dosman33

Lol, nice. Does an audio recording of an ivory-billed exist?

It was the sadness in his voice and the look in his eyes that aligned with his words. I certainly experienced plenty of skepticism directed at me based on my age in my youth, this was not that.

Before I worked at TSS doing in-home PC repair, I did a short stint at Radio Shack and got the Compaq experience you described. I remember going to the introduction event for the Compaq roll-out into Radio Shack stores, I was sitting in a large hotel ballroom with like 100 other Radio Shack sales folks. The Compaq guy was asking questions from the audience and I was literally the only person there who could answer questions like "what motherboard interface did the Pentium 2 use" (it was the first cpu to use a slot (Slot 1) versus a socket which was a big deal back then). I had dropped into the event straight after class at ITT, so I was just wearing casual attire and didn't think anything of it. Apparently that was a mistake, one of the higher up sales guys got offended and complained to my manager. I was offended that apparently no one else there knew anything technical at all, lol. Thankfully I left that job not long after.

I was spending all my time learning computers, and I was starting to build systems for family and friends. Once I was lent out to another Radio Shack store that was short handed and the other salesmen kinda lamented not being able to afford the Compaq a customer was buying. Afterwords, I tried to explain to him that I could easily build him a nicer system for a fraction of what we sold Compaq's for. He was still not interested, I think he was way more broke than I realized. I grew up broke too, but I also had my eyes set on improving my situation. Was kind of a wake-up-moment that most people around me had minimal ambition about this.

I also remember having to push cell phones at RS then too, I think we pushed a lot of Sprint phones. I was still fairly young and was just learning about phreaking, but I remember my boss telling people Sprint phones couldn't be cloned like analog cell phones could back then (I disagreed, but I had to agree it was harder at least). It was apparently a thing that your analog cell phone could be cloned over the air and suddenly your bill would be crazy that month. I only ever heard rumors about that kind of thing happening.

These old ads are great, really takes me back to that era. In the mid to late 1990's I was a pimply faced youth in community college and picked up a part time job doing "PC repair". I couldn't put my finger on it, but the outfit carried itself like it was a major corporation despite being a small office, it was called TSS (Technology Service Solutions). The majority of the other guys were always working in the field so I wouldn't get to know them until many months later. When I got my first paycheck (physical paper), it said IBM on it. I asked my boss why this was and he nonchalantly said "we just use IBM's payroll system". I was very confused but didn't ask any further questions.

What I came to learn later was that TSS was IBM's PC service division which it had sold off to Kodak just a few years prior. I spent most of my time doing contracted in-home PC repair for all the major PC brands of the era, including Gateway. I'd get a service call (on a RIM bullfrog two-way pager), call the customer and tell them "Hi, I'm with <major brand computer>, give me directions to your house and I'll fix your system". Most of the consumer PC manufacturers were unequipped to provide any kind of in-field repair service on their products, so they hired TSS for this. If you bought any kind of extended warranty on your PC then you were paying for TSS to show up on-site at your home to fix it. Apparently this was better than regional central repair hubs.

Let me tell you, there were some seriously crazy stories from the front line. Most of our work was through Sears for Packard Bell (cheapest machines sell higher volume and therefore require the most service, not even counting for PB's lower quality). We serviced Acer, Sony Vaio, Gateway, Dell, and other brands, and did other point-of-sale and other contract work. I remember servicing the Gateway Destination system - that 35" CRT was huge for even a TV at that time. But being up close I realized it actually kinda sucked to use as a computer monitor. People tried to set them up in their living rooms, so imagine using your computer in the living room instead of an office, and required sitting next to the 35" display meant you saw the CRT up close which just meant the low resolution was blown up larger and you could see the physically larger pixels up close.

So yea, showing up to peoples houses meant going to a lot of random peoples houses which was mostly fine, but occasionally terrible. I had multiple instances of working on computers in a house having brownouts. "So wait, the computer reboots when the lights in the house flicker? And dispatch has sent me out with a new display for you... yea, you're gonna have to get the power company out here...". One time, I was sent to a house that was barely a shack in the woods. Main room had a light bulb hanging from the ceiling. That call in particular stands out in my mind, nice people, a 70 year skinny old dude in overalls and a 400' bearded lady in a shack. I couldn't do anything to make their Gatway machine work better as it was the power lines (lightbulb was visibly flickering the whole time I was there, that poor PC never stood a chance), so I showed her how to play her music CD's in PC (between power sags that crashed the machine) and she was tickled pink. One of my trainers had a couple horror stories: one dudes house was an underground bunker. My coworker was sent to replace a modem. After, the client couldn't find his Solitaire on his desktop, so he locked the door and demanded my coworker fix his Solitaire game before he could leave. My coworker obviously had nothing to do with that issue, but he recreated the shortcut to the desktop and was set free.

Eventually I jumped ship from TSS to IBM proper, it was a fun adventure. But that year and a half slinging in-home service calls in the evenings was an interesting time.

I skimmed over half way through and they were still talking about gourds.

It's cute to see folks who have completely drunk the in-house koolaid try to communicate to outsiders, and we're better off for it. I really struggled to understand OS/400 coming in with a working knowledge of Unix/Linux, concepts as simple as creating a text file document in OS/400 don't translate at all.

Yes. I could not fathom why anyone would want to run anything besides AIX on them though. You can run all the other OS's on cheap commodity hardware, the draw for me was having an AIX system to work with.

I was familiar with both the "laptop AS400" and the PowerPC thinkpad - these were different hardware unrelated to each other. I believe the sales demo machine was a CISC architecture demo machine that predated PowerPC, but I'm not 100% confident here. I never laid eyes on the AS400 sales demo machine but we were told about it in IBM AS/400 training school. I also had one of the PowerPC laptops running AIX for a while, nice little machines for the day.

As a youth a few decades ago I had an opportunity to play with one of these systems at home (and I actually still have it boxed up somewhere). I managed to acquire a 9401 Model 150 that fell off the back of a truck, it came with a 5250 terminal and a heavy box of documentation. Even as a kid who had started playing with linux in high school I really struggled to get it to IPL - the system was seriously weird from anything I had known before. Strangely enough, within two years of that I ended up working for IBM and went on to be trained on servicing AS/400 and iSeries systems. What was fascinating as an outsider coming in to IBM was just how hard they clutched their pearls on the AS/400 system. I also serviced RS/6000 (pSeries) and RS/6000 SP clusters so I saw two different sides of the house operate. I was a typical pimply faced youth eager to learn, and the pSeries guys, both in the field and in IBM training schools were happy to feed me all the info I could digest. When I needed software for testing stuff on my own personal AIX box, stuff would get passed my way no questions asked. On the iSeries side, they would quite literally tell me "no" and shut the door in my face if I was asking too many questions. Despite the fact that OS400 can't be ran on any other hardware than IBM's, IBM guards the SLIC or OS "golden tapes" very jealously. The class for learning how to service iSeries was four weeks long back then, and our brains got crammed full of tons of information. But if I asked questions outside the scope of servicing the hardware I'd still get the door slammed in my face ("that's a different class kid, your manager will have to approve that").

I only worked there for about five years and I am grateful for the experience. I'm also glad I left when I did to avoid becoming "institutionalized" in my thinking as I had witnessed others had become. I have to assume that the pearl clutching came from IBM's experience with Amdahl and its prized mainframe (zSeries). They had become so afraid of competition that they were even afraid us lowly CE's would start freelancing and selling consulting services on the side on OS/400 work. As a result of that, you have a walled garden which is very hard for fresh talent to penetrate and IBM likes it fine that way.

Anyone running ripgrep on a an HPC cluster against a large cluster filesystem needs to stop and redesign their workflow. This generates high amounts of small I/O which is the Achilles heel of any large cluster filesystem. You are exporting your workload onto the metadata mechanisms of the filesystem rather keeping it within the higher bandwidth capable memory subsystem on your cluster. It doesn't take but a couple users running these types of jobs simultaneously to bring a high-bandwidth filesystem to its knees. Just stop it already.

Anyone remember the predecessor, Today With A Techie (Twatech Radio): https://twatech.org

TL;DR: I believe the Datamaster should be considered part of the lineage of the ATX standard today.

The interesting thing I recently noticed about the Datamaster is that I believe this system's motherboard inadvertently (or deliberately) became the very first informal motherboard layout standard, a predecessor to the original IBM PC format. The Datamaster and PC are different architectures so it's not an architectural link, but it's clear that the same engineering group that designed the Datamaster's motherboard also had some amount of influence in the PC's motherboard layout. There's nothing magic about the Datamaster's layout, it's just very sensible: power in one corner, I/O slots near the rear edge, BIOS and RAM at the other end, CPU roughly in the middle of everything it has to talk to. But before the Datamaster, systems like the 5100 and System 36 used discrete boards that just plugged into a backplane with minimal logic on it. For the era of those systems that made sense, but those dense card connectors add cost and they add electrical noise to the system. A unified motherboard design was a true improvement in design that matched manufacturing improvements arriving in the late 1970's.

Datamaster motherboard (those are not ISA or "PC bus" slots): https://www.nf6x.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/IMG_3121....

Similarly, there were loose standards like LPX in the 1990's which were never a formal design standard, but clearly every PC maker of that era was using the same logical riser-card design. Perhaps it was the same Taiwanese engineering firm doing the actual design work on the back end for everyone that generated LPX, or perhaps it was just working knowledge moving as individual engineers had success with various designs.

AI is the industrial revolution finally arriving at the land of information and software development, full stop. Read Carroll Quigley's Tragedy and Hope if you want to understand whats happening and see a roadmap of whats ahead. What happened during the agricultural revolution, industrial revolution, and financial revolution is already happening to software development. IR brings cheap material goods to everyone in your civilization, not just the elite. Before, only the king and his court could afford to have skilled tradesmen hand-crafting clocks and pocket watches. After the IR, now everyone has a cheap wrist watch available to them for pennies. It doesn't mean everyone has the best stuff, but it raises the quantity of whats practically available to everyone at the base level and it does this cheaply. The timex wrist watch works fine and is only $15. Not everyone has a Rolex, and there will always be a market for artisanally crafted items that predate the IR. A lot of people don't care how the Timex works, they just need to get back to work from lunch on time. There will always be a market for those that desire (and have the money) to have a wrist watch that works the way they want it to work. In the future, artisanally crafted code will matter to some people who understand code. Most people just need a program to do the thing. Humans will still be able to outperform AI when it comes to making clever, compact, and beautiful code. Go to any local pottery show if you want to see the future. Everyone already has IR manufactured cups, plates, and silverware at home. Yet people still go out and buy hand-crafted versions of these items because they have more character in various dimensions they care about. On the downside, everything will become slop. But it increases the slop available to everyone, while smaller numbers of those who care will still buy artisinally crafted code.

But there's another downside too that Quigley talks about: the arrival of the railroad at your previously isolated village. Suddenly now you have food, medicine and people arriving at a far greater pace. Your towns demographic suddenly starts to shift as your townspeople start to live longer as knowledge can instantly penetrate from the outside world. People can leave much easier too which facilitates brain drain. The railroad brings the industrial revolution to your door. The countries that survived the best were the ones that created these revolutions and then exported them. If the railroad did not originate from your country then the railroad arrived at your doorstep quite literally before you were ready for it. I don't fully understand what this means for AI, but I'm certain this is part of the reason the US is trying to lead the charge. You absolutely do not want the railroad arriving at your doorstep: you want to be the one pushing the railroad out to your neighbors. The only guarantee is change whether you want it or not. If you want some control over that change then you had better be driving the change rather than just reacting to it.

Those that can, do - and those that can't, teach.

Teaching is rewarding which is why people do it, but you're asking them to take less pay for what is often a harder job - convincing kids to learn something when they have dozens of other things competing for their interest. The math aligns on the side with the teacher having the knowledge you would expect in this scenario - with a fair number of teachers not as much knowledge as one would hope they would have. On the students side, if they are bright then this is a soft-skill learning opportunity - how to navigate knowing more than your superior to the benefit of you both.

#loadbearing

Robotic sputnik tool, it is very slick. Something that's not obvious is that these work best on ABUS or other locks that have one solid driver pin and spools in every remaining pin stack. This way, when you locate and lift the solid driver pin, you gain a ton of "back and forth slack" in the plug. As you lift each successive spool driver the slack reduces until the shear line is hit on that pin stack and suddenly full slack again; repeat the process until the lock is open.

The devil is in the details though, there are some subtle features that need to be incorporated into the mechanics for the sputnik to work right. I have built a sputnik from scratch before, only after talking to Oli Diederichsen at a LockCon did I get some additional clues.

Also, I think there are plenty of other interesting things one could do besides brute forcing the lock with a simpler tool. Falle Safe has a single-wire variant on this for decoding locks. Again, the devil is in the details, just ramming wire up a pin stack doesn't get the job done.

It's not an accident that its so hard to get this stuff right, I've heard countless stories like this from friends who are parents.

If the market wanted parents to be able to figure this out it would be getting it right. It's obviously a dark pattern that benefits everyone but the parents and their children. If more people stopped to think deeper about this they would and should be very disturbed by what this means.

I miss Notacon and Jason Scott's Demoscene parties.

Man, this brings back memories of playing with Festival back in the day. I wrote a bunch of scripts to generate dynamic Festival text2speech audio for a Part15 AM radio station, a virtual radio station DJ over 15 years ago. The intelligibility was not great back then, the funny thing was after spending many hours listening and tweaking my input text I trained myself to understand the default voice a lot better. Other people had a hard time with the default voice but I could understand it perfectly. Thankfully some of the improved voices available back then helped it a lot.

To fix pronunciation problems I had developed a set of domain-specific "dictionaries", sed substitution scripts that would translate certain words and phrases into their phonetic versions that would be pronounced better by Festival. Besides announcing the names of songs being played, I was also feeding news articles and some other web-scraped info through it. Tons of fun to hear your project working on the air in public as you drive around town.

Ohm lordy, we're blaming the student for not having years of homebrew experience before he entered school? Sure any hobbiest knows what a 555 is, but when the lab assistant doesn't even catch it and the chip was handed out to the student this is not an entry-level students fault.

Regardless of what the real story is on this van, lookup the Bernie S. case if you want an easy case with proof of government surveillance incompetence. Under cover Secret Service agents were photographed surveilling a 2600 meeting in a mall court, then got embarrassed when the 2600 guys posted flyers with their photographs around. Most criminals are dumb which is a good thing as I like the bad guys getting caught, but unfortunately the smart ones graduate to become politicians.

Heh, reminds me of the days I kept Win95 and Win98 DOS boot disks for emergency booting Windows machines.

Man, this takes me back.

That's certain to spread joy.

Ah yes, memories of my laptop, an Orinoco card, and Netstumbler cruising down the highway during my day-job. Shortly after that I added an X-10 video receiver and a USB Hauppauge WinTV adapter to capture video transmitters too. I'd reach over and trigger a screen-shot whenever live video came into view. Once in a while I'd even capture myself driving through a parking lot or something on the feed.

I think this was the plot of an episode of CSI (don't recall which sub-series, maby Miami?) in the 2000's. Eventually they determine a guy dies of lead poisoning and they figure out he ate massive amounts of chocolate candy. Conclusion: leaded gas used in other countries caused lead buildup on coco plants there and eventually gets shipped back to US chocolate makers.

"So.. what will the world do with this knowledge?"

"Something something, rule 34."

Very interesting. A TL-15 is an excellent container, but I'm not familiar with a 5 wheel combination lock in commercial service in the US. I have a S&G vault lock which has 4 wheels. I don't doubt 5 wheel locks exist though, especially if the safe was possibly installed for a US Senator. Would definitely be interesting to see some photos of the lock (both outside and inside) if you still have any.

Reminds me of this: https://blackbag.toool.nl/?p=31

Same company makes both combination dials and the large padlocks like the 831, 833, 851. I was lucky enough to tour their manufacturing facility, it's a typical machine shop plus a small foundry as they do their own casting on-site too.

This is called the "soft drill". And strangely, this can still be a destructive attack. There are systems that can do proper manipulation by graphing out the gates, and there are systems that just do brute force attacks by dialing every combination. I've been told that the brute force machines that try every combination typically wear the lock out and it needs to be replaced afterwords.