Re: Retro Computing
By: poindexter FORTRAN to Nightfox on Wed Nov 14 2018 06:56 pm

didn't want to pay for it)

The map uses a DVD that's now showing its age, and updates are $160. I could get a cheap Chinese Android head unit for that price.

you can probably just download the update
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Re: Retro Computing
By: poindexter FORTRAN to Nightfox on Wed Nov 14 2018 06:56 pm

My 2014 Prius has a interface that looks like it came out of a kids Leapfrog toy, and updates have been sparse. They just announced that Pandora would no longer work, but they couldn't figure out some way to remove the button (or didn't want to pay for it)

I've never been able to get Pandora to work with my car stereo. Supposedly after connecting my phone with Bluetooth, it looks like the Pandora on my car stereo is supposed to be able to communicate with Pandora on my phone, but it has never been able to.

The map uses a DVD that's now showing its age, and updates are $160. I could get a cheap Chinese Android head unit for that price.

I've tried using the Garmin software to get updated maps for my car stereo, but the software isn't even listing any new maps available.

Nightfox

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Re: Retro Computing
By: MRO to poindexter FORTRAN on Wed Nov 14 2018 10:53 pm

you can probably just download the update

There are torrents out there, and some people on eBay selling pirated versions, yes.

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Re: Retro Computing
By: Chai to Derision on Wed Nov 14 2018 15:29:00

I just popped in a floppy disk into Windows 10 (latest update).
Formatting, copying, chkdsk, all still works with floppies.
I imagine Windows will one day omit the ability to work with floppies,
but it's kinda cool that it's still there. I'm honestly surprised that
they still support it, and I'm not surprised that Apple does not.

I found it a bit annoying when macOS stopped bothering with it. I mean, they've bloated the rest of the OS to Vista levels of bloat, while still deleting useful features.

It's interesting to me that CP/M is still being used in production environments.

One of the things I was tasked with was figuring out what to do if the one computer that runs the ledger goes down, since none of the machines made today will run CP/M out of the box; and also to figure out what to do if the ancient Okidata dot matrix printer they used to print it out ever goes south. Priner was easy -- Okidata still makes them, though they're like $900. Finding a machine that'll run dBase on CP/M was a little more complicated, but amounted to running it in an emulator and getting a second-hand Commodore 128 off eBay.

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Re: Retro Computing
By: Derision to Chai on Sun Nov 18 2018 12:36 pm

I just popped in a floppy disk into Windows 10 (latest update).
Formatting, copying, chkdsk, all still works with floppies.
I imagine Windows will one day omit the ability to work with floppies,
but it's kinda cool that it's still there. I'm honestly surprised
that they still support it, and I'm not surprised that Apple does not.

I found it a bit annoying when macOS stopped bothering with it. I mean, they've bloated the rest of the OS to Vista levels of bloat, while still deleting useful features.

Yeah, I thought it was somewhat odd (but not surprising) when Apple stopped including optical drives in their Macs. I also thought it was odd that Apple never included blu-ray drives in their Macs though - as far as I know, they only had DVD drives.

Nightfox

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Re: Retro Computing
By: Nightfox to Derision on Mon Nov 19 2018 10:13:47

Yeah, I thought it was somewhat odd (but not surprising) when Apple stopped including optical drives in their Macs. I also thought it was odd that Apple never included blu-ray drives in their Macs though - as far as I know, they only had DVD drives.

From what I understand of it, it was mostly the licensing nightmare of having a built-in method for playing Blu-Ray movies that turned them off. Jobs referred to it as a "world of hurt" or something, and focused instead on digital content, downloading or streaming movies rather than physical media.

macOS itself has the drivers to access and burn blu-ray. I had an external USB bluray that worked fine with it, and later replaced the original DVD-RW with a blu-ray burner which I use sparsely enough that I'm considering replacing it with a second hard drive. And there are some third-party apps that let you watch media on blu-ray discs, but all of those apps cost way more than something like VLC, which'll let you watch almost anything for free.

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Re: Retro Computing
By: Derision to Nightfox on Mon Nov 19 2018 03:01 pm

third-party apps that let you watch media on blu-ray discs, but all of those apps cost way more than something like VLC, which'll let you watch almost anything for free.

I've tried using VLC (on Windows) to watch blu-ray discs, but I seem to recall VLC was unable to play blu-ray.

Nightfox

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Re: Retro Computing
By: Nightfox to Derision on Mon Nov 19 2018 15:57:39

I've tried using VLC (on Windows) to watch blu-ray discs, but I seem to recall VLC was unable to play blu-ray.

Right... in order to play Blu-ray you need libraries to decode AACS, and I also think you need to have a key database for region, copyright, whatever. Even then, it'll only play discs for which it has the library and AACS keys. A lot of those just aren't available without shelling out bucks for licenses.

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