Root Access

Journeyman Geek

8:16 AM

Only if you have something better to do

my entire server's basically one big series of distractions made manifest ;p

DavidPostill

8:34 AM

@bwDraco You need a whiteboard to write notes to yourself reminding you to use the whiteboard ... :)

D.Hutchinson

thanks @bwDraco

Bob

@djsmiley2k cool. I'll probably try to preserve it but idk if it'll die or not. I'll try tomorrow, probably. Lemme know if it breaks and you still need it, prolly easier to spin up new than migrate

djsmiley2k

@Bob you blow it away when ever, i sorted i think now :)

Bob

o.O

djsmiley2k

why did it say it failed to send -_-

nuke it ;D

D.Hutchinson

8:41 AM

can I ask a silly question

Journeyman Geek

@djsmiley2k happens to me when my connection properly sucks

D.Hutchinson

I "grew out of" gaming ... around freshmen year of high school ... when I got into sports and band and whatnot ... how do people not grow out of gaming and are still gamers at, say, age 30?

Is it mostly a function of people you hang out with?

bertieb

@D.Hutchinson Gaming is fun, it pushes the right buttons (pun semi-intended?) in gamers' brains

(PS Morning all o/)

Having friends who are also into gaming also helps

At the end of the day it's just another hobby that people do because they enjoy it and can escape from the real world

Journeyman Geek

hm. planned power outage here for the next few hours. mini phone's got probably 2 days of charge thanks to the ludicilously large powerbank, but need to decide if I should concerve laptop power.

bertieb

(except for the EVE Online players who do it because they want a second job...)

Journeyman Geek

8:46 AM

hah

I apparently had a online person I wouldn't call a friend who made a living off SL ._.

bertieb

@JourneymanGeek Second Life? Dare I ask how they made money, or do we not want to know? :P

D.Hutchinson

I see @bertieb

Journeyman Geek

@bertieb shrug sold models to furries or something

bertieb

@JourneymanGeek Oh right, that's not what I was suspecting :P

Journeyman Geek

power is back up \o/

Locutus of Borg

8:57 AM

that was fast

Burgi

@bertieb internet ~~spreadsheets~~ spaceships is seriouis business

2

Journeyman Geek

naw, its been out for a few hours

bertieb

@Burgi So I've heard :D To be fair, some of the stories are pretty cool- organisation pays off, even in gamespace (space gamespace?)

D.Hutchinson

remember the game ... Resident Evil?

that's ... the last time I played a video game ...

Burgi

@Bob that is an awful UI, no wonder it happened

Locutus of Borg

9:01 AM

@D.Hutchinson I thought you were 13?

D.Hutchinson

no, it was a joke for Henry, who I thought the entire time was a bot, until tonight when Ash told me he was human ...

Burgi

@D.Hutchinson games are fun and they provide a means of escapism from everyday life

who doesn't want to control an army of giant robots battling across an entire galaxy?

Journeyman Geek

Its a socially acceptable way to shoot someone in the face

which is frowned upon in polite society

Burgi

GTA san andreas was great for that

Journeyman Geek

lol. My most recent face shooty game was wolfenstein.

Burgi

9:08 AM

i liked murdering hookers with "implements" in san andreas

Journeyman Geek

@Bob would probably have something to say about toilets...

@Burgi ever played saints row 3 or 4?

Burgi

no

Journeyman Geek

similar, but far less serious.

Burgi

i have heard it is very GTA

Journeyman Geek

4 is sort of a super hero sim

sadly, the follow up, AOM kinda lacks the soul of the series

Burgi

9:10 AM

don't you play as the president?

Journeyman Geek

yup, and get invaded by aliens.

bertieb

@D.Hutchinson RE was a fun game and a good send up of the zombie horror genre

Journeyman Geek

also, 4 does not have the russian voice.

(I always play as a female boss/president, and the russian voice in 3 was funny)

Burgi

i'm playing something called lifeless planet at the moment

sadly it is a little lifeless and badly made

djsmiley2k

spawn

Journeyman Geek

9:14 AM

so, its what it says on the box?

djsmiley2k

or the most recent one i've forgotten the name of

no man's sky!

I still wanna play that

Burgi

@JourneymanGeek true

@djsmiley2k its actually not bad now

in lifeless planet it is insanely difficult to see the path you are meant to take leading to hours of frustration as you bash your head against badly made levels and boring puzzles

D.Hutchinson

@bertieb yeah, RE was pretty terrifying, too.

@Burgi hmm ... I wonder whether I could get back into gaming - I could use an escape mechanism from real life, too.

@djsmiley2k spawn, as in, the comic book character?

Burgi

i throughly recommend sunless seas and firewatch

djsmiley2k

nah the other game

wait, i meant spore!

D.Hutchinson

9:24 AM

I had spawn's first issue ... that was a highlight of my collection ...

ah, I see

djsmiley2k

plenty of games to play on PC @D.Hutchinson

D.Hutchinson

@djsmiley2k true true

Bob

@JourneymanGeek -_-

Locutus of Borg

what time is it for you, @D.Hutchinson ?

D.Hutchinson

4:36 am :)

enjoying the freedom until I start teaching for spring semester next week :(

Locutus of Borg

9:37 AM

go to sleep ;P

you're gonna be seriously sleep-deprived

D.Hutchinson

yeah ... soon enough :)

hopefully by 6 am

Locutus of Borg

o_o what time do you wake up?

D.Hutchinson

1ish pm

I work at a university (for now), so I'm in between semesters

Burgi

9:56 AM

does anyone actually believe the white house doctor?

bertieb

@Burgi a MoCA isn't hard to score normal on

(unless something actually is going on)

Burgi

Multimedia over Coax Alliance

interesting

bertieb

Montreal Cognitive Assessment

D.Hutchinson

@Burgi what did the white house doctor say?

last I checked, Trump was normal / sane or something ...

and he labeled himself a "stable genius", I think ...

Burgi

that trump could live to 200 if he stopped eating junk food and that he had aced his mental agility test

D.Hutchinson

10:00 AM

haha ...

jokerdino

@D.Hutchinson no reason he would lie about that

D.Hutchinson

@jokerdino haha

the confidence is kind of ... admirable, though @jokerdino

bertieb

You can actually view the MoCA

D.Hutchinson

@jokerdino I've met him before ... at the harvard club ... I was waiting for an interview with a hedge fund ... he is tall in person ... and his entourage are all tall people ...

jokerdino

yeah, he will easily tower over all of us

Obama isn't that tall in comparison

D.Hutchinson

10:04 AM

I see

jokerdino

Guess I am wrong. Obama is 185cm

Burgi

@bertieb i'd draw a digital clock

D.Hutchinson

@Burgi regarding the mcdonald's he eats everyday, I read somewhere that the fries get thrown out every seven minutes ...

bertieb

@Burgi Yeah, part of the test is clearly explaining it to the person taking it (not easy if they do have some degree of cognitive impairment)

Burgi

@bertieb for the F words one, is "Flobadob" allowed?

bertieb

10:12 AM

@Burgi I'm not sure made-up words count, Bill and Ben notwithstanding :P

user226528

Notice how Intel is brimming with clarity in the following sentence:
> 8.2 High CVSS:3.0/AV:A/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:L/A:N

user226528

10:33 AM

Okay... things are getting scary down here: Windows Server 2012 R2 does not have a Meltdown update yet.

user226528

Huh... This is funny.

user226528

My WSUS dashboard tells me that I have declined the KB4056898 update. That's one funny thing.

user226528

Second, I cannot approve it again. It is expired.

user226528

Third, I ordered the server to check online for updates instead of WSUS. It find no applicable updates online.

user226528

So, is Microsoft telling me to go hang?

bwDraco

11:15 AM

Oh noes.

We've lost power here. This is our first extended power outage since we've moved here.

user226528

That's bad. But what happened to your nose?

Journeyman Geek

It lost power too

user226528

Well, despite the power loss, bwDraco seems to have Internet access.

user226528

So, HP has not released a security update for my system models. Dell has not done so. And Microsoft has pulled the Windows Server 2012 R2 update for Meltdown.

bwDraco

We still have LTE here.

user226528

11:33 AM

I remember reading about Windows Update. Its first version downloaded a full catalog of updates from Microsoft and checked which one applies to your system. Naturally, the catalog grow too big one day. So, in the next version, Windows Update sends the system specs to Microsoft.

user226528

Back then, lots of conspiracy theorists said a lot of things about Microsoft spying on us and such.

user226528

Now, get this: HP's SoftPaq Download Manager downloads an update catalog worth 19 MB each time it runs. And its download server speed sucks.

bwDraco

12:22 PM

Got power back about 15 minutes ago.

At about 6 am local time (1100 UTC), I woke up to a beeping CO alarm, and the desktop's RGB lights (normally dimmed when off or in sleep) were completely off.

user226528

CO alarm is the Carbon Oxide alarm, right? Or is it something mundane that everyone knows and factory life has made me forget?

user226528

Sorry, I meant Carbon Monoxide. The chemical notation is CO.

Burgi

@FleetCommand carbon monoxide

user226528

12:39 PM

Once, I passed one of the pilots as bi. Turns out it was tri.

djsmiley2k

@FleetCommand ?

user226528

Yeah. "?" is the word. I mean how many times do you see an admin who tries to define filters for some piece of contents, copies the address from the title bar, only to find that the filter doesn't work because the content was in a frame.

user226528

^ Hence the address was something else and hidden.

gparyani

0

Q: Why does my trackpad fire random clicks when I scroll with two fingers?

I have an HP Spectre 360 (model 13-4193nr) running Windows 10. I noticed that whenever I scroll using two fingers on the trackpad, it scrolls fine, but it also fires unexpected clicks (left clicks) whenever I use it. This happens randomly in all applications. After some testing, I realized that ...

user226528

Dirty.

user226528

12:45 PM

Happened to me on a ProBook trackpad.

gparyani

@bwDraco Central time? You in Texas by any chance?

Bob

@gparyani He's in NYC

gparyani

1:22 PM

@Bob That's impossible

Oh, wait, I was confused about DST

user226528

^ by

gparyani

1:40 PM

@FleetCommand "about" is also valid there

user226528

At grammatical (syntax) level, yes.

user226528

At discourse level, I doubt it.

user226528

Good thing Codename Lisa thought me all this. Otherwise, how else would I lord over you guys. ;)

gparyani

The Wikipedia user?

User:Codename Lisa

...

user226528

Yeah. My only friend there.

gparyani

1:43 PM

@FleetCommand What's your username?

user226528

I don't have one anymore. I am an ex-Wikipedian.

gparyani

I stopped editing in 2015 because I lost interest. How about you?

user226528

I was disgracefully discharged.

gparyani

@FleetCommand For me, it was just because I was spending my time just patrolling new pages, and not actually editing articles. What happened to you, just out of curiosity?

@FleetCommand By the way, what was your problem on the ProBook?

user226528

@gparyani I was a pariah there. I never learned how to conduct myself. Things that was okay for others was always wrong for me. Codename Lisa was the only one who didn't seem to go into attack mode when she saw me. She said the day when I am permanently blocked, it would be an outrageous unjustifiable-on-its-own kind of block. I didn't think it would happen. And then, it did.

user226528

1:54 PM

@gparyani Misfiring clicks. I cleaned this thing with warm water and a little cleaning solution. That did it.

allquixotic

New ThinkPad X1 Carbon (2018) announced... kinda poopy; Coffee Lake i7 with integrated graphics and 16 gigs of RAM. Bleh. No dGPU but it has “Glimpse” to track your eye and move the mouse cursor which could be weird or amazing (haven’t ever tried it)

Surface Book probably more up my alley

gparyani

@FleetCommand Ah, the Wikipedia admins tend to care a lot more about tone, and I almost got into trouble a few times for what I believe I used the wrong tone.

@FleetCommand I've been experiencing this problem since I bought the machine in August 2016. Cleaning the trackpad didn't help.

@allquixotic Do you know what could cause random clicks when trackpad scrolling?

user226528

And you know what Codename Lisa's solution is to that? She writes in stilted English. Starts all her messages with "Hello" or "Hello again". (Used to this for every message, until the community convinced her to do it per person per thread.) Ends them with "Best regards"! I noticed she isn't being dishonest about it either. She forgoes "Best regards" or writes "no regards" when she doesn't care for an overly rude person.

gparyani

@FleetCommand Let's leave all that Wikipedia stuff in the past now, just let it be.

user226528

2:10 PM

As you wish. I was just responding because I didn't want to be rude. I really haven't learned how to politely tell someone "I don't want to talk about it."

gparyani

@FleetCommand Neither had I. It took me a long time to learn about tone and voice too. I even almost got into trouble a few times for taking a misstep, both IRL and online. But I used each misstep to learn more about how to do it right.

user226528

Wow. Allquixotic didn't stay. I seems our lack of interest in the (I quote) "kinda poopy" ThinkPad X1 was unbearable.

DavidPostill

@FleetCommand Shut up please is reasonably polite :)

5

user226528

ROFL!

DavidPostill

:)

gparyani

2:21 PM

@DavidPostill Hah!

Anyway do you know what could be causing my trackpad issue?

user226528

Oh, God. I spilled milk on my keyboard, laughing.

user226528

🤣

user226528

Although, you probably should put the first three words between quotation marks.

DavidPostill

@gparyani Strangely enough MailChimp has a nice guide. Voice and Tone | MailChimp Content Style Guide

@gparyani nope :(

user226528

@DavidPostill You know, it is quite possible that for a while, seeing you would give me a fit of laughter.

DavidPostill

2:29 PM

Hahahaha. MS have a Tone and Voice guide. Scrolling down reveals:

user226528

Well, not just you; also Jason Statham, that guy in the Die Hard, and that guy in the YouTube video that a dog was licking and I thought was you.

DavidPostill

Why do they think crisp and clear requires font-size: 68px;?

user226528

Later guys... :)

DavidPostill

@FleetCommand ROTFLMAO

djsmiley2k

+/*

-

]##'/;.'~
1

ty 2.1

that was him showing us his bouncy ball

DavidPostill

2:32 PM

@djsmiley2k Please put 2.1 to bed :)

Locutus of Borg

2:51 PM

@djsmiley2k Hi 2.1

djsmiley2k

@LocutusofBorg hi

lol

FML Cat

3:09 PM

So I accidentally crafted a fully automatic grenade launcher that has infinite ammo and doesn't require reload in Mass Effect Andromeda, only problem is it kills you if you don't stop firing for at least 10 seconds every couple minutes.

djsmiley2k

lol

FML Cat

@djsmiley2k Yeah that's pretty much what I thought when it happened

Gear mods in this game are... Strange. You can make ridiculous combinations like that, but can never do what you actually want to do

Journeyman Geek

hm, I need to recommend someone a reasonably priced, but RA approved laptop - in india...

gparyani

@JourneymanGeek RA means...

Journeyman Geek

most of the stuff in the INR 30K ruppee (my budget) range seem to be AMD A series or celerons, and I don't like celerons

@gparyani If you need to ask....

gparyani

3:15 PM

@JourneymanGeek Expensive. That's about $450, and for that price you can get a refurbished 2012 MacBook Pro in the USA

Journeyman Geek

its for a CS student but I'm slightly doubtful rediculous amounts of compiling are involved

@gparyani "in the USA" ;p

(prolly should cue in @HackToHell and @jokerdino since they're in the old country)

jokerdino

yo

gparyani

@JourneymanGeek Other than the trackpad issue above, I like my HP Spectre. I got it for $850 from Microsoft after a $300 education discount.

jokerdino

@gparyani Rental Address

FML Cat

Journeyman Geek

3:16 PM

@gparyani I don't particularly like HPs except on the low end

I could recommend her a HP stream otherwise, but celeron :(

gparyani

I'd highly recommend getting it from Microsoft. They offer education discounts undercutting Amazon and other discount retailers, and Microsoft Signature (no bloatware).

jokerdino

well, my lenovo G500s was more than 30k INR

Journeyman Geek

ya

jokerdino

I think HTH is the go-to person for laptop shopping

gparyani

What do you think about the refurb 2012 MacBook Pro?

Journeyman Geek

3:20 PM

prefer new for various reasons

gparyani

Check Microsoft Store for education discounts @JourneymanGeek

Journeyman Geek

in india?

jokerdino

never heard such a thing

and education discounts?

don't you need to be in uni or something for that at least?

gparyani

Hmm...doesn't seem like Microsoft sells hardware in India, yet

@jokerdino No, K-12 also works, also if you work for an educational institution

Journeyman Geek

once again, india ;p

jokerdino

3:23 PM

Oh, I need to work.

gparyani

I went to their Store page and changed my country to India, and their hardware disappeared.

jokerdino

@JourneymanGeek put it on loop

Journeyman Geek

(IE, if you're not in india or know good indian hardware sources, ehhh, limited help for me)

jokerdino

people are buying laptops on Amazon these days

that or flipkart

gparyani

I guess education discounts aren't a thing in India yet

By the way, we were traveling to India, and my cousin asked for a Mac laptop with a 30,000 INR budget. We brought him the '12 MacBook I mentioned.

@jokerdino Out of curiosity, where in India are you?

jokerdino

3:32 PM

south

gparyani

Near Chennai?

Journeyman Geek

he's a mike. ENNA MIKE!

DavidPostill

@gparyani There are How can I get an Apple student discount in India ?? - AppleNerds

jokerdino

@gparyani yeah

@JourneymanGeek ENNA MIKE EPDI IRUKA

DavidPostill

@JourneymanGeek How can I get an Apple student discount in India ?? - AppleNerds

Journeyman Geek

3:34 PM

ASSAULTA ETUKAN MIKE!

@DavidPostill eh, I'd rather go with windows ;p

jokerdino

MIKE, ENNA NASI GORENG AH HAHA

gparyani

@DavidPostill Those are very good discounts for Apple. The ones here in the States aren't too impressive. But Microsoft's ones are better.

@JourneymanGeek I'm a Windows fan too.

Journeyman Geek

lol

@jokerdino dude, assulata is... fairly common old country slang ;p

gparyani

The only reason I got my cousin a Mac is because he specifically asked for one

jokerdino

@JourneymanGeek yeah :)

assault-ah iruken

Journeyman Geek

3:35 PM

;p

gparyani

I just got back from a trip to India

jokerdino

are you one of those outsourcing people?

gparyani

@jokerdino My other cousin owns an outsourced call center

jokerdino

probably south I guess

gparyani

@jokerdino Naw, near the west

jokerdino

3:37 PM

ah ok

Gujjis lol

gparyani

@jokerdino We're not Gujarati

jokerdino

beyond that, it's Pakistan.

Journeyman Geek

@jokerdino the room I'm in smells strongly of narasu's coffee ;p

jokerdino

filter kapi?

besh besh

Journeyman Geek

well, the podi anyway

gparyani

3:39 PM

@JourneymanGeek Is Changi Airport as good as they say it is?

Journeyman Geek

ya, pure stuff, not cut with chicory like barbarians do

@gparyani used to be!

I had my gate changed trice between checkin and boarding!

gparyani

@JourneymanGeek Don't they have security at the gate, so they start boarding very early and you can't take beverages you buy at the airport on?

jokerdino

@gparyani it's decently good

Journeyman Geek

more or less, yeah

jokerdino

@JourneymanGeek o.O

Journeyman Geek

3:41 PM

Was silk air too!

gparyani

LAX has improved a lot, as has Mumbai. We flew through those airports on the way.

Journeyman Geek

(they fly to cbe, I was dissapoint)

the seats are crap, and you use your own phone for inflight entertainment

jokerdino

@JourneymanGeek can't be worse than Tiger.

Journeyman Geek

Jet is frigging awesome

but they fly to chennai, and we need to switch to another plane, and it takes longer

jokerdino

SIA would be sweet but they are out of my budget lol

oh, no direct Jet to other cities?

gparyani

3:43 PM

@JourneymanGeek I didn't really like Jet Airways; I flew them for my onward connections. I preferred Virgin Atlantic and Air France.

Journeyman Geek

not to the ones I need to go to

gparyani

On my Jet flight from Mumbai to Paris they didn't even speak French

Journeyman Geek

@jokerdino CBE is kinda odd

its major but not so major

jokerdino

@gparyani should have picked Etihad

gparyani

Flew Virgin Atlantic LAX-LHR, then Jet LHR-BOM. Returning, I flew Jet BOM-CDG and then Air France CDG-LAX.

@jokerdino My family didn't want to sit in a 16-hour flight between LAX and Abu Dhabi

jokerdino

3:46 PM

@JourneymanGeek yeah, it's right in the middle

gparyani

@jokerdino Hasn't that been discontinued and merged with Scoot?

jokerdino

@gparyani yeah

all SIA subsidiaries

SIA has another domestic one in India -- tie up with Tata, called Vistara.

@gparyani totally understandable. non-stop flights are PITA

gparyani

@jokerdino I fly GoAir for onward connections because they greatly reduce the price of extra baggage for international connecting passengers

Anyhow, @JourneymanGeek what could be causing my trackpad issue?

Also, what do you think of calling myself Sonic the Hedgehog on MSE?

Burgi

4:13 PM

am i spelling the word "brochure" correctly?

i've typed it so often today its starting to look weird

jokerdino

4:34 PM

brochure looks weird

but I think that's right spelling

Burgi

thanks

jokerdino

I think you are suffering from a version of semantic satiation

Burgi

heh

gparyani

@Burgi That's correct

Burgi

4:54 PM

thanks

XKCD

5:07 PM

"That's ... unsettling." "Yeah, those definitely don't sound like the normal dreaâ ï¼¬ï¼¡ï¼´ï¼©ï¼´ï¼µï¼¤ï¼¥ ï¼´ï¼¨ï¼²ï¼¥ï¼¥ ï¼¦ï¼©ï¼¶ï¼¥ ï¼°ï¼¯ï¼©ï¼®ï¼´..."

allquixotic

You R. Ascam -- cbc.ca/news/canada/london/…

tereško

5:26 PM

allquixotic

5:44 PM

I've never had a supply problem with Nvidia's flagships; maybe those are not well-tuned for popular cryptocurrency algorithms.

(specifically cards like the 980 and 1080)

Burgi

@XKCD the onebox has broken the mouseover

Canadian Luke

Sucky

allquixotic

6:33 PM

OVH's Vint Hill, VA datacenter is now offering "Discovery" (like beta test?) servers: E3-1270v6 (Skylake), 32 GB (:() RAM, either 2 x 2 TB HDD or 2 x 450GB NVMe SSD, and unmetered 250 Mbps

pretty weak as far as the RAM for the cost, which means an E5 with 128GB of RAM is going to be at least double the cost of what I'm paying now

Canadian Luke

What do you have, and what are you paying now?

allquixotic

@CanadianLuke I'm paying $80.66/mo for an E5-1620v2 / 128GB RAM / 2x2TB HDD / unmetered 500 Mbps with spikes up to gigabit as available (I assume the traffic spikes would also be allowed on the US servers)

it's in Beauharnois, QC though so the distance does carry a slight ping penalty

cutting my RAM by 75%, guaranteed network bandwidth by 50%, and increasing my cost by $19/mo just for: lower pings, and a newer generation CPU (that might be faster, but has less L3 cache so might actually be worse) isn't very appealing,

Canadian Luke

Understandable. What do you use your server(s) for?

allquixotic

@CanadianLuke general web traffic (CMSes etc), Teamspeak (VoIP), game servers, and the occasional remote desktop into a Windows VM

for the last two, RAM is super important, and 32 GB isn't enough

Canadian Luke

Sounds good

I got 16 GB of RAM on my Windows PC, and I was running 2 Win10 and 4 Win 2016 VMs all at the same time... Works OK for me :P

But I have no idea how much memory you need for Teamspeak or your game servers

allquixotic

6:44 PM

@CanadianLuke doing what? and how much RAM did you allocate to each guest?

also I don't have any SSDs, so having a lot of room in memory for ZFS ARC (basically page cache) is really important to keep I/O performance high, or else the whole system grinds to 7200 RPM HDD speed

and with a lot of different processes competing for resources on a multi-purpose server that's not OK

with no game servers running I'm using 16 GB of RAM just for running programs

and ARK usually eats about 3 GB per instance and I sometimes run 2 instances

but again, page cache is essential for a well-running server that doesn't have any SSDs, to allow at least read I/O to operate at the speed of RAM most of the time

a desktop is a very different use case

there's a reason why SE's servers all have, like, almost a terabyte of RAM... they can keep almost all SE site data in RAM at all times, which is blazingly fast

even SSDs are terribly slow compared to RAM... which is why that's my single most important server spec, more than the CPU, more than network bandwidth or storage speed... unfortunately my workload (game servers) also chews through a fair bit of CPU, so I have to keep that at least at a good enough level too, I can't just sacrifice everything for 256 GB of RAM

bwDraco

Well, I kinda wish I was able to do these sorts of ambitious projects like playing with ZFS storage or the chatbot.

I think I might be able to spend some time learning JS today...

!!/xkcd 555

ChatBot John Cavil

If you actually do this, what really happens is Douglas Hofstadter appears and talks to you for eight hours about strange loops.

bertieb

@allquixotic Is there an advantage to renting a server Vs running your own at home? I do some similar things, except for the Windows VM

On occasion I wonder if it's worth throwing together a quick spreadsheet / back-of-envelope to figure out whether it makes sense in terms of power and hardware depreciation

I guess the advantage for a rented server is that for a relatively 'fixed' cost, performance should increase over time

bwDraco

There is so much I'm not doing that I should be...

allquixotic

@bertieb Reliability and speed of the Internet pipe (including ping, not just bandwidth), and reliability of power. They have backup diesel generators and uninterruptible power supplies, multi-homed tier 1 networks to protect against a single ISP failure, and basically "truly net neutral" networks that don't mess with your traffic or throttle you

bertieb

6:58 PM

@allquixotic Good point, uplink is definitely 'advantage, rental' (to borrow from tennis)

allquixotic

@bertieb that too; of course, if you were confident in your home power and 'net connection, you could probably find someone willing to lease you hardware

djsmiley2k

@bwDraco don't beat yourself up too much, i bet ALL of us have things we could/should do, which would make us better, that we don't...

allquixotic

but even the best home connections aren't directly connected to multiple tier 1 networks , and incur a fair bit of latency from suboptimal routing

djsmiley2k

the first step is get the cv out there

allquixotic

suboptimal routing is a huge source of extra ping (having to go through many tier 2 and 3 ISPs' hops) that Tier 1 directly connected datacenters don't suffer from

djsmiley2k

6:59 PM

get a business connection at home, if you need that

allquixotic

my ping to a cable or DSL customer in Canada right next to the datacenter is probably 50-100ms higher than to the datacenter

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