- 0 Posts
- 24 Comments
I’m sorry but this is just a fundamentally incorrect take on the physics at play here.
You unfortunately can’t ever prevent further breakdown. Every time you run any voltage through any CPU, you are always slowly breaking down gate-oxides. This is a normal, non-thermal failure mode of consumer CPUs. The issue is that this breakdown is non-linear. As the breakdown process increases, it increases resistance inside the die, and as a consequence requires higher minimum voltages to remain stable. That higher voltage accelerates the rate of idle damage, making time disproportionately more damaging the more damaged a chip is.
If you want to read more on these failure modes, I’d recommend the following papers:
L. Shi et al., “Effects of Oxide Electric Field Stress on the Gate Oxide Reliability of Commercial SiC Power MOSFETs,” 2022 IEEE 9th Workshop on Wide Bandgap Power Devices & Applications
Y. Qian et al., “Modeling of Hot Carrier Injection on Gate-Induced Drain Leakage in PDSOI nMOSFET,” 2021 IEEE International Conference on Integrated Circuits, Technologies and Applications
The “problem” is that the more you understand the engineering, the less you believe Intel when they say they can fix it in microcode. Without writing an entire essay, the TL/DR is that the instability gets worse over time, and the only way that happens is if applied voltages are breaking down dielectric barriers within the chip. This damage is irreparable, 100% of chips in the wild are irreparably damaging themselves over time.
Even if Intel can slow the bleeding with microcode, they can’t repair the damage, and every chip that has ever ran under the bad code will have a measurably shorter lifespan. For the average gamer, that sometimes hasn’t even been the average warranty period.
I think the vision was what Motorola delivered briefly a decade ago with webtop. The original version of it was a chrooted lubuntu with full access to apt, and custom applications that let you render your phone, or phone apps as an application. It was powerful enough to get me through my first 3 years of a computer science program in college with a lapdock as my primary “computer”. (Think a brainless laptop, that you dock your phone into)
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/03/motorola-atrix-the-ubuntu-powered-webtop-experience/
When they moved from android 2.3 to 4.0, they dropped the lubuntu webtop in favor of Android’s tablet mode, which was a huge bummer, and what made me get an actual laptop. Outside of gaming, if that were the average computer paradigm today I’d be a happy camper. Why buy two computers when you can buy one instead?
I actually had one of these myself. I worked at a college help desk as a student, and I got a call and the guy said “every time I flush the toilet, Xbox live disconnects”
My first thought was that it was a joke, the absurdity of the thing right? I unironically asked if I was being pranked, and he said he knew we wouldn’t believe him so he made a video. Sure enough, he walks into the bathroom, flushes the toilet, and like 5s later his Xbox shows a disconnection message on the TV.
Absolutely dumbfounded, I sent the networking guys up to his room, and like all of these stories, it does have a reasonable explanation. They ran the xbox’s Ethernet cable under a rug that was in front of the bathroom. Every time someone went to the bathroom, they would step on the cable, and the Xbox would disconnect. The timeout was 30s or so, just long enough that they’d pee or flush the toilet or whatever before they noticed the disconnection.
I can’t say I’ve ever seen that, but it wouldn’t be hard for an iptables rule at the egress to just block outgoing traffic to 8.8.8.8. it’s not a great workaround for content providers. Especially because there’s definitely a universe where Google kills their DNS offering and a bad actor sets up a DNS server on the same static IP. Not that this isn’t an issue for domains too, it’s just another immutable and this one costs more than a subdomain to maintain.
Dns resolution is integral to load balancing and regional content delivery. There is no universe where a single server, even a specially designed asic, could handle proxy routing if there was a DNS outage and every iPhone or android device or whatever failed to a single IP. Thank God the Internet works this way tbh, dns-based content blocking will probably be the only thing we can do eventually
after the wife and I put ~350hrs into BG3, we were hungering for more. We went back and played Divinity Original Sin 1/2. 1 was tough to play by modern standards but 2 definitely holds up. There seem to be a few easter eggs here and there but I don’t see any reason you’d have to play 1 to understand 2. The combat and skill system is a little different but still very intuitive once you get the hang of it and is definitely a solid recommend for anyone who wants more baulder’s gate but has already done every playthrough under the sun.
Even for those though it’s broken now. For example, I use fkm as an indicator that my phone is dozing/charging correctly and rotation control to force apps into the orientation I want them. Both effectively require persistent notifications to work as intended.
This behavior decision by Google is a straight downgrade. It needed to be at worst togglable by the user.
If your bootloader is unlocked, you can fastboot boot an image and that will only run in memory the one time, however, it will share a data partition (apps, preferences, etc) so it might not behave as well as a native install would have.