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Wanamingo posted:Is there even any advantage to having a manual transmission, as far as the end user is concerned? They look like the most needlessly complicated things, and god help if you there are lots of hills where you live. If memory serves automatics sometimes gently caress up and manuals get better fuel economy. Automatics are also mechanically more complex.
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May 11, 2014 22:59
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What in the world do those glasses even do beyond look stupid?
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May 25, 2014 14:08
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Remulak posted:It is and they know it. Big pan though. Hey when was the last time you heard somebody mention MySpace outside of "oh wow MySpace still exists?"
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Jun 3, 2014 00:02
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Zemyla posted:What legitimate business needs an interest rate of over 30%? Why aren't rates that high literally business-dissolvingly, board-of-directors-imprisoningly illegal? Why do so-called "Christians" tolerate usury to this degree when Jesus would have chased them out of the country with a whip? Sometimes it doesn't really occur to the person taking the loan that payday advance rates are actually downright obscene. They're also often used by the very poor who are highly likely to be financially illiterate. Often they're just desperate or the hideous interest rates ultimately lead to less lost money then things like overdraft fees on bank accounts, penalties for late payment or, you know, starvation and eviction. When it's Monday, rent is due on Wednesday, and payday is Friday sometimes taking $100 and paying $105 in five days turns out to cost less. Companies like that also deliberately prey on the poor because they're the ones that are frequently in desperate enough situations to need it and are also too poor to actually sue.
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Jan 5, 2015 10:25
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Reverse Centaur posted:Public libraries don't exist? That's where all the homeless guys in my town Some people live very far away from them. There are also people who think spending money on public libraries is stupid and wish they would go away.
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Jan 12, 2015 23:42
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Tevery Best posted:It's probably what made my dad recommend defragging as a solution to every single computer problem ever. That and early on you basically had to obsessively defrag your computer all the drat time. Anybody that was computer literate spent a lot of time telling people to defrag their poo poo and it was extremely common for the conversation to go "when was the last time you ran defrag? Oh you don't know what that is? *describes defrag* Run that, let it do its thing, and call me back if it's still slow." You'd get called back basically never.
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Jan 22, 2015 20:52
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Sappo569 posted:Reminds me whenever I see my friend who has a 2010 Toyota, in which a cassette deck was still an optional accessory, that car manufacturers don't always use the latest/best technology Some people still have cassettes oddly enough and a collection of them that they switch into their new car when they get rid of their old one. Though speaking of obsolete technology remember those adapter kits that let you plug in a portable CD player into your tape deck? You know, for people too poor to get a read stereo system or that just had an ancient car? I still have one somewhere, makes me kind of nostalgic.
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Mar 1, 2015 07:11
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Hey who remembers DLL Hell? I'm pretty sure computers in general just sucked during that era but nobody noticed because they were all awful.
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May 14, 2015 05:11
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aardwolf posted:There are still lots of old geezers, areas with poor/non-existent cellphone coverage and small businesses that don't want to fart around with voice over IP out there. It's easier to spend a little bit of money wiring up RJ11 plugs in to your new building than it is to lose a extremely lucrative real estate sale because the customer wants landlines. Yeah, phone jacks are going away, but probably not anytime in the immediate future. Cell phone service is actually a lot more fragile than land lines. Land lines are very reliable and are also useful for things like small, internal phone networks in an office or some such. Sometimes you want that reliability and security over using cell phones for everything. The other thing is that you can control where the signal of a line with wires goes but you can't control a cell phone's signal. Sometimes that's highly desirable. Cell phones are fine for us regular chuckles who don't have secrets to keep and don't need to make life or death decisions at any random time within seconds but some situations kind of need actual lines. I'm pretty sure it's also way cheaper to handle inter-office calls with wired up phone networks than getting business cellphones.
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May 15, 2015 23:02
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Delivery McGee posted:Fair enough. And businesses still need landlines for fax machines. Yeah certain pieces of technology that are considered obsolete for most uses stick around forever in certain situations. Vacuum tubes are still used in a few spots and magnetic tape backups are the thing to use for reliability because it's almost impossible for them to fail. Most of us will go the rest of our lives without ever seeing those things or even needing to remember they exist but they have their place.
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May 16, 2015 01:31
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It'll definitely be one of those things like RS232 that sticks around in business settings well after it's effectively dead in the residential/consumer market, though (it'll still be used way out in the sticks forever because the wires are already there, but us city slickers are rapidly transitioning to mobile phones and cable/fiber internet).
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Geoj posted:There will always be audiophile A big difference between guitar nerds and audio nerds being that different amplifiers do in fact have different sounds. Unlike, say, different cables plugged into a stereo. It will never fail to amuse me that some hardcore audiophiles failed to tell the difference between a top of the line cable and a coat hanger.
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May 16, 2015 06:05
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who keep tube amps (and other forms of tube-driven audio equipment) popular.
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darkhand posted:Worse than that is ~Gold/Platinum/Unobtainium Plated HDMI~ crap. Like, it's digital... It has the data or it doesn't; there's no middle ground, a bit doesn't just suddenly change "flavors" because of the cord. But better conductors means the signal gets there faster and with less degradation!!!!! I'm convinced that crap like that only exists because some people are idiots and don't know any better or just want to say "well my cables are gold plated and yours aren't, pleb  "
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May 16, 2015 07:07
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1000 Brown M and Ms posted:I don't know if I'd call much audophile grade stuff 'popular', at least outside it's niche. When it comes to the guitar itself guitar players generally find the one they like and stick with it forever. Guitars themselves don't really need to change much. What's changing is all the stuff between the guitar and the listener. Part of it is skills; your skill with an instrument can get totally, completely hosed if you pick one up that's too different. The guitar player doesn't want to relearn how to play the drat thing all the time but still wants to make cool new sounds nobody has ever heard. Aside from that you can't really do much with the strings themselves at this point; they vibrate at certain frequencies. It's what you do after it leaves the guitar that really matters.
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May 16, 2015 10:04
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KozmoNaut posted:And yet a Gibson Les Paul or a Fender Stratocaster will literally never go out of style, ever. If it ain't broke don't fix it. Those are good guitars with good sounds that are everywhere. Easy to repair, easy to find people that know how to work on them, and that. Plus you can get a pretty good Strat on the cheap very easily so I imagine a lot of guitar players learned on one. They're familiar, solid guitars that aren't riding on silly gimmicks or being The New Big Thing.
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May 17, 2015 00:42
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A FUCKIN CANARY!! posted:The era where CD burners had become widespread but Steam hadn't completely caught on yet was a hell of a thing. I bought Hitman Contracts on launch day and the CD check wouldn't pass on my PC. To get it working I had to image the CD, mount it in a virtual drive, and install some special software for tricking SecuROM. Each time I wanted to play, I had to shut down and physically disconnect my optical drives or else the copy protection would still freak out. I put up with this for about a week until I just downloaded a warez release off Usenet that worked without hassle and thought "Well, at least the box looks nice." There was also the wonderful joy of CD keys. I'm pretty sure those were placed in a way that practically guaranteed you'd lose them. When games quit coming in plastic cases and started coming in paper sleeves the key would often be on the sleeve. Others were on manuals that tended to get misplaced. Upgraded your computer and needed to reinstall everything? Lol good luck, bro. You might suddenly be unable to play your favorite game.
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May 22, 2015 20:37
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Collateral Damage posted:Bitcoins are worthless regardless of what some web site says they're worth, because there's no way to actually convert your internet funny money to that amount. Most likely you'll get scammed and/or shanked in the process if you try. Buttcoins for their entire history were hilarious partly because the price was artificially inflated by people loving with the market. The completely deregulated nature of them led to literally every single thing that regulation prevents from happening happening in massive amounts. They're worthless now because the people manipulating the market all cashed out. It was basically a pyramid scheme; early adopters and those that really knew what was up made a lot of money. Almost everybody else got hosed.
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May 26, 2015 15:49
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One of the funniest things was the lolbertarians acting like they were Randian ubermensch because they bought an expensive computer and told it to calculate some numbers. Yeah, totally earning your wealth through skill and the sweat of your brow there, Fatty McWhitypants. Aside from all the Grade A Prime Schadenfreude that came out of it it seemed to me like the people most adamant about how amazing butt coins were were walking stereotypes. Seemed to me like a lot of them were young, fat, white guys with at least upper middle class parents.
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May 26, 2015 19:53
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pretty soft girl posted:Anything foreign language and alternative/metal was Rammstein Didn't even stop there. If it sounded vaguely German at all it was Rammstein. I had (probably still have, somewhere) some MP3s of a Russian acoustic band that was blatantly, obviously not Rammstein at all. I don't think it could have been possible for it to be further from Rammstein really but it was all labelled Rammstein. Though searching for some of the other incorrectly attributed bands introduced me to the existence of stuff like Megaherz and Oomph! so thank you for that, Napster. Granted I also found a bunch of stuff that I later found out was Wolfsheim and that band was...very different from Rammstein. I think I even had a KMFDM track that was labelled Rammstein too. My favorite thing about Napster was really searching for incorrectly labelled music and laughing at how hideously wrong people could be.
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Jun 3, 2015 21:29
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Lowen SoDium posted:Oh god, sheep.exe I think that one was called Virtual Girl or something. I remember seeing adverts plastered for it absolutely everywhere. They'd crop up in places that porn should really not have been advertised. I never downloaded it or bought it or anything because I figured it was just some malware-filled piece of bullshit on the level of Bonzi Buddy. That was the other thing about that era of computing. Holy poo poo was malware just everywhere. I kept needing to uninstall stupid custom cursor crap that my mother or sister installed. I'd have to explain that no nobody wants to just give you a free flower cursor with a sparkle trail that has some bad piece of software attached to it don't buy anything on the internet until I get rid of it (but how could they do that? Isn't that illegal? I don't think anybody would do that and I only installed the cursor thing so I didn't install anything else with it seriously just put it back on). Granted most people didn't really know any better at the time and a lot of people probably figured that a little stripper on the computer was probably just a little stripper on the computer.
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Jun 4, 2015 09:02
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Zaphod42 posted:For me it was For those of you that haven't read it seriously loving read this book. It's probably one of the coolest books ever written.
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Jun 5, 2015 09:04
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You know, one of the reasons people pirated music rampantly in the early days of music piracy was that the music industry seemed to think it was totally OK to release $25 CDs with two good songs on them. How many albums came out that were exorbitantly priced but were mostly just bullshit filler to pad it out to 50 minutes? I remember getting burned several times by that. The album would be hyped like crazy, the one or two good songs would be getting spammed everywhere. then the highly anticipated album would consist of those two songs and then poo poo. No wonder people pirated music; there was no justification in waiting that long to buy an album for those two songs when you could just download them before the album was even fully released. Holy hell does the music industry have a long history of sucking a lot in many different ways then blaming their customers for it when they started losing sales. Then the response was doing stupid poo poo like having albums that installed root kits. I think that's another thing that iTunes should be noted for accomplishing, really. You can buy albums in pieces now. If the album has one good song on it then you pay the $0.99 and get on with your life rather than hoping a single comes out. Can't cram an album full of garbage on everybody because they want that one hit anymore.
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Jun 9, 2015 15:50
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axolotl farmer posted:I read somewhere that oldies/classic rock stations only have ~600 songs in rotation. In some cases it's even less than that if you look at individual stations. There was an oldies station where I'm from that was literally just a few dozen songs over and over. They were good songs generally but it was really bizarre when you realized it was just the same handful of songs over and over in about the same order. Then there was the "mix" station that played whatever inoffensive pop songs were popular that week. Maybe I'm cynical but I won't miss terrestrial radio. It was hosed up in so many ways.
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Jun 11, 2015 19:27
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Star Man posted:Book publishers are just assholes when it comes right down to it. This is actually one of the issues with the internet coming around. It's effectively free to duplicate information but people are putting artificial limits on that because money. Ideally we could just say "OK then everything is free" and pay content creators in some way other than sales. Unfortunately there are greedy companies that just have to have their hands in every pie and really don't like it if somebody consumes any form of media without paying for it somehow.
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Jun 14, 2015 22:04
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Star Man posted:Maybe. My perspective might be warped. I'm from a county with a population of 56,000. Actual cities seem unfathomably huge and dense to me so yes it does change your perspective.
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Jun 24, 2015 00:08
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ravenkult posted:Too bad it's industry standard to call it ''digital download.'' ATM machine LCD display MAC card RAM memory PIN number PDF format Absolutely essential People do this sort of stuff all the time.
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Jun 29, 2015 00:41
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Yeah I almost forgot LAME. LAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder Which is even more special in that it...uh...is.
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Jun 29, 2015 01:45
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1000 Brown M and Ms posted:Why is that? All of our words have to come from somewhere. Yeah but that "somewhere" is generally a pretty boring evolution over decades, centuries, and/or millenia. People like interesting origin stories but most origin stories are pretty boring.
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Jun 29, 2015 12:03
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Collateral Damage posted:Iirc they had plans for 9 and 12 cpu machines as well by putting the cpu groups in a circle, but I haven't read much about them so I assume they never saw market. Not entirely true. Intel is still working on that. One of the nice things about having 200 MHz processors is that you could, over time, make individual processors faster. Single-threaded programs are just flat out way easier to deal with but an individual core can only be so fast. The problem is then you need to write programs very differently. So now they're working on stuff like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi I figure it was just more cost-effective to make single cpu machines and let's be honest most people wanted simple machines that had word, e-mail, minesweeper, and a calculator.
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Jul 1, 2015 16:56
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Cat Hatter posted:That's also a big reason U.S. currency no longer has anything larger than a $100 bill. Its a lot harder for a drug dealer to move a pallet of money around than a duffel bag. The $100 bill has been a standard currency in worldwide markets for a rather long time last I heard. American currency is considered the safest currency in the world simply because it isn't likely to lose its value any time soon. Part of the reason it is $100 bills is because larger notes are tracked much more closely. You can get stuff like $500 but you can't just spend it like regular cash. If memory serves you can't spend something bigger than $100 without doing the proper paperwork. Larger denominations are also printed much less so there probably just isn't enough to use. Plus $100 bills aren't likely to get to the "literal pallet of cash" level. $1,000,000 is 10,000 bills. Since a bill weighs about a gram that comes out to a bit over 22 pounds per million. A literal ton of $100 bills would be almost $91,000,000 and I highly doubt single transactions that big are common anywhere for any reason.
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Jul 3, 2015 04:54
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p-hop posted:What is y'alls earliest internet/computer memory? Mine was 10 BEEP 20 GOTO 10 ...no seriously that's the earliest thing I remember. I was like 5 and my dad brought home a computer. He started showing me how to program it and the first thing I figured out was how to make it annoying.
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Jul 4, 2015 10:24
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Der Luftwaffle posted:That is ingenious and insane in the best way. Reminds me of how it was too expensive for the Escape From New York producers to render a wireframe model of NYC for one of the shots, so they built a scale model, painted it black, outlined everything with green tape and just did a flyover shot of that. Practical effects never fail to blow my mind. It's even more mind bending when you realize what some people managed to accomplish using practical effects. Go watch 2001. Literally none of that movie was CGI.
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Jul 6, 2015 09:32
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Jerry Cotton posted:The oldest porno still in existing is probably what maybe three thousand years old? Not a porno movie of course. Older, likely. Humans have been making images of sexy things as long as we've been making images. Pornographic movies are really new but seriously, within days (well, hours more likely) of some new way to make images somebody will put breasts and penises in it.
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Jul 8, 2015 23:20
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Which all kind of defeats one of the major reasons people went to thrift stores in the first place. Sometimes you'd find a gem among the trash and could usually get it on the cheap. Occasionally you'd luck out and find something really cool for like 1/4 of what it would normally cost. If you eBay off all the cool or valuable stuff then all you have left is basically a bunch of trash only the financially desperate would possibly ever buy.
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Jul 11, 2015 23:00
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pienipple posted:It's almost like they exist because poor people might need things like clothes and children's toys they can afford, rather than to enrich nerds with smartphones. If you take out all the good stuff then the poor have far less hope of getting good stuff.
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Jul 11, 2015 23:34
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The reason dollar coins never caught on is because Americans just love, love, love hoarding the drat things. Those and half dollars people just buy up, stuff in a jar, and never spend, ever. The reason people hoard them is because they're uncommon but they're uncommon because people hoard them. Welp.
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Jul 14, 2015 20:48
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Early on Tracfone was actually the better deal if you didn't use your phone much. I didn't text at all in those days and it was actually like 10 cents a text in the end. Tracfone also didn't make you sign contracts or put down deposits or whatever. If your credit was dismal and you needed a phone you didn't even really plan on using much it was better. I'd talk on my phone maybe like an hour or two total every month so there was just no point in getting something fancier that would cost more. Now though, well...you can get unlimited text, drat near unlimited calling, and several GB of data on the cheap. Of course that was also before the collusion that the telecoms were up to came out and they were deliberately keeping prices high. Welp.
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Aug 6, 2015 21:15
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Kaizoku posted:I’ve always figured that enough beige cases over the past decades had become sun-drenched to yellow. Enough exposure to computer labs with outdated machines and you find any alternative appealing. What I find really baffling was how many companies decided that internal computer parts suddenly had to be cute/cool colors. I have a neon green power supply from an old computer and my current motherboard is black. The video card is blood red. People tend to not see the inside of computers all that often so who the hell cares what color the parts are?
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Aug 14, 2015 20:56
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Jmcrofts posted:When you're scrolling through a list of video cards on Newegg, the one with the red PCB tends to catch your eye. Guess that makes sense but this one I bought because it was the best card within the price range I had at the time. It just happened to be the red one. I had a power supply for a while that was actually meant for case mods. It was tacky as hell and had some LEDs on it but I bought it because it was cheap and fit my needs. Somebody at a LAN party asked me if I was getting into case modding and I was like "no." It was weird; I had an old-fashioned white metal case on that computer and it did look kind of like I was being ironic, I guess.
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Aug 14, 2015 22:08
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GOTTA STAY FAI posted:Hell, mine was eight digits long and I had a shitton of people trying to buy it off me. I can't imagine what the really low numbers were worth. Was that just an ePenis++ thing? I never understood why you'd buy an ICQ number when they were giving them away for free. It's really just ePenis++. If you have a very low number then you were an early adopter and could wave your dick around about how long you've been here. This was also around the same time that people were bragging about reg dates here on these very forums. The important thing was to look old so you could blame all the problems on those loving new users and talk about how much better things were in the old days. Or use it to win arguments; "well I've been in these parts and know better than you how they work so your opinion is wrong." It was also some vintage hipster cred and a kind of "well see I knew this would be popular before it became popular, look how smart I am!" Just a lot of stupid bullshit. Low numbers also became increasingly rare as people migrated away, accounts got hacked, people died, or whatever and were sort of a status symbol in a way. Yeah new numbers are free but they have like 15 digits. Numbers with 6 or 7 digits haven't been available for a very long time for free and some people are impressed by them. Some people want to be impressive on internet communities so they'd do whatever they had to to acquire them so they could act smug. I had a 7 digit number and probably would have sold it a while back but forgot the password. Or it got hacked. So it goes.
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Aug 25, 2015 16:38
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evobatman posted:I have a 7-digit number. Where can I sell it? eBay maybe? I don't think you can sell them these days but I honestly haven't checked.
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Aug 25, 2015 18:05
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