Posts by jake

Re: A switch...

Hey, everyone who is anyone uses British style plugs. Place like Uganda, Indonesia, Singapore, UAE ... Was there anywhere else? Oh, yes, China, well known for their safe and sane wiring practices.

Re: Toshiba?

"Any time fot no reason at all."

Typo in the config files?

Re: A switch...

It's a leftover from their post-war austerity program. Keeps electrons from wastefully leaking out when the socket is not in use.

_{I learned not to correct folks who told me that when I lived in Blighty ...}

Re: Reset Buttons

That box is on the same shelf as the breakout boxes, in a former stationary cupboard down in the lab.

Re: Reset Buttons

"Where can you find a paper clip to reset/default that box nowadays?"

Pencil tray in the top center drawer of my desk. Also, most of my toolboxen will have various sizes of paperclips rattling around in them somewhere. The desk down in the kitchen has a small square plastic box with a round magnet at the top that is full of various sizes of paperclips. Refills are in boxes on the "junk shelf" in the pantry, along side binder clips, various kinds of push pins and thumb tacks, staples, household glue and various kinds of tape, post-its, new decks of cards, a couple boxes of strike-anywhere matches, half a dozen types of string, toothpicks, and the like.

Picture a data center in the basement of a tall building in San Francisco's financial district. Card punch up against a wall, near the ancient Otis heavy goods lift. Every now and again, at seemingly random times, the punch generated errors for a couple characters. Nobody could figure out why, not even IBM's field circus dudes.

Until IBM was traipsing in and out one fine weekend, upgrading who knows what hardware, as only IBM could. Someone (ahem) noticed that the gibberish was being generated about ten seconds before the elevator doors opened.

Turned out that the motor for the lift was drawing so much current when it first started that it was inducing errors in the punch on the other side of the wall. Nobody put two and two together prior to this because the lift rarely went into the basement (that level was key-protected) ... until IBM was in and out that morning.

Once I figured it out, and could reproduce the problem at will, a little shielding (spec'd, provided and installed by IBM, gratis!) made it go away permanently.

Even more likely to bring the SEC down on one if one's planning an IPO ...

Who were you, again?

Re: A good swift kick

No, Winkypop never professed love for the elon-thing. Quite the opposite, in fact.

In the vernacular, WTF are you babbling about?

"Cue Yakkity Sax!"

At one tenth normal speed?

Re: "its operator, who was nearby"

Drinking beer and harassing a little old lady remotely.

Just the toy for the cowardly wannabee lager lout on your xmas list.

Re: The robot was about to steal the woman's bag

Playing hockey and getting paid for it, of course!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Smith_(ice_hockey)

Not kidnapped.

Stolen, although I prefer the word "salvaged". Plan it in advance, keep it legal!

Remember, it's an it, a thing, a tool[0], and nothing else.

_{[0] A tool used by tools to harass old ladies. It's going to get worse, mark my words ...}

Re: Ah...

You clearly misheard ... it's the land of the FEE.

Re: Should-Be Obvious Failure

That's just it ... it wasn't a programmer. It was a jive-coder.

Re: Since when was it a perfect stranger's job ...

I categorically deny your premise.

Newsom and the rest of the California legislature has absolutely no place telling me how to raise my kid(s). The ONLY adults who should have a hand in that are those carefully selected by myself. Anybody else can butt the fuck out ... it's none of their business.

Are you one of those people busy-bodies who approach total strangers down the shops, and tell them what they are doing wrong with their family? Ever wonder why you never get invited to parties?

There is a HUGE difference between "parenting" and "It''s the LAW!".

Re: Linux login

I bid on a contract for a un*x shop once. I won the contract without a face-to-face interview. When I walked in on the first morning, the guy in charge of the data center looked startled & exclaimed "Where's your beard?!" ... Despite well over half a century of un*x experience, I do not now, and never have had, a beard. Still makes me chuckle :-)

Perspective from America ...

My Dad caught me reading Marx (Karl, not Groucho) when I was about 12. Instead of getting grumpy about it (this was the peak of the cold war era, people were touchy about such things), he recommended that I get a translation of Mein Kampf, Lenin's works and a newly published English translation of Quotations of Chairman Mao (if they had a copy) next time I was at the Stanford Library. So I did. And discovered these "dangerous" writings were boring, incredibly daft, quite silly in places, and certainly not worth banning. That phase of my life went away in a week or two. Funny how education often has that effect ...

Quite a bit later, I found a scanned copy of The Anarchist's Cookbook squirreled away on a Berkeley FTP site. I printed it out, and Dad and I had great fun finding all the flaws in it ... Yes, I still have all my extremities, and they are still properly attached. Dad has his, too.

My Grand daughter has also discovered these writings, and read them, and came to the same conclusion that I did all those years ago. Hopefully her kid's generation will have the same opportunity.

_{"where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people" —Heinrich Heine}

Re: I see differences...

Gives the kids a good excuse not to do the chores.

But mom, the age verification server was down ... I couldn't do the laundry and dishes, or clean the fridge or start dinner.

Re: "panic spreads faster than Wi-Fi"

"How fast does Wi-Fi spread?"

Almost as fast as gossip through a small village.

"And is it temperature dependent, like honey?"

Probably not. Although gossip is faster in the winter than in the summer.