Posts by SealTeam6 39 publicly visible posts • joined 16 May 2011
I was given NCD xterminals to use in a former job and I did like the large screens and superb resolution but they were 'dumb clients' and I preferred to have some local smartness and a computer onto which I could install my own choice of operating systems and applications and keep working when the central server crashed (which it did quite often).
We once bought several pre-built racks of servers.
They were shipped to us by a moving company which claimed to be 'expert' computer movers.
When the racks arrived we discovered that they were all damaged very badly. The movers had not tied the (wheeled) racks in place on the van so the racks had been flung around inside and crashed into each other like bumper cars!
As both the main and backup computers appear to be faulty I doubt that the problem is fixable without physically visiting the Hubble and fixing it onsite. We no longer have a spacecraft with a robot arm and an airlock that we could use for the job.
A real pity because Hubble is an excellent telescope.
Frank Whittle invented the jet engine in the 1930s, but the British Air Ministry refused to see the potential of it. Meanwhile German engineers read Whittle's engine design with interest and implemented it.
They may have been disgusting Nazis but their management understood technology better than ours did.
I was also studying Computer Science at a university in the 1980s (yes I am an old git) and some fellow students also performed that prank. The best defence against it was to press Control-C before logging in, to exit the prank script. This would 'turn the tables' on the prankster because now you would have access to their user account and you could encrypt or delete all their files (The prank script needed to be run from a logged-in account)
You don't have to buy a Prius. There are plenty of other hybrid cars available. Consider plug-in hybrids which have much larger batteries, longer electric-only range and gas mileage better than 100mpg even if you drive around like Michael Knight from KnightRider.
Electricity from the mains is much cheaper than electricity generated by burning petrol in a self-charging (read as "unable to charge from mains").
I read somewhere (in a dependable publication) that the sun is indeed becoming hotter and that in around 800 million years the hottest point of the Earth will reach 100 degrees celsius. That is enough to start the oceans boiling. That's all the time we have, but it is still a lot considering that complex life only appeared 500 million years ago.
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