The late PowerPC and Intel through 2012 consumer Macs did have an infrared receiver, but it is only a receiver for the sometimes optional, sometimes bundled remote and can not be used for two-way communications. The last Macs to have IrDA were the G3 Powerbook and Bondi Blue iMac. The multicolor iMacs, iBook, and Powerbook G4 all dropped it.

Not true, I haven't played TF2 in months but over the last two weeks or so have received a friend invite from a clearly bogus account about once a day. I suspect that's indicative of a major increase in these things because prior to just recently I hadn't had more than a dozen in the many years I've been on Steam.

They don't *need* Odin for anything normal people do, we're not even supposed to have Odin available to the public. That said Heimdall is open source, cross platform, and in my experience works better than Odin. Even on Windows it's a better tool IMO.

My cable connection is sold as 100/10. It connects using an 8x2 DOCSIS 3.0 channel bonding setup, providing a line rate of 343.04/61.44. DOCSIS overhead makes this around 304/54 usable. My modem's config file has it limit me to 115/11.5 and I can generally use every bit of that.

What sort of a connection do you think is upstream of the DSLAM? I guarantee if even a fraction of the users you share hardware with tried to max out their connections at the same time you'd see the same problems as an over-oversubscribed cable node. There are also plenty of cable providers, mine included, that don't push their oversubscriptions to the limit. I've never had a time where my speed underperformed the rating by more than a few percent where I wasn't having actual errors on the line.

Or anywhere else. FiOS expansion is officially over. It might show up if you're near a current service area and an actual competitor like Google comes to town, but if you don't currently have it don't hold your breath.

Considering that Youtube is going to be most people's default choice, it's probably a good idea to indicate specifically why you're looking for other options.

And somehow flipped the door control to the override lock mode, which has to happen from inside the cockpit during the 30 second buzzer period after the door code has been entered from the outside? Oh right.

Or if it's a commercial domain, just buy a really long registration. It's not like domains are expensive, I've had a few clients who were renewing their domains annually and had expired one or come close to it a few times because they were doing it annually, but when I pointed out that it would only be a bit over $100 to not have to think about it for years they jumped on the idea.

I believe you overestimate the noise created by a properly set up PC cooling system. My PC is pretty high up the ladder with an i7-4790K and SLI GTX970s, but it's also incredibly quiet most of the time. It is capable of getting loud if I turn all the fans up to maximum manually, but that never happens in actual use because it's not capable of getting hot enough to need it. Even running a GPU burn-in test and Prime95 simultaneously, pulling 730 watts from the wall, the GPU fans never exceed 1000 RPM and the CPU fan barely beats them with 1200. My case has two 140mm fans which are both on a dumb fan controller set to "low". Under most uses the power supply and GPUs actually turn their fans entirely off.

I don't have them in the same room so it's hard to compare the two directly, but I'm pretty confident in saying my high end gaming PC with a pretty standard cooling system is quieter under all circumstances compared to my Xbox One. It's definitely quieter than any of my 360s (1x Falcon, 1x Jasper, 2x Trinity), the older of which make more noise at idle than this PC does under gaming loads.

It's not like I have an expensive cooling system either. My CPU cooler is a Cooler Master Hyper212 Evo which costs under $30 on which I'm using its included 120mm fan. It's the same HSF I've had for years. My GPUs both have their OEM cooling solution, the "SSC" variant of EVGA's "ACX 2.0" cooler which is apparently actually a bit louder than the nVidia reference design.

You are correct, it looks like that board was released in March of 2006, but it really doesn't help the case that parallel ports aren't outdated when it was a legacy support board even when it was released. LGA775 had been out for 18 months at the time and the AGP slot just speaks for itself.

You might want to grab a Kill-a-Watt or similar and test your power consumption. Prescotts weren't exactly known for being efficient in the first place and a lot has changed in the CPU world since then. Anandtech's CPU Benchmark Database has the Pentium 4 HT 660 which is a year newer, a full gigahertz faster, and has twice the L2 as yours. When you factor for the clock difference, a 10 watt Celeron is pretty much just as fast in single threaded loads and since everything has multiple cores these days multithreaded performance will be a whole different world.

With how cheaply you can get CPU power these days anything from the P4 era or older can be hard to justify keeping around both for power/heat reasons (particularly notable on Prescott chips) and performance. If you actually use that day-to-day I guarantee that a dual core chip would be practically a religious experience by now, not to mention if your electric costs are anything you care about it very well could save you enough to cover a lot of the upgrade price over the course of a few years.

I'm not saying you need really awesome gear, just that even cheap hardware these days is hugely better than that. Until a few months ago I was running on a Phenom X6 1045 that cost me $90 brand new when I bought it over two years prior. It still did just fine for me day-to-day and I felt no need to upgrade. Yeah it's six cores, but an end-of-life chip that was sub-$100 when bought is by no means a monster build.

We reached the point where for most day-to-day tasks you generally don't need any more performance some time ago, but that doesn't mean there's no reason to replace old hardware. I do contract IT work for a bunch of customers and at this point my line is Core 2 Duo. Anything older gets replaced when possible (made a lot easier by XP being EoLed with no security updates), anything newer gets upgraded to 4+GB of RAM and a strong recommendation of a SSD. Even a first-gen C2D is pretty hard to tell from a Core i7 in most desktop tasks if it has enough RAM and the SSD.

What? Where the heck are you getting your computers from? Aside from industrial PC type boards I haven't seen a parallel port on the back panel in a decade. A few boards I had a while back came with the port on a header and an expansion slot bracket to bring it to the back if you wanted it, but it's long dead on the main ATX back panel section.

I just checked on Newegg to verify I wasn't crazy and the only things they had with a native parallel port were thin clients and point-of-sale style kiosks. For everyone else there are cheap cards to add it and most higher end laptop docks seemed to offer it, but pretty much nothing resembling a normal modern computer has them anymore.

What's the point of a fancy SDR on the lower bands though? At least in the States most of the amateur bands with any kind of useful propagation are so narrow that one of the brain dead simple sound card SDR rigs can cover the majority of your band of choice. 200kHz on 160, 500kHz on 80, five narrow channels on 60, etc. One of the simple sound card based "ghetto SDR" rigs gets you enough TX bandwidth to monopolize a good part of the band. Since transmitting even that wide of a signal would be generally frowned upon for hogging the band or in some cases illegal, what's the point in having more capability down there? If you just want to RX the whole band the RTL TV dongle SDR hacks have over 2MHz bandwidth and readily available upconverters and/or mod information to support those frequencies.

The first band that's wider than half a MHz is 10 meter which is often a wasteland of CB "freeband" types, making 6 meter the first place where a TX-capable SDR with bandwidth that actually interests people would make sense. 2 meter and 1.25 both have about the same bandwidth available, then 70cm and up are where things really get interesting with double digit MHz available to play in.

Multiple BMW owner here, what the fuck are you smoking?

The limited edition "frozen" paints offered on a few M cars in recent years have very specific care instructions, but that's the nature of the beast with a true matte paint finish on a car. They don't have the protection a nice thick layer of clearcoat offers cars with normal modern paint.

Beyond those however they're just a well done normal automotive paint job. My beater 3 series is 13 years old and rarely gets washed, but when a friend got bored and washed/waxed the thing it looked like the paint was in better condition than my two year old Kia.

Nothing else on the car would really care what kind of wash you're doing other than the paint and wheels, so barring a dirty brushed wash scratching the hell out of things what possible way could you even imagine a car wash being able to void a warranty?

This is an approach to security that I forget the specific name I've seen it referred to with but basically it's analogized to certain tasty snacks. Hard candy shell, soft creamy filling.

If someone penetrates the defenses, if someone inadvertently or intentionally opens it up wider than originally intended, or if the attacker is an insider you're hosed.

If it can be connected to a network, you can almost guarantee that at some point someone is going to try to connect it to the internet somehow, and at that point any assumptions you've made about external or inherent physical defenses can go right out the window.

Two words for you:

Google Voice

Not only does it give you great voicemail but you get the option of a second number on which you can filter and forward calls to your heart's content, plus free texting, and you can access it all from your computer, tablet, whatever. For the anti-Google crowd there are a number of other providers offering similar services, any VoIP provider is technically capable of doing it.

Carrier voicemail is a pile of crap across the board, I haven't used it since I got a smartphone.