Science fiction and technology writer

HitScan

Tue Nov 20 13:28:58 2001

I just felt like bitching about things this morning. Whatever, Whenever, Whyever.

Hotmail: I'm still using it after all this time, even though the interface is starting to chafe. But, why the hell can the MyMSN link not ever fucking work? All I want to do is read my quote of the day and horoscope, because that's all I really read on MSN.

HitScan

Tue Nov 20 13:29:19 2001

NT4 + 3DFx: Fuckers all around. Randomly I will experience full-on lockups on this little combo at work. Just this morning as a matter of fact. P.O.S. I want my Win2K! (but for that I have to completely reinstall everything on this box... which would be a pain in the ass.)

HitScan

Tue Nov 20 13:29:38 2001

NetBSD and PHP4: Apparently theres a bug in libtool or some such weirdness and PHP will not built under any circumstances on my NetBSD box here at work. This blows something awful because I wanted to play with Apache + PHP + PostreSQL. That would be killer. Maybe later...

HitScan

Tue Nov 20 13:29:52 2001

Miscommunication: (what, you think it was all computer shit? ;) ) I'm tired of people fuxing things up around here because they can't tell people what they're doing or planning to do. Yesterday, one of our new people (Lets say, Mindy) were supposed to go to a branch library to fill in for someone (say, Allison). Mindy's boss heard from the Allison that she would get everything ready and leave out the instructions so she wouldn't be lost. (Mindy's first time at the branch, and you work alone at them since they're so tiny) Mindy's boss said that Allison would leave the doors unlocked so she wouldn't need to get a key from the Lib Admin. Here lies trouble. Allison has never left the doors unlocked, and never would. Needless to say, Mindy gets there, 1/2 hour away, and can't open the doors. Much bitching. highly annoying. Everybody complains at everybody else and I'm reminded further that the new girl is the only reason I can still stand this damn place, heh.

HitScan

Tue Nov 20 13:30:17 2001

PostWhoring: uh, wait a sec... :biggrin:

OscarWilde

Tue Nov 20 13:47:11 2001

The lib. story is pretty good...

and yes when beauty be so near does even the bitter of fruits taste like honey....

OscarWilde

Tue Nov 20 13:54:30 2001

One must wonder, why the fuck do we need this emoticon:

:offtopic:

???

Is anything in OSY off topic? The only thing that can be off topic is if its on topic...

OscarWilde

Tue Nov 20 13:55:30 2001

:hmm:

HitScan

Tue Nov 20 14:35:18 2001

Indeed, :offtopic: is kind of redundant. Hey, maybe we can get Jeremy to set it up so that it is automatically inserted into the first post of new threads. It would be fitting, no? :biggrin:

I just noticed I've near 700 posts. DAMN! I thought it was under 400 yet. I've more here than at Ars, apparent have for the last few weeks. That's unexpected. (of course, a little more OS tagnutery wouldn't hurt, but I'm not much for the thread starting you know)

HitScan

Tue Nov 20 14:39:15 2001

Win 98 + Office 97, upgraded to O2K: This blows horse nuts. Now Excel doesn't save correctly, and will sometimes hang at close so that it looks like it's gone, but it's really holding the file open and freaking out so that you can't edit that file until you open the taskman and kill all the open copies of Excel. (usually 2 or more...) So, in one of the coming weekends I get to format and reinstall. Hurrah! Or... not, blah.

Riso

Tue Nov 20 22:27:22 2001

/me thinks at the warez'd O2k pro cds he has.

Nah, I dont need that.

Imitation Gruel

Tue Nov 20 22:31:55 2001

/me thinks at the warez'd O2k pro cds he has.

Thief! Criminal! Foul demon spawned from the depths of hell!

(Edited by Imitation Gruel at 2:32 pm on Nov. 20, 2001)

Riso

Tue Nov 20 22:36:34 2001

from Imitation Gruel posted at 11:31 pm on Nov. 20, 2001

Thief! Criminal! Foul demon spawned from the depths of hell!

You forgot anti-christ, Steven Jobs, Aol user, etcetera, etcetera,..

Magus

Tue Nov 20 23:51:40 2001

/me smiles at his legit Office XP cds

HitScan

Wed Nov 21 02:09:35 2001

Oh hell, that's not my box, heh. That belongs to someone here at work. (who also does all the schediling.. in Excel! do you see the funny now? Indeed.)

HitScan

Wed Nov 21 02:12:19 2001

Shitty boxes: I just spent about 3 of my scant few hours off in the evening working on a piece of shit Windows 95 box. This thing was so fuxed that if you tapped, tilted, or sneezed on the damn thing it would reset. Pushing a floppy in too hard or pressing the eject button at all would also acomplish a nice cold restart. It's an adventure to use really. It's just that the adventure would be so much more tolerable if I could give the damn thing an Office Space funeral.

OscarWilde

Wed Nov 21 02:34:40 2001

ho ho ho!!!! ironic no? when Windows 95 came out i hated it so much that i decided to try another platform. Hence why i ended up getting my very first mac. Why ironic? well windows 95 also started the decline in mac market share. Mac users were switching to Win95 where as i switched from my beloved DOS to Macs.

Ah yes the humor of it all.

Windows 9x/ME sucks donkey testicles

pineapples

Imitation Gruel

Wed Nov 21 03:17:41 2001

Edit: I hate all versions of MacOS ever made and would rather use an alpha of Windows 1.0 on the slowest processor capable of running it than the fastest Mac yet built.

(Edited by Imitation Gruel at 7:19 pm on Nov. 20, 2001)

AllYorBaseRBelong2Us

Wed Nov 21 03:31:30 2001

I'd prolly give Unix a try if someone dropped a cluster of Power4's on my lap running AIX.

Magus

Wed Nov 21 05:35:09 2001

No, AYB, don't give in to the Dark Side! Believe me, *nix is only useful for resume padding. I have to use it at work, and am also forced to deal with the foul beast for my CS coursework. I have learned to thoroughly hate it.

For a good example of what *nix does to your brain, read [url=http://arstechnica.infopop.net/OpenTopic/page?a=tpc&s=50009562&f=48409524&m=5740979903]this thread[/url] and watch CADdie make an ass of himself.

Imitation Gruel

Wed Nov 21 07:35:53 2001

I've thought about setting up a Mandrake or SuSe box just to play with it but the thought of being associated with people like The_Shitman makes me ill.

HitScan

Wed Nov 21 18:24:00 2001

Edit: I hate all versions of MacOS ever made and would rather use an alpha of Windows 1.0 on the slowest processor capable of running it than the fastest Mac yet built.

Well... I actually do have an 8088 that can run at 4 or 8 MHz, so I can run Win1 on the slowest possible chip. :biggrin:

I should have Win 1.01 someplace... d/l'd from some online gui museum or something. (hint: win1 suxors!)

DuffMan

Wed Nov 21 18:55:51 2001

Oh yeah, well I hosed my brand new motherboard within 24 hours of receiving it.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid. :bash: :bash: :bash: :bash: :bash: :bash: :bash:

Riso

Wed Nov 21 19:19:32 2001

/me points at duffman and laughs

HitScan

Wed Nov 21 19:19:42 2001

Well, at least now you can get it returned and back to you asap, right? Right?! :eek:

Magus

Wed Nov 21 20:03:24 2001

That bites. What happened, man?

DrPizza

Wed Nov 21 21:35:22 2001

from DuffMan posted at 6:55 pm on Nov. 21, 2001

Oh yeah, well I hosed my brand new motherboard within 24 hours of receiving it.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid. :bash: :bash: :bash: :bash: :bash: :bash: :bash:

What the fuck did you do?

That sounds fucking hilarious.

PaulHill

Wed Nov 21 22:28:12 2001

That's quite frightening. I'm the clumsiest person in the solar system, plus I don't think twice about ripping out NICs whilst wearing a thick chunky pullover and rolling around on the carpet, and I haven't "hosed" anything, ever. Apart from a "friend's" hard disk that accidentally bounced it's merry way down the stairs, that is.

Heh heh heh.

Oh yeah, Microsoft stop supporting Windows 95 at the end of the year, so you could frighten whoever it is still running that peice of shit with that factoid. If it helps.

Magus

Wed Nov 21 22:33:33 2001

/me grins fiendishly
/me decides to try to scare Campus Network Support....

DuffMan

Thu Nov 22 00:29:32 2001

Ok, here's what happened: Got the board set everything up and was working fine. AYB, btw your memory works fine at 133mhz and above. I wanted to put the newest bios on it, so I loaded up the in-windows flash utility and went to the Gigabyte website to get the newest bios. Clicked on my board's name and hit bios and it gave me a list. I clicked the one at the top of the list and downloaded it.

It turns out that Gigabyte's website actually took me to a page that lists bios for all three versions of the board. There are 3 versions: GA7-VTXP, GA7-VTXE and GA7-VTXH. I just clicked the link at the top because it had the most recent date on it, but it was actually the bios for a different version of the board.

I was messing arround with some other stuff while I downloaded and flashed the bios, and I never noticed my mistake. Normally if I was flashing a bios I would be way more carefull about what I was doing but I figured that an in-windows utility would be advanced enough to make sure everything was kosher. Also the board has Gigabyte's much hyped Dual Bios technology which has a back-up bios on board, and is supposed to be completely immune to bios problems.

So when it reboots it just hangs and doesn't even give me the option to use the backup bios which would still be intact and correct. You would think they would have a jumper or something to allow you to go straight to the backup bios. The bios chips are also physically soldered into the board, unlike the picture where they are in sockets. I think just swapping the two bios chips would probably get me up and running but I can't on this particular board. So for all Gigabyte's hype and advertising about Dual Bios and it's ability to safeguard you against bios problems, it is vunerable to using the wrong bios file. Using the wrong bios file is probably the leading cause of bios failures, and Dual Bios does nothing to protect you.

I'm a bit disappointed in the board not safeguarding the bios as promised. I admit this was my fault for not paying attention. But besides that I was pretty impressed with the board, it was stable unless I overclocked it too far, and has good features. I can RMA it so hopefully this will all get sorted out. I might have to pay a fee or something and will have to cover the shipping charges, but oh well. No biggie. Just me being dumb.

HitScan

Fri Nov 23 15:10:50 2001

You know, there are 2 things that piss me off about BIOS upgrades. They still require DOS boot disks, and they are extremely unhelpful in finding what it is you need.

1: You can't tell me it can't be done in Windows. It doesn't use the BIOS while running (well, other than 98 and below maybe , but fuck them) All you should have to do is log on as Administrator, and run a flasher. WHAM! taken care of.

b: Along the same vien as 1, if you're in Windows, you can damn sure check for your users which board they have. Rocket science it ain't. (again, probly have to be admin, but who cares?)

III: I fucking hate booting DOS to flash a BIOS. I don't have a fucking floppy! Last time, to save the box that my bum Radeon toasted I had to borrow the floppy out of my old PS/2 to get it running. That's a pain in the ass like few others.

I would have used the LS-120 from my other box to upgrade it, but due to Maxtor's incompetence, changing any of the master/slave settings in that machine is a tearful puppet show of pain.

DrPizza

Fri Nov 23 15:33:27 2001

from HitScan posted at 3:10 pm on Nov. 23, 2001

You know, there are 2 things that piss me off about BIOS upgrades. They still require DOS boot disks, and they are extremely unhelpful in finding what it is you need.
1: You can't tell me it can't be done in Windows. It doesn't use the BIOS while running (well, other than 98 and below maybe , but fuck them) All you should have to do is log on as Administrator, and run a flasher. WHAM! taken care of.

It can be done in Windows. Whatever are you talking about?

It needs some care to be taken and I think it would have to be done in a device-driver (both to get sufficient hardware access and to turn off interrupts whilst flashing), but it can certainly be done.

Magus

Fri Nov 23 15:52:59 2001

Teach me, O Master. /* Seriously! */

HitScan

Fri Nov 23 16:20:31 2001

You know it can be done, and I know it can be done (I said as much in that post :tongue: ) but I've not yet seen many mobo makers even attempt it. Abit certainly doesn't seem to hurried in their pursuit of easy end user BIOS upgrades. Fuckers.

Though I do see where Duff says that Gigabyte does have one. Shame they forgot to make it foolproof. (If you can flash the BIOS, you can damn sure check it's revision info GB...)

(Edited by HitScan at 8:20 am on Nov. 23, 2001)

Socrates

Sat Nov 24 00:57:22 2001

Rofl:
Great post Duffman.

My scariest momment was installing my raid with 4 drives, expensive ATTO dual channel card, and , BOOM, blown power supply...
s

Socrates

Sat Nov 24 01:33:43 2001

why update in the first place?
s

DuffMan

Sat Nov 24 05:48:04 2001

I had heard that some other users of the board had some problems before they upgraded it. As it turns out, I think it shipped with the most recent bios for that board anyway.

Socrates

Sun Nov 25 01:27:09 2001

Yeah, that's what I found with Asus. If it works, don't fuck with it.
s

AllYorBaseRBelong2Us

Sun Nov 25 02:57:54 2001

Hmm, my memory wasn't fuXored, no complaints about the Motherboard either (as I sold it)

must have been pebcak!

:cheesy:

DrPizza

Sun Nov 25 04:08:18 2001

OSY 1.0 Thread Viewer

Random bitching.