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Jedit posted:I wonder what they thought the original arcade cabinets used, if not CRTs? Definitely CRTs, sometimes vector based instead of raster scan. Mostly airflow issues and possibly the issues with the earths magnetic field rotating the image would be the reason why not to mount CRTs sideways. Another issue is the mechanical mounting of the CRT to the chassis might not work well sideways. Fun fact: CRT tubes are designed for use on only one hemisphere, moving one from the south of the equator to the north can cause the image on screen to rotate and you may have issues with colour purity that a normal degauss won't solve. A fun anecdote I heard: Bang & Olufsen would sometimes mount CRTs upside down for use on the "wrong" hemisphere, that made it easier to get the colour purity right later during production. With large screen TVs the compass direction they're facing can cause a degree or two of rotation, high end TVs had a rotate function built in. longview has a new favorite as of 21:27 on Jan 2, 2013 |
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Jan 2, 2013 21:24
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Kalos posted:Most "lefty-friendly" stuff, really. The public world is built right-handed. We've learned to adapt. Except those lovely scissors that don't work unless you twist your fingers in a cramp inducing way. I do not understand why anyone would decide to use the mouse with their left hand, even as a very left hand dominant person I had no problem learning to use a mouse like a normal person. I use trackpads and trackpoints with my left hand though.
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Jan 11, 2013 18:08
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I googled a little and found this: http://wordspy.com/words/electric-can-openerquestion.aspquote:Ultimately, the question for potential Iridium buyers was what has sometimes been called the electric-can-opener question. Why pay a lot of money to buy something which you know to be inferior to an older, cheaper technology? No luck finding the article referred to, assuming it's the right one.
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May 21, 2013 00:21
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This is my new favourite thread.
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Jul 4, 2013 07:52
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KozmoNaut posted:The word "clusterfuck" really doesn't do the IC4 justice. At first glance that sounds like a healthy case of the second system effect, which probably applies to a lot of the things being discussed in this thread.
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Jul 4, 2013 17:31
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I also heard some stories that one of the northern norwegian ham groups were offered these amazing little totally safe (with all the shielding sold for scrap of course) RTGs to power repeater stations. Surprisingly importing them proved harder than thought. I really like the concept of a nuclear battery, apparently the soviets thought so too, using them liberally to power light houses. The problem is mainly that the thermocouples that convert the heat of decaying plutonium is sensitive to the radiation and the efficiency goes down over time. They also produce a fairly enormous amount of heat compared to electrical power, but that's not necessarily a bad thing for a arctic mountain-top type installation. A soviet Gorn type RTG producing 60W of electrical power (when new) and 1100W of heat (also when new, but heat output is only affected by the nuclear decay). It also weighed 1050 kg. As mentioned, they are still in use for deep space probes -- and are the only reason we can still talk to the Voyager probes, -- this is a problem, since should the rocket launching the probes need to be terminated, it would spray fairly poisonous and radioactive substances (remember: lower half-life = more nuclear energy) over a pretty wide area. Hopefully the area would be large enough that individual casualties are not an issue, but the environmental concerns are huge with launching RTGs.
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Jul 16, 2013 11:00
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Pham Nuwen posted:I was just pointing out that the radiation from cell phones and wifi is incredibly harmless compared to actual ionizing radiation. All the cell phone will do is potentially warm your body very very slightly when in use. The fact that we have understood the dangers of radioactivity for the better part of half a century and I still meet people who don't understand what electromagnetic radiation is is something that should surely be obsolete. It also pisses me off when I'm told either that "well we don't know conclusively do we" or just plain "no, cell phone radiation causes all sorts of problems and I get a headache from using one". It just demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the science involved. I have also literally had a family member tell me that she didn't want a cell phone tower near where she lived because of radiation. Coverage was poor enough that they could only use the phones in one spot, and they were all glued to their phones anyway. I have never met anyone dumb enough to think wi-fi emissions are a health risk but I'm told it often comes up in school boards. Here's something that's either obsolete or never existed in the first place: the general population appreciating science.
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Jul 16, 2013 18:38
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To be fair, most of those people had only seen computers do batch processing jobs like payroll, I can't think of many homes that need a batch processing computer to run their payroll system. IIRC the statement about five computers in the world was made in like 1947, when electrical computers didn't even do payroll, I'm not even sure if they supported punched card input then, and the transistor was a brand new invention. Also the amount of miniaturization that we've seen in computers has been more or less unprecedented, most inventions are more or less the same size as when they started (like petrol engines, mechanical watches hit their size limitations pretty quickly, most other electrical devices that aren't computers in fact). I don't want to be all negative so here's a pretty interesting video about a computer that was obsolete by the time it started, Whirlwind First off let's get some background from our friend wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whirlwind_I posted:Whirlwind I was a Cold War air defense computer system developed by the MIT Servomechanisms Laboratory for the U.S. Navy's "Whirlwind Program".[2] It is the first computer that operated in real-time,[3] used video displays for output, and the first that was not simply an electronic replacement of older mechanical systems. Its development led directly to the Whirlwind II design used as the basis for the United States Air Force SAGE air defense system, and indirectly to almost all business computers and minicomputers in the 1960s. IIRC it was initially proposed to run a flight simulator training software for bombers, after their attempts at an analog computer to do the same failed miserably (earlier in this thread a set of videos about mechanical computers was posted, an analog computer works like this but with electrical circuits to accomplish tasks). This program was simply massive and in the video Jay Forrester goes into much greater detail about all the problems they had to deal with, which were later taken for granted. For example, for computer memory mercury delay lines were used, but this was rightly considered to be too slow and unreliable (Alan Turing is said to have suggested Gin as a suitable delay line compound). So, after looking around, they decided to use the brand new Selectron tube (one of my favourite tube-based names), but this proved to be pretty terrible and barely worked at all. Not to be deterred, they simply invented core memory to make their computer work. There's all sorts of great detail in the video so I'll refer to that now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZLpbhsE72I This computer was later further developed and used in the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, another great story that I'm not sure I'm qualified to talk about, but it's worth noting that the operator's consoles had integral ash trays. So why is it obsolete? When development started the only feasible attack strategy against the US was to use bomber planes, SAGE would have worked very well to protect against these. Except by the time it was ready for use, ICBMs had completely changed the threat image. longview has a new favorite as of 13:31 on Jul 20, 2013 |
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Jul 20, 2013 13:28
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sweeperbravo posted:I've mentioned this to people and the response I get is "BUT THEN THE TOWELS WON'T BE SOFT." I too know the plight of water retardant towels. It's ridiculous when every facet of the towel has to be carefully considered, colour, pattern has to be perfect and above all they have to be soft. What do you mean can you dry yourself with them? That's not important.
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Jul 22, 2013 20:30
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Blue_monday posted:What gets me though? That keyboard clits are still a thing. Once you get used to it there's no going back, I find myself trying to rub the GHB triangle of keys whenever I borrow a laptop that doesn't have it. It's the main reason I don't have a MacBook Air (that and no on-site service warranty). If you hold the center button with your thumb it's a brilliant way to scroll too, not as precise as a wheel but more natural than multi-touch gestures.
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Jul 23, 2013 11:09
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DrBouvenstein posted:And on top of that, it would keep "drifting" in that last direction I pushed it in. This still happens from time to time, but it auto calibrates if you let go of the nub for a few seconds.
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Jul 23, 2013 15:26
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Lazlo Nibble posted:In any financial services company big enough to have a retail storefront all those transactions are going to end up on the mainframe for end-of-day processing anyway, so they may as well cut out the middleman and have the branch reps enter 'em there directly. I worked for a major hardware store and the backend systems were all tied into some kind of mainframe system, I never examined the details but it sounds like it may have been a 3270 series system. Used F keys for navigation, and to select various functions we typed different three digit codes. We used G-Link as a terminal emulator at least. I think there was a Linux server or two handling the bridge between the mainframe inventory system and the much more modern POS systems. Checking inventory from the POS still involved "dialing" in and submitting a request (it was all IP over VPN but it was amazingly slow most of the time).
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Jul 27, 2013 23:29
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DrBouvenstein posted:Yeah, I think you're right. The great thing about CRTs is they actually support multiple refresh rates (some LCDs just pretend to). Pro-tip: 60 Hz is for NTSC video, 72 Hz is for watching 24p video and 75 Hz is for PAL video. MPC can be set up to automatically switch resolutions depending on source FPS and a good CRT can match all video for buttery smooth playback.
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Aug 13, 2013 09:48
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Some of those phones have later been modified for amateur radio use, the 450 MHz versions can be re-tuned for the 70cm amateur band and some crazy finns have been writing new firmware for them.
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Dec 5, 2013 16:57
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KozmoNaut posted:
Hell without schematics I can't even be sure my iPhone has a heterodyned receiver, let alone a super heterodyne!
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Jan 18, 2014 00:04
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kastein posted:
EMF files are in fact still the only "good" way I know of to insert vector graphics in Word documents, unless someone knows of some other common format that will actually work with colour? It doesn't support vector overlays over bitmaps, something I literally wanted to do this morning and ended up just exporting it to giant PNGs instead. This is also no joke a big reason why I use Latex for larger documents, it can accept both EPS files from ancient software and SVG files from modern software by silently converting them to PDF and including them directly. This also means that with a PDF printer almost any piece of software that prints can generate graphics for my documents. Latex is something that should have been obsoleted by WYSIWYG software but to this day I still run into weird formatting issues in Word, so I have to keep using it.
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Jan 28, 2014 19:16
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XTimmy posted:Why the necessity to 'pad out space'? http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2008.07.windowsconfidential.aspx there wasn't any, they just did it as an anti-counterfeit measure
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Mar 16, 2014 10:38
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