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The types of people who hold this concern are categorically unlikely to be the kind of people to ask for help (or accept unsolicited help) from staff at a consu
by anonym29 4y ago
The types of people who hold this concern are categorically unlikely to be the kind of people to ask for help (or accept unsolicited help) from staff at a consumer computer store - they are much more likely to be the type of people who can almost certainly run circles around any consumer technical support or consumer sales staff they ever interact with, in just about every technical domain, and the type who deliberately avoid talking with the staff, as the staff are almost certainly unfamiliar, inexperienced with, and unqualified to address their niche concerns in the first place.
I'd never ask a Microcenter employee whether AMD or Nvidia cards are going to have better pass-through support on the Xen hypervisor to a BSD guest kernel with any expectation of a knowledgeable response, would you?
Would you ask a Best Buy employee whether the session tokens used by a wireless router's web interface are generated using a PRNG or a CSPRNG and expect them to be helpful?
- arp242 4y agoWe had a wide variety of customers on account of being a local business with a long history in the area and a good reputation. This included many tech people and business customers. I have no way of measuring how representative it was exactly, but it's more representative than you might think. Most people don't work in IT and don't want to run Xen in the first place, so it's still fairly indicative what "the average person" thinks – certainly more indicative than you and your 3 friends who work in IT.
- anonym29 4y agoAs I discussed in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34775479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34775479), what the "average person" wants and cares about is an objectively bad metric for anyone who cares about digital privacy when making security/privacy relevant decisions. The "average person" is functionally illiterate on matters of digital security and privacy.
- arp242 4y agoThis thread is about declining CPU shipments, and Intel ME is offered as an explanation for that. It's extremely relevant in this context what "the average person" thinks because if they don't care then it doesn't affect sales.
- anonym29 4y agoI'm certainly not arguing that it's the only reason, or even a primary reason, but it absolutely is a reason. We can debate the extent to which sales decline is attributable to this all day long, but fact of the matter is, x86 CPU manufacturers are hurting right now, and I'm sharing an option for anyone at those companies who might be reading that can alleviate some of that pain. Like I've said in other comments, if I could get a 7950x without AMD ST (formerly PSP), I'd eagerly pay $2500 for it, and I definitely wouldn't be the only one.