as a guy over 50 who has analog meters (triplett, simpson, stuff like that) that are nearly as old as I am, I can say with confidence that you have no idea what you are talking about.

digital meters tend to fail more! they are more complex, and unless you buy very good ones, they will suffer 'cap problems' (esp. if made in china, which nearly all things are, these days).

otoh, buy a used meter of the type I described and as long as it was not hit by a truck, it will likely work and out live YOU.

springs fail? never saw that happen. bushings fail? again, never saw that happen.

I would guess, based on your very high UID that you are a youngster and never really used or lived with such gear before.

probably better to just remain silent than to speak up and tell everyone how much you don't know.

right.

you're only allowed to do illegal things and lie about it AFTER you are hired by the fbi.

does anyone seriously believe that 'law enforcement' is about fighting the good fight and standing up for what is right, anymore?

I have lost 101% confidence in our system's ability to do what's Right(tm). it seems only the stupid or brainwashed would want to work for the government goons.

and of course, goons is basically what they have, now, anyway.

2 words: parallel reconstruction.

FBI is a corrupt org, as are all the top-level 'law enforcement' orgs.

they have no right to call the kettle black, so to speak...

they break any laws they want and they use 'ends justify the means' along the way.

pathetic!

And desktops and laptops last more than 8 to 12 years,

NOT in a corp environment, they don't! 2 or 3 yrs, tops. corps do a 'refresh' and buy new gear (cheaper than supporting older stuff).

and every company I've been at in the bay area, for the last 10 yrs at least, has mandated windows (sometimes giving mac a choice) but they NEVER run linux on the desktop. juniper ran freebsd on the desktop for its engineers (2000 timeframe) but that's the exception, not the rule.

corps keep paying the MS tax. happily, it seems.

MS is not going away. they may not get consumers to rebuy pc's so often but corps do, that much is true.

well, how do you make playlist with a filesystem?

really? that's your question?

% cd somewhere; find . -print > playlist.txt

or equiv.

yeah, that was REAL hard. filesystems suck for audio playback.

oh wait, NO THEY DON'T.

I try the 'desktops' every so often, but I keep getting annoyed and go back to very old fvwm1 (emulating twm. no, not kidding).

very light weight, no huge process list from hell (like all desktop linux's these days) - just the window manager, the x server and some other minor things. makes fast systems truly fast, and slower systems quite acceptable.

what do I run on a rasp pi or beaglebone? yup, fvwm1 and no 'desktop'. makes those tiny systems usable. does not need a lot of memory or disk footprint.

18 months, huh? you think that's long enough?

I still have my N1 phone and its still in nearly new physical condition. bugfixes and security updates stopped several years ago. should I throw it out? even CM is not updated for this phone.

otoh, I have pc's that are more than 10 yrs old, STILL SECURE and STILL able to be updated.

fuck google. they are children with a short attention span. they make linux look like something worse than MS or apple (even MS and apple give more updates than google does on older hardware.)

any site that demands I disable ad-blockers is not a site I NEED to visit. so, its self-filtering.

(what's the problem, again?)

do you live here (bay area)? I do. been here several decades.

the valley does NOT want talent. what do they want? CHEAP LABOR. quality is not important, insight is not important, even code quality is not important. speed and price is all that matters.

I wish I was kidding... ;(

I recently moved and had CC for the previous year I was in my last place. I used a vpn almost all the time and my line stayed up pretty much 100%.

this year when I moved, I transferred CC to my new place and I continue to run a vpn. I now notice, for some reason, that after a few hours, I get a loss of ping to anything. if I stop my vpn, the default router is still unpingable. what 'fixes' it is to reboot the cable modem (and my access pfsense router, which then gets a new dhcp primary addr) and then things are good again for a few hours.

not sure if this is related, but if I don't use a vpn, the line stays up for days and weeks at a time. when I use a vpn, I get a few hours at a time.

might not mean a thing, but then again, it might. I can't quite tell yet. what I am planning on doing is designing/building a reboot/test loop so that my line will stay up even if I'm not home to notice that it went down.

I had to do that kind of thing with pacbell dsl about 10+ yrs ago (their alcatel, aka crash-catel modem was at fault back then; but same thing happened - I'd lose connectivity and only a reboot of the modem would bring it back again).

its not convenient but if this keeps my line alive, sigh, well, this is what I will have to do.

I ran zfs on freebsd for a few years but gave up on it. at one time, I did a cvsup (like an apt-get update, sort of, on bsd) and it updated zfs code, updated a disk format encoding but you could not revert it! if I had to boot an older version of the o/s (like, before the cvsup) the disk was not readable! that was a showstopper for me and a design style that I object to, VERY MUCH. makes support a nightmare.

I've never seen this in linux with jfs, xfs, ext*fs, even reiser (remember that?) never screwed me like this before.

the system also was very ram hungry and cpu hungry.

I'm still not convinced its good for anything but serious users who have a GOOD backup/restore plan. updating a disk image format and not allowing n-1 version of o/s to read it is a huge design mistake and I'm not sure I understand the reasoning behind it, but until that is changed, I won't run zfs.

obsolete?

if you use drives as shelf-spares or backups, then this is a MAJOR problem!

I have drives that are 10+ yrs old and while I don't spin them up very often, I do expect them to still work years from now as long as I give them a spin-up every so often, to keep them in shape.

a drive that fails just sitting there, unused, is NOT something I want to buy! or own.

vpn. all the way.

you see that stream of octets? you can't get into them!

bwahahaha!

now, it seems that comcast (my isp) drops my vpn connection every few hours. I'm working on a modem reboot system that keeps my network up but its a huge PITA that comcast resets my connection several times a day and it requires a full modem reboot to get it back again.

still, I'll continue to use a vpn for many reasons. the 'opaque stream of octets' keeps their fingers out of my data, very nicely. they can't modify or read it in any way.

not really. snmp is an afterthought for them and its clumsy as hell to add snmp to it. I tried and gave up. instead, I picked hobbit (uhm, the new name is 'xymon').

xymon has its quirks but it was not hard to modify to add more snmp features to and its coding was not too bad to get thru. its not written in a lot of 'strange' languages, and that's a plus, to me, too.

personally, I usually just write snmp code fresh, from scratch, using net-snmp mgr tools. its not hard and you get just what you want and you are not muddled down in lots of 'infrastructure' that someone else thought was good but useless to you (like zabbix).

citation needed.

I disagree strongly that 'ipv4 hardware' (huh? what IS that, btw? does this imply that ipv6 is not in 'hardware'? how strange to describe things) is not up to modern network speeds. if anything, they can outrun any intermediate link in the chain from you to some random website. wan is still the slow part and always will be; but unless you truly get 1gig speeds to your door, your hardware will be more than enough for anything wan-based.

I truly have no idea where you got this info from, but you are as wrong as could be.