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Collateral Damage posted:Another way if the Run command is disabled on the start menu is to hit Ctrl-Alt-Del, bring up task manager and use File->New Task. Or, if you are like me, and you like taskbar autohide, but it sucks. So I pop up Task Manager on my second monitor, then use CTRL-SHIFT-RightClick on the taskbar to access the Exit Explorer menu option. Close it, relaunch from Task Manager, and browse the forums while waiting for it to come back up/
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Jun 30, 2016 16:51
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Samizdata posted:Or, if you are like me, and you like taskbar autohide, but it sucks. So I pop up Task Manager on my second monitor, then use CTRL-SHIFT-RightClick on the taskbar to access the Exit Explorer menu option. Close it, relaunch from Task Manager, and browse the forums while waiting for it to come back up/ what
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Jun 30, 2016 16:54
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KozmoNaut posted:And don't get me started on the shittyness of codec packs. C'mon man, the Combined Community Codec Pack - CCCP for short - was capable of playing just about anything!
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Jun 30, 2016 16:54
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RC and Moon Pie posted:36K would have been a dream. My dial-up didn't go past 14.4K. The first modem I had was 2400 baud. Even going to an interface as simple as Yahoo's was back then needed about 10 minutes to download a single page. 1200 bauds for me. I wasn't allowed to use the modem at first, but then I learnt that our local bank had a dial-up service for paying bills. You had to wait for the text-based form to render line by line, but it worked. Downloading anything from a BBS took about an hour. At some point BBSes started supporting SModem, which was bidirectional and had a text chat to kill time while file transfers were active. Good times. Upgrading past ISDN was a pain, though. The cable companies only catered to downtown residents, satellite Internet wasn't available and only companies and university dorms had direct Internet access for a long while.
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Jun 30, 2016 17:08
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Having started with a 300 baud VICmodem I had nowhere to go but up. First PC had a 2400 baud modem and using Telix I could choose between protocols like XMODEM, YMODEM-G (who needs error correction?) and good golly even ZMODEM! Single digit download speeds. 
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Jun 30, 2016 17:17
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treiz01 posted:C'mon man, the Combined Community Codec Pack - CCCP for short - was capable of playing just about anything! Yeah, but before that there was all kinds of spyware infested crap.
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Jun 30, 2016 18:13
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treiz01 posted:C'mon man, the Combined Community Codec Pack - CCCP for short - was capable of playing just about anything! Yeah, but it always balanced to the left for some reason.
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Jun 30, 2016 18:16
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Spyware-infected or horrifically unstable codec packs like K-lite at that. But before that you had to have a dozen different media players installed on your system. Like Quicktime, which couldn't do full screen unless you paid money to unlock it. The codec mess from before h.264 became prominent is something I don't miss at all.
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Jun 30, 2016 18:22
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I got sick of all that codec bullshit, I switched to VLC pretty early, before v1.
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Jun 30, 2016 18:23
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Platystemon posted:At the time I got broadband, movie downloading wasn’t a thing. I mean, they were on P2P in the form of multi‐part archives, but no one I knew bothered because of storage limitations, quality problems, inability to play them back on a TV screen, &c.. I certainly don't miss the days before Bittorrent. You'd download an entire movie only to find out it was a crappy movie intentionally mislabeled as a good movie. At least if you were lucky. If you were unlucky it would be some sort of disgusting/illegal pornography.
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Jun 30, 2016 23:41
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Depending on where it was from, at least. Irc was actually really reliable through the entire kazaa/etc reign and even deep into the days of bittorrent's popularity. The bots that evolved into having custom cli interfaces were always interesting, i might look into the history of them if i get bored one of these days !list
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Jun 30, 2016 23:50
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I always got in on file sharing stuff early on but ended up sticking with them way past their prime. Early Napster was great. Free? And only 20 minutes to get a song on my rad 56k modem! Then poo poo hit the fan. I still tried to figure out ways to find what I wanted on there after the Metallica thing. My favorite fuckery from then was everyone renaming and sharing Metallica songs tagged as "THE SELL OUT BASTARDS". By the time I had given up on Napster I had cable internet and Kazaa/Limewire became a thing. That was great too until every game or program file became some insidious virus, every music file was grossly mislabeled and the porn, oh god the porn. My "HOT DEEPTHROAT CUM GUZZLING BLONDE", 50mb clip would always inevitably be either unspeakable, illegal horror which cannot be unseen, a guy getting his dickhole hosed with a pen or a slideshow of motorcycle accidents and war atrocities backed with a lovely nu-metal track. Then came soulseek and bittorrent. Both still entirely viable methods of pirating things that one isn't willing to pay for. Actually, soulseek is still really awesome for finding obscure old music. Weird punk and such. And bittorrent is still bittorrent. I pay for most of my stuff now but I love file sharing for getting the strange poo poo that isn't readily available to purchase.
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Jul 1, 2016 04:45
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Is Direct Connect and eMule/eDonkey still a thing? I downloaded insane amounts of stuff on those services from 2002-2007, but then torrents started taking over. It was all about finding the best and biggest hubs and servers to connect to to share with other users.
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Jul 1, 2016 07:23
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I refuse to believe that soulseek is still a thing. I have to check that out even just for nostalgia's sake. Just plain old youtube is surprisingly good for old and obscure music, I've found. Sure there are some compression concerns but when you're at a point where the music you're looking for is by necessity recorded from a 30 year old vinyl single or cassette, you're not getting crisp studio quality either way.
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Jul 1, 2016 07:30
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DC is, at least when I was still at uni a few years back. A bunch of grad students operated their own DC++ hub on campus and there was one in the dorms as well. Presumably they're still going.
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Jul 1, 2016 07:31
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My Lovely Horse posted:I refuse to believe that soulseek is still a thing. I have to check that out even just for nostalgia's sake. You're right about YouTube having pretty much everything but soulseek is absolutely still going strong. Audio quality isn't really a big deal if you're trying to find something from an ancient live show or a 7 inch punk album. Soulseek might have that in an easily saved format. Rather than YouTube, where it may or may not be there the next time you want to listen to it. It's been said before but drat near everything I want to listen to, I can hear on Google play for $10 a month. Anything else, well, I may have to work for it but I can find it. I feel like the industry finally figured it out. Hell, mobile devices with huge storage are obsolete for me now. I thought I couldn't survive without my 120 gb iPod a few years ago. Now I've got a phone with 32 gb of storage and most of that is vacant.
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Jul 1, 2016 08:11
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Grumbletron 4000 posted:You're right about YouTube having pretty much everything but soulseek is absolutely still going strong. Audio quality isn't really a big deal if you're trying to find something from an ancient live show or a 7 inch punk album. Soulseek might have that in an easily saved format. Rather than YouTube, where it may or may not be there the next time you want to listen to it. I know I'm in a fringe demographic but having music devices with storage is still a big deal, because I'm constantly in places where you can't get data service.
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Jul 1, 2016 10:41
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Wasabi the J posted:I know I'm in a fringe demographic but having music devices with storage is still a big deal, because I'm constantly in places where you can't get data service. Same here. I go running with a 6th gen iPod nano and the size is good and convenient. Though if I could run Spotify on my phone without sucking up my meager data allowance and draining my battery I'd not hesitate to make the switch.
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Jul 1, 2016 11:17
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My Lovely Horse posted:Just plain old youtube is surprisingly good for old and obscure music, I've found. I always add any rare tracks I like I find on Youtube to a playlist so I don't lose them and whenever I look at the whole playlist there's always more and more videos that have been removed.
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Jul 1, 2016 12:26
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Arivia posted:what  Samizdata posted:Or, if you are like me, and you like taskbar autohide, but it sucks. So I pop up Task Manager on my second monitor, then use CTRL-SHIFT-RightClick on the taskbar to access the Exit Explorer menu option. Close it, relaunch from Task Manager, and browse the forums while waiting for it to come back up/ Are you saying that sometimes you restart Explorer to fix a problem where the taskbar stops auto-hiding? The fact I didn't know about the Ctrl-Shift-Right click thing to get "Exit Explorer" kind of made it hard for me to understand this 
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Jul 1, 2016 12:32
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Jerry Cotton posted:I always add any rare tracks I like I find on Youtube to a playlist so I don't lose them and whenever I look at the whole playlist there's always more and more videos that have been removed. Just save the drat audio tracks ya loonies.
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Jul 1, 2016 12:57
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Wasabi the J posted:Just save the drat audio tracks ya loonies. Why not save the video?
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Jul 1, 2016 12:58
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Jerry Cotton posted:I always add any rare tracks I like I find on Youtube to a playlist so I don't lose them and whenever I look at the whole playlist there's always more and more videos that have been removed. e: I don't really need to open a video file and look at the cover every time I want to hear a song
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Jul 1, 2016 13:05
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Iron Crowned posted:I think they had Ctrl-Alt-Del blocked out or something. Remember this was in the Windows 95 days You can't stop an NMI. The computer must respond in some way, even if it's another login screen.
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Jul 1, 2016 13:09
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I wonder, is SADCHUB still going? If not, when did it stop?
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Jul 1, 2016 14:24
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Cat Hatter posted:I certainly don't miss the days before Bittorrent. You'd download an entire movie only to find out it was a crappy movie intentionally mislabeled as a good movie. At least if you were lucky. If you were unlucky it would be some sort of disgusting/illegal pornography. I remember getting to try so many weird random games from Kazaa just from trying to find a working download of Soldier of Fortune 2.
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Jul 1, 2016 15:02
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mostlygray posted:You can't stop an NMI. The computer must respond in some way, even if it's another login screen. I don't remember the details, this was like 1997
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Jul 1, 2016 15:06
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Dewgy posted:I remember getting to try so many weird random games from Kazaa just from trying to find a working download of Soldier of Fortune 2. I remember getting to experience CP from Kazaa. Put me off P2P for about 5 years.
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Jul 1, 2016 15:47
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My Lovely Horse posted:I refuse to believe that soulseek is still a thing. I have to check that out even just for nostalgia's sake. Strangely enough, there was a recent article from Gizmodo about it: http://gizmodo.com/download-utopia-a-17-year-old-file-sharing-program-is-1769008601 quote:There is a small Soulseek subreddit which averages around one post a week
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Jul 1, 2016 16:04
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evobatman posted:Is Direct Connect and eMule/eDonkey still a thing? I downloaded insane amounts of stuff on those services from 2002-2007, but then torrents started taking over. It was all about finding the best and biggest hubs and servers to connect to to share with other users. eMule is most definitely still a thing. Lots of epubs and weird poo poo.
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Jul 1, 2016 18:30
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WinMX was the best p2p. I tried all the time to convince people to use it over KaZaa but no one listened.
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Jul 1, 2016 18:42
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They all ended up loaded with malware in the end anyway.
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Jul 1, 2016 18:53
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Buttcoin purse posted:
I am saying I pretty much HAVE to restart Explorer every time I reboot (and more than once during normal sessions) to keep autohide working. EDIT: Nesting errors! Samizdata has a new favorite as of 19:26 on Jul 1, 2016 |
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Jul 1, 2016 19:19
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Anyone else use Scour? I think it was pretty short-lived, I feel like it lived and died during the span of my freshman year of college (2000-2001.) After that, I went to iMesh, then Limewire, then Frostwire, which was like a "third-party" Limewire that stripped out the Spyware, then KaZaa, then something like K++ or KaZaa++ that, like Frostwire, was )in theory) spyware free. Never really had any interaction with Morpheus, Grokster, or Usenet sharing. And there was also a DC++ server someone set up on campus, as well as a separate service someone set up to index everything in people's shared folders. It was fun to find something, and then just see what else they inadvertently shared. Since this was before even ubiquitous digital cameras, let alone smartphones, there was surprisingly very little homegrown pron. But since it was a tech school with a 3 to 1 male-to-female ratio, so you REALLY wouldn't want to see most of that student body naked in any capacity anyway.
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Jul 1, 2016 21:42
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I used Scour while it was awesome, it was mindblowing watching the progress bar slide to the right so fast on my college's T1. After it got shut down I switched to WinMX, but when the RIAA lawsuits began I got scared straight shortly after that and gave up P2P.
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Jul 1, 2016 22:46
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Usenet was my go-to thing for a while, funnily enough I started using it in like 2006 and stopped in 2011 or 2012, with sporadic monthly resubs after. Even though it was quite a bit more complicated than any p2p network (either had to use an external nzb site or just learn how to filter groups well in Newsbin Pro) it was free from the annoying copyright letters and the speeds would max out my connection. I still have a soft spot for it, and if I hadn't gone legit for all my software and still cared about bluray rips of movies (i.e. Didn't have access to streaming services) it would be worth the few bucks a month.
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Jul 1, 2016 23:15
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first time i ever heard of soulseek was late last year when someone leaked bowie's blackstar on it like three weeks early. probably did it himself that old weird fucker
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Jul 2, 2016 00:10
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DrBouvenstein posted:And there was also a DC++ server someone set up on campus, as well as a separate service someone set up to index everything in people's shared folders. It was fun to find something, and then just see what else they inadvertently shared. Since this was before even ubiquitous digital cameras, let alone smartphones, there was surprisingly very little homegrown pron. But since it was a tech school with a 3 to 1 male-to-female ratio, so you REALLY wouldn't want to see most of that student body naked in any capacity anyway. DC was loving amazing. My school always had a hub running; university IT would take it down if anyone reported it to them, but otherwise they looked the other way--for good reason, because whenever the DC hub went down we'd saturate the outgoing links with bittorrent traffic. It was ridiculously fast; less than 30 seconds to download a full movie. One guy was infamous for sharing over 2 TB... all of it gay porn.
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Jul 2, 2016 01:16
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Those gays and their porn am I right?
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DrBouvenstein posted:Anyone else use Scour? I think it was pretty short-lived, I feel like it lived and died during the span of my freshman year of college (2000-2001.) AudioGalaxy was where I started. BearShare was also around, but I don't remember it being very useful. I remember accessing usenet through DejaNews, which I think had another name at one point. I wasn't looking in the right places, so all I really remember were the alt.binaries which had what was all the rage at that point - screencaps.
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