Trixanity

11 minutes ago, Levent said:

Seems like very similiar device yeah but I wouldnt waste a single cent on it as,

You cannot upgrade the RAM to 4G as its DDR2 only nor install W10, as CPU does not support X64 instruction set.

Has 32 bit Windows 10 been deprecated?

The reason I said 2 or 4 GB sticks is because those were what popped up when looking for DDR2 memory but perhaps it's some fake eBay product page that I mistook as real. Didn't really look into it beyond a quick glance.

In any case, given the response and my own opinion the moment I was asked to look at it, I'll give it back and tell him to get a new laptop.

5 minutes ago, Levent said:

Hey, thats a MSI Wind U100 (or have identical specs). We had two Medion Akoya E1210 (rebranded Wind U100) and they are completely unusable for anything but windows XP. I have upgraded one to 2G ram, SSD and MSI Wind bios so that I could overclock the CPU but in any scenario, that device absolutely shit to use even back in 2008 standards.

It's a Lenovo IdeaPad S10e but probably very similar. 

Edit: Found a review of the model.

I've been asked to 'restore' an old 10" netbook because he likes the form factor and had it lying around in storage. I told him beforehand that these old netbooks often aren't that good and even if I put in an SSD like he asked it would just move the bottleneck and it therefore might not make sense.

I looked at the laptop and it's a 10" Lenovo laptop and the model number and processor indicates that it's probably from 2008/2009.

It's running Windows XP, has 1 GB of DDR2 RAM (half being soldered on), some awful sub-HD TN panel and an N270 Intel Atom CPU @ 1.6 GHz. 

As you can probably tell already a lot more than the SSD would need to be changed for this to make sense and given the age of the laptop and the money required, it might be a much better solution to go out and get a more modern system although the form factor is hard to replicate as they've fallen out of favor especially with modern bezel-less designs.

The laptop isn't in the best of shape. For instance some of the covering on the hinges has fallen off. When I booted it up, the LCD appears to be damaged with dark blotches in various places. The backlight was quite dim and the hotkeys to increase brightness didn't seem to work but it might just be a faulty software problem.

So basically if you ask me the HDD need to replaced with an SSD, the Windows XP install is unsafe and needs to replaced with Windows 10 (which could break hotkey support etc), the single available RAM stick need to be upgraded with a 2 or 4 GB stick depending on what's available and the LCD would probably need to be replaced as I think it's very detrimental to have a damaged display like that. 

The question is: am I being pessimistic and am I just looking for reasons to not have to work on this old junk? Or am I being reasonable in wanting to say it's not worth it and just to get a new modern laptop?

17 hours ago, Genwyn said:

How long until the raw floppy image for the launch codes ends up on tpb?

 

Im just imaging that somewhere out there was a file cabinet with a giant floppy disk that had the most important data in the world (Hillary Clinton’s nudes) on it, how was this floppy secured? Where was it held? Was there a guy who’s job title was “holder of the floppy”?

 

If said dude was looking at such nudes, he was probably holding a floppy anyway. Might as well recognize the attempt with a title.

I imagine Google is waiting for AV1 to be complete and adopted so they can (hardware) accelerate photo and video across both client and server systems.

Problem is it'll still be a long wait to get there.

12 hours ago, Kisai said:

 

You will not see a capable GPU in a 14" laptop. It is not possible. To use the phrase at the office "That will melt."

 

Basically all 12-14" laptops are rubbish tier performance, by design, because they are too thin to dissipate the necessary heat. This is why you don't see dedicated GPU parts in the Surface Pro tablet/laptops and anything in that ultrabook form factor.

 

At best, "APU" AMD parts might bring up the floor on gaming laptops, but in general, every time a newer CPU/APU/GPU has come out, the OEM's have instead made the chassis smaller, and sacrificed any performance gains with a better chip by using a cheaper slower chip and a smaller battery.

The 13" Razer Stealth has a GTX 1650 option. So I guess you could call that statement false. It's probably throttling like hell but still: there are lots of laptops with dedicated graphics in thin form factors. You'll just have to accept the hefty price tag and the overheating causing throttling.

I bought a laptop with Windows 10 Home 1809 pre-installed. There was no option to skip the Microsoft account at all. I tried many things and going back and forth to find a skip option. I gave up and tried to login and failed (iirc). Then it gave me the option of a local user. It took some fiddling to get there at least. This is a bad change.

3 hours ago, will4623 said:

meh needed one in tech news anyway.

Mine was in Tech News but it got moved for whatever reason.

37 minutes ago, Jarno. said:

If that is true then its crazy yes. Software should not be able to get that level of access in my opinion.

Just read some new info: apparently you don't even need admin access. Any user has access on the basis that any user should be able to change the RGB lighting hence having read/write access.

Quote

The driver executable is placed into a writable location, meaning from a non-admin account you can replace the driver with one that you can use to leverage for gaining admin / kernel code execution, e.g. the old Asus ASMMAP driver.

Quote

The driver also doesn't set an access control list (ACL) on itself while running, which is probably on purpose so that a non-admin user can change RGB patterns. It also means non-admin users can talk to the driver and abuse its features.

Quote

The whole RGB thing works by passing some data from the application to a driver, and that driver then sends the data to physical devices on the motherboard via either smbus (a low speed hardware bus) or general purpose IO (GPIO) from the chipset (PCH).

There's a lot more info but basically instead of the driver acting as a middle man to any requests from the software (and therefore acting as a gatekeeper) it just indiscriminately allows direct access to the hardware like some kind of pass-through. The bus it uses to communicate is shared so any other hardware on that bus would be compromised as well and could (if nothing else) be used to brick your stuff. Also, the NIC is supposedly on the same bus so you could use it while circumventing the OS to send packets to and from your device without you knowing it.

44 minutes ago, Jarno. said:

You might  already have a larger issue when people can get to physical distance of your PC. Pretty much no security can protect against that. But interesting post makes me wonder what it took to figure this out.

From what I understand they'd not necessarily need physical access. I'm assuming the RGB software has admin privileges to write to the firmware and it's unlikely that the software itself is very secure so from there it's just about having remote access to the computer (or the software itself) one way or another.  That RGB software can even get this much access is absolutely crazy. I'd like more high level details to completely understand the attack vector.

So far this seems limited to Gigabyte motherboards (however it might be more widespread). An RGB keyboard or mouse seems to use a much simpler and more appropriate API.

Regarding how and why: a clever guy being tired of the LEDs and trying to nuke the RGB software. You can get a lot of things done when you're irritated. Frustration is a powerful motivator.

A guy just discovered that all the RGB controls on motherboards are designed so poorly that people can use it as a backdoor into the motherboard.

Quote

I got frustrated at Gigabyte's RGB control stuff (I just REALLY want to turn my GPU LEDs off!) so I caved in and started reverse engineering RGB Fusion and OH GOD WHY DID I DO THAT IT IS SO HORRIBLY CURSED

Quote

1) They expose PCH GPIOs so they can bit-bang WS2812B LEDs from usermode.

2) Driver also gives direct read/write access to one of the smbus ports. Actually it might be more than one.

3) They expose some sort of ICSP flashing interface to an MCU?!

4) Driver object has no DACL.

It sounds like it's possible to upload various pieces of software through whatever interface/API the RGB control uses. The RGB software has even been discovered to be quite buggy resulting in the software causing bootloops and therefore resetting CMOS to get out of the loop. So that you can mess with the RGB in that fashion can lead to a host of problems and possible attacks.

Read more in the Twitter thread.

Source: https://twitter.com/gsuberland/status/1175570500292108289

7 hours ago, Jurrunio said:

At least from what OP quoted, the 34.x ms number seems to be latency of the panel in response to user input, not the touch layer.

That's why you read the sources. While the best would be the Chinese ones, the translations could be off. XDA calls it touch latency as does whatever else I can find. The op also calls it 'input latency', not lag. That sounds like a translation as you'd consider touch a form of input. I've never seen anyone advertise input lag and probably with good reason: not many know what it is, not many care and the number probably sounds higher than they'd like. Touch latency, on the other hand, is often advertised to dunk on competition and to highlight responsiveness. High touch latency causes sluggish response and feel when using the device.

2 hours ago, Jurrunio said:

because there is such test in it. Have you even read it from top to bottom? Tho the input lag test is somewhere in the middle

How, again, does the input lag of a display correlate with the latency of a capacitive touch layer in this instance?

What's even the point?

If the latency is accurate, then it's one of the lowest I've seen, so what exactly begs the criticism?

5 hours ago, Jurrunio said:

I talk input latency. Mouse or touch it doesnt matter

Why did you link a display review then?

4 hours ago, Jurrunio said:

If you still dont understand the battery life argument, I give up.

You don't seem to understand that touch latency isn't the same as panel latency.

5 hours ago, Trik'Stari said:

 

My point exactly. It's no longer about the fun of playing the game, it's a serious competition with financial aspects.

 

Even worst, it's gotten to the point that it's decreasing the variety of games coming out. Every developer has been trying to copy fortnite or overwatch for a while now, and it's gotten old.

Most games aren't esports-friendly. It's actually very difficult to make one and some of the recent ones require the developer to pump lots of money into the scene to artificially kickstart it. A game like Fortnite relies solely on Chinese money to sustain it because they keep making changes favoring the casual player to the detriment of competition. From what I hear there are also lots of RNG elements which is also a big no-no; you want to keep RNG to a minimum if you want players to not get frustrated with the game mechanics.

36 minutes ago, Trik'Stari said:

If you're putting that much effort into gaming, it isn't really gaming anymore. Similar opinion to how, once upon a time in some other sports, various leagues banned getting paid for playing, because it "diluted the purpose of the sport".

Well, that much is true. To many of them it's a job. It's hard to maintain personal interest after years and years of playing the same thing.

What's interesting is that the retail box itself holds no false advertisement so you would have to look elsewhere to be mislead. So you could go into a store and pick up an FX processor, be disappointed when you got home and still be a victim of your own doing.

On the topic of misleading advertisement you should look no further than Qualcomm:

It's very subtle but you'd get the impression that you're buying what would be essentially 8 A76 cores when in reality they're calling both A55 and A76 (four each) the same name: Kryo 485. The clock speed advertisement is saved by the 'up to' as only one core goes that high.

I've yet to see a class action lawsuit against Qualcomm despite the significant performance delta. I still see this as being an opportunistic money grab although the advertisement could be better and more accurate when it comes to some of the claims. However I still question how many buyers had actually seen much if any of the advertisement.

So when is the class action lawsuit against Nvidia gonna happen when all those CUDA cores actually amount to zero cores by even the loosest definition?

Anyway the actually interesting tidbit is how many people were actually affected by deceptive marketing if we're gonna call it that.

How many bought a Construction processor off the shelf and build their own PCs? And how many of those would be fooled by marketing? How many of those are enthusiasts who wait for reviews?

How many buy pre-built machines? How many bought one on the basis of AMD's marketing? How many Construction-derived pre-builts were actually made and sold?

Taken those things into account one would think it would be an awfully small number so it must be some opportunistic lawyers having a field day with a free paycheck. It happens all the time.

Here in my country, three out of the big four service providers failed to protect its customers in a recent probe by journalists to see if they'd allow SIM swapping. Those three did it without any ID checks - only the phone number was required and they just handed out a SIM card on the spot. The one provider that didn't fail refused the SIM swap without a photo ID. 

What's odd is that none of the big news organizations are covering it despite how egregious it is although there are plenty of other scandals related to these companies such as emergency calls not working and scamming elderly customers but that's beside the point in my opinion.

3 hours ago, leadeater said:

 

  Hide contents

 

 

 

 

If there was significant market deception why is it that only a single private class action lawsuit has been filed? Where are all the consumer protection authority investigations in any of the hundred odd countries that exist, or at a minimum the EU, AUS/NZ, USA, Canada etc. There are none, it's just some pissed off guy which I don't actually believe, my belief is this was nothing more than an educated opportunistic law suit and the plaintiff was never deceived and knew full well what the product was before purchase. 

School is in session.

5 hours ago, Results45 said:

PREDICTIONS UPDATE

 

For reference:

• Calculations baseline ~ .225 TFLOPS/CU FP32 @ 1755Mhz
• RX 5700/Navi 8 = 7.2 TFLOPS
• RX 5700XT/Navi 10 = 9 TFLOPS

 

RX 5600/Navi 5:

• Half the performance of the RX 5700XT
• 20CU
• 4.5 TFLOPS

RX 5600XT/Navi 6:

• Half the performance of the RX 5800 (60% of the 5700XT)
• 24CU
• 5.4 TFLOPS

RX 5850/Navi 18:

• 1.8x the performance of the RX 5700XT
• 72CU
• 16.2 TFLOPS

RX 5950/Navi 27:

• 2.7x the performance of the RX 570XT
• 108CU
• 24.3 TFLOPS

RX Navi Pro Duo III/Navi 56

• 5.4x the performance of the RX 5700XT
• 2 x Navi 27 = 216CU
• 48.6 TFLOPS

 

Again, please consider these estimates with an iceberg of salt!

 

What are those Navi names supposed to indicate? We already know there's a 24 CU Navi 14.

Also, I'd consider those high CU counts very much theoretical at this point. I think we'll see two (if we're lucky: 3) chips in the 50-80 CU range but I don't think it's feasible to go higher than 80 until they've had a 70-80 CU piece of working silicon in the lab and analyzed. There's too big a risk of them making another Vega/Fiji with a very wide design but being so bottlenecked that it doesn't really do anything with many of the extra execution units.

What is your timeline and what is the process node?

There are so many questions. I mean if AMD can execute on those figures you've listed you might hit the mark but it remains to be seen if it's feasible. I don't know if you've accounted for reduced clock speed in the big designs (does not appear so to me) but you should factor that in.

10 minutes ago, Orangeator said:

Wow, that is a massive blow to Huawei's bottom line. Almost feel sorry for them. Maybe they should really just do a lot of good PR showing that they don't spy... Etc. Change policies, side with the user's privacy publicly, through policy and announcements.

They're stuck between a rock and a hard place. If they try to distance themselves from the CCP and China, their sales will tank in China and they lose whatever support they get from China. 

55 minutes ago, Levent said:

even if you sideload gapps, I dont think your device will be certified (meaning you wont be able to get some DRM apps like netflix off google play) AND on top of that I believe there is another certification for video DRMs that even if you install netflix apk from somewhere else it dictates if you can use it or use it at full resolution.

You can get your device registered by visiting a website and typing in your ID. It should still say uncertified but your device gets whitelisted and therefore access to services and apps.

35 minutes ago, porina said:

Basically they have AOSP? IIRC Amazon are about the only big player going that route.

Yeah, although there is still some legal murkiness as to whether they actually use AOSP with the ban but yeah they'd have to make a fork of some kind I believe. They do have their own OS but there is some doubts whether it's properly compatible with Android apps and whether it can reasonably substitute Android.

9 minutes ago, porina said:

Are there any rules on excluding other app stores on Google's full fat Android? Reason I'm asking is I recall having a Samsung store as well as Google Play store on my S6. Huawei could create their store, and could use better rates as incentive to get more people moved over to it, both users and app developers. Non-exclusively I hope. *cough*Epic*cough*

Many apps including Google's require Play Services to function. To use that you need certification. You may sideload them for personal use though. So Huawei have to use a barebones Android. They have their own app store but it's hard to move people over when they rely on Google.