Skype account management mess

Why is it so hard for the Skype folks to understand that a simple and consistent account management system is much better than a confusing, everchanging, "full of surprises" one?  Every time I log on to my Skype account (which I don't do very often, frankly) I find myself learning a new account management system.  Everything is not like it was the last time I logged on.  Everything's changed, reshuffled.  I only need to do a single simple thing: add some money to the family group account I manage.  And every time I wonder: where did they stick the group account this time around?  How did they call it this time around?  I consider myself lucky if I find what I want within the first ten minutes.  But sometimes I don't.  It's a mess.  A frustrating mess.

People, stop changing things!  Don't you understand that you might be losing customers because of this?  Keep it simple, stupid!

This is the university I graduated from

 

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Mac type 1 fonts in a web page

Lucida Grande

Lucida Grande Thick

Lucida Grande Bold

Lucida Grande size 10

Lucida Grande size 12

Lucida Grande size 14

PCLinuxOS 2007

I wanted to try this OS on my computer over the weekend.  So I downloaded and burned a CD and shoveled it into the CD drive hoping for a quick and easy install.

I was wrong.  The installation was anything but quick and easy.  For starters it couldn't mount the CD drive.  So I was required to specify the following boot options: all-generic-ide irqpoll.  It was a typical problem with all linux disttors about a year ago on the Intel P965 chipset that I use.  But recent linux distributions finally managed to work around this problem.  Except for PCLinuxOS as it turns out.

Anyway, even with those boot options all the PCLinuxOS livecd could do is boot into a command prompt.  It couldn't start the X server.  I logged in with the root/root combination and examined the Xorg.0.log file, where I didn't find anything suspicious, only an innocently looking "fatal server error: cannot run in the framebuffer mode" message which I can't decipher (why does it want to use the framebuffer?  who knows).

Ironically the PCLinuxOS livecd splash screen says: "radically simple."  Nice joke IMO.

Naturally, I couldn't spend any more time with this OS.  Time to move on and try something more worthwhile.  PCBSD maybe?  The only thing I can't understand is how this OS keeps the first position in the distrowatch.org list of OS'es.

How to speedup Vista shutdown

Set the following registry value:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control]
WaitToKillServiceTimeout = 1000

This will force all services to quit within 1 second (the default value is 20000 which means 20 seconds).  And if there is a service that can't do it, it will be killed, which is OK for a typical desktop system.

I also found a good article that describes this trick and a couple of more: http://www.mydigitallife.info/2006/10/31/fast-shutdown-faster-windows-2000-windows-xp-windows-2003-and-windows-vista/