jaclaz

You may need to take note that not ALL cars made in the 1970's were Ford Pinto's . But of course you are right, about the attempt to make better (safer) products, with the only downside that sometimes they don't work or don't work as expected. Getting more practical, in the 70's and 80's having a flat tire was if not "common" something that any driver experienced several times, it is now what, 15 years or 20 that myself or anyone in my family has not got one. Something has become better, be it the wheels, the tires, the roads does not really matter, as long as the result is positive. Still, dishwashers, washing machines and fridges made in the 70's often worked 20 years or more, without a hitch, while now we have electronic, touch screen, wi-fi enabled "intelligent" washing machines that will probably work for 3 or 5 years only (but you might get, while driving in your fully connected car, some three hundreds miles away, a senseless SMS telling you that the washing cycle ended successfully and that the machine is ready for a new one[1]). jaclaz [1] Btw, according to Murphy's Law, the message will be in Korean and you will be distracted by it and crash into the road barrier

Some more data: http://www.troyhunt.com/2014/09/everything-you-need-to-know-about.html jaclaz

Well, the good ol' Old Indian (apocryphal) example of the blanket is not that bad, JFYI: Consider also the "other" possible consequences in practice : and, in order to avoid a possible accusation (actually true) of being biased: jaclaz

Which OS is that? This is for XP: http://support2.microsoft.com/kb/314999/en-us which being in the form of a screensaver it is easy to deploy/setup. Here you will find some alternatives for Windows 7: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/d358382c-e91b-4e91-a1e8-04c53cfd91ce/automatic-logout-after-inactivityidle?forum=w7itprogeneral including a "similar" screensaver: http://www.grimadmin.com/staticpages/index.php/ss-operations And, in any case for a public PC (like a library) most probably something *like* SteadyState, DeepFreeze or similar should be used, and these softwares may already have an in-built similar function. jaclaz

Yep, the not-so-slight difference is the source, I would guess that should be a different level of reliability attributed to a carnival barker (or to a tv show producer) and to a reknown University Professor. Of course academic people are reknown for their jokes , and from time to time it is fun to go through the editor and "peers" review and get an "absurd" paper actually published by , but usually when this happens the joke is publicly exposed soon after, in this case this one went seemingly unnoticed.... A couple fun (or sad) reports on scientific papers and the level of some conferences/publications: http://smritiweb.com/navin/education-2/how-i-published-a-fake-paper-and-why-it-is-the-fault-of-our-education-system http://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-papers-1.14763 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full a bit extreme, but I believe that these are the point of the iceberg, as I expect that most people would be much better at faking (or plagiarize) than what the good ol' scigen can do. jaclaz

Not that I presented it as such: The point here is that the "original" (wrong, but easily fixable) approach of "forcing" the user to keep the RTC on "local time" took all of more than 7 years to be addressed (BTW, the provision had ALREADY been there in Windows NT but was "forgotten"), then once the (simple, small) bug was fixed, it was re-introduced twice or thrice. The point being that the actual cause of the problem emerged in the early days of computing only when the PC started to get "interconnected" and was addressed by the POSIX standard in a more than satisfying manner. For whatever reasons the good MS guys did not conform (or did not conform fully) to it and continued using the (flawed) MS-DOS approach (which would have been alright in itself had everything being coded "right" and there weren't the - already known - needs for interconnection). When finally the possibility of having the RTC set to GMT was given (with Vista SP2 and Windows 7) thus solving a whole set of small possible issues, MS repeatedly created in updates further issues (possibly even worse than the original ones). Since date and time are in themselves a precious part of the computing world one would have expected from MS some more attention and care to the specific implementations. Just for the fun of it, I will provide you a nice link: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4967903/linux-windows-timezone-mapping check particularly the "Obligatory Time Zone Rant:" which may lead you to here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2008_April_22#Romance_Standard_Time which hints how the whole "Romance Standard Time" might be a quiet invention of the good MS guys More seriously, the good MS guys are not alone in making a mess of this specific topic, as there are (scarcely populated) timezones that do not actually exist http://www.forensicfocus.com/Forums/viewtopic/t=11879/ jaclaz

You'd better get a double one today, strong and black, as seemingly you need it. Time/Date (mis)management has been a traditional issue since the advent of computers, and the number of issues (minor or major) that have been caused by it worldwide are slightly more relevant than what you might have experienced in your local (US) and personal (home) usage of a computer. Consider how FAT (and other filesystems, like CDFS ) save date/time in "local time" (CDFS has additionally a field for offset from Greenwich) whilst NTFS saves them in UTC, and how in the past there were several cases of issues with Windows based computers keeping date/time, a few ones: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/909915/en-us http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2400550/en-us March 2007 has been a busy month on the DEDICATED BLOG that MS had to put online : http://blogs.technet.com/b/dst2007/archive/2007/03.aspx for an astounding number of issues which not necessarily are "Microsoft's fault" as a number of them are connected to changes in local Laws, the point made in the article is that for a number of reasons the "conversion" may fail and that the "design" of the whole thing is broken, as you have an automated manipulation of the RTC that may easily fail: http://blogs.technet.com/b/dst2007/archive/2007/03/11/time-zones-not-updating-on-windows-2003-windows-xp-or-windows-2000.aspx More or less *anything* that has a need for "synchronization" or that however relies on date/time to perform some automated action is subject (thanks to Murphy's Law) to an increased risk of failing. A case where a dual boot system caused a mis-setting of the RTC clock: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/22.34.html#subj3.1 And right following a case about the known possible issues with cross-platform filestamps local or through a remote connection: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;Q129574 Surely these issues are not very common for the "average Joe" and most of them are avoided by "solid" programming/scheduling/procedures by the IT managers of international firms, but still it is (was) a completely wrong approach, particularly when it is "common" between "home" OS's and Server OS's. jaclaz

Wait until catcoins get more ground http://www.catcoins.org/ Of course should I personally EVER deal with these senseless "vapourware" money (something which I strongly doubt), guess which one I would probably choose? jaclaz

Yep, guessing (because you did not explicitly provide this piece of information) that the distance was a small one and in the case of both back office and shop being in the same building and under the same electrical switchbox, I was suggesting you how instead of running a dedicated network cable it would have been faster and easier to buy, besides the network cards for the PC's, two "powerline adapters", examples: http://www.cnet.com/topics/networking/best-networking-devices/power-line-adapters/ for your uses any of the "low cost" of the common "500" series, which you can have for less than 50 bucks each, would be a nicely working solution. Unless you do the cabling yourself (but then you would probably have not asked the question ), this would possibly be even cheaper then the cable[1] + wall sockets + electrician wages AND with the advantage that if you change your mind (and move your desks or PC's or whatever) you don't need to move the wall sockets or use long patch cables from the PC's to the sockets, as you can move the adapter to another closer electric plug. But if you want to go down the good ol' way of physical cabling, it's fine as well, you just need to run the cable from point A to point B, you won't *need* right now a CAT 6 cable (a CAT 5e would do nicely) but if you are doing the cabling, it would be a good idea to use CAT 6 anyway, as the difference in the cost of the cable is not that much, examples: http://www.homedepot.com/p/Unbranded-100-ft-24-Gauge-4-Pair-Category-5e-Riser-Internet-Wire-2700-0104C/202206477 http://www.homedepot.com/p/Cerrowire-100-ft-23-4-Category-6-Riser-Cable-Blue-2704-0144CR/202637224 jaclaz [1] Please consider how, unless you use a Crossover cable or auto-sensing network cards, you would probably need additionally a small hub,

Good. jaclaz

Wait a minute. If the thingy is SATA connected, it should be "hot swappable", or not? http://mt-naka.com/hotswap/index_enu.htm jaclaz

For NO apparent reason, BIG DRONES http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/24/6839225/facebook-says-its-internet-drones-will-be-the-size-of-747s (though possibly an engineer that uses indifferently Toyota Prius's and 747's as units of measure is not IMHO particularly reliable): jaclaz

Well, but you have to recognize that one can at the same time provide better anti-bot protection (serious computing) and help abandoned animals (be involved in bettering the society) . http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/asirra/ And this also answers partially the previous questions about what some of the good MS guys have been up to lately ... Though of course cats (particularly lolcats) are much more popular on the internet than dogs (or loldogs), the question is clearly biased towards cats as it is fixed into: ”Please select all the cat photos:” Additionally (to show how international is the approach, and how the culture of attention to details is rooted in Redmond ) it is "fixed" in English: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension_talk:Asirra And now, for NO apparent reason: jaclaz

I have to thank you, instead , it is refreshing to know that I am not the only one in the world that see little use for a (BTW poorly implemented) selective user access on a home PC. jaclaz

Huge bump, I know , but happened by pure chance (thanks to Marc Abrahams and Sally Shelton): http://www.improbable.com/2014/06/08/an-academic-squint-at-mermaids/ to find a nice explanation about mermaids, how they possibly existed but probably became extinct in recent times, direct link to the .pdf of the article by Prof. Karl Banse: http://www.aslo.org/lo/toc/vol_35/issue_1/0148.pdf published in 1990 on the journal Limnology and Oceanography. jaclaz

And, if I may, there is nothing IMHO less useful as a "forced" form/poll. I would (as well as say 35% to 75% of BOTH students and professors) fill the "altro" field with the first absurd profession that would cross my mind at the moment. Like you know : flaming bowls jugglerpsychotropicistnuclear steam engine pilotetc.making the data collected - to say the least - unreliable. This said, something very similar has been solved recently on reboot.pro, here (only seemingly unrelated): http://reboot.pro/topic/20001-minlogon-and-explorerexe/ where, besides the actually adopted solution, several possible alternatives were discussed. jaclaz

I am failing to see the reason for having autologin with a blank password , though I possibly have a workaround for that, which I DO NOT suggest in "normal" operation (just as I would NOT suggest Autologin , nor a "blank password", but of course any informed choice is to be respected ): http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/163190-passpass-bypass-the-password/ Cannot really say if it could be considered "suitable" in your case, you can have a user with a password which is completely ignored. jaclaz

Yep. jaclaz

Maybe I got some definitions wrong. Would this be accurate? The device with media inserted is slow to start, but the device without media is not slow to start. jaclaz

Still, is the delay actually in: CLASSPNP.SYS PARTMGR.SYS DISK.SYS (as hinted before the two latter ones may have a connection with partitioned/not partitioned/fixed/removable status of the media). And personally I wouldn't rule out specific brand/model/*whatever* of the actual card, it seems to me like CF cards are one of the pieces of hardware where every make/model behaves slightly differently. At least some time ago I converted a couple old machines (win2K) to use CF cards (but on IDE/PATA bus, and obviously using el-cheapo no-name adapters) and I remember having quite a few difficulties in finding "decently performing" CF cards (this might be completely unrelated, cannot really remember if the issues I had initially were connected to booting). jaclaz

Here: http://sevenoptimus.x10.mx/ http://sevenoptimus.x10.mx/uniextract17.exe jaclaz

First thing we wish to thank you for this question. Besides changing light bulbs and tagging as by design anything they had no idea how to fix : http://reboot.pro/topic/3541-how-many-microsoft-programmers-does-it-take-to-screw-in-a-light-bulb/ and publishing either misleading or plainly wrong documentation: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/170497-whats-it-going-to-take-to-restore-previous-versions-from-shadow-copies/page-2#entry1086058 (and shuffling it a lot around their site), a substantial amount of them used last 13 (thirteen) years to solve (maybe) a small issue created when - in the course of bettering the Operating System - they managed to worsen it by removing support for an already existing feature: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/mswish/ut-rtc.html jaclaz

Set a "rule" for it (in Outlook): http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/automatically-send-someone-a-copy-of-messages-that-you-send-HA010239583.aspxhttp://email.about.com/od/outlooktips/qt/et_auto_cc.htm jaclaz

So, to sum up. There are Optical Bay caddies for HD/SSD of two types: some with a switch some without a switch The switch use and it's settings are either undocumented or mis-documented, in any case ALWAYS make sure to get one with the switch. If you get one without the switch, it is possible - if needed - to emulate the features of the switch with a rather simple hardware "hack" Besides the already mentioned ones it is worth of note this "feature": http://www.ebay.com/itm/Universal-12-7mm-SATA-to-SATA-2nd-HDD-Hard-Drive-Caddy-for-Dell-Laptops-/221509690280 Which once again brings us to flippism as a good way to solve issues, try the thing as it arrives (you have 50% probabilities the switch is in the right position). If you experience either CPU overhead or shutdown/hibernation issues, try again after having flipped the switch to the other position. jaclaz

That is most probably the so called "z order" it is a known issue, see: http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-reissues-flawed-windows-security-update-7000033049/ I don't think that there is (yet) a completely fixed update. jaclaz