Patterns of Bugs

Jonathan M Davis jmdavisProg at gmx.com
Sat Jan 8 01:27:44 PST 2011


On Saturday 08 January 2011 01:14:41 Walter Bright wrote:
> Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> > On Saturday 08 January 2011 00:16:13 Walter Bright wrote:
> >> Jérôme M. Berger wrote:
> >>> 	When I built my latest PC, I saw in the MB manual that it would use
> >>> 
> >>> speech synthesis on the PC speaker to report errors. So I tried to
> >>> power on the PC without having plugged either CPU or RAM and it
> >>> started to say "NO CPU FOUND! NO CPU FOUND!" in a loop with a
> >>> hilarious Asian accent and the kind of rasping voice that used to
> >>> characterized old DOS games. Pretty fun ;)
> >> 
> >> That's a heckuva lot better than an undocumented beep pattern which is
> >> what I got.
> > 
> > LOL. The beeps for mine are documented in the motherboadr manual, but the
> > beeps are so hard to distinguish from one another, that it borders on
> > useless. A voice would certainly be better.
> 
> Yes, what is the difference between a "slow beep" and a "fast beep"?
> 
> While I'm ranting, does anyone else have trouble remembering which of O and
> | is on, and which is off? What's the matter with "on" and "off"?

I didn't even find out that the sign on many power switches was a 1 inside a 0 
until recently, so the symbols meant nothing to me. I would _assume_ that 1 
means on and 0 means off since a bit that's 1 is on/true and a bit that's 0 is 
off/false (and looking at the power switch on my computer right now, that does 
indeed appear to be the case), but I normally have to just guess whether 
something is on or off if you can't tell from something other than the power 
switch. On and Off would be much better, but I suspect that it's one of those 
things where they chose symbols instead so that they didn't have to worry about 
internationalization. That way, it confuses _everyone_ instead of just non-
English speakers. ;)

- Jonathan M Davis


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