Aaron44126

...Anyone do Star Trek? I didn't care much for Picard season 1 and 2, but the reunion in season 3 has me interested (I've enjoyed the first two eps). The premiere is available to watch for free for a week, no subscription required (U.S. only).

(Can probably manage desktop-class performance with something like this... Who knows about battery life though.)

Twitter's Slack (primary internal communication tool) has been down since Wednesday, and it was apparently intentionally disabled by someone at Twitter (even though Twitter has also been shirking the bill so it would have probably been cut off eventually anyway), making the remaining Twitter engineers' jobs even more awesome... Twitter shut off its internal Slack, and now ‘everyone is barely working’ https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/24/23613288/twitter-slack-jira-outages-performance-degradation (Also includes some notes on the state of getting the "algorithm" ready for open sourcing.)

Had a similar thing, ordered a top panel display enclosure for my Precision M6700 (17" system) because I needed new hinges; I ordered the part from eBay and the seller sent me a 15" enclosure! Obviously didn't even come close to fitting. And they didn't respond at all when I went to request a refund. Fortunately its a pretty clear case, I sent some photos to eBay support and they refunded me directly. (If I recall, I had to wait a few days before being able to engage eBay support because they really want you to work it out with the seller directly.)

Eh. From my perspective, Windows 3.x + 9x was one thing (house of cards OS with pretty regular BSODs)... but with anything on the NT base, BSODs are almost always the result of hardware issue, driver issue, or an issue with other low-level third-party software. Whenever I run across one (very rare) I always take the steps to figure out exactly what was at fault. (Microsoft has really good documentation for diagnosing, but that can require going in through windbg/etc. and I get that not everyone knows how to do that.) The only times that I can remember it being a genuine Windows issue have been related to bugs around a brand new OS release / upgrade. My big issues with Windows 11 are the continued push towards trying to make money off of users beyond the license payment (data monetization, pushing people to Bing search to get ad revenue, aggressively pushing people to Edge to grow the install base so that they can make money off of their eCommerce "features", etc....), which I think is a generally yucky business practice ... and then the fact that they launched it in the state that they did, with no time for a proper feedback cycle, missing / dumbed down features compared to Windows 10, and so on. (Wrote all about it in my article linked in sig.) Nothing against anyone who is now using Windows 11. It's mostly fine. There are some genuinely good enhancements in there mixed in with the muck (WSA, VRR improvements, new versions of core apps like Notepad and Task Manager with real improvements). ...I'm just not going to support that direction of the product. The words are extreme but there is truth in there for sure ... Now, I don't necessarily think that they are "evil", but rather just looking for ways to make more money (it's business after all) and they are obviously not operating with the end user's best interest as the top priority in some cases. This has also gotten worse since Windows 10's release... these sorts of things happened way less in Windows 8 and earlier. Again, as one example, just look at how hard Microsoft is hawking Microsoft Edge. It's not just an advertising campaign; they've taken real, technical steps and embedded them in their products. They purposefully made it a hassle to switch the default browser to something else (rolled back after public pressure). Even now they will inject code into the Google Chrome download page to display a banner and try to convince you to stay on Edge (this article is from two days ago) — I do not want my browser modifying the page being served (unless its for malware/phishing protection). They're definitely taking real steps to try to tell people what they want or influence the products that they use, which I would argue is inappropriate and far beyond the "job" of an operating system or web browser.

I was wondering about this too. Will he post it on GitHub? Will they take pull requests? It could be a way to "improve" the algorithm without having to pay Twitter SWEs to work on it. ...Though really, nothing Elon Musk does with Twitter makes much sense so I hesitate to speculate on anything. I wouldn't be surprised if he releases "something" as open source but it's just a part of a bigger system and largely uninteresting. He does have a propensity to rush things through, and with news suddenly that this will be available "next week" I sort of doubt that Twitter folks have had much time to put together a nice or well-documented package.

Doesn't make any sense to me either. 🤷‍♂️ (But it will be interesting to look at ...)

Elon Musk says the Twitter "algorithm" will be open sourced next week... (Something he "promised" to do back when he originally announced his intent to buy Twitter.) https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1628122949185159168

I've never really taken a hard look at these laptops but a high-end barebones option is interesting. I took a look at the keyboard layout and it is not great. "End" key, but no "Home" key? (I'd rather see them put that in place of the "Pause" button, which I don't think anyone really uses...) No dedicated PgUp/PgDn either. Are there any BIOS settings or tools provided to mess with the fan behavior (other than picking from a couple of thermal profiles)? (Not planning on switching laptops anytime soon, just sort of filing this away for future reference. I'm not convinced that my next laptop will come from Dell.)

I mean ... I poked around with Linux as an alternate OS back in the 2001-2003 range and was generally confused by everything. I'm really comfortable with it now — despite not using it as a "daily driver" OS, I interact with it regularly on servers/VMs/WSL. (I actually pretty frequently pull up a WSL bash terminal on Windows to handle some sort of work that is just easier to do on Linux.) What made the difference was I took a class on it in college and learned all about navigating the terminal, bash scripting, grep/sed/etc., file system permissions, doing compilations (gcc, makefiles, etc.) and writing some simple C programs that use regular Linux system calls (rather than the C standard library) to just get a feel for the mentality behind how everything works. I'm not really sure what the starting point would be without some kind of base like that. It's easy enough to install Linux and get a desktop with a web browser and "app store", but as soon as you want to do anything even a little bit complicated, you're going to be hitting the terminal, and nothing is really explained for you. Finding a book, course, or some YouTube tutorials like @Etern4l mentioned would be critical.

You know, it was sort of slow going at first but I'm about 20 hours in and I'm really loving it. (I'm expecting my run will be in the 60-70 hour range. I only play about an hour a day so it'll take me several weeks...) I'll say that they keep adding more and more mechanics, there's a lot of depth and things to mess with (but fortunately you can ignore a lot of it if you want). I have played all of the previous games in this series and I'd say that it's probably my favorite modern JRPG series right now (dethroning Final Fantasy which has struggled to have good entries since, I dunno, IX — I did enjoy XV which I played this past summer, but it felt sort of like an incomplete game in some ways). This game's story isn't especially connected to the previous ones so I think it could be played standalone, but there are some references here and there (and I expect it might become more connected as I get towards the end, XC2 was like that).

I've always been into emulating older consoles but haven't spent much time with "modern" ones. My kids took over my Switch so it's easier to just play on my laptop so that I don't have to compete for time; I dumped my games/saves, and I've been playing Xenoblade Chronicles 3 in yuzu. (Amazing how far this has come along in a short time, basically every game I have thrown at it runs fine, and many of them can get a 4K upgrade.)

C0 is not the stepping value, it is what CPU-Z is reporting at the "revision". (..."Stepping", consistently reported as "2", is also the value that I would expect to be incremented if there was an actual hardware revision on the CPU.) So they're different between the two tools ("C0" in CPU-Z vs. "22" in Intel's/HWiNFO). I wonder if CPU-Z is just pulling in more bits for the revision field...? I checked CPU-Z on my Precision 7560 and it reports the CPU revision as "R0", so they're not rendering that field in hexadecimal like Intel and HWiNFO are. Anyway, it would seem that HWiNFO or Intel's tool are a better place to check then.

NVIDIA graphics driver 517.89. https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=7H7T3

Intel is indicating that the revision value changes when the microcode is updated. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000055672/processors.html

You can get rid of it, Microsoft even has official documentation (see my most recent post above), or Google around and you will see a simple registry tweak.

I've been looking at Linux for a long time but the "laundry list" of things that I'd have to tackle to switch from Windows is too much for me to handle given my current level of "free time". But getting games to work is honestly among the things that I am least worried about at this point. With Steam+Proton you can play most Windows Steam games with little configuration effort needed (a lot of games are running on Steam Deck this way), and something like Lutris can get you easy access to non-Steam Windows games. Windows programs can run under Wine (with varying degrees of success or tweaking required, depending on the app) — Wine is actually the base that both Steam+Proton and Lutris use to do their thing. But generally I see Linux as a good choice two classes of people at sort of opposite ends of the computing spectrum: Lower threshold — Those who have very limited "computing needs" and can mostly get by with a web browser and basic apps. Upper threshold — Those who have more advanced computing needs and also don't mind spending time learning, experimenting, and tweaking to figure out how to make everything that they need work. ...For people in the middle, they're likely to just end up frustrated. There have been strides made on lowering the "upper threshold" in the last few years but still a long way to go, I feel.

Thank you NVIDIA for having product names that make so much sense and tell you exactly what a product is!

Funny thing is, Precision 7540 is a 15" laptop and those have a GPU power limit of around 80W in that generation? You could get a RTX 4000 or RTX 5000 for it, but it would have the same 80W power limit; so unless you need the extra vRAM from those GPUs, you probably wouldn't be seeing that much of a performance uplift from the RTX 3000. GeForce RTX 2060 (mobile version) and Quadro RTX 3000 (mobile version) both have a TU106 GPU chip with the same specs (CUDA core count, vRAM, etc.). If there is any reported performance difference, it would basically come down to the power limit set by the OEM. (Rated clock speeds don't matter much anymore; in the Precision 7000 line at least, these GPUs will just operate at boost speeds up to the power limit as long as the cooling system working properly.)

I'm not in a rush to update but I will probably do it with other patching in a few weeks (I typically time this stuff with MS Windows patch drops — if I can get by with only rebooting once per month, I am a happy guy); I'll do some before-and-after temp testing when the time comes.

If I'm not mistaken, the "revision" field in CPU-Z indicates which microcode version is in use. If anyone updates to 1.9.1, please report the revision number displayed.

BIOS update 1.9.1. https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=PRMCF - Firmware updates to address security vulnerabilities including (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures - CVE) such as CVE-2022-30704. - Fixed the issue where the system cannot boot after the BIOS update. - Fixed the issue where the Dell logo is displayed incorrectly when the system boots to the operating system and the system lid is closed. - Fixed the issue where the system auto wakes up on days not selected by you in the Auto On Time function in the BIOS setup. Note — If they updated the Intel CPU microcode, undervolting support may be disabled. According to the release notes, downgrading the BIOS down to a version as early as 1.6.3 should still be possible after installing this update.

1. No. Actually, I tried it, and I found that it seriously impacted GPU/gaming performance, so I turned it back off. 2. It was not on by default. 3. It shows dynamic boost, but it doesn't have a separate entry for Dynamic Boost 2.0 which I have seen on my Precision 7560. 4. Yes. 5. 12950HX 6. 3080Ti 7. 1.8.0

Here's a new one... If you use SMS for two-factor authentication for Twitter, pay up for Twitter Blue or they will deactivate this feature on March 20. ...You can still use a physical key or authenticator app (which you should be using anyway) without paying extra. https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/17/23605073/twitter-blue-charge-sms-2fa https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2023/an-update-on-two-factor-authentication-using-sms-on-twitter

We also have DMTF certifications for Precision 3580 and Precision 3581. (5000 series is completely absent, so far...) https://registry.dmtf.org/products/dell-precision-3580 https://registry.dmtf.org/products/dell-precision-3581