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Willfrey posted:I recently inherited an old-rear end pickup truck I was using to move across town with. I picked up one of these things at a Radio Shack for $15.00, poppped it in my tape deck and listened to some music for exactly one 10 mile ride. When I fired the pickup back up it promptly destroyed the tape. I've been using the same $20 Wal-Mart adapter for 6 years in my old-rear end car and it's still fantastic. I use one of the old MP3 players that required actual AAA batteries, hook it up to a USB adapter in the cigarette lighter, and I have a ghetto audiobook player that automatically starts and stops with the car 
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Sep 1, 2012 00:35
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spog posted:I recall that they were something odd like 1.5Mb per disk instead of the standard 1.44Mb That takes me back. You could actually format any standard 1.44 MB diskette to DMF and get that slight bit of extra space. I did that for a version of Windows 3.1 that was stripped down to run off of one diskette.
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Sep 1, 2012 01:37
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ji_howa posted:It is still the choice calculator for financial analysts and actuaries even today! I can see why. It took me a moment to get used to reverse polish notation, but the overall feel of using mine is weirdly satisfying. It's strange feeling, considering I grew up in an era where standalone calculators were almost universally cheap, throwaway crap with no real thought given to form factor, and early 2000's cell phone calculators were annoying and unergonomic to use. I could easily get a program on my phone that does exactly what this calculator does, but it wouldn't be anywhere near as functional as my 12c. My boss really likes mine, and I told him to pick one up for the store, but these things still cost around $70 and I work with a bunch of stoners who would probably lose it...
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Sep 1, 2012 11:00
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flippy piss posted:
As far as I know only Intel did/do that. I built an AMD Bulldozer machine last night and completely forgot about the pins on the CPU as I've been working with i5/i7 for so long now. To be honest id rather rebend one of those pins on the CPU in comparison to having to fix my friends Intel motherboard. He dropped the CPU about an inch above the Mobo and it bent about 3 of the TINY pins on the socket. Magnifying glass and a safety pin was not the most enjoyable way of spending 30 minutes. As for Minidisc players, I loved mine. I had this badboy -  Spending hours manually entering the song/band names while you ripped from a CD was *awesome*
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Sep 1, 2012 11:18
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Landerig posted:That takes me back. You could actually format any standard 1.44 MB diskette to DMF and get that slight bit of extra space. I did that for a version of Windows 3.1 that was stripped down to run off of one diskette. That reminds me of the old 3" disks Amstrad used to make. The Amstrad CPC could format them to hold 180KB on each side, but the PCW could format them to hold I think it was 720KB per side. Thing is, I'm pretty sure the CPC could read PCW-formatted disks - it just couldn't make them, and possibly couldn't write to them (I never tried).
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Sep 1, 2012 14:31
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Dr. Chainsaws PhD posted:But it had been ran over, and still worked fine, after bending the cartridge slot back into shape. My little brother played with it for about 2 years too. Someone clumsy with a 3DS XL tell me how they are, because if they're even half as tough as the GBA family, it would totally be worth it. I can't speak for the XLs, but I can say that both the DSi and 3DS have extraordinary abilities to take punishment. A couple of trade-in ones (got marked defective for some reason, donno what the circumstance was) got turned in at gamestop once while I still worked there during college and we spent at least 30 minutes trying to tear them apart *with a sledgehammer*. The DSi took one solid smack from the hammer about 5 feet in the air, bounced off the floor.... and turned on fine like nothing happened.
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Sep 1, 2012 14:51
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Man, all this talk of durable Nintendo products makes me sad my DS broke. It's repairable, it's just that the top screen is broken. I can fix it if I wasn't so lazy and decided to finally order a cheap replacement. Considering I constantly dropped it, it actually survived my clumsy handling pretty well.
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Sep 1, 2012 14:59
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 I learnt to touch-type on one of these. Dad didn't want me to put the coloured stickers on the PC's keyboard.  So he got me an electric typewriter.An extra PC keyboard woulda been loads cheaper... I think I used nail polish remover to get rid of the goo the stickers left, once I'd finished the touch-typing course. It was agressive enough to do a good job cleaning the goo, and allowed me to scratch off the top layer of plastic on the keys as well. A fun machine though, it used a daisy wheel which would rapidly spin to the right letter, and a hammer would hit it from the back and put it on the page. It also could do bold writing by automatically backspacing and repeating the keypress twice more. And there was a backspace key that removed the letters you previously typed. Backspacing was slow, and if you'd backspace a lot, and then resumed typing, you could finish typing and watch the machine rattle on and finish the text a few seconds later. It didn't use liquid ink but some kind of black plastic stuff on a roll, which worked like carbon copy paper. I used up one roll, and got a new one, and tore open the old one. Every letter I'd typed, except spaces, could be found on it. If I went back far enough I could go all the way back to the first lessons on the machine. I also had one of these:  Solid state mp3 players seemed rather useless at the time because of the small amount of disk space and high price, but this was perfect. I had a friend bring me one from the US. It said it had a "120 second cache", which meant as it would play mp3 files, sometimes the disk would stop spinning for a minute and a half as it played from the cache. In the pic the screen looks rather large but one third of it features some dancing figures that change at random, so despite the large-ish screen there'd still only be two lines of text on it. I later replaced it with a minidisk player even though those were becoming obsolete already. I had a huge machine for recording, and a small pocket-sized one for listening on the go, but that one couldn't record. Since I got free national public transport as a student, I got both second hand for a low price even if that involved traveling to the other side of the country. Sold both to my uncle when I realised I never used them. Stick Insect has a new favorite as of 18:52 on Sep 1, 2012 |
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Sep 1, 2012 18:50
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I actually taught myself to type at 100+WPM on an electric typewriter, because it would whirr when I pressed a button, so I challenged myself to type paragraphs while maintaining the whirr.
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Sep 1, 2012 19:03
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We still all have one of these on our desks at work, and we work for a modern company in the investment industry. They're so noisy and old-fashioned, I really don't like them. Unfortunately, they're also the only accepted proof of having actually carried out a calculation when internal checks are done  The first one I had when I started at the company was so old that the ribbon wasn't even produced any more, so I got a more recent model as a replacement.
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Sep 1, 2012 19:26
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 On the subject of calculators, I was very tempted to buy and HP-30B (seen above) a couple years ago since I thought it was nice that HP was finally making a new, cheap RPN calculator, but I realized that I really can't justify it since I can always just run a calculator program on my smartphone. I've still run into actual calculators in various places but now that smartphones aren't just for early adopters and people with extra cash to burn I can't imagine that they'll last much longer.  Do people still use rubber cement, for example to attach paper to posterboard? Do kids these days still know that you can form it into balls? If not, this is truly a tragic loss.
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Sep 1, 2012 19:40
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mystes posted:Rubber cement balls OH GOD SCHOOL FLASHBACKS YOU WEREN'T THERE MAN. THERE WAS RUBBER CEMENT EVERYWHERE. The horror...the horror...
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Sep 1, 2012 20:07
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I work for an arts and crafts store chain and each year we've been consistently reducing our stock. Rubber cement is becoming a fossil before my very eyes. 
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Sep 1, 2012 20:13
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Stick Insect posted:
Y'know, when I was growing up we had a typewriter-kind of device that had a word processor. I have no idea what that's called. There was a tiny computer or something with the typewriter, and it was just the word processor. My mom used it to print flyers for the Parent-Teacher Committee, and I used it for party invitations.  By the way, this was before we got our own, new computer. At some point before we got the typewriter, we had someone's old computer that my brother and I played Carmen Sandiego on. I think that's all it could do.
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Sep 1, 2012 20:17
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mystes posted:
Schools still require calculators, because they don't want phones in the classroom. Especially for tests.
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Sep 1, 2012 20:19
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Aphrodite posted:Schools still require calculators, because they don't want phones in the classroom. Especially for tests. Edit: Actually its sort of interesting that calculators seem to demonstrate a larger pattern of what used to be common office supplies possibly transitioning to a more limited role as school supplies. For example, I imagine that business use was previously at least half of the market for 3-ring binders and the hole punches for them. I bet now 90% of these are sold to schools or kids. mystes has a new favorite as of 20:47 on Sep 1, 2012 |
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Sep 1, 2012 20:39
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It's super easy to cheat on tests that allow you to use TI-83 or higher calculators. All you have to do is write your answers in the Program function because the TI lets you type full sentences provided you have enough time. There were plenty of times during my math classes where I would input the formulas into Program and just use it. Since I put all the formulas on the same page, to a teacher just glancing past on his rounds it would look like I was actually solving the problem. Kids these days don't know how to cheat creatively 
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Sep 1, 2012 21:08
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HonorableTB posted:It's super easy to cheat on tests that allow you to use TI-83 or higher calculators. All you have to do is write your answers in the Program function because the TI lets you type full sentences provided you have enough time. There were plenty of times during my math classes where I would input the formulas into Program and just use it. Since I put all the formulas on the same page, to a teacher just glancing past on his rounds it would look like I was actually solving the problem. Kids these days don't know how to cheat creatively In one of my high school classes (physics?) someone had made an extremely list of formulas that was being passed around and down through subsequent classes. I think someone told the teacher, but he didn't care because he believed that it would be so much work to enter all the formulas in that it wasn't worth forbidding it. However, I'm pretty sure that the person who actually entered the formulas had used the graphlink adapter to enter them from a computer, though (I guess TI calculators just have USB connectors built in now?). Regardless it certainly wasn't a lot of work for everyone else in the class who just received the file. (I think rather than just dumping the formulas into a program file they had actually made a nice program that displayed the formulas, too). If I were a teacher I would just pass out $1-$5 calculators for tests, and only in cases where it wouldn't be practical to choose numbers that made the arithmetic simple enough not to require calculators. But then, I'm not a teacher and this seems to be a minority opinion. mystes has a new favorite as of 21:22 on Sep 1, 2012 |
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Sep 1, 2012 21:13
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mystes posted:If I were a teacher I would just pass out $1-$5 calculators for tests, and only in cases where it wouldn't be practical to choose numbers that made the arithmetic simple enough not to require calculators. But then, I'm not a teacher and this seems to be a minority opinion. That would be a pretty big disadvantage for kids in AP classes, since the standardized final allows graphing calculators and is written with the assumption that you have one and know how to use it. From what I recall of my AP classes, particularly statistics, the emphasis was much more on understanding what the calculations mean, rather than on just churning out the right number.
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Sep 1, 2012 21:42
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HonorableTB posted:It's super easy to cheat on tests that allow you to use TI-83 or higher calculators. All you have to do is write your answers in the Program function because the TI lets you type full sentences provided you have enough time. There were plenty of times during my math classes where I would input the formulas into Program and just use it. Since I put all the formulas on the same page, to a teacher just glancing past on his rounds it would look like I was actually solving the problem. Kids these days don't know how to cheat creatively Our teachers always wiped the memory before a test. quote:If I were a teacher I would just pass out $1-$5 calculators for tests, and only in cases where it wouldn't be practical to choose numbers that made the arithmetic simple enough not to require calculators. But then, I'm not a teacher and this seems to be a minority opinion. In my math classes we actually used the graphing functions.
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Sep 1, 2012 21:46
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mystes posted:
So how does this differ from, you know, glue?
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Sep 1, 2012 21:57
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mystes posted:On the other hand I sort of don't understand why teachers have chosen to use fancy graphing calculators in the first place so who knows. Four function and scientific calculators are fine for more basic math classes, but from my experiences, once you get to pre-calculus and higher, it's way more efficient to plug an equation into your calculator than to have to graph it out.
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Sep 1, 2012 21:59
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Aphrodite posted:Our teachers always wiped the memory before a test. I had a program that faked a memory wipe for my TI-89. 
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Sep 1, 2012 21:59
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HonorableTB posted:It's super easy to cheat on tests that allow you to use TI-83 or higher calculators. All you have to do is write your answers in the Program function because the TI lets you type full sentences provided you have enough time. Most major high-school examinations (like the IB, or A-levels) require your calculator memory to be wiped before use. It's not so easy to cheat on the really important exams. mystes posted:On the other hand I sort of don't understand why teachers have chosen to use fancy graphing calculators in the first place so who knows.
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Sep 1, 2012 22:03
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mystes posted:I have difficulty believing that current high school students haven't figured this out. Maybe teachers have actually caught on by now, though. I basically did that, except I sold the program for $5 a pop to my classmates and made like $50  Also if you know how, you can keep a copy of the program in the ROM of the calculator (the TI-83 calls it the "archive") and then even if your teacher wipes the memory you can just un-archive it from the ROM right after in like 3 seconds.
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Sep 1, 2012 22:06
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:I basically did that, except I sold the program for $5 a pop to my classmates and made like $50 Impressive. 
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Sep 1, 2012 22:37
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Speaking of CPUs, how common is overclocking these days? I'm suddenly nostalgic for the crazy overclocking days of the Celeron 300A, where the goal among friends was to double the clock speed.
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Sep 1, 2012 22:44
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Mostly done with video cards these days.
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Sep 1, 2012 22:48
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SimplyCosmic posted:Speaking of CPUs, how common is overclocking these days? Presumably less common because enthusiasts are a much smaller proportion of computer users these days, but it's still doable, and there's a relatively active overclocking thread in SH/SC.
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Sep 1, 2012 22:50
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The highscool that my child goes to has these AWESOME TI calculators for their AP math classes. They're on a network, so the teacher can see who has signed into their calculator, they can track what they're doing with it, and more. We got to play with them a little bit during the AP Orientation. Ah, a little Googling returned what it is. It's the TI-Nspire CX Navigator.
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Sep 1, 2012 23:00
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SimplyCosmic posted:Speaking of CPUs, how common is overclocking these days? I'm suddenly nostalgic for the crazy overclocking days of the Celeron 300A, where the goal among friends was to double the clock speed. Double clock speed is pretty much out of the question, but it's still done and pretty easy to do with the right hardware. Intel realized that a certain proportion of their customers wanted to do that stuff so they have special skus which are unlocked. You pay a little extra, but it's as close to an endorsement as you can get.
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Sep 1, 2012 23:01
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Stick Insect posted:
That looks like the Brother GX series we sell here. And for the number of ribbons we sell for typewriters and calculators, neither is close to obsolete.
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Sep 1, 2012 23:20
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This was the single greatest music playing device I ever owned. I literally cried the day it stopped working. It could play unformatted CD-RW's with mp3 files on them so you could just pop in a CD-RW with mp3's on it and add and subtract songs from it whenever you liked. It had several built-in sound equalizers. There was also a slider on the side that you could use to replay your favorite parts of songs. The cache also made it for all intents and purposes completely shock proof. I used to listen to it on the bus every day to and from school. Omegaxisalphabeta has a new favorite as of 23:34 on Sep 1, 2012 |
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Sep 1, 2012 23:31
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Kheldarn posted:The highscool that my child goes to has these AWESOME TI calculators for their AP math classes. They're on a network, so the teacher can see who has signed into their calculator, they can track what they're doing with it, and more. We got to play with them a little bit during the AP Orientation. Bloody hell, I really don't know whether to be impressed or not with that. One one hand, it's clever technology, on the other, it spending $230 per student a great move, when for not much more, you could give them an entire netbook that does all that and a heck of a lot more? What I do miss is my old Texas Instruments scientific calculator that had proper 'STO' and 'RCL' buttons. I can't find anything that does that now: e.g. 5+5=9 STO AC 2+2=4 4+RCL =13 They all seem to have 'M' and 'M+' which don't work the same way and get cleared when you hit AC. (I'm in the UK and TI calcs don't seem popular anymore) EDIT: Can someone tell me if any of the cheap TI calcs do that still? http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=sr_st...ator&sort=price I want a calculator where the STO value stays in memory, no matter whether you hit AC. spog has a new favorite as of 00:16 on Sep 2, 2012 |
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Sep 1, 2012 23:33
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For the engineering equivalent of the bar exam you're only allowed certain types of scientific calculators. They're pretty much the current Casio, HP, and TI models that can't save data beyond a few registers worth of numbers. Even in the most difficult engineering courses you should never need anything more advanced than those little guys. If the calculator does trig functions then you're A-Ok pretty much. My little Casio fx-115es was a workhorse during my time in college and it's still the one I recommend to my friends, but that calculator's a little too new for this thread. Now if you want to get into some old rear end technology, before scientific calculators became small enough to fit in a pocket in your backpack and cheap enough to be bought by students, they had the slide rule. I had to google a picture of some slide rules because I'm not 70 years old. I never got to use one, they were phased out over forty years ago. A slide rule is pretty much a mutated abacus, only it's logarithm based. I don't know much about them other than if you were an engineer in the 50s and 60s you used one of these. Apparently a 10inch slide rule was powerful enough to rival the functionality of modern scientific calculators, but you couldn't be as precise with a slide rule. It's kinda like finding the volume of a liquid using a graduated cylinder compared to a weight/density calculation. Also the great-grand daddy of your ti-84 is the Texas Instruments SR-50, and you were apparently king poo poo if you had one of these when they first came out. Guess what the SR in the model line stands for.
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Sep 1, 2012 23:35
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SimplyCosmic posted:Speaking of CPUs, how common is overclocking these days?
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Sep 1, 2012 23:55
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Danger - Octopus! posted:We still all have one of these on our desks at work, and we work for a modern company in the investment industry. We still use something like this at work because its a good way to have a record of adding up checks.
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Sep 2, 2012 00:30
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SimplyCosmic posted:Speaking of CPUs, how common is overclocking these days? I'm suddenly nostalgic for the crazy overclocking days of the Celeron 300A, where the goal among friends was to double the clock speed. It's recently been a big deal again. One of the most popular CPUs around is the i2500k, which defaults at 3.3ghz but goes to 4.5ghz for virtually no effort on air.
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Sep 2, 2012 00:32
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SimplyCosmic posted:Speaking of CPUs, how common is overclocking these days? I'll still do it if it's not a huge PITA, meaning no ridiculous heatsink, and no water cooling. Really water cooling should be obsolete. It's nothing but problems, and if you get a leak inside your PC case, god help you.
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Sep 2, 2012 00:55
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I for one would like to see a graph of cooling efficiency of water versus air cooled.
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Sep 2, 2012 01:08
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