I’ve been seeing a lot about Sodium-ion just in the past week.
While they seem to have a huge advantage in being able to charge and discharge at some fairly eye-watering rates, the miserable energy density would seem to limit them to stationary applications, at least for now.
Perfect for backup power, load shifting, and other power-grid-tied applications though.
eSATAp! What a wild combination.
Not actually a terrible idea, even if it frequently was limited to powering 2.5" drives due to a lack of 12V. Some had extra contacts for that, but most that I saw didn’t.
It does however affect getting updates from government agencies, and others who insist on only disseminating real-time information to the public via Twitter.
For instance: https://twitter.com/WakaKotahiWgtn
This is the account for traffic events (road closures, traffic accidents, etc) in my city. Not signed in, the latest visible post is from February 2023.
Since I don’t have a twitter account, this is now functionally useless.
Since the realistic competitor here is probably magnetic tape, current-generation (LTO9) media can transfer at around 400MB/s, taking 12 hours and change to fill an 18TB tape.
Earlier archival optical disk formats (https://news.panasonic.com/global/stories/798) claimed 360MB/s, but I believe that is six, double-sided discs writing both sides simultaneously, so 30MB/s per stream. Filling the same six (300GB) discs would take about an hour and a half.
Building the library to handle and read/write in bulk is always the issue though. The above optical system fit 1.9PB in the space of a server rack (and I didn’t see any options to expand further when that was current technology), and by the looks is 7 units that each can be writing a set of discs (call that 2.5GB/s total).
In the same single rack you’d fit 560 LTO tapes (10.1PB for LTO9) and 21 drives (8.4GB/s).
So they have a bit of catching up to do, especially with LTO10 (due in the next year or so) doubling the capacity and further increasing the throughput.
There’s also the small matter that every one of these massive increases in optical disc capacity in recent years has turned out to be vapourware. I mean I don’t doubt that they will achieve it someday, but they always seem to go nowhere.
From the video description:
I have been a Samsung product user for many years, and I don’t plan to stop anytime soon
And all sympathy I had for this person just vanished. If you don’t demand better, they will keep doing - and getting away with - shit like this.
Voting with your wallet might be the one voice you have left in this world, what a way to squander it by continuing to buy products from companies whose representatives behave in this manner.
The estimated training time for GPT-4 is 90 days though.
Assuming you could scale that linearly with the amount of hardware, you’d get it down to about 3.5 days. From four times a year to twice a week.
If you’re scrambling to get ahead of the competition, being able to iterate that quickly could very much be worth the money.
And spatulas. Don’t forget the spatulas.
We’ve done this exercise recently for multi-petabyte enterprise storage systems.
Not going to name brands, but in both cases this is usable (after RAID and hot spares) capacity, in a high-availability (multi-controller / cluster) system, including vendor support and power/cooling costs, but (because we run our own datacenter) not counting a $/RU cost as a company in a colo would be paying:
Note that the total power consumption for ~3.5PB of HDD vs ~5PB of flash is within spitting distance, but the flash system occupies a third of the total rack space doing it.
As this is comparing to QLC flash, the overall system performance (measured in Gbps/TB) is also quite similar, although - despite the QLC - the flash does still have a latency advantage (moreso on reads than writes).
So yeah, no. At <1.5× the per-TB cost for a usable system - the cost of one HDD vs one SSD is quite immaterial here - and at >4× the TB-per-RU density, you’d have to have a really good reason to keep buying HDDs. If lowest-possible-price is that reason, then sure.
Reliability is probably higher too, with >300 HDDs to build that system you’re going to expect a few failures.
Except that they’ve ruined that too. You now need an account to view anything, so the reach of announcements is greatly diminished.
At this point leaving shouldn’t really be too difficult, since a large portion of your audience already has; because they’ve been shut out, or have quit voluntarily.
As of USB-PD 3.1 there are now nine fixed voltages - 5, 9, 12, 15, 20, 28, 36, and 48V - and two variable-voltage modes; PPS with 3.3 - 21V in 0.02V increments, and AVS with 15 - 48V in 0.1V increments.
Combined with a few different current limits, some of these features being optional, and then doubling down with what your cable does or doesn’t support, amazing anything gets charged at all.
I’ve definitely forgotten to close mine once or twice, even though my custom (LoRa) integration is just simulating pushing the button on the wall by closing a relay contact and watching for closed status with a reed switch, it means I can do it from anywhere.
It’s a shame that even “cheap” versions are hundreds of dollars, because the perfect absolute position sensor would be a “draw wire displacement sensor” (goes by a few variations on that name).
Basically a spring-loaded spool of wire with a multi-turn position sensor, rolls in and out like a tape measure.
Unfortunately Firefox doesn’t have a replacement for the “Android System WebView” component, so any app that embeds a browser component (and oh boy is that a lot of them) will still be using Chrome.
There’s a relevant ticket here: https://github.com/mozilla/geckoview/issues/167
It should be possible to have a shim that allows Mozilla’s “GeckoView” component to implement the API, but - per that ticket, at least - most Android ROMs won’t allow alternatives to the Google one.
The Firefox browser is genuinely great, but it’s so far from possible to replace Chrome with it everywhere a browser is used.
Unfortunately what’s shipping today seems it would offer maybe half that.
For the batteries that were announced this past week, a larger-than-refrigerator-sized cabinet held a capacity of around 15kWh.
Around half the energy density by mass of Lithium batteries, and in the order of a sixth of the density by volume.
Now if only we could come up with a system where your car could be charged while stopped at traffic lights, we might be onto a winner (:
Considering however that the price of sodium is around 1-2% that of lithium, I expect we will see significant R&D and those numbers quickly start to improve.