Posts by OID

And now for this evening's space weather report. We've got a hotspot of satellite-wrecking 'killer electrons' in the outer Van Allen belt...

Born Free - Space Radicals ;-)

The impact of high energy particals (aka "Free Radicals" :) has been known for some time, and they're certainly not confined to Spaaaaaaaace.

Back in the day we had a statistically significant run of Cisco 7200 series routers crashing apparently at random.

After a month or several running around with TAC, where we isolated the problem to a memory error (as opposed to say a code bug, which of course wouldn't be a problem...).

TAC sent us an IBM white paper written (IIRC) before desktop computing was a "thing" talking about solar radiation causing flipped bits in RAM leading to crashes.

The proposition was we were experiencing a period of high solar activity and our network was being crashed by solar radiation (via _Terrorist_ High energy/Free Radicals) and the gear was functioning as designed.

Cue questions about why the rather expensive kit didn't use parity checks/ECC RAM to weather the storm without failure & responses about fault tolerant design requiring MORE expensive kit in n+1 fault tolerant configuration.

An object lesson in turning a design flaw into a sales pitch ;-)

Why is the printer spouting nonsense... and who on earth tried to wire this plug?

Re: The user replied: "The same electrician who changed that plug rewired my house last week!"

Maybe "Correct Pin" would be less risky to some idiot using forum comments as a source of "how to" instructions..

IIRC Earth/Ground (Green/Yellow) is connected to the TOP pin, with Live (Brown, continuing the use of UK color standards) to the LEFT pin (Right when looking from the back of the plug), or the one with the fuse inline.

Connecting Earth/Ground to the (Literal) right pin has the potential* to ruin someone's day.

*Accidental punny in-joke, sorry.. ;-)