On Friday 20 Nov 2009 01:06:44 Jake Anderson wrote: > Watch out running a vacuum cleaner around inside a PC, they can > make *loads* of static.
After ten years without a hitch there shouldn't be a problem. Depends what you are standing on :) I did most of a degree in physics. For that I had to study surface effects on electric fields as part of it. Then there's the fact that static charge moves around different materials in different ways. How do I know that ? Well, back in 1974 when I worked at a large industrial company in Sheffield known as Thos. W. Ward we had the original ICL business computer in the room above me where I worked. Cobol in its later stages was largely written here but other work was done in other places. At that time concepts like electric charge on a planetary body or a building were known about but not too well understood. We had large cabinets full of TTL packages. State of the art computing. 500 integrated circuit components per board. 50 or 100 boards per cabinet. I tried to explain to the R&D people who were working on it that every time there was a large bang that the cabinet blew up that it was the static charge on the building. I was told to f**** ***. We were working inside the original British Steel prefab steel building. I have been working with this kind of thing since I was eight years old. I understood this effect better than anyone else when I was fourteen years old. It was something like the 1980's before any University anywhere acknowledged that I was right. Even then the discovery was attributed to a Dr or Professor of something even though I knew about it back in the 70's. In the present day if someone asks me how to fix something I always say something like " 'It it wiv a 'ammer mate !". Works for me;) -- Richard -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
