Eric

If you want to consume information (books, photos, social networking, websites, documents, etc while in bed or on the couch, I find the tablet form factor is more comfortable than a laptop.   Some people attach keyboard covers to them and use them as laptops, but as someone who types about 90 wpm on a desktop keyboard, and 70 wpm on a good laptop keyboard with decent key travel (like a mac or a thinkpad), I find doing anything more than a quick message on a tablet/phone to be a horrible experience.   So, for me, a tablet isn't so great for creating content, but it's fine for reading/researching/learning.    Catherine, as to your worries about privacy: You're screwed.  Not just with tablets, but anything digital.  No doubt you're using Windows, and Microsoft has most likely added a backdoor.  I'm pretty sure I saw some headlines over the past week or two about Apple and the backdoors they've added to their devices.  I doubt the NSA has to work very hard at all to access whatever they want.   You don't sound interested in having a tablet/smartphone, but if you were, this is how I would go about it to maximize security/privacy: Get an Android device with a big developer following.  Any Nexus device, for example. Replace the pre-installed OS (Android) with CyanogenMod, which is still Android, but built from AOSP (Android Open Source Project).  The source code is available for all to scrutinize.  Cyanogenmod also adds additional features. Disable GPS and other Location services. Note that every time you install any app, you are told exactly what access to the system the app is requesting, whether it's your contacts list, location info, local storage, etc.  So pay attention to that and don't install apps that ask for more access than they need to do their task. Cyanogenmod has features that allow you to block app access to the system, so even if you installed an app that wants access to your contacts, you can choose revoke that permission.

When it comes to my day job, the next full-site redesign (within the next six months) I'll be doing just that.  But with freelance work, I don't have that kind of control.  You have to figure that a Business who is paying for a website wants to reach as many people with that investment as possible.    I can build a responsive mobile-friendly site that works in IE8, but bloating up the site with all of the extra stuff to make it work drives me nuts.

IE 11 is a fine browser.  IE 10 is decent too.   My only problem with IE is that there are various reasons that people tend to linger on old versions.  Sometimes it's because people just don't want to or know to update their software.  Sometimes it's because Microsoft will tie new versions of IE to new versions of Windows so that you can't upgrade it unless you upgrade your OS first.  Whatever the reason, the current situation is that there are more people using IE8 than IE11.    From your perspective, Jack, that doesn't matter.  You have control over what version of IE you have installed, and it works great.  From my perspective, I still have to include all kinds of hacks (bloated javascript) in my sites if I want them to render somewhat correctly in IE8 because IE8 doesn't support HTML 5, and that's only one large issue out of many.   At any rate, thanks for keeping your browser updated and not being one of those IE8 statistics I hate seeing in my logs.

KC, I turned the feature back on so that you wouldn't have to clean up duplicate posts.   Does it happen every time? I would assume that it only happens in whatever browser you're using and not in any other.   Cleaning cache/cookies might help, but that's just a stab in the dark.

Ahh, that's interesting.   KC, any changes that you know of that might have coincided with the start of the error message?  I'll enable the feature again to stop the double-posts, but we should try and figure out the cause.  

  It was set to 15 seconds before, and then I reduced it to 8.  I have no explanation for why it started, nothing has changed on the site.   The flood control feature has been disabled now, though.

I'm going to disable the feature, but I'm still really curious about why it's happening.  How long have you had the problem?   It's set to 8 seconds, so it obviously thinks 2 seconds have passed since some event to say that you're posting too quickly.

Guess I'm late to the party here.   KC: I've cut the limit in half, and I'd be curious to know if you still receive the message.  It may be that we don't need any limit at all.  The spam prevention question (what four digit number is associated with a federal income tax return?) seems to do a good enough job of keeping spammers out.  If you still have issues, KC, I'll remove it.   Jack: I know that 8mb is a pretty pitiful limit.  I may increase it when I do the big forum upgrades this year.  Image hosting isn't a bad idea, though.  I might suggest imgur.com as a good service that's easy to use, and isn't totally cluttered with ads (i think every page has a single ad on it).  In addition, it doesn't require an account to use the service.  If you do create an account, you gain the ability to manage your uploaded images.     Even if you don't create an account, imgur provides you with a unique image deletion URL when you upload an image.  You can save that link so that in the future if you want to delete the image without having an account, it's as simple as going to that website address and agreeing to delete the image.

I can't be the only person who goes crazy every time a player falls down holding his shin, screaming, feigning injury.  It's pathetic, and I wish they would toss players out for it.

As a fan of doodling and math, thanks for posting.  Phi is why my avatar is a nautilus shell.    Nature by Numbers:

  I understand the benefit of LinkedIn, I'm just universally antisocial.  I have received email notifications about requests from people who are members of this forum, and that's the only reason I mentioned it.  I feel a little guilty when I ignore them.

I have an account, just like I have a Facebook account. I never use them.   So, if anyone tries to connect with me through some social media thing and I don't respond, don't take it personally.  I haven't even friend-ed my wife.

There are compatibility issues with Acrobat Pro 8 on Windows 7 and Windows 8, especially 64bit versions. I believe Jack is correct, you may need to upgrade Acrobat. EDIT: Perhaps download the 30 day trial of the latest version to see how it works: https://www.acrobat.com/free-trial-download.html

I think this is as close to an announcement as there was: '?do=embed' frameborder='0' data-embedContent>> They were born June 22, 2011. Their names are Isaac and Claire. I was exhausted for at least 6 months, probably closer to 9 months, but now they pretty much keep each other entertained

We'll have flying cars before covering the US road system with solar panels would be possible. It would cost more money than what exists in the world just to cover the US road system in fancy clear glass. That's without taking into consideration any of the really expensive components like photovoltaics, circuitry, LEDs, and an insane network of high voltage transmission lines under every bit of highway in the US. Solar has a lot of promise, and it's being done smartly in a lot of places. This is the opposite of smart. I think my favorite part was where they talked about converting sunlight into electricity to power heating elements to melt snow. Wow.

"Cryptographic hash" is technically correct, but it's also nerd speak. "Encrypted" gets the point across, which is probably more important than technical accuracy when you're sending out that email to hundreds of thousands of users with different levels of technical knowledge. Same here. I got that email from eBay, and I'm still curious about how they're storing passwords. That's a bigger *if* than you might think. It's not uncommon for an application to do a simple MD5 cryptographic hash on a password and store the hash. If that's the case, it's possible to break a pretty good number of passwords using rainbow tables. The *correct* way to do this is to "salt" the hash before storing it... and now I'm hungry. If eBay had been doing it right, there shouldn't be anything to worry about, but it's usually best to assume that everyone is incompetent and act accordingly.

SSD breakthrough means 300% speed boost, 60% less power usage... even on old drives

Samsung SSDs have been superior in terms of speed and reliability since early on, but I'm sure other manufacturers are catching up if they haven't already. I'm probably biased toward Samsung drives because of the research I did when I put them into all of my computers. I think the most important note from that second link is that defragging an SSD is unnecessary, and the additional reads/writes can reduce the life of the SSD and degrade write performance. So in windows 7, it's good to turn it off for the SSD. Windows 8 has more of a general drive optimization tool that is smarter about handling data on SSDs than the standard defrag.

Idunno how I missed this a couple days ago. Short answer, I don't know. Not sure how Windows 7 backup/restore works. Or how Carbonite works. I haven't used either of them. I usually work with dumb backup systems that simply create a disk image of the entire drive. Other software that specializes in moving data/applications from one computer to another sounds like it'd a better fit, and without looking it up I couldn't tell you if Windows 7 backup/restore or Carbonite have that capability. I know that others in this forum have mentioned having good luck with software from EaseUs. I use Acronis True Image for backup, but like I said, that simply makes a complete backup of the entire drive. Transferring it to another computer is possible, but since hardware / drivers are totally different between the two machines, results may be unpredictable. Personally, if move to a new computer, or upgrade the motherboard in a computer, I prefer to do a clean installation of my operating system(s), manually transfer data, and then install software on the new computer as it's needed.

That's the only reason I mentioned it

Or you can use the Windows 8 Storage Spaces features

Nice, MAS. I'm especially surprised at that mSATA price.

Am I missing something here? This seems like a ridiculously good price on a Samsung 500GB SSD. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147249 Maybe prices are falling faster than I was aware of since I haven't been watching for the past 5 months. EDIT: Yeah, same price on amazon. I thought they were still up in the $400 range. http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Electronics-EVO-Series-2-5-Inch-MZ-7TE500BW/dp/B00E3W19MO

ATX must be installed and operate on the C drive. Sheesh. Well in that case, the large SSD isn't just worth it, but probably necessary regardless of cost.