Posts by pmitham

Where the computer industry went wrong – the early hits

Good Old C64

"Its only real drawbacks were its expensive and horribly slow disk drives, but then most early C64 owners didn't get those – because their parents didn't buy them"

Not sure why the author thinks the 1541 disk drive wasn't very popular. Everyone that had a C64 had one. it was the default storage method! even as a 12 year old I had one! (though I did have a tape drive briefly first, very few people had those!!) . the 1541 was an absolute necessity and a great piece of kit! You took it to your friends house then you wanted to trade games as you could connect them together to make copies of disks independent of what the C64 was doing!

Great little machines for their time!

End of the road for biz living off free G Suite legacy edition

Sorry there is no Free opt out option for families using the free g-suite option. I'm in that situation and the ONLY option it to migrate to the paid version! Having said that I've had free g-suite for over a decade and don't mind paying for the service now

D.O.Eh: Here's the new privacy law Canada can't really enforce

Oh, the irony!

The gov't announces this act starting Nov 1 and at the same time we discover that Stats Can can request the banking information of thousands of Canadians "for statistical purposes" without the need to ask permission or inform us that they have breached our Privacy. But they can be "trusted" to not leak any of our banking details (including daily transactions) to Oh, say...the CRA ....Not holding my breath on this one!

Twice-crashed HPE SANs at Oz Tax Office built for speed, not strength, and turned off error reporting

Operator error....

This seems very much like both a setup issue. The vendor (or installer, whomever) needs to take responsibility for the fiber cables being poorly routed, but poor routing should not cause fiber to fail by itself. More importantly how the h$ll do 12 drives fail without anyone noticing? Its extremely unlikely that all 12 failed at the same time. Even without "call home features" turned on, the storage admin should have seen the component failures in the management interface, unless...they we're in the habit of not managing their environment (lazy) I've never worked in an environment where the storage admin just let the drive failures rack up before dealing with it! it was always repaired ASAP regardless of how many more drives could fail before there was an issue.

Mastercard goes TITSUP in US, UK: There are some things money can't buy – like uptime

Re: Backups and redundancy, FFS

MC spend a lot on advertising because they have the marketshare and want to keep it. I almost never see anyone use a VISA card anymore, and more and more stores won't take AMEX because of the high merchant fees. But its good to carry cards of different types for just such an "emergency"

'Plane Hacker' Roberts: I put a network sniffer on my truck to see what it was sharing. Holy crap!

I think its time to purchase "classics" that have no electronics in them. Hence no security risks! Just a carb, no EFI and a simple radio....Jesus the tinfoil hat types WERE RIGHT!!!

Microsoft says Windows 10 April update is fit for business rollout

Best upgrade ever!

Two words: Linux Mint!