Morgenstern on Vista Flash Technologies

eWeek's David Morgenstern is skeptical of Microsoft's ReadyBoost and ReadyDrive technologies. These are Vista capabilities that allow flash memory to increase apparent RAM and speed boot times respectively. As far as ReadyBoost goes, I agree: the idea of depending on a USB dongle to increase RAM seems very hinky to …

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Free Satellite TV

I was reading an article about Libya and it mentioned, as is common in stories from developing nations, the many satellite dishes you see. This is something I can personally vouch for, having seen many satellite dishes in places like Papua New Guinea and Irian Jaya. What I don't get …

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Google Minesweeper Poised To Dethrone XBox360

Well done. via \<a href="http://www.knowing.net/ct.ashx?id=2b24309b-4cf6-414b-b27e-c5a346a93128&url=http%3a%2f%2fswigartconsulting.blogs.com%2ftech_blender%2f"" target=_blank rel="noopener noreferrer">Scott Swigart

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Wes Moise on Text in GDI+

Wesner Moise rants about the problems in GDI+. It's a good read and contains a link to a crucial KnowledgeBase article.You wouldn't think that one would fall back to GDI as an example of a "good" text-layout API, but at least it's lightweight. WPF has a vastly improved API …

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Can't We All Just Interoperate?

So I'm trying to write a program to manipulate the Tablet PC Input Panel from within a Java application. So I have to use JNI to interop with a native .DLL written in C++. My DLL uses Win32 to find the handles to the Java application edit windows and then …

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Amazon Reader: Not Recommended

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I just bought David Goldberg's "The Design of Innovation," (his book "Genetic Algorithms in Search Optimization and Machine Learning," is an exemplary piece of technical writing). On checkout from Amazon …

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.NET Framework 3.0: Indigo issues

The first two versions of Enterprise JavaBeans had a crucial problem: "enterprise" objects had a life-cycle different than that of "plain old Java objects." Types were loaded differently, instantiated differently, and the rules for them going away were different. The justification boils down to "things are different over the network …

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Target .NET 1.x from Visual Studio 2005

"MSBee" is a free MS Build task that allows you to target earlier versions of the .NET Framework from within Visual Studio 2005. Out of the box, VS2005 will only allow you to compile for .NET 2.0.

This is a very helpful utility: just a few months ago I …

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MSDN Wiki - Great Idea

MSDN has created a Wiki. This is a great idea. Just look at P/Invoke.NET to get a sense of how helpful a Wiki can be for user documentation. via \<a href="http://www.knowing.net/ct.ashx?id=3e526214-11b1-482a-911d-12f3aa8b713d&url=http%3a%2f%2ffeeds.feedburner.com%2fAContinuousLearnersWeblog%3fm …

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Zalman Ultra Quiet CPU Cooler: Not So Much

I bought a couple Zalman Ultra-Quiet CPU Coolers for my still-unfinished dual-processor system, discovered that I couldn't use them due to space issues with my MSI dual-core motherboard. So I put one on my old system. It's quieter than the stock Intel Pentium fan, but so is a coqui frog …

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