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...according to themselves:

http://www.securitronlinux.com...
http://www.techspot.com/news/5...

You gotta love how "scared" they are of us. They have NO clue.

"Torrentz.eu, the largest torrent search engine on the Internet, [...]" ...says TorrentFreak, and the websites that copied that claim.

It is a meta-search engine.
According to IsoHunt, Google is the largest torrent search engine.
According to the <title> of BTJunkie, they are ("btjunkie - the largest torrent search engine").
And according to various sources (example), the Away from Keyboard documentary was about "the largest and the most famous torrent website in the world", The Pirate Bay.

So, are there any objective/independent studies into which website(s) really are the largest?

Flash write capacity can be restored by heating it up to ~250 degrees Celsius every now and then.
There are ideas about flash chips with heaters close to each memory block but as far as I know that has not reached consumers yet.
I don't think the industry is much in a hurry either. Of all the consumer grade SSDs I've heard failed none have been out of wear.
For normal usage and functioning wear leveling you will have replaced the entire computer a couple of times before wear becomes an issue.

I'm assuming you're too lazy to google

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/...
http://usabilitygeek.com/windo...
http://www.techspot.com/review...
http://www.zdnet.com/windows-8...

If you're lazy, you can just read the conclusions. It's not necessarily enough to make me upgrade to 8 (already have 8 on one laptop and 7 on some other devices), but it measurably better in a few areas.

Although illegal in many countries (but not all), it is satisfying. And free. It doesn't cover everything, but it certainly covers a lot and is expanding from what I can see. I can't help but wonder when TV shows will be added, along with a choice of where to pull the torrents from (it's locked in to YIFY currently though there might be an easy way to change that, I haven't the time).

Although the team that originally started it dropped the project, it was entirely open source so others could (and did) pick up where they left off. They didn't do so due to legal issues (because they checked multiple times to see that what they were doing was indeed legal), but because they didn't want to be in the middle of fighting the paradigm that the film (and other) industries have established.

Here's a link.

How long until drones are used to fly a prisoner out of prison?

http://www.techspot.com/news/5...

" Crypto-currencies are awesome."
No, not really. I mean, it's a neat idea, but there is no long term inherent stability in hiding money behind math.

http://gizmodo.com/the-quantum...

http://www.techspot.com/news/5...

No, it isn't. There are still more games + gamers on the Mac.

you misspelled nvidia.

It is likely you might be able to buy a retail copy of Photoshop to convent them, and that probably would work, but then you are spending thousands of dollars.

I don't know if this is helpful, but you don't need to spend thousands of dollars for an old copy of Photoshop. Adobe has effectively released CS2 as freeware. Officially, I believe you are only supposed to download and use this if you already have a CS2 license, but lots of people appear to have interpreted Adobe's actions as effectively releasing free software.

So, you might try this as a solution... CS2 was released in 2005, so if your photos are 10 years old, I imagine this could work.

The expensive part isn't the capacitor, it's writing the firmware to detect power loss and do the right thing every time. Intel struggled with this on their early 320 series models, with the 8MB bug as one example where things became corrupt when power loss protection didn't work correctly. One of the reasons Intel drives do this well where no one else does is that they had broad consumer adoption of the 320 series to shake out these firmware issues.

Photoshop CS2 is free, and it's better than GIMP even though it's nearly a decade old. There's no reason at all to use GIMP unless you are using Linux or morally oppose closed-source software.

http://www.techspot.com/review/734-battlefield-4-benchmarks/
Thats a year of gaming on top settings or emerging 4k resolutions to consider. We have the generation of games, ssd, Windows 8.1, cpu, bandwidth, ram, lcd at ~usable levels.
The "GPU" as a card or more cards is the interesting part to get right with drivers and ongoing issues.
Drop the resolution, quality and todays mid range cards are good, but where is the fun in that :)
How the brands write their code, deal with the heat and work over 2 or more cards is always fun to read about.

We need at least 60 fps constantly to experience a normal sense of motion. GPUs need to keep getting better because very few of them are able to *maintain* 60fps in modern games when scenes become more complex in certain areas. We also need to look ahead to 4K gaming which no graphics card currently can handle at acceptable framerates. http://boallen.com/fps-compare.html

There is a lot of need for faster cards, and for developers to start making use of the processing abilities of these cards in their games. I'm looking at you MMOs! ( One genre which still makes heavy use of the CPU). Now if the author had said that in gaming the CPU's speed is becoming irrelevant to frame rate, I would tend to agree. http://www.techspot.com/review/734-battlefield-4-benchmarks/page6.html

But I prefer that my encryption tool and my cloud storage service be completely separate. (How do I know Lockbox isn't sending the keys to the NSA, or whoever?)

It's pointless anyway against the NSA. Seriously. Every single modern operating system (including on routers) has tons of unpatched exploit vectors. There's even a black market for them. The NSA can just infect your machines and ex-filtrate your data and/or the encryption keys... See the previous story:

[NSA] Budget documents say the $652 million project has placed 'covert implants,' sophisticated malware transmitted from far away, in computers, routers and firewalls on tens of thousands of machines every year, with plans to expand those numbers into the millions.

Hell we have multiple celebrations of insecurity every year called "computer security conferences" where without fail new systems are compromised. How can you even look at stuff like Pwn 2 Own, and not have your brain melting in cognitive dissonance as you try to believe there are network attached scenarios where your data is safe from the NSA?

You want your data kept secret? Use whole drive encryption on machines that are never connected to any networks -- And even then there's the Ken Thompson Microcode Hack, so your systems could be theoretically pre-hacked from the factory... I won't buy a CPU that has remote cellular capabilities... Like Intel's Sandy Bridge. Laughed my ass off when I heard about that! "Security Feature" indeed. At least if the machine can't get on the networks there's a much lower chance of your data escaping if it's pre-hacked.

I don't know of any hacker worth their salt -- black, gray or white hat -- that doesn't have a directory of unpatched zero day exploits.
I keep mine in: ~/with/great/power/comes/great/responsibility/
Me having to navigate the directory structure has saved many a newb... The NSA has no such sensibilities.
If the data's encrypted, they assume it could be from a foreigner, and thus give themselves license to get at it, and they can.
This is what happens when you let Threat Narrative run amok.

I say rent him a small apartment in Tokyo with a paid 2 Gbps connection. Then we'll see what he thinks of America's great broadband.

As to the price difference, CPU performance has to count for something too. On media encoding the Intel is more than twice the speed of that particular AMD. And with a discrete graphics card the Intel beat every AMD in the test. And at idle the Intel takes less than half the power of an AMD FX system.

Interesting but Apple developed iPhone over ~2 - 2.5 years. Depending on when the key players sat with Intel that likely would have been enough time to develop a first generation chip.

Remember, Intel was THE LEADER in cutting-edge ARM chips until they sold the ARM division to Marvell in June 2006. They even introduced high-end feature like Mobile MMX and SpeedStep, and pushed clock speeds higher than any of their competitors.

That's absolutely in the time-frame of iPhone development, plus a year into Paul's tenure. The fact that they sold the ARM division and decided to start back at square one with Atom (not exactly a power miser in the first revision) shows that they had no intention of going "high volume, low price" like Steve Jobs was asking.

They did just announce a 6.8" reader, limited only to this year, to see if it's popular. It also has the highest DPI of any dedicated reader at 264, the same as a retina iPad. I'm actually sort of considering getting it.

http://www.techspot.com/news/52251-kobos-68-265-ppi-aura-hd-ereader-is-coming-this-month-for-170.html

I worry I will be disappointed by the title availability and price, and I really like Whispersync for Voice...

The Senate Judiciary Committee had passed a bill that would require a warrant for any email interception. However it seems this didn't make it through congress in the lame-duck session.

It is very upsetting that the Netflix video data sharing bill did.

http://www.techspot.com/news/51175-congress-cuts-amendment-banning-warrantless-email-snooping.html

I gave my Congressman a raft of shit over this.

However, Acer cancelled the event mere hours before it was expected to jointly unveil the A800 with Alibaba. An Acer executive declined to explain the abrupt change of plans, saying only that the unveiling was axed for a "special reason." However, an unnamed company official quoted in a report on the Dow Jones Newswire said the cancellation is related to Google's concerns over Acer's use of Aliyun.

http://www.techspot.com/news/50151-google-pressures-acer-to-cancel-smartphone-running-android-rival.html

I hope you all caught the latest hagiographic articles going around the more gullible news sites - some reporter used the Wayback to look at Zs website circa 1999 and discovered that it included links to people, therefore this was the precursor to Facebook.
http://www.techspot.com/news/52148-zuckerbergs-first-website-contained-an-early-facebook-prototype.html

Magic? I don't believe in real magic.

Stage magic, or clever marketing, that's the kind of magic they've used. Magic which uses smoke and mirrors to obfuscate the real underlying situation.

Like I've said already, many of those WP7 developers did have to modify their code. Microsoft created all kinds of incentives for it. And the ones who didn't bother just suffered a new influx of negative reviews from users with WP8 phones and therefore less visibility in the app store.

Reference for the " many of those WP7 developers did have to modify their code" line? The final WP8 SDK wasn't even published when WP8, yet the WP8 store had 100K+ apps.

And I did have to quote it for you, you're the one who linked to it originally, claiming that it somehow supported *your* point when it very clearly doubted that your point was even possible at all.

I linked to that article because it detailed the process of how Microsoft automatically recompiled WP7 apps to WP8.
If my point wasn't possible, how come there were 100K apps at launch automatically without even the final SDK coming out?

And I'm the one who pointed out to you that all the 5 articles you linked to were from before the WP8 launch (including the article quoted above), thereby nullifying them as evidence for your point, and now you're the one who has the gall to point out the same thing to me? Even quoting the dates and highlighting the "before" in bold as if you were the one suddenly trying to educating me on the matter when I didn't even make half the claim you made? Seriously?!

The point is that you have completely failed to provide any references after the migration showing that there were anything more than a handful of problems. If there a lot of problems, the media would've gone nuts in the WP8 review about how WP7 apps didn't run on WP8.

That all the articles doubting the migration were before it happened is telling. Of course the media is silent when there are no issues. There is nothing to write about! A few apps did have issues, but it's definitely not many as you say.

http://www.techspot.com/news/50645-microsoft-unveils-wp8-windows-store-reaches-120000-apps.html

Without even the final WP8 SDK for developers to make any changes. http://www.extremetech.com/computing/137621-two-weeks-away-still-no-sdk-windows-phone-8-teeters-on-the-edge-of-failure

Please explain from where 120K apps appeared for WP8 on Oct 29th 2013 without the WP8 SDK being released if there so many "breaking changes" preventing them from running?

So the onus is on you to show that there were lots of problems with the migration, and you failed to come up with even one reference.

You were so clearly on the fence too. Microsoft must see it as a great loss to see open-minded users like yourself turning the other way because they--potentially--had intentionally limited stock. No manufacturer in history has ever had trouble manufacturing enough products to meet demand.

Not the Wii. Not the PS3. Not the iPhone. Not the iPad. Not the Xbox 360.

Nope, initial demand is met with plenty to spare by all manufacturers, except those nefarious Microsofties and their illustrious manufacturing wing at Foxconn.

It's not like there are tons of variables that go into it, including the potential for a flop similar to Kin, and underwhelming like the Zune, despite its cult following, and the difficulty in manufacturing 1080p screens for 11" touch devices made through a new manufacturing process. Nothing like that at all.

On the brighter side of things, it is good to come clean and admit that you are a bandwagon follower--admittedly unwilling to decide until a "large" crowd does it for you.

FYI: Microsoft commits to Surface RT support. It's a safe bet that Microsoft will support the Surface Pro for at least nearly as long, and considering it's just a laptop that has tablet functionality intelligently tacked on, its support is practically guaranteed on the software front, and whatever warranty you get guarantees it for that long.

No, 500mb is not that relevant, especially when the average memory size of current computers is 4 GB. I challenge you to find me any benchmark analysis that place Windows 8 far ahead of Windows 7 in basically anything.

But here goes one showing that only in Sleep/Wake and Boot times there is a significant improvement. In every other task the improvement is marginal when it exists at all. Windows 7 is even superior in some tests, like SSD benchmark, 3DMark, DX10 and DX9 anti-aliasing operations, and Battlefield 3 gameplay performance, :

http://www.techspot.com/review/561-windows8-vs-windows7/

Well, according to Valve themselves, dropping price has been the most successful marketing strategy for them by far - whenever they do it on any big game, they get a surge of sales, often bringing in record revenues. Which seems to imply that a great many people use Steam in exactly the same way as GP described.

These cards are based on the same Southern Islands core as the 7000 series. So, why is AMD calling these 8000 series? Because AMD has run out of money, causing the real 8000 series (Sea Islands) to be delayed: http://www.techspot.com/news/50975-amd-radeon-hd-8000-series-could-be-delayed-until-q2-2013.html

Actually I am not aware of a single country in the world where uploading a file in a p2p program at home has been judged by any court as a criminal offence (at least yet).

First US convictions for illegal file sharing. These are felony convictions.

Google shows other criminal convictions overseas.

Additionally and to add to the absurdity of the CIAPC response:

Indeed upon hearing about the situation Chisu apologized to the 9-year-old and pointed to a link on Spotify where her music can be played for free"

http://www.techspot.com/news/50888-police-raid-targets-9-year-old-pirate-winnie-the-pooh-laptop-seized.html

Uhh no... nearly 20W more power consumption than a quad core i5 that's faster than it.

Is it true with Windows, even (anymore, at least)? Windows 7 is faster than Vista, and 8 is equal to or faster than Windows 7 in most cases. See: http://www.techspot.com/review/561-windows8-vs-windows7/page2.html

According to Engadget, PCMark 7 has a bug that causes Windows 8 to score lower than it should.

Rock solid by whose definition? Yours, or the rest of the actual world?

http://www.techspot.com/news/44694-intel-confirms-8mb-bug-in-320-series-ssds-fix-available.html
http://www.guru3d.com/news_story/intel_ssd_320_firmware_fix_for_8mb_bug.html
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4625/intel-testing-firmware-fix-for-ssd-320-8mb-power-bug

P.S. -- This comment comes from someone who owns 5 of these SSDs and none of them have experienced the aforementioned problem, and that's probably because I upgraded the F/W almost immediately. But despite that, a bug is a bug, especially of this catastrophic nature. I can refer folks to similarly catastrophic bugs in other SSDs such as the Crucial m4, so don't think Intel is the only naughty one.

A second attempt - and all subsequent attempts - to mount the drive showed it as an 8MB (yes, eight megabytes) drive.

This sounds like the 8MB bug in the Intel 320 series. http://www.techspot.com/news/44694-intel-confirms-8mb-bug-in-320-series-ssds-fix-available.html

There is a known issue with the 320 series where if the drive looses power suddenly it may corrupt itself, loose all data, and report that it has only 8MB capacity. According to Intel, the only way to fix the drive is to do a secure erase, wiping all data. It happened to me once last spring when windows locked up and I had to force a reboot by holding down the power button. Incidentally, Intel's 4PC10362 that was supposed to fix the problem did not. My drive was running the updated firmware version when it corrupted. This is not considered a manufacturing defect either, so the drive is not replaceable under warranty.

My advice for everyone who asks is to avoid SSDs. If Intel's SSDs, which are widely regarded as the most reliable in the field, can't be relied on in the real world, then the technology is not ready.

Learn how to use these. http://www.techspot.com/guides/506-windows-8-shortcuts-and-tricks/ and if Windows 8 is still slowers or as fast (steps) as Windows 7, the problem is really yourself and not the software.

As FX said, you don't need backdoors when the code is already full of vulnerabilities.

http://www.techspot.com/news/49588-critical-vulnerabilities-in-huawei-routers-laid-bare-at-defcon.html

http://www.securitytube.net/video/5770

AMD has a few different CPU sockets on the market currently:

The AM2/AM3/AM3+ series (each of which is a backwardly-compatible MB - an AM2 board can't take an AM3+ CPU) , the FM2 socket and the G34 socket.

Your comment implies that an older MB could take a newer processor - well, sort of - if you bought a plain-old AM2 MB, no, but if you bought a multi-standard AMD MB (AM2/AM3/AM3+ yes) - it isn't as simple a question as you seem to want to make it.

Intel is currently selling:

Socket 775, 1155, and 2011 - the 1156 you complain about is really no longer a current model (See: http://www.techspot.com/news/46589-intel-to-discontinue-lga-1366-and-lga-1156-processors-in-2012.html )

Each brand has three currently supported sockets, what exactly is the problem Intel has?

"Then actually allow for easy tweaks to the UI. How do you change the login screen? What about sounds? Your average user wants to be able to do this. It's a motherfucking nightmare to do this in the Super-Friendly distro."

Windows is not a "distro" actually. (You were talkinmg about Windows, right?) ;-) I really like how you complain that the GUI tool do do it on most Linux distributions doesn't jump out and bite you on the ass whenever you think about doing it when Windows requires a registry edit to do the same thing.

"And I'm not a slouch here,"

Yes. You are. In fact you are worse than a slouch, because by your own admission you should know better, but you claim to be an authority and then spout off about shit that can happen with any OS that supports a huge range of hardware.

>> And when my cousins visit her I don't get the "the kids broke the computer with their stupid websites" calls any more ;)

Those days are almost over: http://www.techspot.com/news/50009-new-malware-targets-linux-and-mac-os-x.html *sigh* The upside is that finally somebody is going to have to make the first secure os. It's about time.

> The research into frame-rate latencies is really interesting,
Indeed. There was a VERY interesting article last year on Micro-Stuttering And GPU Scaling In CrossFire And SLI
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-geforce-stutter-crossfire,2995.html

> but the whole idea that *anyone* knowledgeable about PC gaming would have *ever* denied that the CPU was an important factor in performance is ridiculous.
Not exactly. Battlefield 3 doesn't use more then 2 cores.
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2011/11/10/battlefield-3-technical-analysis/7
http://www.techspot.com/review/458-battlefield-3-performance/page7.html

If you have a high profile AAA title with that level of quality of graphics it kind of makes you wonder why other games "need" 4-cores?

Their payment must've come up a bit short, because TFA included this chart that seems to imply I.E. is a steaming pile, regardless of version or OS.

Rather, Apple has sued Samsung for combining so many visual and behavioral elements from the iPhone and iPad that they have obviously ripped off the design.

You're allowed to rip off the design : Look and feel used to be not patentable, absolutely. Now it's a little fuzzy, but that patent has not stood up to serious legal challenge - the first didn't.

Established law is that visual and behavioural UI element "feel" is not patentable, usually. That's why "look and feel" lawsuits don't generally work, unless you have a load of lawyers, and a load of time, and the person you're suing doesn't.

Packaging can be weird to understand. Some of the simplest-looking boxes are often hard to manufacture and use to package a product on a assembly line.

Remember that customer experience while unpacking is perhaps the most transient, short-lived event in the life of a product. Other factors such as safety while transport, shelf-appearance and the quality of the product itself is far far more important. And lets not get started about environmental costs of packaging.

It is easy to get all of it if you have a profit margin like Apple does - about 50%. The Nexus has a profit margin of barely 5-7%. So yes, they may cut corners on the box.

But something tells me people who want a Nexus get that the packaging is irrelevant enough as to be worthless within 2 minutes of the customer having finished it. Unboxing is where the function of packaging finishes.

This leads one to the question... underpowered for what exactly?

Buy the right hardware for your project. If this doesn't fit then don't buy it. Buy the ODroid-X, which is a quad core 1.4 Ghz if that is better.

PI is giving me a platform to cheaply learn some stuff, so it fits my needs fine.

At this rate, I bet WD and Seagate have about 6 months to start making SSDs or they're bankrupt.

6 months? I think you're estimating a bit low for an industry that supplies most of the storage to the world. I also think that you're not considering the limited supply of flash and some fundamental lifespan issues. Here's at least one HDD manufacturer viewpoint: Seagate: Flash Memory Not a Threat

to make Apple the most recognized brand in the world

ITYM Coca-Cola.

Go into the fetid, dank mangroves of Senegal. Show the first person you meet two logos.

As of May 2011, Apple is indeed the world's most recognized brand... overtook Coca-Cola some time ago.

citation 1

citation 2

Coca-Cola is now about 8th. FWIW Apple has about 4 times in cash than Senegal's GNP. Point is, I think you may want to find a better measuring stick as brand recognition in Senegal is nearly meaningless.

I like the idea of increasing desktop performance with an SSD to cache the HD; you are basically buying performance, but not risking your data (SSD still has to prove itself to me)
Here is a good performance comparison article: http://www.techspot.com/review/515-crucial-adrenaline-ssd/

That's a myth. Maybe it was true for some old SSDs. But it hasn't even been that true for normal usb drives.

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?83778-Time-warp-drive-vanishing-after-3-days-data-gone-on-reboot-I-need-3-to-5-users-with-this-issue-to-help
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?78706-OCZ-Vertex2-180GB-lost-all-Data-after-3-Days
http://www.techspot.com/news/44694-intel-confirms-8mb-bug-in-320-series-ssds-fix-available.html

You may say those failures are due to bugs, but when there are so many bugs, they are effectively the main failure cause of SSDs, not "wear and tear": http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2011/09/01/ssd-users-report-widespread-data-loss/1

And when the SSD return rates are often even higher than "spinning disk" drives you should be very careful which SSDs you use (so far I think Samsung is OK).

http://www.behardware.com/articles/843-7/components-returns-rates-5.html
http://www.behardware.com/articles/831-7/components-returns-rates.html

As this http://www.techspot.com/news/48924-mpaa-would-allow-megaupload-users-access-to-non-copyrighted-files.html article notes, "the MPAA expressed sympathy towards legitimate users who may have lost access to original content or data that was obtained legally, although they also point out that Megaupload's terms of service offered no guarantee of the safety or accessibility of uploaded data."

The fact is, Megaupload offered NO guarantee any data stored on its servers would be accessible at any given point in the future, if at all. Whether its servers were destroyed by an act of God, or the US government makes no difference -- there was never any contract between Megaupload and its users to safeguard their data, and as a result its users were not deprived of anything tangible when that data was taken offline.

It's kind of like sticking your stuff in a locker at a swimming pool or a gym -- they put up big signs saying they're not responsible for your stuff. Of course, you would never store anything valuable in a locker room, now would you? This sort of 'rejection of liability' flows on -- if the government turns up, takes over the building for some reason or another, and throws you out, they're not responsible for your stuff either. You're just SOL.

A locker in a gym is not the same as a safety deposit box in a bank vault. To argue that they are is just plain silly, and if you tried it in court, I imagine a judge would laugh at you. Your argument would be swiftly defeated by a rebuttal of simple common sense.

So although it's fun to rant about 'suing the gubbermint', such a pointless exercise would never lead anywhere, and the government knows that. By pointing out that you could recover your data through Megaupload's hosting provider, they're really just being 'nice'. They owe you nothing.

The geek ought to have learned by now that not everyone shares his love of complexity --- or his need for or access to broadband services.

That is irrelevant to this discussion and you know it -- AOL's customer base mostly (in the sense of a majority of their customers) people who simply do not understand that they do not need to pay for AOL in order to use their DSL or cable modem service. This is not a matter of costs or users choosing to stick with dialup; AOL's former executives have basically admitted that most of AOL's customers are paying for a service they neither need nor use:

http://www.techspot.com/news/42121-60-of-aols-profits-come-from-misinformed-customers.html

Did you notice the part where the majority of AOL's profit comes from people who are paying for broadband service? How about the part where AOL's executives are fully aware of that fact?

Especially when you consider this:

http://www.techspot.com/news/42121-60-of-aols-profits-come-from-misinformed-customers.html

We are talking about people who are so helplessly uninformed that they are paying for dialup service despite already paying for broadband. Working for AOL is basically working for a scam that is tricking older, less technically literate people out of their money.