Be Excellent To Each Other

I like the guy. A lot. He also replies to comments and engages with people. Truth if ever needed, don't piss off a determined Scot !

I think a lot of people don't realise how long this guy has been around, and how much info he has. But I can 100% vouch, he's spot on. Just after I met my first wife over Yahoo I got a job working at a local computer shop. It was a pretty small shop (two small old stores) but the reason we were always busy was because we bought the rights to Amstrad CPC, and basically had all of the parts Sugar wanted gone. This meant we were the only "official" UK stockist for the parts. You wouldn't believe how much money they made from that. How many older folk wanted them repaired etc..

Any way the other part of our business was school contracts. So we sold *a lot* of pre built PCs, and serviced and repaired them too. Now when I started working there in '98 there was only really Intel around. AMD did have the K62 or whatever but it wasn't very good. Now we had already been told outright by Intel that if we overclocked CPUs and they got wind of it they would never supply us with another CPU. Totally anti overclocking and very gung ho about it too. We would get constant threats from them.

So yeah, sorry for digressing.. What I was leading onto was how Intel behaved when the Athlon came out. The original slot one. Slot A? something like that, it was basically a take on Intel's slot 1. The Intel rep came around and basically said blatantly that if we stocked a single AMD product that they would pull their contract and never sell us anything Intel again. And I remember telling the rep "That's fucking BS" and he said that was the way it was.

And they haven't changed at all. IIRC they have just settled on that? or it may even be ongoing. But that put me off of Intel, and is why I have a chip on my shoulder.

I would imagine it voided support contracts doing so.

Well bugger me. I had not watched the video before I posted that ^. Just watching it now and I literally had shivers running down my spine when he got to the Athlon CPUs. That's *exactly* what Intel did to us.

Kov - no, the contracts with the schools were between us (Edcom, or Educational Computers) and the schools. However, for CPUs we bought directly from Intel and were an authorised seller. For HDDs, floppys etc we used distros but Intel had their contracts directly with businesses, so there was no middle man. And this was good for us, because it meant we got all of the POS crap to put in the windows and so on. Which was why my boss basically shit it and bent over. We never sold a single AMD CPU...

You still had a contract with Intel, on purchasing the CPUs. If you clocked them, you are voided any warranty on the CPU. Which is the same thing.

Oh on the overclocking? sure. They were against it from day one. AMD on the other hand didn't care.

Irony is here we are all of these years later and Intel are actually selling and marketing unlocked overclockable CPUs.

I knew some of the shady shit Intel had got up to over the years, but I've never seen the 'case against them' presented as a single coherent argument like that before, and I never realised they'd been quite so blatantly corrupt, and given to bribery, intimidation and bullying.

The stuff with Dell is particularly shocking, whereby Dell were like 'We need to start selling AMD based kit because it's so clearly better than Intel and our customers are taking the piss out of us and we're losing both reputation and sales', and Intel were just like, 'OK, here's an even bigger backhander than we've given you thus far, no AMD please'. (Intel were GIVING Dell more money than Dell were actually making, just to stop them selling AMD.)

Glad I bought Ryzen.

Hope you're not running Windows on that chip of yours!

Some things are unavoidable.

Just too much stuff that doesn't work, doesn't exist, or is simply too much of a ballache to get running/migrated.

An absolute show stopper, right out of the gates, is fruit machine emulation. The emulators only exist for, and work on, Windows.

My principles have practical limits.

The last few Intel CPUs I have bought have been ES. The last time I bought one new was the I7 950..

Thing is Intel were still pulling crap like that very recently. It happened on Linus' forums. Basically Intel bribed sorry dicks with nothing better to do with promises of goodies and gifts etc. "Rewards" they called it. So Linus must have got a back hander too because all of a sudden you had these users on the forums going under the title (IN BOLD LIEK FROOTFORUMZ) "Intel Response Squad". Now the game, according to Intel, was that these people would come along and aid any one who was looking to buy an Intel CPU. But it's pretty obvious what they were doing. If some one posted a thread asking about anything to do with AMD at all these "Response Squad" twats would come along and immediately go into some deranged fanboy rant about how AMD was crap etc and buy Intel.

I guess they thought it would work, given they were basically using minions and hadn't directly come out and told them to do what they were doing (they didn't need to really there were already plenty of rabid assholes on there already) but soon after it all stopped and the Intel Response Squad vanished. Oddly enough so did literally every trace of it, including all of the posts, the initial threads etc. It all just vanished. I would imagine Linus heard from AMD's lawyers.



That is literally the only trace I can find of it ever existing. Some gutted fanboy with that as his sig.

So yeah, dirty bastards.

Cheapy compatible ink cartridges killed my printer! (And ate my hamster.)

As per this post here - viewtopic.php?p=932367#p932367

I moved to dodgy Amazon cartridges for our trusty old Canon MP-640 last December. The printer had worked perfectly since 2009 on genuine ink. Within 10 months on compatibles, BOOM HEADSHOT, dead. I had a Google on the error and there's all sorts of stuff you can apparently do to bring a Canon back to life from a B200 ERROR but I'm like fuck that printers are cheap and time is short and Dishonored 2 won't play itself. (Like I'm going to start washing print heads in distilled water.)

I tried Currys but after spending 10 minutes deciding on one the young chap cheerfully informed me that my choice was not in stock and he could order one for me that would get here in 3-5 days and I'm just like, 'Well I can do that as well, and it'll cost less'.

As such I have an Officejet 8720 all-in-one on the way from Ebuyer (which is far better than the one I was going to get from Currys, for just an extra £20), it comes with starter ink cartridges but I'll get us straight onto that HP INSTANT INK thing which looks really good, the £4 per month 100 page plan will do us fine I think, especially with the 100 page rollover it allows - and we can always pay a bit more for heavy months.

Exciting times.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc, as Mali would say.

Mali says GET IN DA CHOPPA

My reasoning is sound.

Some of the cartridges were a bit 'drippy', the genuine ones were never like that.

You got lucky. Printers, especially inkjet printers, are the spawn of Satan's diseased gall bladder.

Using an inkjet printer at home in 2017 is like watching TV in 720p

Cras has seen things you wouldn't believe.

I should use a laser printer?

The way ink works in printers is out of order, I spent around £1000 on a small office HP all in one for our office in Dublin. It came with a set of "light" cartridges. When I went over to set it up also ordered a set of larger cartridges so that I could leave with plenty of page capacity.

There was a cock up with the delivery and the black larger cartridge was delayed, the printer refused to allow me to put in the 3 larger colours ones and the light black.

Have the same issue with my home printer as well, the light cartridges ran out and there was a delay getting bigger ones. We use this model at work and always send them out with full ones, so there was a box full of lights in the store.

I took 4 home to tide me over and the printer refused to let me use a 2nd set of them.

This has made me realise that I've used the same printer for around 10 years or more... and it works fine.

I'm scared to upgrade now.

My new HP Envy Printer uses the postal ink thing for £2 a month, they keep posting my cartridges.. All good.

I used to have a Canon printer that I won as a sales prize at work. It was great! Cheap to run, quiet, great quality. It even looked nice.

My wife's cousin dropped a houseplant into it.

Well this is why I'm hoping HP INSTANT INK will turn out to be a good idea and a good deal.

I reckon we were spending at least £100 per year on traditional cartridges, so £48 per year to get nice fresh cartridges sent to the door without me doing anything seems like a reasonable amount to pay. Plus I don't have to worry about them running out as they're MEGA XXXXXL cartridges which HP don't stress about as they just remote-kill them if you stop paying.

It's still a bit of a scam of course, since the amount of ink in a printer cartridge has a value of a few pence, but I can't be arsed with laser printers and their super-expensive toners, slow start up, noise and all the rest of it. (And HP insist that with their INSTANT INK service overall costs are lower than lasers.)

I haven't looked into colour laser printers much as I've had no need to print colour for ages, but my mono laser printer is pretty quiet, doesn't take long to start printing and prints quickly. My last toner cartridge was bought in January and cost me £11.59 (not an official Samsung cartridge, obviously). Plus the print quality is more consistent than with inkjet too.

Also for our scenario we need all-in-one functionality, as Jnr does loads of copying, and Mrs Hearthly scans stuff (and I do sometimes). We like wireless (obv), duplex, document feeder, big paper trays, USB slots, touchscreens, and we're also going to get mobile printing with the new printer. (The one we've ordered has NFC printing as well.)

So whilst you can get a low-end colour laser for 'reasonably cheap' by the time you start matching the feature sets of the inkjet all-in-ones the price creeps up quite a lot, and I'm not sure I'd want to be using non-genuine toner cartridges in a shiny new printer. (And colour toners are rather expensive I believe.)

TBH I'm pretty happy with a £150 printer and £4 per month for ink, for a device that'll meet all our needs and new ink just gets posted through the front door when we need it.

(There's also a £50 cashback offer on the printer although I won't call it £100 printer until we've successfully got the cash back, as those offers are notoriously torturous and long-winded.)

Which is it, please? MrsA needs one for whateveritis she does.

Fair enough The one I have has some of those features (I'll be amazed if I ever print anything using NFC, but the option is there I suppose), but certainly not all of them.

The HP Envy one, supports printing direct from any phone. It was about £40 in a sale at sainsburys.

https://www.ebuyer.com/747642-hp-office ... d9l19a-a80

Be warned, they're quite big apparently.

£50 cashback offer ends today.

Thanking you.

I think I have the same one as you, I think I remember you recommending it in the past. I've never used the NFC print doober either.

Anyway, I have the Samsung Xpress M2026W and it's ace. Very compact, prints fast and, since I spoke to a kind and patient man at Samsung, is now on a static IP so I don't have to reconnect the fucker to Wifi every other week.

Mine's a little different as it has the wireless scanning too. It's this one. It's been great so far, so now I've typed that, it'll break.

Printer arrived towards the end of last week, here is my PRINTER REVIEW of the HP OFFICEJET PRO 8720.

It's big, but not over-the-top big, although I'm not quite sure why it's as physically large as it is, I'm sure I've seen printers with the same feature set be produced with lesser dimensions. That said there are no bits that need to open or extend for any of it to work, like our old Canon had a flap that dropped down on the front to allow prints to come out, but here it's got an always-open yawning chasm. Also there's a document feeder on the top which is potentially handy, especially for feeding documents into it.

Setup was super easy, once it was out of the box there were loads of bits of bright blue sellotape to remove which were holding various parts into place, after that it was just a case of setting it in place, plugging it in, turning it on, and following the onscreen prompts.

There are no physical buttons apart from the power button, everything else is done via a few 'soft' buttons and the touchscreen, which is a decent size/resolution and responsive enough.

The guided setup worked perfectly, and it plays little videos on the screen (with sound!) to show you how the ink cartridges go in and suchlike, there's even a little video to show you how to load the paper tray, for the feeble of mind. Attaching it to a wireless network is part of the setup, once that's done it toddles of to HP to get firmware and software updates, as well as updating its collection of built-in apps. It also gets an email address for itself so you can email things to it from anywhere and it prints them out. (That stuff isn't mandatory, but it seemed daft not to make it as connected and modern and swishy as possible.)

(I haven't had a play around with the apps yet, but there seems to be Google Drive and Dropbox integration of some form available, scan to email, and stuff like that.)

Excellently, it seems that PLUG-N-PLAY now works properly, a mere 22 years after it was first promoted with Windows 95. The three Windows 10 machines on the network all detected the new printer's presence and installed the drivers for it, and also suggested we get the HP App from the Windows Store, which I did, and it provides most of the functionality of the full software install, to the extent that I haven't even bothered installing the full software suite on any of the PCs.

I've set up scanning locations on each of our PCs through the app, so now when any of us go to the printer and press 'SCAN TO NETWORK SHARE' it asks us which of is scanning, we put our own PIN in, and then it scans to our own PCs, which Jnr is very thrilled by.

I also set up HP INSTANT INK which was a painless procedure through the HP website, the first set of cartridges should be here in 10 days apparently, in the meantime we're just using the starter cartridges it came with. Quite spookily, within 15 seconds of finishing setting it up on the HP website, I heard the printer BONG from the other room, so I walked through to it and it was cheerfully thanking me on its screen for signing up for HP INSTANT INK. Clearly we are being watched by sinister pigment-based overlords.

Printing/copying/scanning wise it all works as you'd expect, it's visibly MUCH quicker than the old MP-640, Jnr was impressed at how quickly it rattled off loads of copies of questionnaires for her animals. It has 256MB of RAM so can hold big image-heavy documents in RAM quite easily, whereas the MP-640 would pause quite regularly as the printing client on the PC sent the next bit of the document to it.

Printing quality is excellent, and the paper tray is capacious, it holds 250 sheets which is splendid.

I have gone through the moderately-torturous cashback claim process with HP which should be completed within the next three million years according to the T&Cs, and assuming I haven't got any of it wrong. TBH for £150 it's an awful lot of printer, but getting £50 cashback to make it a £100 printer would be quite the steal of the century.

It's clearly more of a 'small business' printer rather than a true 'home' printer, but since we'll lob a fair amount of stuff at it between the three of us I think it's a good choice for our situation.

There's quite a few things I haven't tried yet, such as NFC printing, and some functionality will never get used, like the fax - but out of the box it was all set up and working as I'd like for the three of us with minimal fuss and effort.

Overall, very impressed, would print again.

875/1000

Yay, printer bargain-tastic!

Also, the first set of HP INSTANT INK cartridges turned up today but I won't be putting them in until the starter cartridges run out.

I printed off a 25 page document yesterday and the 8720 absolutely rattled through it, I've never seen an inkjet go fast, yes it's not as fast as the fastest lasers but it's certainly a match for any sort of midrange laser.

£100 with cashback - what a steal.

I just spent the best part of £4,000 on a gaming laptop for work, they want to have a portable VR solution for scientists and this is the first of 9 we will order if all goes well.

After some efforts to see if HP did anything close to what we wanted I went to Scan.

As is often the case the customer wanted it yesterday, more so after all the time spent looking at HP’s dismal options.

They wanted the laptop to have 2 1080 cards in it, I said that was overkill as they were not going to use a 4K output so one would be enough for the 1080p laptop resolution. They pushed back using the delay on the HP fact finding as an argument so I said Ok as this one is just to test.

So it turns up with 2 huge brick power supplies that feed into a splitter box that has one power cable that goes into the laptop, so much for portability then

Then we find it has Windows 10 Home installed, which is understandable as it’s a gaming laptop, but means we can’t join it to the domain. So before I know this one of my guys wipes all the partitions and tries to build it with Enterprise.

Turns out Scan have some sort of hidden restore partition and then the Windows 10 Home key hidden deep in the BIOS so even after wiping everything it just comes right back up to the original build.

We called them and they wouldn’t help as we had bought this from a reseller, had to get them involved and we will get the information on how to remove the BIOS key etc.

Pain in the arse for enterprise but shows what a great build they have for home use

Oh happy days in 2002 using research grants to build gaming rigs to do structural biology when the Silicon graphics machines with their stereoscopic is vision became a bit leggy.

Our place is big into GPU systems, 300 1080 cards in a "farm" went live in October and I'm ordering my 4th workstation @ £10,000 with 1080Ti cards in it this morning.

They have all moved from the Tesla type cards as you get more performace scaling cheaper gaming cards

So much so that Nvida have caught on and have laid the law down with HP and other big server players trying to stop them from selling branded server systems with gaming cards in, so we build them ourselves

Which LIMS do you use?

Probably his arms, mostly.

A couple Watson Lims for one, for the GPU stuff, the CADD guys either code there own apps or use off the self apps.

These are on CADD worksations and they submit thier jobs to the GPU and CPU farms via a queuing system.

Users are nice and self contained day to day, once I've delivered systems. Last year some guy from Global IT was trying to get them to stop using SUSE and move to Red Hat, he was told to piss off as they weren't prepared to change all their coding and apps so that he could have "Linux standard is Red Hat" on his speadsheet of IT services.

Oh. I meant Laboratory Information Management System. When I did it, we used Nautilus which was pretty good. We would track stuff from DNA design to primer design, through PCR, then sub cloning, cloning and expression. From there it kept going so we could follow the purification into nano scale crystallisation and pull any of the images from the vault. It even went as far as data sets from the synchrotron to the built models. A lot of the software was written in house, like the imaging system for crystals which emailed you when one grew and it was doing a 90 well plate a minute.

And now? Biscuits

If you're suggesting biscuits are less important then buddy, you're wrong.

Perhaps less worthy than the mating habits of fruit flies, but certainly not less important. Oh Gods, no.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malpigh ... ule_system

I did malpighian tubule development as an undergrad, then was a molecular biologist with bacteria and insect cells.

It wasn't "flies fucking"

Same thing, really.

Imaging and screening is another thing all together now, in recent years the scientists are putting in robotic systems that generate data 24\7. Projected image storage growth on my site for 2018 is 200TB, then as we back everything up to disk now another 200TB for that.

Then this year they came with a system that lets them share this stuff between UK and EU sites, it involves sending TB's of data to each site, so our 100MB Wan is getting replaced with a 10GB one in Febuary at a cost of £700,000.