I gamed in DOS in an era when you couldn't look stuff up (I had no internet access until I was about 15) and I genuinely have no idea how I ever successfully played a game
I played Ultima VIII during my freshman year in college. There was a game-breaking bug at the very end of the game - an interactive object you were obviously supposed to click on but nothing happened.
I got it fixed by calling the support number in the manual and immediately connecting with a US based guy who was familiar with the exact bug I was talking about. He was able to email me a patch. Internet at that time meant logging in and entering commands at a Unix prompt.
I honestly cannot believe that I was able to download the attached patch file and run it, and that it worked. It seems like a speculative fiction story written in the 80s.
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UnbrokenEvaHIGH ON THE WIREBUT I WON'T TRIP ITRegistered Userregular
We had a new email scam attempt come through today and jesus christ it's vile.
Someone emailed our payroll administrator from a gmail account with the display name set to impersonate one of our users. The email claimed the user had changed banks, and wanted to update their direct deposit information, and could the change go through for the current pay week?
Thankfully, the payroll admin CC'd the user's work email address when they replied, so the user was notified of the impersonation and able to stop things before the scam got any further. It's scary though because I can see how this scam could easily have worked, and certainly has elsewhere.
I've seen plenty of attempted scams over the past few years since I took over training, as a big part of that is security training. Most of them are wire transfer requests targeting the company, or iTunes gift card scams targeting individuals. That stuff is plenty scummy, but there's just something about trying to steal a person's whole paycheck that just makes my skin crawl.
Hey, our business office fell for that one a few months ago and ended up sending a four-figure paycheck to some scammers! I mean, they gave the person a new check once the truth came out, but the system as a whole still lost the money.
As a result, I now have an hour and a half of required cybersecurity training. Which seems a bit unfair, since I don't even have the system privileges to update anyone's payroll information even if I wanted to.
While I sympathize, there's plenty of other scams out there that can take advantage of people without elevated privileges, and a good course is going to give information that applies to keeping personal accounts secure as well.
I've often considered making a recorded version of my intro course modified for people to share with their parents/kids/etc
I remember that I couldn't run Quake because I didn't have a floating point processor. I could run basically everything else, but not Quake, because it needed something really specific.
To this day, when someone brings up Quake I think "I can't run that".
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I ZimbraWorst song, played on ugliest guitarRegistered Userregular
I gamed in DOS in an era when you couldn't look stuff up (I had no internet access until I was about 15) and I genuinely have no idea how I ever successfully played a game
I played Ultima VIII during my freshman year in college. There was a game-breaking bug at the very end of the game - an interactive object you were obviously supposed to click on but nothing happened.
I got it fixed by calling the support number in the manual and immediately connecting with a US based guy who was familiar with the exact bug I was talking about. He was able to email me a patch. Internet at that time meant logging in and entering commands at a Unix prompt.
I honestly cannot believe that I was able to download the attached patch file and run it, and that it worked. It seems like a speculative fiction story written in the 80s.
I spent so much time on the phone with Origin customer service. They were based out of Austin and mostly had great Texas accents in addition to really knowing their stuff.
Richard Garriott is a stone-cold weirdo but he ran a good company for a while.
We have a new POS system we’re rolling out this week and I discovered I’m set up as an accounting user instead of having full admin privileges as I usually do. Boo!
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Drake ChambersLay out my formal shorts.Registered Userregular
I gamed in DOS in an era when you couldn't look stuff up (I had no internet access until I was about 15) and I genuinely have no idea how I ever successfully played a game
I played Ultima VIII during my freshman year in college. There was a game-breaking bug at the very end of the game - an interactive object you were obviously supposed to click on but nothing happened.
I got it fixed by calling the support number in the manual and immediately connecting with a US based guy who was familiar with the exact bug I was talking about. He was able to email me a patch. Internet at that time meant logging in and entering commands at a Unix prompt.
I honestly cannot believe that I was able to download the attached patch file and run it, and that it worked. It seems like a speculative fiction story written in the 80s.
I spent so much time on the phone with Origin customer service. They were based out of Austin and mostly had great Texas accents in addition to really knowing their stuff.
Richard Garriott is a stone-cold weirdo but he ran a good company for a while.
I celebrated the 4th of July on the roof of their headquarters one year. It was a great bunch of people and it had a really awesome community feel that I doubt exists anywhere in AAA development anymore.
I posit that being computer literate is not generational at all, but much more closely tied to income levels as a child. Early exposure to actual factual computers is what is going to get people more computer literate. I had to learn MSDOS to play computer games as a child, and that we had a computer at all in 1990 was thanks my dad being well-off enough to afford one.
I dunno, I think it is generational, but it is really this tight, say, 28-42 year old band, where they were exposed to a computer coming into the house (or the introduction of the one computer into the classroom) as a young person (rather it just always being there) that made shit like even a word processor, kind of interesting so you poked around on it and learned a bunch of things.
A good example of this is my mother in law. Can barely use a PC, can't figure out how to "Do the Google" but we got her a Fire tablet last Christmas and an Alexa this past year and shes on disability now and cares enough that she spent time learning about these items and now she knows more about them then I do, and I own both!
If she took the time and didn't let herself get frustrated with it, I bet she could learn a lot of stuff about basic networking and advance computer use
I remember having a stack of boot disks for different games with differnet QEMM configurations to make things work on our janky ass 486. Origin games, in particular, took a lot of fiddling to work right.
Yeah, my dad had to do some weird finnagling with DOS to get Crusader: No Regret working for me.
I remember the old days of bootleg floppies from my dads work.
I was awesome at the first level of Prince of Persia but couldn't go beyond that because we didn't have the manual for me to look up the third letter of the fourth paragraph on page 19.
I remember having a stack of boot disks for different games with differnet QEMM configurations to make things work on our janky ass 486. Origin games, in particular, took a lot of fiddling to work right.
Yeah, my dad had to do some weird finnagling with DOS to get Crusader: No Regret working for me.
This brings me back to the DOS-level memory wrangling I had to do in order to make Wing Commander 2 playable. Actually, playability wasn't the problem -- it was the load times. I want to say missions took 20 to 30 minutes to load before tweaking could bring it down to 5 or so.
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
edited January 2019
Those weird little copy protection widgets were fun sometimes. I like how Life and Death had a codewheel shaped like a beeper, so it's a double-whammy of nostalgia.
And I think it was Alone in the Dark that had a special plastic filter that you had to use to find hidden symbols in the manual?
Jedoc on
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Drake ChambersLay out my formal shorts.Registered Userregular
I remember the old days of bootleg floppies from my dads work.
I was awesome at the first level of Prince of Persia but couldn't go beyond that because we didn't have the manual for me to look up the third letter of the fourth paragraph on page 19.
Oh man, the paper manual and code wheel copy protection solutions.
Starflight had a system that was absolutely diabolical. You had to enter a code to get clearance to leave your home base. Thing was, if you entered the wrong code, it didn't tell you -- the doors opened and you could leave.
Then, some time later, perhaps much later, you'd be surprised in space by a law enforcement fleet that would demand you provide the correct code. If you didn't, you got annihilated.
I remember the old days of bootleg floppies from my dads work.
I was awesome at the first level of Prince of Persia but couldn't go beyond that because we didn't have the manual for me to look up the third letter of the fourth paragraph on page 19.
Oh man, the paper manual and code wheel copy protection solutions.
Starflight had a system that was absolutely diabolical. You had to enter a code to get clearance to leave your home base. Thing was, if you entered the wrong code, it didn't tell you -- the doors opened and you could leave.
Then, some time later, perhaps much later, you'd be surprised in space by a law enforcement fleet that would demand you provide the correct code. If you didn't, you got annihilated.
I know Ultima VII Part 2 had that weird copy protection thing where if you answered the copy protection questions wrong it just made everyone spout gibberish so you couldn't get anywhere in the game.
When my dad was in the Navy for Christmas one year I got a floppy drive for my commodore 64 and a big box of games copied by his buddies. It took months to go through all the semi labeled discs to find all the games they had given me. Thank you Navy guy who gave me Strip Poker, you were doing God's work.
I remember my dad had set up some kind of frontend for DOS back in the day that let me boot straight into a bunch of games. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have played as many games as I did if it wasn't for that.
God, videogames today are so EASY to play, comparatively. I don't mean that in some snobby "Oh they were BETTER back then" way, just like, the act of actually playing a game is so much fucking simpler. I feel like if they ever made a 'PC Classic' (which... they would probably never make) they should include an 'oldschool' mode where you have to set up boot disks, deal with sound card conflicts, and so on. It would be tremendously stupid but...
This is in large part due to a debate between John Carmack and Bill Gates, where the former pointed out how painful development of games in DOS/Windows was - which lead to the development of DirectX, which basically made everything just...work.
We had a new email scam attempt come through today and jesus christ it's vile.
Someone emailed our payroll administrator from a gmail account with the display name set to impersonate one of our users. The email claimed the user had changed banks, and wanted to update their direct deposit information, and could the change go through for the current pay week?
Thankfully, the payroll admin CC'd the user's work email address when they replied, so the user was notified of the impersonation and able to stop things before the scam got any further. It's scary though because I can see how this scam could easily have worked, and certainly has elsewhere.
I've seen plenty of attempted scams over the past few years since I took over training, as a big part of that is security training. Most of them are wire transfer requests targeting the company, or iTunes gift card scams targeting individuals. That stuff is plenty scummy, but there's just something about trying to steal a person's whole paycheck that just makes my skin crawl.
Hey, our business office fell for that one a few months ago and ended up sending a four-figure paycheck to some scammers! I mean, they gave the person a new check once the truth came out, but the system as a whole still lost the money.
As a result, I now have an hour and a half of required cybersecurity training. Which seems a bit unfair, since I don't even have the system privileges to update anyone's payroll information even if I wanted to.
Can you not track that shit? You need a lot of information to open a bank account so it seems like it'd be super easy to crush someone into oblivion for that. Unless they were laundering it through someone else's compromised account and hoping no one will track it beyond that.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
I do remember two DOS related things regarding Command & Conquer
1. I never got the sound to work, and that game is heavily based around sound queues and audio for things like being under attack. The upshot of this is that I became incredibly good at Command & Conquer because I had to be extremely engaged and constantly checking on everything in case it was going to shit.
2. I found a load order for the game that caused a bug and unlocked all of the buildings and units from the start of the game. I was, for a long time, convinced that I was the discoverer and only person in the world who knew about this "cheat", but I think it's popped up in a few places now.
I remember the DOS code to give the orca lasers and would enter it every time
This way I would not have to make an airbase with 20+ orca and defend it while I harass and destroy the enemy from the air
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Raijin QuickfootI'm your Huckleberry YOU'RE NO DAISYRegistered User, ClubPAregular
Ugh... My team figured out my birthday is tomorrow...
I remember getting Rise of the Robots for Christmas one year, and opening the box to find fifteen installation disks.
That was a memorable Christmas, spent the entire day at the computer watching an install bar, got to play for like 30 minutes before being sent to bed. The next day though, I raised some robots!
Meh, from a reporting perspective I am not sold on either of our new POS systems
One of them isn’t giving me COGS anywhere (our IT guy also had a look, verified it wasn’t just me). The manager apparently uploaded COGS data but not until a couple of weeks after we’d launched, so I am not even sure what I’ll do for those two weeks.
The other is apparently really popular (Korona, anyone?) and its reports are ok - I can get everything I need - but it’s a bit piecemeal; I have to run 2-3 reports to get all the info I need.
People didn’t like our old POS from a user standpoint, but on the backend I could spit out CSV reports that had every single piece of data I needed and I could quickly and easily manipulate that in excel.
Neither of our new POS systems just spit out the raw data goodness I want.
Hey some of us around the office have noticed one of your testicles hangs lower than the other. It's really upsetting some of our female employees, so I'll have to ask you to do something about it.
Meh, from a reporting perspective I am not sold on either of our new POS systems
One of them isn’t giving me COGS anywhere (our IT guy also had a look, verified it wasn’t just me). The manager apparently uploaded COGS data but not until a couple of weeks after we’d launched, so I am not even sure what I’ll do for those two weeks.
The other is apparently really popular (Korona, anyone?) and its reports are ok - I can get everything I need - but it’s a bit piecemeal; I have to run 2-3 reports to get all the info I need.
People didn’t like our old POS from a user standpoint, but on the backend I could spit out CSV reports that had every single piece of data I needed and I could quickly and easily manipulate that in excel.
Neither of our new POS systems just spit out the raw data goodness I want.
Sounds like the new POS systems are a real... bad... thing
Hey some of us around the office have noticed one of your testicles hangs lower than the other. It's really upsetting some of our female employees, so I'll have to ask you to do something about it.
Hey some of us around the office have noticed one of your testicles hangs lower than the other. It's really upsetting some of our female employees, so I'll have to ask you to do something about it.
Ok Job thread I need advice. I mentioned before that theres a potential promotion on the horizon. I am very excited about this but I haven't heard anything in awhile I need to know if it would be annoying/unprofessional to ask. Basic timeline:
Last week of October: Infosec Chief runs into me in the bathroom, said he got permission to take on a secondary and wanted to know if I was interested. I said yes. He told me to beef up my resume and send it to him because he had a meeting with his boss next week and was going to present the idea to him. I did it the next day.
First week of November: He had the meeting with his boss, got approval to hire me. Said he has to go through proper channels though and to expect the posting sometime near the end of November/Early December.
Early December: Came to my room and openly, in front of my co-workers and boss (whom we hadn't told about this yet since it wasn't official) and talked to me about it, asked me about salary expectation and if I was still interested. Said that since the job wouldn't start until Q1 of 2019 it probably wouldn't be posted until sometime in January now.
Now: Its January...how long should I wait? I was thinking until the 22nd (were off the 21st for Martin Luther King Jr. Day since thats the third full week of the month and close to the end....but I don't want to come off as annoying. I just hate being left in limbo
Hey some of us around the office have noticed one of your testicles hangs lower than the other. It's really upsetting some of our female employees, so I'll have to ask you to do something about it.
One of the commentors made an excellent point - letting your male employees discuss the breasts of a female coworker is a very good way to wind up on the wrong side of a hostile workplace lawsuit.
Seriously, how did that manager think that request was in any way appropriate?
Hey some of us around the office have noticed one of your testicles hangs lower than the other. It's really upsetting some of our female employees, so I'll have to ask you to do something about it.
I’d like to invite you to submit a request for bofa, and this will be taken care of.
Hey some of us around the office have noticed one of your testicles hangs lower than the other. It's really upsetting some of our female employees, so I'll have to ask you to do something about it.
I’d like to invite you to submit a request for bofa, and this will be taken care of.
WHATS BOFA??
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Shortytouching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered Userregular
I'm not sure but I know it's under the purview of the updog department
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
So I'm going to have to send out a reminder email for my staff to take their cybersecurity training.
Is there a website specifically designed to shame people who click on a misrouted link in a cybersecurity reminder email, or should I just rickroll them?
Posts
I played Ultima VIII during my freshman year in college. There was a game-breaking bug at the very end of the game - an interactive object you were obviously supposed to click on but nothing happened.
I got it fixed by calling the support number in the manual and immediately connecting with a US based guy who was familiar with the exact bug I was talking about. He was able to email me a patch. Internet at that time meant logging in and entering commands at a Unix prompt.
I honestly cannot believe that I was able to download the attached patch file and run it, and that it worked. It seems like a speculative fiction story written in the 80s.
While I sympathize, there's plenty of other scams out there that can take advantage of people without elevated privileges, and a good course is going to give information that applies to keeping personal accounts secure as well.
I've often considered making a recorded version of my intro course modified for people to share with their parents/kids/etc
To this day, when someone brings up Quake I think "I can't run that".
I spent so much time on the phone with Origin customer service. They were based out of Austin and mostly had great Texas accents in addition to really knowing their stuff.
Richard Garriott is a stone-cold weirdo but he ran a good company for a while.
I celebrated the 4th of July on the roof of their headquarters one year. It was a great bunch of people and it had a really awesome community feel that I doubt exists anywhere in AAA development anymore.
A good example of this is my mother in law. Can barely use a PC, can't figure out how to "Do the Google" but we got her a Fire tablet last Christmas and an Alexa this past year and shes on disability now and cares enough that she spent time learning about these items and now she knows more about them then I do, and I own both!
If she took the time and didn't let herself get frustrated with it, I bet she could learn a lot of stuff about basic networking and advance computer use
Yeah, my dad had to do some weird finnagling with DOS to get Crusader: No Regret working for me.
I was awesome at the first level of Prince of Persia but couldn't go beyond that because we didn't have the manual for me to look up the third letter of the fourth paragraph on page 19.
This brings me back to the DOS-level memory wrangling I had to do in order to make Wing Commander 2 playable. Actually, playability wasn't the problem -- it was the load times. I want to say missions took 20 to 30 minutes to load before tweaking could bring it down to 5 or so.
And I think it was Alone in the Dark that had a special plastic filter that you had to use to find hidden symbols in the manual?
Oh man, the paper manual and code wheel copy protection solutions.
Starflight had a system that was absolutely diabolical. You had to enter a code to get clearance to leave your home base. Thing was, if you entered the wrong code, it didn't tell you -- the doors opened and you could leave.
Then, some time later, perhaps much later, you'd be surprised in space by a law enforcement fleet that would demand you provide the correct code. If you didn't, you got annihilated.
I know Ultima VII Part 2 had that weird copy protection thing where if you answered the copy protection questions wrong it just made everyone spout gibberish so you couldn't get anywhere in the game.
This is in large part due to a debate between John Carmack and Bill Gates, where the former pointed out how painful development of games in DOS/Windows was - which lead to the development of DirectX, which basically made everything just...work.
Can you not track that shit? You need a lot of information to open a bank account so it seems like it'd be super easy to crush someone into oblivion for that. Unless they were laundering it through someone else's compromised account and hoping no one will track it beyond that.
Needless to say, she basically states "tell management this is inappropriate, illegal, and then get a lawyer if it persists."
Oh wow, fuck that company. Jesus.
All the way to the bank.
I made a thread!
I remember the DOS code to give the orca lasers and would enter it every time
This way I would not have to make an airbase with 20+ orca and defend it while I harass and destroy the enemy from the air
"okay, can I get that in writing?"
That was a memorable Christmas, spent the entire day at the computer watching an install bar, got to play for like 30 minutes before being sent to bed. The next day though, I raised some robots!
One of them isn’t giving me COGS anywhere (our IT guy also had a look, verified it wasn’t just me). The manager apparently uploaded COGS data but not until a couple of weeks after we’d launched, so I am not even sure what I’ll do for those two weeks.
The other is apparently really popular (Korona, anyone?) and its reports are ok - I can get everything I need - but it’s a bit piecemeal; I have to run 2-3 reports to get all the info I need.
People didn’t like our old POS from a user standpoint, but on the backend I could spit out CSV reports that had every single piece of data I needed and I could quickly and easily manipulate that in excel.
Neither of our new POS systems just spit out the raw data goodness I want.
Sounds like the new POS systems are a real... bad... thing
Like zip your pants
I'd rather get fired.
First week of November: He had the meeting with his boss, got approval to hire me. Said he has to go through proper channels though and to expect the posting sometime near the end of November/Early December.
Early December: Came to my room and openly, in front of my co-workers and boss (whom we hadn't told about this yet since it wasn't official) and talked to me about it, asked me about salary expectation and if I was still interested. Said that since the job wouldn't start until Q1 of 2019 it probably wouldn't be posted until sometime in January now.
Now: Its January...how long should I wait? I was thinking until the 22nd (were off the 21st for Martin Luther King Jr. Day since thats the third full week of the month and close to the end....but I don't want to come off as annoying. I just hate being left in limbo
One of the commentors made an excellent point - letting your male employees discuss the breasts of a female coworker is a very good way to wind up on the wrong side of a hostile workplace lawsuit.
Seriously, how did that manager think that request was in any way appropriate?
I’d like to invite you to submit a request for bofa, and this will be taken care of.
WHATS BOFA??
Is there a website specifically designed to shame people who click on a misrouted link in a cybersecurity reminder email, or should I just rickroll them?