The Technology Vent and Rant Thread

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Take one apart. It's floppy inside!

I did this with a 3.5″ floppy and a 3.5″ HDD, because some of the trainee secretaries thought the 3.5″ floppy was a hard disk (the 5.25″ but not 8″ was still about in 1992) and some others thought the actual PC was the hard disk. Then the bits went on a board at the front of the class that gradually got other things.

Two decades later I heard some South Africans call the 3.5″ floppy a "stiffy disc".

I also had the Hitachi 3″ floppy in the more rectangular case in use for about 10 years (used on Amstrad). I gave away my external 8″ drive in about 2006. I used to have a CD drive that took caddies.

I also sold the Sony 3.5″ MO drives for a while and the discs for those looked liked fat floppies, but had the MO "hard disk" inside the caddy. The similar or lower capacity Zip drive discs did have a floppy inside and were rubbish. Almost write-only media. I suspect the Playstation Portable and the Sony Minidisc were/are similar technology to the PC MO discs. I still have an NetMD minidisc player and can use a Chromium browser to manage it instead of the nasty Sony Windows program.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I used to punch a hole on the other side of the 3.5" disk so I could hopefully use the other side.

We did that for Apple floppies (a niche). In theory possible for IBM, but I never saw single sided IBM drives.

AFAIK you can't do that with 3.5″, the extra hole is density type. I never heard of a single sided 3.5″ drive, though single sided 3″ drives existed. I still have one in a box as well as the double sided one.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

About 8 years ago my work PC got replaced with with one of those. It had a big honking heat sink. Of course the first thing I did was reparition to my liking and install debian. The install went well and was super fast. But it wouldn't boot. I assumed the HW was too new for debian, so I reinstalled from scratch, but with a 2.5" SATA SSD as /boot and the rest
on the PCIe SSD. That worked great until the next mandatory HW refresh.

I remember the fun when SATA Mobo stopped having the legacy mode IDE/PATA. Earlier NT Windows install let you pause and insert a device driver, but not XP. Stupid. So I made a "slipstream" CD with the SATA drivers. Still have it, but I can't imagine needing it again now. It was also a problem with Server 2003 and HW RAID, but we installed Debian instead. We'd already tested an upgrade to 2003 on an NT 4.0 Server Enterprise machine (which unlike XP could access beyond 4G) with regular SATA as IDE in BIOS and found it too bloated, so that had Win2000 Server for a while till we dropped Windows Update Server Serivce.

Stupid dropping PAE in XP. No-one was going to buy Itaniums for 64 bit XP. The AMD 64 bit Windows was later.

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by Quoth

We did that for Apple floppies (a niche). In theory possible for IBM, but I never saw single sided IBM drives.

AFAIK you can't do that with 3.5″, the extra hole is density type. I never heard of a single sided 3.5″ drive, though single sided 3″ drives existed. I still have one in a box as well as the double sided one.

I have a Brother word processor that uses one side of a double-density 3.5" floppy discs, but it is non-standard formatted at 240kb. I stopped using it because I was concerned that if something happened to my word processor nothing else would be able to read the disc.

[Solitaire1]

Quoth wrote the following as part of a post:

Originally Posted by Quoth

I still have an NetMD minidisc player and can use a Chromium browser to manage it instead of the nasty Sony Windows program.

I've heard about the Sony music management software, SonicStage. Sony mandated it with their initial Sony Walkman digital audio players (DAP), and without it your computer could not see the Walkman DAP. The software was so bad that although their Walkman DAPs were great, the software caused them to get poor ratings. Plus, at that time their DAPs were not actually MP3 players. Instead, the software would convert MP3s into Sony's proprietary ATRAC format before loading them on the DAP.

Later, Sony dropped SonicStage (you could use any music management program although drag-and-drop was flawed) and added MP3 support for their players. That's when I started using their DAPs. My first Sony Walkman DAP was the first one that actually played MP3s. They did replace SonicStage with MediaGo which, although it had some issues, was a good program that I used until they stopped supporting it. Unfortunately, they replaced it with Music Center for PC which is basically unusable for me.

[ratinox]

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

I've heard about the Sony music management software, SonicStage. Sony mandated it with their initial Sony Walkman digital audio players (DAP), and without it your computer could not see the Walkman DAP. The software was so bad that although their Walkman DAPs were great, the software caused them to get poor ratings. Plus, at that time their DAPs were not actually MP3 players. Instead, the software would convert MP3s into Sony's proprietary ATRAC format before loading them on the DAP.

Inherited from NetMD if I remember the order. Picture a DAP except it uses MiniDisc (MD) for storage instead of flash. The software was excruciatingly slow, it required importing all music into it's own library system, and any download to the device locked the track out of playback on the host and downloading to other discs.

Brilliant technology utterly ruined by Sony's vice-grip desire to control everything. I used to be a big MiniDisc fan and proponent. NetMD thoroughly ruined that.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by ratinox

Brilliant technology utterly ruined by Sony's vice-grip desire to control everything. I used to be a big MiniDisc fan and proponent. NetMD thoroughly ruined that.

And I couldn't believe that the only way to get your own direct recording off the NetMD was via analogue playback!

Apparently (too late) there was a kind of enhanced NetMD with no control over what you put on it (the https://web.minidisc.wiki/ on Chromium solves that) and that allowed you to read your microphone recording via USB.

It crippled Sony's HW becoming a media company.

Yes, Sonic Stage. I don't miss that stupidity!

[badgoodDeb]

This week, I found some notebook pages from a while back, and was wondering if I should keep them. When I saw hints for Mass-11 I was sure I could safely use the backs for scratch notes!


(Mass-11 was a Digital Equipment VAX word processor.)

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

What has Apple ever made themselves (other then the Apple ][ and Apple ][+) instead of copying/stealing/buying the idea/product?

Overlapping windows in a GUI, and QuickDraw regions which was the underlying technology that enabled overlapping windows.

Region patent

[ownedbycats]

I typo'd my email while registering for something and can't verify it. To change the account email or delete account entirely requires contacting customer support. They won't let me do that without verifying my email.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

I typo'd my email while registering for something and can't verify it. To change the account email or delete account entirely requires contacting customer support. They won't let me do that without verifying my email.

That's why when registering, there should always be two fields to type your email. There is a lot less of a change of making the same typo.

[ownedbycats]

it was a mistake of gmail.com instead of outlook.com. Less a typo and more a brainfart.

[JSWolf]

Another peeve is low frame rate movies when we could be having high frame rate movies.

LFR is 24FPS and high frame rate is 48 or 60FPS. With 48/60FPS, we get a clearer/sharper picture and no/less judder.

My pet peeve is so many people complaining that HFR movies do not look good when they actually look better. I hope that we get more and more movies being made n HFR so it eventually becomes the norm and that TV shows also get made in HFR.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

it was a mistake of gmail.com instead of outlook.com. Less a typo and more a brainfart.

Make another account to use to get your other account fixed and that one deleted.

I can't have that sort of brainfart. I have gmail and outlook accounts that have the same name. samename@outlook.com samename@gmail.com.

[ownedbycats]

I was able to contact support by signing out. So hopefully.