Posts by P.Alan Smith

What if computers went back to the '70s too?

Power cuts

I was at the Cambridge University Computer Lab at the time and we did get power cuts, but usually we got a warning phone call some minutes before so the IBM 370 could be stopped and the hard disks spun down. Not nice if it was halfway through your run ...

Ballerinas and fish-gutters beat techies in UK immigration race

UK and Scotland?

I was golfing in Ayrshire only 10 days ago and assumed that I was in the UK as they accepted my Bank of England notes ... perhaps there's another Scotland for me to find!

Beeb's iPlayer reaps streaming traffic dividends

BBC to clever for me!

I may be sitting in the middle of East Anglia, but the portal for the company's net is in Germany and the BBC don't like that. I have to watch at home where I've already got a TV ...

Google nabs patent for Sun's Project Blackbox?

Digital used to offer this as a service

Some ten years ago, we had to rebuild the air conditioning in the main machine room (it couldn't cope with the hot summer in 95-96). For a suitable fee, Digital sent a large truck with a container-sized body, filled with VAXes and disk racks, which truck sat in our car park for a month while the work was done. The only downtime was at weekends to do the disk replication. Surely this counts as prior art.