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General Computer Thread

I guess its all about the content then, I'm not sure how active he actually is.. but I admire his work, keeping all that ancient hardware running and trying to repair and maintain machines like that is difficult..
 
I guess its all about the content then, I'm not sure how active he actually is.. but I admire his work, keeping all that ancient hardware running and trying to repair and maintain machines like that is difficult..

I can just imagine. There's a video from the guy who's got all the hardware in his garage about his attempts to get all his SGI Onyx2 racks up and running. He ended up giving up on it as bad joke (and proving when something's working don't fiddle - he had 3 racks up and running fine then wanted them all up).
 
Its not easy to keep old stuff in working order.. I can do the basic maintenance on systems, I can maybe replace capacitors but other stuff I can't repair, eventually I will have a pile of none functioning electronics.
 
Its not easy to keep old stuff in working order.. I can do the basic maintenance on systems, I can maybe replace capacitors but other stuff I can't repair, eventually I will have a pile of none functioning electronics.

There's always E-bay :)
 
I have to spend 2 weeks in a hotel with shitty internet, who might consider my regular traffic untoward.

At home I have naked broadband.

Can I use my personal modem at the hotel without the hotel getting pissy?
 
Modems here (in NZ) plug into regular phone Jacks, or are you suggesting that Hotels do not have regular phone jacks, that their phones are hardwired into the wall, so that it is harder for someone unscrupulous to steal their telephones?

"It's factored into the bill, just like the light bulbs, they want me to steal their telephone."
 
phone modems need an analog phone line. The hotel may or may not have those in the room. depends on what phone system they have installed.

And even "shitty" internet is faster than a phone modem.
 
Naked broad band, which is what I have, requires no active phone line or phone account.

Which is why I think this may work.
 
I have an old email address I just reinstated after a few months because it ended up being a magnet for spam, but I just noticed it's still getting the same old messages from months ago in the spam folder. Not on my end but on my ISP's email server where they are held.

Just wondering how does that work? If the address had been killed off shouldn't the mails have stopped?

If it's been inactive for 3 or 4 months shouldn't whatever is sending these things notice it's dead and they shouldn't even still be received after so long?
 
So you assume a spammer with a database containing tens or hundreths of thousands of e-mails sent by automated scripts will notice that one e-mail address can't be mailed to anymore, these systems are not smart, they work on the "nuke from orbit" principle...
 
So you assume a spammer with a database containing tens or hundreths of thousands of e-mails sent by automated scripts will notice that one e-mail address can't be mailed to anymore, these systems are not smart, they work on the "nuke from orbit" principle...

you'd think with all those mail-servers they exploit to spread their crap they could have at least one that would receive the non-delivery reports so they know which e-mail addresses are invalid :^)

of course they probably wouldn't be in the spamming game much longer.

They don't even pay attention to who they are spamming (penis enlargment to women, breast enlargement to me).

though speaking of spam I've noticed an increase in the amount of the stuff being sent to my e-mail address in the past week or so.

I have a membership with Goodlife fitness so have to admit my first thought was whether some-one had some how compromised their mailling lists.

I make sue of Office365 with Exchange Server so 98% of it is caught by the spamfilter there and the rest is junk mailed by outlook so I'm not really bothered by it.
 
I agree, you would think there was at least something smart or technical about the whole thing but nope, no smart computing, no spam AI no nothing.

10 open database
20 attach stupid spam to every e-mail in said database
30 send!
40 repeat each day/week/month
50 yup, that's it.
 
So you assume a spammer with a database containing tens or hundreths of thousands of e-mails sent by automated scripts will notice that one e-mail address can't be mailed to anymore, these systems are not smart, they work on the "nuke from orbit" principle...
Yep... I had the same thing happen. An email address that I didn't use for 12 months. It went inactive after 6 months. Someone I knew sent an email to it and it bounced. When I got it reactivated, I found the spam kept coming. They don't bother to check for dead email addresses. Who knows, maybe 50% of their lists contain bad email addresses. But to them it doesn't matter... the cost per email is so incredibly small, I guess it doesn't make a difference. Not worth parsing a rejection folder, I guess. Although I have to expect that there must be some kind of app one could use to quickly parse a folder filled with email rejects and then createa a rejection list of emails to prune off the contact list. Maybe some spammers do this, but could be plenty who do not.
 
Yep... I had the same thing happen. An email address that I didn't use for 12 months. It went inactive after 6 months. Someone I knew sent an email to it and it bounced. When I got it reactivated, I found the spam kept coming. They don't bother to check for dead email addresses. Who knows, maybe 50% of their lists contain bad email addresses. But to them it doesn't matter... the cost per email is so incredibly small, I guess it doesn't make a difference. Not worth parsing a rejection folder, I guess. Although I have to expect that there must be some kind of app one could use to quickly parse a folder filled with email rejects and then createa a rejection list of emails to prune off the contact list. Maybe some spammers do this, but could be plenty who do not.

There is no cost to them as they are usually sending the mail through open relays on mail servers belonging to other people.

And again there's no way for them to look for addreses that don't work. They used forged/spooled e-mail addresses so that only the person who's e-mail address is being use will actually see the notification for failed delivery - the spammers never see it and frankly they wouldn't care - its not like they are engaging in a legal activity anyway.
 
Would be nice if some enterprising hacker could spam bomb the spammers. I'm sure that's been done before or cripple their systems.

A lot of the spam I am getting from that old address is stuff like The Dr OZ Show, Fox News spam, and even Trump related stuff.

Funniest one was a spam for Vaginal Thrush
 
Another early hard drive like device..

http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/univac/fastrand.html

The FASTRAND II random-access mass storage system was one of the most impressive peripherals ever attached to a commercial computer. Used with the UNIVAC 1108 computer, it provided the first permanent file storage capability in the UNIVAC 1100 series family.

No UNIVAC programmer who ever encountered a FASTRAND is likely to forget it. It was big, heavy (it weighed about two and a quarter tons, and required special reinforcement of the raised floor it sat on), had a large window lit by fluorescent lights which let you see the two huge drums rotating in opposite directions at 880 revolutions per minute and the heads jumping back and forth as various tracks were accessed. In operation, it emitted a deep rumble accompanied by a whoosh of air much like the engine room in Star Trek. Opening the door on the end revealed a complex control panel which included, at the top, a collection of “hit detectors” which told you if one of the read/write heads had contacted the drum surface.
 
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