--I'll second this. $5/month at DigitalOcean gets you:
o 512MB RAM, a single-core CPU, o A Static IPV4 address, 1TB of bandwidth, and o 20GB of fast *SSD* disk.
--A few months ago they started charging extra for backups/snapshots tho, so I disabled that functionality. They're the best deal that I've found so far for a cheap cloud VM. (I have no affiliation with them, just a satisfied customer.)
--Just anecdotal evidence, but I've had data loss with FAT16/FAT32 on 4-16GB USB2 sticks. After reformatting to exFAT, haven't had any issues (yet?) with the same hardware. FYI (And it also works in Linux with FUSE, so there's that.)
> Generally, a HDD sitting there spinning away is not what kill them off, however turning them on-off-on-off a lot is the most abusive thing that you can do.
--And this is EXACTLY what they should be building/testing consumer-level hard drives to do! I make it a point to buy WD drives anymore, and they mostly last at least 5 years if not more. I R/W scan every sector before putting the drive in use, and spin them down (usually within an hour of idling, but sometimes in half an hour) to save money on my electric bill. And I turn all my PCs and laptops OFF when they're not being used.
--The drives aren't apparently any worse the wear for it; I don't even put fans on the SATAs like I used to do with IDE drives. And my electric bill is usually less than $65/month. With the savings I get there, buying a replacement drive if one starts failing is actually cheaper in the long run:)
> You get to a point where, even as a born and bred high-level techie, you just want shit to work because you have more important things to do.... I don't understand why linux people are so obsessed with reinventing the wheel 50 billion times.
--Amen to that. Personally I think the community could benefit from some similar-project integration, if the developers and distro-maintainers could sit down and figure how to work with each other.
> Firefox used to export bookmarks in an HTML file, which even the most casual nerd could edit (maybe I only want part of it, or I want to add to it... whatever). Then it became a JSON file or something
--What are you talking about, man? Firefox 25.0.1 for Linux can still export bookmarks to HTML. Try Bookmarks \ Show all \ Import \ Export to HTML
--The.json file is a data serialization format that is kind of related to XML. So in a sense it is somewhat more useful than a plaintext/html file (to a programmer.)
> If you want a media player, it's still worth getting. For all other purposes, it's not the board to get anymore.
--To a certain extent, correct. The main draw of the RPi now is the education aspect and the surrounding community, in addition to the price point. The hardware was obsolete practically from day 1, and on top of that it requires a bunch of peripheral hardware to be useful as a standalone PC (monitor, keyboard, optional mouse, networking infrastructure, SD card, power supply.)
--For my purposes (Squid server for entire household - multiple laptops, multiple PCs and a score or so of VMs) I bought a gen1 Cubieboard + SSD -- similar to Pi, but has better hardware specs -- including a SATA port. I recently bought a Cubietruck to replace that, and so far I'm quite happy with it; my electric bill was under $60 recently, and the Cubie is running 24/7.:-)
> Right. So if something happens to my stick I'll have to produce another one before I can do troubleshooting. If I'm in the field with no resources, I'm just boned.
--That's what backups (spare sticks), redundancy and online storage are for...;-)
--But if you're dead-set against it, I won't bug you with it - NMJ to try and change your mind. I just see a lot of value in ZOL and wanted to pass it on.:-)
--I usually like/agree with your posts, but you might want to think outside the box a little here.
--I've been testing ZFSOnLinux for the past few weeks and I think it's getting close to production-ready; they just added support for POSIX ACLs (for Samba) and it works pretty well with a minimum of configuration. My test rig is a ~2005 older dual-core 64 bit with 4GB of RAM and secondhand spare hardware running Debian Testing--64, and with a few tweaks I'm getting ~50MB-70MB/sec with a ZFS 2x320GB-disk mirror over Samba. The HDs are from 2 different manufacturers and still work well together.
--As far as recovery goes, you're not limited to CD/DVDs; you could install an entire recovery environment (including ZFS, etc modules) to bootable USB stick, with a bit of forethought and planning. (Altho if your equipment is old enough that it doesn't boot from USB, ZFS is prolly not for you as it really only works well with 64-bit and at least 2-4GB of RAM.)
--Certainly ZOL is not for everyone, but development on it is still *years* ahead of Btrfs. If you haven't done anything with it yet, I'd strongly recommend you put together a test rig out of COTS parts and see just how good it is; the docs on zfsonlinux.org are good enough to get started with.;-)
> "Old Khan" is still, without a doubt, arguably the best film in the entire Trek franchise. Even after all this time it still holds up as an engaging story with just the right amount of character development and action. I've seen it more than 40 times, its one of my absolute "go to" favourites, and I still cry when Spock dies at the end - every single time, without fail.
> Win95 was the first consumer Windows that ran, more or less, as its own OS rather than as a growth on top of DOS.
--Bzzt. Wrong, Win95 and Win98 both ran on top of DOS and could not be run without it.** NT, Win2k (mostly for servers) and XP were the major Windows releases that did not boot from DOS.
** They still required config.sys, autoexec.bat (to a lesser extent) and if you wanted to get decent results, EMM386 and "highmem" memory management.
> It was not very good
--That I will give you.;-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_98 [[ Windows 98 is the successor to Windows 95. Like its predecessor, it is a hybrid 16-bit/32-bit monolithic product with an MS-DOS based boot stage. ]]
The thing is though - whoever proposed this amendment should be run out of town on a rail, removed from public office, and their name shouted from the rooftops as an example of WHAT WE DON'T WANT our government to be getting into!
--At times like this I feel compelled to mention the Cubieboard - it can run at 500mA / 1W (altho 2W is preferred IIRC; personally I power mine off the USB port on my Router or TV), has better hardware specs than the Pi -- including a SATA port, and can actually *max out* its Ethernet 100Mbit connection. It's a bit pricier, but a much more capable Linux board - it's become my primary Squid server for the household.
--Look into the Cubieboard; it has better specs than the PI, comes with USB power cord and SATA cable, and is capable of actually maxing out its 100Mbit Ethernet:
Slashdot Mirror
--I'll second this. $5/month at DigitalOcean gets you:
o 512MB RAM, a single-core CPU,
o A Static IPV4 address, 1TB of bandwidth, and
o 20GB of fast *SSD* disk.
--A few months ago they started charging extra for backups/snapshots tho, so I disabled that functionality. They're the best deal that I've found so far for a cheap cloud VM. (I have no affiliation with them, just a satisfied customer.)
" Never build a prison that -you- would not like to live in. " - Lord Havelock Vetinari
--Just anecdotal evidence, but I've had data loss with FAT16/FAT32 on 4-16GB USB2 sticks. After reformatting to exFAT, haven't had any issues (yet?) with the same hardware. FYI (And it also works in Linux with FUSE, so there's that.)
> Generally, a HDD sitting there spinning away is not what kill them off,
however turning them on-off-on-off a lot is the most abusive thing that you can do.
--And this is EXACTLY what they should be building/testing consumer-level hard drives to do! I make it a point to buy WD drives anymore, and they mostly last at least 5 years if not more. I R/W scan every sector before putting the drive in use, and spin them down (usually within an hour of idling, but sometimes in half an hour) to save money on my electric bill. And I turn all my PCs and laptops OFF when they're not being used.
--The drives aren't apparently any worse the wear for it; I don't even put fans on the SATAs like I used to do with IDE drives. And my electric bill is usually less than $65/month. With the savings I get there, buying a replacement drive if one starts failing is actually cheaper in the long run :)
> You get to a point where, even as a born and bred high-level techie, you just want shit to work because you have more important things to do. ... I don't understand why linux people are so obsessed with reinventing the wheel 50 billion times.
--Amen to that. Personally I think the community could benefit from some similar-project integration, if the developers and distro-maintainers could sit down and figure how to work with each other.
> Firefox used to export bookmarks in an HTML file, which even the most casual nerd could edit (maybe I only want part of it, or I want to add to it... whatever). Then it became a JSON file or something
--What are you talking about, man? Firefox 25.0.1 for Linux can still export bookmarks to HTML.
Try Bookmarks \ Show all \ Import \ Export to HTML
--The .json file is a data serialization format that is kind of related to XML. So in a sense it is somewhat more useful than a plaintext/html file (to a programmer.)
> FWIW, I still can't configure GRUB 2 easily.
--I feel like I'm risking replying to a troll here, but perhaps you haven't heard of grub-customizer ?
https://answers.launchpad.net/grub-customizer/+faq/1397
> Linux does not run well on old hardware, and really doesn't run well anymore (period).
--Yeah, I'm calling BS.
http://www.maketecheasier.com/distros-for-old-computers/
--Deadbeef FTW for Linux :)
Will there be a poinTed Stick involved??
> If you want a media player, it's still worth getting. For all other purposes, it's not the board to get anymore.
--To a certain extent, correct. The main draw of the RPi now is the education aspect and the surrounding community, in addition to the price point. The hardware was obsolete practically from day 1, and on top of that it requires a bunch of peripheral hardware to be useful as a standalone PC (monitor, keyboard, optional mouse, networking infrastructure, SD card, power supply.)
--For my purposes (Squid server for entire household - multiple laptops, multiple PCs and a score or so of VMs) I bought a gen1 Cubieboard + SSD -- similar to Pi, but has better hardware specs -- including a SATA port. I recently bought a Cubietruck to replace that, and so far I'm quite happy with it; my electric bill was under $60 recently, and the Cubie is running 24/7. :-)
> Right. So if something happens to my stick I'll have to produce another one before I can do troubleshooting. If I'm in the field with no resources, I'm just boned.
--That's what backups (spare sticks), redundancy and online storage are for... ;-)
--But if you're dead-set against it, I won't bug you with it - NMJ to try and change your mind. I just see a lot of value in ZOL and wanted to pass it on. :-)
--I usually like/agree with your posts, but you might want to think outside the box a little here.
--I've been testing ZFSOnLinux for the past few weeks and I think it's getting close to production-ready; they just added support for POSIX ACLs (for Samba) and it works pretty well with a minimum of configuration. My test rig is a ~2005 older dual-core 64 bit with 4GB of RAM and secondhand spare hardware running Debian Testing--64, and with a few tweaks I'm getting ~50MB-70MB/sec with a ZFS 2x320GB-disk mirror over Samba. The HDs are from 2 different manufacturers and still work well together.
--As far as recovery goes, you're not limited to CD/DVDs; you could install an entire recovery environment (including ZFS, etc modules) to bootable USB stick, with a bit of forethought and planning. (Altho if your equipment is old enough that it doesn't boot from USB, ZFS is prolly not for you as it really only works well with 64-bit and at least 2-4GB of RAM.)
--Certainly ZOL is not for everyone, but development on it is still *years* ahead of Btrfs. If you haven't done anything with it yet, I'd strongly recommend you put together a test rig out of COTS parts and see just how good it is; the docs on zfsonlinux.org are good enough to get started with. ;-)
--join.me is free, but *still* doesn't work well with MS Office "ribbon" menus or UAC prompts.
...but I don't think I'd want my doctor working from a "fuzzy logic" MRI if I had (God forbid) a BRAIN TUMOR or something...
> "Old Khan" is still, without a doubt, arguably the best film in the entire Trek franchise. Even after all this time it still holds up as an engaging story with just the right amount of character development and action. I've seen it more than 40 times, its one of my absolute "go to" favourites, and I still cry when Spock dies at the end - every single time, without fail.
--Amen.
--It will prolly never be in the main kernel tree due to licensing issues, but:
http://zfsonlinux.org/
> Win95 was the first consumer Windows that ran, more or less, as its own OS rather than as a growth on top of DOS.
--Bzzt. Wrong, Win95 and Win98 both ran on top of DOS and could not be run without it.** NT, Win2k (mostly for servers) and XP were the major Windows releases that did not boot from DOS.
** They still required config.sys, autoexec.bat (to a lesser extent) and if you wanted to get decent results, EMM386 and "highmem" memory management.
> It was not very good
--That I will give you. ;-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_98
[[
Windows 98 is the successor to Windows 95. Like its predecessor, it is a hybrid 16-bit/32-bit monolithic product with an MS-DOS based boot stage.
]]
--Oh, for mod points... You should be +5 Insightful
The thing is though - whoever proposed this amendment should be run out of town on a rail, removed from public office, and their name shouted from the rooftops as an example of WHAT WE DON'T WANT our government to be getting into!
--At times like this I feel compelled to mention the Cubieboard - it can run at 500mA / 1W (altho 2W is preferred IIRC; personally I power mine off the USB port on my Router or TV), has better hardware specs than the Pi -- including a SATA port, and can actually *max out* its Ethernet 100Mbit connection. It's a bit pricier, but a much more capable Linux board - it's become my primary Squid server for the household.
http://cubieboard.org/
o_0 --Oh, for mod points... :-D
--Look into the Cubieboard; it has better specs than the PI, comes with USB power cord and SATA cable, and is capable of actually maxing out its 100Mbit Ethernet:
http://cubieboard.org/
--Where, oh where, is Retief of the CDT (and mod points) when you need them...
--The mind of a fish:
waterwaterswimcoldwater,warmwater,swimwaterwater,PREDATORFLEEfastwater
morewater,darknesslight,coralwaterwater,wasthatashark?hmmswimwater,plankton
wigglysquirmything,investigatechompbite
OHSHI--NO CARRIER
" ...why is the rum always gone... " -- J. Sparrow
/ that's "Captain" to you