Kharmakazy posted:

Like my palm tungsten t2 with keyboard!


If I had waited a month they released a version with wifi. Everyone thought it was cool as hell that I essentially had a laptop folded up in my shirt pocket though.

I paid $100 of a 64mb sd card for that thing. On the upside, it could play NES games.

Flipperwaldt posted:

Space Gopher posted:

Yes, that's just a sticker, but a lot of processors around the same era actually had an exposed, unprotected die. Athlon XPs were great CPUs, but putting a heatsink on one was nerve-wracking. A bit of pressure on the edge of the exposed silicon, and you could do this to your expensive new processor:



That's a tiny little chip out of a tiny little chip, but it broke the hearts of a thousand careless nerds. Who all proceeded to post about how AMD $UXXXX on early internet forums.

Manky posted:

Nintendo can have some silly ideas now and then, but drat if they can't make solid hardware while their competitors make consoles that ship with 1 in 8 failure rates. My Gamecube once fell three feet while I was playing Smash Bros. and it was fine. A few months ago a drunk friend peed almost directly into my Wii. It's still fine!

But you want to talk obsolete and failed? The Gameboy Micro. I don't know many other people who've seen or played one in person, so check out this picture for a sense of scale:



Yeah, it's insanely small. It only plays GBA games, no backwards compatibility. Great battery life, easily the best screen of the GBA generation (backlit, instead of the frontlit SP screens), and you could change the faceplates to personalize it. Why was it such a dumb idea, and why did it sell so badly? They decided to release it a year after the Nintendo DS came out.

flippy piss posted:

Why did it take us so loving long to figure this out? Instead of putting the pins on the CPU, and then jamming that into the motherboard, put the pins on the motherboard, and have a metal contraption firmly hold down the pin-less CPU.

Parallel Paraplegic posted:

The Soviets had weird rules about precious metals - if you found some gold thing for instance, even just scrap metal with gold in it, you had to give it to the state (but you got 25% of its value). And if the state took your personal gold collection during an investigation, but you were later acquitted, you got the cost of the gold back but not the gold itself. I wouldn't be surprised if they also had weird export laws that made you declare every single microgram of precious metal you're carrying. If someone wants to look it up here's an old soviet law book I found while googling around that I don't really want to read and couldn't find the answer in cursory searches

Parallel Paraplegic posted:

You totally can, actually. I set up a crafty system back when my grandpa used dialup to use his computer like a gateway and allow me to connect via Wifi so I didn't have to kick him off the computer when I was at his house. It was kinda surreal, connecting via wifi and then loading a page in like 5 minutes.

Actually that brings up another obsolete thing - for years, up until 2003 I think, my dad was so cheap that we were only allowed to use the "free" internet services, you know, like NetZero used to be - you'd get 10 hours (wow!) free per month and then it would cut you off. It would plaster a giant banner ad at the top of your screen (not just your browser) while it was on, and it went down very often, but I still managed to see my first ever porn on that drat connection

Dacap posted:

What is the point of a DVD that offers no advantages and won't play in some players? Is it just the novelty of it being small or was their some kind of tiny player designed for these?

HonorableTB posted:

This is old, but the majority of Russian shops that I went into in St Petersburg and Moscow simply wouldn't sell to you if you didn't have cash. Russians are also very titchy about having exact change (or as close as possible) because for some reason, the culture there hates making change for bigger bills. This was something I had to explain over and over to the people that went on my 2nd study abroad trip.

Manfrompoot posted:

Holy poo poo, they actually released full length movies on it:



This isn't a double pack. It's one cartridge. This has gotta be the biggest GBA cart ever made. The ones with two half-hour TV episodes are around 32MB, so I can only imagine how huge this beast is (for reference, GBA ROM file sizes generally top out at around 16MB).

Interestingly, the GBA Video cartridges wouldn't work on the Gamecube's Game Boy Player attachment, because Nintendo didn't want to be raise the ire of film companies by stealing away their customers.

Inspector_71 posted:

One of our customers uses one of these (minus actual machine) as a computer desk, and whenever I'm over there to fix something I always end up working the pedal the entire time, just spinning that flywheel.

DicktheCat posted:

Everyone is gonna call me pathetic, but this almost made me cry.

I remember going to the theatre as a kid, and sneaking peeks into the projector room, and it was like this amazing world of whirring machines and whizzing film going by at breakneck speeds. I was entirely entrance when that door opened, and several times tried to sneak in.

I feel somehow cheated knowing that when I go to the theatre, it's just a bloody DVD they're playing for me on the projector. Hell, I have a goddamned DVD player. Motherfucker. The only thing is missing is the giant rear end everything.

E: I didn't mean this to be newpage. I'm sorry for lame newpage.

kastein posted:

Another AI poster just reminded me:

MCA and EISA expansion buses. Oh, and external L2/L3 cache modules.

Qotile Swirl posted:

Before I got an actual gamepad (), I had something like that. Mine was much simpler thought -- just a stick that sort of latched on to the 5 key on the numpad with a cross to press down on the 2, 4, 6, and 8 keys.

At its best, it performed much worse than pressing the keys by hand. More often it just snapped off when you tried to use it.

Armyman25 posted:

Find out if any local police are having a gun buy back and turn it in.

XBurritoXLogicX posted:

I'll take a small crack at this! I have very limited information, mostly just books in the sale section of bookstores, so I'm no expert.

Pilsner posted:

I'm installing this specialized car dealership software via a VM, originally written to run on a customized UNIX installation... by Germans. Looks like something from a B-movie:

Internet Friend posted:

(Future candidate for this thread)

Iron Crowned posted:

I'm sure in 10 years, the Nexus 7 tablet I bought a few months ago will seem like a waste of money.

leidend posted:

I went with the Nokia e90 instead. It was fantastic and still to this day the best keyboard on a phone. Crappy OS though.

XTimmy posted:

Why the necessity to 'pad out space'?

Mister Kingdom posted:

And gently caress trying to win radio contests.