• (cs) in reply to Abso
    Abso:
    soer:
    All that needs to happen for this to work for everyone is for the stubborn what-nots at The Daily WTF to rename the 'ads' directory on their web server to something else - however, as they have shown, this is far too much hassle as it is still the same as last time they published some ad images!
    Alternately, you could accept that if you use a plugin to remove some images from web pages then it might remove some images from web pages. And that someone running a web site with ads may not have much interest in accommodating the blocking of those ads.

    And adjusting your rules - or just adding an exception - is not difficult in AdBlock. Which is all I did (when I first noticed the problem ago).

  • (cs) in reply to Abso
    Abso:
    soer:
    All that needs to happen for this to work for everyone is for the stubborn what-nots at The Daily WTF to rename the 'ads' directory on their web server to something else - however, as they have shown, this is far too much hassle as it is still the same as last time they published some ad images!
    Alternately, you could accept that if you use a plugin to remove some images from web pages then it might remove some images from web pages. And that someone running a web site with ads may not have much interest in accommodating the blocking of those ads.

    So your saying that only jerks that instal a plugin are to blame for not seeing ads?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_filtering

    I can't control what's being done by my system administators via proxy.

  • (cs) in reply to brazzy
    brazzy:
    Interesting. Wikipedia lists a bunch of strange diskette formats, but 3 1/4" is not among them. I wonder if this was produced before 3 1/2" became widespread,

    according to this site: http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/?category=stor

    Sony introduced and shipped the first 3 1/2" floppy drives and diskettes in 1981. The first signficant company to adopt the 3 1/2" floppy for general use was Hewlett-Packard in 1982, an event which was critical in establishing momentum for the format and which helped it prevail over the other contenders for the microfloppy standard, including 3", 3 1/4", and 3.9" formats.
  • (cs) in reply to Anon

    Yup, social engineering is as effective now as it was in MH's time. UNLESS! That ad was implying "if you have this, you are unlikely to be a target of a seduction attempt, by Mata Hari or otherwise".

  • philpem (unregistered) in reply to brazzy

    5.25in discs generally had a large hole for the spindle hub, with a thick plastic "hub reinforcement disc" around the inside edge of the hole. The catch is, some cheap discs didn't have the reinforcement, and the disc would split after a couple of dozen insert/eject cycles (or one particularly rough cycle). End result being that you'd get a radiating crack or split going from the inside of the hub to the outside of the disc, rendering the disc unreadable.

    If you add a metal hub to the central section (a la 3.5in discs) -- or even a plastic hub (see Amstrad 3in discs) then you're reducing the possibility of this happening. The only time you'd get damage is if the disc were jammed solid in the fabric liner, and you tried to spin the disc up.

    As for the metal shutters? The common 3.5in disc is infamous for jamming in disc drives if the metal shutter gets bent (which, again, usually happens after a few dozen insert/eject cycles, or a bit of abuse e.g. shoving one unceremoniously into the bottom of a backpack). Some later 3.5in floppies (TDK certainly, maybe Maxell and 3M/Imation as well) used flexible plastic shutters which didn't suffer from this affliction.

  • Abso (unregistered) in reply to frits
    frits:
    Abso:
    soer:
    All that needs to happen for this to work for everyone is for the stubborn what-nots at The Daily WTF to rename the 'ads' directory on their web server to something else - however, as they have shown, this is far too much hassle as it is still the same as last time they published some ad images!
    Alternately, you could accept that if you use a plugin to remove some images from web pages then it might remove some images from web pages. And that someone running a web site with ads may not have much interest in accommodating the blocking of those ads.

    So your saying that only jerks that instal a plugin are to blame for not seeing ads?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_filtering

    I can't control what's being done by my system administators via proxy.

    First of all, I don't have anything against jerks who install plugins. I am one. I just expect a little self awareness from them.

    I'm sorry to hear about your proxy problem, but asking a web page to have special support for one not-widely-used proxy filter setup is like complaining about a program being unavailable on 3.25" disks in 1984. It's true that they could fix the problem if they really cared, but there are very few users affected, and it's not like they could easily have predicted it would be a problem.

    (Unless, of course, inflexible ad-blocking proxies are much more common than I think.)

  • iToad (unregistered)

    Does anybody need any 3M single-side, single-density, reversable 8" floppy disks? They are already formatted for your RT-11 operating system. I took a look, and discovered that I have two boxes of them. They are probably older than any of the ads in the article.

    Perhaps, I should clean out the backs of some of my shelves more often.

  • caper (unregistered)

    I recall that dial-back was a security mechanism for dial-up.

    And didn't some modems have automatic dial-back built-in ? This must be one of them.

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to piskvorr
    piskvorr:
    Yup, social engineering is as effective now as it was in MH's time. UNLESS! That ad was implying "if you have this, you are unlikely to be a target of a seduction attempt, by Mata Hari or otherwise".

    Interesting....maybe you're on to something. Perhaps the message is "with the Lockheed GETEX, you'll be so unattractive to the opposite sex that even an experienced and determined seductress such as MH will take a pass on learning your military secrets."

  • blarg (unregistered) in reply to csnyder
    csnyder:
    If you're not seeing the images, check to see if you have AdBlock enabled - my AdBlock configuration (a fairly common one, I believe) blocked them all, leading me to a real WTF, as the captions by themselves are fairly meaningless.

    so were the pictures

  • C-Octothorpe (unregistered) in reply to hoodaticus
    hoodaticus:
    C-Octothorpe:
    Nagesh:
    frits:
    Wow, work is blocking everyone of those images. I'm sure they're hilarious. See ya tommorow!

    Wow! Frits has a job!

    Once again, surfing pr0n from home is NOT a job... At least, not yet it is.

    It is if you're getting paid for it.

    Lol, would you pay me to wank at work?

  • Ã (unregistered)

    They had a huge market for 3 1/4" diskettes in Hyderabad up until DVDs became widespread. Apparently, the market is still thriving, mostly serving outsourcing contractors who write horrible code and charge by how many 3 1/4" diskettes are required for their source code.

  • C-Octothorpe (unregistered) in reply to frits
    frits:
    C-Octothorpe:
    Nagesh:
    frits:
    Wow, work is blocking everyone of those images. I'm sure they're hilarious. See ya tommorow!

    Wow! Frits has a job!

    Once again, surfing pr0n from home is NOT a job... At least, not yet it is.

    Jealousy makes you ugly in the face.

    It's not the jealousy that makes me ugly in the face, it's the strangling the penguin that does that...

    1. :(

    2. #######)~~~~
    3. :)
    4. ... profit?
  • Meep (unregistered)

    I wonder how dumb all the vacuous bullshit about the cloud will sound in 10 years.

  • Meep (unregistered) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    Considering that Mata Hari was a WW1 spy who was executed in 1917, I don't think that boosting that she couldn't break into your computer is much or a selling point.

    a) she's (long) dead b) she had probably never heard of a computer c) she was the seducing military bigwigs type of spy rather than the tech-savvy breaking into stuff spy

    d) she's a vaguely plausible excuse for a picture of a hottie in a trenchcoat in the ad

  • (cs) in reply to EvanED
    EvanED:
    imgx64:
    Wow, I can't believe people actually used to read 2-page ads! Nowadays, you're lucky to get their attention to read your Google AdWords one-liner.

    To be fair, people still do. (In fact, they pay for something that are like ads -- ever seen people reading Consumer Reports?) You just have to be in the right mindset.

    Maybe imgx64 can't read very well. Every single magazine has 1-2 page, full-page adds in them. Some are even fold outs.

  • Wonk (unregistered) in reply to C-Octothorpe
    C-Octothorpe:
    frits:
    C-Octothorpe:
    Nagesh:
    frits:
    Wow, work is blocking everyone of those images. I'm sure they're hilarious. See ya tommorow!

    Wow! Frits has a job!

    Once again, surfing pr0n from home is NOT a job... At least, not yet it is.

    Jealousy makes you ugly in the face.

    It's not the jealousy that makes me ugly in the face, it's the strangling the penguin that does that...

    1. :(

    2. #######)~~~~
    3. :)
    4. ... profit?

    Still donating your sperm, then?

  • (cs) in reply to amischiefr
    amischiefr:
    EvanED:
    imgx64:
    Wow, I can't believe people actually used to read 2-page ads! Nowadays, you're lucky to get their attention to read your Google AdWords one-liner.

    To be fair, people still do. (In fact, they pay for something that are like ads -- ever seen people reading Consumer Reports?) You just have to be in the right mindset.

    Maybe imgx64 can't read very well. Every single magazine has 1-2 page, full-page adds in them. Some are even fold outs.

    Magazines?

    Are those the germ-infested things I avoid at all cost in the waiting rooms of doctor offices?

  • C-Octothorpe (unregistered) in reply to Wonk
    Wonk:
    C-Octothorpe:
    frits:
    C-Octothorpe:
    Nagesh:
    frits:
    Wow, work is blocking everyone of those images. I'm sure they're hilarious. See ya tommorow!

    Wow! Frits has a job!

    Once again, surfing pr0n from home is NOT a job... At least, not yet it is.

    Jealousy makes you ugly in the face.

    It's not the jealousy that makes me ugly in the face, it's the strangling the penguin that does that...

    1. :(

    2. #######)~~~~
    3. :)
    4. ... profit?

    Still donating your sperm, then?

    Well, the word "donating" is a bit of a stretch... I usually get chased off the bus whenever I try to "donate"...

    What? Was that wrong? Should I not have done that?

  • trtrwtf (unregistered) in reply to frits
    frits:
    amischiefr:
    EvanED:
    imgx64:
    Wow, I can't believe people actually used to read 2-page ads! Nowadays, you're lucky to get their attention to read your Google AdWords one-liner.

    To be fair, people still do. (In fact, they pay for something that are like ads -- ever seen people reading Consumer Reports?) You just have to be in the right mindset.

    Maybe imgx64 can't read very well. Every single magazine has 1-2 page, full-page adds in them. Some are even fold outs.

    Magazines?

    Are those the germ-infested things I avoid at all cost in the waiting rooms of doctor offices?

    No, those are small children.

  • ÃÆâ€℠(unregistered) in reply to C-Octothorpe
    C-Octothorpe:
    Wonk:
    C-Octothorpe:
    frits:
    C-Octothorpe:
    Nagesh:
    frits:
    Wow, work is blocking everyone of those images. I'm sure they're hilarious. See ya tommorow!

    Wow! Frits has a job!

    Once again, surfing pr0n from home is NOT a job... At least, not yet it is.

    Jealousy makes you ugly in the face.

    It's not the jealousy that makes me ugly in the face, it's the strangling the penguin that does that...

    1. :(

    2. #######)~~~~
    3. :)
    4. ... profit?

    Still donating your sperm, then?

    Well, the word "donating" is a bit of a stretch... I usually get chased off the bus whenever I try to "donate"...

    What? Was that wrong? Should I not have done that?

    I have found TRWTF

  • C-Octothorpe (unregistered) in reply to ÃÆâ€â„Â
    ÃÆâ€â„Â:
    I have found TRWTF

    Funny, that's what the judge said too!

  • (cs)

    What does ƒÆ’Įâ€â„Â

    mean?

  • ÃÆâ€℠(unregistered) in reply to Nagesh
    Nagesh:
    What does ƒÆ’Įâ€â„Â

    mean?

    If you were truly from Hyderabad you would know.

  • Ann Onymous (unregistered) in reply to amischiefr
    amischiefr:
    EvanED:
    imgx64:
    Wow, I can't believe people actually used to read 2-page ads! Nowadays, you're lucky to get their attention to read your Google AdWords one-liner.

    To be fair, people still do. (In fact, they pay for something that are like ads -- ever seen people reading Consumer Reports?) You just have to be in the right mindset.

    Maybe imgx64 can't read very well. Every single magazine has 1-2 page, full-page adds in them. Some are even fold outs.

    I just ran into a magazine with a 14-page ad for ... some country I don't remember. I think it was SciAm, which made me a sad panda.

    Shut up, I was in the airport and 3g/wifi was spotty at best.

  • Yakov Smirnoff (unregistered) in reply to ÃÆâ€â„Â

    In Soviet Russia, TRWTF is You!

  • (cs) in reply to Meep
    Meep:
    I wonder how dumb all the vacuous bullshit about the cloud will sound in 10 years.
    Exactly as dumb as it sounds now. It just takes dumb people longer to realize it.
  • C-Octothorpe (unregistered) in reply to Yakov Smirnoff
    Yakov Smirnoff:
    In Soviet Russia, TRWTF is You!

    No no no... It's: In Soviet Russia, the sperm donates YOU!

    Sorry, ok I'm done now

  • J (unregistered)

    I'm still trying to figure out what all the eyeballs are for.

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to Ann Onymous
    Ann Onymous:
    I just ran into a magazine with a 14-page ad for ... some country I don't remember. I think it was SciAm, which made me a sad panda.

    PC Gamer is about 50% or more multipage ads. They euphemistically call them "previews".

  • lesle (unregistered) in reply to iToad
    iToad:
    dogbrags:
    So far, no comments about Mata Hari. If you read the ad, Lockheed (yes, the airplane people) is selling a 1200 baud modem. High technology for the time. Promoting computer security through a dialup connection. Nobody heard of forging caller id?

    Actually, this probably predates Caller ID. I'm old enough to remember when a modem was a box with rubber inserts that you put the phone handset into. You couldn't actually buy one. Like the phone, you leased it from the phone company.

    The "rubber inserts" were acoustic couplers used to connect two different phone systems together non-physically; some reasons were regulatory, some technical, and some physical.

    About 1978 I had a Bell system tech and a then-Centel tech in my computer room, wires in hand, look at each other, and say, OK by you? They connected the wires, and here in Florida I had a local Washington DC phone. (To save on long distance charges.)

    My equipment, the first non-Mainframe type I had, was a Texas Instruments TI-730 (number may be off) with a built-in acoustic coupler and two cassette tape decks for read/write storage.

    Unrelated to the above, I still have the six 3½" mini floppy diskettes that Windows 3.1 came on.

  • (cs) in reply to Nagesh
    Nagesh:
    What does ƒÆ’Įâ€â„Â

    mean?

    It means that the poster's browser/language settings are misconfigured somehow.

    Or perhaps just that CS is TRWTF.

  • Gordon (unregistered) in reply to brazzy

    The format was known as 3 1/4 or 3 1/2 or even 3 inch more or less at random during its early days. 3 1/2 quickly became the accepted usage, but IIRC the diameter of the actual media is nearer 3.25"

  • Jim (unregistered) in reply to brazzy
    brazzy:
    Interesting. Wikipedia lists a bunch of strange diskette formats, but 3 1/4" is not among them. I wonder if this was produced before 3 1/2" became widespread, or whether they were knowingly promoting an obscure dead-end technology as "where personal computing is going".

    One thing that is obviously dishonest is praising a "durable methal hub" as an advantage in one sentence and the absence of "rigid metal shutters" in the next.

    Yuh, but one of them is on the disk itself (the shutter on 3.5s) and the other is the actual drive itself. They're saying the hub is super tough, but the disk is cleverly designed so as not to rely on stupid shutters that get caught on everything, and (when you rip them off) stop Apples's accepting your disk.

  • Jim (unregistered)

    Oh and why is the picture called Dyson.jpg when the company Dysan.

  • Herbert (unregistered)

    I like that Dyson assures its users that they can convert program from the larger media to the smaller.....

    That must be a complex process!

  • Cat (unregistered) in reply to dogbrags
    dogbrags:
    So far, no comments about Mata Hari. If you read the ad, Lockheed (yes, the airplane people) is selling a 1200 baud modem. High technology for the time. Promoting computer security through a dialup connection. Nobody heard of forging caller id?

    Oldschool caller ID was actually much harder to forge. The modern services that make this easy rely on VOIP.

  • SL200 (unregistered) in reply to Your Retarded
    Your Retarded:
    As far as I am aware, 'Manager' is not a verb.
    Did someone say/imply it was?
  • Nagesh 2.0 (unregistered) in reply to trtrwtf
    trtrwtf:
    frits:
    amischiefr:
    EvanED:
    imgx64:
    Wow, I can't believe people actually used to read 2-page ads! Nowadays, you're lucky to get their attention to read your Google AdWords one-liner.

    To be fair, people still do. (In fact, they pay for something that are like ads -- ever seen people reading Consumer Reports?) You just have to be in the right mindset.

    Maybe imgx64 can't read very well. Every single magazine has 1-2 page, full-page adds in them. Some are even fold outs.

    Magazines?

    Are those the germ-infested things I avoid at all cost in the waiting rooms of doctor offices?

    No, those are small children.

    That's why i stopped reading small children

  • Hpesoj (unregistered) in reply to RiptoR
    RiptoR:
    Actually, it does mention them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_floppy_disk#The_3-inch_compact_floppy_disk

    And it even has a picture....

  • Jim2 (unregistered) in reply to Jim
    Jim:
    brazzy:
    Interesting. Wikipedia lists a bunch of strange diskette formats, but 3 1/4" is not among them. I wonder if this was produced before 3 1/2" became widespread, or whether they were knowingly promoting an obscure dead-end technology as "where personal computing is going".

    One thing that is obviously dishonest is praising a "durable methal hub" as an advantage in one sentence and the absence of "rigid metal shutters" in the next.

    Yuh, but one of them is on the disk itself (the shutter on 3.5s) and the other is the actual drive itself. They're saying the hub is super tough, but the disk is cleverly designed so as not to rely on stupid shutters that get caught on everything, and (when you rip them off) stop Apples's accepting your disk.

    WTF drugs you on?

  • Francisco García (unregistered) in reply to brazzy
    brazzy:
    Interesting. Wikipedia lists a bunch of strange diskette formats, but 3 1/4" is not among them. I wonder if this was produced before 3 1/2" became widespread, or whether they were knowingly promoting an obscure dead-end technology as "where personal computing is going".

    Yes, Wikipedia mentions this disk

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_floppy_disk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:325disk.jpg

  • Also Not Gary (unregistered) in reply to Jim2
    Jim2:
    Jim:
    brazzy:
    Interesting. Wikipedia lists a bunch of strange diskette formats, but 3 1/4" is not among them. I wonder if this was produced before 3 1/2" became widespread, or whether they were knowingly promoting an obscure dead-end technology as "where personal computing is going".

    One thing that is obviously dishonest is praising a "durable methal hub" as an advantage in one sentence and the absence of "rigid metal shutters" in the next.

    Yuh, but one of them is on the disk itself (the shutter on 3.5s) and the other is the actual drive itself. They're saying the hub is super tough, but the disk is cleverly designed so as not to rely on stupid shutters that get caught on everything, and (when you rip them off) stop Apples's accepting your disk.

    WTF drugs you on?

    Small children

  • (cs) in reply to nonpartisan
    nonpartisan:
    Go bravely with Thoth! That must be where Nethack got that name . . .
    Yes. Because Thoth couldn't possibly be a name of any greater antiquity than circa 1980, certainly not a name from any sort of mythology which might have predated computers by a few thousand years.
  • UK-Aspie (unregistered)

    I think Mata Hari's techniques would be just as effective today as they used to be. Possibly more so as everybody trusts the computer.

  • Cretins to the left of me retards on the right... (unregistered) in reply to Your Retarded
    Your Retarded:
    As far as I am aware, 'Manager' is not a verb.

    Presumably your correction of grammar means that the posting name was supposed to mean "You are retarded" which makes your contraction of the first two words incorrect; it's "You're retarded".

  • soer (unregistered) in reply to Abso
    Abso:
    frits:
    Abso:
    soer:
    All that needs to happen for this to work for everyone is for the stubborn what-nots at The Daily WTF to rename the 'ads' directory on their web server to something else - however, as they have shown, this is far too much hassle as it is still the same as last time they published some ad images!
    Alternately, you could accept that if you use a plugin to remove some images from web pages then it might remove some images from web pages. And that someone running a web site with ads may not have much interest in accommodating the blocking of those ads.

    So your saying that only jerks that instal a plugin are to blame for not seeing ads?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_filtering

    I can't control what's being done by my system administators via proxy.

    First of all, I don't have anything against jerks who install plugins. I am one. I just expect a little self awareness from them.

    I'm sorry to hear about your proxy problem, but asking a web page to have special support for one not-widely-used proxy filter setup is like complaining about a program being unavailable on 3.25" disks in 1984. It's true that they could fix the problem if they really cared, but there are very few users affected, and it's not like they could easily have predicted it would be a problem.

    (Unless, of course, inflexible ad-blocking proxies are much more common than I think.)

    Ok, just to clear this up - I don't have any ad filtering installed at all as far as I am aware and have no desire to. I currently see adverts on most web pages and accept that this is a valuable income stream for people who run these pages. Sometimes the adverts are for something useful that I may actually be interested in buying - like the ones on the sponsor section of The Daily WTF for example.

    As far as I can make out, the blocking seems to be something that our work ISP is doing - something I don't have any control over. I am not the only person who does not see the pics as you will see if you look back at the comments on previous What The Ad postings.

    This is really not that big a deal - I should probably be doing some work anyway ;) - all I was saying was that The Daily WTF could easily make this one go away by renaming the directory. This would prevent the regular 'I can't see the pictures' discussion which happens every time they post What the Ad.

  • TrXtR (unregistered) in reply to csnyder

    ? Find it so strange when people addblock their favourite sites. Like a big FU to the people that give you the content you enjoy.

  • (cs) in reply to dogbrags
    dogbrags:
    Promoting computer security through a dialup connection. Nobody heard of forging caller id?
    There is a fairly simple way to secure a dialup line: by calling back.

    The server accepts an incoming call and reads the phone number and disconnects immediately. If the number is on a list of approved numbers, it calls out and establishes the connection.

    If you do spoof caller ID, the outgoing call will still go to the authorized host.

    It even works without caller ID, if the user sends the phone number over the connection.

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to brazzy

    It's in this Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_floppy_disk)

    Also found this http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/102681996

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