Killing all the crapware running in the background will probably give you more improvement than a registry cleanup. CCleaner includes a startup tool that lets you turn off or delete the auto startups. (Turn them off until you are sure you want to kill them) If you are running Win7, you might also go to Control Panel -> Performance Information and Tools -> Adjust Visual Effects -> Adjust for Best Performance. You will lose the Aero effects, etc., but on a slow machine it’s much faster.

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And probably using a remote login from bed.....

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Are you saying that the laptop is owned by your employer? In that case it should be covered by thier buisness insurance & not your problem (unless you own the buisness!)

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The PM may have just saved your job. If the customer is testing the software and finds a bug of this magnitude, they not only will reject the package, they may question the companies’ ability to perform. And move to a different vendor. By telling the customer about the issue, he is promoting the company as an honest supplier who has the best interests of the customer in focus. The loss of a customer could hurt you far more than the embarrassment of having an un intended feature pointed out.

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Feiyun Wang wrote:

I confirm that CP is accessible from China. This lounge and this news are public too.

Which probably explains why there are not more Chinese participants. If it does not have to be hacked to get access, they move on to something more interesting like Dept of Defense or CIA files! :)

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The OS is great & every bit as good as Win7 - but as others have pointed out, the applications are the issue. There is an app for everything, but they mostly don't reach the level of the Win app's, they have weird user interfaces, or both.

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The Discovery Channel did a series in 2009 that explored the science needed to make Science Fiction a fact. The first episode provided a physics based theory for creating a working warp drive. Requires the equivalent of converting the mass of the planet Saturn into energy, but the physics say it should work!

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Gary Wheeler wrote:

People like William Proxmire[^] should have been publicly executed as traitors to their species.

The current Democratic administration that gutted the shuttle replacement program should be included. As the USA cuts its funding of applied science, it has destroyed its future in commercial innovation. People focus on the cost of space exploration, but forget the spin outs that have come from NASA - microcomputers, microwave communication networks, satellite TV, Teflon,velcro, Hubble, etc. NASA invented some things, but more often moved creative ideas to the point of commercial application by funding the R&D needed. Although it was no longer a leading edge computer by the time I got to touch it, the first mainframe I used for flight simultion at Boeing (Back in the day!) had been partly funded by NASA because it was too expensive for even a Boeing to purchase. A new level of aircraft design and pre-flight testing was enabled using that computer. It was used to evaluate the suitability of the 747 flight characteristics while carrying the Shuttle (good) and the external tank (not acceptable). Instead of using space and science to build new industries we are funding massive welfare and illegal aliens. Which will only produce more welfare and more illegal aliens. Now if we could find an export market for them.......

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xavier morera wrote:

"You can't hire 9 pregnant women to have a baby in 1 month"

I prefer this version: "No matter how many men you put on the task, it takes 9 months to make a baby."

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Take a look at http://calibre-ebook.com[^]

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These projects would benefit from having a physicist and an economist on the team. They would quickly point out that neither the physics nor the economics will ever work. As people have pointed out the beam spread over that distance is huge: A "pencil beam directly generated by a common helium-neon laser would spread out to a size of perhaps 500 kilometers" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser[^] in diameter. i.e. 196,350 square Km. Not including the diffraction due to atmospheric effects. Thats a lot of ground to cover with collection equipment! Microwave transmission would have an even larger beam spread. It would be more effective to simply locate the solar panels on earth instead. Except for one minor problem: It takes between 20 and 40 years (depending on your assumptions) to recover the energy used to manufacture solar panels. Using 24 hrs per day of peak production as might be possible on the moon could reduce this to approximately 10 years. But now add in the energy cost of transporting solar panels (or the equipment to make them) to the moon and the energy breakeven point is past the service life (approximately 30 years) of the panels. In other words the panels would wear out before they gave back as much energy as it took to manufacture and get them to the moon. Not to mention the high cost of servicing them! There is not enough suitable land in the world for windmills, solar panels or biomass fuels to ever provide the energy the world needs. If you doubt this, remember that the total energy recovered from any of these "renewable" sources can never be higher than the solar energy falling on the area devoted to collection times the efficiency of conversion (for solar panels between 15 and 40%). Do your own calculations. Oil and coal work because Mother Nature has been concentrating solar energy into oil or coal for eons. Hydroelectric works because the entire ocean acts as a collection area. There are only four viable large scale energy sources that are both physically and economically possible; Nuclear, petroleum,coal and hydroelectric. The sooner we realize that the so called green solutions are not physically viable, the sooner we can get on with a real energy program that minimizes the impact on the environment instead of wishing and hoping there was a magic wand.

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I took 4.5 years to get my degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics, if you don’t count the two years screwing around in community college – zero credits transferred. At the Univ of Washington, they used two courses to weed out those not committed to engineering. The first was Physics. The first quarter, the class was held in a movie theater size hall & most seats were filled. The second qtr it was held in a large hall, maybe 200 students. The third qtr was held in a normal class room with maybe 40 students. The optional (for my degree) second year courses were only 15 or so, mostly serious physics majors. Math was the other make or break set of courses. The dropout rate was not as high, but by the time I had my required math courses, I was only a few credits from qualifying for a Math degree. On the other hand the U of W recognized that engineering majors were deficient in the fuzzy language skills and had special ed courses just for engineering majors. Topics like Report Writing, study of Science Fiction, etc fulfilled the language arts requirements to graduate!

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My experience has been that Ubuntu installs older hardware and most (but not all) new hardware without a problem. When it does not install new hardware it can be a big problem because the driver probably does not exist yet. Windows is the opposite; it installs new hardware but usually has trouble with older hardware. Finding an old driver that works with the latest versions of Windows can be equally troubling. There may not be one.

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I have run both an Ubuntu desk top and Windows 7 desk top for a couple years now. As an OS, there is little difference to choose from; - They are different in detail, but both are very competent. - You only do an occasional install, but for me the Linux installations have been faster and on older hardware Linux is less hassle. Windows makes you go searching for old drivers, etc. - Windows has GUI’s for virtually any configuration parameter. You have to use a Terminal window and obscure command line code to fine tune Linux. Think Win 3.1 level with a mix of GUI and DOS. But such fine tuning is rare. - Linux is faster and requires fewer resources – great for extending the life of an older machine. - Updates are equally frequent, but Linux rarely, if ever forces you to reboot after an update. Windows may force you to reboot several times just to finish one set of updates. - Less malware on Linux – not because it is more secure, but because who would waste their time writing malware for an OS with such a small market share? - You can get virtually any application from graphics editing to office suites to audio/video editing or playback, even some cool games. And they are almost all free! So am I a Linux fan boy or use the Linux box all day? Nope, when I need to get something done I use the Windows machine. Even the best applications for Linux simply can’t match the better Windows applications. They lack consistent user interfaces, they fall short in features, etc., etc. The applications seem to be five yrs behind and except for Android app’s I do not see much application development happening.

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It's far easier to build a "dirty bomb" than building a real nuke. The low concentration radioactive material is much easier to obtain and std explosives would work fine in spreading it over a large area. Explode one in a major metro area and it could be almost as effective in creating large areas that would be unusable for years and mass radioactive casualties. Only question is why hasn’t it happened yet? Is it incompetence on the part of terrorist or very competent intelligence agencies?

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Sure! 1) Next time you need to distribute your catalog you can just email it to your customer’s printer and save all that time and cost of printing. 2) If I was the HP manager in charge of ink sales, I would encourage lots of people to send useless multi-color images to their entire spam list.

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I use Ultra VNC[^]. One of several flavors of VNC in the public domain. Each flavor has it's pros and cons. Various levels of security including fully encrypted with plugins. Wonderful for remote access of computers around the office, home or across the internet.

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Thanks I will check these out. I looked at the Skype to Blackberry issue a while back. Skype offers an app, but only for Verizon customers. There are a couple third party app's but they both have issues that made them unattractive. Has anyone looked at using Asterisk? Thanks

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Thanks for the suggestion - we use Vonage as our VOIP (so we can have the US number). I will check out thier phone app's & see what they offer.

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Any VOIP/SIP experts? We have an office in Mexico and US based clients. We use VOIP to provide clients a US phone number. Unfortunately most of our sales people work outside the office during the day & they have Mx cell phones. So while we can get a message to them, they cannot call the client back until they return to the office several hours later or even the next day. :( Is it possible to use Asterisk or similar to forward an inbound VOIP call to the salespersons cell phone? Is it possible to reverse that and allow our sales staff to call or office & then be routed to a US number via our VOIP? Thanks for your help!

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