Re: Floppy drives
"Use blu tack and sellotape!"
Not on my equipment you don't. That shit causes stains, makes the gear look like hell, and adversely affects the resale value.
26589 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
Never say never ...
Picture a data center in the basement of a tall building in San Francisco's financial district. Card punch up against a wall, near the ancient Otis heavy goods lift. Every now and again, at seemingly random times, the punch generated errors for a couple characters. Nobody could figure out why.
Until IBM was traipsing in and out one fine weekend, upgrading who knows what hardware, as only IBM could. Someone (ahem) noticed that the gibberish was being generated about ten seconds before the elevator doors opened.
Turned out that the motor for the lift was drawing so much current when it first started that it was inducing errors in the punch on the other side of the wall. Nobody put two and two together prior to this because the lift rarely went into the basement (that level was key-protected) ... until IBM was in and out that morning.
Going in with a smile, a PleaseAndThankYou[tm], and the attitude of "I don't know if you can help me, let's find out!" when you discover an error helps keep folks on your side ... if you come storming in, looking for blood, you'll only piss 'em off. This is true when dealing with customer service in almost all walks of life. It's basic social engineering, innit.
The one that floored me was the field engineer who opened the back of a server, pulled the diagnostic floppy off the inside of the door where it was affixed with a magnet ... and the fucking thing still worked! Observing my surprise, he just shrugged and said "I know. I don't get it either. They did it this way for years before I got here. I don't ask questions, I just go by their playbook and collect my pay." He claimed to have seen several tens of these things, and the disk was only dead once.
I used to run into programmers who didn't know what a floppy disk was all the time, well into the 1970s, trailing off into the '80s. I even ran across a few in the early 1990s ... These last were mostly folks programming industrial equipment with paper/mylar tape and card decks; seems that general purpose computers were outside their job descriptions. There may even be a few of this last set left in odd corners of the world.
In all likelihood, nothing happened to his hard drive. I've been winning bar bets with this one for decades ... Back in the early/mid 80s, a friend and I were tasked with bulk erasing a couple dozen Seagate ST225 20 meg MFM drives. Having recently acquired a couple of rare earth magnets (industrial surplus, as re-sold by the late, lamented Haltec in Mountain View), we figured we could wipe 'em across the drives and be done with it. But first lunch, at Fred's on Middlefield Road.
For those of you who didn't grow up in the wilds of Silly Con Valley, Fred's was (and is!) a dive bar[0]. Heavy emphasis on Dive. Home away from home kind of place, if you're into that kind of thing. A good place for planning destructive testing of all kinds. So naturally, we decided that we'd pull a drive out of the computer, but leave it plugged in, turn the machine back on and wipe the magnets over it "to watch the computer lose it's tiny little mind". Which we did.
To our surprise, nothing happened. The drive trundled on, ignoring us and our magnets. So we found a bulk eraser for tapes and the like and tried that. Still nothing happened. I wrote a simple "walking ones" program to run over them instead.
I've done this with increasingly strong magnets, and progressively denser HDDs over the years and have never, not once, lost a single byte of data EXCEPT mechanical data loss when the drive head gets bent into the running platter (the traditional meaning of a HDD head crash).
Don't take my word for it, try it for yourself. Or read this account of somebody else trying it and getting similar results.
"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." —Samuel Langhorne Clemens
[0] If you pointy-clicky around in the go ogle link, you can get a look at the interior. Might not look like much, but a LOT of what happened in the proto-SillyConValley started in there ...
Boats aren't all that expensive to buy. They ARE, however, expensive to repair. More so if you're not handy. Even more so if you're not handy and think you are. It's easy to get in over your head. Before purchasing, remember your Latin: Caveat Emptor.
Owning a boat is cheap. Just keep it away from the four things guaranteed to ruin it: Sunlight, oxygen, water, and salt. People in the know add humans consuming alcohol to that list.
You can get a used autopilot in excellent condition, built for a boat, for under $500. Bolting it onto your boat would be a lot less work than adapting an automotive product to do the job. Took me about a day to install one in my Monterey Clipper, and that included testing & tuning as I pulled half a dozen crab pots.
Speed is relative. And expensive. You can get a go-fast that'll take you across an ocean faster than legal driving speeds in most civilized countries, if you choose to throw enough money at the problem. At my age, I've leaned boating's about the journey, not the destination. My advice is to spend money on reliability and comfort, not speed.
I use a Daisy Wheel occasionally, but it's hardly a new affectation ... and I have the receipt dated in the late 1970s to prove it. I don't have a 1053, but I do have a couple working 2741s. Prefer the 1403, mostly for speed (and shock value). And of course there is the Smith Corona portable, which works quite nicely even during power outages.
Nobody has ever accused me of being a hipster. Packrat maybe ...
"I still can't understand why my daughter and her future husband just stayed indoors in a pub down in the village."
Cast you mind back to when you first became engaged ... Would you have preferred to have partied down the pub with your mates, or would staying in with your parental unit(s), partying like it was 1999 have been attractive?
I implemented a four hour minimum for on-site visits in (roughly) 1990, a couple years after I went solo. Double on weekends/holidays. A few clients balked at the new rate ... I simply told 'em "Don't call me unless you actually need me".
A new issue arose. Convincing 'em to pay 4 hours (or more) for a one minute visit. The old TV repairman's maxim applied, "I'm not charging you for thumping your telly with a screwdriver. I'm charging you for knowing where and how hard to thump your telly, and for showing up to do it". The explanation seems to have worked ... although about a year and a half ago, a child CEO wondered why I'd need to thump a telly.
The new-fangled alpine and Mutt can both be configured to do exactly what you ask. I still use (Al)pine for the bulk of my email. Works a treat, even over a 2400 baud dial-up. Or in a terminal emulator, if you insist on the massive overhead of a GUI for a function that is primarily text based.
(What do you mean, 2400's too slow? How fast can you read and/or type?)
"I think the point is that email is not a general purpose filing system."
The point is that people like the user in the story aren't even aware that the concept of "file system" exists. Software designers and support personnel should be aware of this and take it into account when doing their jobs.
... one should always takes a quick peak and ask the user "Are you sure? This file looks like it might be important!" before nuking the trash. Preferably with a witness or two within earshot. This has been true ever since Apple, Inc. invented the "special" class of computer user with the advent of the Lisa, and then lowered the entry bar to this "special" class with the Macintosh.
"That said... "I do confess that I had pulled a few hundred dollars out of the ATM in advance, just in case.""
I have had a couple of hundred dollars in cash available to me "just in case" since the late 1960s (a trifle more these days). It has saved me more times than I can count. Recommended.
16 up and 16 down. That's good enough for me to sample them again ... it used to be more like 32 up and none down. Nobody, and I mean nobody, ever admitted in public that they liked sprouts.
I have about a pound (half a kilo-ish) from a local grower, will cook them tonight and report back :-)
"In a pan with just a few drops of your choice of vegetable oil, slowly cook some fat bacon until it's crunchy"
Instead of veg oil, use a tiny bit of water, 2-3Tbs (50-75ml) or thereabouts (experiment for your quantity of bacon). The water comes up to boiling, which is hot enough to melt bacon fat but not hot enough to cause sticking. As the bacon renders, the water boils off leaving pure bacon fat to finish the cooking, un-tainted by any lesser grease.
Nuts make better cheese than tapioca. Cashews are by far the choice of various vegan friends of mine, followed by macadamias and almonds.
Note that I said "better than tapioca". While I've sampled a few concoctions labeled "vegan cheese" that were actually edible, not one of them seemed like any kind of actual cheese that I've been in contact with.
... one of the most pirated small bits of code out there in the early 1980s ... for those who didn't have his earlier version that was shared through user groups, that is.
And who among us didn't have a series of bootabe floppies with the necessary system files for all the variations of MS/PC-DOS that were in the wild at the time? I still have that box of disks (and a couple releases of 4DOS). Comes in handy six or eight times per year ... you'd be surprised at how many pieces of decades old computer controlled equipment still runs on MS/PC-DOS. Bridgeport CNC machines of the era, for one example that is going to be around for decades to come.
"Seems as though it has been approximating that goal."
So has EMACS, these last forty-odd years. And systemd is attempting a latter-day coup. But that still doesn't make either of them operating systems. And they won't be, either, until you can boot from them as a stand-alone kernel (monitor, executive, whatever).
"A browser is an Operating System Application"
A browser is an "Operating System Application"? Oh, c'mon amfM ... I thought better of you. Inventing new concepts that don't actually mean anything doesn't help your cause. Try again?
For greater than four nines of all WWW sites, there is another pasture. I can afford to miss out on the one in ten thousand; one can only laugh at so many cute cat pics in a lifetime.
As for .gov ... I visit them in person. It's much less trouble, and I usually get whatever it is I am doing done in a single visit, instead of it taking several trips and many days as it so often does on the Web.
The modern day OS, to all intents and purposes, is the traffic cop between CPU, memory & I/O and applications. An easier way of looking at it is that the OS is in charge of the hardware's on/off switch. The OS can contain code to turn the machine off, user-space can't. Browsers run in user space q.e.d.
Note that it doesn't matter one whit what the guest OS or application "thinks"[0], what matters is the reality of hardware ownership.
An operating system living in a virtual machine is just that, virtual, not a real machine. It is not in actual control of the hardware that it is running on, therefore it is not a full OS, it's just a virtual OS. Note that browsers run on virtual OSes, not in lieu of them.
And yes, I am aware of Intel's Management Engine and AMD's Platform Security Processor, but unlike the OS vs. Application dividing line, the OS vs. ME/PSP is dancing on the head of a pin territory. Besides, both of those technically have their own CPU core that they are in charge of, with hooks onto the main system bus of the host computer. I look at them as parasites more than anything else.
[0] Indeed, the point of good virtualization is ensuring that the OS+Application doesn't even notice that is, in fact, virtualized ... to the point of the OS thinking it is capable of turning off it's virtualized hardware. It's still just a virtual OS when running on that machine, in that manner. Without specifying context, these conversations are meaningless. The devil is truly in the details.
"Isn't debating with amanfrommars almost as much a sign of madness as trying to extract meaning from it's high-faluting algorithm?"
No more so than debating with you is as much a sign of madness as trying to extract meaning from your high-faluting(sic) algorithm, nagyeger.
If it makes your badly designed web page look like shit, I'll try another browser. Or, more likely, I'll pass on your badly designed web site entirely. But leave the choice to me ... that way, at least you'll have a chance of me trying another browser. Blocking me outright right from the git-go doesn't give you that second chance; I'll assume you're either hostile or an asshole and move on to greener pastures.
You've said that before, amfM. You are still incorrect. A browser is an application, not an OS, no matter how hard you squint at it.
Unless your browser controls your hardware, of course ... in which case, I submit that your actual OS is very, very b0rken.
For the record, there is still far too much work for not enough Fortran and COBOL coders. If you know either of them well, you can make a lot more money than a common or garden Java Script coder. If you know both, you can pretty much write your own ticket.
Good old fashioned C will always have a place in the world of coding. It should be a part of any real programmer's toolbox.
"Proper racing gloves are a must too, if you have a direct-drive wheel, because those things can mess your hands right up."
If you're all that worried about your girlfriend getting hurt when gaming, a good set of gardening gloves will work just as well as proper Nomex when you're in your mummy's basement. Besides, I really don't think that my SFI-15 gloves would be conducive to fiddling about with your joystick.
Why is it that whenever I see EPG my brain parses it as Eggs Per Gram?
Cost/benefit says no.
There aren't enough usable square $UNITOFMEASUREs to do more than trickle-charge the system, giving you a couple miles of extra travel per day at best. In other words, your round-trip before range anxiety starts to set in is increased negligibly for a relatively high cost.
By way of reference, good consumer grade solar cells typically put out about 15 Watts per square foot, or 160 Watts per square meter. Keep in mind this is under ideal conditions. A Tesla Model S takes about 13,000 Watts to cruise at 55MPH, 20,000 Watts at 65MPH and 32,000 Watts at 80MPH. More if fully loaded.
At current technology levels, solar is good for one thing when it comes to automobiles: Keeping the battery from going flat during long periods of non operation. But you'll have to park it in full sun when you leave it in long-term parking ... don't pick that shady spot, and forget the garage.