Am I the only one who remembers that freezing a hard drive used to be a valid method of restoring a drive? (if only temporairily) BBC lists it as "tops the weirdest computer mishaps"

As I recall it could be used for freeing a stuck head from the platter, or to help give the motor that little extra 'bump' it needed if it was worn out.. all the old FAQs I remember said you'd get 20-30 minutes to copy off the data before the drive died again.

-darkwind

Yup, 350.4 for me too... Got the beard just a bit past rudoplh.

-EvilDark

Grr.. all this talk of snow and here I was at work today in 50f weather.. (and I'm in Milwaukee!)

They say there's a chance of snow tomorrow, but I have my doubts. Anyone wanna ship some snow this way? We could certainly use it. Years ago I remember light flurries in late September/early October, or the year we had over 30" of snow in June...

While I've got my winter jacket out, it hasn't really been zipped up or done anything but weigh me down..

-EvilDark

Of course, pay phones aren't .25 any more.

They aren't? They are here.

Gah, here in Milwaukee, phones are 50c, and soon to be 65c (coming by the end of the year they say) Now more than ever am I glad I have this calling card from the bank, gives me free minutes for each purchase

EvilDark

I don't see what the big stink is over low ICQ numbers. I swear once I had a 6 digit # starting with a 1, but I can't for the life of me remember what it is. I have a 6 digit starting with a 3 however..

I've given it to a few people, and of the odd looks I get, the majority say "and the rest of it is...?"

Come back in 20 years, (if and when ICQ is still around) and you have 10, or 11 digit numbers, then you might have something..

-EvilDark

This comment was edited on Mar 15, 22:01.

[Anyway, I will never understand speeders.

I'm one to be careful on city streets, when it's a 25mph limit, you won't see me over 30, and definitely not a mile over in a school area.

It's a different story once I'm on the freeway, however.. I once made the journey from minneapolis, MN, to Milwaukee, WI in under 4 hours.. according to yahoo it's a 336mi trip, which if travelled from both end points works out to a sustained 84mph. In reality I was between 70-110mph depending on the area... (and believe me that much of west WI is NOTHING but farmland for many many miles)

It was in the middle of the week at that, daylight, the few cars that were on the freeway usually give plenty of clearance and yield to the right when they see you coming.. (gah I wish it were like that in other places)

Either way it's more than an hour I took off my trip, which because of the circumstances (I won't mention here) was a lifesaver.

-EvilDark

Unfortunately, that "clock" on the left is off by a good 10mph or so :-P (well in my car anyway, and I'm too lazy to fix it)

In some areas, if you aren't "going with the flow" then you become a hazard as everyone violently swerves around you. Granted they aren't right for doing it, but until I install that PA system, I'll just have to make do with keeping with the flow.

And since it's been said a few times, you can't beat the V1. Several people I know swear by 'em. When it beeps alerts at me, I can gradually let off the gas and coast down to a reasonable speed, while everyone else slams on their brakes as "lesser" detectors pick up the hazard at the last second. It's quite good for wear & tear on the car..

I can easily justify the price based on how many times it's let me avoid a ticket, plus it's another cool device in the car that makes noises and senses the world around me.. (complimenting the radio scanner, and GPS

-EvilDark

If they were running a speed trap, multiple officers, then I see it unlikely to fight beyond a small "reduction". Here in WI, you can get the points reduced, but somehow the court costs and fees *always* manage to equal the amount offset by the reduced sentence. So you'll still expect to pay a fine, unless somehow you have a solid plan to get the ticket thrown out.

(2 under my belt, one 22 over in a 55, cop reduced to 19 over to put it "in a lower bracket", the second was 13 over in a 45 :\) (I did later get the 22 over reduced to a non-moving violation, no points lost, the 13 over I only got to a 10 over, minus 2 points off my license)

I do recommend radar detectors, *if* you get a good one. My V1 (http://www.valentine1.com) has saved my butt dozens of times, and I've been ticket free since I bought it. I can't find the heart to slow down enough that the cops would leave me alone otherwise.

-EvilDark

I guess I'm not the only one who never stopped playing Doom.. I bought a GBA specifically because Doom is ported to it, and it's still a blast. (After I installed the afterburner light) I recently purchased a flash cart for the GBA, and now I also have PocketNES on there too, with 60 or so NES games to play.. w00t

I cut my teeth on Doom back when it was released. Shortly after playing, and figuring out how to "do networking" a couple buddies and I went out and bought the cheapest net adapters we could find (back when a 10mbit 10base2 adapter would run you $119.. and it was cheap!) strung coax cable around said buddie's now trashed apartment, and played Doom long into the night. Ah so much fun..

These kids today, they have it so easy.. just push "connect" in-game and magically you're playing others. Termination, broken connectors, T-connectors, hubs, and balancing issues.. not to mention blown circuits, overheating, running out of table space... thats a LAN party!

-EvilDark

You know, half of these P2P measures are already in effect, and making it fiendishly difficult for people who want to copy stuff for legitimate use. For example, I don't have a DVD-rom, but my brother-in-law does, and I wanted to get some screenshots off a DVD I own to use for wallpaper. So we try on his new PC with WinXP. Every screenshot we take is black. It took him three months to find software which let him do this, all so we could take pictures of something we can already view on the monitor and turn them into wallpaper which we can view at any time.

Actually, I don't believe that to be an effect of "anti-copying measures". Modern graphics cards have an overlay buffer, which means that the raw video is sent to the graphics card to be processed, rather than rasterizing each pixel seperately through the CPU (very slow).

When you take a snapshot of your desktop with the movie "shown", in reality all Windows (and most graphics programs) see is the surrounding desktop created through the Windows GUI calls, and there simply is no image there.

Similarly, 3d accelerated games won't be included in snapshots because they're rendered entirely within the graphics card, no "image" is seen by the computer. It's just feeding raw data to the card, and that turns the commands into pretty pictures.

There are specialized programs designed to read the buffer of the videocard, and recreate the "missing" data, but I won't go into specifics.

Perhaps you should think about the problem and possible solutions before you go ranting about how the industry is oppressing you. (they may be, but they haven't done much yet)

-EvilDark