The new used computer Yevette just bought arrived today, between two to four days ahead of schedule. It even beat the keyboard I got for her but that's ok since an old one will work.
In fact, it did work since the iMac is up now and it's got a screen the size of a football field. As hoped, it blew her away when she first saw it. The machine is upgrading to MacOS Sierra right now and that will bring her to the State of Apple when she hasn't been near it in years and years.
The old one was a 2006 Mac Pro and it was beyond my ability to repair it. The machine was crashing constantly so now she will be up-to-date with a reliable computer and this will change her jams enormously.
The new used iMac came from the same place as mine, PowerMax, and things went wonky with a super strange power supply problem with mine but that was unpredictable and wasn't their fault. That was the first time a power supply blew in any Mac I have ever owned and that parade goes back to the eighties.
The machine is a few years old but it has 24 GB of RAM and a quad processor which makes it faster than her old Mac Pro. It's got a snappy video card in it so she shouldn't be lacking for performance for some while.
(Time passes, maybe two hours)
Most of that time has been in upgrades with off and on attendance to whatever the machine wanted. I set it up so Yevette looks the same to the App Store as me. That meant she could download anything on this machine so pop, pop, pop, I'll have this one and that one and ...
It's now fully-populated after a clean installation so there's nothing from her original system on this one. I'm now satisfied with the security so it's turned back over to her so she can start playing with it.
Note: her old machine was once mine so everything on it looks like me anyway. All of the software is legal and that's been my principle since far back. Windows people don't seem to buy that too much since they are or were at one time stealing every bit of software they could find. I doubt that hurt the software vendors all that much since the people who did all the thieving probably wouldn't have paid for it anyway.
I've got one fine Instigator buzz going since I didn't do anything but get her a keyboard. However, she had a one-time situation so I was hitting on it that this must be durable, must be durable. She did that and she's beaming now.
A vicarious buzz may be the finest kind for Christmas and I'm just swimming in that. The old one was just bugging the living hell out of her and you bet I heard about it when of course it would piss her off. She was using that machine a lot but it had become like a demolition derby with at least one bearing on disks and / or fans just picking the moment to die. I was kind of cringing at that idea and I knew it was inevitable.
There's still one remaining drag but not for her. I need to get her old machine up for long enough to capture some files she wants. I was going to use her original as the base for the new one but she didn't want that and it wouldn't stay up long enough anyway. Recovering that data is old school systems programmer stuff but the new school probably has their own way since disks always crash eventually.
Unknown if Yevette has the scratch for it but I've advised one more purchase and it's the same for anyone. If your data has any value at all, back it up. I've suggested the same Western Digital drive I've just ordered for mine. Her internal drive is 3 TB and the WD drive is 4 TB. The objective is to turn on Time Machine and she won't ever have to manually back up anything again since it will do it for her.
Smooth.
I've had my hands in disk management for going on forty years and the biggest concern for my own system is my backup disk crashed so that's the one to be replaced and I'll use the same approach as I suggest for Yevette. The only data to be stored on the disk is the backup from the primary.
Note: the disk didn't literally crash but rather it developed communication problems and it wouldn't snap out of that anymore.
$125 may seem high when I'll likely never even use the backup for anything but some of my data goes up to the early nineties with my music and video throughout. You couldn't even put a number on what it's worth to prevent losing that.
How about the pics of a two-year-old towhead and now he's coming around for the car keys to the big rod. The only images you have are digital so how much is that disk worth.
Ed: enough preaching!
It's not even half enough because they still won't do it. (larfs)
Maybe they think, gee, my stuff is backed up on a cloud somewhere so my worries are over.
Sure they are, darlin'. Let's see you restore your system from it and shame on you for putting your security data out there in the first place. A backup is something which can restore your system to almost exactly the state it's running now even after it's burned up in a fire. Unless your cloud can do that, it's worthless.
In my view, for $125, it's not worth the risk.
Ed: you're so old school you probably sound like a gravel quarry every time you move!
Sure, sure. Let's see who comes throwing pebbles while telling me, gee, daddums, my system crashed. Whatever shall I do.
I could give you the technical response but you probably already know it.
Ed: it sounds like you're fucked. Buy flowers?
That's the one.
There was a better one than that since we have already established I'm ancient school so that goes back to when teleprocessing systems were novel for computers. One mainframe alternative to TSO, the IBM standard for general purpose teleprocessing, was WYLBUR which had been written by some university computer hotshots and it had some demented capabilities which TSO could not touch. The professors loved it while the systems and applications people used TSO.
As one of those systems people, WYLBUR was in my purview and there was an edict from above to tighten security. The first move in getting tighter is to restrict login attempts so I changed WYLBUR to limit attempts to three. That might have passed but, in my fun-loving way, I added before it killed the line, 'We can't do this all day.'
Click.
They were livid! I could have crashed the system and bounced it into a wall without them getting so angry.
Management requested I back that change out. The ended the code but not the memory. I might not have been quite their favorite person after that.
Ed: they take it too seriously!
Definitely. Those duffers just couldn't see the mainframe was only a pile of tin. If it crashes, I'll bring it back up again. Fuhgedaboudit.
This could go on for hours so that must mean it's time to ...
Ed: pull out the plug?
Roger that, Cap'n.
In fact, it did work since the iMac is up now and it's got a screen the size of a football field. As hoped, it blew her away when she first saw it. The machine is upgrading to MacOS Sierra right now and that will bring her to the State of Apple when she hasn't been near it in years and years.
The old one was a 2006 Mac Pro and it was beyond my ability to repair it. The machine was crashing constantly so now she will be up-to-date with a reliable computer and this will change her jams enormously.
The new used iMac came from the same place as mine, PowerMax, and things went wonky with a super strange power supply problem with mine but that was unpredictable and wasn't their fault. That was the first time a power supply blew in any Mac I have ever owned and that parade goes back to the eighties.
The machine is a few years old but it has 24 GB of RAM and a quad processor which makes it faster than her old Mac Pro. It's got a snappy video card in it so she shouldn't be lacking for performance for some while.
(Time passes, maybe two hours)
Most of that time has been in upgrades with off and on attendance to whatever the machine wanted. I set it up so Yevette looks the same to the App Store as me. That meant she could download anything on this machine so pop, pop, pop, I'll have this one and that one and ...
It's now fully-populated after a clean installation so there's nothing from her original system on this one. I'm now satisfied with the security so it's turned back over to her so she can start playing with it.
Note: her old machine was once mine so everything on it looks like me anyway. All of the software is legal and that's been my principle since far back. Windows people don't seem to buy that too much since they are or were at one time stealing every bit of software they could find. I doubt that hurt the software vendors all that much since the people who did all the thieving probably wouldn't have paid for it anyway.
I've got one fine Instigator buzz going since I didn't do anything but get her a keyboard. However, she had a one-time situation so I was hitting on it that this must be durable, must be durable. She did that and she's beaming now.
A vicarious buzz may be the finest kind for Christmas and I'm just swimming in that. The old one was just bugging the living hell out of her and you bet I heard about it when of course it would piss her off. She was using that machine a lot but it had become like a demolition derby with at least one bearing on disks and / or fans just picking the moment to die. I was kind of cringing at that idea and I knew it was inevitable.
There's still one remaining drag but not for her. I need to get her old machine up for long enough to capture some files she wants. I was going to use her original as the base for the new one but she didn't want that and it wouldn't stay up long enough anyway. Recovering that data is old school systems programmer stuff but the new school probably has their own way since disks always crash eventually.
Unknown if Yevette has the scratch for it but I've advised one more purchase and it's the same for anyone. If your data has any value at all, back it up. I've suggested the same Western Digital drive I've just ordered for mine. Her internal drive is 3 TB and the WD drive is 4 TB. The objective is to turn on Time Machine and she won't ever have to manually back up anything again since it will do it for her.
Smooth.
I've had my hands in disk management for going on forty years and the biggest concern for my own system is my backup disk crashed so that's the one to be replaced and I'll use the same approach as I suggest for Yevette. The only data to be stored on the disk is the backup from the primary.
Note: the disk didn't literally crash but rather it developed communication problems and it wouldn't snap out of that anymore.
$125 may seem high when I'll likely never even use the backup for anything but some of my data goes up to the early nineties with my music and video throughout. You couldn't even put a number on what it's worth to prevent losing that.
How about the pics of a two-year-old towhead and now he's coming around for the car keys to the big rod. The only images you have are digital so how much is that disk worth.
Ed: enough preaching!
It's not even half enough because they still won't do it. (larfs)
Maybe they think, gee, my stuff is backed up on a cloud somewhere so my worries are over.
Sure they are, darlin'. Let's see you restore your system from it and shame on you for putting your security data out there in the first place. A backup is something which can restore your system to almost exactly the state it's running now even after it's burned up in a fire. Unless your cloud can do that, it's worthless.
In my view, for $125, it's not worth the risk.
Ed: you're so old school you probably sound like a gravel quarry every time you move!
Sure, sure. Let's see who comes throwing pebbles while telling me, gee, daddums, my system crashed. Whatever shall I do.
I could give you the technical response but you probably already know it.
Ed: it sounds like you're fucked. Buy flowers?
That's the one.
There was a better one than that since we have already established I'm ancient school so that goes back to when teleprocessing systems were novel for computers. One mainframe alternative to TSO, the IBM standard for general purpose teleprocessing, was WYLBUR which had been written by some university computer hotshots and it had some demented capabilities which TSO could not touch. The professors loved it while the systems and applications people used TSO.
As one of those systems people, WYLBUR was in my purview and there was an edict from above to tighten security. The first move in getting tighter is to restrict login attempts so I changed WYLBUR to limit attempts to three. That might have passed but, in my fun-loving way, I added before it killed the line, 'We can't do this all day.'
Click.
They were livid! I could have crashed the system and bounced it into a wall without them getting so angry.
Management requested I back that change out. The ended the code but not the memory. I might not have been quite their favorite person after that.
Ed: they take it too seriously!
Definitely. Those duffers just couldn't see the mainframe was only a pile of tin. If it crashes, I'll bring it back up again. Fuhgedaboudit.
This could go on for hours so that must mean it's time to ...
Ed: pull out the plug?
Roger that, Cap'n.
4 comments:
OMG WYLBUR....what about SUGGEST? I heard some genius sys prog wrote it!!
I heard it was some demented loon! (larfs)
Who could possibly remember that?? No need for identities, tho. It's just crazy to see that one again.
Well, I thought about it because of the continuing saga which developed and sorry to say, but I never read it but I would hear stirrings from folks who worked just outside the door in the cubicle area..... And you are still writing to this day. It's just something you always did!
Yes, no need to identify...and then there was WEBSTER.
I do take some pride in WEBSTER and the way he became part of the family with Alex was kind of surreal.
WEBSTER goes all the way back to a Commodore 64. Millennials may think this is the computer we used back when we still lived in caves.
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