I read CodeProject forums a lot... and I hardly ever, ever comment. But this just struck a chord with me. I am one of the proctors at a set of computer labs. There are three labs, each with about 20-30 computers in them. During a recent re-imaging of the labs, one of our supervisors decided to replace Adobe Reader with Foxit Reader. Then all hello broke loose. Certain PDF documents were declared by Foxit to be "corrupt" even when they would open in Adobe just fine. This seemed to be related to professors that put large images into their lecture slides. It's kind of difficult to run a computer lab that most students use for printing lecture slides without them being able to open their lecture slides! And then the network started having issues, to where we couldn't sustain a multi-gigabyte data transfer to reimage the workstations. Without the nuclear option, we had to resort to manually uninstalling Foxit on all the computers. It left behind plugins, ActiveX objects, and the like, and I kid you not, months after the 'foxit incident' I still had students coming up to me with PDF problems - caused by Foxit! I know many people have had good luck with it - obviously the sup that decided to install it had good luck. Why else would he have suggested it? But those stories ARE out there!

Sounds like your CCD sensor is on a high ISO setting. Set your brain to "P" (programmed auto) mode instead of auto mode, and then reduce the ISO setting, preferably to 100. You'll have to keep your eyes open longer between blinks and hold your head steadier to get a good view, though.

> What did u tell me not 2 type

never type
rm -rf /

Awesome! The funniest thing I've read in a while.

Must have had fun with Hoary Hedgehog[^] ;P

Take a look at this IE7 Screenshot[^]. Can anyone reproduce this? This is happening consistently with IE8 beta 1 in both IE7 compat mode and IE8 mode, when I search on google. Also, you can't tell from the screenshot, but the "o" above the active page number at the bottom of the search results is raised by about 1.5 em. This is on Vista x64, latest updates. Firefox 3 works fine, so I dunno. I just want reassurance I'm not going crazy! - Mike

Yep... Ubuntu 64-bit gives you the full 4GB, as would 64-bit Windows. I would bet that 32-bit Ubuntu would give the same result as 32-bit Windows.

Well as far as I know, it is safe. But it does require hardware support for PAE. I'm not sure what processors support it, all I know is that it's a flag in the CR4 register. And even then, PAE may not solve the problem. Because what PAE does is essentially create a 36-bit physical address space. IIRC, it does so by messing with some previously reserved bits in the segment descriptor table. However, physical RAM still exists from 0-4GB, so I would imagine motherboard support would be needed to properly access all 4GB.

Yep... as others above have pointed out, use either /PAE on a 32-bit windows or a 64-bit version of windows. The reason is that 32 bits is only enough to address 4Gb of RAM... BUT - some of that 4GB is reserved for the BIOS, PCI cards, and video. So thats why only 3GB is available.

I have their 256slice and couldn't be happier. I don't use any kind of control panel - just SSH + screen. I don't use their backup service, because I will eventually write a script that creates a backup and sends it to my dorm room computer for storage. It's hosting my subversion repositories, and two (eventually three) websites. "17:37:05 up 130 days, 2:53, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00" - No downtime. Ever. (so far) Michael

IIRC, the access points are programmed for up to four keys, but only one of them is needed on the client. Don't know exactly why, though, so anyone with a more in-depth knowledge of WEP is welcome to explain :) Mike

I had to use it for an XML-to-database import, and BizTalk 2006 is a convoluted, slow, and bloated guano sandwich. :~ ;) Or so I thought until I looked at a book on BizTalk written for the previous version. By that standard BTS 2006 is actually good. It didn't help that what I needed to do was outside the scope of BizTalk. BizTalk is designed to automate the flow of data between different parts - receiving data, transforming it, and passing it on to something else. It's not designed to copy files, perform complex database queries in the process of transforming said data, etc. Perhaps salaries are so high for BTS experts because nobody would otherwise touch the software? ;P Mike

Heh... it thinks I'm near UCLA. Which is quite odd as that's were I'll be in the fall. Not now though.

Corny, but good. I actually haven't heard these yet. Mike

Is it just me, or is there really no good way to launch a non-elevated process from an elevated one? First I read about the Task Scheduler[^] approach, and now about the Remote Code Injection[^] method. (I'm not trying to attack the author here; the articles themselves are well-written but the method is hackish and unreliable.) Vista obviously can launch a program using whatever permissions it wants. (Proof: There exists a first non-elevated program on the system) And launching a program as a non-elevated user seems to be just a matter of messing with the process's security descriptors, etc. So why are the only methods (that I've seen) so hack-ish? The Task Scheduler approach relies on the Task Scheduler service being started. If it's disabled, you're out of luck, your program crashes, etc. A Bad Thing. The remote code injection approach relies on message hooks being injected into other processes. While that is unlikely to change due to the massive amount of compatability problems that woud ensue, it still could. Today's processors are fast enough where the performance impact of a context switch would not be as terrible as it was in 1994. It would be interesting if Raymond Chen blogged about this. It's not in his area of expertise, but those who read his blog know he'd have some strong words to say about these approaches... Anyone know? Michael

If it is really the first byte, 0x00000000, then all it means is you better not divide by zero while in real mode! That's assuming Windows doesn't add this page into its free page list for 16bit compat reasons.

Well the UCLA LUG recommends either Debian or Ubuntu.

And here I was expecting a rant about CNN or something like that...

Not quite... otherwise I would have used app.config :)

What I have done is created an AppSettings class which has many public properties - example:

sealed class AppSettings
{
static string appDir;

public static string AppDirectory
{
    get
    {
        if (appDir != null)
            return appDir;
        appDir = (code to get app dir);
        return appDir;
    }
}

}

And then I can use it from anywhere in the application. Mike