Slashdot Mirror

It looks to me like you'd need more gas-manipulation punch to pull off the Scorcher; at minimum (3rd) caster level, it's a roughly 5 foot wide by 30 foot long damage zone but producing only a brief flash of singeing flame.. As it is, it looks more to me like a first-level Zann Esu style Inferno, with maybe 10 foot range but higher and more sustained damage delivery.

Try iotop.

http://guichaz.free.fr/iotop/

"The business doesn't want to support a Linux client so they open the code they have and abandon it"

How do you deduce this from a single blog post ..

"the Linux Skype version will become open source in the nearest future"

I too have old hardware:
486sx16 with 12MB and 275MB drive, 2 ISA 10baseT - use for testing of IPCop.org linux firewall. Works great.

K6-3D 400 with 256mb and 10G drive - Had to get Ubuntu 7.04 because new versions would not find IDE drvies correctly and had problems with ACPI (or lack of). Then upgrade upgrade upgrade not to 9.04. Took awhile. It is what I am writing on now.

My next projects are Dual PPro 200 with 256MB and 2 2G drives. It was running Linux before with NT3.51 in a VMWare session, but that been a few years. 2 SMALL form P6-500 with 256MB and 10GB.

I also run Core 2 QUAD with 8GB and 256G and 1TB with VMWare 5 sessions. So I do not just have old hardware.

I am finding Linux has loss some of its roots for being able to bring more work out of older equipment. But it does not stop us from trying, does it. Good luck with your project.

I used an old redhat diskette a few months ago to netload from their servers, was fun and slow but did work. Other information for doing these types of installs.
http://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst
http://marc.herbert.free.fr/linux/win2linstall.html -helpful.

Also remember the Async ports on these old machines and be connected to another machine and used for network loading too. ;-) Just takes longer be works very well.

Thank you

Here's distributions that boot from floppy: http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=links#floppy http://bootdisk.com/linux.htm Then, you can install whatever you want via PPPoE.\: http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/apds05.html.en http://marc.herbert.free.fr/linux/win2linstall.html Here's some recommendations from a 486'er: http://www.ipt.ntnu.no/~knutb/linux486/linux486.html

I'm French and I'd whine as well. Here we pay 30€ per month for unlimited dl @ (up to) 28Mb/s (I'm getting about 1.2MB/s), IPTV (150 free channels), and unlimited phone calls to about 100 countries. Fiber is at the same price, but it's not widely available yet. Thank you Free for these low prices :)

yet it looks like a cheap knock-off from rick dangerous back in the days and that you can play online with flash http://rickdangerousflash.free.fr/ here.

The other post had some good tips. Note that strictly speaking you don't need a tracking telescope. You can take a bunch of 10s exposures with a half-decent camera and then overlay them to get a better image. There is software out there that will do this semi-automatically (google for stacking), or you can just use Photoshop.

Don't expect to get something like what you'd see out of the Hubble. In my light-polluted area (suburban), with a 50mm f/1.8 lens, I was able to get a small hazy disc with a central bulge. I suspect my focus was a bit off (very hard to focus a camera on a dark sky - use live view if you have it). Even so, it was fairly clear that the object was a galaxy.

To help locate it in a photo be sure to consult a star chart that includes low-magnitude stars. The stars that you can actually see will be fairly large and prominant in your photo, but they'll be far apart. You'll have lots of small stars that you can't see with your eyes, but decent charts will have them.

Astronomy software will calculate the altitude (angle above horizon) and azimuth (compass heading) for any location date/time. If you don't have access to software, this website will work. You need to enter your own lat/long, and the time in UTC. For the RA/Dec use (from wikipedia):
Right ascension 00h 42m 44.3s
Declination +41 16 9

Right now it appears that in the US that M31 is below the horizon for most of the night. You might have to wait six months to get a good shot.

Disclaimer - while I have an interest in this stuff I wouldn't call myself even an amateur astronomer. Also - if Andromeda is invisible I suspect there is a chance that Orion is above the horizon and it also has a decent-sized nebula (but I'm not sure if you could get that without a telescope).

Actually, when Mac OS X was first released with its dock, there was quite a bit of uproar from fans of Mac OS 9 because they were used to hunting around the sides of the Menu Bar, launching apps from the Apple Menu and switching apps with the Application Menu. A number of third-party hacks came along to restore the "lost functionality." They were also upset that application windows rolled into the Dock when minimized instead of into their own title bars, so they came up with a third-party windowshading hack. A few of these hacks are described on Low End Mac's website. However, users eventually got used to the Dock, and personally, when I go back to Mac OS 9 I use a third-party hack that replicates the Mac OS X Dock, unsurprisingly called A-Dock, to make the app switching experience more consistent. The Dock was a good UI decision, and has lasted the test of time. As for this new Firefox ribbon thing, if they do it right, we'll grumble for a bit but eventually it will become as natural as using the traditional menu bar. If they don't do it right, they'll switch it back in the next release.

level control systems, now owned by Meyer Sound, still has installations from 1996 that are running with either original BeBoxes (repackaged into rack mount cases) or older intel hardware.

http://testou.free.fr/www.beatjapan.org/mirror/www.be.com/developers/developer_news/spotlight/lcs.html

People didn't upgrade because there was no need to; it was not broken and the hardware still works.

One live musical show was using one of these rack mounted original BeBox with Dual Processors. A few years ago it stopped working; they rebooted it and it worked but only one CPU was running. The problem was that they one cpu fan stopped turning, the cpu got very hot - so hot that it unsoldered itself and fell. But the system worked just fine on a reboot, just a little slower!

--jeffk++

Windows still sucks for customization:

* Can you just drag your favorite folders to the common open/save dialog box like OSX ?

* Can you add the option to Right-Click on a folder and "Command Prompt Here" without hacking the registry. Gee, thx for removing File Types "Folder / Directory" customization in Vista, MS.

* Can you over-ride or add your own custom Windows- shortcuts without using AutoHotKey ? i.e. Win-C Run Calculator, Win-Z Run Cmd. http://www.autohotkey.com/

* Can you re-order the taskbar tabs without using Taskbar Shuffle, XNeat Window Manager, or Taskbar Manager ? http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-9937700-12.html

It only took MS _how_ long to standardize on the C:\Users\ folder, when before it kept changing almost every Windows version?

* Why the hell does an Admin need to use something like Unlocker to copy/delete tmp files used by another process or even to kill _any_ process?? http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/

* I still have to make a batch file called x.bat that contains "@start explorer /e,." in every version of windows just because MS doesn't care to teach people how to seemlessly go back and forth between explorer and the command line.

But yeah, Windows is slowly getting usable.

--
Awesome Steam games!: Braid, Darwinia, Light of Altair, Osmos, Trine World of Goo

It looks to me like the earth has been going through warm spikes for a lot longer than we've been around. Our current spike started well before mankind was doing much of anything. One could even conjecture that we're around because it got warmer...

1. We're talking about spikes in CO2, not temperature. One way to see that the current climate change is artificial is that the spike in CO2 is happening before the temperature spike rather than centuries afterwards like in the natural record.
2. I've already said that the climate varies on long timescales but that Meehl 2004 shows the current warming can't be accounted for by natural forcings. Greenhouse gas emissions are the only way we can explain the temperatures over the last ~40 years. And as I've said, it's quite easy to measure our emitted CO2 because governments tax oil and coal. Those estimates are easily high enough to account for the sudden increase in CO2. We're definitely causing the CO2 spike, and it's very likely causing the temperatures to increase at a rate that's likely to be dangerous.
3. Again, as I've repeatedly stressed, events such as Heinrich and Dansgaard-Oeschger events are the best examples of abrupt climate change in the paleoclimate record. These are well known in the climatology community, but they're different from what's happening today for reasons I just mentioned. These ancient events are worrying, though, because they show the climate has a propensity to shift quickly from one state to another, given even small forcings.

As far as "rates of change" go, I'm not certain you can say much at all about the long term history without better resolution in the data. For instance, the rate could vary quite wildly in the blink of 100 years, but that would be blurred in the long term record. These ice and sediment cores implement a nice low pass filter based on how they accumulated and are measured.

Yes, ice core data are smoothed by diffusion and compaction, but studies like Delmotte 2004 and Jouzel 2007 have examined the data at a resolution of ~100 years and largely support the conclusions in the original Vostok and EPICA papers.

Of course, you could respond that decadal variations could exist, but to the best of my knowledge no known natural mechanism exists that could allow CO2 to fluctuate so wildly so quickly. Actually, the Siberian traps may qualify as a plausible natural source, but what sink could possibly have absorbed the CO2 quickly enough to drive the level down far enough below the average for the low-pass signal to record no evidence of this event?

a good cartoon also says a lot...

http://dessins.de.konk.free.fr/enafrique/grandafrique.jpg

Or just use Unlocker: http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/ , it catches failed attempts to delete/move files and pops up a window showing you what's locking the file.

This is diffs the dissembled version of the original against the update on the server, then does the opposite on the client. I couldn't help but think of this as similar to Gentoo's model ... download a compressed diff of the source and then recompile. Both have the same problem: too much client-side CPU usage (though Gentoo's is an extreme of this). Isn't Google Chrome OS primarily targeting netbooks? Can such things handle that level of extra client-side computation without leaving users frustrated?

I'd rather improve the distribution model. Since packages are all signed, SSL and friends aren't needed for the transfer, nor does it need to come from a trusted authority. Bittorrent comes to mind. I'm quite disappointed that the apt-torrent project never went anywhere. It's clearly the solution.

For VHDL itself, I learned that with GHDL (VHDL front-end to gcc, though it hasn't been updated in a year now) and GTKWave for viewing the waves. Throw in make for a build system, and it was all I needed to design and implement (VHDL only, that is) a simple microprocessor.

That's a start anyway.

"What is bing ? bing is an application written by Pierre Beyssac which measures the RAW bandwidth of a remote network link. Let me ad some precisions. By "remote" I mean a link not directly connected to your computer. For instance you can measure the bandwidth of a link between you ISP and the rest of the internet. By "RAW" I mean that you can measure the intrinsic bandwidth of the link not what's left once the other users have taken their share. So even if a link is saturated and you can only get 1KBps out of it bing will be able to tell you whether it is a 128Kbps link or 256Kbps or more. Now don't expect miracles. You will not be able to measure the bandwidth of an ethernet link in a remote end of the internet through your modem at a time when the internet is completely saturated."

Bing appears to have been around since before 1999.

I think Microsoft has a legal problem on it's hands. This is long-established GPL software. Is Bing not software too? Could there be 'brand confusion'? What about prior art etc. etc.

I forgot the link for Dungeon Master: wikipedia.org - Dungeon_Master_(computer_game)

If you have a chance to play it, I highly recommend it. There was a sequel made for either DOS or Windows. (Dungeon Master 2) As I recall, I didn't think it was as good, but it was still fun.

The Dungeon Master Encyclopaedia explains the spell system.

A review.

Back when Microsoft didn't have a stranglehold on the market, people were happy enough pirating 95 and 98, while ignoring things like BeOS and OS/2 (both competitively priced and more powerful)

BeOS first appears on PPC Mac clones in 1996.

BeOS was ported to X86 in March 1998.

BeOS was optimized for digital media work... Through the late 1990s, BeOS managed to create a niche of followers, but the company failed... BeOS

16 MB RAM and 150 MB of hard disk storage was recommended - and more - much more - would be desirable.

The list of supported hardware was very short - and you could forget the portable or laptop PC.

BeOS Ready Systems -- Intel, BeOS Probably Compatible List -- Intel

These info pages from 1998-1999 come straight from Be itself.

There were strong, competitive, MS-DOS machines on the market before the cloning of IBM PC BIOS.

Win 3.1 anchored the franchise. Win 95 took off like a rocket.

The convenience and economy of the OEM system install solves so many problems for the user, for the manufacturer, for the retailer, the service technician, that it is no longer possible to imagine an OS gaining traction in the mass consumer market without it.

Back when Microsoft didn't have a stranglehold on the market, people were happy enough pirating 95 and 98, while ignoring things like BeOS and OS/2 (both competitively priced and more powerful)

BeOS first appears on PPC Mac clones in 1996.

BeOS was ported to X86 in March 1998.

BeOS was optimized for digital media work... Through the late 1990s, BeOS managed to create a niche of followers, but the company failed... BeOS

16 MB RAM and 150 MB of hard disk storage was recommended - and more - much more - would be desirable.

The list of supported hardware was very short - and you could forget the portable or laptop PC.

BeOS Ready Systems -- Intel, BeOS Probably Compatible List -- Intel

These info pages from 1998-1999 come straight from Be itself.

There were strong, competitive, MS-DOS machines on the market before the cloning of IBM PC BIOS.

Win 3.1 anchored the franchise. Win 95 took off like a rocket.

The convenience and economy of the OEM system install solves so many problems for the user, for the manufacturer, for the retailer, the service technician, that it is no longer possible to imagine an OS gaining traction in the mass consumer market without it.

Anyone who has a lot of wire laying around (like if you're into building Tesla coils) can try this experiment:
Make one big loop coil with a lot of turns. Then make another coil by wrapping loops around that one. Then once that's done, do an interleaved coil over that like one of those Rodin coils over the first two. (And this design is open source and public domain because I just made it up. Have fun and hack it!) Now instead of operating this thing like a normal transformer or induction coil, you run electricity through all three coils. What you're going to be doing is trying to collapse or expand three different electromagnetic fields upon one point in space in a way that can be best described as abnormal.

Now the rest of the fun for this experiment is in figuring out what type of electricity to put into the coils and at what power levels/cycles. At most, it may have some interesting results. (See if lasers bend around it, or if objects dropped through the hole in the middle do anything funny.) And then you can come up with theory to describe whats causing the wierd stuff. At the least, it's just a waste of time and possibly some some burnt up wire. (Provided you don't get too stupid and electrocute yourself or burn the house down.) Maybe you could make some really cool dynamic art with ferro-fluid sculptures. (If you have access to ferro-fluid of some sort.) Worst case scenario is that you might accidentally make an EMP device, which may get the FCC or DHS on you.

Hmm, reminds me a bit of R, the plotting part of it, at least. There are a few examples of the kind of plotting you can achieve in R here.

The first thing that struck me was the name...So Microsoft innovates the only way they know how by...

stealing an already used name?

$ apt-cache show bing
Package: bing ...
Description: Empirical stochastic bandwidth tester
  Bing is a point-to-point bandwidth measurement tool (hence the 'b'),
  based on ping.
  .
  Bing determines the real (raw, as opposed to available or average)
  throughput on a link by measuring ICMP echo requests' round trip times
  for different packet sizes at each end of the link.
Homepage: http://fgouget.free.fr/bing/bing_src-readme-1st.shtml

I couldn't find any references to this cult in french so I'm not sure they're here. On the other hand, there are other "something yoga" cults that are explicitly forbidden[french warning]

Ditto on the work of art. I met a French woman in Corsica who had chosen Polaroids as her preferred medium for art. The colors had that cooky, dated hue right away. It inspired me to buy a Polaroid, though I rarely use it. Her website, with said Polaroid pics: http://clotildefotopassion.free.fr/

No safe mode needed, just use Unlocker, it allows you to remove the lock from processes using the files, kill those processes and if even then they can't be deleted it allows you to automatically delete them in the next boot, in one click!

I think you should set up a very very nice Mac desktop at your headquarters with a few TBs of storage on it and plenty of DDR3 memory. This machine, you should use for editing and processing your video. I am by no means an artist but it's no secret that is a strength of Macs. For storage and capturing, just bring some notebooks with Linux and TB external drives.

You can try Ubuntu Studio if you're interested in giving Linux a shot in the former departments ... start with some base footage and try some stuff out on a Mac and then Ubuntu studio before you make your final decision.

Really, you should shoot an e-mail to the blender folks if you want to keep this documentary purely open source ... you may be able to entice them for a little free support if they can use you as a shining example of open source in the documentary community. It also might be a frustrating pain the ass if you're used to Mac editing tools like every graduate in the arts seems to be.

I think there's other things like GordianKnot (not sure where this project is at right now) and Avidemux that are worth investigating if they aren't already on Ubuntu Studio.

Good luck! I love documentaries, especially independent ones!

Honest question: do the universities still function in Zimbabwe? I see a lot of economic refugees from Zimbabwe (some even with British teaching degrees).

As opposed to a dishonest question? :) At least one university does, but that is basically because they told the government to stuff off and started charging fees. It was a bit harsh(a lot of students dropped out), but it had to be done as free education is a bit of an oxymoron. Since they are actually paying the lecturers, we still have some decent ones. The brilliant are long gone I'm afraid.

Your university does not manage it right. It is the university's responsibility to distribute the free Microsoft software. Some universities do not tell their students about it or manage it badly.

Wouldn't be the first time. The IT services department is completely incompetent. Which is why the electronics department manages its own labs, though unfortunately not the internet connection.

One of my problems is downloading a linux distro - since it is usually more than 3 cds. Windows is fairly small and available as a pirated version.

The linux distributions (around here at least) make the rounds just like the pirated XP cds. Only one person really needs to download anything. In fact my last DVD (mandriva 2009) came from south africa where they have better bandwidth. Most people couldn't easily trace who originally downloaded what.

But the sysadmin wants to switch now.
It is quite problematic for a university lab to âoeswitchâ to linux since a lot of software used in other courses (electronic engineering, mechanical engineering) are Windows only. A better solution is to have a dual boot system so that the user's can choose.

We will certainly do so, though I can say, with one exception, I have better electronics software under linux than windows. For example, this is a full replacement for mplab which most people here actually prefer. I have yet to find a decent circuit simulator for linux, but everything else is there. There is also the possibility of virtual machines that can be isolated from the network/USB ports. I doubt anyone will boot windows though. It is literally unusable - an hour to log in, then it tries to load explorer and crashes. We have been hit by a nast

More like don't want to.
Here in France I pay EUR 30/month (USD 39) for 18/1mbit internet + 150 tv channels + free telephone (domestic and most international landline calls are free, cellphones cost a bit), and TWC can't compete with $99 and a service that don't offer nearly what I pay EUR 30 for? Please, give me a break. And when fibre gets rolled out it'll be the same price, only faster (100/50).
Oh, and they do make money on that, here in France.
http://www.free.fr/adsl/

Ouch! I pay EUR 30/month, and for that I get whatever my line can handle (18/1 in my case) and no limits what so ever. Plus free landline phone (including international calls) and a decently large iptv package. http://www.free.fr/adsl/

Tuxrip is a Linux bash script for ripping and encoding DVD in mpeg4 format (XviD, libavcodec). http://tuxrip.free.fr/apropos_en.html --

I use mplayer for ripping the DVD and avidemux for the transcoding the video.

Specifically I use mplayer to dump the VOB files on the disk. Then I use avidemux, which in turn uses x264, ffmpeg, lamemp3, etc. to transcode the video to any format I want. This process is not a "one-click solution," but I find that going through the process for each DVD title manually gives fine-grain control over the final product.

I program in PDP-11 assembly, which is then translated into C, compiled into Java bytecode, and executed on a JVM. I call it Assemblacava, and it's the wave of the future.

Dude, that is *so* 2008! I programm in Sharp 1403H Opcode which is piped into an optimized generator for x86 opcode which is written in eLisp and even runs on my old slightly rigged m105 Palm without a hitch - very cool!. Sharp 1403H Opcode where the future and money is. Get with the proramm!

Oh, and btw., the portables that run it natively have upwards of 300 hours of battery life and are way smaller than these bulky netbooks from last year. Now who's gonna beat that? Hah!

Also the DSi is not a phone.

Only because of the lockout chip. The DS Lite had a homebrew phone app.

In fact, humans will also adapt under such circumstances. The first reports were as early as 1896, but we have a great video that we show our students in Psych 1 here at the University of Iowa that demonstrates a british student who wears world inverting specs for a week or so. At first, she can't do simple things like write her name or make tea, but later in the video it shows her sketching, riding her bike down a country road, and doing all sorts of other things that require visual perception to accomplish.

It really is a remarkable phenomenon.

But, see:
http://wexler.free.fr/library/files/linden%20(1999)%20the%20myth%20of%20upright%20vision.%20a%20psychophysical%20and%20functional%20imaging%20study%20of%20adaptation%20to%20inverting%20spectacles.pdf

-----

But as to the "hard wired" face perception stuff, I think you might be on the wrong track there.

Flash is *not* a W3C standard -> Flash is *not* part of the Web.
In no way does Flash match the definition of the Web from Tim Berners-Lee, which is information to *anyone*.
http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/

Anything calling itself a "website" that has flash inside should be charged with false claims.

Besides even on XP, flash sux (both the cpu and itself):
http://revolf.free.fr/img/why_I_banned_flash.png
http://revolf.free.fr/img/why_flash_sux_even_on_linux.png

Flash is *not* a W3C standard -> Flash is *not* part of the Web.
In no way does Flash match the definition of the Web from Tim Berners-Lee, which is information to *anyone*.
http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/

Anything calling itself a "website" that has flash inside should be charged with false claims.

Besides even on XP, flash sux (both the cpu and itself):
http://revolf.free.fr/img/why_I_banned_flash.png
http://revolf.free.fr/img/why_flash_sux_even_on_linux.png

IPTV is another route providers can turn to. As an example see the package offered by Free.fr (in French). For example a company such as Bell in Canada which currently offers DSL and satellite TV could provider IPTV to their customers. This is an important alternative they should be turning to, especially when you consider the number of apartment blocks that do not allow the installation of satellite dishes.

When you consider the amount of junk on TV and the amount of adverts, I am not really sure I want to be paying for a service that charges me $30+Tax+Charges for a service that matches what I can get for free, and then charges me extra for channels with ad breaks every 5-10 minutes. If TV companies want to know why people turn to torrents, then they should consider that their ad schedule somehow turns a 1 hour film into a 3 hour film, with bundled grief.

> 2- Video editing. Super simple video editing.

Not sure what you count as super simple, but have you tried http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/ ?

Lots of people buy transceivers.

Lots of people buy rotors and controllers.

At least they claim to have built the antenna...

Sure, it'd be cooler if they etched their own circuit boards, mined and refined their own copper wires, and then grew their own silicon for the final amplifier transistors (or at least built their own vacuum tubes), but it looks like these are a few people with no experience who said "We wanna talk to space", and then did it.

I agree that by the standards of the radio amateur community, this is "no big deal", but by comparison to their peers who are sitting around and playing with their Wii's, this is a pretty good step forward.

Being able to build an antenna is a relevant, practical skill in the radio world. They're exposed to the weather, they break, they need repair (or replacement) from time to time.

To see how much more bang for the buck, uh Euro, the Europeans can get, just check out what is being offered in France:

http://www.free.fr/adsl/index.html

Looking at this makes me feel that my ISP here in Canada, Bell (they aren't any better up here), seem very prehistoric.

Well, my main PC does not have antivirus software installed (I use online scanning sites to scan downloaded files :), and it was not a "file in use" problem, Unlocker, would have taken care of that. It was an "access denied" problem, I could not clear the "read only" attribute, which was in the third state (neither checked nor unchecked). Couldn't delete the file either...

The data collection mechanism is internally called âoeService Quality Monitoringâ, or just SQM. It was introduced in Office 2003, and presents itself to the user as âoeCustomer Experience Improvement Programâ (CEIP), or you might also see it under the heading of âoeHelp Make Office Betterâ. . . .What did Microsoft do with the data? It turns out, a lot. The data combined with human judgment was the basis for the placement of all commands on the Ribbon. The Home tab in all programs is a great example of the statistics at work. The commands on the Home tab represent the 80% most used commands of that particular application.

From: here

"One difference between Firefox 2.0 and Firefox 3.0 is that the Back button grew in size," Raskin said. "Why did it change? Because we found that people used the Back button much more than the Forward button."

I hope this information about most used features isn't going to be used to develop a Mozilla ribbon.

my main cause of that is firefox, which can be worked around by setting ui.allow_platform_file_picker to false [1]
hopefully the qt port of firefox will eventually work too.

For your global shortcuts, at least, you can always just use xbindkeys. A very powerful global shortcuts daemon. It's completely independent of the window manager and should be in the repositories of most distros. It gets really interesting when you combine it with the xmacro GUI scripting program to do things that aren't CLI scriptable such as certain types of interactions with virtual machines. For example, I like to hit a hotkey in Linux and certain things automatically happen in a virtual machine I'm running. That's not something I've been able to script with bash. However, xmacro has no trouble taking over the mouse and keyboard briefly, running into the virtual machine, doing what I've set it up to do and then quickly handing back control to me. It makes some normally repetitive and tedious tasks quite fast and easy.

This is great... Now, all you have to do is install the preventive multitasking OS I had written at the time

I thought Windows was the preventive multitasking OS du jour.

This is great... Now, all you have to do is install the preventive multitasking OS I had written at the time then try to bootstrap Minix from it, and you'll have the best of the 80s.

So many memories, so little time. How many people on /. even have fond memories of the Apple II? Just showing my age I guess. Anyone below 30 who even knows what it was like at the time? I ran my first BBS on an Apple II. Kind of like slashdot, minus the traffic :-)

Try this instead.

1. Run Hijackthis and look for any suspicious startup entries. Even the average computer user will be able to rule out most entries as things they recognize, meaning you won't have to google more than a handful, which will probably take 5-10 minutes at the most.
2. Install Unlocker. http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/
2. Browse to locations of files linked to by suspicious startup entries. Check date created.
3. Go to Windows directory, sort files by date, google suspicious files found since above date. Remove files confirmed to be malware or files for which you cannot find any information. (If you can't find any info on them, they're either randomly generated malware names, or malware too new to show up yet in a search.)
4. Do the same in Windows\System32.
5. Run a system cleanup to delete all Temp files and Temporary Internet Files.
6. Now delete the original malware folder.
7. Delete the startup entries with Hijackthis.
8. Restart computer. Should be clean.

The best part is, this will work with virtually *any* malware infection, and will generally catch things that even Malwarebytes misses.

That's what Unlocker is for. http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/

Or you could just run bing:

http://fgouget.free.fr/bing/bing_src-readme.shtml

This is a point-to-point bandwidth measuring tool based on ICMP. It works fairly well and doesn't require you to saturate the network to establish thruput.

It's also nice because you can use bing to measure the speed between two arbitrary hosts. In other words, Server A and Desktop A or Server A and Desktop B.

With that said, if you do observe a potential issue based on your bing results then you will want to try a method like Shawn suggests here (ie; saturate the pipe and see what results from that).

As an aside, if you can use iSCSI or NFS for your network file solution the performance over something like CIFS is notable -- especially on slower networks.