I upgraded my video card recently. I need four DisplayPort outputs so I picked a Nvidia RTX A2000 (old generation, not Ada). The prices on ebay.co.uk looked good value. Then I looked at the seller, and he had about a dozen of these cards for sale. I guess Bitcoin or crypto mining costs have reached some threshold where these cards no longer make money.

(The A2000 is a power-limited card drawing only 70 watts, intended for workstations, but I guess that might also make it suitable for mining.)

I can't really blame the author. If ChatGPT -- or any website -- provides a way to link to a page, it's a reasonable expectation that you can share that link and it will work.

Couldn't you take the legal brief generated by an AI, and feed it into ChatGPT asking "please look up all of the cases cited in this brief and give a URI for each"? Personally I feel that getting AI to check for errors in work is much more useful than getting it to write the work itself.

That's the point Stroustrup is making. With the current C++ language and standard library (STL), he claims, you don't need to write code with pointers, and you don't need to mess with new and delete. The container classes like vector handle it safely for you.

Hmm, I've been using hi-dpi (220 pixels per inch or more) for about twenty years (starting with the IBM T221) and using them with Windows has usually been fine. Even ancient versions let you set a text size of 200%. They mucked it up starting with Vista, doing a blurred scaling in the GPU for some applications, but you can turn that off.

Related https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...

My Windows 11 machine still has mspaint.exe installed. Does this mean mspaint has outlasted its supposed successor? HOORAY!

Fixed that for you

Last week, or seven days ago, Vsevolod Kokorin, also known online as Slonser, wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that he found the email-spoofing (also known as forgery) bug (or vulnerability) and reported or disclosed it to Microsoft, formerly known as Micro-Soft.

What I meant was that the hardware you bought stays working -- you don't have to junk it because the software is full of unpatched, known security holes (or has just stopped working because somebody switched off a server somewhere). You're right that newer, better hardware becomes available, but that doesn't mean the old one is obsolete, if it does what you need. (One exception might be older wireless standards, for example if the 3G network is switched off in your country.) The biggest failing of older hardware is that the battery gets old and tired, as you noted.

Maybe a little unfair. No phone is particularly great, but iPhones since launch have generally suffered less from obsolescence (planned or otherwise) than Android or other competitors. Apple keeps producing security updates for several years and makes sure you can always install them. That can't always be said for Android devices.

Thanks. I misunderstood what the hardware does. I saw it as "a bucket of Pentium chips on a PCIe card" but really those are just an interface to the vector units, which is what you really paid for. And I guess even if Intel crammed 80 Pentium cores onto the card, it would still be outperformed by a pair of 40-core processors designed thirty years later.

But you could, in principle, parallelize your kernel build across the numerous x86 processors in a Xeon Phi. You can't use the GPU to speed up gcc. It seems like there ought to be some application of the technology for integer code that needs to go fast and is parallelizable, but not vectorizable. Intel never found it though.

On second thoughts, it would be hard to get enough memory. The IBM 8580 I mentioned could take 64 megabytes and perhaps more (I had 56 megabytes in mine, scattered across several weird upgrade cards). But the PC-AT... I don't know that even with a 486 upgrade installed you'd be able to install and directly address more than a megabyte.

I used to have an IBM 8580 system which originally used a 386DX processor (the top spec model was clocked at 25MHz). IBM had a licensed clone of the 486 called Blue Lightning, and produced a CPU upgrade. It was a small daughterboard fitting into the 386 socket. The Blue Lightning was clock-tripled (like the Intel 486DX4, which came a couple of years later) so ran internally at 75MHz. That means I could now run Windows XP on that machine from 1987, if my parents hadn't sadly junked it. (It ran NT 3.51 very well so I'd hope enough of the old device drivers are still there in XP.) I expect the Blue Lightning upgrade would work in any 386DX system.

It's possible to go further back. Cyrix produced a 486SLC which had a 16-bit external data bus (like the 386SX) and could be fitted as an upgrade to 386SX systems, but also to 286 ones. There were upgrade kits for the IBM PC-AT. So you could in principle get Windows XP running on a machine from 1984.

Hmm, you're right, it's not "on-die". But it is part of the same chip package. Not on the motherboard. That's one of the main changes when they switched to the M series ARM processors away from Intel.