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HardDiskD posted:I have both types of keyboard, and the small left shift key is not even noticeable. Yeah seriously, it's practically invisible
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May 3, 2018 15:24
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HardDiskD posted:I have both types of keyboard, and the small left shift key is not even noticeable. Judging from the wear pattern on my keyboards, I only ever use left shift and my right thumb for the spacebar. That key would be problematic. E: I just tried using the right shift key and it's so fukken weird. My right pinky is for the enter key and all of those little punctuation rascals, and nothing else.
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May 3, 2018 16:33
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I picked up an oldschool digital SLR today. It's a big ol' bastard with a heavy, 12V NiMH battery, archaic user interface and sluggish everything, but it's the manual which really seals the 'tech relic' deal. After warning the user off low-capacity memory cards- if the image file size is large, the card may be unable to save it- it extols the virtues of inexpensive, high capacity microdrives- a recording medium using a hard disk - and references utterly quaint 128MB cards in all the example diagramsIt also mentions, uhh... 
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May 3, 2018 23:00
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an actual frog posted:I picked up an oldschool digital SLR today. It's a big ol' bastard with a heavy, 12V NiMH battery, archaic user interface and sluggish everything, but it's the manual which really seals the 'tech relic' deal. After warning the user off low-capacity memory cards- if the image file size is large, the card may be unable to save it- it extols the virtues of inexpensive, high capacity microdrives- a recording medium using a hard disk  I had one. In terms of reliability: I'd have been better off trying to save to the hamster.
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May 3, 2018 23:28
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smol hdd 
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May 3, 2018 23:32
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spog posted:
As a teenager I was incredibly jealous of an older friend who owned both an iPaq and microdrive capable of storing an entire gigabyte (!) of pirated MP3s. So they were a bit poo poo, then? Man, carrying around a over dozen hours of music in one device seemed so impressive at the time
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May 3, 2018 23:45
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an actual frog posted:As a teenager I was incredibly jealous of an older friend who owned both an iPaq and microdrive capable of storing an entire gigabyte (!) of pirated MP3s. So they were a bit poo poo, then? Man, carrying around a over dozen hours of music in one device seemed so impressive at the time They were awesome, mediocre and terrible at the same time. They were awesome because you could get 2GB on them at a time when CF cards were a max size of 256MB They were awesome because $/MB, they were much cheaper than those cards (I think mine cost about the same as 2x256MB) They were mediocre because they were slow: you could use it to take high quality digital photos and listen to mp3s, but not record or liveplay video. They were terrible because - at least in my case- it just stopped working. ....oh hey. Guess what I found in my box of bits? I thought you'd be interested, so I had a rummage.  and here's the kicker - it works now! Last used in Dec 2007 and literally been around the world and just passed Disk Check.
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May 4, 2018 00:16
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We had a few microdrives when I first started at the newspaper, for times when we wouldn't be able to get back to the office at lunch and dump the morning's photos. I never used them, but the other guys complained about their spotty reliability. My current personal camera has two 32GB SD cards in it that I fill up maybe once a year. Edit: weren't microdrives in the original iPod, a device marketed to strap to your arm while jogging? I can only assume that went poorly. Chillbro Baggins has a new favorite as of 16:35 on May 4, 2018 |
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May 4, 2018 15:20
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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Microdrives were in all of the classic clickwheel iPods and iPod Mini's. There are companies that sell adapters that allow you to replace the microdrives with compactflash cards, but from my experience with the old iPods, the microdrives held up pretty well (although they usually were the main point of failure).
empty baggie has a new favorite as of 17:57 on May 4, 2018 |
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May 4, 2018 17:52
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People (pro photographers mainly) would actually buy ipods specifically to gut them for the dives since the top tier capacities were so expensive at retail
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May 4, 2018 18:55
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Sentient Data posted:People (pro photographers mainly) would actually buy ipods specifically to gut them for the dives since the top tier capacities were so expensive at retail I remember this being a thing and I wondered at the time if the price of the microdrives was driven up due to short supply because Apple was snatching them all up for their iPods. It was pretty crazy that an iPod back then was cheaper than just purchasing the drive itself. I think I used my first iPod in college more as an external hard drive than I did for actually listening to music, as my car didn't have an aux jack and the FM transmitter I had didn't work very well.
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May 4, 2018 19:58
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empty baggie posted:I remember this being a thing and I wondered at the time if the price of the microdrives was driven up due to short supply because Apple was snatching them all up for their iPods. It was pretty crazy that an iPod back then was cheaper than just purchasing the drive itself. The first Lord of the Rings was edited digitally and they used ipods to move the files from one location to another. One guy was nearly mugged for his ipod while carrying the final cut of Fellowship and had to run away.
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May 4, 2018 22:04
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HardDiskD posted:smol hdd I've never done one of these, but yeah. Excellent username/post combo right here.
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May 5, 2018 00:38
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empty baggie posted:I remember this being a thing and I wondered at the time if the price of the microdrives was driven up due to short supply because Apple was snatching them all up for their iPods. It was pretty crazy that an iPod back then was cheaper than just purchasing the drive itself. And to think when it was new the main thing everyone complained about with the iPod was the price.
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May 5, 2018 01:28
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spog posted:
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May 5, 2018 01:59
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I love that semiconductor memory has gotten so dense that we can basically go back to cartridges now. I'm old enough to remember when optical media was the waaaaave of the future, and it's hilarious that it's circled all the way around again. Maybe someone will come up with a 1TB disc for your Next-next-next-next generation console - the "Total reality simulator".
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May 5, 2018 02:03
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an actual frog posted:Thanks. Honestly I find microdrives so utterly compelling, if only for the manufacturers who- when faced with the inexorable march of Moore's Law- not only found a sweet spot where building an utterly tiny mechanical HDD in a memory card form factor made sense but was actually profitable It’s crazy to think how expensive flash drives were at one time, although it’s also crazy to think how expensive traditional hard drives used to be too. At least flash drives dropped in price much faster than the old style drives. I can’t wait for Apple to release an anniversary edition iPod Classic with flash storage (like they should have done years ago). I know swiping or typing what you want to listen to is technically faster, but the scrollwheel was amazing at the time and is still a satisfying way of navigating through a music library, as well as playing Peggle (these days it’s hard to believe there were several games for sale for the iPod Classic).
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May 5, 2018 02:32
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I have a flash drive on my keychain that's bigger than every computer's HDD I owned from 1993-2001 combined, and it was like $15. You could fit the entirety of iTunes and Google Play's music libraries on 256GB microSD cards inside a single soda can (actually, by the latest update to that XKCD comic, like 2/3rds of a soda can).
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May 5, 2018 02:34
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I made it through 3 of my 5 years of college on a PII-300 Dell with 64mb of RAM. I ran office, played games, surfed, did everything on that old POS. I just bought a windows 10 tablet for $60 the other day with a quad core atom processor in the GHZ range and 2gb of RAM. A $60 tiny thin windows PC that fits in the palm of my hand is orders of magnitude more powerful than the PC that took me through college. Moore’s Law never ceases to be amazing.
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May 5, 2018 13:34
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My buddy is all sad he can't remote into work anymore with his top of the line gaming laptop* that his dad gave him. *From 2006 I should have nabbed a picture. Its running Windows Vista, has never had an update run on it. IE7, weighs about 15 pounds has a 17" screen. He's pissy because he doesn't want to spend money on another computer and hates technology and doesn't understand why it won't work after the most recent tech update for remote accrss because 'it works fine'. Which in his terms means it boots up and opens IE. I explained to him that he no longer has any tube TVs in house, and doesn't watch movies on a DVD player anymore. Just drop the $200 on a i3 or i5 desktop from microcenter so you can work from home a 2 days a week.. he lives in the boonies he'd save at least 15 a week in gas doing so. tater_salad has a new favorite as of 15:10 on May 5, 2018 |
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May 5, 2018 15:05
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I see that mentality a lot on my local Facebook marketplace. GAMING PC, WAS $2000 AND TOP OF THE LINE WHEN NEW Turns out it’s a first gen i5 with 4gb of DDR3 and an old video card and they still want $900 for it.
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May 5, 2018 15:24
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They probably should wait a few years to sell it to someone who wants to build a vintage Windows 7 machine to play games from 2013.
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May 5, 2018 15:50
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Metal Geir Skogul posted:I have a flash drive on my keychain that's bigger than every computer's HDD I owned from 1993-2001 combined, and it was like $15. It's like that gag about what's the bandwidth of a coast-to-coast truck full of hard drives? Dat latency tho
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May 5, 2018 16:45
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He doesn't game on it his dad was done with it and gave it to him.. he uses it to connect to work and browse the internet. I didn't it's a first gen iAnything
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May 5, 2018 17:16
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Chairman Mao posted:The worst part about it is that the design is actually an improvement on the actual Dreamcast controller in just about every way (except that ridiculous loving dpad) but the shoddy build quality completely ruins it. Those things literally fall apart after any amount of real use. I had one that broke the second I took it out of the packaging. 
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May 5, 2018 22:01
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Data Graham posted:It's like that gag about what's the bandwidth of a coast-to-coast truck full of hard drives? No joke, the IPCC used to do that when compiling their climate reports. It's way too hard on the networks to transfer the terabytes (if not more) of climate model output, so instead they mailed hard drives to all the research institutes around the world and got them to send back the full hard drives. Hell, the might still do that actually.
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May 6, 2018 01:30
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1000 Brown M and Ms posted:No joke, the IPCC used to do that when compiling their climate reports. It's way too hard on the networks to transfer the terabytes (if not more) of climate model output, so instead they mailed hard drives to all the research institutes around the world and got them to send back the full hard drives. I had to do that exact thing with a big software update for a banking system. Couldn't handle the bandwidth out since some branches were still on Boonies ADSL. Prepped about 70 external 1TB drives and mailed them out, instructions as a print out. There's some obsolete tech, or at least I hope it's obsolete - local physical servers, especially RODCs. With internet speeds becoming bearable even in the far reaches of my province via 4g/LTE we decommissioned branch servers 5-6 years ago. Azure/AWS solves so many problems.
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May 6, 2018 05:00
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tater_salad posted:My buddy is all sad he can't remote into work anymore with his top of the line gaming laptop* that his dad gave him. On the other hand, you can still legally drive around some really old cars without upgrade/compatibility issues. Will any country/EU ever do something like make inter-car WiFi links mandatory for all vehicles so you can't drive old cars? If I had a laptop like the above, my view would be: yeah, it's a bit slow to access websites, but otherwise it does everything fine, why should I have to buy a new version of Windows because Microsoft stopped supporting Vista? Oh and probably drivers aren't available for my hardware for any version of Windows other than Vista, so basically it has been decided that this machine must be thrown out now even though it still works. This is why I use Linux, I get sick of other people deciding when I need to replace my hardware. Sure, I have to invest more time in learning how the software works, but then the software doesn't tend to have wholesale, major changes very often, so I can keep using that knowledge I built up - and also the hardware - instead of having to periodically re-buy and re-learn things. If I was still using Windows, it'd be: sure, I can spend a few hundred bucks on some hardware, that's no big deal, but then I have to spend some huge amount of time getting that machine to work just the way I want it and/or figuring out which things Windows won't even allow you to do now. I think that if Microsoft spent a lot less time and effort constantly trying to make Windows look and behave differently, I'd be much less resistant to being forced to give them more money every now and then for new versions because they decided to stop supporting the old version. It's not like I'm complaining that I can no longer use DOS, and why won't anyone release DOS versions of their software these days. Is there really much difference between Windows XP and 10 in terms of what applications need to use? I suppose there might be differences in the video card driver model to support new versions of DirectX, but I don't for example think that they would have necessitated putting half the settings into something other than the Control Panel 
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May 6, 2018 07:10
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Buttcoin purse posted:It's not like I'm complaining that I can no longer use DOS, and why won't anyone release DOS versions of their software these days. Is there really much difference between Windows XP and 10 in terms of what applications need to use? I suppose there might be differences in the video card driver model to support new versions of DirectX, but I don't for example think that they would have necessitated putting half the settings into something other than the Control Panel Yes, there’s huge under-the-hood differences. Proper support for multi-core and 64 bits. A completely new security model. Removal of a lot of legacy 16 bit APIs. Re-introducing multi-platform (NT 3/4 also ran on Alpha and MIPS, XP was basically only stable on 32 bit single core x86 with some unstable theoretical exceptions, Windows 10 also supports ARM). A new development model for Windows apps.
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May 6, 2018 07:26
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He's not wrong about how dumb it is to keep the control panel but move half the functionality to a new "Settings" page.
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May 6, 2018 10:34
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Buttcoin purse posted:Words We work for a large international bank.. they don't take security etc lightly, their client no longer works with his PC because it's old as poo poo. Yes you can drive 30+ year old cars and they require more maintenance are less safe. Basically he's using something thats outlived it's useful life and beyond and he's whining about it. When I drive my classic car I don't expect it to work the same as my modern car and I also have a modern car because I'm not relying on a 30 yesterday old vehicle as my mode of transportation.
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May 6, 2018 12:41
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IMO, the problem with maintaining support for older hardware is that it adds a LOT of work to the developers workload to ensure that the software is secure and stable on hardware which is an absolute edge case, the number of user on similar machines is small enough that risking loss of a small number customers is more cost and time efficient then keeping them supported.
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May 6, 2018 15:33
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Just don't develop 
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May 6, 2018 20:10
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R0ckfish posted:IMO, the problem with maintaining support for older hardware is that it adds a LOT of work to the developers workload to ensure that the software is secure and stable on hardware which is an absolute edge case, the number of user on similar machines is small enough that risking loss of a small number customers is more cost and time efficient then keeping them supported. The cost of maintaining support is direct. The cost of dropping support is an externality. That’s the real difference.
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May 7, 2018 02:48
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Platystemon posted:The cost of dropping support is an externality. That cost is mostly only a problem for poor people and the environment so who cares I guess? 
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May 7, 2018 04:06
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Buttcoin purse posted:That cost is mostly only a problem for poor people and the environment so who cares I guess? Linux distributions have lifecycles too - Ubuntu's LTS looks to span 5 years which matches Microsoft's policy as a matter of fact. Being angry that you don't have free access to all future versions of a commercially developed OS in perpetuity because you bought a computer once is bad and dumb.
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May 7, 2018 04:23
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It’s a failure of the markets. Programmer time is expensive, but the money saved by not having to buy millions of new devices would pay for it many times over. The money isn’t going where it needs to, from the people with “old” devices to the programmers who could support them.
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May 7, 2018 05:08
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Calling the production of new versions of executive programs (or operating systems as the kids like to call them) development is a relic from a time when software actually got better the more it was worked on. That time has long since passed.
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May 7, 2018 05:17
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Buttcoin purse posted:This is why I use Linux, I get sick of other people deciding when I need to replace my hardware. Especially when we learn that security issues can be a hardware and software concern.
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May 7, 2018 06:11
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H2SO4 posted:Linux distributions have lifecycles too - Ubuntu's LTS looks to span 5 years which matches Microsoft's policy as a matter of fact. Red Hat do 10 years for lazy people like me. quote:Being angry that you don't have free access to all future versions of a commercially developed OS in perpetuity because you bought a computer once is bad and dumb. Like I said, I'd be happier to pay money if it wasn't for something that was worse than what I had before. In fact I'd be happy to pay more money to not have to deal with all the hassle of things being changed for no good reason. I don't even want a newer version, I just want the same version. Microsoft sold me some software which they eventually say they can't continue to offer security fixes for because it's so bad, and then put their hand out asking for more money. FilthyImp posted:I've never seen a Hardware Libertarian before and it's a pretty amazing thing. My motherboard was only released about 6.5 years ago, and it would actually be fine to run the latest Windows, but the manufacturer couldn't be hosed to release a BIOS update so I can get the Intel microcode update. No, wait, the manufacturer would like me to buy a new one because I haven't given them any money for a while. So I can either bin it, or just be like the majority of people in the world and be hosed Much like Microsoft initially trying to force everyone with Skylake CPUs onto Windows 10, they could invest more resources into making things compatible, but instead they opt for forcing you to buy something new  I think hardware manufacturers had the right idea with those leaky capacitors - make the hardware fail earlier so all these pesky compatibility issues go away
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May 7, 2018 11:46
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