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Digital Equipment answers a user’s bug report that the year 2000 is not a leap year.

Various system services, such as SYS$ASCTIM assume that the year 2000 will be a leap year. Although one can never be sure of what will happen at some future time, there is strong historical precedent for presuming that the present Gregorian calendar will still be in affect by the year 2000. Since we also hope that VMS will still be around by then, we have chosen to adhere to these precedents.

I’ve had a XBox 360 for around a year now and I have to say it has been a fine console. I can’t get enough of Command & Conquer.

Unfortunately, my dear XBox 360 has decided to die a horrible death. There was no warning it just wouldn’t work one day.

Whilst it is pretty bad that Microsoft release a product that is so unreliable, it is far worse the amount of grief I have to go through to get my 360 fixed.

Al over at The Open Sourcerer mentioned in the comments of the ultimate low power server post another low power server running Ubuntu but for the bargain price of £99! There’s no Microsoft Windows option or WiFi but who cares for that price.

Want a home server but don’t want the electric bills that come from leaving a high powered machine on all of the time? Help is at hand.

The fit-PC is a miniature, noiseless, extremely power efficient PC capable of running either Windows XP or Linux. And there’s built in WiFi too.

Make a great small, inexpensive network management server too! 😄

A very interesting interview with The IT Skeptic over on the IT’s About Uptime blog. The interview covers ITIL and CMDB primarily with some background on The IT Skeptic himself.

For those who haven’t come across The IT Skeptic, he tends to take a rather sceptical view of current IT service management practice.

Our internet presence has been slow of late. Customers were complaining that the website was slow, we couldn’t log into the server reliably, sending emails was slow. All told not very good.

I remembered a while ago getting a call from my hosting rep saying that our bandwidth was maxed out. Many hosting providers provide unlimited bandwidth but limit the size of the pipe to your server. This has the benefit that whatever happens you know how big your hosting bill is going to be. The downside is that when the usage approaches the pipe limit, some traffic will start to slow down or fail. And there won’t be any discrimination between important money earning traffic and none monetised traffic.

I ran a survey a couple of weeks ago asking for feedback on The Tech Teapot. A number of you were kind enough to take the time to fill it in.

All of the survey participants are somewhat satisfied & read the blog either frequently or always. The number of readers is currently hovering around the 700 mark with the vast majority of readers accessing the blog via the email subscription option.

I’m going on a few days break so I won’t be posting for the next few days. Normal service will be resumed next week. Whilst I will be at the seaside it most certainly won’t look anything like the picture. The good thing about the hotel is that it is slap in the middle of Whitby & Scarborough on the cycle route using the old railway line. A perfect spot for a bit of cycling, weather permitting. From the looks of the forecast yesterday I may have timed things perfectly. 😄 Where would cycling be without Dr Beeching…

I personally think the doom & gloom is being overplayed at the moment, every bit as much as the euphoria overshot during the boom years.

Things certainly are going to be different for a while, but I don’t think we’re all going to go back to depression era levels of unemployment and the social deprevation associated with it.

Whilst the various world wide responses to the crisis haven’t been great, they’ve been a whole lot better than the response during the great depression.

Occasionally, when the mood takes me, I read up on a topic to a reasonable depth. This time it was Brian Clough, the eponymous ex-manager of football clubs Derby County & Nottingham Forest.