Well, I suppose then it's a good that you could buy a new car every few years back then. If modern cars were only good for 7-10 years like back in the 1970's a lot of people simply wouldn't be able to afford to have a car. Or perhaps there would be a lot of unsafe barely running wrecks on the road.

So, the solution to getting locked into Microsoft is to get locked into Apple? Easy thing would be to dump the iPhone.

The funny thing Nate Silver was one of the very few people who realized that the polling data leading up to the election was off in 2016 and that Trump voters were being underrepresented. He adjusted his models - I suppose to you that's "making up numbers", but he ended up predicting Trump could win. He didn't say that was the most likely outcome, but he gave Trump about 30% odds. It was all the Nate Silver/538 copycat sites that were saying things like 99.9+% Hilary that were arguably just wrong.

I will agree it's probably about time he hangs up his hat. He's been saying for a while that the polling data is getting worse and less reliable for various reasons. Obviously he tries to correct for that as he's always done, but there's only so much you can do. As they say, garbage-in-garbage-out.

I have to say I don't get it either. It's pretty much a generic mid-high end Android phone with a Thinkpad-like theme. About the only thing mildly interesting about it seems to be the back case having something you can grip onto rather than the slippery glass/metal used by most other phones.

They could have accomplished much of the same thing by making a $5 Thinkpad-themed case that could be used with other phones.

The only recent-ish phone I know of that meets those specs is the Motorola Moto E6.

If you consider 2019 to be recent.

I've been building PC's for over 20 years, and my take on MSI is that they like to squeeze out that last little bit of performance by pushing things just a bit too hard. It lets them win the benchmarks on those review sites that scale the plots so a 1% difference between the "top" and "bottom" performing boards looks absolutely massive. But that also comes at a cost, and that they have this problem doesn't surprise me.

The other brand that seems to be heavily affected is Asus, which also isn't surprising at all given my experience with their products.

At my high school in the 90's, they used those old Apple ]['s for the typing classes. They had stacks of them from the labs where they were replaced. When one broke, they didn't bother with fixing - it got tossed and they grabbed another off the stack. They were disposable junk back then, though the real junk was the Mac Performa's that replaced them.

At the time I would have never thought they'd be worth anything. Same with old PC's for that matter.

Except the GTX4070 is hardly high end. You'd be paying about 3x as much for the high end stuff now.

And before you drag out the 3DFX Voodoo again, that was the high end when it came out.

The funny thing is that if the situation was reversed and electric cars were the normal for the last century and it was gasoline cars that were the new thing, the same group of people would be bitching about having to drive to a gas station to get fuel instead of being able to charge at their home, having to have it serviced every few months to change the oil, having to let the engine warm up on cold days, and so on.

In this case, you can swap in a keyboard with a numpad, or a keyboard without a numpad. I'm actually a bit surprised that this hasn't been done before, as it's something I could have seen being done in the Thinkpad line back when they were still decent.

Speaking of Thinkpads, an option for a TrackPoint type pointing device on the Framework would be awesome.

I have several drives that old that still work. I will say anything older than about 7-10 years really is a crapshoot though. My policy for a long time is that I replace any drive that's older than 5 years that's doing anything important (it's not that I don't have backups, but even with backups I'd rather not deal with unexpected drive failures). I'm not always right on the dot with that, but still that's given me a pretty good supply of older drives that were pulled from service while still perfectly functional.

My experience with older drives that have been sitting for long periods of time is that if try to put them back into regular use is that they'll run fine for a few days or maybe a week then they'll fail. I suspect that for many of the old drives I have that will still spin up and read is that they don't actually have a lot of run time left in them.

They are 'minting' NFTs for "recovered physical artifacts from the Titanic". Maybe you should try reading the summary for once?

Well, I can't blame them about being curious about whether or not the Biden administration will shoot crap like that down, given that the Trump administration let them get away with stuff like this.

Newegg, like Amazon, now has a "marketplace" with third party sellers, and not surprisingly, much of the same issues as Amazon.

I'm still trying to figure out what Intel is doing with their Arc cards. When it comes to Intel's integrated GPU's, they by far have the most reliable and stable drivers compared to AMD and nVidia, especially for Linux. Which is why I would go Intel for any system where the integrated GPU would be good enough, and only consider an AMD CPU if I was already planning on a discrete GPU.

With Arc I was expecting mediocre performance but stable drivers. But instead, performance is much better than I expected, but the drivers are an absolute mess.

In any case, I do welcome some additional competition in the GPU market.