Posts by Empty1 63 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2014
"The boat was anchored in the right direction for the chimney stack to not be in the way etc... All these things checked out."
Being an ex sparks,some words or phrases grate a bit
right direction = correct heading, (Right could mean "right hand" or Starboard)
Chimney stack = funnel
Mid 70's and desk sized accounting machine. Likewise weekly powering off and on (core memory so just carried on from where it left off). Tracked down to the use of a Mother Of All Lathes. The chuck was horizontal in the floor and about 20ft across. A 1970's motorised variac on the computer supply sorted it .
When I ran a BBS many moons ago it allowed folk to drop into the o/s which looked and felt like CP/M but was in fact the multi-user Turbodos. There were no built in commands, everything being executables. I made all the dangerous CP/M commands like format, fdisk, del etc as just hidden bat files that logged their use and user for public display and disabled their accounts.
it just showed how many bastards existed.
Many moons ago I ran a fairly busy modem BBS and one of the magazines of the time had a nice big review of it - sadly printing the wrong phone number. Unfortunately it was for an old dear down the road. It was Hull Telephones at the time and I never did find out how they resolved the problem of her no-stop disturbances, I can only think of giving her a new number.
"The only non-tracking remote paging device was the old Motorola pager (at least in Italy) which could be used to track you only in very big macro-areas (north, center, south of Italy)."
The British BT pagers were, AFAIR, untrackable as they were one way devices, oly being receivers.
In the old days (80's?) I used to hope for new hardware customers to have a data-losing fault. Learning the lesson early on reduces the chance of heart ache in years to come.
Far too many times at far too many places II was offered a couple of floppies when asking for their backups after replacing their dead 10Mb drive s
I never said "goodbye" when I pulled the plug on this - the last SCSI drive died and there was nothing I could do. Started off with 4 or 5 10mb seagate drives
System was multiuser Turbodos (cpm clone) with the ability to drop out of the BBS bit into the command prompt and use system commands for up/downloading.
Such good fun.
Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a quay and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its really ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect in it's weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.
(Sauce unknown)
ISTR working on 80mb SMD drives and they dumped a charged capacitor onto the voicecoil to yank the heads back and off the disk for various faults detected. The carriage and heads shot back at a Hell of a speed.One of the labs were I did a bit of training still had an errant 6" bar magnet, as used with a coil for speed feedback ) buried in the breeze block wall behind the drive and was used as a warning not to stand directly behind the drive when first powering up after any repairs in the carriage area.
"The ICO has issued £2m in fines across 20 cases since April 2017, and expects to impose another £1.4m in the coming months. "
How much has it collected in fines compared to issued. When I read of fines , much of the time the co. goes titsup and reappears like a phoenix under anther name.
I just hope they don't use PCB's to cool their PCB's
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polychlorinated_biphenyl
"Some PCBs share a structural similarity and toxic mode of action with dioxin.[5] Other toxic effects such as endocrine disruption (notably blocking of thyroid system functioning) and neurotoxicity are known"
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