Would requesting a mac with the argument of having access to a Unix shell potentially work? In college my IT instructor used a Mac with a windows VM via VMware Workstation and it pretty seemless. He’d use the Mac for most stuff then jump over to the Windows VM for windows specific stuff, and then diving into the native Bash shell for anything else. Honestly it was a pretty sweet setup
I mean this happens. Traditionally it was companies with lots of digital artists for improved software compatibility, but these days it’s really more done for developers and anyone else just as an employee perk to put them on their preferred platform.
Honestly, for administration purposes having a proper native Unix shell running standard utilities is extremely handy, especially when you need to manipulate files, such as working with disk/VM images for example
Yeah getting paid to sit there while windows wastes 20+ minutes of company time updating is always a treat
Meanwhile I got local admin because the IT guy who’s no longer there couldn’t be bothered to install a couple of utilities for me and most of what I actually do is manage SaaS services in a web browser
Y’know what, I honestly haven’t looked at what the PCIe lane layout is like on newer chipsets. Maybe it’s gotten better since I last really paid attention like 5+ years ago. I remember in early-mid AM4 there was a lot of grumbling about how there’s only 20 PCIe 3 lanes followed by early PCIe 4 platforms that would give only 16-20 lanes with another 8 or so PCI 3 lanes. I also didn’t really pay much attention to AMD before AM4 given how far behind Intel they were. But I could be entirely out of date now that I think about it
So hardware that may still be perfectly usable but predates NVMe should be tossed out then?
The exact same thing you already have to do to upgrade the memory on such a computer, you go buy used/old stock DDR3 or cannibalize from another system. Pre-NVMe systems are DDR3 era and older. Time goes on, interfaces update and anyone looking for compatibility with their older system will need to either use an adapter or buy used/old stock. If there’s enough demand like with motherboards there can be a random Chinese brands making new hardware for old platforms using a mix of new and cannibalized parts
I did similar when preparing my wife and I for windows 10 EOL. I went back to Linux on the new drive, my wife to Windows 11. Honestly both have a similar amount of issues (mostly wake from sleep challenges on Linux, although my PC wasn’t great about waking from sleep on Windows to begin with) and most importantly my wife can still play Fortnite and I can have fun trying new stuff out and reveling at how every single game I try just works on Linux whereas 5 years ago it was more of a 50/50 chance whether or not a game would work
Does require you to have the PCIe lanes for it, BIOS support for booting to PCIe (which Intel 6th gen core CPUs were the first to support. 4th gen never did but some had m.2 slots and NVMe support for secondary drives and the 5th gen X99s had some receive BIOS updates to support but that’s its own can of worms) and both Intel and AMD have historically been pretty bad about being stingy about PCIe lane availability
Plus to run more than a single NVMe on a single slot your motherboard either needs to support PCIe bifurcation which is almost exclusively an enterprise feature or they need to have the right lane configuration available to support that x16 slot handing out 4x4 lanes (or 2x8/2x4 for dual NVMe)
Yeah my recent IT experience is similar. I redeployed monitors that had “vista-ready” badges on them during the monitor shortages of 2021-2 I’ve replaced so many of those analogue to digital adapters (usually because the computer only has 1 digital output and 2 displays to drive, or 1 HDMI and 1 DisplayPort but the displays only support HDMI and I only have VGA to HDMI adapters, etc.)
The challenge simply comes down to the fact that displays tend to last so much longer than the computers they’re connected to. Heck my wife is using my decade old 1080p monitors because they were an upgrade over the even older 720p monitors she had before which may well find themselves mated up to my kids’ new computer
A couple of years ago I got my wife to finally play Portal and Portal 2 for the first time. Its been long enough she was entirely unaware of any of the memes about the game so she immediately fell in love with the companion cube and cried when she realized she had no choice but to incinerate it, even going so far as trying to find a bug to exploit to bring it with her
When they do you can still play 2009scape! Has up to 5x XP modes in case you want a less grindy experience, a single player mode and a brilliant community
Worth noting that OSRS is really just a fork of RuneScape from around the mid RS2 days, (if I remember correctly it’s based on a full backup someone found of their codebase, so it started as “hey look we found this old version of the game in a box in one of our offices, wanna play?”) and now it contains more new content than original content. Heck way back in the day the idea of a sailing skill was always a silly joke that nobody took seriously, and I’m talking back when Hunter and slayer were being added. Yet here we are.
I’d ask if you’re at my work, but this is an amount of organizational improvement that they haven’t yet been able to begin
Would a safety deposit box at a bank be an appropriate option for your off-site backups?
For an rail network that runs 24/7 they’re going to have crews specifically to wake up should there be a problem on the busiest sections of mainline as this hoax indicated there were. That’s a significant amount of dollars burned if they close the line due to a citizen reporting heavy damage to the bridge, and just waiting until 8am on the next business day to actually look at anything.
I strongly suspect what happened was they woke up their on-call inspectors (or scrambled an inspector who worked nights, which a rail network may very well have) informed them of photos circulating showing significant structural damage to this 150 year old viaduct, so they roll up and see the exact same viaduct in the exact same shape it’s been in for their entire life and call up their boss and say “oy you wakin me up for this shiv? The bridge is bloody fine! Check your sauces mate!” (And after reporting that it was a hoax probably went and did a more thorough inspection to make sure their bases were covered)
This is the real consideration, depending on your career so far, such a role might be easier just left off the resume. But they did say it was an internship so they likely have no good career experience to speak for. Personally, I’d aim for purely talking about the experience and just say that “the internship ended”
Jesus it’s not even like it just ran rmdir from the current directory and got lost, it just flat out explicitly deleted everything from the root of the drive
Yeah as an admin I love that I can run familiar Linuxy commands in powershell but I also hate that they can’t just use/fork the real userland utilities so everything works just similarly enough to completely throw you off when you stumble across a difference
I love reading this as the backups have never succeeded
Its all creepy until you realize it was all just a chat with an LLM and not actually an agentic machine learning model or chain of models hooked into some custom APIs
LLMs famously collapse into rediculousness once a conversation goes on too long. They’re now at the point where that takes more than a couple of paragraphs of text at least
So back in the earlier days of cinema, you’d go to the Cineplex to see a movie. A Cineplex would only have a single screen for viewing movies while the multiplex would have multiple screens for seeing movies on. This started with the first duplex theatre in 1915 and later the first triplex in 1966, shortly followed by theatres with 6+ screens which is around when the term “multiplex” started being used. Basically for anyone born after the 80s (therefore anyone under the age of about 40) the term is largely obsolete since most theatres have at least 4 screens and qualify as multiplexes, plus the industry has seen so much consolidation that smaller independent theatres with 1-2 screens are pretty uncommon now