General Computer Thread

[Gingerbread Demon]

I don't have an account with Photobucket but on web forums like this one images don't show up for me and all I get is the placeholder mentioning 3rd party hosting.

Is anyone else getting this as well? I've never had an acocunt with them.

 

[Mr Soak]

That's how it works. Photobucket has started blocking third party hosting unless the account holder pays them $400 per year.

There are threads about it in Miscellaneous.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

That's how it works. Photobucket has started blocking third party hosting unless the account holder pays them $400 per year.

There are threads about it in Miscellaneous.

So even though I don't have an account with them I am still getting the placeholder?

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Here you go....... All about D-Wave
...
But yes the company is jammed in controversy...

Didn't spot any reference to qudits - only qubits - similarly for D-wave's website.

Their systems use the adiabatic model rather than the gate/circuit model so it's only suited to global-optimisation problems (specifically, quadratic unconstrained binary optimisation (QUBO) problems) for which one would use simulated annealing, gradient descent, Monte-Carlo methods etc on conventional computers. Studies appear to show it's not mere snake oil.
https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/24/quantum-computing-research-may-back-controversial-company/

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Didn't spot any reference to qudits - only qubits - similarly for D-wave's website.

Their systems use the adiabatic model rather than the gate/circuit model so it's only suited to global-optimisation problems (specifically, quadratic unconstrained binary optimisation (QUBO) problems) for which one would use simulated annealing, gradient descent, Monte-Carlo methods etc on conventional computers. Studies appear to show it's not mere snake oil.
https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/24/quantum-computing-research-may-back-controversial-company/

Thanks for the links.........

Found this gem from the 90s..... Something I've never seen.

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[Guy Gardener]

I found AV controls on the hotel TV remote this time, so I was able to connect my lap top to the TV, even if there still were not enough buttons to manipulate a thumb drive, after I was chuffed figuring out that my old DVD player (with a pendrive port) had the right cables to plug into AV1, which is where I thought the ####er was fixed.

The fridge broke, turned into a freezer, which did a real number on my strawberries.

After a bell hop couldn't fix the fridge, he called for an engineer to replace our mini fridge and the mini bar.... Immediately After the engineer had finished this... One of my external hard drives stopped working. No lights, no hum, no bing bong music when my ancient lap top recognizes a usb device... Dead as VHS, which it, my hard drive, bares more than a passing resemblance to.

Roots...

1. The engineer dropped a mini fridge on my hard drive (which was on the ground, under a table), or rammed it with a dolly/trolley while carting a mini fridge in or out of my hotel room, or he just plain tripped over it in steel capped work boots.

2. Maybe a powersurge destroyed the fridge? It was two days earlier, but if the hotel room draws in power surges, that could have fried my hard drive while i was out of the room for less than a hour, as a work person was in here working with the room's electricity, hell; even the act of unplugging or plugging in the mini fridge might have caused a new power surge. Also earlier that day, both our card keys demagnetized for no reason, except maybe a "Ghost".

3. Random bad luck and it had nothing to do with the engineer or the hotels hypothetically bad wiring.

Sigh.

Solutions.

1. Sometimes corrupted program-files can be fixed by plugging in a new neighborly device in the network which has no issues.

2. It's possibly just the enclosure that is broken, and the hard drive inside the enclosure is fine, and i just have to buy an adapter/new enclosure, or plug the bugger inside a compatible PC's guts to see if it boots, and then transfer 3 gbs of data some where more reliable.

3. I'm frakked.

 

[Santaman]

I've had two enclosures break down while the HDD inside was fine, just plug it into a PC and copy that floppy () to another external device.

 

[publiusr]

I was watching C-SPAN--about the secret history of the iphone.

A lot came from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks

 

[Marc]

I was watching C-SPAN--about the secret history of the iphone.

A lot came from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks

Its quite common in the industry for smaller companies to be bought out by the biggers one for their intellectual property (and I suspect the guy who sold bill gates DOS for $50k in the very early 80s is still kicking himself for not asking for more).

For Apple to see how things could tie into its future products doubly so.

 

[Santaman]

Intergalactic Digital Research... it could have been CP/M
I wonder how things would have developed if Kildall had accepted IBM's offer..

 

[Marc]

Intergalactic Digital Research... it could have been CP/M
I wonder how things would have developed if Kildall had accepted IBM's offer..

Can't rember it was Accidental Empires (Robert X. Cringely) or Hackers (Steve Levy) that gives details on that but supposedly Kildall didn't know until much later that IBM came knocking. Seems that IBM had a very nasty NDA along the lines of you're dead if you reveal what we say but we can tell the world what you say so when the rocked up his wife refused the NDA (he wan't there at the time) and they wouldn't say what they wanted without it being signed.

Though perhaps a better whatif would be if IBM hadn't gone cheap with with the 8088 but had looked to the Motorola 68000 which was already a 16bit chip. No DOS, no 8bit starting point, 640k limit, no braindead (Bill Gate's description) 80286.

 

[Santaman]

The 8088 was 16 bit except for the data bus which, they also already had used the Intel 8080, 8085 and the 8088 in other machines, they knew it and based the expansion slot design on that of the Datamaster business machine, the 68000 was way to expensive and it would have required a full new 16 bit bus system and so on.

If IBM had gone in house they might have chosen the IBM 801 chip which was a research project at the time resulting in the Power architecture, it ran at 15mhz and 15 MIPS already at that time, the 8086/8 0.33 and the 68000 1.4 MIPS, the 801 would have been faster than an AM386 40Mhz chip... Imagine that.

Yep, the 286 was a little strange, on the other hand, programs at the time would only use it as a really fast 8086 anyway, when it was totally obsolete more sophisticated programs finally started to use some of the 286/386 features.

 

[Marc]

Yep, the 286 was a little strange, on the other hand, programs at the time would only use it as a really fast 8086 anyway, when it was totally obsolete more sophisticated programs finally started to use some of the 286/386 features.

part of that was to get the best out of 286 you had to run in protected mode but if you had something that couldn't be run while in protected mode it was time for the three-finger salute.

The 286 era was also the beginning of OS/2 but also co-incided with a massve jump in memory prices. Sure OS/2 could address up to 16MB but who could afford it.

BTW do you remember cards such as the Hyper-RAM? would fit into an 16bit ISA slot but were addresses as system RAM?

 

[Santaman]

Yes, I remember the EMS cards which added EMS RAM to the system and IBM had a card which could turn that even into XMS RAM, the only card I have here at home is the IBM extension card which was used to get the original XT board up to 640Kb, the board itself only had sockets for 512 kb IIRC.
The same with my IBM AT, the mainboard holds 512Kb, the extension card makes it 640Kb or 1Mb, I can't remeber, fished the AT's mainboard and its expension cards out of a trashcan, fitted it into an Aopen ATX casing of which it fills the entire mainboard tray, a Delta PSU of 250 watts, a strange but working Chinese VGA card a 1.22Mb floppy drive and a HUGE Seagate ST-4026 5.25" full hight 20Mb Voice Coil drive.. Beastie lives!

I've got two Philips XT's the NMS 9100 and the identical P 3105 they both have 768Kb RAM instead of 640 because of their bank layout and there is an UMA driver for it..

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Had to reset my windows phone and now the bloody thing won't sync. Grrrrrr I signed into my Microsoft account but the people and calendar app just won't update.

Why MS why do you make stuff that never works 100% all the time?

 

[Marc]

Why MS why do you make stuff that never works 100% all the time?

there is no major software on this planet that works 100% of the time and secondly a lot of problems are easily attributable to user error.

 

[Santaman]

The error occured between chair and keyboard. Yes, that is a famous one..

 

[Marc]

The error occured between chair and keyboard. Yes, that is a famous one..

yep good old PEBKAC.

 

[Santaman]

ID-10T error
PICNIC (problem in chair not in computer)
IBM error (Idiot Behind Machine error)
Carbon based error (computers are silicon based)
Many more exist..

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

there is no major software on this planet that works 100% of the time and secondly a lot of problems are easily attributable to user error.

That may well be true. But in this case my laptop synced perfectly to my PC and both are using Microsoft Accounts but the phone just won't play nice. It's always been a little flakey and works sometimes and not others.