#failed tech

So I can't fairly judge it. But it still sounds like a very smart person's very stupid idea for something that is absolutely not going to do what they want it to.

You can't math-formula your way to flavor, guys. I know you think that should work. But as processed food containing 140% of a safe level of salt proves, making tasty food is as much art as it is science.

The Iomega Zip Disk was stated to be the next evolution in floppy disk technology and touted as a “superfloppy.” Indeed, it was the most popular of the floppy disk successors being cheaper than a standard hard drive while offering greater data storage for the price (hard drives typically cost around $200 for 500mb while a Zip Drive was $200 itself but $20 for each 100mb cartridge and a cartridge was also included with the drive). These drives were also believed to be more stable than hard drives at the time, which were known to have issues with the writing heads becoming misaligned or damaged with slight amounts of movement. 

However, due to Iomega’s attempt at saving production costs, models produced during a period of several months had a foam washer removed from the actuator head area that was used to prevent misalignment due to a jarring stop in the case of sudden power failure. This caused “the click of death” in many drives where the actuator would become misaligned and repeatedly click back into it’s starting position. This misalignment could also be caused by things such as dust, contaminants or even rogue magnetic fields. The misalignment could also cause damage to the zip disks themselves, specifically the edges of the disk, and cause irreparable damage to any drive the disks were inserted in.

Burn Notice has been one of my Netflix binge watching pleasures. Michael Westen doing his spy stuff, helping people, blowing stuff up.  All in all a very enjoyable show. Sometimes it pushes the limits of logic and physics, but hey it's all in good fun right?

This episode had one particularly bad technology fail that I just cannot let pass.  You see, in this one there is a hacker lady who is trying to crack highly encrypted bank files using a cluster of computers which she had some thug steal from a warehouse. Westen and crew thwart her of course but before they do we get to see the high tech cluster this uber-hacker lady had created.

Behold the high tech goodness of... three late '90s - early 00's Dell Dimension XPS towers. Also note that only one has a connected network cable. 

Shall I point out that this episode came out in 2011 and these computers came with Windows 98?

Then I saw this:

A homebrew PC and a vintage pre-Jobs Mac Power PC 8100.  You know the one Apple made when everyone thought they were doomed? The one discontinued back in 1995 when AOL was going to rule the world?

Thankfully they blew up the antiques, but not until they had to throw in one more technological sin.

There is the bomb, taped to the back of the antique Dell... a Dell without a power supply.  They aren't even trying now, are they?

So to recap, a super good hacker lady has a hired thug steal computers, I can only assume from a Salvation Army, to build a "computer" cluster to crack secure files.

She used computers with a combined processing power that is less than my Samsung Galaxy III to break a modern encrypted file.

My inner Tech died a little watching this episode.