Posts by jake

We don't need maintenance this often, surely? Pull it. Oh dear, the system's down

Re: The people who wrote it said that it would take them weeks to fix, at a cost of ~£5k

Glutton for punishment?

Re: Also works for hardware

Mine's a Memorex unit, similar to a tape library (or silo). Half a dozen CD-ROM drives (since swapped out for DVD drives) in a large box with shelves for a few hundred CDs/DVDs and a couple robot arms to swap CDs in and out of the drives. All connected to a Sun 3/260 via SCSI, which in turn allows the rest of the network to access the CDs. It is a fairly handy thing, moreso back in the day, if somewhat of a bear to set up initially. Serves music, data and movies as required.

Picked it up at Wierdstuff Warehouse for a few hundred bucks back around the turn of the century.

Re: Also works for hardware

Quite common for certified testers to circumvent said enforced service periods, too. Usually at the insistence of upper management. Which brings us back full circle ...

On the gripping hand, one could argue that that shouldn't have been (wasn't?) in your job description. Your company paid the outside vendor for that kind of thing, and I seriously doubt your employer was compensated for the work you did for said vendor. I'm pretty certain you weren't compensated outside your regular salary/comptime.

Yes, I know, we've all been there ... Doesn't make it right.

When I see an obvious one like that ...

... I tell 'em that the first fix is free, but my standard consulting rates apply after that. I still have clients from 40 years ago that I acquired like this.

Yes, the source was often still available for that kind of thing in the 1980s. The only problem was that companies using code like this rarely had anyone on the staff who could read it.

Before you buy that managed Netgear switch, be aware you may need to create a cloud account to use its full UI

Goodbye, Netgear.

EOF

Russia tested satellite-to-satellite shooter, say UK and USA

Re: Weapons in Space

I have no intention of being mean. We didn't move up here because we hate the wildlife. And frankly, I doubt freezing would make all that much difference. Most fluids aren't compressible, so freezing in this case probably wouldn't make them hit much harder.

Besides, my deep-freeze isn't set that low ... These things aren't water-based toys, they are oil and alcohol based professional tools and are fully functional down to -40F (-40C). I suspect that they freeze at a much lower temperature than that. The colo(u)r is usually visible on the fur for six months or more... it weathers off of trees in 4 or 5 years.

Part of the point is to mark the critters to see who isn't getting the message. We rotate colo(u)rs monthly. Animals that don't cooperate are relocated. Or eaten. (Rattlers caught in the barns and other public areas get a drop of nail polish behind the head and are released over half a mile away, hopefully to feast on ground squirrels ... they get one dot per molt, the second time they become tacos.)

Behold the Bloo Screen of Death: Bathroom borkage stops spray play

I would have thought that most ...

... of ElReg's UK-based commentards would know where the British Lawnmower Museum and Lock and Key World is located. Truly a monument to the greatness of Great Britain!

He was a skater boy. We said, 'see you later, boy' – and the VAX machine mysteriously began to work as intended

Re: Wheeled office chairs

At least they are racing.

The rain tire issue has been contemplated, but they decided not to go that route because they want fans in the stands. Unlike the F1 primadonnas, the NASCAR drivers are quite happy to meet the fans, sign autographs, etc. They know which side of their bread the butter is on.

(Note that I'm not a fan of NASCAR. Far too crass & commercial. I'm more of an old time racing fan ... where we happily drive on road courses, in the rain. Here's the schedule for my local track ... not a lot of oval track racing there. Not even when the NASCAR circus is in town.)

Re: Bandwidth

Then it's a damn good thing that there is no chance of anybody even suggesting using tape to transfer large quantities of data to/from the ISS, isn't it?

Multiple tapes were sent overseas quite regularly back in the day. I sent a few myself (especially BSD releases). It worked nicely.

I've used many tapes to make a rather large disk image before, and then recombined them to clone the system on another machine across the bay. It's not all that bad. Easier if you have a couple tape drives for your script to alternate between.

Re: The need for speed

HEATHEN!

Mechanical secondaries are the only way.

Re: Mountaineering

Footprints on top of the chassis are usually made in the stockroom before the gear is installed in them. We used to bust QA for failing to notice the marks on the top of taller cabinets before shipping them. It only became a problem when they had windows one floor up so visiting big-wigs could be impressed by looking down on the DC.

Re: can't imagine all that

You obviously never worked in the early SillyConValley & environs.

Re: Changes

"Putting it in an orderly line?"

Sure ... it was a call for multiple comparisons.

Re: The need for speed

Well, queuing is a British thing, don'tchaknow.

Re: Nylon knickers: a whole new problem for "Britain's first supercomputer"

Once when testing for this kind of thing, I discovered that the average female office worker can generate upwards of 85KV walking down the hall to get a cuppa, but myself walking along the same path came up static free. Seems my unmentionables were made of cotton, hers were made of silk and petrochemicals. Her heels were leather, my soles were high-carbon rubber.

It might not be very politically correct to discuss such things these days, but then I don't get paid to be PC, I get paid to fix problems.

Re: Static

Kobe, shirley?

Re: Contact-tracer spoofing is already happening – and it's dangerously simple to do

Sorry about the spleling, I know better ... I had my "in the wee hours" filter installed on the fingers, normally I manage to catch that kind of thing before posting. Mea culpa. Beers all around.

Re: Wheeled office chairs

Ever notice the F1 nerds never talk about racing? That's because follow-the-leader is a child's game, not racing ...

Re: Never heard of anyone ever doing that

Might have been hazing, but it was a common recommendation in Silly Con Valley through the late '70s or thereabouts.

Re: Wheeled office chairs

A properly trained guide dog wouldn't be dragging chairs around, regardless of who was sitting in them. And they certainly wouldn't be removing the limbs of passers by.

Re: The need for speed

Nah. He was a suit. We went surfing to get shut of him and his ilk.

Re: Never heard of anyone ever doing that

Who's ashamed? I was young and impressionable, had just got to Berkeley, all my friends were doing it ... All I remember about it was that I was terribly excited, and awfully pleased with myself when it all worked the way it was supposed to. I only did it that way the once, I discovered other options that came more easily to me, and were more fulfilling.

Re: Static

"Now a PDP 11 fully populated 32K board would have put you back $2K in 1978."

Heath H-11, LSI-11, Q-bus. In kit form. Came with the parts to make it 32K, was upgradable to 64K. Bought from a guy I met at the Homebrew Computer Club for just under list price ... it was still in the original, unopened box. He was selling off all his home computer kit, priorities changed with a new baby in the house.

I swapped that board and a well used, refurbed by me, PC11 for a 64K board a couple months later.

Re: Wheeled office chairs

Yes I know about the "official" name change ... but my Brit friends still call my critters Alsations when they are visiting.

As for the "separate breed", Shirley you're not talking about the designer dog sometimes called the Shepalute? These things exist for one reason, and one reason only: Separating fools from their money.

Re: Upgraded Sneakernet

Surprisingly, Rollernet has less bandwidth than Sneakernet!

Both have the same packet size (give or take), and Rollernet is significantly faster ... but it turns out that there is a routing issue ... Sneakernet almost always uses the least-cost route available, but Rollernet almost always takes the most scenic route.

Re: Wheeled office chairs

"a German Shepard as a guide dog"

For you Brits, that's an Alsation.

This cross-pond translation brought to you free of charge.

Re: Static

Does anyone but me remember populating memory cards with RAM while standing naked in a bath-tub full of cool water? Sounds like over-kill to avoid static, but try to remember that my first 32K of RAM set me back around US$2,000 in 1978 (I *think* that was the price ... might have a trifle more), and the early chips were dreadfully sensitive to static. Yes, 32 kilobytes.

I remember a very similar story ...

... making the rounds at SLAC in the very early 1980s. I never did track down the truth behind it, but it is true that quite a few folks were quite into the then new RollerBlade fad, and were known to use them to get around the SLAC campus, both inside and out.

Re: The need for speed

When I was at Stanford, early one Saturday morning a Grad student drove to Berkeley on his motorcycle & came back with tapes of the over-night build of 3BSD. Our Professor, visiting from DARPA for a couple weeks/months (a dude by the name of Cerf, you may have heard of him), wondered how the hell our VAX had the latest version of BSD already running (10AM-ish), when the Switched56 connected source code system hadn't completed the download of the source, much less started to compile it.

Biker's answer: "My motorcycle's latency might be sub-par, but it still has a much higher bandwidth capability than your network!". Cerf's reply? "Nice hack!" ... A variation of this quote ("station wagon full of mag tape") is often attributed to Tanenbaum in 1996, but it was a fairly common meme around 1980.

Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of 'Advanced Night Repair' skin cream helping NASA to commercialise space

Re: Smoother and less lined?

One wonders if they have talked to Aeroseal about Aerobarrier ... Worked wonders on a friend's leaky Victorian farmhouse. During the morning installation, they put a piece of screen over a 4" dryer vent hole. The screen was completely plugged by their product. Cleanup was minimal, and we continued working in the house that afternoon. Recommended.

Re: Time to hit the retros

Concur.

My 105 year young Great Aunt takes great care to explain to all the young ladies in the family that they have been advertising crap like that for longer than she has been alive, and yet somehow her friends who use and swear by the stuff have always been ugly as sin ...

Amazon Lex can now speak British English... or simply 'English' if you're British

Re: American English is English

No, Hollywood's in La-La-Land.

Re: "Oxford University Press, favours -ize over -ise"

Mine had that problem until I fitted modern seals ... The stock ones leak something awful.

Re: American English is English

Where did the person in California hear it?

Growing up here in the Bay Area, I first heard it in the movies. The first time I heard it "in the wild" was either in Red Lick, Texas or across the river in Ogden, Arkansas.

Re: It's not so much spellings...

Read what the OP posted. For some reason, he thought that being able to insult someone who didn't actually understand the insult was an "advantage".

Advantage for what, exactly? Shirley the point of an insult is to be understood, otherwise why bother? Unless you are trying to be a prat, of course.

Re: "Oxford University Press, favours -ize over -ise"

Anybody who tries to force English to use Latin rules has never really studied English.

Re: American English is English

Nowt wrong wi' that ... Good fishin'!

Re: American English is English

""God willing and the creek don't rise," from the West."

For values of "West" that includes Texas. Which ain't "the west", no matter how hard you squint at it. Shit, it's even on the wrong side of The Rockies!

"especially NYers who are not shy of "correcting" your pronunciation."

Which sets my teeth on edge, and makes me want to go all Joisey on their ass ... For you Brits, that's kind of like a Glaswegian trying to tell someone from Basingstoke how to speak.

Re: American English is English

As in Liverpudlian "broadly sounds" like Mancunian.

Note that Liverpool and Manchester are quite a bit closer together than (say) the Louisiana Bayou and The Bronx. The US is a rather large place, with immigrants from all over the planet.

Re: Alexa can speak double Dutch for all I care

Well, yes. But that's not what the clickbait was about, now was it?

Re: No hope

Several years ago, as the Wife & I were wandering around the Plaza here in Sonoma with a couple of our Whippets, we ran across a family visiting from Yorkshire. Their kids actually went to the same highschool I got me Os and As from ... Small world. I had lived there some 40 years earlier, and yet I had no problems understanding them (and vice-versa). T'dawgs were right chuffed. The Wife, on the other hand ...

Not content with distorting actual reality, Facebook now wants to build a digital layer for the world

Re: No Such Assurances

Well, seeing as the processing will be done on the servers back at Facebook, and undoubtedly they will make a backup of the raw data before blurring them out (just in case the software blurs too much, of course) .... well, you tell me. How long does Facebook keep their backups?

Re: Just Say NO

And yet, Facebook does have your posts from 5 years ago. And everything else you have ever posted, regardless of what you think you have deleted. It's what they do.

Re: Facebook Is In Our Prayers

Do they have wall mounted ceramic fixtures, or just holes in the ground like Italy and Spain?

Re: Great news

Oh, Hollerithevo .... say it ain't so!

Shirley you, of all people, aren't suggesting that the only females worth executive status are of a particular persuasion! That would make you one of those evil —ists, and I'd hate to think that of you.

Relics of the past to be found in Oxford: A medieval friary, a Saxon wall, and... Windows 7

Re: Westgate

Concur. Having spent entirely too much time in Oxford, I can honestly say that I never, not once, said to myself "What this town needs is a major shopping center!".

Out o'curiosity, has the Covered Market been destroyed in the hunt for the dollars of Millennials and tourists?

Re: Other options

The difference is that Linux wasn't claiming to have a problem. The applications (and hardware) were. In the Windows case, it was Windows itself that was claiming to have the problem.

Up from the depths, 864 servers inside, covered in slime, it's Natick!

Re: Warm Oceans

hoola, there are over 321,000,000 cubic miles of water in the Earth's oceans (according to NOAA). By some estimates, "The Internet" (whatever that is) consumes about 200 Gigawatts of electricity per year. That's all the phones, tablets, desktops and servers world-wide, along with the networking and routing and switching that allows you to view all the pr0n CuteCatPics[tm] your little heart desires.

Do you have the math skills to estimate how long it would take to raise ocean water temperature by even 0.001% of a degree (C or F, I'm not going to quibble), if all that power was dissipated into the oceans, with no losses whatsoever?