Preying on the Handicapped and Giving Geeks a Bad Name

When you’ve practically lived online day-in, day-out for the past decade or so you tend to develop a thick skin to the malevolent things that tend to happen every once in a while. But there are some things that you’d never expect, not once in a million years; they strike a nerve and they really do hurt.

This morning I came across such an event that penetrated that virtual suite of armor when I read this Wired.com article about a recent script-kiddy attack on a web forum run by The Epilepsy Foundation – the news is so bad it makes one’s blood boil. A group of crackers launched a bone-chillingly cold-blooded and thoughtless attack on the members of the epilepsy forum. They weren’t looking for money, private info, fame, or acknowledgement — they were merely searching for a way to cause as much physical and mental harm as possible.

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How-To: Changing the Windows Vista Startup Sound

Of the many controversies surrounding Windows Vista, probably the most infamous (and pathetic) issues brought to the table is the Windows Vista Startup sound – and how to get rid of it. If  you were anywhere but under a rock during the beta, it’s impossible to have missed the posts going back and forth by haters and supporters of Windows Vista’s new startup sound – which, like almost everything else in Windows Vista, doesn’t even always work.

This sound isn’t the one you get on startup (which is still there, just like in previous versions of Windows), but rather the one that plays right when Windows finishes loading – and you can’t do a thing about it. In our opinion, it’s a quite nice sound, but unfortunately you don’t get to hear it (most of the time) if you have a analog/digital sound card with analog being the default. At any rate, for those of you that don’t like it, chin up: it can be changed!

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