Notices by DrYak (dryak@mstdn.science)

@prahou @lanodan Wikipedia has a table: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS#Tape_lengths
ntsc T-240 tapes are 500m long (a bit above 2m/minute, PAL has different speed)

Slow speed & short lenght despite large data amount, because the head does "helical scan":
vcr isn't moving the whole tape fast past a fixed head (like music). the head is moving and does a high-speed pass across the width of the tape from one edge to the other (1 pass per frame), while the tape is advancing slowly along the length.

@Infoseepage yup, ut's a question of "when", not "if".

Unless one of the neglected tropical disease pops its ugly head first, thanks to climate change.

(e.g. here around in Europe, dengue is already present in some of the southern countries, up to France)

@codewiz wishing you a happy repairing project!

@jab01701mid @slothrop @MichaelBishop @cwebber @Gorfram @alyx
No! I am John Mastodon!

@tess Saddest part:
These thing are built like tanks, and trivial to swap parts for repairs.
(I've got one which approaching 15years )

I.e.: capitalism has forgotten how to be successful, without so much planned obsolescence that you need to throw away and replace an expensive device every two years.

Also works wrt Roomba being able to work without a cloud connection, and modern capitalism unable to stop slurping all your private data and resell them for profits

@freemo Ripping apart monopolies and splitting them into multiple smaller competing entities is litteraly what anti-trust government organizations (such as US' FTC) have been trying to achieve.

So as long as @stux 's new tax code defines "big corpo" and "small business" in a way that would encourage competitors (and not merely "in the name only" small companies under the same umbrella / same holding), it's a win/win.

@dalias oh, you mean someone has written a driver+firmware combo for those CH375 ISA cards that does NE2000 emulation instead of HD? That would be very interesting to me!

(context: my Pocket386 has such a CH375 onboard)

@dalias oh, I see. Well, thing is: these are not like PCI USB cards (or built in port) which work as long as you have standard UHCI or OHCI drivers (some even exist for DOS).
The CH375 is a small microcontroller which on one side speaks to a USB device and on the other exposes an emulated peripheral on the ISA bus.
i.e. the handling of USB devices doesn't happen inside the host computer, but inside the card itself, thus you can use it an meager ancient 8bit hardware (e.g. Book8088)

@bellinghman @simon3270 @Antiqueight I am in sevetal toots of this thread and feel seen! 😹

(seriously, I am also an adept of "RasPi under the desk as an off-site backup" and obsessively labelling cables)

@ct_bergstrom Though this has still the usual drawbacks associated with using a LLM to generate an output for which the user doesn't have knowledge: there still risk that the Chat AI "lies"/hallucinates (i.e. Bullshits with confidence) by accident and the result is then taken for truth by the user.
[...]

@ct_bergstrom [...]
To quote @pluralistic:
"The problem isn’t that the chatbots lie all the time — it’s that they usually tell the truth, but then they start spouting confident lies."
and:
"That means that when Google ingests and repeats a lie, the lie gets spread to more sources. Those sources then form the basis for a new kind of ground truth, a “zombie statistic” that can’t be killed, despite its manifest wrongness."

https://doctorow.medium.com/googles-ai-hype-circle-6158804d1299