Thanks for the info. I'll print it out and take a look at it. I've got to work out a way to get my doctor to take me seriously without thinking the problem is hypercondria or otherwise being categorised as difficult. In the long run I think another doctor is the only way.
My symptoms are very different to yours from what I can tell. With me it's bouts of extreme constipation and extreme bend over double stomach cramps. These will last for a week or so, subside, then return days or weeks later. It feels like I'm obstructed when it happens. I can't predict when it will happen. However I can't function when it does - I have to miss work and I can't go anywhere because I can't think of too many places where someone who's cramping so badly he's swearing is accepted. The worst bout I had nothing was passing - not even wind but. (I did have wind coming out my mouth. Thankfully no fecal smell. I really thought I was going to end up in a hospital. I had nothing but fluids for about 5 days, and even that was painful.)
What's even stranger is that at the end of that really bad bout I ate like a complete pig and get this, my stomach was fine. My wife has extreme food allergies (onion, garlic, spices) that can result in anaphylactic episodes even with trace amounts (Airways close up and she stops breathing) so I don't normally eat any takeout as the thought of being posionous to and potentially killing my partner because I ate something tasty doesn't sit well. Anyway to get over my bout I'd already (with her approval) had stuff that made me toxic to her - in this case cups of instant soup. So before I returned to a diet that's not toxic to my wife she agreed to one extra day of me eating junk. Well I was famished. In about 6 hours I ate 4 big Macs, and 3 foot long Subway BMTs. I was just fine. No cramps. No constipation. I shouldn't have done it of course but being spoken to condescendingly by the doctor about a lack of fibre in my diet or me eating the wrong things, or not chewing or whatever else nonsense (when I've not changed eating habbits) just irritates me.
Anyway good luck finding a diagnosis and thanks again for the info.
I always wondered why they didn't just call it Windows 7 or whatever code name and then distribute it with application packs, which would include application packs such as: server app pack home/media app pack basics/offic app pack
- Making it clear means you can't sell software people don't need to them (at extra cost of course). You can't justify hundreds of dollars on the basic OS if it doesn't come with paint and calc and 30 services people don't understand but can be told they absolutely need if they want something they do actually want to work.
- Most people want it to be simple to buy and start using a computer. Preferably switch on the computer and away you go. Even filling in the few details they do - ones that require no thought or computer knowledge, like name and address - is perceived as a hassle.
- If the average joe did understand how much crap was there under the hood they'd be horrified. Why make it clearer to them?
A horrible misrepresentation of a text like that'll garner you a C- at best by anyone who has actually read the book
You new here? We don't even have the patience to read an article, let alone a book. As for that C- we're use to getting them after spending too much time on/.
You have an All Terrain Vehicle that requires 3.6 GW??? It must be way better than that crummy Delorian that uses 1.21 GW. Does it go further back in time too?
My family doctor retired this year and my current doctor isn't going to work for anything. My specialist did scope me and tested me for coeliacs (blood test only, though he offered to go do my throat). I certainly haven't been tested for vitamin deficiencies nor had blood counts done. Can you please provide me with more info on the tests you were given and your likely diagnosis? I've suggested blood tests to my doctor and she didn't think them necessary...really do need to find someone better.
- prolonged sitting on the toilet isn't good for your bowels if you're not actually going the whole time - if you have enough time to read while you go (i.e. the action takes that long) there's something wrong with your diet
As someone who's just been diagnosed with Irritable Bowel, let me just say that while it's good to let people know there's a danger to behaving in a certain way (eg. sitting on the toilet for too long) it's not always possible to avoid that behaviour. The entire medical profession sometimes feels like a bunch of unhelpful know-it-alls with no first hand experience of a problem giving you simple solutions that don't work in the real world then blaming you for being unable to implement them.
Modifying my diet has done nothing for me. When I eat healthy I sometimes end up in agony doubled over. Other times I pig out - eating twice as much food and all takeaway - and I'm just fine. (Usually with my wife out of town. She has life threatening food allergies so the only time I eat these foods is if I have no contact with her. Long story.) The idea that my IBS symptoms are due to a lack of fibre in my diet is a sad joke. At best there are food related triggers that I haven't worked out yet, but I can tell you they're not foods sold by some of the biggest junk food chains in the country.
If you insist on asking a question I guess you could ask 'Do we really want to fund the LHC?'.
I'm all for you funding it. I don't live in a country that contributes, so it's not my coin. Fund it all you like. If I thought you were going to be destroying the planet with it I'd be against it, but I don't.
I think that pretty much sums up the way that the scientists on these kind of projects really think about these things, and I find it reassuring. They are just as unenthusiastic about the prospect disappearing into nothingness as you are. They are smarter than me. They are also almost certainly smarter than you. If they are comfortable enough to joke/make bets then I'm not worried.
They are smarter than you. You don't even understand the difference between smart and infallible.
You realise of course that even though there isn't a formal expert review process at Wikipedia, the project is *loaded* with experts. You can barely move without tripping over a Ph.D. Hence Wikipedia's other name, "Unemployed Ph.D Death Match."
Also explains the wide variety of rules selectively employed to completely reject anything that doesn't meet with a moderator's approval. They're use to academia where everyone protects their own patch of turf and the official truth is more about who's views you're aligned with than the truth.
Well Jorge, first of all you take a swipe at Google for respecting the very encyclopedia that you yourself are tacitly acknowledging is at least somewhat superior (by imitating it). Then you show just how PROFOUNDLY out of touch you are by insisting that your changes will require editorial review (unless you're about to expand your editorial staff with thousands of new hires, you must not be expecting much participation).
Bingo! They aren't expecting much participation. When you contribute to Wikipedia you're contributing to a freely accessible resource run by a non-profit. People can justify spending time improving such an animal. Contrast this with Britannica which, apart from behaving badly in this instance, charges for access and suddenly the prospect of contributing to Britannica means I've gone from contributing to the public good to contributing to some jackass company's revenue. One that belittles the contribution no less.
1. Check your event log. Look at both application and security event logs in event viewer. See if there is any correlation between logged events and slowdown. Check if you're getting any Hard Disk or IO errors.
2. If you're running Alcohol or Daemon Tools check to see if they're loading images at startup across the network. If they are unmount the images. Remember your
3. Unplug all your USB devices and reboot. A faulty USB device can and will cause lockups, slowdowns and crashes.
4. Unplug your network (as suggested by another slashdotter). If slowdowns increase, some piece of software is holding onto a file across the network and when it becomes unavailable Windows will sit there waiting for it to return until a timeout.
5. Another slashdotter suggested checking your drives with a SMART utility. Great idea. Also run chkdsk on each partition. Also run memtest86 or similar to test system memory. Any hardware diagnostic software that came with your motherboard or system should also be run. If nothing came with your system find a freeware hardware diagnostic program.
6. Procmon's was suggested by another slashdotter. Another great tool. Before you learn to use it though display all the columns in your standard task manager process list. Look at what's using the most resources. Not just CPU. Look at memory, file handles, and GDI objects in particular but also threads and look at what's doing IO.
7. Start up in safe mode with networking. See if you still have a problem.
8. Use msconfig to disable programs run at startup and reboot. See if that fixes the problem. If it does, slowly re-enable software in small groups until you narrow down which processes are the cultprits
9. If you're concerned about malware run netstat -o after a fresh boot and see if your PC is making any connections to weird sources. Also run hijackthis!
10. If you're overclocking, turn off the overclock and see if that fixes it. Even if you're not overclocking, resetting your BIOS to defaults can weird and wonderful bugs. (I once had a memory pool leak on my laptop that would crash it after at most 24 hours and a BIOS reset was the only thing that worked in the end). See if there are any BIOS updates for your motherboard but be aware that a BIOS upgrade is a risk. Make sure you can revert and make sure you don't do it if you don't have reliable power.
11. Switch off the machine. Open up the case and carefully clean your CPU and GPU heatsink and any other accumulated dust. Dust can accumulate and increase the temp of the CPU, making it flakey. Make sure you know what you're doing so you don't hose the machine. Plenty of info online but if you're unsure get a more hardware savvy friend to help.
12. If you have a video card to swap in, try that. I've seen bad video cards cause all sorts of instability.
If none of the above helps, at some point you'll need to cut your losses and start fresh. Reinstalling even a monster of a system will only take a few man days of effort whereas troubleshooting a hosed config is open ended. If you're spending too much time and your system isn't usable, rebuild it.
Sure you could. If you went to the batting cages and practiced hitting the ball over and over again at steadily increasing speeds, you would eventually be able to hit a fast ball. Now all you have to do is play baseball in little league, high school, and maybe college. All it takes is getting noticed at that point.
Tell that to the thousands of men whose desperate dream it is to play pro ball that don't make it.
In any case you know nothing about me or my physical ability. You're dillusional if you think everyone's able to become a pro baseball player and all it takes is practice.
Obviously if you're over 25 or 30 you couldn't become a pro baseball player now, but you probably couldn't switch gears into any other profession that wasn't close to your own at this point either. The point is that if you start at a young enough age, you can in fact become anything you want as long you keep trying.
Stop watching Disney films would you? The reality is you are presented with opportunities in life and if you try very hard you'll succeed at SOME of your dreams. Now it's true that you can sometimes position yourself so more opportunities come your way but you don't always get to do that. For example want to be U.S. President? Well if you weren't born in the U.S. you'd have to get the constitution changed. Is that possible? Perhaps, but it's not entirely in your control - you can try very hard but still be unable to get the law changed. Another example: Your odds of becoming an astronaut or a nuclear physicist if you grew up in a nation that has no space program are greatly diminished.
I mean, you didn't just wake up one day as a sys admin did you?
No. In fact I've never woken up a sys admin. I've never worked as a sys admin in my life. More false assumptions on your part.
the poing was and still is that using the registry editor is for the average person as confusing as using vi(m).
No it most definitely is not.
In order for someone to (properly) understand what they are doing while using regedit,
If you're asking them to change a key in the registry they don't need that kind of detail at all. To use a car analogy not every driver needs to be a mechanic.
They need to know: 1) How to start regedit. 2) How to navigate to a particular key. 3) How to export a portion of the registry and how to load it back if they need to revert. 4) How to modify an existing key. 5) How to create a new key.
Each of the above can be described in a few lines of text.
Now as for vi....you NEED: 1) Know how to start it 2) To know and understand the different modes. There are more involved concepts here than what a registry key is. 3) Know and memorize a couple of dozen key commands.
3 is the killer and makes vi much harder. With the registry editor you don't need to memorize obscure key bindings. The menus are right there staring the user in the face.
So, do you still think that regedit is such a good idea?
The registry is awful. I've already stated my opinion on that. However I also think the difficulty of using regedit to edit a couple of keys is greatly exaggerated!
hey, vi is pretty simple *if you already know how to use it*:)
Given a user who's familiar with email and the web browser, do you think it'd be easier to teach someone how to use regedit (which requires you to commit very little to memory) or vi (which requires you to remember dozens of key bindings and commands to be effective)? How long do you think it takes to get competent with regedit vs vi?
That wasn't my point. Anything is easy once you know how to do it, including rocket science
That's pure rubbish. Simple repedative tasks are easy. Complex reasoning and deduction isn't. Some problems are in fact intractable. Nor is refining motor skills or pre-empting something. I know how to hit a baseball. That doesn't mean I could easily become a pro baseball player.
You've built your entire argument on a flawed premise.
Brain surgery and rocket science are also easy if you already know how to do these
Let me get this straight. You're comparing opening up regedit, browsing through a tree of values, and modifying one with brain surgery and rocket science??? You call it "the art of registry editing". I could teach any even semi-competent person how to use regedit in an hour max assuming nothing more than windows knowledge.
As for the abomination that is the windows registry I agree it's awful and for more than just the reasons you point out, but it's no harder to change a single registry entry than to change an ini file field value. I wouldn't compare the use of notepad to edit an ini file to brain surgery or rocket science either.
Is it really true that you have to edit the registry to turn off autorun? There isn't any clicky? Amazing. No it's not true. There are lots of ways to do it. The registry editor is just installed by default and pretty simple if you already know how to use it. TweakUI is a free addon Microsoft Powertoy that's worth having and gives you some control back.
WHY would you want to waste your time even doing that? What's the point? There are DTV tuners on USB sticks that are likely easier to hack than some single-purpose hardware like these converter boxes!
Perhaps because the software that comes with them is so awful. I have a couple of SD set top boxes that I got cheap. Those occassionally freeze when the signal quality is bad and have to be powered down to unfreeze. Reception where I'm at is okay on some channels but awful on others. That is enough to make them unreliable. So a couple of weeks back I went out and bought a HD USB tv tuner - in this case a Gigabyte U8000. I did plenty of research but obviously not enough. The supplied software is awful. Timer recording fails, it crashes often and the UI supplied - PowerCinema makes the fisher price default XP theme look adult. I've tried other software but so far no luck getting something that's stable and reliable. (Most don't even want to tune Aussie channels, and many don't save their data correctly)
I still don't have something reliable that lets me tape from digital free to air. I'm really over it.
Slashdot Mirror
No. Colds and flus are rare for me.
Thanks for the info. I'll print it out and take a look at it. I've got to work out a way to get my doctor to take me seriously without thinking the problem is hypercondria or otherwise being categorised as difficult. In the long run I think another doctor is the only way.
My symptoms are very different to yours from what I can tell. With me it's bouts of extreme constipation and extreme bend over double stomach cramps. These will last for a week or so, subside, then return days or weeks later. It feels like I'm obstructed when it happens. I can't predict when it will happen. However I can't function when it does - I have to miss work and I can't go anywhere because I can't think of too many places where someone who's cramping so badly he's swearing is accepted. The worst bout I had nothing was passing - not even wind but. (I did have wind coming out my mouth. Thankfully no fecal smell. I really thought I was going to end up in a hospital. I had nothing but fluids for about 5 days, and even that was painful.)
What's even stranger is that at the end of that really bad bout I ate like a complete pig and get this, my stomach was fine. My wife has extreme food allergies (onion, garlic, spices) that can result in anaphylactic episodes even with trace amounts (Airways close up and she stops breathing) so I don't normally eat any takeout as the thought of being posionous to and potentially killing my partner because I ate something tasty doesn't sit well. Anyway to get over my bout I'd already (with her approval) had stuff that made me toxic to her - in this case cups of instant soup. So before I returned to a diet that's not toxic to my wife she agreed to one extra day of me eating junk. Well I was famished. In about 6 hours I ate 4 big Macs, and 3 foot long Subway BMTs. I was just fine. No cramps. No constipation. I shouldn't have done it of course but being spoken to condescendingly by the doctor about a lack of fibre in my diet or me eating the wrong things, or not chewing or whatever else nonsense (when I've not changed eating habbits) just irritates me.
Anyway good luck finding a diagnosis and thanks again for the info.
I always wondered why they didn't just call it Windows 7 or whatever code name and then distribute it with application packs, which would include application packs such as:
server app pack
home/media app pack
basics/offic app pack
- Making it clear means you can't sell software people don't need to them (at extra cost of course). You can't justify hundreds of dollars on the basic OS if it doesn't come with paint and calc and 30 services people don't understand but can be told they absolutely need if they want something they do actually want to work.
- Most people want it to be simple to buy and start using a computer. Preferably switch on the computer and away you go. Even filling in the few details they do - ones that require no thought or computer knowledge, like name and address - is perceived as a hassle.
- If the average joe did understand how much crap was there under the hood they'd be horrified. Why make it clearer to them?
When he heard the news, Steve Jobs was quoted on his sickbed as saying "How do you like them Apples!?" and chuckling maniacally.
A horrible misrepresentation of a text like that'll garner you a C- at best by anyone who has actually read the book
You new here? We don't even have the patience to read an article, let alone a book. As for that C- we're use to getting them after spending too much time on /.
Total for ATV: 3.6 GW
You have an All Terrain Vehicle that requires 3.6 GW??? It must be way better than that crummy Delorian that uses 1.21 GW. Does it go further back in time too?
My family doctor retired this year and my current doctor isn't going to work for anything. My specialist did scope me and tested me for coeliacs (blood test only, though he offered to go do my throat). I certainly haven't been tested for vitamin deficiencies nor had blood counts done. Can you please provide me with more info on the tests you were given and your likely diagnosis? I've suggested blood tests to my doctor and she didn't think them necessary...really do need to find someone better.
- prolonged sitting on the toilet isn't good for your bowels if you're not actually going the whole time
- if you have enough time to read while you go (i.e. the action takes that long) there's something wrong with your diet
As someone who's just been diagnosed with Irritable Bowel, let me just say that while it's good to let people know there's a danger to behaving in a certain way (eg. sitting on the toilet for too long) it's not always possible to avoid that behaviour. The entire medical profession sometimes feels like a bunch of unhelpful know-it-alls with no first hand experience of a problem giving you simple solutions that don't work in the real world then blaming you for being unable to implement them.
Modifying my diet has done nothing for me. When I eat healthy I sometimes end up in agony doubled over. Other times I pig out - eating twice as much food and all takeaway - and I'm just fine. (Usually with my wife out of town. She has life threatening food allergies so the only time I eat these foods is if I have no contact with her. Long story.) The idea that my IBS symptoms are due to a lack of fibre in my diet is a sad joke. At best there are food related triggers that I haven't worked out yet, but I can tell you they're not foods sold by some of the biggest junk food chains in the country.
If you insist on asking a question I guess you could ask 'Do we really want to fund the LHC?'.
I'm all for you funding it. I don't live in a country that contributes, so it's not my coin. Fund it all you like. If I thought you were going to be destroying the planet with it I'd be against it, but I don't.
I think that pretty much sums up the way that the scientists on these kind of projects really think about these things, and I find it reassuring. They are just as unenthusiastic about the prospect disappearing into nothingness as you are. They are smarter than me. They are also almost certainly smarter than you. If they are comfortable enough to joke/make bets then I'm not worried.
They are smarter than you. You don't even understand the difference between smart and infallible.
Think this is a troll? Think again.
You realise of course that even though there isn't a formal expert review process at Wikipedia, the project is *loaded* with experts. You can barely move without tripping over a Ph.D. Hence Wikipedia's other name, "Unemployed Ph.D Death Match."
Also explains the wide variety of rules selectively employed to completely reject anything that doesn't meet with a moderator's approval. They're use to academia where everyone protects their own patch of turf and the official truth is more about who's views you're aligned with than the truth.
Last year I was reorg'ed four times, and I can't even tell you who I report to beyond my first-line manager
Spaceballs: Snotty beamed me twice last night. It was wonderful.
Scholarpedia looks set to address this difference, it is already quite good in its early stages. Essentially wikipedia where only scholars can edit.
Specialist journal sites are even better.
arxiv.org
Pubmed and the like.
Only trouble is a lot of the content linked at Pubmed is not just paid it's hideously expensive.
Well Jorge, first of all you take a swipe at Google for respecting the very encyclopedia that you yourself are tacitly acknowledging is at least somewhat superior (by imitating it). Then you show just how PROFOUNDLY out of touch you are by insisting that your changes will require editorial review (unless you're about to expand your editorial staff with thousands of new hires, you must not be expecting much participation).
Bingo! They aren't expecting much participation. When you contribute to Wikipedia you're contributing to a freely accessible resource run by a non-profit. People can justify spending time improving such an animal. Contrast this with Britannica which, apart from behaving badly in this instance, charges for access and suddenly the prospect of contributing to Britannica means I've gone from contributing to the public good to contributing to some jackass company's revenue. One that belittles the contribution no less.
Chickenhead congressmen
No wonder the U.S. is such a mess. In other countries we don't let fowl into office.
1. Check your event log. Look at both application and security event logs in event viewer. See if there is any correlation between logged events and slowdown. Check if you're getting any Hard Disk or IO errors.
2. If you're running Alcohol or Daemon Tools check to see if they're loading images at startup across the network. If they are unmount the images. Remember your
3. Unplug all your USB devices and reboot. A faulty USB device can and will cause lockups, slowdowns and crashes.
4. Unplug your network (as suggested by another slashdotter). If slowdowns increase, some piece of software is holding onto a file across the network and when it becomes unavailable Windows will sit there waiting for it to return until a timeout.
5. Another slashdotter suggested checking your drives with a SMART utility. Great idea. Also run chkdsk on each partition. Also run memtest86 or similar to test system memory. Any hardware diagnostic software that came with your motherboard or system should also be run. If nothing came with your system find a freeware hardware diagnostic program.
6. Procmon's was suggested by another slashdotter. Another great tool. Before you learn to use it though display all the columns in your standard task manager process list. Look at what's using the most resources. Not just CPU. Look at memory, file handles, and GDI objects in particular but also threads and look at what's doing IO.
7. Start up in safe mode with networking. See if you still have a problem.
8. Use msconfig to disable programs run at startup and reboot. See if that fixes the problem. If it does, slowly re-enable software in small groups until you narrow down which processes are the cultprits
9. If you're concerned about malware run netstat -o after a fresh boot and see if your PC is making any connections to weird sources. Also run hijackthis!
10. If you're overclocking, turn off the overclock and see if that fixes it. Even if you're not overclocking, resetting your BIOS to defaults can weird and wonderful bugs. (I once had a memory pool leak on my laptop that would crash it after at most 24 hours and a BIOS reset was the only thing that worked in the end). See if there are any BIOS updates for your motherboard but be aware that a BIOS upgrade is a risk. Make sure you can revert and make sure you don't do it if you don't have reliable power.
11. Switch off the machine. Open up the case and carefully clean your CPU and GPU heatsink and any other accumulated dust. Dust can accumulate and increase the temp of the CPU, making it flakey. Make sure you know what you're doing so you don't hose the machine. Plenty of info online but if you're unsure get a more hardware savvy friend to help.
12. If you have a video card to swap in, try that. I've seen bad video cards cause all sorts of instability.
If none of the above helps, at some point you'll need to cut your losses and start fresh. Reinstalling even a monster of a system will only take a few man days of effort whereas troubleshooting a hosed config is open ended. If you're spending too much time and your system isn't usable, rebuild it.
Sure you could. If you went to the batting cages and practiced hitting the ball over and over again at steadily increasing speeds, you would eventually be able to hit a fast ball. Now all you have to do is play baseball in little league, high school, and maybe college. All it takes is getting noticed at that point.
Tell that to the thousands of men whose desperate dream it is to play pro ball that don't make it.
In any case you know nothing about me or my physical ability. You're dillusional if you think everyone's able to become a pro baseball player and all it takes is practice.
Obviously if you're over 25 or 30 you couldn't become a pro baseball player now, but you probably couldn't switch gears into any other profession that wasn't close to your own at this point either. The point is that if you start at a young enough age, you can in fact become anything you want as long you keep trying.
Stop watching Disney films would you? The reality is you are presented with opportunities in life and if you try very hard you'll succeed at SOME of your dreams. Now it's true that you can sometimes position yourself so more opportunities come your way but you don't always get to do that. For example want to be U.S. President? Well if you weren't born in the U.S. you'd have to get the constitution changed. Is that possible? Perhaps, but it's not entirely in your control - you can try very hard but still be unable to get the law changed. Another example: Your odds of becoming an astronaut or a nuclear physicist if you grew up in a nation that has no space program are greatly diminished.
I mean, you didn't just wake up one day as a sys admin did you?
No. In fact I've never woken up a sys admin. I've never worked as a sys admin in my life. More false assumptions on your part.
the poing was and still is that using the registry editor is for the average person as confusing as using vi(m).
No it most definitely is not.
In order for someone to (properly) understand what they are doing while using regedit,
If you're asking them to change a key in the registry they don't need that kind of detail at all. To use a car analogy not every driver needs to be a mechanic.
They need to know:
1) How to start regedit.
2) How to navigate to a particular key.
3) How to export a portion of the registry and how to load it back if they need to revert.
4) How to modify an existing key.
5) How to create a new key.
Each of the above can be described in a few lines of text.
Now as for vi....you NEED:
1) Know how to start it
2) To know and understand the different modes. There are more involved concepts here than what a registry key is.
3) Know and memorize a couple of dozen key commands.
3 is the killer and makes vi much harder. With the registry editor you don't need to memorize obscure key bindings. The menus are right there staring the user in the face.
So, do you still think that regedit is such a good idea?
The registry is awful. I've already stated my opinion on that. However I also think the difficulty of using regedit to edit a couple of keys is greatly exaggerated!
hey, vi is pretty simple *if you already know how to use it* :)
Given a user who's familiar with email and the web browser, do you think it'd be easier to teach someone how to use regedit (which requires you to commit very little to memory) or vi (which requires you to remember dozens of key bindings and commands to be effective)? How long do you think it takes to get competent with regedit vs vi?
That wasn't my point. Anything is easy once you know how to do it, including rocket science
That's pure rubbish. Simple repedative tasks are easy. Complex reasoning and deduction isn't. Some problems are in fact intractable. Nor is refining motor skills or pre-empting something. I know how to hit a baseball. That doesn't mean I could easily become a pro baseball player.
You've built your entire argument on a flawed premise.
What if there's sharks? What if I haven't eaten enough egg and baked beans? Besides wouldn't that make ME the engine?
Brain surgery and rocket science are also easy if you already know how to do these
Let me get this straight. You're comparing opening up regedit, browsing through a tree of values, and modifying one with brain surgery and rocket science??? You call it "the art of registry editing". I could teach any even semi-competent person how to use regedit in an hour max assuming nothing more than windows knowledge.
As for the abomination that is the windows registry I agree it's awful and for more than just the reasons you point out, but it's no harder to change a single registry entry than to change an ini file field value. I wouldn't compare the use of notepad to edit an ini file to brain surgery or rocket science either.
Try these handles: NevaLa1d ForTYrV1rg1n M0thasBas3ment Leg3nInPwnM1nd Asp3rGas B3at3nUpNrd WannaBWayneKerr
Is it really true that you have to edit the registry to turn off autorun? There isn't any clicky? Amazing.
No it's not true. There are lots of ways to do it. The registry editor is just installed by default and pretty simple if you already know how to use it. TweakUI is a free addon Microsoft Powertoy that's worth having and gives you some control back.
http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article03-018
http://antivirus.about.com/od/securitytips/ht/autorun.htm
WHY would you want to waste your time even doing that? What's the point? There are DTV tuners on USB sticks that are likely easier to hack than some single-purpose hardware like these converter boxes!
Perhaps because the software that comes with them is so awful. I have a couple of SD set top boxes that I got cheap. Those occassionally freeze when the signal quality is bad and have to be powered down to unfreeze. Reception where I'm at is okay on some channels but awful on others. That is enough to make them unreliable. So a couple of weeks back I went out and bought a HD USB tv tuner - in this case a Gigabyte U8000. I did plenty of research but obviously not enough. The supplied software is awful. Timer recording fails, it crashes often and the UI supplied - PowerCinema makes the fisher price default XP theme look adult. I've tried other software but so far no luck getting something that's stable and reliable. (Most don't even want to tune Aussie channels, and many don't save their data correctly)
I still don't have something reliable that lets me tape from digital free to air. I'm really over it.