Girlang's comments

On: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller

[Girlang]

The notches on 5.25 don’t identify capacity

[aidenn0 → Girlang]

Wow you're right, that was 3.5" only.

The notch could be done to trick single-sided drives into letting you flip the disk over, which is probably what I was thinking of, but TFA says most drives can't read those with this controller.

According to wikipedia 40 track diskettes could be read by most 80 track drives, but once it was written to by an 80 track drive it was typically no longer readable by a 40 track drive.

[skissane → aidenn0]

I remember our first computer (a 386SX16/20) which my Dad bought sometime around 1989/1990, started out with two 5.25 inch floppy drives – a 1.2MB drive and a 360KB drive, so we could write 360KB disks without corrupting them. (My Dad thought this was important, I guess it was somewhat back then.)

Soon he decided we needed a 3.5 inch floppy drive as well. But he didn't want to give up having both the 1.2MB and 360KB 5.25 inch drives. The existing floppy controller only supported 2 floppy drives, so he went and bought a new one which supported four floppy drives. The chassis had enough drive bays to fit all three floppies and a 40MB hard disk. We had to make some changes to CONFIG.SYS (maybe an installable device driver??) since BIOS/DOS couldn't detect more than 2 floppy drives by default.

[aidenn0 → skissane]

My first computer was a decommissioned CAD machine from my dad's work. A 12.5MHz 286. It also had two 5.25" drives in that configuration, but never thought why. Eventually installed a 1.44MB drive in place of the single density drive.

On: Garment device convertible to one or more facemasks

[Girlang]

This is a brassiere!

On: Go Ahead and Date Your Digital Assistant

[Girlang]

You can change Siri to be a man's voice in the U.S., as I did.

[c22 → Girlang]

My understanding is that Siri was intentionally chosen to be a gender agnostic name.

[sib → c22]

Have you ever met a male person who was named Siri? I've not, but I've met multiple female people by that name.

[c22 → sib]

I've never met anyone named Siri, but I did some brief research and it seems my belief was mistaken.

On: Ask HN: How were the super bowl led torches synced?

[Girlang]

Infrared.

On: Data Loss at GitLab

[Girlang]

Plus github has an agenda that has nothing to do with code, and excludes large segments of the public.

[i336_ → Girlang]

Your comment was killed (I just vouched for it) because of your unsubstantiated claims. Can you give some concrete examples of why you think this way?

On: I Had My Electronics Seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection

[Girlang]

Orlando has a massive TSA theft problem. Watch your personal belongings like a hawk.

[thecrazyone → Girlang]

Until recently I didn't know TSA stole stuff. This is just awful. Way to make an already bad reputation even worse

[aaronchall → Girlang]

That is a serious allegation - can you cite any evidence?

[hyperliner → aaronchall]

Let me Google that for you: http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/top-20-airports-tsa-theft/stor...

On: Does Google execute JavaScript?

[Girlang]

and Chrome supports Flash out of the box!

On: Security researcher gets threats over Amazon review

[Girlang]

If the product functioned, but had a security flaw like that (which doesn't reveal personal information, etc, just could allow someone else to turn your item on or off), I would have given it two stars. It is functional, and for some use-cases it could work (i.e., blocked from the outside Internet). One star would be if it didn't work, or opened a back door from your home network to China.

Still, he shouldn't cave in. The 'they'll fire me' story probably isn't true!