Annoying Questions I'd Like Answered...

[Prak]

I don't know the answer, but can we test it?

[deaddmwalking]

How much space would you need to store enough food to give 1.2 billion people adequate nutrition for a decade?

Without regard to nutritional balance, we can get close. A cubic foot of wheat weighs 48 pounds. 1 pound of wheat has just over 1500 calories. That would be sufficient for one person for one day.

1.2 b x 365 x 10 / 48 = 91.25 billion cubic feet

An 'acre foot' is 46,560 cubic feet

That works out to roughly 210,000 acres

Which is less than a 3rd of Rhode Island.

Of course I might have messed up doing math on my phone, but seems about right.

And this is why we should all use metric.

[angelfromanotherpin]

How much space would you need to store enough food to give 1.2 billion people adequate nutrition for a decade?

Hey, I remember doing this math. The answer depends on a lot of factors, like what are the conditions of the storage, what kind of preparation is available for the food once it's taken out of storage, and what kind of compacting technology is available. I think the best case scenario using modern technology was a man-year of food taking up ~64 cubic feet, which I think becomes ~77 billion cubic feet. For reference, wikipedia tells me that the largest storage building in the world is the Target import warehouse in Georgia, which has 262.4 million cubic feet worth of space. So, you'd need 294 of those.

[Starmaker]

I need a new PC. The budget is roughly $1000, negotiable (I'm applying for loan refinancing and can get extra cash for personal expenses).

Should I buy one now, or are price drops or some fundamental gamechangers that matter at this price level expected in the near future?

[hyzmarca]

I need a new PC. The budget is roughly $1000, negotiable (I'm applying for loan refinancing and can get extra cash for personal expenses).

Should I buy one now, or are price drops or some fundamental gamechangers that matter at this price level expected in the near future?

My suggestion would be to buy someone's broken relatively new PC for peanuts and fix it, which is what I did. Bought a PC with a broken motherboard for $10, replaced the motherboard for $80, ended up with a $1200 PC.

But, in general, it depends on what you want to use it for. I need more information. Because different tasks require different specs.

[Stahlseele]

There are no bigger game changers in terms of computing tech for home users on the horizons that i know off.
SSDs simply get bigger and cheaper.
CPUs simply get smaller and cheaper.
GPUs simply get smaller and cheaper.
RAM is getting bigger and mor expensive for some reason and DDR4 is not really worth buying into as of yet . .
Right now, the choice between AMD/nVidia is purely one of personal taste, they more or less perform exactly the same in 95% of the use cases and offer mostly the exact same features as well, just under different names.
Same for AMD and Intel CPU, although i will freely admit that i am not very knowledgeable about the AMD GPU and CPU stuff because i have gone for years with Intel and nVidia and see no real reason to change it as of right now.
If you do not want to do video/heavy image edition, forget i7 and take an i5.
Most programs and games still don't make proper use of more than 2 cores, let alone 4.
For Storage, HDD still has SSD beat in terms of GB/TB per $, but trust me on this:
You want an SSD for the OS and programs!
256GB is enough for most people and even 500GB is fairly cheap as of late.
And the added speed is not even the main feature, it is simply much quieter.

[Maj]

We have a computer repair shop that puts together boxes with parts of other computers and sells them for $200-$300. It's just a box - no keyboard, mouse, etc - but they are awesome computers. You might try looking around for that.

[Starmaker]

But, in general, it depends on what you want to use it for. I need more information. Because different tasks require different specs.

I want to pass the RHCSA exam (so I don't get caught with my pants down again when someone is looking for certified Linux sysadmins and promises pre-war salaries), mess around with Unity, and play modern-ish games with the possibility to capture the video (also, do other stuff which is either trivial or doesn't have meaningful thresholds). My current best computer is my British butler friend's employer's tween daughter's secondhand laptop (which is awesome, awesomer yet because it was a gift), but it has Intel graphics and the screen is way too small even to edit two files side by side.

[Stahlseele]

So, you are building a complete system then?
Go for nVidia for the game capture, shadowplay is nice for that i hear.
For a screen for working and gaming, i will say this once:
LG Electronics 25UB55-B, 25"
Look it up, it is their professional series, tilt, swivel, pivot, you can actually connect 2 sources to it via HDMI and have both pictures on the screen side by side, you can also use the screens own capabilities to make the screen into 2 or 4 areas for working in.
If you tilt it by 90° to the side, you now have MANY MANY lines of text/code you can actually work with . .
Due to the slightly higher resolution, games that support it will need a bit more power, of course, but you also have a bigger FOW. And none of this curved nonsense. And because it is only 25" diagonal, it is also hillariously cheap for what it offers.

[JonSetanta]

mess around with Unity

I know you mean the video game, but the Rick & Morty Unity is much better for my needs.

[Hadanelith]

With a budget of a grand, you have roughly 3 options:

1) buy a prebuilt. As a computer enthusiast, I don't ever do this personally, but if you aren't interested in/capable of building a PC from a pile of parts, this can save you a lot of frustration. I understand Cyberpower makes pretty decent prebuilds these days.

2) Build it yourself. This is the hardest, but most rewarding option, though it also has the greatest chance to completely screw you. Go to Newegg, build a parts list to your budget, and get a giant box full of goodies in the mail a week or two later. Then spend an entire day assembling, installing Windows, and fucking about with drivers. Common showstoppers here: DOA parts, forgetting small but critical things (looking at you, thermal paste!), forgetting to budget shipping, hamhandedness leading to parts breakage, not having an OS on hand to install, drivers. If you aren't confident about this plan, don't. Save yourself the heartache.

3) Scrounge. Buy a mostly functional machine off Craigslist or some such, and fix it. Comes with some of the caveats of (2), but generally involves less work. Often can be very cheap. Flipside: can be time and effort intensive, and you can end up with shit that just will never work. Still requires messing around in the guts of the machine.

Bottom line: if you're comfortable building it yourself, do so. It'll be built to your exact configuration, you'll know exactly what is installed (and crucially, what is NOT), and you can set yourself up for upgrades down the line. It can also be cheaper. I say CAN, because some of the pre-built stuff is pretty price competitive these days. If you aren't comfortable rooting around the guts of a computer, buy a prebuilt. They come with things like warantees, and they work with a minimum of effort from you.

If you decide to build your own and need some advice, ping me; I build computers for people.

[Stahlseele]

Or if you can fit it into your budget:
Select the parts you want.
Buy it all at one place, have them assemble and install software and make sure it works and then have it delivered to you.

[Eikre]

Putting a PC together is about two pegs above assembling a Lego model. Do it even if you're not confident. Especially if you're not confident. Don't be one of those people who has never changed a tire before.

[Stahlseele]

*shrugs*
Personally, over the years of PC-Gaming/Usage, i have simply gotten too lazy to do it myself . .
My newest pc i had assembled from parts sold by single retailer caseking and had them build it for me before shipping it to me.
And then the mainboard gave out 2 years later and i basically had to do a complete rebuild because swapping out the mainboard is the most annoying thing ever to do on a pc <.<
As a beginner, have somebody with you to help with stuff you are not sure about, but yeah, every pc user should, at least once, build their own machine.

[DSMatticus]

I fucking hate disassembling and reassembling PC's. I'm sure that hurts my nerd cred, but it's honestly pretty annoying.

[Maxus]

I fucking hate disassembling and reassembling PC's. I'm sure that hurts my nerd cred, but it's honestly pretty annoying.

I've had times when I'd have happily taken a kick to the nads rather than keep working on a computer. Especially when a bunch of my buddies are computer enthusiasts who ask questions like "Why don't you try that GPU in another box and see if it'll work there, because even though it's smelling like burnt silicon and the fan isn't moving despite its connection to the power supply, and the rest of the computer is miraculously working, including on-board graphics, it could still be alive after your house got struck by lightning. Are you sure it's really hooked up? What about the drivers?"

And don't want to consider that, no, this piece of electronics is better served by being thrown away. Or buried.

[Stahlseele]

Yeah, also the fact that all coputers i had to work on seem to have been blooddrinkers.
Everything hooked up perfectly, nothing works.
Open computer again, look around, touch nothing but a sharp edge to make me bleed.
Close computer again.
Works.

[sendaz]

Blood for the Blood CPU

[erik]

I've wondered if the edges were left sharp on so many components to scare off amateurs like thorns on a rose. I like blood for the blood cpu explanation better.

[Maj]

I fucking hate disassembling and reassembling PC's. I'm sure that hurts my nerd cred, but it's honestly pretty annoying.

I built every computer of mine up until I bought the box a couple years ago from the store I mentioned, and it was wonderful to not have to fear opening the case. And wonderful to not have to figure out why something wasn't working. And just fucking wonderful to not have to deal with all the bullshit. I would buy another one over spending the time and blood on building my own.

[Stahlseele]

The Happy medium here is simply buying a complete system that is only missing one component that you want and replacing that.
For example, good CPU, GPU and RAM, but no SSD, still an HDD as system Drive. Buy SSD separately and put it in as the new system drive and use the HDD as storage.

[DSMatticus]

Speaking of reassembling and disassembling computers, I just had a power supply die. Hopefully. At this point I'm honestly pretty confused. It hard crashed while doing nothing in particular, and on reboot I got nothing except LED's - no display, no POST beep, nothing. Open up the case to look inside and some fans are running sluggishly like they're power-starved, and I can hear that distinctive capacitor buzz I've come to know and love from my many dead monitors. Of course, capacitors are on everything and I'm not sure which part is buzzing exactly, so I remove the PSU and test it on its own. At which point I find that the PSU fan can have a little trouble spinning up (so it's the PSU?) but there's no capacitor buzz (wait, where's the failing capacitor then?).

So I hook the PSU back up to the mobo for a minimal boot and the only thing I get is the LED light. No fans spin up - not the PSU's, not the CPU's, not the case fan plugged into the mobo. This is worse than it ran when it was still plugged into everything - and there's still no capacitor buzz! At this point I'm hoping that the capacitor was in the PSU and went from "dying" to "dead" while I was trying to diagnose it. So I try the PSU with nothing except a single case fan, and it manages to spin up the case fan. I guess that's not conclusive, because obviously a mobo and a CPU eat way more power than a single case fan but fuck man I really wish one of these tests would be definitive and that I could find a way to get the PSU to fail without the mobo.

So as is, either my PSU fan is dying and my mobo is dead, or my PSU has a dead capacitor and can only muster up enough juice to run a couple fans but not a CPU. And those are both mildly plausible, considering if my PSU fan were dying I really wouldn't have noticed until now anyway.

So really, after all that testing, the only thing I have to show for it is that my thumbs have been ground into raw meat from those stupid fucking plastic clips they use to secure cords. I learned nothing I did not know the instant I heard that capacitor buzz.

[Mask_De_H]

...my British butler friend's employer's tween daughter's secondhand laptop

Do you live in an anime? Does the kid have twin ponytails and an annoying laugh?

[Prak]

You could have just asked if she resembles Kaelik's avatar.

[Hadanelith]

DSM: yes, sounds like a PSU death kind of problem.