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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • They have a secondary motherboard that hosts the Slot CPUs, 4 single core P3 Xeons. I also have the Dell equivalent model but it has a bum mainboard.

    With those 90’s systems, to get Windows NT to use more than 1 core, you have to get the appropriate Windows version that actually supports them.

    Now you can simply upgrade from a 1 to a 32 core CPU and Windows and Linux will pick up the difference and run with it.

    In the NT 3.5 and 4 days, you actually had to either do a full reinstall or swap out several parts of the Kernel to get it to work.

    Downgrading took the same effort as a multicore windows Kernel ran really badly on a single core system.

    As for the Sun Fires, the two models I mentioned tend to be highly available on Ebay in the 100-200 range and are very different inside than an X86 system. You can go for 400 or higher series to get even more difference, but getting a complete one of those can be a challenge.

    And yes, the software used on some of these older systems was a challenge in itself, but they aren’t really special, they are pretty much like having different vendors RGB controller softwares on your system, a nuisance that you should try to get past.

    For instance, the IBM 5000 series raid cards were simply LSI cards with an IBM branded firmware.

    The first thing most people do is put the actual LSI firmware on them so they run decently.


  • Oh, I get it. But a baseline HP Proliant from that era is just an x86 system barely different from a desktop today but worse/slower/more power hungry in every respect.

    For history and “how things changed”, go for something like a Sun Fire system from the mid 2000’s (280R or V240 are relatively easy and cheap to get and are actually different) or a Proliant from the mid to late 90’s (I have a functioning Compaq Proliant 7000 which is HUGE and a puzzlebox inside).

    x86 computers haven’t changed much at all in the past 20 years and you need to go into the rarer models (like blade systems) to see an actual deviation from the basic PC alike form factor we’ve been using for the past 20 years and unique approaches to storage and performance.

    For self hosting, just use something more recent that falls within your priceclass (usually 5-6 years old becomes highly affordable). Even a Pi is going to trounce a system that old and actually has a different form factor.






  • Even as far back as XP/Vista Microsoft has wanted to run the file system as more of an adaptive database than a classical hierarchical file system.

    The leaked beta for Vista had this included and it ran like absolute shit, mostly because harddrives are slow and ram was at a premium, especially in Vista as it was such a bloated piece or shit.

    NTFS has since evolved to include more and more of these “smart” file system components.

    Now they want to go full on with this “smart” approach to the filesystem.

    It’ll still be slow and shit, just like it was 2 decades ago.


  • Imho you’re wrong there.

    Amazon has every incentive to write down Twitches infrastructure cost as far higher than it needs to be, to make Twitch look unprofitable.

    Both to audience and shareholders. It’ll allow them to force more advertising and push up sub prices while making the main corporation revenue look better.

    This while the long term plan looks to be more about getting an excuse to shut down the public facing side of Twitch and get rid of having to deal with the streamers and viewers as direct clients and renting out streaming infrastructure to other streaming sites instead.

    They want to condense their streaming services to simply be simple products they can sell or rent out to other sites rather than having to deal with a load of consumers and legal liabilities that come with them.


  • The A770 is actually fantastic, even more so for the price.

    What was garbage was the drivers and they’ve come a long way in bringing them up to speed.

    They had and to some extent still have a rather gigantic hurdle to cross getting older games up to speed, but the decision to employ at least partial Vulkan translation instead of trying to get DX9/10 drivers up to speed was a huge leap already.

    For modern games, when they are at least tested to run on the Intel cards, they perform on par with cards from AMD and Nvidia that cost $150+ more.

    And no, this isn’t coming from some Intel fanboy, I haven’t bought an Intel CPU since Coppermine and for GPUs I’ve simply switched between what was the best for a specific priceclass at the time I upgraded. And whenever something really new came along, like Kyro3D and PhysX cards (and now Intels GPUs), I bought those too.

    Also realize that Arcs ray tracing engine beats AMDs and keeps up with Nvidias in their first iteration of the chip.

    Their tech is sound and fully has the potential to be a competitor.








  • Exactly. There’s assloads of precedent that if you allow a single company to normalize this crap, it’ll be an industry wide thing within 5 years.

    It happened with paid DLC, it happened with Microtransactions in full price games, it happened with pre-sales, it happened with subscription fees and season passes in full price games.

    People keep pulling this “bwah, it won’t be so bad”, for it to get 10x worse than anything we expected.