佐藤さん：このごろ、コンピューターウイルスに感染する機械が多いそうですね。
木村さん：記憶が消えちゃうんでしょう。転ばぬ先の杖というから、フロッピーは二つ作っておいた方がいいですね。
Korobanu Saki no Tsue
(Kaisha de, konpyuta wo tsukainagara)
Satoo-san:Konogoro，konpyutau uirusu nikansen suru kikdiga oi so desu ne.
Kimura-san: Kioku ga kiechaun desho. Korobanu sakino tsue to iu kara, furoppi wa futatsu tsukutte oita hoo ga iidesu ne.
（While using a computer at work）
Mr. Sato：I hear that a lot of computers these days can get infected by a computer virus.
Mr.Kimura：Yeah，th ememory gets wiped out. As they say, prevention is better than cure. It's a good idea to make two coples of your floppy disks.
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Korobanu saki no tsue literally means to use a cane or staff before you fall down. In English the saying can be translated as, "Better safe than sorry" or "Prevention is better than cure." The computer world was sent into a frenzy earlier this month over a computer virus. The virus, called Michelangelo, was programed to wipe out all the data in any infected IBM-compatible personal computer on March 6, Michelangelo's birthday. The virus apparently originated in the United States and made its way to Japan through various networks and through people exchanging infected floppy disks.
Michelangelo was pernicious-it was designed to get into a computer's memory system and destroy it. Someone apparently said, "Korobanu saki no tsue dakaratte, ichi-ichi insatsu shite oku nomo mendo da (It's a pain to be so cautious that you print out each and every document, even if prevention is better than cure)," only to find their computer had been infected by the virus and the memory had been erased. It's as if computers run things at many companies these days. I wonder just how much trouble it would cause a company to have its computer memories and data banks wiped out....
Another topic of some interest these days is the Y165 billion Minolta Camera paid to the American com-pany Honeywell. Honeywell claimed that Minolta had infringed upon its patent for auto focus technology. Why did this happen? Did Minolta really copy Honeywell's technology? Or did it just turn out by chance that Minolta's technology was the same as Honeywell's? If it happened just by chance, was it then that Minolta didn't check to see if the technology was under patent by some company in another country? Korobanu saki no tsue de, saki ni shirabete okeba yokatta noni (Better safe than sorry-the company should have checked things out ahead of time). Ap-parenetly Canon and five other Japanese companies are going to run into similar problems with the American company Kodak. I hope the companies realize it's too late once you've fallen down.
Problems of this kind are, bound, to occur again. When a company makes a new product I wish they'd remember that prevention is better than cure and first do the necessary research (korobanu saki no tsue to omotte, mazu shirabete hoshii). It seems crazy to have to pay expensive patent fines after the fact. The cane one needs to keep from falling down shouldn't be that expensive.