I bought a Kill-A-Watt recently and went crazy measuring everything around my house from CFLs, to fans. I found out that a small desk-fan running at its low setting consumes roughly 25W. That's 25W*0.001kW*24hours*7days*4.5weeks*0.07$/kwH==0.1323$/month to run all day all month. That's pretty cheap when compared to…

Of course, emulation isn't an illegal route (or something)? I'm not even sure how emulation squares away if you actually own the cart for the game in question. Meh, America. Land of the free.

I just wanted to chime in on the great service provided by ING. I've been a customer of theirs for seven months now and totally adore their services. My wife and I recently signed up for their Electric Orange account and love it. The nice interest rate combined with the 1% cash back on most purchases is a great…

Now if only they'd push some of these UI updates to Google Reader.

I still use Launchy in Vista. I find that its faster and returns more predictable results than Vista's built-in searching. Plus, it's BIG and in FRONT of me when I'm typing on it for less effort and higher speed.

Oh, on topic... Dell's decision won't affect me at all. They lost our corporation as a customer with their Vista Express Upgrade scam. We just got our Express Upgrade kits two weeks-or-so ago. They never had me as an individual, building your own is almost 40% cheaper than buying it through Dell and it doesn't…

I think that a lot of these comments are based on social perceptions or outdated verifications. Ubuntu's latest desktop offerings are smooth as silk. Once the machine's up and running (which is frequently as simple as 'click -> install') I haven't witnessed any issues whatsoever.

Agreed with Rick. I was at a friend's house and all there was to watch was an ocean view and some people running around with a ball.

Tendo; Losing those hard earned RPG characters is a bitch. You've reminded me that I need to backup my saves, too.

chrishad95; That is a good point. Sometimes I like to brandy about the term "Internet Age" to represent the understanding that one has of the Internet (a raw representation of humanity as a whole) and modern marketing. With a low Internet Age, you assume the assumption made by most Joe Sixpacks - It's written, so it…

Naomi; Before the days of parental controls? You mean back when we were all browsing our ASCII porn? :) "Privacy wasn't something my parents afforded us kids.", I wonder if this mindset is what allows free communications-tapping laws to be allowed into the government. This thread is an interesting look into the…

consumer_q; A thirteen year old is relatively old. They've existed in a society hellbent on selling them things and tricking them into doing what they don't want to do (Eat your broccoli, it's delivered via an airplane!) for THIRTEEN YEARS. They've been saturated with a marketing environment unlike any other…

Neat. I wish that the site wasn't dead.

I think that a lot of parents block way too much of a child's online activities. If your child is reasonably educated, they should be able to tell "safe" things from "not-safe" things.

Also, I've noticed that a fairly large number of ISPs hate BitTorrent and will rate-limit customers employing p2p technology. I've personally observed Charter applying entire-bandwidth limitations while p2p is active. An effective DOS attack could be executed by listing a Charter subscriber as a node in an active…

Oh, the file copying... I haven't had this issue at all. Interesting, as I'm usually the first to get shitty hard-to-reproduce issues. Personally, I thought that Explorer has been revamped in a wonderful fashion with great new enhancements such as (finally) the ability to customize the sidebar.

I'm maintaining a dual-boot solution just for games. Vista is a worthless O/S for games so I keep my XP partition around just for them. It keeps my PC nice and speedy for gaming, and soooooo many games don't work in Vista at all that it's not even funny (BF2 is highly degraded, Quake, CC2, CC and Sin in recent…

Additionally, if your TV has programmed channels, time, favorites and the like - you're going to start losing them in short order. That battery backup won't last forever.

I spy a Caturday picture!

Gina; Well... if MS did decide to go the "embed it in the filesystem" route - they could have also added an "export/import metadata" function for backup routines. They could have gone a little further and locked out 'extended tagging', unless the user manually said "Yes, I know what I'm doing and can backup my…