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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Sounds like you’ve got quite the esoteric setup, hehe :)

    My personal solution isn’t exactly small as I have two identical four-disk NAS servers which operate with one as primary and the other as a read-only mirror of the primary. For off-site I don’t have an automated solution but just backup onto external every so often and leave it with a family member.

    A good solution could be as simple as a raspberry pi with an external SSD at a friend or family’s place, and then make that accessible via VPN to your home network.


  • tiramichu@lemm.eetolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldIt broke again
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    2 days ago

    SSDs at the end of their lifespan do tend to fail more gracefully than HDDs, as even when they become fully worn and unable to take new writes, they will often still allow reads.

    But, that depends on the specific type of failure.

    I had an SSD fail in the same way as yours, where the controller chip or something along the path there died, and it went from fully working to toast in an instant.

    Some drives are more reliable, some drives are less reliable, but the only rule is that any drive can break, at any time, old or new.

    Always have backups.


  • Turned out that scratches can easily be avoided if you are careful, and - more importantly - a few scratches won’t prevent the disc being read, thanks to the error correction.

    Back in the day I remember using one of those AOL internet sign-up junk discs as a drinks coaster, for several years. As you’d expect from grinding around on my desk it was filthy and scratched to total hell, never mind the thermal stress of hundreds of hot tea mugs being sat on it. I’d never seen a CD looking so bad.

    One day out of curiosity I decided to wipe it off and put it in the PC to see what would happen. I was genuinely surprised when the AOL splash popped up (and also a little disgusted because I had no love for AOL and was hoping I’d killed it)





  • It wasn’t shit from the start though, was it.

    Back when Windows 95 was a new thing it blew everything else out of the water. Suddenly there was an operating system that even regular people were paying attention to and getting excited about, and it actually deserved the hype.

    Windows was a product at that time, where Microsoft made their money by people purchasing the operating system. And so the incentive was to make a great product that people wanted to buy and use.

    This was true all the way through the Windows XP and 7 days, and only with the release of 8 and especially 10 did we start to see things change.

    Microsoft - who used to put so much effort into trying to prevent people installing cracked Windows - suddenly didn’t seem to care so much anymore about enforcing that. They’d realised that the true exploitable value was in the online ecosystem and the data, not the product, and that was the turning point for everything.




  • The switch has a lot of similarities with phone hardware, but in a different form factor.

    Almost all phones work like this, in that they are mobile-first devices which are designed to depend on the battery.

    A major reason for this design choice is power stability.

    The switch (just like a phone) can charge off any USB power supply, even really low power ones. The power coming in might be enough to slowly charge, but not enough to keep up when you do the most demanding tasks, like playing a graphically intensive game.

    For that reason, the switch requires some charge in the battery, so that if the power draw spikes too much for the charger then the battery takes up the slack and things keep working nicely, rather than unexpected crashing or other oddities.

    In the end, demanding the battery has at least a little charge to run is basically a safety feature to ensure that you have a good experience, and the switch does not die in unexpected ways.




  • There are still times where it’s convenient. I have some display cases with integrated lighting and the inline switches are incoveniently between the case and the wall so its super handy to turn it on and off at the plug.

    Being able to turn things off at the plug also reduces standby/phantom power when things are in sleep, which for some devices adds up more energy usage than you’d think.

    Sometimes when people go on holiday for two weeks they like to disconnect the electrical items in their house for safety. With switched sockets you can just turn them off instead.

    I’m sure I could live just fine without switched sockets, but it’s convenient they are there.



  • What else are you going to do, though?

    If you have some particular and complicated task then sure you’d probably write a program for it in a specific high-level language. But that isn’t what the shell is for.

    If you’ve already got a bunch of apps and utilities and want to orchestrate them together to do a task, that’s a good shell use case.

    Or if you have a system that needs setup and install tasks doing on it to prepare for running your actual workload, that’s also a task which the shell is ideally suited to.

    Shell scripting always has a place, and I can’t see it being made obsolete any time soon.





  • It’s quite easy to understand, even though it’s bullshit.

    When the sales department has a good month and makes loads of sales, the business too has a good month. The activity of those individuals directly correlates to revenue on a month by month basis, so management are naturally going to be incentivised to give the sales team perks and bonuses as motivation.

    In a given month the IT/dev department doesn’t “generate” any money at all, they only cost. We know they generate value in other ways of course, because the product the sales team sell is surely built and operated by the dev team, but because the relationship is indirect management don’t care to reward you.

    Reward sales with nice perks -> Revenue goes up

    Reward devs with nice perks -> Revenue doesn’t change

    So of course management doesn’t see the benefit in giving more money to tech, because it doesn’t seem like you get anything back.

    Of course, the reality is that investment in tech will make the product and the business better and more profitable, but it takes months or years to see the impact of changes, and management has a short attention span.