Search results

  1. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Dan Savage is a Sex & Relationship advice columnist who whose work mostly appears in alternative weekly newspapers. He has a different way of describing the same phenomenon. He says that there is no one "The One" perfect person for everyone. Instead, there are tons and tons and tons of people...
  2. Mercutio

    Something Random

    You are missing something fundamental: There are no discussions. On sites that allow users to track visitors to a personal profile (I know that you're familiar with OKCupid, for example), it's actually incredibly unusual that a message, regardless of how formal, casual, conversational, florid...
  3. Mercutio

    Something Random

    I sort of see it as a failure of my basic humanity that I'm not appealing enough to be worthy of a relationship. That sort of mindset is the result of spending years and years and years of doing the needle in a haystack thing, but try spending four or five hours a week trying to make a...
  4. Mercutio

    question PC may have died-need some feedback on MB/CPU/RAM

    Ask Handruin how he feels about ATI video drivers. :) Somehow I doubt that the low-level interface is the source of potential bugs.
  5. Mercutio

    question PC may have died-need some feedback on MB/CPU/RAM

    AMD has a habit of supporting legacy sockets - AM3 CPUs in some cases will work in AM2 boards with a BIOS flash and willingness to accept slower hypertransport links, but it's disingenuous to suggest that a discrete card has no added value over and above onboard video. Most motherboards that...
  6. Mercutio

    USB 3.0 Cases

    Cooler Master Elite 120 Advance mITX. 3x3.5" or 4x2.5" drive bays, 5.25" bay, supports full size video cards, one front USB3 port, uses a standard PSU. And they're $50.
  7. Mercutio

    10TB hard drives.

    That sounds about right. 3TB drives have been around, what? Two and a half years? I'd be willing to bet that price pressure will have sub-$5000 4k TVs on shelves by then (currently around $25k), and I'm likewise sure that the usual suspects will have prosumer cameras as well.
  8. Mercutio

    Something Random

    The harm would be the loss of a stable full time job that I actually do like. The short answer there is that, in the short cast of characters in my life, her job often dictates the circumstances surrounding our interactions; her actual name isn't terribly meaningful and using it would probably...
  9. Mercutio

    Another mass build and some hardware thoughts

    Virtual PC actually does wind up being a better deal for my usage scenario. It shares the Documents library with the host PC and inherits its printers as well, which means less crap to manage and a smaller image file. For people who think a 60GB SSD is too small for Windows 7, my classroom Win7...
  10. Mercutio

    question PC may have died-need some feedback on MB/CPU/RAM

    A Promise controller may not properly support optical drives. I seem to recall problems with them and I know I made it my practice to avoid putting an optical drive on one. As I recall, I specifically had problems with bad burns on CD-Rs that were solved by moves to native controllers. USB...
  11. Mercutio

    question PC may have died-need some feedback on MB/CPU/RAM

    Corsair Force GTs and Samsung 830s are kind of my personal go-to options for SSDs right now. I just paid for several Intel 330s, but that's a fleet purchase where I expect the two-day turnaround on RMAs to be more important than anything else. OCZ Agility (not-super-fast) series SSDs are very...
  12. Mercutio

    Something Random

    There is little to nothing here, but I have absolutely no evidence that moving anywhere else would improve my fortunes. I'd also like to say that sex work is a job, not a personal indictment. People can be manipulative pieces of crap whether or not they take off their clothes for money. Most...
  13. Mercutio

    Merc's Useful Tools of the day

    While I was looking in to MSVPC on Windows 7, I found this nifty little tool: XP-More, which allows users to quickly duplicate and manage Virtual PC VMs. Interestingly, it's hosted on Microsoft's Codeplex site, which means that Microsoft is at least theoretically aware that one of its uses is to...
  14. Mercutio

    Something Random

    It might be noted that I'm actually a pretty wholesome guy. Not religious or simple minded, but other than my enjoyment of naked ladies I really don't have any vices to speak of.
  15. Mercutio

    Another mass build and some hardware thoughts

    180GB is not a ton of room once VMs and a backup image are included. I've not tested a restore using TrueImage; the version I have licenses for is 2010, and that doesn't work with Windows 8. I'm a little worried that it won't restore properly, and because of the dual boot setup I can't use...
  16. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Here is the problem with looking for functionally weird: The women who are geeky/weird tend to be a lot younger than me - think like 20 year old anime and xbox fiends - and they tend to live in places where they already have craploads of options for finding guys like Chicago or Urbana or...
  17. Mercutio

    Something Random

    I'm open to suggestions but remember that my options are ridiculously limited here.
  18. Mercutio

    Android phones: Tips, tricks?

    Wow. That is the complete opposite of hilarious.
  19. Mercutio

    Something Random

    I just had a weird phone call. Over the weekend, the strip club where my friend works had its 20th anniversary. They were doing giveaways for customers who got dances. My friend apparently used my name and phone number to enter, because I won an ipad. Which is obviously hilarious, because it's...
  20. Mercutio

    question All-in-One PC or Other Options

    My impression of relatively recent Lenovo business (Thinkcenter/Thinkstation) desktop products is that they're relatively solid and similar to what I would've built anyway. I don't know if that's true of consumer desktops but I doubt that there's as much difference between desktop products as...
  21. Mercutio

    This is the thread for the discussion of interesting apps.

    I've noticed that MTP-based sync fails A LOT when there are non-US-but-still-Western-Alphabet special characters. I'm not sure what the problem is, but I had the issue syncing playlists with every application I tried. It might be a limitation of MTP on the device, since all the syncs failed in...
  22. Mercutio

    Newegg Shipping, WTF?

    Both Newegg and Amazon are doing weird things with shipping now. What they're actually trying to do is get shipping that is as fast and as local as possible. About a third of my Amazon deliveries now come from one of two companies that literally just hires "some guy in a car" to drive to a...
  23. Mercutio

    Another mass build and some hardware thoughts

    As I said, the thin client thing is not happening. I have a proof of concept machine dual booting Win7 and Win8 (haven't decided how I'm going to handle the VMs) right now that I need to show to other instructors.
  24. Mercutio

    question All-in-One PC or Other Options

    There is actually a standardized all in one form factor now. It's called Thin Mini-ITX and here is a brochure listing OEMs who are building them.
  25. Mercutio

    This is the thread for the discussion of interesting apps.

    One of my iphone people just started using it since he moved to a Galaxy S3 instead of an iphone 5. I'm sure I'll hear about it if it does anything other than "just work."
  26. Mercutio

    Something Random

    I'm all set in that department.
  27. Mercutio

    Something Random

    <.< >.> One of Newegg's email specials this morning is $10 off on a Hitachi Magic Wand, with offer code EMCNAHB65.
  28. Mercutio

    Desktop, Notebook, Tablet, Other Tablet, Phone

    Why are you bothering with KVM in the first place? Why not RDP or VNC? The phone/tablet situation really bugs me. I see a lot of people who have both devices out, smartphone and tablet. I can only assume it's because they're using SMS on their phone. Why isn't there a worthwhile...
  29. Mercutio

    Desktop, Notebook, Tablet, Other Tablet, Phone

    Dirty Jenny sounds awesome though so maybe that's less of a problem.
  30. Mercutio

    Desktop, Notebook, Tablet, Other Tablet, Phone

    It helps if you turn it off or at least remove audible notifications for most things. My least favorite thing in the world is explaining to people that I. Do. Not. Do. SMS. Ever. (OK that's no 100% true, but the three people who can send me them are white listed and only allowed because they...
  31. Mercutio

    Another mass build and some hardware thoughts

    One of my customers still has a Netware 3 machine that runs some portion of his POS system. Another one has some CNC systems that demand to talk to x86 computers running something called ROX (Copyright 1989) that's installed from 720k floppies. I've never been able to find anything out about it...
  32. Mercutio

    Desktop, Notebook, Tablet, Other Tablet, Phone

    I don't know how many people this applies to, but I am actually so blessed as to have multiple computer systems that I can (if I so choose) use every day. What I'm thinking about right now is the ways that all this stuff has changed how and what I do. I still prefer to use a desktop when I have...
  33. Mercutio

    Mount Nexus 7 in Dash?

    A lot of those "Android Head Units" are like the one I was describing, where they have an app to interface with the head unit, not a head unit that can control stuff on the device. A few of the expensive ones essentially have a $50 tablet for an interface, but looking at the specs on those...
  34. Mercutio

    Something Random

    No, it would go to 10.9 on everything except one category where you would inexplicably be a 10.7. RAID10 of PCIe SSDs? Too bad. Your disk subsystem is a 10.7.
  35. Mercutio

    Mount Nexus 7 in Dash?

    You might want to check laws in your state to make sure that you can in fact mount a computer screen in your car in the driver's field of view. I really, really wish someone made a head unit that had functional controls for Android. I played with something with an Android logo on the box but it...
  36. Mercutio

    question Which Tablets

    Oh never mind. The Nexus PHONE is Samsung.
  37. Mercutio

    question Which Tablets

    That's what the Nexus is. Including the made by Samsung bit.
  38. Mercutio

    The obligatory Blackberry thread

    CEOs can't really say things like that, but they have no realistic chance of topping either Google or Apple and to think otherwise would be at least as dangerous a break with reality.
  39. Mercutio

    Windows 8

    Windows 8 has Hyper-V, just like Server 2008 and Server 2012. The problem is, XP Mode was a de-facto free Windows XP license and that's what is missing. Virtual PC also used some aspects of Remote Desktop to make it appear that installed apps were running natively on the desktop where Windows...
  40. Mercutio

    Windows 8

    Windows 8 does not have XP Mode. Weak.
  41. Mercutio

    Another mass build and some hardware thoughts

    The people I work with have a very different perspective on this stuff. They want the facilities to most closely resemble what people are going to use at home and/or at work. I'm having to expend all my efforts at the moment justifying the use of VMs for older versions of Windows so that I don't...
  42. Mercutio

    Windows 8

    Stardock is now offering Start8 for Windows 8. It appears to be free.
  43. Mercutio

    This is the thread for the discussion of interesting apps.

    I use it so that I can use my larger tablets as GPSes without needing a full-time data connection. It works very well for that purpose. Just like reviews on Amazon or Newegg, people will give bad reviews for stupid shit, so I'd take those reviews with a very large grain of salt.
  44. Mercutio

    Another mass build and some hardware thoughts

    I'm not really arguing with anyone. I'd far rather have flash drives. The problem is that I know full well the other people in my office won't change what they're doing or willing to do in classes if they think it might somehow create a different environment than what a typical home or office...
  45. Mercutio

    Something Random

    I use Go Launcher on my Fire.
  46. Mercutio

    question PC may have died-need some feedback on MB/CPU/RAM

    Your DOS-based software may yet run properly. 16-bit Windows apps and programs that depend on a 98/2000/XP driver are the only things that I can absolutely assure you will not work. Also, I had problems setting up dual boot configurations with 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows, where the boot...
  47. Mercutio

    This is the thread for the discussion of interesting apps.

    Have you not heard of CoPilot?
  48. Mercutio

    question Which Tablets

    I don't know about the Fire HD, but I had a different launcher running on my Fire about 90 seconds after I took it out of the box.
  49. Mercutio

    question Which Tablets

    Yes. This is the huge drawback that kept me from fully recommending the Fire as well. It doesn't include Google's apps and in fact the Fire has to be rooted to install anything from the Play Store and certain .APKs even if you do take the time to collect them and try to sideload them. I hate the...
  50. Mercutio

    My 2nd laptop, a Lenovo Thinkpad or a Toshiba Tecra?

    As far as I know, they were made by Lenovo since at least the mid-90s. It's just that up until 2005 or so, they still said IBM on them.
Top