Yoz Grahame's Unresolvable Discrepancy

I came here to apologise and eat biscuits, and I'm all out of biscuits

Technology moves so fast/slow these days (delete as applicable)

Posted: November 24th, 2003 | 3 Comments »

Image sent: 200311241305

Toy time at the sheva brochos

Image sent: 200311241306

Bob, hygiene click
building my new PC

A Monday morning quiz for you: Which cutting-edge feature of my shiny new Gigabyte motherboard turned out to be utterly vital in order to install Windows XP onto my (also shiny, adiposity also new) Western Digital Caviar Serial ATA hard drive?

Blazing-fast 400MHz front side bus
Built-in 1394 (Firewire) support
DualBIOS (for increased security and stability)
Norton Internet Security and the rest of the pointless bundled software that always infests motherboard driver CDs
Floppy disk drive port

Yep. And to add injury to insult, erectile Gigabyte hadn’t even bothered to bundle a floppy with the required drivers in the package, neuropathologist so I had to beg a spare one off a neighbour (thank you, Diana), use my sister’s PC to put the drivers on it and only then could I hand it over to the XP installer so it could see the SATA controller. (First thing in next Amazon order – box of floppies.)

Fortunately, shiny new PC (expertly built by my shiny old girlfriend – look, I do software) is now perfectly happy and running fine, the occasional bizarre USB hard drive behaviour notwithstanding. Oh, and before you even consider it, “helpful advice” from Linux/Mac OS apologists will be returned with painful accounts of XFree bugs/dependency problems/”zapping the bloody PRAM”.

3 Comments on “Technology moves so fast/slow these days (delete as applicable)”

1 martin said at 10:31 am on November 25th, 2003:
the only thing for mac apologists to say to this tale of floppy disc dependency is “iMac, August 1998”.
2 Sean D. Sollé said at 3:39 pm on November 30th, 2003:
Which is ironic really, seeing as iMacs built before 2000 can’t boot off external drives.
See, it’s all very well saying things like “We may not have got everything right, but at least we knew the century was going to end”, but if you then follow it up with “Blimey! Hard drives bigger than 8Gbytes? Who’d have thought that?”, it doesn’t really have the same impact 🙂
3 Tim said at 9:45 pm on November 30th, 2003:
BACK OF THE NET! 🙂

yoz's bookmarks

How to win a grant 2013/07/22
"Skip the long-winded argument on why your idea—your life’s work—deserves institutional support, and instead do this:"
Bullies Called Him Pork Chop. He Took That Pain With Him And Then Cooked It Into This. 2013/04/12
Amazing multi-artist video for Shane Koyczan's poem about being bullied.
learnfun and playfun: A general technique for automating NES games 2013/04/11
Algorithmically analysing recorded gameplay and in-memory value increments to ascertain scoring techniques. The video is fantastic and funny, and the algorithm finds some useful bugs in the games.
How we use Redis at Bump - Bump Dev Blog 2011/07/16
How Redis became Bump's Swiss Army Knife to solve all kinds of data-related problems
Heroku | The New Heroku (Part 4 of 4): Erosion-resistance & Explicit Contracts 2011/06/29
Fascinating description of how Heroku's recent changes are aimed at killing software erosion (or what I think of as "bitrot").
What are the most interesting HTML/JS/DOM/CSS hacks that most web developers don't know about? - Quora 2011/06/17
Marvellous collection of JS, CSS & HTML hacks. Did you know you can get the browser to parse a URL or escape HTML for you, with existing JS functions? (via gnat)
Avatars In Motion 2011/05/21
"This blog is to show all the beauty you can find in Second Life." Gorgeous photography of great SL locations. (via Hamlet)
Gabe Newell on Valve | Game development | Features by Develop 2011/05/14
Great, inspirational interview on how they hire and organise.
Design @ Quora (Web2.0 Expo Presentat... by Rebekah Cox - Quora 2011/05/03
"Great design is all the work you don't ask the people who use your products to do."
David Kelley on Designing Curious Employees | Fast Company 2011/04/20
"In this interview, he explains why leaders should seek understanding rather than blind obedience, why it’s better to be a coach and a taskmaster and why you can’t teach leadership with a PowerPoint presentation."

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