Posts by John Brown (no body) 25368 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
Especially if said idiot is a relative of a board member and that's how s/he got the job in the first place and why they are still there. Possibly printing off those 10 labels once per month is their only actual responsibility because anything more would be too complicated for them.
"After digging through yet more junk crates we found an RS232 to PS/2 and a PS/2 to USB adaptor, when connected together the mouse worked surprisingly well..."
You were lucky it wasn't an even older Mouse Systems bus mouse. I'm not sure any kind of adaptor ever existed for those other than the 8-bit ISA card it plugged into :-)
(Or even older mice with OEM connections/protocols for anything from BBC Mcro, Amiga, ST or any of the many other unique "personal computers" that used mice in one form or another)
Tell that to the council drones who insist...
The same council drones working under a policy of "test everything, test every year", despite the rules around test frequency, ie there aren't any. Even better the councils who insist all new equipment is tested, when the regulations specifically state that new equipment should be supplied in a "safe" state.
On the other hand, any and all devices that have a mains lead and plug on them should be tested at reasonable intervals, including lighting rigs, or the snack vending machine near the staff kitchen. Maybe only once every 2-5 years though, depending on risk assessment such as is the main lead accessible, does the device get moved around at all that may cause wear on the cable or plug, or the cable gets moved during daily/weekly floor cleaning etc. But that sort of assessment, knowledge and skill is something the testing person is supposed to have, not some some random, arse-covering policy maker at the top of the org bing overlay cautious due to lack of knowledge and skill.
Oh yes, special rules for IT kit too. Things like switches and servers that never move. Not only can you reduce the testing frequency, but you only need to check and test the cable if it's detachable at both ends, not the device itself, in most cases. but again, down to the skills and knowledge of the testing person.
From watching Hornby: A Model World" it seems all the new kit is digitally controlled with the trains having digital recorded sounds of the actual locomotives wherever possible, so quite a bit more than just "chuff chuff" of old using a bit of sandpaper and an offset cam :-)
Yes, when you really HAVE to have a clear out, reading these sorts of articles and especially the comments generated, educates you greatly on just what might be actual disposable rubbish, what might have some ebay value and what is really worth keeping :-)
Of course, no matter what you dispose of, you'll almost always find a need or use for it sometime early next week, but at least you can try to learn from others experience and reduce the odds a little.
"My box of obsolete tech has saved multiple people multiple times... old cables like a DVI to HDMI, PS2 keyboard even an old KVM switch that only had PS2 inputs and an old USB2 external HDD caddy that took IDE drives that saved some ones very sentimental photos that they never had backed up anywhere else on an old system."
Your definition of "obsolete" and "old" appears to wildly vary from mine. Most of what you describe as such above is still in use on my kit at home, including the PS/2, VGA only KVM :-)
"Tulips are concrete, pretty and have an actual cash value -- between $0.25 and $0.75 USD per bulb depending on variety and quantity purchased. Cryptocurrencies are imaginary entities."
True, but the tulip bubble was essentially a futures trading frenzy, so what was being bought and sold was imaginary future values/profits.
I must admit, when I first read the headline and initial paragraph or so, I was wondering at the convergence of the two company names and whether there may be some board members or c-level in common, ie a new company suddenly appears to take over a broken company, loosing most or all of the debt in the process. Of all the possible names of companies in the world, two crypto companies each named after the two most temperature scales, one buying out the other, just seems a little too coincidental.
Yeah, it looks exciting, but nearly half a million for a few minutes of freefall, total trip less than an hour and half. Ok, a few minutes of exciting acceleration too. But still, HALF A MEEEELION? Until Bezos starts competing, I suppose it's the only option, and there's a lot of people who can afford that. Even if you just add up the number of lottery winners around the world that win over, say $5m, that alone is quite a few people and there's not going to be that many flights per year.
"Nobody is "booting DOS" for diagnostics in 2023, unless they are so backwards they haven't learned anything new in the past 20 years and haven't heard of Linux."
OEM diagnostics and set up tools from both Lenovo[*] and HP (at least) still do. Well, to be fair, I've not delved into either deeply enough to say what the OS is underneath, but it's text-mode, command line and doesn't show any obvious Linuxisms when booting. Most likely it's FreeDOS under the hood. Likewise, using Yumi for a multiboot pendrive is still the easiest and simplest to use IMO. UEFI Yumi still seems experimental and Ventoy still seems a bit primitive if usable.
[*] the OEM setup tool for "branding" a factory-new motherboard runs on some DOS-a-like anyway.. Lenovos bootable diagnostics run on Linux.
"Microsoft is preparing for an x86_64 only world with probably only the huge investments that companies have made around 32-bit version of MS Excel holding it back."
Yeah, I wonder how closely Intel and MS are co-operating on this? Can even Win11 and enough relevant drivers work in a pure 64-bit only environment? I bet there's still loads of legacy code still in there.
At least until they identified the one that hit the Pentagon and the one that crashed in Pennsylvania thanks to the passengers trying to take it back and, at that specific time, potentially more that no one yet knew about, so yeah, it affected a bit more than just those few buildings. It took quite some while to cancel all flights and get them grounded so it could indeed have been reasonable to use the EBS for a much wider area if not nationally. I'd certainly not have held it against anyone who authorised its use on that day, and I don't even live in the US.
There seems to be a pattern in US of ignoring the regulations and then taking years to get them properly enforced later, if ever. The Starlink/mobile in-fill capability currently being talked about, DISH networks TV shenanigans, the Aircraft GPS/5G debacle. And that's just the stuff I can remember from El Reg coverage. There was even a story on BBC radio yesterday of Governor(??) in the US who dropped his phone in a resevoir while taking a selfy and ordered it drained so he could get is phone back. It was fucked, of course, a bit like his sense of entitlement and authority!
I'm pretty sure that is one of Nostrodamus; quatrains, although I always thought it referred to David Dickinson
"I always thought internet back in the day had compression so even if you did zip it it still took roughly the same amount of time. Did it or am I making something up my mind?"
Not "the internet" as such, but even in BBS days and especially when the WWW arrived, graphics compression was pretty important to many people, hence .GIF and JPG graphics compression. Even prior to that, there was Run Length Encoding[*], popular both as a very simple graphics encoding format and even built into hard disks, RLL hard disks generally held about 50% more than standard MFM hard disks (some people even used an RLL controller with an MFM drive, living dangerously with their data! I don't recall ever losing data using a an RLL controller to make a 20MB HDD into a 32MB HDD :-))
{*] so primitive that it basically looked for "runs" of the same value and then basically stored the information to say there was a run of 35 zeros, or 29 twelves etc, which worked ok on the basic bitmapped images that were often b/w line drawings or 8/16 colours at most. PCX a slightly more complex format, is still around but has evolved out of all recognition
And just to confuse things even more, there are only so many "human readable" 3 letter extensions so they get used, reused and recycled so who the fuck knows what a .dbf or a .pub file *actually* is until you try to open it and fail! It's not like there's any filesystems out there still in common usage that is actua\lly limited to 3 letter extensions any more. An yet new apps still come long and enforce yet another recycled 3 letter extension, confusing things even further. Let's not even go near the MS default of hiding extensions debate.
Possibly because each app has to out-do the others, so they tweak the compression or the checksumming or anything they can claim makes theirs "better" and so there is a constant arms battle for market share and the punters have to keep upgrading to the next most recent version to open a file not yet supported by the other compression apps.
"I'm curious what list of formats you think are "universal standard" ones."
The closet "universal standard" would probably be 7-bit ASCII. Apart from the languages that don't use the same alphabet, ie a fair chunk of the world. And even then, you'd still still need to install bin2hex and hex2bin to convert anything not in 7-bit ASCII.
"[3] them's fighting words: cue being told off 'cos RDP can do that sort of thing nowadays (? it may well do better now than last time we tried it)"
Yeah, unless RDP has changed since I last used it, the problem with RDP is the D part. I don't want a whole remote desktop appearing on and taking up my whole screen so I can run one app on it. I just want the remote app to appear on my existing desktop :-)
"No doubt there will be a Windows 11 edition that will only use cloud PCs. And they'll pile them high and sell them cheap at your local Electr-o-Mart where average punters can enjoy being ripped off on a monthly basis, forever."
Sadly, that does seem to be the way things are going. It really took off with mobile phones, when the purchase agreement was hidden in the monthly contract payments and customers were offered a "free" upgrade every 2-3 years, ie buying a new phone as we used to call it in the old days. Then "apps" with a monthly fee to keep them working. Even cars seem to be mainly on lease agreements these days. There's a generation or two out there now who don't seem to understand the concept of owning stuff. I dread to think what will happen to them when they retire, own nothing, and can no longer afford all those monthly bills and they really didn't listen to the pension advice they were given on leaving school, ie if you don't put at least 30% away every month, you'll die in poverty, but since they want all the latest shiny and can't even begin to think about saving for a house, will never actually get around to dealing with.
"If there was a straightforward way to boot a fully updated Windows on demand, that would be useful to me."
With per minute or per hour pricing? Sign up/set-up fee? Account "maintenance" fee payable every month "including the first 3 hours absolutely 'free'", even if you don't use it, unused minutes can't be rolled over. Special hourly rates if you use more that 23 hours in a single day! Careful what you wish for, they only want your cash, not to make you happy.
"Even mouth-breathing Fox viewers (whatever they are)"
Me too. If a mouth isn't for breathing, why is it connected to ones airway? If the poster thinks only the nose is for breathing, why can't I eat and drink at the same time via my mouth? He used the phrase at least three times, so I suppose it must have sort of cultural or religious significance in his locality :-)
I'm currently suffering from hay-fever and very grateful for the fact I can be a "mouth breather". The other option would be being dead.
Yes, I well remember the entire second or two I was convinced a UFO was pacing my car as a drove up the motorway at night that I saw out of the corner of my eye. Then I remembered the new cigar-lighter USB adaptor I'd plugged in with it's red LED indicator in the centre console that was now nicely reflecting of the slightly curved side window :-)
"I've never understood the purpose of Windows Repair."
Think of Windows Repair as being the level 1 service/help desk. It can fix the most basic of problems, ie the most common ones, the sort those us with a bit of experience rarely cause because most of the time we know what we are doing. But your average user, who doesn't always understand why Windows should be shutdown properly or the battery should not be forced to keep going even after the OS warned you to shutdown or plug in, or who doesn't understand the difference between Restart and Shutdown (helpfully obscured and bastardised my MS), or or or etc and "break" things the equivalent of "is it properly plugged in" and "have you tried turning it off and on again" situations that 90% of users have 90% of the time when there is a "problem".
Based on that, you are not the target market. the Z16 is more what you'd be looking for. 2xUSB4 & SD card reader on the left side and 1xUSB3 on the right edge.
Looking at the shape and size of the Z13 and Z16 system boards, I'm not sure they could fit more ports there without interconnects and daughter boards. They both look to have some pretty hefty heatsinks and dual fans too.
The Hardware Service Manual is interesting. The entire screen assembly is classed a single unit, so no replacement of a failed camera without a new screen and even the CPU cooler is not classed as a Customer Replaceable Unit, which is unusual even for Lenovo. WiFi is built-in on the system board, Wireless WAN and SSD are both plug-in devices and, unusually for a business grade Thinkpad, soldered on RAM with NO DIMM slot for additional RAM, which will be a deal breaker for many readers here.
"that are small enough to fit in a bag."
s/bag/pocket/ :-) Admittedly, mine doesn't have the SD card reader but it's small enough that I sometimes have to rummage around in the bottom of the laptop bag to find it. There's plenty of really small ones to pick from these days, pretty cheap, work just fine.
I agree with other posters about the limits of only two USB ports on this new model, but it's not as if a power user wanting to plug in multiple devices in all sorts of different locations isn't going to know what they are buying up front. They'll either buy something with the ports they need already built in or probably already have hubs/docks/adaptors they need anyway. I think someone earlier also wonder why Lenovo don't provide a PSU with ports on. Well, the answer is probably that they looked at the market and calculated that making it an optional extra or 3rd party purchase is better and cheaper for the few that want one rather than providing one in every box by default. Sort of the same argument for mobile phones often not coming with a PSU by default these days. Saving on waste and improving their "green credentials". Which kinda makes sense.
"which is why they 1. outsourced to 2. the lowest bidder."
I was speaking with a guy who handles a local councils outsourcing and procurement deals a couple of years back and he said they are legally obliged to go with the lowest bidder who can meet the criteria, even when they have an existing and preferred supplier and really don't want to go with the actual lowest bidder because they know they will shit service. The best they can hope for is that they can get or keep in enough penalty clauses to mitigate the problem they know will come down the line. But the big outsourcers and/or suppliers can afford much better lawyers.
"I'm hearing echoes of Theranos"
Same here. With MS associated with them, even if only as a potential customer, others who know little about the tech or the industry will likely invest, exactly the way Theranos got more investors based on existing "high profile" but otherwise ignorant investors.
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