Search results

$20k would get you in a 40-core, 80 thread Xeon E7 with 64GB RAM... Doesn't Photoshop offload a bunch of stuff to the GPU now anyway? Does moving to something with ever more CUDA cores represent any sort of real-world improvement?

Is the impacted account configured for Exchange ActiveSync or as IMAP/SMTP?

My hatred of WD is based on a lifetime of collected data. The WD20EADs drives I have are supposed to have an order of magnitude higher MTBF rating than WD Blue drives but I think that only 17 of the 24 I had still work. I did use a lot of the 1.5TB -AS drives in one of my file servers for...

The short answer is that there really hasn't been that much progress on the performance front. I don't wanna say that Intel doesn't care about desktop CPUs any more, but Intel doesn't care about desktop CPUs any more. They're rapidly becoming a niche market.

Going with the pure computer-related mistakes: 1. Using "wall" (write all) as a demonstration command for something ordinary users wouldn't be able to do on campus UNIX systems. What I didn't know was that my student account had been granted some extra powers because of my duties as a lab...

Do you really want to be testing on hardware dissimilar to what you're using in production? As I understand it, Opterons are generally in the same place as mainstream desktop CPUs. The performance per core doesn't hold up, so AMD is selling on the basis of providing a lot of low-cost cores and...

I'm not sure if this covers Hamachi or not. The language of the press release suggests that it does, but Hamachi in and of itself has always been outside the main LogMeIn software suite. I use Ignition about once every two weeks to get to a machine at home via my tablet or phone, but I could...

Well, I've definitely dropped a case of hard drives but I think my biggest and most costly mistake was bothering to get an academic degree to work in IT. Not just because I had to pay off student loans but because I skipped out on the .com boom and the opportunity to move to San Fransisco in the...

Lunar, if your computers are noticeably louder or hotter than other normal office equipment, you need better computers. People have slept in the same room with my big file server and never noticed it.

That's one of those things that makes some people proper Engineers with the rest of us are just IT guys.

I'd rather eat the cost for leaving the drives running all the time than have them do anything but run 24x7. Servers I manage have had very few disk problems over their lifetime, something I'm thankful for, and I attribute that in part to not bothering to spin down drives.

Apparently HP is going to resume shipments of consumer PCs with Windows 7. They are touting this as a feature.

I didn't really think to mess with games, but the first two non-trivial titles I picked from the Windows Store, Avengers Initiative and Disney The Little Mermaid Undersea Treasures, both hang on startup on my Surface 2 even though both of them indicate they support ARM processors and that...

Firefox asks permission to install Addon updates when it starts. They're not mandatory.

Chrome REALLY doesn't have the rich Add-ons ecosystem that Firefox does, but the funny part about this to me is that it's going to impact the tiny percentage of Chrome users who are aware that they can install add-ons at all. It's not just that it's a new attack vector, it's an attack vector...

Unlike human infants, absolutely all cat-babies are adorable.

15 years of UI consistency!

As much as I dislike nVidia-based cards, you're most assuredly better off with that Geforce 2. You can find legacy drivers to work with it at Omega Drivers.

In order to get Intel's motherboard drivers installed properly, you need one or two things: The Chipset driver and/or the Intel Management Engine driver (though I don't think that applies on the i865 as it's too old). If your video driver isn't installing properly, it's because one of those...

Lunar wouldn't be the first person to use that line!

OpenBSD is kind of the Cult of Theo de Raadt. I wonder how many well-meaning supporters he has chased away over the years?

The i865 is compatible with Windows 7 and you should really go and get proper drivers for the graphics and system chipset (you may also want/need the Intel Management Engine component to make everything work properly if Windows didn't pick it up and is being weird about detecting hardware). I...

Lenovo sent someone to pick up my T420 (with the cracked palmrest) at quarter to 7 Tuesday night, at the place I specified. It was overnighted to a repair depot 500 miles away and returned to me 8:30 Thursday morning. I spoke to a single Lenovo support rep after a hold time of less than 10...

I've spent a couple days now using the RT-version of the Surface and I have a few thoughts. Most of them are complaints borne out of past experiences, but overall I'd call it pretty positive. 0. Surface needs a swipe-to-type keyboard. 1. There are no decent web browsers. There's IE. But TPLs...

As a general rule, major-revision software upgrades on older devices are usually going to result in some sluggishness. The new software is almost always going to be built on a set of performance assumptions that aren't going to hold for older hardware, such as more CPU cores or available RAM. In...

Right now my main file server is a Server 2012 machine that uses a combination of SoftRAID1 or RAID5 arrays plus SnapRAID to maintain redundancy. FreeNAS/ZFS works, but it's much better with NFS than SMB, and NFS on Windows is somewhat lacking. I don't like how complex my file system structures...

Hint: Stick a copy of your preferred ninite executable on your Skydrive so you don't have to sully yourself with IE. That's also a good place to add whatever other freeware downloads and web shortcuts to get your clients set. I actually have a whole Windows 7 and Windows 8 default user account...

It was a good movie, especially for a "Holiday" release. I was a bit worried that it would be a bit of a diabetes-inducing glurge-fest, but it didn't quite tip over that line. It was a sweet story that deserved to be told. American Hustle, though, deserves to be seen if only for the moments...

The magic glue of all things ebook is Calibre, which runs on everything and deals with every format. If you buy the book from Amazon, you can use Amazon Kindle for Windows (NOT Cloud Reader, which is a different product) to get a copy protected .mobi on to your PC. Once it's there, you can use...

Hard as it is to believe, I have to teach a dozen people to use non-Pro Surfaces in two weeks. Anyone have any favorite Metro apps they wanna mention?

Squee! Demonoid's web site isn't back up, but there is activity on its tracker again. Yes I still have five year old torrents open and there now there is activity on them. So for that guy who has been trying to download my copy of the Complete Works of J.S. Bach since 2011, mazel tov. Also, I...

A cat simulator game.

What did your daughter do to have itunes inflicted on her? Was she torturing kittens? Getting bad grades? Was it arson? It was arson, wasn't it?

My biggest annoyance with Microsoft Mice is that Windows downloads and installs Microsoft's extra configuration software if it detects one. My second biggest annoyance with Microsoft's pointing devices is that they don't make a proper thumb-control trackball. Logitech is the only company that...

There's a dude in Montana or North Dakota who keeps trying to sign up for Facebook and some other services (Christian Mingle and Plenty Of Fish) using an email address that's registered to me. We have the same surname but we aren't related. If I had any idea how to actually contact him I would...

You may very well be in the odd state of actually needing a monitor definition file and/or discover that some other video modes become available with a graphics driver update.

The skills you'll want and need will be vastly different, as will the interests and demands of employers. To put that in to perspective: 18 years ago, something like a quarter of my CS classmates were actively headhunted to go work for booming .com startups because they could write HTML...

"OMG it's ugly" seems to be a perfectly valid reason to reject something for people who use Macs. Historically, OSX had handled device independent scaling (and WYSIWYG color calibration, which I understand is the big reason people stick with OSX for content creation) a lot better than Windows...

Apparently, OSX has pretty serious problems with 4k Display support. Given that a sizable chunk of professional-grade content creation is being done on OS X, that suggests a real disincentive to bother with getting decent desktop-size 4k displays for the rest of us. Goddammitsomuch.

They're Gaming/Hobbyist machines, similar to Dell's XPS line. I read that as "Has a discrete GPU with a cooling system that will fail and kill the system well before the end of the laptop's useful life", but that's more of a general sentiment regarding gaming laptops than any specific...

Completely fine. There's just a hairline fracture running along the palmrest where I normally set my left wrist. I'd take a picture but there's nothing to see. I can definitely feel it as I use the machine though.

Another how cold is it: It's so cold that the palmrest on my T420 cracked from being left out in the car for a few days.

Newegg offers free ground shipping on most non-bulky items these days. Not as handy as Amazon Prime but definitely better than per-item charges.

That looks like a perfect secondary monitor to me.

Not really. They both booted on as little as 40MB RAM, it's just that a server with AD installed took longer to boot. Pretty much the same as current Desktop Windows and current Server Windows now. I can rattle off the other difference but honestly it's all ancient history. To provide a touch...

Newegg has a 120GB Kingston V300 for $70 today, if you're a person who gets their email specials. I suspect there will be a LOT of heavily discounted OCZ drives in the very near future.

If it makes you feel any better, the first time I installed Linux, I did it over a 9600bps serial link and the first time I recompiled my own kernel I had to involve an ftape device because I didn't have enough local storage for all the dev tools AND code. How fast is 9600bps for you young'uns...

... Or they could be like my company, where updating the web site is about as high a priority as ensuring the office supplies are alphabetized and color coordinated.

A bit of ancient (REALLY ancient) history.

I strongly suspect that Windows 7 will be supported for rather longer than 8.x, in much the same way and for much the same reason as Windows XP was. Beyond that, Lenovo and Apple are the only two companies that offer internationally valid warranties on notebooks; most notebook warranties are for...