No! Nothing To Do With The Beatles
Neither the song nor the film, although the merest mention of both allows me to bait the suc - er, the audience in. Art!
Conrad has actually seen the film and cannot remember the slightest thing about it, except they have Wilfred Bramble in the cast, a British character actor who had the lock on 'seedy', and you might know him better as the father in "Steptoe And Son". Let me just refresh my memory -
Ah, a comedy about 36 hours in their day whilst prepping for and doing a televised concert. It was, apparently, a huge commercial and critical success and was a template for a whole flock of cop
ANYWAY what this Intro is on about is hard drives, those mysterious bits of kit that are the heart of any computer. They probably emerged the victorious winner in the evolutionary battle between themselves and the soft drive. Art!
They are an electro-mechanical device, where a spinning disk is read by the stylus head. Bear this in mind; they are a device containing moving parts. This means that, over time, they are eventually going to fail thanks to wear and tear and friction and getting dropped on a concrete floor or being used as a drinks coaster.
Here enter Original Poster, who was a network engineer more than an IT technician, but who was asked by a friend to come and do an assay at his business. Since they were good friends, and there was money in it, he agreed.
First step was to call the boss, who explained that the company had ONE hard drive, which was passed around the office for different people to work with. Art!
OP, probably after dragging his jaw back into place, said this was an accident waiting to happen. What the business needed was at least two servers, one on-site and the other at a third-party location to avoid both being destroyed in the same accident.
He quoted $500 to set up <insert whole load of technobabble here>. The Cheapskate And Stupid Head said this was far too much, just set up the hard drive so it could connect to the internet. OP did so, then sent an e-mail response detailing what he'd warned about and what would inevitably happen. This proved to be a wise precaution, because a year later - Art!
His friend rang back in a state of utter panic; their hard drive had failed, and did OP know how to recover data from a formatted drive?
No, replied OP. There are companies that can do that, except they're expensive. Expect to pay $5,000 for their service.
The denoument is even more delicious. CASH hired an IT company, and being CASH he must have found the cheapest one imaginable, because the so-called 'IT expert' accidentally formatted the drive and thus deleted all the data irretrievably (a well known consequence of formatting). The company lost 15 years of data.
CASH, inevitably, was incandescent with rage. OP, on a call to him, said 'I told you so', also 'I don't work for you', perhaps a tad smugly, and then hung up on him.
You may be wondering if this kind of loss is serious or not. Well, one chap in the comments said he used to do consulting work for a company that refused to do hard drive backups, and he eventually gave up warning them about the perils. Art!
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| They missed 0 'Panic; |
Then the hard drive failed. They spent a whole year and $20,000 trying to restore the data, failing utterly to do so. As he acidly explained, "the loss of all their accounts receivable data figured heavily in their bankruptcy". A hard 366 night's plight, you might say.
So, yes, a very serious loss.
More Box Office Mojojojo
Sorry, couldn't resist.
ANYWAY let us return to having a nosy at more box office figures, prepping things with an input from Art.
Erk. It's only been out 4 days on the stats above and yet it's already well past Indy 5 and even MI:DR. There is no danger of Conrad ever going to see this but Holy Dog Buns! this one seems destined to do well - the budget was a relatively modest $145 million so it's probably already into profit. Conrad supposes if there's a message here it's that lightweight entertainment without budget-bloat can do well. Art!
This one also doesn't especially appeal to Your Humble Scribe, although if it came out on a free streaming service he'd probably move his eyeballs over the screen. It, too, has only been out 4 days, which makes predicting how much 'leg' factor it has a bit daunting. Given that it's budget was 'only' $100 million, of course - obviously! - it doesn't need to rake in as much as the competition. You definitely cannot call it lightweight in any way. Art!
Don't laugh at the take up there -
Because this is the 18th day of release and, given that it only cost $16 million to make, it stands to make back 10x it's budget, even if the critics didn't like it. There is a truism in the film industry that the only two kinds of film that are guaranteed to make their money back are pornography and horror, because the outlay is so low. Conrad is willing to bet cold hard cash that this is definitely NOT the end, because the studio chiefs will be getting that $$$ in their eyes.
Meanwhile how is Indy 5 doing?
O dearie me.
Those Medalling Kids!
Conrad noticed that Shoigu The <insert alliterative vulgarism here> has flown to the land of Norks, probably to see what the Ruffians will be reduced to by next year thanks to sanctions. It's always hilarious to see the grotesquely bemedalled Nork generals on parade. Art!
Cold hard logic points out that the Norks were last involved in a war 70 years ago, so where on earth do all these medals come from? Well, they appear to award a medal to anyone who can get out of bed on time three mornings running, or eat a steak dinner with greens and potatoes. Possibly.
"City In The Sky"
The amazed and startled inhabitants of Arcology One are not only dealing with what seems to be World War Three breaking out on the planet below, but also the arrival of two complete strangers in a mysterious big blue box.
And then Nat
arrived with two bizarrely dressed strangers, people who definitely weren’t
crew or she’d recognise them. There were
no scheduled arrivals for the Black Knight’s lifting body, nor any visits from
any other arcology.
It had been the Doctor’s intention to obtain up-to-the-minute information from the crew, or occupants, of Arcology One, and have Ace separate from him to provide a correlational baseline for his own information. However, with the innate suspicion and acuity of the sphere’s crew, wandering alone and asking questions didn’t seem possible. He’d have to improvise –
Their introduction
didn’t go too well, until the Doctor managed to include his terrestrial alter
ego, Doctor John Smith. At this
‘I had an adviser called
Doctor John Smith!’ she blurted. ‘Long gone now. But he warned me
about what might happen in the Little Crash and the Big Crash, and – and - ’
her voice broke. ‘To pay attention to other Doctor John Smith’s. I
thought he was being figurative.’
She looked around, at
the giant all-encompassing world-city that girdled Arcology One and felt sad
that her ancient adviser didn’t last long enough to get Upstairs.
Hmmm yes, that Doctor John Smith does get around, doesn't he?
From Slavs To Slaves
A couple of points from Konstantin's last economic analysis that didn't really fit into the (woeful!) précis of how Ruffia is getting along. Or, rather, not getting along. The news that you can now be stripped of your citizenship for merely criticising the army was lost in the fuss made over the arrest of Igor Girkin - and we've yet to discover what that was really about.
Also, apparently at the order of The Fat Controller, Belarusians who are involved in any kind of agricultural work cannot now change for a non-agricultural job, or off their farm, or do anything except what Lukashenko deems acceptable. One wonders how long he'll last once Putin falls out of a window after shooting himself in the back of the head (27 times) whilst having had a pot of polonium tea. Art!
Girkin. He's in a bit of a pickle.
Finally -
WILL YOU JUST STOP! I have 0% interest in the ballfoot game to begin with and banging on relentlessly about female ballfooters is not going to change my mind. Just you wait until I take over.
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