Post the very best in obsolete and failed technology

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mystes: May 31, 2006

Fozaldo posted:

When electrons get stopped suddenly they lose that energy in photons of x-ray frequency, in other words your screen gives off x-rays. I've not heard of long exposure affecting anyone though.

Isn't this why CRTs used leaded glass?

# ¿ Mar 28, 2014 13:52

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 00:04

mystes: May 31, 2006

Killer robot posted:

The iRiver I had was in there too. Best CD-based player I had before I got the Zen, little and slim with a cool remote and all, convenient for listening to while biking. It was too thin to use AA batteries: it came with a custom set of rechargables, about the same size but shaped like packs of gum.

I think there was an external battery pack so you could use AA batteries if necessary. This thing also had way too many buttons (I think it mostly eschewed menus for just having buttons for specific settings like shuffle).

mystes has a new favorite as of 20:56 on May 6, 2014

# ¿ May 6, 2014 20:53

mystes: May 31, 2006

Mr. Flunchy posted:

Uh, the same as 'comb'. How've you been doing it?

Where are you from that people pronounce "come" this way?

# ¿ May 15, 2014 16:21

mystes: May 31, 2006

I think one advantage of powerline networking is supposedly that even if you don't get anywhere near the stated bandwidth or the average throughput you got from wifi, it can be more consistent which is important for streaming video.

# ¿ May 24, 2014 03:03

mystes: May 31, 2006

twistedmentat posted:

To be fair, I had them all in a box in my closet and she thought they were junk.

I always wondering how CDkeys worked. I figured they each had an algorithm that was unique to that software, and all you needed to do was enter something that had the same algorithm to unlock it.

It really doesn't matter. Offline they could use a made up algorithm or they could hash the code with a fixed key and check the last few bytes, but either way the program is on the user's computer so it can be used to bruteforce keys at the very least and anyway the check can be patched out. Online they could do anything and nobody would ever know, but there wouldn't be any real reason to use anything but a whitelist of valid codes.

The only thing that would be really stupid would be to not use a whitelist and then use the exact same check offline and online, because this would allow people to generate keys offline that would work for online play (unless they used public key cryptography with ridiculously long codes).

# ¿ Jul 28, 2014 02:45

mystes: May 31, 2006

Wanamingo posted:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-Simon-First-Smart-Phone-Works-/400758781989

Knock yourself out.

You presumably wouldn't be able to use it as a phone, though, since it must have been analog, so it would just be a really giant and heavy PDA.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2014 13:54

mystes: May 31, 2006

Mescal posted:

Does bold without using a separate type wheel.

What does it do, type each character over itself multiple times?

# ¿ Oct 19, 2014 20:57

mystes: May 31, 2006

Maimgara posted:

I work with big rear end printing presses (~4 million pages an hour), and things like the oven still run on win98. These things needs to 'just work', and arranging spare parts for the industrial computers or paying a greybeard to fix them is much cheaper then doing big replacements. Still, that can bite you in the rear end. One time, the oven was getting serviced by the electrician and after fixing his thing, he turned it off and on a couple of times to test his work. Unknown to him, the win98 computer running a equally ancient Oracle DB didn't like being turned off and on halfway through the startup sequence 5 or 6 times. Took half a day sorting that out.

Have you thought of trying to move it to a virtual machine on a modern computer?

# ¿ Nov 27, 2014 02:26

mystes: May 31, 2006

peter gabriel posted:

My Father in law just got a mouse scanner and I groaned when he told me, remembering all the poo poo basically posted on this page, but it fuckin rocks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt4LpLOx0j4

Totally cool little device.

We have the CPU power and software to do this sort of thing right now, but nobody cares because if you don't have a flatbed scanner you can just take out your cellphone and take a picture of stuff.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2014 03:43

mystes: May 31, 2006

Pilsner posted:

How did people think USB A-A cables worked? Allow transferring files between two computers?

It's not that crazy that people think this. In the case of Firewire, for example, you can actually network two computers with a normal cable. USB just happens to be way more stupidly complicated, to the point where they had to go through the trouble to invent USB OTG later so devices can act as both hosts and guests, and it's still such a pain in the rear end that nobody actually does it.

This reminds me of the whole stupid thing where when USB 2 came out they renamed USB 1 to "USB 2 Full Speed" in contrast to "USB 2 High Speed" which was actually USB 2.

mystes has a new favorite as of 00:59 on Dec 21, 2014

# ¿ Dec 21, 2014 00:55

mystes: May 31, 2006

dissss posted:

It simply couldn't work any other way

You couldn't prevent devices from spoofing other devices, but you could take a lot more precautions against malicious devices.

If malicious devices emulating keyboard become common, one solution would be to do something sort of like bluetooth paring, so that when a not previously authorized second keyboard is connected to an already booted computer, you would have to enter a code displayed on the screen to that keyboard to actually allow input from it. This would obviously be a pain, but I'm just trying to give an example about how much could be done if people were concerned about things like this.

# ¿ Dec 21, 2014 17:31

mystes: May 31, 2006

Humphreys posted:

Have a glorious teardown of a 'vintage' mobile phone (I refuse to call them cellphones as those were a different type of wireless telephony completely).

Huh? You realize cellular just means they use "cells" (areas covered by a network of geographically distributed base stations), right? It doesn't imply a specific encoding or anything.

# ¿ Mar 3, 2015 05:18

mystes: May 31, 2006

Light Gun Man posted:

I'm kinda weirded out at how much Netflix usage seems to be entirely "watch the new things immediately and then nothing" or something. They make these categories like "newly added" "recent release" "trending now" and "popular on Netflix" and they are like 90% the same things because they are the things that are new. It's like nobody ever watches anything from before the current month, as if they've already watched every single thing on Netflix that interested them previously. Maybe it just seems that way but drat it's kinda dumb.

This doesn't mean people aren't watching things that aren't new, it just means that it's not the case that everyone's watching the same non-new thing at the same time.

# ¿ Jun 8, 2015 19:15

mystes: May 31, 2006

pookel posted:

Mine didn't. Besides, headphones aren't the same thing.

True, they hurt your neck much less.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2015 19:19

mystes: May 31, 2006

Pham Nuwen posted:

My chinaphone is here and I've been using it since yesterday.

I left it sitting on the bedside table all night, unplugged, and when I checked this morning it still reported 100% battery, which is pretty cool.

It does phone calls, text messages (no MMS that I can tell), and has a very very lovely web browser. I haven't gotten anything except Google to load properly.

The camera is extremely bad (surprise!). It's better than one of those Gameboy cameras, I guess, but not much. The flash is just a regular white LED that does almost nothing.

It has a little antenna that pulls out and actually makes the FM tuner work really well--you don't have to have the headphones plugged in to make it work. It also has an analog TV tuner which can pick up a single Mexican TV station.

So far it's not too bad for $25 but goddamn does texting on a keypad suck. No predictive text either.

You promised pictures.

# ¿ Aug 11, 2015 04:27

mystes: May 31, 2006

Roaming profiles, folder redirection, etc. It may not be perfect but I think it more or less works.

Also:

quote:

First, I don't think even Microsoft has really bothered making it work well (even with their own apps [that means "applications" btw you noobs]), and second, there's no control over how applications store their data, so you can't be sure that porting the users directory will retain relevant program data. It's a shame, because it also makes doing a data backup and reinstall of Windows a nightmare.

This information is like at least 10 years out of date. When you run as a normal user programs can obviously only save stuff to your user folder. The problem is that compared to Linux, more stuff requires you to be administrator on windows so more people just give up and still run as administrator all the time. But in a real enterprise windows setup at least this wouldn't be the case.

mystes has a new favorite as of 04:28 on Sep 12, 2015

# ¿ Sep 12, 2015 04:19

mystes: May 31, 2006

Samizdata posted:

It does suck. My Dad borrowed a laptop from work for a conference he had to go to. The loving thing was GPO locked via AD to map the user's document drive to a network share.

Really? On a goddamned loaner lappy?

(Fixed it, but I am sure the admins were pissed.)

I don't think properly synchronizing laptops with some sort of shared profile is really a solvable problem with any current operating system, though. It would require either locking users out of desktops until they checked in the changes from the laptop, only allowing the laptop to be used when internet access was available to sync changes (might as well use a remote desktop then), or having a way to merge multiple sets of changes to the registry (on windows) or configuration files (on Linux) which would be hard.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2015 04:58

mystes: May 31, 2006

GWBBQ posted:

The local Stop & Shop has these and after 5 or 6 times in a row being flagged to have my order checked and rescanned by an attendant I gave up and went back to regular registers or self checkout if lines are really long.

Same, although it didn't happen every time to me (it seemed like it would do it only when the store wasn't busy).

It seemed particularly dumb, even as a security measure, because the attendant would only rescan the top 3-4 items, so it wouldn't prevent someone deliberately not scanning stuff or something either, so it just seemed like a deliberate "gently caress you" to people using the system to save time.

Also, you still had to wait in the same line for the self checkout machines, so it didn't save time on the whole.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2015 21:46

mystes: May 31, 2006

Shifty Pony posted:

There was a brief time a year or so ago where using feature phones was the new cool thing among those who put entirely too much effort into attempting to project the image of not putting in any effort.

Has "feature phone" now become a generic term for any non-smartphone cellphone?

# ¿ Dec 24, 2015 17:12

mystes: May 31, 2006

Gobbeldygook posted:

"Feature phone" used to refer to phones that did something more than your basic flip phone but were not as fully-featured as a smart phone. Even the bottom-of-the-barrel piece of poo poo burner phone is now pretty well-featured, so it just refers to "phones that aren't running Android, iOS, or Windows".

I don't know if the latter statement is true, though. I have a coworker who still has a basic flipphone and it doesn't play music or have proprietary apps or anything else that you might associated with a "feature phone" in the original sense. It doesn't even appear to have J2ME support, which previously even basic flipphones had. That's why if anything I think the meaning of the word has changed if all non-smartphone phones can be called "feature phones" now.

# ¿ Dec 24, 2015 18:39

mystes: May 31, 2006

robodex posted:

Honestly, the next arms race will be features rather than performance. Fingerprint scanners, 3D, curved screens, thinness, etc.

But features were the selling point before performance. Apple pushed thinness and for a while that drove cellphone design, but we're already to the point where were at the limit and it doesn't matter any more anyawy. There was at least one 3D phone (HTC EVO 3D) and I owned one multiple years ago. The selling point became performance because since they ran out of useful features to add and it just became gimmicks, smartphones are already a commodity.

Many people already feel that curved screens are a gimmick on TVs, and they don't even make sense on a smartphone. Samsung had a special phone that displayed stuff on the edge. Nobody gave a poo poo.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2016 19:12

mystes: May 31, 2006

twistedmentat posted:

I had someone not too long ago go on how laserdisks are better quality than blurays or Hd streaming. Somehow I think that's not true. The main draw of laserdisk collection is to get rare stuff like the unaltered versions of Star Wars in decent quality, or special features on films that were only available on the LDs.

Great, the stupid "records have higher quality than CD's" myth has now completely spiraled out of control. Next time I get drunk with my coworkers I'm going to try to convince them that wax cylinders are the only good recording medium.

mystes has a new favorite as of 04:56 on Jan 28, 2016

# ¿ Jan 28, 2016 04:54

mystes: May 31, 2006

Sentient Data posted:

Apparently snake oil is never obsolete!

Both in the sense of there always being a new sucker and in the sense that the individual stickers literally never become obsolete because they don't do anything in the first place and don't have to even be changed for new models of phones.

mystes has a new favorite as of 02:52 on Feb 16, 2016

# ¿ Feb 16, 2016 02:38

mystes: May 31, 2006

Flipperwaldt posted:

Compact Flash cards are just a connector adapter away from being solid state IDE compatible drives. You've got to get it to fit in the device though, so I'm not sure that would be viable, but otherwise it would be the greatest thing for these players. Shock resistant and fast!

Why would you go through all this effort to make what would effectively be a giant lovely Sansa Cip?

# ¿ Mar 14, 2016 19:29

mystes: May 31, 2006

Lowen SoDium posted:

And UAC was a long overdue tightening of security and administrator privileges. It took a while before old apps were updated to not expect administrator privileges. (you can argue that UAC is a sloppy implementation, but windows running everything as Administrator by default was a HUGE part of all the security issues associated with Windows).

Windows 7 wasn't that much different than Vista, but people received it better because by the time it was released, PC makers started using more RAM, drivers had been updated, and most apps had been updated to play nice with UAC.

UAC is sort of lame because as far as I'm aware, Microsoft's stance is that the prompts you get when running as Administrator aren't even a security feature. They actually even weakened it for Windows 7 to make it less annoying which has resulted in various privilege escalation (if you can call them that; I guess that name presupposes that it's a security feature) vulnerabilities.

The actual purpose of UAC was simply so that even if running as administrator, it would be annoying to use programs that performed lots of random unnecessary operations that required being administrator. Therefore, developers would want to fix their programs to be less annoying, which would have the side effect of making it possible to run as a normal user. (This was arguably necessary because there was a chicken and egg problem where everyone ran Windows as Administrator because software wouldn't run otherwise, but developers had no reason to make software run as a normal user if everyone just used the Administrator account.) However, the only real added security comes in if you take advantage of this to actually run as a non-administrator user.

The problem is that I imagine that most home users still run Windows as Administrator all the time, so unless Microsoft hardens UAC or something, the real security issue hasn't been resolved.

mystes has a new favorite as of 18:28 on Mar 16, 2016

# ¿ Mar 16, 2016 18:21

mystes: May 31, 2006

My Lovely Horse posted:

A friend of mine just started a job at a place where they run Windows 7, but thanks to hundreds of old inflexible employees IT has to keep everything looking like Windows 3.1. Can't (won't?) change it on a per-user basis or make it so that your custom settings carry over to the next day, either. It's setting it every morning or working in some kinda weird retrofuturist alternate universe.

By "looking like Windows 3.1" do you mean a widget theme? Or running "Program Manager" as the shell? Or both?

# ¿ Mar 16, 2016 19:21

mystes: May 31, 2006

Jerry Cotton posted:

I like how no-one in this thread apparently uses several computers at different locations on the regular - which is the number one reason why one would add things to a playlist on a web service.

So download them and put them back into an appropriate web service?

# ¿ Jul 4, 2016 15:19

mystes: May 31, 2006

Collateral Damage posted:

You can't skim a chip or paywave card. Paywave essentially works the same way as the chip, the only difference is the chip is a physical connection while paywave uses a short range magnetic field.

It's radio, not magnetic induction or something exotic like that. With the right equipment it's possible to get a larger range.

quote:

Simplified, the chip is a tiny computer that gets powered up by the terminal and exchanges a couple of authentication tokens back and forth with the terminal. The actual private data on the chip is never communicated.

The key is never communicated and it's not possible to clone the chip. However, IIRC the card hands over the credit card number and expiration date in the clear. I don't know how practical it would be to skim this information from a distance, and this information in itself isn't enough to make a magnetic stripe-only clone of the card because it doesn't have the CCV1 code (which is only in the magnetic stripe). Hopefully someone who obtained this information wouldn't be able to use the card in an online transaction, either, since they shouldn't know the address, zip-code, or CCV2 code (the one written on the card). However, I'm not sure i would dismiss the possibility of wireless skimming out of hand.

# ¿ Jul 10, 2016 15:15

mystes: May 31, 2006

Computer viking posted:

I guess you could mod a genuine payment terminal with a better antenna and walk around charging people? It sounds like it would have a bad effort:payoff ratio if you could even get it to work, and it should be simple to track the owner of the account the money went to. Still, theoretically possible?

Another interesting theoretical idea would be relay attacks where one person would wirelessly communicate with a card and another would use another device to essentially use that card at a genuine merchant's terminal in real time (the two devices could easily communicate over the internet at any distance). This probably isn't that practical right now, but it could become more of an issue in the future.

Setting wireless skimming aside, there are still a lot of possibilities with physical access to chip cards without actually cloning the chips (which should be impossible). In europe, chip and PIN cards were supposed to provide a lot of additional protection (basicallly making it impossible to use stolen physical cards), but it turned out there's a flaw in the protocol that enables a small device sandwiched between the chip's contacts and the payment terminal to convert PIN transactions into pinless transactions, which essentially defeats the entire purpose of having PINs.

# ¿ Jul 10, 2016 15:31

mystes: May 31, 2006

EoRaptor posted:

Part of the spec defines the allowed latency between request and return on information between the card and the terminal. You'd never be able to have a person far enough away to make it worth it.

If so then good, but, for example https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/banking/relay/

quote:

How far away can the fake card be from the genuine card?

It can be anywhere in the world. While testing our prototype we introduced a 2 second delay in all communications and the transaction still succeeded without a problem. Within 2 seconds, a radio signal could travel around the world 10 times. So we expect that the relay attack will succeed regardless of where the genuine and fake cards are, as long as there is reliable Internet or phone coverage.

Maybe they have since changed the spec to prevent this?

# ¿ Jul 11, 2016 01:42

mystes: May 31, 2006

spog posted:

It's an interesting attack, though doing it practically seems unlikely as :

Genuine and fraudulent payment need to occur nearly simulataneously ' yes, I would like to buy this diamond. No, not yet...hold on....nearly ready to pay...is that Elvis there?....yes I definitely want it....did you go anywhere nice on your holidays?... Yes! I will pay now!'

Fake card has a bunch of wires hanging out of it that the genuine merchant can't notice 'this? no, I just add this so I won't lose my card, pay it no attention and sell me that diamond'

I linked that just because it demonstrated that the protocol itself allows sufficient latency to permit relay attacks in the real world, but in my case I was envisioning that on the end with the real card, the attack would be performed wirelessly, which might be possible since there are no PINs in the US (I believe that researchers have already successfully performed relay attacks against other RFID devices, such as mifare cards). By performing the attack wirelessly, there wouldn't need to be an obvious fake payment terminal; indeed, the victim wouldn't need to know that their card was in the process of authenticating a payment at all. This might ameliorate the timing issue.

On the other end, rather than a fake card with wires, wireless payments mean you could just use a physically unmodified NFC-capable android phone (NFC is just RFID) with special software.

# ¿ Jul 11, 2016 10:52

mystes: May 31, 2006

quote:

Our eyes are used to what a 3:2 pull-down looks like and our brains say "That's a movie". When it's smoothed out, your brain says "That's a soap opera".

The use of "your brain" here makes it sound like the problem is some sort of magic neurochemical effect that makes 24 fps be the perfect framerate, rather than people simply having trouble dealing with movies looking slightly different than what they're used to in a way that you would normally stop noticing after 15 minutes.

mystes has a new favorite as of 12:28 on Aug 20, 2016

# ¿ Aug 20, 2016 12:26

mystes: May 31, 2006

chitoryu12 posted:

That sounds like a great way to listen in on other peoples' messages, unless it had a specific tone that only applied to your single answering machine.

Was this actually what the remote was meant for, or was it like blue boxes where someone found that a toy whistle in a Captain Crunch cereal box produced the exact pitch to gently caress up phone lines and give you free calls?

It seems to be hard to google information on these, but wikipedia says:

quote:

In the early days of TADs a special transmitter for DTMF tones (dual-tone multi-frequency signalling) was regionally required for remote control, since the formerly employed pulse dialling is not apt to convey appropriate signalling along an active connection, and the dual-tone multi-frequency signalling was implemented stepwise.

So if they were actually sequences of DTMF tones it shouldn't have been different from entering a PIN on a touchtone phone.

# ¿ Mar 21, 2017 19:33

mystes: May 31, 2006

Platystemon posted:

That style of seven‐segment display is something I�ve only noticed on more recent electronics.

Maybe it�s older than that and I�d just never noticed it, but I�d guess the first decade of the twenty‐first century.

Technically I don't think it's a seven-segment display at all.

# ¿ Apr 29, 2017 15:38

mystes: May 31, 2006

With most things other than citrus fruit you're probably better off using a bender.

# ¿ May 20, 2017 03:21

mystes: May 31, 2006

Jerry Cotton posted:

I remember how disappointed I was with "plug'n'play" printers because they were basically always less plug'n'play than I was used to. (I.e. plugging it into mains, running a parallel cable to the computer, and just ramming text > PRN.)

This is like when plug and play pci cards started coming out but they were actually a complete nightmare when you tried to combine them with ISA cards that used dip switches to set the irqs.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2017 14:13

mystes: May 31, 2006

DesperateDan posted:

I can, but it then means I can't use it for viewing the cars data using torque my boost gauge

Current plan is get a tablet and suffer the mild inconvenience of booting it up and running maps every time, if I can't find an older model one new somewhere.

Unless you're going to get a tablet with data, you're better of using your phone for the map, so you should probably just get the cheapest thing you can find to run torque.

# ¿ Sep 3, 2017 18:07

mystes: May 31, 2006

If you have to use both your phone and a tablet anyway, you might as well use your phone for maps, since then you can just use google maps which will always be up to date.

I guess you could try to just use a tablet with a spit-screen view, though, although you might have trouble finding a mount that can handle a vertical tablet.

# ¿ Sep 3, 2017 23:30

mystes: May 31, 2006

Was it AT&T maps that was a monthly fee or something else? I think around 2010-2012 one of the carriers was still trying to sell people a map service that was like a $10/month subscription.

I got an iphone in 2010 when data plans first started to get cheap, but I only had like 200mb/month I think, and iphones didn't have navigation yet so I an offline navigation app that was like $20, and even by those standards $10/month for maps seemed insane.

mystes has a new favorite as of 23:33 on Sep 16, 2017

# ¿ Sep 16, 2017 23:28

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 00:04

mystes: May 31, 2006

Metal Geir Skogul posted:

I now have the best mechanical keyboard

(E: yes my desk is filthy I both solder and do machining in this room, and I got dumped this week t)

Why does your keyboard have a Solo cup button?

# ¿ Nov 15, 2017 09:18

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