• (cs) in reply to Miriam

    [quote user="Miriam"][quote user="J"]Ah...so Tatiana is the president's daughter.[/quote] Well, of course. It is written in the first two paragraphs!

    It was a nice story, albeit not all that super-exciting./quote]

    I liked it. There is no need for fake drama in order to have an interesting story. I expect that most of us are already interested in good, technical stories. Or bad, technical stories.

    Sincerely,

    Gene Wirchenko

  • JJ (unregistered)

    Brut.

    By Fabergé.

    Thank you.

    Cheap motherfuckers.

  • bill_gates (unregistered) in reply to Donald Knuth
    Donald Knuth:
    They had a 25MB hard drive and 512K, though, not a cassette deck and 8K.
    Cassette deck and 8K should be more than enough for anybody!
  • Vladmir (unregistered) in reply to pjt33
    pjt33:
    Zeke:
    What do Faberge eggs have to do with anything?
    I was wondering that too. I suspect that Tatiana acquired that pseudonym by virtue of a weak analogy between recursive error mail sending and Russian dolls, but I hope that the reason for Fabergé wasn't stretching that link beyond breaking point.
    Wouldn't that be Matryoshka (which for some strange reason people seem to pronounce Babushka....)
  • Charles Tetmpleton (unregistered) in reply to Steve The Cynic

    He just meant it jokingly saying it was older than a 286.

  • Ross Presser (unregistered)

    Got myself almost banned from two BBSes like this, in the late 80s.

    The Citadel BBS software had recently obtained mail networking. You could write mail on one BBS, addressed to someone on another BBS in the network, and after you disconnected (remember, these BBSes were usually run on home computers, with a single phone line, under DOS, or AmigaDOS, or Atari, or whatever) ... after you disconnected, your home BBS would dial the other BBS and deliver the mail.

    They also had mail forwarding as an option. Receive all your mail, from all the BBSes in the area, on your home BBS.

    So I naturally tried it -- I set forwarding for rpresser@BBS-A to go to rpresser@BBS-B, and vice versa. About four hours later the sysop started wondering why the phone kept ringing every three minutes ...

  • Alan Scrivener (unregistered)

    http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lernaean_Hydra

  • (cs) in reply to dkf
    dkf:
    Mike D:
    The 80186 was an embedded-system version of the 8086 that nobody used in a desktop machine because it was incompatible with the PC architecture at the peripheral level.
    Except they were used anyway. My school at the time had some. I really hated them, as they had no interesting software on them at all.

    I assume you're referring to the RM Nimbus PC-186?

    Not that i've ever used one that isn't badly emulated, mind you. However, software for that thing is now so rare to find (you have to literally encounter someone who liberated it from their school before they threw it out or while in the process of doing so) it might as well be unobtainium.

  • Olga (unregistered) in reply to ComputerForumUser
    Suggestions for a better collective noun can be made in the comments.
    Commune.
  • Olga (unregistered) in reply to J
    J:
    Ah...so Tatiana is the president's daughter.
    Well, they were called tsars in those days.
  • rtm (unregistered) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    Feh, amateurs. Mere messages being duplicated. Knew a person at college who found that on a Prime system, he could spawn a sub-user (or whatever they were called on Prime systems) to login, perform a task, then logout. Great. Code your assignment, save, spawn the task build and run it while you continue with other tasks. We all used the capability.

    But, being high on curiosity, but low on forethought, this guy had his task create, guess what? Oh no, not one but two instances of itself.

    You can still do it today, whether in Linux or Windows. Put your fork bomb in crontab and have your own daily what-the-fork.

  • Dominic (unregistered)

    I had a terrible dream about the comment section

  • Norman Diamond (unregistered) in reply to Dominic
    Dominic:
    I had a terrible dream about the comment section
    You dreamt they used Discourse? I have terrible news for you.
  • (cs) in reply to VAXcat
    VAXcat:
    The email behavior reminds of of the lyrics of a Reggae song I heard last week.

    "In time of peace I smoke two joints In time of war I smoke two more I smoke two joints before I smoke two joints... And then I smoke two more."

    Not good. All that tobacco will do you a mischief.

  • (cs) in reply to neminem
    neminem:
    Reminds me of a time our college's mail server got shut down for most of a day back when I was an intern in the IT department one summer. It was sudden rather than gradual, but similar: there was a webform on the site somewhere, not used that much, for requesting the use of school A/V equipment. When submitted, it sent an email notification to an internal address. Attempting to email that address directly would send a notification to the sender that you shouldn't email it directly.

    A clever spambot found this page, submitted the form, and for some reason decided to claim that its email was a random email from the page, namely that internal email. Cue infinite looping of the internal address sending itself a message that you shouldn't email it, which triggered sending another one, which triggered sending another one, and so on until we finally managed to get into that server and kill the process. That was a fun day.

    As has well been documented on TRWTF, it's also dead easy to get the lusers themselves to act as the spambots by initiating a Reply All message to the entire distribution list saying "Oy! Stop using Reply All to copy emails to the entire distribution list, it clogs up the server!" and watch people send it back and forward over and over again.

    Our own company has prevented people from being able to use the "All Users" dist list unless they're particularly so enabled.

  • (cs) in reply to Vladmir
    Vladmir:
    pjt33:
    Zeke:
    What do Faberge eggs have to do with anything?
    I was wondering that too. I suspect that Tatiana acquired that pseudonym by virtue of a weak analogy between recursive error mail sending and Russian dolls, but I hope that the reason for Fabergé wasn't stretching that link beyond breaking point.
    Wouldn't that be Matryoshka (which for some strange reason people seem to pronounce Babushka....)

    This. "Babushka" means "grandmother" and also IIRC is one of the mythical beings who are celebrated around yuletide.

  • jondr (unregistered) in reply to Mike D

    Ahem. The 80186 was used in the Tandy 2000 PC which ran DOS 2.11. Don't believe me, I still have it for you to see. I saved up and spent $600 for a hard disk that had 10 megabyte capacity.

  • Herr Otto Flick (unregistered)

    Oh hey you brought back the old comments system and now people actually comment on your "stories" again

  • Watze Huck (unregistered) in reply to Coyne
    Coyne:
    It was a fair usage: prophylactic has a broader meaning these days; see entry 3 under noun and entry 1 under adjective.. (It was also humorous, which is the whole reason the term has come to the broader usage.)

    No, it's the other way around. It's a general term (primarily medical) for a protective, preventative measure, which has more recently acquired a more specialized meaning in American English as a euphemism for a condom.

  • (cs) in reply to Vladmir
    Vladmir:
    pjt33:
    Zeke:
    What do Faberge eggs have to do with anything?
    I was wondering that too. I suspect that Tatiana acquired that pseudonym by virtue of a weak analogy between recursive error mail sending and Russian dolls, but I hope that the reason for Fabergé wasn't stretching that link beyond breaking point.
    Wouldn't that be Matryoshka (which for some strange reason people seem to pronounce Babushka....)
    Actually I was reckoning that the thought process was along the lines of, "This recursive mail sending sounds like Russian dolls: each reply contains another reply. Let's give the protagonist a Russian name."
  • Rusty (unregistered) in reply to pjt33

    A number of years ago, I was the admin for our Linux email server for our college students. One morning when I got to work, I didn't even get to my desk before two people stopped me to say that student email wasn't working. Got on the server and quickly saw that the hard drive was full (and it wasn't all that big of a hard drive). Further checking showed that the mail queue had expanded to take all available drive spice. Started clearing out some users' queues, but as fast as I cleared them they filled up again, so I disconnected the network cable. Also found that my mail queue was huge, as all bounced (undeliverable) messages had come to my inbox.

    What had happened is that some of out students had signed up to receive email from a local nightclub. The nightclub owner must have realized that our user names were only a string of digits. So, he decided to blast email to every possible string of digits he could come up with, and of course all of the undeliverables were filling up my inbox.

    So I did a whois lookup to find that nightclub's ISP, then contacted the ISP and sent them copies of logs, showing how the nightclub was spamming us. The ISP must have been in cahoots with the club owner, as they didn't seem too concerned with stopping the flow of spam.

    Well, seeing as I believe in taking direct action and am also an old ice hockey player, I called the nightclub. They told me the owner wasn't there, so I left a message in no uncertain terms. I told them, "Your owner is spamming my email server, inviting recepients of his spam to visit his nightclub. If the spams don't stop, I will round up 20 or so of my hockey playing buddies, and we will visit your nightclub. But when we leave, you won't have a nightclub left! Do you understand!?" The gal on the other end said, "Is that a threat?" And I said "You bet it is! Knock off the spam!" I also told her that if she called the cops on me, that I would show the cops the emails sent to every student on campus, inviting them to show up for various alcoholic drink specials, even though many of our students were not of legal drinking age.

    End of story: The spams stopped, and never started again. Although, I'm sort of disappointed I didn't have to get my hockey playing buddies to start a huge fight in that nightclub!

    --Rusty

  • (cs) in reply to Rusty
    Rusty:
    So I did a whois lookup to find that nightclub's ISP, then contacted the ISP and sent them copies of logs, showing how the nightclub was spamming us. The ISP must have been in cahoots with the club owner, as they didn't seem too concerned with stopping the flow of spam.

    They're paying the ISP, you're not. You're some random guy, they are a client.

    They're not going to do a single thing for you unless it stems a lawsuit.

  • Gimix (unregistered) in reply to pjt33
    pjt33:
    Zeke:
    What do Faberge eggs have to do with anything?
    I was wondering that too. I suspect that Tatiana acquired that pseudonym by virtue of a weak analogy between recursive error mail sending and Russian dolls, but I hope that the reason for Fabergé wasn't stretching that link beyond breaking point.
    Those Russian nesting dolls are call matryoshka dolls, not Faberge eggs.
  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to chubertdev
    chubertdev:
    Rusty:
    So I did a whois lookup to find that nightclub's ISP, then contacted the ISP and sent them copies of logs, showing how the nightclub was spamming us. The ISP must have been in cahoots with the club owner, as they didn't seem too concerned with stopping the flow of spam.

    They're paying the ISP, you're not. You're some random guy, they are a client.

    They're not going to do a single thing for you unless it stems a lawsuit.

    I guess back then you would have had to IP-ban the naughty sender. Nowadays you could set up a filter to send a copy of all of their e-mails to spamcop before redirecting the originals to /dev/nul.

  • Mikie Man (unregistered) in reply to Ziplodocus
    Ziplodocus:
    BusDriverMan:
    A few years ago I set up an email forwarding list which also forwarded emails to itself, for reasons which made sense at the time. But it's OK, it has filtering rules: emails sent from the distribution list would not be forwarded by the distribution list!

    It sent one email in its existence. It sent that one message over 4000 times to every one (hundred and ten) of my immediate colleagues and managers. And as we were a public sector organisation, it shut down a government email server. That was where I fully learned to appreciate the subtle difference between "redirected from x by y to z" and "forwarded from x by y to z" when x,y and z are the same entity.

    Reminds me of being at school when they installed a shiny new Pegasus Mail server, giving each of us students an email address (a new and exciting thing back then).

    My friends and I experimented with autoforwarding mail and set up rules to reply back twice for each email received from each of us.

    Needless to say it wasn't long before the whole thing crumbled under the weight of messages we were sending to each other.

    In my organization a few years ago, someone got a virus when sent an email to a very large distribution list. Our security people dealt with the virus quickly, but our email system was still down for weeks, with "reply all" storms. Invariably, someone would reply all "take me off of this email" and the cycle would repeat. When we finally got everything settled down, someone would return from a vacation and restart the cycle all over again. what a mess.

  • MardyGit (unregistered) in reply to Mike D

    Close, but no cigar...

    Research Machine released a 80186 based DOS PC into the UK education market, I know I patched a few old ones up for a Pupil Referral Unit (for kids between school and jail).

  • Neil (unregistered) in reply to rtm
    rtm:
    Anon:
    Feh, amateurs. Mere messages being duplicated. Knew a person at college who found that on a Prime system, he could spawn a sub-user (or whatever they were called on Prime systems) to login, perform a task, then logout. Great. Code your assignment, save, spawn the task build and run it while you continue with other tasks. We all used the capability.

    But, being high on curiosity, but low on forethought, this guy had his task create, guess what? Oh no, not one but two instances of itself.

    You can still do it today, whether in Linux or Windows. Put your fork bomb in crontab and have your own daily what-the-fork.
    This is the one that normally gets quoted:
    :(){ :|:& };:

  • Valued Service (unregistered) in reply to I prefer the straight lesbians
    I prefer the straight lesbians:
    Dr D Ildo:
    Tatiana has a gay lesbian egg fetish.

    Gay lesbians, eh?

    Gay lesbians are only attracted to themselves, as opposed to straight lesbians which are attracted to all women.

  • is that the first time on TDWTF... (unregistered)

    ...that we hear of a son/daughter of an exec being brought into the company in some way, and doing good ?

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