Peter's Evil Overlord List (1996)

Even without doing that, though, different low-level formats can also have more or less overhead. Some might use sector headers and sector trailers, while others might only use one or the other. Some might leave a decent gap between sectors, while others pack them as tightly as possible and expect the hardware to “miss” and have to “go back” to find the new sector header whenever it passes a sector boundary.

And all this type of stuff can be entirely software-controlled, in older machines. Much of the DRM of the 80s was about rewriting the floppy-disk “driver” built into the DOS of a floppy disk such that the disk was formatted normally for just enough of the disk to load that driver, and then the rest of the disk switched to a special proprietary low-level format that disk copiers couldn’t read, but the disk’s loaded DOS RWTS could.

In essence, a floppy disk is an analogue format with an analogue read/write head, that just happens to present a digital signalling protocol to the rest of the machine. (But the timing at which you start/stop movements of the disk read/write head is analogue; and you can repeatedly “sample” the same sector to probabilistically read it; so you can still get away with a lot despite the inability to just read the actual flux amplitudes off the disk.)

RAM is still labeled in 2^30 byte sizes instead of 10^9, because address lines are more important than hard drive manufacturers gaming their specs.

This is made all the more disturbing by the fact that, when I was in college, I witnessed a friend's roommate actually crucify a dead rabbit and stake it out outside... somewhere around Easter.

And, no, it wasn't a dead rabbit they randomly found lying around either. He and some buddies of his went Wabbit Hunting with Airsoft guns one day, and then they settled on crucifixion when they were debating what to do with their newly-acquired dead rabbit. Not so fun fact: around a decade after this, one of the guys involved in the hunting party got killed in a mass shooting. I still wonder if anyone told this story at his wake.

This all happened when my friend and I were studying on his couch, by the way. It was very hard to concentrate on the physics textbook when we kept hearing the whack whack whack of his roommate nailing a rabbit to the cross on the kitchen floor.

Edit: Because it's telling me I'm posting too fast, I can't reply directly to the person replying to me suggesting I'm victim-blaming Tony, so I'll post a clarification here:

I'm not saying that he deserved to get killed or anything. The shooter was a despicable excuse for a person who was upset his ex-wife was moving on with her life and enjoying herself, so he killed her and almost everyone attending her party. None of the people who got shot that day deserved it in the slightest.

I only mentioned he got killed in a mass shooting because it's a really fucked-up coda to an already fucked-up story. Like this story is fucked-up to begin with, and it's even more fucked-up that he got murdered. Honestly, if I was at his wake, I would've told the story not to make him out to be a bad guy or something, but to add some levity and remind everyone what a... shall we say, dynamic guy he was.

This one time, in the Navy, my department head told me that I am not to call an officer a liar, even if he is. Because I had.