Re: Customers
But personal computers with Internet connections were already fairly pervasive by that time, no?
26710 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
I once sent a rather steamy love letter to my Boss, and a system status report to my girlfriend (now Wife). Thankfully, they both found it hysterical. No harm, no foul. An extra pint that evening helped :-)
Side note: Rubbermaid sells all kinds of things, not just cleaning gear.
... seeing as we all know what content playboy.com has always hosted, what did our hero need from that site to set filters? The individual pictures wouldn't be of any help, nor would the names of the files said pictures were contained in, nor the directory names in the file system. Etc.
All he had to do was block the domain. Which didn't require a visit.
And no, in the days of Win95 there was no "machine learning" that could be trained on pR0n.
Pulling ground water had nothing to do with the dust bowl. It was severe drought coupled with a lack of understanding dry farming coupled with stripping the existing native grasses in favo(u)r of row crops. This destabilized the topsoil over a wide area and .... well, the rest is history.
Also, the Dust Bowl wasn't in the midwest. It was in the south-east corner of the Great Plains ... Roughly centered on the two counties in the western-most half of the Oklahoma Panhandle, and extending out a couple counties in all directions into Colorado, New Mexico, Texas and Kansas and a couple more counties in Oklahoma. More minor effects extended further into Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.
"meant to upvote you."
So change it. All you have to do is hit the up arrow. Yes, even after you've already hit the down arrow. And then you can change it back again. And again, if you like. And again, if you're really really bored. And again, if you like to fuck with people's brains.And again, just because. And again, because your cat did it. Etc.
"A proper split system costs a bit too much when you consider how few hot days we get in a year."
Mini-splits would be ideal for the British Isles ... they are heat pumps that work both ways. Cool air in the summer, warm in the winter. And they are usually very, very quiet and last virtually forever, if you keep the service up at the proper intervals (mostly just filter changes/cleanings and pressure checks). Well worth the money, IMO. Also, contrary to popular belief, they can be installed by the homeowner (at least here in the US).
"The half-in half-out, window mounted units are presumably better"
Modern ones actually work quite nicely (if properly sized!), and use less power than you might think.
"most houses have the wrong sort of windows for them."
As long as you can bolt a bracket or two to the outside wall to support them, they will work with any window that they physically fit into. True, you might need to install some sort of blocking material to fill open spaces within the frame, but not taken up by the AC unit, which can get ugly, but what price to pay for cheap comfort? Note that they are usually only good for cooling, they don't work both ways.
At the house in town, we use cheap metal shelf brackets as supports, and 1" closed cell foam insulation cut to size and painted to block the open space. Works nicely.
"Windows 95 has IP stack in the system"
Not unless you sprung for the "Plus!" pack. Microsoft still didn't "get" the Internet at that point. Some can make a pretty good argument that they still don't.
"Windows NT always had IP stack since it first 3.1 version."
For extremely small values of IP stack. Quite frankly, it was the worst approximation of a TCP/IP stack that ever shipped commercially. A small portent of things to come.
Pretty much everywhere I've ever worked there has been a long standing feud between two halves of the population that I can't mention without being accused of being sexist ... One side always says it's too hot, the other side always says it's too cold. Facilities says "set it all to 72F, that's what the HVAC is optimized for" ... and so we listen to pretty much everyone bitch about the temperature.
Until one place I worked at upgraded the AC, and all the controls that go along with it (had to do with a couple of new clean rooms). Naturally, the folks installing all the new gear left all the old thermostats in place. They were no longer connected, so why worry about them. A friend of mine noticed one of the secretaries would inevitably turn one of these controls up, and then keep an eye on it from her desk. Within an hour, one of the engineers would stroll by & turn it down again. Then she'd turn it back up, and so on ... This dance went on all day.
So we hatched up a Plan ... with the Boss's permission, we installed unconnected thermostats quite near both the secretary and the engineer ... and removed the one they were "fighting" over. Now both could happily set "their" temperature to whatever they wanted. It worked. Both were happy, and both commented how comfy the office was with the "new, improved" controls. People in their circle of friends made similar comments. The complaining about the temperature stopped, virtually overnight.
That would have been the end of it, except ever since then I've installed faux thermostats for 'special" people. It has never failed to shut them up about the office temperature. However, be warned ... that type can always find something else to bitch about. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Could be a slow leak at a service valve. These Schrader valves are similar to the valves on your car or bike tires.
There are typically two valves ... one on the hot high pressure side, and one on the cold low pressure side. If the itty-bitty o-ring that seals one or the other somehow gets damaged during service, it can appear to the tech that all is operating just fine ... but after the system has been running for a while, cycling on and off and generally vibrating, a valve can fail. An old AC tech once told me to always have the Schrader valves replaced when the system is serviced. Cheap insurance.
"meh, why all those keys ? use a stenograph keyboard."
I have various chorded keyboards. They work fine, but the Model M still gets ASCII from brain to computer faster and more accuratly.
"better even : only a 1 and 0 key. use binary encoded ascii."
I lived through the days of entering in code by toggling front panel switches. Trust me, you don't want to go back there.
"has been officially cleaned to be CYB, aka Cover-Your-Bases."
What official made that choice, for whom, and when? I've never seen it.
'You speak about very old times if you use CYA."
This morning is "very old times"? I suggested to one of our clients who sold a horse trailer that she include the time, not just the date, on the bill of sale, just to cover her ass. She thanked me for the advice.
"The Political-Correctness-Level in USA is SO unimaginable high it is difficult to grasp for non US."
I use "cover your ass" and "cover my ass" all the time here in the United States. Nobody has ever bitched at me for it. Perhaps you should actually travel to the place you are talking about before making comments about it? Parroting what you have heard makes you sound like a bird brain.
"And never ever make the mistake to use W-list and B-list. Use Allow-List, Deny-List and Reject-List. The latter is: The bouncer throws you in the nearest river and you will never be heard of again."
I use white list and black list all the time. Again, nobody has ever bitched at me about it ... except the nameless, faceless politically correct namby-pamby handwringers that infect/infest certain portions of the Internet. The vast majority of us ignore them.
And I'm in the supposedly ultra-politically correct California. Don't believe everything you see on Dear Old Telly. It lies to you.
"But modern digital crypto currency?? That is nonsense! We must stay in 1923! We cannot evolve our financial system!"
Your assumption that crypto currency is a valid option for that evolution seems to be flawed.
I'm pretty sure it is being shown to be anything but, at least here in the RealWorld.
"in fact one of the items that's suggested for our earthquake kits** is cash in smaller bills."
I know of one Palo Alto neighborhood where a well-meaning housewife organized all the households into preparing earthquake kits one Saturday afternoon (they blocked off a couple streets and made a party out of it). Included in each was about five hundred bucks in smallish bills.
Local teenagers noted this with interest. To make a long story short, by the following weekend, all kits were relieved of their cash.
Moral: Stash your emergency cash somewhere other than in your emergency kit. An Altoids box (or similar small metal box) with the money in a ziplock makes for waterproof and rodent/insect proof.
Epilog: The kids were caught red-handed counting their loot. They did all the gardening in the neighborhood for the following year.
I rather suspect that salt will be the major commodity after societal collapse. It's the one necessity of life that I can't easily produce here post apocalypse, and I'm less than a day's walk from San Francisco Bay! Ever try to move enough ocean water to keep yourself in salt, with just horses for transportation? Try to remember that in this scenario, salt is a preservative for most foodstuffs ...
Various dilutions of Ethanol will also be somewhat valuable, but anybody can make that, pretty much anywhere.
"Fourteen years after the invention of the internet, we still didn't have TCP/IP"
Actually, it was almost exactly 14 years between the first ARPANET connections in 1969 and TCP/IP's "Flag Day" on January 1, 1983.
Note that we had been working on (and testing over the network) TCP/IP for some years prior to it going live.
"It's a mystery to me why gold has always been "valuable""
Get thee to a place where you can learn to pan. I recommend anywhere on the Fraser River in BC (you'll always find gold anywhere on the Fraser ... small bits, but gold nonetheless).
I have yet to meet a single person who hasn't panned a little gold for themselves that hasn't immediately understood. There is something about the look and feel of the stuff, especially right out of a cold river, that can not be matched by anything else.
Be careful. It's addictive ... but there are worse hobbies. At least this ones out in the fresh air.