Posts by jake

"The internet was a born from a US DoD (DARPA) project to provide resilient communications for key US assets in the event of an all out nuclear war."

Oft repeated, but simply not true. The networks that were designed to survive nuclear attack included the "Minimum Essential Emergency Communications Network", or MEECN, and the prior "Survivable Low Frequency Communications System" or SLFCS, Besides, if you use an ounce of common sense, it only stands to reason ... no military would design a command and control system that inherently wasn't securable, and the Internet was not then, and still isn't securable.

In The Beginning, the first two nodes of what became TehIntraWebTubes were at SRI and UCLA, conceived, designed, implemented and run by students and professors. With no Pentagon oversight, input or anything else "intellectual". Money, yes. Oversight, no.

Boiling it down to basics, the (D)ARPANET was just a research network designed to research networking. The "survives nukes" myth came about much later ... The cold, sad reality is that the only reason it was built to be resilient is because the available hardware was really, really flaky.

Re: Blinkenlights ... they are not just for looks.

OMG! A.P. Veening has read it before! Whatever shall I do?

Re: Not Me But.......

"Ages ago"?

After roughly the 1960s, two-wire systems didn't care about polarity at the consumer end (diode bridge built into the hybrid). It was probably poor termination which was fixed when you swapped the wires. I'd bet that it worked when he tested it, and then rattled loose when he bolted the box back together. I doubt the installer did it on purpose, that kind of mistake would have had him laughed at by his peers for weeks.

First meeting to be in Barbados on the weekend of the 17th.

Re: IT

Works with people, too.

I was brought in to down-size a company once. Took three months, but I finally got rid of 20% of the workforce, all in middle management (and nobody else). Company dropped from about 1000 people to about 800, with a good rise in productivity. Profits rose by almost triple the prior year's cost of keeping the middle management employed.

Easy way to start implementing this at your corporation: Get rid of any middle management that does nothing but fiddle about with Power Point and attend meetings. Then get rid of any middle management who complains about those cuts. That should get you into the 15% range or so, you're on your own for the rest.

Re-read the instructions.

Hopefully your house isn't made of Lego, and situated in a lab where any idiot might be encouraged to remodel it. And equally hopefully the builder has very detailed instructions from you, the architect and the engineer before he starts the renovation. If not, I submit your new bungalow is clearly what you asked for.

Re: I think the authors missed some irony-

Never mind the colo(u)r, the wheel should obviously be double-decker. And two lanes wide. In each direction. With deer whistles, because you never know.

Re: @Charles 9 -- The weird part isn't the generator fire - shit happens.

"To start the really big marine engines you need a lot of compressed air."

Or a pony motor.

Re: This would never have happened at a certain broadcaster I used to work for.

It doesn't mention that it all doesn't matter, because fiber was cut at the same time as the power?

_{There's a song in there, somewhere ...}

Re: electric cars

Actually, farmers grow crops to make money. My cousin in Iowa doesn't give a shit how his corn, beans (soy) and wheat are used ... as long as he gets top dollar for them.

Re: This would never have happened at a certain broadcaster I used to work for.

While two stroke diesels exist, I have never seen one powering a backup generator for a modern data center ... but if one exists, I rather suspect it would have some kind of sump-based lubrication system and a blower of one description or another for proper feeding/scavenging of the cylinder(s).

Besides, in your scenario I rather suspect that the starter and/or associated wiring would melt down (ideally blowing a fuse first) before friction heated the motor to the point of starting a fire.

Re: Micro Focus will not be happy

I doubt anybody there cares at all.

Horses for courses & all that.

Re: COBOL

"Grace Hopper looks down, smiles wickedly."

FTFY

Re: COBOL

Aye ... But if you tell that to the young people today, they won't believe you.

Re: COBOL

"the language that never dies."

As I first posted a dozen or so years ago (at least the first time here on ElReg), COBOL is dead! Long live COBOL!

Re: [Aside] Storage media

"Bah! No paper tapes!"

Of course not, silly! They've all been re-punched in Mylar for longevity.

Re: If anyone is interested ...

As I said, it works as it says on the tin. Give it a try, it'll cost you nothing but a bit of time[0] ... and at the very worst, you just might learn something.

It is an approachable variation on the theme, but make no mistake, it's no mere toy. I've helped ween a couple companies off of big iron with it.

[0] Yes, I know, we all have !copious free time ...

Re: Standards.

"there is currently no "-r" option for df in GNU coreutils."

It's open source, add one!

_{Actually ... come to think of it, watch this space ;-)}

Re: After Yotta

The misogynistic bastards in the ElReg Standards Soviet have already named the Norris.

Re: Easy to remember?

So you are blaming marketing departments in a foreign nation for your own inadequacy with your mother tongue? Fascinating.

Re: Easy to remember?

To be fair, illiteracy knows no national boundaries.

Re: Easy to remember?

"Our American colleagues' somewhat strange spelling of "easy""

Eh? This American spells easy "easy". So does every other Yank I know.

Re: Yahoo! still exists?

Dude, I've been running my own email system for decades, around a decade and a half longer than Y!a!h!o!o! has existed. The only dumbass I can blame for email problems is me.

Re: Yahoo! still exists?

I was looking for something completely different a couple months ago when I ran across a complete printout of the fledgling TCP/IP Internet's routing tables from noon on Flag Day (01/01/83). It is not a very large document :-)

Re: Times change

More people knew about them than you might think. Dropping a card deck was a common plot twist in movies & television as early as the mid 1960s.

Re: Times change

As I said, it depended where you were. For example, UCL had what we later called a mirror of the Berkelely FTP site. I should know, I helped 'em set it up and keep it synced. There were similar mirrors in Finland and Sweden. It was a BSD thing.

Re: Kill it with fire?

Probably became a meme started by the enemies of the Minoans, post Thera.

Re: A reel of tape valued at £1M

I purchased a pallet load of used 5 drawer SteelCase filing cabinets from a company called "Weirdstuff Warehouse" back in 1989. There were a dozen in all, arranged in a 3x4 grid on the pallet. One of the employees allowed as to how they had come in with a bunch of office equipment from a small engineering campus that Unisys had just closed in South City (South San Francisco).

None had keys. Knowing that it's easy to pick and then replace[0] a lock in this kind of cabinet, I was pretty happy to pay $40 apiece. The way I figured it, I'd sell 10 for $120 each after replacing the locks ($20 per), for a nice tidy profit of $480, plus two "free" locking file cabinets, which was what I needed for my startup.

It turned out that the lower three drawers of the center two cabinets were full of half inch mag tape. Half were labeled "Sperry", and the other half were labeled "Burroughs", and from the labels they contained system images, source code and some kind of corporate data. Being the curious type, I eyeballed the contents of a couple at random. They contained what was written on the tin.

I have no idea why they were "hidden" in the middle of the load like that, but I have my suspicions. Rather than jump through hoops to return them to Unisys, and having no use for the code, I bulk erased them and re-used the tapes. I wish now I had kept them :-)

[0] Yes, once open I could easily cut new keys, but the replacements are so cheap that it's not worth my time.