Yeah that’s the sad thing is my sonata had more trunk space than most 2 row SUVs, but people swear there’s more hauling space in an SUV for some reason

There’s even better ones available now like the Tangara which is open hardware+software and it’s creators are here in the fediverse!

Real talk, there are not enough minor gods in the modern world. GIVE ME DICKOCALYPSE DAMMIT! (nsfw link)

These are cool because they add efficiency by both preheating your water for your water heater and help cool the photovoltaic cells so they can run more efficiently too. Downside of course is that there’s now a bunch of water pipes on your roof too

No, whole.

Sit/stand desks are also great for ergonomics. You can set your desk to whatever the right height for your monitors is.

I worked at a bank where some of the offices had big fancy banker desks made of gorgeous hard wood and others had much newer sit-stand desks which while made of cheaper materials they did in fact allow for whatever height the user needed for best monitor ergonomics. I’d start my day standing to help me wake up, then around 11/lunch time shift to seated and there were some days I’d simply forget to put the desk down and be standing for the entire workday

I have no clue what MultiPlex theaters are

So back in the earlier days of cinema, you’d go to the Cineplex to see a movie. A Cineplex would only have a single screen for viewing movies while the multiplex would have multiple screens for seeing movies on. This started with the first duplex theatre in 1915 and later the first triplex in 1966, shortly followed by theatres with 6+ screens which is around when the term “multiplex” started being used. Basically for anyone born after the 80s (therefore anyone under the age of about 40) the term is largely obsolete since most theatres have at least 4 screens and qualify as multiplexes, plus the industry has seen so much consolidation that smaller independent theatres with 1-2 screens are pretty uncommon now

Would requesting a mac with the argument of having access to a Unix shell potentially work? In college my IT instructor used a Mac with a windows VM via VMware Workstation and it pretty seemless. He’d use the Mac for most stuff then jump over to the Windows VM for windows specific stuff, and then diving into the native Bash shell for anything else. Honestly it was a pretty sweet setup

I mean this happens. Traditionally it was companies with lots of digital artists for improved software compatibility, but these days it’s really more done for developers and anyone else just as an employee perk to put them on their preferred platform.

Honestly, for administration purposes having a proper native Unix shell running standard utilities is extremely handy, especially when you need to manipulate files, such as working with disk/VM images for example

Yeah getting paid to sit there while windows wastes 20+ minutes of company time updating is always a treat

Meanwhile I got local admin because the IT guy who’s no longer there couldn’t be bothered to install a couple of utilities for me and most of what I actually do is manage SaaS services in a web browser

So part of the reason for the whole envelope situation is that letter envelopes will go through postal sorting machines which will bend the contents so anything that can’t be bent (for example I once needed to mail a forgotten car key to a family member) can’t be sent in a letter envelope.

Usually the solution is padded envelopes, or for certain things there may even be special postage available like USPS’s Bound Printed Media rate for mailing books (which can I add is such a hilariously federal government-grade obtuse way of saying “books!”) but there’s also “non machine” postage rates available too.

Basically boxes are the easy solution but there’s more efficient solutions available if you’re willing to do a very small amount of research. For people packing it can be as simple as “I can quickly toss this in a box and not worry about it further”

Y’know what, I honestly haven’t looked at what the PCIe lane layout is like on newer chipsets. Maybe it’s gotten better since I last really paid attention like 5+ years ago. I remember in early-mid AM4 there was a lot of grumbling about how there’s only 20 PCIe 3 lanes followed by early PCIe 4 platforms that would give only 16-20 lanes with another 8 or so PCI 3 lanes. I also didn’t really pay much attention to AMD before AM4 given how far behind Intel they were. But I could be entirely out of date now that I think about it

So hardware that may still be perfectly usable but predates NVMe should be tossed out then?

The exact same thing you already have to do to upgrade the memory on such a computer, you go buy used/old stock DDR3 or cannibalize from another system. Pre-NVMe systems are DDR3 era and older. Time goes on, interfaces update and anyone looking for compatibility with their older system will need to either use an adapter or buy used/old stock. If there’s enough demand like with motherboards there can be a random Chinese brands making new hardware for old platforms using a mix of new and cannibalized parts

I did similar when preparing my wife and I for windows 10 EOL. I went back to Linux on the new drive, my wife to Windows 11. Honestly both have a similar amount of issues (mostly wake from sleep challenges on Linux, although my PC wasn’t great about waking from sleep on Windows to begin with) and most importantly my wife can still play Fortnite and I can have fun trying new stuff out and reveling at how every single game I try just works on Linux whereas 5 years ago it was more of a 50/50 chance whether or not a game would work

Does require you to have the PCIe lanes for it, BIOS support for booting to PCIe (which Intel 6th gen core CPUs were the first to support. 4th gen never did but some had m.2 slots and NVMe support for secondary drives and the 5th gen X99s had some receive BIOS updates to support but that’s its own can of worms) and both Intel and AMD have historically been pretty bad about being stingy about PCIe lane availability

Plus to run more than a single NVMe on a single slot your motherboard either needs to support PCIe bifurcation which is almost exclusively an enterprise feature or they need to have the right lane configuration available to support that x16 slot handing out 4x4 lanes (or 2x8/2x4 for dual NVMe)

Yeah my recent IT experience is similar. I redeployed monitors that had “vista-ready” badges on them during the monitor shortages of 2021-2 I’ve replaced so many of those analogue to digital adapters (usually because the computer only has 1 digital output and 2 displays to drive, or 1 HDMI and 1 DisplayPort but the displays only support HDMI and I only have VGA to HDMI adapters, etc.)

The challenge simply comes down to the fact that displays tend to last so much longer than the computers they’re connected to. Heck my wife is using my decade old 1080p monitors because they were an upgrade over the even older 720p monitors she had before which may well find themselves mated up to my kids’ new computer

They’re called ozone generators. Handy machines for getting smells out of stuff but not anything you can be in the room while it runs

One could argue that reduced maintenance costs are a value from the cloud providers. E.g. when my AWS VM dies I can get a new one back in <10m (faster with automation). When my self-hosted server dies I need to have planned for that with a warm spare and someone needs to physically be connecting new hardware

Yes this is absolutely a value proposition that CTOs/CIOs/IT Dept Heads need to be considering. You’re not just paying for the VMs and storage, you’re also paying to outsource all of the hardware and some of the configuration work, however you still need admins to manage all of the VMs and configs. If that labor savings is actually enough to cover the immensely increased cost of cloud resources over local/colocated resources that you own (the infrastructure costs are pretty minimal in comparison) than awesome, more power to you.

I really think the biggest value is putting all of your baseline compute in hardware that you own, whether on-prem or colocated, them if you need bursts of resources place that in the cloud. With hardware you own you can spin up temporary VMs, you can keep legacy VMs around, you can fling data around with impunity. These are all tasks that have real costs in the cloud that they will happily bill you for.

But your owned hardware is a set quantity, so if you are rapidly hiring a thousand people or bringing in a new organization or have publicly facing services seeing immeense growth or anything like that and need more capacity immediately, you can’t. It can easily take weeks to bring more servers online even in a rush job, meanwhile the cloud can hand you capacity immediately. That’s the value of the cloud that’s being missed

At the scale of one of the top websites by daily active users, owning your own infrastructure is absolutely cheaper than just throwing it on AWS. At a more realistic smaller scale where you might exceed the bandwidth available for your own hardware, there’s also the option of a hybrid setup where your content is mainly hosted on hardware that you control and then it automatically scales out to AWS or similar when demand spikes.

There’s really tons of ways to make web apps and server infrastructure cheaper than just renting it from a cloud provider, but many orgs lack the vision and drive to do so and just fork money over to [insert hyperscaler here] and watch their app go down when that hyperscaler goes down. I really question this mentality especially when the same organization has constant discussions about not liking how large their cloud provider bills are