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This was absolutely fascinating to me.

Classic Shell for Windows: A skin-able app that allows users of newer versions of Windows to revert to the appearance and UI widgets of previous Windows versions. Want Luna or Aero on Windows 8? Missing the Up button on the Explorer toolbar? Here's the fix.

The experience of doing that is a little too limiting for my taste, but when I've shown something similar off using my Xoom tablet, it gets a lot of ooohs and ahhhs. From people who then don't want to take a class to learn more about it. Jerks.

I'll update with more thoughts once I get them in my hands. They're Sandy Bridge CPUs though, so these machines were probably made sometime in 2011. Don't care. The price and features were right.

Basically, yeah. But when you're talking about investing in 32 CPU NUMA setups and all the tech necessary to feed one, you probably also have a dedicated Cisco guy and a dedicated Oracle guy on hand as well. When I worked in process control it was pretty typical for Honeywell to have an...

I think our national ego is too wrapped up in the metaphorical size of our military wang. There's no such thing as perfect security and the sooner we accept the fact that an Oklahoma City or 9-11 is going to happen every so often no matter how many brown people we kill or middle aged women we...

Aircraft Carriers and Nuclear Subs aren't exclusively military technology. They're a statement of the regime's foreign policy priorities. We keep a carrier group in the Mediterranean Sea, a crapload of them in the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf etc. It's not quite the same thing as gunboat...

There's no practical difference between Windows Server editions except the big-boy one is licensed to handle extra CPU sockets and more RAM. Which means there's no difference. As I understand it, real-world, working Datacenter-edition copies of Windows Server weren't let out in the field unless...

I am hoping that it will eventually.

We had to get done with WWI to understand that chemical weapons aren't really the brightest idea either. Maybe the fact that the current crop of military leadership worldwide doesn't remember things like nukes and mustard gas is the reason we're not giving more thought as to how we should proceed.

Actually I suspect that the military is painfully aware of those costs, but at the same time moving to special forces and drones leads us down a path where our military foreign policy amounts to assassination, and there will be repercussions for that come the day when that technology is cheap...

This is why we can get away with 100 fewer ships in our modern US Navy. I like the bits about operating in 30 feet of water and being able to deliver fire at targets up to 72 miles away. That's insane.

I'd just like to say that I've never, ever dropped, cracked or dinged my two year old Evo. It still looks pretty much new.

I just bought a pair of Elitebook 8560w machines. 1920x1080 display, i5 CPUs, three year parts warranty, for $830 each. I can upgrade them to 16GB RAM for $75 or so and those will be pretty sweet machines for the money.

Oh hai Iron Man 3! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EjG-1U3wqA&feature=player_embedded The villain in this one is most often called The Mandarin, foreshadowed in the first movie. I don't expect they'll call him that in the movie, but in terms of Iron Man villains it's like the Joker showing up...

The Roller Derby League that comes to Chicago-area comic conventions is women-only.

The whole world is on a strong rightward trend in its politics. The current US president is a center-right politician and to hear our current (very) right-wing, he's the biggest socialist threat since the Sermon on the Mount. I've heard enough Canadian political discourse to know that it's much...

Not quite, but it's the closest on-topic thread that already existed. What I was really trying to do was demonstrate some of the differences and limitations of mobile OSes compared to full-featured desktop ones. Performance in that VM was drastically, visibly better in VMware than in...

O Canada! Our home and native land! True patriot love in all thy sons command. With glowing hearts we see thee rise, The True North strong and free! From far and wide, O Canada, we stand on guard for thee. God keep our land glorious and free! O Canada, we stand on guard for thee. O Canada, we...

OK, false alarm, kinda. These guys have a working VM for Jelly Bean. Seems to be OK in VMware Player 5 and VirtualBox 4.2, anyway. Evidently my mistake was looking for something for ICS.

Android x86 is monumentally painful to work with. I've tried running it in a VM, but it doesn't like any of the virtualized NICs available to VMware or VirtualBox. I tried the LiveCD on an older Thinkpad with a Pro/1000 NIC and 802.11. Nope. Crappy HP Pavilion with Realtek NICs? Not happening. I...

Motorola generally makes crappy stuff and yes Touchwiz sucks. Early Samsung Android devices were cheap and kind of awful, but it has improved its fit and finish over time to the point where it truly is a best of breed option that competes with or exceeds HTC's options.

That Cooler Master 212 is a noisy POS and the fan they use on it is a sealed design that can't even be oiled. >:|

HTC has been major player in ARM-based handheld devices going back a good long time. They made of lot of Windows Mobile devices and they have been a top-tier Android vendor as well. They're presently having their lunch eaten by Samsung. They have a good product (the HTC X One) but they're...

It's probably a crappy BIOS. The Thinkpads and Pro/Elitebooks I'm familar with allow BIOS access while connected to an external display.

The latest trend in technology news: Speculation that Apple will buy something. Because $10 billion is pocket change to Apple right now. Never mind if the purchase doesn't make any sense, or that 10% of a company's cash on hand isn't really pocket change. I've probably seen a dozen tech news...

There is nothing cooler than roller derby.

If you were truly dedicated to your clutter, you'd use a trackball or a touchpad. ;)

Pikov is his Chauffeur.

They don't update the .isos. For major releases, they'll occasionally make new ones available. For example, Windows XP is available in vanilla and with SP2 applied.

I can only hope all his neighbors appreciate the new free internet connection I gave them.

I've never encountered 802.11 equipment with WPA turned on by default.

GoG.com now supports OSX. Continuing the trend of supreme reasonableness, it is not necessary to re-purchase titles for which one already has a Windows license, everything is less than $10 and there are a lot of free and $3 titles as well.

I just had a help call from someone I've never even met, asking what his wireless passphrase is. He was indignant that I didn't know so I walked him through resetting his wireless router instead. I'm helping!

In high school or college? Know someone who is? Abusive their youth and inexperience by signing up for Dreamspark, which offers free copies of Windows (desktop and server versions), Office, and Visual Studio. Free.

S3 owners: Are you guys noticing any particular sluggishness with the Google Calendar app?

The Stinson Scale is applicable in a vast array of situations. I've found myself using it in my classes a few times as well.

I still buy the occasional Asus motherboard. I just don't expect to be able to RMA one. I can only imagine what twisted world would lead to someone wanting a Xeon CPU with three or more SLI-compatible PCIe slots. I'm going to pretend it involves something with CUDA and Photoshop.

That's weird. It comes right up for me.

Some motherboards have to have PCI graphics manually selected in the BIOS; they don't auto-detect like you might expect.

Trading on Google halted over early release of earnings report after shares fell 10% in minutes. I think it's fair to say that the doofus who is responsible for making billions of dollars evaporate can safely be called a doofus for the rest of his natural life.

The advice that I've consistently given is that the benefits outweigh the risks. Add an SSD, but keep your important data backed up.

Slashdot had an interesting discussion earlier in the week regarding SSD reliability and associated behaviors. I only just got around to look at it and of course it's largely anecdotal, but Slashdot's comments are usually a lot higher quality than, say, Youtube's.

IPMI support would probably limit you to Intel, Supermicro or Tyan. You're probably talking about ECC RAM at that point. For extra throwback points, the cheap integrated video on this guy is a Matrox G200. Remember those? Ditch the IPMI and you can talk about something like this instead.

Those do look completely sweet, but they're about $20 apiece too dear for me.

I have a couple 500GB ones. Subjectively, they're not game-changers compared to other 7200rpm drives, but they do help when powering on or resuming the machine from hibernate.

1. I already had to have the "No, the $500 thingie looks like it could run your line of business app but it's not really Windows"-conversation with one of my customers. Just today. 2. Understanding that I work for a company with just four employees and in the context of Surface Tablets since we...

While I'm here and thinking about it, Android games I've enjoyed: Bubble Shooter - Basically Frozen Bubble, but a good implementation with lots of puzzle levels and good replayability. Rebuild - Zombie Apocalypse turn based game. Needs more randomness, but it has a very tense, atmospheric...

I've tried a couple from Belkin that have been less than impressive, but this one from Targus seems interesting, particularly since it has USB3 and HDMI support.