Posts by jake

Re: Oh No!

"I can see why you're all clutching your pearls...."

Presumably you'd prefer folks to be seen casting them before swine?

_{Is it awful of me to reply to a rather tired old cliché with a very ambiguous bible passage?}

To me it looked like a late twenty-something channeling his teen angst. He'd have been better off making it a "dear diary" moment than putting it online for anyone to see and take out of context.

Happened occasionally pre-WWW, too.

There was an effort to teach more men how to cook family meals at Foothill Jr. College in Los Altos a little over a third of a century ago. The feminists went berserk. Their theme was "men already have all the opportunities!" It was funny, in a sad kind of way.

Re: Dispassionately

What? You mean act like civilized human beings in a diverse society, with many sometimes opposing viewpoints?

How dare you, Sir!

Yuu MUST march in lock-step with the rest of us, or you WILL be extirpated! There cannot be any crimethink in our society!

Except ...

... the people doing the judging have absolutely no sense of humo(u)r.

It doesn't matter what his views are today. He has been judged in absentia in the court of public opinion, based on today's social mores, on views he expressed a decade and a half ago, and has been found guilty without an actual trial. There will be no appeal, and those suggesting one will automatically be judged similarly.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. You may be next.

_{Remember that of-colo(u)r joke you used to tell in the frat/sorority house?}

Re: PICNIC?

That would be an IBM error.

Re: 10,000,000 3" nursery pots

No, not terracotta. Cheap, black injection molded plastic. Some folks call 'em 4 inch pots. They are 3.25 inches square at the top, and 2.75 inches square at the bottom. 18 fit into a standard 10x20 tray. It was the first year I sold heirloom tomato and hot chili starts. It's quite profitable, if you don't mind getting your hands dirty ... and you can figure out how to automate most of the repetitive work.

Just don't purchase a million pots when you only want ten thousand :-)

"Fortunately they were sequential so it was a little easier to search through."

For me it was a Texaco station, also in the 70s. We pretty much ignored the list because it took far too much time back in the days of Full Service. (Oil, water, air, windshield, brakes, power steering, automatic trans, battery if asked, no extra charge for topped up fluids ... and occasionally freebee new wiper blades. The good old days were, in fact, good in this case!)

_{Fill 'er with Ethyl.}

Re: I found it best to...

When ordering a lot of small parts make absolutely certain that the vendor actually means "per 1000" and hasn't helpfully modernized the use of "M" to mean one million. If you don't, you'll wind up with an argument over who owns 10,000,000 3" nursery pots ... I got the shipment stopped at about 1,000,000 delivered or in transit. We settled out of court, with me purchasing the shipped lot at manufacturing cost. I'm still using them about 15 years later ... the vendor told me later that it took them 18 months to shift the other 9,000,000.

If you want manure, come and get it. 30 sacks, 300 sacks, 3,000 sacks ... it's all the same to me, but I recommend a truck, not sacks. You load.

Re: PICNIC?

In some quarters it is PEBCAK.

POBCAK/POBKAC (Problem Occurs Between Chair And Keyboard)

Or "an IBM problem" (Idiot Behind Machine problem)

And many other variations on the theme. Or, in automotive lingo "The problem is the nut behind the wheel".

Contrary to popular belief ...

... OS/2 is alive and well and still doing good and useful work, world-wide. You can purchase a brand new, shiny license to run OS/2, complete with support for (some) modern hardware. And telephone support. I've used two different versions in various places over the last couple years ... Serenity Systems has sold eComStation since 2001, and Arca Noae LLC has sold ArcaOS since 2017. Both with IBM's blessings. Wiki for more (and links). Recommended.

Re: Go Forth young man ....

The new-fangled WWW subset is to The Internet at large as the monkey exhibit is to the entire city that the Zoo is situated in.

One certainly doesn't need the massive overhead of a GUI and the WWW to read Usenet ... in the old days, we often telneted in to a news server with nothing more than a dumb terminal on a serial line (modem for remote use). Still can, with the proper permissions.

Re: Go Forth young man ....

"Dunno, Forth's back up,"

It was never down, at least not on any Newsfeed that I pay attention to.

"first time I've looked at comp.lang.forth since pre-internet"

Seeing as the comp.* hierarchy became operational in the Great Renaming in 1987, about 17 years[0] after TehIntraWebTubes started passing bytes, I highly doubt this statement.

[0] Or 4 years after Flag day, if you prefer the TCP/IP version.

Re: Recall what Deja Vu was...

I do not see that with Pan 0.146, but I run Slackware. Perhaps give slrn a shot?

I'm with you on Forté's Agent. If they ever port it to Linux, I'll drop 'em a thousand bucks just because I can ... Even if I, personally, choose not to use it.

Edit: I just had a thought ... If you, like a lot of people today, are not running a swapfile, try adding one to your system. Some old programs, especially those that slurp in a lot of text and manipulate it, expect one to exist. Try 100megs or so to start. Won't hurt, might help.

Re: Ban Google

"if some google luser manages to post spam into a newsgroup, it'll get distributed to any other usenet server that carries that group."

That depends on how clued the downstream server's admin is. My system won't see it, because all of my upstreams filter out the obvious crap. Folks who get a feed from me likewise won't see it. Even when one of my upstreams manages to allow junk through, my own filters usually catch it (and drop a note to the upstream in question).

_{Running an ancient copy of Cleanfeed here. It still works quite nicely. Ta, Mr. Nixon.}

Re: Denial of service attacks?

Many large Usenet systems move News around internally (and sometimes externally) with UUCP, even today.

Re: ABPE

I stopped reading all of Usenet during xmas break in '84, it was getting ridiculous with sometimes 250 posts per day! I stopped scanning all the headers in early 1986 when the number hit 600 posts/day occasionally. I stopped subscribing to all groups when it hit 250 groups and 1000 posts/day in '87 ... but by then I was running my own news server, so it hardly mattered.

_{And of course, later all y'all subscribed to a.b.p.e for the articles, right?}

Re: Denial of service attacks?

"So, the modern internet provides an incredibly convenient and easy way to perform denial of service attacks on discussions."

In this example, only the alphagoo view into those discussions is affected. Usenet does not today, did not yesterday, and never will depend on anything that alphagoo does. Hell, Usenet doesn't even depend on the Internet to propagate.

"most Usenet groups were moderated."

No. They were not.

Re: Ban Google

So don't get your Usenet feed from the idiot gookids. There are still a few decent commercial News providers out there, some of which will provide read-only access to text-only groups for free ...and some Universities will also give you a text-only feed for free, if you ask nicely. Squeaky wheel and all that.

The spam is trivially filtered, either by yourself or by your news provider, depending on how your personal sensibilities view a filtered vs non-filtered feed.

Re: Recall what Deja Vu was...

That was DejaNews.

And yes, the gookids have fscked it up. It would seem that the concept of an ASCII-only archive is alien to them.

Re: And another El Red official Unit!

"Is there a list of these informational nuggets somewhere?"

https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-converter.html

Re: Not too far off the mark though with..

You seem to be missing a critical element in your thesis. Those of us who raise hogs also know how to harvest them. In fact, most would say that is kind of the point.

Re: Dark Monitor

"Not to forget that some lapdogs have a small discrete toggle for "enable/disable wifi"."

I'd rather they had a small, discrete toggle to enable/disable woofi.

_{A method to permanently disable yip-yip-yip-yip would be even better.}

Re: Slightly different

My favorite variation on the theme, as personally experienced by me:

The magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake hit us on October 17th 1989, at 5:04 PM-ish Pacific time[0]. It was centered approximately 30 miles SSE of my home. PG&E power and Ma Bell landlines were out over almost all of the Bay Area. My acting boss called my DynaTAC at 5:10 PM & screamed that he would fire me if I didn't fix it immediately. I told him that he needn't have wasted money on the phone call, he could have just opened the window and bellowed. And then I hung up.

I have hated cellular telephones ever since ... not because of what they are, or what they can do, but rather for what they are actually (ab)used for.

[0] The so-called "Bay Bridge World Series Quake".

Re: Kinda the opposite of Cancel Culture, no?

Someone will probably bring up the so-called "paradox of tolerance" in reply to Bob. Allow me to head their justification off at the pass by pointing out that it is still hypocrisy, regardless of the highfalutin name you place on it.

One quite simply cannot become inclusive by labeling people you don't like and excluding them.

Re: I miss IRC...

Everybody talks about AOL and the endless September with regard to Usenet. People forget that when AOL enabled the use of Winsock software it also unleashed the great unwashed masses of 14 year old boys dying of testosterone poisoning onto IRC and damned near managed to kill that, too.

With that said, there have always been islands of sanity on IRC. They have been, and still are, well worth searching out.

Re: IRC was the CB of the '90s

"Whilst CB had government moderation enforcement"

In theory. Reality was quite a bit different once CB's popularity exploded in the late 1970s. Many people bought used radios, and ignored (or weren't told of) the need for a license. Likewise chain-stores (Sears, Montgomery Ward, et alia) sold the gear without forcing the new owner to fill out the paperwork. By the early 1980s, the government had given up entirely, and the FCC got rid of the licensing requirements by mid-'83. CB has been a free-for-all in the US ever since.

Re: I thought they were just going to buy a Chinese one and slap their own label on it....

It's not just the NIMBYs ... one of the biggest hurdles to progress is when a very small group claims their rights are being trampled on, so the vast majority of the rest of the population can (in their minds) just sit and spin while the Government caters to them, a minuscule percentage of the population.

It's supposed to be "We, the people!", not "ME, the subsample!".

Look at San Francisco and Oakland for good examples of what happens when single individuals can completely fuck things up by placing their own interests above those of all of their neighbors. And of course good old Berkeley, which is proof that Government by whoever can scream the loudest clearly does not work.

Re: I thought they were just going to buy a Chinese one and slap their own label on it....

"BTW -- The Amtrak service to Las Vegas used to take a touch under 8 hours. Not really a practical proposition for a weekend visit."

Trains in the US are slow. Very slow. How slow? Thanks for asking ... A little quick research shows it is about 2430 train-miles from San Diego to New York. There are 9 trains leaving SD for NY per day. The fastest makes the trip in just over 72 hours on a good day (or three). That's an average of about 33.7 MPH ... I can drive cross country faster than taking the train.

In fact, the Wife, Daughter and I spelling each other in the Peterbilt have made the drive from Sonoma, California to Allentown, New Jersey and back (5,800 miles, give or take) in under 100 hours. Not once, but several times. Without even bending the speed limits. (Yes, "limits", plural ... interstate highway truck speeds vary by state. Here in California, it's 55MPH, cross the border into Nevada and it becomes 80MPH.)

With that said, I actually enjoy traveling by train. Amtrack is the vacation, not transportation to a vacation.