They made so many terrible Windows 8.1 tablets which they had to support. I used one of these with an atom z3735f and 2GB of RAM as my only Windows computer for a long time, and Windows 8.1 was completely smooth on it despite the anemic hardware. Some even cheaper tablets and mini PCs released with 1GB RAM and 16GB emmc yet somehow also were also able to run Windows 8.1 okay.
This is almost certainly US Mobile. They have some really interesting plans at surprisingly reasonable prices. But ultimately if you just want the cheapest cell service then they’re not the carrier for you.
All web browsers are nearly unusable with 4gb of RAM lately. Even with desktop Linux I usually have nearly my full 8gb used. With 8gb AND Windows it’s only a matter of time before these computers become unusable…
Company computers often come with pre-installed spyware which is notoriously RAM hungry. My company laptop immediately after boot uses nearly a full 16gb before you open any programs. Luckily our IT department realizes this and only allows us to purchase machines with 32GB and up. They’re probably not happy with the current prices, but being a F500 company they can afford it…
There’s huge investment in domestic semiconductor manufacturing in China, but they’re certainly not ahead of the West yet. Or even on par. If they were we’d see them exporting semiconductors and not buying from foreign companies, yet they still do. I work as an electrical engineer in the semiconductor industry and also visit China for work. We all know that our jobs are doomed in 5-10yr, but for now their domestic semiconductor industry simply isn’t able to compete.
The unfortunate part for DIY PC is that the RAM is likely all buffered ECC. And used flash is sketchy in my experience, even if you buy SLC where the whole point is supposed to be that it is more durable.
I operate my hard drives totally external to my old PC’s case with a 3D printed holder keeping them together (with a little space between each drive for ventilation). It’s a little ugly, but it lives in a closet so I don’t really care how it looks. More importantly with my old Neatgear NAS I didn’t realize just how much speed I was missing out on. I guess with a modern Synology unit with a SSD cache you’ll likely get similar performance, but it’s so convenient to be able to run Docker containers and VMs on the same machine.
I fully agree it’s worth waiting for the thrill of the deal.
The Chia crash was great. A local dude I found on Facebook marketplace bought a whole array worth of drives and never got around to even opening the packages for them.
I scored a great local deal on a PC last week, but unfortunately the only weak point of it is the 16GB of DDR5. So I guess for a while I’ll just be chilling with equal amounts of GPU and system memory. Luckily I’m not a gamer and rarely limited by the system memory.
I think a bubble pop may be closer than people think. Several F500 company CEOs are at least calling it a bubble now, but admittedly still 100% on board the AI hype train.
Not the case for me, I’ll typically spend a solid week or two tweaking things after I initially set it up to get all the hardware working perfectly, then never touch the configuration again even as things slowly start breaking with updates.
Although they use milk, they consider egg a meat. They treat their cows like gods, so if you’re vegan only for the reasons of animal suffering then I’d argue being vegetarian in India is philosophically identical
The verification is supposedly not linked to play protect at all. Presumably Epic will be a verified developer even without being on Google Play and therefore their apk’s will remain installable regardless of distribution method. If Epic were blocked then I imagine they’d absolutely have grounds to sue.
I also always call him Dear Leader. We can’t normalize these behaviors from a president, and using the “Dear Leader” title makes it unambiguously clear that his selfish actions are not presidential.
AI companies and investors are absolutely overhyping its capabilities, but if you haven’t tried it before I’d strongly recommend doing so. For simple bash scripts and Python it almost always gets something workable first try, genuinely saving time.
AI LLMs are pretty terrible for nearly every other task I’ve tried. I suspect it’s because the same amount of quality training data just doesn’t exist for other fields.
An old PC is the best NAS, even if you choose a dedicated NAS box it’s likely that you’ll want to “upgrade” to an old PC in a year or two. Unlike premade NAS boxes you have full control over the software and can modify the hardware as needed. You can undervolt/underclock to save power too, so the main difference is only the physical space it takes. Having the ability to run docker containers and VMs on the same device is incredibly useful, and you’ll get significantly faster transfers despite the drastically lower cost.
Leaving ADB open to unverified apps is more than I was expecting. ADB is reasonably straightforward to use even without actually being an Android developer.
There was never any way they’d integrate it to play protect and still allow play protect to be disabled. I prefer this to being required to use play protect personally, though the services do seem somewhat redundant. Presumably the whole point of doing this is to create an Apple style walled garden (which is of course very profitable). Google likely doesn’t want to fully lock it down and risk legal trouble, they just need to make it difficult enough that the masses don’t bother installing unapproved apps that may not act in Google’s interests.
I still hope the EU takes legal action against this anyway.
That’s kinda the case here with Debian being on the extreme opposite of Ubuntu. I don’t see any benefit of putting up with the stability issues and complexity of other distros when Debian “just works”. And once you debloat Ubuntu you just get Debian.
I have no idea why Canonical moved Ubuntu to rely so heavily on snap, it’s wasteful of limited system resources. Removing it sped up both my Ubuntu machines significantly (especially the one with only 4GB of RAM).
Graphene is only supported on Pixels for now, but by their own FAQ this isn’t the plan forever. With Google blocking third party apps at their own discretion on Android, there will certainly be motivation to officially support more devices.
Full Windows 8.1 thanks to Intel’s x86 tablet push at the time.
Windows RT never made it to any other devices besides the Surface RT iirc and was pretty much an immediate failure.