Yeah, I keep forgetting how much time has passed.

Bought my first GPU, an R9 Fury X, for MSRP when it launched. The R9 300 series and GTX 900 series seemed fairly priced then (aside from the Titan X). Bought another for Crossfire and mining, holding on until I upgraded to a 7800 XT.

Comparing prices, all but the 5090 are within $150 of each other when accounting for inflation. The 5090 is stupid expensive. A $150 increase in price over a 10-year period probably isn’t that bad.

I’m still gonna complain about it and embrace my inner “old man yells at prices” though.

I’ll throw in the “basic” choice of Fuck tha Police by N.W.A.

Maybe I’m stuck in the last decade, but these prices seem insane. I know we’ve yet to see what a 5050 (lol) or 5060 would be capable of or its price point. However launching at $549 as your lowest card feels like a significant amount of the consumer base won’t be able to buy any of these.

They should also compare shrinkflation. If a burger price rises by 25% but it’s size shrinks by 10%, the cost is much higher as you’re paying more for less.

Having worked in classified areas, both as an admin and an unprivileged user, CDs were normally the method of transferring data up the network. (Transferring down rarely occurred, and even then you’d be limited to plaintext files or printouts.)

I’ve seen more places use data diodes to perform one- or two-way transfers so that requests can be streamlined and there’s no loose media to worry about tracking. It’s not super fast and higher speeds mean more expensive equipment, but it covers 98% of software update needs, and most non-admin file transfers were under 20MB anyways.

Anything that did require a USB drive, like special test equipment (STE) or BIOS updates, had to use a FIPS-140-1 approved drive that offered a ready-only mode via PIN. This drive could only be written to from a specific workstation that was isolated from the rest of the machines (where data was transferred via CDs of course) and required two persons to perform the job to ensure accountability.

Not the most time-efficient way of doing things, and not completely bulletproof, but it works well enough to keep things moving forward.