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Mad Dog McCree was an awesome game. At work today, I loaded an old server with a CRT monitor and Slot 2 Pentium II processor onto a pallet to be sent to surplus. That old dinosaur acted as our file server until early last year. Also, Kodak Ektagraphic slide projectors are every bit as good today as they were the day they were first sold. Landerig posted:Ahem, 70's and 80's speakers, if they were well made and not low end crap could easily hold up today if you didn't crank them ridiculously. GWBBQ has a new favorite as of 03:45 on Jul 13, 2012 |
# ¿ Jul 13, 2012 03:42 |
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# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 16:48 |
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Mister Snips posted:Carphones, yo
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# ¿ Jul 13, 2012 17:38 |
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El Estrago Bonito posted:You wanna talk old computers? I learned DOS on two old Toshiba Packet Sniffers. Those things retailed new for a huge amount of money and had that odd Asian card slot RAM. Yeah, thats right, RAM in what was basically a PC Express slot.
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# ¿ Sep 15, 2012 21:16 |
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Ensign Expendable posted:There will still be vital systems controlled by a dusty old box with leaking capacitors and Windows XP.
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# ¿ Sep 21, 2012 16:20 |
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Zenostein posted:Wouldn't the smaller disks fall into the smaller tray in most CD drives? Like there was a recessed layer that was maybe 2/3 the size of a normal CD. Surely that'd stop it from flying off.
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# ¿ Oct 1, 2012 20:29 |
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MadScientistWorking posted:As I said earlier insanely bizarre paper catalogs that have an eclectic bunch of goods are not uncommon. Mcmaster Carr, Grainger (Which you probably can't even do business with last I knew), and MSC Direct are three industrial supply companies who are famous for having rather insane paper catalogs. You Are A Elf posted:You're talking about knob and tube wiring which was used from electrical wiring's infancy in the 19th century to the 1930s. I think others have mentioned it in this thread. It is pretty mad inventor's laboratory, though. The picture of the industrial use of it in the wiki article is just scary. edit: my house has cloth insulated wiring and it does literally disintegrate if you touch it or look at it for too long. At least it's in grounded conduit, although that may explain the stray voltage on the ground throughout the house. GWBBQ has a new favorite as of 02:44 on Oct 6, 2012 |
# ¿ Oct 6, 2012 02:42 |
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A SWEATY FATBEARD posted:That's the old vulcanized rubber crumbling away. Most rubber insulation ends up like this (crumbly charcoal-like bits), others rot to tar-like goo.
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# ¿ Oct 7, 2012 18:38 |
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I particularly like the ground wire from the top attached to the painted surface of the box with masking tape. Also, nothing is color coded and while there appear to be neutral wires, they're not going to where any of the hot wires are.
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# ¿ Oct 8, 2012 13:11 |
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Sagebrush posted:I read somewhere that "scram" is actually an acronym for "safety control rod axe man". In the earliest reactors built in the 1930s, the safety mechanism was literally a bunch of control rods hanging from ropes above the reactor, and if something went awry there was a dedicated axe-man who would chop the main rope and cause the rods to drop into place, halting the reaction. I know that that is indeed how the first reactors' control rods operated, but I don't know if that's actually why they use the term "scram". I heard you're on the Chicago Pile team, what do you do? If something goes wrong, I stop the reactor with an axe.
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# ¿ Nov 15, 2012 15:40 |
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:I've always wondered why neutron detectors are so goddamn huge, even pictures of supposedly modern ones I've seen have giant sphere things strapped to them. Is it just that neutrons are hard to detect so you need a big volume to get any sort of representative sample? Do they make smaller ones now that I just don't know about?
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# ¿ Nov 17, 2012 06:57 |
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Palpatine MD posted:I was visiting a technology museum recently and they had a microfiche (Microform) machine on display. How commonly is that stuff still used today? The vast majority of local newspapers that are on file at libraries are also on microfilm. National or regional papers tended to be on microfiche from what I remember but have almost all been digitized by now.
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# ¿ Nov 28, 2012 02:11 |
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TShields posted:I've always wondered what would happen if you had a fingerprint scanner on your computer and you injured that finger to the point of it being unrecognizable- even if just for a short time. I sliced my left index finger open with a paring knife while cutting cheese a few weeks ago, there's no way I would have been able to scan it. spog posted:And I guarantee that you can get through it by walking up to it with a handfull of papers just after someone opened it and smiling helplessly.
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# ¿ Nov 29, 2012 18:03 |
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Mister Kingdom posted:I bought my first computer (Leading Edge Model D) in 1988. It had two 5.25" floppy drives because I couldn't afford the 10Mb HD at $500.
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# ¿ Dec 6, 2012 04:18 |
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minato posted:Are each of the buttons tilt switches or something? Because I don't get why they just didn't label them 1-5. No, there are only 5 buttons.
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# ¿ Dec 16, 2012 19:56 |
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I can't even find a picture of one, but every time I open the arm rest on our 97 Mercedes E320, I feel a sense of disappointment that you can't activate analog call phones anymore.
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# ¿ Apr 1, 2013 19:21 |
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I am going to do that, but I want to wire it up so it keeps the headset charged and the keypad on the handset works so it'll take some work. I'd also kind of like to either program a microcontroller to emulate the original phone and get the speed dial console in the dashboard working or just gut the thing and use the original LCD and buttons.
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# ¿ Apr 1, 2013 21:22 |
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While we're on the subject of the Cold War, let's talk first-generation spy satellites. The Corona Program ran from June 1959 to May 1972, with a rapid increase in pace after Francis Gary Powers' U2 spyplane was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960. The program was hugely successful in reducing the need to violate our adversaries' airspace with manned flights, and even more so in disproving the existence of the "bomber gap," slowing the arms race, and calming public fears surrounding Soviet first strike capability. The program launched 39 satellites, 35 of which carried a total of 148 camera systems, which returned images 161 times. The project achieved several milestones in human spaceflight, including Discoverer 1, the first man-made object placed in a polar orbit Discoverer 2, the first three-axis-stabilized satellite Discoverer 3, the test capsule from which was the first Discoverer 13, the first successful aerial capture of an object returned from orbit Discoverer 14 was launched on August 18, 1960, and returned the first usable images taken from a reconnaissance satellite. And A whole lot of mission failures The Corona Program included 8 generations of satellites designated Key Hole 1 - 4, 4A, 4B, 5, and 6. The 4B looked like this. Part of the reason it took so long to return a usable image was that this was the era of film, and it came back in a container that looked like this ... ... and was recovered like this. This is a photo of the recovery of Discoverer 14's film capsule, which contained the first film recovered from space Simply put, the Corona Program spent 13 years and almost $800,000,000 (adjusted for inflation to 2013) to develop, build, and launch really big disposable cameras into space.
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# ¿ May 6, 2013 19:05 |
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Sagebrush posted:The reason it had to be recovered in midair like that is because the package was designed to self-destruct if it wasn't recovered, so that the Soviets couldn't find out what the Americans were spying on. There was a plug in the bottom of the canister made out of salt, and after a few minutes floating in the water the salt plug would dissolve, allowing water in. The film would be ruined and the whole thing would sink to the bottom of the ocean. Phanatic posted:There was actually a research facility down outside of Atlanta, containing a completely unshielded 10-megawatt reactor. It was mounted on a hydraulic lift, in a pit, and samples of stuff they wanted to irradiate to see what the radiation did to it would be arrayed near the pit. Raise the reactor, zap the hell out of everything nearby. They did this enough that the surrounding area received more radiation exposure than it would have received via the direct effects and the fallout from a full-scale nuclear war. Grass died, trees dropped their leaves.
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# ¿ May 7, 2013 03:58 |
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I'll confirm another use of the ICQ Uh Oh sounds at a Shell station in Stamford CT. I believe it's also a sound effect used in the Worms games.Krispy Kareem posted:So yeah, you can't totally erase a Scan-Tron answer, but the grading computer is smart enough to tell the difference. As far as detecting cheating, Freakonomics has a chapter on how cheating on standardized tests is detected. Basically, you look for a string of right and wrong answers that occurs in a particular set of questions more often than it should by chance, indicating that teachers quickly changed a bunch of answers but didn't want to make them look too perfect. You can also compare performance between sections, between difficulty levels of questions, and compare them to a normal distribution. Altering students' answers on standardized tests is a lot harder to get away with than you would expect.
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# ¿ May 11, 2013 19:44 |
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sweeperbravo posted:Here's an actual thing that bothers me about the phone- remember me talking about being able to text/type without looking?
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# ¿ May 17, 2013 16:51 |
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nature6pk posted:I managed to drop my old Siemens C65 phone off a lift 26 feet down to a concrete floor, and it only had a minor scratch on the corner it landed upon.
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# ¿ May 20, 2013 15:05 |
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longview posted:I googled a little and found this: http://wordspy.com/words/electric-can-openerquestion.asp I was able to pull quote:In May, Iridium, the satellite phone company, proudly announced that a woman who had climbed to the top of Mount Everest had used one of its telephones to call her mother in Mexico. quote:Iridium's phones initially cost $4,500 and calls cost up to $10 a minute. This compared to $50 and maybe 15 cents a minute for "normal" cellphones. The Iridium space phones weighed about four times as much as common pocket phones. You couldn't make calls from inside buildings or moving cars. Iridium's engineers argued that this now "normal" use would have required increased power in satellites. This would have doubled the cost of construction. I would say Iridium phones and electric can openers are specialized products rather than better or worse than alternatives. Electric can openers are great for people with limited hand strength or coordination, just like Iridium phones are great for people who spend time outside of normal cell service areas and need to have a way to communicate. GWBBQ has a new favorite as of 18:25 on May 22, 2013 |
# ¿ May 22, 2013 18:11 |
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There are advantages to having phone service covering 100% of earth's surface.
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# ¿ May 25, 2013 22:58 |
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Ron Burgundy posted:Yes it seems weird to me that an XLR adapter would be TRS in the first place, I've only dealt with TS before.
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# ¿ May 30, 2013 15:46 |
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Greggy posted:
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# ¿ Jun 11, 2013 05:01 |
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Plinkey posted:I moved onto Direct Connect after the napster downfall. Someone ran the server on the school's network (which had no bandwidth limits inside the network) and restricted it to the school's ip addresses. It was amazing.
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# ¿ Jun 27, 2013 03:26 |
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Monkey Fracas posted:Man, this is way cooler than USB drives. Not as practical, certainly, but much cooler. It looks like something out of a 80s/90s scifi movie/TV show bobua posted:All the kazaa talk reminded me of some short lived ftp search engine. I don't recall what it's name was, but you could submit your ftp for indexing, turn on ratios, and let the filez come to you! mystes posted:People really still use direct connect?
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# ¿ Jun 29, 2013 03:50 |
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That's all the inspiration I need to charge up the Sony CD Mavica someone gave me a few years ago. I even have a whole spindle of CDs for it.
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# ¿ Aug 1, 2013 21:54 |
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Did that guy in TFR ever get a letter of clarification from the ATF on the hamster-wheel-powered machine gun?
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# ¿ Oct 5, 2013 00:43 |
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I have a Novint Falcon, it's pretty neat but takes up a lot of desk space. I don't have the pistol grip so it's not nearly as much fun for FPS games. Since it's capable of in-out motion, I searched out of morbid curiosity and sure enough some guy attached a fleshlight to it and wrote drivers to make it thrust I kept mine away from my genitals, played through Half Life 2 with it, and now it's back in the box. I'm probably going to end up selling it soon, you can get a decent price on eBay (this means if you want one PM me and we'll talk,) Plinkey posted:That reminds me of this thing that a lot of our CAD guys swear by: Krispy Kareem posted:Meh, those are scrubs. I was using trackballs in the 80's on my PCjr. http://retail.contourdesign.com/?/products/22
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# ¿ Oct 10, 2013 04:28 |
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Mouthguard Chump posted:The "Powercam" acts by shifting the crankarm out of step with the chainrings which does...something. Having never seen one in action, I can't rightly say how it actually operates, but the theory is that it lets you push bigger gears with the same amount of effort.
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# ¿ Jan 7, 2014 22:01 |
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WebDog posted:Before Bakelite, Celluloid was the plastic of it's day often being used as an ivory replacement. For instance one use was billiard balls where they would routinely explode from impacts.
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# ¿ Jan 8, 2014 21:20 |
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Phanatic posted:Someone actually considered using as a rocket propellant a substance that's so toxic it's lethal if you get a drop of it on your hand, even if you're wearing lab gloves. Deciding that this was too dangerous, they used plain old inorganic, elemental mercury. They were going to fire this rocket in the middle of New Jersey, and built this big scrubber to collect the mercury in the exhaust before it made it out into the atmosphere, but then the research center was shut down by the Navy, which just test-fired the thing out in the middle of a desert somewhere and didn't bother with the scrubber.
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# ¿ Jan 10, 2014 21:54 |
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In a fluorine-rich environment, you can even burn water.
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# ¿ Jan 11, 2014 23:03 |
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Smiling Jack posted:I forget if it was in Things I Won't Work With or Ignition! but someone developed a compound so sensitive it exploded if you shone a bright light on it. http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/01/09/things_i_wont_work_with_azidoazide_azides_more_or_less.php On a related note, silver fulminate can't be stored in a pure form because it will detonate under its own weight.
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# ¿ Jan 12, 2014 00:11 |
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This has been a fun enough derail that I think it deserves its own thread. Let's take the talk of non-obsolete chemicals to Things that go FOOF in the night
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# ¿ Jan 12, 2014 01:31 |
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I'd like to recall the Nokia 5185, which is completely obsolete now but was a good solid phone at the time with great battery life, great reception, and an easy-to-replace telescoping antenna that cost about $5 to replace which was great because that kind of antenna was always easy to break off.
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# ¿ Jan 19, 2014 20:50 |
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dissss posted:There is really nothing to it - because its between the sprocket holes there isn't anything to get out of alignment.
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# ¿ Jan 20, 2014 18:44 |
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Fooley posted:I wouldn't say its good but, uh... http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2013/11/oculus-rift-turned-into-a-working-sex-simulator-nsfw/
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# ¿ Jan 21, 2014 01:23 |
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# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 16:48 |
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Pneub posted:I just read the whole description on the website and I still have no loving idea what it's supposed to be. Is it some kind of wireless volume knob?
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# ¿ Jan 23, 2014 04:42 |