Felger

I recovered a post apo novel written like 30 years ago by a friend last year.

Patient : Miniscribe 8425SA 20 MB SCSI hard disk from an Apple Hard Disk 20SC (external SCSI enclosure with a HDD). Hoped the disk was still in working condition after more than a decade stored (HDD was built in '88 and a sticker mentioned a repair in '99), the enclosure power supply was presumed dead (no power on) and the mac itself was shorting mains power in a few little minutes, probably from the screen high voltage converter dying and shorting.

I simply extracted the hard disk from the enclosure. This full height 3.5" disk has an "external" mechanical actuator : a stepper motor visible from outside drives the arm with the head(s) inside the disk, protected by a bellows. It gives a cool sort of a floppy drive sound when random access occurs.

I simply plugged it on a SCSI chain on my vintage Advansys SCSI PCI Card and ribbons.

Read the HFS partition with an old recovery software I could find on the recovery computer, quickly found the files (very simple file system and hierarchy), recovered them on the PC. Encountered just one bad sector.

Then looked the content of the file as raw shaking and ajusted the recovered text format for use with Windows PC/Word from the old word processor software - I think they were Corel Wordperfect files.

Very few correction to make to the raw text. Layout will have to be more thoroughly restored beyond EOL. Mainly accented characters and a few other replacements to do. I thought it would be more of an chore from an vintage apple system and third party software.

Overall, it was far easier than expected. Took me less than 2 hours. But am a ex data recovery guy with some ressources.

Quite pleased the miniscribe acted almost like a charm after 10 years or so of (warm, indoor) storage and not a single power on. Feared the HDD motor's ball bearing were totaly stuck !

WDDM 1.0 (Windows Display Driver Model) introduced with Vista, indeed came with TDR (Timeout Detection and Recovery) function for the video adapter, enabling a soft reset when possible.

A lot of BSOD were also caused by generic and low quality DRAM sticks, unstable individually (failed addresses) or becoming unstable when paired in dual channel setup, especially with 2 pairs of dual rank, dual sided sticks. Had very often this issue with Corsair Value sticks, or with a XMP (Intel spec) RAM kit used with 1/2/3th gen Ryzen, manually setup to match the 1.35V XMP profile (for DDR4). EXPO does this much better now.

Diag tools like Quicktech Pro then Memtest86+ from Passmark Software and the free one were born on this 'lost era'.

Top 3 : - FPS : Duke Nukem 3D in solo or multiplayer, unmatched fun, terrific background music on a good MPU401 midi card (Gallant SC8000 / Guillemot Maxi Sound 32 Wave FX PnP, better MIDI samples at that time than SB AWE32). And its buggy/hard to use "Build" map editor that gave nighmares to every map designer wannabe.

- Hack and Slash : Diablo II, first game I believe that introduced grinding.

- RTS : Total Annihilation with Core Contingency. What's better than stopping your foes with a swarm of Krogoths ?

I concur : my bank currently offers 1.95% deposit interest's rate for a year (Apr '23)

How the heck do those makers find the time and energy to make such insane projects ??

I'm about wasted after a day of work and in/outdoor house chores.

(I was answering to the previous comment wondering if ramdisks still have any interesting usage nowadays.)

About 150 TBW endurance on a 250 GB Samsung M.2 NVMe Evo 970+. On paper that is, but since it is the OS SSD with Windows Server 2022 STD (sole DC AD/DHCP/DNS/Hyper-V), in production, I won't take any risk. RAID 1 in this scenario would have changed nothing. On the side, I have 40 TB RAID10 for storage.

So I cancelled the first C2 exec (with C2 encrypt on) when I reached 195 TBW on the SSD. Monitoring the ramdisk use still shows about 3:4 ratio on complete snapshot.

I have about 1 million files on the 2,29 TB data to backup.

I had indeed the RAM sticks available for free, simply had to take them (2x16 GB ) from a decomissioned ML350 Gen9 (which uses DDR4-2133P ECC Reg). It now serves me as a bench, litterally.

A very useful use case discovered no later than last week : local dedup management by Synology C2 Backup Agent and TBW on the OS SSD.

C2 Backup agent stores dedup/chunks data by default in ProgramData, which is stored on C:... which is usually a SSD nowadays.

I noticed a 3:4 ratio between written data in local dedup folder vs uploaded data volume on the remote C2 5 TB storage (suscribed a C2 Business).

TBW grew indeed horrifyingly fast on the SSD, and I estimated it would completely wear it in about a year or so, with the 2 TB and growing data to backup with my standard retention scheme.

So I made a 32 GB (16 GB was not enough peak size) lmDisk ramdisk with backup/restore at shutdown/startup (it is featured by lmDisk and quite nicely), mounted in place of the dedup folder, and ran my tasks.

poof, reduced TBW on SSD by 99%.

(4x16 GB DDR4 ECC Reg on my server, so not concerned about memory errors)

I understand your point. I mixed background, long term tendancies with on-the-field daily feelings.

I should have more emphasized on the long-term tendancy : almost all lights are now red in France (and not so better in the UK) :

- Educational system is in shambles. Not enough manpower, not enough funds, too many kids per classroom. Level is steadily dropping. France's PISA ranking is getting worse and worse.

- Health system is on his knees, and the decision to fire (without pay) the unvaccinated health staff put a additional strain upon it. Thousands of them left for Quebec.

- National debt is higher than ever.

- A great portion of the French GDP is in fact born from the pensions spendings (legal age for retirement was 62 till now, and 26% of the total population is 60 yo and more) and public workforce (12,4% of total GDP, very similar to northern europe).

- We lost most of our nuclear workforce and engineering because the plan was to phase out nuke power plants for renewables... until two years ago. I Have a part of my relatives directly involved in nuclear power production field, now retired and they lament the loss of the once respected french "expertise" (well, mainly bought from Westinghouse but cough).

- Big compagnies still perform well (especially luxury companies - thanks China), but the other industrial ones are outsourcing/offshoring production at an alarming rate (the plan was to relocate and reindustrialize, but this was also before the energy crisis). Not much hope here.

Consequently, spendings being high, labour costs are also high (too much, if you ask me). Even if 26% are 60 yo or more, we still "benefit" from a quite high immigration, but we aren't quite able anymore to make the better of it because of the failing public education system.

Forecast are not particulary good, hence the pressure from the EU commission to reform the French pension system and target 65 or 64 yo as legal retirement age.

In fact, very similar to the UK, with more socialism ?

For the "young ones" (I'm 40), I fear that they won't be able to acquire the skills they need if they don't have the basic knowledge (numeracy and literacy foremost) and softskills layer they are currently losing.

This is almost the same situation in France. Very same issue with management.

Most middle earning jobs don't need hard skills anymore, so most of employees gradually lost them over the time (and not the opposite, like a muscle). The gen-Z is additionnaly often missing the most basic soft skills : basic, social skills, punctuality... or even coming to work at all.

So we are gradually building a generation where about two-thirds of people have... no more or almost no skills whatsoever. Can't change a wheel, can't swap a breaker, can't replace a tap, can't do more than basic IT-assisted tasks in a predefined process. More and more youngs must try hard to get their driver license, and so city dwellers conveniently skip it (but a good thing in the end). To the point that basic maths are a thing of the past for them. Perhaps 10% are currently able to write this very comment. Let's not even talk about financial education at this point, more than 60% fail at giving you the right amount of two years worth of an account interests.

I can witness that even business holders are gradually losing skills at running their own businesses those last two decades. Their skill in the differents subjects they must address all day long are almost all declining, even their core ones. They don't want to make longer work hours anymore than their employees and want to "Netflix and Chill" like everyone else.

Remains about the 20% skilled, but I have the feeling that over the last 20 years their portion is progressively shrinking. Lack of forecast made health pro number dwindle, "true" engineers (mechanical/electrical/civil) are harder and harder to find since a non-negligible part of them leave the country after completing their studies.

Are we going to make Idiocracy a reality sooner that expected ?

The forum at forum.hardware.fr was for most of its main mature code parts written between 2000 and 2001. It has not upgraded revision since about 2010. It has a quite outdated but efficient look and UI even in 2023. Way better thread handling than reddit IMHO.

The guys (well almost one sole guy) started a bit before - in 2007 or so - a company (MesDiscussions.net) and sold the forum engine to the most successful french websites like the "infamous" Doctissimo, which now totals almost 300M messages since 2000. I believe it was then sold or incorporated to Doctissimo.

Let's not forget the french invented and used the Minitel well before dial up internet became widely spread. We quite like old things (no pun intended regarding the current First Lady)

Can relate to that, I wondered a sec if I didn't write that comment myself. Didn't go the medication route, however.

I slept for 8h30/9h per night. A better routine (earlier wake up time, 8 hours of sleep max, some intense physical exercice - weight lifting in my case) put me back on track after about 7/8 months.

But I tend to go back to my bad habits by taking too much workload on my sole shoulders...

Yes I can indeed recall systems being shipped with 4x 9-bits sticks.

And god the horrific price of thoses sticks...

I can remember 486 Motherboard in Packard Bell (quite the entry brand...) systems frequently used 36 bits ECC FP SIMMs.

Printers and plotters from this era used ECC modules most of the time.

But by the end of the century, they were replaced by unbuffered, unregistered 16/32/64 bits modules.

Every mid range server still use ECC. Entry HPE Servers use ECC UREG (unregistered, 9 chips) modules, while mid range and more use ECC REG modules (9 chip + interface controller onboard). Ironically, UREG module are more expensive than ECC REG.

Also, most workstations used ECC modules. Less frequently since 4-5 years.

Yorokobe shonen, no one really cares and public health policies won't establish next week (or year or decade) some sort of mandatory social club activity with cops ringing at your door to make you go. You can stay alone in peace.

I professionally solder about 2 to 3 time a week to replace mainly dead capacitors, broken USB or DC power jack connectors, as well as a few SO*-8 EEPROM chips. Became quite good at it after 20 years. But at the end of the day, prices are on the rise in western europe while personal energy is low. I must admit I'm equally ashamed to not be able to do more and being envious.

Still, always a pleasure for a tech guy to scroll through a bonafide geek project.

Loved the page of the guy that mapped and memory-injected a WD hdd PCB Marvell's ARM cores to ultimately install its own linux kernel on it.

I'm always amazed and impressed by the amount of effort and energy needed for those ultimately "useless" (said not in a sarcastic way) personnal projects... I personnaly absolutely can't muster so much efforts for almost anything. And sooo would love to be able to...

Documenting being a major drag.

Good news. I observed those AES cipher/lz2-v2 issues with dead tunnels on newer builds of OpenVPN, on i5-8265u CPU but not on R5 3600. Had to rollback on a previous release.

Am I the only one wondering why almost everyone asking HN questions gets downvoted every da*n time ?

Yep. Wanted to write the exact same thing.

AVX is supported since 1st gen Xeon E3 (Sandy Bridge), launched Q2 '11.

Had almost the same setup and saw about 32W idle on mine. T110 II with Xeon E3 1220, 4 Gb RAM ECC, 1x 128 GB SATA SSD + 1x 6 To HDD IronWolf on a PERC H200 PCIe card.

With a WD 10 GB external HDD, the UPS gives me a 50W load.

Printing GitHub issues on receipt ? Are you trying to compete with the FED's money printing rate ?

"Prouve le moi" ;)

Could not ever get the up-to-date TB16 to do power delivery correctly to anything (HP Zbook/various Asus/Lenovo Yoga 7) except a Dell laptop. The led on the USB-C connector stays off. The power - if delivered - stays very low and the laptop takes from its battery.

I will be given the same task of get a USB-C portable monitor to work on a Huawei Mate D14 (1 USB-C) next week. Already preparing for that massive headache.

Go take a look at the Dell TB16 : it's a quite massive thing, almost the size of an old macmini 2009, equiped with a too short of a tb cable. And fun fact, the TB16 is also fan cooled with an Embedded Controller (EC) and firmware that manage the fan curb.

Yes I can also find tons of second hand PR02/03X 5 minutes from home here, dirty cheap. But the 19v 130w PSUs are usually more expensive and difficult to find.

But the PR and ultraslim dock series are so far very reliable, even after years of use.

I dread the future massive switch to USB-C and TB3 entry dock.

I hope a chip maker will eventually release a all-in-one TB controller with USB3.x/Display outputs/GbE Ethernet/Sound embedded. Currently, everything is split into differents ICs, hence the high cost and complexity.

Plus Power Delivery capabilities... Had Asus Expertbook B1500CEAE (11th gen Core and tb3 controller) a few weeks ago that sadly don't support USB-C power delivery plugged on the USB-C port of a multiport AV replicator setup, but charge ok if directly connected to the TB3 USB-C port.

This same configuration (USB-C power supply plugged on the multiport's USB-C) works on an Apple Macbook Air M1 2020.

Here, we still use 2015' Dell laptops with PR02X and PR03X old fashioned docks. And some HP zbook with Ultraslim docking station 2013 , with few displayport issues on the first firmware releases.

Next laptop generation will sadly be the end of all those proprietary yet reliable docks and the beginning of USB-C/TB3 wd15/wd19/tb16 era and its army of bugs, failures (WD15 someone ?) and painful and hazardeous firmware upgrades.

Go see the Forteress of Polignac, 10 km north from le Puy-en-Velay. Nice castle with a uncommon setup atop a hill and high walls. Rich history.