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Code Jockey posted:Is this the first ever video compression technology? Yes! It's a primitive form of RLE
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Nov 29, 2012 22:13
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Dick Trauma posted:I got your deck right here, buddy. It was perfect for playing Micro Surgeon!
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Jan 22, 2014 12:58
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"SUPERMAGNETS For Cancer-Detection Research"? is this MRI? Also: "TSUNAMIS! How Science Predicts Those Giant Sea Waves" A: poorly 
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Apr 11, 2014 09:14
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Flipperwaldt posted:They were still 1.44MB formatted under MS DOS. Floppy drives could actually format disks, i.e. rewrite the magnetic tracks and sectors, unlike hard disks. "Formatting" a hard disk actually just overwrites the data, the disk's firmware lacks the code to format-format (what you may have heard of as "low-level format") the disk So, with the right program, you could redraw the magnetic layout of a floppy disk as you wished, making tracks and sectors as narrow as the physical limits of the disk and drive allowed. This was only useful as long as you had a driver for your OS that could read the format back
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Feb 7, 2015 19:27
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thespaceinvader posted:PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. Technically, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth and PHP was still written in Perl, it initially stood for Personal Home Pages thespaceinvader posted:Nerds lover recursive acronyms. Also "Yet Another X"
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Jul 1, 2015 16:06
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WebDog posted:So I attempted to fix that by re-installing windows 98 over itself...which surprisingly didn't break it, but didn't help. I don't know where so many myths on Windows 98 came from. Of course it could be reinstalled over itself: it's how you restored really bad cases of system file corruption that couldn't be solved with SFC. It also rolled back Windows to the "Gold" version, overwriting any updates you had installed (Windows Update is much older than you probably think). It didn't touch your documents or registry at all: after a reinstallation you still had all your files, settings, third party drivers... and third party driver issues. You had to manually nuke system.dat (the registry), and any .inf/.sys files (drivers) for the installation to reset those; maybe delete autoexec.bat and config.sys too for good measure, in case you were using ancient DOS drivers Christ, I can't count how many times I reinstalled Windows 98 and saw the notorious tambourine progress animation. It wasn't even to fix issues, I just liked to gently caress with all the options and settings during installation to see how much I could customize, eventually even found the tool on the CD-ROM that let you make a configuration file for an unattended installation. The Windows 95 CD-ROM may have been full of goodies like music videos and Hover, but the Windows 98 one was absolutely full of low level technical tools for developers and administrators Windows developer and blogger Raymond Chen once said that all executables in the Windows directory are written or were changed so that they won't do anything bad or dangerous when double-clicked, because there were people who, for some reason, opened the Windows directory and double-clicked every single executable they found. I was one of those people Raygereio posted:lighting techniques from 1897. Georges Méliès famously worked with natural light only. His movie studio was pretty much a greenhouse
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Jul 10, 2015 18:30
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Or set it to Suspend instead of Shutdown
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Jul 10, 2015 19:09
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The alternate function on my Lenovo's F5 button is... refresh
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Jul 11, 2015 16:15
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Ensign Expendable posted:What kind of a keyboard do you have where Fn is right next to Alt? The "close" key on its own closes the current window, no need to press Alt like if it was read as F4
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Jul 11, 2015 18:41
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Mercury Ballistic posted:Here is a new topic: imagery satellites. Back when only a few countries had them, they needed to recover the actual film. The satellite would jettison the film canister and it would deorbit and reenter the atmosphere. Prior to landing on the surface, it would be decending via parachute, where it would get grabbed out of the air by a waiting aircraft, then whisked away to wherever for processing. I remember these! As a last resort, if they couldn't be recovered while airborne, they were designed to float. They had a salt plug that would slowly dissolve in water, ensuring that the canister would eventually fill with water and sink, to prevent enemy capture
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Sep 13, 2015 22:20
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My school had one of these:  No idea what it was used for, though Antifreeze Head posted:Edit: here's some content via the Best Movie Poster Thread. I've seen this, it's actually not a silly action movie, just that kind of incredibly naive new age/fringe science movie they loved to make in the 70s-80s, like Brainstorm and Altered States. Also the kind of movie that Ghostbusters risked to be if Dan Aykroyd had his way Wasabi the J posted:That's some Regular Show-levels of made-up movie premises bad. And it doesn't even mention that he trained the dolphin to talk! SLOSifl posted:I understand that 1000m = 1km and how that's all super great, but that convertibility is not useful in daily life. It really, really doesn't matter that the distance between places can be divided or multiplied by 10 easily. And water freezing at 0 degrees and boiling at 100 is also equally meaningless to daily life. There just isn't a tangible benefit. I guess this is how the British rationalized their absurd pre-decimal coinage too
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Oct 15, 2015 20:14
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robodex posted:Like, you'll never hear someone say they're 183cm tall or to use 236.6ml of water, they'd say 6 feet tall or 1 cup of water Yeah because where metric is the norm, people don't use metric measurements in that stilted way. Like for height, in Italy you'd say you were "1 and 83" tall e: I think the most useful part of metric is that 1 L of water weighs 1 kg, and fits in a 10x10x10 cm cube. Like if I need to measure a volume of water (or milk etc.) and I don't have a graded container, I can use a scale hackbunny has a new favorite as of 22:44 on Oct 15, 2015 |
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Oct 15, 2015 22:38
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blugu64 posted:I'll keep that in mind next time I'm carrying a cube of water around But then you do some quick math and realize a cubic meter of water weighs a literal ton e: and since human bodies have almost the same density as water, you can quickly and correctly tell if you can compress a body in a suitcase or car trunk, knowing the body's weight. Like I know I could fit an appropriately liquefied/compressed average adult body in my hiking backpack; probably not lift it, but it would fit e2: I'm saying metric is a godsend for napkin math e3: metric paper sizes are great too: fold a stack of A(N) paper in half, you get an A(N+1) sized booklet, in the same aspect ratio. Get with the program, USA 
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Oct 15, 2015 22:47
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KozmoNaut posted:I'm only speaking from a European perspective, to be fair. Nearly every FM station around here is just blatantly mainstream copycat dreck, all of the good jazz, classical, hard rock etc. is digital or streaming only. Europe where? In Italy I can think of a dozen super popular, privately owned FM stations, not counting the four state-owned stations, a Christian station that will probably continue broadcasting until and after the heat death of the universe, and two political stations Is it really declining? I can't imagine FM radio going away. I mean it's free, you can get it anywhere, there are millions of FM receivers around. It's so weird
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Oct 18, 2015 18:58
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1500quidporsche posted:Also it's worth asking if anybody remembers AM being any good and if so what was it like? AM interference makes the coolest noise. Once in a few years I'll try AM, find absolutely nothing but Radio Uno (first state-owned station) and whistling noises, and turn to FM again Now, if we want to talk obsolete broadcasting technology, what about cable radio? In Italy it's exclusively operated by Rai (the state-owned network), transmitted over the phone lines in AM; it intersects the frequency band used by DSL so it's doomed. They don't even make receivers anymore, even Rai recommends buying used. The site of the FD5 station has an impressively nerdy section on classic receivers, including circuit schematics
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Oct 19, 2015 21:21
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robodex posted:I have a PS1 Gameshark Pro, which I believe is one of the few cheat devices released for consoles that you could actually do direct memory searches to make your own cheats. Is that the one that also acted as an LPT adapter for the PS1's proprietary parallel port?
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Oct 19, 2015 21:22
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Tubesock Holocaust posted:The PS1 I had didn't come with the serial port in the back Parallel  . Serial was the smaller port for linking two PS1s for multiplayer. Another obsolete technology: networking over serial cables. The physics department of my university was wired for DECnet, and there were thick bundles of cables strewn absolutely everywhere, often connected to long dead dishwasher-sized machines
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Oct 21, 2015 23:25
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Grumbletron 4000 posted:There were the first anti theft stereos where the whole unit slid out of its chassis. A flip out handle would allow you to carry it around with you. Nobody could steal your stereo but you looked like a tool toting the thing around. I was a kid at the time and the guys carrying their car stereo around looked cool to me, because it meant they had a car stereo 
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Oct 23, 2015 23:31
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Lurking Haro posted:These are really common in Germany, mostly made of plastic. They are on many gift keyrings and even parking discs. Keeping them in your wallet can wear the edges down and some carts might have trouble accepting them then. A bare keyring without a chain or fob, of the right size and stiffness, works great for unlocking shipping carts
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Dec 22, 2015 17:06
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KozmoNaut posted:Oh yeah, I remember Sonique: mamasutra feel good feel good... The volume dial in the large and medium views was so annoying to use
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Dec 28, 2015 17:54
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Horace posted:Talking about jewel cases, weren't they awful poo poo? Every part of them was a failure. The hinges snapped all the time, the little teeth usually held the disc too strongly for a while before snapping off and not holding it at all, and if you got a booklet with the CD the paper would get hosed up by the semi-circles that were supposed to hold it in place. Then there were those 2-disc cases where the inside part hinged - for a brief period before breaking. Yes, my god, jewel cases were horrible. Never had one that didn't break, and they never looked anything but cheap and ugly Horace posted:Why couldn't they have just shipped CDs in cardboard sleeves like miniature LPs? I have always wondered this too. There will never be a nostalgic revival for CDs that isn't ironic, because cardboard sleeves were often beautiful but a jewel case is always going to look like cheap, utilitarian crap that ages terribly. Scratch or bend a cardboard sleeve, that gives it character. Scratch or bend a jewel box, it belongs in the garbage now. Don Norman of Design of Everyday Things fame has written about materials aging well vs those that do so terribly, and how people factor that in the value they assign to things I guess the rationale was that the jewel case wouldn't let the CD touch the case so it wouldn't scratch, but it's bullshit because my Windows 98 install CD had a cardboard sleeve, and it's still perfect despite getting more airtime than White Christmas
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Feb 9, 2016 17:45
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Astrobastard posted:Speaking of SCART im pretty sure noone outside of Europe had to suffer with these bastard things. It wasnt so much the connecetor (okay it was) but you were guaranteed to have some 1.5cm thick cable hanging out the back that was near on impossible to maneuver into a decent location or even around other cables. gently caress SCART The connector was complete and utter poo poo. The worst connectors were those without a full set of pins, they were possibly even wobblier On the other hand, SCART as a standard was pretty good. Well, better than RF. And it was bidirectional! took me years to find out, it wasn't even documented in the VCR's manual. The way a VCR was usually setup was:
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Feb 18, 2016 14:23
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ryonguy posted:Is the reason when more than three(?) sprites were on the same horizontal level on my NES they would flicker related to something like this? Different issue IIRC, I think the NES simply couldn't draw all of them quickly enough in the span of a horizontal refresh cycle and so it dropped frames
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Mar 11, 2016 01:05
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Zaphod42 posted:Also the blue bomber himself is blue because of the NES limitations. The limited color palette had one additional shade of blue than any other color, so they made him blue so they could still have a couple different colors for megaman and have another shade of blue left over for backgrounds, to stand apart, so megaman wouldn't blend in to the backgrounds. The NES palette wasn't limited, it was inexplicable  No yellow and ten blacks, and the colors are very uneven
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Mar 12, 2016 01:04
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Platystemon posted:Obsolete technology: computer consoles with built‐in ashtrays: I'm old enough to remember arcade cabinets with ashtrays That SAGE console demonstrates two other obsolete technologies:
hackbunny has a new favorite as of 17:23 on May 2, 2016 |
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May 2, 2016 17:16
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evobatman posted:Something I've wondered about are the Cray supercomputers of the 70s and 80s. How do they compare to todays computers? A typical PC today has 4 cores, 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. Do concepts such as RAM and CPU power even relate to a Cray? Yes and no, the point of Crays and other vector machines was to execute lots of calculations in parallel, with several processors that could perform hundreds or thousands operations in parallel - or rather, perform the same arithmetic/logic operation in parallel on thousands of different values (a vector of values, hence "vector machines"). Since memory was slow, a lot of the memory wasn't shared between processors, so you can't even do straight comparisons with RAM. They were pretty exotic architectures, painstakingly designed on paper and hand-built (Crays famously had all signal wires in the same length, so that signals would be synchronized at the hardware level - a feat that required weird twisty wiring), very different from a PC (although PCs took some concepts from them, see SIMD instructions). They are, in fact, more closely related to GPUs: it wouldn't be wrong to say that your computer's video card is an embedded supercomputer. I don't know exactly how modern CPUs compare to the old supercomputers, but modern GPUs outperform them several orders of magnitude hackbunny has a new favorite as of 13:04 on May 4, 2016 |
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May 4, 2016 12:58
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twistedmentat posted:Dude is only 22, there is no way he ever was in a car with manual windows unless his parents had an old beater around. Rentals! No idea why, but it seems in the USA they keep those features out of base models specifically so that rental car places can buy cars without them. Then again he's too young to rent a car at most places
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May 7, 2016 17:58
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TotalLossBrain posted:A rifle prominently featured in neocon masturbatory fantasy novel "Unintended Consequences". Holy poo poo I looked it up, and the cover is a soldier raping lady justice in front of the burning US constitution  e: OMG "In one part of the novel, he races his hot-rodded GMC truck against a rival Porsche, with Bowman winning, driving in excess of 140 mph to win" this book must be so bad. I'm tempted to read it e: HAHAHAHAHA of course the only female character is "a victim of childhood abuse and organized crime", "abducted by mafia thugs during a trip to Chicago, Illinois, who force her to become a sex slave for mafia bosses and leaders" even hackbunny has a new favorite as of 15:45 on May 18, 2016 |
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May 18, 2016 15:41
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I don't know whether I should feel relieved or disappointed that I won't have to read it twistedmentat posted:This looks like poo poo a kid would come up with based on watching lots and lots of old cartoons where automatic services go wrong. I cannot imagine anything like this being practical, reliable or even affordable. Like all you'd need is one thing to go wrong inside and everything just stops working. See also the almost proverbially hosed up automated baggage handling system at Denver International Airport: http://calleam.com/WTPF/?page_id=2086
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May 21, 2016 22:36
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KozmoNaut posted:Why the hell would they require a bachelor's degree? Class warfare
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May 25, 2016 10:09
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TinTower posted:Britain's plugs are the best I've read that designers hate the British plug because it's so big and awkward and hard to incorporate in an elegant design You will find, in any case, that it's Italian plugs that are the best:  Compact, inline, symmetrical (AC polarity is a lie). Almost perfect, if not for this nonsense:  The left, wider outlet, requiring a wider plug, goes to the 16 ampere circuit, the right one is 10A. Except we haven't had separate 16A and 10A circuits in decades Our switches are superior, too: 
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Jun 10, 2016 14:42
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BattleMaster posted:"Unnecessarily big" Fitt's law dude. If the whole thing is a target, you can't miss
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Jun 10, 2016 14:46
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The American everyday object with a surprisingly alien design, for me, was the doorknob. American doorknobs manage to feel big and heavy and flimsy at the same time. Big rattly spring-loaded things that threaten to come off in your hand at the slightest provocation
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Jun 10, 2016 14:53
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Spy_Guy posted:
Son of a bitch  . I will kill you and take it from you
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Jun 15, 2016 07:52
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Humphreys posted:Well poo poo, that looks very interesting. I might give it a go for shits and giggles. Thanks for making me aware of it. I worked on it a long time ago! No, it doesn't do a lot. I downloaded it some time ago when I needed to run a Windows program on a Mac, and sure enough I ran it, but the system was so unstable, kept bluescreening or locking up Humphreys posted:EDIT: Wow the LiveCD download is 64MB! It's also super easy to start developing for it, must be the easiest OS to compile in history. Pity nobody wants to
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Jun 24, 2016 22:51
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Jedit posted:"Great stuff" not including the Edsel, of course. It has its moments  
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Jul 25, 2016 12:20
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Neither are the old analog computers used to do things like calculate where a bomb would land, calculate differentials, and calculate firing trajectories. Yeah, they aren't computers, they are calculators
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Sep 12, 2016 14:12
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Rappaport posted:Wasn't the Z3 the first programmable computer? Or, if it wasn't, what made Colossus the first? I'm not very savvy with early computer stuff The Z3 was also Turing-complete on a technicality, IIRC
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Sep 13, 2016 12:23
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Platystemon posted:Colossus had to be re‐wired to re‐program it. Z3 could be fed new programs on punched tape. Even the Z1 was programmable! I love the Z1, it was 100% mechanical, the only electrical (not electronic!) component was the clock, a motor spinning at 60 rpm i.e. 1 Hz. The thing must have been a nightmare to keep running reliably, so much grinding metal, but drat, the balls in single-handedly building such a complex machine knowing that the technology wasn't quite there yet Jerry Cotton posted:This is the worst discussion about a purely semantic issue I've ever seen and I haven't even participated yet. It's not purely semantic. It's no coincidence nor conspiracy that Turing, and not Zuse (or Babbage) is considered the founder of computer science: there's a world of difference between a calculator and a programmable machine, it's a whole new branch of science. Zuse and Babbage designed universal programmable machines (the Z1 and the analytical engine, respectively) but didn't realize they were fundamentally different from calculators
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Sep 13, 2016 13:12
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It's not like he came up with the first formal model of a computer in the first place  Computer designers before Turing were like "what useful features can I add to my computer", Turing was the first to go "how much can I remove before it's no longer a computer" and prove that the cool features of the cool computer can be replaced by programs that run on the simpler computer. He literally created computer science. Computer science wouldn't be relevant to computer engineering for a long time, but computer engineering wouldn't have gone very far without his theoretical work Take video games for example: some early games, like Pong, were single-purpose logic circuits that may as well be made of relays (in fact someone did make a Pong clone out of relays as a proof of concept, a few years ago), but all video games from about 1980 onward are programs running on a computer. Oversimplifying, we could say that without Turing, we would still be stuck with Pong hackbunny has a new favorite as of 23:33 on Sep 13, 2016 |
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Sep 13, 2016 23:14
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