Why buy AMD?

First benchmarks are in, and it seems that Intel is still king of the hill at the very highest end, at least in single core performance which still seems to be major selling point, especially in gaming. In heavily multithreaded loads AMD seems to win out, just because they have more cores on the chips, but so far games are not really utilizing multiple cores. Ah well. Not exactly surprising.

I'd still suggest that you go for AMD if you can choose. I certainly can - I am not looking for the very highest end gaming experience, but for software stuff high thread count surely helps (make -j8 ...). But not just because AMD is underdog here - because there must be an underdog. If a single company has a monopoly, at any field, the general public always loses.

Did you notice how Intel dropped their prices massively immediately after AMD's launch?  If AMD wasn't around that definitely wouldn't have happened. On the contrary, prices would by even higher.

As long as AMD is alive and kicking, Intel can't extort customers for every last cent they have as the customers will just slip away. But if AMD were to die... Well, for everyone's sake I hope that will not happen. If you think high-end Intel CPUs are expensive, the cost is nothing compared to what the prices would be if AMD weren't here to keep them at bay.

So do support AMD, if possible. It's best for everyone (except Intel and their stockholders) that they remain viable competitor for Intel.

Curse of subscription software

I've got one simple rule about software: Absolutely no subscription software. Absolutely no exceptions, ever.

Sometimes this makes my life more difficult, like now I'm stuck with Photoshop CS4. Hell, I'll rather learn to use GIMP before I submit to handing out money to Adobe every month, for ever. The monthly price might sound low but accumulated over years and years, it gets stupid expensive overall. Repeat that for every single software you use and suddenly you are forever tied to paying for essentially nothing new.
And this is ignoring the fact that software companies do die occasionally - and when license server shuts down, suddenly you will have nothing for all that money spent. Unless you are willing to break several laws to crack that subscription-based prison.

In my case it also helps that I've never been into newest features there is, so I don't have to have the newest, shiniest thing there is.

Latest case here is EagleCad. Ten years ago when I was shopping around for CAD software, I ended up with Eagle, version 4 or 5 I think (IIRC, it was version 4, but my license included free upgrade to v5 that was published very shortly afterwards). Open source offerings were not mature enough and other paid software was ridiculously expensive.

Last year I upgraded my Eagle license to version 7, which was very much worth it due to several new features, and so far I've been happy with that.

And then Autodesk came along and decided to make it subscription-based. Well, fuck them, Eagle 7.7 will be the last version of Eagle I use. Since I've learned eagle pretty well and I have no reason to go shopping for alternatives, I haven't, not yet. But I've been told that open source ones (KiCad for example) have grown mature, so at some point I may have to start learning them.

There's just two major issues; old designs (in case of some updates) and component libraries. Component design (in Eagle, and  with other CAD package either) isn't very difficult, but for larger devices (say past 100 pins/balls) it's pretty labor-intensive to create, check, double-check and triple-check all pins. If I were to change CAD package, I would have to do all that work again. And that would - will - suck, when I get there. Not anytime soon, I hope... Although come to think of it, I might as well get started now, when there is no pressing need to. Less stress later on.

Now, unfortunately (and very likely by very deliberate design) Autodesk has removed all older Eagle versions (that is, versions that are subject to subscription slavery) from download pages. And I didn't have a copy (aside the one I have installed) anywhere as backup. But it seems that they've (at least for now) forgotten about the FTP site which is still up; so if you want to get copy of 7.7, go there now and get your backup copy before they get rid of that, too.

ftp://ftp.cadsoft.de/eagle/program/7.7/

One last scenario:

"Oh, the software you use is now obsolete so we shut it down -- but hey, you can upgrade to this newer, better, shinier PRO-version, it's just $19 more per month!"

Upgrades.

Maybe I should be kinda ashamed to admit this, but I've been using ancient Borland C++ Builder 4 (which is about 20 years old now) for most of my Windows development - until now. Mostly because there hasn't been any reason to upgrade or switch - VCL system (also used in Delphi) was just superior to any other toolkit on market back then.

The compiler was old, not exactly great with optimizations and not very compliant with newer standards either (which, granted, made working with newer libraries kinda difficult), but I just saw no need to upgrade. After all, most of my Windows software is simple-ish tools that don't really benefit from flashy UIs. Functionality over form, and I could throw sellable app together in half a day or so with Builder at this point.

I did try upgrading, with trial version of newer Builder, at one point, but I ran into endless number of mysterious issues with project imports. Although old, I still need to keep those older tools alive for some time now, so that was pretty much no-go. I've tried Visual Studio too, mainly for Unreal Engine stuff, but I'm not very happy with platform lock-in that comes as standard feature there. I'm trying to move away from windows (or at least windows-exclusivity) here.

So, I finally gave in and upgraded to newest C++ Builder XE8, or 10.1, or Berlin (now Embarcadero), whatever the version name is supposed to be), not least because they offer Android build environment right away and Linux should be coming soon too (hopefully, at least it was listed as upcoming feature). As a bonus the new version doesn't really interfere with older version, so I can actually have both installed and use older to maintain the older software. Nice.

So far I've played around with it and damn I like it. I can actually make software that runs on Windows and Android with just new compilation! Yeah, it doesn't look "native" (on android) by default but screw that, I'm still making mostly tool apps so slight UI irregularity isn't really an issue. If Linux build does the same, I'm absolutely sold.

But then. In previous post I was thinking about upgrades. When originally building this computer I prioritized raw disk space above speed - due to need to store massive amount of photos, videos and everything, this computer being primary source and with backups held elsewhere. SSD didn't fit in back then. Not enough raw capacity. And there still isn't really; for example my 10-year collection of camera RAW images alone is around 140GB now (and that is after initial culling of unneeded/unusable shots.)

But still, now I caved in, due to slow compilation speeds of newer tools, and got 240GB SSD as new primary disk, with most of the big stuff (like that raw library) held on old spinning disk. Of course that means complete re-install of everything. Which, as you might guess, will take a long, long time and never is very pleasant experience.


So now I'm slowly upgrading. Fortunately our internet is unlimited, I've used some 30GB tonight alone so far...

I can't advertise my site?

I haven't really tried web advertising before, mainly because the business we're in is pretty specialized. Until now, as I now happen to have a product that might be of wider interest (Eltrip-55 driving log - sorry, English pages are out of date or nonexistent at the moment) - and it's pretty much impossibly to find without some advertising effort.

So, I start creating adsense account, make simple ad template and when it's done...

Not allowed due to bad words?!? (yeah, sorry, this is in Finnish, but if you are familiar with adWords the meaning here is very likely very clear to you)

"Trippi" of course is Finnish slang to drug trip, so I can see why that would be an issue. The problem is that this is our domain - trippi.fi - that got triggered; word "trippi" wasnt't in the ad text at all. And the content itself is perfectly safe and legal. We have also had the domain for some 20 years now, so I'm not gonna change it now.

Well, I requested this to be manually reviewed, let's see what happens...

AMD Ryzen and product introduction

Just some weeks ago I was considering if I should upgrade AMD's FX 4300 CPU I have on my home computer. After quick browsing I came to conclusion that no, there's no point, as even best-of-the-best in FX series isn't that much better. Very likely SSD as main disk would give bigger speed benefits, but that'd require full reinstall of OS - not really something I'm willing to do right now.

Why I mentioned this is new AMD's Ryzen line, which on first glance looks very interesting. Lots of oomph for low price and heat ratings look nice. Of course that upgrade would be even more costly, but I'll be following upcoming reviews with lots of interest - although that home PC is not due for that big upgrade, one of my work test PCs is ... shall we say, ancient at the moment, and is long overdue for upgrade (read: retire my workstation from development work, replacing the old one with that, and getting one workstation. And spending about a week reinstalling everything...).

But I'm still digressing the main topic I wanted to add here, one that is slightly more related to electronics development.

In one discussion thread I was someone complaining how AMD only published the high-end CPUs, and not the medium- or low-end ones. To me, that makes very clear business sense, and honestly, that is exactly what I'd do - and have done.

There is huge number of people who are actively looking to upgrade their computer as soon as possible, to get best performance possible for games or whatnot. Gamers especially want performance, they want it now and are willing to pay for it. They don't really need huge number of cores - 4 cores can easily be sufficient, so they'd go for medium end market if that is available. If not, they will grumble - but they also will get higher-end CPU instead, paying premium for it. And AMD knows this, oh, they know it so very well.

So AMD will wait a bit - maybe some six months after high-end Ryzen 7s reaches market - and then they release medium and possibly low end lines, cashing in with higher-end offerings in the mean time. After that people that were willing (and able) to wait a bit will get their cheaper CPUs.

CPU market is kinda special case, but the variation of this applies to other markets too. Do consider if this applies to your own niche market, too, and it might make sense to exploit peoples' impulsiveness.

Spam.

I've been close to drowning in junk (e)mails lately. All are essentially same; offer for pretty nice paying, remote work. And of course all these are from random persons, and links provided point to random sites. How very surprising...*eyeroll*

Previous similar spam invasion (different topic, that time being mainly malware-distribution) died off some time ago. With same M.O.; essentially same content from many, many addresses. One would think that anyone with IQ better than fairly dumb boot would realize that there is something wrong when getting same message from multiple sources, but unfortunately bounds of human stupidity do not appear to exist.

But back to current invasion, these links seem to point to random wordpress sites (based on URLs, I haven't tried to open any of the links). There was just some news about wordpress sites being infected lately, I wouldn't be surprised if these were connected to that.

Now, from another source I learned that these "job offers" are apparently "real" - you'll be laundering drug-related (and other illegal goods) money. And since you, being nothing but simple, disposable mule, are very likely the first person where the money is transferred, which means that you will be very easy to track out by law enforcement. Just don't go there, please, you'll save yourself a lot of pain (depending on your location, possibly even in literal sense...)

Meanwhile, I hope this current spam wave will die out so I don't have huge pile of email cleanup waiting me every morning... Spam tools of course take care of some of those, but not all, unfortunately. And since this work mail we're talking about, I can't allow automatic cleaning to be completely unmonitored.

But I have a feeling that then the next wave, just with different scam will be arriving to drown out my inbox...

Oh, visual studio ...

Uhh.. You want to replace that function call with what?

Yes, I'm aware of drawbacks of this function. This, however, is fairly old toy/hobby 3D project codebase I've ported over to newer compiler so I'm not really interested in making it "proper".
Here is where my internal "-Wall" person is fighting with "don't frickin' care" person; I'd rather not disable these warnings, but VS is making it very difficult not to go there at the moment...

But I'll just mention one of the greatest features of VS that doesn't seem to be common in other editors: Ability to have two views of same file open at same time.

I can't understand how few editors have this ability, as it makes some things so much easier... Screw all fancy class viewers and code insights, just let me see the actual definitions in the code while I'm working with the code elsewhere!