BombOmOm

I’m not sure how much time you are given and how much ‘hands on’ is desired, but you could buy a bunch of cheap, old, used desktops (that all use the same parts) and teach the kids what the various parts do (CPU, GPU, motherboard, PSU, SSD, RAM). Then have them build the computers and install linux on them.

Maybe pre-wire the PSU to most of the parts to save time during the build day(s). You may also want to have the CPUs pre-installed so you don’t get bent pins galore.

This entire idea would be massively benefited by a TA that could assist working with groups.

Ok, but what if an entire programming language is made of whitespace?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language)

Pain, absolute pain. Can we please not have another debate?

We can tie that in with shorter campaign seasons too.

Honestly, given how annoying the alternatives are, I would say just buy a USB drive and put the bios file on there. You can get very good ones for under $20 and almost free ones if you don’t mind having an old tiny one.

OC spray, aka ‘oleoresin capsicum spray’, aka pepper spray. People often get it for self defense against humans or bears. The bear version tends to be a much larger and stronger bottle.

I don’t normally open carry, though to do regularly concealed carry. Have been told by others a few times they were happy I was carrying, made them feel better when we happened to get into a seedy area. Luckily nothing came of it, and hopefully it stays that way forever.

The biggest thing is you have changed a random write to a linear write, something HDDs are significantly better at. The torrent is downloading little pieces from all over the place, requiring the HDD to move it’s head all over the place to write them. But when simply copying off the ssd, it keeps the head in roughly one place and just writes lineally, utilizing it’s maximum write speed.

I would say try it out, see if it helps.

Also, if the HDD is having to do other tasks at the same time, that will slow it down as the head can only ever be in one place.

It might be worth switching providers. Starlink and 4G ISPs (TMobile, Verison) are surprisingly good.

Pentium D processors are pretty power hungry, so factor that into your thoughts. Also make sure you put a modern OS on it that is getting security updates. It probably has Win XP or Vista installed which isn’t safe to connect to any network.

It should work fine as a router as long as you don’t enable any of the packet inspection features. For basic routing and firewalling for a home network it should be plenty powerful. I would personally put a small SATA SSD in it as the main drive and ditch the 90GB HDD.

As an additional idea, if you put a larger SATA drive or two into it you could make it a NAS.

They have things like official ECC support, unlike Ryzen. Which is pretty important.

I have not personally experienced a dropout with a SMR drive. That is from the reporting I saw when WD was shipping out SMR drives in their Red (NAS) lineup and people were having all kinds of issues with them. According to the article (below), it sounds like ZFS has the worst time with them. WD also lost a class action suit over marketing these as NAS drives, while failing to disclose they were SMR drives (which don’t work well in a NAS).

We want to be very clear: we agree with Seagate’s Greg Belloni, who stated on the company’s behalf that they “do not recommend SMR for NAS applications.” At absolute best, SMR disks underperform significantly in comparison to CMR disks; at their worst, they can fall flat on their face so badly that they may be mistakenly detected as failed hardware. Source

As you are looking for bulk data storage, the drive’s speed isn’t of too much concern. A 5400RPM drive is plenty.

If you are looking to put this drive into an array with other drives, make sure you get a CMR drive as SMR drives can drop out of arrays due to controllers finding them unresponsive. If a drive does not list it is CMR, it’s best to assume it isn’t. Seagate has a handy CMR chart, for example.

Additionally, if there are multiple spinning drives in the same enclosure, getting drives with vibration resistance is a good bonus. Most drives listed for NAS use will have this extra vibration resistance.

In addition to them still trying to one-up nVidia on who can cost the most, a bunch of people bought GPUs during covid. Vast majority of people aren’t due for an upgrade yet. I have a 6800 XT and haven’t glanced at a new GPU yet. No real point yet.

For running an OS off a USB drive, I would recommend getting a USB to M.2 enclosure and putting an M.2 drive in it. This will give you better performance than any flash drive out there. The memory they put into normal flash drives is just slow slow slow for the use case of an OS.

M.2 Enclosure

M.2 Drive to go in it

Now, the only negative there is that is kinda expensive. If you really want to stick to a normal USB drive, maybe try this one out. But I would really like to stress that running an OS off a normal USB drive is going to be slow.

Assuming the accounting system this thing links with both does not protect from SQL injection attacks (many don’t, despite it being easy to protect against) and also has a table named “Bills” with a field named “amount”; what this would do is go through every single Bills record and half the value in the amount field. This would completely fuck the system, particularly when it came to billing and tax filing as the numbers for accounts billing and receivable wouldn’t even come close to matching each other. The accounting department would have a hell of a time fixing the damage.

Since the health is a float, yeah, it can create issues. A health of 0.000000001 is greater than zero, but that would almost assuredly be displayed to the user as simply 0, causing player confusion. The easiest solution is to have health and damage always be integers. A less great solution is to use a non-floating point decimal format. If such doesn’t exist in your language, you can emulate one by having health and damage both always be integers, but move the decimal point over, say two points, when displaying to the user.

I’m still annoyed with how verbose Objective-C is. Just check out what one has to do to create and concatenate a string. Madness:

    NSString * test = [[NSString alloc] initWithString:@"This is a test string."];
    NSString * test2 = [test stringByAppendingString:@" This value is appended."];

And god forbid you want to concatenate two things to a string:

    NSString * test3 = [test1 stringByAppendingString:[test2 stringByAppendingString:@" Adding a third value."]];

There are some decently priced drives available used on eBay and Mercari, but they tend to get snatched up pretty quickly. Official refurbs are probably your best bet if you don’t want new, I know B&H sells official refurbs.

The main issue is people think ‘I spent $200 on this, it still works, I’ll sell it for $150 used’ and don’t bother checking what is actually selling. Both eBay and Mercari have a sold listings filter, which is a great way for both buyers and sellers to figure out what things are actually worth.

As someone who is bad at CSS, I can confirm at least half of your statement. ;p

Unlikely. The main issue comes with port forwarding, but you are locked out from doing that already. I say go for the triple NAT, put your own router after the ISP’s modem and then you have full control of your LAN.