IT BS thread

I usually had that when I was system building and didn't have the keyboard plugged in, or during the early days of USB.
The best part of that is when you do find a keyboard, you still have to do a hard shutdown

 

Ya know, to this DAY I won't trust swapping a PS/2 rodent or keyboard while the system is hot.

Yea, yea, I know, even semi "modern" hardware with a PS/2 is usually OK with a hot swap.

***

I can't do it.

I put it up there with 'sleep' and 'hibernate'. I've been told for years by media and 'folks in the know' that this shit works great.

And I've essentially had nothing but problems with them for the longest time. Honestly, I disable sleep and hibernate on all my machines....totally. Power it on to use it, then shut it the fuck down when you're done. Nothing you are doing is so important that you HAVE to be back 'at the desktop' in 20 seconds instead of 60 or 90. You're a random, regular schlep that watches porn and tracks his fantasy football team.

 

I use sleep/hibernate all the time. Never a problem. In the "old days", a bit of an issue but no longer.

 

Heh. Again, what I keep being told.

A couple weeks ago I got in a shipment of new HP laptops.

Nothing on the internet, nothing searchable. Every one of them when 'waking up' has a roughly 33 to 50% chance of 'forgetting' their windows activation.

We're only talking 13 units here.

Another recent shipment of desktops, about a dozen Dells. Clean Win7SP1 install, windowsupdate to the balls, vanilla desktop environment...'sleep' has a 25-33% ish chance to nuke the Outlook mailbox path and prompt you to point it at the Exchange server.

Just more of the same. Similar to shit I ran into with new machines from various OEMs in 2012, 2011, 2010, etc all the way back to the pre-9x days.

I just avoid it all together. Turn your shit OFF when you aren't actively using it. I told this to the users at my 'new' job site (around 50 latops of varying age/hardware specs/manufacturers) and my 'wake up/unhibernate/thought I saved it' tickets dropped by 90+% in two weeks.

Just keep it in mind.

 

Windows activation sucks. I've had problems with it on reboot and while running. A part of the 'activation' is the detection of hardware changes. What's that? New USB device? Something as simple as a change in memory configuration triggers it. Most retarded thing in the world of software licensing.

 

Windows doesn't require DNA samples to activate yet?

 

Pretty soon

 

I didn't want to make a new thread on this, does anyone have any recommendations on a temperature monitor for the cpu and gpu?

I have an asus G55VW-DH71 laptop it has an intel i7 (gen 3 "haswell") 8gb of ddr4 ram and a 2gb dedicated nvidia card (geforce 745m.) I think I may have overheated it playing payday 2. So now i want to be able to monitor how hot its getting to prevent it getting too hot again. I'm not looking to overclock or anything just monitor the temps. A good cooling pad is coming with my next paycheck.

I also had a couple error messages followed by a blue screen and the computer rebooting.
video_tdr_failure
and
video_dxgkrnl_fatal_error

I've only had the computer for about 2 weeks now so this has freaked me out a tad. Thank you for any info about whats going on and/or a temp monitoring program.

 

I run Core Temp, CPU-Z, and the Asus AI Suite pretty much at all times. I keep them up on my second monitor to spy on what's happening with the hardware while I'm gaming. Like so:



This is my 23" display as the main display, with a 19" Dell on the left as the 'extra'.

I also use new-defunct Windows desktop 'gadgets' (Google around and you can find where they're at now) for CPU meter, GPU meter, and network meter.

 

At least I can't lose my DNA!

 

But I'm sure someone would figure out how to fraud your DNA eventually lol

 

That's fine, it's not like I'm reproducing it.

 

Hey, some of us have put no small amount of time/effort/$$$ into exactly this. Enjoy having freedom and disposable income!

EDITED in:

So...Labor Day! Wife and yout are out shopping/catching movies. I'm cannibalizing 3 HP pizzabox retired servers to frankenstein a Dell R210 for the house. Using cut-up beer carton for drive mounts and hacked up pencil eraser parts to keep it from grounding....cold beer, Joe Bonamassa cranked up on the stereo...this is why we work hard....or we have issues, one or the other...

 

I Frankenstein electronics on top of UHMW scraps at work.

 

I would say this may belong here..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKOrkLxOBoY#t=33

 

Holy cow, that is a pretty powerful laptop! A good cooling pad is a decent idea -- never use on top of a bedspread or couch cushion, etc. Could be it overheated, or could be a driver or hardware issue. The first two are more easily remedied. Things to do:

1. Make sure there is plenty of airflow around the vents.
2. See if there is a BIOS updated available. The fan speeds are likely controlled via the BIOS automatically, and a faulty BIOS may not be adjusting the fans properly.
3. See if nVidia has an updated driver available. Could just be a driver issue.

If it keeps happening, you may need them to swap out the video hardware. I swore off nVidia years ago due to quality issues, although I know it is probably an irrational fear.

 

A friend is discussing the demise of Moore's Law in the next decade. Recall Moore's Law says that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every couple of years.

Anyhow, his hypothesis is that when this happens, the number of software and IT engineers will decline dramatically.

I say this won't happen simply because the ability to make something faster and smaller has been greatly reduced. I don't think it will stop innovation at all.

What say you all? I'm curios to hear what you think. After all, it's our jobs he's talking about

 

It's a bubble that will pop at some point, however I don't see it affecting software innovation.

 

I've been out of semiconductor for about 8 years now, but when I got out, they were beginning to deal with the problem of photolithography nearing limits -- they were using the smallest wavelengths of light and trying to squeeze it though the mask to make the imprint (EUVL). ASML was actually using a layer of flowing water to stabilize the light. I am sure they will find some ways to go beyond those limits, but they aren't getting smaller at the pace that they used to.

As to what this means, who knows. I don't agree with that hypothesis -- we can't count on available power growing and growing without a totally new concept for computer processing, so we have to figure out ways to be more efficient with what we have or come up with a new way. Which takes guys with pocket protectors and propeller hats. And maybe some strange new form of algae.

Look at the PS3, which is an amazing piece of hardware. Big pipes, small buckets, lots of parallelism possible. Hard to program and optimize (programming and synchronizing multiple threads and workloads always made my brain hurt), and too unlike the XBOX and PC platforms. They punted with the PS4, making it more like the other platforms so game makers can focus on making cool games.

Anyway, I think it will spark new innovation, not diminish it.

 

I replied to him with a similar note. I don't think innovation slows, if at all.

The both of us have worked in semiconductor until he decided to go to law school and become a patent attorney He's a super smart guy so I was surprised by his thesis.