zip-drives where great - at least compared to what other possibilities where around these days:
overall, zip-drives where not that expensive, especially the medias.
but they died every now& then ...
so it was more or less only a possibility to transfer data, not so much to archive it! this was what cd-r and later dvd-r where there for :)
imho. the "real" problem where often the drives themselfs, they where available with various interfaces, the most common was (!) parallel / "printer-port" / centronics (!) .. veeery slow.
the "best" ones had scsi =?> fast etc. but you needed an scsi-controller with an external connector for that
if i remember it correctly, there where even IDE/PATA-drives available - but i think only internal ones - and later usb-variants (also slow) ...
btw. what where the alternative in the late 1990ties!?
* syquests
great drives, especially the 5.25 inch variants, but they where already "dated" by then. and the 3.5 inch variants where pretty expensive and had reliability-issues ...
additionally: lots of people mistook the 3,5 inch variants for floppy-disk-drives and ruined early models by inserting floppies into them =?> the later got some mechanical protection against that!
* (old) harddisks
my "medium of choice" where old hdds, which i plugged into the machines between which i wanted to transfer data ...
by far the "best" option, but also the most "technical" one ;)
but google/gmail is pretty open about why they deny your emails - idk ... mail authentication =?> dkim/spf/... or similar technical details etc.
interestingly i have more "problems" with the other "big" (free)mail providers like yahoo or gmx, which are often not so "open" about why they reject your mail ... even google is pretty happy with my setup :))
yes ... especially if you want to execute quantum-circuits which use a lot of qubits.
why!? one approach of the simulation of quantum-computers rely on the so called "state vector" of the machine, and its memory-usage grows exponentially.
i've used the ibm quantum platform together with python/qiskit during my last project - which was something like: simulate quantum-networks on "real" quantum-computers...
ibm's support, introductions / documentation anbd usability of the platform is really great.
idk ... not comparable / much better than most of the quantum-computing hardware startups i know / looked at. of course, its easy if you have "deep pockets" like ibm does ... ;))
ok, back to the quantum platform:
it had a free-tier on the "old" quantum-platform - until july 2025: 10 minutes of compute on a set of machines - back then up to 127 qubits - per month ... no identification necessary / just an email-address.
sadly this "very generous" free-tier was killed of during the transition to the all new "quantum cloud platform" during spring/summer 2025 ...
i'm a veteran technology professional (25+ years) with experience in a variety of software-development, system-architecture, systems-administration, service-reliability-engineering and devops-/cloud-engineering (container / kubernetes) roles.
yes please, remove the crazy US of A from NATO already.
maybe then we are able to concentrate on 2 essential things here in europe:
* defend our countries
and they are not defended in west-asia or anywhere else on the planet where the USA decides to "causally" bomb yet another country with no meaningful aim or even grasp of the reality of the "problem" at hand.
* build weapons for the use of defense
not "weapons" which are only there to enrich their producers like in the USA.
remember: NATO was meant to defend against the soviet-union.
it dissolved in 1991, case closed.
since then NATO is more or a less just a "tupper-ware" party like sales-channel for overpriced crap from the USAs MIC.
just my 0.02€
ps. and always remember frank zappa, who said in 1981 (!) something like:
us-american politics is the entertainment-division of the MIC.
about 20 or 25 years ago i used whatever old hardware i could find in someones cellar or a junkyard together with 2 NICs and a floppy-disk drive / FDD based linux-distribution ...
it outgrew its original media - FDD - and is still active, as a router-focused distribution:
idk the exact procedure which will apply to enter the birth-date on such a system, but if other comments are correct: just enter what you want!
there will be no real possibility to tie this to anything "legal" / to "enforce" any "official" check of lets say your passport or other governmental id.
and if in my personal opinion (!) the pretty crazy guy behind the systemd-project tries to introduce/enforce such a thing ...
then i think it'll be time to either fork the project or look at systemd-free linux distributions like devuan ~ a systemd-free fork of debian :)
i'm a veteran technology professional (25+ years) with experience in a variety of software-development, system-architecture, systems-administration, service-reliability-engineering and devops-/cloud-engineering (container / kubernetes) roles.
i'm a highly motivated self-learner, an excellent problem solver and i can help you to resolve your technical obstacles.
yes ... i thought this is included in the expression "as a service" :)
it doesn't matter how you slice & dice it, the "service" is to have someone - be it business or be it a person - who is responsible for running this service ... you get an SLA and according to the conditions you are able to work with the entity which provides the service ...