Posts by jake

I finally have the parts to complete my Amdahl 470 V5 restoration.

Where the hell am I going to put the bloody thing?

Hopefully I can shuffle the kit in the machineroom/museum/mausoleum/morgue around enough to fit it in ...

If that's not "computer storage", I don't know what is ;-)

Most murders are gang, drug, alcohol or sex related.

And in that order (at least here in California). I'm talking 95+%.

Not a single one of the killers I'm typing about even thinks about it before doing the deed. Laws, and the threat of punishment don't enter the picture. It's an emotion-based thing, brought on by poor up-bringing (for the most part), IMNESHO.

Might not be politically correct to state it, but the male children of un-married mothers in the inner-cities are by far the largest percentage of murderers here in CA.

Gut feeling is that the worst problem is people living in hamster-habitats. We're built to be small-group hunter-gatherers, not spoon-fed masses.

The other problem is welfare mothers smacking their kids around, thus teaching the kids that violence is a good way to get your point across.

I have no answers.

ACs are funny :-)

Last night, I was at xx73 "thumbs up" and xx37 "thumbs down"[1].

Tonight, I'm at xx77 "up" and xx71 "down"[2].

In twenty four hours (or so), a time period that I didn't actually post anything new in, I had four "up" and thirty four "down", for reasons which I don't understand. Apparently, I picked up another AC fanboi/grrl who is afraid to actually comment on whatever I wrote that irritated it. I feel sorry for the poor sap.

Speak up if you have an opinion, kids! It's just ASCII :-)

[1] I noticed the inverted 73/37 in the tens & ones columns as a passing curiosity[3]

[2] No, I'm not going to tell anyone the actual numbers. They are meaningless.

[3] I'm a computer geek, I see patterns, so shoot me.

Whatever.

We've been Microsoft-free here at chez-jake for a couple years.

The constant "upgrade" and "make certain I'm protected" cycle got old ...

But if you like it ... follow your bliss. Who am I to argue?

Awesome. Thank you, Jordan!

I'm downloading the code as I type ... My eldest niece (13 years old) has an interest in programming close to the hardware. Dunno why ... Probably my fault :-)

This will be a wonderful tool for any teacher who understands that there is no such thing as software ... software is merely the current state of the hardware.

Gawd/ess. The mind boggles.

You are tired. Go to bed. Sleep. How hard is it?

Playing with miscellaneous crap doth not a relaxing snore make.

If you are crossing multiple timezones, melatonin helps ...

My take.

1) Too small for decent heat, either fast and hot or low & slow. Useless. Not a kitchen gadget, either.

2) Friends don't let friends make "packet" food. This is doubly true for coffee & tea. Quintuply true for anything chocolate.

3) I use a stick blender (under US$30) and a pot.

4) Acme 180. Can be motorized, but it's hardly necessary. US$90-ish. The extra 30cm actually makes sense occasionally. Lasagna comes to mind.

5) Useless bit of kit ... unless you are trying to say "look at me! I'm a pretentious twat who knows nothing about wine!"

6) I usually make toast under the broiler ... or under the salamander if I'm in a hurry and trying to feed a bunch of people. When it's just the wife & I, I use a US$17 Hamilton Beach four-slot toaster.

7) Mu. I have proper fryers. Nothing else need apply, IMO.

8) My refrigeration is handled by True, Delfield & Traulsen ... but on the rare occasion that I want to cool a beer down in a hurry, I spin it in a bath of ice-water. Only takes a couple minutes.

9) Victorignox "Fibrox" 8-inch chef's knife ... We use 'em for damn near everything. Under US$40.

10) See "stick blender", above.

What do they expect?

No roots.

We've been doing what passes for "modern IT" here in the SF Bay Area for half a century. Over there? Maybe a dozen or so years; a decade with any seriousness. The kids they are hiring think knowledge of Redmond or Cupertino's products is equivalent to having a working grasp of ones & zeros. So does the manglement doing the hiring.

Here's a hint: It don't work that way.

Monkey with a screwdriver.

About twenty five years ago, the test technician in charge of testing OEM[1] parts returned by our corporate customers was busted for recommending perfectly good, but badly configured (by the customer) parts to the scrap heap. His buddy, in turn, bought the "scrap" for pennies on the dollar (or less ... ). I figured his scam out when he scrapped a perfectly good Sun 3/260 ... I had borrowed the power-supply, legally (all paperwork done), out of MRB [2] to test one of my test boxen that had gone tits-up. The silly twit hadn't noticed that it was in MRB simply because it was supposed to have 16 megs of RAM, not 8 megs.

We documented similar thefts for a week or so, and called in the cops. They got a warrant, and searched his house ... finding over 1.5 million US$ in perfectly good hardware. He was arrested, and released on his own recognition a couple days later, pending trial.

A couple days later, he wandered onto our campus "after hours", calmly ::snipped:: the ground wire to the 400amp service providing power to the building he had worked out of, opened the electrical panel, removed the safety panel, used an insulated screwdriver to loosen the neutral wire from the bus, and linesman's pliers to pull the neutral, instantly sending 240 Volts through any 120V kit that was plugged in and powered up. Killed coffee pots, microwaves, fridges, radios on desks, lights, desktop computers ... and the security cameras. He's lucky he didn't burn the place down. Fortunately, the VCR tape containing the video was undamaged.

He didn't know that I had fixed the security cameras that he had disabled (probably, I don't know for a fact, but he smirked at the camera above the service panel ...).

He did roughly $325,000 damage in a couple seconds. And 2 years inside, with 5 years probation. He never worked in the high-tech world again, to the best of my knowledge.

[1] "Original Equipment Manufacturer" ... kit built by other corporations that we configured & resold alongside our own home-built kit.

[2] "Manufacturing Review Board" ... anything that shipped had to go through Manufacturing for final QA, even if we didn't build it. If it b0rked in the field, Manufacturing was in charge of figuring out why bad gear made it out into the field with our name on it.

Minor correction.

This concept isn't quite correct: "How could a network that was designed to be so robust it could withstand a nuclear attack" ...

What we now call "The Internet" was designed to be a research network to research networking. That's it. The "survive nuclear attack" meme came after it started becoming mainstream ... for values of mainstream that include "available in the dorms, if you have a terminal, know how to pull wire, or can afford two modems & two telephone lines".

I'll re-read the article and commentardary later and decide if I have anything further to add to the conversation ...