Forums are back!
[quote]<strong>The server is currently down (or the provider is doing router
maintenance), we're still waiting to hear back from the tech at the
facility.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
- Neal
On Monday, March 25, 2002, at 06:54 PM, James Flowers wrote:
> MacNN Feedback Form Message
> ------------------------------------
>
> Name: ***** *******
> Email: [email protected]
> Subject: MacNN/AppleInsider Forums
> Timestamp: Monday, March 25, 2002, 6:54pm
>
> What happened to them and when will they be back?
>
> Included URL: <a href="http://forums.appleinsider.com"; target="_blank">http://forums.appleinsider.com</a>; <a href="http://forums.macnn.com"; target="_blank">http://forums.macnn.com</a>;
>
>
--
Neal Parikh
Director of Technical Operations
The Macintosh News Network
</strong><hr></blockquote>
That is the email I recieved earlier from MacNN if you wish to know why they were gone...
I hope the dark days aren't coming back <img src="graemlins/hmmm.gif" border="0" alt="[Hmmm]" /> .
[ 03-27-2002: Message edited by: Spart ]</p>
maintenance), we're still waiting to hear back from the tech at the
facility.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
- Neal
On Monday, March 25, 2002, at 06:54 PM, James Flowers wrote:
> MacNN Feedback Form Message
> ------------------------------------
>
> Name: ***** *******
> Email: [email protected]
> Subject: MacNN/AppleInsider Forums
> Timestamp: Monday, March 25, 2002, 6:54pm
>
> What happened to them and when will they be back?
>
> Included URL: <a href="http://forums.appleinsider.com"; target="_blank">http://forums.appleinsider.com</a>; <a href="http://forums.macnn.com"; target="_blank">http://forums.macnn.com</a>;
>
>
--
Neal Parikh
Director of Technical Operations
The Macintosh News Network
</strong><hr></blockquote>
That is the email I recieved earlier from MacNN if you wish to know why they were gone...
I hope the dark days aren't coming back <img src="graemlins/hmmm.gif" border="0" alt="[Hmmm]" /> .
[ 03-27-2002: Message edited by: Spart ]</p>
Comments
<strong>
That is the email I recieved earlier from MacNN if you wish to know why they were gone...
I hope the dark days aren't coming back <img src="graemlins/hmmm.gif" border="0" alt="[Hmmm]" /> .</strong><hr></blockquote>
Just a tip: you might want to edit out your e-mail and name, especially seeing as you don't have the "allow others to see my email address" feature enabled.
No!?!!! Really?!!??!
Thanks for the info...
[ 03-27-2002: Message edited by: sapi ]</p>
[ 03-27-2002: Message edited by: Mr.Potatohead ]</p>
<strong>No, the "dark days" are not returning. We're going to move the forums server out of that ISP relatively soon, and it will eventually be housed at the same rack as the other servers (that ISP is far more reliable...).</strong><hr></blockquote>
Just how many unreliable hosts are there out that way? :eek:
I know a couple of good ones locally, if you don't mind planting your servers out here in the cornfields.
<strong>
Just how many unreliable hosts are there out that way? :eek:
I know a couple of good ones locally, if you don't mind planting your servers out here in the cornfields.
LOL...yea I'm from Iowa as well...although it's pretty much out of the way of everywhere unless you live here.
[quote] Click, hum.
The huge grey Grebulon reconnaissance ship moved silently through the black void. It was travelling at fabulous, breathtaking speed, yet appeared, against the glimmering background of a billion distant stars to be moving not at all. It was just one dark speck frozen against an infinite granularity of brilliant night.
On board the ship, everything was as it had been for millennia, deeply dark and Silent.
Click, hum.
At least, almost everything.
Click, click, hum.
Click, hum, click, hum, click, hum.
Click, click, click, click, click, hum.
Hmmm.
A low level supervising program woke up a slightly higher level supervising program deep in the ship's semi-somnolent cyberbrain and reported to it that whenever it went click all it got was a hum.
The higher level supervising program asked it what it was supposed to get, and the low level supervising program said that it couldn't remember exactly, but thought it was probably more of a sort of distant satisfied sigh, wasn't it? It didn't know what this hum was. Click, hum, click, hum. That was all it was getting.
The higher level supervising program considered this and didn't like it. It asked the low level supervising program what exactly it was supervising and the low level supervising program said it couldn't remember that either, just that it was something that was meant to go click, sigh every ten years or so, which usually happened without fail. It had tried to consult its error look-up table but couldn't find it, which was why it had alerted the higher level supervising program to the problem .
The higher level supervising program went to consult one of its own look-up tables to find out what the low level supervising program was meant to be supervising.
It couldn't find the look-up table .
Odd.
It looked again. All it got was an error message. It tried to look up the error message in its error message look-up table and couldn't find that either. It allowed a couple of nanoseconds to go by while it went through all this again. Then it woke up its sector function supervisor.
The sector function supervisor hit immediate problems. It called its supervising agent which hit problems too. Within a few millionths of a second virtual circuits that had lain dormant, some for years, some for centuries, were flaring into life throughout the ship. Something, somewhere, had gone terribly wrong, but none of the supervising programs could tell what it was. At every level, vital instructions were missing, and the instructions about what to do in the event of discovering that vital instructions were missing, were also missing.
Small modules of software --- agents --- surged through the logical pathways, grouping, consulting, re-grouping. They quickly established that the ship's memory, all the way back to its central mission module, was in tatters. No amount of interrogation could determine what it was that had happened. Even the central mission module itself seemed to be damaged.
This made the whole problem very simple to deal with. Replace the central mission module. There was another one, a backup, an exact duplicate of the original. It had to be physically replaced because, for safety reasons, there was no link whatsoever between the original and its backup. Once the central mission module was replaced it could itself supervise the reconstruction of the rest of the system in every detail, and all would be well.
Robots were instructed to bring the backup central mission module from the shielded strong room, where they guarded it, to the ship's logic chamber for installation.
This involved the lengthy exchange of emergency codes and protocols as the robots interrogated the agents as to the authenticity of the instructions. At last the robots were satisfied that all procedures were correct. They unpacked the backup central mission module from its storage housing, carried it out of the storage chamber, fell out of the ship and went spinning off into the void.
This provided the first major clue as to what it was that was wrong.
Further investigation quickly established what it was that had happened. A meteorite had knocked a large hole in the ship. The ship had not previously detected this because the meteorite had neatly knocked out that part of the ship's processing equipment which was supposed to detect if the ship had been hit by a meteorite.
The first thing to do was to try to seal up the hole. This turned out to be impossible, because the ship's sensors couldn't see that there was a hole, and the supervisors which should have said that the sensors weren't working properly weren't working properly and kept saying that the sensors were fine. The ship could only deduce the existence of the hole from the fact that the robots had clearly fallen out of it, taking its spare brain, which would have enabled it to see the hole, with them.
The ship tried to think intelligently about this, failed, and then blanked out completely for a bit. It didn't realise it had blanked out, of course, because it had blanked out. It was merely surprised to see the stars jump. After the third time the stars jumped the ship finally realised that it must be blanking out, and that it was time to take some serious decisions.
It relaxed.
Then it realised it hadn't actually taken the serious decisions yet and panicked. It blanked out again for a bit. When it awoke again it sealed all the bulkheads around where it knew the unseen hole must be. <hr></blockquote>
A cookie to that person who know where I took it from.
Where's my cookie?
[ 03-27-2002: Message edited by: starfleetX ]</p>