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Hold on to Your Hardware

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Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#541

Post by Arn_Thor »

myself248 wrote: post #101
Arn_Thor wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering my helium-filled hard drives a strategic reserve now

That's another lifetime-limited thing -- the helium leaks out, and you cannot (for practical purposes) stop it or even meaningfully slow it down. When it's gone, the drives are dead. And the helium leaks by calendar-days, it doesn't matter whether the drive is powered on or off. Non-helium hard drives are basically limited by their bearing spin hours. If one only spins a few hours a week, it'll probably run for decad…

I'm using the drives, not hoarding them, so normal wear and tear is likely to be a problem before helium depletion enters the picture

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#542

Post by nik282000 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #96
Arn_Thor wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering my helium-filled hard drives a strategic reserve now

Gonna sit on my half-empty tank for party balloons from my daughter's birthday, maybe we'll be able to sell it to pay off mortgage quicker than the helium itself escapes the tank.

Store the tank upside down so it doesn't leak out of the valve ;)

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#543

Post by balamatom »

kps wrote: post #449
balamatom wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real talk. Well, some of the "old school" has left the market of natural causes since the 2000s. That only leaves the rest of 'em. Wer dey go, and what are your top 3 reasons for how the values of the 2000s era failed to transmit to the next generation of developers?

There's no market for it.

Not real talk.

To have a market for something you need people to find it valuable.

What drove the shift in values?

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#544

Post by M95D »

antisthenes wrote: post #340
upofadown wrote: post #93

This article inspired me to look and see what this computer is. Apparently it is a "AMD Athlon(tm) II X2 250 Processor" from 2009. So 17 years old. It has 8 GB of DDR3 memory and runs at 3 GHz. It currently has OpenBSD on it, but at least one source thinks it could run Windows 10. The fact that I didn't know any of this is what is significant here. At some point I stopped caring about this sort of thing. It really do…

Did any of the components fail over time? HDD/SSD? Pretty surprising to have this thing still be working 17 years later, unless it spent a good chunk of that in 'cold storage'.

I have two Phenom II x6 - same generation as Athlon II. One desktop and one server.

The server ran non-stop for the first 10 years. Motherboard, a 790, failed and upgraded to 880G. One memory stick failed, replaced by lifetime warranty (Kingston) but the pair I received was slower CL9-10-9 vs. 9-9-9 for the failed one. After 10 years my router and a rk3288 SBC took most of it's jobs. I moved most of the hard drives (7x 2GB Seagate ST2000DL and 1 spare) into a DAS (SATA RAID enclosure) connected directly to the router where they are still running. None failed. The server bacame an offline backup. I started it weekly to sync. Last week I replaced it with a rk3588 ITX board - not because it failed, but because I wanted to explore / play with the new ARM CPU.

The desktop is also still working. I bought it second-hand a few years after the first. It was used at least 4h every evening and at least 10h every weekend. I'm still using it right now. One HDD failed - it was a 120GB PATA Seagate from ~2004 IIRC. No data loss, it was in RAID1. One GPU failed, a GTS 250, upgraded to GTX 970, still working. I'm going to keep using it for at least 5 more years, possibly more. Firefox no longer supports Win7 and I'm in the process of migrating to Linux. Total Commander (I'm a user since Win31) and file associations are holding me back. xdg-open is... absolutely horrible.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#545

Post by rolandhvar »

bombcar wrote: post #534
rolandhvar wrote: post #156

So what happens when the datacenters need to upgrade (new hardware, or stupid enterprisey reasons like "must be new when replacing broken stuff")? Surely there remains a secondary market for the enthusiasts?

The difference is "datacenter equipment" has changed - it used to be large rack mount servers that, while a bit silly to run at home, at least could be done if you wanted to spend the power budget. These are entire datacenters build for one thing - and they're water-cooled and integrated so tightly that it's unlikely you can do much with any parts or part of the setup. The difference between buying an off-lease Dell…

Yes I see, fair enough

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#546

Post by organsnyder »

kelnos wrote: post #509
organsnyder wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keeping services running is fairly trivial. Getting to parity with the operationalization you get from a cloud platform takes more ongoing work. I have a homelab that supports a number of services for my family. I have offsite backups (rsync.net for most data, a server sitting at our cottage for our media library), alerting, and some redundancy for hardware failures. Right now, I have a few things I need to fix: - on…

You're spending that much time on it because you're doing too much. Your use of the term "homelab" is telling. I have: * A rented VPS that's been running for ~15 years without any major issues, only a couple hours a month of maintenance. * A small NUC-like device connected to the TV for media. Requires near-zero maintenance. * A self-built 5-drive NAS based around a Raspberry Pi CM4 with a carrier board built for NAS…

It's definitely mostly a hobby, but I also want to get something close to the dependability of a cloud offering.

I started small, with just a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant, then Proxmox on an old laptop... growing to what I have now. Each iteration has added complexity, but it's also added capability and resiliency.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#547

Post by faust201 »

leptons wrote: post #518
faust201 wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point about Apple is that everyone from zoom, slack etc will be forced to optimize for that 8GB. (Same like getting rid of awful flash player). Many a people need only a basic device for Netflix, YouTube, google docs or email or search/but flights tickets. That will be amazing. Many have job supplied laptop/desktop for great performance (made rubbish by AV scanners but that's different issue)

It's cute that you think any of that optimization will happen just because Apple crapped out a budget laptop.

It is saddening that you are ignorant in knowing that technology companies follow Apple's devices more carefully that other OS.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#548

Post by faust201 »

underlipton wrote: post #431
faust201 wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point about Apple is that everyone from zoom, slack etc will be forced to optimize for that 8GB. (Same like getting rid of awful flash player). Many a people need only a basic device for Netflix, YouTube, google docs or email or search/but flights tickets. That will be amazing. Many have job supplied laptop/desktop for great performance (made rubbish by AV scanners but that's different issue)

>(Same like getting rid of awful flash player). I was looking up an old video game homepage the other day for some visual design guidance. It was archived on the Wayback Machine, but with Flash gone, so was the site. Ruffle can't account for every edge case. Flash was good. It was the bedrock of a massive chunk of the Old Net. The only thing awful are the people who pushed and cheered for its demise just so that Appl…

It was awful especially if you use open source OS like Linux. It slowed the computer, fans full speed. Wtf are you smoking?

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#549

Post by faust201 »

underlipton wrote: post #490
alsetmusic wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash was a dumpster fire on MacOS. Apple probably would have supported it on the iPhone if Adobe had stopped it from crashing apps and made it performant on Apple's primary platform at the time (the Mac). I remember pulling up crash logs for people showing them that Flash was in every one of the Safari crashes the wanted me to fix. I told them it was out of my hands.

All the other browsers managed it fine. That sounds like a Safari problem. Which would be totally in line with Apple's modus operandi.

Did you use netscape?

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#550

Post by SergeAx »

torben-friis wrote: post #43
barrkel wrote: post #15

I don't buy the central thesis of the article. We won't be in a supply crunch forever. However, I do believe that we're at an inflection point where DC hardware is diverging rapidly from consumer compute. Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you rent, or buy a time…

The thing is, other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer limit you? My phone has 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage, laptops today are ridiculous compared to anything I studied with. I'm not arguing mind you, just trying to understand the usecases people are thinking of here.

> other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer limit you? As a software engineer: 1) I need Docker to run some dependencies for my project: databases, caches, things like that 2) My IDE is quite a resource hog 3) I prefer my build process to be as fast as possible.
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