Now, this would be the perfect time for a swear word.

Kaylee ,'Jaynestown'


Buffistechnology 3: "Press Some Buttons, See What Happens."

Got a question about technology? Ask it here. Discussion of hardware, software, TiVos, multi-region DVDs, Windows, Macs, LINUX, hand-helds, iPods, anything tech related. Better than any helpdesk!


Typo Boy - Dec 09, 2009 9:18:18 pm PST #11913 of 25501
Calli: My people have a saying. A man who trusts can never be betrayed, only mistaken.Avon: Life expectancy among your people must be extremely short.

Someone was telling me that if I'm not doing memory heavy stuff, 2 Gig won't make a lot of difference over 1 Gig. True? False? I do mainly browsing (firefox), word processing, email (thunderbird plus gmail for webmail). Will an upgrade from 1 Gig to 2 Gig not make much difference?


Tom Scola - Dec 10, 2009 1:28:15 am PST #11914 of 25501
Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.

With memory prices being what they are these days, it doesn't make much sense NOT to upgrade.


Gudanov - Dec 10, 2009 3:08:12 am PST #11915 of 25501
Coding and Sleeping

You should just open up Task Manager, switch to the Performance tab, and there's a meter for how much memory your processes are using. If it's near 100%, then more memory won't hurt. That doesn't mean you'll see a big performance difference if you add memory, some programs will allocate more than they need if they see the available memory, but it's a good quick and dirty test.

Memory prices have gone up recently (a gig still isn't real expensive), and if it's not DDR3 memory they aren't real likely to come down again since the DDR2 and DDR memory supply will shrink. Not that'll probably get real expensive.


Dana - Dec 10, 2009 8:40:04 am PST #11916 of 25501
I'm terrifically busy with my ennui.

When I have a link to an image, and the file name is followed by a colon and a number, is that somehow specifying the size of the image? And can someone tell me what search terms I should use to find information about this?

For example:

(a class="thickbox" href="/blah/blah/blah.jpg:900w")


§ ita § - Dec 10, 2009 8:58:40 am PST #11917 of 25501
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

The only thing that occurs to me is that the blah URL is redirecting to a script which takes the 900w as a parameter, as well as blah.jpg. My provocateuse sites have what look like paths but are really script parameters: [link] is passing jonathan_rhys_meyers and 94 to the script named show. There aren't any subdirectories off the root.


tommyrot - Dec 10, 2009 9:24:35 am PST #11918 of 25501
Sir, it's not an offence to let your cat eat your bacon. Okay? And we don't arrest cats, I'm very sorry.

Doesn't the colon with the 900 mean use port 900 instead of 80? Of course that wouldn't explain the 'w'....


§ ita § - Dec 10, 2009 9:31:10 am PST #11919 of 25501
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

The inclusion of an alphabetical character made me think parameter, but now I'm wondering how a browser parses that.


Dana - Dec 10, 2009 9:51:32 am PST #11920 of 25501
I'm terrifically busy with my ennui.

Okay, I'm going to dub this "beyond my pay grade" and not spend and more time trying to figure it out. The developers can explain it to me if they decide they need to. Thanks.


Typo Boy - Dec 10, 2009 10:26:57 pm PST #11921 of 25501
Calli: My people have a saying. A man who trusts can never be betrayed, only mistaken.Avon: Life expectancy among your people must be extremely short.

This is a laptop using DDR1 memory. Not that cheap to upgrade. Downloaded smart defrag and CCleaner and was shocked by how much they improved performance over the regclean and defrag that comes with XP.


tommyrot - Dec 11, 2009 6:30:36 am PST #11922 of 25501
Sir, it's not an offence to let your cat eat your bacon. Okay? And we don't arrest cats, I'm very sorry.

This just gave me a geekgasm: Keystick keyboard folds up like a Japanese fan

We could use a good portable keyboard, and designers Yoonsang Kim & Eunsung Park might have a solution with Keystick. It's a full-size keyboard in its unfurled form, but then it collapses like an accordion into a nice compact package when it's time to hit the road. If this were small enough, it might be even better than that excellent Microsoft Bluetooth Mobile Keyboard we reviewed.