About four years ago, I tried to log into FB. My account was strictly a small number of family and school friends, less than twenty total, to keep in tabs with. But this time, instead of the usual feed, I was shown a nasty looking message that my account was flagged due to another account in my feed having suspicious activity, and that I would have to do the facial recognition thing. I don't have a camera on my computer, don't want one, and had been a FB user for over twelve years. They would not respond to any questions about which particular account got me flagged. When I used my wife's account to look over my tiny friend's list, everyone was there, nobody flagged.

After about two weeks of run-around by FB's administration, I wrote them back to let them know they could fuck off and I'd have nothing more to do with them. Pulled a bit of a Karen, but screw it, at least tell me what the original problem was in truth. With my wife's account I let my friends and family know what was going on and I'd no longer be a part of FB, maybe they should consider their positions with the service. It became patently obvious my account and others like it were the product they were selling, and I neither want nor need that in my life.

As for Twitter (won't call it X despite what Elon expects...), I tried to sign up for it not long after it started, and could never get through the the registration process. In hindsight. it was doing me a favor. I have no need of what Twitter is trying to sell. Besides /. and Reddit, I'm not on any other so-called social media. And I'm fine with that.

Thanks for that! I'm glad someone else appreciates (appreciated?) ObjC for what it is/was. I never quite got C++, and struggled with Pascal with Objects / Delphi for some time. I came across ObjectiveC, and OO programming started to make sense. I went back to Delphi, and its OO take also began to make sense. And then I struggled with C++, so basically I use it as "C with Objects" and leave it at that. Still don't get C++ completely, and I'm fine with it. Basically all my programming is "retro" these days (DOS, Win3.1x, even some CP/M), so my ObjC programming is kept almost totally to the Linux command line.

The two biggest struggles with ObjC was and still remains: its frameworks are still tied almost completely to NeXT, and so are almost all its instructional materials. It's tough to open a book purported to teach ObjC, and the first chapter details installing Xcode on a Mac. I haven't had a Mac in over 15 years. Happily, GNUstep is relatively close (for wide values of "close"), so it's not all that bad.

Yah, you old fogeys pretending to be old fogeys...

This always brings to my mind the guy in Texas, Willingham, who was later put to death over the house fire that killed his children. All based on apparent junk forensic science, even known then to be. Several investigations after showed it was all junk forensic science, and the then governor ignored it all. He even changed the make up of the state commission responsible for investigating such cases to keep it from reviewing a major report showing the inept science used. Most likely an innocent guy went to the death chamber, and nobody at the state level cared. Governor said 'he was a monster!", but who really was the monster in all that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

There are at rare times that I can understand the need for using a death penalty, not for retribution or deterrence, but simply the rid the world of a human piece of garbage. That centers almost completely around child molesters who kill their victims. And I come from a family that has dealt with the violent death of one of our members.

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?