But are you older than token ring?

Considering that token ring was first released by IBM almost exactly a decade after TCP (which I was very specific about - TCP specifically, not TCP/IP), then I would most definitely say yes, I am very much older than token ring.

Token ring was introduced as a low-cost networking option for smaller offices that did not require the use of (at the time) fiendishly expensive switching and routing equipment. If you wanted to hook a bunch of machines together into a network and had no need for external access, you quite literally needed only the cabling and the cards that were installed in the computers. No hubs. No switches. Nothing else.

Of course, using token ring also allowed techs to engage in shenanigans such as - when the ring was broken in some way - getting a junior tech to crawl around on the floor looking for the break and the token that fell out of it, to stuff it back into the cable. Sometimes we even did that with particularly difficult customers.

I am two years older than TCP.

I am quite literally older than the Internet.

I have a massive wingspan:weight ratio, so I always have to choose between sleeves being long enough on a shirt that’s 4x too big, or sleeves that end 3 inches short on a shirt that mostly fits.

So you look like you just sauntered out of Auschwitz?

<rant>

You’re the reason why most shirts don’t fit me. I hate “slim fit” shirts, and anything fashionable is so slim fit you would have trouble fitting it over a skeleton or a 1,000-year-old Sahara-desiccated corpse. Why is your kind so common that the marketplace gets flooded with clothing that can only fit a famine victim?

And I’m not obese in the least. I just have a 50-inch chest with a 36-inch waist. I have pecs, not some wafer-thin slabs of barely-there muscle that would have trouble bench-pressing an onion scape.

About the only thing that fits me are 2XL tops that are regular or relaxed fit. Even jackets have gotten into the “reverse-vanity-sizing” madness that has recently beset Canada, with many “size 50” suit jackets really being a size 46 or even a 44.

</rant>

.

That I am simply not greedy enough, ruthless enough, or duplicitous enough to be my own boss, much less the boss of anyone else.

The hardware to read the tapes are calibrated to the maximum size they are configured to accept. So when you hit up eBay, you will need to know the maximum amount of data you will need, and either the size of the largest tape drive to hold all that - if you are not getting a machine with an auto-loader - or the maximum number of drives that the machine’s autoloader can take, so you can size the tapes properly for the data.

Say you need to back up 25Tb. You are unlikely to ever need more backup than that. So you either look for a machine that takes 25Tb tapes, or you get a machine that can take max. 5Tb tapes, but has an autoloader that can hold at least 4 additional tapes (in addition to the one in the drive) such that all five will automagically cycle through the backup process. That way, all 25Tb will be backed up in either case without your direct and immediate involvement, all you have to do is rotate the tapes off-site after the backups are done, and slot the next ones in for the next backup run.

Obviously, incremental backups are a no-go, as backups are stored off-site. So it’s an all-or-nothing process. And as such, this is usually done both on your entire primary data set (for fast total-disaster restores) once in a while, with a different set of tapes focusing on your local/on-site warm backups and backing up only the atomic/incremental locally-stored backups for the day/week/month.

It sounds like your healing will never be done until that eternal sleep takes you. My condolences.

Keep an eye on that brain injury. Here’s hoping you missed a bullet with that as well. AIUI, severe shocks like that prematurely age the brain by 20-50 years, making it look like Swiss cheese towards the end. But judging from the quality of your prose (which is excellent), it seems that you aren’t very far down that path just yet. Good luck.

If you want longevity and shelf stability, tape drives are the way to go. You can get them in very large capacities, even into the hundreds of TB.

Their benefit is that they have no internal motorized components, they are a lot like VHS videocassettes - two spools with tape. This makes them very shelf-stable, unlike hard drives which can have their spindles seize up over time.

They also have absolutely epic data densities. You could store on one tape the contents of dozens of the largest hard drives currently available.

Their downside is that you need highly specialized hardware to read and record them. And this makes the hardware quite expensive.

So why don’t we use tape drives to store data? Because they store said data linearly - great for writing once, terrible for finding or updating said data - and because they are slow. You want to get to a file 20Tb in? Enjoy scrolling past every single byte up until that point.

But for cold backups, there ain’t nothing better.

Wow. There is A LOT to unpack, there.

I’d go with the one you are most comfortable in addressing.

For some reason I cannot fathom for the life of me.

Tell me you are not a man without saying you are not a man.

Any male of our species that has passed through the 12-18yo stage of life will at least understand that humour, even if they have matured beyond it.

I roll my own eyes at shit like that, and would never employ it myself. But I can’t roll my eyes without even a tiny 12yo grin, even though it’s been four decades since I was that age.

The litmus test of determining if there is bigotry involved is to change the terms in contention. If it is bigoted in one direction, it is fundamentally bigoted in both.

You hit the nail on the head when you posited “if this was a guy doing it to his girlfriend” it would be toxic, manipulative, and abusive.

Let’s make misandry as unacceptable as misogyny. Because true equality will be impossible until we do.

Many modern routers have this exact capability - to take a USB-only printer and serve it up over the network. Even some ISP modem/router combo units are set up to do this. Check to see if your router has any USB ports on the back.

Crime is a result of desperation and lack of economic opportunities.

Chronic addictions are a result of untreated/untreatable trauma.

Homelessness arises from poverty and precarious economic conditions, and can trigger both of the prior two.

And yet, these people are voting for the parties that would seek to implement and perpetuate poverty, precariousness, trauma and economic inequality.

…the fuq?

Came here to say exactly this, only I wasn’t expecting to be anywhere as concise and erudite as you have been.

The window-wart AC in a vehicle - especially if it never had AC from the factory in the first place - is something I can understand. Ugly AF, but at least it’s functional.

The generator on top? What TF is up with that? Surely it would be simpler to swap out the alternator for something more powerful that can push up to 15A on a 110V converter.

I recall hearing about this one informal conference between climate scientists, ethnographers, and collapse-aware economists. About two dozen ppl in total, IIRC.

Their exceedingly conservative estimate of the BAU path had humanity experience a 40-60% collapse (3.2B to 4.8B dead) by some point in the 2050s. And you don’t see that without a whole hell of a lot of secondary civilizational/technological collapse and loss of knowledge.

And they concluded that humanity existing past 2150 or 2200 was vanishingly unlikely due to polar restriction due to lethal wet bulb temperatures making the rest of the planet uninhabitable for year-round occupation, and the sheer lack of arable land in the polar region.

The problem is that we have been accelerating past 1.5℃ of warming in terms of CO2 production. We haven’t even begun to slow down, much less reverse to net zero. And since climate change has an inertia to it that is thousands of times stronger with our current change than in prior changes, there is now a non-zero possibility that - even if we go extinct - the planet itself could end up in a Venus scenario. Things are moving just far too fast for any ecosystem - much less the entire planetary ecosystem - to adapt and migrate in order to remain maximally productive in natural CO2 sequestration.

“This is AI-generated content” seems to be the new slur seeking to shame people into silence. Better than “Incel”, I suppose, but certainly more insidious and less dismissively hyperbolic.

We are fucked. We are so incredibly fucked.

Very interested in hearing your best-case and worst-case outcomes for humanity over the next 30 or so years. Worst-case being, of course, the “business as usual” path that we have not deviated from at all.

Good cannot flourish while greed does.

Capitalism cannot exist without extensive, institutionalized greed.

Considering how America is moving towards that same state, with it’s Republicans?

No, I don’t think it’s a coincidence. Oligarchic autocracies can occur under any circumstances where a power-hungry elite manage to wrest control by using the masses as “useful idiots”. The Conservative leadership, in general, have learned this trick very well.

Especially people who never lived in a communist state

That’s a rather impossible requirement, considering that all “communist states” to date have been oligarchic autocracies that were just as much about communism as they were democratic.

Real communism is market ownership by the people, and not some elite cabal of politicians or capitalists. And a top-down planned economy is pretty much anti-communism, as it violates the very fundamentals of communism as being worker-driven.