CoffeeFiend

Someone would have to be a bit nutty to believe they'd do something like that... unless you mean in a long time from now.

That's why multiple monitors is useless for you. Most people always have a few apps open at once. Like a browser (I never close it basically), a mp3 player app of some kind (WMP), pretty often either a mail client (outlook, especially at work) or pdf app (acrobat), something downloading in the background, an instant messenger and so on. Many apps these days work very well with multiple monitor setups, like Visual Studio 2010, Altium Designer and many others. And even when you're using an app on just one monitor, it can be extremely helpful having something else opened on the other e.g. you're working in Photoshop on one monitor, and on the other you have some notes from your client (acrobat or outlook opened) -- it beats having to walk a half mile to collect slices of dead trees at a networked printer. Or Visual Studio on one, then SQL Server Profiler tracing on the other. Or some sort of HTML/CSS editor on one screen and a browser on the other for some. So many options and uses! Most CAD/graphic design/programming workflows work great with such setups. But even without multiple monitors, I can't even imagine working with just one app open at one. I typically have a dozen apps running at once or so.

Some content requires to create applications, that depends on what you're serving. But you don't have to make it a web server -- it already is. As usual, MS has plenty of free training videos. As for installing and pre-configuring everything you need (including many popular applications), you can use WebPI which is totally awesome. Anything and everything's only a couple clicks away (be it SQL Server Express, PHP, WordPress or whatever) As for multiple sites, you just use different bindings (not that I'm into hosting or anything like that). But sure, you could use the default web site, which indeed is mapped to %SystemDrive%\inetpub\wwwroot

It basically won't help at all for the vast majority of tasks (it'll mainly help a few specialized tasks like video encoding) There's nothing much to it. Buy the proper hardware, put it together, install the OS as usual. That much crunching power would typically benefit greatly from added RAM, which 32-bit XP won't support. Ditto for extra CPU registers and many, many other small things (e.g. the global dispatcher lock getting removed with Win7) No. It only has 4 cores. You see twice as many because of hyperthreading -- which was mainly developed as a way to work around the poor architecture of the Pentium 4 (Netburst) and its excessively long pipelines, effectively halving the cache per core in the process... You can't put two i7's on the same motherboard, much like you couldn't do with any other "desktop class" CPU before. For this, you have to buy "server" CPUs i.e. Xeons for Intel setups. Keep dreaming First, you need a fancy dual CPU motherboard (of decent quality, and ideally with several key features) which is not going to become cheap in the foreseeable future. Then you need a pair of suitable Xeon CPUs. Right now that would be in the 5600 series (or better). If you want something which at least matches in speed with 2nd gen Sandy Bridge CPUs like the i7 2600k at stock speed (not the old and much slower ones like the i7 920 @ 2.67GHz), you'll need at least the Xeon W3690 but those can't be run on dual socket boards either. So that pretty much forces you to buy a pair of Xeon X5690's. And then the RAM... Yeah, you don't buy that uber-cheap consumer DDR3 RAM either, it has to be those expensive ECC RDIMMs. And lots of boards require a server chassis and PSU(s) too. So let's say, a pair of Xeon X5690's (that's pretty much like getting a pair of "decent" 2nd gen i7's), a "basic" Supermicro MBD-X8DTE-F-O motherboard, and a measly 12GB worth of ECC RDIMMs at 1333MHz e.g. two 3x2GB kits (not that I'd want to be buying small 2GB sticks) like the Crucial CT3KIT25672BB1339. The total price so far is near $3000 (not bad still -- our last dual E5530 server costed ~$10k about 6 months ago), assuming you don't need a server case the the matching server PSU(s). And $3000+ later, you have something that still is no faster at most tasks due to other limitations (like the disk subsystem, network latency & throughput, the GPU limiting games, most software not magically being able to make use of 16 logical CPUs, etc) Or, if you want something twice as fast as your existing i7 920 (assuming I got the model right), then spend $300 on a i7 2600k and be done with it (well, OK, you still need a new Socket 1155 motherboard, but those are a lot cheaper still). Or overclock it to be even faster. Or maybe you just want/need a $150 Crucial M4 SSD...

While I'm not a fan of the particular coding style used, it's surprisingly well thought out/designed. That really could have came in handy back then. But yet again, it's even shorter/more concise in PowerShell using regex pattern matching and hash tables. Yes, the syntax is different (it's really one switch statement, with 3 short regular expressions for matches) but on the other hand the program flow is much simpler.

That's typically the kind of problem people encounter: issues with the master browser (and network discovery)

I like it I like to think the people who are building this system aren't completely incompetent and have thought of basic issues like dual booting. Either ways, you should still be able to boot from a plain old BIOS (Win8 or otherwise).

Chances are what you have is fast enough for you anyway. We can't really guess for you without knowing your expectations, uses or budget (not that I know anything about prices in that part of the world)

The exact same words I was thinking. Because of minor annoyances with a pre-beta (which might work differently or which you might be able to tweak how you see fit later on), you're willing to switch to a minority OS that runs basically no useful software, has no games and has poor hardware support, along with the epic fail that is Unity? I'd sooner switch to Windows ME, or even OS X (which at least works and has some useful software). Either ways, most of us already know that if you end up doing so, you'll just be distro hopping for a while and then go back to Windows (Vista or otherwise)

Mine would be having little software available and poor hardware selections (yet at high prices). Most likely yeah. I guess it depends on how much control they'll leave to Jonathan Ive now that Job's gone, and if they move in another direction. Personally I think it's just a matter of time, especially with Android eating into their iPhone/iPad market share.

Welcome to capitalism 101. Corporations have to keep making more and more profit every year for their shareholders. They do so by diversifying their offerings (something Google really sucks at IMO), which is most easily done via acquisitions. Big parts of adsense/adwords were bought (Applied Semantics, and many others like DoubleClick). They bought Urchin for web analytics. They bought several companies for maps. Youtube was purchased. Big parts of gmail from from aquisitions like Postini. Android (the OS) was bought from Android Inc. The list goes on and on and on. They even bought Motorola's phone division lately. What do you mean, is happening? Nothing's changed. They've always been like this (e.g. buying DejaNews circa 2001) Then I would suggest either outlawing corporations (worldwide), or coming up with a better economic system and convincing everybody to switch to it.

I'm not quite sure why it's not working for you. If I keep the extracted files (setup.exe and so on) from %temp%\{some GUID here}\Disk1 and run setup.exe -r on that, it does generate a valid setup.iss file, which does work with the -s switch as expected. If that helps, here's the contents of the setup.iss file: [InstallShield Silent] Version=v7.00 File=Response File [File Transfer] OverwrittenReadOnly=NoToAll [{CBDF64A5-44E0-4ECF-B5B3-FE8EF961CF13}-DlgOrder] Dlg0={CBDF64A5-44E0-4ECF-B5B3-FE8EF961CF13}-SdWelcome-0 Count=3 Dlg1={CBDF64A5-44E0-4ECF-B5B3-FE8EF961CF13}-SdStartCopy2-0 Dlg2={CBDF64A5-44E0-4ECF-B5B3-FE8EF961CF13}-SdFinish-0 [{CBDF64A5-44E0-4ECF-B5B3-FE8EF961CF13}-SdWelcome-0] Result=1 [{CBDF64A5-44E0-4ECF-B5B3-FE8EF961CF13}-SdStartCopy2-0] Result=1 [Application] Name=LockIndicator Version=1.0.1106.2401 Company=Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. Lang=0009 [{CBDF64A5-44E0-4ECF-B5B3-FE8EF961CF13}-SdFinish-0] Result=1 bOpt1=0 bOpt2=0

I hope the firmware isn't as ghetto as the WRT160N v3 I've got here (it's got to be one of the worst I've ever seen). Anyway. AP isolation is disabled by default on it, but I'd have a look at it under wireless > advanced. This is most likely the reason.

I think that's the best option too. Why bother if there's something pre-made that does the job reasonably well... But if you were to write such an app, there would be several key decisions to make such as: relying on datestamps / archive attribute / file sizes to see if something's changed vs hashing all files to see if they've changed (better test but a lot heavier, especially with large files). Or watching for changes "live" using a FileSystemWatcher (quicker, knows instantly when something is updated) vs comparing the files each time the tool is run (doesn't have to be ran "live") and so on. It would still be pretty simple to write such a tool in a number of languages.

What router (or 3rd party firmware)? Because by default they should see each other.

No, that would work fine in any regular port, unless you went out of your way to enable some option like AP isolation to "isolate" your wifi clients from everything else (shouldn't be an issue so long as your wifi is reasonably well secured i.e. using WPA or similar) DMZ means that ~100% of web traffic (hackers, script kiddies, network-spreading viruses and all) would go right to your HTPC and that's about it. It would be directly exposed to the internet, without any protection from the router. So your question sounded like "how can I plug my HTPC (for no particular reason) in a very unsecure manner, and then add a firewall?" which seemed a bit odd for sure. Edit: darn. Beat to it by a minute or so

I don't agree. I think it gives decent (but basic) idea of how fast a computer you have. A computer with a slow CPU or slow GPU or slow disk or such will show lower scores in the respective entries, and faster PCs will score higher. No, it's not a good indicator of things like "how many FPS will I get in game XYZ" but I don't think it was ever intended to be something like that either (and I think that's what most people seem to have against it). The score is directly derived from a benchmark of the components, so it is exactly that, a (non-perfect) indication of the said parts' performance. I'm not sure what more you're expecting? Nothing will replace specialized benchmarks for specific tasks. But WEI will give you a good idea how the computer will perform at most general tasks. More expensive doesn't mean it has higher performance either... I wonder what card that is (knowing would probably solve that mystery)

I don't see why he'd want to do that in the first place. It makes no sense to me. My HTPC happily sits behind my router, and if I wanted to "expose" something (and not via VPN) then I'd just forward the necessary port(s).

Yes, but what if there are more than one blank line at the end? (just kidding). I obviously missed that part, sorry about that.

You're welcome And yes, it can take a while to "get it". That's fine. I was using what you posted above. Line 1 started by "Name". Line 2 had just "Level" on it, line 3 was a bunch of dashes, and line 4 was where the data started. Perhaps your log file was slightly different. Sure. But what about if there are 2 empty lines at the end? Or about a bug that somehow introduces a blank line in the middle of the file? It's easier and more reliable to just skip empty lines altogether. Just test $vmcluster's value before calling your method like such: foreach ($clusterobject in $servers) { $vmcluster = $clusterobject.name if ($vmcluster) { $vmcluster } } i.e. if ($vmcluster) { your_code_here }, then your code won't be run if $vmcluster contains nothing.

Nah. It was pretty well explained. I think you just didn't "get" how to use it yet then. Just use a foreach loop like this: foreach ($clusterobject in $servers) { $vmcluster = $clusterobject.name $vmcluster } The advantage here is that you can not only access the name property of the cluster object ($cluster.name) but every other property that was read from the log file. Obviously, you'll be doing something else than writing it to the console, so replace the last line ($vmcluster by itself) with whatever you'd like to do with it (like calling disableesxhostmonitoring). Or if you're positive that you'll never need the other properties, then just create a list of names, and use it directly with a foreach loop (still very similar). Then again, I'd probably use a parameter on that function for the cluster name (much like you would in any other language)

Almost? It so happens that I have a GTS 250 in my work PC. With the latest drivers: Still not bad for card that was like $60 (and that came with a $20 MIR too iirc). Sure beats the onboard Intel video when it comes to OpenGL apps!

Been there before I also use PowerCLI, but we don't have clusters full of ESXi machines. And yes, it is indeed a rather general PowerShell question. This should do the trick: $servers = @() foreach($server in gc clusters.txt | select -skip 3) { $tmp = $server.split(" ",[system.StringSplitOptions]::RemoveEmptyEntries) $tmpSvr = New-Object System.Object $tmpSvr | Add-Member -membertype noteproperty -name Name -value $tmp[0] $tmpSvr | Add-Member -membertype noteproperty -name HAEnabled -value $tmp[1] $tmpSvr | Add-Member -membertype noteproperty -name HAFailover -value $tmp[2] $tmpSvr | Add-Member -membertype noteproperty -name DrsEnabled -value $tmp[3] $tmpSvr | Add-Member -membertype noteproperty -name DrsAutomationLevel -value $tmp[4] $servers += $tmpSvr } assuming your cluster list is called clusters.txt. This recreates an actual PowerShell object called $servers. You can use it like any other object now. For example, if I run $servers | format-table after that, I get: Name HAEnabled HAFailover DrsEnabled DrsAutomationLevel ---- --------- ---------- ---------- ------------------ cluster1 True 1 True FullyAutomated cluster2 True 1 False FullyAutomated cluster3 False 1 False FullyAutomated 123442 True 1 False FullyAutomated server23 True 0 False FullyAutomated test123 False 1 False FullyAutomated abcd False 1 False FullyAutomated

Soon... But I might as well wait until I upgrade. Too much hassle otherwise, especially with an update coming soon and little spare time at the moment. 120GB doesn't cut it for me, even as an "OS and apps" drive (no games). Half-decent 120GB sandforce models (OCZ, Corsair, etc) are ~$150, and 240GB models (Crucial m4 256GB, OCZ Vertex 240GB, etc) are like $450+ which is more than I'm willing to spend on SSDs unfortunately (more like $250). RAID0 is cheaper for sure, and as a bonus it's a lot faster than a single 120GB SSD. Sounds like win-win to me!

You're right yet again! I updated my ancient drivers (so old the version number was probably a negative number) to 10.10 preview 3 and refreshed. Got 7.2 and 7.2 now: Still not bad for a 4 year old build I guess (I'll be upgrading to Ivy Bridge whenever it's out, and probably with a pair of decent 120GB SSDs in RAID0)