Posts by jake

Re: Customers

Prestel didn't connect to the Internet.

Re: Customers

Télétel's Minitel terminals were not set-top boxes, and did not connect to the Internet.

Re: A lot of El Reg Readers really are very old

Hey, I'm not old. Yet.

Here in Sonoma people are saying 50 is the new 30 and 60 is the new 40 ...

_{Give me another 60 or 70 years and we'll talk.}

Re: Customers

"I worked for a company that made set top boxes to access the Internet before PC's became pervasive."

Eh? What country had set-top box Internet access before personal computers were pervasive?

Re: American Midwest

Pulling ground water had nothing to do with the dust bowl. It was severe drought coupled with a lack of understanding dry farming coupled with stripping the existing native grasses in favo(u)r of row crops. This destabilized the topsoil over a wide area and .... well, the rest is history.

Also, the Dust Bowl wasn't in the midwest. It was in the south-east corner of the Great Plains ... Roughly centered on the two counties in the western-most half of the Oklahoma Panhandle, and extending out a couple counties in all directions into Colorado, New Mexico, Texas and Kansas and a couple more counties in Oklahoma. More minor effects extended further into Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.

I have a couple almond trees here (Sonoma, California). I have never irrigated them, ever. They produce roughly the same amount of nuts in wet years as in dry years.

Re: The catch...

"Unfortunately our politicians still cling to the delusion that they can stop it happening"

Dolt be silly. They know damn day well that they can't stop it. What they CAN do is convince enough suckers to re-elect them by paying lip-service to it.

Re: The catch...

"What's the plan for Manhattan after sea level rise, for example?"

Party everywhere else?

"Even Venice, which has known about this problem for decades, has no real plan."

Venice will continue sinking regardless of what sea level does.

"Where does the model suggest that the rain will go?"

What kind of silly question is that? The answer is obviously outside their remit.

Re: American Midwest

As a Californian rancher/farmer, IMO we should ban the growing of rice, cotton and almonds. Those three suck up far more than their share of the state's ag water.

Re: American Midwest

The midwest is more like between the Great Plains and Appalachia. And it's not really mid- or -west.

Re: John Steinbeck

"Grapes" only worked once. Now that people know how nice the Salinas Valley is to live in, you can't afford it.

I should know ... we tried to get a place down there before we found this place.

Mini-splits

"A proper split system costs a bit too much when you consider how few hot days we get in a year."

Mini-splits would be ideal for the British Isles ... they are heat pumps that work both ways. Cool air in the summer, warm in the winter. And they are usually very, very quiet and last virtually forever, if you keep the service up at the proper intervals (mostly just filter changes/cleanings and pressure checks). Well worth the money, IMO. Also, contrary to popular belief, they can be installed by the homeowner (at least here in the US).

Re: (Slackware, just to date this scene)

Every day, for nearly 30 years.

Slackware is the oldest continuously developed distro, and for more than one reason.

If you haven't tried it recently, try it again. I'll bet you'll be surprised.

Window AC

"The half-in half-out, window mounted units are presumably better"

Modern ones actually work quite nicely (if properly sized!), and use less power than you might think.

"most houses have the wrong sort of windows for them."

As long as you can bolt a bracket or two to the outside wall to support them, they will work with any window that they physically fit into. True, you might need to install some sort of blocking material to fill open spaces within the frame, but not taken up by the AC unit, which can get ugly, but what price to pay for cheap comfort? Note that they are usually only good for cooling, they don't work both ways.

At the house in town, we use cheap metal shelf brackets as supports, and 1" closed cell foam insulation cut to size and painted to block the open space. Works nicely.

Re: Once upon a time, long ago..

"Windows 95 has IP stack in the system"

Not unless you sprung for the "Plus!" pack. Microsoft still didn't "get" the Internet at that point. Some can make a pretty good argument that they still don't.

"Windows NT always had IP stack since it first 3.1 version."

For extremely small values of IP stack. Quite frankly, it was the worst approximation of a TCP/IP stack that ever shipped commercially. A small portent of things to come.

Re: air CON

"If you've got snowflakes, your aircon is set too cold..."

It might be the right temperature, but the humidity needs adjusting.

Re: Cooling

That's why we don't allow untreated outside air and inside air to mix in situations like that.

Properly engineered modern air handler systems are truly marvelous to behold.

Re: air CON

Pretty much everywhere I've ever worked there has been a long standing feud between two halves of the population that I can't mention without being accused of being sexist ... One side always says it's too hot, the other side always says it's too cold. Facilities says "set it all to 72F, that's what the HVAC is optimized for" ... and so we listen to pretty much everyone bitch about the temperature.

Until one place I worked at upgraded the AC, and all the controls that go along with it (had to do with a couple of new clean rooms). Naturally, the folks installing all the new gear left all the old thermostats in place. They were no longer connected, so why worry about them. A friend of mine noticed one of the secretaries would inevitably turn one of these controls up, and then keep an eye on it from her desk. Within an hour, one of the engineers would stroll by & turn it down again. Then she'd turn it back up, and so on ... This dance went on all day.

So we hatched up a Plan ... with the Boss's permission, we installed unconnected thermostats quite near both the secretary and the engineer ... and removed the one they were "fighting" over. Now both could happily set "their" temperature to whatever they wanted. It worked. Both were happy, and both commented how comfy the office was with the "new, improved" controls. People in their circle of friends made similar comments. The complaining about the temperature stopped, virtually overnight.

That would have been the end of it, except ever since then I've installed faux thermostats for 'special" people. It has never failed to shut them up about the office temperature. However, be warned ... that type can always find something else to bitch about. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Re: Refrigerant or refrigerating fluid?

Could be a slow leak at a service valve. These Schrader valves are similar to the valves on your car or bike tires.

There are typically two valves ... one on the hot high pressure side, and one on the cold low pressure side. If the itty-bitty o-ring that seals one or the other somehow gets damaged during service, it can appear to the tech that all is operating just fine ... but after the system has been running for a while, cycling on and off and generally vibrating, a valve can fail. An old AC tech once told me to always have the Schrader valves replaced when the system is serviced. Cheap insurance.

Re: This is perfect for a Friday story

Those of us old enough to know better aren't the frogs in the pot, young feller me lad.

Indeed.

Software that is not housebroken and leaves little bits of itself scattered all over the file system should be avoided at all costs. (Are you listening yet, GNOME, systemd and Wayland? No? I thought not ... )

Re: This is why we can’t have nice things

"It’s exactly this kind of thinking that makes multi gigahertz modern systems run like arthritic slugs and means they need gigabytes of memory just to wake up."

It's also the reason that after nearly 30 years of Linux, I still run Slackware.

Re: Quality of life?

I intend to be fit and healthy and live forever, or die in the attempt.

Re: The flaw with crypto...

"in fact one of the items that's suggested for our earthquake kits** is cash in smaller bills."

I know of one Palo Alto neighborhood where a well-meaning housewife organized all the households into preparing earthquake kits one Saturday afternoon (they blocked off a couple streets and made a party out of it). Included in each was about five hundred bucks in smallish bills.

Local teenagers noted this with interest. To make a long story short, by the following weekend, all kits were relieved of their cash.

Moral: Stash your emergency cash somewhere other than in your emergency kit. An Altoids box (or similar small metal box) with the money in a ziplock makes for waterproof and rodent/insect proof.

Epilog: The kids were caught red-handed counting their loot. They did all the gardening in the neighborhood for the following year.

Re: Quality of life?

Jogging's bad for the joints, especially as you get older. Walking is just as effective, and easier on the system. Better, get into swimming.

I'm well past 50. I feel better than I did in my late 20s.

I rather suspect that salt will be the major commodity after societal collapse. It's the one necessity of life that I can't easily produce here post apocalypse, and I'm less than a day's walk from San Francisco Bay! Ever try to move enough ocean water to keep yourself in salt, with just horses for transportation? Try to remember that in this scenario, salt is a preservative for most foodstuffs ...

Various dilutions of Ethanol will also be somewhat valuable, but anybody can make that, pretty much anywhere.

"Fourteen years after the invention of the internet, we still didn't have TCP/IP"

Actually, it was almost exactly 14 years between the first ARPANET connections in 1969 and TCP/IP's "Flag Day" on January 1, 1983.

Note that we had been working on (and testing over the network) TCP/IP for some years prior to it going live.

Re: Not a very good exchange token

"Wembley Stadium apparently serves 40 pints per second at halftime."

They clearly need more taps!

Re: Gold vs electricity

"It's a mystery to me why gold has always been "valuable""

Get thee to a place where you can learn to pan. I recommend anywhere on the Fraser River in BC (you'll always find gold anywhere on the Fraser ... small bits, but gold nonetheless).

I have yet to meet a single person who hasn't panned a little gold for themselves that hasn't immediately understood. There is something about the look and feel of the stuff, especially right out of a cold river, that can not be matched by anything else.

Be careful. It's addictive ... but there are worse hobbies. At least this ones out in the fresh air.