ethergeek

Any idea why the packets are getting dropped? Dropped by a router upstream? Malformed? Failed CRC?I'd fire up a packet sniffer like wireshark on your box and see if you can discern why the packets are getting retransmitted.If 8% of your packets are failing CRC somewhere upstream, you probably have a modem that's gone dodgy or a router that's improperly mangling packets. Check for a firmware update?

Anyone had the opportunity to try out a cooked ROM with Windows Mobile 6.1 in it? Find any software incompatibilities? Notes of interest? I'm thinking of putting a cooked ROM with 6.1 onto my HTC Kaiser, but I want to see what other people are finding first...

Yeah, I'll put GTA4 in the same pile as duke nukem forever: I'll believe it when I see it in stores.

The big issue (and why we see more multi-core chips coming out now) is that we are reaching the limit of how high we can crank clock speeds...it's to the point where the die size is not small enough for the electrons to get through the chip before the next clock cycle starts.So until a new, smaller fabrication process is developed, we're gonna see the clock speeds plateau and the number of cores increase.

Why don't you start by updating your system to FC7? There's really no reason to be running such an old distro these days...

If you want to vilify BitTorrent for piracy, you need to blame TCP, UDP, and IP too. All things are used for legitimate purposes as well as illegal activities.

RealPlayer has *always* sucked bigtime. Just use VLC.

Just get portablefirefox and rename the executable from firefox.exe to winword.exe and put it on a flash drive. Easy enough.

I suppose the preference of chat clients is personal but I never cared for Google talk very much. I also don’t think that just because a product or protocol is open source it is the best on the market. In the end it comes down to the fact that most of my friends are on Yahoo! so I am also on Yahoo!

I'm not knocking yahoo, or implying that something is better by virtue of being open source. I'm just saying that Yahoo would be vilified alot less often if they opened up their protocol and published the specifications. Their target demographic of computer-illiterates will use their ad-ridden client anyway, (and the rest of us will settle for reduced functionality in Adium/Trillian/Pidgin/whathaveyou), whether there's another option or not; so it doesn't even impact yahoo's revenue model.

I wish more people would implement OpenID with multifactor security...it's a pain in the *bottom* to grep through my keepass database every time I log into a site (I'm one of those people that insists upon using 16+ character randomly generated passwords for everything) but that's the only real reliable way of limiting damage if my passwords are compromised.I use RSA SecureID at work and I love it, except when AD hassles me to change my password as if it doesn't already change every 60 seconds anyway. Since my token is on my keys, there's really not much risk of compromise.I love multifactor authentication like this, the only problem is, the way the industry is heading, I'm gonna have to tote around 20 different tokens! The government needs to step in here and put smart chips on our drivers licenses, and give every citizen a smart card reader. Then we could use the keys on the card along with a single password to authenticate ourselves to sites via some centralized keystore managed over in Langley ^_^Of course, this will never happen...damn liberals freak out at even the idea of a digital passport!

Norton sucks bigtime. They used to be *the* defacto name in computer security...they even *used* to have a lightweight antivirus product.Then something happened. Everything they make is bloatware, slows down windows, and just generally makes a complete mess. And their firewall product is a joke!Get AVG for virus scanning instead. Use comodo for firewalling.IMO the only reliable virus scanning is on-access, since most people who try to send you viruses will compact them with UPX and/or obfuscate them inside a wrapper that's used for legitimate purposes too. The "compressed" binary can slip through the signature based filters, and unless you have an on-access scanner that can scan the memory before it's code is executed, you're pretty well screwed on this one.On another note, I wish Yahoo would quit dicking around with norton and fix the bugs in the Mac version of their Messenger...it's so feature-incomplete it's not funny.

If you're just getting into 3d animation and modeling, Alias/Wavefront has a "student edition" of Maya that you can download for free and use however you like for personal, educational purposes. It watermarks your renders and everything, but the files are compatible with the full pro version, say if you need to give it to a prospective employer as part of your portfolio. The pro version can render it without the watermark.

PortableFirefox + FoxyProxy + Tor (or a good list of open proxies/your home network proxy) is the way to go here. I use it all the time when I need to get past a restrictive environment at a client site.

If you're linux-savvy, the safest bet would be scalpel. http://gotdfs.com/.

This can be put onto a bootable linux CD to avoid damage to the drive's deleted contents caused by booting. Give it a look; it's helped me save my friends' asses on more than one occasion.

I really hope everything goes Jabber like google talk. Open source protocols are teh awesome. I hate that my IM client has to reverse-engineer the protocol every time they change something.At least AIM is being nicer about it by releasing an API.

so whats up with you Mac?

Leopard? It works great. All the time, every time. Does everything my windows box did and my linux box does, all in one operating system. Except games, but that's what my 360 is for.

I used mail.com *years* ago. I think the last time I checked my mail.com account was something like 6 years ago.Kinda freaky, LOL.

Great...so they broke vista and now they wanna break XP with broken vista features?I've never been so happy I made the switch to Mac.

I never had this problem with gethostbyname, though the last time I coded on Slowaris was using gcc 2.95 and gcc 3.1...so, if you're using a newer version of GCC I can't really speak for why it doesn't work.What linker options are you passing to GCC to compile it? Sounds a little bit like the linker is resolving the wrong library and linking it. I can see problems happening when you link a non-gnu library and expect it to behave like it's gnu counterpart.

As long as they don't change the licensing on MySQL I don't care who owns it. On the other hand, if they **** with the licensing of MySQL, people may just flock to the happily BSD-licensed PostgreSQL.

"Magic" is the idiot's last resort for explanation of some facet of their reality when they simply lack the understanding to explain what is happening in logical, sensible terms.In other words, when science fails, dumb people turn to "magic" for an explanation. The smart people just admit that they don't know

This is why you use skype instead. It provides end-to-end encryption to ensure that this sort of crap can't happen.

Hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles won't become popular untill you can refill them everywhere you want. It's nice that the FCX comes with a hydrogen manufacture system ... but what use is it if you're 500miles away from your garage and the fueltank is empty?

That's a problem for taking it on road trips, but I was more or less only addressing in-city commuters with that one. I have a 20 mile drive each way, M-F, to get to and from work. I have a 12 gallon tank and have to gas up every week, around $30 a pop. That's about $120 a month. Even if the system that came with the FCX added $100 bucks or so a month to my home natural gas bill...it's still a savings, especially timewise. Going to the gas station is a pain in the *bottom*.
For road trips, I'll take my old fashioned gasoline V8 engine...nothing quite like the feeling of flying down the I-10 at 140 MPH with that nervous-as-fsck eye on my fuzzbuster

I'm very sure that the oil companies have a hand in this because they have already killed the electric car, which was spurring up in California before the oil companies forced GM to take them off the streets.

Well, that was part of it...the EV-1 failed primarily because it wasn't cost effective to maintain and produce parts for, and they had R&D costs to recoup, so the car was priced over the price point of the target demographic of consumers. The oil companies did indeed make it difficult however...since they partially fund R&D for vehicles that run on fossil fuels (which is part of why the zillions of ford locusts on the road are so cheap) and they would not fund research and development for the EV-1 (though government grants for renewable energy helped).
I'm eagerly anticipating availability of the Honda FCX outside of California. The FCX is a hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle that apparently will ship with a hydrogen manufacture system that runs on natural gas (though I can't factually comment on the efficiency of this, I'd speculate it's fairly low, given how much energy is needed to break the hydrocarbon bonds in natural gas) that runs in your garage (so I've heard). It claims a top speed of 100mph, so I'll need to keep my gas car for freeway driving, but something that has a 400 mile range...the FCX is incredibly hard to beat. The most impressive aspect of the technology I think is the emissions: *pure* water.

solar cells at 0.5% ? Imho they are a lot more efficient than you think, the latest generation of solar panels could reach 30% (or something near that, at least it was a lot more than 0.5%).

I should clarify...the current production generation (what most solar technology is at this time) functions at that efficiency. Yes, more efficient ones are available, but not yet in widespread use. Think of those Caltrans call boxes with the solar panels on top. That's an example of what I mean by "widespread use".