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Re: Random Thoughts Thread

by marurun Mon Sep 30, 2019 10:27 am

That was pretty awesome. Not the drugs and abuse, but that you've managed to find some solace here. I am so glad that you are looking ahead to the future as well. Keep us posted on all the great things to come.
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Re: Random Thoughts Thread

by noiseredux Mon Sep 30, 2019 10:29 am

super honest and heart-felt post. The internet needs more of that. Good stuff, brother.
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Re: Random Thoughts Thread

by Forlorn Drifter Sun Oct 06, 2019 4:35 pm

I'm currently in love with translation hacks, but seeing how few are available for PS1/PS2 is disappointing. If I knew Japanese, I might make a go of it... I want to play the PS2 Evangelion game, and there's like... half of the PS1 library that could be translated. Mix that with Dreamcast, Saturn, etc. stuff.

PC-98 has a ton of interesting stuff too, but I feel like every game that catches my eye on PC-98 is a hentai game.
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RCBH928
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Re: Random Thoughts Thread

by RCBH928 Thu Oct 17, 2019 12:58 pm

After watching Ghost in the Shell ('95) and Hackers ('95), not to mention WarGames (1983) , it amazes me that people back then had a very good grasp of what hacking and hackers were. The WWW was literally invented 2 years earlier, and I bet hardly anyone had internet in 1993, not even governments nor big corporations were hooked to the net back then.
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Re: Random Thoughts Thread

by isiolia Thu Oct 17, 2019 3:49 pm

There were predecessors to the internet that would have given people a basic idea of what might be coming. As you mentioned, access at the time was very limited, but there were nationwide networks since the 60s.

In the consumer arena, the more common thing would be a Bulletin Board System (BBS), which is a lot more like what the initial parts of Wargames are like. You'd call in (via modem) directly to a server or whatnot, and access the various services that way. Very similar to the way that early internet services like Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy, worked, just without the access to the internet, as it wasn't a thing yet. My dad had us subscribed to a local one when we got our 386 back in the early 90s, which let us download shareware and so on (one of the ways that DOOM proliferated).

I think things took off fairly quickly there though, since offhand there's also Sneakers from '92 (would recommend), or The Net (if you like Sandra Bullock) from '95 that were also kinda tuned in to potential issues.
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Re: Random Thoughts Thread

by RCBH928 Fri Oct 18, 2019 10:53 am

isiolia wrote:There were predecessors to the internet that would have given people a basic idea of what might be coming. As you mentioned, access at the time was very limited, but there were nationwide networks since the 60s.

In the consumer arena, the more common thing would be a Bulletin Board System (BBS), which is a lot more like what the initial parts of Wargames are like. You'd call in (via modem) directly to a server or whatnot, and access the various services that way. Very similar to the way that early internet services like Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy, worked, just without the access to the internet, as it wasn't a thing yet. My dad had us subscribed to a local one when we got our 386 back in the early 90s, which let us download shareware and so on (one of the ways that DOOM proliferated).

I think things took off fairly quickly there though, since offhand there's also Sneakers from '92 (would recommend), or The Net (if you like Sandra Bullock) from '95 that were also kinda tuned in to potential issues.


It still amazes me that they made mainstream movies back then about this, in a time where I am sure if you asked random people on the street "What is the internet?' they would not know. I am thinking maybe internet and computers were a lot more ubiquitous than I think.
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Re: Random Thoughts Thread

by isiolia Fri Oct 18, 2019 11:57 am

It was certainly a transitional period, though you're really going from a basic concept of remotely accessing a computer via modem/etc (not a huge stretch) to the actual internet. By the mid 90s or so, that would definitely have been something a lot of the US would have been aware of. Various online providers were marketing heavily - free AOL disks in the mail, by the check-out, included in magazines, and so on. Plus TV advertising and so on. It would have been hard to be completely in the dark regarding it.
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Re: Random Thoughts Thread

by BoneSnapDeez Sat Oct 26, 2019 1:48 pm

Are these "Mandela Effect" people serious are just fucking around with me? It's like Flat Earth, I can't tell who's sincere and who's satirical. I see people on Reddit stating things like "Froot Loops is spelled differently than I remember it at age 2!!!!" and then launching into a massive diatribe about CERN forcing people into interdimensional travel. What the fuck.
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Re: Random Thoughts Thread

by RCBH928 Sun Oct 27, 2019 11:31 pm

is quantum computing a technology that is eventually going to happen or is it a theory kind of thing like time travel?
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Re: Random Thoughts Thread

by pierrot Mon Oct 28, 2019 1:30 am

RCBH928 wrote:is quantum computing a technology that is eventually going to happen or is it a theory kind of thing like time travel?

They're already out there, it's just that people's perceptions of what quantum computing is are potentially tainted by google, and others. Basically, the idea is to continue counting bits beyond the physical level of knowing whether or not an electron is nearly guaranteed to be there. They're referred to as quantum bits, or qubits, and essentially have four states, as opposed to the regular two-state bit. A lot of the computation aspect of it is still somewhat theoretical, last I had looked into it (which was admittedly a couple years ago). What it's not really suited for, because programing a quantum computer with qubits is immensely challenging, is just replacing typical user terminals. What quantum computers can potentially do really well is find prime roots of massively large numbers. That can be used to create encryption that would be practically impossible for any typical computer to crack.

That technology is likely quite a ways away from practical application, though. I think the prototype that was done at UC Berkley (I want to say it was) back in 2012 or 2013 was only able to find the prime factors of 15 half of the time. (The half of the time part is actually consistent, since that includes results of 1 and 15.)

The potentially more interesting, and more immediately promising, quantum technology is in communications, though. There are some firms in China that actually were able to demonstrate stable, encrypted, communications with quantum entangled particles. It's "encrypted" only really because any attempt by a third party to observe the communications breaks the channel.
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