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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Yes. A perpetual license just means no fixed end date, not that it’s irrevocable or interminable.

    You can probably get away with continuing to use ESXi free licenses even commercially, you just won’t have support. And at home, nothing is going to stop existing versions from working.

    Incidentally, assuming I found the right license agreement: https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/downloads/eula/universal_eula.pdf

    It doesn’t actually say it’s perpetual. It only says “The term of this EULA begins on Delivery of the Software and continues until this EULA is terminated in accordance with this Section 9”, but that section only covers termination for cause or insolvency, there is no provision for termination at VMware’s discretion. So, while I’m not a lawyer, it definitely sounds like you can continue using ESXi free.

    Actually, reading further, I think the applicable license is this one: https://www.vmware.com/vmware-general-terms.html

    But that one has even less language about license term and termination. Although it does define “perpetual license” as “a license to the Software with a perpetual term”, again not irrevocable or interminable.











  • Storage media doesn’t make a difference here. You can partition a spinning drive, an SSD, NVRAM, phase change storage, hell even magnetic core if you have enough of it.

    It also depends on how you did the partitioning. A full partitioning program like gparted will intelligently move and resize partitions. But even if you blindly rewrote a partition table, if you did something like take a 100gb partition, changed it to 50gb, and added a 50gb partition after it, as long as the filesystem has only used that first 50gb, nothing bad will happen. A partition table just says “partition starts here, ends here”.

    Just look at the output of fdisk:

    Disk /dev/sda: 100 GiB, 107374182400 bytes, 209715200 sectors
    Disk model: Virtual disk
    Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
    Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
    I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
    Disklabel type: dos
    Disk identifier: 0xaf179753
    
    Device     Boot     Start       End   Sectors Size Id Type
    /dev/sda1  *         2048 192944127 192942080  92G 83 Linux
    /dev/sda2       192944128 209715199  16771072   8G  5 Extended
    /dev/sda5       192946176 209715199  16769024   8G 82 Linux swap / Solaris
    





  • tl;dr:

    The standard model of coin flipping was extended by Persi Diaconis [12] who proposed that when people flip a ordinary coin, they introduce a small degree of ‘precession’ or wobble—a change in the direction of the axis of rotation throughout the coin’s trajectory. According to the Diaconis model, precession causes the coin to spend more time in the air with the initial side facing up. Consequently, the coin has a higher chance of landing on the same side as it started (i.e., ‘same-side bias’).

    “Higher chance” being 50.77% to land on the same side it started from. But this varies by person; apparently some people introduce more precession than others. But even if you could figure out how to do it reliably, I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.