Do you really want the kiddies that need that spoon-feeding shit? Back in the day, they would never even have had any idea what a "modum" was. The very problem with fakebook and stinkaglam is the hipsters and normies using it, especially the ones who never access it except from their phone. There needs to be at least a minimum bar of entry, of which an SSID with no internet behind it (DHCP/DNS forcing you to the web-board interface, etc.) is a damn good start. The easier you make it, the lamer the people you attract.
But what you describe is even more restrictive than the old BBSes, because you have to be physically in range of it, rather than having the city-sized barrier of local phone calls. (Note to Europeans: most of the US has had free local calling for decades.) It might work in the case of some kind of cafe, but then you're already going to attract hipsters, so why bother?
I ran a BBS, and so did a couple of my friends. A friend's BBS had a multi-player BBS door (maybe it was even LORD) that only one user ever played, and he called daily at the optimal time. It had a screen full of really cheesy flavor text when it started up ("You are the Lord of the Land!" type stuff), and I decided to hex-edit the text into a parody of the original. I don't think I changed anything else but that intro text. So my friend and I waited (we only had to wait an hour or so), and sure enough, he logged in. And went to the game. And apparently he actually read that crap every time, because he immediately blew a gasket when he saw it.
And it suddenly came to me – It’s the community, stupid!
This is something I have realized for quite some time now. I would really like to run a local-focused web forum. The effort of actively pruning people outside the area trying to gain a foothold is probably less than the technical effort to run an actual dial-up BBS these days, so I won't even begin to consider running a "real BBS". And not being limited to a single physical channel by dial-up will be so much better anyhow.
One of these days. Right now I'm in the middle of a lot of IRL crap that's keeping me from doing much of anything productive, but it should be over soon enough.
I recognized that as a Courier init string about a third of the way in. I still have mine somewhere, along with a stack of few others that I found in thrift stores in the late '90s/early 2Ks. Hell no, there was no way I was gonna let a Courier modem get junked. Screw Sportsters, though, even the externals.
And then there was the time I found a Courier that didn't have all its features enabled (like HST, for instance) and I found some Russian flasher software and firmware image to hack it with. I actually had to go in with DOS Debug to make a couple of patches because the flasher wasn't waiting long enough in a timeout loop somewhere, but I got it running long enough for the hacked firmware to set all the feature flags. Ah, those were the days when firmware wasn't always encrypted and signed, and obscurity was the only thing in the way of hacking it.
Now that I have my phone service as part of the DSL modem, I don't even know what bandwidth I would get if I hooked up a modem to it. Would it stick me with a 9600bps compressed voice channel, or would it make its VoIP-based calls with a full 56K T0 equivalent and give me the best signal possible? I would hope the latter, if only because there are people out there who are still in love with their fax machines.
I ran a Fidonet system as well. I can't remember what frontend I used, maybe it was Front Door. I even wrote my own mail tosser in Turbo Pascal. Somewhere I still have that old PC, and it still boots into OS/2 and the BBS. OS/2 was the best DOS multi-tasker ever.
I stopped caring so much about in the late '90s, but in early 2000, I got DSL with a small static IP block, and I've had a static IP at home ever since.
I think about running some kind of BBS or local-focused web forum from time to time, but there's always something more important to do.
And the rules were brilliant. There isn't enough focus on the Too Easily Annoyed part these days; almost everybody gets a pass, if only because their information is the real product, and advertisers are the real product. You have to annoy the most annoying of the too easily annoyed types to get kicked from stuff these days.
In these days of shifting from "Cable is King" to Cord Cutters... well, as far as I know, they did get the cable companies to put emergency interrupt capability in every fucking channel. But it's a bit hard to do that with Netflix, or even an https request.
And the problem with disaster emergencies is that they are so infrequent that the mindless masses have no clue what to do, because it hasn't happened since the last Oscars, and that's as far as they can remember before their ADD kicks in and they start wondering what all the gossip page celebrities are doing.
To make it worse, now mostly mundane stuff has become an "ALERT!!!!!111!!!", which contributes to giving everyone alert fatigue, and when something real happens, they don't even know if they are supposed to care. But a siren going off while they're trying to sleep? In the land of people calling 9-1-1 because their fast food isn't fast enough?
Oh hell, don't tell me about stress reliefs. The first generation of magsafe chargers had about a 2mm piece of tubing as a sorry excuse for a strain relief, and this was when Jobs was still alive. The solution? Make it 4mm! And I went through about three Logitech wired joypads, all of which broke a wire inside where the USB cable came out of the back of it. No strain relief, just a countersink sort of opening that it came out of. When I had gotten tired of fixing them, I lucked into a wireless version cheap at a thrift store.
Yeah, that phone on 4.4.2 that I mentioned? It was manufactured by LG, and was sold as a Tracfone starter phone. It may have been one of the last of its generation still on the shelves at the time (not gonna pass up a $10 Android phone with triple minutes for life when I was already looking for a Tracfone), but that still doesn't excuse still being on 4.x for a phone from one of the main smartphone manufacturers. (Not that I expected anything more, I have long been aware of how bad the Android update situation is, and I don't much like using phones in general anyhow. But it works well enough when I do need to check something on the internets.)
How many Android users have ever had a patch available for their device? I have two Android devices (a random cheap tablet I got at Fry's that I don't use, and a cheap smartphone), and they have never had OS updates available. The tablet is stuck on 4.1 (or is it 4.11?), which had some serious vulnerabilities on its own. (heartbleed?) The phone, which I bought less than a year and a half ago, is on 4.4.2.
They only "settled" on 10 because 9 was slashed and burned over 15 years earlier when certain small developers (*COUGH*javaruntime*COUGH*) tried to detect Windows 95/98 by comparing the leftmost characters of the version string, equivalent to the regex "^Windows 9.*"
This is Tizen, see above discussion about the TDWTF thread. The amazing part is that he found 40 of them without going insane. It may be fish in a barrel, but it's fish in a barrel made out of wood spat from the very mouth(s) of Cthulhu. That's how bad Tizen is.
I wanted to emphasize this. This is not new to regular visitors to TDWTF. Enlightenment, which Tizen is based on, is horrible. Fundamentally horrible, as in at the very core of its API, its basic object type is a typedef to void*. So everything you call expects to be passed void pointer references to objects. Which of course will accept any kind of pointer, no matter where it came from.
The Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Tizen is a mind-bogglingly stupid codebase. It has almost no capacity for Enlightenment and is therefore surprised by virtually everything that happens to it. Here is an example of how stupid it is: it thinks that if you can't see its pointer types, it can't see you.
Its behaviour would be quite endearing if it wasn't spoilt by this one thing: it is the most violently crappy codebase in the Galaxy. A void*, a void*, a void*.
The other side of this is if you want to re-sell or give away the device. It may not be possible to re-register it for someone else to use, and even if it is possible, if you don't de-register it, the device may forever be useless.
Why the fuck would the FCC have the power to do anything like that? Other than making sure that the puny low-power wireless radio in it works properly, and doesn't cause interference, they can do fuck all.
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Do you really want the kiddies that need that spoon-feeding shit? Back in the day, they would never even have had any idea what a "modum" was. The very problem with fakebook and stinkaglam is the hipsters and normies using it, especially the ones who never access it except from their phone. There needs to be at least a minimum bar of entry, of which an SSID with no internet behind it (DHCP/DNS forcing you to the web-board interface, etc.) is a damn good start. The easier you make it, the lamer the people you attract.
But what you describe is even more restrictive than the old BBSes, because you have to be physically in range of it, rather than having the city-sized barrier of local phone calls. (Note to Europeans: most of the US has had free local calling for decades.) It might work in the case of some kind of cafe, but then you're already going to attract hipsters, so why bother?
I ran a BBS, and so did a couple of my friends. A friend's BBS had a multi-player BBS door (maybe it was even LORD) that only one user ever played, and he called daily at the optimal time. It had a screen full of really cheesy flavor text when it started up ("You are the Lord of the Land!" type stuff), and I decided to hex-edit the text into a parody of the original. I don't think I changed anything else but that intro text. So my friend and I waited (we only had to wait an hour or so), and sure enough, he logged in. And went to the game. And apparently he actually read that crap every time, because he immediately blew a gasket when he saw it.
It was so worth it.
I have a couple of broken (as in the plastic case) C64s with no power supply lying around.
No, you can not have the SID chips, I plan to hook them up to a microcontroller.
And it suddenly came to me – It’s the community, stupid!
This is something I have realized for quite some time now. I would really like to run a local-focused web forum. The effort of actively pruning people outside the area trying to gain a foothold is probably less than the technical effort to run an actual dial-up BBS these days, so I won't even begin to consider running a "real BBS". And not being limited to a single physical channel by dial-up will be so much better anyhow.
One of these days. Right now I'm in the middle of a lot of IRL crap that's keeping me from doing much of anything productive, but it should be over soon enough.
I recognized that as a Courier init string about a third of the way in. I still have mine somewhere, along with a stack of few others that I found in thrift stores in the late '90s/early 2Ks. Hell no, there was no way I was gonna let a Courier modem get junked. Screw Sportsters, though, even the externals.
And then there was the time I found a Courier that didn't have all its features enabled (like HST, for instance) and I found some Russian flasher software and firmware image to hack it with. I actually had to go in with DOS Debug to make a couple of patches because the flasher wasn't waiting long enough in a timeout loop somewhere, but I got it running long enough for the hacked firmware to set all the feature flags. Ah, those were the days when firmware wasn't always encrypted and signed, and obscurity was the only thing in the way of hacking it.
Now that I have my phone service as part of the DSL modem, I don't even know what bandwidth I would get if I hooked up a modem to it. Would it stick me with a 9600bps compressed voice channel, or would it make its VoIP-based calls with a full 56K T0 equivalent and give me the best signal possible? I would hope the latter, if only because there are people out there who are still in love with their fax machines.
I ran a Fidonet system as well. I can't remember what frontend I used, maybe it was Front Door. I even wrote my own mail tosser in Turbo Pascal. Somewhere I still have that old PC, and it still boots into OS/2 and the BBS. OS/2 was the best DOS multi-tasker ever.
I stopped caring so much about in the late '90s, but in early 2000, I got DSL with a small static IP block, and I've had a static IP at home ever since.
I think about running some kind of BBS or local-focused web forum from time to time, but there's always something more important to do.
And the rules were brilliant. There isn't enough focus on the Too Easily Annoyed part these days; almost everybody gets a pass, if only because their information is the real product, and advertisers are the real product. You have to annoy the most annoying of the too easily annoyed types to get kicked from stuff these days.
Just "Dangit, Bobby!" would probably be most appropriate in this case.
In these days of shifting from "Cable is King" to Cord Cutters... well, as far as I know, they did get the cable companies to put emergency interrupt capability in every fucking channel. But it's a bit hard to do that with Netflix, or even an https request.
And the problem with disaster emergencies is that they are so infrequent that the mindless masses have no clue what to do, because it hasn't happened since the last Oscars, and that's as far as they can remember before their ADD kicks in and they start wondering what all the gossip page celebrities are doing.
To make it worse, now mostly mundane stuff has become an "ALERT!!!!!111!!!", which contributes to giving everyone alert fatigue, and when something real happens, they don't even know if they are supposed to care. But a siren going off while they're trying to sleep? In the land of people calling 9-1-1 because their fast food isn't fast enough?
Oh hell, don't tell me about stress reliefs. The first generation of magsafe chargers had about a 2mm piece of tubing as a sorry excuse for a strain relief, and this was when Jobs was still alive. The solution? Make it 4mm! And I went through about three Logitech wired joypads, all of which broke a wire inside where the USB cable came out of the back of it. No strain relief, just a countersink sort of opening that it came out of. When I had gotten tired of fixing them, I lucked into a wireless version cheap at a thrift store.
Yes, exactly. I think you're getting good at this, Mr. Coward.
I didn't say anything about closing the door. How could I close it? I don't have a remote for it. They had to drive back to close it.
Great. Now try that from 80 miles away. I hope your couch has good fuel economy.
Yeah, that phone on 4.4.2 that I mentioned? It was manufactured by LG, and was sold as a Tracfone starter phone. It may have been one of the last of its generation still on the shelves at the time (not gonna pass up a $10 Android phone with triple minutes for life when I was already looking for a Tracfone), but that still doesn't excuse still being on 4.x for a phone from one of the main smartphone manufacturers. (Not that I expected anything more, I have long been aware of how bad the Android update situation is, and I don't much like using phones in general anyhow. But it works well enough when I do need to check something on the internets.)
How new are you? Microsoft kowtows to EVERYTHING done by brain-dead developers when making new Windows versions.
And I think you missed the hidden sarcasm, this was in the official Java runtime from Sun.
Generate nightly when I sodomize my cat
Bazinga! But what if I prefer to use less or tee instead of cat?
How many Android users have ever had a patch available for their device? I have two Android devices (a random cheap tablet I got at Fry's that I don't use, and a cheap smartphone), and they have never had OS updates available. The tablet is stuck on 4.1 (or is it 4.11?), which had some serious vulnerabilities on its own. (heartbleed?) The phone, which I bought less than a year and a half ago, is on 4.4.2.
Because millennials don't understand how antennas work.
I've been messing with them since 2010, and IMHO it's STCube that's the real clusterfuck. Naturally, they've gone full retard into it.
They only "settled" on 10 because 9 was slashed and burned over 15 years earlier when certain small developers (*COUGH*javaruntime*COUGH*) tried to detect Windows 95/98 by comparing the leftmost characters of the version string, equivalent to the regex "^Windows 9.*"
I suppose the next feature for DNS servers will be regex blocking?
This is Tizen, see above discussion about the TDWTF thread. The amazing part is that he found 40 of them without going insane. It may be fish in a barrel, but it's fish in a barrel made out of wood spat from the very mouth(s) of Cthulhu. That's how bad Tizen is.
The Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Tizen is a mind-bogglingly stupid codebase. It has almost no capacity for Enlightenment and is therefore surprised by virtually everything that happens to it. Here is an example of how stupid it is: it thinks that if you can't see its pointer types, it can't see you.
Its behaviour would be quite endearing if it wasn't spoilt by this one thing: it is the most violently crappy codebase in the Galaxy. A void*, a void*, a void*.
Because by then all the good seats have been taken?
The other side of this is if you want to re-sell or give away the device. It may not be possible to re-register it for someone else to use, and even if it is possible, if you don't de-register it, the device may forever be useless.
Why the fuck would the FCC have the power to do anything like that? Other than making sure that the puny low-power wireless radio in it works properly, and doesn't cause interference, they can do fuck all.