BombOmOm

Many of those are due for retirement purely due to age. There isn’t a replacement system for many of them. Furthermore, countermeasures have gotten better; future designs will better take these into account.

What the fuck is a GRAVITY BOMB

Simply means it is a free-fall bomb. They are cheaper to make as they don’t require an entire ICBM to deliver.

Ryzen laptops which feature capable integrated GPUs serve light and medium gaming tasks well. For heavy use, there are desktops, which is where the real power is. Portable systems like the Steam Deck are also hitting from the mobile side as well.

Gaming laptops have always been an extremely niche product and have gotten squeezed from all ends in recent years.

Tell Russia to stop issuing nuclear threats, we just got another one from Putin in the last 24 hours. It’s easy to dial back tensions when you aren’t being threatened with annihilation on a daily and weekly basis.

Pentium D processors are pretty power hungry, so factor that into your thoughts. Also make sure you put a modern OS on it that is getting security updates. It probably has Win XP or Vista installed which isn’t safe to connect to any network.

It should work fine as a router as long as you don’t enable any of the packet inspection features. For basic routing and firewalling for a home network it should be plenty powerful. I would personally put a small SATA SSD in it as the main drive and ditch the 90GB HDD.

As an additional idea, if you put a larger SATA drive or two into it you could make it a NAS.

they also had gay marriage … before we did

The US legalized gay marriage nationwide in 2015; Mexico didn’t achieve the same until 2022.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage (Timeline section)

Yeah, that’s the issue with the argument of ‘just turn it off’. You can turn it off, then tomorrow there will be another thing to turn off (hope you were paying attention to the news to find out what it was!). The next day an update will come along and turn half of them back on. The following the mental script you made to will stop working because they moved half the settings, etc, etc, etc.

It’s a never ending battle as Microsoft fundamentally does not respect their paying users. Microsoft could add a top-level toggle box to automatically disable bloatware, telemetry, and the privacy nightmare that is OP’s story about how the OS records everything you do, but they don’t have this. They don’t want you turning this stuff off, they don’t respect you.

I have not personally experienced a dropout with a SMR drive. That is from the reporting I saw when WD was shipping out SMR drives in their Red (NAS) lineup and people were having all kinds of issues with them. According to the article (below), it sounds like ZFS has the worst time with them. WD also lost a class action suit over marketing these as NAS drives, while failing to disclose they were SMR drives (which don’t work well in a NAS).

We want to be very clear: we agree with Seagate’s Greg Belloni, who stated on the company’s behalf that they “do not recommend SMR for NAS applications.” At absolute best, SMR disks underperform significantly in comparison to CMR disks; at their worst, they can fall flat on their face so badly that they may be mistakenly detected as failed hardware. Source

As you are looking for bulk data storage, the drive’s speed isn’t of too much concern. A 5400RPM drive is plenty.

If you are looking to put this drive into an array with other drives, make sure you get a CMR drive as SMR drives can drop out of arrays due to controllers finding them unresponsive. If a drive does not list it is CMR, it’s best to assume it isn’t. Seagate has a handy CMR chart, for example.

Additionally, if there are multiple spinning drives in the same enclosure, getting drives with vibration resistance is a good bonus. Most drives listed for NAS use will have this extra vibration resistance.

There are lots of random assholes on the internet. I like when they are forced to stay on the internet and not able to bring their asshollery into one’s real life.

If you have a username attached to a publicly posted comment, people will be able to see your history. The internet is forever. Publicly posted comments are, by definition, not private. Treating them as such, in any capacity, is a mistake.

The biggest thing is to not post personal details, or to even post accumulations of details over many comments that can narrow things down. The weather where you are at the time, what type of car you drive (or your lack of a car), what type of job you have, etc, etc, etc. On their own, each of these pieces of information don’t mean much, but you start putting them together and you can narrow things down considerably.

It is also not a bad idea to occasionally throw in some misinformation about yourself. Maybe you don’t drive a Corolla, but instead a Hilux.

Yep. Passcode unlocks are legally protected, unlike fingerprint unlocks. If you have any desire to keep the police out of your phone, you should not have fingerprint unlock enabled.

Best description of this I have seen is: the 5th Amendment protects compelled production what you know. It does not protect what you are (fingerprints, hair, etc).

For running an OS off a USB drive, I would recommend getting a USB to M.2 enclosure and putting an M.2 drive in it. This will give you better performance than any flash drive out there. The memory they put into normal flash drives is just slow slow slow for the use case of an OS.

M.2 Enclosure

M.2 Drive to go in it

Now, the only negative there is that is kinda expensive. If you really want to stick to a normal USB drive, maybe try this one out. But I would really like to stress that running an OS off a normal USB drive is going to be slow.

Really happy to see replaceable batteries! It’s a wear item and guaranteed to brick your device after a number of years if they aren’t replaceable.

It’s gross they were collecting them in the first place.

Assuming the accounting system this thing links with both does not protect from SQL injection attacks (many don’t, despite it being easy to protect against) and also has a table named “Bills” with a field named “amount”; what this would do is go through every single Bills record and half the value in the amount field. This would completely fuck the system, particularly when it came to billing and tax filing as the numbers for accounts billing and receivable wouldn’t even come close to matching each other. The accounting department would have a hell of a time fixing the damage.

Since the health is a float, yeah, it can create issues. A health of 0.000000001 is greater than zero, but that would almost assuredly be displayed to the user as simply 0, causing player confusion. The easiest solution is to have health and damage always be integers. A less great solution is to use a non-floating point decimal format. If such doesn’t exist in your language, you can emulate one by having health and damage both always be integers, but move the decimal point over, say two points, when displaying to the user.

I’m still annoyed with how verbose Objective-C is. Just check out what one has to do to create and concatenate a string. Madness:

    NSString * test = [[NSString alloc] initWithString:@"This is a test string."];
    NSString * test2 = [test stringByAppendingString:@" This value is appended."];

And god forbid you want to concatenate two things to a string:

    NSString * test3 = [test1 stringByAppendingString:[test2 stringByAppendingString:@" Adding a third value."]];

There are some decently priced drives available used on eBay and Mercari, but they tend to get snatched up pretty quickly. Official refurbs are probably your best bet if you don’t want new, I know B&H sells official refurbs.

The main issue is people think ‘I spent $200 on this, it still works, I’ll sell it for $150 used’ and don’t bother checking what is actually selling. Both eBay and Mercari have a sold listings filter, which is a great way for both buyers and sellers to figure out what things are actually worth.