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Rap Game Goku
Apr 2, 2008

Word to your moms, I came to drop spirit bombs


Lurking Haro posted:

You could watch several DVDs at once without slowdown!

Also teapots. I went to a nerd high school so we had competitions to see who's computer could render teapots the fastest.

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pienipple
Mar 20, 2009

That's wrong!

Computer viking posted:

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.

It also has a very simple and clean interface that's rather pleasant to use. I installed BeOS5 on my PC just to play with it a few years ago and it still performed quite well despite lack of drivers for modern hardware.

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

pienipple posted:

It also has a very simple and clean interface that's rather pleasant to use. I installed BeOS5 on my PC just to play with it a few years ago and it still performed quite well despite lack of drivers for modern hardware.

The interface is certainly part of it. (In the same vein, I liked Photon in QNX. Shame their free desktop version just quietly disappeared.)

Also, I should go see what Haiku (openBeOS) has been up to lately; I think they have gotten to a fairly usable state...

SLOSifl
Aug 10, 2002


I loved sliding the window title bars around in BeOS. They even had some Mac and Windows looking themes and I think an Amiga one.

Had no multiuser support which was becoming more important at the time though. Clean API and neat filesystem.

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!

Elliotw2 posted:

The good news is that if you have about an hour, you can flash the firmware to a CF card and slot that in with zero modification since they shipped with either Microdrives or CF cards.

Microdrives totally go here I guess.



They're literally tiny hard drives that used an expanded CF bus for data and power transfer. They've been completely out performed in stability, speed, power draw, and capacity by the regular flash memory CF cards these days.

And they were fragile as poo poo. The newspaper I work for had a couple of 1GB microdrives back in the day when CF cards only went up to 256MB. The quarter-gig was enough for a Nikon D1, but the Microdrives were available for extended assignments, though most of us ended up buying extra CF cards with our own money because we didn't trust the Microdrives. A D1 will shrug off a 3-foot drop onto concrete, a Microdrive shits itself if you move the camera while it's writing. And God help you if you have an OG iPod and take it jogging in one of those bicep holsters.


(My hosting, also the first GIS result for any combination of "hamster" and "microdrive")

HardDisk posted:

D'awww :3:

Depending on the weight, they would make pretty cool keychains.
They weigh maybe twice as much as a CF card, the weight is negligible.

Ultimate Mango posted:

Stand alone GPS units will go here soon. Between in car systems and phone apps there isn't much need (they will still exit for marine and aeronautics and such of course, but the portable unitaskers need to due).
They do have a niche if you're out in the sticks with no cell reception -- Google Maps is great and all, but requires the internet unless you know the place has no cell reception and preload poo poo in advance. On the other hand, they cost more to update than to just buy a new one, so you may get weirdness when driving on a recently-built highway bypass.

On the other other hand, newer cellphones also use GLONASS as well as GPS. Which is ... really just a gimmick, but it's cool. And if Putin starts WW3, and your phone survives, and you can rig up a bicycle generator to charge it, you can still get a pointer no matter which side's satellites survive!

On that note, I learned to use a map and compass in Boy Scouts and JROTC. In this day of GPS, old-fashioned orienteering is pretty much obsolete, but I hope they still teach it in case your batteries run out. I still have one of these that I stole from the US Government:

With that and a USGS topographic map at one of those scales, I can, for example, call in artillery fire to close enough.

Code Jockey posted:

I miss old MacOS. :smith: I love it. Totally nostalgia for school probably, but I miss playing that world map jigsaw puzzle thing.
I kinda want an old Mac, if only for Oregon Trail.

All the discussion of RS232 made me wonder if anything still uses the ol' parallel port (i.e. the old-school printer plug).

Speaking of plugs that are dying/dead, I wouldn't be surprised if new builds stop including RJ11 jacks in the walls in the next few years. Who still has a landline phone? I have a spool of Cat5 and a hookup for terminals/borrowing a crimp tool, was wondering how to fish it through the house, but then realized I can just tie it to the phone lines and yank them out, because I'm never going to use 'em.

aardwolf
Apr 27, 2013
There are still lots of old geezers, areas with poor/non-existent cellphone coverage and small businesses that don't want to fart around with voice over IP out there. It's easier to spend a little bit of money wiring up RJ11 plugs in to your new building than it is to lose a extremely lucrative real estate sale because the customer wants landlines. Yeah, phone jacks are going away, but probably not anytime in the immediate future.

Lazlo Nibble
Jan 9, 2004

It was Weasleby, by God! At last I had the miserable blighter precisely where I wanted him!

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?
I remember seeing that on later-era DEC hardware. VT100s were more fun—the keyboard connected over a coiled black cable with a standard 1/4" stereo plug on the end. You couldn't make the design more "1970s" with anything short of a full-on Bicentennial-themed red, white and blue version.

Proteus Jones
Feb 28, 2013



pienipple posted:

It also has a very simple and clean interface that's rather pleasant to use. I installed BeOS5 on my PC just to play with it a few years ago and it still performed quite well despite lack of drivers for modern hardware.

I actually used BeOS R5 Professional as my main PC for a while back in 2000 (it was 1999 or 2000). The OS had a ridiculously fast boot time and had a very nimble window manager. Ultimately, it was already dead since they had banked on being picked by Apple as the Mac OS successor instead of NeXTSTEP. There was some commercial software available, but not enough to sustain any kind of viable ecosystem.

I still remember being wowed buy the rotating cube with different videos playing on each surface.

Proteus Jones has a new favorite as of 06:33 on May 15, 2015

Konstantin
Jun 20, 2005
And the Lord said, "Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.
DSL modems also use RJ11, and they aren't going away anytime soon. There needs to be some way to get wired Internet into the home until the wireless companies actually offer decent data plans, and it's good enough.

axolotl farmer
May 17, 2007

Now I'm going to sing the Perry Mason theme

Zopotantor posted:

Ahem.


This is a Microdrive.

Microdrives store the data on an infinite loop of magnetic tape.

There was a trick to gain a couple of kB per cart if you reformatted it many times over. It worked by stretching the tape a bit from the spooling, and since it was analog tape read by a magnetic pickup, just as long as there was enough magnetic stuff on the tape to read and write data, it worked.

Humphreys
Jan 26, 2013

We conceived a way to use my mother as a porn mule


Dammit, my whole life I have been wrong about RJ10/RJ11/RJ12 ....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjNCUDrdULw

I have ALWAYS called an RJ11 an RJ12, and RJ10 an RJ11. Don't I feel silly being all smug when I heard people referring to them correctly and it was me that was wrong.

A Festivus Miracle
Dec 19, 2012

I have come to discourse on the profound inequities of the American political system.

Delivery McGee posted:

On that note, I learned to use a map and compass in Boy Scouts and JROTC. In this day of GPS, old-fashioned orienteering is pretty much obsolete, but I hope they still teach it in case your batteries run out. I still have one of these that I stole from the US Government:

With that and a USGS topographic map at one of those scales, I can, for example, call in artillery fire to close enough.

They still teach basic orienteering. GPS have gotten a lot better in recent years, but they're still not really that accurate - most elevation data from a GPS is worthless, and they still cost a ton of money. If you asked me to pinpoint what tiny little bump on a topo map we were standing on, I'd probably be wrong, but I'd still manage to get us in general vicinity.

3D Megadoodoo
Nov 25, 2010

Does GPS work in a dense forest? Because the only times you ever really get lost are forests, deserts, and open seas.

Geomancing
Jan 8, 2004

I am not an egghead. I am well-read.
The more leaf cover you're under, the less accurate it'll be, if it can even get a reading. When I worked as a surveyor's rodman, we'd occasionally have to go do some GPS work around woods. One time we were on a hill, still some trees above us, and even sticking the receiver on its pole up in a tree, it took forever to get any reading at all, and taking it back to the office, it was a reading more than ten feet off, when in the open it could be accurate to within an eight of an inch.

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

Geomancing posted:

The more leaf cover you're under, the less accurate it'll be, if it can even get a reading. When I worked as a surveyor's rodman, we'd occasionally have to go do some GPS work around woods. One time we were on a hill, still some trees above us, and even sticking the receiver on its pole up in a tree, it took forever to get any reading at all, and taking it back to the office, it was a reading more than ten feet off, when in the open it could be accurate to within an eight of an inch.



GPS has issues with forest cover because the signals are LOS, so if there's canopy the only satellites you can see will tend to be those directly overhead, and if you're only looking at a small cluster of satellites in one area of the sky you don't get the best precision. You can also get multipath reflections off the trees, and unless your receiver's really good at determining which signals are echoes and which ones are the real satellite, that'll also screw with it.

That said, the only way you were getting 1/8" accuracy with GPS is if you were using an additional signal as well, like iGPS that leverages the Iridium constellation as well.

Hey. Speaking of obsolete and failed technology...

ToxicSlurpee
Nov 5, 2003

-=SEND HELP=-


Pillbug

aardwolf posted:

There are still lots of old geezers, areas with poor/non-existent cellphone coverage and small businesses that don't want to fart around with voice over IP out there. It's easier to spend a little bit of money wiring up RJ11 plugs in to your new building than it is to lose a extremely lucrative real estate sale because the customer wants landlines. Yeah, phone jacks are going away, but probably not anytime in the immediate future.

Cell phone service is actually a lot more fragile than land lines. Land lines are very reliable and are also useful for things like small, internal phone networks in an office or some such. Sometimes you want that reliability and security over using cell phones for everything. The other thing is that you can control where the signal of a line with wires goes but you can't control a cell phone's signal. Sometimes that's highly desirable. Cell phones are fine for us regular chuckles who don't have secrets to keep and don't need to make life or death decisions at any random time within seconds but some situations kind of need actual lines.

I'm pretty sure it's also way cheaper to handle inter-office calls with wired up phone networks than getting business cellphones.

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!

ToxicSlurpee posted:

Land lines are very reliable and are also useful for things like small, internal phone networks in an office or some such. Sometimes you want that reliability and security over using cell phones for everything.
Fair enough. And businesses still need landlines for fax machines. :v: It'll definitely be one of those things like RS232 that sticks around in business settings well after it's effectively dead in the residential/consumer market, though (it'll still be used way out in the sticks forever because the wires are already there, but us city slickers are rapidly transitioning to mobile phones and cable/fiber internet).

Konstantin posted:

DSL modems also use RJ11, and they aren't going away anytime soon. There needs to be some way to get wired Internet into the home until the wireless companies actually offer decent data plans, and it's good enough.
Oh, right, people still use DSL. I figured DSL nowadays was about as outmoded as 56k was ten years ago when I had DSL.

Speaking of wireless, about half the hotels I stay in have ethernet jacks in the walls, and maybe a third of those still have the ethernet hooked up to anything. That's one place wi-fi has fully taken over.

Lazlo Nibble posted:

I remember seeing that on later-era DEC hardware. VT100s were more fun—the keyboard connected over a coiled black cable with a standard 1/4" stereo plug on the end. You couldn't make the design more "1970s" with anything short of a full-on Bicentennial-themed red, white and blue version.
Back when I had a computer with a PS/2 port, I used IBM Model M keyboards. Some of the older ones I had had cords that were fully detachable, with a PS/2 plug on the computer end and some weird wider-than-RJ45-but-similar-in-appearance plug on the keyboard end.

Also the fact that somebody felt the need to add "looks like ethernet but smaller" to describe RJ11 instead of just "phone plug" supports my idea that it's on its way out. :v:

Edit: though I guess he may be explaining for the benefit of the Europeans among us, with their weird-rear end phone plugs. There's the jokes about the Polish, but there's always some truth in stereotypes:

A Polish phone plug. Note that it's just an adapter for an RJ11, because seriously. WTF, Poland?

Chillbro Baggins has a new favorite as of 01:05 on May 16, 2015

Arsenic Lupin
Apr 12, 2012

This particularly rapid💨 unintelligible 😖patter💁 isn't generally heard🧏‍♂️, and if it is🤔, it doesn't matter💁.


Delivery McGee posted:


With that and a USGS topographic map at one of those scales, I can, for example, call in artillery fire to close enough.

Why, so can I, and so can any man, but will it come when you do call for it?

ToxicSlurpee
Nov 5, 2003

-=SEND HELP=-


Pillbug

Delivery McGee posted:

Fair enough. And businesses still need landlines for fax machines. :v: It'll definitely be one of those things like RS232 that sticks around in business settings well after it's effectively dead in the residential/consumer market, though (it'll still be used way out in the sticks forever because the wires are already there, but us city slickers are rapidly transitioning to mobile phones and cable/fiber internet).

Yeah certain pieces of technology that are considered obsolete for most uses stick around forever in certain situations. Vacuum tubes are still used in a few spots and magnetic tape backups are the thing to use for reliability because it's almost impossible for them to fail. Most of us will go the rest of our lives without ever seeing those things or even needing to remember they exist but they have their place.

Pham Nuwen
Oct 30, 2010



Delivery McGee posted:

Edit: though I guess he may be explaining for the benefit of the Europeans among us, with their weird-rear end phone plugs. There's the jokes about the Polish, but there's always some truth in stereotypes:

A Polish phone plug. Note that it's just an adapter for an RJ11, because seriously. WTF, Poland?

Eh, this is what American phone connectors used to look like:



(bottom is what would go on your wall)

Karasu Tengu
Feb 16, 2011

Humble Tengu Newspaper Reporter
I mean, it's the same idea as RJ11 and such, since it's just the same 4 wires except they're a bit more obviously split up.

Rev. Bleech_
Oct 19, 2004

~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

THE PENETRATOR posted:

THE ZUNE PLAYER

Zune > Every iPod ever made

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?

If your CPU doesn't look like a tablespoon of blackberry jam afterward, you're doing it wrong.

Delivery McGee posted:

All the discussion of RS232 made me wonder if anything still uses the ol' parallel port (i.e. the old-school printer plug).

Earlier I said hotel systems still use RS232 for telephone and TV systems; they also still have parallel port dot matrix printers doing manual call accounting.

1000 Brown M and Ms
Oct 22, 2008

F:\DL>quickfli 4-clowns.fli

ToxicSlurpee posted:

Yeah certain pieces of technology that are considered obsolete for most uses stick around forever in certain situations. Vacuum tubes are still used in a few spots and magnetic tape backups are the thing to use for reliability because it's almost impossible for them to fail. Most of us will go the rest of our lives without ever seeing those things or even needing to remember they exist but they have their place.

Vacuum tubes are still very common in guitar and bass guitar amps because, compared to solid-state amps, they have a different sound that many guitarists prefer. These days amps with software modelling that can emulate tube amps are becoming popular so it'll be interesting to see if actual tube ambs remain as popular as they are.

Proteus Jones
Feb 28, 2013



1000 Brown M and Ms posted:

Vacuum tubes are still very common in guitar and bass guitar amps because, compared to solid-state amps, they have a different sound that many guitarists prefer. These days amps with software modelling that can emulate tube amps are becoming popular so it'll be interesting to see if actual tube ambs remain as popular as they are.

I have one of the Fender Mustangs, and while it's definitely not a top of the line modeling amp, the ability to load different amp profiles/effects kits is killer.

Geoj
May 28, 2008

BITTER POOR PERSON

1000 Brown M and Ms posted:

These days amps with software modelling that can emulate tube amps are becoming popular so it'll be interesting to see if actual tube ambs remain as popular as they are.

There will always be audiophile :spergin: who keep tube amps (and other forms of tube-driven audio equipment) popular.

JediTalentAgent
Jun 5, 2005
Hey, look. Look, if- if you screw me on this, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine, you rat bastard!

Delivery McGee posted:

Oh, right, people still use DSL. I figured DSL nowadays was about as outmoded as 56k was ten years ago when I had DSL.

I still have DSL, myself. Not for lack of ATT and myself trying to get me to drop it, I suppose.

For something in the 1.5-3mb speed range, though, there's not that big a price difference between cable and DSL or Uverse after promo periods, as far as I can see in my region.

ToxicSlurpee
Nov 5, 2003

-=SEND HELP=-


Pillbug

Geoj posted:

There will always be audiophile :spergin: who keep tube amps (and other forms of tube-driven audio equipment) popular.

A big difference between guitar nerds and audio nerds being that different amplifiers do in fact have different sounds. Unlike, say, different cables plugged into a stereo.

It will never fail to amuse me that some hardcore audiophiles failed to tell the difference between a top of the line cable and a coat hanger.

Lord Booga
Sep 23, 2007
Huh?
Grimey Drawer
What is with the terrible DSL speeds that seem to be around, especially in America.

Here in NZ unless you're rural, you're usually going to get ~10mbit from DSL, depending on how close you are to the cabinet.

With the rollout of VDSL that was done a few years ago, you can be getting 20-60mbit (once again, depending on how close the cabinet is).

Then again, we also have a countrywide fibre roll out with a base rate of 30mbit, all the way up to gigabit.

Cable is only available in two cities, and even then a limited section of them.

darkhand
Jan 18, 2010

This beard just won't do!
Worse than that is ~Gold/Platinum/Unobtainium Plated HDMI~ crap. Like, it's digital... It has the data or it doesn't; there's no middle ground, a bit doesn't just suddenly change "flavors" because of the cord.

Adeline Weishaupt
Oct 16, 2013

by Lowtax

ToxicSlurpee posted:

A big difference between guitar nerds and audio nerds being that different amplifiers do in fact have different sounds. Unlike, say, different cables plugged into a stereo.

It will never fail to amuse me that some hardcore audiophiles failed to tell the difference between a top of the line cable and a coat hanger.

Legit, an audiophile-grade amplifier is meant to produce sound with as little colouring and distortion as possible. A guitar amp is entirely meant to be the biggest thing that colours your sound and distorts it in as many cool ways as possible.

dissss
Nov 10, 2007

I'm a terrible forums poster with terrible opinions.

Here's a cat fucking a squid.

Lord Booga posted:

Then again, we also have a countrywide fibre roll out with a base rate of 30mbit, all the way up to gigabit.

Hah countrywide. I'm like 20 minutes walk away from the Wellington CDB and am stuck on ADSL.

Lord Booga
Sep 23, 2007
Huh?
Grimey Drawer

dissss posted:

Hah countrywide. I'm like 20 minutes walk away from the Wellington CDB and am stuck on ADSL.

Well... eventual rollout (eventual being sometime in the next decade for some places..)

ToxicSlurpee
Nov 5, 2003

-=SEND HELP=-


Pillbug

darkhand posted:

Worse than that is ~Gold/Platinum/Unobtainium Plated HDMI~ crap. Like, it's digital... It has the data or it doesn't; there's no middle ground, a bit doesn't just suddenly change "flavors" because of the cord.

But better conductors means the signal gets there faster and with less degradation!!!!!

I'm convinced that crap like that only exists because some people are idiots and don't know any better or just want to say "well my cables are gold plated and yours aren't, pleb :smug:"

Tunicate
May 15, 2012

there *is* a quality difference for headphone cables, but that's because low-end headphone cables are just utter crap. So moving to a normal patch cable actually improves poo poo.

JediTalentAgent
Jun 5, 2005
Hey, look. Look, if- if you screw me on this, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine, you rat bastard!

Tunicate posted:

there *is* a quality difference for headphone cables, but that's because low-end headphone cables are just utter crap. So moving to a normal patch cable actually improves poo poo.

Along those lines, I actually bought someone some headphones a few years back as a gift and did bit of research on the internet about them to see how they rated. I learned there was a headphone mod hobby where people were going in and taking them apart and replacing the included cables and soldering in new ones, doing some other changes to the construction, etc. to make them sound better. Sort of surprised by that, for some reason.

Vanagoon
Jan 20, 2008


Best Dead Gay Forums
on the whole Internet!

JediTalentAgent posted:

Along those lines, I actually bought someone some headphones a few years back as a gift and did bit of research on the internet about them to see how they rated. I learned there was a headphone mod hobby where people were going in and taking them apart and replacing the included cables and soldering in new ones, doing some other changes to the construction, etc. to make them sound better. Sort of surprised by that, for some reason.

The Koss 60 ohm drivers have a baffle in front of the driver and people love to gently caress with it for whatever reason:
http://www.head-fi.org/t/124243/kramer-mod-ksc75

I like the way they sound out of the box thank you very much.

Porta Pros and the KTXPro1 are great cheapies.

tight aspirations
Jul 13, 2009

Geomancing posted:

The more leaf cover you're under, the less accurate it'll be, if it can even get a reading. When I worked as a surveyor's rodman, we'd occasionally have to go do some GPS work around woods. One time we were on a hill, still some trees above us, and even sticking the receiver on its pole up in a tree, it took forever to get any reading at all, and taking it back to the office, it was a reading more than ten feet off, when in the open it could be accurate to within an eight of an inch.

Doesn't civilian GPS have a built-in error of like 20 feet?

1000 Brown M and Ms
Oct 22, 2008

F:\DL>quickfli 4-clowns.fli

Geoj posted:

There will always be audiophile :spergin: who keep tube amps (and other forms of tube-driven audio equipment) popular.

I don't know if I'd call much audophile grade stuff 'popular', at least outside it's niche.

Guitarists are pretty conservative though - look at how the most popular guitars are still Fenders and Gibsons that haven't really changed much in 50+ years. They probably won't change over to modelling amps for a very long time.

azflyboy
Nov 9, 2005

Jonathan Yeah! posted:

Doesn't civilian GPS have a built-in error of like 20 feet?

Not any more.

When GPS was first made available to civilians, there was a system called "selective availability" that introduced errors into non-military GPS receivers, but that was disabled in 2000, and the current block of GPS satellites don't even have the SA hardware installed. Modern GPS receivers do have some limits in them to prevent military use, since GPS receivers capable of operating above 60,000ft in altitude or is moving more than 1000 knots require special export authorization to keep them from being used in things like missiles.

The accuracy of modern GPS receivers is pretty darn impressive, since the units used on some airplanes have to know their position within a 600ft circle at all times (which isn't too bad for something moving that fast), but they generally know their position to within 60ft or better unless something is interfering with the GPS signal.

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Platystemon
Feb 13, 2012

as a person who never leaves my house i've done pretty well for myself.
The U.S. Coast Guard, FAA, and DOT undermined selective availability with Differential GPS and Wide Area Augmentation System.

DGPS and WAAS are not themselves obsolete—they improve GPS accuracy above and beyond correcting for SA—but they were instrumental in SA’s obsolescence.

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