Recent Posts

1376

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by zridling on February 09, 2009, 11:21 AM »

Best I've seen in a long time. The payoff is worth 3 minutes.

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Living Room / Re: What are you getting for your Special Other for Valentines Day?

« Last post by zridling on February 09, 2009, 11:14 AM »

What Deozaan said. The only day we celebrate is the anniversary of the day we met. We don't do xmas, valentine's, Bastille, Boxer, German Unity Day, Independence, black presidents, or any other holiday. Those are for those fancy government workers and bankers! Otherwise, it's an excuse for corporations like Hallmark to induce guilt that I'm not buying their products based on cultural expectations. Me don't play that.

A random gift, act of kindness, or event, or gesture is more meaningful to us.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Games for Linux

« Last post by zridling on February 08, 2009, 10:28 PM »

Wow, great list! Love that they don't require Wine. My favorite chess program offers a native Linux version, so that's all that counts for me.

 

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General Software Discussion / Re: What was it like to use Linux like back in 2000?

« Last post by zridling on February 08, 2009, 10:22 PM »

I used three for a while over a couple of years, but when XP went to SP1, I came back. The one I used most was Knoppix. I remember not being able to grasp the whole 'free' thing at that time. Funny now. The differences since are impressive.

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General Software Discussion / Nice Twitter app for Vista, looks like AIM

« Last post by zridling on February 08, 2009, 10:09 PM »

Very nice Twitter app called blu for Vista/Win7. Looks great.



I haven't perused the DC profiles to see who's Twittering. If you are, I'm zaine_ridling on there.

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Living Room / Re: Please tallk me off the ledge... Intervention needed!

« Last post by zridling on February 08, 2009, 08:17 AM »

Darwin, how long do you keep a notebook, 2, 3, 4 years? If it's on the long side, upgrade now. If you're switching to another machine every 2-3 years, always go with cheaper hardware. My favorite machine is not my newest one, but my 2000 machine, still running all original parts. It's slow today, but I got my money's worth.

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Living Room / Re: Greetings from the Atlantic!

« Last post by zridling on February 08, 2009, 08:11 AM »

Wow, thanks for taking us along, 40hz!

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Living Room / Re: Tech News Weekly: Edition 06-09

« Last post by zridling on February 08, 2009, 05:46 AM »

Speaking of Google, they now have Life Magazine's library of photos digitized and in Google Images.

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Living Room / Re: Meme time! Five Things People Don't Know About Me

« Last post by zridling on February 08, 2009, 05:41 AM »

Five more things. I'm so strange I could keep this going for years.

(1) My mom is typical: she asks me to call her all the time. On the other hand, my mom is atypical: when I do get around to calling her, she starts making excuses to get off the phone within five minutes. (I call her once every six months or less. The occasional letter is better.)

(2) I dislike trivia games because I feel life's too short to spend it remembering most minutia.

(3) I was on the 'Bozo the Clown' show as a kid once. It was not nearly as fun as watching it on the TV. They taped an entire month's worth of shows in one day and we were herded into the little stands, asked questions, told to scream in delight, and then get the hell off the stage. Turned out Bozo was an insurance salesman who was arrested for being a peeping Tom in his other life.

(4) I taught statistics as a college instructor for years at schools throughout the US Midwest. Loved the job, hated the pay. Never had the ambition to become a professor; besides, the wife's career turned out to have a much better future.

(5) I was in love with my very cute cousin from when I was 9 to 11 years old. We were born on the same day in the same year. We pretended to secretly 'date' for almost two years at family gatherings. I don't regret it. She's still freakin' hot! Now, we laugh about it to this day and wonder what could have come from forbidden tween love other than genetic disaster. (Don't you judge me! She looked like this).

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Living Room / Re: Hot geek love - holy smokes! [just sad]

« Last post by zridling on February 06, 2009, 08:41 AM »

It's definitely reminds the ladies what they're not missing! 

This one is from 'Tim':
What makes you the hottest tech guy?
My "hard drive" is one of the new solid-state models — no mechanical delays, low access time, and always cool.

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Living Room / Re: Hot geek love - holy smokes! [just sad]

« Last post by zridling on February 06, 2009, 08:15 AM »

The site is not, but this portion of it would have to be, don't you think?

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General Software Discussion / Re: Benchmarked: Ubuntu vs Vista vs Win7

« Last post by zridling on February 06, 2009, 05:47 AM »

I can't wait to try Ubuntu 9.04, and I hope it doesn't disappoint. I finally admitted 2 months ago that Intrepid Ibex has been nothing but CRAP for me and I wouldn't use it if I hadn't installed everything on it already.    Ext4 looks like a step in the right direction until either BtrFS gets it's legs  or ZFS gets a GPL-compatible license.

-Edvard (February 05, 2009, 10:49 AM)

8.10 punked me good. So I'm using openSUSE for the meantime. However, the latest Fedora 11 beta offers both BtrFS and Ext4 filesystems as defaults if you want.

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Living Room / Hot geek love - holy smokes! [just sad]

« Last post by zridling on February 06, 2009, 05:02 AM »

Love is where you find it, but these poor guys don't have a clue as to what it even is, I suspect. See for yourself via the profiles.


How can you love another if you don't love yourself?


What exactly does he mean by 'Megaman'?

Are there other geek love/dating sites out there?

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General Software Discussion / Re: Department of Defense launches open source site Forge.mil

« Last post by zridling on February 05, 2009, 05:05 AM »

Do you think that it is a good idea for the government/military to use open-source software? Isn't it a serious security risk?

-bgd77 (February 05, 2009, 04:22 AM)

Quite the contrary. Collaboration, openness, and open standards sniff out weaknesses; look no further than browsers as an example. Well-formed data, universal, standards-based transforms, ubiquitous communications protocols will prevent costly, insecure code from being written over time. And specific code for weapons wouldn't be shared with the public, of course, but you can bet Great Britain is at the table, as may be other allies.

Much of the US Military uses Red Hat Linux right now in places like the Army’s Blue Force Tracking systems. And outside the DoD, but closely related, the NSA has been a part of the development of SE Linux. (Intellipedia offers more stories.)

*Also, check out Matthew Burton's essay, Why I Help “The Man”, and Why You Should Too.

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Living Room / Re: Free Ubuntu pocket guide available for download

« Last post by zridling on February 04, 2009, 11:48 PM »

Keir Thomas's Tips book is helpful, too. Nice find, 40hz!

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General Software Discussion / Re: Benchmarked: Ubuntu vs Vista vs Win7

« Last post by zridling on February 04, 2009, 09:28 PM »

Our test machine packed an Intel Core i7 920, which in layman's terms has four cores running at 2.67GHz with hyperthreading and 8MB of L3 cache. It also had 6GB of RAM, plus two 500GB of hard drives with 16MB of cache.

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General Software Discussion / Re: WINDOWS 7 THREAD (ongoing)

« Last post by zridling on February 04, 2009, 06:00 PM »

Don't have the link, (chris pirillo?), but Microsoft announced that Win7 will be sold in five flavors compared to Vista's six. Still three to many to me. Offer both 32- and 64-bit versions on a dual layer disc and let the customer choose how much or little to install. Make it so that they can always go back and install more if needed.

EDIT: Here's the link. I don't count the Enterprise license for desktop use, of course.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=3456

• Windows 7 Starter Edition (aimed at emerging markets and netbooks)
  
• Windows 7 Home Basic (aimed at emerging markets)
  
• Windows 7 Home Premium (primary home edition)
  
• Windows 7 Professional (primary business edition)
  
• Windows 7 Ultimate (for consumers who wants everything)
  
• Windows 7 Enterprise (volume license only)

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General Software Discussion / Benchmarked: Ubuntu vs Vista vs Win7

« Last post by zridling on February 04, 2009, 05:55 PM »

From TuxRadar.com:
A lot of people have been chattering about the improvements Windows 7 brings for Windows users, but how does it compare to Ubuntu in real-world tests? We put Ubuntu 8.10, Windows Vista and Windows 7 through their paces in both 32-bit and 64-bit tests to see just how well Ubuntu faces the new contender. And, just for luck, we threw in a few tests using Jaunty Jackalope with ext4.

When Windows users say that Windows 7 is easier to install than ever, what do they really mean? When they say it's faster, is it just in their heads, or is Microsoft really making big strides forward? And, perhaps most importantly, when Linux benchmarkers show us how screamingly fast ext4 is compared to ext3, how well do those figures actually transfer to end users?

These are the questions we wanted to answer, so we asked Dell to provide us with a high-spec machine to give all the operating systems room to perform to their max. Our test machine packed an Intel Core i7 920, which in layman's terms has four cores running at 2.67GHz with hyperthreading and 8MB of L3 cache. It also had 6GB of RAM, plus two 500GB of hard drives with 16MB of cache.


________________________________________________
Interesting comparisons. BIG caveat? Don't forget that Win7 is still beta.

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General Software Discussion / Re: How much trouble is a 64-bit OS right now?

« Last post by zridling on February 04, 2009, 09:59 AM »

Silly question: why wouldn't you want to use a 64-bit OS with 64-bit CPU? Been running both Fedora and openSUSE 64-bit for months, without a hitch.

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General Software Discussion / Re: WINDOWS 7 THREAD (ongoing)

« Last post by zridling on February 02, 2009, 11:11 PM »

Also found this critic site, which hopes to avoid some of the problems that occurred during Vista RC1, where reports were ignored all the way to gold. Most of them revolve around improving Windows Explorer.

http://windows7critics.blogspot.com/

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Living Room / Re: Meme time! Five Things People Don't Know About Me

« Last post by zridling on February 02, 2009, 04:41 PM »

For a meme like this to be successful, it should contain some 'spicy material' I think, so here goes:

1. My only brother has recently chosen a "career" as professional criminal.

-Shades (February 01, 2009, 10:45 PM)

My brother did this in 2002, and bought himself a life sentence in 2003. The whole thing tore our family apart. The TV shows never tell you crime's impact on criminals' families. It wastes life savings, forces people to choose sides, and if like me, you still keep in contact with the offender, it's an emotional and financial burden. In other words, the family gets sentenced, too. Which is why I believe every troubled teen should have to spend a month sitting in a courtroom. It's very easy to convict people, the state has built-in advantages, and appeals go nowhere. In the end, you find out it's far better to avoid the crime in the first damn place!

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Living Room / A better way to rate software?

« Last post by zridling on February 02, 2009, 04:19 PM »

Perhaps more efficient. I've had every one of these reactions.

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Living Room / Re: Drive Dock: Turn bare drives into floppies

« Last post by zridling on February 02, 2009, 04:13 PM »

Looks similar to this Thermaltake unit, which is more discreet.

-Lashiec (January 31, 2009, 06:34 AM)

Thanks for the link Lashiec, I like those BlacX models even better.

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General Software Discussion / Re: WINDOWS 7 THREAD (ongoing)

« Last post by zridling on February 02, 2009, 04:09 PM »

Yet another positive Win7 report from the field.

"Pacific Crest Securities equity researchers today write that Microsoft’s (MSFT) forthcoming Windows 7 is 'a dramatic improvement over Vista' and that it has 'implications for the technology sector' beyond just what it will do for Microsoft... 'the increased speed and stability, relative to previous Windows iterations, are striking […] Everything seems to run faster and more smoothly.'"

If you've been using the beta, you'll likely agree. And since people are likely to sit on this [7] version as long as they did XP, it might be wise for Microsoft to reconsider charging for service pack upgrades, similar to what Apple does with OS X upgrades.

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Living Room / Re: Meme time! Five Things People Don't Know About Me

« Last post by zridling on February 01, 2009, 02:56 AM »

You guys love horror movies like I love Sci-Fi movies. The only sci-fi movie I couldn't finish despite two tries was Stranded (2002). Why Vincent Gallo was allowed to walk away from that performance alive I don't know. That was a crime against nature, it was that bad.

More than anything, I love seeing people cast against type in sci-fi movies. Sean Connery in Outland, for example, and it turned out to be very good.