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For a while, Seagate's branded external drives carried a five year warranty. I bought a lot of those and I've returned quite a few as well.

Seagate's external enclosures for the last few years have been really awful. Though I like the Freeagent models that sit parallel to a horizontal surface a hell of a lot better than the previous drives that sat on a tiny little stand and were otherwise made to sit perpendicular, just waiting to...

I'm poor right now. No one wants any IT contractin'.

I think the party line at the time was that they were bringing the Word version number to parity with the Excel version number in the same version of MS Office.

Quick Greg Santilli grammar refresher: LOSE: the opposite of WIN. LOOSE: the opposite of TIGHT.

Buy a full-length video card and see how quickly you change your mind. I just go ahead and plug in a couple extra SATA cables when I see that I have ports parallel to the board.

It's not, as long as it's not your only backup.

Harper is an idiot, but on the whole Canadian politics are much, much saner.

I figure that it boils down to either no snow or living in a decent country. I'll take one or the other.

Where I live now, we have a high cost of living but also salaries that are based on the state rather than regional values. So things like food and gas are very expensive vs. lower than normal salaries. That's the worst of both worlds. I'd take a job if it meant I got to move to Canada, for sure.

My thinking is that I'd do better someplace where the salaries are inflated beyond reason due to high cost of living. The advantage would translate into a huge bonus for retirement savings when I relocate to whatever part of BFE I might ultimately choose for a retirement destination.

I don't want to live in Chicago.

I really need to sit down and start looking for a different job. Which will probably mean moving someplace else and lots of other bothersome crap. I cannot summon the enthusiasm to get started.

I've definitely had Server 2008 with AD on machines that just had SATA drives on Intel controllers.

That's... curious. And I'm not sure I've ever seen that behavior, though I do know that I've run into unusually unresponsive Windows Servers a couple times.

I didn't say you did. You just reminded me of something I have been meaning to rant about.

So where are people getting the notion that using NAS for backup somehow represents a good idea?

It's a NAS. It's used for all the craps that NASes are meant to be used for. Which is not the same thing as backup. Even when I was relying on keeping my file servers rsync'd for redundancy I was never deluding myself that doing so was the same thing as a backup, but that appears to be what my...

Meh. Either way. They're the cheap ones.

I vaguely recall seeing little fan control devices made to sit in a 3.5" drive bay last time I actually visited my local parts distributor in person.

I have a little Terk powered indoor antenna. The only channels I can get are the PBS station with a tower that's just down the road in Gary, and a couple Spanish-language stations. I decided it's not worth bothering with OTA TV.

Does Drobo advertise in mass market or something? I've had three of my customers in the last couple months tell me that they wanted to get a Drobo system for backups. I keep wanting to yell at them that there's no functional difference between having a RAID setup that's built directly into...

The no-kidding best deals going for Smartphones and Data Plans in the US, unless you're on some kind of sweetheart deal like mine, are with pay as you go carriers like Cricket (Sprint) and Virgin (Verizon, I think). They even undercut T-mobile by a fairly substantial margin. I have no idea how...

I've read that the most common 8" and 12" fans (oversized for computer use) from the usual suspects like Sunon are actually pretty loud. One of my students bought a Cooler Master case with a built-in 8" fan and it was unmistakably audible even though the retail packaging trumpeted that case's...

There's a spiffy little Android tool that has an astonishing level of support for PC-based (AV-type) remote controls. And I'd had any sleep in the last day and a half I'd even be able to remember its name. Uh, uh... whatever. I remember that it was $5. Go me. DLNA is pretty lame. It basically...

Journalspace was a huge site for a while. The reason they went down the tubes is that one of their admins had decided that the only data continuity they needed was RAID1 and another admin deleted their database after he was fired and before they took his access away. Sometimes you just shake...

At 9:38PM, I got a call from some random person that they were attempting to make an Amazon delivery to my office. They were lost and wanted directions.The person identified told me that he works for a company called Esenda and that his company was contracted to make deliveries for Amazon. I let...

Vortexbox is supposed to do exactly that. I'm going to put it on a nice little ITX machine.

That's about what I thought. Just checking to make sure. Thanks.

I understand that there's an inherent weakness in virtual database servers, but obviously they're out there and people are dealing with the performance issues of that configuration. What should I be doing to mitigate the penalties of heavy disk I/O in a virtual environment? Just dedicate some...

Yup. So I have a class on this now. I have $2000 to spend on hardware. I'm going to buy a Boxee box, a Popcorn Hour player and s Seagate Freeagent Theater thingy. I figure I'll load Vortexbox (which is just a Linux distribution) on a spare PC. I might buy a cheap DLNA TV to go with all of it...

300MB is still better than any version of Windows that's newer than Server 2003.

It's been a decade or so, but I've definitely run into "Controller firmware is different so the array is unreadable even though it's the same controller" before. I think caution is justified, especially when it's your personal stuff. I very well might move back to using hardware RAID now that I...

The machine is fine now with IE and Firefox. I deleted and recreated his Firefox profile, as I indicated would most likely work.

Nope. That's a big part of the point. For commercial use, ninite has a cost that I'd probably pay if I worked for a big company. I wish the default install of Spybot didn't include Teatimer, though.

I have a machine with the Conduit Toolbar right now. It has 14 other toolbars installed and has had its .exe file association jacked and some other nasty stuff done to it as well. I'm going to see where I wind up with it.

I think a more important idea for them might be to increase the visibility and importance of updating to modern versions. My coworkers, who are theoretically computer people, still won't do things like Java and Flash updates "because it might mess something up." I use scheduled runs of the...

I like the lie detectors interpretation. It's more random.

Babelfish says "As you think where better future of polygraphy" So, yeah. OK. So I guess he's asking about lie detectors?

I certainly can't see a subjective difference between FF4 and 5.

My phone says there are no newer updates. Maybe I should just load a custom firmware on it and be done.

RAID cards should have air horns as standard equipment.

Also today's Amazon free app is Peggle, which is spiffy if you like Popcap games.

That's why they should use the Windows Firewall. :P

Oh, and Netflix does not show in Android market, either. Looks like I'm connecting to 802.11 at 54Mbps. So there are clearly issues.

I regularly tell people not to bother with third party firewall software. I uninstall that crap where ever I find it. It's too easy to mess up a machine with a stupid firewall config and it's too much work to fight with the software when you actually want to do something. Use the built in...

I had to do a factory reset on my Evo. An update got pushed out and because I was in a low-service area when I happened to install it, the phone got stuck in a state where it couldn't finish installing. I'm on Android 2.3.3 and there do not appear to be any more updates available. Since I...

People like that drive me insane. The 24" monitor in my boss's office is set to 1024x768. I don't even know how she can work like that.

I think I did the right thing. Though it was a nice ego boost.

One of my cats does that. I broke down and bought him a drinking fountain. Another of my cats is hypnotized by toilet flushes. He gets up on the vanity so he can watch. Sometimes I flush it just because I happen to see him up there. Cats are weird.