Depends on what you use/have. I use an Acer Predator Helios 500 PH517-61 laptop (Ryzen 2700 and Vega 56 with 32GB RAM, 512GB SSD nvme for Win10, another 512GB M.2 for extra stuff like games and software, and 2TB SATA drive for extra storage - has a lot of space)... I haven't really opened it yet to give it a cleaning as Acer designed this thing to be cool and quiet. Already had this 'beast' for over a year and its temps are the same as the first day I bought it.... but to be fair, unless you live in a dusty area, you shouldn't HAVE to open the PC or a laptop for cleaning very often. If its just dust removal, then for laptops its recommended to do once a year (to take care of the exhaust vents and fans)... and if you live in a dusty region, about once every 6 months. For thermal paste cleaning/replacement, about once every 2 years. For PC's/desktops... only dust cleaning is advisable once a year... and again, thermal paste replacement about once every 2 years (maybe sooner if the previous application wasn't done correctly - which various OEM's tend to do for most laptops).
While it would be good if prices for SSD were lower they are coming down in price and manufactures are developing new techniques to increase capacities but it says a lot when they're fitting a TB of storage capacity into 3 or 4 chips in form factors such as M.2.
About the cleaning question, my most used systems get a good clean once a year, they both are housed in cases with good intake filters. As for HDD vs SSD, I've got a Seagate ST-412 which was made in 1981, it is a 5'25" full height harddrive with a capacity of ten Megabytes and it is still working, so harddrives can be exceptionally reliable, same goes for the pile of ST-225's which are at least 34 years old, I also have a ST-4096 in my posession and a ST-4026 and yeah they all work..
Not nearly often enough! Basically - if you are concerned, just take a look. If it's pretty dusty in there, it probably needs a quick vacuuming. Just did that to my old (~6 years) desktop and it's feeling much better now!
Once a year for me. I strip the machine down to just the case and clean all that out because mine has two intake fans at the front, is all black and seems to be a dust magnet. It's become a habbit to just tear this down once every year and clean everything, it's just nicer seeing the insides all clean as my case is a cube case with a clear window on the top and the board sits horizontal inside. Also seems to run quieter again after a clean.
True, but for their time they were quite decent, the ST-225 was an incredible drive for an XT or early AT machine, heck of a lot better than 720Kb 3.5" or 360Kb 5'25" floppies.
Or even some of the earlier hard disk. Read the following last night on hard disk for the Tandy TRS (Trash)-80. https://www.prof-80.fr/images/Floppy_HD_K7/HD_5Mo/Tandy TRS80 5MB Hard Disk.pdf 2 platters, 4 heads, 2.5MB. 3600RPM.
^^ cool But NOTHING compared to this one.. http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/univac/fastrand.html Specs: Capacity: around 90Mb Drum speed: 880 RPM (yes DRUM, not disk!) Read/write heads: 64 on a movable boom between the two drums Transfer rate: about 100KB per second Weight: about 2,25 Tons Notes: Since the UNIVAC 1100 series machines to which the FASTRAND II was connected used 36-bit words rather than 8-bit bytes, it isn't possible to precisely compare the capacity of a device such as the FASTRAND II with contemporary byte-oriented disc drives. Calculating the total capacity in bits and dividing by 8 yields a total capacity of 99 megabytes, but since UNIVAC software in the FASTRAND era used 6-bit FIELDATA character codes (by the time ASCII came into wide use, most FASTRANDs had been retired in favour of a variety of disc drives), the capacity in terms of contemporary computer documents was 132 million characters. When UNIVAC adopted ASCII in the 1100 series, they stored 4 characters in the four 9-bit fields of each 36-bit word, so the capacity of a FASTRAND II in terms of ASCII characters would be 88 megabytes. The same considerations apply to calculations of the transfer rate. The FASTRAND II was the second member of the FASTRAND family, and by far the most common. The ill-fated FASTRAND I had only one rotating drum and half the storage capacity. A single massive drum rotating almost 15 times a second acts as a powerful gyroscope which tries to stay in a fixed location with respect to the distant stars. Unfortunately, the Earth rotates, and this leads to a conflict between the Earthly imperative of motion and the FASTRAND I's desire to stay put, which resulted in the devices tending to move around the computer room. In the FASTRAND II, the two drums rotated in opposite directions, which cancelled out the gyroscopic effect. The story of the Navy ship which set sail with a spinning FASTRAND only to have it stand on end at the first course change is, as far as I can determine, apocryphal. Around 1970, the FASTRAND III was introduced. It was physically identical to the FASTRAND II but increased the recording density to from 1000 to 1500 bits per inch, thereby increasing the storage capacity and transfer rate by 50%. You could attach as many as 8 FASTRAND cabinets to each controller, and the controller could be connected to two separate I/O channels on the computer, allowing two simultaneous data transfers. In addition, each FASTRAND cabinet could position its read-write head boom independently, notifying the computer when it arrived, so all units could be seeking at the same time. And such delecious hardware did come with a pricetag: (1968 Dollar) $41,680 for the controller and $134,400 for one drive.
Hacking in the '60's.. lets see, you just walk into the computer buidling, of course late in the evening/night with a keycard you've obtained somehow, then you need to keep it together so you can slip that HUGE REEL-T0-REEL tape into a washing machine sized drive.. then you inconspiciously find a terminal, log in with an account you've obtained somehow and copy the 200KB files onto tape WHICH MAKES A HECK OF A NOISE, then you need to slip back into the machine room and retrieve your HUGE REEL-T0-REEL tape and make it out of there unnoticed..
In the cold war the Soviets payed people to bring Western technology to them, there were several cases of that, they stole the Z-80 and 8086 designs and a lot of other things, complete circuit boards, software and so on. There's a really nice novell about that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo's_Egg_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Hess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Koch_(hacker)
My first MS-DOS (1.25) machine from NEC used 5.25 inch single sided floppy discs. It sure beat using a cassette deck like I did with my Commodore Vic 20. The NEC cost over $2800 US 1983 dollars, more than I paid for my first used car. The inflation calculator says > $7300 in today's money. That included an Epson MX-100 dot matrix printer, and an MS Fortran Compiler.
Don't know about the hacking but dad was a programmer on mainframes in the early - mid 70s and said the limited amount of memory was a good motivator for writing tight and efficient code. Which model NEC was that? The first DOS computer I used was an NEC APCIII (as it was sold in Australia) and the model before that was the APC which had 8" floppy drives. Dad sold his Kaypro II to cover some of the cost. I got my start in IT with a company that was an NEC distributor but that was 1989 and they'd moved on the Powermate series and APCIV and everything came with a hard disk.
The NEC PC 8801. It had an internal 8 bit processor (Z80) and 64 kb memory and an external 16 bit MS-Dos processor and 128 kb memory. You put the MS DOS OS floppy and started the computer while holding down the ALT key. It would boot up to the 16 bit external processor and use the internal 8 bit processor and memory as a print buffer. The dual 5.25 inch floppy drive bays were external.
I’d like to see a return to that. Maybe a D-Wave version of the recent protein folding breakthrough could write code a 0 and a 1 at a time.
https://youtu.be/iXn9O-Rzb_M https://www.techspot.com/community/...walton-and-tim-schiesser.266697/#post-1858014 So nVIDIA has recently showed their "Dark Side" to the public with their recent behavior. They've threatened a fairly popular Independent Media Outlet (Hardware UnBoxed) with a "Get In Line with our marketing statement or else be BlackListed from sampling our Founder's Edition Cards." Here's the full transcript of Steve's email with nVIDIA: Hi Steve, We have reached a critical juncture in the adoption of RayTracing and it has gained industry wide support from top titles, developers, game engines, API's, consoles, and GPU's. As you know, nVIDIA is "ALL IN" for RayTracing. RT is important and core to the future of gaming, but it's also one part of our focused R&D efforts on revolutionizing video games & creating a better experience for gamers. This philosophy is also reflected in developing technologies such as DLSS, Reflex, & BroadCast that offer immense value to customers who are purchasing a GPU. They don't get free GPU's, they work hard for their money, and they keep their GPU's for multiple years. Despite all this progress, your GPU reviews and recommendation has continued to focus SINGULARLY on rasterization performance and you have LARGELY discounted all of the other technologies that we offer gamers. It is very clear from your community commentary that you do not see things the same ways that 'WE GAMERS', and 'the rest of the industry do'. Our Founders Edition Boards and other nVIDIA products are being allocated to media outlets that recognize the changing landscape of gaming and the features that are important to gamers and anyone buying a GPU today, be it for gaming, content creation, or studio & stream. Hardware UnBoxed should continue to work with our Add-In Card partners to secure GPU's for review. Of course you will still have access to obtain pre-release drivers and press materials. That won't change. We are open to revisiting this in the future 'should your editorial direction change'. Bryan Del Rizzo Director of Global PR GeForce Talk about Mafiaa like behavior. ======================================================== Here's a Great article about the history of nVIDIA's behavior: AdoredTV - nVIDIA: Anti-Competitive, Anti-Consumer, Anti-Technology https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0L3OTZ13Os (click to expand) For those of us who have been around long enough, we've lived through and seen what nVIDIA has done. We know all this stuff that's been talked about in AdoredTV's video. For the rest who don't follow the industry, here's a recap of nVIDIA's atrocious behavior in the industry. Enjoy! ======================================================== I'm INCREDIBLY disappointed at nVIDIA's behavior as of late. They didn't need to resort to this kind of MAFIA like tactics, but it shows their true colors and how afraid they are that they don't have control over the independent press to spin things the way they want.
A Hadamard (H) logic gate acts on a qubit to create a superposition where a measurement has an equal probability of being 0 or 1. Introduction to Quantum Programming | by Quentin Truong | Towards Data Science Quantum logic gate - Wikipedia ETA: My comment above applies to quantum circuit gate arrays and not to quantum annealing used in D-Wave. The latter relies on the slow transformation of the system Hamiltonian so the ground states can be measured. That type of quantum computer is limited to combinatorial optimisation problems, AFAIK.