I really wouldn’t write off the Shield completely. It’s a few years old, but it works really well. My TVs are all disconnected from my network, and each has a Shield attached. The Shield can stream 4k HDR from Jellyfin, play ad-free YouTube with SmartTubeNext, and handles remote game streaming at 4k/60 with Sunshine/Moonlight. It’s really a versatile little box.
Kudos for posting an actually unpopular opinion.
I’m not vegan in the sense that I do still use animal products; I realize that it’s wrong, but it’s difficult to get away from. I haven’t eaten meat in over a decade, so I guess that “vegetarian” is probably the best description.
That being said, I have FAR more respect for those who go hunting and fishing than for those who eat meat from a restaurant or supermarket. Eating a hamburger or a steak is easy. You simply go to a store and buy it. Yet people stick their head in the sand and ignore the fact that factory farming is a brutal practice that causes an absolutely disgusting amount of pain and suffering for animals. The masses conveniently ignore that fact and continue on with their meat-based diets.
Hunting an animal for food means that although you’re killing the animal, it’s still lived a natural life. It hasn’t suffered on a factory farm and been raised solely for human consumption. Hunters cause far less suffering than farmers.
You act like this is a negative thing that they’re choosing to ignore. If anything, this will make them even more supportive of him; most of them would do the same if they could get away with it.
I appreciate the suggestion, but that looks like a Java library. Interpreted languages make me feel dirty. Java makes me feel even dirtier. If it’s not C, C++, or ASM, is it really worth using?
I’m not sure if I get it. It just basically gives mostly wrong answers. Oh…
I’m okay with the “human-readability,” but I’ve never been happy with the “machine-readibility” of XML. Usually I just want to pull a few values from an API return, yet every XML library assumes I want the entire file in a data structure that I can iterate through. It’s a waste of resources and a pain in the ass.
Even though it’s not the “right” way, most of the time I just use regex to grab whatever exists between an opening and closing tag. If I’m saving/loading data from my own software, I just use a serialization library.
Leader of a terrorist organization endorses another terrorist organization. Can’t say I’m surprised.
That’s kind of the point I was trying to make. They feel so different, I can’t imagine one being a viable alternative to the other.
I couldn’t care less what happens to the wine industry, but are people really using weed as an alternative? They’re completely different experiences. I enjoy drinking, but cannabis is in no way pleasurable to me at all.
Children can have phones, tablets, etc when they are old enough to purchase them with their own income.
Before that, a desktop with parental control software is more than enough for schoolwork.
This is very situational. I’m not a contractor, but I spend a significant portion of my time doing hobbies that require power tools. I don’t need a drill that will last for an entire day at a jobsite. Ryobi works fine for me. On the other hand, I wish I had never spent $600 on a cheap planer; I knew I’d want a better one eventually, and sure enough, I found a need to upgrade after a few years. Now I’ve spent $3600 on planers. I could have just gone with the $3k one and saved myself $600.
If I’m going to use it once, I borrow it. If I’m going to use it every few months, I buy a cheap one. If I’m going to use it every week, then it’s worth it to me to buy something I can keep for at least a decade or two.
I agree with you to a certain point.
When somebody finishes high-school and becomes an adult, they should develop a useful skill that they can turn into a career. This might be going to college for STEM, it might be a trade-school, or it might be an apprenticeship as a skilled tradesman. I wouldn’t discount all liberal arts degrees either; a degree in graphic design can be well worth the time.
The important thing is that people entering the workforce can say “I’m a doctor,” “I’m a plumber,” “I’m an auto mechanic,” “I’m a software developer,” etc. Be able to say “I do something.”
Going to college for an undergraduate degree in art history? That’s something you should do after you’re already established in your career and you feel like you’d like to learn something more. Going to school to learn to be a chef, paint cars, build furniture, etc, they might not be STEM or law degrees, but they’re useful.
I guess in summary, kids should go to school to learn a useful skill. Adults should go to school for whatever they want.
A lot of boomers are really particular about well-manicured yards, pristine gardens, etc. Squirrels do not help with this.
I love seeing little divots where our squirrels bury nuts. If they eat some of our plants, then I put a cage around it or plant new ones. Seeing the little guys play and eat the food we put out for them far outweighs any minor landscaping problems they cause.
The problem isn’t that Harris is being held to a higher standard. The problem is that Americans think of elections the same way they think of a sporting match. It’s “my team is going to win!” not “I’m going to vote for the candidate that is best aligned with my beliefs.” A huge number of the people who are voting Republican are doing so because the Republican party is their “team,” and damn it, their team is going to win even if it kills them.
Many years ago, I was discussing politics with a coworker (always a bad idea, but whatever). It went something like this:
“So, you don’t think the less-fortunate should be able to afford medical care?” “No, of course not, everyone should be able to see a doctor.”
“You don’t think gay people should be allowed to marry?” “I’m not gay, but they can do whatever makes them happy.”
“You support the war in Iraq, then?” “I support our troops, but the war is kind of a waste.”
“We definitely should legalize weed, right?” “Um, I’d smoke it if I didn’t get drug tested.”
“So why are you voting Republican, then?” “My family is Republican; we always do.”
This is only true when you have a single transmission medium and a fixed band. Cable internet is a great example; you only have a few MHz of bandwidth to be used for data transmission, in any direction; the rest is used up by TV channels and whatever else. WiFi is also like this; you may have full-duplex communications, but you only have a very small portion of the 2.4Ghz or 5Ghz band that your WiFi router can use.
Ethernet is not like this. You have two independent transmission lines; each operates in one direction, and each is completely isolated from any other signals outside the transmitter and receiver. If your ethernet hardware negotiates a 10Gb connection, you have 10Gb in one direction and 10Gb in the other. Because the transmission lines are separate, saturating one has absolutely no effect on the other.
You are absolutely correct; I phrased that badly. Over any kind of RF link, bandwidth is just bandwidth. I was more referring to modern ethernet standards, all of which assume a separate link for upload and download. As far as I am aware, even bi-directional fiber links still work symmetrically, just different wavelengths over the same fiber.
If you have a 10GBaseT connection, only using 5Gb in one direction doesn’t give you 15Gb in the other. It’s still 10Gb either way.
This is a really good explanation; thank you!
There is one thing I’m having a hard time understanding, though; I’m going to use my ISP as an example. They primarily serve residential customers and small businesses. They provide VDSL connections, and there isn’t a data center anywhere nearby, so any traffic going over the link to their upstream provider is almost certainly very asymmetrical. Their consumer VDSL service is 40Mb/2Mb, and they own the phone lines (so any restriction on transmit power from the end-user is their own restriction).
To make the math easy, assume they have 1000 customers, and they’re guaranteeing the full 40Mb even at peak times (this is obviously far from true, but it makes the numbers easy). This means that they have at least a 40Gbit link to their upstream provider. They’re using the full 40Gb on one side of the link, and only 2Gbit on the other. I’ve used plenty of fiber SFP+ modules, and I’ve never seen one that supports any kind of asymmetrical connection.
With this scenario, I would think that offering their customers a faster uplink would be free money. Yet for whatever reason, they don’t. I’d even be willing to buy whatever enterprise-grade equipment is on the other end of my 40/2 link to get a symmetrical 40/40; still not an option. Bonded DSL, also not an option.
With so much unused upload bandwidth on the ISP’s part, I would think they’d have some option to upgrade the connection. The only thing I can think is that having to maintain accounts for multiple customers with different service levels costs more than selling some of their unused upload bandwidth.
This is kind of a shit article. Most of these are just old hardware that eventually had modern improvements, not “trends.”
A “trend” is cold cathode black lights inside the case, not a silly naming scheme for CPU revisions.
I can’t speak to the AI voice generation part of this, but you might be interested in the Domesday Duplicator for digitizing your audio, especially if some or it is slightly degraded.
https://github.com/harrypm/DomesdayDuplicator
The project was originally designed for laserdisc, but it’s been expanded to support VHS and cassette tape. Traditionally, you would play your tape on a cassette player, then the built in analog circuitry would convert the magnetic signals into audio, amplify them, and feed them to a sound card on your PC, which then converts the analog signal to a digital audio stream.
With the Domesdsy Duplicator, you record the raw magnetic signal from the read head and directly digitize it into a bitstream that you can then process as needed. For DIY archiving from an analog source, it’s one of the best options for signal fidelity, and it will give you the truest representation of what’s actually on the tape.
I have a few services running on Proxmox that I’d like to switch over to bare metal. Pfsense for one. No need for an entire 1U server, but running on a dedicated machine would be great.
Every mini PC I find is always lacking in some regard. ECC memory is non-negotiable, as is an SFP+ port or the ability to add a low-profile PCIe NIC, and I’m done buying off-brand Chinese crop on Amazon.
If someone with a good reputation makes a reasonably-priced mini PC with ECC memory and at least some way to accept a 10Gb DAC, I’ll probably buy two.