We used dialup until 1996, when we got a 10mbps cable internet connection, newly available in our 20k population town. We have never had a slower service plan than that since.
Questioning this, because I worked with a sysadmin who was in an @Home/CableLabs DOCSIS beta region at about that same time, and we all envied him of course. That was in San Jose, CA.
So what's the real story behind your piddlly little town getting bleeding edge cable internet service? (Or was it somewhere like Los Gatos?)
I was distracted by the poor typesetting in parts of the page. The meaning of the text is overwhelmed by the distracting spacing used to justify the text:
> . I n o t h e r w o r d s , s i l i c o n - o r g a t e - l evel
I'll second Ubiquiti. I have 15 year old hardware from them that still gets security updates. Pricier than cheap chinese junk, but well architected (on-camera compression and motion analysis.) Their video system is rock solid and nothing goes to the cloud.
I would love to see the US rekindle the domestic manufacture of affordable consumer/prosumer network hardware. The US can already manufacture SoCs, PWBs, and chassis hardware, we just need a business case for putting it all together. Managed well, sustained protection from international competition could provide this business case, and buffer against global shipping disruptions, while the sheer volume of CPE equipment would eventually drive down costs.
Domestic manufacturing is not coming back because there are no guarantees whatsoever that this ban is going to last. Nobody is going to shell out hundreds of millions to setup manufacturing for such a low-margin product when it is much cheaper and risk-free to just sidestep the ban.
Mikrotik manufactures a lot of stuff in Latvia, yes. That's where they're based, and where most of their engineering happens.
Some of their stuff is also stated to be made in, at least, Lithuania, Malaysia, Vietnam, and China (in no particular order).
And I really don't have much of an idea how much of the devices are made in any of those places, but it's not hard to find an occasional clue.
For example: The Mikrotik wAP AC that is hanging on the wall in the room where I write this is was labelled as having been made in Latvia when I bought it. But the main brainbox IC inside of it, a Qualcomm QCA9556, is manufactured by TSMC. That's probably not something made in a Latvian plant.
What of the rest? The metal and plastic components of the housing? The connectors, the PCBs? The jelly-bean parts on those PCBs?
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The recent ham-fisted FCC rules make it so any foreign-made component of a new router design excludes it from sale in the US, by default.
It may be harder than you think it is to get this done.
Even the simple stuff might be hard: Do we even make LEDs in the States? I don't mean anything high-power or fancy (we definitely don't make those here), but I also can't find any evidence suggesting that we can even manufacture a lowly status LED in the US at this point.
Or, something mechanical: PCB-mount 8P8C ethernet jacks. I don't find any of those manufactured in the States, either. (Can we even muster up the effort to make those? They're mostly injection-molded plastic, which we haven't forgotten how to do stuff with. But they also use beryllium copper, which is a special kind of a spooky to work with in terms of health hazards.)
I'm not sure that Mikrotik putting together some stuff in Latvia, of all places, represents a very good example: If they were doing in Nebraska what they presently do in Latvia then their products would still be excluded by default.
It takes a few years, but the Broadcom chips in Pis eventually get mainline support for most peripherals, similar to modern Rockchip SoCs.
The major difference is Raspberry Pi maintains a parallel fork of Linux and keeps it up to date with LTS and new releases, even updating their Pi OS to later kernels faster than the upstream Debian releases.
Also, unlike a lot of other manufacturers who only provide builds of Linux for their own hardware for a couple of years, it seems that even the latest version of the official Raspberry Pi OS supports every Raspberry Pi model all the way back to the first one with the 32-bit version of the OS.
Likewise, the 64-bit version of the OS looks like it supports every Raspberry Pi model that has a 64-bit CPU.
Yeah I was very impressed at being able to download a raspi image last year for my original pi model B, most companies would have just told me to throw it in the bin and buy the new one (at 10x the price lol)
Two questions: under what conditions would you only have 10 seconds to respond? And how would you develop yourself to be effective under this kind of pressure?
What: Interview, Date, Conflict resolution (more like holding back to respond), setting boundaries, negotiating, or when you feel threatened like when you were a kid if you were bullied…
How: Like any other skill practice if you were in that kind of situation and you were stuck and trying to do sudo runs as if it was real and getting the right muscle memory.
When making purchases online I relax my uMatrix policies (so the payment will go through) but I'm blown away by what's trying to load; I see CDNs for pinterest, tiktok, twitter, linkedin, etc, all wanting to run javascript on my checkout page despite having no visible logo or services. I leave these disabled and have never had a payment fail. But I do wonder what mechanism lands them there.
I’ve seen the same thing. You go to pay for something and suddenly half the internet wants to join the checkout process.
Most of it seems to be third-party scripts bundled in by payment providers, analytics, or “marketing” integrations the site owner probably didn’t even realise they enabled. It just accumulates.
The worrying bit is how normal it’s become. If you didn’t have uMatrix, you’d never even know it was happening.
Yes, give me weird orbits! I want a shot which is just outside the target area to get sucked in by the gravity of the planet, but potentially letting me slingshot around an intermediate planet towards a more distant one. The tap command should still mean “gravity disengaged, momentum still active“ to allow shifts from one orbit to another.
I'm also using 11ty on a couple projects, but I abhore the npm ecosystem.
I'm considering letting an LLM generate a flat python script to replace what 11ty does for me. Once removed from the fracas, it should be stable for decades.
> notification reliability is always a top support complaint
I know octogenarians who use signal daily. "You called me and it didn't ring" or "messaged and it didn't beep" are definitely the top support complaints I receive. Thanks for being sensitive to this use case.
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