I was part of the hardcore build it yourself crew for years and years, but I find now that for the last 10 years or so now, and especially with the death of places like Fry’s and all the bullshit Newegg pulled, it’s way easier and cheaper to buy a pre-built box that’s maybe 90-95% there, then tweak what you need to tweak.

Get that manufacturers warranty and forget trying to part it out yourself.

$3,500 here.

https://www.magicmicro.com/14443-13/?gclid=CjwKCAjwgsqoBhBNEiwAwe5w0-_ZgYLWExSn5qI8px0IsfY6YxDieItNckeje3agVUSZTF_OilVppRoC8nsQAvD_BwE

Sounds like someone wasn’t able to ship product and had their licensing pulled…

Hilarious that it even embedded the tweet so you can see it’s not an accurate quote.

Bad enough when humans do it, adding nothing.

I would love to teach again, but aside from the fact that, physically, standing and talking for 8 hours a day is outside my reach now, I would also take probably a 66% to 75% paycut to do it. :(

“Gaming”

“Sub $1,000”

My gut reaction is “choose one”.

You might be able to get a gaming laptop under $1K but get ready to replace it in 2 years.

Text encoding is SUPER basic and anyone looking to get involved in Linux or scripting absolutely should know that stuff FIRST.

Source: I was teaching Linux 23 years ago before it was cool.

Here’s a good primer:

ASCII:
https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/ASCII-American-Standard-Code-for-Information-Interchange

URL encoding:
https://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.ASP

Entity encoding:
https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_entities.asp

Really, ALL of the W3Schools stuff is just fantastic. Anyone remotely interested in this stuff should start at the beginning there and work up.

Not in HTML. Never has worked that way.

Special reserved characters have always been handled this way because you don’t want to accidentally interpret something the wrong way.

Same for URL encoding. You upload “Clever Name.PDF” to a website and it generates a URL of “Clever%20Name.PDF” because spaces aren’t valid in URLs. %20 is the code for a space.

OP noted: “Don’t get me started on how this messes up linux commands and scripts”

If you’re running linux commands and scripts, you’re not a normal user and should know this already. :) It’s only been the standard for 30 years or so.

& is how & is represented in HTML.

https://www.hammockforums.net/forum/showthread.php/105012-What-does-amp-amp-mean-see-it-a-lot-and-its-not-in-the-acronym-page

If you need a literal &, then preceed it with an escape character like “\”.

Aha! Makes sense!

26th? I thought it was the 21st?

I don’t get the surprise… Apple has ALWAYS been like this. They don’t want “normies” screwing around with “their” gear.

Heck, you needed a case cracker tool to open the OG Macintosh machines, they were specifically engineered to keep people out.

https://archive.org/details/mac_Mac_case_cracker_instructions_box_198x

My work software kept seeing weird bugs in Chrome, so I switched permanently.

If you’re doing this in a business environment, I wouldn’t fool around with a home rolled option and would just go straight with a Websense subscription:

https://www.websense.com/content/support/library/deployctr/v76/dic_wcg.aspx

Microsoft required 10% of system resources be reserved for Kinect support, even in games that didn’t support Kinect features.

https://www.eurogamer.net/how-the-xbox-one-gpu-reserve-unlock-actually-works

That reduction in horsepower for the actual games showed up in reduced resolution and framerate.

Lifting that restriction allowed the Xbox One to reach parity with the PS4.

Because the 360 refresh was functionally the same, both the One S and One X added new functionality (4K Blu Ray, 4K Gaming).

I just thought it was bad, probably AI generated, concept art.

One evolution went like this:

At launch, it came with Kinect and 10% of system resources were reserved for Kinect processing, even on games that didn’t support Kinect. That resulted in lower framerates and resolution than equivalent PS4 games.

Then Microsoft, wisely, removed the Kinect requirement and released a Kinect-free version of the one. With that extra performance boost, the One gained parity with the PS4.

Sony announced the PS4 Pro for 2016, but while it had more power than the stock PS4, it lacked a 4K Blu Ray drive.

Seeing the opportunity, Microsoft added a 4K drive to the Xbox One and launched the Xbox One S one month ahead of the PS4 Pro.

They also pre-emptively announced the Xbox One X which would be the powerhouse machine of the generation with 4K gaming and 4K physical media.

The idea being that hopefully people would choose the One S over the Pro due to the 4K drive, or would at least wait on buying anything until the One X dropped a year later.

Last generation was really weird as to one company having both the weakest and strongest hardware in the same generation.

Xbox One W/ Kinect
PS4 / Xbox One No Kinect
Xbox One S (same hardware + 4K Blu Ray)
PS4 Pro (stronger hardware, no 4K Blu Ray)
Xbox One X (strongest hardware + 4K Blu Ray)

Historic generations were about 5 years…

The big problem with the Xbox One was that it was underpowered because of the Kinect requirement, so they ditched Kinect then rebranded as the Xbox One S, throwing in a 4K Blu Ray player.

Still wasn’t enough, so the One X had full 4K capabilities.

If they had launched with the One X things would have looked a lot different.

Makes sense:

Xbox - 2001
Xbox 360 - 2005
Xbox One - 2013
Xbox One S - 2016
Xbox One X - 2017
Xbox Series S|X - 2020

4 years, 8 years, 3 years, 1 year, 3 years.

2028 would be on the long side but not unheard of. The reason for the big gap between 2005 and 2013 was the 2008 economic crisis.

2020 was the covid/supply chain crisis.