As someone who maintains a few of these "craplet" install (read: slipstream OEM + sysprep) systems I take offence at your wonderful stereotype.
The "crapwear" we install:
All current windows updates (last count was I think 84 odd since SP2) Sun Java Firefox (great msi installer can be obtained from frontmotion) Ad-aware (personal version, with permission from lavasoft of course) Spybot S&D Nero 6 OEM (since all our new machines have DVD burners now they are so cheap)
It also leaves "install me if you want" style icons for OpenOffice and a couple of free version AV packages.
We make no kickbacks from any of this btw, we do it because our customers deserve to have a good start (even if they have chosen windows, *grins*)
Now, if Microsoft had their way, the only thing in that list we could put on a customers new PC would be their updates, they would get a lovely big pile of disks they need to install, and likely smitfraud or vx2 from the second web site they visit.
Yes it can be used for evil, but I can't believe I am the only one using it for good.
> home servers that will control your entertainment, > television, telephony, and your home automation system
Why the heck would you have a server do all that? The telephony is best left to a good hardware sip compatable unit, TV by your home entertainment PC... as for the server itself (with say a few TB of hdd attached) I usually recomend FreeBSD to most people ^_^
This is of course what I tell my not so geeky friends who want some extra shinys in their house, the average person is still saying "400G HDD? I could never fill that!", how the hell am I supposed to talk them into home automation when they can't get their head around storing all their DVDs on a fileserver so they can watch them whenever they want?/rant off
1. Teleport without error to my own pocket dimension 2. dispell all negative effects on me 3. teleport a friendly cleric in to rez
On a little more realistic scale, how about you make a will?
IN THE EVENT OF DEATH EACH PERSON NAMED WILL RECEIVE THE ENCLOSED USB DRIVE WITH THEIR NAME ON IT... not overly difficult, and there are real legal comebacks if it is processed and you are not in fact deceased, instead of just looking like a tool.
That "degradation" output is yet another thing that the disk can enable or disable the ability to do.
There will come a time when all HD stuff will be HDCP or nothing (exactly how the studios want it), because as "screener" type pre-release pirate movies show, a little/lot of loss of quality does not matter to a lot of people.
Not that you couldn't turn the sound off on most Hollywood movies anyway due to the re-hash nature of most of them these days.
I see about 2-4 a week, mainly jetway, but increasingly asus, gigabyte and other big brands. From what I can tell bad power and bad power supplies (read cheap and light, as in weight that is) increase the speed at which these things fall apart, about 1 in 20 has no visible sign that the caps are damaged, and only un-soldering and testing can prove the problem.
As an interesting extra, asus now has 2 mobos that use no caps on the power regulator, their "Republic of gaming" boards use solid state dc-dc converters.
The 8-phase cap-less Power design demonstrates two hardcore commitments of ROG products: ultimate overclocking capability, and ultimate reliability. The 8-phase power design yields unparalleled superiority in the overclocking arena, while the EL cap-less design removes any worries of capacitor problems once and for all.
Even the 6M claim could be a steaming pile, count the amount of users online at peak time please, not half made accounts, nor anything else, how many people play the game....
Store I work at initially didn't bother, but then a local (as in nation wide only) started doing visa debit cards (cards that use your money like a normal eftpos transaction) and not chargeing any extra fees, of course, they became extremely popular because people were not paying a fee every time they swipe it... the businesses were. Now about 2/3 of our in-store non-cash sales are via credit cards that we are getting charged for.
The old addage "2W of cooling for 1W of computer" holds true, if you keep 3-5 systems inside a house you will either:
A. need to leave an air con on low all the time (variable speed or "inverter" style ones are best)
B. deal with a stinking hot room and the possibility of cooked parts every now and again
100W of cooling seems like a good way to cool 300-500W of CPUs, maybe a heat exchanger (yeah, second pump needed) to keep the nasty chemicals away from the PCs, and of course have current monitoring on the pumps so if they stop (fuse or break) you can have your PCs shut down automagically, a USB keyboard cut down and the power key wired up to some logic will handle that quite well:)
Maybe some stop valves on each PC terminal, and some quick disconnect fittings would be a good idea, and a self bleeding system would be a good idea.
Another thought, what if all the PCs cooling blocks get blocked at once? you are going to have a pump without cooling.... BOOM. Fit a pressure valve and have the cold line lead through to the hot side if head pressure gets over norm:)
Yeah, remember "release candidate" is just a fancy word for open beta so far as Microsoft is concerned. But then, so is any version of windows prior to its first service pack.
As for the filtering, next time drink from the hose!
Hrmm, interesting to see if it will work with nero imagedrive (or other fake drive software with output to files), if so burn to imagedrive, load iso into dvd-decrypter and burn as many as you like without any copy protection at all.
Of course makeing us actually burn them to disks just adds a step or 2 in there, more wasted disks.... worse for the environment....
Wait, you want to be in bright light?!? What are you doing on/. then ^_^
I lost a little brightness with the ones I got (claimed to be as bright as a 75W globe) but that suits me, too much light and I would need to turn the brightness up on my screens:)
Companies should make money, companies that make money and don't hurt the environment should be praised for it however, wish we had a wal-mart in Australia, all our superstores seem intent on hiding CF as far away from customers as possible:/
Don't know what ones you have, the Philips ones I have been using for over 4 years now (no, I have not replaced a single one) give a wonderful pure white light, not sure about camera tainting, but if you want something that is lit for photography, then, well, buy the old filament type globes.
As a side note, the one light I did not change (the outside porch light) has blown about every 3 months since purchase, after 3 years I eventually changed it for a CF light too.
His software lets you pinpoint servers in the anon TOR network, good trick, but ultimately useless (since its the users computer you are trying to find).
Of course the other problem is "giving it a heavy load" define heavy load? is it just a little more than usual? or does it mean you have to heat board (he goes off system clock, maintained by a frequency crystal on the MB), most data centres I would think would be fairly efficient at routing even high heat loads out of enclosures and away from the machine.
And then, whoever he does this to can sue him for DoSing their machine, if they can prove (and its not overly difficult) that heat damages computer parts, he can be nabbed for wilful destruction of property as well, since his whole exercise heats the machine for no other reason than locating it.
Then of course, the only way to "heat up" said computer is to do it through the TOR api, which i am guessing most anon servers are built to handle very well (since that would be their primary task).
Oh, and this of course neglects to take into account that your TOR requests may be handled by many many servers in a cluster, each one heating and skewing at different rates...
Ok, its late on a Saturday afternoon and I can poke that many holes in his trick (even if only one is at all real), gimme a good 2-3 hours with some energy drinks in me and I can find more I am sure ^_^
If he can prove it works (and successfully do something usefull with it) in the real world, then it would be a better story.
Yes, but (unless things have changed a lot since I looked last) US cable providers don't inject ads into the web sites you view.
As an Australian this worries me, because sure as fuck some arsehat over here is going to look at this and think its a great way to double shaft users, I was thinking about upgrading to a 3g phone from my old nokia brick, but now I might not.
Now, we just need them to open the API so we can get a great multiplayer RTS going, a bit of 3d modeling and you can have your city as the battleground, and your friends the units, battle for control of the area!
That one that warns of "your pc is infected with malware" from system tray, known some places as smitfraud others as VX2, now uses several hundred reinfection methods, from infected active script desktop images, to the old favourite, making itself the default program to open files of type.exe
In fact, all those tricks you list are used by one version or the other (or if you are unlucky and get the latest updated version, all of them).
Faster now just to backup data, format and re-install than try and debug each and every method used by the particular version you have, I have tried auto remove tools, all of them end up out of date less than 24hrs after launch (someone is making enough from this thing that paying lots of money to a few programmers is not a problem).
The pay-off is of course when the user clicks that task bar balloon and it installs the "protection racket" software of choice onto your PC, which says it found 4366724 virus' and spyware, and to please pay them for a full licence to remove them. Of course if you pay them, it does NOT remove even its own malware, at least yesteryears organised crime DIDN'T break stuff if you paid.
The real kicker is, the 3-4 times I have seen it infect a pc (had user, on a fresh pc, do what they did when it first happened) it was through an IE "unpatched code execution" bug of the week.
When I tell people to use firefox, and then pre-install it on their new PC/repair, do they think it is a joke?
"Robots are widely used in Japan and are seen as a way to help deal with an aging population."
I forsee robotic seal "wolfpacks" hunting down the elderly with their lasers and vaporizeing them, kinda like running man, lets take a look at "last weeks winners":P
Yes it will actually, this is a bigger pipe, and since the internet is a series of pipes..
But really, if an Aussie ISP (internode for instance) has just upgraded from 3Gb/s to around 6Gb/s, how much would it benefit them if they could just sell off most of the fibre they are using currently and just run one at 107Gb/s?
As for 25MB/s, a newer HDD will easily reach around 40-50MB/s, added with the popularity of NAS and small raid systems most good PCs can suck almost 70MB/s (560Mb/s).
Of course, with Australian broadband being lucky to get (until just recently) above 1.5Mb/s this is rather moot.
Same for my copperhead, right side buttons adjust DPI, pinpoint accurate when needed, able to swing a tank turret around and pop a round in an apc when required:)
As for OP, yes, mice are extremely subjective, buy some extra snacks for your next lan party, and trade them to people to try their mice.
A 7 button mouse for me, with lots of programmable buttons and variable DPI will not suit someone who wants just an accurate mouse with 3 buttons:)
It is interesting to know how many m/s their max is though ^_^
Yup, every pc I have tried vista on has worked fine in s3 mode, maybe they are using dells (or such) with shoddy PSUs without enough juice on the 5vSB?
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As someone who maintains a few of these "craplet" install (read: slipstream OEM + sysprep) systems I take offence at your wonderful stereotype.
The "crapwear" we install:
All current windows updates (last count was I think 84 odd since SP2)
Sun Java
Firefox (great msi installer can be obtained from frontmotion)
Ad-aware (personal version, with permission from lavasoft of course)
Spybot S&D
Nero 6 OEM (since all our new machines have DVD burners now they are so cheap)
It also leaves "install me if you want" style icons for OpenOffice and a couple of free version AV packages.
We make no kickbacks from any of this btw, we do it because our customers deserve to have a good start (even if they have chosen windows, *grins*)
Now, if Microsoft had their way, the only thing in that list we could put on a customers new PC would be their updates, they would get a lovely big pile of disks they need to install, and likely smitfraud or vx2 from the second web site they visit.
Yes it can be used for evil, but I can't believe I am the only one using it for good.
Why the heck would you have a server do all that? The telephony is best left to a good hardware sip compatable unit, TV by your home entertainment PC... as for the server itself (with say a few TB of hdd attached) I usually recomend FreeBSD to most people ^_^
This is of course what I tell my not so geeky friends who want some extra shinys in their house, the average person is still saying "400G HDD? I could never fill that!", how the hell am I supposed to talk them into home automation when they can't get their head around storing all their DVDs on a fileserver so they can watch them whenever they want?
And after all that torture, all that pain and death, everyone who receives the message deletes it as spam....
That's why wills can be modified...
1. Teleport without error to my own pocket dimension
2. dispell all negative effects on me
3. teleport a friendly cleric in to rez
On a little more realistic scale, how about you make a will?
IN THE EVENT OF DEATH EACH PERSON NAMED WILL RECEIVE THE ENCLOSED USB DRIVE WITH THEIR NAME ON IT... not overly difficult, and there are real legal comebacks if it is processed and you are not in fact deceased, instead of just looking like a tool.
That "degradation" output is yet another thing that the disk can enable or disable the ability to do.
There will come a time when all HD stuff will be HDCP or nothing (exactly how the studios want it), because as "screener" type pre-release pirate movies show, a little/lot of loss of quality does not matter to a lot of people.
Not that you couldn't turn the sound off on most Hollywood movies anyway due to the re-hash nature of most of them these days.
As an interesting extra, asus now has 2 mobos that use no caps on the power regulator, their "Republic of gaming" boards use solid state dc-dc converters.
http://www.asus.com.tw/products4.aspx?l1=3&l2=11&
http://www.asus.com.tw/products4.aspx?l1=3&l2=101
From the link...
Even the 6M claim could be a steaming pile, count the amount of users online at peak time please, not half made accounts, nor anything else, how many people play the game....
Yup, same in Australia.
Store I work at initially didn't bother, but then a local (as in nation wide only) started doing visa debit cards (cards that use your money like a normal eftpos transaction) and not chargeing any extra fees, of course, they became extremely popular because people were not paying a fee every time they swipe it... the businesses were. Now about 2/3 of our in-store non-cash sales are via credit cards that we are getting charged for.
The old addage "2W of cooling for 1W of computer" holds true, if you keep 3-5 systems inside a house you will either:
:)
:)
A. need to leave an air con on low all the time (variable speed or "inverter" style ones are best)
B. deal with a stinking hot room and the possibility of cooked parts every now and again
100W of cooling seems like a good way to cool 300-500W of CPUs, maybe a heat exchanger (yeah, second pump needed) to keep the nasty chemicals away from the PCs, and of course have current monitoring on the pumps so if they stop (fuse or break) you can have your PCs shut down automagically, a USB keyboard cut down and the power key wired up to some logic will handle that quite well
Maybe some stop valves on each PC terminal, and some quick disconnect fittings would be a good idea, and a self bleeding system would be a good idea.
Another thought, what if all the PCs cooling blocks get blocked at once? you are going to have a pump without cooling.... BOOM. Fit a pressure valve and have the cold line lead through to the hot side if head pressure gets over norm
Yeah, remember "release candidate" is just a fancy word for open beta so far as Microsoft is concerned. But then, so is any version of windows prior to its first service pack.
As for the filtering, next time drink from the hose!
Hrmm, interesting to see if it will work with nero imagedrive (or other fake drive software with output to files), if so burn to imagedrive, load iso into dvd-decrypter and burn as many as you like without any copy protection at all.
Of course makeing us actually burn them to disks just adds a step or 2 in there, more wasted disks.... worse for the environment....
Wait, you want to be in bright light?!? What are you doing on /. then ^_^
:)
I lost a little brightness with the ones I got (claimed to be as bright as a 75W globe) but that suits me, too much light and I would need to turn the brightness up on my screens
So, the, uh, lightbulb-event-horizon?
:/
Companies should make money, companies that make money and don't hurt the environment should be praised for it however, wish we had a wal-mart in Australia, all our superstores seem intent on hiding CF as far away from customers as possible
Don't know what ones you have, the Philips ones I have been using for over 4 years now (no, I have not replaced a single one) give a wonderful pure white light, not sure about camera tainting, but if you want something that is lit for photography, then, well, buy the old filament type globes.
As a side note, the one light I did not change (the outside porch light) has blown about every 3 months since purchase, after 3 years I eventually changed it for a CF light too.
More like Windows ME
"Same as last version, but look its shi... oh crap, it crashed again"
Close, but no cigar.
His software lets you pinpoint servers in the anon TOR network, good trick, but ultimately useless (since its the users computer you are trying to find).
Of course the other problem is "giving it a heavy load" define heavy load? is it just a little more than usual? or does it mean you have to heat board (he goes off system clock, maintained by a frequency crystal on the MB), most data centres I would think would be fairly efficient at routing even high heat loads out of enclosures and away from the machine.
And then, whoever he does this to can sue him for DoSing their machine, if they can prove (and its not overly difficult) that heat damages computer parts, he can be nabbed for wilful destruction of property as well, since his whole exercise heats the machine for no other reason than locating it.
Then of course, the only way to "heat up" said computer is to do it through the TOR api, which i am guessing most anon servers are built to handle very well (since that would be their primary task).
Oh, and this of course neglects to take into account that your TOR requests may be handled by many many servers in a cluster, each one heating and skewing at different rates...
Ok, its late on a Saturday afternoon and I can poke that many holes in his trick (even if only one is at all real), gimme a good 2-3 hours with some energy drinks in me and I can find more I am sure ^_^
If he can prove it works (and successfully do something usefull with it) in the real world, then it would be a better story.
Yes, but (unless things have changed a lot since I looked last) US cable providers don't inject ads into the web sites you view.
As an Australian this worries me, because sure as fuck some arsehat over here is going to look at this and think its a great way to double shaft users, I was thinking about upgrading to a 3g phone from my old nokia brick, but now I might not.
Now, we just need them to open the API so we can get a great multiplayer RTS going, a bit of 3d modeling and you can have your city as the battleground, and your friends the units, battle for control of the area!
/raises glass
.exe
That one that warns of "your pc is infected with malware" from system tray, known some places as smitfraud others as VX2, now uses several hundred reinfection methods, from infected active script desktop images, to the old favourite, making itself the default program to open files of type
In fact, all those tricks you list are used by one version or the other (or if you are unlucky and get the latest updated version, all of them).
Faster now just to backup data, format and re-install than try and debug each and every method used by the particular version you have, I have tried auto remove tools, all of them end up out of date less than 24hrs after launch (someone is making enough from this thing that paying lots of money to a few programmers is not a problem).
The pay-off is of course when the user clicks that task bar balloon and it installs the "protection racket" software of choice onto your PC, which says it found 4366724 virus' and spyware, and to please pay them for a full licence to remove them. Of course if you pay them, it does NOT remove even its own malware, at least yesteryears organised crime DIDN'T break stuff if you paid.
The real kicker is, the 3-4 times I have seen it infect a pc (had user, on a fresh pc, do what they did when it first happened) it was through an IE "unpatched code execution" bug of the week.
When I tell people to use firefox, and then pre-install it on their new PC/repair, do they think it is a joke?
Hrmm, i read the article a little differantly..
:P
"Robots are widely used in Japan and are seen as a way to help deal with an aging population."
I forsee robotic seal "wolfpacks" hunting down the elderly with their lasers and vaporizeing them, kinda like running man, lets take a look at "last weeks winners"
Yes it will actually, this is a bigger pipe, and since the internet is a series of pipes..
But really, if an Aussie ISP (internode for instance) has just upgraded from 3Gb/s to around 6Gb/s, how much would it benefit them if they could just sell off most of the fibre they are using currently and just run one at 107Gb/s?
As for 25MB/s, a newer HDD will easily reach around 40-50MB/s, added with the popularity of NAS and small raid systems most good PCs can suck almost 70MB/s (560Mb/s).
Of course, with Australian broadband being lucky to get (until just recently) above 1.5Mb/s this is rather moot.
Same for my copperhead, right side buttons adjust DPI, pinpoint accurate when needed, able to swing a tank turret around and pop a round in an apc when required :)
:)
As for OP, yes, mice are extremely subjective, buy some extra snacks for your next lan party, and trade them to people to try their mice.
A 7 button mouse for me, with lots of programmable buttons and variable DPI will not suit someone who wants just an accurate mouse with 3 buttons
It is interesting to know how many m/s their max is though ^_^
Yup, every pc I have tried vista on has worked fine in s3 mode, maybe they are using dells (or such) with shoddy PSUs without enough juice on the 5vSB?
And you think they will pass the cost saving onto the consumer?
Mod parent funny please ^_^