Re: My militia.com!
"When three meet to discuss revolution, two are fools and the third is a police spy." —Russian proverb (supposedly)
26717 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
"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.
The way I see it, as long as it's faintly on topic repeat whatever you like, whenever you like. There is no way that every commentard who might be interested in what you have to say read it the first time around ... and there have Shirley been many new commentards added since then, too.
"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.
Back in the day I worked on a lot of T-carrier stuff. I can't tell you how many times an owner/client ranted about a shiny new (fractional) T1/E1 link being down, how the equipment was shit, the field guys were incompetent, and how pretty much everybody involved with the installation should be taken out behind the barn & horsewhipped. Most of the time[0], it was an incorrectly set loopback switch on the new node. Seems bosses in general can't resist flipping switches ... and can't read blinkenlights.
Sometimes I'd casually reached out and toggle the loopback switch, thus fixing the link and painting the boss's face an interesting shade of red when I presented him with the bill reading nothing more than "Call out. Flipped loopback switch. $1,000" on an official invoice.
But once in a while, after inspecting the node, I'd stand aside & motion the boss through the door before me. While he had his back to me, I'd flip the switch ... and we'd go off to his office for a chat about fixing the obviously broken machine. I'd let him rant on for several minutes, around 20 was the record, but always ending up with something along the lines of "so what are you going to do about it, then?". To which I would quietly reply "Oh, I've already fixed it. We'll invoice you for the call out". Sometimes the resulting sputtering reached epic proportions ...
[0] The rest of the time it was a cable that had fallen out of the CSU/DSU because it hadn't been screwed down properly. We always took the blame for that, even if it was their guys bolting stuff together. We've all done it, we're only human, I'll take the blame, no charge ... sometimes it's handy to have a friendly couple of faces in a client's datacenter who probably won't ever try to throw you under a bus.
Somewhat sadly, Torpenhow Hill doesn't actually exist.
Howewver, the rivers Avon, Ouse and Esk do.
Or Pendle Hill... "Pen" means hill. Pen Hill became Pen 'il, became Pendle ... Which became Pendle Hill, because, well, because it's British. So basically, we now have the rather imaginatively named Hill Hill Hill.
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.
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.
... a diesel generator that might have had a similar issue. The thing ran just fine during a routine heat-cycle the week before, but during a mains power failure a pin-hole leak had developed in a fuel line. On the pressure side. Fortunately a security guard on-site smelled the fuel and hit the Big Red Button within a minute or so. The leak had drenched both the plywood wall of the shed (about four feet away) and the lagging around the hot side of the turbo. Diesel's kind of hard to start burning ... unless it gets hot and has a nice wick.
Even if it had caught fire it would not have affected the computers inside (other than the lack of power) ... the generator shed shared no walls with the data center, and in fact was located about 50 feet away from the main building. Common sense, innit.
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.
"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!
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 ...
... I've been using GnuCOBOL (Wiki) on Slackware (pkgs.org) for a while now. It works just as it says on the tin, with no histrionics. Recommended.
Some people say a man is made outta mud
A poor man's made outta muscle and blood
Muscle and blood and skin and bones
A mind that's a-weak and a back that's strong
You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
—Tennessee Ernie Ford
"So much worthless knowledge soon to be consigned to the bit bucket in the sky."
No worries, that's all just duplication of early Usenet, which is archived quite nicely at DejaNews. Or would be, if the idiot kids at AlphaGoo could figure out how to work with simple text files.
Yes. UUCP, UUencode, xmodem and kermit all came about over a couple of years, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Not surprisingly, this was about the time that AT&T was forced to allow direct-connect modems on their lines, leading to modems becoming much smaller and cheaper than the old acoustically coupled versions.
This lead directly to Community Memory[0], Fidonet, BBSes and the like ... followed almost immediately by Delphi, TheWELL, BIX, and Compuserve (and Q-Link (AOL), yadda yadda yadda) ... and a little known thing known as dial-up Internet access.
The rest, as they say ...
[0] Edit: Community Memory was earlier. I'm concatinating time again.
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.