Viewing profile — mrbill

Reminds me of an early release build of Win95. It would properly set time back an hour for Daylight Saving Time, but not set a flag that it had been done, so it would do it over, a…

I'm amazed that they can sell them for $125 including shipping (which has to be at least $40-50) and still make a profit. Makes me wonder what THEY paid for them.. Vendor said they…

It wasn't really the sysadmins that got free stuff - it was department managers / tech leads, etc, that would get gear in for review to see if it fit with our workflow, processes, …

I worked in oil and gas (Halliburton) for 12 years. The amount of stuff we got in "for review", "for test", "preview", etc. was simply amazing. Even pre-production gear a lot of th…

It's not just workstation hardware - I've recently bought a couple of Dell T410s off eBay for $125 each (shipped!). Quad-core Xeon E5620s, 4G RAM, 6-bay hotswap chassis, DVD-ROM, i…

It definitely still exists - I used my old DECUS membership number to get a new set of license PAKs (and a link to download the install media and software kits) last week.

From the page: "No you can't just "sed s'/Red Hat/CentOS/' (someone always offers that)"

I'm not always somewhere that I can get overnight delivery.

I had one. Horribly slow, and the keyboard was terrible and near unusable. Sold it to a coworker a couple of weeks later.

No wireless charging on the new phones. I used the heck out of it in the Nexus 5 days, but got so used to plugging in my Pixel 1 in the interim that I hardly used it at all once I …

I'm currently using a Pixel 3, but just ordered the 3a as my new "backup" phone (replacing my OG Pixel 1 and a P1XL I bought refurbished). I'll probably use the 3a as my primary ph…

The book about Fordlandia is great. https://www.amazon.com/Fordlandia-Henry-Fords-Forgotten-Jung...

Tons. If not a POTS line its a VoIP connection.

I'm guessing that shipping is the biggest part of the cost? I see that a 10lb box is only $5 more than a 5lb box...

archive.org - look up Jason Scott/@textfiles on twitter.

Protip: cheap ultrasonic jewelry cleaner. You wouldn't believe some of the gunk i've gotten out of pens that sat in a drawer for 20 years....

I love my Parker 51s. All of them older than I am (of course) but the ones that still work (aren't cracked, etc) work wonderfully (filled with Noodler's inks).

After I finally bought a copy (at a pretty expensive price), someone uploaded a version to the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/lisploreguidetop00brom

I got mine back in the RHEL4 days, got a 97%, and yeah its bugged me for years as I want to know what I got wrong. Probably the "hardest", most involved, "gotta know your shit" cer…

Dave Cutler (one of the designers of VMS at DEC) led the development of WNT at MS. While some ideas may have trickled down, WNT isn't "based" on VMS. If it was, it would be a lot b…

The book "IBM's 360 and Early 370 systems" by IBM Press goes DEEP into the development of these systems, and is one of my very favorite technical books. I paid $50 for a used copy …

I was one of the poor folks who could only afford the Matrox m3d (aka PowerVR PCX2), which shuffled video data to and from the 3d accelerator over the PCI bus, and was therefore sl…

I bought a bunch of the Cree LED bulbs from HD when they first came out, and I've had probably 6-8 of them fail into what I call "disco strobe" mode. Eventually I'll replace the re…

I worked for Halliburton as a sysadmin for 12 years.. during that time they owned 34/8 and 134.132/16. Looking now: 134.132/16: still LGC/HAL 34/10: HAL 34.64/10: Google 34.128/10:…

The fancy bed was auctioned off in 2013. http://www.heinleinsociety.org/2013/07/own-heinleins-second-... It went for just over $2K. https://www.ebay.com/itm/Robert-A-Heinleins-Bed-…