If you want to compare taxes you should look at tax revenue as % of GDP. That's how you can compare taxes between countries. You can't just look at any one thing like income taxes.

So look at the OECD data. https://data.oecd.org/tax/tax-revenue.htm

I would have thought the average availability to be lower somehow.

Given how reliable the equipment really is makes me wonder who really needs high availability. Most people aren't hosting NASDAQ servers exactly.

And ideally their own category, not It Career.

I just read that you said VM server. That sucks.
Any reason why you are installing software on the host instead of one of the VMs?

@JaredBusch said in Fitness and Weightloss:

Sadly, my post from the top of the thread in 2014 shows I am where I was in 2014 again.

Keep up the good work. Even if you didn't drop any weight, you didn't gain anything either in 5 years (2014-2019) which itself is a success!

Thanks to you guys I got it sorted out now!

You guys have a serious omission in your conversions. RGB values depend on the color space. While we often use sRGB color space for the web, that's not often the case when the file comes from somewhere else.

CMYK is used in printing because that's the color used in a 4-color offset printing press: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black.

Logos or other things that need exact color reproduction are often printed in 5 or more colors where the logo has it's own premixed color, not made up by CMYK colors. These exact premixed colors are Pantone colors and there are sets of pantone color swatches so everyone can see what every color looks like. Every company that has a logo from a graphic designer have the pantone numbers for their logo. That is the original colors so to speak.

There is not an exact conversion between RGB and CMYK unless you make a lot of assumptions and this varies between software and settings. Just as an example assume that you make a print using CMYK colors and one paper have a slightly yellowish tone while the other is ultra white. Will the logo look the same on both of these prints made with exactly the same CMYK colors? No, it wont.

When dealing with print shops it's often best to send the original file to them and let them handle the RGB to CMYK conversion. A TIFF file with embedded color profile is the standard here.

And if you are printing something that needs to be an exact color, like a logo, you should give them the Pantone number for that color. If you don't have it, it's probably not that important.

That's one reason I don't like Dell or HP. They put their name on stuff they didn't make and then makes firmware and drivers difficult to find, especially on older stuff.

Anyway straight HBA card on R640 seems to be the Dell HBA330.

According to this, it's just a card with the LSI SAS3008 controller, also known as the SAS 9300-8i controller card.

Here are the latest firmware and tools
https://www.broadcom.com/products/storage/host-bus-adapters/sas-9300-8i#downloads

And here is a guide from someone who flashed an IBM card wih the same controller. Maybe it could be of assistance in your case too:
https://www.servethehome.com/flash-lsi-sas-3008-hba-e-g-ibm-m1215-mode/

@stacksofplates said in Any Camera People Here?:

@siringo said in Any Camera People Here?:

@Obsolesce said in Any Camera People Here?:

It comes down to specifically what you require... here's a pretty detailed comparison.

https://www.apotelyt.com/compare-camera/nikon-d3500-vs-sony-a6000

I'm not the camera person, so unfortunately I don't know what all factors went into the decision. But I know she was 100% happy with it.

Thanks @Obsolesce for the info and link, much appreciated. I'm starting to lean towards the Nikon D3500, if for no other reason than it can take alot of photos before it needs a recharge. This is useful as I go away into the bush alot away from mains power.

But this is a huge market, so I won't be surprised if I change my mind.

I have an older D3100 and I really like it. Doesn't have Bluetooth, but they're good cameras. IMO your ability to frame the shot and your lighting are the biggest factors. You can still take really good pictures with a normal meh camera, and really bad pictures with a $6000 camera. My flash diffuser that I built makes a big difference in how pictures look, it's like night and day with it and without it.

Back in the 35mm film days most of the difference between cameras where in how you used them and the speed. With the same lens they produced the same quality. That is true today as well - more or less.

With Nikon the higher end cameras are faster to use, has a more ergonomic layout and can use a larger number of lenses. They often focus faster and in lower light and are more customizable. But the image quality will be more or less the same.

If you are using the camera mostly as a point-and-shoot, it's a waste to buy a more advanced camera than you need. It will just be heavier and more expensive without much of an actual advantage.

If you however are an enthusiast or perhaps even a part-time pro, a little more advanced camera will be worth the money. Personally I think that breaking point is the D7000 series on Nikon. So if you really want to learn how to photograph I suggest D7000 series or higher. Otherwise you will be disappointed and upgrade.

HP used to say it was OK way back in the days because of authentication, encryption etc. What they say today I don't know.

But this is what the security researches says:
https://www.synacktiv.com/posts/exploit/rce-vulnerability-in-hp-ilo.html

HP iLO is an administration tool, and as such should only be accessible from an isolated VLAN, different from the users' VLAN.
More specifically:

• Do not connect iLO to your network if the interface is not actually used;
• Do not expose any iLO interface to any untrusted network;
• Use strong, randomly generated passwords for each server instance.

As a reminder, HP iLO 4 also exposes the IPMI interface on port 623. The IPMI v2 authentication protocol is affected by a design weakness that allows an attacker to retrieve a hash of the password, provided only the username is known. The hash can later be brute-forced off-line. This can not be patched or mitigated, except by proper network isolation.

Finally, as for every service running on a corporate network, iLO event logs should be centralized and monitored to detect unauthorized connections.

This is how easy it is to hack the iLO 4 if the server is running version < 2.54.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/you-can-bypass-authentication-on-hpe-ilo4-servers-with-29-a-characters/

Version 2.54 was released September 2017. How many keep their ILO firmware up to date?
iLO 4 runs on G8 and G9 servers.

@black3dynamite said in What Are You Watching Now:

Youtube Video

Looks like Gravity but with Brad Pitt instead of Sandra Bullock.

@travisdh1 said in Question about weather or not I should enable write-through mode on a RAID1 SSD array:

@pete-s said in Question about weather or not I should enable write-through mode on a RAID1 SSD array:

@dave247 said in Question about weather or not I should enable write-through mode on a RAID1 SSD array:

@pete-s said in Question about weather or not I should enable write-through mode on a RAID1 SSD array:

@dave247 All enterprise SSDs have power protection caps so that is an expected feature.

If the raid controller cache makes an improvement or not depends on the workload and the size of the cache.

I think the 3.84TB drives have 4GB cache internally. That's large compared to the RAID controllers cache. What do Dell recommend?

I haven't asked Dell what they recommend. The H730P has 2GB and the H740P has 8GB though.

Give them a call. A little more than 3 years ago I spec'ed a computer with 4 SATA SSDs in two RAID1 arrays and I remember that they were adamant that I get the H730P controller. Machine was an R630.

Of course they were, they're job is to sell you thing, or more expensive things, than you really need.

True, but in this case it was their tech department, not sales. But in any case, SSD technology moves fast so a lot has happened in the last three, four years.

Dell (and others) are also pretty slow in adopting new technology and it takes a while for new drives to show up in their line up so I guess the drive Dell had back then were already old.

That's why I like Supermicro - they keep up with new tech and you can mix and match to your heart's content.

@gjacobse said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Sigh

with some regret - rejoined Facebook....

Sigh

not even sure why -

Don't feel bad. Facebook is designed to be an addiction - like alcohol or tobacco.
You may not know why you rejoined but Facebook's psychologists knows exactly why.

Also, the database is just a version of SQL Express so you should be able to install SQL Server Management Studio and connect to the WID. Perhaps you can find out what the database is actually doing that is slow and that way find the problem.

AI will not replace managers and automation will not replace workers.

Look at agriculture. From hunting and gathering to farming. From doing that farming with manual labor to plowing with oxen, horses, tractors to robotic machines with GPS navigation.

Since gathering food was something about 100% of the population did in the stone age and today it's only a few percent, what happened? Did the automation and technology replace the workers? Yes, for sure.

But those workers went on to working with something else instead.

For instance, how many worked in the tech industry a hundreds years ago? Right.

How many worked in tourism? How many worked in sports and recreation? Beauty industry?

When one door closes, another door opens.
Nobody is getting replaced.

PS. Even if you possess no skills and are completely useless in the labor force, we will still need consumers

Alright, I took another approach at this.

Looking directly at the source for different kernels over at kernel.org I can see that the NVMe driver has SR-IOV support from kernel version 4.8.
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git/tree/drivers/nvme/host/pci.c?h=v4.8#n2015

It's very interesting for virtualized workloads because SR-IOV means you can assign the NVMe disk to different VMs directly and bypass the hypervisor. This is the same for NICs at 10/25/40/100 gigabit. There will be a significant performance drop if you don't use SR-IOV.

Hard G for me. If the inventer wanted it pronounced JIF he should have called it Jagged Image Format or something.

Not that it matters anymore as PNG can do everything GIF can, and can do it better too. No, not just some things, everything.

How vulnerable are databases to unprivileged data access?

I'm thinking about a scenario where you have multiple users accessing the same database server but they don't have access to each others data.

@Dashrender said in Is Flickr circling the drain:

@scottalanmiller said in Is Flickr circling the drain:

@Pete-S said in Is Flickr circling the drain:

Flickr doesn't make sense in a world full of smartphones and visual overload.

What about it do you feel doesn't make sense? For photographers, what's really competing with it? I don't see how smartphones affect the need.

Flickr's real problem I think is in that they offer free services when they are really designed around pros.

agreed, the free service should be something like 5 GB of storage, or less...

The problem is that they built flickr when everyone and their uncle had a dSLR and was an amateur photographer. Back when newspapers still had photographers on staff. When the world was different. So their potential user base was huge.

Today people use instagram to post their images or snapshat or whatever. They don't need anything that flickr offers and don't care. Those that still care and have other needs are a tiny minority that get smaller and smaller each day. So yes, if they change their business model they could survive as a small niche operator. Similar to how Tri-X and HP5 have survived.

@nerdydad said in Small colo infrastructure - rack layout feedback:

Are the switches logically stacked together? If so, don't forget to distribute your connections between the servers across both switches for added redundancy. Otherwise, looks good to me, as far as the hardware layout goes.

Yes, it's a real stack not just configuration stack. It will be connected like the picture below, but with two firewalls for redundancy.

We had some discussion on this here:
https://mangolassi.it/topic/18052/questions-on-redundant-switch-setup