An old friend of mine, the late Bob Long (W6QBN) once spoke of an incident when he was a tech at CDC many years ago. "Seymour hated phones" he said. One day he came to visit the Arbor Vitae Cybernet site in Los Angeles and everyone carefully removed all the telephones that would be in his path.
Unfortunately, one phone was overlooked, a hand set in the corner of the room that was dedicated to the use of just such an acoustic coupler. Murphy being an employee of the installation, the phone rang just as he walked through while talking to a couple of colleagues. Seymour ripped it out of the wall, opened a window and threw it out. "He didn't change his stride or even comment on it."
Ahh, acoustic couplers -- remember whistling into the phone and getting one to send an ack?
Inspired by a superb role model, the US Department of the Interior wants to "index all the world's fingerprints". I mean, why stop at the border? Offer it as a free service that offers paper stars - enough paper stars and you get a pony. A free pony.
Asshat, if a black hole went anywhere near us, the whole world would be compressed into a singularity. STUPID!
And if all inane Slashdot comments were somehow rendered in new matter, we would soon achieve three solar masses ourselves* and become our own planetary black hole.
Then again, there is the issue of piracy itself. I am concerned that people with cutlasses and bad teeth (presumably from carrying the cutlasses that way) board our ships, shoot the captain and take his music away from him.
Oh my oh my, nothing like a good solid metaphor for loading both barrels with buckshot and implication. Loaded language is a big culprit here. Piracy is so much more villainous than copying, isn't it? You'd have to be against dirty, scary pirates. Whereas "copyist" makes you think of monks and parchment. Nope, gotta load it first...
I sincerely hope and wish the gentleman would read all the comments in this thread. It would be interesting to see what direction the new CEO of Sony would take if the previous one most unfortunately expired from a ruptured aorta.
Much more frightening is that forensic recovery of some years ago; you save the tapes, have the hardware and put it all together just like your DRP plan of the same era you pulled out of the dusty safe says to do. A grateful exec thanks you, waits for a bit, then says -- "now, what was my password seven years ago?"
Why is this. I have only ever been able to make X-windows work over private networks.
Not sure this is indicative, but I remember the old Vaxstation X-windows systems I used long ago tended to use UDP a bit too freely, and could have benefited by the use of TCP session connect protocol. I remember having looked into the protocols used in contrast to the Xerox 3150 (I think it was) large laser printer I was trying to integrate at the time. If I remember correctly (and there's no guarantee of that) the Xerox interpretation of certain standard protocols was not always the common interpretation. That is, they seemed to conform to the written standard but not to anyone else (there were many problems networking Xerox printers than other third parties during the NT 3.51-4.0 era, for example).
I read the Red Book series of X.500 documents once, sometime later (a directory spec, not directly related to X-windows and only mentioned here for illustration) and developed the opinion that the networked world relied more surely on conventions than standards, because a lot of published standards seemed to be more philosophy than actual format definitions.
Things may have changed, but I'm still in a fairly continuous, mild state of astonishment that we can plug things together at all and have them work.
Actually, I think the misspelled word "intergration" is rather funny. There's a small office building on a corner near where I live with an upstairs office window offering "systems intergration services". I've had much fun wondering about the cross-section of their clientele. Would they be people who didn't notice the misspelling, didn't care, or perhaps thought "They must be technical, because it's clear they can't spell" -- or, even worse, think it's a good variation on a word based on "integral". Philosophically, "integral" relates more about mathematics than systems interfaces. Then I think -- perhaps "intergrate" is a more correct usage than "integrate", as it often deals with the inter- -- Internet, internal, etc.
But the more rational part of me just thinks "lol they cant spellX0r" and gives it a rest.
Spelling is still fluid, and variations don't bother me despite my being something of a traditionalist that way. What truly bothers me is errors in grammar that stop the flow of thought and corrupt the meaning of a sentence, e.g. "these softwares that we have to install". Plurals... almost as bad as selecting the wrong homonymic form of "there".
Sheesh, now don't I come across as a bloody wanker. Back to Joomla before I start thinking again.
The problem with word docs goes beyond business philosophy. Technically the file format is a bit of a mess, and OLAP was it's name oh. It's complex, format piled upon format and probably not well understood (they haven't really improved their office suite materially since Joel Spolsky left, imho).
I do not equate complexity with sophistication, myself, but then I'm just a very old geek and I could be wrong.
It wasn't quite so bad in the olden days, where you got paid at an appropriate level that matched the level of aggro you had to undergo. After a while slaving away for the good of the system gets very, very old. Maybe we don't need a couple of trades, but there are times when I think we could use a tradesman's attitude.
But even if they don't shower that often, as long as no germs are added, their immune system can probably cope with
Unless you're talking about biochemistry, that's kind of missing the point. The point of a chemist washing their hands first is an entirely different matter from the normal daily biohazards. Your immune system may be able to cope with the odd germ, but how is it going to handle trichloroethylene?
Sort of depends on where the water's coming from, doesn't it? I remember once when the water piping in an old -- think it was a 360/95 or some such oddity -- failed (yes, it was a looong time ago) and the area under the false floor flooded. This was before Ethernet and the floor was a rats nest of individual terminal cables (not from the 360) -- hundreds of them, along with power cabling. The real problem surfaced (so to speak) some time later, when the actual rodents who did make a rats nest of it displayed the properties of dissolved urea and the effect of said resultant acid on the pre-teflon (I did say it was a while ago) cable insulation.
Needless to say, it was a rat shit situation, and I was never more glad that I'd gone down the software track. Nobody wanted to get anywhere near the network guys for a while.
Slashdot Mirror
An old friend of mine, the late Bob Long (W6QBN) once spoke of an incident when he was a tech at CDC many years ago. "Seymour hated phones" he said. One day he came to visit the Arbor Vitae Cybernet site in Los Angeles and everyone carefully removed all the telephones that would be in his path.
Unfortunately, one phone was overlooked, a hand set in the corner of the room that was dedicated to the use of just such an acoustic coupler. Murphy being an employee of the installation, the phone rang just as he walked through while talking to a couple of colleagues. Seymour ripped it out of the wall, opened a window and threw it out. "He didn't change his stride or even comment on it."
Ahh, acoustic couplers -- remember whistling into the phone and getting one to send an ack?
Inspired by a superb role model, the US Department of the Interior wants to "index all the world's fingerprints". I mean, why stop at the border? Offer it as a free service that offers paper stars - enough paper stars and you get a pony. A free pony.
In other news, the Crosby estate sues Microsoft for violation of trade dress in re: "Bing's Greatest Hits" volumes 1 through 94.
Asshat, if a black hole went anywhere near us, the whole world would be compressed into a singularity. STUPID!
And if all inane Slashdot comments were somehow rendered in new matter, we would soon achieve three solar masses ourselves* and become our own planetary black hole.
*I'm working on it. I'm on a diet, ok?
Its Europe, send packages of condoms in the mail and directions to orgies. That will keep those buggers warm.
Don't bother sending them to England, they don't do that over there.
Hmm... so that's where he got them...
Love the first line of the summary. That's proper nerdery, that is.
And if you read the language they are written in. Also known as recognizing the file format. So even durable papyrus only addressed half the issue
Perhaps less than half. How do you determine the password on those old papyrii? They're obviously encrypted. Product of two primates perhaps?
Oh my oh my, nothing like a good solid metaphor for loading both barrels with buckshot and implication. Loaded language is a big culprit here. Piracy is so much more villainous than copying, isn't it? You'd have to be against dirty, scary pirates. Whereas "copyist" makes you think of monks and parchment. Nope, gotta load it first ...
I sincerely hope and wish the gentleman would read all the comments in this thread. It would be interesting to see what direction the new CEO of Sony would take if the previous one most unfortunately expired from a ruptured aorta.
Much more frightening is that forensic recovery of some years ago; you save the tapes, have the hardware and put it all together just like your DRP plan of the same era you pulled out of the dusty safe says to do. A grateful exec thanks you, waits for a bit, then says -- "now, what was my password seven years ago?"
Why is this. I have only ever been able to make X-windows work over private networks.
Not sure this is indicative, but I remember the old Vaxstation X-windows systems I used long ago tended to use UDP a bit too freely, and could have benefited by the use of TCP session connect protocol. I remember having looked into the protocols used in contrast to the Xerox 3150 (I think it was) large laser printer I was trying to integrate at the time. If I remember correctly (and there's no guarantee of that) the Xerox interpretation of certain standard protocols was not always the common interpretation. That is, they seemed to conform to the written standard but not to anyone else (there were many problems networking Xerox printers than other third parties during the NT 3.51-4.0 era, for example).
I read the Red Book series of X.500 documents once, sometime later (a directory spec, not directly related to X-windows and only mentioned here for illustration) and developed the opinion that the networked world relied more surely on conventions than standards, because a lot of published standards seemed to be more philosophy than actual format definitions.
Things may have changed, but I'm still in a fairly continuous, mild state of astonishment that we can plug things together at all and have them work.
If I tilde once, I tilde a thousand times - & means derefrence. I octothorpe you one for that.
But the more rational part of me just thinks "lol they cant spellX0r" and gives it a rest.
Sheesh, now don't I come across as a bloody wanker. Back to Joomla before I start thinking again.
You misspelled "intergration"
I do not equate complexity with sophistication, myself, but then I'm just a very old geek and I could be wrong.
Sometimes I do feel like I screwed up
It wasn't quite so bad in the olden days, where you got paid at an appropriate level that matched the level of aggro you had to undergo. After a while slaving away for the good of the system gets very, very old. Maybe we don't need a couple of trades, but there are times when I think we could use a tradesman's attitude.
(A few good stories too.... Cisco does not play well with bat guano...)
Neither does Crisco.
Cue the war stories -- please -- they're fun, and it's Monday here...
But even if they don't shower that often, as long as no germs are added, their immune system can probably cope with
Unless you're talking about biochemistry, that's kind of missing the point. The point of a chemist washing their hands first is an entirely different matter from the normal daily biohazards. Your immune system may be able to cope with the odd germ, but how is it going to handle trichloroethylene?
Answer: Not as well.
Hell, I can do that too. It's the getting it back together and running that's the trick.
Itemised bill: Hammer tap, 1ea. @ $0.05. Knowing where to hit, 1ea. @ $24,999.95
It's all just semantics until one of our desktops demands the vote.
(ducks)
Well there are those who have said that the best thing about my blog are the comments
The best thing about any blog is the comments. Who comes to Slashdot to read the articles?
Needless to say, it was a rat shit situation, and I was never more glad that I'd gone down the software track. Nobody wanted to get anywhere near the network guys for a while.