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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I once had a brand new disc (from a multi disk movie box) which has never been played. When I inserted the disc into a laptop disk drive (those where you have to press the disk onto the holder in the center) the disk completely shattered. It turned out that the material of the disk has aged to a point where it became brittle, despite of never been exposed to UV light or anything else. It probably could have been stored at wrong ambient temperatures in the warehouse. The said disc and the movie box was made in 2004.


  • We are approaching the time where the lifespan of CDs (DVDs, BlueRay etc.) from the late 90s and early 2000s reach their limit.

    In general, factory-pressed CDs and DVDs are expected to last many years if you store them under ideal conditions, but the exact lifespan can vary. Some studies have suggested that factory-pressed CDs and DVDs may last for up to 20 years or more under ideal conditions, while others have found that they may begin to degrade after just a few years.




  • I think this is because it is pretty boring to film a computer in action, because it does noting - it doesn’t move for example. So beeping sounds were added for every action a computer would do: opening or closing windows, transferring files to a disk, calculating,…

    These sounds were added at a time computers were not that common in every household and to emphazise that the computer is doing something. In recent movies, computers are more silent.

    Another thing film makers did to show interaction with a computer is the constant usage of the keyboard. Every thing is done with the keyboard. Open a window: type 5 sceonds on the keyboard. Transferring a file onto a disk: type the whole bible on the keyboard. This was done because it would be pretty boring to show someone use the mouse or drag-and-drop files.

    It its somehow compareable to the movie trope of constantly reloading a gun. You can see this often in older movies: the protagonist is going inside a building and he is reloading his gun. Then he stops a the corner of a hallway and is reloading the gun again - despite no shot has been fired. This was also done to show the audience that a gun will be involved.






  • The car as a device to transport one from A to B has been developed to completion. Any car is capable of fulfilling that task. The next stange of developement is that the comfort features in cars are being replaced with a universal control unit: a touchscreen (-computer).

    All physical buttons (air condition, radio, etc.) are being phased out and are accessible over the central touchscreen, hidden in menus. This way it is easier to get customers into subscribed services (e.g. for the ability to lock your car remotely or to use the heated seat feature you have to subsribe to this particular service in order to use it).

    Also, when features are controlled over a software interface like those touchscreens instead of physical buttons, it it easier to give access to users - or restrict them from it:

    IIRC at the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Tesla remotely enabled their cars by allowing free supercharging as a helpful measure to help people to escape from Ukraine. Pretty nice of Tesla, isn’t it? Well yes, in this particular case, but this kind of remote software interference from the manufactor can also work in the other direction. They can easily restrict the functionality of your car. Functions your car still would have if they weren’t controlled remotely.

    Cars become a Software-As-A-Service product.

    Edit: spelling


  • That would be a reason to stop using anything made by HP. One should not encourage such business practice.

    A slightly off-topic anecdote: At work we use ZIP drives as our daily backup. Each day of the week has an own tape cartridge. These cartdriges were made by HP. After a while of usage we got a message that would warn of data loss, if the cardridge is not replaced by a brand new one within a certain timeframe (I think it was 30 days). So there was plenty of time to get new cartridges, right? Well, it turned out that as soon as the message popped up the cartridges were not been overwritten when we inserted the cartridge of the day. We found out two weeks later when we wanted to restore some files out of that backup. After that incident we switched the manufacturer of those tape cartridges and never hat any problems since.

    We then decided not to use any HP products anymore since. I wouldn’t even use a HP mouse out of principle! HP is scum.