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Recently, a group of computer scientists (all males) announced that computers should also be referred to as being female. Their reasons for drawing this conclusion follow: 1. No one but the Creator understands their internal logic; 2. The native language they use to communicate with other...

Damn it! I just lost a post. Luckily it was a picture post, so easy to reconstruct. Is there a head on that surface? Hard to tell for sure from those pictures, but there certainly appear to be blank, naked arms. Compare with this Fireball CX: The topmost head on the GXP is well below the...

On the whole, I like the new one Doug. I'm not sure that it's 100% right, but there are some nice features to it. If you were to start with that and tweak it, I think you'd end up with a very nice look indeed.

Time said: "There's also no point measuring miniscule differences between operations that are fast on any drive..... Benchmarking 101. Exactly.

There was a VESA II as well, if I recall correctly, but I don't think it ever made it to market. For a while there, VESA II vs PCI as the next standard was hotly debated.

Damn it, when are some of you guys going to sell some of that beautiful SCSI gear over here in a proper-way-up country? There has hardly been a thing advertised here that I didn't want. That drive of yours, Steve, would have been perfect as a replacement for my Atlas IV / 1000JB / SV6003H /...

Prof: great post!

Her turn for the day off. I have to go and do all the work today. Sigh.

Opera rocks. Bloody Tannin makes me use IE so he can have the Opera. Bastard.

Isn't it funny that you can get quite a bit done when you only have a little while, but when you take a whole day off to do things, you achieve almost nothing. Didn't manage my promised other half last night. In fact I'm not sure that I achieved anything yesterday, except having a relaxing day...

Quite so, Time. It doesn't make sense. Lord alone knows how many Win95B machines I have seen running IE 5.0 without the slightest fuss, including his for the last year or two until just recently. We never install patches unless they are needed. The time factor makes that out of the question...

Ohh, I know about ugliness, Steve. I have to look at Tannin every morning in the mirror. Mostly I just close my eyes. So, that's the old non-slimline you in Flagreen's avatar, then? Let me see, I have to translate. I guess, being so much younger than most of you I should think in kilograms...

Sorry, Tannin. Silver BBs. But what about the Mark 1 X15? They look wonderful. Hmmm .... A short list of the best-looking drives ever made. (Just off the top of my head, subject to revision.) (Not in any order.) Seagate Medalist Pro ST-51080A, and its various relatives Seagate Decathlon...

Steve, you should eat more. You're looking positively skeletal.

I'd love one, Tim. But only siler BBs to be found over here. As for the Cheetah, I'll just have to wait until it fails, if I live that long, and can take the top off. The inside of drives is almost always worth looking at. Right now it's back in harness, buried deep inside our technical server...

Tim, I have tried them all. Well, a great many of them, anyway. No matter, I only use Windows at home. The real work I use OS/2 for. Looking at James' link now.

Ohh. That's double width the way I think about it. Damn! I thoiught there was a real improvement to be had there. I thought you meant extending the taskbar so that it scrolls off the top of the screen (right-hand side of the screen if you have it horizontal). Of course, with no z-order sorting...

Double height? How do you do that? I hate the way Windows goes to two illogically-sorted colums the moment you start to do anthing much. (Taskbar does that without being asked, of course.)

For only 8 - 10 windows, Alt-Tab is perfect, or, if you prefer to mouse around, a sideways start bar works well. (i.e., down the left, not across the bottom - a Windows start bar across the bottom of the screen where there is only room for two or three readable items is a guaranteed signal that...

Huh? Extra click? What on earth are you guys talking about? There is no extra click involved. Move mouse to over minimized app, left-click once, app is restored to whatever state you left it in (windowed or full screen). Where is this "extra click" coming from?

Yup, more info on the way, James. It will indeed be basic level stuff, for despite my family influence, that's the level I am at. I'm taking the day off today but it's too nice outside to spend long on the computer. (I'm sorting through my MFM controllers and taking pictures of the Miniscribe...

But why would you want a minimized app in your taskbar? (I'm not arguing here, just don't understand.)

Huh? That's what it's for. Why on earth would you want minimized apps clogging up the task bar?

It would be fun to pass on now to the things that can be done with the inside of hard drives. They are amazing things, and the games that you can play with reflecting things into them are limitless. Here, for example, is the result of no more than five minutes tinkering with a Medalist 10240...

Oh: formal shots can look OK, but you have to get them just so. This one here - - a Quantum Fireball CR, doesn't look anything special but it does the job. It's still not quite right but that is about as good as I can get without either more practice or else a good quality tripod - I bought...

I'm doing hard drives, CPUs, and motherboards. Each one is quite different. The hard drives are middling-difficult. The first thing I discovered was that you can't just point and click. To start with, you need to decide if you are going to go for a formal view or an informal view. If you want...

James, a little bit of my experience with the Sony, for what it's worth - which isn't much, as it's not something I'd particularly recommend unless you have special reason to want floppy disc storage. For me, it was Hobson's choice, as my main priority was being able to use the camera with...

hiC! darn bubbles

Haven't had a drink all night. Unless you count that fizzy stuff with the lemon in it. But it's only a real drink when it's got alcohol in it isn't it? I can tell when people are drinking alcohol because they walk funny and lie down to talk with DB. Buck was doing it the other night. Anyway, I...

You know what the really great thing about wise old sayings is? You can ignore the bloody things, that's what it is. I was surfing just now, looking for details on the ultra-crap VX Pro main board I just laid my hands on (for photographic purposes only, of course), and this particular site that...

Excuse me Bartender, what is my friend DB lying down like that for? And why did he ask for a glass of run? I thought he liked rum. Do you think he would wake up if I put some of this ice down his trousers?

You should have mentioned Strauss in that context too, Tannin. What Tannin meant to say, Sol, is that certain of Wagner's more fanatic admirers also happened to have some rather ... er extreme opinions about politics. Notably a young Austrian war veteran by the name of Schicklgruber. Half the...

I think it's cute.

Yes Buck. At least I think so. I'll check them side by side on Monday. Unless I forget.

Genome @ Home does horrible things to my one and only net-connected Windows machine, good Sir. Tannin and I will have to put our heads together to figure out why. Somewhere in amongst the 17 other things we meant to do today. All our other machines, about six of them, either don't run Windows...

They sure are. We just bought our first Cuda ATA IVs, 40GB ones, and had some fun listening to them. Or not listening to them, more to the point.

Thanks HD. A nice, readily understandable refresher course.

Oh be quiet, Tannin. Can't a girl have any fun?

Easy freeware graphical FTP client especially for the FTP retard uploaded to the front page.

Thanks Buck. I tried asking Tannin but he just mumbled something about "never used to happen under DR-DOS" and went back to looking for a 286-16 board that still works. I'll see the system sometime next week and put the Mercutio cure into effect. Ill let you all know how it goes.

Tannin has gone retro. Poor old fellah. I think the stress was getting to him. Any of you with technical questions relating to modern hardware had better address them to me instead. As usual, if I don't know the answer, I'll just make it up.

Outside of the "compulsory" ones that Win98 insists on before installing, no James. I'm getting to see the machine again sometime next week. But the chances that the relevant bits of the Windows code are in the same exact locations after thre reinstalls and a format are zero. Still, I'll run...

Yup, all new HTML, and lots of new pictures, some revisions to the text here and there too. Hmmm .... Power consumption. That would be a useful thing to add, though I think it might mean a lot of work to track down figures for so many chips. Plugging the figures in would not be difficult, but...

Hmmm... Thanks Mercutio. The original version of that file is definately gone: it's had a DELTREE C:\WINDOWS and a FORMAT C: Guess I'll try 98SE and if that doesn't work try the replacement file you mention.

How long did it take? Zero years, zero days, and zero minutes: they were both announced at the same time in January 1989. :) But that does not invalidate your point, of course, HD. Moore's Law has proven to be astonishingly accurate. Perhaps a fairer way to look at the rate of progress back...

Clippy, you can get a reasonable idea of the way the K6-2/450 performed, together with its competitors (which are listed above and below in more-or-less accurate speed order) from this page here. OK, I grant you it was only Tannin that wrote that, I would have done a much better job myself, but...

www.pmview.com

Guess the subject explains it pretty well. Anyone have an explanation for this? The system is a K602/450 on a solid but performance-challenged little Biostar board with integrated everything and no secondary cache. It's running Windows 95B with IE 5.0, and it has trouble on the web. It worked...

Excellent thread guys, I'm learning stuff. Keep it up. But just to throw in a bit of perspective, let's consider that notion of "itty-bitty speed steppings" that Cougtek mentioned - because the truth of the matter is that they are all piss-poor little itty-bitty steppings now. Just yesterday...

Oh, and the other classic way of getting that checksum error is a bad CPU. If you ever miss it and think you would like to see it again, just plug in a Duron and don't bother with a fan. (Or an Athlon - matter of personal taste and how many dollars worth of chip you want to destroy.)