🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <32290bc2...@news.cyberport.com>, tan...@cyberport.com
(Warren Young) wrote:

> hns...@sirius.com (Ron Hunsinger) wrote:
> 
> >> _Some_ phones, mostly older ones, are "magnetic".  They use the old
> >
> >I do have such a phone, I did make a disk full of known good data, I did
> >even go so far as to compute a checksum for the disk (32-bit CRC), and I
> >did leave that floppy under the phone for a couple of weeks, the phone did
> >ring (many times).
> >
> >The result? Nada. No affect on the floppy AT ALL.
> 
> I guess you were just lucky.  Or, the electromagnet in the phone is
> weaker than ones I'm familiar with.  This really doesn't prove
> anything, you know.

It doesn't? What would you think constitutes proof?

I had a hypothesis ("a ringing telephone can erase a floppy disk"), I
designed and experiment to test the hypothesis ("make a floppy with known
data, use a disk utility to compute a CRC of the entire disk, make sure I
have one of the original phones with the electromagnetic ringer, put the
floppy under the phone, let it ring many times, verify that the CRC is
unchanged, load the programs off the floppy, run them"), I performed the
experiment and observed the results.

Isn't that the scientific method? What method would you prefer?

-Ron Hunsinger