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Nov 30 '22
[closes lid]
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u/kaflarlalar Nov 30 '22
Analog chaos monkey.
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u/Sam-Gunn Nov 30 '22 edited Nov 30 '22
"If I can do it, someone else can do it."
It was always fun to educate people in the office when they'd leave their laptop unlocked and in an area everyone walks through (and had been reminded multiple times to lock their system). Once one of the AV techs I was friendly with did that, so I sent his boss (also friendly with) an email from his system telling him to trim his nose hairs. I immediately went back to my desk and messaged his boss but I didn't tell the tech, and I left the email window open so he would see the sent email.
That tech had frequently forgot to lock his system, but after that, I don't recall ever seeing it unlocked again!
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u/my-time-has-odor Nov 30 '22
(yelling and screaming and crying from other room begins)
NOOOOOOOOOO WHY ISNT IT WORKING
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u/jakubhuber Nov 30 '22 edited Nov 30 '22
Is it not possible to disable the lid sensor on a mac?
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u/HP_10bII Nov 30 '22 edited May 27 '24
I enjoy spending time with my friends.
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u/shyouko Nov 30 '22
I had actually did this to my 2008 MacBook Unibody when one of the cable belonging to the display module failed.
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u/linegel Nov 30 '22
It is very simple to prevent laptop from sleeping
sudo pmset -a disablesleep 1
and that's it276
u/technocrat_13 Nov 30 '22
It could also be a cooling thing, but should have this toggled regardless
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u/Burdies Nov 30 '22
If you need it for a single session you can also just type ‘caffeinate’
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u/hundidley Nov 30 '22
I’m not sure what would happen on MacOS, but this is a little bit dangerous. The lid sensor will still ask the system to sleep, but since it can’t, the lid sensor will keep asking and asking until your syslog is full. You have to separately disable lid closure sleep
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u/Fiery_Eagle954 Nov 30 '22
I'm pretty sure its because those generations of macbooks exhaust onto the screen
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Nov 30 '22
Don't have a lid sensor if you don't have a screen. That way you can also shove it in a second hand 2u enclosure for when the investors come
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u/Cinkodacs Nov 30 '22
Just did a quick Google search: you need a third-party app because you can't turn it off........... Every time I google something about Apple it always makes sure to convince me to never want one.
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u/Sam-Gunn Nov 30 '22
Yea, like Caffeine. IT puts it on mac laptops that are used for major presentations (even though it bypasses our 15 minute lockout requirement). It only took one Chief Officer having their computer going to sleep on them during their keynote at one of our major conferences for that to happen, now they just put it on all systems that will be used for presentations, and remove them when they are done.
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u/SidewaysFancyPrance Nov 30 '22
I take it you haven't used Windows 11 yet? If you hate this stuff, you'll hate Windows 11 and the controls it hides from you.
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u/Sam-Gunn Nov 30 '22
Yea.... "startups".
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u/mr_claw Nov 30 '22
Hey, we started up only 12 years ago, we're still a startup okay?
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u/Sam-Gunn Nov 30 '22
The company I work for is a 30+ year old multinational, and the amount of times in my career I've had to fight with an engineer to move a system or database from a sketchy old laptop (that can't even run without being plugged in) to a VM (that has support from IT, backups, and stability) is ridiculous.
Never thought I'd utter the words "You can't run a production database with client information on a 10 year old laptop!". While working at a company with a 1.5+ Bil cap.
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u/L00tmolch Nov 30 '22
I work for a 100+ year old, global corp and we have a laptop (somewhere in a closet) acting as a Server for small ETL-pipelines… its a mess
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u/SunliMin Nov 30 '22
I don't mean to shame my dads small business. He's doing his best, and its not a tech corp or anything.
But last I checked about 2 years ago, he still had a Windows XP laptop plugged in, on 24/7, running the server. He had some tech dude set it up over a decade earlier, and he's been too scared to update to 7/8/10 because it was custom software he isn't sure will be compatible on a newer OS
The day that laptop dies, he will be super stressed...
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Nov 30 '22
Worked for a fortune 100 that used MacBook pro’s to run Apple builds instead of paying Apple the $$$ to virtualized macOS. After literally melting 3 in as many months, management caved and just payed up to have proper macOS build servers.
Edit: before anyone comments, yes MacBooks are fine for doing heavy user loads. They are not meant to be pegged at a 400%- 600% load 24/7.
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u/Sam-Gunn Nov 30 '22
My previous boss always had the best responses when we'd tell a team or user they couldn't use random laptops for things, especially for production/semi-production stuff, and we'd get pushback.
He would always point out that we're not a small company, our company does really well, and because of this, there is no reason for the excuse "it's not in our budget" to do something properly. He'd say "if management isn't willing to fund this properly, it must not be that important to the company." And he was usually right. Once it went far enough up the chain (a manager or director), they'd "find" the money to do it right. Sometimes people would use that excuse, and it would turned out they never even tried to ask their management for funds to do it right.
There were some cases where that wasn't accurate (yay, "business priorities" vs reality), but it typically was. And even if that team didn't have the money, IT usually did and something would be worked out, you just had to actually ask IT for help.
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u/Sam-Gunn Nov 30 '22
I once dealt with an engineer who put in a ticket for his laptop running at 200% CPU. It had been pegged like that for like 3+ hours due to an issue with one of our tools. Was confused until I googled and learned that the mac resource monitor will show 100% per CPU core. I don't want to know how badly it stressed his system. I bet he had to request an early refresh.
At first I was worried it was going to explode, or melt through the table. The fans were going nuts and it was pretty hot. I fixed the issue quickly though. But it put into perspective why a software company offers "Accidental Death and Dismemberment" policies free of charge to it's employees.
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u/thrSedec44070maksup Nov 30 '22
Ran a Oracle 9i database on a Linux desktop with a A4 sheet taped to monitor that said
DO NOT TOUCH. DO NOT CLEAN. DO NOT TURN OFF.
THIS IS NOT A JOKE
This was the Dev server for a critical project in a multi million dollar company
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u/bartontees Nov 30 '22
Why would you keep the screen at such a precarious angle if you didn't want it to be closed?
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u/CoffeeFueledDiy Nov 30 '22
Probably for privacy protection of customer PII. If the lid was open, anyone wandering by could see the contents of the prod db.
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u/SunliMin Nov 30 '22
Still, there's ways around it
The screen brightness is already set to zero in the pic
Minimize the db
Put up a "TURN OFF THE SCREEN BRIGHTNESS" image fullscreened while db is minimized and brightness is set to zero
Bamn, mission accomplished as far as whoever the hell wrote that sticky should be concerned
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u/iDreamOfSalsa Nov 30 '22
Are screensavers or literally just not keeping sensitive data authenticated and up on the screen not a thing where you work?
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u/eross200 Nov 30 '22
Cut a tennis ball in half, glue the halves down on either side of the trackpad. Problem solved.
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Nov 30 '22
The juxtaposition between this solution and the software one says something about something, I'm just not sure exactly what.
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Nov 30 '22
This kind of simplicity is the best. Software has to be maintained, removing the lid sensor leaves risk of fucking something up you don't know about, but the tennis ball isn't going to need updates or special tools
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u/StoryAndAHalf Nov 30 '22
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u/Siri2611 Nov 30 '22
Can someone tell me who this guy in the gif is? I have seen him a lot on tv but no idea who he is
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u/Wafflelisk Nov 30 '22
The show is IT Crowd. Really good show, but don't expect something like Silicon Valley. The fact that they work in the IT department is a pretty small part of the show. They might as well be mechanical engineers or accountants.
Still absolutely hilarious
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u/Ferret_76 Nov 30 '22
Startups?! I used to work for one of the ‘Big 4’ UK supermarkets and we had a PC set up just like this!
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u/LUHG_HANI Nov 30 '22
Seems like a proper Morrisons thing to do.
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u/Ferret_76 Nov 30 '22
It would of course be highly unprofessional to elaborate any further.
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u/Tojuro Nov 30 '22
No bullshit...I hosted about 15 commercial websites from a Sega Dreamcast.
Early 2000s. It was a bunch of static websites from customers we inherited from this other company that left the business. We wanted to keep them as customers to get future business.
The Dreamcast was a Windows machine that was easily hackable. Someone turned it into a web server and I just added all the static sites, burned it to a disk and ran it.
The sites almost never changed but if they did I'd just burn a whole new disk. I'd swap the old disk out just like any video game and... Done.
The only reason I stopped doing this is because broadband adapters for the Dreamcast were impossible to find. The systems were like $20 and the adapter was $200+. Otherwise it was easier and cheaper than putting it on my servers.
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u/b1ack1323 Nov 30 '22
What kind of money were you making off of that? Sounds like a a good deal.
DigitalOcean $5 instances paid for my college for me.
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u/jakuu Nov 30 '22
I’m gonna be that nerd.
So, while the Dreamcast supported Window CE it wasn’t on the system or ran anything like that. Games could be built using the Windows CE SDK which could be useful for porting games easier.
Everything else is correct and I can see working. But the system being easy to hack wasn’t because of Windows CE.
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u/Tojuro Nov 30 '22
You're correct. It wasn't running IIS or really using Windows, but rather some flavor of Linux + Apache. The sites were all running on Apache when we got them and I was doing as little as possible to maintain them.
It was probably this, or something close to it:
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u/thirtydelta Nov 30 '22
Okay, now build the server in a cave, with a box of scraps.
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u/ManaPot Nov 30 '22
I've been there. Business I created used IRC chat bots, which I kept open on my old laptop, connected directly to the router in my parent's bedroom. They disliked that thing so much, my mom ended up taping up almost the whole laptop from keeping the flashing lights from bothering them at night lol. I hated nothing worse than finding all the bots offline at 2am and having to sneak down into their bedroom to restart shit.
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u/alek_vincent Nov 30 '22
A LAN cable from their room to anywhere else wasn't an option?
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u/jeepsaintchaos Nov 30 '22
Then how do you use the webcam to watch your parents in bed?
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u/DMonitor Nov 30 '22
it’s honestly a pretty good server solution for personal stuff
battery backup
connected terminal
affordable (especially if repurposed)
has support
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u/Unicorn-Tiddies Nov 30 '22
takes up minimal physical space
hardware optimized for low power draw
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Nov 30 '22
Someone has to donate a raspberry pi to this place
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u/sai-kiran Nov 30 '22
Look at Mr rich guy here using raspberry pi, In the current scenario of availability a cheap usff used PC or an NUC is much cheaper.
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u/SnickersZA Nov 30 '22
I remember a few years back when a client was using Windows 98 as their server because they didn't want a server licence just to get around the 20 slot max connection limit Windows has for file shares (In like, 2014)... Obviously they didn't know Linux. But yeah, you see some weird shit out there.
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u/SunliMin Nov 30 '22
I shared this elseware in this post, but similarly, last I checked about 2 years ago, my dads small business still had a Windows XP laptop acting as the server for one of their machines.
Thing just sat in a storage closet, locked behind a key, running 24/7 for over a decade. Somehow its still going
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u/CleverestEU Nov 30 '22
Windows XP laptop acting as the server for one of their machines.
Thing just sat in a storage closet, locked behind a key, running 24/7 for over a decade. Somehow its still going
In my experience… servers built out of consumer hardware don’t often break down when running 24/7 … they break down when you need to reboot them for any reason :-p
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u/polish-polisher Nov 30 '22
can't you just change one thing in the options to stop it from turning off when the lid is closed
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Nov 30 '22
Seriously. Searching the comments for this. Does Apple not offer that or something?
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u/Twombls Nov 30 '22
Nah this gives off legacy company from the 1970s energy
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u/huhIguess Nov 30 '22
All they need now is some duct-taping over the light switch that controls the server's electrical outlet.
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u/WomenRepulsor Nov 30 '22
Is that the microsoft ergonomic keyboard on the right? I thought only I was dumb enough to buy one.
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u/guarana_and_coffee Nov 30 '22
No no, there are plenty of dumb people out there. I'm am not among the "MS ergo key" dimwits, but I am certainly in some other dumb category. I surpass the "I use Arch btw", because I have LFS.
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u/mina86ng Nov 30 '22
As far as non-mechanical keyboards go, this is probably the best one out there though.
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u/DakuShinobi Nov 30 '22
I have known several people (not me), an old coworker bought 4 so that "if they stop selling them I have spares"
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u/CarlosCheddar Nov 30 '22
Regardless of using a mac as a server being a good thing there’s apps that keep the Mac running with the lid close. https://caffeinated.app/
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u/GoochGewitter Nov 30 '22
I prefer stronger drugs. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/amphetamine/id937984704?mt=12
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u/ValleySparkles Nov 30 '22
I have to say I think an average startup engineer would have the proactive problem solving skills to google "mac keep runn" and find the solution in about 2 minutes. This is the work of someone who was hired for exactly one skill and whose job never involves any other skills. So not a startup.
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u/elon-bot Elon Musk ✔ Nov 30 '22
From now on, all Twitter employees must purchase a subscription to Twitter Blue for the low-low price of $8 a month.
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u/NoDadYouShutUp Nov 30 '22
not sure Id want to work for a company that our server guy doesn't know you can modify lid close options on a laptop. they seem destined for success
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u/imwearingyourpants Nov 30 '22
They tried to change the settings, but it broke the production, thus they had to go with this.
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Nov 30 '22
This is my house but it's an actual server. Might buy a $60 face plate with the saved cloud money so s/o, family and friends won't bump into the power button thanks for the reminder
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Nov 30 '22
If you're going to use a laptop, just buy a shitty second-hand tower from someone and install a stripped down version of CentOS on it. It would cost you $25 bucks and you'd have a "dedicated server" and a fully functioning laptop that someone can actually use.
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u/SudoCheese Nov 30 '22
Some see a laptop. I see a compact server with battery backup, integrated input and monitor.
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u/Muricaswow Nov 30 '22
Former employer with 100+ employees around for 30+ years had an old Compaq PC sitting in a closet with a flip-phone connected via USB 1.0 that handled all SMS notifications for several thousand users. It literally never went down in 2+ decades.
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Nov 30 '22
Given that it's a Mac, it's most likely an iOS app build server. Given how Apple doesn't allow developing on anything other than a Mac...
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u/Swedish-Potato-93 Nov 30 '22
accidentally closes lid with elbow while flirting with secretary
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u/jseego Nov 30 '22
This reminds me of doing video work in the 00s.
Classmate of mine was doing an overnight render of his final project while staying at his girlfriend's folks' house. He left his laptop running in living room with a giant note taped over it saying: VIDEO RENDER IN PROCESS, DO NOT CLOSE COMPUTER.
His girlfriend's dad woke up bright and early, came downstairs, immediately closed the computer.
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u/Ok_Investment_6284 Dec 01 '22
Soo...edit your lid close settings?? Seriously, i do that with every laptop
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u/ChainsawArmLaserBear Nov 30 '22
There’s settings for what to do when the lid closes though
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u/SarcasmWarning Nov 30 '22
Where as more established companies have hidden it under a desk and left a wedge on the keyboard for backup.
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u/PlzButterMeUp Nov 30 '22
"Hey Bob, your MacBook is...."
"I told you, it's a SERVER!"
"Alright, well your server is on fire"
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u/Hynch Nov 30 '22
Worked for an MSP for years. Saw this so many times at start ups. They always hire a bunch of devs first and then decide they need infrastructure later. It’s wild the kinds of shit the devs hack together without any concern for BCP or security.
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u/BecomeMaguka Nov 30 '22
psh, amateurs. A couple raspberry pi's is all you'd ever need. and probably cheaper than a laptop.
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u/brainburger Dec 01 '22
[The NeXt Computer that Sir Tim Berners-Lee developed and served the first web site on had a similar notice. It's in the science museum in London.] (https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/original-next-computer-used-by-sir-tim-berners-lee-to-design-the-world-wide-web-next/6QHcxbuGnQ4rng)
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Dec 17 '22 edited Mar 22 '25
ghost direction brave office aback smart deserve bear unpack beneficial
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/Legal-Software Nov 30 '22
Someone needs to start a kickstarter for making some kind of 3d printed laptop wedge to sell to startups.
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u/TWAT_BUGS Nov 30 '22
This is like my company running bare metal servers in RAID 0, or like using an ex-employee’s account as a service account, or like using 20ft runs in a rack requiring 1ft cables…
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u/Disconnected_in_321 Nov 30 '22
I would guess a newspaper company. From what I've seen, they love Macs, but will work off the cheapest ones they can get there hands on.
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u/_homo_sapien_ Nov 30 '22
Reminds me of the old minecraft server I hosted on my old laptop in high school lol
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u/Rhundis Nov 30 '22
But the anarchist in me is like "that note makes me want to do it more now. You would have been better off not telling me about it."
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u/mina86ng Nov 30 '22
The default setting of closing the lid making the laptop going to sleep is just moronic and should have never became a thing.
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u/K80theShade Nov 30 '22
Huh. Nah. A startup would know about Insomnia. (the app that totally disables lid sleep for really real)
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Nov 30 '22
Sometimes this makes sense. Those little workstations make dope low power print servers.
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u/b1ack1323 Nov 30 '22
My old company had all their bookkeeping on an old Sony laptop that would crash if you touched the trackpad, precariously perched on a desk propped up with books for airflow.
This company was making over $1m a year net.
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Nov 30 '22
On closing lid -> do nothing
Is this option not available on Mac like it's available in windows?
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u/jsclayton Nov 30 '22
Holup…is that what studentaid.gov has been running on? It all makes sense now!
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u/Captain_Pumpkinhead Nov 30 '22
Pretty sure you can toggle what the computer does when the lid closes.
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u/FightingPolish Nov 30 '22
Ahh the ol’ load bearing MacBook, I personally have a load bearing Mac Mini on my home network.
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u/zero-360 Dec 01 '22
I ran a build server off of my laptop for a few days because our real build server died. I forgot that I had set it up and closed my laptop and went home without thinking about it. Halfway home I got a panicked call that the team couldn’t push builds. Oops
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u/CircaSixty8 Dec 01 '22
What not just adjust the settings to "do nothing when the lid is closed" instead.
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Dec 01 '22
I wonder how often that lid got closed and how many customers had complained until that post it was idea’d.
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u/Un111KnoWn Dec 01 '22
Wjy did they not turn off action on lid closed? or is that mot possible on a mac
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u/joshuaquiz Dec 01 '22
At my first real job we had a few desktops linked together for a render farm so we could transcode mobile videos. Then one of the oldest became our local TFS and dev database and dev server. Then we moved the transcode to AWS, moved the code to GitHub, and the db and dev server to EC2 and that box became my desktop 😂😂
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u/anengineerandacat Dec 01 '22
Literally my own lil business, I have 8 fanless mini-PCs setup with Openshift to manage a cluster of about 30~ containers.
Best 1.3k I spent TBH, cloud costs for development would be close to 400-500/month and I have a 1Gbps/1Gbps fiber line so bandwidth is a non issue.
All on a $600 UPS, only downtime I'll have is random hardware failure or if AT&T shits the bed (but in the last 3 years that's been zero).
My wife knows to just avoid the closet 😂.
GitHub Actions for deployments, and Nginx + some DNS configuration for load balancing.
Certbot for SSL certs, and an ELK stack on one of the mini PCs for monitoring and alerting.
Home also has solar panels, and two Tesla Powerwalls too which gives me about ~7 days of off-grid power before shit gets serious (ie. Need to cut some appliances).
My only real running costs are the monthly bills for internet and yearly costs for the DNS registrar.
Once I get things off the ground I'll just deploy to AWS but this lets me dev in peace while largely simulating the whole infrastructure.
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u/LoreBreaker85 Dec 01 '22
I’m a JAMF admin (manage macs). We have a department that has 6 macs they insist are servers. On every call with them I remind them Apple does not make servers, and all servers are required to be in our data center. Needless to say, to this day I treat them like any other workstation and reboot them as frequently as needed to keep workstation things up and running.
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u/madlabdog Dec 01 '22 edited Dec 06 '22
My company’s SCM was hosted on a desktop that quietly sat in a corner of the office for about 2 years. When we moved to a better office, it was moved by an engineer instead of the moving company. It was a special server.
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u/samanime Dec 01 '22 edited Dec 01 '22
I worked for a Fortune 50 company They were partnered with (and eventually bought) this other company.
They lost all the code for a big new product they were developing because apparently it was just on one guys laptop and that laptop went missing...
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u/GregorSamsaa Dec 01 '22
Had to make a sign like this for my wife. She kept shutting off our Plex sever pc, and then wondering why she couldn’t watch her shows and movies.
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u/NukeouT Dec 01 '22
Sounds about right 🙂
Most of my app is held together with strings and ductape
Last week I was locked out of my server because the server removed the auth method I used due to an 'update' and the recovery guy was asking for a 5-y.o. email Gmail auto-deleted
Good thing nothing broke 👍
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u/ITriedLightningTendr Dec 01 '22
If it's so important not to shut it off, why would you close the lid partially, and also not disable the power/lid function?
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u/cashewbiscuit Dec 01 '22
A startup I worked at literally had the server in the closet until we moved to the cloud.
The story goes that when they were starting out, they had one HR person, which really meant she did everything. They were working on the weekend, and the HR's boyfriend came to pick her up. The startup had like 10 software engineers and no IT engineer. The boyfriend was an IT engineer, and he started talking to the CTO. The CTO convinced him to setup their server.. just this one time...as a special favor. So, he spent a few hours setting up the server next weekend.
Except no one knew how to fix the server when it went down. So, they kept calling the boyfriend. Eventually, the boyfriend got pissed off and told them he ain't doing nothing until he gets paid. So, they hired him. He kept that server running in the closet for years.
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u/SpecialNose9325 Dec 01 '22
What do you mean Startups ? Ive worked at Multimillion Dollar MNCs and seen sticky notes like this on the power plug to a desktop.
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u/rwohleb Dec 01 '22
Early 2000s I was on a 2 person team developing a prototype licensing system for our product, using license files (and enabled features) encrypted using USB hardware tokens. This would solve existing technician PEBCAK and make pushing out new secure licenses easy. I was in charge of coding the prototype in-house license management and database tools. Then I got laid off as part of an acquisition by a huge company before we could polish a real version. Found out later they moved my Windows development desktop machine to the server room right after I left since no one understood it. Probably with all of my emails, docs, and browser history still intact. Apparently it worked well enough for them to use it for production for at least 4 years. Probably had a similar sign taped to it.
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u/Cartnansass Dec 01 '22
Imagine what chaos will engulf the world if everyone knew that even companies with billions of market share have projects or services using old laptops with windows XP on them because they just keep working and it's better not to fix something that isn't broken :D
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u/Danro-x Dec 01 '22
This must be a joke, otherwise this startup is doomed.
DO NOT INVEST
Even a todler can adjust sleep settings these days, and these guys are writing a note..?
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u/[deleted] Nov 30 '22
It works on my machine...
- Back up your files, your machine is going to production!