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spog
Aug 7, 2004

It's your own bloody fault.

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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lazer_chicken
May 14, 2009

PEW PEW ZAP ZAP

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.

In the 7 series they made a note to actually laser-cut the pipelines so there was no way to turn them back on, though :(

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.

A FUCKIN CANARY!!
Nov 9, 2005


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.

Killer robot
Sep 6, 2010

I was having the most wonderful dream. I think you were in it!
Pillbug

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.

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.

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.

Good soup!
Nov 2, 2010

lazer_chicken posted:



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.

Ah the memories of turning my Powercolor Radeon 9800 SE into a 9800 Pro. :allears:

Geoj
May 28, 2008

BITTER POOR PERSON

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.

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.

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.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


Ignore my posts!
I'm aggressively wrong about everything!
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.

Johnwohl
Dec 8, 2011

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.
There was a commercial highlighting it's size where a man's trying to find his phone in his jacket and resorts to calling it up from a pay phone.

Motorola Vader?

AlternateAccount
Apr 25, 2005
FYGM
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?

Killer robot
Sep 6, 2010

I was having the most wonderful dream. I think you were in it!
Pillbug

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.

BogDew
Jun 14, 2006

E:\FILES>quickfli clown.fli

Johnwohl posted:

Motorola Vader?
Or the StarTAC - with such innovative features such as silent vibration!

mrkillboy
May 13, 2003

"Something witty."

WebDog posted:

Samsung SPH-N270


It was released as a limited edition collectable during Matrix Reloaded, sold for around $500, and despite a run of 10,000 appears to have sold roughly 2000.

That's a really loving ugly phone. It looks like something the marines in Aliens would carry.

EvilMuppet
Jul 29, 2006


Good night catte thread, give them all many patts. I'm sorry,

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?

BogDew
Jun 14, 2006

E:\FILES>quickfli clown.fli
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.

DrBouvenstein
Feb 28, 2007

I think I'm a doctor, but that doesn't make me a doctor. This fancy avatar does.
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...

Bonzo
Mar 11, 2004

Just like Mama used to make it!
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.

Ensign Expendable
Nov 11, 2008

Lager beer is proof that god loves us
Pillbug
Flash drives will never be obsolete, you can't boot from Dropbox.

Lowen SoDium
Jun 5, 2003

Highen Fiber
Clapping Larry

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.

Ensign Expendable
Nov 11, 2008

Lager beer is proof that god loves us
Pillbug
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.

jgrrr
Oct 3, 2007

&
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.

Last Chance
Dec 31, 2004

Ensign Expendable posted:

Flash drives will never be obsolete, you can't boot from Dropbox.

Quoting this for posterity

MadScientistWorking
Jun 23, 2010

"I was going through a time period where I was looking up weird stories involving necrophilia..."

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.
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.

Plinkey
Aug 4, 2004

by Fluffdaddy

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.

cyberia
Jun 24, 2011

Do not call me that!
Snuffles was my slave name.
You shall now call me Snowball; because my fur is pretty and white.

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 :downs: 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).

SimplyCosmic
May 18, 2004

It could be worse.

Not sure how, but it could be.

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.

56k
Apr 4, 2004

by T. Finninho
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?

ZALGO!
Dec 4, 2006

These are the end times. We've got to be prepared! ZALGO!
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

The Wurst Poster
Apr 8, 2005

Literally the Wurst...

Seriously...

For REALSIES.

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?

Acute Grill
Dec 9, 2011

Chomp

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.

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

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 :shobon:

Ensign Expendable
Nov 11, 2008

Lager beer is proof that god loves us
Pillbug
There will still be vital systems controlled by a dusty old box with leaking capacitors and Windows XP.

Kwyndig
Sep 23, 2006

Heeeeeey


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.

Ensign Expendable
Nov 11, 2008

Lager beer is proof that god loves us
Pillbug
The IBM Master the Mainframe contest still suckers young impressionable high schoolers into learning COBOL, so don't feel that old.

mrkillboy
May 13, 2003

"Something witty."

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
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.

Pokey Araya
Jan 1, 2007

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.

3D Megadoodoo
Nov 25, 2010

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.

Babunar
Sep 15, 2009
My old workplace has a Novell NetWare server that can be used as a failover EPOS server if necessary. It's so beige.

spog
Aug 7, 2004

It's your own bloody fault.

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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0dB
Jan 3, 2009
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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