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You might try putting a sheet of inkjet paper behind the item being scanned if that's at all possible with your scanner(might not work on a sheet-fed scanner). It usually works for me. You might still have problems with the mylar though because of the shiny surface. The problem here is that...

I hate that SOB. The expressways he built cut a lot of neighbourhoods in two. Thankfully he was stopped before he built one right through Manhattan. He had planned to raze Chinatown and other parts of lower Manhattan for it. He is evil in a way Bill Gates couldn't evil imagine. :evil: Evil...

We didn't get color until I think 1967 or thereabouts. I think it was the second season of Star Trek because it really was a big deal at the time for me to watch that show in color. Before that we had a huge B&W console with a 21" screen, I think. The thing broke quite a bit, too, and the...

I guess it is just me, then. Probably since I don't have any machines that use DDR I just look at the price of PC133, and that seems to have fewer fluctuations than the other types.

I just want to thank everyone for their help so far. It's greatly appreciated. I passed what might be some sort of right of passage in Linux yesterday-I compiled my own kernel. As I mentioned above, I needed to load the vfat module on startup, so I figured why not just make a new kernel while...

I figured this one out. They're both FAT16 partitions, but the solution should work with FAT32 as well. What I had to do was edit the /etc/fstab file(which I had already changed to get the drives to mount on startup) and change the file system type from msdos to vfat. I also had to make sure...

Is it just me, or does it seem like RAM prices have been at their least volatile(at least by my memory-no pun intended) during the last few months? I've been checking RAM prices on Pricewatch on a fairly regular basis. After the price dipped to very low levels(a stick of PC133 256 MB for $10)...

Those stories just bought to mind one of my favorite pet peeves-namely people who don't know how to properly handle electronics. Not just customer returns, but I've seen auctions on eBay where they take a picture of a M/B, processor, RAM, or card on a carpet. Once I see that, I completely lose...

I can definitely relate to some of those stories having repaired electronics for the last 15 years, and having sometimes dealt with customers whose shoe size is larger than their IQ. Maybe one of these days I'll start my own website with some of my tales, including some really stupid things...

Here's couple more for all the Linux gurus around here: The disk I have Linux on has the small DOS partition I mentioned, and the rest is Linux. I configured LILO to give me a choice of booting into DOS or Linux just to see how to do it. I have absolutely nothing in the DOS partition. I just...

Newer doesn't always mean more fuel efficient. Just look at SUVs. Some of the larger cities like Tokyo also require you to have an off-street place to park before you can get a car. This is something the US would do well to emulate. All those rows of parked cars are an eyesore.

Well, I agree some of the laws in Singapore are ridiculous, like the ban on chewing gum but I don't see anything wrong with the permit idea. Cars can easily overrun a city and make it unliveable if you let them. In fact, every large city and many smaller ones have chronic traffic and pollution...

I finally got around to installing Linux on one of my machines after talking about doing it for a long time. Appropriately enough, given the Linux mascot, I did this last night after the blizzard. The machine is the one that I found, which I talked about here. I put in a 200 MHz MMX processor...

Tannin and I have both suggested a gas tax as the best way to get people to buy more responsible vehicles. I'm still surprised that more thought isn't given to gas mileage when people buy vehicles just from an economic perspective. A 12 mpg SUV will burn about 22 more gallons of gas than a 100...

Bush's environmental record is awful, although Clinton's wasn't any better. In fact, it was under Clinton that SUVs were allowed to proliferate. SUVs were/are not required to abide by the same mileage requirements as cars, and Bush's proposal that their mileage be increased by 1.5 mpg in the...

I have to agree with that. Not just with global warming, but it seems that politicians and world leaders won't do anything about a problem until it comes and bites them in the behind. Maybe when the sea levels start to rise enough that water is at the steps of the Capitol Building or White...

I'm personally glad when we get hit with snow like this. I went for a nice long walk last night when it started coming down, and another one tonight about two hours ago. With the airports closed and nobody driving everything is so much more peaceful. The air is so much cleaner as well. If...

40 is still very young as far as I'm concerned. I turned 40 this past November 30 and frankly, I still feel the same as I did in high school. I don't look much different either other than that my hair is slightly different now(a bit longer than it used to be and combed differently). My mom's...

BTW, I like your new avatar, Tea. You didn't accidentally stick your finger in an outlet, did you?

I'm not sure if it would have anything to do with this particular problem, but did you remove FindFast and a couple of other TSRs that install along with M$Office? The first time I installed M$Office on a machine I noticed that there would inexplicably be drive activity every few minutes, even...

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Unfortunately, I looked at that right before dinner. If those images are for real, then they're appalling, although I suspect some of them may have been fakes sent in by someone with an axe to grind. And if they are real, I certainly hope those infants were humanely euthanized. I couldn't...

:o I guess I won't be getting that on 56K! This is a perfect illustration of how bad software bloat has gotten. Why on earth should a benchmark program require as much space as an OS like Win98? It seems every new generation of faster CPUs is eventually slowed down to the level of their...

It's called the law of conservation of energy. It takes a certain amount of power to spin a disk, which has air resistance, at a certain speed. Since the disks are already microscopically smooth, nothing more can really be done to reduce the aerodynamic drag. Bearing resistance is a much...

I had no idea they had gotten that fast. Still, if there's a situation with many random seeks, the drive solution might be better. 30 ms is still 3 orders of magnitude faster than a state-of-the-art tape, although a HDD is obviously not as portable or duarable. I suppose there's enough...

The main advantage of this whole idea over tape is the huge decrease in access times. Even if the 1 TB+ drive is a real slug with access times over 30 ms, it will still be orders of magnitude faster than a tape library. Heck, I could probably look in a card catalog, take a book off a shelf...

Looks like they had the good sense to not put a slow actuator on it. 5.2 ms seek + 10K RPM should bring access times down to around 8.2 ms compared to ~13 ms for most 7200 RPM IDE drives. Not too shabby. The only drawbacks I see are price and the need for either a S-ATA card or a P-ATA to...

Honestly, I'm amazed that anyone would even try to run XP on such a machine. That must be painful. On the other hand, Win98 or 95 will run quite snappily on such a machine if you don't have anything running in the background. However, 32 MB pretty much limits your choice of software...

I haven't looked at a tax table in quite some time but I remember when I did my taxes last time I worked for someone else around 1990 that there were huge jumps when your changed tax brackets. For example, there may have been a line that said taxable income $21901 to $22000(tax $3293) followed...

On site I definitely wouldn't hesitate to charge full rate. At home I would allow some leeway, depending upon several factors-possibility of repeat business, ability to pay, possible referrals, whether or not they were a PITA, how much of a rush the job was, whether or not I'm being paid cash...

Intriguing idea, although I'm not sure offhand if there would be enough of a market to justify the hard drive makers doing the R&D work. Once enough home users are into video something like this will definitely make sense. Right now we can get 320 GB in a 3.5" standard form factor IDE drive...

Mercutio, in a case like this I would have absolutely no problem charging $100 per hour for the four hours you were watching ERP do it's thing. This is a case of customer responsibility if I ever saw one, and the fact the you probably won't get much meaningful repeat business from this client...

The low-medium-high is just the blower speed. The compressor is still either on or off. I have yet to see one that does what I would want(continuously variable compressor speed). There are some commercial units that do this, but I don't need 100,000 BTU. ;) On second thought, a room at 0°...

I've had some devices look worse than that after 10 minutes at 212°F. The plastic would be melted a lot more badly than that if it were really 20 minutes at 400°, and there is no way it would work. That would be plenty of time for the heat to work it's way into the internal parts. Heat would...

95°F, 100% humidity, all sorts of flying insects, and the smell of air pollution(which always smells worse in summer) are a couple of good reasons. As of late I've grown to hate summer with a passion. There just aren't any redeeming features in my book. The types of females I prefer don't...

You would be surprised how quickly the body acclimates itself. When fall starts, even 50°F feels chilly. By the time winter's over, 35°F actually feels warm. Winter is good in that you can always put more clothes on if it gets colder. Summer sucks. Once you're down to shorts and a T-short...

No mention of the oven temperature. Somehow I doubt it was on anything much higher than about 250°F by the looks of it. I thought this thread was about NYC last summer until I looked at it. We had what seemed like an endless string of days in the 90s and 100s. :( We're finally having a real...

In part it is definitely due to the density. I've noticed it's usually at least a year before you'll see SCSI drives with similar platter densities but much lower seek times. For example, right now SCSI drives with 36 GB/platter are common. IDE was using 40 GB platters over a year ago. Yes...

You make an excellent point here. I've often wondered what's the point in going from 5400 RPM to 7200 RPM and continuing to use the same activator when you can accomplish the same reduction in access time by using an activator that's 1.4 ms faster and keeping at 5400 RPM(which will save you...

:lol: :mrgrn: :lol:

Honestly, it's a tough call to make. On the one hand, a reusable vehicle is subject to repeated stresses that a one-use vehicle isn't. On the other, a reusable vehicle must be built more robustly to repeatedly survive the stresses of launch and reentry. I wouldn't base my decision on the...

It becomes second nature after a while. I've long drilled into my head the idea of going limp whenever I fall off my bicycle. Although I haven't had a crash in something like seven years, the idea has served me well in the past. One time I hit a pothole doing 37 MPH. The front wheel bent and...

Here's a link to deadly space accidents: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/science/20030201-0930-space-accidents-chronology.html Combined you have at least 145 deaths(that they'll admit to) versus 17 for the US(3 in the Apollo fire, 7 on Challenger, 7 on Columbia). Yes, almost an order of...

A thermistor is just a resistor whose resistance varies with temperature. There is no polarity. If the fan is using a transistor junction or other electronic temperature sensor then the wrong polarity will definitely cause a problem. As for the components that do have polarity, we have...

Due to the nature of the defunct Soviet Union's government, it is difficult getting an exact accounting of deaths connected with their space program, but suffice it to say the number is an order of magnitude above America's losses(17 in all). I think something like 4 cosmonauts were lost on...

It can be argued that the overuse of antibiotics is helping to create more resistant strains of bacteria and virii. And guess who produces antibiotics? No doubt in my mind the drug companies, aided by doctors, are helping to create these resistant bugs on purpose. They get more money now for...

Just to clarify, what I mean is a jumper on the M/B that remaps at least the first 1M to the video card RAM. Or perhaps you can use all of the video card RAM except 1 or 2 MB so you have graphics capability and the use of almost all of the 32 or 64 or 128 MB on the video card. In the...

It's MS by a close margin for me. Although as of late their operating systems has become reasonably stable, I am thoroughly annoyed with their stupid PA. one license per machine, and pending adoption of DRM. PA and DRM are highly intrusive schemes that I personally wouldn't tolerate on any...

About all the mission control data tells us so far is that it was a sudden, catastrophic failure of some kind. An educated guess would be that some tiles came slightly unbonded during launch, and the stresses encountered during reentry caused them to fall off. It only takes a few tiles in a...

Looks like me and SteveC started a thread on this at the same time.