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Unix v4 Tape Found

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Re: Unix v4 Tape Found

#81

Post by ekjhgkejhgk »

lewiscollard wrote: post #75
ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on mathstodon.xyz (mastodon for maths) and haven't seen any of that. So I guess it's the people you subscribe to. But I have the freedom to decide what I want to consume.

> I'm on mathstodon.xyz (mastodon for maths) and haven't seen any of that. So I guess it's the people you subscribe to. I was on an automotive-focused instance. I did see a lot of that. > But I have the freedom to decide what I want to consume. As do I; I had the freedom to delete my account, thus avoiding the need for any active measures to make my life free of schizoposting.

TIL there's many Charlie Kirk fans amongst fans of cars?

Re: Unix v4 Tape Found

#82

Post by lewiscollard »

ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #81
lewiscollard wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm on mathstodon.xyz (mastodon for maths) and haven't seen any of that. So I guess it's the people you subscribe to. I was on an automotive-focused instance. I did see a lot of that. > But I have the freedom to decide what I want to consume. As do I; I had the freedom to delete my account, thus avoiding the need for any active measures to make my life free of schizoposting.

TIL there's many Charlie Kirk fans amongst fans of cars?

If this is intended to accuse me of being a Charlie Kirk fan I can only conclude that you either did not read what I wrote (in which case, you should refrain from replying to it), or you are being dishonest on purpose.

Re: Unix v4 Tape Found

#83

Post by rtkwe »

nish__ wrote: post #79
rtkwe wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitionally if they're "pushing it near the top" they're not only using FIFO, there's a priority ordering involved... My guess is there's stuff in progress and maybe they need to arrange access to or setup the readers for a tape that old and of potentially unknown format.

Yes it's probably better to finish in progress stuff first.

So much of this is old and potentially delicate and they don't have unlimited space to work in so they'd have to pack up some other in progress digitization project to setup the tape flux digitizer and maybe have to arrange to get the correct one for this type of tape too.

Re: Unix v4 Tape Found

#84

Post by superxpro12 »

dmix wrote: post #25
reactordev wrote: post #12

Please let there be an ultimate force in the universe that spared this tape from tape degradation and/or magnetization that it can be read and extracted into a raw dump fs that we can preserve for all time. (fingers crossed) Tapes from back then haven’t held up over the years. It all depends on the environment it was stored in.

I remember reading we're nearing a timeframe where VHS and cassette tapes made in the <=1980s will start degrading pretty seriously. So if you own lots of VHS or camcorder tapes you have a relatively short window to save old family videos... or just deal with fuzzy images and bad audio.

I recently went through this. The problem is finding VCR's... there arent any.

And then the ones with manual tracking are even more rare, or out of the price range, which you likely need as the tracks degrade.

Re: Unix v4 Tape Found

#85

Post by CamperBob2 »

ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #62
CamperBob2 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no Preferences button. If there is, they've either hidden it well, or it's not visible without a login. There should simply be a button -- a conspicuous one -- that toggles the color scheme. It's trivial to add such a button. It doesn't need to be tied to a user ID; it doesn't even need to set a cookie. The fact that no such button exists is a choice someone made, a poor choice that disregards decades of huma…

I'm on two instances and both have a Preferences button. Is it possible that your instance moved it away from the default place? What instance are you on, I can help you find what you need to click.

It's the link in the article. But I'm diverting the thread at this point and arguably making this a worse place by doing so. The other replies indicate that the question has been raised and is under consideration, which is all I can ask given that I'm not prepared to jump on Github and send them a PR myself. Thanks for your reply and the rest of the input people have offered!

Re: Unix v4 Tape Found

#86

Post by WorldMaker »

easyThrowaway wrote: post #58
retrac wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be able to use that old floppy drive. But you won't be able to use that old Pentium machine the drive is in. Because you will need several hundred gigabytes of RAM and a very fast IO bus. The gold standard today for archiving magnetic media is to make a flux image. The media is treated as if it were an analog recording and sampled at such a high rate that the smallest details are captured. Interpretation is…

'that were properly made' is doing a lot of work in that sentence. I've got a bunch of Sega Saturn and AKAI/Zero-G sample cds that are basically unreadable already due to disc rot. There was a lot of cheaply made optical media floating around in the late '90s.

Also we've started seeing some of the first wave of "properly made" CDs from the 1970s/1980s degrade. 45-50 years is a good, long run, but it is certainly not "forever".

Re: Unix v4 Tape Found

#87

Post by WorldMaker »

ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #72
lewiscollard wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was on Mastodon for three years. I deleted my account. When I found out that Charlie Kirk was murdered, my second thought was "well, best create yet another filter on Mastodon so I don't have to watch people celebrate Charlie Kirk being murdered" and when I caught myself having that thought I realised that being on Mastodon was a net negative for my wellbeing. (I didn't like the guy either, by the way, or at least…

I'm on mathstodon.xyz (mastodon for maths) and haven't seen any of that. So I guess it's the people you subscribe to. But I have the freedom to decide what I want to consume.

From early in my Mastodon journey I made it something of rule to not follow anyone who doesn't CW politics, and mute or block many of the accounts that post politics on main unfiltered.

I don't need that many filters if people make good use of Subject lines (I do like to joke that CW is the short Welsh for Cwbject.) It means I don't see a lot of "celebrities" in my feed that cross-post from one of the other sites and doesn't add CWs because their client or cross-poster doesn't support them, but that seems to be so much the better. It also often means I remove Boost privileges in my feeds from people that will boost stuff without CWs.

That sort of curation is a lot of little bits of work over years. I can definitely understand the feeling that the easiest way to catch up on that curation is to just quit. It's why I quit Twitter (when it was still Twitter). It's why I don't bother with BlueSky or Threads. Mastodon gives me enough curation tools and I've used them for long enough that I feel happy with Mastodon.

Re: Unix v4 Tape Found

#88

Post by satiated_grue »

accrual wrote: post #9

> It is a '70s 1200ft 3M tape, likely 9 track, which has a pretty good chance of being recoverable. Not old enough to have this kind of knowledge or confidence. I wonder if instead one day I'll be helping some future generation read old floppies, CDs, and IDE/ATA disks *slaps top of AT tower*.

Take a look at floppy disk controllers like the AppleSauce, Greaseweazle, and Kryoflux for preserving floppies by recording at the flux-transition level.

Re: Unix v4 Tape Found

#89

Post by gf000 »

avar wrote: post #68
gf000 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, just replace micro-SD card with HDDs and it is pretty much how it works in the real life for absolutely massive data sizes. Also, packing it up "taking forever" is irrelevant, that's latency, not bandwidth.

I tried setting that up, but now the trucker's union is refusing to talk to me, citing concerns that the platters will all spin up due to road vibration, derailing the truck in a ditch due to the cumulative gyroscopic forces. They remain unconvinced that chatGPT has told me it "should be fine", and have inquired as to whether I don't have better things to do than trying to win increasingly obscure and contrived argum…

AFAIK it's discontinued since, but AWS had a service where you could send data via a huge truck https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-snowmobile-move-exabyte... , it's absolutely not a fantasy.

Re: Unix v4 Tape Found

#90

Post by glenneroo »

lewiscollard wrote: post #82
ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TIL there's many Charlie Kirk fans amongst fans of cars?

If this is intended to accuse me of being a Charlie Kirk fan I can only conclude that you either did not read what I wrote (in which case, you should refrain from replying to it), or you are being dishonest on purpose.

I don't see how you made that leap. It was directly in reference to your reply:

> I was on an automotive-focused instance. I did see a lot of that.

They were more or less just rewriting what you wrote.

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