My eleven year old daughter saved up her half of a new desktop PC by working her ass off. I made room in our budget for our half.
And GPU cards are freaking double the price we were expecting. I used logical increments for pricing and part picking and my daughter has been pouring over the different options… But now we have to figure this out.
Apparently GPUs are really good for bitcoin mining - hence the huge price rises recently.
I bought a new PC recently and had to settle for a slightly less powerful graphics card because of the price rises. I still got a good one, but it was hellishly expensive.
And don’t buy a secondhand GPU, chances are that it had been bitmined to heck and back again.
Yeah, right now I’m looking at a 1050 Ti, two and a half year old tech. But old enough that it’s only about 15% above MSRP.
I’d like to get her a 1060, but that’s just not going to happen.
Why do dead ants smell so bad?
I’m so glad I’m not the only one who thinks that! It’s one more reason that I hate the little things. I did some research and found out that they release formic acid when they die, and that’s what puts out that awful smell.
Is the code that performs the bitmining being stored in a GPU’s NVRAM, firmware or other permanent storage? I know that since they have their own processors, they can work on code independently, but I wasn’t aware that it could stick around if the video card is installed in a new computer with a different OS.
Or, is it just that the bitmining program would be exercising the GPU enough that we’re talking about a reduced lifespan of the electronic components?
That. They excercise the GPU to its max. Keep in mind modern GPU’s have to do a lot of work to render polygons, pixels, sprites and other amusing things for games on the monitors…
It’s that time of year, so I have 2-5 random little tiny ants wandering my desk when I work from home for the day. I don’t want to encourage this behavior.
For some reason it reminds me of the widget program that can draw penguins, sheep and other things that walks around on top of your windows on your desktop, occasionally falling down to the bottom of your desktop.
A rite of passage has been passed, I unsubscribed from Build-a-bear’s emails today. I won’t need them for a while.
I kind of miss running stupid stuff like that. I had ‘christmas lights’ on my display back in college and tons of screensavers, some playable.
The Oscar the Grouch extension for Mac OS was apparently a real mess as it got installed in schools and encouraged kids to delete stuff. Like the System Folder contents or apps. It basically tweaked the ‘Empty Trash’ menu item so Oscar from Sesame Street would pop out of the MacOS trash can and sing briefly every time.
I remember as a kid watching Sesame Street thinking that Oscar just needed to lighten up. Now that I’m in my 40s I understand why he was so grouchy all the time. He’s kind of my spirit animal.
Maybe Oscar worked in IT, and only moon-lighted as a Sesame Street character?
Win10 is an absolute load of b0ll0cks - busy with reinstalling my work’s laptop as it is starting to bog down.
The usual bevy of apps is installed (firefox, chrome, office2013, and two or three others) so it should not be bogging down, but it does.
Blah. Win10 ftmfl
Garrison Keillor update.
The negotiations/mediation was a success. The same guy that told him to get out sent a letter earlier this month that sounded a lot like, “Hey, we’re all friends here. I always enjoyed working with you and appreciated how you helped me in the past. You want the archives back up. We want the archives back up. The fans want the archives back up. We can make this happen really quick.”
End result: Garrison gets $275K, both sides won’t sue the other, and yes, the archives of A Prairie Home Companion and The Writer’s Almanac will be back online at the end of the month.
I’m glad this is settled, but after hearing for months “Garrison did something bad but we’re not comfortable telling everyone exactly what it was”, to read the letter from that same person where he’s saying everything’s fine is a bit strange. There’s also the matter that it actually was a different person who made the woman’s objections known to MPR, and that guy is no longer with the Chris Thile show that succeeded A Prairie Home Companion. It’s like they found out they made a big mistake by getting rid of Garrison and had to figure out a way to save face.
Holy crap. Bill Zabka looks just like Daniel Craig
It’s funny how you don’t realize just how bad your old shoes have gotten until you get new ones. I mean, I knew that my old shoes needed to be replaced from the state of the lining, but oh, the new ones feel good!
How is it that steel plate magically turns into concrete in Marvel movies?
In The Avengers, when Hulk is trying to pick up Mjolnir, his feet start crushing the surface he’s standing on and we see rubble.
In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, when a grenade explodes on the flight deck of one of the Project Insight helicarriers, we see rubble thrown into the air.
In both cases, those decks would be inch-plus thick plate steel here in the real world. Why is it concrete?
Never noticed that. Probably because of theatrics.