CoffeeFiend

Vista has a built-in firewall. Not that I understand why he's worried. Even if his ISP knew he's using a particular version of Windows, then what? It's not like they actually care. As long as they're making money (i.e. you pay them), they couldn't care less.

They could try to fingerprint it, using infos gathered from different ports, but if you have any kind of decent firewall (or router), then there's very little they can do.

Looking at your posts, it seems like you have a 1GHz T-Bird Athlon (Socket A, circa 2000), on a board with a VT8361/8601 chip (so likely an old VIA KT133A chipset or very similar from the same era), old PC133 RAM, PATA/IDE drive, and now a GeForce 6200 (AGP). Personally, on those specs, I most definitely wouldn't be upgrading to anything beyond XP, regardless of what the upgrade advisor might say. Your WEI score would likely be 1.x (CPU almost certainly in the 1.x range, vid card around 2.x, hard drive and memory probably 3.x) Sounds like you're long overdue for an upgrade. You can get something that will literally run circles around that (and run Vista/Win7 great, including the x64 versions) and has tons of new useful stuff (USB2, SATA, eSATA, FireWire, multichannel HD audio, SPDIF/DVI/HDMI outs, hardware H.264 decoding, etc) for around $150 e.g. Athlon64 X2 (dual core, more features and instruction sets), good 780G mobo and 2x2GB of DDR2.

There's also the half-open connections thing that might interfere, and your router's max concurrent NAT sessions.

I can see a lot of people moving to that in the near future too. It's pretty amazing what MS pulled off here. In a couple of years, they made a perfectly good alternative to vmware's high-end products, matching pretty much all of the features, and beating it on cost too (especially if you're going to virtualize windows -- Win2008 Enterprise including 4 licenses for VMs). I'm starting to be somewhat worried about vmware's future. and that's coming from a die-hard, long time user of vmware too. Not only I'm going to get the best of workstation + server/esx/management tools combined, but it's built right into Windows (you know it'll be supported too, updating right from Windows Update too), and I can actually logon locally on that box and use windows apps (unlike on ESX). Also, the ESX(i) series never seems to actually run on any of the hardware I have or plan on buying ("newfangled" stuff no one's heard of, like onboard SATA from intel ICH chipsets).

So what's your point? *ducks* (couldn't resist)

I'm hoping to move on to that within the next 6 months too. There's not a gigantic price diff between a decent ed of Vista/Win7 + vmware workstation and Win2008 R2 x64 with Hyper-V 2 either (in fact, it's probably cheaper if you have action pack subscription!) And Hyper-V has most of the stuff I want in workstation (snapshots, scripting support and so on) *and* vmware server combined (and even extras, like Live Migration, all the mangement tools and such -- without paying thousands of $). It's probably $200 extra, but you're also getting a LOT out of it too: active directory, group policy, direct access, kick-a** remote desktop services (with aero glass, directx redirection and all), IIS 7.5 (finally including a decent ftp server), MSMQ, a stable platform to run SQL Server onto, etc.

No need to be sorry, just a misunderstanding I guess (disk or memory footprint). Disk footprint probably increased a lot, but when 1TB drives are $80 (8 whole pennies a GB) I can't say I worry too much about a few MBs extra, especially if it brings new features. Edit: Looks like I had missed that post you made while I was writing mine.

You'd be right. Installing the client tools on most Linux distros is usually a real pain (especially in vmware server, where the ISO doesn't seem to be updated quite as often -- you usually have to resort to copying that new ISO from a recent version of vmware so it works at all). the various vmware tools iso sizes: linux.iso: 200MB windows.iso: 32MB (includes x64 tools/drivers) freebsd.iso: 25MB winpre2k.iso: 13MB solaris.iso: 8Mb The Linux tools ISO is 3x bigger than all the others combined. Well, not sure how you calculate your footprint. Just the GUI? Going by what metric? (it has to be private bytes, not that "Memory" column in task manager). I'm using v6.5.2 on Vista x64, and the GUI takes 34512KB (going by private bytes, as per process explorer says). Even if you count the NAT/DHCP/auth services (11256KB extra), it's still a hair under 45MB total (out of 8GB, so about 0.5% of my RAM) I'd hardly call that bloated. Some of my apps running are using over 500MB private bytes... Also, there's a whole lot more to this than just memory usage -- tip of the iceberg really, and RAM is dirt cheap. Last time I paid $37.99 CAD for a "Buffalo Firestix Heat FSH800D2B-K4G 4GB 2X2GB PC2-6400 DDR2-800 CL4" kit (that's $33.96 USD by today's rate).

They don't seem to get that all of us will actually ban them on sight. Nobody wants them around, nor any of their junk. They're just wasting their time. We'll just keep banning them regardless.

That only works for sites using basic authentication (most aren't these days). For other sites, you have to know in advance the url the login http form posts to (which you'd find out by looking at the page source), you need to know which fields are on the said page (varies from a site to another), you'll also have to url encode the login & password (in case they contain "special" chars), then finally you make the http post using a XMLHttpRequest object.

20 hot-swap SATA bays for under $300 is pretty good anyways. It's about as much drives as one is going to get in a PC without going crazy expensive. You can hookup that many with the onboard SATA ports and some cheapo $30 4 port SATA generic cards with a silicon image chipset (works just fine). You can still manage to power that many HDs on a quality PSU that has enough "umph", without $1200 RAID cards that have staggered spinup. I'm thinking about that too... Maybe a P182, maybe another CM, maybe the Norco, ... not 100% sure yet. Yes, and yes. (this post typed on a computer sitting in a CM stacker 810 as well -- the one without the dual PSUs though). It's a shame they don't sell them anymore.

and many, many more features, like the invaluable snapshot tree, scripting support and everything else.

Unlock the taskbar and drag it to the top

I haven't bothered looking at the minidump (I really doubt there will be anything worthwhile in a 32KB zip file, especially when we can already see stack corruption). But right off the bat, you can notice "DEFAULT_BUCKET_ID: VISTA_DRIVER_FAULT" -- that's already a good clue. And IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL is often caused by faulty drivers too. Have you upgraded anything lately? Updated drivers? What's your hardware? ... You can setup your machine for a full memory dump, something that will contain valuable infos. Then compress it up upload that somewhere and give us the link, we'll have a look.

Antec is good all-around. Great quality for the price. No complaints. Last 2 I bought were Antec, and the next one likely will be too. Coolermaster also has some great offerings. The stacker is one of my all-time fav cases (I just love the old 810) Gigabyte? Didn't even know they made cases, never seen one (not even in a store) Lian Li is nice, but way overpriced IMO. Thermaltake... Mostly about looks, but I've seen worse. Others? There's always some others. I've been thinking about this Norco RPC-4020 for a while myself. This one's even nicer, but definitely out of my price range (especially when you add the pair of high end RAID cards and the 36 1TB+ HDs )

Yes, because people who bothered to give the new stuff a chance (as in trying it for more than 10 minutes) and actually like it are all shills... Most (not all, but nearly) of the people I've seen that don't like the new method never really gave it a chance. Once you're used to the new stuff, it's very hard to go back to the old way (what do you mean no search in the start menu? You mean I gotta go around looking for it now? Ow...) Most of those people are also the die-hard fans of older OS'es that often don't like, won't use, and won't upgrade to the new versions as it's "bloated" (as in, won't run great on their old P3) so nothing lost there IMO. "Dear Microsoft: Users like the posters of this forum are telling how they would prefer the interface crafted." Yes, listen to the 10 people who complain about it (far less 1% of its regular users, doesn't even register if you look at the whole user base). The other 99%+ seems to have no real complaints -- if anything I'd say it sounds quite good! "Each time these topics arise, you use the phrase 'usability testing.' Each time you utter or type this phrase, I would like you to visualize the dollars that you will be turning down." God forbid, it's actual everyday end-users that talk about this (I have before, and trust me, I don't get a penny from MS -- I'd happily settle for not having to pay them!). MS talked a lot about it (many great presentations on the subject -- you should have a look). They made decisions for Win7 that go against my normal setup (e.g. taskbar with 2 rows, and auto-hidden -- both being used by like < 1% of users). But the end result is still fantastic for the vast majority. That's what it's all about. Please most people. There will be a vocal minority whining regardless of what they do. A lot of enthusiasts are thrilled about all those changes. It's like the first big upgrade to the GUI since Win95 (e.g. totally different taskbar for a change), or having toolbar buttons logically grouped by what it is they do (i.e. ribbon interface) instead of having to find a lot of the stuff deeply buried in menus (as there was limited space for buttons). We've had such big changes before (e.g. dos to windows, or win 3.1 to win 95) and most people adapted just fine. Some people weren't happy back then either, but I sure wouldn't go back.

Precisely! IE is very useful for that They'll only be happy when MS is forced to send you a blank CD with a $200 price tag, or that the CD has their competitor's software on it. Funny thing, all 3 of us (both quoted and myself) are Firefox users, yet think this "getting rid of IE" thing is getting ridiculous. The EU court is completely out of control. For sure. As for Opera, the simple concept of making a product that people actually want is alien to them. Firefox, Safari, Chrome and several others are doing great, despite IE shipping as the default browser. There is a healthy market for 3rd party browsers. It just happens that nobody wants of their junk, even for free. Actually, I'd pay extra NOT to have Opera. I'll gladly take ANY browser over it (yes, including IE -- and Chrome and Safari and so on).

If you'd find it useful, I can try it on my passively cooled Sapphire HD 4670 using HDMI (already know it works perfect over DVI, just gotta look for my HDMI cable) and onboard 780G too (ASUS M3A78-EM mobo, AM2+ indeed). I did pay the extra $10 not to be stuck with the GeForce 8200 on a cheaper M3N78-VM (I've finally learned my lesson after buying enough nvidia cards)

For most purposes, good old Gigabit is still overkill (I just upgraded to a jumbo frame capable switch recently). 10 10GbE and beyond works great for backbones and such I'm sure, but I doubt we're about to see that in homes and SMEs anytime soon. Newegg's only 10GbE NIC costs like $3000, a basic switch with a couple 10GbE ports will run you as much, and then you need some pretty fast drive arrays and servers to push data that fast... Sure, you could easily saturate it with several cheap servers/boxes if you tried (not with typical workloads).

Definitely not. The world would be a boring place if we all agreed and liked the same things and so on. ...while making use of sarcasm and making it sound like other (extremely knowledgeable) members are clueless and lecturing/insulting them -- repeatedly (see rule 7b). And after being banned for that kind of behavior (not by me that is, but it clearly sends a message that him and his poor attitude aren't wanted around here), he makes use of anon proxies to evade/circumvent the ban to start the exact same crap yet again. Besides, when we ban someone, it's because we don't want them around, we don't just want them to just open yet another account instead (those kind of people tend to get banned repeatedly anyhow)

That's also changing very rapidly. Lots of electronics people are stuck in the 70's and 80's electronics (e.g. 555's and 74LSxxx chips), but we're in a different era altogether (with WAY more advanced parts e.g. some fairly advanced microcontroller lines, CPLDs, FPGAs and so on, and WAY more complex designs and PCBs, all running increasingly complex software). My job involves both sides almost equally, and that's probably what makes it even harder. You get to keep up with both (hey, it's only twice as bad ) Off to work, to fix some problems with some new analog board (opamp problem), write some C and a bunch more things...

Dull moments I can live with no problem. Every job has not-so-exciting parts. Doing what needs to be done instead of doing what you feel like doing is often like that, but you're getting paid for it... (If it was easy and fun, it surely wouldn't pay much as there are worse jobs at minimum wage). However, the amount of stuff to know and learn all the time is a constant, never-ending struggle. You can try to specialize, and hope you'll always be able to find a job within that niche for your entire life (unlikely as tech changes so fast), or spend most of your time trying to keep up with it all (i.e. not have a life)... Falling behind isn't much of an option here. BTW, "Something hardware-based" sounds quite vague.

If only he used Tor then we wouldn't know it's him yet again, right? Oh, wait... It's amazing how persistent some people can be, especially when they are wrong. And this time, he gets banned in one!

Loads of it, for various reasons. Be it apps that just "grew" from a quick little thing to a monster app with no real direction or planning, code that used to be "ok" but now looks a lot uglier with several extra features tacked on in odd ways and tons of bugfixes (not always pretty) accumulated over time, bad decisions made by management, incompetence, lack of time, poor designs, feature creep (how 'bout a kitchen sink with that?), specific customizations made for a single client or user, tons of code that needs refactoring (but who's got time?), bits and pieces of code sprinkled all over the place by people who can program half-decently but aren't particularly familiar with the language/frameworks/whatever at hand, people not always using the same conventions (even simple things like naming stuff and indentation) and so on. And typically, rewriting it all from scratch doesn't tend to yield results that are any better... And like most programmers, you're going to do a fair amount of maintenance work over the years too. So get used to ugly code I think there's a whole lot more to it than just that. A lot of people just don't enjoy doing that kind of stuff (e.g. maintenance work inside a lib that's used by some business app -- most people find it all very boring), it doesn't always pay great (outsourcing is common these days too), lots of places with unreasonable expectations, timelines and what not, lots of people find it just too complicated (or plainly "not cool") and much, much more. In fact, a LOT of people probably would switch careers now if they would have known what to expect back then. In most fields new tech only advances so fast... You learn the job once, and you got very little new stuff to learn after that. But when it comes to IT, the pace is just unreal. Even more so for programmers. It seems like you're always having to learn some new language (or even new versions of them), new frameworks, TONS of new technologies (pretty much everything IT folks deal with), new versions of every app all the time (VS, SQL Server, etc), new methods, new ways to do things, tons of stuff you never had to do before all the time (be it directx, data warehousing, socket programming, WPF or whatever else), lots of us have to do development of all kinds ("client" apps, web apps, apps running as services on servers, embedded apps and so on) and a lot of those same people (especially on the embedded side) have to deal with several CPU lines too... By the time you're familiar/comfortable with something, it's about to get replaced with a new version (most of the time anyhow). It's not exactly the easiest career IMO. You could invest 24h a day to your career (and learning), and it would still feel like you're falling behind somehow. And that's assuming your job is only being a programmer (no other/extra duties)...