Posts by FeRDNYC

BOFH: Rerouting responsibility via firewall configs

Re: Percussive or gravitational maintenance.

The LART is reserved for Lusers whose Attitude merely needs Readjustment, though.

Meddling "IT" "professionals" get the spring-operated trap door, or the defenestration ejector.

Re: "web interface ... a back-rev browser that doesn't complain about certificate errors."

My damn 2021-vintage HP printer STILL serves its web interface in HTTP only. It claims to take a certificate that will let it enable the HTTPS server, but I've seen no evidence of any truth to that claim.

Plus, even if I could give it a self-signed certificate, then I'd have the adventure of trying to convince my browser to trust that certificate.

Re: ... or some cosmetically waxed neanderthals

Not with that attitude!

Admin brought his drill to work, destroyed disks and crashed a datacenter

Re: New AC...

It's also why I keep a few old, beige power cables around, from back in the day before everything turned black.

Those cables are reserved for my systems' case power supply sockets -- it's drilled into everyone's head that you can unplug any of the black or whatever cables, but you NEVER touch the beige ones.

So far, the only unplanned shutdowns any of those machines have had were when the power went out at the source.

Sometimes, it doesn't even require abuse to make a mess...

When the first-gen AOLNet dial racks were built, they were all specced with these giant, honking 6-rack-unit UPSes at the bottom, because there were a lot of install locations where we couldn't rely on constant, clean power.

A few years in, all of those UPSes were filled with aging batteries that had to be replaced. So maintenance started a battery-refreshing tour. The UPSes were built as drawers, there was a nice handle on the front you could pull to slide it open and expose the batteries for swapping.

Unfortunately, between the vibration of air-shipping and installing the cabinets, their age, the impressive weight of those UPSes, and the fact that they'd never been opened once since the racks were built, many of the drawer mechanisms were... not in the best of shape. All of the maintenance people ended up a little bit haunted by the memory of pulling open those drawers, an act that was far too frequently followed by the sound of dozens of ball bearings clattering onto the floor of the data center like a rainstorm.

(We left the UPSes out of future iterations of the design, deeming them more trouble than they were worth. Redundancy was observed to be the more effective insurance against downtime: If the power went down to an installation, customers could just dial in to a different one. That's why AOL had at least 2 or 3 local phone numbers in most areas.)

I think my favorite thing about that ad is how they immediately undercut it with a giant disclaimer about how they specifically don't offer any guarantees that their servers can survive anything in the video. Then what exactly is the point of it?

Apple goes glass whole as it pours new UI everywhere

Wow, and we called 10.15 "Catavista"!

That new desktop design is the most Windows Vista looking crap I've ever seen. Did Apple lose everyone with a long enough memory to remember how everyone hated Vista the first time around??

BOFH: The Boss meets the unbearable weight of innovation

Re: Damn sans-serif fonts

Neither! They're both powered by steak sauce, apparently. I mean, our Secretary of Education should know, if anyone would... right? Right? ...Right?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/12/linda-mcmahon-a1-instead-of-ai/83059797007/

At least the de-flattening is free of charge...

Here in the US, the machine's "AI" anti-theft system would not only tip it over on you, it would also automatically dial 9-1-1 to report the accident, ensuring you an expensive ambulance ride to an even more expensive ER for your troubles.

Admittedly, it's weird for bankruptcy to be employed as a theft deterrent. Kind of feels like someone's lost the plot.

The Reg translates the letter in which Oracle kinda-sorta tells customers it was pwned

Re: Great Oracle Robbery

Also, nobody broke into any of the baggage compartments on the train, and anyone who tells you different is a liar, liar, pants on fire! Never once did any unauthorized person access or remove any passenger belongings from any secure area of any train.

...Some clever bandits did make off with 6 million pieces of passenger luggage we'd temporarily piled on the siding overnight while the train's baggage facilities were being sprayed for Novell source code. (Can never be too careful.) So, really, that's on you irresponsible people for not being more careful about where we leave your luggage.

But never once was anything taken from the train, nor did any unauthorized persons succeed in boarding the train! (Heck, we didn't even find any Novell code. So, good news all around. You're supremely welcome.)

BOFH: HR tries to think appy thoughts

Hey, shouldn't have left all those phones there in the room if they weren't supplies for the group project! Mistake anyone could make, and the BOFH always will make.

TAKE IT DOWN Act? Yes, take the act down before it's too late for online speech

Re: "What was that about "Congress shall make no law...."?"

Unfortunately, unless they're identified by name in connection with the photo, the law is likely to consider the "subject" of that picture to be the tattoo itself, not the person on whose body it appears, so the only one with any rights regarding that image is the photographer. (Tattoos have no representation rights.)

Teens maintained a mainframe and it went about as well as you'd imagine

Re: Feeding the Beast

Countless times I've had a cashier that's had to call a supervisor to bring an new roll of receipt paper as none was kept at the till. How much did that cost in lost productivity?

If you define productivity as "completing the day's sales", and assuming customers were content to just wait longer or use a different register, the answer is "none" — which is probably the crux of the problem.

If the cost of a decision is merely to inconvenience (but not lose) customers, most businesses are more OK with that than you'd prefer, sadly.

Re: Confused?

I can totally see someone (and by "someone" I mean the 1980s workplace comedy-of-errors stereotype that this other kid is portrayed as) manually dragging cut-sheet paper through the feed mechanism, advancing it by hand as each line of output is printed. I'm sure the off-kilter output lines, swooping roller-coaster hills and valleys, and partially overlapped text just added to its... "charm".

*Insert Steve Rogers "understood that reference" meme*

One fateful night, Serge's pal forgot to get extra paper, panicked, and started shoving anything faintly paper-related into the machine – including cardboard.

WTH? Suddenly this story veers into bad sitcom territory. I can't really grasp the mindset of someone who panics THAT desperately, at any age. It doesn't seem like the sort of thing you grow out of, either. I shudder to think what that guy is up to these days. I'm sure the hijinx continue to be "hilarious".

BOFH: The Prints of Darkness pays a visit

Re: HP 4050n

That's great... until, of course, Apple rips out CUPS' (already-deprecated) support for printer drivers entirely, in favor of "IPP Everywhere or Bust". Which they're seriously talking about doing.

(Granted, they've been talking about it for years, and it's a very slow process, but that's kind of the point. After several years, they're still talking about it, and if they haven't let go of the idea by now then it's probably going to happen eventually.)

Inkjets are also terrible

The BOFH definitely should also hate small consumer inkjets, they're just awful.

Over 15 years ago, it was already common knowledge that Your Printer is a Brat.

BOFH: Have you tried forcing an unexpected reboot?

I once installed a macOS update on a friend's laptop. The damn thing went all the way through the update process, got to the whole "finishing up" part of the performance that comes right before it reboots into the updated OS... and then just didn't. Didn't finish up, didn't reboot, didn't do anything. Just sat there with its skinny little progress bar at 100%, chewing on something.

For obvious reasons I didn't want to risk interrupting the process of completing the OS install. So I sat there watching it do whatever it was farting around doing for a full 90 minutes before I finally threw in the towel and forcibly power-cycled it. At which point, it came right up in mere seconds.

Great and all, but man was I pissed off that I spent AN HOUR AND A HALF watching the thing do... absolutely nothing, as it turns out.

Microsoft wouldn't look at a bug report without a video. Researcher maliciously complied

I've mentioned this before, but even worse are the new automated, scripted phone-support systems. Not only can they drag you through stupid, tedious troubleshooting steps, explained in plodding, laborious lowest-common-denominator detail, but (to the extent possible) they're able to check whether you're following their directions. And if there's any sign you are not, you are in for a world of hurt.

Here's an example: The last few times I've had to call my cable company for support, their first line of defense is now a "TellMe"-style automated "support tech" that walks you through the process of restarting your cable modem. (I know, my eyes practically rolled out of my head, too.) Here's how that should go:

• You drill down into their ponderous phone tree, indicating that you have a problem with your internet service, you can't get online, etc. etc. until you finally convince the system that it appears to be a connectivity problem with the modem itself.
• The nice artificial lady's synthesized voice tells you to unplug your modem.
• You unplug your modem.
• You say or press whatever you were told to confirm that you've done so.
• "She" makes you wait 60 seconds, while Things Happen behind-the-scenes.
• "She" tells you to plug it back in.
• You plug in your modem.
• You say or press whatever you were told to confirm that you've done so.
• "She" makes you wait another 60 seconds for bootup.
• After the time passes, "she" tries to contact your modem over the broadband network.
• Whether or not that fails, because you're still not able to get online, you finally get routed to a living support tech.

Now, that's the ideal scenario. But here's how it can go:

• You drill down into their ponderous phone tree, indicating that you have a problem with your internet service, you can't get online, etc. etc. until you finally convince the system that it appears to be a connectivity problem with the modem itself.
• The nice artificial lady's synthesized voice tells you to unplug your modem.
• You don't unplug your modem. You know you JUST DID THAT right before calling, and it didn't make a damn bit of difference, so why go through it again?
• You lie and say or press whatever you were told to confirm that you've done so.
• "She" makes you wait 60 seconds, while Things Happen behind-the-scenes.
• The Thing Happening behind the scenes turn out to have included their system trying to reach your modem, while you said it was unplugged. Their system therefore succeeds in contacting the device. This is where your day gets much worse.
• "She" comes back at you with, "Hmmmm. Something doesn't seem right..." in that irritating faux-concerned voice that seems to be the default mode of these synth-rep systems.
• "She" continues with the worst words in any language: "Let's start over!"
• Go all the way back to step 1!

At that point I think I just hung up. The line came back to life a few hours later.

Framework Desktop wows iFixit – even with the soldered RAM

I think we've seen coverage casting doubt on the "improvements" from soldered RAM.

I haven't seen anything of the sort. In fact, the coverage I've seen has all been pretty universal in acknowledging that it's a real need in these modern architectures, and offers significant performance gains (like, speed multiples, not just increments) -- the only debate is how much it really gains you in practice for different workloads, and whether the tradeoffs are worth it (both financially and in terms of future modifications).

But the effectiveness and the real benefits of soldering the RAM right next to the CPU... that part's pretty undeniable, from everything I've read.

Re: Director of Sustainability

Or you're just not funny.

The problem with CAMM2 is, a year after the ThinkPad P1 Gen7 announcement and the touting of its new RAM modules as the way of the future,

• AFAICT that laptop is still the only one that uses them
• NewEgg (NEWEGG!) doesn't appear to even carry those modules, at all!
• There's a CDW link in the iFixit article about the ThinkPad P1 Gen7, because CDW does carry them, but they still only list the two modules (32GB and 64GB) that were available at the ThinkPad launch, and they're both out of stock.

It might be too soon to call CAMM2 a complete failure, but it's not looking too healthy.

Developer sabotaged ex-employer with kill switch activated when he was let go

I would bet money it's still active.

Money you have to spare, since presumably you billed them exorbitantly for this service?

"Leaving on good terms" doesn't mean they get to take advantage of you when they suddenly have a problem that needs solving. "Leaving on good terms" should mean that they're more than happy to compensate you reasonably, if not generously, for riding in on your white horse and extracting their fat from the frying pan. Heck, if they didn't offer right up front, then they're kind of being jerks.

Creative use of "Creative", here

Presumably Lu is of Chinese descent and speaks Chinese at least semi-fluently, so can we not describe it as "creative" when someone simply falls back to their native/second language when labeling things, relying on the fact that most English-speaking users won't be able to recognize the meaning behind the foreign words? I mean, he named applications "destruction" and "sleep" — would those be "creative" names if the English words were used?

I dunno, maybe I'm looking at it wrong, but it feels like there are two ways to present that information:

• Dang, this guy labeled his software in Chinese so they'd never be able to detect it, he's some sort of criminal mastermind!
• Huh, lucky break for him that nobody caught on to this. Some of his code was even labeled things like "destruction" or "sleep" in Chinese!

OBS-tacle course: Fedora and Flathub's Flatpak fiasco sparks repo rumble

The article is only tangentially about this, but...

I absolutely cannot understand the mindset of Linux users who glom on to "Long-Term Support" distributions like Ubuntu and RHEL/CentOs/Rocky — systems where the library support and system interfaces are frozen in time for the entire 3, 5, 10 years that the distro is supposedly supported — but then they want to run the latest, greatest software on them, and expect it to Just Work™ despite all of their system libraries being 7 years old. It's even worse when they expect brand-new code to support being BUILT on those ancient systems, using the crazy out-of-date dependency versions available.

It's not JUST that it seems like it's defeating the entire purpose of an LTS distro, to want to install unproven, bleeding-edge software on it. The thing that really bothers me is that it ends up holding back development of projects because they feel like they have to keep supporting all of these ancient environments.

Plenty of open-source C++ projects avoided using anything more modern than C++11 until earlier this decade, because Ubuntu 16.04 shipped with GCC 4.8 (no --std=c++14 support) and didn't reach end-of-life until May 2021. Those same projects no doubt have been avoiding using any C++20 features, for fear of tripping up the all of the GCC 7 users still running CentOS 7 (despite it reaching end-of-life last July.)

A Python project I'm involved in still won't incorporate any code that requires Python 3.9 or higher without gating it behind version checks, because while 3.9 is the earliest release that's still officially supported by the Python project itself (until October), the package download statistics still show a significant percentage of Python 3.8 users, even more Python 3.7 users, and a continuing trickle of Python 3.6 users. Even though Python 3.6 has been out of official support since December 2021, it's the version that Ubuntu 18.04 shipped with, so there are going to be people clinging to their Python 3.6 installs until that distro finally ages out of our misery in 2028 (f---ing Extended Security Maintenance!) and we can finally pry it from their cold, gnarled, ancient hands.

My take is, if people want to run 10-year-old distributions, they need to resign themselves to running 10-year-old software on it. So that the developers of that software, who have continued development over the many years that the distro was frozen in time, can soar on the wings of a more modern codebase, without the LTS anchor dragging them back into the dirt. (Or whatever florid metaphor you prefer.)

Re: Misleading statement

The linked page opens (in infuriatingly center-justified text),

OBS Studio is officially distributed as a Flatpak on Flathub and a PPA for Ubuntu 24.04 and newer. For other installation methods, including unofficial packages, click here.

Flatpak Instructions

You can install OBS Studio from Flathub here.

If your distro is not already set up to install Flatpaks, you can follow the instructions here.

Ubuntu Instructions (24.04+)

It's clear that the primary distribution model is their official Flatpak build, though they maintain a PPA as well because Ubuntu users cling to their 10-year-old distribution installs. Bluntly characterizing a reasonable summary of the offerings as "poor reporting" is you being either disingenuous or unreasonable. Fortunately, it's also rude enough that I have no real desire to waste any more of my time figuring out which.

BOFH: The USB stick always comes back – until it doesn't

Re: Value

Those do seem awesome, and the pricing for the sub-256 GB models is very reasonable. (The jump from 32 GB to 64 GB to 128 GB, for instance, is $5 US each — from $20 to $25 to $30. The jump to 256 GB, OTOH, almost doubles the price to $55.)

But the design of that product page annoys the crap out of me. Here's how the options are ordered. See if you can spot the sorting algorithm used, and why it's exactly the WRONG one:

• 1 TB
• 128 GB
• 256 GB
• 32 GB
• 512 GB
• 64 GB

Do better, Corsair.

WordPress war latest: Ploy to trademark Hosted WordPress, Managed WordPress derailed

Re: "because an examining attorney determined they don't qualify as trademarks"

The USPTO is definitely not a rubber-stamp capitulator. They review every application they receive, often in excruciating detail, and regularly reject applications.

(Mostly because they get some WILD applications. Like the time Billy Joel's people tried to trademark "Billy Joel", in an astonishingly broad set of contexts. (The dozens/hundreds of other living people named William Joel were brought up in the denial, as you'd hope/expect.)

BOFH: Engage Hollywood Protocol – because nonsense always looks legit

And now thanks to generative AI, you don't even have to do your own plagiarizing!

BOFH: Time to put the Pretty Dumb F in PDF reader

Re: ** Pedantic interlude alert **

But that's exactly the point, a bullfrog's breakfast would consist primarily of flies and mosquitos.

Google reports halving code migration time with AI help

Re: How much time saved?

In the end, LLM-written code is about as good as would be produced by some third world outsourcing shop

That may be true, which is why they're not using the LLM to write code. They're using it to modify existing legacy code. Two of the examples they gave are migrating Java 8 applications to Java 17, and migrating JUnit 3 tests to JUnit 4.

Unlike writing all-new code, these are tasks that are much better defined, much easier to train a model to perform... and much, much more tedious. They are high-effort, low-perceived-reward tasks. (Especially when success is defined as there being no discernible effect on the software itself. A successful migration is one where nobody can tell you've done it, because the post-migration code works exactly the same as before... except, you've sunk thousands of person-hours into making internal updates.)

Scouring hundreds of thousands of lines of code looking for deprecated or changed APIs, then updating the code to newer interfaces, is such a tedious job that many shops end up deciding to never do it at all. Legacy code is just kept limping along in legacy systems as long as possible, until it's eventually replaced with all-new code written to newer standards.

(That all-new code is very frequently a bare-bones affair. It eliminates deprecated APIs and other outdated internals, yes, but also strips away many of the features of the older codebase that — due to time, money, or design constraints — don't get reimplemented in the first versions of the new, replacement system. That's how you end up with software releases that hemorrhage functionality compared to their previous versions, because the "totally rewritten!" new codebase threw away everything that came before — including a ton of the features.)

If Google can use AI-assisted processes to avoid some of that write-bandage-discard loop, and break the ground-up rewrite cycle, I'm all for it.

Re: "LLM-driven verification"

Effectively, kind of yeah! But it's clever how they did it.

We validate the resulting changes automatically. The validations are configurable and often depend on the migration. The two most common validations are building the changed files and running their unit tests. Each of the failed validation steps can optionally run an ML-powered “repair”. The model has also been trained on a large set of failed builds and tests paired with the diffs that then fixed them. For each of the build/test failures that we encounter, we prompt the model with the changed files, the build/test error and a prompt that requests a fix. With this approach, we observe that in a significant number of cases the model is able to fix the code.

So they have a unit test process with an AI component that can react to failed tests by suggesting fixes. The two AI processes are totally independent of each other.

BOFH: Forecasting and the fine art of desktop upgrades

Re: "right above the underground car park exhaust vent"

Perhaps some wheezing as well.

Spoiler alert: He quit it in 2009.

Give the colored-pencil brigade some rubber bands to play with, they'll be fine.

BOFH: Don't sell The Boss a firewall. Sell him The Dream

The best flim-flammery is when even YOU buy what you're selling.

Open source maintainers are drowning in junk bug reports written by AI

Re: Just say NO

I know big tech tends not to care as much about privacy as you or I would like them to

Ironically, though, they do still care about PRETENDING they care about privacy, which is what would prevent them from doing anything like that. They reserve breaches of privacy & trust for internal uses, where they can plausibly deny looking at sensitive information that people prefer to assume they don't go poking around in. (And also reserve it for money-making situations like marketing, not actually benefiting society out of the goodness of their hearts. When doing that they become very privacy-conscious, suddenly.)

'Best job at JPL': What it's like to be an engineer on the Voyager project

"Well, Voyager 2 is the one that's been flying the longest, and Voyager 1 is the one that's furthest from Earth. So they both have a claim to fame."

Big "I love all my children equally" energy there.

I actually spent a semester and a summer off during my junior year of college, working at the JPL. This was back in 1995, and they very shrewdly didn't let me mess with the space systems — I spent half the time in the parallel computing lab, the other half in network security. Great place to work, though.

BOFH: AI consultant rapidly transitioned to new role as automotive surface consultant

Re: ... almost there....

*standardize. ;-)

Re: ... almost there....

0.5 meters can typically be expressed as 1 LARTlength.

Fedora 41 beta arrives, neck-and-neck with Ubuntu – but with a different focus

Re: A boring distro

True, CentOS is dead, but Rocky Linux lives on. (It's basically CentOS reborn. Just independent from Red Hat.)

Opening up the WinAmp source to all goes badly as owners delete entire repo

Cleaning up a codebase for release is a huge and difficult task,

That part's certainly true. Open-sourcing a project after the fact is always more difficult than just starting it in the open right from the beginning. Without the scrutiny of their code being public, developers (whether independent or corporate) tend to cut corners and do a poor job of managing their dependencies properly and in accordance with the licenses they were obtained under (assuming everything they're using was even legitimately obtained to begin with).

and if you're about to give the code away, that probably means it's not worth anything to you any more.

This statement, on the other hand, is painfully out of touch with both the commercial software industry and the open-source movement.

Source code, itself, is worth a lot less than you'd imagine, even for commercial applications. People don't buy source code. (Heck, these days they increasingly don't even buy software, but that's another discussion.) And open-sourcing code doesn't make it "worthless", in fact it can greatly increase the value of the applications based on that code. Ask Mozilla. Open-sourcing (what was then) Netscape saved their business. And proved worth it in the long run, despite the initial efforts going not much better than WinAmp's first attempt.

So why spend good money on paying your staff for the time it takes to clean it up?

Well, if you're serious about opening up your code, you spend good money cleaning it up because (a) you have to, if it's going to be subjected to public scrutiny — that's just table stakes for an open-source project, and the reason why it's a lot harder to do after-the-fact; (b) because all of that work is technical debt that accrued over the closed-source lifetime of the project, and in all likelihood was gonna have to be paid down someday regardless (even if it stayed closed-source); and (c) because an open, well-maintained codebase with hundreds, if not thousands, of eyes on it will ultimately lead to better code, and therefore better software. And better software is ultimately worth more than buggy, sloppy piles of outdated spaghetti code that's been slapped together in secret.

...Like I said, that's if you're serious about open-sourcing a project. Remains to be seen whether the LLamas really are, and just need to regroup and do better on their second try, or if this was all just a bit of theater they staged, hoping to slow their product's inexorable descent into total irrelevance.

Big Tech's eventual response to my LLM-crasher bug report was dire

Re: "Fiction"

See, the problem I see with this is limiting it to "when an LLM [...] deviates from fact".

A more useful model for dealing with the output of LLMs may be to keep in mind that they never "tell the truth", and they never deal in "fact". They synthesize their inputs into outputs in ways that may occasionally align with reality, but certainly aren't guaranteed to. Even when they do, it's not because the model is "telling the truth", except perhaps accidentally — it's still telling stories, whether or not they happen to be "based on a true...".

It's like how Michael Bay has, on rare occasion, accidentally made a good movie. (The Rock was great. Pain & Gain was also very well done.) These are stopped-clock outliers, occurrences that happen as much in spite of all his efforts as because of them. So even though lightning has occasionally struck, it's not as if we should expect that he'll repeat that performance with future films, or even improve his average.

LLMs don't ever "tell the truth". They generate stories. They'll probably get better at generating responses that more closely resemble reality more of the time, but I still wouldn't want to rely on one for my supply of facts.

Intel's processor failures: A cautionary tale of business vs engineering

Re: Engineers and MBAs

The best manager I ever had at a technical job (or any job) was completely non-technical, an ex-military man in fact. He ran the network security group at CalTech's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in the mid-1990s.

He knew how to do three things, and saw them as his job in managing the team: Hire good people, listen to what they tell him, and make sure they have what they need to do their jobs effectively. Whenever that meant running interference or kicking down roadblocks outside or inside the lab, it was always the same response: "Tell me what you need, and I'll make it happen."

BOFH: The Boss is right, the applications of AI are truly staggering

Yes, the Boss was on to something...

Specifically, the pavement beneath that window.

Smeary!

The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed

Que? As far back as I can remember, Macs (which is what I assume you're talking about) used a Finder window to browse and launch applications, the same way Windows did in 3.1 and earlier with the Programs folder. The Apple menu has only ever provided access to a few core OS functions like Quit, Log Out, Shutdown, etc.

The primary innovation with the Windows 95 Start Menu wasn't that it provided links to log out of your account or restart the system, it was that it ALSO supplanted the Explorer-based application grid window by providing a dynamic menu of all of your installed software. Apple never seriously went that route at all, they went from Finder windows to -- what do they call it? -- Mission Control, I think? A mobile-style full-screen app grid.

BOFH: Why's the network so slow?

Re: Mornington Crescent?

Nah, I'm just getting flashbacks to playing "Give My Regards to Broad Street" on the Commodore 64, lo those nearly four decades ago.

BOFH: Come on down to the dunge– erm … basement

Re: Resemble

Painful lesson of long experience, messing with computers, the moment you decide something is junk, and get rid of it, because it's collecting dust, it will become the one object you need in a life & death situation. That flat ribbon hard drive / floppy drive / cd-rom ATA cable? The day you ditch it, the next day, you're going to need it. Fifty years that thing can sit in a box, looking malevolent, but the day you toss it will become the day it became life & death critical.

Well, sure. That's why I keep one of everything that might possibly ever again be of some use. Generally, the "best" one, by whatever criteria seem sensible at the time. I still have my best (read: longest) floppy ribbon cable, my best (read: thickest jacketing) parallel cable, my best (read: ...best) PCI sound card, etc.

But ONLY ONE of each. All the others get sent to that great parts bin in the sky.

Re: Plot error alert

OTOH, Im looking at the 3 DL380s, the DL360, the Gen10, three Synologies, 2004 Mac Pro, 2009 Mac Pro, 2013 Mac Pro, Sun Blade 2500, shevles full of PCI-64bit / PCI-X RAID cards, a few 32bit PCI cards, a VL-Bus SVGA card.... floppy cables, HDs, even a 5.25" (half height) 20MB disk drive... and thinking "Do I have too much junk?"

Sounds like you definitely have too many associated controllers, for your relative scarcity of tiny storage! Never mind "where are you going to plug all those PCI-X cards into?", but even if you found compatible motherboards, what would you possibly RAID with them?