barrytone

Cobol is still used for a lot of bank mainframes. You are right though... It is very old. Then again, so is C. I was talking to a woman who works on bank mainframes last year some time. She said a lot of the programs have copyright notices for 1982 in the comments :roll:

That's very true... Which is why I carry only one live CD, a couple of blank CDs, my laptop with ISOs, a couple of USB keys (only small ones unfortunately) and a few other bits and pieces like a patch cable and a null serial cable.

I was considering being awkward and asking for a 1280 x 768, but I'll make one myself :P

Why do you carry all that you can just buy a 1 or 2 GB flash drive and build your own customised Slax using MySLAX Creator and MySLAX Modulator. I can't speak for degoba, but I carry CDs rather than a flash drive because almost all the machines I work on won't boot from USB :)

After re-watching one of the episodes where a viewer asks if there is a way to make his computer's volume gradually increase to provide a gentler wakeup, I thought I'd have a go at finding my own way to do it with VBScript and a few other files. The first thing you need is the 2003 Resource kit from Microsoft. You can get it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...;displaylang=en And the second this, is NirCmd. NirCmd is a really handy little exe with a ton of options for controlling windows. It's very useful for giving scripts a little bit of extra power, and it's well worth having anyway. You can get it here: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/nircmd.html First things first, of course... Download and install the 2003 resource kit tools. You need this for a little program called "sleep". Basically, it does nothing but wait for a specified amount of time, and then terminates. Then download NirCmd. NirCmd comes as 3 files in a zip file. You need to put the nircmd.exe file somewhere in your PATH. I've put it in my windows folder, but you can put it wherever you would like, as long as it's in your PATH. If you don't: you will have to edit the VBScript accordingly. Next comes the VBScript. Basically, what it does is to set your volume to zero using NirCmd, start your chosen music player (WinAmp in my case) using your chosen playlist, and then proceeds to up the volume in increments until the desired volume is reached. The VBScript looks like this: Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell") 'Make a shell object to use MaxVol = 30000 'Set the volume to ramp to, a value between 0 and 65535 WaitTime = 10 'Set the delay between each step up in volume (in milliseconds) Increment = 100 'Set the amount the volume steps up by each time PlayerPath = """c:program filesWinAmpWinAmp.exe""" 'Set the full path to your music player PlaylistPath = """c:playlistsbeatles.m3u""" 'Set the full path to the playlist you want to use CurVol = 0 'Make sure the volume is at 0 to start with WshShell.Run "nircmd setsysvolume " & CurVol ,0,1 WshShell.Run PlayerPath & " " & PlaylistPath 'Start the music player with the playlist Do While CurVol < MaxVol 'Ramp up the volume using the previously set parameters WshShell.Run "nircmd setsysvolume " & CurVol ,0,1 WshShell.Run "sleep -m " & WaitTime ,0,1 CurVol = CurVol + Increment Loop 'And we're done! Save the above as a .vbs file in somewhere meaningful (c:alarmalarm.vbs perhaps), and that's pretty much it! You can play about with MaxVol, WaitTime and Increment to get the volume ramping to behave how you want. You can use the Windows 'at' command to schedule the script to run as an alarm in the morning, just as described in the Hak5 RSS alarm clock tutorial. Like so: at 07:00 /every:m,t,w,th,f c:alarmalarm.vbs Remember to change PlayerPath and PlaylistPath to suit your system. The triple quotes are needed because VBScript isn't best friends with filenames that include spaces :P One last thing... You may have to edit the line that executes your music player if you are using a player other than WinAmp. Not all players will let you pass a playlist file to them as an argument, but WinAmp is fine with it :) Have fun! And if you have any suggestions, or any problems, be sure to let me know.

Strange... I'm in the UK and got 250kb/sec the whole time. Only half my full speed, but not too bad all the same. Still, thanks!

You know I'm going to save that bbcode in a text file for future use :D I wonder if Darren could apply it as a word filter? ;)

For some reason, I found that bit hillarious I remember when that happened. It started about the time I was switching network cables about :P

I'm not sure about other stores, but when I used to work at Staples we just had an ancient looking quad tape deck that went through all 4 tapes. I only worked there for 6 months, but I was very sick of the whole 15 tapes we had by the time I left :roll:

Great if you've got the extra £120 :P I do like the look of the n770... But it is a little bit to pricey for me.

I couldn't agree more. They could have at least said it was overclocked to 2ghz or something like that. And maybe even have the CPU at least look like it's being sufficiently cooled for such an overclock. Having the fan spinning on the heatsink would have been a start too :roll: Altough, looking at some of their other videos: they're a bit loopy.

I saw a guy using one on the train the other day. I was trying to figure out what it was without staring too much. I didn't succeed... So thanks for the link ;) They look pretty cool. I might have to invest in one.

Damn that's a lot :shock: It's so nice to see people putting their time and money into entertaining others for free, though. /me donates

TADDAAAA! Kilts FTW

VERY! ;)

Right, this one's a little less mean than the last ;) If: barry = 944189 and tone = 362029 and hak = 13924 then 112117 = <What?> Your clue is: "ASCII 48 - 57 not included" Answers to me in a PM as to not spoil it for others :) And as before, I've checked everything as much as I can, and I'm really sorry if there is a mistake in it! Good luck!

Cool wallpaper :) For all those who just have to be able to see :P

Exactly :)

You mean using the php gtk? There is a nice little tutorial here: http://www.devx.com/opensource/Article/21235/0/page/1 The files aren't actually stand-alone, they are still interperated by php, but the gtk allows the files to be run without a web server.

That would ROCK "All those who are omnidexrous, raise my hand" Just using both of my own hands equally well would be cool enough for me :P

Thank you :) Man... I completely forgot I posted that :shock:

I've played guitar for about 4 years now :) I dabble in any instrument I can get my hands on... At least I try to :P

Smart bombs are smart... But not THAT smart ;)

Not even twice it's half length? ;)

So basically, you're saying use a base 3 numerical system, instead of base 2? It's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure it would be very practical. One reason digital communication can be done at very high frequencies (and is very useful) is that it only has two states: on and off. Because of this: there isn't really much chance of error, as the bits are unambiguous. A problem with using 3 bits is that the electrical signals for transmitting digital data are all based on tolerances. For example: for CMOS based logic, (I can't remember the values for TTL off the top of my head :P ) a '0' is any voltage falling below one third of the supply voltage (Vdd), and a '1' is any voltage above two thirds of the supply voltage. The reason for this is that it would be very hard, if not impossible to use exact voltages. By introducing a third state, the voltage to signify the said state would have to fall between one third and two thirds of the supply voltage. For the amount of benefit you would gain from using a base 3 numerical system, the circuitry required would be way too complex, potentially slow, and more prone to errors. If you think about it: if you just want to keep adding bits, you may as well be using an analouge signal ;) It's an interesting idea, but I think you would be sacrificing speed and simplicity for storage space.