I got the first intel Mac Mini (Core Solo), and it only survived a year or two before something on the logic board literally burned up. Not a good first impression on the switchover to the new architecture :(
Uhh, these 12VHPWR connectors seem like a serious fire risk. How are they not being recalled? I just got a 5060ti , now I'm wishing I went AMD instead.. what the hell :(
Whoa, the stuff covered in the rest of the post is just as egregious. Wow! Maybe time to figure out which AMD models compares performance-wise and sell this thing, jeez.
Yeah wait, what happened with EVGA? (guess I can search it up, of course) I was browsing gaming PC hardware recently and noticed none of the GPUs were from EVGA .. I used to buy their cards because they had such a good warranty policy (in my experience)... :\
In 2022 claiming a lack of respect from Nvidia, low margins, and Nvidia's control over partners as just a few of the reasons, EVGA ended its partnership with Nvidia and ceased manufacturing Nvidia GPUs.
> I used to buy their cards because they had such a good warranty policy (in my experience)... :\
It's so wild to hear this as in my country, they were not considered anything special over any other third party retailer as we have strong consumer protection laws which means its all much of a muchness.
The big bombshell IMO is that, according to EVGA at least, nVidia just comes up with the MSRP for each card all on its own, and doesn't even tell its partners what that number will be before announcing it to the public. I elaborate on this a bit more in a response to a sibling comment.
I've never seen this accusation before. I want to give the benefit of the doubt but I suspect it's confusing scalping with MSRP-baiting.
It's important to note that nVidia mostly doesn't sell or even make finished consumer-grade GPUs. They own and develop the IP cores, and they contract with TSMC and others to make the chips, and they do make limited runs of "Founders Edition" cards, but most cards that are available to consumers undergo final assembly and retail boxing according to the specs of the partner -- ASUS, GIGABYTE, MSI, formerly EVGA, etc.
MSRP-baiting is what happens when nVidia sets the MSRP without consulting any of its partners and then those partners go and assemble the graphics cards and have to charge more than that to make a reasonable profit. This has been going on for many GPU generations now, but it's not scalping. We can question why this "partnership" model even exists in the first place, since these middlemen offer very little unique value vs any of their competitors anymore, but again nVidia has the upper hand here and thus the lion's share of the blame.
Scalping is when somebody who's ostensibly outside of the industry buys up a bunch of GPUs at retail prices, causing a supply shortage, so that they can resell the cards at higher prices. While nVidia doesn't have direct control over this (though I wouldn't be too surprised if it came out that there was some insider involvement), they also never do very much to address it either. Getting all the hate for this without directly reaping the monetary benefit sounds irrational at first, but artificial scarcity and luxury goods mentality are real business tactics.
Then you didn't follow the situation, since majority of EVGA anger was because nVidia wouldn't buy back their chips after EVGA failed to sell cards at hugely inflated price point.
Then they tried to weaponize PR to beat nVidia into buying back their unsold cores they thought they'll massively profit off with inflated crypto hype prices.
Ok, this seems to be based entirely on speculation. It could very well be accurate but there's no statements I can find from either nVidia or EVGA corroborating it. Since it's done by the manufacturer themselves, it's more like gouging rather than scalping.
But more to the point, there's still a trail of blame going back to nVidia here. If EVGA could buy the cores at an inflated price, then nVidia should have raised its advertised MSRP to match. The reason I call it MSRP-baiting is not because I care about EVGA or any of these other rent-seekers, it's because it's a calculated lie weaponized against the consumer.
As I kind of implied already, it's probably for the best if this "partner" arrangement ends. There's no good reason nVidia can't sell all of its desktop GPUs directly to the consumer. EVGA may have bet big and lost from their own folly, but everybody else was in on it too (except video gamers, who got shafted).
Maybe, but that's not a great analogy. The standardized, user-accessible sockets mean many different CPUs can be paired with many different motherboards. There's also a wide variety of sizes and features in motherboards, plus they have buses for connecting various kinds of peripherals. GPUs have none of this flexibility or extensibility.
Yeah, but you’re missing the specialization angle.
NVIDIA and Intel as companies are specialized in the design (and in the latter case, manufacturing) of chips. Board OEMs are specialized in making a consumer-ready product, maintaining worldwide sales and distribution channels, and consumer relations.
Of course, it wouldn’t be impossible for NVIDIA to start doing these things on their own (see Apple, who designs chips, designs computers around those chips, and operates retail stores where those computers are sold), but presumably NVIDIA prefers the current arrangement, where they can just focus on the chips and leave the rest to OEMs.
See also Intel under Gelsinger, who sold off the NUC and server lines (finished products) to focus on the core business (x86 chips).
Ironically, Intel's GPU business seems to be entirely in-house. Though maybe it too will get spun off in whole or in part.
As far as nVidia is concerned, they lost the privilege to be treated like a small fabless startup. They are regularly ranked as the highest valued company on the U.S. stock market. They clearly can make and sell the whole card themselves, so having GIGABYTE, ASUS, and co. hang around and take the heat for their business decisions feels pretty scummy. It's also clearly bad for the consumer, as Founders Edition cards actually do sell for MSRP. This partner crap is all an obsolete relic of a bygone era, being drawn out well past its prime.
My favorite was dragging a text clipping of "secret about box" to the desktop in System 7.5 and it would spawn a breakout game with the dev team's names as "bricks" :) fun times.
I wish these were legal. I do a lot of hiking in forest/mountain trails and it gets SUPER old having someone going along the trail bumping some loud music on a big Bluetooth speaker in their bag. Like, really? Get some earbuds and cut that shit out please. I came to nature to be in nature, not to listen to the latest hardstyle tracks emanating from some dude's backpack. I don't really see why I shouldn't be able to RF jam that shit since they're apparently allowed to jam my earbuds with their acoustic interference.
Completely agreed. I want to be able to talk to people from any modern reasonably-secure operating system. Specifically, I found that there was no possible way to use Signal on OpenBSD natively. The only [poor] workaround was to create a Linux VM and use the Signal app for Linux in there. Frankly, if a communication protocol isn't usable on BSD it's not acceptable to me.
I've had a broken Signal account for like a year. I migrated from an older phone and the process didn't work because apparently the version of Signal I had on the old phone was "too old" or something? (why didn't the new destination phone's copy of Signal tell me this?) ... I've been waiting, hoping they fix the issue where I can re-register my phone without having to delete the app and lose all my message history with photos from family etc. For a while, I could receive messages but not send them (yes, seriously). Recently a "re-register device" button appeared, but when I try to go through that process, I get the SMS with the verification code, I enter it, and the app crashes. Now I can't even access the message history because the app forces me to resume the "re-register" flow, but it doesn't work. I'm holding out hope that yet another app update will eventually fix THAT crash and I may indeed one day be able to use Signal again. Not that I want to, I'm not impressed with my experiences with it. :\
I only ever flash via CLI or via "drag & drop" method. The web flasher is great for first-timers but there are 100%-offline methods for all the devices.
For this use case - internet resiliency - I suspect the availability of un-flashed LoRa boards will be approximately zero in situations where it's needed. I agree that building an offline capable tool chain would be a good idea (perhaps all you'd need would be RasPi sd cards already flashed with everything needed to flash and configure common LoRa boards, and an archive of android apks?) But if I were allocating internet resiliency club resources, that'd be fairly low down my list.
I think that depends on the scope of the risk someone is trying to mitigate.
As an example, Hundred Rabbits is living in a situation with extremely iffy internet. They live on a sailbot and work in computing out there. They have had to build their own tools that were not dependent on a reliable internet, or even reliable power sources.
Collapse OS and Dusk OS are projects that are building tools to mitigate against the risk of society collapse. These are scenarios where, not only is there no internet, there is no longer any capability to fabricate any more silicon chips, and people start scavenging existing systems.
depends. I have a pretty good stash of compatible devices going back a few years (as I've been tinkering with meshtastic since 2022), and some are on very old firmware versions. If "SHTF" unexpectedly and I needed to deploy them to as many community members as possible, a good percentage of them would be useless because they are not compatible with the newer versions of the firmware. (on the upside, I do stash the firmware zips on my NAS, along with tons of other OSes, drivers, firmwares, etc.)
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