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Ok. Some guy named Kushim from Uruk made an error in his calculations for his stocks more than 5000 years ago. Beer production was a big thing in early civilisation, it seems. It obviously led to stuff like math and writing. The tablets with his bookkeeping (and his errors) have been found, making him the first known person to miscalculate something.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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A late aunt of mine was an office worker in the very early days of photocopiers. They were expensive, few and far between, so carbon copy was still common. Her office ran out of carbon paper. They had to resupply, but expecting photocopiers to take over, they made a very small order for 500 sheets. They thought.
When later checking the order form, they had to admit that it clearly indicated a unit size of boxes, each 100 sheets. So, they stocked up 50,000 sheets of carbon paper to last until photocopiers took over.
I believe that they were allowed to return a significant fraction of the lot, but far from all of it. I suspect that if you visit that office today, they may still have a few unopened boxes of carbon paper in their office supplies room.
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Dealing with such an accident without burning a nice stack of money. In a larger organisation with lots of trucks and good logistics it's not much of a problem. All requests for new tires were routed to us and that pyramid of tires disappeared within weeks. Lots of paperwork, so the carbon paper would have been helpful as well.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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I'm just transferring about 1.6Tb across USB3.0 between two external drives. It's pretty slow at about 80Mb/s and will take 7hrs according to Windows.
Which got me thinking about the best we've got right now, which seems to be the Samsung T5 at 380MB/s, which would theoretically do it in about 1hr 10min. Which then got me thinking about those old 3.5" floppies, with a max of about 500kbps, so about 296 days.
Over 6,000X speed improvement. And I'm guessing there's a long, long way to go on this journey yet.
That's kinda cool
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Best/only real use for floppies anymore: The Imperial March[^]
Real programmers use butterflies
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I went to the page - looking at the sidebar I suddenly realized this is a genre.
(certainly better than most rap).
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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And it's, worker zig-zagers versus piggy badge flashers
Training Generation Fallout
Waterfall bricklayer pincushion crawl out
There's smoke in my iris
But I painted a sunny day on the insides of my eyelids
So I'm ready now (What you ready for?)
I'm ready for life in this city
And my wings have grown almost enough to lift me
I'm a dinosaur with Jones Beach in my hourglass
Passing the time with serial killer coloring books and bags of marbles
Don't tell me you ain't the droid that held the match to the charcoals
Don't tell me Lucifer and God don't carpool
(This is our school)
I'm not trying to graduate to life at the personalized bar stool
Head in a jar on the desk, feet dangling in a shark pool
(Man please) Man please
My name stands for my being
And my being stands for the woman who stood
And braved the storm to raise the seedling
(Brother, sun, sister, moon, mother beautiful)
Yeah middle sibling suitable but far from son of excellence
Beckoned a long time ago, I was to way the wishers wish
But missers miss, I slept through my appointment
Saw the liquid dreams of a thousand babies solidify
And picked the rose that wilted
The second I introduced myself as Nervous
Well it appears the scars of learning have spoken
Some are burning, some have frozen
Some deserve tall tales, some wrote them
Some are just a brutal repercussion of devotion
Mine are all of the above cuz everything leads to erosion
Now where I live there's a homeless man, he sits upon a crate
He makes a rusty trumpet sound like the music that angels make
Now if you ever come and visit me, I suggest you watch the show
Tell him Aesop Rock sent ya just to hear his horn blow
...
- Aesop Rock, Battery
Real programmers use butterflies
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There can't possibly be a "right rap." 
Occasionally I break out some really old stuff : The Disposable Heroes of Hiphopracy. That album just drips with politics. There's not much else on it actually and it's still relevant thirty years later, for the most part.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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7 minutes to format a floppy disk, a few seconds to copy a few text files and... drumroll... repeat it when the disk becomes impossible to read...
I still use a USB floppy drive from time to time to copy files from/to some old industrial controllers...
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Do you have a computer with 32-bit windows lying around?
DCF[^] is 42% faster than dos and it allows you to save images of your diskettes.
But it is a dos program.
Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello
Never stop dreaming - Freddie Kruger
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Those were the days when you could tweak the timing of your routines to save stuff on tape to be faster than a C64's floppy (which was extremely slow).
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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Andrew Tanenbaum: Computer Networks (1981), Chapter 1, Problem 1:
Imagine that you have trained your St. Bernhard, Bernie, to carry a box of three floppy disks instead of a flask of brandy. (When your disk fills up, you consider that an emergency. These floppy disks each contain 250,000 bytes. The dog can travel to you side, where you may be, at 18 km/hour. For what range of distances does Bernie have a higher data rate than a 300 bps telephone line?
Updated version: Bernie now has the flask replaced with box containing 8192 microSDXC memory cards, each holding 128 GByte of data. For what range of distances does Bernie have a higher data rate than a 100 Mbps optical fiber?
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Ah, the days of compulsory "Friday afternoon backups".
The whole afternoon, just spent swapping floppies ... we even had a timesheet code for "backing up".
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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If we go way back, we find the original IBM PC came stock with a cassette tape interface and no floppy drives. That was thirty-eight years ago. I was still in gradual school then. All of the hardware we used was donated so we didn't have any PCs in the department when I left.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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I never saw an IBM PC without a floppy station, and I am very surprised to find, searching the internet today, that no floppy was an option at all. It certainly was not the norm. Reviews from those days certainly assumed a floppy, preferably two.
The original PC did have a jack for a cassette tape interface, but it was not commonly in use. Some other machines had that only, no floppy option. Some also had interfaces to paper tape punches/readers (there was some discussion about the advantages of zig-zag folded paper tape versus on a roll). The inclusion of a floppy on the IBM PC was a significant factor in making it a success.
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Going back decades, my biggest fear when I saw storage capacity increasing at an alarming rate had always been, "how much data are you willing to risk losing all at once?"
Fortunately, prices have also come down at a reasonable rate, so the risk is kinda mitigated by doing multiple backups on multiple devices. Of course, the increase in transfer speed also comes into play...if we were still looking at floppy disk speeds...a system running backups 24/7 would never catch up.
So...yeah.
Somewhat related aside: I'm still somewhat impressed by today's MicroSD card storage capacity (and they ain't showing much signs of slowing down), given their physical dimensions. I'm much less impressed by the fact that I lost a 128GB one somewhere in the pile of junk on my desk...
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Chris Maunder wrote: with a max of about 500kbps, so about 296 days
Back in the time, files were not that big, which means that you are back about 25 years ago, when you indeed needed a couple of hours to copy a big data stock.
Which is exactly what you are doing. So in what are we better nowadays ? 
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“Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.”
― Robert A. Heinlein
| Ravings en masse^ |
|---|
| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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I got Herself coal for Christmas, as I didn't think she'd mined it.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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You might start feeling some pressure and heat until it turns to diamonds.
"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."
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Is that now dark humor by you professional english speaker?
It does not solve my Problem, but it answers my question
Chemists have exactly one rule: there are only exceptions
modified 19-Jan-21 21:04pm.
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Pressure makes whine, not diamonds!
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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If you keep the pressure up for about a million years, the whine turns into diamonds. 
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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She might scuttle your plans for the evening.
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