Posts by swschrad 225 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Dec 2010
it had white-out ribbon on it, and a special backspace key that went back, placed the white-out ribbon down, and let you type your one character correctly, blocking out the old oops.
I presume also never used a Mag Card Selectric, which was perhaps the earliest stored program typewriter that didn't require a supercooled machine room of computers.
it ain't NT 3.51, but it works. except occasionally you have to pop the battery out because it won't shut down. and occasionally won't really start after you log in, and you have to pop the battery out.
come to thing of it, it's cranky as hell and makes me want Windows 98 again.
the last beta release is always the first general release. which means the last of the beta bugs will the first of the public bugs.
and eventually when they run the first general patch, something they surprisingly don't do in beta, guess what? there be dragons here.
I have seen that so many times since I started dealing with these infernal machines in 1980 that it's no surprise at all.
I have a friend who is no nerd in any way, whose computer came up this morning on Windows 10. "I can't find anything!"
so, if you don't have things off the desktop and findable through standard Windows trickery, either do it or search on "remove gwx.exe" and do the conversion on your own time, after all the shrieks and eeks are over, and the upgrade path is well known. there's a year to update for free.
VZ is disseminating.. if a fiber cut took out their 911 wireless capability, they had both primary and redundant communications in the same fiber duct. even for 911, the cost and complexity of engineering full redundant alternate path communications, in which nothing in the stream at all is ever within a shovel cut of any other part of the primary path, means it isn't done.
911 centers connect to 911 routing services, which are connected to phone companies, which you connect to when you grab the phone. to cut costs, increasingly, the routing services are contracted out to whomever. whomevers are not required to be as robust as phone companies.
you know, the old finger-pointing exercise that has been endemic in IT forever. "oh, no, the issue is over there with BlatherCo." "well, actually, you need to talk to VitaHost."
how much of the crudware resident on corporate PCs ends up in Enterprise, and how many apps in Enterprise evolved over in PC, that is. "uhhh, it appears the core middleware in our disk hives came from PC, and they got the developers. we're in countdown to a fatal exception here."
I'm glad I'm miles away from a front row seat these days.
there is also the possibility that if you don't pay and John Q Robber does, then somebody you don't want in your house will take it over and take what they want.
or Billy Joe Hackathon will hit the database and auction off whole cities of locks.
we have three effective technologies to secure our homes. (1) my own lock. (2) big-ass dog. (3) New Orleans Mastercards, with numbers like .38, .45, 9mm, etc.
the noise also pips across the radio spectrum where police, national defense, and other useful services live. in the UK, those services use less power than they do here across the pond in the US, so the interference from PLD is more noticeable. in the US, the "smart meter" set at the power companies have been pushed into VHF shared services for their transformer monitoring and air-conditioner remote shutoff gear because of trying and failing to get their stuff to work without burying everything else where they wanted to park their transmissions.
it's very old hat now to set priority low for IP data, high for IP phone, and top priority for internal network management, you know. then somebody downloading 450 Mb of manuals from a vendor is not going to hammer your conference call with market analysts.
if you're REALLY important, dual-path your IP the right way... separate networks, different physical paths, entrance points on opposite sides of the building, stout battery backups, nothing duplicates anywhere or lies parallel. monstrously expensive. but in cases of life-safety communications, like airplane control, it's routine and has been for decades.
at least it is over here in the US
look around the mall. it ain't valuable any more. over here in the 50 states, most malls are half leased, something to do with building 5 times more stores than people use.
I agree, if RS had gone Maker last year, they'd be growing. there are at least 5 3D printers under the $1000 mark, for instance. 3 bucks for a roll of filament, which the machines eat like popcorn. Raspberry PI headquarters and take that phone space, put in a round table and a big power supply, and hold Saturday afternoon "make it do something" classes. get the parts back on the pegboard.
nah. down at Tandy Tower, all the suits want slick phone apps. so that's what everybody wants, new phone every 5 months and push cute apps.
gurgle, and the drain is clogged again with another power tie.
lenders wouldn't let them. for sure they've closed about 300. I saw a report early this week that said about 700. but I rather doubt they had the cash to do that, and again, lenders don't want them to waste cash on silly things like mall rental buyouts and legal staff separation payments. they'd rather The Shack buys more robot toys and push them to... uh... I don't see anybody coming in...
got tied up an hour crossing the Canada/US border a few years ago one month after a radiation stress test. told the guys at the heart clinic the next year. now they have signs up all over the place, check website thus-and-so if you have to leave the country within 3 months of a test.
oh, and bacon? should set it up so you have to do a breath test, and no entry to the US if there is no yummy bacon detected. this is our heritage, and we will fight to the last man for a rasher.
they DO have one. the most likely, considering one of the papers dislodged by the Nut Koreans referred to a MafIAA plan to freak the DNS servers as a piracy retort, would be to seed The Interview direct to torrents.
the Nut Koreans, wild and kicking out walls, would then wage war on the torrents.
so Sony wins in the end in their phantom war against the wrong guys, and the MafIAA would let them back in the club for liquid lunches.
the harder one: comms failure.
the easy one: borked flight plan submissions. answer: spit it back in the pilot's face, like we do in the US. fix your problem, then resubmit. anybody who ever put a card deck in the pigeonhole and got a barfed printout back from JCL with no program on it should understand that. I am advised the US flyboy system says where the problem was when a flight plan is rejected. the stack of NOTAMs tacked on the wall (or that's how it worked back when I found these things out) needs to be read again to avoid hitting the next issue.
two explainations. one... they use a different set of sneakies to spy on their own. two... the sneaks from Nonameistan are using a different set of sneakies to spy on the "five eyes" guys, in hope of drawing all attention to the "five eyes" nations so they can keep the game going as long as possible and amass the money and tools to have flying cars.
the spy game is like that. redirection and red herrings.
if you are on an antenna lead, you have one kind of access and one type of regulation and pricing (free, regulate at source.) if you are on a cable-tv or satellite, you have another (regulation at middleman, whatever pricing the market will bear.) if you are trying to stream, still another (market controls access, pricing is whatever this experiment is looking for, plus subscriber pays for the network at whatever cost the market will bear.)
there is no competition, there are various oligarchies dictating your lifestyle.
I have always believed that you need a flat regulatory environment, where the type of wire you have doesn't mean a damn thing about how you pay for and use a service. hopefully the FCC is going there. it is going to stun several of the oligarchies who are milking their piece of the system to the last drop. if they had to compete on a flat playing field, they'd be long dead working like that. I shed no tears, as they usually have the shittiest service, too.
how about that ad for General Genocide? click their icon, look for the gearwheel, click it, and select BLOCK OR REPORT. in the past, I have been clicking BLOCK. I am now also going to click REPORT, and join me in flooding the twits who are censoring the reported users until they stop this fulminating foolishness.
It has come to the attention of our legal department that your laws infringe upon the ability of Microsoft to lock your users in and screw them over. This will never do, and as a result, we are rescinding your ability to exist as a nation. You are required to turn over the keys within 7 days and leave the territory, except for those workers who are grinding out wireless mice and Xboxes. Failure to do so will require stern measures.
Sincerely, Microsoft
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