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It could be worse: I have an acquaintance who is an auditor for the IRS. He has a US Government-provided Compaq laptop that is so old it has a Windows ME sticker on it.

I don't want to belong to a social networking site. At all. Ever. It's not about "more useful", it's about my disinclination to participate in the first place. I get two or three messages that make it through my filters every week. That's two or three messages I do not want. There does not...

The problem with Linkedin is that they Will. Not. Stop. Spamming. Apparently the only way to make yourself unavailable to linkedin crap is to belong to linkedin and turn it off. I've had invitations@linkedin.com blocked as a sender for ages, but I still get invited to join. I can't just block it...

Restoring dozens of open tabs is a perfectly valid reason to want an SSD or at least a Hybrid drive in your PC. It's not like EMC can't afford it. ;)

Linkedin is somewhere on my corporate death penalty list along with WD and nvidia anyway.

I have a pair of T61s that I'd like to continue to use in at least some capacity. Now I'm trying to decide if it's worth $100 - $150 to get new batteries for them or just let them go quietly into that good night with batteries that only maintain 50ish% of their original charge. I suspect that a...

The new start page maybe? It's the only thing I noticed.

I really want to see something in a next-generation screen before I really commit to buying a phone. 1280x720 in a Galaxy S3 certainly is impressive, but I wonder how much better off we'll be from one or two more rounds of product launches.

I wish.

So I need to noise proof my office. The building I'm in now used to be a bank. The acoustics are such that the person in the office in the opposite corner of the building can hear my laptop speakers at about 40% volume; I can hear our receptionist chewing right now, with the door to my office...

Probably not. They'll just tell us to do everything with Powershell.

As I said, no one is paying me so I don't care all that much. I think the issue is more that people are so used to getting huge game-changing functionality from web services for free and then get sticker shock when they want to use them to do real work. These are the same sorts of people who...

I understand it just fine. I just prefer the greater precision of degrees F.

You presumably had real science classes in high school and college. Why would you have to learn anything at this point?

The only metric scale I dislike is temperature.

The fact that the smallest category of users/devices the Zenprise people offer is 1 - 200 suggests that they're not going to be anything like reasonable or sane for pricing on a 15-user workgroup.

If there is one issue we might point to in all this, it's that Microsoft is being moronic any time it decides to "shift focus to consumers."

Today's iCrap conundrum: I have been asked to help find a secure data sharing solution for a small group of people. They're about 70% OSX in their office with a Server 2003 machine. They need remote access to a relatively large store of data, around 80GB. The data is mixed-format, not all...

You don't see value in universal acceptance of a standard system of measurement that can be derived from fundamental, observable principles?

... and the S3 will still be awesome-r.

You can temporarily lord your phone superiority over the rest of us. Especially ddrueding. ;)

The final preview is available now. Apparently it's buggy as all hell and they're still dicking around with the start screen.

In my experience, Lenovo sends a DHL van that brings me a box to put the impacted notebook in. The van arrives within a couple hours of the support call unless I tell them to wait on it. The DHL van takes away the notebook. Three to five business days later, the repaired notebook is back...

Cricket Wireless to undercut everybody on iCraps.

Oh but they said if I just drove two hours to the nearest Apple store I'd just have to wait in line for someone to work on it! I always wanted to set fire to a NeXT machine. But that's cause they had Magnesium chassis.

Apparently I'll have a return box tomorrow and they're saying a week to two weeks to get it back. The troubleshooting and RMA process involved speaking to four different people and took about 45 minutes. I'm not terribly impressed.

The Perc and IBM controllers are both some form of rebranded LSI controller. They're generally not used so much as pulled from systems and replaced with other controllers for one reason or other. "New system pull" is a very common condition to find them, anyway.

Powered on the MBP this morning for the first time in a couple months... and the screen didn't. It's fine on an external display and that's lovely and everything, but the laptop is basically seven months old and has barely been moved or used in most of that time. Now I'm on hold with Apple. Huzzah.

Basically the whole rest of the world has one standard. Just not the USA.

I'm trying to think of a place where I would use that. Nothing is immediately coming to mind. Maybe it could be used to move backup files from one system to another over a VPN or something.

I just switched my office to Vocalocity's VOIP service. We're using various Cisco phones now, or I can swap in a software based phone that runs on Windows. I can manage all my phone numbers and extensions from the web or from a tool that runs on Android and iOS. I can configure calls to ring...

Last time I picked up my ipad, iOS was still a POS that seemed to exist entirely to get in the way of me and my data, and there is no way to fix that problem. Conversely, I don't really think Android versions matter all that much to end users. I have Gingerbread and Honeycomb and ICS devices...

The IBM M1015 supports modern (larger than 2TB) drives, unlike a Perc5/6. It also supports Expanders so you can plug in to one of those cheap 4-bay SiL things or an HP SAS expander. There's a firmware hack that essentially disables all the RAID features of the card. That is useful since most...

It's getting on toward winter down there. It wouldn't surprise me if the chimp pops in again once Tony has climbed out of the bush and taken a weed whacker to his beard.

Putting aside my well justified thirst for justice with regard to WD, it's been my observation that neither WD nor Seagate "green" drives work all that will for anything other than single drive bulk storage. Why is your drive a dynamic disk? Is it part of a softRAID or something? I've observed...

I feel sorry for those cursed with the burden of improper hand preference. As with so many things, the majority is simply wrong.

I did say "with an AMD GPU", not "AMD card." To the best of my knowledge, there have never been straight-up nVidia consumer-class video cards. Which is fine. Because they would probably catch fire and molest puppies. Which would make the puppies catch fire and die. Which is actually a blessing...

I had a closet full of them, but I've deployed them all. I should probably buy five or ten more but I don't want to pay $80 apiece for them and I've not has good experiences with the wireless version. I spend ~15 hours a day on computers and these things are the best and most comfortable pointer...

You probably lack the particular cultural literacy to properly digest the awesome that I have linked to, but for everybody else, this is the radio play version of Star Wars as read at a comic book convention by Pinky and the Brain, Zapp Brannigan, Yakko and Wakko Warner, Batman, Yosemite Sam...

Have an hour and a half to kill? Watch or listen to this, because it's awesome.

Kinky.

When I take days off I wind up spending tons of time on the phone or responding to emails because someone doesn't know how to do something and that invariably leads to some kind of emergency. Besides, there really isn't any place I want to go or anything I really feel like I should do other than...

My answer to that is to not go on holidays.

The smegma-eating unclefucking dildobreaths at Logitech have stopped manufacturing the most perfect pointing device in the history of the universe, the Trackman Wheel. I can buy the shitty RF wireless version for only about twice as much or I can find another decent trackball. Needless to say, I...

So this thing about how to get to the boot menu in Win8 seems like it might be interesting. Maybe it's just me, but a boot menu I can't access without an already-started instance of Windows seems, I dunno, kinda idiotic. But then, 2/10ths of a second is plenty of time to press F8 five or six...

Your wife does not like strippers or high speed networks. Why the hell did you marry her?

NICs aren't that bad if you just want to run a crossover between two machines. I've seen 10GbE PCI-e cards go for $75 on ebay.

Coming soon: Freeagent drives designed by FA Porsche.

Two words: 4k Porn.

I went with the tried and true "stack crap on my fancy new desk" method. I figure that I have a laptop and the sofa in the lobby is pretty comfortable.