Tim Streater wrote:
In article ,
The Natural Philosopher wrote:

All speakers leak HUGE amounts of flux.

Hmmm, only the cheapo, poorly designed ones, according to giggle.


Not in my experience.

There is no requirement for them not to.

Unless they're touted to be "video safe".

'we put carap magnets in this, they barely do 80dB/W BUT THEY ARE VIDEO
SAFE !!'

yeah, right :-)

On Fri, 30 Jul 2010 13:50:52 +0100, "John"
wrote:


But items made of metal - requiring welding, brazing, assembly, etc seem to
carry a premium as their production methods aren't as advanced or as
efficient as a purely electronic item. On this assumption though a TV should
cost even less - but there is a lot of material in the casing and the
screen. Packaging and shipping - along with what the market will pay is also
a factor. Selling plasma TVs to people with a perfectly adequate CRT TV
proved that people will pay for very little improvement in 'functionality'.

That's very likely part of it, electronics can be knocked up in a
Chinese shed by robots and low paid people and don't cost a lot to
ship.

Actual metal bashing needs more man-hours and is still done in the UK
occasionally. Too heavy and bulky to freight at low cost.

Having said which there's probably a massive mark-up on a boiler when
you see how much more metal you get in some agricultural machinery
which doesn't cost much more.

On Sat, 31 Jul 2010 11:17:17 +0100 (BST), "Dave Liquorice"
wrote:

On Fri, 30 Jul 2010 19:59:33 +0100, Fred wrote:

I was told it was due to weight. CRTs are heavy so it costs more to
ship them halfway around the world. LCDs and plasmas are lighter and
also thinner, so they can fit more in a container too.

There isn't a lot in the weight between our old 28" CRT and 42"
plasma... Packaged volume is another matter, the box for the CRT made
a great play house for the kids for quite a while, the plasma box is
only 9" deep, useless as a playhouse. B-)

Useful for a cat though

at least the LCD box fits into the attic

In message , Albert Ross
writes
On Fri, 30 Jul 2010 13:50:52 +0100, "John"
wrote:


But items made of metal - requiring welding, brazing, assembly, etc seem to
carry a premium as their production methods aren't as advanced or as
efficient as a purely electronic item. On this assumption though a TV should
cost even less - but there is a lot of material in the casing and the
screen. Packaging and shipping - along with what the market will pay is also
a factor. Selling plasma TVs to people with a perfectly adequate CRT TV
proved that people will pay for very little improvement in 'functionality'.

That's very likely part of it, electronics can be knocked up in a
Chinese shed by robots and low paid people and don't cost a lot to
ship.

Actual metal bashing needs more man-hours and is still done in the UK
occasionally. Too heavy and bulky to freight at low cost.

Having said which there's probably a massive mark-up on a boiler

Not as much as there is on some of the parts

--
geoff

"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
...
Tim Streater wrote:
In article ,
tony sayer wrote:

Might that have been where someone put a large loudspeaker next to it
and magnetised the screen?.

Or it was a convergence fault?...

I never found out. It was a different telly next time I went there :-)

(I'd say that if a l/s had that kind of leakage there'd have to be a
fault with it, too).

You would be wrong there, then.

All speakers leak HUGE amounts of flux.

There is no requirement for them not to.

I've got a big speaker right next to my CRT TV and it has hardly any
effect - if I take it away there is a bit of colour fringing visible on a
pure white field indicating that the degaussing circuits (or whatever they
have) have compensated.

--
Max Demian

In article , Max Demian
scribeth thus
"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
...
Tim Streater wrote:
In article ,
tony sayer wrote:

Might that have been where someone put a large loudspeaker next to it
and magnetised the screen?.

Or it was a convergence fault?...

I never found out. It was a different telly next time I went there :-)

(I'd say that if a l/s had that kind of leakage there'd have to be a
fault with it, too).

You would be wrong there, then.

All speakers leak HUGE amounts of flux.

There is no requirement for them not to.

I've got a big speaker right next to my CRT TV and it has hardly any
effect - if I take it away there is a bit of colour fringing visible on a
pure white field indicating that the degaussing circuits (or whatever they
have) have compensated.


Well I've never had that many moving coil loudspeakers but the ones I
have had Spendor BC1, Rogers LS3/5A and LS5/8's and Tannoy Yorks haven't
been problematic, but perhaps I don't want they right next to 't
telly!...
--
Tony Sayer

tony sayer wrote:
In article , Max Demian
scribeth thus
"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
...
Tim Streater wrote:
In article ,
tony sayer wrote:
Might that have been where someone put a large loudspeaker next to it
and magnetised the screen?.

Or it was a convergence fault?...
I never found out. It was a different telly next time I went there :-)

(I'd say that if a l/s had that kind of leakage there'd have to be a
fault with it, too).

You would be wrong there, then.

All speakers leak HUGE amounts of flux.

There is no requirement for them not to.
I've got a big speaker right next to my CRT TV and it has hardly any
effect - if I take it away there is a bit of colour fringing visible on a
pure white field indicating that the degaussing circuits (or whatever they
have) have compensated.


Well I've never had that many moving coil loudspeakers but the ones I
have had Spendor BC1, Rogers LS3/5A and LS5/8's and Tannoy Yorks haven't
been problematic, but perhaps I don't want they right next to 't
telly!...

Its an inverse square thing anyway, and the larger the speaker the
further inside it the magnets are.

A good bookshelf type is the worst offender.

On Sat, 31 Jul 2010 14:33:28 +0100, geoff wrote:

In message , Albert Ross
writes
On Fri, 30 Jul 2010 13:50:52 +0100, "John"
wrote:


But items made of metal - requiring welding, brazing, assembly, etc seem to
carry a premium as their production methods aren't as advanced or as
efficient as a purely electronic item. On this assumption though a TV should
cost even less - but there is a lot of material in the casing and the
screen. Packaging and shipping - along with what the market will pay is also
a factor. Selling plasma TVs to people with a perfectly adequate CRT TV
proved that people will pay for very little improvement in 'functionality'.

That's very likely part of it, electronics can be knocked up in a
Chinese shed by robots and low paid people and don't cost a lot to
ship.

Actual metal bashing needs more man-hours and is still done in the UK
occasionally. Too heavy and bulky to freight at low cost.

Having said which there's probably a massive mark-up on a boiler

Not as much as there is on some of the parts

Oh yes that too. Our fitter recommended a Vaillant. His experience was
that Worcesters weren't nearly as good as they're supposed to be and
some other makes were impossible to fix, Vaillants were manufactured
to be repairable and at a reasonable cost, although his definition of
reasonable probably differed significantly from yours or mine.

An agricultural magazine looked into parts costs, the winner was a
simple bolt which could be obtained anywhere but which the
manufacturer had marked up several thousand percent. That's where many
industries make the bulk of their profit, rather than knocking up
cheap disposable stuff like electronics.

In article , Fred fred@no-
email.here.invalid writes

One disappointing thing is that you used to be able to get small TVs
(~14 inch) quite cheaply to use in the kitchen/bedroom/wherever but I
haven't seen anything small and cheap yet.

You can't compare the size of CRT TVs and LCD TVs directly. If you had
a 28" CRT and bought a 28" LCD to replace it, you'd be disappointed.

A 19" LCD is about right for the viewing distance for a 14" CRT, and
there are plenty of these around, most of them have Freeview built in.

--
Mike Tomlinson

In article
s.com, Man at B&Q writes

Well if they can sell [...] a Belkin IEC mains lead
for £20

http://www.russandrews.com/product.a...p=1&pf_id=1545

Never underestimate the stupidity of people.

--
Mike Tomlinson

On 02/08/2010 in message Mike Tomlinson
wrote:

In article
s.com, Man at B&Q writes

Well if they can sell [...] a Belkin IEC mains lead
for £20

http://www.russandrews.com/product.a...p=1&pf_id=1545

Never underestimate the stupidity of people.

The review is interesting, I suppose if you've spent that much on a kettle
lead you have to notice how good it is. No name either, presumably Mr &
Mrs Head's son, Dick.

--
Jeff Gaines Dorset UK
All those who believe in psychokinesis raise my hand.

On 02/08/2010 15:31, Jeff Gaines wrote:

The review is interesting, I suppose if you've spent that much on a
kettle lead you have to notice how good it is.

Recently I've been swearing at kettle leads which have a nasty habit of
falling out of servers, so there definitely quality issues. Maybe not
the ones RA are trying to solve :-)

On 02/08/2010 16:14, Tim Streater wrote:
In article ,
Clive George wrote:

On 02/08/2010 15:31, Jeff Gaines wrote:

The review is interesting, I suppose if you've spent that much on a
kettle lead you have to notice how good it is.

Recently I've been swearing at kettle leads which have a nasty habit
of falling out of servers, so there definitely quality issues. Maybe
not the ones RA are trying to solve :-)

Tie-wrap 'em to something.

Not necessarily an option.

Do your servers slide out in the rack?

Yes. But these ones hadn't been.

If so do you have the cable
management arm at the back, with all the cabling installed in it so you
can pull the server out while in-service? Or did some soppy date do that
for all cable *except* the power cord, so when you pull the server out,
the management arm unfolds nicely but the power cord, being tie-wrapped
to one of the rack uprights, just pulls out. I've seen it done!

Tee hee. We don't use cable management arms any more because they cause
more problems than they solve.

The problem wasn't cables being pulled, it was just crappy plugs which
didn't sit in their holes well enough and edged themselves out ever so
slightly, so looked like they were in but weren't actually connected.

We've got some posher ones now with little clamps, which do well when
there aren't other bits in the way, and are impossible to remove when
there are :-(

On 02/08/2010 17:33, Tim Streater wrote:

Tee hee. We don't use cable management arms any more because they
cause more problems than they solve.

Could you elaborate? I'm rather a fan of them.

I think my initial gripe was I couldn't follow cables. I then compared
racks with arms and racks without and the ones without were just easier
to work with. It doesn't help having all your cables (eg 2xpower, 6+
network, 4 FC) coming off at one edge. Power was particularly bad for
that - if you've got 2xPDUs on separate phases, you end up with one on
either side of the rack, and half the power then needs to cross back to
the other side, which then stops the arms working neatly. (all our
servers have 2 PSUs).

On 02/08/2010 19:02, Tim Streater wrote:
In article ,
Clive George wrote:

On 02/08/2010 17:33, Tim Streater wrote:

Tee hee. We don't use cable management arms any more because they
cause more problems than they solve.

Could you elaborate? I'm rather a fan of them.

I think my initial gripe was I couldn't follow cables. I then compared
racks with arms and racks without and the ones without were just
easier to work with. It doesn't help having all your cables (eg
2xpower, 6+ network, 4 FC) coming off at one edge. Power was
particularly bad for that - if you've got 2xPDUs on separate phases,
you end up with one on either side of the rack, and half the power
then needs to cross back to the other side, which then stops the arms
working neatly. (all our servers have 2 PSUs).

Mmmm. I would have thought all the cables coming off at one edge not
particularly a problem. They're all going to go into the cable
management ducting anyway, and then off to patch panels etc. For power,
they go down to the bottom of the rack where the power strips are.

No network cables leave racks for us apart from from the switches at the
bottom. So no cable management ducting involved.
Not really space for power strips at the bottom of the rack for us
either - we've got a lot of power cables :-) The PDUs are mounted
vertically at the sides, hence the crossover issue.

I think the main problem with rack cabling has always been that the
lengths are never what you need. In the end I got fed up with dealing
with the consequences dealing with over-long cables that for the next
installation they all got made up to length.

Mix of 0.5s, 1s and 2s seems to cover it for us without _too_ much
spaghetti. How do you manage to get your cable lengths that accurate?

Dunno if that scales
though. But our company never got a proper grip on installations. They
tended to be done on an ad-hoc basis with no view to the future. A good
basis for spaghetti, that.

We've got some beautiful rats-nests, and the one with the arms is the
worst :-) The newer stuff is fairly sane though, and that's the ones
I've been describing.

In message , Albert Ross
writes
On Sat, 31 Jul 2010 14:33:28 +0100, geoff wrote:

In message , Albert Ross
writes
On Fri, 30 Jul 2010 13:50:52 +0100, "John"
wrote:


But items made of metal - requiring welding, brazing, assembly, etc seem to
carry a premium as their production methods aren't as advanced or as
efficient as a purely electronic item. On this assumption though a TV should
cost even less - but there is a lot of material in the casing and the
screen. Packaging and shipping - along with what the market will pay is also
a factor. Selling plasma TVs to people with a perfectly adequate CRT TV
proved that people will pay for very little improvement in 'functionality'.

That's very likely part of it, electronics can be knocked up in a
Chinese shed by robots and low paid people and don't cost a lot to
ship.

Actual metal bashing needs more man-hours and is still done in the UK
occasionally. Too heavy and bulky to freight at low cost.

Having said which there's probably a massive mark-up on a boiler

Not as much as there is on some of the parts

Oh yes that too. Our fitter recommended a Vaillant. His experience was
that Worcesters weren't nearly as good as they're supposed to be and
some other makes were impossible to fix, Vaillants were manufactured
to be repairable and at a reasonable cost, although his definition of
reasonable probably differed significantly from yours or mine.

I used to recommend worcester, but I see so much worcester stuff coming
in now, not any more

Yes, vaillant seems to be the fitters weapon of choice nowadays


--
geoff

On 03/08/2010 14:36, Tim Streater wrote:
In article ,
Clive George wrote:

On 02/08/2010 19:02, Tim Streater wrote:
In article ,
Clive George wrote:

On 02/08/2010 17:33, Tim Streater wrote:

Tee hee. We don't use cable management arms any more because they
cause more problems than they solve.

Could you elaborate? I'm rather a fan of them.

I think my initial gripe was I couldn't follow cables. I then compared
racks with arms and racks without and the ones without were just
easier to work with. It doesn't help having all your cables (eg
2xpower, 6+ network, 4 FC) coming off at one edge. Power was
particularly bad for that - if you've got 2xPDUs on separate phases,
you end up with one on either side of the rack, and half the power
then needs to cross back to the other side, which then stops the arms
working neatly. (all our servers have 2 PSUs).

Mmmm. I would have thought all the cables coming off at one edge not
particularly a problem. They're all going to go into the cable
management ducting anyway, and then off to patch panels etc. For power,
they go down to the bottom of the rack where the power strips are.

No network cables leave racks for us apart from from the switches at
the bottom. So no cable management ducting involved.

Ah. Well we had (big) routers in several racks (800 wide, 1000 deep, 47u
high) as well as optical kit. Each bit of kit had its routing engine
(with two serial ports) as well as a backup engine, so each box needed 4
serial connections back to a terminal server as well as two ordinary
ethernet connections back to a switch. All this was only manageable with
400x400 vertical cable management ducting and 24 or 48 cat5 ports
prewired between racks. Then there were a couple of hundred fibres
connecting the routers and the optical kit, running in different ducting
on top of the racks. So, some huge optical patch panels too.

I try and avoid dealing with routers :-)

(serial? Is this old kit by any chance?)

I think the main problem with rack cabling has always been that the
lengths are never what you need. In the end I got fed up with dealing
with the consequences dealing with over-long cables that for the next
installation they all got made up to length.

Mix of 0.5s, 1s and 2s seems to cover it for us without _too_ much
spaghetti. How do you manage to get your cable lengths that accurate?

Well, this is why I'm not sure what I was trying to do was going to
scale. The answer was to have them made up on site, which worked well
enough for copper and power - I didn't even try that with fibre.

I might consider doing that for a major routing install, but for network
and power there's no way - nobody here's going to accept hiring a
professional wireman for a day to install a single server.

But doing that sort of thing was the only way to keep on top of the rats
nest. Trouble is, there's always folks back home who seem to think that
all cables are infinitely thin, and should therefore not pose a problem.

Fortunately we don't suffer that :-)

We've got some beautiful rats-nests, and the one with the arms is the
worst :-) The newer stuff is fairly sane though, and that's the ones
I've been describing.

I hope all your cables are labelled at each end, then :-)

In the newer stuff, yes. The older rats-nest, no :-( We keep talking
about rewiring that rack completely...

Though there is some argument as to how they're labelled. I reckon both
ends need both source and destination (source so you can plug it into
the right hole again, destination so you can trace). Others think it
merely needs labelling with the other end, so eg Server X NIC 2 is on
the end which plugs into switch 2 port 34, and I think that's barking.
Or am I just overly paranoid?