Linux FTW!
Norton Ghost. Epic Fail. Four tries to simply migrate and expand a disc.
Linux, dd command. First try, win. Followed up with a little Partition Magic, and we now have 140 GB free.
Lesson – reach for the Fedora first.
Entries Tagged as 'Technology'
I would like to register a complaint!
It has ceased to be!
Its expired and gone to meet its maker!
Its a stiff!
Bereft of life, it rests in peace!
Its kicked the bucket, its shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible!!
Its fucking SNUFFED it.
The Fabulous Red Ring of Death!
This is an Ex Box!
Mr. Dell goes to China.
Dell’s outsourcing their manufacturing. What else is new. But if this comment on /. is correct, they’re totally fucked:
You make a point, but you’ve missed the larger picture. I am a Dell employee and I can tell you the future of the company is not manufacturing PCs or notebooks, but rather offering services-after-the sale for the machines built by contract manufacturers.
Well, if you’re planning to offer “services after the sale”, what do you have to offer that’s going to get me to open my wallet? I bought my last laptop 4 years ago. Do you know how much contact I’ve had with the manufacturer since I got it? None. No services. No upgrades. I didn’t buy the extended warranty. I haven’t sent the unit in for service. Granted, I can replace my own keyboard when it wears out, but I didn’t even buy THAT from them, I got it from an overstock place on the internet.
If Dell thinks that they are going to make money the way that car dealerships do, they’re mad. Of course, they aren’t. The real reason they’re outsourcing the manufacturing is money. They can have machines built in China for half of what it costs to build them in Round Rock. And you can bet your last dollar that they won’t be dropping their prices.
Punk Spam
Yeah, that’ll work. Insult me, why don’t you.
Spam subject: “what a stupid face you have here brian”
And all that’s in it is a link entitled “Watch” that goes God knows where.
Well, at least it’s a blatant attempt to pwn my machine, and it isn’t masquerading as something that will make my dick 57 feet long.
Gallery Nuked.
In the process of upgrading to Gallery 2.2, I nuked my installation. How? Stupidity. I figured “hey, why not take this opportunity to migrate the database to MySQL 5″. Bad move. Something got horked in the database move, and most of the pretty went with it. And it was down hill from there. It was only about 50 pictures, so no harm, no foul -I’ll just re-import them and everything will be fine.
Long story short: I wiped it out, and started with a clean slate. I know it was the database move because doing the same thing to my mother’s gallery without changing the database yielded a perfect upgrade. Of course, since I haven’t shown her how to use it yet, she has no pictures in it.
Lesson – upgrade one thing at a time, kids.
Which party is the party of censorship again?
The Democrats, being the vote-whores that they are, want to restrict the Internet again. For The Children.
I have two questions:
1 – What part of “Congress Shall make no Law” do you morons not understand??
2 – How do they intend to enforce this on all the nations that AREN’T the United States?
Want to keep your kids “safe” from porn? KEEP THEM OFF THE FUCKING INTERNET!
Brasso is your friend
After seeing this mentioned at Lileks, I figured I’d give it a shot on my Sony MZ-RH10 Hi-MD Minidisc recorder. It had been badly scratched by merely being in my hand. And I’m not talking about the minor scratching that Todd had on his iPod, I’m talking about scratches so bad you need to tilt the unit to see the screen.
Brasso did a wonderful job taking out those scratches, and my MZ-RH10 is, while not perfect (hey, I spent a minute on it, and I got what I wanted. Leave me alone) it certainly is much better than it was.
And, in the more bang for the buck category: A quick application took out the surface scratches on the touchscreen of my Nintendo DS. I’ll try a more vigorous application later to see if it can take out the deeper cuts.
And if I’m feeling particularly brave, I’ll try to buff out the scratches in the clearcoat on my motorcycle.
Why I hate cell phones
Battery life. You get this phone, it’s supposed to have 4 days of standby. I’m lucky if I get two with moderate usage. OK, fine. But to have the thing croak in less than 24 hours is unacceptable.
Lesson learned: always bring a charger on a road trip, even if it’s one day.
Insert random expletives here.
I’m'a smack BP up side the head
BP ad: “What is global warming” – followed with several granola-eaters fretting that “it’s real, very real”, and then (complete with hand wringing) “the ice caps are melting, the glaciers are disappearing”, and another “we’re destroying the planet’s ability to heal itself”.
What fucking arrogance. Do you honestly think that we could destroy this planet if we WANTED to? We can’t. It’s entirely too large for us to have that kind of impact.
And what’s BP’s solution? Using hydrogen to generate electricity – which they claim will reduce carbon emissions by 90%. I’ll take Bad Ideas for 500, Alex.
Alex: “Nearly twice as much as you get back.”
Me: “What is the amount of energy required to produce hydrogen?”
Alex: “That’s correct.”
Let’s see – how do we get hydrogen? Two ways – electrolytic liberation, chemical liberation. Electrolytic – exactly what it says: electricity. Chemical – most methods produce by-products that are toxic.
And for every watt of energy you use to liberate hydrogen through electrolysis you can only get about 0.5 watts back out through either combustion or through a fuel cell. Where, precisely, do they think they are going to get all the electricity to generate this hydrogen? The only one that doesn’t produce carbon is nuclear, and wouldn’t it be more efficient to just put the nuke plant on the grid and be done with it?
Using enviroweenies to push the anthropogenic global-warming agenda to promote a bullshit technological agenda in an effort to increase your company’s market share is despicable. That people actually believe in and are actively promoting the use of tax money to research the “hydrogen economy” is far worse. That’s going to be an enormous gob of money thrown down the shit-hole for no benefit whatsoever.
Maybe this will teach you to keep manufacturing in the U.S.
Maxim Integrated Products, Inc (the chipmaker, not the magazine)has a truckload of unfinished chips hijacked in Malaysia.
Although I doubt they will learn it, there is a lesson here.
The lesson: never do business in countries run by kleptocracies. The desire to steal rubs off on the general public. If Maxim thinks that they are going to get any of their chips back, they are out of their mind(s).