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User: jandrese

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Comments · 6,981

  1. Re:Well on Lawyers Say Hackers Are Sentenced Too Harshly · · Score: 1

    What about the guy who spits on the sidewalk and makes a slippery spot. Later that day the president is walking down the sidewalk, slips, falls, and kills himself.

    That guy would only get a file at most! What justice is that?

  2. Re:Bad on Blurring The Line Between BIOS And OS · · Score: 1

    Not that any bios memory scan has ever caught an actual memory bug. Those things are about the most worthless scans the bios does.

  3. Re:HA! on Intel Announces New, Slower, Chip · · Score: 1
    CPU: 486 or lower

    Believe it or not, there are plenty of (old) games out there with pretty much this exact requirement. Many of them run too fast on a modern (say Pentium-66) processors. Even the processor slowdown programs can't handle the severely overpowered Pentium and Athlon processors. There's nothing like pulling out your old copy of Cresent Hawks Inception and have your character run faster than the refresh rate of your montor will allow.
  4. Re:Off but On Topic... on Finally, A Working NES! · · Score: 1

    I don't know. The whole "moving parts" thing always worried me with the PS2. In general it is easier to make something last a long time when there are no moving parts involved. Like most posters in here have said, most of the time an old 8 bit NES can be made to work again by just cleaning off the contacts; and it was poorly designed by modern standards. will the spindle motor on my PS2 still be good after 10 or 20 years? That's a big if. It is not encouraging to remember that I've seen many many old CD-ROM drives (except the 1x drives for some reason) with dead spindle motors, especially the 2 and 4x drives.

  5. Re:They've threatened it before on Mozilla, Gecko, Netscape, And Their Future At AOL · · Score: 1

    Windowsupdate is one of the few sites where I don't care if it doesn't work on non-IE browsers. It's not like you're going to be running the site on a non-Windows platform, at least you're not going to be running the automated scans on a non-Windows platform.

    Unfortunatly, I do still run into some sites that don't work in anything but IE. Usually it's a matter of a menu not appearing or some text shifted underneath an image. More often it's a piece of Javascript that doesn't work correctly in anything but IE but is required for navigation. This gets worse when you set Mozilla to block popups and obnoxious behavior (resizing windows, etc...). It's very annoying when the site in question is for your bank or work and you're not running Windows, but usually one can get around problems like that (view source is your friend).

    Some sites are even worse. Screenblast doesn't work correctly unless you have IE 5 and WMP 8 (IIRC) installed (it refused to run even with WMP9 or IE6!)[1].

    [1] Note that last time I tried was a couple of months ago and I'm back on my FreeBSD machine at the moment and cannot test to see if they've fixed their broken site.

  6. Re:Yea but... on Terahertz Imagery Progresses · · Score: 1

    In Alias they hacked into a computer system and retrieve all of the relevant data in 5 seconds by placing a credit card on top of the monitor. Lets just say they don't let basic physics, chemestry, or even common sense stand in the way of the story.

  7. Re:Its too bad.. on Why Do Google Hit Numbers Vary? · · Score: 1

    Is it just me or does that list look fake? Who types in that much verbiage to a search engine? I can see a few people doing it because Ask Jeeves encourages it, but not every single query? It looks more like some sort of useless FAQ page, except it gets rotated every 30 seconds.

  8. Re:CompUSA is at fault here on California EULA Lawsuit · · Score: 1

    Lots of stores don't let people return opened software because apparently LOTS of people were getting the software, burning a $0.05 CD, and returning the software. This led to an extremely high return rate on Windows, and even if the software is still in good shape you can't just put the shrink wrap back on and resell it (well some stores will, but most stores won't). Lots of online games will kick you out if someone is using your CD-Key, so if you bought the same box that some loser returned earlier, then you would be SOL if you wanted to play while they're online. For the (extremely limited) amount of software that still comes on Floppy, there's the danger that the loser stuck the floppy in his virus infected system with the write protect off and gave the store a big old liabilty problem if they resold a disk with a virus on it. Finally, the stores have to go through this big old rigamarole to return the software to their distributor and get a "fresh" copy.

    I suspect that we'll get some microscopic-print version of the EULA on every box of software if this case actually goes through, although I can dream about the whole "license to use a copy in only one predescribed way on one machine while we can do whatever we want to you" scam being brought down by sheer common sense.

  9. Re:Baked an (Origin 2000) on Baked Apple · · Score: 1

    Fortunatly I wasn't the one who actually screwed the board back in (I was working with a partner). Also, we were both co-ops and the machine was a test machine. It was still a rather nasty little incident, but it's not as uncommon as you might expect. When you're working with bleeding edge hardware, it is somewhat expected that the hardware will fail spectacularly once in awhile.

  10. Re:No news for me... on UK ISP Imposes Download Limits · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Well, if you were creating your own music videos and collaborating with several of your friends that 4Gb wouldn't last very long.

    If you were an aspiring artist that allows anybody and everybody to download your artwork, that 4Gb won't last very long.

    If you actually use those teleconferencing solutions (Netmeeting for example) with your friends that 4Gb will be gone in no time.

    If you were trying to download fansubbed episodes of old foreign TV shows you can't get anymore, that 4Gb won't last you a season.

    If you are interested in television commercials and want to download them in storable/indexable format, especially for old commericals, then you aren't going to get much with your 4Gb

    If you are trying to download all of the independant free music online to try to find the diamonds in the rough, then you're 4Gb are going to fall short.

    I've noticed a trend from MRTG that some games (RTS games in particular) take up a surprisingly large amount of bandwidth, especially if you are acting as the server in an 8+ player game. I don't have hard numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised to see that add up quickly if you are an avid gamer. I don't know of MMORPGs are worse, but if they are then it's almost certain that the 4Gb wouldn't be enough.

    This is only the tip of the iceberg. As time goes on more and more people are going to start using high bandwith applications on a regular basis. I don't think there has every been a time where the amount of bandwidth people use decreases without some sort of drastic outside influence (bandwidth caps for instance)

    I could turn the question around and ask: if you aren't using 4Gb a month then why are you paying the big $$$ for broadband service? It seems to me you aren't utilizing it enough to make it worth the $40/month minimum it tends to cost. You don't need 1.5Mb download speeds to surf the web, read email, or SSH around.

  11. Re:Vote Next Year Everyone on PATRIOT II Legislation Leaked · · Score: 1

    I thought it was Pat Buchanan that took away the critical Democratic votes in Florida.

  12. Re:They did NOT spam on TiVo switches off UK sales · · Score: 1

    That doesn't seem to make much sense. I've never seen the Tivo change channels without asking first. And Tivo Inc never buys prime time slots for it's promotional content for obvious reasons ($$$). Changing to a different channel ALWAYS works too, you don't have to reboot.

  13. Re:IMHO on E-commerce Sites to Collect Sales Taxes Nationwide · · Score: 1

    I'm going to be the one LMAO when you try to carry a refrigerator back to your house five miles away on your back through the woods and over the highway.

  14. Eww Gross on Nokia's Cellular GBA - The N-Gage · · Score: 1

    Is it just me, or does that look like something someone would cook up as a "futuristic" interface in a movie? Am I the only one who finds it ugly as sin? It looks like an interface nightmare to boot, with virtually nowhere to grip it while you try to use those tiny buttons that are helpfully arranged in a random manner?

  15. Re:Baked a SUN server once on Baked Apple · · Score: 1

    I baked an SGI Origin 2000 once. I had to replace some of the CPU boards and apparently I tigtened that funky connecter a little too tight. One of the components (I'm not sure what it was) exploded when I powered the machine back up. It wasn't loud (I didn't hear it in the loud server room), but it took me about 1 second to smell the thing after I walked around to the back. I've never hit that breaker so fast in my life. The fried component apparently had something to do with the power to the machine because it created a plasma stream in the case that burnt straight through the backplane and scored the support beam behind it. There was even backwash on the two CPU boards (partially burnt off surface components) and they had to be replaced. There's nothing quite as sobering as looking at one of those backplanes (which are unusually thick for circut boards) and seeing a 1cm hole burned straight through it.

  16. Re:Bah! on 300 Episodes of the Simpsons · · Score: 1

    I went though it with no problem with MOzilla. I'm still using the same session to post this response. I'm using 1.2.1.

  17. Re:Favorite quote: on 300 Episodes of the Simpsons · · Score: 1

    My favorite Millhouse quote: "The 'house always wins!"

  18. Re:Favorite quote: on 300 Episodes of the Simpsons · · Score: 1

    That was from Homer the Heretic where Homer skips church.

  19. Re:space elevator physics explained on Columbia Coverage · · Score: 1

    That depends on how it's built. If you have the cable extending past Geosynchronus orbit, then snapping the cable at the base (the only place terrorists would normally be able to reach), means that you just loose the cable to space. While that would no doubt be a huge blow to the world (that space elevator is NOT going to be cheap), it's not going to slaughter millions of people. Snapping a cable higher up (at it's midpoint where it would do the most damage to Earth) is akin to a terrorist hijacking the Space Shuttle and crashing it into DC.

  20. Wait a second... on CPU Convective Water Cooling · · Score: 1

    Is that a 5 1/4 floppy drive in that machine? What's he running, a 486?

  21. Re:Bad idea.. on DALnet For Chatting, Not File Sharing · · Score: 1

    Maybe he could have put it another way: There wasn't going to be anybody who was going to take up the pro-kiddy porn position, so there was no debate on the issue.

  22. Re:hmmm.... on Pentagon and Wi-Fi Deal Reached · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If people can easily modifiy consumer equipment to detect these radar signature, than no foreign nation is going to have trouble building someing that does exactly the same thing. In fact most nations already do build devices like this, especially on fighter planes. Most of them are much more sophisticated, featuring much better sensitivity than consumer equipment along with direction finding ability (there are even missiles that seek on RADAR emissions).

    Personally, I'm estatic over the prospect of expanding the total number of completely independent channels from three to five or six.

  23. Re:Here's a thought -- less disposable income! on AOL Not Alone In Subscriber Decline · · Score: 1

    Every time I think that, I remember back to the time when it took forever to download an ISO, and when web pages _crawled_. I remember back to when downloading a single fansub off of the usenet wasn't feasable because the parts would expire before I got them downloaded. I even remember back when logging into my home machine with ssh to read my email was painful because of the annoyingly high latency of modems, and difficult because I'd get a new IP every 8 hours or so when my ISP kicked me off.

    Heck, I'm getting reamed in the rear every month by Comcast and I still keep going back to them (well, they are the only broadband provider in town...).

  24. Re:isn't trying to profit from the service on Power Companies Offering Cable (TV, Net) Service · · Score: 1
    half the national average


    You undermined your very point by noting that Wide Open West (apparently a very good local deal for you) "blows thier[sic] doors off in pricing" compared to Comcast, but in most of the nation national carriers like Comcast are the only choice, so the power company is probably correct.
  25. Re:Storage Medium for the Really Long Haul? on DVD: Degradable Versatile... · · Score: 1

    The big downside with microfilm/microfiche: searching. It takes forever to find information stored on microfilm.