I do volunteer "IT Stuff" for a community center near my home. This includes helping high school age kids through CompTIA A+ certification. There's even a grant to pay for exams for a few kids every year, which is honestly a big deal since the exams themselves are very expensive. I also do a Help Clinic a couple times a month that is primarily geared toward cleaning off malware, doing data transfers and counseling people interested in buying something new.

HP has absolutely staggering mindshare in relation to anything involving printers. It's selling $150+ single tank inkjets RIGHT NOW, as if that is a good idea and a quality product from some actually reputable manufacturer. There are a very small number of low-cost HP color laser printers that are actually kind of a good deal as used/refurb products, but I beg and plead that people consider the humble Brother monochrome laser models for their home printing needs. Almost no one listens, even though an equal number of people will concede that any positive experience they've had with an HP printer was either 30 years ago or involved the dishwasher sized printers they have in their office.

I actually had a lot of respect for him. He was from probably the last gasp of computer magazines as useful sources of timely information. I am sorry to hear that he has passed. I hope that he did not suffer.

Fuck cancer.

In the mid 90s, I was dealing with process control systems that ran on NT/Alpha and PPC because x86 systems weren't thought to be able to handle the IO loads. We also offered the same product on Solaris.

I will say that it was cool to see an Alpha chew on an x86 binary for a minute and then watch as FX32 kicked in and whatever-it-was would run faster on the workstation than the best PC in the building. It wasn't really surprising, except that in a lot of cases the PHBs would look at the DEC systems and say something like "I thought you said those things can't run Excel."

On the other hand, our system worked so much better on UltraSparcs than it did NT4 that it was actually funny that we gave customers the option to use anything else.

One of the frustrating things about Premier for me is the wide variance in sentiment about how well it works as an application. Both my partner and I do a certain amount of video editing. Her job means that she's basically married to the rest of Adobe Creative Suite, but she also says Premier specifically behaves poorly on the mix of Apple and Windows computers she uses.

Other video editing pros I've checked with say they can leave it running for weeks on Walmart-grade trash PCs and never see a hiccup.

That can't be the same software.

DaVinci Resolve is free and cross-platform. You can spend $350 on a paid license. They send you a really nifty desktop editing device if you do that, but it's a big-boy editor that can do big-boy work.

In my experience, the only thing Premier is good at is crashing.

Wireless networks aren't solely for internet data transfers. My partner is always bitching about how long Time Capsule needs to run on her Macbook and how long it takes to move finalized video projects off it, but she also refuses to plug the goddamned thing in with a cable even though she hasn't unplugged the fucking thing from AC in like two and a half years and there's an $200 SFP+ to Thunderbolt adapter literally inches away from the wall wart.

I might be a little salty about it.

It's called Hyper-V and it's been included as part of desktop and Server Windows since the days of Vista / Server 2008. If you have a Pro or Enterprise SKU of desktop Windows, it's a standard OS component.

I'm not going to use the FSF solution because it turns out that there are many alternatives. Even when I was talking about Linux on IRC in 1994, I was specifically using either Yggsdrasil or Slackware at the time rather than Debian.

Regarding Microsoft, there's lots and lots of industry-specific applications that run on Windows and nothing else. The system I'm looking at this morning runs on a Paradox DB and looks like it uses Delphi libraries. The vendor says it needs to live on Windows Server 2016. Since that's what someone is paying me to keep running, that's what it's running. I'm guessing that the four or five developers who made that application aren't going to make a Linux version any time soon given that they haven't even certified compatibility for their software on any newer Windows version in the last eight years. As a pragmatic matter, Windows exists and people need it to work. Their money spends as well as anyone else's.

I operate a MSP for small businesses. I started on ESXi and moved to a combination of Windows Server datacenter (Windows Server instances running on DC edition are automatically licensed, and I'd be spending that money anyway) and XCP-ng for my hypervisors. I have no major complaints about either product. I think you'll hear about Proxmox a lot in this thread as well, but it's a nonstarter for me because some people claiming to work for the FSF were condescending dickholes to me on IRC in 1994 and it'll be a cold day in hell before I use anything that's derived from Debian. I don't have anything bad to say about Proxmox itself. I'm just never going to try it.

At the point when I can run clustered nodes and easily transfer guests between them, when I have easy access to handle backups and out of band management, I'm pretty happy. It's ever pretty straightforward to give a VM direct access to a PCIe device or raw drive on both platforms.

I'm only dealing with ~20U of hardware and a total of a few hundred CPU cores for everything I'm doing, which is pretty small scale, but what I'm doing works in theory and in practice so I'm putting in a good word.

Arrow Lake Ultra 9 CPUs are 125W base/250W max TDP vs ~350W max on the 14900k (depending on limits set by the motherboard, which sometimes were more generous than that). Intel chose to design for much better power efficiency in this generation. Given that 14th gen Intel was giving Threadripper desktop CPUs a run for their money, I think Intel made the right call.

Honestly, the thing that makes me most interested in this camera is that the developer included the option to make a build for left-handed users.
I'm not terribly confident in my ability to build the custom circuit boards on my own, but hopefully someone will do a manufacturing run for nerds who haven't done anything in the EE realm since they were undergrads.

AMD actually DOES have a modest upgrade path, depending on your needs and in fact has released new Zen 3 hardware as recently as this month. The upgrades are somewhat modest, but you can now look at either x3D CPUs all the way down to the 5600x3D or move up to a modest but potentially worthwhile 5950x or 5900X, if you have a workload that scales with core count. Either way, you can look at viable upgrade for as little as $150, which is probably cheaper than getting an AM5 motherboard, let alone the RAM and CPU to put on it.

I'll also mention that there are Ryzen 7500Fs (F = no built in graphics) on AliExpress for around $120, as a budget path to upgrade to AM5, and for those of us who DO like our full size motherboards, x670E offers as many as three fully functional x16 PCIe slots and bifurcation support that Intel platforms generally don't have, which is nice for those of us who like our u.2 drives and 100Gb NICs as well as a decent GPU.

The vast majority of people whining about Zen 5 are whining about gaming performance. In fact, if you go look at tech reviews and Youtube content, you'll come away with the idea that it's a failed platform because it doesn't compare favorably with Zen 4 X3D systems, which have an ungodly amount of on-die cache purpose built to improve gaming performance.

But I'm not particularly interested in playing games and I AM interested in having a fast video editing workstation. So here's an alternative take: My 9950X is around 33% faster than my previous editing system, a Threadripper 3960X, which has 50% more cores than the 9950X. It also has about half the TDP of the Threadripper and it also tolerates undervolting the CPU in a pretty substantial way, and all on a platform that cost less than my last motherboard.

If you're coming from a Zen 4 system, yes, there's zero reason to upgrade, but why the fuck are you looking at upgrading from a two year old platform in the first place? Zen 5 is still a safe harbor for people using latter-day Intel, people upgrading from Zen 3 and those looking for a moderately future proof upgrade path.

A zillion years ago, I had a contract IT job at a Disney site because an on-site admin got deported and I was the sacrificial body they hired as a replacement. I was at that time the only IT person in a tri-state area. Disney refused to give me a place to sit or a PC authorized on its network. I just got a Nextel phone with zero numbers in it and no one I could "push to talk" to. Supposedly that phone was supposed to ring if someone needed me, but it never did. I wound up working in the server room and checking my webmail from a file server because they didn't give me anything else to use and the one and only thing they told me to do was handle user support tickets like on-site account issues or hardware problems.

While I was there, one of a pair of giant Cisco routers on site started to fail. It was randomly dropping connections within one blade of its telco-style high density blades and I could tell one of the exhaust fans in the back had died. I didn't know a damned thing about it, but so I ran it up the chain in corporate IT. Eventually I got on the line with someone senior enough to know Disney's WAN architecture... and it turned out that Disney had absolutely zero documentation on these particular devices, not even asset tags, nor could they remote in with passwords they had. This basically told me "This is a you problem not a me problem."

And so I, as kid on a six-month IT Support contract, went to the on-site management and explained the deal. He signed off on a same-day visit uncontracted support visit from a Cisco tech, who informed me that these long out of hardware support routers had never had their running config saved and both of them were probably going to die from all the toner floating around the server room, which was also home to some secured printers the on-site HR people used. But he was able to get parts and these things were designed to have parts replaced while they were running, so they did get fixed. The bill from Cisco was high five figures and as far as everyone was concerned, this was all my fault as the responsible person on site and it was very, very obvious that I was going to get crucified over it.

About two days later, some guy shows up and introduces himself as my replacement. I was only about halfway done with my contract, but unlike me, this guy had a new laptop, new phone and an actual knowledge of operations. I was still paid for the remainder of my contract, and the one and only thing that gave me any solace over the gig, per my replacement, was that it turned out that in the massive comedy of errors that was my entire time on that job was that I'd somehow been put in a Super Admin group with rights through the whole AD forest rather than just at my site or local domain and as such it was imperative that I not be allowed to touch absolutely anything on my way out the door. Nice guy though. He did at least buy my lunch.

Yes, this was around 20 years ago, but these are not people I would trust to have their IT act together.

My file server is a 36c/72t Lenovo SR630 with an LSI 9600-24e running to a pair of 24-bay SAS chassis. There's ~20TB of u.2 drives connected and another ~250TB of too-old-to-use-in-production SAS drives. That system is mostly a VM host but it has 40Gb connections to my video editing workstation and my partner's gaming PC.
I have an LTO6 changer and important files are sync'd back to my datacenter and/or Crashplan.

Shockingly, none of this is loud except the first minute or so of the SR630 powering on.