Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
-
A couple of years ago, I was working in a computer shop as a "technician", I was 15, first job I ever had.
One day an elderly lady came into the shop, probably 50'ish, she and her whole family "suffered" from electromagnetic radiation, and the mother had the worst suffering. She complained about her TV box that just had died.
I accept the tuner and see it's wrapped with 10 layers of aluminium foil, with a tiny hole for the IR receiver.
The whole box smells like burnt electronics, and the foil gets darker for each layer I unwrap. I try explain to her that the box gets warm and overheated by wrapping it like this, and she's lucky that it didn't catch fire.
I further explain to her that she will not get a new box, because the warranty does not cover _this_. The mother tells me she has to wrap it like this, because she gets headaches when she's watching the news.
She then proceeds to go into a rage mode and gets her whole family into the shop, where all of them starts yelling at me, the younger kids start throwing stuff down from the shelves and touching the TVs with sticky fingers (literally, sticky, like yuck!).
Unsure what to do, boss is in a meeting, and my colleague is busy in the back.
So I calmly tell them that in this building there's 4 wireless networks, 3 wireless phones, high voltage cables run in the wall behind me, there's factory tracks 20 meters behind the building, next door business is an electrician, you're standing in front of wall with 30-40 TVs, 5 HDMI splitters, 3 TV boxes and a Blu-ray player. And they've all been standing in front of them for the last 10 minutes.
They all suddenly feel really sick and run out of the store, never to be seen again. From that day, I decided I'll never work in a shop again, and pursued my dreams to become a developer.
TL;DR: Family is "sensitive" to electromagnetic radiation, almost put burnt down their house because of stupidity, yelled at me. I decided to pursue my dream as a developer.16 -
So today I saw this guy:
long size = long.MaxValue;
//method that may or may not set
//size
int[] array = new int[size];
Apparently we are processing blu-ray movies in place in memory.5 -
We had a blind auction at work. Selling off 'redundant hardware'
Most of it was old crap but a bit a couple of bids in for shits and giggles. Also, I'm a desktop man but we have rolling blackouts so an older laptop for the simple sake of having something bigger than my phone to browse definitely has some appeal.
So there was an old HP Elitebook 8540W. A chonky boi if ever I did see one.
Spec sheet as listed
4GB DDR3
i7 M 640 @ 2.80 Ghz
128GB SSD
Win 10 Pro
"not booting up/ power button flashing"
So bid R100. Now for context, a petrol is R22 a liter. A Big Mac is R43, a Big Mac meal is R90
So basically I big so I could harvest the SSD. And I won.
Much to my surprise, I simply attached the correct charger and it boots fine. The drive was empty though but that's fine cause I was gonna chuck Ubuntu on it anyway. Also found it was in fact 8GB of RAM. It also has a blu ray drive
So in summary, for the price of 1.1 Big Macs I got:
Full 1080p 15.6"
128GB Samsung SSD
8GB ram
First gen i7
Blu ray player
I'm most not sad about the 900x that I bid on as well. It was a cute little thing, my plan was to steal the ram and ssd out of this thing and put it in that, then boom ultra portable little machine for R400. Oh I also got an old monitor with a feint line down the screen for a grand total of R18 -
Non-techie friend: Does Blu-ray Compact disc will be blue in color or contains blue films ( In India we use blue films to refer porn movies ) ?
Me: :/6 -
Dear laptop vendors, stop wasting so much precious device estate on nothing!
This wasted physical space could easily fit in six USB ports, or four USB ports and two HDMI ports, or four USB ports and one HDMI and one LAN. Or four USB ports and two SD card slots.
> "Who the heck needs 6 USB ports?"
You don't need more USB ports… until the day you do need them comes.
> "HDMI and LAN are feature creep!"
It's "feature creep", until you need it.
> "Ever heard of USB hubs?"
While better than nothing, they are tedious to carry around and can hardly support more than one external high-power device such as an external hard drive or blu-ray drive, except if you have an external power adapter, which is even more tedious to carry.
Also, have fun closing programs until the operating system stops whining "volume is busy" just so you can unmount your external SSD and then reconnect it through a USB hub. Sounds like fun, huh?
You were playing audio from your external SSD? Too bad. Now you need to close the media player to be able to unmount the SSD, then later restart it and seek the last position. And all of that could be avoided if your laptop happened to have one more USB port.
9 -
Friend of mine wants to use his old blu ray player as a surround sound amp. Okay, sure it's supposed to have that functionality.
Struggle, struggle, struggle. Then I see on the back, a powered by Java sticker. Guess it's one of those 3 billion devices4 -
Why does it have to be so hard to watch blu-ray movies on Linux? Either the decryption libraries crash or they freeze the whole system.
I give up, I'm booting Windows now.7
Top Tags
Weekly Rant
View