Posts by 2Nick3

"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.

Re: Solution

"Sure in most cases it means manual counting of votes etc but as these are doing in local polling stations they are on a much smaller scale and feed up to the total making fraud much more difficult as the votes come in from so many other locations."

There are often highly localized items on the ballot, so that one nefarious counter could change an outcome. I've seen town council seats won with less than 80 total votes tallied, and I'm in a fairly populous area.

Plus there is the sad fact that there are otherwise quite intelligent people who have problems counting past 10 (unless not wearing shoes, then they can hit 20 with some regularity). That's why the whole electronic tabulation thing took off to begin with.

Re: Core!

"Part of it is the miscreants doing. They'd take the ransom and never send the "unlock" code."

One bad apple among the bad apples ruins it for everyone!

Re: Will they be Fined?

"Also divide by the number of people, since it's reasonable for small countries to levy smaller fines since they are affected less, and the difference gets even smaller."

Better would be to divide the fine by the number of vehicles they are being fined for. I'm willing to bet there are significantly more VW diesels in Germany than in the US, so that 4x greater fine in the US is significantly more per vehicle.

Re: Sir, the odds of successfully negotiating a football field are a million to one

"So you mean there's a chance?"

In California, the bastion of all that is progressive and good? A Dem controlled state had a Dem controlled committee cave to the telco/cable companies. Could it be that this isn't really a partisan issue, but a problem with most all of our elected officials?

On the positive side is the public outcry was at a level that made them flinch. They do still hear the voters if we yell loudly enough. Which should inspire the public to be that much more vocal on issues.

Re: "The fictional prez, a former Army Ranger and Gulf War veteran"

The character stopped reminding me of Clinton right there - voluntarily served in the military during the "Bush War"? There's suspension of belief, but that is pushing it, isn't it??

Re: Printouts - please eat without ketchup

5 years is a long time for things to change, especially with an Administration change in DC. What made sense 5 years ago might not any more, so I'm giving them some benefit of the doubt here.