In some real deal applications like connecting rods on engines you can stick your head into. Techs will measure when a bolt has reached a correct torque spec when the bolt has stretched to certain dimension measured with a micrometer.
Torque is also very misleading depending on material. Steel bolts stretch in what feels very linear. Stainless steel bolts, when those are tightened up it's like hitting a wall going from loose to tight.
Click sticks (torque wrenches) also have something to say. Where you hold your hand on the wrench will affect the torque value. Usually there is a line on the handle showing you exactly where your hand should be placed and pulling from.
I work in semi heavy industry. The industrial grade consumer items are great, but usually heavy. The latest example I have is buying bookcases from Uline. Not cheap, not light. But full steel and can hold binders easily. Getting more shelves and another matching one down the road is also easy.
Flea markets are also another great source for well built items. Have had great luck buying industrial grade tooling and electrical test/measurement equipment there.
It's not just China, everywhere I look I see companies partnering with shoddy marketing/SEO 'consultants'. They are rarely transparent about their tactics, and often resort to click farms, fake reviews, keyword stuffing etc. The company doesn't understand the risk to their brand, because they don't understand what the consultant is doing in the first place.
The problem here is, I guess, that these tactics do actually work on the short term. So the consultant gets paid, the team reaches their targets and the manager gets promoted.
By the time eBay, or any other platform supplier, implies sanctions (and rightfully so, imo) the 'consultant' is long gone, and everybody loses.
> The problem here is, I guess, that these tactics do actually work on the short term.
Let's be honest: these tactics work over the long term. When they blow up, you just start again with a new name. Use the same consultant if the last one was good, a better one if a friend of yours did better than you did.
Agreed, Aukey is actually a good quality brand I like to buy since they appeared on amazon.fr, along with Ugreen and a few others. I don't know why they let their image be damaged like that, that's so not needed.
Maybe because your opinion was shaped by their efforts. Perhaps maybe you would’ve bought from Anker instead? Perhaps they were able to charge you $30.99 instead of $10.99 after they faked the reviews.
I was recently shopping for a USB hub, and Anker and Aukey had what appeared to be the exact same offering with different branding. It made me believe that they use the same OEM, but I'm not sure whether that's actually the case since I'm not familiar with their engineering and manufacturing processes.
I have only ever heard good things about Anker but their premium price has kept me from purchasing them. I bought Aukey several times because they were considerably cheaper than Anker.
I was and still am impressed with their quality and with their support so I have continued to buy their products.
I really like their now outdated PA-U32 USB power supply, it was a great value for the money and I probably have a half dozen or more.
I think all of my USB powerbanks are Aukey and I have been happy with each.
Rampow, one of their main competitors does exactly the same thing (giving out gift cards for goods reviews) so maybe it’s a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.
"Most people prefer the simplicity of plugging a M.2 card into a motherboard connector rather than mounting a separate drive and running cables to it."
I love that part so much, I'm a complete convert. Considering replacing SATA SSDs with NVMe SSDs just to reduce the cable load inside my rig. Just wish PCIe cards with dual NVMe ports were more abundant.
The placement of the M.2 slot on motherboards often seems daft. On my ASUS motherboard, it's directly above my graphics card that dumps 300W worth of heat.
It seems like a lot of video cards are trending towards blower style designs which don't vent hot air inside the case, so if you have one of those it's probably not a big deal.
On my Asus Z270i, the M.2 that's right there has a heatsink too.
Seems very much like the opposite to me, even Nvidia's "Founder's Edition" went to an open design in its latest iteration. Only AMD reference cards seem to still be blowers, AIO designs are pretty much all open.
Now that I look, it does seem like a lot of them are open air cards. I have a mini ITX case, so I only ever look at blower cards since I don't really have the airflow to carry the GPU heat out.
Making a dual NVMe PCIe card would require either an expensive PCIe switch chip or PCIe bifurcation, which needs to be configured in the BIOS if the motherboard supports it at all.
Slower NVMe could use a 2x connection. You could have one card with two electrically separate 2x connections that fit into one 4x slot, at least given my current understanding of the PCIe slot/lane structure.
The problem is that any given PCIe root complex does not necessarily support operating those lanes grouped into an arbitrary number of PCIe ports. When you have an x16 group of lanes coming off a CPU, it usually supports operating as x16, x8+x8, and x8+x4+x4, with the latter two requiring some help from the motherboard to re-route lanes. Operating as x4+x4+x4+x4 is usually not possible on consumer-grade CPUs. I'm not aware of any CPU that supports splitting an x4 down to x2+x2.
The Southbridge/PCH on the motherboard is at heart a PCIe fan-out switch that is designed to offer bifurcation down to x2 and x1 ports, but on the flip side doesn't support aggregating lanes into ports wider than x4 (which is the width of the host connection to the CPU).
There are already plenty of low-end NVMe drives that use x2 connections instead of x4. If you put them into a PCIe port that's coming directly off the CPU, you'll have at least two lanes rendered unusable.
Intel has a SSD coming soon that is essentially two x2 drives on a single x4 M.2 card (one with 3D XPoint memory and one with QLC NAND flash memory). I'm expecting this to only be fully functional when attached to the PCH or another PCIe switch that supports bifurcation down to x2. When attached to a CPU PCIe port, I expect only one half of the drive to be accessible.
The bifurcation limitations of CPU PCIe ports may end up changing as PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 make their way to the market, and make SSDs with x1 and x2 connections more viable.
I've encountered a Threadripper motherboard that lacked the firmware capabilities necessary to use a passive PCIe x16 to quad M.2 board.
I also haven't seen those quad-M.2 boards listing support for the mainstream Ryzen (AM4) platform, only the Threadripper and Intel HEDT platforms. Have you gotten an AM4 Ryzen system to split its x16 slot into 4x4?
Yes, but now that I look it up it's apparently a feature restricted to X370 and X470 boards. Doesn't really make sense to me considering the PCIe comes off the CPU.
TR4 boards that were released at TR launch day might miss the firmware support for PCIe bifurbication in the initial release. However, it was added in the later firmware releases.
This isn't about light rail. This is about allowing lighter train cars--that aren't designed to survive collisions with freight trains--on regional rail lines.
> that aren't designed to survive collisions with freight trains
They are designed to survive collision with freight trains. In Europe we also have freight trains on our passenger tracks. They're just designed to survive them in a different way - by deforming to absorb impact rather than being rigid to resist it.
Exactly. Nobody cares about the cars, it's about the contents. And a train that cannot deform, will come to a very sudden stop when it hits an unmovable object, which is not going to be good to the occupants. Crumple zones are generally better.
Downside is that that's probably where the train driver is. Preventing collisions is definitely the better approach.
I think the arrow points the other way in Europe. Their passenger rails are smooth for a nice ride. They run cargo over the smooth rails. In the US, once you leave the East Coast, you're on freight rails which are bumpy and annoying.
In the US, once you leave the East Coast, you're on freight rails which are bumpy and annoying.
Yeah. In a few spots, it's OK, but the majority of it is pretty bad. I take a lot of long-distance Amtrak trips, and sleeping can be hard if you haven't done it in a while and you're not used to it.
I was surprised to find that the Shinkansen in Japan is a pretty rough and unstable run, too.
Americans on the internet like to imagine Japan and its technology as perfect in every way, but the HSR between Tokyo and Kyoto can be almost sea-sickness worthy.
I don't think this is because of bad rails so much it is that the infrastructure is so heavily used, and aging, since Japan was a pioneer in this arena.
I have used that particular Shinkansen route at least thirty times in each direction. Admittedly not so much recently. I have also traveled by high speed rail in Northern Europe, for comparison.
Your experience on the Shinkansen is very different from mine. The only explanation I can imagine is that your train was travelling slowly, which can happen - rarely - in typhoon season.
Otherwise, which high speed lines have you used that did not induce seasickness in you?
It wasn’t the slow train. I had my wife with me so I splashed out for the fastest train available. It was around 7am, so I assume it was rush hours.
I’ve taken a few high speed routes around the world. KTX between Seoul and Busan. The entire Eurostar route. Others I can’t remember off the top of my head.
The best experience so far has been Trenitalia between Rome and Naples.
I did not mean to imply that slower trains such as Hikari or Kodama on that route might make one nauseous. Rather on very rare occasions, a too-slow train would let you feel the side-to-side as it banks.
Well anyway it seems to have been just a one-time experience, from which you've managed to deduce both generality and cause.
Again, from experience that's not common, so perhaps a more charitable explanation than system degradation might have been warranted. Certainly the rolling-stock is much newer than the system. The Nozomi you used would have been, at a guess 15 years or younger.
You're right. It does, unfortunately without citing any sources of its own.
In Europe, freight rail is less than a quarter that of the US, while passenger rail is much higher than in the US. Where tracks are shared, passenger rail generally takes priority in EU, and vice versa in the US. When reading about European railcar crash standards, I found no evidence that modern design standards include any requirements on crashing into freight trains. Just generic crumple zone requirements.
Don't forget heavy rail and regional rail! European EMUs and DMUs will go a long way towards making passenger rail in the US feasible again.
It's ridiculous how few places in the US have even considered subway anymore. Seattle's light rail, for example, is pretty much a subway except for one at-grade segment.
because of cost. seattle's system is a multi billion dollar boondoggle. costs for just three stations went up by half a billion dollars on a current expansion that was to only cost two billion. systems like Seattle's burn through so much money because politicians in the local area get to decide who gets service and how instead of focusing on who needs service and where. then throw in the billions that system is already backlogged on maintenance and it will fold under its own weight if not cut back services on other parts to pay for the rail.
If you took all the money people spent to buy, maintain, and insure, their vehicles, then topped it off with the money the highway fund put into the roads to support it the cost per mile is one third what mass transit it costing.
light rail isn't flexible to the needs of a changing city. it however appeals to a romantic version of transit that does not exist nor did it ever outside of two or three cities in the world of which only one is in the US though if you push it Chicago can almost count. Instead it benefits politicians who love ribbon cutting and paying off contributors.
The cost per mile lumps in cheap to build rural roads with urban roads, pulling down the average. It also doesn't take into account the several hundreds of billions deficit in roads investment. At today's levels of investment American roads are crumbling and are barely holding together. And that's just the federal road system. Most states also have issues funding roads. And this is before we also calculate the cost of requiring all the parking to support a roads-or-nothing environment, or health externalities from pollution and inactivity.
The reality of the situation is that if you want a city to have more than Oklahoma City levels of density, while not having congestion completely strangle the economy, you need to build rail, or at least invest in usable mass transit. A two-track subway in Manhattan can carry something upwards of 80k people very reliably within twenty feet of right of way; a highway lane only carries about 2.7K per hour.
Have you ever been outside the USA? Transit obviously can and does work in the vast majority of the world.
We can’t really win the battle with roads. For one thing, we are running out of places to put new roads in big cities, so bandwidth is already pretty constrained. For another, single occupancy vehicles aren’t very energy efficient, nor can they be.
We can live in small cities. There, roads work fine.
The energy efficiency issue isn't so clear. Single-occupancy vehicles don't run empty, at least until self-driving makes it possible. In typical systems, trains are pretty empty.
I haven’t sat on an empty train in a big city in a long time. If it’s a small city without a lot of economic activity, it makes sense that your trains would run empty.
Maybe you consider Boston to be a small city? They have some pretty empty trains, particularly the commuter rail. (yes it leaves the city, but that is the whole point of something that we aren't calling a subway)
It's not, but it's certainly a factor. EMU and DMUs are not manufactured on a regular basis in the US due to the different requirements and the size of the market, so each order is essentially an expensive custom order. The rolling stock that does exist here usually performs less well.
Because of the cost of (and in some cases impossibility of) buying multiple-units, passenger railroads here are operated using a locomotive and some railcars; this is very inefficient, especially for commuter or regional rail which stops and starts fairly regularly. DMUs would almost certainly be cheaper and more performant to run.
The Docklands Light Railway has worked quite well. It gets you from A to B much quicker than a bus although the top speed is not high, by avoiding jams etc. It's also driverless unlike the busses.
Where's the funding going to come from? USA has no money for infrastructure. MTA is struggling in NYC. Seattle's light rail is going to be completed in 2041+ and is being paid through a regressive car tab tax. I think it's a pipe dream that rail or transit will ever be improved other than very modestly in the USA.
In other words, if we can become less dependant on oil / natural gas (i.e. pipelines for them) we'll have more money for mass transportation. The irony is, our love of personal transportation is foregoing our transition to trains and such.
