There are a few things I like to do to "customize" the system:
1. Switch Start menu to Classic. Unlock taskbar, ungroup similar items, show systray. 2. Switch background to no picture, color black. 3. Change all security options to off and don't remind me they're off. 4. Open IE, download FF. Delete IE from desktop, install FF. 5. Get and install latest motherboard/chipset/video/audio drivers. Set screen res.
At this point, the UI and hardware are set up exactly the way I like them and I consider the install complete. I used to tweak this and that in order to wring out every drop of speed and performance but nowadays I find myself content with just the above. If this is my main machine, then I'll restore all the stuff I backed up prior to the install and then I'll install my favorite apps and games. If this is for a friend/family member/coworker, it's done.
Pretty boring, I know, but my goal is to have the machine back up and running as soon as possible after the install, and I find this does the trick nicely.
Well I'm actually heavily into the BF series, and seeing as how I already have framerate issues with my current setup, I'm loathe to voluntarily experience a reduction. Mind you that I understand that has very little to do with Windows/MSoft and lots to do with EA/DICE/Nvidia; still, the end result is the same.
Because nearly everything I read at the time told me that it would be great for gaming in general. At that point I knew a lot about Windows 98; I knew how to install it and then strip everything out that I didn't need. I was able to bend it to my will, and my upgrade to XP was sort of a culture shock because I didn't know where everything was or how to tweak it just hte way I wanted. I remembered that I wavered between the two for about a month and then just dove all the way in and made myself use the (then) new OS from Redmond. It turned out to be quite an improvement over the Win98SE2 once I figured my way around.
Nowadays I'm still a heavy gamer, and while the thought of having all of my games organized sounds nice, all of the benchmarks I've seen show an actual reduction in framerates and an increase in overhead from Vista. This is also the reason I won't be using a Linux distro as my main OS--I can get some but not all of my games to run on it. Plus I'm now finally running SLI with two 7900GT's, and I can't and don't want to buy a DX10 card at the moment.
I'm moderately skilled and the problems others have had with Vista's install and driver support don't really faze me all that much; but the bottom line for me is that until my favorite games perform better on Vista, I'll be sticking with XP.
Regardless of what retail actually is, the going rate at Best Buy, Walmart, Target, Fry's, and countless other retailers is $20 or less for a standard, new release DVD. I have NEVER paid more than $25 for even a special edition at any of those places. If this is the sector in which B&N hopes to become competative then they're going to have to do something to raise their margins on everything ese they sell.
That said, I go to B&N for books and magazines only.
UNLESS they stop charging up to 50% OVER retail for their CDs and DVDs. Honestly, how do they actually sell that stuff in their brick-and-mortar stores? $30 for regular, non-collector edition DVD's? $18 for the latest Brooks & Dunn CD ($14 at Amazon)? I honestly feel sorry for anyone who buys those there and doesn't know any better...
actual like using SAP? I have yet to come across anyone who does. Sure it works and has lots of neat features but seriously, those of us "in the trenches" who must use it regularly... well I for one would rather pull my hair out than use SAP...
Yeah it's OT but I'm curious. If Oracle DID somehow manage to snap it up, would/could they make it any better?
Yep, nay-sayers be damned, but to think this isn't a big, government corporation undertaking this, wasting our tax dollars with endless beaurocracy. This is the product of back yard and garage tinkerers (albeit several generations removed). Who can't look at that webcast and imagine seeing that for real, in the 1st person, someday? It gave me chills when the curvature of the earth came into the frame. I've seen dozens of rocket launches and shuttle launches, but that was pretty unique. Reminds me of when I was in grade school back in the eighties, watching the shuttles go up.
Regardless of the success or failure of the launch, this is mightily impressive. My hat's off.
I remember waaaay back when, about 1998, I had a Creative Labs S3Savage4 Video card, CD-Rom, Soundblaster, and speakers. It seemed my PC was well on it's way to becoming a CL machine, because I loved their products so much (they just seemed better somehow). Now I only have an Audigy ZS 2 which I just took out because of conflicts with my EVGA 680i... It's such a pretty card though I never even used it's 5.1 output...
Just don't need it when I do much of my gaming a music stuff with a headset. And 5.1 headsets? Meh...
Didn't the Discovery channel or Nova do a show where they modeled the hot spot under Yellowstone and where it's moving in relation to the earth's crust? I seem to recall that computer models showed that the hot spot was moving slowly under the part of the crust that supports the massive thickness of the Rockies and that all of the geothermal activity at the site would slowly "peter out" (my words)?
Predicting a massive super volcanic explosion seems to be FUD... I sure hope, anyhow.
Good point you have there... I guess if murder was a socially acceptable thing and then all of a sudden the powers-that-be tried to ban it, it might make people want to do it more. The only thing is that it is generally accepted that killing other people is bad...
Maybe someone else could argue this better than I.
...that we're being naive if this sort of thing isn't going on already. What with the vast amount of our telecommunications that are already surrepticiously monitored by our government, why are they even bothering with public discourse?
I guess my point would be: how are digital photo uploads any different from any other form of digital media?
On one hand, I find myself thinking, go ahead and look all you like at anything I have put online, I've nothing to hide. On the other hand, this could count on the running (and unfortunately growing) list in my head of things that I used to consider private which now my government would say is not.
Fine, whatever. So long as this sort of thing is only used to fight crime, then I guess I'm all for it. Just don't get all uppity at my anti-establishment fark chops and my uber-leet gaming website forum signatures in Photobucket.
Re:Is tis guy really that unlucky?
on
Is Vista a Trap?
·
· Score: 1
Or was I just lucky? I loaded the free beta on a new hard drive for a while to see what was what. Internet access just worked upon first bootup. My Audigy worked, though I may have had to install drivers, I don't remember. The only serious problem was that the NVidia drivers on my 7900GT were lacking. Switching resolutions had about a 1 in 3 chance of corrupting the screen, forcing a cold reboot. But that's certainly fixable. It's probably even fixed now.
You just described my Ubuntu install of 6.10 a couple months ago. Exactly the same, down to needing 7900GT drivers.
But did I like Vista? No, not really. It was very pretty. And Aero was kinda neat. But once you dive in a few screens you start to notice that most screens and control panel applets look exactly the same and do the exact same thing. There were nice things: The Recycle Bin works across network shares now. It correctly alphabetizes roman numerals. But as fas as any huge "OMG!" feature, no.
That said, though, this article really seemed like FUD unless, as I said, I got lucky.
You can install neat 3d desktop effects on Linux too, but again they kind of get old after a while (at least they did to me) and I didn't need them. I liked the OS in general but not well enough to give up my WinXP partition completely. And just like in Vista, some of your software will not work. In Ubuntu's (and Linux in general) for me this means games. Cedega and Wine are almost there but not quite. My point is, I got to play with and see new eye candy without any closed-source nonsense. It would be an adequate, maybe spiffy even, OS for general office and internet apps. And yes, I too considered myself lucky.:)
In all fairness, at least you don't have to compile binaries or hack the command line to get some stuff to work in Vista... I think.
I had this exact thing happen to my hotmail account of over 4 years. Thing is, all I had in it were rants between me and my now ex-wife, so no big loss. I don't know what I was trying to prove by saving those anyhow...
Sorry for the generalization but with the exception of Fox and the NYT you have to admit that most of the media machine loves to hate on anything that smacks of conservative or right wing goings-on. While I agree that there isn't anything even remotely resembling the hard-hitting journalism of yesteryear in today's society, the "heavy hitters" of news are most often quite polarized. You're either pro or con, and rarely do you see anything reported as pure fact.
Also because the the politcal state of the nation is a hot button item, any story that can be linked to those in power will get way more coverage than stories about the "underdogs". Unless there's another pretty blonde girl who's gone missing, or somebody got stuck on a mountain, or so-and-so had a wardrobe malfuntion...
Here's an excerpt, after he "proves" he's "legit" to the "hackers", they do a test run to see if they have access to his college:
Shouldn't need anything else. Have had a chance to set up a couple of IDS/IPS evasion bots, perimeter scanning came up clean. Small SQL injection issue merged with XSS shows that the backend database may beeither 768-bit encrypted or a simple 3DES matter, but a little more time should take care of that issue. Once the tables are writable to sa, should be ready to jump in and jump out with no problem. One of their systems caught an early sniff, but was shut down with a smurf.
I just LMAO. Oh yeah, and when the media gets wind of this, guess what, he's republican... or at least the guy he works for is. Queue the media's leftist agenda in 3... 2... 1...
(My point is that it could have been anyone but you can bank on the fact that the media will drool all over this if it's legit, heck--sometimes they don't even do that. BTW I'm an independent.)
UNLESS.... it's all a clever ploy to see how easy it is to do such a thing, and the guy was going to expose this, but I think I'm giving him too much credit although maybe if he's smart he can spin it that way...
I won it at GeForce Lan 3. WOOT. I also won 2gb of Corsair XMS2 800MHz memory, a 7900 GT, and a Corsair 620w PSU. I already have a 7900GT so it looks like I finally get to build an SLI system.
Sorry for bragging. Unfortunately it's late and I have to work tomorrow so no system building for me tonight:(
I am so stoked about building this system. I'll be buying a C2D tomorrow to go in it as the best I have right now is a P805D lol.
I'm sorry, when was this? If it was any time in the past ten years, forgive me for missing it as I was abroad, defending the right to do so. Vote, that is. Please tell me when this voting took place.
I just watched the entire video. It brought up an interesting point-why aren't the voters able to um.. vote on which machines they want to use? It goes without saying that this should be a paper ballot vote. Which reminds me. What was wrong with the old method? Oh yes, that was entirely to obfuscating for the general public.
The elections in this country are a farce anyway. And before you get your tighty-whiteys in a bunch, I served for 10 years in the USNavy, protecting the values of our democratic society so don't call me unpatriotic. Makes me sick that the core value in a democracy can so easily be corrupted though, which is one of the reasons I got out.
...of "post-modern". Isn't that some kind of oxymoron? Like, if something really is post-modern, doesn't that mean it's in the future? And since we can't (yet) travel to the future, aren't we just stuck in "modern"? Why not just say, "Web 2.0 is the "future" of the internet?
Meh. I must not nearly exsistential enough to understand this.
Slashdot Mirror
There are a few things I like to do to "customize" the system:
1. Switch Start menu to Classic. Unlock taskbar, ungroup similar items, show systray.
2. Switch background to no picture, color black.
3. Change all security options to off and don't remind me they're off.
4. Open IE, download FF. Delete IE from desktop, install FF.
5. Get and install latest motherboard/chipset/video/audio drivers. Set screen res.
At this point, the UI and hardware are set up exactly the way I like them and I consider the install complete. I used to tweak this and that in order to wring out every drop of speed and performance but nowadays I find myself content with just the above. If this is my main machine, then I'll restore all the stuff I backed up prior to the install and then I'll install my favorite apps and games. If this is for a friend/family member/coworker, it's done.
Pretty boring, I know, but my goal is to have the machine back up and running as soon as possible after the install, and I find this does the trick nicely.
Well I'm actually heavily into the BF series, and seeing as how I already have framerate issues with my current setup, I'm loathe to voluntarily experience a reduction. Mind you that I understand that has very little to do with Windows/MSoft and lots to do with EA/DICE/Nvidia; still, the end result is the same.
Because nearly everything I read at the time told me that it would be great for gaming in general. At that point I knew a lot about Windows 98; I knew how to install it and then strip everything out that I didn't need. I was able to bend it to my will, and my upgrade to XP was sort of a culture shock because I didn't know where everything was or how to tweak it just hte way I wanted. I remembered that I wavered between the two for about a month and then just dove all the way in and made myself use the (then) new OS from Redmond. It turned out to be quite an improvement over the Win98SE2 once I figured my way around.
Nowadays I'm still a heavy gamer, and while the thought of having all of my games organized sounds nice, all of the benchmarks I've seen show an actual reduction in framerates and an increase in overhead from Vista. This is also the reason I won't be using a Linux distro as my main OS--I can get some but not all of my games to run on it. Plus I'm now finally running SLI with two 7900GT's, and I can't and don't want to buy a DX10 card at the moment.
I'm moderately skilled and the problems others have had with Vista's install and driver support don't really faze me all that much; but the bottom line for me is that until my favorite games perform better on Vista, I'll be sticking with XP.
Regardless of what retail actually is, the going rate at Best Buy, Walmart, Target, Fry's, and countless other retailers is $20 or less for a standard, new release DVD. I have NEVER paid more than $25 for even a special edition at any of those places. If this is the sector in which B&N hopes to become competative then they're going to have to do something to raise their margins on everything ese they sell.
That said, I go to B&N for books and magazines only.
UNLESS they stop charging up to 50% OVER retail for their CDs and DVDs. Honestly, how do they actually sell that stuff in their brick-and-mortar stores? $30 for regular, non-collector edition DVD's? $18 for the latest Brooks & Dunn CD ($14 at Amazon)? I honestly feel sorry for anyone who buys those there and doesn't know any better...
actual like using SAP? I have yet to come across anyone who does. Sure it works and has lots of neat features but seriously, those of us "in the trenches" who must use it regularly... well I for one would rather pull my hair out than use SAP...
Yeah it's OT but I'm curious. If Oracle DID somehow manage to snap it up, would/could they make it any better?
Yep, nay-sayers be damned, but to think this isn't a big, government corporation undertaking this, wasting our tax dollars with endless beaurocracy. This is the product of back yard and garage tinkerers (albeit several generations removed). Who can't look at that webcast and imagine seeing that for real, in the 1st person, someday? It gave me chills when the curvature of the earth came into the frame. I've seen dozens of rocket launches and shuttle launches, but that was pretty unique. Reminds me of when I was in grade school back in the eighties, watching the shuttles go up.
Regardless of the success or failure of the launch, this is mightily impressive. My hat's off.
I remember waaaay back when, about 1998, I had a Creative Labs S3Savage4 Video card, CD-Rom, Soundblaster, and speakers. It seemed my PC was well on it's way to becoming a CL machine, because I loved their products so much (they just seemed better somehow). Now I only have an Audigy ZS 2 which I just took out because of conflicts with my EVGA 680i... It's such a pretty card though I never even used it's 5.1 output...
Just don't need it when I do much of my gaming a music stuff with a headset. And 5.1 headsets? Meh...
Didn't the Discovery channel or Nova do a show where they modeled the hot spot under Yellowstone and where it's moving in relation to the earth's crust? I seem to recall that computer models showed that the hot spot was moving slowly under the part of the crust that supports the massive thickness of the Rockies and that all of the geothermal activity at the site would slowly "peter out" (my words)?
Predicting a massive super volcanic explosion seems to be FUD... I sure hope, anyhow.
Good point you have there... I guess if murder was a socially acceptable thing and then all of a sudden the powers-that-be tried to ban it, it might make people want to do it more. The only thing is that it is generally accepted that killing other people is bad...
Maybe someone else could argue this better than I.
Sure, no better way to stop people from wanting something is prohibiting it.
Wait a sec...
how many houses does Al have there?
...that we're being naive if this sort of thing isn't going on already. What with the vast amount of our telecommunications that are already surrepticiously monitored by our government, why are they even bothering with public discourse?
I guess my point would be: how are digital photo uploads any different from any other form of digital media?
On one hand, I find myself thinking, go ahead and look all you like at anything I have put online, I've nothing to hide. On the other hand, this could count on the running (and unfortunately growing) list in my head of things that I used to consider private which now my government would say is not.
Fine, whatever. So long as this sort of thing is only used to fight crime, then I guess I'm all for it. Just don't get all uppity at my anti-establishment fark chops and my uber-leet gaming website forum signatures in Photobucket.
Or was I just lucky? I loaded the free beta on a new hard drive for a while to see what was what. Internet access just worked upon first bootup. My Audigy worked, though I may have had to install drivers, I don't remember. The only serious problem was that the NVidia drivers on my 7900GT were lacking. Switching resolutions had about a 1 in 3 chance of corrupting the screen, forcing a cold reboot. But that's certainly fixable. It's probably even fixed now.
:)
You just described my Ubuntu install of 6.10 a couple months ago. Exactly the same, down to needing 7900GT drivers.
But did I like Vista? No, not really. It was very pretty. And Aero was kinda neat. But once you dive in a few screens you start to notice that most screens and control panel applets look exactly the same and do the exact same thing. There were nice things: The Recycle Bin works across network shares now. It correctly alphabetizes roman numerals. But as fas as any huge "OMG!" feature, no.
That said, though, this article really seemed like FUD unless, as I said, I got lucky.
You can install neat 3d desktop effects on Linux too, but again they kind of get old after a while (at least they did to me) and I didn't need them. I liked the OS in general but not well enough to give up my WinXP partition completely. And just like in Vista, some of your software will not work. In Ubuntu's (and Linux in general) for me this means games. Cedega and Wine are almost there but not quite. My point is, I got to play with and see new eye candy without any closed-source nonsense. It would be an adequate, maybe spiffy even, OS for general office and internet apps. And yes, I too considered myself lucky.
In all fairness, at least you don't have to compile binaries or hack the command line to get some stuff to work in Vista... I think.
I had this exact thing happen to my hotmail account of over 4 years. Thing is, all I had in it were rants between me and my now ex-wife, so no big loss. I don't know what I was trying to prove by saving those anyhow...
Sorry for the generalization but with the exception of Fox and the NYT you have to admit that most of the media machine loves to hate on anything that smacks of conservative or right wing goings-on. While I agree that there isn't anything even remotely resembling the hard-hitting journalism of yesteryear in today's society, the "heavy hitters" of news are most often quite polarized. You're either pro or con, and rarely do you see anything reported as pure fact.
Also because the the politcal state of the nation is a hot button item, any story that can be linked to those in power will get way more coverage than stories about the "underdogs". Unless there's another pretty blonde girl who's gone missing, or somebody got stuck on a mountain, or so-and-so had a wardrobe malfuntion...
Holy cow. This technique actually has a name.... and you knew what it was... I'm in complete awe over here.
:)
(not a troll, simply poking fun)
Here's an excerpt, after he "proves" he's "legit" to the "hackers", they do a test run to see if they have access to his college:
Shouldn't need anything else. Have had a chance to set up a couple of IDS/IPS evasion bots, perimeter scanning came up clean. Small SQL injection issue merged with XSS shows that the backend database may beeither 768-bit encrypted or a simple 3DES matter, but a little more time should take care of that issue. Once the tables are writable to sa, should be ready to jump in and jump out with no problem. One of their systems caught an early sniff, but was shut down with a smurf.
I just LMAO. Oh yeah, and when the media gets wind of this, guess what, he's republican... or at least the guy he works for is. Queue the media's leftist agenda in 3... 2... 1...
(My point is that it could have been anyone but you can bank on the fact that the media will drool all over this if it's legit, heck--sometimes they don't even do that. BTW I'm an independent.)
UNLESS.... it's all a clever ploy to see how easy it is to do such a thing, and the guy was going to expose this, but I think I'm giving him too much credit although maybe if he's smart he can spin it that way...
This is too funny.
they are going to be looking at a lot of before / after pictures now. I'm looking forward to as well. Very interesting.
..the "twins paradox" for some reason. Too bad they can't measure the ages of the "entangled photons"... Or can they?
How is this off topic? Oops, I forgot to say that I won an EVGA 680i SLI. There.
I can't wait to install this board.
I won it at GeForce Lan 3. WOOT. I also won 2gb of Corsair XMS2 800MHz memory, a 7900 GT, and a Corsair 620w PSU. I already have a 7900GT so it looks like I finally get to build an SLI system.
:(
Sorry for bragging. Unfortunately it's late and I have to work tomorrow so no system building for me tonight
I am so stoked about building this system. I'll be buying a C2D tomorrow to go in it as the best I have right now is a P805D lol.
Cheers!
I'm sorry, when was this? If it was any time in the past ten years, forgive me for missing it as I was abroad, defending the right to do so. Vote, that is. Please tell me when this voting took place.
I just watched the entire video. It brought up an interesting point-why aren't the voters able to um.. vote on which machines they want to use? It goes without saying that this should be a paper ballot vote. Which reminds me. What was wrong with the old method? Oh yes, that was entirely to obfuscating for the general public.
The elections in this country are a farce anyway. And before you get your tighty-whiteys in a bunch, I served for 10 years in the USNavy, protecting the values of our democratic society so don't call me unpatriotic. Makes me sick that the core value in a democracy can so easily be corrupted though, which is one of the reasons I got out.
...of "post-modern". Isn't that some kind of oxymoron? Like, if something really is post-modern, doesn't that mean it's in the future? And since we can't (yet) travel to the future, aren't we just stuck in "modern"? Why not just say, "Web 2.0 is the "future" of the internet?
Meh. I must not nearly exsistential enough to understand this.