Financial & Travel Musings

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One of the really big changes in computers over the years has been the amount of memory that’s available and the technology that it uses.

The very first computer used clockwork (really: it was built in 1850) but in modern times things began with vacuum tubes before moving on to magnetic drums, then tapes and finally the magnetic discs that we still use today. Actual internal memory went through a similar cycle moving from clockwork to vacuum tubes to magnetic drums then magnetic cores and then on to solid-state or integrated circuits as we’d call them today.

That continual change and improvement in the technology meant that the need to limit memory has all but disappeared. As recently as 1976 for instance it was commonplace to have 11 users sharing all of 48k of memory yet within a few years a single personal computer had a great deal more memory and these days even 2GB of memory rarely seems enough yet that’s 87,000 times the amount that eleven users shared just over 30 years earlier.

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When a British company is trying to sell overseas for the first time, the first market that they tend to look towards is in America simply because of the common language and, of course, the reverse applies too.

However, it’s not quite a common language and one of the things that these companies often forget is that their product documentation and website often need to be translated into the appropriate version of English. Unfortunately, that’s far from an obvious thought as the familiarity we each have for the other’s dialect often means that we’re almost completely unaware of the differences.

Take a few simple examples: bath taps in the UK are bathroom faucets in America, rubbers in the UK are erasers in America, the lift becomes an elevator and that’s just a few trivial examples amongst many that often aren’t obvious because whilst we see each other’s TV we generally don’t live in each other’s country and therefore never encounter the trivial, but important, differences like these.

So, if you are doing UK/American marketing try taking a short holiday in the UK or vacation in America and perhaps thereby avoid unfortunate assumptions.

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Let’s face it, that’s just not going to happen, is it?

I don’t mean the time travel aspect of it: that’ll happen one day. No, it’s the business of getting to see the President right away that’s not going to happen. Unless it’s planned for in advance.

I think the only time travel series I’ve seen which even thinks about this is Seven Days that where they arrange the codeword in advance and, of course, that’s the only way that it’s going to work. In the early days of time travel it’s likely to be similar to the early days of air travel ie there will be limitations on the distance that you can go back.

Limit that distance and it doesn’t leave you a lot of time to get in touch with the authorities, convince them that you really are from the future and for them to do whatever is necessary to prevent the disaster. Without a codeword or similar quick way of proving that you are who you say you are then it’s going to severely limit the possibilities, at least in the early days of the technology.

One final thing is worth noting and that’s if there’s some really, really major disaster that spurs on the development of time travel in order to prevent it then it would actually be necessary to put the contact mechanism in place for time travellers well in advance of time travel being possible. Ridiculous as it may seem now when time travel is considered, at best, science fiction and indeed thought of as impossible by a large number of people, it seems only sensible to put in place those contact and proof mechanisms in place just in case that major disaster is going to happen soon and time travellers do turn up in time to prevent it.

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