The General thread for Computers And Internet

[neonzx]

"The Sound Of Music"

https://youtu.be/jpMrTxMV6E4

Music to my ears. The sound of a modem connecting and then negotiating a connection with the host.

[John Thomas8]

This is the latest spam e-mail I received:

The Portrayal can be found at : V7881225531049967
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[RTH10260]

40 years ago

[Mrich]

Apparently photos on the new iPhone 15 are such higher resolution that they can eat up your space. This (gift) article describes the issue and how to change your configuration if you want to

https://wapo.st/3ETtxp6

[RTH10260]

the goog old days when a picture still fit on a floppy disk

[AndyinPA]

Apparently photos on the new iPhone 15 are such higher resolution that they can eat up your space. This (gift) article describes the issue and how to change your configuration if you want to

https://wapo.st/3ETtxp6

Yeah, I read that earlier. Bummer. I'm still considering it, though. I can download.

[MN-Skeptic]

One thing an iPhone can do is take “live” photos, basically a teeny movie. That’s great if you’re taking photos of people, for example. However, if you’re taking photos of an item on a store shelf to research it further, a “live” photo is overkill, a poor use of memory space, so turn off the “live” option for those photos.

[John Thomas8]

Picked up a 17" HP laptop at an estate sale on Saturday for $20. 8G of memory and getting Windows 11 on it took 5 hours. Ugh. Stuck 32G of memory in it this evening and performance is visibly better, but I should have grabbed an SSD to supplant the 5400rpm SATA drive. Just clone the SATA onto the SSD and make it the boot disk and use the slow drive for data storage.

Live and learn.

[Reality Check]

Picked up a 17" HP laptop at an estate sale on Saturday for $20. 8G of memory and getting Windows 11 on it took 5 hours. Ugh. Stuck 32G of memory in it this evening and performance is visibly better, but I should have grabbed an SSD to supplant the 5400rpm SATA drive. Just clone the SATA onto the SSD and make it the boot disk and use the slow drive for data storage.

Live and learn.

I put an SSD in my 10 year old 15" HP laptop and it really improved performance. I bought a Samsung 500 MB GB SSD and the Samsung cloning software worked very well. Now 6 years later I would go with a 1 TB SSD.

[John Thomas8]

Picked up a 17" HP laptop at an estate sale on Saturday for $20. 8G of memory and getting Windows 11 on it took 5 hours. Ugh. Stuck 32G of memory in it this evening and performance is visibly better, but I should have grabbed an SSD to supplant the 5400rpm SATA drive. Just clone the SATA onto the SSD and make it the boot disk and use the slow drive for data storage.

Live and learn.

I put an SSD in my 10 year old 15" HP laptop and it really improved performance. I bought a Samsung 500 MB SSD and the Samsung cloning software worked very well. Now 6 years later I would go with a 1 TB SSD.

Sigh, an M.2 1T SSD is $64 on Amazon.

[Reality Check]

Sigh, an M.2 1T SSD is $64 on Amazon.

My laptop was too old to support an M.2 drive. I bought a SATA SSD and a SATA to USB cable and cloned the internal drive. I then swapped out the internal for the SSD. I about panicked when it failed on the first boot but it booted on the second try. I think I paid $80 at the time for a 500 GB SATA SSD.

I upgraded another even older Dell laptop with a WD 500 GB SSD and used Macrium Reflect to clone it. It worked well also. I think Macrium is retiring their software at the end of the year though.

[John Thomas8]

We'll see, found a 1T Western Digital M.2 for $50. If I can get down under a minute for a boot I'll call it good.

[RTH10260]

a couple of years ago i upgraded my SATA 2TB in my HP laptop to SATA SSD 4TB (i had to break intomy piggy bank). The HDD was starting to sound louder by the day and I feared it may die on me after five years. And yes, i am a data hoarder and was counting the remaining free bytes. Boot time and initial signing in dropped to a third. it took me several weeks to get used to a totally quiet laptop with the eventual spinup of the fan.

[RTH10260]

OMFSM - why do i stumble overthese artefacts

[keith]

from 1993:

For you ol' IBM Mainframe junkies... (feel free to skim its an hour and 38 minutes)

[johnpcapitalist]

Speaking of retro computing (like the above VM video), look at what I just got for $50 at a garage sale two weeks ago:

Osborne 1 computer.jpg (58.71 KiB) Viewed 6219 times

Yep, that's the Osborne 1 from 1981. The world's first portable computer. About 25 pounds. Small enough to be carry-on baggage on airplanes.

Packs a 4 megahertz Z80 processor, 64 kb of memory and two 180kb floppy drives. The screen is a 5" diagonal with 56 x 24 characters. My cellphone screen is substantially bigger.

I bought it because I worked with my two closest friends (who I had dinner with recently) on a software product for medical AI and data collection on this machine because we needed something that could be rolled through hospitals. We built a prototype in CP/M Basic on the Osborne 1, and one of the partners actually rolled his Osborne 1 through the hospital and did patient workups on it, printed them out on a dot-matrix printer and dropped it in the (paper) chart. We all got some journal articles out of the project, which helped launch our early career successes.

When the IBM PC came out, we needed more memory and more speed, so I ported the CP/M Basic code to C, and it ran tons faster than the Basic version. Having a hard disk also helped with performance of the AI diagnostic module versus a pair of floppy disks grinding away for an hour to process the patient data against the knowledge base.

Unfortunately, we never had the money to market the code. We were about 25-30 years too early for the market as well... But we had fun. I'm going to take the Osborne 1 out to the West Coast in a few months when I visit them, and we'll see if we can find a copy of the software and get it to run.

[p0rtia]

My first computer. Loved it.

[keith]

Speaking of retro computing (like the above VM video), look at what I just got for $50 at a garage sale two weeks ago:

Osborne 1 computer.jpg

Yep, that's the Osborne 1 from 1981. The world's first portable computer. About 25 pounds. Small enough to be carry-on baggage on airplanes.

Packs a 4 megahertz Z80 processor, 64 kb of memory and two 180kb floppy drives. The screen is a 5" diagonal with 56 x 24 characters. My cellphone screen is substantially bigger.

I bought it because I worked with my two closest friends (who I had dinner with recently) on a software product for medical AI and data collection on this machine because we needed something that could be rolled through hospitals. We built a prototype in CP/M Basic on the Osborne 1, and one of the partners actually rolled his Osborne 1 through the hospital and did patient workups on it, printed them out on a dot-matrix printer and dropped it in the (paper) chart. We all got some journal articles out of the project, which helped launch our early career successes.

When the IBM PC came out, we needed more memory and more speed, so I ported the CP/M Basic code to C, and it ran tons faster than the Basic version. Having a hard disk also helped with performance of the AI diagnostic module versus a pair of floppy disks grinding away for an hour to process the patient data against the knowledge base.

Unfortunately, we never had the money to market the code. We were about 25-30 years too early for the market as well... But we had fun. I'm going to take the Osborne 1 out to the West Coast in a few months when I visit them, and we'll see if we can find a copy of the software and get it to run.

Built in a tent in Solana Beach north of San Diego. Osborne used to come into the Gyro shop that I frequented. He interupted an argument I was having with somebody over Computer Accounting applications and how they should be flexible and adapt to the customer, instead of the other way around. He tried to hire me right then and there.

[Foggy]

And?

[Mr brolin]

Happily geeking away on my new toy ..... that I won, free, gratis, for nothing !!!!

Got entered into a competition when I registered an all-in-one desktop for support then almost 2 minths later got a very suspicious spam like email from Lenovo saying "Woot-Woot you be a WInner!!!!!!"

Normally would be sentenced to /dev/null hell but opened in a sandbox and it turned out I had in reality won myself a shiny new laptop.

Specifically one of Lenovo's shiniest of new toys the Yoga Book 9i.

Take a regular thin 'n light, touchscreen, convertable laptop and replace the keyboard with a second equally gorgeous screen, throw in an equally thin and light keyboard that folds into a cover that can contort into a sturdy support and voila.

Double the screen estate laptop, either side by side or one above the other, folds into a tablet if you want, can be used with the keyboard as a regular laptop.

Upgraded to Windows 11 Pro, dropped Office onto it, added it to my ZeroTier network just got off a work related Teams and a Slack video call, happy as a happy thing, video call on the top screen, content and notes running on the bottom screen, no Alt-Tab window swich frenzy.....



Or maybe Netflix when I'm on one of those, show up but not constribute calls......

[p0rtia]

[johnpcapitalist]

Built in a tent in Solana Beach north of San Diego. Osborne used to come into the Gyro shop that I frequented. He interupted an argument I was having with somebody over Computer Accounting applications and how they should be flexible and adapt to the customer, instead of the other way around. He tried to hire me right then and there.

Might that have been Andy Kay of Kaypro? Kaypro was located in Solana Beach. Osborne was a Silicon Valley company. Adam Osborne had lived in Berkeley for many years, starting when he wrote some of the first books on building computers with microprocessors and doing assembly-language programming.

I ran into Osborne in a bar in Berkeley, California in the mid-1980s when I was in school there, after I had worked on the AI/medical charting project I mentioned in the post above. I thanked him for creating the Osborne 1 and for the books he wrote, where I learned enough assembler programming to speed up my IBM PC C code.

He wasn't particularly happy to hear my effusive praise. I later heard elsewhere that he was a fairly bitter alcoholic in later life, because of the collapse of Osborne Computer and the later collapse of Paperback Software, which built a clone of Lotus 1-2-3 for the IBM PC at much lower prices. Paperback was sued for copyright infringement by Lotus because of the similarities in the user interface and formula language.

[keith]

Might that have been Andy Kay of Kaypro? Kaypro was located in Solana Beach.

Oh yeah. You are 100% correct.

I was ramping up to move to Australia, and didnt even consider his offer.

And yes I loved Osborne's books too, still have a couple. Just got Em confused in my head.

[John Thomas8]

[RTH10260]