I met my wife through a local BBS.
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I have no memory of this.
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That really is pretty clever!
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This seemed like one of the better places for thisā¦
It sounds like something out of an urban legend: Some Windows XP-era laptops using 5400 RPM spinning hard drives can allegedly be forced to crash when exposed to Janet Jacksonās 1989 hit āRhythm Nation.ā
But Microsoft Software Engineer Raymond Chen stands by the story in a blog post published earlier this week, and the vulnerability has been issued an official CVE ID by The Mitre Corporation, lending it more credibility.
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Hollywood hackers: (furiously typing random words) Iām in!
Real life hackers: (listening to 80s/90s playlists for hours on end) Found the song that crashes computers!
It wouldnāt be at all believable in a movie, which is what makes it so realistic.
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When I was in high school, there was a gimmicky product to locate keys that became popular one holiday season. These worked by clapping a rhythm or a whistle to get the key chain to respond with an annoying beep.
My high school boyfriend was gifted one of these keychains, and one day we discovered that Madonna sang in the exact frequency of the whistle that would activate the keychain. It was pretty funny to us to be in the car and have the keychain blow up when Like a Virgin started playing.
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oh god i dream of finding one of these at a garage sale or in a thrift.
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You couldnāt get me to play with high voltages. I once got zapped changing a wall switch. Iād turned off the wrong circuit breaker.
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Thatās 70% of the job. Then thereās the care and feeding of unbraided thick copper wire around the new screw of a new switch. If you havenāt done it before, reverse the ratio. Itās in tenths.
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For a brief moment, looking at the thumbnail for that video, I was thinking āwaitā¦ that circuit board looks familiar for some reasonā¦ā
Turns out I was thinking of a slightly different calculator, the Sanyo ICC-808D. Iāve only seen that circuit board once, near the beginning of the year, but evidently it stuck in the brain. It was the board used for the ābelt gizmoā in Ghostbusters. Very similar design, though clearly a little more modern.
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This was my calculator growing up, the one my dad got to use instead of a slide rule:
I remember some of the function chaining and reciprocal stuff (as shown on the last few pages of the manual) could be confusing since it wasnāt really obvious that it would do that.
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Once shitty ways of doing math on computers got endemic, innovation in the field ended. Now thereās just an increasing bland and dull series of proprietary tools.
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DiscMaster is a new website that is sifting through the CDs and floppy disks in the Internet Archive and making it all into a searchable database. Even more incredibly, itās taking all of the old file formats and making them viewable in a browser. As of this writing, the archive represents more than 7,000 CDs and 11 million files.
One of the most difficult parts of looking through old files is the formats. In the early Wild West days of the online world there were no standardized file formats, no set way to render a video, no agreed upon audio codec, and no single way to render text.
While it may be easier in general to watch a random video, listen to a random sound file, or view a random document on the modern Internet, itās not as though thereās a single solution to these problems. Iām sure I could name multiple video, audio, and text formats that are in active use today. The problem isnāt the variety of formats, but the accessibility of tools to read them, which the tool referenced in the article is literally trying to address. The article is good overall, but I took some exception to this particular premise.
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But you need a competent operator, tooā¦
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