Most impressive feat of the computer kind (pissing contest)

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LoudMusic

LoudMusic

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What is the most amazing thing you've done with a computer? Has to be legal (requested by Giles) - he thinks it should involve operating the computer, but I choose to leave that one open to the community (:

I'm not a programmer, so there isn't much there I can comment on. I did write a rather impressive screen saver program in BASIC when I was in 10th grade. And I've made my share of websites with varying degrees of impressiveness.

Mostly I deploy and support computers. I guess I play a lot of games too.

Oh! I ran BeOS 5.0.3 on a quad Pentium Pro 166mhz IBM PC Server 704. It has 256mb of memory and twelve 4.2GB disks. I'm probably the only person in the world to do that. It was cool.

A former colleague of mine and I had a "Mac Throwing Contest" a few years back. It was rated on A) How high B) How much noise and C) How much attention could you draw. We were throwing a bunch of old Macs into a dumpster and smashing them to little bits.
 
Hmm good thread, bound to be lots of cool stuff mentioned.

Alas i cannot think of any really relevant ones this second. I networked my house up, plugged up all the Cat5s etc. was quite good fun.

I programmed a robot this year in Java. That was hilarious. Could tell it to move forward, backwards and rotate.

Oo oo, i created a tomato in 3D! Cut the tomato into 12 slices, layed them out, photographed them, fed the black and white photos into a BMPReader via Python (the language we were using), a bit more tinkering later and a fuly rendered black and white tomato was ours to play with. That was pretty amazing imo.
 
We borrowed a laptop to bring vacation in England a few years ago. We were setting it up with a local access number in west England from our ISP.

So to test this, I hooked it up to our second phone line, dialled into the England number via 3,000 miles of transatlantic cable, and IMed our desktop computer which was sitting approximately 8 inches to the right of the laptop.
 
In the last 2 years, I've shown just over 300 people how to use office applications/Internet.
 
Fully encoded in HTML a Promo CD for the Sanctuary. From initial Autorun for HTML, I created and programmed everything on the CD with the exception of one Flash show. (thanks ALPHA).

I wrote the entire CD, all the Promo material, including the 6 CGI movies and the Floor plans. Did the Design for the buildings, did the program for those and started the working drawings. I also did up the image design for the CD and the CD cover. Took all the pictures on the CD.

All total, it was nearly a year of after hours work, 700+ hours. I copy and distribute the CD's as needed (Shipping, mailing, marketing and pay for the materials).

I actually shipped one off to Duke for his review.

AO
 
Um .. playing Dangerous Dave on my 23 year old Epson QX-10 last week.
 
The most impressive thing I've done on a computer... well, in recent memory, I went 25 and 0 on a public CS server, that was mighty impressive (especially considering I was fighting a cold at the time).

But I was quite the computer nerd even when I was young (as in 3 or 4 years old). I figured out how to reprogram my dad's games he created in basic on our old Commodore 64! Sadly, the Commodore isn't with my family anymore; it was stolen 11 years ago.
 
Programming - Wrote a Java version of Microsoft's Windows Explorer, trying to imitate all the features/look as closely as possible. Never really finished it...but it is a nice, quick, usable browser if a little feature sparse. It was over 15,000 lines of code, was massively multithreaded, and took me over a year in my free time....

I also have written a lot of simulation software; it's just spitting out data but sometimes the results are nice and unintuitive and pleasantly surprising.

Software - I managed to install Windows on a computer that already had Linux on it. Everywhere you look on the web it says this is impossible, but I only had to back up the MBR before installing XP.

Hardware - Right now I'm designing a simple (integer computation only) CPU. It's about two-thirds done...I can post some schematics if you are curious.
 
Programming
Designed my first fully .css running website with the help of Sage, learned so much.

Software
Formated XP myself without problems?

Hardware
I can plug in/out everything that connects to my computer or my computer connects to and hook it all up within half an hour. :sly:
 
If you're doing web work learning CSS is a must. Kudos to those of you who use it. I also recommend http://www.w3schools.com as a source for more info specifically on CSS, but also all aspects of web design.

Ev0 -- It's been a long time since I've played any CS, but back in the day I was number two in my town, and not by much. Most games would be roughly 14 people, he would have a couple more kills than me and perhaps one fewer deaths. We were always three to four times better than everyone else on the servers.

I've also completed Quake 2 and Half-Life on the most difficult settings (:
 
LoudMusic
If you're doing web work learning CSS is a must. Kudos to those of you who use it. I also recommend http://www.w3schools.com as a source for more info specifically on CSS, but also all aspects of web design.

Ev0 -- It's been a long time since I've played any CS, but back in the day I was number two in my town, and not by much. Most games would be roughly 14 people, he would have a couple more kills than me and perhaps one fewer deaths. We were always three to four times better than everyone else on the servers.

I've also completed Quake 2 and Half-Life on the most difficult settings (:
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Yep, makes website look a lot better. 👍
 
sUn
Yep, makes website look a lot better. 👍
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It also makes everything easier to edit later, and generally load faster for the end user. It's all around good. Also, the more content you have the more beneficial it is, exponentially.
 
Programming: Since school I've only programmed business apps, nothing out of the ordinary, but back in school I did a small 3D renderer and made some cool animations with it, in... Turbo Pascal ( :crazy: ).

Networking: managed alone the IT of a business with 8 branch offices (albeit small ones) alone for a few years. Two of them were 600 km away and everyone was on 56k dial-up when I started there... made for quite a few extended work weeks.
 
jpmontoya
Programming: Since school I've only programmed business apps, nothing out of the ordinary, but back in school I did a small 3D renderer and made some cool animations with it, in... Turbo Pascal ( :crazy: ).

Networking: managed alone the IT of a business with 8 branch offices (albeit small ones) alone for a few years. Two of them were 600 km away and everyone was on 56k dial-up when I started there... made for quite a few extended work weeks.
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Ouch. I'm glad I haven't had to deal with remo... wait. I do. DAMNIT! I have one user in Atlanta and one in Memphis, the rest of us are in Little Rock together. Remote users are the biggest pain in the ass an admin has to endure.
 
LoudMusic
Ouch. I'm glad I haven't had to deal with remo... wait. I do. DAMNIT! I have one user in Atlanta and one in Memphis, the rest of us are in Little Rock together. Remote users are the biggest pain in the ass an admin has to endure.
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Yup, nightmares...

When I started there, PCAnywhere was only installed on remote DCs, not on PCs, and the best part is I have to fight for the phone line with MS Proxy and Exchange to connect, because PCAnywhere was configured to directly call the same modem used for dial-up. All this while all PCs were still on win98 ...heaven :)

After a few upgrades - DSL (couldn't afford anything better), routers, NetSupport gateways and W2k workstations - it became a lot easier.... as long as the issue were not with the 🤬 🤬, 🤬 internet connection or hardware :crazy:.
 
I must say Software, the best thing I have accomplished was Going Skeet Shooting with Microsoft windows CDs

In the Hardware department, we got about 20 old school P1s and video taped us dropping them from a 7 story car garage ealry in the morning, then we proceeded to use the Micro-Macro Relocator on the flattened Fragments. Truly was an awe inspiring moment in my life.


Micro-Macro Relocator Definition - a 5 lb. Sledge Hammer : )
 
miata13B
I must say Software, the best thing I have accomplished was Going Skeet Shooting with Microsoft windows CDs

In the Hardware department, we got about 20 old school P1s and video taped us dropping them from a 7 story car garage ealry in the morning, then we proceeded to use the Micro-Macro Relocator on the flattened Fragments. Truly was an awe inspiring moment in my life.


Micro-Macro Relocator Definition - a 5 lb. Sledge Hammer : )
Click to expand...

Micro-Macro Relocator! Ha ha ha! I'll have to use that one (:
 
I like Duke's one.

For a laugh, I wrote my own forums software in PHP/MySQL, including designing the database behind it. It's happily supporting a relatively light workload at the moment.

A while ago though, my father's IBM PC AT (see "Oldest Computer" pissing contest) needed a new printer. But since the computer was delivered by Noah, there was no vendor support for it. We needed to use the new printer, but the computer wasn't particularly interested in talking to it.

So, I switched the partially-working printer to "Hex Dump" mode, where it prints out the data in Hex characters rather than as a document. Then, using the Hex Codes list in the new printer's manual, a text editor and a calculator, I wrote a new printer driver for the word processor.

Still works today.

In a bizarre example of give-and-take, at the same time, my father was fitting a new head gasket to my car.
 
I successfully tried out liquid nitrogen cooling in my computer. It was a bit messy, but it was pretty cool (looks at burnt out garage :) ). I oc'ed my 3.4 Ghz P4 to 4.1 Ghz.

Otherwise, the most impressive feat i've done is getting banned from using computers at my school for a month because i did not log off a computer that was logged in as an admin. I didn't even know that the compy was logged on!
Anyone else think that the punishment was a bit too harsh?
 
GilesGuthrie
I like Duke's one.

For a laugh, I wrote my own forums software in PHP/MySQL, including designing the database behind it. It's happily supporting a relatively light workload at the moment.

A while ago though, my father's IBM PC AT (see "Oldest Computer" pissing contest) needed a new printer. But since the computer was delivered by Noah, there was no vendor support for it. We needed to use the new printer, but the computer wasn't particularly interested in talking to it.

So, I switched the partially-working printer to "Hex Dump" mode, where it prints out the data in Hex characters rather than as a document. Then, using the Hex Codes list in the new printer's manual, a text editor and a calculator, I wrote a new printer driver for the word processor.

Still works today.

In a bizarre example of give-and-take, at the same time, my father was fitting a new head gasket to my car.
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And I nominate Giles as the victor for this thread. Close it at your leisure (:
 
Programming:
12th grade programming assignment. We were to make a full scheduling type program for the school's gyms. In total, we had close to 25 pages of code after about 1.5 months of work. We had to learn SQL within a few days and we had to do several modules in very specific ways because our teacher was a douche. To make it worse, she forced us to use Visual Basic rather than learn C++ which would have made our lives a lot easier. Once it was completed, our teacher started b*tching that it wasn't coded using her method and the person we were coding for requested some new features. We had a week left to hand it in and in that week, we had to recode the ENTIRE project. Final result was 30 pages of code, 2 access databases, and something like 15 tables between them. Final report of the entire project including charts, tables, and such added up to 110 pages.

Hardware
I programmed a few PIC16F84 microcontrollers for a gr 12 engineering class. We had one assignment where we had to make a circuit for a traffic light relay, and another where we made a train crossing. About 4 or 5 pages of Assembly code and about a week of code debugging went into each. After building the test circuits, we had to etch our own PC boards for the final product... each pc board took 3 classes to finish and another 2 or 3 classes to debug.

My review for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas apparently got so many hits the day it was posted that bytesector.com went down for a few hours 👍

I have in a period of 3 months taken my digital camera in for warranty repairs 3 times and a 4th time is coming within a week. Sony with their stubborn ways refuses to RMA it and so had to spend almost double the camera's worth to replace the faulty parts up to this point.

Nothing crazy but I have hooked my guitar amp up to my laptop's audio out. It made for some interesting effects when I dialed up the distortion.

Software:
I once found a computer with more than 1k pieces of spyware, 8 or 9 browser hijacks, and waaay too many viruses. The owner wasn't willing to reformat and I actually managed to clean the whole thing but for this one stubborn as hell browser hijack
 

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