I got 4K TVs for both of my kids, they're dirt cheap-- sub $200. I'm surprised the Steam hardware survey doesn't show more. A lot of my friends also set their kids up on TVs, and you can't hardly buy a 1080P TV anymore.
Does Steam hardware survey show the resolution of your usual desktop, or your gaming resolution? eg I run at 4k in Windows normally, but quite often run games at 1080p.
The integrated wifi/bt on my AM5 board was so bad I had to disable it and use a PCIe card.
For obvious reasons AMD boards don’t tend to ship with Intel wifi, but in my experience anything else sucks. The intel 6e cards are amazing and dirt cheap.
> For obvious reasons AMD boards don’t tend to ship with Intel wifi
Funnily enough, the threadripper (at least WRX90, and at least asrock) come with an Intel dual 10Gb LAN card. Probably because none of the alternatives are good enough for a pro board.
Was it the 9560 by chance? (The original AC / wifi5 one) Those were terrible. Our house isn’t practical to wire, so I had a lot of them. All swapped to AX210 cards (6E) and those work phenomenally.
I also dual boot, in addition to being an incurable distro hopper, and these AX210 cards worked out of the box in basically everything.
Yeah I’ve got a Lenovo Legion laptop that I dual-boot Windows and Linux. I haven’t tried in a while but for at least a year it was impossible to soft-reboot to switch OSes if you wanted wifi to work. My best theory was that Windows and Linux had different firmware that they loaded into it at boot and they weren’t reloading that after a soft reboot (just using whatever was already running on the card).
I had the MX900. I used it with my 15" Powerbook G4. It was wonderful. Over time however the connection got worse and worse to the point it was basically non-functional. I assume it was the proliferation of 2.4ghz wifi and the early bluetooth being unable to cope.
Another possibility: USB-3 proliferation and inadequate shielding. Many 3 devices spew so much 2.4ghz noise that it interferes with wifi, much less lower power protocols.
I do something similar for an audit trail at work. I work with the type of data where we may need to know who looked at what and when. All those records are stored in a separate SQLite DB (main DB is postgres), and I cycle it out once per calendar year. That makes archival trivial, and should a compliance person need to look at it a simple desktop app can open the file easily.
You can't beat SQLite for ease of use. I'd try it out and simulate some load to see if SQLite can keep up, if you keep your inserts simple I bet it can.
My wife is Japanese and we buy Japanese style rice grown in California (Nishiki Premium). She still complains it isn't as good, but my theory is it's actually the water used in prep. Our Wisconsin water is incredibly hard, and water in Tokyo won't scale a kettle EVER. It's very, very good.
You could run an experiment pretty trivially to determine if the hardness of the water is the issue. Get one of those charcoal filters, get some coffee filters, and cook some rice with various combinations of the filtering.
The previous place I lived in had very hard water, and I found that running the water through both a coffee filter and then a Brita charcoal filter worked rather well to soften the water and improve the quality of the rice I was cooking.
Try The Rice Factory, a rice importer in New York state. They import prize rice from Japan, in refrigerated containers. It's a clear step up in quality from anything grown in California.
Well yeah, but you're comparing steak from the blue ribbon cow to Tyson, I sure hope they win. You might still be right about regional quality but you should at least compare the best both have to offer.
I would be amazed if rice grown by Japanese immigrants like Koda or Tamkai couldn't reach the level and it really was the land that made the difference.
Nishiki uses an offshoot of Calrose rice, which is okay but popular Japanese rice is often Koshihikari or Yumipurika: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nishiki_rice (do click the link for SICK web art on a random wikipedia page)
My family buys bags of flour every time we're in Canada because the old recipes apparently don't taste quite right with anything else. We'll probably keep doing it because it's kind of fun.
My wife's PC is a i7-2600 circa 2011. I have the ram maxed out, an SSD, and an nvidia card and for day-to-day stuff you'd never know it wasn't brand new-- seriously. It even runs Windows 11 perfectly with the Rufus modified installer.
If you're chasing FPS in AAA games it's not going to cut it, but it boots in seconds, loads apps quickly, plays streaming video perfectly...
I'm using an old x99 board for my desktop currently. If I swap out the i7 with a Xeon it can take up to 512GB of ram. That would be pricey, but I could do 256 and the Xeon for under $300 total. Still a lot for a toy, and I'm sure it would be super slow...
From a somewhat low-paying job that has no transferable skills? How big is the pension? If it's not nearly as large as the person's prior paycheck, it doesn't sound like a good deal at all.
Someone gave me an NT4 CD when I was a kid and on the jewel case it said it supported x86, PPC, I think some other architectures too. I was disappointed I could never get our PowerMac to boot from it. :P
I had a job in 2006 where the sysadmin ran the entire shop on a single OpenVMS server with two 500Mhz Alpha CPUs. It was our file server, AD server (somehow), DB server, web server, everything.
I just looked it up and that CPU came out in 1996, at the same time Intel released their 200Mhz Pentium. Alpha was way ahead of their time.
Somewhere there is a blog about how that CPU had some hardware bug that prevented it from hitting 1ghz. if it didn't have that I'd be a 1ghz 64bit processor in a desktop early on. I really cannot find the blog. It was down a rabbit hole of how Intel AMD both picked some IBM mainframe to base their designs off but AMD went for an older quirky design but it allows a lot of advantages. Anyway, search engines are awful now.
I tried a few Kagi searches, but found Wikipedia claiming that at least one Alpha ran faster:
> The Alpha 21164 or EV5 became available in 1995 at processor frequencies of up to 333 MHz. In July 1996 the line was speed bumped to 500 MHz, in March 1998 to 666 MHz. Also in 1998 the Alpha 21264 (EV6) was released at 450 MHz, eventually reaching (in 2001 with the 21264C/EV68CB) 1.25 GHz.
I used that all the time from my flip phone. It took forever to type out a google search and results could take a minute or two to arrive but it was better than nothing.
Primarily I used it to google the address of a place I wanted to go so I could enter that in my TomTom. Times have changed.
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