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So here we are, stupid people, madly eating sheep and cattle and not much else. The moment anyone suggests eating kangaroo or Emu, we all cry out in shock and horror! Oh Shame on You, you Evil Person, for suggesting that we eat our national symbol! Shock! Evil! Horror! Haven't you ever heard of...

Great illustration, Taz. Actually though, the funny thing is that we don't eat our national symbols, at least not to speak of. At a rough guess, kangaroo accounts for maybe 0.001% of the typical Australian's diet; Emu maybe 0.0001%. Most of the kangaroo meat sold for human consumption goes...

Not at all. As I said, I like swap meets; they provide an easy and pretty-near foolproof way to identify at least some of the dishonest and/or incompetent people that give the industry a bad name. As long as it is clearly understood that swap meet vendors are not to be confused with genuine...

You said it yourself. So "Trevor" runs an on-line store? And his on-line business is doing so badly that he has to work on Sundays as well. Not much of a business then, is it. He would be well advised to sell the business (or give it away if he can't find anyone willing to pay money for it)...

Ha! Don't you start it. Our leader's greatest claim to fame is his unmatched skill at licking your leader's arse. Lower than that you can't get.

Swap meet vendors. Think about it. Why would you get out of bed at some ungodly hour on a bloody Sunday and drive for miles to set up a stall at the one place you can be just about certain of getting the lowest of all possible prices for your goods? Answer: there one possible reason and only...

But I can bloody buy one soon enough. Luckily, come to think of it, there are no Mr Ks out where I go. Plenty of Emus though - which, on average, are of roughly equal intelligence.

I actually got rather confused there for a minute. (Seriously. No joke.) I was only half awake having my morning cup of tea and caught myself wondering how come David was so familiar with the Australian scene. Then I remembered that the thread isn't talking about John Howard, it's some other...

Ahhh ... Buck? Would you mind freeing one arm? I'd like a cup of tea now, if that's OK. Cyril is just about up to speed on the building and mending things department. He's been at this game for long enough to be pretty right on the selling things side of it too, with a little practice and some...

Lawyers, says LiamC. Me, I'd add: Telephone company sales peope Car yard service department managers The sort of computer vendor you see at swap meets Nine out of ten politicians The average accountant Marketing weenies Nine out of ten plumbers Real estate agents Anyone who goes to school at...

Oh, have it your way then.

Yes you are.

Rather a strange one by my standards. Cyril is human. Or at least I have always assumed so. He is not, repeat not, imaginary. He is not, repeat not, one of my sock puppets. Cyril has been a customer of mine for ... oh .. maybe 5 or 8 years. Long time anyway. He's been helping out here since...

Cyril gets all the dirty jobs. Or haven't you noticed yet?

I'm not going to respond to Ted's post just yet, as it makes too much sense do deal with with a half-brain (my usual state when I'm grabbing ten minutes during lunch). But BenQ. Now there is an interesting company. The do make good stuff, and they make cheap, flashy rubbish as well. Mostly on...

Funny you should mention those two, Liam. Just yesterday I picked up Podkane of Mars, hesitated, started re-reading Between Planets instead. Perhaps that's why so many Heinlein titles popped into my head just now. As for Merc and the Amber Series, the later ones are, in my opinion and in the...

Hopefully, there won't bloody be a next visit!

Where do you dig this stuff up? That's more like Jerry than Jerry is. I always used to enjoy reading his Byte column, but that was long before you were 14, Merc, and the hardware he used to talk about was completely foreign to me at that time. (We are talking state-of-the-art CPM machines...

Tea!

Five reasons to hate Sony Poor reliability and compatibility record (i.e., we see a higher proportion of Sony drives faulty than we do of many other brands). I suspect that this has more to do with the electronics or firmware than it does with the mechanicals. It may well be the Sony firmware...

If I had to make a list of my top ten all-time favourites, books I loved when I was 32 or 22 (or in this case 12) and still love today, Lord of Light would certainly be on it. The last time I read it was perhaps a year ago. That was .. oh ... the 20th time or something like that. I've been...

Are you talking Zelazny Bill?

Amazon are doing reviews of T-shirts now?

I'll be nice. I won't tell her you said that. Anyway, she likes the Furball, so maybe she'll take that as a compliment. :o

Not the rotational speed, no. (That would be horribly difficult to do without buggering up the data integrity.) But it controls the acceleration of the read-write heads, making them start and stop gently so as to reduce noise.

OK, I'll buy the assertion that Incredimail doesn't itself contain spyware. (I've never seen it listed as a black hat.) But I would be very reluctant indeed to ignore te accumuated wisdom of two such experienced old campaigners as Time and Buck. So where is the problem? If it attracts bugz, how?

That makes good sense to me, Doug. I do the same with hard drives. Besides, getting the motherboard in can sometimes require a fair bit of banging and sudden shocks (get in you damn thing!) so it's better not to subject the HDD to that if you can avoid it.

Yup. Seagate was #1 for years, but when Maxtor merged with Quantum, Quakstor went past them by a fair margin. So this is quite a significant change: Seagate, it seems, are back to #1. WD are well behind Seagate, Quaxtor, and Hitachi, probably in front of Samsung but I'm not sure of that last...

In general, it is much easier to mount the CPU and HSF before you put the mainboard in the case. Quite often you can't get hte space you need to lever a HSF clip on/off once it's in the case unless you remove the power supply. RAM? Who cares? But it's a good practice to mount te CPU, RAM, and...

I have absolutely no problem with sending customers to the competition. It's not like we are starving and desperate for every last dollar, and the reality is that some customers really will be happier and better served by a different shop. We can't be ultra-good at everything, nor can Competitor...

Life imitates art. :o

Nothing, so far as I know. I assume the sun rose, possibly it rained a little. But it was definately a Tuesday. Or perhaps a Sunday.

Don't be sorry, Taz. I'm not sorry. In fact I feel much the same way about it as I feel about the 19th of June last year having been a Tuesday (or possibly a Thursday). Shit happens: if you talk enough of it for long enough, even someone with my legendary restraint and paitence with total idiots...

But it would be sinful

According to Time, Incridimail contains spyware

Then on what basis does contract law operate?

If it doesn't meet the published specs, your retailer has no choice. They must refund or replace it. This is true everywhere, it's bound to be true even under US consumer law.

Use it, Merc. But keep a bloody close eye on how much you have clocked up. It's very easy to discover that you are a long way behind where you thought you ought to be with these things. Supplier credit is like a chainsaw: wonderful tool, but you must remain aware of exactly what you are doing...

Plug in a $10 Realtek. Time is money.

Winbench does access times, Doug. No doubt there are a million others too. I can't remember what I used to use, but Winbench will certainly do it. I think Merc is right on the mney: it sounds very like an AAM problem. But what's the story with Maxtor's tech support? Surely they have a utility...

Sorry: I didn't make it clear. From those figures, it looks to me as though the drive is very slow and on the second set of tests it was only testing access times as measured within that tiny partition.

Why would a controller chipset give you bad access times but not bugger up everything else as well? Nope, I don't believe it Doug. For my money, it's a faulty drive. (Or the model is always incredibly slow, which I don't believe. I'm not the world's biggest Maxtor fan, but surely they aren't...

For all its many faults, Mubs, Netscape 4.x had an excellent little email app. We were installing it as the default email client on customer machines right up until Thunderbird 1.0 came out, because there really wasn't anything else much about that was as good. So don't stress out about it: it's...

Interesting. We sold a handful of BenQ drives a while back, probably CDRs but I forget exactly. They went OK, seemed a bit cheap and flimsy. Most of the (pretty good) Mitsubishi CD and CDR drives we sold were probably manufactured by BenQ. I'll have another look at them. The majority of...

You are right, of course, Will. Although maybe the most concerning thing is that I'm not concerned about it. Not something I'm likely to do again anytime soon, at least not without a conscious and at least semi-reasoned decision first, but I don't regret it in the slightest. Didn't regret it for...

Not for another ten years. You mean the truth-telling, Buck, or the bread knife in a vital part? (Tannin!) (Sorry Tea. Only joking.) (You should have let me handle him.) (Are you kidding? You'd have told him to -) (And you didn't?) (Hmm .... you've got a point. Next time he's all yours...

Don't joke about that! I rather suspect that something rather like that process - the totally unpremeditated flick, flick, flick between completely different mental states - is what sometimes goes on in the mind of murderers. One minute you are eating breakfast and saying "yes dear" for the...

I lost my temper with a customer today. First time in ... oh .. I don't know, maybe five years, maybe 10. I have no excuse. It was a perfectly pleasant morning, I was well rested, had enough work to keep me occupied, not so much that I was having trouble coping with it. No problems at home, in...

Yeah. It's pox. The only good thing is that you don't have to provide the right serial number - e.g., a drive I put in a machine the other day, which was already bolted in with case on: I used the serial number of some other drive and it worked just fine. Well, as fine as Disk Mangaler ever...

Gigabyte. Every time. Or failing that, Biostar. Not often that Merc and i agree 100% these days, but I'll take 5 to one Merc will vote for Gigabyte too. Intel boards are generally quite solid, but under-specced and over-priced. Besides, you only have three CPUs to pick from: P4 (grossly...