Poles apart on the Intel question
With the prospect of an office in more than one time zone, the question is: where do we put Intel?
Several of you point out that there’s no need for Intel to have to share with Father Christmas at the North Pole when the South Pole is so far untenanted.
‘Perhaps the office is built with a time line down the middle of it – hence people in different time zones but in the same location,’ says Mike Maple. ‘I bet all the support teams work on the side of the office an hour ahead, that way they complete some calls before they were logged.’
Now all Microsoft has to do is find an office where it’s two years earlier on one side than the other, ship Windows Vista from the early side, and, bingo, it’s more or less on time.
Sharp practice
‘Having received my education in Ireland I happen to know that to pare a pencil means to sharpen it,’ says Anthony Sheehy at Compex Development & Marketing.
‘Hence a pared pencil means one that has been sharpened. So the idea of being prepared is actually having your pencil sharpened beforehand.’
Programmers of the world unite
We asked last week: where have all the computer programmers gone?
‘In my experience you either get more money or a better sounding job title at each annual review,’ says former computer programmer Paul Reeve, who would prefer we didn’t say who employs him, because now he has a fancy job title which includes the phrase ‘new media’, but no more money.
‘I’m a computer programmer,’ says Richard Quadling, a lone voice in our postbag this week. How can this be? We thought they had been eliminated.
‘I’ve only had two jobs,’ he continues. ‘The other one was for 15 years at Carval Computing. There I was a trainee computer programmer. For 15 years! In the next 15 years, I hope to make it to the heady heights of senior developer.’
Remember: we warned that if you are still a computer programmer, maybe everyone forgot about you.
Cabbage patch
Translating Chinese names must be amusing for the people who do the job. Peter Leeson at Q:Pit has a name printed on his business cards (Li Sen) that translates as ‘Gloomy Plum’, which makes us think of him as a sort of sad, fruity Mr Potato Head.
‘Thirteen years ago I was living in Taiwan,’ says Anita Chapman at Brakes. Many of the ex-pats visited a local jeweller who would create their name, translated into Chinese, as a pendant.
‘He would ask you to say your name for him and he would listen and translate it into the nearest Chinese characters,’ she says.
Her pendant always caused mirth when she wore it: the ‘Ta’ sound was translated using the pictogram for ‘cabbage’.
Plums; cabbages. Any more unfortunate translated Chinese names?
Blue is the colour
Chris Belham at PIMSS wants us to help with his project to catalogue the coloured screens of unhappiness that he sees on his PC. We’ve all experienced it: a mysterious blank picture that tells us nothing – except that something is terribly wrong.
He starts with the daddy of them all, the ‘Windows Blue Screen of Death’.
Not to mention the Citrix Grey Screen of Confusion (a hung screen when it just gives up) and the Lotus Notes Little Red Box of Absolute Panic.
Can any of our readers contribute other colours of unhappiness?
Let’s do lunch – in 14 minutes
‘We’re stuck with the earth’s spin and orbit. So we have 365 days in a year, nothing we can do about that,’ says Nigel Ford at Dulwich Prep School.
But, he adds: ‘We could simply divide the day into 1,000 units. Each would be the equivalent of 86.4 existing seconds. We could group these in tens/hundreds as required.’
Meanwhile Alexander Moon at Beacon hypothesises: ‘If the second was shortened to 0.0864 of a second, we could have 100 seconds to a minute, 100 minutes to and hour and 100 hours to a day. The working day would have to be extended to 33 hours a day, but those on an hourly rate would certainly benefit.
‘However, a lunch hour would only be 14 minutes in non-decimal minutes.’ Ah, that’s the flaw. We’d never get it adopted in France.
Crouching tiger, hidden meaning
These days we are regularly told that we live in a ‘global world’. The reason? China. So Backbytes offers our contribution: translate your name into Chinese.
‘My daughter has an obsession with Chinese characters so I thought that with the aid of the Microsoft Word Chinese IME I would show her what her name would be like in Chinese,’ says Phillip Darlington at DS Limited.
However, Chinese characters are not letters. So he did the nearest thing possible and constructed a phonetic representation of his name (da-ling-tong) in Chinese characters and used Babelfish to translate it.
‘It came up with Big Holy Child. I put in my wife’s name and it came up with something completely unflattering which I can’t put here,’ he says.
We expect outrage from Chinese scholars next week, but meanwhile, have a go.
Sands of time
Jon Szwer hopes you are not too busy, because he has sent us the unwinnable but very addictive Falling Sand Game, which we feel that with only a few weeks of practice could produce some attractive results.
Unfortunately we had to write this column, so we’ll leave it to you to produce something pretty, but don’t bet on us being impressed.
Be pre-prepared
We haven’t had space for prefixes for the past few weeks, having so many other very important subjects to discourse on, but that doesn’t mean we have forgotten some of the most controversial topics.
‘Bill Lamin’s pupils have to submit pre-prepared work for examinations. However, this isn’t a doubling for once – the pre in prepare isn’t a prefix,’ says regular correspondent John Gilliver at BAE Systems.
‘Think about it: if it was, their work would have been pared.’ Does that mean there would be two of everything? Please don’t write in, we’re just messing with your heads.
Starting to lose the decimal point
What do you do when you have an impractical concept that needs arguing to its logical lack of conclusion? Yes, you consult an academic. And right on cue, Trevor Sharp writes to us from the Exeter School of Business and Economics to discuss the decimal year.
‘Surely the issue is that weights and measures are in units of 1,000, not 10,’ he says. ‘Also we need to see what the fundamentals are. A second is nothing special, but a day is one rotation of the earth and a year is one rotation round the sun. Although variable they can be seen as physical quantities.’
This means a top-down decimal year: using a rotation as a basic physical quantity, he suggests a slight adjustment of our orbit would result in a 333.3 day rotation, so a year could be three rotations, and the day remains unchanged.
‘A day would need to be divided into 1,000 equal parts called a milliday. The milliday could be divided up into 1,000 microdays.’
This is extremely practical, if one of you could just nudge our orbit a bit? Next week: we redesign the second and work from there.
A traditional job
Pete Kostiuk is delighted to see that in last week’s Computing, DFS was looking for an exotic job type called a ‘computer programmer’.
‘When was the last time I saw a vacancy for a computer programmer?’ he asks rhetorically. ‘It has to be more than 10 years ago. They’re all called system engineers or developers now. They’ll be merging server farms next and calling them mainframes.’
Are you still called a computer programmer? If so, write to us and let us know. It might just be that they forgot you existed.
Pole position
Last week’s article on mobility quoted Intel’s John Johnson, whose office layout intrigues Andrew Rowland at Hyperion.
‘He talks about working with “people who are not just in a different time zone but in a different location”, leading me to think that he normally deals with colleagues in the same location but a different time zone,’ he says.
‘In my office, we think he must work at the North Pole. An office built right on the Pole would enable you to cross every time zone in the world just by walking round the room.’
Wouldn’t Santa Claus be upset to be evicted from his office by Intel? Is the company’s office staffed by elves? We will not rest until these questions are answered, possibly in the negative.
World Cup once a millennium
Our attempt to decimalise the year isn’t getting any more practical, which surprises no one. ‘The concept of the decimal year so far depends on using 10 as the multiplier for seconds, minutes and hours,’ says Simon Ellison at TISL, revealing where we got the concept of decimalisation from.
But he makes the sensible point that we could take a lesson from the world’s currencies, and use the base of 100 instead. ‘A 100-second minute, 100-minute hour and 100-minute day will give us a year that is equivalent to about 317 (non decimal) years,’ he calculates.
Which means a World Cup slightly less than once a millennium, which doesn’t really work for us.
‘I agree with Dennis Stephenson that a Decyear is 11.5 days,’ says John Hannawin. ‘But surely his analysis is too logical? When I grew up, in the computer world a Decyear was how long a PDP 11 took to boot.’
Storm in a C cup?
It’s summer, so Sue Flower at Elsevier has wisely been consulting Weather.com for the weather in Oxford. Last Tuesday it warned her that there would be PMT storms. ‘Poor weather,’ she says. ‘I know just how it feels.’
Shockwaves from hover bovver
The more stories we run on who might or might not get an electric shock, the less we know.
If we were more upset about this state of affairs, we’d try to change it by educating ourselves, but instead – courtesy of Michael Franks at William Sturges & Co – we bring you the British Sub-Aqua Club’s notes on the electric charge that a helicopter winchman can carry.
‘All the rotating machinery in a helicopter generates a substantial amount of static electricity. This builds up in the structure of the helicopter until a part of it touches the ground or sea surface, at which time it is all earthed. The part of a hovering helicopter that is likely to touch the surface is the winchman on the end of the winch cable. Do not touch the winchman until either he or the trailing tail of the winch cable has touched the boat or the sea surface, or you will experience a hefty electric shock,’ it says. Gosh.
A winning year
We suggested that Toshiba’s offer to knock 66 per cent off the price of notebooks if England win the World Cup (66 per cent, 1966, you see?) wouldn’t be replicated in Brazil, but we’re too smart for our own good, as Malcolm Fox at Epicor points out.
‘Actually it wouldn’t be too hard for Toshiba to offer the same deal in Brazil, as Brazil last won in ’02,’ he notes. And on that theme he can’t resist having a pop at the French: ‘Had Toshiba known, it could have safely cornered the French market four years ago by offering 98 per cent off had France won.’
Timely power trip
Someone we will only refer to as ‘Julian’ has experience in creating a shorter working week from sixth form.
‘At the time, the school had just been rewired with the installation of a centrally controlled clock-and-bell control system, controlled by a dedicated circuit.’
So a group of dedicated students, some now ‘in senior positions of responsibility’ created a variable frequency control timer, which was ‘connected to the control cabling by drilling a hole in the wall… great pleasure was taken in accelerating time and making Friday afternoons that little bit shorter.’
An engineer was called to ascertain why the main control fuse often blew on a Friday. ‘He thought my reasoning that the mains supply was a bit unreliable with frequent power trips, was probably correct and the solution was to install a mains filter.’
A grenade colada
We’ve enjoyed translating recipes from French to English with Google, even if no one has written in to tell us they’ve attempted to follow the resulting instructions. But if you move onto Spanish, things get even more complicated.
‘I was given a packet of Spanish cabbage seeds and thought I should try to translate the instructions so I could keep the seedlings happy,’ says Daphne Groves at Varndean School.
The translation: ‘To use the plantitas of homogenous growth, despising but the great ones preferredly.’
Fruit preparation raises its own problems. Ric Naylor at DSG tried translating piña from Spanish. He thought he had a pineapple, but instead he apparently has a ‘fragmentation hand grenade’ in his fruit bowl. If visiting Spain this summer, check your dessert carefully.
In a lather over Java palaver
Much as we might try to avoid it, every now and then we bring you a little bit of common sense.
‘I’m not surprised that Paul Field found Java to be a more popular search term than .Net,’ says David Hazel at Enchaine Informatic Ltd, ‘It’s the name of an Indonesian island, a type of coffee, and a programming language. I can think of reasons why all three might be popular in Indian cities, although admittedly not why any of them should be more popular than sex among people of Bangalore.’
If anyone has holidayed on the island of Dotnet recently, or drank its coffee, let us know what it was like.
Feeling fruity
Our translation thread strays into enemy territory: war reports that do not even need translation to become nonsensical. It’s sort of like a linguistic friendly fire.
‘When I was involved in artificial intelligence research 30 years ago, we used to play with a string of English sentences capable of misinterpretation,’ says Robin Jones at the Institution of Analysts and Programmers. ‘Probably the best known is the disturbingly surreal: “Fruit flies like a banana”.’
Back on the safer ground of terminology, Burgess Taylor asks: ‘If Babelfish translations are “double-de-gook”, are Google translations “Goggle-de-gook”?’
Book home
World Cup fever grips notebook manufacturer: ‘I note that Toshiba are offering 66 per cent off notebooks if England wins the World Cup,’ says Phil Wainwright at Pilgrim Homes, citing ‘Toshiba’s confidence in the England squad and offer you the chance of benefiting from their success’.
As he points out: ‘As far as I can see it clearly demonstrates Toshiba’s total confidence in the England squad being sent home long before the final whistle is blown.’ Somehow we doubt if Toshiba is offering the same deal in Brazil.
World-beaters at having away days
With one day to go until those of you who don’t like football accept that you’ll be talking to yourselves for the next month, it’s time for our last set of tips on how to bunk off for England games undetected.
Brian Butterly suggests: ‘What about making sure you see the football by making a deal with your suppliers for an “in-depth supplier review” at the appropriate dates and times? Then arrange to meet at a pub between the two addresses with widescreen TV? You and your supplier get to see the football; you earn the eternal gratitude of your supplier and you are seen as being proactive in supplier management.’
If you don’t have time to organise such a grandiose scheme, Andrew Tait has a last-minute tip: ‘Get in before anyone else, put your jacket over the back of your chair, put a half drunk cup of coffee on your desk, log your PC and put the radio on. Go home and watch the football. People then think you are in the office, just not at your desk. Come in after the match, carrying a notepad, and complain about the meetings you have to attend.’
Worse things happen at sea
Last week we had the story of the computer room whose floor floated away, thanks to pesky mice. This week Mark Humphrys at Norwich School of Art & Design recalls his time as a seismic surveyor on an ocean-going survey vessel looking for oil and gas deposits.
‘The computer room housing the IBM AS400s, all the navigation equipment, robotic tape drives and numerous PCs were cooled by air conditioning that relied on water pipes running through the underfloor void space, up to the ceiling mounted units. Of course it was mostly unfiltered sea water. Imagine the mess when the pipes burst.’
At least you can’t blame the mice for that one.
Lunar lunacy
‘Actually, David Norfolk could have it wrong as he forgot about the unit of time called the month,’ says Dennis Stephenson, continuing our pointless quest to define the decimal year, which at the moment lasts just over one day.
‘So 10 seconds to a minute, 10 minutes to an hour, 10 hours to a day, 10 days to a week, 10 weeks to a month and 10 weeks to a year adds up to 1,000,000 seconds. Call this a Decyear, the equivalent to just over 11.5 current days.’
That’s far more sensible. Though in this case ‘sensible’ is a relative term.
