Ok, seriously, what is up with games requireing my router to support potential security exploits to connect?

No fallback to a fixed port layout (for those of us who are willing to open ports) or a better peer-to-peer based game hosting method.

Fail COD:MW2, fail indeed.

Arggg, Microsoft can kiss my arse over this one.

Cannot find the fricking OEM 30day product keys anywhere, call MS and they tell me that is an OEM problem and only the OEM team can help me, and they have no phone contact.

Eventually track down the keys (extracted in an interesting way) here

Windows Vista:

        * Ultimate - VMCB9-FDRV6-6CDQM-RV23K-RP8F7
        * Business - 4D2XH-PRBMM-8Q22B-K8BM3-MRW4W
        * Home Premium - X9HTF-MKJQQ-XK376-TJ7T4-76PKF
        * Home Basic - RCG7P-TX42D-HM8FM-TCFCW-3V4VD
        * Starter - X9PYV-YBQRV-9BXWV-TQDMK-QDWK4

Windows 7:

        * Ultimate - D4F6K-QK3RD-TMVMJ-BBMRX-3MBMV
        * Professional - HYF8J-CVRMY-CM74G-RPHKF-PW487
        * Home Premium - RHPQ2-RMFJH-74XYM-BH4JX-XM76F
        * Home Basic - YGFVB-QTFXQ-3H233-PTWTJ-YRYRV
        * Starter - 7Q28W-FT9PC-CMMYT-WHMY2-89M6G

Note these are not illegal, these are the publicly available (albeit hard to $#^$*% find) supplied by MS.

In a move set to bring their implied quality back to the rest of the market, Seagate are dropping warranties on all new internal 3.5" and 2.5" drives from five years to three years on jan 3rd.

http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/message?board.id=ata_drives&thread.id=2879&view=by_date_ascending&page=21

This is an official Seagate announcement.



Seagate 1.5TB Customers,
Some Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB hard drives may show uncharacteristic operation when used with Mac and Linux operating systems in multi-drive configurations. Users may experiences pauses in video streaming applications or a dropped drive from RAID arrays. Customers seeing these symptoms should contact Seagate Technical Support directly by phone or by email for a firmware upgrade.

In order to assure the proper application of the new firmware, please communicate/have ready a description of the issues you're seeing when you contact Seagate Technical Support. Please include the following disk drive information:


* model number (see here for help determining the model number)
* serial number (see here for help determining the serial number)
* current firmware revision (Seatools for DOS can tell you, and it should also be listed on the drive label)


Also, please describe

* your system
* your operating system, and
* the application in use when the issue arose.


You will receive a prompt response with appropriate instructions.

Just had a very odd thing happen while browsing a forum site with Chrome.

Doing normal kinds of things, posting, moderating, etc. Then I logged in as an admin, preceded to the "modify site settings" section of SMF management, adjusted the forum title, saved and Voom! (this forum is no more, it has ceased to be)

Site now reports it can't find its DB.

Hopefully chrome just threw in some "usual" values in some paths that are in the same entry screen, but it may have spidered its way through the admin area, yet to see the nitty gritty till I can ssh into it later on.