m0xte

Yeah I bought a Magic Mouse 2 earlier this year and regretted it instantly. Apple need to stop thinking outside of the box when it comes to mice.

You’re right about the positioning as well. If you have a full size Apple keyboard the trackpad is too far away always. If you have the compact layout Apple keyboard it’s too much of a compromise with keys.

Best outcome for me was turfing the lot and the Mac and getting a Logitech mouse and a TKL layout cherry MX red based keyboard. So much better.

I’m sorry but the Apple input devices are inferior even to the lowest grade no brand stuff from Aliexpress at this point.

Yes. Similar experiences. Basically the position I ended up in was mandatorily selling out to Oracle with no other choice on the table. The key purchasing decision was whether Sun or HP got to bugger us for hardware. This was loudly shouted out to drown out the “why do we need oracle” question. This took months of noise and pretendering (pretend tendering) and all sorts of meetings where no one knew anything about anything that was being required. But everyone was doing Six Sigma of course do the cargo culting was justified by process. Eventually HP was pulled out of the hat because someone saw a nice shiny sales brochure.

In the end, £1m down the shitter, 9 web pages written in JSP backed with a full 42U rack HP/UX crate running oracle was seen as a success. The whole platform was scrap in three years. each http request made cost £83 in the end ($100ish).

And that’s defence spending in a nutshell.

No one says a thing to stop this happening.

This is the thinly veiled next round of Trump vs Bezos by the sounds.

Hint: There are no winners.

That’s about it for commercial stuff. The trick is really managing it pre-compliance which amounts to renting a signal analyser / SA / measurement receiver and going at it with a near field probe to avoid having to pay for it more than once. Rigol do some adequate kit for less than your mugging from a leasing company now. As for the lab guys they don’t have a tight loop with the design engineers when you are going for compliance testing.

We used stuff in defence sector I can’t talk about even today past saying they have specially designed facilities that rival the commercial sector and fairly capable high end 3D field mapping equipment that cost more than my house did. It was based on commercial kit from Agilent with their own software and hardware.

As for antennas, they’re not really that voodoo. I’ve built quite a few even up to 2.4GHz. I played with 10GHz as well but not successfully yet. Same for radiation. PCB traces are antennas and transmission lines. Impedance control is fun IMHO.

There are design patterns and crib sheets at most large companies that avoid such pitfalls though. Spinning another board is expensive so avoiding this sort of stuff is where your design engineers should be leveraged. Some stuff is indeed tweaking but that’s getting less these days with some of the CAD software around. But it costs real money.

I have, in defence sector.

Correct. Although it’s possible on older handsets with 3.5 jack that the audio amplifier in the handset itself is possible to receive. I’m not sure about lightning.

But I very much doubt at the stated range. The EMC guys would be all over that.

It’s physics. There is EMC testing done on these devices. There is little opinion involved in such matters.

I doubt it. That probably wouldn’t pass the EMC testing. Exaggerating I suspect to back up the claim.

Really why is this a surprise when you can hear the phone blips and buzzes from the RF induced pickup on shitty hifi equipment.

I am disregarding the whole thing. The author knows nothing of EMC. This is expected at close quarters.

I suspect that’s unlikely from my own experiences on this stuff. Perhaps 20-40cm is more likely.

This is not surprising. We’ve been using AM and FM radios to debug circuits for decades. They can pick up oscillations and instabilities.

But the range is centimetres at best. So much so the antenna gets used as a fairly directional probe.

10Gb - Stick it on a bitlocker encrypted USB stick and chuck it in the post. Next day download if you send it 1st class here.

<10Gb - chuck it on S3 and send a link to the other person.

I just get poked on slack. Question answered. Life carries on.

The advantage there is I can choose when to respond which is never the case in shoulder tapping office environments and meeting schedule negotiations both of which are disruptive.

Email is even better than meetings and disruptions!

Yeah which is why I do neither.

Completely agree. Perhaps we should get on air and outnumber them :)

You want to hear some of the crap I hear on 2m in London UK. I dumped my HT in the end so I don’t get annoyed.

CW and FT8 are generally best if you don’t want to deal with that sort. CW is much harder to put the effort in to be a dick and FT8 doesn’t have being a dick built into the protocol.

That’ll be also because the local club usual incompetence can’t get in the way with social distancing. I had so much trouble even going back a few years getting my license because most folk can’t organise a piss up in a brewery. RSGB were little help.

Eventually ML&S came through on this front with their training and examination courses which were excellent.

More than that. General direction was negative. They’re removing kernel extensions (bye bye corp vpn), terrible historical direction on browser extensions, bugs galore, crazy expensive hardware. I’m done.

95% probably isn’t good enough.

1blocker is fairly awful I find and rather expensive because you’re a captive audience that doesn’t have access to working uBlock.

This situation is one of several reasons I recently dumped macOS and went back to windows and am using edge and doing all my unixy stuff in VMs.

Which incidentally sucks terribly. Ad blocking on iOS and macOS is a complete turd.

Energy isn’t going to get cheaper and neither is the environmental impact of consuming lots of it.

My conclusion is that my home lab was a learning exercise that comes to an end and that having physical hardware was actually detrimental to it.

I still have a home lab. It's just virtualized.

So much this. I think my energy bill for my single PC as mentioned elsewhere in this thread works out about $70 (equiv) a year.

When I had the full whack server rack it was pulling that a month and 99% of the time it was idle.

Not OP here but it takes me about an hour to rebuild my machine from scratch.

I had a fairly large home lab once. I had a fully topped out SPARCserver 1000E and a disk enclosure in my bedroom. I also once lived with an E450 on the kitchen table for a month. But they’re noisy as hell, inconvenient, expensive to keep running and expensive to feed with power and take up a lot of room and thus are not compatible with family and general sanity over time. They become needy balls and chains.

So roll on to now I’m using a silent build Ryzen windows desktop with 64Gb of RAM and a couple of mundane SSDs that I fire up VMs in virtualbox as required. At night it gets turned off. I’ve got a $5 digitalocean box that runs all my persistent linux stuff. If I want to play with networks it’s done with GNS3. Office 365 runs my email and all my stuff is sync’ed with onedrive and a couple of offline SSDs occasionally when I get nervous. My network is the fritzbox my ISP gave me plugged into the back of the desktop via Ethernet. That’s it!

My life is better for this. I hope people grow to realise this is much less of a mental burden over time which gives you more head space and a clean context switch away if you need it.

I’m not saying that it doesn’t result in a saving but that the fact that industry has to exist to keep costs constrained is a net loss.

Imagine if pricing was transparent, calculable and easy to rationalise the cost of a change. But it isn’t unless you pull a third party in.

Well the point is more that a lot of stuff doesn't even need to be in a queue. It's just cookie cutter engineering. "I did this before and it worked so I'll do it again" without any consideration on what it does and why it does it.

Mine doesn’t give a crap if my outbound is 200 gig a month uploading stuff to onedrive or iCloud. Why should it have that opinion on anything else? I’m paying for a pipe. The only control metric they have is asymmetry and that’s a technology tradeoff in my case (ADSL)

Yes I’m a big proponent of stateless stuff. In fact 20 years ago I was crowing this to a deaf audience. Instead I find queues in databases that didn’t even need to exist. And our solutions, kubernetes for example, are complicated Rube Goldberg machines rather than things that make us sleep easy.

However really the software industry is all about state and where to keep it because that’s where the trolls collect their gold coins.

So what can we do?

I think it’s simpler. This smells like a load of marketing to justify the existence of another silo which is controlled by some form of vanity ideology.

Nope.

We still have plenty of choices which don’t need an ideology shipped with it. I’m good with a text editor, an open source OS and a VPS, colo or some hooky box under my desk hanging off my ADSL line. That’s the small web that isn’t consumed by some portalisation which is really the issue isn’t it which is not being solved here by trying to create another one?