Posts by CrazyOldCatMan 6355 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Oct 2015
Technics and... Aiwa
My (well, more accurately, my parents) first 'HiFi' was an Aiwa. Worked fine and had two casette decks (making it easy to copy tapes!).
My current (almost totally unused) hifi is a Technics. I think we bought it in ~1994.. (also has two cassette decks and a turntable). It still sits in our lounge but is mostly there as a small, low-lying place to put stuff on top of.
he pointed out the answer he wanted was "a whiteboard"
Many years ago, in a city far, far away (OK, Leicester) a roomful of wannabe IT specialists (HND in IT) were horrified when their first lecture in Systems Analysis started with the words "Sometimes, a computer is not the best option"..
There were only really two good lecturers on that course - the said Systems Analysis tutor and the Telecoms Tutor.
And it's no coincidence that both of them had extensive industrial experience. Most of the rest of the tutors were PhD students (or people that had just got their PhD) and who were deeply uninterested in teaching a lowly HND class. I suspect that the only reason that most of them were there was because it got them easy access to all the female Art students..
(Our Art campus had the highest VD rate of any Polytechnic campus apparently.. we technical students were stuck in the middle of the city while the arts students got to be in the nicer bits of the outskirts)
William inherited a very efficient English civil service
And gradually dismantled it because they, rather unsportingly, wanted a say in how the country was run. After all, under the Saxon system, free men were entitled to a say in how things were run.
Under the Normans, not so much.
(The English titles for Noble ranks are a real mixture: King (Saxon, Cynge), Duke (from Latin Dux, meaning "commander of two legions"), Earl (Saxon, Eorl meaning "Noble Warrior") etc etc.
winning disputed territory, and then running it with rather notable efficiency
I think most of The North[1] would disagree. Unless you define "running it with rather notable efficiency" as "slaughtering 30% of the population because they got a bit uppity"..
[1] Of England. As wot used to be called "The Danelaw" and was, in part, populated by other descendants of Vikings who didn't like those posh la-di-da descendants of Vikings coming over here from Normandy and slaughtering those southern Saxon ponces..
so selling off your buildings and renting them bark is barking mad
It was the Done Thing for a while in uber-capitalist circles. Something to do with propping up share prices by extracting value from existing assets in order to pay dividends.
And, like all such short-term measures is utter, utter futile madness in a long-term view.
Sadly, CEOs and Boards are now not selected for the long-term view - they are selected to 'maximise shareholder value' in the short term. Then, when the company involved get into financial difficulty[1], said CEO and Board regretfully leave with their diamond-studden golden parachutes.
[1] Which they inevitably do. Like the "buy the company with debt raised against the company assets" that became popular in the early 2000's and directly lead to the collapse of a number of large companies when their market share declined and they could no longer service the debt incurred in buying themselves. As happened with Toys 'R Us.. (and nearly has happened with Dell).
I've never seen a server with a "boot from OneDrive"
No - but Macs can retrieve a fresh copy of MacOS directly over the internet[1]. Saved my bacon a few times..
[1] Which, of course doesn't work when everything goes out through a proxy that requires authentication.
I have a hard time understanding why all the other Linux distros joined hands with Redhat and implemented that thing, systemd
Several reasons:
A lot of other distros use Redhat (or Fedora) as their base and then customise it.
A lot of other distros include things dependant on systemd (Gnome being the one with biggest dependencies - you can just about to get it to run without systemd but it's a pain and every update will break your fixes).
Redhat has a lot of clout.
but I'm pretty sure an 286 could have run a pre-emptive multitasking OS
It did (sort of) - it was called QEMM (later QEMM/386). My old PS/2 50z[1] with an expanded RAM card did it quite happily. Enabled me to run Ultima (6?) while the IBM 3270 emulator sat in the background (and it was pretty finicky about being able to respond to incoming events..)
[1] The old IBM sort, not the new-fangled games machine. Had a 50khz 286 chip with *zero* wait states for the memory. What a beast it was. Could run OS/2 (the early versions - not Warp) and was used for travel agency machines.
Could we please go back to IBM/370 Assembler? That was vaguely understandable
And, even more importantly (under TPF anyway) didn't use stacks..
Of course, what it *did* use (a dedicated 4k block that every programme segment in the chain had access to) was just as bad. You put some data into your reserved address (EBW000+150), only to find that some numpty down the chain was also using it (but hadn't told anyone) and so when control gets passed back to you your data is essentially randomised.
That's why good mainframe shops have QA departments with real teeth - to stop idiocy like that.
And it actually costs us less than buying Office + Exchange + Server licences + support.
But at the cost of having all your end-user data living on someone elses computer and under someone elses control. In effect, you have outsourced your security to someone else - someone who only cares about you continuing to pay them..
You might feel comfortable with that but I'm not.
Back EMF blew a couple largish transistors. Turned the steel caps inside out [...} then through the acoustical tile ceiling
Yup. My experiments with 12v transistors (see above) resulted in a number of holes in the drop-ceiling. Mind you, the tiles were only expanded polystyrene.. (this was the mid-80's after all).
Effectively a huge resistor doing double duty as a bar heater - yes, it glowed red.
Old bar heaters were exactly that - one big coil of resistance wire coiled round a big ceramic bar. They relied on the fact that they were really, really hot to discourage people from touching the bare wires..
Later ones coddled the users by adding a glass sleive over the wires.
MiL had one still in the late 1980's. When she switched it on you could see the electricity meter rev up to 5000 RPM..
The new-fangled transistors were less forgiving. They didn't even emit magic smoke - they just died.
In the early 80's I went through a phase of testing how much current/voltage a standard 12v transistor could take (I was supposed to be doing my AO-Level Electronics but that was boring..).
I managed to get them up to 240v but at that voltage they tended to glow like an LED for a couple of seconds and then pop the top off with some vigour.. I gave up when the Electronic teacher discovered what I was doing and stopped me on health grounds.. (his, not mine! He nearly got a heart-attack when he saw how many transistors I'd experimented on..)
Is it really a surprise when in the late '80s Computer Studies
<Grump>
I wasn't allowed to do A-level Computer Studies since I hadn't done O-Level CS. I pointed out that I'd been coding (in hand-assembler no less, thereafter in BBC Basic) since I was 12 and offered to take the O-Level paper to prove it.
School wasn't interested. So, in revenge, I managed to fail A-Level Chemistry and Physics - just to spite them (honest!). I managed to scrape a pass in A-level Biology though. I ended up going off to college to do BTEC Certificate in Computer Technology (which I passed with distinction).
</Grump>
I knew exactly what he had done at that point..
Likewise. Especially more or less since the same thing had happened to us - just got our first shipment of brand new (386?) desktops directly from Taiwan.
We were used to buying stuff from UK vendors and so didn't bother checking the power supply settings. Cue one whole benchful of new machines going pop..
(Supplier eventually agreed to replace those machines - about 30% of the rest of the first batch and the next batch were DOA anyway due to build problems and our account rep was told that the next batch had to be better (and all the DOA machines replaced free) or not only would he get no more business from us but we'd see him in court. Since we were their first UK customer[1] he managed to get it sorted - but only after he spoke to the head of the company directly).
[1] Which we didn't know about until after.. we wouldn't have touched them with someone else's bargepole if we had known.
The directors should personally deliver copies of the data to the registered home of each person on their list
Hell no! If I was on the list I wouldn't want any of them coming anywhere near my house - I value my stuff being where it is, not being nicked by a sociopathic ex-director with minimal connections to ethics or morality.
Besides that, my dog is too elderly to chase them.
give up those server passwords right quickly
Or quietly mumble the word "l0ftcrack"[1] when the Police ask..
(If the Police and Courts have physical access to the servers then getting the local admin passwords isn't that hard - non-trivial, but not hard).
[1] Or whatever its called nowadays. May days of using such tools are (sadly) past.
Are you still taking the dried frog pills ?
No - the sole FDA-approved manufacturer got bought out and the new owner raised the price by 5000%..
(Just one of the many, many reasons why I'm glad I don't live in the US. I'd be paying more than my years salary for health insurance+medicines - if I could get insured. Which, now that some states allow people with pre-existing conditions to be refused cover, I probably wouldn't be. So, at best, I'd be bed-ridden. Worst case, I'd be dead from long-term hyperglycaemia)
They DO fall down if you push them hard enough
As does the cat of ours with the nickname of Weeble.. but she also possesses claws and will happily use them on anyone trying to push her over/away from her food bowl[1]..
[1] Hence the name Weeble. Her other nickname is "grand pyramid".. Or, as the vet put it: "somewhere inside that cat is a thin cat trying to get out". My response "not trying very hard".. Dieting one cat in a multi-cat household (with a couple of very timid rescue cats) isn't a viable option.
Freaky things happen at very low frequencies
As was proved in a survey of various 'spooky' (in the paranormal, not political sense) sites. Testing showed that quite a few of them have higher levels of infrasound (under 20hz). And lab tests have showed that those frequencies can engender panic, alarm and anxiety.
what they mean by American exceptionalism
They take exeption to anything invented elsewhere?
(Especially those eevill commies in Yrope.Why - they believe in *socialised* medicine that delivers better outcomes for less money! How is Big Pharma and hospitals gonna make money out of that eh?)
All that's needed is to change the power plug to 2-prong
And make sure that the power supply *really* does multi-voltage.. Been there, done that and got the slightly charred result (handheld card reader we were evaluating, supposedly should auto-switch between 120v/240v. Didn't. Released magic smoke. Didn't buy any more of that model..)
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