Topic: The Chit-Chat Thread

@NEStalgia Nah, I know better than to trust Sony. (At least Google, Amazon, etc straight up tell you they're not safe ) it was some "samsclub.com arus" thing in the ledger. Haven't been to Sam's in 10 months. Only thing I've done out of the ordinary was order that PCM for the pickup, and go to a gas station I haven't used in a bit. It's all good, though.

@AlohaPizzaJack I don't know, when Sony screwed me I was buying stuff at a Walmart in the midwest, and WoW characters in Malaysia.....

@ThanosReXXX Not with XP. Those stories I've heard secondhand. When I had somewhat of a support role along with my other duties, I did have to convince a client we worked with to upgrade their Windows Vista "server" back when the extended support for that was about to end. They thankfully upgraded, but only to Windows 7. I heavily hinted that they should get a proper server since their "server" was also a work station, but apparently saving money is more important. shrugs

This is the same company that complained to us at one point for allegedly shutting off access to our software early (there was a payment notice out, but the product they were using hadn't expired yet). The real issue was that this was around the time where Microsoft was forcing heavily encouraging users to upgrade to Windows 10. Their "server" upgraded itself, and the upgrade also shut off the services to SQL Server that they needed. THAT was the real, easy-to-fix issue.

I don't think I've ever spent so long proofreading an email that both explained what happened and said that we weren't at fault as nicely as possible. The lady I normally dealt with was nice enough, but her boss...not so much.

@AlohaPizzaJack
Yo!
I have finished Mission 6 (M06: Infiltration) just now. 🤓



Well, not bad for a 1st person shooter beginner. 😏
Btw, i have Failed once during Mission 6 due to fell down into acid pool because i suddenly forgot to press B button for jump. 😅

Time to sleep.
It's already 00.30 a.m. here.
Good night... 😴

@Anti-Matter Are you playing solo or finding online randoms? I found that game really difficult even with 2 players. It really seemed balanced for full squads only!

Hey. It’s been a while, so I thought I’d stop by and say hello. I see nothing has changed. Dogs and cats living in harmony together and @Anti-Matter shooting stuff. Is @ogo79 still a beast?

@NEStalgia I'll ignore that veiled smart@ss comment, seeing as I have only ever been in business 2 business sales, and most people/clients I spoke to, knew more than enough about the hard- and software they were working with, to be able to handle some pretty damn basic settings, even if they weren't instantly visible...

But let's just move on, seems like we're going in circles anyway, and I like to keep things positive.

So, how about that Tiger Woods, huh?

@Tyranexx Yeah, well... what company does NOT like saving money? But I've also had those kinda discussions, back when I was selling server racks and blade servers for Hewlett Packard. The trick always being that you should learn/master have the skills and the patience to play the long game, and let the other party see the bigger picture and the long term benefits.

In the case of the story you just mentioned, I would have been all over that guy, explaining to him that he'll be saving far more money by upgrading sooner, because part of (or most of?) his software is either going to be end of life or incompatible soon, and subsequently, so might access to his database, which could, or in this case apparently did, cause the SQL Server issues.

Kinda like scaring them into a sale... But a quality one, nonetheless, that they themselves would definitely benefit from as well, meaning I would have created yet another very satisfied customer, who I could safely bother for even more stuff, over the years to come...

@NEStalgia
I played Solo with Lone Wolf MODs.
Can you see the third picture above?
I was very Defensive player, so i equipped with something Defensive (Lone Wolf + Auto-Revive)

@bimmy-lee
Hello!
Long time no see you in this website.

@Anti-Matter Wouldn't worry too much about only failing once or twice every mission. Most people fail at (or get stuck in) some mission at some point, or finish without having a perfect score, so need to replay it anyway. It's just how it goes. And practice makes perfect, so you just need to get better, and you will, the more you play.

@bimmy-lee Hey there! was actually looking up your email last week, and archived it for later use, but because I had no interesting things to report, I decided to get back to it at some point last weekend, but obviously forgot all about it again...

So, are you just dropping by, or back for a while longer?

@ThanosReXXX You need to need to try selling to end users more. It can still be B2B. But sell things to the cube-rats actually using this stuff. Watch them install Chrome in ultra-secure environments. Not just the users, the admins as well! Watch them actually click on the email about how their business can be more profitable using one simple trick! You're missing the 2.7 billion reasons the internet should not be allowed to continue to exist.

Back in the 90's the only people on the internet were techies and the world was fine. Sure we were at war with each other, but we knew how to launch countermeasures. Just remember. The AOL users are NOW ON YOUR NETWORK!

@bimmy-lee Hey! Very long time no see!!

@Anti-Matter I still recall getting pretty well beaten in some of the "arena" type "survive for X minutes" type rooms.... It's chibi on the outside, it's hardcore on the inside without a full team

@NEStalgia Well, that's not up to me: initially, I was working in the office, so my manager or boss decided who we wanted to reel in, and that's basically always the fortune 500, or the ones slightly below that, but not Joe or Jane Average in their cubicle.

And now, as an independent contractor, I'm still selling to managers/bosses. That's just how it works. Employees don't get to decide things for the companies they work at...

But yeah, the internet should never have existed. At least not for a certain type of people, and/or companies, and yet here we are, trying to filter out the few, still relatively fresh water streams from this open sewage...

@NEStalgia Have you checked out this month's free Games with Gold already?
I obviously also posted it in the appropriate forum, but have a look see for yourself:
https://www.xbox.com/en-US/live/games-with-gold

I highly recommend Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon. If you've never played it yet, it's basically a love letter to those fifties and sixties invasion movies, with giant insects, aliens and other monsters threatening the Earth, and you and your team trying to eradicate them, played in third person view. I've always found it pretty entertaining.

@ThanosReXXX They may not do the deciding, but they'll find the right way to break it!

Yeah, the internet....the internet has destroyed everything about everything in the world. It gave us some good things, but mostly it was like the tooth fairy. You may have a shiny new baseball glove but it seems a really awful consolation price for having stolen your teeth. The world itself is now a cesspool of behavior, and worse, a direct threat to most people all shaped around the internet. In the mid 90's it was a cool information tool, but it was never meant to run our lives in every aspect as a central consciousness......the fact that we shot from "useful communication and information tool" to "central nexus of all activity on earth" in a mere 15-20 years is terrifying.

Back when I started, the whole point is it was distributed, everyone was empowered, and there was no central authority. We were ditching mainframes for distributed everything. Within a good 10 years they flipped it on its head and turned it into the definition of a top-down hierarchy of authoritarian control where "the cloud" represents a single central mainframe for all earth. If today's internet were the internet that was there when I entered the world of tech, I'd not have ever entered the world of tech.

@ThanosReXXX I'll have to give it a try! Overall not a terribly exciting month for Gold, but compared to the dumpster dive Sony is offering this month it looks like a treasure trove! I'm expecting both are holding onto a "wow" freebie for E3 month....even the absent Sony... "RDR2 for free, please don't forget us!"

@NEStalgia Ah, the cloud... That always reminds me of the truckloads of clueless celebrities, who apparently don't even have the slightest inkling of any tech-savviness in them. Even with all the negative goings on concerning the cloud and user data, how many of them still make their dirty little pictures and videos, and happily allow them to be (automatically) stored in the cloud, where they're basically beckoning the hackers to come at them?

Obviously, that doesn't mean that the hackers are excused, and what you do in your private life is of course nobody's business, but it would be a whole lot smarter to actually also keep it private, and NOT allow a third party cloud service, no matter how safe it's supposed to be, to back that kinda stuff up.

Every time I see an item in the news or in any kind of info-tainment program about another celebrity photo leak, all I do is shrug and wonder for the umpteenth time why these people aren't getting any wiser, after already having been burnt before, or having seen colleagues being burned.

Then again: it's a weird time to be alive in anyway, because it's not just celebs. Kids nowadays are also sharing and sending all kinds of shady stuff to and from their phones, damn the long term consequences.
If you ask me, schools need to start educating kids on the pretty much eternal consequences of putting content online...

Be sure to let me know if you do enjoy Earth Defense Force, whenever you get the chance to play it. I've no idea if it has any major benefits concerning upscaling and so on, when played on the One X, but it's a fun game regardless.

Hey all, yeah, I think I’ll hang around. I needed a break from social internet, and during that time; I think I developed some methods for being less annoyed with the general population. I never really followed the forums, but a lot of the people I enjoyed conversing with are here; so I’ll do more posting here and less under articles on the main page.

@bimmy-lee Aha, good on you. Well, in that case: good to have you back again.
So... does that mean more beer-related comments from now on?

@ThanosReXXX - Thanks, good to be back. You know I’ll be trying to slip as many beer and 80s pro wrestling comments as possible. I’ll even shoehorn them in. I’m not above it.

@ReaderRagfish - My one man Internet comment section embargo of little interest worked!

@bimmy-lee Welcome back friend! Long time no see!

Tip: The articles and forums here are usually fine, but the article comment sections still sport the occasional dumpster fire. Enter at your own risk. I've started spending less time in them.

@ThanosReXXX Unfortunately, they were the kind of customer that certainly could have afforded the upgrade but decided to pursue the route they had went before on a slightly more modern (at the time) OS. I suppose that one could be called a draw.