Posts by John Geek 168 posts • joined 12 Mar 2015
I'm *OH* so glad my ivy league liberal arts parents, may they RIP, never EVER touched a computer in their life, so I was never called to do any family support such as this. My dad used a vintage Underwood full sized mechanical office typewriter, probably 1950s vintage, right up until he couldn't write anymore in his 90s.
yes, but of that 25% of total system price spent on RAM, how much cheaper were similar spec 4x512MB non-ECC rams ? if the non-ECC stuff was 12% cheaper than the ECC stuff, and the ram was 25% of the total, then the total system price of the ECC was more like 3%.
oh and the Opteron was AMD's server CPUs, marketed against the Intel Xeon's.
in fact, Intels' Celeron, Pentium, and Core I3 cpu's have ECC enabled, but only when used on a 'server' chipset, like a C2xx, not on a desktop/laptop chipset. and the only reason Core i5 and i7 have it disabled is so they can sell more expensive Xeon chips which are functionally identical.
If 4GB systems have an average of 3 single bit faults a year, then a 16GB system would have 12/year. My desktop and laptop both have 16GB and both are 5+ years old.
and a week ago I'd just dug up my old WNDR3700v3 to use as an extra WAP to provide coverage for the north end of my rather long and linear house...
.... so as of a couple hours ago, its running OpenWrt 19.07.3
Speaking of annoying Netgear features, the same 'model' WNDR3700 could have any of 3 or 4 different chipsets depending on the version. v1, v2 were Atheros, V3 is Broadcom, V4 is a different Atheros, and V5 is a MediaTek. *yuck*.
I have moved several folks onto win10 who initially had to be dragged kicking and screaming from win7...
1) I delete *ALL* the Microsoft 'apps' crud thats pinned to the start menu, and pin their favorite stuff there instead
2) I disable Cortana via a regedit hack
3) I setup Chrome (or Firefox, whihcever is their preferred browser) as the default, I also install MPC-HD as the default media player
3) I set them up with a local account (which yes, MS is hiding deeper each time)
and blam, in about 5 minutes they are perfectly happy, in a day they are amazed at how much faster it is. in a week they comment that it hasn't crashed once.
I hang out on a database server forum. VAST majority of the Docker users who show up with problems related to the database server are COMPLETELY clueless about systems administration, networking, software in general, and have built their world by stuffing other peoples black boxes (eg, docker containers) together, without ANY idea how any of it works. its all magic to them. devops cargocult style.
now, sure, there's some who use docker as a deployment tool, and these guys generally build their OWN containers from scratch, and know what they are doing, but they are way outnumbered by the clueless.
I've been trying to unsubscribe to Insider emails for a couple years now, but their unsubscribe links want me to authjenticate with a Microsoft Account, which I refuse to register for. I used to beta test their stuff eons ago, like Windows XP vintage, and quit after taht, but have stayed on their $#@$@@ email lists since.
hopefully, they'll start over with registrations for this new 'channels' program. ya right.
I opened a random ASM file from the github and OMG, the comments were referring to CP/M command line parsing. I was working for Digital Research on CP/M internals when the IBM PC came out, and I vaguely remember hearing that Microsoft took their 8 bit 8080/8085/Z80 BASICA for CP/M and ran it through an automatic 8080->8086 code translater to bootstrap GWBasic. Obviously they did lots of work to it after the auto translater, splitting code and data segments, and so forth (the 8080 didn't have segments at all).
high school, circa 1970, 'earth sciences'' teacher drove this ratty mid 60s Jeep Wagoneer in which we did many field trips. It frequently wouldn't start when hot, he'd pull the rubber mat up near the gas pedal, there was a strategic 1" hole in the floor, through which he'd bang the starter a couple times with the crowbar kept under the seat, vrooom, chugchugchug...
LGPL, AGPL, Apache, and BSD/MIT
I like the PostgreSQL version of the BSD style license. and if there is no PARTY1 (The University of California in the PG license), its even simpler.
Portions Copyright © 1996-2020, $PARTY2
Portions Copyright © 1994, $PARTY1
Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose, without fee, and without a written agreement is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph and the following two paragraphs appear in all copies.
IN NO EVENT SHALL $PARTY1 BE LIABLE TO ANY PARTY FOR DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, INCLUDING LOST PROFITS, ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE AND ITS DOCUMENTATION, EVEN IF $PARTY1 HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
$PARTY1 SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIMS ANY WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE SOFTWARE PROVIDED HEREUNDER IS ON AN "AS IS" BASIS, AND $PARTY1 HAS NO OBLIGATIONS TO PROVIDE MAINTENANCE, SUPPORT, UPDATES, ENHANCEMENTS, OR MODIFICATIONS.
wired phones get their power from the headphone jack in the form of analog audio. but I'm sure you know this.
my good full sized headphones require significantly more power than most any small audio source can output, so I have to use a headphone amplifier with them, which yes, has a rechargeable battery.
wireless phones need power for both the Bluetooth radio receiver, the Bluetooth compression decoder, and the audio amplification needed to drive the phones.
Costco (US big box membership retailer) had Samsung 32" 3840x2160 monitor on sale for $319 this weekend. Bought one for my wife, its gorgeous.
has HDMI 2.0 and DP 1.4(?) inputs. on her Latitude w/ the usb c expander box, I had to use the DP port to get 60Hz, the HDMI port would only do 30Hz, awwwww. I had the DP cable already, so all is good.
a bigger screen would have to be farther away to minimize neck strain looking back and forth, so zilch for gain.
3 ton? my truck, a 2002 Ford F250, weighs nearly 4.5 tons(US) loaded, and its a 7.3L turbodiesel. yes, its 4 WD because sometimes I need to go off road, or drive over the mountains in the winter.
its primary function in my life is to haul our caravan on long road trips, while carrying my astronomy and music festival stuff (awnings, tables, chairs, in addition to telescopes, ice chests, water, propane). its secondary function is carrying my rather large telescope to local star parties along with the tall ladder and everything else I need, and generally haul anything else too big to fit into my wife's estate.
sigh, the /20 was the bastard stepchild of the system/360 lineup. it only has 8 16 bit registers, instead of the 16 32 bit of the rest of the 360 line, and its instruction set is very subset and incompatible. The /20 had 4-32KB of core memory, and you needed at least 12KB to run the DPS OS which wasn't very compatible with anything else in the 360 lineup. its a shame its not a 360/40, those could at least run the mainstream DOS/360
restoring that thing to full operational state is likely going to be a major project. they used DTL logic, and ceramic hybrids rather than integrated circuits, which IBM called SLT. The DTL logic can be either 0-3V or 0-9V. I know a retired guy who restored an IBM 1130 of the same generation a couple years ago, it was about a 2 year full time project to get it fully functional. Part way through it, the front panel lights started dying of old age, and they were an unobtanium 'grain of wheat' lightbulb, so he ended up having to engineer and fabricate a LED based front panel replacement
Early Monday morning of my last week at work before retiring, I get a panic call from someone in corporate IT who'd heard I knew PostgreSQL. Apparently there was this PC in a wiring closet, running some sort of ancient linux and a bodge of proprietary crapware that used a Postgres database, it had been powered down to move it and change its UPS, and it wouldn't come back up.... It ran the card reader and turnstile for the garage security gate. They had the logins for it, so from home over the VPN I was able to log into the box, poke around, wow, this is some old stuff, Red Hat Linux 6, an app written in perl by a Japanese firm, and a PostgreSQL 7.3 database... Anyways, it took me about a half day to figure out that someone had changed a postgres configuration file over a year ago but never restarted the database or the box, and the change they made was invalid so postgres wouldn't start. logging had been disabled, so there was no error logs to debug, thats why it took me 4 hours instead of 30 mins. wave magic wand, turnstile works again.
real beer has no lactose and is vegan inherently, as its just made from water, barley, hops and a bit of yeast. I prefer my brews with minimal to no adjuncts. ok, a bit of oatmeal in an oatmeal stout is OK whomever started putting chocolate and/or coffee in stouts and porters should be taken out at a dawn and summarily shot
first, there's LiFePo4 batteries which are far less likely to go up in a fire. These come in brick sizes up to 200AH per 3.2V (nominal) cell, or even higher. requiring far fewer cells means you need far less equalization circuitry,too.
2nd, these LiFePo4 batteries can be discharged 80% 2000 times and still have most of their capacity. lead acid batteries lifetime gets greatly shortened if they are discharged below 50%
3rd, they can be charged at insane rates, like 100 amps into that 200AH cell, linear til its full, so 2 hours to fully recharge. lead acid batteries require an absorption phase to achieve a 100% charge that often takes 6-8 hours.
hmm, one of my pi3's is in a nice alloy case that has a heat spreader pressed against the CPU chip.
now, my workload for it is very light weight, it runs a python script that sleeps for 2 minutes, then reads some weather data and updates a couple servers. so it runs very cool
ah, they have a pi4 version now...
https://flirc.tv/more/raspberry-pi-4-case
used to be a MANMAN system.
first version of Oracle, we extensively customized it to match our existing business processes, took a couple years., finally went live, was quite clunky.
we skipped a major release and when we went to the next release, we redesigned our processes to follow the default model of Oracle, and were live in 6 months. sure, some people in purchasing, AR, AP, etc had to be retrained to the new workflow but that wasn't that hard.
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