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What the original paper actually meant: "Given the low data density of current (early 90s) drives, it might theoretically be possible to recover data but only by reading every single bit manually using an electron microscope." (turns out this theory was wrong btw as mentioned above by The Fool) What idiots think it means: "ZOMG IF YOU DON'T OVERWRITE THE DATA 87363 TIMES THEN SOMEONE CAN JUST RUN A PROGRAM AND GET ALL THE DATA BACK!  "My old boss tried to make us use that bullshit 35-pass wipe on everything, and wouldn't be convinced it was pointless. Then he tried to wipe a drive and when it still hadn't finished 36 hours later he dropped the subject. Sweevo has a new favorite as of 11:51 on Nov 28, 2017 |
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Nov 28, 2017 11:49
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evobatman posted:There are people out there claiming that bits in a harddrive can be something other than 0 or 1. Apparently there is a state between the 0 and the 1 that can contain information about what bit was there up to 35 generations ago. My understanding is that hard drives haven't stored single 1s and 0s on the disk for years. The disk surface is an analogue medium that contains a value that encodes multiple bits into a single spot. Also the density and speeds required for modern drives means that bits aren't stored in a single location, but are sort of smeared out over multiple spots and then combined into the actual results using insane voodoo. So the value actually written to the disk depends not only on the value you want to store, but also on the values of neighbouring data. Sweevo has a new favorite as of 22:09 on Nov 28, 2017 |
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Nov 28, 2017 20:55
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jojoinnit posted:They really leaned hard into ages being Sega backwards but it's a pretty crappy slogan. 
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Jan 5, 2018 11:16
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TheGreasyStrangler posted:My Amiga 1000 has a ramdrive icon that loads up with Workbench The Amiga RAM disk changed size automatically to fit the contents, so no janitoring was required. With DOS you had to decide ahead of time how big the RAM disk was going to be and then that RAM was unusable for anything else even if the RAM disk was empty.
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Feb 11, 2018 11:36
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Iron Crowned posted:I sorta miss having old tapes of movies recorded off TV, it was always fun to watch ancient commercials. You think it's going to be tapes of cool old TV, but what you actually get is: - 10 minutes of whatever was on TV before the film because the clock on the VCR was wrong - A lovely 3am film that wasn't worth watching and cuts off 10 minutes before the end because of the above - 25 minutes of random TV because someone forgot to change the channel when setting the timer - A good film with the middle third missing because someone recorded a soap opera over it - The first half of a sitcom episode someone mistakenly though they could squeeze onto the end of the tape
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Feb 27, 2018 17:34
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Here's what happens to VHS when you make a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mES3CHEnVyI
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Feb 28, 2018 01:21
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tater_salad posted:I worked for iomega's support company and the clicking drive wasn't that big of an issue and you got a free drive I'd that happened. Yeah, IIRC the click of death issue was very sort lived. Early drives weren't affected, then after it appeared (due to a design change to reduce costs) it was resolved fairly quickly. Yet it's the one story that always comes up when someone mentions Zip drives.
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Mar 25, 2018 11:16
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It's one of those things were everybody says they saw it, or that it happened to their uncle who works at Nintendo or to their girlfriend who you don't know because she goes to a different school. It's really two different problems that people conflate: 1. The click-of-death was where poorly aligned heads made the drive report read errors. Part of the error recovery mechanism was for the drive to snap the heads back to the home position and retry. A tiny rubber washer acted as a cushion to prevent the head from being damaged by the rapid movement. At some point the washer was eliminated as a cost cutting measure, but that made drives wear out quickly and the clicking sound caused by the moving head would gradually get worse and worse until the drive refused to read any data at all. This didn't affect the disk itself, and Iomega put the washer back after about 3 months so the majority of drives don't suffer from the clicking problem. 2. Disk damage. This is unrelated to the clicking issue. Disks that were physically damaged could scratch the heads, and the heads would then scratch any other disks inserted, and those scratched disks could damage other drives, etc... The disks were reasonably sturdy though and had to be damaged in fairly specific ways before setting off the chain. Sweevo has a new favorite as of 19:15 on Mar 26, 2018 |
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Mar 26, 2018 19:12
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jojoinnit posted:I've been finding all sorts of useless hardware and software that people are donating to charity shops who think it's somehow still worth £20 and up: I just got back from my weekly trawl through the charity shops. Empty-handed as usual. I don't know where they get their ideas about prices. I know they're trying to raise money for charity, but who looks at a clipart CD-ROM from 1998 and thinks "yes someone will pay £10 for this"? So it sits on the shelf for 8 months between the PS2 wrestling games and the no-brand Pentium 4 computers they're trying to sell for £50. Meanwhile the hideous grandma ornaments that fill 50% of the shop are flying off the shelves because they know nobody is going to pay more than 50p for some tacky ballerina figurine or a weird porcelain-headed doll. Sweevo has a new favorite as of 12:18 on Apr 1, 2018 |
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Apr 1, 2018 12:13
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Jerry Cotton posted:That would be because it's literally poo poo. Yep. Someone needs to tell iD that good level design isn't an endless series of monster closets.
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Apr 12, 2018 18:15
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Star Man posted:I think I've read that the Windows 9 and compatability issues with Windows 9x is a myth. It is. There's no Windows API function that would return "Windows 9". The version functions would return "Windows NT x.xx".
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Apr 23, 2018 00:07
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Pham Nuwen posted:Floppies seemed to be super unreliable at that point; the reasoning I've heard was that in the face of declining supply, nobody had manufactured new disks in a while and a new-in-box disk might already be 5 years old. It wasn't that the disks were old. It was that the later one were just really poor quality. Good floppy disks will last 30+ years. I've got BBC Micro disks from the early 80s and Amiga disks from ~1992 that all still work perfectly. However when floppies started falling out of common use in the late 90s and early 2000s the quality of new disks nosedived virtually overnight (and it's kind of obvious when you hold them - they feel lighter and flimsier), and that's when then joke about them being bad out of the box became true. Sweevo has a new favorite as of 11:32 on Apr 28, 2018 |
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Apr 28, 2018 10:32
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Last Chance posted:hmmm I think that's a pretty shaky reason to still use platter drives. should be backing up regularly with an automatic solution. if you're at a point where your drive is making weird noises and you haven't backed up yet.... no bueño Yeah. Regular drives don't fail any more gracefully than SSDs. People have this idea that they'll get a few read errors one day and then have time to copy everything before it gets worse. But the drive is just as likely to poo poo itself catastrophically one day and never work again.
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Apr 30, 2018 15:31
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spog posted:Minidiscs were so much better than tapes, but Sony crippled them with its software. Sony doesn't have a good track record when it comes to media formats: Betamax, Minidisc, UMD, the 40 variously incompatible versions of Memory Stick. They got it wrong every time. When people were arguing over Bluray vs HDDVD smart money would have been on HDDVD solely because Sony was behind Bluray.
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May 16, 2018 10:26
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Buttcoin purse posted:Aside from the fact that it said "bytes" later, I don't think I've ever seen microcomputer storage sizes quoted in bits. I think that for old minicomputers you'd see storage sizes quoted in words, so perhaps bits were used too back then. Console games used to quote the cartridge size in megabits because bigger numbers sound more impressive to 12 year olds.
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May 16, 2018 15:16
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Cojawfee posted:Audio only works if you use a dvorak keyboard. Nobody has ever used a dvorak keyboard to write anything except 10,000 word blog posts about how they use a dvorak keyboard
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Jul 9, 2018 11:46
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Terminal animations are also really inefficient, because for every character that's actually displayed on the screen it's also having to send 10-15 characters worth of escape codes to move the cursor around so that each part is drawn in the correct place.
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Jul 31, 2018 00:09
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Ghost Leviathan posted:One thing I don't think anyone will miss is the dizzying variety of plugs and sockets for mobile phone chargers. Because then Apple couldn't charge you $35 for 3 feet of wire.
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Aug 4, 2018 10:07
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JazzmasterCurious posted:e: Which segues into tech relics: Checks. Not used since the late 80's here when ATM's took over. We've had this discussion here before (or in another thread) about the completely decentralized US banking system. "Oh, there are so many states, small banks and actors, that a centralized online debit system is not possible". Guns, bibles, cheques, and fax machines: four things you will have to pry from America's cold dead hands.
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Aug 9, 2018 18:44
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The EEVBlog guy is waaaaay into bitcoins and gets super defensive when you tell him they're dumb.
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Sep 29, 2018 22:00
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barbecue at the folks posted:Is there a thread on audiophile bullshit? Seems like it would be a good opportunity to laugh at idiots with way too much money to burn and the people gleefully fleecing them. There's this episode of The F-Plus: https://thefpl.us/episode/138
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Oct 2, 2018 11:00
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RandomFerret posted:I remember being frustrated that they didn't include enough letter stickers to spell anything Two of every vowel and one of everything else. You ended up with tapes labelled "IND1AN4 JON35"
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Nov 14, 2018 14:12
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Wasn't XP 64 just the 64-bit version of Server 2003, but repackaged for home users?
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Nov 27, 2018 11:59
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Jim Silly-Balls posted:Motocross Madness I still have the discs for Motocross Madness 1 & 2. I install them once every 3 or 4 years just to dick around on the stunt courses.
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Dec 5, 2018 16:58
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Fil5000 posted:I swear, I ran windows 2000 all the way up until about 2008. I had to find fan patches to get some games to even let me install them. I ran 2000 until 2012 when I switched to windows 7. 2000 will run pretty much anything XP does. It only really became a chore around 2010 when .net 3.x/4.x took off.
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Mar 27, 2019 17:43
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My 1200 broke ~15 years ago and I kept telling myself I'd buy another one on ebay when the prices came down. Now decent ones sell for more or less what they cost new. 
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Mar 31, 2019 10:51
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Bloody Hedgehog posted:I was into PvP as well, but started to lose interest when Kurtz decided he wanted to try and get the comic into newspapers and become the modern Garfield. Nobody has ever seen it, and it might be an urban myth, but allegedly somewhere there's a Garfield strip with an actual joke in it.
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Apr 8, 2019 22:36
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Regular Nintendo posted:no mention of bettar than penney arcaed? Lowtax had a dumb feud with the PA guys back in the day, and held a grudge about it for years
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Apr 9, 2019 16:39
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FilthyImp posted:Or was it fallout from that adwords-style payment thing that fell apart? That's the one. SA and PA were both involved with a sleazy dotcom-era ad network called eFront, who collapsed owing site owners tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid ad revenue. eFront sent PA a bunch of fake legal threats to intimidate them. Meanwhile they'd told Lowtax they'd pay him what he was owned if he'd agree to defend eFront on their internal forums, which he did and then they didn't pay him after all. So it was a combination of a bad situation and two guys with a knack for rubbing each other the wrong way. Sweevo has a new favorite as of 19:18 on Apr 9, 2019 |
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Apr 9, 2019 19:11
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Queen Combat posted:And then IIRC did the whole Strawberry Shortcake thing around the same time? Those strips were 7 years apart.
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Apr 10, 2019 16:01
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Bargearse posted:I'm going to have to add heat sinks and a cooling fan, the accelerator is a trapdoor expansion board that doesn't get a lot of airflow, so runs pretty bloody hot. They used to do dodgy things with those accelerators. Lots of 33mhz and 40mhz accelerators had 25mhz chips in them with the speed rating scratched off.
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May 6, 2019 16:31
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ReidRansom posted:Speaking of relics... Now that we've long since moved on to digital projection, why is is that we're still hanging onto 24fps as the standard for movies? I get that anything higher doesn't quite look right, like as in what we expect of a movie, but that's only because we're so accustomed to it, and I'd expect that everyone would quickly reset their expectations if more movies were being distributed in higher frame rates. Is there any other reason though, beyond Hollywood rear end in a top hat studio execs doing their usual thing projecting their own stubborn idiocy onto the wider public? Because if you shoot in anything besides 24fps a bunch of morons scream themselves hoarse about how "it looks like teevee..."
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Jun 12, 2019 15:15
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evobatman posted:I believe both 48 fps and 60 fps CAN be good for movies, but you would need to actually design the content of your movie for this. If it were done correctly, it should look wrong at 24 fps. Exactly. It's not 48fps that's the problem, it's everything else about the movie making process. But dumb grognards keep shrieking "48fps sucks" like it's the framerate making the rubber monster costumes or lovely cgi look like crap.
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Jun 13, 2019 16:41
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You put a piece of electrical tape over the end of the screwdriver.
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Jul 25, 2019 19:56
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Fil5000 posted:Up to when I was about 14, the RM Nimbus seemed to be the computer of choice for my local education authority. It looked like a PC, it ran a version of DOS, but it wasn't quite PC compatible (and apparently it's one of the few computers that used the 80186). My school had a computer room with about fifteen of them in as well as the odd one scattered around in classrooms. On reflection, having a whole school using 186 based PCs through the early to mid 90s was perhaps a bit odd. My school was exactly the same. They were just starting to replace the Nimbuses when I left in 1996.
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Aug 16, 2019 11:32
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Wow an actual 40mhz 68030 rather than a 25mhz one with the speed rating scratched off!
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Sep 27, 2019 12:42
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Cojawfee posted:It's always weird when tech people go full chud on their channel. I was watching the eevblog guy solder some project he had and then he started going off on how the UK should just do brexit already because some old people were tricked into it. Dave is a textbook example of the kind of nerd who thinks being smart in one subject automatically makes him an expert in every less complicated subject. He's kinda racist about Chinese people (but no more than the average Aussie), and is WAY into bitcoins and gets really salty and defensive when anyone points out what a colossal waste of electricity they are. Sweevo has a new favorite as of 17:28 on Apr 14, 2024 |
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Sep 30, 2019 12:29
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GrandMaster posted:Soo.... You can hook them up to nothing haha Literally every single piece of computer or networking equipment that isn't consumer-level garbage has a serial port. If it's not on the rear panel, then it'll be inside somewhere.
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Oct 23, 2019 19:42
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It's the same circuitry that would have been in the power brick. It doesn't really matter where you put it.
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Dec 4, 2019 18:00
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Bargearse posted:If David Pleasance is to be believed, Commodore were still making decent money off the C64 in Eastern Europe. In the early 90s Commodore UK and Commodore Europe were still making good money selling the low-end Amigas (500/600/1200) as games machines, and the C64 was still trickling out at a decent rate. Meanwhile Commodore US were pissing away millions chasing the business market that had already settled on the IBM PC, and designing an endless series of new machines nobody wanted and whose only competitors were other Commodore machines. Sweevo has a new favorite as of 00:22 on Dec 25, 2019 |
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Dec 6, 2019 14:02
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