Post the very best in obsolete and failed technology

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Slanderer: May 6, 2007

Pham Nuwen posted:

According to http://www.americanlibrariesmagazine.org/article/filtering-and-first-amendment, the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) requires that libraries receiving certain grants and discounts must implement web filters. Those filters, according to the Supreme Court, must be disabled for adults immediately upon request, no justification required. Library personnel are also allowed to unblock (for all users) sites which have been mistakenly blocked.

Presumably due to misunderstandings of the law and worries over losing funds, some libraries may be dicks about their filters.

The real issue is with libraries being unable to deal with the mentally ill dudes who come to use a public terminal to look up weird fetish porn.

DocCynical posted:

Then buy them from DX. You can get 2 primary cells for about 4 bucks, or buy some secondary ones and a charger and dance all night.
http://dx.com/s/cr123?category=400

Dear god, do not buy batteries from Deal Extreme. This is a very bad idea

# ¿ Aug 12, 2013 05:53

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 07:36

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

Three-Phase posted:

You can get USB to Serial converters. Be careful, because the quality on some is really dodgy and can be a serious PITA to get working.

I've used them at work when you have an old protective relay (monitors really big pieces of electrical equipment like transformers and motors) that will only communicate over RS232 or RS485.

Anything that isn't bottom-of-the-barrel cheap will work fine. I have a half dozen on my desk at work for various bits of legacy bullshit.

# ¿ Oct 17, 2013 03:08

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

kastein posted:

I saw something I forgot I even owned today while cleaning out my storage unit. A voltage regulator vacuum tube.

A what, you say?

http://www.radiomuseum.org/tubes/tube_0a3.html

It's basically a tube full of gas chosen to have the right ionization voltage. For a reasonably wide range of currents, it will maintain roughly the same voltage across the two terminals. So you use this to bias another tube that actually regulates the voltage supplied to the loads in your circuit.

They were obsolete decades before zener diode regulation became obsolete, which was decades ago.

To expand on this: Voltage regulator tubes act basically like neon indicators. In fact, I found and built one schematic for a xenon flash strobe circuit that used a cheap neon tube from radioshack for the trigger (as you are charging the high-voltage side of the circuit, the trigger activates once the voltage reaches the required DC voltage to ionize the gas and complete the circuit).

The way these things work is pretty cool. The tubes are made with an inert gas mixture and two electrodes. Inside the tube, there is some fraction of the atoms that are ionized at any given time due to random processes. A voltage is placed across the electrodes, and any free electrons are steered towards the anode, and the much bigger positive ions are dragged towards the cathode. The gas in the tubes is at a very low pressure, which means that on average a particle can travel quite a long way before colliding with another (compared to in high pressure gas)--in the presence of an electric field, this means it has a longer time to accelerate. When an ion or electron collides with another atom, it has enough energy to knock off an electron, creating another ion-electron pair, which are in turn accelerated into other atoms. Eventually electrons reach the anode, and ions reach the cathode (where they get an electron back and drift back through the tube).By using this avalanche effect, you are able to multiply the number of ions in the gas (which also makes geiger tubes possible). It also helps create the regulation effect--for a given gas mixture, there is a voltage below which the ions don't have enough energy for the avalanche process to begin. However, once you start further increasing the voltage across the tube, the current through it is limited by the finite number of ions that can be generated. This means that the voltage across the tube is also limited, which lets it regulate higher voltages down to the intended voltage.

One issue with the tubes, however, is that only work with a band of currents. Too little current flowing the the tube and the ionization process ceases. Too much current and the tube can internally arc, which dramatically decreases the voltage of the tube. Super unforgiving for circuit design, I'd imagine.

Another cool thing is that some voltage regulator tubes were radioactive. By putting a tiny about of some radionucleide into the tube, you can increase the average number of ions present. Although radioactive decay is inherently random, it is more reliable than random ionization, and allows you to fine-tune the voltage at which a tube turns on. For instance:

http://www.goldmine-elec-products.com/prodinfo.asp?number=G18735

This idea was also applied to spark plugs, but I can't imagine it being very useful.

http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/consumer%20products/sparkplugs.htm

edit: wikipedia had a link on radioactive regulator tubes:
http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/consumer%20products/electrontubes.htm

Slanderer has a new favorite as of 20:30 on Jan 13, 2014

# ¿ Jan 13, 2014 20:25

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

uwaeve posted:

Also still the proud owner of a Compaq iPaq along with a sleeve that housed a second battery and expansion slot. Was great for synced contact info and reading ebooks. Though I think I mainly read project gutenburg stuff that were essentially text files, my memory is hazy on that. I don't believe you could buy current releases.

I got 4 or 5 of these brand new at a yard sale, along with a bunch of branch new accessories (folding keyboard docks???) a couple years back. After a while I realized I have absolutely no use for them, but I can't bring myself to throw them away.

# ¿ Jan 21, 2014 22:23

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

Nyyen posted:

Irritating sound effect bro! My brother and I both had got one of these in white growing up, sometime around 1988:

Each pull of the trigger played a different shooting sound, 9 in total including the three on the Revenger, and the 10th pull would play them all one after another in the most irritating 30 seconds of chip sounds possible. My brother still has his on a shelf in his living room, and it still works using the same batteries that it came with. They were built Tonka tough too and even the stickers have hung on all these years with the only sign of their age has been the plastic yellowing some. I can't track down who made them or anything useful on them since the only text on the entire thing is a little sticker saying "made in China".

I think I had one really similar to this. But I also had 2 or 3 other toys with the exact same sound effects, only with slightly different tones or whatever (or maybe just lovely distortion, i forget).

Haven't been able to track done the crappy chinese sound chip all these things used, though.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2014 05:51

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

Related to this: Back when I played Counterstrike in high school, there were a few dudes floating around the servers I played on with a program called Half Life Sound Selector and a small bank of converted songs / clips that they could stream over the voice channel. However, the voice channel was compressed to poo poo, so just about everything sounded like garbage.

However, What Is Love was an exception. It was one of a few songs that didn't lose too much in the process, so people requested it out of desperation. Certain servers ended up with that song piped over the voice channel almost continuously.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2014 17:37

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

Krispy Kareem posted:

E-ink is an odd technology in that it really doesn't get utilized anywhere near as much as it should. Kohl's department stores recently went to digital price tags on their display racks and used terrible looking washed out LCD screens, when for that purpose, E-ink would have been perfect and probably cost less.

E-ink displays are still more way expensive than cheap monochrome LCD displays. In bulk, those things are dirt cheap.

# ¿ Mar 11, 2014 15:08

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

Base Emitter posted:

Those were cool... If I remember correctly it wasn't a projection TV, it actually had an angled phosphor screen inside a vacuum tube with the electron gun at the bottom rather than extending out the back, so it was basically a flat front-view CRT.

I had to look this up---this is a super weird display.

http://imgur.com/jw1G7ms

Some better pictures of a larger version of the tube:

http://www.r-type.org/exhib/aar0023.htm

# ¿ Mar 26, 2014 07:01

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

Computer viking posted:

One of the few future technologies I pine for is a desktop-sized version of Samsung's ridiculous cellphone OLED displays.

The Samsung OLED in the PS Vita is wonderful. While I'd love to see that in a huge size, I'm worried that it would burn out my eyes with its glory.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2014 17:10

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

Fozaldo posted:

When electrons get stopped suddenly they lose that energy in photons of x-ray frequency, in other words your screen gives off x-rays. I've not heard of long exposure affecting anyone though.

mystes posted:

Isn't this why CRTs used leaded glass?

That's one reason. An interesting thing to note is for color* CRTs that there isn't much lead in the "panel glass" at the front of the display---that glass contains a few percent of lead oxide or barium oxide (and strontium oxide maybe?). The glass in the funnel and neck of the CRT, however, had up to 25% lead oxide, and all the parts were fused together with glass solder that has like 75% lead. I'm not sure why lower lead content glass was used in the front panel, to be honest. I do know that optical properties were a big factor--they needed a glass with a good index of refraction and dispersion that didn't discolor with age (due to electron bombardment). Lead and barium are still used for certain optical glasses. Also, cost and manufacturing concerns are probably another reason. Finally, the glass in the front panel is probably thicker.

*Monochrome CRTs were made from a single piece of glass, I believe

# ¿ Mar 28, 2014 15:55

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

Shugojin posted:

Tell me about it. One of my friends is a bit OCD about his apartment door being locked. There is a ritual of running back to it and jiggling the handle and pushing on it to make sure it's actually locked. Several times. Leaving his apartment takes like 5 minutes after you leave the door.

If he had this he would never get away from the car.

As someone who often does this, I can say that part of the issue is that once you start performing these dumb rituals out of habit you stop thinking about them at all...which means that you probably aren't paying attention closely enough to actually check that the door is locked.

# ¿ Apr 4, 2014 04:15

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

GOTTA STAY FAI posted:

Eh, looks like a bunch of hype to me. They're marketing it as if each disc is made of stone, but it looks like they're really just regular discs made from a more durable plastic.

"Unlike other storage mediums, M-Disc has a rock-like layer that permanently engraves your data in stone."

It can't be both "rock-like" and literally be stone.

And I don't know how the technology can be "proven for 1,000 years" if commercially-produced compact discs have only been around since the early 1980s.

I guess good job to the marketing team for being aggressive, but I think it would be more honest to say "Look, we took regular media and made it stronger so your data will be preserved for longer!"

Their claims are based on the recording process changing the structure of the data layer, instead of causing a change in dye or something. And you prove something will last longer by doing testing at elevated temperature and humidity (and probably intense light for this stuff). It's the accepted testing paradigm for basically everything (and scientifically valid, for complicated reasons)

# ¿ Nov 29, 2014 16:05

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

Platystemon posted:

Like every CD-RW/DVD‐RW ever?

Oh yeah, I think it's similar. Except this would be using higher temperatures, and probably has a higher annealing temperature to return it to a blank state (probably too high to make this reasonably rewriteable). A higher annealing temperature means that the phase change from amorphous to polycrystalline would take longer to occur due to thermodynamic effects at room temperature.

I haven't read more than a few pages on this, and I'm typing on an iPad, but it doesn't seem to be complete BS, at least. They have a bunch of technical marketing justifying their "engraved in stone" line, and really it's not really anything to make a fuss over.

Thermodynamic effects are really responsible for most of your digital data degradation---material phase changes, ion migration, magnetic moments changing, etc... For this reason, all of the degradation gets slowed down by low temperatures. Flash memory degradation is an exception, sorta, since quantum tunneling is required for trapped charge to escape. But that probably has a lower probability of spontaneous occurrence at lower temperature too I guess.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2014 23:35

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

Laserjet 4P posted:

Speaking of cards: http://blog.codinghorror.com/revisiting-the-black-sunday-hack/ is a nice read.

This rules

# ¿ Dec 18, 2014 03:26

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

twistedmentat posted:

Remember when game companies didn't treat their customers like criminals?

I honestly can't even tell if this is sarcastic at this point.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2015 17:39

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

Humphreys posted:

PM me if you want to know more after this - I'm sure I'll get into poo poo for stupid long posts:

1. Strip down the various component cases after figuring out the convoluted way modern dashes are designed (partly to prevent quick and easy stereo removal but went from there to be 'stylish').

2. Find the possible EEPROMs that hold data you want to fiddle with. Or just just take a scorched earth approach and try every chip one at a time.

3. Two methods of dumping the chips, using a 3M clip to attach to the chip while it is still in circuit (doesn't work for all and can be a bitch for the clip to stay on and get contact with all pins, plus some components may draw power away from the chip thus loving up attempts to read), or as I do with most, is heat gun, stready hand a lift the chip - put them into a ZIF socket (I have a bunch of SMT sockets for various types), then plug that into the programmer.

4. Dump the EEPROM

5. Figure poo poo out.

One little thing that became a BIG DEAL with this car was a thing called 'VIM' or video in motion which would prevent the stereo from showing video files while driving (also negating ability to hook a apple tv or similar into the stereo as a replacement source). figuring out VIM consisted of soldering to all EEPROM pads on the target firmware EEPROM and feeding wires out to programmer, then taking live dumps while fiddling with the gears (Reverse, Neutral, Drive, or Reverse, neutral, 1st) and changing various addresses and seeing if the video feed cuts out after hitting 5km/h or above.

^ Gone are the days of just earthing the video sense to chassis instead of the handbrake sense wires.

Some random photos:

<snip>

I'm honestly surprised this is as simple* as identifying + modifying data stored in EEPROM--were there at least any neat data protection or obfuscation schemes to figure out? I'm looking at a device right now that guarantees EEPROM integrity through power loss by storing two copies of each data structure, with separate CRCs and some flags used to indicate which one was updated last/if one might be invalid/something (never bothered to fully figure that part out). I would have thought that you would need to get into reflashing custom code onto the micros, or maybe inserting inline devices on the bus to intercept and modify certain packets.

Out of curiosity, was there just a value on the eeprom at some fixed location with the speed threshold for disabling VIM? Or was there some more complicated going on?

*"simple" in relative terms for embedded systems hacks, but admittedly complicated + difficult in the real world

# ¿ Mar 4, 2015 21:19

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

Fo3 posted:

I've heard that USB-RS232 are hit and miss, but has anyone had better luck with express-card to RS232 adaptors?
About the only things I have with rs232 ports are old slot 1 or sktA desktops in pieces. I'm not even sure if my s939 system has rs232, and that's the oldest system I have still powered up and running. E: I'm going to need a serial connection for some old automotive haltech EFI system.

Most RS-232/USB Converters work just fine nowadays. There were more issues in the past, due to sketchy Chinese hardware and/or bad drivers, so it wasn't uncommon for them to fail after a few hours, or to cause random BSODs.

# ¿ May 11, 2015 15:24

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

Kazinsal posted:

It honestly amazes me that USB-RS232 dongles are so hit or miss. It's a loving UART on a USB device controller, like, holy drat. Is there not a company out there that knows how a UART works?

A company called FTDI makes rock-solid converters, for example, but most people buy the top item on Amazon (the cheapest) or whatever garbage that some office supply store carries. There are also huge markets for counterfeits from China (people recently got mad at FDTI for releasing a new driver that bricked all of the counterfeit devices that stole their design).

# ¿ May 11, 2015 15:28

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

robodex posted:

Yeah I just read this article about it and... Holy poo poo, I get wanting to protect your IP but intentionally bricking the end user's hardware when they have literally no way of knowing if their device was counterfeit? That's.... A little extreme

While cloning IC functionality has a long tradition, once people are cloning your stuff, putting your name on it and using your driver it has gotten out of hand.

As far as I'm aware, this mostly affected Arduino knockoffs, so haha who cares

Jonathan Yeah! posted:

Can you submit any dicey driver to Win update then? Does MS not vet this stuff? In an extreme example, couldn't a rival release a malicious update to another manufacturers devices?

Nope. The driver is provided by the company FTDI, signed by MS, and is supposed to apply to FTDI's products (tied to the VID and PID assigned to FTDI). It isn't illegal to use another company's VID to clone their device, but the usb implementers forum can sue if you do so while displaying a USB logo, and FTDI can theoretically sue for the infringement (but harder to do, because lol China). But similarly, it probably also isn't illegal to do stuff like this to prevent clones that use your VID and PIDs.

Slanderer has a new favorite as of 17:30 on May 11, 2015

# ¿ May 11, 2015 17:19

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

C.M. Kruger posted:

Speaking of old calculators, I'm surprised nobody's mentioned the Curta yet. I've wanted to get a Type 1 and a Type 2 for a few years now. There's just something that I find really cool about a mechanical calculator that fits in the palm of your hand. There's a site here that has manuals and a flash simulator for it.

Perhaps inevitably, everyone always tried to take their Curta apart to see how it worked, only to have it come apart into springs and rods. It was impossible to reassemble without specialized jigs, so the company considered the "real" price of their Calculators to include the cost of sending it back for repair that first time.

# ¿ May 20, 2015 17:11

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

Zaphod42 posted:

That's cool but its kinda silly to pay your carrier to communicate through their towers or require public wifi when your hardware should absolutely be capable of communicating ad-hoc.

Except that it's a feature that few people want, so even if chipsets support it, the carriers aren't going to write the software to support it.

# ¿ May 22, 2015 20:57

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

Keiya posted:

I retagged that Zelda song from Weird Al to System of a Down on the recommendation of some site that kept track of stuff like that. Apparently they didn't do a terribly good job.

About that...

http://kotaku.com/5885558/no-system-of-a-down-did-not-make-a-zelda-song-but-this-guy-did

# ¿ Jun 6, 2015 13:09

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

thespaceinvader posted:

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.

Nerds lover recursive acronyms.

They are genetically predisposed to repeating the same unfunny jokes for generations (see: The cake is a lie)

# ¿ Jun 29, 2015 18:30

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

WebDog posted:

No one has made one. There has been discussions to try and replicate it but there's no easy way given that the system was pretty much altering electronic signals (got an oscillator handy?) that was literally dialed in on the fly enabling real-time adjustments.
There was an organic level to it that you can't really replicate, even with random seed generators most plugins come with nowadays.

It also meant that nothing could be saved unless you wrote it down or recorded a clean pass. Many operators had notes filled with ways to dial in starfields and so on. The high res (900 lines!) were played back at 60/50 frames per second then recorded back at 24 frames, hence the very fluid look.

Most of what Scanimate did can be easily replicated from combining bits from plugin packs, Red Giant has a Starglow effect that you could use to get that famous glow effect then combine it with a bit of a noise filter to give it that fuzz, there's a really fun VHS filter they have that's good for that.
If you were to re-create it you would need something could create sawbone sine waves and send them through an X/Y luma offset to distort the image.

What's the source of that quote?

# ¿ Jul 5, 2015 20:37

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

Zonekeeper posted:

Yeah, they expected the weird proprietary GD-ROM disc format to act as the entire anti-piracy system, which would have worked fine as the blank discs weren't available anywhere nor could they be burned without special burners. It was Sega's decision to release a Japan-only series of multimedia CDs that unwittingly added a backdoor to bypass their antipiracy scheme entirely.

Mil-CD was a format released by Sega whose gimmick was that they were normal CDs that did extra stuff in a Dreamcast like play video or access web features. To support them, the Dreamcast needed to be able to execute code from otherwise normal CDs. That would be fine and dandy, except they were so confident in GD-ROM's ability to prevent piracy that they forgot to add an antipiracy scheme to the Mil-CD feature.

One of the more interesting things to result from Dreamcast's poor security was Bleemcast. This software was an emulator bootdisc for commercial PS1 games that was ported over from the PC version. The bleemcast disc would exploit the security hole when booted, and would then launch an emulator from RAM, which would allow you to swap in a PS1 disc. It was originally going to be a universal PS1 emulator, but because of compatibility issues they only ended up selling 3 different bootdiscs for Gran Turismo 2, Tekken 3, and Metal Gear Solid. Even with the emulation layer, the DC was able to run these games much better than an actual PS1, so they were rendered at a higher resolution with additional post processing. The DC controller didn't map 1:1 with the PS1 controller, which was an issue, but otherwise these discs apparently worked somehow. The PC version of Bleem was a full emulator, but many (or most?) games were unplayably buggy without dedicated compatibility fixes.

However, before they could release more bootdiscs (or a universal emulator), Sony sued them and drove them to bankruptcy with legal fees.

# ¿ Jul 22, 2015 23:46

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

Humbug Scoolbus posted:

I have a Bleemcast version of Thrillkill actually.

An unreleased emulation of an unreleased fighting game? Nice!

# ¿ Jul 23, 2015 03:51

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

Woolie Wool posted:

A better reason is that most modern CDs are mastered for low fidelity equipment (iThings, etc.) and undiscerning listeners and sound horrible by design. Even the CD rips of my Stratovarius and Dream Theater records sound amazing compared to the official CD releases despite being CD rips and subject to both the limitations of CDs and the limitations of vinyl and suffering inevitable degradation along the chain from the cartridge to the preamp to the ADC.

There are some drat good CDs from the '80s out there, though. I have a few albums where the CD beats the vinyl hands down.

As for vinyl records being direct transfers of brickwalled CDs, I guess I've been lucky because most of the modern vinyl I've bought was mastered for vinyl and sounds pretty great. The new Queensryche album is definitely a CD transfer though and so is Blind Guardian's big 4LP compilation--both sound terrible.

lol, calling this out for being dumb audiophile garbage. iPhones (and most modern smartphones) are actually pretty good audio-wise, because with modern electronics it's harder to make something lovely at this point.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2015 07:12

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

Phanatic posted:

Nah, modern CDs suck:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

I'm not referring to that part, but instead to the claim that iPhones are low-fi. They probably have better fidelity than a lot of car or home equipment (which shouldn't be surprising, because digital audio is extremely mature, and they don't have to do any real power amplification). Now, a lot of headphones connected to these devices are garbage (looking at you, Beats), but that's another issue.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2015 16:28

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

Woolie Wool posted:

Oh, I see, I didn't specify the exact make and model of headphones that came with the device, instead of assuming people would have the common sense to realize that most of the people listening through their iPhones use the stock earbuds or whatever piece of poo poo they can pick up at the convenience store because it says "iPhone" on it. That's what Joe Sixpack listens to music through, not Sennheiser HD 558s. There used to be a time when decent stereos were actually a fairly mainstream thing, and it also happened to be the time when most recorded music sounded a hell of a lot better.

lol if you think that modern releases are mastered for earbuds. If that were the case, they would be bringing the bass so far up that it would be hosed on car speakers.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2015 17:14

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

Woolie Wool posted:

Well most car speakers are garbage too (and inside a car, so the noise floor is through the loving roof), so

"Garbage" means nothing in this context. Again, the assumption that anyone would master for earbuds (with poor low-frequency response) is loving ludicrous from a technical perspective.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2015 17:24

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

Platystemon posted:

Back in the days of click‐wheel‐sporting, hard disk‐containing iPod, I recall aftermarket devices that plugged into the dock port and had their own digital‐to‐analogue converters and amplifiers.

Unlike gold HDMI cables, they had a plausible method of operation. I don�t know if Apple�s components were mediocre and theirs were better, but it�s possible.

Either way, I haven�t seen such devices advertised for iPhones. Maybe the iPhone�s audio circuitry is better, or maybe the add‐ons were always snake oil. All I�m saying is that if the iPhone�s circuitry were sub‐standard, I�d expect to see marketing for external amps/DACs like I did for the iPod.

Then again, gold HDMI cables exist, so maybe my expectations are just out of line and it�s coincidence that I haven�t seen ads for such devices.

I think external DACs are still a thing, but it's a small niche. I think that the internal DACs on current iPhones will do 16 bit / 44.1kHz, so an external DAC isn't going to give you any benefit with normal CD-quality audio sources. It''s hard to get 24 bit / 96kHz lossless for most stuff, so there is very little practical usage. Now, some audiophiles claim that even standard audio files will sound better with a high resolution DAC, no ABX test would back that up.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2015 17:29

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

chitoryu12 posted:

I haven't updated to an iPhone 6 for a number of reasons, but a main one is that it's loving huge. I don't exactly wear skinny jeans, but it's so clunky that I can basically fit an iPhone 6, its charger cord and my earbuds in one pocket at the same time and that's about it. An Otterbox just makes it even worse. The CEO at the company I work at has an iPhone 6S in an Otterbox (which I often have to fix or mess around with for him because he's extremely technologically impaired but also wants top of the line stuff as a status symbol because he grew up poor and married wealthy) and it's so unwieldy that it almost necessitates a belt clip or external pouch of some kind.

1. 6S? That hasnt exactly been released yet, so...
2. Who carries USB cable in their pocket for charging it?
3. Of course an otterbox case makes it unreasonably big. I have no idea why anyone would use one for everyday use.

# ¿ Aug 6, 2015 15:33

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

chitoryu12 posted:

Sorry, forgot the 6S hadn't been released. When I go outside the house (especially for an extended time period), I carry my charger cable and either a wall plug or a portable charger so I can keep my phone topped up. I also bring my cable to and from the office and keep my phone charged from my computer.

I have literally never heard of anyone carrying their phone charger regularly because that is probably insane for one reason or another. I have one in my laptop back for travel and that's it.

GOTTA STAY FAI posted:

iPhone screens are so goddamn fragile that an errant sneeze two blocks away will spiderweb them. I don't blame anyone who uses a big bulky-rear end case 24/7 to protect a phone so expensive to repair.

The only people I know who regularly bitch about breaking their phone screens are sloppy drunks. This anecdote is 100% accurate and factual.

# ¿ Aug 6, 2015 17:24

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

Squish posted:

Isn't ferrite memory so drat stable, that these might well have the same data stored in them?

One interesting thing to note--the core memory pictured is actually fairly low density. Before it became obsolete, the cores became crazy small and the memory planes became huge.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2015 17:41

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

Samizdata posted:

Dear God, I know this is technically , but I remember cracking several codewheels, so I could put them in text files and several trips to the self-serve copies at the copyshop so I could xerox entire game manuals...

In this thread or another, someone pointed out how some of the colors on certain codebooks were selected in order to make it impossible to make black and white photocopies of them

# ¿ Sep 1, 2015 02:55

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

I got the original Eee PC when I was a college freshman, and that thing was super convenient for taking to class with me. I used it mainly for browsing SA and typing up the occasional assignment for other classes, but the keyboard was hard to use for serious typing. But once I got an android phone (and a decent mobile web browser), I stopped using it.

It did come in handy a few years later when I needed a lightweight laptop to carry around while monitoring readings from a bunch of mobile sensors. With a stripped-down version of XP installed, it served as well as an expensive specialized piece of equipment.

# ¿ Sep 2, 2015 10:15

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

mrkillboy posted:

Good news!

What the fuckkkkk
http://www.syfy.com/znation/blog/z-nation-george-r-r-martin

# ¿ Sep 24, 2015 13:20

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

Mister Kingdom posted:

Back in the late 80s, I worked for a locally owned grocery store that had in house charge accounts. We used NCR registers like this one (ours were brown):

We had three and the third one was the master unit that had a cassette drive in it to record not only charge transactions, but daily sales info as well.

At the end of the day, we would clear out the registers and take the tape out. It would then be put into a device called a "Byte Bucket" (I have never been able to find a picture). It was an industrial cassette reader about 6" square and about a foot long. It was attached via RS232 cable to one of these:

A program would read the tape and create a file (on a 5.25" floppy) to be used by the in house charge account software housed in a regular PC clone. I never found put why they couldn't attach the cassette reader to the PC.

The software read the file and updated the customers' accounts and produced sales reports for the day. At the end of the month, we ran statements which were printed using a wide carriage dot matrix printer. All in all, it would take about three hours to run not including mailing out the statements.

Since the company who designed the software hadn't provided a user manual AND went out of business not long after, I was tasked with coming up with one. It's amazing how many steps there are when you break it down.

I left the store, but for several years afterward I would be called in to re-install the software when it went wonky. They were still using my instructions, now torn and repaired numerous times.

When they moved the store to a new location, they ditched the charge accounts and started accepting credit cards.

Despite the ridiculous number of steps involved, it worked quite well, and rarely malfunctioned.

I hadn't really considered how normal businesses integrated computers back then, so this is pretty cool.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2015 17:23

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

Zonekeeper posted:

What killed these devices was how locked down consoles became. Anyone trying to make a cheat device now has to deal with system updates making their devices/hacks worthless, and most players aren't willing to risk getting their accounts (which contain all the DLC and games they bought) banned if they get caught.

These days most "cheat devices" involve save editing since traditional realtime memory hacks are pretty much impossible now outside of PC game trainers.

Not really, though. These things (GameShark, game genie, action replay, etc) could only really thrive with cartridge based systems, since that allowed for an easy route to direct memory access. Yes, they came out for the playstation (with and without the parallel port) and PS2, but that was only due to iterative complex hacks as the systems themselves became more complicated. And once last generation came around, everything was USB, so there was no longer any way to get memory access. Sure, the console manufacturers wanted to prevent cheat devices, but once consoles turned into PCs there was nothing more to be done

# ¿ Oct 19, 2015 06:43

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 07:36

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

EoRaptor posted:

U.S. law is actually a bit weird here:

You cannot be compelled to provide something you know (password, pin code, etc) under the 5th amendment right to avoid self-incrimination. A court can, however, compel you to provide access where there is reasonable knowledge of evidence present (unreasonable search and seizure). Sometimes, these two conflict, and unless you can afford the legal bills, you will lose.

You can, however, be compelled to provide something you are (DNA, fingerprint) without a court order. So, if you use TouchID or other fingerprint locking, the police can compel you to unlock the phone or otherwise 'open' the device, without the need for court intervention.

Thus, if you care about the contents of your phone, never use fingerprint, facial recognition, etc, as a locking method.

I can vaguely recall one instance where a guy was jailed for contempt of court(for a year or something) for refusing to give his (email?) password. I Think it was a case where there was a ton of evidence that he had been hiding money owed to like an ex-wife or something? I think he was released after the judge observed further imprisonment was unlikely to compel him to disclose the information.

In US v. Fricosu, I think a judge ruled that someone could be compelled to hand over a password for a laptop in order to get a specific piece of information that was already known to exist. The EFF was against this because (i think) the defendant wasn't guaranteed immunity from anything else found on the laptop, which would be a 5th amendment violation. At the end nothing was ruled though, because a family member gave the government the password.

Then there was that time an IT guy in SF went to jail for not giving the city the passwords to a network he built. I recall being hilariously unsympathetic because he was the kind of IT rear end in a top hat who would refuse his coworkers any access to "his" network.
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-officials-locked-out-of-computer-network-3205200.php

# ¿ Oct 20, 2015 22:58

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