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Fozaldo posted:This goes on all the time, I recall several articles on Hack a Day where people would bridge a solder connection on a circuit board and turn an average oscilloscope or voltage meter etc. into a top of the range model with more features worth hundreds more. Oh yes. I meant that the particular twist was not that they were locking out extra abilities with a software switch, but they were adding a process that deliberately slowed things down. Sort of like they caused the computer to count to ten after every instruction - solely to slow it down.
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# ? Sep 19, 2012 17:57 |
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# ? Mar 28, 2024 10:57 |
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:I remember back in the old Geforce 6 days, I think, someone made a tool which would write a value to a hardware register that would turn on the disabled pixel pipelines that made your 6GT inferior to a 6Ultra. Literally the same chip, but some of the processing power was software disabled. To be fair, this is very very common and it makes a lot of sense because it gives them a way to use imperfect chips. Chip yields, especially at the beginning of a new line, are very low. Well under 50%. So if you can disable part of the chip to make it functional, boom, you just turned a loss into a cheaper product that you can sell. So sure, you as a consumer could re-enable the pipelines and possibly get a better product for free, but it's possible those pipelines are non-functional and they were disabled for a reason. Also the 6800gt had all 16 pipes, it was the vanilla 6800 (12 pipe) and the later 6800xt (8 pipe) that people unlocked. Also ati 9500 non-pro to 9500 pro was a popular one.
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# ? Sep 19, 2012 18:03 |
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I don't remember the exact details, but the first PC I ever built for myself had an early ATI Radeon that could get a 40%+ performance increase from additional pipelines by simply modifying some registry values after you installed the drivers.
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# ? Sep 19, 2012 19:03 |
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lazer_chicken posted:To be fair, this is very very common and it makes a lot of sense because it gives them a way to use imperfect chips. Chip yields, especially at the beginning of a new line, are very low. Well under 50%. So if you can disable part of the chip to make it functional, boom, you just turned a loss into a cheaper product that you can sell. So sure, you as a consumer could re-enable the pipelines and possibly get a better product for free, but it's possible those pipelines are non-functional and they were disabled for a reason. Yeah, that's just it. Back with the initial example of The 486SX, it started because there were a whole lot of screwed up processors that would have had to been thrown out, and instead were sold at a discount. Even disregarding the extra money-making scheme of selling "coprocessors" later, once their process improved making deliberately crippled SX chips let them sell both full CPUs at their original high margin asking point, and crippled CPUs at a lower margin but still profitable point to people who wouldn't have bought at full price. Especially since at the time if you weren't big into Doom or massive Excel sheets you probably wouldn't notice the difference. Similar cases tend to work the same way.
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# ? Sep 19, 2012 19:14 |
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lazer_chicken posted:
Ah the memories of turning my Powercolor Radeon 9800 SE into a 9800 Pro.
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# ? Sep 19, 2012 22:03 |
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Space Gopher posted:That was the Athlon CPU - they set the frequency lock by laser-cutting certain bridges on the CPU package. With a pencil (or, even better, a tiny dab of conductive paint) you could reconnect the bridges and overclock it. Can't find any pictures, but by 2002 or so some PC modification retailers started selling stickers you could place over the traces (basically a sheet of plastic with conductive strips and adhesive) that made the unlock more permanent than using a pencil - it wasn't uncommon to have to re-draw the lines periodically - or less guesswork than using conductive paint. In later iterations of the Socket A Athlon (after they switched to a silicon substrate from ceramic) they were pretty much required because AMD started burning a hole in the substrate with a laser. Space Gopher posted:A few years later, AMD also released three-core CPUs that were really four core dies with one die locked out in software. With the right motherboard tweaks, you could re-enable the fourth core, which was often as not 100% functional. You can still buy Phenom IIs that are rebadged quad-core CPUs based on six-core dies. Granted its no i5-2500 but for $100 its a decent processor.
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# ? Sep 20, 2012 03:36 |
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Geoj posted:You can still buy Phenom IIs that are rebadged quad-core CPUs based on six-core dies. Granted its no i5-2500 but for $100 its a decent processor. It's not, really. You could put AMD's entire desktop lineup in this thread, Phenoms/Llano as obsolete and Bulldozer as failed.
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# ? Sep 20, 2012 04:31 |
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Player pianos were mentioned a couple pages back. I actually remember hearing they caused one of the first 'old media threatened by new media' cases in history that actually tried to go the legal route. Admittedly TVTropes isn't the best source here, but according to them apparently Sousa went before Congress and tried to argue that player pianos would cause humanity to evolve away from vocal chords because we'd no longer have to sing to make music. I'm not entirely sure Sousa understood quite what the issues at hand were.
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# ? Sep 20, 2012 05:09 |
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WebDog posted:I recall around 1999 there were miniature mobiles that had to be controlled with a dailing wand. They were utterly impractical as they could barely hold any numbers - something like 12. Motorola Vader?
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# ? Sep 20, 2012 05:27 |
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Weren't a lot of the NVIDIA Quadro cards the same as the GeForces with just a different BIOS and some flashing would get you to the same place?
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# ? Sep 20, 2012 05:42 |
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AlternateAccount posted:Weren't a lot of the NVIDIA Quadro cards the same as the GeForces with just a different BIOS and some flashing would get you to the same place? I remember that, though I think it was a similar case to some of the disabled core cases in that Quadro cards were subject to more rigorous testing, since they were marketed to customers that would care more about the occasional minor rendering error than a gamer.
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# ? Sep 20, 2012 06:19 |
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Johnwohl posted:Motorola Vader?
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# ? Sep 20, 2012 08:35 |
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WebDog posted:Samsung SPH-N270 That's a really loving ugly phone. It looks like something the marines in Aliens would carry.
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# ? Sep 20, 2012 10:00 |
mrkillboy posted:That's a really loving ugly phone. It looks like something the marines in Aliens would carry. So you're saying you think it's awesome?
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# ? Sep 20, 2012 10:31 |
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Orb Drive! I honestly had no idea these existed until I came across a book that mentioned using them as backup. These were one of the few competitors to Iomega's zip drive. Castlewood's Orb drive at it's peak featured 5.7gb and appeared somewhat popular for DV video production where you could plop around 6 hours of footage. Castlewood's main competitor was SyQuest (of which several employees had left to form). Syquest had been in the game for quite some time developing the Ez 135 SCSI hard drives where you would load up 135mb platters for storage. (in 1995) Not having backwards compatibility with other devices in it's range and never upgrading beyond 135mb they quickly lost to Zip. Later on they gained notoriety with the SparQ drive. Featuring a larger storage for cheaper than a Zipdrive (1gb for $39 over 100mb for $22) it really died in the foot with a severe design flaw that would damage a drive and then cause that to damage any disk placed in there. Both filed for bankruptcy around the early 2000's.
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# ? Sep 20, 2012 11:25 |
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They might have been mentioned, but there were a few of those "ultra-capacity" drives from the mid to late 90's. Iomega "upgraded" the Zip drive with the Jazz drive! Super Disk: And related to that, the Sony HiFD: The SparQ Drive: All got crushed by CD-R's/RW's...and of course, those got crushed (for file transfer purposes) by flash drives. And now flash drives are slowly getting less popular because of cloud storage like Dropbox, Google Drive, etc...
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# ? Sep 20, 2012 14:47 |
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I actually save any Zip drives I find because they will interface with some musical equipment made in the late 90s. Also the one I bought in 1997 still works just like the day I took it out of the box.
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# ? Sep 20, 2012 15:34 |
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Flash drives will never be obsolete, you can't boot from Dropbox.
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# ? Sep 20, 2012 15:36 |
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Ensign Expendable posted:Flash drives will never be obsolete, you can't boot from Dropbox. Not that it will obsolete flash drives, but you can boot form network on most systems.
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# ? Sep 20, 2012 15:41 |
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Yes, but it's a pain to set up and you can't do it over wifi. Although it would be cool if you could, especially for tinkering with mobile devices.
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# ? Sep 20, 2012 15:46 |
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i recently acquired a working laserdisc player after drunkenly purchasing a broken one 3 years ago. the main positive is that it has a higher audio quality than DVD, but unfortunately it still doesn't meet the "uncompressed" by blu-ray.
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# ? Sep 20, 2012 15:49 |
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Ensign Expendable posted:Flash drives will never be obsolete, you can't boot from Dropbox. Quoting this for posterity
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# ? Sep 20, 2012 16:22 |
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Fozaldo posted:This goes on all the time, I recall several articles on Hack a Day where people would bridge a solder connection on a circuit board and turn an average oscilloscope or voltage meter etc. into a top of the range model with more features worth hundreds more.
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# ? Sep 20, 2012 16:46 |
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MadScientistWorking posted:That is stupid though because you should be able to buy a high end oscilloscope fairly cheaply. An old engineering trick which extends out to almost every single product you can imagine is that for every high brand product line that one can find you can find a cheaper variant from which the only difference is in name only. Or buy a used one in a government surplus sale.
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# ? Sep 20, 2012 20:11 |
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WebDog posted:Or the StarTAC - with such innovative features such as silent vibration! I remember when the StarTAC came out, my mum got one and everyone thought it was so amazing because of how small it was. I think a lot of people were pretty sure that it was the pinnacle of mobile phone technology. It was also one of the first mobile phones to implement caller ID (in Australia) and when my mum would answer her phone and know who was calling it blew her friends' minds. They all thought she was psychic or something Then it became a race to make the tiniest phone possible. Once they started making SIM cards that were smaller than a credit card you could get phones that were half as big as a StarTAC and we would laugh at how huge and clunky the StarTAC looked next to these tiny phones. Also, I remember the obsession in the mid to late 90s about making everything 'the size of a credit card'. It was a staple advertising line for gadgets and other junk. I still have a Victorinox Swiss Card which took all the tools from a Swiss Army Knife and put them into a plastic card that was always slightly too bulky to fit into my wallet. I even had a digital camera that was small enough to fit into an Altoids tin (and came with a promotional tin to carry it in).
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# ? Sep 20, 2012 22:57 |
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WastedJoker posted:Has anyone posted the first few blu-ray players which were not firmware upgradable? It's oddly nostalgic to think back about how often every new big Blu-ray release had a series of BD players that were not compatible with it. That went away for awhile, but came back for a time once the first generation of networked Blu-ray players came out, with issues with certain streaming services like Netflix.
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# ? Sep 21, 2012 00:52 |
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Serious post: I haven't even used my blu ray player in like 2 years or maybe more. I don't have it connected to the internet. Will it play newly released movies?
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# ? Sep 21, 2012 01:09 |
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I remember my dad bought one of the first generation HD-DVD players and the thing was like a computer, when you turned it on it took like two or three minutes to boot up
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# ? Sep 21, 2012 01:18 |
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56k posted:Serious post: I haven't even used my blu ray player in like 2 years or maybe more. I don't have it connected to the internet. Will it play newly released movies? I would love to tell you but you have failed to register your player make and model and upload that information to the forum's tech support database. Have you tried inserting a newly released movie and pressing play?
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# ? Sep 21, 2012 01:28 |
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Ensign Expendable posted:Flash drives will never be obsolete, you can't boot from Dropbox. Also because, despite all our technology, it's still the most simple way to transfer files between two physically-close computers. No special software, no need to trust your data to third party security, works on any operating system, and no limitation on file size other than the actual storage of the drive itself. Just copy some files onto it and gently lob it at the recipient.
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# ? Sep 21, 2012 03:18 |
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Kalos posted:Also because, despite all our technology, it's still the most simple way to transfer files between two physically-close computers. No special software, no need to trust your data to third party security, works on any operating system, and no limitation on file size other than the actual storage of the drive itself. Just copy some files onto it and gently lob it at the recipient. Except the PC as we know it is already on the way out for everything but businesses as far as corporations that make them (and software for them) are concerned, and it's only a few tens of years before we all have crazy augmented reality glasses that read our thoughts anyway
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# ? Sep 21, 2012 03:29 |
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There will still be vital systems controlled by a dusty old box with leaking capacitors and Windows XP.
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# ? Sep 21, 2012 04:00 |
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Ensign Expendable posted:There will still be vital systems controlled by a dusty old box with leaking capacitors and COBOL. Fixed that for you. poo poo, my college taught COBOL, now I feel super old.
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# ? Sep 21, 2012 04:04 |
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The IBM Master the Mainframe contest still suckers young impressionable high schoolers into learning COBOL, so don't feel that old.
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# ? Sep 21, 2012 04:12 |
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ZALGO! posted:I remember my dad bought one of the first generation HD-DVD players and the thing was like a computer, when you turned it on it took like two or three minutes to boot up
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# ? Sep 21, 2012 05:03 |
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Ensign Expendable posted:There will still be vital systems controlled by a dusty old box with leaking capacitors and Windows XP. If I had a dollar for every machine I found in an obscure place, that almost nobody knew about/knew what it did, running and storing critical information, running Windows XP for a business with no back up what so ever, I would have about $87.
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# ? Sep 21, 2012 05:10 |
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Pokey Araya posted:If I had a dollar for every machine I found in an obscure place, that almost nobody knew about/knew what it did, running and storing critical information, running Windows XP for a business with no back up what so ever, I would have about $87. The worst are old laptops relegated to server duty because they're so god drat small that they can physically get pretty much lost.
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# ? Sep 21, 2012 08:45 |
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My old workplace has a Novell NetWare server that can be used as a failover EPOS server if necessary. It's so beige.
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# ? Sep 21, 2012 08:55 |
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mrkillboy posted:I have a fairly recent Blu-Ray player and it still takes time to boot. Not anywhere near 3 minutes (more like 30 seconds) but I don't recall any of my DVD players taking more than 3 seconds to get ready to play. I've heard a complain from occasional PS3 users that everytime they want to play it game, it takes 20 mins to start, because their system always insists on downloading and installing a non-skippable software update.
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# ? Sep 21, 2012 11:12 |
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# ? Mar 28, 2024 10:57 |
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Quick Disks! Also known as loving Quick Disks! The first samplers used these. They were double sided, so before playing that looping saxophone sample you'd have to pop in the disk, load it for a while, pop it out, turn it over, pop it in, load the rest of the sample and finally get to performing that sweet 2 seconds of 12-bit fart. Look at the size of the drive. Most of it is a rack for your 10 favourites. This is why Zip drives looked good.
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# ? Sep 21, 2012 11:33 |