Stuff
As expected U.S. Navy to remove commander of 7th Fleet amid latest accidents: “Vice Adm. Joseph Aucoin — a three-star commander of the U.S. 7th Fleet based in Yokosuka, Japan — will be relieved of his duty Wednesday for loss of confidence in the wake of four accidents.”
This is standard procedure. Three front line vessels are out of service and 17 sailors are dead or missing. This requires strong ‘medicine’ during peace time.
The current information is that the steering on the McCain failed just before the collision. No information as ot why the crew didn’t increase speed to avoid the collision, or why the collision alarm wasn’t sounded.
The ABC has an explainer on the ‘traffic rules’ on the ocean.
NPR has a nice little history lesson: Confederate Statues Were Built To Further A ‘White Supremacist Future’ – they aren’t about history, they are about intimidation.
13 comments
The ABC’s traffic rules don’t really apply to large container ships and oil tankers in the presence of smaller nimbler boats. The only laws there are the laws of physics, that say that the big ship ain’t gonna change course or speed to avoid some little pipsqueak ship. Especially if it’s in a defined shipping lane where there’s supposed to be nothing in front of it other than ships going the same direction capable of making the same or better speed. A big oil tanker cruises at around 18 knots. A destroyer is capable of 40 knots. You do the math. An oil tanker overtaking a destroyer is about as likely as cows flying by flapping their ears.
The maintenance situation in the 7th Fleet has been abysmal compared to the US-based ships. My guess is that had a lot to do with the situation. The crew of the USS John McCain had fixed 100 depot-level items in the past few weeks, i.e., things that are supposed to be fixed while docked at the maintenance dock. That ship had a maintenance situation barely better than a Russian Navy vessel. The 7th Fleet really needs to start hiring tugboats to shadow their ships if this is how bad things are.
Both Rule 5 – avoid collisions, and Rule 17 – even if you have the right of way avoid the collision, apply. The COLREGS apply to every vessel and determine insurance payouts. On inland waters the more nimble vessel is always assumed to be at fault.
The MV Alnic MC is a small tanker, only 600 feet to the McCain’s 505 feet and it was carrying a light load and running high in the water, but the winning move for the McCain was hit the gas after hitting the collision alarm.
Sounds like the whole 7th Fleet needs some serious dock work & retraining! That’ll scuttle 45’s NK plans! 😆
OT (Does a thread called “Stuff’ have an OT?) 😉 😀
See this:
This Woman Was Detained By Anti-Terror Police For Reading A Book About Syrian Art. She Wants To Know Why.
“Exclusive: The Independent Police Complaints Commission won’t investigate why Faizah Shaheen was detained under terror laws for reading a book about Syrian culture.”
She’s an NHS Psychotherapist & US citizen.
The USA is now a Fascist country. And Aus. is not far behind!
So now this was tweeted:
“Trump set to implement transgender military ban, allow removal of current transgender troops”
White House to brief Pentagon on transgender ban details: report
And this was a response:
GEN Mark A. Milley @ArmyChiefStaff (Verified account)
“The Army doesn’t tolerate racism, extremism, or hatred in our ranks. It’s against our Values and everything we’ve stood for since 1775.”
There were many similar responses.
This should be interesting! Maybe the US Military will invade the WH? The Secret Service won’t do anything, they’re not getting paid! 😆
One more before bed:
State Dept. science envoy resigns with letter that spells out ‘Impeach’
I’m off to bed with a smile! Maybe even a grin! 😉 😀
Oops! This just in:
Kellyanne Conway says journalists should be “forced” to report favorably on Trump
My tweet in reply: “She’s as much a lawyer as Elmo! She MUST have had a lobotomy to be that incredibly stupid! A 2-for-1 deal with her lover 45!🤢🤮”
Well… that smile didn’t last long. Never does these day’s. Oh well!
OK, Stuff really is an OT kind of post.
There has been over use of the 7th Fleet without an increase in support services and maintenance. Between China and North Korea, both Obama & Trump have sent vessels from the 7th out on ‘show the flag’ missions, but no one is scheduling ‘fix the boat’ missions. More sailors of the 7th Fleet have died on these ‘show the flag’ missions than have died in the Southwest Asia/Middle East combat zones since the beginning of the year.
The Turkish woman was a victim of the program to deputize flight attendants as police officers. They report anything they think is ‘suspicious’, and apparently reading an actual printed book now falls in that category. Oh, this was in the UK , not the US, but the same crap has happened here. At one point several Orthodox rabbis were questioned in the US because they prayed in Hebrew prior to take off.
The military was easing into accepting LGBTQ service members, and now Trump wants to make a U-turn, something that fits into his xenophobic, racist, misogynistic personality. The military doesn’t like reversing course without a damn good reason. Trump and Reason have nothing in common.
The art community did it first with ‘Resist’ in their resignation.
Ms Conway should be ignored by everyone after creating ‘alternate facts’. She should convince Trump to stop being a schmuck, and then the media will stop reporting he’s a schmuck.
Oops! Yeah, I meant she was a UK Citizen! 3AM typo. 😉 I’ve said several times that the Murdoch controlled Trinity all work from the same rule book. It’s obvious because the crap they try to pull is all the same. Getting hard to tell them apart. *shrug*
Badtux:
I’m designing a system for a client that I’ve built systems for before. Their LAN is 10 Gb. I was considering the new AMD Ryzen Threadripper Series CPU & MoBo based on the X399 series. I saw that ASRock (of all manufacturers) have a MoBo for it with a built in 10 Gb port (& dual Intel 1 Gb w/ teaming). It also supports up to 128GB Quad-Channel DDR4 RAM.
I had to laugh when AMD released the X399 chipset! Given Intel just released their X299 & this chipset/cpu is a direct competitor! Intel won’t be able to call the next release “X399” as they would normally do. Naughty AMD! 😆 I can’t blame AMD for “1-upmanship” given this is their first real competitor to high-end Intel systems for several yesrs!
ASRock X399 Fatal1ty Professional Gaming TR4 Motherboard
I thought you might be interested.
I like the new AMD TR CPU’s. One thing is they have more PCIe3 lanes than the Intel equivalents. The TR CPU has 64 lanes alone. That makes designing high-performance gfx design systems simpler. 🙂
If anyone is interested, I’ll put up the design when I’m done as I have in the past. I wish I could afford one! 😉 😆 Though, with my commission, I can upgrade my X170 Mobo & 6th Gen Intel CPU! I knew buying a *1st gen* of the newest Intel CPU/Chipset series would probably be a problem. Though, thankfully it’s been mostly minor issues. The X270 fixed some of them as well as the 7th gen CPU. But I may still wait until end of next year. I’ll think about it. 🙂
That looks like a killer MoBo. I have absolutely no use for anything that powerful and fast, but I want it anyway. I looked at the ASRock site, because I really don’t want to know if I could scrape together the price of the board, and accessories.
Kryten, I like the look of the Threadripper, but I’ve heard things about dubious reliability both on the part of the CPU itself and on the part of the motherboards that use it. All of which reminds me of my days with (name of defunct storage company) when we were trying to build servers out of the very first Opteron processors, neither the motherboard manufacturer nor AMD were any help with why our board kept flopping over, we had to actually get down in the weeds with a JTAG debugger to figure it out (turned out to be their BIOS was setting some bit wrong in CPU DRAM refresh configuration resulting in random DRAM bit losses that destabilized the system, we ended up writing our own BIOS!). So I’m still adopting a wait and see attitude on Threadripper. If it’s still there a year from now and has proven itself in production for other people, then I’ll consider it.
Of course, for Old Reliable there’s my dual- X5675 NAS / virtualization system. We’re talking four generations old now, Westmere generation (Nehalem architecture), dual 3.06ghz hexacore with 96gb of RAM. Bloody thing is reliable as a brick and serves data at full 10 gigabit speeds. Sort of inclines me to trust Intel and Supermicro (it started out as a Supermicro 826 Superserver with an X8DT6 motherboard, it’s gotten improvements since then, such as a newer SAS2 backplane for the drives). And the cool thing is that since it’s all eBay scrap, it cost virtually nothing!
LOL I know what you mean Bryan! We’re still geek’s @ heart! 😉 😀
The gossip around the Pro water-fountains Badtux is that AM rushed the TR series out because Intel was rushing their next gen X377 out! Apparently, both new *desktop* series have problems. A firmware fix is due to fix the majority of (mostly minor) issues with TR. AMD was focusing on getting their new killer EPYC (seriously?!) Server CPU working perfectly before release (hence it’s delay). The EPYC series has 128 PCIe gen3 lanes, 64MB L3 cache, up to 32 cores/64 threads (EPYC 7601). AMD must be confident of beating Intel in the Server space (and on spec’s, they do) as they are priced similarly to Intel equiv parts. Something AMD hasn’t done for many years!
AMD showcased their new Petaflop slim rack system, dubbed “Project 47” @ SIGGRAPH. It was such a successful demo, they took advanced orders! I sould say, their partner & system builder Inventec did. 😆
AMD Showcases 1 Petaflop “Project 47” Rack at SIGGRAPH
Info on EPYC:
AMD Introduces Epyc server processors
I want one of those also! Maybe 2! 😉 😀
All this explains why AMD have been quiet the past few years. 😉
It appears the EPYC & MoBo’s supporting it are due out sometime soon. So, I suggested to the client they should wait. They agreed. So my project is temporarily on hold. 🙂 I HOPE they decide to go with EPYC! Man, what fun I’ll have! Their render farm is about 4 YO now. So they are curious about Project 47 also. Want me to find out what I can. 😀
I’m actually feeling… excited for the first time in a few years! Hope it lasts.
Here’s an honest recent review of the AMD TR 1950X with f/w updates.
Guru3D: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X review
As I thought, it’s great for content creators, overkill for gamers. Especially given most high-end game creators have been optimizing their games the past few years for Intel architecture, given AMD were all but out of that market. Some have quickly released patches (mentioned in the reviews on those tests) that are addressing that now that AMD are back in the game! *ahem* 😉 😀
If I were building one for myself, I’d wait awhile for AMD to address a couple of concerns. Such as Overclocking being “All or nothing”! Either all cores, or none.
That is apparently being addressed (somewhat anyway). Example: My 6700K runs @ 4.8GHz on 1 core, 4.7GHz on 2, 4.6GHz on 3, or 4.5GHz on 4, and it’s automatic depending on workload. I can actually go higher, but with the water-cooler I have & the 2 Noctua NF-A14 industrialPPC 800-3,000 RPM 140mm fans not running higher than 2,000 RPM (and they are surprisingly quiet @ that), my core & package temps never go above 60C, which is where I like it. 😀
As a side note, I initially thought the expensive Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR4 3000MHz 15-17-17-35 T2 (tCAS-tRCD-tRP-tRAS) kit I got was crap. It can’t be overclocked even to 3,100 even with a good RAM cooler (that came with the kit on a free special). I discovered however that the timings could be tightened fairly well! I managed 13-15-15-33 with only a slight bump in V. The latency dropped significantly to 50ns & came #1 from 127,087 UserBench tests compared online. My system scored overall @ 119% (98th percentile) – that means that out of 100 systems with exactly the same components, mine was 98th – for an Intel 6700K based system & even beating some much more expensive x99 systems. The test summary comment was: “Performing way above expectations (98th percentile)”. Pretty pleased with that!
Hey… It’s not often I do something right these past few+ years! I’ll take what I can get. 😉 😀
You guys like good useful FREE s/w…
One of the annoyances with W10 is the file Search/Indexing is a resource hog & not that fast! This is mainly because it’s no longer just a file search facility, but integrated into Cortana & the Windows Store!
Here’s an extremely good freeware/donationware replacement called “Everything” that’s fast & uses minuscule system resources. D/L size is a measly 1.3 MB (for installer or portable x32/x64 versions).
voidtools – Everything
Documentation is quite good, with an unusually decent FAQ!
I’m not sure if the search/index *feature* of W10 can be removed in non LTS branches (Home/Pro/Education/Corporate) of W10. I believe so (using one of the *Antispy* tools. You may have to run the tool again after updates, which is normal for most things disabled in non LTS branches.)