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The super durable laptop will never be obsolete  I just learned yesterday that the last sku or two of white macbooks can update to OS Sierra. _____________________________________ I work at a college radio station, and we've got a couple old items. Two are displayed openly atm: BMXIII-26 donated by WCBS NY  Everything I read says Pacific Engineering & Research BMXII consoles were the workhorses of the 80s and early 90s. I don't know for sure when this BMXIII was bought, but it looks like the engineer's fingernails were used to scrape some of the paint off over the years. The BMX itself is a no frills, pure analog mixer, with on-board pre-amps and 2 inputs per fader with switcher. Exposed gain adjustments at the top mean you can adjust inputs on the fly for new/replacement devices. Each input takes 6 wires, I assume Left Ground, Left Hot, Left Neutral, RG, RH, RN. You can also wire up sends, direct outs and patches. I don't know what patches require you to patch a device back into itself, but many of these inputs seem to be set up that way.  Also it uses multiple power supplies? I can't dig up a manual for this thing. I did read that the size and weight of the power supplies is because they are fanless, basically giant heatsinks. Y2K stickers means it was set up around 2000 I guess.  I can't figure out how the system can tell to feed 48v to a specific input, also I can't identify how the talkback system works either. This might be where the patches come in, maybe they are direct sends. Meanwhile, mostly every comparable board these days use pre-amp boxes feeding digital audio to the console, integrated with a wealth of internal processing features, hooked into a master computer to allow recording of all tracks individually. Multiple boards can be synced over ethernet or additional DB-25 cabling. It's black magic compared to ancient alchemy. Even then, I heard BMXs only get better with age, that they are beautiful. But besides hearing what 2 decade old pre-amps sound like, there's no reason to wire this devil back up. ______________________________________ We also have a Tascam 32, reel to reel player/recorder with a razor plate. Currently loaded with Sound Ideas Sound Effects tape #113. It does work, but warbles noticeably. 
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Mar 29, 2017 17:42
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Trabant posted:Basically, if a design isn't suitable to human use, it's probably because it was cheap and/or made sense to an engineer. And I say that as an ex-engineer. Yeah, sometimes an engineer is too focused on the trees to see the forest. I had a guy ask a simple question about something on my HMI the other day and I had to reply with "I didn't even think about it, I was too busy getting [x] to work. I'll fix it before I leave today."
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Mar 29, 2017 17:45
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P.N.T.M. posted:I work at a college radio station, and we've got a couple old items. Two are displayed openly atm: Mind if I ask what station you work for? It's not WSOU is it?
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Mar 29, 2017 17:54
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P.N.T.M. posted:The super durable laptop will never be obsolete I used that same type of Tascam back in the day. Not really a fan but it was fine. A lot of old consoles used multiple power supplies. But I've seen them as separate audio and logic/48v I think. Maybe in this case it was just redundancy? I'd assume the 48v just goes to all mic inputs all the time. By "patches" I'd assume that's an insert point for anything you'd want inline on the channel like a compressor or EQ. Radio consoles are usually really bare bones compared to boards used for music.
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Mar 29, 2017 17:57
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Trabant posted:My guess is because actual designers weren't actually involved in consoles until... what, the 16-bit era at best? You could probably argue the entire field (UI, ergonomics, etc.) was barely applied to consumer electronics until the 90's (and late 90's at that), although there were obviously some great designs along the way when experts were hired/consulted. I suspect CE companies often stumbled onto the good outcomes, rather than having planned them. See also: early colour palettes. the web-safe palette - mathematically neat, awful for actually making pretty graphics.
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Mar 29, 2017 18:17
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Kelp Me! posted:Mind if I ask what station you work for? It's not WSOU is it? WBCR - Brooklyn College Radio The Ape of Naples posted:A lot of old consoles used multiple power supplies. But I've seen them as separate audio and logic/48v I think. Maybe in this case it was just redundancy? Ahh, yep I am thinking of music consoles with internal processing. Still, digital routing is amazing. I'm pretty sure there are even more power supplies in our storage closet. It's really a demon. As far as simple goes, things like the accessible wiring, panning and gain make simple work uncomplicated.
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Mar 29, 2017 18:26
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P.N.T.M. posted:WBCR - Brooklyn College Radio Ah, ok. WSOU is Seton Hall and as much as I love the music their DJs/newsreaders are hilariously awful. They should really have them read a news article out loud before letting them on the air.
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Mar 29, 2017 18:31
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Mistayke posted:My job gave me a ThinkPad T520 eight years ago. Six years ago. Release date was 2/2011 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad_T_Series)
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Mar 29, 2017 18:49
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KozmoNaut posted:I got my Chromebook replacement the other day. It's more or less the antithesis of that whole concept, where the Chromebook was thin and light and sleek, the T420 is thick and bulky and heavy. It feels very substantial indeed. I just bought the Lenovo Z50-75 from Microsoft after they halved the price I'm assuming trying to get rid of them. For the price ($300) the thing is screaming fast. I haven't really bothered updating my 4-5 year old PC and just didn't feel like going through all the research to see what the good components are these days. I didn't realize how fast modern PCs with Windows 10 are.
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Mar 29, 2017 18:56
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I bought an Acer laptop for $300, put an SSD in and the thing flies. Even the onboard Intel graphics aren't too bad , I can play stuff like Civ6 or Cities Skylines with no problem at low/med graphics settings. It's a 7th-gen i3, so a fraction above the low-end Celerons in most Chromebooks/low end Windows laptops. Thing came with 8GB of RAM, 14“ screen at 1080. It's pretty awesome and I'm not sure how I got it so cheap, other similarly specced machines are in the $400+ range.
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Mar 29, 2017 21:33
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Kelp Me! posted:I bought an Acer laptop for $300, put an SSD in and the thing flies. Even the onboard Intel graphics aren't too bad , I can play stuff like Civ6 or Cities Skylines with no problem at low/med graphics settings. It's a 7th-gen i3, so a fraction above the low-end Celerons in most Chromebooks/low end Windows laptops. Probably bottom barrel parts. I think they sell those in batches based on failure rates or something. So even if it's the same part used in more expensive devices it's not the same quality. Not that it's a bad buy, but that's one of the reasons some laptops are far cheaper than others.
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Mar 29, 2017 21:43
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Krispy Kareem posted:Probably bottom barrel parts. I think they sell those in batches based on failure rates or something. So even if it's the same part used in more expensive devices it's not the same quality. Do you have a source for that? Seems kind of sketchy TBH. It was this thing BTW (I was wrong, 4GB of RAM not 8) https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01K1IO3QW/
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Mar 29, 2017 21:46
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Trabant posted:My guess is because actual designers weren't actually involved in consoles until... what, the 16-bit era at best? You could probably argue the entire field (UI, ergonomics, etc.) was barely applied to consumer electronics until the 90's (and late 90's at that), although there were obviously some great designs along the way when experts were hired/consulted. I suspect CE companies often stumbled onto the good outcomes, rather than having planned them. As an odd side note to this, it may go back a bit sooner to maybe the 8-bit era. I think this might be in part due to Nintendo's status as a toy/game company prior to their status as a video game company to design stuff that was easy to hold by kids and had easy to use and access controls. But you have things like them wanting to make sure the US release of the NES had more a VCR-style feel so as to not look like a conventional game system, too. I think you also had one of the early NES game developers actually come out of an industrial design background, if I remember. Looking back at pre-NES and non-NES controllers, there seems to be a trend of holding them almost like a notepad and pen or holding a touchtone handset phone or calculator in your palm: Picture the Atari, Coleco, even Intellivision. Beyond the 'this is how arcade sticks look" there could have been a sense of, "This is a 'input' style that people are conditioned to understand. If they can scribble a note, can handle this." NES coming around with an almost totally 'all-thumbs' controller seems so different that despite how well it ended up working I'm surprised it didn't meet more resistance.
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Mar 29, 2017 21:48
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I don't know but I know sometimes the midrange version of a graphics card is the exact same chip as the high-end version, it has just been "binned" for a quality issue in manufacturing and had the dodgy bit disabled.
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Mar 29, 2017 21:49
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Kelp Me! posted:Do you have a source for that? Seems kind of sketchy TBH. It was this thing BTW (I was wrong, 4GB of RAM not 8) https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01K1IO3QW/ No I don't. I read some article several years ago about computer makers buying parts from OEM suppliers and how the batches are arranged by failure rates. So you could choose a certain brand of NIC card and pick from different quality batches. Like I buy my spare Apple EarPods online for cheap from batches that didn't pass QC. They work fine. I'm just probably dealing with maybe a 2% failure rate instead of a .5% rate and paying 1/3rd the cost.
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Mar 29, 2017 22:05
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ishikabibble posted:It was a Sears branded Intellivision, not an original console. Most of their Sears-branded products where just products they slapped their label on.    Trabant posted:My guess is because actual designers weren't actually involved in consoles until... what, the 16-bit era at best? You could probably argue the entire field (UI, ergonomics, etc.) was barely applied to consumer electronics until the 90's (and late 90's at that), although there were obviously some great designs along the way when experts were hired/consulted. I suspect CE companies often stumbled onto the good outcomes, rather than having planned them.
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Mar 29, 2017 22:52
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SubG posted:But you don't need to be a UX genius to know that selling shoes by bundling two lefts or two rights but never one of each is a bad approach. Have you, like, seen shoes? They're generally designed to be so terrible there's a separate, marginal category of shoes that are based on what we actually know about feet (orthopedic shoes).
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Mar 29, 2017 22:57
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Did you know that up until last year or so, the thinnest padding in a standard hockey uniform was always on the head?
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Mar 29, 2017 23:04
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Jerry Cotton posted:Have you, like, seen shoes? They're generally designed to be so terrible there's a separate, marginal category of shoes that are based on what we actually know about feet (orthopedic shoes). JediTalentAgent posted:As an odd side note to this, it may go back a bit sooner to maybe the 8-bit era. I think this might be in part due to Nintendo's status as a toy/game company prior to their status as a video game company to design stuff that was easy to hold by kids and had easy to use and access controls. 
SubG has a new favorite as of 23:10 on Mar 29, 2017 |
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Mar 29, 2017 23:06
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SubG posted:Nah, orthopedic shoes would be like ergonomic controllers or something. The old TRS-80 joystick controller would be a shoe where you had to keep four of your toes in the front and your big toe in back, just behind the heel, and also you had to keep stamping your feet to keep them on the ground or they'd suddenly start levitating and floating off in random directions. Ah the Manolo.
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Mar 29, 2017 23:06
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Jerry Cotton posted:Ah the Manolo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8ccgHq26Qc
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Mar 29, 2017 23:16
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I'm impressed by the 3D.
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Mar 29, 2017 23:28
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Guy who mentioned Duracell Thinkpad batteries, are there actually aftermarket laptop batteries that won't catch on fire or die in a month or just be outright fake? I've never heard of any but maybe they're real
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Mar 29, 2017 23:34
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Jerry Cotton posted:I'm impressed by the 3D. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdNxXyQUufQ ...and first person dungeon crawler Dungeons of Daggorath: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQKQHKdWTRs
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Mar 29, 2017 23:38
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shovelbum posted:Guy who mentioned Duracell Thinkpad batteries, are there actually aftermarket laptop batteries that won't catch on fire or die in a month or just be outright fake? I've never heard of any but maybe they're real Yes, but the good stuff tends to be priced close to OEM. Personally, I would definitely trust a Duracell battery as much as an OEM battery.
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Mar 29, 2017 23:40
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SubG posted:Nah, orthopedic shoes would be like ergonomic controllers or something. The old TRS-80 joystick controller would be a shoe where you had to keep four of your toes in the front and your big toe in back, just behind the heel, and also you had to keep stamping your feet to keep them on the ground or they'd suddenly start levitating and floating off in random directions. I must be one of the very small part of the population that likes the Virtual Boy. I have one, love it. At one time I was in the early stages of making a homebrew port of Metal Slug for it. Obviously it was be simplified and from memory I got through recoloring a bunch of sprites and had basic left and right movement working. The goal was to have enemies fly out in 3D and obsticles be on a different plane. Paralax scrolling of the background assets was on my 'I wish' list.
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Mar 30, 2017 10:14
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Humphreys posted:I must be one of the very small part of the population that likes the Virtual Boy. I have one, love it. At one time I was in the early stages of making a homebrew port of Metal Slug for it. Obviously it was be simplified and from memory I got through recoloring a bunch of sprites and had basic left and right movement working. The goal was to have enemies fly out in 3D and obsticles be on a different plane. Paralax scrolling of the background assets was on my 'I wish' list. Virtual Boy Tennis is a really fun game. I owned one briefly, but it would give me such bad headaches. 30 minutes and I was done, but it was a really neat little system. With the exception of ColecoVision, I have owned (or in some cases - still own) everything made since Atari 2600. The crown jewel in my collection is the Vectrex Clearly where the original Macintosh got it's design from, and still one of my favorite systems of all time. Notable for occupying the oddest niche - having the same type of vector monitor that some popular arcade games had, which meant those games always poorly translated to home versions. Compare arcade Asteroids with Atari 2600 Asteroids.   It's not just a difference in horsepower between arcade vs home - it's a completely different technology. Raster monitors (most arcade monitors and TVs) use a beam which scans left to right a line at a time, lighting pixels as needed. Vector monitors use a beam which moves across X and Y coordinates instead of scanning in the same pattern. So the graphics are effectively "drawn" on the screen, instead of loaded into a frame buffer, which is then drawn by the scanning beam. Vector monitors were black n white only for a long time, then a color one was used for some arcade games - notably the Atari Star Wars arcade game, which was basically the X-Wing / Deathstar sequence from Episode IV. So the Vectrex had its own screen (unheard of at the time) and it was a vector screen to boot (double super unheard of). The downside? It basically got ZERO licensing to port arcade titles, plus it was released at the worst possible time: shortly before the big videogame crash of 1983. I got it for XMas 1982, iirc. I still play it once in a while. The games are really fun - and really - they had no choice. Basically black n white only, vector graphics - with colored overlays (that you invariably lost or got cracked) - to provide some semblance of "color". But if you didn't have fun gameplay - you literally had nothing. The pack-in game was built into the system - an Asteroids knock off called Mine Storm. I discovered that it was possible to have a "perfect" game of it - to the point where it starts glitching and exhibiting all sorts of odd behavior, some of which I doubt was intentional. If you got through 13 rounds without dying at all - it would either crash outright (maybe 30% of the time) or it would just start acting super weird - invisible mines, mines with hitboxes WAY bigger than the sprite, etc. Was also notable for having one of the first games that used synthesized speech. There was a Donkey Kong knockoff called Spike which had "cutscenes" with hilariously robotic voices. "Eek! Help. Spike!" "Oh no! Molly!" and a "Darnit!" when you died. But it was a game that talked and that was awesome. All of this would look hilariously archaic now, but it was revolutionary in the pre-NES days, because graphics were universally terrible. If you could figure out what was what enough to play the game - good enough. But it was super rare to see a game and go "wow!" because of the graphics. Hell - one of the most renowned Atari 2600 games - Adventure - your on-screen avatar was literally a square. Or compare arcade Pac Man to Atari 2600 Pac Man. It's the same game in only the loosest sense of the word. It's so crazy to me how far it has come - having been around for the early days of home gaming. (yes. I'm OLD). I can remember fantasizing about portable gaming that would actually duplicate (or nearly so) what you could get on your TV. Now we literally have that.
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Mar 30, 2017 14:22
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Sad part about Pac-Man is that it could have looked a lot better, even on the 2600. What was released was basically the alpha build.
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Mar 30, 2017 15:21
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The best way to play VirtualBoy games is using a VR headset. You get the full 3D effect, the emulator allows for greyscale (or any colour) instead of red and you can even play it as a floating screen in front of you instead of it being fixed to the center of your vision.
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Mar 30, 2017 16:02
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KozmoNaut posted:Unless you're hooked on absolute thinness and other gimmicks, Thinkpads really are the best laptops out there. HP EliteBooks and Dell Inspirons are decent runners up, though. Dell Latitude and Precision are the models you want. Inspiron is the plastic consumer line. I wouldn't piss on an HP EliteBook with a stolen dick. I have one for work, and when I ran the driver update software, it gave me ads for McAfee antivirus. The Dell Command Suite of tools on the other hand is really good, and Lenovos utilities are decent too, although they have like 3-4 apps with overlapping update and diagnosis functionality.
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Mar 30, 2017 16:04
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evobatman posted:Dell Latitude and Precision are the models you want. Inspiron is the plastic consumer line. Oh yeah, I have no idea how that became Inspiron. Latitude was what I meant, and Precision model are good too. I've had two different HP EliteBooks at work, and they were both really good, on par with Thinkpads of the time. Personally, I don't care much about the OEM tools. At work they run a tight ship with proper enterprise management, and at home I run Linux Mint. KozmoNaut has a new favorite as of 16:45 on Mar 30, 2017 |
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Mar 30, 2017 16:42
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I support hundreds of HP Elitebooks and have never seen an ad on any of them, ever. Although I have a custom image that I push down through SCCM, which has none of the HP software installed with the exception of the HP SoftPaq Download Manager. You can do driver updates through that and it has zero ads.
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Mar 30, 2017 17:16
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HaB posted:The pack-in game was built into the system - an Asteroids knock off called Mine Storm. I discovered that it was possible to have a "perfect" game of it - to the point where it starts glitching and exhibiting all sorts of odd behavior, some of which I doubt was intentional. If you got through 13 rounds without dying at all - it would either crash outright (maybe 30% of the time) or it would just start acting super weird - invisible mines, mines with hitboxes WAY bigger than the sprite, etc. You probably know this, but since you don’t mention it: GCE knew about the bug and would send out a fixed cartridge to anyone who complained. Naturally, the fixed version is ungodly rare. There’s one listed at 1200 USD on eBay at the moment.
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Mar 30, 2017 18:43
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evobatman posted:I wouldn't piss on an HP EliteBook with a stolen dick. I have one for work, and when I ran the driver update software, it gave me ads for McAfee antivirus. The Dell Command Suite of tools on the other hand is really good, and Lenovos utilities are decent too, although they have like 3-4 apps with overlapping update and diagnosis functionality. I've had nothing but positive things to say about the HP EliteBooks I've had over the past few years, but I always buy an off the shelf copy of Windows for my computers. The average monthly cost of it just makes sense for all the hastle you're missing. Groda has a new favorite as of 20:18 on Mar 30, 2017 |
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Mar 30, 2017 20:01
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Nthing the HP Elitebook sentiment. Worked for HP between 2013-2015, had two of them and I think the only complaint I had was the exterior case was easily scratched/dented. Otherwise they're excellent notebooks.
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Mar 30, 2017 20:17
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SubG posted:Yeah, the Sears Super Video Arcade was an off-brand Intellivision and the Sears/Telegames Video Arcade was a rebranded Atari. There was also a Sears Video Arcade II, which was more or less an Atari 2600 Jr. with a much worse controller and a less fantastically '80s case. To jump back to the Intellivision for a minute, I wanted to point out that the chunky block of plastic plugged in to the side of the console is a voice synthesizer. It was compatible with a handful of games (as you can see in the ad), and had the most amazing 80's computer voice. Mattel also had plans for a keyboard, which would turn the console in to a full computer. http://www.intellivisionlives.com/bluesky/hardware/keyboard_tech.html There was even a music synthesizer! http://www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk/museum/mattel/keyboard/index.php
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Mar 30, 2017 21:13
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SubG posted:Sure. But you don't need to be a UX genius to know that selling shoes by bundling two lefts or two rights but never one of each is a bad approach. At some point you'd look down and just notice your own feet and put two and two together. A lot of these early controllers look like they were designed by people who had never actually seen a human hand, but only heard of them in old stories, like unicorns or dragons or some poo poo. I remember using some awful controllers, especially early PC ones. Have you ever gone back and used an original NES controller? It's not as comfortable as I remember.
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Mar 30, 2017 21:36
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Nintendo had the first draft of the best controller with the SNES, then Sony perfected it.
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Mar 30, 2017 21:55
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whiteyfats posted:Nintendo had the first draft of the best controller with the SNES, then Sony perfected it. 
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Mar 30, 2017 22:37
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So LGR got a new in box toy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLy_jEbuY-U
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