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

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

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...

Why do these double posts keep happening?

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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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

Why would anyone buy that?

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...

From memory, CPU0 is the one that typically gets hottest. The others will be in the neighborhood of 58 - 60C. I really only pay attention to temps when I'm gaming, mostly because I can feel heat wash off the side of my case (my legs are probably around 18" away from the PC), but ironically most...

Setting aside schadenfreude, this really, deeply sucks for people with affected notebooks. I replace my hardware at a greatly accelerated pace, but I wouldn't want a customer or a student to have a computer that has a built-in death sentence. Desktops and graphics cards I don't care so much...

My 3.2Ghz Q6600 spikes up to 62C or so in a P180 while using all four cores to play City of Heroes (which can use all four cores). 70C seems a bit much though.

My 3.2Ghz Q6600 spikes up to 62C or so in a P180 while using all four cores to play City of Heroes (which can use all four cores). 70C seems a bit much though.

The Inq is reporting that nVidia may have a chip level defect on very common G84 and G86 GPUs. Basically, and this is no surprise to yours truly, the chips are all destined for a short, overheated life after which they will die. The G84 and G86 are found in GF8x00 cards that aren't 8200s or...

The answer is resoundingly "no." They just don't keep track. Or care in the slightest. They're probably just happy you called, instead of pirating or misusing an XP Volume license disc like a sensible person would. Anyway, yes, I have done this and been just as shocked. This also means that...

Control Panel has been essentially unchanged in terms of icons and functions since Windows 95. NT4 followed the Windows 3.1 scheme, but Windows 98 and 2000 are practically identical to Win95. OK. Windows 2000 rearranged the Network applet. Fine. Windows ME introduced Category View, which no...

Try playing with the girlfriend you're fortunate enough to have. :P

Seriously, how often are you changing IP settings? You're either DHCP or you've got a box with some ports on a firewall mapped to a static IP. The only time in the last year or so that I've had to change IP settings manually, except to statically assign addresses on a server, was the very...

Here's some fun information about Symantec's business practices from someone who works there. I'm particularly interested in the fact that they'll issue a refund for just about anything.

I'm perfectly willing to believe that the wiring in your building just sucks. If you want a REAL cable conspiracy, the building where I work is also home to a Comcast Office. Every single time they make a change to their internet service (which they accomplish by adding more cable lines...

You can simulate the same effect by using NTFS volume mount points, so that array#1 has 4TB for your music + your documentaries, and array#2 has 4TB for all your TV shows and array#3 has 4TB all your solo female porn and array and array #5 has some of the lesbian porn and array#6 has the rest of...

RDP is *a lot* more efficient than standard VNC. I'm not sure about how much tuning the various variations and sub-variation have, but VNC in general is a damned pig for bandwidth. I've standardized on TightVNC for my needs, which is supposed to be better for low-bandwidth. I realize you...

RDP is *a lot* more efficient than standard VNC. I'm not sure about how much tuning the various variations and sub-variation have, but VNC in general is a damned pig for bandwidth. I've standardized on TightVNC for my needs, which is supposed to be better for low-bandwidth. I realize you...

I've been paid to take a sledgehammer to drives. They even gave me the hammer.

Ignorant critics, maybe. I've been teaching Vista certification classes, which means I've been using Vista a lot more than I really want to. I'm well aware of the feature set as well as Microsoft's take on reality. I'm still not impressed or happy with it.

My understanding is that cable providers are required by law to provide the TV signals that would normally be provided on an antenna, in the VHF range. Which amounts to channels 1 - 20. They can't keep those channels off your TV. Everything else, at least in Chicago, requires a digital tuner. I...

My way of doing things, with the multiple "small" arrays, is starting to make more sense now, isn't it? ;)

With DSL you only have guaranteed bandwidth to where ever your phone company has its lines going. You still have shared bandwidth from that point on (of course, it's a phone company, so capacity probably isn't a huge issue for them). Cable service can vary widely. One cable segment can be...

With DSL you only have guaranteed bandwidth to where ever your phone company has its lines going. You still have shared bandwidth from that point on (of course, it's a phone company, so capacity probably isn't a huge issue for them). Cable service can vary widely. One cable segment can be...

Still 25% left, too. :D

Mmmm $85 750GB hard drives. Too bad I already bought a Dyson Vacuum today.

My biggest issues are software incompatibilities, driver issues and odd Explorer crashes. I miss my "Up" button on Explorer Windows, and I don't particularly care for the "Breadcrumbs" now used to navigate the Explorer address bar. The differences in the control panel, particularly "Programs...

There's an amazing wind farm going up about 70 miles south of Chicago, near Kentland, Illinois. I took some pictures of what they're doing (even caught them hoisting the blades on one), but supposedly they'll have 400 or so 100m tall windmills by the end of the year. From what I read about that...

... if the electrical grid can handle it.

The cost as configured on them is higher than the Thinkpads I would've bought, and the manufacturer service isn't anywhere near as good. They aren't as rugged, either. A couple years ago, I would've at least had the bright spot that they all shipped with 3-year service plans by default but now...

I just got done with an interesting call from a Dell CSR. I ordered 10 Latitude 630s about 10 days ago for a customer (sob, the result of an argument I did not win). Normally Dell ships and products arrive about four days after I place the order. This batch didn't, and I didn't even get a...

Generally speaking if there's no known fix for a malware program but something completely untrusted/unknown, I'll take a chance on it. The machine is already infected, after all.

I've seen boards from Gigabyte and Asus that include a plate that has a couple standard SATA ports and a place to plug in a Y-shaped molex connector. I call those things Ghetto eSATA, and I have found them useful a time or two.

Thanks for the tip. I did not even know where to start looking.