On 22 Sep 2011 at 17:16, Liam Proven wrote: Those model M keyboards came from a time when there were still a fair number of people upgrading their own systems and places doing repair, so the comparison isn't apt there. Rather, consider today's keyboards--mostly junk and consumables. I don't see any trend toward wanting to repair keyboards, even though they've essentially been unchanged for the last 30 years. Mice are just as bad. I'm a backward sort of user, simply because upgrading creates a lot of trouble and doesn't buy me anything that I can use. Given my slow DSL connection (1.5Mbps on a good day), I can't really use my system for much more than browsing, downloading documents and email. So the system I'm sitting in front of here is a 2.4GHz P4 that I picked up on Freecycle as junk. A pin was bent on the CPU, so it was discarded. I do have a AMD 64 bit system, but I have 32-bit Linux installed. I have plenty of older motherboards and for their application, they're fine. I don't own a system that requires a USB keyboard or mouse--or a PCIe video card, for that matter. But I'm not representative of the consumer community at large, any more than Tony is. The comment from one reader about his microwave oven is more to the point. I recently took a wall oven+microwave combination out of service (32 years old) and replaced it with a 20 year old double ovwn. The door spring in the old unit had broken, meaning that I was going to pull the oven anyway; the "new" oven had better insulation (more energy efficient) as well as being generally of better quality, so it was worth it. That left me with the old unit and a 32-year old functioning microwave (doesn't use the membrane buttons, but rather a glass panel with capacitve pickup). No takers, offering it for free on Freecycle and CL. People want the "consumable" appliances. (I already have another microwave that fits my needs better). At any rate, the basic idea is that people prefer new things, whether it's a pair of pants or an automobile--and that's not likely to change. --Chuck

More than that, those were built at a time when people valued quality, and rejected cheap junk, because the mentality was to do things right and make them to last. The obsession with "new" overshadowed that and now new is more important than anything else. I used 3278s and never saw a Model M until a few years ago. When the places I worked finally forced me to use a commodity PC as a terminal, I hated the keyboards and just put up with it because I thought that was all there was. I have a couple of NOS Model Ms now and they remind me a lot of the 3278s. I admit I don't use them regularly because they're a lot slower for me than my high-end mechanical import boards. But that doesn't take anything away generation or two. I think most people here would agree with your view. Not about yourself I mean ;-) I mean upgrading doesn't buy much except in specific cases. I intentionally stay behind on hardware and software and by the time I buy something I'm sure it will work. I let the other guys alpha and beta test stuff. I don't have time to break my setup by upgrading for nothing. I do a little experimenting but I don't need the latest of anything for anything I do. Except for new releases of the stuff I work on for a living, I leave new stuff to the people who work on it. No, but you sound pretty representative of the guys on this list :-) That's so true. I remember when fuel injected cars came out in the mainstream and how quickly the carbs disappeared. I was having a discussion with some of the guys at work, most of them went right out and bought new stuff and had problems. I like stuff I can wrench on and don't have to depend on other people for. I finally did have to buy a fuel injected car and sure enough it had undiagnosable problems that left me stranded on the highway several times over a year until they figured out what it was. Then it happened again on another vehicle until a mechanic figured out the problem. On the other hand I knew a computer technician who built his own test harnesses and diagnostic equipment and did most if not all of his own diagnosis and repairs on all his automotive electronics. This guy never worked as a mechanic, he was just a guy like Tony who never met anything that lit up that he couldn't figure out. I admire those guys a lot.

On Thu, 22 Sep 2011, John Foust wrote: Which reminds me - I can provide a home for wayward Commodore gear in the Pacfic Northwest area. g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.simpits.org/geneb - The Me-109F/X Project Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies. ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://www.scarletdme.org - Get it _today_! Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

----- Original Message ----- From: "TeoZ" <teoz at neo.rr.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Thursday, September 22, 2011 8:12 PM Subject: Re: Repair Culture Sorry, not quite true. I bought a little box that gives my good old CRT TV digital channels via the SCART socket, so no widescreen TV for me yet :) (unless you were talking about pre-SCART CRT's) Regards, Andrew B aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk

On 23 Sep 2011 at 18:32, TeoZ wrote: Sigh, I still use an OTA converter box. No cable; I'd have to go dish--and there are enough obstructions around that viewing would get "interesting" once the wind came up. There's just something that irks me to pay to watch advertisements with some (really awful) program content mixed in. In spite of upgrading my antenna and having most of the transmitters within 10 miles, I find OTA DTV reception to be remarkably sensitive to rain and wind effects and find the problems that stations have with the transmission equipment to be much more numerous (i.e. flat- out outages). I watch a lot less TV now than I did before the switchover. Mostly due to greatly inferior content. --Chuck

I watch a little more TV than I used to, and I do mean little. I now get a chance to see programs I haven't seen in years (Red Dwarf and Quantum Leap) along with more of those I already knew I enjoyed watching (Real Housewives Of New York, New Jersey and Orange County - the New York version being by far the most entertaining, plus Greys Anatomy). So for all those extra channels (in my case about 50 more) I watch 6 extra programs regularly. Regards, Andrew B aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk

Actually, the onlty reason I'd buy a digital TV (or decoder) is becasue I wanted to watch stuff not available on analogue channels, or becuase I wanted to continue watching TV after they stop broadcasting the analogue signals. Quite honestly, I find the dropouts on a poor digital signal (picture freezes/skips, very low resloution over part of the screen, etc) to be a lot more annoying than the snow on a poor analogue signal. Mybe you didn, but I certianly wouldn't... I've never had my enjoyment of a film or TV programme spoiled by the recrding/reproduction ssytem. I have had it spoiled by a poor plot, poor screenplay, poor acting, poor prodcutionm and the like. Something that is not improved by going to a DVD. -tony

I've never seen a SRT with a SCART socket, but that's being pedantic... Even if your old TV doesn't have a SCART (or composite video) sockets, you can presumably take the output from the digital TV receiver and feed it to an RF modulator that you connect to the aerial socket of your TV. Now, if you haeva system A 405-line TV, that's another matter. -tony (who finds TV much liess interesting than many otehr things and would be happy to live without it.)

It's been quite a while since I've had to troubleshoot a powersupply and I have one that is making a loud whine and need to put a load on it to make sure it is functioning properly. Any suggestions? It is 12V/24V switchable output.

6.5-7A max from the powersupply On 9/22/11 8:03 PM, "Simon Fryer" <fryers at gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, 22 Sep 2011, Geoffrey Reed wrote: any reason not to just use an automobile headlight bulb? If you know anybody who actively works on cars, . . . there are a LOT of two filament (High/Low beam) bulbs that get replaced when one filament goes bad. That bulb, using the OTHER filament, seems to work fine to load microcomputer power supplies. . . . and you can get some LIGHT on what you are working on!

On 23 Sep 2011 at 1:33, Eric Smith wrote: If you're on the cheap, get a plastic pail that'll hold a couple of gallons of water, add salt and fashion a couple of electrodes, preferably of carbon (welding rods with do) or stainless steel. Adjust the concentration of salt and the position of the electrodes to get the resistance that you're after. Use in a ventilated area. It's amazing how many KW five gallons of water will absorb before boiling. This is no hack--liquid rheostats have a long and distinguished history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_rheostat --Chuck

Geoffrey Reed wrote: A car headlight bulb? Peace... Sridhar

It's interesting. If W. Edwards Deming was responsible for the rise of Japanese industry, who holds the philosophy behind China's rise? It seems that one can concentrate on quality and succeed, and also that one can not give a fig about quality and succeed by producing junk. So who's got the right idea? By all that Deming held sacred, the huge enterprises built on the back of cheap labor and adversarial monetary policy shouldn't exist. Yet there they are, manufacturing short-lived garbage. I recall the invasion of Japanese steel into the US market. US steelmakers were using methods and equipment from before the war to produce their goods and rewarded "tonnage" with bonuses. The Japanese, having their industrial infrastructure bombed out of existence, rebuilt using state-of-the-art technology and produced a better product for what initially was a similar price. The US fought with all of the weapons of trade--import quotas and penalties and ultimately failed. Until what remained of the US steel industry got the message and, instead of using their mony to pay stock dividends and salaries, revamped their infrastructure, they weren't competitive. The same can be said for the Japanese auto industry. Before 1970, no one I knew owned a Japanese auto. By 1980, even my parents had succumbed to the purchase of a Toyota; all my "made in the USA" father had to do was test-drive one and compare it with the trash that Detroit was churning out. So will we see the same thing in computers? You know, the Toyota Celica of PCs that will easily put in 20 years of service? It's hard to see that happening. Or will computers be like chewing gum--use it once and throw it away? --Chuck

On 09/23/2011 03:54 PM, Al Kossow wrote: I can provide that *this afternoon*. My infrastructure network has moved to my new building, I have IP addresses, very good connectivity, and a very beefy VMware host machine. If there's a market for that, I'm up for it! -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

Yep, KVM/IP is very common for server hosts. As far as VMs, VirtualBox is free, and supports "Remote Machine Display" which works with any guest OS. See here: http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch07.html Scott. On 24/09/2011, at 10:18 AM, John Foust wrote:

[snip] [> ] OK, that is the current model - but is it a good one? At a time when we're struggling to create jobs, maybe it's a better idea to help people acquire those "special skills" thus creating good-paying middle-class jobs, and quit depending on cheap manufacturing and "recycling" (read: dumping) in the third world as our default. That's another aspect: the current short-lifecycle PC (and now phone/mobile device) business is an ecological nightmare. But the bottom line (to slightly rephrase what you said above) is: the insatiable corporate profit machines of today's IT industry are fed by a continuous "upgrade" cycle that is of dubious value to the end consumer. What is obsolescence? I would concede that a Ford Model T is obsolete because it cannot participate in the high-speed transportation infrastructure of today - but I miss my 1963 Falcon, a steel-body station wagon that had better gas mileage than my wife's relatively new Subaru. I could fix almost anything on the Falcon with only a handful of common tools. The Subaru is so loaded with specialized components and systems that I can't effectively work on it. (Note: half of the auto makers' revenue comes from repair. A fox in charge of the henhouse?) And the Falcon was perfectly happy at 70 or 80 miles an hour - don't ask how I know (hint: I owned it in high school). It's an apt comparison, because the auto industry thrives on an annual cycle of "new" releases that rarely offer any real value add over prior models on a year-over-year basis, or (I'd argue) even a five year span. And no one needs 300HP and 200mph top speed unless he/she is on the track. The last thirty years of engineering could have instead produced automobiles that could routinely achieve 50+mpg. Perhaps I'm particularly vocal about this today because I'm feeling this pain quite directly right now: there is special-purpose software I need for school that today is only available for Intel-based computers (Mac, Windows, Linux - but Intel only). I have a perfectly good dual G4 desktop that can play movies and music, render realistic animations and swooshy screen savers - oh, and do the things I really care about doing, like email and web browsing and writing text and code. The expectation is that I'm going to toss my current tools on the scrap heap and put out more money for "newer, shinier" when there is no discernable benefit to me. You may argue that perhaps I'm a special case - but unless you're a high-end gamer, I will argue that the only justification for multi-core superzoomers is to run the cutsie animations in bloatware like Windows 7. If today's processors had existed when Windows Vista was introduced, it's possible people might not have realized just how awful it really was..... -- Ian