I'd like to have a way to explicitly reject an incoming call so that it does NOT go to voice mail. While I'm (cross my fingers) lucky that my cell phone doesn't get many spam calls, I don't want to waste my time even deleting their inevitable voice mail.

For my home phone, things got bad enough long ago that I put it behind Asterisk. Checking my CDR, the spam call situation is worse than ever, but they never get past my CAPTCHA, so the phone stays quiet. Some numbers are whitelisted to bypass the CAPTCHA, but anything unknown has to key in a randomly-assigned digit before the call goes through.

I also ended up ditching the landline in favor of VoIP; the VoIP service costs me less per month than what AT&T charged for Caller ID alone.

As long as Intel insists on not supporting ECC on desktop chips, they don't stand a chance of getting my business. Even with "only" 16 GB, I want ECC.

This sounds eerily like the 1988 fire at the switching center in Hinsdale, IL. Hopefully they didn't ignore alarms as happened then.

I rarely need to use the Windows 10 box, so it's not as bad as it could be.

Every time I think Windows 10 can't get more insufferable, Microsoft reaches a new low. I guess they solved the malware problem - by baking the malware into the OS.

While, unfortunately, I have to use one Windows 10 system in my office, fortunately it's the only one, and anything else is either Windows 7 or Linux. None of my personal machines have the misfortune of using 10, and as long as they keep doing things like this, none will.

I have absolutely no regrets about going with AMD for all my recent builds. As lackluster as Bulldozer was, Ryzen (even my relatively pedestrian 1700) has been wonderful - and I'd even take Bulldozer over Meltdown, FUD, and gag orders any day.

It's a nice incremental bump, but I'm not so sure it's worth upgrading if you already have a Ryzen 7. At any rate, I've been quite happy with my 1700. If I hadn't already upgraded to that, though (and was going to upgrade from an old system) I wouldn't hesitate to pull the trigger, thoughI might save up a bit more and go for a Threadripper.

I got bitten by Intel Obfuscation Syndrome when I bought a Core 2 Quad Q8200, not realizing that it was the only one of the Core 2 Quads to not have virtualization. Yeah, I should have looked before I leaped. In the end, it was a bad buy all around, as the DG43NB motherboard I bought to go with it also ended up crapping out in a surprisingly short time, but lasting long enough to be out of warranty. Needless to say, all of my later builds have been AMD (with various makes of motherboards).

You do know that Heathkit was selling build-it-yourself color TV sets decades ago, when vacuum tubes ruled and LCD flat panels hadn't yet even been dreamed up? There were much higher voltages involved there (hundreds of volts for plate supply, tens of kilovolts for the CRT anode), and even today there's a hell of a lot of DIY in the amateur radio world, where you still have high voltages to deal with.

I have an old APC Smart-UPS 1500 (the black version that Dell sold, bought at a blowout price from TigerDirect back in the day), and one thing I found was that the default hair-trigger response was murder on my batteries, due to a daily power grid switching transient that would unnecessarily trigger the unit for a few seconds. Setting the sensitivity to low made a huge difference in battery life, and another thing that helped was to switch to monthly self-tests instead of weekly. I do a manual battery calibration once a year.

The 1500 is a bit overkill-ish for my setup, but it has served me well.

As init systems go, I actually like systemd, far more than Upstart or, especially, Solaris SMF. The XML-laden can of worms known as SMF is particularly something I hope I never have to work with again (then again, with Solaris being barely on life support now, that's a pretty good bet). The only thing I'd wish is for systemd to confine itself to being an init system. Tying important system components tightly into systemd, on the other hand, is something I think is a Bad Idea.

I've ripped-and-replaced several of my CentOS 7 installations with Ubuntu Server 16.04 recently, though, and any new CentOS installs that I do will be KVM guests. Last spring, on a project, the client wanted to use an old server as a development system. I fire it up to do an installation, and whaddya know, the RAID controller doesn't show up. On a hunch, I tried Ubuntu Server just to see what would happen, and it worked fine. Unfortunately, some of the software we were using didn't support Ubuntu, so we ended up buying a cheap refurbished desktop as a development box. I could have just run CentOS as a KVM guest, but that seemed more trouble than it was worth.

It turned out that the RAID controller was deprecated in C6 and the driver was yanked in C7. No "this driver is now unsupported" warning, it was just ripped out completely. Then I discovered that the SAS HBA in my home NAS was deprecated in C7, so C8 would be a no-go unless I ate the cost of a new HBA.

That became academic when C7-1708 was released. The final straw was that the ZFS modules wouldn't build on the new kernel. Between that and the perennial problems with DKMS and weak-updates that required occasional manual cleanups, and Ubuntu shipping with prebuilt ZFS modules, it was clear to me that it was time to switch.

The Evan Doorbell tapes offer quite a treasure trove of stories, techniques, and sounds from those days.

The Esquire article probably did more harm to phreaking than anything else, IMO. Captain Crunch made a bold claim that three phreakers with blue boxes could take down the Bell System by stacking connections. Among the Evan Doorbell tapes, there are some examples of how stacking worked, and its limitations. Only a few two-wire tandem switches were actually stackable; the four-wire switches that handled the lion's share of long-distance traffic were not. Also, each extra link added also increased the noise floor to the point that signalling tones could only go so far. Evan Doorbell, in his own discussion of stacking, said that about 24 links or so was the most he could count on any of his tapes of stacks.

Crunch's hypothetical "three phreakers" might have been able to busy out a few minor trunk groups, but take down the Bell System? Not likely. Nonetheless, claims like that had to light a fire under the security department's butts.

Though it didn't come out until decades later, AT&T was no stranger to mass surveillance; their Project Greenstar system, deployed in 1964, which was meant to catch phreakers committing toll fraud. It monitored random trunks for out-of-place occurrences of 2600 Hz, and would then start recording the call in question. Ma Bell was concerned enough about its legality that it was kept top secret and never mentioned in phone fraud trials.

Indeed - and if I didn't use ZFS, I'd use good old MD-RAID. I don't like to be beholden to non-portable RAID, whether it's BIOS-based or a hardware controller.

On the other hand, portability is a bit less of an issue when the drives are bolted down to the motherboard, and my recent Ryzen 7 build doesn't really have enough lanes to fully take advantage of a second M.2 drive. I'd have loved a Threadripper, but that's a bit too luxurious for my budget, and a Ryzen 7 1700 is still a huge upgrade from an FX-6100.

Kudos to AMD for not ripping out ECC support on reasonably-priced CPUs, for that matter (even going back to my old AM2+ builds that are still going strong). Lack of affordable ECC support is right at the top of the "why I avoid Intel" list.

Since most people don't really understand how the net work, let alone how computers work, it's ridiculously easy to bullshit the masses. You can see this every day with phishing scams, "Your PC/phone/tablet is INFECTED!" scamware, social media hoaxes, and on and on. Unfortunately, this also gives big ISPs (and Hollywood for that matter) plenty of room to sling their own bullshit as well.