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  1. Mercutio

    Way too much E-mail

    I am having a sudden onset of bastard operator syndrome just now and entertaining fantasies of setting 100MB quotas on their inboxes. I must say it's doing wonders for my mood.
  2. Mercutio

    End of TV :(

    I tend to think of TV Torrents basically as a secondary resource. It depends on what I want, but almost all the stuff I like is geek friendly enough to be readily available. Plus Comcast keeps screwing around with traffic shaping so I really can't download anything these days anyway. >:(...
  3. Mercutio

    Something Random

    I have two trip meters in my Element, so I use one to mark fill-ups and the other for paid mileage. That's how I keep track of those things. :)
  4. Mercutio

    Way too much E-mail

    Originally, I *did* migrate them to Gmail, set up IMAP and moved all their mail. Except... The worst offender in all this, the dude who pays the bills, bought a Motorola Q two weeks ago and managed to make it work with the wireless "push" E-mail/Contacts/Calendar on his Exchange Server...
  5. Mercutio

    Something Random

    That's kind of funny, actually. For as long as I've been driving, I've kept a mileage logbook for the sort of thing (plus paid mileage). I can't believe more peopel don't do that.
  6. Mercutio

    Way too much E-mail

    I'm dealing with a guy right now who keeps telling me Outlook is sluggish on his PC and, in fact, a lot of Outlook clients in his office aer sluggish. So I look. The guy has a 7.4GB Exchange Inbox. Other people in the same office have 1.4, 2.5, 2.8GB and likewise complain of E-mail slowness...
  7. Mercutio

    Thinkpad, worth the upgrade?

    That thing is probably overkill, but I know some engineers who would probably kill for one. Bet it weighs 12 lbs.
  8. Mercutio

    It's HOT

    I managed at hat trick this weekend and get about 40 hours of contracting work this weekend (from Friday to, uh, about an hour ago), which is more than I've had in probably the last month prior. So I spent all weekend in luxurious central air cooled offices. The temperatures all weekend have...
  9. Mercutio

    TV show recommendations

    Venture Bros, Weeds, Battlestar Galactica and Heroes are I think the only shows I watch that are still on the air. There's a show on Comcast On Demand called "Bikini BBQ" that was pretty hilarious to watch with a bunch of lesbians.
  10. Mercutio

    1TB Seagate for $109.99 shipped

    woot has 750GB Seagate ASes for $77 + $5 flat shipping (for up to 3 drives). I've had to ship back almost half the 750GB Seagate drives I've bought (6 out of 13)and I know ddrueding has had problems with them as well. And I had huge problems with the 80GB models I bought for my summer computer...
  11. Mercutio

    1TB Seagate for $109.99 shipped

    woot has 750GB Seagate ASes for $77 + $5 flat shipping (for up to 3 drives). I've had to ship back almost half the 750GB Seagate drives I've bought (6 out of 13)and I know ddrueding has had problems with them as well. And I had huge problems with the 80GB models I bought for my summer computer...
  12. Mercutio

    File Area Networking (FAN) - Data storage solutions

    Windows Server has a technology called dfs that you might want to look in to. With dfs implemented (and it's really, really easy) your data is replicated to all participating servers and users can always look in a single namespace to find the data that they want.
  13. Mercutio

    Beijing Olympics

    Also, who the hell cares about sailing? And insofar as someone might, does being a sailor make one an athlete? Is the performance of an olympic sailor related in any way to his physicality, or is it a matter of his expertise with instruments and objects? I eagerly await the day when Starcraft...
  14. Mercutio

    Beijing Olympics

    I am not arguing that point, regardless of the undeniable correctness of my opinion. My concern in this topic is that as loathsome and disgusting as I find the national preoccupation with such things as Basketball, Golf, Hockey and NASCAR, at least people seem to have a constant level of...
  15. Mercutio

    Beijing Olympics

    As someone who thinks sports are at best a completely pointless waste of time, space and energy, the thing I cannot comprehend is how, once every four years, we suddenly give a flying fuck about all these sports that might as well not even exist 1447 days between Olympics. Wow. Ping pong...
  16. Mercutio

    TWC RoadRunner Speed Boost?

    At least in Chicago there is cable industry competition. Where I live there is only one municipality that doesn't have an exclusive franchise with Comcast so that residents can choose to get Wide Open West. Oddly enough, pretty much everything Comcast offers is about $15 a month cheaper there...
  17. Mercutio

    Broken Server 2008?

    I switched the hardware out and took the boards. I may play with them on my own. I can't believe they'd be that bad or that they'd be bad in the way that they were. My client was on the verge of strangling me over the performance of those machines. I have about 20 non-billable hours above and...
  18. Mercutio

    Broken Server 2008?

    They have one standard 750GB SATA drive that's being used for the OS and 3 750GB drives that are completely unconfigured. All are on the motherboard's onboard disk controller (the three drives will be run in softRAID 5, but as I said they aren't even formatted). And there's no disk encryption...
  19. Mercutio

    Broken Server 2008?

    Drivers are off the Intel web site, current as of Sunday. I've been looking at Process Explorer already. Again, nothing is REPORTING that it's using massive CPU time, but the CPU time is reporting being used. It was like that before the previous wipes and the hard disk change as well. At this...
  20. Mercutio

    Broken Server 2008?

    I'm running the drives through ACHI. There does not appear to be a DMA mode setting in Windows and I don't remember seeing anything in the BIOS for it either. 178 minutes to copy 2GB of files from one of these machines to NAS box that's on the same 1GBit switch. Server 2008 also uses the "more...
  21. Mercutio

    Broken Server 2008?

    Well, after a 20 minute adventure of opening the page and getting the program downloaded and running on both machines, I see temps that are in the normal range of 42 - 50C per core (the delay was literally waiting for the pages to load, not downloading). In a server room. Both machines are in...
  22. Mercutio

    Broken Server 2008?

    I'm not physically in a place where I could install a DVD drive or access their USB ports at the moment. They're completely headless machines. They use Intel DG965OTMKR motherboards. I've tried Crucial and Corsair RAM. They've had Samsung and Seagate "AS" 750GB drives (slow crappy drives, I...
  23. Mercutio

    Broken Server 2008?

    I've got a 2008 Server machine. Well, actually, I have five of them. But two of them are really, really, really slow. Slow beyond reason, given their hardware specs. These boxes aren't really DOING anything. At the moment they're domain controllers and they have a couple file shares. I've even...
  24. Mercutio

    Broken XP

    The issue is that the Windows disc you're using isn't appropriate for the version of Windows on the PC. There are three main versions of Windows CDs: Retail, OEM and Volume. There are also standard OEM discs, and manufacturer-specific discs. Each disc is evaluated and must be the proper service...
  25. Mercutio

    nVidia may have "issues"

    TSMC only fabbed what they were told. The specifications and designs are the responsibility of nVidia's engineers, which presumably included material science-types who are aware of what insulates and what conducts heat. In an unrelated note, the whole AMD Spider setup (Phenom + 790G board with...
  26. Mercutio

    More Vista nonsense

    The thing I take away from all this is that Vista offers no more protection than XP did. And for the most part, we're OK with the level of security that XP has. A lot of people end up turning off (or turning down, if they know how) UAC anyway.
  27. Mercutio

    Opting out of Internet Advertising

    I operate on the NPR/PBS principle. If the sites need money from me, they can ask and I will provide it directly. I will not subject myself to commercial speech and in fact I'm genuinely uncomfortable with any amount of marketing that is greater than zero. I have a subscription to salon.com and...
  28. Mercutio

    HP Executable drivers, aka WTF is wrong with .INF?

    For what it's worth, I was trying to set the printers in question up on a linux-based print server appliance which claimed compatibility with an overwhelming majority of printer hardware. Just not the printers I wanted. It wasn't worth my time to deal with them. They're probably in a landfill...
  29. Mercutio

    Opting out of Internet Advertising

    That would've been a lot more interesting and useful back in about 1998, before there was such a thing as Adblock Plus.
  30. Mercutio

    Treewalk and Confetch DNS

    I pretty much run my own DNS servers all over the place, but I don't see a reason to use anything besides bind or maybe the standard Windows DNS server. Does Home Server not do DNS?
  31. Mercutio

    Something Random

    And here's another fun link: Why GM's CEO still has a job.
  32. Mercutio

    Another Digital Camera Thread - Point and Shoot

    Here's a fun rant about the constant need to buy new or upgrade your equipment.
  33. Mercutio

    How far do you go?

    My day job is to teach computer skills to employees of local steel mills. This is about 50% professional certification stuff (Microsoft Certifications) and about 50% total bullshit (Convert your home videos to DVD). My schedule isn't fixed, so it's pretty common for me to work 40 hours in three...
  34. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Why do these double posts keep happening?
  35. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Funny thing about hookers - and I'm positive that you'll hear about this in the upcoming month - Hookers always report there's an upswing in their business when the national political conventions are in town. The Upswing at the Republican side is always VASTLY higher. Likewise, business is...
  36. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Funny thing about hookers - and I'm positive that you'll hear about this in the upcoming month - Hookers always report there's an upswing in their business when the national political conventions are in town. The Upswing at the Republican side is always VASTLY higher. Likewise, business is...
  37. Mercutio

    More Vista nonsense

    I will 100% assure you that Windows 7 will also be a pig, unless Microsoft decides to modularize the whole thing, which I 100% assure you they won't do. The other day I put together two quad core machines on 1TB Samsung drives with 4GB RAM each. One has Vista Business and the other XP Pro. The...
  38. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Well, technically, she's not old enough. But I'd vote "diseased skank party" before republican any day of my life. I have a feeling that her Cocaine, Hookers, Valium, Purse-size Dogs and Hookers platform would be very popular.
  39. Mercutio

    Nice, Inexpensive case

    HEC cases are really nice, too. Very well built, and HEC power supplies are very high quality for an "unknown" brand. One of the Chicago-area distributors I deal with put HEC PSUs in the Foxconn cases it sells, so I see quite a few of them. I'm almost 100% positive that HEC is the OEM for the...
  40. Mercutio

    How far do you go?

    In my father's case, I think it's that "good enough" tools became available for Windows systems starting in the mid to late 1990s (he was evaluating NT on Intel starting with version 3.1), and either stopped being available on Sun machines or became too expensive compared to similar software on...
  41. Mercutio

    Miscellaneous Sale Thread

    This thread shall before spiffy non-woot items such that might be found on sites like Fatwallet or Dealtime or something. Anyway, Amazon.com has a $50 MIR on the very expensive but very nice Logitech diNovo Edge Bluetooth keyboard today. Which brings it down to $85. I use the...
  42. Mercutio

    Nice, Inexpensive case

    That's a much better inexpensive choice, but the styling is a bit too gaudy for my taste. The interior sure does look nice, though.
  43. Mercutio

    How far do you go?

    On a user level, I'm fine with VMS. Type "posix" at a prompt and everything is nice and appropriately *nix-y. :) Anyway, my father switched because his tools did. I'm not sure how much time he spent designing circuits or whatever after he started his company, but he moved from DEC machines when...
  44. Mercutio

    TWC RoadRunner Speed Boost?

    I use whatever they give me, upstream at least. Downstream much less often.
  45. Mercutio

    Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro

    Why would anyone buy that?
  46. Mercutio

    Nice, Inexpensive case

    Honestly, the one I linked. 1. It comes with a power supply. Not a good one, but not a POS, either. 2. The power supply is correctly positioned at the top of the case. There are two big issues with the PSU at the bottom. One is that it makes the bottom part of the motherboard a cabling mess...
  47. Mercutio

    Nice, Inexpensive case

    This is the case I bought for my kid class builds.. It's $52, has a fair PSU but is extraordinarily well constructed for a case at that price. The important part is that right now Newegg is selling it with free shipping. Since shipping on a case is usually $15 or so, I thought I'd point this...
  48. Mercutio

    How far do you go?

    You may in fact be the first computer person in the history of time to say that you miss Goback, and not in the verbal sense which involves some kind of firearm. Anyway, you can get the same results with Acronis TrueImage, particularly the new Home versions with the "Snap Restore" feature.
  49. Mercutio

    How far do you go?

    My mom is on a Linux box. She can get recipes, print and do Email, so she's happy. My dad, who was a DEC guy before being a Sun guy before being a Windows guy (yup: he's one of about four people who was buying Itanium workstations) is now convinced that a home computer needs to have Internet...
  50. Mercutio

    How far do you go?

    I'm going through that stuff with my father too. He just retired. He used to own an engineering firm with many smart people working for him. He has a PhD. He's not an idiot. But he browses porn with Internet Explorer, and he clicks on stuff that he shouldn't. Apparently the folks in his office...
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