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.

Dune 2. It was the gateway drug that turned me playing computer games into a full blown addiction for a bunch of my family.

Relations camped out waiting for a slot to satisfy the urge for months until they could scrape together the cash to fund an appropriate PC to run it themselves at home.

The three 5.25 inch drives bother me. Most PCs with that sort of aesthetic from the 80s or 90s with a real floppy connector can only run two floppy drives without needing some pretty weird bios and OS config.

AI models produced from copyrighted training data should need a license from the copyright holder to train using their data. This means most of the wild west land grab that is going on will not be legal. In general I’m not a huge fan of the current state of copyright at all, but that would put it on an even business footing with everything else.

I’ve got no idea how to fix the screeds of slop that is polluting search of all kinds now. These sorts of problems ( along the lines of email spam ) seem to be absurdly hard to fix outside of walled gardens.

In New Zealand it is pretty common for members of parliament to get thrown out of the chamber for a whole bunch of reasons. In general you have to do whatever the speaker says, sort of like you would a judge in a court proceeding. There’s a whole lot ( perhaps dated ) rules around treating other members of the house with respect, letting them speak when their part of the process is up etc.

I think most of this is covered by this list of rules: https://www.parliament.nz/en/pb/parliamentary-rules/standing-orders-2017-by-chapter/chapter-3-general-procedures/

Who are these mad men who are dumping stuff to SSDs and then sitting them on a shelf? Can’t get my mind around it.

I also like old school single player games often to zone out playing.

Titanfall 2 was good mindless fun, it is like $6NZD on steam, no idea what your currency is.

I bought the Castle wolfenstein reboot games on steam recently in a bundle and that was great fun for the $17NZD.

Also the Halo master chief collection was approximately $25NZD at one point and that was great fun on a dollar per hour basis.

The mass effect games were like $10 at one point too, and the first couple of those are great.

Again, I don’t know much about the xbox pricing on these, they might be still gouging on that platform.

I’ve never been this angry in the shower in my life.

I Hope things get better for you man.

Aramoana here in New Zealand. It has a population in the low hundreds and it is famous for a horrible massacre in 1990. The cops here don’t usually have guns and in a little place like that there are often only a handful of police that are anywhere in the general region.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramoana_massacre

Razer mice and keyboards can be managed with openrazer under Linux. I still use deathadders on a few Linux machines ( and one Windows games PC ) but I’ve ditched my razer keyboards for keychron which don’t really need any software. You can configure the RGB components of them all with openrgb if you want in Linux and Windows.

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.

I learned what a tankie is, which is fun.

I’ve been commenting a bit, whereas on reddit I would only post a comment a few times a year when I could be bothered dealing with the likely burst of negativity that would come as a response to it.

Kind of feels a bit more like Web 1.9 or so from about 2003 which I think was about the sweet spot for minimal rage bait and crazy and still a decent bit of user interaction and scale.

It would be about perfect if you could chop out a few of the folks trying to shoehorn in politics to every little thing.

I’ve been using Linux for something like 27 years, I wouldn’t say evangelical or particularly obsessed.

I started using it because some of the guys showing up to my late 90’s LAN parties were dual booting Slackware it and it had cool looking boot up messages compared to DOS or Windows at the time. The whole idea of dual booting operating systems was pretty damn wild to me at the time too.

After a while it became obvious to me that Slackware '96 was way more reliable than DOS or Windows 95 at the time, a web browser like Netscape could take out the whole system pretty easily on Windows, but when Netscape crashed on Linux, you opened up a shell and killed off whatever was left of it and started a new one.

I had machines that stayed up for years in the late 90’s and that was pretty well impossible on Windows.

Often on Linux group membership changes only take effect on login. So you could try logging out of your session and logging back in after your group changes to test that theory out.

The context of this post is Linux on AMD cards, is there any support at all for raytracing or upscaling of any sort on Linux on either AMD or Nvidia? Serious question.

A 2 gigabit event isn’t big enough to be considered a real attack, a service like cloudflare can sink a 2 terrabit attack every day of the week.

Building a DDoS protection service ( that isn’t just black holing traffic ) starts with having enough bandwidth to throw away the attack volume plus keep your desired traffic working and have a bit of overhead to work your mitigation strategies.

What this means is to DIY a useful service you start by buying a couple of terrabits of bandwith in ‘small’ chunks of a hundred gigabits or so in most peering locations around the globe and then you build a proxy layer like cloudflare on top of it with a team of smart dudes to automate outsmarting the bad guys.

I don’t like cloudflare either, but the barriers to entry in this industry are epic.