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Huh-uh. 1842. Alexander Bain. I accept apologies in the form of leftover wedding cake. http://www.sciencenet.org.uk/Origins/telecom.html

It's not my business and there was no profit motive. The woman with the HP now thinks that installing RAM is something that requires an engineering degree and a pair of able-bodied assistants, but IMO that's HP's fault.

I also spent a little better than an hour today trying to install RAM in a Pavilion 8750. *None* of the "how to open our whack-ass cases" documents on HP's site accurately depicted that particular procedure. Previous to that, I think it'd been six months or so since the last time I played in a...

Not true, Tea, not true at all. Fax technology has been with us since the mid 19th century. It was formally standardized in the 1980s at 2400bps, and indeed, a great many fax machines only talk that speed. Later a specification for 9600bps was added, then finally 14.4. I believe these speeds...

The 7599 is one of those cases that has the entire moreboard obscured by powersupply and/or drive cages. I couldn't see chips on that board with an xray machine. I told the woman who owns the machine to live with no sound or buy a decent computer.

You haven't seen the piercings my ex is sporting lately, .Nut.

I think this is our other really funny thread. Feel free to continue spreading the joy, IMFU.

... and if you think PeeWee cares about, say, industrial computing or optical switching applications, you have more faith in him than I do.

Screw it. After three hours of trying to get an AWE64, then a CMI cheapie, to work under 98SE or 2000, I've decided that it's not my problem. All things sound hang that PC. Who the hell builds integrated boards without an option to turn off the integrated bits? OK. Don't answer that.

FreeBSD???

No ISA. Four PCI slots. At this point I think my options are to swap PCI slots to see if any work better for that AWE64, or install Win2000 and hope it works better. No sound is, of course, completely out of the question.

A joke you must've missed. Autoupdate is kind of scary, especially with the now-standard practice of rolling all the critical updates into one big ball. What am I downloading, again?

A truly secure machine isn't connected to a network and is sunk in two feet of concrete (along with all its cables). Oh. And it isn't turned on, either. The other side of this is that I would've assumed Windows would do some kind of checking to determine the source of the messages being...

If I'm using a non-Windows OS, I buy a USR Courier. Nothing else will do. But for everyone else, the Winmodem is the only justifiable choice.

Logitech is good kit if you don't mind losing some of the craptastic "features" their drivers provide, like the automatic "snap-to" messageboxes. You basically lose nothing (I can scroll in VB.NET with a logitech trackball), so I'm not sure what the point is.

I have a presario 7599 (p3-700) sitting in my car right now. Its onboard sound is dead, but not dead enough that Windows can't still detect it via plug and play. Compaq, in its wisdom, provides no way to disable onboard sound either through the BIOS (I can change it to IRQ 5 or IRQ 9, that's...

Having to boot off a 5.25" floppy? Automatically granting billg and co. admin rights on your machine (which is something that SP3 does, BTW)? Multics translation layer? All-encompassing DRM? Product activation? TCP/IP support provided exclusively via AOL? Read-Once installation media? I can...

I like Supra SupraMax 56k winmodems. They're Conexant (Rockwell)-based, but I haven't had problems with 'em. The other two big winmodem chip-makers (lucent and HSP) both make custom-driver-of-the-week crap that I don't like dealing with. I have a whole pile of Lucent Winmodems I can't use...

Logitech's native drivers can be goofy sometimes. I've seen them cause problems with screen updates, for example.

I *like* 98 first edition. I mean, once you strip all of IE out of it, it's really well-behaved for a lightweight system. ME is that buggy? I know it's ugly and DOS-less, but it's buggy, too? I'd think the very last release of 9x would at least be "less buggy". Wow. This changes my whole world...

I'm sure cas has already heard about this but maybe the rest of you haven't. The simple explanation is that the gentleman who wrote that article figured out an easy way to use a flaw in Windows message-passing code to grant himself higher-than-Administrator user rights from a guest account...

Let's not say things we can't take back. Do you not remember NT4's SP1 and 2?

I'd just like to point out that in the case above, it's likely that the PC is actually using multiple antivirus packages. None of which have been updated in three years, and all of which are incompatible. I dealt with a member of that species a couple weeks ago. 256MB AthlonXP 1400+ running...

Type 12: the "Zero Understanding of the Concept of Progress" More simian than the UaaR, and with less people-skills than the CFC, the ZUofCoP is the guy who can't understand why the copy of Windows XP you sold him won't go in his 5.25" disk drive. Or worse, thinks that because he OWNS Windows...

Type 10 - The "Upgrade against all reason" UaaRs are the folks who last bought a PC sometime before the introduction of the serial mouse, who feel that the best way to spend their money is to upgrade, rather than replace the boat-anchor they've developed some kind of deep spiritual relationship...

You all forgot Type 6 - The completely frickin' clueless Type6s are the folks who'll come in, buy a top-of-the-line machine because they heard about this new-fangled "internet" thing, and mate it to a 12" VGA display. They expect everything to work exactly the same way, every time (and...

The drives are definitely behaving like floppies. They show up as the "A:" drive and have a normal floppy-like icon, as opposed to the generic "removable storage" icon common to zip drives etc. These drives are on SEVERELY generic boards. AWARD BIOS, but fewer options than normal. I don't think...

*I* can build a great PC for $600. HP can't. At least, not if they want to make money. Or rather, that $600 PC turns into $1000 by the time they make some money on it. I don't build PCs for profit. I do it for a hobby. Don't make a dime. At the same time, I don't want to spend more time on my...

I get answered the question "So you're a computer person? My relative xyz who took a computer class in college says to never buy a BrandX because they suck goats. What brand do you think I should buy?", or a question very similar to that one, seventeen times yesterday (I was working someplace...

There really hasn't been any. Seriously. Very, very slow month. ATI announced a card that spanks GF4s. WD wants a 200GB drive in every PC, Microsoft is going to stop shipping 2000 in December. Eugene at SR got a half-explanation for crappy SCSI performance in XP. OS/2 is still dead, and so are...

I stand by my previous evaluation. Birds and fish are evil.

I'd have very little difficulty being the first to adopt a new model hard disk. Other stuff, I'd rather wait. I did take a leap of faith for KT333 not too long ago. That was a surprisingly good experience. Motherboard chipsets are normally the last things to buy early.

Birds. Horrid creatures. All they do is shed feathers and crap. Fish are bad too. Unblinking fish-eyes disturb me, as do their scaley bodies. Amy has fish. I don't think they're pets. They're dreadful little creatures that remind me of HP Lovecraft stories. They ate their young, and one of the...

Rescued from a pound or shelter Tea. Like my cats. One day I'd like to have a shorthair Scottish Fold again, too, but whenever I think of it, I remember all the animals that are in shelters that need homes, too.

... and while we're at it, Nancy Heathcliff Blondie Beetle Bailey Mallard Fillmore Wizard of Id Crock ... and a few more that I enjoy: PreTeena (yup, I'm surprised too, but it's funny) LuAnne (same deal, moreso since it's scripted by a man) Mutts (Homage to "Krazy Kat") Life is Hell K...

I have two cats, named Will and Grace. The local humane societies wouldn't let Amy and I adopt a cat because of an enormous risk of FIV and Feline Leukemia in the feral cats near my apartment, so we drove almost two hours to a vet that operates a non-kill animal rescue. When I got my kittens...

You have to remember the ":)" Some of my favorites: Most of these are available through either ucomics.com or comics.com. Dilbert Doonesbury Get Fuzzy Boondocks Zits Arlo & Janis Rose is Rose And of course the late, lamented Bloom County/Outland, Calvin and Hobbes and Far Side. I'd add to...

I think that's the point, Bartender.

I'm a big fan of sequential art (aka Comic strips and comic books). While I was looking at some books of comic strips I was thinking about buying, I ran across something that I find hysterical. A little background: Family Circus is an obnoxiously unfunny comic strip about raising young...

IIRC, phoenix was one of the early birds. Back with GaryH. I came to SR in late 1998 (November?). It took me an entire year to get 100 posts but I lurked quite a bit. I think I found a link to SR on a visit to anandtech.com, and the forum by the "active topics" link that used to be in top...

After hearing it on infinite repeat for about three hours today, I have concluded that "Yellow Submarine" is without question a leading candidate to replace "Being force-fed my own scrotum" in my recurring nightmares.

... or transition to 64bit Linux, which seems to be more in-line with HPaq's strategic posturing of late and would doubtless pose less difficulty in portability.

Now I'm going to have to break out my VCDs and look, 'cause I don't remember.

Gary has, IIRC, six personas on SF at the moment. Maybe more. Which is OK. Every time he goes away for a couple month, SF gets a couple new users when he comes back. :)

True story, by the way. And a great movie. I was blown away when I first understood that people actually lived through that. I'm sure Tannin will chime in here and we'll have a marvelous discussion about the practice of selling command ranks to aristocrats in Victorian-era Britain and the...

If you'd like, I can give you all the A+ material in the entire world. I teach it, after all. :)

I don't recall any 486-era system boards that used SIPPs actually. I think they pretty much died on early 386 systems. Internal modem + cheap ISA soundcard + an I/O board or two + SCSI controller = a fun couple of hours for a tech. Especially when two or more of the above don't have manuals.

Cripes. What does automatic update-downloading do to us poor modem people... or mid-size companies with marginal internet connections? If nothing else, there's always the DisableWindowsUpdate policy, as crappy as that would be...

Geez Mark, you forgot that she'll need to install her SIPPs one at a time. :) Personally I always enjoyed dealing with wide SCSI drives on SCSI-1 controllers (the adaptor is HOW much?)

I asked about a 512k fractional line last year (only $380 a month from SBC!) and the super told me "no". Also "no" on Primary and basic ISDN (ISDN is good here - we don't pay per-minute in Indiana). Didn't ask about Frame relay and I don't have the equipment for that anyway. :( The place where...