jcl

If it was protected admin account I suppose the system could have flaked out and lost or forgotten about the admin token. Though I wouldn't expect software updates to be affected in that case. Not that I actually know who owns the update process.

Well, I've never had to do anything with mplayer ;-) You know what's fun about this discussion? We're very close to debating the relative merits of the same software. AFAICT nearly every non-proprietary component of CCCP that didn't come from Gabest came from Linux. In particular, it looks like all but a handful of the codecs originated on Linux. The rest presumably are available for mplayer through one of the Win32 codec packages.

I should have mentioned that the mplayer defaults are usually good enough. AFAICR the only thing that I've needed to tweak is subtitle scaling. (There's a tab in the preferences window for sub options but I don't use the graphical interface so I'm stuck hiring sherpas for an expedition through the manpage after the spring thaw.)

IME it's comparable to Windows w/CCCP for anime. You have to install extra codec packages and it can be a pain to configure the media players* but otherwise it's quite nice. * The list of options in the mplayer manpage runs nearly eight thousand lines.

Urge to kill... rising. I can't remember exactly when it was that I realized that I hated everything about Ubuntu that wasn't Debian. The earth tones, the wallpapers, the name, the code names -- my God, the code names. Edit: And I had the same problem with the NTFS partitions on my external HDD. I don't with Fedora. I'll have to look into that. I'm running Windows 7 under KVM; I wonder if Hyper-V supports recursive virtualization.... Edit: No mention of Hyper-V anywhere I looked.

Oh, hey, look, I have a Linux machine again. The old one burned up twice last year and... well, it's a stupid story.

No, Illinois has had other governors. It happens all the time. Other politicians aren't 'caught' because no one cares. Rhetorical question?

Bizarre. The first thing I thought of was that it might be a hardware or driver defect. I have a notebook that has a stroke when I try to drive a high-resolution display (an HDTV, specifically) on VGA. The built-in display works fine but the second display paints at about 5 Hz (software paints, I mean; refresh rate is fine, AFIACT). There's massive artifacting, too, but I don't know if that's the notebook or the TV's upscaling. I would say it was just beyond the IGP's capabilities but it's supposed to be a supported configuration and I would expect overloaded hardware would affect both display

Shouldn't that only happen when you're viewing protected content that forbids VGA output? I'm looking over one of the Vista content protection whitepapers and it seems clear that they wanted VGA to work. [Edit: By "work" I mean "not be disabled". Microsoft seemed to favor degrading the content.]

Eh? Every computer I've used has been happy to push as many pixels over VGA as the hardware could manage.

'New Year' indeed. Roman chronological imperialism! Romans out of Gaul! No blood for... uh... anyway, no blood for it! Impeach Caesar!

What he said and meant has been disputed. The source -- assuming we're thinking of the same story -- claimed that those present believed Bush was speaking metaphorically.

People are reading way too much into that patent.

That's bizarre. AFAICT I can play 720p H.264 in software (no hardware decode at all) on my X2 @ 1.8 GHz. Even at 1.0 GHz it took me a few minutes to find a scene that caused problems.

It's there:

One thing I like about electric vehicles is that they could, in theory, use modular power plants. If you could swap between, say, gas generator, biodiesel generator, CNG generator, hydrogen fuel cell, battery, and nuclear modules you'd probably be set for the life of the vehicle. Well, maybe not nuclear.

Meh. Hydrogen is competing with electricity storage and I don't think that's a competition it can win. If you could built an electric car with, say, a 200 mile range and quick-charge or quick-change batteries I don't think there'd be a compelling reason to use hydrogen. [Edit: A family car, I mean.]

Natural gas?

Except for the part where they clear brazilians of acres of rainforest to grow sugarcane to produce the ethanol.

It's warns me -- and by "warns" I mean "displays an error and exits". AFAIK that's been the default behavior for years.

mplayer, xine... Really, all of the media players that can play VCDs and DVDs should be able to play disc images. Edit: The Linux port of VLC presumably can as well.

True, and you'd be working around bugs in a program that shouldn't exist in the first place.

Those registry keys don't affect that particular test. Java applets manage their own network connections and the applet that drives that test only creates two connections, only one of which is active at any given time. You can confirm this by watching netstat while the test is running -- look for connections on remote ports 8085 and 8086 -- or by disassembling the applet. Also, your hack set the maximum number of connections to twenty-two, not sixteen. DWORD values are expressed in hex.

I rarely find myself in situations where shutdown speed matters. Certainly less often than situations where blowing away processes could be a problem. That's supposed to control the delay between user input and windows jumping to the foreground. I would think the problem would be obvious. Google it. Er, no. It's safe to go a bit higher than the recommendation but that's excessive. Not to mention that it doesn't do what the comment describes.

Can break menus for people who don't have superhuman dexterity. Can prevent processes from gracefully terminating. Can break the world for people who don't have superhuman reflexes. Powers down the monitor when the screen saver is active or something, if I'm not mistaken. 0 is supposed to truncate the text. Enables tab completion of file names. Doesn't affect anything else. IINM those violate RFC 2616.