Posts by jake

Re: Prelude to Mars

They aren't sending you to Mars with a specific brand of beer, they are sending you to Mars with the raw ingredients to make beer. Nobody says you have to make a Bud clone. And who would want to ... it's a lot harder than you might think. Simple Ales are a lot easier to make than American industrial lagers. If you don't believe me, try it.

Re: Prelude to Mars

Did you typoe "Pot still ..."?

Re: Prelude to Mars

The object isn't to export it, silly ... the object is to produce it for local consumption.

Re: About the same time that ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Brinker,_or_The_Silver_Skates#Origin_of_the_story_of_the_boy_and_the_dike

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." —Samuel Langhorne Clemens

Re: This is one comman you never, ever type in - whoops.

"The smart thing is to type it into an editor, and when you both agree that it's perfect, cut-and-paste (without newline)."

Copy & paste can be fat-fingered, too. Turn it into a script. I have many one-line scripts, each named with a longish descriptive name that is often longer than the actual complex, dangerous command.

Re: From Experience (and In Hindsight)...

Or, if you prefer, molly-guard.

Re: DIKE

"It's a fairytale, made up by an American and not based on any facts, so who cares?"

You just pissed off a whole bunch of Star Trek and Star Wars fans ...

Re: About the same time that ...

And here I thought Venice was in Los Angeles ...

Re: About the same time that ...

My big Dic[0] also says it has been spelled variously "dic", "dik" and "diyke". Perhaps we can infer that the British can't actually spell at all. Doth the lady protest too much?

Ah, well. This kind of esoterica all Greek to most people. As long as the meaning is obvious, does it really matter in a forum like this one?

[0] OED, second dead tree edition.

Re: About the same time that ...

Offa died in the 6th Century. Dike was the common spelling (in English) starting some 800 years later. These days they no longer bother to teach spleling, near as I can tell. R U OK W dat?

Re: Paper White...

Oh, I dunno. I've seen a close approximation to 99FF33 ...

Re: DIKE

Sarah? Is that you?

Oddly enough ...

... you just did.

About the same time that ...

... schools stopped teaching kids how to spell "dike".

"Don't crush that person of short stature, hand me the side-cutters" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

Re: Thermal Incident

"you will get a contact nicotine buzz"

No, I will not. I refuse to work on that kind of hazmat, and have done since I first started working on computers. The interior of a smoker's computer is the epitome of narsty ... Several people I know quit smoking when I pointed out that their lungs undoubtedly looked and smelled worse than the mess inside their computers.

Re: Ahhhh

The theory I've heard from clients investigating DevOps is that QA is overhead, so who needs it? To which I respond "So is Janitorial." ... They usually get the message.

Re: Thermal Incident

Corrosive air can elude the thought processes of the unwary ... In the mid-80s, I was working for a company that built gear to dynamically allocate bandwidth between voice and data.

Incredibly Big Monster of a company started getting weird bit errors on their global T1 (E1, T3 etc ... ) network. I was assigned to track down the problem after lower level techs couldn't figure it out.

Going thru' the data, I discovered that once the problem started occurring at any one site, it gradually became worse ... It was never bad enough to actually take down a connection, but network errors ramped up over time.

Further review showed that the same team of installers had installed the gear at all the sites with the problem.

I flew out to Boca and discovered that they had installed punch-down blocks in a janitor's closet ... directly over a mop bucket full of ammonia water. Seems it was the only wall space that was unused almost universally in such spaces.

Blocks relocated and corroded wire replaced, no more bit-errors ...

Re: Thermal Incident

Here, they smell of horse. Even the ones in the machineroom/museum/mausoleum/morgue that supposedly breathe properly filtered air.

Re: Thermal Incident

"To be fair, C7000 enclosures very rarely catch fire"

Only true if you're not fully versed in the proper application of thermite.

Re: Some good rugged laptops from yesterjob.

"cant beat Panasonic for sheer strength - and bulk!!"

You got THAT right ... I used to carry a Panasonic Sr. Partner. 38 pounds of luggable (including case, modem, manuals & floppies). At least it had a built-in printer. I still have it. You get attached to the daftest things after a quarter million air-miles together.

Mine has an MFM controller in the expansion slot, a 20 meg hard drive in one of the floppy bays, and an aftermarket hack that upped the stock 256K of RAM to a more usable768K. I used an external modem. Yes, it still works. Came with Panasonic-labeled MS-DOS 2.2, but it currently boots MS-DOS 3.3 ... It might be hard for some of the younger readers to believe, but a LOT of RealWorld[tm] work was done with such primitive devices.

Re: We must...

In this modern world, it'll be the opposite ... One bad kid used a Doogee as a weapon, so all phones obviously must be banned.

Re: If I have enough lego to need sorting

I see your three-pin plugs (literally, they are HUGE) and raise you an eight-pin DIP ... The venerable 555 has a habit of landing pins-up just exactly where my heel is going to come down. I've stepped on 6 of the damn things over the years ... all drew blood, two of them left bits behind in the bone, requiring removal by a surgeon. No other IC has ever assaulted me, just the 555. Is it paranoia when they really are out to get you?

Re: If I have enough lego to need sorting

Not servants. Children. Well, it worked for me anyway ... by the time I had amassed enough to have issues with the sorting, along came the next generation.

Re: So they can detect a disturbance in laser intensity

Look up TDR (time-domain reflectometry). Various versions of this have been an essential tool in my network troubleshooting kit for decades. This thingie is just a enhanced variation on the theme, and a cool, useful new tool.

Re: Microphones made from glass

Carbon mics are still in use today. I have one at my elbow as I type ... it's a 1950s Model 500 Western Electric rotary dial telephone ... It still works perfectly, and is the only phone I use in my office. (Yes, my telco still supports pulse dial ... and when it drops that support, I'll install the circuitry to convert the phone to DTMF.)

As a side note, will any of the equipment you have purchased this year still work and be in daily operation 65ish years from now? I fear we are losing something very, very important in our throw-away society ...

Re: Mass-produced

They don't look all the same. Not at all. In fact, when I first saw that photo, I thought "Phineas, Franklin & Freddy" ...

Re: SMS

"how are you turning your Christmas lights on this year?"

You still run low quality strings of mains powered lights through dead, drying fuel full of accelerant? And you allow this fire waiting to happen inside your house? How quaint. Does your insurance agent know?