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thedouche posted:My brother has one that was used drat constantly for 5 years and it's still chugging along. I think the service still exists. I think I'd use it of I had a compatible device (15 bucks a month to listen to anything I think). Not only is the service still around, Microsoft's still actively developing it. It's tied into the windows phone stuff, and the PC side is probably the slickest-looking MP3 player software on the market. As for the hardware, I'm convinced the original Zunes are close to invincible. I ran (as in, feet pounding the pavement while the hard drive's spinning) with a brown brick for years, and these days it gets cooked constantly in my car. Still going strong. Sadly, it fell victim to Microsoft being so drat full of itself. The player was packed with all sorts of "social" features that might have been awesome, except they required all your friends to own Zunes too. And, they picked a case design that looked great in person, but photographed like crap. The brown Zune was done with some kind of plastic-molding trick that gives it a sort of green halo that shifts as the light hits it; the effect looks nice holding it in your hand, but when you take a head-on picture, it just comes out turd-brown. Everything was designed so that, after everyone in the world had one (just like all the testers in the MS labs), they'd be satisfied with the purchase. Nobody ever stopped and said, "so how do we get people to buy these in the first place?" because hey, we're Microsoft and people will buy them because of that.
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Jul 17, 2012 22:34
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Perestroika posted:Speaking of obsolote, how about this one: TI ain't poo poo. If you want to go to some of the very best obsolete technology, look no further than HP's first programmable calculators. When they were introduced in the 70s, a "computer" was still at least the size of a minifridge. These things, though, were complete little handheld computers, with full programming capability, expansion slots (that could hook to peripherals including printers, card readers, and scientific equipment), and glorious RPN. Needless to say, they were very popular in the scientific, engineering, and finance communities for quite a while. I know more than a few people who swear by them, and they still sell the HP-12C finance model. None of that gets into their best feature, though: their absolute, bombproof reliability. It's hard to believe if you've dealt with HP's crappy inkjets and consumer laptops, but their name used to be synonymous with expensive, incredibly reliable equipment. When NASA needed a last-resort backup for the Space Shuttle's computer - something that could calculate the engine burns to get out of orbit and back home if the main computers had all died and Mission Control wasn't available on the radio - they went out and bought HP-41 calculators from an office supply store in Houston. They plugged a high-resolution quartz timer into the expansion port, glued the covers shut, replaced the feet with velcro, and sent it into space as flight critical equipment. Here's Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, floating alongside a bunch of them: 
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Jul 18, 2012 21:07
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amishbuttermaster posted:I'm not sure about how they're doing under Lenovo at the moment but Thinkpads have always been not only hugely successful with both businesses and consumers but they pretty much always featured the cutting edge of what you could cram in a notebook shell. They were never failed not obsolete. If you want a genuine obsolete-but-awesome Thinkpad, there's always the 701 series. IBM wanted to build a very small portable computer, but ran into the same problem netbook users had more than a decade later: a small computer means a tiny, cramped keyboard that's really uncomfortable to use. The solution? The "butterfly keyboard." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=478hsrVjVQk These days, widescreen LCDs, the space requirements for a touchpad, and cost-cutting mean we'll probably never see that mechanism in a new computer again. But, it was incredible in its own time, and it's still pretty awesome to see.
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Jul 19, 2012 23:35
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0toShifty posted:That's actually a hologram sticker of what the die looks like. It is about 3 times larger than the actual chip. I took a pentium II cartridge apart the other day. The package itself was a FCBGA - flip-chip with ball-grid-array - and it can't really be taken apart. Wikipedia has photos of a slot 1 P2 with the cover removed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_II Yes, that's just a sticker, but a lot of processors around the same era actually had an exposed, unprotected die. Athlon XPs were great CPUs, but putting a heatsink on one was nerve-wracking. A bit of pressure on the edge of the exposed silicon, and you could do this to your expensive new processor:  That's a tiny little chip out of a tiny little chip, but it broke the hearts of a thousand careless nerds. Who all proceeded to post about how AMD $UXXXX on early internet forums.
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Aug 30, 2012 00:52
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Terrible Robot posted:Was this the crash where he told police that a German man named Dieter had been driving and had run away after the crash? My friend and I still make jokes about that, but I never bothered to find out what the full story was. Wired has a long article that goes into a lot of the details of the Gizmondo disaster. Buckle in, it's a hell of a ride. Broken Athlon dies really weren't such a huge issue if you weren't careless. The die could take the pressure straight on; it was only a problem if you put pressure on one edge of the chip. A lot of the problems came from people trying to use coolers designed for socketed Pentium 3s, that didn't sit properly on the little rubber dots that were supposed to even out the load and keep things from crunching on one edge.
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Aug 30, 2012 07:40
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GruntyThrst posted:I think it's more that smaller die sizes mean that modern CPUs just straight run a lot cooler than they used to, so unless you are doing some SERIOUS overclocking you no longer need liquid cooling. The switch to heat pipes really was a quiet revolution. Yes, die sizes have gone down, but manufacturers have used the increased thermal headroom for more clockspeed and more cores. A heavily overclocked modern CPU uses as much or more power than an overclocked chip from the Athlon XP/P4 era. I do miss the days of overclocking budget CPUs, though. Up until the end of the Core 2 Duo era, you could get great results on a budget if you paired a cheap processor with a decent motherboard, and overclocked the hell out of them. These days, you have to buy an upper-midrange unlocked multiplier CPU and a fancy chipset if you want to overclock at all. On the budget end of the spectrum, you're just better off buying a cheapo Dell. And while modern CPUs are fast enough that it's not totally terrible (you can still turn that cheap Dell into a credible gaming system), it's still sad to see it go.
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Sep 2, 2012 04:06
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Isentropy posted:It would be; to make a long story short, the quantity of heat transfer is proportional to the Reynolds (measure of turbulence) and Prandtl numbers. Prandtl numbers for liquids are orders of magnitude higher than that of gases. The Prandtl number isn't a measurement of how well a given substance moves heat, it's a measurement of how it does it. That kind of analysis falls apart completely when you're talking about heat pipes, because they work by phase change: the coolant boils at the hot end, condenses at the cool end, and latent heat effects carry a lot of energy. Plus, water cooling systems are actively pumped. If you just depended on convection to carry heat away from a CPU (or whatever else), water cooling would work poorly. In practice, the limiting factor is almost always the radiator dumping heat into the air. Small pre-assembled water coolers designed to fit 120mm fans aren't any better than a similarly sized heat pipe cooler. Big custom water cooling loops that can fit a 360x120mm radiator (or something even bigger salvaged out of a junkyard) give you better performance, because they've got a bigger radiator. But, they're also expensive, a tremendous pain in the rear end to maintain, and the performance increase isn't really relevant unless you're trying for a let's-burn-this-motherfucker-up sort of thing (in which case, you're probably better off with phase change the old fashioned way: a copper pot and a dewar of liquid nitrogen).
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Sep 2, 2012 19:27
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Jedit posted:Yeah, but there are fewer fans running at lower speeds. Pulling up a random thread from Google: That's an old system, and the baseline for air-cooled CPUs was one of the annoyingly loud AMD stock coolers from that era. This is getting into the territory of the SH/SC parts picking thread, and we can take the discussion there if you want, but an air-cooled system built with attention to noise levels will almost always be quieter than a water-cooled system that has to run a pump as well as the same number of fans. Water cooled computers are, outside of a few specialized applications, an excellent subject for this thread - they're obsolete and failed technology suited mostly for increasing the owner's e-peen.
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Sep 2, 2012 20:37
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:Unless all of those jacks were wired to separate physical phone lines (like, separate lines that went all the way to the phone company, which would likely have separate numbers), or analog home phone technology was simplified by leaps and bounds since the 80's (it hasn't, to my knowledge) I can't really think of a way the phone company would even be able to tell if you had multiple phones. All the jacks in your house go to a single box outside where they are all wired together and connected to the main line that comes into your house. I guess they could measure resistance or inductance or something on the line while you used it, more phones would take more energy to ring and provide more resistance etc, but that would be pretty rough unless they knew the specifics about every single phone in your house. Of course I'm not an expert, just some rear end in a top hat who knows about his home phone system and basic electronics principles. Does anyone else know if that's even possible? Yes, it's possible, especially back in the day when phone ringers were mechanical devices that were fairly standardized, and which drew quite a bit of power. Part of the reason phone companies tracked that was so they didn't burn out their infrastructure (even today, you're probably restricted to a certain REN, or "ringer equivalence number," on a landline, although there's not a chance in hell you'll ever hit it). But, most of the reason was so they could tack on an extra charge for everything they could.
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Sep 16, 2012 04:14
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:Neat, I forgot that back then the ring signal itself actually had to power a physical ringer mechanism and in that case I can see how you could pretty easily tell them apart. Add "electromechanical bells" to the list of obsolete technology I guess Even today, the ring signal carries a lot of juice. It's still enough to run a bell, if you happen to have one of the ancient-style battleship phones around. A couple of years ago, I was fixing my mom's phone jack after some mechanical damage. I didn't bother to unplug it at the outside wall, because hey, what are the odds the phone will ring in the middle of a five-minute job? Holy gently caress that was a bad decision. I've been shocked with stuff that should be worse - but for some reason, phones just hurt.
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Sep 16, 2012 05:01
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redmercer posted:Weren't there some graphics cards you could upgrade by re-drawing in the traces with a #2 pencil? That was the Athlon CPU - they set the frequency lock by laser-cutting certain bridges on the CPU package. With a pencil (or, even better, a tiny dab of conductive paint) you could reconnect the bridges and overclock it. A few years later, AMD also released three-core CPUs that were really four core dies with one die locked out in software. With the right motherboard tweaks, you could re-enable the fourth core, which was often as not 100% functional.
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Sep 19, 2012 17:42
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eddiewalker posted:I don't think the FCC with let US carriers activate any handset that isn't E911 GPS capable, which is pretty much anything sold before 2001-ish. If you just want a phone to dial 911 in an emergency, activation doesn't matter. All the carriers will accept 911 calls from any phone connected to their network - if you can get a signal (and that phone does, it has the time) then you can place an emergency call. For carriers that use SIM cards, you don't even need one in the phone. The lack of E911 means that you'll need to tell the operator where you are, but you should be able to do that anyway. Location services don't always work. mystes posted:I thought they could also do triangulation for phones without GPS? Did this change? I thought that non-smartphones still usually didn't have GPS. Different carriers implemented the E911 requirements differently. Triangulation is very difficult when you don't have line-of-sight, or when there's only one tower. GPS receivers are so cheap these days that even very low-end phones tend to have them. Not only is there the E911 compliance thing, but they also let carriers sell expensive navigation app subscriptions to dumbphones.
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May 26, 2013 21:38
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Exit Strategy posted:Well, they're vacuum tubes / thermionic valves, so yes. Yes, they do. Not quite. They're basically low-power neon lamps with funny-shaped electrodes. So they're a lot warmer than LEDs but nowhere near as warm as an incandescent lamp or vacuum tube that needs to get red-hot to work.
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Jun 29, 2013 20:36
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DNova posted:What would cause any part of it to not be able to "do seconds"? A sub-1Hz refresh rate, so it couldn't update to one second before it had to move on to the next one. It's generally not a problem with nixie tubes, but it's not an unreasonable thing to think about. This was posted a bit upthread, but it illustrates the (potential) problem perfectly. See how it can't display a seconds field that ends in 1, because it takes too long to update? Same deal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYhlQDS03KM&t=17s
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Jun 29, 2013 21:28
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DNova posted:It makes me wonder what we do today that in 50 years will seem too stupidly absurd to be true. "You had oceans of oil, perfect raw material for any organic chemicals you wanted to cook up, and you burned it? Even though you knew about the effects of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?"
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Jul 17, 2013 20:51
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Code Jockey posted:Oh my god that looks awesome, thank you! They exist. The only problem is that they cost $20-25k, which will also put you into an entry-level dedicated track car and cover a couple seasons' worth of track-day expenses. Unless you're really into the idea of simulation for its own sake, you might as well spend the money to go play in a real race car. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WDk1ndGWLQ
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Feb 10, 2014 02:11
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Veotax posted:Chip and PIN was first introduced in the UK twenty loving years ago, Jesus Christ America. I'd rather have the old mechanical carbon copy machines than the UK's "chip-and-PIN is so perfectly secure that the cardholder is assumed to be responsible for any fraud or unauthorized activity" approach to liability.
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Jul 12, 2016 16:03
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bring back old gbs posted:one challenge would be to get the duration slider working correctly. it'd be trivial to do it as a segmented LED that lit up with the song length but to do it right it'd need to be like it is in the concept with the slider bit physically sticking out, motorized to move with the song as it plays. it's not just a standard linear pot like the equalizer or volume slider, it'd need some extra magic to be motorized, but also you can drag it around to seek You'd also need to handle all the things that the original Winamp UI did as pop-up dialogs - basically every button on the playlist component. It's a cool concept render but it would be a terrible product in real life.
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Aug 26, 2019 17:32
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Vavrek posted:Computers are, uh. Computers are weird and different surprisingly non-mathy? Like, computers are built out of really complicated, continuously varying* analog electronics hardware which is all set up to produce these incredibly simple but reliable devices. One of the ways they're simple is that you don't think about a range of voltages, you just call one voltage HIGH another one LOW, and you make sure HIGH and LOW are far enough apart that the analog electronics respond very differently to each. Then you stop thinking about anything analog and just talk about HIGH and LOW and maybe call them TRUE and FALSE or 0 and 1, and you hook those devices together into a complex machine that's designed to respond in perfectly predictable ways to certain sequences of bits. "Mathiness" isn't defined by proximity to differential and integral calculus. Saying computers don't do math because you felt it wasn't very "mathy" to build one of the simplest possible pieces of binary logic is about as reasonable as saying, "oh, electrical stuff isn't hard, I put together a battery and LED once and all you need to know is V=IR. It's all just algebra, right?" Anyone with a decent bachelors-level education in computer science would instantly agree that computer science is nothing but an applied branch of some high-level theoretical math concepts. The core concepts of the field were worked out from first principles decades before anybody actually built an electronic digital computer. The electronic parts are just a highly refined, complex implementation detail that's still abstracted away when reasoning about the larger system.
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Feb 8, 2020 18:08
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AntherUslessPoster posted:Since I first saw this pic a few years ago it still unknown to me how he made this work. MS Flight Simulator had (and still has) an incredibly active mod community, that has no problem doing things like hooking deep into the simulation engine to render a bunch of different views over the network. Judging by the pictures that come up when you google "flight simulator multiple pcs" it's probably this software.
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Feb 9, 2020 21:46
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Moo the cow posted:I believe the Zune was the last piece of consumer electronics that was available in the colour of 'poo poo-brown'. It wasn't quite poo poo brown - the plastic used the same double-molding trick Apple used for the iPod, but instead of just putting a polished clear layer over white or black for maximum glossiness, the Zune had color combos like a matte green-tinted halo over a warm brown brown base color, or a blueish halo over black. It actually looked pretty neat in person. You'd get hints of both colors at different angles. The brown one was a retro look that was on-trend for the mid 2000s: half 70s hi-fi, half well-worn National Forest Service sign. Unfortunately, nobody thought about how it would look in photos, where the whole color-shifting thing was impossible to capture and it just blended into a really ugly, well, poo poo brown.
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Jul 9, 2020 07:41
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legooolas posted:There's some obsolete tech for you - user replaceable parts and memory card slots in phones and laptops. Sockets, card readers, and other interface hardware cost money for parts, add extra steps in assembly and QA, take up internal space, usually fail at higher rates than directly-soldered parts (resulting in warranty claims), and in phones, can present another place for water or dust intrusion. Streaming services have also decreased the amount of storage that people want, so expansion hardware is less of a selling point. With the extra costs and less market demand, those features are first on the chopping block. Apple might try to turn it into a big public "courage" thing, and other manufacturers might just drop the feature from the spec sheet and hope people don't get mad, but it's the same factors driving both approaches. FilthyImp posted:They're also hideously expensive. Quality and support are expensive. All the stuff that's not reflected on a spec sheet - everything from tougher hinges and external finishes, to hardware with "business grade" rather than "super max RGB" drivers - costs more to build. Then you get soaked again, because by not choosing bottom-tier gaming grade garbage, you're buying a "premium" product and the manufacturer knows you've got extra money to burn. This is true whether you're buying a Thinkpad, Dell Precision, HP Elitebook, or, yes, a Macbook Pro. If you can't afford a new one, keep in mind that most businesses lease their hardware, and after 3-4 years most PC laptops depreciate to practically nothing. The battery will probably be pretty worn down at that point, but you can usually find new-old-stock replacements. A used business system won't be able to handle games, but for everything else, they're a much better way to get a cheap computer than the equivalent-priced Walmart trash. (ps: avoid Thinkpads these days, Lenovo's been coasting on the brand name for a long time. Dell and HP's pro lines are quite a lot better)
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Jul 11, 2020 18:36
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90s Solo Cup posted:*indignantly points to Apple logo while sipping overpriced Starbucks latte* Remember, every single person who uses an Apple laptop is an idiot who makes decisions based only on brands. That's why I bought an Asus Republic of Gamers laptop with the extra RGB upgrade, and a Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra! Sure, they might cost a bit more, but this way everyone will know I'm a true nerd and not some vaguely gay-coded hipster stereotype. Wouldn't want people to laugh at me for thinking about using an Apple product! (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jul 31, 2020 13:54
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Cojawfee posted:I had my own TV in my room for my Nintendo that had a VHF and UHF dial. A quick glance at wikipedia says that UHF didn't really take off because older sets didn't have the UHF dial, so people wouldn't be getting these UHF channels until they decided to upgrade their TV. Considering how expensive TVs were then, people probably weren't likely to upgrade their TVs that often. Because of that, stations weren't really interested in the UHF licenses. By the time I got this TV, it was really old. I think it was my aunt's old TV. Old enough that I had to use a RCA to RF to antenna adapter to plug my N64 into it. By the late 80s to early 90s, most people had a TV that could receive UHF. But, the signal itself has some less-desirable properties - it falls off much quicker than VHF when there isn't line of sight from the transmitter to the receiver, and it's generally more susceptible to noise that shows up as static. You can get away with a smaller antenna on UHF, but overall quality usually turned out worse. So, the big-money network affiliate TV stations stayed on VHF channels, and UHF was relegated to weird local stations, religious broadcasters, and so forth. These days, almost all over-the-air TV is UHF. The channel numbers you see on the TV don't have any relationship to the frequency any more; part of the HDTV standard included a way for stations to present a channel number that matched their old VHF frequency (CBS Channel 4, your home for Local Sports Team) even when they moved the actual signal to channel 37 or something.
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Aug 14, 2020 22:32
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Last Chance posted:Didn’t Sony do the analog stick and rumble features well before Nintendo attempted them with the N64? Those features were a pretty big deal. Not really. Both consoles were pretty clearly designed with analog stick input in mind from the start. Who did it "first" depends on whether you want to base it on who shipped the very first analog controller or who shipped it as a default option rather than a specialized accessory, but in any case they were very close to each other, and the N64 pad launched before anything with the Dual Shock design. The PlayStation originally shipped with a standard controller that had a d-pad, four face buttons, four shoulder buttons, and no analog sticks or rumble. Sony technically launched an analog controller for the PlayStation in Japan a few months before the N64 came out, in spring 1996, but it was a weird, oversized, and very expensive arcade flight stick setup that didn't sell well. The N64 launched in 1996 (summer in Japan, fall in the US) with a single analog stick in the standard pack-in controller, and a separate rumble accessory. Sony came out with the dual analog controller in the spring of 1997 - it had the familiar twin stick layout, but no rumble. The first Dual Shock, with analog sticks and rumble motors, came out in fall 1997. It wasn't a standard pack-in item with the system until a while later - I don't remember exactly when they changed over, but I think it took a couple of years to drop the old style controller as the default.
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Aug 21, 2020 21:54
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TotalLossBrain posted:something similar is true for the HP calculators being discussed alongside this. Calculator nerds consider the HP-48 series to be the best HP ever made* (though there were other great ones like the -28). They took a dump starting with the HP-49 model, trying to imitate TI with cheap rubber buttons and a similar OS. The 48 is a perfectly fine calculator. The 41C... well, when NASA wanted a backup of last resort for calculating orbital mechanics in the space shuttle, so that the astronauts could still get home even if all the onboard computers failed, they went to an office supply store in Houston, bought some HP-41Cs, slapped in a timer module, replaced the rubber feet with Velcro, wrote some custom programs, and sent them into space. As far as I know, nobody’s seen fit to put an HP-48 into the National Air and Space Museum. It might be a bit faster and a touch more capable, but I think we all know which one wins on rule-of-cool here. never let this distract us from what’s really important, though: gently caress a TI, lyfe [enter] 4 [enter] RPN [enter]
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Mar 18, 2021 03:29
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barbecue at the folks posted:Man, I went fishing for ugly MSX computers (they must exist) but ran into Sony machines instead. Holy poo poo:  this has everything you could ever want turbo button? no, turbo slider oh, and a second slider, for the Ren-Sha Turbo function and a bright red floppy drive with "FDD" in giant letters, just so the world knows you're on the cutting edge of magnetic storage
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Jul 10, 2021 19:38
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Johnny Aztec posted:Picked up two of these Webster-Chicago Transcriber/Dictation machines the other day: For a long time, wire recorders were the only way to get compact, battery powered, good-enough-for-voice quality recording. That’s why mob snitches “wear a wire.”
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Jul 20, 2021 03:02
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