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DoctorWhat posted:I thought the advantage of CompactFlash was that it seamlessly replaced/emulated hard drives on legacy machines without needing drivers, just using a dumb adapter. Indeed, much like PCMCIA it is remarkably similar to IDE, and hence compatible in both directions - handy for replacing iPod hard drives with CF cards, but I'm not so sure that IBM microdrive CF sized hard disks are that useful anymore... Has anyone suggested those as amazing but obsolete in the approx 400 pages I skipped after reading the start of the thread? 
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Dec 12, 2016 00:55
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Wait what? Your old currency is going to just... stop being currency? That is so weird. I could walk into a store now with a (if I had one) 1945 $5 bill and buy skittles with it if I wanted to. It's not like we're the only place which does this. I had about £20 worth of Hong Kong dollars left over from a holiday trip in 1999 and they were in the "still accepted by banks but not currently in circulation" region. In fact, is the US in the minority of places by not expiring old notes? Re: 80s phones they were mostly pretty nasty colours here for the British Telecom rotary dual phones like chocolate brown, a pastel green often used for 70s hospital crockery, or beige.
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Dec 20, 2016 00:26
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Iron Crowned posted:
You mean like the Graffiti Pro app on Android? (By Access, who took over the Palm OS licensing I believe) I've not tried it for many years, but when I used it it was fine. Then they updated it and added adverts. To a keyboard app. With no paid alternative app without the adverts. ffs :P (No idea if the current version does that crap)
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Mar 3, 2017 21:22
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although I think for me what I miss is being able to write instead of type. If I could use graffiti on a modern smart phone, that would be aces
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Platystemon posted:That may be all that’s displayed on‐screen, but your device is uniquely identified internally. It's worse than that - lots of car Bluetooth connections slurp your contacts from your phone too. And some even keep them (they just hide them) if you tell the interface to delete then all. Yaaaay. Tl;dr: Don't Bluetooth connect your phone to a hire car.
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Mar 10, 2017 12:18
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shovelbum posted:It doesn't even sound like the Pi mode is emulation, much less the FPGA only mode The Pi is for mysterious "we don't seem sure what we'll do with this yet" acceleration purposes.
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May 14, 2017 00:05
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Gromit posted:That's not so bad. I've heard that the electricity company here will install 3-phase if you need it for, say, ducted AC. Moot point, of course, as I have no intention of getting 3-phase in just to run some stuff in that rack cabinet. In the UK it tends to be against the health and safety rules at most companies to have multiple phases in the same rack, since you can do yourself more damage with 440V potential between different phases...
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Jul 14, 2017 07:16
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From a few pages back:quote:Using VCR for backups I never got around to trying with VHS, but using a miniDV camcorder over FireWire for backups was very easy and gave pretty good capacity on a tape (10GB or so, depending on the level of redundancy) and seemed reliable enough, but was slow (real time, so 1 hour for 10GB). Also from a few pages back: quote:TV broadcasts of sound to load on 8-bit micros If you were quiet enough in the room it was possible to use a microphone near the TV speaker to record this to a tape, as the signals were pretty robust to cope with being on low quality, cheap cassette tapes 
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Dec 9, 2017 12:09
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How expensive is custom CNC-ing of things like aluminium compared to 3D printing it? Having looked around briefly online it looks like setup costs for any CNC work is far higher that 3D printing, which is a bit of a killer for prototyping. (Have been looking at making some vintage RC car parts from fancier materials than the usual selection of plastics)
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Feb 28, 2018 13:06
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Buttcoin purse posted:These devices could just let you connect using some standard protocol but instead force you to use the applets. The Dell stuff I've used for remote consoles is Java "web start", where it download a Java applet-ish sandboxed thing rather than it being an in-browser applet. This at least avoids the terrible mess that is browser plug-ins  And some of the ports used are standard VNC ports but I believe it layers some additional incompatibilities on top of that. Agreed that it would be approx 1 million times better if it just used standard VNC, or they published their extensions for others to implement. Be glad you don't work at a university where they have a lot of in-browser Java applet junk for legacy apps, which modern browsers really tend not to like at all...
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Mar 26, 2018 14:26
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Pilsner posted:
Alt+space is the standard hot key for the window menu with minimize, maximize etc on it. Hope can you cope without that?
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Apr 13, 2018 12:12
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Buttcoin purse posted:If you want to hot remove a drive, under Linux I tend to tell it to delete the device before I disconnect (not just unmount it), which actually makes the drive spin down, because I've had some machines that reliably hang when I don't. I don't think all machines are like that though. Does running "eject" on the device not do enough? Deleting the device file sounds like a very odd thing to have to do. (I've never had to do that) eSATA is excellent though, and some crazy USB ports actually have the eSATA socket smushed in them too, as eSATAp, but I'm not sure if that's a proper standard or something insane motherboard manufacturers just do for fun/to confuse users.
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May 3, 2020 19:35
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Toast Museum posted:Interesting. Got a source? Sources saying that a single pass is insufficient are plentiful, especially if that pass writes all zeroes or ones, since it moves the value to more like .05 away either side from 0/1 depending on what the previous contents were. (Or something like that) Or is this no longer true? (Also different for SMR drives which are cheap and terrible and need read-modify-write cycles to work at all)
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May 4, 2020 13:09
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legooolas posted:Or is this no longer true? Replying to myself actually having looked this up (should have done before posting!): https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/10464/why-is-writing-zeros-or-random-data-over-a-hard-drive-multiple-times-better-th Multiple passes not required due to high densities of disks and recording formats making things much harder and "very unlikely" that any recovery of even whole bytes is possible. But they still recommend encrypting drives for maximum security when you're done with them. Flash/SSD drives very different and need different tools. E;fb
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May 4, 2020 13:19
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barbecue at the folks posted:Wait, VCRs also recorded teletext? Mostly badly, with SVHS recordings doing a much better job. The recent improvements which have made more recovery possible are to do with trying to work out the most likely character at each position (and there are some checksums in the data too, I believe). This optionally uses GPU compute power to speed things up a lot - it's a surprisingly large amount of effort to decide the signals and then work out the most likely page contents! I have a bunch of tapes I've recovered Teletext from in this way, and it's still very hit and miss depending on the recording quality and length, but far better than just sticking a tape in a VCR and trying to view the Teletext on a telly. I should submit these to the archive! Only cost me about £8 to get a suitable TV capture card and the rest is pretty straightforward The e/j thing in the output I'm guessing it's because the encoding of those characters is similar enough that they are easily confused during the processing of the noisy signal. You can do manual tidying afterwards if you're feeling like you have the time...
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May 8, 2020 13:47
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Holy poo poo, I never realized!
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Pretty good posted:Were there any spring loaded slider phones other than the Samsung matrix one? The Nokia 7110 had a spring loaded slider. One of the few phones I had which I do kinda miss. Also the one I had was imported from Hong Kong and could write Chinese using basically 5 (I think) different strokes and then a menu of matching characters, which I thought was pretty impressive in terms of dictionary/auto-complete-type of thing. (Not that I can read/write Chinese, so it may well have just been taunting me the entire time with what characters it suggested)
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May 21, 2020 23:56
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Hirayuki posted:It didn't take me long to find a way to use Winamp to put music on my first-gen iPod mini; even if it wasn't exactly like mounting an external drive, it was still far simpler and less infuriating than using iTunes. I have a first gen 5GB iPod and was using it on a Windows PC with some third-party software as the first thing I did, as I didn't have a Mac then. I think it was called xTunes or something like that? Was the flakiest piece of software I've ever used, and regularly crashed the entire PC  (so I'm probably wrong on the name of the software, having tried to blank it from my mind!)
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May 25, 2020 18:46
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several posted:SCSI chat SCSI was certainly less painful than the terrible IDE interfaces which were on soundcards for a long while. Maybe SCSI CD drives were also a thing before IDE ones? I certainly remember using a SCSI CD drive on PCs at school in 1994-ish, which also had caddies (with giant sprung sliding openings like a huge floppy disk) instead of a drawer for the disc. We certainly didn't have many of them as they were rather expensive IIRC...
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May 25, 2020 18:51
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Shifty Nipples posted:At that time the most likely places to find an encyclopedia on CD and a computer with a CD drive were schools and libraries so it makes sense to have a system like that when so many people will handle the CDs. We had some kind of SCSI CD tower of power at my school attached to a NetWare server to share the CDs to network attached PCs without anyone having to touch the CDs at all. Worked surprisingly well! (Probably didn't do anything except the file data, as I don't think anything like Redbook audio or whatever would have any way of getting handled) We also had waaay too many PCs on a 10-Base-2 network and performance did indeed nose-dive when a whole room of netbooting PCs running DOS and Windows 3.1 were used at once against that same NetWare server. That network and NetWare worked amazingly well for years other than that room. I still have nostalgia for DOS and NetWare because of helping to run that setup for a while at school
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Jul 4, 2020 01:44
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AntherUslessPoster posted:No, gently caress samsung. 2 years of my life, memories and photos were gone after an OTA update on the very first samsung note. It fried the memory chip. Everything was gone, all passwords, notes, contacts etc etc. Not that this helps past you, but please everyone back up things you need and want to keep. Especially all that stuff on your phone, which you might drop down the loo, or lose, or drive over it or something. I've seen way too many people lose stuff they really would rather not. Or is backup a failed and/or obsolete technology?
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Jul 5, 2020 00:20
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mobby_6kl posted:Hell 60GB is still a pretty impressive amount of music, even my Note9 only has 128 gigs of storage and most of it is taken up with app data and recorded videos so I don't even have that much space for music on a phone that was 1 grand two years ago. There's some obsolete tech for you - user replaceable parts and memory card slots in phones and laptops. Whyyyyyy? Oh, 128GB micro SD card : ~£20 128GB more internal storage in a phone : ~££££££ Guess I've answered that myself. To blend with the previous Apple arguing/ranting in the thread, are they to blame for this or did others start doing it first and they just popularised as much as possible being soldered onto laptops/phones/whatever rather than socketed and upgradable? (Yes I know there are still some which have slots, bit it's becoming less and less common it seems?)
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Jul 11, 2020 10:47
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Rev. Bleech_ posted:just give me the size/thinness/form factor/etc of a decent 13" pc laptop with a SATA or M2 SSD instead of loving bullshit rear end eMMC plz Where are you looking? There are lots of competent laptops like this... My partner has an Acer Swift 5 14" laptop which is honestly so light it feels like they've forgotten to put the PC in the laptop case. It's like 960g and has a touchscreen and 2 M2 slots in it  (Admittedly 14" instead of 13" in this case, but it's insane)
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Aug 3, 2020 00:30
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several people posted:many remotes Just wait until it's on offer and get a Logitech Harmony of some sort to replace your many remotes. And then spend several days getting it to work, but once it's done you'll never touch it again... Until you get another piece of AV equipment and then you get to go through it all again, hooray! (It's pretty good once it's set up, to be honest, and it is acting as a Bluetooth keyboard to my MythTV box to control that so that I don't have to mess with lirc...)
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Aug 13, 2020 00:33
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Powered Descent posted:But there was no way to use those codes to tell the VCR to keep recording an extra hour or so after the scheduled end of the show you wanted. At least in the UK there was, via PDC : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_Delivery_Control ..which worked with those Videoplus codes. Not sure about other countries, or how well it actually worked in practice, but it was supposed to solve that exact problem.
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Aug 14, 2020 02:05
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Johnny Aztec posted:I have a distinct memory of helping a friend convert songs to .WAV because his system wasn't fast enough to run MP3s. Didn't that get fixed later when decoders using fixed-point maths instead of floating point, so it was all integer arithmetic and would work more quickly on processors with low performance or no FPU? I remember playing mp3s on a terrible Windows CE PDA when madplay was created, or something similar. Not 100% sure but I think that also worked fast enough on 486s too
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Sep 27, 2020 15:01
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boar guy posted:just have kids and you'll never need an alarm again My 15-month-old sleeps for longer than I do. Long may this continue! My alarm and failed technology combination is that I have several digital watches which either make no noise or are incredibly quiet because I was dumb and lost the tiny springs which connect the alarm buzzer to the inside back of the case (probably when changing batteries)  Need to find some suitable replacements but I suspect they are all subtly different...
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Oct 8, 2020 18:01
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Zopotantor posted:These are still being made AFAIK, but what I really want is the programmer’s version. I totally want one of these too, and they are way too expensive for me to buy one (from eBay or wherever) with the lack of use it would realistically get. Why can't they make them again if they can still make the 12C? I'm sure they could make a pile of cash if they re-released it.
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Mar 19, 2021 19:44
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Chemmy posted:unlimited PTO How unlimited was that really? I've heard that used a lot as a benefit in (mostly US) startups but always wondered how it really works out. I mean, I've worked at startups in the UK but holiday was the same as anywhere else then, but that means ~5 weeks (excluding sick and bank holidays) so that might seem unlimited to some people in the US? E: typo fixes (ugh autocorrect and tired) legooolas has a new favorite as of 01:46 on Apr 6, 2021 |
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Apr 6, 2021 01:30
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Shibawanko posted:how obsolete were your computer science classes in school? From a few pages back but I wanted to say that my computer science classes at school when I was in the UK studying for A-levels (so when I was 16-18 in 1993-1995) were excellent. They were called "Computing" rather than Comp Sci for no obvious reason, but we did a bunch of history of computing, the usual (?) sort of algorithms and logic stuff and databases and programming in C. Then you could do whatever you wanted (within reason) for your final project, but were encouraged to do something in C or databases so that the teacher had sufficient experience of them to be able to help by answering questions etc. The network was a NetWare 3 network with thin Ethernet (mmm, one collision domain) and about 200 PCs on it, with loads of hubs and only one switch (they were expensive!) to separate the staff and students networks. All worked amazingly well though! (We did disconnect rooms from the rest of the network if we were doing to play Doom or Decent or something though, to avoid people getting cross with the network performance tanking...) I entirely blame this (and working there in the summers for a couple of years) for why I headed into computery things after, and even more why I have nostalgia for DOS and Windows 3.1, due to how much stuff worked incredibly well there. (Pre internet-access) I've no idea of their normal budget at the time, but other departments would fail to spend all their money in a financial year and it would get thrown at IT to spend quickly so that the school wouldn't get their budget reduced the next year! Fun times
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Apr 6, 2021 01:44
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SubG posted:According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, around 25% of US workers receive no paid time off.  Is this normal paid full-time employees or including contractors or whatever too? Here it's up to contractors to do their own tax and pay themselves sick and holiday pay, so they don't get any really, but for everyone else 20 days plus bank holidays (8 days) is legally required. (https://www.gov.uk/holiday-entitlement-rights) Obviously this doesn't stop people being on zero-hours contacts, which means 0 * 20 = 0 days legally required. Zero hours contacts are freaking awful Could well be similarly 25% on such contacts here so that they get no paid holiday.
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Apr 6, 2021 02:07
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KozmoNaut posted:How about the Nokia Symbian phones? Smartphone or feature phone? Smartphone, just not terribly smart. You could add apps etc. Wasn't the first iPhone technically not a smartphone because it couldn't do MMS and that was part of the requirements? (Might also have been made up to attack the iPhone?)
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Apr 9, 2021 12:42
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KozmoNaut posted:Then my Sony-Ericsson "Greenheart" phones were also smartphones, because you could install J2ME apps on them. That goes for the horrible Samsung X660 I had before those, too. They all had web browsers, could do e-mail had (rudimentary). Wikipedia says "A smartphone is a mobile device that combines cellular and mobile computing functions into one unit. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, which facilitate wider software, internet (including web browsing[1] over mobile broadband), and multimedia functionality (including music, video, cameras, and gaming), alongside core phone functions such as voice calls and text messaging." ..but has no citations for where this definition came from, mentions no extensibility, installable applications, touch UI or such. So I guess it's up to whomever writes any particular definition? I always considered the Symbian and Palm phones I had as "smart" but obviously nothing like it's expect from a modern phone.
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Apr 9, 2021 19:54
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Mescal posted:Jesus, yeah. My partner calls me old when I complain about this. Most stuff should work just fine on less resources. But they write duct-tape-and-molasses code because RAM and storage is cheap. And you've got a machine that should be ten times overpowered for ordinary daily stuff, but it cries uncle trying to like, load a loving PDF. I've recently got an HP 200LX which is an XT (8086) PC with a bunch of PIM applications in ROM in a palmtop form factor, because it was mentioned in this thread and reminded me that I wanted one years ago but they were outrageously expensive when new. It's an amazing example of how tiny, tiny applications and storage were and could be when done right. 2 AA batteries last a month of occasional daily use! Insanity. (Obvs completely unusable for anything remotely modern)
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Apr 19, 2021 18:14
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> key mapping chat I like the Compose key method which X uses : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key ..and then have AltGr set as Compose instead, since I find the sequences much easier to remember. E.g. Compose `a for à, compose - L for £. The basic ones just seem to be obvious according to how you write the character and accents or whatever. I just wish it were a bit easier to add entries, as I've not found a nice way to add things for some now-common Unicode or emoji characters yet.
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Apr 23, 2021 09:54
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Sweevo posted:Minidisc failed because it was full of DRM bullshit and because it didn't include a way to use them for data. It could have cleaned up in the post-floppy era when CD-R drives were still expensive (and prone to making coasters) and people were trying things like ZIP, Jazz, and LS120 drives to fill the gap. If there had been a standard way of storing a few hundred MB on a minidisc then they could have eaten into the early USB stick market, and been used instead of CDs to play MP3s from. Apparently they did make a data drive : http://www.minidisc.org/minidisc_faq.html#_q12 ..and even a ThinkPad MD module! I had no idea this existed - I was just looking up about NetMD to see if that could do arbitrary data (it can't), and this showed up 140MB a disk, although there was a higher capacity version which was incompatible, because of course it was. Presumably it was all horribly expensive as well as slow, and too late?
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Sep 19, 2021 21:19
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SniperWoreConverse posted:What the gently caress this poo poo is getting crazy WSL has let you run Linux VMs on Windows 10 for a while, in a way that makes them seem native-ish. Also I've been running Linux desktops since about 1996, so what do you mean finally arrived? I'm hoping they say that Windows runs Android apps better than Android, in the same way that IBM marketed OS/2 running Windows 3.1 apps better than Windows...
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Sep 23, 2021 23:39
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SniperWoreConverse posted:I remember a lot of "this is the year of the Linux desktop you guys finally micro $haft will get what's coming to them!" And it never happened. Linux never took off as a mainstream thing. It'd be pretty funny if it became mainstream by simply getting eaten by Windows like this. I get the feeling they've done this for the cloud and server side of things rather than the desktop side though, as they know that that's where the money is in cloud hosting of services (mostly). Mega Comrade posted:... the biggest blocker for anyone picking up Linux. Either you stick with something out of the box with the default repos and then it's pretty great, but you tinker even slightly and you need to know what you're doing, there is no middle ground, so it's just not suitable for most people. Flatpak, snaps, containers (various sorts), every language has its own packaging system, etc etc. Failed and obsolete : One packaging system to do everything. Now it feels like I need a packaging and dependency system to manage all the packaging systems. (Although python are working on making their packaging work better with system-provided packages) Absolutely agree on the development side of things (although I develop on and admin Linux desktop and server/VM hosts for people so I'm obviously biased, but almost all compute we run is on Linux servers) and whilst there are a zillion different desktop environments, you can at least mix and match whatever applications from them you want, and customise how everything looks and feels to an outrageous degree. Also obsolete : doing any customisation rather than just using default settings.
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Sep 25, 2021 13:10
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Zopotantor posted:Yeah, I’m a software guy, I’m leaving transceivers and poo poo to the experts. My only hands-on experience with network cabling was when I had to solder BNC connectors to thinwire some 30+ years ago. That sucked. When I was at school in 1993-1995 we had a *lot* of 10Base2 thin Ethernet networking, and we had some lovely fancy crimp tools which made making custom cables incredibly quick and easy. We rewired whole rooms of PCs really quickly with lovely correct length cables. It was a thing of beauty having cables that were just right. I'm still genuinely impressed at how well and reliably our NetWare 3 network with DOS and Windows 3.1 hosts on it worked. Wish things were that simple and worked well now. I definitely feel like an old man shouting at clouds now with how insanely complex everything is. Edit: When I say crimp tools I mean several of one awesome crimper which you could do all the wire stripping, cutting outers, then crimping on the connectors with one tool but by using different bits of it and turning it around etc. It was fabulous
legooolas has a new favorite as of 22:51 on Oct 1, 2021 |
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Oct 1, 2021 22:49
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legooolas posted:Edit: When I say crimp tools I mean several of one awesome crimper which you could do all the wire stripping, cutting outers, then crimping on the connectors with one tool but by using different bits of it and turning it around etc. It was fabulous Replying to myself instead of editing, but I'm pretty sure it was like this one : http://academy.delmar.edu/Courses/ITNW2313/icoax.htm But I think a bit better as when you put the cable in to strip it it had a stopper so you just jammed the cable in there and it did it all to the right lengths for the connector etc. I definitely got to the point I could make them in a few seconds without even looking after a while of using it
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Oct 1, 2021 23:00
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This thread continually makes me want to buy things. I've been looking at DAT Walkmans (walkmen?) which I obviously don't need. Relatedly-ish, are there any tiny mp3 players like the sansa clip which are still available and have preferably a micro SD slot and maybe Bluetooth for headphones (not absolutely required!)? My other half wants something maybe for Christmas so that they don't have to use their phone for this sort of thing. Seems obsolete enough to ask here, but if there a different thread I should use then I'm happy to be pointed there instead Thanks obsolete goons!
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Oct 4, 2021 13:10
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RC and Moon Pie posted:While one side of my brain is kinda grossed out about it, the other is singing detachable penis to the chorus of Personal Jesus. I assumed it was a reference to this track : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detachable_Penis
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Nov 27, 2021 00:13
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