I upgraded the BIOS, I think it had to do with turning on a virtual mode.

Bricked it like nobody's business. Nothing like a blank screen when you turn it on.

My previous desktop was easy to flash, and had a large enough flash chip that it actually kept the old image, and you could boot it so that it would recover. Unless, I'm guessing, that it was so bad that it couldn't do much. Makes me wonder. But it never bricked, and I never had an issue.

My 9 character password has been busted for two years now. I now have a system that gives me 13 character passwords that are now different for each site. Unfortunately, not every account, something I've been thinking about. That seems adequate for now, my wife was bitching about how she had to go with the new system when I was trying out Win 8 Consumer Preview since I was using my Hotmail account.

Maybe using 4 "symbols" as it were, but I wouldn't limit myself to seven characters, I'm thinking about adding in a number sequence that not many people would actually know (phone number from the '60/'70s, my first work data entry machine (029 and 129 would NOT be the numbers! :), possibly the now current address of a former home that was only a RR number back then, actually, quite a few of those...), and finally adding something to identify the site to identify the account.

Of course, I always had to deal with the sites that only allowed 8 characters way back then. Some would take more, but the actual password was limited to 8. Sad actually.

Passwords are on their way to being dead. It really is only a matter of time.

I was one of the lucky 250K+ of Twitter that had to reset their passwords.

No, to be truly secure, you put it in a room with no windows, make sure the computer is unplugged, lock the door with a lock that has no key, and you're done.

This sounds harsh, but when you consider that the biggest problem of securing computers is the user that uses it, accidentally or purposely, just say no to the user.

The one point that I find quite laughable as a reason for stopping work on it is that there are not that many nightly 64-bit users.

Well, first, if you want to run 64-bit, you have to know that it exists in the first place. They offered a download link for awhile on the page where you could download the beta, Aurora and Nightly, but that disappeared over a year ago when I was rebuilding my computer. Not that that particular page was well known, either. I knew it was in the FTP site, I just had to look for it.

Yeah, I understand that the compiler has started putting out invalid code for the 64-bit version. OK, well then maybe the compiler needs to be changed or fixed then?

And browsers don't use more than 4GB?? Really?? I have the memory screenshot that shows me using 5GB of RAM under these nightlies. It happens every day and usually multiple times per day for me. It's not a bunch of tabs with media opened in them, it's one tab with Google Reader running for a few hours. Can't wait to see what happens when I switch to 32-bit, and I run out of memory before I run out of physical memory on my machine. And I've only got 8GB.

There will be a time when they HAVE to support 64-bit under Windows. They are talking about some point in 2013. I can't believe that a period of a few months is going to make it easier. There was a recent patch when they went from 19.0A1 to 20.0A1 that made the nightly unstable in a matter of minutes. Works in 32-bit mode, but doesn't in 64-bit. Is waiting nine months later after bad patches like that getting into the main code really going to help debug those bad patches?

My son, who is currently in the Warrior in Transition Unit, preparing to get out of the Army has hearing aids that will pair with his cell phone.

Unfortunately, he won't wear them, they give him headaches (without the pairing...), so they're pretty much useless for him at least.

I have no idea what brand they are.

As the owner of a Palm TX, I find that my Galaxy Note (which I acquired two months ago), I find that the Note weighs less, is much thinner (especially without the leather cover just as wide, is a nicer screen, and just a little longer. The Note is faster, does a lot more, and I make sure I carry it everywhere, unlike the Palm. Playing with my daughter's S 2, I can see that it's nice to be able to have better control with only one hand. But that's about it. The keyboard is useful enough in portrait mode (although landscape mode is TOO big. :S ). I also have larger than normal hands (square meaty palms, the fingers are normal enough...).

And considering people are developing for the Note, while I don't think anybody has been developing for the old Palm Pilot series in quite a while, it's definitely an app win.

Just updated to ICS. I'm loving it EXCEPT for the damn WiFI issues. :p Where I used to connect to, now doesn't, and they just get disabled. It even happened to my home network, although rebooting it fixed that problem. So at least my home setup (still?) works.

I didn't want to buy the Note when I did, I wanted to buy it with ICS already installed and have a look at the S 3, but my old phone's battery bricked (six months ago a battery for the thing was $100. And they aren't available anymore.) And I had to have a phone. So I went ahead and bit, although I guess I could have just picked up a cheap Go phone and lived with that for three months.

Now that the hardware war is over and they lost, I still can not stand Apple's Windows software. iTunes, Safari, QuickTime, everything else I've tried, it's junk. Making sure that it looks like Mac OS is just plain stupid, because I'm pretty God damned sure it doesn't work the same anyway. Yes, I want to learn just what the hell the green, yellow and red balls do on the wrong side of the window. That is the height of arrogance.

Until they fix the issue with systems running Sand Bridge and above slowly losing their minds (apps lock up slowly one by one...), I'm not about to even think about upgrading. Running the CP now, and I'll be back to running Win 7 here shortly. Sad that this bug exists in the Developer's Preview and the Release Preview.

Worst Microsoft beta experience ever.

Get the distracted driver out of the equation by taking the driver out of the equation. Self driving cars. Then it doesn't matter how distracted the driver, I mean, passenger, is.

32-33 FPS HTML
69-70 FPS Canvas
23-28 FPS SVG
54-60 FPS Flash

Quad-core I5 at 3.40GHZ running Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64; rv:14.0) Gecko/20120412 Firefox/14.0a1 ID:20120412030726
GeForce GT 440

So, yes, I'm cheating by running the burning edge of the latest FF in 64-bit mode, alpha software running on Windows 8 64-bit, also alpha.

It helps that I'm the only one home now.

She rarely uses her cell. We still have a land line (and this still goes for VOIP), and we have multiple cordless phones, and two corded ones. One in the bedroom so we don't miss that special call in the night if need be, even if ALL the cordless are dead, and she has a corded speaker phone on her desk, even though she also has a cordless. Too many phone calls lasting longer than your average cordless phone will handle, and the batteries for that last a year. Especially if the old system has a few years on it, and the phones only last five minutes, and give you zero warning that they are running out. So now we have a new cordless system, 4 phones, not 3, and the base is also a speaker phone for when you can't find a phone.

Now that the kids are all out of the house, it's not a huge deal, but I think it would certainly help if you do have kids, or anybody else for that matter. This system might actually last longer, the batteries are rechargeable AAAs, so the replacements will be cheaper than replacing the system, unlike what we were looking at with the previous system. It also helps that this new system can keep a list of numbers that can be blocked. They ring once, and then nothing.

I cook her breakfast when she's ready (it takes her awhile).

Unfortunately, she doesn't really keep a morning routine, she hits her office in her housecoat, and only gets showered and dressed when I drag her out, or she has a lunch appointment with somebody.

She has no problem with cutting somebody off at the knees if they call (or God forbid knock at the door) and she's busy or expecting a phone call. Even me if I'm out and need to talk to her.

She not only has multiple monitors, she has multiple computers, a work laptop (at one point two of them) with a second bigger screen, and her home system.

She usually VPNs in with GotoMyPC (the ability for the other computer to show what she's doing, and for the other side to take over and do something as well is an absolute must for her). The laptop will go to one PC, and her home machine will go to another PC at the office. Different operating systems, one's XP, the other Win 7.

We live in Florida, her office is in New Jersey.

The FTP server is full. Why they don't upgrade with more storage is beyond me. So instead, they use Outlook's Mailbox as a way to keep things synced among machines.

Big spacecraft, at least by the technology we have currently, have one advantage. They can carry much more energy with them, to be either used for energy weapons, or to be used to accelerate kinetic weapons. Now, if you can get a terawatt reactor with fuel with all the other accoutrements that need to go into a spaceship the size of a 747, you might have something. Somehow, I doubt that you're going to get the basics of a space fighter down to the size of a 747. But you're still going to have some large structures out there for support. You're not going to fly down to Earth because you've ran out of fuel. And in your down time, you're going to want to have some kind of gravity, which today, means some kind of rotating structure, be it like the space station in 2001, or two capsules/fighters twirling around a cable.

And while smaller might be better, remember that at the distances that battles will be fought at, I doubt that any enemy that would be shot at would actually be capable of being seen by human eyes. Blinded by the darkness of space or the brightness of the sun, targeting will be by various means and completely automated. Whether something is 100 meters or 300, if you're shooting over 100K meters, it's still shooting mosquitoes.

We're already getting to the point where automated cars will be taking the road, we certainly will have that for space ships when we finally get our asses out to space.

Expect drones, and if they are spread out enough, drones with enough intelligence to do the fighting without human intervention.

Energy weapons might be workable by then. Giga or terawatt lasers might be able to get enough energy on somebody long enough to do some damage.

Missiles, nuclear or chemical, that explode on or near contact, again, self guided, may work. The trouble is if they miss, they won't have enough fuel to hit anything else close by, unless a trajectory is planned for that. And we all know what Sun Tzu says, no plan survives contact with the enemy.

The other weapon choice will be kinetic weapons, which may be not more than railguns throwing whatever mass they can at the enemy. Or as Ian Douglas uses in his Galactic Marine series, sand bags with chemical explosives (you don't want the sand to be melted) are boosted to some fraction of the speed of light and the bomb goes off, spreading the sand, killing your enemy that way.

And I would certainly add Ian Douglas as an author to read about possible space combat.

Somebody (RIAA, MPAA, or other *AA) PAID somebody to introduce this bill, a bill that the entertainment industry had already written for them, and then proceeded to pass out checks to the rest of the congresscritters to get it passed. It's all about the money in this case.

If the congresscritters had any kind of actual understanding about what this bill does (we can argue that they should, but I very much doubt that most of them actually do understand any bill that they are voting on in any kind of detail to actually make a rational decision, but it's not going to change the fact that these idiots will remain idiots in the near future, and probably in the long term future as well...), they would be up in arms about it. All it will take is a takedown notice on somebody's reelection site (you know that somebody's going to screw up and put non-cleared copyright material on their site at some point) and the idiots will find out how well and screwed they (and the rest of us citizens) are over this stupid law.

Too bad, I would have like to have seen a Lego black hole created.

Considering the meltdowns that have occurred with other AV companies (Norton being the one I always shake my head at), and MS hasn't had one yet (it probably will, it's just a matter of time, but I have a feeling there will be no signature that manages to prevent the system from booting...).

I'm running it now. Even if it isn't the default in Windows 8, I'll still download it and use it.