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Comment Re:EOL XP already... (Score 1) 458

I don't particularly see much wrong with the current control panel in Windows 7, but if you really need to see absolutely buttf***-ALL EVERYTHING in there, then create your own folder or folders with a little of everything or BFA EVERYTHING in the control panel in one spot.

http://clubhouse.microsoft.com/Public/Post/16246d0f-c698-4a64-9757-925cc166d393 gives more detail, but for the tl;dr crowd:
Create new folder.
Name folder: Witty Folder Name Here.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}
Open Folder.
Holy crap, everything + 20 is in here.
Rejoice.

Comment A supplemental tip: (Score 1) 458

10. I can't seem to be able to "right click" on a taskbar item and select move to bring it back on screen if it happens to be off.

- As already mentioned, hold down shift. There are lots of cool ctrl- and shift- options available throughout the UI. And there are plenty of resources for finding them. Heck, head over to LifeHacker.com and search for Win7 tips and tricks... some very good resources there. There's no need to sit in ignorance and be frustrated.

Or, the user could just hold down the Windows key (that's Super (thanks for asking) for those of us coming from other worlds) and just use the arrow keys on the keyboard to walk a window back onto the display.
Up: Restore/Maximize
Down: Restore/Minimize
Left: Tile Horizontally, Maximize Vertically, snap to left side
Right: Tile Horizontally, Maximize Vertically, snap to right side

It's great for walking a window from one display to another when you're using a multi-monitor display and don't want to deal with dragging between windows.

Comment Re:I don't know why (Score 1) 83

Short and curlies translation of the newspeak for the rest of us:

If you're an advertiser, pay us to use our service so that you can use our users as your advertising mouthpiece. In the end, you're probably going to get paid by people buying your crap, so we want our share up front.

If you're a user, you can manually type in an ad for something if you want. We can't tell you what not to type, as long as it stays within a reasonable guideline (don't talk about diddling your granddaughter, old man). You just can't let an advertiser insert crap into your tweets through an automated/scripted method.

To touch base on the other questions, AC:
'paid tweet' is where a user goes to a service that offers to give them money in exchange for letting that service post an advertisement of some sort in their timeline (getting to that in a moment).
If you remember your blogging history, about 4 years ago, there was a row with paid blogging posts. ie: company pays a person after thirty days for posting an advertisement in their weblog. The biggest name in that deal at the time was PayPerPost*.
The thing was, PayPerPost blog posts were manually entered.
The paid tweets mentioned are usually automated (user connects to advertiser via OAuth service and gives permission for that service to write to their timeline), and either selected at random, or by fitting a demographic such as number of followers, location, number of tweets per week, how often you're blocked according to a 3rd party service such as TwitBlock...

'timeline' is easily thought of as a history of posts. To corrolate this to familiar sources, Slashdot's homepage can be thought of as a timeline.

'ecosystem' is just a fancy way of saying 'our service'.

(* Note: I once was a PayPerPost Postie, and have done the sponsored blogging bit. It paid rather well (read: over $1200 in a year just posting odd posts here and there) then.)

Comment Re:So what? (Score 1) 315

Microsoft themselves give you the mechanism to slipstream service packs into your media. nLite and other applications just make the process easier for a first timer (so instead of manually expanding, copying, and creating the ISO, it's done for you), or a busy admin.

Granted, I can imagine them saying "Here's the tool to make your administration jobs easier. However, if you use it, we're going to send you to Pound You In the Ass Prison", but I don't particularly think that's likely, since it's an option administrators have had since Windows 2000.

My Win2000 and XP discs were stamped this way, but the mechanism for editing and modifying discs have been made available to anyone willing and patient enough to go through the steps by Microsoft themselves. You can create a disc for the purpose of legally installing the operating system and its patches.

(On a personal note, I honestly think they'd want you to do it, too, so that it might lower the chance of another machine with their OS freshly installed on it becoming a 14 second zombie.)

Comment Re:Firefox is the most unstable program in common (Score 1) 570

Firefox on Windows 7, 32-bit, is leading me to dabble in alternate browsers again.
It's actually getting to be so aggravating that I would actually consider reinstalling Internet Explorer.

I hibernate my system each day when I leave for work, simply because I'm gone for up to 12 hours a day. It makes no sense to leave a machine with a 300w power supply on for half a day when I can't use it. Important-to-me stuff that I can't have shut off was relegated to a 30w machine that sits in the living room.

After a couple of days of such behavior, Firefox has blimped up to 500 MB of memory in use, and I only have about 12 tabs open, usually to image intense pages, and not flash!

I tend to watch a couple of stupid vids here and there, watch someone draw through one of the streaming video sites, check email, and peruse a couple of sites with artistic communities of varying skill levels and styles. Other than that, I'm not doing much in the browser itself.

The fact that closing the browser takes minutes, instead of seconds, is already an annoyance. Reopening is just as bad, since it's reopening the tabs I had loaded earlier.

I don't have toolbars loaded. I only use a few plugins, of which the notorious Adobe Cra^WFlash is one (blip.fm, youtu.be need them for my usage).
My addons use is relatively minimal, compared to the number of addons there are.

Every few months, because it just drives me insane, I uninstall the current version of Firefox, nuke the profile, and just run a clean install. I get some speed back.
I run vacuumplaces extension regularly to try to keep it stable... but this is the most high maintenance, buggy piece of junk I've ever run.

Sadly, because of a few specific things I need that I haven't found out how to replicate in another browser, I'm stuck with Firefox.

(Give me a working alternative to DownThemAll!, and I might be able to survive.)

Comment DST has holdings in Zynga... (Score 1) 136

... so the real reason behind the purchase is to incorporate ICQ into junk like Mafia Wars, and all the other FACEB00C games that they control, and use it as an off FACEB00C's record communications device to take over Mafia World. ... or something like that.

Uh-oh!, indeed.

Time to deactivate my UIN.

Comment Re:Yeah (Score 1) 449

If you're into pain, there is a use for system restore.

Having worked with small business customers who can't afford to go the nuke and pave route when Windows XP manages to shit the registry hive, you learn how to get around things, and then teach an important lesson.
I've started those phone conversations with suggesting to mount the drive via an external device, but some do not have one immediately available.
Those conversations turn to "Take a bathroom break and get a cup of coffee now. We're going to be at it for an hour."
I'll walk them through the steps to attempt to recover the registry hive, which depends on a restore point being there.

If that fails, I tell them two things. Get an enclosure to mount the drive and back up their stuff because they have no choice, and for the love of dog, next time, BACK UP THEIR STUFF.
If it works, then I have 'em back stuff up, explain that they'll want to reinstall the OS if any complications arise. If they don't have a backup solution, then I'd be glad to help them pick one out.

Comment Minmatar Frigate, anyone? (Score 1) 138

I'm surprised that there hasn't been a single EVE reference to this project yet.

Soon as I saw this project, I thought, "It's like they're developing a Minmatar frigate of some sort!"

With that in mind, I genuinely hope that this project exceeds expectations, and that we may see more projects like this in our near future. Good luck and best wishes.

Comment Re:Huh? (Score 1) 700

Uh, correct me when I'm wrong as I don't use the thing, but don't some Blu-Ray discs require a network connection to allow playback?

And, if so, I'd assume to get the Blu-Ray updates, you have to have access to PSN, which means getting banned from PSN would be counterproductive to play Blu-Ray on a purchased device.

I'd research, but the corporate firewall is set to particularly brutal levels today.

Comment Too bad it wasn't ClamAV this time. (Score 1) 472

I bet that after seeing what McAfee can do when it screws up, they won't bitch about what ClamAV did.

(for those who need the summary: ClamAV pulled an update that caused it to shut itself down if it was version 0.94 or older after announcing ~6 months in advance that people needed to update, and kept filling log files with warnings to update. McAfee is breaking a Windows component that causes the entire computer to not function, with a less obvious warning, left for the reader to figure out. The hint is the first word in the previous sentence.)

Comment SEGA. Nintendo. Etc. (Score 1) 379

I think that the secret grumblings going on is that these developers are wishing for a time when the Sega Master System and the Nintendo Entertainment System roamed the earth.

You didn't really get demos of games for these, free for downloading at the time they were popular.

( - This ignores, of course, the Nintendo Play Choice 10 machines, and any Sega equivalent of the time, in which I'm sure plenty of us of the respective age range would beg mom for quarters to feed whilst she did whatever she was out and about to do. It was great, because one would feed a machine quarters, play games, and when one gets home, beg dad to buy Track and Field or Contra, or whatever. PC10s were, effectively, paid demo machines that would give you access to the full game for the right amount of dosh and skill!
It also ignores the people who had dumpers and carts to dump their old games onto, or necessary emulation software to play it on a PC.)

Comment Re:1 day ago (Score 1) 152

A derp-a-derp-derp.
Would help if I actually linked what I discovered.

From TFA, I followed a link over to a blog at the Telegraph that contained links to the Netposti interface (link set to english. På svenska, Suomeksi are options for .fi, .se).

What shows up after logging in, I have to leave to someone who actually has a login for the service. It'd be an expensive, expensive trip overseas just for me to get an answer (passport, plane, time off from work, sedatives, rental vehicle, ...), so I'll leave it to someone who might just be able to walk down the road and get set up.

Comment Re:1 day ago (Score 1) 152

Doesn't seem so. Following a few links through the article, they genuinely appear to have a site set up for receiving digital mail.

Requires either a user/pass set, or a (government issued? possibly as part of the ID?) smartcard read by the site to get logged in.

I'm nowhere near there, so I lack a user/pass or ID for login, but it seems to be legit.

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