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I do not remotely get the love for shitty Bethesda games using that engine but my roommate loves them. Fallout 3 and 4 and Skyrim are all unplayable messes to this day if you're playing the game as it was delivered, even on the extra-special diamond uranium game of the decade edition. This is...

You use Storage Spaces using ReFS, something that's available with Windows Server. You can create a double-parity volume using a pool of seven drives minimum (plus a cache tier if you want faster drives for that). Storage spaces are kind of weird because there are fewer tunable parameters than...

Basically the same thing. I don't actually want the HBA doing RAID calculations. I'm perfectly happy to let software do all the RAID calculations and use something that's well understood and portable to other hardware without needing an extra $900 controller. Plus it gives a couple of the 48...

I don't know how much you know about this, but Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 edition branched off down two paths. One of them is the TSR-WotC-Hasbro IP that is currently 5th edition D&D. The other is a continuation of the 3.5 edition rules and completely separate lore and now a newer but VERY SIMILAR...

This part of the USA primarily has tornados and ice storms. When I was little, I experienced a near miss from a tornado. It traveled through a corn field that was less than a mile from my house. The same tornado wiped the next town down the road (all ~three dozen houses, church and school) off...

The event my roommate is working this weekend, Windy City Smokeout, physically blew away event areas from wind gusts, has been damaged by hail and is also dealing with an expanding sinkhole in the United Center parking lot. She's a plague of locusts and a sea of blood away from full on Book of...

ORD is a pain to get to if you drive. It's not a big deal at all if you take trains.

I'm usually looking for more for wireless connectivity in dicking stations, but big kudos if someone manages to work Thunderbolt into the name of theirs. re Surface: I like them as devices for students and that is how I am most familiar with them, but I do think an individual needs to pay for...

There's a whole lot of nothing out by Cicero but you can ride the Orange Line in to downtown if you want to get downtown. I don't mind going to O'Hare myself, but as obnoxious getting there can be, I have actual mental scars from going to Midway: my father decided the perfect driving lesson for...

I have a lot of NUCs in service. Those and Lenovo SFF systems are the majority of what I've deployed over the last several years. I have nothing bad to say about them. They're the very definition of vanilla. Lenovo's m700whatever systems can have pretty impressive configurations as well. Those...

There's a twitter or tumblr or something post from the spouse of a NASA engineer about how thoroughly space wants to kill humans in space, and the exhausting efforts needed to keep the ISS running. This is something that makes the billionaire hobby of building rockets and, in some conjectures...

They bragged about not seeking regulatory compliance. There is a global standard for submersibles, but it doesn't have any specific rules for super-deep dives. They called their craft a research vessel and all passengers were said to be employees conducting research. A dead billionaire's family...

I used to have developer environments on VMs that were secured separately from whatever the rest of their PCs were doing, but running locally. Now the virtual desktops run on the same physical hardware as the servers where their code winds up and they just get a software defined VPN for their...

Google Photos has private albums even if the underlying version of the OS does not and TECHNICALLY Snapchat is an app that supports dual logins, which allow a user to quickly switch from one account to another. Snapchat only grants the ability to log in on more than once for a single account at...

For a lot of people. Gaming is the most significant use case for a typical PC. If things like Geforce Now and Stadia are acceptable in general, there's not much of a case to be made for having fat client systems on the vast majority of computers. Apple's version of this argument is contained in...

Apparently not even Microsoft is asking its employees to transition to Windows 11 if they're happy on 10. Maybe they know the "every other version is decent" pattern is real? Maybe it's even deliberate. Microsoft is REALLY pushing 365 hard for end users and the current corporate messaging is...

Attractive people have been using looks to their advantage since forever, LM. No generation has a monopoly on it. With the GenZs, the fact that there are sexy pics around somewhere is absolutely taken for granted. They grew up with cameraphones and instagram and they've been taking racy pictures...

Funny parental sanity story: My domestic partner is still a part-time stripper. She doesn't dance very often and summer and fall are the busy times for her real job but every once in a while, say for example when she manages to get a championship-grade traffic ticket (22mph over in a...

Apropos of absolutely nothing, I downloaded the demo and then almost immediately bought the full version of Amid Evil (It's probably on Steam if that's your thing). It's a bit like Heretic or Hexen from the early days of FPS shooters, with a fantasy vibe, fast character movement and no...

It's not that difficult? The addin board runs $3 - 500 and unless they update the u.3 spec again, it's portable to whatever PC you need it to be in. It's acceptable to get access to the 16TB Enterprise SSDs that aren't being made with quality NAND in consumer space.

You can absolutely move to U.2/U.3s HBA to get a high endurance/high capacity disk interface if you feel the need. The reasons for doing so now are very similar to the reasons SCSI was an option 25 years ago. Such HBAs do not require bifurcation support, and there's nothing wrong with using...

Disney Circle is still a pretty decent option if you don't want to spend that much time faffing around with it.

Everything in the RTX4000 series can be considered downgraded by one designation based on past standards of performance and pricing vs older generations. The 4080 probably should've been a 4070Ti, for example.

4060 came out. It is not particularly better in any way than a 3060Ti until the AI frame generation stuff is put in play. The A770 and 6700XT are both in the same price range. Intel released better Iris/Alchemist drivers just this week and while the 6700XT is 10 - 15% more expensive, it also...

You're not worried at all that the recent change in government in Finland might spread through the rest of Vikingland?

Roblox is a massively popular game construction platform. People who make games using it can even get paid if their creations get popular enough. The very first time I saw it, several people were sexting in the open world text chat, and a little more exploration found games within it that were...

Unfortunately, screens are on some level a necessity. Most educational programs at this point incorporate Chromebooks or ipads. Take the device away and the kiddo can't do homework. The GenZs who live with me all have stories about how much they got away with even with a desktop PC in a public...

Chicago has the worst air quality in the USA today because half of Canada is on fire right now. The air smells a little funny and visibility out my window is about a third of what it normally is. I usually have a small joke that the southern tip of Lake Michigan is probably one of the safest...

Disney has a thing called Circle that gives parents decent control over screen time. It's $10/month, but I'm told it's very flexible. I'd probably segregate everything on distinct SSIDs and then enforce connectivity limits with a combination of a proxy server and more restrictive DNS, if...

The issue with 2U for me is that it will bump me up to the point in my datacenter billing where I need to pay for a full rack every month rather than half a rack. As you might imagine, I'd rather not go there. I bought Dell hardware from Savemyserver a couple times, but it's been a few years...

Looks like $2000 for an R740xd with 24C/48T, 32GB RAM and a 2x 10Gb NIC. The TDP on both CPUs pushes your requirements but there's probably a reduced power option in the firmware; 85W looks about as low as Xeon Scale stuff seems to get and these are sold with two CPUs. I'm pretty sure you can...

I'm finding that U.2/U.3 support on a backplane is the most exotic part of my wishlist. An Adaptec HBA1200 is affordable and can support tri-mode (SAS/u.2/u.3) operation, but I'm really only seeing u.2/u.3 backplanes on Supermicro and the usual Tier 1 OEMs. Supermicro makes a 20 bay 1U...

My go-to for this purpose is SpaceSniffer. Wiztree works faster, but I like that Space sniffer displays everything in the context of a single window representing the source drive or folder. Also: Seeing the sizes of games on dd's PC makes me glad I'm not a gamer.

Where I live, it's all overhead lines. We have a lot of tall trees. This means we can have power outages just from WIND.

Apparently somebody has managed to cobble together enough video footage that there's supposed to be a feature length documentary by the end of this current week. That won't be sensational at all, right? I went to a drag show in Tampa last night. I took pictures and got to hang out with some...

This stuff is why I'd rather use full software RAID. I think most of us here have had a "but it was supposed to work!" moment with a RAID setup, even if it might've been back in the days of IDE devices.

Not always. Some businesses still want hardware on premises. Data centers generally have power sorted but sometimes they charge extra for access to the giant batteries or fancy real time power monitoring. The last nasty long term outage where my servers are, the pumps that feed diesel into the...

That's actually interesting to know, although I'm curious what led you to experiment with this configuration. Broken RAID1?

FWIW, a lot of server systems I support need more than five minutes to shut down properly. 90 seconds for a desktop to shut down? Cool. VM or database host? Not so much. The batteries I use are generic but I haven't found OEM batteries to work any better.

I buy them for all my customers with on premises servers and the bill for replacing them in mine kind of gets split up in the labor cost of swapping everyone else. I do them every couple years after finding that there's a pretty steep decline in capacity in the third year pretty much across the...

Every two years in September.

It's a lot easier to design a spherical bathysphere to deal with pressure than to make an oblong one. The design that went poof is partly carbon fiber composite and partly titanium and that on its own is a little bit suspect. Who knows how they joined the materials? They were really proud of...

My father was a Naval Officer and these days he's a bit of a Naval historian. He used to tell me about shipwrecks and naval disasters, and it always struck me how desolate almost any fate besides safe passage can happen to anyone who takes to the open water. There's a story in the news right...

The Christopher Titus Tool has a bunch of nifty stuff built in to it for first run on a new PC. It installs my friend Chocolatey and also brings up a quick menu that can fix a whole bunch of things all in one go, like restoring the old style right click menu and turning off telemetry in Windows...

There is some pretty justifiable complaint that Burnham is the most Mary Sue character ever to show up in a Trek series. She's Spock's heretofore unknown sister. She's a disgraced and insubordinate officer who somehow manages to ping pong between losing her commission and having command rank...

If nothing else, I feel like I've identified a product that needs to exist.

There aren't many options for a roll-your-own 1U hot swap storage chassis. Newegg has a discontinued Athena Power case with 12 2.5" bays, but those bays only supports an older Mini-SAS connector spec that doesn't include the high-bandwidth interface I'm looking for, and I don't see an option...

My family used to have a hi-fi system that did that. Wound up that part of the electrical wiring in the house wasn't done properly and so the wiring was acting as an antenna that would sometimes become an inducted antenna for high power frequencies. We got air traffic bound for Midway and fire...

Picard is awful. It's just a string of guest roles for no particular reason. Lower Decks is great, although I do understand why a lot of people say that it's not really Trek. If you haven't seen it yet, it's animated and the vibe varies between Star Trek continuity porn and absurd humor. It's...

Not sure anyone fully cares, but Paramount put the entire first season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds up on Youtube. Strange New Worlds is excellent through and through and it's well worth watching, capturing both the fun of the Original Series and the gravitas of Deep Space Nine.