Search results

  1. Mercutio

    N.Z. Students Can Use txt Speak on Tests

    It's still an abomination. But then, here in the US we have Ebonics and IM-speak.
  2. Mercutio

    My new system

    There's a great deal of talk, in Newegg's reviews of the Aria case, of having to mod for airflow. You might also want to swap out 750GB drives for something slightly more reasonable, perhaps more single-platter-ish.
  3. Mercutio

    The President's Rumsfeld Lie

    What color is the sky in your world, Stereodude?
  4. Mercutio

    Music

    I think it's interesting music. It's what was playing in the Borders I went to last night. I don't know what I heard, exactly, and the guy I asked did not know either, but it was a weird fusion of about five different musical styles.
  5. Mercutio

    The President's Rumsfeld Lie

    I'd love to see Bush's head on a platter. Literally. Or the end of a sharp stick. Whichever. Bozo, President Clinton lied about an affair with his wife. Bush and his administration lied to send US troops to a foreign country where their lives were imperiled and he is mortgaging the US economic...
  6. Mercutio

    1600x1200 on a 6100?

    I think I added an extra 0 when I calculated it.
  7. Mercutio

    1600x1200 on a 6100?

    I'm using 1280x1024 on one right now. There's no reason they shouldn't support 16x12, either. A 2D display at that resolution should only need 61.4MB of video memory.
  8. Mercutio

    PC Gaming = World of Suck

    Marvel Ultimate Alliance looked cool, so I bought it. Turned out it was one of those godawful console games that happens to have a PC port. I can't decide if I should shoot for Activision's Money Back guarantee or if I should just microwave the install disc now.
  9. Mercutio

    Music

    Has anyone ever heard of a band called "Stereolab?"
  10. Mercutio

    Music

    Mahler was one of the last composers of the Romantic era. He's well known for the enormous ensembles required by his orchestration. Takemitsu is somewhat unique as an avant-garde classical composer native to Japan. He does quite a bit of work for movie soundtracks as well. His music is...
  11. Mercutio

    HP OfficeJet Pro K550

    I have an Deskjet 520 that's worked since I bought it, the day I graduated from High School; I see 500s and 520s to this day. It's everything NEWER than that which sucks. Anyway, this is a workgroup printer. It has a monstrous 350-sheet feeder and obviously better construction than a $60 P.O.S...
  12. Mercutio

    MP3 - related utilities

    I like FLAC, but if I bog a system down enough, playback goes to hell. I like Ogg, since it supports multichannel audio. Apple Lossless just pisses me off. It won't play in ANYTHING I use. AACs are almost as bad, simply because an AAC is a container format that might have Apple Lossless in it...
  13. Mercutio

    HP OfficeJet Pro K550

    "Stack of consumer inkjets" cause us problems: Because all printers suck, they die. Then you have to buy a new one. One that doesn't use the same ink cartridge as the others. Now you're having to keep multiple cartridges on hand. Different printers also have different capabilities. Why can his...
  14. Mercutio

    DDR2 prices

    Why are you bothering with DDR2-800? I tend to set up HTPCs using the MythTV model: The computer by the AV components has to be good enough for playback, but there can be a back end someplace else for storage and transcoding.
  15. Mercutio

    DDR2 prices

    DDR2 prices were actually lower than DDR until about a week before AM2 was released. They've been unreasonably high ever since.
  16. Mercutio

    MP3 - related utilities

    dbPowerAmp
  17. Mercutio

    More Vista nonsense

    Vista sounds wussier - large, pointless quicktime movie I've never used Vista on a machine that would actually let me install a sound driver. So this is new to me. Basically, new sounds are a couple octaves higher in pitch (probably so they sound better on crappy notebook speakers) and are...
  18. Mercutio

    Music

    I'm not quite sure what to make of his posts in this thread either. Last five recordings I've listened to: 1. Gershwin's "An American in Paris" suite 2. Mahler's 1st Symphony 3. Miles Davis's "Birth of Cool" 4. Takemitsu's "Orion and Pleiades" 5. Wendy Carlos's "The Well-Tempered Synthesizer"
  19. Mercutio

    HP OfficeJet Pro K550

    It actually matches our needs pretty well. We teach classes in things like Photoshop and some consumer photo-editing crap (I think Picture It!) where a photo printer is handy; a color laser isn't really right for that kind of printing - though that was my preference - and, expensive as they...
  20. Mercutio

    HP OfficeJet Pro K550

    Duplex printing. 350 sheet tray. Builtin LAN. Photo-printing cartridges that aren't horribly expensive ($18 apiece). It's a little louder than a personal photo printer, but it's a workgroup-type unit, so that's not entirely unexpected. It's also enormous, as big as two reasonably new HP...
  21. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Head of the Republican National Committee outed as gay. Can we stop bothering with "republican" and just use "hypocrite?" It's less typing and it's far more accurate.
  22. Mercutio

    State of the union, help me choose/design new PC

    My understanding of the first AM2 chips that were released is that they were in all ways functionally identical to latter-day 939s save for the upgraded memory controller. I distinctly recall reading something that suggested Virtualization was tech that was not immediately supported with the AM2...
  23. Mercutio

    Music

    Udaman's posts are hard to read, but there's no reason to call them gibberish. He's obviously spent some time here, reading and typing. Give him some credit.
  24. Mercutio

    State of the union, help me choose/design new PC

    Maybe it's 'cause I work for lawyers, but agreeance is a word I hear a lot.
  25. Mercutio

    More Vista nonsense

    I LOL'd
  26. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Illinois has sent three governors (all from Kankakee, oddly) to prison over time. Blagojevich (can't believe I spelled that right) seems to be ethically challenged as well, but to his credit, his issues seem to be more patronage/nepotism issues than George Ryan's License-for-Bribes scandal. He's...
  27. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Moving within the US isn't going to fix the sizable political voice of evangelical christians and other social conservatives in this country. The USA is a place where basic principles of science are up for debate, to say nothing of the social justice issues I consider important. I'm endlessly...
  28. Mercutio

    Music

    There are a fair number of long-time friends here, udaman. I've sent SF members hardware (including jtr, whether he posts here or not), loaned them money, arranged for gifts and generally made Real Life-type, non-forum-drama things happen. Others have done the same for me. That's something a...
  29. Mercutio

    Newegg hard drive sale

    I've not seen any reason to suggest that Western Digital has improved QA in any part of its product line. Anecdotally I can say that of the last six computers that I've worked on that I have found to have disk drive problems, five had Western Digital drives (1 40GB, 3 80GB, 1 320GB) and the...
  30. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Since no one else has brought it up, I'm just going to say that election night was a happier night than usual. Not that I don't still hate this country.
  31. Mercutio

    Newegg hard drive sale

    Why do you hate your data, Adcadet?
  32. Mercutio

    When to Build Computer?

    My thoughts are in the "State of the Union" thread. Basically, the Core 2 Duo is the rational choice, being faster, consuming less power and producing less waste heat. I'd probably look at an E6400, 2 - 4GB of DDR2-667, an Intel motherboard, or possibly a Gigabyte one with at least one IDE...
  33. Mercutio

    VMware converter

    VMWare converter, a tool for turning running systems into virtual machines is presently available free of charge on the vmware site. Sweet.
  34. Mercutio

    Lifehacker

    I've been spending some time today reading the stuff on Lifehacker. And some of it is AMAZINGLY useful. Here's an article on setting up mass extension installs for Firefox. Looks really straightforward and simple to use. And this article describes InstallPad, a tool for tracking and...
  35. Mercutio

    State of the union, help me choose/design new PC

    I'm planning to use the free VMware Server so we can load multiple versions of MSOffice on the same machine. Turns out that the clipart database (out of all of Office) breaks when you have more than one version of Office install on Windows. So I get complaints when the clipart doesn't work in...
  36. Mercutio

    Nvidia G80 details revealed

    I'd just like to point out that the two power connectors for the big version of this GPU are 12V molex connectors, not PCIE power connectors. Good thing we got those weird new connectors on our power supplies, that can't even manage to keep up with the third generation of hardware that might...
  37. Mercutio

    Spare 168pin DIMMs

    I think I'm done. I'm not completely sure but if there's anything else I still have a couple 256MB modules left. And a metric ton of 64MB modules. Thanks again everybody!
  38. Mercutio

    State of the union, help me choose/design new PC

    AMD is still making new socket 754 processors. 939, however, is done.
  39. Mercutio

    State of the union, help me choose/design new PC

    Actually after playing around a bit, Dell's price for an E520 Dimension (crap) desktop with an E6300 is $630 + shipping ($29 ground) and tax (6% in Indiana) is $695. I can build and get the same machine as they're selling for $565. Even adding the $100 for a copy of XP (I don't need to, volume...
  40. Mercutio

    Disappearing threads.

    Did you refresh the board after you posted. Sometimes weird crap happens to me if I mistakenly use my back button to navigate here.
  41. Mercutio

    State of the union, help me choose/design new PC

    Nope. I can save $5 per DIMM if I go with some no-name modules, but Corsair's "value" memory is generally pretty good stuff.
  42. Mercutio

    When to Build Computer?

    Photoshop supports as many CPUs as you can throw at it. And there are previews of 4-core systems that have made it to technical press. They're saying Q4 06 or Q1 07 for initial shipments. I don't know if the way you use your machine means that you NEED four cores or not, though.
  43. Mercutio

    State of the union, help me choose/design new PC

    I foresee issues with availability of Socket 939 motherboards. Which is extremely unfortunate, 'cause AM2 doesn't do anything for me, either. Right now, building off Bozo's i946 board, this is what I'm looking at: E6400 Core 2 Duo Bozo's board 1GB Corsair DDR2/533 160GB Seagate SATA drive NEC...
  44. Mercutio

    State of the union, help me choose/design new PC

    No. But what are you doing with a non-US copy of Windows Server anyway? --- So it's new computers for my computer labs time. 30 computers - half my machines, in other words - have depreciated to the point that they can finally be replaced. Current machines: AthlonXP/2000 or XP/2500s 512MB...
  45. Mercutio

    Best movie you've seen

    Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan was in fact as completely hysterical as the trailer suggests. In fact, I don't think I went more than two minutes during the whole movie without finding some reason to laugh out loud.
  46. Mercutio

    Newegg hard drive sale

    Took what? Two and a half years for 400GB drives to drop to $200.
  47. Mercutio

    When to Build Computer?

    You may actually want to wait for four core machines since image processing is on the short list of things that genuinely benefit from having lots of CPUs.
  48. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Yay porn! ;) My brother participates in a forum called American Women Suck. Now, personally, I disagree with most of the points they raise, but even I would admit there's some truth to some of them. Not the angry, hateful prattle on their main page, but issues like paternal rights and divorce...
  49. Mercutio

    Spare 168pin DIMMs

    To those who sent me memory modules: I used them all this weekend. I spent most of Saturday fixing up PCs from 300MHz to 1GHz by installing extra RAM, swapping some motherboard/CPUs and replacing full-on Windows XP installations with TinyXP. PCs that were taking 15 minutes to start XP + Norton...
  50. Mercutio

    Something Random

    I have a brother who would be willing to offer a 30,000 word essay on that subject.
Top