Aaron44126

Eh. I am kind of inclined to go along with the suggestion in the message. Worry about it "if the problem recurs". Not sure what really can be done other than replacing the fan assembly again — or the motherboard, if this turns out to be not a fan issue.

Eh, I generally agree with @Etern4l. My original assertion was based on a cursory web search. If Google isn't being explicit about the level of privacy offered with this backup method, then you can assume that it is not private and they would be able to turn data over to i.e. law enforcement that comes in with a court order.

Yeah, I haven't used it myself but I see the claim that "Google One" device backup feature has the data encrypted by your Google account password.

This is the second time I have seen this site linked here recently, but I am suspicious. There is no physical address listed and it is full of misspellings and grammatical errors. That plus "prices that are a little bit too good" are typical scam site red flags. Buyer beware...

I have found Apple One to be a good value, but you actually do have to make good use of it, I can see that it would not be a good value for that many people. Cloud storage is absolutely necessary if you want to keep photos/videos backed up and iCloud does a good, seamless job of this in iOS. (With iCloud "Advanced Data Protection" turned on, you can actually back up your whole phone including passwords and health data with end-to-end encryption. I understand that Android has something similar, but third-party apps have to specifically register with the backup service to have their data backed up and not all of them do it....?) My kids both have iPads and Apple Arcade is a good source for games for them to play. Most "regular" games on the App Store are full of ads and/or constantly trying to get you to spend money on microtransactions; Apple Arcade games are pleasantly free of both. There's a lot of fluff on there but some decent titles too. (I don't play anything off of there myself, though I am mildly interested in Fantasian.) Wife and kids are both doing music all of the time as well, so Apple Music is beneficial to have and it means that I don't have to pay for Spotify or similar. Plus, they offer lossless audio which Spotify has been teasing for years but still hasn't launched (to my knowledge)... I actually do workouts with Apple Watch + Apple TV, so Apple Fitness+ is beneficial to have. Apple TV+ actually has some decent shows too. This is not a service that I would stay subscribed to it all of the time if it wasn't part of the bundle. But, currently enjoying season 4 of For All Mankind for example, Foundation season 2 was also fun, and there are a few others that I want to try out like Extrapolations and Ted Lasso. Apple News+ is the least interesting of the bunch. I've never found the need to pay for access to news (though I do support public media), but I do occasionally use Apple News+ to read something from a normally paywalled site like the The Wall Street Journal. For each individual service, you can definitely find a cheaper non-Apple alternative. However if you actually use several of them then Apple One is probably cheaper than a pile of alternatives added up. Plus, the general benefit of not having them try to monetize my usage of their services with data tracking and targeted ads is something that I am willing to pay a little bit extra for.

Unfortunately, nothing about this story is a surprise. :-\ Dell does generally use FedEx for delivery and doesn't require signature. They also "lock down" many of the options that you can use with FedEx like rerouting the package. One thing that you can do is place a "vacation hold" on your address through FedEx, and FedEx will not attempt to deliver the package on days when a vacation hold is in effect. But really, you do have to decide where you want the machine shipped and be prepared for the uncertain delivery date. (If I worked in an office, I would have it shipped to the office, even if I was not sure if I was going to be there on the delivery day.) The lack of repair parts is also not a surprise. When I bought the Precision 7770, I had to wait over a week to get a replacement display panel and a multiple weeks for a replacement heatsink when I asked for those. I'm not sure what is up with Dell's parts supply these days. It wasn't like this in the past. The mouse thing is weird. I can sort of get it if you're talking about the touchpad, but you should still be able to connect a USB mouse and use the PC. If you have tried multiple different mice and it is still not working, then it is most likely a software problem and not a hardware problem.

...Because laptops already don't have enough space for keys that people actually want. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/ai-comes-for-your-pcs-keyboard-as-microsoft-adds-dedicated-copilot-key/

Maybe S3 sleep (old systems) vs. "modern standby" (new systems) have a difference in terms of this behavior?

Best I can tell, there is an "issue" relating to the extradition from The Bahamas being tied to the seven charges that were the subject of the original trial and The Bahamas not responding to a request to allow them to pursue additional charges (which will prevent the second trial from starting), and also the SBF lawyer team asking the Judge Kaplan to delay sentencing until the second trial is completed so that sentencing can be determined based on "all relevant conduct". Given that he is pretty well damned after the outcome of the first trial, and that the sentencing guidelines would be the same even if he were convicted at the second trial, dropping the second may be the best way to keep things from being held up for an indefinite period of time.

Looks like they possibly did it to avoid delays in sentencing and restitution? https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/bankman-fried-wont-face-trial-over-alleged-foreign-bribes-campaign-funds/

I'm always suspicious of an online eCommerce shop that has "really good" prices, is full of grammatical errors and misspellings, and doesn't list a physical address anywhere... Anyway, you'll want to check if this card supports LVDS output. It is new enough that it probably doesn't, and thus won't work in the Precision M6700 (unless you have an eDP display, a rarity). M6700 doesn't support graphics switching with AMD GPUs, so you can't just rely on Optimus and run the internal display off of the Intel GPU as you could if you have a newer NVIDIA GPU installed.

All of the Precision 7680 displays are 60 Hz, including the OLED panel.

I actually did have this issue on both Windows and Linux. It manifested itself slightly differently, but in both cases I could observe the GPU becoming throttled when the system decided to give the CPU extra power. I remember being able to see a "cycling" behavior to it just by looking at the graphs in Task Manager — GPU utilization up and CPU utilization down for a bit, and then vice versa, like they were competing with each other even though actual load that I was running was not changing. (I much prefer the behavior of my older M6700 where the GPU was just automatically given power priority, and the CPU would be throttled a little if the GPU needed to run full tilt.) I spent more time digging into it on Linux and was never able to fully fix it before I stopped using the system. I guess this is what happens when you try to cram desktop chips into a laptop, and don't give it enough power (despite the chips being power-limited compared to the desktop configuration, 240W is not enough).

I ran Linux on a Precision 7770 for some time and only had a few issues to note that were specific to the system. First off, the fingerprint reader doesn't work consistently, and you also need to set it to "never power off" lest you get a buzzing sound coming from the system. Next, there were issues with GPU performance being inconsistent which I attribute to the power management situation (CPU "stealing" power and causing the GPU to throttle down hard). The GPU would normally perform fine but then have random drops to low performance that would last for 10ish seconds and occur a couple of times per hour when gaming, causing very noticeable FPS drops. Can't speak to HP vs Dell as I have only ever used Dell. I do like the business support ("ProSupport") that Dell offers, it is not hard to get the system physically serviced if you have a need to, wherever you are. However, I don't think that I will be getting another Dell workstation anytime soon because of various issues (between Dell, Microsoft, and also I guess NVIDIA). I don't necessarily think that HP would be any better from that regard, for me.

Second trial cancelled. Seems prosecutors decided that it is unnecessary. Still three months until sentencing. https://www.reuters.com/legal/sam-bankman-fried-will-not-face-second-trial-us-prosecutors-say-2023-12-29/

This seems to be an ongoing issue. There was some chatter over here, with links to some Reddit threads where people are also seeing this; it seems like Intel still has some driver issues going on. (I have an AX210 card but no 6 GHz capable router to try to use it with ...)

Yeah, I am basically chalking this up to hype turned into reality as people spent more time with the game.

I feel like this game wasn't as good as it "should" have been given Bethesda's typical handling of big "open world" games and the amount of resources poured into making it. And, I guess it seems to feel worse as you spend more time with the game and things just get sort of repetitive, there is a lot of "sameness" between the bazillion different planets that you can go to. I found this to be a good take from someone who likes these games. (Disclaimer: Haven't played the game myself... and this sort of thing is why I don't buy into hype and pick up games at launch anymore, I'll wait to see feedback first.)

Eh, it really seems like they are giving up. https://blog.beeper.com/p/beeper-moving-forward

Beeper posted a (draft?) blog post and then retracted it, but it was picked up by archive.org. They're going to support using a jailbroken iPhone in place of a Mac to generate iMessage registration data. If you don't have an old iPhone that can be jailbroken, they'll sell you one with everything that you need preloaded, or rent one to you for a monthly fee. There is also this comment: "Long story short - after today’s release, we will not be continuing to fight a cat-and-mouse game." Which I take to mean that if Apple finds a way to break this again, they won't be trying harder to make it work ...? The text next to that indicates that they are posting a response about Apple's response, but there is no link to that post, so I guess it is not ready yet.

Indeed, ZBook Fury G8 doesn't use MXM but rather a proprietary form factor GPU card. (https://www.ebay.com/itm/166104149781)

Makes sense, hopefully NVIDIA fixes it in their version soon. ...Though more recently I've preferred to just stick with Dell's drivers to reduce the chance of trouble. There isn't often a new feature in NVIDIA's drivers that I can't wait a few months for. Kind of sad how "house of cards" the whole driver situation on these laptops has been recently. On top of issues with the NVIDIA driver (this, plus the NVPCF.sys BSOD thing which several users have run into over in the main 7X60 thread), I've been fighting with an audio driver issue with my Precision 7560. It periodically decides that it's not going to pay attention when I plug something into the 3.5mm audio jack (leading to a few minutes of hassle while I try to join a work video conference using my headset), and when it decides to be this way I can't find any way to "fix" it other than a full reboot. I guess I'm moving to USB audio full-time.

This is true, but I don't think that is enough to win a case here. It would be enough if they were just reverse engineering a standalone piece of software. They make grand claims about wanting to improve message security for everyone... But, in addition to "reverse engineering", Beeper is accessing Apple's network/server infrastructure without permission, and trying to derive a profit from it (Beeper Mini is supposed to be a subscription app, if they can get it working properly again). Can you think of any other case where a company has made a successful business model out of piggybacking off of another company's digital infrastructure without permission ...? I imagine that Apple is evaluating their legal options and we'll be hearing something on that front in the next few weeks. ("Unauthorized access to a computer network" is a crime in and of itself.) Don't forget that they are also open-sourcing everything that they make relating to iMessage interoperability. Again, they make claims that they are doing this so that everyone can "audit" the security of their integration, but their argument is blatantly incomplete. This is opening the door for less scrupulous or even malicious clients and bots to be created, and that is definitely not improving security. I don't see a situation where Apple would stand for this. Short-term, they'll employ technical measures to block Beeper's access to the iMessage network (as we see already). Medium-term, if Beeper doesn't take the hint, they'll take legal action against Beeper to get them to stop trying. And long-term, they will make architectural changes to iMessage to make it more resilient against this sort of thing. Even if Beeper could eventually prevail in court, if Apple decides to take legal action then the cost of litigation alone could basically kill them. Apple has a top-notch team of lawyers and Beeper doesn't really have any revenue stream. We'll see what happens, but I'm pretty sure that if Apple wants this unsanctioned integration effort to be dead, it is going to end up dead. Finally, even if the EU forces Apple to open up iMessage for interoperability, you can bet that it will be done on Apple's terms and that will mean going through their designated API endpoints and not just allowing anyone pretending to be a legitimate Apple device to get in. The one thing that Beeper can do that Apple wouldn't be able to do much about is what people (including Beeper) have been doing for years. Route the messages through a real Mac, using an iMessage bridge. There are other projects like BlueBubbles and AirMessage that do this. Can't really complain about what people do with their own computers, and it is entirely Apple software running the iMessage traffic. Apple could still probably (both technically and legally) block mass deployments of this technique i.e. in a Beeper data center, but if individuals want to run a bridge on their own system then what can you do?

Beeper's latest "fix" requires that you have access to a real Mac, be it yours or your friend's or your uncle's or whatever. https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/19/24007919/beeper-mini-cloud-android-imessage-fix They're not routing messages through the Mac (as was their old solution), but they do use it to generate "registration data" that can be handed to either Beeper app and use that to access the iMessage network. The "registration data" must be periodically refreshed, so you've got to keep your Mac powered on. Seems like they were using their "fleet" of Mac servers to provide this registration data before, but Apple has keyed in on a single Mac being used for hundreds or thousands of iMessage connections and is blocking those. This new method might work as long as Beeper's implementation of the protocol is close enough to a real Mac's so that there is nothing in the traffic that could serve as something for Apple to use as a block flag. However, it is a bit more cumbersome than what they were promoting a few weeks ago and I don't think it will see nearly as much adoption as what they could see if a physical Mac was not required.

If turning off the setting to "turn off the monitor" fixes this, I wonder if there is something going on with the GPU driver that is causing it die or fail to wake back up when the monitor goes to sleep. I could suggest things like... Make sure that you are using the current Intel GPU and NVIDIA GPU drivers (I'd start with the ones from Dell, not the ones from upstream). In the BIOS setup, turn switchable graphics off if it is on or vice versa, to see if the behavior changes.