Turns out communism was just a red herring!

Honestly I don’t have anything specific I’d recommend. When I was looking into it, I just did a ton of reading on forums along with articles about how to get everything set up. I also looked at the prices I was offered compared to the prices I’d be able to pay elsewhere, and got quotes from several different companies.

In the end there were a bunch of reasons I didn’t go with solar. I really love it as an idea, and I really want to do it, but it’s enormously expensive. There are lease options, but they’re also expensive and many of them seemed predatory. My utility ended their purchasing program for solar-generated power, and I’m still required to pay a large monthly fee to be connected to the grid, so I couldn’t plan to offset my costs there either. The tax credits are helpful, but you still need to pay up front.

Unfortunately the amount of delta-V you’d need to boost it to a parking orbit of some kind, or to the moon, would be deeply impractical. And it doesn’t have the shielding required to support any sort of deep space habitation.

I’d love to see some or all of it returned to be displayed in a museum, but it would probably be more expensive to do that than it was to build it in the first place. The vehicles to return it in whole or in pieces simply don’t exist right now, and on-orbit disassembly would be incredibly difficult and dangerous for astronauts to carry out.

No, this was part of a group buy program in my area, which was designed to reduce prices. I ended up turning them down because it was still more expensive than it seemed like it should be, and they were going with an older single inverter system instead of a newer and more efficient micro inverter system.

I’ve heard the door to door guys tend to massively upcharge. I haven’t had any come through here, though, so I don’t have any direct experience.

I was talking with a solar company about a solar install with battery storage last year, and they only offered the Powerwall as an option. I literally laughed at them and said there was no way I was tying an enormously expensive piece of home infrastructure to Tesla, because they couldn’t guarantee it’d keep working if Tesla decided to shift direction.

I’m one of the admins who manage CrowdStrike at my company.

We have all automatic updates disabled, because when they were enabled (according to the CrowdStrike best practices guide they gave us), they pushed out a version with a bug that overwhelmed our domain servers. Now we test everything through multiple environments before things make it to production, with at least two weeks of testing before we move a version to the next environment.

This was a channel file update, and per our TAM and account managers in our meeting after this happened, there’s no way to stop that file from being pushed, or to delay it. Supposedly they’ll be adding that functionality in now.

Yes, CrowdStrike says they don’t need to do conventional AV definitions updates, but the channel file updates sure seem similar to me.

The file they pushed out consisted of all zeroes, which somehow corrupted their agent and caused the BSOD. I wasn’t on the meeting where they explained how this happened to my company; I was one of the people woken up to deal with the initial issue, and they explained this later to the rest of my team and our leadership while I was catching up on missed sleep.

I would have expected their agent to ignore invalid updates, which would have prevented this whole thing, but this isn’t the first time I’ve seen examples of bad QA and/or their engineering making assumptions about how things will work. For the amount of money they charge, their product is frustratingly incomplete. And asking them to fix things results in them asking you to submit your request to their Ideas Portal, so the entire world can vote on whether it’s a good idea, and if enough people vote for it they will “consider” doing it. My company spends a fortune on their tool every year, and we haven’t been able to even get them to allow non-case-sensitive searching, or searching for a list of hosts instead of individuals.

Speaking as someone who manages CrowdStrike in my company, we do stagger updates and turn off all the automatic things we can.

This channel file update wasn’t something we can turn off or control. It’s handled by CrowdStrike themselves, and we confirmed that in discussions with our TAM and account manager at CrowdStrike while we were working on remediation.

VASAviation has the audio of this, along with a radar view of what happened and video from the ground. It was very, very close, and appears to be completely the controller’s fault.

https://youtu.be/KmI6pVTjCt0?si=Q39JOnyE37QYlCwB

Can’t speak for the person you’re replying to, but I’m a security engineer and stuff still makes its way to me that you would think would get filtered out by others (and isn’t my job to fix). It just takes the right person thinking “this is obviously a problem with $system, let’s just send it straight over to them so they can fix it quickly!” And then we get the fun job of proving it’s not us and has no relation to us.

We got a ticket today for packet loss between two systems, neither of which have any of our tools on them…