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It's actually possible that your router got re-flashed from your ISP. That does happen. Though I expect that would impact your neighbor as well, were it the case. I normally monitor 802.11 signals with a program on my phone called Wifi Analyzer.The simple graph mode normally tells as much of...

80 machines total.

It's kind of a PHB thing. I start talking about techie things and she tunes it out because she can't be bothered to be interested by any of it and oh hey her kids are sending her text messages and did she hear that Vickie at her country club said bitchy things about Jennifer? So she'll ask me a...

I'm about 98% sure that unit is the same as the Rosewill one. They're cosmetically identical.

It's not my favorite thing in the world either. I've had it for a while and it's barely been used, but that thing is one of the reasons I'm not fond of SiL's SATA chipsets. eSATA has some of the same sorts of arcane nonsense associated with it as external SCSI. Sometimes the enclosure has to be...

I've got a Rosewill 8 bay enclosure I'll sell you.

Digg got sold not that long ago for a pittance as well. To me, Slashdot is still far and away the best place to learn about IT issues outside my immediate needs and interests. I pick up so much random, useful stuff in discussions there. I can't believe it's only worth some fraction of $20M...

"Yeah, sure, Mr. VMware guy. I'd love to help you, but David is the one with the real purchase authority. You're gonna have to talk to him..."

One of my stripper pals showed me something odd today: a 320x200 Android 2.3 phone with a TOTAL of 175MB(?) RAM and 256MB internal storage, and so many carrier-loaded apps that it was not possible to update basic preloaded software. I couldn't see who made it (strip clubs be dark, yo), but...

Next time they call I'll be sure to pass them your phone number.

I get sales calls from VMware sales once or twice a week, even though I've never paid for anything but VMware worstation and my IT budget doesn't even make a blip on their radar.

I'd love to do some kind of thin client system. It would make my life a zillion times easier. But no, it's not happening. Too much of our training works from the assumption that everyone has a local machine where they can store data and make individual, persistent changes. Plus my boss doesn't...

I know I can auto-start a Virtual PC image and I normally handle backups natively within the VM rather than backing up the VM file itself, especially on VMs that need to be running full time. Are you sure this is a case where you need to be virtual? If you don't have any kind of worthwhile...

Actually that could very well be a winner. I hadn't even looked at Silverstone. Most of its products would be well out of my price range. Thanks for suggestions all.

That's certainly a nice box, Coug, but the case is far too large for most of my classrooms. Antec doesn't offer any well made and inexpensive minitowers. If I went the mITX route, there's the ISK110, but that gets back to the very real possibility that I won't be able to source a power supply in...

I have a bothersome mix of first and second generation Antec NSK38xx cases. The first generation models use an obnoxiously-hard-to-source PSU and nothing else looks right with them. I want to ditch those chassis at least, and I might do that by just replacing the the 40% or so of my systems that...

Sadly, I've not invested much time in learning Powershell, which is supposed to be a vastly better alternative. I can slip in to bash if I need to do something that I don't immediately know how to do with DOS-style scripting, and I have workalikes for *nix commands for times when I forget what...

Sometime in the last couple of releases, Thunderbird has gained support for several IM protocols, most notably Gchat and XMPP. I've also found an add-on that allows me to load the web interface for Google Calendar in a Thunderbird Tab. I can do the same thing locally with Lightning, but the web...

I'm in the habit of hitting Win-R and/or starting things from a cmd.exe Window, which is more or less the same way I interact with a *nix system. What I wound up doing to make things easier for myself was to toss a bunch of batch files for the relevant apps in a folder called c:\bin where I...

I haven't managed to dig as deeply in management tools with Server 2012 as I wanted, but I will say that overall I approve. I don't think the install even took five minutes (USB3 thumb drive to SSD), and adding/installing roles is simple and well-organized. A lot of my criticisms about Windows 8...

I finally got the go-ahead to do new classroom systems. My older machines are nearly six now. Surprisingly, the C2D E6300s I bought all that time ago are still perfectly adequate for everything that happens in our classrooms. At the time, I felt like I might have over-specified just for buying...

I'd link to Microsoft's articles about it, but their site is all fucked up because of Server 2012 stuff now, but here's the article from wikipedia.

He said he thought he was taking a computer class, not an internet class, and that the internet is where all the filth in the world comes from. Which, granted, is kind of why I like it.

I tried to teach a class tonight that included a student who was so completely opposed to using the internet that I had to ask him to leave.

Server 2008 manages that for Windows client systems, Handy.

I assume you guys are using the Mandatory Access Protection feature that's baked in to Windows Server 2008 to do that stuff, in which case end users can get access to a provisional network with internet access to have updates and virus definitions loaded even if your VM is judged unfit for full...

Not enough drive bays. Also, missing the DickPort(TM) for all the sloppy BJs that I assume a $1200 computer case will offer.

Apparently it's a Linux-based fork of FreeNAS. The administrative interface looks very similar to me, but it doesn't appear to do ZFS, which is the biggest single reason why I settled on FreeNAS in the first place. My experience with FreeNAS/ZFS is that out of the box Samba performance is...

Arrr!

That sounds like a support/administration nightmare. Microsoft and Cisco both have tools for ensuring that systems have current security software and patch levels prior to negotiating a full network connection, but I can think of way too many problems with that policy to be comfortable.

Considering that we're looking at devices that are sold for under US$80 retail and have several middlemen between them and their manufacturer, it in no way surprises me that $.15 for decent media player or email app is considered an extravagance. Also, I think we all know that Acer doing...

Potentially handy thing I just ran in to: http://www.arctablet.com/blog/archos-tablet/arctools-google-apps-and-market-installer-for-archos-gen8-youtube-fixed/ArcTools, which installs Google's standard apps on many devices that for some reason do not have them. It's made for Archos devices but...

This article was linked on Slashdot yesterday, but I only just got around to reading it. In essence, the author is describing the realities of cheap electronics manufacture, such that any random plant in China can gear up, build the logistics chain for supply and do a production run of complex...

Mostly it's 40-year-old, 250lb. grandmothers in NASCAR-related apparel who light their next cigarette with the butt of the current one. Around here, a 40 year old with a six year old grandchild is not unusual.

I'm frequently reminded that, not only do I have an office, I have the largest office. Which would probably be substantially more appealing were it not for the bare steel shelving units that hold my parts collection and all the loud server crap that's running full time, which is a big part of...

Presumably it's the same program. There's not all that much difference between Vista, 7 and 8.

Can I play that without Steam?

If it makes you feel even slightly better, I have a $1000 Onkyo receiver sitting on my desk at work and I blew about $500 on acoustic treatment stuff so I can listen to music at anything above a whisper without everyone in my office complaining they can hear it.

Yup. Those are things.

How to get three hard drives in a Thinkpad: 1. Obtain an mSATA drive like an Intel 310 2. Put a drive in the regular drive bay 3. Replace the optical drive with a regular SATA drive in an ultrabay. Ta da!

Since when can we embed youtubes?

There's an online version to try as well!

This is not a computer game. This is a game played with actual people. Whom you know. Because some of you know people. It is called Cards Against Humanity. You can buy it from their web site or just abuse the printer you already have at work.

They give you a retail key for it. I think that's because there are fewer SKUs for Server 2012 but as far as I know the only real differences are extra SMP support and licensing for Hyper-V stuff. I'm more interested in seeing what IIS and AD management are like.

I'm going to put together a Server 2012 system tomorrow-ish for my own amusement, since it's finally up on Technet.

That's what I always say to strippers when they're down about their job, which is often. Especially on days when they don't make any money or just after some douchebag has asked them to do something incredibly inappropriate. They do all have good stories though.

That's kind of a killer toolset for tablets, actually. You can get some pretty serious video content up and running on your 64GB device at whatever quality level is appropriate and it's all legal to grab it. I haven't found anything that does Vimeo playlists, but Vimeo is actively hostile to...

Last night I decided I wanted to have all the episodes of "My Drunk Kitchen" on one of my tablets and available offline. So I went and looked, and sure enough, someone makes a tool for that. It's called Bytube, the Bulk Youtube Downloader. Bytube is a Firefox add-on that works with either...

I love digging up nine year old threads in which to post! An interesting thing that I just noticed is that Microsoft is going back to the MCSE/MCSA branding for Windows 8 and Server 2012. Which is really excellent, because who the hell can keep track of the current alphabet soup of its...

Shit. That's horrible, Coug. I hope things work out for you. One of the reasons I stay in the crappy job I have is that in spite of everything else, it has been stable. When I was a full time contractor I would occasionally go weeks or even months without real work. I'd get on a contract and...