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wa27 posted:This is my dad's current phone (Samsung Convoy). I took this pic 5 years ago after he had a house fire. It melted pretty bad and the outer screen is dead, but it still works fine. If Samsung had a museum, this should be in there like the Desert Storm Game Boy. Is it old enough that it's going to lose connection once 2G GSM shuts down this year?
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Aug 5, 2019 19:57
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Shut up Meg posted:I miss the tactile aspect of metal and mechanical switches.
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Aug 6, 2019 19:24
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Jerry Cotton posted:(I think Americans use voice recognition nowadays to completely fail to do stuff like setting a timer or turning off lights? Dunno sounds extremely hosed up.)
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Aug 6, 2019 20:10
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Peanut Butler posted:its p good for driving, I just hold down the handsfree button and it kicks it in to the ok google- "send text to bob" "okay" "hi bob I'm about thirty minutes out on I-70, see you soon", works well enough- drat. I have to try that. Is this an Android Auto thing?
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Aug 6, 2019 20:26
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Platystemon posted:Additionally, light travels half again as fast in air as it does in glass. I demand that we install ether tubes. Classical ether, not this bullshit anesthetic.
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Aug 6, 2019 20:40
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Peanut Butler posted:so I went shopping for a new one and they were all either smart TVs, or huge expensive videophile equipment pieces.
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Aug 6, 2019 21:21
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Giant Metal Robot posted:Or just don't ever connect your TV to your network? Haha! Fooled you! You literally cannot pair the remote without hooking the TV up to wifi.
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Aug 6, 2019 22:40
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Explosionface posted:The only computer program worthy of being in awe of was Kid Pix. (applauds in Mac). Speaking of which, in (it must have been, I think?) late '82-early '83 my husband and a group of other computer engineers flew out to evaluate the nascent Mac for adoption as the standard campus computer. They came back looking like they'd seen God. My husband couldn't/wouldn't tell me why until a good while later. I think at that time one person on campus had been to Xerox Parc and seen the original OS. So they came home, the administration committed to the project, and my husband spent the next couple of years cross-developing on a Lisa, which ran like a pig. It was worth it.
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Aug 18, 2019 16:44
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drat, I love iIfocom. Sadly, Douglas Adams's games required the hint books unless you were Douglas Adams. I had a friend who worked there in the '80s. He held a fair bit of stock, but then the bigwigs at the company IIRC decided what they really needed to do was develop a database manager.
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Aug 18, 2019 19:11
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You should all be very glad you never tried to play Adams's BUREAUCRACY. It has a blood-pressure meter as a mechanic, and by all accounts it was appropriate. It was supposed to be frustrating, but the word of mouth I heard was that again it was impossible without the hint book.
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Aug 18, 2019 19:48
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twistedmentat posted:I've played a few modern adventure games, like Kathy Rain. Only once did I have to google a solution to a puzzle and that was only because what I needed to do was not actually the direction you were given I usually have to google a couple of puzzles, even in really well-thought-out games like Machinarium. I just fail the Read Developer's Mind roll.
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Aug 24, 2019 18:56
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shovelbum posted:Hence the shameless corporate whoring I watched a '60s Julia Child the other day. (They're on YouTube. They're awesome.) The show loving taped over the labels on the milk carton. And the measuring cup. Because NPR was a government service that didn't advertise products.
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Aug 28, 2019 16:37
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Plinkey posted:Do you mean PBS? Whoops. Yup. Actually, it was NET then, as I recall; National Educational Television.
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Aug 28, 2019 17:51
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BalloonFish posted:It's not impossible, just very expensive - like, even with the values of Silver Shadows no longer being rock bottom it can still cost more than the car is worth to diagnose and repair a hydraulic fault.
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Sep 8, 2019 01:37
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Fortunately, my brother wanted much of my dad's workshop, and donated the rest to a makerspace.
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Sep 18, 2019 04:17
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In the 1950s, people worried a lot. (I wonder why?) One of the things they worried about was that watching TV in a dark room would cause eyestrain. The solution? The TV lamp. It sat on the top of the TV and cast a dim glow on the wall behind it; this supposedly protected your eyes by lowering the contrast between the bright TV and the room, without making it harder to see the TV. There were many options, in pottery, plaster, and fiberglass. Mount Rushmore  Sailboat  Owl (note light-up eyes!)  Water mill with planter  A couple of other anti-eyestrain solutions I remember: a publisher all of whose books were on pale-green paper, again to diminish contrast, and special reading floor lamps that featured one upright lamp to light the whole room and one to be angled so that the light came over your left shoulder. I remember having the illumination come over your left shoulder -- not the right, who knows why -- being a big deal.
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Dec 5, 2019 19:17
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Having a separate directional light is neat; do you carefully place it over your left shoulder?
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Dec 5, 2019 19:26
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When I was growing up, my brother's friends' father had a hobby Linotype machine. An entire linotype machine in his barn. It was so cool. He did each of our names for us, and I remember how hot the leads were as they dropped into the tray. Those suckers are mechanical magic.
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Jan 25, 2020 18:22
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ryonguy posted:Now, I have a question: why this entire machine, that was the default for mass printing for a century, that is insanely complex and expensive, using hot molten metal to rapid-form letter blocks instead of a simpler system that just drops reusable steel letter blocks into position?
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Jan 25, 2020 18:58
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bring back old gbs posted:An ad for IBM selectrix typewriters: Those were incredibly handy in academia. Need to insert 12 mathematical symbols into a one-page paper? Without a Selectra, you handwrite them in. With a Selectra, you swap balls, hit the weird characters, then move on. Also handy, in a pre-computer age, if the Russian department has one; you can do all your normal departmental stuff in English, then learn to type Cyrillic on an English keyboard and you're good.
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Jan 27, 2020 17:15
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Pham Nuwen posted:Selectric. It's called the IBM Selectric. GDI, I even googled to check. I have no idea how I got it wrong. Error between brain and keyboard. Old IBM typewriters, like old IBM keyboards, are built like highly functional bricks. You have to work very hard to break them.
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Jan 27, 2020 18:55
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bring back old gbs posted:I demand to know the contents of Is there any doubt? Porn.
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Jan 28, 2020 17:09
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Johnny Aztec posted:Not much you can do with 80MB but I am sure people have tried.
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Jan 28, 2020 17:30
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Plinkey posted:But that's basically just how delay lines work. I had to design and build some for testing radars but we used coiled fiber optics instead of copper to get multiple miles of delay, same idea just a lot lighter. Some of the earliest delay lines used liquid mercury, which I think is metal as gently caress. (yes. I did that on purpose.)
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Jan 29, 2020 16:32
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Johnny Aztec posted:I think I have them put up, but I have a few Mercury switches that I scavenged. When I was growing up, we had a few special lightswitches in the house that glided rather than snapped. Those were mercury switches, too.
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Jan 29, 2020 18:08
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I remember, and I think a lot of people my age do, playing with the droplets of mercury from a broken thermometer or barometer. It's just so nifty. Of course, my 2 1/4 kids can't walk upright, but it's the price you pay for fun.
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Jan 29, 2020 18:32
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The Ape of Naples posted:Of course, this all might not be 100% correct but I believe that that agreement stands to this day and Apple plays no part in the music business.
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Jan 29, 2020 19:02
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Apple wasn't just the Beatles' holding company; it was their record label.
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Jan 29, 2020 19:27
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(counts) 26 open tabs, 10 of them on SomethingAwful. What can I say, I hate the Back button; if I load all the tabs I want to read at once, I can click from one to the other without waiting. Then there's the fic I'm reading and need to comment on, three Wikipedia pages, a comic on Git I need to scroll ack and read from the beginning. And lots of Stuff.
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Feb 2, 2020 18:37
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AntherUslessPoster posted:I think its all because coding etiquette and overall level decreases over time. It's easier to throw a 150mb library in than to properly and elegantly code in a function you need. The truth is that people have gotten more and more expensive, while hardware has gotten ridiculously cheap. It only makes business sense to throw an extra server in the rack, rather than hiring the very expensive person who knows how to carve your bloatware down to a reasonable codebase PLUS migrating the entire existing codebase to the new, optimized setup. Assuming you are the very expensive programmer, persuading your management that slowing everybody else in the company down in order to fix the accumulated cruft in the code is a very, very hard sell. This isn't about etiquette. It's about what's cheap to fix, and what's very very expensive to fix. (I still remember that The Mythical Man-Month recommends writing two versions of every library, one that is memory efficient and one that was CPU efficient.)
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Feb 2, 2020 19:15
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AntherUslessPoster posted:Everything boils down to profits yet again. Sad sad world we live in Or we can grab a hundred new processors from the collective next door, because they're fabbing a hundred thousand [insert your favorite imaginary number] a day. Less human time is consumed by the alternative solution, which means everybody in my collective can go outside and watch the clouds for a bit.
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Feb 2, 2020 20:57
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AntherUslessPoster posted:But if you love programming, would you not find a way to implement a good written code somehow, just because you love what you do and do it with full commitment and dedication?
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Feb 2, 2020 21:12
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WithoutTheFezOn posted:That post zips me right back to college in the 80s. Every single computer engineering student had a copy of the K&R book. (high-five of olds) I was taught out of K&P, too. ("Software Tools", by Kernighan and Plauger.) One of my commonest tasks in the computer room was explaining to people "No, that Tektronix is just in APL mode, hold on a sec and I'll put it back into regular mode."
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Mar 7, 2020 19:18
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https://twitter.com/bphennessy/status/1292282665559785474
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Aug 9, 2020 05:50
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JnnyThndrs, I adore the contrast between your cottagecore shelves and the technology collection. Nicely played! It's only indirectly Chrome's fault Flash is going away. Adobe itself is EOL-ing Flash because they don't want to keep However, there is a project afoot to archive most known Flash games, together with a streaming Flash player that will continue to work post-12/31. Project Flashpoint! e: Just to be clear, after the EOL date, Flash won't work at all, in browser or in a standalone player. https://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/end-of-life.html Arsenic Lupin has a new favorite as of 00:16 on Oct 29, 2020 |
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Oct 29, 2020 00:01
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Man, I saw that and had a visceral memory of how they sounded.
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Dec 25, 2020 20:08
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LifeSunDeath posted:The entire reason I read the book was to learn more about "one-time pads," the application and also how it works with numbers stations, that's it. The rest of the book was enjoyable, and obviously not like some whistleblower type book. All of VENONA is now online, and it's fun reading if you're that kind of person. https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/declassified-documents/venona/ For a good memoir about one-time pads (among other things, see Leo Marks's excellent Between Silk and Cyanide.
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Jan 2, 2021 17:50
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Those are an absolute joy; where did you find them? e: There are two different operas based on that story: "Manon Lescaut" by Puccini, and "Manon" by Massenet. There's also at least one ballet.
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Feb 26, 2021 21:18
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barbecue at the folks posted:Man I miss that solid feel of vintage Sony electronics, the feeling that you really are holding a marvel of space age engineering in your hands. I always wanted a minidisc Walkman but was too young to afford one myself and my parents definitely didn't have the cash to spend. I miss the satisfying button click and weight of the old TI scientific calculators. RPN, man.
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Mar 17, 2021 17:15
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TotalLossBrain posted:You're describing HP calculators I started to say HP but then corrected it. Sigh. My brain is obsolete and failed.
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Mar 17, 2021 18:01
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