If I read it right, I’d need to pay €3 on each item when Aliexpress bundles 20 1€ items together - €60 in tax for €20 worth of items, or effectively a 300% tax. That’s what the language implies with “applied to each different item, …, contained in a consignment.”
That’s not just a tax on revenue, or an incentive to buy locally - it’s prohibitory. Do they want to obliterate the "direct-to-consumer" cheap goods for good with this?
But who this law protects anyway? Most of “local” sellers that offer Aliexpress-kind of items (where else can I find my “stainless steel meat shredder claws” but there!?) basically drop ship from Taobao and the like in bulk. And this law now forces me to use them. What’s the point of this? A tiny revenue stream from handling fees? But even these drop shippers don’t offer much in terms of variety. Nor do or possibly can the supposedly big warehouses of Aliexpress-like platforms located within EU - it’s just not feasible. So this law implies that unregulated variety is a luxury now?
If it bundles them together into one parcel (while staying under 150€) I read the announcement such that the entire package would get taxed by 3€.
If I recall correctly some of the goals of this are
- to relieve the load on the custom s enforcement agencies by motivating sellers to import and declare goods in bulk.
- to make sure there is someone domestic who is legally responsible for liabilities and other regulations (e.g. for waste and EC compliance). It's easier to force a big company to do something than a 2 person shop in China. There are already laws in the book where the marketplace becomes liable if the actual seller cannot be found.
I believe AliExpress bulk imports much of its wares to EU warehouses already (at least popular stuff). It's not possible for everything but for popular items it's happening more and more frequently.
> That is implemented under the assumption that these distros are most of the time used in enterprise contexts.
I've been using OEL since before Rocky was a thing. It was and still is a free alternative to RHEL.
Apart from that, all my planned use of XPipe fits entirely in the Community feature set (maybe apart from Yubikey/GPG agent).
But now I'd need to pay $5 a month just to open a shell? No thanks.
Also, a slight tangent, but charging homelab folks $5/mo is weird. The only profit I'm making with my homelab is negative. And I, as a developer, would much more likely to ask my employer to buy an enterprise license if I actually liked using it at home. Like Tailscale, JetBrains, etc.
Considering the costs of a more serious homelab, I think paying $5 a month for a tool that can save you some time and effort, can be reasonable. Of course only if you see the value for yourself. That value comes from more features than just the shell opener, that is only a part of XPipe.
The community version is pretty extensive in what you can do with it, so I think you can accurately judge whether the homelab plan is worth it for you by using it for a bit.
I wonder if something like this is possible with HDMI? Separate 10G SFP+ for each color channel, one more for i2c, create a similar style breakout PCB, maybe add an MPO or CWDM mux… Could be a fun project. Optical HDMI cables are expensive and most of the time come with a preexisting cable which is hard to route (in conduits) due to HDMI connector size.
Such products are already commercially available [0][1]!
DIYing it is probably too painful to be doable. You won't be able to source any kind of protocol translation chip, so you'll have to send it essentially raw into quad SFP+ transceivers. Running 4+ fibers instead of the required 2 (or even 1) is very expensive, and any kind of WDM immediately blows up your budget. Unless you're getting the stuff for free from a DC renovation or something, it's just not worth it.
On top of that you also have to deal with designing board for extremely fast signals, which is pretty much impossible to debug without spending "very nice car" amounts of money on tooling. People have done it before, but I definitely don't envy them.
If you need 4x channels, it sounds like a job for QSFP? HDMI is already differential signalling, so you don't need to do that, but you might still need level shifting.
Probably a box on the source end to manage DDC and strip HDCP.
> You won't be able to source any kind of protocol translation chip
I think many of those chips are simple off-the-shelf parts. Probably you would need special licenses only to decode HDCP.
If you have an FPGA, you could even create valid Ethernet frames and send the data / video stream over any standard switch / media converter as long as you have enough bandwidth and no packet loss. (10G would be enough for FullHD and 25G for 4K if you make it a bit smarter and can strip the blanking interval.)
There's even cheaper versions of this now, "fiber" HDMI cables with the electronics in the HDMI plugs themselves, no additional power required. They go up to 100m length. I do wonder how these work, since I've never seen a good teardown of one.
My plan, if I ever need long haul(>3meters) video or audio links, is to get the signal into ethernet(or even better ip) and use common network equipment to transport it.
The theory being ethernet is such a well developed, easy to source common jelly-bean part that this would trump any gains that specialized transports might otherwise have.
But this is probably just my inner network engineer being disdainful over unfamiliar transport layers.
Nah, this is totally the reasonable way to do it, iff you can tolerate the compression loss or whatever. Because 4k60 is like 12Gbps uncompressed, and even more after you cram ethernet headers onto everything. So most such devices include some compression, and the really expensive ones let you configure how much.
Failing that, you're probably doing SDI over your own lambda.
It's much cheaper to just buy an optical HDMI cable if you need a long point to point run, it's like 50 bucks for 100 ft. The cool stuff you can do with HDMI over IP lies in switching the signal to different endpoints on demand and things like multicast to multiple receivers, both of which are things you can do with off the shelf HDMI over IP gear.
I have wondered about the same (and/or DisplayPort) but with QSFP optics to simplify dealing with the four channels of data.
"Classic" DVI-derived HDMI would probably be trickier because of variable clock speeds and additional data but modern HDMI 2.1 is pretty similar to DisplayPort in that it uses four lanes at fixed rates and sends data as packets over those.
I would love to be able to use standard widely available fiber patch cables for long distance video runs rather than needing proprietary cables only offered in fixed lengths and equipped with enormous connectors that are not friendly to conduit.
Also these days data rates are getting high enough that even normal lengths are problematic, DisplayPort just recently announced that 3 meter cables will need active components for the full 80 gigabit per second mode, which means that a computer on the floor connecting to a monitor on a standing desk will not be guaranteed to work with passive cables. HDMI also recently announced version 2.2 with a bump from 48 to 96 gigabits per second so they'll presumably be in the same boat.
SDI over fibre with a cheap converter if you need to push multi hindered metres. Then people moves to 222-6 which packetised the SDi over IP, and now 2110 which breaks out the SDI to its components.
For most long haul links people still compress, good old h264 or 265 with latencies in the 200-500ms range (plus network propagation), or J2k/JXS and NDI which are more like 50-150ms. Ultimately 200mbit of h265 is far cheaper to transmit than 10ish gbit of 2110, and in many cases the extra 500ms doesn’t matter.
If I read it right, I’d need to pay €3 on each item when Aliexpress bundles 20 1€ items together - €60 in tax for €20 worth of items, or effectively a 300% tax. That’s what the language implies with “applied to each different item, …, contained in a consignment.”
That’s not just a tax on revenue, or an incentive to buy locally - it’s prohibitory. Do they want to obliterate the "direct-to-consumer" cheap goods for good with this?
But who this law protects anyway? Most of “local” sellers that offer Aliexpress-kind of items (where else can I find my “stainless steel meat shredder claws” but there!?) basically drop ship from Taobao and the like in bulk. And this law now forces me to use them. What’s the point of this? A tiny revenue stream from handling fees? But even these drop shippers don’t offer much in terms of variety. Nor do or possibly can the supposedly big warehouses of Aliexpress-like platforms located within EU - it’s just not feasible. So this law implies that unregulated variety is a luxury now?