Need.For.Speed.Underground.2 Disk 2 Vip Hack
Beatrice Pfliger
A few years ago I took a job as an intern at the college I go to. They have this program where students who have a lot of free time on their hands can work as lab assistants when they aren't having classes, and though we were not paid for it, the hours we spent there counted towards extracurricular activities.
The labs were a desolate place during afternoons, so a lot of those extracurricular activities went into playing Need for Speed Underground 2 and Counter Strike with other four lab assistants. By evening, though, right before classes, the labs were full. Most of the assistance we did involved explaining to business and law students that they can't use their hotmail login to log into the lab network and vice versa, or how to place an acute accent on a vowel (such as the '' in "resum").
We had some house rules in the labs, and chiefly among them was that all porn is forbidden in the lab. In theory we should handle people caught browsing through porn sites first by giving them a verbal warning, then a written one, then telling it to the dean. In practice, though, it was much more fun and efficient to harass them by exposing them loudly, sending a NET SEND message to their machines saying the porn site had stolen their credit card data and, in some rare cases, threatening to tell it to their parents (and in one case, wife).
There was one user, though, who deserves some sort of honorable mention. We noticed this guy was always saving something in a bunch of floppy disks. He usually brought ten at a time to the lab. Some of us felt pity for this, and I even considered walking him to a store to buy a flash drive (which are sold even in drugstores around here for crying out loud). Anyway, you already know what he was saving on those disks from the title of the thread, but back then we figured he was bringing homework from home. Then one day he asked some help because he was losing the data on his floppy disks - besides being old disks, he also had a habit of putting his cell phone over the stacked floppies. When I got to his PC he got all dodgy and suddenly didn't want help with his disks anymore, but it was too late. It was also the first time I'd seen Selena Spice. We gave him the warning and the usual harassment and I thought that was it.
Fast forward to two weeks later, and I catch this guy having trouble with his floppies again. I approached him from behind the monitor, so I didn't see what he was checking this time, and told him that it was his cell phone's electromagnetic field that was destroying the data on the floppies. He thanked me, but then, looking somewhat afraid of getting caught, turned the monitor off in a reflex. Bad move... That's like quickly stuffing stuff in your underwear when a cop is about to run a search on you. I turned the monitor around and then turned it on in a swift motion. It was a site that showed girls in bikinis, no genitals nor nipples exposed. The floppy disk porn guy claimed that level of exposition did not count as pornography. Not that I would care, he was ocuppying a machine that someone else could be using to study or something, so the usual quarreling ensued.
I couldn't decide whether his exposition level argument was valid, so I just gave him another round of harassing by using my cell phone to take a picture of him and the monitor showing the aforementioned site (told him I'd publish it in the college newsletter), then calling other people in the lab who were waiting for a vacant computer to do some homework to have a chat with him. And that was the last I saw of the floppy disk porn guy, for he has never appeared again anywhere near the labs.
I, er, "know a guy" who as a teenager used to save porn on floppy disks, then take them to his room. The only PC in there was an old 8088 XT with a monochrome amber, CGA resolution monitor, so nobody suspected it of even being capable of displaying pictures.
I doubt it's erasing so much as bad blocks. Floppies are already very failure-prone as it is; back when I last used them (a decade ago, for fuck's sake) they would often get corrupted after a couple months of normal usage. The cellphone probably increases the failure rate, although probably not terribly, you're right about that. More likely, he was using 10 at once so his chance of getting a bum disk went way up. Plus, he was reading/writing porn from/to them all the time. Also, modern floppy drives seem a lot shittier than they used to be. Maybe not, but it seems to me they're so low-quality nowadays that corruption is much more frequent than when I first used floppies.
Floppies definitely got worse over the course of even the 1990s, so I can't imagine how bad they are these days. I remember doing an ad-hoc test to see how durable floppies were circa 1994. I was able to scribble all over the internal disc of a floppy with a ballpoint pen and still read all the data off it. Then, later, circa 2000 (just before flash drives became affordable) it had gotten to the point where I literally couldn't carry a floppy in my hand for three blocks without corrupting something on it.
Also, modern floppy drives seem a lot shittier than they used to be. Maybe not, but it seems to me they're so low-quality nowadays that corruption is much more frequent than when I first used floppies.
Agreed. Floppy drives made after the rise of USB thumbdrives began tend to be crap. This seems to be because the companies that used to make good ones have stopped making them altogether because there's no longer any money in it; those who remain are mostly those who have always made cheap, crappy floppy drives and can stay in the business because their costs are lower.
And what's this about discs getting corrupted after a few months? My first computer was an Apple IIe, with dual 5 1/4" floppies. I used that extensively for almost 5 years (read: played lots of games on it) and never lost any data that I can remember. I'd occasionally lose something on 3 1/2" discs of later systems, but that was due to abuse or accidents far more often than disc corruption.
Totally OT, but I'm wondering...
[quote user="Renan "C#" Sousa"](such as the '' in "resum").[/quote] A quick lmgtfy didn't reallly indicate what the answer was, but if they're messing with graves in the word to begin with, shouldn't there be another grave there?
Where I work we send customers information on floppy disk (still to this day) and 1 in 5 of the disks is bad right off the bat. We have an oldschool disk-duplicator machine that still faithfully chugs away and as time goes on the statistics on pass/fail get worse and worse (and it's not the machine, it is serviced regularly). Luckily our office is full of packrats so we still have all the old "original" floppy drives (including 5.25 ones) around the office to use when we need them on rare occasion. New floppy drives do seem to have just about as good a failure rate as new disks, they won't read "known good" disks 1 out of 5 times or so.
Oddly, the integrity of data on the floppy disks I own is inversely proportional to how old they are. The old 5.25" floppies from my PCjr are still perfectly readable (at least as of the last time I checked... the disks outlived all the computers with compatible 5.25" drives, unfortunately). Early 3.5" floppies for my IBM PS/1 mostly work, though ones used for personal data storage have a greater likelyhood of having gone bad than commercialy written disks, probably due to the far-more-frequent re-writes on the data storage floppies. Very few of the floppies used with my Windows 95 PC are still readable, and now I consider floppies I use for computer fixes (Ethernet drivers, boot disks, etc.) to be disposable, as they are usually unreadable weeks to months after being used.
It has gotten to the point where I fear trying to update my BIOS from a floppy, any longer. Instead I prefer the in-Windows route, error-prone as that is. (In fact, my last BIOS update from 3.5" disk failed miserably. I have yet to see a failure during a live update, though.)
I have a TI-99/4A that I still drag out of storage occasionally, with lots of BASIC programs stored on cassette tapes. Sadly, many sections of those have degraded beyond readability. (Still fun to listen to the melodic attempts to read them with the cassette player, though.)
Me neither, but the Dell computer my workplace bought me last year has a stinkin' floppy drive in it. I have no idea *why* they selected that particular option in the build screen... it's an Optiplex 960.
From my understanding, the disks live longer if you pull them out every year or so and just load all the data from the disk, then put them back away. The drive "refreshes" the magnetic signal as it reads the data.
Newer disks are also poorer as well. I have 8" and 5.25" disks from the dawn of time that still work flawlessly (often outlasting the equipment they were designed to work with), and ancient AOL floppies that still work, but new-in-box disks come with bad sectors already on them. The reason there may actually be down to logistics - electric forklifts that spew huge magnetic fields are now the norm, but were much less so just 15 years ago.
Fun floppy-related story. When I first bought my PC's current chassis, Windows XP was the hot shit. However, most mainboards required an aftermarket driver for their SATA chips if you weren't running them in crippleware IDE emulation mode - and the XP disks of the era didn't have a clue about them. The XP installer, for those of you who are clueless, can only load aftermarket mass storage drivers off a floppy. Yes, yes, slipstream blah blah yawn I don't give a rat's ass that shit takes work.
So I installed a floppy drive, seeing as Vista was still in the distance and I figured I'd need it more than once. However, to avoid spoiling the aesthetics, I installed the drive BACKWARDS, so it's completely internal to the chassis. Later, I did a large hardware upgrade just when Vista came out. I was going to use Vista on the new build, so I disconnected the cables to the floppy drive but forgot to actually remove it.
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