Posts by Dr. Ellen 269 posts • joined 14 Jul 2007
As I type this on my computer, I am looking at a pretty decent monitor. When I click a few buttons on the remote, I am looking at a television. The only fly in the ointment is poor speakers. It has other tricks I have not explored, and it's about as large as my desk can accommodate. Why should I buy something else?
Vandal Savage has been around a very long time.He was one of the major villains for the original Green Lantern, first appearing in GL 10 (1943). He's still running around, because he is immortal. Back in the old days, they could make him behave by threatening him with a life sentence in the pen. Immortal, so long and boring ... These days , he'd be released on a ridiculously low bail.
The egg came first. There have been recognizable eggs for millions of years before the first recognizable chicken appeared. This also applies to computers: the code in the egg must be subject to proper conditions before a chicken can be created. The code in the computer is the same, and one of the proper conditions is the computer being in a state to reach and run the code.
There's an old saying: "It's hard to make things foolproof, because fools are so ingenious." The internet of Things is one thing - but there is a whole world of Things that don't use the Internet. But they're designed by the same kind of engineers.
My particular object of tech-hatred was a copier that landed in our library some twenty years ago. It knew how you wanted to use it, and it was determined to do it for you. Only that wasn't always what I wanted to do. An 8-1/2 x 11 copy on 8-1/2 x 11 paper? Flawless. A life-size copy of something small? Surely you wanted the image to take up the entire sheet of paper. Nothing else would do! It could be commanded to do what you wanted, but as soon as you lifted the cover for the next copy, it set itself back to what it knew you wanted it to do.
The trouble was, the people who designed, made, and sold the copier made it work the way they wanted it to. And the rest of us. who used copiers differently, were left cursing in their wake. The makers and the customers weren't the same people. It works that way for light bulbs, too.
Where I worked (and that ended 15 years ago) they bought a new computer every time one started to have trouble on the network. Fortunately, there was no rule about destroying or properly disposing of the old ones. So I'd take them, clean 'em up and upgrade if necessary, and find somebody who needed a computer. Usually they upgraded everything - monitors, too, and keyboard/mouse combos. I didn't charge for this - everybody needs a hobby - and made quite a few people happy.
Built quite a reputation as the Computer Fairy .
Fukushima is big. So are wild boars, on a different scale. If the locals are smart, they'll start exterminating boars before the population explodes. Because boars are not good for agriculture - they'll eat just about anything, and they'll root around in the dirt to get more of it. Since these ones are radioactive, they can't or won't be eaten, so they're a total loss, foodwise. They destroy crops and ruin land.
Fifty years ago, I was arguing about valid Nazi medical results obtained by horrible people doing horrible things to innocent victims. There is still no good answer to the question, but at least medical science is advancing so eventually those results can be ignored. (The arguments were carried out in fanzines, which were on paper in those days. No Internet, but there are similarities. Things change, but sometimes they only change venues.)
Conditions vary. If you don't have any fuel, the axe wins. They're so simple even a caveman can use them. In fact, a caveman invented them.
The ancient days and ways live on. Stone age? Rock is great for prestigious buildings. Bronze age? Look at all those statues! And it doesn't rust. Iron age, industrial age, information age -- they all stand on the shoulders of earlier ages.
(As a side note: I tried to use windows 1. 3.1 was much better.)
I worked in a museum that had a vault to store books and artifacts, protected by a halon system. We were told that halon quenches fire in relatively small percentages, so if somebody happened to be in the vault when it was released, they still could breathe (though they'd be wise to leave promptly). None of us tested that.
In any case, it's better than releasing the kraken.
Why, yes. I think it was the eighties. I was having royal trouble with the dBase III manual -- so I called the mothership. And got somebody high on the totem pole. I reamed that handbook out for twenty minutes: "Don't you think it might have been nice to have "print" in the index, instead of hiding it under "Set Print"? If you needed that "Set Print", couldn't you put a pointer in the index under "Print"?
I think he was rather shaken by having contact with an actual customer. He sent a copy of the dBase III+ manual, which did help.
I had a friend who was both blind and without hands. He wanted to write. Some kind of organization gave him a PC XT 286, which was a computer intermediate between the PC and the XT. It lived in a PC box, but had a 286 processor. IBM didn't make many; rumor says they were using up their PC cases before they got to making the AT. (Yes, they existed: https://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=260 )
Since it was an orphan of sorts, repair parts were hard to come by. He'd learned the program (both reader and word processor) and didn't feel like changing -- I quite agreed when I tried to shoehorn some other screen reader into a 386. It involved a special output card, as well, The company had disappeared without a trace. So I ended up maintaining an old, scarce computer for about twenty-five years.
I made a new keyboard for him. He'd learned to use a peculiar keyboard with a modified typewriter, so I made a larger copy mated to a regular keyboard (I had to get access too, for maintenance.) Thank heavens Windows hadn't been created, because I haven't the faintest idea of how to make a mouse. But that PC-286 was his friend and muse, and he wrote a lot with it. (I have a novel he did. Rather Wodehouse, it was.) And I kept it going until the day he died.
I worked at a nuclear physics lab in the Sixties, where we had a CDC 3100 mainframe. The mains power was somewhat noisy, but the real problem was a door. It was intended to keep radiation out of the control room, and it was HEAVY - solid Ferrocrete about six feet thick. It ran on rails, and was driven by an electric motor, and every time we opened or closed the door the computer would complain bitterly. So the lab finally got a rotary converter - a motor/generator set with a decent amount of flywheelage. No matter what went into the motor, clean power came out of the generator, and everybody was happy.
I would LOVE to be able to use Linux on my computer. I've tried the current versions of Ubuntu, Debian, Linux Mint, and Zorin Linux, and not a one of them will work. Years ago, Zorin Linux worked. Then I tried a clean install of the next version, and -- nope. They all are asking for files that aren't on the distribution. And those files aren't easy to get to, without a working Linux.
As a consolation, I can use Raspbian on my Raspberry Pi, and it's based on Linux. Apparently they now have a version that can run on a PC. I'll try downloading it.
I once worked for a museum that was given to the occasional Bloody Purge where they would -- release -- a third of the staff. We got a new director, whom nobody loved. He felt the same about us. Short story, they made me useless for about a year, then fired me for being useless. I remember keenly what I thought when I was given the news of my firing: "Oh wow, a vacation I don't have to come back from!"
A year later, I ran intp the girlfriend of one of the other people who had worked there. "They just fired him!" she said. "They made him useless for a year, and then just fired him."
I laughed, and laughed, and laughed, then told her: "That's just what he was saying about me, a year ago."
Long ago, I was told to collect the sounds of heartbeats for as many animals as possible. I took the electronic stethoscope and the tape recorder and went to the zoo, where I'd arranged to meet a cooperative zookeeper. Most animals were uncoooperative, but I got quite a few recordings. The two scariest animals I met were the ostrich -- and the wombat. Those beasts got claws.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1903 was awarded to Niels Ryberg Finsen "in recognition of his contribution to the treatment of diseases, especially lupus vulgaris, with concentrated light radiation, whereby he has opened a new avenue for medical science." -- nobelprize.org
Scientists are reporting development and successful initial testing of the first practical "smart" material that may supply the missing link in efforts to use in medicine a form of light that can penetrate four inches into the human body. Their report on the new polymer or plastic-like material, which has potential for use in diagnosing diseases and engineer new human tissues in the lab, appears in ACS' journal Macromolecules. -- https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111116143049.htm
Then there are the two people from Arizona who each took a teaspoon of fish tank cleaner -- which did indeed contain chloroquine phosphate. Even if that was all that was in the tank cleaner, a teaspoon of it would be a massive overdose almost certain to kill. Nobody can speak so clearly that an idiot can't make a Darwin Award of it.
I'm still using 5.1.1 on my phone. For decades I've wanted a pocket computer, and now I have one! (The keyboard ain't so great, but I can live with it.) It works. Why should I change anything? Of course I usually keep it in airplane mode, and only turn it on when I want to make a phone call, or am expecting one. It's a great pocket reader, though, holds music, and kinda works as a camera.
Still using Win7, too, and Office 2003. They work. Life can be perilous out on the bleeding edge of technology -- if I don't need it, why should I buy it?
I had a blind friend with a speech-output computer - an XT-286. (I don't know how many people have told me there is no such thing, but there was.) There was a special board that handled it all, and a special word-processing program that fed it. The manual (and the company that produced it, the program, and the board) were lost to the mists of time. I decided the easiest thing to do was simply to keep the thing running, and with the occasional part replacement it did. Worked for about thirty years, and in fact outlived the friend (may he rest in peace).
Boeing's problems are not all from management and/or software. What about the stray tools rattling around on the tankers they (try to) sell to the air force?
The problem is that the bosses and the workers don't live in the same building any more. Neither knows exactly what the other is doing.
I have never flown an airplane. However, I have operated a large bit of tech with a lot of control functions and alarms. Operators NEED a switch or button to shut up the alarms, because otherwise they can't even think, let alone solve the problems. It's not so bad when one alarm goes, but when there's a cascade of problems and a cascade of horns, buzzers, honkers, and god knows what ...
The worst single day I've ever had with teaching computer (I was the only computer-literate in the place) to a secretary. She had thoroughly absorbed the lesson of the typewriter: hit return at the end of the line. No amount of demonstrating, explaining, pleading, or exhorting did any good. I gave up in despair, and went away.
An hour or two later, I was called before the Director. I had made that secretary cry. I was later told by the other people in the office that she'd asked me because she was afraid to ask the director.
http://mentalfloss.com/article/66345/amazing-images-classic-japanese-fart-battles
"From Japan’s Edo Period (1603-1868), there’s He-Gassen, or, “the fart war.” This centuries-old scroll, dated to approximately the 1840s, depicts an epic battle of gas between booty-baring men and women on horseback and on foot. Even a cat gets caught up in the fray at one point. The powerful gusts of human wind depicted can break through boards and traverse wide battlefields."
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