h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

You should all be nice to your computers, especcially mallet person. When computers take over the world, they'll remember who was nice and who whapped them with the mallet. And guess who'll be treated more fairly...

Yes, if everyone was nice to their computers for a change, and put their mallets away and buried their hatchetts, the world would be a much better place full of love, security and happiness.

yeah, ours is called the "CBGS" or "computer be good stick". it works surprisingly well!

I am appalled by the amount of violence that has entered this forum!
(Actually I'm not, but I couldn't think of anything else to say! )

Perhaps the inanimate objects just WANT US TO BE NICE TO THEM. They are really just waiting for the moment to sticke and then laugh at all the people who were nice to them and destroy all those who were mean. Either way we can't win.

I remember learning at school that an object at rest will remain at rest. An object in motion willremain in motion at a constant velocity unless acted upon by an external force, (or somthing close to these two laws).

What wasn't taught was that if the object was "inanimate" then it would jump up of it's own accord and strike a passing bipedal ape descendent in the shin, without just cause or warning, only to move rapidly back into position and act all innocent.

Keys on the keyboard behave in a similar manner, being solely responsible for thousands of speeling mistooks the world over. They move out of the way just when your confidence is high enough to not looked down at them.

this doesn't have anything to do with computers, but Boston MA. I swear the city rearranges itself every night, and no matter what street you are on, it is always just off the map your are looking at, and for that matter all of the streets are one way opposite the direction you need to go.The city itself is a giant Rubik's cube conspiracy.......

I'm sure the same is happening with my sock drawer.

Researcher 46039.

Another Law of Life.

When you find yourself lost on the way to work, because the city has rearranged itself overnight, and you have to ask for directions, because the part you're in is off the map, the person you ask is only a visitor or is lost themself. Or... a person that will take three quaters of an hour to tell you how to drive a five minute trip. "You past the third paving slab on the right, past the house with the green door - or was it blue?............." etc .. etc ...

I think I know the feeling. I always get asked for directions when I'm somewhere new, or more often, when down Southampton, people often start talking French and German to me for some unknown reason...

Bluebottle.

You know it's funny, when I was on holiday in Turkey earlier this year, one of the little kids in the hotel - maybe only 18 months old was speaking German. I thought she was better at it than me - and I'm 36!

I know. Someone I knew once said that, for example, the French must all be very intelligent as they all know how to speak French when we find it impossible to - but I don't think they're as intelligent as all that as they don't even know how to speak English!

If that's an argument, you'll love this: most English speakers don't know how to speak English....in Canada/US anyway. Also, the Quebec language-law is under fire again (this is the one that requires shopowners to post signs in French (dominating) and English (submissive)) by English speakers who are tired of the fascism of the idea.

All of that's in an attempt to preserve French in and English environment, and both British English and France French are almost alien tongues on this continent....

I think that all of these inanimate object cock-ups is a way for the Universe to tell us to pay more attention to what's going on and stop taking so much for granted.
I used to work in a building downtown that featured a computer-controlled air-conditioner/circulator as none of the windows could be opened. This system would blow cold air in the winter and hot air in the summer regardless of who reset it or how often.
The same kind of system was in the computer lab at college: one part of the room was always cold and the other much warmer. The system wouldn't work at all if any of the windows were open, or when everyone was in the lab on a weekend catching up. Any attempt to reset or correct for this (using a console that was as user-unfriendly as the best of Microsoftware) would severely worsen the situation.

Fruitbat

The computers that work best are the simplist.
I never had any problem with my Amstrad PC 1512, yet these modern ones are designed to break down...

You're right - the original (twin floppy) 1512 was pretty reliable (I used to be the engineer at an Amstrad dealership in Aberdeen), but the monitors would regularly blow up, and the add-in hard drives had a 1 in 3 chance of dying in the first month...

The five coloured floppy disks you booted "GEM" from were cute, too...

WoW!!!! Someone else who remembers GEM??? I'm shocked!
I thought I was the only one in the world who did.
I often feel that I'm one of the few people who still has a Spectrum, and plays on it now and then.

I had an Atari ST long before I had a PC, so I knew GEM well! BTW, if you've used an Atari ST, did you notice the four strange ASCII characters you got in Atari BASIC when you printed CHR$(5), CHR$(6), CHR$(7) and CHR$(8)? If you put them together in a square, they formed the face of Divine Drilling Equipment Salesman J.R. "Bob" Dobbs - short-term personal savior to the Church of the Subgenius ( http://www.subgenius.com )

Guys have any of you worked on an analogue computer, with all the servo amplifiers, (valve driven) resistor cards relay racks etc? We're talking stone age stuff now. I was working on such a machine in the late 80s/early 90s attached to a C130 Hercules (Fat Albert)Flight Simulator!!

I'm Jealous

Hi Jealous!

I used to have a Telecom computer, which was pretty cool since it was connected to the phone line and could be used sort of like an answering machine (although it couldn't record the messages) This was about 10 years ago, when modems were for the rich people.

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