engineering

Disaster Recovery – planning for the real world

Earlier this week, thousands of Vodafone customers around the south of England lost mobile service (calls, SMS, data). The cause? Theft of equipment at one of Vodafone's operations centres in Basingstoke. It appears that Vodafone has or had a single point of failure (often referred to as 'SPOF') in its infrastructure, surprising, since SPOF is usually one of the first aspects of a complex system to be identified and removed/mitigated.

Antique computing – Jacquard Loom

Although the Jacquard Loom does not compute, is does feature stored programs in the form of external punched cards. These programs are not tied to a specific machine, and a machine can be supplied with numerous different punched cards, and therefore can weave many different patterns.