CoffeeFiend

It's pretty hard to find the perfect editor indeed. I tend to use notepad for smaller stuff, and full-blown IDEs for programming (so much more powerful/useful for that purpose). So Notepad++ usually works well for that. But I really love ultraedit. It has LOTS of very handy features. Just too bad it's 50$, which does seem like an awful lot when you see lots of big IDEs (like Eclipse/VS Express/Netbeans/Sun Studio/etc) and countless text editors available for free. There is a "unlimited upgrades" license, but 125$ -- for a text editor? UEStudio seems even nicer, but at twice the cost (100$ for one version or 250$ for unlimited upgrades) I'll definitely skip! If only UEStudio was 20$, I'd be buying it right away.

S.SubZero: agreed 100%! I still keep an old LS120 drive somewhere in a bin, just in case I ever need to use a floppy (or LS120 disk) again, but it's been a few years since I've used one. Haven't had one in any of my PCs for at least 5 years (probably closer to 10). For carrying files over? No way! We've got networks everywhere and VPNs, email, USB flash memory sticks (including most mp3 players), optical media, etc. Why use tiny old media that's unreliable, a total waste of space and not cost effective? Besides, lots of PCs don't have floppy drives anymore (whereas you can pretty much take network access, optical drives, USB ports and all for granted - unless you're using very old stuff). Flashing BIOS'es? More and more flashers can run right from windows. And you can use a USB flash memory stick or bootable CD as a floppy if you absolutely have to. Even as a last resort I wouldn't use floppies - too unreliable (even though it checks the CRC before flashing so not too risky). Any old PATA IDE HD formatted/bootable works great. Haven't used a floppy for this in ages. Booting stuff? Even less of a reason. Boot floppies? Make a bootable CD out of it along with all the other images you might need (or go the lazy way and get your hands on one of the countless ones "out there"...) Even then I hardly use those anymore. And most people have or are moving to WinPE/BartPE instead nowadays. There's always PXE too. Mass Storage Adapters? Not required anymore with Vista (nor will be with LH). Can be integrated on install CDs otherwise (from existing driver packs - very convenient). They're unreliable (I've seen soooo much stuff being corrupted - bad sectors were all too common). Excruciatingly slow. Way too small to be useful for anything practical anymore. Not cost effective AT ALL (you can get several 4470MB DVDs for the price of a 1.44MB floppy). Most new PCs don't ship with those drives anymore. Haven't seen blank floppies for sale anywhere in quite a while (unlike say, optical media which is sold everywhere). Even 10 years ago they were already a real PITA. Ever head to install Win95 or Office using floppies? Now THAT took a very long time. I can't possibly think of a reason why I'd want to use one. They've long been dead in my book (except for old legacy stuff - like most all old hardware). They're the new punch cards.

Well, just like you, I'm not running Vista (not yet anyways). And there's already a good bunch of somewhat similar projects -- things to make the command prompt prettier, although not in a Vista sidebar thingy, like console (sourceforge project). Kinda becomes redundant at some point IMO, and it's very much a matter of preferences. I'm not sure I even want a sidebar at all... I guess I'll ahve to try Vista to see if it just gets in the way or if it's actually useful. Personally, most of the time I just use VSCmdShell (v1.1, inside VS2005). That, along with the old The old "command here" shell integration/reg tweak. Couldn't care less how ugly it looks really, as long as it's functional and efficient. I do use a custom font for legibility though. Don't see this as a 3rd negative post, it's nice of you sharing good findings, but not everyone's going to go crazy over such an addon for an OS almost nobody runs yet. I think you just had set your expectations a little too high perhaps.

Well, it's not a joining thing. I'm not taking sides here. I'm generally against posting such updates (or even most posts that start with [release]) unless they benefit most people or such, like a SP for Windows (and are in the right section, like news). The number of SQL Server users here is likely quite low, and I think most of them already heard of this in a way or another via any developer blog, rss feed or such. And even if it's not the same build of SP2 (so still new in a way), it would have been helpful to point it out, as most people would just think it's old news... Edit (to make the post more useful): As a side note, this is just for the "full thing". For the express ed, you have to redownload the whole thing again here. You also want the updated BOL too (Feb 2007 here), Samples (Feb 2007 here), the feature pack (Feb 2007 here). There's also a Best Practices Analyzer (Feb 2007 CTP here). There's also a few more downloads for MS Office and Sharepoint, a bunch of readmes and all that if you want it. There's about 1.25GB worth of stuff in total (around 30 separate downloads) for those who didn't already download all of this last month.

It's rather old news, but this is a new build of SP2 nonetheless (see bug info here).

Tried it just for fun. Don't have a use for them apps, but it's always fun to see the results (couldn't hurt to do a scan either, been way over a year). It's quite slow, especially checking all the hashes. I don't have that much patience. And it seems buggy. It sound 28 "infections" supposedly: 22 cookies (Oh noes! Cookies! Run for your life!) - and 6 entries I've manually added to my hosts file for a couple problematic sites. Doing a custom scan found nothing unsurprisingly. I'm surprised some people still need those type of apps these days. Bah! New GUI, but otherwise...

oops. browser bug... didn't mean to post same thing twice

Google or do a forum search for fontinst.exe No need to dual post...

What server side tech are you using? No point in us giving out a full answer only to find out you're using something else... And what is the actual problem you're having preventing you from doing this? Not sure how to generate the markup, or not sure what the SQL query should be? You need "event" to be unique or anything like that? Also, why not have a EventID-like column (autoincrement, pri key) or such too? Edit: forgot to add, does it need to do anything else like only list events that haven't "expired" or such? Usually, what I'd want is something like this <select name="events"> <option value ="1">Event Name</option> <option value ="2">Whatever</option> ... <option value ="n">Last Entry</option> </select> Where the number is the EventID (or just "id" or whatever) associated with the name, and you have the event name displayed.

Well, with 32kb clusters, you could only use half of the card... I'm not really suggesting anything (other than perhaps buying a 2GB card for whatever device doesn't support FAT32 -- newegg has some 2GB MiniSD on for $14.49)

The main thing is not performance, but rather that it's wasteful. A 1 byte file takes 64KB. A 65537 byte file takes 128KB. With smaller clusters there's less "loss". As for working, if it seems to work, you may be OK, but you can never be totally sure. I wouldn't trust any important data to it, especially with the price of 2GB cards nowadays. Depends how much you value your data, and how remote the risk is (or seems to be). I'm not taking any chances - I value my photos very much. But if it was just to store mp3's or such I'd just fill it up (formatted with huge clusters). There are known issues with using 64KB clusters with some hardware/software though (like old versions of windows). There VERY often are some bugs associated with this - like not seeing the free space properly (and hence things like a camera reporting a wrong # of photos' worth of space left on the card) And that's just a temp fix if I may say... Cheap 8GB cards are just around the corner, and you're just not going to use 128KB clusters.

Big cards like that can be an issue. FAT16 is normally limited to 2GB. It can be formatted to 4GB, but that's with very large clusters, and most utilities won't do it. FAT16 means 2^16 clusters total (65536). So 2GB is 2097152KB / 65536 clusters, which makes 32KB clusters. Or 64KB clusters for 4GB (if you can trick something in formatting it that way). The real problem is camera support for FAT32. On newer cameras you can pretty much take it for granted, but my "old" (but perfectly fine) DSLR doesn't support it. That's likely the case with more older electronics (cell phones and PDAs perhaps?). They just weren't expecting flash memory to drop in price so quickly I guess (back when I bought my DSLR the cheapest 1GB cards were 600$) - and often they won't release a firmware update as they'd rather sell you a new and expensive device you don't need just to get FAT32 support... Using this 64KB cluster trick some of them will work, but there's always that slight chance something will go wrong, and your card's contents will be corrupt. If whatever device you want to use this card in doesn't support FAT32, you have 2 main options: 1) formatting with huge clusters using 3rd party utils - that's OK if it's just to put MP3's on it or something (data that's not so important that you have backed up somewhere else already) 2) buying a couple 2GB cards. They're dirt cheap now (like 30$), will format easily as plain old FAT16, and will work safely in any device, no special formatting required, no chance of data corruption. I personally went with this one, there's no point in even risking losing 2GB worth of photos to save on a 30$ card. Safe, cheap, hassle-free, and still fits quite a bit of photos or whatever on it.

That explains it! The counter is a special custom 5.5 bit signed integer that goes from 0 to 23, and was overflown by 3. What, no half bits you say? That's nonsense! Funny bug though. Wasn't lucky enough to experience it...

You're welcome. Yeah, it's quite nice. I mean, one could do it all by hand, it's really not THAT hard to make something simple that would work. Have scripts that collect info (SNMP would be a pain though) and dump it into logs, then log parsers, math and some GDI+ stuff for graphing, etc. But then one has huge logfiles taking lots of disk space and that take a while to process. So you'd have to develop some round robin database (RRD) equivalent or such. Optimize, maintain, support, document and bugfix it all. Add new features. Add some scripting or config engine so you can get it to do fancier stuff (especially for the graphing)... An awful lot of work for what seems like such a simple task. And here all we have to do is get it to collect the data, that's about it.

Yes it keeps a "history". Just look at the linked page for the very first image here. There's even a yearly graph on there. It's meant to monitor SNMP devices, but you can make it graph really anything you want using simple scripts (gotta understand basic scripting though - which I would hope you do if you're monitoring servers). Also, check out RRDtool for somewhat nicer graphing. There's a bit of work involved to make it all work, but it's totally worth it. You can find tutorials, guides, FAQs and all kinds of resources using good ole google.

I usually monitor things this way. Just need MRTG and some scripts. You can monitor anything you want.

Avast is OK, but since he's looking for 5 user licenses, he's not likely in a home and non-commercial scenario, so it's not free. He'd have to buy the pro version, so 40$ USD/seat. That's the exact same price as NOD32. Kaspersky is 10$ more. I hear good things about the Avast home/free version - but the comments sound much like "pretty good for a free app". Haven't used it much, so can't really say much about it. Kaspersky is extremely thorough, but it's heavier on system resources. If you need absolute and the most extreme protection (e.g. something that will can for viruses inside installshield installers in a RAR'ed ISO image), this just might be your best bet. I've used it for a couple years and was rather happy with it (besides the annoying NTFS alternate streams it creates). I've given up on it after getting a bug that made it peak the CPU to 99% solid non-stop (even if you leave it for an hour, it still wouldn't go down). That, and it was just more of an AV than I really needed (I wanted something a bit lighter). Didn't like the console in the newer version either (seemed like they've just dumbed down the previous one and removed options). I had a bunch of false positives with it though (but nothing major) NOD32. Good app like kaspersky, but lighter (quick, decent resource usage, etc). Good config options. Provides very good protection. Good definitions and updated timely. No false positives yet. Haven't had problems of any kind yet really. Haven't used BitDefender. No idea... Might be worth trying. noadware isn't even an antivirus... And you REALLY don't want that crap on your system either: pretty good link but in french (use google language tools or the fish). It's from the same people who make Spyware Assassin -- the FTC filed complaints about that bogus/rogue app too. It was listed on many sites as a rogue app too. It reported false stuff to get you to buy it and more crap. They were promoted by the CWS/CoolWebSearch spyware and all, and some old versions even installed spyware (VX2/h and Look2Me). Who wants to run software from companies without any morals/ethics like that? So not only it's not an AV, it's plain BAD advice. If one wants antispyware apps, there's more than enough free and good ones, like ad-aware spybot s&d... There's no reason to spend a single penny on this thing. Not sure about Vista support though. But they all have trials. Why not download them all, install the trials on the PCs, and in a month's time buy the one you prefer/had less problems with? There's a thread about AV products too if you're looking for other's opinions. There's many sites with reviews and awards (like VB100%) too.

I don't see using DDR making any difference. You should at least get "beep codes" or something. If it's not doing anything (not posting, not beeping), then it's most likely dead. DDR won't help at all. For the processor? There's some for sale for 10$ with no bids... Not surprising, who's shopping for parts to build such an old box? The only people interested would be those who just fried an old CPU and want a cheap replacement (without upgrading). You might have a hard time selling it, and after ebay/paypal fees, there's going to be enough left to buy a cup of coffee (if you manage to sell it). Odds are you'll pay for listing fees and such a few times, and never sell it too. As for the dead board... Nobody's going to buy it (unless they don't know it doesn't work, and if you don't tell 'em, they won't be happy when they receive it, expect complaints and all). Even in perfect working order it wouldn't go for much (20$ maybe?) There's nicer boards around 40$ new... Personally, I wouldn't bother even trying to sell this stuff anymore. Even listing the board in "uknown/possibly broken/no warranty" along with the CPU, after all fees, you won't have much left - definitely not enough to upgrade any desktop (unless it's a 486, and even then), much less a server. This thing (if it even worked) is about 4x slower than that 73$ combo I mentioned before (for which you'd probably get around 50$ for 2nd hand), has no SATA, no PCI express, less memory slots, CPU doesn't support modern instruction sets, no warranty, etc. Keeping older stuff costs more (e.g. SDRAM costs more than DDR/DDR2), and is way harder to find. That's half the reason why I don't keep old systems around (that, and they're too slow, they waste electricity/creates extra heat pointlessly, and just means extra stuff laying around wasting space that I've got to look after). Parts for newer systems have far more bang for the buck, are way faster, more power efficient (for the most part at least), and are cheaper and easier to find (should anything fail) and upgrade. I've given faster boards/CPUs away for free.

Good luck with that... Can't find anything for socket 462 new, and the 2nd hand stuff usually sells for far more than it's worth. Last I've checked, those old Athlon XP 3000+ -ish CPUs go for about as much as a AM2 Athlon64 X2 3800+ costs nowadays (prices, old and new). I'd rather just buy a new AM2 motherboard (can be had under 50$). For the price of a 2nd hand Athlon XP, you could buy a AM2 Sempron 64 3000+ (43$ new at newegg) and motherboard... I just can't see a reason to invest anything in such an outdated platform (socket 462, AGP, no SATA, etc) If you're willing to buy 2nd hand (like you would for an Athlon XP chip) you can find even better deals... Same if you don't mind Socket 754 stuff: 73$ gets you a Sempron 64 2800+ (64 bit, 800MHz HT bus, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, NX bit, 62W) with a motherboard that has PCI express, 3 DDR memory slots, SATA and all (for which they still make CPUs); everything new with warranty. Can't tell for sure about the new Pro version, but the old was very notorious for problems like that (not posting at all). See "ZP fix". It didn't particularly like weak PSUs either. I wouldn't waste too much time on this. It's likely a dead board. And you only have a slow CPU for it anyways. And that board is not good for overclocking at all (even using 3rd party BIOSes) - you'll need serious luck to hit 1.2... And I don't see how this board will let you add more RAM than any other board you already have (just 2 slots one can use)...

Well, he got his answer in post #3: it's an optimized disc, where duplicate files are only there once (but are present in the TOC several times). Nothing new here... Even my old NT4 install CD had this a dozen years ago. Several apps can do this easily. I have to agree mostly. The only reason why traditional CD sales sometimes makes more profit is that you can't just buy the one or 2 good tunes from the CD for 1 or 2$, but only the whole thing for 15$. Also, with traditional media they like to sell you the same tunes over and over again (on those "best of" albums, movie soundtracks and what not). And typically people buy the CDs without listening to them first. With digital distribution, most sites have previews, and people won't buy the boring tunes (some new CDs just suck altogether). But then again digital downloads are like ~100% profit, and because of DRM it's likely they'll manage to sell you the same song in another format eventually (another sale)... Anyhow. If they want to make max profit, perhaps they should update their business model/way to do business? If they offered something like allofmp3 (but legal, no DRM) I'm sure they'd make a killing. That's what most people want nowadays (preferably with some format/bitrate choices). Well, that, and produce good music for a change - it just might help. Track density (how many tracks per inch) is more than the double. Pit length is also much shorter. It also has better ECC (wastes less space). As for the "checksums" (ECC) on a CD, it's roughly 13% (2324/2048) - nowhere near half the capacity. You can burn CD/XA Mode2 Form2 (aka XCD) disc using special software if you want (storing ~800MB on a 700MB CDR). But if there's any dust or scratches at all, expect not to be able to fully recover your data. I've burned a few mpeg4 rips this way before but you can't read any of them now... DVD media also has ECC bits - there's no way around this.

Not related to nlite at all indeed. Hopefully a mod will move the post... But yes, you can. Quick how-to here Now, if one could only slipstream service packs in SQL Server...

Yeah, I know PCI is kinda slow - alright: REAL slow compared to PCIe. But fortunately, it doesn't affect performance all that much in many common scenarios (e.g. streaming audio/video and such for which PCI is already overkill), or the performance would often be limited by something else (like the network). I'm dreaming of a nice PCIe card too, but when the card costs as much as the drives... As for 1x cards (1 lane), you won't find any as it would be totally pointless: PCI 2.2 @ 66MHz is faster (266 MB/s vs 250 MB/s for a single PCIe lane). That would just be a slower and more expensive card that works in less PCs. AFAIK they're pretty much all 8x (now that's significantly faster than PCI!) Well, I don't think just killing off power to drives is such a good idea. And it won't change performance. Performance is only affected when you access the array (RAID5 is computationally intensive - XOR'ing everything for parity). Hardware RAID is less CPU intensive, but it comes with a price (like 300$ extra for a 4 port card).

I'm significantly older than Jeremy, and I've NEVER seen a single laserdisc of my whole life. Saying it's the main medium is just ludicrous. And these days, DVD sales outnumber CD sales in many (most?) places, and the trend continutes. I don't have any old CD/CD-RW drive anymore (haven't had one for 2 or 3 years now) - just like floppies. DVD media basically costs the same, but holds like 6x more stuff. Both types of drives are pretty much at the same price point (dirt cheap). Yeah, like putting a cassette in the other deck, hitting record on the blank tape side and play on the other is hard... Or just plugging the line out to a sound card. It's equally trivial to copy. I guess the only hard part about copying blank tapes is finding somewhere that still carries blank tapes - protection by obsolescence! Just like gramophone recordings would be "harder" to copy because nobody sells blank wax cylinders. You forgot about 78rpm records, 8 track tapes, and 8mm film reels for movies. It's the age of high quality digital audio/video, multichannel/surround sound, digital players (computers, portable mp3/video players, consoles, etc), PVRs, HTPCs and everything HDTV. So basically you're saying they should back 20 years+ in technology, and offer low quality analog stuff, on olde crappy tape media that degrades significantly over time, costs more to produce, takes more space, and won't play on most devices where we take it for granted by now? Perhaps the plan is to make more money by alienating their paying customers by providing them with useless low quality crap that belongs in a museum? Perhaps we should buy walkmans again to replace our nice and expensive mp3 players, and carry along hundreds of tapes if we want some selection? Or we just all have to bother with doing an analog capture off junk tape media and then reencode it to have mp3s? Yeah, I'm sure that would go over real well! That's like the ultimate, very best ever thing they could do to kill their sales altogether, and have all P2P traffic increase 10 fold overnight.

Right. That's the number of pixels it has, and it's all you're getting. I wouldn't call this high definition by any means. That's 18% more pixels than a NTSC DVD (720x480) - or just 98% of a PAL DVD's resolution (720x576). It's more like a wide-ish 480p. Good enough for DVDs, but that's about it. I sure wouldn't buy that for watching HDTV content. Marketingspeak for "a chip that takes anything up to 1080p and downscales it - to pretty much DVD resolution i.e. 852x480", while trying to actually sound like a good thing. In short, it'll be able to display a HDTV signal, but not in HDTV quality... The pixels aren't there, no amount of processing will change that. 1080p is 1920x1080. That TV will resize it down to 852x480 (more or less DVD resolution). It has only 19% of the pixels required for 1080p. Honestly, I wouldn't bother buying something with less than 720p native resolution (1280x720).

This has NOTHING to do with overclocking at all. It's called uncapping. It's illegal in most places, and if you get caught bad things can happen (depending on local laws), from suspension of service (and then be stuck on dialup or something) to up to jail sentences in some cases... And it's hardware (model)/firmware/ISP specific usually. And often the bandwidth restrictions are enforced at the ISP end too.