• meseek #2982
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    61 year ago

    I see BB has a long history of stupid.

    I remember some 20 years ago I bought a LaCie Porsche external HDD. It died. Just wouldn’t turn on. The enclosure was pretty firmly built so getting it open wasn’t really trivial. I was at BB and just out of sheer curiosity in what they’d say, I went up to their repair department. Three kids who were supposed to be trained professionals claimed it was not possible to open without damaging the drive. They said they tried several times and all HDDs were DOA out the enclosure.

    Not sold. I went home. Took about an hour of prying (I didn’t want to damage anything) but I got the case open to reveal a bargain basement Seagate. Connected. Worked just fine. As I had originally surmised.

    Always wanted to see just what they did to theirs to not salvage the internal drive.

    • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet
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      51 year ago

      HDDs are not consumer serviceable. They were right about that. They shouldn’t be opened outside of an industrial clean room. But the actual enclosure? Of course you can open it. Best Buy mostly employs kids who passed the CompTIA A+ exam. So they do know stuff, but they often lack experience.

  • SeedyOne
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    151 year ago

    Working in IT at the time, we were fairly sure things would be fine by the time New Years Eve rolled around,. Even going so far as to camp overnight outside at the Rose Parade, a wild time on a normal year and ridiculous in 1999 with Colorado Blvd packed with partyers.

    The moment came and, of course, nothing really happened…except some GENIUS thought it would be a good idea to set off a giant firework at the college next door, scaring the living shit out of a few thousand people. Good times.

  • Oha
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    581 year ago

    Got that one on pretty much all of my computers

  • @[email protected]
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    61 year ago

    When 52x read was top of the line. If we compare SSD to CDs it would be exponentially faster.

    • @[email protected]
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      21 year ago

      Me too, and I came into the comments to mention what had just occurred to me, despite having seen this exact image shared at least a half dozen times before.

  • Echo Dot
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    1 year ago

    I never understood why those stickers were put on computers because it just scared technologically illiterate people which back then was basically everyone.

    They 100% knew it wasn’t going to be a problem for at least a year before the event because they fixed it. The only computers that would really be affected was anything that wasn’t networked, because it couldn’t download the update. But if it wasn’t networked, then you could just change the time to some earlier point to avoid the issue. Then download the patch as and when you can get it on a disk.

  • @[email protected]
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    671 year ago

    I remember people I knew stockpiling canned goods and everything. What a weird time.

    And yet still not as weird as people stockpiling toilet paper and boycotting Corona beer in 2020.

    • @[email protected]
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      1 year ago

      December 31st 1999, I was at a house party in Lexington, KY. We had a few radio stations playing for ambiance. Once we realized that at least 2 were playing Prince “Party like it’s 1999,” we tuned as many radios as we could. Turned out that 6 stations ended 1999 with Prince, and started 2000 with “It’s the end of the world as we know it,” by REM.

    • @[email protected]
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      41 year ago

      went over to my friends house on new years eve around like 6 or 7pm. His step dad was in the living room cleaning all this guns. He was absolutely convinced that as soon as midnight struck society would crumble and mass looting/killing would begin. he also stocked up on can goods, TP, beer, etc. I was like 16 at the time and he offered me one of his guns to take home to “protect your family”. I kindly refused.

    • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet
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      1 year ago

      We knew that the problem was already solved, but the media kept leaning into the sensational doomerism. That was the first time in my life that I realized that the media might not be unbiased or truthful.

    • meseek #2982
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      81 year ago

      My bank said that like 20% of their clients emptied their accounts lol

    • @[email protected]
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      31 year ago

      Boycotting Corona beer? Here in Germany I have heard that their sales went up when Corona happened.

      • Echo Dot
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        11 year ago

        It was probably just Trump supporters. Those guys eat all the gloom and doom stuff up because they actually really hope the world’s going to end, as it’s the only way they’ll ever end up on top.

      • @[email protected]
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        11 year ago

        I’m referring to news items like this one.

        But, while looking for a source on that, I found a couple of articles (Snopes and PolitiFact) that say it’s fake news.

        So, this much 🤏 faith in humanity restored, I guess.

        • @[email protected]
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          21 year ago

          Here in Germany, Corona Beer was never that big, so I guess the amount of people who bought it because they had just noticed it for the first time is higher than the amount of people who would have bought it but didnt because of the disease.

    • Boomer Humor Doomergod
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      21 year ago

      On December 31, 1999 I saw a truck loaded up with possessions and “HEADED TO THE HILLS GOOD LUCK EVERYONE” painted on the side.

    • Flax
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      61 year ago

      Probably scared it would crash on y2k

    • @[email protected]
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      51 year ago

      A lot of software was updated prior to y2k to be able to cope with dates. But the transition was still difficult for some software.

  • magnetosphere
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    291 year ago

    I remember a friend of mine learned some outdated programming language, and got a lucrative temp job preparing mainframes for Y2K.

    • @[email protected]
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      351 year ago

      Y2K is treated like a tempest in a teapot, but it really only was that way because of a lot of work behind the scenes to make it so.

      At the end of the day the worst thing that happened to my family was that Dad had to buy a new version of Quicken, because our old copy of 4.0 didn’t support 4-digit years… But imagine if that was every Fortune 500 and state government that suddenly couldn’t process payroll or invoices, or if power plants or water treatment systems stopped being able to control electronic systems because of a date/time mismatch between the SCADA systems and the operators’ terminals? Y2K was a non-issue because a lot of people spent a lot of time going through a lot of code to be sure that critical systems would continue to work as expected.

    • AggressivelyPassive
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      191 year ago

      That “outdated” programming language still runs large parts of the world economy and administration. Cobol will survive humanity, it’s like a cockroach.

      • magnetosphere
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        51 year ago

        Oh, yeah. I certainly didn’t mean “outdated” as an insult; only that hardware/software engineers didn’t think their machines would still be in use by 2000.

  • @[email protected]
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    111 year ago

    I had a guy trying to convince everyone that WW3 was going to start because computers on warships wouldn’t know what date it was.

    • The Picard ManeuverOP
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      121 year ago

      “Hey, what’s today’s date, Bill?”

      “What do you mean you don’t know? We’d better bomb somebody!”

  • @[email protected]
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    1 year ago

    Meanwhile, rebels like me were on a long-distance call just to see if we’d get billed for 100 years.

  • @[email protected]
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    331 year ago

    We had a LAN Party!

    486 proxy box using RedHat and ipchains sharing dialup Internet for about 8 of us in parents basement.

    Enjoying looking up websites and seeing odd dates like 19100 show up. Nobody died, outside of Starsiege Tribes CTF.