LAN interface driver catch-22

Allegedly some VCRs came with instructions - on tape!

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thats why I always have a trusty old 3com 3c905...wait..*blows dust* yep that's the one

"Rich Grise" schreef in bericht news: snipped-for-privacy@example.net...

Rich,

That's (still) very common. I remember my days at DEC where you needed an "All in one" account to ask for an "All in one" account. Not to mention the ISP helpdesks that say to look at their website while you're complaining to have no connection. Happened to me last week again.

petrus bitbyter

The local electric company, Progress Energy, has a TV commercial where they ask you to report your power outages on their website. Do I need to say any more? :(

Just as all the telephone companies list a 1-800 number for you to report your telephone is not working ;)

Cheers

PeteS

Or the good old error message from the BIOS:

Keyboard Error or No Keyboard Present Press F1 to continue, DEL to enter setup

Snort

I'd forgotten that, but I do now remember it well (it was easy to get that message, as I recall).

Thanks for the reminder of stupidity and what we dealt with ;)

Cheers

PeteS

I was just musing this morning about earthquakes. We don't have earthquakes here in hell... it'd put out the fires and Arizona would be cooler ;-)

...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | | | E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat | |

I had an intermittent hum, or no dial tone with hum on my phone when I lived way out in the country. The phone company would use their computerized test system when I could finally call them, and tell me there was nothing wrong. Finally, I had a very weak dial tone, and the loudest hum so far and managed to get the service desk. The woman could barely hear me over the hum, yet she asked, What seems to be the nature of your problem? Can you speak up, I can't hear you for the hum! Finally they sent someone out. There was a mile of buried cable that was damaged from the pedestal to my house. The line card had several bad ports, the line back to the CO was leaking to ground, and the card for that pair was bad at the CO. All this, after two months of being told there were no problems. :(

Did you ever wonder why there are fuses for the keyboard port on PC motherboards? I had a keyboard cable catch on fire on one of the first XTs I sold, years ago. IBM had the power connector just inches from the keyboard connector, and tied directly to the +5 VDC rail. The AT boards had fuses. I wonder how many keyboard cables burnt, or motherboards died from a bad keyboard or cable?

For 9 years I'd been complaining to the phone company about the noise on my line, and the loss of DSL signal. For 9 years they told me there was either no problem or the line was TNF (tecnically not feasible). I had a T1 installed finally and when testing for it, they found a fault 30-35 feet from the box on my house. Lo and behold, that is where the junction box was. They sent a crew out to dig up and repair said junction box. I arrived home in the middle of this and asked the quy what he found. He lifted on of the bundles of wires and showed me all the broken wires and insulation cracked and missing. Then he picked up the main splice (encased in gelled sealent) and squeezed. The water ran like squeezing a wash cloth in the shower. Yep, nothing wrong with those lines.

Needless to say, my neighbors are much happier now that their phone lines work. :)

Its amazing what they can find, when they want to. :)

I know I've told this before, but when I was working as a broadcast engineer at a Christian TV station I had five WATS lines quit about 15 minutes before the start of a 10 day Telethon. I call AT&T long lines and got a woman with a bad attitude. I explained the problem, and that we needed those lines fix, as soon as possible. She started screaming that every #$%^ call she got was an emergency, that it was Friday afternoon, and we should consider ourselves lucky if they were repaired by the following Friday because at least one of the ten lines was working.

I pointed out the $1,000 deposit per line we had to pay up front, and their written guarantee of resolving problems in under 24 hours. She screamed, "I don't give a damn about your problem! I have real customers with bigger problems! What do you want me to do, pull someone off another job for you?" I sighed and told her, "I don't care what you do, but I would hate to have to start our telethon by telling our members that AT&T long lines refuses to honor their contract because we are a Christian TV station. A lot of local business owners are members." Boy, did her attitude change! She whispered, You wouldn't do that to us, would you? I said, "I'd hate to have to." and hung up.

The first truck rolled in seven minutes later. Trucks kept rolling in, including the district field supervisor. They found a bad line card in the equipment room for the complex, and all five numbers were on that card.

It was working before the telethon started. All the telephone guys were laughing like crazy, and told me the woman was afraid they would fire her, and everyone else in her department if they didn't keep us happy. The supervisor told me, "They don't understand what the word emergency means. Thanks for lighting a fire under them!" ;-)

At the old house I went for two years like that. Then they sent a tech out who, by happenstance, had worked for me at Dickson Electronics. I showed him my measurements and he found the _flooded_ underground vault within two hours.

...Jim Thompson

My signature comes from a time when I was working in a factory producing high-end loudspeakers. One of the sub-woofers had a amplifier with this warning printed at the outside and I felt it somehow described Usenet so I made it my signature.

Is that why IBM changed the protocol so that I couldn't use my wonderful ½ton XT keyboard when I bought a 486?

Yeah, they rely way too much on automated test equipment nowadays...

Back when I worked in the CO, the call would come in, and I would put the test setup on the cable pair, and could usually tell whether the problem was in the main cable, feeder, or drop just from the meter readings! Of course, it didn't hurt that I could then talk to the line guys (who had their breaks down in our break room!) what was going on, and have the line fixed within the hour...

Amazing what you can read with a voltmeter and a 50V source of battery!

Charlie

I _knew_ it had to be water... anytime it rained my "line lights" would start to glimmer. And I could measure the drop with my DVM.

But they didn't do squat until the tech I knew showed up.

...Jim Thompson

No, they had already used up their stock of obsolete word processing keyboards, and moved onto other in-house surplus. ;-)

IIRC the ole heavyweight keyboard is still somewhere in the basement and I just found out that the Linux 2.6.* kernel comes with a XT keyboard driver. So maybe there's still hope, all I need to find a way to connect the keyboard to the parallel port.