I love the Microcenter near me. Yes, it is three times further then Best Buy but I don't have to worry about idiots trying to rip me off. Here are two experiences for examples:

1) I was looking for a particular motherboard. The sales guy saw me looking at them and comparing them. He warned me about getting that model, "Those are very flaky. See those with the stickers? Those are ones that were returned. We tested them and they work fine but there must be a reason so many are getting returned."

2) I went in looking for a half height video card. I told the sales guy that this model was supposed to support half height. He wasn't sure and opened up the box so we could look at it. If you opened the box at Best Buy they would look at you like you were planning on stealing it.

I can't tell you the number of times I have gone in looking for some weird adapter and had them say, "Sure, we have it three different styles." These guys even knew what kind of adapter I was looking for from just my description.

My brother-in-law has a Tiger Direct store near him that he is proud of. It was half the size and 1/4 the selection of Microcenter.

Ben Rich (head of Lockhead in the 90's) said in his book that one time he was at the GE engine plant. One of the guys was pointed at two jet engines. He said they were the exact same engine. The only difference was one was for the Air Force and had 200 extra inspectors look at it and cost twice as much for that reason. Next time you want to blame the contractors for how much things cost take into consideration all the extra regs and paperwork they are required to do. Another fav of his is how they go crazy labeling things secret or top secret. That doubles the paperwork and makes all their work that much more difficult.

He compared the overall cost of a new plane for the air force to the overall cost of the new model for the Mustang. The amounts were fairly close. Ford gets to spread the cost over thousands of cars. The manufacturer of a planes gets to spread the cost over a few hundred planes.

If you want to monitor a serial or parallel port in real time you need an older os like DOS. WinXP, NT and newer made it hard to do this. That is why programs that control stepper motors or gather data through a serial port use some flavor of DOS. That is why some CNC machines use DOS.
For example:
http://www.dakeng.com/turbo.html
http://deskam.com/
http://www.luberth.com/cstep/software.htm

Where we live we have the choice of WOW, Comcast and AT&T. We have WOW and have great service, techs that know what they are doing and paying only 2/3 what my friends that live in areas nearby that only have Comcast. A Comcast sales guy stopped by once. I looked over his deal and told him that he was more expensive then what we have now even with his limited time deal. He admitted that this area was tough and that Comcast offers deals here that they don't offer elsewhere.

From the page where Google talks about keeping your account secure....
"We can tell you, though, that trying all of these programs often makes a difference, as does having the latest versions.

        * Google Pack - Norton Security Scan, Spyware Doctor
        * Kaspersky Free Virus Scan
        * Spybot Search and Destroy
        * Lavasoft Ad-Aware
        * MacScan"

Norton is not part of the Google pack. Besides, when did it become a good idea to run more then one anti-virus? I always thought that was a good way to cause problems with them fighting each other over a virus.
From the Google Pack page...

"Learn more about Google Pack Software

        * Google Chrome Web Browser
        * Google Apps
        * Google Earth
        * Google Toolbar for IE
        * Spyware Doctor with Anti-Virus
        * Google Desktop
        * Picasa
        * Adobe Reader
        * Firefox with Google Toolbar
        * Google Talk
        * Skype
        * RealPlayer"

What is interesting is that it includes Chrome and Firefox. It is nice to see them recommending Spybot. It has long been a favorite of mine that seems to have lost some of its popularity over the past year or two. On the other hand, they have RealPlayer in the Google Pack and I have despised them for ages.

I was trying to read the article with Chrome, the eventual winner, and these incredibly annoying ads took up a big chunk of the top left corner. This is with the AdBlock extension for Chrome. The ad was bad enough that it covered several words of the first sentences on each page. I thought that a nice experiment would be to load the page on Firefox. Hey, whadyaknow, the annoying ad is gone in Firefox. To me that says Firefox won the two most important categories. Mem usage and getting rid of annoying ads.

Maybe I am confused. Hasn't this already been done by the after market chip makers?

  http://www.performancechipsdirect.com/ Just one of many makers I found.

Car nuts have been hacking cars much longer then hackers have been hacking software.

Uno or Duo in Chicago, and not one of the many they have put up around the country. Connie's is pretty good too. All others around the world wish they were as good. In particular New York pizza tastes like cardboard. One of the great joys of when I lived in Chicago was the pizza. I am not sure why there is any need to discuss it. It is obvious that Chicago has the best pizza.

I used to live near one of those in suburban Chicago. It was still called Plank Road. An excerpt from a local paper (http://www.ledgersentinel.com/article.asp?a=5946).

"The roads were financed by private, state chartered corporations, in which stockholders expected to make a profit. Tolls, generally a penny a mile for a one-horse buggy or wagon and an additional half-cent for every other animal providing the power. Up in Wisconsin, driving from Milwaukee to Green Bay via the plank turnpike cost $3.78—a not inconsiderable sum when government land was selling for $1.25 per acre.

Here in Kendall County, Oswego was the target for two plank road ventures. According to “A History of the County of DuPage Illinois” published in 1857: “The Naperville and Oswego plank road was laid through the central part of this town [Naperville]. The projectors of this road thought to facilitate the communication between Oswego, Naperville and Chicago...The road was completed from Chicago to Naperville, but no farther. The project was a failure; the stock was worthless, for people would travel by railroad. The material of which the road was constructed is now being torn up and converted to other uses.”"

This became a huge problem here after we started to upgrade to dual cpu machines. On the old machines it would only index when the computer wasn't doing anything which really wasn't that often. With a dual cpu setup one cpu is usually doing nothing so desktop search was indexing _all_ the time on just a few machines in one office. The office kept complaining about their network connection running at a crawl. The few machines indexing the share were conflicting with each other. "Hey somebody looked at this file, we better re-index it." They created a vicious circle of indexing the same files over and over.

I tried Vista but it was slow and half my hardware didn't work. The same computer runs Win7 without a problem with fewer driver issues. I have it running on 2 of three desktops at home. The wife gives me a funny look when ever I mention upgrading her computer or it would be three for three. This might have something to do with it. http://xkcd.com/349/

Its like win2k and xp. XP was really win2k done right. Win7 is vista done right.

Four computers at home.

OS - Came with puter that I got second hand, MS really likes me and sent me a free copy, RC of Win7
Office - MS really likes me and gave free copy, part of license from work (the guy that deals with MS told me that our license actually covers people taking it home, who am I to argue?) and OO.o
AV - Avast free or AVG free
Games - Paid for, Armor Games or Gamespot
Utilities - Sysinternals, downloads.com etc. all free
Graphics - paint.net, picassa, paid for Macromedia Creative Pack once.
Programming IDE - MS really likes me and sent me a free copy.

The only thing I have had to pay for were games and one of the graphics packages. I use the Macromedia suite for work so it really doesn't count.
I am not going to count MP3's since most were ripped from CD's I own. The licenses for Office and Windows might be a little iffy but I don't feel bad since I provide free support to family and friends. I do try to actually have at least one real license for Office and Windows, but since I fill out survey's, beta test, and watch propoganda vids that is usually not a problem.

Yes