floofloof

Also, software still kind of sucks. It’s better than it was, but we need to improve it, the bloat is just barely being handled by silicon gains.

The incentives are all wrong for this, except in FOSS. It's never going to be a priority for Microsoft because everyone is used to the (lack of) speed of Windows, and "now a bit faster!" isn't a great marketing line. And it's not in the interests of hardware companies that need to keep shifting new boxes if the software doesn't keep bogging each generation down eventually. So we end up stuck with proprietary bloatware everywhere.

Yes, I went up to a 5950x a while back from a 3600 for the same reason: it was the best CPU I could get without upgrading motherboard and RAM. And I hardly ever play games. Looking at the performance benchmarks it seems the X3D stuff actually slows down non-gaming workloads a bit (perhaps because it increases temperatures), so I don't feel the need to chase after that tech.

They do still seem to be making advances in single-core performance, but whether it matters to most people is a different question. Most people aren't using software that would benefit that much from these generation-to-generation performance improvements. It's not going to be anywhere near as noticeable as when we went from 2 or 4 cores to 8, 16, 24, etc.

The 5950X is now pretty midrange when it comes to some desktop benchmarks, but mine is still serving me well and I don't feel I'm hitting the limits of the CPU. If I were shopping now I'd certainly find that price appealing for what it offers. I'm not considering Intel these days, but the price premium on latest-generation AMD CPUs is high.

Because they have undue power over our lives.

My comment was just advising people to be media-literate and consider the source, though I also said that this in itself doesn't make the article questionable (I actually think it's quite credible). And I linked to Wikipedia's article about this news website. I wasn't trying to defend Israel or be controversial, and it was a bit of a surprise to see this get deleted.

Do SSDs do that automatically in the background, or is all the data I'm not actively refreshing gradually rotting away?

The problem is that USB flash drives don't keep their data intact for very long when they're powered down. It lasts long enough for everyday use, but not even as long as a hard disk for archival.

USB sticks and SSDs are no good for long-term storage. The data on them degrades rapidly if they're not powered up. Spinning disks last longer. So your process would be better done with those.

Huh? USB is a connector, not an archival format.

It's a shame their capacity lags so far behind current hard drives. And not many drives for these discs are still made, so what are the chances of them becoming unreadable just because no one has equipment to read them?