today's leftovers
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Standards/Consortia
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Right Channel Radios ☛ Learning CB Radio Codes and Lingos Used by Veterans
As a form of communication, CB radio has come to embrace its own idiosyncrasies and paradigms. In a way, it’s developed into something like its own language altogether, especially when it comes to the way CB radio codes have developed over time to aid in making communication clearer and faster. It’s always possible to mishear words over a CB, especially if you’re close to the edge of your receiver’s range, and that means CB radio users have developed shorthand code systems to make sure that confusion and miscomprehension are kept to a minimum.
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The Verge ☛ ICQ is shutting down after almost 28 years
Your ICQ number is finally shuffling off to the great beyond. Russian company VK, which has been the service’s steward since 2010, published a message Friday that simply reads, “ICQ will stop working from June 26th,” and implores users to switch to its other chat solutions.
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Tom's Hardware ☛ 90s instant messaging service shuts down after 28 years — ICQ will stop working from June 26
Once popular messaging service ICQ (short for I Seek You) will finally shut its operations on June 26, almost 28 years since its launch in 1996. The messaging platform peaked at nine million users and had 2.5 million daily active users. The number of users it was able to have globally was remarkable at the time, given that most users were on dial-ups and DSL internet was brand new, limited to a handful of countries.
AOL acquired ICQ from Mirabilis in 1998 for $407 million. In 2010, Mail.Ru, later renamed VK, acquired the platform because it was trendy in Russia. The company intended to modernize the app while making it cross-platform-compatible.
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PC Mag ☛ ICQ, One of the Oldest Instant Messengers, Is Shutting Down
VK didn’t respond to a request for comment. But the ICQ shutdown suggests the company would rather retire the app than continue spending money on it. VK operates a Facebook-like social media platform, along with VK Messenger, which has over 10 million downloads on Google Play. Still, the X/Twitter account for ICQ is teasing a comeback in some form.
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TechSpot ☛ What Ever Happened to ICQ? | TechSpot
Launched after less than two months of development by the Israeli company Mirabilis, ICQ predated and influenced many popular chat programs of the era, including AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and MSN Messenger.
Incredibly, ICQ has also outlasted its chief competitors: AIM shut down at the end of 2017, Yahoo's communications program bit the bullet in mid-2018, and Microsoft laid its Messenger client to rest in 2014.
ICQ offered several innovative features, including multi-user chat, async offline messaging, resumable file transfers, and a searchable directory.
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Openwashing
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Heather J Meeker ☛ Data Scraping Opinion Implications for Hey Hi (AI) and Open Source Copyright Issues
On May 9, 2024, an opinion was issued in the case of X v. Bright Data by the US District Court for the Northern District of California, on the topic of copyright monopoly preemption. On first blush, this opinion is important for what is says about the limited ability of social control media sites [...]
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Games
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The Arcade Blogger ☛ Bally Midway’s Stanley Jarocki
Jarocki’s influence on the industry should not be underestimated. He was the king of the Japanese licence, bringing many games over from the East and introducing them to American arcade gamers across the nation. Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Rally X to name a few, and of course he oversaw the most successful arcade game ever to be released in the United States – Ms Pac-Man.
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[Old] New York Times ☛ Pac-Man Sublicenses Extend Bally's Profits
According to Stanley W. Jarocki, vice president for marketing at Bally Manufacturing Corporation's Midway division in Chicago, which manufactured and sold some 96,000 Pac-Man arcade games in 1981, coinoperated machine sales were just the beginning.
Although the Pac-Man game was the biggest seller in the $5 billiona-year video game industry's brief history (surpassing even the legendary Space Invaders, which was also produced by Midway), the creature's performance in the sublicensing game, Mr. Jarocki believes, will earn the company even more in the long run.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Linus Åkesson ☛ Spin, Crazy World
Very keen viewers may have noticed that I've disconnected a cable in the floppy drive. This disables the spindle motor so we can hear the stepper motor more clearly.
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Stephen Smith ☛ Raspberry Pi 5 with SSD
The Raspberry Pi 5 is quite a speedy little computer, but the main bottleneck is using microSD cards for storage rather than SSD type memory drives found in most other computers. You could connect an SSD drive to the Pi via an USB port, but then this only runs at USB speed rather than full SSD speed and isn’t much better than a microSD card. The Raspberry Pi 5 added a PCI express connector with the promise that this would allow a fast way to connect SSD drives as well as other devices requiring faster data transfer rates. At the time of shipping there wasn’t a way to utilize this connector, which was too bad. There are now lots of different interface boards to allow the Raspberry Pi 5 fast interconnect with all sorts of devices.
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