Intel Powers Students' Wallets Into Oblivion

Time traveler's first rule: check the I/O ports before packing. Nothing says "mission failed" quite like bringing a USB stick to a floppy party. The violent solution seems appropriate - that 90s computer clearly deserves what's coming after the crushing realization that your entire GitHub repo won't fit on 1.44MB. Pro tip: next time, bring a parallel port adapter and enough patience to last until 2023.

The eternal hardware flex vs. reality gap! When you're watching those VR optimization videos, everything seems so achievable—just tweak a few settings and boom, silky smooth gameplay! Then reality hits when some YouTuber casually drops that they're running a rig with components that cost more than your car. For the uninitiated: an RTX 4090 is NVIDIA's flagship graphics card (~$1600) and "9800x3d" likely refers to AMD's high-end CPU with 3D V-Cache technology (~$500). That's basically the computing equivalent of saying "yeah my daily driver is just a modest little Lamborghini." Meanwhile, the rest of us are over here with our GTX 1060s trying to figure out which settings to turn down so our headsets don't transform into PowerPoint presentations with extra steps.

The eternal battle between marketing and reality. Hard drive manufacturers use 1MB = 1000KB to make their products seem bigger (931GB of actual storage when you buy a "1TB" drive), while the rest of the computing world knows 1MB = 1024KB. It's like ordering a dozen donuts and getting 10 because "our definition of dozen is more convenient for our profit margins." The bell curve shows most people understand the correct definition, but marketing departments and those who believe them occupy the tails of blissful ignorance.

That's the Portal cake logo with "The MSRP is a lie" repeated like a dystopian mantra. Graphics card prices haven't been this fictional since cryptocurrency miners were building rigs in their mothers' basements. Manufacturers slap on MSRPs that belong in fantasy novels while retailers mark them up to "market value" – which is corporate speak for "whatever desperate gamers will pay." Nothing says "modern computing" like needing a second mortgage for a GPU that'll be obsolete before you finish paying it off.

The Ruby on Rails philosophy in one image: why bother optimizing your code when you can just throw more CPU cores at it? This meme perfectly captures the "Rails magic" approach – your app runs like a three-legged dog until you upgrade your server. Then suddenly it's "fast enough" and everyone pretends the code isn't a dumpster fire underneath. Classic web framework solution: when in doubt, blame the hardware! Meanwhile, the Go developers are in the corner writing code that would run on a calculator.

When your dating life and file system both have compatibility issues. FAT32 is a file system with a 4GB file size limit that most developers have moved on from years ago - just like this guy's dating prospects. Nothing says "I'm still running Windows XP" quite like proudly declaring your love for obsolete storage formats while staring pensively at your multiple monitors.