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Industrial chemists call it "inspirational" 
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Jul 1, 2015 10:16
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Boiled Water posted:Industrial chemists call it "inspirational" I hear industrial chemistry teeters between boring and scary, while "interesting" is a rarer commodity. Cooking and selling meth would probably spice things up a bit.
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Jul 1, 2015 10:29
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An interesting thread from another forum about building Pentium Pro PCs.
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Jul 1, 2015 12:50
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On that topic, I was toying with the idea of putting together an ALR Revolution 6x6 years ago, the only 6-way Pentium Pro machine made. You could find the parts pretty cheap on ebay, but I never got further than picking up a memory card and two CPU cards. The Pentium Pro only supported 4 cpu multiprocessing, but ALR came up with a clever way to work around that limitation and build a 6 cpu machine. The way they did that was they divided the CPUs into two groups of 3, then a special arbitrator circuit presented a fourth "fake" CPU in each group and passed the instructions sent to the fake CPU over to the other group. 
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Jul 1, 2015 13:04
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That sounds like a recipe for bugs and weird race conditions. I love it.
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Jul 1, 2015 15:41
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thespaceinvader posted:PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. Technically, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth and PHP was still written in Perl, it initially stood for Personal Home Pages thespaceinvader posted:Nerds lover recursive acronyms. Also "Yet Another X"
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Jul 1, 2015 16:06
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KozmoNaut posted:That sounds like a recipe for bugs and weird race conditions. I love it.
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Jul 1, 2015 16:15
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thespaceinvader posted:PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. That was them trying to force something into 'php' after 'personal home page' stopped being correct.
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Jul 1, 2015 16:33
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Collateral Damage posted:Iirc they had plans for 9 and 12 cpu machines as well by putting the cpu groups in a circle, but I haven't read much about them so I assume they never saw market. Not entirely true. Intel is still working on that. One of the nice things about having 200 MHz processors is that you could, over time, make individual processors faster. Single-threaded programs are just flat out way easier to deal with but an individual core can only be so fast. The problem is then you need to write programs very differently. So now they're working on stuff like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi I figure it was just more cost-effective to make single cpu machines and let's be honest most people wanted simple machines that had word, e-mail, minesweeper, and a calculator.
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Jul 1, 2015 16:56
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Manfrompoot posted:
I had one. It didn't even autocenter the mouse bit. Doom really was...
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Jul 1, 2015 18:34
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hackbunny posted:Technically, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth and PHP was still written in Perl, it initially stood for Personal Home Pages Microsoft denies that 'Bing' is 'bing is not google', but nerds gonna nerd.
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Jul 1, 2015 19:07
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CoolCat posted:A personal favourite of mine was the MiniDisc. Around 1999-2000 I had a portable Minidisc player, a Denon home Minidisc player/recorder, and I got an in-dash Minidisc changer installed in my car. An album would take up a whole disc but it beat hauling CDs around and worrying about scratching them, Then my car got broken into and my stereo stolen and iPod for Windows came out in 2003. (Which was weird at the beginning because you had to use third party software to build a music library - I forget the software) Cat Hassler has a new favorite as of 03:16 on Jul 2, 2015 |
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Jul 2, 2015 03:14
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Freshman year of college for my radio course we had to go out and purchase minidiscs to record our assignments on  This was in 2009, cannot speak to whether or not this was already an obsolete thing but it definitely felt like it was.
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Jul 2, 2015 03:44
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My first programming teacher had us put our midterm assignments onto floppies. He went by the vet later that day, forgot he still had our assignments in his jacket pocket, and got a complimentary fridge magnet
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Jul 2, 2015 04:11
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Tunicate posted:My first programming teacher had us put our midterm assignments onto floppies. This was me in 2002 and it was already obsolete by then. My laptop at the time didn't have a floppy drive so I had to buy one. E: College freshman programming.
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Jul 2, 2015 04:14
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Humphreys posted:Behold this innovation from Australia Post! We have this in canada and it actually serves a purpose. Employers are legally required to provide you with paper copies of certain documents (tax papers, records of employment etc). Sending them via email does not meet the legal requirements to prove they were dispatched, normally they have to be sent via regular mail with tracking etc. So these online mailboxes are set up with delivery receipts that meet the legal requirements. The one in canada is called ePost, it's actually handy as I can have bills forwarded to my bank so they get paid automatically.
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Jul 2, 2015 05:08
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sweeperbravo posted:Freshman year of college for my radio course we had to go out and purchase minidiscs to record our assignments on Our local university still has a minidisc deck in every booth and editing bay. Obviously, they're rarely used, but they're nice to have around when you need them. They usually only get turned on when someone forgets his or her laptop charger and still needs to record an aircheck during a shift.
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Jul 2, 2015 14:07
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Safety Meetings posted:The one in canada is called ePost, it's actually handy as I can have bills forwarded to my bank so they get paid automatically. I'm seeing this kind of thing a lot in this thread. Can you not set up your bills to be automatically charged to a card or checking account electronically? Everybody who sends me a bill just charges my debit card or a credit card on the due date and don't bother sending paper bills anywhere. Even a pissant little town in Texas let me pay power and cable automatically and that was 8 years ago.
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Jul 2, 2015 14:15
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Is it me or is there an alarming lack of easy to use electronic transfer methods in the states? Here in Australia there's B-Pay, which apparently was a world first in having banks agree to a single bill payment service. You pretty much just put in your biller code and the reference number and it does the rest. A company has to be signed up to use this however. But even then almost everyone here can be paid by electronic transfer and I can even setup most bills to pay automatically if I wanted to. Also pretty much every bank here has a reasonably well rounded app so payments online is pretty commonplace.
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Jul 2, 2015 15:01
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The us very much is behind the times. I believe banking software written in cobol is to blame.
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Jul 2, 2015 15:20
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If you're paying a corporation of some sort, online bill pay is easy. All banks have it, and most companies are set up to receive electronic payments, so it goes through in a day or two. At my last apartment, I had one local telecom provider who wasn't set up to receive them, so when I did an online bill pay for them, my bank actually just printed out a check and mailed it to them...still free, so I couldn't complain, but it took over a week on average. But if you want to send money to a person? Ha, good luck. There's a reason that companies like SquareCash and Venmo exist, and why Snapchat and Facebook Messenger now have the ability to send money . Banks in the US do not make it quick or easy.
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Jul 2, 2015 15:24
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Yeah, in Canada it's as easy as doing an Interac transfer, most if not all banks support it here. The US is crazy behind when it comes to banking stuff.
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Jul 2, 2015 15:38
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Boiled Water posted:The us very much is behind the times. I believe banking software written in cobol is to blame. It's really not a software problem. The UK's banking infrastructure is COBOL on Z/OS mainframes, yet we have direct debit, standing orders, and inter-bank transfers and have for decades. "Writing a physical cheque to pay a bill" is a quaint thing that old people did back when the world was black & white.
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Jul 2, 2015 15:59
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Oh wow. Here in Australia if wanted to send money to a mate all I need to is put in their Bank Service Branch number and account number and boom! funds direct into their account. No fees. Sometimes there are delays as banks tend to sit on the cash for a day or so, mostly if it's interbank transfers. But you can setup accounts to be linked so there's no delay. There's talk about having the delay removed as well. Pretty much every bank now have a robust app where if you had no card or cash and someone gave you an invoice with their details on it, you could pay for services on the spot, even emailing them a receipt. A new feature that's rolling out is cardless withdrawal where you use your phone to request an amount and it gives you a code to input at an ATM to collect. I could even text that code to a mate for them to collect at an ATM. It's pretty rare for me to actually be carrying cash nowadays as even parking meters and vending machines are slowly catching up. That kind of explains why BitCoiners go nuts about the idea of an online currency that can go from owner to owner without a bank given there's nothing like what we have in the states.
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Jul 2, 2015 16:00
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Yeah, basically it's not any kind of technology problem, it's just American banks being assholes and making it difficult for people. Most people's paychecks are direct-deposited these days, and bills are easily paid online, but for person-to-person transactions you use cash or a check. I had occasion to appreciate checks recently, when I left my wallet at home but had a loose check in my purse for no good reason. I was picking up prescriptions, and the girl at CVS let me write a check - for controlled substances! - with no ID, no driver's license number, nothing. (Mind you, I go there all the time and she knows me. Still, I appreciate North Dakota at times like that.)
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Jul 2, 2015 16:20
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That just seems so ridiculously backwards. Right now, I have two competing apps on my phone, made by two different groups of banks and telcos. They each allow me to securely transfer small amounts (~$300 in one app, ~$1150 in the other) to other users, or participating stores. There are daily and monthly limits, so to transfer larger amounts, I have to use my bank's app or online banking website, which use stronger authentication methods. The apps are brilliant though for small transactions and they're heaps safer than cash. KozmoNaut has a new favorite as of 16:52 on Jul 2, 2015 |
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Jul 2, 2015 16:50
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Now I wonder, in countries where nearly every transaction is handled electronically and no one carries cash - how does the black market work? Do you still use bank transfers to buy coke from your dealer? Does he use them to buy from his supplier, or would he be worried about leaving a paper trail?
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Jul 2, 2015 17:35
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I think those kinds of deals still use cash. It's illegal here to conduct business transactions over ~$1500, because of widespread tax evasion on home renovations etc., but there's obviously nothing stopping you from buying drugs etc. with large amounts of cash. However, having large amounts of cash on you is probable cause for the police to search/question/detain you.
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Jul 2, 2015 18:03
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That's also a big reason U.S. currency no longer has anything larger than a $100 bill. Its a lot harder for a drug dealer to move a pallet of money around than a duffel bag.
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Jul 2, 2015 18:35
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Cat Hatter posted:That's also a big reason U.S. currency no longer has anything larger than a $100 bill. Its a lot harder for a drug dealer to move a pallet of money around than a duffel bag. This is also why the Euro is preferred in countries where both currencies can be used; the 500E note is a lot bigger (and thus smaller)
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Jul 2, 2015 18:56
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Cat Hatter posted:That's also a big reason U.S. currency no longer has anything larger than a $100 bill. Its a lot harder for a drug dealer to move a pallet of money around than a duffel bag. Bills larger than $100 have always been hard to come by. Bills in such large denominations were minted for government transactions across departments, not for everyday use.
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Jul 3, 2015 02:14
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Cat Hatter posted:That's also a big reason U.S. currency no longer has anything larger than a $100 bill. Its a lot harder for a drug dealer to move a pallet of money around than a duffel bag. The $100 bill has been a standard currency in worldwide markets for a rather long time last I heard. American currency is considered the safest currency in the world simply because it isn't likely to lose its value any time soon. Part of the reason it is $100 bills is because larger notes are tracked much more closely. You can get stuff like $500 but you can't just spend it like regular cash. If memory serves you can't spend something bigger than $100 without doing the proper paperwork. Larger denominations are also printed much less so there probably just isn't enough to use. Plus $100 bills aren't likely to get to the "literal pallet of cash" level. $1,000,000 is 10,000 bills. Since a bill weighs about a gram that comes out to a bit over 22 pounds per million. A literal ton of $100 bills would be almost $91,000,000 and I highly doubt single transactions that big are common anywhere for any reason.
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Jul 3, 2015 04:54
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ToxicSlurpee posted:You can get stuff like $500 but you can't just spend it like regular cash. If memory serves you can't spend something bigger than $100 without doing the proper paperwork. Larger denominations are also printed much less so there probably just isn't enough to use.
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Jul 3, 2015 05:14
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My brother's rear end in a top hat boss once paid him his wages in 500€ notes. He was loving destitute despite having a few grand in his wallet.
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Jul 3, 2015 05:24
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Larger denominations are also printed much less so there probably just isn't enough to use. Plus $100 bills aren't likely to get to the "literal pallet of cash" level. $1,000,000 is 10,000 bills. Since a bill weighs about a gram that comes out to a bit over 22 pounds per million. A literal ton of $100 bills would be almost $91,000,000 and I highly doubt single transactions that big are common anywhere for any reason. Not common, but they do happen.
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Jul 3, 2015 05:28
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Jerry Cotton posted:My brother's rear end in a top hat boss once paid him his wages in 500€ notes. He was loving destitute despite having a few grand in his wallet. Has no one told him about banks?
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Jul 3, 2015 06:10
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Boiled Water posted:Has no one told him about banks? Saturday.
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Jul 3, 2015 06:15
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I have a more pressing question: Why singe payed in cash at all? Are you in Greece?
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Jul 3, 2015 07:08
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Boiled Water posted:I have a more pressing question: Why singe payed in cash at all? Are you in Greece? You'll have to ask the boss. Last time I heard he'd left the country.
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Jul 3, 2015 07:12
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Boiled Water posted:I have a more pressing question: Why singe payed in cash at all? Are you in Greece? A boss is mentioned, which implies employment, can't be Greece.  I imagine  would be more appropriate.
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Jul 3, 2015 15:52
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