You are aware that Epyc 2 is lower power per performance than Intel, right? From the servethehome.com review, "AMD gives you more performance per dollar and per watt." https://www.servethehome.com/w... Not only is the Ryzen 7742 substantially faster than the Xeon 8280, it is lower overall power.

That may be true, but how well would she be able to use it without someone like you to smooth out the rough edges?

I wish that with Power-shell Microsoft would take the Cisco approach to the command line, where all you have to do is do the shortest unique version of a command or switch.

I am not saying to shove everyone into plumbing. And, btw, those are union prices set to a large degree by the union. In a state like Illinois, where I am from, for a lot of projects, companies do not have a choice.

There is a shortage of plumbers, electricians, welders and other skilled trades people due to the extremely low number of people going into the field. Here is an article describing the problem

What I am saying is that we need to get a balance. Don't dump everyone into trades. Put more people into trades, and less people into college programs that have little to no workforce demand, and/or help the people that drop out of college. It is a societal problem that has made way too many people, especially in major urban areas (talking to you Chicagoland) feel that trades jobs are beneath them. Just because I have a BS in Electrical Engineering means I know how to automatically safely wire a house (though I could read up on it) or do a good job doing it. We need skilled trades people and not have the people driving their luxury cars look down on those people.

The issues with the trades is not pay. Take a look at how much a plumber or electrician can make in the Chicago area. Here is a link showing how much they make. A 5th year apprentice would make about $70k a year working full time.

The problem is that the trades are totally dismissed by the school counselors. We don't need so many people in traditional colleges. We need more people in the trades. Another example is in lower level IT. Basic help desk and level 1 support people need vocational training, not a BS or BA. We need to re-align higher education.You do not need a BS in CS to maintain a network.

There is no denying that the 5s is really fast. However, in everyday use, does it need to be?

I just got a Galaxy S4 ($50 on Amazon) and I have had zero lag in anything I have tried. Is the 5s faster, yes, is it noticeable in everyday use, not really. Just like with everyday use of desktops, the AMD A10 series is plenty fast for general desktop use, even though in benchmarks a Core i5 smokes it. However, unless you are running something very demanding, which most people don't, they won't see a difference.

Also, I like being able to have a spare battery and put in an SD card to add memory without Apple charging insane upgrade prices.

Last month was the last month my ISP (Mediacom) was not limiting bandwidth. They give different amounts for different plans. For the 20Mbps the limit was 350GB. We are Netflix and Amazon prime video and Hulu junkies here, and last month I hit 420GB. The extra charge, assuming I use the same amount would have been $20 more per month. I opted for the 50Mbps package that cost $20 more, and also comes with 999GB
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However, I would have been happy staying where I was, therefore I think they do not give enough of a cap.

By the history of large government IT projects, this is pretty well normal. The DOD, IRS, and just about every large department has had anything from minor to major disasters when setting up or updating systems.

I think too much of this is due to government bidding requirements that put too much emphasis on who you know more than what you know. I have seen too many stories where competence is the last thing looked at for contractors.

I have been looking at the IP v6 specs for enterprise level hardware, top of the line products from Cisco and the likes. The last I check, a few months ago, the accelerated routing on their top of the line Layer 3+ switch had about 1/2 the aggregate routing for IPv6 as it did IPv4, and older hardware is much worse.

Until the hardware ASIC's are acellarated as much for IPv6, I think businesses will lag unless they need to use IPv6 due to contract requirements (military and the likes). Why would they pay more for modern hardware that is slower than what they have to adopt IPv6 when IPv4 is satisfying their needs, even if NAT is a gimped solution. It still works, and is pretty fast.

I guess you have not been looking at any reviews for the 7000 series then. The 7000 series cards are not winning on performance/watt except on OpenCL now, but are better for the performance/cost in every level. Check out Toms Hardware Best Graphics Card for the Money for this month, and pretty much the past couple of years, and AMD comes out on top in almost every category. Also, there are generally no Radeon specific features such as PhysX, but that is because Nvidia owns PhysX. And, as far as absolute performance in all categories except the very top ($400 plus range), AMD quite often is higher than Nvidia. Compare the Radeon 7850 to the similarly priced and recently release 650 ti. Take off your green colored glasses and take a look at what the current video card situation is.

As ericloewe said, AMD is more than competitive in the discrete card market. If you check out the tomshardware.com best buy for the price range for video cards, almost every month AMD cards dominate. For example, take a look at the recent 650ti launch for Nvidia. It came out at a price of $150, while the Radeon 1GB 7850 is currently at $160, about 7% more, but has roughly a 15-20% performance increase. The reason Nvidia is ahead is first that there is a perception of being better made by fan boys, and also, that Nvidia throws a LOT of money at developers to make games "Made for Nvidia" (I don't remember the exact phrase actually), which includes PhysX. I have met quite a few people that for no good reason refuse to buy AMD/ATI cards, but slavishly get Nvidia, even when they would be better off financially and performance wise with an AMD. And, AMD is normally many months ahead in releasing next gen cards. CPU wise, especially with their APU's for low end machines, they are also very competitive for a light gaming machine. Their latest APU was about twice as fast in games with better game support than the Intel HD 4000 on a core i7. CPU heavy things, the Intel chips were faster. However, I know a few people with laptops with the AMD A8 APU's, and they do not notice any everyday lag, and they can game on a laptop that has discrete video card performance in a $500-600 laptop.

As a person with Celiac Disease, which by the way is not an allergy, but an auto immune reation to gluten in the villi in the small intesting, I certainly do not wish ill will or accomodation from any place that is not gluten free friendly, I just don't give them my business.

I would like to disagree with the premise that not learning math facts is not important. As a person who has taught College Algebra to many adult non-traditional plus traditional students, I saw a very large correlation between those that did well and those that had the basic math facts down. The problem is that they may get the algebraic concepts without a problem, but get hung up on the arithmetic, and therefore still do not get problems correct. I know it is a correlation, not a causation, but at least from my observations the fundamentals and knowing the tables are important.

I think part of the problem also is the ridiculous requirements put into textbooks by some of the states. Some locales have required multiculturalism parts of classes, even something like elementary school math, which should be pretty much a fact based class.

I live in Illinois, and I know my children's books are not up to the level of what I had 30 years ago. The books seem scatter brained with forced examples of what the states want put into the books. Also, the forced lack of focus on the fundamentals has gone a long way towards lowering the ability of students from the US to compete in a global academic environment, especially in the sciences and computer fields. Another item is what is wrong with timed drills, and letting students know that the world is not equal and that some people are better and faster in math than others. Welcome to the real world! I am not saying advertise who is the best, but don't stop doing timed tests and drills because some helicopter parent is complaining that their snowflake did not get the highest possible score. A friend of mine is a former principal at an elementary school, and he said that the biggest number of complaints he had were from parents who thought that it was traumatic for their children to not be able to complete timed math fundamentals tests.

Yes, the textbook manufacturers are sleazy and always trying to sell the new latest greatest edition, but don't forget some of the ever changing junk they have to put in to make the politicians happy in the big states (thank-you California and Texas). Let the experts decide what needs to be in an effective textbook, not the politicians.

I know that CDMA is an older standard, however, from what I remember it has always had better voice quality and tower transfers than GSM.

The one big advantage of GSM is the use of SIM cards, and that simultaneous voice and data were possible. CDMA also has better spectral efficiency than TDMA used by GSM. Check out Wikipedia's article on it and look at the efficiency of the latest CDMA vs GSM standard.

Don't act like the carriers stuck with CDMA to be dinosaurs. It actually was , at least for voice users, the better technology.