ares35

at the office we have the ones you have to push down–and hold for the water to run. i’ve encountered them elsewhere and you get 10-20 seconds before the water shuts off… ours doesn’t. by the time you get your hand down to the water, it’s shut off.

ad-skip to present day. encryption and drm is being introduced into the new atsc 3.0 broadcast standard, and some stations are already using it.

i bought a few smr drives, knowing they were smr. they were cheaper, a lot cheaper than the same amount of space in cmr. used only for static media storage, so that’s not a big deal, really., but holy hell was it slow getting stuff on them initially.

i have a few self-powered externals that are also smr (quite common with those as they use 2.5in notebook hdd). when those things have to start shuffling bits around and rewriting tracks, sustained write speeds fall well under what even usb2 can send.

i bought a big external hdd recently on impulse… a clearance sale. it was really, really cheap. with the thinking that i could ‘shuck’ it because i’m short on space in a couple storage systems. i checked. i can, but i haven’t. hell, i haven’t even used it yet other than to run a full smart diag on it, followed by a full format and a read/write verify. took days. then i put it back in the box and have basically forgotten about it until now.

you have to be careful on what models you buy. some have usb built onto the controller board (no internal sata) or other things (e.g. encryption chip, weird power) that make it more difficult or even impossible to use the internal drive in an environment other than the enclosure it ships in.

patents is what you’re thinking of. and all (afaik) of them relating to mp3 format have expired.

usb nvme adapters are not expensive and it likely won’t be the only time you need it. they are a handy accessory to have on hand if you have nvme storage.

don’t mess around with imaging to a file on the zfs, then restoring it. simply clone nvme -> nvme using a usb nvme adapter then replace the internal with the clone.

that’s not a ‘problem’ everywhere.

if they dump the free refills here and still take 15 minutes to make a simple order, i’m going elsewhere. i’ve already cut way down because of cost and time, i’ll just forget they exist entirely. three competitors are literally adjacent. all three also have free refills, and all three can beat mcdonalds service times. prices are basically the same now, mcdonalds hasn’t had that advantage since before covid.

or onlyoffice

it’s a ‘refurb’, listings for those by third-party sellers are usually lacking in details, just saying ‘ssd’–not what type or brand. technically, op got what he ordered.

it really depends on where and from whom you get it. i’ve seen laptops sold as ‘brand new’ that have been cracked-open by sellers and ‘upgraded’ to sata ssd from nvme (worked on one a few months ago a guy just bought as new off amazon, with no indication in the listing that it isn’t as-built by hp originally); and i’ve seen more than a few ‘refurbished’ units (desktops and laptops) with cheap sata ssd used where nvme was available.

“decades” from now, autonomous vehicles will have their own roadways, designed for them and with the infrastructure needed for the tech at that future time.

the streets as we know them today will be for last-mile (literally) transport, pedestrians, bicycles, some forms of public transit, and what not.

Full autonomous vehicles, and particularly significant levels of adoption of them are decades away

the only way fully-autonomous vehicles will truly work and work as envisioned, is if user-operated ones are taken off the roads entirely. and yes, that is at least ‘decades away’

a pallet of 4th gens? i have a dozen left here from around that era that i can’t get rid of without literally giving them away. they’re ‘tolerable’ for a gui linux or win10 with an ssd, but the ‘performance per watt’ just isn’t there with hardware this old. i used a few of them (none in an always-on role, though), but the rest just sit in the corner, without home nor purpose.

these 800 g1s are, iirc, 12vo, so upgrade or reuse potential is a bit limited. most users would want windows, and win10 does run ‘ok enough’ on 4th gen, just make sure they’re booting from ssd (120gb minimum). but they’ll run into that arbitrarily-errected wall-of-obsolescence with trying to upgrade or install win11 when win10 retires in ~ 18 months (you can ‘rufus’ a win11 installer, but there’s no guarantee that you will be able to in the future). that limits demand and resale value of pretty much all the pre-8th gen hardware.

i personally bought them. no i don’t have money. didn’t then either. they were about $200 each, just prior to when vista started shipping (they were on sale). ram was upgraded from scrap, so was one of the video cards and one of the cpu (they were both originally windsors)–the other was bought new for ~$50 in late 2008 or so.

i have a couple dual core athlons (windsor and brisbane athlon 64 x2) at the office from that era. they are still used, even. have 8gb ddr2, dvdrw, and dx10-capable geforce cards.

and this is why i refused to give you my social back when i lived in your service area and had a land line installed.

just put a big pillow ‘on’ the external hard drive.

mine would go something like:

stuff i play: 1
stuff i used to play: 3
stuff i got just because it was cheap: 983785789567

apple does ‘support’ their hw better, it’s just that it’s a pretty low bar to start with these days. they and their competitors could do better–much better, but zomg! someone has to think of the shareholders. they’re far more important than users or the planet.