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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • deadbeef@lemmy.nztoGreentext@sh.itjust.worksAnon describes experience
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    8 days ago

    Had a similar experience in what I think must have been my second year of primary school.

    I was asked to go through a math problem that was written out, something like “4 + 7 = ?”.

    I said “Four plus seven equals eleven”.

    The teacher said that was wrong and said “Four add seven is eleven”.

    I’m like, what is the difference? She says, we aren’t onto “plus” and “equals” yet

    Six year old me spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to figure out how their was some difference between plus and add. She just could have said “they are the same, but please use these words to describe them in our lessons”.


  • It’s an engineering sample that was produced before the final product was available. They use the really early ones to figure out if what they got back from the fab actually runs and how fast it will go safely. Later ones end up at motherboard partners so they can test their new board designs.

    It is pretty common for them to leak out onto the second hand market after the final release. I’ve never heard of one that had any real problems, but in theory you might be buying something that has some issue that they hadn’t discovered at that point.


  • I’ve changed distro’s a bunch of times personally and for business I have influence in a bunch of times in the last 30 odd years.

    Slackware -> Redhat -> Suse -> Ubuntu -> Debian.

    The reasons for each were ( as best I can recall ).

    Slackware to Redhat was just because a proper package manager made sense at the time. I think the Redhat releases were a bit more up to date too.

    Redhat to Suse was because Redhat stopped doing the free long term releases, the short term ones were too short to be workable.

    Suse to Ubuntu was a similar thing to Redhat with Suse trying to push you into the enterprise version.

    Ubuntu to Debian most recently was due to the Ubuntu releases coming with more and more unwanted crap, we had been running mint on desktops to avoid whatever their mutant gnome reskin was called and then their regular gnome releases, but we were still running regular Ubuntu on servers. Eventually when they started putting pretty core stuff in snaps we decided to move to Debian.

    Hopefully that is the last migration we have to do for a while.


  • I’m not sure. They could have been describing that to me, but because the local body funding mechanism we have here is called rates rather than property taxes I could have easily got that confused in with the state tax discussion.

    I was kind of astounded that a spreadsheet of tax rates would play a significant part in a decision of where you were going to live.


  • I have heard folks distantly related to me talk like the state tax rate was pretty damn important when selecting which part of the United States to move to.

    They were the sort of people that would sit ( in their living room in New Zealand ) and watch fox news and go on the engineered logical and emotional weirdcoaster that sort of media offers up. This is some pretty niche viewing for folks in my country.













  • Not sure a short summary will cut it.

    They had no competition for a long period and ended up with an accountant CEO that caused their R&D to stagnate massively. They had a ton of struggling and failing to deliver all in most areas, and they wombled about releasing CPU generations with ~4% performance uplifts, probably saving a few bucks in the process.

    AMD turned back up again with Ryzen and Epyc models that were pretty good and and an impressive pace of improvement ( like ~14% generational uplifts ) that caused them such a fright that they figured out they had to ditch the accountant.

    Pat Gelsinger was asked to step up as CEO and fix that mess. They axed some obvious defective folks in their structure and rushed about to release 12th generation products with decent gains by cranking the power levels of the CPUs to absurd levels, this was risky and it kind of looks like they are being bit with it now.

    Server CPU sales are way down because they are just plain uncompetitive. They have missed out on the chunk of money they could have got from the AI bubble because they never had a good GPU architecture they could leverage over to use. They have been shutting down unprofitable and troublesome divisions like the Optane storage and NUC divisions to try and save money, but they are in a bad way.

    The class actions mentioned elsewhere in the thread are probably coming because the rush to make incremental improvements to 13th generation and 14th generation CPU’s resulted in issues with power levels and other problems that seem to be causing those CPU’s to crash and sometimes fail altogether.


  • Yeah, I reckon having a split of the frontend and the backend results in about half the complexity in each. If you have multiple frontends you can upgrade whatever the least important one is to see if there are any problems

    I didn’t really answer your original question.

    When I was using NUC’s I was using Linux mint which uses cinnamon by default as the window manager. Originally I changed it to use some really minimal window manager like twm, but then at some point it became practical to not use one at all and just run kodi directly on X.

    If I was going back to a Linux frontend I’d probably evaluate libreELEC as it has alot of the sharp edges sorted out.


  • I used to run kodi on linux on intel NUC’s connected to all our TV’s a while ago. I don’t remember it being particularly unreliable. The issue that made me change that setup was hardware decoding support in 4k for newer codecs.

    What I’ve had doing that frontend function ( kodi, jellyfin, disney plus, netflix etc ) for the last few years is three Nvidia shield TV pro’s which have been absolutely awesome. They are an old product now and I suspect Nvidia are too busy making money to work on a newer generation version of them,

    The biggest surprise improvement was how good it was being able to ( easily ) configure their remotes to generate power on / off and volume up and down IR codes for the TV or the AV amp they were using so you only need a single remote.

    Separating the function of the backend out from the frontend in the lounge has reduced the broken mess that happens around OS upgrades drastically.


  • Most hubs didn’t protect you from anything in particular.

    Most of them would forward everything to every port, some really insane ones would strip out the spanning tree that could have prevented a loop.

    It’s been a long time since I did anything that goes as far into a network as the desktop, but 15+ years ago we had a customer ring up with the same sort of complaint. After we followed the breadcrumbs on site we found a little 8 port hub ( that we hadn’t supplied ) plugged into two wall ports that went to two different Cisco edge switches in the server room, two cisco phones also with their passthrough ports both patched into same switch and then two desktop PC’s.

    Amazing.