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Admin
I always wondered why modems made noise out loud like that.
I kinda thought it was something like that.
Admin
Lol total newb, dialtone is the first thing I check if the modem isn't working randomly. More often some jerk just left the handset off the hook...
Admin
:laughing:
Admin
People like that fill me with incandescent rage. It makes me want to campaign for compulsory euthanasia for everyone older than, I dunno, 55, who can't keep a civil tongue in their heads. Nasty, vicious, sour, poisonous, disgusting old oxygen larcenists.
Admin
Why not half that? :notes: :door:
Admin
When I found myself habitually on a computer with a quiet hard-drive, I found myself missing the noise the hard-drive made because I didn't know whether the computer was busy or frozen.
Classic because the caller is a
with blind support from an authority figure.
Admin
Hey! I resemble that remark. :rage:
Admin
/me takes notes :pencil2: :notebook:
Admin
Please.
I know people in their 20's who don't understand that the monitor is not "The computer."
My grandmother taught herself Skype in her 80's (this was back in the early 2000's). She just made up her mind that "If that's how my grandkids are talking, I'm going to learn it so I can talk with them."
There's nothing about age that causes or cures the problem. It's all about attitude.
I think their should be "Service authorization boards" that decide what you can have/use. IT techs will "remove" your PC privileges. Auto mechanics will "remove" your driving privileges. Veterinarians will "remove" your animal care privileges, etc.
Admin
The thing is, we already have a system in place to deal with the last two. If someone's abusing animals, they get the animals taken away and a fine or jail time or whatever. If someone violates traffic law a lot, they get their license taken away and a fine or jail time or whatever.
But none of those things are from the people who deal with them. The animals generally get taken away by humane societies via legal action. The driver's licenses get taken away by the state government. There's no law that says you can't be stupid with a computer, even if only because half of congress would be breaking it the moment it was passed.
Admin
Worse, manufacturers have stopped including disk usage indicator lights on many computers. Now I have a stupid ritual of waiting 5 minutes on the login screen and 10 minutes after logging in, because sometimes the disk gets overstressed and takes too long and certain "smart" applications give up and exit instead of just waiting.
+1 - though by the time that happens cars will be self driving anyway.
Admin
Both versions are true, actually.
Admin
Ah, but you miss the point. Yes, abuse and mayhem are criminal, but there's nothing shutting down outright stupidity.
You speed or cause damage, yes, you lose you license, but there's no punishment for the moron who buys a new car, drives 35K miles on it, and then yells at the mechanic when the break-in oil has become sludge. No one stops people who dress their pets in stupid outfits that the pets obviously hate.
Admin
I hate dressing up, but nobody's throwing me in jail for putting on a fancy shirt.
Are you suggesting we should ban everything that anyone could find even the slightest bit uncomfortable? Should we ban running for office because I don't like watching their commercials? Should we ban email because some companies send spam using it? Should we ban charging money for products because I would prefer to get everything free?
Admin
Lighten up, Francis.
We're talking about people dressing up pets, not what shirt you're wearing.
Admin
Why not half that?
Admin
It started with faxes, because a lot of fax machines shared the same line with a human and so the human had to have some time to turn on the fax machine if they heard the tone.
Modems evolved from fax machines.
Admin
Hey, don't judge Ben's life choices!
Admin
Also, Modems evolved from Modems.
One wonders why they never backported any newer tech concepts backward. I mean, if you were transmitting on eight frequencies through the telephones instead of the one (er, two I guess), then couldn't you increase bandwidth the same way our sparkly DOCSIS 3.0 modems do it?
Surely the Telcos would love this idea, as it would stretch their monopoly on copper even longer? :trolleybus:
Edit: Added a trolley, because apparently it wasn't obvious enough.
Admin
FTFY
Admin
Oh, high-speed copper internet? Enter 100/100 VDSL2.
Admin
Admin
Doesn't that depend on the copper wires not being a crusty load of shit?
Admin
Hmm. USB drive with an LED drive activity indicator--that'd be neat.
Admin
Sure there is! His insurance says "fuck you, you can replace the car yourself."
Admin
Perhaps they should, though.
Admin
Sounds like someone in here might benefit from buying himself an SSD for Christmas...
Admin
They sort of did--there was a time in the 90s if you were willing to buy a second modem, a second phone line, and your ISP supported it, you could dial in on both lines at once and supposedly get double-speed internet.
Admin
My desktop has a 128GB SSD. I was referring to my laptop which has an old hard drive.
Admin
Admin
For me, I have a TV that apparently has an unshielded amplifier near the front speaker. If I align my phones correctly, I can detect 3g wireless activity with it. :wink:
Admin
True. Which is why I'm currently stuck on ADSL2+.
Admin
Back in the day, my neighborhood couldn't get DSL at all for a long time. When it did become available, I got service from a small, regional ISP that was a reseller for SBC (or whatever they were calling themselves at the time). Their prices were higher than buying direct from SBC, but with customer service that was rated 5 stars, while SBC's was 0. (Their prices were higher because SBC didn't like resellers, and charged them more than consumers; the ISP just passed their costs through.)
Eventually, after a few years, I noticed they were running a promotion for higher speed service for less money than I was currently paying — win-win! Unfortunately, my copper couldn't support the higher speed, so I couldn't upgrade and didn't get the lower price, either. :/
Admin
And while I'm as foolishly nostalgic as the next person, I definitely do not miss the days of having to partition phone line time between voice and internet access. Especially fun when you were part way through a large download and someone picked up the phone to make a call. There were download managers to help out with that situation, but not all sites supported resuming a download.
Admin
:rofl: Hey, that's the one I wrote.
Admin
Oh wow, this reminds of when I was 11 using Internet Explorer 6 on XP and some sites would say that you needed to disable any download managers to make sure the download worked, and I had no idea what a download manager was until you wrote this post. Our internet was definitely not dial-up.
Admin
Wait, seriously? Or did you just not realize that Ctrl-J was actually a really cheap built-in download manager?
Admin
:get_off_my_lawn.mp4:
Seriously, when I was 11 I don't think I'd
never even seen a computer. I first touched one when I was 13 — a PDP8-L with 4k of memory and a BASIC interpreter loaded from punched paper tape. When I was 11, the original IBM PC was still over a decade in the future; even the Apple ][ was almost a decade away. Although I used a lot of computers in school and work, I didn't actually own one of my own (a '286) until I was almost 30.Admin
I just never made the connection, I guess. Besides, you have to enable a special flag in
chrome://flagsto enable download resumption, so I don't really think it counts.I was born in the nineties so I missed a lot of cool early computing technology while I was growing up. My grandmother has a working Windows 3.1 computer that runs The Incredible Machine, though...
Admin
I was born in my nineties.
Filed under: I am now 110+ years old.
Admin
That reminds me when I was in my teens, using Windows XP and pirating the hell out of everything, including the aforementioned XP. Remember, this is the time that Rapidshare was the big thing, probably the biggest it'd ever gotten.
So, I was downloading a lot but
didn't want to pay forcouldn't afford a premium account. But my ISP was assignin IPs dynamically, so I had a script plugged into my download manager, that would reset the router after each download.And, but only for a while, this great thing called P2M has happened and one could download gigs of pirated HIV infected software from Gmail and Yahoo, all in 10 MB parts.
These were the great times.
Admin
And you too could play TIM, for the low low price of £6.59 eurobux
Admin
Not sure if serious... All external disks and thumbdrives I've come across had an activity LED. I'm looking at one blinking right now and there's a USB stick behind my notebook which probably doesn't blink currently but will if I access something on it.
Admin
How does that refute his point? Buy an SSD for your laptop.
Admin
Can you listen to check whether someone is watching porn on their phone nearby?
Admin
So you did see some before 11?
Admin
FTFY. Tech is a hell of a lot nicer now. The things that you missed out on that were worthwhile were some of the communities of people, many of whom were really worth being part of. But the tech? Fuck that shit. We don't need a return to dicking around with CONFIG.SYS in an attempt to get all your drivers out of working memory so that your games could run, or having to tell each game separately what the sound card's IO ports were…
Admin
Bah. I added "I don't think" as an afterthought, because it's possible I had but don't remember it, and missed that I made a double negative.
Filed under: INB4 somebody takes "I don't think" out of context and agrees with that as a general statement.
Admin
I see. :trolleybus:
Admin
Sorry, I should've said "USB device that contains an activity LED for the hard drive in the computer."