Jump to content

Ace2213

Member
  • Posts

    36
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Awards

This user doesn't have any awards

Recent Profile Visitors

The recent visitors block is disabled and is not being shown to other users.

Ace2213's Achievements

  1. So I've been able to get not very far with them. I see them in device manager but what I can do with them is almost nothing. Initializing in gpt mode hasn't worked so far but mbr does sometimes. But then formatting is very tricky as only certain format sizes end up showing in file explorer, with corrupt data inside. Formatting the entire drive doesn't work. I opened one up and couldn't find any useful info. There is a number on the controller though. Is that helpful? There's no brand name or anything
  2. I don't have them on hand right now, but I'm pretty sure he does use the same vendor. I'll let you know when I'm at his place. What's the relevance of the controller model?
  3. In this case, my friend already bought these SSDs and is unable to sell them. So splitting their profit with me is better than not selling them at all. Sunk cost fallacy. And in my case, my motivation would be fun and educational purposes. And I couldn't agree more about Google. Crack down on fake news all you like, but real information that CAN cause harm if followed incorrectly? Sounds like some anti-right to repair bs. Maybe I'll try Chatgpt. Thanks for the tips. I'll see what I can find on YouTube. Fortunately they haven't entirely ruined that search engine just yet.
  4. So I have a friend who works with importing SSDs from China. He has a bunch of defective SSDs sitting in his house that were returned due to defects. Either they don't get detected as storage or don't get detected at all. In some cases they are detected by disk manager, but you can't perform any tasks on them. Now obviously there's a good chance these units are just defective or corrupt. But couldn't it also be a firmware issue? I know it's theoretically possible to manually modify hardware firmware based on all the fake Chinese GPUs with spoofed model numbers, but I can't for the life of me find out how to get into it. Thanks to Google prioritizing "authoritative sources" which would naturally never endorse this for so many reasons. I figure there's a reasonable chance at least some of these SSDs might have a typo or something in the firmware that would be stupid easy to fix, rather than discarding them as e-waste. Any keywords that can point me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.
  5. The surface book is trash for different reasons. Here's a much better quick example, although there's many more on Amazon alone. www.amazon.com/Acer-Display-Graphics-Keyboard-A515-43-R19L/dp/B07RF1XD36 www.amazon.com/Acer-i5-8265U-Keyboard-Fingerprint-A515-54-51DJ/dp/B07RF2123Z
  6. What? In what way? Since Ryzen beats them in performance, battery life and price.
  7. Do these issues also exist in those massive sized rips of 20-40 gigs or so for a single movie? I always assumed they were identical to a BluRay, since the size lines up.
  8. That cost 10% of what the inferiorly specced Mac Pro does.
  9. I'm not sure if it was mentioned yet, but any non-Apple PC can use off the shelf parts, reducing the cost of the initial investment and making it more viable since he can resell the parts after the project or simply keep them in stock for other projects/uses. The Mac Pro can be resold, sure, at a loss, but the parts aren't transferable or reusable. Anyone who works with PCs knows how valuable this is.
  10. I recently decided to start a social network the addresses the problems that exist with current implementations. I quickly found myself facing all these privacy challenges that were discussed on the WAN show last night, regarding user data and human tracking. I was extremely troubled by what I felt was the industry cornering me into making choices that essentially serve up my users' data on a platter. I decided to take a stand and try to find a privacy-friendly solution for each scenario. Not all of these are related to websites. Some are examples that Linus brought up and I have found a solution for. Weather? Ask the user to input their city. Is it as accurate as geolocation? Probably not, but good enough. Navigation? Unavoidable. That said, it's not necessary that Google constantly tracks you and makes suggestions/guesses about places you visit frequently and asks if these are your home/work. Home and work are very useful to program in, but they should be done manually by the user. It's not that hard. Voice assistants? Great, but turn off trigger phrases by default. Or better yet, for everyone. It's not that inconvenient to (long) press a button or squeeze your phone to have it begin listening. Biometrics? Should only be stored locally on the device and encrypted. Facial recognition? Should be banned. Habits/interests/demographic/history? Obviously not only completely unnecessary, but also borderline predatory. Unfortunately marketers love the shit out of this, and that's not my area so I don't have a solution. Advertising? Ads suck. But they don't have to. Classifieds are nice, don't require spying on you, are not repetitive or monotonous, don't show up when you don't want them to or for things you don't care about, and they encourage individuals and small businesses, as opposed to ads which are usually ran by inhuman corporations. Perhaps if corporations tried to become more human about this instead of shoving ads down our throats after spying on us and still being creepy rather than interesting, people wouldn't hate them so much. IP addresses? Unavoidable, so keep them for a few days or a week tops. Blacklists make sense, until you remember that VPNs exist. Maybe encrypt IPs? External services? Whenever you integrate a third-party service into your website, you're inevitably sharing some data with them, like SSO for example. You can control what data you give them, and if they insist on requiring certain unnecessary data, find another provider for the same service that is more respectful of privacy. It's that simple. Payment gateways? By integrating them and their buttons, you're allowing them to serve cookies through your website (on every page, even ones that don't show the button and have nothing related to payment on them). Floatplane's homepage for example, without being logged in, in incognito mode, serves 14 cookies. One by sails.sid, one by Cloudflare and the rest are all by Stripe or Paypal. Unless you know what each of those cookies is doing and can vouch for them, it's best to not serve them since they can be used to spy on users. Most buttons use an HTML form, an image and/or a javascript file hosted on the gateway's website and by requesting it in your website's code, your visitors also pull the cookie. So while it takes some work, it's possible to emulate the view of the button using HTML, CSS and local images (on your server) to bypass the querying of the gateway's website without affecting its functionality. The big one, Cloudfrickingflare? Despite my best efforts, I was unable to find a suitable way of deploying their services. Using them as a DNS is fine (aside from the obvious ramifications of that), but if you want to take advantage of most of their services, you have to allow them to proxy your website and serve it for you. This gives you access to their CDN, DDoS protection, firewall features, apps, SSL certificates (which I think are extremely problematic but won't get into them here), analytics, etc. But when you use them as a proxy they start serving their controversial _cfuid cookie. And since they are the edge node, they are the final line between you and your end user, so there's nothing you can do about it (short of maybe using javascript to delete their cookie after it gets served to the user). They can modify your website, inject content and cookies into it, block your own content, but you can't do anything to their modifications. Their cookie is controversial because it doesn't have a "secure" flag, which triggers security warnings in some tests. My issue however is with the existence of the cookie all together. Cloudflare refuses to explain what the cookie is used for, hiding behind excuses like "security purposes" (which is false because that cookie is served even without using Cloudflare SSL or any of their security features), and their publicly facing information explains that they place this cookie on every single internet user's device. If this cookie is discovered, you are considered "safe", because you have visited a website proxied by Cloudflare in the past. If the cookie does not exist, you are considered "risky". Obviously this is a ridiculous way of conducting "security", assuming that's all the cookie does. I got banned from Cloudflare's forums for asking about the issue and referring to it as spyware, after being given the runaround by their mods and told to simply "don't use it if you don't like it". So, I don't use it. Is it ideal having to find different, more expensive providers for each of their features separately? No. But it's worth it. Cloudflare has become too powerful to be given the benefit of the doubt and entrusted in this way. And the EU cookie consent law is quite frankly crap and only annoying because as mentioned in the WAN show, very few people read and even less understand privacy policies, that use intentionally cryptic language like "we only share data with our partners or with our other departments". "Informed consent" is such a commonly brought up phrase nowadays when it comes to sex. Shouldn't it be equally important for our data? I look forward to hearing what other scenarios you can think of that require giving up our data, so that we may find a solution to it together.
  11. Oh damn. Didn't notice that. So where would that lack of hyper threading impact me? Running VMs? I don't think it should affect gaming and I don't do anything that requires more than 4 cores/threads.
  12. This but with on-board graphics. I wanna know if there is any reason to buy the 3200G over the 2400G or if I should swallow the $30 difference. They seem identical when looking at the numbers, except for the iGPU. Same core/thread count, same clock speed, same boost clock, same TDP, same cache. Is the 3200G basically a recycled 2400G with nerfed graphics? The only other difference I see is the "features" that the 2400G supports simply by being a higher tier. Like FreeSync and a miscellaneous list of marketing terms like "VR Ready" and "SenseMI".
  13. True, but believe it or not, there are very few games I can't run at 720p/1080p low/medium with very playable framerates. Even heavier titles like the Witcher 3 is surprisingly playable, albeit with some stutter here and there but not nearly enough to make it unenjoyable. It's mostly newer titles that I struggle with. Hell, I first played through Skyrim on my old i3-380M! That's why I'm so excited about Vega. If it's such a major step up, I can only imagine how far I can push it.
  14. Coming from Intel graphics, it seems I'll be getting a lot more than what I'm used to! Do you have any data on the battery life performance of Ryzen-powered laptops with and without a dGPU?
×