Posts by DJV 2649 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Aug 2009
My first hard drive for an Amiga 2000 (a Quantum 80MB, if memory serves) started failing to turn on after about 2+ years. The solution was to open up the case pull the hard disk and attached card from the slot, give it a good shake and shove it back in. That usually fixed it. It was a regular occurrence for another couple of years when I could afford to replace it with a HUGE(!) 540MB one.
Back in the last century I was in hospital after having a nasty burst appendix sliced out. A couple of days after the op, a young student nurse wearing a nametag that said Nurse Butcher turned up to my bedside having been assigned to disconnect the drip from the cannula in my arm. The cannula had to be left in place in case the drip needed to be re-attached.
I think she should have placed a finger somewhere on my arm to stop the blood flowing into the cannula as she capped it off. Instead, several quite impressive spurts of blood erupted from the cannula hitting her, the bed and my mother's coat* on the chair beside the bed. Nurse Butcher became a bit panicky as she wrestled the cap over the gushing and I don't think she appreciated it when, afterward all the fun was over, I laughingly mentioned that she had a good name for her job. Still, I probably wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for such dedicated angels.
*Mother's coat (mother was visiting) was a shade of dark purple so didn't show the bloodstains - the same couldn't be said for the bed or Nurse Butcher!
I think this thread has now hit the unwritten El Reg rule that "if it goes on long enough it is imperative that someone must include at least one Monty Python/Douglas Adams/Terry Pratchett/Airplane* reference."
(* Delete as applicable - actually no, don't delete - just include all of them)
As shown on this map, there are several other places that do it "our" way as well:
https://www.aceable.com/blog/countries-that-drive-on-the-left-side-of-the-road/
Well, I do keep an old plastic Personal Banker card from when I had an account with a branch of Barclays. I kept mainly because I refer to it as my "Bastardcard" as the Personal Banker's name was Rosemary Bastard (with no apostophes). While Barclays is still with us, the branch in question has long gone.
The first computer I worked on that was graced with a hard drive was a Burroughs B21. It had 256K RAM and a massive 5MB drive which contained the OS (BTOS), the Pascal compiler (the C compiler was still a year or two away) and all the programs and data that I was developing. One summer, which wasn't quite as hot as this one has been, it spent several weeks with the case off as the heat was making the hard drive power down!
Didn't they make a documentary about all this a few years back? Oh yes, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBvIweCIgwk
Here in Norfolk (UK) we have tourist-confusing names like Wymondham (pronounced Win-dum), Happisburgh (Haze-brer) and Costessey (Cossey or if you're broad Norfolk, then Caaar-sea). A friend of mine was once asked by a tourist if he could direct them to "Ack-lee" - took him a few seconds to realise they meant Acle (pronounced A-cull).
Way too long - be a bungee boss and get it down to a few seconds!
"the Internet became a way to get rich by selling useless crap (including politicians) to the innocent"
You'd have to be pretty innocent to buy a polician off the Internet! Now, a "politician removal spray" - that would be worth buying if it could be proven to work!
Back in the 1980s I was working in a company that was using Unisys kit (actually rebadged Convergent Technology systems) running CTOS. These could be "clustered" together into small networks. Downstairs, the boss and admin staff used a system that consisted of a network consisting of a master computer, with the hard disks attached, and two or three networked slave machines. Upstairs, each developer had a single computer but one developer (let's call him Derek, mainly because that was his name) had quite a powerful system.
When the downstairs master computer had a problem the boss decided that Derek's computer would have to act as the master computer for a while. Derek did warn them that, in the process of developing software, it was possible that we would often crash the computers, but the boss wasn't deterred. Derek had also discovered (via the CTOS API manuals) that there was a system call the forced a deliberate crash. He wrote a small program to call that API and every so often, when he was bored or whatever, would whisper to the rest of the developers (who were safely isolated on their own systems) something like, "Listen for the shouts downstairs." Then he'd run the program to crash the network resulting in cries of anguish below. He's then shout out something like, "Sorry, but I did warn you that we often cause crashes."
It didn't take too long before a new spare computer was made available and Derek's system became disconnected from downstairs again.
Indeed, but there are probably still people out there who don't have friends who are either in IT or who have been previous TalkTalk victims customers. So these people end up being conned by the rose-tinted adverts until they learn the truth about how "good" TalkTalk's service is. Safe bet that most of them won't be back after their contract runs out...
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