Royal Horticultural Society's PC is rooted for all to see Entries are thinning out for our irregular roundup of Blue Screens of Death, so the series will take a break (unless, of course, readers flood us with amusing sightings). Let's start at Sunglass Hut, in New York City, from Bob: BSOD at Sunglasses Hut Dave from Guernsey spotted this in the Houston, Texas mall called The …
It seems strange to me, after doing things with computers for over 40 years, that these error messages are still so unhelpful.
A generation back we all seemed to assume that by the time we retired at least, computers would be able to tell us things like that they'd found a problem accessing a certain module, and that the software needed to be reinstalled or even, ( in our wilder dreams) that the bloody things would just fix the problem and carry on. But nothing has changed. NOTHING!
I mean, how do you do percussive maintenance on something that is hosted in the cloud, i.e. in a bit barn on another smeggin' continent?
Having a thunderstorm at the right place and time appears to be the closest equivalent, but that option doesn't appear to be available to many of us.
a pc restarted itself in asda the other day, and teamviewer helpfully popped up on startup with the password on it.
i told security and i'm not even joking, they gave me the bum's rush for looking at this screen which was by design placed to be seen easily by shoppers insead of thanking me for point it out (they hadn't noticed yet, the fact the screen was right above their desk would've made a wonderful photo i now realise i should'ev went for instead)
so i just told them they're illegally using a non-commerical license for it and slunk off while they panicked and pulled the power out
Count me in "People who did pay the licence fee but the software arbitrarily says that they didn't".
I had a Norton security suite on my PC. Unknown to me, apparently they discontinued the product I had. The result was that my PC nagged me to buy a new key although my paid-for year hadn't run out.
At least that is what I think happened, although of course it looks a lot like a virus.
It was called something like Norton Internet Security or Norton Secure Internet or Norton-ette Insecure, and so was the suite that they released to replace it, which made it pretty difficult to tell what was happening.
While uninstalling, their tool invited me to visit their web site to explain why, and while doing so, the site crashed my web browser, so, guys, if you were still wondering, you know now.
Was waiting on a plane once, at the gate.
Pilot said there would be a delay, the computer insisted that the landing gear was in the UP position.
This, despite us being at the gate, at usual wheels down height.
He said he would turn the computer off and on again, to some chuckles.
This worked. It seems the wheels were in the DOWN position after all.
> Went to watch Thomas Dolby play London's Scala
The more things change... Went to see Stephen O'Malley of apocalyptically loud drone-merchants Sunn O))) at Village Underground in Shoreditch the other week.
He was accompanied by a projected moody art film, which would have been even more atmospheric if the person whose laptop it was playing on had remembered to disable push notifications.
I recently read about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Lost_Child
"The promoting innovation that made "The Little Lost Child" significant to cultural history was an idea in the mind of George H. Thomas. [...] Thomas's idea was to combine a series of images (using a stereopticon) to show a narrative while it was being sung. He approached Stern and Marks about illustrating "The Little Lost Child." Lyrics appeared toward the bottom of the images. The first performance went poorly due to upside-down images of inappropriate size and placement, but these technical difficulties were soon corrected." Although it may have not seemed soon if you were in the audience.
But in the end they sold a lot of sheet music.
Apparently "stereopticon" doesn't mean 3-D in this case but a projector that can hold two picture slides and gracefully fade from one to the other. This was not new technology at the time of "The Little Lost Child".
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