joey_spaztard

Also hard drives, from about the last fifteen years, have calibration data for the specific individual heads that read and write the data to/from the platter.

Some, not all, harddrives have an eeprom that can be transplanted to a different pcb when trying to do data recovery on a drive with a faulty circuit board.

'Ask your grandparents' would be more accurate. Sales of models of hard drive that could be low level formatted had almost entirely ended by the year 1992. Primitive PC's that only ran DOS and had 20MB or 40MB hard drives were considered obsolete over thirty years ago, when windows 3.11 onwards existed.

The linked article seems to have been deleted.

I have an HMD global flip phone, branded "Nokia".

It is usable but the software is mediocre.

The volume buttons on the side are not disabled when the keylock is on so the ring volume goes up and down when you move around with it in a trouser pocket.

The SMS message storage gets messed up so long threads can't be deleted.

The phone firmware occasionally asks the user to participate in a survey.

The content of the file remains accessible to the process that has it open and continues to take up disk space.

... and a new file with the same name (and path) and different content can be created that exists at the same time.

This can be confusing.

"I'v updated that file on the server and it has not taken effect. I'v ssh'ed in and I can see the new version. What is going on? If I reboot that box the phone will start ringing..."

Amusing.

So, in the year 2001, NZ telecom provided most of the telephone lines and a much smaller company called Clear sold phone service in some areas. When a customer of one phone company called a line provided by the other they had to pay two NZ cents to the company terminating the call. This meant that NZ telecom customers calling ISP numbers on Clear lines for hours resulted in a trickle of money that was enough for a 'free' service.

This ISP service closed in the year 2002 when they stopped being paid to receive calls.

It looks like OP acquired the domain name when it expired in the year 2015 and, eleven years later, has gotten around to putting up a reproduction website.

I wonder how much email you get that is intended for people who had an ISP email address quarter of a century ago?

The "internet explorer" browser-in-browser on the website somewhat works, but it is connecting to websites from an Alibaba cloud datacenter in China, user-agent claims to be an Apple computer and it is using many different exit ip addresses.

Google, gmail, youtube, reddit, yahoo, archive.org etc don't work because they are blocked in China.

It appears that this orange hnn website does not work in China either.

Some websites are 403 forbidden as they seem to be blocking the exit ip addresses.

If you play with this, it may help the enter URLs including the https:// as it does not seem to always properly handle a website upgrading http to https. It may not update the address bar if you get redirected.

From casual observation of people, I feel that alcohol consumption has a large effect on ability to learn.

Tim Hunkin's The Secret life of Machines.

It is on youtube.

I see a couple of dozen hours of TV a year because the nearest pub has often has a TV turned on with subtitles, sound off, I would like to watch less.

It was posted to hnn as a 'public beta' in January 2024, so about 2 and half years.

Nice idea, this reminds of of the few models of USB stick drive with a physical keypad for entering a PIN.

"Remember to set the BIOS to not try to boot from floppy, to avoid people leaving a disk in the drive then complaining that the computer does not start up, and boot sector viruses."

I presume OP is referring to Microsoft Windows Vista, released at the end of the year 2006.

It had a poor reputation. My vague recollection is that I experienced an irritating number of driver-related BSODs. To me, it now feels like a standard Microsoft experience of them pushing out a new OS then fixing it with service packs over a few years.

To answer OPs hypothetical thought-experiment:

In my view, running Windows Vista today would firstly have the problem that Microsoft has added lots of extra stuff (OS APIs, runtime libraries etc) and you would find that quite a lot of software won't work without stuff in newer versions of Windows.

I feel that if someone added enough extra stuff to Vista to run current software to Vista that it could run most current software then it would not really be Vista anymore.

Most of the Window XP source code has leaked. As far as I know, no pirates are patching, recompiling and releasing versions of it.

Patching Windows security holes is a lot of work. I think Vista was vulnerable when some NSA tools leaked in the year 2017 and it was possible to remotely seize control of Windows machines if port 445 was reachable and things like the wannacry worm caused global chaos.

I'm fairly sure that when Vista reached EOL it still had a lot of LPE vulnerabilities.

see also "Douglas Adams biscuit story"