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Tubesock Holocaust posted:
Fixed. I don't know what the gently caress I was thinking. I remember buying a 128MB Lexar thumb drive and then marveling at how amazing it was to save and transfer files that would take several floppy disks to move.
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May 14, 2015 01:57
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Tubesock Holocaust posted:Fixed. I don't know what the gently caress I was thinking. This reminds me how in the wake of the original iMac announcement (with it having no floppy drive) there were a number of file locker websites that sprung up, imacfloppy.com and the like. They gave you like 2MB that you could login and upload and download from.
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May 14, 2015 02:09
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:SGI 1600W Flatscreen Ooh. I have an O2 that would look good with one of those ... I think it should "just" be a case of finding a 1600W and the SGI PCI card to drive it. Not that I would have any sort of use for it, ofc.
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May 14, 2015 02:19
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El Estrago Bonito posted:Stand alone GPS will always be around as long as people need them for outdoor activities. For navigating in cities phones are better than most GPS these days but trying to do Geocaching or hiking using a cellphone can be a nightmare if you can't get good 4G reception. Isn't that only to fetch map data? There's plenty of apps that have pre-loaded map data. Navigon comes to mind as one for Turn by Turn. I'd bet there's others for general map navigation as well.
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May 14, 2015 02:24
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flosofl posted:Isn't that only to fetch map data? There's plenty of apps that have pre-loaded map data. Navigon comes to mind as one for Turn by Turn. I'd bet there's others for general map navigation as well. Dedicated GPS receivers are more rugged, have better battery life, and better antennæ—possibly better chipsets in other ways, too, but there’s no way to cheat on antenna size.
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May 14, 2015 02:27
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This was a long rear end time ago and I was a really dumb kid but I seem to remember that with pre-MacOSX it was pretty easy to delete or disable vital plugins. Confirm or deny? The whole plugin system hosed with us in general considering we were mostly there to play games on our parent's computer without the guidance of the internet, mostly.
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May 14, 2015 02:27
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flosofl posted:Isn't that only to fetch map data? There's plenty of apps that have pre-loaded map data. Navigon comes to mind as one for Turn by Turn. I'd bet there's others for general map navigation as well. You can even download and save areas in Google maps. They seldom have any useful map data out in the woods, but it can be handy to save on roaming fees in foreign cities. Platystemon posted:Dedicated GPS receivers are more rugged, have better battery life, and better antennæ—possibly better chipsets in other ways, too, but there’s no way to cheat on antenna size. Battery life is a fair point (though bringing a power pack can keep a phone going for a while), but is the antenna size that important anymore? If my phone can get a good lock while inside a moving bus surrounded by buildings ... shouldn't it be an absolute cakewalk standing still in a more open landscape? I understand that surveyors get precision I can only dream of, but I don't really need sub-metre precision to find out which end of which little mountain lake I'm looking at. Computer viking has a new favorite as of 02:40 on May 14, 2015 |
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May 14, 2015 02:29
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Computer viking posted:Ooh. I have an O2 that would look good with one of those ... I think it should "just" be a case of finding a 1600W and the SGI PCI card to drive it. Not that I would have any sort of use for it, ofc. Maaaaan I want SGI hardware so bad. I keep trawling local craigslist for it, but no dice. One of my treasured childhood memories was playing Doom when it first came out, blazing fast, on an SGI workstation of some kind at a local university since my friend's dad was the chair of the CS department. Cool looking things, too. I've got a [modern] Sun workstation, just need to add the SGI, and maybe a BeBox to round out the interesting PC collection. 
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May 14, 2015 02:29
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They are very nice little things - and they use things like VGA and PS/2 connectors, unlike Sun and their weirdness.  I'm more happy with the Alpha PWS, though: It's a 433MHz Alpha AXP, from not very long before HP gave up and sold that chip designer team over to Intel to try and fix the itanium. It can run Tru64 Unix, FreeBSD (alpha was their main 64-bit platform for a while), Windows NT4 (alpha was what you bought to get a fast exchange server, and it has a translation tool to convert Intel binaries), windows 2000 betas (apparently), and ... OpenVMS. Oh, and for a party trick you can pull half the motherboard out after undoing a few clips and captive thumbscrews , and slot in a pentium one instead - leaving the cards and disks untouched. Not that I have a Pentium motherboard for it. I've got Tru64 on it now, a hobbyist OpenVMS disk lying around, and it has run FreeBSD just to test. No luck getting hold of NT/alpha media so far. It also needs a bios battery before I can boot it again. Oh, and I picked up a PA-RISC 2U rackserver for free for no good reason. 2x1GHz CPUs, 6GB Ram, and good luck finding a copy of HP-UNIX to run on it. I installed Debian just to test; it's currently stacked in a basement. Wonder if anyone in Norway wants one of those. Computer viking has a new favorite as of 02:52 on May 14, 2015 |
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May 14, 2015 02:46
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El Estrago Bonito posted:Stand alone GPS will always be around as long as people need them for outdoor activities. For navigating in cities phones are better than most GPS these days but trying to do Geocaching or hiking using a cellphone can be a nightmare if you can't get good 4G reception. Many phones have real (not assisted) GPS, and any Android device can use Here Maps for on device navigation. E: efb, not on the last page yet
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May 14, 2015 03:04
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Light Gun Man posted:My USB zip 250 drive served me incredibly well and without issue, I still have it and pull it out to use on occasion Stop Code Jockey posted:Maaaaan I want SGI hardware so bad. ...which hardware, if I might ask? atomicthumbs has a new favorite as of 03:52 on May 14, 2015 |
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May 14, 2015 03:49
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NLJP posted:This was a long rear end time ago and I was a really dumb kid but I seem to remember that with pre-MacOSX it was pretty easy to delete or disable vital plugins. Confirm or deny? Do you mean like force quitting Finder and everything else except one program to make poo poo run faster? Maybe that was really early OSX, I forget. We did that a lot in HS programming to free up ram for compiling because the computers had poo poo for ram and it sped it up x2 basically.
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May 14, 2015 04:07
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NLJP posted:This was a long rear end time ago and I was a really dumb kid but I seem to remember that with pre-MacOSX it was pretty easy to delete or disable vital plugins. Confirm or deny? They were called extensions, and there was an extensions folder. They were unstable as gently caress. You might be thinking of this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extension_conflict The "March of the icons" at startup below the Welcome to Macintosh/Mac OS thing at start-up was all the extensions loading up. Vanagoon has a new favorite as of 04:31 on May 14, 2015 |
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May 14, 2015 04:20
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Vanagoon posted:They were called extensions, and there was an extensions folder. They were unstable as gently caress. Mac OS really was a loving travesty, goddamn.
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May 14, 2015 04:42
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Although it took some work to learn and maintain I had no issue supporting and using Mac OS, right up until 9.2 and the transition to OS X. The extension situation was certainly no worse than dealing with goddamn IRQs on a PC.
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May 14, 2015 04:50
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Hey who remembers DLL Hell? I'm pretty sure computers in general just sucked during that era but nobody noticed because they were all awful.
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May 14, 2015 05:11
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Hey who remembers DLL Hell? I'm pretty sure computers in general just sucked during that era but nobody noticed because they were all awful. It was the genesis of the WinSxS folder that everyone seems to hate so much. That, and the underlying mechanism are pretty good at what they do, but it gets a mountain of poo poo because the way the files are linked makes the folder look huuuuuge.
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May 14, 2015 05:14
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Dynamic linking is goddamn great for making sure you don't have horribly bloated binaries and a thousand copies of zlib on your system but lazy programming can and will make it the ultimate in software maintenance nightmares.
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May 14, 2015 06:33
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Another fun memory from working at an electronics recycler/ebay lister. We would occasionally get network analyzers/sniffers, or as one of the guys there would call them, "lunchboxes." I forget what they were actually used for, but they went for a pretty decent price in ~2008 or so when we put them up for bidding on ebay. Probably one of those niche things that can't be replaced/upgraded unless you spend a ton of money to modernize your 20 year old network from scratch or something. If anyone is familiar with them, I'd love to hear more about the things.   Sometimes, we'd get really old ones with green, amber, or red plasma screens. I always wanted to take one home and run some old-rear end DOS games on them, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_1AH4sUg My favorite goofy thing about them is that the keyboard was connected via RJ11 port (landline telephone , the kind that looks like ethernet) instead of PS/2. Was this ever a common thing?
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May 14, 2015 07:50
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THE ZUNE PLAYER
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May 14, 2015 08:13
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Vanagoon posted:Then there's this. The fact that large parts of classic Mac OS were running under emulation to not break 68k backwards compatibility. Emulators are cool, yo.  (That's a CP/M emulator running inside a Mac emulator inside a Windows emulator inside another Mac emulator, on BeOS.)
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May 14, 2015 08:13
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Zopotantor posted:Emulators are cool, yo. You ever read that Neal Stephenson essay, "In the Beginning Was the Command Line"? Dude had a major boner for BeOS and the BeBox. 
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May 14, 2015 08:30
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Zopotantor posted:Emulators are cool, yo. I agree that emulators are cool, but not when the underlying operating system is running using emulation. That's wasteful. I prefer video game console emulators myself.
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May 14, 2015 08:41
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Zopotantor posted:Emulators are cool, yo. Ha, I had a comparable amount of levels on screen a few days ago - though different kinds. Windows desktop at home, running a Ubuntu VM (so I can VPN to work without messing with the windows side) , running a remote desktop to my workstation, where I fired up another remote desktop to the university to start a download. It got ... confusing to keep track of where my input headed, especially with several of them fullscreen.
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May 14, 2015 10:32
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Vanagoon posted:I agree that emulators are cool, but not when the underlying operating system is running using emulation. That's wasteful. It's fun seeing how deep you can go before it's unusably slow.
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May 14, 2015 12:36
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SwissCM posted:It's fun seeing how deep you can go before it's unusably slow. Like, keep going until you smell burning, and you open your computer up to find an unrecognizable melted, burned place where the CPU was?
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May 14, 2015 12:43
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Vanagoon posted:Like, keep going until you smell burning, and you open your computer up to find an unrecognizable melted, burned place where the CPU was? Yes
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May 14, 2015 12:45
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Pope Guilty posted:You ever read that Neal Stephenson essay, "In the Beginning Was the Command Line"? Dude had a major boner for BeOS and the BeBox. I owned one of those. And yes. 
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May 14, 2015 13:14
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One thing with RS232 (and sorry for going back to it) for industrial control could be the lack of requiring a Vendor ID and Product ID of you were to create a USB interface (I could be completely wrong on this. Cheep bastards! Also I have never had issues with RS232 to USB adaptors other than having to manually go into Device Manager and reassign the COM port number to something lower that the legacy applications I use can see. All else fails I use my trusty old Panasonic Toughbook! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0n6mX8Q1waA
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May 14, 2015 13:43
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Athenry posted:This reminds me how in the wake of the original iMac announcement (with it having no floppy drive) there were a number of file locker websites that sprung up, imacfloppy.com and the like. They gave you like 2MB that you could login and upload and download from. I remember in 2004 or 5 while at uni, watching some guy have a melt down in the computer lab because the computers didn't have a floppy drive. We all just stared
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May 14, 2015 13:53
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Code Jockey posted:Maaaaan I want SGI hardware so bad. I keep trawling local craigslist for it, but no dice. p-hop posted:My favorite goofy thing about them is that the keyboard was connected via RJ11 port (landline telephone , the kind that looks like ethernet) instead of PS/2. Was this ever a common thing? Collateral Damage has a new favorite as of 13:56 on May 14, 2015 |
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May 14, 2015 13:54
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Horace posted:I'm pissed because I just had to buy a CD from eBay to get a track which vanished from not only Spotify but also iTunes, Amazon Music Store and every other digital outlet I searched. Now I've got to use someone else's computer to 'rip it' (don't think I've even used that expression in half a decade) then use Dropbox or something to get it onto my laptop. I was DJ in the 90s and I paid £22 for a import double album for a single track once. Actually, make that twice. It was a weird as gently caress 1.30 loop thing that I needed 2 copies of to cut back and forth to extend/gently caress around with. So £44 for 1 weird track*, back then £44 was a lot of money too. Course it made me so popular that I made all the back multiple times in fees, free drugs and women. I used to actually kid myself poo poo like that to justify such silliness , or flying to London or New York to buy records Kids nowadays have it so lucky, you're not a real DJ unless you take a plane trip and spend enough for a meal on your obscure bleep bloops. Get off my lawn * Chrome suggests that I mean 1 weird trick, hahaha
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May 14, 2015 15:26
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El Estrago Bonito posted:Stand alone GPS will always be around as long as people need them for outdoor activities. For navigating in cities phones are better than most GPS these days but trying to do Geocaching or hiking using a cellphone can be a nightmare if you can't get good 4G reception. You used to be able to save map data on Android, but Google took that feature out for some reason. I guess that's an obsolete technology 
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May 14, 2015 17:42
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Can anyone talk about BeOS? I recall finding out about it in ~2006 and hearing it was great, but never found out what was so good about it.
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May 14, 2015 17:56
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Ensign Expendable posted:You used to be able to save map data on Android, but Google took that feature out for some reason. I guess that's an obsolete technology I think it's back? 
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May 14, 2015 17:57
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Chakan posted:Can anyone talk about BeOS? I recall finding out about it in ~2006 and hearing it was great, but never found out what was so good about it. It deserves more than a short phone post, but in short: It was written specifically for good multimedia and desktop performance, and it's a fairly clean and modern design that delivered nicely on that. The API is also a nice clean C++ affair that forces you to write the GUI in a different thread than the rest, which helps it feel responsive even under load. It's still being used for writing control systems for radio playlists/announcements/etc , since it both performs well and is easy to write for - and you can sell it as a package with supported hardware. Computer viking has a new favorite as of 18:14 on May 14, 2015 |
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May 14, 2015 18:04
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Chakan posted:Can anyone talk about BeOS? I recall finding out about it in ~2006 and hearing it was great, but never found out what was so good about it. BeOS was almost the new MacOS. Power Computing and UMAX even shipped clones with it.
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May 14, 2015 18:06
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Chakan posted:Can anyone talk about BeOS? I recall finding out about it in ~2006 and hearing it was great, but never found out what was so good about it. You could watch several DVDs at once without slowdown!
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May 14, 2015 18:40
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p-hop posted:Another fun memory from working at an electronics recycler/ebay lister. We would occasionally get network analyzers/sniffers, or as one of the guys there would call them, "lunchboxes." I forget what they were actually used for, but they went for a pretty decent price in ~2008 or so when we put them up for bidding on ebay. Probably one of those niche things that can't be replaced/upgraded unless you spend a ton of money to modernize your 20 year old network from scratch or something. If anyone is familiar with them, I'd love to hear more about the things. Fun fact: those Dolch keyboards are now basically the most desireable mechanical keyboard ever made on anything.
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May 14, 2015 18:58
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Code Jockey posted:Maaaaan I want SGI hardware so bad. I keep trawling local craigslist for it, but no dice. I have a NeXT Turbo Pizza mobo framed on the wall of my office.
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May 14, 2015 19:31
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