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[King Zultan]

Use it until it dies all the way?

[Egan_BW]

Rip it open and arrange all its guts on a plate like a cheese board.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Classic hardware can be useful for classic functions. Any software from its own era will probably have less issues on it than one sold today.

2013 isn't too far away quite yet, but stick it in a closet for another 10 years and it could save you some trouble down the line, assuming you have any reason to dig into computer history.

[methylatedspirit]

Use it until it dies all the way?

I think I need to elaborate. The right mouse button on the touchpad doesn't work. The Left Shift, Space and N keys don't work. The Bluetooth on this thing is intermittent at best. There's probably other problems with this thing that my brother told me about, but I forgot. You could use it, technically, but it wouldn't be a pleasant experience. Plus, I have a way more powerful laptop that I'm typing this post on. What would I need this thing for? The old one's lighter, and the touchscreen's cool, I guess, but why carry two laptops, when I can just carry one?

Send it to a charity? Better than destroying it, at least.

I know charities accept old stuff, but I don't think they would accept a laptop with a half-working keyboard and touchpad.

Rip it open and arrange all its guts on a plate like a cheese board.

See, the problem is that I'm quite good at disassembling things, but I'm garbage at putting them back together.

Classic hardware can be useful for classic functions. Any software from its own era will probably have less issues on it than one sold today.

2013 isn't too far away quite yet, but stick it in a closet for another 10 years and it could save you some trouble down the line, assuming you have any reason to dig into computer history.

Interesting point, but I thought tech isn't advancing as fast as it did, computer-wise. Like, Moore's Law is either dying or dead, so how much faster can things get? How likely is it that there's going to be some massive change that renders all previous computers obsolete?

[Egan_BW]

I didn't recommend putting it back together~

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I mean, that could happen, but even without any big computer leaps the software and hardware of any particular time will still be temperamental on newer computers. There's a billion little reasons why that have nothing to do with computer power, hence why even specialized emulation tools still suffer endemic problems even though you can pump a thousand times the original processing speed into old programs.

And if that's not satisfying I guess you could always murder your electric bill generating cryptocurrency on the thing.

[Reelya]

Interesting point, but I thought tech isn't advancing as fast as it did, computer-wise. Like, Moore's Law is either dying or dead, so how much faster can things get? How likely is it that there's going to be some massive change that renders all previous computers obsolete?

Moore's law is alive and well for the foreseeable future.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/mooreslaw.asp

Note that the original law as stated by Moore was merely that the number of transistors on the largest chip was doubling every 2 years. Nothing to do with clock speeds or anything. Some people actually see them adding more cores and getting around clock speed limitations and think they're somehow cheating, and side-stepping Moore's Law. But the law as stated never said anything about speed, but about complexity.

We can actually see how well Moore's original statement has held up. The 8086 had 29,000 transistors. The I9 7980xe has 7 billion. Which if you do the sums, works out as a factor of 1.8 every 2 years, or roundabout what Moore actually said. But that's only Intel, AMDs are hitting around 20 billion transistors.

As for overall computer performance, which is what people actually care about, it's not really bottle-necked by either clock speed or Moore's law. The 3 GHz P4 has a single-threaded rating of ~585 vs the ~2826 of the I7, both running at 3 GHz. So, per year, single-threaded performance of a 3.0 GHz Intel has increase 15% per year for the last decade, but that's a metric that artificially hamstrings how much of a performance increase there has actually been. In any case, you can always throw more CPUs into your box, so in the event that individual CPUs stop getting better then they can start shipping boxes with dual or quad CPU sockets, or even cards with grid processing on them. And then we need to consider the fact that the x86 architecture itself kind of sucks, and if they redesign the silicion from the ground-up at some point then there will be a new boost of processing power unlocked. All up we're not actually going to hit the limit of computers getting exponentially better any time soon.

[methylatedspirit]

In any case, you can always throw more CPUs into your box, so in the event that individual CPUs stop getting better then they can start shipping boxes with dual or quad CPU sockets, or even cards with grid processing on them.

I'm not gonna argue that point, but I figured that I'd share this footnote in computing history, since it did actually happen at least once in the consumer market. Same thing happens in servers too, but that's just boring.

Introducing: the Quad FX! This was a platform which let you insert 2 Athlon 64 FX's into a dual socket motherboard. Since these chips were dual-cores on their own, the idea was that you could get a quad-core system by putting two of them into the same system.

2nd half of 2006. AMD were caught off guard when Intel annnounced their Core 2 Quads, so they had to act quick. They had 2 options: make quad-core chips on their existing 90 nm process (wouldn't work; too much heat output) or wait until 2007 (and risk losing mindshare/relevance when those do come out, at least in AMD's head). So they took the third option: mount two Athlon 64s on the same motherboard, and now they get a quad-core of their own to beat Intel with.

In theory, anyway. I mean, it was a quad-core, but the problem was, it sucked. AMD's aging K8 architecture just couldn't beat Intel's Core 2 architecture. K8 may have beaten Netburst, but Core 2 was just such a good architecture that descendants of it are still used in Pentium Gold, i3, i5, i7 and i9 processors. And even if it could beat the Core 2 Quad (which it didn't; pick any workload, and it usually got its ass handed to it), this is literally running 2 processors in a system at once. You'd consume double the power of a Core 2 Quad, and for what? A power hog of a system that didn't even touch the processors it was meant to beat.

In the end, it was a market failure. AMD released their Phenom line of chips in late 2007, but Intel still remained the performance king. Intel's dominance in the CPU space would continue until around 2017-2020, where AMD's Ryzen chips are finally starting to be competitive with, and sometimes even beat Intel.

(I'm pulling most of my info from an Anandtech review of the Quad FX: here it is)

[Reelya]

That example is just an implementation blip. As you said, they did it with their previous gen architecture.

The reason multi-socket machines haven't caught on is because individual CPU performance is rising too fast to make it cost effective for that to scale. So there's also little to no investment to get the most out of such a setup. In the event that individual CPU performance stalls out for any perceptible amount of time then multi-CPU machines will start to become viable.

Another reason it hasn't caught on is because we just offload more and more stuff to the GPU. So you get a better GPU, and people doing science get stuff written in shader languages to run on the parallel 2560-core GPU stuff. When you already have 2560 RISC processors to work with, why do you need to have an additional x86 processor in their to get more performance. Keep in mind that while dual CPU motherboards haven't taken off, many people have 3000+ GPU cores in their boxes already. Or double that if you use SLI.

[Frumple]

I got my brother's old laptop, a Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro. The keyboard and touchpad are on their last legs, and it's in poor physical shape. What can I do with it that isn't "disassemble it and cannibalize it for parts", "use it as a HTPC" (already have one) or "destroy it"?

I've been using my half-dead laptop as a mousepad, personally. It turns out they're actually, like, super good at providing a fairly stable flat surface on top of a less stable one (like a bed, in this case). You can meaningfully use a laptop that's largely non-functional in any situation where a fairly heavy flat surface would be helpful, which depending on your lifestyle may or may not be plentiful.

[King Zultan]

I got my brother's old laptop, a Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro. The keyboard and touchpad are on their last legs, and it's in poor physical shape. What can I do with it that isn't "disassemble it and cannibalize it for parts", "use it as a HTPC" (already have one) or "destroy it"?

I've been using my half-dead laptop as a mousepad, personally. It turns out they're actually, like, super good at providing a fairly stable flat surface on top of a less stable one (like a bed, in this case). You can meaningfully use a laptop that's largely non-functional in any situation where a fairly heavy flat surface would be helpful, which depending on your lifestyle may or may not be plentiful.

You could also use it as a weapon if needed and beat the shit out of someone with it.

[Yoink]

Having grown up on an island, albeit a very large one, travelling elsewhere in the world has always been referred to as "going overseas" in my experience.   
It occurred to me the other day, just what do people from landlocked countries call the act of travel to other countries on the same landmass? Is it called going abroad, or simply travelling? Surely there's a snappier name for international travel than "international travel". I feel like there were other possibilities I was planning on mentioning when I mulled this question over earlier, but I've forgotten now. Hell, I even forgot a whole other question I meant to ask in the same post. Dang.       

[TheSteppeWolf]

Having grown up on an island, albeit a very large one, travelling elsewhere in the world has always been referred to as "going overseas" in my experience.   
It occurred to me the other day, just what do people from landlocked countries call the act of travel to other countries on the same landmass? Is it called going abroad, or simply travelling? Surely there's a snappier name for international travel than "international travel". I feel like there were other possibilities I was planning on mentioning when I mulled this question over earlier, but I've forgotten now. Hell, I even forgot a whole other question I meant to ask in the same post. Dang.       

As someone from a landlocked country, we call it simply "traveling" or depending on how you go there. Example: "I want to drive to Russia"

[dragdeler]

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[scriver]

Here in Sweden pretty much the rest of Europe is regularly just referred to as "down on the continent" because of the seas between us