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  1. Mercutio

    Home NAS

    Synology just uses Linux LVM so if you're REALLY ambitious you might try creating your array with your drives attached to a Linux host and mdadm like the wind to set your chunk size to something bigger like 64 or 128k. :D But honestly, you're getting 2x one HDD worth of write speed, and...
  2. Mercutio

    Ryzen

    Small servers are not necessarily loud. I have Lenovo RD550s servers at home, in my office and in the datacenter and they're all shockingly quiet except right when they start up and put the 20krpm fans on full blast for about 15 seconds. Even with the CPUs pegged at 100% for 10 minutes, they...
  3. Mercutio

    Home NAS

    If you have software RAID, it should be a parameter you can set at creation of the array, but if you're seeing 700MB/sec sequential writes, you have NOTHING to complain about.
  4. Mercutio

    Something Random

    I tend to view public transit as part of the experience. Chicago is a vastly different place through the El than it is from Lake Shore Drive and Interstate 94. I also take a different view of cities with wholly inadequate transit, like Vegas (outside the strip) or Denver (has light rail but...
  5. Mercutio

    Something Random

    More likely Berlin / Munster / Vienna / Bern / Budapest / Prague, for a European trip. I still haven't made any significant trip to NYC, a trip that's a much higher priority, but also one I wouldn't want to attempt without a decent local guide. My brother is in Prague and both I and my best...
  6. Mercutio

    Home NAS

    RAID6 is always kind of iffy and write speed depends a lot on implementation but in my experience with HDDs, it's usually about as fast as write speed of between one half and two drives for an array of five or six, depending on stripe sizes, caching strategy etc. That's generalizing across...
  7. Mercutio

    Something Random

    I'm a big fan of going anyplace I can go for about $100. This means frequent trips to central Florida, Vegas, NOLA etc, as those are usually the cheapest flights, or else day trips to whatever is in range. I'm a fan of visiting cities any chance I get.
  8. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Humble Bundle's Turkey-Syria Earthquake relief package is a crazy good deal even if most of the products are Steam games. X-Com 2 and Pathfinder: Kingmaker by themselves are probably worth $30.
  9. Mercutio

    Something Random

    I have never in my life thought of using a piece of hardware as a display item. I do keep some old stuff in plastic bins, including a few old graphics cards and sound cards, and the oldest of the disk drives. I'm most weirdly sentimental about my first CD burner and my Soundblaster AWE32, which...
  10. Mercutio

    Video Cards

    There are a bunch of sites that offer rankings. Many of them want to use specific cards rather than generic chips, but it's easy enough to navigate. cpu-compare.com is an easy one to remember.
  11. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Since you're using someone else's VM, is it possible the actual disk image was thin-provisioned and/or set to use dynamic RAM?
  12. Mercutio

    SSDs - State of the Product?

    I've seen the Intel P4500 4TB as cheap as $800 on Amazon, but never when I was looking to buy a 2.5" drive of that capacity. There's some difficulty in knowing whether or not a particular drive is new or a pull, but most of the time pulled drives are around half of MSRP rather than 80%. The...
  13. Mercutio

    Video Cards

    Since we're probably talking about consumer graphics hardware, single-precision FP32 is probably a decent indicator of GPU computing performance. The actual specifics will depend on what a given application has decided to implement and support.
  14. Mercutio

    Video Cards

    The RTX 4090 has dual encoding modules, which could be a big deal since nVidia typically has the best supported encoding hardware. On the other hand, Intel has the best overall support for codecs in Quickpath, which can be enabled from either CPU or a GPU. In either case, you get the same...
  15. Mercutio

    Video Cards

    Video work is a whole thing, man. It's deeply specialized and the recommendations change entirely based on your hardware and applications. My setup is extremely idiosyncratic because I choose to work in Resolve Studio instead of some other thing.
  16. Mercutio

    Something Random

    LM, you have much to learn about awesome movies. This movie is bad. Everyone knew it was bad. It is still AWESOME. Hal Needham stunts? Motorcycles? DUNE BUGGIES WITH LASERS? Fuck yes. I lost a dear friend last year who had a more-than-passing friendship with Barry Bostwick through Rocky Horror...
  17. Mercutio

    Which LinuX

    If Red Hat derivatives were off the table, I'd probably take up Slackware, which is philosophically closer to a standard Unix than most anything else. I almost always use Ubuntu if I'm teaching. It's just the path of least resistance.
  18. Mercutio

    Something Random

    I need to share with everyone the greatest movie of all time. I am making the GenZs watch it tonight.
  19. Mercutio

    Which LinuX

    I actually have a very long and deeply held prejudice against ANYTHING based on Debian because some waste of oxygen from the FSF was shitty to me on IRC in about 1995, but truly, Ubuntu doesn't think commercial software is the devil, comes with the hooks to get almost everything running with...
  20. Mercutio

    Which LinuX

    There is no Microsoft Office for Linux, but people have gotten most of recent versions of Office to run on WINE. It's cool if you don't care about Access or Outlook. And no one should use Outlook for anything anyway because it's awful. You could also get away with running the Android version of...
  21. Mercutio

    Which LinuX

    I would probably say Ubuntu, just from the abundance of support that exists for it. You will lose out on a few things, like some cloud services not making official Linux clients, but IMO if you do most everything in a browser, Firefox is fully functional from the moment you boot the installer...
  22. Mercutio

    Android phones: Tips, tricks?

    Most of the changes are pretty subtle, and if you're a Samsung user, Samsung likes to do as little as possible to expose users to Google stuff. There are some little things that you'll notice in Settings, like the battery use indicator is different. Samsung's philosophy is that users should be...
  23. Mercutio

    Video Cards

    Just to answer my own question, I did find this list. Short version: There are affordable 48" 120Hz gaming OLED displays and weirdo longscreens, but the minute one starts looking at 24 - 32" screens with prioritized color accuracy, the prices range between $3500 and $5k. Oof.
  24. Mercutio

    Video Cards

    Be glad you are still at a point where glasses are somehow optional. My eyesight can't even be corrected to 20/20 with glasses, and I am physically incapable of putting in contacts. Not hyperbole. I had a very patient optometrist and his assistant conclude, after three hours of trying, that the...
  25. Mercutio

    Mirrorless Cameras (MILC) and Lenses

    I believe the cameras with the software in question were Powershots or their predecessors rather than DSLRs. I do have a Kodak DC290 kicking around my place somewhere. It's definitely an antique at this point, but I recall it smoking the image quality of early smartphone cameras. Turns out, it...
  26. Mercutio

    Video Cards

    I'm a little bit surprised you'd chose a 27" screen. I've had 32" monitors for 15 years at this point.
  27. Mercutio

    Video Cards

    There's a bit of a curve in this because there is no One True Display that has both extremely high refresh AND high color accuracy. You usually get one or other the other. Samsung hauls out weird high end displays that kinda-sorta do both for big trade shows, but then they use nonstandard ultra...
  28. Mercutio

    Something Random

    dd, give Puss in Boots 3 a shot. Not kidding. I saw it in the theater AFTER I'd pirated it. It's enjoyable for both kids and adults. I'm obviously a pretty hardcore Marvel person. I go to midnight showings and I also usually go as part of a group to see them as well. We average a theater...
  29. Mercutio

    Mirrorless Cameras (MILC) and Lenses

    This is another one of those "long memory" things, but Canon used to package a gallery and light editing cool with cameras in the Win98/NT4 days that didn't put things under Pictures in My Documents. It was a big source of irritation for me because the only other software I regularly saw doing...
  30. Mercutio

    Video Cards

    Honestly even 75Hz is subjectively noticeable.
  31. Mercutio

    Ryzen

    I have a hard time taking Linus Sebastian seriously. I know he has smart people working for him but he's also the muppet version of gamer stereotypes, and very often his non gamer content boils down to "watch what happens when we spend the GDP of Burkina Faso on hardware." But I have been...
  32. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Ant-Man Quantumania is maybe the most 3D trippy thing Marvel has done since the first Doctor Strange movie If you are a fan of substances, take substances. It's also doing a whole space opera story rather than a comedy heist like the other entries in the series.
  33. Mercutio

    Mirrorless Cameras (MILC) and Lenses

    I can only respect the corporate grudge. Fatwa on all the bastards. It makes sense that would be an issue with DPP, but I've never considered using it. I remember some precursor Canon camera software that wanted to keep had data somewhere under Program Files YEARS after user directories were...
  34. Mercutio

    Mirrorless Cameras (MILC) and Lenses

    I've had absolutely zero problems with Sigma Art or Sport lenses. In fact, I found that I like Sigma's 50/1.4 better than the melted-butter soft Canon EF 50/1.2 and the Sigma Sport EF 70-200/2.8 more than the Canon L version (FREELY admitting the RF L version is lust-worthy though). I know and...
  35. Mercutio

    Windows 10

    Mostly I work with Farmer's agents and independents, but the sites are names you'd recognize if you've ever worked with an independent insurance agent.
  36. Mercutio

    Ryzen

    Virtual CPUs are only ever about 60% as fast as real ones but if I had to guess I'd say you're getting more headroom in your thermal budget to hit higher clocks if you aren't using them.
  37. Mercutio

    Mirrorless Cameras (MILC) and Lenses

    The thing I dislike about Sony is screwy the control interface is. Sometimes touch works and sometimes not. Canon cameras more or less work along the same intuitive lines as operating a mobile device, and it's pretty straightforward to operate it with the hard controls or the display. Sony...
  38. Mercutio

    problem Newegg

    We lost the Chicago area Fry's years ago. We still have two Microcenters though. They're well worth visiting, especially for the novelty of being able to see computer cases prior to purchase, but the value is somewhat questionable since both Chicago and Westmont, Illinois have rather local high...
  39. Mercutio

    Mirrorless Cameras (MILC) and Lenses

    I already had EF lenses from the 5D I had been using. Granted that most of them are Sigma rather than Canon, but the only thing Sigma really gives me to complain about is weight. Their optics are excellent. That predisposed me to stick with Canon, even if I'd need an adapter to use them on...
  40. Mercutio

    Windows 10

    The sad thing is that some insurance agents I do for work just last week got instructions that they are to only visit certain insurers' sites with IE mode Edge. I tried to explain why this was a terrible idea in 2023 and yesterday I forwarded them the same news article about it going away. But...
  41. Mercutio

    Windows 10

    The horror has finally come to an end.
  42. Mercutio

    RAD of the RAID

    It worked for cheapskate Dell and HP consumer desktops that were still shipping with HDDs in 2019. Kind of.
  43. Mercutio

    Wireless Outlets and Devices

    It should also be mentioned that nearly all internet security cameras that don't run through ONVIF route data through Chinese servers, since the common infrastructure APIs for that stuff are controlled by Chinese companies. Very few security camera systems talk to smart home systems directly...
  44. Mercutio

    Wireless Outlets and Devices

    You can either build a local IoT controller with an RPi or buy a device like a Hubitat Elevation. Or use a VM, I guess. Down side to building your own is that the USB transceivers for different protocols cost more than a Hubitat does. I have Google, Amazon AND Apple voice assistants in my...
  45. Mercutio

    Ryzen

    Y'all need to be glad you ain't got workstation hardware. I almost never power off my Threadripper voluntarily but between the RAM, the Infiniband and u.2 HBAs, fresh boots are actually a little bit terrifying. There's probably a 3 minute period where my monitors are just black.
  46. Mercutio

    RAD of the RAID

    IMO RAID0 for capacity is the most valid reason to RAID0 anything at this point. The usage you are describing pretty closely mirrors how I handle things as well. Has anyone ever turned off the weird RAID0-with-an-Optane drive and found that SSD performance is absolutely trash thereafter? I've...
  47. Mercutio

    Mirrorless Cameras (MILC) and Lenses

    Yes, the RF 35/1.8. I bought it because it was well reviewed and 1.8 is normally fast enough for my needs. Even the quasi-macro is pretty handy to have for shots of objects. Nadia's theory is that it's meant to take pictures of food, which is as good as any. I just don't get why the AF is wonky...
  48. Mercutio

    Mirrorless Cameras (MILC) and Lenses

    The A6000 can't cut it in a nightclub, even with a Sigma 18-35/1.8 shooting wide open. It was still fun to play with and a nice upgrade from my Lumix GF2 as a small body and it was perfectly fine outdoors even at twilight. It just didn't handle the rapidly changing lighting conditions as well as...
  49. Mercutio

    RAD of the RAID

    Raid 5 will always be slower for writes than raid 0. You need Windows Server to get Raid 5/6 from Storage Spaces although you can it from fancy HBAs if the original owner paid the license fee for that capability.
  50. Mercutio

    Mirrorless Cameras (MILC) and Lenses

    M series bodies were so frustrating. It would've been just fine if Canon supported it, but even four years ago, it was on its way out in terms of lens releases. The appeal of the small body and lens is pretty clear but I wound up telling people to look at MFT if they really wanted small. Hard...
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