Back then most emulators were just an executable and a couple smaller files. Throw a full library of games on a ZIP disk, head to your friend's house to play games.

Before iomega's Zip there were the Bernoulli and SyQuest drives.

Bernoulli drives inflated under spin and the head made an air cushion to push that inflated package away from it to avoid crashes. If the disc spun down, then the media moved away from the head. I have no experience with these so I don't know how well this worked in practice.

SyQuest was just a removable HDD platter. It had pretty poor read and write times because the head couldn't be as close to the disc as in a real HDD. They were however very reliable. They had 44 and then 88MB versions in a 5.25" cartridge, and then 135MB and 230MB in 3.5". Then I think some other larger capacity as well before the market chose iomega because it was cheaper, then rejected it because zip drivers were flaky, and went to CD-R which was also becoming cheap.

This is reminiscent of Sega v. Accolade. Do they have published requirements for the use of their logo? In which case this license requirement would be an attempt to graft those terms onto the AGPL?

It's not news that fructose is believed to be more of a devil in your diet than sucrose. But they commonly appear together. Here's a table I found of the ratio in some fruits. Then there's "HFCS" or High Fructose Corn Syrup, which typically has either 42% or 55% fructose, the rest being glucose (and about a quarter water.) As there are a number of fruits with a higher percentage of fructose than HFCS, the problem isn't really the percentage, it's the quantity.

The biggest problem with HFCS isn't that it's used to make things sweet, although regular corn syrup is mostly glucose which is easier to metabolize, it's that it's used to make ultraprocessed foods shelf stable by replacing some of the fats in them with HFCS and citric acid. HFCS doesn't go rancid.

Slashdot is recently at an all-time high in bootlicking for not at all mysterious but trite and depressing reasons

Slashdot is a place for nerds to argue about stories that somehow make it to the front page through a) the storm of shit which is submitted and b) the process of piquing the interest of the editors. It is a waste of time by definition, my friend, and it always has been. We don't come here to be constructive.

I don't think that a driving actor is what's needed here. In illustration I point to the AI-generated psuedo-George Carlin special "I'm Glad I'm Dead". It is not the equal to or a substitute for a genuine Carlin performance, but it is an effective rendition of one of Carlin's styles. Normally he'd have bits in several different signature styles in a given special, and over the years he came to favor rants and lectures. The fake special does in my opinion a fairly convincing job of providing an emulation of this style only.

If a director were involved in the process of producing the content at a level nearer than 40,000 feet, they could direct the AI team to produce performances with emulations of specific emotions. But somewhere in the mix there's got to be people who understand how to ask the computer for what the director wants, and it's grossly underappreciated how uncommon this is in general. Most people aren't good even at coming up with search terms, let alone AI prompts. Especially with everyone thinking they should guess what the user wants instead of listening to them, tricking software into giving you a useful search result has become its own field.

I'm not here to apologize for the AI slop, I think it's a naked money grab with no artistic value, both overall and also in this case.

That said: Having no artistic value doesn't separate it in any way even from some artistic projects that people tried hard on, let alone your average mass-market focus group-driven cynical schlock.

I think you alluded to this in there somewhere, but my point is that you can't look to the mass market for artistic value. Sometimes some of it makes it in there somehow because that makes it more salable, but expected ROI is really the only thing that determines what hits the big screen whether it's slopped out by AI or committee.

Indeed, LS120 was unreliable and therefore worthless except that you got a 2x or 4x speed floppy drive. If you had a lot of floppies to image, that was a nice feature. Only a few of the late models read floppies at 4x speed.

I had just about every kind of Zip 100 drive. The original dark purple external parallel and SCSI versions, the internal ATA and SCSI, translucent USB... They all get the same click of death problem eventually. I also had a SyQuest 135 (and the 44 before it, both in SCSI) and never had any problems with that. All the printers had both so they could take people's files, and I don't mean printer like a box on your counter, I mean like a "print house" but nobody in publishing calls them that.

Now you can stick your old SATA SSD in a $3 USB3 dongle... I have such attached to my router for downloads. I don't miss the removable spinning media stuff even a little bit. What a fucking hassle.

I hope you find something good soon.

I've certainly never formatted removable media in NTFS. That sounds like a way to make your life more difficult than necessary.

Unfortunately, it was all of our responsibility to make sure our neighbors didn't turn out to be uneducated assholes, and we collectively failed. As it turns out, abdicating that responsibility to a department of education in a far-away land didn't actually satisfy the need.

He planned at losing, but being the colossal loser he is...he accidentally snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. He's such a loser he can't even lose right.

Do you people even listen to yourselves?

If tickets were an auction, the problem would instantly solve itself. You could even still have a secondary market for last minute buyers. And the extra revenue would go to the venue/artists, rather than a random scalper.... if those even exist anymore. I expect it's more likely Ticketmaster themselves selling them as resell at a 3x markup.