Sandy Bridge

Y'all know the "deep state" is just institutional inertia, right? A company hires a new CEO, that doesn't change the culture overnight. Maybe it does fairly quickly if they company is Twitter and they get rid of 87% of their workforce within two months, but most companies and governments don't operate that way. In no small part because to do so would also mean losing tremendous amounts of institutional knowledge, which usually is more harmful than having some inertia. It's sad to see technically smart people falling for Trump's lies like this. Why might ABC give assurances that Trump would be fact-checked, but not specify either way for Harris? Because Trump is an inveterate liar. And what's he do but go spouting off lies about people eating cats and dogs. I have friends who live in Springfield, Ohio. It's a complete lie just to smear his perceived enemies. He will say anything to get people to give him money/do business with him/vote for him, and has no qualms about reneging on agreements. So, I was going to say the fact that my laptop is out of commission is what's bothering me, but after seeing this page of posts... it's more bothering that some people, including people here, have fallen for that nonsense. It's a cult of personality, and that's hard to see when you're on the inside of it, but if you're willing to accept that Trump is fallible and start cross-checking with other sources who aren't also in his orbit, the cracks start showing up pretty quickly.

1962, if we assume you lived in the U.S. Go any earlier than 1957, and if you are a man, being drafted in Vietnam would become a worry - either you currently, or you in a couple of years if the war didn't end. If you're a woman, your brothers/boyfriends/etc. being drafted would be a concern. Given how unpopular Vietnam was, that would not be a great time. With 1962, you'd reach 18 at 1980, late enough that you'd be past the civil rights movement, and the turbulence that went with it, as well as Vietnam. You'd probably have been too young at Watergate for it to make you as cynical as it made the people who were already adults at the time. The economy was largely good in the 80s and 90s so you'd have great career opportunities, and along the way the Berlin wall fell, the world opened up, technology evolved tremendously, and crime rates would fall as well, thanks in part to the phase-out of leaded gasoline. Raise a family starting in the late '80s or early '90s and your kids would be raised in an even more idyllic environment than you were. By 2024 you'd be thinking about retirement. The instability of the 2020s and 2030s would be of some concern, of course, but much later in life than for someone born in 1985. Of course it depends on situations too. If you will be born at a random place in the world, later than 1962 is likely preferable due to increasing global standards of living. Thinking about earlier periods in U.S. history, it's hard to find one where I wouldn't have to add additional conditions like "with a minimum economic standard" or "of a certain ethnicity". You could still lose the lottery being born in 1962 and be dealt a bad hand, but IMO the odds of that were generally higher earlier than that.

Has anyone here taken Floorp (https://floorp.app/en) for a spin? It's a new browser from Japan, and has been described as "Vivaldi, but on Gecko." For those who aren't already Vivaldi users, that means "batteries included and customizeable, on Gecko", in other words more features are included without extensions being required than in mainstream browsers, and it has lots of customizable options. Importantly, because it's based on Gecko, that means it also has full support for Manifest v2 going forward. I'm trying it out currently, as while I'm currently happy with Vivaldi and have been for many years, most of my extensions are Manifest v2, and I've come to like the Tampermonkey scripts that I've written. Still a bit early to decide what my browser for 2026 will be, but it's got vertical tabs, workspaces (without requiring the "re-open my tabs from last time" setting as Vivaldi does), and highly customizeable shortcuts. It's got dual sidebars too, though I'm still figuring out the full power of those. In other words, it certainly seems promising, more so than most alternative browser projects I've come across, and I'm really happy to see one that focuses on features as much as on privacy.

That's great news, but that link has a tracker embedded in it. uBlock Origin warned me. Some shady-sounding "skim resources" site. Dunno if its origin is wherever you copied the link from or if the forum added it on or what, but that's part of the reason I'm using uBlock Origin! I believe the intended link is https://whattrainisitnow.com/calendar/, and that Firefox version is 115.x.

Potentially 10% if all the "Unknowns" are running Linux. Seriously, I take StatCounter stats with a large helping of salt. They tend to have lots of aberrations - like how macOS lost 7% of the entire market between November and December - not 7% of macOS, 7% of everything. Steam also shows increased Linux share, over 2%... it also has had its fair share of aberrations. But that is a second data point. I'm curious if there are any more concrete metrics, points of comparison. The Linux increase sounds plausible, if not macOS losing 7% in December... but I'd like something a bit more reliable than StatCounter before proclaiming 2024 to be the Year of the Linux Desktop. (Although if Microsoft keeps cloud-ifying Windows, 2025 may be the Year of the Linux desktop for me)

I was thinking the other day, my Windows 8.1 desktop is basically a file server/media center PC now, I'm not using it for anything that wouldn't work on 10. Maybe it's time to switch it to 10, and make it "current". Then I saw that Microsoft is moving towards Start menu ads in Windows 10 (https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-is-bringing-annoying-windows-11-start-menu-ads-to-windows-10/). Nope. It's sticking with 8.1.

These have been out for a couple of weeks now... is anyone turning their processor model up over 9000? I think I saw that their AVX512 performance is hugely improved over Ryzen 7000, otherwise I'm not sure how much the uplift is? From the reviews I saw it seems like their TDP is significantly lower but their power use is actually pretty similar in practice? Definitely curious if that's the general trend or perhaps motherboard-setting dependent. I'm back on the notebook train though, so unless I have a need for more power, I'll probably be sticking with my 5800H for a while.

A 14 TB hard drive. 7200 RPM. Toshiba, CMR. Unlike the stealth-SMR WD Red that I purchased a few years ago. My old 2 TB hard drive failed after 10 years, so it was time for an upgrade. I cycle them through where the newest one becomes the largest external backup drive, and the smallest external backup drive becomes an internal drive. So a 2 TB failed, a 6 TB becomes an internal one (still a backup though, as it will remain due to being the WD SMR drive), and the 14 TB becomes the new external. Also have another 2 TB (WD), 3 TB (Toshiba), 4 TB (Seagate), and 8 TB (Seagate) still in service, not counting any SSDs. Not quite keeping up with the highest-volume Backblaze drives, but I have one that's near the middle of their pack again!

Also water tonight! Hydrating, refreshing, frequently available, inexpensive... it has many redeeming qualities! Lately my drug-containing beverage of choice has been lapsang souchong tea, a black tea from China whose leaves are smoke-dried. It had disappeared from the local market, but reappeared via the Internet, just as good as before, but from a different brand. I've also been drinking more beer. I've moved to an area with at least four breweries within walking distance, not counting places that sell beer but don't make it themselves. Turns out that going to a bar and having a pint or two can be a good way to have more real-life conversations. So can going to a coffee shop with a bar and having a cuppa tea. I've been doing more of both.

Just a nice slow guitar and drums song...

I'm not as much of a pessimist about the potential for non-modifiable hardware as some. That Framework has been shipping upgradeable laptops for multiple generations indicates there is demand, and you can still find non-fruit-branded laptops with some upgradeable parts. I'm not saying full PGA and what-we-all-hoped-MXM-would-be-even-if-it-never-really-was. But things like replacement keyboards, eGPUs, repairing screens, chassis mods... those are still niche, but I don't see them as any more niche than they were, and questions like, "which SSD/RAM should I put in my laptop?" and "should I buy Laptop A or Laptop B?" remain as relevant as ever. Rather, I see the most likely actual cause of the perceived decrease in the size of the community (including non-NBT sites) as due to the commodification of hardware and the fact that you don't need to upgrade even half as often as you used to in order to have highly usable hardware. Things were exciting in the 90s and 2000s, and moved fast, but there was a reason that Weird Al joked about hardware being obsolete before you opened the box - two-year-old hardware was getting long in the tooth, four-year-old hardware was ancient, and reliability was not necessarily all that great. Now I can surf the web and write code and listen to Spotify on my 12-year-old desktop and it's still quite usable, and probably could at least to some extent even if I'd never upgraded its original 8 GB of RAM or 80 GB SSD. And it didn't even have a top-of-the-line CPU. So when you have hardware that can last a decade and still be usable, other than for gaming, the interest in fixing things up and tweaking them for more performance is naturally going to be lower. It's like how I really don't need to pay much attention to my 12-year-old Honda, it just drives and drives quite reliably, whereas if I had a 12-year-old Chevy in the '60s, I'd have to know quite a bit to keep it in shape for the distances I drive my Honda, and if I had a 12-year-old Model T in 1930, I'd really have to know how everything worked. We might not be quite to 2010 Honda levels in computer technology, but a lot of us yearn for the '50s Chevy days when we're probably closer to '80s or '90s Camrys in terms of reliability and longevity. As for NotebookTalk itself? I wasn't really at NBR much the last few years, so I can't say how much its traffic had declined by the end, but it does feel like a lot of the crowd dispersed, with only a fraction winding up here. We've only got 639 threads in "Notebook Manufacturers", for instance, which isn't bad but is probably a month or so of new threads at NBR, over the course of more than two years. That said, forums can live on with low but consistent levels of activity for many years, even over a decade, if the administrator remains interested, and if, when they aren't, someone takes up the mantle. I wouldn't be surprised if that is what happens. Given the current trajectory, I don't foresee particular growth, though. There will likely be some visitors who chance upon the site, see it is somewhat active, and join, but we don't have the types of articles that NBR had, or that NotebookCheck currently has, that can draw in new visitors, nor do we have the traffic such that we'd likely to be in the top 10 results for any particular laptop model search, as was the case for NBR in its heydey. To an extent it is what it is - it would be a Herculean effort to try to change that given that there already are established players for both laptop reviews and sites that discuss everything under the sun. Maybe the planets align and a positive self-reinforcing cycle begins, but in lieu of that, I don't see it as a bad outcome that this is a site that I can come back to every few weeks or couple of months and have interesting discussions, and if I do have a need to post a technical thread about my laptop, I know where to do it.

Interesting, it's been a while since I was PSU shopping, and I didn't notice the PowerSpec ones when I was shopping last time. Did some searches on them, found several other people saying "Tier C" (without saying on what basis), but the only in-depth review I found of one was from Tom's Hardware. On that one they said it was made by High Power, with generally high quality, but with one of the criticisms being a sleeve-bearing fan that might not last the whole 10-year warranty. Which is a reasonable concern. Of course, it wouldn't be surprising if PowerSpec uses multiple ODMs and if quality varies among the models. What is your recommended PSU review site? JohnnyGuru was my reference back in the day, and I see he has recommended Cybenetics as a good reviewer these days. Last tech-related purchase: The expansion for the game Suzerain. My favorite political-themed game at the moment, most games in the genre are mostly about numbers, it's much more about the people (although having the budget to do things still matters).

The "how good is the emulation/can I game on it" are key for me. A more efficient processor with better battery life? I'll pay a little bit. Less noise? Useful in a laptop. But perfect compatibility with my existing library of software and games? Priceless. And x86 is perfectly good enough when it comes to battery life and (with a halfway decent laptop design) fan noise these days. We aren't in the days of the Transmeta Crusoe where the status quo in the x86 space left a lot to be desired across the board - you can buy x86 systems with quite good battery life and acoustics. That said, if the emulation is good enough that the average person can't tell the difference, and can just install the programs they need without realizing it isn't an x86 CPU, Qualcomm has a chance to build market share. That being the "if". It needs to be good enough that retailers aren't getting a lot of returned ARM-based laptops because people tried to install the two pieces of native software they need (browser + varies by person) and couldn't get it to work. If they can manage that, they might succeed at least among the non-gaming crowd (the latter likely being more skeptical than the public at large due to running lots of performance-sensitive native software). I'm still skeptical on the whole. The safe, conservative option is to buy an Intel or AMD laptop, and most buyers will want a low-risk option. Most salespeople will recommend a low-risk option that they think will make a sale, unless their commission is higher on the higher-risk option. Windows dropped the DEC Alpha and MIPS in the '90s, Transmeta and Via never became more than niche players (despite being x86-compatible and x86, respectively), and Windows 8 on ARM flopped. ARM in the datacenter, if you just need to run NGINX and want to save on your power bill, can make sense. But there's a long history in the consumer space of the consumer preferring the safe option that will run everything they run today without any concerns on their part.

That is sci-fi cool. But I'm not sure if it's what I'd call practical. I can think of at least one use case - it's winter, I'm at a coffee shop, getting ready to leave, and thinking, "did I leave my gloves behind my laptop's screen, or in my coat pocket?" Currently, I have to reach behind my laptop and see if my gloves are there, and if not, find them in the coat pocket/where they fell on the floor/etc. With this laptop? Problem solved! I could see them right through the screen! The article does mention it can reach 1000 nits, not sure that has anything to do with it being transparent though. I could see such bright screens being useful out in the sun. For some nice historical context, GSM Arena did a writeup on mobile phones with transparent screens, of which there have been a few, including some that reached the market. A couple of relevant quotes: I'll be curious to see one in person if they make it to my local Micro Center - but at this point it's not at the top of my Christmas wish list.

Currently, Micro Center's Charlotte site says, "Unfortunately, there has been an unforeseen delay to our Charlotte Grand Opening. We deeply apologize for any inconvenience and will announce new opening dates soon." Will be curious to hear from Jarhead or any others who try it when it does open! So far the Indianapolis one is garnering over 600 Google Reviews, at 4.7 stars. No idea how reliable Google Reviews are, but there at least seem to be quite a few people shopping there.