Posts by n2ubp

If you're one of the 16,000 Amazon employees getting laid off, read this

Classified ads in the newspapers, at least in the USA, were/are extremely overpriced past the point usefulness. You pay by the word, bold words cost extra. Every little thing that might get attention costs extra. Greed killed off classifieds.

Old but gold: Paper tape and punched cards still getting the job done – just about

Western Union

For a few years I worked in a Western Union shop in Mahwah, NJ that refurbished Teletype and other machines of the day. Much of the paper tape seemed to have been impregnated with a light oil. Extended storage of some of these tapes in a sealed plastic bag would cause the oil to leech out of the paper which then damaged the tape. Test tapes used many times a day were made of Mylar. The Teletype machines used pins to sense the holes. Newer design General Electric Terminet's used light beams to sense the holes in the paper tape and ran at a higher speed. The IBM 1403 high speed printer used a loop of tape for carriage control punched out by a printer pool operator to tell the printer the size of the paper and how to move the paper. I would think it would not be a big deal for someone to come up with an app that used a flatbed scanner or equivalent to scan damaged paper tape and make corrections to damaged areas, though you would have to teach the app about 5 and 8 level coding for different vintage machines.

How the OS/2 flop went on to shape modern software

OS2 2.1 was a decent OS, so was Warp. I think I remember the 8580 MSRP being around $8k USD at announcement, and that was for a basic unit without extra memory. Those PS/2 option cards were expensive, the OS2 drivers for them could be a pain in the neck to install. Until Warp all the OS2 installs I did were on 1.44 diskettes.. lots of them, far more than Win 3.0 or Win 3.1. Once you got OS2 up and running many aps people wanted to run were just not available but available for Windows. Prices few small businesses or consumers were willing to pay for hardware or software, lack of software, unexpected crash and burns requiring full reinstall of OS2 to a freshly formatted hard drive... that's what I remember.

T-Mobile US drags New Jersey borough to court over school cell tower permit denial

Maybe if they don't put those scary signs on the tall fences...

Maybe they are afraid of those scary signs on the 8 foot high fences topped with barbed wire surrounding the site stating "Danger Radio Frequency Radiation Hazard signs".

Just replace the signs with happy faces and all will be well.

Mozilla CEO quits, pushes pivot to data privacy champion... but what about Firefox?

Firefox just does not work on some web sites.

I'm one of those diehard Firefox users. The past year or more Firefox is just not compatible with some very important web sites, like banks, USA government, utility companies, etc. and I find myself having to switch over to unGoogled Chromium to deal with the government, deal with financial transactions,or purchase an item from a nationwide store that is not Amazon. If this is true for others and these measurements are based on government sites that son't play nice with Firefox then of course the numbers will be low.

Results are in for biggest 4-day work week trial ever: 92% sticking with it

A 4 day workweek at IBM means less vacation time

IBM calculates bases annual vacation time on total days worked, not hours worked. Work less days and get less vacation time off.

Dell planning job cuts as PC demand jumps off a cliff

Perhaps Dell would sell more computers if their online site shipping delays for non customized laptop and desktop computers were less than one month?