Eric

Holy smokes, that feature is magical. I allowed Chrome to show notifications for the site, and I got an immediate browser popup (bottom-right corner) when you mentioned my name. I'm not sure what the browser support is for notifications like that, though. I'd be curios to know if Firefox and IE users got a prompt for whether to Allow or Block notifications from the site.

Yes, that red line is gone now. When editing your post, quotes can be reliably clicked/dragged to move them around. When you hover over a quote, you'll see a little 4-arrow handle appear in the top-left corner of the quote. The editor has changed quite a bit under the hood; it feels less flaky, and is much faster to load. There used to be a bit of lag when adding a reply while waiting for the editor to load, and now it should be almost instantaneous. The difference is even more noticeable on mobile devices. I really like being able to highlight some text in a post, and quote it directly from there. Member mentions have been added... just type @ and follow with a few characters of a member name. Example: Thank you @JohnH for another donation

Alright, the latest forum update is finished, and you'll probably notice the change in the navigation at the top. If you're looking for unread topics and things like that, check out the Activity tab. All of that has been consolidated into a more powerful "Activity Streams" feature. There have been some changes to the editor too. Quoting selected text is a big one. There are a pile of other changes, so post here to me know if you have any questions. If you notice any weirdness immediately after the upgrade (specifically, the editor buttons have the wrong icons), make sure to clear your browser cache. In Chrome click the "Hamburger" icon at the top-right choose Settings click History on the left side click Clear browsing data... button uncheck everything but Cached images and files click Clear browsing data button In other browsers

I changed the clocks and stayed up an extra hour. My kids got up at their usual time. Extra hour of sleep, my ass.

I'm going to guess that the only reliable way to run most tax software on Linux/Mac is with a virtual machine. There's no getting away from Windows for a lot of niche software, unfortunately. Photoshop is the one application that keeps me using Windows on my desktop (my only remaining Windows computer)

I think this is supposed to be cute, but it gave me the creeps.

Gotta find the silver lining: Melanoma risk rises 75% when tanning beds are used before the age of 30.

What, exactly, is a tanning bed model? Is it like a fashion model, only they... appear in ads for tanning beds? Is it some form of online adult entertainment geared toward tanning bed enthusiasts? I'm sorry, it just doesn't compute, and if I don't ask I'll have an aneurysm thinking about it.

There must be some trick to linking to facebook videos, but I don't know what it is. Here's a video Sam Adams did for April Fools day last year. They called it HeliYUM.

Mine is coming up on 6 years old and still holding its own. Also liquid cooled, and the only upgrade I've done in that time is adding SSD drives. I built mine myself, but it's probably not as pretty as something from Digital Storm. Those people are like craftsmen.

Did you say 7 2TB drives? 14TB? Holy smokes, that must be some computer case. That's a good question. First thing to consider is that at this time, as far as I know, there's no doing a true fresh install with the free upgrade to Windows 10. That could change in the future, but all of the information I've seen says it's unknown whether Microsoft will offer an ISO (disc image) download for Windows 10 to people upgrading from Windows 7 or 8. The closest you can get is doing a "keep nothing" upgrade, which still isn't the same as formatting a partition/drive and doing a fresh install from a disc. Personally, I've always preferred to start fresh with a new installation of Windows instead of upgrading. It's hard to put into words, but I feel like upgrades are never as "clean" as formatting the partition and installing fresh. That's what I did when I went from 95 to 98. And from 98 to 2000. And from 2000 to XP. And from XP to 7. And from 7 to 8. But when 8.1 came out, I trusted the upgrade, which was flawless and felt no different than doing any other Windows Updates. Will I try the upgrade again going from 8.1 to 10? I'm not sure. On one hand, I'm confident that it'll go just fine, but on the other there's my nerd OCD nagging me to do a fresh install. In my case, I have very little software that I need for my work, so reinstalling it is a little bit time consuming, but not nearly as awful as doing multiple years of tax software and accounting software, and restoring data backups, and all that jazz. All of my data is just text and images on a network drive and all I need to do is install Adobe Creative Suite, my FTP client, a few web browsers, and my text editor, and I'm ready to go. If I were in your shoes, I'd probably prepare for a fresh install, but try the clone and upgrade path first, because (and I'm making an assumption) that "adding back all of my programs" step is going to be a long and tedious chore.

And it makes sense that they would want some continuity between different devices using their windows OS given the move toward tablets and smart phones among the general public. My complaint was that the execution was poor in Windows 8. I never minded the full-screen start menu, although not having a visible button to activate it in 8.0 was a mistake they shouldn't have had to correct in 8.1. I use my windows key on my keyboard, but the Start Button is a convention that has been ingrained in people since Windows 95. Leaving it out of 8.0 was dumb. What did bother me was that running Modern UI apps transported you to Metro-land, and left you feeling kind of stranded once you got there. Microsoft did a bad job of integrating the Modern UI stuff with everything else. And by default, some metro apps were associated with common tasks like picture viewing... so you're sitting at your familiar desktop, you attempt to open a JPG file, and you're booted to a full-screen environment tailored for tablet use. Try to listen to music, and you're sent to XBOX Music or whatever it's called, instead of Windows Media Player. Of course you can change the default applications back to their Windows 7 defaults, but it's something you have to frig with... and something a novice user might not understand. Anyway, once you correct those things, it's fine. It's not like Vista where driver compatibility was terrible and performance was just as bad. The core of the OS is fast, stable, and solid. Windows 10 allowing you to run Modern UI apps in a window on the desktop is a significant step in the right direction.

I realize you don't have to use it, and I don't either. My feeling is that 8 is perfectly usable because you can avoid the Metro/Modern UI, but "It's avoidable" isn't exactly high praise. They didn't give enough (any?) thought to integration of the Modern UI in Windows 8--to me it feels "bolted on".

It's not an unsafe choice as far as driver and software compatibility goes. Like I said, under the hood, the guts are all essentially the same as Vista, with gradual refinement and optimization with 7, 8, 8.1, and now 10. As the above video states, they've made it faster and more lean to bring down the hardware requirements. The interface is a different story. 8 brought huge sweeping changes, with gradual refinement in 8.1 and 10. These changes didn't degrade software compatibility or the stability of the operating system, but they did upset a lot of people. For a new computer, I think the decision comes down to how comfortable you will be with the changes to the interface. If you're one to embrace change and enjoy poking around a new system to see what's new, then go for it. If what you see in the video gives you hives, then stick with 7 for as long as you can.

In case anyone is interested in an overview of the release version of Windows 10 that'll be out in a couple weeks. I'll be installing Windows 10 on a spare machine in a couple weeks so I can do some testing with the new Edge browser. I imagine it'll be quite a speed improvement over IE.

Floppy drives I might believe, it's pretty rare to even find a motherboard that supports one these days. But I'm pretty sure that's not true about CD/DVD drives. It might lack software for playing DVD/BluRay movies or something, but CD/DVD/BluRay drives will continue to work. I'm almost certain you can preorder Windows 10 on DVD.

I agree that there are risks to upgrading, and few benefits. Best to leave a working business machine alone. But I guarantee that there isn't going to be a VISTA fiasco, since Windows 7, 8, and 10, are all essentially Vista.

For the sake of discussion, here's an additional page that I came across this morning. But I never know whether to trust the information. http://judismithlaw.com/overseas-freelancer-w8ben-or-w8eci/

Thanks KC!

That strikes me as odd. When I do contract work, I'll fill out a w-9 and they don't withhold anything. They'll send me a 1099 at the end of the year, and I pay taxes on the income then. Can you link to what you quoted from? I was really hoping that the purpose of the W-8BEN was to document whether withholding is necessary. I say that, because I'm being told that they're cutting a check for the full amount, and it's up to the contractor to report the income.

Alright, so here's the backstory. My full time job is as the webmaster for a University. We're going through a website overhaul this summer, and hired a designer through 99designs.com. 99designs allowed us to host a design contest for the work that we needed done, a flat fee for the contest is paid up front to 99designs, and once both parties (designer and client) are happy with the work, 99desings takes their cut and sends the rest to the designer. Now, we have additional work for the designer, and he says he accepts PayPal. We can't just sign up for a PayPal account with a Purchasing Card, though, we have to jump through some hoops to add this guy as a vendor to our system, and make him sign contracts and forms and whatever. Oh, and I forgot to mention one relevant detail, the designer resides in South Africa. So, I'm told that the first step is to send this guy a W-8BEN for him to fill out. He does a little looking around and comes across the following page and reads that he'll be on the hook for 30% http://blogs.angloinfo.com/us-tax/2012/12/24/what-is-form-w-8ben-and-what-is-it-used-for/ That's a large chunk. Am I missing anything? EDIT: My understanding, for what it's worth (hint: not much at all) is that since he is not, nor ever has been to the United States, he fails the Substantial Presence Test, and therefore has no tax liability to the US. http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/International-Taxpayers/Taxation-of-Nonresident-Aliens Am I wrong? I have no idea what the deal is with that 30% flat figure is for or when it comes into play, but I'd be interested in knowing.

The Enter key creates a new Paragraph. On the web, Paragraphs almost always are double spaced (have a bottom margin, that is, white space between paragraphs) to improve readability. The reason that style is so common is because indentation of the first line (like in newspapers) is almost never used and not having either styling leads to a difficult-to-read monolithic slab of text with no visual separation between paragraphs. It's pretty much standard practice for Enter to create a Paragraph. There isn't a feature to change it per-user, I'm afraid. The only thing I could do is change Paragraph styling site-wide to remove that bottom margin for all paragraphs, which I'm reluctant to do for two reasons: I'm not sure that everyone wants it that way, like I said Enter = Paragraph is pretty standardMore importantly, every paragraph in every thread would lose its bottom margin, and as a result we'd have no spacing between paragraphs, just that monolithic slab of text in every post.Anyway, in instances where you don't want a new paragraph, what you're looking for is a "line break". Most word processors, including Word and this site's editor have a shortcut to create a line break. Here (and in many programs) it's Shift+Enter. Sometimes it's Ctrl+Enter. If your problem is that you have changed the default behavior in Word and other applications, and when you get here you're creating double paragraphs by mistake... All I can say is sorry for the frustration

​Haha, they're boy/girl twins, he's on the left.  It's an easy mistake to make though, since he's got a hippy haircut and wearing his sister's dress in that pic.

​8.1 has an option to send you directly to the desktop and bypass the start screen when the computer boots. I see the Start Screen as an alternative to having shortcuts on your desktop, with the added benefit of being able to type a few letters of the name of a file/application on your computer and having it quickly found. Hit enter to open/execute it. I find it a lot faster than Start > All Programs > Scroll through folders > Click folder > Click shortcut but to each their own. This is essentially the same way I used the Start Menu in Windows 7, though, because it also had a search bar built in. Not the same computer I was on yesterday, but here's another screenshot. It's just a full screen start menu. It's got shortcuts for launching applications. Visually, it's different. Functionally it's similar, except for the All Programs area, which I don't care for in Windows 7 OR Windows 8 because it's a mess of everything installed on your computer and cumbersome to find anything... hence my preference for using the quick search features in both operating systems.

​There are things in 8 that I prefer not to use, so I pretend they don't exist... but for the most part, the stuff that's in 7 is also in 8. Once I have my applications open, there is zero difference. My frequently-used applications are still pinned across the bottom, but also pinned on the start screen, which I rarely need to use. Here's a screenshot of my 8.1 desktop. If you can give examples of specific things you find more difficult, I might be able to suggest an easier/faster approach.