Posts by 2Nick3

Re: As ye sow, so shall ye reap

"CA, where good software goes to die."

Good, bad, mediocre, and every type between. Did anything they touch improve or flourish?

Re: $270 per site per year

"Somehow I think AT&T and Verizon would see things differently..."

Bronx Telecom would have to have roaming relationships with Manhattan Telecom, Brooklyn Telecom, Queens Telecom and Staten Island Telecom, and that's just so you can move around New York City and have your Bronx Telecom phone work. Jersey City Telecom would probably not join the group, so your calls (and data) are going to cost a lot more across the river, if your phone will even have a signal.

It's one of the advantages the big guys have - you're almost always on their network, and if you're not they know who's network you would roam to, so it's easy to have those relationships in place. With thousands of independent providers it would be a nightmare trying to figure out what a call would cost outside of your provider's service area.

Re: IT Policy led to pranks

Changing the default WAVs that came with Windows to more "entertaining" ones was always a good trick. The fact that "DING.WAV" is now not just a 'Ding' sound gets past any locking down of settings.

Not that I know from personal experience - I think I read about it here on The Register Forums. Yeah, that's it!

Re: "Vanishingly Small"

People have been predicting the death of the Windows desktop for a very long time. There are far too many who find Windows works "perfectly fine" at this point to see a real change.

If ME, Vista and Win8 didn't chase people off, 10's not going to have much of an impact.

Re: "In a reminder of a golden age when we still had physical media,"

When your "unlimited" data plan slows to a crawl you realize that having your music locally on your device has some significant advantages.

Plus not having to tote your full-sized phone everywhere is a plus. Seeing people with the new iPhones at the gym is pretty silly looking sometimes.

Re: hyprocrites

I'll just point out that Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Ghandi both spent a lot of time in jail, knowing it was a consequence of their actions. They knew the law (right or wrong, it was the law they were under at the time), chose to violate it, and accepted the consequences. Before you put Julian Assange on that same pedestal you have to get past the fact that he is putting avoiding those consequences above trying to clear his name as an accused rapist.

Re: Bodily fluids.....

Urine and the next person to play the game don't get along, either.

Thankfully I lost the game of Rock/Paper/Scissors and didn't get the first turn...

Re: Still,

"You know things are bad if you have to use Facebook as a positive reference."

Sounds like a new corollary of Godwin's Law (common use, not original)!

"Yes, but have you seen the prices Amazon charge for retrieving from Glacier."

How long do you expect the update to take to install? If your pre-upgrade backup has migrated to Glacier by the time the update finishes you might need to update your hardware!

Why in the world does your toothbrush need to be online? It's a piece of plastic with bristles at one end. The electric ones that live on their chargers really don't need to send you a notification when they are recharged, do they? Or do you need a model that reports to your dentist how often you brush, for how long (on each tooth, right?), with how much pressure (on each tooth, again, because why not???).

Yeah, a brush that tells you that you are pressing too hard (or soft) with some kind of audible notice would be reasonable, or that tells you when you've been on an area long enough, but can anyone really justify why it has to be online to do this?

Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Re: Spazturtle

"Good point, just like the famous case of McDowell's that opened up in Queens, New York back in the 80s."

Was that real, or just in "Coming to America"??

"I still see sometimes some "3com" strings coming from snmp requests to re-branded routers"

Got to think that microcode is a bit out of date...

Re: MOSFETs and clean rooms

Funny how "TEMP" sometimes translates as "Keep the most critical data you have right here - it will be safe forever!"

I once had to admit to an IBM VP that I had indeed reformatted the 3995 optical disc that the DBA had stored the copy of the DB2 config file on just prior to his managing to corrupt the production config file.

When the VP finally stopped for a breath I added, "The disc was both physically and logically labeled TEMP002A/B." He took 2 more breaths and the tirade was redirected to the DBA.

Re: On the other hand...

Had a friend in college who would buy a new printer, whatever was on the best sale, when his ran out of ink. He'd sell the old printer for about half what he paid for it (super-cheap printers don't last long on a college campus), and at least in his own head he was coming out ahead of buying ink.

"The bad guys either exploited some as yet undisclosed weakness elsewhere on the server or did an inside job."

Or the bad guys exploited a well known issue with an available fix that wasn't applied.

Re: And what is 5G?

"Could they actually hear each other on the call?"

Can you hear me now?* Drat - how do I fail back to 4G with this thing??? Hello? Hello??

* - Ironic as Sprint didn't make a 5G announcement with the others.

Re: Better option anyway.

"There *is* a Vancouver, Washington, but it's really just an inconveniently located suburb of Portland, Oregon."

With no income tax in Washington and no sales tax in Oregon I'd say it's pretty well located!

Re: "some patent troll will sue for using one of the C languages?"

"It's interesting to note that OS/2 supported Win 3.x API because IBM had a license to do so."

And OS/2 with WinOS2 was more expensive than OS/2 with "Bring your own Windows" because of that - IBM transferred the licensing cost to the customer.

Re: Conspicuously Missing...

I had AT&T Uverse for a few years (the exact length of the contract). On a regular basis, on Thursday mornings between 10:30 and 11:30 I would have a momentary outage, which would knock internet connectivity down for about 10 minutes as the modem resync'ed. Working from home made that a real pain.

Finally found out that new installs were done on Thursday morning, and the tech assigned to this area wasn't labeling the box, so he had to hunt for an inactive port to hook the new customer up to. His method for this was to unplug cables until he found an inactive one.

I laugh at the "We want you back" mailings I get from them. Or will until I need to switch off of Spectrum again to get New Customer Pricing...

"You lucky guy ! My first was a 20MB MFM drive. I thought I'd never be able to fill it !"

Throw that on a RLL controller and see your capacity go up to 30MB! Or do I have it backward and you'd end up at 13MB...

Re: Need an IT equivalent of mechanical sympathy....

"It's not sympathy, it's mentally threatening them with a large axe (with a nod to Douglas Adams of course) that works for me."

The device, or the relative?

Re: Pissing on customers

"its not so much leaving, its leaving then offer a cheaper solution at the same time. with migration assistance."

That's a great point - if AWS could migrate Amazon off of Oracle, they can do it for anyone else, too! The AWS Sales guys must love it - that's got to be one of the easiest customer reference calls ever!

Re: A Collaboration Of Liars

"Present them, one by one, to the American people and they'd say 'Sure. That's obviously right'."

And here's the thing - I disagree. I don't think providing mass amnesty to illegal aliens is right. In some cases, yes, but a blanket policy to absolve people of an illegal action is wrong.

"Of course, the USA ought to be able to come up with a better choice than Trump/Clinton."

Exactly. Both sides managed to alienate the middle, and that's where Trump was able to win. Here's hoping that lesson was learned (and here's doubting it was...).

Re: "...5G connection running at 2.8Gbps..."

Which is better: Morse code than two squirrels with semaphore flags?

Re: "OS/2 Warp"

You could copy the contents of the floppies to a directory and install from there. I ran an OS/2 2.11 farm and would copy the floppies to one server then run the install across the network from there. Saved eons of time having to install a FP on 80 servers.

Developed that out to a repository for all of the packages (Notes, CM/2, ADSM, etc) and fixes on the servers. Once I was done with the base OS install on a new machine I didn't have to touch a floppy or CDROM again.

Re: del *.*

Back in '95 I was working at a help desk where a number of colleagues from the Windows support team were upgrading their WfW 3.11 machines to Win95 (1,2), and a number of them were having issues copying the '95 install files to their machines over the network (3). The drive wasn't full, but the copy job was failing for everyone at just about the same spot in the file list.

I looked at the screen, and noted two things: They were at C:\> and the end of the dir/w showed 512 files and directories (max for the root of a FAT12 volume). On pointing this out the user of that machine typed in "del *.*" and was about to hit Enter when I yelled "Stop!" This got a bunch of angry glares (4), to which I said "Think about what that will do."

At which point I was (rather impolitely) told to go back over to my side of the call center.

1. Not me - I was happily running OS/2. Warp 3.0 on one machine (probably beta at that time), 2.11 on a PS/2 Mod70

2. No idea why they weren't doing a fresh install instead of an upgrade/migration

3. CDROM drives were scarce, so one person copied the CD to their system and everyone else was copying that directory to their local hard drive

4. There was a lot of animosity between the Windows and OS/2 support teams, and the fact I had identified the problem was already a poke in the eye.