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