FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

my energy in 2025

This morning, on February 2nd 2025 at 06:58 (GMT+1) I've received an E-Mail by Oracle stating “Your Oracle Cloud account has been reactivated.”

I couldn't believe my eyes and didn't really understand how to respond. At the point in time where I received this E-mail, my post regarding Oracle's mistreatment has already gathered thousands of shares and was also discussed heavily on Hacker News among other platforms.

My many pleas and requests from the past week didn't do anything. My GDPR request didn't do anything so far. But within a few hours of public complaints and so many people telling me to take this to court... I guess this was simply the easiest way.

I still don't fully understand the E-Mail I've gotten. It talks about an order about universal credits that occurred at 5:20 AM, where I've been cold asleep. When I login to Oracle Cloud, no such credits exist. Additionally, they don't show up when I look into the “Cost and Usage Reports” under my account management. Even more interesting are the dozens of files showing an account and server activity, with the calculated cost of it all, for a time period where my account was supposedly irreversibly deleted.

I'll share more interesting findings soon. I am honestly just shocked about this development. I would've expected many things except for a 180.

Interestingly, two days before Oracle deleted my account and all servers associated with it, I publicly criticized Oracle's CEO in a viral post for promising dystopian AI surveillance technology to his investors.

https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/113879369270806353

What a weird coincidence.

The tech person at Oracle at least lets me know that they'd feel similarly betrayed and dislike this handling of user data too 🥲✊

I also love how I ask “Is there anything I can do to avoid this happening in the future?” and they respond with “Oh, don't worry. You don't have a future at Oracle. This will not happen to you again, as we don't allow for you to make another account.”

This is a public service announcement to never ever use Oracle

After realizing that my servers were offline since the 25th of January 2025, I've been in contact with Oracle support in a multitude of ways trying to figure out why this happened and how we can recover both the account and data.

I wasn't told that my account was disabled. I didn't receive an E-Mail or anything. When logging in, I was simply told that my username or password was incorrect. After (successfully) resetting my password twice, I realized it wasn't about the password. Oracle had just deleted my account without any notice.

Both through calls and text, always with the same service request (SR) number, I contacted support. Initially, support told me that my account was flagged “Inactive” and hence disabled. They also verified that they saw me login almost daily and that I never missed a payment or anything. Even if an account was inactive, that's never a reason to disable it, especially without any warning E-Mail or an E-Mail letting me know that my account was disabled in the first place.

This chat was the result of all of that, where the highest team I've yet been elevated to told me that there's nothing they can do about it, there's no reason they can tell me for why this happened, and there's no one else I could ask.

lololol

With the development of the minicomputer and the microcomputer in the 1970s, "mainframe" moved towards its modern meaning, with computers partitioned into micros, minis, and mainframes. IBM started using "mainframe" as a marketing term in the mid-1980s; e.g. calling the S/390 "mainframe class". 6/n

IBM's construction of computers from frames was a major innovation: the frames fit through doors and were transportable. Earlier computers were often constructed in place and difficult to move. Photo shows an IBM 701 at GE with frames for power and drum storage, and main frame in the center.

What is the origin of the word "mainframe"? Digging through archives, I traced it back to 1953. The IBM 701 computer was built from "frames": power frames, a storage frame, a drum frame, and the main frame. This 1953 drawing from the Installation Manual shows the dimensions of the "main frame". 1/n

pro tip for anyone dealing with hostile bureaucracy:

rules and laws aren't real! people make them up together

if you get a no when you really really need a yes, try again. ask again a different day, a different location, a different person, a different way

the system is people, all the way down

and you might find the person who says yes

me trying to get people to play tabletops with me

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/29/which-side-are-you-on-2/#strike-three-yer-out

"Trump has torn up the rules to the labor game, but that doesn't mean the game ends. That just means there are no rules."

The Leopards should be afraid, for without rules, Wildcats may eat their faces for a change.

These punks saw me coming

In case you were wondering... My spouse is a school bus driver and these are the instructions drivers have received today.

🦨As promised, we've added a toggle that allows you to remove any lesbian content from the game, to keep all the anti-woke anti-DEI people happy. Here's a demonstration of it in action

#indiedev #gamedev #gamemaker

Somebody asked me:

"Why bother with FPGA? Why don't you just use an emulator at that point?"

My view on modern #retrocomputing:

* Hardware will fail. If we are to preserve long-term, both emulation and gate level simulation are critical.

* FPGAs can implement things that are hard to implement in software, and vice versa.

* Improvements in one will positively affect the other.

---

I do not disrespect the nostalgia, but I have an unusual perspective on #retrocomputing:

I never stopped using any of this stuff, so for me, it's a continuum. I used all this stuff yesterday, I use it today, and I will use it tomorrow.