Subj : Re: What to do with a gia To : Barry Martin From : Ky Moffet Date : Thu Oct 15 2020 22:11:00 BARRY MARTIN wrote: > Hi Ky! > Don't recall that but probably did it accidentally: any > machine I had a Windows on was going to be one that was refurbished, > so probably an older version, maybe updated. Ubuntu would be the > latetst LTS version,so automatically older to newer. So no worries! > Yes, I've done a lot of 'learn from others'. ...Someone's probably > going to gripe about your password being 'password' but doesn't > matter Doesn't matter since no one else is going to stick their grimy fingers on my keyboard, and if some network attack is as far as needing password input, it's already too late. With recent installs I disable it entirely, if I can. (Some distros won't let you.) > as have to be in range. Someone made the joke here that if I > started seeing a bunch of cars parked outside the house I'd better > change the WiFi password! When your street looks like a parking lot, you're really in trouble... now that every new car has wifi, it's amusing to turn on the unloved cellphone's wifi and watch the endless parade of unsecured wireless going by on the highway. (Also amazing that it has enough range to see them at all.) > KM> Oh yeah, have had that sort of thing too.. which of several KM> icons? Which drive was it on again?? And sometimes I don't realize I'm using the one on the wrong drive until one day I need to twiddle something on disk and... what do you mean, I'm running the copy in D:\storage instead of the one in C:\Utility ?? Or worse... what do you mean, you're running the copy from over on \\Bullet\F:\Utility?? Especially with Win7 and Aero active -- it lets you move stuff around on disk and Aero keeps track. (If you disable Aero, this does not work.) Pretty soon you don't know where any of your shortcuts point, even tho they still point at the right program!! It's the one feature that endeared Aero to me (otherwise I can't stand it, because I can't get eye-restful colors) because it tolerated my dragging stuff around without troubling to reinstall, AND without editing the wandering program's shortcut. > BTDT!! I've put a file called "WhatIsThis" is some subdirs so I > could find what it did or why it was created. Usually used the > extension '.BJM' for a further indicator I created that file. > Windows (at least the old ones when I used it) needed to be told .BJM > was a text file; Oh yeah, now I have textfiles in the root of every drive, so I can see where I am even if it's non-obvious (or I'm oblivious). No content, just need the filename to tell me where I am. Eg. Silver_C_WD500.txt > Linux just knows. I'd like to know how it just knows! >> Possible incomplete/incorrect programming. > KM> Bingo. This is the hazard of having unfinished features, which > KM> was like as not the root of the problem. > > I C:/ Time to upgrade your compiler. > Yes, have run into a few of those. And have sometimes seen where > there's an exchange between a user and the author where the author > states he's just not interested enough in that feature/option to do > it, or admits it's beyond his capabilities. Too bad more of these don't get picked up by better/more interested programmers. That's actually why all the sudden improvements in ReactOS -- lately got the attention of a bunch of programmers with time on their hands, and they fixed/improved more stuff in the past year than the one-man-band-and-occasional-help managed in the previous two decades. Those of us who've been keeping an eye on it are suitably grateful. > I've got a notebook computer which seems to have that issue. It is > set to dual boot between Windows-something (10? - it did that sneaky > upgrade people were in an uproar over maybe three years back) and > Ubuntu 18.04. Haven't tested with Windows but with Ubuntu it needs to > be connected to The Internet to complete booting, otherwise the > screne gets to a certain point and the sceen semi-randomly blinks and > the HDD LED indicates constant access. Plug in an Ethernet cable - > boots fine. That's nasty; I'll consider myself warned!! > The internal WiFi on this unit is intermittent so has a dongle > added. Apparently the boot issues occurs before the driver is > loaded. So far I haven't run into goofy onboard wifi, but have had a couple NICs croak... you might check if the wifi card is loose, or its antenna is loose. Usually you can get to 'em easily as it's typically a card in a slot (meaning it's also easily replaced, relatively speaking) with its own door, since the slot can also accommodate those micro SSD drives. > KM> And I'm like... no way in hell. KM> At the aforementioned launch were some 1000 IT pros. During the KM> presentation, they all developed identical angry frowns. (I was KM> off to one side near the front and had a fine view of the KM> > audience.) > > It's kind of funny when everyone comes up with the same conclusion! > Oh yeah. But seems so obvious if you have the first clue about business vs its necessary reliability. Someone in the same era figured out that downtime for big business could cost as much as $8 million per MINUTE... so building in even brief cloud-caused downtimes was out of the question. And considering how much sheer waiting around one did on that era's broadbland (typo, I swear!) it would have been a very costly switch even with zero downtime. Which was flamingly obvious to everyone in the room, except for the hapless Microsoft presenter. (Who was a nice guy, but a true believer in The Future Is Cloud. Sadly, he may have been right, if premature.) > There are good and bad things about The Cloud. Might make things a > lot easier with 'everyone on the same page': utilities up-to-date and > so compatible (assuming the machine can use -- 64-bit utility on a > 32-bit machine...). Well, that might be processed 'in the Sky' and > just the end result sent out (seeing some problems with that too!). Yep. And it's becoming forced, first by Adobe and Autodesk with their subscription-only models, and soon enough by Windows. My sister's architectural firm is already all cloud-based, because by way of their necessary software, going cloud is now state of the art, and if you're not up to date on everything, you can and will be sued into a culvert the first time anything goes majorly wrong and some shyster can claim you weren't using "supported, industry standard" everything. (They don't even keep older company cars, same reason.) Which is how I came to have a stack of 5 year old PCs, and the titular giant server. Out of support means too much liability (especially when your projects are budgeted in multiple millions of dollars), so out the door they go. But.. "I'm not a production environment; I'm a basement." :D > KM> If only thinking could instantly install the OS of our KM> choice, with all the desired features... I know! I'll call it KM> Telepathy. > Let's float that idea to the flagpole and see who salutes! Wait, why is DOS up on the flagpole?? > I have a bad habit of sometimes playing 'Stack'..... Mine are more like "randomly piled". > KM> Methinks I'd rather not have it blowing off the driver, because > KM> who knows what that might do under the hood. > Yes, I've created > some problems trying to repair a problem. Some repair projects get a > delayed start until I have a backup in place just in case 'poop > occurs'. Not even that, but that should it change its mind about resolution while I'm doing something, I could wind up with unfortunate clicks. This is why I turn off ALL the sliding and fading everything on linux, because it can and DOES capture the wrong click (Windows tends to have a more definite time boundary for click vs menu, but I've still seen the problem there). > Possibly why the BIOS for this motherboard has switches to control > the various cores. Initially I'm thinking why would someone want to > shut off a core (it's an 8-core CPU)? Probably more the other way: > allow an overclocker to turn on a core and maybe use a quad-core as a > quint-core. If it's actually a 6-core (never heard of 5-core!) then you might be able to enable 'em (I gather there are BIOS hacks to do this for some CPUs). I don't know why you'd want to disable one, tho. But hyperthreading is still not cores. Paladin's old single-core P4 gets displayed by Windows as 2 cores, but it's not -- it's just got hyperthreading. > KM> One of the Dells has an oversized recovery partition, and I > wound KM> up putting all sorts of junk in there as storage... > > Sneaky hiding place for private data too! Especially if the partition is hidden > I was semi-playing around with 'split' systems. In the past have > used two hard drives: one for the boot and the OS, the other for > data. This time figure to try the boot/OS drive as one of those > solid state critters, potentially some problems so left the data on > the 'rust drive' as you call it. Was also thinking along your lines: > not necessarily hide stuff but use the 'excess' space for > don't-need-too-often storage. Never did (or at least not so far) use > the extra space on the SSD but did find I was running a little low on > the space I allocated for the OS. Multiple backups to what I already > have - just in case! -- and delete one of the 'sneaky' partitions on > the SSD and expand the OS partation in to it. Worked without problem > (whew!!). Oh yeah... for some reason I've forgotten (except that at the time I was still doing a DOS boot partition), Bullet has 3 small FAT32 partitions before it gets to the larger XP64/NTFS partition. Good thing I haven't run out of space on the NTFS partition... tho I sure have found a lot of junk to put on D: and E: !! Also, I like to have the swapfile on its own partition, along with any browser cache or other wastes of space, to confine fragmentation. > KM> I make images of small drives and store them on a big drive. > > And then an image of the big drive on an even bigger drive! I don't YES! > play around with operating systems like you do so no real need to do > the imaging. For you it makes sense. Oh, this is not so much for the OS as for the complex tangle of software that eventually inhabits the OS. Egads!! > ) The half-baked build-your-own NSA project here is considering > use of several old/small hard drives for storage. Some might be > clobbered together under JBOD, though if one fails they all > effectively fail. EEEP!!! > Might be better to use as individual drives and/or store > non-critical I spent six months rebuilding 14,000 image files for a friend who'd had his data on a RAID system (some species of linux), since the best that professional data recovery could do was still a mess. Me, I ain't NEVER doing any kind of striped, cobbled-together, or other fragmented-among-the-hardware file storage. I am not a busy commercial server that needs the performance boost, and for me it is not worth the risk. When you get to where you and your hex editor can edit the garbage out of a JPG in 30 seconds flat, you've done way too many of 'em. > data. As far as the power draw, was a semi-consideration -- inital > project was sort of thinking the unit in a computer case, so use a > ATX PSU. The use of an RPi put a bit of a twist on the PSU aspect -- > woiuld definitely need an external supply, which could be that 5v/12v > one I have -- if able to supply the necessary start-up current. My brain hurts. What would such a creature do for a living? >> KM> I dunno VNC... but now I know who to ask. Wikipedia?! > KM> Some bloke on a BBS. > :) ...So did I provide a usuable introductory explanation in an > earlier message? Uh, somewhere... kinda cross between remote desktop and Mouse Without Borders... or so I gather... >> KM> Dig up from the grave as the case was with this one... was KM> >> supposedly dead. Not dead, just slow boot like a server. Happy KM> >> birthday to me. It is rather fun when something that doesn't >> work can be fixed easily! > KM> Such as by turning it on! > > Some times they just need the rest! That was the old method for fixing CDROM drives -- power 'em down overnight and sometimes they'd get unconfused and work again. > .. Anyone with "cloisterphobia" should not consider becoming a monk. HA! þ RNET 2.10U: ILink: Techware BBS þ Hollywood, Ca þ www.techware2k.com --- QScan/PCB v1.20a / 01-0462 * Origin: ILink: CFBBS | cfbbs.no-ip.com | 856-933-7096 (454:1/1) .