Dabombinable

Purely compatibility reasons. yes, zen4 can run everything zen 2 can, but not at the same timings for all commands. Its supposed to be a ps5 still, not a ps6. Compatablilty when making a pro version of a console is the number one priority. 

IMO the only thing I personally want out of the ps5 pro is HDR10+ and Dolby HDR support. 

 
  
there is a user accessable m.2 slot that you can put in more storage. It has no proprietary lock like the xbox has. 

It doesn't impress me. It creates maybe passable flavor-text/music you might hear in a shopping district inside a video game, but it doesn't sound real. It sounds like an AM Radio.
 
This is the problem with most "music" and "voice" AI, is that taken separately (See RVC) you can make a perfect clone of another song because all the AI does is "autotune" the voice B from the original voice A, but you use the same backing audio. All you've done is made a cover using the source voice, which to me isn't a "cover", it's akin to "nightcore"'ing a song where you just speed it up 50% and have done nothing else to it.
 
I'm not sure what the underlying process is for Udio because I've honestly just picked half a dozen different songs to check the genre adhere'dness but it seems like everything was washed with a noise filter that ranges from "radio" to "phonograph". I'd say most of these don't sound like what they claim to, and the ones that do, sound like they're inside a bathroom or hallway or down the street, or something.
 
They all lack "professional sound" mixing feel to it. If this was 1960, you could probably get away with it on LP or tape. 
 
Thinking about it for a minute, I believe I know what they did. They likely used commercial music as training data from different periods, because that would explain the incoherent levels of noise. The AI doesn't understand the "hiss" of a LP isn't part of the music.
 

Little Coppermine ITX board is up and running in Windows 98 SE.
VIA VT8604 chipset, S3 ProSavage AGP integrated graphics, and of course, Celeron 1000.

I'd forgotten how massive of a difference a good hard drive makes on Windows 98. This 5-platter Hitachi Deskstar ATA is so much snappier than the CompactFlash card in my Compaq Win98 laptop, it's unreal. It almost consistently tops out the ATA interface with its sequential reads/writes.

Finally have a working SS7 board - can see if I killed my old K6-2 500 with the mosfet short, and test my 72pin SIMM.
Had to swap the cooler or the board wouldn't fit. And the Medalist finally died after years of bad sector warnings so that was also replaced, and the Fireball's performance is on point.
Board appears to have great performance as well despite the 8bit TAG (128MB cacheable RAM). Will be getting a K6-3+ of some clock speed (Jan's patched BIOS and 2V support means perfect compatibility).

You can get a standard MLCC capacitor in a 0602 package up to 330uF
 
you can also get super small, super caps too.  https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Seiko-Semiconductors/CPH3225A?qs=3etwrb1wR%2BhUOph6lAO7eg%3D%3D
 
They 100% have enough power to save the dram cache to the flash before the caps fully discharge.

Well done everybody!!

She lives!
Wouldn't boot with the original RAM, which had corrosion along the slot. Replaced it with another 133mhz stick while I left the original to soak in an alcohol bath.
Also unplugged (probably forever) the system's two incredibly bothersome fans. On the Core 2 Duo unit I replaced the small axial CPU fan with an 80mm radial set on top of the heatsink, will probably do the same here. Cools the CPU just as well but almost silently, and provides enough intake of its own so as not to need another noisy system intake fan.

HDD still works! The system software runs on Red Hat Linux. It boots for a little while then performs a soft reboot after around 30 seconds. The Core 2 Duo unit did this one too; I am not sure why. Probably why both of them ended up for sale in thrift stores. 

These units are awesome but they reinforce my belief that computers should not be forced into places they do not belong, because look what happens! Your $2,000 piece of rack gear is now useless because someone pulled the wrong plug and Linux got corrupted. 
 
EDIT: Got the OS booting properly!
It has a pretty ballin' GUI, seems to run a real desktop environment. I thought it would just be CLI. 
After the GUI loads, an ancient Firefox version opens and loads into a cached website for the Public Radio Satellite System's FTP server management site. It seems at some point this unit was run as a satellite fileserver. Rad.

Utter BULL SHIT. If you ask me. All these greedy companies are doing is giving me a reason to NOT buy their product.

Well to add onto this, Turions have very bizarre compatibility problems.
It seems that support for older chips is removed from newer BIOSes.
With a Core 2 Duo, there are older chipsets that don't support newer chips, but I've never had an older chip not be supported on a newer chipset as long as it fits in the socket.
Turion 64 is not this way at all. A non-Ultra chip won't work in a machine designed for the Ultra chips, and the only difference is the clockspeed. A machine built for the later 2ghz non-Ultra models also will not accept the early 1.6ghz models built on a larger process node. 
I still find it really funny that AMD branded their Turion chips above the blazing fast speed of...... two whole gigahertz!!!! as "ULTRA" chips, and considering that a 2.1ghz "ULTRA!!!!!" performs like a 1.6ghz Core 2 Duo while consuming almost triple the power... 
 
EDIT: They ALSO do not modulate their clocks whatsoever, it seems. Unlike a Core 2 Duo, where a 2400mhz chip can run at any speed between 200 and 2400mhz, a comparable Turion chip has two speeds: 2400mhz, and off.
 

It is so funny how old computers sometimes refuse to work for no explicable reason whatsoever.

Picked up a lovely rare Artist Edition Pavilion DV6 a few weeks ago - 2.4ghz Turion Ultra, ATi HD 3200, 4GB DDR2. 
Instant WHEA error in any Windows version - whether booting from an installer CD or HDD with OS on it.
I had tried a good deal of solutions, was on the verge of buying a new motherboard.
As a last resort, I swapped the DV6's Turion CPU with the 2.1ghz Turion Ultra from my DV4 Special Edition. 
 
Not only did the CPU swap fix the WHEA error, but the 2.4ghz CPU which caused the error in the first place works flawlessly in the other laptop.
The two boards use the exact same socket, northbridge, and southbridge. The CPUs have the same FSB speed and cache. There is not a single reason under the sun that a CPU would POST but be unstable in one, yet a near identical CPU would resolve this issue, while the original CPU works fine in a different machine. I would understand if I'd put this CPU in after-the-fact, but the 2.4ghz chip has been in there since 2008!  

Bought a piece of satellite radio gear at a thrift shop because the I/O on the back looked suspiciously akin to a PC motherboard. Sure enough, it's based around an ITX board running a 945 chipset and Core 2 Duo mobile CPU with a 667mhz front-side bus. It boots its little operating system from a 1TB RE3 hard drive and interfaces with its FPGA boards over the IDE drive controller (which is admittedly weird as hell - the board has enough PCI lanes for each of the three custom cards so why take this route?) 

There's the MB899 industrial motherboard.

The I/O cards are based on Altera Cyclone II and III FPGA chips, with 8MB on the II and 16MB on the III. They connect to the IDE disk controller with the middle board being master and top/bottom configured as slaves. Manufacturer isn't abusing the IDE connector to send proprietary signals, either - the motherboard recognizes a hard drive plugged into the IDE port.

 
 
So the FPGA cards are sending encoded satellite radio signals over the IDE channel to the disk controller on the southbridge. The Core 2 Duo chip then decodes these digital audio/video streams and repeats them, displays over VGA, or records to the SATA hard drive.
 
 
Edit: It now runs Windows 7

More scummy phone photos of the pristine FX 1800 (G94 die, same as 9600GT/9800m). It still has under 100hr of usage, still the cleanest, shiniest 9000-series card out there. Funny to compare it to the beat-up ones on eBay.



Tomorrow or the next day I'll have a great deal more old video cards to post; 17 untested cards from '06-10 are arriving. Two 9800 GX2, FireGL v7200 (single slot Radeon X1800), and a pair of HIS 4850 cards among others (mostly high end GeForce). Hope I get some nice working cards out of it.

To quote AMD "The AMD Polaris and Vega graphics architectures are mature, stable and performant and don’t benefit as much from regular software tuning.  Going forward, AMD is providing critical updates for Polaris- and Vega-based products via a separate driver package, including important security and functionality updates as available.  The committed support is greater than for products AMD categorizes as legacy, and gamers can still enjoy their favorite games on Polaris and Vega-based products."

Pretty much it'll be perfectly fine for the next 2-3 years. Considering that Vega based APU are still being sold in stores, as are Polaris GPU.

Future proofing for what? What are you trying to achieve? E.g. if games, what resolution and type of games?
 
If you're trying to play the very latest games at 1440p/4K then you have lost the future already, but if you're playing older games at 1080p then sure, a Vega 56 or 1660 Ti will do 2-3 years if the card survives that long.
 
RX 580 is too slow for the most recent AAA games, even at 1080p, but it is plenty powerful enough for older games like GTA V.

Go with Vega 56, its faster than than the 1660ti and the 8GB of vRAM will be useful in newer games:
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-rx-vega-56.c2993

 
Performance rankings from this year:
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html

Go with Vega 56, its faster than than the 1660ti and the 8GB of vRAM will be useful in newer games:
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-rx-vega-56.c2993

 
Performance rankings from this year:
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html

Admit it, Linus dropped it.

Admitedly the PC which I built for my brother (he only had to buy the PSU) does do quite well with an RX 580 and an i7 3770S. And that's with a 128GB boot SSD and games on a 2TB HDD.

He had my old GTX 1070, but complained about stability. So I gave the 1070 to a friend in exchange for his RX 580 (ex mining). Friend's PC no longer has coil whine+runs games better, and my brother's PC is now fully stable. My friend also has my old i7 4790K however, and I replaced that with the 3700X because it was holding the 1070 back in some games.

DOS 6.22 With Soundblaster drivers, CD-ROM drivers, the Roland MT-32 emulator working and a mouse.
 
Glad i put the extra time in to it

 
I'm using CTMOUSE.EXE

That'd have been using one expensive controller. The best I ever managed was 3x 250GB Samsung 250GB 5400RPM HDD in RAID 0 on my Abit VP6. Would have been the full 4x250GB if 1 drive (not using Samsung DRAM) hadn't been DOA. Didn't know much about benchmarking HDD back then, and they later ended up in OG Xbox (another one died a few years ago as well 😞).

I've got 2x 200GB SATA 7200.7 that were run in RAID 0 in the PC they originally came from. 1 has SMART errors however and they run both hot and loud (seeks are very "crunchy" due to being the SATA models). Which is why I don't use them in my Barton PC build anymore (250GB 5400RPM laptop HDD from 2008 is so much quieter+faster).

I'm a little surprised this crusty fella is still running. Might hold the record for the longest-lasting 7200.7 drive on the planet - the drive itself is close to 20 years old with close to 12 years of flying hours, and still no SMART errors. 
One of my favorite sounding drives too. Makes a nice purr on the randoms.

The poisonous mindset that makes ppl into a smombie. No you dont have to be available at all times, no you dont have to reach anyone at anytime and instantly, and this is especially true for kids in 99.9% of the time. There is always a tomorrow and there is always a game they can play at home when for whatever reason they cant go outside.
Never had a phone as a kid until i got into middle school (even then it was some cheap basic one) and still survived and still had friends. And i mean real friends who help in trouble instead of running.

It's not a perfect law. Like I said, the age verification is pretty rough. But I am for banning them from voice chat. I have permanent hearing damage from squeakers yelling in my ears.

Summary
Florida Govenor Ron DeSantis passed a new law banning people under the age of 14 from using social media with the reasoning that it is heavily addictive and the young people don't understand what they are getting into. 
This legislation, called HB 3, is the same legislation that is requiring age verification for sexually explicit websites. 
 
Quotes
My thoughts
I think all of this new legislation has the right heart and people under 14 100% should NOT be on social media. There are so many scammers and child predators that are just waiting for kids like these to fall for their schemes. 
That said, I think the age verification is a TERRIBLE idea. Not because verifying age is bad in order to get on these websites, but it 100% could get hacked. 
 
Sources
 https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/25/tech/florida-social-media-law-age/index.html
https://apnews.com/article/florida-social-media-ban-desantis-fd07f61e167bd9109a83cd7355b5f164