Reality Check
Andrew McCabe, Deputy Director of the FBI is a career civil service employee. Mr. McCabe announced his retirement. Like most civil service employees in law enforcement, Mr. McCabe has a lot of unused vacation and compensatory time. Depending on what government and/or agency you work for you may take the accrued time or be compensated for it. Mr. McCabe is tired of the bullshit coming out of the White House, so he is going to burn off his leave time.
I received paychecks and health insurance for six weeks after I resigned from my civil service position. I only worked a decade while McCabe has more than twice as many years of service. Taking time off requires a break between active cases. You can’t plan for that. There are a lot of divorces in the law enforcement community.
As a retired civil servant, Mr. McCabe can tell us what he thinks of Trump.
13 comments
The odious idiot is more than odious, he’s insane. According to MSNBC’s Ari Melber Trump was furious that the former FBI director Comey was allowed to get on an FBI chartered jet and not be stranded in LA when Trump terminated him. Apparently Trump wanted that termination with extreme prejudice.
Comey was in LA on FBI business and the flight was already paid for. It was a round-trip from DC to LA and back. The whole flight costs less than Air Force One taking off. Further, while Comey heard the media reports, he didn’t have any paperwork telling him personally that he had been fired.
Trump has no idea how things work in the government. The only organization he is familiar with is a family business which operates on the whims of the current patriarch.
“Trump has no idea how things work.”
Just leave it at that m8! It’s demonstrably accurate. 😉 🙄
Even better: “Trump has no idea.”
Why waste words? 😀
Well! Speaking of *Reality Check*… I was checking up on Tech news I’ve missed the past few weeks… And just when everyone thought AMD & Intel absolutely hated each other… This:
Intel Officially Launches 8th Generation Core Processors With AMD Radeon RX Vega M Graphics and HBM2 VRAM
I’m guessing Nvidia & their fanboy’s won’t be at all happy! Seriously pissed in fact. But that’s what Nvidia get’s for being proprietary & greedy. Intel is the only Company allowed to do that, according to Intel! 😉 😆
If it were April 1st, I’d be seriously PMSL! 🤣🤪
I assumed you were taking some time off to shop used furniture stores for old file cabinets 😈
Yes, the top predators think the lesser beings should never have hopes of advancement. The real driver for video cards are the games – which graphics processor offers the best and smoothest performance for the games that people are willing to spend major money to play. Software support is the key.
If you can get the gamers to buy your boards, business will follow.
On a couple Tech forums I visit & when my current build is on my profile, I got several young fools laughing at my *crappy* choice for a gfx card given how much i spent on the rest. I got the Gigabyte GV-R939XG1 Gaming-8GD (Radeon R9 390X) that I paid about $540 for in Nov 2015. At the time it was in fact the *2nd best* gfx card available (according to reviews etc. which I always take with a pinch of salt). The best was Nvidia GTX980 Ti based cards. They cost double what I paid for less than a 50% boost in performance, in theory. That doesn’t factor in things like the AMD cards have a feature called Freesync. It’s free & open standard. Nvidia have G-Sync, which is proprietary & they charge Display manufacturers $200 to support it! It didn’t work on linux because as is typical with Nvidia, they don’t do open source drivers unless they are forced to. So, to get better than I had, would have colt me another $700+ all up! Which paid for my CPU & MoBo! Also, most games I was playing & still enjoy, support AMD specific features such as Vulcan & Mantle which improve game performance significantly in games that support those extra features.
When I posted screencaps & a few in-game vids with the FPS counter displayed in some games with very high activity that usually drop the frame rate on any card a lot, in games like DOOM, Civilization Beyond Earth – The Rising Tide, Battlefield Hardline & a couple others, playing at 2K (2560 x 1440) on high gfx setting & easily hitting 60 FPS, most came back with “yeah but I get 140 FPS on my dual 980 Ti’s”! My response generally was “Because your parents have more money than brains obviously! Anything over 60-100 FPS is a total waste and not even remotely needed! Ask anyone who knows what they’re talking about.” I usually got several people agreeing, not the fan boys of course.
Heck, my 390X still beats the last 2 generations of gfx cards from both AMD & Nvidia until you pay 2-3 x the price! My plan was & is to wait for this current refresh cycle to end & the next major gxf chip design to come out (end of this year apparently). Also the new Intel Z390 chipset & CPU’s are being launched 6 Months early to counter the AMD ThreadRipper which is killing Intel sales. 🙂 SuperMicro showed off a Z390 prototype board @ the recent CES & a *leaked* report said that Intel are pushing Manufacturers to have Z390 products out my mid year. Money always wins! 😆
I’ll wait until they’re out 3 Months or so, to give the beta tester suckers time to find the bugs & the manufacturers to get their rev 1.1 or rev 2.0 products out, then build a new system. I have money put away for that & can reuse most of what I have anyway.
I did get myself 1 new toy recently! There was a special on an portable small drive case that supported 2 x M.2 NVMe SSD cards & has a Thunderbolt 2-3 port. I have Thunderbolt 3 on this system & was running out of space on my Game drive (a 1 TB 850 PRO SSD). I had 2 1TB 960 PRO M.2 cards, but didn’t really need them in the system (1 was my W10 boot & the other was for CentOS), but I’m hardly using CentOS & 512 GB would suffice for both. I have a couple 950 PRO 512 M.2 SSD’s I got when i built this, so put those back in & used the 960’s in this new case. Copied over my Game folder & set the drive letter to G:, and they load in a second! It also has USB 3.0 port & I can use it on my DELL Notebook & Tablet. 😀 The problem with using Games via STEAM, Origin Access or uPlay is that if you change game drive, folders etc… You have to re-download the games in most cases! Screw that. this simplified that enormously! Though both STEAM & Origin management App’s finally let you change the location of installed games & just rescan & d/dl anything missing, in theory. I also have a few App’s from STEAM, a couple are quite big (GFX design with large libraries).
Oh! Seagate released some big 12 TB HDD’s with insane performance! The IronWolf NAS PRO & BarraCuda PRO drives. They have benchmarged performance of over 250 Mbps read & 240 Mbps write & decent IOPS! Two of those in a RAID zero is the same price as a Samsung 560 PRO 2TB SSD at about the same performance! BUt you have 24 TB (effectively)!
I’ll buy a couple!
So… That me! I’ve given up on getting much work done & just game & tweet mostly! 😆
I have 61 games on STEAM & about 70 on Origin (plus expansions & DLC’s). Collected about 270 on GoG. Plus a big library of CD/DVD games I’ve bought, mainly on sales, over the years. I own a lot of App’s & s/w tools too. Maybe if I get bored gaming, I might try to get some work going. I do some work designing systems for some people, currently doing one for a friends Son’s 17th Birthday in a few months. So I get some cash spending money that way. What the Gov don’t know, won’t hurt me! 😆
You might suggest the ‘critics’ take a physiology course that includes the eyes. Beyond 60 fps your brain isn’t processing it. Exceeding 60 would be like engineering a billion colors – which your eyes don’t see. Essentially they are throwing money at a nonexistent problem. They are bragging about wasting money.
We have been on the ‘bleeding edge’ of technology and would just as soon others become the beta testers for new hardware and software.I have spent my share of time tracing intermittent problems and it is time for the younger techs to ‘enjoy’ the pursuit of stability.
You should open a gaming center, like the old time arcades that that had the early video games.
Kryten, those 12 terabyte drives are fast only for streaming. They may claim to have great iops, but the cheapest consumer SSD manages far more iops on my real world benchmarks. That said, I may get a couple of them myself, because centralizing all of my data into a single ZFS mirror array would save me a huge amount of electricity. My big 12 bay server uses around 300 watts. A NUC7i7BNH uses 45 watts and a 2-bay Thunderbolt 3 drive enclosure with two hard drives uses about the same. Yeah, I think that’ll make a good replacement for this pile of hardware sitting beside my desk….
Like all hardware, it depends on requirements of course. 🙂
I am seriously considering a pair of the BarraCuda Pro 12 TB with my old Samsung 840 PRO 128 GB SSD (or when I get my new system that will support 3 x M.2 NVMe drives, I may use one of 950 PRO 512GB SSD’s, 60 GB as cache – the max, & the rest as temp, Documents etc.) as a cache (via Intel’s SRT which now works in W10). If I were updating the HDD’s on my 4-bay l0cal NAS, I’d use the IronWolf Pro’s as they have better iSCSI performance. On the big SAS NAS, I’d use the Seagate Exos X12 drives. But I have no plans to upgrade that any time soon. It’s mainly used for archive/redundant backup these days, with a 2nd redundancy on a pair of Seagate Enterprise V5 4Kn ST8000NM0115 8TB SED HDD’s that I got @ a bargain price last year. They perform surprisingly well & I wanted a secure archive.
One of the added advantages with the BarraCuda Pro drives is that Seagate include 2 yr Data Recovery for a failed drive. They claim a 90% success rate. And I know from experience in that biz it can be damned expensive (15 yrs ago would cost around $10,000 minimum here to recover a 500GB HDD with no guarantees!)
Prometeus are trialing a mix of Exos X12’s & Nytro 3130/3330 SAS SSD’s for their Hyperscale/Cloud SAN. Results look very impressive so far. The 3330’s are highly optimized for random writes, whilst the 3130’s are highly optimized for random reads, both available in up to 15 TB capacity.
If I were able to function more reliably & for longer periods, I’d be working for them in Romania & Italy. But those days are over for me.
Here are a couple of reliable performance reviews:
Seagate BarraCuda Pro 12TB Review
Seagate IronWolf Pro NAS 12TB Review
Well, I may not we able to effectively work in the industry any longer, but I can still enjoy & appreciate the tech and play with some now & then. The prices for these new toys are surprisingly good! The IronWorlf PRO 12TB is currently around AU$660 & the BarraCuda PRO about $620. Given the crap exchange rate, I expected worse. By comparison the Samsung 860 Pro 4TB SSD is ~AU$3,000! 😆
Oh! 71 games on STEAM now! LOL
Regarding my Prometeus comment above… To clarify: They have complex requirements & a complex storage environment now. The needs are varied & requirements mixed. They have 2 SAN environments now, the above describes one and they have evaluated several configurations before deciding on a trial. They considered the Nytro 3730 SSD’s which have 10x the endurance (10 DWPD) but at a much higher price of course. There are always takeoff’s. The other SAN is different. For that they are evaluating the Seagate Enterprise Performance 10K v9 HDD’s, which now have capacities to 2.4TB & excellent power management vs performance & a variety of Enterprise SSD’s. This SAN is manly for DB applications, where TPS , latency & reliability are important. They are also evaluating the HGST Ultrastar SS200 series, and Toshiba threw their hat into the ring with an interesting series of Enterprise PX04S SSD’s with four models supporting high read to high write endurance/performance. HGST is pushing hard since the SAN is HGST, but Toshiba want to break in badly! For a change, Seagate are actually fighting instead of resting on their laurels, which has been the norm in the past. So, the boys are having fun with the competition! I do wish I was there… Reality sux!
If anyone is interested, this is a M.2 Thunderbolt portable case I got. It is exceeding my expectations, which doesn’t happen often!
Netstor NA611TB3 Portable NVMe Enclosure Review
Actually Badtux, I’d have thought you’d be interested in the Seagate SkyHawk AI HDD’s for your Biz? Or is this different? Just curious. 🙂
The extra games I got were a “Humble Paradox Bundle 2018” sale. Essentially 16, including the recent Stellaris that I wanted to get that’s $30-$60 (depending on the pack) alone right now, for $15. A nice win for a change! 😀
We actually sold off the hardware business, Kryten. Margins in hardware suck. That said, we might have to get back into the hardware business with a partner because our customers are overglorified mall cops (i.e., they know a lot about walking around looking for shoplifters or gang graffiti writers, not much about computers) and keep trying to deploy our solution on totally inappropriate hardware despite our guidance.
Don’t blame you! And yeah, the margins do suck. When I had my Computer Store 79-81, was a license to make a fortune! Often had markups of >300%! Was normal because the cost of the support was high then (there were no PC *geeks* yet!) Lot of hand-holding etc. 🙂 Still made a bloody fortune though! Then I joined the Military… Possibly the worst idea of my life! Oh well…
FYI: Seems AMD are not done yet! They are going to skip the 12nm process & go straight to 7nm on the ZEN 2 architecture. They are also completely redesigning the architecture to avoid the Spectre/Meltdown flaws.
Zen 2 Design is Complete, Rolling Out To Customers in Late 2018 – Next-Gen EPYC Rome Family To Skip 12nm in Favor of 7nm Process
So, I have decided to definitely hold off on my next build until 2019. See how it all shakes out first!
Also because Micron split with Intel over RAM (Micron wanted to release the next Gen DDR6, Intel wanted to wait so they wouldn’t have to support it for a couple more gen’s). Samsung have announced DDR6 also now (after Micron said they split with Intel & will release within a year). Though, it’s unclear whether this will be for GPU only or GPU/CPU! I’ve heard sample prototype yield’s are not very good so far!
Fun times! 😉 😀
Here’s an interesting update. 😀
AMD’s 7nm ‘Matisse’ and ‘Starship’ Processors Based On Zen 2 Microarchitecture Spotted In HWINFO Changelog
One BIG advantage AMD have & will continue to have over Intel, is that every 2-3 Gen’s, Intel requires a CPU socket change. So you have to buy a new MoBo. My i7 6800K (Gen6) CPU from 2015/16 works on Gen6/7 Z170/Z270 chipset MoBo’s but will not work on current Gen8 (2017) Z370 MoBo’s! And many, including myself are NOT happy! AMD, on the other hand, typically keep the same socket for several Gen’s! The current AM4 will support the ZEN+ and ZEN2 CPU’s.
So, that will be the end of my “let’s see if Intel are any good again” experiment failure! Can’t say I’m at all surprised, I even expected this to be the case. I know Intel. Back to AMD!