oh I wasn’t talking about storage media. I’m talking about rack servers, switches, storage arrays (with new drives), etc., etc… The older hardware can wear out/break (I used to do MTTF/MIL-HDBK-217 calculations for avionics) but generally speaking it’s got a lot of life left in it by the time it hits the surplus market. It’s also usually designed with redundancies/failover mechanisms which means you don’t have to bodge together inferior solutions.

Gotta see some evidence on that claim. Older stuff is more power hungry no doubt about it, but especially old data centre equipment is waaay more reliable and built with some very nice creature comforts.

This.

Almost all of my gear is bought used: switches, server, even memory. My main server is an old Dell C6100 blade server I got for $250. My disk array is a 12-bay SAN that I found for $50 and took a chance on being able to get it working. It’s power hungry but it’s got redundant everything and I have spare parts on the shelf next to it.

I’ve been branching into ARM servers a little and right now I’ve got an RK3588 board with 32G of RAM. That’s new (and expensive for me) but I got a fibre channel array for $20 that I’m going to try to make work with it. $8 FC HBA and a $12 cable along with a $30 m2-to-PCIe adapter intended for eGPUs. I’m not going for speed here, but used data centre equipment is nice and some of it is dirt cheap because it’s too slow for “real” work.

What? You have to show ID art the ticket counter or kiosk to get your boarding pass. Security usually only looks at the boarding pass, then you have to show ID at the gate. That’s how it’s been in Canada as long as I can remember.

My car is a diesel. I believe catalytic converters are the usual fare for gasoline engines.

and I like how you’re trying to steer the conversation in exactly the same way but in a different direction.

I mean seriously, you call the hypothetical person in some low level clerical/administrative role a fascist because they won’t quit because it’s simply not that easy to do so, yet in the same breath you say “I totally have so much power as an individual to drive the piss ass politics in a country of 330 million” – hypocrite much?

It’s just like the DEF tanks on 18 wheelers. I buy a 10L jug of it from Walmart for something like $10. In my trunk there’s a panel you remove and under it there’s a small cap very similar to the gas cap. Remove that, hook up the DEF bottle hose (the bottles come with a 12-15" corrugated hose) and very slowly pour it in. You don’t want to spill that stuff, it’s nasty not because it’s urea, but because when it dries it kind of crystallizes and makes a real bloody awful mess.

Replace the cap, replace the panel cover, close the trunk and you’re done for another 9-15mos.

It’s my understanding that the cheat was in all TDI models, but the smaller Jetta was particularly bad because it didn’t have a urea system and the fix for that model was to retrofit one. My Passat may have needed a more robust urea injector and not just software, but I can’t remember now. Either way on my year/model the fix was barely noticeable.

The dumbest part is that after I got my car updated (the Passat only needed a firmware update) the fuel economy was not even one MPG worse. It’s been a decade and I’m still regularly getting slightly better than 50MPG on the highway and low-30s in the city. There was no reason to cheat.

I’m currently driving that VW TDI – best car I’ve ever owned in 35 years. Next vehicle wasn’t going to be a Tesla, but perhaps an F150 Lightning if they ever get their head out their asses and offer a regular old e-pickup – I don’t want quad cab and a short bed, just two doors and a regular full size bed would be great. Alas, that’s hard to find in ICE, let alone electric.

Between (old) reddit, phpbb and smf… the old reddit model wins by a landslide in my opinion. I’ve used all of these over the years and absofuckinglutely HATE phpBB and SMF, with SMF earning slightly less hatred than phpBB.

I’m also old enough to have downloaded .QWK files for offline BBS forum reading/replying and even connecting to the internet over a FidoNet-internet bridge. Lemmy did the exact right thing in copying reddit’s format.

I mainly use it to generate unit tests and it frequently makes shit up that clearly won’t work. Like directly invoking non-exported functions that I deliberately choose not to export, because they don’t need to be exported.

If you work where I work, their solution is to just #include "the_file.c" so they have access to all the functions/variables I painstakingly marked static specifically to prevent them from trying to unit test the internals.