Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCCCIII

[sadkingbilly]

Brittanic House, as was. Now Citypoint. Reprimanded one of the Senior Crusties for "fking about" with the network cable and creating "beaconing" on the network...

Problem resolved by moving his desk!

where to? the car park?

had a few mates worked there in 80's, used to meet in the Moorgate bar regularly.
(i was dahn the road at natwest.)

[Zigenare]

BP in moorgate?

Brittanic House, as was. Now Citypoint. Reprimanded one of the Senior Crusties for "fking about" with the network cable and creating "beaconing" on the network...

Problem resolved by moving his desk!

[sadkingbilly]

BP in moorgate?

[Zigenare]

I remember IBM token ring in 1985? ish?
didn't catch on. AFAIR

"Madge Networks" - Their cards were brilliant and some of them had a little back door that permitted access to low level data about the network... They had an American sales rep with the unfeasible name of "Shel Musiker"! Nice bloke, helped me dig BP out of the mire...

[sadkingbilly]

Real Time Developments were acquired by Alphameric PLC in 1987, eventually becoming Timeweave and going bust recently.

I don't know if the Clearway was related to the IBM Token Ring network.

It's Z80 based.

probably not. it was designed for IBM PC's to talk to midi's and mainframes.

[DoctorStrangelove]

Real Time Developments were acquired by Alphameric PLC in 1987, eventually becoming Timeweave and going bust recently.

I don't know if the Clearway was related to the IBM Token Ring network.

It's Z80 based.

[sadkingbilly]

I remember IBM token ring in 1985? ish?
didn't catch on. AFAIR

[NickFitz]

More light reading to pass the time until next week's Bank Holiday

• ‘It was as if someone had been murdered’: the felling of the Sycamore Gap tree - ”I set out to answer the question a whole nation has been asking: what made two men cut down the Sycamore Gap tree?” Andrew Hankinson, who wrote an excellent book on Raoul Moat, on another case involving disgruntled men on the fringes of society.
• New ‘Superdiffusion’ Proof Probes the Mysterious Math of Turbulence - ”Turbulence is a notoriously difficult phenomenon to study. Mathematicians are now starting to untangle it at its smallest scales.” There's a million dollar prize if you can sort it out
• NASA’s Voyager 1 Revives Backup Thrusters Before Command Pause - ”Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California have revived a set of thrusters aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft that had been considered inoperable since 2004. Fixing the thrusters required creativity and risk, but the team wants to have them available as a backup to a set of active thrusters whose fuel tubes are experiencing a buildup of residue that could cause them to stop working as early as this fall.” If you thought your starter motor was hard to reach, try fixing it from 15 billion miles away
• Universe expected to decay in 10⁷⁸ years, much sooner than previously thought - ”The universe is decaying much faster than thought. This is shown by calculations of three Dutch scientists on the so-called Hawking radiation. They calculate that the last stellar remnants take about 1078 years to perish. That is much shorter than the previously postulated 101100 years.” Better book that holiday sooner rather than later.
• An 8-Year-Old Boy Got a Metal Detector for His Birthday—and Found a 170-Year-Old Shipwreck - ”The ship remains was that of the St. Anthony, a schooner that was built in 1856 and wrecked later that same year.” Some kids get all the luck
• The Curious Case of the Pygmy Nuthatch - Forrest Wickman investigates an ornithological error in a movie: ”The bird in Charlie’s Angels is, I believe, the wrongest bird in the history of cinema—and one of the weirdest and most inexplicable flubs in any movie I can remember. It is elaborately, even ornately wrong. It has haunted not just me but, as I’d later learn, the birding community at large for almost a quarter of a century.”
• Vystery - ”Unveil the mystery image, one click at a time.” A simple-sounding game: you get a limited number of clicks to de-pixelate an image and guess what it is
• LA’s Traffic Ordinance: 100 years on since cars got priority over pedestrians - HT to ladymuck for the story of a century of jaywalking: ”To mark the centennial of LA’s 1925 Traffic Ordinance, author and historian Peter Norton tells Zag how the pivotal law rewrote the rules of the road in America and much of the world.”
• The first CLEARWAY LAN (Local Area Network) - HT to DoctorStrangelove who's just found one of these early networking gizmos in his garage, as one does: ”Whilst at the Open University in the mid-1980’s, I was asked by my boss to see whether it might be possible to connect up our various academic offices to a Word Processing and printer network… We persisted and installed a ‘ring-based’ packet switching system which worked via the serial RS232 port called ‘CLEARWAY’ supplied by Real Time Developments Ltd of Farnborough.”
• Trademark Design Codes - ”The United States Patent and Trademark Office has a system of 1,400 descriptive ‘design codes’ allowing you to search for trademarks with ‘Rickshaws’, ‘Centaurs’ or ‘Mechanical women’.” This page includes a handy tool for searching for combinations of terms and seeing matching trademarks. Want snakes with top hats? Snazzy Snake™ (a registered trademark of Zoo on Yoo Inc. of Naperville, Illinois) is there for you
  
  

Happy invoicing!