Makes Me Stupid, Stupid
by Paul McGoldrick
The sight of Bill Gates turning up in a courtroom to defend Windows is a true turning point for Microsoft. It was almost as if the company has finally acknowledged that it is not omnipotent and must answer to some system. So, there he was - a devoted family man, with his wife beside him - soberly dressed in a suit and single-colored tie, no less, and able to control his notorious outbursts for a lengthy period of time in the witness box.
Unlike me. I've been on the road this last week travelling with a laptop that's not really been used to capacity since it was new. No, I'm not going to report Windows' problems, this isn't a dig at Microsoft this time. My ISP has decided, since I last used it, to regard the toll-free number they have as a different domain and wouldn't allow me to access my e-mail. So I had to go about a very tiresome procedure to access my normal dial-up system using a calling card (no way was I going to pay hotel rates for the long-distance call.)
With one of the calling cards in my wallet there was no way to do it because of the system they use to accept the number being dialed and the card numbers. I tried using one telephone handset to access the number and then hand off to the PC on another jack in the room but I just couldn't get the timing right for the hotel's telephone system, which wanted to let the two devices individually use the two different lines going to the room.
Finally I programmed the modem to dial the access code from the hotel for an outside line, pause, then AT&T's access number, pause, pause, 1, the number I was dialing, pause, calling card number, PIN. Once I got the pauses the right length the system worked every time during my stay, and thank heavens this modem, at leasr, no longer limits the digits dialed to 12 or 13. But it got me to wondering about features that should, logically, be provided on any PC and one of them is so obvious there must be a flaw in my thinking.
There is enormous hype for providing services using Internet Protocol. Voice over IP (VoIP) is certainly a heavily-hyped one of them. But what about plain-old telephony? The PC always has audio output available and audio input as well. Most of us, even with high-speed access available at home or the office, still have a telephone modem loaded or available on our road machine(s). Our keyboards have number keys, all the way from 1 to 0, plus # and * keys. Why doesn't someone link all these things together to make a speaker phone (with no extra equipment) or a headset phone (with one $3 accessory)? There is nothing else needed, even the DTMF dialer is on the modem. Can anyone tell me that I'm being stupid?
Computers often make me feel really stupid and I can rarely follow set-up
instructions that well, with words like "Apply" being sprinkled
around in the various boxes that are spawned. I thought apply was something
that people did for jobs - I didn't know it meant "make it so."
No it's no news to me that I am software-challenged, and I suspect that
a whole lot of things Bill said about his engineers not being able to break
up Windows would suggest he's pretty software-challenged himself.