Froedlich

7 ms·

31.
by Froedlich 2y ago
"Streaming tape backups." Several different hardware formats, various software interfaces, native OS and commercial. Backups are important, but only restores count. Thousands of dollars and years down the tape rabbit hole, I eve
32.
by Froedlich 2y ago
Charles Moore, creator of the FORTH programming language, also created a one-hand "puck" keyboard that worked by chording. Supposedly, he used it to write programs in FORTH while driving to work. As far as the story goes, he progr
33.
by Froedlich 2y ago
We've had the "Mechanical Turk" version of AI-generated content for two decades; the pay-by-the-word "content farmers" and the spammy sites that use their output. The main difference between that and "AI"
34.
by Froedlich 2y ago
I'm re-reading Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine" at the moment. It's about Data General and the development of a new minicomputer. I read it at the dawn of my IT career in the 1990s and found much of was
35.
by Froedlich 2y ago
All of my clients have their own servers, hot spares, and off-site backup.
36.
by Froedlich 2y ago
We had a local election back in 2004, where Candidate A unleashed a spam tsunami at text and voice numbers. Enough that it angered enough people to turn the election to Candidate B. (best as we could tell after the fact) Candidate B, it ev
37.
by Froedlich 2y ago
Back in ancient times - the 1980s - one of the DAK-style electronic toys mail-order places sold an interesting box. It worked like this: 1) pick up line 2) play a pre-recorded message (default: "Please enter your extension.") 3)
38.
by Froedlich 2y ago
Call from another jurisdiction, and good luck trying to enforce any laws. Back in the old days spam call centers were often in the Caribbean for that reason, but now that phone calls are so cheap, they might be anywhere.
39.
by Froedlich 2y ago
Exactly. Which I have tried to explain (unsuccessfully, alas) too many times. We only answer calls from numbers we recognize. This has caused some interesting issues, though. My wife answered one of the unknown-callers on her cellphone a
40.
by Froedlich 2y ago
In 2007 I put together a bunch of servers running openSUSE 10.2. They run some specialized application software that's version-dependent and is unlikely to ever be upgraded. The working network is not connected to the internet, so the
41.
by Froedlich 3y ago
Yeah, that's the usual response when someone doesn't have much data to keep track of, or thinks they can "just google it" to find something again. I have a "knowledge management" system I put together over the
42.
by Froedlich 3y ago
If you get assigned to something like that, own it, no matter how useless it is. It's an opportunity to bulk up your resume for free.
43.
by Froedlich 3y ago
Someone I knew was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 20 years after taking his child to the ER. The doc there decided it was "shaken baby syndrome" and called the cops. After that, he was on the guilty-until-proven inno
44.
by Froedlich 3y ago
> Having no understanding as to the technicalities involved, the project was given the go ahead by the directors after several meetings with a vendor -- Been there, got the T-shirt. Had the "sysadmin" job title and everything.
45.
by Froedlich 3y ago
Yet Another Account on Yet Another Service, and most people are already maxed out on what they can handle. I periodically get someone trying to get me to sign up for the New Hot Thing. If I had time for that, I can find better uses for it
46.
by Froedlich 3y ago
TCL/Tk and Lazarus for programming. Trinity for a desktop GUI and file manager. VirtualBox for multiple testing environments. VNC and SSH for managing remote machines. VLC for playing videos. Speedcrunch for calculations. Imagine if y
47.
by Froedlich 3y ago
[waves hand] That would be me. Other than a few web forums, I don't use my phone for anything that requires a password. Certainly not for email, banking, or anything that involves personal data, money, or business. A lot of stuff, I
48.
by Froedlich 3y ago
I have about 150 accounts, though some of them are logins for vendors I dealt with once, a decade or more ago. > I guess the next step would be to have usernames, phone numbers and even payment methods (apparently virtual credit cards so
49.
by Froedlich 4y ago
John Barnes wrote a novel called "Kaleidoscope Century" back in 1995. AIs had been created, some went rogue, and then they were fighting each other for computing resources. Then humans started shutting down computers and fragment
50.
by Froedlich 4y ago
I moved from Turbo Pascal and Delphi to FreePascal and Lazarus. I write business application software; mostly inventory and sales stuff. Pascal was popularized by Borland, who sold a complete develpment environment that was tiny, fast, wel
51.
by Froedlich 4y ago
Vernor Vinge wrote a short story about something similar; "The Cookie Monster" from 2003.
52.
by Froedlich 4y ago
I periodically hit pages where I can't tell what a vendor's product does. Or I already know what it does, but it's so full of buzzwords, trademarked terminology, and bafflegab I'm lost. VMWare's web site was a goo
53.
by Froedlich 4y ago
I usually used Binary Coded Decimal.
54.
by Froedlich 4y ago
> enjoying the sort of expansive freedom that I have, where I could literally walk out my door right now and be thousands of miles from here in a couple of days with nobody saying boo about it... --- I've read several accounts writt
55.
by Froedlich 4y ago
"We're Number One; why bother to try harder?" I would suspect GMail is costing Big G more than they're making out of it, and they're trying to gently shove users off the platform, but they've never had any prob
56.
by Froedlich 4y ago
I go through my bookmarks every five or six years, weeding out the dead links. Surprisingly, many of them go back to the 20th century, and a few even to 1995, when I was running Mosaic on SCO Unix. Now that disk space is so cheap I've
57.
by Froedlich 4y ago
> Samsung Samsung also sells "Euro spec" (can install new bootloader) and "America spec" (locked in hardware) phones under the same SKU. You can't tell the difference until you try to flash it. I got bit by tha
58.
by Froedlich 4y ago
You mean "Microsoft deliberately pwning your computer" instead of "the same level of abysmal security Microsoft has delivered since DOS; expect someone to pwn your system Real Soon Now"? Add TPM and UEFI, and the CPU a
59.
by Froedlich 4y ago
1) is he available under my insurance plan? 2) irrespective of his certificates or qualifications, does he listen when I'm trying to describe my problem or is he just looking down and poking at his laptop or tablet checking boxes? (I
60.
by Froedlich 4y ago
I have an 8-camera home surveillance system. It really wants to talk to the mothership in China, but it will work without it. However, the only interface to its control box/recorder is through a plugin for Internet Explorer 7. I have

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