After this little incident, the cases on all three systems were promptly put back onto their respective systems. As soon as this was done, we were visited by someone with an ailing Packard Bell. From the description of the problem (fixed disk 0 error, hard drive making funny noises) we determined that the technical description for this hard drive was to be summed up in one word (one of my favorites...) Hosed.
Since this drive was a little on the smallish side (by today's standards, at least,) it appeared that finding a suitable replacement was to be an interesting task (since it would involve a trek to one or more of the local computer shops.) Finally, a suitable replacement was located (about 20 miles away,) and we went on a mission to purchase it. Then I, actually having money for a change (one of the good things about a tech support job), remembered the paltry 200MB of total disk in Rocky, and we returned with not one, but two 840MB IDE hard drives that fateful night.
Anyway, now we have an unbootable Packard Bell sitting in the corner of the den (the thing actually makes a good doorstop, as many Packard Bells do,) and we have two hard disks sitting around waiting to be put into systems. Under normal circumstances, this would be a matter of plopping the new drives into their respective systems, formatting and tossing software onto the suckers, and bingo... Wrong. In nature (and especially the den,) randomness tends toward a maximum. Already, there is some grandiose plan in place to move several of the existing hard drives around... Unfortunately (ir is it?), it looks like yet another 3 or 4 months with the cases off the systems.
Another thing that some of you may have noticed is the spiffy little animated "World Wide Waste of Time" icon on the bottom of the page. Although I do appreciate the honor, it really is redundant, considering that I have believed since it's inception that the Web was a waste of time in the first place. Of course, someone out there must be willing to disagree, possibly even vehemently... Still, whatever useful content out there appears to be drowned out by a flood of meaningless, self-promoting web sites, advertising that nobody in their right mind would ever even venture near, and plenty of sites by people out there who actually think that there's another living soul out there intersted in their collection of pigmy African mosquito specimens.
No matter how strange some of the content on the Web gets, there is always someone stranger... usually the user. The problem is that no matter how many lusers we have to face out there who see nothing but money on the Internet. These are the types who spam USENET, torment us with annoting animated GIF ads and even worse web sites. (I've heard a rumor that somewhere in Microsoft technical support, there's an overstuffed couch out there reserved especially for the techs faced with the task of talking a newbie through configuring their machine for the Internet. So far, I haven't found the thing, but with some of the calls I get, it sure would be nice.) You'd think that the Web community has had enough of this garbage. Unfortunately, someone is willing to disagree.
In fact, it may be true that there are people out there who think that there should be comptency tests before anyone should be allowed to buy a computer, as a "bozo filter" for the entire net. We have to wonder how many of these people who themselves could not pass such a test, including the people who try to sell us the suckers. Unfortunately, it only appears that more of these lusers are on the way. It seems that anyone looking for a fast buck is willing to find a way to plunk down more of these lusers on the Infobahn.
The latest trend in dumping incompetents onto the web is called by many different names. Some call it the NC (short for "Nefarious Conspiracy",) others call it the "Thin Client," others just call it a dumbed-down computer. esentially, that's all the sucker is. A computer that's meant to bring the Internet into our living rooms, where it doesn't belong.
This whole concept is being called a "threat" to the Wintel architecture (why not the Mac, I wonder?) The people who are predicting the imminent doom of the PC architecture obviously haven't looked at any of these insiduous little devices. From what I have seen, they are braindead little set-top boxes with a dumbed-down web browser and little capability for expansion. That means that when the next big Internet technology hits, all that's left to do with these little boxes is to toss 'em.
Why not just spare yourself the effort of yanking all the cables out of the thing and the laborious effort of trudging over to the nearest trashcan and forcibly throwing the offending atrocity of technology away? As Barbara Bush encouraged us to do, "Just say no." Anyone lured into actually buying one of these things will be stuck with a slow, braindead silicon vegetable sitting on top of their television set. And you thought that AOL was bad...
In reality, it probably isn't quite this bad. There has to be some useful purpose for these thiNC-client-whatever they call these things. Right off hand, the idea that these things maybe useful as targets for trapshooting comes to mind. they also could be used as modern art in some form or another (but hey, is there anything in existence that some starving artist out there isn't willing to turn into a chunk of surrealism? I know that quite a few of them would have a field day here in the den. I would be willing to bet that more than a few art critics out there would gladly write a scathing review of the den. They wouldn't know art if it dropped out of the sky and conked them on the noggin in what could only be described as a piece of natural performance art. My den is not a disastrous mess, as some would believe. What I have elected to spend my existence in is an original piece that has been done in the relatively infant style of post-modern entropy.
With the advent of the dumbed-down SuperWebTerminalBoy!!!!!(tm), we are faced with the advent of more lusers that clog up our bandwidth (and the task of removing the clog is far beyond the capability of the Roto-Rooter man, as much as he may try. Maybe there is a bright side to this, at least for the personal operating system tech support bunch. (I have wondered why it's called "Operating System" support, since most of the time people call, the system isn't operating.) These little boxes may be idiotic enough to lure the idiots away from the real computers. Hey, the technoheads out there can dream, can't they?