Posts by Bob Royal

Company that made power systems for servers didn’t know why its own machines ran out of juice

Re: Being a techie site....

Easy: Stupid Network Monitoring Protocol or similar I seem to recall. OCIMHMR!

UK digital ID plan gets a price tag at last – £1.8B

Names are fluid

I managed to avoid a photocard driving licence until I officially became an old git at age 70. The tattyist bit of paper sufficed until then because no-one ever consulted it. My lovely wife still has a (pristine) paper version which has never seen light of day for 30+ years. However; try not to become old, because you can't even get a bus pass when you don't have a passport or driving licence any more. Funny how you cease to exist when your passport expires (or sooner in EU). Under common law, you used to be able to use any name or many. Not any more, thanks to computers. If your name happens to be something like ภูมิพลอดุลยเดช you can't have a British passport with that on it. Come to think of it, most all the boat people have probably got names written in arabic, so they'll just make up a name in english (or several at random), how is that definitive?

Techie solved supposed software problem by waving his arms in the air

In Thailand you learn the alphabet phonetically. It starts: Gor Gai, Kor Kai, Kor Kuat, Kor Kwai, Kor Kon, Kor Rakang etc. You see the point, no need to import from NATO/OTAN.

Wayback gives X11 desktops a fighting chance in a Wayland world

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

A "toaster" that doesn't do CRUMPETS!!!!!

Sysadmin cured a medical mystery by shifting a single cable

Not data but phone network

Back in the day, when telecoms ran on 2Mb BT branded lines (can't remember the name, arrgh.) Descended to the basement of an office in London of a well known British bank. Had to duck under the cable, stretched across the middle of the room from the multiplexer to a wall socket! This muxed the carefully configured redundant 2Mb links to a single 8Mb line. Did the work on the PABX and left 'em to it.

After three weeks of night shifts, very tired techie broke the UK’s phone network

Good? Old Sysyem X?

The only time I ever had a scheduled overnight shift was to interface test with (YES) System X. I swore never to do it again, tired or what! Turned out, System X had a somewhat different reading of OSI 7 layer protocols than our "designers". Main and standby processors on a single shelf are good. Ever pressed the reload button on the wrong CPU? What fun! Especially when the reload comes on a cartridge tape and takes about 10 minutes to load. How about redesigning a cabinet with 2 CPUs on a shelf and 2 shelves of telephone gubbins with split power supplies (not duplicated) to a 4 shelf model? Easy, just connect the 3 shelf interfaces A to power breaker B & v.v. Good job it was only the 1st production model for review in the lab. Still - made a living and a nice pension sorting out other peoples ***k-ups, (especially salesman's fantasies.) Happy daze.