I think the problem is the farmers would be happy to know IT if it meant they could fix their damn tractor. Deere doesn’t want them to know IT, it wants them to just call their local Deere service center anytime anything doesn’t work. Problem is, if it’s during a harvest or some other critical time, they can’t wait a week for a service appointment so they have to pay through the nose for immediate call out. And much of the time, the problem is something that they are easily capable to fix on their own, but can’t because they don’t have access to the service software that only dealers get. Or it’s a situation like iPhones where they can easily make the repair but need the software to authorize the repair.

The result was a lot of farmers installing hacked Ukrainian firmware on their tractors, simply because the hacked version would accept any part connected and not require authorization from a service laptop.

Well that’s shooting yourself in the damn foot.

Apple users are a tiny percentage, and most of the sort that happily uses whatever Apple gives them without question or concern for other options. I have no idea what this thing did, but if it did something different than every other browser should start targeting Windows and Linux.

Yes I am, and that is exactly the point. I do not want spinning disks in my desktop, or anyone’s desktop or laptop. Give the actual computer a fast SSD for the OS and programs, then store the big data on a NAS or server. How’s the computer access it from that server in real time.
At 100 megabits (10 megabytes per second) that isn’t very fun. Gigabit ethernet is 100 megabytes per second give or take. That is where it starts to become useful for storage, as most spinning disks themselves have a transfer rate between 100 and 150 megabytes per second.

But as you just pointed out, that can become a bottleneck. Especially if you have multiple people accessing the server. How much of a problem it becomes depends on what they’re doing. IE, 10 people editing photos can happily share a gigabit link to the server because they load the photo once and then the link sits idle while they work as the photo is cached in RAM, 10 people editing uncompressed high definition video will probably want a constant full gigabit to each of them because they’ll be using almost all of it constantly so you need a gigabit to each desk and 10 gig to the server (and a storage array with sufficient bandwidth)

All true. But what if you aren’t just storing media for consumption? What if you’re doing photo editing, video editing, etc? If your NAS is either flash-based or has a flash cache, that extra speed can be really useful.

100 MByte/sec. 8 bits per byte, call it 10 when you include overhead / CRC / etc.
1000 mbit = 100 mbyte

About damn time. We got a boost every few years from 10 to 100 to 1000. Then we just… Stopped. Stagnated. It’s understandable why, for a good long time one gigabit was all anybody needed, 100 MByte/sec is pretty good even for a NAS.

Of course then fiber ISPs got in the game, now in a lot of places you can buy 7-8gbps as a consumer product. And even multi-gig, which was supposed to ‘fix’ this, really ended up being insufficient. You could make a salad argument that multi gig was a waste of time and we should have just started moving to 10 gig.

Unfortunately, 10 gig switches still carry a significant premium. But this will start to shake that up. Sooner the better.

This is absolutely right. We are getting to the point where the circuit pathway is hundreds or even dozens of electrons wide. The fact that we can even make circuits that small in quantity is fucking amazing. But we are rapidly approaching laws-of-physics type limits in how much smaller we can go.

Plus let’s not forget an awful lot of the super high-end production is being gobbled up by AI training farms and GPU clusters. Companies that will buy 10,000 chips at a time are absolutely the preferred customers.

I think a lot of it was frog and hot plate situation. If they had done all this stuff all at once people would have dumped them immediately, but they did it slowly always seeming reasonable and considered at each step.

And a lot of people still adopt their product because for better or worse, it is the best known and relatively easy to use.

I don’t use Plex. I have never used Plex. But based on the one time I tried, this doesn’t surprise me even a little bit.

Years ago I installed it on my NAS, it was a one click download package. I installed it and hit the button to set it up. And then it prompted me to make a cloud account.

Why do I need a cloud account? I am logging into my local server and I am not sharing anything with anybody nor am I subscribing to any cloud services. I have no need of a cloud account. But, the way they built the thing, you need a cloud account to log into your local system.

I did not create a cloud account. I uninstalled it. I concluded that a company that claims to care about user privacy, but requires cloud integration in an area that absolutely does not require cloud anything, does not actually give a shit about privacy. I Googled and found that the requirement for a cloud account was, at the time, a fairly new thing. Lots of people didn’t like it. I concluded that this company was beginning to enshittify, although this was years ago and none of us had heard that word yet. But either way, it was obvious that the company was moving in a not customer-friendly direction and I did not want to be along for the ride.

My choice has been proven right several times over the years since. And yes, every time they remove a feature, or make some other customer unfriendly decision, I retell this story.

The moral here is that a company either cares about its customers or it doesn’t, and it’s usually pretty easy to tell which one fairly quickly. When one bad decision is made, and not corrected, others will follow.

Synology is the latest example of that. For anyone not paying attention, they have recently announced that their 2025 series units will only work with Synology branded hard drives, which are of course more expensive than standard Seagate or Western Digital drives (which work just fine). But if you look, the bread crumbs are there and form a trail. Over the last few years they have removed features, for example the device is no longer can decode h.265 surveillance video, and the units will no longer display SMART data for ‘unsupported’ drives. I say no longer because they used to, but an update changed that so they no longer do.

Bottom line though is don’t do business with companies that don’t respect you.

Yeah I actually hadn’t seen that at all. There’s not many of those toaster style NAS cases, that one is fairly big as it needs a full size power supply. What I have in mind though is basically same size and form factor as a Synology DS9xx, 4-6 3.5" bays, main board under or off to the side, 1-2 NVMe slots, low power CPU. Basically clone a Synology DS9xx but put a standard UEFI BIOS on it as well as a video output. I think that would sell pretty well. Especially if you gave it 10 gig ethernet and a CPU that had an AI accelerator.

Could of course build the thing yourself, but it ends up bigger.

Yeah exactly. And from what I understand of this thing, it has a fairly easy to use auto update system. So every couple months just plug it into your router and hit the update button. I don’t think it’s a ripoff.

If you are asking this question, this product is probably not for you.
It’s for the non-technical prepper type, the guy who has 10,000 rounds of ammo and dried food for 10 years but still uses AOL.
The idea is just get this thing, plug it into a solar power bank, and then you can get information you might need to survive which wouldn’t be available online if there is no more internet. You could absolutely put the same thing together yourself without a problem. If you have the skill and the wherewithal to do that, you don’t need this. If you don’t have that skill, then you are the target market of this product.

Oh absolutely. Without a doubt. Broadcom / VMware have lost trust for good

Tons of alternatives from other NAS vendors, but I’m not sure anyone makes a Synology type box that is a generic x86 to run your own OS. Plenty of tower server type things but I’m not aware of any little toaster type boxes.

Oh tons of alternatives for sure. Where I’m at, at this point if I go somewhere else I’m going to want open source most likely.

Yeah exactly. I’m on vacation, if I wanted to do chores I would have stayed home. Plenty of choice to do right here.

Broadcom released a free VMware again, Synology is locking down their products,… Did Synology just hire some brain dead Broadcom executive?

This is seriously ‘how to kill your brand and customer good will in one easy step’ type nonsense.
Synology does not have the respect in Enterprise that someone like Dell or HPE does. They exist in Enterprise because of admins who use it at home and then bring the knowledge to work.

All this does is make sure nobody will buy one for the home anymore. There are too many other good options. And various open source NAS OS choices becoming more mature by the day.

If I was an OEM like Beelink or Servermicro I would be rushing to make an unbranded storage box, five or six 3.5 in SATA hot swap bays in front, 2-4 NVMe ports on the bottom, decent low power CPU, and an SODIMM socket or two. They’d sell a ton of them.

I also wouldn’t be surprised if a Synology ‘jailbreak’ to load a third party OS comes out.

This 100%.
AirBnB used to be cheaper than a hotel. Then it got so easy to tack on fees and ridiculous requirements that you’re basically paying more than a hotel to housekeep your own room. Mix in lots of shady hosts and most of the time I’d rather just stay at the Hilton for the same price.

It can still be useful as a novelty, like book a party house somewhere or as easily cheaper way to house an awful lot of people. But for the most part, I’ll pass.

It’s a matter of implementation versus invention.

If I asked you to build a hundred story skyscraper, that would be difficult, but we already have all of the technical components. All the component problems are already solved- we know how to make high quality steel, we know how to design the frame of such a building, we know how to anchor it into the ground, etc. You just need to put those technologies together in a functional design.

If I asked you to build me a spacecraft that goes faster than light, you couldn’t, because that sort of propulsion system has never been built. And while we have theories on how one might build it, we don’t currently have the capability to build any of those theoretical drive systems even as test articles (mainly because they need things in space larger than we have the capability to launch or will have the capability to launch anytime soon).

But if I asked you to build a thorium reactor, all of the component problems have been solved. We have a lot of coatings that resist corrosion, and so making valves and pipes out of them (and more importantly, designing the system of valves and pipes) takes work but we know how to do it. We understand how to make and process thorium fuel, even if we don’t have much experience doing it.

As for your grid, I don’t want my grade either powered by text that isn’t safe reliable and productive, but the fact is we don’t have that right now. A lot of power still comes from coal and similar shitty sources. So I will absolutely take less shitty.

Yeah I use the word if a lot, but that has a level of probability associated with it. I can say if we figure out a way to generate power from magic pixie dust tomorrow our energy problems will be solved but there’s no probability of that. Here there is a technology that has been known to work since the 1900s, that we have built research reactors on, and that is now being actively developed. The “if” here has a high degree of probability.

Uranium reactors are for the most part very safe, and I personally think we should consider building more of them. The problem with them is when something goes wrong, it can go very very wrong contaminating a huge area. Now granted more modern reactor designs make that sort of issue much less likely, but the worst case scenario of a uranium reactor, no matter how unlikely, is still a lot worse than the worst case scenario of a thorium reactor.