1
point
bane
Joined 54,970 karma
R&D is what I do these days.
Back and forth in startups, megacorps and everything in between.
Not much of a coder anymore, more of a management drone. But I think I've gotten some good ideas pulled together over the last few decades.
(get me at banehn [at symbol] gmail.com)
- Sometime in 2006 we bought a house and our realtor gave us a gift certificate for $2500 at Best Buy (weird, but...those were the days). A brand new, state of the art 720p DLP projection TV was just a hair under that - we still have it and it works great. But I had a couple dollars to burn off on the card.
I happened to have noticed that they were trying to clear out any remaining floor models of CRTs. One of them was an absolutely giant Samsung, memory says it was >34", but I'm not sure how big...with a sticker on it for, and I'll never forget this...$.72.
Soooo two big TVs for the price of one!
Long story short, we were moving out of that house, CRT tvs were long since obsolete and that TV hadn't even been turned on for at least 5 years. So we decided to throw it away. I had never picked it up before and had forgotten how heavy CRTs could be. I ended up having to get two friends to come help me move it to the curb, it was well over 250 lbs. The trash company also complained when they had to pick it up and had to make a return trip.
I kinda regret getting rid of it, but it was among the heaviest pieces of furniture in our house.
- Thanks for answering! I'll ask you this question as another form of an answer. Is it possible you are making a false dichotomy expecting that the different media are expected to provide the same result for their relative consumers?
- Let me turn your question around, what are the benefits of communicating science via video such that it's a very popular medium that people use to learn about science?
- Thank you. There is goodness in this world!
- During COVID, by father was dying in a hospice center (from something else, not COVID). Because of the circumstances and the condition of the medical system, it was impossible to get into where he was to see him, and the staff was too overworked and understaffed to find a way to connect us to him. He was alone, fragile, dying, and terrified.
As my mother and I sat in the reception area fighting with the hospice administrator, a medical transport pulled up and unloaded another patient. After putting the new patient back in their room the driver walked up to us as we were sliding into a heated argument with the hospice administrator.
She asked the administrator what the problem was and was told that policy was visitors can't be going into the patient area and it was very firm. They'd had issues with the local government about being slack about it. The driver turned to me and said something along the lines of "here's what we're going to do:
Since I can apparently run around freely in this place, I'm going to find your father and put a star in his window so you can always find where he is.
Number two, I'm going to give you a set of full hazard gear.
Number three" and she turned to the administrator put her finger up into her face and very sternly said, "they are going to hire you as a part time employee, in maintenance, or IT support or whatever, and your hours of employment here are going to be whenever you need to visit your father."
she turned back to me, "but this doesn't mean it's a free pass, you are going to wear all of this hazard gear whenever you come 'work' here, promise me that okay?"
She then took the administrator off to a side room, had a conversation, and I had a piece of paper to sign about 30 minutes later making me an employee of the hospice.
I made it into and out of the hospice without incident for the next week until we decided to bring my father home to die as he wasn't receiving almost any care there. I don't know what the ambulance driver and the administrator discussed, but I suspect it was the absolutely woeful state of the facility.
The look on my father's face when a head-to-toe masked man entered his room the first time, and when I took my mask off to show him I was there for him, and how the terror just simply fell from his face, is something I will always remember as is the kindness of the driver who put herself out there for us.
The period was incredibly hard, beyond the situation with my father, the medical system was in absolute shambles, and as my father's health was rapidly deteriorating, it was among the only kindness we received during that wretched journey.
- I don't know why my sense of ethical outrage over the cancerous spread of this worthless garbage technology doesn't extend so hard to LG in this. But I've finally just hit the wall with Microsoft. Between all the forced account sign-ins, ads, random reboots and updates that aren't for the purpose of securing the OS...I'm done.
I haven't seen this level of anti-consumer nonsense from Microsoft since the late 90s when lots of circles called them Micro$oft.
It's a shame since Satya Nadella came in and made a lot of right moves. Support for Linux, open source, etc. I could stretch myself to forgive the other stuff as some kind of wrong headed thinking about a cloud-first strategy. But in the last few years that productive pivot stopped and the company moved back into high-risk money grab steps.
My current daily driver is a Windows machine, but my last few builds around the house have all been some kind of Linux. Last year I moved my home server infrastructure over. I kept a windows VM around for a few things but it ultimately corrupted itself and was replaced by a Linux VM that's been chugging along just fine.
I think when I rebuild my home desktop sometime next year Windows gets relegated to a "run when needed" VM. I've really only kept it around for games and a few other Windows only software but those days are fast fading thanks to numerous efforts by Valve and others and a fallback VM for other stuff works fine in my experience elsewhere.
I think I don't have the same concerns about LG because the relationship with me as the consumer seems different somehow, and I simply expect less from them?
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- Or if these chat apps could hold a conversation as basic as "I don't know where you are, would you allow me access to your gps?"
- A lot of AI models also suffer this flaw.
- It also pioneered billions of other users with "hey google" and "siri" uselessness which also copied and then completely flatlined with things to do beyond calling the wrong person in your call list, setting timers, and playing the wrong song.
- You have good points!
For me, eliminating the few hours dealing with some stupid config option I messed up is easily worth $250, which unraid basically makes go away. But yeah, most of the things the system does are really just some basic linux distro with various bits installed.
The terramaster NAS's are surprisingly reasonable for pre-built NASs. And I think they'd be fine if you want an <4 bay NAS solution.
There's a few tiers I think of home NAS users:
0 - add an external hard drive to my base machine, maybe share it (or the content) to other users on the network
1 - put the drive on the network, there's a bunch of OEM "drive on your network" options there
2 - the 3-5 bay home NAS user. Used to be a medium user, but now can easily hit ~100TB.
3 - the greater than 6 bay home NAS user.
At some point, I moved from #2 to #3 and decided that I had enough spare drives lying around that it was worth it to invest in a big case and centralize everything in one box. It's around this time that I think the cost efficiency of the NAS hardware really left me behind.
A 6-bay terramaster is around $500 and provides an N95 and 8GB of memory. So basically in rPi5 territory.
A 12-bay terramaster is like $1800 is with an i7-1255U and 16GB of memory.
I built a 16+ bay unraid system this year for around $1500 that included an i9-12900k and 128GB of memory + an unraid lifetime license. I know I'm a #3 NAS user, but the different in price is a bit, for less capable equipment.
You could build the same system, and save about $400 if you put it together and just put some linux distro on it.
I guess that point I was making originally still stands, I think these retailers could build really nice NAS options on a big price undercut. At volume I bet they could negotiate moving unraid licenses for much cheaper as an OEM option.
Note: Yes! I acknowledge none of these choices really include the actual drives, any of these options might allow for a gradual in-fill and replacement of drives over time.
- As an American, we grow up almost entirely without this gem of children's literature. I'm so thankful that PBS aired this story when I was a small child. The imagery was so strong that it has forever stuck in my head. When I see other stories like "The Fountain" or Super Mario Galaxy, I immediately think of the Little Prince.
I've yet to revisit it as an adult, but I think maybe it's time?
- Unraid weirdly requires booting off of a USB for the base OS. I think it's to manage licensing.
SSDs are generally expected to be used as write-through caches with the main disc pool. However, if you have a bunch you can add them to a ZFS array and it works pretty much flawlessly.
- I personally think big-box computer retailers that build custom turn-key computers (e.g. Microcenter) should get into the NAS game by partnering with unraid and Fractal. It's as turnkey as any commercial NAS I've ever used but comes with way more flexibility and future proofing and the ability for users to get hyper technical if they want and tweak everything in the system.
It's wild how much more cost effective this would be than pretty much any commercial NAS offering. It's ridiculous when you consider total system lifecycle cost (with how easy it is to upgrade unraid storage pools).
Looking right now and my local Microcenter builds essentially three things: desktop PCs, some kind of "studio" PC, and "Racing Simulators". Turnkey NASs would move a lot of inventory I'd wager.
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What's worse is that in most of these fields, you don't really even start working until after your PhD.
4 years is going to be a long time to underfund what's basically 4 entire classes of researchers coming out of Doctorate programs. It might take decades to recover our research programs.