Now is probably a good time to remember what a VPN can and cannot do. It can block your ISP from knowing which sites you’re going to. It can bypass ISP-level blocks, including geo-blocks.

It cannot stop the endpoints (WhatsApp, both the client and server) from harvesting whatever data they want from there.

Meta is clearly concerned about bans on WhatsApp. This is nothing more than their own self-interests.

This is highly dependent on what your needs are and how you plan to solve it. SATA-3 maxes at 6gbit, which SAS-2 had in 2009. Most cards are x8, and have at least 4 full speed SAS lanes (of whatever generation). That means 24 Gbit. PCIe x8 2.0 (from 2007) had 4 GB (32 Gbit). So if that meets your needs, you can run it on an ancient board.

However, if you need something more advanced, such as SAS-3, a SAS expander, or a card with more native lanes, then you would need to plan accordingly.

I’ve been running on an LSI 9211-4i4e, which is only a PCIe 2.0 card, for many years. I did notice my speeds dropped when I expanded the 4e to a 15-bay DAS (plus the 4 internal SATA drives), but it’s still enough to meet my needs.

It’s not really about 24/7, but it is about quality of components. Enterprise gear is made using slightly better parts and tighter tolerances. Things like more expensive capacitors rated for more hours/cycles, better power filters, things like that.

The end result (and this is easily verified) is the failure rate is much, much lower than comparable consumer-grade equipment.

There is sometimes a blurry line between what counts as enterprise vs pro-sumer vs consumer gear, though.

If you can use SAS (you’ll need a SAS PCIe card, roughly $50 used), get SAS drives. They are enterprise-grade exclusively, there is a massive supply of used drives as servers get refreshed, and a very limited secondhand market because most people can’t use SAS drives.

You won’t get the latest or largest drives, but you’ll get something that works perfectly fine for home use.

I recommend against Go Hard Drives. They get drives that previously failed but currently test ok, then wipe the SMART data. I had a whopping 133% failure rate (all 3 original, plus 1 replacement) before I returned the whole thing.

If you insist on using them, do the most extensive burn-in testing you possibly can. I would use at least a full week, to make sure it’s actually (semi-) reliable.

I couldn’t tell from the article. Does the Brazilian justice system work differently than I expect? It just says he was initially convicted, but then exonerated. Does that mean the charges were thrown out for lack of evidence, procedural missteps, or something of that nature? Or was it dismissed because the judges disagreed with the law? Or am I completely misreading/misunderstanding the whole thing?

That model was a flop, but people love the feature. Just not enough to buy the rest of the car that goes with it.

It’s also not the only model with that feature.

Someone else suggested that it’s a common regional term, and (apparently) not my region. I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt that it’s common and nonsexual in her area. However, around here I would’ve avoided terms and phrases associated with porn/fetish.

As for how it could’ve been written, she had already very clearly established her gender, so she could’ve just said student. But that can also be reasonably inferred from her age, and isn’t really relevant to the rest of the point she was making. The entire clause could’ve been dropped. Start the sentence with “Like most teenagers”.

I presume her goal was to highlight her age and lack of obligations. That would make sense given the following details of her and her peers spending so much time on these apps. The more natural flow (again, my local dialect) would be “15-year-old high-school student”, or possibly “15-year-old girl in high school”. But these are still unnecessary.

4th paragraph:

I’m a 15-year-old schoolgirl and like most teenagers I spend a fair portion of my spare time on social media, often scrolling through short-form videos on apps such as Instagram or TikTok

There are a number of EVs that make all sorts of fake engine sounds, both to the interior and exterior. The feature is surprisingly popular.

Is it just me, or does it feel out of place that the author described herself as “a 15-year-old schoolgirl”? I don’t think I’ve ever even heard that term outside of porn, and you wouldn’t describe her counterparts as a “schoolboy”.

Many, many years ago (20-ish?) I spent a full weekend trying to get Gentoo working on an even older PC. I wasn’t completely new to Linux (having installed and used a bit of Mandrake and Fedora Core), but I was certainly no expert.

I spent the entire weekend trying and failing to get a usable system, reinstalling numerous times with different options, installing countless packages, and following innumerable guides on troubleshooting. I never had a system even close to as usable as Fedora was out of the box.

Still, I consider that weekend a complete success. I learned more about Linux in that one weekend than at any point since. Everything after that has been little tidbits needed for the task at hand, without much of the base foundational understanding. Failing with Gentoo taught me so much.

Not OP, but I saw this at an old-school Fortune 500. To get Casual Fridays, you had to donate a certain amount to a specific charity (ours was a local food bank). It wasn’t a lot, something like $25/quarter, but it was definitely an expense

A credit card the account is with visa, tho it may be managed by your bank thanks to partnerships and bank end integration. Depending on the circumstances you actually will be directed by your bank to contact visa or who ever directly or be forwarded by your bank.

Do you have a source on this? Because it directly contradicts EVERYTHING I have ever experienced. Visa is a payment processor, but more as a middleman. I’ve even been redirected (through automated systems) back to my bank when making a purchase using a Visa card. Any disputes are handled by bank. You can’t get a Visa card without going through a bank. My debit card has a MC logo and can be used as such, but it’s also my ATM card.

Your point about debit vs credit is valid, though possibly more convoluted than needed. On credit, it’s someone else’s money in limbo, until the bill is paid.

Presented without comment, SanDisk’s MSRP for that drive is $579.99 CAD.

https://shop.sandisk.com/en-ca/products/ssd/internal-ssd/wd-blue-sn5100-nvme-ssd.html?sku=WDS200T5B0E-00CPE0

I just want to add that the crash will take down the entire economy, not just AI and tech companies.

Simply by subtracting AI companies from the equation, the US is already in a pretty substantial recession. The process of them crashing out will make that even worse.

Why would they start with the harder one? Samsung is much better funded, and therefore will be a much more difficult case.

And no, it does not matter that Samsung did it first.

This is basically the exact scenario that led me to detail that I was only talking about consumer gear. Server gear is a very different beast, with a variety of tradeoffs that I didn’t want to get into. For instance, I’m assuming you can only use Registered RAM.

The biggest problem with DDR3 is that the last (consumer) boards/CPUs that could use it are really, REALLY old. 5th-gen Intel or AM3 AMD. Which means you’re looking at a full decade old, at the newest. These boards also probably can’t do more than 32GB.

Now, I suppose if you only need 32GB RAM and a CPU that’s pathetic by modern standards, then this is a viable path. But that’s going to be a very small group of people.

They introduced the Sacagawea dollar coins a while back with the expectations that people would use them for daily transactions. After an initial brief interest, they quickly fell off. Turns out that people in the US don’t really care to use coins, and used the paper $1 bills at every opportunity.