Re: Feh!
Pretty certain I had a demo disc of Microsoft Bob once.
We used to joke that it was named Bob after the evil entity in Twin Peaks.
Only it was more evil.
Then again I'd not be surprised at Microsoft Bob II - now with AI!
138 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Feb 2008
I do love how the LGP-30 brochure describes it as Small, and Mobile (presumably because it was on castors)!
Like a lot of people out there of a certain age, BASIC was where we cut our programming teeth as the first high level language we used, mostly because it was on pretty much every home micro by default.(Unless you were one of those people who had a Jupiter Ace!)
All made possible by Kurtz and Kemeny's decision to make the language public domain rather than controlling it.
In a previous job, all the server passwords were written down on small cards and placed inside one of those little cashboxes that was kept in the bottom drawer of my desk.
It was locked, obviously, but nothing a good screwdriver couldn't break open.
The reasoning of the person who suggested this was if ne'er-do-wells could get to the box it was already a security fail.
I'm not entirely sure what the benefits of information gleaned from an air fryer would be. Are there two guys in Beijing going "Oh look, Mr Smith at 37 Acacia Avenue Croydon is having chips again"?
Anyway, MY air fryer just has two knobs and a light. One knob to set the timer, one knob to set the temperature, and a light to show you it's heating up. What more do you need?
Even on UKGov's own 'Find a Job' website I've seen dodgy looking jobs which I'm pretty damn sure do not exist.
For example , the same job title and summary description appearing in a row with different company names and no real job descriptions, just a link to send CV and covering letter.
Look up the company names and you find websites which look for all the world like they were run up from one of those website sample templates, with poor spelling. Websites for both companies had the same postal address, but the only jobs in the careers section were in Hyderabad and Bangalore.
Neither of which are in London UK.
"Yeah right", I thought. "Those aren't real jobs, they're just fishing for CVs and contact info for dubious reasons"
This kind of thing needs vetting.
The Atari ST was the last pre-PC computer I had. I even had the fancy special black and white monitor that let you use the high-res (for its day) 640x400 mode.Think it was probably the BW monitor that helped a lot with the 'Jackintosh' nickname.
After that it was just a bunch of generic beige box PCs until I switched to Macs in the early noughties with the G4 'dome' iMac.
Some days I really miss the excitement and diversity in the olden days before everything became so homogenized.
Some days I wish something other than Windows had become the mainstream standard.
I had a 6809 machine running Flex once. A "Mandarin IP68" which kind of spun off from people who'd made stuff for the 6502 based Microtan. Had 2 5.25" floppies. I had it hooked up to a Televideo 925 terminal. Good stuff. Learning 6809 came in handy some years later at Uni when I had a 68000 project and realised just how similar the coding was!
I'm reminded that the Oric-1 (and Atmos) used serial colour attributes. So you could have colours at a single pixel row high, but 8 pixels wide. However the attribute occupied the byte of video ram before the actual pixels you wanted to have those foreground/background colours. An awful lot of Oric games had objects which were very stripy!
What about teaching the kids about basics of online security and not to give away their details to random people?
Might be better than some knee-jerk reaction of "The kids are using these things which didn't exist when we were their age! It must be banned!!" which is bullshit.
This is a bit like when a famous person dies and you hadn't been aware they had still been alive.
I mean, I had an ICQ account many many many years ago, well over two decades, and it's entirely possible the account might still exist except I stopped using it, forgot the number, almost certainly forgot the password, and it was linked to my old Demon email address so even if I'd wanted to I couldn't have used it.
Totally surprised it had lasted that long.
Crafting config.sys files to make different things work was a real skill. DR-DOS made that a lot simpler by allowing you to set up a boot menu for all the different settings you need for different games and Windows.
Wing Commander 3 was the one with the video clips featuring Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell slumming it, right?
Admittedly it's a long long time since i last had to use a mechanical mouse. Though I do remember the time I saw a friend having to move his mouse across his desk, lift it and move it back to the other side, then move it across the desk again, and so on. I popped off the bottom and the entire inside of the mouse was stuffed with crud. Picked it all out, cleaned the rollers, and all was good. Apart from he'd been using his mouse like that for so long he took a while to adjust back to using it normally!
I did have a mouse once which had a small scroll-ball in the top for scrolling around a page in all directions. Fine, but that soon crudded up to the point where it became unusable and was hard to get at to clean where the little connection film snapped.
So back in about 2014 I was doing a bit of jobhunting on the side and a recruitment agency called me to set me up for an online test for a company called Phorm.
"That name sounds familiar" I thought and looked them up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phorm
Having looked them up I decided I had no intention of working for them but I'd do the online test for practice.
Then I got a phone interview. Again, I had no intention of working for that company but hey, interview practice and it might be fun..
The interview consisted mostly of the interviewer trying to persuade me that the company wasn't bad really and I shouldn't believe everything i read on the internet about them.
He sounded increasingly desperate as the interview went on and if it hadn't been a phone interview I would have been laughing in his face.
The even more fun thing about this was Phorm ceased trading a full three years before the company I was working for did.
After having my Ubuntu installation demand I signed up to Ubuntu Pro just to complete the update I was doing, and making me jump through bloody hoops in order to do that I'm rather less keen on that than I used to be, so I'm looking at other distros right now. Was thinking of going to Mint which I last tried in late 2022, but wanted to check out other things first.
Some of the comments here have been quite informative in terms of what not to try!