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Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

Collateral Damage posted:

A significantly less failed computer in Sweden was the Z80-based ABC 80 which was popular in many schools and homes, and still has a minor cult following. It held a significant market share until the C64 came along.

Ha, I have one of those. Still works fine, and given that the thing is older than me, that's kind of impressive. I've got a tape drive for it, though I wouldn't bet on too many of the tapes working anymore; never got my hands on a floppy drive (or any of the crazy modem/network action).

Also, the real way to get more TV channels in Norway was to live close to Sweden. I still think Swedish is a better language for dubbing Disney cartoons.

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Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

If wikipedia is anything to go by, Lithium ion batteries have about 2/3rds the energy density of gunpowder, weight for weight. Much nastier reaction products, though.
Compared to e.g. gasoline, both are rather puny.

Computer viking has a new favorite as of 10:14 on Jan 3, 2014

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

Oops. I looked in the table and noticed both were in there, and then picked the wrong type. And I know gunpowder isn't a high explosive, but it's good enough to count as "explosive" in the context of airplane safety. :)

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

Manky posted:

I can't think of any technology to post myself right now, but can anyone tell me about obsolete or failed musical instruments?

Talking about more classical instruments, the harpsichord family is a small niche these days, after a long dominance, and the hurdy-gurdies have gone from a common instrument to a historical curiosity.
The former is best described as a piano that plucks the strings instead of hammering them, and the latter is, uhm. A keyed violin with a rotating wheel instead of a bow?

I do like the sound of harpsichords, but they have some fundamental issues compared to the pianoes; mostly that there's no way to control the volume or duration of each note (it's either plucked or not). Larger models had two keyboards with different amounts of force, but that's still a rather rough solution. Bonus modern (well, in this context) harpsichord use: Golden Brown, by the Stranglers.

As for the hurdy gurdy, it's more of an ... acquired taste, kind of like the bagpipes. There's an explanation of the thing here.

Computer viking has a new favorite as of 16:24 on Jan 4, 2014

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

Jedit posted:

Janis Ian's famous civil rights song Society's Child opens with a harpsichord solo solely because the studio offered to provide any instruments required for the song and she'd always wanted to play one.

That seems like an entirely appropriate reason to use one. :D
Manky: I can understand getting tired of them after a while, it's not the most varied of sounds.

edit:
Also, I think I need to stop continuously updating my posts after submitting them; there's two different versions of my previous post quoted, and the in-thread one is different from both.

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

Lallander posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7OeRkXWTtQ

I think this is the one you're looking for.

Having only barely played any instruments in my life (some forced piano and keyboard at school), that looks fascinating.

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

XTimmy posted:

There's a reason bigger productions are still shot on 35mm/16mm and it's both because it's really really hard to replicate the tonality, flexibility and detail of film, even if the end result is a digital file.

Pft, 16/35mm. There's a 70mm festival here I'm kicking myself for having missed several years in a row.

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

The Prokunin-Gorsky collection is absolutely fantastic. One way or another most of it ended up in the US, so there's a gallery hosted by the library of congress here; most images can be clicked for bigger (and the link with the image title hsa even larger editions).

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

gvibes posted:

Maybe this was common knowledge, but I didn't realize this until recently - color digital still photography still uses black and white sensors, overlaid with a multi-color filter - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter.

Scientific photography often does something even closer. We have a couple of microscopes at work that we use for fluorescent antibody images (immunofluorescence) - basically, you decide what different things you want to see in the image (specific proteins and receptors, usually), buy antibodies that will stick to those, tag the antibodies with different fluorescent dyes, and pour the entire lot over your sample. After washing the excess off, put it in the microscope and blast it with UV. On the microscope is a magazine of narrowband filters that will each only pass the color matching a single dye, and a (2mpix, in our case) b/w camera. Play with the settings in the controlling computer for a while, press the button, wait for things to go *chunk-click* a few times, and you get a stack of b/w images that can be merged in false color.

Here's a random image of a few cells, nabbed from Pierce antibodies after a trip to GIS:

(Sadly, the only images we have in papers are kind of uninteresting, and I don't have any of the posters at hand.)

The mars rovers and Hubble do something similar: High-res b/w camera, filters, and multiple exposures. It's not ideal for fast-moving subjects, but it gets you a higher resolution, and the option for studying emissions in specific wavelengths. While the mars rovers carries a red filter, most of the images taken are actually IR/G/B. The IR channel is apparently more interesting, and it's good enough for color photos (of mars, at least).

Computer viking has a new favorite as of 09:47 on Jan 11, 2014

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

There's an inergen system in the server room - and there's one detail about it I've wondered about for a while. Outside the door, there's a yellow "break glass, push button" box marked simply "inergen". Is that the "oh poo poo the firewall is a wall of fire" button, or the "oh poo poo, there's people trapped in there and no fire, stop the gas dump" button?

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

NLJP posted:

Incidentally, the French in that bit with the clean leather gloves translates roughly as:

"That was better."

"Yeah, there wasn't an explosion."

"I reckon you'd have about seven seconds to remove yourself from it."

Also, I love the light jazz soundtrack. One can only hope that's the sort of thing they had in the background while they were blasting everything they could get their hands on with disturbingly reactive chemicals.
And thanks for the inergen info. :)

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

Dogan posted:

Okay, I know this is a few pages back, but how the heck does this Dolby Audio track work? Does the projector literally scan the space between each sprocket hole like a QR code to glean the digital audio data off of the film?

The blocks between the sprocket holes are exactly that, yes. As wikipedia says it:

quote:

Dolby Digital cinema soundtracks are optically recorded on a 35 mm release print using sequential data blocks placed between every perforation hole on the sound track side of the film. A constant bit rate of 320 kbit/s is used. A charge-coupled device (CCD) scanner in the image projector picks up a scanned video image of this area, and a processor correlates the image area and extracts the digital data as an AC-3 bitstream. The data are finally decoded into a 5.1 channel audio source.

The SDDS track on the outside is presumably similar.

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

Flipperwaldt posted:

The post he quoted heavily implies that that's how DTS works, but also that all the other stuff actually contains the audio.

Given that a similar amount of space can inefficiently encode an analog stereo soundtrack, it's not entirely surprising that you can squeeze in a compressed digital soundtrack there. :)

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

Ron Burgundy posted:

Actually it's backwards compatible matrixed multitrack. There is a left, right, center and surround channel encoded into the stereo track. But it will still work on a mono reader.

Oh, that's sneaky in the best possible way. I can see it working for stereo as mono (the intensity of an entire "row" is the sum of both stereo channels), but how do you add the other channels? Left/right offset on the signal part of each channel?

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

DicktheCat posted:

Thanks for all the information regarding old "computers"!




I have no actual content. I am sorry.

The slightly newer stuff, like the PDP-11 (1970 and onwards) is also rather fascinating. The first models are very obviously a box full of separate transistors and such wired up, and yet you could turn one on and run a prehistoric Unix on it ; add an interactive terminal and it would probably feel ever so slightly familiar.

Later versions moved to integrated chips, which suddenly feels more modern (and looks way more 80s to me) - but there's something magic about that time frame when computers were still unfamiliar-to-me heaps of wire but the software was relatable.

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

Lowen SoDium posted:

We had one of those in Highschool at the same time as you. It was more or less just an LCD monitor, but with out a back on it and no built in light. As a mater of fact, I had seen instructions on line on how to make an overhead projector in to a video projector using an old LCD monitor and it looked pretty much like a DIY version of this thing.

We also had one that was specifically for a TI-83 calculator.

Ha - my TI-83 had the connector for that (I got it from a teacher we knew who had some spares). I did get to test it, and tetris on the thing was fun. Horrible refresh rate and pixel transition time, but it's not like the normal screen was much better.

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

Dogan posted:

You're gonna have to elaborate, because I have no idea how the hell these designs are practical

The bottom one is a thinkpad W700ds. Massive 17" workstation laptop; optional wacom tablet in the wrist rest (to the right of the trackpad), optional colorimeter (so you can close the lid and have it automatically calibrate the main screen). The lid is extra thick, allowing them to hide another dingy extra screen you can pull out.

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

Inspector_666 posted:

Swipe is the only way to type, dude.

It's even worse than normal touch+dictionary in languages that like gluing together new words on the fly, and only a minority of my phone typing is in English. Two-thumbs typing it is. :)

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

Lazlo Nibble posted:

Pressed optical media hasn't used CAV since the LaserDisc era. Data is written with the same linear density at the outer edges of the disc as at the center, so when you're streaming something off the disc that needs data to come off at a constant rate the drive adjusts the speed of rotation to compensate. It's been this way since they first published the Red Book standard for CDs. Doing it the way you describe would waste an enormous amount of space.

wikipedia posted:

To accommodate the higher data transfer rates and random access requirements of modern CD-ROM drives, CAV systems are used. This is because seek performance would be greatly affected during random access by the requirement to continually modulate the disc's rotation speed to be appropriate for the read head's position.
Audio CDs are apparently CLV, but higher speeds are certainly not - you don't remember the discussions of the merits of CAV vs Z-CAV when you got to 32x and higher?

Computer viking has a new favorite as of 11:18 on Mar 16, 2014

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

Platystemon posted:

CAV can be used to improve random‐access performance. That doesn’t mean anyone actually does.

Random‐access performance is not a concern these days. Everything is either inherently sequential (films, music) or uses optical discs merely as a transmission medium (modern games, everything else).

The Xbox, Gamecube, Dreamcast, and Wii used CAV. I’ve heard conflicting reports about the Xbox 360. As far as I know, Blu‐ray has no provisions for CAV operation.

Ah, but the XP disc was a data CD - not a DVD, not an audio CD, and not specialized game media. And data CD definitely used CAV in a way that would make the outer tracks faster (though that might not have been why they did it). :)

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

Which explains why slimmed XP images could be so much smaller, I guess.

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

KozmoNaut posted:

Counterpoint: Comic Sans MS.

Counter-counter: Automated cartoon lettering is what it was designed for, and one of the few uses where it doesn't look too out of place.

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

As I've understood it, the main reason to use Lotus Notes is as a development platform, where email is just one of the features; it's supposedly a reasonable way to make enterprise-wide database/messaging things.

To my knowledge I've never been in the same building as an open Notes client, so I have no idea how true that is.

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

These days, workstation SCSI would typically be SAS, which is a perfectly nice technology that uses the same power and data connectors as SATA (and you can put SATA disks on SAS controllers, though not the reverse). It helps that it - like SATA - uses one cable per drive instead of daisychaining.

Oh, and the alpha and related OSes deserves an effortpost at some point. I could do it, but I'll have to replace the BIOS battery in my PWS first.

Computer viking has a new favorite as of 08:09 on Mar 25, 2014

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

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

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

Doing my taxes this year consisted of not clicking the "I want to make changes"-button on a web page. We've basically got the same pre-filled system as you (though web based), but it's had a couple of years more polish, to the point where it seems to be correct for a lot of people.

Of course, the system that handles logins tends to melt in exciting ways during peaks; in 2012 it logged a couple of hundred people into the account of one random and increasingly unhappy guy, and last year they had some caching issues that also dropped people into random wrong accounts. I think it worked out ok this year, though.

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

DrBouvenstein posted:

There's, like, two dozen tax software programs in the US that do this, too.

TurboTax, TacAct, H&R Block has one...uhh...others? I imagine Quicken/Quickbooks probably has some kind of tax thing built in to one of its versions.

Sure, but those don't get most fields pre-filled through the magic of the IRS already knowing almost everything about you.

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

Eh, secure data submission over HTTPS is hardly SciFi anymore. Sure, if you've got keyloggers and such intercepting your keypresses it'll get out ... but if it comes to that, you've already got a stack of problems.

And I really don't know what the elderly do here. I'll ask my grandparents next time I see them.

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

SwivelTits2000 posted:

No. You are literally the only person to ever express this opinion on the Internet.

Disable it, problem solved, move on. Myself, I want my mid-80s ATMs with the clacky keys and the monochrome text-only green screens.

Those keyboards are completely horrible, though. Hiding my PIN would be so much easier if I didn't have to hammer down each key at a precise angle to get it to register.

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

Rollersnake posted:

Okay, that was pretty awesome. What's a good example of something really cutting edge made on the C64 back when the technology was current, though?

This, maybe? 1995 is still a long time after the C64 was released, but it's way closer. :)

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

Code Jockey posted:

Speaking of fond memories of old machine sounds, someday I need to hook up my C64 dot matrix printer. Maybe I'll fire up Print Shop Pro or something, make some nice banners for the next birthday party I throw. :v:

I'm that guy, that guy that legitimately loves the horrible, screeching buzzing noise oldschool tractor feed dot matrix printers make. That's the soundtrack to my childhood right there. :allears:

So many school reports printed off of my old one.

Also totally buying a Model M / Unicomp as soon as I can spare the cash. Modern squishy silent keyboards just don't feel right, y'know? I like my typing to sound like the wrath of god!

My day-to-day keyboard at home is some modern one with blue Cherry switches. I also have a Model M (1987 vintage) that I rescued from a bin at uni. The Model M is louder, but it's a very different sound - the M sounds like you're pushing selector buttons on on something industrial from 1955, while the blues are much more rattly and bright. I've been asked to stop playing games in the evening on both of them, though - they both go through walls annoyingly well.

I actually prefer the Cherry switches, though - they feel lighter and I think they click at a shallower point. On the other hand, the M makes typing feel like Serious Business - I drag it out for some things just because it's so enjoyable. :D

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

Coffee And Pie posted:

That reminds me, does anyone else remember Cinemania? It was a MS program that was a lot like a proto-IMDB, with pictures and reviews, and even a few video clips, which was a big deal back then.

Oh wow, yes - it was in the MS software pack we got bundled with the (AST! Cyrix! Win3.11fW!) 486, together with Encarta and MS Golf (for whatever reason). Being a Norwegian preteen with a limited interest in movies, I watched a few clips as novelties.

MS Golf, OTOH, was great. :D
(I spent a lot of time with Encarta, too. Does anyone else remember the fractal tree drawing thing it had?)

Computer viking has a new favorite as of 02:20 on May 10, 2014

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

WebDog posted:

I preferred the little moon orbit example. You could kick it in at the right angle to make some nice spirograph patterns.

I eventually got a standalone (Win3.1) program that let me set up an arbitrary number of objects and set their mass and initial velocity/direction of travel. Quite neat. :)

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

Here is a random 38 sq.m. apartment in a much newer building (I'd guess late 1990s). One of the pictures is the shower/bathroom.

Oh, and it's $1770/month. :norway:

Computer viking has a new favorite as of 15:26 on May 13, 2014

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

My dad once mentioned he had painted some posh late-1800s apartments that had now-disabled pipes to pump seawater to the bathtubs - it was apparently quite the luxury.

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

Inspector_666 posted:

The thing is, that bathroom isn't really that tiny even by American urban standards. But why not just put in a partition between the shower and everything else? It's not as if stand-up shower cubicle things aren't widely available.

I suspect they took down a dingy shower curtain before taking the pictures, but yes - a folding door or something would have made a lot of sense. (And I've seen way worse, up to literal "your legs have to go out the door to sit on the toilet"-designs. That was literally the first result. :) )

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

Shugojin posted:

There is (maybe was, he survived a stroke a bit before I graduated) a British professor in the physics department at Penn State. He frequently asks "do you mind if I rub out right here?" in reference to the chalkboard :mmmhmm:

Our department leader is an elegant old Norwegian woman. She speaks English rather well, except for an unfortunate tendency to pronounce "come" with a U (as in "must"). She's also fond of expressions like "we need come together and...". I have maintained a completely straight face for several years.

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

Dick Trauma posted:

Just keep the PhoneNet and SCSI terminators in the same bag. One stop shop for terminating! :black101:

Now we get to hear from people that were tormented by SCSI chain management.
Black goat, silver knife, five black candles, full moon, midnight - right?

I haven't had to fight scsi (I've only really used SCA, in reasonably simple setups). I did however bring 10BASE--2 (Thinnet) to sleepovers and living room LANs in my early teens. I still like BNC connectors, but really really don't miss the terminators or the chain topology.

Edit: Beaten, I see.
For added content, the grounding issues you got were fun as well: the shielding on coax was tied to the ground of the connected computers, which made for electrical fun times if you first connected something improperly grounded , then, say, grabbed your own (grounded) computer and the cable to connect them.

Computer viking has a new favorite as of 10:05 on May 26, 2014

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

Both cat5 and cat5e can do 1000-BASE-T (which is gbit over four wire pairs). Cat5e and cat6 are also capable of 1000-BASE-TX, which is gbit over two pairs - but most things use -T anyway.

10gbit requires cat6 (max 55m) or cat6a (max 100m), though.

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Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

Code Jockey posted:

Things I haven't thought about in probably a decade: Kai's Power Goo

To quote Kai:

quote:

These days I get such questions all the time… “So where are you? What were you doing? Why are you back now? What is that Frax thing anyway?”
(...)

Of course if you even just know my name still, you are showing your advanced age, ha… The old Meta stuff doesn’t even really run any more, and the new kids have basically forgotten all the early days - which is the right of every new generation :)

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