Older Folks and Vaping Back Porch - Part Seven

[MamaTried]

Unfortunately, that's no longer the case. You can get nailed from special crafted images, malvertising using ads to deliver payloads to your machine (using javascript), and a host of other nefarious ways to get users to go to a page, click on a link, or execute an attachment. It's not like the old days where you had to actually execute something to get infected.

yep.

back in the day i used to have the habit of randomly clicking on white portions of pages out of boredom or impatience. after spending a lot of time cleaning viruses, i learned about invisible gifs/jpegs that can invoke stuff.

my last job involved anti-piracy and i spent most of my time on shady sites. even being hyper-sensitive, i'd often have to reinstall the OS.

them bastages are getting cleverer every day

 

[retired1]

my last job involved anti-piracy and i spent most of my time on shady sites. even being hyper-sensitive, i'd often have to reinstall the OS.

Running a VM in Linux helps with that. If the VM gets nailed, all you need to do is kill the container and create another.

 

[MamaTried]

Running a VM in Linux helps with that. If the VM gets nailed, all you need to do is kill the container and create another.

that's what i ended up with, when i was working.

i had several flavors of Win and linux under a VM.

 

[Janet H]

Well Ginny just had to call the neighbor to come over to clean the ice and snow off our porch in front because of me worrying if something happened we wouldn't be able to get out. It makes me feel so useless. I edited this because the rest was too depressing. Nevermind.

Pat, it would be much worse if you tried to go out and fell. Better to get at least a path cleared on the porch so you can get out. You have some salt or ice melt or even some sand for traction. Don't forget to put those special spikes on when you go out too. We worry about you so you gotta take care.

 

[DavidOck]

Yes, they're alive and well. I use Forte' Agent. I can't recommend a newsreader for your setups though. Maybe someone else can.

Started with Agent 0.91 Now at 8.0. The way it handles executables and html pretty much requires user intervention for anything to happen. Put it on my first DOS laptop, whopping 20 Gig HD. The combination of news reader and email client in one program lured me in

 

[classwife]

We are all of an age of growing physical limitations...

It is much better to be wise and ask for/accept the assistance that is needed than to be stubborn and suffer the consequences !

 

[Kim B.]

Happy Birthday to Sir Roderick, 72 years old today.
Always did have a crush on Rod the mod...

 

[NCC]

Started with Agent 0.91 Now at 8.0. The way it handles executables and html pretty much requires user intervention for anything to happen. Put it on my first DOS laptop, whopping 20 Gig HD. The combination of news reader and email client in one program lured me in

I can't say the first version I used. I'm on 8 now too. I just checked and see I've still got the v2.0 installation, but I kinda doubt it is compatible with a 64bit OS. Ya never know, I may want to set up a 32 bit machine some day, LOL.

EDIT: Dug a little deeper and found the installation for v1.8. That is possibly the earliest I paid for. I used Free Agent for a while before that. I also used a program named NewsRover for a while before Agent. I see v1.0 from 1997.

 

[bigbells]

Kim's post about Rod Stewart's birthday made me think of one of my numerous Rod Stewart favorites. I played his early records until they practically disintegrated.

 

[NCC]

Kim's post about Rod Stewart's birthday made me think of one of my numerous Rod Stewart favorites. I played his early records until they practically disintegrated.

I preferred his pre-blonde music. Or was that pre-disco? Meh, they're the same thing.
Post-disco, and still blonde {or is it grey?}, Downtown Train (1990) appealed to me. More like the old Stewart.

You COULD gather from this comment that I wasn't a disco fan. I once thought there could be nothing worse ... then RAP proved me wrong.

 

[bigbells]

Here's one of the early Rod Stewart songs that I'd sit and listen to over and over and over in 1970:

 

[MamaTried]

screw you, Rod



all through high school -all 4 years-i was secretly in love with a gal whose nickname was Maggie. i never had the courage to approach her, although we always ran in the same circles. she wasn't even pretty. she was just- i dunno- special.

then, a couple years after high school this damn song comes out.

to make things worse, she calls me up out of the blue to tell me she was secretly in love with me all during HS. what the...

we meet, and being as slow and dense as i am when it comes to the female gender, i decide to "take it slow"...

two weeks later, my best friend (who also was in love with her thru HS) calls me to tell me they just slept together. a few weeks after that, i hear she's marrying another guy--the most improbable guy from HS i could have thought of.

screw you, Rod.

 

[Kim B.]

Sorry, MamaT, after that post, I couldn't resist.

 

[umanbean]

a huge 2GB HDD

20 Gig HD

???
Those were some huge drives 'back then'.

My first PC was an XT clone w/ 10MB HDD (Tandy 1000)

Around '85-'86 I started using AT clones - Kaypro 286i w/ a gigantic 20MB drive - after I went to work selling and building them for a company that sold Kaypro-based turn-key business systems. (Anyone remember CP/M?) We also installed and customized Timberline accounting software, which, IIRC, was around 7-800 per 'module' (Gen. Ledger, Payables, Receivables, Payroll, etc = $800 each). Also, IIRC, the 286i box + an amber monochrome CRT sold for about 1500-2000 depending on options and time to install and setup it up. A big line printer back then went for 2-3000 and up!

Ahhh yes, the 'good ol days'... when we were all used to saying 'mega' - and 'giga' was just a distant dream.

 

[Semiretired]

If you think about it - we went from having dual floppies and no hard drives as a standard with a few kilobyte of RAM to some of the first hard drives, which if you were lucky had 10MB of data storage capability and maybe 1MB of RAM in only a few years. Now we have TB of data with GB of RAM and it only took a few decades. They have been working on liquid memory where 1GB would be the same size as the head of a pin. And 3d is nothing compared to holographic movies, which I believe is not to far away for TV...

Imagine what computers or TV's will be in a few decades from now...

 

[Sterno]

i dont even remember what my first pc had except that it had win95

ETA: i think it had an early pentium in it

 

[retired1]

First computer I worked with was a UNIVAC DCT 9000. Looked very similar to this:

Headed overseas and worked with one of these:

Then back to the US where this was state of the art (UNIVAC 418):

Around this time, the military contracted with Zenith for the first PCs and the first Z100s started to hit our desks:

 

[SteveS45]

Good Morning Porch Dwellers while on the back porch disconnecting the Christmas lights front the right side of the house yesterday decided to just sit on the bench and have a few vapes while enjoying the peaceful snow covered back yard.

 

[umanbean]

Imagine what computers or TV's will be in a few decades from now...

My imagination isn't good enough to comprehend even the next 5 years, much less decades. The pace of changes and 'improvements' seems to be accelerating exponentially. So much so that laws and regulations, and the average consumer, can't stay on top of the pace.

Consider the as-yet unbridled theft of our personal data (aka 'metrics') collected by gov, googly, facebork, cellphone companies and most all smartphone app vendors, ISPs, and now, with Windows 10, Microsoft et al. Europe is miles ahead of the US in throttling some of this (IMO) unethical behavior, and, after receiving much derision over Win10, Microsoft has just announced changes to it's data collection policies with the next update... but too little too late IMO.

I wish the global rate of Linux adoption would EXPLODE! That would feed huge improvements to the overall Linux experience (initial setup and hardware compatibility), which would fuel even more adoption.

Well... back to real life... gotta go install a scanner, network cables, and new a workstation in the Clerks Office to comply with new state laws re: scanning Deeds, Plats, etc. to the state database.

 

[retired1]

My imagination isn't good enough to comprehend even the next 5 years, much less decades. The pace of changes and 'improvements' seems to be accelerating exponentially. So much so that laws and regulations, and the average consumer, can't stay on top of the pace.

Doubtful things will change too much over the next 5 years as far as hardware is concerned. We'll continue to see improvements in solid state technology as well as CPU power. But the overall design of PCs in general most likely isn't in for an earth shattering change for some time yet.

Consider the as-yet unbridled theft of our personal data (aka 'metrics') collected by gov, googly, facebork, cellphone companies and most all smartphone app vendors, ISPs, and now, with Windows 10, Microsoft et al. Europe is miles ahead of the US in throttling some of this (IMO) unethical behavior, and, after receiving much derision over Win10, Microsoft has just announced changes to it's data collection policies with the next update... but too little too late IMO.

Europe tends to go way too far with some of their legislation to where it borders on the ludicrous. Then again, the law makers there are really no better than those we have here. No common sense in any of them.

I wish the global rate of Linux adoption would EXPLODE! That would feed huge improvements to the overall experience, which would fuel even more adoption.

While this would be nice, I'm not sure I'd like to see that kind of adaptation. At that point, it becomes commercialized and we end up with another "Microsoft".