Ah, gotcha, not relying on USB for power, then. That’ll also work!

I’d suspect that too. Try just reading from the source drive or just writing to the destination drive and see which causes the problems. Could also be a corrupt filesystem; probably not a bad idea to try to fsck it.

IME, on a failing disk, you can get I/O blocking as the system retries, but it usually won’t freeze the system unless your swap partition/file is on that drive. Then, as soon as the kernel goes to pull something from swap on the failing drive, everything blocks. If you have a way to view the kernel log (e.g. you’re looking at a Linux console or have serial access or something else that keeps working), you’ll probably see kernel log messages. Might try swapoff -a before doing the rsync to disable swap.

At first I was under suspicion was temperature.

I’ve never had it happen, but it is possible for heat to cause issues for hard drives; I’m assuming that OP is checking CPU temperature. If you’ve ever copied the contents of a full disk, the case will tend to get pretty toasty. I don’t know if the firmware will slow down operation to keep temperature sane — all the rotational drives I’ve used in the past have had temperature sensors, so I’d think that it would. Could try aiming a fan at the things. I doubt that that’s it, though.

No one else invents new screws to prevent access (except Nintendo).

Like, on gamepads? I have multiple sets of security bits that I bought just to get required bits to open gamepads, and I’ve never owned a Nintendo gamepad.

Some countries have compulsory military service for all of its citizens.

North America…

While the US hasn’t had a need for peacetime conscription — its war planning has assumed that its peacetime military, especially its navy and air force, could hold off an invader for six months, long enough to train up untrained infantry from scratch – that’s not all countries in North America. I’d guess that Cuba likely has it.

checks Wikipedia

Looks like they have two years of mandatory service.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_Cuba

Conscription is inscribed in the 1976 Constitution of the Republic of Cuba in article 65, stating that “Defense of the socialist homeland is the greatest honor and the supreme duty of every Cuban citizen.”

Cuban nationals were required to serve under the Obligatory Military Service (SMO) system. Under this structure, it was compulsory to complete three years in military service, the militias of territorial troops, or the brigades of production and defence.[2] The SMO was reinforced by the first Law of Military service which was established in November 1963.

As of August 1991, the SMO changed to the General Military Service Law and the requirements of active military service were reduced to two years, with enlistment being obligatory between the ages of 16 and 28, however most nationals were not called to service until they were 17.

EDIT: Here’s a map:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription

Mexico apparently also has it, though there it’s only a randomly-selected subset that are required to serve.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_Mexico

Military Service in Mexico (Spanish: Servicio Militar Nacional, or SMN) currently involves all males reaching the age of eighteen years. Selection is made by a lottery system using the following color scheme: those who draw a black ball must serve as “availability reservists”, that is, they are not required to perform any activities whatsoever and will receive their discharge card at the end of the year. Those who draw a white ball must serve “framed” which means, they must start service immediately from 8am-1pm for one year in total, until they receive the discharge card.

My only complaint is that the volume knob does not work.

I’d guess, without looking, that instead of controlling hardware in the interface, it probably intends to talk to the PC. It may do this by presenting itself as an attached USB keyboard and simulating media key presses.

If this is Linux, you’re likely seeing XF86AudioLowerVolume and XF86AudioRaiseVolume keysyms sent. You can run xev (this works on Wayland as well, but be sure to have your mouse cursor over the xev window) and turn the knob to check.

This would be consistent with it doing that:

https://old.reddit.com/r/SoundBlasterOfficial/comments/ox2xhs/sound_blaster_x4_volume_issue/

Firstly, the volume knob control directly adjust the PC master volume, it is a great feature as external volume button however the volume changes is so drastic that even a 2% up in master volume can be uncomfortably loud.

If this is Linux, you can probably set up software to have those keysyms do whatever you want when pressed, but under Wayland, it’ll depend on the compositor you’re using. I use sway, which doesn’t appear to have them do anything out of box, but you could set it up to fiddle the volume on your currently active sound output or whatever.

Note that just because a sound interface is on USB is not a hard guarantee that you aren’t going to get noise from the power supply leaking into the audio, if it’s getting power from the USB port. USB power can be remarkably dirty. I owned one USB audio interface that also let very audible noise into the output, as well as other (more expensive) interfaces that don’t. Or at least that I could hear; I didn’t try running measuring hardware against it. Very much possible to have power supply circuitry inside the USB audio interface clean that up, but it costs more money, so…

I wish that there was someone that intentionally induced noise on the USB power lines and tested USB audio interfaces to see how much leaks through into their output, but I haven’t seen anyone out there doing that.

Worst case, it is possible to get a powered USB hub and just plug a single USB DAC into it, at least.

The motherboard has functioning built-in surround sound. And yet they sold my father a goddamn Soundblaster.

The SoundBlaster card may have a better signal-to-noise ratio than whatever on-motherboard sound is present, even if the motherboard has sound hardware with a lot of outputs.

…speaking as someone who has used sound hardware with annoying noise that could be induced when the CPU was under load.

I mean sure, if you like spending $1500+ on a new computer every year…they’re completely irreparable, unupgradeable, and they have a definite lifespan when Apple arbitrarily decides that they’re “obsolete”.

That was kind of Steve Jobs’ original vision.

folklore.org archives a lot of stories from the early Apple days.

https://www.folklore.org/Diagnostic_Port.html

Expandability, or the lack thereof, was far and away the most controversial aspect of the original Macintosh hardware design. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was a strong believer in hardware expandability, and he endowed the Apple II with luxurious expandability in the form of seven built-in slots for peripheral cards, configured in a clever architecture that allowed each card to incorporate built-in software on its own ROM chip. This flexibility allowed the Apple II to be adapted to a wider range of applications, and quickly spawned a thriving third-party hardware industry.

But Jef Raskin had a very different point of view. He thought that slots were inherently complex, and were one of the obstacles holding back personal computers from reaching a wider audience. He thought that hardware expandability made it more difficult for third party software writers since they couldn’t rely on the consistency of the underlying hardware. His Macintosh vision had Apple cranking out millions of identical, easy to use, low cost appliance computers and since hardware expandability would add significant cost and complexity it was therefore avoided.

Apple’s other co-founder, Steve Jobs, didn’t agree with Jef about many things, but they both felt the same way about hardware expandability: it was a bug instead of a feature. Steve was reportedly against having slots in the Apple II back in the days of yore, and felt even stronger about slots for the Mac. He decreed that the Macintosh would remain perpetually bereft of slots, enclosed in a tightly sealed case, with only the limited expandability of the two serial ports.

Burrell was afraid the 128Kbyte Mac would seem inadequate soon after launch, and there were no slots for the user to add RAM. He realized that he could support 256Kbit RAM chips simply by routing a few extra lines on the PC board, allowing adventurous people who knew how to wield a soldering gun to replace their RAM chips with the newer generation. The extra lines would only cost pennies to add.

But once again, Steve Jobs objected, because he didn’t like the idea of customers mucking with the innards of their computer. He would also rather have them buy a new 512K Mac instead of them buying more RAM from a third-party. But this time Burrell prevailed, because the change was so minimal. He just left it in there and no one bothered to mention it to Steve, much to the eventual benefit of customers, who didn’t have to buy a whole new Mac to expand their memory.

That being said, modern USB does represent a major change from that point in time, since it’s a relatively-high-speed external bus, and USB does permit for some of the devices that historically would have needed to live on an internal bus to be put on an external bus.

GPU prices are coming to earth

https://lemmy.today/post/42588975

Nvidia reportedly no longer supplying VRAM to its GPU board partners in response to memory crunch — rumor claims vendors will only get the die, forced to source memory on their own

If that’s true, I doubt that they’re going to be coming to earth for long.

https://lemmy.today/post/42574307

GPU prices are coming to earth just as RAM costs shoot into the stratosphere - Ars Technica

If said rumor is true, so much for GPU prices falling.

EDIT: Well, I guess more properly, for video card prices falling; in this context, distinguishing between the GPU chip and the card it lives on does actually matter.

Prices rarely, if ever, go down in a meaningful degree.

Prices on memory have virtually always gone down, and at a rapid pace.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage

If consumers aren’t going to or are much less likely to upgrade, then that affects demand from them, and one would expect manufacturers to follow what consumers demand.

I remember when it wasn’t uncommon to buy a prebuilt system and then immediately upgrade its memory with third party DIMMs to avoid paying the PC manufacturer’s premium on memory. Seeing that price relationship becoming inverted is a little bonkers. Though IIRC Framework’s memory-on-prebuilt-systems didn’t have much of a premium.

I also wonder if it will push the market further towards systems with soldered memory or on-core memory.

You can have applications where wall clock tine time is not all that critical but large model size is valuable, or where a model is very sparse, so does little computation relative to the size of the model, but for the major applications, like today’s generative AI chatbots, I think that that’s correct.

Last I looked, a few days ago on Google Shopping, you could still find some retailers that had stock of DDR5 (I was looking at 2x16GB, and you may want more than that) and hadn’t jacked their prices up, but if you’re going to buy, I would not wait longer, because if they haven’t been cleaned out by now, I expect that they will be soon.

Historically, it was conventional to have a “you have unsaved work” in a typical GUI application if you chose to quit, since otherwise, quit was a destructive action without confirmation.

Unless video games save on exit, you typically always have “unsaved work” in a video game, so I sort of understand where many video game devs are coming from if they’re trying to implement analogous behavior.

Have you played the existing Legend of Zelda titles? I mean, there are a ton of them. Even if you stop at Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda

Thanks for the added insights! I haven’t used it myself, so appreciated.

Linux has a second, similar “compressed memory” feature called zswap. This guy has used both, and thinks that if someone is using a system with NVMe, that zswap is preferable.

https://linuxblog.io/zswap-better-than-zram/

Based on his take, zram is probably a better choice for that rotational-disk Celeron, but if you’re running Cities: Skylines on newer hardware, I’m wondering if zswap might be more advantageous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II

The original retail price of the computer was US$1,298 (equivalent to $6,700 in 2024)[18][19] with 4 KB of RAM and US$2,638 (equivalent to $13,700 in 2024) with the maximum 48 KB of RAM.

Few people actually need a full 48KB of RAM, but if you have an extra $6k lying around, it can be awfully nice.

TECO’s kinda-sorta emacs’s parent in sorta the same way that ed kinda-sorta is vi’s parent.

I compiled and tried out a Linux port the other day due to a discussion on editors we were having on the Threadiverse, so was ready to mind. Similar interface to ed, also designed to run on teletypes.