No. No. Unequivocally no. Do not attempt to repair cracked solder joints using a heat gun. The movement of the air will shift the chip when the solder melts, and will likely cause bridges which will short the chip and destroy it. The oven is much safer; there is at least no air movement. However, the safest method for repairing this requires an x-ray machine, as there is no other way to safely check the solder joints.

If you've been an admin since NT and don't use command-line...I feel sorry for you. Powershell is AMAZING - and you don't need a GUI on any of your servers. You can run 2012 without it and just use RSAT to handle 99% of your daily admin tasks.

If I were working on a serious project in which I needed no distractions, I would not be pleased at the idea of anyone being nearby, man or woman. I code best when I lose myself in the project and ignore everyone and everything else.

Bankruptcy =/= going out of business. It means they're broke and need government help to fix it.

I misread. This is a new hole. My apologies.

The hole was found six weeks ago. If they didn't fix it within that time frame, we'd have a serious problem on our hands. http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...

Tech pros have access to essentially everything. We have to know the ins and outs of every piece of software, have access to everyone's user accounts, and access to all storage locations. Because of that, we have to maintain strict confidentiality. It's best to keep that information to yourself, educate users on best practices, and ensure that proper procedures for security are followed.

Contributor is an employee of referenced article's owner, I assume, since all of his posts come from the same site.

Kingston has been my go-to brand for at least a decade. I've used some others for performance, but Kingston was always rock solid, with great customer service. It saddens me to hear this.

Exactly which cable company is NOT providing telephone service these days? They're telecoms now, plain and simple. The skirt around regulations by claiming "different technology", but it serves the same purpose, and seems like the same thing to the general public. It would seem you're against strict regulation. What will keep telecommunications providers from inspecting every packet that crosses their wires and holding up smaller businesses for protectio...I mean, transit fees? If I pay for 50Mbps bandwidth, and Netflix pays their provider for 50Tbps of bandwidth, but Comcast decides they should be making more money, what stops them from throttling Netflix traffic in exchange for more money? Streaming a video might take...2-3Mbps, right? The number crunchers at Comcast, though, see that Netflix traffic on their network takes up some 50%+ of the total traffic, and they want to ride the gravy train. So, they'll hold up Netflix for more dough, and Netflix will pass on the upcharge to their customers - making Netflix look like the bad guy to people who don't understand how it all works. Shady stuff, man, and we shouldn't give that kind of power to Comcast or At&t or anyone else.

Changing the key is not illegal. Using that change to access data which Microsoft has explicitly deemed outside your legal access IS illegal.

if they stopped putting so much time into their acronyms.

Someone should mod this up!

I've never heard of Chinese++...isn't Chinese hard enough without making it more complex?

Programming languages are very much like spoken languages. If you understand the origin language, or have an innate ability to infer meaning, it is possible to naturally understand a new programming language. I studied C++ in high school, so Java and C# are familiar and easily understood. The structures make sense, and if I don't immediately know offhand what something does, I can infer from the surrounding code. The same holds true for spoken languages. English is my first language, and I studied German in school. I never formally studied any other languages because that wasn't my passion. My passion was working with computers. However, I can generally infer the meaning of spoken Spanish in the same way I would deduce the function of unfamiliar code. I look for parts I recognize, use them to help decide what the unfamiliar portion means, and test my guess.