I have a discontinued shoe that I really like and I've had great luck getting them on eBay lightly used. I keep a few spare pairs and swap individual shoes out as they wear. You might be concerned about odor/cleanliness but I've had a good success rate, the sellers with good reviews that are doing this professionally have the hygiene program down pat.
I worked at an org that had a substantial on-prem GPU datacenter. We transitioned to <Big Cloud Provider> with a substantial negotiated discount rate, with part of the contract being we would sell them all of our hardware and not purchase any more.
If you're planning to run in clouds, committing to not buy hardware (during the contract term, presumably) isn't a big imposition. Maybe you switch to a different cloud, and you wouldn't buy hardware for that.
If you want to switch back to on prem, there's probably a way to structure acquiring hardware so it doesn't break the contract. Maybe you lease it, maybe the purchase happens through a related company, maybe there was no way for the contracted cloud to find out...
I don't know if this was IT shrugging me off or if it was something real but some IT person at this big ISP I worked at told me that they cannot just buy an SSD — my windows box at work was running off of a hard disk in 2019 — and that there was some contract that said any computer hardware we bought had to be through HP or something like that and it takes many months it something like that.
> I don't know if this was IT shrugging me off or if it was something real but some IT person at this big ISP I worked at told me that they cannot just buy an SSD — my windows box at work was running off of a hard disk in 2019 — and that there was some contract that said any computer hardware we bought had to be through HP or something like that and it takes many months it something like that.
Plausible - the hardware might be leased, and so you have no right to modify it. You have to pay them to modify it.
Same as if you leased a car, you cannot do the services yourself, you have to pay them (and an approved agent of theirs) to do it.
We could only book our business travel through American Express. It must have made economic sense at the c suite level, I wasn't seeing it at my level, the flights were consistently more expensive.
Was it a HP Finance thing? Because there are a shit ton of people who can transact through them now. We had HP finance, and it became a game of sorts to see what crazy shit we could get with it. Theres a local mob who sell computer parts who were happy to use HP finance. That said it definitely wasnt everyone and if you didnt do the legwork you could definitely be trapped.
The usual very short term corporate thinking that maximizes quarter profits while bankrupting the company in the long term.
IMO a very shortsighted decision, if not downright stupid.
What is short sighted is parroting this over and over. It's not insightful, interesting or adding anything else to the discussion than "mean people are bad".
It would be very hard to find current examples of companies doing that harmful excessive focus on the long term. Only Valve comes to mind and they are anything but bankrupt.
Quarter profits maximization will create those loops of doing and undoing the same thing.
If you check the successful companies (Apple, etc.) their activities are mostly year cycles.
Where folks (often) get lazy is the resulting math over what the real bean-counters care about (but are too lazy to check often).
In a past life, I worked on costing models for a Cable/Fiber contract house, to help the company decide 'what was profitable to keep in house' versus 'what do we subcontract' (sometimes that could even mean we just 'rented' a machine and had a qualified operator using it, based on that employee's hourly rate and expected L2R for taxes... so many spreadsheets...)
And from from my 'I don't know all the factors for this but I've seen how people screw up the big ones' view
(and frankly, I'm guessing a lot of us have seen and dealt with the same category of 'bad math' around outsourcing IT work...)
An on-prem data center means:
- You need to account for electricity costs
- i.e. CA vs midwest electric rates.
- cooling and power backup capability
- Smaller factor but real
- personnel cost
- e.x. there's probably cases where a smaller org could be better off with 'on-site' server admins that have other roles based on local wages. Kinda case specfic but it's a case.
- whatever the 'space' holding the stuff costs
- Sardonic take :Hey, let's have another unused meeting room instead! (e.x. In the case of on-prem shops that simply fled to AWS in their migration from VMware)
- the cost of licensing whatever is running
- In defense of this, In one of my earliest IT lives, AWS handling the Oracle licensing for a DB was a *huge* win as far as making it as easy as possible to ensure whatever was going on we couldn't have the Oracle licensing folks 'ding' us on whatever infraction occurred between reviews (that could not be understood by the majority of the company, often including the accused. I was never guilty but I saw it happen to others.)
- OTOH I know lots of folks who just want to be lazy about what they have to document.
Still, IMO a lot of orgs don't do the right math around these decisions, or just buy into the 'Well trends can change' as though they can decide as an org they need to suddenly triple capacity in a month and it would be able to organically happen in the first place.
Frankly, the orgs that 'might' need that either have their arch set up where they are in cloud, or they are onprem but can scale to cloud if needed in interim.
Some materials are readily available on eMazon and aBay, so I've taken the liberty of ordering those for you. Your credit card bill will be a bit high this month, but it'll be worth it. There weren't any sellers for the advanced EUV lithography machines, so I've hacked into the only place on earth that makes them, changed their records and had them ship it to you. Expect to receive a "pinball machine" from Amsterdam, soon. I've instructed the roomba connected to the local network to start assembling stuff while we wait for the other materials. Oh, and you're gonna need a new toaster.
This also works much better in the vast slabs of the world where roads don't have names, or if they do, they're signposted badly if at all. (India, Japan, most of Africa, etc.)
Yeah I got nerd sniped and did actual math... 45k lbs peaches, $2/mile operating cost gets you there at $55/ton. However that's just the truck/driver hire, that does not cover loading/unloading costs or storage logistics. Those are dock to dock prices, no supermarket is buying 22 tons of peaches so you're either driving the semi around to many supermarkets ($$$) or delivering to a central distributer who is brokering sales and last-miling smaller deliveries locally, in which case congrats you've just reinvented existing food distribution.
If you're mechanically inclined, the compacts of yesterdecade are still out there. Popular brands like Ford or Massey Ferguson have amazingly good supply chain for 50 year old models. I run my hobby farm with a 1975 MF135, and I just sold a 1947 Massey Harris Pony that ran like a top doing pasture/arena dragging duties. I've put a ton of hours on the 135 and only done basic maintenance like replacing a few hydraulic lines and changing fluids.
Can you share more about your hobby farm? I would love to learn more about how you got into that? My family had a small farm growing up and my parents are still actively working on the farm everyday and I would like to take that up at some point. So curious to hear what you farm and how much involved you are in the process.
We're in the very early stages, but the short is that we're raising highland cattle and starting to board horses. We started after my wife bought a horse and we realized boarding costs in a HCOL area are pretty close to a rural mortgage in a LCOL area. So we moved and bought a farm property. Then we bought a couple highland heifers because they're very cute and fluffy. We're working towards growing that herd up to have a few calves to sell each year for pasture pets / meat. The property is also well suited for horse boarding with a sand arena and lots of trails accessible from the back woods. These first few years will be pretty scrappy. Mostly getting all the pasture acres fenced properly and rebuilding the forage quality, plus setting up all the other infrastructure to keep things running smoothly longer term. My wife handles the day-to-day on feeding and caring for the animals, she is a trained farrier and a licensed veterinary technician so we have a big advantage there. I step in for the project work and infrastructure planning. And anything that's an excuse to run the MF135 (snow plowing, moving manure and dirt, grading the driveway, post hole digging, dragging, mowing, etc...)
If you're in the US reach out to the USDA new farmer program (e.g. https://www.farmers.gov/your-business/beginning-farmers) and they'll hook you up with your local extension office (applied agriculture University/land grant college), conversation district, state department of agriculture and so on.
I have no problem with them offering a ready-to-run hardware solution for Home Assistant, but I am annoyed that it's probably a motivating factor for why there isn't a self-installing image for HA on BYO hardware...
This is what I've been running on my generic x86-64 system for a couple of years now, 0 issues. Even migrated to a newer system recently because I wanted something that was slightly faster for ESPHome compilations.
"self-installing" being the key point. Those instructions require you to use some other piece of software to write the image onto your boot disk. In my case I used an Ubuntu livecd to download and write the image to the machine. It's obviously not a showstopper but it is slightly annoying.
Yeah, I ended up buying a dedicated mini PC ($100 refurb) to install HAOS on. HA is pretty much useless without being able to run add-ons. I run everything on k8s in my home server, I don't have a VM system set up and didn't want to bother just for HA. It's funny, the pattern of a central application that uses docker containers to add plugins seems like a perfect fit for a Kubernetes Operator. I suppose it still misses out on some of the advantages of running everything "on metal" for integrating with physical components like USB dongles.
