On Tue, 18 Sep 2012 20:32:29 -0700
Sean Kelly <sean@invisibleduck.org> wrote:

> On Sep 18, 2012, at 3:50 PM, Nick Sabalausky <SeeWebsiteToContactMe@semitwist.com> wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Actually, music over bluetooth? Wouldn't even an FM transmitter be better quality? (Well, unless you have one of those newer antennas that can't be retracted.) Bluetooth has *really* bad bandwidth.
> 
> Bluetooth 3.0 HR does something like 25 Mbit/s. The trick is finding a car stereo that supports the high bitrate for audio. I agree with you about the phone support, but it's because the mic is shoddy rather than anything about Bluetooth. I don't use the phone setup in my car very often for that reason.  With noise reduction turned on I just sound like I'm under water, and with it off it's just noisy in general. My car doesn't offer a very quiet ride though, to be fair.

I guess my bluetooth info's pretty out-of-date. When I think "bluetooth audio" I still think "Wii remote speaker". Granted, that's a terrible "speaker" period (I usually have it muted), but my understanding was that the bandwidth couldn't have really driven anything much better...at least at the time, I guess.

On 9/18/2012 8:36 AM, Sean Kelly wrote:
> On Sep 18, 2012, at 12:48 AM, Walter Bright <newshound2@digitalmars.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> The most common failure I've had are the power supplies, they're still as
>> bad today as in the 80's.
>
> There are good power supplies, they just don't come in pre-built computers
> because they're expensive.  I think the same could be said of products from
> any era.
>


Well, you guys have convinced me. Next time I buy a PS, I'm going to spend more money on it.

On 2012-09-18 09:37, Nick Sabalausky wrote:

> - Oracle (Even if it's not a terrible DBMS, it's certainly overpriced)

You need a SAP system to keep track of the cost of your Oracle system :)

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On 2012-09-18 17:12, H. S. Teoh wrote:

> Reformatting and reinstalling, though, is a matter of course on any
> Windows installation that I've ever seen. I've heard of such things as
> stable Windows installations, but as far as my experience goes those are
> mythical beasts. Things just fail the moment you start doing something
> non-trivial, like anything besides read email, watch youtube, and browse
> the 'Net. I've been spared this pain for the most part 'cos I swore off
> Windows and have been running Linux as my main OS for at least 10 years,
> but I do still get requests for help to fix broken Windows
> installations. Most of the time, the thing's either unfixable (hood is
> welded shut) or not worth the effort to fix 'cos reformat + reinstall is
> faster (shudder).

I had a Windows machine running as an HTPC that I had no problems with. Although the only thing I used it for was to watch movies.

> That's not to say that Linux doesn't have its own problems, of course.
> The libc5 -> libc6 transition is one of the memorable nightmares in its
> history. There have been others. X11 failures can get really ugly (back
> in the days before KVM, a crashed or wedged X server meant your graphics
> card is stuck in graphics mode and the console shows up as random dot
> patterns -- good luck trying to fix the system when you can't see what
> you type). Once I accidentally broke the dynamic linker, and EVERYTHING
> broke, because everything depended on it. The only thing left was a
> single bash shell over SSH (this was on a remote server with no easy
> physical access), and the only commands that didn't fail were built-in
> bash commands like echo. So I had to transfer busybox over by converting
> it into a series of echo commands that reconstituted the binary and
> copy-n-paste it. It's one of those moments where you get so much
> satisfaction from having rescued a dying system singlehandedly with echo
> commands, but it's also one of those things that puts Linux on some
> people's no-way, no-how list.

That's also the beauty of Linux, you could do it. Try doing that on a Windows machine.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On 2012-09-18 17:36, Sean Kelly wrote:
> On Sep 18, 2012, at 12:48 AM, Walter Bright <newshound2@digitalmars.com> wrote:
>>
>> The most common failure I've had are the power supplies, they're still as bad today as in the 80's.
>
> There are good power supplies, they just don't come in pre-built computers because they're expensive.  I think the same could be said of products from any era.

What kind of computers are you guys using. I have never owned a pre-built computer (except for laptops). I always buy my own components and assembles the computer. Then I know what I get.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On 2012-09-18 21:58, Jonathan M Davis wrote:

> I have an rsync cronjob back up my home partition nightly so that the chances
> of losing that data are slim (though I don't back up all the rest of my data
> from my many hard drives unfortunately - it would take up too much space).
> It's saved me on a number of occasions from corrupted or lost data even
> _without_ hard drive failures. Regular backups are a must IMHO, though I think
> that most people consider it too much of a hassle to bother with
> unfortunately.

It's dead easy on Mac OS X with the built in TimeMachine. Just select the backup disk and you're done. By default it backups all HFS+ disks, if you want you can choose to exclude some.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On Wednesday, 19 September 2012 at 06:11:00 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 9/18/2012 8:36 AM, Sean Kelly wrote:
>> On Sep 18, 2012, at 12:48 AM, Walter Bright <newshound2@digitalmars.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> The most common failure I've had are the power supplies, they're still as
>>> bad today as in the 80's.
>>
>> There are good power supplies, they just don't come in pre-built computers
>> because they're expensive.  I think the same could be said of products from
>> any era.
>>
>
> Well, you guys have convinced me. Next time I buy a PS, I'm going to spend more money on it.


What exactly do you guys _do_ with your computer that suddenly breaks the power supplies?! Maybe I'm just too young to know, but I've never seen a power supply break...

On Wed, 19 Sep 2012 10:37:44 +0200, Mehrdad <wfunction@hotmail.com> wrote:

> On Wednesday, 19 September 2012 at 06:11:00 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 9/18/2012 8:36 AM, Sean Kelly wrote:
>>> On Sep 18, 2012, at 12:48 AM, Walter Bright <newshound2@digitalmars.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> The most common failure I've had are the power supplies, they're still as
>>>> bad today as in the 80's.
>>>
>>> There are good power supplies, they just don't come in pre-built computers
>>> because they're expensive.  I think the same could be said of products from
>>> any era.
>>>
>>
>> Well, you guys have convinced me. Next time I buy a PS, I'm going to spend more money on it.
>
>
> What exactly do you guys _do_ with your computer that suddenly breaks the power supplies?! Maybe I'm just too young to know, but I've never seen a power supply break...

Use them every day for a regular computer? While I've had no spectacular
failures (yet), this has been sufficient to break a PSU or two.

Then I decided to spend money getting a quality PSU, and it hasn't had
a single problem in 7 years.

-- 
Simen

On Wednesday, 19 September 2012 at 08:36:46 UTC, Mehrdad wrote:
>
>
> What exactly do you guys _do_ with your computer that suddenly breaks the power supplies?! Maybe I'm just too young to know, but I've never seen a power supply break...

I once tried to do some GPU calculations. After several hours, the PSU failed, frying my components. The graphics card was literally ON FIRE (!). Nothing was salvageable.

Anyways, that is what *THAT* is how to kill a PSU, and *THAT* is what happens when they fail...

On Wednesday, 19 September 2012 at 08:53:33 UTC, monarch_dodra wrote:
> On Wednesday, 19 September 2012 at 08:36:46 UTC, Mehrdad wrote:
>>
>>
>> What exactly do you guys _do_ with your computer that suddenly breaks the power supplies?! Maybe I'm just too young to know, but I've never seen a power supply break...
>
> I once tried to do some GPU calculations. After several hours, the PSU failed, frying my components. The graphics card was literally ON FIRE (!). Nothing was salvageable.
>
> Anyways, that is what *THAT* is how to kill a PSU, and *THAT* is what happens when they fail...

Dang that's... intense. o.o

Are laptop power supplies more durable or something?
None of my laptops (or anyone's laptop I know) have had problematic power supplies...