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Relating to timwhit's interest in "American Theocracy", here's an article from today's Salon.com: "Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism" Across the United States, religious activists are organizing to establish an American theocracy. A frightening look inside the growing right-wing...

It is good to see you, Tea. I'm glad they finally released you from that Turkish prison.

Seems like a good way to get decent onboard graphics for an Intel System. The price is certainly reasonable. I'm not seeing any reason to complain about it. Mate it with a dual core something or other and I'll bet it would be a pretty nice little setup.

Try hitting Shift-Numlock to toggle it on and off. It's a kind of a whacky issue that lots and lots of thinkpads have, something about numlock behavior with an external keyboard and I don't remember the details since I don't bother to use anything but the perfect keyboard that's already on the...

Is this a laptop keyboard?

This is the political thread closest to the top of the Pub page so... Who will be the most hated President?. W. just dropped to 31% approval. I can't believe it's still that high, but maybe if the price of gas goes up another $.50...

Greg, that would be the second choice. You can handle it. Really. Honest. :)

Hope you aren't trying to do L2TP. Many SOHO routers can't forward IP by protocol, which is something L2TP needs to work. Yet another reason to set up a Smoothie I guess.

I've been keeping a Meebo Window open to deal with PITA client who won't use decent forms of communication. It works.

meebo.com

I just use "C:\Drivers". Windows doesn't autodetect things (you can integrate drivers with slipstreaming, but that is complicated and obnoxious), but you know exactly where they are and can point it to the right place when prompted.

Here's a hint: Build yourself a driver CD before you install the new OS. Once the OS is installed, copy the drivers to a \drivers folder on the PC. Leave it there forever and never go hunting for drivers on the web again. That's SOP for PCs I build.

Given that I've seen trailer-park types do things like bolt the motherboard directly to the chassis (no standoffs), then take a jigsaw to the case (with motherboard attached!) to make cards fit right, I'd be very, very, very scared of what a Walmart shopper would do with DIY components.

It might also interest folks to know that Walmart is going to start offering ala carte PC parts for those interested in building their own PC. I can't imagine how that will work out, but supposedly they're going to outfit something like 1/3 of their stores for it.

There's nothing wrong with gaming on Server 2003. There's probably something wrong with your main machine being an XP box, but that's more a matter of your own poor taste.

1. The board went back the same day. 2. Jetway is and always has been the worst possible brand for anything and everything I can think of. It may be part of the global "PC Chips" umbrella, but if it is, it's the part where the stuff that got rejected from all the other brands. 3. ECS, as I...

The problem with Lucifer's Hammer is the co-author. I have no idea why Jerry Pournelle is famous for anything except collaborating with Larry Niven.

True Story. I needed an AGP video card with a DVI connector. Didn't want to spend much money (just wanted to demonstrate to one of my customers that DVI looks nicer than VGA). Drove over to my local disti. Cheapest card they had was a $32 64MB Radeon 9250 from Jetway. Jetway is the company that...

iTunes is a pile of shit. It gives software in general a bad name. And Acrobat 4 is usually better behaved than 5. But then, the minute you use something not from Adobe to view a PDF, you find they suck a lot less anyway.

Reality has a well-known Liberal bias. That is all. Actually, no it isn't. The whole episode was like Jon Stewart dressing down the hosts of CNN's Crossfire. It's not that the man was six feet away from the chimp-in-chieff while he was saying things like: "The greatest thing about this man is...

Don't for get the magic of google's "site:" keyword, for searching obnoxious monolithic web sites (cough IBM/Microsoft/Sony cough)

Should've done the printing on a Mac. ;)

I may have a 512MB PC133 DIMM for that thing, Coug. I'll have to look and see if I still have it. I know I have at least a couple 256MB PC100 modules, but they're Compaq spares and I kind think I couldn't make them work in anything else. Anyway, there's no doubt in my mind that Thinkpads are...

Something else: Because of the orientation of parts in a desktop case, the PSU is not "above" the CPU (warm air rises etc etc), it's to one side of the CPU. I believe that reduces or possibly minimizes the amount of airflow and/or ventilation provided by the power supply, which could very well...

I guess I need to post a photo of the cases in question. There's just shy of nothing I can do to improve airflow in any of them. Anyway, 50C is about my comfort level. Obviously, the AMD chips WILL work when they're much hotter than that; these PCs were running at over 60C for two and three...

The full version of Acrobat is different in only the tiniest ways from Reader. I've gotten to use it a few times and as far as I can tell it sucks no less than the free version. Basically, you gain the ability to set content protection and to copy and paste bits of text or graphics. That's what...

None of the desktop cases I have support a fan of any meaningful size in the rear of the case. None of them have air-holes for ventilation in the front of the case (none I can think of anyway), although two of them have a place to mount a front fan. As I mentioned in the thread I referenced...

Didn't write this, but I found it. It's a fun little read. Dear President Bush, Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's law. I have learned a great deal from you and try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual...

In this instance I believe that the incredibly poor ventilation from desktop cases with 17" monitors sitting on top of them is the main cause of difficulty. In the past I've tried premium copper heat sinks and various different thermal compounds without much luck.

I just did a batch RMA of drives to Samsung. My "batch" was 5 drives that I've collected over the last 18 months. Two of them are being RMA'd for things like making noises I haven't heard drives of that model make. Two of them are plainly out of warranty (manufactured February 2002 and April...

SuSE is free and quite usable. Good OSes don't have to cost money. :)

I don't think it's stealing to copy a bunch of bits. Sorry. I don't. That's the wrong word to use to describe trading digital information. The original data still exists. Someone got paid for it. It's not like I took a physical, depletable item off a store shelf so that no one else can have it...

1. All the machines aren't on very often. 2. Having machines at 100% CPU utilization frightens and confuses the other instructors. I got yelled at last time I had folding set up. 3. The PCs in question were using AMD retail heat sinks with artic silver in place of the standard thermal pad. I...

mubs, You aren't going back to India, are you? :(

Two PCs sitting side by side in a room with the thermostat set to 23C. Both Barton 2500s on GA-7S748 motherboards, in Enlight desktop cases. Base CPU Temp after 20 minutes being on and idle (measured with motherboard monitor 5): PC1: 71C PC2: 68C Installed CoolOn on PC1, rebooted. (BIOS...

The really offensive thing is that this person is supposed to be an instructor of web and programming related topics. We need a full-time sort of person, unfortunately. I *really* need to break down and learn design stuff I guess.

I swear I'm going to quit this job if people don't quit asking me about Frontpage crap. The... person who does our web page likes to "live-edit" it - work directly from Frontpage with the actual page. And she just deleted a bunch of stuff. This is, of course, my fault. Or "web person" doesn't...

Slightly related to that subject... I used to love to go to the library. I can't stand the ones we have where I live, though. Nothing worse than getting a book you've been looking forward to reading and finding out that some jackass took a sharpie and marked over every time used the word "God"...

If the choice is between someone who only has $250 having a computer and not having a computer, I think I'd be a little less picky. Not only that, I think it's the right place to cut a corner. That system has a motherboard that's several steps up from PC Chips/Jetway/ECS. It has enough RAM. It...

Two more things: 1. Literature Map, a tool for finding authors much like the tool timwhit posted for finding (non-classical) bands whose music you like. 2. I keep raving about comic books. Here's a small collection of a comic that I really enjoy. The files are in .cbr format, and can be most...

I *still* haven't gotten around to reading that. I keep finding fiction that I want to read more. It'll probably be out in paperback by the time I get around to actually reading the hardcover. Sigh. I've been reading books by Eric Flint for several years. He's actually lives in nearby East...

I've got a room full of Barton 2500s on SiS748s that I think are about to melt down. So I'm very interested in this.

I know about Junkbusters, which keeps me off lots of lists. Particularly helpful when I don't want the catalog from that place where I ordered that Transsexual Midget Donkey porno.

I got an AARP membership card in the mail today. I guess the retired people are getting a little more aggressive in their recruiting these days.

I can probably find you a 512MB PC3200 part, timwhit. Anyway, I know all about U-series drives and their vomit-box connection. Some of the PCs I support here have U-series drives, or Maxtor DM8s, which are probably just as bad. Given enough RAM, a slow drive can be made tolerable. Not having...

That $450 machine you're talking about would be a mid-high end system for the people I deal with, ddrueding.

Where else do you get a brand-new $30 hard disk?

I'm not sure if it's a load of crap or not, but I have some candidate machines to try it on. I'll probably have a chance to try it later this week.

$235. It's a POS, sure, but I can build a $235 box today using all name-brand, new parts. Celeron 315 (2.2GHz/533MHz bus) 512MB of OCZ RAM Asrock P4VM800 motherboard (S3 graphics included) Foxconn TLN436-C4002 chassis with 350W Sparkle PSU 20GB 5400rpm Seagate Hard disk (U-series X) LiteOn 52x...

I have to fault their total failure to examine the dangers of Improvised Explosive Devices on their server products. I mean, when I'm pissed at a server I'm not usually thinking "handgun", but rather "I wonder what I could do with a 220V connection, and a few gallons of gasoline."