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I suspect that many people do not know the power of Mellanox ConnectX adapters. Here's the deal: Mellanox adapters are readily available on Ebay and other marketplaces. They come in lots of different models, but in most cases, 3rd generation cards can be bought in pairs for around $60. These...

Finally and at last, computers are available in a new computer, which has apparently only recently been discovered. Prior to today, Apple laptops have been available in silver, white and briefly in grey and translucent candy colors. Today, after decades of research, Apple has finally developed a...

See subject. Is it just me?

I'm vaguely aware that Youtube is really cracking down on ad blocking so I thought I'd mention some things. I've been using SmartTubeNext since forever. It's an AndroidTV client that'll run on a Shield STB with ad blocking and sponsor blocking that works so well that my partner actually ditched...

Bad guys compromised WD's cloud storage services and WD doesn't know what they took yet.

Anybody have gaming headset recommendations? Or anti-recommendations? Is 7.1 worthwhile for FPS stuff? The main thing I know is that cheap headsets don't seem to hold up very well.

Apparently Windows 11 has leaked. I haven't heard about anything but cosmetic changes yet, but we'll all be complaining about it soon enough. Might as well make a thread. The biggest change I'm aware of is a move of the Start button to the center of the dock, which, one, who cares? And two...

Here's a funny issue. Not my deal but somebody asked me and I have no goddamned idea. Android has had multi-user mode on devices since KitKat. Not every Android device vendor supports mutli-user, even on Lollipop. Somehow, it's optional and apparently less common on devices with Intel CPUs...

This is driving me mildly nuts and I've done a few rounds of testing without making any headway, so I'm just going to ask others. My main desktop (Haswell-E, 80GB RAM, GTX970) freezes when I encounter certain web videos. The freeze lasts 1.5 seconds or so, just long enough to be annoying but not...

This is probably news. What's going on in the world of semiconductors that Intel no longer feels like it needs 10% of the people who work there?

Can anyone explain to me why the Android keyboard sometimes truncates the spacebar in favor of a key devoted to inserting graphical smiley faces? I've tried all four of the keyboards on my phone and they all do it in at least some applications, most notably Hangouts, but also Skype and other...

I have a Hyper-V host with four Samsung 850 Pro drives in it, each home to a guest OS install and nothing else. There's also a Intel SSD with the host OS install, but the host is perfectly well behaved and in fact I think it's only ever restarted for Windows Updates maybe five times, total. Two...

I like the desktop Picasa application for managing personal photos. I like that it recognizes faces. I like that it's easy to add tags and I like that it integrates with Google's online photo galleries since I was actually using Picasa even before Google bought it. But, like a lot of things...

I've found that I can't submit a form on SF using recent builds of Firefox or Palemoon for Android. I'm just checking on my phone and a couple tablets. I'm definitely logged in. It's just like the "submit reply" button doesn't do anything. Can anyone else replicate that?

I have an HP Powerbook 4550 sitting here that makes a loud, high-pitched whine when it's running off battery power. AFAIK, it's hardly ever used on battery, but I replaced the hard drive in it today and the first thing the user told me is that "it never used to do that" whereas I had assumed it...

iOS 9 will introduce the concept of lower case letters to the default on screen keyboard. Apple device owners can expect basic literacy to follow sometime thereafter. No word yet on when Apple invented the concept of letters but I'm sure we'll hear all about it soon enough.

So what do you all use for phone mounting in your cars?

I saw this on Slashdot and thought it was interesting: Phoronix Compares Socket 478 Netburst devices to modern Intel and ARM CPUs.. I've been telling people for a while that the CPU in my cell phone is probably faster than their XP-era Pentium 4 and it turns out that it's almost certainly true...

Broadwell-DT parts. Usual story: Improvements in power efficiency due to die shrink and modest per-clock performance improvement. Yawn. These guys add a potential L4 cache and apparently offer slightly-better-than-AMD integrated graphics, which I have to say is something I would not have guessed...

Ebay seems to have a lot of inexpensive Infiniband controllers. Looks like there are quite a few PCIe 10GbE adapters for under $40, but I can't tell what if any transceiver is being sold with them. We'd probably be talking about $30 per meter of cable but that's still substantially cheaper than...

When I do the math on my big file server, it should have a continuous draw of just under 600W. I've gone through three Gold-rated 850W PSUs (PCP&C, Corsair HX, Seasonic - all rated for 50C operation) in the last eight months, the latest just this morning. The PSUs all fail in the same way: some...

I have a classroom site that is presently served by the world's slowest DSL. On a very good day (as in, I saw it one time while the telco people were on premises), it speedtests as high as 384kbps but is normally in the 128 - 192kbps range. I have two other sites within three and a half miles...

I'm sitting in front of a Toshiba Satellite A5005 with a first-generation Core i3 CPU in it. It absolutely refuses to operate with GPU accelerated drivers. Standard VGA? Fine. Software rendering in X? Fine. But if I try to start a GUI that matches the purported capabilities of the panel and the...

I did an in-place upgrade from Server 2008r2 to Server 2012r2 for my main workstation a few days ago and I've been fighting with something weird ever since. My file server runs Server 2012 (not r2) and is normally connected 24x7 to an OpenVPN end-point. It's been running that way for a couple...

This can be the thread about Windows 10. I'm sure we'll need one of those. So far, what we know is that it has an unholy combination of start menu and start screen, modern style apps can be made to run in windows, virtual desktop support, apps can be docked to corners and the standard console...

I guess it might just be me, but seemingly every Asus motherboard I've picked up that was manufactured in the last three or four years will auto-select the disk controller to IDE mode after a power loss. I have this problem with workstation boards and budget desktop products. I don't have THAT...

Windows 8.1 has some really weird upgrade mechanics associated with it and it's really picky about what kind of product key it will take. If you find yourself in the position of needing to install Windows 8.1 but only have a Windows 8 product key, as might have happened for PCs sold at retail...

10TB drive announced from WD/HGST.

It's back to school time, which for me means getting to look at or hear about the malware that's been on high school and college students' computers since May, the last time they actually looked at a device other than their phone. I have a standard procedure that works pretty well (install...

A company called BuyDig.com is offering Lexar 32GB USB3 thumb drives for $12 on Ebay. I bought a couple and they came in the same obnoxious retail packaging as the ones I've seen at Microcenter.

I spent a while experimenting with a proper way to clone a drive on a few Windows 8 machines that were configured to boot off UEFI. So far, exactly none of them have worked 100% properly. The most likely error I seem to run in to is an error in the Windows startup files on the System partition...

One of my students brought me an Inspiron 1750 this morning. He had attempted to replace its keyboard and in fact had downloaded the proper documentation and followed along. Normally, a keyboard repair is dead simple but in this case the guy broke the little keyboard ribbon cable retention...

I just found out that one of the people in my office still maintains a few web sites with Frontpage. By itself, no, that's not a big deal. It makes code that works and hey, at least it's not shitting Javascript all over everything. But thinking of a straightforward replacement, the only thing...

Newegg is now offering a competitor to Amazon Prime. Here's the web page for it. It's $50 for 3-day shipping, which doesn't seem all that helpful, but free returns and supposedly better service might make it worthwhile. I'm undecided. Newegg's customer service is atrocious but I still buy from...

Has anyone run in to this before? I have a relatively new Server 2008r2 system, perhaps six weeks old (running as a virtual machine on an ESX 5.5 host, if that matters). Backups worked fine until Saturday night but since then, when I try to fire off a backup, I get this error message: "System...

My workflow for dealing with discs is to use Handbrake with AnyDVD HD. I never write back to disc and I've owned my copy of AnyDVD for something like 10 years now. That system obviously works, but I can't justify telling someone to go buy a $150 program just to copy a few discs. I know DVDFab...

I almost hate to ask this, but does anyone have any strong opinions about bluetooth headphones? I've had BT headSETS that were pretty crummy for audio quality, but I'd like to find something I can use with my phone while I'm working out that: 1. Doesn't require a cord and works with my phone or...

Here's a fun, simple question for everybody: What do you think constitutes basic computer knowledge in 2014? A few thoughts: Windows presently has at least three radically different interfaces. XP, Vista/7 and 8 all behave differently, meaning that instruction using rote memorization is...

Granted that the collective membership of SF probably sits around Dell Ultrasharps and 50" TVs for the most part, but does anybody have any strongly held preferences about all around decent monitors at this point? I need to buy about 60 of them. Amazon has been selling Asus VS247Ps for $150...

Is anyone using BTSync, perhaps as an alternative to rsync for replicating a directory structure across the Internet? I was able to copy around 45GB of .jpgs from my apartment to a file server in my office overnight, which as a proof of concept suggests that that it would work very well as an...

TABLE. Not Tablet. Though apparently it'll run for two hours on a charge. It's a novelty item for sure, but I can't recall a time that an all in one desktop system genuinely caught my interest prior to this.

Has anyone ever put together an Amazon EC2 instance? The pricing estimator is a little overwhelming.

I have a few things I'm not really using. Maybe someone will be interested, maybe not. I'll probably Craigslist this stuff next week if there aren't any takers. * SuperMicro 5 3.5" to 3 5.25" hotswap SATA 1.5Gbps bay enclosure. Beige. Loud as hell with stock fan. * Off-brand (Vantec or Norco...

Seagate announced the other day that they're discontinuing 2.5" 7200rpm drives in favor of high capacity 5400rpm models and hybrid drives for performance. Seagate also announced some 3.5" hybrid drives. I've had a few hybrid drives and, other than a modest subjective improvement in boot/resume...

I have a new in box Xeon 5570 here. 2.93GHz Quad Core, Hyperthreaded. This is an SMP-able i7 CPU. I'm probably going to try to move it on Ebay but if anyone from SF wants it, I'll sell it for $100. Yes, you need a workstation class board for it. They sell on Ebay for ~$100 - $200. I thought I...

Do you have a Windows Server with WSUS 3.0 installed? You can make it a crapload more useful with Local Update Publisher.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2025926/intel-exits-the-desktop-motherboard-business-to-focus-on-new-form-factors.html Not any time soon, but that's still a pretty huge issue for those of who build and maintain systems.

First of all, I do have a preference for personal music players, the Sandisk Clip+, which supports .flac, has a simple UI, long battery life and a microSD slot. BUT: I want to manage music players for other people. Remotely. Over the weekend one of my customers paid me in part to put a bunch...

This was absolutely fascinating to me.

I don't know how many people this applies to, but I am actually so blessed as to have multiple computer systems that I can (if I so choose) use every day. What I'm thinking about right now is the ways that all this stuff has changed how and what I do. I still prefer to use a desktop when I have...