Re: $3/month?
Thank you Mike for posting this. Now also switched to the "Family Classic" subscription model.
Posts by It depends.....
13 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jan 2012
Copilot invades Microsoft 365 Personal and Family for an extra three bucks a month
Avis alerts nearly 300K car renters that crooks stole their info
Tuesday 10th September 2024 09:20 GMT
Can anyone confirm if this affects AVIS customers in the US only, or globally?
UK-based Reg reader here. I rented a car from AVIS in Dublin at the start of August this year, so it sounds like this breach happened after my rental completed. I must admit that I was not impressed with them anyway - having paid for the 4-day hire in advance, using a stash of Avios in order to bring the entire rental price down to under £50, they kindly charged my Mastercard for the full hire when I returned the car to Dublin Airport (you need to supply your Credit Card to guarantee insurance - or in other words, in case you scratch or damage the car, they use the card shown to bill you). After I contacted them to point out their error, they then took 28 days to refund me.... hmmm.... call me cynical, but this struck me as quite a nice "revenue-generator-on-the-side" if they can get away with doing this to several hundred customers a month and benefit from all of that lovely accrued interest...
Andrew Tanenbaum honored for pioneering MINIX, the OS hiding in a lot of computers
Wednesday 26th June 2024 09:17 GMT 
Kudos to Tanenbaum
I am so very glad to see the warm appreciation being shown towards ast on this thread. His books are some of the clearest written books that any aspiring learner of Computer Science could ever wish to read. Like others in this comments section, I too had copies of Tanenbaum's 3 books - Computer Networks, Modern Operating Systems and OS Design and Implementation. These were all "bibles" to us back 'when I were a lad'/undergrad (between 1988-92).
And when I say that his books were clear and well written - case in point. I got my Mum to read the opening chapters of Modern Operating Systems and in just one evening, she took in those chapters and really understood the basics/background that were contained in those opening chapters. My Mum left school aged 14 without a single 'O' Level or qualification to her name and basically spent her entire working life working in laundries. Yet a 50-something lady with no formal education grasped the basics of how modern computers worked simply in one evening simply because ast had that ability to impart knowledge in a clear and easy to read manner. I struggle to name any other authors since then who have had that same ability to "impart knowledge so easily".
The guy deserves all the plaudits that he gets and he certainly helped me on the path that has taken me to where I am today (a 54 year old who has been working in IT constantly since graduating back in 1992).
McDonald's ordering system suffers McFlurry of tech troubles
Tuesday 19th March 2024 10:41 GMT
Re: Mass turnpike usa
Mass Turnpike...Natick Mall.... sigh!
True story - I am a Brit, I joined EMC at the turn of the century, back in the days when most of the training was still based over in Hopkington/Milford and so we visited the area frequently. As we were usually billeted at hotels near the I-90 (I lost track of how often I stayed at The Sheraton Castle at Framingham!) I got to know the area fairly well. As someone who had disliked McD's burgers since my early teens, I had my first ever sausage & egg McMuffin over there - and to this day, it is still the only thing that I will ever eat from them. Plus we would always visit Wrentham Mall to stock up on cheap Levis and Bose headphones .... great memories!
Silicon Valley Bank's UK arm bought by HSBC for 1 British pound in rescue deal
Unix is dead. Long live Unix!
Tuesday 17th January 2023 17:31 GMT
Re: About 15 years ago...
As an SGI (& Sun and SCO and..) admin back in the '90s, I also loved working with Irix. However... its TCP/IP implementation was ... full of holes IIRC - I distinctly remember having issues trying to get tcp_wrappers working correctly back on our Indigos that were running Irix 5.0 or 5.0.1 (my memory is hazy on the specifics).
Irix 5.3 for the win - things were much more stable by this point!
Red Hat buddies up with Nutanix to provide an escape route from VMware
Starlink's latent China crisis could spark a whole new world of warcraft
The hour grows late, the enemy are at the gates... but could Intel's exiled heir apparent ride to the rescue?
Tuesday 19th January 2021 11:54 GMT
Re: They should rebrand themselves as Penelope...
Have an upvote for the Silicon Graphics references - while working as in my first full IT Admin role after graduating, at a local University back in the "Windows for Workgroups running on top of Netware 3.11/3.12" days, I was then given the task of looking after our Science Faculty's SG Workstations... Indigos, Indigo2s, etc. What a way to learn unix (well, Irix actually...). Just don't remind me of the seriously broken TCP/IP stack that Irix had been cursed with, which meant that getting things like TCP wrappers to work was... interesting, to say the least.
Working in IT during the 90s was such a hoot!
IBM stands for I Block Money, says sales rep: Big Blue sued yet again by its own staff over 'missing' commissions
Wednesday: Facebook sparks another privacy brouhaha. Thursday: Facebook axes Iranian disinfo bods. Fancy that!
Whois? More like WHOWAS: Domain database on verge of collapse over EU privacy
Acorn King Moir: BBC Micros, Ataris and 'BS' marketing
Friday 13th January 2012 13:46 GMT
Wow - memories - wrote my final year Comp. Sci BSc. Dissertation at Portsmouth Uni in 1992 using Impression an an Archimedes 420, and was then printed out on, of all things, a (borrowed) Canon BJ10 Ex !!! Four of us Acorn advocates at Uni banded together and printed out our dissertations this way. We went through a quite a lot of ink IIRC ..... happy days (and greetings to RJW, Flossy & Old Simon if any of you are reading this :o)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
