friends and family think Futureshop really does stock good products at decent prices
Futureshop exists in my world because of their return policy. Prior to Best Buy buying them, they were the only high-tech shop with a "Satisfaction Guarantee" in my area (that I know of).
I can get a much better price at the College St shops, and hardly ever any screwing around with mail-in rebates.
But if I don't know if the widget is going to work with my system, it's off to Futureshop....
Bragging about uptime (or even taking uptime very seriously) is like publicly admitting that you are a fool.
On the other hand, it can be fun if you are running a system where you CAN do all the necessary hardware and software maitenance, keep it secure, AND get 1000 days uptime.
Of course, that was a departmental server behind several layers of firewalls, on an isolated subnet, with restricted login access and the bare minimum of services available, local and network.
Then he some convoluted explaination that they were getting faster at a faster rate %wise than intel which was a confusing statement since both chip makers increased speed by the same # of mhz.
But that's exactly the point, a 500 MHz improvement on a 2GHz chip is a 25% increase in speed, and a 500 MHz improvement on a 3GHz chip is only 17% faster.
Think about it. A 100 MHz Pentium to a 200 MHz Pentium is a big deal (100% faster). A 3.2 GHz Xeon to a 3.3 GHz Xeon isn't worth the upgrade (not even 4% faster); you'd only get the faster chip if you were building a new system anyway.
The problem is, DVD+R is the only format that supports dual layer, currently.
And, to counter more anti-DVD+R FUD, all my players which handle DVD-Rs are quite happy with DVD+R DL. This includes a Panasonic 5-disc carousel model something42, an APEX 1500, a really, really dodgy (but dirt cheap) Nova, and the Sony drive in my iBook. Some of those are old enough that DVD+R DL wasn't thought of yet.
It's actually pretty easy to remove macrovision. You can buy black boxes to do it pretty easily.
Heck, my cheesy Dazzle Analog->FireWire->Analog converter yanks out Macrovision. So you get a decent DV stream from a Macrovisioned source. Or, if you leave it in "analog through" mode, it removes Macrovision from the analog signal. Good enough for converting VHS and LaserDisc to DVD with Kino.
Dedicated "signal stabilizers" are cheaper, and probably suck less than anything Dazzle has ever made.
Out of the box, you can only play MPEG2 with the DVDPlayer. If you have just the MPEG2 elementary or program streams, you need something extra to play them back--or you need to make a DVD master image first and open that.
For a mere $20US, however, you can play them back. (But not transport streams. And not AC3 audio. So it isn't great, but... it's something.)
MPlayer and VLC also both work on OS X, though if you have an aging G3 system like I have, it's probably not going to work well enough.
Of course, if Sony hadn't won, and VCRs had ended up illegal, what would we use to play our permanent copies?
Back in the day, you could get playback-only machines, at least from Panasonic.
I worked at a video rental store, and we had a fleet of those for rent. (This was in the late 80s, when there were still plenty of people who didn't have a VCR yet.)
We also had some proper recorders for rent, for people who wanted to do more than just rent a few movies for the weekend. They usually only got rented out when we ran out of the playback-only machines.
So, had home recording been made illegal, you would still be able to watch commercially-produced videos.
The main difference between the MOS 6510 and the original Rockwell 6502 was the 6510 had an on-chip I/O port at address 0 & 1. This sacrificed two bytes of RAM (data direction register & I/O register), but by wiring 3 lines of it you could turn on or off the BASIC, KERNAL or CHARGEN ROMs. (Cassette control was in there too.)
The BASIC was 8k, and the "KERNAL" (yes, that's how they spelled it) another 8k. You could switch them on or off separately. A fun trick was, writes to a ROM address would actually go to the RAM at the same location, so you could copy BASIC to RAM, switch to the RAM bank, and then start modifying the BASIC interpreter. If you got this wrong from BASIC, you got to use the power switch. (STOP-RESET might not save you at this point.)
Cartridges had access to the entire CPU bus, so could actually take over any section of memory. But ones that expected to co-exist with the system were required to use a paritcular 8k bank, just before the BASIC ROM.
Hah! I'm waiting for the Commodore 128 MP3 player, with the extra bank-switched RAM for longer playback time. AND it'll autoboot, so you won't have to type:
But, I don't think that any hardware should be in any way regulated by a software license.
That's fine, but in that case, do not use GPL software on your closed hardware.
If you use any code that is not public domain, you must get permission to include it with your hardware product. Even if the hardware is useless without it.
BSD code asks nothing in return.
GPL code asks that you include the source and allow the user to modify the software.
Sun code asks that you pay a certain fee (usually as part of the compiler suite), and set additional restrictions on the final code ("...a license agreement that protects Sun's interests..." and "...defend and indemnify Sun and its licensors from and against any damages, costs, liabilities, settlement amounts... incurred in connection with any claim, lawsuit or action by any third party that arises...").
Your decision, as a hardware developer, is which requests you feel best suits your business needs and expense budget.
Don't like the GPL terms? Don't distribute GPL code. Don't like Sun's terms? Don't use their code. (And it'd be really hard to dislike BSD's terms, now that the advertising clause is gone.)
Maybe what you want isn't available under the terms you want. So either write it yourself (after all, who knows the hardware better than you?) or negotiate more favorable terms with the copyright-holders.
To be fair, if the iPod is set to be automatically managed, the folder structure is just a bunch of numbered folders with the song files in them.
On your computer, iTunes organizes things quite nicely.
But, since the iPod is a music player, not a music transferer, it doesn't matter about the folder structure on the iPod itself. Since the UI is driven by a database, rather than the actual song files, you get a very responsive UI, regardless of where the song files are actually located on the iPod.
Some discs don't have a protective lacquer coating. If you don't put an adhesive label on them, they are likely to fail very quickly, just due to physical damage.
I've got ones like that, and a post-it note is enough to peel the recording layer off the disc. (Remember, the recording layer is actually on the top side.)
I've had so many of those fail for mechanical reasons, I don't know if a marker pen would have also killed thm. But there are really delicate discs out there, so watch out.
He said the Copyright Act clearly defines media that legally can be used for private duplication of copyrighted material and MP3 players no longer meet that criteria.
Sorry buddies, while this might mean you can't copy a disc from your friend, it certainly doesn't take away any rights I have to copy my CD to my own iPod. My music, my property, my right to do what I want with it (within my domain).
The Act does NOT clearly define which media can be used for private duplication; it contains the clause, "audio recording medium" means a recording medium, regardless of its material form, onto which a sound recording may be reproduced and that is of a kind ordinarily used by individual consumers for that purpose, excluding any prescribed kind of recording medium.
The provision for private copying states only what may be copied onto an audio recording medium.
The section on levys applies to blank audio recording medium. That means medium to which no sounds have ever been fixed (emphasis mine).
But the important part is in the first definition, where it says, is of a kind ordinarily used by individual consumers for that purpose.
So because MP3 players are used to play music, they become audio recording media.
Actually, it looks like the judge is wrong. After all, the Act does not mention CDs, tapes, records, and so on either. It does this for the highly intelligent reason that it applies to the Right to Copy, and not the mechanics involved with any particular technology.
The levy is separate from the "personal use right-to-copy".
Passage of the one may have been contingent on acceptance other, but they are NOT coupled in the legislation.
The judge said that the plaintiffs had not proved that the Copyright Act had been broken, and therefore would not lift the shroud of privacy to allow them to go digging for evidence.
Basically, the labels hadn't proved that the copying was, in fact, distribution, and not merely personal use.
I don't know if it was a deliberate degradation of the system, or just some very weird atmospheric effects, but....
A friend and I was returning from a trip, travelling through Virginia on July 5 this year. Early in the afternoon, somewhere in West Virginia approaching Virginia the signal dropped out on the GPS so badly it lost staellite reception. This was using an external antenna under a clear, blue sky on an Interstate--you don't get better reception conditions than those.
Periodically, it would regain signal for several minutes. But when it did, it would display a position well off the highway, sometimes 10-20 miles, sometimes in a completely different state.
Downloading the data to my computer, you can see a bunch of disconnected path segments. And you can also see a moving average speed of 800 mph. Since we were trying to get around a traffic jam at that point, 800 mph is sheer fantasy. And I'm not sure a Honda Accord goes that fast in the best of times , either.
I gave up and shut off the GPS. We got around the traffic jam the old fashioned way: guess where we were on the paper map and hoped we remembered which was the last exit number we saw.
Then, around 6 PM, I turned the GPS back on and everything was back to normal.
It's almost as if I imagined the whole thing... except for the really weird track log downloaded to the computer.
And I still hear about systems where people want to tie GPS receivers into toll charging systems, truck driver logging systems, rental car monitoring and so on. Yeah, I'm going to trust one of those.
inetd works by connecting to a program's stdin and stdout, so it launches each time there's a connection on the port. That's fine for some things, but anything with a lot of small transactions will really hammer your system. So http is best as a long-running daemon.
Now, all that aside, there's no reason why you couldn't do this, right now, with tools you already have. (Note: This hijacks runlevel 4 for a completely different use; if you modify chkconfig to work with more runlevels, you could avoid that.)
Put a line like this in/etc/inittab:
bg:35:once:/etc/rc.d/rc 4
(I'd recommend deleting the existing runlevel 4 script too.)
Now use chkconfig to turn everything off in runlevels 3 and 5 that should be started "late":
chkconfig --levels 35 httpd off
This isn't perfect, and redirecting the output of rc is probably a good idea. Also, it might be better to just remove the daemons in question from the old runlevels. And I haven't looked into the shutdown behavior.
It can cost rather more than $1100 a year to rent an apartment with a larger room to put the larger desk in.
I bought an LCD screen for the same reason: I didn't want to take up more space in the room for the computer gear. An 18" deeper desk was not acceptable. And at the time I bought mine, it was only twice the price of a decent CRT. A bigger house would be something like $200,000 instead.
Mind you, "bigger house" is still on the shopping list.
{Some compilers even leave the variable and function names in the code -- almost as though they want you to be able to decompile stuff!}
There are two things that lead to this; one of them is the obvious, debugging symbol tables are needed to allow a source debugger to show you the variable names. After all, who wants to know that you've got a 3 in gr12... and a 7 stored at 0x002fdc1c. Errr, I guess IA32 people would want to know about EAX and so on. Still.
Traditionally, vendors would run the "strip" command on the finished program. This removes (most of) the symbol tables to reduce the amount of on-disk space used by the program. (The symbol tables are not mapped into memory when the program runs, so it doesn't affect the memory footprint.) But, given the low cost of disk today, people now (should) leave the symbol tables in the program for better in-place debugging. It can also help get more information from a core file when the program crashes; stack traces and other program state information will be more meaningful.
Plus, any symbol that is available for runtime linking or dynamic loading must have a symbol table entry. Library calls aren't generally coded with offsets from a base pointer any more--though that may be how they are implemented. (OS/2 and Amiga both had offset-from-base systems for the dynamic libraries. There's some vestiges of the OS/2 linking system still present in Windows, though new code uses symbolic linking.)
Generally, at least on Linux and Solaris, people just let the compiler make every 'extern' available for runtime linking, so you wind up with many more symbols in the symbol table than you really need. But you don't have to maintain an 'export list', and that makes developers very happy.
Put it all together, and decompilers are going to have a very nice time of it. I'm looking forward to it; I hate trying to figure out what closed-source software is doing wrong relying just on truss (or strace) and similar tools.
Heck, it would be neat to see what your code looks like in source form after the optimizer has had its turn with it.
The thing about those McMansions, though, is that most of them are very poorly constructed--especially when you consider the price being charged for them.
A friend is looking at new and used homes in the western New Jersey area, so he was driving me through some of the new housing developments for comparison. The "merely" $600,000 homes were amazingly sloppy in construction; only mid-efficiency furnaces, contrasting utility fittings (plumbing vents and such) on the roof, tacked-on decorative elements. There was a lot more I could point out just from the car, but I've forgotten most of it.
A number had gas fireplaces as well, but had a completely fake chimney built out of frame and siding. (Screams "rodent home" to me.) The fireplaces themselves had cool-venting balanced flues partway up the wall--and the furnace vent didn't use the chimney space, it went up through the roofline elsewhere!
It wasn't until we got to the $750,000 neighborhood that I saw high-efficiency furnace vents and sensible chimney construction--those homes had masonry chimneys (so no room for rodents) or none at all. (All the furnaces vented at grade.)
Also, starting around $700,000 you started to see colour-matched vents on the roofline. How much can it cost to buy a black vent cap instead of a plain aluminum one?
Still, most homes had at least two 2-3 ton airconditioners, so I am sure glad I'm not paying to cool those monsters. (If you need that much cooling, you did not use high-quality insulation techniques.)
My technical writing professor was of the opinion that the comma was better omitted for a simple list.
If the list is complex enough that it isn't clear if the 'and' is part of an item ("Proctor and Gamble" vs. "Proctor, and Gamble") you should use it. Also, consider using a semicolon as the item-separator in the first place--and then you do want a semicolon before the conjunction in front of the terminal list item.
That same professor would hold up examples of bad punctuation and ask for diagnoses. Usually, a student would timidly offer, "Uh, that comma isn't necessary?" Which would get him ranting, "It is not that it is not necessary, it is WRONG!"
"Eats, Shoots and Leaves" sums up the problem right in the title.
That depends on how bad the infestation is. I've found it necessary to keep the machine of the 'net and let AdAware and SpyBot have their crack at it first. Otherwise, the poor thing is so badly hammered that you aren't going to be GETTING any patches from Microsoft.
And aren't some of the problems that people have had with XPsp2 blamed on Spyware infestations? So, best thing to do is clean first, then patch.
Now if I can find a way to get a copy of XPsp2 without actually having XP, so I can put it on my keychain drive for friends who still don't have broadband....
Slashdot Mirror
Futureshop exists in my world because of their return policy. Prior to Best Buy buying them, they were the only high-tech shop with a "Satisfaction Guarantee" in my area (that I know of).
I can get a much better price at the College St shops, and hardly ever any screwing around with mail-in rebates.
But if I don't know if the widget is going to work with my system, it's off to Futureshop....
On the other hand, it can be fun if you are running a system where you CAN do all the necessary hardware and software maitenance, keep it secure, AND get 1000 days uptime.
Of course, that was a departmental server behind several layers of firewalls, on an isolated subnet, with restricted login access and the bare minimum of services available, local and network.
But that's exactly the point, a 500 MHz improvement on a 2GHz chip is a 25% increase in speed, and a 500 MHz improvement on a 3GHz chip is only 17% faster.
Think about it. A 100 MHz Pentium to a 200 MHz Pentium is a big deal (100% faster). A 3.2 GHz Xeon to a 3.3 GHz Xeon isn't worth the upgrade (not even 4% faster); you'd only get the faster chip if you were building a new system anyway.
And, to counter more anti-DVD+R FUD, all my players which handle DVD-Rs are quite happy with DVD+R DL. This includes a Panasonic 5-disc carousel model something42, an APEX 1500, a really, really dodgy (but dirt cheap) Nova, and the Sony drive in my iBook. Some of those are old enough that DVD+R DL wasn't thought of yet.
Heck, my cheesy Dazzle Analog->FireWire->Analog converter yanks out Macrovision. So you get a decent DV stream from a Macrovisioned source. Or, if you leave it in "analog through" mode, it removes Macrovision from the analog signal. Good enough for converting VHS and LaserDisc to DVD with Kino.
Dedicated "signal stabilizers" are cheaper, and probably suck less than anything Dazzle has ever made.
For a mere $20US, however, you can play them back. (But not transport streams. And not AC3 audio. So it isn't great, but... it's something.)
MPlayer and VLC also both work on OS X, though if you have an aging G3 system like I have, it's probably not going to work well enough.
Back in the day, you could get playback-only machines, at least from Panasonic.
I worked at a video rental store, and we had a fleet of those for rent. (This was in the late 80s, when there were still plenty of people who didn't have a VCR yet.)
We also had some proper recorders for rent, for people who wanted to do more than just rent a few movies for the weekend. They usually only got rented out when we ran out of the playback-only machines.
So, had home recording been made illegal, you would still be able to watch commercially-produced videos.
The main difference between the MOS 6510 and the original Rockwell 6502 was the 6510 had an on-chip I/O port at address 0 & 1. This sacrificed two bytes of RAM (data direction register & I/O register), but by wiring 3 lines of it you could turn on or off the BASIC, KERNAL or CHARGEN ROMs. (Cassette control was in there too.)
The BASIC was 8k, and the "KERNAL" (yes, that's how they spelled it) another 8k. You could switch them on or off separately. A fun trick was, writes to a ROM address would actually go to the RAM at the same location, so you could copy BASIC to RAM, switch to the RAM bank, and then start modifying the BASIC interpreter. If you got this wrong from BASIC, you got to use the power switch. (STOP-RESET might not save you at this point.)
Cartridges had access to the entire CPU bus, so could actually take over any section of memory. But ones that expected to co-exist with the system were required to use a paritcular 8k bank, just before the BASIC ROM.
That's fine, but in that case, do not use GPL software on your closed hardware.
If you use any code that is not public domain, you must get permission to include it with your hardware product. Even if the hardware is useless without it.
BSD code asks nothing in return.
GPL code asks that you include the source and allow the user to modify the software.
Sun code asks that you pay a certain fee (usually as part of the compiler suite), and set additional restrictions on the final code ("...a license agreement that protects Sun's interests..." and "...defend and indemnify Sun and its licensors from and against any damages, costs, liabilities, settlement amounts ... incurred in connection with any claim, lawsuit or action by any third party that arises ...").
Your decision, as a hardware developer, is which requests you feel best suits your business needs and expense budget.
Don't like the GPL terms? Don't distribute GPL code. Don't like Sun's terms? Don't use their code. (And it'd be really hard to dislike BSD's terms, now that the advertising clause is gone.)
Maybe what you want isn't available under the terms you want. So either write it yourself (after all, who knows the hardware better than you?) or negotiate more favorable terms with the copyright-holders.
On your computer, iTunes organizes things quite nicely.
But, since the iPod is a music player, not a music transferer, it doesn't matter about the folder structure on the iPod itself. Since the UI is driven by a database, rather than the actual song files, you get a very responsive UI, regardless of where the song files are actually located on the iPod.
I've got ones like that, and a post-it note is enough to peel the recording layer off the disc. (Remember, the recording layer is actually on the top side.)
I've had so many of those fail for mechanical reasons, I don't know if a marker pen would have also killed thm. But there are really delicate discs out there, so watch out.
You don't have to take their word for it.
The Act does NOT clearly define which media can be used for private duplication; it contains the clause, "audio recording medium" means a recording medium, regardless of its material form, onto which a sound recording may be reproduced and that is of a kind ordinarily used by individual consumers for that purpose, excluding any prescribed kind of recording medium.
The provision for private copying states only what may be copied onto an audio recording medium.
The section on levys applies to blank audio recording medium. That means medium to which no sounds have ever been fixed (emphasis mine).
But the important part is in the first definition, where it says, is of a kind ordinarily used by individual consumers for that purpose.
So because MP3 players are used to play music, they become audio recording media.
Actually, it looks like the judge is wrong. After all, the Act does not mention CDs, tapes, records, and so on either. It does this for the highly intelligent reason that it applies to the Right to Copy, and not the mechanics involved with any particular technology.
The levy is separate from the "personal use right-to-copy".
Passage of the one may have been contingent on acceptance other, but they are NOT coupled in the legislation.
The judge said that the plaintiffs had not proved that the Copyright Act had been broken, and therefore would not lift the shroud of privacy to allow them to go digging for evidence.
Basically, the labels hadn't proved that the copying was, in fact, distribution, and not merely personal use.
A friend and I was returning from a trip, travelling through Virginia on July 5 this year. Early in the afternoon, somewhere in West Virginia approaching Virginia the signal dropped out on the GPS so badly it lost staellite reception. This was using an external antenna under a clear, blue sky on an Interstate--you don't get better reception conditions than those.
Periodically, it would regain signal for several minutes. But when it did, it would display a position well off the highway, sometimes 10-20 miles, sometimes in a completely different state.
Downloading the data to my computer, you can see a bunch of disconnected path segments. And you can also see a moving average speed of 800 mph. Since we were trying to get around a traffic jam at that point, 800 mph is sheer fantasy. And I'm not sure a Honda Accord goes that fast in the best of times , either.
I gave up and shut off the GPS. We got around the traffic jam the old fashioned way: guess where we were on the paper map and hoped we remembered which was the last exit number we saw.
Then, around 6 PM, I turned the GPS back on and everything was back to normal.
It's almost as if I imagined the whole thing... except for the really weird track log downloaded to the computer.
And I still hear about systems where people want to tie GPS receivers into toll charging systems, truck driver logging systems, rental car monitoring and so on. Yeah, I'm going to trust one of those.
Now, all that aside, there's no reason why you couldn't do this, right now, with tools you already have. (Note: This hijacks runlevel 4 for a completely different use; if you modify chkconfig to work with more runlevels, you could avoid that.)
Put a line like this in /etc/inittab:
(I'd recommend deleting the existing runlevel 4 script too.)
Now use chkconfig to turn everything off in runlevels 3 and 5 that should be started "late":
This isn't perfect, and redirecting the output of rc is probably a good idea. Also, it might be better to just remove the daemons in question from the old runlevels. And I haven't looked into the shutdown behavior.
It can cost rather more than $1100 a year to rent an apartment with a larger room to put the larger desk in.
I bought an LCD screen for the same reason: I didn't want to take up more space in the room for the computer gear. An 18" deeper desk was not acceptable. And at the time I bought mine, it was only twice the price of a decent CRT. A bigger house would be something like $200,000 instead.
Mind you, "bigger house" is still on the shopping list.
There are two things that lead to this; one of them is the obvious, debugging symbol tables are needed to allow a source debugger to show you the variable names. After all, who wants to know that you've got a 3 in gr12... and a 7 stored at 0x002fdc1c. Errr, I guess IA32 people would want to know about EAX and so on. Still.
Traditionally, vendors would run the "strip" command on the finished program. This removes (most of) the symbol tables to reduce the amount of on-disk space used by the program. (The symbol tables are not mapped into memory when the program runs, so it doesn't affect the memory footprint.) But, given the low cost of disk today, people now (should) leave the symbol tables in the program for better in-place debugging. It can also help get more information from a core file when the program crashes; stack traces and other program state information will be more meaningful.
Plus, any symbol that is available for runtime linking or dynamic loading must have a symbol table entry. Library calls aren't generally coded with offsets from a base pointer any more--though that may be how they are implemented. (OS/2 and Amiga both had offset-from-base systems for the dynamic libraries. There's some vestiges of the OS/2 linking system still present in Windows, though new code uses symbolic linking.)
Generally, at least on Linux and Solaris, people just let the compiler make every 'extern' available for runtime linking, so you wind up with many more symbols in the symbol table than you really need. But you don't have to maintain an 'export list', and that makes developers very happy.
Put it all together, and decompilers are going to have a very nice time of it. I'm looking forward to it; I hate trying to figure out what closed-source software is doing wrong relying just on truss (or strace) and similar tools.
Heck, it would be neat to see what your code looks like in source form after the optimizer has had its turn with it.
Those are great for shoulder-surfing, I can spot a "picture password" from across the room. Or across the Home Depot....
A friend is looking at new and used homes in the western New Jersey area, so he was driving me through some of the new housing developments for comparison. The "merely" $600,000 homes were amazingly sloppy in construction; only mid-efficiency furnaces, contrasting utility fittings (plumbing vents and such) on the roof, tacked-on decorative elements. There was a lot more I could point out just from the car, but I've forgotten most of it.
A number had gas fireplaces as well, but had a completely fake chimney built out of frame and siding. (Screams "rodent home" to me.) The fireplaces themselves had cool-venting balanced flues partway up the wall--and the furnace vent didn't use the chimney space, it went up through the roofline elsewhere!
It wasn't until we got to the $750,000 neighborhood that I saw high-efficiency furnace vents and sensible chimney construction--those homes had masonry chimneys (so no room for rodents) or none at all. (All the furnaces vented at grade.)
Also, starting around $700,000 you started to see colour-matched vents on the roofline. How much can it cost to buy a black vent cap instead of a plain aluminum one?
Still, most homes had at least two 2-3 ton airconditioners, so I am sure glad I'm not paying to cool those monsters. (If you need that much cooling, you did not use high-quality insulation techniques.)
Besides, the money they are getting from people will still exist, they can work some other way to get it.
I've buried IE as well, so here's how I start it these days when I have to: Start -> Run -> iexplore
A lot easier than remembering where I put it.
My technical writing professor was of the opinion that the comma was better omitted for a simple list.
If the list is complex enough that it isn't clear if the 'and' is part of an item ("Proctor and Gamble" vs. "Proctor, and Gamble") you should use it. Also, consider using a semicolon as the item-separator in the first place--and then you do want a semicolon before the conjunction in front of the terminal list item.
That same professor would hold up examples of bad punctuation and ask for diagnoses. Usually, a student would timidly offer, "Uh, that comma isn't necessary?" Which would get him ranting, "It is not that it is not necessary, it is WRONG!"
"Eats, Shoots and Leaves" sums up the problem right in the title.
Don't forget gay marriage is legal in Canada... so you could meet someone right here on Slashdot!
That depends on how bad the infestation is. I've found it necessary to keep the machine of the 'net and let AdAware and SpyBot have their crack at it first. Otherwise, the poor thing is so badly hammered that you aren't going to be GETTING any patches from Microsoft.
And aren't some of the problems that people have had with XPsp2 blamed on Spyware infestations? So, best thing to do is clean first, then patch.
Now if I can find a way to get a copy of XPsp2 without actually having XP, so I can put it on my keychain drive for friends who still don't have broadband....