move /var/log to a RAMDISK

As do I. Apart from video editing, which I dont do so much any more, my highest CPU usage is now either websites clogged with javaScript, or playing a realtime game and that is more GPU than CPU

My 5 year old HP desktop was simply, out of its refurbished box, better than anything I need at far less power consumption than what it replaced.

I only bought it as a cheap platform to test out a major Linux upgrade as I wanted to leave its predecessor there in case the upgrade didn't work. It's predecessor is STILL sitting there.

Pretty much yes. And of course discs removed and replaced with SSDs. Corporate discs automatically go to the crusher.

I had a look, and they are available in unknown brand from at least amazon at £7.69

By comparison my Sandisk 16GB class 10 A1 whateverthefuckthatmeans SD was only £6 from the Pi hut.

IME they don't even leave the office with the PCs, the IT department removes them and puts them in the box to go to the crusher.

I had a further look, as its a dull wet day and its bloody cold for summer, and in fact you are hard pressed to even find a card under 1GB at all, and they are not the cheapest.

The current price point minimum seems to be around 16GB

Usually some contract firm doing the IT upgrade does that.

Probably depends on the size of the IT department - the last place I saw it happen was Yahoo! where internal staff did it.

A relative was (contract) managing projects like this for IBM. Who were the 'IT department' for several insurance firms. I cant remember who actually removed the drives, but I got the impressions it was the firm in charge of recycling, whose contracts were written in blood and cursed by corporate zombies.

So as I understood it, the PCs went to a firm who swore to remove the drives and crush them.

After that I assume they went to industrial auctions where refurb firms bid for them

All the machines I have bought came with brand new SSD drives and a fresh install of WinShit, which I promptly erased as soon as Linux was installed.

And the thing is that a corporate Lenovo, Dell or HP machine is far more likely to install out of the box than some bleeding edge assembled by morons POS gaming machine or cut price system built from substandard parts.

And cost peanuts in comparison. I cant buy a new machine for what a refurb of equivalent power costs. The bean counters write these things off against tax, and the people who deal with them quote low prices to remove them on the understanding that an undeclared asset is being transferred as well. So they make a decent margin onselling them, but they are still bloody cheap.

It may well be worth looking at getting a new PC.

Since around 2005 my house server was a Dual Athlon PC in a noname case and not new when I got it in 2005 and has had at least two new disks (bog standard WD 500MB blue) since then. Last April it collapsed in a heap and was replaced with a new system with a Ryzen 3 43006 chip: 500 GB RAM and

The difference has been dramatic: the new system cold boots in 41 secs (from hitting the 'on' button until the Login' prompt appears). I have password protection on the M2 SSD so this includes the time needed to enter the SSD password.

Weekly backups (by rsync to a local 3.5" WD Essentials USB drive is at least 5 times faster. Similarly, The weekly Fedora dnf-managed package update that follows it is now getting read at 4.2 Mb/sec rather than the

Figures, Yahoo! was busy going down the pan at the time there's no way they'd be springing for the kind of services IBM would use.

Yep - it costs them next to nothing to put it on there. For me it's FreeBSD that gets to install itself over the whole disc. It's been failing to annoy me for thirty years now, I've yet to encounter a Linux that lasted a month without annoying me. There's a Linux VM lurking for a couple of slicer applications that I can't be bothered to try and make run under FreeBSD's compatibility layer.

Unless you buy used cards on Ebay from people who pull them out of old phones. I got a bunch of 16GB cards that way and most have worked well. One was toast. The smallest ones, 128MB or 64MB, are usually cheapest from those sellers.

Horses for courses. What runs on my *desktop* needs to be up to date, and user friendly. I do all the complex s*it on servers and Pis.

I write code on this, but I don't compile it on this machine.

When you are looking at second hand SD cards plus postage, the cost benefit analyis told me I should pay the money for whatever was the current best price on new stuff , with plenty of life left, from the same shop that was shipping me the Pi. To leverage the postage. and that turns out to be 16GB. Why, I don't have a clue. I could ask an old college friend who used to work designing NAND flash in California, but I am not sure I give a rat's arse why.

Again, you asses a situation and what you want, and work out the least cost and effort to arrive at that target. If I could get 2GB cards at 5 for £10 I'd use those, But I cant.

I was interested because I don't remember ever having an SD card for my ancient camera that was that small (256MB).

It's amazing how much of the modern up to date utterly fashionable technology one finds one neither needs nor wants.

I had a 'Damascene' moment sitting in the sun, roasting some meat on a braai, in a game park in South Africa watching some hippos and crocodiles (fortunately the other side of a river), when I realised that all of civilisation is there really simply to keep us warm and put food on the table and give us somewhere safe to sleep at night, and the rest is simply there because we get bored.

Well, I have a place to sleep safely at night, and mostly warm and always have food.

I'll settle for that, and as to getting bored - what were computers and the internet invented for if not to allow access to all sorts of weird s*it?

(I know, they were both invented, like integrated circuits, to fight wars with. Hey ho).

Most societal collapses seem to occur because one resource or another that is so fundamental to a societies existence, runs out or just stops for natural reasons. It might be water, a supply of fish, or anything. Today its energy. Our society is utterly dependent on energy derived from coal oil and gas. And the so called 'renewables' are no replacement for it.

Coal enabled the UK population to rise from 5-10 million to 50 million, oil and gas has taken us to 70-80 million. No one knows, there are so many illegal immigrants these days . Renewable energy will take us back to 5 million - or probably less, as we do not have a pre-existent system set up to achieve anything at all with say horses or oxen,

Nuclear might take us to 100 million. But no one seems to want that. I think they prefer to die.

I don't think we 'need' to do anything. In a Godless world we find Nature is supremely indifferent to our success or failure as a species. What persists in this world is whatever lucks out and finds a *way* to persist, for a time. As circumstances change, species change.

As a general species, we have become as unbelievably arrogant as we have become unbelievably stupid. Or perhaps we always were, but civilization now has been built by the clever few, us engineers, and the rest of the population is simply incapable of understanding it or keeping it going, and worse, doesn't even understand that their very lives depend on it.

We have built a society where even the most ill adapted and incompetent can survive and prosper, and in that mood of compassion, have inadvertently built a world full of people who are simply too stupid to keep it going. And given them enough political power to destroy it. Which they are doing.

Ah well. Darwin in action. We tried.

I won't live to see the worst of the collapse.

Its a shame. Id like to see all these unbelievably arrogant and stupid people dying in screaming agony as the realisation dawns that everything they were told or believed in was all a load of utter s*it, and that no matter how much they scream about their 'rights', and what the government *ought* to be doing, there is simply no one left to give them a single thought.

Life is rough, tough and desperately unjust. Life's a bitch, and then you die.

It's a shame that these lessons are no longer taught.

Yes block structure arrived in programming with Algol.

The early documentation on procedure calls in Algol I was mind numbingly strange because it did not refer to a stack - it was written in terms of textually putting the subroutine code where the call was with modifications to the variable names to achieve the same effect. We covered in college, when it got to recursion most of the minds in the lecture hall went into meltdown. I was lucky, I already knew about stacks and spent most of the lecture marvelling at the baroque explanations.

Algol was OK but at college it was BCPL that I really liked working in - we didn't have C because we did have Martin Richards.

I learned C one the job (from a photocopy of the reference section of K&R first edition) writing a table driven remote debugging tool for folks writing games for the early cartridge based consoles - the other part of the job was making the fake cartridges with RAM for the game code, an overlay EPROM for startup and a serial port to run it from.

One cool part of that job was the people - my boss was Nick Toop who designed the Acorn Atom (I learned a lot from him!) and the owner of the company was David Levy who only just got away with his cash challenge for anyone with a chess program that could beat him - he set a five year time limit, it took less than six!

We had a wonderfully eerie window display, it was a beautifully made prototype of a chess machine which appeared to be no more than a very thick board with normal pieces on it and a marked out space to store the pieces off the board ... You played it by moving the pieces and the computer played by sliding the pieces around the board (the jiggling to do a knights move was fun to watch). There was nothing visible moving the pieces. You could even put the pieces on the board randomly, hit the "setup" button and watch them move silently into place all by themselves.

Inside the thick board was an stepper driven X-Y mechanism holding an electromagnet, inside each piece was a bit of steel and a tuned L-C passive resonator, I'm sure you can work out the details.

It didn't sell, they cut costs going into production and replaced the carved wooden case and pieces with moulded plastic and the brass gears with nylon ones - result it looked tacky and squeaked. The prototype looked like an expensive chess set and was silent. IMHO they should have gone with keeping the quality high, raising the price to luxury levels and providing software updates for a price.

Pity about what it did to their lungs but yes.

Renewable energy requires two things in order to handle the load, it needs a LOT of wind, tide, solar ... plants building and it needs a lot of mid to long term efficient energy storage, enough to run everything out of storage for at least a week and preferably ten days (globally the requirements are best measured in terawatt hours and the numbers aren't small).

The plants can be built quickly despite the NIMBY brigade - quickly enough I don't know but it seems likely. I really like the floating solar plants that are starting to happen - the panels work a lot better when they're water cooled and you could even put a water source heat pump under them.

The storage is the big one - there's nowhere near enough gravity based storage options around, there's nothing like enough lithium either and don't even think about lead/acid. If those were all the options I'd be agreeing with you wholeheartedly but ...

There is plenty of vanadium, iron and chlorine for the current crop of grid scale flow batteries - they tick a lot of boxes, long live electrodes, zero (yes zero) self discharge (unless the tanks leak), cheap and safe. We'd need between two hundred and a thousand litres of electrolyte (depends on the chemistry) per person to hold ten days of two hundred watts average each.

The task is huge but it is not too huge - it can be expected to take decades and it is already happening as fast as production can go. When flow battery electrode assemblies hit the DIY market things will really be moving. I expect that within a decade followed by IBLCs getting hard to obtain.

There is precisely no chance of getting enough nuclear plants built before we all die and what do we do when that fuel runs out ?

The sun is good for the next five billion years, the core heat might give out sooner but not much and the moon's orbital momentum won't even notice if we stop the tides globally.

These people are idiots - they have no idea how much needs to be done before we can stop burning oil, coal and gas - which we have no choice about we have to do that well before it runs out otherwise we'll never survive the energy wars.

Nobody is going to permit nuclear until far too late (it probably already is nuclear plants are not quick things to build) which leaves renewables as the only game in town - we *have* to make them work! It is physically possible to make them work given that we now have reliable flow battery designs, the rest is simply a matter of engineering much of it civil!

If we're really lucky something better might turn up while we're at it but we can't count on that or a sudden embracing of nuclear power - any engineer worth their salt knows you have to work with what you've got, it's no use wishing for what you can't have.

I use 8GB Samsung in my cameras and flight recorders. If you buy branded cards from brands that are known the own their own chip fab, then you're less likely to end up with some chunk of junk with memory to hold just a fraction of its advertised capacity.

No, it is not possible to make them work. Not sustainably anyway. I have spent years studying this and that is the simple conclusion

There will be either a sudden embracing of nuclear power, after the lights go out in the white house, or the collapse of civilisation as we know it.

There are no other viable scenarios