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Well yes that too, but some of the fans I recycled from a starter system I bought had a green glow that was on whenever they were powered on. There was no way to control them.
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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I guess I'll be the dissenting opinion here. I'm old enough to join AARP (not that I have, yet, because that would imply I was old) and I love my RGB lighting on my mouse, keyboard, soundbar, and animated triple monitor background. The PC tower has a bunch of lighting too, but alas, it is kept inside a thermostatically ventilated cabinet so I cannot enjoy them as much. Keeps me young!
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Lights on fans and other parts of the computer?
Utter [CENSORED]! As useless/pointless as it gets. It's just one of many wanna-be gamer e-[CENSORED] extensions...
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I let this through moderation, but edited you message - you need to watch your language in this forum, or you stand to be kicked off by Chris.
I know there are "worse words" but the automated system picked up on the ones you did use so ... caution is advised.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Lots of lights, spinny fans and a bubble tube, that was my first work PC, basically a gamer PC as it was the only one they had on the shelf with enough grunt!, Nice big power supply that I repurposed after on the LED strips shorted and poped the mother board, why were they plugged into the mother board, so they could change colour with the CPU temp, I kid you not. No, Power light, Hard drive activity that is all I need!
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My desktop PC is also in a tempered glass cube. I have RGB on the two sticks of RAM and one on the CPU fan and that is. Just enough to be able to see inside, but nothing like a country fare.
Advertise here – minimum three posts per day are guaranteed.
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My mobo has RGB on one corner, but I have it disabled.
My 2080 TI GPU has an LED strip above it, which is the only light in my case currently.
Admittedly, it has kind of grown on me, just the lone light strip in my case, although my 4080 is going to be a founders edition. no lights.
I shopped around for high end ram that didn't have light strips, but that was also for clearance reasons. I'm on air and my CPU cooler is kinda bulky, as is needed for the i5-13600K I'm running.
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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That's a younger person's bling. Being within striking distance of retirement myself, lights on my PC would be almost as fashion-inappropriate as me wearing Speedo swim briefs to the pool.
There are no solutions, only trade-offs. - Thomas Sowell
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I hate the lights. I've been building my own gaming rigs since the '90s and saw this stuff creep in over time. Seems to have something to do with social media and people sharing pics of their stuff, so it all has to light up and look cool. It's almost impossible these days to find good gaming PC parts that don't light up, the last time I bought a new PSU even it had lights in it!
I don't need my "work" desk looking like a disco. It's absurd. Keyboards, mice, GPUs, CPU fans, mobos, etc. All decked out like props in a low-budget sci-fi movie.
So I got a jet black, totally enclosed case. Still leaks a lot of light through the vents, but at least they aren't distracting me from the screen. You know, the one bit that actually needs to light up.
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Finally, I have no more lights except my GPU. All high end performance gear
I went with an ASUS ROG Strix z690 G mATX. It has a little bit of RGB on it but you can turn it off, and I did.
I have noctua for all of my cooling. None of it has lights.
I have G. Skill Ripjaw DDR5 6000 CL32 RAM. No lights.
I have an EVGA 1000W modular PSU. no lights.
I have my 2080TI that has one LED strip on top, to be replaced soonish with an RTX 4080 Founders Edition (No lights)
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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When my previous laptop was on its last legs and I was finally forced to replace it, I wanted something higher spec so it would last a few years. I ended up getting one targeting gamers. This, of course, came with an RGB backlight keyboard, which out of the box was configured to constantly change colors. And even when in sleep mode, the entire keyboard would pulsate on and off, not just the power light. So I had to put a stop to all of that nonsense with in the first couple days of using it. It's hard enough to sleep when a device is lighting up half the room, and crazy when it feels like there's a christmas tree in the room with light levels flickering and/or changing colors.
Maybe the best way to fight this trend is to get the eco activists in a frenzy about all the extra electricity wasted on unnecessary lighting.
FYI - When devices that are on at night come with super bright LED indicators built in, a Sharpie is your friend to tone down the brightness it gives off.
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Herself got a letter from the doctor telling her to book a annual blood test with the practice nurse, and giving her a URL to book it online.
And boy is it a silly URL given that most of the recipients are of a senior disposition...
https: And yes, every character has to be typed correctly from the letter.
So when you spell it all correctly, you can book an appointment - once you've typed a small novella identifying yourself as you'd expect.
And to confirm, they send you an email.
Which contains a link you have to follow to read the message (which eventually turns out to be "we'll get back to you in the next couple of weeks or so").
But first, prove you are who you say you are by entering your DOB.
And this is where the yoof bit comes in ... the DOB year field starts with 2023. Yes, they expect 2 week olds to be computer literate.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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It's kinda like when you call a company and have to enter your account id via automated prompt to only have to say it again when you reach a real person.
Jeremy Falcon
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And when the person on the line asks for that info I give them: "But, I just typed all the info into your system from my phone. Why don't you get it from there? What do you mean you can't? You need to tell your tech dept to fix your obviously broken system so it doesn't waste my time!" That always serves to start our further conversation off on the right foot too.
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...and the only way to enter the DOB year is a dropdown listbox that you can only scroll one line per click.
Hey people, that is stretching the attention span of a 75yo!
Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994. So does this signature. me, 2012
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Droplists for DOB components are so stupid. The month list might be reasonable, it's only 12 items long. But 28-31 items for the day and over 100 for year is just ludicrous. I've typed/written that date so many times my fingers fill it in from muscle memory.
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On the other hand, I am not too happy when the only way to pay for my blood test the other day was to go to https://<domain>/#!/f0088ef0f4.
Even if your URL is longer, I find it harder to type this one correctly!
(Yes, it is against the law to make this the only way to pay - Norwegian law give you the right to pay in cash; the seller or servicer cannot refuse to accept cash payment. Reporting it to the police is not worth the effort; they'll just throw your report into the cylinder archive. The offender is a doctor - don't you understand that this makes a big difference? A doctor cannot be treated as a common man. Everybody must understand that!
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Seriously?
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Some years ago when I still worked for a large US multi-national, we face something similar. Every month or so we (i.e. everyone) received a printed newsletter from the main marketing department. It usually ran to at least five pages, and each page had references to products that may be of interest in helping to sell ours. Each reference included a URL that ran to three or four lines of text across a piece of A4, so 200-300 characters. I suggested to the team that a more efficient, and cheaper, method of disseminating said information would be to email it everyone, so they could just click on the links. The response was, "we'll take that under advisement"*. They did stop sending it (to us techies at least), but it took almost twelve months.
*What do you know, limey?
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Richard MacCutchan wrote: URL that ran to three or four lines of text across a piece of A4, so 200-300 characters
A local newspaper regularly runs articles that have URL references such as these...or they'll suggest to visit "the site", but won't mention any URL at all.
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The funniest thing I see is printed ads, in newspapers and magazines, which are no more than dumps of their web pages, including the image of a pushbutton labeled 'Press for more information'.
I won't claim to have seen it this year, but it is less than five years since I last encountered it.
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Another story, from "our" environment (i.e. programming), where the user was the one with going to extremes:
An eternity and a half ago, I worked for a company making a Fortran IV compiler for their own machines. They had an F77 compiler in the sleeves, completely rewritten from scratch. One very important customer forced them to release this new compiler earlier than planned: The old one could handle only 99 arguments to a function. Now this customer had crossed that limit and could no longer compile their programs with the Fortran IV compiler. The new F77 was ready for 127 arguments, but its developers assured that it could fairly easily be extended to 255. Going past that would require some more serious refactoring. The customer was satisfied; he did not expect to go beyond 255 arguments.
I never saw that Fortran code with 100+ arguments. They can't all have been single-letter names. Let us assume an average length of five characters, plus comma and a space. From col 7 to col 72 you can fit nine arguments. So you have twelve lines packed to the right margin with arguments for a single function. Presumably professional coders do write code like that! Or at least did in those days.
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You wouldn't want too many of those in your app - they would eat stack like it was going out of style!
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Nowadays, stack is a problem even in Fortran
Recursion didn't enter Fortran until Fortran-90. All memory could be statically allocated. One of the reasons why Fortran has survived so well is that it would never crash on stack overflow (or heap empty), it is 'safe', memorywise. Even though recursion has been allowed from 90 on, seasoned Fortran programmer are not familiar with the term, and won't ever use it
Several other languages of that age did allow recursion, but only with functions explicitly flagged as recursive. Chill and Ada are examples - and for Ada, recursion was only allowed if the maximum recursion depth (hence, stack requirements) could be statically determined, at compile time.
In this case, both the old IV compiler and new 77, "secretly" allowed recursion. The compiler writers used back ends shared with other languages, and they didn't spend resources on making a special stack-less back end for Fortran. The static nature of Fortran made it trivial to determine the maximum stack requirement for a (non-recursive) Fortran program. I suspect that the same was true for a lot of other Fortran compilers as well around the 1970-80s. Actually, memory requirements were reduced, as the static allocation for each function could be reduced, with several functions using the same stack locations if they were not running at the same time. (I have a vague memory of some article claiming that Fortran optimizers could reuse even statically allocated space for different functions that couldn't be active at the same time, but I remember no details.)
Which reminds me of an old thought - warning: sidetrack follows:
(Maybe this should be moved into the 'Architecture' forum)
There is no real reason why stack frames are allocated edge to edge! The stack head has pointer to the frame below, but that pointer could go anywhere. Stack relative addressing never goes outside the current stack frame. Traditionally, even if you have a million objects, each running its own thread, each thread is allotted a stack for its maximum requirements. This can bind up quite a few megabytes that are hardly if ever used, most certainly not all at the same time. Never ever are every single thread preempted at its very deepest nesting of calls at exactly the same time.
Even though you with desktop PCs can just plug in another 64 GiB of RAM to satisfy stack needs, in other systems (such as embedded), this is not always possible.
Stack frames could be allocated from the heap, with space is occupied only as long as a function is active. Thereby, a given amount of RAM would be capable of handling a much larger number of threads. Especially in event driven architectures, a large fraction of threads idle at a low stack level. They receive an event and go into a nest of calls for handling it, after which it return to the low stack level waiting for the next event. The thread might do some sort of 'yield' halfway, but the great majority of threads would be back to 'ground base', or at a moderate call nesting level, most of the time.
The argument against this is of course the cost of heap allocation. There were machines offering micro coded function entry point instructions doing heap allocation from a buddy heap, so stack frame allocation was essentially unlinking the top element from the freelist of the appropriate size. Function return linked the frame to the top of the list. This requires a couple memory cycles for each operation.
Even though another 64 GiB of RAM is cheap nowadays, lots of programmers recoil in horror over buddy allocation: It causes lots internal fragmentation! 25% with binary buddies! Well, but how much can you save in stack requirements? Besides, lots of architectures demand word, doubleword or paragraph stack alignment anyway - that leads to internal fragmentation/waste as well! With a buddy scheme, allocation might be as cheap as two instructions. What is that on the total instruction budget for a modern style method call?
If the allocation cost worries you, lots of optimizations are possible, in particular if frame allocation is the responsibility of the caller. E.g. if a function's stack frame has a lot of unused (internal fragmentation) space calls a function asking for a small frame, it could fit in that internal fragmentation space, not requiring another heap allocation. There are dozens of such optimization.
I never heard of any software allocating stack frames on the heap. I never heard of anyone using the microcoded stack frame heap allocation on the one architecture I know of providing it. Is that because I am ignorant? Is it commonplace? Or has it been considered and rejected? If that is the case, what were the arguments against it?
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