3/29    A friend wants a PC (no mac). She doesn't want Dell. Is there a
        good place that can custom build for you (SSD, large RAM, cheap video
        card--no game)?
        \_ As a side note: back in my Cal days more than two decades ago when
           having a 387SX made me the only person with floating-point hardware,
           most machines were custom built.
	...

1/19    Transcript between the Italian cruise ship captain and the Port
        Authority
        http://www.csua.org/u/v9i (abcnews.go.com)
        This captain is amazing.
	...

11/8    ObM$Sucks
        http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms11-083
        \_ How is this different from the hundreds of other M$ security
           vulnerabilities that people have been finding?
           \_ "The vulnerability could allow remote code execution if an
               attacker sends a continuous flow of specially crafted UDP
	...

11/4    Holy cow, I got a warning from my ISP that they were notified
        by BSA/baytsp.com that I was copying music/video/software.
        Do they do port scan or something? That's a first for me.
        \_ They hang out on P2P networks and track IP addresses.  -tom
           \_ I believe they are paid by content providers to perform this
              monitoring service, so you should only run this risk with content
	...

10/1    I am thinking of installing firefox on soda under my home directory.
        Will this make me a hozer?
        \_ Possibly. I wonder if we should have another VM for that...btw,
           I remember someone saying they're glad we're not on FreeBSD
           anymore, but last I checked, a bunch of our stuff is on FreeBSD,
           but our login server is not.
	...

9/9     What should outbound mail server be when reading mail from soda
        with IMAP? Is there a FAQ?
        \_ It's <DEAD>mail.csua.berkeley.edu<DEAD> (same as for incoming mail).
           \_ "The message could not be sent because connecting to SMTP
               server <DEAD>mail.csua.berkeley.edu<DEAD> failed. The server may
               be unavailable or is refusing SMTP connections."
	...

7/27    I have an actual technical question here. My MySQL DBA tells me
        that I can't expect a MySQL port to be able to run effectively
        on more than a two CPU box, he says that the extra CPUs will
        sit there unused. Is this true? I have a bunch of new quad core
        servers that I would like to use as Database machines. -ausman
   \_ It's not that simple.  If you stress test your new fancy multi core
	...

7/2     Is imaps working?  What are the hostnames of the "incoming and
        outgoing mail servers" for CSUA email, and what kind of options
        should one set?
        I also noticed that we seem
        \_ Setup yer .forward or .procmailrc for now. I'm at a loss, too.
        \_ <DEAD>mail.csua.berkeley.edu<DEAD>. Using SSH (on default port 993) like before.
	...

7/2     ssh: connect to host 128.32.112.233 port 22: No route to host
	...

5/31    History of winners and losers by *popularity*:
        VHS > Beta Max
        USB2 > Firewire
        x86 > PowerPC > Everything Else > DEC Alpha > Itanium
        BlueRay > HDDvd
        \_ It's too early to tell RE: "Blue"Ray. They may both turn out to be
	...

8/4     I went to Fry's for the first time in ages and was surprised to
        see a 1T Seagate HD on sale. I'm still using my 250G and it's
        only 60% full. What the heck do people put on their HD these
        days, porn? I can't imagine why anyone would want to buy a
        1T drive for personal use.
        \_ HDTV.
	...

5/17    My new 750G Seagate HD shows only 698G available. WHAT THE FUCK??
        \_ 750G = 750*10^9 bytes.  Your OS is probably measuring in 2^30 bytes.
           See GiB vs GB
        \_ Also, disk drive manufacturers advertise "raw" storage, while
           your O/S measures usable storage. You lose quite a bit to
           disk label information, metadata and other various things.
	...

11/15   [unrelated to politics] My debian machine at home (I'm learning and
        tinkering) seems to spin the HD down occasionally.  I'd like to never
        spin down the HD (or at least control which hours it can).  Any
        pointers to doing this?
        \_ # apt-get install hdparm
           # hdparm -S 0 /dev/hda
	...

5/11    If you noticed that your laptop HD never rests because it's doing
        something, and you've already killed all auxilary processes and made
        drives not "Fast Indexable", it's the explorer that's funky. Here
        is one solution. Kill explorer and then run it again. You can use
        a batch file script:
        taskkill -im explorer.exe /f
	...

5/11    I'd like to be able to use my mp3 player as a rescue os disk as well.
        It shows up as USB HD on most OS.  The mp3 player itself works fine
        as long as I store all of the music on the first vfat partition.  I'd
        like to be able to either install linux onto the HD or store various
        ISO images on the HD and have it boot from it, with menu, so I can
        can select different images.  Anyone know of such method?
	...

5/5     I have a Hitachi/IBM Travelstar 80G HD that occasionally makes loud
        clicking noise unrelated to head seek. Today while moving a 150M file
        I started hearing that clicking noise again, and 1 min later my
        computer freezes. I rebooted, tried copying other files and it's fine
        and went back to the same file, and it freezes again. Help?
        \_ Download the diagnostic from the http://hgst.com web site.
	...

4/27    I am seeking data backup suggestion for my wife's computer. We are
        talking about 4G and we have about $400 to play with. A flash drive?
        A standalone RAID box? A Zipdrive. What says the mighty motd?
         -- ulysses
        \_ If it's just 4G, then back it up to DVD. Plextor/TY media. -chiry
           \_ We have found CDs and DVDs to be an unreliable means for
	...

4/10    My iPod prefetches a few songs from the HD, buffers them into memory,
        and then shuts down the HD to save power. If possible, how do I do the
        same thing on my iTunes where I pre-declare non OS swapped mem so that
        I can save power on my notebook?  -ok thx
        \_ <crickets chirping>
        \_ This might work for you on OS X:
	...

4/8     To save power I set my laptop to shut down HD after 1 min of
        inactivity. However, my laptop always does something to the HD
        and I know this because it keeps clicking and clicking. I've turned
        off Norton Realtime Anti-Virus thing, Firefox/IE, MS Word, and
        pretty much everything I can think of, but it just never turns off.
        What could be causing this? BTW I have 1.5G of RAM and XP and
	...

3/23    I'm thinking about getting this laptop but the 60GB to 80GB upgrade
        adds about $150, and the 256MB->512MB RAM adds another $150. Is there
        any reason why I should do this, when I could potentially just buy a
        100GB drive for $230, and likewise something similar with RAM?
        \_ Tell us which notebook you want and maybe we can give advice.
           E.g., the ThinkPad T42 has only one accessible memory slot,
	...

3/20    Poll for people who have only 1 HD (laptop for example). How did YOU
        partition your HD and why? I'm thinking of putting all the games and
        media data in one partition and leave the OS and VMWare files in
        another partition. The rationale is that when I play games or do media
        stuff I don't work, and when I work (on VMWare) I don't play games and
        play media files. However, this has the disadvantage of parition
	...