Sandy Bridge

King Charles III is taking Twitter to court over unpaid rent. Source Probably not the best look to stiff the King...

Any Bolt owners in this thread? With the new tax incentives and the price cuts on the MSRP they're extremely affordable, and as a hatchback fan I'm mildly tempted. Not that I really trust Chevy to make a reliable car, but I figure there are fewer moving parts on an electric car so it's probably better than a gas Chevy now that they've fixed the battery issues. It's also the only electric hatch on the market in the U.S., so it kind of wins by default. I probably won't go it this year since my 2011 Honda still has a lot of miles left... but there are free EV chargers at work so there is something to be said for the idea.

Where did you find the time to make 198 posts in the past year while doing a residency and having two young 'uns!? I know how little free time my friends who have been in residency have had without having children! Eh, but I suppose they did tend to post on some forums, just typically medical ones rather than tech ones. So maybe I can see where it makes sense that a forum on something different would be appealing. Congratulations all, especially Reciever and Hiew! I created a thread in Site Feedback before seeing this one, so feel free to delete or merge it... but congratulations is deserved.

I'll be curious to hear what you think of it. I haven't read it yet, but I'm curious how approachable it is for the average person. Is it a book that people can read and follow and gain insight from, or is it a book that you read 10 pages of and display it on your bookshelf as a conversation piece that makes you appear well-read? Augustine of Hippo... IIRC, one of our required readings in college was Augustine's Confessions, or part of it at least. I still to this day remember how every other sentence he invoked the deity, and while I am sure it was well-intentioned as a display of his piety, it made it extremely difficult to stay focused on the philosophical/theological argument as someone used to works from the past few hundred years. Or to translations of classical Roman authors, for that matter. If I'd had a translation that omitted most of his pious invocations of God, I might have enjoyed it, but at least the translation I had was a bear to get through. Its only real rival in that regard in my college repertoire was Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which might have been fascinating if I'd never heard of the theory of evolution before, but as it was, was an extremely detailed argument for something that I already knew about conceptually. --------- Currently I'm reading Candice Millard's River of the Gods (2022), about the European discovery of the source of the Nile. Millard is my favorite non-fiction author, and it does not disappoint. Adventure non-fiction is her specialty, she used to work for National Geographic, and always travels to the locations where the events happened to have first-hand familiarity. Combined with a knack for picking interesting but not-that-well-known topics and great writing skills, and I'll always pick up her new books. I could see her being her generation's David McCullough, in terms of being a very popular and effective history writer for the populace at large, albeit with a somewhat different focus than McCullough (another of my favorite authors).

I like the idea. How much traffic would there be? Only one way to find out. But I've got a Pentium II sitting under my desk right now, and indeed it's always been a pain getting drivers working with its network card... That reminds me too, I need to go back and finish that blog post on getting WiFi up and working on a 1997 ThinkPad...

Congratulations to @Reciever, @Hiew, et. al. on one year of NotebookTalk! I noticed the 1 year anniversary badge today, and I know it was a few days earlier than when I joined, but we're now at roughly a year since the phoenix rose, and I have to say, it's been a fun place to discuss notebooks and other adjacent tech. Thanks for building a place for us!

Thanks for the screenies! I agree, I was not wowed. Where'd the spend the graphics budget, too detailed of grass or all the clouds in the sky? If the latter, it isn't as pretty as the real sky when I was up at the lake the other day! Just for fun I'm downloading the demo to my Sandy Bridge + RX480 rig, and for added fun (and so it doesn't eat nearly half my free SSD space), to a 7200 RPM hard drive. Will report back in a day or two how it plays. I actually expect it to be at least as playable as Crysis was when it was new, and hey, I've got 32 GB of RAM so I meet the Ultra specs there!

I was expecting higher requirements with the title "The Next Crysis". This game can run on an Ivy Bridge Quad-Core processor that was released over a decade ago, soon to be 11 years, and video cards that are equivalent to my RX 480 that I bought in 2016, MSRP $240 for the base 8 GB version. Positively pedestrian requirements! Now granted that's 720p 30 FPS, but when I tried to run the OG Crysis on my 8600M GT laptop, which was the 4th-most powerful laptop GPU available when I bought it mere months before Crysis's release (behind the 8700M GT, 7950 GTX, and just barely behind the 7900 GS; the 8800M series had not yet launched), I got 22 FPS at, IIRC, 800x600. That was stretching the bounds of playable! Now I have a laptop that, for half the price of my 2007 Crysis-playing laptop, with no adjustments for inflation, is just about at the "Recommended specs", and should easily hit 1080p 30 FPS given the differences. Point being that a lot more systems, as a percentage of all gaming rigs, are going to be able to play this game without upgrades than were able to play Crysis without upgrades when it came out. Really the minimum requirements aren't much more than Crysis Remastered's, either, especially considering that game came out over two years ago: Crysis Remastered OS: Windows 10 64-bit Processor: Intel Core i5-3450 / AMD Ryzen 3 Memory: 8GB Storage: 20GB Direct X: DX11 GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti / AMD Radeon 470 GPU memory: 4GB in 1080p More VRAM and RAM and storage, but the processor is still a quad-core Ivy, and the GPU is only half a tier up, seems like a modest jump overall for two years aside from the GTA-like storage space requirements. My take is their marketing department did a good job of predicting what would go viral by releasing super-high-end "Ultra" specs when most games only have "Minimum" and "Recommended", and the Internet isn't realizing that while not low-end, aside perhaps from storage this game's requirements really aren't that outrageous.

Watched episode 1 tonight. It was pretty good. Felt like watching a zombie apocalypse movie, a bit of a 28 Days/Weeks Later vibe. Not sure if it's going to be Game of Thrones (seasons 1-7) good, but I wasn't sure GoT was going to be that good for the first few episodes either. I plan to catch episode 2 some time next week. I'll also note that you don't have to have played the game to follow what's going on. I haven't figured out exactly all the relations between all the characters yet, and am still figuring out who all is going to be recurring, but I've figured out who Joel and Ellie are so I think I'm going to be okay.

For user mode programs, one of the programs you can use to view (and edit) running memory of other programs is HxD Hex Editor. Go to Tools -> Main Memory, choose the program whose memory you want to examine, and you can start viewing it and editing it. This could be used to verify patching happened in a equivalent process for user mode programs. There are probably tools that offer a similar experience for kernel-mode programs, but I don't know what those tools are. 0Patch almost certainly uses a kernel-mode driver to apply its updates, since a user-mode program shouldn't be able to patch kernel-level components. Their user manual mentions that you must install it with an administrator account, which would be required for installing a kernel-mode driver. But just like you can do sketchy things with other user-mode programs as a user-mode program, once you have a kernel-level driver installed, you can do quite a bit at the OS/kernel level. This is why you'll occasionally read about a flawed update to an anti-virus program causing havoc; they also are putting tentacles all over the place to do what they do, with kernel-level drivers, and are another category of program where thought about, "do I trust the developers of this program?" should be made before installing them. It's also worth noting that Windows NT (the core architecture of Windows today) dates from the early 1990s, and was not considered a cutting-edge design even at the time, but a pragmatic one. GNU was following then-modern OS design principles with its HURD kernel, but Linux and Windows NT went with older monolithic designs. Sandboxing wasn't really a thing, and while there was a whole lot more protection from accidentally trampling on other applications than there was in DOS-based Windows (especially in the early days in Real Mode), there weren't a lot of guardrails against intentionally trampling beyond the user/kernel mode split. A walled garden like iOS can restrict some of the abusable APIs to only be used by first-party software, but Windows NT was not designed like that, and at a time when most computers weren't networked, the security threat model was different. The upshot is this is why it's important to be careful about downloading programs from the Internet, and why (from a security standpoint) Microsoft launched the Microsoft Store where applications are more restricted than traditional Win32 applications, with sandboxing that follows those modern principles that didn't exist when Win32 was created. I don't yet feel like I have enough information to say whether 0Patch is trustworthy. Which, if they are, is probably one of their main business challenges. The tradeoff of using their product is you are definitely screwed if they aren't trustworthy, while you are potentially screwed if you don't use their product and a hacker exploits a flaw on your system that their software would have protected you from. The lower-risk of a user you are, the less potential upside there is in the risk of trusting 0Patch. For additional reading, I'd recommend the book, Showstopper! by G. Pascal Zachary, about the development of Windows NT.

There is something to be said about Windows 8.1 feeling less bloated than 10, in that it is very responsive. A friend once asked me why I kept using my old Core i5 2500k desktop when I had a shiny then-new Kaby Lake i7-8750H laptop. A lot of the reason was that even though by all respects the new laptop should have felt faster based on raw specs, in practice the Windows UI was more responsive on the old workhorse. The obvious difference that could account for that was the operating system. I sometimes bemoan how software has kept up with hardware in terms of resource requirements. My old Pentium II with Windows 98 was slow as molasses at booting, but once it finally finished booting, it could start Word 2000 faster than my 8.1 desktop with Word 2010, and I wouldn't be surprised if that in turn is faster than my Ryzen 5800H/Windows 10 laptop would be with Word 2019. I'll be curious to see how long Windows 8.1 still feels viable. For me, XP still felt viable for about 2 years after its expiration date, although increasingly less so as time went on. I expect something similar for 8.1, with gradual discontinuation of software support eventually resulting in it not being very realistic to run as a modern system. It might last a bit longer than XP did though, with its architecture being comparatively several years newer at the time of its expiration, and the pace of evolution in OS features slowing down.

Haiku Beta 4 dropped in December, sporting a nice list of new improvements, including better HiDPI support, thumbnails in Tracker (the file explorer), support for GTK, and a port of WINE, the latter two of which enable a lot more applications to run. To give it a try, you'll need a Pentium II or Athlon or later, 384 MB of RAM, and 3 GB of storage space. A little more demanding than Windows 98, but quite reasonable by today's standards! Is anyone here running Haiku? I took Beta 3 for a spin in a VM last year, and found it to be a pleasant experience, and the UI to be extremely responsive, even in a virtual machine. That beta wasn't at a place where it could wholly replace Windows for me, even from a non-gaming standpoint, primarily due to not yet having a wide enough variety of software, but I appreciated the different-but-sensible UI paradigms and saw a lot of potential. It was refreshing to see a different take than what the Big Three (Windows/Linux/Mac) provide. I plan to try Beta 4 as well. (Side note on organization, I wanted to put this in the "Operating Systems" sub-forum but can't create threads there, and Haiku does not fit into any of that forum's sub-forums, so this seems like the most appropriate spot)

From what I've read the Windows Store version was not enforcing the CPU check, at least as of a week ago. Pretty sure that's the one that people reported using on Ryzens, and if so I see no reason it wouldn't work on older Intels. Can't verify myself as I haven't "upgraded" any PCs to Windows 11.

This, as well as some of the other Twitter incidents, reminds me of the area of the company where I work, although Twitter is worse. Our staff is too small, and most importantly too new to the team, for our number of projects and their ambition. We're essentially a year after where Twitter was in November when they laid off 75% of this staff; we had 100% turnover of our entire technical staff in late '21 and early '22, although our one saving grace is a couple of the transfers were internal so we can still pester them when we really need their help. The management strategy seems to be "hope that with growing technical competence and familiarity with the product, things work themselves out." On one of our products, management literally took a page from Musk's book and decided "we can turn off 3 of the service's 5 services for half the day and it will still work okay." Turns out, customers were able to notice, and we're still working through the consequences of that, including the technical side effects. The longer I'm there and the more other employees trust me, the more I learn about how many are at least considering looking for other jobs. It's the smart ones that could help solve the problems that are looking, too, of course. They can see the mismanagement and have other opportunities if they want them. I've started talking with recruiters myself, and have already learned that I could get a nice raise if I'm willing to go work for Big Evil Corp. So... when I see that Twitter is like that but worse and across the whole company, I see the ship sinking. Is Twitter's infrastructure really improving, or are they just patching the above-the-water holes that Musk saw before he bought it while below the water line the structure is rotting?

So, it's been about 2 months since I bought my new laptop. It's great! Twice as many CPU cores (and probably close to twice as fast per core), twice the GPU power, DDR4 instead of DDR3, NVME storage instead of SATA SSDs. Some of my games play much more smoothly on it. And yet when I'm not gaming, or am gaming on a game that runs fine on the old system, I've found I often am still using my old desktop. Why? It has all my stuff on it. All my programs installed, all my data local, everything configured exactly how I like it over the past 5-6 years since I last installed Windows (it's really nice not having to reinstall Windows every few years to keep it working well like in the old days). I plan to add some more storage to my laptop (512 GB isn't enough, even if it's fast), and eventually I can probably fit enough of my stuff on it that the rest can live on network storage. But I'm wondering if anyone else has found the same thing with a laptop that doesn't have terabytes of storage and everything set up - the old workstation with things tweaked just so still gets a fair amount of use? Maybe it just means I need a good KVM? I've thought about getting one for audio (3.5mm) + two USB ports, but have had a hard time finding one for that niche (without a monitor but with audio). Or is there something about being used to having 6 TB of storage and then having 0.5 TB and missing having all those hundreds of programs installed locally?

I might've bought a PS3 to play this if there were one other PS3 exclusive I also wanted to play, the problem was there never was that second game so I could never justify picking up the PS3. Now that it's arriving on PC it's so many years later that I'm not sure that I care... But it's also coming to HBO and I happen to have an active HBO Max subscription, so I'll try it there first. Pity it doesn't drop till 9 PM and I already have plans around that time, guess I'll have to avoid this thread until I can catch up on it Monday...

I would pay money to buy software that does that if it worked reliably for any CPU and for Windows 10 as well as 11. It sounds like Unison does currently work on Qualcomm and AMD CPUs (although that may not continue indefinitely?), but they appear to have partnered with Microsoft in making it a Windows 11 exclusive. Slight shame that it requires Bluetooth as well, it would be nice if it also supported USB. I guess that's the crux of it though, if I were willing to buy a computer just to have that integration I'd be running a Mac, since I'm not, I'm not going to buy a Wintel 11 computer just to have it if that's not otherwise the computer I want. And they'd rather sell CPUs with this as a value-add than sell it as standalone software. Which one would be more profitable? I don't know. Some day though, I'll get back to the golden era of being able to send an SMS from my computer, just like I could with my Sony Ericsson and the right software setup on Windows 7...

I am curious to see what their classical redo looks like. Skimming through that list (which is unfortunately very surface-level and non-opinionated as all such lists are), the one that jumps out is Foobar. Though mainly due to name recognition, it probably isn't the best one on the list. Worth a try though. Opinions based on experience are still appreciated! I trust the members of this forum more than app store reviews, it's rare indeed that I find such reviews to be informative.

Sony has announced two new Walkman models, available in Japan, Europe, and the UK, and starting at 46,000 yen/399 Euros. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/new-sony-walkman-music-players-feature-stunning-good-looks-android-12/ They feature 3.5mm headphone jacks, real physical buttons for all the music controls, classic Sony industrial design, and expandable microSD storage. No need to dust off that old M2 Micro card, you can use standard memory formats now! Anyone planning to pick one up or still rocking a dedicated mp3 player? It's a bit pricey for my "Mobile Devices & Gadgets" budget (I'm more for the notebooks and desktops), but it does have some appeal with its expandable storage, headphone jack, and audio focus. A potential replacement for my old iPhone that's now an iPod? Maybe someday.

I'd argue that there's a significant difference between "Fast Ethernet" (100 Mbps) and Gigabit. It's a 10X difference, and while sure, loading NotebookTalk on Fast Ethernet isn't going to be noticeably faster, for any large file transfers there will be a noticeable difference. "Fast Ethernet" is slower than USB 2.0, and we all know and love how much faster USB 3.0 is than 2.0 (also roughly 10x as fast). "Fast Ethernet" is also slower than many and perhaps most Internet connections, even in the U.S. which is not nearly as fast as places like Estonia and South Korea. While we might not need that bandwidth every day, for things like Steam games, photo backups, and Linux ISOs, I'd argue it's worth the near-zero cost difference that exists today, if buying a router/laptop/etc. For my Hue hub that has Fast Ethernet, I agree that there way no reason for Philips to spend the extra 10 cents on Gigabit, it'll never need that volume of traffic. It probably would have been okay with old-school 10 Mbps from a bandwidth standpoint. 2.5 Gbps is indeed a lot more of a "needs a use case". The cost difference is in the tens of dollars, the speed increase is lower, and the real-time impact of those savings is significantly less. It would have been cool if my new laptop had 2.5 Gbps but it's fine that it only has gigabit. Maybe I'll spring for it when I upgrade to a fancy new 802.11be router.

Republic of China = Taiwan. People's Republic of China = Mainland Communist China. For some reason authoritarian states like to call themselves republics, but so do actual republics. It's confusing. Probably intentionally so on the part of the authoritarian states. Anyway I came here to post about the APIs and third-party clients breaking but Aaron beat me to it. 50:50 on whether it was intentional or not. I've noticed the first effect of my blocking Twitter locally, my U.S. Senator had some embedded tweets in his web page that no longer load. I'm expecting to see other examples if I come across "lazy journalism" articles that spend a significant part of the article just embedding Tweets, but I guess I haven't come across any of those this week.

By being really incredible programmers. More specifically, their software overwrites the vulnerable part of Windows in-memory, while it is running, rather than on disk. This prevents Windows from overwriting their patches due to its file protection system seeing modified files, and also prevents hackers from exploiting the security flaws, which are no longer present in the in-memory version of Windows (which is what is really important, programs always run in memory even though they are stored on disk while not running). I know a guy who has added new functionality to an early 2000s strategy game by using a similar technique, in that case hooking into where functions are registered in the in-memory version of the code and redirecting the old functions to new ones that he has compiled from C or C++ code and which provide that new functionality. Pretty incredible stuff. I'm a good enough programmer to know conceptually that this is possible with some Windows APIs that could let you do this sort of thing, but am not nearly knowledgeable enough in assembly, in-memory executable structures, and reverse engineering to pull off anything like 0Patch. Let alone also knowing enough to identify the security flaws and fix them. 0Patch probably relies in part on publicly available reports of the security flaws to know what to patch, and most patches will fall into several common categories, such as buffer overflows, but it's no mean feat. There's a reason they charge for it, people who have that much knowledge of the Dark Arts can command a high salary. I don't know that you could use those APIs on sandboxed Windows Store style applications, but for classic Win32 applications, and evidently for Windows itself, it is perfectly possible to write a program that modifies another program while it is running. We're used to living in the post-MS-DOS world, where programs have their own memory spaces, you aren't supposed to be able to overwrite another program's memory. Not the case with these APIs. There's a sense of power that comes with realizing there is a way to do that even today, and that if you know enough about the program you are trying to modify - which is the really difficult part - you can modify it to behave how you like, regardless of how it was intended to behave. This API is the specific one I've used to overwrite another program's memory (along with a few of its sibling APIs to read the structure of the program's data and know what I want to modify). It's intended to be used for debuggers; if it's the one 0Patch is using it, they're repurposed it for a different type of de-bugging. I've only used it for proof-of-concept programs, since I don't have sufficient knowledge of adjacent skill sets to make something really impressive with it, but it works as advertised. It's also worth noting that you want to think about whether you trust the people writing these sorts of programs - your thought of "this may be too good to be true" is a good instinct. Like anti-virus programs, they reach rather deep into your system to do what they do. I have no reason to believe 0Patch is not trustworthy, and politically they're from Slovenia which has a good reputation, but I am not Bruce Schneier or Brian Krebs. If you are enough of a Real Programmer to write 0Patch and fix these flaws, you are also enough of a Real Programmer to write software that would add security holes to a system.

RIP Windows 8.1. My desktop is still on 8.1, I did the first-year upgrade-and-downgrade so I could update it to 10 whenever I want, but I never wound up wanting to upgrade it. I'm downloading the January 10th updates as we type. 8.x got a lot of flak for its UI changes, but so long as you have drivers that properly support it (a potential challenge on more recent hardware), it's stable as can be. I'm that odd person that even came around to liking its Metro UI style with the full-screen start menu and tiles, even on non-touch desktops. I can fit up to 60 large tiles on my Start screen so all my most-used (and even semi-frequently-used) programs are accessible with a tap of the Windows key and jump of the mouse to a predictable location. That can be replicated on 10, but the glorious lack of feature updates and Control Panel being in charge of things rather than the Settings application? Nope... although 10 is finally reaching the age where there's not much risk of new features. 8.1 has a few other fringe benefits as well, such as using the pre-sandbox version of Calculator that starts instantly rather than the slow-to-start Windows 10 version, and has some nice upgrades over 7 such as the revamped Task Manager. Microsoft seems to have learned at least one thing from 8.x. 11 also has controversial UI changes, but Microsoft isn't trying as hard as it typically has to ram it down people's throats. Had they taken a more patient approach with 8.x, perhaps instead of a reactionary "this is different than what we've known since Windows 95" dominating the headlines, the Metro/Tile style would have gradually spread with more positive coverage from those who voluntarily chose it. I was skeptical at first, but being able to wade into it at my own speed, eventually found it to be my favorite.

Tom's has published a nice article on the upcoming 802.11be (WiFi 7) standard. Basically, it'll be faster - more streams, twice the max bandwidth per stream, and the ability to use multiple frequencies at once in an aggregated connection. I'm still not exactly sure what the practical max bandwidth increase in a laptop with two or three antennas is, but it's likely faster than for 802.11ax. Is anyone chomping at the bit to upgrade? I've still got a three-antenna 802.11ac router that works perfectly well for me, the only reason I have to upgrade is that they've stopped shipping firmware updates a few years ago so it's probably been part of a botnet without my even being aware of it. Although who knows, maybe a fancy new 802.11be router would make it so large sequential WiFi transfer speeds exceeded gigabit Ethernet speeds in practice as well as in theory, that would be nice too.

IDC has released their latest PC shipment numbers, showing 292.3 million units shipped in 2022. This compares favorably with sales from the last pre-pandemic year, 2019, of 266.7 million units. So, although the pandemic boom of 2020-2021 in PC sales has subsided, sales remain significantly higher than they were pre-pandemic. Manufacturers surely wished the boom had continued indefinitely, but "what goes up must come down" as they say, and happily for the PC industry the sales appear to have come down to a higher level than where they started. --- Of note, at a meta level, this is in part a post pointing out the folly of comparing statistics from the pandemic years to statistics in "normal" years. A lot of articles are saying, "PC shipments fell in 2022 compared to 2020 and 2021", but that's like saying "U.S. defense spending fell in 1946 compared to 1944 and 1945." I think it's a lot more useful to look at the data when there aren't extreme situations skewing it - how's it compare to historical averages, rather than how does it compare to times when there was something that we all know was highly unusual going on? From that "historical averages" standpoint, we can see that the PC industry appears to be shipping quite a few units still. Maybe there's still a little bit of pandemic boom carryover, and maybe manufacturers over-invested in production capacity that is now being under-utilized, but overall demand looks to be pretty healthy.