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The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

Powerful Two-Hander posted:

using software to fake mount an ISO as a cd drive

time to burn a cd, better disconnect from the internet, turn off the screensaver, close any other programs, do a little luck dance then start it being careful not to move the mouse after clicking the button and tiptoe out of the room

*comes back an hour later to see it failed at 97%*

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The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

Plank Walker posted:

sorry prof, my homework is in the google graveyard :rip:

i'd believe "the google service that hosted my homework was shut down" far more than the old "my dog ate it"

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

Jim Silly-Balls posted:

when I started college every single dorm hall and school building was on H U B S

loving HUBS, not switches.

so I’m sure it was collision central, but you could see every single computer on campus. I had a program that would just scan every IP in a block for open SMB shares and return the findings

I got so much music, software and movies that way. it also had the added advantage of on Napster, peers that were on campus would show up with a ping time of 1, so if
you saw one of those in your Napster searches, you went for it.

this was also peak edgelord time at the height of BMEZine and rotten.com and whatnot so I also inadvertently stumbled on a lot of really gross hosed up poo poo :cry:

when i started was the same year that they instituted a policy that every student must have their own computer (which you were forced to buy through them, but i digress), they upgraded the dorms with 100mb switches, but the university owned apartments and houses were still on these ancient units that had a 100mb uplink and 10mb local ports, and they were only upgraded as they went bad. this lead to tech-savvy students destroying them by jamming the fan with a pencil until they overheated and died to get an upgrade

being that every student now had their own computer, every new file sharing service that popped up also basically killed the network until it was blocked. not that it mattered as we had our own intranet of game and warez servers, as the unofficial word from the campus IT department was basically "we don't care what you do as long as you don't expose it to the outside world"

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

mediaphage posted:

if i could get one of those 1080 HD CRT tvs for watching videos on i probably would, would be great out in the shop

i don't think any consumer crts actually had the dot pitch to fully resolve a 1080 signal. those "super fine pitch" sony models from the mid-00s came the closest with ~1400 horizontal lines, but that's it

crts have been out of the mainstream for long enough now that people forget just how huge and heavy they were, not to mention that larger ones in particular had a lot of image problems: convergence, geometry, overscan, etc... plus, anything you find now would be 15+ years old and basically on borrowed time. oh, and when that 200lb+ hunk of glass does die, the number of places that actually take crts for disposal is approaching zero, so the only way to get rid of it is to have a friend help you toss it into some random dumpster in the middle of the night

surprisingly, smaller crts actually seem to be worth more than the large ones as retro gamers can still play things authentically and don't have to worry about someone getting seriously injured or dying if you need to move it

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

Jonny 290 posted:

Nice. I remember a dark age in broadband where ISPs figured out they could sniff packet TTL coming out of your connection, if it was 63 you were using their (obviously lovely) router, if it was 62 you were using it as a bridge and using your own router which they got real mad at. Solution was to pop some iptables rules into your router to +1 the TTL

this still works if your mobile provider meters or restricts tethering

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

mediaphage posted:

nope

i check periodically and assholes want like $200 for people to have the privilege of coming and getting them (plus here as ive said recycling them is free)

come to think of it, when my friend's uncle died last year, he had one of those huge 40" XBR tubes as well as a CRT rear projection and they had to pay someone to haul them away because nobody would take them for free

e: if you want people who are really delusional about the value of old tvs, a few years ago there were people asking four figgies for early generation edtv plasma displays that doubled as space heaters because "it cost $10k new"

The_Franz fucked around with this message at 15:22 on Oct 15, 2021

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

eschaton posted:

I know a bunch of people who work on CRTs in the retrocomputing scene, they’re not that bad, you just have to know how to discharge them and work with them safety (one hand in your pocket, tools made of insulators, that sort of thing)

I’ve even done a tiny bit myself with classic Macs and terminals, nothing beyond just replacing parts but I’m far more worried about necking a tube than I am about high voltage when the CRT isn’t operating

much, much more difficult is fixing “CRT cataracts” where the adhesive between the implosion/radiation shield glass and the actual picture tube is breaking down

to do that you need to remove the implosion shield via VERY EVEN AND STEADY heating to loosen all the adhesive at once, clean both it and the actual CRT, and then reattach it with a modern adhesive

it’s very easy to crack the implosion shield via uneven heating with a heat gun—at that point the CRT is still fine, but good luck finding another glass that fits perfectly if your tube is non standard (like say my friend’s AT&T BLIT terminal, with its portrait orientation) so you’re going to get a nice little dose of X-rays every time you use it

I have one “reasonable, standard” tube that needs fixing this way, a DEC VR241 monitor that’s part of a VT240 color terminal, and an oddball custom tube that needs fixing in the form of an HP 2647A widescreen graphics Terminal from the late 1970s which I do not look forward to

there used to be a couple of places that still rebuilt crt tubes, hawkeye in the us and racs in france, however both closed their doors in the last decade. i think a lot of the equipment wound up at a tv museum somewhere in ohio. the process is neat to see

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3G7b-DcOO4

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

polyester concept posted:

sounds like a typical out of touch boomer

in the bits where actually see him, he's not that old

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

gabensraum posted:

that reminds me i once downloaded a "128-bit"version of netscape navigator, because it said that it was only legal for US citizens and i was like ha ha gently caress you cia

i guess it meant that it supported 128 bit encryption

yeah, the old days where "strong encryption" was something governments thought they could control. remember the clipper chip or when the ps2 was export restricted because the magic gate encryption used on the memory cards was considered "strong"? also something about saddam using the ps2 to launch missiles

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

Silver Alicorn posted:

remember when the military bought a bunch of ps3s to make clusters

there was a very narrow period just before cuda debuted where the cell was useful for that kind of thing, and per-unit the ps3 was way cheaper than an ibm cell blade

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

Fuzzy Mammal posted:

congrats intel you did it, you made a 10nm intel desktop chip. 1st new process since skylake in tyool 2015. tick toooooooooooooock as they say. keep it up!

they benchmark slightly faster in certain tasks when compared with amd's year old offerings while using more than 2x the power

naturally this means amd is finished, pack it up amdailures, etc...

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

Jonny 290 posted:

also they do it with 4400mhz ddr5 ram, compared to (most of the time) 3200mhz ddr4. zen4 will resume the wreckage

and by the time zen4 is out, 64 gigs of ddr5 ram likely won't cost more than the processor or motherboard

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

Jonny 290 posted:

you couldnt build a machine between 98 and 07 and have it boot on first post without a blood sacrifice

the era of non-keyed connectors was a dire one indeed

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

kitten smoothie posted:

and after you close it all up you realized you did it wrong, and rather than rip it out and try again you decide “well turbo button is now the reset button and that’s how it will be”

i plugged in the cable for one of those creative live drive things incorrectly once and it actually incinerated the cable

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

Sagebrush posted:

i totally see your point from a theoretical technical perspective.

even if it's true, i think it literally does not matter for 99.999% of users. and if it were causing damage to ddr sockets more than one time in a million, we would have heard about it.

it's like the old athlon/duron heatsinks: lots of people complained about how horrible they were and how they broke traces on the motherboard trying to install them, but ultimately it was just a handful of extremely uncoordinated people with fists made of ham. they weren't a good design, sure, but they weren't that hard to work with overall

getting that duron 800, bridging the traces with a pencil and seeting 4 digit clock speeds for the first time was :eyepop:

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

Sniep posted:

ram is the kind of thing that is expected to be installed and removed like, 3 times in its entire lifespan. it's probably built to withstand hundreds of cycles

you're not going to gently caress it up by applying slight torsion on the contacts during seating

honestly, upgradability these days is a non-issue, as by the time you are ready to upgrade anything, the whole system is ready for a refresh and it doesn't cost that much overall

30 years ago when that 33mhz 486 system cost you $7000 1990s dollars though, it was extremely important. you could still buy a new car for what a computer cost then. not a very good one, mind you, but a car nonetheless

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

Midjack posted:

micro center seems to generally be avoiding the trap that fry's fell into.

they had their adapt or die moment some time ago. there was a point where they were feeling the sting from internet shops because they were selling generic, no-name white-box hardware at the same or higher price than name brand parts online, and they wouldn't have things like the then-new tnt video cards, but they would sell you an outdated s3 virge decelerator for it's original msrp. they revamped and have been going strong ever since

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

i miss the styling of 90s unix workstations. those things cost a small fortune and they looked and felt like it

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

Chumbawumba4ever97 posted:

The whole ATA / IDE thing which was not that long ago. Desktop computers were maxed out at a whopping two hard drives. And if you used a cd ROM or DVD drive on the same cable as the hard drive, the hard drive would run at 2,000 kbps or whatever the speed of the optical drive was

motherboards, even in the mid-90s, had 2 ide ports, so that wasn't much of an issue. generally you put the hard drives on one and the optical drive(s) on the other. you wanted a scsi card with your optical drive + burner on it so you could copy playstation games with a high degree of success without having to first rip it to the hard drive

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

Jonny 290 posted:

i didnt gently caress with any network ones but i was the kid in 10th grade who successfully finally figured out how to get the pioneer external 6 cdrom changer working in the hs library. so many mscdex.exe's running lmao. but it worked!

when i was in university we saved one of those things from the dumpster. i think we got it working once, then i wound up selling it on ebay for $50. neat, but it was really slow at the time (4x or 6x when 32x or higher was the norm), and kind of pointless with hard drives getting into double-digit gigabytes for not much money

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

Sweevo posted:

they were OEM fitment in loads of cars in the late 90s to early 2010s.

i just remembered that i have one in my trunk. no idea if it still works or not

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

Powerful Two-Hander posted:

that was just because it was the easiest way to get switchable map packs. Iirc you could get compact flash map sets around 2000. now of course it's just an SD slot.

now built-in gps is increasingly not found on new cars at all since people just use carplay

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

SYSV Fanfic posted:

Ahh zip drives. Click of death.

i've always heard of this but never experienced it despite using zip drives for almost everything from 1997 until whenever usb thumbdrives became ubiquitous, including through university where they spent the entire time in my backpack when not in use. maybe it's because i always kept the disks in those plastic clamshell cases :iiam:

mr backup z64 was superior to the doctor v64 since it loaded faster and saved games to the zip disks instead of needing some extra memory cartridge

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

The Puppet Master posted:

just remembered that i got half-life 2 as the collector's edition which included a limited edition t-shirt (xl men's only)

when the 360 was coming out and mountain dew was doing a promo where you could win one before the official release, i wound up winning one and it came with a swag box, which included a bunch of xl t-shirts that wound up ultimately being cut into pieces for rags because they were more like a tent than a shirt, and there was no way i was going to be a walking mountain dew advertisement

i do still have the original japanese metal gear solid collectors edition nearly mint in the box, including the t-shirt still folded up in plastic

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

Fart Sandwiches posted:

you don’t have pms so I’ll ask here. for real I will buy this from you. I’m a huge metal gear geek and I had the shirt when I was younger but I wore it too much and it got ruined. I have hayter’s autograph on my original copy of the game I got at toys r us

sorry, not really wanting to get rid of it right now

axolotl farmer posted:

pseudointellectual gen X:ers who appreciate the 'deep' lyrics and 'intricate' harmonies :jerkbag:

p. much, my older gen-x cousins will go to see them live

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

Sweevo posted:

he insisted on taking literally every strip of cardboard and piece of wood from his deathtrap book wall, and had to move everything using a hand cart, including those ancient VAXes which probably weight 150lb each.

there was also something about getting tricked by a fake lawyer that i forget the details of, and hints about his rage-quitting his scifi book club after a row over cinema tickets. unfortunately all the juicy stuff seems to have happened IRL and all you get online is his sanitised one-sided version.

those vax systems probably pull a few kilowatts just to display some text

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003


i spent the whole day staking out this pizza shop and setting up a con, but it was worth it for a single free pizza (probably :10bux: at the time)

one of these had a sketch where a middle eastern guy shows you how to make a "door buster" from some pipe and when they test it, they're obviously just knocking down a piece of cardboard in the door frame

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

SYSV Fanfic posted:

Holy poo poothe wrongly convicted is a riveting read.

yeah, but like everything else on his site, i feel that we are seeing a heavily filtered version of events. the us justice system is still supremely hosed up though

and how the hell did he think that going around the jail and jimmying cell door locks with a toothbrush was a good idea? how oblivious do you have to be to think that doing something like that would end any way but badly for you?

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

polyester concept posted:

a lot of that site reads like ulillillia wrote it

i wonder how he is doing. last i heard he was a bernie supporter :unsmith:

i read somewhere that he lost his job at walmart because he refuses to get vaccinated :smith:

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

yippee cahier posted:

he can’t handle seeing people with masks. the silver lining is that enough people wear masks in walmart in florida to freak him out. he really did seem to be doing great — moved out, bought a car, went swimming in deep blue water, etc. and hope this doesn’t set him back too far.

ah that was it. i hope he finds something else, he has not had an easy life

Achmed Jones posted:

if only there were a difference between "knows something about a person who broadcasts their life" and "bothers or interacts with that person in any way". alas

there was a point where even his well-wishers were getting creepily obsessed with him to the point of basically e-stalking him

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003


"this is the first day, right?"

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

Armitag3 posted:

I had a harrowing thought that one day servers are going to have anime names

"going to"

:lol:

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

Sagebrush posted:

why does Bink Video still exist?

in the past it was basically the only drop-in video player that was optimized for everything from pc platforms down to nintendo handhealds and was allegedly unencumbered by patents. there are more options now like libvpx or libav1, and vulkan has extensions for cross-platform hardware decoding, but bink is still a relatively cheap video playback solution that takes minimal effort to use

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003


poor guy lost his job and was basically blacklisted because he bought a bag of weed in 2003

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

those airblade things that require you to put your hands into the slot are the worst. it's like a sadistic challenge to not touch the dirty sides while your hands are being blown to and fro

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

Jim Silly-Balls posted:

sometimes their listed dimensions included the bezel, making that 15” screen more like 12

it was the actual size of the tube corner-to-corner, much of which was behind the bezel

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

SYSV Fanfic posted:

The house is one block away from the CO. They can't get uverse because it's too close,

I know copper DSL is distance limited and excludes many people that way, but this is the first case I’ve head of where someone is too close to get service :psyduck:

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

if you have to care about formatting, it means you aren’t using an auto-format tool in tyool 2022, and that’s bad

The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

sb hermit posted:

Never forget that the little beep you hear on a dreamcast controller is not for letting you know that the VMU is turning on.

It's to tell you that the VMU has no batteries.

Also, the VMU was a gimmick that never had quite enough traction to be seriously useful besides things like selecting plays in football in secret.

I remember putting a battery into it to try out the tamagotchi aspect of sonic adventure and realized very quickly that it was a waste of time. I still don't know anyone that actually enjoyed raising chao.

I recall the batteries in those things not lasting long at all, and it was basically worthless so they were never replaced. I'd also love to know how the designer of the dreamcast controller decided that the cord should come out of the bottom of it, instead of the top like every other controller in existence

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The_Franz
Aug 8, 2003

Jonny 290 posted:

my dad getting pissed that the cable box with a remote was more expensive so he just bought two big hunks of coax cable and relocated the cable box to the side table next to his chair

the cable company used to charge you based on how many jacks were 'active' in the house. anyone with a brain just told them 'one' and split it themselves

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