Posts by Lord Kipper III

Re: "an on-prem email server"

They are? Thermal management in space is really quite difficult (unless permanently in the dark but that then makes solar panels not too functional).

Re: Performant?

Multics seem to to have a hold on universities in that part of the UK, us engineering undergraduates at Cardiff in mid to late eighties had the use of a Multics system although Fortran and Pafec was the limits of our excitement.

https://www.airshipsonline.com/airships/ss500/Zorin.htm

Re: Lack of plannng

The gas fired Didcot B power station is just over the fence with also the old open cycle gas turbine generators (Rolls-Royce Avon powered for the power generation geeks) also still there. The original connection to the Nation Grid 400 kV infrastructure is still there also. 84 MW of diesel generators on site though - surely some opportunity for batteries such as those being installed across the UK by the likes of Pivot Power with the opportunity for Amazon to trade the batteries in the UK power market although their primary function would still be keeping the servers and support infrastructure running.

I take your Gemini 49 and raise you my Psion Wavefinder, can't say if it still works though as the last OS it had drivers for was XP.

Re: Not a Cossie, but...

Car Magazine once observed that the fastest vehicle seen on the UK motorways would be a white Astra van.

Re: Often overlooked

Fear not, we simply beam Slim Whitman to deal with the invasion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSbigjiKLoU

A common practice in my undergraduate days 30+ years ago running PAFEC jobs on our university MULTICS system. With deadlines due too many of us would be on and slowing things down. Some would be over confident, set the job running then go to the students union/pub only to return to discover that mysteriously their job had ceased to be. Can't possibly think how that could happen.

Skill now practised as a tool to stop my youngest son playing Minecraft on the desktop at meal times. He's not figured yet that I can connect to the Linux machine using SSH from my Chromebook and remotely shut the machine down.

Re: Low earth orbits will be unusable ...

Well, it has happened (although in Mexico and not in actual space);

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoE4m8RqOWs

The Story Of How The CIA Stole & Returned A Soviet Spacecraft Before Being Noticed

Re: "278 fscking MB!!! For a printer!!"

Does CUPS in Linux offer direct cat photo printing?

Asking for a friend.

I'd expect more than a large GDPR fine from my partner (or indeed someone else's partner) if I were following the football on my phone whilst, ahem, partaking of some horizontal jogging.

I briefly hovered over the 'report abuse' option but then thought that El Reg is a broad church and perhaps the gnome has an equally broad mind.

Re: Re:Victorian railways had a few exploding boiler incidents

As a young boiler maintenance engineer at Didcot Power Station in the early 1990s,the coal fired boilers had several safety relief valves dotted around the boiler operating at various pressures. Sometimes the valves would just begin to pass steam at normal operating pressure and make a noise which would put us in breach of our noise limits so we would have to drop load. Less MW generated meant less £ so especially in the winter we were encouraged to fit a device called a gag that would force the valve stem down onto the seat to stop the valve passing. This of course meant that the valve could no longer serve its intended function but as we had sufficient other valves and a repair would be immediately scheduled. One evening I was asked to install the gag on one especially noisy simmering valve but having applied the recommended force to the gag the valve was still passing steam noisily. I phoned the Charge Engineer (shift manager) reporting failure and that I was giving up and going home for my tea to be told to try a little more force as this evening, MW were really quite expensive and the suits in HQ would be quite disappointed that load would have to be reduced. I tried a little harder, still no success and was joined by a colleague offering a large spanner to apply more force to the gag. At this point I concluded that I did not wish my life to end in a sudden bang and steam whiteout due to the safety valve body splitting apart due to the use of unreasonable force, invented some Engineering Directive (a bit like Space Corps Directives but less funny) about the use of gags and went home.

Re: You ever wonder?

Why wait ten years. Come on, you know you want to...

Re: Coming home

Sheer jealousy mainly because they don't live there but of course there is Swindon's epic Magic Roundabout (oh just Google it!) which is nearly unique in the UK (and would absolutely terrify most American drivers who freak at the prospect of a normal roundabout).

Disclaimer, in don't live in Swindon but live sufficiently close to appreciate it from a suitable distance.

Re: BT HomeHub?

I too had concluded that our BT Home Hub 5 was living up to its (perhaps unfair?) reputation of being terrible due to frequent Wifi problems at home preventing our teenagers from using their gadgets and me watching Star Trek on Netflix via Chromecast and I was on the cusp of binning it and buying someone else's router. First step on that BTexit journey was the £18 Openreach VDSL modem off ebay. Next step was finding a router that did not resemble a randy porcupine that Mrs Sinclair would be happy to see on the telephone table in our hall (in fairness, the Home Hub is relatively anonymous looking except when being hit by angy teenagers who can't find the reset button). As an interim, I plugged in a Home Hub 4 that I had serving up wifi in our garage and that appears to be working fine so far.

So it would be Google and not BT I have to blame for this personalised DDOS system that out four Chromecasts are providing (three permanently on and one plugged into the TV USB port). Thanks a bundle Google, at least I didn't splash out a sizable sum for a replacement router (although that's only because I couldn't get my wife's permission to buy something that had the performance plus bells and whistles).

Over to you Google.

Re: Didn't they used to have a flywheel?

I was a graduate trainee at Didcot power station in the early 1990s and the control engineers desk had a special light marked JET Pulse that would flash when they spooled the machine up to warm the plant operators. Very impressive to see the impact the pulse had on the local system.