Many years ago, I had an Aptiva tower computer, an odd little machine. One of its creative features was the built-in Trident video card that automagically disabled itself if a PCI video card was added to the system. At least, that's what it was supposed to do.
When I installed a snazzy new STB Velocity 128 3D card in the machine, I discovered the built-in video card did automatically stop functioning, but did not become invisible to Windows 95. As a result, Windows frequently enhanced my computing experience with fun activities like:
trying to exclusively use the non-functional Trident card for display
dying--apparently in shock over having two video cards--during boot
rediscovering the Trident card and prompting me to install drivers for this "new" hardware
After much time spent updating drivers, firmware, and the BIOS, I gave up and called IBM technical support. My hope was one or more of the undocumented jumpers on the motherboard had something to do with really disabling the Trident card. Instead, I was informed Nvidia and STB had messed up by not making their hardware fully compatible with the auto-disable feature of the Aptiva's built-in video. According to the tech:
"We're IBM. We make the computers, and everyone else has the responsibility to make sure their equipment works with ours."
I was neither surprised, nor disappointed, when IBM left the consumer desktop market a few years later.
The novelty is that your CD player only shuffles one CD's worth of music at a time (or perhaps 6 CDs or so if you have a nice CD player).
I've had a Kenwood 6+1 changer since my college days, and I'm not at all sure what I could replace it with were it to die. I've found seven discs on "Random All" is just about the perfect amount of music for me. Even on computer-based players, where I could randomize as many albums as I want, or even all my music, I find I prefer to select only four to eight albums at a time.
Still, it's nice to see random track playback getting some press. Since iTunes and the iPod were released, playlists have been hyped rediculously. I hated playlists when Winamp appeared and introduced them, and I've seen nothing in the current crop of playback devices to improve my disposition towards them.
Give me ~80 GB of storage to hold my collection, and let me hand select four to eight albums for random all non-repeating. That's all I want.
I don't remember ever applying a MS patch that messed up another piece of software.
You don't use BrioQuery Explorer or Brio Insight on Windows 2000.
The patch for MS03-045 broke both BrioQuery Explorer and Brio Insight in such a way that any key pressed in combination with a Shift key would instantly repeat 136 times. Brio rushed out a patch for BrioQuery Explorer 6.6.4.44 and for Insight, but since I'm still on BrioQuery Explorer 6.2.2.53 I have to either bounce on Caps Lock in place of Shift or cut and paste to a text editor.
Plus the contacts were close enough to test with my tongue so why not? I needed to see if the line was live...
Once, many years ago, a friend and I were in his parent's basement racing slotcars. He put his head on the track so he could watch his car zoom away, and the track lightly shocked his ear. Of course, as a regular test-the-9-volt-on-his-tongue kind of kid, he immediately had to try sticking his tongue to the track. Idiot.
Yes, but then instead of the much hoped for "XBox Forever", they'll try to show how the controllers appear in an alternate universe and lose most of their fans.
And does this indicate an upcoming series of "XBox Special" handhelds?
My wife is an avid console gamer, and she already has nine game systems connected to the TV in the living room. (Counting the Sega CD and 32x as part of the Genesis, despite their $#%!@$% separate video connections and wall warts.) She doesn't have a X-Box yet due to a lack of titles that interest her, but she'll likely get one eventually. And let me tell you, as the one who modifies the A/V cabinet and fights the wiring rat's nest behind it to accommodate these systems, I was thrilled when the PS2 completely replaced the original Playstation. (Okay, there's the multitap incompatibility, but that's relatively minor.)
How many people play PSX games on a PS2?
Not only is my wife still playing them, she's still buying titles off the long list of Playstation games she wants. Indeed, we pre-ordered and picked up the PS2 the morning it was released specifically to play Playstation games. Sure, we bought some launch titles, but that wasn't the point. (Thank goodness, as they weren't very good!) Her Playstation was dying and needed to be replaced anyway. The timing was perfect.
Now, there probably won't be too many folks who have their X-Boxes die just as the X-Box 2 hits the shelves (cue conspiracy theories about destructive updates), but backwards compatibility can still be beneficial. The PS2 didn't launch with many titles, and the ones it had were generally not much to get excited over. However, it had an enormous back catalogue of Playstation titles, many available at discount or pre-owned. That helped its success substantially.
I hope you realize that for most home computers that only have a power button, holding the power button down for 5-10 secs is the equivalent to hitting a reset button.
Find an old IBM Aptiva with Rapid Resume. On those accursed beasts, the power button is merely a polite suggestion, often ignored.
My sister was offended that I would send her little kids Thomas The Tank Engine chocolate lollipops for Xmas stocking stuffers. She said they didn't support Disney because Disney supports gay rights.
Similar story: This Christmas, my in-laws gave my brother-in-law's daughter a Fisher-Price Little People Noah's Ark. As we're sitting around playing with the little plastic animals, my brother-in-law noticed the flag for the top of the ark. Visibly furious, he turned to me and hissed, "Why is there a rainbow on this flag?" Now, I'm not a religious guy, but I managed to recall a rainbow at the end of Noah's story in the Bible. He disagreed with my reasoning and insisted that this, like all rainbows, was a pro-gay-rights symbol.
If a rainbow sticker (with the colors in the wrong order for a rainbow, no less) on a child's toy and a lollipop shaped like a cartoon train can offend, then I'm sure folks will manage to find the "three daemons raise a pitchfork" image offensive.
Have any other Compaq laptop owners had similar experiences with the lid of their laptop?
Well, the display clutch (a.k.a. hinge) on my Compaq Contura Aero 4/33c did break. (No suprise there, the Contura Aero display clutch was fabulously bad.) Not only did Compaq have replacement clutches for sale (directly and through parts resellers), but the replacement clutches were of an improved design.
Amusingly, it was when I ordered a replacement bezel for my Aero that I ran into trouble. The kit was readily (and inexpensively) available through parts resellers and included the display bezel, latch, screws, and some other odds and ends. The kit I received though was missing the display latch. In its place, Compaq included a small slip of paper explaining that the display latch was out of stock when the kit was assembled and directing me to simply use the existing latch instead. Too bad for me that my screen bezel was fine and my latch was broken.
I pay $240 for "one year's" worth of toric lenses from my optometrist. They usually last me a year and a half.
That price is still high.
My first pair of toric lenses was $50 per lens. By the time I purchased my last pair of non-disposable replacements, the price had risen to $96/lens. Disposables were finally available, but non-disposables were cheaper per year. (Especially since I always got 2-1/2 to 3-1/2 years of daily use out of non-disposable lenses, not the 1 year they assumed.) When my contacts died earlier this Fall, I was able to buy a year's worth of disposable toric lenses for somewhere around $60. I'm not sure of the exact price, as my insurance reduced it to $9.99.
I happen to know for a fact that at some point in your life, you bought an album and only liked a song or two on it.
So you listen to the audio snippits before hand on PriceGrabber.com or Amazon.com or Buy.com or dozens of other places, and you decide whether the whole album is worth buying. It's like, it's like that NERDS cereal that came with two flavours in one box. You might have thought the one flavour was really, really good and the other was just okay. So, you had to decide if the box as a whole was worth the money.
See, today CDs are just like that! Sugary, to appeal to the youth while providing none of the substance and nutrition adults want.
Oh.
And they stopped making NERDS cereal a long time ago, didn't they? I guess people didn't want two cereals in one box.
Nevermind. Bad example! CDs are nothing like NERDS cereal.
Basically, it would simply be a touch-sensitive dumb terminal for a "central server" or master machine on my desk or in my closet.
You've pretty much described the Zenith Data Systems CruisePAD, another bit of tablet technology that failed to find a market. CSO was practically giving them away not long ago.
When the network gets fritzy, we all try to get to the forum and bitch about how much we hate our Office of Information Technology (OIT) here. If we can't get to the forum, we bitch to someone in person, usually a roommate, until we can vent on the forum.
When I was in school, Internet access was provided by a bank of 2400 baud modems and a terminal server. Every few days the terminal server would lock up, and we'd be cut off. Waiting for IT to correct the problem was painful: a 24 hour delay, minimum.
Soon though, we discovered we could fix the problem ourselves. Throw enough characters at the terminal server, and a buffer would overflow causing it to reboot. I kept a "C" battery by my keyboard just for the purpose of weighting a key in times of Internet outage. By the time my microwave popcorn was ready, the terminal server was back up, and I could return to MUDing.
Shortly before I graduated, the school rolled out 10Base-T to the dorms. Speedy downloads and graphical web browsing were finally ours, but network outages were longer and more frustrating. Sometimes, there are advantages to crude technologies.
Sounds like the VMS phone utility from about 1979.
What my friends and I found most amusing about "phone"--way back in the days of vaxen--was that it was not an "application". No, nor was it a "utility". Instead, Digital called it a "facility".
Right there in the computer lab, on our first day of college, my new found friends and I vowed to only write facilities from that day forward. It's worked out about as well as you might expect.
"Boxen" is a pseudo-word for drooling simpletons who live for Think-geek ads and the next kernel release. I am sorry this site provides such a warm, fuzzy place for you to be in.
Shift-Insert, Ctrl-Insert -- These are your friends.
Darn right! I automatically switch back to these anytime I'm working on a Windows box. I just can't wrap my head around Windows using those new-fangled Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V key combinations now.
For some reason (insert evil plot here) XP can only format a FAT 32 Partition up to 32GB. Windows 2k and 98 can format up to the drive limit I believe (or at least to 127GB).
Like Windows XP, Windows 2000 cannot create FAT32 partitions larger than 32GB. It can mount them, it just can't create them.
According to Microsoft, "This behavior is by design."
You nkow, I've never heard of anyone EVER getting a speeding ticket for going 1 mile over the speed limit, except in movies (comedies mostly).
Visit Carroll County, Maryland sometime. The cops there are strict, and they will ticket folks for exceeding the speed limit by only 1 m/h. I know several people ticketed there for exactly that and therefore always carefully drive the speed limit while passing through.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, thanks. Now I have that annoying Toy Box song stuck in my head.
Many years ago, I had an Aptiva tower computer, an odd little machine. One of its creative features was the built-in Trident video card that automagically disabled itself if a PCI video card was added to the system. At least, that's what it was supposed to do.
When I installed a snazzy new STB Velocity 128 3D card in the machine, I discovered the built-in video card did automatically stop functioning, but did not become invisible to Windows 95. As a result, Windows frequently enhanced my computing experience with fun activities like:
- trying to exclusively use the non-functional Trident card for display
- dying--apparently in shock over having two video cards--during boot
- rediscovering the Trident card and prompting me to install drivers for this "new" hardware
After much time spent updating drivers, firmware, and the BIOS, I gave up and called IBM technical support. My hope was one or more of the undocumented jumpers on the motherboard had something to do with really disabling the Trident card. Instead, I was informed Nvidia and STB had messed up by not making their hardware fully compatible with the auto-disable feature of the Aptiva's built-in video. According to the tech:I was neither surprised, nor disappointed, when IBM left the consumer desktop market a few years later.
I've had a Kenwood 6+1 changer since my college days, and I'm not at all sure what I could replace it with were it to die. I've found seven discs on "Random All" is just about the perfect amount of music for me. Even on computer-based players, where I could randomize as many albums as I want, or even all my music, I find I prefer to select only four to eight albums at a time.
Still, it's nice to see random track playback getting some press. Since iTunes and the iPod were released, playlists have been hyped rediculously. I hated playlists when Winamp appeared and introduced them, and I've seen nothing in the current crop of playback devices to improve my disposition towards them.
Give me ~80 GB of storage to hold my collection, and let me hand select four to eight albums for random all non-repeating. That's all I want.
You don't use BrioQuery Explorer or Brio Insight on Windows 2000.
The patch for MS03-045 broke both BrioQuery Explorer and Brio Insight in such a way that any key pressed in combination with a Shift key would instantly repeat 136 times. Brio rushed out a patch for BrioQuery Explorer 6.6.4.44 and for Insight, but since I'm still on BrioQuery Explorer 6.2.2.53 I have to either bounce on Caps Lock in place of Shift or cut and paste to a text editor.
Once, many years ago, a friend and I were in his parent's basement racing slotcars. He put his head on the track so he could watch his car zoom away, and the track lightly shocked his ear. Of course, as a regular test-the-9-volt-on-his-tongue kind of kid, he immediately had to try sticking his tongue to the track. Idiot.
Yes, but then instead of the much hoped for "XBox Forever", they'll try to show how the controllers appear in an alternate universe and lose most of their fans.
And does this indicate an upcoming series of "XBox Special" handhelds?
My wife is an avid console gamer, and she already has nine game systems connected to the TV in the living room. (Counting the Sega CD and 32x as part of the Genesis, despite their $#%!@$% separate video connections and wall warts.) She doesn't have a X-Box yet due to a lack of titles that interest her, but she'll likely get one eventually. And let me tell you, as the one who modifies the A/V cabinet and fights the wiring rat's nest behind it to accommodate these systems, I was thrilled when the PS2 completely replaced the original Playstation. (Okay, there's the multitap incompatibility, but that's relatively minor.)
Not only is my wife still playing them, she's still buying titles off the long list of Playstation games she wants. Indeed, we pre-ordered and picked up the PS2 the morning it was released specifically to play Playstation games. Sure, we bought some launch titles, but that wasn't the point. (Thank goodness, as they weren't very good!) Her Playstation was dying and needed to be replaced anyway. The timing was perfect.
Now, there probably won't be too many folks who have their X-Boxes die just as the X-Box 2 hits the shelves (cue conspiracy theories about destructive updates), but backwards compatibility can still be beneficial. The PS2 didn't launch with many titles, and the ones it had were generally not much to get excited over. However, it had an enormous back catalogue of Playstation titles, many available at discount or pre-owned. That helped its success substantially.
Find an old IBM Aptiva with Rapid Resume. On those accursed beasts, the power button is merely a polite suggestion, often ignored.
Future nothing, this is already a standard feature on tablet PCs.
Yeah, Sun stole that thunder from Smalltalk, not QT. Get it right.
Mittens is already in there. Toonces the wardriving cat gets early access to all these things.
Similar story: This Christmas, my in-laws gave my brother-in-law's daughter a Fisher-Price Little People Noah's Ark. As we're sitting around playing with the little plastic animals, my brother-in-law noticed the flag for the top of the ark. Visibly furious, he turned to me and hissed, "Why is there a rainbow on this flag?" Now, I'm not a religious guy, but I managed to recall a rainbow at the end of Noah's story in the Bible. He disagreed with my reasoning and insisted that this, like all rainbows, was a pro-gay-rights symbol.
If a rainbow sticker (with the colors in the wrong order for a rainbow, no less) on a child's toy and a lollipop shaped like a cartoon train can offend, then I'm sure folks will manage to find the "three daemons raise a pitchfork" image offensive.
Well, the display clutch (a.k.a. hinge) on my Compaq Contura Aero 4/33c did break. (No suprise there, the Contura Aero display clutch was fabulously bad.) Not only did Compaq have replacement clutches for sale (directly and through parts resellers), but the replacement clutches were of an improved design.
Amusingly, it was when I ordered a replacement bezel for my Aero that I ran into trouble. The kit was readily (and inexpensively) available through parts resellers and included the display bezel, latch, screws, and some other odds and ends. The kit I received though was missing the display latch. In its place, Compaq included a small slip of paper explaining that the display latch was out of stock when the kit was assembled and directing me to simply use the existing latch instead. Too bad for me that my screen bezel was fine and my latch was broken.
That price is still high.
My first pair of toric lenses was $50 per lens. By the time I purchased my last pair of non-disposable replacements, the price had risen to $96/lens. Disposables were finally available, but non-disposables were cheaper per year. (Especially since I always got 2-1/2 to 3-1/2 years of daily use out of non-disposable lenses, not the 1 year they assumed.) When my contacts died earlier this Fall, I was able to buy a year's worth of disposable toric lenses for somewhere around $60. I'm not sure of the exact price, as my insurance reduced it to $9.99.
So you listen to the audio snippits before hand on PriceGrabber.com or Amazon.com or Buy.com or dozens of other places, and you decide whether the whole album is worth buying. It's like, it's like that NERDS cereal that came with two flavours in one box. You might have thought the one flavour was really, really good and the other was just okay. So, you had to decide if the box as a whole was worth the money.
See, today CDs are just like that! Sugary, to appeal to the youth while providing none of the substance and nutrition adults want.
Oh.
And they stopped making NERDS cereal a long time ago, didn't they? I guess people didn't want two cereals in one box.
Nevermind. Bad example! CDs are nothing like NERDS cereal.
Now if only they'd put the Rome Lab Snowball Cam back online.
You've pretty much described the Zenith Data Systems CruisePAD, another bit of tablet technology that failed to find a market. CSO was practically giving them away not long ago.
When I was in school, Internet access was provided by a bank of 2400 baud modems and a terminal server. Every few days the terminal server would lock up, and we'd be cut off. Waiting for IT to correct the problem was painful: a 24 hour delay, minimum.
Soon though, we discovered we could fix the problem ourselves. Throw enough characters at the terminal server, and a buffer would overflow causing it to reboot. I kept a "C" battery by my keyboard just for the purpose of weighting a key in times of Internet outage. By the time my microwave popcorn was ready, the terminal server was back up, and I could return to MUDing.
Shortly before I graduated, the school rolled out 10Base-T to the dorms. Speedy downloads and graphical web browsing were finally ours, but network outages were longer and more frustrating. Sometimes, there are advantages to crude technologies.
What my friends and I found most amusing about "phone"--way back in the days of vaxen--was that it was not an "application". No, nor was it a "utility". Instead, Digital called it a "facility".
Right there in the computer lab, on our first day of college, my new found friends and I vowed to only write facilities from that day forward. It's worked out about as well as you might expect.
Yeah, real programmers use vaxen.
Darn right! I automatically switch back to these anytime I'm working on a Windows box. I just can't wrap my head around Windows using those new-fangled Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V key combinations now.
Ctrl+C is center, darn it! Ctrl+E, feh!
Like Windows XP, Windows 2000 cannot create FAT32 partitions larger than 32GB. It can mount them, it just can't create them.
According to Microsoft, "This behavior is by design."
Come on, you can do better than that. Focus!
Yay! Twinkies!
Visit Carroll County, Maryland sometime. The cops there are strict, and they will ticket folks for exceeding the speed limit by only 1 m/h. I know several people ticketed there for exactly that and therefore always carefully drive the speed limit while passing through.