Windows Server 2003 is pretty much XP with extra crap thrown in (seriously, if you want to say that some of the serious improvements in XP over 2k are "add-on crap" making it the "ME of the 21st century", then go ahead. I think that ME was a failure because it was unstable, not because of the features they added. With XP I think I'll keep my free built-in cd burning ability and the fact that it actually has drivers for the old integrated radeon in my sister's pc. I've even seen XP running on a pentium 166 with 128MB of ram without swapping, and it was still pretty responsive, although I'll admit it was using ALL the ram and we didn't try running anything, especially not office.)
Windows Server 2003 is pretty much the same kernel as XP, with a few extra things turned on, such as supporting more cpus, extra types of software raid etc, and some things off by default, such as the XP skin and the quick tasks side-panel in explorer. Basically set swap to how much you need, but in a server you should have the space for 4GB swap easy.
It's also a good idea not to set the swap min and max to the same number, because having your server dies horribly the moment it fills its swap is not good. I recommend setting the max to 2x the min, regardless of how much you have, as long as you have the drive space.
As far as I remember the "conversation" I was asked to say my booking number, and then my surname and finally to say yes to confirm the details of the booking I was cancelling, and it was DEFINITELY a recorded voice I was talking to. Made me wonder at the time if there was a person sitting behind the recording controlling it, or whether it really was that good at recognising what I said. Seriously, most people I talk to face-to-face have trouble understanding me sometimes, and on the phone it's normally worse, but this went through without a single mistake.
A quick scan of the comments didn't mention this, so I thought I would.
Clickteam make a set of 2d games and application creation programs, called "The Games Factory 2" and "Multimedia Fusion 2" specifically designed to be easy to use. They're trying hard to push their products to the education market, so you might want to take a look.
You could open the door to my old mini with the key upside down, essentially having the flat side of the key open the lock. Now that's what I call security.
I have another story: A friend of mine had a red car (dunno what make / model) where the join between the top of the door and the roof was about a centimetre of rubber. Aparently some theives just dug their fingers into this and pulled, bending the top half of the door enough to unlock the door from inside. Unfortunately for them after that they proved to be stupid, because they managed to break the left stalk on the steering wheel, leave a clear footprint on the driver's seat (?) and break the handbrake. After all that they still hadn't managed to start the car, so they left. There wasn't even a radio in the car, because that had been nicked the week before.
Except that all those $ for ISK services are strictly against the game's eula, and technically by using one you'd be breaking contract law, and who worries about taxes on illegal money?
The "$130K" value isn't an actual value though, as the in-game currency (and any other item in the game for that matter) "officially" have no real-world value. At all. The "$130K" is what he could get if he traded all the in-game ISK for time-cards, which do have a value. Although I wouldn't be suprised if the eula said that CCP could restrict how many timecards you could "buy" with eve ISK at once (or even let them stop you buying any). I think that if you buy timecards with isk it should ask you for an account name and put the time directly onto that account (or at least lock the timecard to that account). That would prevent the in-game rich exploiting CCP's generous time-card offer to get a very substantial sum of real money, and leaving most people relatively unaffected.
"ATI has released the world's first consumer 3D graphics card with GDDR4 memory clocked at the highest ever stock speed" I think the sentance should end after "memory", maybe putting "and it's" between "memory" and "clocked". They seem to have badly merged "first graphics card with gddr4" and "graphics card with the highest ever stock speed" into one sentance, and now it sounds like it's the first to have the highest-ever-speed GDDR4, implying that there have been cards with GDDR4 in the past, which AFAIK there haven't. Too be honest, 1000MHz isn't any faster than the older "GDDR3" memory anyway, so what's the difference?
It annoys me whenever I see words like "dime" on an international page. I'm british, and had to google for "dime" to find out how much it is. How difficult would it be to put "dime (10c)" instead?
It also annoys me that some americans call cents "pennies". It gets really consfusing if they never mention that they are using american slang instead of meaning the real english penny, which is worth 1.88 times as much.
No, g is only 56Mbps. If you've tried a 100+Mbps wireless it was "pre-N", not G. Maybe you should try an actual wireless g router? Stay away from the belkin ones, I've only had problems with them.
We got broadband, and had to install adsl filters on every phone socket. After a few months, we started having phone trouble, specifically that people couldn't ring us. We could pick up the phone, get a dial tone, and dial out, but sometimes if someone tried to ring us then it would give a busy tone (without us being on the phone at the time). At first we blamed my sister for being on the phone too much, but then the problem worsened. One day I got a call from home (I'd gone to uni by then) and there was bad static on the line. I rang back and the call was fine. The next week it was fine, but I was told that several calls to different people that week had had noise very much like old dial-up internet "static". I agreed to look into it when I got back in a few weeks.
When I got home the problem had worsened even more to the point where no phones in the house had a dial tone any more and no calls were possible. The internet was working, so I tried unplugging the modem data cable to see what happened, but we still had no dial tone, so I figured that it must not be the internet interfering. I tried plugging one phone into the master phone socket, which normally has a line in it running to the other sockets in the house, so unplugging this isolated all the other phones. Problem gone. Ok, so it wasn't the line, it was something in the house. I went around and unplugged everything from every phone socket, then reconnected the sockets to the master, and plugged back in the phone I'd used earlier. All fine.
So I plugged things in one-by one until every socket was filled again except the pc's one. Everything working fine. This was odd, because I'd tried unplugging the modem earlier and the problem was still there. A quick glance under the desk gave the difference: this time I'd unplugged the adsl filter as well, and not just the modem. A little experimenting confirmed that whenever this filter was plugged into a phone socket, even with nothing plugged into the filter, every phone in the house went dead. I guess it had a short in it or something, but that wouldn't explain the earlier problems we were having, especially the "people sometimes can't ring us" one.
I wonder how long it would have taken a bt engineer to find it?
I don't know if this is just my luck or something, but I've had quite a few dvds where pressing the remote's "play" button while on the main menu made it play the movie.
Maybe my dvd players just makes the play button also be "ok" when I'm in a menu?
I'm almost offended by the fact that you assume I'm American, when in fact I am English (rare I know). But yeah, I agree with your point about vowel sounds. Maybe we should just all agree on a certain spelling for each sound, be it combinations of vowels or accented vowels, but at least agree.
I like the idea of moving the caps key. My preference is turn the scroll-lock key into caps lock, make shift+caps lock be scroll lock (so basically combine caps and scroll lock into one key), and replace the old caps key with two keys for those wierd marks some languages have above letters. I know, I know, the Alt Gr key does some of them, and local keyboards already have the appropriate key(s) for their local language, but what about the rest?
Then again, a campaign to get rid of the accents above letters in european languages and replace them with the letters or letter combinations that sound exactly like them wouldn't go amiss either.
I have actually run a system with two different-speed cpus in it (both Athlon MPs, both 2400s, but the motherboard didn't correctly read the multiplier from one and ran it at 600MHz instead of 2GHz), and the only problem I ever found was that the cycle counters were out of sync (well duh), meaning any apps that were single-threaded, set to use both cpus, and read the cycle counter for a very accurate timer got very confused. Setting them to only use one core sorted it.
Eg I ran the CS:S dedicated server and it measured the speed of the 2GHz cpu, but then reading the cycle counter from whichever cpu windows switched it to. The uptime counter flickered between approx. 0:00 and approx. 2:00:00,and counted at different speeds, the 0:00 one normally and the other about 3 times slower. People playing jumped around like crazy, but restricting the server to use only one cpu made it stick at either 2:00:00 or 0:00 depending on which cpu it was restricted to.
Basicly, the problem is that it doesn't store the equivalent of 37x10^-2 for.37 (integer and power), more like 0.37x10^0 (fraction and power). And while 37 is easily representable in binary, the fraction 0.37 comes out as approximately: 0b.01011110101110000101000101 (to 26 binary places), or 0.36999996006488800048828125 in decimal. I think they do it this way so that they lose the smallest-value bits when the number is too large for the mantissa, instead of the largest-value ones.
I use nero 7 (specifically NeroVision) to make dvds. The quality is good, but unless I did the following to disable the nero codecs the audio was out of sync with the video. Also, turning off the "smart audio transcoder" (something like that) is a good idea because a bug in the "auto" (default) video quality option means that it calculates quality to fit the video and audio to the disk assuming re-compressed audio, and then "smart transcoding" decides not to re-compress the audio and it goes over the size of the disk and fails to burn.
To disable nero codecs: Start > Run > regsvr32/u "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Ahead\DSFilter\NeAudio.ax Start > Run > regsvr32/u "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Ahead\DSFilter\NeVideo.ax
Um, that IS how computer floats are stored, just with a power-2 (binary) exponent instead of decimal. With a limit of 23 bits on the matissa iirc for a 32-bit float. Maybe an 8-bit exponent and 1 "sign bit", if memory serves.
My calculator always stored 12 digits of precision even though it could only display 10.
So 10/3 = 3.333333333 on screen but 10/3 - 3.333333333 = 3.3 e-10, not 0. This is also why 2/3 would show on-screen as 0.666666667, because it was actually rounding 0.66666666666 (maybe an extra 6 on that, can't remember if it treated the 0 as a digit of precision). Any calculator which ends 2/3 with a 6 on-screen can't be very good in my opinion.
You could always use a much stronger, non-flexible plate on the kneecap. Like a steel toecap, but for the knee. After all, your kneecap doesn't bend, so the armour over it doesn't need to be flexible.
I said "CAN'T" do the trick, not "don't NEED to". They can't because corporate edition doesn't ask about activating / validating (at least not normally). It does seem to have those wpa files, so whether it asks about activating if you delete them is a completely different point. (Which would probably prove me wrong about the trick not working though, but hey, I'm at work using a legal corp pc atm).
Incidentally, you can get Windows keys for free if you attend a university that's part of the MSDNAA (Microsoft Academic Alliance), and join some programming course. I got several XP keys, various Visual Studio keys and even got a free and completely legit key for each edition of Windows Server 2003. But I'm using them, so no, you can't have one.
Except that most pirate copies are based off of the corporate edition and: a: don't need activating, so you can't do this trick b: don't have serial numbers compatible with any other copy of XP, and so c: you'd need to buy a corporate edition key, which are very expensive, and you probably need to be a business to get one.
Leaving the classic "Repair install": Boot off of the cd, press f6 and install sata / raid drivers if you need to, then ask to install windows and then ask to repair the current install (I think that's it). You'll probably need to re-install all your drivers afterwards, but not software and you won't lose your documents.
I know someone who plays female characters in FPS games (such as UT2004) because they're thinner and harder to hit. Most of the males in that game are massive. In most FPS games, you can't see your character, and you can't get given items like in an MMORPG, so most of the arguments here don't apply.
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Windows Server 2003 is pretty much XP with extra crap thrown in (seriously, if you want to say that some of the serious improvements in XP over 2k are "add-on crap" making it the "ME of the 21st century", then go ahead. I think that ME was a failure because it was unstable, not because of the features they added. With XP I think I'll keep my free built-in cd burning ability and the fact that it actually has drivers for the old integrated radeon in my sister's pc. I've even seen XP running on a pentium 166 with 128MB of ram without swapping, and it was still pretty responsive, although I'll admit it was using ALL the ram and we didn't try running anything, especially not office.)
Windows Server 2003 is pretty much the same kernel as XP, with a few extra things turned on, such as supporting more cpus, extra types of software raid etc, and some things off by default, such as the XP skin and the quick tasks side-panel in explorer. Basically set swap to how much you need, but in a server you should have the space for 4GB swap easy.
It's also a good idea not to set the swap min and max to the same number, because having your server dies horribly the moment it fills its swap is not good. I recommend setting the max to 2x the min, regardless of how much you have, as long as you have the drive space.
As far as I remember the "conversation" I was asked to say my booking number, and then my surname and finally to say yes to confirm the details of the booking I was cancelling, and it was DEFINITELY a recorded voice I was talking to. Made me wonder at the time if there was a person sitting behind the recording controlling it, or whether it really was that good at recognising what I said. Seriously, most people I talk to face-to-face have trouble understanding me sometimes, and on the phone it's normally worse, but this went through without a single mistake.
A quick scan of the comments didn't mention this, so I thought I would. Clickteam make a set of 2d games and application creation programs, called "The Games Factory 2" and "Multimedia Fusion 2" specifically designed to be easy to use. They're trying hard to push their products to the education market, so you might want to take a look.
To be honest I found this one suprising. How many people are searching for "google" in google?
You could open the door to my old mini with the key upside down, essentially having the flat side of the key open the lock. Now that's what I call security.
I have another story:
A friend of mine had a red car (dunno what make / model) where the join between the top of the door and the roof was about a centimetre of rubber. Aparently some theives just dug their fingers into this and pulled, bending the top half of the door enough to unlock the door from inside. Unfortunately for them after that they proved to be stupid, because they managed to break the left stalk on the steering wheel, leave a clear footprint on the driver's seat (?) and break the handbrake. After all that they still hadn't managed to start the car, so they left. There wasn't even a radio in the car, because that had been nicked the week before.
Except that all those $ for ISK services are strictly against the game's eula, and technically by using one you'd be breaking contract law, and who worries about taxes on illegal money?
The "$130K" value isn't an actual value though, as the in-game currency (and any other item in the game for that matter) "officially" have no real-world value. At all.
The "$130K" is what he could get if he traded all the in-game ISK for time-cards, which do have a value. Although I wouldn't be suprised if the eula said that CCP could restrict how many timecards you could "buy" with eve ISK at once (or even let them stop you buying any).
I think that if you buy timecards with isk it should ask you for an account name and put the time directly onto that account (or at least lock the timecard to that account). That would prevent the in-game rich exploiting CCP's generous time-card offer to get a very substantial sum of real money, and leaving most people relatively unaffected.
"ATI has released the world's first consumer 3D graphics card with GDDR4 memory clocked at the highest ever stock speed"
I think the sentance should end after "memory", maybe putting "and it's" between "memory" and "clocked". They seem to have badly merged "first graphics card with gddr4" and "graphics card with the highest ever stock speed" into one sentance, and now it sounds like it's the first to have the highest-ever-speed GDDR4, implying that there have been cards with GDDR4 in the past, which AFAIK there haven't. Too be honest, 1000MHz isn't any faster than the older "GDDR3" memory anyway, so what's the difference?
I wish people would write clearly.
You cruel person. Do you have something against harvard, posting a link not only to their site, but to a photo on their site, on slashdot?
Britain had the penny as it's smallest unit well before it went decimal.
It annoys me whenever I see words like "dime" on an international page. I'm british, and had to google for "dime" to find out how much it is. How difficult would it be to put "dime (10c)" instead?
It also annoys me that some americans call cents "pennies". It gets really consfusing if they never mention that they are using american slang instead of meaning the real english penny, which is worth 1.88 times as much.
No, g is only 56Mbps. If you've tried a 100+Mbps wireless it was "pre-N", not G. Maybe you should try an actual wireless g router? Stay away from the belkin ones, I've only had problems with them.
We got broadband, and had to install adsl filters on every phone socket. After a few months, we started having phone trouble, specifically that people couldn't ring us. We could pick up the phone, get a dial tone, and dial out, but sometimes if someone tried to ring us then it would give a busy tone (without us being on the phone at the time). At first we blamed my sister for being on the phone too much, but then the problem worsened. One day I got a call from home (I'd gone to uni by then) and there was bad static on the line. I rang back and the call was fine. The next week it was fine, but I was told that several calls to different people that week had had noise very much like old dial-up internet "static". I agreed to look into it when I got back in a few weeks.
When I got home the problem had worsened even more to the point where no phones in the house had a dial tone any more and no calls were possible. The internet was working, so I tried unplugging the modem data cable to see what happened, but we still had no dial tone, so I figured that it must not be the internet interfering. I tried plugging one phone into the master phone socket, which normally has a line in it running to the other sockets in the house, so unplugging this isolated all the other phones. Problem gone. Ok, so it wasn't the line, it was something in the house. I went around and unplugged everything from every phone socket, then reconnected the sockets to the master, and plugged back in the phone I'd used earlier. All fine.
So I plugged things in one-by one until every socket was filled again except the pc's one. Everything working fine. This was odd, because I'd tried unplugging the modem earlier and the problem was still there. A quick glance under the desk gave the difference: this time I'd unplugged the adsl filter as well, and not just the modem. A little experimenting confirmed that whenever this filter was plugged into a phone socket, even with nothing plugged into the filter, every phone in the house went dead. I guess it had a short in it or something, but that wouldn't explain the earlier problems we were having, especially the "people sometimes can't ring us" one.
I wonder how long it would have taken a bt engineer to find it?
I don't know if this is just my luck or something, but I've had quite a few dvds where pressing the remote's "play" button while on the main menu made it play the movie.
Maybe my dvd players just makes the play button also be "ok" when I'm in a menu?
I'm almost offended by the fact that you assume I'm American, when in fact I am English (rare I know). But yeah, I agree with your point about vowel sounds. Maybe we should just all agree on a certain spelling for each sound, be it combinations of vowels or accented vowels, but at least agree.
I like the idea of moving the caps key. My preference is turn the scroll-lock key into caps lock, make shift+caps lock be scroll lock (so basically combine caps and scroll lock into one key), and replace the old caps key with two keys for those wierd marks some languages have above letters. I know, I know, the Alt Gr key does some of them, and local keyboards already have the appropriate key(s) for their local language, but what about the rest?
Then again, a campaign to get rid of the accents above letters in european languages and replace them with the letters or letter combinations that sound exactly like them wouldn't go amiss either.
I have actually run a system with two different-speed cpus in it (both Athlon MPs, both 2400s, but the motherboard didn't correctly read the multiplier from one and ran it at 600MHz instead of 2GHz), and the only problem I ever found was that the cycle counters were out of sync (well duh), meaning any apps that were single-threaded, set to use both cpus, and read the cycle counter for a very accurate timer got very confused. Setting them to only use one core sorted it.
Eg I ran the CS:S dedicated server and it measured the speed of the 2GHz cpu, but then reading the cycle counter from whichever cpu windows switched it to. The uptime counter flickered between approx. 0:00 and approx. 2:00:00,and counted at different speeds, the 0:00 one normally and the other about 3 times slower. People playing jumped around like crazy, but restricting the server to use only one cpu made it stick at either 2:00:00 or 0:00 depending on which cpu it was restricted to.
Basicly, the problem is that it doesn't store the equivalent of 37x10^-2 for .37 (integer and power), more like 0.37x10^0 (fraction and power). And while 37 is easily representable in binary, the fraction 0.37 comes out as approximately: 0b.01011110101110000101000101 (to 26 binary places), or 0.36999996006488800048828125 in decimal. I think they do it this way so that they lose the smallest-value bits when the number is too large for the mantissa, instead of the largest-value ones.
I use nero 7 (specifically NeroVision) to make dvds. The quality is good, but unless I did the following to disable the nero codecs the audio was out of sync with the video. Also, turning off the "smart audio transcoder" (something like that) is a good idea because a bug in the "auto" (default) video quality option means that it calculates quality to fit the video and audio to the disk assuming re-compressed audio, and then "smart transcoding" decides not to re-compress the audio and it goes over the size of the disk and fails to burn.
/u "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Ahead\DSFilter\NeAudio.ax /u "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Ahead\DSFilter\NeVideo.ax
To disable nero codecs:
Start > Run > regsvr32
Start > Run > regsvr32
Um, that IS how computer floats are stored, just with a power-2 (binary) exponent instead of decimal. With a limit of 23 bits on the matissa iirc for a 32-bit float. Maybe an 8-bit exponent and 1 "sign bit", if memory serves.
My calculator always stored 12 digits of precision even though it could only display 10. So 10/3 = 3.333333333 on screen but 10/3 - 3.333333333 = 3.3 e-10, not 0. This is also why 2/3 would show on-screen as 0.666666667, because it was actually rounding 0.66666666666 (maybe an extra 6 on that, can't remember if it treated the 0 as a digit of precision). Any calculator which ends 2/3 with a 6 on-screen can't be very good in my opinion.
You could always use a much stronger, non-flexible plate on the kneecap. Like a steel toecap, but for the knee. After all, your kneecap doesn't bend, so the armour over it doesn't need to be flexible.
I said "CAN'T" do the trick, not "don't NEED to". They can't because corporate edition doesn't ask about activating / validating (at least not normally). It does seem to have those wpa files, so whether it asks about activating if you delete them is a completely different point. (Which would probably prove me wrong about the trick not working though, but hey, I'm at work using a legal corp pc atm). Incidentally, you can get Windows keys for free if you attend a university that's part of the MSDNAA (Microsoft Academic Alliance), and join some programming course. I got several XP keys, various Visual Studio keys and even got a free and completely legit key for each edition of Windows Server 2003. But I'm using them, so no, you can't have one.
Except that most pirate copies are based off of the corporate edition and:
a: don't need activating, so you can't do this trick
b: don't have serial numbers compatible with any other copy of XP, and so
c: you'd need to buy a corporate edition key, which are very expensive, and you probably need to be a business to get one.
Leaving the classic "Repair install":
Boot off of the cd, press f6 and install sata / raid drivers if you need to, then ask to install windows and then ask to repair the current install (I think that's it). You'll probably need to re-install all your drivers afterwards, but not software and you won't lose your documents.
I know someone who plays female characters in FPS games (such as UT2004) because they're thinner and harder to hit. Most of the males in that game are massive. In most FPS games, you can't see your character, and you can't get given items like in an MMORPG, so most of the arguments here don't apply.