Yep. About ten years ago I had a Gateway/ALR server with then-massive 2Gb of RAM. It insisted on checking that RAM at startup, 256K at a pop, a couple of steps per second. Yes, this means it took nearly 15 minutes *just to check the RAM that never failed*. Called Gateway and asked how that could be bypassed.

"Whyyyy would you ever want to do thaaaaaaat????" the rep mooed at me.

Ummmm... maybe because 32,000 people are waiting to use the site while this machine is counting its frickin' toes, that's why.

There was no bypass, no BIOS setting, no keypress. It was like the original IBM PC again.

Oh, and then Windows 2000 *started* booting.

And if it had to check the RAID array, forget it. Go home, come back tomorrow.

Sure, the days when I had to wait for a particular server to count through 2Gb of RAM 256K at a time at boot are gone, but in compensation, cell phones, which used to be largely instant-on, now take longer and longer to start. The worst example was a work-issued Blackberry 9630 earlier this year, running BBOS 5.x, which took an astonishing 13 minutes, 10 seconds to come to ready from a battery pull. Even my 9700 with OS6 takes over two minutes to fire up, down from five minutes when it was new with OS5.

It should be illegal to sell a phone that takes longer to start than the human brain can live without oxygen.

Let's ask two popular search engines the same simple question:

"Who's the black private dick who's a sex machine to all the chicks?"

Seriously. Try it on Bing, then try it on Google.

Game over.

TWAIN? Lolwut?

MS-DOS 1.0 was a variant of CP/M, not the other way around.

What the hell fun is THAT? I mean, this is the best thing since Girls On Trampolines, and they design a dress to defeat the most intriguing part.