Recent content by jtr1962

The 20th century model worked fine. The problem is businesses think their profit margins should be a lot higher now. It's the difference between making a reasonable profit providing a good or service, versus an obscene profit. It's also the result of defacto monopolies like Microsoft. In theory...

Sounds like a much better idea than every home having a furnace and hot water heater. Are there any heat exchangers to recover some heat from wastewater? In theory if you could recover most of the heat once you "prime" with some hot water to get things started you would need to add very little...

I looked into that first for the kitchen sink. They have ludicrous power requirements, starting at well over 5 kilowatts. That doesn't even get you a great flow rate. If your incoming water is 40°F (typical in NYC winters) and your outgoing is 110°F, 5 kW only gives you ~0.5 gpm, maybe twice...

He repairs PCs for a living, so that at least gives him some credibility. Truth is people are too complacent. We should have nipped this whole thing in the bud years ago. It's not just happening with PCs, either. Too many things are becoming rentals instead of buy once and use forever.

Yeah, I'm getting the impression we're fast approaching a time where a PC will need to be on its own circuit breaker, much like a larger air conditioner.

Speaking of that I was in MicroCenter the other day and saw what I thought was a heat exchanger for a small air conditioner inside one of their display computers. I think it was an RX7900 video card. So much for more efficient processors. Unless I needed a space heater, I'd never run one of...

Honestly, I smell a big class-action lawsuit against MS for stuff like this. You shouldn't have to jump through all their hoops just to access your own data. I get security to some extent but you should be able to disable it. I'm the only one who will ever access my PCs. Nobody lives with me...

That explains why using a picture doesn't work. I guess if you cut off someone's head and attempted to use that to log in it wouldn't work, either. I'm surprised more fingerprint ID sensors don't use IR also. True story here-one of my family members was scammed by someone. A relative (who is now...

I don't recall being asked for a PIN when I set up my new laptop. It is set to log me in with facial recognition. Maybe to future-proof that against my appearance changing radically I should make a cast of my face. Merc, I wonder if you could get an artist to do something similar with that guy...

I don't get that, either. A driver's license, or non-driver's ID, issued by the state with your picture should be sufficient to serve as ID on a video call.

Seems like only a $20 to $30 difference between 500GB and 1 TB. I'd just go with 1TB. It's possible he may do stuff which needs more space later.

I'm guess that's low-end commodity stuff which people on a budget buy. I definitely did see SSDs going for $35/TB last year. I also recall 8TB HDDs going for $100, give or take. If fact, here we go...

I saw prices of commodity SSDs drop to as low as $35/TB last year. Now it seems $45 to $50 is about the best deal you can get. Longer term of course, the trend is still down, as it's been with DRAM.

This is a textbook case of why you should back up your data in multiple places, like thumb drives, external hard drives, the cloud, etc. As for passwords. I've long ago made spreadsheets of passwords I use for various sites. There's no way I'm going to remember many or most of them. Besides, a...