My phone will not charge complaint thread

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  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 41,034
    Tjohn said:
    kyoto kid said:
    Tjohn said:

    Chem Lab I worked in had a Trash-80. I wrote a few basic apps for it. surprise I so old...

    ...I still wrote programmes for a Burroughs B6700 using what today are considered dead languages, but I know LG has me beat.

    Used both card punches, and Decwriter terminals (like the one on the left - crikey, what a waste of paper). The only one with a CRT was the Sysop.  .

    You win. smileyyes

    Yeah, but yours was bigger'n mine. surprise

    ...but isn't yours older? 

  • MistaraMistara Posts: 38,675

    huuh  i have mysterious store credit of 5 bux

    i haven't redeemed a gc or returned anything lately.

    is dated the 3rd, i didnt buy anything on the third

    where could it have come from?

  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 41,034
    Mystarra said:
    Tjohn said:
    kyoto kid said:
    Tjohn said:

    Chem Lab I worked in had a Trash-80. I wrote a few basic apps for it. surprise I so old...

    ...I still wrote programmes for a Burroughs B6700 using what today are considered dead languages, but I know LG has me beat.

    Used both card punches, and Decwriter terminals (like the one on the left - crikey, what a waste of paper). The only one with a CRT was the Sysop.  .

    You win. smileyyes

    Yeah, but your's was bigger'n mine. surprise

    blast from the past.  lol  remember the ones looked like a washing machine?  lifting the disks out

    back ups on reel tape, the special cabinet to store the reels?

    ..ah yes, those wonderful Digital™ "Maytags" as we used to call them.   600# With a whopping 178 MB capacity.

    I still remember using a "desktop" 9 track tape reader at the development firm I worked at in the late 80s early 90s to read typesetting tapes from various medical journal publications which were converted (through an array of filtering programmes I wrote) into a readable format on screen for final editing and cleanup before being burned onto CD-ROM.

     

  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 41,034
    DanaTA said:

    Non-complaint:  Yay!  I found my headphone replacement earpad set.  It was in the drawer I'd looked in twice before. frown  Probably just out of phase and had slid into the "Phantom Zone" for a while.indecision

    'Nother non-complaint:  Yay!  My new smart phone (Samsung J3 "Luna Pro") has arrived.  Now charging battery.  Finally joining the mid-2nd decade of the 21st century.  Phone tech is 2 years old so it's already enfeebled but I hope it will suffice.  The price (~$50) was right.yes  I cannot for the life of me understand paying significant fractions of a thousand dollars for a freakin' phone just for the latest fad bait.surprise

     

    I know.  My sister has the latest iPhone.  What a waste.  Maybe it's not the latest, but it was when she got it.  I read an article about the latest one.  It was touted as the best one yet.  But, tests in an independent lab showed that it was actually slower than the previous model!!!

    Dana

    ...I remember when the iPhone 6 came out and there was the issue with it bending.

  • Mystarra said:

    huuh  i have mysterious store credit of 5 bux

    i haven't redeemed a gc or returned anything lately.

    is dated the 3rd, i didnt buy anything on the third

    where could it have come from?

    There was a Labor Day promo on  2 Sept where if you bought one new or still ease you got a $5 credit added to your account (and one of the qualifying items was a PC+ item that cost less than $5). If you bought two new or still new releases you got more credit and the highest was buying 3 (or more) got you $17 credit.

  • MistaraMistara Posts: 38,675
    Mystarra said:

    huuh  i have mysterious store credit of 5 bux

    i haven't redeemed a gc or returned anything lately.

    is dated the 3rd, i didnt buy anything on the third

    where could it have come from?

    There was a Labor Day promo on  2 Sept where if you bought one new or still ease you got a $5 credit added to your account (and one of the qualifying items was a PC+ item that cost less than $5). If you bought two new or still new releases you got more credit and the highest was buying 3 (or more) got you $17 credit.

    oh that explains it.  thanks smiley

    i was trying to resist the sci fi crates in fg
    didn't know i had a fetish for sci fi crates.

  • LeatherGryphonLeatherGryphon Posts: 11,499
    edited September 2019
    kyoto kid said:
    Tjohn said:
    kyoto kid said:
    Tjohn said:

    Chem Lab I worked in had a Trash-80. I wrote a few basic apps for it. surprise I so old...

    ...I still wrote programmes for a Burroughs B6700 using what today are considered dead languages, but I know LG has me beat.

    Used both card punches, and Decwriter terminals (like the one on the left - crikey, what a waste of paper). The only one with a CRT was the Sysop.  .

    You win. smileyyes

    Yeah, but yours was bigger'n mine. surprise

    ...but isn't yours older? 

    Well, it was around the mid-'70s.  I had two machines.  The oldest was a Raytheon 706.  The Computer History Museum lists the manual for the 706 as being published in 1969.  The other computer was also a Raytheon but they'd reorganized as Raytheon Data Systems so it was an RDS-500

    The 706 had 16K words of actual core memory (16-bit words).  And the RDS-500 had 32K words of core memory (16-bit words)  The newer (about 1975) RDS-500 had floating point arithmetic and came with disk drives but the older 706 had no floating point features and had no native hard drive.  It had 7-track mag tape (yes, 7-track, and only 200 characters per inchsurprise), a high speed paper tape reader, a snail speed paper tape punch, a card reader, a line printer and an ASR-33 teletype.  I had to write floating point routines for the CPU.  As well as drivers for the hard drive (when we got one) and a driver for the Gould electrostatic graphic printer and the Tektronics storage screen graphic display device. 

    The first year or so of programming on the 706 was a bitch because we had to read the FORTRAN compiler from paper tape, read the source code from the card reader, write intermediate compilation data to the magtape, punch out papertape assembly code (at 10 characters per second), then read in the papertape assembly code (thankfully the papertape reader was high speed) for assembly into binary executable code to be punched out as binary to paper tape, then read the papertape binaries and all necessary subroutine binary papertapes into memory for execution.  If lucky I could get through 3 or 4 FORTRAN complilations per day. frown I hated code that borked, it would waste a whole day to fix three errors.angry

    The RDS-500 that we got a year or two later was soooo nice, it had a proper disk drive that was used by the FORTRAN compiler and assembler.  Yay!  Yet, neither one had any sort of network capability.  I wanted to synchronize activities between the two machines so I dug out the schematics found some programmable signals on the backplane wirewrap board, devised a serial connection between the two machines and created my own serial protocol for data and event transmission.  By the end of 5 years of development on those ancient machines we were creating topology maps sent to other buildings on the space center and creating video animations of electric field intensity topology maps over the space center grounds during thunderstorms.  Remember, this was about 45 years ago and we had squat for memory.  One had to be creative with one's algorithms and economical with one's code.cool

    The 706 was strictly single process at a time computing.  The RDS-500 had a multi-process operating system, but I was one of of the few users in the country who actually used its multi-process features and pushed them to their max and found some problems with it.  I ended up reading the entire source code for the OS, flowcharting it, and discovering where the multi-process separations could be violated.  I devised a patch to fix it and sent it in.  They were very appreciative.  

    Note:  The old 7-track mag tape drive data density was so sparse that we could place a clear disk shaped capsule of magnetic fluid on the tape and actually see the individual bits written to the tape.surprise

    Post edited by LeatherGryphon on
  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 41,034

    ...yeah, you win. 

  • LeatherGryphonLeatherGryphon Posts: 11,499
    edited September 2019
    kyoto kid said:

    ...yeah, you win. 

    Well, yeah it was older.  

    The mag tape drive was interesting.  When I started we only had the one 7-track 200-cpi drive so we couldn't even copy tapes.  Which made life interesting for a while. 

    Several years later the tape drive started behaving somewhat wonky so we dug out the manuals that came with it and found the alignment specifications and instructions.  With oscilloscopes attached at various places we tweaked signals and alignment screws and watched the signals on the scopes reach specified levels & forms until we came to one instruction that said to tweak a particular screw in a particular place, but we had no such place. frown  This was back in the day when hardware manuals were bibles and had very exacting and trustworthy data so we were confused.  We called the manufacturer and described our problem.  Finally, their engineers asked us for the serial number of the drive.   We found the serial number to be "00001" and told them and they replied with some excitement.  "Oh, you guys are the ones who got our prototype!  We wondered where it had gone."surprise  Luckily the guy who designed it was still with the company and he directed us to the proper place on the equipment to tweak that last adjustment.  But other than that one issue the drive had worked fine for the years that I had dealt with it.  Solid machinery.yes  Probably a boat anchor now.sad

    And now I know that software design is not the only engineering product for which the prototype is forced into production.indecision

    Eventually, when we got the RDS-500 it came with two 9-track, 800-cpi tapedrives.  Wheee..., fancy!  But on the 706 we still used the 7-track drive.  Also, by that time Raytheon had provided a disk drive for the 706 and a FORTRAN compiler that used it.  Wheee... we're thoroughly modern! yes  I was so damn tired of organizing and maintaining the bazillions of little rolls of paper tapes that comprised my subroutine library.

    And now for something not completely different:

    On YouTube, there's a series of videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwftXqJu8hs that show some guys refurbishing an IBM-1401 computer from the early-'60s.  It's particularly interesting to me for two reasons.

     

    1) In college I cut my baby teeth on an IBM-1130 which was from the mid '60s and used some of the same equipment (line printer, card reader).

    2) One of the guys in some of the videos is someone I knew in college.  OMG, he's become an old man! surprise

    Post edited by LeatherGryphon on
  • MistaraMistara Posts: 38,675
    edited September 2019

    the old 386 or 486sx was hurtin without a math co-processor

    if you had a 486dx2/66 you were really cooking.

    Post edited by Mistara on
  • ChoholeChohole Posts: 33,604
    Mystarra said:

    the old 386 or 486sx was hurtin without a math co-processor

    if you had a 486dx2/66 you were really cooking.

    Aye   my 486dx2/66  went on for years and years, served me, served my Son when I bought my first pentium, served his children when he upgraded, lost track of it after that as he split up with the mother of his older children but left them with the 486 to play with.

  • LeatherGryphonLeatherGryphon Posts: 11,499
    edited September 2019
    Mystarra said:

    the old 386 or 486sx was hurtin without a math co-processor

    if you had a 486dx2/66 you were really cooking.

    Yeah, not having specialized math hardware is like having to make your own pasta before every meal.  Possible but slows down dinner.

    I'm in reminiscing mode so forgive me:  With memory being sparse and no floating point instructions in the CPU it was sometimes necessary to return to the basics of computation.  There were a couple of times where I had a calculation to make that would have been a breeze with floating point but there was not enough memory to include the floating point routine and also since it was a real-time situation, speed was essential and a generic floating point routine would have been too slow.  So, by choosing appropriate limits on the input data I would analyze the algorithm and was able, with appropriate scaling and acceptable precision, to reduce it into its primitive functionality and devise judicious use of very fast integer register shifts, rotates, masks, and adds & subtracts to evaluate the answer using only integer arithmetic and squeeze the answer into a register without having to use generic floating point algorithms.  These types of solutions were prevelant back in the days of limited memory.  They worked fine as long as you were certain that your input values would not exceed your expectations and make mincemeat of your algorithm.  This is also why some programs (not mine) failed catastrophically and made the news a few times.  I believe there was an incident during one of the moon landings where input values were out of range and the computer went wonky and the astronaut had to quickly recover or become a new crater on the moon.surprise

    Post edited by LeatherGryphon on
  • MistaraMistara Posts: 38,675

    day job giving me the AHjidda  i'm too old for this scatt

    non complaint  1936 flash gordon good for hours of giggles.  I'm used to Brian Blessed as the hawk men Jefe

     

  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 41,034
    kyoto kid said:

    ...yeah, you win. 

    Well, yeah it was older.  

    The mag tape drive was interesting.  When I started we only had the one 7-track 200-cpi drive so we couldn't even copy tapes.  Which made life interesting for a while. 

    Several years later the tape drive started behaving somewhat wonky so we dug out the manuals that came with it and found the alignment specifications and instructions.  With oscilloscopes attached at various places we tweaked signals and alignment screws and watched the signals on the scopes reach specified levels & forms until we came to one instruction that said to tweak a particular screw in a particular place, but we had no such place. frown  This was back in the day when hardware manuals were bibles and had very exacting and trustworthy data so we were confused.  We called the manufacturer and described our problem.  Finally, their engineers asked us for the serial number of the drive.   We found the serial number to be "00001" and told them and they replied with some excitement.  "Oh, you guys are the ones who got our prototype!  We wondered where it had gone."surprise  Luckily the guy who designed it was still with the company and he directed us to the proper place on the equipment to tweak that last adjustment.  But other than that one issue the drive had worked fine for the years that I had dealt with it.  Solid machinery.yes  Probably a boat anchor now.sad

    And now I know that software design is not the only engineering product for which the prototype is forced into production.indecision

    Eventually, when we got the RDS-500 it came with two 9-track, 800-cpi tapedrives.  Wheee..., fancy!  But on the 706 we still used the 7-track drive.  Also, by that time Raytheon had provided a disk drive for the 706 and a FORTRAN compiler that used it.  Wheee... we're thoroughly modern! yes  I was so damn tired of organizing and maintaining the bazillions of little rolls of paper tapes that comprised my subroutine library.

    And now for something not completely different:

    On YouTube, there's a series of videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwftXqJu8hs that show some guys refurbishing an IBM-1401 computer from the early-'60s.  It's particularly interesting to me for two reasons.

     

    1) In college I cut my baby teeth on an IBM-1130 which was from the mid '60s and used some of the same equipment (line printer, card reader).

    2) One of the guys in some of the videos is someone I knew in college.  OMG, he's become an old man! surprise

    ...cool.

  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 41,034
    edited September 2019
    Mystarra said:

    the old 386 or 486sx was hurtin without a math co-processor

    if you had a 486dx2/66 you were really cooking.

    Yeah, not having specialized math hardware is like having to make your own pasta before every meal.  Possible but slows down dinner.

    I'm in reminiscing mode so forgive me:  With memory being sparse and no floating point instructions in the CPU it was sometimes necessary to return to the basics of computation.  There were a couple of times where I had a calculation to make that would have been a breeze with floating point but there was not enough memory to include the floating point routine and also since it was a real-time situation, speed was essential and a generic floating point routine would have been too slow.  So, by choosing appropriate limits on the input data I would analyze the algorithm and was able, with appropriate scaling and acceptable precision, to reduce it into its primitive functionality and devise judicious use of very fast integer register shifts, rotates, masks, and adds & subtracts to evaluate the answer using only integer arithmetic and squeeze the answer into a register without having to use generic floating point algorithms.  These types of solutions were prevelant back in the days of limited memory.  They worked fine as long as you were certain that your input values would not exceed your expectations and make mincemeat of your algorithm.  This is also why some programs (not mine) failed catastrophically and made the news a few times.  I believe there was an incident during one of the moon landings where input values were out of range and the computer went wonky and the astronaut had to quickly recover or become a new crater on the moon.surprise

    ...I actually have a manual pasta maker,.

    yeah, compared to today where an automated probe can touch down safely on the surface of Mars or even a moving comet, seems so much was still done by via "seat of the pants" back in the day. 

    Post edited by kyoto kid on
  • PetercatPetercat Posts: 2,321

    Non-complaint:  Yay!  I found my headphone replacement earpad set.  It was in the drawer I'd looked in twice before. frown  Probably just out of phase and had slid into the "Phantom Zone" for a while.indecision

    'Nother non-complaint:  Yay!  My new smart phone (Samsung J3 "Luna Pro") has arrived.  Now charging battery.  Finally joining the mid-2nd decade of the 21st century.  Phone tech is 2 years old so it's already enfeebled but I hope it will suffice.  The price (~$50) was right.yes  I cannot for the life of me understand paying significant fractions of a thousand dollars for a freakin' phone just for the latest fad bait.surprise

     

    I think cell phones have replaced motorcycles as an integral part of the teenage mating ritual.

  • MistaraMistara Posts: 38,675
    edited September 2019

    never noticed before  

    Dirty Harry resembles wolverine in some lighting smiley

     

    never knew there were more trinity movies

    Post edited by Mistara on
  • Non-complaint:  Yay!  My new smart phone does have better antenna or receiving circuits and is able to (just barely) make phone connections from my house without me having to stand on a chair upstairs leaning against the top of the window.indecision

    Complaint:  Getting it to work though, was a bitch.  Straight out of the box it looked like it was going to work but it refused to complete activation.  I spent the first day trying all sorts of things to get it transfer my phone number to the new phone but no deal.sad  Then today I spent 2 hours on the phone with TracFone helpdesk having them try several of the things I tried myself yesterday.  We were turning on and off all sorts of options and pulling the SIM card to double check ID numbers and configuration values.  Finally, I heard someone in the background at the helpdesk yell out, "try updating the Android OS itself".  Which meant that we had to put everything back together and re-enable WiFi access but when the new OS was installed it all just worked.  Yay! yes

    Non-Complaint:  Now that my new phone is working and is much faster and less frustrating than my old phone I've finally succeeded in installing the Uber app and my pharmacy app which was my whole purpose in buying a new phone to begin with.smiley  I even figured out how to transfer my old contacts list to the new phone.  Yay!

  • Petercat said:

    Non-complaint:  Yay!  I found my headphone replacement earpad set.  It was in the drawer I'd looked in twice before. frown  Probably just out of phase and had slid into the "Phantom Zone" for a while.indecision

    'Nother non-complaint:  Yay!  My new smart phone (Samsung J3 "Luna Pro") has arrived.  Now charging battery.  Finally joining the mid-2nd decade of the 21st century.  Phone tech is 2 years old so it's already enfeebled but I hope it will suffice.  The price (~$50) was right.yes  I cannot for the life of me understand paying significant fractions of a thousand dollars for a freakin' phone just for the latest fad bait.surprise

     

    I think cell phones have replaced motorcycles as an integral part of the teenage mating ritual.

    Perhaps, but it might be debatable whether they're less dangerous.frown

  • TJohnTJohn Posts: 11,093

  • Oooh noooo.... And I'm going camping!

  • Oooh noooo.... And I'm going camping!

    A tent collapsing on your head is less bad than a house collapsing on your head.

  • Oooh noooo.... And I'm going camping!

    A tent collapsing on your head is less bad than a house collapsing on your head.

    Just don't pitch tent too close the little creek on the flood plain. enlightened

  • Oooh noooo.... And I'm going camping!

    A tent collapsing on your head is less bad than a house collapsing on your head.

    Awkward... I read that as "a horse collapsing on your head". My clever response was all geared to the probability of running into a random horse versus a random axe murderer. But houses... those things are everywhere! *cue scary music*

     

    Oooh noooo.... And I'm going camping!

    A tent collapsing on your head is less bad than a house collapsing on your head.

    Just don't pitch tent too close the little creek on the flood plain. enlightened

    i'm too girlie for tents. i need a toilet that flushes and a hot tub. i think i've escallated the camping idea to a late summer/early fall weekend get away. cabin, castle, or hotel... mmmhmmm...

    sneaky side complaint: working with a geometric shell has given my models the blight and some other issues.

    sneaky side complaint resolution: fiddle fiddle. i cured the blight.

    additional side complaint: but now i have a complexion issue (model's face doesn't match neck).

  • MistaraMistara Posts: 38,675
    edited September 2019

    I stuck again.

    I know a font can be embedded in a pdf,

    but can a font be embedded in a word doc?

     

    google worked lol

    Post edited by Mistara on
  • MistaraMistara Posts: 38,675

    is there a way to set the font size in my sig line?  trying to make it smaller  like 8 pt

  • LeatherGryphonLeatherGryphon Posts: 11,499
    edited September 2019

    Oooh noooo.... And I'm going camping!

    A tent collapsing on your head is less bad than a house collapsing on your head.

    Awkward... I read that as "a horse collapsing on your head". My clever response was all geared to the probability of running into a random horse versus a random axe murderer. But houses... those things are everywhere! *cue scary music*

     

    Oooh noooo.... And I'm going camping!

    A tent collapsing on your head is less bad than a house collapsing on your head.

    Just don't pitch tent too close the little creek on the flood plain. enlightened

    i'm too girlie for tents. i need a toilet that flushes and a hot tub. i think i've escallated the camping idea to a late summer/early fall weekend get away. cabin, castle, or hotel... mmmhmmm...

    sneaky side complaint: working with a geometric shell has given my models the blight and some other issues.

    sneaky side complaint resolution: fiddle fiddle. i cured the blight.

    additional side complaint: but now i have a complexion issue (model's face doesn't match neck).

    That type of camping is like claiming you're horseriding while riding in the cab of the truck pulling the horse trailer.

    Post edited by LeatherGryphon on
  • Oooh noooo.... And I'm going camping!

    A tent collapsing on your head is less bad than a house collapsing on your head.

    Awkward... I read that as "a horse collapsing on your head". My clever response was all geared to the probability of running into a random horse versus a random axe murderer. But houses... those things are everywhere! *cue scary music*

     

    Oooh noooo.... And I'm going camping!

    A tent collapsing on your head is less bad than a house collapsing on your head.

    Just don't pitch tent too close the little creek on the flood plain. enlightened

    i'm too girlie for tents. i need a toilet that flushes and a hot tub. i think i've escallated the camping idea to a late summer/early fall weekend get away. cabin, castle, or hotel... mmmhmmm...

    sneaky side complaint: working with a geometric shell has given my models the blight and some other issues.

    sneaky side complaint resolution: fiddle fiddle. i cured the blight.

    additional side complaint: but now i have a complexion issue (model's face doesn't match neck).

    That type of camping is like claiming you're horseriding while riding in the cab of the truck pulling the horse trailer.

    oh you're being generous now... lol...

  • Sfariah DSfariah D Posts: 26,247

    I went to see a foot doctor.  He suggested that I get some shoe insert or something like that.

    Right now I have not gotten my computer back but I am on a computer in the center's computer lab.

  • WinterMoonWinterMoon Posts: 1,933

    i'm too girlie for tents. i need a toilet that flushes and a hot tub. i think i've escallated the camping idea to a late summer/early fall weekend get away. cabin, castle, or hotel...

    That's too bad. In a tent you would be relatively safe from axe murderers, because of the extremely small chance they'd actually find you. Axe murderers don't just roam around the woods, looking in random places for victims. They stay around cabins, because they know sooner or later someone will rent it again. Remote mountain lodges are also known to turn random people into axe murderers. The only safe option sounds like a castle.

    And if you do go into the woods, make sure that you and all your companions are attached to each other with rope, even when just walking on a path. A lot of people vanish into thin air every year, when the people they're hiking with lose sight of them for as short a time as a second. They're never found!!! And if they are, it's hundreds of miles from where they disappeared, months or years later, and they look just like they did at the moment of their disappearance. Oh, and they're dead, like just recently deceased. Sometimes the bodies are still warm, despite lying in the snow. Usually they'll be missing socks and shoes. I've read about this on Reddit, so I know it's true!!! No one knows what's causing this to happen, but the most popular theories are time-gates and Sashquatch. You have about a 2000% better chance of being killed by a Bigfoot than by a bear. And the most important thing to remember when you go into any place that has trees: If you see random staircases in the woods, you have to pretend you haven't noticed them, and stay as far away as possible. If the path passes by near them, turn back and go hiking another day. Or never again, because that's even safer.

    Have a jolly weekend, and enjoy your trip to the great outdoors! laugh

     

This discussion has been closed.