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?
322 posts • joined 19 Aug 2014
"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.
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!
Got tired of a coworker who would prank everyone, constantly (and therefore not get much work done). It did train us all in proper workstation security, but daily having someone had to fix their setup because of him - tape over the laser in the mouse, paper under mouse buttons, toothpick in the keyboard He was, as he would need to be, very cautious about locking his screen when he left his desk, so the group revenge on him was to unplug the line cord from the laptop PSU/brick. Then it was reinserted just enough to look plugged in, but not make a connection.
About 3 hours later he was in a near state of panic when he was getting all kinds of warnings about the battery being almost dead. He even crawled under his desk to look at the power cable, and reseated the plug in the socket. After his laptop suspended because of the low battery I told him what to check, let him know we had more in our list of revenge pranks, and told him it was time to stop. Which he mostly did.
Taking his car apart and reassembling it in his bedroom would have been one thing, but I don't know how we could have gotten a giant Jiffy-Pop into his house, nor been able to retarget an space-based laser system. We can't all be students at Pacific Technical University, after all.
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.
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.
So some vocal portion (likely a minority) of Google employees don't want to work on a DoD project, and Google won't be bidding on the business. That's a scary precedent to set, looking at the political climate these days - You can't make all the people happy all the time, and if the unhappy ones can cause you to reject business/revenue you will eventually run out of customers you can do business with.
Think about it - the list of customers that could easily be "rejected" is pretty vast: Government agencies, Big Oil/Energy, Big Agriculture, run by Republicans, run by Democrats, Pro-life, Pro-choice... It really starts getting scary when you think about how crippled a company could be by this kind of thing.
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.
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.
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 other benefit is that Apple supposedly vets all submitted applications - but as we've clearly shown here, they (sometimes?) do a miserable job."
Could Trend Micro have coded the apps to detect when they are being tested by Apple and not do the data slurp?
So you have two redundant power buses, but only the cables to hook each machine up to one of them. Why wouldn't you hook half to Bus1 and half to Bus2? That way you're mitigating any risk to only half of the machines.
There may be mitigating circumstances not documented in the story, but we have all laughed at stories where both PSUs were connected to the same power bus.
"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.
"The FCC in fact already has the authority to introduce precise measures that would force cable companies that are making billions in profits annually to invest in infrastructure that would bring fast internet to rural America."
If it's so easy for the FCC to do this why didn't it happen under the previous administration? We could be 10 years down the road to getting this addressed.
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...
Way before you even start talking about the (abundant) technical issues with this, the concept of requiring a smartphone to vote should be getting challenged. If requiring an ID to vote is seen as trying to make voting too hard for certain demographics, what is requiring a smartphone?
Where is the ACLU on this??
"The company says that none of the images actually appeared on the screen and seems confused as to what the reason for the hack was in the first place (we're willing to bet the answer is not more complicated than: because we can)."
Because putting porn where the children could see it is a great way to get attention.
Are we sure Darktrace didn't pull that one off themselves - it's pretty "sexy" (yeah, I did that) to have in their announcement.
"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!
"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...).
@phuzz You're saying that like Hillary was any better of a choice. Different, yes, better, no. She seems to constantly say what her audience wants to hear, and is focused on covering her backside. Email-gate would have been over in 3 seconds if she would have just stood up and said, "Yeah, that was a bad decision by me." Denying it repeatedly, pushing responsibility toward her staff, doing everything but being responsible for it, destroyed her credibility to a LOT of people. At least with Trump you know what he's thinking - because he Tweets it constantly. And enough people thought that was the better option.
Both sides alienated the middle in this election cycle. As you can't write in "Snoopy" on the ballot any more we all got what we all got, with neither side being all that happy about it.
Bring on the "you're an idiot" replies and the "But Trump..." rants - then reread "Both sides alienated the middle" and realize its still happening.
Or think of it this way - how much do you learn by being called stupid??
"...because there's nothing about Intel's 2018 RF components..."
I agree that the design blueprints and firmware code are probably not on a public share (at least on purpose...), but the way the line is written it implies that everything is already disclosed.
Or that they aren't not disclosed. Or not aren't not undisclosed. Or...
(No Coffee icon, so we'll go with the next best thing...)
"Qualcomm argued Intel should cooperate because there's nothing about Intel's 2018 RF components – the SMARTi7 RF transceiver and the XMM 7560 baseband processor – that remains undisclosed to the public"
The way that reads Qualcomm is asking Intel for information which has already been disclosed publicly, and complaining they don't have it.
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.
"In the run-up to the referendum itself, a number of big tech companies' UK tentacles came out as pro-Remain and told their staff to vote against leaving the EU, including IBM..."
Maybe if they hadn't laid so many people off that would have been more effective for the Stay contingency.
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.
"I later upgraded it to 4 MB of RAM by replacing around thirty-two discrete integrated circuits so I could run DesqVIEW."
You can be honest here - it was to run Wing Commander and we all know it.
(Mine's the one with the printout of the config.sys and autoexec.bat to get 632KB free base memory, with mouse support, in the pocket)
I always loved when a user would ask me "Is there anything else I can do to fix this?" during repeated reboots of OS/2 (ie - lots of dead time). If they were a fun user I'd tell them they could always click their heels together and chant "There's nothing like a working Thinkpad."
The best was the gal who did that, then when the desktop came back up (corrupted INI files...) shouted "It worked, it worked!!"