Update 2024-03-27: Greatly expanded the "Samples" page and renamed it to "Glossary".
Update 2024-04-04: Added 5 million mid-2011 posts from the k47 post dump. Browse (mostly) them here.
Update 2024-04-07: Added ~400 October 2003 posts from 4chan.net. Browse them here.
Welcome to Oldfriend Archive, the official 4chan archive of the NSA. Hosting ~170M text-only 2003-2014 4chan posts (mostly 2006-2008).
To function at all, a computer needs an operating system program. Some operating systems require users to type in commands to tell the computer what they want to do.
Many computers use a graphical interface or point-and-click interface such as Windows. Icons are symbols representing the different peripherals, programs, and files. Functions are activated by selecting a particular icon with the mouse.
Some interfaces allow plug-and-play, the possibility of connecting new hardware to the computer without having to adjust or configure the system to take the new hardware into account: the interface program recognises the hardware automatically.
Programs for specific tasks are applications.
Applications include:
database software allowing information to be stored, added to, sorted, and analysed.
spreadsheets for calculations to be performed on numbers presented in rows and columns, for example in financial forecasting.
wordprocessing on a wordprocessor that permits texts to be entered, checked, changed, and printed. Desktop publishing or DTP takes this one step further by allowing the production of attractive documents of near-professional quality.
Vital applications that have great commercial success are killer applications or killer apps.
New software that is announced, but that appears late or not at all is, informally, vapourware.
The quality of the operating system determines how useful the computer is. The more effective it is, the more programs it can run at once and the more efficiently it uses the finite resources of the processor.
... Microsoft, the company that gave the world the ubiquitous Window graphical interface.
Windows popularised the mouse-driven point-and-click interface first seen on the Apple Macintosh.
Files and programs are arranged into icons so that user can see at a glance what files are available and what programs are running.
PC games required users to enter complicated DOS commands to configure audio, video and graphics cards. The newly 'plug and play' capability for Windows 95 stems from a new collection of Microsoft programs called DirectX that solves the memory problems of previous Windows versions.
In the 1980s the firm's applications for its own operating system sold poorly. Lotus, Wordperfect and Borland became the leading suppliers of (respectively) spreadsheets, wordprocessors and database software.
The spread of desktop publishing means many students now work on exactly the same Quark Express software as the professionals.
Microsoft has become a world leader in 'vapourware', new software announced long before it is ready for market, then delayed for months as the company eliminates bugs and changes specifications.
Learn, ride the data line into the box, break free of the immunity of the anti and hot wallZ, design, develop and inject the file of sinners, down goes the wallZ, exit the gui and shoot for the terminal #, up comes a signal, seems troubling, wait.... did you forget your proxy..........knock knock......judge asks why the us servers, now sitting in prison writing c on a napkin.
Have YOU! washed your handS? include <water.h> include <soap.h> include <YOU.h>
hey guys, my story goes liek this: ive sold a code to the game league of legends, the code is worth abotu 130 us dollars and ive been scammed by a guy who allegidly did successfull trades on reddit before. all i have is his skype, can u guys help me out somehow to mess up hos internet and make him pay? for me its a lot of money, also sorry for my bad english. i dont want to do bad things but might as well retun the favour..
Okay, I'm just coming out of the shitter of the Australian education system now. In year 9, students across my country received these free laptops made by Lenovo - pretty decent for basic tasks, not good for games or any of that but whatever.
At the end of a student's schooling life, they give you the laptop. It's a free fucking laptop. But as soon as you sign your name and download the clean OS, free of all that government blocking shit, everything goes to hell. That Windows 7 security upgrade that fucked up a bunch of computers? Hit my shitbook twice. Had to take it in for re-imaging twice. And now some shit's happened again. and I can't fix it.
There's no disc drive on these. No fucking disc drive. I can't burn a Windows 7 disc to repair my system, because I can't run it on the laptop. Instead, I have to go through all this trouble to install an ISO onto a USB drive and run that to hopefully fix that problem. Whereas it'd take about half an hour if that to burn a disc, the process of repurposing a USB drive to run this ISO has taken half an hour - for ONE HALF of it to be scanned for bad sectors. It's a free laptop, but is it worth doing all this bullshit just to keep it running? Would it have been so hard to add a disc drive, even a fucking CD drive, in the event of a fucking boot failure?
Fuck Windows. fuck the Australian government. Fuck Lenovo.
Thousands of Apple faithful expected for birthday bash this weekend
MACPAINT: Curator Adam Rosen writing 'Happy 30th Birthday' using version 1 of MacPaint on an original 128-kilobyte Mac.
ORIGINAL: Curator Adam Rosen booting up an original 128-kilobyte Mac at the Vintage Mac Museum in Malden, Massachusetts. The logo for the original 128-kilobyte Macintosh computer is displayed at the museum.
Decades before changing the world with iPhones and iPads, Apple transformed home computing with the Macintosh.
The friendly desktop machine referred to as the "Mac" and importantly, the ability to control it by clicking on icons with a "mouse", opening computing to non-geeks in much the same way that touchscreens later allowed almost anyone to get instantly comfortable with smartphones or tablets.
The Macintosh computer, introduced 30 years ago today, was at the core of a legendary rivalry between late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Microsoft mastermind Bill Gates.
Thousands of Apple faithful are expected for a birthday party this weekend in a performing arts in Silicon Valley, not far from the company's headquarters in the city of Cupertino, California.
"The Mac was a quantum leap forward," early Apple employee Randy Wigginton told AFP.
"THAT'S COOL"
He said: "We didn't invent everything, but we did make everything very accessible and smooth. It was the first computer people would play with and say, 'That's cool.'"
Prior to the Jan 24, 1984, unveiling of the Mac with its "graphical user interface", computers were workplace machines commanded with text typed in what seemed like a foreign language to those who were not software programmers.
The man remembered today as a marketing magician was a terrified 27-year-old when he stepped on stage to unveil the Mac, then chief executive John Sculley said of Mr Jobs in a post at tech news website CNET.
Said Mr Sculley: "He rehearsed over and over every gesture, word, and facial expression. Yet, when he was out there on stage, he made it all look so spontaneous."
There was a drive to keep the Mac price within reach of consumers in a market where computers costing US$10,000 or more were typical.
While clicking an on-screen icon to open a file appeared simple, memory and processing demands were huge for the computing power of that era.
"Every time you move that mouse, you are redrawing the screen," Mr Daniel Kottke of the original Mac team said. "It is almost like video."
The original vision of launching a Macintosh with 64 kilobytes of RAM and a US$1,000 price gave way to introducing one with 128 kilobytes of RAM at US$2,500.
Mr Kottke said: "The Macintosh brought a new level of accessibility for personal computing to a much wider market in the same way the iPad did 25 years later."
The release of "hypercard" is credited with inspiring fanatical loyalty to Macs.
Said Mr Kottke: "It was the idea that you could create a page on your screen and create links to other pages. You could have all your computers networked to share data; it was like private Internet."
The rivalry between Microsoft and Apple has yielded to the mobile age, with Google and its Android operating system targeted as the new nemesis as lifestyles centre on smartphones and tablet computers.
The original boxy Macintosh, with a mouth-like slit below the screen for "floppy" data disks, has evolved into a line that boasts slim, powerful laptops and a cylindrical Mac Pro desktop model.
Said Mr Wigginton: "I am thankful to have been a part of it. Once you go through an experience like that, and it was extremely painful, you look back and every sacrifice is absolutely worth it. It is when Apple leapfrogs in technology that they succeed."
The FAQ here is a little vague on some points: FAQ says short word. Must it be a word or can it be a random string? Max length? Case sensitive? Forbidden characters? (I assume # is one) Link to more in depth info?
Guys I'm looking for a new monitor, around 222/24 inch would be great. My budget isn't that great though, I don't wish to spend more then €100(135.57$ or £82.6). Anyone can direct me to some sites or whatever?
Dr Kwabena Boahen of Stanford University holding a biologically inspired processor, which was built using a new computing system based on the biological nervous system.
PALO ALTO (California) - Computers have entered the age when they are able to learn from their own mistakes, a development that is about to turn the digital world on its head.
The first commercial version of the new kind of computer chip is scheduled to be released next year. Not only can it automate tasks that now require painstaking programming - for example, moving a robot's smoothly and efficiently - but it can also sidestep and even tolerate errors, potentially making the term "computer crash" obsolete.
The new computing approach, already in use by some large technology companies, is based on the biological nervous system, specifically on how neurons react to stimuli and connect with other neurons to interpret information. It allows computers to absorb new information while carrying out a task, and adjust what they do based on the changing signals.
In coming years, the approach will make possible a new generation of artificial intelligence systems that will perform some functions that humans do with ease: see, speak, listen, navigate, manipulate and control. That can hold enormous consequences for tasks like facial and speech recognition, navigation and planning, which are still in elementary stages and rely heavily on human programming.
Designers say the computing style can clear the way for robots that can safety walk and drive in the physical world, although a thinking or conscious computer, a staple of science fiction, is still far off on the digital horizon.
"We're moving from engineering computing systems to something that has many of the characteristics of biological computing," said Dr Larry Smarr, an astrophysicist who directs the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, one of many research centres devoted to developing these new kinds of computer circuits.
Conventional computers are limited by what they have been programmed to do. Computer vision systems, for example, only "recognise" objects that can be identified by the statistics-oriented algorithms programmed into them. An algorithm is like a recipe, a set of step-by-step instructions to perform a calculation.
But last year, Google researchers were able to get a machine-learning algorithm, known as a neural network, to perform an identification task without supervision. The network scanned a database of 10 million images, and in doing so trained itself to recognise cats.
In June, the company said it had used those neural network techniques to develop a new search service to help customers find specific photos more accurately.
The new approach, used in hardware and software, is being driven by the explosion of scientific knowledge about the brain.
Dr Kwabena Boahen, a computer scientist who leads Stanford University's Brains in Silicon research programme, said that was also its limitation, as scientists are far from fully understanding how brains function.
"We have no clue," he said. "I'm an engineer, and I build things. There are these highfalutin theories, but give me one that will let me build something."
