Posts by PeteS46 17 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Oct 2016
This reminds me of an incident back in the 1990's IIRC. I had arranged our 3 main sites to have Megastream2 links in a triangle and BT sales assured me that the links were diverse. But a fire in a tunnel between Manchester and Salford was upstream of our links and they failed. We were OOS for about a week, again IIRC.
Not just us, either! Lots of businesses including banks were offline. So no cash machines, card payments..... (cue public unrest).
The situation was so serious they drafted in plods from other areas to reassure the public. I had to issue them with local guide maps (thanks to the Tourism centre) so they didn't come across as gormless when interacting with the tourists and other plebs.
Lesson learned: If your provider says the links they serve are diverse:
* Don't believe a word they say!
* Insist on them providing guarantees with significant penalties for failure!
* BT/Openreach sales lie!
aka Bernard
ZX81 RAM - I used duct tape to secure it.
The 'power station control' bit was an add-on eprom (from Dave Husband IIRC) which converted the ZX81 to be a 'Forth' machine. Up to 4 threads! It worked so well that I wore out the keyboard!
I probably still have the remains somewhere....
PeteS
In 1978 I inhabited a computer-nerd collective called 'Galdor Computing'. (In Surbiton as unlikely as that seems.)
One Sunday I was cooking late-lunch for the inhabitants (we didn't rise with the larks!) and turned the house radio on, BBC R4 of course, not knowing what was happening apart from it was too late for 'The Archers' (thank your own deity!) And there was something new on, interesting and funny. So I turned on the 'all stations' mode, so everyone in the house, office and mainframe room could hear.
IIRC, Arthur and Ford were about to be thrown off their transport or have to suffer the Vogon Captain's poetry.
Gradually the whole crew of Galdor accumulated in the house, to better hear the feed without the noise of the fans cooling several ancient mainframes. Anything that could capture the attention of a disparate crew of bright, technology obsessed nerds should't have been fascinating to the mundane world. But it was!
I'm a (something), which is legal, non-violent and quite usual nowadays. But if 'the powers that be' decide that (somethingism) is a threat to the state (probably because it will reduce the profits on some megacorp) then I'll be a criminal. And us (somethings) will be hunted down using, for example, facial recognition technology. 'For the greater good' to quote some spoof cop flic!
Has no-one read '1984' recently?
OOPS! West Drayton is? (used to be) where the Lord of the UK Skies lives (aka Distress and Diversion - who you call if you REALLY have a problem). If they are OOS then both civil and military aviation around UK are at severe risk. Hopefully they have enough redundant circuits and diverse routing to cope. Anyone know different?
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