The M16 was supposed to be "self-cleaning", therefore, no cleaning kits were issued. But it needed them even more because the ammunition had its propellant changed at the last minute into something that gunked up the works even faster.
I'm looking forward to them resolving the bit where the *nix Firefox builds performed slower than the win32 builds, supposedly due to Profile Guided Optimizations in javascript:
Actually, I think the horde in Left4Dead is a large part of the success of its formula... it's the first fps I've seen with a good crunchy shoot-'em-up factor, at least one that relative noobs can engage in.
As for me, I've never been into any kind of horror game prior to Left4Dead. (Ostensibly, I'm still not, since more often than not I find myself pretending that the horde are just normal folk -- there's something about shooting into the crowd that satiates the anti-social tendencies in me.)
Mrr, all this talk of naval warfare sort of makes me want to play EVE.
Except that EVE is pretty terrible at doing any kind of tactical combat (the best description I've read is that EVE is basically paper-rock-scissors in space).
They're being vague because they (reporters, editors, advertisers, hell just about everybody) probably have a lot of money in Cisco in their stock portfolio. If it was good news that would bump stocks up they probably would have called it out.
It's actually kinda amazing how much stock prices are tied to news releases. Remember that earlier story about how Google news somehow picked up an outdated news report with bad news on an airliner, and a whole bunch of automated wall street scripts started dumping stock in that airline which led to a panicked run on that stock which ultimately took out a big fraction of the stock value? Yeah, interesting times:P
Thanks for sharing, I like seeing other people's lists like this.
I'm still holding on to my Palm TX (with a failing touchscreen)... haven't really seen equivalents for everything I like to have on me (whether I use them or not) on any other platform yet.
On sites you do for fun, simply don't use your real name. All your real friends have cute/clever codenames / nicknames for you anyway, right?
Create a few web pages under your real name (esp. if you have a relatively unique one), and make sure it comes up above anything else. That way, you control what prospective employers might dig up on you through casual searching. My web pages are just a few things about my kids and a few interesting hobbies I've pursued over the decades... come to think if it, they pretty much look like my resume, except with pictures and links to more detail.
I've never used LinkedIn, so no comment there. Several larger corps seem to be setting up their own internal LinkedIn equivalents, though, so exercising those might be a good and relatively safe way to move around and network within your company.
I think most of my job leads have come in through monster.com and other, more traditional, less social networky sites. The nice thing is that I can maintain profiles there, but control whether it pops up or not in employer searches depending on whether I'm looking for work.
I don't really believe in "computer augmented" social networking, though... call me old-school, but I don't really see much point to Facebook and the ilk beyond entertainment value. They're great for keeping tabs on people you already know, but meeting someone in meatspace and physically shaking their hand and talking about random things for a few minutes gets you way more "interpersonal connectivity points" than having some degree of friend-of-a-friend connectedness or other paper stats.
We use Camstudio (newer versions of VLC can do this too) to record videos of us doing common tasks, and publish to a server. This makes it a breeze to document a lot of simple stuff like "how to open a PuTTY session" that would otherwise be really time-consuming to write and insert and annotate screenshots. This leaves more time to document things that really need documenting, and immediately quashes all those complaints about instructions being hard to follow from people who can't find an icon or menu entry or whatever.
The other thing we do is create shortcut scripts and macros using AutoHotKey or xbindkeys that simplify otherwise complex tasks. This reduces a lot of small repetitive tasks into "run this script", which both simplifies the task itself in addition to making the documentation much shorter and less error-prone.
Of course, while I'm doing this I find it hard to keep myself from chanting the mantra: "go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script" to myself...
Well, I wouldn't do this for money, because I'm not that kind of guy... but I'd burn a bunch of ClusterKNOPPIX CDs / DVDs (or whatever the useful equivalent is nowadays) and have them work on cranking out HD videos of winners of the past Internet Raytracing Competitions from the past decade or so.
I always thought that the one feature that Satellite Radio should have provided (but did not) was actually to offer limited internet data service. For example, they could have a data channel that occasionally broadcasts the updated contents of major websites, such as cnn.com, weather.com, hell maybe even slashdot and twitter, etc... whatever people were interested in "subscribing to" when they happened to have full internet or phone connectivity. Their device would just need to set up a little web proxy configured to cache the updates you're interested in, and voila... you've got "good enough" internet news, weather, and updates to a laptop or set-top or PDA in remote locations for much cheaper than other forms of 2-way internet access.
People (like me) pretty much do something similar to this using AvantGo / Plucker for "time shifted" web browsing... I'd love a way for my Plucker database to be refreshed while I was out in the bush. But obviously these types of users are probably more technical than the Sat Radio's target market.
Thanks for the plug, I just tried flycast and it appears to work pretty well, even while driving.
I never "got" the need for satellite radio... Why go through all the trouble of setting up a realtime broadcast system and pump through pre-recorded stuff? It wasn't even killed by the iPod... at least on an MP3 player you can create your own mix and shuffle to your favorite songs. What satellite radio competes with was the tape cassette... I used to record radio shows on tape so I could listen to something on long driving trips. Even now I "time-shift" internet radio to CD-Rs to take with me in rental cars.
I have been in one or two rental cars with satellite radio. It was a little bit neat until we drove into the mountains. We actually gave up on tuning into the signals in the foothills.
If there was 1 thing that really broke any allure of satellite radio for me... it was tuning into Prairie Home Companion and finding the sat feed to be in low quality monoaural while the FM broadcast of the show sounded much better in stereo. Silly people who think NPR is "talk" radio...
Anyway, I'm really looking forward to HD Radio taking off, but apparently because of some stupid patent issue, the tuners are very expensive, and you simply cannot buy a portable unit or even a USB tuner for your PC/laptop. Also the low-quality "talk" radio quality thing probably affects HD Radio as well.
Yeah, they don't really consider it "piracy"... they usually bought it from a store off a shelf. They do realize that it's quite a bit cheaper (1/5 to just over the price of blank media) than what other countries might be paying for it.
Places to buy "official" software practically have no presence or visibility in any marketplace. And if they did have a store, the locals would just laugh at how ridiculous the pricing was.
Incidentally, people are much more sensitive to "market" prices. For example, when Nintendo releases a game, it doesn't sell for a fixed price, but rather by some kind of composite of materials complexity (e.g. 1MB vs. 4MB ROMS in old Famicom carts, which was actually listed as a "feature" on the box!) and how popular the game is on the charts, and of course traditional supply/demand of commodities. Only in the U.S. have I seen so much corporate and marketing-based price fixing, where a lame game based on a movie debuts at $40, and then maybe goes in the bargain bin for $20 some years later. The concept that some product (especially "dated" things like books and software) could have a fixed price is still somewhat alien to the East.
Walk into a mall and there are no "legit" software stores. You still buy your software, there are stands and small storefronts all over the place filled with shiny boxes and jewel cases.
Short term solution is just buy legit copies of what they have installed and send it to them, so at least they have the licenses and CDkeys available, might help you get some leniency if the BSA or someone decides to come down on you. And then work to clean up the mess and get them aligned with IT / accounting standards.
As far as the cultural aspects, they will never understand... it is much more convenient to install and run things through the "pirate" distribution channels, which have usually cleaned out the annoyances of product activation and click-through EULAs and all that other crap that US software companies subject us to. Also they wouldn't stand for software with half of the additional-cost features locked out, even if they are features they'd never use.
On the other hand, this mentality makes them particularly amenable to adapting open source software, since they tend to be technically proficient enough to learn new ways of doing things, and really appreciate and expect not to have to deal with licensing hurdles and DRM. All you have really need to do is convince them that the open source software is technologically superior, which in most cases isn't too terribly difficult.
Well, so I rushed out and bought an Eee901 for my wife for about $550. I'd say it's about the "sweet spot" for their netbook line. They're about the same size as the 7" models but make better use of the screen real estate, yet smaller than the 10" models, which seem a tad too big and don't offer any extra screen resolution for it.
Anyway, you all remember what fanfare that piece was released with. But a few months later they quietly started selling the stripped-down version of the Eee901 (with 512MB of RAM instead of 1GB and 4GB of SSD instead of 16-20GB) for only $300 at places like Target and Walmart, even in the Linux flavors to boot. And it's ridiculously easy cheap and easy to upgrade the RAM (up to 2GB if you replace the stock OS - I'm liking eeebuntu) and storage (add as a big SD and as many USB drives as you like).
So it seems to me that Asus has a strategy of doing lots of press releases for their high-end models and scalping the rich tech boys to pay off the engineering costs, but then selling the very competitive stripped-down version at the mainstream retail outlets to get volume.
So anyway, keep a lookout for these cheap stripped-down pieces they sell to the "low end market"... I'm already planning my Eeebot army.
So it's been a while (like a decade) since I've used Citrix for work, but I'm pretty sure I hated it. Same thing with Exceed (performance and reliability really sucked compared to running cygwin+Xorg or even VNC).
I haven't been able to figure out from their website exactly what Project Independence is... though a link on the sidebar looks like it involves the Xen hypervisor. I think Xen is a good idea, I just haven't had any awesome experiences with it.
I do have lots of experience doing more or less exactly the same thing using the free VMware, VirtualBox, and qemu software. Those work great.
I run my "Work image" inside VMware, since I don't have or want all that much control over it. It's also a 32-bit WinXP image, and I'd rather run a 64-bit OS on the bare hardware. I use VirtuaWin to switch back and forth between the full-screen VMware guest session and the native Win2003 x64 Server running on my work laptop. That works pretty nice, though it took some experimentation to keep it from thrashing the pagefile with the VMware guest too much.
I still find VMware relatively cumbersome to install on Linux, so on those machines I much prefer running VirtualBox, which has simple Debian packages. I have WinXP and CentOS images there to run a few proprietary software packages that don't run under Debian for some silly reason.
Qemu is great for running and remastering KNOPPIX CDs / DVDs. It's a bit slower than the others, but much more straightforward.
FWIW, I just started playing with the Win7 Beta last week, and didn't think it was all that bad (I have actually never touched Vista). I think the transition from WinXP to Win7 will be easier than from Win3.11 to Win95 and also even from Win95 to WinXP; but maybe that's just because MS has trained me to expect it to be so much more painful:P But I didn't have too much of an issue with where they rearranged important control panel items and munged up the start menu this time.
My greatest complaint is that I can't make the "Start" icon smaller than 64x64 to shrink the size of the taskbar.
I've done some quick benchmarks on identical hardware using PerformanceTest.
Yeah, 64-bit executables are a bit bigger than 32-bit executables, so they take marginally longer to load from the disk. That's probably why you're confused.
But looking at the benchmarks, integer operations are much faster (2-3x), floating point and memory operations are a bit faster (10-20%), and disk access is marginally faster (5%-10%). There was no difference on memory writes for some reason.
There was no difference on 2D or 3D video card performance, but PerformanceTest still used 32-bit routines for that sequence of tests at the time.
Yep, exact same kernel and everything. On XP x64, I hear there's even a properties page somewhere that still says "Windows 2003 Server x64" (maybe it was even the sidebar of the start menu).
I wouldn't know firsthand, since I actually run Windows 2003 Server x64 on my laptop.
Hmm, that's lame... but I have to admit I have the same problem with the Gnome menu and quicklaunch icons.
Since I mostly use widescreens, I typically move taskbars to the left edge of the screen and shrink them down as small as possible so I just have one column of small icons, that way it takes much less screen area.
As a side affect, the menu is much more natural to navigate (well, except for the fact that they moved "All Programs" to the bottom to make it easier for people who use the brain-dead default).
But the taskbar is also much less cluttered, since every open program just takes one icon and they're all the same size. I can easily mouseover or temporarily enlarge the taskbar to read the window title. They're not juggling around in a mess of automatic resizing like they do when the taskbar is at the top or bottom of the screen. I also have enough room left so I can display all the notification icons so they don't randomly hide from me, and still have room left over for a generous set of quicklaunch icons.
Only downside is that I can't read the entire clock display without a mouseover, but that's why I have a watch, dammit.
Thanks... it's had the run of my laptop for over a week, though, so I'd just as soon flatten the system and reinstall under a VM... that might also fix the Windows Media Player making Windows 7 hang as well.
I haven't figured out how to enable any of the glitzy GPU effects under Windows 7, so I guess I won't miss them by running it as a VM.
Slashdot Mirror
The M16 was supposed to be "self-cleaning", therefore, no cleaning kits were issued. But it needed them even more because the ammunition had its propellant changed at the last minute into something that gunked up the works even faster.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_AK-47_and_M16#Reliability
Your government contractors in action.
I dunno, I've never even seen an explanation of how to do this. Even on the Swiftfox / Swiftweasel pages, both of which make no mention of PGO.
Anyone on a Gentoo box want to chime in? :P
Not to mention they tend to be awesome at handling the metric system:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28768
I'm looking forward to them resolving the bit where the *nix Firefox builds performed slower than the win32 builds, supposedly due to Profile Guided Optimizations in javascript:
http://www.tuxradar.com/content/benchmarked-firefox-javascript-linux-and-windows-and-its-not-pretty
LSL is the counterpoint... these games were full of fail, and yet there was always a happy ending.
And they produced what, half a dozen sequels to it? Well, I'm including the missing one.
Actually, I think the horde in Left4Dead is a large part of the success of its formula... it's the first fps I've seen with a good crunchy shoot-'em-up factor, at least one that relative noobs can engage in.
As for me, I've never been into any kind of horror game prior to Left4Dead. (Ostensibly, I'm still not, since more often than not I find myself pretending that the horde are just normal folk -- there's something about shooting into the crowd that satiates the anti-social tendencies in me.)
Mrr, all this talk of naval warfare sort of makes me want to play EVE.
Except that EVE is pretty terrible at doing any kind of tactical combat (the best description I've read is that EVE is basically paper-rock-scissors in space).
This is just a test
Vendor B is Cisco btw.
Dunno why they were being vague.
They're being vague because they (reporters, editors, advertisers, hell just about everybody) probably have a lot of money in Cisco in their stock portfolio. If it was good news that would bump stocks up they probably would have called it out.
It's actually kinda amazing how much stock prices are tied to news releases. Remember that earlier story about how Google news somehow picked up an outdated news report with bad news on an airliner, and a whole bunch of automated wall street scripts started dumping stock in that airline which led to a panicked run on that stock which ultimately took out a big fraction of the stock value? Yeah, interesting times :P
Thanks for sharing, I like seeing other people's lists like this.
I'm still holding on to my Palm TX (with a failing touchscreen)... haven't really seen equivalents for everything I like to have on me (whether I use them or not) on any other platform yet.
On sites you do for fun, simply don't use your real name. All your real friends have cute/clever codenames / nicknames for you anyway, right?
Create a few web pages under your real name (esp. if you have a relatively unique one), and make sure it comes up above anything else. That way, you control what prospective employers might dig up on you through casual searching. My web pages are just a few things about my kids and a few interesting hobbies I've pursued over the decades... come to think if it, they pretty much look like my resume, except with pictures and links to more detail.
I've never used LinkedIn, so no comment there. Several larger corps seem to be setting up their own internal LinkedIn equivalents, though, so exercising those might be a good and relatively safe way to move around and network within your company.
I think most of my job leads have come in through monster.com and other, more traditional, less social networky sites. The nice thing is that I can maintain profiles there, but control whether it pops up or not in employer searches depending on whether I'm looking for work.
I don't really believe in "computer augmented" social networking, though... call me old-school, but I don't really see much point to Facebook and the ilk beyond entertainment value. They're great for keeping tabs on people you already know, but meeting someone in meatspace and physically shaking their hand and talking about random things for a few minutes gets you way more "interpersonal connectivity points" than having some degree of friend-of-a-friend connectedness or other paper stats.
We use Camstudio (newer versions of VLC can do this too) to record videos of us doing common tasks, and publish to a server. This makes it a breeze to document a lot of simple stuff like "how to open a PuTTY session" that would otherwise be really time-consuming to write and insert and annotate screenshots. This leaves more time to document things that really need documenting, and immediately quashes all those complaints about instructions being hard to follow from people who can't find an icon or menu entry or whatever.
The other thing we do is create shortcut scripts and macros using AutoHotKey or xbindkeys that simplify otherwise complex tasks. This reduces a lot of small repetitive tasks into "run this script", which both simplifies the task itself in addition to making the documentation much shorter and less error-prone.
Of course, while I'm doing this I find it hard to keep myself from chanting the mantra: "go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script" to myself...
Well, I wouldn't do this for money, because I'm not that kind of guy... but I'd burn a bunch of ClusterKNOPPIX CDs / DVDs (or whatever the useful equivalent is nowadays) and have them work on cranking out HD videos of winners of the past Internet Raytracing Competitions from the past decade or so.
http://www.irtc.org/
Hey, liked your post.
I always thought that the one feature that Satellite Radio should have provided (but did not) was actually to offer limited internet data service. For example, they could have a data channel that occasionally broadcasts the updated contents of major websites, such as cnn.com, weather.com, hell maybe even slashdot and twitter, etc... whatever people were interested in "subscribing to" when they happened to have full internet or phone connectivity. Their device would just need to set up a little web proxy configured to cache the updates you're interested in, and voila... you've got "good enough" internet news, weather, and updates to a laptop or set-top or PDA in remote locations for much cheaper than other forms of 2-way internet access.
People (like me) pretty much do something similar to this using AvantGo / Plucker for "time shifted" web browsing... I'd love a way for my Plucker database to be refreshed while I was out in the bush. But obviously these types of users are probably more technical than the Sat Radio's target market.
Thanks for the plug, I just tried flycast and it appears to work pretty well, even while driving.
I never "got" the need for satellite radio... Why go through all the trouble of setting up a realtime broadcast system and pump through pre-recorded stuff? It wasn't even killed by the iPod... at least on an MP3 player you can create your own mix and shuffle to your favorite songs. What satellite radio competes with was the tape cassette... I used to record radio shows on tape so I could listen to something on long driving trips. Even now I "time-shift" internet radio to CD-Rs to take with me in rental cars.
I have been in one or two rental cars with satellite radio. It was a little bit neat until we drove into the mountains. We actually gave up on tuning into the signals in the foothills.
If there was 1 thing that really broke any allure of satellite radio for me... it was tuning into Prairie Home Companion and finding the sat feed to be in low quality monoaural while the FM broadcast of the show sounded much better in stereo. Silly people who think NPR is "talk" radio...
Anyway, I'm really looking forward to HD Radio taking off, but apparently because of some stupid patent issue, the tuners are very expensive, and you simply cannot buy a portable unit or even a USB tuner for your PC/laptop. Also the low-quality "talk" radio quality thing probably affects HD Radio as well.
Yeah, they don't really consider it "piracy"... they usually bought it from a store off a shelf. They do realize that it's quite a bit cheaper (1/5 to just over the price of blank media) than what other countries might be paying for it.
Places to buy "official" software practically have no presence or visibility in any marketplace. And if they did have a store, the locals would just laugh at how ridiculous the pricing was.
Incidentally, people are much more sensitive to "market" prices. For example, when Nintendo releases a game, it doesn't sell for a fixed price, but rather by some kind of composite of materials complexity (e.g. 1MB vs. 4MB ROMS in old Famicom carts, which was actually listed as a "feature" on the box!) and how popular the game is on the charts, and of course traditional supply/demand of commodities. Only in the U.S. have I seen so much corporate and marketing-based price fixing, where a lame game based on a movie debuts at $40, and then maybe goes in the bargain bin for $20 some years later. The concept that some product (especially "dated" things like books and software) could have a fixed price is still somewhat alien to the East.
Walk into a mall and there are no "legit" software stores. You still buy your software, there are stands and small storefronts all over the place filled with shiny boxes and jewel cases.
Short term solution is just buy legit copies of what they have installed and send it to them, so at least they have the licenses and CDkeys available, might help you get some leniency if the BSA or someone decides to come down on you. And then work to clean up the mess and get them aligned with IT / accounting standards.
As far as the cultural aspects, they will never understand... it is much more convenient to install and run things through the "pirate" distribution channels, which have usually cleaned out the annoyances of product activation and click-through EULAs and all that other crap that US software companies subject us to. Also they wouldn't stand for software with half of the additional-cost features locked out, even if they are features they'd never use.
On the other hand, this mentality makes them particularly amenable to adapting open source software, since they tend to be technically proficient enough to learn new ways of doing things, and really appreciate and expect not to have to deal with licensing hurdles and DRM. All you have really need to do is convince them that the open source software is technologically superior, which in most cases isn't too terribly difficult.
I still think the "joynipple" has a nicer ring to it, and more accurately represents the mechanics and feel of how it actually works.
Well, so I rushed out and bought an Eee901 for my wife for about $550. I'd say it's about the "sweet spot" for their netbook line. They're about the same size as the 7" models but make better use of the screen real estate, yet smaller than the 10" models, which seem a tad too big and don't offer any extra screen resolution for it.
Anyway, you all remember what fanfare that piece was released with. But a few months later they quietly started selling the stripped-down version of the Eee901 (with 512MB of RAM instead of 1GB and 4GB of SSD instead of 16-20GB) for only $300 at places like Target and Walmart, even in the Linux flavors to boot. And it's ridiculously easy cheap and easy to upgrade the RAM (up to 2GB if you replace the stock OS - I'm liking eeebuntu) and storage (add as a big SD and as many USB drives as you like).
So it seems to me that Asus has a strategy of doing lots of press releases for their high-end models and scalping the rich tech boys to pay off the engineering costs, but then selling the very competitive stripped-down version at the mainstream retail outlets to get volume.
So anyway, keep a lookout for these cheap stripped-down pieces they sell to the "low end market"... I'm already planning my Eeebot army.
So it's been a while (like a decade) since I've used Citrix for work, but I'm pretty sure I hated it. Same thing with Exceed (performance and reliability really sucked compared to running cygwin+Xorg or even VNC).
I haven't been able to figure out from their website exactly what Project Independence is... though a link on the sidebar looks like it involves the Xen hypervisor. I think Xen is a good idea, I just haven't had any awesome experiences with it.
I do have lots of experience doing more or less exactly the same thing using the free VMware, VirtualBox, and qemu software. Those work great.
I run my "Work image" inside VMware, since I don't have or want all that much control over it. It's also a 32-bit WinXP image, and I'd rather run a 64-bit OS on the bare hardware. I use VirtuaWin to switch back and forth between the full-screen VMware guest session and the native Win2003 x64 Server running on my work laptop. That works pretty nice, though it took some experimentation to keep it from thrashing the pagefile with the VMware guest too much.
I still find VMware relatively cumbersome to install on Linux, so on those machines I much prefer running VirtualBox, which has simple Debian packages. I have WinXP and CentOS images there to run a few proprietary software packages that don't run under Debian for some silly reason.
Qemu is great for running and remastering KNOPPIX CDs / DVDs. It's a bit slower than the others, but much more straightforward.
FWIW, I just started playing with the Win7 Beta last week, and didn't think it was all that bad (I have actually never touched Vista). I think the transition from WinXP to Win7 will be easier than from Win3.11 to Win95 and also even from Win95 to WinXP; but maybe that's just because MS has trained me to expect it to be so much more painful :P But I didn't have too much of an issue with where they rearranged important control panel items and munged up the start menu this time.
My greatest complaint is that I can't make the "Start" icon smaller than 64x64 to shrink the size of the taskbar.
I've done some quick benchmarks on identical hardware using PerformanceTest.
Yeah, 64-bit executables are a bit bigger than 32-bit executables, so they take marginally longer to load from the disk. That's probably why you're confused.
But looking at the benchmarks, integer operations are much faster (2-3x), floating point and memory operations are a bit faster (10-20%), and disk access is marginally faster (5%-10%). There was no difference on memory writes for some reason.
There was no difference on 2D or 3D video card performance, but PerformanceTest still used 32-bit routines for that sequence of tests at the time.
Yep, exact same kernel and everything. On XP x64, I hear there's even a properties page somewhere that still says "Windows 2003 Server x64" (maybe it was even the sidebar of the start menu).
I wouldn't know firsthand, since I actually run Windows 2003 Server x64 on my laptop.
http://www.osnews.com/story/3655
It's OK, but I should disable the comment I'm forced to write for the log every time I want to shutdown or reboot.
Hmm, that's lame... but I have to admit I have the same problem with the Gnome menu and quicklaunch icons.
Since I mostly use widescreens, I typically move taskbars to the left edge of the screen and shrink them down as small as possible so I just have one column of small icons, that way it takes much less screen area.
As a side affect, the menu is much more natural to navigate (well, except for the fact that they moved "All Programs" to the bottom to make it easier for people who use the brain-dead default).
But the taskbar is also much less cluttered, since every open program just takes one icon and they're all the same size. I can easily mouseover or temporarily enlarge the taskbar to read the window title. They're not juggling around in a mess of automatic resizing like they do when the taskbar is at the top or bottom of the screen. I also have enough room left so I can display all the notification icons so they don't randomly hide from me, and still have room left over for a generous set of quicklaunch icons.
Only downside is that I can't read the entire clock display without a mouseover, but that's why I have a watch, dammit.
Well, that goes without saying. After all, I'm hanging out here on the internet with people like you :P
Thanks... it's had the run of my laptop for over a week, though, so I'd just as soon flatten the system and reinstall under a VM... that might also fix the Windows Media Player making Windows 7 hang as well.
I haven't figured out how to enable any of the glitzy GPU effects under Windows 7, so I guess I won't miss them by running it as a VM.