mcbaes72

This is more of a "cool story, bro". 
 
I took a vacation day off work to be a guest speaker at my son's middle school. I taught several classes of 6th and 7th graders on desktop PC parts and how to build them. 
 
First, I gave a PowerPoint presentation to discuss the various parts and their role/purpose. Then, after a Q&A session, I had enough time to give about half of the class some hands-on training (after school, I showed the teacher how to assemble and disassemble so she could help the other students the next day who didn't get a chance). Using old Dell and HP desktop PCs from the XP and Vista days, I showed them how to remove the heatsink/fan, CPU, motherboard, RAM, and HDD. There was no GPU. Also, for safety reasons, I removed the power supply in advance. After assisting them on how to take it apart, I let them take turns putting it back together. 
 
Other than a couple of students who were obviously bored, majority of them were excited and learned pretty quickly. It was a fun day to teach them something I enjoyed doing. 

Someone may be trolling them.

Exactly my experience this AM and I had multiple devices trying to get in.  I then said f*ck it, took a Lyft to MC to see what they had, and walked out with an FE in 10 minutes.
 
Screw BotBuy

I wanna see how the amd launch goes. Maybe it will be a little better. 

Got one from bestbuy online, could never add one to the cart from their website, but was able to order one thru their phone app.

Was able to checkout on BestBuy and got the tracking number a few hours later. Staggered stock helped but was a little buggy. "Add to Cart" showed up but when I clicked it didn't add it twice but 3rd time was the charm.

WOOHOO I got the Founders edition
 
only took 38mins to checkout

So I just left the Sharonville Microcenter.  They got over 250 3070s in today along with a few 3080s and 3090s.  More cards than people by a long shot. 

My mom-in-law, love her but let's just say she's not the most electronic savvy person. Here's a few:
 
#1
Her: My cell phone says 100% fully charged, but when I unplug it, doesn't respond, screen is blank.
 
Me: Did you press the Power button? 
 
Her: It's turning on, I forgot I turned it off, thank you. 
 
#2
Her: The laptop is low battery. Do we buy a new battery? 
 
Me: No need, just plug it in to charge. 
 
Her: The adapter is plugged in the wall outlet, but it's not charging. 
 
Me: Is it connected to back of the laptop? 
 
Her: It wasn't, but is now. Thank you. 
 
#3
Issue: Cable box remote was out of sync with TV (after she pressed several wrong buttons). 
 
Her: I turn on TV and cable box turns off. I press Power again on remote and now cable box is on, but TV turns off. 
 
Me: Okay, put remote control down, walk over to the TV, and manually turn it on. 
 
Her: Where is the Power button? 
 
Me: Right side of TV, towards the bottom corner. 
 
Her: Okay it's on. 
 
Me: Now, try Power button on remote control, should turn both off same time. 
 
Her: They both work now, thank you. 
 
There's other instances like right-click instead of left-click on the mouse and wonders why "a little window box" keeps showing up. Or somehow gets lost using Facebook on the laptop (instead of on her phone), opens up a new tab by mistake and wonders why Google search page appears, doesn't know how to get back to FB page. Calls me up and I explain that Facebook isn't deleted or broken, just click upper left corner tab with blue FB icon. 
 
Haha...we're definitely lucky that we know what we're doing when it comes to A/V equipment and computers. 

They keep fares low to be competitive at the expense of the driver.
 
Breakdown of Uber
 
Passenger fare
( cost varies and may be somewhat innacurate at the time of post, may also vary by city and state. Gives a general idea however )
- Ride Fee $1.70
- Booking Fee $1.20
- Additional $0.20 per minute
- Additional $0.90 per mile
 
3 Mile Trip at 15 Minutes ( seems pretty typical )
$1.70 + $1.20 + (3 x 0.90) + (15 x 0.20) = $8.06
 
Payout
(Total Cost - Booking Fee) x 80%
($8.06 - $1.2) x .80 = $5.48
 
California Average Gas Price according to energy.ca.gov
$3.047
 
Say your car gets 32MPG

15 Miles / 1 Gallon = 0.46875
$3.047 x 0.46875 = $1.43
Not including the fuel to go pickup and after drop off.
 
Payout - Fuel Expense
$5.48 - $1.43 = $4.05
 
You are also responsible for insurance, in which some cities require you to have the same insurance and paperwork as a Taxi / Cab Company.
By the time you factor in all expenses, that ride made you less than $3. Rides are never guaranteed and you may only get 1 a day.
 
The more drivers the less rides obviously. Better suited as a side gig rather than a full time gig. Still low pay regardless.
Uber also tries to avoid paying any fees it doesn't have to and tries to push it more onto the drivers responsibility, once again reducing profits.
 
I really cant see what the attractiveness of being a Uber Driver is personally.

Based on information from WCCF and PCgamer, it's looking like AMD's next gen CPUs will be even better than leaked benchmarks suggested. It seems the new infinity fabric and memory controller can handle higher speeds than the 3000 series wile maintaining the 1:1 RAM : IF clock relationship.
 
Going from a current sweet spot of 3600Mhz DDR4 up to 4000Mhz DDR4 while maintaining 1:1 relationship with infinity fabric, could yield around 10% extra performance since infinity fabric clock has been shown to scale almost directly with CPU performance. If we take the IPC and clock speed improvements into account, we are potentially looking at a 25% performance increase vs 3000 series. 
----------------------------------------------
Summary
 5000 Series AMD CPUs might be even faster than expected thanks to improvements in the memory contorller and inifnity fabric
 
Quotes
 
My thoughts
None of this is for sure yet, we have to wait for 3rd party benchmarks and reviews. However it certainly does look like AMD have got a massive upgrade in store for us. If the rumored gains in performance pan out, I don't mind one bit that AMD decided to increase their pricing slightly. Even at that higher price point I expect that AMD chips will be in very high demand during november-december. 
 
Sources
 https://www.pcgamer.com/amd-ryzen-5000-cpus-may-run-best-with-faster-ddr4-4000-memory/
https://wccftech.com/amds-ryzen-5000-zen-3-desktop-cpus-memory-overclocking-ddr4-4000-mhz-sweet-spot/

Am I the only one being shocked by the budget? That's not even enough to produce two episodes of Games of Throne.

4G+ LTE on the moon
5G on the space station....
4G decent speeds in the country side open terrain
 
3G or no signal in the middle of a big city between buildings
 
Genius.

Summary
This week NASA awarded Nokia a $14.1 million contract to build a 4G LTE network on the Moon. NASA wants 4G LTE on the Moon to provide a reliable way for astronauts to communicate with each other, it could also be used to communicate with spacecrafts.
 
Quotes
 
My thoughts
Portions of the Moon may now be getting better cellular service than most of Earth, which is pretty sad.
 
Sources
https://www.engadget.com/nasa-nokia-lte-moon-211628751.html

Alright, I am a techie type, I can make anything work if given enough time. But my fiencee is definately one of those gamers that have no idea how the system they play on works. She is also subborn, I love her to death tho. Most of the time if she has an issue she will come to me, other times a game will be running slowly and she will just sit there frustrated and I come over and classic "no way to get it to work better or at all" no matter what I say cant change her mind, so I usually just do it anyway and get it to work, also she was on odd hardware at the time, and not all the games were officially supported, so most of the time it was my tinkering that had it working, so I always knew once in a while I'd have to re-do things to get it to keep working as updates came. She was running a Phentom II AMD processor with like 4 cores. Not a lot of power there, had a GTX 970 ti with it, and like whatever ram I could fit, prob around 28GB DDR3. Odd combo but worked alright for a long time, until she could get her next. But yea I have a lot of funny (to me) stories of issues shes had with that odd combo of hw.

So we use Office 365 Business at school (again) and I had to show one of my classmates, who started his apprenticeship normally back in August and not like me who only now had his first day at school today, how to download the Office programms and I also had to explain to him that you're supposed to turn off the Device after you've finished using it: His Surface Go 2 was really hot and it was really frozen and sluggish to the point of almost being unsuable. Once I opened Task Manager the case was clear: He has not turned off his Surface Tablet for 8 days straight. Also I had to remind him what his Email was and had to make sure that he changed the default Password to something more secure that only he knew. Oh and also they Nicknamed me the Hackerguy now because well I'm too smart for them 🤣

this is bad. Like, real bad. Frickin passports and payroll info. Stuff like that, and some hacker has access to all of that. Hopefully police get involved

Summary
Intcomex has suffered a major data breach, with nearly 1 TB of its users’ data leaked. The leaked data includes credit cards, passport and license scans, personal data, payroll, financial documents, customer databases, employee information and more. 
 
Quotes
   
My thoughts
This is one of the bigger leaks I've seen this year, but I'm glad that the companies are being professional about this and addressing the issues. The amount of data leaked is also really bad, can't believe that credit card data is not secured properly. Oh, and of course the hacker was Russian 😆
 
Sources
https://cybernews.com/security/miami-based-tech-company-suffers-massive-1tb-data-leak/

The "bots" here are automated tools that just do the equivalent of clicking the "buy" button for you -- its still real payment information being used. The reason bots are used is because they can react to an item going up for sale or going back in stock almost instantly, and certainly much faster than a human could.
 
In some cases, these bots simply emulate the mouse and keyboard input, but in many cases you can actually bypass an online storefront's GUI entirely and directly send a network request that would have been generated if a buy button was clicked -- bypassing a lot of code and potentially buying an item before it even is listed.
 
In either case, the bot can sometimes complete dozens of purchases before you have even refreshed your webpage.
 
--------------------------------------------
 
Personally, I wouldn't mind, except that these bots are used to get items in very high demand to then turn around and re-sell them at a massive markup. It deprives actual individual customers from buying an item at MSRP, and for huge market segments of limited stock items like designer sneakers or concert tickets, these bots are buying up the entire supply -- meaning the only way a true customer can get the product is from these "scalpers".
 
These bots are essentially allowing a middleman to insert themselves between you and the merchant, extracting extra money without contributing anything in return.
 
--------------------------------------------
 
There are two ways to fix it: increase supply, or make botting ineffective.
 
The first is the best and most foolproof option because it is solving the underlying economics. If enough product is available, then people can ignore the re-sold items and the botters are stuck with inventory they cannot profit on. Eventually, the lack of income forces botters out of the market. Of course, increasing supply is not an instantaneous option. Thus, in the meantime, there is option 2:
 
Botting can be made much harder, to the point of being effectively impossible. The problem is that for every bot you can turn away, a merchant must make it more tedious to buy the item. Its therefore a tradeoff of making it reasonably easy enough to purchase an item, but not so easy that anyone with decent technical knowledge can just code up a bot for your site in an afternoon.
 
The tools used to deter botting include CAPTCHAs, order limits, API obfuscation or tokenizing (to force going through the site itself), and ID verification. There can also be more complex behavior analysis, where the website captures things like mouse movements right before and after a purchase is made and then uses some heuristic to decide if the purchase was made by a human. All of these options are actually available as off-the-shelf tools, though large merchants develop their own to make it harder for a potential bot to discover the "right" behavior.
 
Nvidia is likely pausing their storefront to implement one or two of these options.

As a MSI motherboard (X570 Unify) and 2080Ti (Gaming X Trio) user I will be buying a new Asus MB to go with my backordered 3090 once the 3090 arrives. I'm sorry, whether it was intentional or not doesn't matter at this point. The only way companies learn to stop these sort of practices is when it hurts their wallet. I'll go spend some money with someone else who isn't stuck in a controversy that is one hundred percent their own fault. Even if it's a single rogue manager MSI should of provided training on preventing a situation like this from occurring.

Teaching a summer class at Ball State U...as a tech person.  Content is Microsoft Office... The class is composed of professors.
 
In to the part of the class where we are doing some basic excel.  An older prof raises her hand, and i walk over to look over her shoulder.  She says, I can't open the excel program.  I say, ok, lets take the mouse, and double click on the folder we've put on the desktop for this class.  She picks the mouse up, taps it against the screen two times...  I blinked, did not laugh, did not smile...and i say, Yep, nope...lets put that back down there, and move the mouse around, you see the little arrow moving around?...
 
Anyway, i have a few stories...but that one i consider one of my favs, and I feel like i did a damn fine job not laughing my ass off.

Source 1: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/75377/amd-ryzen-9-5900x-12c-24t-cpu-on-zen-3-at-up-to-5ghz-with-150w-tdp/index.html
Source 2: https://www.techpowerup.com/272715/first-signs-of-amd-zen-3-vermeer-cpus-surface-ryzen-7-5800x-tested
Source 3: https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-ryzen-7-5800x-8-core-zen3-cpu-spotted-on-aots-benchmark-site
 
   
Some update(s) to this story:
 
Here's a family photo of the Zen 3-powered AMD Ryzen 5000 series CPUs
 
 
Source 4: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/75765/heres-family-photo-of-the-zen-3-powered-amd-ryzen-5000-series-cpus/index.html
 
AMD Ryzen 9 5950X And 5900X Zen 3 CPUs Show Performance Dominance In Early Benchmark Leak. AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 5950X Also Benchmarked in Geekbench 5. Ryzen 5 5600X benchmarks appear, cruise past Intel's Core i5-10600K:
 
 
Source 5: https://hothardware.com/news/amd-ryzen-9-5950x-5900x-zen-3-cpus-performance-benchmark
Source 6: https://www.techspot.com/news/87194-ryzen-5-5600x-benchmarks-appear-cruise-past-intel.html
Source 7: https://www.techpowerup.com/273587/amd-ryzen-9-5900x-5950x-also-benchmarked-in-geekbench-5
Source 8: https://ranker.sisoftware.co.uk/show_run.php?q=c2ffcee889e8d5eddeeadce8dafc8eb383a5c0a598a88efdc0f8&l=en
 
Another quick update:
 
AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16-Core CPU Hits 5GHz Without Breaking A Sweat
 
 
Source 9: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?utf8=✓&q=5950X
Source 10: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-ryzen-9-5950x-5ghz-benchmarks 
 

When you see someone say you're buying a PS5 and have this in the marketplace ad....for $599.

I don´t get why people are willing to pay these ridiculous prices. It is way too much for a consumer to pay. $20 would at most and that is stretching it. I am glad there are cheap third party sellers.