Tech stuff you thought was magic

Capt'n Midnight

Zip Drives.

If you carried a boot disk with the drivers you could use it to copy 100MB to or from any PC.

jimgoose wrote: »

Mmm. Maybe so, but it's hard to beat the therapeutic value of listening to twelve spindles in a RAID-10 going hell-for-leather while a couple of gig or so of RDBMS crap is being faulted into core. :cool:

Raid 5 is redundant.
Mirrors are just so much easier to build and recover.

Scariest thing in the world is a RAID rebuild, knowing all the drives came from the same batch. And then all the idiosyncrasies of RAID controllers, almost every shaggin one I've had the mispleasure to deal with had a new gotcha. More than once I was glad to be able to software mirror to a single large drive.

syklops wrote: »

Theres an index of files, kind of like a phonebook. When you delete a file, the computer removes the file from the index. If you scan the hard drive for files you might be able to find the file again.

There is no might about it. Things like photorec mean it's a virtual certainty unless the file was wiped or overwritten.

Back in the days of DOS it didn't even remove the file from the index, with things like Norton Utilities all that was missing was the first letter of the file name.

Eugene Norman

Your Superior wrote: »

Ah, so you're a worker drone who makes other people rich. Well done, and keep being a good boy.

He works for the rich.

Eugene Norman

Aongus Von Bismarck wrote: »

I'll admit to being impressed the first time I used Skype. I was in South America and could call home for a very low rate compared to using my mobile.
Technology rarely impresses me. Indeed, in the context of my job it is often a source of frustration and lost productivity. I don't want to have to restart Citrix, or power cycle the machine. I don't want to know about a network glitch or an emergency outage. IT should just work. The same way other utilities work. When it doesn't it's the failure of IT staff and management.
It's preposterous that they suggest I get in under my desk in my suit to check a cable or connection. We're the profit making part of the firm. I don't have the time or desire to do the work of others.

If you were the sole profit making part of the firm you wouldn't need technology now would ya. Back in the day traders had to trade in person on trading floors which probably involved actually knowing something about companies and a slight bit of memorisation.

Now it's basically all software as befits a low level data entry position. As to why it's so well paid given its been proven that monkeys do as good a job and the work is done for traders by the software,well that's hard to explain, probably it's just being near a fountain makes you wet.

Ave Sodalis

Dravokivich wrote: »

He does it a lot. Then when people try to explain it back to him he just point blank refuses to acknowledge that sometimes a user may need to assist in trouble shooting to identify and aid in resolution of the issue. I've seen a lot of it working as the complaints dept in a call centre when I told people I wasn't going to escalate their issue as I didn't consider it serious enough and was still within SLAs.

Something about work, something about how great he is, something about how how IT staff are annoying and everyone else below him, something about how everyone else is jealous... just about every post he makes in boards has just been summed up there.
The best of it is, I remember him giving out about IT not dressing smartly enough and yet he doesn't want to mess his suit doing IT work?

Frynge

Seriously people....




Walkman!

Day Lewin

I still think aeroplanes are impossible. Think about it - tons of metal in the air for hours and not falling to earth...actually, scrap that: don't think about it. Just cross your fingers and shut your eyes.

This can't happen, yet it seems to. It has to be magic.

YellowFeather

mikemac1 wrote: »

Booked a Ryanir flight and the email confirmation was on my gmail account

The day of the flight my phone alerted me it was 3 hours away and various options how to get the airport from my current location and when my check in was.

Many here wont be impressed but I never knew google was smart enough to figure all this out!

That one is more scary than magic. I was freaked out about two years ago when I would Google a location on my work pc, and then next thing my phone would tell me how long it would take me to get there. (Turns out it was pulling it from being logged into my Gmail account on both devices.) Every now and again, for no apparent reason, it would tell me how long it will take to get home.

Recently, Google Maps started suggesting locations and linking them with people in my phone. Thought it was a weird bug at first showing me where my contacts had looked up, but, it's got to do with signatures in their emails coming to my Outlook - but not their regular signature locations -their secondary ones.

At this point, my iPhone (which is linked to my Gmail and work Outlook account) can practically tell me what colour underwear I'm wearing.

You'd have to wonder what it knows that I'm not aware of. Too much I'd imagine. I just hope it never turns evil or I'll be fecked altogether.

Capt'n Midnight

The dangers of electricity.

Guy drops in on his mate. Yer man's in the kitchen standing there shaking and no reply when asked if he's OK and there's a wire. So the guy puts two and two together and grabs a broom and whacks yer man to break the electrical contact. Whacks him so hard he breaks the arm.

This was back in the 80's and it turns out

Frynge wrote: »

Seriously people....




Walkman!

My first time listening to a Walkman thinking "It's not working there's no sound coming out of it" because the sound wasn't coming out of the box on the table, it was in my ears :eek:

innocent times


and strobe light on record decks to get the RPM right

Alun

YellowFeather wrote: »

That one is more scary than magic. I was freaked out about two years ago when I would Google a location on my work pc, and then next thing my phone would tell me how long it would take me to get there. (Turns out it was pulling it from being logged into my Gmail account on both devices.) Every now and again, for no apparent reason, it would tell me how long it will take to get home.

Recently, Google Maps started suggesting locations and linking them with people in my phone. Thought it was a weird bug at first showing me where my contacts had looked up, but, it's got to do with signatures in their emails coming to my Outlook - but not their regular signature locations -their secondary ones.

At this point, my iPhone (which is linked to my Gmail and work Outlook account) can practically tell me what colour underwear I'm wearing.

You'd have to wonder what it knows that I'm not aware of. Too much I'd imagine. I just hope it never turns evil or I'll be fecked altogether.

That's Google Now doing a lot of that. I found it way too creepy and turned it off

sheesh

Tarzana2 wrote: »

The cloud. Amazing.

I was impressed with the idea of 'The cloud' first as I thought it was distributed computing always on always, Always available one server goes down there is another in a different part of the world to takes its place. then a couple of years ago a server farm in the us got flooded and wiped out a large part of amazon for most of the states.

its just a server! you get some disk space and some processor time! I feel cheated somehow!

eamonnq

YellowFeather wrote: »

At this point, my iPhone (which is linked to my Gmail and work Outlook account) can practically tell me what colour underwear I'm wearing.

and people wonder why we need smartphones!!!

jimgoose

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

...More than once I was glad to be able to software mirror to a single large drive...

Ah, one bearing failure from death - that's the spirit!
"If only we could fall
like cherry-blossoms in Spring,
Pure and radiant!"

BANZAI!!

branners69

My Archos 120 Multimedia player was magic. You could watch TV shows on the go and listen to music and copy your photos from a memory card to it. This was all the way back in 2002! You could even connect it to your TV!

http://www.mp3newswire.net/graphics/ArchosFM20.gif

circadian

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-31622297

If this kind of tech gets to public use in the next 5-7 years then the internet is going to take a huge leap.

Chances are, connecting to WiFi to a hardwired connection in your home will be a thing of the past. All devices will connect to this type of system not to mention mobile calls costing nothing as it's just transmitting as data across whatever the new Skype is.

Read the article though, I know it's early days but to get 1Tb wirelessly is impressive.

Magic.

zeffabelli

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

-Arthur C. Clarke.

Egginacup

fizzypish wrote: »

I work in a pretty technical field and despite this I'm a modern day luddite. Through out my education I came across ideas and principals that before I bothered my hole figuring out I just mentally labeled as "magic". To name a few:

Cloud computing: I initially thought this was some very clever method of bouncing information around the atmosphere as a method of storing data. (I know, I ****ing know. I'm a dumbass!!!!!)

Torrenting: Thought it was the name of a site. Looked it up and its a much more economic method of sharing data over the internet.

Also some terms used in industry to sell **** piss me off:
Labeling a new phone 3G or 4G or 5G.... This term has to do with a governing body of technology drawing a line in the sand regarding speed of transmission, security and a whole heap of other criteria but companies use it as a selling point because 4G is a bigger number than 3G. Show me the spec sheet where you meet every one of these criteria before using it as a selling point!

So AH have you any irritating sales terms that piss you off or general terminology that you thought was black magic but is actually a very simple concept? Don't limit your response to the genre of my examples.

"Low-latency"

Just say "reliable" or "the shit doesn't fuck up that often"

Retarded buzzword cliches for hardware:

"Rack and stack" .....just say install you berk

Dravokivich

Egginacup wrote: »

"Low-latency"

Just say "reliable" or "the shit doesn't fuck up that often"

Doesn't actually mean that in the only products I can think of where it's relevant. It's about the length of time a process takes. It'd be a key performance indicator in music technology and production equipment. Where there needs to be a near perceivable instantaneous conversion of Analogue to Digital and Digital to Analogue.

circadian

Egginacup wrote: »

"Low-latency"

Just say "reliable" or "the shit doesn't fuck up that often"

Retarded buzzword cliches for hardware:

"Rack and stack" .....just say install you berk

Low latency is pretty important and I thought understood reasonably well. It is only one of many factors related to reliability, and the idea of latency itself isn't JUST reliability. It affects general performance, if something is working albeit a little slower than usual then it is still reliable.

Never heard rack and stack. Is it related to racking and stacking servers?

jimgoose

circadian wrote: »

Low latency is pretty important and I thought understood reasonably well. It is only one of many factors related to reliability, and the idea of latency itself isn't JUST reliability. It affects general performance, if something is working albeit a little slower than usual then it is still reliable.

Latency is basically response time, and has little to do with speed. In networking, you'll often notice that a HSPA connection will take the best part of a full second for an ICMP Echo round-trip, while a more traditional DSL setup will take 25ms or so. This is important in things like networked games, where there the actual volume of data transferred is low - often only a few simple vectors for location, weapon aiming, this kind of thing - but high latency makes playing quite frustrating.

circadian wrote: »

Never heard rack and stack. Is it related to racking and stacking servers?

It refers to installing servers in racks, yes.

circadian

jimgoose wrote: »

Latency is basically response time, and has little to do with speed. In networking, you'll often notice that a HSPA connection will take the best part of a full second for an ICMP Echo round-trip, while a more traditional DSL setup will take 25ms or so. This is important in things like networked games, where there the actual volume of data transferred is low - often only a few simple vectors for location, weapon aiming, this kind of thing - but high latency makes playing quite frustrating.


It refers to installing servers in racks, yes.

Cool, I guess I'm racking and stacking on a regular basis so!

I know that latency is response time, I was going for a general, easy to understand description. Most people would perceive it as a slow response i.e. Video and audio going out of sync if the audio track has high latency, it is perceived as slow.

Faith+1

jimgoose wrote: »

I got a Sony Blu-Ray player for Christmas a couple of years ago, and only lately fired it up having acquired a new electrical telly-box with the HDMI in it. According to Sony's blurb, this thing is "WiFi Ready!", which as it transpires means that as well as an Ethernet port it has a USB port that can accommodate Sony's proprietary WiFi adapter that can be had for the thick-end of €200. Obviously I bridged the network with a cheap little TP-Link box and thus ran an Ethernet drop to TV/AV Corner in the living-room. But I would just like to nominate Sony for this weeks "Big Fat Fcuk You!!" award.

My god! I'm 30 and what you just said made no sense to me! It read beauitiful though!

I've turned into my old man now! God help me.

Faith+1

Ipod's imo. Who can forget the days of a big heavy bast*rd walkman in your pocket? Used to record all my music off the radio and think It was the sh*t because I had up to date music! Then it was was CD Walkman followed my minidisc. Don't get me wrong they were brilliant in their day but christ they loved AA batteries, were bulky and you had to carry your music disc's with you.

Then Ipod came out. Small, rechargable battery, excellent storage capacity (eventually). Just the idea of having all your music in one little device was amazing to me.

Even today I still use it whilst most people use their phone for music. Just a shame Apple stopped producing them.

jimgoose

Faith+1 wrote: »

My god! I'm 30 and what you just said made no sense to me! It read beauitiful though!...

Don't panic, it's all just ones and zeroes!

Faith+1 wrote: »

Ipod's imo. Who can forget the days of a big heavy bast*rd walkman in your pocket?...

The whole music thing is so ridiculously easy these days it's almost boring to someone like me who recalls having to have a twin-deck stereo for copying cassettes, or else risk being simply tragically unhip! :pac:

Ste-

jimgoose wrote: »

me who recalls having to have a twin-deck stereo for copying cassettes, or else risk being simply tragically unhip! :pac:

High speed dubbing for the win!

Irish Guitarist

Records. I find them more fascinating than any modern technology. Unlike a CD you can pretty much see what's going on with a record, and all that's happening is a round slab of plastic is spinning around slowly while a needle passes over it. It looks so simple but it's producing beautiful music. It's also therapeutic, even almost hypnotic, to actually watch the record just spinning.

AndyBoBandy

Irish Guitarist wrote: »

Records. I find them more fascinating than any modern technology. Unlike a CD you can pretty much see what's going on with a record, and all that's happening is a round slab of plastic is spinning around slowly while a needle passes over it. It looks so simple but it's producing beautiful music. It's also therapeutic, even almost hypnotic, to actually watch the record just spinning.

This is where the magic is happening;

http://www.thatericalper.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Close-up-of-a-record-stylus-on-the-grooves-of-a-vinyl-record.jpg

and even closer;

http://www.synthgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/record_groove.jpg


just awesome.

good good good, good vibrations

Tarzana2

A lot of biotech stuff is amazing, PCR and the like. Cell culture. All that good shít.

Faith+1

Andybobandy wrote: »

This is where the magic is happening;

http://www.thatericalper.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Close-up-of-a-record-stylus-on-the-grooves-of-a-vinyl-record.jpg

and even closer;

http://www.synthgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/record_groove.jpg


just awesome.

good good good, good vibrations

No way is that a record! Amazing!:eek:

AndyBoBandy

Faith+1 wrote: »

No way is that a record! Amazing!:eek:

it is.

Greenmachine

Years ago a program call x-copy on the amiga seemed amazing. Especially when used to copy an x-copy disk. I had no idea at the time how data was stored on computers. I was just happy fooling around with monkey island and superfrog and god knows how many other games.