Some systems already have that. Replaced a switch yesterday and re-arranged some things on my network board and got a HomeKit notification that some things were offline and when it came back. Knowing when something goes offline isn’t as useful as keeping things up though. With something like a hardwired camera/NVR, even if your ISP service is interrupted the cameras can still record, and you can put a UPS there to keep things going, even if the rest of the network is down.

I heard there was a process for requesting additional data, but you have to actually pay for the 5 users and they’ll bump it a few TB every couple months on request. That’s from people reporting their experience with support, so it might not be totally consistent.

I kind of get it though, people hear “unlimited storage” and then don’t even make an effort to be efficient with that space, and just want to keep everything forever. There’s a real cost to that storage, and it’s higher than many think since it’s not just a single HDD like many would have sitting on their desk but a series of arrays/pools and all the related systems to ensure reliability and uptime. They probably did some calculation where 99% of users would be profitable even with their “unlimited storage” and eating it on the other 1% was a reasonable advertising cost. Over time that calculation changed and they had to update the service.

Presumably it was GSuite/Google Workspace. While they advertised unlimited storage if you paid for 5 accounts, it wasn’t really enforced so you could pay something like $20/month and get unlimited storage on G-drive. There was a daily cap on how much data can be moved, but that’s fine for hosting incremental backups like many that took advantage.

This is true in central Canada too. Heat pumps get pushed saying they put out 3 times as much heat as the energy they use, but electricity is 7x the cost of natural gas.

I’m sure there’s applications where that’s true, but then you’re essentially talking about having a gas furnace plus a heat pump, so you’re installation cost is close to the sum of both systems. Energy rates vary by region, but around here electricity is about 7 times the cost of gas, so a heat pump running at a coefficient of performance around 3 would still cost twice as much to run as a natural gas furnace, it would be cheaper to just turn off the heat pump altogether and only use that “supplementary” heat.

I suppose if electric heat is the primary option then sure. Around here though natural gas is pretty much ubiquitous and the cost per joule is a heck of a lot lower than electricity. About $6/GJ for natural gas, compared to about $42/GJ for electricity. Would need a pretty efficient heat pump to see the cost savings in my area.

Could be a larger demographic thing. Tech enthusiasts tend to have lots of devices(tablets, portable computers, etc.), so they tend to like the smaller form factor phones since they can always use their tablet/laptop when the small phone is limiting. Those people are also the ones you see in these kinds of online communities. For a lot of other people though, they’re getting the big phone and then not having a personal tablet/portable computer at all. Those aren’t the kind of people that hang out online and talk about tech stuff though.

Also agreed. However the manufacturers know how many of each device they sell and seem to think the smaller form factor devices aren’t very popular. I imagine there’s multiple reasons, like the smaller phones tend to also have lower battery life and lack other features due to size and they tend to appeal to people on tighter budgets that upgrade less often.

Something kind of unique about UnRaid is the JBOD plus parity array. With this you can keep most disks spun down while only the actively read/written disks need to be spun up. Combine with an SSD cache for your dockers/databases/recent data and UnRaid will put a lot less hours(heat, vibration) on your disks than any raid equivalent system that requires the whole array to be spun up for any disk activity. Performance won’t be as high as comparably sized RAID type arrays, but as bulk network storage for backups, media libraries, etc. it’s still plenty fast enough.

My understanding is essentially Apple has enough money on hand and foresight of product demands that they can do things like tell a supplier that they’re going to buy everything well in advance and secure those deals before other manufacturers are willing to commit. Presumably, there’s nothing to stop Samsung from going to TSMC and saying they want to buy all the capacity for 2024, except that Samsung doesn’t feel confident about matching Apple’s sales volume on those upcoming products.

I’ve also heard Apple will also fund expansion of their suppliers when needed. If someone makes a thing that Apple wants but doesn’t have the capacity to meet Apple’s volume, Apple will provide what they need to increase capacity, along with providing commitments to purchase enough product that the manufacturer is taking on minimal risks from the expansion.

True, though Apple does contribute some things, like MagSafe for iPhones is becoming part of Qi 2. I think Apple get a bad rep just because they’re a large target sometimes, but I don’t recall other big platforms releasing a bunch of their work as FLOSS either.

I’m also on the fence about the repairability thing. It’s nice to be able to open up an old computer to add more RAM/Storage/etc., but I also get that making everything integrated and soldered improves durability and reliability. I do think they take that a little too far sometimes. While RAM/SSDs should typically last a long time, the battery life often becomes the limiting factor for usability so making that repair simpler would go a long way. Pricing can be hard to bite too, while I don’t mind the idea of soldered RAM, I don’t like that upgrades are pretty heavily marked up compared to most manufacturers.

Then again, I’m still in the ecosystem, so unless there’s some government oversight setting standards for Apple to follow they’ll continue doing what’s profitable and their sales keep steadily growing despite the occasional bad press.

Also distribution. It’s relatively cheap to transport energy in the form of hydrocarbon type fuels because most of your fuel(oxygen in the atmosphere), is in abundant supply pretty much everywhere. Solar has huge variation in seasonal production at higher latitudes, geothermal, hydro, and wind power tend to be most economical in places where the geology/topology is favourable.

The trick in my area is my ISP is a crown corporation that competes with the privately owned ISPs. They don’t give a crap what you do(as long as it’s not too illegal or damaging their service), the standard on their fiber is upload speeds are 1/2 the download speed and you can pay an extra $10/month for symmetrical. I put it to the test once as I was testing online backuo software. GDrive has a limit of 750 GB/day uploaded data, and I did that consistently for a couple months straight(IIRC that was pretty close to maxing my upstream at that time). Never heard a peep.

I think it was based on things like radio play time, ratings, sales, etc… So Disney and other big names would have got a proportially bigger cut than smaller artists.

Personally, I think there should be a stronger separation between commercial, non-commercial, and personal use. Friends sharing/copying some media isn’t a big deal to me, but someone making copies and undercutting the original artist should be subject to some pretty strict consequences.

I also think there should be some protections put in place to protect the actual content creators, because most people’s issue with copyright isn’t usually with the people actually creating things. The issue is corporations that insinuate themselves between the creators and consumers, funneling all the profits for themselves. It’s a pretty shitty system where artists make covers of their own albums so they can get a reasonable cut of the proceeds.

Canada had a system where we charged a levy on things like blank media, then distributed that levy to right holders. I don’t think it was a very good system, but maybe something that could have been improved upon.

Ratio on private trackers isn’t really a big deal as long as you’re the kind of person that can keep a couple hundred GB worth of things seeding close to 24/7. Aside from actual ratio(the thing your torrent client reports), they tend to have a system that rewards having things seeding, whether anyone actually connects to you or not, that you can use to boost “ratio”. There’s also usually some options for acquiring some content without it counting against you, like freeleech(download data isn’t counted in your ratio) for low seeded or new torrents, or discounted/refunded credit for extended seed times, or seeding large amounts of data. Aside from the first few months in a new tracker, ratio isn’t a big issue.