Bugger off you racist - I'm partly Devonian and have a massive collection of Commodore 64 games, that I didn't actually pay for. You'd be amazed how often you never hear "arrr!" in Plymouth or Exeter.

The "generic" SW England pirate accent thing is bollocks and a Hollywood fiction. It's closely associated with "Mummerset".

Anyway, I am a self-hosting fan to the point that up until recently my company offsite backups were stored in my home attic.

Let's do the traditional car analogy: If you are a mechanic then you can maintain your own car and your family's and your mates too. If not, then you can pay someone else to do it. You might go back to the main dealer (MS) or that bloke down the road (me).

I do run "vanity" email domains for my family and friends as well as the corporate ones for work.

"Oh, my sweet summer child,"

As soon as you kick off with that nonsense, you have lost the argument. There is a nonce (I use that term illadvisedly) on the Register who still insists on using it.

It was a mildly amusing rebuke in, say, the noughties. Leave it there. Nowadays you simply sound like a fuckwit.

DRS.

For me, the biggest win for DRS is being able to patch a cluster without pissing around with where the VMs are. I ended up writing a shitty Powershell script that nearly works - https://github.com/gerdesj/Pat... I don't bother updating that script because I'm only using it until my last VMware cluster is toast.

Proxmox HA is good enough. Note that it supports autostart too properly. A VMware HA cluster has never supported autostart - you have to bodge it.

DRS needs a properly expensive license. The old Essentials Plus didn't get it - you only got basic vMotion and certainly not Storage vMotion. You had to go Standard at a minimum and ideally Enterprise Plus for the full toybox. Then more for Tanzu containers and all that bollocks.

Proxmox gives you OpenvSwitch and HA and Ceph and the rest for nowt, if you know what you are doing. Its no harder than VMware.

Hands up who's had to deal with their vCentre running out of space on one of its 15 odd volumes or its STS cert expiring. What about discovering that administrator@VCENTER.LOCAL is not root or that both used to have a 90 day password expiration. I've been a VMware fanboi for 20 years. Been there, seen it, written the wiki page and done it more than twice. Luckily I know how to use chroot ...

Now, your hot failover - I never used that in 20 years, with VMware. I used to run a Novell NetWARE setup that did that, back in the '90s with an eye wateringly expensive set of network cards. It's 2025 and clustering and app (not host) load balancing and failover is a fixed problem without invoking that horror.

"You're confusing vSphere with vCenter."

No they are not. They had a single ESXi and whilst ESXi is only a component of vSphere (if you pay for a license) it is fair to separate freebie ESXi from "full fat" vSphere. VMware's marketing also wasn't that clear either, back in the day, until v4ish - I'm old enough to remember ESX and GSX and all that guff.

A Proxmox box has the full feature set for clustering built in - HA and file system(s). You now also get (it is still in alpha, but frankly better than some VMware releases I've dealt with over the decades) a thing called Proxmox Datacenter Manager - a sort of super vCentre. Ideal for MSPs (like my company).

20+ years I was a VMware fanboi. No more. I am doing another migration at the moment.

I recently visited FL for a couple of weeks. The good Lord granted a massive swamp .. a concrete base with grassy islands! FL has a lovely climate (apart from the hurricanes n that) and FL man deployed air conn with the ability to freeze air.

Cold dry air is not healthy - humans are used to atmospheric humidity - we are largely wetish breathing beasts. Temperature range from -20C to +40C is quite easily manageable if coupled with suitable humidity. Cold, dry, SHARED air is really crap. Now you have shared heavy doses of viruses and bacteria to contend with.

There is no point in getting whizzed up about the plain fact that an American of any flavour will consume far more resources relating to heating and cooling than nearly any other human on the planet. It is the way of things. FL, CA and TX (man) are probably the worst exemplars.

AI ... LLMs are handy. They are just a tool and given enough training on decent data are a great aide memoire. They are the old school secretary (female - obvs) that predicts the woefully sexist boss's thoughts and fixes things up. ... without the casual abuse.

The hysteria with regards replacing programmers and so on is absolute bollocks.

A LLM does not know when it is talking bollocks, so for disciplines such as maths, it should be restricted to, say, a chat about theorems, axioms etc - all very useful but for goodness sake, do not ask it for a solution to a simple arithmetic problem.

I suggest you consider your LLM chats as one with a mate who is somewhat pissed - they will whitter on about all sorts of nonsense but also manage some sort of clarity.

I'm a consultant and own the firm. We are migrating our SMBs to Proxmox. I spent quite a while (25 years) getting to grips with VMware and I am absolutely livid (and also mildly sanguine!)

The world turns and we all have to adjust. I do find it rather distasteful how many people and businesses like me and ours have been treated without any consideration - we were their experts and we are now running away in droves.

A short term profit will be all they get.

TikTok's management are profit focussed, as any corporation should be, with a frisson of attention from above, occasionally. That would be the government having a tickle to the private parts to keep things moving smoothly (now that is a euphemism I hope I never have to deal with!)

TT is basically a nationalistic influence movement, par excellence. It's not shy and frankly rather well done. They looked at Google, Facebook and the rest, intercepted the ball and ran with it.

We reap as they sow or perhaps vv - you decide.

"But if someone posts something negative about another person and they claim it is "fake news" who decides?"

That would be libel and a court in some jurisdictions. Whether you can afford it is an issue too.

Elsewhere you are probably SOL.

I'm 53, a Brit and the son of two soldiers.

I went to several BFES (British Forces Education Services) schools in West Germany, back in the day. You may recall that things were quite fraught back then - different to today but also the same. We used to get bomb threats roughly weekly - just at school, it was worse for the troops. Some of those were traced to older kids having a laugh. (lol)

In about 10 years (roughly late '70s to mid '80s) quite a lot happened. I was 10 in 1980.

Anyway, govt agencies have to deal with quite a lot of crap that you never even hear about. Its quite hard to discern whether you have a murderous maniac on the blower or a kiddie trying to impress a girl or whatever.

I was roughly seven or eight years old when my Dad showed me how to look for impromptu devices on the chassis of a car. My brother is a year younger. We would always check after parking our car. That was the times.

Nowadays are different but we should perhaps re-allow the old norms to come back in and start to check our cars again, when it might be appropriate and be a little more observant about what is happening around us.

Your threat model might be more biased towards firearms, if you are US based, for example. Avoid them if you can!

"and later return the iPhone to the Apple Store where he'd bought it."

Waste not, want not!

"that caused the price of Bitcoin to jump by more than $1,000 momentarily"

That's fast trading that is. I wonder how many BT were grabbed and flogged at that time to exploit the differential?

I've never heard the term "keyboarding" in the UK or anywhere else for that matter.

I should point out that you almost certainly are quite happy to click on a floppy disc icon to save, despite the fact that most people here are too young to have seen one outside of a museum or a socials post from an old person (40+).

This is all rather tragic.

I've been a nerd for some time but I'm not sure I'd bother getting excited about fucked up last ditch error handling routines.

Real ... erm ... OSs abend with a proper lack of colour and silly emojis and create a massive screen dump (no way of scrolling back or saving to file/network) of complete gibberish hex that has nothing to do with actual the issue that caused it. Ideally that hex should be a Rick roll.

How did the self driving cars respond?

Tomorrow (Monday), I will be wearing my: "Have you thought about turning it off and on again?" T shirt.