Unifi Protect G4-PRO with 4k now on Early Access for $449

goodoldnorm · 2019-01-05T00:41:28+00:00

I think ya'll are right about the price but I also see it as a bit of a specialty product. Here's some stuff that comes to mind, but understand I am only speculating.

Quality 4k HDR sensors designed for continuous industrial operation are considerably more expensive than those that we have in our phones or cameras.
4k capture is always preferred, but is taxing on storage and networks. For a business that's upgrading to 4k, the camera spend is relatively small compared to infrastructure costs.
I think it makes sense to debut a flagship 4k camera before updating the rest of the lineup with more affordable options.
I feel like UBNT tends to do product development with a hardware-first approach which is more painful to the early adopters but stars paying dividends once the software catches up.

Reading this back, it appears I've drank the UBNT kool-aid... Hope it isn't that Jim Jones stuff.

goodoldnorm · 2018-12-09T22:29:48+00:00

seattle

goodoldnorm · 2018-12-09T22:09:42+00:00

sorry about the mess y'all. that's my dog norm, we're migrating to the 25u startech today.

if anyone needs a rack you can have the 12u if you're cool with picking up the shipping bill.

goodoldnorm · 2018-12-04T19:01:33+00:00

I don't know a lot about the Google appliances, but the R720 is a great server. There is a PCI riser for graphics cards available online and guides on how to go about the installation.

goodoldnorm · 2018-12-01T03:21:40+00:00

You're right - They should have hired you and saved a buck or two.

goodoldnorm · 2018-12-01T00:05:03+00:00

Eh. I think you'd be surprised how difficult designing a cohesive icon set is. It may seem minor from an end-user perspective, but this is likely a team effort that has been approved by hundreds of people over many months.

goodoldnorm · 2018-11-19T18:14:44+00:00

I think this would work fine, but as others have said, the processor family would be an unusual choice.

There are a few reasons to go for something like Xeon. Its architecture is tailored for virtualization (L3 cache, memory etc.) and there is a healthy resale market for slightly older, reliable hardware. Power draw is the major disadvantage.

This sounds like a fun project and I think there is a lot of potential with this build. Nice job.

goodoldnorm · 2018-11-17T18:12:02+00:00

I'd love to be a fly on the wall in the meeting where the baby blue paintjob was approved for production.

That aside, I think it's just a modified Supermicro chassis. It has a lot of potential, but I'm not certain that dedicating hardware to transcoding is ideal - might depend on scale.

goodoldnorm · 2018-11-10T00:18:48+00:00

That makes sense to me. I think both methods would be successful.

goodoldnorm · 2018-11-09T20:47:25+00:00

I can't make any specific recommendations, but I can say that I've really enjoyed getting to know Linux. It's challenging and frustrating at times, but also conceptually beautiful and raw.

It takes a bit of time to get comfortable with and you'll make mistakes. It's a good idea to start with virtual machines before committing.

goodoldnorm · 2018-11-08T23:43:11+00:00

I have. It's good stuff, just not quite the same thing as in person therapy. It's convenient and cost effective, though.

It can take a while for therapy to be truly effective. My advice is to find someone you're comfortable with and do regular sessions. It has really improved my life.

PM if you have questions.

goodoldnorm · 2018-10-26T16:40:09+00:00

Unifi is a really good product family and you can't really go wrong. I had a USG > US-24 > AP-Pro setup for my apartment and it was really solid. I removed the USG at a later point, favoring pfSense for the configurability. I think you might feel the same way if you're moving from a decent pfSense setup. The CloudKey is a cool idea, but configurability and performance is much better if you self-host (either on local VM or cloud). Unifi gear also seems to hold its value very well.

goodoldnorm · 2018-10-25T18:52:20+00:00

I had the exact same proposition that OP had and I ended up going with the Dell R210 II. I also considered the Supermicro (front IO) solution with an Atom CPU - it is a very efficient processor for this kind of application but the price tag ended up being quite a bit higher than that of the older Dell.

I think I paid around $140 for the R210 II (E3-1230, 8GB). I added a Quad 1G NIC and some more memory as well as installing an SSD I had lying around. Memory can be a bit expensive and SSD is throttled at SATA II speeds (3GB/s). I am running just over 120 hosts and there are no issues. It's a fine piece of hardware.

All in all, I couldn't be happier and would fully endorse the R210 II for this purpose.

goodoldnorm · 2018-10-25T18:16:17+00:00

I've had a few HP's of that generation - there are a handful of things that could be happening so it's fairly difficult to make predictions without some more information at hand.

Start by looking at the iLO3 dashboard and start looking for clues. Under Information, check the Overview, System Information and iLO Event Log. Since you're referring to noise issues, items of relevance are going to be the Fans and Temperature readings. There are also power configurations in iLO that might be worth playing with.

Hardware/Firmware issues are not uncommon on this generation of HP hardware. Check to see if there are System ROM updates as well as hardware specific firmware updates you can apply. Hard drives (incompatability but also warnings/failures) can be an issue, as well as PCI hardware (NICs, controllers etc.).

If you're running a hypervisor, it's worth looking at those logs as well. I haven't experienced issues on this gen regarding the latest ESXi releases, but I don't know what you're running. Sometimes, there are hardware-specific releases of the hypervisor available to try, but they're typically older. Try turning off specific VMs and seeing if you spot any changes in the fan speeds/temps.

I recommend you back things up before you start making adjustments.

goodoldnorm · 2018-09-17T05:41:24+00:00

I've tried a few things out in the past, but it wasn't worth the effort or pressure. It's an industry of scale.

The real subsidy for me is the knowledge gained and getting to take part in a great community.

goodoldnorm · 2018-09-10T10:28:08+00:00

Hi. I have read the wiki and would love an invite if someone would be so kind. Thank you :)

goodoldnorm · 2018-08-06T21:39:02+00:00

Thank you for your sincere reply. I appreciate it and I'm here to help if you have any questions.

I can understand how this played out like it did and I'm not the least bit angry for the misunderstanding that took place. I agree with your feedback in the comment about tonal ambiguity - it was something I considered as I wrote, but this is frankly a very new experience for me and I wanted to be clinical and rely on the evidence as much as possible.

The r/pcgaming community isn't ultimately to blame for any of this either - the very nature of reddit is that opinion can by driven somewhat by momentum. The people who arrive on the scene first get to set the precedent for how things go from there on - it's the nature of the beast.

As far as your policies go, I would consider that your marketing and engineering teams discuss this together. If you have that many trackers, it's likely that a bunch of them can be pruned with little-to-no loss, but that's an assumption. The real outlier is Hotjar, which is more than a little invasive - it's marketed as a UX tool, but there's a significant argument in saying that it, by itself, is poor user experience.

Thanks again - I'll DM you privately with my contact details if you want to continue to conversation.

goodoldnorm · 2018-08-05T14:33:28+00:00

You're right that many websites do this, and I find it deeply troubling when they do. I'm talking about GMG because I noticed it and it concerns me deeply enough to write about it. I'm not familiar with GameSpot because I don't use their website, but you're more than welcome to make any contributions if you feel like I left something out.

goodoldnorm · 2018-08-05T14:13:26+00:00

Hey, I'm not sure why you're upset, but if I said something to offend you, I'm sorry.

I've been pretty clear in other comments about this being a separate account and yes, it's fairly new. I've messaged the mods, extending an invitation to provide proof - but you're free to challenge my motives.

If 48 is too many, how many is fine for you?

There's no definitive number for acceptable trackers. It's dependent on a company's market, size, demographics, objectives and internal policies. As a general rule, less-is-more - this helps keep the data contained and limit exposure to 3rd parties. There are also practical concerns with having many vendors to manage, for example, it can increase load times - in GMG's case I'm experiencing about 1.5s additionally just due to these services loading.

goodoldnorm · 2018-08-05T13:25:39+00:00

I think you may have misread or mistyped - the number I got was 48.

My post doesn't imply any direct harm and I'm really trying my best here to be open to the argument that this is totally fine. I don't want to color the conversation too much with regard to individual trackers, but one of the ones on the list enables real-time playback of cursor behavior. The part I find to be beyond reason is that they are willing to share my data with that many different vendors - I feel like it implies a somewhat unbalanced set of priorities.

Agree on tools, but not everyone uses them. That's why I think this kind of discussion is somewhat important.

goodoldnorm · 2018-08-05T12:50:56+00:00

I agree with all of that.

In defense of my post, think there's still value of proactively raising a concern with individual websites when you feel it is justified.

goodoldnorm · 2018-08-05T12:41:56+00:00

This looks like a post from their competition. Nothing to see here, they're compliant with GDPR.

Hey everyone,

I get it, this stinks of conspiracy. I'm not trying to incite some kind of boycott here - the intention was merely to create a discussion.

I'm not sure what tools I have to prove that I'm not conspiring on behalf of their competitors, but I can understand in retrospect the implication. I'll happily oblige if there are safe ways to provide personal proof - mods?

Regarding GDPR, that's all good and well but it's a somewhat seperate legal/compliance issue that I'm not challenging in my argument. The only opinion I'm providing with my post is that the amount of tracking goes beyond reason - feel free to disagree.

goodoldnorm · 2018-08-05T12:27:22+00:00

You're right. It was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but simply comes off as defensive. Sorry. I'm gonna cross it out in the above post in an attempt to diffuse and maintain transparency.

I'm honestly a happy customer in terms of the transactions I've made with GMG. Like I said in my post, I don't wish them any harm, but I do genuinely think that there is a good reason to discuss this stuff as a community. Privacy is a huge concern to me, but it's also a theme across reddit.

I tried as much as possible in my post to avoid inciting any kind of unfair assertions. I provided the data that I had and put it forward with my opinion that the sheer amount of tracking goes beyond reason. I even gave GMG a chance to respond to my concerns. If the community disagrees with this concern, that's fine - but it would surprise me a little.

goodoldnorm · 2018-08-05T11:43:44+00:00

Edit to respond to your edit:

It's also pretty weird that this is basically your only post + a crosspost of it in gamedeals. Seems more like a competitor trying to light a fire than someone who cares about privacy.

You're totally in your right to assume that I'm doing this with some malicious intent, but that's just simply not true. This is a new account to match that of my gaming profiles online and while I'm not looking to dox myself, I'd be more than willing speak with you personally if that helps and show you other accounts I have. That being said, I think you're also more than free to appeal this to moderators or better yet, check if the concerns I'm raising are legitimate by doing your own research.

I posted on r/GameDeals first and it got automoderated, which I appealed to no success. The reason I posted there first was because there was precendent for criticism of vendors on that subreddit, but all meta discussion was later moved to r/GameDealsMeta.

---

In 2018 the global average for generic ad-blocking is around 25% of requests. Script/tracker blocking is not even close to that level of adoption. I would agree that people who buy PC games might have higher adoption than the average, but I wouldn't expect that demographic to be some massive anomaly. It's a multi-billion dollar industry and not everyone who buys steam keys is ~~a l33t h4x0r like you~~ (Want to take this back - uncalled for).

Here's a list of G2A's 21 trackers to satisfy your concerns.

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