As mysteries go this was small change, but I stumbled across its solution earlier today: spam nominally from Facebook friends. I've been getting a recognizable species of link spam every day or two for a couple of months now. The From: field always contains the name of someone I know. The From: email address, however, is unknown to me and does not ( Read more... )

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Pete Albrecht sent me a link to an article that means well but doesn't quite hit the bullseye. No one seems to be asking, Is Vista really necessary? What does all that complexity actually buy us? Why is Vista better than XP? Or how about that now mostly abandoned but still pertinent ( Read more... )

Back in 2001, I saw previews of a movie called Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and my initial strong reaction was, Yukkh! That's creepy! The film attempted photorealistic human characters, and did about as well with the animation as one could do circa 2000, but many people commented that ( Read more... )

Yesterday's meltdown didn't go especially well. The Intel D865PERLK motherboard needs a slew of drivers for its chipset, but the drivers wouldn't install, the disk formatted weirdly, and I'm beginning to think that something, somewhere, messed up the 137 GB barrier fix that I applied last April when I put the system together.

Some of you may know ( Read more... )

My main system here burped yesterday and then refused to boot. (I got it running again with a couple of files on a floppy disk; a trick I'll explain in a day or two.) It's been showing some odd signs of instability for several months, and what bothers me far more than that is that I have no idea why—and I'm typically ( Read more... )