[ih] capacity v bandwidth

[Grant Taylor]

On 5/31/26 2:13 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
> Turning purple is a clear sign of psychological stress.   Vint's escort 
> was probably contemplating the massive amount of paperwork required to 
> document the incident, the disciplinary hearings that would follow, as 
> well as considering what his or her new life would be like at the new 
> assignment on one of the outer islands of the Aleutians.

I may be strange in that I wonder how the process failed to allow one 
simple human error (not hearing something correctly or responding to the 
wrong thing) could end up with such an outcome as this.

I would sincerely have hoped that there would have been processes with 
barriers that would have prevented this type of mistake.  Even something 
as simple as needing to present your ID to an additional person and them 
validating that you are the intended person.

It seems obvious to me that there was no malicious intent involved in 
this.  So not a superstitious attack of any sort.

Aside:  This is why I use shell aliases in interactive environments that 
require me to append the name of the host that I want to shutdown / 
reboot / etc.  A simple logistic check that should prevent simple accidents.

> There was a meeting, and I was late for it.   I wasn't a participant 
> giving a presentation, but more like a fly on the wall to learn about 
> some project.  After getting through the check-in procedure in the 
> Entrance (with security clearances it could take a while...), I went 
> down a corridor, saw a meeting already in progress with a few dozen 
> people, most of them around a large table engaged in intense debate.  I 
> found a chair against the wall and quietly sat down.  No one noticed.

Another simple, natural, and understandable mistake.

> The discussion involved DIA and DCA, which apparently "don't work well 
> together".  As a techie nerd, I had heard of DIA and DCA, but hadn't had 
> any actual experience with them.  They were both part of IBM's technical 
> architecture.   DIA was Document Interchange Architecture, and DCA was 
> Document Content Architecture.  I could believe that they didn't work 
> well together -- possibly designed by different committees or groups 
> within IBM.

TLAs, FLAs, or even longer acronyms that sound like they cross 
pollinate, or at least collide are a poor detection mechanism.

> I quietly got up and left the room.
:-)



-- 
Grant. . . .
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