited budget the USA could not resume manufacturing SaturnV-class launchers without at least a decade lead-time.
For what it's worth, before the "space race", the USA was planning the Dyna-soar project, using a truly massive booster (Sea Dragon), which would be fabricated in a shipyard. Long-term that kind of booster is going to be needed, unless the political will to build Orion-class launchers is somehow found (and short of a Footfall scenario I can't see that happening)
"It's a little strange, though, because if you buy something somewhere and it ends up being a stolen item, you're obligated to give it back to the original owner."
If you buy a fake Picasso, you get to keep it even once identified as fake.
Picasso's estate don't have the right to come along and take it off you or splash it with paint.
"By "pissed" I mean we would charge them with the costs of removing all of the hardware from the field and doing the board reworks. You don't get these kinds of guarantees at the hobby level, but you do at the higher end. We've never had to do it for "clones" but we have for parts that didn't meet spec in other ways. "
How much did that cost (including intangible losses) vs the cost of installing chiptesters on the tape dispenser of the pick and place machines?
" it costs money to test the validity of every chip on the production line"
It costs money to install a chip tester on the line for every device before it's planted on the board and adds nothing to the line time, as it's in the chip chute or tape-path. The actual monetary cost is small beer if correctly implemented.
It saves money if that means you reduce your return rate by 1-2% and it might save you from a bad batch of manufacturer chips too.
Not that it will help if you're buying your components from a mall in downtown Shenzen.
Slashdot Mirror
Makers went away from the jumpers and allowed the drive to be reprogarmmed to report smaller capacities directly. This is covered in the latest versions of hdparm.
"Quality control is a huge huge problem in china"
vs the level of Quality Control on USA-made products? (Hint, I live in the EU and see more problems with USA produced devices than chinese ones.)
Fake products aren't a new thing. 20 years ago a friend of mine was very lucky to discover that the fully certified blades he'd imported from the USA for his Huey helicoptor had in fact been end-of-lifed and pulled/refurbed from a junkyard with fake paperwork. The guys writing them off had even blasted a few shotgun holes in the things, but that's nothing some bondo and paint can't cover up, is it?
(lucky, as in the blades were in use on the machine and he noticed something odd so he took them off and checked them, instead of having them fail in flight. Many places which write off rotary wings now shred the things as a direct result of this kind of incident.)
Chinese manufacturers are very diligent about doing what they're told. If you tell them not to cut corners, they won't. The issue is that there are as many unscrupulous businessmen outside the PRC willing to commission/buy dodgy kit as there are businessmen in the PRC willing to produce/sell it to them.
" if that argument wouldn't keep a fence out of prison why should Amazon get to use it to profit from fake goods?"
If you're in the EU and get a fake via Amazon, you can be assured that trading standards officers will be all over it like a badly fitting shirt.
Ironically it's easier to get refunds on fakes from ebay than from Amazon, because ebay's policies on reporting counterfeits is much more weighted in the consumer's favour.
"I guess it depends on how bad the noise is"
Noise is relative.
We're putting systems on desktops with near-silent PSU, chassis and CPU fans along with SSDs for booting, but can't quite justify the spend required to put 4Tb (local scratch space for scientific computing) on SSD (you can only do so much inside a $2k/system budget.)
As a result we've had a couple of people complain about "electrical arcing noise" from their computers, which turned out to be headseek noise when they're grinding on large datasets. In previous generations of equipment that noise was drowned out by other sources (including the fans on older equipment in the same room, or even the AC blowers), but because we've managed to eliminate case drumming the noise manifests as a faint ticking.
"but the seemingly obvious solution is just to pot the magnetics in an adequately thermally conductive epoxy or other encapsulant."
As another poster noted, this can make things worse, especially if the epoxy is rigid.
Some of the best methods involve potting _part_ of the coil (wax drops) or using rubber o-rings to absorb the motion/sound. The issue then becomes that those parts have to pass thermal energy in order to avoid melting.
Acoustic noise control in switchmode circuitry is an engineering discipline all of its own, however I'm willing to bet than in the next 5-6 years it will be as normal to see acoustic issues processed as part of board production engineering as RFI issues are now.
"When you name your movement after a bunch of guys who didn't want to pay taxes,"
History lesson: The Boston Tea Party was almost entirely composed of smugglers who'd been making out like bandits due to high import taxes on tea and had suddenly had their livelihoods demolished by that tax being reduced to nearly zero.
The "taxed tea" they dumped into the harbour was substantially cheaper than the smuggled stuff they'd been selling up to that point.
When you realise that, you start possibly realising the real intent of the Tea Party.
A modern analogy would be recreational drugs being legalised & made available via dispensaries at low prices and a bunch of narco-gangs going around destroying legally imported supplies of the items in question in order to keep the price up.
A properly tuned 1950s (or even a 1930s) engine has similar emissions to a current engine. The issue is that they don't stay in tune for very long because all the controls are mechanical and the emissions only stay low over a narrow speed/power band.
All the extra gubbins on auto engines are because they have to operate at a stupidly wide range of power and speed settings. A properly-specified constant-speed, constant-power engine (ie, driving a generator) can dispense with a lot of that stuff and still be more efficient/emit lower pollution levels.
Even with all the extra stuff on a modern engine, they emit a LOT of VOCs whilst warming up - they're intentionally run rich for the first few minutes to light the catalytic converter, resulting in far higher VOC outputs than a non-catalyst-fitted engine. As at least half the automotive fleet in urban environments is only used for short runs which don't give the cat a chance to start up properly, this aggravates pollution issues in many areas.
FWIW: IC engines are _only_ fully efficient (about 35%) at near full load/wide open throttle. At normal operational speeds/loads they're closer to 2-3% efficiency and all that anti-pollution stuff has its own parasitic penalties. We vastly overspecify car engines for day-to-day usage in order to have more power on demand and pay a heavy penalty for doing so.
Pet idea: A stirling motor driving a generator to feed the batteries in an electric vehicle. Electric motors can be run at considerable "overload" for short periods - the issue is getting rid of heat before they melt/burnout.
Toyota's working on 10hp "power units" (essentially a single-cylinder motor-generator) which can be multiply-installed and individually started up as required to provide power in their hybrid range. This is a good way of increasing efficiency and reducing pollution.
On topic: The Berlin wall _was_ an ugly edifice with no redeeming values. Having said that it's worth remembering why it was there and why similar walls have been erected since then in the middle east.
" You don't need to know how to configure your toaster."
Actually, you do, but you picked that up so long ago that you didn't think about it.
Using your stove analogy, anyone using mine (gas) needs to know to push the button which fires the igniter and I've seen plenty of people without experience of gas appliances stand there wondering why it isn't working.
"I'm sure a lot of people said that very thing when cars were new."
My wife actually said it yesterday - she's from one of those countries where there's no driving license requirement.
And this is despite her past comments about how bad drivers are in in that country (imagine being a passenger in a taxi driven by someone with less than a week behind the wheel. Been there, done that, screamed in horror as he pulled a sharp turn in front of an oncoming 18 wheeler....)
"People want their computers to be like their cars.
They don't want to know what is happening under the hood. They just want to drive it."
Even if you don't know what's happening under the hood, you still know you have to add fuel, not run red lights and keep right (or left), etc etc.
Driving licenses are supposed to be there to ensure you know the basic road rules and won't be a menace. I've spent time in countries which don't require a test to get one and unsurprisingly they have death/injury rates 10-50 times higher than countries which do. In countries where cars have recently become affordable those rates are higher still.
I'd argue that setting up a webcam is promoting yourself from "driver" to "technical/DIY/mechanic" status and as such you'd better understand what you're doing or there WILL be painful consequences.
"voyeurism laws that apply to staring into someones window for an extended period"
Such laws usually require that the observation position be either
1: Not in a public space
2: Concealed
Or that the observer is using a visual aid (binoculars, telescope, telephoto camera)
This depends on the jurisdiction of course but an "expectation of privacy" does not give anyone carte blanche to wander around naked inside their house when one wall is a picture window facing the street with the curtains open (I've seen prosecutions for exactly this behaviour and judges heavily slammed defences based on "if it's indoors, it's private")
"Or that the owner wants to access a private device remotely."
In which case they would have changed the password.
"a crapload of administrative/dependent territories that are inconsistently applied"
Historically, ccTLds have only been allocated when someone applies for them(*). The more likely explanation for Canada's territories not having ccTLDs is simply that noone's asked for one.
(*) Several of the allocations have been fairly dubious. Christmas Island (australian territory) being one example, where the custodian wasn't resident on the island and noone on the island knew anything about the .cx allocation. Tuvaalu (.tv) was another. The government there had to go to court to retrieve their ccTLD from a predatory registration made by a company resident in the UK.
Officially the allocations are the property of the area's government, delegated to XYZ entity as a matter of trust. In most cases the relevant govt is utterly unaware of this and whoever controls the ccTLD acts as if they are not accountable.
We can measure 2 different rates of time easily enough, but it's still monotonically increasing.
The wild part to consider is time flowing "backwards" or even 2 or 3 (or more) dimensional time vectors.
Untrue.
You use "is" if referring to the entity (Microsoft is an evil company) or "are" if referring to the members of the entity (Microsoft are a bunch of evil bastards)
Note however that the "are" is qualified by "a bunch of" in order to make it clear you're referring to the set members.
Qualification may be implied ("United States is" vs "Red states are") - english is wonderfully inconsistent.
Rocket science is easy.
Rocket engineering is extremely, mind-curdlingly HARD
As one commentator put it "Even if there were gold bars stacked at the landing site ready for collection, it still wouldn't be worthwhile making the flight to collect them"
The issue was that the space race was about militaristic chest-thumping and was promoted as such. Because of that, interest was lost as soon as Apollo 11 landed. The USA had won, why bother with anything more?
There were plenty of opportunities to keep interest up but the media had other priorities and exo-geology still doesn't feature highly on their radar.
Just to clarify: The "gas generator" is the part of the engine which drives the turbopumps which supply fuel+oxidiser to the main combustion chamber. It's analogous in some ways to the high pressure injector pump in a diesel engine.
"NASA engineer have only been testing the Rocketdyne F-1 engine"
No, they've only been testing the gas generator from the engine. Firing the entire engine will take a LOT more work.
"What the US lacks is the financial will"
Not just the financial will. Even with an unlimited budget the USA could not resume manufacturing SaturnV-class launchers without at least a decade lead-time.
For what it's worth, before the "space race", the USA was planning the Dyna-soar project, using a truly massive booster (Sea Dragon), which would be fabricated in a shipyard. Long-term that kind of booster is going to be needed, unless the political will to build Orion-class launchers is somehow found (and short of a Footfall scenario I can't see that happening)
"It would seem the US were finally able to re-manufacture FOGBANK"
As with the manufacture of seamless tubing for SSMEs there was heavily reliance on the memory of retired staff.
Not the first technique that was lost and certainly won't be the last.
"It's a little strange, though, because if you buy something somewhere and it ends up being a stolen item, you're obligated to give it back to the original owner."
If you buy a fake Picasso, you get to keep it even once identified as fake.
Picasso's estate don't have the right to come along and take it off you or splash it with paint.
They DO have the right to go after the forger.
"The FTDI driver license states"
It didn't state anything at all when the new driver went in via windows update.
"By "pissed" I mean we would charge them with the costs of removing all of the hardware from the field and doing the board reworks. You don't get these kinds of guarantees at the hobby level, but you do at the higher end. We've never had to do it for "clones" but we have for parts that didn't meet spec in other ways. "
How much did that cost (including intangible losses) vs the cost of installing chiptesters on the tape dispenser of the pick and place machines?
" it costs money to test the validity of every chip on the production line"
It costs money to install a chip tester on the line for every device before it's planted on the board and adds nothing to the line time, as it's in the chip chute or tape-path. The actual monetary cost is small beer if correctly implemented.
It saves money if that means you reduce your return rate by 1-2% and it might save you from a bad batch of manufacturer chips too.
Not that it will help if you're buying your components from a mall in downtown Shenzen.