"What is the carrying capacity of a migrating European Swallow Ethernet cable?"
Two pigeons. Three is right out.
252 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Aug 2020
"What is the carrying capacity of a migrating European Swallow Ethernet cable?"
Two pigeons. Three is right out.
"it held data for a now-obsolete system that needed to be retained for 12 years for legal reasons"
I once worked for a place that had three mission-critical applications, each running on its own Unix server (well, Unixish; most of them were Xenix), plus there was a fourth server that backed up the other three.
I had taken to naming the servers after mythological figures. Charon (the ferryman across the River Styx), along with its main function, served as our Internet gateway. Vishnu ("The Preserver") was the backup box. Shakti ... well, to be honest, that one was named more for the band [1] than for the goddess.
Came the time that all three of those applications got replaced by two new ones -- all at the same time, but that's another story. Their servers got replaced by Apple kit and NetWare. [2]
We needed to keep two of the old applications available, though, for people to refer back to, essentially read-only. Given the much reduced load, we coalesced them onto one Xenix box.
I called that machine Baal -- for old, superceded systems, the name of an old, superceded god. [3]
[1] Shakti plays jazz fusion that's heavily influenced by Indian classical music. It originally consisted of John McLaughlin, Zakkir Hussein, L. Shankar, and T. H. "Vikku" Vinayakram. They have toured in various incarnations over the years. As it happens, they're on a world tour now, but not coming anywhere near me, alas.
[2] Far from ideal, especially for this old Unix hand, but those were the requirements for the two high-end, off-the-shelf applications we bought.
[3] Ba'al is the Caananite god that the Israelite prophets are always inveighing against in the Hebrew Bible, aka Old Testament.
I call BS on your calling BS.
The bit you're reacting to appears to be this: "any operating system released this century wouldn't run [1-2-3] at all."
The people involved could have mistakenly believed it wouldn't run, and acted accordingly.
Or Randi knew at the time that it could run but did away with it anyway -- or more likely, didn't bother to look into the question --because his goal was to get the guy onto modern kit, not to enable his continuing obstruction; but Randi now, in retelling the story, is misremembering.
Or it could have been an older version of 1-2-3 than your folks have, which truly couldn't have run on a modern OS.
So there are any number of ways for that one brief assertion, even should it be false, not to invalidate the entire story.
"Goddamn UEFI straight to hell."
Serious questions: what are your pain points with it? And how much of that pain is due to UEFI per se, and how much to the TPM?
My experience of TPMless UEFI is much more positive. Sure, there's a learning curve, but that's the case with anything new. And there's some frustration, but my distant memory of BIOS-based machines includes a significant amount of frustration with those too.
But as I say, that's on a couple of older machines that, if they even have TPMs (I honestly don't recall), they're disabled. Since I run Linux and FreeBSD, I've never had to open that can of worms.
There are a couple of things about UEFI that I actively like:
GPT: 128 partitions (it's hard to imagine needing that many, but you can format a drive with more if you want them); no primary/extended/logical ickiness; effectively no size limits (we're a fair few Moore's-law generations away from exceeding 64-bit sector numbers, whereas we're already maxing out MBR's 32-bit fields).
All the on-disk boot stuff lives in a file system -- no more magic sectors (other than the partition table of course), and no more of the contortions GRUB has to go through to fit itself into an MBR-formatted drive.
My favorite off-label modem use: as a primitive speed-dialer.
1987. We badly, badly wanted tickets to the upcoming Pink Floyd concert. In those pre-Internet days [1], the way to get them was by phone. Problem: world+dog wanted the same thing we did, so getting through was a matter of blind luck. So we all sat at our phones, dialing and dialing and dialing.
Unlike my friends, I had a computer -- my first, an Amiga 1000 -- and so, an optimization was available. I got into the terminal program and used the modem to dial the ticket company's voice line [2], prepared to pick up the phone and then type <space> to make the modem hang up, should I actually get through. I got a busy signal of course, but then it was a simple matter of "a/" (which meant "redial the last number"), wait for busy, <space>, repeat. For at least a couple of hours.
That shortened the retry interval a lot, vs manual dialing -- and so, I figured, greatly improved my chances. Even so, it wasn't me who finally got through, but one of the others who, all that time, had been redialing the hard way.
Not only didn't I ever connect, but in all those hundreds(?) of attempts, I only once or twice got a normal busy signal. The rest of the time it was fast busy, which meant upstream network congestion -- that's how swamped the system was.
[1] Yes, I know. I'd even heard tales of it. But as far as the general public were concerned, including my long-out-of-university self, it might as well not have existed.
[2] I can't recall whether that was still BASS (Best Available Seating Service) or whether they were already Ticketmaster by that point.
"If you get stuck in that situation mix them or alternate between dog food and cat food."
I agree with all of your post *except* for the quoted sentence. I don't know -- never kept cats -- but I'd want professional advice before feeding a cat even a partial dog-food diet.
Once in a while, if you run out of cat food? Sure. But as even a semi-regular occurrence? That seems unwise.
"cats are 'obligate carnivores' "
Agreed.
"for whom most (if not all) vegetable matter is anywhere from mildly to very toxic."
I don't believe plant material as such is actively toxic to cats, just that it's of little to no nutritional value, since they're not set up to digest it.
That said, it's been speculated that cats in the wild might ingest a certain amount of plant material -- conveniently partially pre-digested -- in the stomachs of their prey, and might in fact get nutritional value from it. (I read that some years ago, and don't know whether it's since been confirmed or refuted.)
"Perhaps a dumb question but.. Is there much difference?"
There is. Cats can't survive long-term on dog food.
They need taurine (an amino acid) in their diet, while dogs can synthesize the stuff, given the necessary precursors. Thus, cat food is supplemented with taurine, but dog food typically isn't.
Cats are obligate carnivores -- in the wild, they *must* eat meat. Dogs are more omnivores than true carnivores. And taurine is something that you get in meat and fish.
I had the reverse happen. Can't recall whether I've told this story...
While driving along a rural, low-traffic section of Southern Ontario's Highway 401 late one night, I had reason to call 911 (Emergency Services). Not yet an actual emergency, but could easily have become one if not taken care of -- road debris big enough to cause a serious accident, and it was black, so easy not to spot at night.
I tried to describe where the problem was, but the operator wasn't getting it -- she didn't recognize any of the landmarks I gave. It was a frustrating minute or two -- for her as well, I presume.
I can't recall which of us twigged first: my phone had roamed and I was talking to one of New York State's 911 operators across the lake. I'm sure she had a really good mental map of her chunk of New York. Ontario? Not so much.
I was already in a service center's parking lot, so after apologizing, I went inside and placed my call on a (wired) pay phone. And then turned off roaming on my cell phone.
"Manually burning 10 DVDs and then only checking the result for errors a week later"
No. They verified each backup both at the time and *again* a week later. (See the description of Guillermo's first, by-the-book run-through.) So it wasn't, at least in that respect, a "garbage" procedure; it sounds to me like a particularly diligent one. (It may well have had other problems -- the length of the manual hints at the possibility -- but on the evidence we have, failure to verify backups wasn't among them.)
"USB harddrives were readily available and easily large enough to hold 10 DVDs worth of data"
They had about 40 weeks' worth of DVDs in the pool. That many HDDs would have been pretty expensive, I imagine, and also quite physically bulky to store and manage.
Formatting DVDs in parallel seems like a smart improvement to the procedure, but it would have been best to clear it with the boss first -- maybe there were reasons for doing it the way they did. (Given the then state of the technology, potential drive compatibility issues come to mind -- but that's just a wild guess.)
It seems to me that if Guillermo was too "busy" to label the DVDs, he might also have failed to verify them. But if so, that wouldn't have been the procedure's fault; rather, it would push his story even further into "Who, Me?" territory.
"I don't speak Italian. Somehow I managed to communicate..."
I was in Frankfurt am Main on a business trip, walking from the conference centre back to my hotel (a quaint little place on the edge of the red-light district -- much more atmospheric than the bland, corporate, could-be-anywhere box that we could have been staying at).
Anyway, a truck driver pulled over, asking me for directions. I don't speak German and he didn't speak English, but I knew where Mainzer Landstraße was, and I'm pretty sure I was somehow able to convey the directions (fortunately, pretty simple from where we happened to be).
Same stimulus; opposite prank.
One of my highschool teachers, nigh-on half a century ago, told the story of the time a student fell asleep in class. They hung (not "hanged", q.v.) a "do not disturb" sign on his back and carried on. At the end of the period they filed out *quietly*, and told the incoming bunch to do likewise.
The kid finally woke up of his own accord -- and was mortified to find himself in the wrong class.
A sports bar I used to frequent, back in CRT days, had one TV whose image was backwards. Text was mirrored etc., but the really disorienting thing was watching baseball players run the bases clockwise.
It seems that the unit had previously been used as the image source for some kind of projection system. That thing's lenses flipped the image, so the TV's horizontal deflection coils had been flipped over (or rotated, or the connections just swapped; I don't know the technical details) in order to compensate.
When the TV came out of the projector and began to be used on its own, the coils never got changed back.