I have always enjoyed playing video games with my brothers. We fought each other over who gets to use the computer next. Eventually, we had new computers replace old, and we each had a machine to ourselves. Even though I was the oldest, the computers were the boys' endeavors, and I was stuck with the hand-me-down of the hand-me-downs. And when they both left for college, I had the same tattered and torn computer, only even more out-of-date.

I guess I didn't really mind, but my family took notice, and one Christmas I got upgrades. A new case, a new hard drive--and by the time it was all unwrapped, I had a completely new computer!--all in separate parts. This was orchestrated by my best friend, who then walked me through assembling and setting up my amazing, tiny (it's the size of a shoe box) computer. He didn't do any of the work, since he knew I liked to do things at least once by myself. It was terrific, and once again, I had to fight my brothers over who got to use it first. This time, I had the upper hand. This computer was all mine.

This taught me how easy it is to do, and proved to me that I could handle the upgrades from then on out. I mean, I built the thing myself. Everything else is just a walk in the park.

Truthfully, it's not too hard to build a computer by yourself. It saves a lot of money over buying one off the shelf, and it's a lot of fun to do. Once you're done, you'll know exactly how your computer is configured and what hardware you've got, because you picked out the parts yourself.

Look for a launch announcement by Amazon this week or next of a new web service around payments, adding to their S3 (storage), EC2 (virtual server) and other services. They’ve been quietly testing the service, which will compete with PayPal and Google Checkout, for a few weeks.

• OfficeIns, a tool for viewing and disabling Microsoft Office Add-Ins
  
• ZipInstaller, an ingenius tool for "installing" programs that are packaged in zip files without their own installers
  
• ShellExView, a tool for viewing and managing file shell extensions
  
• ShellMenuView, for investigating and managing the right-click menu items in your system
  
• Volumouse, a tool for controlling your sound volume using the mouse wheel
  
• NirCmd, a great commandline tool that can do all sorts of useful things like shutting down windows, changeing sound volume, etc., (very useful for calling from other tool (we use it in FARR)
• SmartSniff, a tool for reconstructing network traffic conversations
  
• And their newest utility, GDIView, which lists GDI resources in use.
  

A while ago, you had an idea for a new company that would change the world. You stayed up all night feverishly sketching your plans for global domination.

Yet there you are, months later, still sitting in your cubicle, that brilliant flash a distant memory.

Wake up: Not every idea--even a great one--turns into a money machine. In fact, it's often just as useful to know when to dump a good idea as it is to pursue one--if only so you can get to work on that next "great" idea.

Here are three ways to know when enough is enough.

Introduction

In the world of hackers, the kind of answers you get to your technical questions depends as much on the way you ask the questions as on the difficulty of developing the answer. This guide will teach you how to ask questions in a way more likely to get you a satisfactory answer.

Now that use of open source has become widespread, you can often get as good answers from other, more experienced users as from hackers. This is a Good Thing; users tend to be just a little bit more tolerant of the kind of failures newbies often have. Still, treating experienced users like hackers in the ways we recommend here will generally be the most effective way to get useful answers out of them, too.

The first thing to understand is that hackers actually like hard problems and good, thought-provoking questions about them. If we didn't, we wouldn't be here. If you give us an interesting question to chew on we'll be grateful to you; good questions are a stimulus and a gift. Good questions help us develop our understanding, and often reveal problems we might not have noticed or thought about otherwise. Among hackers, “Good question!” is a strong and sincere compliment.