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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Right, my bad. I read TCP/IP. It’s still early.

    🤣🤣🤣 Quite alright. It’s 5AM somewhere on the planet, no?

    I believe that makes you older than Arpanet, which is what I was really asking.

    If you had asked me if I was older than Arpanet, then no. It first came online a few short years before I was born.

    Even though the “IP” in TCP/IP came four years after TCP, the introduction of TCP is frequently cited as the “birth of modern networking”, and as such, the Internet.


  • But are you older than token ring?

    Considering that token ring was first released by IBM almost exactly a decade after TCP (which I was very specific about - TCP specifically, not TCP/IP), then I would most definitely say yes, I am very much older than token ring.

    Token ring was introduced as a low-cost networking option for smaller offices that did not require the use of (at the time) fiendishly expensive switching and routing equipment. If you wanted to hook a bunch of machines together into a network and had no need for external access, you quite literally needed only the cabling and the cards that were installed in the computers. No hubs. No switches. Nothing else.

    Of course, using token ring also allowed techs to engage in shenanigans such as - when the ring was broken in some way - getting a junior tech to crawl around on the floor looking for the break and the token that fell out of it, to stuff it back into the cable. Sometimes we even did that with particularly difficult customers.






  • Almost all guns that can cause hearing damage (with repeated firing) without a silencer are still going to cause hearing damage despite that silencer.

    It just takes a few more shots to accumulate the same level of auditory damage.

    That’s how loud shots are despite the action of silencers. Silencers exist to protect your hearing when you likely only need to fire off one or two shots at most… with such few shots you can avoid the conspicuousness of hearing protection while getting that hit done.





  • I have a massive wingspan:weight ratio, so I always have to choose between sleeves being long enough on a shirt that’s 4x too big, or sleeves that end 3 inches short on a shirt that mostly fits.

    So you look like you just sauntered out of Auschwitz?

    <rant>

    You’re the reason why most shirts don’t fit me. I hate “slim fit” shirts, and anything fashionable is so slim fit you would have trouble fitting it over a skeleton or a 1,000-year-old Sahara-desiccated corpse. Why is your kind so common that the marketplace gets flooded with clothing that can only fit a famine victim?

    And I’m not obese in the least. I just have a 50-inch chest with a 36-inch waist. I have pecs, not some wafer-thin slabs of barely-there muscle that would have trouble bench-pressing an onion scape.

    About the only thing that fits me are 2XL tops that are regular or relaxed fit. Even jackets have gotten into the “reverse-vanity-sizing” madness that has recently beset Canada, with many “size 50” suit jackets really being a size 46 or even a 44.

    </rant>

    .






  • Any brands protected by American law must be independently-owned, with full transfer of all branding, patents, trade secrets, intellectual assets and physical assets.

    So, for example, for even a single bottle of Perrier to be sold in America, it needs to have been made by a company registered with the brand name of Perrier, with exclusive use of that name within the country, independently owned and under zero control by Nestle, being manufactured using the exact same process with the exact same ingredients, and having control of the exact same patents and American-side infrastructure.

    America is such a large marketplace that it would be impossible to split a company like this. Patents alone would prevent this, forcing Nestle to divest themselves of each individual subsidiary.



  • I have a “data transcription machine” which is meant to pull data off of old media. It has:

    • 3½″+5¼″ combo floppy drive
    • IDE hot swap cage
    • Zip 250 IDE drive
    • Jaz 2Gb SCSI drive
    • Internal 50-pin and 68-pin SCSI controllers

    Let’s just say that I have enough devices cross my bench that SpinRite 6 gets a monthly workout on some piece of old storage tech or another. Not everything is recoverable, but…