Endorkend

They have a secondary motherboard that hosts the Slot CPUs, 4 single core P3 Xeons. I also have the Dell equivalent model but it has a bum mainboard.

With those 90’s systems, to get Windows NT to use more than 1 core, you have to get the appropriate Windows version that actually supports them.

Now you can simply upgrade from a 1 to a 32 core CPU and Windows and Linux will pick up the difference and run with it.

In the NT 3.5 and 4 days, you actually had to either do a full reinstall or swap out several parts of the Kernel to get it to work.

Downgrading took the same effort as a multicore windows Kernel ran really badly on a single core system.

As for the Sun Fires, the two models I mentioned tend to be highly available on Ebay in the 100-200 range and are very different inside than an X86 system. You can go for 400 or higher series to get even more difference, but getting a complete one of those can be a challenge.

And yes, the software used on some of these older systems was a challenge in itself, but they aren’t really special, they are pretty much like having different vendors RGB controller softwares on your system, a nuisance that you should try to get past.

For instance, the IBM 5000 series raid cards were simply LSI cards with an IBM branded firmware.

The first thing most people do is put the actual LSI firmware on them so they run decently.

Oh, I get it. But a baseline HP Proliant from that era is just an x86 system barely different from a desktop today but worse/slower/more power hungry in every respect.

For history and “how things changed”, go for something like a Sun Fire system from the mid 2000’s (280R or V240 are relatively easy and cheap to get and are actually different) or a Proliant from the mid to late 90’s (I have a functioning Compaq Proliant 7000 which is HUGE and a puzzlebox inside).

x86 computers haven’t changed much at all in the past 20 years and you need to go into the rarer models (like blade systems) to see an actual deviation from the basic PC alike form factor we’ve been using for the past 20 years and unique approaches to storage and performance.

For self hosting, just use something more recent that falls within your priceclass (usually 5-6 years old becomes highly affordable). Even a Pi is going to trounce a system that old and actually has a different form factor.

You should replace that thing with something more modern. I had a 5000p chipset system someone gave me with dual quad cores and an assload of ram.

The shitty box idled over 400W. I went as far as getting low power ram and the newest CPU it would support that also supported frequency and power scaling and it still used over 400W on idle.

This while I had a Xeon E5 box that was only a few years younger that uses more in the neighborhood of 50W on idle and utterly decimates the 5000 series box in CPU performance.

You’re probably better of fetching some old Ryzen 1800x system of ebay for higher performance and leagues lower power consumption.

As for the raid, don’t use it. Hardware raid has always been shit and in modern Linux and Windows is as good as completely depricated.

The discussion was already had

I tried TikTok some time ago and got bored with it.

I’m the type that prefers long form content. I watch 20-240 minute videos on YouTube,

I never got into Vines or the Vines/TikTok clone thing YouTube is doing either.

So most of the crap I see from TikTok is here, on Reddit and Mastodon.

And normally only the most entertaining crap from a platform gets to other platforms and I’m not impressed by what I’ve seen, at all.

Well, TikTok can’t get any worse, right?

Plain Toast and bacon and eggs.

Fuck artificially limited choices.

Even as far back as XP/Vista Microsoft has wanted to run the file system as more of an adaptive database than a classical hierarchical file system.

The leaked beta for Vista had this included and it ran like absolute shit, mostly because harddrives are slow and ram was at a premium, especially in Vista as it was such a bloated piece or shit.

NTFS has since evolved to include more and more of these “smart” file system components.

Now they want to go full on with this “smart” approach to the filesystem.

It’ll still be slow and shit, just like it was 2 decades ago.

Pretty much this.

I’ve become so jaded with people in general I can’t be arsed bothering with what anyone but my wife and mother think of me, do to me or say to me.

(my dog and cat too tbh)

I tend to watch the whole Marvel lineup to this day starting early December and my wife and I watch the whole shebang of Harry Potter on Christmas eve and day.

March/April I tend to rewatch Boston Legal and the cliffnotes of Dragon Ball OG to Super. Rest of the shows I rewatch aren’t as tied to time of year.

I switched to Microsofts keyboard because of this.

The Google one used to be perfectly fine when you wrote multiple languages in a single sentence.

These days, even if I just write dutch, french or english (or, not and), it does absolutely idiotic autocorrects.

Don’t have that issue with Microsofts keyboard.

Also, the google one has become very laggy for me in certain apps, especially on my tablet. If I try to comment on a Youtube video, it takes a good 30 seconds before I can actually type anything.

An Israeli firm bought them.

First app I installed with fdroid is Yet another Call Blocker and it’s the one app I haven’t swapped out for an alternative yet.

I have some alone time with my wife.

I got a company to install an extra consumer grade internet connection with a different ISP on top of the main (already redundant) business one.

Sold it to them as being best for redundancy and to make sure that if sync traffic between our 6 locations was heavy, it wouldn’t impact the main line.

The main line was actually more than sufficient to handle 100x the heaviest traffic we ever had. We were right next to a university, which got us a hookup to the national backbone on fiber (this was in the age of T1 and T3 lines being the norm, 2 of those 6 locations had to make due with 256KB lines), so it was rock stable, blistering fast and because it was backbone connected, utterly and completely unrestricted and unmonitored by third party.

But the advantage of consumer lines in that period was that cable and DSL were starting to become common for consumers, at speeds comparable to most business internet lines. These also usually had dynamic IPs.

This was simply so my and my colleagues internet and at the time Napster traffic wouldn’t show up on the traffic logs and wouldn’t be identifiable by our official IP range :p

Because the delay is part of adblocker detection on non Chrome based browsers.

All I have left to say about Google and Youtube in particular is that Youtubes ads have become so problematic, both in amount and quality (like seriously, people get banned for using innocuous words in videos targeted at adult audiences, yet completely fucked up ads are squarely targeted at children) and at this point, it’s time for YouTube to die.

A new platform needs to come along.

Which will be hard since Google has such a stranglehold on the datacenter and backbone level that they have an absolute advantage when it comes to bandwidth and storage costs. Which is the main cost for video platforms like YouTube.

I suspect this is less of a slowdown and more of a “we’re trying to detect adblockers and in Chrome we can do most of this check on the application level which is fast, while on Firefox we have to do it the extra slow way and we CBA to optimize any of it because the delay is to our advantage.”

Yes.

In Belgium.

Generally you can only easily buy hunting rifles here.

But you can buy every kind of firearm if you get the proper licenses and have them registered.

My uncle is a gun nut. He doesn’t fire them other than the required qualification renewals. He’s more into them to show off and simply have them.

His most prized guns are a Barret M82-a1 and an antique “elephant gun” chambered in .577 Express.

He has a load of various revolvers, handguns, a couple ARs and an AK, all bought legally.

All but the “normal caliber” hunting rifles he owns are to be either disabled (firing pin removed) or stored at a shooting range.

Most of them are disabled and in a display case at his home. The Barret, 2 ARs and some of the handguns are at the shooting range.

EDIT: note, there are of course different regulations when you’re in a profession that requires a gun, like security.

My answer is how it is for your regular person that just wants guns for recreation or show.