it has been known for years that the defaults on windows are insufficient, and they don’t make it easy to switch to a password prompt at boot time (though it is possible)

Which reputation? I used to work for a dell heavy hoster with thousands of dell servers almost 20 years ago - and apart from them being cheap I have nothing good to say about them. Worst is the remote management - several generations of DRACs all broken in new and interesting ways, and support is useless. You just get better discounts at that scale, which for a business owner drowns out the complaints of the tech people.

Notebooks also have similar bugs over generations - and nowadays they also feel even cheaper than they used to be.

Displays were somewhat acceptable - given you’re fine to work around the DPMS bugs they have in pretty much every display for the last two decades - but their display selection page is unusable and lacks most interesting details. So it is better to just get something you can check out in a shop.

That’d break git repos where files with the same name, but different case exist.

SSDs?

I currently have a bit over 2400 tabs open, and it has been roughly a month since I restarted firefox for being too laggy. It is becoming an issue again.

It’s not just cores - it is higher performance per rack unit while keeping power consumption and cooling needs the same.

That allows rack performance upgrades without expensive DC upgrades - and AMD has been killing dual and quad socket systems from intel with single and dual core epycs since launch now. Their 128 core one has a bit too high TDP, but just a bit lower core count and you can still run it in a rack configured for power and cooling needs from over a decade ago.

Granite rapids has too high TDP for that - you either go upgrade your DC, or lower performance per rack unit.

For people who weren’t looking for a developer workstation back then: Threadripper suddenly brought the performance of a xeon workstation costing more than 20k for just a bit over 2k.

That suddenly wasn’t a “should I really invest that much money” situation, but a “I’d be stupid not to, productivity increase will pay for that over the next month or so”

Just wanted to comment that this should happen faster than in a few years… and then checked the calendar

So CrowStrikes strategy is “you installed CrowStrike while TSA told you not to install it, as was clearly proven by us taking down your network, so we’re not at fault”?

If you can afford it see if Eaton has a smaller tower UPS suitable for you.

Recall is a legal term for the car industry which includes stuff like reporting obligations. So if the defect meets the severity level of a recall it should be called as such, even if it is ‘just’ a software update. Ambiguous terms for safety violations are dangerous and may cost lives.

Have been using it since late 90s, stopped using it with the shutdown of SixXs as there still were no viable native options in pretty all my infra locations. Recently started using it again as I finally have an ISP providing proper v6.

Funny thing is that the only reason I’ve found *arrs a few years ago was Netflix deciding to be stupid, making me look at how I can manage my local library better nowadays.

Screen is another thing - but I can live with that, mostly - it’s a bit hard to find x86 notebooks with decent resolution (not talking retina style, just better than “1080p on a 14 inch display”). And while the screen itself is nice on the apples I’d prefer a lower resolution one if I can get a matte screen instead.

But fact is that nobody wants to sell you a proper x86 notebook. It’s almost impossible to find something with more than 32GB of RAM, and while there are a few with more than 64GB they’re all xeon based monsters larger than 16", as far as I can tell can’t really be ordered, and have a price tag equal or larger to a full spec 14" mac book pro. And obviously you can’t really think about battery life with intels space heaters.

It’s especially sad as current mobile Ryzen CPUs could very well compete with Apples ARM CPUs - the one thing Apple is better at is the absolute low power state, as soon as it has too actually do something the power (and TDP) curve is very close to mobile Ryzen. But pretty much every manufacturer fucks up the thermal design, or gimps it in other ways.

One exception nowadays: Business notebooks - and that’s only because the rest of the notebook market went to shit. If you want a somewhat compact notebook with more than 64GB of RAM, decent CPU performance and good battery life Apple currently is the only one offering something.

Helsinki is getting out of the “burning stuff to make electricity” business. It used to have coal power plants - last ones closed down in 2023 and 2024. There are some dedicated plants for district heating still, but also there’s the trend to move away from burning stuff.

The space used by the smallest solar charger I’ve seen on Amazon seems to be similar to 6 or more batteries in the format the N900 was taking - so if you look at space, slow charging from solar charger, and reliance on sun conditions taking individual batteries seems to be the better option for a few days hike. It’s also easier to stow individual batteries to wherever you still have space left.

With my N900 I used to travel with 6 to 10 charged batteries to have a few days of runtime. Things got better now with powerbanks - but for something like hiking just carrying a few spares would still be smaller and lighter.

There was the 386DX and significantly cheaper SX - first was full 32 bit, second just 32bit instruction set with smaller external busses.

Then you could add the math coprocessor. And of course RAM and disks were expensive. 16MB RAM was way above normal for that time.

About 20 years ago I made a script that converts pictures to HTML tables. Back then RAM was a severe problem for this, and even for more powerful hardware browsers tended to just crash on larger pictures.

I checked it again a few years later, and things looked way better. I guess using CSS it’d be rather trivial nowadays to do the same with a short video by just cycling through showing/hiding tables of each frame.