Posts by nintendoeats

Frustrated consultant 'went full Hulk' and started smashing hardware

A non-profit is just an org that isn't allowed to post a profit, that doesn't mean it's a charity. Many orgs that serve industry are non-profits.

Apparently it was really the PA.

Alaska Airlines grounded by mystery IT meltdown

Re: Cloud?

Altogether now...

"If you think safety is expensive, try having an accident."

Your graphics card's so fat, it's got its own gravity alert

So then let's go back to the original statement I had a problem with:

"Have a computer with 750ti + i7 2600 (1.7 tflops), it still plays most games just fine."

Either this statement is meaningless because it uses a definition of "plays most games just fine" that is not relevant to people affected by GPU sag, or it is demonstrably false because such a computer will be unable to play a great many popular titles from the past 5 years, even with very limited settings.

So I'm really not clear on why so many people seem to keen disagree with my fairly obvious thesis "you need a computer that isn't obsolete if you want to be able to pchoose what new (or actually pretty old now) releases you want to play".

I've had a remarkable number of conversations with people who seem to believe the computer they bought 10-15 years ago somehow still owes them something. If you only want to play AoE, then great carry on doing that. No problem, I can absolutely respect that. I like keeping old computers in service; my file server is still a bloody Lynnfield!

But what I often see from people doing this is twofold:

1. Moral superiority, as in this case, implying that everybody else is a fool for wanting to...you know...play modern games and/or with reasonable graphics settings.

2. Actually complaining that modern game developers don't support your toaster. I've encountered a remarkable amount of this, and it's very irritating when somebody comes in and says "o y gaem no wurk!?" and then get angry with the response "because your computer is so old that I regularly pass up similar machines at thrift stores".

And hence, having experienced this same conversation many many times over the past decade (often from people asking for my help), I cease to have any tolerance for it. If somebody wants to play old or very lightweight games on an old computer, that's awesome, I think it's great that they can do that. However, if you want to participate in public conversation about gaming computers, their habits do not excuse them from having perspective about how their use-case compares to the way the market moves in general.

/rant

Ok, but as I said, I don't think "literally 51% of games for the platform" is a useful definition of "most games" when you are discussing gaming computers. If somebody comes to you and says "I want to build a gaming computer, will a 750Ti be good enough", and you say "yes, that will play most games just fine" then you should not be surprised that they do not come seeking your advice in the future. In the world of gaming PCs, "plays most games" means something like "will play all but the most demanding games that are coming out this year".

If you want a computer that can play most PC games ever made, then you will be happy with an iGPU and GPU sag is not an issue for you.

I have no idea what you mean by that.

If "most games" is supposed to mean "at least 51% of all games that have ever existed" then yes it's true, because I would guess that more than 51% of games had already come out when that machine was current (and emulation is magical). However, I don't think that such a definition is relevant to most people fitting out a gaming computer.

OG said in their first post "I have a computer with 750ti + i7 2600 (1.7 tflops), it still plays most games just fine", which is clearly untrue if "most games" is supposed to mean "most new games of reputable make".

Then in their next post they defended the position "you don't need a high end GPU" which is much more reasonable as you CAN play most games just fine with something mid-range if you are willing to compromise on some settings. I was observing that they had gone from defending the first position to defending the second.

I would like to know whether your would measure the performance of 720p Alan Wake 2 on such a computer in FPS or SPF.

Re: What I'd do

PCIe ribbon cables are a thing, they are often used to mount the GPU vertically (which also solves this problem, but introduces airflow issues).

"You don't need a high-end graphics card" and "you can play pretty much any game with a 12 year old GPU and a 15 year old CPU" are not equivalent positions.

Re: 3kg ?

The moment this was mentioned, I thought of the time I hung a 1060 with a massive aftermarket cooler off the side of my Zima. Getting power to the card is a bit of a faff of course.

This isn't a new problem

I have a vintage machine with a Gravis Ultrasound in it. That card is very long, and I have it supported by a piece of wire to stop it from flexing. Other high-end sound cards from the time have similar issues. I think the fact that most caes where horizontally oriented at the time is part of why they felt ok with that.

So same day, different component. One could argue that sound cards were the GPUs of their day.

There are actually things that matter other than flops...Such as API and ISA support, VRAM, bandwidth, other types of computer performance...

Yes, if you only play CS then there is no problem since Valve takes pains to make sure that runs on a toaster. OTOH, the sole multiplayer game that I play (Hunt Showdown) will not run on that computer. Not that it will perform badly, it won't launch because it requires AVX2 support. There are many many many many many games which will not be playable on such a machine, even at lower resolutions and framerates.

Microsoft throws in the towel on HoloLens 2

Re: "we have signaled a last time to buy"

"Last time to buy" is for customers who already depend on the product. It's a standard mechanism to provide business continuity.

Say you design an AR escape room and use HoloLens as your platform. Microsoft will contact you and say "yo, we are discontinuing these headsets, so tells us how many you want by such and such date". Then you figure out how long it will take you to move to something supported, estimate how many headsets you will need before then, and order them.

At a previous workplace, whenever we discontinued a product that supported $COMMUNICATION_STANDARD we would get substantial orders from existing customers. We were the only company support for $COMMUNICATION_STANDARD, and the people still using it wanted to get as much time out of their existing installations as possible. Ordering a few dozen of our parts at that time for use as spares made sense for them.

Two years after entering the graphics card game, Intel has nothing to show for it

Re: their integrated graphics

My experience developing graphics systems was that the only one that "always works" is LLVMs software OpenGL implementation :p

I've had fair chunks of my life stolen by both Intel and Nvidia driver bugs. ESPECIALLY Intel.

Windows 95 support chap skipped a step and sent user into Micro-hell

Re: Ah yes. Winblow$ 95

The Quantum Bigfoot was also known for being intolerably slow even then. There were much faster drives out there.

As major web browser makers snuggle up to AI, these skeptical holdouts remain

I saw this headline and knew deep down in my heart that it was going to be Vivaldi. I should send them more money, as they clearly understand me.

Python script saw students booted off the mainframe for sending one insult too many

Was this before or after the board stabbed Ken in the back?

What do Uber drivers make of Waymo? 'We are cooked'

The benefits of the lighter vehicle are related to energy efficiency and wear, not upfront cost.

Those are two numbers in a complex engineering decision that involves many numbers. They are not "the" numbers, they are just "some" numbers. I'm not advocating for busses or trams, I was merely highlighting a single engineering benefit of trams. You are merely highlighting one economic benefit of busses (assuming your numbers are reasonable which I have not verified). Neither data point is sufficient to make a decision between the two for a given application.

Presumably they are worrited about being sued. So if, as mentioned above, you lie about whether you are using Uber the hospital is no longer liable and doesn't care.

Plus, if the power comes over the wire, the vehicle can be lighter.

If you follow these items to their logical conclusion while trying to remain economincal, I expect you will wind up with...a road network.

If you want to allow people to get everywhere they might want to go via tram, then you are talking about replacing all the roads with tram lines. If you want people to go at any time then you need to run the trams constantly. Now...why don't we do that already...let me think...oh right, because it would be prohibitively expensive, so instead we allow the people who want to go to those locations at those times to pay the bulk of the cost themselves.

Intel tacks two years onto Raptor Lake CPU warranty after voltage crash fiasco

Re: AMD for the Next PC Build ?

Don't forget

APX (the failed ISA, not any of the other things they called APX)

i286

FDIV

F00F

Probably a few others I'm forgetting

There is no honor among RAM thieves – but sometimes there is karma

In the last several months, WhoMe and OnCall have been making more strident calls for submission than usual, including specific claims that their supply is running dry.

Example: https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/17/who_me/

"If you've found a novel use for a tool – whether meant for computer use or not – we'd really like to hear about it. Click here to send an email to Who, Me? and we may immortalize your tale on some future Monday. The mailbag's getting a tad sparse, so we could really use some stories."

Within the last 3 months seems pretty recent.

Their recent pleas for submissions heavily imply that.

Unless you want them to start making things up, the writers are not the limiting factor.

Windows 11's Recall feature is on by default on Copilot+ PCs

Re: On by default

I agree with you, but I also take his point. "features that are the future computing" can be interpreted as "features that most people will want turned on". Obviously such things should typically be enabled by default.

Corollary: this is not the future of computing.

IT worker sued over ‘vengeful’ cyber harassment of policeman who issued a jaywalking ticket

Re: Unlawfully accessing patient's medical records?

People rarely get what they are asking for. They basically make up numbers and then accept something lower down the line.

A notable exception was the hot coffee lady who just asked for her medical bills to be paid and was awarded some crazy number by the jury.

The thing is, this behaviour is irrational. It is actively harmful to the person doing it. That is a defining characteristic of mental illness. It's one thing for somebody to do things that are poorly thought out or socially unacceptable, it's another for them to behave in a manner that is blatantly self-destructive for no potential benefit. One is being an asshole, the other is having a malfunctioning brain. It's unfortunate that third parties are hardmed by mental illness, but that's hardly a new thing.

I should think the fact that people who knew him considered him to be mentally ill, and that he seemed to be a generally function human being otherwise, would lend some credence to this view.

This is all just really sad. Clearly this man is mentally ill. His behaviour is so obsessive and extreme that I have trouble even being angry at him, as he clearly lacks normal capacity for self-control.

Google finally addresses those bizarre AI search results

People ask nonsensical questions all the time, often because they have had no exposure to the subject matter. Those are also cases where people are unlikely to be able to tell fact from fiction.

Ex-OpenAI board member accuses Sam Altman of 'outright lying'

..."disappointed that Ms Toner continues to revisit these issues"...

You mean the ones that are inconvenient to you that she feels are unresolved?

A thump with the pointy end of a screwdriver will fix this server! What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Lesson learned

If you need an adjustable wrench, something has already gone wrong.

In Debian, APT 3 gains features – but KeepassXC loses them

I wrote that and completely forgot that people still run hard drives in desktops. If a hard drive has to spin up, half a second is nowhere near long enough of a timeout.

If something you depend on is waiting for a network resource, half a second is not a reliable target in all situations.

HR expert says biz leaders scared RTO mandates lead to staff attrition

Just to expand on this thought, I left my last workplace with what I consider to be a magnum opus of internal documentation. There is still a bunch of stuff that I wish I had been able to guide people through manually before I left, because sometimes people just need to ask questions.

Quoth Socrates (via the writings of Plato):

...writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father’s support; alone, it can neither defend itself nor come to its own support.

It depends on a lot of things, but one thing I have particularly found is that the culture of communication is really important, and ESPECIALLY whether people prefer text or video. Asking questions and learning over text is hard because the cost of asking and answering is too high. People skip details, or avoid tangents, or don't ask followups.

I worked at a company where we tended to prefer video. There were many new people who started during full remote, and with one exception they did great (and the exception was not by their own fault, nor because of remote work). There was one person in particular who I mentored with nothing but voice chat, and he went from being an intern to being primary developer responsible for the module I had written.

I moved to another company which was nominally 2 days in the office, but a lot of people only actually came in on Monday. They wanted to communicate exclusively through text. While there were many things wrong there, I found the fact that I had to fight to get people to talk about things "live" to be a real problem. There was no documentation, everything was learned by either reading the (incomprehensible) code or messaging people.

Companies that value and foster a culture of communication should be fine primarily remote. Companies that do not...well they're screwed anyway, can't help them with that.

I don't think it's even possible to have sufficient internal documentation for somebody to learn everything from it, at least not in software development. There are too many moving pieces, too many small decisions that turn out to be important, too much "it only works when %100 of everything is done right". You need a mix of good reference material and knowing who to call when you hit something that isn't documented.

Let's say you employed John Carmack.

One day word comes down from corporate: everybody needs to start wearing a steak on their head at all times.

John quits because he doesn't want to wear a steak on his head.

Who lost in this situation?

Father of SQL says yes to NoSQL

Re: The long view

Perhaps they are talking about a certain Redmond based companies refusal to support either language in an entirely standards-compliant way for at least a decade?

For example:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/announcing-msvc-conforms-to-the-c-standard/

I don't think I need to find a source for HTML, we all know what IE was like.

Apple crushes creativity and its reputation in new iPad ad

Re: accused the ad of "crushing human creativity"

Not really related, but I was watching an episode of Murder She Wrote last night where they spent a lot of time at the "Serious Cybernetics Corporation". I just about died.

It also had the distinction of being the only thing I've ever seen where computers featured heavily in the plot and they didn't make any errors. So credit to J. Fletch for that one.

Perhaps more to the point, there was really nothing socially unnacceptable about saying "word processors are better than typewriters. The writing was absolutely on the wall for the typewriter and ~everybody knew it.

Has Windows 11 really lost marketshare to Windows 10?

Re: The flagship OS and its hardware requirements

It's all about workload right?

I was building Linux for a course the other day. "This will take several hours" says the professor.

Little did he think of -j12 and a 3900x which could do it in 15 minutes.

So it's very much about use-case.

So Windows 11 does have one thing that is useful: Auto HDR. Of course I highly doubt there is any technical reason Windows 10 doesn't have this, but there it is.

Thus, it is installed on the PC connected to my TV that I use only for games.

Re: Deja vu

I did it. Writing you from Linux right now. Only switch back to Windows for one game and a photo editing application (and I'm working on that too).

Re: The flagship OS and its hardware requirements

Oh, do you not have a build amchine sitting around with a first gen i7 in it?

I can fix this PC, boss, but I’ll need to play games for hours to do it

Re: I know for a fact ...

How do you know whether the devs have written proper software?

Re: I know for a fact ...

As somebody who writes tests that are the equivalent of taking your code and putting it in the heart of a nuclear reactor, I resent that.

It may take decade to shore up software supply chain security, says infosec CEO

Re: Always releveant article

Hum, sounds just like my last employer.

Enterprise browser maker Island says it's now worth $3B

Re: At least one of us is confused by this

I was expecting that story to end with "and we all gave ourselves a letter grade bump" :p