bjack on 24/7/2024 at 02:38
+ 1 on Linux, but it will be a challenge to play some games on Wine. I have a Linux setup and Wine running on an old Xeon workstation. It plays Thief really well. Much faster than Win 10 (can’t go to Win 11 because my Xeon chip is too old).
I can dual boot this older system in Linux or Win10 and usually use Win10, but the start up is terrible. The constant updates! I’ve turned off all the reasource hogs (especially indexing and backup auditing, or whatever that process is that takes up 100% IO and 30% CPU).
I keep a Windows system alive to play new FMs and play old games. Soon enough, I will have to disconnect my Win10 box from the net and download new FMs to a thumb drive.
So be it.
Back in the 90s, a new computer was obsolete before you even bought it. I’m happy to have milked 14 years out of a circa 2010 HP workstation.
DuatDweller on 24/7/2024 at 19:14
Yeah right now you should stay clear of 13th and 14th gen Intel CPU, tough too many RMA and even the replacement get burned, many have skipped toward AMD CPU because of this.
As for Windows 11, I'm eyeing an ASUS gamer laptop (12 gen Intel) with Nvidia GPU.
Pyrian on 26/7/2024 at 05:17
I read Crowdstrike's statement:
(
https://www.crowdstrike.com/falcon-content-update-remediation-and-guidance-hub/)
It's so much more incompetent than I'd expected. Usually with something this bad, there's like several failures that happened coincidentally to cause a cascade. Not this time.
They made a bad update. They passed the update through automated testing. The automated testing had a bug (undescribed) that prevented it from catching the issue. And then...they rolled it out worldwide. There was no phased rollout attempted. There was no f'ing "quick test by the devs on a local box" done. No human QA of any kind beyond "Oh, the 'Content Validator' says it's fine".
Everybody who signed off on this being an acceptable procedure in the first place needs to not have their jobs anymore. IMO.
Qooper on 30/7/2024 at 20:55
Quote Posted by heywood
I'm nodding my head with you. If we were in a pub or coffee shop we'd probably have a good rant about it together.
Aye, I'd be happy to grab that beer with you and rant about these things.
Quote:
There are moments almost every day where my corporate-issue laptop, i5-1245U that clocks up to 4.4 GHz, can't keep up with my typing in an active text input field. That never happened with the 6502-based home computers I first learned to program on in the 1980s. On the projects I've worked on, we always adopt a threading model that avoids blocking in the middle of user input. Why can't Microsoft?
Software has so many unnecessary layers that even the simplest, smallest things are sluggish. And we both know how good software engineering has the potential to be, it's just that where we are today, this isn't it. Not even in the same direction.
Man, 6502! I've heard from some programmers that the 6502 was very pleasant to program. I started out with MSX writing basic, then QBasic on a 386. It wasn't until the 7th grade that I started writing assembly on a Z80 (my Texas Instruments graphical calculator). But that opened up a whole new world! :D
Quote:
I feel like software engineering had a great building phase in the 1990s and 2000s, which was awesome to be a part of, even though I was a bit late getting in. But now it feels more like civil engineering. We relish our rare opportunities to build something new, while spending most of the time as custodians of old infrastructure, maintaining our earlier works and always wishing we could refactor and improve on them. Agile has made software development more disciplined and manageable, but it puts such a focus on capability delivery that the other -ilities suffer. Where I work, we have systems that have been operation for 15 years that are already becoming borderline unmaintainable.
That's an interesting perspective! Kind of like at one point software projects followed sequence of waterfall stages, now looking at the state of our entire industry as a whole, it seems that we're in the "maintainance" stage. It'd be interesting to see a distribution chart of where the money is, and how much of it is in maintaining old software (I bet it would be a big portion).
mopgoblin on 31/7/2024 at 10:42
Quote Posted by Pyrian
They made a bad update. They passed the update through automated testing. The automated testing had a bug (undescribed) that prevented it from catching the issue. And then...they rolled it out worldwide. There was no phased rollout attempted. There was no f'ing "quick test by the devs on a local box" done. No human QA of any kind beyond "Oh, the 'Content Validator' says it's fine".
Astonishing. I am
terrible at testing the code I write on my personal projects, and I still feel like I test it more than these guys did with their extremely widely-used shit.
Quote Posted by Qooper
Software has so many unnecessary layers that even the simplest, smallest things are sluggish. And we both know how good software engineering has the potential to be, it's just that where we are today, this isn't it. Not even in the same direction.
This is one of the secondary reasons I decided not to go into software development as a career, I saw hardware getting faster and software getting sloppier and more bloated to meet it, and I just didn't want any part in that. I have found GPU programming to be pretty fun and interesting though, there's a lot of cool stuff you can do, and generally if I screw something up it's my own fault rather than some awful API trying to be too clever for its own good.
DuatDweller on 2/8/2024 at 07:55
What are we gonna do?
Intel is going batshit crazy rejecting warranties on failed Core i9 CPUs.
And they ain't getting any solution out. I fear Intel might die of "Too big to fail" soon enough.
If I can't get a gen 12th Intel I would have to go for AMD Ryzen CPUs.
DuatDweller on 2/8/2024 at 08:11
Thanks for that info.
heywood on 2/8/2024 at 12:47
I purchased an i5-13400F to use in a lower power mini-ITX build. The price was good because of this bug. Everything I read said the stability issues were limited to the CPUs with higher boost clocks. I was going to go all-AMD this time, but their current gen CPUs have oddly high idle power consumption. I would definitely go AMD now for a gaming rig, even without this bug, because they have greater power efficiency under load and they are cheaper.
Sulphur on 2/8/2024 at 13:31
The X3D chips from AMD are really pretty much top-tier for gaming as of right now, so they'd be the best choice. They're also decently priced, which is refreshing.
