Back in the 90's up until the mid-2010's, I dealt with a certain brand of medical office electronic records (ie electronic medical records or EMR) that ran on AIX that was very popular then. The support came with a USRobitics modem that sat on top of the server system to allow the support desk of that EMR company to call into the server for administration. The dial-in user had full admin rights, as it was simply the "root" user. Yea, that root, ya know, "root". And I'll let you guess the password, it only had four letters.

Since my company's product needed root access to finagle a few files living in /etc for it to run, I'd simply go in the client's office, ask to do a simple "site survey" which was mostly to look at the modem for the number, half the time posted on the bottom, or at least do a Sprint ANI to get it, then "good day"ed out. I'd also look for a note with the root password in the rare case it wasn't the default. My own work to install my company's setup took 15-20 minutes, and I was rarely if ever questioned on what I was doing on their precious server.

Whenever there was a need for me to work on my company's software, I had the dial-in access and used it. And certainly, it always occurred to me I was accessing a system I didn't own without the client's specific permission to do so, and could have been violating not a few of HIPAA's concerns. Later that EMR company moved to RedHat Linux, and dial-in access got a -lot- harder but still doable in many cases. It wasn't the only company using a "real" Unix, there was also another company whose EMR ran on SCO. They didn't always have a modem for dial-in support, but I never failed to get the root credentials for my own support use.

Note: "real" Unix, as that's how those companies' support looked at it, AIX and SCO were "real", Linux and *BSDs weren't.

They showed up to DC wearing t-shirts with the date "1/6" on them. In the morning. When were those t-shirts made? Well, obviously not after 1/6, and most likely not on 1/6, either. The t-shirt wearing folks seemed to have a pretty good idea about the event.

And the USA is not one of those sane countries, sadly.

Florida has a 6% sales tax, but Orlando/Orange County has a 6.5% sales tax.
The county to the north, the populous Seminole County, it's 7.0%
And in the growing but still basically empty Osceola County, it's 7.5%

For those (like me) who only use credit, it's no big deal, but it can be a huge surprise when you pay cash with only paper, and get back a yooj handful of coins.

BitLocker is just Microsoft's native drive encryption scheme, built right into Windows. In Settings or Control Panel, there's an object just for it. It has the dubious advantage that using Active Directory, the BitLocker recovery key can be backed up in the workstation's Active Directory account. Or you can print out the recovery key, save it to a thumb driver, or your organization might have an MBAM (Microsoft Bitlocker Administration and Monitoring) site to get the key from.

You mention ransomware, and that's not far from being right, in a way. If you have a drive encrypted by BitLocker, and whatever system you use to store BitLocker recovery keys isn't properly updated, you might get an outdated key. As in invalid and unusable, and you can't unlock your drive. Well, good luck ever getting into that drive, -ever-. It apparently doesn't take much for a workstation to generate a new key, and if you didn't take the moment to find it, or had reason to even look into the new key, your backup just failed you.

I get you, but maybe a somewhat better analogy involving plumbing and the removal of housing wastes is a septic tank.

I just paid $13.5K for a whole new septic system for our little old house in our little old neighborhood west of Orlando out in the county. It's honestly money that would have been better spent getting our hookup to the sewer system (~ $9K at the current fee) and the additional cost on the water bill (currently we pay for water coming in, but not sewage going out). But our old neighborhood has constantly been passed up for sewage lines, although Orange County (thru the water/waste utility OUC) sees nothing wrong with upgrading several fancier neighborhoods north of us for "environmental" reasons at minimal costs to their residents. The county willing pays a good portion of the sewage connection for people with plenty of money, yet by-passes lower income blue-collar neighborhoods with no reduction in the same fees. So we all still have septic tanks here, and a *lot* of those systems would not pass current code and should be replaced, but many residents just don't have that kind of money sitting around in savings accounts, either for a sewage connection or for an upgraded septic system.

Since water and sewage are utilities much like copper-pair phone service is, and cellular service is becoming, and the economic factors for supplying them out to the public are very similar, it just seems a somewhat better analogy.

That's what it came to mean later, substitute "microcomputers" for "microprocessors". But originally CP/M stood for "control program / monitor". Monitor was a fairly standard term for a primitive operating system.

It started becoming "control program for microcomputers" after PL/M, which stood for "programming language for microcomputers."

I'm not here for the breaking news, I'm here for the interesting and insightful comments!

Here in the general Orlando area, Comcast is not too bad, they get the work done. And that I can say *nice* things about AT&T these days compared to a decade ago, well that's just black magic! Then there's Spectrum.

In several satellite offices of our company we needed to setup business Internet service. These offices are in strip malls and medical office plazas, and we knew going in that Spectrum was available at those places. So when we requested service, we'd have independent contractors come out with the damn router (invariably an Arris DS1670a), look for a cable, and tell us there wasn't one. They'd have to call in "Construction" to get a cable run to the building. Construction would "do something" and say the contractor could come out. And again, contractor said there was no cable, they'd call Construction. This went on for over three months at one office, spread among seven services calls. At the last contractor visit, I asked to speak with Construction directly. Well, turns out I can't, and I can't even get them to call me back. I dutifully reported this back to our Telecom department, who made very nasty calls to Spectrum to get this straightened out. Which eventually did happen. By the way, the contractors are not paid if there is not a cable to connect the router to, it's considered a failed install, and they get nothing for the trip. Waste of time for them and me.

At another site, where practically every office and business on the plaza has Spectrum service, we were told it was not available at that particular office. This, despite having been in the office before build-out, and finding their ground feed and splitters. At another site, they honestly did not have their cable run in place, but took over four months to get the run in place, including a couple of months where they dug their colorful plastic cable conduits into the ground, but left them in pretty loops at the side of the building. To be clear, these are places where our nextdoor neighbors have Spectrum service, yet Spectrum tried to tell us *we* couldn't have it. We're an international company, don't tell us such crap. They took the order, said they could do it, then attempted to welch out of it.

I always *love* it when folks trudge out this old bromide. "It wuz da Democrats then that...[did whatever]!". All the while quite consciously "forgetting" that almost to a man, every one of those then Democrats have since become Republicans. Sure, there are a few exceptions, Manchin of WV, who might as well be a Republican. I'm born and raised a US Southerner, I know well what it means to have Southern Democrats ie "Dixie-crats" running the state. Look up John Connolly, governor of Texas in the 60's, who started the "Democrats for Nixon" movement, or the ex-Democrats who turned in their party cards to become Republicans in the 80's. The Democrat Party of the present is not the Democrat Party of the 30's and 50's, much like the Republican Part of the same years is not the modern Republican Party. Things change, people re-align, it's not the same decade after decade.

I started with SLS way back when (late '92?), but soon moved over to Slackware as soon as it came out. While I've moved to Ubuntu (with a special love for Mint), I have bought and installed every copy of Slackware since, all the way to 14.2. While you might use another distro to try out and use Linux, you use Slackware to learn what Linux actually is all about. All due thanks to our BDFL, Pat V!

How about the CEO, is he planning on dragging his ass back to the office? Or would that cut into his tee time?

I find it funny that just before reading this, I had an issue logging into Slashdot. Noticed I wasn't logged in even though I have "remember me" checked, and I've been using the same home directory for ages. Look, I'm a 60 year old low 5-digit member, really I'm going to recall a password I probably set ten years ago? No biggie, I have had to use the password reset feature here on /. a time or two before. This time... ??? I click on the "send password reset code" button, and found the email with the password reset link. Clicked on it and the page opens. Nice, so I type in a new password and click "save", and immediately the page bitches at me that I need to put in my old password, the one I currently forgot. Cleared the page, reclicked the password reset link, same exact problem. I need to enter the password that I don't remember to reset password I don't remember for one I can.

So I guess there will be a day, maybe not so far in the future, that ol' Mr Foobar of uid 11230 will no longer ever be allowed to log into SlashDot again. Oh well...

Film at 11...

Another low UID'er here, and yea, there used to be a time when the editors *did* care, and do things like the math. CmdrTaco had no problem doing it, and even sometimes did the math wrong. But in the last twelve years (or so) of this site's existence, ..., well I say no more.

"Singular "they" has always been a part of English"

Strictly speaking, no it hasn't. "They" entered English just vaguely sometime in the 1100's or early 1200's from Norse (it's cognate with "that"). The original English pronouns began with "h" and a vowel or two, and started to become indistinguishable due to normal and historical vowel changes. "They" tended to solve the confusions of the original pronouns. Norse is the reason we have doublets like "shirt" and "skirt", both original male clothing items.

Otherwise, I agree with you.