|
Kelp Me! posted:There was also that "DRM" that I think Sony had that was really just malware that installed itself if you put one of their CDs in your computer It wasn't malware, it was a way worse root kit. I think Lenovo is the one who installed actual malware on their bottom tier PC's.
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 16:35
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 26, 2024 00:03 |
|
|
Mammal Sauce posted:I miss Incredible Universe. I can understand why they went out, but it was cool as hell walking in to separate rooms all dedicated to single consoles especially the ones nobody I knew owned. 3DO, Neo Geo, Turbografx 16, Philips CDi, Atari Jaguar, etc. I used to work at the one in Phoenix. It was good for a while, it was noncommissioned so people didn't have to worry about being oversold, and Tandy was pretty serious about keeping knowledgeable people on the floor so "What TV should I get?" wasn't answered with "Uh....this one?" But then people figured out that they could visit an IU for information and then just go to Best Buy to get it a bit cheaper. The first few stores were profitable, but then Tandy hugely overexpanded, and the stores were so goddamned big that you can't even repurpose them into much. They wound up selling the profitable ones to Fry's for pennies on the dollar, and I think the unprofitable ones mostly became UPS or Amazon warehouses. Also the loving uniforms were khakis, with purple shirts trimmed in teal. Someone once stole my work shirts out of my apartment building's laundry room washing machine. And just those shirts, the other things I had in there were left alone. What kind of loving degenerate does that?
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 16:36
|
|
|
Kelp Me! posted:There was also that "DRM" that I think Sony had that was really just malware that installed itself if you put one of their CDs in your computer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 16:36
|
|
|
Phanatic posted:Also the loving uniforms were khakis, with purple shirts trimmed in teal. Someone once stole my work shirts out of my apartment building's laundry room washing machine. And just those shirts, the other things I had in there were left alone. What kind of loving degenerate does that? Someone who had a scam going that required one of your uniforms.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 16:38
|
|
|
Kwyndig posted:Someone who had a scam going that required one of your uniforms. It's like a heist movie where they steal policemen uniforms. But a really boring heist movie where all they stole were TV's and Gateway computers.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 16:45
|
|
|
Krispy Kareem posted:It's like a heist movie where they steal policemen uniforms. But a really boring heist movie where all they stole were TV's and Gateway computers. Flipping 10 $2000+ TVs on the street for half that price is probably a lot easier than flat-out robbing a place and laundering $100k
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 16:54
|
|
|
Krispy Kareem posted:It wasn't malware, it was a way worse root kit. Lenovo installed a thing that put a root CA in, I think people even got the private key for it after a short while.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 16:58
|
|
|
Kelp Me! posted:Flipping 10 $2000+ TVs on the street for half that price is probably a lot easier than flat-out robbing a place and laundering $100k Maybe it was far more subtle: a Circuit City-sponsored act of corporate subterfuge, where their agents would infiltrate stores and feed buyers bad information and recommendations, driving them away. Five short years later and -- boom! Your reputation is in ruins.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 17:02
|
|
|
Trabant posted:Maybe it was far more subtle: a Circuit City-sponsored act of corporate subterfuge, where their agents would infiltrate stores and feed buyers bad information and recommendations, driving them away. A guy who worked under me believed the 2 dudes wearing gray polos with the Apple logo on them when they told him they were from Apple and needed to inspect the serial numbers on all of our iPads, which they then immediately ran out of the store with, so anything's possible I guess thankfully it was right after the holidays so "all our iPads" were 2 last-gen ones and a 1st-gen Mini, so not the end of the world, but still the biggest single-incident loss in the whole region aside from the time some crackheads in Central Square threw a trash bin through the front window and literally dragged the entire "high-value merch" cabinet from the back room and into a waiting SUV Snow Cone Capone has a new favorite as of 17:13 on Mar 21, 2017 |
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 17:11
|
|
|
Enos Shenk posted:
Red boxes were cool, but if you were really into phreaking you had a blue box which allowed nearly unrestricted access to trunk lines, from which it was possible to place nigh untraceable long distance and international calls free of charge. Of course the move to digital telephony in the late 90s and more recently VOIP technology has rendered them useless, unless you find yourself in a third world hell hole with 70s/80s era analog telephony exchanges. Geoj has a new favorite as of 17:24 on Mar 21, 2017 |
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 17:20
|
|
|
You missed the one I worked at!  Mine was a "SWIS" (store within a store) way in the back of a B. Dalton bookstore. People used to wander in and look about in confusion. One guy thought all the boxes of software must have been books-on-tape. We had three demo stations: an IBM XT, a Commodore 64 (later switched out for an Amiga 500) and a Mac Plus. It was a good time to be interested in computers and computer games because it was like the wild west with so many competitors and schools of thought. During my post-college period of Very Poor Employment I also worked (briefly) at Computer City, which was somehow even worse than CompUSA. The highlight was being barked at by a shift lead because I had my hands in my pockets. EDIT: The earlier post about the handheld autodialer made me remember a very obsolete related device: The handheld answering machine remote!  You would carry this with you so you could call your home phone and when the answering machine picked up you'd hold the remote's speaker to the mouthpiece and press the button to produce a tone that would trigger the answering machine to play back your messages. Dick Trauma has a new favorite as of 17:36 on Mar 21, 2017 |
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 17:33
|
|
|
Collateral Damage posted:iPods and MP3 players in general would never have been a thing if you couldn't play illegal MP3s on them. Even Apple realized that the iPod would flop badly if it only played legitimate files downloaded from iTunes. I'm sure they really wanted to keep their walled garden pristine, but I guess someone had the common sense to require unrestricted MP3 playback.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 17:39
|
|
|
HaB posted:I did this. Pretty sure I never had any trouble buying one. Not sure I ever encountered a Radio Shack employee who cared if I was even breathing much less what I was doing with the stuff I was buying. The Radio Shack employees I encountered were always deeply interested in getting my name and address and phone number, and in trying to persuade me to join their battery club.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 17:44
|
|
|
Powered Descent posted:The Radio Shack employees I encountered were always deeply interested in getting my name and address and phone number, and in trying to persuade me to join their battery club. You could literally get fired if you went too long without meeting those idiotic metrics, and they used to do secret shoppers who would do things like intentionally bring up a component video cable and mention they were using it for composite, and if you didn't correct them and explain why they needed a composite cable instead (even though they're identical cables except for the color coding), you better believe you were getting written up. Didn't ask for an email? Written up. Didn't ask for an email a second time? Written up. (Yes, we were literally taught by corporate to badger the customers for information). Too many writeups and you were gone. e: IIRC you were supposed to push the extended warranty 3 times during the sales conversation, no joke. Thankfully the store I managed flew relatively under the radar because a) we were in a college area so tons of people buying cheapo headphones, which were about the only item where the extended warranty was actually worth it, and b) a customer once wrote a scathing Yelp review about one of my guys pushing the warranty too hard, and it turned out the guy was part of some department of commerce organization or whatever and had some serious "people actually read my reviews" cred, so after I managed to smooth it over with him my district manager used to give my store a lot more leeway on it. I definitely saw at least one or two desperate associates buying cheap poo poo with cheap warranties to inflate their numbers, which is probably the scummiest corporate-influenced thing I've ever seen with my own eyes. One of them was actually the top seller in my store but absolutely refused to push warranties and other promo crap (when he finally quit my store's sales went down by like 10%+, even with the guy who replaced him). Good job, Radio Shack. Snow Cone Capone has a new favorite as of 17:56 on Mar 21, 2017 |
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 17:51
|
|
|
My favorite DRM flop was when Sony introduced "copy-proof" CDs with a ring on the bottom. You could copy them after drawing over the ring with a Sharpie.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 18:02
|
|
|
Wilford Cutlery posted:My favorite DRM flop was when Sony introduced "copy-proof" CDs with a ring on the bottom. You could copy them after drawing over the ring with a Sharpie. That reminds me - anyone else ever make crazy patterns on their burned CDs with sharpies? You'd put it in a portable CD player, pop the lid and hold the switch down so it thought the lid was closed, and hit play, then just hold the marker in place and let the spinning CD create the patterns. You could make some sweet spirograph-style poo poo like that.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 18:11
|
|
|
Wilford Cutlery posted:My favorite DRM flop was when Sony introduced "copy-proof" CDs with a ring on the bottom. You could copy them after drawing over the ring with a Sharpie. There was also the one that auto-ran some DRM and playback software when you inserted it into your computer. If you held down the shift key while inserting it, which disables autorun, you were technically circumventing copy protection which could be considered illegal depending on your countrys laws.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 19:03
|
|
|
Dick Trauma posted:EDIT: The earlier post about the handheld autodialer made me remember a very obsolete related device: That sounds like a great way to listen in on other peoples' messages, unless it had a specific tone that only applied to your single answering machine. Was this actually what the remote was meant for, or was it like blue boxes where someone found that a toy whistle in a Captain Crunch cereal box produced the exact pitch to gently caress up phone lines and give you free calls?
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 19:26
|
|
|
chitoryu12 posted:Was this actually what the remote was meant for...? It was a feature of some of the Panasonic Auto-Logic answering machines. Family had one back around 1988. It wouldn't surprise me if instead of being keyed to individual answering machines it would work with groups of them under the assumption that the odds of finding a matching machine would be low. Before too long the machines became sophisticated enough that you could set a numeric code for retrieval and just punch that in during the OGM. I still have an answering machine, built into a cordless phone base station.  EDIT: This is far enough in this past that even my good memory can't recall if it generated DTMF or some other sort of squawk. Dick Trauma has a new favorite as of 19:35 on Mar 21, 2017 |
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 19:32
|
|
|
chitoryu12 posted:That sounds like a great way to listen in on other peoples' messages, unless it had a specific tone that only applied to your single answering machine. quote:In the early days of TADs a special transmitter for DTMF tones (dual-tone multi-frequency signalling) was regionally required for remote control, since the formerly employed pulse dialling is not apt to convey appropriate signalling along an active connection, and the dual-tone multi-frequency signalling was implemented stepwise.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 19:33
|
|
|
Technology before everything became standardized was wonderfully terrible. I bought two data transmitters to send wireless traffic from one computer to another, but the range was like six feet and it worked on the same 900mhz spectrum as cordless phones. When I finally got it working it was like magic watching kilobits of data move one at a time between the two computers. I think I used it twice and it cost $90. It wasn't even remotely portable with a base station and huge rear end dongle that may or may not have connected via the parallel port. So yeah, a battery activated remote that squeaked into your phone receiver to retrieve messages. Sounds about right. In some dystopian cyberpunk alternative universe that's what we're all using.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 19:52
|
|
|
mystes posted:
That's assuming they bothered to set different tones in the device's memory each time they made one. It's unfortunately common for manufacturers to just set a default across all models with no way of changing it even when the protocol supports multiple inputs.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 20:02
|
|
|
Dick Trauma posted:It was a feature of some of the Panasonic Auto-Logic answering machines. Family had one back around 1988. It wouldn't surprise me if instead of being keyed to individual answering machines it would work with groups of them under the assumption that the odds of finding a matching machine would be low. Before too long the machines became sophisticated enough that you could set a numeric code for retrieval and just punch that in during the OGM. Remember when the iPhone’s visual voicemail was A Big Deal?
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 20:07
|
|
|
Platystemon posted:Remember when the iPhone’s visual voicemail was A Big Deal? It's still Apple-only isn't it?
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 20:08
|
|
|
shovelbum posted:It's still Apple-only isn't it? Google Voice had something similar as part of an app, and Android itself has had its own version since Marshmallow.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 20:15
|
|
|
Can you still pulse dial a landline phone by tapping the hook? I considered myself an amateur phone phreak anyway, and even tho it had nothing to do with it, I was happy to have found this workaround when one of our home phones had a 6 button that wouldn't work. You could hear the pulses being sent, so I tried tapping the hook button really fast and it worked. Got to where I could dial entire phone numbers that way. So I'm pretty 1337 is what I'm sayin.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 20:16
|
|
|
HaB posted:Can you still pulse dial a landline phone by tapping the hook? In most places, I don’t think so, on the basis that pulse‐to‐tone adapters exist. e: I just checked because I have landline and a phone on my desk old enough to have a tone/pulse mode selector. In my area, it is, in fact, still possible to pulse dial as of 21 March 2017. Platystemon has a new favorite as of 20:23 on Mar 21, 2017 |
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 20:18
|
|
|
I have an Automatic Electric 80 that can confirm that pulse dialing is working here in Los Angeles via Frontier copper. Looks similar to this lovely beast.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 20:30
|
|
|
Ah, the good old days of home phones that doubled as blunt objects in case of home defense. e: that reminds me of the time I got screamed at by an old lady for not knowing what a "princess phone" was, apparently it's these guys? lol sorry for not knowing the name of a phone model from 25 years before my birth 
Snow Cone Capone has a new favorite as of 20:47 on Mar 21, 2017 |
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 20:45
|
|
|
Krispy Kareem posted:Technology before everything became standardized was wonderfully terrible. I bought two data transmitters to send wireless traffic from one computer to another, but the range was like six feet and it worked on the same 900mhz spectrum as cordless phones. When I finally got it working it was like magic watching kilobits of data move one at a time between the two computers. That's cooler than what I had. To move anything that was too big for floppies, I had to resort to a null modem, a serial cable, and a copy of Laplink that someone at school had given me.  I was able to use that same serial cable and null modem plug to play Doom against a friend on another PC. Now THAT was just transcendent -- we were both in the same game! When Warcraft II came out, a friend talked a bunch of us into investing in a "network adapter" and oh my god, EIGHT PEOPLE could all play at once in the same game! Suddenly the LAN party became a staple of my weekends.  I still have that old null modem kicking around my box of various plugs and adapters. I'm not sure when I last had a computer that even had a serial port, but hey, you never know when you'll be called upon to fix something ancient.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 21:38
|
|
|
o god expansion cards with BNC terminals I just had a flashback  My parents' house is still wired up for thinnet, every bedroom has a thinnet-to-RJ45 hub in it 
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 21:53
|
|
|
Ugh, coax cable LAN parties. You can't leave yet, Dan! You're in the middle of the chain! edit: WHO STOLE MY loving TERMINATOR?
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 22:05
|
|
|
Platystemon posted:I have one of these:  And stuck in the pages...are we still doing the post your first amazon order thing? (Although I don't think this was actually my first amazon order). 
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 22:39
|
|
|
Holy poo poo, Amazon existed in 1996?
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 23:23
|
|
|
Yes but they only sold books, and you had to pay for shipping.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 23:25
|
|
|
Kwyndig posted:Yes but they only sold books, and you had to pay for shipping. “Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?” —A guy who really ought to have known better, 1995
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 23:32
|
|
|
Johnny Aztec posted:Holy poo poo, Amazon existed in 1996?
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 23:46
|
|
|
Platystemon posted:“Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?” This might be the most wrong article ever.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 23:49
|
|
|
[He now sells things online, incidentally.](http://www.kleinbottle.com/) Incredibly specialist things that there wouldn't be enough of a market for in any one place.
|
|
#
?
Mar 21, 2017 23:56
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 26, 2024 00:03 |
|
|
Keiya posted:[He now sells things online, incidentally.](http://www.kleinbottle.com/) Incredibly specialist things that there wouldn't be enough of a market for in any one place. Quoting so you can’t delete your shameful Reddit syntax. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU When I say he ought to have known better, I mean it. He lead one of the first hunts for computer crackers.
|
|
#
?
Mar 22, 2017 00:03
|
|