Author Topic: Guardian article - Are the 2012 Olympics part of a plot to take over the world?  (Read 35781 times)

Offline theteacher

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To be honest, I don't get it.

Kids these days  ::)

The 3.5 inch high-density "floppy" drive (they were usually in a hard plastic case, and not very floppy) had a storage capacity of 1.44 Mb.
The drive itself inside the case is indeed very floppy though - as floppy as the drive in the 5 1/4 inch floppy case!  :)
Oops - I meant "disk", not "drive".  The drive wasn't floppy at all, assuming it was working correctly :)
Allow me to correct my bad English: "The disk itself inside the case is indeed very floppy though - as floppy as the disk in the 5 1/4 inch floppy case!" - which was what I was trying to say.

Offline Not Myself

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Allow me to correct my bad English: "The disk itself inside the case is indeed very floppy though - as floppy as the disk in the 5 1/4 inch floppy case!" - which was what I was trying to say.

I was not attempting to criticise your English, but rather my own, as you merely copied my error  :-[
The internet - where bigfoot is real and the moon landings aren't.

Offline theteacher

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Allow me to correct my bad English: "The disk itself inside the case is indeed very floppy though - as floppy as the disk in the 5 1/4 inch floppy case!" - which was what I was trying to say.

I was not attempting to criticise your English, but rather my own, as you merely copied my error  :-[
I know  :)

Offline ka9q

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Wasn't sorry to see them go - notoriously unreliable.  I had a brief ceremony when moving house, where I took a big pile of them, pressed a magnet against them, then tossed them into the rubbish.
They were certainly unreliable, but the magnetic material was amazingly hard. I once tried to erase one with a bulk demagnetizer (remember them? An AC-powered electromagnet designed to erase an entire reel or cassette in a few seconds). I did a pretty thorough job, but to my amazement some of the data was still readable.  The oxide used on floppies had a very high coercivity, meaning it took a very strong magnetic field to "flip" the domains and change their magnetism.

Offline ka9q

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If you had a lot of critical files that were 1.45Mb, you'd remember the capacity!
Hard to believe we ever used something that small, huh? Now we carry around USB flash drives that are several thousand times as big.

Of course, in my day, we used the original IBM-designed 8" floppies: single-sided and only about 243kB. I managed a PDP-11/40 minicomputer in my undergrad days, and at my suggestion we got a pair of RX01 floppy drives. They required the users to buy and manage their own media instead of filling up my RK05 (5 MB?) hard drives with their stuff.

I continued to use 8" floppies as late as 1985-86 when I started my TCP/IP stack. I still have a box of them and an old drive in storage. One of these days I'll build an interface and see if I can still read them.

It's amazing how much we used to do with 243kB floppies, 5 MB hard drives and 32KB of main memory. I'm not sure that our computer applications have really kept pace with the developments in hardware.



Offline Glom

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Disk hyperinflation is one of the more remarkable things to behold.

A typical hard drive today has a capacity that is 1 million times that of a floppy disk.

Offline cjameshuff

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RAM is pretty impressive as well. This machine has 2500 times as much RAM as my first machine did, and 250 times as much RAM as that machine had hard disk space.

And CPU...I've got a $15 eval board on my desk with about 8 times the MIPS of that 68LC040, and an actual hardware floating point unit.

Offline gillianren

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I stand in hard drive aisles in electronics stores sometimes and think, "How many of the first computer I ever learned to use would you have to string together to have the memory that you can now fit in the palm of your hand?"  And then I think, "I'm not sure they made that many."
"This sounds like a job for Bipolar Bear . . . but I just can't seem to get out of bed!"

"Conspiracy theories are an irresistible labour-saving device in the face of complexity."  --Henry Louis Gates

Offline ka9q

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Let's see...my very first computer was a handbuilt intel 8080 with 8K of RAM. I think the clock rate was 2 MHz. No mass storage; I used paper tape. Not until 1980 or so when I was out of school and could afford it did I buy my first pair of floppy drives (8", 243KB).

My current home Linux server has 8 CPU cores, 12 GB of RAM and a 2.4 GHz clock. I've got about 12 TB of disk space, which is about 50 million times those original floppy drive and 1.5 million times as much RAM.

It's only 6000 times the clock speed (for just one CPU), but the increase in clock speed doesn't really describe the increase in CPU power as modern CPUs use extensive pipelining, multi-level caching, superscalar execution and vector processing to greatly increase how much is done on each clock.

Offline gillianren

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Oh, my computer experience isn't quite that far back; I believe it would have been the 1984-'85 school year wherein my class got its very first computer.  I learned how to make the little turtle move around the screen.  Interestingly, this means I am late to computers by the standards of most of my online friends--no paper tape or punchcards or what have you--but early by the standards of my in-person friends--no Oregon Trail.
"This sounds like a job for Bipolar Bear . . . but I just can't seem to get out of bed!"

"Conspiracy theories are an irresistible labour-saving device in the face of complexity."  --Henry Louis Gates

Offline Andromeda

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Ha ha ha ha HA HAAAAAA

"The opening and closing ceremonies of the London Olympics are mass satanic rituals disguised as a celebration of Britain and sport. Their medium is the language of symbolism."

http://www.davidicke.com/headlines/69689-olympic-focus-tonight-at-9pm-uk-time-and-all-next-week-
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'" - Isaac Asimov.

Offline Echnaton

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My families first computer was a TRS 80 model 1.  We got it used, from a company that had replaced them with better word processing machines. IT had 4 floppy drives and we added a cassette tape drive. It was nice to be able to load a program on one floppy and the storage disk on another.  It had 8K of ram, because of the external expansion pack.   You had to load a special keyboard anti-bounce program on boot or it would be useless Periodicity it would go wonky and rub across the connector.would have to be disassembled so the connector corrosion could be removed with an eraser, always taking care to run the eraser the proper directions so you wouldn't lift the metal from the circuit board.

The first computer I owned was an Apple 2C that I used with our TV as a monitor.  Flight Sim was a blast.
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. —Samuel Beckett

Offline Andromeda

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Can we take the computer stuff to another thread?
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'" - Isaac Asimov.

Offline Inanimate Carbon Rod

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The Olympics seems to be going well, and the dastardly plan has yet to be sprung.  ::)

I suppose to be a CT you have be simultaneously a perpetual optimist and cynic: OMG! Massacre at a cinema a week before the UN makes the US ban games! Project Bluebeam is going to simulate God visiting earth! FEMA camps being setup just as new bird flu strain hits US! Gubmint to release proof of extraterrestrial contact! Bigfoot is being covered up!

Wait? Not one of those things has come to pass? Again? Oh, they will do, soon, real soon. Oh yes.

 ;D
Formerly Supermeerkat. Like you care.

Offline Laurel

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I'm sure there are some dastardly plans being sprung at the Olympics that involve performance-enhancing drugs, but that's not exciting enough for CTs.
"Well, my feet they finally took root in the earth, but I got me a nice little place in the stars, and I swear I found the key to the universe in the engine of an old parked car..."
Bruce Springsteen