Sheetz, a US convenience store chain, is moving its 838 locations off VMware.
Sheetz has used VMware virtualization across two Dell R440/R450-series servers at each of its locations since 2019. Now it’s migrating 12 to 14 virtual machines (VMs) in each of its stores from VMware vSphere to StorMagic’s SvHCI, “with an additional two VMs to be replaced over the coming months to transition from Windows 10 to Windows 11,” Scott Robertson, infrastructure team manager at Sheetz, told Ars Technica via email. Ultimately, Sheetz will move about 11,000 VMs from Broadcom's virtualization platform. Sheetz is still running the original Dell server hardware.
So far, Sheetz has finished migrating more than 600 stores, averaging 200 per month, according to a company announcement today. Sheetz should be finished with the migration in four months, the announcement said.
Do you remember AIM? It may suprize you to hear that AOL’s instant messanger was actually supported all the way up to 2017– two years after Discord launched. Unlike Discord, AIM is a protocol, not a platform. Everything on your favourite Discord server is at the mercy of the corporate masters of said server; you can’t just spool up your own. Not so for AIM, as [Veronica] explains, both on her blog and in a YouTube video that we’ve embedded below.
The key is the fact that the AIM protocol isn’t locked into AOL’s now-defunct servers; it was reverse engineered in its prime for open-source messengers like Pidgin. You can host your own server, too, using the OpenOscarServer by [mk6i]. Even better, it’s not just AIM, but ICQ! In the sort of irony you only get in real life, the OpenOscar community does all its support on a Discord server. But then, they couldn’t hardly do it over AIM or ICQ these days.
For those of you who were too old or too young to get sucked into the 90s instant messenger craze, these protocols don’t just create chat rooms, that would be the even older Internet Relay Chat protocol, but usually worked more like SMS text messages. You have a contact list, and you send messages to your contacts via a server that acts as a hub. Once upon a time, that server was AOL’s, but now thanks to the OpenOscar project, it can be anybody’s computer. Of course, like texting, you can rope all of your contacts into one big group chat, and the protocol does support images and VOIP. (Which is starting to sound a lot like Discord.)
If you’re tired of your friend-group being at the mercy of American tech companies, [Veronica]’s blog post serves as a good guide to get you started running OpenOscarServer on a Linux system; she used a virtual private server but figures a Raspberry Pi ought to have enough grunt if you don’t have a huge number of people signed up.
For completeness, we should mention that while AOL pulled the plug on AIM nearly a decade back, ICQ, the other protocol supported by OpenOscarServer, lasted straight through until 2024.
Thanks to Keith Olson for the tip! Our tipsline is based on decentralized “electronic mail” technology that anyone can access.
Zoom is warning of a critical vulnerability in its desktop client and software development kit for Windows that could be exploited by an unauthenticated party to hijack accounts. [...]
I always listen to something while I drive--music, a podcast, an audiobook, or just the radio. But when a navigation app is guiding me by voice, it often interrupts whatever audio is playing. On a trip with frequent direction changes, those interruptions get annoying."
All the "talk to Waze" stuff though. No way, I'm not letting Waze have access to my microphone. :)
Atlassian Corp. today announced it is expanding Jira with updates that will help developers prepare, distribute and track work performed by artificial intelligence agents. The company’s new Jira Planner helps turn incomplete project ideas into technical specifications, while its Jira Coding Agent and integrations with third-party agents transform work items into requests. With automation rules […]
I wonder if there is any additional costs in operating for planes... Obviously handoffs between satellites have some cost... but the send to ground shouldn't be any more I wouldn't think... in touch with 2-3 sats at anytime and sending.
Receiving from ground probably takes some computation on the ground to decide which sats to send the packets to that will reach the plane that is also moving... would assume in some directions where roughly in the same direction between sat and plane it is easier, and when flying against the grain, that probably requires a lot more continuous calculations.
In the end... I bet the $10k, and now $20k is like 90% margin or more, knowing that people paying this have a plane and trying to milk the profits from them. ;) That said, I can get a first gen (2016-2019) Cirrus Vision Jet for like $2m used... that doesn't mean I am paying $240k a year for Internet. *sigh*
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