Techy Gubbins - The Bear and Badger

LazyGunn

I just dont think they expect you to ask for the part rather than going through their whole technical support rigmarole

Interestingly, and this was a few years back, mind, they supplied parts that were out of warranty IF they had good reason to believe the fault was common. They've been really good, although admittedly, a while ago, and i agree on the refurb thing, esp if you try get them to send replacement parts than replace the whole thing (would be less hassle, and free). I stand by Dell being business machines and not adapted at all for consumer use in an infrastructure way (And they would probably gain a lot from pulling out of it entirely cept for alienware imo) but their outlet is a thing of beauty

LazyGunn

Oh yeah, my hint, if you go for a make your own approach (i recommend this, its almost idiot proof these days and you learn a lot), buy your bits from ebuyer.com their returns policy is second to none (again, my experience), theyve returned expensive parts that i myself have broken, gratis

Both dinopc and especially pcspecialist can make you shit hot custom machines on credit

acemuzzy

My boss has recently released this: https://github.com/peterbrittain/asciimatics

Retro ASCII-art animations are at your fingertips...

(I've obviously given him abuse for having spent his spare time on this; hope he doesn't see me posting it on a video game forum...)

LazyGunn

Hes spending his spare time much btter than i am! I've spent all morning making collections of rocks...

LazyGunn

max users: the max creation graph in 2016? how swanky?

Blue Swirl

There are going to be six different versions ("editions") of Windows 10: Home, Mobile, Pro (Home plus extra bits), Enterprise (Pro plus extra bits), Education (Enterprise plus extra bits), and Mobile Enterprise. Presumably there'll be a Server version, too.

This is going to cause so much confusion, especially as (IIRC) for previous versions of Windows Pro had more features than Enterprise, but now it's the other way around.

Clicky clicky

Roujin

Is it going to cause confusion?

Considering most home Wnidows 10 users to start with will be users doing the free upgrade from 7 or 8 wont it just automatically upgrade depending on the current version installed?

Business users with IT support will also be okay unless all their guys are dribblers.

New domestic buyers buying new hardware will only get the choice of home or pro from manufacturers I guess.

I dunno, it doesn't sound that different from how many versions of win 7 or 8thete were. The only interesting thing is Mobile Enterprise I guess because up until now there has only been 1 version of the mobile OS available.

acemuzzy

Even as a techie I don't find it terribly clear from that description what pro gives over home.

Also, what details have been given on universal apps / xbone stuff? Is it cross-buy or streaming?

Finally, anyone seen any "all xbones are dev boxes" chat recently?

Blue Swirl

Roujin wrote:

Is it going to cause confusion?

I would put money on it. As examples:

1) I was in a book shop and an older lady was asking the staff if she should get Windows 8 for Dummies or Windows 8.1 for Dummies. For Windows 10 imagine the same situation but with at least six different versions which also depends on the form factor of the machine in question.

2) Windows 7 Home Premium was going to be called just "Home", but after Windows Vista had "Home" and "Home Premium", people on the latter thought that going to Windows 7 Home would be a downgrade. Odds on the same thing happens with people getting the gratis Windows 10 upgrade. "I have Home Premium now, I don't want Windows 10 Home, that'll be worse, surely?"

3) For Windows 7, in terms of number of features, it went Home Premium -> Enterprise -> Pro. For Windows 10, it's Home -> Pro -> Enterprise -> Education, at least as far as I can tell from the article above. Should a hardcore PC gamer get Pro or Enterprise? If I'm a parent of a child in middle school, do I get Education or Home? If I'm the IT guy at a school, do the teachers need Enterprise or Education?

Being public tech support at Microsoft must be a nightmare. Soon they're going to have to offer support for Vista, 7, 8, and 10. Then they're going to have to figure out which edition the customer is using. Soul eroding.

cockbeard

Can anyone recommend an APTX compatible Bluetooth music receiver with twin phono outs

I realise I cannot afford SONOS and will get my stuff back next month, want bluetooth convenience

hunk

Aargh, win7 is driving me insane, it's really making me hate ms/Windows! Two issue's at play here.

Windows update on the Mac refuses to work for some odd reason. I installed win7 with boot camp and everything in the Windows install is working fine except for..... Windows update.

The other issue is reinstalling Win7 on my Asus n75 notebook. It's a fucking pain in the arse as a straightforward install from cd always sees the installer hanging for 12hrs and up. Looked it up and it appears there's a bug in the bios of recent Asus mobo's, something to do with ahci and ide. If you switch between them you can confuse the bios rendering the mbr invisible to it and your win install useless. Which is how I locked myself out of Windows and got myself stranded in Linux in the first place. Strangely it only affects Windows somehow.

Need to update the bios on mobo.....
Meanwhile back to Linux for now.
I need my pc working and don't have time monkeying around.

Why is Windows so fucking arduous and annoying?
Grrrrrrr...., I want the last 2days of my life back!

Blue Swirl

hunk wrote:

I installed win7 with boot camp and everything in the Windows install is working fine except for..... Windows update.

Have you done all the stuff with verification keys and the like? You don't get updates with dodgy versions of Windows, which yours will be counted as until you've put the key in. I have Windows 7 on two Macs and everything works fine, so this should be fixable.

hunk wrote:

Looked it up and it appears there's a bug in the bios of recent Asus mobo's, something to do with ahci and ide.

Sounds like Asus should be the focus of your ire here, not Microsoft/Windows.

hunk

The disc is an original win7 pro disc.
I did key in the code at install but I can't remember having to verify the install in settings?

As for the mobo matter, I blame both. Grumble, grumble......

Blue Swirl

hunk wrote:

The disc is an original win7 pro disc. I did key in the code at install but I can't remember having to verify the install in settings?

If the copy of Windows thinks it's a dodgy copy, it'll say something like "this copy of Windows in not genuine" in the bottom right-hand corner of the desktop. There'll be something you can tinker with in the computer settings. If it doesn't have the non-genuine warning, I don't know what's gone wrong, and you're on your own.

hunk

Pretty sure windows notified the copy as genuine. It'd better be, the packaging included a swanky hologram sticker!
But I'll check again to make sure.

djchump

Noice.

Blue Swirl

djchump wrote:

Noice.

Should certainly improve the quality of pre-painted miniatures. The board gamers will be happy.

acemuzzy

Some nice JS graph choice pages...

http://www.jsgraphs.com/
http://selection.datavisualization.ch/

djchump

Can't remember if I'd already linked an article about the UE Kite Demo prod, but this has lots of interesting info: http://www.fxguide.com/featured/epics-unreal-engine-open-world-behind-the-scenes/

Including that the photogrammetry is processed using Agisoft: http://www.agisoft.com/
But the "delighting pass" is still a bit "special sauce".

cockbeard

Getting a little annoyed about SQL unable to resolve collation conflicts

The databases, tables and even columns all have the same collation set up, I can't see any reason why unions across DB are throwing this error

I can fix it by specifying a COLLATE on each field as I pull it out, but by christ that's a pain in the arse

Anyone got any ideas about somewhere I may not have looked

LazyGunn

djchump wrote:

Can't remember if I'd already linked an article about the UE Kite Demo prod, but this has lots of interesting info: http://www.fxguide.com/featured/epics-unreal-engine-open-world-behind-the-scenes/

Including that the photogrammetry is processed using Agisoft: http://www.agisoft.com/
But the "delighting pass" is still a bit "special sauce".

I've been doing shadow removal on satellite photography for a year and a bit now and I've found photoshops content aware fill very useful for this - you have, however, just inspired me to talk to just the man to get the needed info for treating this kind of thing. Nice

dynamiteReady

cockbeard wrote:

Getting a little annoyed about SQL unable to resolve collation conflicts The databases, tables and even columns all have the same collation set up, I can't see any reason why unions across DB are throwing this error I can fix it by specifying a COLLATE on each field as I pull it out, but by christ that's a pain in the arse Anyone got any ideas about somewhere I may not have looked

There's a programming thread in the 'Forum Talk' section, and you might have more luck there.
I'd like to help you, or at the very least, write something smart and relevant, but I'm useless with SQL. Muzz, I suspect, will have an inkling, and Beano might be better still... I think Davy K also knows a bit about SQL*.

*Sorry for baiting you guys...

djchump

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-06-05-final-fantasy-15-leaves-much-of-versus-13-behind

hunk

For the past 2 weeks I've done 3 Windows installs and I've come to really hate the Windows installer. Slow and clunky, it really is a terrible abomination and pos.
The mac osx installer is slow too but after the lengthy install procedure you're mostly done. Not so in windows.

In windows, after a clean install you still have to go through the arduous process of manually installing drivers. Sometimes all hw components are recognized, more often than not one or more components need to be manually installed. Worst case scenarios are when your sata disk, usb and lan/wifi won't work out of the box.

Once you've survived the trial of installing essential drivers there's still windows update with 190 essential updates waiting for you. Install time easily takes up a day, if not more. Compared to Mac or even Linux this is just ludicrous. Mac update procedure only takes up 2-3 hrs, Linux even less. And windows varies anywhere between 5-24hrs?

And that's a best case scenario, the fun really starts when one of the 190 essential updates induces a bsod. Good luck trying to identify which one is the culprit.

Seriously, wtf ms. Surely you can do better.

AJ

Not going to get into a discussion on something so dull, but you're probably bring too harsh on them.

Last couple of times I've had to install Windows, it did all the drivers itself and took less than an hour to download all the updates. Also, I'm told that Windows is by far the easiest desktop OS to do large scale installs of.

Anyway, at the end of the day, people installing the OS themselves are a tiny part of Microsoft's market and I don't think there should be a huge expectation of MS to cater for them. They're certainly better at supporting minority customers than Apple are.

hunk

Ok, admittedly the win8 install was tolerable but the other 2 win7 installs were exercises in patience.

AJ

And to think 7 was where it started to become reasonable...

hunk

Come to think of it xp and vista were far worse.
I somehow unrealisticly expected a clean install of win7 to be smooth sailing. Sadly not the case.

AJ

Believe it or not, it is on some systems, just depends on the box.

hunk

Apple mba 2009-2010 and an Asus n75 notebook.
2 fairly decent manufacturers and decent legacy hardware to boot.

You'd think ms would've added the Asus drivers to the wu repository by now but alas. Apple bootcamp support is pretty good with them supplying the necessary drivers.

Howdy, Stranger!

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