In theory but the difficulty in practice is that if you were to invest in local manufacturing you'd have to be sure that someone else won't be given a waver via lobbying / corruption and will then be able to completely undercut you. The current US administration lacks the credibility to give such assurances. Given existing models are exempt you're better of just delaying new models while you wait for a new admin.
I'm not sure the democrats could give such assurances either. If domestic manufacturing is 2x as expensive that's a lot of money that could be spent on campaign donations and still break even.
“Long and hard” is not something the US does anymore. You would be insane to invest here based on the assumption that the current tariffs and regulations will survive any period of time. Even Trump changes his mind every week, probably based on whoever pays most.
To be clear, that F35 was being incredibly careless, flying low in broad daylight. All the stealth features of an aircraft are useless if you can look at it with your own eyes. In any conflict with China, F35s would not be flown that way.
APKWS interceptor is about 35K USD and works much better than drone-based interceptors. The problem is to scale the production, training and deployment. Another problem is detection. One needs wast multilayered system that US military missed to build as big stationary radars are very hard to defend.
Air-launched interceptors like this have the problem on relying on a super-expensive manned carrier (fighter or helicopter).
The intercept cost is now not only the cost of the interceptor, but also the cost of the flying hours of the launching platform, and the risk of losing the launching platform.
If you equip even some of your Shaheds with AA missiles (cheap manpads with autonomous IR target acquisition and guidance), like is already happening in Ukraine, the feasibility of APKWS becomes problematic. The technology is developing fast these days.
APKWS launching from air is a stop-gap measure in any case. The detection range for Shahed-type drones is tenths of kilometers, not hundreds, like with fighter jets or big missiles. One cannot have that many fighter jets in the air all the time even without the threat of manpads.
But ground-based platforms work just fine and cheap enough to scale up the deployment to cover the big area.
The big advantage of APKWS over interceptor drones is the rocket engine, they are much faster and can catch Shaheds within much bigger radius or within much smaller timeframe than interceptor drones.
First, if I understand correctly, APKWS is laser guided (one of the reasons it is relatively cheap is cheap simple guidance), it needs the carrier to designate the target.
Second, it is rather short range, and that range is helped significantly by the speed and altitude of the launching platform. Launching from the ground upwards would significantly reduce its range, which is anyway just a few km.
Due to the short range, you will need a densely distributed significant numbers of them, and still be in danger of saturation attack (the attacker can saturate one route, you have to be ready for all possible routes). Having a carrier platform allows the missiles to be quickly brought where they are needed, so overall you need much less of them (still too much, as having enough carriers in air imposes limits as well).
You can have longer-range ground missiles, but then the costs rise. Also, I am not sure how feasible/robust is to laser designate air targets from the ground. I suspect it does not work over longer distances, i.e. you need a more sophisticated and costly guidance system/sensor suite on the missile.
The beauty of an anti-drone drone is that you have a much more robust human-assisted guidance, for cheap (camera and communication link). With advances to AI, even that human and communication link are becoming obsolete...
With rocket propelled missile you have much faster closing speed, and quite limited energy budget - essentially you have to make a correct decision fast and precisely, otherwise the missile is wasted. With a drone, everything is slower and easier to correct.
The latest APKWS is IR guided and works in fire and forget mode that works nicely from the ground. And then drone interceptor struggles with Russians Shaheds with jet engines.
On the other hand the latest development with drone interceptors is rocket booster to quickly bring in within Shahed. So I guess there would be a convergence between APKWS and interceptor drones.
IR guided fire and forget is fine, but undoubtedly quite a bit costlier than the basic laser-guided one. If you want to use it against jet engined Shaheds while launching from the ground, you definitely need larger rocket motor, i.e. costlier interceptors. But that might be fine, the jet engined Shaheds are not as cheap as the basic ones anyway.
Actually, I am surprised they still use the Shahed platform for the jet engined drones. A Reaper-like platform with high aspect ratio wings would be much more aerodynamically efficient, allowing longer range/loiter time/larger payload. It is definitely more expensive airframe, but that jet engine might be the main cost factor anyway.
Re: IR seeker against plain Shaheds: does the basic weedwhacker Shahed have enough IR signature? (More precisely: does it have it if you did some basic precautions - cover the engine, some mixing of the ambient air with the exhaust.) The power level of that engine (= the whole source of IR energy) is quite low...
Shahed shape is dictated by the need to sustain very high G and aerodynamic forces during the launch from a truck which in turn allows for a very fast deployment. Anything more aerodynamic will imply stronger, more expensive frame and less payload.
Shahed has sufficiently bright IR that even a basic seeker works. To keep the cost low no efforts were applied to minimize the signature.
It is fascinating how well designed Shahed was for its intended purpose of being the cheapest mass-produced platform that would saturate any advanced air defenses while hard to track launch site. However, with appearance of cheap mass-produced counter-measures it may no longer be optimal.
To deny the US the use of any nearby airfields (Okinawa, several others in Japan an Philippines). This will limit US airpower to carriers, which are few and sinkable.
Of course, China wants to be able to fight those F35s in the air - to mitigate the damage they can do to them (while the F35s still have airfield/carriers to land on) - also in order to make it easier to sink those carriers.
Still, you can bet that all US nearby airfields would be peppered very early in the conflict.
There won't be a direct conflict with China, at least not in the last 10 years, because the US first needs to complete de-coupling his economy from China more, re-industralize in-shore or at least near-shore, and dramatically build up its military and logistic capabilities to fight an expeditionary campaign on China shores.
China also is not stupid, and no matter how much they posture, they won't invade Taiwan.
No one is invading China. Coupled or de-coupled is a completely irrelevant consideration. People think MAGA are crazy, but no one is suicidal. A war with China would be over in a matter of hours. And anyone who did not manage to get to Africa or extreme South America before the outbreak of hostilities would have a great chance of dying. The only question is will death be quick in a blast, or slow as you try to walk out of the US.
To be clear, Trump announced that the US had destroyed Iran's air defenses, missiles and missile launch capabilities. Trump also said that the US enjoyed air supremacy over Iran and were flying when and where they wished.
Maybe one of these days we'll see a B-52 take off with JDAMs and not JASSMs but probably not, kind of scary to try and drop gravity bombs on a country that your stealth fighters can't fly over.
Small nitpick. 4.8.1 was .NET Framework, which is a totally different beast that .NET (1 through 10). .NET Framework was heavily dependent on Windows, while .NET (1 through 10) are the newer OS independent system. It's not that they've forgotten to update the system .NET, its that that product is in long term maintenance only mode and modern .NET is a totally different software.
Technically the auditing already existed, but functionally it didn't because Enron could bully Arthur Andersen into getting the results they wanted, or just ignore results they didn't like.
Banning IP leasing would concentrate power in the hands of those who have large IP blocks. Makes one wonder what the real motivation behind this post is.
Have you tried getting an ipblock from a RIR and failed? they seem widely available if you justify it and at a reasonable price. If not, you can always go to a host and buy at a smaller fraction...
> Have you tried getting an ipblock from a RIR and failed? they seem widely available if you justify it and at a reasonable price
RIPE wont "sell" me an IP block, no matter how reasonable a price I offer. RIPE will gladly let me pay them LIR annual membership dues for 2 years before they consider allocating me a /24 (based on current waiting list times)
I was aware of the yearly membership (600$/yr in my RIR), and that they are on a per request basis where you have to demonstrate that you will put those IPs to the use and benefit of the general public, so you need to talk about your users basically, and if you are B2B you need to talk about your client's users.
But in my RIR I don't think there's a 2 year minimum.
Regarding IPv6 blocks do those require a 2 year membership as well? They are probably easier to get.
I mean…not curtailing leasing concentrates power with sketchy rent seekers and empowers the enterprises which use them (many of which range from “sketchy” to “evil and criminal”).
So I guess I’m having trouble envisioning a world without IP leasing that’s materially worse than the one we have.
I bought a bundle with 512GB of RAM and an older 24-core EPYC (7F72) + supermicro motherboard on ebay a bit over a year ago, it was really an amazing deal and has made for a truly nice NAS. If you're okay with stuff that's old enough that you can buy decommissioned server stuff, you can get really high-quality gear at surprisingly low prices.
Companies decommission hardware on a schedule after all, not when it stops working.
EDIT: Though looking for similar deals now, I can only find ones up to 128GB RAM and they're near twice the price I paid. I got 7F72 + motherboard + 512GB DDR4 for $1488 (uh, I swear that's what I paid, $1488.03. Didn't notice the 1488 before.) The closest I can find now is 7F72 + motherboard + 128GB DDR4 for over $2500. That's awful
AMD also has some weird cpus like the 7c13 7r13, that are way way way below their normal price bands. You don't even have to buy used to get a ridiculous systems... Until 4 months ago (RIP ram prices).
https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-7c13-is-a-surprisingly...
I've heard it claimed that the era of being able to do this (buy slightly old used server hardware cheap on ebay) is coming to an end because, in the quest for ever more efficiency, the latest server hardware is no longer compatible with off-the-shelf power supplies etc. (there was more but that's the part that I remember) and therefore won't have any value on the second hand market.
I hope it was wrong, but it seems at least plausible to me. I'm sure that probably fixes could be made for all these issues, but the reason the current paradigm works is that, other than the motherboard and CPU, everything else you need is standard, consumer grade equipment which is therefore cheap. If you need to start buying custom (new) power supplies etc. to go along, then the price may not make as much sense anymore.
When boxes get decommissioned it's generally the entire thing. So you can pick up used power supplies as well. Or just buy new because even if it isn't ATX it's still a widely produced item that's used across multiple product lines.
The troublesome hardware is the stuff with custom backplanes and multiple daughterboards each hosting a node. Also AMD CPUs that lock themselves to a single motherboard.
The power supply incompatibility came to fruition a long time ago. Buying used Supermicro ATX motherboards to build into servers stopped being a thing for me about 1 decade ago. But used servers and desktops, even with their non-standard parts, have continued to deliver high value for me even today.
When I was looking in October, I hadn't bought hardware for the better part of a decade, and I saw all these older posts on forums for DDR4 at $1/GB, but the lowest I could find was at least $2/GB used. These days? HAH!
If I had a decent sales channel I might be speculating on DDR4/DDR5 RAM and holding it because I expect prices to climb even higher in the coming months.
I don't remember DDR4 ever hitting $1/GB. Was I not shopping in the right places? IIRC DDR3 settled in at $1/GB quite a long time ago and recycled datacenter DDR4 was maybe ballpark $2.50/GB at some point.
I'm curious, what is the powe draw for such a system? Of course, it heavily depends on the disks, but does it idle under 200W?
I personally feel like I will downscale my homelab hardware to reduce its power draw. My HW is rather old (and leagues below yours), more recent HW tends to be more efficient, but I have no idea how well these high end server boards can lower their idle power consumption?
That's an "if you have to ask, it's not for you" question. Also, the noise these things make... You better have a separate garage. The constraints of a data center are really far from those of a homelab.
Oh, nice! I always wanted one of those, a many-core build server running ARM would be excellent for Yocto. Anything running in quemu in the rootfs is so slow on x86 and I've seen the rootfs postprocess step take a long time.
Though... these days, getting enough RAM to support builds across 80 cores would be twice the price of the whole rest of the system I'm guessing.
Aside from the memory cost being exorbitant, 4th/5th gen ES CPUs aren’t horribly expensive for the core count you get. 8480s and 8592s have been quite accessible.
Stuffed an 8480+ ES with 192gb of memory across 8 channels and it’s actually not too bad.
Just give it a few years and you'll be able to buy the thing for a fraction of the 'current' price. By that time it will be considered to be 'slow' and 'power-hungry' and people will wonder why you're intent on running older hardware but it'll still work just fine. The DL380 G7 under the stairs here also used to cost an arm and a leg while I got it for some finger nail clippings.
I don't agree. There are a lot of inference performance improvements to make. I think the cost of inference continues to fall, and pretty much every application of AI becomes a commodity with brutal competition.
I've long thought it would be funny to do a startup where we would make accounting software that was solely a chat interface, with the only data store being a GL account list stored in context. There is probably a VC firm dumb enough to fund it.
Source: My company manages logistics for dozens of US manufacturing companies.
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