>and a lot of blink codes when you encounter bad sticks
Which sadly happens quite a lot with ECC DDR4 for whatever reason.
>If you're feeling cheap and are okay with the previous generation, the Haswell/Broadwell-based T7910 is also serviceable
The T5810 is a known machine, very tinkerable, just works with NVMe adapters (they show up as a normal NVMe boot option in UEFI) and even have TPM 2.0 (!!!) after a BIOS update. Overall, they are the 2nd best affordable Haswell-EP workstations after the HP Z440 in my opinion.
>E5 v4 revision CPU
They are less efficient than V3 CPUs due to the lockdown of Turbo Boost, but then again on a Precision you'd have to flash the BIOS with an external flasher regardless to get TB back.
Forgot about Dell gimping Turbo Boost on that firmware.
Another route is the PowerEdge T440 (tower server), which does respect Broadwell-EP turbo logic without a reflash. Not quite as quiet as a workstation, though.
It's not an issue with Dell it's an issue with how the chips themselves are designed. There are buggy microcodes in the Haswell-EP series which can be exploited to unlock FULL Turbo Boost on ALL cores of the CPUs. This is NOT possible on Broawdwell-EP.
More than 30 years later, you can still run winquake.exe on Windows 11. Fullscreen does not support widescreen but the windowed mode still works flawlessly. As much as Microsoft has been questionable lately, their commitment to backward compatibility is impressive.
I love this about Windows so much it's hard to explain to somebody who doesn't understand why it matters. :-)
I know what you’re trying to say. That Proton IS Windows at some level. And so MS gets some credit for that. But they don’t.
A lot of actual work went into Proton and into making games work therein.
MS is a slow, lumbering, monoculture that has lacked innovation and creativity for a very long time. I don’t see how freezing APIs or keeping old APIs around (mostly through versioned DLL hell) as some grand accomplishment.
A lot of work went into Proton, yes. But the work was to get Proton working. Not individual games. So MS should get all of the credit that Quake still runs today, and Proton should get all the credit to get Windows app to run under Linux.
If Windows would not have the amazing backwards compatibility it has, then would Quake still run on Proton, if it would not run on Windows today? And if so, how much effort would have the Proton team had to invest to make that happen?
My guess is, an impossibly high effort that would benefit Quake, but perhaps not other games of that era.
Microsoft is the reason Quake works on Proton still today.
Why do we need Windows 11 to support old software when we can use an older version of Windows, in an emulator at that. Playing Quake doesn't require a secure, patched box, and if a secure environment is the point of extreme backwards compat, then it seems like endless backwards compatibility is not the best way to achieve that goal (sandboxing an old, emulated OS, for example, comes to mind as more reasonable).
Letting Microsoft play this backwards compatibility card feels not healthy for the evolution of software or the diversification of the industry.
Breaking backwards compatibility is bad for diversity, because it "culls" a whole load of otherwise working software that is not being maintained. You can see the reverse of this on the app stores, which have mandatory update policies.
Regularly doing it basically forces developers into a limited-term license, subscription, or SaaS model, in order to pay for the upgrade churn required by the platform.
And a lot of it is just churn. Not evolution, not better, just .. different.
> it "culls" a whole load of otherwise working software
It doesn't cull it, you can still run Windows 3.11 or 98SE as well under emulation as on contemporary original hardware.
If anything, breaking backwards compatibility forces you to run your old software in an "authentic" environment, versus say, on some hardware/software combination tens of generations removed. Like, why would you want to run SkiFree in Windows 11, it feels like an abomination to me, almost disrespectful to the game. I don't want to see my old programs in Windows 11...
>you can still run Windows 3.11 or 98SE as well under emulation as on contemporary original hardware
That's mostly how the backwards compatibility works anyway, just under the hood. The OS is using all sorts of compatibility layers to make the older software sit on top of and work on the newer OS versions. It just mostly works flawlessly, so you don't think about it unless it doesn't work automatically and forces you to go into the properties and tinker with which compatibility layer to manually apply.
I didn't know that, but I would have assumed that. And that being the case, the difference seems to be whether you want to run your old program in a Windows 11 chrome or a Windows 3.11 chrome :shrug:
> not healthy for the evolution of software or the diversification of the industry.
Not good for evolution, but fantastic for diversification. Being able to write a program that solves a problem and be "done" with it is fantastic, but having the platform walk out from under you requires ongoing work. That ongoing work often demands payment...so platforms that constantly change tend to be highly commercialized.
Open source on Android suffers from this. So many "done" apps are no longer compatible.
And the changes to the underlying platform may not be benevolent. Android, for example, deprecated their API for filesystem access and introduced a scoped replacement that was two orders of magnitude slower. They then banned Syncthing, a file sharing tool, from the Play Store because it doesn't use the latest APIs (APIs are so slow that SyncThing is unusable...the opened bug hasn't been addressed in the intervening years).
The lesson is that any platform that is a moving target presents a risk to both the developer and the user, as that movement concentrates power with the platform owner in a way more more slow moving (or static) platform does not.
All that said, I use Linux 100x as much as I use Windows, because it gives me other kinds of control.
Because it's not limited to games, forcing updates cuts of a lot of apps that can't invest enough in updating.
Also the barrier to use you're suggesting with alternative install/emulator is pretty high for an average user. It also breaks integration with everything else (e.g., a simple alt-tab will show the VM instead of 2 apps running inside)
Also because a lot of progress is regression, so having an old way to opt out into is nice
Integration is the biggest thing. While some desktop VM hosts provide various integration bits like file sharing and rootless window support, the experience is rarely seemless.
Drawing a few examples from an old Raymond Chen blog post[1], integrations required for seemless operation include
• Host files must be accessible in guest applications using host paths and vice versa. Obviously this can't apply to all files, but users will at least expect their document files to be accessible, including documents located on (possibly drive-letter-mapped) network shares.
• Cut-and-paste and drag-and-drop need to work between host and guest applications.
• Taskbar notification icons created by guest applications must appear on the host's taskbar.
• Keyboard layout changes must be synchronized between host and guest.
These are, at least to a useful degree, possible. Integrations that are effectively impossible in the general case:
• Using local IPC mechanisms between host and guest applications. Chen's examples are OLE, DDE, and SendMessage, but this extends to other mechanisms like named pipes, TCP/IP via the loopback adapter, and shared memory.
• Using plug-ins running in the guest OS in host applications and vice versa. At best, these could be implemented through some sort of shim mechanism on a case-by-case basis, assuming the plug-in mechanism isn't too heavily sandboxed, and that the shim mechanism doesn't introduce unacceptable overhead (e.g., latency in real-time A/V applications).
Finally, implementing these integrations without complicated (to implement and configure) safeguards would effectively eliminate most of the security benefits of virtualization.
emulation is addressed in the next sentence? Also see the sibling comment with more details on the list of issues if you "simulate" the OS instead of using the real one
You don't necessarily "need" it but what feature of Win11 or OSX is worth the making all existing software inoperable? Can't say I have seen one outside of gets security updates.
I don't know, you could do something totally wild like re-imagining the filesystem... I, for one, would love a flat blob store organized in some other way than folders or filenames. I think there's tons of interesting things that could and would be explored without backwards compatibility holding us back. That's how the original OS X came to be.
But what I really don't get, is why we need backwards compat when computers can run computers, and old operating systems hardly demand resources on a modern computer.
It only matters if you don't have the source to your programs. So yes, there is a huge corpus of programs where this matters. But there is also a large library of programs where the source is available and backwards compatibility does not matter nearly as much.
As a concrete example, the source to quake is available, this has allowed quake to run on so many platforms and windows infamous backwards compatibility has little effect in keeping quake running, windows could have broken backwards compatibility and quake would still run on it.
if you have the source to those programs, and are willing to (sometimes significantly) rewrite parts of them and recompile (see: wayland, for example)
The amazing part is that you don't need to do this in windows whether you have the source or not. I am a linux user, but for all their faults, Microsoft got their backwards compatibility stuff right. Something that the oss world, on average, needs to be convinced it's a desirable thing.
SDL was born from Icculus to run commercial games without issues on X/GL or whatever.
So, it's actually a NOT in your clause. More like a 99% of the existing graphical games modulo some oddies with Ogre3D and friends.
At least in order to be playable under Linux. Said this, the 99% of the games from that era will run perfectly fine with OssPD->Pipewire (install OSSPD, just run the game) and 32bit SDL1 libraries.
Quake is a rare exception. Source availability is rare on Windows, falling to almost zero for commercial applications (for obvious reasons). There's also plenty of corporate internal applications where the one company that is using it is also the only one with the source .. and they've lost it.
Quite a lot of game source is lost entirely even by the original authors.
Not to mention that even if you do have the source, changing the use of an API can be a really expensive software modification project. Even Microsoft haven't been entirely systematic, you can easily find WinForms control panel dialogs in Win11.
Some embedded Windows apps exist in this space as well. Oscilloscopes and other expensive scientific instruments that run Windows XP.
I wonder if your statement was ironic, as the article you posted does not describe Reform as far-right?
From the article:
> In March 2024, the BBC called the party far-right but soon retracted its statement and apologised to Reform UK, writing that describing the party as far-right "fell short of our usual editorial standards".[219] Commenting on the incident, the professor of politics Tim Bale wrote that labelling Reform UK as far-right is unhelpful, and that it "causes too visceral a reaction and at the same time is too broad to be meaningful". Bale noted the importance of distinguishing between the "extreme right" and "populist radical right", and stated that parties described as far right should instead be "more precisely labelled".[220] Reform UK itself rejects the descriptor, and has threatened legal action against media using it.[221] In May 2025, Ross Clark, writing in The Spectator, argued Reform is "now a left-wing party", by attracting disillusioned Labour voters with stances on restoring welfare benefits, nationalising the steel industry with 50% of utilities and increasing government spending (including the NHS).[222]
I can relate to this probably the most out of everything I've seen on HN so far. My fiancee is pansexual and overall seems to prefer women, so I surely am quite a bit of a surprise in her life (to the point where her family laughed at the fact that I 'fixed her' the first time I met them...) as a straight man. I know she loves me, I love her with all my heart but I am aware that at some point she may want to change me for someone of the opposite sex. I have therefore decided that as long as this does not happen behind my back I will support her, even if that means I have to endure a lot of pain.
I don't really see why you should support that. In your case your wife is not closeted and living a lie, everything is out in the open. So deciding to change you for someone else, regardless of sex, is no different than if I decided to change my wife for another woman. We give stuff up to make a commitment to someone else. It doesn't always work out and I'm not saying people should stay together when they don't want to, but I am questioning your pre-acceptance of your partner wanting to shag someone else even though that would clearly make you very unhappy.
"Prefer women" could be in a sexual context, romantic context, platonic, etc. and the commenter above didn't define it. I imagine it's hard enough for bisexual people to be asked if they're "living a lie" by having to choose a side.
They aren't choosing a side, they're choosing a person. Being bisexual surely just opens the field to more potential mates, but once you're with someone the same rules apply as to folks in any other relationship. And I don't want to sound too conservative - if you choose to be with someone and both agree to have an open relationship of some kind, or any other mutually agreed kind of thing, that's no-ones business but yourselves.
In this case though, they're saying their partner is pansexual - open to many kinds of sexual activities. And they're saying that they'd be accepting if their partner needed to go and do sexy stuff with someone else even though it'd cause them a lot of pain (that's my reading of it, not having a platonic friendship with someone else as you mentioned). I'm asking why? Having a different to hetrosexual appetite before going into a relationship shouldn't give you special rules once you're in one - it's absolutely no different than if a hetrosexual person wanted to sleep around. OK if your relationship allows for that, really not OK if it's going to cause your partner/spouse/love pain, as they said.
For you and anyone else reading this I recommend the book "the designer relationship" - its actually about polyamory but I think it does a great job solidifying the concept that really, a relationship between two people can be basically whatever they want it to be, not defined by social norms. What comes first is open and honest communication and negotating through hard conversations to find a way of mutually meeting everyones needs
FWIW my wife is bi and dates women, not that really ever bothered me but in no way has it ever been more damaging to our marriage beyond basic scheduling conflicts. I will admit I would have had a much harder time opening up to her being with other men though. Im lucky that she has never fallen in love and wanted to run away with one of em I guess, but partly thats because our marriage is otherwise great and shes already free to explore her gay side so why would she want to leave?
I admit that when reading the description of your relationship (I don't mean to be disrespectful, for what it's worth) I can't help but wonder how it can possibly be consistent with "a relationship between two people can be basically whatever they want it to be." It really reads like the relationship is whatever _she_ wants it to be.
If you had come into the relationship with the understanding that you'd both date/have sex with other people then great; it doesn't matter what other people think. However, when you say that it was hard for you to accept her being with other men, and that you're lucky that "she has never fallen in love and wanted to run away with one of em", damn. My first instinct is that you should take your own advice: find or design a relationship where you don't have to accept this.
I realize that some of my knee jerk reaction might just be instinct/cultural values, I mean no disrespect.
In experiments they have found that women are much more ok with sexual infidelity than men. They aren’t fully ok with it just more ok with it than men by a huge margin. There’s a huge gender difference and given how culture doesn’t differentiate this aspect in terms of teaching, logically the only origin is biological.
It fits with evolutionary psychology as well. If a wife engages in sexual infidelity a man could end up raising a child that is not his own and that is a huge evolutionary cost so men evolved to be extremely guarded against sexual affairs while for women the cost is just a man potentially raising another child. She loses resources of the man but if the man doesn’t raise another child it’s not as huge of a deal. This isn’t stuff I’m making up… it’s academic.
For you to be in a polyamorous relationship you are definitely overriding your default biological drive and giving evolutionary advantages to your mate (if she is female and you male). Birth control largely eliminates this cost but the emotional states are the same in the sense that is a form of submission. Case in point: Most likely it is the female partner that initiated polyamory and the male partner who had to learn how to accept it.
Between this, a post about disrespecting your wife if they have sex during an open relationship, and your other post about emotional violence being inflicted on a child if their parent comes out as gay, you need to seek some therapy. This is major incel vibes.
You have a right to have firm boundaries and communicate them clearly to your partner. Doing so will usually make a relationship and life together better, not worse because your partner will respect your honesty and strength. If her doing that will hurt you, I strongly recommend you communicate clearly and up front that you know she has those interests, but following up on them is a deal breaker for you, and you need her to be honest about that. You’re not even married yet, have the conversation now! It won’t be good for you or for her to be an angry shell of yourself like the dad in the article, making a sacrifice you never wanted to make.
I'm only mentioning this as a potential future divorce topic.
It's not up to debate whether or not I accept cheating because I've already set it as an immovable barrier multiple times: come into sexual contact with anybody else during the marriage and she's going to be thrown out of the window with all of her belongings.
But if she comes to me with honesty and hasn't done anything yet - why would I want to be on bad terms with her as she leaves? I can only be sad at her decision.
dude fuck that - cheating is cheating - don't be that guy (unless you're into that sort of thing, of course). if she feels that you aren't the one for her, drop it like it's hot. there's plenty of other fish in the sea
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