Ha, that's very close to my story as well. I had a 166Mhz Pentium and it was all PCI cards and 100mbit by then. That was essentially the start of my career.
Reminds me of a Pentium Pro router put into a datacenter, two 2GB mirrored scsi drives, two nics, happily running a hardened pfSense, ran with zero issues for the better part of a decade.
It just wouldn't die.
The suspicion was because the electricity going to it cleaner than average, in a datacenter, the normal wear and tear on electronics may have been reduced.
Respect was paid at it's decommissioning to convert it into a vm, knowing it's luck, chances are it would still boot up and keep on running.
At work, we needed a PC for a Linux-based Webkiosk the other day. The computer proposed by the colleague who actually orders stuff comes with a Windows license. I said we don't need that. A fruitless, lame effort was made to locate a substitute w/o a Windows license. I renewed my protest, but the feeling that the problem is me was already floating in the air. I gave up. We purchased a Windows license to run Linux. For the umpteenth time.
It's like a Microsoft tax on PCs.
Those OEM licenses do seem quite cheap. I think it was Dell who gave an option for a while. To remove the Windows license and have Ubuntu instead only saved $10.
It was low enough where I think most buyers questioned if it would be worth it to have the license just incase.
I can’t help but think what this means is just that the menu isn’t that’s important as a marketing tool. If having an up to date website and menu resulted in a noticeable boost in business, every restaurant would have it.
Average person either finds the place through google maps or a TikTok video, checks a few photos of the food or venue, then goes. Doesn’t matter what the exact menu is because there are plenty of options and something will be appealing.
Or it’s good for customers and bad for restaurants. There are such things, and menu can be easily one. Especially tourist focused restaurants infested with such tactics, and you can avoid most of them just looking on their menu.
Yeah that context matters significantly. What’s the turnover rate for restaurants in your area? What’s the variance in menu? “Success” in my neck of the woods is staying open more than 2 years, and menu availability plays a significant role.
We usually order by phone, then drive by and pick up the food. Can't do that w/o a menu. The solution is usually to take a printed menu with you when you're there. But that's a chicken-and-egg problem!
I think it's important for customers and they usuallly post the menu in google maps thing, basically the customers are doing the labor of the business owner and the business owner as he still gets the results he doesn't do it
The conversational context did not involve anyone making any claims about the viability of businesses operating sans info. You can check—nowhere does the person who you're responding to (or any of the ancestor comments in this thread) write in their comment that companies are losing business because of the lack of up-to-date information, whether on their own site on through Google Maps.
The context is people, very reasonably, making a plea that that info be published on the open web.
Website? Ha, with local restaurants here you're in luck if the photos of the menu posted by customers on google maps or FB or where ever aren't too fuzzy to read.
Yet, living in Germany, the problems I hear about our healthcare system from friends or in the media are an absolute far cry from the insanity that I hear about the US system. Maybe some of it is sensationalism, but I very much doubt that would account for the whole story.
What's usually missing from anecdotes is class cohorts - so, US working class with Medicaid or a crappy marketplace plan vs working professional with an amazing plan vs retiree with Medicare vs...
Nothing's perfect, but the plan differences seem stark. For example, my wife had a crappy marketplace plan and I had a plan through my employer. For her, an MRI was denied, denied, then finally approved with many calls. For me, it was approved immediately. For her, pre-auth to a specialist was denied until her doctor went and tried a different referral strategy. For me...well, I haven't been denied yet. It goes on - same city, same hospital, some of the same referrals, etc.
I've come to think the price discrimination really does mean we have class-based care which seems to allow for the sensationalism. Combine a dire scenario with a working or indigent class American, and they don't have to exaggerate much at all.
Having lived in both Germany and the US, my experience with the German system is that there are a lot more, smaller hospitals and private practices, the care is good, and all I ever paid for out of pocket was prescription medications. I didn't have to wait long for an MRI (two weeks) versus months in the US. I had a number of things that would have been hundreds or thousands of dollars in the US that I never paid a penny for in Germany. I'll also say that hospitals are absolutely crazy about sending bill collectors after you. I had a handful of small charges--like $10 or $20 things--that I hadn't realized were even there and two months later they freaking inundated me with bill collector notices.
It does make a big difference exactly where you are in the US, however. Some places have a glut of healthcare providers and other places don't.
> I didn't have to wait long for an MRI (two weeks) versus months in the US.
Where in the US did you have to wait months? There seems to be an MRI/imaging location in every other shopping center in the US right now. I've never had a problem getting a same day MRI when needed. Perhaps you were waiting for the 'free' one your insurance would accept?
A bad moment to have a make-or-break moment for your CPU business - a lot of customers will probably hold off purchases right now because of the RAM prices, no matter how good your CPU might be.
Isn't this new server CPU a drop in replacement though? So the DC could pull off the old CPU, drop in the new one and not touch the existing RAM setup, yet be able to deliver better performance within the limits of the existing RAM. Then once RAM prices drop (okay that might be a while) separately upgrade the RAM at a different time.
That's semi-dependent on supplier arrangements; i.e. lots of shops won't want to upgrade CPUs on a server out of fear that they can't get support later; sometimes that's justified by contract, sometimes it's not.
I have 2 thinkpads, and one of them is better in every aspect - except that the inferior one has it's 2 USB-C ports on opposite sides of the laptop, while the other one has both ports on the same side. Being able to plug in the charger from either side is really great, will definitely look for that in a future laptop.
I think there is a tendency to simply give in and buy bigger hardware if something doesn't work. With friends and family, I sometimes feel like having to talk them off the roof with regards to pulling the trigger on really expensive (relative to the tasks they're doing) hardware, simply because performance is often abysmal due to the fact that they trashed their OS with malware and bloatware and whatnot and can't understand all of that.
It's the same at work, to some degree. Our in-house ERP software performs like kicking a sack of rocks down a hill. I don't know how often I had to show devs that the hardware is actually idle and they're mostly derailing themselves with DB table locks, GC issues and whatnot. If I weren't pushing back, we probably would have bought the biggest VMs just to let them sit idle.
The blog is fine, it just looks like he didn't foresee that there would be a month where wouldn't post anything, so the navigation links break down. If you go to the last month he posted in, everything works as usual: http://blog.fefe.de/?mon=202505
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