To quote that same document:

Figure 5 looks at the average temperatures for different age groups. The distributions are in sync with Figure 4 showing a mostly flat failure rate at mid-range temperatures and a modest increase at the low end of the temperature distribution. What stands out are the 3 and 4-year old drives, where the trend for higher failures with higher temperature is much more constant and also more pronounced.

That’s what I referred to. I don’t see a total age distribution for their HDDs so I have no idea if they simply didn’t have many HDDs in the three-to-four-years range, which would explain how they didn’t see a correlation in the total population. However, they do show a correlation between high temperatures and AFR for drives after more than three years of usage.

My best guess is that HDDs wear out slightly faster at temperatures above 35-40 °C so if your HDD is going to die of an age-related problem it’s going to die a bit sooner if it’s hot. (Also notice that we’re talking average temperature so the peak temperatures might have been much higher).

In a home server where the HDDs spend most of their time idling (probably even below Google’s “low” usage bracket) you probably won’t see a difference within the expected lifespan of the HDD. Still, a correlation does exist and it might be prudent to have some HDD cooling if temps exceed 40 °C regularly.

Hard drives don’t really like high temperatures for extended periods of time. Google did some research on this way back when. Failure rates start going up at an average temperature of 35 °C and become significantly higher if the HDD is operated beyond 40°C for much of its life. That’s HDD temperature, not ambient.

The same applies to low temperatures. The ideal temperature range seems to be between 20 °C and 35 °C.

Mind you, we’re talking “going from a 5% AFR to a 15% AFR for drives that saw constant heavy use in a datacenter for three years”. Your regular home server with a modest I/O load is probably going to see much less in terms of HDD wear. Still, heat amplifies that wear.

I’m not too concerned myself despite the fact that my server’s HDD temps are all somewhere between 41 and 44. At 30 °C ambient there’s not much better I can do and the HDDs spend most of their time idling anyway.

Entra isn’t Azure. Entra ID is what they renamed Azure Active Directory to. But not always; there’s also Azure Active Directory B2C (yes, that’s the fully expanded name). And various other Azure-branded things that may or may not belong together.

Microsoft are spectacularly bad at naming things.

It’s a miracle they haven’t renamed Windows 11 to “360 365” or “Live 6.5” or “Active-DOS Series X” or something.

Not really. 32-bit libraries are mostly relevant for people who want to play old games, which mostly means old Windows games. Windows software doesn’t tend to use Unix timestamps a lot.

It’s not terribly exciting but I find myself using this a lot:

#!/bin/sh

echo "$*" | sed -e "s/x/*/g" | bc -l

Just a little shorthand for bc that allows me to write “x” instead of “*” to avoid shell expansion nonsense. I put it in ~/.local/bin/= so I can e.g. just write = 17+4x5. Combined with a Quake-style terminal this is much faster than launching a calculator app. It’s a script instead of an alias so it works regardless of the shell I’m currently using.

The call to bc -l could be replaced with one to qalc -t if you know qalc to be present on the system .

There’s a reason why oldschool X-Com players kept coming back to the games despite technical issues like the Groundhog Day bug. (Thank all applicable deities for OpenXcom solving those issues, though.)

My most used features so far are vertical splitters, vertical nudging, and the new placement modes for conveyors and pipes. With an honorable mention going to conveyor wall holes, which also free up a lot of design options.

Honestly, though, just about everything in this update has been a godsend. Priority splitters are the only thing I haven’t really used yet. Even the elevators rock; being able to zoop up to 200 meters up or down in one go can make them useful even as a temporary yardstick for tall structures. (Also, I did end up needing to go 150 meters straight down to get at some resources and can confirm that elevators handle their intended purpose very well.)

Given the usual quality of BIOS/UEFI option descriptions it’s remarkably close to being sensible. I would’ve expected something like “enables limiting CPUID maximum value”.

My vent core feels retroactively unblasted by this revelation. You really can’t expect anything good from any of the major studios anymore these days.

Besides, “there are only two sexes” is rather obviously inaccurate. While intersex people aren’t terribly common, they do exist and are well-documented – as are the genetic reasons for why they’re intersex. XX men and XY women are also a thing. Genetics are inherently messy.

But acknowledging all that would mean having to admit that sex is a complex matter and can’t be handled with simple statements like “the one you were born with is the one you should have”. It’s easier to just pretend intersex people don’t exist.

Holy shit, that’s much better! Thanks; I didn’t know about that package.

Unfortunately, it follows the current Gnome design language. Gnome’s approach to UI design doesn’t click with some people, me included. I feel that while the main UI has not changed much since GIMP 2, the dialogs have become far less intuitive to use.

Yeah, the 13 feels a lot more solid. The 16 pays a certain price for its enhanced configurability. Honestly, though, a full-size touchpad module would go a long way to fixing that. The two spacers next to the keyboard look fine (if the keyboard is centered) but the touchpad spacers look less great.

I have a Framework 16. Is it as well-built, efficient, or quiet as a MacBook Pro? Nope. But if something breaks I can easily replace it, and I can upgrade it without having to throw everything away. Also, hot-swappable ports. That’s nice too.

It’s all about trade-offs in the end.

Not everyone needs to talk to everyone. But many people need to talk to many people.

Microsoft had to abandon the initial Vista project and start over because they couldn’t manage a team of 1000 developers. People working on adjacent features had to go through so many layers of management that in some cases the closest shared manager was Bill Gates. For something like getting a change in the shutdown code reflected in the shutdown dialog.

Huge teams become exponentially harder to manage efficiently.

I hadn’t heard about Copilot telling people how to activate Windows 11 without a license, though. So I’ll thank OP for that bit of levity.

Fair point. It remains to be seen how well this will work out for them. But given that doesn’t seem to be even a vague launch date I’d say there’s going to be plenty of time for a transitional phase where they can get their bugs sorted out – and the underlying operating systems can get Wayland running if they haven’t already.

Xfce’s stance is that they want to offer Wayland support soon but will remain X11-compatible for the foreseeable future. Going by what their wiki says about it, work seems to be progressing fairly well.

That does make encryption was less appealing to me. On one of my machines / and /home are on different drives and parts of ~ are on yet another one.

I consider the ability to mount file systems in random folders or to replace directories with symlinks at will to be absolutely core features of unixoid systems. If the current encryption toolset can’t easily facilitate that then it’s not quite RTM for my use case.

If you use a .local domain, your device MUST ask the mDNS address (224.0.0.251 or FF02::FB) and MAY ask another DNS provider. Successful resolution without mDNS is not an intended feature but something that just happens to work sometimes. There’s a reason why the user interfaces of devices like Ubiquiti gateways warn against assigning a name ending in .local to any device.

I personally have all of my locally-assigned names end with .lan, although I’m considering switching to a sub-subdomain of a domain I own (so instead of mycomputer.lan I’d have mycomputer.home.mydomain.tld). That would make the names much longer but would protect me against some asshat buying .lan as a new gTLD.