I think with a lot of these chips geared at AI there’s so much variation in how performance is measured you can say things like it beats an H100 inferencing on a specific INT4 model and that might be true. However, it might only hold for that narrow case.

So press releases aren’t worth much to me. Show me benchmarks.

I don’t see how Huawei could have made that jump. There’s a lot of generational knowledge and software development behind Nvidia’s chips. No company can become a competitor first time.

Pretty much anything over 10,000 employees. You can’t really organise that many people in a productive way. Let’s face it… You’re exploiting something.

Lurking account on a different instance.

I knew as I wrote it that somebody would come along and say “Wine/Proton is not an emulator” but I didn’t want to get into the detail.

Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?

A lot of stuff runs with windows emulation as if it’s native. It’s the same method the steam deck uses and so Valve actively do work to keep it working. The main problem is games with heavy anti-cheat.

Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?

Generally, yes. I think so.

If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?

See above.

Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?

There’s .NET libraries for Linux, but things have to be recompiled to use them.

How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a “Linux Update” program like what Windows has?

The distribution maintainer will issue updates on a regular basis. Update procedure is different for different distros, but all have a push-button update scheme. It’s pretty solid these days.

How does digital security work on Linux? Is it more vulnerable due to being open source? Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?

Keep your system up to date with security updates, and you’ll tend to be fine. Smaller user base tends to mean that there’s far less malware. Antivirus isn’t necessary.

Obviously phishing scams don’t care what OS you’re on, so mind what you click.

Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?

AMD ones are very solid.

Nvidia ones can be a pain from what I hear, but I don’t buy green.

Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?

No.

That said… You can always wipe a disk when you install an OS.

And also, what distro might be best for me?

Download a few Live-USB images and try them out. You don’t need to install them to get a desktop and a browser up. You can see if there’s any compatibility issues with your hardware.

Whichever works for you, go with it.

…but what are we actually trying to measure here? The miles travelled, or the wear and tear that’s caused by the wheels spinning?

Do they exist anymore?

Interesting that it’s just a cost of doing business in China as well.

Obviously. How much?

I was more meaning “on what scale?”. I assume he wasn’t a few hundred short.

He was fined €240M? What had he done?

I’ve put on a bit of weight since then, but I wouldn’t say that I’m giant.

You spent a few evenings downloading a hundred or so 1.44MB floppy imges over a 56kbps modem. You then booted the installer off one of those floppies, selected what software you wanted installed and started feeding your machine the stack of floppies one by one.

Once that was complete you needed to install the Linux boot loader “LiLo” to allow you the boot it (or your other OS) at power on.

All of that would get you to the point where you had a text mode login prompt. To get anything more you needed to gather together a lot of detailed information about your hardware and start configuring software to tell it about it. For example, to get XFree86 running you needed to know

• what graphics chip you had
• how much memory it had
• which clock generator it used
• which RAMDAC was on the board
• what video timings your monitor supported
• the polarity of the sync signals for each graphics mode

This level of detail was needed with every little thing

• how many heads and cylinders do your hard drives have
• which ports and irqs did your soundcard use
• was it sound blaster compatible or some other protocol
• what speeds did your modem support
• does it need any special setup codes
• what protocol did your ISP use over the phone line
• what was the procedure to setup an tear down a network link over it

The advent of PCI and USB made things a lot better. Now things were discoverable, and software could auto-configure itself a lot of the time because there were standard ways to ask for information about what was connected.

If somebody has been diagnosed with a mental disorder it doesn’t give them a free pass to be harmful to others. Their actions are still their responsibility. The diagnosis is there to help her explore options for managing her condition, getting treatment or medication. It’s not there to give her an excuse for being a bitch.

Yes you’re right, but then you get into the argument

• The data is corrupt
• The data are corrupt

I’m camp one because I treat data as a collective noun of data-items, not as a plural of datum.

No, which is why people saying “Buy it and don’t connect it to the internet” isn’t helping. More people need to not buy it and tell other people not to buy it.

To get them to stop they need to lose both the original sale and the additional advertising revenue. Right now their thinking is:

• People are buying our TVs
• Putting advertising on them isn’t causing our sales to drop
• Therefore it’s costing us next to nothing to do.
• It often gets us extra revenue if they connect to the internet.
• If they don’t connect, we still more than covered our costs.

There is no downside for them. Only upside. The equation needs to change for them to stop doing it.

Ta

They’re industrial boxes with a screen. Not aesthetically what I want in my living room. The displays are chosen for their longevity, not their picture quality. They’re often actively cooled with fans, so adding a noise level to their operation.