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prices are going up
ok gut out all possible ports, and shift to a hub
also the transition from Ethernet Port, to one with hinge part to allow thin laptop
the jump to wireless screens seemed like a fantasy in 2014, now every meeting room has screen share
the next cord cut might be wireless USB docking hub
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Roger, my laptop came with both an Ethernet port and a USB-C connector. The USB-C connects to a hub I bought with HDMI, USB-A(2), and Ethernet support. The hub was <$50.
Small giggle: The hub was marked as an Apple product, and it's hooked up to an HP laptop.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Well, a USB hub (C or not C, that is not the question) is fine, but also makes the whole thing less "portable"...
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To me, a portable is acceptable only when hooked up to a 28-30" screen, a decent full-size keyboard and a high quality mouse (preferably wireless), memory card reader, memory stick socket (for now: USB A socket; both this and the memory card reader is built into the screen), and with access to "unlimited" disk space. In other words: It must be seated in a docking station. If I am going to take it home from work, it must have one dock at work, one at home. Using it undocked is only in emergency cases. So what's the use of a 'portable', then? I can bring home the stuff I work on using a memory stick.
The only job where I got a portable was when the employer offered no choice. The portable was docked permanently at the office; I never took it home (or elsewhere).
Today, I have got a private portable and an dock, as a reserve in case the main one fails. I very rarely use it. Even though it is a high quality one, I rarely use it. It is very much like the smartphone: The main reason for having one is that 'the rest of the world' claims that I cannot live without it. I go along, even though I do not really believe in those claims.
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I'm happy to report that today I received a USB-A/USB-C to 2.5 Gb Ethernet port, along with a USB-A/USB-C connected CD/DVD Reader/Writer, both for <$50. Problem solved.
Will Rogers never met me.
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My previous laptop at work had about 11h autonomy, 4x USB A and 1xUSB C and all possible readers and an Ethernet port.
My brand new laptop has only two USB A and a USB C with 2,5h autonomy. SO I have to carry around a USB hub with hanging 20cm cables, plus my power supply - this is not a laptop anymore, it is a thin desktop.  Sure, the laptop is not heavy, but the extra needed hardware is pure nonsense.
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11h runtime on a laptop? You're kidding, right? Or did that thing weigh 15lbs?
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Ralf Quint wrote: You're kidding, right?
Nope... I had a Dell back then that could hold the whole working day in a normal usage. Was like that for two or three years, then I had a problem and the technician came... after that battery life drop 50% or 60%
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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Sorry, but I have never seen ANY laptop that would get more than 4-4.5h of "working" time in real life. Of any brand. And I (and a lot of my clients) use Dell's a lot.
The best "runtime" I ever got was a small 11.4" Lenovo with no spinning rust (64GB EMC), 4GB RAM and that could effectively work maybe 6-7h, mostly typing, not even web browsing or email...
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Ralf Quint wrote: Or did that thing weigh 15lbs?
I kid you not, I could work one whole day and sometimes even more without plugging it in. So forgetting my power supply home has never been an issue in the past, for instance.
Our IT would replace the original batteries with some extra(?) and super powered(?) batteries. And yes, it was quite heavy, but far more practical than carrying dangling cables all around, AND you could not forget your "power" since it was IN the laptop 
Since I usually do not carry anything else than my laptop when I have to move it, the extra weight was not an issue. It was a Lenovo, cannot tell you anymore which ref exactly. I miss it veeeery much, I even postponed the normal 3-year-replacement-rate by 2 years to keep it. It unfortunately died from an electrical shock from a failing power supply (how ironical) which short circuited something and had the motherboard die - I did not even think that this was still possible with all protections they have now, but it was 
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The new laptop my employer gave me a few months ago has three USB-C ports and what look like a microphone jack, a card reader, and some little rectangle I don't recognize. It also came with a dongle that gives me one USB-A port and one HDMI port. My manager, who loves Apple products, was overjoyed that Windows laptops have finally caught up with Mac laptops. I hate having to drag the dongle and a USB hub everywhere I go. At home, it connects to my WiFi. At my desk at work, the dock has an Ethernet port. Welcome to the future, I guess.
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Our company supplied laptops have been getting smaller each year. "Too heavy" they whine. Give me a tool - reasonable screen, ports, and "hard disk".
This round, the HP laptop has USB C, HDMI, audio, USB A. But it is nice and thin.
We were issued a USB C "dock" (4 in ^3) that has 2 Display Port, VGA, audio, RJ45, x USB A & x USB C.
Portable docks are available with differing sets of connections.
Or you can collect and carry individual dongles for each connection.
Yes, they boot very quickly, but the storage is not enough to have a full load of tools and local work.
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Some of the business-oriented laptops still come with more ports. I recently got a new Dell Precision laptop at work, and it has a pretty nice complement of ports. The Latitude line also has some similar models, and I think Lenovo also still makes some laptops with a variety of ports.
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Those things are not included in laptops for years now. Ever that craze started to make them lighter and thinner. But what makes this really bad is that more and more laptops are also reducing the number of USB ports included that you could use to attach USB based optical drives and/or Ethernet adapters to your device. I had to get a USB 3.1 hub to plug in both of those as well as at least one USB memory stick and a USB mouse/keyboard combo... 
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I don't know how to break this to you, but it's been over ten years since the last laptop I had with an internal DVD drive. It's how laptops are so slim and light. You can buy an external DVD drive for less than $50, for what little use you will have for it. Watching movies on DVD and ripping CDs are also activities that have been relegated to the dustbin of history.
I guess people assume that if you have a laptop, you want to move it more than six inches, so you will have wi-fi. For desktop use, you can get a port replicator that has video, ethernet, and usb. Ten years ago these were expensive parts that were customized to the laptop, but USB3 has made inexpensive generic ones available.
You are awakening from a technological coma. Check out music and video streaming, and USB monitors, but don't ask who's been president, because the answer isn't pretty.
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DARPA wants a decompiler that can not only produce easily modified code but which will be verifiable.
Why DARPA hopes to 'distill' old binaries into readable code • The Register[^]
Having used decompilers over many years I don't see that this is likely.
I suspect it will be similar to the DARPA Robotics Challenge.
If I am reading it correctly (the 'HAR') it is even supposed to use a new representational format. So one would need to understand that first.
Following is the comment from one person (paraphrased perhaps) ...
Along with being able to deconstruct, edit, and reconstruct binaries, the team said its processing pipeline is also able to comb through HARs and remove extraneous routines.
So static code analysis that removes unused code. Which means dynamic linkage is not allowed.
The verification part?
The team has also, we're told, baked in verification steps to ensure changes made to code within hardware ranging from jets and drones to plain-old desktop computers work exactly as expected with no side effects.
I am just stating that seems like a really bold statement. Seems like if they can just do that then they should trash the rest and just present that to the world.
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I'd agree that it's unlikely - but if it worked it would be a game changer*
* And they would probably get sued by Adobe, Corel, Microsoft, ... once it became clear it was used to remove anti-piracy measures ... at a guess 20 minutes after release.
"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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OriginalGriff wrote: once it became clear it was used to remove anti-piracy measures ... at a guess 20 minutes after release.
lol
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It will make it easier for the military/etc to build malware while retaining the original functionality of the program.
Next they will ask that the new version of the exe should generate the same MD5 and SHA2 hashes.
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... and bought a new graphics card.
About a month before Herself broke her humerus I had to stop playing GTA V because some change at Rockstar had made it use a tiny little bit more video memory that previously, which was causing my venerable GTX660Ti to run out of memory*
Which meant I could play for minutes only before the sound started to stutter, and if I ignored that then it would randomly crash to the desktop. The only solution to this was to drop the game resolution from 1920x1080 to ... 800x600. Which was solid but ugly as hell and unplayable in the real world.
So I didn't play. And I've missed it.
No more! I have bought a new card - RTX4060 - which should be fine for a few years of life when GTA VI finally comes out**
It'll be here tomorrow (along with the Displayport to HDMI adapters I'll need) - I'm looking forward to this!
* I suspect that my triple monitor setup contributed to this, but I've been running that fine for years.
** Currently expected next year? The financial projections from Take-Two Interactive predicted a massive increase in sales in its upcoming 2025 fiscal year which starts in April 2024.
"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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I also look forward to buying Nvidia Geforce RTX 4060 but it is to update my Bring Your Animations to H264/HEVC Video article to support AV1 encoding. Unless one of my users wants to sponsor me a 4060 for me to test AV1 video encoding...
I do not play PC games.
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Shao Voon Wong wrote: I do not play PC games.
Well, there's your problem then! 
"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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Sadly I'm just about done with GTA V. I've played it for years, my online character has over $2B, and I was down to just following a daily routine...I've accomplished pretty much everything there is to do in the game, including some personal goals I had set for myself (including surpassing my crew leader in terms of RPs).
After I started playing Red Dead Redemption 2, GTA quickly fell to the wayside. These days if I launch the game, I get bored within 5 minutes.
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i might have added to the caption: "this kind of fire-stick is a larval god that is evolving into our future master." [^]
«The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled» Plutarch
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i'm so busy working on a Ph.D. in forgetting right now that i often forget i am learning. !
Quote: Neuroscientists today report the first results from experimental tests designed to explore the idea that "forgetting" might not be a bad thing, and that it may represent a form of learning—and outline results that support their core idea.
Last year the neuroscientists behind the new theory suggested that changes in our ability to access specific memories are based on environmental feedback and predictability. And that rather than being a bug, forgetting may be a functional feature of the brain, allowing it to interact dynamically with a dynamic environment.
In a changing world like the one we and many other organisms live in, forgetting some memories would be beneficial, they reasoned, as this can lead to more flexible behavior and better decision-making. If memories were gained in circumstances that are not wholly relevant to the current environment, forgetting them could be a positive change that improves our well-being.
[^]
«The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled» Plutarch
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