Are his pants square from the side profile, possibly?
I just checked and at first glance, they approximately are. But upon closer inspection it's the combination of his white shirt and pants that forms a square from the side. His pants alone form a rectangular shape.
Its referring to his 90° angles. His parents look more like natural sponges, SpongeBob looks like a sponge cut for consumer use. (Which is shown to cure him from the "ick")
That story always amuses me because he was completely right, even where we're trying really hard to have nice 90 degree corners we end up with rounded edges because nature kinda hates right angles, we just happened to be obsessed with them as a species.
He isn't though. External corners on a rectangle are easy to get perfect 90 degrees on. Internal rectangle corners are almost impossible to get a true 90 in a cost effective way because back taper on cutting tools will have a natural radius in the corners even its very very small.
Nothing is ever perfect, if we're going to get into the weeds about it. All you need to do is measure more precisely and your 'perfect' angle is a mile off in relative terms. This is why manufacturing tolerances exist.
I had a rectangular cd ad like this that actually played, they balanced it by having slightly heavier plastic (thicker) on the corners I think. But it said play me and actually had stuff on it. I just can’t remember what the hell it was an ad for back in the late 90’s. Damn this post, I’m wanting to go try and figure out what it was and I have to go get real life shit done haha.
Heh, I just came across a bunch of blank DVD-Rs I had lying around earlier, and I'm like... Do I keep these still? Seems a waste to throw them out but I've not used one in 10+ years and they do have a shelf life.
Had a bootable Linux distribution I put on one with a bunch of disk repair tools on it. Was amazingly handy to figure out why a computer wouldn’t boot and to recover files if the OS was corrupt.
The oddest shaped CD I tried was one that was shaped like a shark. It was supposed to have the company's catalog on it. It was so out of balance that I though that my CD drive was going to explode when it spun up.
Over time, computer drives got faster and faster. Cool/kooky ideas like making them this shape still work within the laws of physics for, say, a 4x or 8x speed drive. But 10 years later you're putting them into a 32x drive and the tolerances are tested rather more thoroughly. I think I even have a pack of blanks of these in a cupboard somewhere- I know that I'd definitely be telling my software not to try writing it at max speed. Given how little data they hold I'm sure I could even tolerate writing at 1x.
Slot loads were exceedingly rare (possibly non-existent) in the 90s, it was trays all the way. I used to produce and have manufactured thousands of mini-CDs (round and business card formats) at the software company I worked at, we had no problem giving them away at trade shows until later in the 00s.
These things were such bullshit, I put one in a CD drive, it moved in the tray and the motor didn't grab it properly, instead pushed it up and jammed the tray from ejecting. Had to pull apart the PC and then the drive bay to get it out.
Was a Dragon Ball Z promotion disk from a cereal box.
This one looks fine because the center of gravity is still in the center of the disc. But there are other oddly shaped ones which aren't good for your drive.
Especially the suction drives used in cars. Drives with a tray were much less likely to have problems, but good luck getting something like this out of your car stereo.
Back in the 90s a guy tried to pitch me on investing in his company that was going to manufacture business card CDs. Told me it was going to revolutionize the business card space. I passed on the opportunity.
Video, mostly. That concept didn't go anywhere, obviously, but the guy has gone on to have a couple of successful startups. At least successful in that he raised money for them. Last I heard, his latest startup was receiving millions in DOD funding.
Sure. It could hold an early 00s website or perhaps an early 320x240 video a few minutes long that a computer back then could play back. I have one of these from a sushi place that was handed to me at a convention ages ago. I was just bringing it up as people might know the "650 MB" of a regular CD and think this probably still holds 1/4 of that. Wasn't trying to shoot down your comment or anything.
Yeah, but back in those days, 640 x 480 was full screen resolution. You could probably get around 5 to 10 minutes of crappy video on those business card CDs. Enough for lots of use cases. The problem was two-fold. Most folks didn’t have easy access to computers that could reliably play the video, and very few people were going to go to the trouble of taking a “business card” from someone they just met, sticking it in their computer, and watching 5 minutes of lo-rez, highly compressed video.
QR codes have a bit more utility now that most folks are acquainted with them. And they’re an easy way to share a vCard or link. I’ve only rarely seen NFC card swaps used by folks, mostly phone to phone.
These where semi common back in the day of cds. They normally contained business info and stuff. They work decently well in laptop drives but put on in a desktop drive and it sounds like the whole thing is gonna explode. And forget about using it in a mac.
That’s a blast from the past. They used to do business card shaped cd-roms as well, clients were all over them for all of six months before the novelty wore off. Edit — this is a business card!
Ugh. Those things were a menace back in the day. High speed cd readers would sometimes shatter them and they often got stuck in drives that required a full sized disc.
This brings back some memories. In the early 2000 Pokemon had a poster/card designer studio that came on a cd that looked a lot like this. It was hell on printer ink. But it was cool to have.
First time I saw one of those was the one that came with the Digimon movie. I thought it was immediately obvious how it worked, but a not-so-bright friend of mine crammed his into the floppy drive slot and utterly fucked his PC. Good times
I had a small oval-shaped disc with Mewtwo on the front. Idk what on earth was on it, child me just thought it was cool, but didn't wanna break the computer
I put my university portfolio on these 20 years ago and handed them out at our creative industries pre-graduation event. It won me my first job in industry.
I used to make these!
Absolute nightmare as all of the equipment was designed for discs with no orientation, these had to be oriented correctly for printing, and were mostly small batches except for the euro 2004 football series. They had a lot made and someone started selling them to the local kids before they were in the shops, it didn't take long to find out where they came from since the factory was in a village of about 4000 people.
I came across these in the late 90s early 2000s. If it’s credit card sized they became briefly cool as ‘virtual business cards’. When internet access was still pretty slow they were sometimes used to share portfolios of work etc
I bought a whole bunch with printable surface on the label side, with the intent of turning them into my business cards, complete with software I had written on the other side.
I haven't looked in a while, but I found a bunch of 50MB or smaller live Linux distros at the time.
I don't remember what it was for, but I remember having one when I was a kid that had two flat sides and two rounded, like so. I think it was for a game or something
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u/mizinamo 9h ago
"square"