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Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Elim Garak posted:

What did handheld calculators use as displays before LCD's? Like the kind of display Speak and Spells had?

Yes, LED display.

And before that VFT (vacuum fluorescent tube display). Which was expensive or difficult to make or something. My dad has an old one that has a display of four digits and you have to press a button to switch between showing the first four and the last four digits of a big number.

It isn't this one, but it looks a bit like it and is built on the same principles:

# ¿ Aug 4, 2012 13:05

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 03:51

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Fuzz1111 posted:

Everytime the limited format support is brought up someone calls the formats that it doesn't play "piracy formats" and it really is a big copout: if sony intentionally omitted support on the basis of piracy, why did it leave in support for other video and audio formats that pirates use?

I think you're mistaken in the idea that a corporate decision should be internally consistent and make sense. They're pandering to the market to sell products and to their anti-piracy interests at the same time and end up with these half-assed compromises.

They've done this before. Portable Minidisc recorder with an optical in, but no out. But still provide a line out, instead of consistently sticking with just the headphone out then. So they can pretend it's a fully fledged digital recording device, but not provide you with a feature that would actually make it useful. And that was still comparably effective in making it useless for pirates.

With digital video it has become harder for them. You can't not support any popular codecs and still pretend it can function as a media player. That poo poo won't sell and they know it. They learned that lesson the hard way; they absolutely tried. See the usb/mp3 "supporting" version of Minidisc they had later. But that apparently doesn't stop them from dragging their feet and sneaking in the inconveniences for pirates they can get away with.

If piracy isn't the reason, and neither is cost or difficulty, as you rightly say yourself, what the hell is? How is citing piracy as the most probable reason a cop-out? Nobody's saying its a very sensible or efficient measure.

Fuzz1111 posted:

My parents got this thing in 1994 and it was obsolete even then (my dad got it because it was the same model that he used at work).

[*] 386SX 16mhz (with performance closer to a 286 than it's 386DX big brother)

A 386SX wasn't that crazy in 1994. My dad got a new one in 1993 and I worked with a 8086 until 1996. Before Win95, just about anything could run DOS and Win 3.11 about equally and not having the newest computer just meant you couldn't play the most recent games. Or maybe that was just a matter of lower expectations on my part. Anyway, Win95 really was a tipping point that pushed the market forward and having a new computer really became a lot more important after that.

My first computer was this Amstrad PC1512:

Two double density (180KB) floppies, no harddrive. More or less CGA compatible video. Black and white screen that allowed for 4 shades of grey! Came originally with non-MS DOS and a non MS graphical interface called GEM Desktop (still have the floppies somewhere). Upgraded from the standard 512KB ram to 640KB!

It was almost 100% IBM PC compatible, but that was only a problem with IBM DOS anyway. MS DOS gave no fucks.

It had wonderful idiosyncracies: the mouse was called a turtle in the manual. It had a UK keyboard without F11 and F12. It had a knob for pc speaker volume, which was nice when playing games with sound. Also, instead of using a CR2032 battery for keeping time, date and bios settings, it took four AA batteries in an indentation at the bottom of the other indentation that the stand of the screen fit in.

I got it in 1991 after it had been in my aunt's attic for five years. I upgraded to a Pentium 60 in 1996 because I needed a sound card and VGA to use ScreamTracker.

# ¿ Aug 9, 2012 19:51

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Fuzz1111 posted:

You could be right, I guess it just reminded me of the sort of stuff a mate of mine says - I try not to talk with him about anything to do with sony because he's a huge fanboy and everything they make is flawless:
him: hey see if you can adjust the TV, can't get it to look right (he's colourblind)
me: [after 10 minutes of stuffing around] your TV doesn't seem to allow any setting thats not hugely saturated
him: it's vibrant!
me: the speaker distorts too easily
him: good i don't like bassy music anyway
me: why doesn't your so called media centre play any media
him: not everyone's a pirate like your pc using buddies! oh by the way can you take my usb drive home with you? I have more mkv's for you to convert

Oh no, yeah, I see where you're coming from now. If someone is defending it as a sensible and comprehensive measure, then that's just wrong. I think we both agree there's incompetence in play somwhere somehow.

I had a similar experience by the way with Sony earphones that had very harsh highs. Someone defended them by saying they would wear down to a duller sound over a few months. Yep, two wrongs apparently making a right, right there.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2012 14:13

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Crimsonjewfro posted:

I dunno if you guys talked about it (I haven't seen it mentioned it, but I might have accidentally skipped it), but all the MD x MP3 talk reminds me that, probably because of some delay for the technology to arrive here in Brazil, we actually had a happy medium, before portable MP3 players won the battle, that was the MP3 CD player.

Not only in Brazil, mate.

Absolute shite. The left one goes through a fresh set of batteries in ~20 minutes (paid 150� for that in 2000(?)), the right one (2002) tops at roughly ~120 minutes on a good day. They need the full 3V so using 1.2V rechargeables is right out.

The internals of these are basically normal cd-rom players, without any of the power/shock protection optimizations discmen had already gone through at that point. Navigating files/folders was a nightmare on the tiny screen. The left one doesn't even show titles. It was s-l-o-w at booting up and skipping tracks.

I've used these in the car for a while, with a power adapter and a tape deck adapter, but they very quickly turned out not to be worth the hassle.

I'm really surprised to see you mention battery life as a good point for them.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2012 15:24

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

I guess my poor experience with those MP3 cd players is due to a combination of early adopter's problems, bad luck and my tendency of buying the shittest brands (I'm a cheapskate :ssh:

Lowen SoDium posted:

Say hello the Psion Series III.

I wanted this thing so loving bad. Not that I could have used it for anything then. Or even now.

But, gently caress, a tiny computer that fits in your pocket! It's got a real keyboard and everything.

If the thing ran DOS and had sound, I'd still be interested.

EDIT New page content: remember these?

Flipperwaldt has a new favorite as of 18:39 on Aug 29, 2012

# ¿ Aug 29, 2012 18:13

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Zamujasa posted:

Oh god, I had at least three of these in various flavors and denominations, but I think I actually had this exact one at some point.

I think it actually did have a fair number of games (possibly 5, mostly games like Tetris/Quarth/Breakout/lovely Racing Clone), but they were all pretty much terrible in the end.

Some of the tetris variants with exploding bricks were ok. It was the ultimate in pre-angry birds bathroom break gaming! You could totally pause the game and continue during the next poo poo for extra high scoring.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2012 21:04

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

blk posted:

Bought this right away when it came out (holy poo poo, 1996, apparently), still have it, it still works perfectly. Even the Lithium Ion battery it came with still works as new. I haven't had a disk fail on me either; they all still play problem free. Sony may have a bad reputation, I don't know, but this thing was -is- solid.

Although I think the earphones with remote it came with ~~are gone~~ are in my parent's attic. But like all Sony earphones (at the time?) they sounded like poo poo anyway.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2012 10:42

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

madlilnerd posted:

I had one of the earlier Siemens phones, which stood out from everyone else's Nokia 3310 because it had a bright orange glowing screen instead of a green one. The case was blue, but I can't remember the exact name of it.

C45? There were others with an orange screen, but the C45 was quite a common model, from what I remember.

I had the S35i. The best and most beautiful phone I ever had, relative to the standards on the day of purchase. I paid near to 500� for it, which, looking back, is insane. But I loved it and I still do. So many tiny details in the operating system that made this phone superior. Pressing backspace for a few seconds while typing a text deleted the words one by one, instead of wiping the whole text. It recognised text delivery reports as different from other texts and only silently beeped once for them. Even though it had a non-learning T9, it's the only T9 I never switched off in irritation. The calendar made a decent calendar a necessity in my subsequent phones. The scroll buttons did scroll, instead of setting keypad volume or something equally senseless. Beautiful interface. Wish phones today were made with such love and attention.

EDIT: pic

Flipperwaldt has a new favorite as of 18:26 on Sep 16, 2012

# ¿ Sep 16, 2012 18:23

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Shai-Hulud posted:

Yeah its really strange that bank transfers aren't really used in the US. Everything i need to pay on a regular basis just gets transfered automatically at the end of the month. Paying my rent in cash or with a checks? What?

Indeed. I was just writing up a whole post about how it blows my mind. It's ridiculously convenient. If I owe my sister 10�, I'll pay her back through bank transfer, and she lives like three miles away from me.

I can't even imagine what it's like to have to forgo that convenience.

# ¿ Sep 30, 2012 20:06

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Tears In A Vial posted:

I know that some groups have problems with bank transfers because they come from bank accounts associated with parents and guardians, and the surnames are often different from the kids, so it can be difficult to match up who has paid and who hasn't.

[...]

This is not just one or two, it's a hundred kids, and it's a lot easier to just flip through a 100 checks with the kids name written on the back than it is to check our online bank account for transfers from different accounts.

This is why you would send a bill that mentions a unique structured message people must attach to the bank transfer that identifies what payment is for what bill, no matter what account it's sent from.

But I guess that organisational effort is only worth it if bank transfers are common and (almost) everyone pays that way.

Anyway:

burtonos posted:

How about this bad boy?

I'm...not really sure what to make of them.

I don't see a single benefit in this system over normal 35mm film. I wonder what the guy that came up with it was thinking.

Parallel Paraplegic posted:

As for that guy who said his phone network is off, I don't know what system you guys use over there but here phones are at a minimum synced to the towers, and the towers are synced to GPS time, and GPS time is based on the satellites' on-board atomic clocks.

I don't know either, but if I let my phone clock sync time with the towers, it's five minutes early compared to the other clocks I have here that radiosync to an atomic clock in Frankfurt.

Flipperwaldt has a new favorite as of 17:53 on Oct 1, 2012

# ¿ Oct 1, 2012 17:48

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

EDIT: sorry, missed the new page.

Mu Zeta posted:

credit cards aren't as common over there.

This is true, from what I can see. Everything is done with debit cards. Among the people I know, the only ones with a credit card have it to order poo poo over the internet internationally. And even that isn't really a necessity anymore, with European webshops starting to adopt other methods of payment (ie. one click bank transfer thingies).

So, most stores will take credit card, but you'll be looked at as if you were some exotic specimen. And some stores won't take credit card. But they will very nearly all take some sort of plastic. It's certainly not necessary to carry around cash all the time.

Of course, RFID/NFC stuff only really works with a credit card, due to security issues, I suppose. Which is why adoption rate for that is a lot lower here.

Super Waffle posted:

Credit and debit cards are practically synonymous in the US, is that not the case in Europe?

No.

Flipperwaldt has a new favorite as of 16:01 on Oct 3, 2012

# ¿ Oct 3, 2012 15:59

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Jibo posted:

Also Win, U, U will shut down the computer. Comes in handy some times.

Only works in XP, so semi-appropriate for this thread, I guess :v:

# ¿ Oct 30, 2012 20:11

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Did we already do the variomatic?

# ¿ Nov 2, 2012 00:30

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Gaz2k21 posted:

I remember channel 5 launching and being excited about it only to discover I lived in an area where it wasn't available, even Freeview has only just been made available in my town in the last year so we've been stuck with 4 terrestrial channels or SKY.

It's not like I live in a remote area either....

I may be missing some intricacies of the UK situation or misunderstand your timing, but I've been watching British channels for almost four years now on satellite. Subscription free. From Belgium, of all places. This is possibly the thing called Freesat? So I think you could have had more than four channels earlier, is my point.

# ¿ Nov 18, 2012 21:07

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Pilsner posted:

instructions on how you need to remove the case and fiddle with jumpers to configure it.

There was a time when you needed to do that with some soundcards in the ISA era, to set IRQ and DMA. Which was inconvenient.

Perhaps, if it wasn't mentioned before, I can suggest autoexec.bat and config.sys as obsolete technology?

I've spent hours of my life messing around with those to get things running. LOAD HIGH, SET BLASTER and poo poo. I'm glad the dream that was Plug 'n Play somewhat came true eventually.

# ¿ Dec 12, 2012 23:56

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

mystes posted:

I don't recall setting IRQs with jumpers being that bad until plug-and-play cards came about but mixing plug-and-play and non-plug-and-play cards seemed to be a complete nightmare involving trying every possibility for the IRQs.

Yeah, the only reason I remembered this is because I'd had soundcards before that that could be configured through software. So that struck me as being archaic at the time. So you may have a point that mixing PnP and non-PnP made that I had to mess around with it so much that I remember.

As for running games on inadequate hardware: Stunts, on a 4.77MHz 8086. I don't know if that actually reached framerates above 1 fps.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2012 13:55

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

redmercer posted:

I'd be flat-out amazed if I heard that come out of a PC speaker. I can't find it, but the PC speaker intro to The Crescent Hawks' Revenge sounds a lot more what you'd expect a tortured beeper to sound like

Can't download the file here to see what you're talking about, but back in the days, pc speakers were actual speakers, not piezo beepers. Like, 2" in diameter or something. And as long as you've got the processing power, you could get fairly useable sound out of it. Impulse Tracker had pc speaker support. Obviously mono and obviously limited in frequency range, and not the preferable way of working, but definitely more than a gimmick.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2012 20:08

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

VikingSkull posted:

The "they" in The Guy They Wrote The Book Around was actually Smokey, too. It's my favorite book of all time.

I don't know anything about motor sports, but from context I'm deducing that you meant to say Smokey is "The Guy" in The Guy They Wrote The Book Around.

Awesome second breath this thread has found, by the way.

# ¿ Jul 11, 2013 01:06

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

[quote="Ron Burgundy" post=""41734556"]
Speaking of which, remember SPARS code? Those three letters on CDs, tapes and records that told you the analog and digital status of the production chain.

It was pretty much abandoned essentially because it's a limited system.
[/quote]I've got some cds with a code like that.

I get that it's not terribly useful or relevant for the end user, but I don't see how it's a limted system.

# ¿ Jul 11, 2013 17:14

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

DrBouvenstein posted:

Fun fact: Atari joysticks have the same shape and number of pins as a Sega Genesis controller.

Also Amstrad. I used to have a joystick that had a three way switch on the bottom.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2013 20:58

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Zeether posted:

I just found out via Wikipedia that the BBC still does a teletext thing called Red Button but it's digital. So I guess teletext still exists in a way, but Ceefax is long gone.

The information pages may be gone, but the technology is still in use for subtitles for the hard of hearing. At least on satellite, don't know about the rest.

Also checking in to say teletext is still being used to its fullest potential in Belgium and it would still be my go-to place to find out when a specific plane will land on Brussels airport.

# ¿ Jul 28, 2013 23:15

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

ChickenOfTomorrow posted:

So 888 still works?

It does on satellite, which I suspect so far is still drawn from an analog signal or something (?)

# ¿ Jul 28, 2013 23:53

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

If that's a chiclet keyboard, then what do you people call this?

# ¿ Aug 13, 2013 02:24

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

carry on then posted:

The Novint Falcon

Uh...

I thought it was maybe because I was blocking javascript or whatever, but unblocking didn't make any difference, so :shrug:

edit: sorry, I'll timg in case any of you are at work.

Flipperwaldt has a new favorite as of 11:21 on Oct 10, 2013

# ¿ Oct 10, 2013 11:18

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

It's weird that when the video was posted on the top of this same page, nobody cared. Add a picture and the crowd goes wild.

# ¿ Jan 5, 2014 00:55

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

EDIT good god, y'all, I'm one slow-rear end motherfucker.

mints posted:

It's been years since I took the class we covered this in and I'm sure I'm missing some key elements, but the data in-between the sprockets keeps the film synced with the soundtrack which is housed in a HDD in the projection room. This way when a theater has to cut and splice a film that's from a beat up print the audio doesn't come unsynced.

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

# ¿ Jan 19, 2014 22:51

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Computer viking posted:

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.

I guess what surprises me most about it is the precision at which those projectors must run to align all that well enough every loving frame to read it.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2014 23:07

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Axeman Jim posted:

MDs [...] have better sound quality than an MP3 player (in terms of both bitrate and noise)

This has been true for a while in history, but it certainly wasn't when MD first came out.

Currently there are a number of solid state mp3 players that can play lossless formats, so that and the anti-skip are pretty moot now.

Not knocking the reliability though and not saying he's an idiot for sticking with whatever has worked for him consistently.

eddiewalker posted:

It was OK until you got tired of the 10 songs you were carrying. It shipped with parallel port adapter to load up music and transferring 32mb took so drat long that I never rotated anything on.

Maybe you could buy a USB1 adapter, but that new little connector was never going to catch on.

Ahhhhh.... the PMP300. Sucked down battery while in standby mode too; about just as fast as when playing music! Glorious.

# ¿ Jan 21, 2014 23:44

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Wanamingo posted:

These were a little bit before my time, so I'm sort of wondering what the point of them even was. I know it was just a status symbol and that the only practical use was to wow people with how fancy it was, but poo poo, could that thing even hold a single album on it?

I had a Diamond Rio PMP300 with 32MB of storage. It took about 8 128kbps songs, if they weren't too long. Free codecs were just terrible at bitrates lower than that.

Apart from the novelty value, the appeal to me was that it had noticably better sound quality than a cassette walkman, but wasn't susceptible to shaking or shocks, like a discman would be. Discmen weren't actually useable on a bike back then. Putting new songs on there, even through the parallel port, was slightly more convenient than putting new stuff on a Minidisc, that didn't allow file transfer at the time but required you to record them (starting and stopping the recorder manually for each track if you didn't have a cd player or computer with an optical cable). It was also way lighter than the portable Minidisc recorder/player I had.

So despite having most of the alternatives of that age, I used the mp3 player quite a bit during the short period that it wasn't obsoleted by some other model. I lived about 3km from school and wearing headphones while you were at school was not done, so the short playback time wasn't as big an issue as you'd expect.

That, and, you know, living in the future and all.

It was roughly a year or two when there were all those exciting new developments in portable music devices where you didn't know which way it was all going to go. Minidisc? Philips' Digital Cassettes? MP3s? And it was an exciting idea to be part of the vanguard of whichever team you felt offered the most quality and convenience wise.

Mp3 was a completely new concept at the time in the sense that you wouldn't need to keep buying additional physical disks/discs/cassettes all the time for your portable player in addition to the cds you had at home. You could also just pick out your favorite songs and compile them into a playlist on the fly instead of being stuck with fixed selection and order albums/compilation cds. That was a Big Thing. I liked that. It's hard to imagine a world now where that isn't self evident.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2014 12:46

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

mints posted:

I know when the service first started it was googlemail.com in the UK for some reason, but I'm not sure if there's other options out there.

Germany had a similar thing going with someone else owing the rights to the name gmail somehow.

# ¿ May 20, 2014 01:36

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

WebDog posted:

Also to add a damning blow, research proved there was no actual difference in sound quality between a SA-CD, DVD-A and a regular CD. In fact in order to fit all channels into a disc the sampling rate had to be dropped from 192khz (in stereo) to 92khz.

One: I'd argue that actual 5.1 sound, with discrete channels, mixed properly is in and of itself a sound quality upgrade over stereo. Two: a sampling rate of ~96kHz is over twice that of an audio cd, so mentioning those numbers offers no indication that the sound quality was only on par with audio cd. Three: the numbers aren't relevant to SACD because its sampling rate is in a whole different order of magnitude to begin with.

Why don't you just mention that audio engineers (or anyone else) can't pick out the difference in a double blind test for either format. That's a lot more to the point. The material can still be of a better quality (theoretically mostly potential for extended dynamic range) that may start to matter when digital postprocessing is applied during a later remix or something. Though that doesn't make it superior as a playback medium.

# ¿ May 25, 2014 11:41

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

I swear to god that f.lux automatically adjusting color temperature of your monitor actually does something to ease you into going to sleep vs. constant daylight blue keeping you up at night.

Is free though.

Actual damage to your eyes? gently caress if I know, but it sounds pretty unlikely.

# ¿ May 25, 2014 14:45

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Gorilla Salad posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lCQDUDRxJQ

*opens a can of pears*

"Voila! Peaches!"

# ¿ Jun 18, 2014 13:53

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Gotta give it to Sony that anti-piracy was never an afterthought. They had products designed around it, oblivious to any other concern, user convenience and non-content profit margins be damned. That's dedication.

# ¿ Jun 30, 2014 15:31

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

JediTalentAgent posted:

Another thing about shutting off autorun was that I didn't think that was really an option until post-XP Windows, was it? I guess you could hold down a key on the keyboard and force it bypass autorun that way, but I could never get it to not-Autorun in XP on its own. I seem to recall there was a UITweak tool you'd have to download to shut off autorun, but I might be misremembering.

Wanted to correct you, but I was misremembering and it indeed involved either a registry edit, group policy on XP Pro or the TweakUI tool.

TweakUI wasn't some scary or unattainable thing though. A bit beyond mom and dad maybe.

# ¿ Jun 30, 2014 22:52

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

You guys should chill out and watch this documentary on when, how and why albums came into existence:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Em4kpy1YuNQ

Much more interesting than this "I can name more x than you!"

# ¿ Jul 17, 2014 13:49

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

My mom had a printer with a scanning cartridge like that in the early 2000s. I want to say it was an Epson, but I don't really remember. It wasn't a retrofit and yet you couldn't have both ink and scan cartridges in the printer at the same time. An advertised feature of it was making copies. She used it in a business context for a couple of years where it had to serve as both a fax and a printer.

That was like the dumbest "money saving" purchase ever.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2014 11:36

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

My parents bought a Sony miniDV camera with both Firewire and USB. For some reason anything transferred over USB was of an awful analog video tape like quality. It was designed like that. What a huge disappointment that was. Why bother with a digital connection at that point.

# ¿ Dec 22, 2014 02:10

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

You could literally take the analog output and pipe it through a composite-to-usb video capture cable and have something you wouldn't be embarrassed to show on a tv versus something that would make you cringe on a 2005 cellphone screen. It was really, really bad. It was mostly the camera being underpowered to do a decent real time re-encode.

Though it proabably wouldn't be the first time for Sony to make something that goes "Haha, in your face, sucker!" is was still very disappointing.

I guess I wasn't as much into looking up reviews on the internet before buying at the time.

# ¿ Dec 22, 2014 12:29

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 03:51

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Computer viking posted:

Nah, they genuinely held more data.

They were still 1.44MB formatted under MS DOS.

# ¿ Jan 24, 2015 00:32

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