Sadly I'm in that position. I have hundreds of PLCs and legacy controllers on my network that are IPv4 only and will never be replaced. At least not in a reasonable time frame. I'm talking 20+ year life expectancies.
Delivering what in what industries? I see SOME usefulness in SOME areas like, specifically, machine vision. But a lot of things? Medical? yeah, no. Lots of issues there. Text generation? Hallucinations out the ass and extremely iffy results often.
Most of the 'wins' in the text gen side still require a TON of work on the human's part to make it usable. People like to mention Pro's in Math and coding talking about it helping them with stuff but they are experts already.
It has potential in a lot of places but this rapid paced forcing of it everywhere is idiotic and foolhardy.
I adored my Psions. I used a Sienna for years and a 5mx for much longer than is probably reasonable. I used an original psion netbook (not an upgrade series 7) until a lightning storm fried it :( probably still be using that thing. I miss the UI/UX.
Exactly. The Pi is useful for some stuff if.you need a lot of GPIO or legacy hat support etc. or just hate x86 for some bizarre reason. Otherwise I can see literally no benefit to a Pi over an N95 or Nx00 box. I using them all over the place and have been rock solid. And you can get them with multiple nvme sockets, sata, etc.
The Pi obsession truly boggles my mind. I can see it with the RP2040 etc but a regular Pi? Why?
I bought several Pi 4 2GB models for $30 back before COVID hit. At that price point they make sense for running some dedicated things, like my DNS servers, GPS-synchronized NTP server and such.
But yeah, at $85, even with a bit better performance, I'm not seeing it.
Ditto to this. I have fallen in love with the N series chips. I use N100 mini PCs all over the factory floor as client machines for workers that manage job control and I am typing this on an N200 power PC that I have slapped a 48GB DDR5 SODIMM in. Working great.
Btw, ALL N95/N100/N200/N305 systems I have used have worked fine with 32GB DDR4 SODIMMs or 48GB DDR5 SODIMMs. Even tho Intel claims 16GB max for DDR4 and DDR5.
Also, the N305 chip is great. Basically two N200 slapped together. They didnt double the L3 tho which is annoying. But the 8 cores is fantastic.
I am currently running a 4 box Proxmox HA setup with with 3 N200 systems directly connected to each other with 2.5gbit links. Working great. I am hoping someone puts out larger DDR5 SODIMMs. these with 64/72/96GB would be fantastic :)
Oh, and I am using 118GB optane nvme drives as swap location and l2arc for the systems. regular NVMe drives for storage/OS
You can buy second hand 100g networking cards pretty cheaply. The caveat is that they only support older PCIe standards, so you need PCIe 16x to use them at full speed.
Please also don't forget typical NVMe drives are pretty fast now. Just two of them can nearly saturate a 100g link.
Personally I know a lot of people in IT field who have single mode fiber SFP28 networks. I'd say 0.001% - 0.01% is closer to reality.
Like 99% of the people I know who work in IT don’t have anything near what you’re mentioning. They spend $100 on all their networking equipment, not just a switch. They’re not laying fiber in their house. And outside of that group the number is basically 0.
I guess typical gateway drug is to get a 10g internet connection or 10g NAS at home and find out copper based cat6/7 is a lousy solution to actually make use of it.
Surprisingly high latencies (compared to fiber, that is) and noisy fans due to a lot of heat generated.
It's hard for me to picture doing something with an internet/NAS connection and caring about the extra percents of a millisecond copper gives you. And all the 10g cards amazon is showing me are fanless. Even if you need a fan, it should be enough at whisper-quiet speeds.
I say this because I am almost at this point (I run copper through my house) but was scared off on going full fiber. I know some who have, but it’s definitely really, really rare.
I had (well, still have) cat 7 in the house, while venturing into fiber as well. 10GBASE-T switches are noisy and surprisingly power hungry.
One big reason for fiber is a home lab. Transferring large VM images etc. is so much faster. Ability to run iSCSI fast is also amazing.
Single mode fiber is pretty nice. It's fast, has low power requirements and no need to worry about electrical issues. Prices have declined significantly. The only minus is that you can't have PoE, so the best option is to wire both.
Oh do I get the pain of hardware lost due to short sighted ambitions. Some many things I have let go over the years.
But let me try to make you feel a bit better. A lot of this retro hardware nowadays is more about maintenance rather than just using it. If you are into that, it is great! But for many it just comes to a point of trying ever harder just to keep these things going. It is to be the technology Sisyphus.
Last year I finally gave up on my Powermac G5 when the power supply went, a machine much younger than any Next hardware. I just gave it away to someone that had the patience to work with it. Unfortunately the FIF (F*K It Factor) is a thing that eventually creeps up and it becomes a case of passing these things onto others that have a higher tolerance for aging hardware issues.
I’m curious how you used it as a daily driver back then.
Did you use it for internet access? Granted, JS was less prevalent back then, but I’m not sure what browser you had available.
What about listening to mp3s while doing something else, could the m68k manage or are you just not doing those things normally?
Also not OP, but 90% of everything I do happens in an SSH session. It doesn't really matter what I run on as long as the terminal isn't completely broken. I run `ssh TheHost exec tmux a` from all sorts of devices. A NeXTstation would do fine except I prefer my custom USB-only keyboard.
Not OP, but if it was anything like Macs running on similar hardware - MP3s was not viable, simply not enough grunt. Also most (all?) MP3 decoders relied on a FPU unit to function. But CD's where fine.
I don't know which era of chip you're thinking of, but when I was a kid listening to MP3s, it was the late 90s, and I had a Performa 5200 with a 75 MHz PowerPC 603 (or possibly 603e); it had a FPU, like all PPC chips, and IIRC like the final series of 68k that Apple used, the 68040 which Wikipedia says was also used in some models of NeXT machine — my problem was MacOS and how it multitasked (cooperatively), making MP3 playback clip every few seconds if the player was in the background; and I'm sure it was the OS not the chip, because I later upgraded to a newer computer with a 200 MHz chip, and it behaved exactly the same way.
Yeah, I listened to mp3s on my Performa 5260/120. I actually could notice the difference playing 96kbit vs 128kbit mp3s, in how much it affected the computer's performance. Luckily all I was probably doing at the time was chatting on Hotline so it didn't matter TOO much... haha
I think the PPC had just enough power to get through a 128Kbit MP3, it was just more efficient than the 68K range which is why Motorola stop developing those. As for the stuttering that sounds about right. Co-operative multitasking is computationally efficient but caused a problematic user experience.
In the 680x0 days we all tossed a CD into the drive and played that. Or put it in the multi-disc cd changer nearby, sometimes along with a few other discs carefully chosen for maximum sonic whiplash when you put them on shuffle.
Im currently putting kids to bed and dead tired. So I will dig up stuff and post a better response tomorrow.
But tl,dr: most everything I did was SSH based for network. Otherwise document editing, pdf viewing etc worked fine. I had a turbo color 33mhz with 128mb of ram.
I also had a ton of custom compiled replacement libraries friends and I worked on and we managed to get newer openSSL working with omniweb etc. I was able to use html mode gmail even! :)
GOOD. There shouldn't even be a question about this. I have family members who would have died if the current state of abortion bullshit in the US had been a thing.
All these fucks voting out protections THEY ENJOYED their entire reproductive lives is so damn infuriating.
This isn't about that scenario. In case you get an abortion for a purely medical reason you can abort at any point in the pregnancy, 1 week or 9 months, it doesn't matter.
The one we just put in the constitution is the type of abortion you can request for any reasons up to 14 weeks
At this point its like school shootings. Vote for people trying to fix the issue and hope someone in power, that opposes that position, loses a loved one, due to that position, when you hear about the problem in the news [1]. The only person so far that seems to have gotten worse after experiencing gun violence themselves is Scalise
