While working for a broadcasting/networking integration gig, we designed, assembled and field-terminated thousands of copper and fibre runs from 1/2 ft to football field lengths.
The amount of time required to terminate a copper cable in the field is seconds, and felt a bit like art. Something about the way it reliably reacted was magical and felt "strong."
Terminating or splicing a fibre cable felt like wrestling a snake covered in melted crayons, and the failure rate was significantly higher across the board. And it wasn't just workmanship, but quality of product, terminating environment, available equipment, misuse by future operators etc.
That said, at a certain point, we as a firm learned that most purchasers would rather the low latency/small footprint of optical/fibre versus copper, maintenece/failure be damned. Though, maybe part of our willingness to push fibre came from knowing that most purchasers would in 1-2 years call us back in to replace the rack terminations with copper :)
There are 2 very different main types of "copper" in this context. Each can break down into more specific subcategories but they have a relatively common general behavior with their primary type.
First there is the BASE-T RJ45 stuff, which it sounds like you might have been working with. At 10G or higher speeds this get relatively power hungry and is not really an advantage over fiber unless you are also delivering PoE or are trying to reuse existing cabling.
This type (DAC) is a special type of pre-made cable assembly which eschews much of the advanced signalling/conversion logic. The upside is the power usage is low (often even lower than fiber) and the cost is dirt cheap. The downside is the lengths are much more limited and it's intended to be preterminated SFP-to-SFP (or the like) cable assemblies instead of modular patching/custom built.
There is indeed a latency difference, usually DAC < fiber < BASE-T, but they are all within a few microseconds (not milliseconds) of each other so you really have to be pressed to care about it (to the point you're looking at specialized low latency switches and paying extra to lay things out in a way which minimizes the number of L2 hops rather than the cost).
DAC cables use twinax. Properly terminating twinax is not easy. It's not as forgiving as twisted pair going into an RJ45.
DAC cables have a limited length range. It's not like 10GBASE-T where you can run the cable hundreds of feet and then put a connector on exactly where you need it. The cables only work at short distances so it's easy to stock the cable sizes close enough to everyone's needs.
I think the only reason RJ45 termination is an (occasional) thing for short patching is you're also in spec to go 100 meters with it so the tools and materials to do so are already commonly in use.
For passive DACs the range of lengths is so low you can just get away with having 2 or 3 different lengths on hand and never need to worry about it. Active DACs start to be too much to bother with again.
Fiber it's possible, but again really only because you can go kilometers with it rather than because people want to make short patch cables themselves.
Nope. For production, you want to reduce risk and variation. DACs are already available in about 5 sizes up to the max 7m length, why would you terminate any other size in the field?
I did spec a couple of 7m dacs a few months ago to run between two adjacent bays, but normally for more than 2m I'll just drop a SM sfp and run a preterminated fibre cable.
In the field its the armoured fibre on a reel, 100m, 200m, 500m etc, with opticon connectors, or some normal cat5 typically for APs
Some network guys I know prefer fibre even within the rack, just because they don't want the weight and the obstructions in the rack. Apparently more than once the weight of the DACs and the bulk of the cable bundle has caused a problem with NICs.
Personally that surprised me, but I can see where they're coming from.
If you start doing bonded links with DACs or if you have a bunch of servers, the cable management situation gets ugly in a hurry, and the usual solutions like patch panels and keystones aren't applicable. Source: my basement
Admittedly I'm not buying Enterprise Grade(TM) stuff, but...
For simplicity I just use 10G LR modules everywhere. A pair of fiber transceivers is $25. Pretty sure last batch of 3M pre-terminated fibre cables I was grabbing were like $3 a piece or something. So we'll round up and call it $30.
I can get a 3M DAC for about $20.
So yeah it's cheaper, but the price isn't _that_ different. I was using DACs in quite a few places (and still am), but in general I've found it easier just using fiber. (For one, I've had a few devices that didn't get along with various DACs but worked just fine with the fibre transceivers.)
If you do it only once and would never touch it - yes.
But the time spent on digging around and occasionally debugging what and where exactly came off and no longer links (at best) or there is still link up but the are too many errors, add some SLA on top of it... No.
> The amount of time required to terminate a copper cable in the field is seconds,
This article is about Direct Attach Copper (DAC) cables which are not something you can field terminate. They use twinax copper and have special modules on the end.
You are thinking about standard RJ45 terminated cabling for 1GBASE-T or 10GBASE-T, which is a different.
> That said, at a certain point, we as a firm learned that most purchasers would rather the low latency/small footprint of optical/fibre versus copper, maintenece/failure be damned.
Direct Attach Copper has slightly lower latency than fiber, but the difference is negligible. Both have significantly better latency than 10GBASE-T through twisted pair cabling.
Yes, thanks. It was confusing me for a second because no, no almost one is terminating twinax in the server room.
I had IT company recommend to me a bunch of fiber cables for a cleanup I was doing. They had about 20 or 30 laser modules we would need, and however much fiber.
When they asked why I planned on doing copper, I told him because each run is three fucking feet.
I’m not sure if they just didn’t realize that’s not what fiber is for or they didn’t know that DAC existed.
1. The copper cables discussed in the article are not field terminable. And if they were, they'd be a pain in the ass.
2. Terminating fiber used to be a pain, but is now pretty easy with the right tools, fuser, and someone with basic training. Even cheap fusers do the job with very low failure rates. They now have so-called "knuckle draggers" terminating fiber.
> That said, at a certain point, we as a firm learned that most purchasers would rather the low latency/small footprint of optical/fibre versus copper, maintenece/failure be damned.
Copper bundles get real thick, real fast: I ran an OneFS cluster for many years, and we had >50 nodes, and all the cables (each node dual-connected) ran to two central switches for backend replications. Rat's nest.
I was very happy when Isilon started officially supporting active optical cable (AOC) on the backend. Really helped with airflow and keeping things tidy.
How much of that was terminating vs splicing for the optical fibre? I have not done the actual hands on work of splicing but have specified fibre runs a couple of times and all the guidance I have seen is that for reliability you want to always splice on good-quality, factory-terminated pigtails because field terminated connectors are (so I've read) very unreliable. When possible we've just run pre-terminated cables so we don't have to get somebody in to splice and that's been really reliable.
I'm pretty sure you didn't design, assemble and field-terminate DAC cables. These are not regular RJ45 or DB25 serial cables, which you can assemble in the field.
I have never heard of the possibility to field-assemble DAC cables. Usually that's when you switch to fiber
The American economy and larger global investment market/rigging is ...speculative and a sham. And it's no longer the 80's/90s, the US is falling behind in most emerging fields of science, standards of living, political freedom etc.
Worse, we all take part in it with employment, 401k etc.
So....who better to distract everyone from that stark reality, than a reality TV criminal! He's perfectly equipped to stir up tension over....erm...greenland....to distract from the obvious (multiple) crashes coming.
"Mr. Foreman was not at home during the 2002 police raid, but a security camera system and his wife, using her cellphone, recorded the “faces and bodies” of the officers while they were on the property, according to the lawsuit"
"2002"
New York Times, everyone.
Props to afroman for his perfect demeanor/attitude during all this.
They're implying "An establishment calling itself a 'newspaper of record' can be expected to have high standards, such as correctly reporting dates, and I'll hold them to that"
If you can spot a typo in the first few seconds of reading a piece, so can the editor and sub-editor before it's published.
Myself and most other programmers I know have at least once (more like 100 times) had the experience where you can't figure something out in some code you've been staring at for an hour, then another person comes along and immediately sees an obvious glaring error that you missed.
I can only imagine the same thing happens in newsrooms with text, especially when it is visibly very similar, like "2002" and "2022."
The process these days is more like publish then do editorial review. See it on major outlets all the time - break the story as early as possible, get the eyeballs and ad revenue, then get it cleaned up for posterity.
Sometimes this results in radical changes to a piece within hours of publication - yesterday for instance the BBC ran a piece headlined something like “I watched my father murder my mother”, and six hours later in slides an editorial correction saying “she did not, in fact, see her father murder her mother. She was asleep in another room at the time.”
Sony Ericsson P800 from 2002 had 640×480 videos captured from its camera :) While I wouldn't claim the quality is great, you could tell more or less what was going on.
Twice I have relied on mine and neighbors ring camera for proof hat I did not cause damage to my vehicle on insurance claims, and was instead another driver(s)/hit and runner(s).
Wether insurance went after those people for the claims or police, it certainly helped me there.
Same is said for dash cameras. It is in 99 percent of scenarios for "set and forget" not for some malicious anti-neighbor behavior
A question, per your final comment on being available to answer questions:
What do you feel is the benefit to the community for this that isn't offered by native blocking/existing extensions?
I ask not out of malice, I ask because 2 reasons:
1. I imagine spending time on this/it's working well required you to see the value/benefit to it.
2. We must assume all hacker news commenting follows the rules, IE; good faith comment with relevant experience when required. This seems like a way to promote getting around that.
The reason I have this extension is because I don't want to hide those comments. I want to be able to read them when I quickly scroll a thread. Oftentimes, I'm reading so many Hacker News threads that I want to be able to pull out the commenters that I like. I even like reading the comments from commenters that I dislike in the hopes that I see if I still disagree with them.
I'm not hiding anybody. I'm just making it more apparent when they're commenting
> that isn't offered by native blocking/existing extensions
There is no “native blocking” on HN. You cannot block a user or hide their comments and submissions in perpetuity. You can only hide on a per-story basis.
I am in a similar area IE; usual coldest is low 20s, often sits around 32-38f. But have oft worked outside in consistent cold snaps from negatives to 10f or so, also on boats/the docks.
working in dry extreme cold is infinitely worse than balmy 35f. One because in both scenarios moving snow/moisute out is required regardless of temps for working safety, and two because dexterity is gone at the lower temps/layering becomes inhibitive to work.
Ie; I'd rather work in a rain/snowcoat and be able to use my hands to get back inside quicker, than to work 8 hours outside in the "Clear/dry" extreme cold.
those handheld propane torches, oft used for weedburning on asphault/concrete, are very good for clearing "post snow clean up ice patches, IE tire treads that iced over, foot prints.
Not useful for snow as you'll quickly be swimming and out of propane
The amount of time required to terminate a copper cable in the field is seconds, and felt a bit like art. Something about the way it reliably reacted was magical and felt "strong."
Terminating or splicing a fibre cable felt like wrestling a snake covered in melted crayons, and the failure rate was significantly higher across the board. And it wasn't just workmanship, but quality of product, terminating environment, available equipment, misuse by future operators etc.
That said, at a certain point, we as a firm learned that most purchasers would rather the low latency/small footprint of optical/fibre versus copper, maintenece/failure be damned. Though, maybe part of our willingness to push fibre came from knowing that most purchasers would in 1-2 years call us back in to replace the rack terminations with copper :)