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LeonenTheDK

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Why I love FreeBSD 4 months ago

When my company was briefly running FreeBSD on new (5 years ago) Lenovo servers with Intel NICs, we too had some issues. I don't remember the exact details, but our sysadmin at the time had to do a bunch of work to get it fixed.

Cloudflare was down 8 months ago

Nice, just got woken up by my outage alarms, just for it to be Cloudflare again. At least it's _my_ problem!

But my goodness, they're really struggling over the last couple weeks... Can't wait to read the next blog post.

I actually ended up purchasing this unit and getting it running with the instructions from [0] mentioned elsewhere. RAM and everything else seems to be almost identical to the dongles. (4 core A53 CPU running just shy of 1Ghz, 512 MB RAM, 4GB flash storage).

The only couple issues I had getting a plain old Linux on it from the instructions was that it didn't like the image buddy prepared custom for his tutorial in [0]. The solution was to follow the source links in the article, and flash it with a "generic" image from the person I believe originally got Linux working on these types of devices. I can't overstate how good these instructions and discussions in the comments are. The other thing was the modem didn't work, but all that required was copying the files from the original modem partition on the device to /lib/firmware of the new Linux installation. Super straight forward.

Sadly the screen, while it did function with the stock firmware, doesn't work out of the box with the Linux I flashed to it. Digging around, I think I've determined it's a DSI display, with maybe some evidence of Linux showing its there, but the kernel I have wasn't compiled with any support to run it. I'm not knowledgeable at all in this space though so there's that.

It's a great device, all the same benefits of the dongles, but with a battery to boot. If only I knew how to get that screen to work.

[0] https://wvthoog.nl/openstick/

EverQuest 1 year ago

I haven't played retail in the last few years so I'm not sure if that rep has changed, but on my main I never bothered to regain the Booty Bay rep and was still KOS to them. Hilarious.

Bad Moon Rising 2 years ago

That's brutal they'd execute the stand-in after the celestial omen was deemed to have passed. I wonder if the person standing in knew it was coming? Was it a great honour to take the king's place during a crisis, or was the person put there in a more deceptive way?

Absolutely living the dream! Being a sustainable one man SaaS is what I'd ultimately love to be, but not only do I have no ideas about what to SaaS, I highly doubt I'd have the drive to follow through if I did.

Kudos to you, and to another 9 years!

Also I'm stealing the term Hobbit software, talk about comfy.

[dead] 2 years ago

That's what I said elsewhere here, it's just so eggregious. Hadn't considered it might be a rival trying to burn competition.

Or maybe the Botting process went bad lol.

[dead] 2 years ago

It's actually crazy, I got here from a notification via pushbullet (which usually sends me hour old high point posts). But here we are with it barely 15 mins old. You'd think they'd try to not be so eggregious about it.

Very interesting, I had no idea there was that much potential impact on the brain. I started doing it for the usual weight loss reasons, as well as building better eating habits long term. But it seems like there's some other plausible benefits to be had. Interested to see what future research reveals.

Popcorn Time 0.5.0 2 years ago

That's kind of what I'm thinking, after getting my 4k HDR TV I was blown away by the filesizes needed to make full use of it.

Just the most popular stuff and limited to 1080p or less though... Yeah 16Tb is pushing it.

I've been keeping an eye on the Simula One for some time, it does what I think you're looking for[1]. I have to assume outside of the Apple ecosystem this type of this is already possible with existing VR headsets, but the closest I've seen is Virtual Desktop[2].

I guess for the Apple ecosystem we've gotta wait for some software updates to make it more useful. Not that I can justify paying my own money for the Vision Pro or Simula One.

[1] https://youtu.be/a3uN7d51Cco?t=16 [2] https://www.vrdesktop.net/

I wonder if that "theatre experience" would be a significant improvement for most people. I already do this with friends remotely by jumping on discord and hitting play on whatever service we're using at the same time. There more more automatically in-sync solutions out there for sure, but I can't see doing this in VR being more than a novelty that wears out after a few sessions.

Only in the sense that I'm not being contacted my recruiters on the reg. My employer hasn't had any layoffs and carries no debt, despite sales being down. Probably helps that we're very small and already pretty lean.

Even if there is something to "come after us", and it's intelligent, I've seen it argued that most if not all of the easy to get "advanced" resources (eg oil, some minerals) have been harvested. For a new civilization to rise and reach our levels again from scratch would be very difficult.

I haven't checked the veracity of that statement recently though, I'll see if I can't find it again.

I'm curious if you could talk about any of the consequences at all. There's a very similar situation unfolding at my company currently. New project running on FreeBSD because that's what the admin likes, and he takes every opportunity to bash Linux that he can. I'd like to prepare for potential pitfalls best I can.

We've already had issues around compatibility with third party software and OS upgrades (which surprised me in particular, likely a mistake on the admin's part but I'm not privy to the details).

FreeBSD seems like a wonderful OS for purpose-built hardware (eg pfsense, PlaystationOS, Netflix's distribution servers), but I'd much prefer to be on something common for the general compute. I don't even want to know what hiring another/replacement admin will be like in the future (we're entirely on-prem in a city that's away from a major population centre, niche enough as it is without adding FreeBSD on top).

milliForth 3 years ago

I have heard nothing new out of Green Arrays but the site still seems to be selling the boards. If I had free cash available I'd try ordering one just to see. It's a really interesting concept and I'd love to see it developed.

I see the sqlite hype as a (legitimate) pendulum swing away from defaulting to 'web scale' everything to a realization that most of the systems we design don't need it.

That was exactly my thought, the majority of work that gets put out there isn't going to need to scale to many different nodes to serve thousands+ of concurrent users. If you're actually serving tonnes of traffic and need clustering or high end redundancy, have at 'er. But for most of the professional work I've done, SQLite is more than enough (provided you back it up properly!)

I think this is also influenced by my philosophy of keep things simple and only scale when you need to. I haven't had need of k8s or anything like that and suspect many companies serving small-medium traffic loads don't either.

For me it goes beyond repair, if I sell the device later and the next user wants more RAM, they have the option to do so. Plus bringing ram forward between mainboard upgrades (save for transitions between DDR4, DDR5, and whatever else may come in the future).

I remember now too Dell was working on a new memory module for laptops called CAMM, I think it was aiming to bridge the gap between soldered and SODIMMs, but I'm not sure where its development currently is, nor the real world differences.