Posts by John Brown (no body) 25330 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
I'm not sure any of the Lenovo laptop line is upgradable any more other than some still having one or maybe two SODIMM sockets and, in most cases, the SSD is upgradable. None have options to upgrade CPU or GPU, and to be fair, I think that applies to all laptop OEMs these days. If any current models have socketed CPUs I've not seen one in years!
But yeah, the X13 is a bugger with only soldered on RAM, ditto the T14s (basically the same device), but not the Intel based T14
"T series Thinkpads used to be some of the most repairable laptops around. Not only were parts available, but the repair and maintenance manuals were in the Internet, and for free."
That's still the case, on the whole. I only see enterprise class kit, and most of it is pretty easily repairable, full parts/repair manuals available to all, plenty of Lenvo created videos on YouTube demonstrating the parts replacement process. Where things have changed from the IBM days is primarily in the consumer grade kit and to an extent in the enterprise kir where, for example, on some of the cheaper models the RAM is on the system board, possibly with no expansion SODIMM socket, but most will at least have one SODIMM socket for expansion or all the RAM is SODIMM. Other than that, it's all on the system board except the WLAN, the SSD and maybe, the WiFI card. A few, for design reasons rather than repairability, may have small expansion boards for, eg USB and/or Ethernet. Primarily cost-cutting measures in term of manufacture which, to be fair, they ALL do, so to stay competatve, an OEM pretty much has to follow the crowd whether they want to or not. As for parts repair, when new parts are sent out from Lenov, sometimes they are marked up as factory repairs, so those where it's economic to re-work the board, they already do that. I've never seen Dell or HP parts sent out marked as repaired, but maybe they are just less transparent about that.
Having said that, I'm fairly confident they will not be releasing board schematics and/or any board level components as sparers. Consumer repairs will be pretty much as they are now, replace entire modules, eg system board, battery, LCD panel, SSD, keyboard, maybe RAM and not much else, the assumption being that 99% of consumers will have neither the skills nor kit to replace a broken USB port on a system board. That will remain the job of repair centres. On the other hand, if we are going back to easily replaceable batteries in their phones and tablets, that's good news :-)
Yeah,. pretty much the entire story seems to be "we know who tried to contact the gang". There's no juicy bits of useful info such as inter-gang comms or insider dirt, no scandal. Unless there's more to come, it's just a little bit of schadenfreude and not much else. I think I'm more disappointed than anything else.
"The only thing which makes this item newsworthy is the incidental involvement of an AV, albeit a somewhat recalcitrant one."
Personally, I think that is exactly WHY it's a story. If it was a "mundane"[*], human drive hit and run, there's a specific person to hunt down and charge with a crime. But just WHO is the driver of an autonomous vehicle? If the EV is to blame, then who gets charged? The company as a whole? The s/e dev team/department? A specific person in the dev team? The person or people who provided the data to the dev team? (maybe it was faulty data or local driving laws at fault, not the s/w itself).
* let's not even go near the atrocious US road death rates, one of the worst, per capita in the developed world.
Another form of "cruise control". Not a self driving car, just an "ordinary", brand new EV that failed so spectacularly that the brakes (regen?) didn't work and the car was stuck driving along at 30mph, the poor driver only able to steer, not stop or slow.
"It is not being reported the way every similar story in the past has been reported."
Looking at this thread a good number of hours after it started, and seeing the many comments, I think I can see both sides of this one. Although, my thoughts on the lack of video being shown to track down the other car may result from one of the "accused" being a multi-million (billion?) dollar corporation, since the sequence of events appears to be that the victim may have only been slightly injured by the "missing" car, the worst injuries then being caused by the Cruise car. And Cruise are the ones with the most data and video on exactly what happened and may be reluctant to hand anything over without a warrant, which will not only add to the delay but may not be worded very well, or be legally arguable as "too broad", so Cruise have more excuses to delay. If Cruise thought they were entirely innocent, I'm sure they would have volunteered the data, so any "strangeness" is almost certainly just corporate ass covering.
"US watchdog the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) recalled all 300,000 devices sold in the US, citing a risk of crashes causing serious injuries."
I wonder how the number of accidents per OneWheel stacks up against other forms of transport and how many others they are planning on "recalling" based of those relatively low statistics? eScooters is the most obvious one that comes to mind, but maybe cars too? :-)
In most places, no matter what colour the lights, if there's someone still crossing the road after the lights change, you still wait. The fact the human driven car hit her is bad enough, but the self-driving car should not have even started moving if it had seen her and if the correct "rules of the road" were properly programmed in . The poor pedestrian might have got away with a minor injury if the Cruise car was following the correct procedure, so in my view, both the human driver and the Cruise vehicle were at fault. But ;lets see who the "driver" of the Cruise vehicle is when it comes to court. I'm sure the insurance companies would like to know too. This could be a landmark case.
"The whole thing was pretty slick and high tech for 1992/1993*
Nowadays, it's much more advanced, although students are expected to purchase their own driving simulator hardware and software. I believe the approved options are Carmageddon and Grand Theft Auto.
"Mine (a gift), will do pretty much all of it without the phone anywhere near it. It has its own cellular/mobile whatsit"
Thanks :-) Although my question was a bit snarky, it was actually a genuine question on the functionality as many Smart watches, especially down the cheaper "no-name" end of the scale are actually capable of very little as stand alone devices so it's good to know the iWatch is actually mainly useful even when "untethered" :-)
"My Apple watch, on the other hand, does that plus calculator, calendar, phone, lighting controller, compass, blood oxygen, ECG, thermostat control, finds my keys, texts, pays for groceries, tracks my mileage, lets me know if there's too much noise, finds EV chargers, identifies songs, lets me know I need to take meds, lets me read email, and tells me how much I've walked in a day."
How much of that will it do if you leave your iPhone at home? Does the watch actually *do* much at all or is it primarily a slightly smart wireless terminal display for the phone?
"I'm sure someone will buy it for the gold value"
I'm not sure just how valuable the gold is or even if it is gold.
Caratage is the measure of the purity of gold, usually referred to as Carat(s). According to the article, the Apple "gold" watch is "18 Karat gold". So is it real gold? Or, is it like Krispy Kream doughnuts, which are neither crispy nor cream, even if the name sounds like it.
I think the problem is the weird way contract law can work in some jurisdictions.
As I understand it, the sub-letter signed the contract as-is and sent it back to Twitter, who then sat on it beyond the agreed termination date and then effectively altered it and signed it and now claim the altered version the sub-letter "signed" is the one to be enforced.
"Suddenly they have lost all scariness."
Yeah, I took one look at that and though, it ain't gonna fly unless it's got a rocket or micro-turbojet the model aircraft crowd[*] use, the latter not being cheap throwaway devices.
* Or people building "Ironman" flying suits!
Nowadays, it's assumed that users already know how to use a computer, but that's not always the case, even for users who've been users for years. I still see people with no idea about even the most basic keyboard shortcuts. Back in the day, training someone on how to use a specific program or system, you'd assume, and base the training time/costs on the employer having already trained their users on the basics. The trainers job was to teach the users how to run WordStar, or a specific DBase based stock management system. Not to spend the first full day showing them where the power switch is, how to adjust screen brightness, what the strange and different non-alphanumeric keys were for, how to insert a floppy disk etc. Although many employers thought that actually was part of the job, until the contracted pre-requistes were pointed out to them and no, they were not getting an extra free day of basic computer use training they should have already paid for. And as most people in the training game will point out, it STILL happens today.
"Do not just truncate the screen - use scroll bars."
I just installed a backup "solution" for my BiL, who is a Windows user with no chance of saving. It got wiped off the system as soon as I realised the main GUI windows was not resizable and you had to be constantly hitting the scroll bars to see what was going on. Why would anyone choose a fixed size window for anything other than an error message "click ok to acknowledge" thing? Always let the user resize the window because you don't know what screen size, what resolution and what magnification settings they are using. Having a minimum size may be almost acceptable if making it too small will hide the important info. And NEVER have a status windows that sits right in the middle of the screen with "always on top" set when your program claims there is an error that takes 2 hours to fix!. Yeah, that backup program which BiL had installed himself went in the bin as soon as I saw it. (Samsung Autobackup if you are interested, came "free" with his 2TB USB Samsung drive)
"Although, that's more HP's fault for designing a fragile power button, than the user's."
There was a model of All-In-One we had. The microswitch for the "power" button was the same as the once inside a mouse. It was activated by a spike/plunger on the side of the case, part of the entire back of the AIO. It was actually, physically part of the plastic housing, a small stud held by two plastic S shapes. It only had to move maybe a 1/2mm or less to activate. But bloody impatient students would press again, harder, when it didn't burst into life instantly. On a good day, the spike/plunger would bend and get jammed down the side of the switch so undoing a couple of case screws and popping the corner of the back fixed it. On a bad day, the S bits snapped and a whole new back cover needed to be fitted by calling out our maintenance IT provider for a "user damage" fix that cost us.
"That's standard public sector accounting and maybe some private sector places as well."
Yes, the twisted "logic" is that if you didn't spend all your budget this year, you can make do with that much less next year. So there's always pressure near the end of the financial year to spend the money on $something, just to make sure you don't get a cut in next years budget, whether you actually need $something or not. The "trick" is to stock up on stuff you'll need next year anyway in the same budget area you expect to need more money for other stuff next year.
"wasn't even connected to the PSU in that PC!!!!"
Yep. A university where "a Very Important Person" needed the floppy drive fixed ASAP because it was vital to carry out his job. Except the "faulty" one had never even been connected internally
"stacked in the office for two years because they had to be bought when the budget was available"
A local council bought 2500 PC and stacked them up in a warehouse unit and allocated a small number of people to build and deploy them while the economy was good and the prices were low. It took 5 years to get any where near the end of the deployment, and DOAs were long past the "replace it" stage and even starting to go past the 5 year warranty when a financial downturn happened, the one before the current one, or maybe the one before that, the council started making people redundant/not filling leavers posts and they had 100's of PCs "spare" and not enough people to deploy them to.
"if the cells were used for numbers and set to 2cm wide then you need a 130000cm or 1.3km wide screen."
That immediately brought to mind The 5000 Fingers of Dr T
I don't think I've ever seen it since I was a very young child it when it scared the bejeezus out of me at the time!
"I imagine having your license suspended for drunk driving is not good for being allowed on racetracks!"
Depends on whether they ask. I know people who started race driving before being old enough to legally take to the roads and therefore didn't even have a driving licence so it's not a requirement.
"Also, if Eben sticks to his earlier hints about naming, it might be the second time in my life I own an integrated-keyboard home computer designated "500" :)"
LOL, and the 4 series is already capable of running FS-UAE and emulating an Amiga 500. A Pi5 should be even better at it, maybe even cope with A1200 emulation at full speed :-)
"my old 3B+"
If that fails, or you need another one, the 3B+ will bre remaining in production until Jan 2028. I didn't check for other models, but I assume the 4 range will stay in production for some years to come too. It's not like most OEMs where they end production of the old work horses every time new shiny comes out. I imagine that's because they now have a large commercial market who want long term stable hardware and that mean products (and low prices) remain in place for us consumers too.
"Ok so I’ve now found their working time server ntp.virginmedia.com but it’s antisocial of them to block everyone else’s."
Really? Since when? I had no idea VM had their own timeserver, and none of my kit seems to have an issue using others, or at least not that I've noticed.
So, Eben--tell us, for the record please: why has it taken you twelve years to add an "on-off" switch?"
Possibly because it's not an "on/off" switch. It's an ACPI power management function that can be used with a mechanically actuated sensor to act as a sleep/hibernate/off/on switch under software control so as to do a clean mode switch by, for example, shutting down or suspending OS and App services in a correct and data safe manner. It's little more subtle than just pulling the power or manually running shutdown command. And it's quite a long way from being an essential, "must have" since the aforementioned shutdown command and pulling the power works just as well in most cases :-)
You don't have to keep upgrading. You can just buy what you need and replace it if it fails.
From the Raspberry Pi website "Obsolescence Statement. Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ will remain in production until at least January 2028"
It's worth noting that they have said the commercial/industrial control markets in effect subsidises the hobbyist/home user side thanks to economies of scale. So bringing out a newer, faster model every 2,3,4 or so years to keep up with commercial demand, filters down to us home users. I've still got an original Pi B running, a couple of 2's and a "spare" 3B+ that got replaced with a 4 because the 3B+ struggled a bit with 1080p video and craps out if said video is X265.
You raise an interesting point. Except that pretty much every engine requires multiple different fluids for them to work properly, clutch fluid, radiator coolant (ok, maybe not that, water will do in pinch), brake fluid, engine oil, any of which may be low and need topping up or replacing at any time and needs to be checked regularly by the owner/driver. I dunno about you, but I don't risk any of those fluids getting anywhere near down to a level where the vehicle might not be ready for a trip without a top up. Why would DEF be any different? Just keep it topped up as with all the other "fluids" a car or truck uses.
Depending what and how you drive, a DEF tank should need filling every 3000-10000 miles, way less often than the fuel tank, and it's a pretty small tank in general and not hard to stick a pint or two in every time you fill up if you're really worried the apocalypse is due.
"I'd expect their argument to be that they're merely a marketplace which puts buyers in contact with sellers, and any accusations of wrongdoing should be directed to them."
Go into certain bars in seedy parts of town where the owner turns a blind eye to drug dealers and said owner can be up on charges too or, at the very least, lose their liquor license. With greats rights comes great responsibilities :-)
"I still need a license to concealed carry it"
I've often wondered about the, me not being in the USA, exactly what it means. I'm assuming that means you are not allowed to carry a firearm in you pocket or backpack, or in a shoulder holster under a jacket without the correct licence, but are able to carry it in full view, eg on a belt holster like the cowboys of the old West?
"order a gun online (or via mail order if anyone still has paper catalogues)"
That's a strange distinction. Surely "mail order" is simply "distance selling", whether you have a paper catalogue or do it via a website. Either way, you order something and it gets mailed to you :-)
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