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Agreed on all counts. I did vote in the last two presidential elections but not in the last two years. In fact, I'm probably not bothering to vote any more unless I'm particularly excited by one of the choices. IMHO we would probably do just as well selecting someone at random from the general...

200 GB in my main machine, 180 GB in second machine, but I'm probably going to move the 100 GB to the main machine. Other than that, an assortment of mostly small (20 GB or less, mostly way less) drives in several spare machines I found by the curb and refurbished. Total is definitely under...

McCain would be good provided he adopts Huckabee's tax plan (sales tax in lieu of the income tax). As for a wave of misery hitting the US soon, it's probably a given. You and Tannin may call it a readjustment of living standards. I call it a recession. I personally welcome it regardless of what...

Being that 2-platter drives have always represented the sweet spot in $ per GB, this would mean 800GB to 1 TB drives for about $79 to $99. Now that I've started putting some movies on my computer, I can see how fast hundreds of GB of storage can go. My 200GB drive is roughly half full. At best...

I share those sentiments. We're definitely headed for a major recession. It might turn into a full-blown depression if the Hildabeast gets into the White House.

Probably sometime this year according to this. A lot depends upon how many people actually have a need for something that huge. My guess is not many. Actually, 640GB should be enough for anybody. ;-) Personally, I'd rather see research focusing on making 500GB $100 solid-state drives than...

I didn't realize it's been that long but it has. It's also probably been at least 2 years since I posted at SR. I was there recently just to check if I had any PMs. The place is practically unrecognizable. The fact that StorageForum is still a viable community after 6 years, despite its small...

Not a chance-the integrated graphics on his old machine wouldn't have been up to it. Also, take those minimum system requirements with a grain of salt. MSTS will run, but barely, and with detail levels turned way down. The program has evolved greatly since it's inception. Add-on routes and...

Assuming this is true, then SSDs have already surpassed capacity of magnetic disks. Of course, there's still that pesky little cost per GB factor, but that will fall soon enough. I think $2 per GB is probably realistic sometime this year as we move to smaller process sizes. That's also the...

Any difference between any of the HD formats versus standard DVD playing in a player with a 1080 line upconverter? My brother borrowed The Day After Tomorrow. In all honestly on my mom's 1080p 42" TV it looked pretty close to HD, and that's on a player without upconversion. It is on a dual-layer...

While we're on the subject is there any speed difference in ordinary use between this processor and a similar dual-core? Or for that matter a single core? How many applications are actually multi-processor aware? I'm curious because for a lot of tasks my brother's new Athlon 64 x2 4000+ didn't...

Go ahead and buy it. I don't see anything much better than either the MH-C9000 or the Eneloops on the horizon. The MH-C9000 is a great charger. There may or may not be a bump in Eneloop capacity this year. Even if there were, it would probably only be to 2100 mAh, a mere 5%. I think NiMH...

Well, 2007 was marginally better for me than 2006. And up until 2007 all my years were getting progressively worse since at least about 1982. I'll take marginally better over worse any day. Now let's hope the trend continues in 2008. Don't get me wrong. Just so you don't get the wrong...

Here's what our house looked like this year: Sorry about the blurriness-this camera doesn't handle low light conditions well. Also, the sodium vapor streetlight right in front of our house tends to overwhelm the display. I've had larger displays, but this is the first all-LED one, and...

UPDATE: All the parts came this week and I put them together. Unfortunately, the power supply was DOA so I had to use the one from my mom's system to set up the machine. XP installed fine, everything works. The only issue is that XP only sees anywhere from 2.75 to 2.93 of the 4GB of RAM. I...

Somehow I knew this would be devastating to you when I first read about it a couple of days ago. ;) Now she's going to end up with a post-pregnancy fat body just like Britney. :( Oh, the horror....

I'll do that after I build a better mousetrap. ;) Hopefully now that the work stuff is winding down for a few weeks I can do a few fun things like the bike light. I need a brighter light more than ever for those rides on cold, dark winter nights.

Been busy with work-related stuff the last two weeks. I'm amazed I had time to post what I did. I'm really tired. Assembling 500 LED regulator boards with 16 parts each will do that to you. Ugh, that's 8000 little parts I had to put into place. :mad: Well, after the next batch of 500 I'm doing a...

If I built that many systems in a month I think my hands would be practically immobile for about the next year. I guess you don't have CTS, at least not yet, anyway. If you're really lucky you're not prone to it, either. Interesting numbers. I guess it just proves the anecdotal evidence that...

Oh, I forgot to mention, as far as the poor "owning" their own homes, I have two words-subprime loan. Between these shady loans, and borrowing what little equity there was in their homes, many "poor" managed to live above their means, at least up until now. Look for lots of foreclosures soon as...

Most of those trinkets aren't terribly expensive, and quite of bit of them are probably bought used, especially the car, or even taken from dumpsters in richer neighborhoods. And I'm sure a fair amount is stolen. Also, maybe you and I have a different definition of "poor". To me poor is someone...

The graph shows the upper 25% with much of the tax burden. That's upper middle class, a group I'm not concerned with here as they usually get there through hard work. The upper 1% has a relatively small share of the tax burden compared to their ability to pay. Under Hong Kong's system I think...

BTW, if anything I just wrote above sounds incoherent, it's because I spent 18 hours today assembling regulator boards full of components the size of fleas. In other words, I can't even see straight right now.

OK, let's do it a little different. We agree that the poor shouldn't be taxed at all, and those who make well above average should be taxed more than those who are middle class. How about a sales tax with the following characteristics: 1) Basic necessities like food and items of clothing...

Brain fart-the results should be closer to 1000 amps at 480VAC, not 100. And that would be one heck of a huge cable. Of course, no reason charger can't step up the voltage so you can use a smaller cable.

BTW, the multiple ~400kW charging stations needed in a service station don't represent a huge engineering challenge. Networks for electric trains regularly supply spikes of a few megawatts every time a train passes by.

By 2022 we'll probably all be using made in China ultra inexpensive EVs so the new standards will be irrelevant. I agree by then there won't be any American automakers to apply them to. First, 5-minute charging can only be done at a service station equipped for it. For home charging, figure...

Even if in the end it's no more "fair" than the income tax (which isn't really very fair) it'll be a heck of a lot simpler to implement. And finally April 15 will be just another day on the calender for most people. Sure, accountants and lawyers will fight this tooth and nail for obvious...

Going by their figures of 5 cents per kilowatt-hour over the reactor's 40-year lifetime the cost would be about $3.5 million (200kW x 8766 hours per year x 40 years x $0.05 per kilowatt-hour). Something like this might be interesting for a group of maybe 100 homeowners to share also...

Funny but something just occurred to me. All that managerial dead weight you mentioned can no longer be written off as a business expense. I tend to think the FairTax will make companies streamline their operations as much as possible. That includes getting rid of all those do-nothing top...

You could get around the smaller percentage tax burden on higher income people by taxing luxury items at a higher rate. Sure, it adds complexity, and it's probably not in keeping with the FairTax philosophy of simplicity, but if milking the rich is your goal, then an income tax is not the only...

And what do you do for businesses? There's just no simple way to have an income tax on businesses. If you tax solely by gross income (revenue) then a business with huge income and huge expenses, but little profit, would pay an enormous amount in taxes. Another business with less income, but far...

And food would be exempt under the FairTax as well, as would anything else currently exempt under most state tax laws. This myth of the poor being taxed more comes up every time the idea of a national sales tax is floated. Fact is a single person making $10 an hour in a place like NYC currently...

That may well be a possibility down the road should he ever need to install software which requires Vista. I may have to take the plunge myself in a year since it's rumored the new MS Train Simulator coming out then will require Vista.

You've actually had times where you were using >4GB of RAM? Honestly, given how cheap RAM is these days, if I started regularly using a page file I'd probably just buy more. Just for kicks I tried enabling the page file. Windows wouldn't let me set it larger than 3GB (the amount of physical...

As a cyclist I love it! No more getting doored by idiots exiting their cars without looking. Well, I could still hit the idiot themself, but they're a lot softer than a car door. Given the size of a lot of auto drivers these days, if I hit them they would probably just :bounce: off anyway. As...

I think it's going to be a case of if you can't beat them/join them. Mechanical disks will never be able to compete with SSDs in terms of latency. There's just no way something which rotates can have a sub-0.1 ms access time. For now they can compete in transfer speeds, but even that advantage...

Yeah, but my point is that if the OS is incapable of addressing more than 4GB (physical and disk combined), and you already have 4GB physical memory, then there's nothing to be gained with a page file. Let me just state for the record that I've always hated the idea of page files. They were...

Yes, 4 GB is overkill here, but I can foresee a time that 2GB might not be enough. My brother may decide to do a lot more with this machine than his present machine just by virtue of its capabilities. I can easily see him getting into video editing perhaps. Let's not forget that since we have...

Looking at the latest offerings while researching the PC for my brother has led me to one conclusion-that the idea of virtual memory, paging to disk, or whatever other names may have been used, seems to be obsolete. I disabled the page file on my machine when I installed XP. I only had 1GB at...

I think you meant 1-2TB. :tounge: A lot of whether or not SSDs take over in the next few years, besides cost per GB, is indeed capacity. I really don't see magnetic drives increasing capacity by leads and bounds. It seemed like we were stuck at 500GB for ages before the bumps to 750GB and...

Thinking of these: Case (Lian-Li PC-60-I've already bought two of them and I just love them) Power Supply (seems as good as Seasonic for half the price, doesn't have a PCI-E connector. Would that ever be important?) HDD (500 GB Samsung. Newegg's shipping methods on HDDs concern me however...

The AMD690 has a parallel port and SATA Raid (neither of which my brother is likely to use or need). The 7025 has IEEE1394 (probably won't be needed either) but it does have a DVI output (definitely useful once my brother gets an LCD monitor). For those reasons and others you mentioned then I'm...

I didn't buy anything yet (busy these past few days assembling regulator boards) but here's what I was thinking about: RAM (I've had good luck with this brand in two other machines, and it's on sale) Processor (actually the same one you linked to) Motherboard (one of these three)...

The kind of idiot likely to buy one is the same idiot who never bothers to read the fine print or do research before buying. I can picture it now: The idiot gets home, and proudly shows off his new drive to a friend: "Hey look! It's got a gazillion billion bytes! Cool man!" The friend says...

I plan to put up lights this year because it cheers things up, and there's really not much else cheery in my life these days. That being said, Tannin has some good points. Putting up enough lights to dress up a house is quite a bit different than getting into a oneupsmanship with the guy next...

Those prices bring back memories (no pun intended). I remember when I first started getting into computers in late 1998. Next year a friend gave me his old 386-40. I was happy to spend a whopping $99 to fill all the slots with 32 MB of RAM. That seemed like a ridiculous amount compared to the...

Agreed. Since this is a new build, and we won't be reusing anything from his old machine, we'll stick with SATA. That's a very remote possibility. Seeing that '98 is only at this point finally becoming pretty much obsolete even for casual users, by the time XP or XP64 is a burden we may well be...

Anybody try either of these? GIGABYTE GA-MA69VM-S2 GIGABYTE GA-M68SM-S2 Both are a little more pricey than the AMD board Merc linked to but they're more or less what I'm looking for (i.e. four RAM slots).

He'll be using XP instead of '98. XP can handle up to 4 GB natively as far as I know. There is a registry tweak or something similar to allow it to handle even more, IIRC.