On Sat, 2 May 2020 11:44:00 +1000, Xeno
wrote:

On 2/5/20 11:02 am, trader_4 wrote:
On Friday, May 1, 2020 at 6:06:42 PM UTC-4, Clare Snyder wrote:
On Fri, 01 May 2020 13:30:55 -0400, wrote:

On Fri, 01 May 2020 08:06:06 -0400, micky
wrote:

In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 25 Apr 2020 21:31:03 -0400,
wrote:

On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 20:21:34 -0400, Clare Snyder
wrote:

On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 17:02:20 -0400, wrote:

On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 15:21:36 -0400, Clare Snyder
wrote:

On Sat, 25 Apr 2020 12:49:15 -0400, Bud Frede
wrote:

Clare Snyder writes:

On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:02:39 -0500, Mark Lloyd
wrote:

On 4/23/20 10:29 AM, micky wrote:
Another problem with getting a heat pump is that the wirign to the
thermostat is inadequate. no easy way to run a new wire to the same
location**.

I don't have a heat pump, but 2 stage AC and heat. This requires 7 wires
(including power return) to the thermostat. I now have 10 wires
installed (3 for later use).

I have a 2 stage furnace plus AC running on 4 wires - using a single
stage thermostat.

I have the same setup here.

In the past I had tried various fancy thermostats and didn't have luck
with them. The manuals were horrible and I don't think the people who
designed the thermostats ever had to actually use them.

A few years ago when it was time to replace my furnace and AV, they
threw in a new thermostat with it. It's a White-Rogers programmable
model. I can't control it across the internet with my phone, and I'm
sure it doesn't have all the fancy features, but it works reliably, it
was easy to figure out how to use, and the manual was well-written.

I think this is like the old constant upgrade cycle Microsoft did with
Office. The average person only used 10% of the features, but they kept
adding more and more features so they could sell a new version to you.
If it was still available for purchase, and if it would still run on a
modern computer, many people would be happier with Office '95 or
something rather than the latest and greatest Office
whatever-version-they're-up-to-now.

There are some things that get new features that I use and that improve
the experience. For the most part though, I'm at that 10% level and the
rest is just added complexity and is actually a drawback for me.

It feels strange to think this way. I'm in IT and I am constantly
learning new things and growing my skills. It's just that there are some
areas where I'd like less complexity. It's less to worry about, less
hassle, etc.

I try to resist "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and not upgrade just because
there's something new. I want what I guess I could call "appropriate
complexity." :-)

Yeah, I'm not the typical consumer, and I know that I'm not who the
product makers aim at. Maybe I'm just getting old or something...


Like the motto of my IT company here in Ontario - "appropriate
technology for the information age".
In the beginning I sold a LOT of off-lease and reconditioned hardware
which allowed many companies to get into office and retail
computerization at an affordable price.

That is where I usually get my PCs if I can't get one for free.


in 33 years I'm on my second brand new computer (and it's about 7
years old, more or less)(Not counting my first non-ibm compatible
RatShack CoCo - which I still own)

The only new computer I ever bought was when my wife still had her
business and I was working for IBM. It was on full IBM enterprise
maintenance and if I put a call in on it, I could take the call, order
the parts and write them off.
The IRS let me fully depreciate it in the first year and write off the
M/A contract. It worked out well for me.

The only new computer I've owned in 36 years was a PC Jr. It sold for
iirc $1600, but they would take 500 off if you had the bar codes of 20
or 25 products by Kimberly Clark or some similar company, so they were
worth 20 or 25 a piece. The last day after people had left work, I went
around and found 1 or 2 boxes of kleenex and I cut out the bar code,
without even asking anyone, but I know no one cared. Then a week
later of course they stopped making the Jr.

11 years later, I bought The next one at a hamfest, and it didn't work.
I gradually figured out that he had replaced one of the 2 floppies with
something special, then put it back the way it was before selling it,
but he didn't undo some change to a mobo jumper, so it thought it had
only one drive and it had two and that was enough to stop everything,
except maybe there was a one line message on the screeen.

I've bought 2 others used at hamfests, one laptop from ebay, and been
given a bunch.

IBM diskette drives are not the same as the ones in other machines.
When other companies cloned our machines they were not exactly the
same, maybe for legal reasons.
When the company I worked for was building "clones" and selling hard
drive kits for IBM PCs some of the floppies we were using WERE
identical to IBM's drives. They were made by Alps, Mitsubishi,
Shugart, Panasonic, Matsu****a, TEAC and Tandon and I believe IBM even
used some Sanyo Denki drives.

Going back to the full height single sided ( drives there were
companies like Tandon and Qume, and Magnetic Peripherals -ALL of
which were available to the third tier manufacturers - and used by
IBM.
You may be correct going back to "hard sectored" drives - which were
virtually all Shugart - but that's going back to '76 or '77 - before
the "PC". The old 180KB jobs.
By '87 the hard sector drives were pretty much relegated to the
non-ibm compatible - the CPM boxes were one axample that still used
hard sector drives when I got into the business back in '86

I agree with that. I never heard of any incompatibility between IBM
PC floppy drives their media and the clones. The thing that made the
Compaq and later PCs so successful was that they were just about 100%
compatible with IBM. If you couldn't take a floppy disk from one machine
to another, it would have been a disaster.

Yes, the PC drives were 100% compatible. What did vary between
manufacturers (but not IBM and compatibles) was the format (sector size,
interleave, etc.) but a friend wrote a PC program that could read just
about any disk.
My Coco with A-DOS could even read PC disks. As long as the data was
compatible with a program on the computer. A lot of qbasic and other
versions of basic would halfways run on the cocobasic - and I ported a
lot of stuff over. Haven't done any basic programming for AGES. Used
to edit a lot of 6809 machine language too - been likely 30 years or
more since the last attempt. Had OS9 and c compiler too - I'd be
totally useless on it now - - -