The x86 architecture still going strong. I've always though Ryzen was a fitting name, AMD had Ryzen from the ashes and struck a blow to the long dominant Intel.
When I built my Ryzen 1800X desktop, I named it "AMD Ryzing". My optimism turned out well placed.
I recently upgraded from that to a Core Ultra 7 that I got from work (e-waste recycling). It was not my intended upgrade path, and I hope Lisa isn't too mad lol (I kept my Radeon though).
Sort of: there were about half a dozen in micro PCs in a load picked up from a hospital. I was kinda bummed that they were BIOS password locked (as were the other PCs from there). The model didn't have a password reset jumper (or any reset mechanism outside of contact Dell support with proof of purchase), so I couldn't sell them as whole systems, and stripped them for parts.
We get DDR5-based systems from time to time, but they're understandably rare. Most of the time, they still work. My rule: any day I come across DDR5 is a good day.
But why was the hospital throwing away what was essentially new high end systems that can run all the latest SW and operating systems? For what reason? It just makes no sense to me. Or am I too poor of a peasant to understand?
Are you by any chance in some super-rich part of the US? Because then no wonder your healthcare is so expensive when hospitals treat high end PCs as single use disposables. Here in Europe I sometimes see hospitals and doctors practices using 10+ year old PCs and still rocking the old 17-19 inch 1280x1024 CCFL LCD monitors from like the mid-2000s.
Regardless, I'd love to just run into high end PCs being thrown away here and pick them up for free, but where I live I see people barely throwing away their value-line Dell/HP Core 2 Duo towers with audacity to ask for 25+ Euros for their e-waste with the classic "no lowballs, I know what I got" attitude.
> For what reason? It just makes no sense to me. Or am I too poor of a peasant to understand?
I don't understand it either. Two scenarios make sense to me:
Somewhat probable: everyone in a department got upgraded, no exceptions. 'This is a really nice PC, but the boss says it has to go.' (There were about 100 i5 9th gen mini PCs (still OK), and 500 t640 thin clients in that same load.)
Less probable: some department got closed and cleaned out.
> Are you in some rich part of the US?
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Not particularly rich (rust belt), but healthcare is a significant part of the local economy. About 90% of healthcare here seems to run on HP, but Dells can appear.
> Here in Europe I sometimes see hospitals and doctors practices using 10+ year old PCs and still rocking the old 17-19 inch 1280x1024 CCFL LCD monitors from like the mid 2000s.
My stomach turns seeing the dozens of 24" probably 1080p monitors we scrap every day. Pretty much all are significantly scratched when they come off the truck, otherwise reselling them might be good business.
>Somewhat probable: everyone in a department got upgraded, no exceptions. 'This is a really nice PC, but the boss says it has to go.'
Here in Europe all that is 100% resold either locally, or further to balkans/eastern-europe due to much lower purchasing power making the resale efforts of ~5 year old HW economically viable. I check the local "craigslist" often and I notice when a business is clearing house due to a flood of used HPs/Dells/Lenovos from a single user. However the list prices aren't remotely palpable to be good deals. I assume the person/business hired for clearing the house is marking them up significantly hoping to squeeze a big win from a mark.
Some of the tech companies I worked for here would first auction their older HW internally at every upgrade cycle to the employees before selling what was left to a clearing company, which makes me feel we're being robbed to be offered by employers to bid for their e-waste when in the US people find better stuff in the trash for free. Europoor indeed.
>otherwise reselling them might be good business
I assume those businesses don't bother reselling 1080p monitors and 2 year old PCs, and instead just throw them away, because the price of labor is so high in those parts of the US, that paying a full-time employee to take care of such resale tasks will cost them more money than they expect to make from the sale, so it's assumed to be cheaper and less hassle to just throw everything in the trash instead of wasting time on the used market dealing with tire-kickers just to gain what is essentially peanuts money for those businesses' bottom line.
> Here in Europe all that is 100% resold either locally, or further to balkans/eastern-europe
My company's policy is that retired laptops are destroyed. (I suppose properly wiping them or removing storage devices should be enough but for some reason it's not considered sufficient.)
There are indeed lots of second-hand former company laptops being sold, and some companies even specialize in refurbishing and selling them. I don't know what percentage ends up being recycled but it's definitely not 100 %. I'd assume the more security-oriented the organization gets, the more likely it might be to avoid recycling devices intact.
With that said, I haven't seen two-year-old high-end devices getting retired. But if there are only a few of them, and a large fleet is being renewed, I suppose it can make sense from a fleet management point of view to renew the few perfectly current ones as well.
> But if there are only a few of them, and a large fleet is being renewed, I suppose it can make sense from a fleet management point of view to renew the few perfectly current ones as well.
I suspect that had something to do with it. The Core Ultras came out of Dells, and as mentioned, the industry around here uses HP almost exclusively. (The rest of that load was HP, only about 1% were those Dells.) Some dogmatic system administrator probably said "We we are only supposed to use HP, get those Dells out of here!"
If an intern did it (or even a low paid full-time employee), one could easily turn a profit selling used equipment. (I work in the refurb department, reselling used stuff is literally my job!) 5 minutes per monitor @ $25/each = $300 per hour. You could sell to wholesalers for much less per unit, in exchange for not wasting time with random people.
I'm not sure how prevalent this practice is, but IT equipment is sometimes on a depreciation schedule. If an employee starts selling the company's PCs and monitors, an accountant will get very angry, because he told the government that the stuff is literally worthless, but it apparently isn't because it was sold for something. IANAL, but I'm fairly sure that's tax fraud. Once it's turned over to someone else (my company) for free, the valuation resets, or something.
Oh come on, stop felling sorry for yourself. I'm from one of those countries compared to which even Eastern Europe you offload hardware to is a paradise.
None of what you're describing is available here at all. I sometimes see Europeans willing to ship here (already very few) offer heavily used and scratched ThinkPads and Dells for money they weren't worth when they were new. Add at least $80 on top for shipping, and no warranty, you get what you get.
On the local market, you will find those Core 2 Duo with precisely the attitude you're describing, but at 2-4 times the cost.
So I buy everything new, which is expensive with our salaries, but we have no choice. At least new hardware is available now thanks to selling over the internet and improved logistics.
10 years ago you could only buy what was offered by local shops, which was always at least two generations behind, and at least twice as expensive as it was in the EU (forget the US).
For example, if things continued like this to this day, I'd estimate the newest CPU you could buy right now would be something like Ryzen 3600, at twice the cost it was in your country when it just came out. If we're lucky, maybe 7600 would already appear at a similar overprice.
I'm sure many parts of the planet are even in a worse position than we are.
Skyrim has to be one of the most modded games out there, with maybe only Minecraft being up there in terms of mods. Its probably also the biggest game out there when it comes to... lets just say nsfw mods.
Taxpayers. Imo if we didn't have such high national debt in the US, those interest payments to the debt could have instead been used for something like national health insurance. The politicians of the past really screwed us all with the debt.
There was a bit of a mitigating circumstance of COVID (for Trump and Biden), which caused the debt to jump for many countries as well (and not just the US), but it's not like Trump et co are helping the math along with all the tax cuts and asking for a US$ >1T military budget.
>I'm also in disbelief that not one music streaming service has implemented a system that weeds out ALL generated content.
I've been using the SkipIfFake app since apparently the streaming services won't do something similar to identify AI music. It will automatically skip any AI generated music for you if it plays.
Do you remember if it was named Musika? [1] If so, that game has actually been decrypted so I could work on a recomp. There's also Phase [2] which seems like the more likely pick. Unfortunately, it was never decrypted. I modeled out the Metadata db structure that the iPod OS exposed to games that represented its iTunesDB so I should be able to support custom songs/albums in a recomp in the future. Long term, I'd love to be able to BYO API key for Spotify and expose your Spotify library to the game as your "iPod's" music. I feel like that would modernize the experience. I'll get there when work calms down and I'm no longer working 60 hour work weeks :(
Same for me. When I was High School and uni, there was still copying from Wikipedia, obscure blogs, paying people, etc. but I did all my own work. It was a rewarding experience and breath of fresh air from 'remembering-regurgitating learning'.
Even the topics that I didn't enjoy, I did the essays, presentations, assignments myself, and that led me to learn at least something in those topics.
I would get that as well - I ended up at the urgent care a few times just because it was so painful and unsettling.
It was never diagnosed but I'm pretty sure it was costochondritis - something in my sternum area was inflamed and would give off this awful shooting chest pain.
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