Tech

Drop Ship Has Sailed

Chill Annoying, Clowns, Tech

What are your IT pet peeves?

When I go to work conferences and people try to hand me their old laptops randomly.

First of all, Karen, I’m not the laptop recycling depot. We have an MSP for that.

Second of all, I flew here just like you did. What the fuck do you think I am going to do with your and half a dozen other people’s machines? I don’t have room in my carry-on for eight laptops (I already carry two myself).

Third, I’d never presume to just walk up to someone and just hand them random junk. What the hell is wrong with people? I know too many see us overpaid computer janitors but that doesn’t mean I am gonna act like one.

Start Spiking

Chill Annoying, Clowns, Tech

I am using Windows 11 on my work laptop now as I need to experience what my users experience.

And it is. Fucking. Slow. OMG SO SLOW. Who wrote this, a snail? It’s amazing how absolutely abysmal the experience of using modern software has become.

Take My Apple-cation

Chill Annoying, Clowns, Tech

Is this serious?

While by no means perfect, Apple’s machines just work, are wicked fast and their laptops last a whole day on battery. Even their high-end machines. And no, I do not mean a whole eight-hour work day. I mean an entire 24 hours. I brought an M2 Macbook Pro to a three-day work conference, used it for hours after the conf each day and didn’t charge it the entire time I was there. Try that with any other machine.

The Macbook Pro might be the only actually-good laptop on the market. It is truly an excellent machine, the exemplar of what a laptop should be. Lenovo, Dell, HP and any other maker now just seems to churn out absolute crap in this category. They appear to have just given up. Using an Apple machine feels great in comparison.

The M-series chips are pretty damn innovative, by the way.

Apple’s products are overpriced only if you don’t care about quality, reliability, supportability, usability, resale value, and not having to fuck around with your machine for hours to get it to do something that Apple ones just do by default. Or in the case of Windows specifically, spending half a day evicting all the surveillance and ad infrastructure — only for it to be reinstalled on the next update.

And Linux — don’t even get me started. Using that as a daily driver is about as smooth as sliding 300 meters on concrete. Clarification: I use Linux all the time. I was working in three different Linux VMs today that I have doing various things on our network. But as my main machine? Hell no. Too much bother and hassle.

As I mentioned, Apple machines are not perfect. Finder is absolutely chock full of bugs, is ridiculously slow, and has not improved at all in more than a decade. Pseudo-security has been ramped up too much — as with most companies — so you have to actively fight your machine to make it do what you want.

But compared to using Linux or Windows? Or a tablet running any OS? It’s not even a choice. Apple is the way to go.

Crawlers

Chill Annoying, Tech

Only people who didn’t know anything about anything thought that was true.

I personally — and I mean with my own funds — could build enough infrastructure to crawl 90%+ of the web every few days and store the metadata. It’s just not that much data. It’d take about $200,000 of gear and connectivity. That’d buy me a dozen petabytes of storage and a couple dozen 10Gb links. And that’s enough. The software is all open source.

Google’s moat has nothing to do with the ability to crawl or digest anything and more to do with their former search algo dominance.

Hours Matter

Chill Annoying, Clowns, Tech

Also, as most of you reading this are not familiar, at the true enterprise level hardware support simply cannot be that shoddy as what Synology is offering. Since that higher tier is what they are attempting to move to, having a drive show up “lol, whenever” is simply not any sort of acceptable answer.

I worked at a hosting provider a while ago. We had very large HP 3PAR SANs (60+ drives in each). When a drive failed in those we often had a replacement in two hours. Yep, two hours. Someone from HP literally drove from the distribution center with the drive or drives, showed up at our datacenter, put the drive in and verified it worked. We were by contract guaranteed a new drive within four hours but almost always received it much sooner. And we paid dearly for that, by the way.

Until Synology can offer something close to that, they ain’t enterprise shit. They’re just playing pretend; hoping to capture the margin but not providing what’s required by the true enterprise market.

Plot Lost

Chill Clowns, Tech

Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move.

I was previously a loyal Synology customer. No longer. I will never buy one of their devices again. Their lock-in model means paying more for drives that aren’t even as good as the ones I already use and are vastly slower to receive if something goes wrong.

And as the article points out, if Synology goes out of business you’re fucked. You will not be able to find working replacement drives.

Big nope. There are tons of alternatives out there. Shit, I have the skill to build my own NAS from scratch. And no, I don’t mean TrueNAS. I mean using the raw tools (mdraid etc.) and making it work. That’s what I did before Synology was even a thing. I can do it again if needed. All I really use a NAS for anyway is storage (not transcoding etc.) so it’s not even that hard.

I got into a rather salty exchange with some clown-ass Synology product manager I emailed directly about this, which was fun. Entertaining, at least. I’m very good at making people angry, which might not be that productive but is certainly enjoyable when I make a doofus fume.

No matter the price or even lock-in, a vendor that can’t get a NAS drive to me in 24 hours is fucking worthless. For home, but especially for enterprise. Just to make that clear.

So there are at least four major reasons to steer clear of Synology now: ancient hardware, lock-in, price, and donkey-based shipping.

Avoid, avoid, avoid.