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Tyson Tomko posted:Unreal Tournament was my game of choice because it was badass and ran great on all kinds of lovely hardware. M-m-m-m-m-onster Killll! I dug up a copy of UT99 some weeks ago, and after some tweaking* to make it work I was surprised at how decent it still looks. I mean, it's clearly old, but the textures work fairly well, and the maps try to hide their low poly counts. It also works perfectly fine at LCD-native resolutions, which is nice. * There is a replacement OpenGL renderer available that works much better with modern cards; apart from that it's fine.
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Jun 8, 2016 19:47
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Quake 1 was an excellent middle school computer lab game.
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Jun 8, 2016 20:42
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I think the renderer I used back in the day (openGL on the voodoo 3, possibly) did remarkably good closeup textures, too - tiling instead of scaling, so the details were sharp (though repetitive) up close.
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Jun 8, 2016 22:23
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Aero was inoffensive and I don't mind it, though I will agree that they went a bit overboard with the un-maximised titlebars. I had a similar theming journey on the Linux/BSD side, which is probably why I left windows more alone (apart from wallpapers). These days I use a mostly standard KDE 4 and an equally standard windows 10 ... but I suspect that if I had as much empty spare time now as I did in 2003, that might not have been the case.
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Jun 9, 2016 18:42
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thathonkey posted:You can always tell a microsoft ui though. I hate their font rendering and overly abrupt and jolty scrolling. Even the stuff they make for OS X doesnt feel like a mac app it feels distinctively microsofty. I prefer the Mac rendering on HiDPI/retina screens, but it is annoyingly mushy on anything else. Then again, I'm the sort of guy who was really happy to find the SGI Screen bitmap font repackaged for windows, and now use it for all my terminal needs. The windows font renderer is an interesting compromise, where they will shift things around to make straight lines align with pixels. It makes for much blacker and sharper glyphs at the cost of kerning and shape, which I honestly find much easier to read. Cleartype uses subpixels to get more proper shape and placement than straight greyscale anti-aliasing, but still snaps to (sub)pixel rows/columns for similar reasons and tradeoffs. In comparison, the Mac rendering places things exactly right, and dumps it into the subpixel grid - this works very well as long as the resolution is high compared to the glyph size, but is very divisive when it isn't. I don't like it except when doing graphical design. And let's not talk about the "modern" windows font rendering, which is an awful mess of greyscale anti-aliasing that probably looks good on HiDPI tablets.
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Jun 9, 2016 20:51
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Casimir Radon posted:I was always worried that going nuts on the ui customization wouls just makes things more sluggish than they already were. Probably mych less of a concern nowadays. Depends. If you are just replacing some bitmaps with other bitmaps of comparable size, and changing some colors and fonts, it shouldn't have any meaningful impact - it's not like the windows UI system cares much about the content of the textures.
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Jun 10, 2016 16:30
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As I've understood it, it's ideal to have the record and play heads be separate (wikipedia claims they should have different distance to the tape), and you need to fit an erase head in there as well. Head flipping uses a compromise head, while tape flipping allows you to have separate heads.
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Jun 14, 2016 07:59
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Original_Z posted:I never understood Microsoft works, it was being produced long after office came out, why have two suites which did mainly the same thing? Some of it was just market segregation, but yeah - you'd think it would have been easier to have a cheap pared-down version of office.
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Jun 16, 2016 12:24
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FilthyImp posted:OS/2 was IBM realizing they were boned with the MS DOS deal right? Was OS/2 Warp their off brand Windows? Kind of, but kind of not. After the PC sold surprisingly well, IBM wanted to create a better OS for it. Understandably so, DOS was extremely primitive compared to all the other OSes IBM sold. To develop it they signed a joint agreement with Microsoft. In the beginning, this worked fine - OS/2 1.x started like a cleaned-up DOS with some abstraction and a better memory model, but on the way to 2.x it picked up HPFS (which MS forked to create NTFS), networking and filesharing, and a few iterations of UI. Originally, MS was all-in on this, so the older versions were "a better cleaner windows" - windows 3.0 supposedly has a lot of design influences from their OS/2 work. They split up in 1991, and MS reshaped their OS/2 3.0 work into Windows NT. As for OS/2, version 3 ("Warp 3") came out in 1994, and was probably the last time an OS/2 was "better" than windows: It had a more solid and NT-like kernel than the weird dos+stuff - design of Win9x, a GUI with a start menu before W95 launched, a more thorough and customizable UI, better internet support out of the box, and it could still run DOS and Win3.1 programs. It was also memory-hungry, kind of slow, expensive, and had IBM's distinct "we use engineers as UI designers" design style. Still, it's unfair to call it a windows knock-off; it's better understood as an older cousin of the NT family. Oh, and Ars did a long article on OS/2 you might want to read - http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/11/half-an-operating-system-the-triumph-and-tragedy-of-os2/ Computer viking has a new favorite as of 09:57 on Jun 23, 2016 |
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Jun 23, 2016 09:51
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Jerry Cotton posted:Like... Windows applications? Which it mostly ran just fine? I don't think they ran Win95 apps, so by Warp 4 things were more linux-like - but by then things were also clearly going downhill for them. I might be wrong, though - I haven't exactly used OS/2 much .
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Jun 23, 2016 12:50
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Because the DVD standard is little more than the menu system and "play this MPEG file"; there's no way they could have told the player to do that.
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Aug 15, 2016 16:10
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Armacham posted:I saw this video too. How does a supercomputer take 8 minutes to boot into Linux? My 8 year old iMac can boot into El Capitan quicker. In my experience, the more powerful and expensive the hardware, the longer it takes to boot. I believe it's a combination of having more controllers to initialize (and each controller being more complicated), doing more thorough testing, and the hardware/firmware makers not caring as much because they know you don't sit around watching servers reboot every day. Besides, when you're done initializing all that stuff you get to sit around waiting for the OS to do basically the same thing: probe all the buses, find every controller, fire up the appropriate drivers, then probe those controllers for devices hanging off them, perhaps several levels down. This scales quite well, too. Netbooks get through their BIOS init very quickly. Desktops take a moment, expensive workstations are downright slow. Servers still take minutes to reboot, and I can only imagine how slow supercomputers with racks upon racks of interconnects and weird NUMA controller things initialize. As an example, one of the workstations I use is a two year old Dell optiplex that cost a small fortune. They delivered it with the single SSD and DVD burner connected through a cheapish Dell-branded RAID controller; I think it was a H310 (which is a rebranded LSI part). On every boot, that card slowly boots its own firmware, then probes every possible port for something looking like a part of a RAID, and then I don't know ... calibrates itself by calculating pi to a billion digits or something? It took forever to boot, so I ripped it out and moved the drives to ports on the motherboard (driven by the Intel chipset). That took it down to normal desktop-like reboot times. The rack servers are kind of fascinating, though. At some point they test that all the fans work properly by spinning them up and watching the rpm readouts, which alone takes as long as going from off to bootloader in a laptop. Hilariously noisy, too. 
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Aug 23, 2016 08:31
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Humphreys posted:Never reboot The workstation runs Windows; it's beyond my powers.  I guess I could run it on a hypervisor, but I've got to limit the amount of stuff only I know how works. (I'm way past "job security" and into "nobody can help me with anything I do and there's too much of it for one person".) Computer viking has a new favorite as of 09:22 on Aug 23, 2016 |
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Aug 23, 2016 09:15
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Humphreys posted:I was being a dick - not being serious. I guessed as much - though running a windows machine on a hypervisor just so you could claim insane uptimes would have a certain appeal. 
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Aug 23, 2016 13:33
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Mak0rz posted:Lmao I got 0/6 on this I think you mean the Shannon-Nyquist sampling theorem? It basically states that if you sample a signal at more than twice the frequency of it's highest-frequency component, you can recreate it perfectly. That doesn't entirely apply to lossy codecs, though. MP3 doesn't get its compression from lowering the sample rate (which will typically stay at the same 44kHz as the original source), but from a combination of more efficient but imprecise ways of describing the signal plus deliberately dropping information that human hearing ignores.
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Aug 24, 2016 23:08
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(MP3 stuff removed - because yeah that's not interesting. ) The Neil Young lossless player looks to be simultaneously "technically better" and "completely pointless", which I guess is on the better end of audiophile snakeoil. (If there is a companion store that sells differently mastered tracks with less dynamic compression it might actually have a genuine niche.) As for tech relics, I had to fire up an XP image to find a browser that could download a generated PDF via some messy javascript on a NIH webpage today. Of course, said XP image is technically speaking still the only supported alternative on the network at work. At least we are allowed to run Win7 if we accept not having support. Oh, and the NIH page in question is the only way to apply for a licence to use some huge data sets, and you have to reapply every year. I already look forward to next year. Computer viking has a new favorite as of 03:53 on Aug 25, 2016 |
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Aug 25, 2016 03:45
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The Kins posted:My dad worked in IT for a Fairly Large Multinational at the time, and I'm pretty sure he had to basically spend New Year's Eve at work just to make sure things didn't explode. The way I remember it, he and his team spent a short amount of time making sure everything was updated, and the rest of the night playing PS1 Gran Turismo on the absurdly large projector in the cafeteria. While he's not a goon (AFAIK), Ashens did a full series of videos about the gameboy and all the crap you could buy for it - and he found a small animation of his long-dead rabbit on his GB camera. ( https://youtu.be/1z2_af1vfJM )
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Aug 25, 2016 09:05
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One of the dubious benefits of living in a country with a weird primary language is that the call centers will be mostly staffed with native speakers, though lately some of those native speakers have been living in Spain. The last Lenovo tech that fixed my laptop was an Indian guy with an impenetrably thick accent, though. Some things are apparently universal. When I last called in to reactivate a windows license, it was automated - and varied between a very calm reading of the instructions and a guy absolutely barking the digits in the unlock code.
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Aug 25, 2016 17:52
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Data Graham posted:It's wild how technologies can evolve through a lifetime from "workshop tinkering" to "massive industrial assembly lines" to "niche artisan craft". The current situation for cellphones and the like is a weird hybrid - they are only made on a massive industrial scale, but actual repair (e.g. resoldering chips) is the realm of a few individual specialists.
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Sep 15, 2016 08:27
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It's got a lump of BSD kernel code (mostly FreeBSD, now) grafted onto a Mach microkernel, with a userland that's a weird mix of BSD stuff and Apple in-house projects, with a strong NextStep inheritance. No Linux kernel code in there, though they've grabbed some GNU userland tools. ... In my defense, the desktop at home runs windows.
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Sep 23, 2016 19:12
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SwissCM posted:Stuff works okay, it's interesting that WIndows 10 is causing me more issues nowadays than my linux stuff does. We have a stick PC with Windows 10 Home that as shipped, on first boot, couldn't install windows updates because it didn't have enough free disk space. 32 GB disk and a fair bit of it free, but something about how windows cumulative updates works requires a lot of disk space if you get too far behind. We managed to work around that, but yeah. In actual obsolete tech, this thread somehow inspired me to buy the components for a simple tube headphone amp, as a teach-myself-soldering project. Tubes are superior for this in exactly two ways: They look cool, and the operating principle is nifty in a "science toy" kind of way.
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Sep 23, 2016 21:18
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Humphreys posted:This looks like a good guide to building including part numbers and where to source: That's exactly what I'm looking at, yeah. It's kind of cheating compared to an all-tube high-voltage setup, but I'm not too bothered by that. I bought my parts from Elfa ( http://elfadistrelec.no ), but that's more about them having free shipping to Norway than anything else. I did just get everything, split over three cardboard boxes, so I'm currently thinking about some practical details. I'm building it on perfboard, which works fine for most of the parts. I need to figure out what I'm doing with the tube socket, though. I also accidentally got headphone sockets that don't fit on it, but I'll just leave them dangling for now. I also need to figure out the best place to work, this isn't a very large apartment. I'm thinking of using a steel plate (off an old pc tower) as a work surface and sitting under the extractor fan in the kitchen. (I don't know how picky the fire alarm is and I can't disable it, so I'd rather be paranoid.) Computer viking has a new favorite as of 13:05 on Sep 24, 2016 |
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Sep 24, 2016 13:00
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Humphreys posted:Reemmber when IBM was called 'Big Blue' due to the blue suits their sales force used to wear? The history of IBM is sort of impressive. From the early days of tabulating machinery and pre-computer punchcards they have, over the years, kickstarted the mainframe and then PC markets, propelled Microsoft to success (and regretted it), set things up so Oracle could succeed (and probably regretted that too), left the consumer market entirely (selling the PC business to Lenovo, who have done well with it), and after that dip in the '90s they refocused on consulting and development projects that I believe make them quite a lot of money again. I think of them as the Britain of computing history.
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Sep 25, 2016 08:57
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Hell, I just bought another three laptops for the department and "the keyboard is good" was one of the deciding factors. We had a couple of people that tried Surfaces, but two of them now have normal laptops and the last one mostly uses a desktop. (A huge workstation tower, even). I've had people ask me to order them better keyboards. Of course, biology research is the kind of job where you end up typing a lot - and I have perfectly normal people with educations in things like molecular biology or even veterinary science writing R code to do their own analysis. We're probably not representative of much.
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Sep 27, 2016 01:48
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That was just implicit, but yeah - I don't think one without a keypad would have went over well. On the other hand, there's remarkably little data entry in this; most datasets have hundreds of thousands of points per sample and are exported as text files from the relevant tools. It's mostly about the analysis code, article writing, and emails. A couple of years ago I spent some office money on the cheapest gaming keyboard with cherry brown switches I could find for myself. She tested that and liked it, so I found a reasonably neutral-looking one for her. As for why our staunch computing gear supplier has a broad selection of gaming gear, I have no idea.
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Sep 27, 2016 21:06
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Without actually checking, "expensive specialist hardware for the kind of companies that can afford it" seems like a solid niche - so I expect they are still available at an exorbitant price. Edit: Yup. https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/900828-REG/Avid_9900_65170_00_Artist_Transport.html There are cheaper ones as well, though. Computer viking has a new favorite as of 11:48 on Sep 28, 2016 |
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Sep 28, 2016 11:45
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I'd also like to add that it's not like Adobe are masters of good UI - Illustrator is a rat's nest of inexplicable interface choices. At least there's enough keyboard shortcuts that you can eventually make do without touching most of their UI.
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Sep 30, 2016 15:49
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Mak0rz posted:
I'll concede that InDesign isn't too bad. I think Photoshop is OK, but I suspect that's only because I've used every version since the Win98 days, so I got to learn a simple version and then get used to the new stuff in small increments. Illustrator is ... a thing. I mean, I can and have used it productively, but it feels like it's designed by aliens or Germans or some other group that just doesn't think the same way I do. Things I want in a vector drawing program: Easy ways to rotate, do boolean operations on, mirror, and otherwise operate on vector shapes, in an interface that makes it obvious what I'm working on and what things belong together how, perhaps with a trivial way of picking new fill and line colors. Things from that list that feel like a top priority in Illustrator: (OK, picking colors is easy enough if you've got a decent preset of them loaded up. God knows why they don't make it trivial and obvious how to grab one from a color picker, though.) Computer viking has a new favorite as of 18:31 on Oct 1, 2016 |
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Oct 1, 2016 18:28
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Admittedly some of those games had the excuse that they could only render their software 3D in a tiny viewport, and after adding the rest of the UI they still had a lot of empty space to fill.
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Oct 2, 2016 01:08
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Even that was a bit iffy on 36-bit platforms, as I've understood it. You could cram 6 6-bit characters into a word if space was at a premium, or 4 8-bit chars if you needed the expanded charset, or 5 7-bit chars if you were using 7bit ASCII like much of the world. I even think there was an expanded 9-bit charset around at some point.
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Oct 5, 2016 16:13
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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wwh0KH-ICCw
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Oct 16, 2016 02:46
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Somewhere in my old room is a TI-83 with a weird connector for the overhead projector screen - I inherited mine from a high school teacher friend of the family (he bought himself a fancy silver 83+ model). I remember the projector screen as being kind of crap - low contrast and horrid refresh rate. Still, we borrowed one and played Tetris and Ski or Die in a break for the novelty value.
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Nov 7, 2016 01:58
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Dick Trauma posted:When I was in high school (and later in college) you could use a calculator during class but not during tests. I was terrible at math so calculators were a mixed blessing, teasing me with how easy they could make things. Ha, I used that exact calculator in highschool alongside my TI-83 - my grandfather worked for some office supply company and gave one to my mom at some point. I remember it as being surprisingly capable.
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Nov 18, 2016 21:42
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Killswitch posted:Still cant believe they dropped all ports for 4 thunderbolt 3s. (Thats what they are, right?) Gonna run my 2015 MBP into the fuckin ground now. USB C ports carrying USB 3.1, displayport and thunderbolt, I believe. Not the worst possible choice, though one each of USB A and mini-DP would have been incredibly useful additions. At least there's a reasonable number of them and it's a nonproprietary standard.
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Dec 12, 2016 17:45
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Kelp Me! posted:Suit coats are full of little oddities like decorative pockets and the lower front button, which seems to exist solely for the purpose of being taught never to use it. I've never quite understood the suit button thing - it's the same look you get if the pillowcase is too small for the pillow. I still leave it open (since the cut makes closing it look weird - and marks you as clueless). It seems like an artifact of suit design suddenly freezing more than it being the best possible choice - there seems to be a lot of weirdness in formal men's clothes up to it suddenly stopping at the suit. Computer viking has a new favorite as of 18:43 on Feb 6, 2017 |
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Feb 6, 2017 18:39
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Pham Nuwen posted:Besides plugging it in like a USB keyboard, it can apparently transfer files to another Alphasmart or a computer using infrared. Unfortunately, while smartphone cameras can pick up infrared (10,000 lifehack articles about how to check your TV remote confirm this), I haven't found anything that can use the camera to receive IR data as sent by an Alphasmart or an old Palm Pilot. I don't think that's entirely doable. I'm not sure what speed it transfers at, but I'd guess 9600 baud. That's way more transitions/second than a 60fps webcam can capture.
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Feb 17, 2017 11:33
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EVIL Gibson posted:You get a dedicated 38khz ir receiver then. Well, I already have an arduino with an IR LED lying around to build a transmitter... (Or, to be exact - to build a roomba IR wall. Apparently the blocker signal is just 38kHz IR in 1ms pulses.) As for IR, there is this - I wonder if that USB thing is just a plain IrDA receiver? Either way it should be possible to talk to it with an USB IrDA dongle ... bar the fun problems of reverse engineering the protocol and data formats. Computer viking has a new favorite as of 18:36 on Feb 17, 2017 |
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Feb 17, 2017 18:19
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The one problem with the 32GB Win10 devices is that you risk getting into a state where the space required to install windows updates is larger than the free disk space - we ran into that with a stick PC at home. How much of a problem you find that to be is of course up for discussion.
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Feb 21, 2017 18:48
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The system requirement is 16/20 GB for 32/64 bit, but even though the stick is locked to 32bit that's literally not enough to do large updates - it may need all of the 32 GB for itself to have a fair chance of getting through updates without handholding. It seems to work better when you haven't accumulated over a year of outstanding updates, though; it's not very smart about how it batches multiple feature updates. Still, point taken - officially (and in more normal use) it doesn't require all 32 for itself. I'll nag him to update it. The stick in question pretended there were no updates available for a straight week of us leaving it on and connected and sporadically clicking the button to check; after a reinstall stripping out some unnecessary windows components and translations it quickly found them. This was as-shipped with nothing installed, which is kind of crap. There's no recovery partition on the thing either; c: really is somewhere near 32GB. Right now it's stuck in a boot loop where it doesn't have enough space to clean up after an upgrade that failed for lack of space. I'll have to see if I can wipe and reinstall it somehow. Computer viking has a new favorite as of 03:07 on Feb 22, 2017 |
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Feb 22, 2017 02:16
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I've generally been happy to run Linux/FreeBSD on servers and at work and then come home to game and the like on windows. I still do, but the amount of random issues with windows has been steadily increasing. It doesn't help that Win10 through some problem with settings sync silently moved my desktop from stable to the fast insider ring some weeks while ago; I really should fix that. Still, just small things like how it keeps re-adding the English/US keyboard keyboard layout and setting it as default reminds me of problems I used to have on Linux, as does the way explorer on the gaming PC freezes for 30 seconds when I try to see the list of audio output devices. The two arguments for windows have always been "it's easier" and "it runs everything" - the latter is still true, but I'm no longer entirely sure that it's less annoying to maintain. Computer viking has a new favorite as of 00:11 on Feb 26, 2017 |
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Feb 26, 2017 00:07
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