Posts by Stoneshop 5956 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2009
Nope, goes back to 1998[1] at least, because I ran afoul of it when I had just gotten my sidecar rig. And McD franchises are insuficiently independent that they can set such a rule individually, if they can think one up in the first place.
[1] so that's been 15 years without McD "food". Can't say I miss it.
As a motorcyclist & cyclist I can assure you that it's not safe to ride while holding onto anything but the handlebars
Cycling: I can hold a bag and have both hands on the handlebar by simply gripping the bag and the bar together. It's perfectly doable for just about anyone over the distance you have to cover to get out of the drive-through. Once out of it you may want to put it in a messenger bag, backpack or pannier, eat the contents or fling them against the service window as an act of protest, but at no point is it even remotely unsafe.
Motorcycling: put the bag between your legs, pull out of the drive-through, and proceed as above. In my case I could simply open the topcase and ask the service window person to put the bag in there. Which I have done at a not-McD drive-through.
p.s. saw a cyclist soar through a red light at a junction of probably the 3rd and 4th busiest roads in my town - both hands busy eating a bag of crisps. Things like this give me homicidal urges
Why? If he manages to evade Darwin, I see no reason to override that. If he doesn't, well, problem solved anyway.
It's not safe to hand over a collection of burgers in bags and drinks to a cyclist or motorcyclist
And it's not safe either to hand a cup of hot coffee to a driver who might dump it in his/her lap while driving off.
I've been refused service in a McD's drive-through while riding a SIDECAR motorcycle, so no risk of tipping over, ample place to put the bag anywhere SAFE instead of in my lap, and all this is perfectly obvious to anyone but the most moronic of burger-flippers.
If you need to have another go with this config, put an arm on the main box sticking out backwards, at least one linguini past the CHAV's tail. Then attach the chute pullout line to the end of that arm, so that it is more or less taut. This will keep the chute from tangling.
400Hz AC -- allowing the power supply components to be smaller was the reason I was given
Indeed. A transformer's power rating is the core area times the working frequency times some factor, so if your frequency goes up, the transformer's size can go down while keeping the same power specification. Also, smoothing capacitors need only buffer 1/800 sec instead of 1/100 (or 1/120) sec., so you can use smaller caps (in value, which translates to physically smaller again).
I have a considerable stash of Trackman Marble FXes, two or three in use at home, one at work, and a couple of spares. As a bonus the one at work keeps colleagues from grabbing my input devices when they want to show something, using my computer (I hate that).
The other pointing device I use is the venerable IBM (now Lenovo) clitmouse. Conventional mice, whatever number of buttons they may have, don't really work for me.
We don't allow cleaners in any of our server rooms
Fair enough, but this was not a server room. This was somewhat of an annex to the administration and planning office, with maybe 10 people working there and using that system, the only one around. Mind, this was 1986, give or take a year..
The 11/725 was somewhat of a predecessor of the MicroVAX line, systems meant to be put in an office, next to one's desk. Internally it was as good as identical to the 11/730, but where the 730 was a rackmount system with a cabinet that could take a diskdrive and a particular tapeunit, the 725 had a BA123-like cabinet, with a Rsomething25 disk unit (fixed disk and cartridge combined, somewhere around 25MB each). I can't recall what that cabinet was called.
The real BA123 however was better suited to office environments, with no single air intake that could get blocked by bin bags and such.
. Just when you thought it couldn't go any further, there it was again in a new place doing its thing
Down in boreholes in Arizona, together with a Device Under Test: a nuclear bomb. Connected to another one topside, equipped with core memory. Even if that one was not expected to survive being tossed about, they could still try and read out the data in memory in another system.
Being asked whether they wanted service contracts on those PDPs (11/23 or 11/03 IIRC), the answer was "Nah, they're just consumables".
Quite right. I worked at a place a few years ago - their HR and payroll ran on a 32 bit x86 based VMS machine. It weighed about 60 pounds and it's uptime was more than 6 years.
So, the porting _has_ been done, but no-one's been told about it until now.
There's a story I want to share with you.
I was sent out to fix a VAX11/725, that would quite frequently halt (as in, couple of times per week) for no apparent reason. No crashes, and they would find the poor thing in the morning, powered off I went, checked, found no probable faulty component, replaced a sensor board, but the problem persisted. I replaced a power harness. No dice. We hooked up a logic probe and it, after yet another of those halts, pointed to the airflow sensor. Which was clean, but still, it _had_ triggered the power controller. The intake filters were OK, not squeaky-clean, but I have seen much worse, and those systems didn't trip.
We got a swap unit in (an 11/730) and I took the 725 away to the PRC. Took it apart, cleaned it, replaced every bit of harness that even just looked scuffed, replaced the temp and airflow sensors, and I think I replaced the sensor board yet again, for good measure. Then ran it, without a single hiccup, for two weeks.
So back to the customer it went, the very cleanest 11/725 in all of Europe, and lo, it was halted again the next bloody day. Something that the 11/730 had not suffered from, even though being in the same place, connected to the same power and everything.
Now the time of the halts as seen from the last opcom message would seem to implicate the cleaners, but the system was in a recessed space with its power cord plugged in somewhere behind it, and there was a free wallsocket in plain view for the cleaners to use. They would have to reach over and behind the system to unplug its cord, and plug it back in afterwards; one could think that the 730, being higher, made that more difficult. If that was the modus operandi in the first place, which was rather unlikely. Still, the correlation was unmistakeable.
Dirty power and other such causes had been ruled out in the meantime, so finally a colleague went and sat there, thermosflask of coffee with him, waiting for the cleaners to enter and reveal their nefarious ways. and sure enough, the cleaners came, one plugged the vacuum into the visible wallsocket and started vacuuming, the other emptied the wastebaskets, then took the waste bag from the paper shredder, tied it up and put it aside.
Right in front of the poor 11/725's air intake. Fwump. Clack.
Two years back we were offered a PDP11 that was kindof stuck in a cellar. It had to be moved out, as the house was being sold (and as the owner was unable to take it with him, it was either to whoever wanted it, or scrap). It turned out to be an 11/44 in a half-height cabinet, with a second cabinet with a 67MB Control Data disk drive with 5 disk packs to go with it, and a Kennedy tape drive.
We had to severely disassemble the lot, until the parts were of a size and weight that you could manhandle up the spiral cellar stairs (they must have been straight when the system was put there; several of the nuts and bolts we _had_ to loosen had never been loosened before). Fortunately one of the guys who came to rescue the system had been a DEC FS tech, and knew which bolts, brackets and other fastening-type hardware had to be undone to get the lumps of iron to separate into chunks that had a chance of getting up those stairs.
It's now reassembled and waiting refurbishing of the diskdrive. The tape drive at least needs its vacuum system adjusted, but that's not as essential. The system itself is about ready to go.
The PDP-11's (and PDP-8's) did not (at least in the late 70's) run VMS, they ran a group of OS's named RTS/E, RSX and Ultrix. Ultrix was a clone of Unix, which was born on At&t 3B systems, which were clones of PDP's.
Total and utter bollocks. With a hulahoop and bells on.
None of the PDP families ever ran VMS. And neither did they ever run Ultrix, because those are 32-bit OSes and none of the PDP families had that amount of data bits.
AT&T 3b's were late to the party, appearing in the late '70's when the groundwork for Unix goes back to 1969. They also were 32-bit systems, implying that they can't have been a clone of any of the PDPs.
Now shut the fuck up, or I'll find a Massbus cable and thread it through your intestine so that it sticks out either end.
Most of the board would be empty apart from traces, and all the work would be done by a small FPGA
DEC already had single-chip PDP CPU's; you could put a large part of what was then still needed as external support circuitry on the die with it today without much effort.
when the 32-bit clock counter rolls over and we find ourselves back in the 1970's.
Depends. Real-time systems don't necessarily need to be aware of the current wall-clock time. "There's an item coming down the assembly line, it needs to be sprayed/welded/have a barcode stuck on/whatever", is not a task that requires the robot to know whether it's 19-jun-2013, 1-jan-1970 or 19-jan-2038.
In the run-up to Y2K, I was told several routers had to be replaced because their firmware was not Y2K-compliant and they couldn't be upgraded to handle the then-current firmware version that was. After a brief check I reported that the longest-running router had still 42 months to go before *it* would hit that particular date which was roughly half a year away on our calender, and that one which had just been rebooted happily lived in late 1993 with no ill effects. From which I deduced that if any of them would ever reach their Y2K-rollover, the worst that would happen was that they wouldn't be routing for a few minutes until they had finished rebooting, just as with any other interruption, the chance of which occurring would be way greater.
No routers were replaced that year.
The only RPN calculators still available from HP are a handfull of financial models that they've been making for 30 years with maybe a tweak here or there. No HP41-like powerhouses, not even a general purpose programmable model.
And RPN IS awesome. HP however, has long ago forsaken that moniker.
$ cnt = 99
$ msg = f$fao("!UB month!1%C!%Es!%F of VMS support", cnt)
$ loop:
$ write sys$output f$fao("!AS on the wall!/!-!AS", msg)
$ write sys$output "Take one down and pass it around"
$ cnt = cnt - 1
$ if cnt .gt. 0
$ then
$ msg = f$fao("!UB month!1%C!%Es!%F of VMS support", cnt)
$ write sys$output f$fao("!AS on the wall!/", msg)
$ wait 00:00:02
$ goto loop
$ else
$ write sys$output "No more months of VMS support on the wall"
$ endif
Yeah, there was a wealth of info there, and not just technical. Most of the notesfiles had no official status, but at least they were a searchable source, and could point you to the right FCOs, SPDs etc. It's never even been ported to Alpha, AFAIK, which baffles me.
I think the closest comparison, functionality-wise, would be Usenet, but with one central server instead of being distributed, and with infinite retention.
All you'd need to do was after the first purge change the version limit property of the directory to 1.
That would need a rather crafty setup, as any directory from your home directory down would be owned by you, so you'd be able to change the file limit back, and he'd need to have a batchjob running that sets the file limit on any directory you've created that day, plus purge the files in it anyway. Having directories not owned by you but writable by you (so you can't change the file limit) requires more acl-fu than I'd care to think up after working hours.
So do you we need an 'industrial archaeology' of computing?
It's good to know what wheels have been invented already, what their flaws and strengths are, and in what contexts they work best.
That way you might not end up with the Microsoft Triangular Wheel: Now With 33% Less Bumps Per Rotation than the Microsoft Square Wheel*)
*) Sale of the Microsoft Square Wheel Gold WIth Rounded Corners withdrawn pending a patents dispute with Apple.
In the cluster internals the node number is a single byte, which can't be 0 or 255 (and 254, I think), so theoretically you could go up to 253, but that includes cluster storage controllers.
You'll need a serious amount of kit, and need to spend some time on storage and interconnect layout, but after that it'll Just Work.
Whether a sane setup needs a cluster that big is another matter entirely, but the IT definition of 'sane' is anything but, anyway.
The iCharger an iPhone owner has at home is most likely the original iCharger, or else one of the bazillion clones all looking almost exactly like an original iCharger You, wanting to perform nefarious activities, just have to buy one of those, and for good measure just a few of the other models of the aftermarket iPhone chargers, modify them, and replace the found iCharger with that one of yours looking just like it.
Just one burglary needed
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