Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[mnementh]

Yes, that's why they're giving away the old defective stock. 

mnem
Wait for it... wait for it...

[mnementh]

Exactly. BTW for anyone interested GTA V is FREE at the moment in the Epic Games store. Which works on windows 

Oh fuck. They made me install the new launcher... what's this shit with the fucking squirrels...? And why do they KEEP coming back? When I fuck a squirrel to death, I expect it to STAY fucking dead.

mnem
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/2bb13a40-23ca-40c5-a1d8-d7cac710534f

[bd139]

LMAO.

Just went for a run while it was installing. Came back:



 

[Mr. Scram]

Exactly. BTW for anyone interested GTA V is FREE at the moment in the Epic Games store. Which works on windows 

Apparently it's free to keep. Not bad. It being the Epic Games Store isn't too great but a gift horse and such.

[mnementh]

I made breakfast, coffee, and shopped online for a spoke wrench. 

mnem
 

[beanflying]

Just on midnight here should I go boot up the 'work' machine so it is downloaded in the morning for 'work' after Discord 

[tggzzz]

Xenix was actually quite nice. It was slightly tragic when they gutted the GP surgeries here and got rid of all the Xenix stuff. It actually worked properly and didn't have any major security risks because no USB holes, no internet access. They were all Wyse terminals. I was responsible for moonlighting to install shockingly fast 10baseT in a lot of GP surgeries in North East London at the time. Fortunately we weren't around when Windows landed 

I'd been on Sun and Xenix for a long time, then HP-UX with its radical improvement w.r.t. shadowed Motif widgets. Windows 3.11 came 5 years later. Cretinous flattie GUI designers clearly never knew history, and repeated the bad bits. Effin hamburgers and everything that goes with it - especially buttons with a label X where you aren't sure whether X means "in state X" or "press to get state X".

As for X, yes. It wasn't appreciated. The true Unix successor to X was actually "rio" which was part of Plan 9 and actually written by someone with a clue stick (Golang designer Rob Pike). Unfortunately Windows had taken over by then and rightfully so because of extreme UI consistency and cost. Shame the consistency bit didn't last. 

I spluttered until I read the followup sentence

There was actually a really sweet spot on windows when NT4 SP 6a dropped where everything was just right.

XP had a decent GUI as well. That Windows explorer's ergonomics have never been surpassed (once you'd tweaked it to stop hiding things from you).

[tggzzz]

Hmmmm I cant help but think that its probably much better just to keep with Microsoft Windoze 10 for the OS, stops all of this fuckery and twatting about 

Nah. I'm not clever enough to understand how to administer Windows.

Anyway, tried a live disk of xubuntu 18.04, and autorepeat works fine

Yet another indication that it really is time to move on from 12.04; hence the new machine real soon now. Not sure what I'll do with my WinXP that, once in a blue moon, I use for gaming. I suppose it will be Wine for the intellectual stuff (PCBs, Harpoon, evalboard GUIs), unpatched XP for the glider simulator, and bugger the rest unless it works inside a VM.

[nfmax]

There was actually a really sweet spot on windows when NT4 SP 6a dropped where everything was just right.

I remember that moment! Then an update arrived which caused the keyboard to no longer be recognised. Never did get to the bottom of that, switched to Apple.

[tggzzz]

Hmmmm I cant help but think that its probably much better just to keep with Microsoft Windoze 10 for the OS, stops all of this fuckery and twatting about 

Nah. I'm not clever enough to understand how to administer Windows and resurrect a bricked PC.

Anyway, tried a live disk of xubuntu 18.04, and autorepeat works fine

Yet another indication that it really is time to move on from 12.04; hence the new machine real soon now. Not sure what I'll do with my WinXP that, once in a blue moon, I use for gaming. I suppose it will be Wine for the intellectual stuff (PCBs, Harpoon, evalboard GUIs), unpatched XP for the glider simulator, and bugger the rest unless it works inside a VM.

[bd139]

I would plan to start migrating off Ubuntu derivatives as soon as possible. 20.04 is a stinking pile of shite. They integrated snaps into it which is basically a misguided corporate app store that can't be eviscerated. Your way out is Debian...

Nah. I'm not clever enough to understand how to administer Windows and resurrect a bricked PC.

Ok I'm probably going to bite on that one this time because I spend a lot of time administering Linux and I think that it is actually false at this time. Windows almost certainly just works at this time on all hardware I've tried it on. And as for bricked PCs, I haven't seen one that wasn't hardware for a long time. Zero effort. Initial windows 10 was a bit of a mess but we're doing ok now. I haven't had a single administrative issue for at least 2 years.

The same is NOT true with Linux. The boot process on Linux is a complete shit show beyond all proportions with the whole initrd junk then systemd on top now. Add LVM to that and I'm done. Every time, and this does happen, we get a hosed Linux node it's easier to just redeploy it with ansible than try and recover it. Windows is really really easy to recover in comparison, even with bitlocker, hardware TPM, all sorts turned on.

The only criticism I have of windows is the telemetry situation at this time. Oh and the shit show that is .net.

[bd139]

There was actually a really sweet spot on windows when NT4 SP 6a dropped where everything was just right.

I remember that moment! Then an update arrived which caused the keyboard to no longer be recognised. Never did get to the bottom of that, switched to Apple.

end of 1999 that was and OS X didn't get squeezed out until 2001. Classic MacOS? That was an abortion. I bought a G4 powermac to run OSX. Even that sucked after 10.4. The last "good mac" I had was a core Duo iMac (white slab one). I suffered since then and finally fucked them off for good at the end of 2019 after the second abortion that was the Macbook Air. OSX is unusable now.

I might actually buy a G4 again for a laugh if I see one around. It was a good time.

Edit: just a point on OSX being unusable now. I work with a bunch of contractors and they spend all day fixing shit on OSX and not doing any work. It's like windows in 2008 again.

[tggzzz]

I would plan to start migrating off Ubuntu derivatives as soon as possible. 20.04 is a stinking pile of shite. They integrated snaps into it which is basically a misguided corporate app store that can't be eviscerated. Your way out is Debian...

I've been wondering aboutr shifting allegience. That stupid desktop==laptop ?unity? crap was one reason I never bothered to upgrade xubuntu. Now, as you say, there's that snap misfire, but I've seen a few things that sort-of indicate you don't have to use it.

Two distinguishing user-interaction-level characteristics that I pay attention to are the package manager and the window manager.

I like xfce since it is not cute and stays out of your way, as the XP GUI did.

I like synaptic since it shows you "if you want this then the consequences would be Y", and then gives you a chance to say "whoopsie, no thanks". Applications that just do what you say whether or not you like it are anathaema to me - especially backup-level sync applications. I still shudder at the thought of iTunez' sync command; up yours Apple!

[Specmaster]

Well it seems that I'm definitely going to be in last place to get my crystal tester kit but hey, maybe not so much of a straggler after. I just received confirmation that mine has been at long last shipped from the UK warehouse, so lets see how long it takes now 

 

[AVGresponding]

Those Prema's went for £190 in the end... £150 or so more than my budget!   

Why get GTA V just because it's free? It's an old game now, get something new!
Oh wait, they don't make new games any more, just re-heat old ones because it's cheaper and easier. My bad.

[Specmaster]

Geez, the speed of these Chinese doing hand soldering, if you don't want to watch the entire video, skip forward to 23:30, strewth.

[Specmaster]

Those Prema's went for £190 in the end... £150 or so more than my budget!   

Why get GTA V just because it's free? It's an old game now, get something new!
Oh wait, they don't make new games any more, just re-heat old ones because it's cheaper and easier. My bad.

I thought that was stupid money for what is at least to me, an unknown brand and no info available.

[ch_scr]

I finally caved and wired the money today. Now let's play the waiting game and hope it arrives in good shape.

[Saskia]

back in the old days (tm) I did get to phool around with some of the coolest kids on the Unix block.

Apart from that 4.4 BSD source license that is still sitting on my shelf I was in the great position to be invited to various Silicon Graphics conferences. Had my Indigo, Indigo2, Power Indigo2 (R8000), Crimson, O2, Octane and Origin at home. Plus, a 3030, a 4D20, 4D25, 4D35, 4D85 ...

*sigh*

I also still have Unixware 7 which was a great little Unix at that time. My alltime favorite OS was BSD/OS which was written by the original CSRG Berkeley folks. One out of that team now works as my delegate, and just gets stuff done. Very satisfactory....

I just effing hate Windows. The last usable Windows (to me) was 2008R2.

In other news, I just bought a dead Asus Prime X370-Pro for 20 Brussels-Pesos. It came with the original box, etc but is generally dead.
Looked up the serial number in the Asus Warranty portal. Warranty until 2021. I guess I'll fill out an RMA form.

[Ice-Tea]

Geez, the speed of these Chinese doing hand soldering, if you don't want to watch the entire video, skip forward to 23:30, strewth.

Impressive. Slightly less impressive: how they just toss it all on the big pile in the middle.

[med6753]

I plan on being on Discord at 2130 UTC today. Anyone else? 

[bd139]

Geez, the speed of these Chinese doing hand soldering, if you don't want to watch the entire video, skip forward to 23:30, strewth.

... snip soldering video ...

Blimey that's fast. Might explain why half of it doesn't work 

So Saskia mentioned TensorFlow the other day and the discussion over RTX cards has got me humming and hawing over pulling the trigger on an RTX 2060 now. I have had some ideas on the back burner a while about anomaly detection and event classification. I have about 300Gb of raw time-series anomaly data available in Thanos going back 9 months as a training corpus. Both for the purposes of early warning monitoring systems and making some cash through throwing market data into it

This entirely isn't about GTA. Honest 

I plan on being on Discord at 2130 UTC today. Anyone else? 

Yes. Eurovision on this evening so no audio but will be there.

[Saskia]

I finally caved and wired the money today. Now let's play the waiting game and hope it arrives in good shape.

better the waiting game than the crying game ...

will try to be on discord.

[ch_scr]

That soldering is crazy fast imagine how hot that iron must be. Think I'll be there on the Discord

[AVGresponding]

Those Prema's went for £190 in the end... £150 or so more than my budget!   

Why get GTA V just because it's free? It's an old game now, get something new!
Oh wait, they don't make new games any more, just re-heat old ones because it's cheaper and easier. My bad.

I thought that was stupid money for what is at least to me, an unknown brand and no info available.

I believe they're a well known and respected brand in Germany.