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oohhboy posted:Thanks for this little bit of random kit mom......... Use it with a Raspberry Pi and OpenCV to make some facial recognition stuff or something
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Nov 13, 2017 08:51
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Humphreys posted:Use it with a Raspberry Pi and OpenCV to make some facial recognition stuff or something Hmm, good idea, I will hold on to it for now. Thanks!
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Nov 13, 2017 09:27
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oohhboy posted:Not even sure what I am going to with this thing I think your mom wants you to Skype with her. Mine threatened to buy me a webcam for this years ago, but fortunately I had the completely valid excuse that my Internet connection was too slow and lovely for video. I just picked something with similar specs up from a garage sale for $2, although it was used and it doesn't say Microsoft on it, in fact I don't even know what it says on it 
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Nov 14, 2017 03:14
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oohhboy posted:Thanks for this little bit of random kit mom......... I go thrifting for old computer junk almost every weekend and see a lot of these. I always get excited to see a nice computer equipment box and then get disappointed by yet another loving webcam.
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Nov 14, 2017 03:33
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Buttcoin purse posted:I think your mom wants you to Skype with her. Mine threatened to buy me a webcam for this years ago, but fortunately I had the completely valid excuse that my Internet connection was too slow and lovely for video. I have an iPhone, MacBook Pro and she has me on Facebook (shudders) with matching apps. I don’t go thrifting as I know I am not going to get anything of worth and I am not doing some YouTube channel ahmm. Junk can be slightly interesting in a historical sense.
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Nov 14, 2017 12:13
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 Do tech documentation relics count? One of the local secondhand shops had 50% off books and I got stuck in the reference section. From 1983 - same year the Jargon File got published, apparently - but it was for kids so it's not in-depth or specific enough enough to be entertainingly outdated. A few of the sillier-named/more obsolete ones anyway, they might trigger a memory or a media scare: bit diddling and bit twiddling, blue ribbon program (works on the first try), Cheshire Cat store, COM (have a guess first), cybercrud, E-COM (no relation), file protection ring, floppy disk (incorrectly referring to 3½" as "mini-floppies" :spergin), gang punch, graunch, hard disk ("...come in 5.25, 8 and 14-inch varieties"), liveware, Polish notation*, Stanford mouse, and... Williams Tube memory, which I'd never heard of and is genuinely cool.. There's also a bunch of weirdly snobby definitions for things like "black box", "canned program", and straight up "naïve user". * "...This notation was named "Polish notation" because no one could pronounce the name of its Polish inventor, Jan Lukasiewicz." 
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Nov 17, 2017 13:00
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Found a few very old school terminals today... Digital Equipment Corporation LA120-DA DECWriter III's. Came out of the back back room of the parts department of an old car dealership that operated for a few generations.   
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Nov 19, 2017 04:28
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super nailgun posted:Found a few very old school terminals today... Digital Equipment Corporation LA120-DA DECWriter III's. Came out of the back back room of the parts department of an old car dealership that operated for a few generations. Finally a reason to turn on the TERSE option in an adventure game.
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Nov 19, 2017 12:50
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I kind of miss when everything came in that color. Last couple of years, I've been rolling around in my head getting an old Packard Bell tower and hollowing it out and turning it into a modern gaming PC.
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Nov 19, 2017 12:55
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super nailgun posted:Found a few very old school terminals today... Digital Equipment Corporation LA120-DA DECWriter III's. Came out of the back back room of the parts department of an old car dealership that operated for a few generations. Wonder how those things have held up over the years. DEC built solid stuff.
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Nov 19, 2017 13:21
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super nailgun posted:Found a few very old school terminals today... Digital Equipment Corporation LA120-DA DECWriter III's. Came out of the back back room of the parts department of an old car dealership that operated for a few generations.  If you don't plan to keep them all, and you're feasibly close to Albuquerque, I will hop in my truck and come get one.
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Nov 19, 2017 16:02
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Pham Nuwen posted:
One of them is definitely for sale. I'm in Portland though, so that's either a big road trip or an expensive freight bill :P
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Nov 19, 2017 19:02
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uvar posted:
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Nov 19, 2017 19:55
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When I worked at a computer store back when I was a teen, I used to explain computers like an office to customers. Processor/CPU = You're brain Hard Drive Capacity = How big your filing cabinet of documents is RAM = How big your desk is, thus actively working on more things at once without going to filing cabinet Floppy Disk/Zip/Jazz/CDROM = Your Briefcase, how many files from your filing cabinet you can take with you It kind of worked for most customers.
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Nov 21, 2017 08:45
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To this day it seems weird and abstract that there's a distinction between RAM and disk space. Feels like there ought to be a trend toward some kind of computer architecture where solid-state memory means no booting, no "loading programs into memory", no "saving". I mean I get why it is the way it is certainly, but I can hardly blame non-technical people for not understanding why all that stuff and all those metaphors are necessary. E: True that phones have done a good job of obscuring that distinction, like nobody even asks how much RAM an iPhone has, but it's still fundamentally there and looks like it always will be Data Graham has a new favorite as of 11:41 on Nov 21, 2017 |
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Nov 21, 2017 11:20
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It bothers me when people talk about RAM instead of system/main/working memory in a historical context since early modern computers tended to not have random-access memory at all. (Also random-access memory is a lovely term in general but that's another matter.) As to why the lines between working memory and mass memory are so blurred nowadays I think it's merely because mass memory is so loving fast nowadays. Back in the day when you were working with mass memory you loving noticed it. First time I used a system with a HDD (a 20 MB Winchester) I couldn't fathom the difference between system commands and executables because everything loaded and ran "instantaneously". 3D Megadoodoo has a new favorite as of 12:42 on Nov 21, 2017 |
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Nov 21, 2017 12:36
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Solid state drives are way faster than ye olde platters of yore but isn't working memory still way faster than that?
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Nov 21, 2017 15:32
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Mak0rz posted:Solid state drives are way faster than ye olde platters of yore but isn't working memory still way faster than that? Of course it is. However, when your Microsoft Lumia brand pocket computer system is loading, say, a photograph into working memory from mass memory, the delay isn't really noticeable.
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Nov 21, 2017 15:38
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Yeah, SSDs run circles around mechanical hard drives, but even the fastest SSDs are still slower than molasses compared to DDR SDRAM.
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Nov 21, 2017 15:39
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It's also important that RAM has different speed characteristics than HD or even SSD. In RAM you can typically address down to 8 bytes at a time, whereas HDs require you pick up 4096 bytes and are much faster if reading sequentially. SSDs (kind-of) do away with the "read sequentially" requirement but are even harder on the read (and write) a large block of data. There's a reason that external memory algorithms are a thing (though they have now been rebranded as "big data"). Different kinds of memory are different and if you have to do things fast, you need to know that. These days, the memory hierarchies are even more complex than 10-20 years ago; now we have registers, 3 levels of cache, RAM, SSD, HD, cloud storage (possibly even in different tiers, like an S3 bucket vs a Glazier bucket). Phones got it right. Especially the iPhone, which doesn't even list RAM. They are tightly enough integrated and sufficiently special-purpose and fast it doesn't really matter anymore. Apple tried blurring the lines a couple of versions of OS X ago, but people didn't get it. Some people even insist on closing mobile apps today, even though it doesn't really matter (and mostly matters in a negative direction because the phone is better at it than you – just because a phone tells you an app is open, doesn't mean it's true).
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Nov 21, 2017 16:16
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klafbang posted:Phones got it right. Especially the iPhone, which doesn't even list RAM. They are tightly enough integrated and sufficiently special-purpose and fast it doesn't really matter anymore. Apple tried blurring the lines a couple of versions of OS X ago, but people didn't get it. Some people even insist on closing mobile apps today, even though it doesn't really matter (and mostly matters in a negative direction because the phone is better at it than you – just because a phone tells you an app is open, doesn't mean it's true). People keep beating this drum about how the OS is so good at managing running apps, but it seems like switching between any two apps on my Nexus 5X is about 50% chance that when I switch back, the original app will need to fully refresh because it got taken out of memory. Like, if I click an external link in Awful, then switch back from the browser, it's pretty likely that Awful will have to re-draw the page I was on from scratch.
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Nov 21, 2017 18:35
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klafbang posted:Some people even insist on closing mobile apps today, even though it doesn't really matter (and mostly matters in a negative direction because the phone is better at it than you – just because a phone tells you an app is open, doesn't mean it's true). That's great I've got a Windows phone.
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Nov 21, 2017 18:42
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Fair enough – I was basing that on iOS. I haven't used Windows phone since my employer found out I didn't bother charging it and gave me an iPhone instead nor Android since version 1.something, and just assumed they did memory management similarly. I've not had issues with programs running in the background since somewhere around iPhone 5 (+/- 1).
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Nov 21, 2017 18:52
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Here's a pro-tip: Windows phone is dead and nobody uses or talks about the surface. So whatever iOS is doing is right somewhere important as far as the end user usage experience goes. But seriously, RAM isn't going away, there will always be the need for super fast and responsive working memory than mass memory could possibility deliver. DOS commands being fast is a function of how DOS is used and your perception than the raw speed of your computer. Whenever command you use you are asking it to do one thing only with no choice other than a couple flags that mostly don't change how demanding it is. You get this impressive looking scroll of text that make it look like it is doing alot of stuff. Then compare this to the early GUIs which were pretty much trash and DOS comes off smelling like roses. Would I use a CLI today? no unless I need to do something that is not normally allowed or only accessible via CLI for good reasons. If you want to have that holy poo poo that looks fast feel you can boot you machine in verbose mode which I think is actually slower that normal(I haven't stop watched it). Do miss a little being able to type /? and getting useful information "sort of" if it didn't scroll off the screen or wasn't too big.
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Nov 21, 2017 22:38
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oohhboy posted:DOS commands being fast is a function of how DOS is used and your perception than the raw speed of your computer. Whenever command you use you are asking it to do one thing only with no choice other than a couple flags that mostly don't change how demanding it is. You get this impressive looking scroll of text that make it look like it is doing alot of stuff. Then compare this to the early GUIs which were pretty much trash and DOS comes off smelling like roses. Do you touch computers for a living or did you acquire these weird and simplistic opinions somewhere else? Especially that bit about "boot you[sic] machine in verbose mode", what the christ are you talking about?
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Nov 21, 2017 22:55
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Pham Nuwen posted:Do you touch computers for a living or did you acquire these weird and simplistic opinions somewhere else? Especially that bit about "boot you[sic] machine in verbose mode", what the christ are you talking about? It's a thing that went away in Windows when 8 came out. MacOS and Linux still support it. It just shows a log of every little thing getting loaded while your computer is booting up, occasionally useful for troubleshooting. Bad CLI opinion sounds like someone that doesn't do technology professionally, or is bad at it.
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Nov 21, 2017 23:11
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The Fool posted:It's a thing that went away in Windows when 8 came out. MacOS and Linux still support it. It just shows a log of every little thing getting loaded while your computer is booting up, occasionally useful for troubleshooting. Yeah, I'm familiar with printing poo poo to the console during boot, it gave me something to watch back in the day as my 486 tried to slowly grind Linux into motion. It's just the implication that you'd turn that on because you miss the responsiveness of a CLI (I guess?), dropped in the midst of the discussion the rest of us were having about relative speeds of RAM, SSD, and spinning rust and how those affect the way the OS does things. Obsolete memory technologies (heavily simplified possibly to the point of missing some nuance, don't bitch just read the wiki article instead): Delay line memory: use a speaker to induce waves in a tube full of mercury. You basically beep out the bits into this tube of mercury, then as each bit propagates to the end of the tube it gets picked up by a microphone and looped back around to the start of the tube again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory The Williams Tube: draw out your bits as dots on a CRT, then to read the data, detect the difference in electric charge remaining on the front of the screen after a dot has been drawn (1) vs not drawn (0). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_tube
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Nov 21, 2017 23:54
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I don't use any CLI enough for me to (right now) put in the effort to learn something I use maybe once a month. It is super powerful when you can fully utilise it but I am not going to expect people to know about it. I don't expect any IT related professional of any level to use it as their primary interface or a default thing they use and if they do that's great! Bad CLI opinion is treating CLI as some badge of elitism.
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Nov 22, 2017 00:05
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New technology like 3D Xpoint might blur the lines between RAM and disk eventually. It's not quite there yet, though.
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Nov 22, 2017 00:09
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oohhboy posted:I don't use any CLI enough for me to (right now) put in the effort to learn something I use maybe once a month. It is super powerful when you can fully utilise it but I am not going to expect people to know about it. I don't expect any IT related professional of any level to use it as their primary interface or a default thing they use and if they do that's great! You must feel magical with all the wizards you deal with.
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Nov 22, 2017 00:11
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Windows Phone was DOA because Apple beat them to the smart phone market by six years and are far better at marketing. There's a reason why people thought that the iPod was the only MP3 player and that people assume that smart phones are some kind of iPhone.
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Nov 22, 2017 00:19
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It was three years (07 to 10) and Windows Phone had a whole lot more problems than Apple's marketing.
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Nov 22, 2017 00:38
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Windows Phone failed because microsoft would put out a flagship phone tat was supposed to be the new hotness, only for them to almost immediately obsolete it with the next major release. They also didn't have copy and paste at launch, in 2010, and the excuse was that "well the iPhone couldn't copy and paste at launch too!" Of course, for anybody who got suckered into developing for WP, you had to write your apps in In conclusion: 
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Nov 22, 2017 00:49
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Nobody bought Windows Mobile because there were no apps. There were no apps because nobody bought Windows Mobile. It’s like trying to get a job without experience.
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Nov 22, 2017 01:58
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There were no apps because every time they iterated windows mobile, they completely changed the API and the old apps wouldn't work anymore. Imagine if upgrading your iPhone meant all your apps stopped working and you had to wait for the maker to re-release it. MS did that three times.
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Nov 22, 2017 03:01
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Pham Nuwen posted:Delay line memory: use a speaker to induce waves in a tube full of mercury. You basically beep out the bits into this tube of mercury, then as each bit propagates to the end of the tube it gets picked up by a microphone and looped back around to the start of the tube again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory Thank you for posting about this, because it's just 
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Nov 22, 2017 03:38
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super nailgun posted:One of them is definitely for sale. I'm in Portland though, so that's either a big road trip or an expensive freight bill :P For reals? I live in eastern Washington and can pick it up myself. What do you want for it?
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Nov 22, 2017 06:32
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A Pinball Wizard posted:There were no apps because every time they iterated windows mobile, they completely changed the API and the old apps wouldn't work anymore. Imagine if upgrading your iPhone meant all your apps stopped working and you had to wait for the maker to re-release it. MS did that three times. Plus, there were a ton of apps for Windows Mobile, but nothing for Windows Phone because MS suddenly decided compatibility wasn't important, and we see how well that worked out.
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Nov 22, 2017 08:03
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oohhboy posted:Here's a pro-tip: Windows phone is dead and nobody uses or talks about the surface. So whatever iOS is doing is right somewhere important as far as the end user usage experience goes. Are you a Markov chain bot?
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Nov 22, 2017 09:05
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Did I pass the Turing test?
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Nov 22, 2017 09:15
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