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RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

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Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#421

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> maybe $250/month (...) which you can then use to go and earn 100x that. 25k/month? Most people will never come close to earn that much. Most developers in the third world don't make that in a full year, but are affected by raises in PC parts' prices. I agree with the general principle of having savings for emergencies. For a Software Engineer, that should probably include buying a good enough computer for them, in…

>Most developers in the third world don't make that in a full year And many in the first world haha

25k annually (before taxes) is $12/hour with a 40 hour work week, how many software developers in the first world are working for that? There are probably some, but I’d be surprised if there were “many”.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#422
post #416

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Disclosing that you spend half the median income on top-spec Apple hardware every year is a confession , dude. There's no justifying that spend, past, "I like having the newest toys." Happy for you and whatever sales rep whose performance review you're making a slam dunk. It's still not good advice for the vast majority of people who use their computers for work. You're an economic elite living in what is commonly kn…

I don’t spend anywhere near that. It resells for 60-80% when I replace it a year or two later. That offsets the cost drastically. Spending $700 per month on your work tools (where that represents 2-3% of revenue) is not unreasonable. My minuscule office space in the shitty part of town costs as much. I think anyone running their small business that depends on high performance computers should have an annual budget of…

It's still thousands in unnecessary spend. You've likely thrown away a few years of post-retirement funds, and at least a few months of runway in the case of a crisis or emegency. It doesn't matter if it seems like a reasonable expense as a percentage of revenue, because the marginal improvement in productivity, for the vast majority of people, is going to be insignificant.

You can justify it to yourself however you like, but outside of your bubble, it's a poor allocation of money.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#423
post #382

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>and a lot of blink codes when you encounter bad sticks Which sadly happens quite a lot with ECC DDR4 for whatever reason. >If you're feeling cheap and are okay with the previous generation, the Haswell/Broadwell-based T7910 is also serviceable The T5810 is a known machine, very tinkerable, just works with NVMe adapters (they show up as a normal NVMe boot option in UEFI) and even have TPM 2.0 (!!!) after a BIOS updat…

Forgot about Dell gimping Turbo Boost on that firmware. Another route is the PowerEdge T440 (tower server), which does respect Broadwell-EP turbo logic without a reflash. Not quite as quiet as a workstation, though.

It's not an issue with Dell it's an issue with how the chips themselves are designed. There are buggy microcodes in the Haswell-EP series which can be exploited to unlock FULL Turbo Boost on ALL cores of the CPUs. This is NOT possible on Broawdwell-EP.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#424

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I think everyone has quibbles about the CPI. Ultimately though, it would take a lot of cherry-picking to make it seem like overall cost of living has gone up 3x while wages have gone up less. As a counterexample, an NES game in 1990 cost $50 new (in 1990 dollars! Not adjusted for inflation). Battlefield 6 cost $70 new this year (in 2025 dollars), and there were widespread complaints about games getting "too expensive…

Housing, vehicles, groceries, and health insurance are all up massively. Who gives a shit how much a game costs if you can't afford groceries and rent?

Fortunately, you are wrong. The cost of milk in 1995 was $2.50/gallon; today, it's about $4.13/gallon — which is less than inflation since 1995. Ditto for many other grocery products: although you can always cherry pick some that have gone up relative to inflation (e.g. eggs), there are many that gave gone down. Groceries are tracked by the CPI.

Vehicles are also cheaper relative to inflation. In 1995, a new Toyota Camry cost $16k base. Today, a new Toyota Camry costs $28k base, which is less than inflation on $16k since 1995 — while being much safer, faster, larger, more comfortable, with a better sound system, and more fuel-efficient. Vehicle prices are tracked by the CPI, as well.

We can keep going. How about a pair of canvas Converse sneakers in 1995? $30 new. Today, 30 years later with 112% inflation: $60 new, aka, slightly cheaper relative to inflation than in the 90s.

I'm guessing you use a laptop for work. Let's see: in 1991, an Apple Powerbook cost a little over $2k. Today, you can buy a Macbook Air that makes the 1991 laptop seem like an abnormally heavy and ugly calculator for $1k. Is it unfair that I'm using laptops rather than desktops? Okay, let's look at desktops: in 1998 when the iMac launched, it cost $1299. Today, a massively faster iMac with a much larger screen costs... $1299.

Etc etc.

As per my original comment: you are right that housing has gone way up. But not everything has, and wages have gone up as well, and it would be very hard to claim overall cost of living is up 3x while wages are up less.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

maybe not on an SSD but it definitely helps a lot on HDD by virtue of having far less disk traffic. The kernel's method for figuring out which modules to load is effectively to load every single module that might be compatible with a given device in series and then ask the module for its opinion before unloading it, and then once it has a list of all (self-reported) compatible modules for a given device it picks one…

Why does it not cache that list for next boot? On hardware changes one could add a boot flag to invalidate the cache. That may not make sense for all installs, but for power user installs I think it would make sense.

For anything involved in the I/O stack this would be a complete non-starter because having a cache implies the existence of a filesystem which in turn implies the existence of all underlying modules. PCI, network stack, USB, etc can all be necessary prerequisites for that so it's a non-starter for anything involved with them too; at this point we've already ruled out most of the computer.

Also for embedded systems there often isn't a writable filesystem, and that is a huge part of linux's userbase.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDK; at the time i was using gentoo, in which it's natural not to have more modules than necessary because part of the installation process involves generating your own kernel configuration. Even though it's not the normal way to install debian there ought to be some sort of way to build your own custom kernels and modules without interferance from the package manager (or you can just run it all manually and hope tha…

Every time I hear about gentoo I am torn between the "I should really be doing that" mindset and the "I don't have time for that" mindset.

Surprisingly enough the hardest part about gentoo is actually not the kernel but the userspace. Every package has these "use flags" and "keyword flags" which can control compile-time options and that seems fine enough on its own until you get to the point where you have multiple packages all sharing a dependency with mutually-exclusive USE flags and it's entirely up to you to figure out how to untangle this mess in a way that every package's dependencies are satisfied.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Set modules=dep in ( https://manpages.debian.org/jessie/initramfs-tools/initramfs... ) and run update-initramfs. I doubt that'll affect boot time but it reduces initrd.img size a lot.

maybe not on an SSD but it definitely helps a lot on HDD by virtue of having far less disk traffic. The kernel's method for figuring out which modules to load is effectively to load every single module that might be compatible with a given device in series and then ask the module for its opinion before unloading it, and then once it has a list of all (self-reported) compatible modules for a given device it picks one…

> helps a lot on HDD by virtue of having far less disk traffic

Still doesn't matter because we're talking about init ramdisk here. It's a sequential file loaded into RAM before the kernel. Whether it's 5MB or 20MB would't matter much even on a hard drive. After that it's all in RAM anyway.

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