Posts by Dr Patrick J R Harkin

The 'blem wit' error messages

Gather round children, while the old man reminisces...

Many years ago, sometime in the last millennium, we had a Burroughs patient result system which we used for research. The search language was called TCP (Test Control Protocol) and it was made up of very primitive commands (Move pointer, compare result, advance record, that sort of thing. Stuff you'd do now with SELECT * FROM MyTable WHERE Surname LIKE "Smit%" took hours to code!)

Every move or search command required two destinations - it jumped to the first if the search/move succeeded, and the other if it failed. Just about the first instruction in every search program "Go to start of database" - I can't remember the syntax, but we knew the ref number of the oldest specimen in the database, and coded it in. Now, that jump couldn't fail, but the syntax demanded a fail destination, so I coded one in.

About eight years went by, and the database grew (we worked out later) to a size which meant the compiler needed to be told to use a bigger data type to handle addresses - but we didn't realise that until one day when the computer couldn't make the jump to lightspeed - sorry, to the first record. And a rather confused lab tech brought me the sheet from the lineprinter: UNKNOWN AND UNFORSEEN ERROR. SPOOKY, ISN'T IT?

Apple's iPhone numbers do not add up

@Ascylto

"When I tell people that the US Americans pay for incoming and outgoing calls they are amazed. Rightly!"

May not still be the case, but when I was in Denmark some years ago I learned that you pay from the second you pick up the handset, not the second you're connected. You're using the line, so you pay for it!

Virus writers charged with copyright violation

Fire the arrow, then paint the bullseye round it

Some nice lateral thinking going on there. If they're deleting P2P mp3's, they haven't damaged your system (as if they'd deleted part of the OS or a paid-for application) and it should be fairly simple to peer-share replacements. A prosecution under "damage to property" might therefore fail, and since writing a virus is not of itself a crime in Japan (and I don't think it is here, either) there's no case to answer.

But they wanted to get these guys, so they found a law which undeniably has been infringed. It is indeed an Al Capone situation, though probably with fewer spin-off Edward G Robinson films.

Why Paris? Well, these guys were caught with their pants down... Waddya mean, I can't have a coat icon too?

O2 misses iPhone targets

But what is a sale?

Jobs says he's sold 4 million - and I'm sure he has. To resellers. He can honestly claim enormous sales even if not a single iPhone ends up in the hands of a user, or even gets shipped from the factory. he has made a sale.

What about 02? I don't know how thier business model works, but they may well have sold 190,000 phones to CPW. Again, they've made a sale of 190,000 units, even if CPW still have 189,999 still sit in CPW store rooms.

And as for CPW - are CPW shops franchises? If they are, CPW Head Office can claim to have sold whatever number, and again they're correct - they've sold them.

A much more interesting question is "How many people are actually using an iPhone?" and the man On The Clapham Omnibus (Hammersmith & District line tube/Network Southwest train) says "not many"

I've had a play with an iPhone in the Apple store in Birmingham. The user interface is wonderful and I'm strongly tempted, but it would simply be replacing one block I have to carry with another. If it had enough ram to replace my mp3 player two, so I'd be replacing two bricks with one - that would be much more tempting...