This goes to show you theres always someone out there thats baked even more then you are....

http://unix.rulez.org/~calver/pictures/ ... index.html

That deltree /y c:\*.* is an old trick 'hackers' have used to week out the realy stupid idiot's on usenet.
I've seen this happen a few years ago, a guy went in posting "how do I hack?" and this was the response. I love it when stuff like that happens.

That modem connector being yanked out is just freaky, I find it really scary that someone can put a CD in the wrong place too! Whever had all those errors was PWND!1
Hahahaha.... "space left on the screen"
I don't see why the laptop warrenty wasn't upheld - a simple "I dropped it" should have covered it... Or am I thinking of insurance here?
Haha, gnome crept in - then exploded... I think it was drink spilt or something.
I love those hard-drive mountings... I have something similar. All my drives have odd screws.
AOL-ers... *sigh*. People I know online have alot more shortcuts than that on the taskbar.
That duct-tape one is totally brillient.... Just amazing!

I'm guilty of the screw thing as well. Pushing the tray open button on my DVD RW will sometimes cause my IDE cable or power cable to jiggle loose because of the bad mounting.

Of course I've found the screws now, but my case is open, so I've gotten into the "genius" practice of just reaching in, grounding myself and reconnecting.

Also, the motherboard in the plastic bag was great. Although I've stuck NICs, Sound cards, Video cards and even RAM, haphazardly in a ziplock bag with a dryer sheet. Of course they were components I didn't care about anymore and was quickly shoving into someone elses PC so any defects were instantly inherited by someone else.

P.S. That mini-CD through me off, I actually thought somebody was trying to jam a cd in a an old school "floppy" drive, ahh, back when they were actually floppy and disks not diskettes.

Yes - I've used a PC that had a 5" floppy drive, at school. I've heard tales from my father about people folding the floppy's up and then wondering why they didn't work .

I don't know how your IDE or power cable can wiggle loose - power cables always need pliers for me, and IDE's are just a little bit easier.

I have a few anti-static bags in a drawer, and if I get new components, I just use them/store them.

Lol!! i used to get as many error dialog boxes as that back in good old windows 98.

I never flood my desktop with icons, i increase the height of my taskbar and put them there instead.

LMAO! the hard drive mounting one. I used to do that before i got my silent case, since the screws would never tighten, haha!

Shortcuts = bad

AOL = bad

Lol, good job with the PCI slot, can't say i've ever done that, but i HAVE put a memory card in the wrong way round a couple of times (dont ask how).

Floppies are ancient, haven't used them in a few years now.

the duct tape one is good, very good...

"hmmm, my Visa didn't work the first time, maybe i'll try another one" rofl... very gooooodd

oh and... "I have windows running from my CD!", that would have been a better quote for the lack of IDE cables in the MB

lol, SCT rules, nice one ac

I used a floppy last year sometime... Can't exactly remember...
I also used one a couple of months ago for a boot floppy.

And you think duct tape is bad? Try blue-tacking a hard drive ontop of a multimedia (caase on it's side - not the tower type) power supply!... OH YES! ROXOR=ME!1

On the subject of dumb practices:-

I've had someone send me a 5.25 floppy disk with a piece of paper sayin 'year end final accounts backup' stapled to it - yep, dirty great staple right though the media...

I once made the mistake of saying 'send me a copy of the diskette' - I got a beautiful photo-copy of a diskette in the very next post...

Phone call from panic-stricken accountant "I can't connect to the Network"

10 minutes later we are down to checking the idiot stuff...

"Is the network connection cable (the blue one) firmly in the socket at the back of the PC"

"Yes"

"Is it loose at the other end, where it plugs into the wall socket"

"It doesn't go into the wall socket"

"Where does the other end go then?"

"I dunno - It's in my hand"



My favourite is STILL the senior accountant who complained that his new PC was faulty because it kept closing the 'cup holder' (CD-ROM drive tray) and spilling his coffee everywhere...

Al (MaDbRiT)

LMAO! You guys are funny! You would all hate my desktop whenyou go to use my computer I dont clean anything i just pop it all in a folder named desktop to get to my year old info i have to open desktop/desktop/desktop/desktop/desktop/desktop/desktop/desktop/desktop/desktop/desktop/desktop/desktop/ and it in that tree haha but it goes far far back that kinda happens after you fill two 200gig hard drives

talk to me about it. I filled two 2 GB disks, and it was hell. can't load a single thing on there, and it's slow as a snail.

Lol well i have two 200 gig hard drives in the computer then
i have like 2 plug and play ones im this close to just saving up for this one
http://www.alienware.com/GearShop_Pages ... emId=12948
that be fun to fill it would only take what 19 life times to fill?

An think about one thing as you click the buy button
YOUR SAVING 10 BUCKS!

I've always found it hard to fill up a hard drive.
My Atari's 512 Mb (It may have been less IIRC) hard-drive was never full. Then my old Pentium-120's hard drive has 2 gig's I think... That took a few months to fill (remember, win98 takes up ~ 800Meg). Then the additional 500 meg drive (which was on the power supply) never got filled.
Then I've always had room since.

I do occasionally fill up a 6 or 8 gig drive, but once the stuff's burnt off onto CD/DVD, it's about 80+% free.

Anyway, I've used all sorts of things to get my PC working. I've had to sand away at a part of the CD plug to get it onto the motherboard, I've squashed a transister a little when putting in my graphics card before... Let's see, screwed the motherboard straight onto the backplate - no spacers (twice... And people complain about shorting their boards out and such... pffftttt).
I never wear gloves/ground myself when I reach into the PC (I usually touch the case though - although I think it needs to be at least plugged in to ground).
I've spilt coke over my keyboard, and onto a part of my laptop (that got me scared). I've bent up a pin in the monitor plug o that I had to tweak it back with a pair of electric tweasers... I've actually had a hard drive just dangling there near the bottom of the case (sure - it was just to quick-copy some data across... but still).
I've bent up some hard-drive IDE-pins before... trying to think... I'm sure there are others - but I can't remember them. All very sensible at the time though.

I like the "I don't know - it's still in my hand" excuse Al ... Very funny.

it sure helps when the computer with the small hard disk has a burner. I didn't realise that WIn 98 took up so much space. XP takes up 1.5 GB though.

I could easily go through that 1.6 TB in less than a month. Not even a challenge. A home cable connection and Newsgroups? That wouldn't be near enough space for me. I almost wish I had gone to college for the sake of a big fat pipe and paying 30 bucks for unlimited newsgroup access. "20 TB a month is too much you say? Well, I payed my 30 bucks, deal with it."

I believe you can get win98 down to 200mb with a custom install. I remember the days of my .97gig Western Digital Quantum Fireball. Even better were the days when you would put down 200 bucks for your whopping 80mb HD.

I too forgot to bother with spacers the first time I transferred my p133 to a different case. The worst was my last PC though, which was bought barebones (and I later found out, had a faulty PSU). I never bothered to notice that the PSU fan wasn't turning, but did notice it was incredibly hot on the top rear end(like burn your hand hot). So I added all kinds of case fans to keep that sweet 1ghz Duron running cool, never bothering to check out the PSU fan because how often do people get faulty PSU's? One day the PC powered itself down, didn't want to turn back on for more than a few seconds, so I let it cool down for a few minutes, power it on and everythings working fine. GRRRRRIIINNNNDDDD!!!! Then the bastard starting shooting sparks out the back of the case for a good 10 seconds untill I powered down and sizzled for a good 2 or 3 minutes.

Never did understand newsgroups want to explane it to me cuz anything that would use that much room i want to know about

Most newsgroup software is kind of like a big Outlook Express interface. People post messages, some have attachments of files(like email basically). You subscribe to groups(like a server or IRC channel in a sense) and check for new headers in those groups(like new mails in an outlook express inbox) and you generally grab the newest 1000-3000 headers per group. From the titles of the headers you determine what type of content is in the body of the message, you get the body of the messages, you find out how many if any files are hosted on the server or that you have locally. Then you download any attachments you want.

The benefit of newsgroups, besides that most everything we are talking about downloading(pirated crap) gets posted to newsgroups before it trickles down through IRC, BT, DC++, KaZaA, etc..., is that you are downloading the file from the source(in a sense) and the source is a massive server on a massive pipe. So basically you can top out your internet connection with whatever you are downloading.

It's not that newsgroups will necessarily take up tons of hard drive space, most newsreaders automatically delete your cache when it reaches a specified size, but that if you have unlimited newsgroup access you have virtually no wait so it's easy to blow through 10 gigs in a half hour and be like "oh shit, i'm low on space."

As an example, Comcast my ISP, provides free newsgroup access with 1gig of transfer per month, up or down, which is measily. With only fetching 3000 headers from a handful of subscribed groups, and downloading only one movie (700mb Director's Cut of Maniac, a great horror/gore flick), I completely used up my 1gig of transfer in about 30 seconds of downloading. So doing the math, you can see that if you are constantly scouring hundreds of newsgroups for new headers, bodies, etc, it's easy to eat up a lot of space.

if u want to check out newsgroups, google has every single one on it's site. Just click on Groups, and you'll be taken to a search page allowing you to search through every single forum on the net.

*correction*search google for "newsgroup reader" or something.
I use outlook express myself - reads stuff just fine.

... After ITID reminding me about all the software there I may have to look into it...

lol ewww pirated stuff thats not good for the people that work hard to make it.... yes i know not all newsgroups have pirated stuff just some SHUT THEM ALL DOWN 8)

I just think of it as a test drive.

Think about it, if I go and warez MS Visual Studio.Net 2099 or whatever, and then with it write some application that becomes like the next great P2P program or the greatest new game ever, I can't release it and charge money for it untill I've purchased a valid license for the software used to make it.

Otherwise I'm sure down the road somewhere, someone would think to look up wether or not I've ever registered a legal copy of MS Visual Studio.Net, and IF I hadn't then I'd probably end up getting sued. Well atleast in the US it goes like that.

I'm not trying to justify something, but I mean, in a sense it is just using the trial programs most companies offer, just in an uninhibited manner.

If I went and somehow made a game on the Quest engine, that miraculously turned out to be so playable and amazingly well done that it was being hyped as the greatest game of all time, and I know everyone is going to buy and play it. I'm still going to HAVE to buy Quest Pro from Alex AND probably one of the custom builds AND probably arrange some kind of completely custom license for the situation as I don't know particularly how Alex has written the docs on selling ASL made games.

So in the end, if anything ever comes of someones warezing, thing company gets paid, if not, then it's just some schlep who wasn't going to pay for it anyways.


I will say that "JFK Reloaded" demo that is out, is really making me want to spend ten dollars on it. Ten dollars to shoot a former president, that's incentive to buy software-- OH GOD THE GOVERNMENT IS RAIDING MY HOUSE!

Yes - exactly my point ITID... The demo's shouldn't really be limited - they should give a user almost 100% of the features available in the full release (except maybe some minor tags and some other features available for top-quality, experts that need those features...

If you use something alot, and are going to produce something spectacuar with it - you want to buy that product to get support from the team, upgrades, additional features, etc... The most important being the ability to make something great with that product and then sell it on or release it to the crowd.

Personally I download a few movies, but I have bought about 4 of them on dvd purely because the dvd quality is great, and the price is low now. Same with CD's and MP3's.

The reason I download music is because I don't exactly like the one artist. I like certain tracks. For example, Robbie William's track A Man For All Seasons. I like that paticular one, but not any other of his tracks. In my collection, an artist is lucky to have two tracks under his or her name.

007bond wrote:The reason I download music is because I don't exactly like the one artist. I like certain tracks. For example, Robbie William's track A Man For All Seasons. I like that paticular one, but not any other of his tracks. In my collection, an artist is lucky to have two tracks under his or her name.

Well from what I have been reading there are some places where you login to a database and pick what you want to burn to a cd and it cost you like 20 bucks a cd and you can put what ever songs on there you want until its full so cant say you just download it because of the one song really

$20? That's cheap-ish... Although I bet that's limited to America. I haven't heard of much like it apart from buying mp3's online (which is pretty crap IMO).
I want CD-quality so I can rip it myself to my own quality thanks!

... Now where were we?

Nope, downloading it suits me fine, especially since i'm not paying for the internet, my dad is.

Yup online in America so far...
It all started because of napster if I remember right.

Its pretty cheap all I do is find one of the 30 or 40 dollar cd and buy it burned like that and I save like 10 to 20 bucks so thats a good thing.

I dont want to sit there and pay for there image.

yeah, well when ur only 13, downloading music without paying for it suits me. But yes, you probably are right when you say that Napster started the craze. By the looks of it, major record companies are going to be the ones who end it.

007bond wrote:yeah, well when ur only 13, downloading music without paying for it suits me. But yes, you probably are right when you say that Napster started the craze. By the looks of it, major record companies are going to be the ones who end it.

13?!? Wow, when I was 13, There were rumors of a Super Nintendo coming out soon! Come to think of it, that's when I played King's Quest V for the first time too. Dang, that game (and I) is old. I'm just past twice your age.

Wow, when I was 13, There were rumors of a Super Nintendo coming out soon! Come to think of it, that's when I played King's Quest V for the first time too.

Just goes to show you how much gaming consoles have progressed in the past 13 years.

Lmao
I remember when Nintendo was just a rumor...
I remember the day they said it was real and I also remember they day it came out to stores 100 bucks my ass lol...

I also remember banding on the dumb Nintendo about 90 percent of the time to play for the 10 percent of the time....

The one question i have is the duck hunt game how in the world does it know where the gun fired on the screen if the tv wasnt ever made to tell it where...

HAHAHA I remember when mario was like the best game out there that dam flag GRR now im humming the turn of the game.

I was never into gaming systems when I was young... The only systems I used to play was master system (the mega drive and snes were out at that time) and the old Acorn BBS (a cassette system) and the sinclair ZX spectrum.... There was also the SinclairQL and Atari 520STe (kinda like te old acorn archemedies in UK schools until 96-ish).

I was an "old-school"-er, who grew up on the basics... Then got to the newer stuff. I know amazing things that most guy's my age don't, and don't care about... Like old valves, and the way people used to try and get colour from black and white TV's by sticking plastic onto it with green, pink and brown "strips"... The old build it yourself kits, to make a PC... I know more but I don't want to bore anyone and I don't really think of it as "amazing" so I can't pick anything out of my brain.

Yeah well I remember hearing about electricity and just goin', "Yup", coz I was so badass that I knew what was up even back then.

ac19189 wrote:Lmao
I remember when Nintendo was just a rumor...
I remember the day they said it was real and I also remember they day it came out to stores 100 bucks my ass lol...

I was just saying that "when I was 13"...

I remember when Nintendo first came out too but I was younger, of course. And that was when Atari was the coolest thing around.

...and I must say, it's SUPER Mario Bros. that had flags and catchy tunes. Mario Bros. was a semi-monotonous jumping around game on one screen where you challenge Luigi who, at the time, was your look-alike except for the green suspenders.

All Hail Video Games

ac19189 wrote:The one question i have is the duck hunt game how in the world does it know where the gun fired on the screen if the tv wasnt ever made to tell it where...

Hell, you've done it now.... i'm screwed

Lmao....

Anyone have a clue how in the world duck hunt works?
I must know!

I think it has something to do with the refresh rate of the TV... The gun see's what place on the TV it hits, it then gets the electron timing, and by some clever maths you can calculate where on the TV you are shooting.... Or something along those lines.

Well see thats the thing you can hook the game up to the oldest tv you can find and it still works....

If the tv wasnt made for the game how can it work...

http://stuffo.howstuffworks.com/question273.htm

Lots of home video games and arcade games use some sort of gun as an input device. You point the gun at the screen and pull the trigger, and if you hit the target on the screen, the target explodes.

To create this effect, the gun contains a photodiode (or a phototransistor) in the barrel. The photodiode is able to sense light coming from the screen. The gun also contains a trigger switch. The output of the photodiode and the switch are fed to the computer controlling the game.

At the same time, the computer is getting signals from the screen driver electronics. If you have read How Television Works, you know about the horizontal retrace and vertical retrace signals used to align the picture on the screen. The screen driver electronics send pulses to the computer at the start of the horizontal and vertical retrace signals, so the computer knows where on the screen the electron beam is located during each frame.

The computer normally uses one of two different techniques to figure out whether or not the gun is pointed at the target when the user pulls the trigger:

* The computer blanks the screen and then paints just the target object white. If the photodiode senses darkness after one vertical retrace signal and then light after the next, the computer assumes that the gun is pointed at the target and scores a hit.

* The computer blanks the screen and then paints the entire screen white. It takes time for the electron beam to trace the entire screen while painting it white. By comparing the signal coming from the photodiode with the horizontal and vertical retrace signals, the computer can detect where the electron beam is on the screen when the photodiode first senses its light. The computer counts the number of microseconds that pass between the time the horizontal and vertical retrace signals start and the time the photodiode first senses light. The number of microseconds tells the computer exactly where on the screen the gun is pointing. If the calculated position and the position of the target match, the computer scores a hit.

Well, the second way is something that I was trying to get across... The timing of the electron-beam doing one "frame".... Good going there ITID.

This may have already been answered (can't be bothered to read lots of long posts), but the way I was told that a light gun works is that it takes a very very small picture, and if that picture matches something that is shootable, then it's killed.

8) Hmm... Sad thing is I understand that. I Know for a fact that duck hunt wont work on my tv. Two of the tubs are burnt out so it looks like I have a plasma tv but not as long.