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alexpgpThere's a very old joke about a hardware engineer, software engineer, and sales engineer (a legitimate Silicon Valley job title, I might add) who were driving to the airport to catch a flight when, suddenly, there was a "pop" sound, followed by a "whup-whup-whuping" noise, accompanied by significant difficulty in controlling the vehicle. The driver pulled over on the shoulder and everyone got out.
"I've heard about this sort of thing happening," said the software engineer. "Maybe if we get back on the road, the problem will go away and everything will work."
"No," said the hardware engineer, "we've got a definite problem here, and it's probably one of the tires. I suggest we take the spare and successively swap each tire with the spare until the problem goes away."
"You are both wrong," said the sales engineer. "What we really need is a new car!"
<rim shot>
I mention this because my Kindle suffered some kind of catastrophic software glitch while I was in the middle of reading Athwart History: Half a Century of Polemics, Animadversions, and Illuminations, and when the hardware emerged from the long, dark, ressurrection of its silicon soul, all of the content was gone.
Yowza!
To be sure, in the final analysis, this is not as bad as it might sound, unless something like this were to happen out at the end of the copper (and pretty much everything else), where digital life chugs along at modem speeds, which happens every once in a while when I go to Kazakhstan. For now, at least, as long as I have connectivity, Amazon will happily let me download another copy of anything I've bought from them for the Kindle. As to whether bookmark information, etc. is preserved—I'm not sure that survives, but in the end, even that's not the end of the world (though it sure could be annoying).
But before going online to re-download a bunch of files, I did what years of writing control system software taught me to do: do one last reboot and see what happens.
And what happens?
This time, the Kindle found all of the "lost" files, that's what.
"I've heard about this sort of thing happening," said the software engineer. "Maybe if we get back on the road, the problem will go away and everything will work."
"No," said the hardware engineer, "we've got a definite problem here, and it's probably one of the tires. I suggest we take the spare and successively swap each tire with the spare until the problem goes away."
"You are both wrong," said the sales engineer. "What we really need is a new car!"
<rim shot>
I mention this because my Kindle suffered some kind of catastrophic software glitch while I was in the middle of reading Athwart History: Half a Century of Polemics, Animadversions, and Illuminations, and when the hardware emerged from the long, dark, ressurrection of its silicon soul, all of the content was gone.
Yowza!
To be sure, in the final analysis, this is not as bad as it might sound, unless something like this were to happen out at the end of the copper (and pretty much everything else), where digital life chugs along at modem speeds, which happens every once in a while when I go to Kazakhstan. For now, at least, as long as I have connectivity, Amazon will happily let me download another copy of anything I've bought from them for the Kindle. As to whether bookmark information, etc. is preserved—I'm not sure that survives, but in the end, even that's not the end of the world (though it sure could be annoying).
But before going online to re-download a bunch of files, I did what years of writing control system software taught me to do: do one last reboot and see what happens.
And what happens?
This time, the Kindle found all of the "lost" files, that's what.
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no subject
Date: 2011-03-26 04:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-27 03:45 am (UTC);^)
Cheers...