Recent content by Mercutio

  1. Mercutio

    Here is a thread to talk about gaming

    Apparently the big news now is that Microsoft is expecting its gaming projects to hit 30% profit margins, which is somewhat unprecedented by past performance and on top of that, with the acquisition of Activision, there's no longer a non-Microsoft gaming company big enough to buy the Xbox brand...
  2. Mercutio

    question Which Tablets

    For what it's worth, there have been supported Microsoft OS releases on ARM since Windows 8. They might not be well supported and they certainly didn't have the massive engineering push that came with the new Snapdragon Elitewhatever, but the Thinkpad x13s pre-dates the "PC-spec" SoCs by a...
  3. Mercutio

    Empire in Decline

    A happier thought for just a moment: If Trump is allowed to run in 2028, the Democrats could potentially nominate Obama. He's not History's Greatest President by any stretch of the imagination, but we can remember a time when a sane and competent administrator (who isn't kissing 80 years old)...
  4. Mercutio

    Hard drive Failure Rates

    Backblaze data seems to suggest that the bathtub curve for drive replacement is getting wider. Big drives really do seem to be lasting longer than old ones did. The article links to the most recent Backblaze data dump if anyone needs to see it, but the important detail is that they're still...
  5. Mercutio

    question Which Tablets

    I know that Marine tablets are a thing. I've been out on Lake Michigan and seen them in action, but I can't say for sure that it's not just a fancy case over a regular tablet.
  6. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Someone asked me this morning to remote in and connect his second monitor.
  7. Mercutio

    Empire in Decline

    I went to protests on Saturday in Valparaiso, Indiana. There were around 1000 people there, which is about 950 more people than these things usually have when they're in Indiana. We had a bunch of idiots in "Roll Coal" trucks gun their engines or try to drown out our chants and I'd say support...
  8. Mercutio

    question Which Tablets

    I'm also on the lookout for one of those things, just to satisfy my personal curiosity. I know one person who has an Asus Snapdragon X Elite something or other, but 80% of her job is just being in meetings and taking notes about meetings. I don't even think she knows the difference between what...
  9. Mercutio

    Something Random

    The application I support is still largely Visual Basic. We need to move our development to C# and two of my three developers are in their mid 60s, so I'm guessing modernization efforts are gonna have to wait for some meemaws to retire.
  10. Mercutio

    Something Random

    The Better Offline podcast has a 100-minute long interview with the guy from Gamer's Nexus today. There's a lot of discussion of non-public aspects of running an outlet dedicated to reviewing PC hardware.
  11. Mercutio

    Windows 10

    Pour one out for Windows 10. Somewhere, LunarMist is cursing the $10,000 Mac Studio he was no doubt forced to buy thanks to the end of mainstream Microsoft Support.
  12. Mercutio

    question Which Tablets

    For a mixed use device, a Lenovo IP Duet 5 (13Q7C6) is genuinely pretty nice. FullHD OLED, 8GB RAM and better-than-advertised ~14 hour battery life on a 13" 2 in 1 that weighs almost exactly 1kg means that there's a lot to like. It's ChromeOS, which can be a down side, but since it can always...
  13. Mercutio

    Windows 11

    I've used Flyby11 to upgrade Windows 10 on more than 30 PCs so far this week. Most of them were laptops belonging to social workers or retirees from my community center. Have we bitched about how stupid Windows 11 hardware requirements are recently? Almost everything people brought me had either...
  14. Mercutio

    Home NAS

    The last couple on-premises storage devices I've bought were Ugreen devices. At this point I might go with an Aoostar system instead. As long as the hardware basically works and I can put Truenas on it, I don't particularly care.
  15. Mercutio

    Home NAS

    Synology just announced that they're no longer going to force users to buy special Synology drives starting with rollout of the next release of their custom OS. I don't actually have any devices new enough to be impacted by that, but at least I no longer have to toss it from consideration...
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