111–120 of 198 posts
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Obviously the US plugs are the worst, but thats the price for being the first. PAL was better than NTSC, too.
They needn't have been so bad: one small change--tilting the pins at an angle--and they could've been mechanically sound like Aussie ones.
http://www.jmjwebsitedesign.com/cdpro/wp-content/uploads/201...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Obviously the US plugs are the worst, but thats the price for being the first. PAL was better than NTSC, too.
They needn't have been so bad: one small change--tilting the pins at an angle--and they could've been mechanically sound like Aussie ones.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know Britons love their plugs, and I have never quite understood why. They look brutish, clunky and over-engineered. The opposite of elegant. The reason why they have fuses is so you can use ring circuits, which saves copper compared to the usual radial wiring. So its just about saving a little money. Everyone now gets to state his favourite plug type. Bring it on! Mine is the swiss Type J ( http://www.worldstandar…
Chinese win. Hands down. You can plug nearly anything in to them. http://imgur.com/dgT2mjk Of course, there's no guarantee what your reward will be, and they maybe aren't the safest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC_power_plugs_and_sockets#Chin...
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I have done that, when I was young and stupid and didn't have a UK compatible plug. I have also witnessed a many people doing it. You can also trick it by doing a sort of dance with te plug where you partially force in the ground, then one live, then you spin it and put the other one in. The day we have USB wall sockets can't come soon enough.
Eh, USB carries data, not just power. I don't trust any USB socket that I don't control.
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Women who carry mace might also welcome one of these in their handbags. Or people who keep getting inspected at airports. I'm sure there's a market.
I can already see the marketing slogan: "Stick it to the man" :)
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They needn't have been so bad: one small change--tilting the pins at an angle--and they could've been mechanically sound like Aussie ones.
NEMA 5-20 is exactly that. It's somewhat less common, due to the fact that it implies a 20 amp supply. Most plugs and sockets use the 15 amp version.
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They needn't have been so bad: one small change--tilting the pins at an angle--and they could've been mechanically sound like Aussie ones.
I'm not sure the order these were conceived, but it may be that there was already a plug with a similar configuration. http://www.jmjwebsitedesign.com/cdpro/wp-content/uploads/201...
Reminds me of a story I heard many years ago. UK power plugs have three prongs to include earth. If you rewire earth, live and neutral AND alter the plug wall socket to match, then all is well, but if someone steals your PC then plugs it in using a standard wall socket then ouch.
When my grandparents died and we sold their house (in the uk) we had some builders in to tidy up some stuff and they discovered that in a big part of the house the earth was actually wired to live in the sockets. They'd lived with it for 40 years or something. Guess not many devices actually use the earth. (The wiring was originally done by my grandad'a brother - use a professional people...)
http://smile.amazon.com/GE-3-Wire-Receptacle-Tester-50542/dp...
(that's US wiring but surely there's a UK equivalent)
I once encountered a computer that was the opposite of this; plug any USB device into it, and the device would never work again, even in another computer.
At work, I encountered a HD which fried SATA ports. If you plugged that HD in a SATA port of another computer, that SATA port didn't work anymore. I don't know if the HD had been damaged by the computer it was originally from, but we didn't use both that HD and that computer anymore. There have been other stories of "contagious" hardware damage in the past, like the infamous ZIP drive "click of death", but that HD is…
Usual story: replacement part is about £0.50 and I could replace it in the lab, but postage for one part is £4.
Might see if I can get one as a sample, or from the Far East with 'free shipping'.
Many moons ago, I worked in the education sector and some smart kid ran a paper stapler up a keyboard lead, leaving it full of metal staples. The power short blew an axial fuse on the motherboard. The next user encountered a 'dead keyboard', so they swapped it for the one on the next desk..repeat 6 times before someone realised the fault was travelling with the keyboard...
Someone joked that this would be useful to ensure people won't randomly plug USB drives into their computers. Sounds insane, except that... "During a stop-over in Hong Kong, he finds a spare USB key in his hotel room. Curious, he inserts it into his laptop. By the time he arrives in Australia, his computer is infected."[1] This was the one of the infection vectors for a large flare-up between the Chinese government a…
Hey, didn't an article on USB dead drops get posted yesterday?
