The size increase in hard drives around that time was insane. Compared to the mid-90’s which was just a decade ago, hard drives capacities increased around 100 times. On average, drive capacities were doubling every year.

Then things slowed down. In the past 20 years, we’ve maybe increased the capacities 30-40 times for hard drives.

Flash memory, on the other hand, is a different story. Sometime around 2002-3 or so I paid something like $45 for my first USB flash drive - a whole 128MB of storage. Today I can buy one that’s literally 1000 times larger, for around a third of that price. (I still have that drive, and it still works too!)

That chart doesn’t really show the recent price hike. Late last year, I bought an 8TB Samsung SATA SSD for $350. If I wanted to buy that same drive today, it would be $630.

The Samsung monitors we get at the office still appear to be just dumb screens. No remote or anything like that. But that’s from their business lineup of monitors. Wouldn’t surprise me too much if their consumer/gamer lineup would be different.

I have to say, they really should come up with a different name. Searching and finding the website for a company named “Why!” is pretty much impossible with today’s search engines.

Most of those apps could be replaced by a website that will work anywhere. But a website can’t spy on you as easily… so they push apps instead.

It probably has to do with whether the driver’s license is Real ID compliant or not. Here in Minnesota, you have the option of getting the Real ID license that can be used as a federal ID card for things like flying, or the regular old driver’s license which soon will really only be good for showing you’re allowed to drive a car.

I only have the regular driver’s license so I don’t know what all getting the Read ID involves, but having your biometric data scanned and stored seems like something they’d require.

That’s my experience with Asus going back over 25 years now. To me, Asus has always been substandard products sold at premium prices. If I wanted a substandard motherboard, I’d buy ECS and save a bunch of money. And to be fair to ECS, I’ve had some of their boards that have worked just fine, which is more than I can say about the Asus stuff.

It certainly could. That’s the gamble you’re taking.

I usually replace drives after 5 years if they are doing anything I consider important. So those drives to me would have 1-2 years left in them. Of course, I have seen a good number of drives I have repurposed to things less important still manage to rack up impressive numbers of hours.

I’d say not really, Tolkien was a writer, not an artist.

What you are doing is violating the trademark Middle-Earth Enterprises has on the Gandalf character.

How do they compare to TVs? At least the last time I looked into it, pretty much every TV was terrible compared to even a halfway decent computer monitor.

That’s actually just what I did. New PC runs Manjaro Linux. So far all the games I’ve thrown at it work just fine.

Maybe I should have done that with the old PC, but I’m lazy and Windows 7 was working well enough.

Not anymore since it no longer works.

I was still using Steam on Windows 7 as late as last month. Losing access to Steam was one motivation to finally upgrade my computer.

Next year should be 100% Linux for me. Steam is dropping support for Windows 7 at the end of this year, and I don’t have any other newer Windows PC to run Steam on.

It’ll probably end up worse than that. Turn off secure boot and Windows may still run, but it will no longer verify and all these sites will now refuse to work on your computer. So if you like to run Linux, even dual booting or running Windows in a VM for those things that absolutely require Windows won’t be good enough anymore.