Today's rant

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Rant #1 Vista

I only have dial up access to the internet and dislike hearing all the dialling beeps and whistles while it dials up. So I finally got around to setting the modem volume to off. Nope. Vista greys the option out. So you can see it but not change it.
Plan B. Get to exactly the same modem options screen but via the admin option. Wonderful it is no longer greyed out. Speaker volume set to off.
Connect to internet... It still makes all the dial up sounds completely ignoring the setting anyway Vista sucks.

Rant #2 Online banking.

My bank has "upgraded" their website security. This means I can no longer access it using Firefox 3. The browser is no longer supported. The website helpfully suggests I upgrade to Firefox version 2 Nice one bank. Perhaps they should upgrade to using an abacus.

That's why I still use Windows NT Workstation 4.0, OS/2 Warp Server Advanced 4 (actually 3.0), and Windows XP Professional.

Windows Server 2008 seems worse for a server OS (Min. hard disk space: 75GB?!)

But of course, I miss the old Longhorn days (2003-2004)

I wish they could bring the old Longhorn UI back (bring the features into the shiny new secure Vista so it is easier to use)

Also reduce the footprint by 14GB! Or in the case of Win2K8, reduce by 74GB!

*blink*

*blink*

Dial-up?

For real?

And then you suggest a bank upgrade to an abacus?

I'm sorry but I just found this post incredibly humorous Not trying to be rude or anything, but I seriously thought it was less than 3% of the internet population (not including third world countries or the elderly) still using dial-up.

Pretty sure when Microsoft sat down and made the sound settings, the dialup wasn't the first thing on their mind.

I ended up cutting the wire/solder point to the positive side of the little speaker on the modem card.

Doesn't effect its functionality any.

Tallyman, I like your new avatar. That position looks very familiar to me, do you know/remember what game it is from? I can't shake the feeling I've seen the game that position appears in before, and it's driving me insane. White's down a pawn, but looks like he can still hold a draw without much trouble.

I live in rural France. Miles away from any towns. We are lucky to have a phone line here let alone broadband! Microsoft is under the incorrect assumption that the whole world is on fast internet. I would suspect there are far more people still on dial-up than broadband if you take the whole world into consideration.

I notice that Mozilla are to release a final version of Firefox 2 and then pulling the plug on that version. Just as my bank has set that as the standard!

I found a solution with a bit of lateral thinking. I looked up some Hayes modem commands and discovered L0 turns off the sound so added that as part of the initialisation string. It works! Which is more than I can say for crappy Vista.

Sorry to disappoint, I like chess but am not familiar with the particular game in my avatar, its just one I found on Google images.

Now I have to find some way of searching games by their FEN strings... there probably is something already, I just hope your avatar's game is in a free database somewhere.

hehe i've listened to the noises before to help diagnose a faulty modem many years ago

Your avatar kind of reminds me of a chess game that I had back in the 1980s called Sargon II. I had it on a Commdore computer and had alot of fun playing it, but I did eventually figure out how to beat it. I haven't tried a computer chess game in quite a long time, but I'm so out of practice I'd probably get beaten every time.

I had one on the Commodore 64. I think it was called Collosus chess. I don't know about computer chess nowadays but the machines used to have their weaknesses. One such was a travelling chess computer I had - it could never see an exposed knight fork coming i.e. any scenario where I could move my knight to attack two of the opponents pieces but in so doing exposing another attack such as a bishop or rook attack on a third piece.

I hate playing with a clock though. I like to play chess like I make love... slowly

They don't any more. It's to the point where even the strongest human chess players could never hope to compete with relatively cheap chess engines that you can run on your laptop.