Sandy Bridge

I've started playing 5D Chess (with Multiverse Time Travel), which had been on my Steam backlog for a while. I've played 4 games against its AI, won them all (three at Trainer level, one at Regular), half of them I won unintentionally, most recently by putting the AI's king in check both in the present and in the past at the same time. One game got pretty crazy though, both me and the AI kept moving pieces back through time, occasionally to a different universe, and at one point I considered moving my queen both to a different universe and to the future at the same time. I eventually realized the AI was time traveling so much was that because my queen had a checkmate threat in a combination of the primary present as well a different dimension, and the AI's only way to prevent that was to go back to the past and find a way to capture my queen. Or at least that's what I think it was doing, I'm only about 63.2% certain on that. Each of the rows of boards is a different universe, the branching structure shows where the alternative universes split from, dark purple arrows across boards show traveling into the past (which creates a parallel universe; you can also travel to the past and a different universe at the same time), and the lighter purple arrows show traveling between different universes (while not also time traveling). Each column is a point in time. It's an interesting game. I've never played chess competitively, but tend to do well against other people who don't play chess competitively (and get destroyed by those who do), and I feel like I'm starting to understand the rules pretty well. Sure it's a little weird to see three knights on a board or a bishop whose "diagonal" move is across a row and time instead of a row and a column, but once you realize that's a possibility it opens up a whole new world of possibilities. Or is that a whole set of universes of possibilities?

Wired had an article on this topic in one of the recent issues (I get the paper version, nice to read something that isn't on a screen with breakfast in the morning). It's been a month or two and I'd say my understanding is fuzzy because of that, but that isn't the only reason my understanding is fuzzy, it's also a challenging concept. What I do recall is that making fast analog CPUs general-purpose programmable is currently not easy. The analogy they used was that we're basically in the 1950s still, there's been a grad student who did a partial Python port to a boutique fast analog CPU that a Columbia professor has made about 20 of, but we're still waiting for our FORTRAN-on-a-common-chip that can really open the floodgates. They mentioned at least one potential use case that isn't neural nets. I think it was something physics related, which would make sense; analog computers were responsible for the rangekeepers on battleships such as the Iowa class (1943 - 1991). And maybe narrowing down the range of possible results, for final refinement by a digital computer, and at much lower overall energy expenditure than if the calculations were done purely digitally. Based on my admittedly likely-inaccurate understanding, I think part of what Ishayin said may be right - even if these chips don't become wholly general-purpose like current CPUs, they may be very useful in certain domains. A battleship rangekeeper didn't need a Ryzen 7950X with 16 high-performance general-purpose cores that could also run Crysis, it "just" needed an analog computer that could calculate where to point the guns to hit the target ("just" in quotes because that's not an easy physics problem).

It's finally happening! 6-core X3D on AM4! https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-ryzen-5-5600x3d-to-launch-july-7th-for-dollar229-at-micro-center-only $229 for the CPU, $329 for a combo with a mobo and 16 GB of DDR4. Sounds like a pretty good deal, although then I see the plain-old 5600 is only $119 (Tom's says $129 but it's $119 right now), and the 5800X is $179. So maybe it's just AM4 upgrade season. Anyone tempted to upgrade an older AM4 system to the new 5600X3D? It'll be available exclusively at Micro Center, while supplies last, which is expected to be for a few months.

Well, unfortunately, I'm probably returning my 2.5 Gbps setup. After getting the drivers that worked and getting those benchmarks, my desktop would not reboot, had to system restore it to before those drivers were installed. It's on 8.1, which is officially supported by the card, but the drivers aren't stable on 8.1 at all. So, although I see there are Windows releases of iperf, I'll be skipping that as I've fought enough driver issues on that PC recently. I guess you get what you're paying for in driver support by buying Aquantia or Marvell instead of Realtek. 256 GB on a PC that supposedly maxes out at 32 GB is impressive. I've heard of support doubling once larger DIMMs are available, but not... octoplying? Is there even a word for multiplying by eight?

Each benchmark is one SSD, I didn't RAID them or anything. Have two in the system because they were so cheap I figured I might as well buy two and make my notebook my main system.

Compared to a year ago, fuel prices in the Midwest seem pretty moderate to me right now. It was $5 per gallon in the U.S. last June, and $2/liter in Canada. Didn't stop my Canada Day plans, thanks in part to my Honda's efficient 1.5L I-4, but my cost per mile traveled will be much lower this year. My most recent fill-up was $2.99/gallon. The secret to the low prices being Sheetz moving in to town; they aren't always the lowest but their determination to gain market share has lead to some nice competitive pricing; it's usually either Sheetz or the Circle K that's off the main road that has the lowest price. I can see the prices seeming higher once you're used to not having to buy petrol at all though. Like when I worked somewhere with heavily subsidized lunch, restaurant prices seemed so expensive in comparison! Is "wasn't actually bad" a ringing endorsement? The windshield wipers in particular, but also HVAC, being on the touchscreen is what always got me. Admittedly I've yet to jump on the tablet PC tablet trend, so I'm not the most gung-ho person about touch interfaces in general. What was it that convinced you to buy a Model S despite being 100% against the touchscreen? Being electric? The acceleration? Just being really cool at the time? Some combination of that combined with the lack of many EV competitors at the time?

I saw this today, not surprised there's a thread on it. As someone who still uses a local Windows account, I have no interest in this... what's my CPU for if not running an OS? And of course, minimizing monthly subscriptions is a good thing. That said, Microsoft will still sell you a perpetual license for Office, it's just not advertised as much as Office 365. So I suspect Aaron44126 is correct, it would be another option. Why you'd want it... I'm not sure? Especially as a boot drive. And considering that Windows is shipped with most PCs at a per-license cost that's considerably lower than retail, I have a hard time seeing where this would produce any potential cost savings for the customer.

I find it interesting that Ford, GM, and now Volvo are going to the North American Charging Standard, which is basically (but not exactly?) Tesla. Combined with Superchargers being built along some of the main routes that have been missing them around here, it's a good argument to buy a Ford. I'd thought about Bolting over to Chevy this year, and was surprised by how modest the insurance coverage increase would be, but am likely to stick with my Fit instead, between hopping jobs and most if not all of the 2023 Bolts already likely being sold. Although I did learn that local municipal L2 charging only costs 8 cents/KWHr, which is really good, and would be a lot cheaper than gasoline. Still wish there were more non-SUV EVs with non-touchscreen controls available. The Leaf's range is insufficient for my road trips, the Bolt is being discontinued, Teslas are all-in on touchscreens... and most everything else is pretty expensive. In the mean time though, my Honda is likely to keep running for many years to come, and composes the orange section of the parking lot along with a 20,000%-cooler circa 1972 Camaro. No one else has jumped on the orange car bandwagon yet but I'm hoping we convince someone else to join Team Orange before long.

Yeah, I researched the options quite a bit, and couldn't really convince myself I'd be able to notice the Samsung difference, especially compared to what I could gain by putting the money towards other upgrades. A Steam library sounds like the perfect use case for those SSDs. I've recently been tweaking my backup plan to exclude my Steam games for the same reason - easy to re-download. Only catch is that a small number of the older ones put their save games in their download directory, so I have to watch out for that. But the two of those that I play regularly and might care about a save game for are easy enough to selectively enable in my backup.

Really nice day today, about 70ºF and hazy. Got a nice walk in on my break. Maybe the haze isn't the greatest, I think it's still from the Quebec wildfires? But overall pretty pleasant, and June in general has been mild and wet. After a dry May, that's just about perfect.

That's brilliant. I don't know why I never thought of that. Haven't seen it when I've been on the interviewer side either. I've also worked at a big company that had a policy of not allowing HR/managers to give feedback beyond, "yes, they worked here from X to Y." That said, I have had non-manager colleagues from that company act as references. It doesn't have to be from a manager to be a compelling reference if the colleague can speak effectively to your skills.

Oh, and I was supposed to post or comment on a benchmark. Mr. Fox's quad-SATA-SSD benchmark is certainly interesting. The speeds scale pretty well, I suppose it's a "as long as you trust the reliability of the SSDs and have a backup plan in place" proposition. Here's my Inland Prime 2 TB benchmark (two separate drives): Pretty happy with the sequential speeds, this lappie is limited to PCIe 3.0 so there would have been little point pursuing faster speeds sequentially. Random read could be a bit better, that's probably where I lost out due to not spending the extra $30/drive for a 970 Evo. Interestingly, the 970 Evo has since dropped to the same price... I guess a lot of other people were also buying Inland over Samsung at a 30% price difference.

That's a perfect description of why I believe non-competes need to be significantly curtailed or abolished. And aside from spreading trade secrets, shouldn't discussing your employer's work conditions be protected by the 1st Amendment? Free speech and all that? Okay, I can kind of see "not working in the same field as a side gig while you're working for us", but the rest of it... employees should be able to move to other companies pretty easily. If you work for Intel and AMD says, "We think Intel processors are awful", why should that prevent you from moving to AMD? But, ugh, that sounds miserable. HR not approving sick leave? 108ºF temperatures? Managing 18 people on 10 projects? My manager managed, at a maximum, 13 people on 5 projects, and was clearly overwhelmed (granted, one of the projects was chaotic and most of the people were new to the company). But he has the title. Giving people the job without the title is a form of abusing employees' lack of negotiating power. -------- Serious advice, start looking externally. And maybe take that Project Manager title too. That doesn't mean you have to stay long-term, just having the title shows that you got promoted there. I left a job a month after getting a promotion because they were so slow with getting around to it that I was already interviewing by the time they did (and they didn't give a salary raise along with the promotion, I'm not sure why they thought the title alone would be enough to make me stay). But the title increases your marketability even in the short term. One of my colleagues recently accepted a project management role and she said the biggest blocker in the job search was not having had the title - check that box off and you wouldn't have that problem. And I know it can suck looking for a new job, but you don't want to be like my uncle who worked at Wal-Mart for 19 years even thought he hated it for the last 12 or so, because he never seriously pursued something better. It might not have come around quickly, but I'm sure he could have found something much more satisfying if he'd dedicated some effort towards that direction; indeed, a year after he was laid off from Wally World and retired a bit earlier than he planned, he wound up with a new gig that he likes much better. Doesn't have to be a lot, apply to one job a week and eventually you'll find something better. Saying this as someone who gave notice yesterday on my surprisingly stressful job that's been burning through people left and right. Admittedly I'm probably less risk-averse than you are, but my stress levels have been falling rapidly since that conversation with my manager, even though I'm still there for another week and a half. Not everyone would be comfortable not having something lined up right away, and I understand that, but the key is getting to where you are comfortable. For a lot of people that, "accepted a job offer", for me right now it's, "multiple second-round interviews". And I also know the feeling of just wanting to browse EFGXT NotebookTalk in the evening after work, rather than trying to find a better day job... but that's a trap. The forum will survive a few hours spend perusing the local job boards, spend some time finding yourself a better job.

Many of Micro Center's items are in-store-pickup only; even if you can reserve them online, you have to go in-store to pick them up. This is especially true for their screaming good deals. It's part of their business strategy; if you're going to swing by the store to pick up your new SSD or CPU anyway, you may well pick up that other thing you've been thinking of buying that is regular-priced. It would think Toronto at least would be a good market. Not sure how much overhead it would add stocking/supplying parts for two countries though. But Micro Center has surely done more research than I have on good markets. Why is Indianapolis a better market than Silicon Valley? I don't know, it doesn't seem intuitive but maybe the tech scene out there prefers to buy online. Or maybe Indianapolis being between Columbus, Cincinnati, Detroit, and Chicago just means there are a lot of people in Indy who are familiar with Micro Center but live a bit too far from any to shop there frequently. And as much as I'd love to see a Micro Center in every major metro area, they're probably smart to expand incrementally; this is "fast" by their averages. What I've heard from the grapevine here is that they're more profitable than most retailers, consistently so, and generally well-managed; I suspect part of that is conservative business practices and managing risk well. Hopefully these new stores are successful, and there are more in future years.

Software upgrades definitely count as upgrades! Especially when they boost performance! It reminds me of the days of downloading modded GeForce drivers to get an extra 3-5% performance... over the course of that GPU's lifespan it added up to 25% or more improvement, which was significant. It also probably indicates poorly optimized drivers on release, but it was fun. Is the Omen 16 underperforming relative to other laptops with a 3060? Is the 3060 just too power-hungry for what it can deliver, or is it limited in other ways? --- 64 GB of RAM is $100, if it's DDR4. I remember buying 8 GB of DDR3 (desktop) in 2011 for $30, it went down to $26 or something like that, but then it went way up and I could have sold it for $70 a few years later. I would not be surprised if DDR4 bought today could be sold at a profit in a few years. The RAM market is cyclical and we're in a supply glut currently. Heck, maybe I should go buy a few hundred GBs just to have on hand to resell in 2026. SSDs are highly transferable. New laptop, great. No more space in a laptop? External enclosure. Or a PCIe expansion card for a desktop, I spent $15 on mine and you can probably find one that supports two SSDs for slightly more than that. Assuming you'll have things to store on them, it's hard to go wrong. Although I will admit that hard drives are perfectly adequate for large, infrequently accessed files. I've used 573 GB (binary) of my 4 TB (decimal) of storage so far. A bunch of games, my entire music collection, various software. Already more stuff than I had on the OEM 512 GB SSD; I never had my full music collection on that one for starters. No regrets over going for 4 TB, the secondary drive has a backup of the important (not re-installable from Steam) contents of the primary one, and some day I'll use it for primary storage as well.

I should call my ISP and ask for slower Internet service. Like ryan said, for 96.1% of things it won't be discernable (to a point, anyway, I'm not planning to go back to dial-up). I finally went through on 2.5 Gbps intranet, though. I realized that I could use APIPA for a point-to-point link and skip the whole switch/router thing, so that's what I did. Got two of the Asus USB-C2500 (which is a USB A 2.5 Gbps Ethernet adapter, don't ask my why "C" is in the name), put a Cat6 cable between them, fiddled around with drivers, and it works! So far I think the fastest I've hit is about 1.7 Gbps, maybe 1.8. I think that's limited by a combination of factors including spinning rust and the nature of the files being transferred. Still, it's fast. I ought to set up a couple ramdisks and test it that way to see what the practical max is, assuming no storage bottlenecks on either end. I'm also strangely tempted to see if I can get it to work on my oldest working laptop with built-in Ethernet, which has slow Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps, as it would really knock the socks off of the prior NIC on that PC, and even off of the theoretical max of its 450 Mbps WiFi card. It would be completely bottlenecked by about seven other things, and drivers are likely to be an issue, even for Linux where it struggles to run modern kernels, but 2.5 Gbps Ethernet on a laptop from 2007 has the same sort of appeal that putting a native install of Windows 98 on an SSD did for me (and Windows 98 is faster on an SSD).

After announcing their new Indianapolis store back in March (which will be opening in July), Micro Center has now revealed the other two locations in their 3-store expansion plans: Charlotte and Miami (https://www.microcenter.com/site/stores/miami.aspx). Charlotte is slated to open in "early 2024" and Miami in "2024". All three locations will be the first in their respective states. Previously, the only two in the southeast region were both in the metro Atlanta area. I'm excited to see the expansions; my friends in Seattle are always bemoaning the lack of a Micro Center and I suppose they will continue to do so, but quite a few millions of people will now live close to a Micro Center who didn't previously. Are any forum-dwellers in the vicinity of Charlotte or Miami, or within feasible driving distance?

It is necessary here in July and August as well. 74 F (about 23.5C) and rainy today. Not exactly unpleasant.

Broke out some of the scotch for the first time in a long time. Port Charlotte. Despite being "heavily peated", it's actually less peated that the Laphroaig or Ardbeg that I'd typically go for. Really, what that means is, "heavily peated for what a sane person would choose" rather than "as much peat as possible!". Once I re-calibrate my peat meter, it's actually pretty good. I think I've been underappreciating this one due to being used to the peat being so on-the-taste-bud that it's impossible to miss, but there is some merit in being a bit more subtle and letting the other flavors have the presence be noticeable as well. Single-malt Islay remains my favorite. I remain fascinated that an island of just over 3000 people can have such a well-known world-class product.

I am legitimately curious what Linda Yaccarino saw in that job opening. Like, what is the potential upside in applying for, let alone accepting, that position? Elon is a famously difficult boss, and Twitter has well-publicized problems. Sure, if she can lead Twitter to success, it'll be a great accomplishment, but what makes someone think, "CEO of Twitter under Elon Musk is the job I was made for"? On the plus side she can hardly do worse than her immediate predecessor, Elon Musk... but that's probably not the criteria for success.

When it comes to DRAM, I think we're there, in the promised land, where prices are low. GPUs, not quite yet, and AM5 motherboards are still overpriced for sure, but RAM and SSDs are cheap now. Hard drives are coming down too, at the right capacities you can hit $16/TB, still a fair amount less than the roughly $50/TB for TLC SSDs. But the price difference is a lot less than it used to be. I'll still probably buy one or two more hard drives, but five years from now... it might not just make sense to buy spinning rust anymore.

It's been really nice up here lately, mid to upper 70s, or about 25 Celsius for all of you metric folks. Have hardly had the AC on at all this year. For the most part it's possible to open down the windows at night if it warms up during the day, and that's not always necessary either.

Yes. The only downside in your scenario is sometimes 17" is slightly more expensive, because it physically needs more materials - plastic/metal for the chassis, and a larger screen. But it's usually not a large difference, unless they also bump up the minimum specs on the 17", e.g. the 17" starts with a 3080 and the 15.6" starts with a 3060, and you don't have any reason to go beyond a 3060.

I prefer to go a bit more old-school than Vista or 7. Never really embraced the Aero Glass, perhaps because it got too associated with Vista RTM in my mind. Instead I stuck with XP's themes, either Luna (including the Zune, Silver, Olive, and Royale Noir variants), or the Classic theme a la Windows 95/98/2000. So, after 6 months of having my laptop follow a fairly standard Windows 10 theme, I'm back to using Curtains's XP theme, along with a few vintage applications for a blissful Windows eXPerience: Curtains doesn't get the icon spacing at the top of the application quite right, but combined with period-accurate (and better than current-day) versions of Minesweeper and co., it captures the right feeling. Meanwhile I can still keep using my full-screen Start screen; while I prefer XP's to Vista/7's, I still think 8.1 was the best in that category. I want to set some XP-era icons as well, and maybe sounds and cursors. I probably won't have them set that way all the time, but the XP era was my favorite time for computing, and notebooks in particular. Everything was still progressing quickly, there was optimism so long as you weren't doing battle with Microsoft, you weren't being pitched online subscriptions to everything, and things were finally at a stage where they were both pretty stable and pretty secure, at least once SP2 released.

I was wondering why Katja was looking at AM4 for a new system in 2023 until I noticed the thread is a year old. I just re-installed Windows 10 on my laptop rather than jumping to 11 when I upgraded its storage. I've recently taken a liking to putting my taskbar on the right side of the screen, and that still hasn't been added to 11. But my dad got a PC with Windows 11, and has been pretty happy with it. AFAIK he isn't on NotebookTalk or other similarly-hardware-nerdy forums, but he's fairly technical, having been a professional developer. The taskbar's in the center but there hasn't been anything breaking like I had happen when I jumped on Vista pre-SP1. On the other hand, he's also technical enough to not be bothered by having to learn a few new things. Maybe that's the sweet spot, technical enough to be willing to try new things, not so technical as to be a super-fan of esoteric features that haven't been carried forward.