joeyh3

I try to keep as little debt as possible, and pay off bills within only a few days of getting them. Money's so much easier to manage when you only have to worry about assets and not liabilities. So assuming this is an extra $1000 that wasn't already in my pre-determined budget, I'd probably put it aside for a new computer, as mine's getting a bit old.

Desktop: (2 x 1680 x 1050) + (1280 x 800) Laptop: 1600 x 900 Having multiple, large monitors makes things so much easier, especially when drawing and programming and stuff like that.But it's also nice not having to switch between windows when browsing the web, watching youtube, talking on Steam/Skype, etc - just have each thing on a separate monitor/portion of a monitor and it works well

I primarily prefer Coke products over Pepsi, but Wild Cherry Pepsi is an exception as Cherry Coke doesn't have enough flavor in it.

Have you ever seen those little stickers that people put in the back windshield of their car - the ones that have stick figures showing off who's in their family? Here's what mine looks like: Needless to say, I don't have a significant other to buy anything for this year

I was going to try it this year, but then half way through the month, I had the chance to get a promotion at work, so I stopped and shaved in case they wanted to give me an interview or something, it'd be nice to look professional. Then the next day, they called me on my cell phone and gave me the job, no interview required, so I basically shaved for nothing

I don't eat cereal all that much. It's a breakfast food, and I find that if I don't eat breakfast, that's an extra ten minutes that I get to sleep. On the rare occasions that I do eat it, I prefer Raisin Bran, without milk.

Usually I prefer to be either alone, or with just a few friends. I'm not too fond of large groups, or being around people who aren't friends, however.

I am so glad I don't work in retail anymore, that was a horrible experience. Last year I waited inside of a Walmart for six hours to get a 40" TV for $250. It was pretty fun though. However, I doubt I'm going to be doing that again this year, especially since it doesn't appear that our local Walmart is doing a midnight event :/

If I ruled the Earth, I would keep most everything the same. The only thing that I would change would be that I'd make it a crime for anyone to attempt to wake me up before noon, punishable by banishment to a distance at least five miles away from me, to last until I feel like waking up.

^ I was gonna say that. I have a hybrid tablet/netbook at work, and I've been running Windows 8 on it for about a month now (Microsoft Volume License customers can get early access to new products, depending on what license they have). On a tablet, it's actually a fairly decent OS - fast, responsive, very touch-friendly, etc. On a traditional computer, it's pretty much garbage. The Metro interface was clearly designed for a tablet, and running it on anything else simply feels very awkward to use. It also hinders multitasking - if you want to run a Metro app, then that's all you can interact with at a time. You can't run two Metro apps, or a Metro app and a traditional app, side-by-side. On netbooks and smaller laptops, this isn't much of an issue, but on computers with a decent sized display, you're wasting a ton of screen space. Plus the entire interface just is a hassle to use. I shared my netbook with a couple of people, and out of about a half dozen victims test-subjects first time users, I think only one managed to figure out how to get back to the start screen after a few minutes of playing around. To me, I think the biggest issue with Windows 8 is that it's trying to be a tablet and computer OS all in one, and that's just not how it works. There's a reason why Apple has Mac OS and iOS, and why the open-source community has Linux and Android. Phones, tablets and computers all do the same thing, but they accomplish it in significantly different fashions. Interacting with a tablet is nothing like interacting with a computer, and vice-versa. Trying to create a common interface to work on both of these uniquely different devices categories is just asking for disaster. I have no plans to upgrade to Windows 8. I'm going to stick with Win7 for as long as I can. Unfortunately, my copy of Windows 7 came from MSDN:AA, and since I'm no longer a student, I can't transfer it to a new computer. So once my current computer reaches the end of its service life, I'm likely to switch to Mac OS.

I have to use it at work a lot. As a network and computer technician, I fix a lot of computer problems. I try to work on as many problems as possible using a remote desktop application, as that has a number of advantages: - I don't have to walk in a room while class is in session, interrupting the class. - I don't have to waste time walking all over the 150+ classroom building. - I can work on other things at the same time. The program that I use for remote desktop, however, tries to emulate the experience as if you were sitting right there at the computer, so if caps lock is enabled on the computer that I'm tying to work on, then everything I type will be in caps, even if caps lock is not enabled on my computer. That happens very often too, as a lot of students and teachers enable it for reasons that are beyond me. Whenever that happens, if I try to enter a password on the remote computer (to log in as an admin or something), it won't work because the casing would always be off. So to get around that, I have to enable caps lock on my computer, and then the two caps locks will cancel each other out and I can type normally on the remote computer. It's more silly than anything else, but it happens multiple times a day, so I do have to use caps lock often simply to work on the remote computers.

In all honestly, I'm not sure that it'd be wise to chase after such a goal. The length of a story should be determined solely by how much of a story there is to tell. This means that if you're going to tell a story, it should be only as long as it needs to be, and not any longer or shorter. If you set a minimum and come up short, then that will just lead to padding, which will annoy readers as it drags the story on unnecessarily Conversely, if you set a maximum, and surpass that, then you end up cutting out parts which can weaken the plot of the story. Imagine this - you say your goal is 700,000 words, but what will happen when you finish writing everything you originally planned to write, and realize that it only came to 400,000 words (which is still unrealistically high)? If you try to pad it out by adding an extra 300,000 words of filler, then most likely your readers would end up very upset, as they'll perceive this as wasting their time just so you can reach a minimum word count. They'll find the story to be fill of unnecessary scenes, extravagant levels of details, etc. More likely than not, they'll stop reading the story in entirety. If you think it will take 700,000 words to tell your story, than by all means, go after it. But I just don't think that writing that much just because you want to write that much would be wise - what would be the point of 700,000 words if no one is going to read all of them because they got angry at how dragged out the first 100,000 are?

I have a pair of Motorola S305 bluetooth headphones that I use with my phone, but I use them more for it's MP3 player than actually talking on the phone. I'm not a big fan of using bluetooth to have phone conversations, for a number of reasons (including the fact that I don't like talking on the phone).

I actually work for a public school district, and I'm pretty much the only person in the entire 6500+ student district who runs our content filter (Technically my boss has access to it, but the day-to-day operations of the filter are handled by me alone). Anyway, there seems to be a few misconceptions here about how schools block sites, and why they do so. First and foremost, most blocking is done automatically with no input from the people operating the filter. Content filters analyize sites and categorize them, and if they fall into certain categories, the filter automatically blocks them. A lot of times, a filter administrator won't even know that a specific site was blocked, as it was all done in the background. With most filters, forums such as this one will fall into a category such as "Online Community", "Social Networking", etc. those categories also include sites like Facebook and Twitter, which are usually blocked due to liability reasons (a lot of school administrators do not like those sites due to cyber-bullying, people posting pictures/videos of other students, etc). Instead of trying to each individual site where this concern may arise, it's easier to just block the entire category. A second reason is bandwidth - school's cannot just buy the same cable modem/DSL service that you use at home - those are shared lines, and schools typically need private lines instead, which are way more expensive. A 10Mbps cable modem would run about $25 - $50 a month for a home user, but a 10Mbps connection for a school could easily cost several hundred dollars a month. So there's a limited amount of bandwidth for all the computers in a school, and schools would prefer that the bandwidth go for educational use instead of entertainment, as if you have twenty students trying to download a game in one computer lab, it will make it take much longer for twenty students in another lab to view videos about history or physics or anything else required for their class. A third common reason - these sites just aren't part of your education. The internet connection in a school is meant for students to learn, not to have fun (unless you're like Twilight and find learning and fun to be the same thing). A lot of students don't want to do their work and instead surf fun websites, but they're there to do classwork, so sites are blocked to keep students on task. Content filters are kinda a necessary evil. They're there for a reason (partially because in the United States, the law requires schools to use one), but they do serve a purpose. I get blamed a lot for sites being blocked/not being blocked, but in reality, unless I manually block something (which happens fairly rarely), most blocks are automatic and are done without me even knowing. That trick only works on older and low-end web filters. The reason that worked was because HTTPS traffic is encrypted, so a content filter cannot determine the content of HTTPS packets. However, for traffic to be encrypted, a certificate needs to be used to identify the website. The certificates themselves are not encrypted, so modern filters are able to determine which website the certificate was issued to, and if the certificate contains a blocked URL, simply close the connection, preventing users from accessing the site. Some filters are able to go a step beyond that - instead of just analyzing who the certificate was issued to, they just encryption the entire stream and just analyze the data like it was a regular, non-HTTPS transmission. This is a bit more complex though, as the computer receiving the data is expecting a HTTPS transmission from the site that the certificate was issued to, and the filter, not having the server's private certificate, will not be able to re-encrypt it using the original certificate.So instead, the filter has to re-encrypt the data using it's own certificate. This causes a problem because the encrypted data would show that it was coming from a location other than where the client was expecting, which will result in an error. The only way around this is to install the filter's certificate on the client computers. When it comes to controlled networks, where the organization owns every computer on the network, the second method is the best way to filter the Internet connection, because they can simply put the filter's certificate on all the computers, and the end users will never know that their data was unencrypted and inspected by the filter. However, in schools that allow students to bring their own tablets and laptops and that, the first method is more ideal, because otherwise there will be a ton of errors and complaints about fake security certificates and that.

Desktop: CPU: AMD Phenom II 920 (4 x 2.8Ghz) RAM: 8GB DDR2 1066Mhz SSD: 73GB Intel SSD HDD: 2 x 500GB 7200RPM (RAID 1) GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 550 TI Display: 2 x HannSpree 22" 1650 x 1050, 1 x Wacom Cintiq 12wx 12" 1280 x 800 Laptop (Toshiba L675d-S7052): CPU: AMD Phenom II n640 (2 x 2.9Ghz) - throttled to 60% capacitiy on battery RAM: 4GB DDR3 1066Mhz HDD: 500GB 5400RPM GPU: Radeon HD 4250 Display: 17" 1600 x 900

I wouldn't say that a domain controller would be a good benchmark, as Active Directory is not resource intensive by any means, especially if it's a test environment. At work, I have a physical domain controller running with only 1GB of RAM (and it's the operations master and root DNS server for our organization), and that thing runs very smoothly. Besides, servers in general are far more optimized for resource utilization than desktop OS. Especially when it comes to the GUI - Windows servers typically have a lightweight, flat GUI with no themes or that, while Linux servers typically don't even have a GUI at all. In comparison, Desktop versions of Linux and Windows tend to have GUIs with plenty of effects, transparacy, animations, etc. Such tasks are normally handled by the GPU, but since VMs don't have access to the host's GPU, it's up to the vCPU to perform those renderings instead, which conversely is passed onto the host's CPU. Another issue is hard disks - desktops and laptops typically only have a single drive, but when they're running VMs, you have multiple operating systems trying to access data on that drive instead of just a single one. Again, that's another bottleneck that can harm performance. The last time I owned a Mac, which was about four years ago during the OS10.5 days, it did manage the drives in a way as to prevent fragmentation, and automatically fragmentation what did occur. However, like I said, he never mentioned if it was a specific OS or all of them, so you can't really speculate on what the potential cause is without that knowledge.

Are the operating systems actually installed on the computer, or is using a program like VMWare, VirtualBox, etc to run virtual machines? If he's running virtual machines, then of course it will be slow - most consumer grade computers are not really designed to handle virtualization that well. It takes up a lot of CPU power and memory to run virtual machines, because you're essentially running two operating systems at once. If you're doing virtualization, you need a lot of RAM and a powerful CPU. If he's got multiple OS's actually installed on the computer, and he's multibooting, it's possible that the hard disk is just heavily fragmented or experienced data corruption during the process. You didn't mention which OS is running slowly, or if it's all of them. At any rate, if they're installed on the actual hard disk (instead of just a virtual machine), the easiest way to remove them involves reformatting - be sure to back up your data first. Yeah.... No. Without Linux, the Internet would not be anything like it is. The overwhelming majority of web servers run Linux, as do a lot of the routers and switches that power the Internet. Even devices such as TVs, DVRs, cell phones, GPSs, MP3 players, etc all run Linux as well. It's great because it's so adaptable, it can do just about anything. You probably use Linux multiple times a day and don't even realize it. Also, when referring to Linux, "Free" doesn't mean price, but instead freedom. You're free to take Linux and modify it however you want, do whatever you want with it, and then redistribute it. There are a number of Linux distributions that do come with a price tag, such as RedHate Enterprise Linux and SuSE Enterprise. And really, saying stuff like "Mac is for art only" is a thing of the past - there's so many programs available for each of the three platforms that if you can find a program that does something on one, chances are you can easily find a similar program on the other two. Unless you're doing some very specific, specialized task, you can probably make do with any OS. Especially since most things are becoming web-based now - all three systems take you to the same Internet.

None. I graduated from college a couple of months ago Though in the near future (probably Spring or Summer), I'm planning on taking a few classes to get a Cisco Networking Certification, as having one of those would really help me get a better paying job.