Ahhh.... 2005... The StorageTek acquisition should have worked out much better than it did. The problem was Sun was casting about for a more rounded revenue stream. The bottom had fallen out of workstations, and servers we're getting commoditized, and they were competing with "free" in the software division where I was. They were dabbling in early Cloud computing ala Sun Grid, which may have been the reason for the extra address allocations. Behind the scenes McNealy was fighting for his job, ultimately getting ousted in 2006. The board replaced him with the ponytailed boy wonder and the 2008 crash finished things. The Dark Load of Lanai moved in and sacked the place while he was between his fourth and fifth divorces.

I actually had an office next to ponytail for a couple months in '97 after the Lighthouse acquisition. Completely antisocial. You couldn't even say "good morning" to him in the hallway without getting a confused look on his face as the only response.

T

A 737MAX8 burns about 750 gal/hr, and seats roughly 175. So the same trip to visit my parents works out to 4.5 hours x 750 = 3,375 gallons of Jet-A, divided by 175 people, which comes up just shy of 20 gallons per person. Jet-A is running about $9.30/gal today, so my share would be $186. My truck seats four, so $186 x 4 = $744 then add in airline salary & profits which vary wildly depending on schedule and purchase options. This is before I add $400 in checked bags, and $250+/night in hotel rooms once I'm there. Add a rental car, and extra insurance... It gets quite costly.

My truck does the same trip for 154 gallons of diesel fuel, which is going for $3.12/gal here in the Austin Metro, so $480 until I buy fuel in occupied territory of Commifornia, where it jumps to nearly $6/gallon. Which is why I have a huge auxiliary fuel tank and top up in Arizona. RV pads rent for $50 - 75/night, I have permanent free parking at my parents ranch, and can bring my spare house with me with Starlink and all the creature comforts like my own bed, etc... So as you can see the cost structure is appealing, but it costs fully 5 days in time vs 1 day for flying.

I did mention I do use the RV for work. I don't always know where the destination will be. It's job dependent. But as for visiting my parents... Yes, I used to. The state is a complete corrupt shithole, run by power mad evil clowns. Just registering my F-250 out there costs $900 per year vs. $82 where I live. They'd tax my income at 13.9%, and that washes thru the economy like spoiled milk (Milk $6 gal out there vs. under $3 here...), and don't get me started on the schools & housing costs...

Other options: busybody, nanny, scold, Karen?

I own a Ford F-250, diesel, crew cab. My primary use is to tow my RV trailer, which weighs upwards of 12k lbs. (5600+ Kg). I use this RV roughly 7 weeks of the year, 4 weeks of which this year are actual business trips, and are fully tax deductible. Don't bother commenting on my needs or use case, there's a work reason. The truck has a 6.7L engine which produces 440hp (328Kw) & something around 975 ft/Lbs (~1300 nM?) of torque. When I'm not using the RV, It sits idle in my driveway at a ratio of something like 15:1. I drive it to keep the batteries charged, and the tires round. It's not getting used as a daily/commuter. I have a nice hybrid for that, and it gets 48 mpg...

My trailer is basically a "brick" aerodynamically. I've estimated it takes roughly 175 hp (131kW) to push the air out of the way to maintain 65mph interstate speeds. Which should point out the problem with electric trucks in general. The 131kW means I need 131 kWh battery to run for 1 hour. Oddly enough, that's the size of the extended range pack in the F-150 Lightning. I did some back of napkin math when the F-150 Lightning came out, and guesstimated that I'd be able to move with a safety margin, roughly 75 miles per day towing my RV. That translates to a 25 day trip to get to my elderly parents on the west US coast. A trip I can currently do in 2-1/2 days using diesel.

That's why electric pickup trucks are failing. They only work for the "urban cowboy" types that drive them for show/comfort/want. Those with actual work to do, they're simply a non-starter.

I have been watching Edison Motors up in Canada. That's the ticket for trucks. Genset & large battery with regen braking.

T

AWS aside, as they now seem to have the equivalent of 8 Class A's... That's gotta be a Telco. Not even Sun+Oracle ended up with 5 class A's. As least I don't think they did... Sun was working on their own cloud there at the end, so I'll have to hedge my bet here. I was amused to find Oracle using Sun's 129.146.x.x block from the MPK campus for OCI VM's a couple years back.

But you are right... I've often stated that if we knew back in the early 90's that 4+ billion people would be walking around with a always connected Sun Workstation equivalent on their hip on in their purse, we'd have made some different engineering choices.

I have a dual stack IPv4/IPv6 ISP these days that issues a single IPv4 (dynamic but hasn't changed in 8+ years), and a /64. My problem with their IPv6 is the RA & addressing are not under my control. They assume I have no need for an static IPv6 address or subnetting inside my network. Every time I've poked at it, and tried to subnet I end up in RA hell. It's kind of a waste to have a /64 to myself and no way to make use of it.

T

More name calling...

Complete sidestep, no refutation of statistics at all. Check. Call objectioner a name. Check.

All that sweet Humboldt green bud around you, and you choose violence. Go have another bong hit. You seem to need it.

Cute progressive word play. Check. Message implying Nazi's were right wing. Check. Implication that gun violence is a right wing phenomenon. Check.

None of this is true of course. Nazi's were socialists, a mere step away from Communism. Communists killed over 100 million people over the last century, and the actual German Nazi's another 60m+. Violence to meet their goals is part of their creed.

Polling from the Democracy Institute just in the last month has Democrats in the US approving of violence up to and including assassination as high as 30%, and they're willing to admit that openly when asked in a poll. So just fuck right off. While you're doing so, ask yourself what has gotten into your head and hardened you heart. Because those polling number are obscene, and completely unacceptable in a civilized society.

The real crux of the problem is the '10s were not great for CPU performance increases. They shipped like 7 (?) generations of CPU's with basically the same single thread speed, and a bunch of horrible security issues like spectre & meltdown, etc... All you got were more cores, useless instruction sets, more memory, and near the end of the '10s NVMe & finally some better single thread speeds. Windows 10 was advertised as the "last version of Windows", etc... Win 7 to Win 10 was free for existing COA's... Expectations were set. Bargains were plenty...

I actually ran an old Dell T3500 (circa 2011) as a gaming rig until '22. I picked it up used for $75. I swapped out the HDD for an SSD, put a modern GPU in it, and swapped the 4 core workstation CPU for a 6c/12t server Xeon. 48Gb of interleaved triple channel DDR3 gets close to early dual channel DDR4 speeds, not really but close enough... The Win 7 COA allowed me to update to Win 10. I got 99fps on most of the games I play. The only downsides was no microcode updates, and the 130+ watt TDP. Otherwise it was a tank.

In the end I bit the bullet and built a replacement rig from new parts. The newer Ryzen 7's, PCIe4 GPU's and faster DDR4 memory finally made it worth the trouble. I did what I could to de-fang Windows 11, and I do most of my important work on Linux via my homelab cluster. The money I saved skipping several generations of PC's was used to build a homelab, and take some training. And that's the crux here... They forced customers to spend money that didn't land in M$'s pocket. That's a bad precedent to set. I've been assuming the Spectre/Meltdown stuff was some of the motivation, but the newer CPU's don't seem to have fully closed the hole.

T

I don't have DirecTV, and for the most part... I don't watch TV.

Problem solved!

T

Have you read up on the Federal Reserve Bank? :)

Irrelevant. The point is he was shot for his speech. He was trying to persuade people, for whatever motivation, and someone got mad an killed him.

The "hate speech" trope is disgusting. Hate speech is free speech. The revisionism around that is absurd. Once you justify violence over speech, you've lost everything we've gained over the last 250 years.

T

I live in a state with a "homestead" protection. It's kind of an odd provision. I can declare bankruptcy and keep my homestead. I'd lose other property, but not my primary residence. The only way I lose my house is to not pay the mortgage or my federal income & state property taxes.

As for safety nets... I think it's long past time we couple unemployment and COBRA coverage in some fashion. This would roughly double the amount needed to provide unemployment benefits, but provide a much needed safety net. Structured correctly, it could alter the layoff calculus for corporations. The benefits having a limited period & termination date make's sure it's a safety net and not a hammock.

T

Except... The only way it continues to exist is if it generates a profit. It's there's no profit, it stops happening.

Hospitals close, doctor's/nurses/techs leave, etc... Say I was a doctor (I'm not)... You call out the indifference, but you're indifferent to my needs. I'm not working for free. My college cost a lot of money.

As for socialism, it always fails. Always. People hold up Canada and England's public health service, but omit that you can wait a year or more for a simple MRI, and die in the queue. When you look at full blown socialism, that too always fails, from the Mayflower compact to Venezuela...

We need safety nets in society. Some of these are socialistic in nature, unemployment, medicare, etc... Some are regulatory, like making it illegal to hold cancer patients hostage to contract negotiations. Violence only leads to more violence.

T

How'd that work out for Charlie Kirk?

T

Someone please tell the AI filters in HR....