* Massachusetts' RMV AFAICT resells one's data, resulting in new car purchasers receiving a huge amount of fraud in their mail. It can be difficult to distinguish what is a legitimate correspondence from the dealership vs. what isn't, as the fraud mail does not clearly identify itself. (And in fact, that's the tell.)
* My Subaru runs ads for Sirius XM. (Ad, on the infotainment screen. While the car's in motion.) I did not pay for my car to run ads, obviously, and obviously that was never mentioned by the dealer, ever, before or after purchase.
Are you in the US? Currently if you are in the US and not native-born, you're at very direct risk. That data is how ICE builds their enforcement leads. It's still often wrong, so they might break down your door and arrest you at gunpoint anyways.
This is not straightforwardly true. Many people say that Toyota sells their data to insurance companies, but they do not unless you *affirmatively* opt in.
If you read the lawsuits and allegations carefully, they all say that they were tricked into opting in (NOT that they weren't opted in). If you review the setup process you see that the claim is outlandish and likely someone else did setup for them or they "forgot."
Toyota makes you affirmatively click a "yes" or "no" (or maybe it says "Accept" / "Reject" or whatever) for Insurance sharing when setting up a profile.
I always thought that is from companies that get their hands on registration data. Or I could be wrong and it is the dealer itself selling it on not the manufacturer.
Pretty sure it's registration data. Anything public is now used for junk. We transferred a piece of property this year and have been getting constant spam for realtors to sell it for us. We bought a used car from an individual and started getting spam for warranties once we registered it and got plates.
Just to be clear: real estate is generally public records viewable by anybody, while vehicle titles/registrations generally aren't (without having been deliberately sold by the state).
You're missing the fact that if I wanted to find you and kill you companies are collecting that location data and I can buy it and use it to accomplish my goal.
I waited too long for the M4 Mac Mini, I waited too long for the Oled Steam Deck. What's the next thing I should wait too long to purchase before it becomes not worth it?
I have an electric that I can buy cheap used parts for and it doesn't have any telemetry since it's radio is 3g. And if I really want to make sure I could disable the radio and wouldn't notice a thing.
Incorrect. Field sobriety test like walking a straight line or doing those bizarre tests can be difficult for those who haven't been drinking. Now if he refused a breathalyzer or blood sample and he was sober, that's the wrong move. If he refused a breathalyzer or blood sample AND he was NOT sober, that's the correct move. It's far cheaper to take the one year license suspension than get a DUI and deal with all of those issues. This has nothing to do with the officer, but protecting yourself.
Motherboards used to be $100, $200 for the high end. Now they want $300+, ram is crazy, storage, video cards, etc. I'm not surprised sales for these components is hitting a wall.
> Motherboards used to be $100, $200 for the high end. Now they want $300+
Entry level motherboards are still $100.
$300+ is a very high end motherboard.
The existence of very high end products is confusing because it can give the impression that you have to buy a $300 motherboard because it exists. If you compare features side by side you're rarely missing anything important for the entry level motherboards.
Some people really want the best of the best and feel the need to buy motherboards with Thunderbolt 4 and other future-proofing measures just in case they might need them, but it's premium and luxury territory.
Entry level motherboards used to be just fine to use. The last time I was shopping, they all had a random deal breaker in terms of a missing feature. Maybe I’m just pickier now, but I doubt it.
Future proofing is an expensive way to pay for features you don't need and will probably never use.
It's smarter to buy a cheap motherboard that meets your needs now. If in the future you find the need for USB4 or some other feature, upgrade the motherboard.
More often than not, builders will try to future proof for eventualities that don't arrive before it's time to upgrade to the next CPU socket anyway. There are a lot of people with expensive, outdated "futureproofed" builds who would have been better off saving the money on the original purchase so they could upgrade sooner instead.
When you try to future proof, you are basically hedging. It’s a kind of insurance; sometimes it pays off, sometimes it does not. Having more disposable income now than I did 10 years ago I tend to pay more attention to this sort of things, but everyone can choose where they put the cursor. Someone who overestimated their RAM needs when buying a computer last year are probably pretty happy about it, but it could have swung the other way.
I future proofed by stepping back to high end components from last generation (except for GPU). My memory speed is slightly lower, but I have 32 cores and 128 GB ECC RAM on 4 channels. I doubt I will need to upgrade this thing any time soon for my typical use cases.
Note that this was before the RAM shortage, but I bet you could still do this now and save a little versus mid-tier current gen gear.
This. In 2017 I bought the cheapest AM4 motherboard with a USB-C port (a Gigabyte X370 Aorus Word Salad). I'm still using it because BIOS updates gave it Zen 3 support.
Wanna guess how many times I've used that USB-C port? Maybe once or twice in the 9 years I've owned it. Never needed it. I also couldn't tell you what X370 is getting me that B350 wouldn't have gotten me.
I would only agree if you already plan on doing major hardware upgrades within like 3 years at the latest. Past that and you will inevitably be missing new features that will be shipping even on budget hardware and won't be saving on anything.
Buy a $300 motherboard now in case you need future features, or buy a $100 motherboard now that does everything you currently need and then buy a second or even third $100 motherboard if you ever actually need those future improvements.
Then you get a new board designed for the new features instead of something several years old and you come out $100 on top.
Futureproofing is nonsense. PCs just don't work that way, and haven't for decades.
> Buy a $300 motherboard now in case you need future features, or buy a $100 motherboard now that does everything you currently need and then buy a second or even third $100 motherboard if you ever actually need those future improvements.
Right, but the problem is that by now your $100 new motherboard requires a new CPU and new RAM. Which is very much not $100.
In the past we got away with PCI cards to add features without changing the motherboard, but we still ended up changing everything every 2 years anyway…
I don't really agree with this. Motherboard prices haven't been moved at all by AI.
I would also say that most consumers, who are almost exclusively buying gaming-oriented boards, do not need anything high end. They can pretty much buy the cheapest board available.
I am shopping around for a mini ITX board and the difference between something at $180 and something at $400 is basically one to two faster USB ports, which are pretty much irrelevant on desktop computers, and a few minor conveniences that I imagine most people can do without.
The higher-end chipsets add no discernible advantage and there are no CPUs that are unsupported by the lower end chipsets (on the AMD side, at least).
The high end stuff is just available for people with a lot of money.
I am massively sick of gaming focused boards. I don’t want my board to be “tough” or “mil-spec” or be extra shiny or have fancy-proprietary-auto-overclock. I want a reliable board that complies with all the specs it claims to support. Low idle power consumption would be nice, too.
This is obnoxiously difficult to shop for in the desktop/workstation space.
The PCIe lanes are the worst. You have x16 slots that run x1, you need to check slots with m.2 to make sure an x8 doesn't become x4 if you insert storage. Wait if I plug something into the thunderbolt port my 10g network card runs at half speed? Obviously these are actual physical limitation from PCIe lane counts, but it makes it impossible to search. Just painfull.
My advice to anyone doing motherboard shopping is to read the manual off the manufacture's site before deciding. The pcie lane tradeoffs tend to be in the block diagram next to the contents page.
This is exactly why my comment goes over the head of people who cry just get the basic boards. No, this is why the basic boards for $100 don't cut it. You now need to dive into the technical data and realize that the $100 board seems like a deal for a reason, and suddenly the $300+ category is your only option if you want to get a PC that doesn't run on fake specs.
I'm just struggling to figure out how many people actually need the PCIe lanes for anything more than GPUs and storage, though.
Like, what are you actually connecting your desktop to?
The only reason laptops depend on Thunderbolt is because they have limited internal expansion and need high performance external I/O.
If you need more things than gaming boards offer then obviously you have very advanced needs and can go pay for a workstation board, something like an sTR5 socket Threadripper board.
They exist to partition capability so that enterprises can’t connect all of their peripherals and some ECC memory to get the same functionality for 1/10 the price. It’s not a physical limitation.
Obviously market tiering is part of it and you can play tricks with north and south bridge and pcie switches (which adds cost), but a ryzen board that advertises a pcie 5.0 x16 gpu slot and 5.0 x4 m2 slot only has 4 lanes left to work with from the cpu (i.e the cpus only have 24 usable lanes). Which while you can play with generations to get more lanes it's effectively still 16gb/s. That needs to cover network, extra m2 slots, usbs, as well as the extra PCIe slots.
I don't mind having to work within those physical limits but I do want to be able to search for boards that support N components. i.e 1x 4.0x8, 2x 3.0x8, 4x 5.0x4 . But the best you can search for is physical sizes of pcie slots and then dive into a spec sheet for each one, only to find that the 6 x16 slots only have 1.0x1 of bandwidth each.
I think the biggest aspect is that there’s so little demand for the configuration that you’re looking for.
Most people only need the PCI lanes for graphics cards and storage. There aren’t many other internally installed devices out there that actually need that kind of bandwidth, and a lot of those use cases are already covered by alternatives like Ethernet or USB, or they’re already on your board (m.2 slots, fast Ethernet ports).
The 6x16 slots with 1.0x1 bandwidth are there so that people can plug in stuff like sound cards and other random stuff that generally has pretty light bandwidth needs.
If I just search for “PCIe card” on Newegg most of the resulting products max out at x4, and most of the ones that do are already on the board (m.2 cards, additional USB/Thunderbolt).
The one use case that seemed useful and unusual in my search results was a quad port HD video capture card which seemed to require x4 bandwidth.
If you had a scenario like you describe where there isn’t a single x16 slot, you’ve instantly annoyed 95% of the market that needs that full bandwidth for a GPU, whether it be for gaming or for professional applications.
Some solutions that avoid expensive workstation boards and CPUs include getting a higher end chipset to get gaming boards that come with 2x x16 slots, or you can use accessories and adapters that just plug into m.2 slots.
What you are asking for is a workstation motherboard, which does exist. Filter by the sTR5 socket for AMD Threadripper chips, for example.
Unfortunately, as far as finding something cheaper than that, you're looking for a product that appeals to a very small to non-existent market demographic.
Most of the buyers who want workstation boards (companies) do not want a computer that requires assembly.
The demographic that builds their own PC is almost exclusively doing so to play games.
Everyone else who wants to use a computer wants a portable laptop.
The good news is that all the complaints you have about gaming boards are mostly cosmetic. There's nothing unreliable about gaming boards. They all support the specs they claim to support. You don't have to use any overclocking features (I don't). They are off by default.
If you want low idle power consumption, what you actually want is a system that has soldered RAM (LPDDR) which essentially goes against the other parameters of what you asked for. You don't want a module desktop PC at all if that's your parameter. What you really want is a mini PC or a Mac mini.
You're asking for a workstation board with low idle power consumption, but nobody who wants that is optimizing for low idle power consumption.
The best system for you is probably an HP, Dell, or Lenovo workstation PC. The good news for you is that these are all over eBay as corporations tend to sell them in bulk when they're done with them in just a few short years. They're reliable, quiet, and have low idle power consumption. Or, you can go with the big workstations that support ECC RAM.
My parents bought a mid-tier PC for $3,000 (in 1995 dollars) and there was still a thriving PC industry at those prices! While things are getting more expensive now (and that sucks) we have had it really good for a long time.
you mean you don’t prioritise helping your landlord buy their newest mcmansion? i’m just happy to have a roof over my head and continue to pay ever increasing rent!
Buying whole 2020 era PCs here for around $200 mark. As long as you don't need crazy CPU or GPU grunt, which is most people, they are almost indistinguishable from a new one.
Windows 10 LTSC + Firefox + uBlock Origin on an i5-9400 feels faster than my M4 Pro MBP. Probably same or better on Linux.
> Windows 10 LTSC + Firefox + uBlock Origin on an i5-9400 feels faster than my M4 Pro MBP
I don't remember Win10 being particularly lean (although I'm sure 11 is worse). And the M4 is definitely a much more powerful CPU. Can you not run Firefox and uBO on that? Or have they really weighed things down that much with the OS somehow?
> Probably same or better on Linux.
Even with the Cinnamon desktop environment I can vouch it uses considerably less RAM for just the desktop (ordinary applications are probably about the same) and offers much faster filesystem access by default. I'm sure this is at least partly due to not being weighed down by built-in anti-malware (that would do basically nothing for people who are comfortable using Linux in the first place).
Upgrade my cpu the other day, got a ryzen 5 5600 for ~$100 new, can't complain. Still on my rtx 2060, can't complain either. As long as you don't fall for the 120hz and 4k memes you can easily get by with 2020 hardware indeed.
I mean, if you think about all the motherboard does, and how many layers the PCB has to support all the features such that for a vast majority of users, the only things you need besides the motherboard is a CPU, some RAM, storage (either in M.2 or SATA) and maybe a dGPU, it's wild that it is often the cheapest item in the PC.
This is neat, but I will stick with Instax wide. With a $1000 mint body you can get full control of the film. Is it the same aspect ratio? No. But I can get film at Target and it’s instant. Very cool, any analog film is awesome, but this price just isn’t sustainable.
Thankfully the App Store doesn't allow side loading, because it completely stops fraud like this. At least that's the number one reason why I keep getting told if we allow side loading this will happen.
Is there more scams of web3 in the App Store or on the open internet? Not defending Apple but kind of a strawman to claim they said it stops 100% of fraud and abuse. That’s like saying seatbelts don’t work because people still get hurt in car crashes.
Apple are pretty bad for this and I don't think it's the first time it's happened. A lot of the problem is if you search for some app in the iOS app store the top result is a paid ad and the established app you want is the second result so people who don't know that click on the top one and lose their funds.
Also they should check the app but wallet security is tricky - you can put subtle vulnerabilities in that are hard to spot.
And don't you think its a strawman to compare only being and to install "" approved "" ($100/year for apple) software to a seatbelt? There is no use case for not wearing a seatbelt. That is not true for being able to install software.
Plenty of people disagree that there is no use case to not wearing a seatbelt. That you find it impossible to imagine makes it an even better analogy actually.
People can disagree with whatever, everyone is allowed to be stupid.
But most reasonable people agree there's no tangible use case to not wearing a seatbelt. There are infinite tangible use cases to using software outside the app store, that reasonable people can all acknowledge.
Eh, kinda a weak argument. Too easy to counter with "but sideloading would let that happen more!" That might even be right, and a difference in amount is important. There will never be a totally secure system, after all.
I think the actual problem is with how the App Store changes the way people think about and relate to software. The fact is, running code on your computer is dangerous. You are trusting it with control over its operations. The responsible thing to do is provide platform-level safeguards (permissions systems, sandboxing) and engender a general understanding that you should only run an app vetted by someone you would hand your phone to.
This is fundamentally incompatible with software as a market, of course, so this path will never be taken.
If only people had spatial awareness, they would look around vs listening to their phone changing directions randomly while walking. The bell is for both persons safety.
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