Posts by Colin Sutton 4 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Feb 2009
They geolocate your address by driving past and seeing your house number that you broadcast in the visible frequency; they geolocate your Mac address and your SSID that you broadcast at a radio frequency. If you broadcast your data unencrypted it's the same as a poster in your window: if you don't want people to look you shouldn't post visibly.
I was fascinated to read that the Argus 500 with my hot backup software was still running the Advanced Gas-Cooled Nuclear Power Station after the 2MB Burroughs Disks were replaced. I debugged the OS on those machines.
One of those Burroughs disks had an intermittent problem when it was delivered, would drop a couple of bits once every few hours. A keen hardware engineer sat looking at a scope connected to the data lines waiting for the problem to occur. He spotted that there was a glitch when the vacuum pump operated - the disc was in a sealed enclosure, with a small window through which we could check how bad the scratches were after a head crash. He replaced a filter across the pump drive circuit, and the drive never lost a bit again.
My help-desk story: I was called up one night at 3am by a power station operator telling me that the printer wasn't working. It turned out it had run out of paper. I led him through connecting up a new box of fan-fold paper and went back to bed. An hour later I'd just got back to sleep when he rang me again: "the printer is working ok now" .
colins_at_swiftdsl.com.au
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