Posts by Robert Carnegie 4461 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Sep 2009
"Horace Goes Skiing" had the animated vehicles in a very few kilobytes. It was a computer game which included a "Frogger" bit to cross a busy road to get to the skiing area, then a skiing game. Then to cross the road again, I think.
I suppose these days you can get it in Java and attach that to e-mails for people to play the game when they get it.
That sounds like the fictional "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" in which an article about the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation "describes their marketing division as a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes, with a footnote to the effect that the editors would welcome applications from anyone interested in taking over the post of robotics correspondent" - I'm not sure exactly what happened in the Guide office after the first half of that quote, but it's probably a legendary quitting or a legendary firing.
Aha, I read down the comment here, and we are informed by "tweell" that "Huon of Bordeaux is the title of a thirteenth century French epic poem." It turns out that the weirdness in the synopsis of Andre Norton's novel is mostly copied from the epic poem. Even the participation of Oberon the king of fairies in the mission to Babylon. Which I want to be Baghdad, but for this particular time, maybe that's wrong, too.
I mean, I don't know that Babylon is wrong, but the last time that I heard much about it was the Book of Revelation. And it's a certain community's slang for police, but that's probably not relevant.
Oh, so Andre Norton didn't make it all up in "Huon of the Horn" (1951) which I described in a comment above. Although that implies that somebody else did.
Wikipedia: "The poem tells of Huon, a knight who unwittingly kills Charlot, the son of Emperor Charlemagne. He is given a reprieve from death on condition that he fulfil a number of seemingly impossible tasks: he must travel to the court of the Emir of Babylon and return with a handful of the Emir's hair and teeth, slay the Emir's mightiest knight, and three times kiss the Emir's daughter, Esclarmonde. Huon eventually accomplishes all these feats with the assistance of the fairy king Oberon." Sorry, what?
Andre Norton's version is, according to what I take as the book cover, just like that. Norton's Huon kills Charlot who attacked Huon and his brother apparently without provocation. Charlot had it coming, but Charlot was maybe king and his father was Emperor, so there were consequences.
In real life, or in Wikipedia, Charlemagne divided his empire among his sons, his son Charles, or "Charles the Younger", or "Charlot" in that sort of thing, was designated King of the Franks. Charles the Younger died of a stroke aged 39, which is bad luck and/or the consequence of a surfeit or something.
There's a cartoon page for people like you. But my main point would be "Don't put the "Sooner and Later bins NEXT TO the Shredder". Well away, please.
Make it a Shredder icon to destroy documents. But after you put documents in, you have to press the "Shred" button on it to start the shredder. Or you open it, and you can shred files individually. You do you, you know? And it animates and it makes a noise. But you ALSO make the Shredder icon pop up at random when it has stuff in it, and it animates and it makes the noise. It doesn't actually destroy the files then, but it frightens the user. In a good way.
Some of this, we do already get.
Yes and no. It's computer users, including programmers, who casually treated 1024 bytes as "one kilobyte" (KB) and likewise for MB, GB, and TB, when those came along. I still do. But it never was a real standard, and storage sizes counted by 1000 and 1000000 bytes were not actually wrong... technically. So now, 1024 bytes is one kibibyte (KiB) and so on.
I, for one, have not read what I think is Andre Norton's first published novel, "Huon of the Horn" (1951), but it sounds pretty wild and in need of fact checking.
"As Huon, the young Duke of Bordeaux, traveled with his brother to the court of Charlemagne, they were attacked by Amaury and another knight, whom they didn't know. The armed knight wounded Huon's unarmed brother; in anger, Huon killed the knight, not knowing it was Charlot, son of the Emperor Charlemagne. For this deed he was sentenced to die, but the sentence stayed on condition that Huon perform an impossible quest in the city of Babylon--the very stronghold of the Saracens. Aided by Oberon, king of the fairies, Huon accomplishes his quest and returns to defend his dukedom."
"Charlot" seems to be Charles the Younger, to whom either this did not happen or he was magically brought back to life in the story. Either we are supposed to know who Amaury is, which I don't, or else he or conceivably she is explained in the book. Babylon probably wasn't especially or at all "the very stronghold of the Saracens" at that time, and perhaps the book reveals that in due course.
I would put it under "Checking that the backup has worked". If you are not backing up a user's files, then those files are at risk. And the files are work which belongs to the company, not to the user.
Now, how to check, and what to do about it, I'm not sure. Perhaps if a user's files on the server are not changing, and the user is currently showing up to to work, then send them an e-mail after a month, to remind them that only the files on the server are backed up. Maybe send their boss an e-mail about it more frequently.
Large magnets under the pavement should work. Any car facing the wrong way is turned 180 degrees. Or is flipped sideways into its own side of the road, but sometimes that's inconvenient for other drivers.
Marking a line down the middle of a road to separate traffic going opposite directions is described by Wikipedia as an idea of "ancient civilizations" which didn't quickly catch on in so-called modern times. Some municipalities still think they're for sissies.
For a lot of software installations, "C:\Program Files (x86)\Name of Program", or something like that, is the default file save location.
Sometimes the developer makes the foolish assumption that the software will be used by an adult.
And if a developer sets "My Documents" as the default, what happens when Microsoft renames that? As they have. You used to get "My Music", "My Pictures", "My Videos" (from memory). Currently-ish ( Windows 10 I think) these are renamed to remove an implication that any of this media is owned by you.
Probably yes - Han's problem is (as reported) that he got the backup server to turn off, just after it became the live server.
But conceivably, the live server hands over to the backup server only if the backup server is there - say, when a problem is not yet critical. In that case, it would have been better to remove the backup server sooner.
If I was the original programmer, I might use that style to deal with, say, ten different cases that I thought were going to be mostly just the same, but I wasn't sure, or I thought there could be a requirement change, so I put the same unit ten times with variations in the copies that required it.
Or if I was afraid to use functions, or if I wanted the program laid out neatly on one page in the order that it happens.
Or if a manager wanted the program to be on one page and in order, without subroutines.
But also, gosh, I've written some clever stuff, that I don't understand myself at maintenance time.
We're talking about compressed data on a CD. Technologically impressive that you can boot from what is loosely a Zip file.
I'm going to allege that Knoppix on home-made CD went up to around 700 MB because also technologically you could put on more data than 74 minutes / 650 MB. I suppose that the last 50 MB was stuff that you could live without.
This may be a case where data goes faster through fibre than through a disk drive head. Certainly if you mean floppies. But I think the story is poorly worded. Surely they didn't install illicit fibre for a permanent network connection? Eventually somebody would notice it there and deputy heads would roll?
"Garage" is French for parking. I guess since about the early 20th century, "garage" in English meant "parking with a team of engineers on site for the maintenance that your car inevitably needs whenever it is used". "Parking garage" means "A building that you can park your car in, and that's all."
BBC radio broadcast middle-class adventures of "Paul Temple" between 1938-1968, and later, surviving episodes are often repeated. Paul Temple writes detective stories and also investigates "real" criminal plots. Paul and his wife live in a flat in London and their car lives in a garage nearby, although sometimes they park it in the street. This is unwise as then it is usually booby trap bombed or sabotaged in another way (I think this is what happens to Paul Temple, not what happens in London). Then it's back to the engineers at the garage, if any of the car is left. At least once, it was booby trap bombed IN the garage.
As I say, I favour passwords that just have lower-case letters - random - and plenty of 'em (and spaces), but here we're discussing that even that won't save you sometimes.
I also use things like A and 3 and / and only those when a system insists that even an unreasonably long password of letters isn't cryptic enough and I must use the shift key one or more times.
If you want to use a pipe in a password, which really is demanding that something goes wrong, type "pipe". Unless setting a password that cannot be typed is intentional.
I think this is a list of a certain person's personal grievances. But the "telephone sanitisers" mentioned in the source are people who are paid to wipe clean the telephones on desks in an office.
The sort of thing that a person can do on their own. Or in science fiction, you can get a robot for. Hairdressers... well, you need to cut long hair shorter, but a lot happens apart from that, that we could do without.
I think the "A" ark was supposed to be for leaders and thinkers, and the "C" ark for people who do practical work. These are the people who wanted the "B" ark people to leave them alone. By flying off into outer space and then getting killed - that seems to have been the intention.
Meanwhile, the A and C people, who may have been law abiding enough to not need security guards, all caught a telephone disease and died.
I think the implication is that the laundry went straight into the household washing machine, and the microphone and case with it. The soapy water would penetrate the case, but the rinsing would not be as effective as you'd want. It would be not much better if it was, but I think what we've got is soapy dirty laundry water inside the microphone case. The outside should be lovely and clean, though.
"I know not everybody has got a body like you" - but body shaming isn't nice, is it.
And nearly all cars look like running shoes now, except for SUVs which look like industrial workers' boots, and microcars which look like baby shoes. Just to my taste, it's not especially special.
I thought of you today - your location - when there was someone chatting on the radio about wanting to harmonise how British Muslims can recognise the new moon and therefore the start of a new month - or whatever the issue is that they were talking about.
When it's cloudy.
Would a UK standard apply where you are? And to how many people?
I also remembered this coverage of what happens when someone invents a new way to do something to improve on different methods by which people are already doing the thing.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/927:_Standards
A fine idea, yes (except that your battery would be flat all the time :-)
Even if it's glued on, it can be removable.
Or, the battery pack could put energy into the functional side of the device wirelessly.
Another approach may be to have an option to power the device from an external battery connected by the USB-C port, once the built in battery fails. So you don't remove the original battery, but you replace it by adding on another one.
It's not quite right to say that a patent involved in an industry standard should not be a patent.
Imagine that I have invented a new type of watch strap fastening that is safe and effective and sounds an alarm when it unfastens unintentionally, and it meets the needs of legally enforced electronic tagging of persons for curfew or not bothering their ex-partner purpose. I allow the electronic tag industry to adopt my fastening design in an industry standard, licensed on FRAND terms.
But at the same time, I still want to collect big on selling my patented fastening for common wristwatches and other wearable technology, and why shouldn't I?
Noise cancelling 'phones usually run on their own power supply, so that runs out. However, well-made earphones may just plug the ear effectively. That may or may not totally cancel outside noise without using electric power to do it.
Cordless earphones don't have to be cordless. You can tape and tie them onto string for safety or onto a necklace or clothing. There may also be a deterrence of theft, if your personal technology looks like ropey trash.
I think that safe driving isn't required to exclude running the car over a dog. Or strictly, over a person if the person doesn't give you a chance of not running over them.
The car may skid, however, or worse. That's undesired.
But a typical car has many little insect corpses stuck to the front facing surfaces. And innumerable airborne viruses cooked to death inside the machinery. Not all deaths are newsworthy.
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