Nokia suffered from lack of direction from the top... They had both symbian and maemo, both officially blessed, but incompatible. Symbian was the past and maemo had promise, so what did management do... a hail mary bet on microsoft? It came out of nowhere and seemed desperate, I believe the market's reaction reflected this sadly.
Pretty neat. I have been thinking about how I can build a tiny NAS, but I would like ECC so that rules out the pi, etc.
Best option I have found so far might be this ASRock 4x4-v2000 https://www.asrockind.com/en-gb/4X4-V2000M , it has an 8-core cpu and supports ECC. Would need to get a M.2 to 4x SATA adapter. The hard part seems to be figuring out how to buy the board itself...
I built my home NAS on this and it's great. Has Oculink ports built into the board so I can just use M.2 for the OS itself and it supports 10 GB ethernet, so as long as I'm wired in, there is effectively no network latency since that's faster than SATA anyway. The board itself also does video, so I can use a Ryzen CPU without Radeon graphics and not have to get the pro to support ECC.
What benefit would ecc have for a nas? Just making sure there are no bits flipped in your data before writing to disk? If so, seems like file integrity checking would be more important.
The Helios64 "Full Bundle" looks nice, but only 4 GB RAM seems limited for ZFS. Plus, for 300 USD, there should be a way to set up a similar x86 system, possibly from second-hand parts. I'm thinking some older AMD Zen with 8-16 GB RAM and a Fractal Design Node or similar case.
Yes, I know that would likely use more electricity, but in my particular case (France), electricity isn't that big of a cost, plus I wouldn't be running this 24/7. More like one or two evenings a week. The only reason why I'm not running recycled "enterprise" servers at home is that my apartment is small and I absolutely cannot stand the noise they make.
But those are usually "consumer" parts (in the broad sense). In particular, they won't take ECC RAM. I'm hoping this will change now that AMD has a believable "enthusiast" offering that has ECC.
This to me is the main issue. Usually, manufacturers think ECC = Enterprise = Running in a computer room = Doesn't need to be quiet.
Of course, usually clients looking for thin, least-possible-U systems doesn't help either.
I've actually gotten my hands on a Lenovo tower server my client wasn't needing anymore which is really pretty quiet. But it's "huge" by rack standards. It's basically a full PC tower in height, but longer.
I could see myself running it in the kitchen or something once I get it home after the lockdowns.
The issue is it only takes 2.5" drives, which are still quite expensive if SSDs or use SMR if HDDs.
I too have a helios4 and i like it for it's ECC Support but it has a plethora of drawbacks.
* 32bit OS means maximum 16TB Partition Size
* it's not fast at all. It can barely saturate a Gbit connection without any encryption using HTTP. Even with the Crypto Engine enabled, any encryption and the connection drops significantly
* Depending on which version you got, the fans are quite annoying, no matter which version you got, the fans are quite ineffective
* it has at least one known hardware bug concerning SATA and the internal Flash.
* WOL and the internal Watchdog are hit or miss at best
On the other hand the linux support and documentation is top notch so i dont want to complain too much but i am kinda disappointed with the speed i got from it
Ah. I haven't run into speed or capacity issues (different use cases & preferences, I suppose).
For the fans - I am not using the included case. I have one stock fan on top of the SOC and one 120mm fan for the disks. The stock fan is decently loud on bootup, but it stops or low-speed during regular operation.
I guess this is cool, but maybe they should focus on actually making Windows Terminal into a usable terminal emulator first. I've found so many bugs with it and it still doesn't even have a GUI for its settings.
Seriously watch every Alan Kay (not the survivalist) video on youtube, you will not regret it. It's practically criminal that they have such low view counts.
Seriously, this video made my day and I am searching for more. I basically think of it as a "how computing stacks should be" talk. Also just launched GNU Smalltalk on the side and looking for a good tutorial, by the way.
You're not the only one. What you describe is actually hypothesized in the concept of the "uncanny valley effect":
"...as the appearance of a robot is made more human, some observers' emotional response to the robot becomes increasingly positive and empathetic, until it reaches a point beyond which the response quickly becomes strong revulsion. However, as the robot's appearance continues to become less distinguishable from a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once again and approaches human-to-human empathy levels.
"This area of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a "barely human" and "fully human" entity is the uncanny valley. The name captures the idea that an almost human-looking robot seems overly "strange" to some human beings, produces a feeling of uncanniness, and thus fails to evoke the empathic response required for productive human–robot interaction."
I doubt that you are alone in your reaction, but the robots' appearance is driven more by function than by form. This dance exercise goes some way to redress the balance, with movements that are more fluid and graceful than the jerkiness typically displayed by robots. Yes, weird, and perhaps alien. But of course unnatural: nature has provided no precedent or template for robot designers to follow.
