Electric symbols - what does this one mean?

[Johny B Good]

Ah, you must be what used to be described as "The New Man" (or whatever bollicks expression was used) to provide your other half with a whole 37 minutes of 'quality time'. :-)

[Johny B Good]

It's been like that for well over a decade now as far as being able to find useful tech info. The results have long been swamped by crass commercialism to the point where such quests are rather akin to a search for the "Holy Grail".

[Tony Bryer]

It does usefully identify the 'top' of the plug. The socket in the Mail piece would be a tad more user-friendly if the USB sockets were horizontal.

[polygonum]

It does. And there seems to be no convention for vertical USB sockets. Probably entirely which was easier to build - except on things like desktops which have optional vertical/horizontal orientation themselves.

That USB3 sockets have blue tongues does make it slightly easier to see which way the socket has been mounted.

[Andy Burns]

Try a google search for lighting connector, ignore the suggestion of "did you mean lightNing connector?" and even turn on the verbatim option under search tools, and you're still swamped by apple cables rather than anything to do with lights, even putting the two word phrase in quotes only helps slightly, I thin the PageRank pigeons need retraining ;-)

[Tim Watts]

Thank you and Andrew too. I had not noticed voltage switching had arrived. 20V? Interesting.

Does this mean that "bad code" now had the potential to blow stuff up?[1]

[1] One computer from the 80's could literally fry itself if an IO port was programmed wrong - was it an Apple II - cannot find it on google.

And I wonder if the voltage can be controlled from the computer side of the USB chipset - or it is something the chip is hardwired to negotiate from the USB side only?

Wonder what implications this has for dumb chargers and their cheaty resistor dividers?

[Andy Burns]

[fred]

Slightly better on ixq:

but they're still not ready to replace the big G.

[dennis]

One of the most important things about google is to use - eg

-apple on every search.

[dennis]

The ones on my thinkpad aren't blue.

[dennis]

I find 47 mm a bit tight.

[Johny B Good]

Drifting a little bit more 'Off Topic', I noticed a link to a 'Scratch Monkey' article.

I was already aware of this story and the meaning of the phrase "Always mount a scratch monkey' some 2 decades back when I acquired a diagnostics tool installer on a floppy disk which would refuse to run unless the disk write protect tab was set to write enabled.

The reason being a crude form of copyright protection whereby the installer would be disabled after completing the install, only being re-enabled when the uninstall option was run to remove the software off the original computer it had first been installed upon to facilitate transfer from one machine to another without allowing multiple instances of the software on more than one PC at a time.

Of course, the way around this 'limitation' (and the risk of it going 'horribly wrong') was to use something like 'Teledisk' to create 'scratch monkey' cloned copies from which to do the actual installation.

I tended to create scratch monkey copies of floppy disk distributions of software as a matter of routine regardless of the need for such a workaround to any similarly inspired copyright protection schemes simply to reduce the risk of damaging the precious originals. The copies would be used to run the actual installation process and I always referred to them as 'Scratch Monkeys' thereafter.

[Andy Burns]

Well yes, and in the end I did use -lightNing which gave useful results, but what is the point of the (fairly recently added) "verbatim" option?

[Theo Markettos]

"lighting connector" (in quotes) mostly works for me.

Also "lighting" "connector" if you don't need them next to each other. But it turns out that lots of Apple pages have typoed 'lighting' in them, so Google is doing the right thing in returning them.

Theo

[fred]

Recently introduced? Perhaps resurrected? Years ago G used to restrict searches only to the quoted terms but will now ignore them as it sees fit, apparently to bump the hits up. They would rather return a million nonsense hits than return zero on a tightly controlled search terms.

Contrary to Theo's experience I have found that explicit quoting on individual terms (such as "lighting" "connector") has ceased to be effective.

[polygonum]

That the vast majority of new USB3 sockets I have seen recently have blue tongues does make it slightly easier to see which way the socket has been mounted.

(Since USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports may coexist on the same machine and they look similar, USB 3.0 specification mandates appropriate color-coding and recommends that the Standard-A USB 3.0 connector has a blue insert (Pantone 300C color). The same color-coding applies to the USB 3.0 Standard-A plug. Than Dennis' Thinkpad doesn't conform to this mandate is another matter.)

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Tim Watts escribió:

Commodore Pet. IIRC, it was a single POKE to one of the video controller registers which caused the monitor scan frequency to go out of the range the monitor could handle and it would go up in smoke.

[Bob Eager]

Could also be done on a PC.

[whisky-dave]

atts

Wasn't tehre a simialr thing with teh BBC computer in that you could overdr ive the video ULA display chip cause it to heat up.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , whisky-dave escribió:

Yes, but only if the heatsink fitted to the Ferranti ULA was not well fitted or had become dislodged (e.g. during transport from the factory) and was not conducting heat away from the chip. You got a corrupt screen or twinkling characters in mode 7.

Fixed with the later VLSI ULA which had problems of its own.