> since I live in the midwest now, and I don't get to see my glorious Ducks rule the Pac 10

Maybe you can watch Masoli play at Kansas City Community College.

> Now I'm using the 'nv' driver in all it's crappiness.

It's segfaulting because you regularly spell its wrong. I work for Nvidia, snuck a little grammar checker into the driver. No one will ever know! Bwahahaha.

Rabid

No one reads old SlashDot threads...

Yes, it's AX=ABS(AX).

I certainly wouldn't ding someone for not ripping though the answer - it's way too obscure. I've no problem explaining what each instruction does. But after that, it's pretty good at showing a thought process. Go get off my lawn, but dammit I think any geek should understand bits and bytes, and enjoy them. So even if they don't crank it out, I'd get a sense of the candidate, whether they thought the problem was pretty cool or a waste of time.

I once heard of some compiler geeks writing a program to find these code snips. "Gee, what five-or-fewer x86 instructions would perform x?" You supply a dozen inputs/outputs, the program tries all permutations of instructions, sees if In gives Out, Bob's yer uncle. The story (or legend) says the proggy shook out one or two new ones. If you don't think that's nifty, you're No Hire to me.

-- Rabid

I loved saying in an interview "I see you have x86 assembler on your resume". The color drains from the kid's face, I give 'em a snippet:

cwd
xor ax,dx
sub ax,dx

It's nothing rocket, just some fun with 2s-complement.

-- Rabid

> thermite and shit

Take it from me, that's a bad combination.

Rabid

> Radeon 4650 in my new machine and it runs Crysis on high

Whoa, you're my spiritual cousin. I just bought a Radeon 4870, and it runs Crysis on high right up to the final boss, whereupon it balloons to 3GB of ram (of my 4GB), pegs both CPUs, goes to 2 frames per minute. Who the heck ran that game when it came out, two years ago?

> For the life of me, I've never understood why they turn off the extensions by default

The 'feature' was born, oh so many years ago, because some Windows Program Manager had Macintosh Envy. The Mac allowed you to have "Letter to Grandma", not "Letter to Grandma.doc". What this dork PM failed to recognize is that extensions, a very simple concept, is really quite useful, and easy to use. C'mon MS, turn them back on (by default) in Win7.

> I'm trying my hardest
> large attachments he usually doesnt need to open but Outhouse downloads them anyway
> every idea I've tried comes to nothing

You're quite the wizard, gosh he's lucky to have you helping him out.

Outlook, like every other frikken mail program, has a setting to download just the headers until you dblclick to view the message. Search on "Outlook download headers". Don't call it Outhouse, because, y'know, the search won't work that way. Am I getting too technical for you?

Rabid

> Fixtures can be removed if explicitly stated in the agreement, likewise chattels may be required to stay for the same reasons.

Oh yeah I bought my house, had all kinds of chattels running round the yard. He wanted to take em but I said huh no way, those my chattels now. Hm, we ate real good that first two weeks.

The Baroque Cycle (yes, awfully long, but I enjoyed it) has a great ending! The third book is the best of the three, the last half is the best sixth, and the last 100 pages are terrific. The escape from jail, the trial with Newton and the Solomonic gold, and then Jack's hanging - my gracious that was good stuff.