As a Formula 1 fan, while watching a F1 Grad Prix, I've been using real-time information feeds on https://www.formula1.com/en/f1-live.html pretty much since it was released. If memory serves me correct, that must have been around season 2008. After getting my first iPad (yes, the 1st gen one) in 2011, I went for the beautiful paid App by Soft Pauer flooding me with all kinds of information during the race. I assumed, that I had all the same information available as the TV-commentators.

In 2014 something happened. The app was same, but the publisher changed into Formula One Digital Media Limited, making it not a 3rd party software, but an official F1-product. At the same time, the free timing on the website was removed, causing a lot of commotion, as an example Why did FIA dumb-down the Live Timing on F1.com? Also, in a review (Official F1 Live Timing App 2014 reviewed), the paid app was considered very pricey and not worth the value. Years 2015 onwards, made it evident, that in loving care of the Formula One Group, they improved the app adding content, more content, improving the value and finally a TV to it. It was possible to actually watch the race via the app. All this ultimately resulted in a must-have app for every F1 fan.

This year, for Singapore weekend, they did something immensly stupid.

They changed this:

into this:

ARGH!

Did they really think nobody would notice? To put it shortly, their change was a drastical one. I ditched the new timing app after 5 minutes of failing attempts to get anything useful out of it. The people doing the design for that piece of sofware completely dropped the ball. Thy simply whipped up "something". Probably in their bright minds it was the same thing than before, it kinda looked the same, right. Obviously, they had zero idea what any form of motor racing is about. What information would be useful to anybody specatating a motor racing event was completely out of their grasp. They just published this change to App Store and went on happily.

Guess what will happen, when you take an expensive piece of yearly subscribed software and remove all the value from it. You will, but the authors of the software didn't.

IT MAKES PEOPLE MAD!

It didn't take too long (next race, to be exact), when they silently dropped the timing feature and released the old app as a spin-off titled F1 Live Timing. Obviously informing any paying customers of such a thing wasn't very high on their list of priorities. In their official statement they went for the official mumbo-jumbo: "The launch of our new F1 app didn't quite live up to your expectations, and live timing didn't deliver the great mobile F1 experience you previously enjoyed." By googling, I found tons of articles like Formula 1 makes old live timing app available again after problems.

As a friendly person, I'll offer my list of things to remember for FOM personnel in charge of those apps:

• Do not annoy paying customers. They won't pay much longer.
• If you do annoy paying customers, make sure they won't be really annoyed. They will for sure stop paying.
• If you make your paying customers mad, have the courtesy of apologizing about that.
• Also, make sure all of your paying customers know about new relevant apps, which are meant to fix your own failures.
• Improve on software design. Hire somebody who actually follows the sport to the design and testing teams.

Thank you.

Couple days ago 8pm, I got an email from Facebook. Personally, I think face book is a criminal organization and want absolutely nothing to do with the idiots. Given the nature of the email, I started investigating:

Yeah, right. Like I would create an account there. And if I would, I wouldn't use any of my proper emails. Their information gathering from non-users is criminal and they do know pretty much everything there is to know about me. Still, I wouldn't give them anything too easily.

I did confirm the time. I wasn't even using a computer when above mail was received. So, I'm claiming, it wasn't me!

Things started getting really weird, when these arrived:

Somebody from New Jersey, USA had reset the password for this newly created account. How nice of them!

Also, there was some trouble logging in. Well that can happen, when you're hacking.

Given the option in the mail, I did click the "If you didn't do this, please secure your account". The first thing they want from me is my phone number. Again, they need to steal that information from me, I'm not going to GIVE it to them. Without verified mobile number, face-jerks let me do nothing. I cannot report the security incident. I cannot request closing the account. There is absolutely no options before entering my phone number. Nobody at super-smart face book anticipated things like this to happen. I really love their service design there!

Just to make sure, I did check my email logins at my service provider. No suspicious activity there. I did reply to security@facebookmail.com regarding this security incident, but I really don't have my hopes up. If somewhere there's a nipple visible or just regular business presentation, then the jerks at FB will censor the material in 5 minutes. When something really serious happens, they don't care. Their only motivator is the stock price. Visible nipples can threaten their revenues, security incidents to so much.

My guess is, that after their last incident (see: Relax, just 30 million Facebook accounts were compromised after all), there is lot of people wanting to crack the site. To me it looks like, somebody is progressing with the attempt and using my mail account at it.

Now that my new PC is done (see my previoius post and Larpdog's Twitch https://www.twitch.tv/videos/319110553):

It's finally time to make some space to my old junk storage. I found two of my previus PCs there, which finally need to go to SER.

When reading this, please understand that I do own other PCs too. Also, I have owned more PCs than I currently run and these two heading out, its just that I don't have those ones anymore to write a blog post about.

New PC - 2018 - Reference

Just to get the difference, I'll post couple bad still images from my new PC:

Both pictures are actually crappy for a number of reasons. First, a Noctua NH-D15 CPU-cooler is huge. It weighs 1.3 kg and is 16 cm tall measured from top of CPU to top of Noctua's fans. It takes 16 x 15 x 15 cm space from the PC case, just to make sure there is proper air flow for the heatpipes coming from the CPU. For photography, it means everything else is hidden by it. Ufffff!

Then Asus motherboard has an aluminium shielding covering everything. That's most likely for EMC protection and heat management. In a properly cooled PC-case, black aluminium transfers heat out of the motherboard faster. Also, a Fractal Design PC-case is pitch black. What I have here is a black picture of blackess on black.

Finally, also the graphics card is quite a beast. It takes 30 cm in lenght and is over 5 cm thick. Yet again covering everything inside the PC, that would be worth looking at. So, this 2018 PC is visually quite boring. Maybe that's why people love having some sort of light show inside their transparent case. Ufffff! My case doesn't have any transparent parts in it, no PC-disco for me, thanks.

PC 1 - Pentium 4 from years 2002-2008

This one I used in couple of hardware configurations for many many years. Mostly with Windows XP.

After serving me well, I decommissioned this around end of year 2008. There are changed files in early 2009, but it looks like I haven't used this PC since. It has been mostly gathering dust in storage.

CPU

Spec:

• Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor 2.40 GHz, 512K Cache, 533 MHz FSB
• Launch: 2002/Q1
• Cores: 1
• 512KiB Cache
• 2.4 GHz
• 533 MHz FSB
• Socket 478

Details are at Ark Intel.com https://ark.intel.com/products/27438/Intel-Pentium-4-Processor-2-40-GHz-512K-Cache-533-MHz-FSB

It was my last PC not running 64-bit AMD64-instruction set at the end of 32-bit era Mighty powerful at the time, still less powerful than my iPhone 8 today. It looks like this with Intel's boxed CPU-cooler:

Board

The motherboard for this project is an Asus P4PE:

More details are at Asus' website: https://www.asus.com/supportonly/P4PE-XTE/HelpDesk_Manual/

Graphics card

Given the fact, that I never like putting enormous amounts of money into GPU's, so this one has a Club-3D Radeon 9800 PRO 128MB DDR GDDR:

The manufacturer's fan on top of the GPU was a piece of junk. I had to replace it in a year or so. Also, note the S-Video output between standard VGA D15 and DVI-D. Before HDMI, hooking up a PC to an everyday TV was tricky. S-Video was one of the supported connectors in TVs having multiple SCART-connectors.

Also looking at the pics of the CPU-cooler and the graphics card make me laugh. There is almost no cooling at all in neither. Also the simpliness of graphics card is something that really sticks out. Modern cooling, especially in graphics cards, looks HUGE!

One notable thing to mention, is that this graphics card connected to the MoBo via AGP or Accelerated Graphics Port and having DirectX 9.0 hardware acceleration making it pretty fast (at the time). If you've never heard of AGP, don't worry, it was just an attempt to make GPUs connect to CPU/RAM-package faster. It was little bit faster than PCI, but not much. Obviously, it wasn't such a great invention and was quickly surpassed by PCIe, which seems to stand the test of time. For curious ones, I googled up some specs for the card: https://icecat.biz/en-in/p/club3d/cga-p988tvd/graphics-cards-RADEON+9800+PRO+128MB+DDR-113233.html

PC 2 - Pentium from years 1994-1998

Ok, this baby is an old one! To make it really ancient, it even runs IBM OS/2 as operating system. Those padawans who don't know what an OS/2 is, just hit to Wikipedia for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2. During the active years in servie, I recall upgrading the CPU once, doubling the RAM once and swapping the GPU-card to a faster one. This is the oldest hardware I have, and didn't create any records at the time. For anything newer, I have proper records of the history in my wiki.

CPU

Spec:

• Intel® Pentium® Processor 150 MHz, 60 MHz FSB
• Launch: 1996/01
• Cores: 1
• 8 + 8 KiB Cache
• 150 MHz
• 60 MHz FSB
• Socket 7

Details are at Ark Intel.com https://ark.intel.com/products/49958/Intel-Pentium-Processor-150-MHz-60-MHz-FSB

This old puppy has one distinguishing feature: it is Spectre/Meltdown-proof! As it doesn't have any kind of prediction or jump analysis in it, it cannot be fooled. Actually, there is nothing in it to make it run faster. It is a product of an era when everything was made faster by adding megaherz (note: not gigaherz) to base frequency.

The installed CPU with Intel's boxed cooler looks like this:

Please, notice how a heatsink and a fan on top of it are almost 20 mm high!

Also, don't confuse this Pentium to any of the modern day CPUs Intel calls Pentium. This one was really one of the first ever manufactured Pentiums. Initially this had a slower Pentium in it (I think 90 MHz), just getting an upgrade was inexpensive at the time.

Board

Motherboard is a Asus P/I-P55T2P4. Some specs of it can be found from: https://www.asus.com/supportonly/PI-P55T2P4/HelpDesk_CPU

Layout of the board is:

Note how this is clearly a PCI-era board, but it still has three ISA-slots in it. And please, don't confuse PCI for a modern PCI-express. That's probably why, the word "conventional" is used in Wikipedia article of PCI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_PCI

GPU-card

Oh, this is a trip to memory lane. Card is a S3 Trio64V+. Some information about this relic is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Trio and http://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/cpu/item/359-s3-trio64v.

The card looks like this:

Note how I have Scotch Tape on two holes of the mounting bracket. Reason is simple, back in the 1990s we didn't know how air in a PC case should flow and we had it wrong. Sucking air trough graphics cards (or any other necessary components) is not smart and that's why its done differently today.

This particular card first appeared in 1995 and I've been using it for couple of years around that time. S3 was a really successful graphics company and their products were really good at the time. Also, at the time companies did design and manufacture their own cards. Today manufacturers just release specs and reference designs for the actual manufacturers to do the heavy lifting. Also, for old geezers like me, it is soooo weird to see a graphics card to be running just-the-regular PCI.

For brief history of GPUs in the 90s, read something like From Voodoo to GeForce: The Awesome History of 3D Graphics @ PC Gamer. Just like CPUs, also GPUs have gone giant leaps during past 20 years.

If you've never heard of company called S3 Graphics, go educate your self at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Graphics. Brief highlights are January 1989, founding of the company, November 2000 at point where S3 had officially been outran by competition, they changed their name to SONICBlue. And finally March 2003, when filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. They had their moment, but given the fierce competition by Nvidia and Ati and Matrox and many others, they just couldn't keep up with the technological advances fast enough to be able to offer interesting products to customers. Today, what remains of S3 is part of HTC, the Chinese cellphone manufacturer.

Ok, the junk's gone - What then?

Yes, it cleaing up doesn't end here. I still have ~1000 floppy discs in storage. Now that PCs having a 5.25" or 3.5" drive are gone, I'll keep cleaning some more. Maybe I should take a peek into some of those floppies to see if there is anything valuable in them.

Also, I have the images of the OS/2 hard drives. Next I need to figure how to read them.

Next Saturday, on 6th October, I'll be joining (again) with Larpdog on his Twitch-channel https://www.twitch.tv/larpdog to assemble my new PC. The stream language will be Finnish and we will start on 17 Finnish summer time, making it 14 UTC.

This is something similar we did last year (see the post about it).
Unfortunately Twitch-videos are kept only for 14 days, so that recording link has gone sour.

Update:

Link to the stream is https://www.twitch.tv/videos/319110553