The issue is that these power banks are often cheapo corporate gifts or bought out of vending machines, catering to the cheapest possible price and not certified to anything.
In this case they have crappy BMS that doesn’t have thermal sensors or even make sure the cells are balanced during charging, and no mechanical integrity so the cell can just get crushed and explode.
The solution is to require all consumer electronics with batteries to be certified (if carried on a plane or in the post), and part of that certification process needs to be mechanical; including crushing with normal levels of in-transit forces, and electrical testing; including charging the device at a high temperature.
It’s not that simple… the voltages are all different, and each chemistry has different charge and discharge rates, so this just makes the end product insanely complicated and expensive.
We've already got programmable charging chips that can adapt to different chemistries, and they're already pretty cheap, and USB-C has proven that fancy voltage negotiation protocols can be done cheaply.
I swear the majority of UL and CE marked electronics on amazon are fraudulent. Honestly, I don't think certification is going to work, at least not with out a long term economic policy to onshore manufacture. There's just no practical system for verifying certification when the origin is obfuscated for the majority of our good, and produced outside of our regulatory system. We also just don't make these things in sufficient quantity, or economically enough to supplant the import market.
I think the mistake here is not printing the registration number on the products themselves so that you can type it into the portal or whatever and look up what it’s supposed to look like. Like photo ID.
Yep. UL & CE certification to standard X. The lack of retail marketplace and manufacturing regulation enforcement are the problems that are fixable similar to lack of safety standards in automobiles in the US prior to 1966. Safety regs are written in blood and so people can winge and whine all they want about headaches, cost, red tape, and paperwork but too bad.
Cloudflare Access is still experiencing weird issues for us (it’s asking users to SSO login to our public website even though our zone rules - set on a completely different zone - haven’t changed).
I don’t think the infrastructure has been as fully recovered as they think yet…
Just waiting for macOS to get their act together in the Business space so that Windows can become a gaming only OS.
I know people always say that macOS purposely don’t target business, and things like this, but at this point.. why not? Honestly? They have the best hardware in the world right now. Catering just to personal use (and these lines are getting blurrier each day with WFH) is just inconvenient.
I don't think Windows keeps gaming if it loses corporate. Valve's very successfully created a PC-like linux based console, has been gently pushing linux PCs, and it has a huge amount of power over the gaming industry. Dedicated gaming computers probably mostly follow Valve to linux. Non-dedicated gaming computers are whatever people have - i.e. in your hypothetical macs.
As someone who doesn’t touch Windows anymore without hazard pay, part of the problem is a lot of the ancillary business apps are Microsoft as well. For example Outlook, which technically exists on Macs, but is missing half the features.
I shudder to think what extra features they cram into Outlook for Windows considering Outlook for macOS is already bloated to hell. I've had to use it for the past few months due to our company upgrading the internal AD version (or something) while they built out the support for native macOS Calendar/Mail, and I hated every second of it
Don’t worry. New Outlook on Windows is rapidly reaching feature parity with the Mac version, and as soon as they remove Classic Outlook from support, all versions will be equal(ly missing half the features).
Windows itself is only a small part of the business ecosystem. The real behemoth is Active Directory and everything that integrates with it. Creating something that powerful, complex and user-configurable is not in Apple's DNA.
If Apple can pull off a workflow where they give you a free online user directory and natively allow people to “login with iCloud for business” on managed devices, they’ve nailed it.
That’s 99% of the way there and fully within their capability.
The idea that Active Directory is merely a user directory is one of the great misconceptions. Windows Server with AD offers incredible amount of things out of the box, from Windows Deployment Services to capture, manage and deploy PC images over PXE, to Certificate Authority to manage and issue and auto-deploy certificates, to print server, file server, web server, hypervisor, virtual desktops, and a huge number of other features and services, all centrally managed and linked with each other, with a well-established track record of providing backward compatibility for decades. Whatever I set up today, I can expect to still be using in 2045.
Yes and that’s why Windows is a behemoth, but honestly how much do users actually need that stuff? Most 365 cloud deployments are incredibly simple, and now Apple has an opportunity to make a solution that leaves all that cruft behind and focuses on roaming/zero trust/cloud native.
But the margins are in the cloud stuff (email, iCloud, etc) right?
They just need to make an Apple version of SharePoint and Exchange, and wala.
Now you have a suitable stack for small and medium businesses with simple requirements, like most retail, small lawyers, small accountants, etc
I setup a small business recently and I was able to use a full Apple stack except for Exchange Online Plan 1 (email) and Mosyle (MDM). These are both tech that Apple has (iCloud Mail and Apple Business Manager), it’s just lacking a few critical features.
Outside of margins, Apple also famously said (under Jobs) they had no interest in the enterprise because the users don’t choose the products there. They want to sell direct to their customers, and the way the OS works and behaves shows that. There’s MDMs, yeah, but you just don’t get the level of control you can with Windows at scale and it’s very much on purpose.
With enterprise, the users aren’t the ones choosing or even configuring their computers.
Which is a bit strange because at NeXT, Jobs initially focused only on institutional (mostly .edu) customers and not end users. They included services like NetInfo for centralized configuration management.
I guess because NeXT ultimately failed as a business, he didn't repeat that approach upon returning to Apple?
Apple was also quite dominant in K-12 sales in the pre-internet era.
The quote I'm remembering from Jobs I thought was much earlier, but it came post-iPhone:
> "What I love about the consumer market, that I always hated about the enterprise market, is that we come up with a product, we try to tell everybody about it, and every person votes for themselves. They go 'yes' or 'no,' and if enough of them say 'yes,' we get to come to work tomorrow. That's how it works. It's really simple. With the enterprise market, it's not so simple. The people that use the products don't decide for themselves, and the people that make those decisions sometimes are confused. We love just trying to make the best products in the world for people and having them tell us by how they vote with their wallets whether we're on track or not."
I'm wondering if the success of the iPhone kind of led to that line of thinking since it was primarily a consumer product anyway, it was Apple doubling down on it.
Also makes sense though. "Enterprise" comes with a lot of baggage and support requirements that can really slow your product down and turn into a bloated mess of one-off features for one specific customer's use case. You're no longer making product decisions for what you want the product to be but instead your roadmap is driven by whatever the enterprise customers want.
Why should he stop caring about the things he spent his whole life building?! You don't stop caring about things you love just because you get old. Maybe you don't care about your business because your goal is to sell your idea to Big Tech and sip cocktails for the rest of your life, but that's not what this is about.
If you think world hunger and global warming can be solved purely with financial means, you live in a damn simple fantasy.
The reason for it being a two level device at present is likely due to it being mostly research and not so much engineering.
They say their next chip will deliver grey scale and many more signal points.
My guess on color is one or more of the following is true:
[0]The color info is normally sent via the color sensitive cells now damaged and we have yet to understand how that signal enters the nerves we can send a signal to.
[1]It may be that we need a far smaller, more precise signal point to achieve color. Current tech stimulates many nerve endings. This was the basis for my interpolation comment above. Basically, each pixel stimulates an area of the damaged retina which contains a great many possible signal points if it were possible to stimulate them individually. Because so many are stimulated all at once, the subject perceives white phosphines rather than colored ones.
An analogy would be the colors on a CRT. A broadband beam would light them all up, yielding monochrome vision. A narrow beam can light up a few or just one, yielding color.
One thing I just realized writing this is our blue sensor cells are scattered about, not well clustered like the green and red ones are.
Maybe current users see a bit of color at the very extent of the artificial visual field due to a failure to hit the necessary blue cells...
[2] It may be some sort of pulse is needed to encode colors. And perhaps the current signaling is continuous.
AIs are pretty bad at rewriting, they always pick gimmickey marketing words. I always thought of Grammarly as a premium entry into that segment for proper professional writing. Shame it’s going the way of slop.
Did you read the article ? The main point of this and the prior article is that YES colocation/baremetal IS a better option for this company (and I would argue the majority of AWS users)
UniFi SFP modules work fine in Dell and Synology servers, so contrary to most of the anecdotes in this thread I’ve always just bought the 20 packs and had no issues.
Didn’t need reprogramming.
The quality is fine, oldest modules more than 5 years old and only 1 failure in 100.
What nics are you using on the server end? Im looking at moving from 10Gbe copper to 25Gbe/100Gbe between Mikrotik switches and 14/15th gen Dell servers
In this case they have crappy BMS that doesn’t have thermal sensors or even make sure the cells are balanced during charging, and no mechanical integrity so the cell can just get crushed and explode.
The solution is to require all consumer electronics with batteries to be certified (if carried on a plane or in the post), and part of that certification process needs to be mechanical; including crushing with normal levels of in-transit forces, and electrical testing; including charging the device at a high temperature.