Free Republic

I am sure SOMEBODY is going to complain something about my posting this, but I have always gotten good computer advice from FR. I am getting started in voice acting, and have a website promoting my talents. Can anyone tell me how to make my main page play a sound file from a list of files? I want to have 20+ comic intros on the site, and have the webpage play one of them, at random, whenever the page is re/loaded. www.everybodyandme.com

Susan* bought her 6-year-old son John an iPad when he was in first grade. “I thought ‘why not let him get a jump on things?’ ” she told me during a therapy session. John’s school had begun using the devices with younger and younger grades—and his technology teacher had raved about their educational benefits—so Susan wanted to do what was best for her sandy-haired boy who loved reading and playing baseball. She started letting John play different educational games on his iPad. Eventually, he discovered Minecraft, which the technology teacher assured her was “just like electronic Lego.”

Florida AG Shuts Down Boynton Beach Tech Support Scam August 24, 2016 11:12 AM TALLAHASSEE (CBSMiami) – A Boynton Beach tech support company which reportedly scammed its customers out of $25 million has been temporarily shut down again by court order, according to Florida’s Attorney General’s Office. The company Client Care Experts, formerly known as First Choice Tech Support, LLC, is owned by CEO Michael Seward and his partner Kevin McCormick. The state’s Attorney General’s Office said the operation was run out of a boiler room in Boynton Beach and employed more than 200 telemarketers at the location. The court...

A seminal moment in the quantum technology field just happened: Google's team of scientists have simulated a hydrogen molecule from its quantum computers, a breakthrough that suggests it could “simulate even larger chemical systems,” writes one of Google Quantum’s engineers, Ryan Rabbush. The search engine’s achievement underscores the technology’s potential as Rabbush posits it can “revolutionize the design of solar cells, industrial catalysts, batteries, flexible electronics, medicines, materials and more.”

I have done a fresh install of Win 7 OS but I can't get the windows updates. It's been a few days and I am getting nothing from MS - I've tried several "fixes" suggested on different OS forums, but still nothing. Anyone have any suggestions? Thanks

Those who demand a disarmed population claim that it is the easy availability of guns that causes people to do bad things with guns. The core assumption is that guns have no useful function.  The people who wish to disarm the population constantly say that guns are only made and used for one thing - to kill people.  It is implied is that no person actually wants to kill people, and they would not, if there were no guns. From that follows the idea that people do not really want guns.  If only some barriers were put in place...

I need some help from you computer gurus. Just powered up my Toshiba laptop a little while ago and began surfing. Suddenly a tone started beeping and a message filled the screen saying a malfunction had been detected and gave a toll-free number to call to get help from a technician (yeah, right). Underneath that message is a screen saying that Windows 8.1 64-bit Defender encountered an error code: 0x80016CFA. Can't close the windows, and powering down the laptop fails, it just powers back up. I sure could use some help FRiends.

My Pine64 Media Center Several months back, I participated in a Kickstarter campaign for the PINE A64, First $15 64-Bit Single Board Super Computer. The campaign started in December of 2015, and was designed to fund the production of a 64-bit computer on a card for the masses priced at $15. Initial estimated delivery was January or February. Their initial estimates on shipping were somewhat optimistic, as I just received mine the other day (5/21/2016). Reading through some of the comments on the project, some people were rather bent out of shape about the shipping delays, which is something I...

Need expert help from any who speak 'normal' English as we have no computer gifted language experts living under the roof here. Have been using Windows XP and Outlook Express (with which I am familiar and have had no problems using) Recently during a storm, the computer fried to crispy bacon and died. Guru able to save the hard drive from the old, puting same hard drive into a reconditioned make with Windows 7 operating system....making the puter available for wifi. Problem, windows 7 is not compatible with Outlook Express and unable to reconfigure the files from old programs. Now...

The government’s cyber spying outfit has an ‘unbelievable’ child porn problem. But the NSA can’t—or won’t—say how often it finds such criminal images on its workers’ computers. Two senior U.S. intelligence officials said recently that defense and intelligence employees have an “unbelievable” amount of child pornography on their work computers and devices, and that child porn has been found on the systems of the National Security Agency, the country’s biggest intelligence organization. But the NSA, which is responsible for keeping tabs on its own computers as well as military and intelligence agency networks, cannot say just how many times employees...

In the tech industry, one day a skill is hot, the next it's not. IT professionals spend a lot of their career learning, training, and trying to keep up. Job hunting site Dice prides itself on helping IT pros navigate which skills to pursue. It just concluded an analysis of its database of 80,000+ tech jobs from April 2015 through April 2016 to determine the fastest-growing skills based on job openings. We then cross-checked those skills against Dice's annual salary survey, published in February, which offered the average salary for jobs using those particular skills in 2015. The good news?...

Windows 7 will start but when it goes to Google Chrome, it will freeze up within 5 on any and everything. On Internet Explorer, it doesn't freeze but graphics don't work properly. Example, go to any site with a moving weather radar and it won't load. Or any site where you have a box to search within the site, you can't type or click in the box. Also, say on yahoo.com homepage, the ads and other junk on the left and right sides don't show up but the headlines do and you can click them and to the sites.

My Sony Vaio laptop came with Windows 7 preloaded and no physical disks. I read that there was supposed to be a recovery partition on the hard drive and figured that would be all I needed. To this point, I never had to use it. I do regular backups of my data (documents, music,etc) to an external HD. Yesterday, I was looking at Task Manager and saw a bunch of processes running. I looked at the descriptions of what they were supposed to do and stopped a bunch I thought I did not need. Computer continued to run fine. Long...

Congress plans to question about two dozen federal agencies on whether they were using backdoored Juniper network security appliances. In December, Juniper Networks said it had discovered unauthorized code added to ScreenOS, the operating system that runs on its NetScreen network firewalls. The rogue code, which remained undetected for two years or more, could have allowed remote attackers to gain administrative access to vulnerable devices or to decrypt VPN connections. The U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform wants to determine the impact that this issue had on government organizations and how those organizations responded to the incident. The...

There was a glitch that wouldn't let anyone post a response the last time I did this, so I'm going to try it again. TheRobb7 My son and I were interested in watching the Xbox play the NFL season against itself in Franchise Mode. We would watch 1 game a week and simulate the rest. PROBLEM : we can't get the Xbox to do it. It will only play against itself in Exhibition Mode, which means that we couldn't compile stats and standings. Does anyone out there know of a work-around?

A little over three months ago, National Review endorsed Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) for Speaker of the House. In doing so, National Review helped place a man with a two-decade history of pushing open borders immigration policies in charge of the Republican Party’s entire legislative agenda. Ten weeks after that endorsement helped Paul Ryan secure the Speakership, Ryan proceeded to swiftly pass an omnibus spending bill that funded and expanded President Obama’s immigration agenda.

My copy of google chrome is not running as it dont fully finish launching on my launch attempt . I can not force quit it from the force quit applications window.. because its nt running. I can not launch it as the Icon in my dock seems inert. there are a couple of forums I NEED my password for and they were available immediately using chrome. At Wits End, M.M.

Ok got something weird happening, and I'm at a loss what it could be- been researching for days now- thought I had the answer, but today the problem came back again I use windows 7 Hybrid Sleep, instead of shutting down- and for years it's worked fine- no issues- As of recently, I'll put the computer into sleep mode, everything does what it's supposed to- computer powers down- tower power button light goes to yellow like it's supposed to and the light on the front of the tower goes out (The HP symbol lights up when tower is working- then...

OLYMPIA, Wash. - More than 3,000 prisoners in Washington have been mistakenly released early since 2002 because of an error by the state's Department of Corrections that resulted in wrongly calculated sentences for about 3 percent of the prison population. At a news conference announcing the error Tuesday, Gov. Jay Inslee said he has ordered immediate steps to correct the longstanding computer glitch. "Frankly, it is maddening," Inslee said. Authorities say a July 2002 state Supreme Court ruling required the Corrections Department to apply good-behavior credits earned in county jail to state prison sentences. However, the programming fix ended up...

This week, Google announced a breakthrough that could prove its quantum computer is actually using quantum mechanics. When researchers gave the D-Wave 2X a carefully crafted test problem, the 1,000-qubit computer solved it 100,000,000 times faster than a classical computer could. Quite a few tech giants and government organizations are investing in quantum computing. And many of them, including Google, NASA, and Lockheed Martin, are working with the commercial quantum computers built by D-Wave. The idea is that these devices can harness the counterintuitive effects of quantum mechanics to solve problems faster than conventional computers, which could potentially improve artificial...