cory5412

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;_;7

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Today is a good April Fools day.

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i wish you could take vacations from being mentally ill and chronically ill cause this shit exhausting

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Used Mac Pro Thoughts

I am trying something novel. Instead of dropping ten-thousand words into the forum as a reply to another post, I’m writing some stuff and putting it here, free of its original context. This is mostly for my own edification, because this stuff isn’t Important™ or even in any way important.

The context for this post is that somebody has started a thread asking about physical reliability concerns for some Mac Pro models slightly newer than an iMac they are using now. My argument in this thread has been that buying a Mac Pro 4,1 (the 2009 model) or 5,1 (the 2010 model) today is a Bad Idea™ because they are very old, very costly, and Apple is almost certainly going to discontinue support for it in the newest release of Mac OS X in the next two to three years.

The post directly preceding what I’ve written here argues that eventually the used Mac market will look like the used PC market, in as much as that (paraphrasing here) eventually people will buy a Mac, use it for a few years, and then buy a new one.

I admit, this is frustrating to see because this is, well, exactly how all computer markets have always worked. It is, as such, puzzling to see somebody write this. The biggest difference, and the first thing I address, is that the market for used high end Macs is affected by the Mac Pro 6,1, which is the somewhat unpopular cylindrical model introduced in 2013. The 6,1 is a huge change conceptually from the previous generations of the Mac Pro, but offered nearly the same amount of overall horsepower to the 5,1 model. Apple then skipped over the next generation or two of CPU and GPU equipment entirely, making the rock and the hard place even more severe.

Here’s what I wrote, essentially doubling down on the idea that a 2009 Mac Pro would be a bad replacement for a 2008 iMac, and that the Mac Pro in general is largely unnecessary these days unless you are doing a few particularly high end workloads.

I think one of the biggest problems with the way the used Mac market works right now, which I would argue is pretty different from the way the used PC market works, is that the Mac Pro 6,1 didn’t prove to be a particularly compelling product to anybody who had any Mac Pro manufactured in the previous five years.

For better or worse, you can add 64 gigs of RAM and 12 total CPU cores, as well as two GPUs, to any Mac Pro 4,1 or 5,1 (and the 3,1 was still considered a solid contender with its 8-core Xeon 5400 configurations, and still worked officially with the newest versions of Mac OS X in 2013). So, people who bought a 4/6/8/12 core Mac Pro in 2008+ (which, in 2008/2009, would likely have been a very compelling choice over the top end iMac for most people who were considering that top end iMac.

As the OP literally said, an iMac from 2008 has lasted them until now, so I don’t think that in modern times, there’s a lot to the idea that Mac Pros last longer than lower end contemporaries. The main difference today really is that the Mac Pro will easily handle more concurrent work at once, or doing large compute tasks more quickly (thinking: compiling, rendering, things that normally halt productivity for minutes-hours-days at a time.)

The unavoidable truth is that the Mac Pro 5,1 is a 7-year-old machine, nearly physically completely identical to an 8-year-old one, and over the past 15-20 years, Apple has generally not bothered to keep machines patched very far beyond 5-7 or so years. The last generation of Power Macintosh G5s got a bit over five if you consider that 10.5 can arguably be said to have received security patches until around 2011 when Mac OS X 10.7 was released.

Mac Pros are high end computers, but I don’t know if in this case, that really means they will be better, especially given that OP has already said they’re using a nine-year-old iMac.

I think that given the weird state of used Macs, especially Mac Pros, if you’re going to drop $1500 or so building a “well equipped” Mac Pro 4,1 or 5,1 (and: you will, a sampling of relatively middling 2009 configurations on eBay shows that you start looking at $500 or more when you get into six- and eight-core models) then it’s worth looking at what that money will get you in an iMac, either today or in a few months, when an i5-8400 in a baseline iMac will itself be a six-core chip, and likely a lot faster than a Mac Pro 6,1 and that much faster than a 6-core configuration of a 4,1 or 5,1.

To double-down on this point of the fact that the OP is currently using a 2008 iMac, I don’t think in this situation it’s worth discussing the idea of 12-core models, although dual hexcore Westmere Xeons is definitely something that contributes to old Mac Pros costing so much. A “late 2017″ or “early 2018″ six-core iMac (even an i5 model, without hyperthreading) is easily going to be a 300-500% overall speed/performance/capability uplift relative to a 2008 iMac, and it should give any 2008-2010 Mac Pro model (short of a 12-core) a run for its money as well.

And, if history is any indication, a new iMac in the next 6-9 months is going to last around as long as a new Mac Pro in the next 6-9 months.

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please reblog this if your blog is safe for asexuals

(an ace safe space)

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Concept: fantasy world where dragons are A Thing™ but instead of them being these rare, semi-legendary creatures who exist solely to terrorise and wreak havoc and mayhem and burn inconveniences to a crisp they’re like… dogs… vaguely domesticated cats…

They come in loads of sizes and it’s a common thing to hear them scritching across your roof or rummaging in your garbage. You pass by like four every time you go to the market.

There’s even some snoozing at market stalls and strays playing with children and stealing scraps of food that fall in the street, with mottled scales and mixed textures of feathers and mismatched jewel colours.

Your favourite baker has three tiny western diamondtips who are in charge of keeping the ovens fired up and don’t always eat all of the bread. Sometimes.

Linda Bagshot on the corner has a ground rooster who can’t fly but always reaches up and stretches her neck out as far as she can to try and scrounge pets as you pass her garden wall.

A local inn is named after its summer aura who is the length of the room, all careful length and soft scales, with breath perfumed like spring breeze and scales that emanate just enough warmth to comfort, just enough that you won’t fall asleep, just enough that it’s tempting nonetheless.

The school you went to has a forest guardian older than the town itself who spends all his time slowly ambling down the corridors, and his favourites are the kids learning their first letters who like to read to him, sound out letters and marks that don’t have any correlation just yet, and you know that nobody has conclusively proven that dragons understand human tongues but you also know that if anyone understands, it’s him.

There’s a festival of dragons, a public holiday where banners are strewn and candles glow even into the wee hours and rainbow confetti and paint clogs the streets and maybe some overexcited babies set things alight but that’s ok, the town prepared better this year, far fewer people will lose their gardens and eyebrows this time, they promise.

And yes ok, there are big dragons. Ferocious dragons. Dragons that only come out once every ten years to feed and pillage. Dragons who rule the seas and shake mountains, who take flight and block out the stars. There are reasons you don’t go into the woods at night, reasons some wells are avoided, reasons entire villages up and vanished without a trace.

But there are also dragons who curl up with your children to rock them to sleep, and ward off nightmares. There are dragons who open doors and fetch supplies and guide those without sight. There are dragons who mimic words and whistles and delight in your joy when they get them just right.

There are dragons who adopt orphaned piglets, kittens, lambs, calves, puppies, ducklings. There are dragons who sunbathe and dragons who need kept on ice and dragons who climb atop weather vanes in storms to conduct electricity. Dragons who sparkle like jewels in the light and dragons who glow in the dark and dragons with flora creeping in and around their scales and dragons who sound like windchimes when they fold their wings.

Concept: there are dragons.

There are so many dragons.

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I love Generic Sitcom and also Hospital Drama. Mmmmh.

us tv: reviewed 

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I sometimes genuinely use you’re welcome, but I definitely believe I say some variation of “no problem” or “it’s no trouble at all” at the end of conversations.

Als, customer service of any type is difficult emotional labor that is massively under-valued. In addition, cool cities need people to do these jobs too, and of course there’s the issue that anybody dedicating their time to work, any work, should be paid enough to live within a reasonable (accessible) distance of they are doing that work.

“Millennials are so entitled"

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Proving a point to my boyfriend.

PLEASE REBLOG if you (male or female) believe it is perfectly okay and natural for a guy of any age to cry

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I’d read it.

I have no words

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NASA created retro travel posters for different locations in our solar system in hopes of inspiring young people to imagine a future where common space travel is a possibility. 

Source

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today i got some columbian food in the back of a haunted mall how was everyone else’s day

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NPR journalists David Gilkey and Zabihullah Tamanna died a year ago this week, ambushed on a remote road in southern Afghanistan while on a reporting assignment traveling with the Afghan National Army.

Since their deaths, NPR has been investigating what happened, and today we are sharing new information about what we learned. It’s a very different story from what we originally understood.

The two men were not the random victims of bad timing in a dangerous place, as initial reports indicated. Rather, the journalists’ convoy was specifically targeted by attackers who had been tipped off to the presence of Americans in Afghanistan’s Helmand province.

Gilkey, an experienced photojournalist, and Tamanna, an Afghan reporter NPR hired to work with him, were sitting together in a Humvee when they were attacked.

“After the loss of our colleagues, we wanted to be sure we understood what really happened on the road that day,” said Michael Oreskes, senior vice president of news and editorial director at NPR. “So we kept reporting.”

Not A Random Attack: New Details Emerge From Investigation Of Slain NPR Journalists

Illustration: Isabel Seliger for NPR Caption: Journalists David Gilkey and Zabihullah Tamanna were killed on the road to Marjah, Afghanistan, last year during a reporting trip.

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ayn rand failing to understand that sesame street is for young children

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and now for a game of tac-toe-tic

Today on “rules of English language I didn’t realise were a thing until someone pointed it out”