Young Frenchwoman desperate for fat pipe tumbles out of window A 25-year-old French woman's search for a Wi-Fi signal ended rather badly when she fell out of a first floor window, suffering "multiple fractures". The network-needy numpty was apparently sitting last Friday on a windowsill in her flat in Menton, a coastal town in southeastern France, with her laptop extended into the void " …
I remember getting a bit dangly on a hotel balcony in Greece having successfully located a victim WiFi box to tap into.... using Linux and VPN mostly .... I would have used the hotel WiFi, but it was always mysteriously broken, unlike the wired pay-for PCs nearby! I suggested to the hotel lady that I could easily fix it but she seemed to not be too keen ... even after a visit by a little van of IT experts it was still "broken". For about 2 weeks as far as I know. Or permanently, who knows....
It is a good word despite being fairly French in nature.
Robert Rankin (he of Sprouts of Wrath fame) used the word to describe what you need to do to solve the small screw problem. When you take something to pieces and reassemble it you're bound to be left with a number of small screws that came out of said laptop/watch/etc, and it is important to defenestrate them immediately lest they breed and multiply.
Is it wrong that my brain went with the innocuous way to take the double entendre before the risqué one?
I would also go with "yes" as this is The Register on a Friday afternoon. If your first response is the innocuous one, then possibly some retraining may be in order.
>Has she not heard of a USB wifi adapter and a long extension lead?
She may have done, but if she had to head to Le Clerc to buy one she could have just popped into a cafe with WiFi (weefee).
Using stuff already in her home, she could have tied the laptop to a broom with duck-tape...
> did she expect to be able to use the laptop while extended out at arm's length?
I had to hold my phone at arms' length out of a plane door the other week[1]. And it worked fine :-)
Vic.
[1] I needed to get a GPS fix for my tracker application. A clear view of the sky tends to mean a faster lock...
Surely everyone knows that MacBook Airs use SSDs that don't weigh anything at all.
Trouble is they also use tiny little surface-mount connectors that don't plug in to anything at all -- boss's son demolished an Air, I got the resulting box of bits, and now am the proud owner of a teeny little 128G SSD that I can't bloody use!
Hi Paul, I believe that sadly a mandatory language (usually French) was dropped as a High School subject several years ago, in favour of kids individually choosing a lame easy subject like "studies of Powerpoint studies", or something.... much to the disgust of my parents (retired French and Latin language teachers) but never mind, chin up! - French is still the most popular second language being learned in schools. Amongst people that aren't brazen slackers destined for History of Art degrees at St Andrew's Uni, that is.
Additionally, most wannabe independent nations in Northern Europe normally wanna-be like Nordic countries (presumably because they are unusually financially well-off) but for some reason they seem reluctant to learn Norwegian, Swedish or Finnish .... ;)
Seems that Spanish might be more popular than German at the moment, additionally..... appears that Mandarin Chinese has leapfrogged German, although if these kids go on holiday to the EU they might be in for a bit of a shock.... especially in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, or in Brussels.... etc.
Plus, having seen the location of Menton, perhaps she was trying to get a signal from Italy? Perhaps she was signalling ahead for a spaghetti order with a fast getaway car waiting, Ronin-style to get her over the border to her table? ;)
Well as a "Merican" I can see the use for calling it a ground floor. I still feel that in number it should be the first floor. When I count apples I do not start with zero apples because at the time I do in fact posses one. Therefore if you have a floor you would begin with 1. Zero floors would be the absence of a floor.
Wee wee she said, I lit the candle with the handle on the gateau at the chateau then came home to check on the painting of the Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies by Van Klomp, which I keep in in a long knackwurst sausage. While attempting to signal the resistance I fell of the window sill and landed on General Von Klinkerhoffen's little tank! Oh where is Rene when you need him!
When are you Brits going to stop calling the second floor a "first floor"? "First above the ground" makes it, from any rational point of view, the second floor. I can see the French doing it to preserve quirky ancient cultures and all that, but this is a bleeding edge, high tech, serious online publication here. Even computer nerds know that an element at index zero is the first element, not the first after the zeroth.
Typical of a country that cant spell basic English words correctly.
We start with the descriptive "Ground" floor usually meaning street level. each floor above that is counted. Is it really that hard to understand?
The American way is not universally right.... or accepted.. get over yourselves...
i downvoted you coz i'm a brit. but if it's a numbers game you win hands down. just got back from china and in the four cities i visited all their lifts showed ground as 1.
But i believe their children are born at 1 as well so what we would call their first birthday is actually their second.
Foreigners, go figure.
I thought the Indians in Silicon Valley were trying to teach you Real English, there's plenty more of them at home, and it is their second official language, especially if they don''t speak Hindi .... ;)
Also, aren't "a hell of a lot of you" native Spanish speakers by now? ;)
Even better. In a boat the floor is not the floor, that is the sole. There are numerous floors and each one is attached to the keel, and holds a pair of frames. The sole may rest on the floors but it doesn't have to. And to make it even more fun, the ceiling is the inner layer of planking over the frames, so that when the boat rolls you can sit on the ceiling.
So currently I am building a boat with ten floors and no ceiling.
Obviously when one counts floors one begins with zero for the ground floor, first floor above ground is one, first below ground is minus one. If one were to be writing lift (or "elevator") management software this is how one would number the floors; some lifts I've used even use this numbering scheme on the buttons for humans to choose the required destination level (-2,-1,0,1,2 etc).
> I can see the French doing it to preserve quirky ancient cultures and all that
In France we often call the *second* floor, first floor. Below that there is the entresol (but not in every building), and below the entresol de rez de chausée, or ground floor. Below the ground floor one may have one or more sous-sols (basement, underground floors), which sort of makes it handy to have a 0 point in the scale. How do you cope with that in L'Amérique?
This coming from somebody in a country where they had a problem understanding the difference between imperial and metric measurements and lost a space probe as a result...
http://articles.cnn.com/1999-09-30/tech/9909_30_mars.metric.02_1_climate-orbiter-spacecraft-team-metric-system?_s=PM:TECH
The word "theft" didn't appear in the article. The word "apartment" did. It would be cuckoo-bananas to assume her own WiFi router wasn't INSIDE her apartment, so why was she moving her laptop FARTHER AWAY from it in order to get a better signal?
Maybe I'd understand better if I didn't drink so much.
Interesting, but it seemed to be somewhat less than fully implemented when I was there 1 year ago?
Occasional building-based subsription WiFi boxes..... usually in odd locations and bad signal. But otherwise most people using 3G dongles at stupid data costs, which is why the students are normally extremely keen to hang out at cafes with free wifi! Actually come to think of it so were many adults. Some were brazenly using the tables outside the cafe but within range of the AP... without buying anything :P
I'd agree the 'Merkin system of numbering floors was more logical if it actually was. However, if we are counting the number of floors in a house, and only that, then the first floor is the basement.
Many US houses have basements that include pool rooms, gyms, and a room for the grown-up son. So these count as 'floors' in every sense. And if we discount a level because it is below ground, then it's every bit as logical (or illogical) not to count the floor at ground level either.
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