|
laserghost posted:Someone mentioned game piracy. Most of the civikised world missed the extreme fun that were russian game compilations. 10 games on one CD? No problem! I saw some really elaborate pirate CDs in Europe in the early 00s. BEST OF WAREZ proudly on the cover. Professionally printed cases and real pressed CDs, Digipak cases the size of a double CD that folded out to hold 4-6 discs. Weird installers that would unpack and repack sound files and graphics and took forever. The guy who had them said it was like a subscription, there would be a new compilation out each month.
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2015 19:31
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 19, 2024 09:56 |
|
|
Dick Trauma posted:I'm pleasantly surprised that bringing up the Mold-A-Rama elicited such a widespread response. Maybe this one will do the same. Wow nostalgia trip, I had the 150 in 1 unit too. Talking about the relay I remember thinking I wonder what would happen if I trigger the relay and when the relay makes its connection it switches it off, and then when it springs back maybe I can get it to switch back on and repeat......BUUZZZZZZZZZ loving awesome, I just made a buzzer with a bit mental theorizing.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2015 19:36
|
|
|
axolotl farmer posted:I saw some really elaborate pirate CDs in Europe in the early 00s. BEST OF WAREZ proudly on the cover. Professionally printed cases and real pressed CDs, Digipak cases the size of a double CD that folded out to hold 4-6 discs. Weird installers that would unpack and repack sound files and graphics and took forever. NOW: That's what I call warez! 85 Speaking of, totally obsolete thanks to itunes et al 
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2015 19:36
|
|
|
Fozaldo posted:Wow nostalgia trip, I had the 150 in 1 unit too. Talking about the relay I remember thinking I wonder what would happen if I trigger the relay and when the relay makes its connection it switches it off, and then when it springs back maybe I can get it to switch back on and repeat......BUUZZZZZZZZZ loving awesome, I just made a buzzer with a bit mental theorizing. I can't remember, was it possible to get shocked by those? I don't recall ever getting juiced by my electronics kit. I just purchased the 750-in-1 Snap Circuits kit for my 9 year old's birthday. Here's hoping I didn't just blow 80 bucks.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2015 19:44
|
|
|
axolotl farmer posted:I saw some really elaborate pirate CDs in Europe in the early 00s. BEST OF WAREZ proudly on the cover. Professionally printed cases and real pressed CDs, Digipak cases the size of a double CD that folded out to hold 4-6 discs. Weird installers that would unpack and repack sound files and graphics and took forever. Was it per chance Twilight series? quote:Behind the Twilight series existed a whole organisation, led by two men by the initials of B.G. a.k.a. "De Oorbel" (trans. "the Earring" perhaps a reference to software piracy) from the village of Soest, Netherlands, and the now deceased M.S. a.k.a. "Idi". The organisation also produced and distributed other illegal software packages (Crazybytes) as well as music and films (Moviebox). The CD-ROMs were professionally pressed in large quantities.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2015 19:46
|
|
|
laserghost posted:Was it per chance Twilight series? Don't know, but I remember they actually said BEST OF WAREZ on the cover, so prob someone copying Twillight's thing.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2015 19:55
|
|
|
Krispy Kareem posted:I can't remember, was it possible to get shocked by those? I don't recall ever getting juiced by my electronics kit. If you were very specifically trying to, yes. But you'd have to touch two leads to your tongue or something. They ran off either a 9V or a few AA batteries (depending on which one you had). It is, AFAICT, impossible to shock yourself intentionally or otherwise on the snap circuits.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2015 19:58
|
|
|
Magnus Praeda posted:If you were very specifically trying to, yes. But you'd have to touch two leads to your tongue or something. They ran off either a 9V or a few AA batteries (depending on which one you had). It's definitely possible to give somebody (mild) shocks with a 6V relay rigged as a buzzer, just ask my sister. 
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2015 20:42
|
|
|
Krispy Kareem posted:I can't remember, was it possible to get shocked by those? I don't recall ever getting juiced by my electronics kit. There was a couple of transformers on there so if you knew what you were doing you could up the 9 volt battery a bit I guess, nothing unsafe though, probably not even noticeable without licking the wires.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2015 20:42
|
|
|
Fozaldo posted:There was a couple of transformers on there so if you knew what you were doing you could up the 9 volt battery a bit I guess, nothing unsafe though, probably not even noticeable without licking the wires. I figured as much. I was just trying to figure out if my lifelong propensity for getting shocked started young. "turn it off at the circuit breaker? naaah."
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2015 20:59
|
|
|
Krispy Kareem posted:I figured as much. I was just trying to figure out if my lifelong propensity for getting shocked started young. "turn it off at the circuit breaker? naaah." Come to think of it you couldn't even do anything with the transformers as there was no AC,I can't even think what the hell they were for.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2015 21:06
|
|
|
axolotl farmer posted:Don't know, but I remember they actually said BEST OF WAREZ on the cover, so prob someone copying Twillight's thing. The big ones around here were "Best Of Internet", "Frozen", Silverado" and "Extreme". A few guys at my school had subscriptions to them, and would lend you the CDs if you had a new album they could copy or some good porn, that sort of thing. I remember they all had fancy graphical menus and stuff, usually with chiptunes playing in the background, and there was always a nice split between games, music and random other software. KozmoNaut has a new favorite as of 21:12 on Jun 8, 2015 |
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2015 21:10
|
|
|
I've found what seems to be a really nice talk about dissecting Twilight series of warez CDs: https://archive.org/details/D3T206201308021600TwilightDissectingAWarezCdSeriesElgerJonker I've just skimmed through the video, but there was a surprising amount of work done into those.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2015 21:42
|
|
|
Krispy Kareem posted:Are you referring to DVD extras? Because I thought NetFlix was moving towards offering those options via streaming? It'd make sense as it'd be pretty cheap to provide a directory commentary track alongside the regular audio. Or a couple of hours of low quality behind-the-scenes features. I mean that has nothing to do with the nuts and bolts of digital distribution---this isn't a vinyl-sounds-warmer argument or anything like that. But I still have a region-free DVD player hooked up to my home theatre because I have a whole shitload of films that just aren't available any other way. Like just a couple years ago Celestial started making parts of the Shaw Brothers catalogue available on the iTunes Store. That's cool, but the catalogue is around 800 films, and I think about 75 are available for streaming. And they're an outlier in that they aggressively go after putting their catalogue in new markets. Imagine you just heard of John Woo and your only way of watching films is via Netflix, iTunes, Hulu, and so on. You can get his Hollywood films and, what, one or two of his Hong Kong films? And he's a big loving name. Once you start talking about minor/obscure poo poo your chances of finding it digitally drop off precipitously. And Hong Kong/Chinese language cinema is an example of non-Hollywood filmmaking that has a comparatively large and comparatively mainstream audience. A similar argument applies to silent films, independent and various new-wave film movements, and so on. Again, this has nothing to do with digital content distribution as a thing in and of itself. And presumably availability will get better over time (like it did with DVDs and is still happening with blu ray). My point's just that if you care about the depth of the catalog, physical media is still a long loving way from obsolescence unless all you care about is poo poo that's recent and popular.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2015 21:42
|
|
|
Dick Trauma posted:I think this is the only weirdly shaped record I ever bought, but it's a doozy. I bought that one back in the 80s (from Walmart of all places) for about $6. I found this at a record store: Neil Young "Southern Pacific/Motor City"; Disc:  Front cover:  Back cover:  Inside one:  Inside two: 
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2015 01:23
|
|
|
Pagers. Nothing says "I am both important and stupid" like a pager.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2015 01:36
|
|
|
Thunder Moose posted:Pagers. Nothing says "I am both important and stupid" like a pager. When I worked for a paper/chemical distribution warehouse in the late 90s/early 00s, our salesmen used pagers. A couple had cellphones of their own, but we rarely called them on them.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2015 01:41
|
|
|
Piracy pretty much always driven by a want of accessibility. It's not going to die as you will always have kids and teenagers who don't have access to a credit card, and want access to the latest thing. Even today it's still alive and well, rips still exist, most of the time they just remove extra languages and generally are there for people who can't download 30GB games. Even the more locked down games (like UbiSoft's stuff) are a tantalising challenge for groups wanting to get some sort of reputation for themselves Steam based games are pretty much now a common way of delivering a 0-day release as that platform has been reversed engineered, right down to being able to grab things off the Workshop without even having the game. From what I can gather people just download the pre-load then wait for the final files and crack to get released. Skyrim was done almost immediately at launch. Even legitimate sales are now getting undermined from third party Steam resellers as countries like Australia push up prices to absurd degrees ($80+ for a new game) that consumer affairs magazines actively suggest you find ways to buy things internationally to get around it. In other countries with lax copyright laws, like China, it's booming because their government only allows something like 30 international films into their box office. That's given rise to hollywood bidding ferociously to gain access to a marketplace that just bootlegged the hell and back out of their films, the kicker is they have to usually film some Chinese actor only scene to slot into the regional release, but it gets them a far bigger return. An interesting case study was back when Avatar was released and the Government was well aware their locally made film about Confucius was going to get drowned, so they made a deal where if you buy a ticket for Confucius, you got one for Avatar - thus saving it at the box office...and overflowing bins everywhere with discarded tickets. DVD region locking got pretty insidious for a short moment. Well aware that people were simply buying players and bypassing the region code there was a very short lived way to detect this and stop certain DVDs from playing should your player have had it's region changed. The only way around it was to manually navigate to the chapter where the movie started, which was a bit of a neat trick as not all players supported manual inputs.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2015 03:26
|
|
|
SubG posted:No, I'm saying that the library of films available via streaming is small (compared to the library available on physical media) and coverage is biased toward recent films with a broad, mainstream audience. And, more broadly, this applies to digital content in other media (music, books) as well. Netflix streaming is just weird in general, really. You're not going to be able to watch Disney's Frozen over it any time soon, but if you're in the mood for the 2013 Russian film Snow Queen? Well, are you ever in luck. 
Wanamingo has a new favorite as of 07:34 on Jun 9, 2015 |
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2015 07:32
|
|
|
I sort of wonder how much something like Youtube's fan-made music videos have similarly changed the file-sharing music scene. Instead of having to load up a file sharing program, go to shady sites, etc., I can type in a random song or album in a trusted and well-known site like Youtube and hear it on demand.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2015 07:57
|
|
|
JediTalentAgent posted:I sort of wonder how much something like Youtube's fan-made music videos have similarly changed the file-sharing music scene. Instead of having to load up a file sharing program, go to shady sites, etc., I can type in a random song or album in a trusted and well-known site like Youtube and hear it on demand. Probably has. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3bRPHPQsOs
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2015 08:08
|
|
|
Thunder Moose posted:Pagers. Nothing says "I am both important and stupid" like a pager. Our doctors wear them when they're on duty at the hospital. Given that I think the nationwide pager network was shut down some years ago, I have no idea how they've implemented it. Seems useful, though.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2015 08:43
|
|
|
Computer viking posted:Our doctors wear them when they're on duty at the hospital. Given that I think the nationwide pager network was shut down some years ago, I have no idea how they've implemented it. Seems useful, though. It's possible that they're just faking being pagers, and are basically just stripped down phones 'paging' over SMS.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2015 11:07
|
|
|
Slime posted:It's possible that they're just faking being pagers, and are basically just stripped down phones 'paging' over SMS. One-way pagers are still used in secure areas that don't allow 2-way RF communications. Not sure how they do it.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2015 11:40
|
|
|
Computer viking posted:Our doctors wear them when they're on duty at the hospital. Given that I think the nationwide pager network was shut down some years ago, I have no idea how they've implemented it. Seems useful, though. I think a lot of times these places will roll out something like Vocera for on-premisis paging networks. This is more to rapidly contact a Dr or nurse who could be anywhere on the campus but not have cell-phone coverage. Off site, I imagine they use a call-tree that dials home lines and mobile numbers at the same time. The big advantages pagers still have is they're built like tanks, a battery lasts forever, and you can receive a pager signal in places that mobile phone signals just won't penetrate. The thing is, as a mostly obsolete technology, maintaining a paging infrastructure is stupid-expensive. You can get cases for phones, mandate swappable battery smartphones, and buy microcells to propagate mobile phone networks which is much more inexpensive.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2015 11:52
|
|
|
WebDog posted:DVD region locking got pretty insidious for a short moment. Well aware that people were simply buying players and bypassing the region code there was a very short lived way to detect this and stop certain DVDs from playing should your player have had it's region changed. I remember making beer money by unlocking DVD players. A code is all that was needed, and thankfully the shop I worked for sold mostly brands and models that could be unlocked. Worse was when I was younger, trying to find 'just a VCD' player cos I couldn't afford the $200-$500 for a DVD player. My laptop had a DVD reader drive but only burnt CDs. So I would take the 8+ hour effort of ripping and encoding DVDs down to VCDs. I still have the worst rip I ever made - LOTR Fellowship of the Rings crammed onto one compliant VCD.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2015 12:31
|
|
|
Humphreys posted:I still have the worst rip I ever made - LOTR Fellowship of the Rings crammed onto one compliant VCD.  That is absolutely horrifying.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2015 12:47
|
|
|
Pah, VCDs. Back in my day we had .avis on CD and spent 20 minutes downloading the latest DivX codec before each movie night, and we liked it! Multiple CDs more often than not, as well. "Hey, I've got Lord of the Rings, you want it?" - "Sure, why not." Next thing you know, you get handed 6 full-size jewel cases.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2015 12:56
|
|
|
I made quite a lot of cash selling VCDs at highschool, enough to build a new PC, and buy lunch for my friends from time to time, I would buy the VCDs from China off Yahoo auctions then copy them, and photocopy the covers for free at the local youth club that was in the library. I sold porn on floppy disks before that as I was one of 3 kids at school that had the internet lol.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2015 13:30
|
|
|
Computer viking posted:Our doctors wear them when they're on duty at the hospital. Given that I think the nationwide pager network was shut down some years ago, I have no idea how they've implemented it. Seems useful, though. There are actually still companies that will take your money in exchange for a honest to God nationwide pager.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2015 13:37
|
|
|
blugu64 posted:There are actually still companies that will take your money in exchange for a honest to God nationwide pager. Picture taken just now:  My last job I had a pager, too. I was working as a biomed tech contracted out to almost 2 dozen hospitals in northern New England and New York, mostly in rural areas. Plenty of places with little/no cell coverage. So all the techs had pagers. I left that job in 2013 and got my current job as an IT tech at a managed service provider. And we still use pagers. a God-damned tech company uses pagers. Inertia is a Hell of a thing. The issue right now is that the entire paging system is built on an old piece of software on an old server with a whole bunch of logic and filters created over the last decade and a half. We've demoed other systems recently, and no one wants to be the poor sap to go through and re-create all that logic so that we only page on what we want to. As it is, if we just pointed our alert stream at a new system and turned it on, it's be on the level of an "alert" every five minutes, 99% of which are just junk/false positives/informational message only.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2015 14:04
|
|
|
DrBouvenstein posted:Picture taken just now: These pagers were the bane of my existence at my old fire station where you had a 50-50 shot of receiving legible dispatch information or a jumbled mess. Do not miss them one bit.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2015 14:25
|
|
|
All these odd shaped CDs and records reminded me of flexidiscs, which were the early 1980s equivalent of cover mounted CDs. They were usually square, because they were stapled to magazines with perforations at the spine side so you could tear them off. The best bit is that they didn't just have music on. I saw several that had computer software recorded on them, which you would transfer onto a blank cassette via your stereo. If you were super techy, you could hook your stereo up to your Spectrum and load programs direct from the disc.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2015 15:22
|
|
|
DrBouvenstein posted:Picture taken just now: Looks like a Motorola Advisor Elite, spent a summer recrystallizing those things back in the day.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2015 15:26
|
|
|
You know, one of the reasons people pirated music rampantly in the early days of music piracy was that the music industry seemed to think it was totally OK to release $25 CDs with two good songs on them. How many albums came out that were exorbitantly priced but were mostly just bullshit filler to pad it out to 50 minutes? I remember getting burned several times by that. The album would be hyped like crazy, the one or two good songs would be getting spammed everywhere. then the highly anticipated album would consist of those two songs and then poo poo. No wonder people pirated music; there was no justification in waiting that long to buy an album for those two songs when you could just download them before the album was even fully released. Holy hell does the music industry have a long history of sucking a lot in many different ways then blaming their customers for it when they started losing sales. Then the response was doing stupid poo poo like having albums that installed root kits. I think that's another thing that iTunes should be noted for accomplishing, really. You can buy albums in pieces now. If the album has one good song on it then you pay the $0.99 and get on with your life rather than hoping a single comes out. Can't cram an album full of garbage on everybody because they want that one hit anymore.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2015 15:50
|
|
|
JediTalentAgent posted:I sort of wonder how much something like Youtube's fan-made music videos have similarly changed the file-sharing music scene. Instead of having to load up a file sharing program, go to shady sites, etc., I can type in a random song or album in a trusted and well-known site like Youtube and hear it on demand. I have a coworker who recently cancelled her Spotify account since she was just listening to music through Youtube most of the time, so it's a completely viable way to get your music. ToxicSlurpee posted:You know, one of the reasons people pirated music rampantly in the early days of music piracy was that the music industry seemed to think it was totally OK to release $25 CDs with two good songs on them. How many albums came out that were exorbitantly priced but were mostly just bullshit filler to pad it out to 50 minutes? I remember getting burned several times by that. The album would be hyped like crazy, the one or two good songs would be getting spammed everywhere. then the highly anticipated album would consist of those two songs and then poo poo. No wonder people pirated music; there was no justification in waiting that long to buy an album for those two songs when you could just download them before the album was even fully released. Holy hell does the music industry have a long history of sucking a lot in many different ways then blaming their customers for it when they started losing sales. TBH this is still a problem with pop music, but now that the music industry has embraced a-la-carte pricing and streaming nobody notices anymore. It's almost like they realized selling a couple million copies of a popular song for a buck is more profitable than selling a couple hundred thousand physical CDs with production costs! robodex has a new favorite as of 16:04 on Jun 9, 2015 |
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2015 16:02
|
|
|
Jedit posted:The best bit is that they didn't just have music on. I saw several that had computer software recorded on them, which you would transfer onto a blank cassette via your stereo. If you were super techy, you could hook your stereo up to your Spectrum and load programs direct from the disc. 
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2015 16:05
|
|
|
Youtube has an extra angle--find a bunch of songs you like, use an autoripper program to download the audio only from URL, build a digital library without torrents or limewire. Piracy has gotten so easy nowadays, way easier than it ever has been, but people are still opting for Spotify subscriptions and Pandora One accounts. It really hammers home just how wrong the RIAA was about piracy killing album sales, when it was really their refusal to make it convenient. Now they make way more cash off of ads being served to average users and rake in recurring charges from subscribers, and still have album sales through iTunes, even though literally any person could have the same album ripped from Youtube in about five minutes or less.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2015 16:11
|
|
|
DrBouvenstein posted:Picture taken just now: I'm a software engineer not in IT, but my current job is a pretty small company so for the first 6 months I worked here I was on pager duty and had one pretty much identical to the one pictured here. Yes, even these days. (I think its just IT employees and maybe doctors at this point) Being told I never had to take the pagers home again (because we hired more IT and they got better at uptime) was one of the happiest moments of my life. Otherwise its a great job, but god drat do I hate loving pagers. Somehow far worse than a cellphone because responding to it is such a pain, if you've got an automated system ringing the pager over and over when the poo poo hits the fan its pretty frustrating. JediTalentAgent posted:I sort of wonder how much something like Youtube's fan-made music videos have similarly changed the file-sharing music scene. Instead of having to load up a file sharing program, go to shady sites, etc., I can type in a random song or album in a trusted and well-known site like Youtube and hear it on demand. The fan-made music videos aren't even necessary, any artist worth their salt will already have all their official music videos on youtube for you to listen to for free anytime. The music industry has fundamentally changed. (For the better.) Ain't nobody buying singles anymore.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2015 16:56
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 19, 2024 09:56 |
|
|
I'm currently torn between my retro sensibilities and reason. It would be neater to buy the whole album, because padding or not it was a whole package when it came out and I feel like that's worth preserving; on the other hand I've listened to it a few times now online and there are like four really good songs tops. The divide between "I can listen to this online any time" and "LOCAL COPIES" is something I'm gonna have to sort out after that.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2015 17:02
|
|