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I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

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Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#191

Post by soraminazuki »

justin66 wrote: post #185
philpem wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had no idea who this guy was but did a web search to fill myself in and all this turned up ... https://lists.vcfed.org/pipermail/vcf-midatlantic/2019-Decem... Allegedly he'd quit three times in one year: https://lists.vcfed.org/pipermail/vcf-midatlantic/2019-Decem... https://lists.vcfed.org/pipermail/vcf-midatlantic/2019-Decem... I dunno, the whole damn situation stinks, but it feels like there's a hell of a lot mo…

> the outcome of that was that Jason opted to berate and belittle me. If when communicating with him you trivialized the loss of a couple dozen large containers of historical IEEE-related documents that he saved, packed up and rented a truck to deliver as "just a box of magazines," I bet he did berate you.

It might've been worse than "just a box of magazines." Here's one not so subtly comparing it to garbage.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40021590

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#192

Post by rightbyte »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #178
rightbyte wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That screwdriver I'm keeping even though it doesn't work well? It's going in the landfill anyway. Might as well go tomorrow, as in 50 years. Hold your horses. You need that one for abusive usecases. My favourite flathead is both bent and chipped.

Sure, but I don't think I need two phillips' heads that would be more useful as dagger side-arms from the 15th century than they would be for screwing or unscrewing anything. I finally got fed up and replaced them and threw them away after I grabbed two in a row that didn't actually get the job done.

Ye that's true. You should not hoard too much stuff so it gets in the way.

I got like 12 old worn out tshirts I save since I want to use them for painting. But I never actually use them when I paint ...

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#193

Post by textfiles »

xoa wrote: post #177
amichlin wrote: post #160

Again, former VCFederation (Mid Atlantic and National) volunteer here. I was only a volunteer when this donation came in and was part of the team that made sure this donation got a good home later on. No one involved at either end of this is still actively involved with VCF, so the OP is taking an organization task to because of a lack of institutional knowledge. I offered to privately explain what really happened on…

> Again, former VCFederation (Mid Atlantic and National) volunteer here. I was only a volunteer when this donation came in and was part of the team that made sure this donation got a good home later on. No one involved at either end of this is still actively involved with VCF, so the OP is taking an organization task to because of a lack of institutional knowledge. I offered to privately explain what really happened…

No post body was provided.

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#194

Post by ajsnigrutin »

jrumbut wrote: post #146
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But all these things are precious historical documents of the development of technology and of course ourselves. They are vitally important to keep. Sure, but we can digitize them, offer them online, for free, for everyone, with OCR even with search features... There's no need to keep moldy originals anymore, unless they're "special" to someone (=someone wants to keep them). Eg. there's a really nice collection of…

> we can digitize them We can, but will we? And will we maintain those collections? There is some resilience in having collections scattered here, there, and everywhere in addition to having a substantial chunk of history reliant on one charity that is constantly under threat due to copyright law. History suggests that at some point the Internet Archive will be lost. Additionally, a digital copy doesn't preserve the…

Sure, shit will happen, but it's much easier to preserve digital media than it is for physical media, especially when shit happens. Disk space is cheaper and cheaper while physical space is getting more and more expensive for the most of us. Also, physical media can't be duplicated (noone will actually print out copies of those old magazines, and even if they did, it wouldn't be the same).

I know you lose the experience of paper, but that experience is limited to the few that have the actual copies. Digital is available to everyone. I see more issues with more modern media, where eg. videogames cannot be played at all anymore, due to always-online drm and requiring backend servers that the publishers are shutting down (so even pirate cracks cannot help). For comparison, you can fit the whole NES and SNES library on a usb stick with space left over.

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#195

Post by telmnstr »

theodric wrote: post #95
wmf wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point is that it's already been digitized. All of it. The stuff in your attic isn't a valuable historic artifact; it's deep in the trough of no value.

I may have the only omnibus of PET Benelux Exchange magazines out there, which seem to be entirely unavailable online. There are exceptions.

Scan and share!

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#196

Post by weregiraffe »

lmpdev wrote: post #77
Sakos wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In which languages? And who has access to the digital copies? And how complete? This isn't as clear cut or solved as you make it out to be.

This is why I data hoard I have friends who are Serbian living elsewhere and are about to start a family They have no Serbian children’s media afaik (and it’s not exactly easy to find) I found ~200GB of Serbian dubbed children’s media someone painstakingly digitised on /t/ I’m keeping it for when they eventually have those kids Unless shown otherwise, assume nothing is archived correctly, completely or at all

What will happen to your hoard after you are gone?

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#198

Post by Brian_K_White »

ghaff wrote: post #174
Brian_K_White wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throwing out your own stuff, that was only ever yours, not merely given into your custody, has absolutely no bearing or relation to this story.

I think you're way more optimistic about the record-keeping and level of organization of a group like this than I am.

I am very clearly agreeing with Jason that the organization has demonstrated itself to be entirely disorganized. The opposite of optimistic.

I have addressed the excuse of turnover already. It isn't one.

But even if it were an excuse, that still goes poof when the organization discovers that they dropped a ball that someone else trusted them with and handled something so poorly, and tries to deny any cuplability and even tries to bash Jason back, instead of saying "Shit, we didn't know because we're all new here since then. We feel terrible that this happened!"

That would cost zero cents to have done, but it was still too much.

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#199

Post by epakai »

lupire wrote: post #143
epakai wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's intensely invested in it, and sometimes comes off frustrated at the lack of interest (based on what I see on mastodon, happen to share instances). The suggestion of malware was probably somewhat offensive as it is antithical to bringing disparate retro system users together. Sorry that happened, but I think he is an unusual case. Hoping to provide some understanding for why it played out that way even though you…

Security through being offended at the idea of needing security is rarely a winning plan.

They seem to be ESP32 based wifi modems talking to 8-bit machines over a variety of interfaces. I don't think exploits compromising the 8-bit machines are a serious concern or even likely. Presumably the question was just being playful curious.

The IoT-style modems, maybe, but that wasn't what was asked. I'm not sure what the architecture is like for the network so I can't really say if there are security concerns there.

Re: I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

#200

Post by philpem »

philpem wrote: post #123
wolpoli wrote: post #16

> I also want to take this moment to clearly state that Evan Koblentz, the director of the Vintage Computer Federation for many years, who took the original donation, had absolutely no say or part in this pulping of historical magazines, having been driven out of the organization years before. Sounds like new staff came in and they decided to clean things up, but decided to keep the plastic boxes.

If they're still useful, why throw them away?

To clarify, I'm talking about the boxes. As in why throw good boxes away. Actionpackers are tough little brutes, and much sturdier than cardboard.
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