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Trabant posted:But Fab 1 fits the thread topic perfectly! PC World says the disks were DOS and CP/M. Apparently the actual computer type is unknown, though.
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Jan 7, 2016 00:23
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monolithburger posted:You just know every child that tested that out hit themselves square in the face 9 times out of 10. I'd be more concerned with the fact that the child has a rope around his neck.
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Jan 7, 2016 00:51
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Chocolate Teapot posted:I'd be more concerned with the fact that the child has a rope around his neck. The joys of asphyxiation and whiplash are only a kick away!
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Jan 7, 2016 01:02
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There's a block on the rope to keep it from strangling you if pulled, but that somehow doesn't make it look safe.
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Jan 7, 2016 01:13
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Computer viking posted:There's a block on the rope to keep it from strangling you if pulled, but that somehow doesn't make it look safe. There are enough other ways to hurt you with a rope hanging from your neck. A little later, Skip-it was born. Many people tripped.
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Jan 7, 2016 01:34
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Computer viking posted:There's a block on the rope to keep it from strangling you if pulled, but that somehow doesn't make it look safe. According to the patent description that's an optional feature. This was cited as prior art: 
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Jan 7, 2016 01:45
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Samuel L. ACKSYN posted:PC World says the disks were DOS and CP/M. This is because huge swathes of computers in those days were custom for that model. Today, everything is a PC-AT clone, so all the operating stack from the hardware on up is the same. This was not the case previously, and each model of computer would have its own hardware stack and accompanying BIOS and operating system build. The closest analogy I can make is the different architectures linux supports, but even that is very standardized, with one ARMv7 system being much the same as another. In the days when the Z80 was still used as a CPU for personal computers, each system was very different from another, and the consumer could choose between different BIOS's as well as different operating systems, further complicating things. The IBM PC-AT changed all this, when IBM tried to maintain compatibility between models, and then lost the court case against other manufacturers who were making copies (clones) of the system. Attempts to customize this system (IBM PS/2 or Tandy desktop) got shut out of any support by third parties, and effectively we are using the PC-AT to this day. The switch to x86-64 and UEFI is finally changing to a more modern standard, not just extending the existing one.
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Jan 7, 2016 02:08
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EoRaptor posted:The switch to x86-64 and UEFI is finally changing to a more modern standard, not just extending the existing one. UEFI is a beautiful example of how to replace something bad but functional with something even worse.
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Jan 7, 2016 02:32
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Shifty Pony posted:According to the patent description that's an optional feature. People really struggled before videogames huh? 
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Jan 7, 2016 02:54
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SubG posted:Or Soylent and antibiotics, to kill off your gut bacteria so you no longer have to poop. This is something Rob Rhinehart, the guy who invented Soylent, actually did: He's going to regret that when the C. diff hits him. 
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Jan 7, 2016 04:39
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Woolie Wool posted:He's going to regret that when the C. diff hits him. Rob Rhinehart is what you would get if a libertarian futurist and an anarcho-primitivist settled their differences by headbutting each other until one died and the survivor had severe brain damage.
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Jan 7, 2016 05:01
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GWBBQ posted:In addition to giving up water, he tried giving up alternating current http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1331 Some moron posted:The walls are buzzing. I know this because I have a magnet implanted in my hand and whenever I reach near an outlet I can feel them. I can feel fortresses of industry miles away burning prehistoric hydrocarbons by the megaton. I can feel the searing pain and loss of consciousness from when I was shocked by exposed house wiring as a boy. I can feel the deep cut of the power bill when I was living near the poverty line. I can feel the cold uncertainty of the first time the power went out due to a storm when I was a child. How long before the delicate veil of civilization turns to savagery with no light nor heat nor refrigeration?  Speaking of obsolete technology (when not camping in the wilderness). Does this guy not have plumbed natural gas?
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Jan 7, 2016 05:15
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Probably the manufacturer saying this is the reason he uses it:quote:Primus PowerGas is our carbon dioxide neutral fuel. To offset carbon dioxide emissions from the gas and the metal cartridge, we support the Darkwoods Forest project that is managed by Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) and the Forest Carbon Group. Darkwoods, one of the most biologically diverse and oldest forests in Canada, is now a permanently protected conservation area thanks to the project. It is the largest project in Canada’s history and covers 55,000 hectares that include 17 watersheds, 50 lakes and a stand of western red cedar more than 600 years old. Unlike several neighbouring forests, Darkwoods is no longer threatened by deforestation. By preventing deforestation and introducing sustainable forest management, which include replantation of trees, the CO2 storage capacity increases. As trees capture CO2, the net balance of CO2 emissions from the gas is zero. The entire Darkwoods area in British Columbia is now protected and only a small part of the land is used for sustainable forestry.
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Jan 7, 2016 05:49
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WebDog posted:Sounds like a relic from old school Quake 3 where pro gamers turned everything distracting off so the game had no lighting or animations and dropping the resolution down to get stuff like 98FPS and so on. Quake 3/Quake Live players still do that and get pissed off when people tell them that it is strange.
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Jan 7, 2016 07:00
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Pham Nuwen posted:UEFI is a beautiful example of how to replace something bad but functional with something even worse. Would you explain this in more detail?
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Jan 7, 2016 08:23
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Boiled Water posted:Would you explain this in more detail? I haven't written anything talking to/running in EFI, though I did write a BIOS floppy bootblock in assembly once: Typical BIOS booting might be annoyingly far from how the hardware actually works today, but it has a tiny "API" which is usually implemented reasonably near the standard. In practice, a class of students can write their own bootloaders in a week, and then you're basically done talking to the BIOS and leave it to the OS to enumerate hardware and hopefully dig up enough drivers to make use of it. UEFI is perhaps best described as a small OS in itself, with ways to write and load drivers and arbitrary programs. To boot, you write an executable file (in windows PE format) that links to UEFI function calls, and use that to find and boot the OS. UEFI can initialize things for you, though all it's typically used for is grabbing a working high-res framebuffer to put your boot animations in. Oh, and since there is a lot more to implement, there's also more ways to do it wrong - as the motherboard makers have been demonstrating for some years now. (It's getting better, though). The main problem with UEFI - beyond "if safe boot is on your OS needs to be signed by MS", which seems to work out ok in practice - is just that it's quite overengineered for a bootloader.
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Jan 7, 2016 11:01
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Platystemon posted:
Camping stoves inside of your house are a great idea, and totally not a massive fire hazard. This man only makes good decisions.
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Jan 7, 2016 12:46
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Trabant posted:But Fab 1 fits the thread topic perfectly! Writers are weird about what they write on, so it doesn't surprise me. George Rape-Rape Martin writes exclusively with WordStar 4.0 on a DOS computer.
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Jan 7, 2016 12:59
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carry on then posted:I still get a kick out of UT2004 playing a "holy poo poo" sound clip when you max the graphics. Which is much less impressive when you're playing on an ultraportable laptop and it still hits 60FPS. My mates and I still to this day call putting a game into highest detail as "holy poo poo mode".
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Jan 7, 2016 13:34
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1000 Brown M and Ms posted:IIRC I needed drivers for the CD drive, ethernet, monitor to get it above 640x480 in 256 colours, USB, sound, and probably a couple of others that I'm forgetting now. Maybe I'm not looking in the right places, but drivers from that era seem quite hard to find. There is at least one VESA universal driver that's been written specifically for windows98, it's even working for Win98 VMs. Perhaps you can try it? This should be it: http://bearwindows.zcm.com.au/vbempj_x64.zip, from this page: http://www.navozhdeniye.narod.ru/vbemp.htm
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Jan 7, 2016 13:51
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Thanks for the advice, but this was years ago in another country with a person who I haven't kept in touch with. But if I ever decide to do something similar I'll keep that in mind.
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Jan 7, 2016 14:05
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Computer viking posted:I haven't written anything talking to/running in EFI, though I did write a BIOS floppy bootblock in assembly once: UEFI is just a worse Open Firmware.
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Jan 7, 2016 15:21
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Keiya posted:UEFI is just a worse Open Firmware. Open Firmware (OpenBoot on Sun) was pretty decent, agreed. I liked hitting the Stop-a key combo to pull up the firmware console even after the OS was booted. Coreboot is the best, really. It's incredibility fast, it's open source, and I know the guy who started the project so I can just ask him if I need help 
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Jan 7, 2016 15:52
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Platystemon posted:
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Jan 7, 2016 16:31
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Isn't natural gas pretty regional? I know no one in New England that has it (they all use oil, electric, or wood). Most everyone I know in the South with a house built in the last 30 years seems to have natural gas.
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Jan 7, 2016 16:44
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Krispy Kareem posted:Isn't natural gas pretty regional? I know no one in New England that has it (they all use oil, electric, or wood). Most everyone I know in the South with a house built in the last 30 years seems to have natural gas. Back home in eastern Washington we didn't have gas because hydroelectric power was so cheap. Luckily we do have it here in New Mexico, where most of the electricity is coal-fired.
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Jan 7, 2016 16:50
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Krispy Kareem posted:Isn't natural gas pretty regional? I know no one in New England that has it (they all use oil, electric, or wood). Most everyone I know in the South with a house built in the last 30 years seems to have natural gas. As far as I've seen, it is. In rural areas, the infrastructure may just not be there for a gas hookup, but (at least here in the Midwest) there are delivery services that will come by regularly to fill tanks for you if you have gas appliances. If you're really rural, it's probably cheaper to go for wood, though. Wood stoves are cheap as hell to buy and maintain, and if you own some acreage, fuel grows right out in the back yard!
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Jan 7, 2016 17:08
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"A worse OpenFirmware" seems like a good summary, yeah, though perhaps not the most informative for the mildly curious.  Oh, and piped gas is so regional that I don't think a single house in Norway has it. We mostly hear about the idea when a random house explodes somewhere else, which understandably limits the enthusiasm for it.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:22
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Computer viking posted:"A worse OpenFirmware" seems like a good summary, yeah, though perhaps not the most informative for the mildly curious. Don't you guys have a lot of oil? Natural gas is basically a byproduct of drilling for oil IIRC
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Jan 7, 2016 17:33
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The house I live in near Philadelphia was originally built with gas lighting and coal fired steam heat. The coal was replaced by an oil burner. Electricity was added in the 1910s, in the 1970s, there were gas stoves added to the kitchens. There was a gas dryer at one point, but it's electric now. Plumbing wasn't original of course, hot water was oil fired, but converted to natural gas last year. The knob and tube wiring uses the old gas pipes as the neutral in some spots. The circuits are ring circuits in some places. Imagine living in a house not designed for modern rooms like bathrooms or kitchens. Sure there were kitchens but not like today. My bathroom was the stairs to the cellar at one point. 0toShifty has a new favorite as of 18:04 on Jan 7, 2016 |
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Jan 7, 2016 18:01
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Krispy Kareem posted:Isn't natural gas pretty regional? I know no one in New England that has it (they all use oil, electric, or wood). Most everyone I know in the South with a house built in the last 30 years seems to have natural gas. Some parts of New England have gas lines from Canada, and others coming up from NJ. The area I live in (north western VT) has gas lines almost everywhere, and it's slowly expanding to the southern and central parts of the state.  That's from 2009, and it's only the larger pipelines, obviously.
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Jan 7, 2016 18:21
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carry on then posted:I still get a kick out of UT2004 playing a "holy poo poo" sound clip when you max the graphics. Which is much less impressive when you're playing on an ultraportable laptop and it still hits 60FPS. I feel similarly about Warcraft2's "Your sound card works perfectly!" I sometimes do an impression of that guy's voice when I install a new game  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_A1GNx0M9M Speaking of obsolete technology, how about having to manually set IRQ numbers when installing games? 
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Jan 7, 2016 19:27
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0toShifty posted:The house I live in near Philadelphia was originally built with gas lighting and coal fired steam heat. The coal was replaced by an oil burner. Electricity was added in the 1910s, in the 1970s, there were gas stoves added to the kitchens. There was a gas dryer at one point, but it's electric now. Plumbing wasn't original of course, hot water was oil fired, but converted to natural gas last year. Kitchens were usually lean-tos built on the side of houses so they could catch on fire and not hurt anything and be rebuilt easily.
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Jan 7, 2016 19:29
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Zaphod42 posted:I feel similarly about Warcraft2's "Your sound card works perfectly!" When I was running Redhat on a 486, it could never seem to remember the config for the ISA soundcard from boot to boot, so every time I booted it would run the "Kudzu" autoconfiguration thing. For sound cards configuration, it played a clip of Linus Torvalds to test: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK0xXFZtJ8Q Burned into my loving brain.
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Jan 7, 2016 19:31
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Pham Nuwen posted:When I was running Redhat on a 486, it could never seem to remember the config for the ISA soundcard from boot to boot, so every time I booted it would run the "Kudzu" autoconfiguration thing. For sound cards configuration, it played a clip of Linus Torvalds to test: That's solid gold. I'm gonna have to remember that audio clip and use it at some point in the future.
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Jan 7, 2016 19:54
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Greatbacon posted:Haha, I ran into that when I got a I seriously doubt Deus Ex was written with multithreading support, so I'm not sure why that helped!
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Jan 7, 2016 20:11
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gaming laptop for my birthday back in the late 2000s and picked up Deus Ex on a Steam sale.
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Because all of the processes running on other cores were then running on the same one as Deus Ex I would guess.
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Jan 7, 2016 20:26
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Non Serviam posted:Camping stoves inside of your house are a great idea, and totally not a massive fire hazard. This man only makes good decisions. Actually that stove is relatively safe since it uses pressurized flammable gas that's ready to burn when it exits the can, really no different than a natural gas range. If he was using a white gas camping stove indoors I'd be concerned - they pass low pressure liquid fuel through a loop of pipe that is exposed directly to the flame, which vaporizes the fuel before it reaches the burner. Once it's up to operating temperature this is perfectly safe, however before it gets up to temperature you have to prime it by filling a small cup at the base of the burner with fuel and setting it on fire.
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Jan 7, 2016 20:36
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Anyone remember Blue Frog? It was an attempt to fight spammers with spam. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Frog The spam community fought back and they faded out pretty fast, but it kind of worked for a while.
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Jan 7, 2016 21:42
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Mercury Ballistic posted:Anyone remember Blue Frog? It was an attempt to fight spammers with spam. I remember them. They must have been doing something right if they pissed off the spammers so much.
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Jan 7, 2016 21:46
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