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Linux is a very mainstream OS with great hardware support for everything.

IIRC my go-to high end products up through the Pentium 3 era were Tyan, but it was experiences with Abit as the go-to for overclocking support that eventually put me on to Gigabyte, which I found to be much more stable and boring in a way I genuinely appreciated. I think it's funny that you...

As I understand it, the people at SpaceX are better at managing him in ways that let them work than some of the other concerns where he's more involved.

Oh Frick Go Back is a one shot tool to remove ad-related BS from Windows 11. This is something the world probably needed.

Which Abit board did you have? 😁 The RAM controller is on the CPU die, and it MAY be something that gets addressed with Ryzen 9000. Hopefully, they've addressed that and also the heat spreader design.

I have a cousin whose personality is "I have a Tesla" in the same way that some middle aged guys are all about their beard or beer snobs who are really, really serious about hops and whatever the fuck else goes in beer. He started on a Roadster and I'll admit they seemed cool. He's on his third...

I have a stack of servers that are using every bit of 384 or 512GB RAM right now, albeit in allocation to a VM of some sort. But some of those VMs will hit 90% utilization under load and could probably stand to be allocated an extra 50% more RAM soon. No, that's not a mainstream need for...

My boss's brother is a senior person for the Chicago office of the IRS. He's a GS13 or 14, don't remember which. Anyway, I saw him a couple weeks ago (late May, 2024) and his government issued laptop was a consumer model HP that had a Windows 7 sticker on it. He referred to it as his NEW laptop.

I don't think it matters, although having more RAM than you need is kind of a waste of electricity. On the other hand, if you're building a PC to keep for years and years, why not pad it out based on anticipated need? My workstation has 128GB of DDR4 3600 because it came with the motherboard...

No one ever. EVER.

Everything they brought me was either an expired Chromebook or had Windows 8 (no, not 8.1) on it. When I was finally given a password to get on one of them, it had Internet Explorer tabs still open from 2016.

A customer's wife asked me to look at their home computers. I told them that as long as she brough them to me and understood I'd charge for my time, no big deal. The computers were described as "brand new." The newest actual PC is a Surface 3, but there are also two Chromebooks old enough to be...

You have 24 threads. Using one or two to compress data in memory is probably pretty goddamned negligible in terms of impact on performance.

I generally give models commercial rights to their images unless I know that their financial status is materially changed from their work. I work with a couple people who can afford to pay me real money and that's enough. Anything else I do is just for fun anyway.

Microsoft decided it wasn't done inflicting Windows 11 on us. I think it plans to keep doing so until we say that we like it.

Every so often, pictures I take wind up in particular sorts of magazines that I can't believe are still being printed. Not necessarily those. OK also those. Seriously, some of my boudoir work has been used in tattoo pin-up magazines. I have no idea where to buy them; one of my IT customers is...

Most people are going to consider a ~$500 camera body to be adequate for most purposes and indeed I can get great results results I'd rather shoot with my old T3i than a new phone; that thing will absolutely smoke a 200MP Samsung Ultra-whatever for image quality, and that's what people are going...

I don't think even people whose entire living is based on Oracle or SAP expertise like those products. Given that my Samsung tablet S9 tablet can make a fair stab at denoising video on Android, I'm going to guess it's probably at least not anything to complain about.

My first few lenses were definitely kit lens cheapies, the Canon EF-S 18-55/3.5-5.6 and 75-300, plus some manual FD lenses my dad had from his time in the military that were a PITA to try to adapt on an EF body. Early on, it didn't seem like changing aperture did very much for me on the lenses I...

Cue Mystery Science Theater 3000 theme song. In this case, a super-intelligent robot made it, which is just a variation on the classic "A wizard did it" that a lot of speculative fiction uses. I've seen most of those movies several times. I don't remember them being described as either...

Their life cycle incorporates the DNA of the parasite that incubates from a facehugger. In Alien3 and the Aliens v Predator films and games, Xenomorphs that come from non-human hosts (a dog and the Youtja aliens, respectively) have clear signifiers of their parasitic parent's species...

Fun true fact: The Weyland-Yutani corporation, which owned the Narcissus and the Sulaco, the space ships in the first two Aliens movies, is name checked in Blade Runner as well and there's nothing in either series to make them incompatible with one another. This can further be extended to...

I generally don't need a Photoshop alternative but a Lightroom alternative. I use Capture One + Topaz software for photos and Davinci Resolve Studio for video editing. I also use a tool called Optyx as a first pass tool to cull the photos I've taken from any given shoot. Optyx was a one time...

Oregon Trail 5th edition was released at about the same time as Windows XP. It's a completely normal Win32 application. It definitely SHOULD work. Things get a lot goofier when you try to get games originally made for Windows 95/98 to run on new systems, but for example the original Age of...

A zillion years ago, I had a job deploying about 3,000 top-end at the time Thinkpads to BP's Downer's Grove "The Cancer Hot Spot" Research Facility. There were four VPs with offices there and I was asked to be the personal point of contact for those guys, or more realistically their assistants...

Off topic CSB but my folks spent two months on a private island in Hawaii for their 50th wedding anniversary in 2018. My mother spent the entire time complaining about how dark and grey and even slightly chilly it was for most of their visit because Kilauea was actively erupting and really had...

My rent is reasonable. My apartment is a short walk (300 feet?) to Indiana Dunes National Park or to the South Shore commuter rail line to downtown Chicago. My neighborhood is diverse. My landlord doesn't mind my cats. The stated reason I am not allowed to switch out the AC unit is that it is...

I bring this up every year, but I don't have functional AC, and because of how my apartment is laid out, there's no real airflow either. No windows on the west or south, where they would offer any relief to heat. I'm just used to it, but I use a pair of industrial fans to generate airflow...

The SER6 uses the same barrel and transformer as 9th generation Intel NUCs, which I have verified by plugging one in where I had the NUC. I have no idea why the newer ones changed.

I'm going to blow away the OS on absolutely anything before I put it in service regardless. The digital license entitlement makes life a lot easier in that respect. It may be that the 7840HS is a bit much for the cooling solution in that form factor. My most-purchased Beelink units are much...

I usually buy Beelink devices. They're put on sale on Amazon with shocking regularity. I have purchased Intel based Minisforum workstation systems a couple times. Never bought an AMD model.

something something low hanging fruit something My #1 stupid waste of time games are Breakout or Bubbleshooter type titles. I like this one for Android and understand that I tried dozens before I picked that one. These games work really well for those "It's going to be a couple minutes while I...

I think that it is, yes. I quite like NUC-like PCs as full fat desktop client PCs and I prefer AMD's approach to overall architecture at the moment. Strix Point by all reports is a very promising upcoming platform. It would be insane to put those facts aside just because you've typically only...

Kind of a cool story: City of Heroes is the only MMO I really played. P5 was also a fan, back in the day. The game was closed by its Korean parent company NCsoft in 2012 as a cost-saving measure after a Korean-only title failed at launch, even though the game was still making money and had a...

I kind of live in Resolve Studio (the paid version). It's.... a lot. I learn things as I need to, but if you don't have complex needs, it might be easier to work with CapCut, which a lot of my Onlyfans-ing friends use for themselves since it runs on literally everything, or something a little...

Mildly off topic from anything important, but Humble Bundle is currently selling a package that includes Corel Draw, Painter and WordPerfect Office for $25, for people who want a useful Office Suite and don't like the idea of using something like G2A to get a grey market version. That's a pretty...

Yes. There's a market for them on eBay.

Someone posted their experiences with the current flagship Matrox C680 as of June 2024. It's actually an AMD workstation GPU, but Matrox provides all the drivers on its own. The person who made this video does take it seriously as a $50 graphics card and of course it's completely pathetic, but...

It's just a checklist for branding. One of the checkboxes is a new key for the keyboard. It's functionally meaningless.

Copilot+ is just branding, like having a laptop that says it supports Intel Vpro. Your King Kong desktop with a 400W GPU will run rings around a Snapdragon X Elite-whatever in every possible way. The only thing that can be said is that said desktop doesn't have anything like the power...

Me asking a group of bluegrass-playing boomers who need to sit down to pick a banjo for 90 minutes to do anything in Indiana sounds like a great way to get hate crimed. Their crowd looked like it had a lot of overlap with an NRA convention. The rag was honestly a real highlight for me. I was sad...

That game is very pretty. It's an absolute walking simulator it is something different and enjoyable. It's on Xbox game pass, which is probably the only way I could see someone obtaining it. It's not worth $20. I own an odd number of games where you play as an animal just trying to survive and...

I don't know when Lightroom was updated but now you can just mask an element in a photo and make it go away. No photoshop required. And then apply that edit to every photo. I took some concert photos where there was a rag sitting on stage the entire time and in every frame. It was a one-second...

That's not actually a reinstall situation. There's a tool called mbr2gpt you can use if you are still on MBR disks. Otherwise, you just have to pop in your firmware and track down whichever of the 40 different things the TPM emulator dingus is called and enable it. Windows doesn't actually care...

Microsoft has apparently restarted its Insider Update channel for Windows 10. Makes me think there's a big subset of customers who have gone ahead and said "not no, but hell no" to a Windows 11 migration.

I went ahead and made a game thread in the pub just to keep this to bitching about nvidia and intel like normal.

Just to keep the stuff out of the video card thread. Marvel's Midnight Suns is free on Epic Right now, if you are a person who played and like the Firaxis X-Com games. I always check Epic and Amazon Games every week became none of my other friends remember to do that and get mad when they miss...

My partner has re-purchased Skyrim on every platform, every time it has been released. Same thing with the Bethesda Fallout games. I mentioned this somewhere else, but doing the math from her reported play-times across Playstation, Xbox, Switch and PC, she's spent a meaningful portion of her...

That's on the specific sellers, a bit like blaming Ebay or Craigslist for sellers there. G2A is weirdly big enough to offer buyer protection, which is often not the case from other ventures that sell grey-market Microsoft keys. I've never bought a game through it though, which I understand to...

As usual, my caveat is that I really don't care how well games work. Do they mostly work? That's close enough for me. Developers will sort it eventually. Intel GPUs probably are vastly better on Windows than Linux, driverwise, just for the usual reasons around the size of the market and the...