Y’know what, I honestly haven’t looked at what the PCIe lane layout is like on newer chipsets. Maybe it’s gotten better since I last really paid attention like 5+ years ago. I remember in early-mid AM4 there was a lot of grumbling about how there’s only 20 PCIe 3 lanes followed by early PCIe 4 platforms that would give only 16-20 lanes with another 8 or so PCI 3 lanes. I also didn’t really pay much attention to AMD before AM4 given how far behind Intel they were. But I could be entirely out of date now that I think about it

So hardware that may still be perfectly usable but predates NVMe should be tossed out then?

The exact same thing you already have to do to upgrade the memory on such a computer, you go buy used/old stock DDR3 or cannibalize from another system. Pre-NVMe systems are DDR3 era and older. Time goes on, interfaces update and anyone looking for compatibility with their older system will need to either use an adapter or buy used/old stock. If there’s enough demand like with motherboards there can be a random Chinese brands making new hardware for old platforms using a mix of new and cannibalized parts

I did similar when preparing my wife and I for windows 10 EOL. I went back to Linux on the new drive, my wife to Windows 11. Honestly both have a similar amount of issues (mostly wake from sleep challenges on Linux, although my PC wasn’t great about waking from sleep on Windows to begin with) and most importantly my wife can still play Fortnite and I can have fun trying new stuff out and reveling at how every single game I try just works on Linux whereas 5 years ago it was more of a 50/50 chance whether or not a game would work

Does require you to have the PCIe lanes for it, BIOS support for booting to PCIe (which Intel 6th gen core CPUs were the first to support. 4th gen never did but some had m.2 slots and NVMe support for secondary drives and the 5th gen X99s had some receive BIOS updates to support but that’s its own can of worms) and both Intel and AMD have historically been pretty bad about being stingy about PCIe lane availability

Plus to run more than a single NVMe on a single slot your motherboard either needs to support PCIe bifurcation which is almost exclusively an enterprise feature or they need to have the right lane configuration available to support that x16 slot handing out 4x4 lanes (or 2x8/2x4 for dual NVMe)

Yeah my recent IT experience is similar. I redeployed monitors that had “vista-ready” badges on them during the monitor shortages of 2021-2 I’ve replaced so many of those analogue to digital adapters (usually because the computer only has 1 digital output and 2 displays to drive, or 1 HDMI and 1 DisplayPort but the displays only support HDMI and I only have VGA to HDMI adapters, etc.)

The challenge simply comes down to the fact that displays tend to last so much longer than the computers they’re connected to. Heck my wife is using my old 1080p monitors because they were an upgrade over the even older 720p monitors she had before which may well find themselves mated up to my kids’ new computer

They’re called ozone generators. Handy machines for getting smells out of stuff but not anything you can be in the room while it runs

My general opinion is that organ donation should be opt-out. Most people aren’t organ donors not due to any real objections to the practice but purely because they don’t know that they aren’t.

Make it easy to opt out for any reason, but also make it easy to opt back in if you change your mind, because bodily autonomy is important in any free nation.

But also people are lazy idiots and for no-brainer medical questions like vaccines and organ donation, they should have to put in a minimum amount of work to continue a bad practice for the wider population. Make the bad practice slightly more work than the good one.

There are no doctors in rural America

Yeah this is false far more often than it’s true. I live in a small town (the kind where ambulance and fire services are all volunteers) with nothing but farming communities and farm/hunting land surrounding me. I have 4 hospitals in a 30 mile radius, and more clinics than I care to count

Yes there are some very poor rural regions of states where access to healthcare is a struggle, but they are the exception rather than the norm

I’m in the states and my kids had the option to get their flu shots at the school this year. Somehow one of my kids was skipped despite us immediately signing and returning the consent forms.

It does feel like it’s very hit or miss whether or not flu shots are offered at the schools though. I remember getting the flu vaccine at the school just once and I never remember seeing lines or anything at any of my schools for flu vaccines the years I didn’t get it at the school. I imagine they only do it when either there’s special funding for it or the data says they especially need a lot more vaccination this year

My sister in law has a neighbor who flooded his home and immediately blamed the Democrats…I wish I was joking…

To be fair, most languages end up using English words for stuff that’s tech related. For example, I’ve been learning Italian and actually laughed out loud when I learned that the Italian word for coach (which seems to be used for both buses and trains) is “Pullman” it gets even more obvious when it’s a computer-related technology

Probably next year I might try to learn a bit of German because I keep encountering Germans writing in German on various parts of the internet and it would be fun to join the club (plus I’d love to visit Germany sometime so that would remove one barrier for sure)

I absolutely have been, but holy crap this job market sucks. I’ve gotten so close on multiple interviews just to get passed up at the last minute (or scarier, they’ll announce they’ve decided not to fill the role at all!)

On the upside, with this contracting gig I’m making more than I made when I worked for them full time while only working ~30 hours a week fully remotely so it’s not a bad gig at all. I’m just frustrated that my boss wants to get me a job offer, the CTO wants to get me a job offer, I have the director of safety saying he wants me to get a job offer, but the CFO just isn’t budging

To be fair, penises happen to be shaped like the most efficient rockets we know how to build right now.

Now, the fact that we have a space race between private space companies each mostly funded by a single individual that’s a horrifying demonstration of the failures of the world’s tax systems. No individual nor individual family should be that wealthy.

lawmakers were really putting the peoples’ interests first, they would have just said that for a part-time job the employer would have to provide benefits based on the fraction of 40 hours the employee worked (e.g. 20 hours is half-benefits).

Then shitty jobs would only give people up to 10 hours per week so they’d have to work 4 jobs to get close to 40 hours, and of course that quarter benefits wouldn’t cover jack shit. Quarter benefits and people working 4 jobs would also make it a 75% chance that any employee you hire and schedule at ~10 hours per week doesn’t accept the benefits thereby saving the business money

Better solution would be single payer healthcare, i.e. Medicare for all, plus expanding social security to pay more than a starvation amount would also be ideal. I’ve also previously outlined the thoughts of expanding SNAP/Foodstamps to all, housing assistance vouchers to all and Social Security to all to effectively reach UBI based entirely off of existing programs that tens of millions of Americans are already on right now. Work becomes how you fund hobbies and a better lifestyle and economic downturns don’t hurt normal people as much

Korea wasn’t legally considered a war for bullshit political reasons for far too long and as a result veterans and families of veterans were denied benefits they should have received after giving some or all for the country now fucking them over

For similar reasons in my current independent contractor role I’m limited to working less than 32 hours per week, presumably to prevent claims of being misclassified as a contractor.

Now as for why I’m an independent contractor and not a full time employee that’s down to freaking corporate politics following being laid off, leaving for another role and then being begged to come back because they needed my expertise and organizational knowledge (I’ve been heavily trained to pick up the torch for an employee who’s retiring in 2 years, which with the amount of undocumented nonsense and organization-specific decisions it would take a solid 2 years just to get anyone trained up on everything and I’m the only one with the technical and organizational knowledge in the organization right now) so in short they’d greatly reduce costs by bringing me on full time but the CFO won’t approve the job offer (and that’s literally the only stakeholder holding it back)

When I started my career in IT I consciously started keeping a variety of backup careers in mind, and I intentionally keep my expenses where I could simply swap careers and make it all work financially.

Probably my most viable backup plan is to move into banking or finance. Decent money available there, still tickles the part of my brain that loves understanding numbers and processes while also working my brain entirely differently than troubleshooting network problems. Data science, HIT and HRIT are also options in considering if I want to stay in the realm of IT, but that depends on how burnt out I get really

In my personal life I’ve been picking up more off-screen hobbies to help stave off burnout among other reasons. I’m hoping career-wise I can promote myself into management before I get too burnt out, but you never know

The heck are you talking about? The baseline security config in Debian is far better than most distros out there, and QubesOS is really only realistic for folks with the threat models of those in C-suites or targets of nation state hackers. Seriously what makes your threat model so severe that you need better isolation and security than what Debian provides (which is already far above average) yet you’ll still post about it on forums?

One could argue that reduced maintenance costs are a value from the cloud providers. E.g. when my AWS VM dies I can get a new one back in <10m (faster with automation). When my self-hosted server dies I need to have planned for that with a warm spare and someone needs to physically be connecting new hardware

Yes this is absolutely a value proposition that CTOs/CIOs/IT Dept Heads need to be considering. You’re not just paying for the VMs and storage, you’re also paying to outsource all of the hardware and some of the configuration work, however you still need admins to manage all of the VMs and configs. If that labor savings is actually enough to cover the immensely increased cost of cloud resources over local/colocated resources that you own (the infrastructure costs are pretty minimal in comparison) than awesome, more power to you.

I really think the biggest value is putting all of your baseline compute in hardware that you own, whether on-prem or colocated, them if you need bursts of resources place that in the cloud. With hardware you own you can spin up temporary VMs, you can keep legacy VMs around, you can fling data around with impunity. These are all tasks that have real costs in the cloud that they will happily bill you for.

But your owned hardware is a set quantity, so if you are rapidly hiring a thousand people or bringing in a new organization or have publicly facing services seeing immeense growth or anything like that and need more capacity immediately, you can’t. It can easily take weeks to bring more servers online even in a rush job, meanwhile the cloud can hand you capacity immediately. That’s the value of the cloud that’s being missed

At the scale of one of the top websites by daily active users, owning your own infrastructure is absolutely cheaper than just throwing it on AWS. At a more realistic smaller scale where you might exceed the bandwidth available for your own hardware, there’s also the option of a hybrid setup where your content is mainly hosted on hardware that you control and then it automatically scales out to AWS or similar when demand spikes.

There’s really tons of ways to make web apps and server infrastructure cheaper than just renting it from a cloud provider, but many orgs lack the vision and drive to do so and just fork money over to [insert hyperscaler here] and watch their app go down when that hyperscaler goes down. I really question this mentality especially when the same organization has constant discussions about not liking how large their cloud provider bills are