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You'll learn the answer to that question the day you get a digital projector. :) And remember, XGA kicks the kicks the crap out of progressive scan any day of the week.

You live in Finland. Put your PC in a garbage bag, cut holes where the cables go, and set it out a window. :) (Yes, I know it can be nice and warm in Finland, but you live in a country with wild Reindeer.)

Yup, probably. Probable candidates include having lots of cables in a rat's nest under your desk, bad connection between speakers or speakers and sound card, using the analog audio cable between your DVD-ROM and sound card instead of the digital one, using analog cables between sound card and...

I didn't list the OKC bombing. I was eating lunch in my dorm cafeteria when I heard about it - the building had a low-power FM station that was broadcast to a couple of surrounding dorms - and the monkey running the thing broke through the music that was playing, some insipid, singsongy Beatles...

3ware doesn't joke around. Their hardware does all the same things as enterprise-class SCSI RAID controllers, like enhancing read performance on RAID1. I've not bothered with Adaptec. Honestly, I'm not sure your friend would notice for his personal machine, but if he wants a high caliber piece...

If you buy stamps from the vending machines in our postal offices, you'll get dollar coins - either Susan B. Anthony or the new one, but dollar coins nonetheless. I just found that out. Also, I've been told that in addition to the supply of $2 bills delivered to the federal reserve (for...

Does that mean something?? Got an oil change this morning. The grease monkeys didn't know what the noise was, either.

One of the big reasons Quebec stands out in my mind was that it was one of the first moments in the internet age I can remember where "online" trumped traditional media. I sat, with 4000 other people, on IRC channel #quebecvote, and got a moment-to-moment accounting of the vote. Those online...

The above review reminded me a bit of a short story by David Sedaris, "Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol", in which a serious, adult (no, not that kind of "adult") theater critic reviews grade-school xmas pageants.

I don't remember the massacre at Tienammen Square as such, but I really remember watching "Good Morning America" the morning before it happened. There was an intense "China is going the way of Germany" vibe from the reporter stationed in Beijing even up to a few hours before it happened. 9/11 -...

Don't necessarily listen to Tannin. He has a fever right now. The 2200-series workgroup printer is a perfectly nice little unit. Its little 1x00-series brother is a piece of crap, though. Of course, any HP with a model number above 4000 is a marvelous printer. Not that you could afford such a...

Yay Doug!

Just a noise. Clatter clatter clatter, and only when I'm basically idling. When I get up over 10mph, it goes away. I'd say it sounds like something metal vibrating against something else metal, but an inspection of the undercarriage doesn't show anything like that (muffler firmly in place). No...

Do remember that a car is basically building up a big ol' static charge just in the change of potential between tires and pavement while it's rolling around. People zap themselves all the time getting in and out of cars. As I understand things, cool, dry environments are worst for ESD. I hear...

I'm trying to be a conscientious objector to anything more than a moment of silence on 9/11 - the last thing I want is another unctious rememberance with a corporate logo very close by, but today I had an interesting conversation with someone just a bit older than me about moments everyone...

$2 bills are exceedingly rare. Cash drawers don't have a space for them, even. Half-dollar and dollar coins are also rare. The first paycheck I ever received - $40 for installing a new motherboard and a hard disk in someone's old PC - I rode my bike all around my town (30,000 residents)...

Well, the standard as I hear it is... 2000 volts is enough to feel - a good jolt. 200 volts is enough to see arc if it's really dim (some people can feel charges this small, but if you've ever felt 110VAC you realize it takes a second to actually sense the shock). 20 volts is enough to cause...

I buy that high-mileage oil formulation. Which, if it makes my car sound like a dying giraffe after I've driven 2300 miles, might not be a good idea. :(

Eons ago (1994-1995) when I ran the most-popular Taco Bell web site on the internet (Taco Bell did not have a web site until 1999), I had dozens of stories from employees (trading soft-shell tacos for weed, working while under the influence of several different drugs, overcharging drunken...

No, but there's a difference between CTRL-N and double clicking the evil blue "e".

One of the students in the A+ class I'm teaching at the moment suggested that I might be just a touch too cavalier about ESD. He does some kind of electronics work, so I suppose he may be right but at the same time, I can honestly say I've never out-and-out killed any PC hardware via static...

Er, that would be different. My car has never burned oil before and I've 700 miles before I even hit the conservative "3000 mile mark" that oil change places seem to push. But then, $30 is an awfully cheap fix. Can you tell I know nothing about cars?

ie6setup /t:c:\temp /c I think. If I remember right.

I guess I'm not that worried if the new 20GB drive I buy to replace a failed 2GB drive carries a full warranty. If it'll knock $15 off the price, I guess that may be a good thing. Besides, it's a Maxtor. I suppose that as long as their current (== the drive I actually want to buy) drive has...

Considering that board + CPU for that Celeron is close to $200 and PowerEdge = "server chassis", I'd have a tough time passing that up.

Comdisco? Or Comcapital? Comdisco is all the way over in Schaumberg. Don't feel bad about the car thing. My car is making a noise that I don't want to deal with, either. Right now I'm pretending I don't hear it (it makes a clatter sound at idle, if anyone knows what that is) but evenutally I'll...

The honest-to-goodness best buy in monitors is any source for Dell lease-returned displays. Ebay will work in a pinch for those, but better yet is to find a warehousing company (like Comdisco up here in Illinois) that has them. Little computer stores often have 'em, too, albeit not always at...

I didn't live through much of the cold war, of course. In my analysis, the US seems to have won only by exponential escalation of threat to the USSR. Kilotons begat megatons begat star wars. They just couldn't compete economically. In head-to-head contests, well, here, it seems they bested us...

Hell, *I* remember the Bhopal/Union Carbide thing and I was under 10 years old when it happened. It was HUGE. Front page news, 10 minutes of the 30-minute national news broadcasts for about a week (that was huge - plane crashes would get maybe five minutes), TWO stories on the then-top-rated...

I'm a PC tech, not an HVAC guy! Last thing I really want to do is start measuring the calories/joules or BTUs I need to build a semi-efficient generator. That's WAY too much work.

Ars technica had an article up over the weekend (I think. Going days without being online is messing up my sense of time) about moving to carbon, rather than silicon, for processor manufacture. I've heard talk of using germanium also. Both of these have vastly different thermal properties...

Wow. Not only am I a maladjusted, socially-retarded hacker, now I have engieering to aspire to! Slashdot.org had a great discussion about whether that "hacker" page was a joke or not. I think the bit about AOL is particularly amusing, because I talk to people every day that actually feel that way.

Jump on that thing, Tannin. You can always stick it in a wood crate with some cut-outs for the power cables, or toss it in a closet. Heck, one of those old dot-matrix printer-silencing enclosures would even be good enough. James is offering you a bargain, even if you have to buy the consumables.

From the "My back is STILL sore" dept. One major point against both UPSes and 21" monitors: They really suck when it's time to move.

It is unbelievably difficult to lose a loved one. There really isn't much that I could add there except to say that for someone so young to lose so long a struggle is truly heartbreaking. Your sister should have had so much more time.

I'm glad I don't have a TV. I don't even want to think what coverage of the anniversary is like. One thing that does piss me off to no end is that suddenly our president is eloquent and bold (http://www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/09/08/ar911.changed.presidency/index.html) where before he was...

So how much would an Ultra5 cost to ship from Oz?

Wow. XPSP1 won't even officially be out for another three days and there's already clearly-written articles describing the crack for it.

That is not good news. Maxtor drives have been my mainstay for several years now. Although I can't complain about Maxtor reliability to date, I don't think I can, in good faith, continue to offer Maxtor drives in new builds. A one year warranty on what is often one of the most expensive...

If you're stuck with it, add the site that the adware uses to your HOSTS file. Then, no ads. w00t!

Traditionally video cards don't matter much in servers, but just to contradict time, I'd like to point out that a thicker case is going to be a slightly better EMI shield than a thinner one. Since servers tend to be put in places with lots of EMI (with all the HVAC and power requirements...

Just quibbling with James..

My other (linux-based) suggestion would be the wonderful little gem pavuk, which is basically a site-downloader on steroids, that attacks downloads with a tenacity that I can't recall seeing anywhere else. I downloaded MS's trial version of SQL Server 7 with pavuk. It sustained a .01k/sec...

wget on a linux box can resume downloads. IIRC, the downloading doohickey that comes with Mozilla does, too.

First thing: Outlook viruses can be spread whether the preview Window is present/in use or not. Some of the bugs out there have figured out how to execute themselves upon receipt. Second thing: At least some of the Apple products are impacted by poor MS products. The other side of things is...

The three times I've done XP on machines with modems, I can say I had problems only once - a generic Cirrus Logic based dual modem just wouldn't work with XP. I replaced it with a couple of Genica Lucent-based modems and everything worked. The Supra Connexant-based modems I use in builds work...

Incidently, I'm given to understand that current minor pop star Nora Jones (jazz/pop vocalist. I haven't heard of her either) is Ravi Shankar's daughter.

Crap. Bill and I are in agreement about something fundamentally related to politics. ... and in Hell, Satan just had to put on a pair of earmuffs.

Living where I do, the reparations thing is a really, really big deal, even with otherwise intelligent/respectable people. There are bumper stickers and community rallies and guest-editorials in newspapers. The thing is, I can't for the life me imagine how a roughly $10,000 after-tax payout to...

Thanks. There are a couple of XP machines where I'm working right now, so I might as well give it a shot.