Surfing - updated

Surfing is a great activity.

You can do it either online, or in places such as Australia. Or in Australia you can both surf and do online ... whichever you want at whichever moment (unless there is a shark warning, i'd imagine)

I am doing it at work, in London.

"Internet means end for media barons," media shark Rupert Murdoch screams in print today.

Well, the internet here works but not everything connected to it.

It seems that in a nearly unique occurrence for nearly two years' time the print might prevail tomorrow.

For those who have got access to it.

Well, I am back to my surfing ...

With a prioritising plan meanwhile - hopefully - evolving in my head.

Epilogue at 2.15am:

A miracle! It started working after all, my surfing ended and nobody is unlikely to notice a thing. Fantastic, this world of online!

Followin day, at 16.30pm: Online as usual, definitely. Print did not need to prevail. Anyway, the system (surely) must be built so that one single downtime cannot be too long, cannot take too long to get it back running. That would be problematic if no one could process or "live" anything. Especially when your job relies on the system making it possible for you to do those things.

Of course if you ran out of electricity, that would .. make things properly challenging.

How to do online without electricity.

My technical knowledge is not quite adequate to explain this and anyway it depends a lot on the system configuration. Usually the mainframe runs in a place which is ideally as sheltered as Tora Bora - meaning for example underground in an artificial cave with proper electricity back-upsystem. These machines do not sleep like your office computer might do if you are ecological.

I guess it depends are you able to access the main frame direct from your PC which sounds ... unlikely. You would have servers at your work handling the connection with the main frame. And this tend not be battery-powered.

What this means, basically, is that if aliens invaded earth they could read our (good) online newspapers if the servers keep running from their Tora Boras. Anyway, I doubt too many people were busy doing jobs as mine if the situation ... above our heads was acute.

To make myself clear, I do not believe in aliens - at least in the sense of Alien-the-film or them possessing especially violent desires to attack us. Just one of these lazy frases i guess.

Still, the British Rail filed a patent for a flying saucer in the 1970s, told yesterday's The Times. Now, who would have believed that (especially as it was not April 1st either yesterday or on the day the patent [now expired] was filed).