It not just "bad" caps. My 42" Samsung TV died, not because of defective caps in the power supply, but because the caps were inappropriately rated. They were 10V-rated caps in a 15V circuit.
...
Ah, thank you for that snippet of info, you might just have solved a couple of weird PSU issues/faults, never thought to check the voltage rating of the caps..I must be getting slow in my dotage.
I've been following the Dell case with some vested interest, approx 50 Optiplex machines made/purchased during the quoted time period's worth of vested interest, which will soon be heading in my direction for wiping, refurb and redeployment|disposal when they get pulled from service.
Already have two which had been u/s for a while, found them hiding in a cupboard..I always wondered when I started here why there were so many Dell keyboards and monitors attached to a whole array of non-Dell towers.
Re:Think carefully. Do you want to be close to MS?
on
Which Language To Learn?
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· Score: 2, Informative
When I write in perl I can't even decompile the code I wrote myself 5 minutes earlier. It's eerie. It's like a one way hash for logic..
Firstly, I'm not really a programmer, ok, I've done a bit of hacking around with Z80/6502/HC11/68K/PIC/FORTRAN/Algol/Pascal/Apl/Ada/C/Perl/Python and a whole bunch of other languages over the years, and am faffing around with Erlang to keep myself amused at present, but have done the occasional contract work (I *really* hate databases..)
but Perl, ahh, great language to have some fun with.
Best bit of weird Perl I ever wrote was a cgi beastie running on a LAMP server, same code handled both the GET and POST, tracked multiple sessions/whatever without using cookies, searched a database, displayed the results, usual sort of web BS. Main code was conceived over a couple of pints at the pub, written, tested, then up and running on a production system within four hours, a couple of minor tweaks in the first week of operation (mainly fixing html formatting snafus to fit in with the rest of the site), and that was it for something like three years.
They want a modification done, they don't contact me but give the code to a wonk programmer who allegedly knew his stuff, I hear he spent a week trying to figure out what the hell the Perl code was doing, gave up, spent another couple of weeks reimplementing the same functionality on an IIS server with some MS thing (to this day, I still wonder why he didn't just use PHP). Btw, the code I supplied was documented, laid out fairly clearly and heavily commented, it was contracted.
I'm perversely proud of this, even with comments and documentation, Perl can be a bitch if she wants.. (I've a number of cron'd Perl scripts running on one of my servers as I type this, even though I wrote them, about two years ago now, I'm not quite sure I know *exactly* now what they're really doing - still, so long as they churn out the graphs and stats I require..)
Long, tedious and boring story cut short, one day I woke up and decided that I no longer enjoyed working in the IT sector. (after about 20 years of putting up with the various levels of brain death involved in supporting both the machines and their (ab)users..), so jumped.
I'd gotten so sick of the whole game that after I quit my last full time IT job, swore I'd never do it again, and it was almost a year before I touched a computer of any sorts again, and about two before I went back online.
First couple of years readjusting to the (major) cut in salary were pretty nasty, saving grace was that I owned my house outright and had no outstanding debts, even so , financially were tight at times but things have sort of stabilised. Currently working for a charity as a sort of Über-handyman (plumbing,painting,electronics and hardware repair, NC machine programming etc etc - the etc etc including IT work...but for reasons explained below),
To make ends meet, I've been doing things like plumbing, woodwork (joinery mostly), painting and decorating etc, it sort of helped that I'd a family who were involved in these trades so I'd grown up knowing how to do most of it., and honestly, I've been as happy as a member of the genus sus in coprophilous materia..
A cautionary note though, once it is known that you actually know anything about IT in whatever field you jump to, be prepared for what usually happens next. I'm slowly getting dragged back into IT in my current job at the charity, mostly through the electronics related work I'm doing for them (my 'field' before I jumped to the computer/network admin side of things), but also through what I'm seeing as seriously screwed up Network/computer installations within the charity I work for (and others) which they're paying people good money to 'administer' on their behalf.
Even though you swear blind at the start that you'll never do any IT work again, it *will* find you..in my case, I don't mind as it's for a reasonable cause (and I really hate seeing people who've got Noddy MCxxxx and CCxxx bits of paper pretending to know what they're doing and taking the piss in this manner, especially with a charity).
So, be prepared for a drop in living standards based on monies etc, I can't tell you if you'll be any happier. I am, I actually sleep more than a couple of hours a night now (after years of 18-20 hour days, six days a week) and I no longer see reams of 'C' code in my bloody dreams (and I praise the flying spaghetti monster for that, as I do so hate 'C' ) but that's just me, YMMV.
One bit of advice that I can give you from my experiences jumping ship. I can't stress this enough, if you do go through with it, *plan* your exit, know what else you *can* do, and see if you could survive/make a living doing whatever you choose. Plan your exit, don't just jump ship the way I did before you have something else sorted out to go to first.. This lack of forward planning was my only mistake/regret, understandable at the time, as I was seriously pissed off and wasn't quite thinking straight, but this lack of planning probably caused me the most grief the first couple of years.
Like at least one other poster has said, in general it'll help if you have a degree of some sort as well.
and finally if you do jump, then good luck, and hope it works out for you.
It seems to be a regional thing as to whether a black cat crossing your path is good or bad luck.
Where I'm from in the UK (Dorset coast) its considered very good luck.
where I am in Scotland, black cats are considered to be lucky (in general, not just crossing your path) as well.
I always assumed the unlucky black cat thing to be a mainly american variation of the superstition, as that's where I've mainly heard this one from, though ISTR reading in a book on superstitions many years ago that some central/eastern european countries have this slant on it as well.
wrt the article, a case here maybe of the WB publicity drones and suits forgetting which country they're in ?
I won't dispute the energy saving, but for what it's worth regarding their reliability and 'incompetent' manufacture..
I swapped most of our lights over to CFLs a couple of years back, the only ones which aren't, are a couple of spots (which I'll be replacing with LED fittings at some point) and a 4ft long fluorescent tube fitting in the loft.
The reliability of the CFLs has really been only *marginally* better than that of the old tungsten filament jobs they're replaced, and up till recently, the CFLs I'd been using had been mainly badged as being manufactured by Philips and GE (so I would assume they know what they're doing?), in fact, the ones I bought as a test from a local discount shop, no-brand madeinchina specials, have been a wee bit more reliable and, interestingly, produce a more 'natural' colour that the usual CFLs (just wish I'd bought more of them at the time, as they no longer have the same model available).
I would point out that, as these companies are out to screw as much money as they can from 'consumers' it would be most uncharacteristic of them to make a consumer product that would last for a long time, so, as they've become a more 'mass market' item, I'll bet they've taken the basic design of the CFL's and 'fixed' them in such a manner that a simple component on the PCB is guaranteed to fail within a year (or less, dependant on voltage surges etc).
Asking around before commenting here, I got similar stories from other people about their experiences with CFLs, basically, yes, they save energy, but they're nowhere near as reliable or as long lasting as they claim on the box.
I mean, if they gave us lightbulbs that last for a long time, we'll be wanting 'Everlasting razor blades and forever cars' next..
(Talk about synchronicity, as I finished this, one of the CFLs in the front room has just given up the ghost, and that's the third CFL failure this month)
Ah, the joys of floppy install sets.. Clearing out an old box of disks I came across a couple of my second Slackware distro set floppies (SLS/T1, the other is Illegible[Blackcurrent&Pernod stained label, v.looong story]) , marked Feb '94, which was the second time I'd ever installed linux on a box.
The floppy images were lovingly downloaded to a Sparc 2 ( the only networked box in the lab back then) then written out via the hit-and-miss Sun floppy drive to said floppies, then transferred to the PC at the other end of the lab (ISTR, 'twas a 386 dx 33, 170 Meg HD 16 Meg RAM). Great fun, started at around 5:00pm, finished around 6:30am the next morning, still leaving me with 2 1/2 hours of playing before I had to start work again at nine.
My first Slackware distro install was sometime in December '93, done in a similar manner, but using only seven working floppy disks. I started with around 20, but the Sun floppy drive kept fubarring them (a not too uncommon occurrence), had no replacements at hand, and the shops were closed, so ended up having to overwrite the seven working disks with the next wanted floppy images in sequence, another all-nighter starting around 5:30pm, ISTR I actually finished the install at around 11:00am(ish) the next day.
As far as I can tell, in both cases, this must have been Slackware 1, and that I must have been quite mad back then...
Still run Slackware (Basically 12 with local hacks and non-packaged software), my desktop, server and firewall are all Slackware boxes. I've tried other distros, but for some reason keep coming back to Slackware.
Ach, don't worry.. In a couple of weeks, as the economy slips further into the blessed state of Titzup, you'll be able to purchase the bank itself on Ebay c/w whatever assets the FatCats have left it with for a fraction of what he paid for this server alone..
In the good old DOS PC days when 10Mb hard disks were 'big' and 'Stoned' was probably the only wild virus ever found on the lab machines..
There was an issue wrt Stoned I think, or some other virus of the time whose name escapes me, its final action was to zap the old MFM hard disks via some low level init call, but, this wasn't fatal as we could get the info back off them with a bit of faffing, however, the first generation of those new fangled IDE disks, the same init call permanently screwed the disks.
It killed a number of expensive large (40Mb) hard disks back then in the lab..thanks mainly to one serial offender who disabled the virus scanners on these new machines when they stopped him running infected code off floppies. (don't ask, the guy was a serious pain..)
I also remember a fun summer spent manually repositioning the heads on a bunch of MFM drives by trial and error which had 'gone faulty' after virus infestation, turned out there was a small grub screw which worked loose on an optical interrupter on the head positioning motor shaft if the drive was particularly hammered (lots of seeks over a short period of time etc). There was an opening of the case and a lot of twiddling and adjusting whilst watching the position of the heads over the platters (not carried out in a clean, dust free environment I hasten to add). As that was one brand of HD, I doubt it was a targeted effect of a virus though, just bad design.
My memory is vague on this, as I was more hardware design and Sun support..
Slashdot Mirror
..Between all that and their proprietary memory in digital cameras...
My Sony Alpha 330 DSLR takes standard SD cards as well as memory-doobries, but as for the battery..growl, snarl, spit blood &etc.
It not just "bad" caps. My 42" Samsung TV died, not because of defective caps in the power supply, but because the caps were inappropriately rated. They were 10V-rated caps in a 15V circuit.
...
Ah, thank you for that snippet of info, you might just have solved a couple of weird PSU issues/faults, never thought to check the voltage rating of the caps..I must be getting slow in my dotage.
I've been following the Dell case with some vested interest, approx 50 Optiplex machines made/purchased during the quoted time period's worth of vested interest, which will soon be heading in my direction for wiping, refurb and redeployment|disposal when they get pulled from service.
Already have two which had been u/s for a while, found them hiding in a cupboard..I always wondered when I started here why there were so many Dell keyboards and monitors attached to a whole array of non-Dell towers.
When I write in perl I can't even decompile the code I wrote myself 5 minutes earlier. It's eerie. It's like a one way hash for logic..
Firstly, I'm not really a programmer, ok, I've done a bit of hacking around with Z80/6502/HC11/68K/PIC/FORTRAN/Algol/Pascal/Apl/Ada/C/Perl/Python and a whole bunch of other languages over the years, and am faffing around with Erlang to keep myself amused at present, but have done the occasional contract work (I *really* hate databases..)
but Perl, ahh, great language to have some fun with.
Best bit of weird Perl I ever wrote was a cgi beastie running on a LAMP server, same code handled both the GET and POST, tracked multiple sessions/whatever without using cookies, searched a database, displayed the results, usual sort of web BS.
Main code was conceived over a couple of pints at the pub, written, tested, then up and running on a production system within four hours, a couple of minor tweaks in the first week of operation (mainly fixing html formatting snafus to fit in with the rest of the site), and that was it for something like three years.
They want a modification done, they don't contact me but give the code to a wonk programmer who allegedly knew his stuff, I hear he spent a week trying to figure out what the hell the Perl code was doing, gave up, spent another couple of weeks reimplementing the same functionality on an IIS server with some MS thing (to this day, I still wonder why he didn't just use PHP). Btw, the code I supplied was documented, laid out fairly clearly and heavily commented, it was contracted.
I'm perversely proud of this, even with comments and documentation, Perl can be a bitch if she wants..
(I've a number of cron'd Perl scripts running on one of my servers as I type this, even though I wrote them, about two years ago now, I'm not quite sure I know *exactly* now what they're really doing - still, so long as they churn out the graphs and stats I require..)
Long, tedious and boring story cut short, one day I woke up and decided that I no longer enjoyed working in the IT sector.
(after about 20 years of putting up with the various levels of brain death involved in supporting both the machines and their (ab)users..), so jumped.
I'd gotten so sick of the whole game that after I quit my last full time IT job, swore I'd never do it again, and it was almost a year before I touched a computer of any sorts again, and about two before I went back online.
First couple of years readjusting to the (major) cut in salary were pretty nasty, saving grace was that I owned my house outright and had no outstanding debts, even so , financially were tight at times but things have sort of stabilised. Currently working for a charity as a sort of Über-handyman (plumbing,painting,electronics and hardware repair, NC machine programming etc etc - the etc etc including IT work...but for reasons explained below),
To make ends meet, I've been doing things like plumbing, woodwork (joinery mostly), painting and decorating etc, it sort of helped that I'd a family who were involved in these trades so I'd grown up knowing how to do most of it., and honestly, I've been as happy as a member of the genus sus in coprophilous materia..
A cautionary note though, once it is known that you actually know anything about IT in whatever field you jump to, be prepared for what usually happens next. I'm slowly getting dragged back into IT in my current job at the charity, mostly through the electronics related work I'm doing for them (my 'field' before I jumped to the computer/network admin side of things), but also through what I'm seeing as seriously screwed up Network/computer installations within the charity I work for (and others) which they're paying people good money to 'administer' on their behalf.
Even though you swear blind at the start that you'll never do any IT work again, it *will* find you..in my case, I don't mind as it's for a reasonable cause (and I really hate seeing people who've got Noddy MCxxxx and CCxxx bits of paper pretending to know what they're doing and taking the piss in this manner, especially with a charity).
So, be prepared for a drop in living standards based on monies etc, I can't tell you if you'll be any happier. I am, I actually sleep more than a couple of hours a night now (after years of 18-20 hour days, six days a week) and I no longer see reams of 'C' code in my bloody dreams (and I praise the flying spaghetti monster for that, as I do so hate 'C' ) but that's just me, YMMV.
One bit of advice that I can give you from my experiences jumping ship. I can't stress this enough, if you do go through with it, *plan* your exit, know what else you *can* do, and see if you could survive/make a living doing whatever you choose. Plan your exit, don't just jump ship the way I did before you have something else sorted out to go to first.. This lack of forward planning was my only mistake/regret, understandable at the time, as I was seriously pissed off and wasn't quite thinking straight, but this lack of planning probably caused me the most grief the first couple of years.
Like at least one other poster has said, in general it'll help if you have a degree of some sort as well.
and finally if you do jump, then good luck, and hope it works out for you.
It seems to be a regional thing as to whether a black cat crossing your path is good or bad luck.
Where I'm from in the UK (Dorset coast) its considered very good luck.
where I am in Scotland, black cats are considered to be lucky (in general, not just crossing your path) as well.
I always assumed the unlucky black cat thing to be a mainly american variation of the superstition, as that's where I've mainly heard this one from, though ISTR reading in a book on superstitions many years ago that some central/eastern european countries have this slant on it as well.
wrt the article, a case here maybe of the WB publicity drones and suits forgetting which country they're in ?
I won't dispute the energy saving, but for what it's worth regarding their reliability and 'incompetent' manufacture..
I swapped most of our lights over to CFLs a couple of years back, the only ones which aren't, are a couple of spots
(which I'll be replacing with LED fittings at some point) and a 4ft long fluorescent tube fitting in the loft.
The reliability of the CFLs has really been only *marginally* better than that of the old tungsten filament jobs they're replaced,
and up till recently, the CFLs I'd been using had been mainly badged as being manufactured by Philips and GE (so I would assume
they know what they're doing?), in fact, the ones I bought as a test from a local discount shop, no-brand madeinchina specials,
have been a wee bit more reliable and, interestingly, produce a more 'natural' colour that the usual CFLs (just wish I'd bought
more of them at the time, as they no longer have the same model available).
I would point out that, as these companies are out to screw as much money as they can from 'consumers' it would be most uncharacteristic
of them to make a consumer product that would last for a long time, so, as they've become a more 'mass market' item, I'll bet they've
taken the basic design of the CFL's and 'fixed' them in such a manner that a simple component on the PCB is guaranteed to fail within a
year (or less, dependant on voltage surges etc).
Asking around before commenting here, I got similar stories from other people about their experiences with CFLs, basically, yes, they save
energy, but they're nowhere near as reliable or as long lasting as they claim on the box.
I mean, if they gave us lightbulbs that last for a long time, we'll be wanting 'Everlasting razor blades and forever cars' next..
(Talk about synchronicity, as I finished this, one of the CFLs in the front room has just given up the ghost, and that's the third CFL failure
this month)
Ah, the joys of floppy install sets..
Clearing out an old box of disks I came across a couple of my second Slackware distro set floppies (SLS/T1, the other is Illegible[Blackcurrent&Pernod stained label, v.looong story]) , marked Feb '94, which was the second time I'd ever installed linux on a box.
The floppy images were lovingly downloaded to a Sparc 2 ( the only networked box in the lab back then) then written out via the hit-and-miss Sun floppy drive to said floppies, then transferred to the PC at the other end of the lab (ISTR, 'twas a 386 dx 33, 170 Meg HD 16 Meg RAM). Great fun, started at around 5:00pm, finished around 6:30am the next morning, still leaving me with 2 1/2 hours of playing before I had to start work again at nine.
My first Slackware distro install was sometime in December '93, done in a similar manner, but using only seven working floppy disks. I started with around 20, but the Sun floppy drive kept fubarring them (a not too uncommon occurrence), had no replacements at hand, and the shops were closed, so ended up having to overwrite the seven working disks with the next wanted floppy images in sequence, another all-nighter starting around 5:30pm, ISTR I actually finished the install at around 11:00am(ish) the next day.
As far as I can tell, in both cases, this must have been Slackware 1, and that I must have been quite mad back then...
Still run Slackware (Basically 12 with local hacks and non-packaged software), my desktop, server and firewall are all Slackware boxes. I've tried other distros, but for some reason keep coming back to Slackware.
Ach, don't worry..
In a couple of weeks, as the economy slips further into the blessed state of Titzup, you'll be able to purchase the bank itself on Ebay c/w whatever assets the FatCats have left it with for a fraction of what he paid for this server alone..
God, this is going back,
In the good old DOS PC days when 10Mb hard disks were 'big' and 'Stoned' was probably the only wild virus ever found on the lab machines..
There was an issue wrt Stoned I think, or some other virus of the time whose name escapes me, its final action was to zap the old MFM hard disks via some low level init call, but, this wasn't fatal as we could get the info back off them with a bit of faffing, however, the first generation of those new fangled IDE disks, the same init call permanently screwed the disks.
It killed a number of expensive large (40Mb) hard disks back then in the lab..thanks mainly to one serial offender who disabled the virus scanners on these new machines when they stopped him running infected code off floppies. (don't ask, the guy was a serious pain..)
I also remember a fun summer spent manually repositioning the heads on a bunch of MFM drives by trial and error which had 'gone faulty' after virus infestation, turned out there was a small grub screw which worked loose on an optical interrupter on the head positioning motor shaft if the drive was particularly hammered (lots of seeks over a short period of time etc). There was an opening of the case and a lot of twiddling and adjusting whilst watching the position of the heads over the platters (not carried out in a clean, dust free environment I hasten to add). As that was one brand of HD, I doubt it was a targeted effect of a virus though, just bad design.
My memory is vague on this, as I was more hardware design and Sun support..