Articles of Distraction

[Angrboda]

Today I learned that my Cat7 cable was actually a waste of money

The IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) sets the standards for Ethernet equipment. Whenever the IEEE decides on a new Ethernet speed specification, it defines exactly what cabling infrastructure supports it. As an example, when the IEEE set out to define a standard for 10-gigabit home and office networking, it settled on Category 6A, or Cat6A.

But Category 7 (Cat7) was created by a different body entirely. While the ISO/IEC settled on the Cat7 specification in 2002, the IEEE skipped it entirely and settled on Cat8 as the higher-bandwidth option. In fact, the IEEE has never officially adopted Cat7 for mainstream Ethernet use.

Because the IEEE didn't define a Cat7 standard, makers of network switches, routers, and other networking equipment also skipped it. As a result, anyone buying a Cat7 cable for their home network won't get the performance boost they might expect. Their devices simply aren't built to work with those cables.

The Ethernet connector trap

Standards aside, how Cat7 cables are built is a key issue. Cat7 specifications don't natively use the standard RJ45 connector people are used to. That's the connector you'll find on any other Ethernet cable you buy, and it's the connector your devices expect.

Instead, Cat7 relies on specialized connectors known as GG45 or TERA connectors. These connectors are required for the cable to achieve its rated shielding and performance figures. But cable makers know that few people have devices that use those connectors, so they fit their cables with RJ45 connectors instead.

The problem with that approach is obvious, but cable makers ignore it. By ditching Cat7's native connectors in favor of the more ubiquitous RJ45, manufacturers compromise its functionality. Cat7 requires end-to-end grounding with specialized hardware, something your average home router doesn't have. Plugging one of these cables into a home router can even create ground loops and network noise that impact performance.

Furthermore, the lack of a real Cat7 specification means that any two cables may not be alike. Some are simply Cat6 cables with a new label attached. And they come with a price hike.

More importantly, Cat7 doesn't offer any performance improvements for most home networks. Cat6 can handle 10Gbps speeds so long as the cable is less than 55 meters long. Most routers have gigabit Ethernet connections. Some support 2.5Gbps ports. More premium routers and network switches may reach 10Gbps at most, and Cat6 is more than up to the job.

[Angrboda]

What Microsoft actually sank

The cylinder, nicknamed Northern Isles, was not a scrappy proof of concept. It packed 855 servers across 12 racks, held 27.6 petabytes of storage, and drew a total of 240 kW, roughly 20 kW per rack.

Before it went under, the team pumped out all the ordinary air and replaced it with dry nitrogen. No oxygen means no oxidation on the components, no humidity working into the boards, and no human elbow knocking a cable loose, because nobody is allowed inside a sealed tube on the seafloor.

Then the whole thing was bolted to a ballast-filled triangular base and lowered next to the European Marine Energy Centre, one of the rougher patches of water in Europe and exactly why they chose it. The logic was blunt: survive there and you survive anywhere. The site had a second selling point.

Orkney’s grid runs on close to 100% renewable power, fed by wind plus the tidal and wave devices being tested at EMEC. A data center that gets cooled by the sea and powered by the weather above it, with no freshwater bill, is precisely the combination every AI infrastructure planner is currently losing sleep over.

The failure rate that broke the assumption

When the cylinder surfaced in the summer of 2020, one number did the rounds: the servers underwater failed at roughly an eighth the rate of the ones on land. Project Natick lead Ben Cutler put it plainly in Microsoft’s own writeup, saying the team’s “failure rate in the water is one-eighth of what we see on land.”

The raw numbers are sharper than the ratio. Microsoft lost six of the 855 servers in the sea. The control group running the same jobs in an ordinary data center on land lost eight, out of just 135. That works out to a 0.7% failure rate underwater against 5.9% on land.

Two things were doing the heavy lifting: the cold North Sea hauling heat away for free, and the nitrogen-plus-no-humans setup killing the slow corrosion and accidental-bump damage that quietly chews through land servers over time. It turns out the healthiest place for a hot rack is a sealed tube nobody is allowed to touch.

https://www.autonocion.com/us/scotland-m...ervers-ai/

[Fake Messiah]

Mel Gibson mocked the ASL interpreter (for deaf people) behind her back at a recent fan expo event in Toronto

[The Valkyrie]

Mel Gibson mocked the ASL interpreter (for deaf people) behind her back at a recent fan expo event in Toronto

Well, we all know that Mel "ultra-christian" Gibson is a piece of shit.