1. Time slows down as you approach the speed of light. Velocity is a derivation of time (speed = distance / time). This can make it difficult to measure, and the time dilation needs to be accounted for.
2. When measuring things close to the speed of light, the equipment itself has the same limitations. It takes time for a signal to get from one part of the equipment to another.
3. The Earth itself is moving in the solar system, the solar system is moving in the galaxy, and the galaxy is moving in the universe. The speed of light is an absolute limit, but the measurement of something moving between two points on Earth is a relative measurement. If something was fixed in an absolute position, it would be moving very quickly relative to the Earth.
4. The speed of light limitation applies to objects with mass. The mass of neutrinos is believed to be non-zero, but is not yet completely known, and objects with energy essentially have more mass, so the mass of it changes as it accelerates. It’s hard to do maths when you don’t have all of the starting variables.

There’s nothing new in Windows 8 that warrants replacing Windows 7 so soon but there’s enough changed on the surface to piss people off. People don’t like having changes forced upon them (see also: Facebook). The only people that will be getting Windows 8 will be people who got it pre-installed and had no choice, and I don’t see any businesses upgrading to Windows 8 whatsoever.

Decompiler
Converts object code to a higher level language, such as C.

Disassembler
Converts object code to assembly.

Stupid
Charging thousands of dollars for software whose target audience primarily use it to crack software rather than paying for it.

The “SQL” pronunciation is actually defined in the original 1986 specification for SQL and confirmed by common DBMS such as MySQL.

Most of the answers seem to revolve around running Visual Studio as a normal user rather than an administrator, but I was already doing that.

Eventually, a reply to this bug provided an answer.

When I checked the key, I saw

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\DDECache\VisualStudio.10.0\system]
"ProcessName"="devenv.exe"
"WindowName"="Visual Studio Application Management Window"
"WindowClassName"="VisualStudioAppManagement"

Deleting the “system” key then opening a file again worked and replaced the key with working values

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\DDECache\VisualStudio.10.0\system]
"ProcessName"="devenv.exe"
"WindowName"="DDEHandler"
"WindowClassName"="DDEHandler"

When it has the correct values (refresh to make sure that it does) remove “set” permissions from your own user so that it can’t replace them with the bad values, to make the change permanent.

In particular, it is common for people to set a “cd /d path” in their AutoRun key in the registry but this breaks the power toy and Windows 7′s built in hold shift and right click on a directory to open a command prompt there. This can be worked around by adding a /d to the shell extension in the registry.

What doesn’t seem to be mentioned anywhere though is that this AutoRun key also gets run when you double click on a batch file. That means a batch file which assumes its own current directory (a reasonable assumption – more reasonable than using absolute paths) may not be able to find files in the same directory as it.

What I really wanted to do was move my home directory to my D: drive but the command prompt was still opening on the C:

Most people also seem to only change the default directory of their command prompt to match a non-default home directory.

The first mistake I made was to type “cmd” into the start menu and right click on it to pin it there. This calls it “Windows Command Processor” and starts in C:\Windows\System32 (because that’s where cmd.exe lives). Instead, go through the start menu programs list and find “Command Prompt” under “Accessories” and pin that. It will correctly default to your home directory, because the “start in” is set to %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%. Note that you could just change this shortcut’s arguments (cmd /k cd “PATH”) or start in but it will only change it for that one shortcut.

Anyway, once you are using “Command Prompt”, set your home directory. I’m using Windows 7 Pro, so I can go to Computer Management and just set the directory for my user in the GUI under “Users and Groups”. This is no longer available in home versions of Windows (they shouldn’t have removed it) but you may still be able to set your home directory by using the command

net user USERNAME /homedir:PATH

where “USERNAME” is your user name and “PATH” is the directory you want to set. You can check this with the command net user.

When I type “cmd” into the run dialogue, it still opens on C: but at least batch files work now. Further suggestions are welcome.

This is a huge problem. Corporate users need this to log in to certain websites, and some places like hotels may use it with a captive portal to allow you to access their wifi.

The solution is to install the fennec browser from Mozilla. This is still in early development, but it seems to work OK so far and it actually lets you log in to authenticated websites.

NTLM authentication on fennec

(serac.universal.edu.au/blog)

WordPress’ description of pingbacks suggests that they are just remote comments, but as the other site just copied the content verbatim with no additional comments, and even copied site-wide preferences such as the “tagline”, this doesn’t seem right.

So I installed GRUB manually with grub-install /dev/sdb. Now I needed to restore the original Windows 7 MBR so that it didn’t require GRUB to boot it.

The Windows 7 “startup repair” from the installation disc detected the OS but didn’t find any boot problems with it, so I went to the command prompt on the disc.

There are several commands for this. A lot of web pages suggest using “bootsect”. However, this did not fix anything. The fact that it was for use on individual partitions was probably a clue on that. Some web pages even used “bootcfg” which is for older Windows installs such as XP (it affects your boot.ini), but is still included on the Windows 7 disc to add to the confusion.

The command that did work was:

bootrec /fixmbr

Afterwards, for good measure, I also ran:

bootrec /fixboot