* Posts by robn

9 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Mar 2011

Police arrest suspect in murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO, with grainy pics the only tech involved

robn

Jury nullification.

China plans to toss foreign-made PCs from government agencies 'in two years'

robn

Yes, Russian invasion of Ukraine refutes that theory. Unless you consider it a "Special military operation" and not a war. Or the closing of all MacDonald's in Russia means this doesn't count.

Richard Branson uses two planes to make 170km round trip

robn

Not quite as high as a SR-71

A SR-71 reached 85Km, you would expect a rocket plane to get to a higher altitude than an air-breathing aircraft.

Florida Man sues Facebook, Twitter, YouTube for account ban

robn

Re: It's the plot of 'The Producers'.

But, but... He's a self-proclaimed beeellionaire! He could fund the lawsuit with his pocket change. There's no need for anyone to contribute.

Excuse me, what just happened? Resilience is tough when your failure is due to a 'sequence of events that was almost impossible to foresee'

robn

Re: The

At a bank I worked at (last century!), the disaster recovery exercise chose a random bunch of employees associated with the systems to participate in the recovery exercise. Those not chosen were considered victims of the disaster, and could not provide any input to the exercise.

'Chinese wall'? Who uses 'Chinese wall'? Well, IBM did, and it actually means 'firewall'

robn
Pirate

We could switch from black/white to the "Chinese" version, where the good/bad colours are red (i.e. blood, life) and white (i.e. bleached bones, death)

Lenovo's latest gaming monster: Eight cores, 3.2GHz, giant heat sink, two fans. Oh, and it has a phone bolted on

robn

ATA?

As in the precursor to SATA, using those huge ribbon cables?

A paper clip, a spool of phone wire and a recalcitrant RS-232 line: Going MacGyver in the wonderful world of hotel IT

robn
Headmaster

Re: Proper lash up

I once wrote 25-27 lines of comments to document the usage of a single assembler instruction. And actually, it only pertained to one register operand for that instruction.

IBM tunes up Java for z196 mainframes

robn
Alert

re: 31 bit?

For backward compatibility with existing 24 bit applications!

The end of a list of parameter pointers is marked by setting the high-order bit in the last address. If they went to 32-bits, all 24 bit application would break since you could not determine whether an address with the high-order bit marked the end of the parameter list or was a value larger than 2GB.

Going with 31-bits only meant executables built in the 60's and 70's can (potentially) still run under current versions of the hardware and the OS.