
Re: BOFH has been going on 25 years....
Has it really been 25 years since I was working helpdesk at an ISP whose unofficial motto was "putting pedestrians on the information superhighway"?
Crap. I guess it has.
267 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Feb 2017
China's massive expansion of coal-fired power plants DEFINITELY should result in sanctions from every other country on earth.
China has been the world's worst CO2 emitter for years now, they're more than double the US, and it's only going up.
The public AC chargers around here that have a fee at all (most are free) all charge by the minute. There isn't a kWh fee at all.
Dunno what the HVDC chargers do, I've got a plug-in hybrid, so I mostly just charge at home unless I'm somewhere that a free charger gets me rockstar parking.
My ESD-safe steel toe shoes are twelve and a quarter inches long. The foot is actually a pretty convenient measuring unit for me to use, I can get a reasonable approximation of the size of a room just going heel-to-toe.
I still support the US going completely metric and ditching this silliness - except for temperature. Fahrenheit is a much better scale for normal human operating temperature than centigrade. 0-100 being really cold to really hot makes a lot more sense than 0-100 being pretty cold to dead.
I disagree. It's just a bad UI.
There's no good reason a link shouldn't be detected and made clickable, the vast majority of sites that allow comments do it.
You don't get the bulb from HP, and never did.
That's always been a 3rd party repair.
One of my Brother lasers has a bad fuser roller. The only part available from Brother is an entire fuser assembly, and costs almost as much as a new printer. A 3rd party roller is about $30.
I was gonna say, I'm very confused by all of this.
5 on a Friday is THE deployment time for anything big. Yeah, it means my weekend is fucked. But it means the next week I'm taking Tuesday, Wednesday, and maybe Thursday off if things went well over the weekend, and it means I've got until Sunday evening to roll everything back if it didn't work.
And of course I take a nap Friday afternoon before doing anything big. If something interrupts my nap, maybe updates get delayed a week.
Seriously? I remember when that thing came out, it was the most hated desktop ever, and with good reason. It's NEVER been usable, it was designed to be unusable, its entire premise was "how can we make a computer unusable" and it succeeded. It's worse than Gnome 3, and that's saying a lot. The protests finally got that mess removed from Ubuntu even if it didn't get rid of the nearly as awful Gnome 3, and many of us just gave up and switched to the very nice Xfce.
That abomination not being usable isn't just a bug, it's a design philosophy.
My home EVSE has an ethernet port but it's not connected to anything, because I couldn't see any reason I'd want that.
I intentionally got one that didn't need any connection to a network. If it hadn't been possible to buy one that didn't, I'd just roll my own with something like OpenEVSE.
The local utility board can't tell the difference between a car and a dryer.
Nope, it's the old formats.
Some years ago, they broke Word's ability to read its own old formats. Unless they've since fixed it, in order to open an old Word document you have to first convert it with LibreOffice - at which point, you don't really need Word any more anyway.
I'm not really sure exactly where it broke, but early '90s files is probably about right. And don't forget nobody put .doc on the end of Mac files back then, file identification was based on the type/creator codes, which really was a better solution.
I've got a few Extended IIs and old ADB - USB adapters. They're stored someplace, because the Extended II was the 4th best keyboard Apple ever built.
1st is the Magic Keyboard with Touch ID and numeric keypad. That's right, the current production keyboard. It absolutely stomps the Extended II's ass.
2nd is the Magic Keyboard with numeric keypad. Yep, also still available brand new.
3rd is the Apple Keyboard with numeric keypad. The wired version from 2007, nice and flat with USB ports on each side.
Why do those 3 others win over the insanely great for its day Extended II? Because they're flat, quiet, and extremely easy to type on.
Loud keyboards suck.
And when the first flat keyboards came out, I just knew I'd hate them, they looked like the evil chicklet keyboards of the '80s. And I was wrong, so incredibly wrong. They're amazingly good, better than anything that's come before. They've got just the perfect amount of key travel, they're so low on the desk that I never have to throw some asshat's wrist rest across the room because they're too low for said asshats to use wrist rests, they don't have those stupid little feet to put them at the wrong angle, and they look good.
So no. I'm not bringing my Extended IIs back into use for anything but my vintage Apples.
And those horrible IBM keyboards were never any good for anything but improvised LARTs.
I know, right? My first few cars had really nice, soft, velvety cloth seats, not like the horrible vinyl seats on the '70s low end cars. And then leather showed up everywhere, and it wasn't as nice. And now vinyl is back, and you can't even get cloth any more.
Why did they think anybody would want vinyl seats?
Where I live, ISDN was cheap. Really cheap. Cheaper than a regular phone line, and you got 2 phone lines. I don't even remember exactly how much it cost, but it was less than $50/month for ISDN service.
ISDN "dialup" 64k internet service was $20/month, the same as 56k dialup. 128k was $35/month. It wasn't "supposed" to be always on for normal customers, but I wasn't a normal customer, and my internet service was free, along with a 5-pack of usable static IPs.
So my ISDN was always both channels up unless I was using a channel for voice. It would auto-drop a channel if I picked up a phone, reconnect it when I hung up.
I kept it until I got 1.5 megabit DSL.
It's the same in the US. Lots of us have been so gerrymandered that for most elections our vote doesn't matter at all. Vote against the Orange Menace? Of course I did, both times, but my vote didn't matter at all because my state was going to the tiny-fingered, cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing shitgibbon no matter what. My vote counts in local elections (we've even had a city council election decided by a single vote in the last few years) but effectively doesn't at the state level.
It's pretty obvious what that is - an American recipe converted to metric - and done quite badly. 6.35mm means it wants about 1/4 inch pieces of potato. 1.42 grams of salt is about 1/4 teaspoon, 49 grams of flour is about 1/3 cup of all-purpose flour (because American recipes don't use weights for salt, pepper, spices, or flour).
"Somebody else's computer" is as true now as it ever was. You think it's "getting old" because you don't like the truth.
There is no "cloud". The "cloud" does not exist. It is now and always has been somebody else's computer, a computer you do not own, do not control, and which WILL eventually get hacked because it's a massive target.
Your bank isn't safe because there's any chance it won't be compromised. Your bank is only safe because government insures your money when the compromise happens.
For your password storage, you're a fool if you put it on somebody else's computer.
KeePass is a far better option than keeping your passwords on somebody else's computer.
When I was in school, we typically got three or four bomb threats a year. It was always assumed that it was somebody wanting part of the day off, but it tended to work. They'd evacuate the school until a few minutes after whatever time the bomb was supposed to go off, then let us back in.
The phone system in town was too antiquated to actually trace a call unless somebody happened to be at the switch while it was connected, which was almost never, and the callers were never stupid enough to stay on the line longer than was needed to call in the threat.
Nobody was ever all that alarmed about it, after all none of the schools I went to had actually been blown up since 1958, and then it was just the one, and the racist scum were at least considerate enough to do it in the middle of the night.
I even get that from my girlfriend. "The WiFi's not working!" shouted across the house.
I'd test WiFi, reset a few access points for the fun of it, verify that yes, it's functional. She insists it's not working. I look at her phone, verify it's working, and ask for a more detailed description of the problem.
Yep, it's an internet connectivity issue. "Why didn't you say the internet wasn't working?"
I've finally learned to test, then just say "WiFi's fine, the internet connection is down." - which of course annoys her, but I'm already annoyed anyway, so we're mostly even.
Of course, then I have to deal with Comcrap, so I get even more annoyed.
No, it's a group of women who were brainwashed into the christofascist concept that women should be controlled by men.
Here's a link that shows just how disgusting it is: https://voicesfromtheblogs.com/submitting-to-husband/
And it gets worse from there, some christofascists condone marital rape and physical abuse.
I much prefer the legal approach. Apple should be required to allow app installation from any source, not just their own app store.
Once that's fixed, I don't care if Apple charges 99%, but until then they should only be allowed to charge reasonable processing costs, not an extortionate 30%.
I don't care about Twatter at this point, though. I deleted my account and deleted the app from all my devices, and it'll stay that way until Space Karen is no longer involved with it.