Every god damn time

No, I actually like DickPlay ports.

(Tho I think we should be using open standard ports overall.)

The cash registers at a place I worked had this for the PS2 keyboard connection, too. IIRC, you needed to slide back a sleeve before giving the cable a tug. All this was behind the tight counter, buried under a layer of dust and whatever else fell behind the register. A skilled coworker could do it with one hand, but I never mastered that skill.

Lol @ 1am

Who unplugs a cable by pulling on the wire?

Dude, it’s a dinosaur using a computer. Cut him some slack.
- Watch out. That's how you create a Slackware user.
- dis playport, dis not dinosaur
- It's a croc. Notice the two tail ridges
The same people who complain on Amazon reviews that the cable broke for "no reason"
99% of the people out there
- I think this number is far too high.
- That explains the elections

Had this at my company some time ago. People just don't understand retention mechanisms I don't think

Mechanical retention plugs are fading away, sadly. Long live the era of loose, wiggly plugs that may one day need to be held at a 20 degree angle to work.
That being said, I hate the retention clips on RJ45 and RJ11 jacks... I've had a few that wouldn't release at all. Then I wind up struggling with my router for 4-5 minutes because its hooked up in my entertainment stand. If you accidentally snap those suckers in the process and plug them back in they will slowly slide out and you're left wondering why your ethernet connection isn't working a couple months later.
I've debated getting a spool of cat5 and a bag of RJ45. Much cheaper than replacing a whole cord every time and saves a lot of landfill. On the days my PC repair teacher was busy with a full IT backlog he'd sit us in a circle and had us put plugs on Cat5e, so the process isn't unknown to me.
I've never actually seen a display port cable, so if there was one in the back of a PC I had to pull out, I'd initially treat it like a HDMI cable and just pull it out.
It doesn't look like it has screws, so if it has some way of locking in place it must be sneaky about it right?
- My rule of thumb for technology is "don't force it". If it doesn't come out with a light pull that's when the flashlight comes out and I start inspecting. This rule doesn't always work, though. Sometimes it takes the strength of 10 gorillas to put RAM in and I'm always scared to push harder.
- It has two teeth like things and usually a barely noticeable "button" to press to release.
when your main stat is strength, and you've entirely ignored int/wis
Seriously though, if the cable doesn't want to come out with reasonable force, the solution is PROBABLY NOT to apply more force. What kind of cavemen do you have working there?
- cavemen
  Worse. University students.
  I'm a sysadmin at a university. Last semester, we lost five DP cables, two DP-VGA adapters, one graphics card, and one motherboard to these acts of barbarism. Plus the non-DP stuff -- keyboards with missing or broken keys, mice with buttons bent out or just smashed to bits, RS232 connectors broken because they forgot to unscrew them, all kinds of USB cables cracked at the connector because students unplug them to use with their own laptops and plug them back into the front IO creating a nice little 180° bend, countless ethernet cables ripped out of the motherboard, stolen equipment, monitors that were straight up broken off their stands...
  Calling them "cavemen" is an insult to cavemen.
uh. what is that?
- The severed remains of a DP cable, sill attached to the port.
- DisplayPort connector stuck in socket I think
Back in my day you would rip your arm off before the cable breaks.
- China to the rescue, a good tug and they peel like a banana now
:[‘

"text so that the comment is federated properly"
- "text so that the comment is federated properly"
  Say what now?

I lived with my gfs family for a short while. We had a breakin one day (South Africa). Guys tried taking a pc that was plugged in with a vga cable. They couldn't get the cable off (the thief probably never used a pc in his life). They left the monitor (heavy crt type) with the vga cable, with a piece of the motherboard still attached to it.

Africa sounds terrible. You live in a place where they still use VGA? How horrible.
- Don't you go knockin my VGA. I still have about 10 in my attic. If nothing else, they're great self-defense weapons. They could do some serious damage to a potential attacker and probably still work after.
- That's yet another reason I ain't gonna play Sun City.

But less evil than the HDMI fees.

You know they make displayport cables without the clips, right?

I did not know this. Are they allowed by the spec?
- Fuck the spec.
- The latch is optional. Most of my DP cables don't have them, and I'm glad for it because they're sometimes a pain in the arse to unlatch.
- I have a hell of a lot of DP cables, and only have one or so with clips.
Why do they even make them with the clips? If someone trips on a cable or something, and there's no clip, it's a mild inconvenience to plug it back in. If it's clipped, you can bring the whole computer crashing down!
- Cable strength. Loose cabling can cause contact and thus signal issues
- Permanent installation for server multiplexer is useful.
- Designed so they wouldn't become another HDMI fiasco, where you have to search for aftermarket clips so your plug stays in. Now, do Displayports need it, probably not. They feel about as secure as a USB. But there is that fear going back to even VGA, where most worked fine without screwing them in, but just to make sure... (I can't recall, did EGA have screws?)
Yep and the DisplayPort standard says the latch is optional
In fact, I’ve never seen a DP cable with the clips. I had no idea they existed !
- Do they also make cables that dont have the power pin (21 iirc?) Connected so both gpu and monitors try to power each other and never actually power up?

Kids nowadays don't know about DVI, VGA, COM, Parallel or Gameport. I loved the days when one could accidentally remove the screw on the board side.

In some cases those were load bearing cables, too
- Table? Naw, cable.
- This photo is so stressful
- When the engineers specifically design a connector to never disconnect accidentally, they shouldn't be surprised by people who take it as a challenge.
- Red power receptacles. Was this at a hospital?
I just never bothered with the screws, some cables even came without them.
- I always gave them half a courtesy turn
You make it sound like they can afford modern hardware.

Maybe it's because the dinosaur high as fuck.

Shares a wardrobe with Carl Brutananadilewski.

skill issue

Just do what I do. DVI to HDMI to an HDMI audio extractor to DVI.

All that for one of these guys, with the speaker bar (not pictured)

I miss my DVI to HDMI. Had to trade it off to a friend because his BenQ tinted everything lime green over HDMI. I gotta get another one to put in my big bag of cords I'll never use but really like to have around.
Are your rechargeable batteries on a space heater?
- Hah, no. Kinda looks like it, though. It's a lamp, made out of a big glass vase and some LEDs, and the inside is a burned out resistive load that helped dissipate the excess energy from an old automated welding station. Basically, a big heatsink with a bunch of huge resistors. Just meant to dump a ton of energy out as heat for a few seconds at a time. I don't have any better pics of it, I'm afraid.
- Nice
Hey, relax man. We aren't all mechanical engineers here.
- Oh snap, just giving out personal information over here. Ill have to edit that in a minute.
Many monitors have an audio out port in the monitor itself now. Really useful if you have multiple inputs.
- Yeah, that is super handy. I wish this one had that. That's what I was trying to emulate with the audio extractor.

Why do display port cable connectors have these stupid latches with a crappy button that will, even when the button is fully depresses, still stick out so that removing the connector nis always a draaaagggg..

Yeah, HDMI licensing sucks but at least you can plug and disconnect HDMI in a normal way. Dispkay port is the worst

I do like the hooks on Display Port, honestly. There were quite a few times where HDMI cables came loose while adjusting my screen due to the cable being tied together with other cables for organisational purposes. Putting it back in always a chore then.
I don't think it is even much of a hassle when unplugging it from a machine, such as a PC. I do agree it's a pain for monitors however, as the ports usually are in a more indented position.
You can buy cables without the latches on them, though idk if theyre technically to spec
- That’s how my display port cable came with my monitor
But have you considered that the DisplayPort shape looks kinda sexy

Slightly OT, but what do you call people who role play as dragons/reptiles/etc? "Furries" seems inaccurate, but it's the first term that comes to mind when I see art like this.

Scalies
- Can confirm, "scalies"
  For birds it's "avian"
- To fully understand, I believe this video is very... uhm, "educative"? Scalie Squad vs. Furry Force (very NSFW) by college humor
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEmh5a_wSyw
- I thought that was just like a meme term. I didn't realise reptile furries actually called themselves that
I think its "Scalies" or something as in scales instead of fur
I think they're scalies?
Pokemon PMD fans

A similar vein as this, at work I was talking about a heat gun:

"Look, the feet are molded into the cable so if you break it you have to buy theirs!"

I then pull the cable out to show it as an example and snap

I didn't realize it had a retention clip at all, so I lightly pulled it and snapped the thin plastic holding it in. I thought it was held in by friction.

Oops.

I've cut my finger with that sharp metal bump in the DisplayPort cable head. I forgot what I was doing, though. but I was struggling to unplug it and accidentally pressing it abobe that sharp metal bit.

The cut was small but deep, I end up enjoying to see my fresh red blood for a while because it was quite a lot. I rarely bleed that much.

Dp over usb type c fixes this...

yea but running video over USB c just feels wrong.
- 🤔 literally why?

It DisplayDePorts your silicon.

Vga even worse

When HDMI came along and replaced DVI, I thought that would have finally been the end of video connectors that lock into the slot.

Thankfully I've been lucky enough to never actually own a monitor with a DisplayPort. They've all been HDMI-only. I currently don't need more than 4K 120Hz anyway so HDMI 2.0 is good enough. Probably won't upgrade again until we have 1000Hz displays (which is what's needed to completely eliminate motion blur).

DisplayPort as a standard is free of charge and better in every way. AFAIK, it can handle multiple 8K monitors without issues provided your GPU is strong enough.
HDMI royalties are disgusting
There are DisplayPort cables that don’t have the latch if you prefer them.

I gotta confess, as an IT guy I have never ever seen displayport in my life. Not a port, nor a cable. Which is especially weird given that I have 6 displays hooked up that technically use it without a single actual port.

Are you sure you know what displayport is?
- Yeah. It's a video interface but I have never seen the physical port, as I've said I have 6 monitors hooked using it's signalling protocol, but all the physical connections are either type-c(DP alt mode) or eDP.
Most GPUs and monitors made in last 5 years have at least one.
Have you bought a single monitor in the past 5 years or so? Mine all have hdmi and DP.
- Yeah, MP Trios and glance which are type c only, latter also having hdmi. Though last time I dealt with desktop equipment I think was within 5 years but the pieces were probably more than 5 years old, think those were xiaomi a1's and some random chineese FHD panels, with either 1650 or 1050 cards when we've built some budget workstations. I swear I didn't try to avoid DP, just got lucky to deal with last pieces of equipment without it, and working remote on laptops got me severely out of touch with modern hardware.
Every single monitor I've seen that's built in the last 8ish years has at least one. All modern graphics cards do too. Are you sure you've not seen them?
- They thought that was for Double Penetration.
- Just checked, there are still brand new monitors on the market with just VGA+HDMI (e.g. MSI MP223, DELL SE2722H), but you'd really have to scrape the bottom of the barrel nowadays to find one. I think I actually might have a GPU with one of those lying around somewhere, thought, but does it even count if I never used one?
This is statistically impossible, unless "IT guy" just means "computer nerd" rather than someone who works in an IT role.
I don’t think you should have been downvoted, but what is it you do? Remote monitoring? We deployed hundreds of monitors last summer and I swear I almost memorized the goddamn DisplayPort pinout.
Have you never seen a discrete GPU as an IT guy? A monitor? I kind of doubt you're in IT if not.