Posted on 04/11/2008 5:47:55 AM PDT by Squidpup
Several years ago as I was migrating to a new computer, in the file migration process I inadvertently blew away an entire directory containing several hundred files with 3D models, drawings, assemblies...you know, engineering work product of great worth to my company.
Aghast, I jumped on-line and found a file recovery product available for immediate download, spent to money (yes, it was about $30, IIRC), and put the software to work. To compound my angst, I had already done further writing and relocating of other data on the disk, so I had NO assurance that the deleted files were even in a recoverable condition.
To my immense relief, the software was able to fully recover almost 100% of the deleted files, and the 20-30 that could not be recovered were preserved in another format that, if necessary, could be imported without great expenditure of time or effort, so no data was irretrievably lost.
Suffice to say that event has made me a lifetime member of the recovery software fan club.
OH, and there IS just one thing more: I DO NOT, any longer use “Shift+Delete” when romping about zorching files and folders I think I don’t want anymore. I use standard “Delete” EXCLUSIVELY, which sends things to the “Recycle Bin” where I can retrieve them if I discover I’ve deleted something by mistake. Just THAT little change of habit has saved my bacon several times; making my error a simple matter of Restoring something from the Recycle Bin instead of trying to do a file recovery.
Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a winnnahhhhh!!
Fascinating. I seldom do anything important on the computer these days.
But I quickly learned the workings of the CP/M file system and in about a day with a disk editor I had patched together the sectors that contained my source code, sufficient for copying to another floppy.
I’ve had that problem a few times. It was usually followed by things being thrown and words I cannot repeat here being uttered.
Yeahbut, see, THAT was “back when”; when users were important and were allowed, if not entirely expected, to go spelunking about the innards of their computers, exploring the murky depths of things like file allocation tables, file header data structures, track and sector formats, and other such arcane things. I still have the actual schematics of one of my ancient machines.
Now??? Feh!!
NOWdays, it’s all about the user’s “out-of-the-box experience” [OOoooooo! Ooohhhh! Aaaaahhhh!]; a marketing phrase that smacks of the metaphysical.
NOWdays, the less the user interacts with the tortuous internals of the O/S and hardware, the better.
Nowdays, you see, “user” does not define a person who should have control beyond what is delegated by the “developer”, an idea that is all but an Article of Faith among the Priests at the Temple of Information Technology.
Finding a user delving into the back-end of their desktop is an event that gives most IT Managers a case of the hives. And, NO, they really DON’T like it if a user knows what a “registry hive” is; it makes them edgy to think that someone not of their station might be — gulp — EMPOWERED with such knowledge, because it plays upon their darkest fear: that a mere user might gain enough knowledge to not NEED them anymore; that a user might actually have — dare I say it? — CONTROL.
LOL!
If I had a dollar for every time I’ve sat in front of a belligerent piece of software and cursed it as a “steaming heap of crap” or “damnable piece of JUNK”...
That urge to throw things, though...I found a way to cure that: get a big enough CRT monitor that you can’t snatch it off the desktop without exertion.
At that point, the worst you might do is throttle your mouse; unless, of course, the software developer’s NECK is within reach. In THAT case, I’d guess you might need an attorney.
You’d throw an attorney at the software developer’s neck????
Boy, am I glad I don’t write software anymore!
I’ve spent $3k on attorney fees already, and about the same amount on computer stuff every time the bleepin’ thing screws up.
Uh, well, yes. You don’t actually think I’d strangle the developer, myself, do you?
Please. I wouldn’t bring myself down to that level.
As for you...you’re never in jeopardy unless your software either sux right out-of-the-box, or has such a wide-open API that it can be transmogrified into a helpless kluge by the “we know better than you do about how your software should work” types in corporate IT.
Frankly, of the software packages I’ve used that I hated, I still don’t really know whether they suck because of their as-shipped condition, or because of subsequent bastardizations done in-house after delivery.
That probably explains why I haven’t ACTUALLY strangled any developers, recently. If anything could make me more upset than being made to use dysfunctional software, it would be finding that I’d strangled the WRONG developer over it.
Hm. So throwing an attorney costs $3k? Guess I'm glad my Judo days are behind me then.
Or maybe I should have become an attorney. I'd be rich.
Well, nearly everything I did was embedded stuff. The one real exception was my port of a chess game (in FORTRAN) to run on a CP/M based logic analyzer. Nobody but the perpetrator (not me!) knows how this escaped the R&D lab to the customers.
Space-time check schtick.
Earth had been considered dead for some time.
The humans, gone for parts unknown and presumed extinct.
This summer, the search for humanity begins...
..and the winner takes all.
“Humans are extinct.. aren’t they?”
“Vidscan in there and you tell me.”
“The Lurge used your sleeper ship for target practice, it is statistically improbable that you live.”
“Then tell me again how I am here?”
Your space-time check has been rejected due to one or more parameters being incorrect or because the secret authentication code was incorrect.Please re-correct and resubmit for uninterrupted access to The Undead Thread.
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Interesting idea.
An echo from the past, seen and heard in the future?
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