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Remember when magicJack had it's own team in Women's Professional Soccer? And several of the biggest names in women's soccer? Including several members of the future multiple World Cup winning squad? And then the whole thing flopped, because the magicJack guy was insane? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MagicJack_(WPS) This and the ongoing adventures of John McAfee (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McAfee) are my favorite Where Are They Now? of crazy tech people to check in on from time to time.
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# ? May 15, 2016 22:10 |
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# ? May 15, 2024 17:38 |
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Oyak posted:Well, every Veterans Administration hospital in the US still makes its employees use a program with a command line interface in order to request vacation time or sick days. This means learning to program a few lines of code if you want time off. God Bless America!
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# ? May 16, 2016 00:59 |
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When did you become Dr. Quarex?
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# ? May 16, 2016 01:03 |
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Casimir Radon posted:When did you become Dr. Quarex? I figured I might as well do something with my new title since I cannot officially use it at work
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# ? May 16, 2016 01:14 |
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woodch posted:(Maelstrom) Did you ever make your own sound packs using ResEdit? If so - yeah they'll work with the PC port as well.
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# ? May 16, 2016 02:30 |
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Nice! I mean I hope this came before MEMMAKER and it wasn't just running that for you and making a menu. At least some games had a "make a boot disk" program. Otherwise yeah, it was always a pretty huge bummer when you wanted to play this new game but nope, you gotta gently caress around with EMM386 some more. Oh cool, I have enough RAM now.. but only if I don't load the mouse driver, and the game works better with the mouse EVIL Gibson posted:Sometimes I compile linux open source or kernels just because I think my CPU isn't working hard enough and I want to watch it burn. You should try Gentoo Linux!
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# ? May 16, 2016 04:24 |
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Run Seti@Home or something like that (and then wonder why it's so warm in the room [don't get brain damage] and about your power bill) Command Line interfaces aren't the worst, there's also not really a point in spending millions on modernizing something to then resemble the Windows 8 UI and then have more bugs, more overhead and less function while being somehow more incomprehensible. Of course it doesn't have to turn out like that, but well, come on - we all know it'd turn out exactly like that. I was just thinking about this thread because I bought an IBM PS/2E this weekend on eBay. Normally the last thing I'd need is more old computer crap but I might just equip it with a DOM Module and enjoy a completely silent old PC. I also love Desktop cases, I was never a fan of those towers even though admittedly they make more sense. IBM always did some fine engineering back then, I'm really curious how it's put together.
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# ? May 16, 2016 07:54 |
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Police Automaton posted:Run Seti@Home or something like that (and then wonder why it's so warm in the room [don't get brain damage] and about your power bill) Oh yeah, your mentioning brain damage reminds me of another way to burn your CPU: mine bitcoin. quote:spending millions on modernizing something to then resemble the Windows 8 UI and then have more bugs Yeah, it's way harder to get GUIs right. The same can probably be said for textual interfaces like Norton Commander, vs. actual non-interactive CLIs like code:
quote:I bought an IBM PS/2E I want one (should have tried to buy one when my dad's work was getting rid of them back in the day) but they're so expensive, and then there's the postage. quote:DOM Module ???
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# ? May 16, 2016 08:48 |
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It's actually DOM not DOM Module (as that would mean Disk on Module Module) They're basically really small SSDs similiar to CF cards that are used in industrial settings often. You can get them with SATA or IDE interfaces, those with IDE interfaces in small capacity are easy and cheap to get out of China and are the perfect hard drives for such old computers, especially if they're built to spec and don't have a strong power supply and/or don't have much room. They also exist in DIP packages with very small capacities and were used on earlier Industrial PC boards. In such a settings you usually don't want mechanical hard drives and also don't need to change the contents often. Engineers in the field could basically just pop the old chip out and put a new one in. Even earlier you'd use EPROMs, I have industrial PC boards where you can plug in an EPROM and it'll be recognized as a disk by the board. These are of course not in-field writeable though. (Sometimes that was a bonus because they can't be easily tampered with) Police Automaton has a new favorite as of 09:12 on May 16, 2016 |
# ? May 16, 2016 09:06 |
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klafbang posted:Unicode is a mess. It's better than the good ol' code pages, but ho boy is the video wrong about it solving all issues. Aside from the unicode domains that for a short time was every phishers dream, it's also a coding nightmare: https://eev.ee/blog/2015/09/12/dark-corners-of-unicode/ Hang on. ' But 16 bits covers the entire BMP, which contains all current languages, some ancient languages, dingbats, mathematical symbols, and tons of punctuation.' The whole reason we don't just use the BMP these days is that it doesn't and cannot contain all of modern Chinese, specifically all the stuff in the Supplementary Ideographic Plane. Nobody would be going through the pain of UTF-16 just so we can write in ancient Egyptian or frigging Linear A.
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# ? May 16, 2016 11:09 |
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IIRC, Unicode was originally 16 bits. It was then merged with a competing standard, which used 32 bits but promised to only ever use 24 bits. Therefore, the first 16 bits are "special," as in the first unicode standards tried to put every language in there (including merging Chinese and Japanese based on all of "means the same," "sounds the same," and "looks the same.") Merging of the two standards is also the reason we have both the UCS and UTF encodings (obviously in both little and big endian versions). While UTF8 is incredibly clever for many things, it should just die horribly and be replaced by UCS4 little endian.
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# ? May 16, 2016 12:31 |
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I'm more of an ascii type of guy
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# ? May 16, 2016 12:47 |
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Police Automaton posted:I'm more of an ascii type of guy Is this you? code:
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# ? May 16, 2016 12:55 |
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Jerry Cotton posted:Is this you? no, i'm over here
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# ? May 16, 2016 13:06 |
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klafbang posted:While UTF8 is incredibly clever for many things, it should just die horribly and be replaced by UCS4 little endian. It's kinda nice how you can open a UTF-8 file in a dumb/old program like, say, Vernon Buerg's LIST, and if it's mostly ASCII then it's still readable, instead of every letter being separated by 3 NUL characters like it would be with UCS4. I wonder if this Visual Basic 6 clone of LIST supports UCS4?
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# ? May 16, 2016 13:15 |
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Unctuous Cretin posted:This and the ongoing adventures of John McAfee (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McAfee) are my favorite Where Are They Now? of crazy tech people to check in on from time to time. i remember that guy from farcry 3
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# ? May 16, 2016 13:26 |
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Heath posted:Just quoting this for the new page Just quoting this to provide a link to an allegedly-working-on-modern-Windows copy of the game complete with pre-configured DOSBox: http://www.theisozone.com/downloads/pc/dos-games/prince-interactive-cd-dosbox/ I'm going to assume this is cool because the company who made this is as gone as Prince is.
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# ? May 16, 2016 13:42 |
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klafbang posted:Merging of the two standards is also the reason we have both the UCS and UTF encodings (obviously in both little and big endian versions). While UTF8 is incredibly clever for many things, it should just die horribly and be replaced by UCS4 little endian. Nah, UTF-8 was for backwards compatibility. Having all your existing English-language text files be compatible as-is was and is pretty important. Going UCS-4 everywhere a) means that means all your text in English and other European languages is like 4x as big (not as big a deal as it used to be) and b) doesn't even get you what you want because one Unicode code point doesn't equal one character (because of things mentioned in that article like decomposed characters). You can't usefully index a UCS-4 array to do, well, anything, you're going to have to iterate through it no matter what, and even in memory let alone on disc it's probably faster to do that with UTF-8 because the overhead of getting four times as many bytes from RAM/disc to the CPU is higher than the overhead of unpacking UTF-8 on the fly.
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# ? May 16, 2016 14:08 |
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I largely agree. My big problem with UTF8 is that it violates the fail-fast doctrine and is people tend to fail to understand it, and the largely backwards compatibility hides that fact until something bad happens. I don't think the technical issues matter anymore to a degree where it is a weighty argument against a fixed encoding. Of course, if that had been the dominating opinion in the late 90s/early 2000s my only half-forgotten knowledge of the differences between 850, 865, and 1252 would still be useful today
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# ? May 16, 2016 15:07 |
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FilthyImp posted:Computer Relics - Before the Age of Autism we were just Nerds. this was still possible in Redondo in '07 or so, using the same mainframe system. Eventually they from terminals to actual computers, but still used the mainframe for book tracking. And you know, what? It worked pretty well. They started moving over to some kind of web client in... 05 or so or so and it never worked properly. As recently as 2012 it still didn't. Not sure now, don't want to check. Those terminals were rad. Little red or orange CRT screens, clackety Model M keyboards... goddamn I miss that throwback poo poo.
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# ? May 17, 2016 01:00 |
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Moms.......ON THE NET! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvTGOw7GcY4 (Warning: This video contains an unusual amount of 1990's; discuss this video with your doctor if unsure before viewing)
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# ? May 24, 2016 07:02 |
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is that legolas
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# ? May 24, 2016 09:19 |
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What was Gopher
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# ? May 24, 2016 09:37 |
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An early alternative to HTTP. It sort of was like a text based version of the web with sites being accessed via command lines or numbered menus. It was quickly surpassed when CERN insisted HTTP would be free after Gopher wanted a fee for it's use. And HTTP also offered a bit more sophistication such as combining images and text together on a page along with Mosaic and other early WWW browsers helping push HTML forward as the standard.
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# ? May 24, 2016 09:58 |
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Images? How fast do you think my internet connection is? That'll never catch on.
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# ? May 24, 2016 11:32 |
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I remember setting up initialization strings on my 14.4 external modem so I could connect with a friend to play Hexen Eventually we graduated to Diablo but my 486/dx266 really chugged and I ended up upgrading to a Pentium 100.
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# ? May 24, 2016 11:36 |
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Wtf is a phlog
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# ? May 24, 2016 12:08 |
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Regular Nintendo posted:Wtf is a phlog goPHer Log, as opposed to weblog because this isnt the web its the gopherspace
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# ? May 24, 2016 12:15 |
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gopher is still around, it's snappy on old computers. Purely text based content is IMHO as clean as it gets and is in no way a "disadvantage". Depends on the content, really. http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/ knock yourself out, you can also reach wikipedia via gopher.
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# ? May 24, 2016 12:55 |
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Kaizoku posted:goPHer Log, as opposed to weblog Back in 2003, an army mate used his SonyEricsson to send photos and small text updates to his phlog - "phone blog". IIRC it was hosted somewhere that could accept MMS updates, which I guess was kind of neat.
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# ? May 24, 2016 13:48 |
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If you Google Image Search "gopher client", the first three matches are beautiful Windows 3.1, OS/2 and MacOS clients, all GUIs. I mean beautiful because in that day any time you could use a GUI for the Internet it was amazing, I was dialing into a BBS in Telemate and then getting a shell prompt on a Unix machine to run gopher Also old browsers supported gopher:// URLs.
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# ? May 24, 2016 15:20 |
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En_2T7KH6RA http://www.xanadu.net/ Poor guy has been struggling with this and his other projects for the past 50 years.
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# ? May 24, 2016 16:28 |
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Man, I feel kinda sorry for this old man, it's like we're disappointing him every time we open up a web page But I'm kinda confused as to what makes this significantly different from HTML with links except for being ten times harder to read
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# ? May 24, 2016 16:49 |
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Regular Nintendo posted:Wtf is a phlog It's what happens to taggers in Singapore
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# ? May 24, 2016 17:11 |
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kilogram posted:Man, I feel kinda sorry for this old man, it's like we're disappointing him every time we open up a web page I think his idea is that you should (actually, graphically, with multiple windows and lines) show how two or more documents are connected. If you cite a scientific paper, it would show that as a separate window with lines and highlight blocks showing "this part here refers to that part there" instead of an obtuse link to a landing page for the quoted article. I don't know if you could do "live" embedding as well? It's like some weird hybrid of reviewer comments in Word, a visual diff tool, the hover-previews of links in imgur comments, and normal web pages ... and I can actually imagine a few cases where it might be useful. Still, it's deeply niche and web pages seem like a more convenient structure.
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# ? May 24, 2016 17:40 |
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I'd take it a lot more seriously if his website didn't make it seem like he's fighting some weird holy war against HTML
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# ? May 24, 2016 17:52 |
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BOOTY-ADE posted:It's what happens to taggers in Singapore Underrated post right here
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# ? May 24, 2016 18:06 |
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Hmmm, seems reasonable.....quote:The computer world is not just technicality and razzle-dazzle. It is a continual war over software politics and paradigms. With ideas which are still radical, WE FIGHT ON. quote:Conventional electronic documents were designed in the 1970s by well-funded conventional thinkers at Xerox PARC, who asked, "How can we imitate paper?" The result is today's electronic document-- Microsoft Word format and the printout format PDF. They imitate paper and emphasize appearance and fonts.
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# ? May 24, 2016 21:56 |
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GBS - With our limited resources we can only go slowly, unlike today's Red Bull-fueled young teams
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# ? May 24, 2016 21:57 |
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# ? May 15, 2024 17:38 |
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It hovers in a weird room between crazy and inspired. Unlike actual crazy people, the technical and practical parts make enough sense and they haven't invented too many new words. On the other hand, it still reads as a bit ... off the beaten track. As a contrast, consider this oddball who I sporadically run into on Norwegian forums: http://bendiklaland.info/documentiveinformals.html He has more than once tried to find programmers for some project that would, uhm, let you construct algorithms through different kinds of structured art, or something. It's kind of hard to parse. Computer viking has a new favorite as of 22:47 on May 24, 2016 |
# ? May 24, 2016 22:37 |