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General => General Discussion => Topic started by: Prog Snob on May 13, 2016, 06:15:08 AM
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I know there's a PC thread, but fuck PCs. Most, not all, of the geeks I know don't use PCs, so I figured why not create a thread for anyone who loves computers and exploring every aspect of them, whether it is building an insanely powerful machine or using nifty software like Wireshark or Kali Linux.
The first article I wanted to post here I just came across while on the Cisco Learning Network. It goes over the basics of fiber-optic cables and the two modes it uses, single-mode and multimode.
https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/blogs/vip-perspectives/2016/05/05/optical-fiber-explained-and-demystified
Dig in!
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I'm not sure how much mileage you're going to get from a discussion on fibre optics.. I think I have forgotten everything I ever learned in school about them. :biggrin:
Can you remember every computer you owned, from a kid? My list goes something like:
* ZX Spectrum 48k + (A UK 8-bit classic. Tape drive. Games took 10 minutes to load.)
* Atari 512ST (Had a fierce rivalry with the Commodore Amiga. First computer I had with a mouse)
* Apple Mac Classic (All in one, with the small black and white screen. Tiny hard drive, thin)
* Apple Mac Performa 630 (Colour! Prince of Persia!)
* Windows Desktop PC - 120Mhz Pentium I, IIRC (Quake (I and II) was an unhealthy additiction. Multiplayer with a friend's computer by linking together with a serial cable. 28k modem that sent the phone bill through the roof.)
* Windows Desktop PC - Some sort of self-assembly job, where I bought the motherboard, case, graphics card, etc separately and put them all together. (Broadband!)
* Windows Desktop PC - Bought this one from a manufacturer. DVD Writer!!
After that, a couple of Windows Laptops, and we're up to date. The first one is a dinosaur now, but I bumped up the memory and installed Ubuntu to keep it limping on.
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I deal with fiberoptics on a daily basis so that stuff is all known to me... not a whole lot to say there besides it's amazing how it works. We deal with almost all 10G short range in our DC and long range for our outside network connections. Internally we are also mostly at 40G between switches and our highest performance servers operate with 100G fiber uplinks.
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People can discuss whatever they want. :) I was just posting an interesting article. Hell, we can talk about water cooling systems or anything else.
As far as remembering all the computer I owned, let's see.
*IBM PC-XT (My parents got it for me for Xmas many years ago)
*Gateway (I don't remember much about it)
*The next two were home built, though I don't remember the specifics of them now.
*Acer laptop. It's what I have now, but I removed Windows from it and right now Linux Mint is installed.
I deal with fiberoptics on a daily basis so that stuff is all known to me... not a whole lot to say there besides it's amazing how it works. We deal with almost all 10G short range in our DC and long range for our outside network connections. Internally we are also mostly at 40G between switches and our highest performance servers operate with 100G fiber uplinks.
We also deal with a lot of fiber optic links here in the huge transit network. I'm not sure of the specifics of them, though I could easily find out. I can imagine they're probably the same speeds that you mentioned.
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Maybe, maybe not. My company needs the highest speeds possible. All my previous jobs at banks didn't come close to having as quick of a network as we have here. To compete with other online ad tech like google and facebook, we need to keep up with the times. 100G long range circuits is a thing now, we are actively looking into it as well.
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People can discuss whatever they want. :) I was just posting an interesting article. Hell, we can talk about water cooling systems or anything else.
Of course - sorry if I came across a little snarky. Didn't mean to. :)
What do you think of Linux Mint? Would it be suitable for older hardware? My ancient laptop dual boots with Ubuntu and Windows 7. I can't fully ditch Windows as I need it to run some of the music software to hook up to my Boss and TC Electronic pedals. It's a pain that Linux isn't more widely supported for that kind of stuff. >:(
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People can discuss whatever they want. :) I was just posting an interesting article. Hell, we can talk about water cooling systems or anything else.
Of course - sorry if I came across a little snarky. Didn't mean to. :)
What do you think of Linux Mint? Would it be suitable for older hardware? My ancient laptop dual boots with Ubuntu and Windows 7. I can't fully ditch Windows as I need it to run some of the music software to hook up to my Boss and TC Electronic pedals. It's a pain that Linux isn't more widely supported for that kind of stuff. >:(
You didn't come across as snarky. I was just clarifying the purpose of the thread. :)
I like Linux Mint, but I wouldn't recommend it for older machines. I would say to go with Ubuntu MATE which is very lightweight.
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Thanks, will check out Ubuntu MATE..
This channel on Youtube is good if you are into retro computer hardware: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8uT9cgJorJPWu7ITLGo9Ww
E.g. this one on oldschool computer music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_3d1x2VPxk
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Ubuntu MATE is really cool. Unfortunately, my laptop has switchable graphics so there are problems with drivers. Linux Mint works just fine but I use Windows 8.1 in dual boot with it. Usually, I use Mint for college stuff, bash scripts, programming etc.
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Thanks, will check out Ubuntu MATE..
This channel on Youtube is good if you are into retro computer hardware: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8uT9cgJorJPWu7ITLGo9Ww
E.g. this one on oldschool computer music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_3d1x2VPxk
Thanks. I'll check those out when I get home. I like looking at some of the older equipment.
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It's been ages since I messed with actual unix command line scripts. The next major update to windows 10 will have a native bash command terminal from what I read.
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TRS-80
Apple 2
IBM AT
Compaq portable
The latter three came and went, as my old man would bring different ones home on the weekends. At the time they were all cutting edge, though.
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The latter three came and went, as my old man would bring different ones home on the weekends. At the time they were all cutting edge, though.
Similar to me. I can't recall any of my old PCs through my childhood, but my father was a data center manager for a bit and would always bring home different computers. It's actually how I got into technology, having been playing with it since I was a kid (granted, now all kids play with computers but back in the early 90s that was not normal).
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When I was in the sixth grade, my school decided to have computer classes. It was the first year our school did it. I loved it and that's how my parents came to the idea of buying a computer for the home. We did those BASIC programs. It was impressive to type lines and lines of code just to see something flash across the screen for a split second. :lol
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When I was in the sixth grade, my school decided to have computer classes. It was the first year our school did it. I loved it and that's how my parents came to the idea of buying a computer for the home. We did those BASIC programs. It was impressive to type lines and lines of code just to see something flash across the screen for a split second. :lol
:lol nice. My town has ATT in it with their labs and therefore lots of smart asians in technology. So growing up in school, computers and programming were fairly popular that they offered a programming glass for a one year experiment in 8th grade. I took it, we learned Pascal and it was awesome. I remember I programmed a game for betting on (fake) horse races using random number generators for how fast each horse would travel and a banking system for the players. Programming was always so much fun back then. I ended up taking AP Computer Programming in high school and taking another one time offered experiment class after school on discrete mathematics. Definitely helped guide me towards getting my computer engineering degree.
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That's pretty awesome. So how well do you know programming? Which languages did you learn?
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I had an Acorn Electron when I was about 7 and I learned BASIC programming :)
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That's pretty awesome. So how well do you know programming? Which languages did you learn?
High school and college only taught C++, I don't program professionally and stopped enjoying it during college so I haven't learned anything new in this area since college. I also learned some machine language for the certain motorola chip we used for programming in my robotics class. I would say I knew programming fairly well having done so much course work, but I'd need one hell of a refresher if I were to try and program now.
Also, I used to use Visual Basic for programming AOL Progz back in the 95-98 years when trolling AOL was fun.
My little brother followed my footsteps and got his degree in computer science. He is way better/more into programming than I ever was and does web programming for a living.
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I started to teach myself C++ since that's a pretty ubiquitous language and most of the hacking programs are designed using that. I just kept pushing it to the side but plan to one day pick it back up, even if it's just for an hour a day.
Machine language is pretty difficult to learn, isn't it?
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I started to teach myself C++ since that's a pretty ubiquitous language and most of the hacking programs are designed using that. I just kept pushing it to the side but plan to one day pick it back up, even if it's just for an hour a day.
Machine language is pretty difficult to learn, isn't it?
Yea, programming in hex is not fun.
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Do you mean assembler or? We were programming ARM and some custom RISC processors in one course but it's not really my thing. I like high level programming (object-oriented) much more. Last semester I had object-oriented programming in Java and I loved it, still developing my Java skills. Soon we'll start with some Python but just with basics. I plan to study it further if I like it.
I remember we were studying QBasic in elementary scool but teacher was terrible, I didn't learn anything :lol.
Great topic :tup
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I started to teach myself C++ since that's a pretty ubiquitous language and most of the hacking programs are designed using that. I just kept pushing it to the side but plan to one day pick it back up, even if it's just for an hour a day.
Machine language is pretty difficult to learn, isn't it?
Yea, programming in hex is not fun.
You ever see the videos of that guy who has his own os. TempleOS?
Anyway I like this topic, I've built many pc's and I was actually cleaning out my closet when I just found a bunch of old motherboard and hard drives, I'm going to have to slap those in and see what's on there.
I'll never forget my first pc, it was a windows 95 AMD compaq, AMD 266mhz. I had spent a weekend in elementary school learning how to recover windows because I deleted some system files by accident :lol
Since then I've been building my pc's, I have stacks of old video cards, motherboards, and processors.
I've always been a big AMD fan but I'm going to build a new Intel gaming rig when the 1080 comes out later this month.
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I had an Acorn Electron when I was about 7 and I learned BASIC programming :)
Predecessor to the mighty BBC Micro! Our school had one, which lived on a trolley and was wheeled between classrooms.
I did some BASIC programming on the Spectrum, but was too young to understand much about it, other than following tutorials. I didn't learn to program "properly" until uni, where we used a language called Modula 2, which nobody in the real world has ever heard of.
Then, my first real job doing C programming, and then Java came on to the scene about 1999, and it has been Java ever since, plus some of the other technologies that comes with the web.
Assembly language isn't easy, as you are at the lowest possible level, putting values into the registers of the CPU, but I'm in awe of those guys in the 80's that managed to create seriously playable games with such limited resources. You wouldn't get much into 48 or 64kB these days!
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Do you mean assembler or? We were programming ARM and some custom RISC processors in one course but it's not really my thing. I like high level programming (object-oriented) much more. Last semester I had object-oriented programming in Java and I loved it, still developing my Java skills. Soon we'll start with some Python but just with basics. I plan to study it further if I like it.
I remember we were studying QBasic in elementary scool but teacher was terrible, I didn't learn anything :lol.
Great topic :tup
Yea, thats actually what I meant. The terms are fuzzy. I can't recall at all what type of processor it was, but I think it was a RISC as well.
Anyway I like this topic, I've built many pc's and I was actually cleaning out my closet when I just found a bunch of old motherboard and hard drives, I'm going to have to slap those in and see what's on there.
I'll never forget my first pc, it was a windows 95 AMD compaq, AMD 266mhz. I had spent a weekend in elementary school learning how to recover windows because I deleted some system files by accident :lol
Since then I've been building my pc's, I have stacks of old video cards, motherboards, and processors.
I've always been a big AMD fan but I'm going to build a new Intel gaming rig when the 1080 comes out later this month.
Nice. I've got a large stack of extra parts as well. Also, from the PC thread, Im going to my friends house on Sunday to build his PC so that should be fun. In fact, I just took a 400GB SSD off the shelf from work to be his OS and took a 2TB drive from an old server awhile ago that he will use for his data.
For my PC, since I plan on getting the GTX 1080 card soonish, I am going to take apart my whole PC and give it a good clean and fresh build with Windows 10. My case is disgusting since I have a cat and it gets dust and fur all on the insides and my fan performance is suffering so since I need to get inside to replace the 1080, I might as well go full in and gut it all, clean it, and re-install.
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Nice. I've got a large stack of extra parts as well. Also, from the PC thread, Im going to my friends house on Sunday to build his PC so that should be fun. In fact, I just took a 400GB SSD off the shelf from work to be his OS and took a 2TB drive from an old server awhile ago that he will use for his data.
For my PC, since I plan on getting the GTX 1080 card soonish, I am going to take apart my whole PC and give it a good clean and fresh build with Windows 10. My case is disgusting since I have a cat and it gets dust and fur all on the insides and my fan performance is suffering so since I need to get inside to replace the 1080, I might as well go full in and gut it all, clean it, and re-install.
Is your work ok with you taking stuff home? I worked for a one place that let you buy some of the older machines at a reduced price, and the money went to charity. They stopped it eventually, because apparently all the data on the hard drives had to be securely destroyed. This had to be done by an external company, so no more cheap PCs.. :sad:
I used to be into PC gaming, but I ended up spending a fortune, as it seemed like you needed update the hardware with the release of the latest game. Sometimes you could get away with updating the graphics card, but other times you needed a brand new motherboard, memory etc. It all got pretty expensive! :biggrin:
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Yea, we have lots of unused stuff that my boss will look the other way. We are a small team so not a big corporate environment. The old 2TB drive from a server is a bit tricky though because we do have a policy for hard drive destruction now... but that hard drive was from an old server from a company we bought so it was kind of off the books so another "look the other way" type of scenario. We've given away some really nice servers to people in our company in the past but they are getting more strict about it now (not because of giving them away, but because the company is finding ways to reuse old equipment in different ways). I have a server in my basement that I took from work.
I actually have a degausser in my office for hard drives which is kind of cool, and also our policy is to shred SSDs (via blender). So for the first one we did, I recorded it and put on youtube, it's pretty cool:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHu_EJVZm58 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHu_EJVZm58)
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Excellent choice of the "smoothie" setting. Nobody's getting data off that bad boy! :lol
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My dad was a modem engineer, so I grew up with TRS-80 (my dad would call it Trash-80), C64, had Apple IIe in middle school, used to do a ton of programming and play games with that.
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Anyway I like this topic, I've built many pc's and I was actually cleaning out my closet when I just found a bunch of old motherboard and hard drives, I'm going to have to slap those in and see what's on there.
I'll never forget my first pc, it was a windows 95 AMD compaq, AMD 266mhz. I had spent a weekend in elementary school learning how to recover windows because I deleted some system files by accident :lol
Since then I've been building my pc's, I have stacks of old video cards, motherboards, and processors.
I've always been a big AMD fan but I'm going to build a new Intel gaming rig when the 1080 comes out later this month.
Nice. I've got a large stack of extra parts as well. Also, from the PC thread, Im going to my friends house on Sunday to build his PC so that should be fun. In fact, I just took a 400GB SSD off the shelf from work to be his OS and took a 2TB drive from an old server awhile ago that he will use for his data.
For my PC, since I plan on getting the GTX 1080 card soonish, I am going to take apart my whole PC and give it a good clean and fresh build with Windows 10. My case is disgusting since I have a cat and it gets dust and fur all on the insides and my fan performance is suffering so since I need to get inside to replace the 1080, I might as well go full in and gut it all, clean it, and re-install.
I used to have a bag of parts from my old computers, but those were destroyed by the ex along with my Cisco equipment. I used to buy old parts from people on Craig's List just for shits and giggles.
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I've sold most of my old parts besides my hard drives now. I will sell my gtx 770 once I upgrade. Sucks your ex destroyed your stuff >:(
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Tell me about it. Fucker.
Anyways, I downloaded a Wireshark course so I'm going to mess around with that today. I'm also looking for a good C++ course, so I can develop my own hacking apps. Don't worry. I'm only going to test it on the mini network I have setup here. Though, I did hack into my landlords Wifi when mine was incapacitated. I have my laptop, my old deskop, and the laptop my mother was going to get rid of. Along with learning Wireshark, which is a must for any experienced network engineer due to the understanding one gleans from it in regards how data travels across a network, and C++, I'm studying for the CCIE. Right now, I'm reading a book about TCP/IP which is probably one of the most important things to fully understand in networking.
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I had an Acorn Electron when I was about 7 and I learned BASIC programming :)
Predecessor to the mighty BBC Micro! Our school had one, which lived on a trolley and was wheeled between classrooms.
I did some BASIC programming on the Spectrum, but was too young to understand much about it, other than following tutorials. I didn't learn to program "properly" until uni, where we used a language called Modula 2, which nobody in the real world has ever heard of.
Then, my first real job doing C programming, and then Java came on to the scene about 1999, and it has been Java ever since, plus some of the other technologies that comes with the web.
Assembly language isn't easy, as you are at the lowest possible level, putting values into the registers of the CPU, but I'm in awe of those guys in the 80's that managed to create seriously playable games with such limited resources. You wouldn't get much into 48 or 64kB these days!
From what I remember Chris Sawyer coded almost all of RollerCoaster Tycoon in assembly.
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I'm not sure how much mileage you're going to get from a discussion on fibre optics.
The whole telecommunications infrastructure fascinates me mainly due to my work (wireless telecommunications). I'm on the site planning/engineering side but I've done a lot of work with backhaul for the major cell phone carriers so I've worked with Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Lightower, etc. While not essential to my line of work I love knowing how fiber optics works with connections to switches, individual sites, and the like.
Not that I would get one but are there any feasible fiber connection cards directly to home computers or would that not even matter if the local provider doesn't offer something like that? Like could you ask them to install a fiber to fiber switch in lieu of a fiber to copper switch?
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I'm not sure how much mileage you're going to get from a discussion on fibre optics.
The whole telecommunications infrastructure fascinates me mainly due to my work (wireless telecommunications). I'm on the site planning/engineering side but I've done a lot of work with backhaul for the major cell phone carriers so I've worked with Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Lightower, etc. While not essential to my line of work I love knowing how fiber optics works with connections to switches, individual sites, and the like.
Not that I would get one but are there any feasible fiber connection cards directly to home computers or would that not even matter if the local provider doesn't offer something like that? Like could you ask them to install a fiber to fiber switch in lieu of a fiber to copper switch?
I don't know if there are any switches made that have direct fiber connections, though I could be wrong. The ones we use at my job use a transceiver which gets plugged into a special switch port. They look something like this:
(https://www.mastermagazine.info/termino/wp-content/uploads/Transceiver.jpg)
I actually have a couple lying around the house that we weren't using at my job. No reason other than I thought they were cool. :lol I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that eventually fiber will come directly into the home, but again, I think there will be some kind of intermediary connection point, like a patch panel of sorts, before it gets to the routing/switching device.
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I always thought if I ever had a stupid amount of money I'd have some kind of server room in my house with business level switches and maybe even see if I could get a wireless carrier to install a DAS system. I've seen one off donor systems only costing around $12K.
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You can find top of the line switches and routers for decent prices just by looking around the Internet. Couldn't you just put together your own DAS system by buying the parts? Though, I guess it depends on how big of a space we're talking about.
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Nah you'd need to get a carrier to install their own equipment. I'm sure there is a way to pull signal from a nearby cell site but if you want to do it right you'd need to get their own equipment put in. I'm not even sure if it's possible for an individual home owner to get something like that but I think it'd be neat. Hell I've seen full cell sites built on top of people's houses but that's a whole different thing.
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But it sure would be fun to try to install something ourselves. ;D
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I must admit I've always had more of an interest in the hardware and software side of things, than the networking stuff. Seems like there's more network types here than I though there might be, which is cool too.
This might be of interest to fans of older PC games like Doom, Wolfenstein, Quake. It's a documentary on id software. Really fascinating stuff (for me, anyway :biggrin:). (Up until 6 months ago I always thought it was pronounced "I.D.", and not "id" - oops! :lol)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7YreEwtV7D0
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Call me stupid but I never thought about the fact that Doom or Wolfenstein isn't actually 3D. Hearing how they tricked you into thinking you saw 3D depth is really interesting.
Doom WASN'T 3D! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb6Eo1D6VW8)
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Call me stupid but I never thought about the fact that Doom or Wolfenstein isn't actually 3D. Hearing how they tricked you into thinking you saw 3D depth is really interesting.
Doom WASN'T 3D! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb6Eo1D6VW8)
Call me a huge nerd, but I always knew about these games being faux 3D with raycasting. :blob:
Doom was much more advanced, since it wasn't limited to the roof and floor being flat, and Duke Nukem 3D was a little more advanced again, cheating looking up/down using some kind of shifting or parallax, but I always think of Quake as being the first true 3D FPS on PC (unless there was another before it, my history of PC gaming isn't great).
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Call me stupid but I never thought about the fact that Doom or Wolfenstein isn't actually 3D. Hearing how they tricked you into thinking you saw 3D depth is really interesting.
Doom WASN'T 3D! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb6Eo1D6VW8)
Call me a huge nerd, but I always knew about these games being faux 3D with raycasting. :blob:
Doom was much more advanced, since it wasn't limited to the roof and floor being flat, and Duke Nukem 3D was a little more advanced again, cheating looking up/down using some kind of shifting or parallax, but I always think of Quake as being the first true 3D FPS on PC (unless there was another before it, my history of PC gaming isn't great).
Yea I just never really thought about it but it makes alot of sense from the perspective of progressing from 2D to 3D and find away to fake 2D to look like 3D. It just makes sense and the way they did it is pretty impressive. You're right, Quake was the first real 3D game.
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I've never been much of a gamer, except the ones based on Lord of the Rings. Occasionally I'll put an emulator on my laptop and play some of the older Nintendo games.
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So went to my college roommates house in north Jersey today... cut down a tree, smashed a macbook with a sledgehammer (https://youtu.be/EavnvAfPhdQ (https://youtu.be/EavnvAfPhdQ)}, and built his PC.
Specs from the PC thread
Rosewill Dual Fans MicroATX Mini Tower Computer Case FBM-01
$23.26
You save:
$26.73 (53%)
Logitech Wireless Combo MK270 with Keyboard and Mouse
$27.95
You save:
$2.04 (7%)
ViewSonic VA2746M-LED 27-Inch LED-Lit LCD Monitor, Full HD 1080p, DVI/VGA, Speakers, VESA
$189.99
You save:
$142.01 (43%)
Microsoft Windows 10 Home 64 Bit System Builder OEM | PC Disc
$80.00
You save:
$29.99 (27%)
EVGA 500 W1 80+, 500W Continuous Power, 3 Year Warranty Power Supply 100-W1-0500-KR
$39.15
You save:
$0.84 (2%)
EVGA GeForce GTX 960 04G-P4-1962-KR 4GB SC GAMING, 6.8 Inch
$189.99
You save:
$30.00 (14%)
Samsung Electronics 24x SATA Half Height DVD-Writer Internal Optical Drive SH-224FB/BSBE
$17.48
You save:
$41.60 (70%)
Crucial 8GB Single DDR4 2133 MT/s (PC4-17000) CL15 DR x8 Unbuffered DIMM 288-Pin Desktop Memory CT8G4DFD8213
$29.99
You save:
$30.00 (50%)
ASUS H110M-A LGA 1151 Intel H110 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro-ATX DDR4 Motherboard
$67.16
Intel Boxed Core I5-6500 FC-LGA14C 3.20 Ghz 6 M Processor Cache 4 LGA 1151 BX80662I56500
$203.99
You save:
$137.27 (40%)
Subtotal (10 items): $868.96
Total savings: $440.48
What is not listed here is that I will give him:
Intel 100GB 400GB SSD I have from work for the OS
2TB WD Cavier Green I also have from work for his Data
An old wireless USB network adapter I have (I think it was a NetGear, but not a big deal could have bought a new one for 15 but why not)
It came out real nice too! (also built the desk with him).
(https://i298.photobucket.com/albums/mm267/cramx3/Mobile%20Uploads/20160515_141729.jpg)
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That's a nice rig there. :tup
No problems on first bootup?
Has anyone here done a water cooled PC? I did one for a little bit around 15 years ago but I've been thinking I may revisit it in a future build. I had a bunch of problems with my first build with condensation and a small leak but that was my first water cooled build so I was new to it.
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No real problems, I had some issues with powering it on at first, but that was just me being an idiot. Once I got the power working everything worked just fine. Didn't really test it though since I was running short on time. I wanted to try out a game and see the graphics, but installing steam and downloading the free Tomb Raider game that came with the graphics card would have taken too long.
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No, the only thing I have is a liquid cooler for my CPU. Had some thoughts about it but to much of a hazzle for my taste. Would be cool though.
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So what is C# or C++ ?
How does it differ to BASIC ?
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So what is C# or C++ ?
How does it differ to BASIC ?
C# and C++ are a different family of language, both being descendants of the original C language. This means that the syntax and keywords are both totally different than BASIC. The C family of languages let you work at a lower level of the computer hardware than BASIC, say for manipulating the content of memory, or messing about with network connections, and that kind of thing.
C# and C++ are also object oriented languages, which means you create code modules (classes) which model real world entities. E.g. you could have have a Car class that models both the properties of a car (make/model/colour), and actions that a car can take (accelerate/brake/change gear). You've also got fun stuff like inheritance which allows you to build classes on top of each other..
BASIC is more of a procedural language, meaning that you can create procedures (subroutines) to separate out and reuse common sequences of commands. These subroutines can be called from the "main" program to perform individual tasks, and then return control to the main program.
Here's a comparison table of languages for a laugh: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_languages
I'd say that there's very little commercial development done these days using BASIC, compared to C/C++/Java/C#.
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:lol Imagine writing a program for a NASA launch using BASIC
10 CLS
20 input " Yo, you ready to go to space, dawg ? ";A$
30 if A$ = "yes" or "y" then GOTO 50 else GOTO 40
40 Cancel Launch
50 LAUNCH !
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:lol Imagine writing a program for a NASA launch using BASIC
10 CLS
20 input " Yo, you ready to go to space, dawg ? ";A$
30 if A$ = "yes" or "y" then GOTO 50 else GOTO 40
40 Cancel Launch
50 LAUNCH !
Ha ha - you've missed your calling!
I like the way you're checking for different input values, though you gotta allow for case sensitivity. If Mr Astronaut answered "Yes" instead of "yes", the whole thing would be called off, and there'd be a lot of explaining to do to Mission Control.. :lol
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:emo: waited my whole life to be an astronaut.
Should never have skipped caps lock class.
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I was great at BASIC back in the day - I used to write animations which were entirely ASCII code and then slight alterations between frames - which were basically clearing the screen between frames.
And I could make text scroll across the screen and stop at desired moments. I forgot the code for that of course :P
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Very cool. I used to love messing about with that kind of thing on the Spectrum. You'd get a magazine with a program you had to type in by hand, to do something cool on the screen, or get you infinite lives in some game or whatever. It would take 20 minutes to type in a series of POKE and DATA statements, you'd hit "go", and the whole thing would reset on you, losing everything you'd typed!
Many happy hours! :P
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haha. like when you're typing a massive reply on an web forum and you hit delete and for some reason instead of delete - the webpage reloads.
I usually copy and paste my text as I go now. If it's a really long reply.
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Yeah, definitely been there. It's always the best and wittiest replies that get lost too.. :lol
Sometimes I'd type my reply in Notepad and then just copy/paste it in at the end. It's like typing a Word document - Ctrl-S every 10 seconds or sooner.
Never trust a computer!
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The new GTX 1080 has some nice specs on it, the embargo for reviews was lifted today so reviews are popping all over the place. This thing has 8GB of RAM. Though it won't be on sale just yet the starting cost in the US is $700. I used to think that running a game on full 1080 resolution with maximum or ultra settings on a dual or triple monitor setup was as good as it got for gaming, now you can do 4K resolution and these cards power that which is insane. Not to mention also ready for VR kits. I think I will eventually upgrade my video card at some point.
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Sometimes I'd type my reply in Notepad and then just copy/paste it in at the end. It's like typing a Word document - Ctrl-S every 10 seconds or sooner.
i do that if i'm replying on DTF and i'm on my phone. It's just easier that way.
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The new GTX 1080 has some nice specs on it, the embargo for reviews was lifted today so reviews are popping all over the place. This thing has 8GB of RAM. Though it won't be on sale just yet the starting cost in the US is $700. I used to think that running a game on full 1080 resolution with maximum or ultra settings on a dual or triple monitor setup was as good as it got for gaming, now you can do 4K resolution and these cards power that which is insane. Not to mention also ready for VR kits. I think I will eventually upgrade my video card at some point.
Yea, the 1080 is a BEAST.
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I'm not sure how much mileage you're going to get from a discussion on fibre optics.
The whole telecommunications infrastructure fascinates me mainly due to my work (wireless telecommunications). I'm on the site planning/engineering side but I've done a lot of work with backhaul for the major cell phone carriers so I've worked with Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Lightower, etc. While not essential to my line of work I love knowing how fiber optics works with connections to switches, individual sites, and the like.
Not that I would get one but are there any feasible fiber connection cards directly to home computers or would that not even matter if the local provider doesn't offer something like that? Like could you ask them to install a fiber to fiber switch in lieu of a fiber to copper switch?
I don't know if there are any switches made that have direct fiber connections, though I could be wrong. The ones we use at my job use a transceiver which gets plugged into a special switch port. They look something like this:
(https://www.mastermagazine.info/termino/wp-content/uploads/Transceiver.jpg)
I actually have a couple lying around the house that we weren't using at my job. No reason other than I thought they were cool. :lol I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that eventually fiber will come directly into the home, but again, I think there will be some kind of intermediary connection point, like a patch panel of sorts, before it gets to the routing/switching device.
I guess I missed this previously and stumbled onto it just now. I just re-inventoried all of our SFPs (what you have pictured) yesterday at work. Cool little gadgets.
As for fiber to the home, already there. My fios is fiber right to the Verizon box outside my house, from there it gets converted to coax. When they installed it, I ended up chilling with the technician for the couple hours while he worked since it wasn't terribly different than something I'd have to do in the data center. He also showed me how to install my own wall jacks, which I ended up doing myself instead of paying Verizon (or someone else).
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I know fiber goes to the home. I was referring to it actually going into the back of the router inside one's home. I can imagine the speed dips significantly once it gets turned to coax. Not that I'm complaining about speed since I've downloaded things at some nice fast speeds.
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I know fiber goes to the home. I was referring to it actually going into the back of the router inside one's home. I can imagine the speed dips significantly once it gets turned to coax. Not that I'm complaining about speed since I've downloaded things at some nice fast speeds.
Not really, at least not until we pass 1Gbps speeds to our homes (which google fiber offers and I believe comcast is starting to roll this out as well). I could be wrong, but from my understanding a coax cable can reach over 1Gbps and maybe never actually be a problem honestly. I think maybe splitting it inside your house could end up being more of a drawback than the actual coax cable itself. Fiber is very expensive compared to coax so it doesn't make much sense to have fiber inside your home anytime soon. But obviously in the future it will be too slow, when we get to 10Gbps... 100Gbps, the infrastructure will need to be upgraded for sure.
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I know fiber goes to the home. I was referring to it actually going into the back of the router inside one's home. I can imagine the speed dips significantly once it gets turned to coax. Not that I'm complaining about speed since I've downloaded things at some nice fast speeds.
Not really, at least not until we pass 1Gbps speeds to our homes (which google fiber offers and I believe comcast is starting to roll this out as well). I could be wrong, but from my understanding a coax cable can reach over 1Gbps and maybe never actually be a problem honestly. I think maybe splitting it inside your house could end up being more of a drawback than the actual coax cable itself. Fiber is very expensive compared to coax so it doesn't make much sense to have fiber inside your home anytime soon. But obviously in the future it will be too slow, when we get to 10Gbps... 100Gbps, the infrastructure will need to be upgraded for sure.
I probably could have just looked up the speeds myself. :lol I was just thinking out loud and being lazy. As far as the coax speed, I'm guessing it's the same as Cat 5,6,7 cables and there are probably different grades of it and it depends on what is being sent over the line.
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I know fiber goes to the home. I was referring to it actually going into the back of the router inside one's home. I can imagine the speed dips significantly once it gets turned to coax. Not that I'm complaining about speed since I've downloaded things at some nice fast speeds.
Not really, at least not until we pass 1Gbps speeds to our homes (which google fiber offers and I believe comcast is starting to roll this out as well). I could be wrong, but from my understanding a coax cable can reach over 1Gbps and maybe never actually be a problem honestly. I think maybe splitting it inside your house could end up being more of a drawback than the actual coax cable itself. Fiber is very expensive compared to coax so it doesn't make much sense to have fiber inside your home anytime soon. But obviously in the future it will be too slow, when we get to 10Gbps... 100Gbps, the infrastructure will need to be upgraded for sure.
I probably could have just looked up the speeds myself. :lol I was just thinking out loud and being lazy. As far as the coax speed, I'm guessing it's the same as Cat 5,6,7 cables and there are probably different grades of it and it depends on what is being sent over the line.
I actually had to google it myself, turns out no one knows the max speed of coax. It's all about the way the signal is sent through the cable it seems. Theoretically it can hit 1Gbps but no one knows yet how much more. At least that's what I seemed to learn from my quick search.
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And we both know the theoretical and actual results are usually nowhere near each other. I'm sure there's a spec for it somewhere. There has to be. I'll do some more digging. I had the 4 parts of the whole Ethernet spec downloaded to my phone at one point. It's like thousands of pages. :lol
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coaxial_cable
https://www.rfcafe.com/references/electrical/coax-chart.htm
The Wikipedia article probably has lots of links to references and whatnot. I'm sure we can find more data through there.
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Well theoretically there is no limit to a coax cable :lol it depends on how the bits are being sent through it.
One of the standards is DOCSIS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS)
There are theoretical speeds there. Someone can create a new way to transmit the data on coax and get better bandwidth theoretically as well.
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I'm going to read more about it when I get home. Right now, besides reading Wheel of Time and ASOIAF, I'm reading this book for the CCIE. It's the first of many books I need to read through and understand. Starting with how TCP/IP works, and knowing it thoroughly, is a must before getting involved in any networking topics. It's the foundation.
https://www.amazon.com/TCP-Illustrated-Protocols-Addison-Wesley-Professional/dp/0321336313/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1463514933&sr=1-1&keywords=tcp+ip+illustrated
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I'm going to read more about it when I get home. Right now, besides reading Wheel of Time and ASOIAF, I'm reading this book for the CCIE. It's the first of many books I need to read through and understand. Starting with how TCP/IP works, and knowing it thoroughly, is a must before getting involved in any networking topics. It's the foundation.
https://www.amazon.com/TCP-Illustrated-Protocols-Addison-Wesley-Professional/dp/0321336313/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1463514933&sr=1-1&keywords=tcp+ip+illustrated
I have that book... never read it though. I should. I got it many years ago after I think my first job when it was recommended to me by my coworkers.
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It's the first of three volumes, though the third volume isn't something I would need to read for what I'm doing.
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Giving this thread a bump. I was just watching an interesting video about DNS. For those of you who work in networking, you probably know the basics, but it does go into some more in-depth topics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRysni9ND2w
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So, I just rooted my old Galaxy 4. I'm in the process of turning it into a hacking/pentesting phone.
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So I got my mother's old laptop to boot. I'm taking Winblows off of it and putting on Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition
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How old is the laptop?
I have an ancient laptop (maybe 10 years old) that I use for connecting to guitar gear via usb and general browsing. It dual boots Windows 7 and Ubuntu, and Ubuntu by default, but there are no Linux drivers for any of the Boss or TC Electronics software apps, so that means having to boot into Windows. Every time I do that, the machine grinds to a halt downloading Windows updates and I forget what I switched it on for!
I've toyed with the idea of installing an SSD, and maybe going for some sort of lightweight Linux instead of Ubuntu, but the machine is so old I don't think it's worth spending any time or money on.
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I'd like to use Mint but my laptop has ATI discrete graphics and drivers gor it are shit. It's like I'd use it anyway but somehow it is turned on by default which causes overheating and I can't easily disable it (nVidias on Linux have that option).
How old is the laptop?
I have an ancient laptop (maybe 10 years old) that I use for connecting to guitar gear via usb and general browsing. It dual boots Windows 7 and Ubuntu, and Ubuntu by default, but there are no Linux drivers for any of the Boss or TC Electronics software apps, so that means having to boot into Windows. Every time I do that, the machine grinds to a halt downloading Windows updates and I forget what I switched it on for!
I've toyed with the idea of installing an SSD, and maybe going for some sort of lightweight Linux instead of Ubuntu, but the machine is so old I don't think it's worth spending any time or money on.
You should try Lubuntu or Puppy Linux if you don't need it for anything special.
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Yeah, the Linux portion doesn't have to do anything special, just have Chrome installed for occasional web browsing.
I think I tried Puppy at one time, and it vomited during the installation IIRC - possibly display driver related. Might be worth trying again with a newer version.
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How old is the laptop?
I have an ancient laptop (maybe 10 years old) that I use for connecting to guitar gear via usb and general browsing. It dual boots Windows 7 and Ubuntu, and Ubuntu by default, but there are no Linux drivers for any of the Boss or TC Electronics software apps, so that means having to boot into Windows. Every time I do that, the machine grinds to a halt downloading Windows updates and I forget what I switched it on for!
I've toyed with the idea of installing an SSD, and maybe going for some sort of lightweight Linux instead of Ubuntu, but the machine is so old I don't think it's worth spending any time or money on.
It's just a few years old, so Windows 7 was originally on it. She was going to throw it out but I told her I'd fix it and keep it for my daughter.
The apps you use...are they regular Windows exe files? You can use WINE on Linux to run Windows applications and this way you wouldn't have to use Windows at all.
As far as lightweight distros, try Ubuntu MATE or Mint MATE.
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The apps are the Boss Tone Studio and TC's Tone Print Editor. I plug in the pedals into the computer via USB and you can tweak the sounds using the app and save them back to the pedal.
I'll give it a shot through WINE, but I'm thinking I might need USB device drivers for the pedals themselves.
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Give it a shot and see what happens. Let me know.
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Has anyone here ever used TOR, I2P, or any other anonymity based browsers?
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Has anyone here ever used TOR, I2P, or any other anonymity based browsers?
I have, a few times. Don't know what you need it for, I did it for the country restricted streams (Wacken festival 2 years ago) and it worked like a charm. I used Tor.
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I haven't used Tor but I'd like it try it out just to see how it is.
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Has anyone here ever used TOR, I2P, or any other anonymity based browsers?
I have, a few times. Don't know what you need it for, I did it for the country restricted streams (Wacken festival 2 years ago) and it worked like a charm. I used Tor.
It serves multiple purposes. Anonymity is a big one.
I haven't used Tor but I'd like it try it out just to see how it is.
Give it a shot. There are some good tutorials out there.