Status-Q

[Original Link] The story of a chap in Australia who wanted his hardware and software to work as advertised, and wanted the store to sign an agreement to that effect.

[Original Link] Splendid (and brave) letter in today’s Times from J.F.James.

[Original Link] From Memex 1.1:

Paul Strassman did a lovely,
polemical piece for PBS about the
risks implicit in a software monoculture (i.e. a world where
everybody uses Microsoft software) in which he used analogies like
the Irish potato famine to illustrate the point. Microsoft then

replied with a thoughtful piece. Both arguments are flawed, but
the exchange is instructive and would make excellent material for
class discussion.

There’s a story, which may or may not be true, about a caller to a computer helpline saying,
“I deleted a file from my PC last week and I have just realised that I need it. If I turn my system clock back two weeks will I have my file back again?”.

And why not? That’s rather a good idea for a system design…

An article about the 007 phemonenon, reprinted from the New Yorker in today’s Sunday Telegraph has some nice thoughts.

“…Dr No fails, just as Hugo Draz, Emilio Largo, Ernst Stavro Blofeld and all the other nincompoops fail, largely because of their tendency, when at home in their lairs, to avoid the normal practice known as walking and instead cover extremely short distances by monorail.”

“The most worrying aspect of the Brosnan era is that, while GoldenEye took $350m at the box office, the computer game of the same story made even more. How the implications of that success will feed back into future films, one shudders to imagine.”

These little movies have been doing the rounds recently. Great fun.

things1.mpg (approx 640K)
things2.mpg (approx 320K) (my favourite)
things3.mpg (approx 720K)

Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side and a dark side, and it binds the universe together.

From an NYT review of David Rockefellers memoirs, quoting his description of arguments with an an arch-rival at Chase:

“If the disagreement was strong enough, we could end up pretty close to the borderline of incivility.”

[Original Link] BBC article on the dramatic steps taken by the Korean government to ensure wholesale broadband deployment.

It was understandable really. I’d been lulled into a false sense of security. But after goodness knows how many years in the computer industry I should never have forgotten the cardinal rule for survival: “Don’t ever do what Microsoft suggests unless you absolutely have to!”

It happened like this: My wife Rose uses her elderly PC heavily every day, for word-processing, email, and the web. That’s it. Nothing very fancy, and it’s worked reliably ever since we installed Windows 2000 some time ago. So reliably in fact, that I was starting to think quite highly of the operating system.
I, in the meantime, had switched to a Mac and had installed several different operating system versions without incident.

However, the large number of security holes found in Microsoft’s software recently made me think that I ought to run ‘Windows Update’ to get the latest patches. I’ll just quickly do it over breakfast, I thought. It suggested I install Service Pack 3, and after an hour or two (it’s only a 300MHz Pentium, after all), the installation was finished. I rebooted and everything came up just fine. Except for the network card. The device manager said it couldn’t find enough resources (IRQs, I/O ports etc) to install it. Suddenly, by trying to bring myself right up to date, I had thrown myself back into the bad old days of interrupt clashes.

I will spare you the details of the hours I spent downloading new drivers, trying new CMOS settings, removing other peripherals. Having to use a machine with Internet Explorer on because Microsoft’s support site requires it and doesn’t work with other browsers, when the machine with Internet Explorer on had just been killed by something I downloaded from that site. And so on…

Suffice it to say that in the end I fixed it. I found a page somewhere on the web which told me that some similar cards needed a registry patch to work. In particular, one had to set
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\ Services\Pcmcia\Parameters\DisableIsaToPciRouting
to zero. This had been fixed in recent service packs. It had certainly been ‘fixed’ in mine, and so I guessed that perhaps all I had to do was to unfix it by setting it to 1. I rebooted and it worked! Obvious really. I then just had to rebuild the machine.

Rose’s next “Service Pack” will have an Apple logo on the box, I think.