It's about damn time... think of the applications once it gets out of alpha...
- use it as a screen in a home theater... minimal exposed hardware, no screens to pull down or cats scratching at the pretty moving lights... woohoo! (downside: sneeze, and you'll have to pause the movie until the turbulence dies down. And Linus help you if you open the windows!)
- If this could be scaled down, think about the niftiness of laptop screens made with this! You could even scale them to your particular situation. (on the plane in Coach? Have a nice 12" screen. Made it to the hotel in one piece? Crank it up to 12'!)
- Use this in place of LCD screens for that fancy artwork on your walls... hmm, I wonder if you could rig up to sense movement in the fog field... nifty "Minority Report"esque GUI, here we come!
- (submitted by co-worker who just happened to walk by) Rig one up in the ladies locker room, and project the wall about two feet from where it actually is. Hide behind fog, enjoy view. Hope they don't have a towel-snapping fight and blow away all your fog... ( he made me post that, I swear...) (posted mostly verbatim, gross sexual innuendos, hand gestures, gutteral grunts, stick figures, and hastily made pop-up book omitted)
- This might make videoconferencing and videophones cheaper too... it would be nice to see some figures estimating how much cheaper this will end up being then LCD.
I have to disagree here. I don't read his comment as a comment on consumers at all, but rather perception. Consider:
It's 10 years ago. We're all enjoying Doom on our 486-DX2's, and drooling over the latest Pentium preview (coming soon... MMX!). Someone comes up to us, and tells us that those fun USENET and NEWSGROUP things we keep playing around in may hold evil hax0rs, who can hack our boxes and steal our.... Doom savegames. "Egads!", we exclaim, "whatever can we do?". "Well, " says Mr. Someone, "we can make it nice and secure, but it's likely that Memphis, Chicago, and especially Cairo will cost more. So, do you want us to protect your savegames?"
Now, lets be honest. 10 years ago (hell, 5 years ago, for most people), we didn't have much on our PC's worth protecting with security, firewalls, etc... at least those of us on WinTel. Come on, how many people had a firewall on their 19.2 baud modem? Did you worry about hax0rs when you upgraded to 28.8? 33.6? The magical 56k? (complete with the X2 wars). Would you have paid extra back then, so that MS could spend millions (stop laughing, they really do) working on security n' chit? Now that hackers (black, grey white and blue) are in the mainstream, broadband is common, and people actually put a monetary value on the data in their computer, security is important to consumers, and they're willing to pay a little extra. It doesn't seem so evil to me...
I appreciate your viewpoint, and you are correct in that complaining about this particular issue would likely net "0" response. I was, however, referring more to the origional posters comment about "My tax dollars shouldn't go to support this". When it comes to a more basic point like that, then I would fully encourage people to email their congressperson... it may not be quite as effective as a snail-mail or a phone call, but it's a start.
And I, for one, don't buy the "writing wouldn't do any good" argument, either. I forget how the saying goes in it's entirety, but it starts with something like "With a single step, a journey is forged". Your letter may be ignored... but if 50 people from your area also send a letter about this, maybe that won't. It takes less than you'd think to get noticed.
Of course, my view on government is skewed, given that I'm Canadian, and as everyone knows, we're ruled over by omnipotent polar-bears and their inuit headhunting henchmen, who will lock us into our igloos with no supper if we ever reveal their presence....
They spend your tax money on putting 80-year old medical marijuana growers in jail, forcing everyone to digital tv and cable whether they like it or not, and flying the president and his 80-person entourage all around the country so he can attent fundraisers for his party... why should this be any different?
Oh, and lets not forget using your tax dollars to build a fake company to entrap two russian hackers... add on administrative costs, the plane tickets to fly them over here, cost of the trial, cost of keeping them in jail...
Don't like it? Write your congressman, write your senator, heck, even write your president (or, if Gore isn't available, settle for Bush ((OH, the karma's gonna pay for that one!)) ).
Remember, if you have enough time to post on slashdot, then you have enough time to email your government. There is a page somewhere that gives easy access to email links for everyone, but being at work, I don't have it handy. I'm sure it'll pop up shortly.
"The average Windows administrator in the study earned $68,500 a year"
"The Windows technicians, however, only managed an average of 10 machines each"
So, let me get this straight... they actually expect us to believe that WinAdmins make almost 70K a year to handle 10 machines? I don't know what kind of fantasy world this study was done in, but I want in!!!
Of course, far be it from me to suggest that this portrayal of WinAdmins might be a bit off... but, for reference, I support close to 200 WinTel machines and 5 servers, and I don't make anywhere close to 70K US a year... I think I may print this article and see if I can get a raise out of it...
Lesse... 70K per 10 boxes, 200 boxes, equals... woohoo!
I tried dumb terminals for the telephone POS team. It didn't work out, for a number of reasons, the most notable being that when their request for a monitor colour other than "amber" was denied, they started using coloured markers to make it interesting shades of baby-diaper brown ("The amber hurts my eyes."). When I put "goop" on it (an anonymous, 20 year old bottle of something, picked up from a high school, used to keep the kids from drawing on the screens. No ink sticks to this crap), they tried holding unshielded speakers to the monitor to get it to change colour ("It works at home!"). Even when I spent the time to explain the intricate details of CRT tubes and colour guns, they still tried again when I left.
These are the same people who ***COMPLAINED**** when the latest drive image came with Clippy turned off. How frightening is that?
I should be nice to them and mention that the previous sysadmins stance was "If you don't like it, fix it yourself", and the only way for users to get service was for them to hammer their machines to the point where the didn't work anymore, and then complain to their supervisor. It was bad, really bad, but even their warnings to me when I took the job didn't scratch the surface of the evilness this place has.
My current favorite user recently regaled me with the story of how her new TV's remote had died, and therefore she poured water down the back of it until it sparked. She was very sure to point out *HOW SMART!* she was to let the water dry before she returned it to the store to get an exchange, and she's very happy with her new, functional remote.
The deep, stabbing pain in my head rose to new levels as I commented that it was odd for the batteries in a new remote to die that quickly, and she said "What batteries?"
It's been a bad day, so -::begin true it-happened-to-me BOFH-style rant::::Sorry for the length, but I feel better now::
Yanno, I've been telling my users for years now that the easiest way to stay safe is to keep updating. I even (choke cough sputter) turned on "Automatic Update" in Windows, just so it would keep them up-to-date. They disabled it, claiming "Every once in a while things would get slow for a bit, but now it's fine" or my favorite "I got funny messages". (PS: Also had to reimage 7 machines because somebody decided he was a geek and he could just copy his registry between machines).
So I capitulated, and started sending everyone reminders by email when they had to update. I included the URL to windowsupdate and copious instructions. "It's too hard, I don't know what to do", they whined. I tried sending them the enterprise update exe's. They downloaded them, alright... put them right on their desktop, and forgot about them. I rewrote the reminder emails to include a script to do everything for them. It worked, for a bit... then I started noticing machines not being updated, and virii floating around that shouldn't. Turns out they'd started sending my emails right to the trash. "It didn't seem to do anything", they said, "it just popped up some box and then went away, so I figured I didn't need it." The box, of course, said "PERFORMING AN IMPORTANT UPDATE ON WINDOWS, PLEASE WAIT."
Exasperated, I set up the NT login script to push the updates to the user (which I'd been avoiding, it involved actually getting the NT server working). It seemed to work fine, until one day I browsed the network by accident (hit the wrong button), and noticed that I had 65 computers in the group in an office of almost 200. Turns out some genius had found his way into Network properties and changed the setup to skip login to the NT server. "It was really annoying", they said, "I'd start up my computer in the morning, and then I'd have to wait for, like, a whole minute or two! Sometimes it wasn't even done when I got back from getting coffee! This is so much easier, we just hit 'escape' when the login screen comes up. Why didn't you do this in the first place?". It was at this point that I found out no-one was using the network drives either ("We have a network? Like an internetwork?"), thereby rendering pointless my copius virus scans and backups and RAID setup that I'd blown my monthly budget on. Fine, I say to myself, I'll show these buggers.
So I set up a dummy machine, with which to do nothing but keep running perfectly and with all updates and latest drivers installed. I burned a bootable CD image from it, and whenever someone called in with a virus complaint, I'd go to their machine, pop in the CD, reboot, and go for an extended coffee break. The image had a boot virus scan to clean everything else up. Happy, was I, as I noticed the drop in virus calls. Soon, they dried up. I was actually starting to feel good, untill one day the VP called me in to find out why we were sending no less than 9 different virii to our clients every day. Their excuse? "When you did that thingy with the thingy, it made all our games disappear, and I've almost gotten to the second level!" Yes, indeed, they were just ignoring the virii now, even though they were getting messages from the antivirus program. Seems they believed clicking "Quarantine" would mean that I'd take their computers away and lock them in the server (clean) room for a while.
So I tried locking down with PolEdit and SysEdit. They brought in their own windows CD's and reinstalled, because "something was broken and it wasn't letting me do what it used to". I pulled the CD drives (no use for them here anyways, except for games), and came out of the IT room late one night to find one of the file clerks studiously pulling hard drives from the cases to reimage at home and return the next morning. I drilled holes in the side panels and put a padlock on them. The users started bringing in laptops to do their work on from home, which even made the problem worse. I screamed bloody murder, demanded to know what the source of these problems were. Everyone played dumb. I felt my brains rotting and leaking out of my ears.
Then, salvation. The VP mentions that he's seen alot of people emailing lately, and he wants to make sure that it's all company business. Would I monitor employee email usage, he asks? I try to suppress my snoopy-dance of joy as he gives me the escape clause from the moral dilema I'd been facing about finding out what the problems were. I monitor, I read, I find out who's sleeping with who (including a schedule for a tryst in the closet behind my server room. I consider installing a hidden camera), but most importantly, I find out the source of my headaches. An industrious middle manager has discovered the joys of wholesale computer warehouses, and has been joyously selling the employees games to play at work, and later, the laptops they brought in. I wonder how exactly he managed to charge people $25 to "upgrade their L4 cache so their games go faster". I admire his inginuity, but I know he must go. I feel good about this decision, mostly because I know he's screwing around with my computers, but also because I can justify it as "doing the best thing for the company". That, and productivity has gone in the tank, and everyone is blaming their computers, and at his direction, me. I'll make BOFH yet, I tell myself.
That was a long time ago, at least in computer years. Once he left, things bounded back up to normal. People started doing what they should, not avoiding security so they could play games all day long. Why do I tell you this long story? Because that is my experience with users, and that is the pain that is caused when they don't do what they're told to. So, as someone who's told users for years to do their updates, I feel no sympathy for users hit by this particular (and moderately ingenious) virus. If they were good users, they would do their updates like their SysAdmin tells them to. They are bad users, users like the ones from above, and so I say "No PC for you!". I wouldn't feel like this, except the story specifically states that this virus takes advantage of known vulnerabilities. I don't see it as a bad thing, I see it as a chance to see who listens to me, and who'll get "upgraded" to a new 486 next month. I'm in a BOFH mood today, can you tell?
In closing, I reflect on my outing of the middle manager. I printed out his more venemous emails regarding me, along with copies of invoices for illegally imported computer components and computer games charged to his expense account. I wrote a touching resignation letter for him to sign, explaining how he was leaving for "personal reasons". I left these on his desk as he was out to lunch, pointed his desklamp at them, turned it on, and turned off the room light. On top, I left a short note:
It is dark. You are likely to be eatten by a grue.
You know, I was going to post something informative or maybe even (+3 Insightful), but this nausious feeling just won't go away. I can understand suing someone for libel... even if I do think it's just customers sharing their experiences. Considering the net-based nature of his business, people posting in online forums about how bad he is would strike me the same as people marching outside the front door of the local pet store carrying signs and shouting slogans. But to then start suing the people who carried news of the origional lawsuit? Or the ones who carried the ad banners for the legal defense fund? What's next, sue the WayBack machine? Sheesh... sounds like someone isn't selling enough Kibbles n' Bits to pay the bills...
I hope the good folks at Google countersue him, and I also hope that this spurs all the people who've had bad experiences with this place to file a group or class-action lawsuit, and I hope it hurts him good.
Does anyone know the results of the origional lawsuits? (not including the &*%(#&'s who settled)
And does anyone have the links to the legal defense fund, and any of the BB's that posted the comments? They deserve links on my homepage (made and hosted in Canada, where we don't take this kinda crap, eh?)
Now, I'm going to write the nice man an email explaining why I'll be boycotting his business, and why I'll be encouraging others to as well. Shouldn't you, too? If you have enough time to post on/., then you have enough time to do this as well.
(Sig 0.5b) I'll defend your right to spew fruitless venom and baseless idiocy with my dying breath, just as you must defend my right to call you an asshole.
Sorry folks, but I have to be the one to say RTFB (read the friendly bill). While it does have many good points, it doesn't cover software:
(c) As used in this section, the following terms have the following meanings: A 'digital work' is any literary (except a computer program), sound recording or musical work, or dramatic, motion picture or other audiovisual work, in whole or in part in a digital or other non-analog format.
[emphasis mine]
This bill appears to cover fair-right usage to create backups of music CDs and DVDs, and if I read it right, would also allow you to circumvent DVD copy protection if you wanted to play the DVD on your "preferred format"... so if you prefer video tape or DivX, you'd have every right to record it to that format, provided it was for personal use and not public consumption.
You know, I really found this to be a sad movie, because there was one point in it that struck too true:
It doesn't matter how awful and crippling your disease is. If there aren't enough of you to make money off of, then it isn't worth our time to try and cure you.
I was flipping through the posts above, and a few thoughts occured to me:
Me: Why would drug companies make a treatment when they can make a cure?
Me: Simple. If you charged people $100,000 apiece to get a cure for AIDS, they would riot in the streets and burn you in effigy.
Me: If people would riot for being charged $100,000 for a cure, then why aren't they rioting for being charged $5,000 a month for a treatment?
On a different note:
I agree with most people above. The bottom line of $5,000 a month for 20 years is more appealing than $100,000 a head, and it's just that simple. Especially when that disease is communicable, such as AIDS or HepC. Cure it, and it goes away, treat the symptoms, and everyone gets it.
And, on another different note:
Am I the only one absolutely disgusted that research into a cure for AIDS or Alzheimers is being shut down because somebody put a patent on an enzyme? And, more to the point, am I the only one disgusted that drug companies are allowed to make massive profits? Sure, a resonable return on investment should be expected for investors, but to put the future of the species into the hands of Wall Street? I find it humourous that congress can pass legislation encouraging drug companies to test drugs on children, but it can't put strong federal backing behind a cure for AIDS or cancer. Cure those, after all, and thousands become unemployed. Treat them, and everyone gets a nice, cushy job taking care of the sick.
My grandmother died of a disease that had a cure "in the pipeline". Clinical human trials started just a few months after she went. I found out years later that the drug could have been available almost 10 years earlier, but a copyright lawsuit held everything up as it was appealed to higher and higher courts.
What scares me is not that this happened.... it's that it might happen to me.
If you'd paid attention to the post, you would have noticed the part where I said I mounted it next to my chair, facing up. This negates the neccessity of lifting of hand, and indeed, the suspending thereof. Instead, it would, to a cognicent person, evoke an image of a monitor facing up next to the arm of a chair. In reality, I found it more comfortable than a standard mouse, though I am a trackball man by trade. The main advantage was that I could see exactly where and what I was pointing at, and when I tried some drawing (in MS Paint, admittedly) using a stylus, it worked impressively well. It is nice being able to see what I'm doing on the small screen, while not being bound to it 24/7. And, for surfing, it was mightly convenient... just tap a link I want, just wave my finger to evoke mouse-gestures... very easy, and if I'd been in a position to hold on to the equipment, I would have added an armrest that left my hand dangling above the screen. Quiet comfortable, I imagine.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I keep forgetting there are lots of people out there who still think P2P is only for piracy and pr0n. For those who actually have the inspiration to look for more than the last band they saw on MTV, there is a huge mass of varied media out there in P2P-land, put there by people who actually want their music/video/etc to be distributed for free. The only big-label music that I download is from artists who have explicitly stated that they support their material being available on P2P (and for the most part, that's just so I can redistribute it to others).
And yes, I've written the RIAA and the Big 5 to let them know that I'm boycotting, and that I support the rights of artists to decide what happens to their music. I think a more important question is: Have you?
Funny you should mention that... just last night, one of my friends popped over with a few SyJet cartridges of mp3/ogg files (yes, I still have a SyJet, and I love it. Got a problem with that?). He comes bustin' in, and says "I found this awesome music online, ain't never heard it before, it is so awesome, you've never heard stuff like this before" etc etc etc.
Turned out he had 4 gigs of Rammstein.:-)
(Guess that just goes to show you what mainstream media does to your perception of "big bands")
There is a touchscreen addition you can get... it looks like a standard glarescreen, but converts your CRT monitor into a touchscreen monitor and hooks up to your PS/2 mouse port (link not available, I'm at work, sorry). I tried one recently with Opera, and let me tell ya, it's nifty! I put the touchscreen on a 14", mounted it facing up next to my chair, and ran it to a dual-head graphics card set to mirror (or whatever the hell it's called) the image. Et voila! My hand movements on the 14" translated to mouse movements on my standard monitor (20"). The 14" was pretty comfortable, though I spent a bit of time adjusting the angle and hight. As a keyboard warrior, it took me some getting used to, but only a 1/2 hour or so. Additionally, you can use it with your off hand, which is very uber-nifty!
Check eBay, they should be quite cheap... not good resolution on the mouse movements (maybe 150-300 dpi), but still useful. I want to pick one up and try Q3 or UT with it.
WSJ actually lets Shawn point out the truth!
on
Shawn Fanning Interview
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
From the article:
"As Napster grew and ultimately hit its peak, if you look at CD sales [they] were up as long as Napster was popular. The point at which Napster started filtering (blocking out certain songs after a court order in March 2001) is the point at which the record industry announced that this constant increase in their CD sales suddenly changed."
I am boggled that the WSJ finally let someone point this out! Sure, when Napster was the baby of the media, they had all the charts and spreadsheets pointing out how CD sales were going up, but as soon as the gov't stepped in, did you notice how all those figures disappeared? Soon, it was "Napster evil, artists starve, story at 11".
Ya see, I don't figure the decline in CD sales as a result of piracy, or of changes to the consumer economic model. I think it is good old-fashioned grass-roots protest. I know, myself, I haven't bought a mass-market CD since the RIAA started their petty little lawsuits to drive everyone out of business, and I know I'm not the only one. I also know a good deal of friends who are using KaZaA(lite), Freenet, LimeWare, et al, in protest of the death of Napster.
I say Rock On to P2P! 'Real Soon Now'(*), people will figure out that it's the downturn in your economy and protest from consumers over price and silicone-inflated plastic singing Barbie clones that is driving down sales, not P2P. Perhaps, in some fit of irrational sanity, they may actually examine why people use P2P, and figure out that if they can improve on the model with, say smooth resumes on interrupt, distributed Akamai servers, no bogus files, live cuts, better indexing, and proper labeling, that they may actually be able to charge a resonable amount per month to let people download mp3 or Ogg files. But, alas, they cling to "We'll only release music that is old and out of date, and we'll insist on proprietary formats, and DRM that ensures that you'll never play this on another computer, or even your own if you have to reinstall, or if we go out of business."
So, while you're at it, write your congressperson and senator, and urge them to kill any bill which requires DRM enabled sound cards and speakers (which, yes, has already been proposed), let alone any bill which requires anything electronic to be DRM.
Next week: How to get your Barbie to record Britney Spears songs! (By some odd coincidence, the electronics get implanted in her chest, she switches randomly between anatomicly correct and "anatomicly unidentifiable", and Ken does all the singing anyways)
(*)Mad Propz to Jerry Pournelle and Chaos Manor! http://www.jerrypournelle.com
You'll be fine until someone figures out who invented the modern method of timekeeping. Once someone can prove that their ancestor created the modern method of timekeeping, we'll have to pay a fee to change the time on our clock, and undergo random inspections to ensure we haven't modified the origional work contrary to the Clock EULA.
Clocks will also now cost upwards of $200 thanks to licensing fees, but we will all have to pay it because a sundial doesn't have a loud enough alarm.
In related news, hundreds of people will be thrown in jail for animal cruely for trying to find the 'snooze' button on their black-market roosters, whom clockmakers insist is a derivitive work.
And you people scoffed when they said that the Julian calindar would cause chaos!
Hmm... US government puts out bill to require anything digital to have copy protection on it... cost for digital equipment goes up.
Last month, US government drives legislation to force all TVs' to have digital tuners installed, including all TVs' manufactured in the US, and all being shipped via the US. Cost for TVs' and consumer electronics goes up.
US government also tables legislation requiring all television networks to convert to digital within 5 years. All existing TVs' and VCRs' will be obsolete. Cost to consumers goes up.
Result: In 5 years, all televisions and VCRs are digital, copy-protected, and controlled. Government gets to dole out the new "digital" channels to whomever meets their standards.... or should that be 'ideals'?
Earlier in the year (and the year before, and the year before) the US government threatens to put stricter regulations on the Internet, including what you can do, what you can read, and where you can read it. Stocks of net-filtering software go up, ad banners start to reduce fees paid because of declining revenue, free-speech sites and those not funded by a corporation start going away.
Earlier this year, US government tries to force libraries to filter the websites available on their public computers. US government also successfully forces schools to filter content. Those who do the filtering? Corporations who use their own judgement to determine if a site should be filtered or not.
DMCA serves as pretense to shut down P2P networks, mp3/warez websites, Instant Messangers with file sharing capabilities (it's coming, just you watch) etc.
"THE WAR ON TERRORISM" (tm) serves as pretense to search anyone, anywhere, even from outside the country.
US government arrests people that it invites into the country (the two russian credit card hackers and the FBI) or those that haven't even done anything to the US (Skylarov ((SP?)))
You know, I saw a sig that said "Canada: It's like being in the loft above a really great party". I don't know about you, but I'm starting to think that not all the noise from the party downstairs is good.
And, on a different note, as IANAL (sorry, everytime I see that I read I-anal. I just can't write it with a straight face), what happens if I come down to visit with my Sony minidisc player? Do I get arrested for having non-conforming hardware? Technically, this could extend to anything with a memory, including a watch, a car, a phone.... sound worrisome?
You know, I started this post out noting increased costs... then I got to noting the decreased liberties... then I started thinking "Yanno? If I were slightly more paranoid, I'd almost think that the US government is trying to discourage free speech and push internet and technology access up to the higher tax brackets, where they have more control, while removing these tools for freedom from the 'unwashed masses'. But that would be a bad thought, and I'm double-plus good!"
And, if you think I'm kidding, take any of the paragraphs up above and look in slashdot archives... they all came from here.
"If you don't think, you're letting the terrorists win!"
After years of doing custom case mods, here's a few tips I've used over the years to make quieter computers:
{* Disclaimer - if you accidentally duct tape your CPU fan and your PSU inlets, please try and smother the flames with your body because (1) No one else should be hurt because of your "specialness", and (2) You'll be doing all of us a favour. Either way, don't blame me. *}
The easiest fix: Take some foam padding, preferably the antistatic kind that most hardware ships in these days, and line your case panels with a layer or two. It'll cut down on a good portion of the noise, and it'll improve your airflow (you didn't really think that air was supposed to go through those decorative holes, did you?)
Be sure to keep it thin on the back side, next to the mobo. I know it says antistatic on the box, but do you really want anything touching your mobo?
Next, replace your damn PSU. Standard ones are way too damn noisy. I don't have any links handy (I'm at work), but they are plentiful and easy to find. Oh, and say "damn" alot. It helps.
Getting more in-depth, remove your peripheral drives (CD, HD, etc), and put them back in with rubber washers both between the drive and case, and between the screw and case. It cuts down on vibrations significantly.
Tie up your loose cables. Sounds silly, but I've found that in several systems with significant airflow, they were either moving around or causing turbulence. Either make or buy rounded IDE cables for the best flow.
If you have a very noisy harddrive, yank it from that small and normally loose 3 1/2" bracket and put it in one of your 5 1/4" bays with the help of drive brackets. Insulate around it with antistatic foam padding, use rubber washers, put an ultraquiet mini fan behind it, set to pull air(that old socket 7 fan you have lying around will do just fine). Finally, remove the bezel in front of it, drill some small holes for airflow, insulate with foam padding (remove the padding around the holes ((yes, it is sad that I have to point that out)) ), and pop it back in. Voila! Thicker padding to cut down on sound, it's in the 5 1/4" drive section, which I find is much sturdier and less prone to rattle, and the fan will keep it cooler than it would have been before.
Consider dropping that 52x CD. Sure, it's impressive, but you install all your games with max install, right? (right??) Or better yet, go buy software that will copy your CD to the HD and then subst the directory to a drive letter. Voila! CD at HD speeds. Replace the 52 with something more conservative, and you'll notice a big difference (and lower spinup time)
crud, "subst", I just dated myself...
Consider spring-mount screws for your case fans. I have a whole bag of them, but I'll be darned if I can remember who made them. They're basically just a short metal or plastic spring with a screw at each end. One end screws into the hole on the fan, the other into the case, voila, instant buffer against vibrations.
If things are still too bad for you, consider an external case mod. The quietest I ever did was to replace all of the metal panels on the case with 1/2" beechwood (damn, but it was pretty), but not all of us have the time and patience to work up something like that. The easiest is to take your panels off, and slap some starch/water paste on them. Next, take some thick cloth (or a few layers of thin cloth, if you feel the need to be difficult), load it up with the paste, and then just slap it on your panel. Make sure it's all wrinkly and folded n' chit. Let it dry, and the cloth should stick on just fine, adding another layer of sound barrier for ya.
DISCLAIMER 1: This has been known not to stick on some of the new, shiny, smooth cases.
DISCLAIMER 2: Take the panels off of your PC BEFORE you start slathering them with starch. Or, at the very least, remember to turn your PC off first.;-)
Finally, try putting your PC on a phone book or something similar. Sounds silly, but it dulls the noise that resonates into the floor/desk. If it makes a difference for you, then build something more permanant for your case to sit on (or, at the very least, give it some ultracool extra-long legs like the AT-AT Walkers from Star Wars.... complete with little lazer guns on the CD drive... )
Lastly, note that a heckuvalot of the noise you hear could be from your monitor, too. But I will avoid monitor mods for today, lest some yahoo stick a phillips through his tube and show up at my doorstep, ready to share the tale. (it's happened, and I swear he was still smoking).
Don't complain. I remember back in the day (well, ok, more like the day after the day... after all, the day goes back sooo far....) when I'd use that load time as an indication that a big bad mob just got loaded or activated... the PC would slow down, and I'd either duck down or backpedal as a matter of instinct... Thats one of the little things that gets lost when we upgrade to big bad hax0r boxXxen, as the kiddies say these days.
Course, these days I still do that as instinct in games, even though nowadays it's normally one of my background programs doing something. I get nailed for it on LAN parties, as people figured out they just had to start massive network activity on my PC to get me to turn back and hide behind a corner... normally when they were waiting there for me...
It's worse than that. It's the move to capitalism of "studies", and it's been going on for a while.
Consider:
Study "A" states that the Capital_I_Internet is a nice, cozy place with lots of interesting things, and this is a "Good Thing" (tm). They suggest that a lack of regulation is also a Good Thing.
Study "B" says the Internet is an evil place, where 3/4 of the traffic is pr0n, and 1/2 the users are child molesters lurking in the shadows for Your Children! Dear Lord, Someone Please Save The Children!
Study A will perhaps get you a few more hits from the ACLU domain, and if you're really lucky, your dean may get invited to a conference in Buttf*ck, Nebraska to discuss how the Internet can improve bovine fertility.
Study B ensures that you get massive media coverage, your own segment on CNN, at least 1/2 page articles in every major newspaper, and every moral and religious group that hears about this study donating money based on the headline. Your dean gets invited to a half dozen major conferences and meetings, all expenses paid, and you get to appear on "Larry King Live" or some such thing. Your face, your university, and everything possibly associated with this study ensures not just your 15 minutes of fame, but that when the devoutly religious VP of BigCorp sees your smiling face on CNN denouncing the evils of the net, that you get a nice, cushy position producing BigCorp-brand studies to say the same thing.
So, which one would you do? Or better yet, which one would you be allowed to publish? Controversy breeds cash, ladies and gentlemen, and places that are barely breaking even like universities need every bit they can get.
(Of course, there is always the ubiquitous option "C", wherein you publish a study suggesting that pr0n isn't a bad thing, and that perhaps it serves as a release for potential peds and other assorted unmentionables. When going with this option, the normal result is flaming bottles being thrown at your house, followed by regular mob-crowd beatings, loosing your job and every bit of captial you have, getting arrested for coughing in the general direction of Washington [Germ Warfare!], and being thrown in a 6x8 cell with "Ted", who will happily help you gather mounds of empirical evidence on whether lube is *really* neccessary.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn, I wasn't expecting anyone to get that =P
It's about damn time... think of the applications once it gets out of alpha...
/wild_speculation (Dim as dim)
- use it as a screen in a home theater... minimal exposed hardware, no screens to pull down or cats scratching at the pretty moving lights... woohoo! (downside: sneeze, and you'll have to pause the movie until the turbulence dies down. And Linus help you if you open the windows!)
- If this could be scaled down, think about the niftiness of laptop screens made with this! You could even scale them to your particular situation. (on the plane in Coach? Have a nice 12" screen. Made it to the hotel in one piece? Crank it up to 12'!)
- Use this in place of LCD screens for that fancy artwork on your walls... hmm, I wonder if you could rig up to sense movement in the fog field... nifty "Minority Report"esque GUI, here we come!
- (submitted by co-worker who just happened to walk by) Rig one up in the ladies locker room, and project the wall about two feet from where it actually is. Hide behind fog, enjoy view. Hope they don't have a towel-snapping fight and blow away all your fog...
( he made me post that, I swear...)
(posted mostly verbatim, gross sexual innuendos, hand gestures, gutteral grunts, stick figures, and hastily made pop-up book omitted)
- This might make videoconferencing and videophones cheaper too... it would be nice to see some figures estimating how much cheaper this will end up being then LCD.
Ok,
It's 10 years ago. We're all enjoying Doom on our 486-DX2's, and drooling over the latest Pentium preview (coming soon... MMX!). Someone comes up to us, and tells us that those fun USENET and NEWSGROUP things we keep playing around in may hold evil hax0rs, who can hack our boxes and steal our.... Doom savegames. "Egads!", we exclaim, "whatever can we do?". "Well, " says Mr. Someone, "we can make it nice and secure, but it's likely that Memphis, Chicago, and especially Cairo will cost more. So, do you want us to protect your savegames?"
Now, lets be honest. 10 years ago (hell, 5 years ago, for most people), we didn't have much on our PC's worth protecting with security, firewalls, etc... at least those of us on WinTel. Come on, how many people had a firewall on their 19.2 baud modem? Did you worry about hax0rs when you upgraded to 28.8? 33.6? The magical 56k? (complete with the X2 wars). Would you have paid extra back then, so that MS could spend millions (stop laughing, they really do) working on security n' chit? Now that hackers (black, grey white and blue) are in the mainstream, broadband is common, and people actually put a monetary value on the data in their computer, security is important to consumers, and they're willing to pay a little extra. It doesn't seem so evil to me...
Wow, somebody stored their mod-points in the wrong orifice this morning.
At least, next time, find something more inventive than "Troll", eh? If you're going to be a silly moderator, try using imagination. I suggest:
-1, Short-Post, -now-you-all-must-pay!
-1, Too-many-big-words
-1, Responding-to-trolls
-1, I-don't-understand-irony
-1, hey,-aren't-you-the-goat.se-guy?
-1, I-got-turned-down-by-the-girl-in-accounting-again
And I, for one, don't buy the "writing wouldn't do any good" argument, either. I forget how the saying goes in it's entirety, but it starts with something like "With a single step, a journey is forged". Your letter may be ignored... but if 50 people from your area also send a letter about this, maybe that won't. It takes less than you'd think to get noticed.
Of course, my view on government is skewed, given that I'm Canadian, and as everyone knows, we're ruled over by omnipotent polar-bears and their inuit headhunting henchmen, who will lock us into our igloos with no supper if we ever reveal their presence....
Awww, CRAP!
I find it unspeakably, laughably ironic that this got modded to 0.
Oh, and lets not forget using your tax dollars to build a fake company to entrap two russian hackers ... add on administrative costs, the plane tickets to fly them over here, cost of the trial, cost of keeping them in jail...
Don't like it? Write your congressman, write your senator, heck, even write your president (or, if Gore isn't available, settle for Bush ((OH, the karma's gonna pay for that one!)) ). Remember, if you have enough time to post on slashdot, then you have enough time to email your government. There is a page somewhere that gives easy access to email links for everyone, but being at work, I don't have it handy. I'm sure it'll pop up shortly.
So, let me get this straight... they actually expect us to believe that WinAdmins make almost 70K a year to handle 10 machines? I don't know what kind of fantasy world this study was done in, but I want in!!!
Of course, far be it from me to suggest that this portrayal of WinAdmins might be a bit off... but, for reference, I support close to 200 WinTel machines and 5 servers, and I don't make anywhere close to 70K US a year... I think I may print this article and see if I can get a raise out of it...
Lesse... 70K per 10 boxes, 200 boxes, equals... woohoo!
I tried dumb terminals for the telephone POS team. It didn't work out, for a number of reasons, the most notable being that when their request for a monitor colour other than "amber" was denied, they started using coloured markers to make it interesting shades of baby-diaper brown ("The amber hurts my eyes."). When I put "goop" on it (an anonymous, 20 year old bottle of something, picked up from a high school, used to keep the kids from drawing on the screens. No ink sticks to this crap), they tried holding unshielded speakers to the monitor to get it to change colour ("It works at home!"). Even when I spent the time to explain the intricate details of CRT tubes and colour guns, they still tried again when I left.
These are the same people who ***COMPLAINED**** when the latest drive image came with Clippy turned off. How frightening is that?
I should be nice to them and mention that the previous sysadmins stance was "If you don't like it, fix it yourself", and the only way for users to get service was for them to hammer their machines to the point where the didn't work anymore, and then complain to their supervisor. It was bad, really bad, but even their warnings to me when I took the job didn't scratch the surface of the evilness this place has.
My current favorite user recently regaled me with the story of how her new TV's remote had died, and therefore she poured water down the back of it until it sparked. She was very sure to point out *HOW SMART!* she was to let the water dry before she returned it to the store to get an exchange, and she's very happy with her new, functional remote.
The deep, stabbing pain in my head rose to new levels as I commented that it was odd for the batteries in a new remote to die that quickly, and she said "What batteries?"
ROFLMFAO
Damn, but that hit the spot. I think that's my sig for the week =)
It's been a bad day, so - ::begin true it-happened-to-me BOFH-style rant:: ::Sorry for the length, but I feel better now::
Yanno, I've been telling my users for years now that the easiest way to stay safe is to keep updating. I even (choke cough sputter) turned on "Automatic Update" in Windows, just so it would keep them up-to-date. They disabled it, claiming "Every once in a while things would get slow for a bit, but now it's fine" or my favorite "I got funny messages". (PS: Also had to reimage 7 machines because somebody decided he was a geek and he could just copy his registry between machines).
So I capitulated, and started sending everyone reminders by email when they had to update. I included the URL to windowsupdate and copious instructions. "It's too hard, I don't know what to do", they whined. I tried sending them the enterprise update exe's. They downloaded them, alright... put them right on their desktop, and forgot about them. I rewrote the reminder emails to include a script to do everything for them. It worked, for a bit... then I started noticing machines not being updated, and virii floating around that shouldn't. Turns out they'd started sending my emails right to the trash. "It didn't seem to do anything", they said, "it just popped up some box and then went away, so I figured I didn't need it." The box, of course, said "PERFORMING AN IMPORTANT UPDATE ON WINDOWS, PLEASE WAIT."
Exasperated, I set up the NT login script to push the updates to the user (which I'd been avoiding, it involved actually getting the NT server working). It seemed to work fine, until one day I browsed the network by accident (hit the wrong button), and noticed that I had 65 computers in the group in an office of almost 200. Turns out some genius had found his way into Network properties and changed the setup to skip login to the NT server. "It was really annoying", they said, "I'd start up my computer in the morning, and then I'd have to wait for, like, a whole minute or two! Sometimes it wasn't even done when I got back from getting coffee! This is so much easier, we just hit 'escape' when the login screen comes up. Why didn't you do this in the first place?". It was at this point that I found out no-one was using the network drives either ("We have a network? Like an internetwork?"), thereby rendering pointless my copius virus scans and backups and RAID setup that I'd blown my monthly budget on. Fine, I say to myself, I'll show these buggers.
So I set up a dummy machine, with which to do nothing but keep running perfectly and with all updates and latest drivers installed. I burned a bootable CD image from it, and whenever someone called in with a virus complaint, I'd go to their machine, pop in the CD, reboot, and go for an extended coffee break. The image had a boot virus scan to clean everything else up. Happy, was I, as I noticed the drop in virus calls. Soon, they dried up. I was actually starting to feel good, untill one day the VP called me in to find out why we were sending no less than 9 different virii to our clients every day. Their excuse? "When you did that thingy with the thingy, it made all our games disappear, and I've almost gotten to the second level!" Yes, indeed, they were just ignoring the virii now, even though they were getting messages from the antivirus program. Seems they believed clicking "Quarantine" would mean that I'd take their computers away and lock them in the server (clean) room for a while.
So I tried locking down with PolEdit and SysEdit. They brought in their own windows CD's and reinstalled, because "something was broken and it wasn't letting me do what it used to". I pulled the CD drives (no use for them here anyways, except for games), and came out of the IT room late one night to find one of the file clerks studiously pulling hard drives from the cases to reimage at home and return the next morning. I drilled holes in the side panels and put a padlock on them. The users started bringing in laptops to do their work on from home, which even made the problem worse. I screamed bloody murder, demanded to know what the source of these problems were. Everyone played dumb. I felt my brains rotting and leaking out of my ears.
Then, salvation. The VP mentions that he's seen alot of people emailing lately, and he wants to make sure that it's all company business. Would I monitor employee email usage, he asks? I try to suppress my snoopy-dance of joy as he gives me the escape clause from the moral dilema I'd been facing about finding out what the problems were. I monitor, I read, I find out who's sleeping with who (including a schedule for a tryst in the closet behind my server room. I consider installing a hidden camera), but most importantly, I find out the source of my headaches. An industrious middle manager has discovered the joys of wholesale computer warehouses, and has been joyously selling the employees games to play at work, and later, the laptops they brought in. I wonder how exactly he managed to charge people $25 to "upgrade their L4 cache so their games go faster". I admire his inginuity, but I know he must go. I feel good about this decision, mostly because I know he's screwing around with my computers, but also because I can justify it as "doing the best thing for the company". That, and productivity has gone in the tank, and everyone is blaming their computers, and at his direction, me. I'll make BOFH yet, I tell myself.
That was a long time ago, at least in computer years. Once he left, things bounded back up to normal. People started doing what they should, not avoiding security so they could play games all day long. Why do I tell you this long story? Because that is my experience with users, and that is the pain that is caused when they don't do what they're told to. So, as someone who's told users for years to do their updates, I feel no sympathy for users hit by this particular (and moderately ingenious) virus. If they were good users, they would do their updates like their SysAdmin tells them to. They are bad users, users like the ones from above, and so I say "No PC for you!". I wouldn't feel like this, except the story specifically states that this virus takes advantage of known vulnerabilities. I don't see it as a bad thing, I see it as a chance to see who listens to me, and who'll get "upgraded" to a new 486 next month. I'm in a BOFH mood today, can you tell?
In closing, I reflect on my outing of the middle manager. I printed out his more venemous emails regarding me, along with copies of invoices for illegally imported computer components and computer games charged to his expense account. I wrote a touching resignation letter for him to sign, explaining how he was leaving for "personal reasons". I left these on his desk as he was out to lunch, pointed his desklamp at them, turned it on, and turned off the room light. On top, I left a short note:
It is dark.
You are likely to be eatten by a grue.
You know, I was going to post something informative or maybe even (+3 Insightful), but this nausious feeling just won't go away. I can understand suing someone for libel ... even if I do think it's just customers sharing their experiences. Considering the net-based nature of his business, people posting in online forums about how bad he is would strike me the same as people marching outside the front door of the local pet store carrying signs and shouting slogans. But to then start suing the people who carried news of the origional lawsuit? Or the ones who carried the ad banners for the legal defense fund? What's next, sue the WayBack machine? Sheesh... sounds like someone isn't selling enough Kibbles n' Bits to pay the bills...
/., then you have enough time to do this as well.
I hope the good folks at Google countersue him, and I also hope that this spurs all the people who've had bad experiences with this place to file a group or class-action lawsuit, and I hope it hurts him good.
Does anyone know the results of the origional lawsuits? (not including the &*%(#&'s who settled)
And does anyone have the links to the legal defense fund, and any of the BB's that posted the comments? They deserve links on my homepage (made and hosted in Canada, where we don't take this kinda crap, eh?)
Now, I'm going to write the nice man an email explaining why I'll be boycotting his business, and why I'll be encouraging others to as well. Shouldn't you, too? If you have enough time to post on
(Sig 0.5b)
I'll defend your right to spew fruitless venom and baseless idiocy with my dying breath, just as you must defend my right to call you an asshole.
This bill appears to cover fair-right usage to create backups of music CDs and DVDs, and if I read it right, would also allow you to circumvent DVD copy protection if you wanted to play the DVD on your "preferred format"... so if you prefer video tape or DivX, you'd have every right to record it to that format, provided it was for personal use and not public consumption.
Hmm, I wonder if this would make DeCSS legal?
It doesn't matter how awful and crippling your disease is. If there aren't enough of you to make money off of, then it isn't worth our time to try and cure you.
Sincerely, The Big Drug Companies
Me: Why would drug companies make a treatment when they can make a cure?
Me: Simple. If you charged people $100,000 apiece to get a cure for AIDS, they would riot in the streets and burn you in effigy.
Me: If people would riot for being charged $100,000 for a cure, then why aren't they rioting for being charged $5,000 a month for a treatment?
On a different note:
I agree with most people above. The bottom line of $5,000 a month for 20 years is more appealing than $100,000 a head, and it's just that simple. Especially when that disease is communicable, such as AIDS or HepC. Cure it, and it goes away, treat the symptoms, and everyone gets it.
And, on another different note:
Am I the only one absolutely disgusted that research into a cure for AIDS or Alzheimers is being shut down because somebody put a patent on an enzyme? And, more to the point, am I the only one disgusted that drug companies are allowed to make massive profits? Sure, a resonable return on investment should be expected for investors, but to put the future of the species into the hands of Wall Street? I find it humourous that congress can pass legislation encouraging drug companies to test drugs on children, but it can't put strong federal backing behind a cure for AIDS or cancer. Cure those, after all, and thousands become unemployed. Treat them, and everyone gets a nice, cushy job taking care of the sick.
My grandmother died of a disease that had a cure "in the pipeline". Clinical human trials started just a few months after she went. I found out years later that the drug could have been available almost 10 years earlier, but a copyright lawsuit held everything up as it was appealed to higher and higher courts.
What scares me is not that this happened.... it's that it might happen to me.
There, wasn't that nicer than "RTFP, jackass"?
And yes, I've written the RIAA and the Big 5 to let them know that I'm boycotting, and that I support the rights of artists to decide what happens to their music. I think a more important question is: Have you?
Support P2P, become a supernode!
Turned out he had 4 gigs of Rammstein. :-)
(Guess that just goes to show you what mainstream media does to your perception of "big bands")
Check eBay, they should be quite cheap... not good resolution on the mouse movements (maybe 150-300 dpi), but still useful. I want to pick one up and try Q3 or UT with it.
Ya see, I don't figure the decline in CD sales as a result of piracy, or of changes to the consumer economic model. I think it is good old-fashioned grass-roots protest. I know, myself, I haven't bought a mass-market CD since the RIAA started their petty little lawsuits to drive everyone out of business, and I know I'm not the only one. I also know a good deal of friends who are using KaZaA(lite), Freenet, LimeWare, et al, in protest of the death of Napster.
I say Rock On to P2P! 'Real Soon Now'(*), people will figure out that it's the downturn in your economy and protest from consumers over price and silicone-inflated plastic singing Barbie clones that is driving down sales, not P2P. Perhaps, in some fit of irrational sanity, they may actually examine why people use P2P, and figure out that if they can improve on the model with, say smooth resumes on interrupt, distributed Akamai servers, no bogus files, live cuts, better indexing, and proper labeling, that they may actually be able to charge a resonable amount per month to let people download mp3 or Ogg files. But, alas, they cling to "We'll only release music that is old and out of date, and we'll insist on proprietary formats, and DRM that ensures that you'll never play this on another computer, or even your own if you have to reinstall, or if we go out of business."
So, while you're at it, write your congressperson and senator, and urge them to kill any bill which requires DRM enabled sound cards and speakers (which, yes, has already been proposed), let alone any bill which requires anything electronic to be DRM.
Next week: How to get your Barbie to record Britney Spears songs! (By some odd coincidence, the electronics get implanted in her chest, she switches randomly between anatomicly correct and "anatomicly unidentifiable", and Ken does all the singing anyways)
(*)Mad Propz to Jerry Pournelle and Chaos Manor!
http://www.jerrypournelle.com
You'll be fine until someone figures out who invented the modern method of timekeeping. Once someone can prove that their ancestor created the modern method of timekeeping, we'll have to pay a fee to change the time on our clock, and undergo random inspections to ensure we haven't modified the origional work contrary to the Clock EULA.
Clocks will also now cost upwards of $200 thanks to licensing fees, but we will all have to pay it because a sundial doesn't have a loud enough alarm.
In related news, hundreds of people will be thrown in jail for animal cruely for trying to find the 'snooze' button on their black-market roosters, whom clockmakers insist is a derivitive work.
And you people scoffed when they said that the Julian calindar would cause chaos!
Hmm... US government puts out bill to require anything digital to have copy protection on it... cost for digital equipment goes up.
Last month, US government drives legislation to force all TVs' to have digital tuners installed, including all TVs' manufactured in the US, and all being shipped via the US. Cost for TVs' and consumer electronics goes up.
US government also tables legislation requiring all television networks to convert to digital within 5 years. All existing TVs' and VCRs' will be obsolete. Cost to consumers goes up.
Result: In 5 years, all televisions and VCRs are digital, copy-protected, and controlled. Government gets to dole out the new "digital" channels to whomever meets their standards.... or should that be 'ideals'?
Earlier in the year (and the year before, and the year before) the US government threatens to put stricter regulations on the Internet, including what you can do, what you can read, and where you can read it. Stocks of net-filtering software go up, ad banners start to reduce fees paid because of declining revenue, free-speech sites and those not funded by a corporation start going away.
Earlier this year, US government tries to force libraries to filter the websites available on their public computers. US government also successfully forces schools to filter content. Those who do the filtering? Corporations who use their own judgement to determine if a site should be filtered or not.
DMCA serves as pretense to shut down P2P networks, mp3/warez websites, Instant Messangers with file sharing capabilities (it's coming, just you watch) etc.
"THE WAR ON TERRORISM" (tm) serves as pretense to search anyone, anywhere, even from outside the country.
US government arrests people that it invites into the country (the two russian credit card hackers and the FBI) or those that haven't even done anything to the US (Skylarov ((SP?)))
You know, I saw a sig that said "Canada: It's like being in the loft above a really great party". I don't know about you, but I'm starting to think that not all the noise from the party downstairs is good.
And, on a different note, as IANAL (sorry, everytime I see that I read I-anal. I just can't write it with a straight face), what happens if I come down to visit with my Sony minidisc player? Do I get arrested for having non-conforming hardware? Technically, this could extend to anything with a memory, including a watch, a car, a phone.... sound worrisome?
You know, I started this post out noting increased costs... then I got to noting the decreased liberties... then I started thinking "Yanno? If I were slightly more paranoid, I'd almost think that the US government is trying to discourage free speech and push internet and technology access up to the higher tax brackets, where they have more control, while removing these tools for freedom from the 'unwashed masses'. But that would be a bad thought, and I'm double-plus good!"
And, if you think I'm kidding, take any of the paragraphs up above and look in slashdot archives... they all came from here.
"If you don't think, you're letting the terrorists win!"
{* Disclaimer - if you accidentally duct tape your CPU fan and your PSU inlets, please try and smother the flames with your body because (1) No one else should be hurt because of your "specialness", and (2) You'll be doing all of us a favour. Either way, don't blame me. *}
The easiest fix: Take some foam padding, preferably the antistatic kind that most hardware ships in these days, and line your case panels with a layer or two. It'll cut down on a good portion of the noise, and it'll improve your airflow (you didn't really think that air was supposed to go through those decorative holes, did you?) Be sure to keep it thin on the back side, next to the mobo. I know it says antistatic on the box, but do you really want anything touching your mobo?
Next, replace your damn PSU. Standard ones are way too damn noisy. I don't have any links handy (I'm at work), but they are plentiful and easy to find. Oh, and say "damn" alot. It helps.
Getting more in-depth, remove your peripheral drives (CD, HD, etc), and put them back in with rubber washers both between the drive and case, and between the screw and case. It cuts down on vibrations significantly.
Tie up your loose cables. Sounds silly, but I've found that in several systems with significant airflow, they were either moving around or causing turbulence. Either make or buy rounded IDE cables for the best flow.
If you have a very noisy harddrive, yank it from that small and normally loose 3 1/2" bracket and put it in one of your 5 1/4" bays with the help of drive brackets. Insulate around it with antistatic foam padding, use rubber washers, put an ultraquiet mini fan behind it, set to pull air(that old socket 7 fan you have lying around will do just fine). Finally, remove the bezel in front of it, drill some small holes for airflow, insulate with foam padding (remove the padding around the holes ((yes, it is sad that I have to point that out)) ), and pop it back in. Voila! Thicker padding to cut down on sound, it's in the 5 1/4" drive section, which I find is much sturdier and less prone to rattle, and the fan will keep it cooler than it would have been before.
Consider dropping that 52x CD. Sure, it's impressive, but you install all your games with max install, right? (right??) Or better yet, go buy software that will copy your CD to the HD and then subst the directory to a drive letter. Voila! CD at HD speeds. Replace the 52 with something more conservative, and you'll notice a big difference (and lower spinup time)
crud, "subst", I just dated myself...
Consider spring-mount screws for your case fans. I have a whole bag of them, but I'll be darned if I can remember who made them. They're basically just a short metal or plastic spring with a screw at each end. One end screws into the hole on the fan, the other into the case, voila, instant buffer against vibrations.
If things are still too bad for you, consider an external case mod. The quietest I ever did was to replace all of the metal panels on the case with 1/2" beechwood (damn, but it was pretty), but not all of us have the time and patience to work up something like that. The easiest is to take your panels off, and slap some starch/water paste on them. Next, take some thick cloth (or a few layers of thin cloth, if you feel the need to be difficult), load it up with the paste, and then just slap it on your panel. Make sure it's all wrinkly and folded n' chit. Let it dry, and the cloth should stick on just fine, adding another layer of sound barrier for ya. DISCLAIMER 1: This has been known not to stick on some of the new, shiny, smooth cases. DISCLAIMER 2: Take the panels off of your PC BEFORE you start slathering them with starch. Or, at the very least, remember to turn your PC off first. ;-)
Finally, try putting your PC on a phone book or something similar. Sounds silly, but it dulls the noise that resonates into the floor/desk. If it makes a difference for you, then build something more permanant for your case to sit on (or, at the very least, give it some ultracool extra-long legs like the AT-AT Walkers from Star Wars.... complete with little lazer guns on the CD drive... )
Lastly, note that a heckuvalot of the noise you hear could be from your monitor, too. But I will avoid monitor mods for today, lest some yahoo stick a phillips through his tube and show up at my doorstep, ready to share the tale. (it's happened, and I swear he was still smoking).
Hope this helps!
Don't complain. I remember back in the day (well, ok, more like the day after the day... after all, the day goes back sooo far....) when I'd use that load time as an indication that a big bad mob just got loaded or activated... the PC would slow down, and I'd either duck down or backpedal as a matter of instinct... Thats one of the little things that gets lost when we upgrade to big bad hax0r boxXxen, as the kiddies say these days.
Course, these days I still do that as instinct in games, even though nowadays it's normally one of my background programs doing something. I get nailed for it on LAN parties, as people figured out they just had to start massive network activity on my PC to get me to turn back and hide behind a corner... normally when they were waiting there for me...
Consider:
Study "A" states that the Capital_I_Internet is a nice, cozy place with lots of interesting things, and this is a "Good Thing" (tm). They suggest that a lack of regulation is also a Good Thing.
Study "B" says the Internet is an evil place, where 3/4 of the traffic is pr0n, and 1/2 the users are child molesters lurking in the shadows for Your Children! Dear Lord, Someone Please Save The Children!
Study A will perhaps get you a few more hits from the ACLU domain, and if you're really lucky, your dean may get invited to a conference in Buttf*ck, Nebraska to discuss how the Internet can improve bovine fertility.
Study B ensures that you get massive media coverage, your own segment on CNN, at least 1/2 page articles in every major newspaper, and every moral and religious group that hears about this study donating money based on the headline. Your dean gets invited to a half dozen major conferences and meetings, all expenses paid, and you get to appear on "Larry King Live" or some such thing. Your face, your university, and everything possibly associated with this study ensures not just your 15 minutes of fame, but that when the devoutly religious VP of BigCorp sees your smiling face on CNN denouncing the evils of the net, that you get a nice, cushy position producing BigCorp-brand studies to say the same thing.
So, which one would you do? Or better yet, which one would you be allowed to publish? Controversy breeds cash, ladies and gentlemen, and places that are barely breaking even like universities need every bit they can get.
(Of course, there is always the ubiquitous option "C", wherein you publish a study suggesting that pr0n isn't a bad thing, and that perhaps it serves as a release for potential peds and other assorted unmentionables. When going with this option, the normal result is flaming bottles being thrown at your house, followed by regular mob-crowd beatings, loosing your job and every bit of captial you have, getting arrested for coughing in the general direction of Washington [Germ Warfare!], and being thrown in a 6x8 cell with "Ted", who will happily help you gather mounds of empirical evidence on whether lube is *really* neccessary.
Not that that ever happens, of course, right?)