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Search - "cds"
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"The difference between SSDs and HDDs is that HDDs store data on spinning CDs inside the drive"
-- a 3rd year CS student
Spinning CDs?? CDs?!?!?24 -
I’m kind of pissy, so let’s get into this.
My apologies though: it’s kind of scattered.
Family support?
For @Root? Fucking never.
Maybe if I wanted to be a business major my mother might have cared. Maybe the other one (whom I call Dick because fuck him, and because it’s accurate) would have cared if I suddenly wanted to become a mechanic. But in both cases, I really doubt it. I’d probably just have been berated for not being perfect, or better at their respective fields than they were at 3x my age.
Anyway.
Support being a dev?
Not even a little.
I had hand-me-down computers that were outmoded when they originally bought them: cutting-edge discount resale tech like Win95, 33/66mhz, 404mb hd. It wouldn’t even play an MP3 without stuttering.
(The only time I had a decent one is when I built one for myself while in high school. They couldn’t believe I spent so much money on what they saw as a silly toy.)
Using a computer for anything other than email or “real world” work was bad in their eyes. Whenever I was on the computer, they accused me of playing games, and constantly yelled at me for wasting my time, for rotting in my room, etc. We moved so often I never had any friends, and they were simply awful to be around, so what was my alternative? I also got into trouble for reading too much (seriously), and with computers I could at least make things.
If they got mad at me for any (real or imagined) reason (which happened almost every other day) they would steal my things, throw them out, or get mad and destroy them. Desk, books, decorations, posters, jewelry, perfume, containers, my chair, etc. Sometimes they would just steal my power cables or network cables. If they left the house, they would sometimes unplug the internet altogether, and claim they didn’t know why it was down. (Stealing/unplugging cables continued until I was 16.) If they found my game CDs, those would disappear, too. They would go through my room, my backpack and its notes/binders/folders/assignments, my closet, my drawers, my journals (of course my journals), and my computer, too. And if they found anything at all they didn’t like, they would confront me about it, and often would bring it up for months telling me how wrong/bad I was. Related: I got all A’s and a B one year in high school, and didn’t hear the end of it for the entire summer vacation.
It got to the point that I invented my own language with its own vocabulary, grammar, and alphabet just so I could have just a little bit of privacy. (I’m still fluent in it.) I would only store everything important from my computer on my only Zip disk so that I could take it to school with me every day and keep it out of their hands. I was terrified of losing all of my work, and carrying a Zip disk around in my backpack (with no backups) was safer than leaving it at home.
I continued to experiment and learn whatever I could about computers and programming, and also started taking CS classes when I reached high school. Amusingly, I didn’t even like computers despite all of this — they were simply an escape.
Around the same time (freshman in high school) I was a decent enough dev to actually write useful software, and made a little bit of money doing that. I also made some for my parents, both for personal use and for their businesses. They never trusted it, and continually trashtalked it. They would only begrudgingly use the business software because the alternatives were many thousands of dollars. And, despite never ever having a problem with any of it, they insisted I accompany them every time, and these were often at 3am. Instead of being thankful, they would be sarcastically amazed when nothing went wrong for the nth time. Two of the larger projects I made for them were: an inventory management system that interfaced with hand scanners (VB), and another inventory management system for government facility audits (Access). Several websites, too. I actually got paid for the Access application thanks to a contract!
To put this into perspective, I was selected to work on a government software project about a year later, while still in high school. That didn’t impress them, either.
They continued to see computers as a useless waste of time, and kept telling me that I would be unemployable, and end up alone.
When they learned I was dating someone long-distance, and that it was a she, they simply took my computer and didn’t let me use it again for six months. Really freaking hard to do senior projects without a computer. They begrudgingly allowed me to use theirs for schoolwork, but it had a fraction of the specs — and some projects required Flash, which the computer could barely run.
Between the constant insults, yelling, abuse (not mentioned here), total lack of privacy, and the theft, destruction, etc. I still managed to teach myself about computers and programming.
In short, I am a dev despite my parents’ best efforts to the contrary.30 -
Linux is great they said
Linux works well they said
Linux is totally awesome they said
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4 live cds
(Ubuntu, mint, Debian, Antergos)
3 wouldn’t boot beyond splash screens or even into setup.
no fucking keyboard
No fucking wifi
No fucking trackpad
Now I’m sitting here with Antergos, with a USB keyboard, USB mouse and an ethernet cable plugged into my laptop 🤷♂️
Good news... I think I might be getting through the hard parts26 -
The coolest project I've worked on was for a certain country's Navy. The project itself was cool and I'll talk about it below but first, even cooler than the project was the place were I worked on it.
I would go to this island off the coast where the navy had its armoury. Then to get into the armoury I'd go through this huge tunnel excavated in solid rock.
Finally, once inside I would have to go thru the thickest metal doors you've ever seen to get to crypto room, which was a tiny room with a bunch of really old men - cryptographers - scribbling math formulae all day long.
I can't give a lot of technical details on the project for security reasons but basically it was a bootable CD with a custom Linux distro on it. Upon booting up the system would connect to the Internet looking for other nodes (other systems booted with that CD). The systems would find each other and essentially create an ad-hoc "dark net".
The scenario was that some foreign force would have occupied the country and either destroyed or taken control of the Navy systems. In this case, some key people would boot these CDs in some PC somewhere not under foreign control (and off the navy grounds.) This would supposedly allow them to establish secure communications between surviving officers. There is a lot more to it but that's a good harmless outline.
As a bonus, I got to tour an active aircraft carrier :)8 -
When I was like 8 years old or so, I had Nero installed on my older sister’s PC. Nero is a software for burning CDs.
Nero had a button called “Create CD” and 8yo me thought “what if I create CDs and sell them” 😂 I thought a fucking disc will materialize inside the drive 😂 big brain time
Interestingly enough I’d already built one PC from scratch at that age, but optical drives that can write discs were so rare to me that I didn’t even understand them. And physics. And common sense.1 -
What a shame with asus. You open a new bought laptop and you see some bunch of CDs but your laptop doesn't have the CD reader. Priceless... :)3
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*Me trying to store a game in a CD ~15 years ago*
1. Burning desktop link of the game into it.
2. Burning the .exe file only ...
3. Moving whole game folder into a CD ...
4. Installing something called DirectX. I remember, it should be in one of my CDs.
5. Playing the game.3 -
Arch Rice Update
Distro: Arch Linux
WM: i3-gaps
Browser: qutebrowser with my GitHub open
Pomodoros: pomo
top: gotop
Vim: Open with Python code, taglist, powerline and gruvbox color scheme
Terminal: st, Luke Smith's build
Neomutt, configured by mutt-wizard
Vifm, with ripped CDs and projects open
Bar: bumblebee-status
Background: https://github.com/skuzzymiglet/...
Qutebrowser means I can finally abandon my mouse/trackpad (except for pesky video ediors and music notation software). Nice feeling not having to drag my fingers over a piece of metal. Try it out!
High-res:
https://ibb.co/mbL6yXb
Some dotfiles (not all): https://github.com/skuzzymiglet/...11 -
Cracking old recovery CDs for the 9x/2000/XP era shines some light into how companies operated and when concepts came to be in that time:
Packard Bell: An EXE checks that you're running on a Packard Bell machine and reboots if it's not. How do we bypass it? Easy: just fucking delete it. The files to reinstall Windows from scratch come from...
...
C:?
Yup. Turns out Packard Bell was doing the recovery partition thing all the way back to the 9x era, maybe even further. Files aren't even on the restore disc so if your partition table got fucked (pretty common because malware and disk corruption) you were totally fucked and needed to repurchase Windows. (My dad, at the time, only charged at-cost OEM prices for a replacement retail copy. He knew it was dumb so he never sold PB machines.)
Compaq:
Computer check? Nope, remove one line from a BATCH file and it's gone.
Six archives, named "WINA.ZIP" through "WINF.ZIP" (plus one or two extras for OEM software) hold Windows. Problematic? Well... only because they never put the password anywhere so the installer can't install them. (Some interesting on-disc technician-only utils, though!)
Dell:
If not a Dell machine, lock up. Cause? CONFIG.SYS driver masquerading as OAK (the common CD driver) doing the check, then chainloading the real OAK driver. Simple fix: replace the fake driver with the real one.
Issues?
Would I mention this one if there weren't?
Disc is mounted on N:. Subdirectories work, but doing anything in them (a DIR, trying to execute something, trying to view shit in EDIT.COM) kicked you back to the disc root.
Installer couldn't find machine manifest in the MAP folder (it wanted your PC's serial before it'd let you install, to make sure you have the correct recovery disc) so it asked for 12-digit alphanumeric serial. The defined serials in the manifest were something like "02884902-01" or similar (8-2, all numbers) and it couldn't read the file so it couldn't show the right format, nor check for the right type.
Bypassing that issue, trying to do the ACTUAL install process caused nothing to happen... as all BATCHes for install think the CD should be on X:.
Welp.
well that was fun. Now to test on-real-PC behavior, as VBOX and VMWare both don't like the special hardware shit it tries to use. (Why does a textmode GUI need GPU acceleration, COMPAQ?????)4 -
"Non-devs never call Steven Spielberg to have their TVs fixed."
But sure they MUST call a dev to update their Android, iPhone, Windows, installation of Anti-virus, data recovery, malware removal, to shortlist 20 laptops from market, ask for what printer to buy, why is there a weird animation in Android sometimes, come borrow my WiFi, have their phones and computers fixed, RIP old audio CDs (yes!), fix Bluray, fix anything electronic, repair their bike, teach them science, politics...
This While True loop never escape.1 -
!Dev / story
My phone starts dying gently but surely. Since last week I cannot use my jack input anymore, and thus can't listen to music in the car. I also compose music, and was eager to listen to my latest production (for reviewing purposes) in the car. In my frustrated search for a spare device with a jack, I found a pile of blank CDs instead. "Aw yiss, I can haz music in my car" I thought with a huge relieved grin.
I grabbed a CD, looked at my pc, and my grin faded instantly to an "oh" of disappointment: I deliberately did not install a CD drive in my computer.
Not losing hope, I grabbed my Mac and tried inserting my blank disk in the drive. "Clunk, clunk", the cd won't go in. "Ah silly me, I replaced that drive with a SSD". So I went looking for that spare cd drive.
After I found it, its SATA power interface was smaller than regular SATA devices, and any connectors I tried were too big. "Hmpf, ok, I'm desperate, let's remove that SSD in my Mac". So I went grabbing some screwdrivers, removed the cover lid underneath the computer, and removed two screws from the SSD casing, allowing me to lift the unit up, disconnect the cable, plug in the cd drive, flip the Mac carefully, turn it on... And burn my CDs, and finally I resetted everything back to normal, carefully removing the cd drive and closing the computer.
What one doesn't do in frustration...2 -
Hot Take:
Subscription based products are exactly why we don't see major break-throughs in software anymore.
*** I am warning you, don't mention AI in the comments, I am gonna fucking lose it. ***
Tell me one thing, If you spent thousands to create a product that you now have a good subscriber base on, why would you invest money into making another? Why wouldn't you just consider improving the product at hand and selling it to more people to create additional profit?
In the 90s we used to get any software on CDs/DVDs and you actually got to own it. Meaning that the company can only take money from you ONCE and never again (almost). This also meant that the companies knew that soon they'd have to come up with something else that will make them money, thus them creating new software every couple or so years, some even creating ground-breaking software.
But then, there is thing called MONOPOLY.
We will never get another music app than Spotify or Apple music, because they are just too far ahead. They're built on subscription model.
You can probably think of more examples of great companies building great products and moving them to subscription model and therefore never creating another software, because frankly, why take the risk to lose money when you can gain more money by improving the product at hand?
We will never get the same frequency of good games coming to market from established companies like RockStar. Why should they bothered to make GTA 6 when they can sell millions of worth of Shark Cards every month and rake in the profits?
Subscriptions have totally killed off software creativity and motivation for devs/companies to create great software.17 -
Just received a CD that contain < 5gb worth of stuff from my fileshare at my secondary school.
can't wait to find a computer that still has a cd drive so i can find out what coding wonders I have on here...1 -
First exposure...
When I was a kid, my parents would put on Tom & Jerry and other cartoons on an old family computer (you know - yellowed plastic, big, bulky tower, and an even bigger CRT monitor) for me to watch (Windows 95 didn't cut it, so they booted up Geexbox from CD)... Sometimes the playback would stop / the volume would be too quite - so I had to figure out how to control it by myself, without the help of my parents... Slowly, I was able to boot up Windows, and use my father's CD collection of All-In-One CDs (utilities and games). Later we were able to afford connecting to the internet through our phone landline - it was all downhill since then. Nowadays I'm helping my dad when it comes to computers (he's currently learning how to use Excel properly). :-)2 -
Are desktop PCs becoming a legacy, a history, just like floppy disks or CDs? Do you have one? Do you really need it?
I do have a decent tower pc in my balcony since last year. Haven't used it since early August and I honestly don't know what would I use it for once I bring it back in28 -
My older brother introduced me to linux and android custom roms when I was like 11. So I flashed my old sony Ericson phone with custom roms from xda and tried Ubuntu live CDs on my mother's old 40gb hdd laptop.
But my introduction to programming was when I saw some videos about the raspberry pi on YouTube.
I was like 14 and programmed basic scripts for my raspberry pi in nano over putty or notepad++.
At first I didn't even knew to intendent but in the process of my first project (Python sunrise alarm clock with tts) I learned many valuable things about Python and Linux/Debian.
The years after that I learned more with my now multiple RaspberryPIs, Arduinos and other hardware.
So in conclusion RaspberryPIs, the diy/open source community and especially my brother introduced me to programming.
I am now doing bigger projects with my brother and have (really basic) knowledge of java,Javascript,php,html,Arduino/C++ and Python. -
I think the linux live CDs with games on it, that my dad had compiled for me, were one of my first exposures to computers.
I remember how if you passed some specific argument, it would talk to you in a pretty sci-fi female voice too.2 -
MG...
Found out that I had apple music for free for months.
Now I only have until the end of the year to get alllll the CDs I ever wanted legally.
Already spend 5gb in two days... Let's see if it's really unlimited...
After the end of the year, unsubscrive. Worst experience after installing the app, Apple wants to know everything about me, shares my Playlist without asking... (just 10 minutes arround definitions, still abusive for a premium service).
Fuck Apple abusive policies, thank you for the opportunity to rape Apple without pay.
Space oddity by David Bowie, finding so many songs I forgot I love...2 -
Has to fix a bug in our old products web interface, how did I ever put up with it. In some places it has 7 nested iframes. It is also some of the worst code I have ever seen, no user input is sanitised plus there is no structure to the code, try looking for a CDs element without going into chrome dev tools is impossible as there are 52 separate CSS files1
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Hey guys
I'm trying to do something different from the usual and need your help.
I want to install linuxCNC in a pen drive (as in a live CD, but with the file system in the PEN which is usable)
I want to plug it into my mother's laptop, use it with my machines, then just unplug and it will run the native windows for my father.
How can I do this'?
I only find Live CDs, and I'm afraid of ruining my OS when If I try to install (afraid of installing on the SSD instead of the PEN).10 -
I had a relative that used to come to our house to study because her home was kinda far and also because we had a computer .
She was studying computer science at the time and I was only 13-14 years old. One day she came with 3 CDs of red hat. I asked her about it and she told me it's something like windows. My reaction was wow it must be something huge because I knew at the windows XP was only the size of one CD .
My relation with computers was only to play games and some music that's why I couldn't hold myself not to install it. I fucked my computer endless times, It was like playing puzzles let's try this option and then switch to another... It took me like 4 days to install and I was really impressed with it you know seeing the terminal and stuff. Weeks later I switched back to Windows because I couldn't install my games and play mp3 files (require to install some libraries and I had no internet).
Fast forward 8 years later and I was studying linux system for CS degree and guess what? I was the major in class because I knew about many stuff like partition systems (ext2, swap..) and how to install linux on a computer...
This was my feeling 😎 at class. -
I remember that when I was about 8 years old, my dad brought a desktop computer home one day.
I don’t remember any specs, but it had a huge ass CRT monitor, a very loud clicky keyboard, a mouse with a real ball inside, and a CPU that uses floppy discs and CDs. Nope, CDs, not DVDs. And on that computer, it ran Windows 95. There’s was no internet most of the time (it was still quite expensive and unnecessary and dial up was troublesome to set up back then).
I remembered playing bootlegged games sold in CDs that my dad bought during his trips to China back then. Duke nukem, Command and Conquer Red Alert 2, Microsoft solitaire and GTA 3. Those were the games I played.
As a kid, it was glorious, looking through a box on a table, seeing and interacting with so many different worlds, stories, characters and games. I really miss those simpler times.
These days, every time I open my laptop, and I see that new mail that need to be dealt with, that homework that’s about to be due and a reminder of my next class in 15 min. Well shit.1 -
Back in 2004-2005 when I was 2-3 years old, (I guess that, from this statement, the fact that I'm 15 rn can be inferred), I would sit on my dad's dinosaur computer. I don't remember brands and stuff, just Windows XP, Dial-up internet and the heap of CD-ROMs I had my parents buy me. They had all kinds of games, software, etc. It was a time when sharing that kind of stuff over the internet was, to say the least, impractical. It kind of makes me feel older than I am, looking at the cases full of those CDs, remnants of a past era. But what I consider my first actual exposure was in 2007, when I got my first laptop (netbook) and started diving in, exploring. It was the computer through which I learnt programming (My first lang was cpp), and the one that got me interested to dive deeper into the matter.
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My very first computer had a bunch of CDs with tons of random freeware, shareware and demos. One of these happened to be an awesome graphics demo called Second Reality from Future Crew ( https://youtu.be/rFv7mHTf0nA check it out! ).
This demo was the reason I became addicted to programming back in the days and I started with QBasic, Power Basic, Pascal, assembler using MSDOS "debug" command (worst assembler out there!), and several strange C dialects like C-- (I found it hard to get hands on affordable compilers and totally missed Linux until several years later).
Delphi and Visual Basic accompanied me quite some time until I finally found the language which perfectly met my needs until today : C++
This was all way before I started to study ☺️1 -
Fuck these braindead people who don't include OOB remote installation option or at least a virtual keyboard into installation CDs. What if I don't have one/the one I have is broken? (and no, I can't just go out and buy a new one, okay?)10
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So today my teacher told me to do that project for some competition or something(frankly, I don't remember clearly what this is for). He gave us the machines we need, the CDs with the systems we have to work with. We are supposed to make a properly working Beowulf cluster from the things I've been given.
Well, no.
Fucking no.
I am really okay with making this the way my teacher wants us to do. I am okay with installing an ubuntu 16.04 server that is completly irrevelant to the project, because it's not part of the cluster. I am really okay with using some weird linux distribution on the master nobody has ever heard of. But I'm not okay when the software we've been given(including operating system) has seven pages of documentation, escpecially when fucking screenshoots of how PXE booting should look like are roughly 70% of it. No, I couldn't find a thing on the internet about it. I couldn't read the fucking manual. There was no fucking manual. There was no fucking --help. There was no motherfucking english language. Everything was motherfucking spanish, including that 7 pages long document that was supposed to guide us through our work. It was planned to be done until march. The only reason I can think of about why doing the stuff the document tells us to do would take four motherfucking months is that we'd have to learn spanish to do this. And I'm not going to do that. Not because I don't like spanish or learning. Simply because I didn't sign up for this to learn languages.
And no. I can't switch to other, human purposed software. I am only allowed to use the things the teacher has given us. Because somebody has worked on it already couple of years ago and they had left a pdf file about how to install that ubuntu server I've been writing about a while ago. Which, by the way, was the "installation guide for animals". Showing how to install a system, screenshoot after screenshot.
It took about an hour to figure out the thing supposed to handle pxe booting computers all the time was telling us that it can't work because we had to configure ethernet interface manually. Because why the fuck not. -
"X is dead! My project has just gone up in smoke, because docs/programs have been permanently lost."
This time, it's Sun. No one's dumped their compiler package CDs for Solaris, and now you can't order them. Whoops! There's like 5 versions of Solaris that have SDKs and docs that are just gone.
Dump your CDs, you stingy motherfuckers. "oh they're stamped, they have my name in them, i paid $600 for the license" do it anyway, because time is unrelenting and the rot claims us all. we must run faster than it does, and you're just standing still.7 -
Question for audiophiles: I have a bunch of music on old original media (CDs, cassettes, and vinyl). It’s getting increasingly hard and inconvenient to listen to these whenever and wherever I am like I can do with Spotify. Tape players are disappearing along with CD players and turntables. And it’s just not as available everywhere like streaming services.
While I’m in the process of making playlists in Spotify to represent each CD, cassette, and record, I’m finding lots of tracks and even whole albums and artists are not found.
So now I’m trying to figure out how I’m gonna be able to listen to them once I individually digitize each missing track/album. I want to stream rather than download files to individual devices. Ideally I’d have a media server in my house with a gateway to the public Internet and an app on my phone to tap into it.
Is there (still) something like this out there? Some kind of open source streaming solution? What do you do/recommend?12