Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | SteveNuts's commentslogin

Logically that probably makes sense, but it would require everyone in the chain of command agreeing to that policy, and there’s no way that would ever happen from a liability standpoint.

Java or Bedrock edition, and have you tried logging into your EntraID Microsoft Teams for Xbox account lately? Make sure to check the box to keep you logged in!

Last I heard UK Minecraft players aren't even allowed to talk anymore without ID verification.

And if someone makes a server that doesn't do the chat verification, Microsoft blacklists that server in the client-side server address textbox. This system was developed to destroy pay-to-win servers, but they're now applying it against servers that refuse to censor "fuck".

The worst part of Ansible is data manipulation, what would be an easy dictionary operation in Python is a huge mix of lookups in Ansible.

Incredibly frustrating that the data you want is right there but you can't easily grab it.


If Jinja templating for data manipulation gets too complex or inconvenient, you can create your own module in ansible and use python code for data manipulation. But at this point you are better served with plain python which I think is where pyinfra should shine. I want to take a look though at how hard it is to implement your own module for it.


If you're doing data manipulation with server state, you would probably want to create a Fact[0]. This is a straightforward Python class.

If you're doing data manipulation locally you would simply write Python code.

Operations[1] are Python functions which execute (yield) commands which will be run on hosts.

That's the gist of what it takes to write custom modules for Pyinfra.

[0] https://docs.pyinfra.com/en/3.x/api/facts.html [1] https://docs.pyinfra.com/en/3.x/api/operations.html


There's nothing specific about this related to Python, that's just demonstrating how it works.

This is usable anywhere on an affected Kernel version


The “normies”? What does that mean in this context?


Yeah and that type of work bid usually goes to huge conglomerates. A local mom and pop electrician shop isn’t going to be building a datacenter, it’ll be something like Siemens.


A friend of mine is an independent electrician in the Columbus, OH area. Last summer he told me he was getting plenty of datacenter construction work, albeit it was in the form of subcontracted jobs from the larger firms who were awarded the contracts.


Even if the datacenter does hire some local labor for construction, that's still all temporary jobs. It's not an ongoing source of employment for locals.


They'll pay tons in taxes to energy company.


I work for an electrical contractor that does large data center projects and we almost always partner with a local contractor to provide labor from the local union(s).


sure, that only covers construction though. Once the thing is built they are going to travel in all the maintenance that needs to happen, and that local tradesman is not going to get to many new home construction jobs after it goes in. Who wants to live nearby a noise polluter like that?


Local shops will absolutely be contracted to work on the project. A datacenter project like this can't find enough qualified electricians.


I would imagine there aren't too many electricians in Yeehaw, Minnesota, trained and qualified to do gigawatt data center installs. So they'll freight in contractors to do that work, and maybe temporarily employ a few locals for a month or two for auxiliary stuff.

More generally, this is the universal playbook when someone wants to dump some megaproject on a community that doesn't want it: This will create X jobs and inject $Y into the local economy. Can you name one case where this actually happened? It's usually very few additional permanent jobs and, particularly for public-works stuff, millions or even billions in extra debt to pay off. But don't worry, this next thing we're working on once we get the local council to issue a permit to bulldoze your forest park, that will bring in jobs, we promise.


>Yeah and that type of work bid usually goes to huge conglomerates.

Which are exactly the kinds of entities that the trades unions and industry interest groups are most deeply in bed with.


What is the contingency/continuity plan if the single controller becomes incapacitated while on duty with no warning to pilots?


Same as if the radios stopped working or otherwise communication fails. Execute the planned procedures (which vary).

Often Approach will take over the "tower" and operate in crippled mode (no clearances to cross active runways, you must go down to the end kind of thing).

Some airports are uncontrolled at various times and would revert to that. Some airlines would require the pilot execute a missed approach and deviate to a towered airport, others may allow them to land.


I admit I'm incredibly naive on this subject, but what makes it so hard to track an object as large as an aircraft carrier when starting from a known position such as a naval port?


As described above the issue would be continuous observation, not how to follow it assuming you never lose sight of it.


You certainly can't do continuous observation but even just with commercial satellite offerings you can get pretty close.

For example nowadays Planet Labs [1] offers 30-50cm resolution imaging at a rate of one image or 120sec video stream every 90 minutes over a given 500 km^2 region. There is no situation where an aircraft carrier is going to be capable of evading a commercial satellite offering with that frequency and resolution. Once you know approximately where it is or even where it was in the semi-recent past, it's fairly trivial to narrow in and build a track off the location and course.

1. https://www.planet.com/products/satellite-monitoring/


Commercial operations like Planet Labs currently cover most of the Earth multiple times a day.


This should not be assumed to be available in case of a war.

See say https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/leading-satellite-firm-hol...

> Planet Labs PBC, a leading provider of high resolution images taken from space, said Friday it would hold back for 96 hours images of Gulf states targeted by Iranian drone attacks.


Clouds occasionally happen


SAR is not blocked by clouds.


What would you track them with? Follow them with helicopters and/or boats?


Break out the pocket book and pay Planet Labs to do it. You could do it with much less frequent visits than this probably the search area for it every 2 hours isn't very large and image recognition systems are pretty good. The big threat is cloud cover.

https://www.planet.com/pulse/12x-rapid-revisit-announcement/


Note that that article is from 2020. Nowadays the frequency is actually down to 90 minutes/1.5hr. The resolution is up as well and they can do massive image capture (~500km^2) and video (120sec stream) from their passes.

Also nowadays they provide multi-spectal capture as well which can mostly see through cloud cover even if it takes a bit more bandwidth and postprocessing.


What if US government bans US-based companies from selling pictures within area where carrier operates?

(of all "national security" reasons these is one of more reasonable ones)


The problem then is the black out zones themselves reveal a lot as well if adversaries can find their bounds. That narrows the search area for their own observation satellites immensely even if it's too large to respond to IRL.


Well in that case congratulations. You've just made it easier. Now you don't even have to track them. You just have to look for the blacked out box, the "error we can't show you this", reused imagery from their long running historical imagery dataset, or improperly fused/healed imagery after alteration.

So now you don't have to do the tracking, just find the hole.

And then you can use a non-US provider to get direct imagery now that you know exactly where to look.


If the restricted area is large, a carrier is regionally disabling for an imagery provider. If it's smaller (and therefore must move over time to follow the carrier group) as soon as the imagery provider starts refusing sales in an area, any customer can test and learn its perimeter with trial purchases, find a coarse center, and learn its course and speed. You don't care about anything else until there's actual hostilities.


It would make tracking impossible, as no other country operates satellites.


You don't even need a free account on flightradar24 to track its planes, at least two launch from it and pattern circle around it almost daily.


That relies on transponders which can be switched of if decision is taken to do so.


Sure, and they don't decide to do that in many cases.


...literally yes (to the latter)? Is that not exactly why modern warships have to implement things like measures to reduce their radar cross section? If you could actually just rely on "ocean too big" then there would be no need for that.


It is in part for small crafts (frigates and corvettes) but for pretty much anything larger there's no concealing those ships.

The primary reason however for minimizing radar cross section and increasing radar scatter is to harden protections against radar based weapon systems during a conflict.

Even if the ship is still visible in peacetime operations, once electronic countermeasures/ECM are engaged, it gets an order of magnitude harder for guided missiles to still "see" the ship.

Depending on the kit, once missiles are in the air the ship and all of their friends in their strike group/squadron is going to start jamming radar, popping decoys, and trying to dazzle the missiles effectively enough for RIM-174/SM-6, RIM-66/SM-1, and RIM-67/SM-2s to intercept it without the missiles evading. And should the missile make it to close-in range then it's just praying that the phalanx/CIWS takes care of it.

And if everything fails then all that jamming and dazzling + the reduced radar cross section is going to hopefully result in the missiles being slightly off target/not a complete kill on the vessel.

So they still serve a purpose. Just not for stealth. Instead serving as compounding increases to survival odds in engagement scenarios.


But what you're describing is stealth. "Stealth" doesn't mean "invisible". Humans wearing combat fatigues aren't literally invisible either especially when moving, they're just harder to track/get a visual lock on to aim at.

The point still stands that you cannot rely on "ocean is too big for anyone to find me" because it very much is not.


I think you are sim-interpreting what I was saying (and if you see what I've posted elsewhere in the discussion thread I'm very much in agreement with you).

I was just saying that stealth is a component of ship design for small crafts (i.e. those that would generally stay close to the coast) but that it's not the case for larger ships and even for those smaller ships it's just not the primary purpose for radar optimized hulls.

Close to the coast, non-coastal radar won't be able to detect ships nearly as well as out at sea where they stand out like a sore thumb. And of course coastal radar will still light up any ship so stealth there is of little value on foreign shores.

But really outside of some niche cases for small crafts, radar "stealth" is all about survivability and not the traditional view of stealth.

TLDR I think we are pretty much in agreement.


What is the point of a device like this if the only difference is form factor? Why wouldn't someone just buy a pre-configured gaming PC?


Every PC I’ve ever tried to repurpose as a gaming console of any sort has had way more jank to it than I’d ever tolerate in a console, in the 25ish years I’ve been hooking computers up to TVs. Even the Bazzite box I’ve got is pretty bad by comparison. Hell, my actual Steam Deck has a lot more undesirable “enthusiast” behavior to it, let’s say, than I’d want out of a Nintendo product for example, even though it’s just about the best I’ve seen (the actual best is Retroarch with a skin mimicking the PS3’s menu, on a dedicated distro that could take it from cold boot to interactive in like three seconds flat even on an rpi2… but that won’t play actual modern PC games, just emulated consoles and such, so it’s not a fair comparison)

A common failure is the controllers. It’s hard to get a combo of OS stack, Bluetooth chip, and controller that Just Works like they do on consoles. Something always needs fiddling-with.

Video or audio out are also often a problem. Glitched audio or audio mode-switching, trouble switching video modes, screwed-up HDR, all kinds of stuff. Maybe fine on your monitor with headphones. Not fine on a TV or projector with 5.1+ audio receiver.

The UIs also bug out or crash more often, and usually aren’t that great at being a TV UI in the first place (even Steam IMO is worse than most consoles, as far as the Big Picture UI)

It also gives devs a stable target with a known market, which is nice for both the devs and the owners of the devices.


There's something to be said for having a standard, known SKU, both as something for developers to target if enough people own it, and for users to troubleshoot if they're e.g. having an issue running X game.

This kind of already exists with the "Deck Verified" label on Steam games.

That said, this sounds similar to Valve's upcoming Steam Machine and I'd much prefer that to be the standard console/PC hybrid to keep the Linux gaming momentum going, and perhaps one day I can ditch Windows for good.


The main goal is money, an Xbox branded windows PC has potential to drive sales.

Microsoft can also hopefully target a smoother user experience than a typical windows PC provides. They want this to be a valid console competitor, but just slapping xbox brand on a windows PC isn't enough to do that.

Having a first party hardware device to target for PC games can also help devs with having a clear performance target for PCs, similar to how the Steam Deck is currently a minimum spec performance target for a lot of games.


There are a few points I can see

1. Console-like living room ready experience. It's surprisingly hard to get a PC made with off-the-shelf parts to integrate cleanly with a home theater system (think features like HDMI CEC, One Touch Play, etc). A custom SoC can solve this, something we are seeing Valve also do with the Steam Machine.

2. As the target hardware for basically all Xbox games, end-users who don't want to fret over system specs can easily just buy this and know they are getting the intended experience.

Whether that's enough to move units remains to be seen.


If this is true then the reason that a console would be better than a custom PC is that it would also be designed to work better for that purpose. Turning on the device when the controller turns on and sending CEC commands are two huge things that aren't well supported outside of the console space. Also it would likely run a trimmed down version of Windows and would be set up to "just work" in a way that a system that can have any arbitrary set of hardware will never be able to do.

But the really nice thing about the concept of treating a PC and console as the same platform is that you don't have to worry about why people might prefer to go the route of buying the console. You can go with a regular gaming PC if that's what you prefer and your library will have all the same options.


Microsoft are in a tough spot (as far as Xbox hardware goes at least). PlayStation is selling much better on the console side, and Valve with the Steam install base has a good shot at making a non-Windows OS a serious platform for gaming.

Their hand was forced in the end. They have to consolidate PC and Xbox users to compete.

The idea of a machine with a locked down mode that can boot legacy Xbox titles and probably run competitive games with very little chance for cheating is interesting. But given Microsoft's track record with consumer devices I await to be convinced.

Valve should be worried if they do turn out something good, maybe this will mean the Steam machines are pushed more aggressively price wise. We can hope...


It's a device with a fixed, known-good set of hardware for developers to target, which is all that any of the major consoles is. Your question applies just as much to the Steam Deck and upcoming Steam Machine.


Let's speculate that they need a carrot for Windows developers when they attempt to use a monopoly stick on the Steam Deck.


I mean, at that point it is a pre-configured gaming PC. Hardware that's uniform across millions of units provides advantages, both for developers and users. IMO that's a big part of why the Steam Deck outsells more powerful competitors: there are so many of them that it gets targeted by developers, so more people buy them, in a virtuous cycle.


> MacBook Neo's NVMe being slower than the Air/Pro isn't just a benchmark footnote — it compounds with file count in a non-linear way.

The “isn’t just” part is a dead giveaway almost always.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: