A whole bunch of the in game characters would say funny things if you clicked them enough, even the random critters that raomed the map.

I also remember finding the secret music track when putting the game disk into a CD Player. Great stuff.

Off topic, but speak of the devil and he shall appear.
Apparently a trove of 200 floppy disks owned my Gene Roddenberry have turned up, and been deciphered (they were made on a proprietary OS made just for Gene, apparently) and 'there may be surprises in store on this, the 50'th anniversary of the original Star Trek' is all that's been said about it so far....
http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/04/200-floppy-disks-belonging-to-star-treks-creator-have-been-recovered-and-could-offer-some-surprises/

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Really great. Weird to think that something this high tech may be on the verge of being replaced by solid state storage. I know that spinning disks will still have a place in bulk storage for quite a while but terabyte SSDs are getting cheap!

Ridiculous disk golf skills. *promote

It was about 15 years ago. I threw mostly Innova disks. Haven't played in 8ish years but still have 40 or 50 disks sitting in a bag somewhere. Maybe one day ill pick it up again.

My understanding is in California your car can be towed and impounded by an officer if your vehicle is six months out of registration.

Ive been pulled over with expired tags multiple times. They have used it as an excuse to check me out. I've been let go the couple times its happened to me. One time just had a good conversation about disk golf after he saw my disks in the car. Another time he wanted to search my car, which i refused. Then i was given a drunk test and grilled about why he couldn't search my car. He ended up just letting me go.

Bah-VHS...Betamax.
I want it on full size laser disk!

What Is Love - Floppy Disk Version has been added as a related post - related requested by Zawash on that post.

The only thing I would add is that the inverse gamma encoding has more to do with band width than disk space. It's about how many gray levels you can send to the monitor per draw frame.

He pulled up on the brake pedal, if it was warped disks he'd have to push down on it to get that effect.

Mm, extremely warped disks?

This video lacks a lot of salient details.

Yes, the F35 is aiming at the A10 because contractors want jobs (something to do).

However, the strength of the A10 is also its weakness. Low and slow also means that it takes you a long time to get to your troops. Fast jets arrive much sooner (significantly so). A combination of both would be ideal. F35 to get there ASAP, and A10 arriving later to take over.

It's not really worth debating the merit of new fighters. You don't wait for a war to start developing weapons.

Yes, our recent enemies are durkas with small arms, and you don't need an F35 to fight them - but you also don't even need to fight them to begin with - they aren't an existential threat. Terrorist attacks are emotionally charged (well, until they happen so often that you get used to hearing about them, and they stop affecting people), but they are nothing compared to say, a carpet bombing campaign.

The relevance of things like the F35 is to have weapons ready and able to face a large national power, should a nation v nation conflict arise with a significant other nation. In the event that such a conflict ever does, you don't want to be caught with your pants down.

Defense spending costs scale with oversight requirements.

Keep in mind that money pays people. Even materials are simply salaries of the material suppliers. The more people you put on a program, the more that program will cost.

Yes, big contractors make big profits - but the major chunk of their charges is still salaries.

Let me explain what is going on.

Remember the $100 hammers?
In fact, the hammer still cost a few bucks. What cost 100+ bucks was the total charges associated with acquiring a hammer.
Everything someone does in association with acquiring the hammer, gets charged to a charge code that's specific for that task.

Someone has to create a material request - $time.
Someone has to check contracts for whether or not it will be covered - $time.
Someone has to place the order - $time.
Someone has to receiver the package, inspect it, and put it into a received bin - $time.
Someone has to go through the received items and assign them property tags - $time.
Someone has to take the item to the department that needed it, and get someone to sign for it - $time.
Someone has to update the monthly contract report - $time.
Someone has to generate an entry in the process artifacts report, detailing the actions taken in order to acquire the hammer - $time.
Someone on the government side has to review the process artifacts report, and validate that proper process was followed (and if not, punish the company for skipping steps) - $time.

Add up all the minutes here and there that each person charged in association with getting a hammer, and it's $95 on top of a $5 hammer. Which is why little things cost so much.

You could say "Hey, why do all that? Just buy the hammer".
Well, if a company did that, it would be in trouble with govt. oversight folks because they violated the process.
If an employee bought a hammer of his own volition, he would be in trouble with his company for violating the process.
The steps are required, and if you don't follow them, and there is ever any problem/issue, your lack of process will be discovered on investigation, and you could face massive liability - even if it's not even relevant - because it points to careless company culture.

Complex systems like jet fighters necessarily have bugs to work out. When you start using the system, that's when you discover all the bits and pieces that nobody anticipated - and you fix them. That's fine. That's always been the case.



As an airplane example, imagine if there's an issue with a regulator that ultimately causes a system failure - but that issue is just some constant value in a piece of software that determines a duty cycle.

Say for example, that all it takes is changing 1 digit, and recompiling. Ez, right? NOPE!

An engineer can't simply provide a fix.

If something went wrong, even unrelated, but simply in the same general system, he could be personally liable for anything that happens.

On top of that, if there is no contract for work on that system, then an engineer providing a free fix is robbing the company of work, and he could get fired.

A company can't instruct an engineer to provide a fix for the same reasons that the engineer himself can't just do it.

So, the process kicks in.

Someone has to generate a trouble report - $time.
Someone has to identify a possible solution - $time.
Someone has to check contracts to see if work on that fix would be covered under current tasking - $time.
Say it's not covered (it's a previously closed [i.e. delivered] item), so you need a new charge code.
Someone has to write a proposal to fix the defect - $time.
Someone has to go deal with the government to get them to accept the proposal - $time.
(say it's accepted)
Someone has to write new contracts with the government for the new work - $time.
To know what to put into the contract, "requrements engineers" have to talk with the "software engineers" to get a list of action items, and incorporate them into the contract - $time.
(say the contract is accepted)
Finance in conjuration with Requirements engineers has to generate a list of charge codes for each action item - $time.
CM engineers have to update the CM system - $time.
Some manager has to coordinate this mess, and let folks know when to do what - $time.
Software engineer goes to work, changes 1 number, recompiles - $time.
Software engineer checks in new load into CM - $time.
CM engineer updates CM history report - $time.
Software engineer delivers new load to testing manger - $time.
Test manager gets crew of 30 test engineers to run the new load through testing in a SIL (systems integration lab) - $time.
Test engineers write report on results - $time.
If results are fine, Test manager has 30 test engineers run a test on real hardware - $time.
Test engineers write new report - $time.
(assuming all went well)
CM engineer gets resting results and pushes the task to deliverable - $time.
Management has a report written up to hand to the governemnt, covering all work done, and each action taken - documenting that proper process was followed - $time.
Folks writing document know nothing technical, so they get engineers to write sections covering actual work done, and mostly collate what other people send to them - $time.
Engineers write most the report - $time.
Company has new load delivered to government (sending a disk), along with the report/papers/documentation - $time.
Government reviews the report, but because the govt. employees are not technical and don't understand any of the technical data, they simply take the company's word for the results, and simply grade the company on how closely they followed process (the only thing they do understand) - $time.
Company sends engineer to government location to load the new software and help government side testing - $time.
Government runs independent acceptance tests on delivered load - $time.
(Say all goes well)
Government talks with company contracts people, and contract is brought to a close - $time.
CM / Requirements engineers close out the action item - $time.

And this is how a 1 line code change takes 6 months and 5 million dollars.

And this gets repeated for _everything_.

Then imagine if it is a hardware issue, and the only real fix is a change of hardware. For an airplane, just getting permission to plug anything that needs electricity into the airplanes power supply takes months of paper work and lab testing artifacts for approval. Try getting your testing done in that kind of environment.



Basically, the F35 could actually be fixed quickly and cheaply - but the system that is in place right now does not allow for it. And if you tried to circumvent that system, you would be in trouble. The system is required. It's how oversight works - to make sure everything is by the book, documented, reviewed, and approved - so no money gets wasted on any funny business.

Best part, if the government thinks that the program is costing too much, they put more oversight on it to watch for more waste.
Because apparently, when you pay more people to stare at something, the waste just runs away in fear.
Someone at the contractors has to write the reports that these oversight people are supposed to be reviewing - so when you go to a contractor and see a cube farm with 90 paper pushers and 10 'actual' engineers (not a joke), you start to wonder how anything gets done.

Once upon a time, during the cold war, we had an existential threat.
People took things seriously. There was no F'ing around with paperwork - people had to deliver hardware. The typical time elapsed from "idea" to "aircraft first flight" used to be 2 years. USSR went away, cold war ended, new hardware deliveries fell to a trickle - but the spending remained, and the money billed to an inflated process.

-scheherazade

I think the worst that probably happened to the computer was a) disk erasure, and looking at the boot error 2) the cmos battery was sucked out of its socket.

Excellent Dag. Love me some good old noisy floppy disk noises!
I had a 128 mac my parents bought me for Xmas in 84. I ended up trading it to my brother for his Apple 2 (bought for him when it first came out in the 70's) because he had tons of games for it, and I had little on the mac.
I also learned programming on Apple 2's in 7th grade...an elective summer school class. Does that earn me double nerd points?

I did tape scratching in the 90s a lot, with modified reel to reel machine. The technique i used is harder, doesn't differ from vinyl scratching a lot (except in mine, i didn't cut the audio with fader but lifting the tape head from tape. THe end result surprised me, didn't expect it to work as at that point, had no knowledge of anyone ever using that (now i of course know that i was actually late..) It is a lot like vinyl, you still need to keep manually rotating the reels, working with the tape motor, needing to hit hits precisely without actually seeing where they are (easier with reel but there's a lot of tape in that reel and manually rotating against the motor and motion, makes the tape tighten so you can't use marks on the reels either...) Plus few handy effect like taking both reels and just turning them opposite directions, making the tape sits still but stretching, making all kinds of nice screeching sounds as the vibrations from the reel and the tape are heard, not the audio material on tape...)

Next i'm thinking of refitting old 5,4" floppy disk with analog tape head and maybe drawing the recordings on to to it, attaching the tape head to the end of my index finger.. Then i could get even closer to vinyl as there is something interesting on rotating sound sources.. Mainly it is the recording part that makes tape scratching interesting, taking a scratch sample, scratching it, resampling it again, using signal generators, designing harmonics etc.. Maybe that's next for me, using one hand to record and the other to play back.