I can close it, I can open it. I think the eject button is fine?

I had a dell laptop with one of those touch control buttons, and I had to take them off, because they used to get pressed randomly...

hmm

What's the best Laptop company? I know it's subjective, but asking for opinions.

@4-K It will stay open if you put your coffee cup in it ...

Yeah, my Laptop is Dell

@DavidPostill Not everyone is like you, sir.

Depends on what you plan to do with the laptop

general purpose

I think laptop quality depends more on how much you're willing to spend than the brand - I've used terribad cheapo ones and super great ones from the same company

+1

@BenN thanks!

But I've seen some surprisingly good cheap PCs too...

I have a Cheap Toshiba Laptop, better than the costly Dell Laptops.

You will call me stupid for spending so much money on it

It's a box of problem.

Did you buy it from a reseller or from Dell directly?

Dell Agent @BenN

Authorised dealer.

@BenN nods.

@4-K if you plan on doing occasional and not-too-heavy gaming, I would recommend lenovo...

Dell lattitudes are generally not bad.

HP Envy are solid machines for general purpose (uncertain about gaming) but the good ones are about $1000

@Rahul2001 What about Asus?

Asus are more knowledgeable in hardware, right?

Very Bad experience from Dell. Inspiron

@Hennes Yeah

Desktops are more flexible

I never buy brand name desktops. They generally are to locked down in the BIOS/EFI, sometiems do not have PCI-e slots (or have 4 PCI-e slots which are not PCI-e compatible)

E.g. a lenovo SFF with max 40 draw by 4 PCI-e slots.

Anda nice 75W graphics card in one of them

Thanks guys!

Or the Del optiplex 745 which disabled onboard graphics if you places anything in the PCI-e x16 slot

Which in my case was a RAID card. No a GraKa

@4-K I don't have a lot of experience with them...

I got bad experience with almost all brand name desktops

@Hennes apple?

Probably because they get locked down to a few configurations and I tend to follow my own

Apple did not work with SSDs except their own. Needed to replace some OS files to enable it.

So I guess Apply is also up there

@4-K Prolly a good idea to start with what you need, look at reviews then decide.

"Build quality" varies wildly with models in the same brand

Aye. In general Asus has good builds. As does SuperMirco and Tyan

SuperMicro gets lots of faf for not being up to triple AAA server quality. But compared to the rest they still shine

As does Tyan. Always a tad slower. Always definign what it means to be rock solid.

@Hennes heh, I think my 530 had it too

MIGHT have been a chipset issue tho, with shared lanes between that slot and the IGP

On a 745?

Core2 era?

yup

core 2 era

I don't remember what chipset. The 530 was a dumpster diva ;p

The 745 had a Q965 express chipset

And some of them had two PCI-e slots, some had only 1

For the same version number

oh, 28W TPD. Says enough on how old :)

Just for the chipset

ahh

G33 express

definitelyrealquotes.com/?id=3_4

(possibly NSFW ;p)

A dozen loaded, all safe

And some even believeable

definitelyrealquotes.com/?id=1_7

got a few F words, and mentions of STDs ;p

I guess I was lucky

@Hennes Clearly you were practicing safe hex :)

I pressed the button for try againa few times. Got mostly the same questions and people. Bad random ?

There aren't so many combinations ...

I foudn that one better with Emelia's plane.

@Hennes I though it fitted Shakespeare's quill pen as well. Spare pen and all that.

Credits go to John Oliver... :P

Hmm, time to google who this obscure person is.

@Hennes the best comedian in my opinion, and someone who i am overly obsessed with, in @Bob's...

!!caaaaaaaaat

spam for your flagging superuser.com/a/1114956/337631 check the link in the answer ...

what the...

that was quick :)

!!nothingtoseehere

Damn that gif is too large :(

I guess I can finally tell what it feels when I snipe spams.

@Mokubai Wins the award for FGITW

I still love the Police Squad style humour.

That was an awesome series

Was there a vote some time ago on whether the chatbot should stay or go?

Got 9 stars

@Mokubai

I voted twice..

-.-

Cavil voted no

@allquicatic No he didn't want to stay or no he didn't want to go?

@Mokubai he voted to leave

he's part of the dumb masses

he wants his retirement check and doesn't care if he's in the RA or not

@allquicatic oi

Or maybe he just tired of only being used for cat pictures... maybe he just wants to... music begins playing ... sing!

out of curiosity how many of you use windows for your main computer?

@aleccj1 +1 Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit

and if so why not *nix or os x?

I use Windows 10 Pro x64

I stay on Windows because most people use it on their PC and as a developer I want to be able to target most people

@aleccj1 <shrug> I've been using Windows since Windows 3.1. I had dual boot in the past (Linux) but not on this laptop.

Besides, MS software seems to be a lot more solid than the *nix stuff I've used, and Apple stuff is too much $$$ for me

how is windows more solid? i have experienced the opposite

Not Windows, but the software on it

@aleccj1 That's hard to answer. It depends on what you do with it and what programs you run.

Maybe I'm just unlucky, but all of my experiences with *nix software have required me to fiddle around with weird text files or install some other thing before the thing I want will actually work

To be honest, though, some of my frustration probably comes from my lack of experience with Linux

And there was the time I installed Ubuntu, ran the Software Updater like it asked, rebooted like it asked, and then was presented with a kernel panic that wouldn't go away

@BenN People have similar experiences with Windows Update though (not me personally).

Yeah, I've had bad experiences with WU too (not that bad, fortunately), it's definitely not perfect

But it's what I'm familiar with :)

@aleccj1 Convince devs of all the games I play to develop first-class ports (not emulation; buggy and slow) to GNU/Linux or OS X and I might consider switching; til then, it's a no-brainer that I have to have at least one good Windows box with a high-end GPU.

well yeah id agree on the gaming part

i play so few games now that it doesnt matter much to me though

Then again, I use more platforms than almost anyone else.

i use OS X, came from arch linux

My server runs Ubuntu as the host OS with a Windows virtual machine. I have a Macbook Pro that runs (only) OS X (haven't bothered with Bootcamp). I have an iPhone and an Android LG Volt and I maintain/assist with the operation of several Android phones in the family (Note 4 used to be my primary phone). My server used to run SmartOS. Even my main Windows desktop has Ubuntu 16.04 installed as dual boot and a VMware Workstation VM.

I don't "just" run one thing or another. I run what I need for the task at hand. Which basically means I run everything.

yeah i have 15'' MBP with only OSX though ill be experimenting with openBSD on qemu

used to have a thinkpad w530 running arch but it died 2 months ago, RIP in peace

I use a "MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015)" (top-end model with 512 GB storage) as my main driver at work because work seems content to let me suffer on a 2010 Dell Latitude with 4 gigs of RAM, a 5400 RPM HDD, and so much security software that starting Word takes 10 minutes.

@aleccj1 My machine is Win10 and rock solid, except when hardware such as hard drives start dying. The main thing is not to install every piece of turd software you "might" need.

@Mokubai I have every piece of turd software I "might" need, but I'm very good at preventing their aggressive "I MUST START ON BOOT AND POP A WINDOW IN YOUR FACE WHEN YOU REBOOT :D" bullshit from taking hold

half the battle is just neutralizing start-on-boot nonsense

you start when I tell you to start, and not before, goddamnit

Well that too...

@allquicatic mine is late 2011, 2nd gen core i7, 1tb sshd, 16 gb ram, i use it primarily for video production and playing with the unix userland

Don't install everything, and control what you do.

Then there are the exciting scenarios where you accidentally install two incompatible programs and one refuses to uninstall while the other is installed

I am currently in that situation with Hyper-V and VMware -_-

my main problem with windows is windows rot and the fact that it frustrates the shit out of me due to appearing to be made for those that cant computer

@BenN o_O I thought Hyper-V and VMware worked out their differences long ago

Not VMware Player, apparently; I can't uninstall it while Hyper-V is present, and I'm not going to uninstall Hyper-V because I have a lot of nice VMs that I would prefer to not reconfigure

> Windows Rot is defined in the Urban Dictionary as the process by which a Windows machine becomes progressively slower the longer you use it and the more software you install on it

@allquicatic got mine for $760 on ebay, certified apple refurb, pretty good deal for a MBP with dedicated gpu

@aleccj1 "Windows rot"? Maybe with Windows Vista and earlier... these days you just use Disk Cleanup every 3 months; CCleaner twice a year; and a non-Scientology defragger like PerfectDisk once or twice a year, and it runs as well as factory. Oh, and clean up old detached devices (thumb drives you've thrown in the trash, etc.) and make sure it doesn't revert your new drivers to older ones.

i also much prefer to utilize package managers whenever possible

therefore i dislike windows

it's not all that bad... I have an install that was originally Windows 8 and has been upgraded numerous times (8.1 -> 10 -> 10 Anniversary) and it runs exactly as I need it to.

Windows rot is a misnomer, more like "User installed a shedload of crap, never uninstalled any of it, left all their 'updaters' running all the time, and clicked every 'install x' popup that appeared in front of them."

I've also expanded the boot partition from 4 to 8 TB; migrated RAID controller three times, and switched from 4 x 4 TB to 2 x 8 TB.

i guess i dont like it also because of percieved lack of user control with windows

and no out of the box bash

There's plenty of control still, it's just that the newer UI doesn't present very much of it

oh also i loathe those "are you sure you want to "x"? popups

You mean UAC? I can't recall any unnecessary instances of that elsewhere in the OS itself

any of you guys use any of the BSDs?

@aleccj1 If I'm going to be in the so-called "*nix" world, I don't go for any half-measures. Give me native GNU/Linux or go home. MinGW, Cygwin, UoW, even OS X's BSD userland is insufficient and limited compared to what you get within 5 minutes of installing Ubuntu and running apt install (maybe with a few PPAs). Therefore I primarily just use my dedicated server over Mosh or Guacamole (depends on if I need a GUI or not) for my *nix stuff.

makes sense to me @allquicatic

ive been having a pretty good experience with os x, what specifically is insufficient for you?

and fyi i came from arch so i understand full measures haha

@aleccj1 Not a fan of the terminal emulator (iTerm2 is a little better but still not great). No systemd. Jenkins doesn't work equivalently to how it runs on GNU/Linux (many, many issues in the configuration and installation process that don't manifest on Ubuntu/Debian by installing it via apt). When compiling programs, there are many glibc-specific things that various programs I use expect, so the compile fails. I could go on and on.

brew isn't terrible, but it's not GNU/Linux, either.

for me os x is the best of both worlds, BSD userland coupled with plentiful proprietary software for when its needed

A Mac is for convenience, good hardware, long battery life, low-effort system administration, and primarily for the beautiful display and GUI. So, I use it mainly for that. Other than the occasional dip into Eclipse -- where most of what I do is backed by a GNU/Linux server, so very little is actually done on the Mac -- it's basically a video player, IM, and web browser. The occasional Adobe Acrobat or Excel.

oh yeah, i use adobe cs 6 for video editing so os x is useful

VBA is horribly, horribly broken in Excel 2016 on OS X. I had to email myself a file and hop over to my Windows desktop because apparently adding 25 + 26 in VBA when both variables are stored as Longs produces an overflow. I didn't know the max value of a Long was less than or equal to 51...

most people in the field have macs

why not libreoffice? or even google docs?

@aleccj1 Google Docs doesn't have any meaningful support for automating Sheets with code. Like, serious automation. Cell-level access to formatting data, underlying values, color coding, borders, reading and setting formulas, R1C1 mode, etc. Libreoffice has most of that, but uses a completely different API that I'm not familiar with.

i see

I've been using Office VBA for automating repetitive tasks (and saving other people hundreds of hours of manual labor) on and off since about 2001. If you don't work in the fields I work in, you don't really see the practical purpose to it, but it's absolutely essential when you have a spreadsheet with 58 columns and 4900 rows and you need to calculate, aggregate and cross-check an accounting weenie's arbitrarily laid-out spreadsheet with rows and columns merged here and there, hidden rows, etc.

@allquicatic what is your profession?

it's not my day job, but I occasionally get pulled into helping other people with their stuff when they get in a tough spot, because I know the APIs like the back of my hand and rarely need to go on MSDN.

@aleccj1 I'm a software engineer with occasional responsibilities ranging from finance to HR to recruiting to training.

what kind of software?

@aleccj1 I'd rather not say.

ok

F

U

N

K

@dog what kind of dog are you

and how do you type? do you have an interpreter?

No, it's a JITted dog

what is that

It was a .NET joke :)

oman lol

im still learning python

Some programming languages are "interpreted", while .NET is compiled into bytecode, which is compiled Just In Time

OH yeah i know what that is

i know about languages just not much on how to use them

do any of you use zsh?

@allquicatic I do none of the above

going to nuke some more google tags

AMD Zen technical data and block diagrams officially released! anandtech.com/show/10578/…

4-wide decode, 6-wide dispatch, 10 execution units.

Microsoft open sources PowerShell; brings it to Linux and Mac OS X

"We will be extending the PowerShell Remoting Protocol (MS-PSRP) to use OpenSSH as a native transport. Users will have the option to use SSH or WINRM as a transport." (From the blog post.) Yay!

@BenN Meanwhile, reports of snowfall down in hell...

You'd never expect Microsoft to be this aggressive with making things open-source. Wow.

They've changed quite radically over the last few years.

Hang on, I'm trying to install PowerShell in Ubuntu on Windows

E: Unable to locate package powershell Huh, I guess it's not in the package manager yet

@BenN That would have made absolutely no sense not even a year ago.

It works! PowerShell is very confused about where it's supposed to print text, but it works!

powershell on dotnet on bash on ubuntu on windows

rofl, that's insane

that's like running wine on windows

...only worse

Quick question: Is it okay to wrap a metal duct connected to the furnace with fiberglass insulation?

@bwDraco rumors are it's faster than Broadwell-E, but when they say "faster" are they talking about total throughput, or single-thread? because if it's single-thread, we gamers might be interested

Both single-thread and multi-thread.

AMD overhauled the entire execution engine.

O_o

huh... even if I don't end up buying this, I think it will serve as giving Intel "twenty lashes" on the back, to whip that previously-complacent organization into shape :D

Remember that Zen is a rewrite of the entire architecture from scratch.

maybe the upcoming 14nm arches from Intel won't be as much of a slouch if they realize AMD is legit chasing them now

and maybe if it's really good (I have my doubts, especially because of all the crazy Intel-specific optimization these days) I'll actually buy one o_O

I think we need to wait for benchmarks to come out before any conclusions can be drawn. It'll be interesting to compare the flagship Zen 8C/16T part with the Intel Core i7-6900K.

I just want it to be good enough to set off alarm bells at Intel HQ. that's all I ask of AMD.

My gut tells me that AMD will deliver 90% of the performance at 60-70% of the price.

wake the sleeping Intel giant and make them compete with somebody

AMD wants to not be seen as the "cheap solution". They want to be seen as a "competitive solution".

They've been spending as much money as they can on R&D, and it looks like the investment is paying off.

@bwDraco They could actually move a lot of product if gamers see it as a way to get something faster than the 6700K for gaming without paying $1000 for Broadwell-E

I'll pay $400 for a CPU that beats my 6700K soundly in single-thread

Polaris has already proven successful in mainstream systems.

I kinda think that AMD will charge about $600-700 for a CPU that nearly matches the i7-6900K.

As for the 4C/8T mainstream parts, I think AMD will be able to approach the i7-6700K (and perform at the same level as the non-K i7-6700) inside of $250.

keep in mind that a lot of games are still DX11 or even DX9.0c, and those games can easily be CPU-bound on FPS if you have a good GPU

less likely to see CPU bottlenecks on DX12 / Vulkan

yup. Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag sure is.

but I probably won't be playing exclusively DX12 / Vulkan games for another 5 years, minimum

I think Intel hasn't done as major of a re-write of their CPU architecture as Zen is for AMD, since at least Nehalem, maybe even Core...

Sandy, Ivy, Haswell, Broadwell, Skylake... all names of Intel architectures that have been relatively iterative, mostly just keeping up with industry trends like DDR4, PCIe 3.0, support for faster system buses, moving stuff onto the CPU die (and then back off again, in the case of the VRMs), better iGPUs, power efficiency and die shrinks, Turbo Boost, and a few new instructions. That's about it for Intel since ~2011.

Zen has been more than four years in the making and it sure looks like we have a phoenix rising.

Let's hope we see a return to the Athlon XP glory days...

I remember the days when Athlon XP processors were vastly faster than Pentium 4 chips clock for clock...

Zen is an SoC. AM4 motherboards have no northbridge or southbridge.

@bwDraco wow

so what will the mobo have? headers for connectors? :)

This is why AMD is able to unify everything around one socket.

Looks like the on-chip southbridge might have some issues...

techpowerup.com/223583/…

Probably an issue with early prototypes. Pretty sure AMD will sort them out.

pcworld.com/article/3109267/hardware/…

> It’s not a CPU. Technically Summit Ridge isn’t a CPU, but an SoC, which means there’s no chipset needed for most of the functionality. On at least one Summit Ridge demo board, we spied a chip that appeared to handle the SATA and SATA Express ports. But these are engineering boards, so who knows.

techpowerup.com/225129/…

It's a huge honor for the engineers who worked on this brand-new architecture, to be able to bring AMD back to glory \o/

> During the event, AMD demonstrated an 8-core, 16-thread "Summit Ridge" desktop processor (featuring AMD's "Zen" core) outperforming a similarly configured 8-core, 16-thread Intel "Broadwell-E" processor when running the multi-threaded Blender rendering software with both CPUs set to the same clock speed.

Oh. My. Freaking. God.

If AMD can bring those clockspeeds up to match a 6900K running at full speed, they'd have a bestseller on their hands.

8C/16T Summit Ridge beats an i7-6900K, both chips running at 3.2 GHz.

Pretty sure AMD can get the clock speeds up. Remember that the TDP of the Summit Ridge chip is 95W, less than the 140W TDP of the Intel part.

Okay, it's 3.0 GHz, not 3.2 GHz. Then again, if Summit Ridge is comparable to Broadwell-E clock-for-clock in more benchmarks than this, then Intel is going to have to step up its game.

Eh. Wait for release and see what happens.

Wouldn't be the first time pre-release claims have turned out to be wrong.

See: RX480...

Heck, see Bulldozer which everyone thought would be a Sandy Bridge killer until it actually came out with rather disappointing perf.

Bulldozer involved some very questionable design decisions. Of course, AMD will still be a bit behind Intel by the time Zen is launched, but competitive pricing will mean that Intel finally has serious competition.