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Farmer Crack-Ass
Jan 2, 2001

this is me posting irl

Pulcinella posted:

A projector and a document camera were incredibly helpful, but you don’t need a smartboard to do that. I’m impressed some of this poo poo is actually getting thrown away. My first district had a warehouse where old technology would be entombed until the end of time. You see it can be hard to publicaly dispose of things ina school district. Trying to dump some old windows 95 tower PCs? Better do it in the dead of night or someone will complain to the media about how the school district is wasting tax payer money throwing away 25 year old computers.

I can imagine, although this varies between districts. The one I worked at had little compunction about tossing poo poo; we just had to make sure we noted the asset number and serial number for records, then we'd send it off to some recycling outfit. (And of course, once it hit the recycling pile, well who's going to give a poo poo if it winds up somewhere else? :ninja:)

There was one time when I wanted to formally buy something as surplus - it was an old (even for then) InFocus LP1000, with some special short-throw lens, that someone had donated. Between it being a monster-sized projector and it having the short-throw lens that lacked adjustable zoom, nobody wanted it, but it was still too big and prominent to just go to recycling. The IT director had to go through some process which involved having the board of directors sign off on it as an official "surplus" item, which then allowed him to formally sell it to me for :10bux:.

(I got a lot of use out of it. One of the best value-for-money purchases I ever made. One of my friends has it now, it still functions!)


quote:

The big textbook companies have even managed to go backwards. In the late 90s/early 2000s textbook companies would produce supplementary software to accompany the textbook. Usually multimedia with videos, pictures, Flash games and interactive experiences, etc. Now they struggle to put a PDF online and fix the errors in the online quiz. (E.g. “Calculate the answer with the correct number of significant figures” but the person writing the quiz for the textbook company got the wrong answer so the quiz marks correct answers as wrong).

lol the Flash content

At the district I worked at, someone in IT got sold on buying Wyse thin clients and connecting them to Windows terminal servers; this was going to allegedly be a big money saver over buying regular PCs for the school libraries and computer labs.

"let's throw 40 Windows desktop sessions onto a two-processor Pentium 3 server blade, what could go wrong?"
"oh hey guys the school textbook industry just discovered Flash"
"gently caress"

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Armitag3
Mar 15, 2020

Forget it Jake, it's cybertown.


I had a harrowing thought that one day servers are going to have anime names

mystes
May 31, 2006

Armitag3 posted:

I had a harrowing thought that one day servers are going to have anime names
Nah they've probably already been renamed to stuff from Fortnite or Minecraft or something.

Armitag3
Mar 15, 2020

Forget it Jake, it's cybertown.


ssh into madoka

I'd rather not

axolotl farmer
May 17, 2007

Now I'm going to sing the Perry Mason theme

obeyasia posted:

transferring data between devices with infra red.

my first work phone was a palm sometehing (treo?) but it had windows mobile on it. it was a $500 hunk of poo poo of course.

I had a samsung flipphone in 2007, and for some reason my work laptop had an infrared port on it. was able to get some terrible quality photos out from my phone.

carry on then
Jul 10, 2010

by VideoGames

(and can't post for 10 years!)

Armitag3 posted:

ssh into madoka

I'd rather not

all the unix/linux servers in the engineering department were named after star wars planets

i remember logging on to both geonosis and kamino at points

Jonny 290
May 5, 2005



[ASK] me about OS/2 Warp
all the infrastructure at the dialup isp was named after disasters

we had a wtc.arkansas.net

Jonny 290
May 5, 2005



[ASK] me about OS/2 Warp
it was named after the '95 incident.

They didnt change it after 9/11 lol

Sniep
Mar 28, 2004

All I needed was that fatty blunt...



King of Breakfast
how else were they supposed to remember

Carthag Tuek
Oct 15, 2005

Tider skal komme,
tider skal henrulle,
slægt skal følge slægters gang



the servers at DIKU (comp sci institute at copenhagen university) were named after stuff from norse mythology

Cybernetic Vermin
Apr 18, 2005

my work computer is named "computer", because somehow that wasn't taken at the dept.

Tankakern
Jul 25, 2007

NETWORK\computer001

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

Armitag3 posted:

I had a harrowing thought that one day servers are going to have anime names

"going to"

:lol:

Armitag3
Mar 15, 2020

Forget it Jake, it's cybertown.


The_Franz posted:

"going to"

:lol:

Please,.please

crazysim
May 23, 2004
I AM SOOOOO GAY
my macbook was named after the katamari damacy creator's games.



unfortunately, this had real-world collisions with other people so my macbook kept renaming itself.

Jonny 290
May 5, 2005



[ASK] me about OS/2 Warp

Armitag3 posted:

I had a harrowing thought that one day servers are going to have anime names

Farmer Crack-Ass
Jan 2, 2001

this is me posting irl

if you ever get an electric bike you gotta get that plate transferred and then do up a custom battery meter with the "stop/slow/normal/racing" thing going on

Jonny 290
May 5, 2005



[ASK] me about OS/2 Warp
mhmmmmmm

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016

Jonny 290 posted:

all the infrastructure at the dialup isp was named after disasters

we had a wtc.arkansas.net

legit thought that the disaster was supposed to be Arkansas

Captain Foo
May 11, 2004

we vibin'
we slidin'
we breathin'
we dyin'

Best Bi Geek Squid posted:

legit thought that the disaster was supposed to be Arkansas

lol

Volmarias
Dec 31, 2002

EMAIL... THE INTERNET... SEARCH ENGINES...

carry on then posted:

all the unix/linux servers in the engineering department were named after star wars planets

i remember logging on to both geonosis and kamino at points

The computers in the CS lab in college were named after breakfast cereals. capncrunch, booberry, etc.

Jonny 290
May 5, 2005



[ASK] me about OS/2 Warp

Best Bi Geek Squid posted:

legit thought that the disaster was supposed to be Arkansas

i legit worry about my younger brother, who has worked in a stable IT job at the uni for about 15 years now, which is great, but also all their (the state, not my brother) politicial positions have gone from that 60/40 "eh we'e bipartisan but just so happens the R's won last round" poo poo in the 90s/00s to the current "being gay is a capital offense and also we gave the Washington County jail inmates horse dewormer if they get covid" climate


* this ACTUALLY HAPPENED https://www.5newsonline.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/washington-county-jail-sued-ivermectin/527-18d006bb-c127-434c-a658-75845ab5ed93

cheque_some
Dec 6, 2006
The Wizard of Menlo Park
back in HS my geeky friends and I all got into Palm PDAs

people who got into them later had Bluetooth, but I only had Infrared. Remember pointing two devices at each other for an entire class period to transfer a big game or something.


Also, IrDA is reminding me of AlphaSmart. Anyone else have these things in school? They were basically portable keyboards with a three line LCD you could use to type up your paper. Then you could hook it up to a computer and it emulated a keyboard and would "type" in what you wrote to a ClarisWorks doc or other word processor so you could transfer it for printing or whatever. Basically a way to let more kids in the class be able to type up their papers without needing more computers. The AlphaSmart 2000 (this was when you would add "2000" to the end of things to show that they were advanced) added IrDA as a transfer option, although I never managed to get it to work

Midjack
Dec 24, 2007



cheque_some posted:

Also, IrDA is reminding me of AlphaSmart. Anyone else have these things in school? They were basically portable keyboards with a three line LCD you could use to type up your paper. Then you could hook it up to a computer and it emulated a keyboard and would "type" in what you wrote to a ClarisWorks doc or other word processor so you could transfer it for printing or whatever. Basically a way to let more kids in the class be able to type up their papers without needing more computers. The AlphaSmart 2000 (this was when you would add "2000" to the end of things to show that they were advanced) added IrDA as a transfer option, although I never managed to get it to work

we had them, no irda so it was the serial cable for us.

Poopernickel
Oct 28, 2005

electricity bad
Fun Shoe
Holy poo poo I forgot all about AlphaSmarts.

My high school English class had a set of them. We had to use them a few times, and it was the dumbest thing ever. Lmao at trying to write an essay on a screen that only holds 4 lines of text.

Poopernickel fucked around with this message at 06:48 on Feb 15, 2022

Raluek
Nov 3, 2006

WUT.
oh man i forgot about those things

they had an admin password, and then a super-admin password or something like that (for recovering the admin account? for managing the device instead of just unlocking rights? i dont remember) and we discovered that they were both set to the defaults for some reason. so the computer-y kids logged into these accounts and changed the passwords. apparently they could not be remotely reset either, because the next year i remember some admin or another asking me to unlock the device i had been using the year before lmao

or something like that, this was like fourth or fifth grade

stinch
Nov 21, 2013
I had a class with amstrad pcw, electronic typewriters with single line displays and pc with win 3.11.

if you didn't get their early enough to get a pcw the next option was the typewriter. word in the win 3.11 era was so buggy and would often explode the formatting leaving the document an incomprehensible mess or save files it couldn't open.

Sniep
Mar 28, 2004

All I needed was that fatty blunt...



King of Breakfast
anyone have to suffer thru one of these ?


sb hermit
Dec 13, 2016





carry on then posted:

all the unix/linux servers in the engineering department were named after star wars planets

i remember logging on to both geonosis and kamino at points

Same here. Real world galaxies and star wars planets. It's a naming convention to help group hardware.

Virtual machines are just named for the services they provide.

Armitag3
Mar 15, 2020

Forget it Jake, it's cybertown.


Sniep posted:

anyone have to suffer thru one of these ?




Suffer like g key did

Pile Of Garbage
May 28, 2007



the NT in windows NT stands for new technology

Sweevo
Nov 8, 2007

i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Vista stands for Very Intrusive Safety Technology AAAGGGHHHHHH!

Progressive JPEG
Feb 19, 2003

premium ringtones

KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD
Jul 7, 2012

taco talking

Sweevo
Nov 8, 2007

i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Progressive JPEG posted:

premium ringtones

i was in germany at the height of that fad and literally every single ad on every tv channel was trying to sell 50 different annoying crazy frog wannabes

Captain Foo
May 11, 2004

we vibin'
we slidin'
we breathin'
we dyin'

Progressive JPEG posted:

premium ringtones

premium ringback songs

carry on then
Jul 10, 2010

by VideoGames

(and can't post for 10 years!)

Progressive JPEG posted:

premium ringtones

the itunes ringtone store, where you could pay an extra 99¢ to cut a 30-second chunk from a song you already own to use as a ringtone on your iphone 3g

tinaun
Jun 9, 2011

                  tell me...
the iTunes ringtone store still exists and is the only way to set custom audio ringtones in iOS to this day

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

in the era of premium ringtones i was a hipster and/or snob about it and only used MIDI ringtones. sure, phones could play WAV files, but that just sounded like (garbled, noisy) music, not a telephone ringing. i felt that the electronic tones of MIDI files, in addition to being a lot more clear on a tiny phone speaker, were more appropriate for a ringer.

i had software to chop up MIDI files and extract certain tracks and configure them for the Nokia synth table and everything. hell, i probably still have MIDIs of the austin powers theme song and stuff sitting deep in an archive folder somewhere.

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carry on then
Jul 10, 2010

by VideoGames

(and can't post for 10 years!)

tinaun posted:

the iTunes ringtone store still exists and is the only way to set custom audio ringtones in iOS to this day

no it isn't, there are many tools to convert any audio file for free

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