
Re: Deep mine shaft
Now I know how Elisha Gray felt.
946 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Dec 2018
Once Upon a Time there was a big broadcaster which informed, educated and entertained the merrie folk who lived in a constitutional monarchy.
This was back in the days when people still printed internal telephone directories, for it was a big organisation.
Big, and riven with internal strife between various factions. One group of apparatchiks took over the production of the internal directories from another inefficient and wasteful group. (How difficult can something be if those idiots can do it?)
All you need to do is collect all the information from the HR database.
Come the joyous day of publication the grateful staff eagerly opened their personal copies of the telephone directory.
It was important to check that your name was spelled correctly, your impressive job title was up to date, your address was correct along with your internal telephone number.
The day was not joyous for everybody, specifically those poor devils whose details had been replaced with the dread phrase "TO BE MADE REDUNDANT".
Many of them lived happily ever after.
Big Ironically, the folks who browse around Distrowatch are the kind of people who have access to the hardware which underpins much of the Internet.
It would be a real shame if Facebook/Meta disappeared completely.
Not that I would ever suggest such a course of action. Those folks are also not petty fanatics. As long as you don't mention vi and Emacs.
I think the implication is that Reg readers are too sophisticated to fall for simple phishing approaches. We are, however, craven enough towards authority figures to fall for anything coming from someone in IT support.
Possibly they also assume that many of us work in IT support and would have to clean up the resulting mess whilst suffering reputational damage.
It's all hooey, my first virus infection came from an e-mail from some eejit in IT. I hate the feckers.
Not everybody needs an OS with commercial software. Some (retired) old Gits just like tinkering with old machines.
An OS doesn't need to be a Windows or Linux competitor to be interesting.
If you don't like or need it, don't use it.
It's free.
Similarly, if the latest Raspberry Pi isn't to your liking or doesn't meet your requirements, I'm not really interested.
There was a time when the comment section here was full of useful technical tips and very funny posts.
A colleague was working at a new divisional HQ. This was during the 80s so the building had brand new access controls. Most of the staff worked 9 to 5.
They wouldn't give him an access card because he was based at a different site.
During the install process he decided to go for a cigarette break in the car park.
It was after five o'clock so the solitary security guy was on his rounds.
Consequently, he was unable to get access after he'd finished smoking.
He decided to have another ciggie and a think.
He noticed somebody exit the building without having to present an access card. (The main door was double sliding glass doors.)
He took a piece of A4 paper from his car, slotted it between the two glass doors and wiggled it about.
You shouldn't be able to enter a secure, expensive building that way.
Up to a point, Lord Copper.
The Hawker Hurricane was constructed by draping Irish Linen over a wooden frame. They had to use metal for the engine, machine guns and some tubes forming an interior frame.
First RAF kite to fly at 300 mph.
Of course, when Concorde was designed they couldn't get the wood any more so had to make do with metal.
I can remember (more senior) colleagues discussing this in the 1980s. Presentation to us might be separate copper pairs going in different directions to different exchanges at each end of circuit. There was no guarantee that they wouldn't be multiplexed together on some PDH/SDH link somewhere in the middle.
These were mostly "music" circuits rented from BT, plus some of that new-fangled data that would supposedly replace our venerable 75 baud telegraph.
Yabbut, site was surrounded by private land, only way out was drive. Unless you wanted to start negotiating for wayleaves with neighbouring farmers.
The real problem was that they took the compiling hardware plus the associated authentication/digital signature box. Without the sig/hash/whatever, the code wouldn't run on our proprietary hardware.
Had they left things alone we could have couriered the signed code to another site or Internet access point.
But they had to make things better.
Eejits.
I worked for a medium sized company (Medco Ltd).
We were taken over by a very big company (Jumboco)
Jumboco's HQ and labs were in a different country.
Jumboco insisted that our nightly builds must be done on their mighty compilers in their labs. They could then be released to our greatful customers as required.
We only had one fat pipe to the outside world, this was obviously a single point of failure and could not be countenanced by a big important company.
Pro tip:- If you are going to dig a long trench alongside the existing cable for the new cable ensure that a) this work is performed on a Friday afternoon and b) a very important software upgrade is being released to one of your most important customers on Saturday.