Lost!

I recently purchased one of these bad boys and let me tell you, the quick and dirty: If you’re thinking about buying it - Buy It.

The default configuration for this computer comes crammed with a full assortment of features. I’m not in the mood to write them all or stretch this post out to be 2 feet long, so check it out at NewEgg if you haven’t already.

The CPU on this plays HalfLife, Age of Empires III and a whole host of other games with no problems. That also gets into the dedicated graphics card - no problems whatsoever out of the box - all worked. I was a little fightened of the glossy screen at first because when I played with it at the store, I thought “hey, I can shave with my reflection in this”, but you get use to it and you end up liking it more than a standard LCD. It also has the ability to hook 2 additional monitors up to it (1 x VGA, 1 x DVI, 1 x S-Video TV-out) which means Vista will allow you 3 monitors total.

There are 3 USB ports (1 Left, 1 Right and 1 Rear Left) allowing you to connect all sorts of goodies. I’m even using a Hauppauge USB based TV converter to watch TV. Granted, Vista’s Media Center can’t see the damn card, but for now, I’m not fighting it.

For how much it can handle, I typcially run VMWare, Visual Studio, Firefox with tens of tabs, music playing at all times and usually something downloading in the background (Today it’s Windows Server 2003 R2 and SQL 2005 Ent).

There are 2 annoying things:
1: The system cooling fan that kicks in when things get hot runs in pulses - 1 second on then off, wait a few seconds and repeat. This usually only happens when you have the power options turned all the way up.

2: The front speaker LEDs cannot be turned off. I’m seriously thinking about cracking the case open and disabling them.

Granted, there are no pretty screenshots, no pictures, no graphs - there are already others that have all that - this is mainly my opinion and by god, this was a surprising little computer for what it was. I was pricing an IBM worth 2 of these and I’m thinking of buying one for my wife as well…

6 months of hell and the thief gets probation - that was the outcome of a 45 minute foot chase after a victim identified the thief that was in the bank video.

Check the story out here.

While that story is interesting, the problem is the sentence the thief got. The thief was on probation when the initial theft took place, she was on probation when she was apprehended and she only received 40 some odd days in jail and got….more probation.

If thieves only get a slap on the wrist after putting someone through 6 months of hell and costing the victim around $30k, whats to stop them from doing this all over again to the next person? Sometimes I start to lose faith in the system - this is one of those times.

So I’ve crawled out from under my rock and figured out that there is life beyond the computer. Imagine if you walked up along the sidewalk and found this:

Let me tell you, I’d tip the guy $100 on the spot if I saw something neat like this in person. He has a whole stash of pictures on his website as well.

I’m not one to follow this “person” (I say that so I don’t get some defamation of character lawsuit against me - long story very short and without cursing: I don’t like them…) but this REALLY irked me.

Paris was released from jail after 3 days. This is on top of the preferential treatment she got to begin with and kept getting before being sent to jail.

Your average idiot would have gone to jail the first time, the second time, the third…wait, CA… Strike 3.

Anyone getting a traffic violation and possible jail time from such violation in CA should be using her case as a foundation for their sentence.

I call this issue an extreme amount of preferential treatment.

Bullshit.

The story goes like this:

MSFT gave a Dev an MVP for a program
They threatened him about said program when they figured out it worked with VS Express
Arguments ensued over licensing (MSFT: Violated VS Exp TOS/ Dev: No I didn’t)
They took away said MVP blaming Dev’s lack of work in the community
Program was changed with a registry entry hack allowing it to activate
MSFT Happy
MVP Award Email sent out
Program updated to allow said “hack”
MSFT Pissed off (again)
MVP Recalled
Insert more threats
Rinse and repeat

Read On