In hindsight, I would have gone for an AMD deskop replacement laptop instead of the Dell Intel-based gaming laptop that I purchased last year. The CPU is the best the Raptor Lake line has to offer in mobile format (i7-13900hx) but there is no conceivable way for the laptop, ast thick as it is, to cool it beyond very bursty workloads.
This affects the laptop with other issues, like severe thermal throttling both in CPU and GPU.
A utility like throttlestop allows me to place maximums on power usage so I don't hit the tjMax during regular use. That is around 65-70W for the CPU - which can burst to 200+W in its allowed "Performance" mode. Absolutely nuts.
I used a privacy.com Mastercard linked to my bank account for Oracle's payment method to upgrade to PAYG. It may have changed, this was a few months ago. Set limit to 100, they charged and reverted $100.
Sort of related, but in the two or three times I've lucid dreamt, one of them was flying and having relatively functional control of my direction. Not sure how/why my brain rendered this sensation having never experienced it in real life, but it felt strange and novel and not easy to direct.
It was akin to a sensation of VR games where my mind seems to interpolate real-life expectations with visual input, but not quite. Not quite "brain-computer-interfaces", but perhaps a glimpse with current tech.
I'm not well-versed enough on sci-fi to be able to connect more dots than this, but I am assuming these are common tropes.
The Mass Effect series describes the Reapers as (copied from masseffect.fandom.com - I <3 this game's lore):
"The Reapers are a highly-advanced machine race of synthetic-organic starships. The Reapers reside in dark space: the vast, mostly starless space between galaxies. They hibernate there, dormant for fifty thousand years at a time, before returning to the galaxy...the Reapers spare little concern for whatever labels other races choose to call them, and merely claim that they have neither beginning nor end."
The other pop-sci-fi analogue I can think of is The Borg.
Along these same lines, the tabletification of Mac OS is annoying. A friend asked me to help with importing photos from the Apple Photo app on his brand new desktop Mac.
The sequence of events was:
Lightroom Legacy needs photos imported because the new Lightroom (cloud/subscription version I believe) has a different workflow, interface and apparently, features, so he's using both for the time being.
So he follows guides on Adobe to import from iPhoto through a plugin.
I had to learn after much google-fu that iPhoto has been replaced by the new Photo app. No compatible libraries found, says the unhelpful error message.
No way to import his Photos library into it without first exporting all photos into a separate folder and importing that one into Lightroom Legacy. Why there is no compatibility shim/layer for that functionality I will never understand...
He refuses to export and reimport all his photos because he has A LOT of them. He does photography as a hobby primarily, but has been using his iPad and iPhone for a while without a Mac PC and was astonished at not being able to do such a simple process.
Part of my troubleshooting involved looking for a potential directory where the Photos app stored the files. It's some sort of package file that creates what seems to be the equivalent of a virtual directory. So I search for the Mac Drive icon... that took me to google, to then Finder, settings, and enable showing the drive. Why the hell does Apple hide the frigging storage device?!!! (I know why... but it's maddening)
One more reason to never want to use or support any Apple product in the future.
See, the file system is a fine system for general data, but if you have data of a specific kind, then there’s often a better way than just dumping them in the file system. That’s always been Apple’s approach: let data assigned to a specific app be handled by that app [1].
Apple’s approach has also been to allow export of that data into standard interoperable formats (be it music, photos, emails, contacts, calendars, etc.).
And FWIW, the photos are in “~/Pictures/Photos Library” - that must have been very difficult to find.
[1] it had two pieces of metadata, content type and creator, for files in Mac OSes prior to OS X, when it regressed to the windows/Unix way of handling things with inelegant file extensions.
Windows has a Pictures folder. Before they started screwing with the OneDrive directories, it used to be in ONE location. Now it's in OneDrive\directory location, which works, even if it annoys me. The upside being automatic backup and restore. That Pictures folder is accessible systemwide and is accessible through EVERY application that can browse directories.
The Photos library on the Mac was not accessible via Lightroom Legacy. He (& I) could not locate it through the "Browse" functionality within the application. I think I could open the photos through finder, but could not import them through Lightroom Legacy. I could, however, Open With: from the Photos app, which then imports into the application just fine. This irked him enough to not want to do it, and I explained that it was the only way to do so, or otherwise export and import the desired photos in bulk.
I see what you're saying, but Apple's approach was clearly not intuitive for me, nor the Mac user. It's what it is, but Apple needs to facilitate working with their virtual folders/libraries natively through applications, not force users to resort to using workarounds... to export into interoperable formats for applications that run natively on their OS. Either Adobe is screwy or Apple is screwy here, but I'm leaning on Apple so far.
There has always been a vision in computing where you can access the same data with different tools.
In the Kernigan and Plauger Software Tools book that describes the Unix user space you could use tools like wc, awk, sort, uniq, and grep, bound together with the shell, to do all kinds of things on plain text files.
As a photographer of course I want to share images between Lightroom Classic and DxO and as a computer graphics “artist” (I almost want to say “technician”) I want to work with images in Photoshop, web editors, tools I write to create images, etc.
Shouldn’t I be able to make music with GarageBand and then listen to it in iTunes and then write a program that plays it through my smart speakers at sunrise to wake me up?
Office 95 revolved around COM which meant that a Microsoft Word file was a composite file that could also contain data from other programs like PowerPoint and Excel so I could embed a small spreadsheet in a word document. (The fact that this system was documented and open was a weakness as much as a strength because you never knew if the recipient of a file had all the applications to open it)
Currently Office uses a documented XML and ZIP based file format. It is easy-peasey to load data in Excel format into pandas to do data analysis (less error prone than CSV even.). It’s not hard to write a program in PHP or Java that makes an Excel sheet complete with formulas for somebody to fill in then have them upload it back to a web site and suck the data out.
Locked in data is one reason why the cloud and mobile age feels like a step backwards than forwards, never mind the possibility of losing your data because you couldn’t pay the bill or your vendor got bought by Google, etc.
What bothers me is not that it displays web results but that it forces Bing results and forces Edge to open said links despite it not being the default system wide web browser.
Yeah it’s even embarrassing for Microsoft, having to lure people into using edge. That may be the raison d’être of these inline web search results.
It’s a crappy feature anyway, I never use it. It doesn’t get in my way so it’s not a big deal to me. In any case if that’s all there is to this ad thing, the drama around it is surprising to me.
I can tell you that when I moved from a contract position to full time at Dell Services (now NTT Data Services), they had to review and possibly? interview 2 additional candidates despite hiring from within.
>>The IT department decided they were done with their pets, moved everything to a big vSphere cluster, and backed it by a giant RAID-5 array. There was a disk failure, but that’s ok, RAID-5 can handle that.
Precisely why, when I was charged with setting up a 100 TB array for a law firm client at previous job, I went for RAID-6, even though it came with a tremendous write speed hit. It was mostly archived data that needed retention for a long period of time, so it wasn't bad for daily usage, and read speeds were great. Had the budget been greater, RAID 10 would've been my choice. (requisite reminder: RAID is not backup)
Not related, but they were hit with a million dollar ransomware attack (as in: the hacker group requested a million dollar payment), so that write speed limitation was not the bottleneck considering internet speed when restoring. Ahhh.... what a shitshow, the FBI got involved, and never worked for them again. I did warn them though: zero updates (disabled) and also disabled firewall on the host data server (windows) was a recipe for disaster. Within 3 days they got hit, and the boss had the temerity to imply I had something to do with it. Glad I'm not there anymore, but what a screwy opsec situation I thankfully no longer have to support.
> the boss had the temerity to imply I had something to do with it.
What was your response? I feel like mine would be "you are now accusing me of a severe crime, all further correspondence will be through my lawyer, good luck".
> even though it came with a tremendous write speed hit
Only on a writes < stripe. If your writes are bigger then you can have way more speed than RAID10 on the same set, limited only by the RAID controller CPU.
Due to network limitations and contract budgeting, I never got the chance to upgrade them to 10 Gb, but can confirm I could hit 1000 Mbps (100+ MB/s) on certain files on RAID-6. It sadly averaged out to about 55-60 MB/s writes (HDD array, Buffalo), which again, for this use case was acceptable, but below expectations. I didn't buy the unit, I didn't design the architecture it was going into, merely a cog in the support machinery.
>For instance, per the article most of these "Nones" still believe in God or Gods but don't subscribe to a particular religion. They're definitely not atheists as you might expect from the label.
As an atheist, not that it makes me special in any way, since we're all born tabula rasas, it does work in favor of the slow elimination of blind faith due to the dilution of the importance of strongest way of dissemination of that poison. Personal faith has the capability to dissolve organized religion into nothingness. That is the ultimate succession toward worldwide secularism and hopefully, secular humanism.
This affects the laptop with other issues, like severe thermal throttling both in CPU and GPU.
A utility like throttlestop allows me to place maximums on power usage so I don't hit the tjMax during regular use. That is around 65-70W for the CPU - which can burst to 200+W in its allowed "Performance" mode. Absolutely nuts.