Its not a one step process, you need to figure out what 2-3 processors, graphics cards, etc you are looking at, then do the further research on each-- when buying a car you dont just go looking at performance charts and then choose the car with the biggest bar, hopefully you actually do further research on your prospective purchase.
If you ask nicely @ 4chans/g/ (tech) board, you can occasionally get a really nice (though sometimes questionable) who's who of processors and graphics cards.
Best method Ive found is going to newegg, doing power searches for the contenders in each category (ie, ruling out atom and via cpus, setting price caps), then sorting by best reviews, and if there is a question at that point refer to benchmarks to see what their actual performance is. Makes things way easier when you have a basic idea of what your choices are, rather than pulling out the intel cpu chart and blindly picking one.
My (possibly incorrect?) understanding was that 3-4x 7200rpm drives arent a drop-in replacement for a 15k in all situations-- the slower drives still have a higher rotational latency, do they not? Even if you throw 50 slower drives at the problem, there are still situations where the 15k drive will respond faster simply because of its rotational latency.
If you need 120TB of space, you wont be doing it with only 60x 2TB drives if you have any regard for the integrity of your data (ie, enjoy your massive dataloss).
an unforgivable assault by religious wackos on the rest of us
Wait, which religious wackos are these? Did I miss the recent headline "NEW US LEGISLATION ESTABLISHES 'MARRIAGE'"? Care to tell me when this "unforgiveable" law was actually established?
The problem with that argument is you could use that for any number of arrangements-- claiming for example that marriage should be allowed to be between a person and a rock.
Marriage has a specific definition, with a specific purpose, which, for the most part, has remained pretty much the same throughout most of human history. Now people want to change that, and are insisting that it is the greatest instance of persecution ever committed that the laws havent changed yet. Never mind the fact that the debate isnt centered on ensuring that civil unions have the same rights as marriage,but on redefining a word and its use. Forgive me if im not terribly distressed over the current situation.
Noone has ever been able to explain adequately why there is such a push to call such a union a marriage.
And btw it is NOT exactly the same as racism, 90% of the people on either side of the debate are not out to persecute those in homosexual unions. Making that comparison belittles just how serious the race problem was. The current "travesty" being committed is that homosexuals cannot form a union that is recognized as marriage by the federal government (which AFAIK would be a first in human history)-- oh the horror! Call me when you have an actual problem with homosexuals being denied service at businesses, or physically harassed. Otherwise, cut the hyperbole.
The MOST common attack vector out there (ad-injected PDFs) will work in the most up to date chrome with noscript installed and running as a non-priveleged user. Not to mention, have fun teaching a financial controller how to use noscript.
So somehow you seem to be stuck in the 2005 era mentality where spyware only comes bundled with other software, and porn sites are the primary way of infecting a machine.
NEWS FLASH
Most infections i see in offices these days involve NO explicitly downloaded files, NO programs having been executed, running Google's Chrome (and I can verify that by checking that history hasnt been tampered with). The user wasnt viewing porn, or going to shady sites, or viewing warez-- they were browsing news or facebook or yahoo, and some sleezy ad auto-downloaded an infected pdf, which auto-launched and infected the machine. Often, "least privelege" doesnt even prevent the virus from rooting the whole box-- none of my users have admin or even power-user priveleges.
"Ah, but youre using Adobe's crappy plugin", you exclaim. Ok, except that there are vulerabilities in Foxit as well, and there is no TECHNICAL reason that could not be used as an attack vector. If youre not aware, there is currently a vulnerability allowing the F1 key to allow an infection, and several years back a rendering flaw allowed jpeg files to infect your machine.
You have this outdated mentality that only files ending in exe, pif, com, or scr are capable of infecting your machine, and that you have to be visiting shady sites to come across this crap. And you seem to think that the sites that trick users make it obvious that theyre generated by a browser-- having seen these sites first hand, and tried to instruct users on how to tell the difference, I can tell you that it takes a techie to notice. Even when using chrome, which uses a non-native interface, the "your computer is infected" popups look IDENTICAL to "My Computer", down to the native skinning (and Im not even sure how that is possible from within chrome).
You also mention "not even opening spam"-- are you aware that within certain versions of outlook (I believe 2003?) some emails can have their payload activated by simply pressing "forward" or "delete" (the reading pane might have to be activated).
There is just a ridiculous amount of misinformation out there about what prevents and what causes viruses-- for example audio CDs cannot cause a virus if you just disable autorun. Browsing porn with adblock isnt really a layer of protection-- if someone has a hot 0-day exploit that theyre going to plant on a porn site, theyre probably not going to place it in a div labeled "ADs"; adblock is more likely to protect you on sites like yahoo or facebook. Trusting opensource explicitly is just retarded-- do you actually check out the source and scan it for backdoors? If someone managed to get some obfuscated attack code inserted into firefox, would you REALLY notice? What about that neat little opensource utility with a community of about 30?
Your entire post hinges on the premise that
I don't get viruses because I don't do stupid shit.
which basically asserts that its "stupid shit" to expect a PDF plugin to be safe, or jpegs to be safe, or deleting spam to be safe, or using audio CDs to be safe. What planet are you from?
Because every time they actually attempt to MARKET, they end up confusing end users and techies alike. Do you not remember their seinfeld ads? Or the windows 7 launch party ads?
MS may be good about getting customers, but that is IN SPITE of their marketing attempts.
the notion of a god both describe things which would have a physical reality, thus both require physical evidence.
Ok, so I would love some clarification here...
A) exactly what do you mean by that first statement, that god describes something with a physical reality? Im sure you could make a statement from that that a vast majority of Christians would agree with, but based on your second assertion I do not think that is the case.
B) exactly what kind of evidence would be both appropriate and sufficient to prove God? As has been noted by many fairly clever apologists, a SuperNatural God is outside of (super) the natural. This does not mean He does not act within nature, but it makes it rather difficult to demand the same sort of evidence that you would for a rock. You might as well demand evidence for a miracle (and Im sure that the claim would be that since it can be accounted for by natural causes, clearly nothing outside of nature can have influenced it).
How about we flip the tables around and I DEMAND an explaination for where the ball of matter which caused the big bang came from, and then demand solid incontrovertible evidence to back up your claim. You see the problem, I assume, of demanding evidence IN the universe for something from before it presumably began?
Nope, it's just that established and comfortable civilizations have money to spare to build luxuries like churches.
Yes, as we all know, Paul of Tarsus, that wealthy aristocrat, spent his days establishing churches throughout the Roman empire through using his vast fortune and living in comfort.
your the one claiming god exists, it's up to you to prove his existence. that's how it works,
Wouldnt it get some odd glances if someone was walking towards a sheer cliff, and at his friends' warnings blithely dismissed them with a "YOURE claiming theres a cliff there, its up to YOU to prove its existence?" It really doesnt matter what that person thinks about the cliff; its there whether its proven to that person's satisfaction or not.
There are things that are by their very nature unproveable. God's existence or lack thereof cannot be proven or disproven through scientific experiment; the idea of "super-natural" is that it is "above " or outside of (super) nature, and trying to insist that natural science be used to prove the existence of something outside of nature is about as sensical as a 2 dimensional cartoon character insisting that there cannot be three dimensions because he cannot fathom it.
To steal an analogy from CS Lewis, your insistence that it's your opinion of God that matters is rather like a fly trying to decide whether or not he believes in the elephant in the room. It is not what you think of it that matters.
And on that note I think it is interesting that intelligent people supposedly interested in truth, while insisting that we produce evidence or reason or logical argument for the insistence of God, will all the while ignore a multitude of writings on this very topic by highlyintelligentChristians with well-developed and well-defended arguments. One of the most common tactics I've seen by athiests with an axe to grind is to demand an explanation for one phenomenon claimed by Christianity, and when an adequate defense is given, the argument suddenly shifts to new ground. One rather begins to question the sincerity of the demands for explanation.
Usually when you find people expounding on how X is uncrackable, they completely miss the fact that the crackers wont be aiming at the strongest link. Case in point, the story about the quantum encryption implementation getting broken-- Its all well and good that quantum encryption in theory is unbreakable, but in practice it relies on humans implementing it, and that is where the exploit will occur.
Its not like parts of the game cant be patched to bypass this crap, you know; requiring the CD to be in the player to play the game has never been uncrackable, what makes you think this will be much different? Quoting from the story, "It won't hold them off forever (I think) but it will hold them long enough for the game to get its sales."-- that is, he thinks it WILL be broken, and anyone who thinks it cannot is being foolish. If there is enough interest in a product, no matter what the DRM method, it WILL be broken, be it through faking CD presence, mounting ISOs, generating fake keys / hashes / auth codes, faking a server connection, whatever.
Decent video cards can be had for far less, and drivers are going to be part of your computing experience whether or not you game. You may have your reasons for gaming on consoles, but lets not exaggerate here.
Automatic Updates should not be the equivalent of loading some unstable branch in Linux. We pay MS a lot of money to get this shit right, and they're full of fail.
Which updates would those be, and which users have trust issues with microsoft? I dont think Ive ever heard a user say "boy I sure do wish I could trust MS more so I could run automatic updates!"... in fact, the 2 camps seem to be "automatic updates are off, and user has no idea" and "automatic updates are on, and user has no idea".
And MRT removes the recently popular MBR and atapi.sys rootkits, does it?
How about MS outsources the malware removal to folks who are actually good at it, like say to the combofix guy? How expensive can it be to hire the guy full time to keep combofix updated?
I honestly believe that 95% of the posters on Slashdot either don't have a job or are trolls that live in the sewers because a good majority of you have no idea how WORK works.
I know how work works, and one of our government clients hired us to set up a public-access computer center. Option A was to install deep freeze, antivirus, and tons of other lockdown crap onto each PC and then manage them individually, and hope none of the hard drives failed, or image them and outline the reimaging process for their local IT manager.
Option B was to simply put it all on a terminal server and PXE boot all the machines. Something goes wrong? Pull the plug and reboot it. Thin client dies? Throw another one in there, put the PXE boot floppy in it, and fire it up. Need to deploy software? Stick it on the server. Configuration change? Do it on the server.
I think you vastly underestimate the number of different use cases out there. Perhaps you imagine that every company's IT focus is structured the same; I know of several companies that could get all of their work done with nothing but a web browser (email access, report generation, file modification)-- and i DONT mean internet explorer+activeX.
I also know of a few people who have timeshares, and use them; somehow youve come up with the notion that timeshares are unilaterally bad as well, but then we've already established that all you can see are your own needs and preferences which youve taken to be representative of everyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
Its not a one step process, you need to figure out what 2-3 processors, graphics cards, etc you are looking at, then do the further research on each-- when buying a car you dont just go looking at performance charts and then choose the car with the biggest bar, hopefully you actually do further research on your prospective purchase.
If you ask nicely @ 4chans /g/ (tech) board, you can occasionally get a really nice (though sometimes questionable) who's who of processors and graphics cards.
Best method Ive found is going to newegg, doing power searches for the contenders in each category (ie, ruling out atom and via cpus, setting price caps), then sorting by best reviews, and if there is a question at that point refer to benchmarks to see what their actual performance is. Makes things way easier when you have a basic idea of what your choices are, rather than pulling out the intel cpu chart and blindly picking one.
$100? Why not $60? There are perfectly good AMD and intel processors for well under $100 that perform adequately for 90% of users.
My (possibly incorrect?) understanding was that 3-4x 7200rpm drives arent a drop-in replacement for a 15k in all situations-- the slower drives still have a higher rotational latency, do they not? Even if you throw 50 slower drives at the problem, there are still situations where the 15k drive will respond faster simply because of its rotational latency.
Correct me if i am incorrect.
Maybe the I stands for Illiterate?
If you need 120TB of space, you wont be doing it with only 60x 2TB drives if you have any regard for the integrity of your data (ie, enjoy your massive dataloss).
You dont need to have your specific union called marriage to do so either. There are many heterosexual couples which get along just fine without it.
an unforgivable assault by religious wackos on the rest of us
Wait, which religious wackos are these? Did I miss the recent headline "NEW US LEGISLATION ESTABLISHES 'MARRIAGE'"? Care to tell me when this "unforgiveable" law was actually established?
The problem with that argument is you could use that for any number of arrangements-- claiming for example that marriage should be allowed to be between a person and a rock.
Marriage has a specific definition, with a specific purpose, which, for the most part, has remained pretty much the same throughout most of human history. Now people want to change that, and are insisting that it is the greatest instance of persecution ever committed that the laws havent changed yet. Never mind the fact that the debate isnt centered on ensuring that civil unions have the same rights as marriage,but on redefining a word and its use. Forgive me if im not terribly distressed over the current situation.
Noone has ever been able to explain adequately why there is such a push to call such a union a marriage.
And btw it is NOT exactly the same as racism, 90% of the people on either side of the debate are not out to persecute those in homosexual unions. Making that comparison belittles just how serious the race problem was. The current "travesty" being committed is that homosexuals cannot form a union that is recognized as marriage by the federal government (which AFAIK would be a first in human history)-- oh the horror! Call me when you have an actual problem with homosexuals being denied service at businesses, or physically harassed. Otherwise, cut the hyperbole.
Youd get someone who would crack it simply to troll everyone else and ruin it for the cancer researchers.
This looks kinda purple to me....
[citation needed]
Oh wait, heres a citation, and it says that MSSE performs AT LEAST as well as 90% of the others out there.
The MOST common attack vector out there (ad-injected PDFs) will work in the most up to date chrome with noscript installed and running as a non-priveleged user. Not to mention, have fun teaching a financial controller how to use noscript.
NEWS FLASH
Most infections i see in offices these days involve NO explicitly downloaded files, NO programs having been executed, running Google's Chrome (and I can verify that by checking that history hasnt been tampered with). The user wasnt viewing porn, or going to shady sites, or viewing warez-- they were browsing news or facebook or yahoo, and some sleezy ad auto-downloaded an infected pdf, which auto-launched and infected the machine. Often, "least privelege" doesnt even prevent the virus from rooting the whole box-- none of my users have admin or even power-user priveleges.
"Ah, but youre using Adobe's crappy plugin", you exclaim. Ok, except that there are vulerabilities in Foxit as well, and there is no TECHNICAL reason that could not be used as an attack vector. If youre not aware, there is currently a vulnerability allowing the F1 key to allow an infection, and several years back a rendering flaw allowed jpeg files to infect your machine.
You have this outdated mentality that only files ending in exe, pif, com, or scr are capable of infecting your machine, and that you have to be visiting shady sites to come across this crap. And you seem to think that the sites that trick users make it obvious that theyre generated by a browser-- having seen these sites first hand, and tried to instruct users on how to tell the difference, I can tell you that it takes a techie to notice. Even when using chrome, which uses a non-native interface, the "your computer is infected" popups look IDENTICAL to "My Computer", down to the native skinning (and Im not even sure how that is possible from within chrome).
You also mention "not even opening spam"-- are you aware that within certain versions of outlook (I believe 2003?) some emails can have their payload activated by simply pressing "forward" or "delete" (the reading pane might have to be activated).
There is just a ridiculous amount of misinformation out there about what prevents and what causes viruses-- for example audio CDs cannot cause a virus if you just disable autorun. Browsing porn with adblock isnt really a layer of protection-- if someone has a hot 0-day exploit that theyre going to plant on a porn site, theyre probably not going to place it in a div labeled "ADs"; adblock is more likely to protect you on sites like yahoo or facebook. Trusting opensource explicitly is just retarded-- do you actually check out the source and scan it for backdoors? If someone managed to get some obfuscated attack code inserted into firefox, would you REALLY notice? What about that neat little opensource utility with a community of about 30?
Your entire post hinges on the premise that
I don't get viruses because I don't do stupid shit.
which basically asserts that its "stupid shit" to expect a PDF plugin to be safe, or jpegs to be safe, or deleting spam to be safe, or using audio CDs to be safe. What planet are you from?
The sad thing is I am not sure if you are kidding or not.
Because every time they actually attempt to MARKET, they end up confusing end users and techies alike. Do you not remember their seinfeld ads? Or the windows 7 launch party ads?
MS may be good about getting customers, but that is IN SPITE of their marketing attempts.
the notion of a god both describe things which would have a physical reality, thus both require physical evidence.
Ok, so I would love some clarification here...
A) exactly what do you mean by that first statement, that god describes something with a physical reality? Im sure you could make a statement from that that a vast majority of Christians would agree with, but based on your second assertion I do not think that is the case. B) exactly what kind of evidence would be both appropriate and sufficient to prove God? As has been noted by many fairly clever apologists, a SuperNatural God is outside of (super) the natural. This does not mean He does not act within nature, but it makes it rather difficult to demand the same sort of evidence that you would for a rock. You might as well demand evidence for a miracle (and Im sure that the claim would be that since it can be accounted for by natural causes, clearly nothing outside of nature can have influenced it).
How about we flip the tables around and I DEMAND an explaination for where the ball of matter which caused the big bang came from, and then demand solid incontrovertible evidence to back up your claim. You see the problem, I assume, of demanding evidence IN the universe for something from before it presumably began?
Nope, it's just that established and comfortable civilizations have money to spare to build luxuries like churches.
Yes, as we all know, Paul of Tarsus, that wealthy aristocrat, spent his days establishing churches throughout the Roman empire through using his vast fortune and living in comfort.
Is that how it went?
your the one claiming god exists, it's up to you to prove his existence. that's how it works,
Wouldnt it get some odd glances if someone was walking towards a sheer cliff, and at his friends' warnings blithely dismissed them with a "YOURE claiming theres a cliff there, its up to YOU to prove its existence?" It really doesnt matter what that person thinks about the cliff; its there whether its proven to that person's satisfaction or not.
There are things that are by their very nature unproveable. God's existence or lack thereof cannot be proven or disproven through scientific experiment; the idea of "super-natural" is that it is "above " or outside of (super) nature, and trying to insist that natural science be used to prove the existence of something outside of nature is about as sensical as a 2 dimensional cartoon character insisting that there cannot be three dimensions because he cannot fathom it.
To steal an analogy from CS Lewis, your insistence that it's your opinion of God that matters is rather like a fly trying to decide whether or not he believes in the elephant in the room. It is not what you think of it that matters.
And on that note I think it is interesting that intelligent people supposedly interested in truth, while insisting that we produce evidence or reason or logical argument for the insistence of God, will all the while ignore a multitude of writings on this very topic by highly intelligent Christians with well-developed and well-defended arguments. One of the most common tactics I've seen by athiests with an axe to grind is to demand an explanation for one phenomenon claimed by Christianity, and when an adequate defense is given, the argument suddenly shifts to new ground. One rather begins to question the sincerity of the demands for explanation.
Usually when you find people expounding on how X is uncrackable, they completely miss the fact that the crackers wont be aiming at the strongest link. Case in point, the story about the quantum encryption implementation getting broken-- Its all well and good that quantum encryption in theory is unbreakable, but in practice it relies on humans implementing it, and that is where the exploit will occur.
Its not like parts of the game cant be patched to bypass this crap, you know; requiring the CD to be in the player to play the game has never been uncrackable, what makes you think this will be much different? Quoting from the story, "It won't hold them off forever (I think) but it will hold them long enough for the game to get its sales."-- that is, he thinks it WILL be broken, and anyone who thinks it cannot is being foolish. If there is enough interest in a product, no matter what the DRM method, it WILL be broken, be it through faking CD presence, mounting ISOs, generating fake keys / hashes / auth codes, faking a server connection, whatever.
$200+ dollar video cards
Decent video cards can be had for far less, and drivers are going to be part of your computing experience whether or not you game. You may have your reasons for gaming on consoles, but lets not exaggerate here.
Automatic Updates should not be the equivalent of loading some unstable branch in Linux. We pay MS a lot of money to get this shit right, and they're full of fail.
Which updates would those be, and which users have trust issues with microsoft? I dont think Ive ever heard a user say "boy I sure do wish I could trust MS more so I could run automatic updates!"... in fact, the 2 camps seem to be "automatic updates are off, and user has no idea" and "automatic updates are on, and user has no idea".
And MRT removes the recently popular MBR and atapi.sys rootkits, does it?
How about MS outsources the malware removal to folks who are actually good at it, like say to the combofix guy? How expensive can it be to hire the guy full time to keep combofix updated?
I honestly believe that 95% of the posters on Slashdot either don't have a job or are trolls that live in the sewers because a good majority of you have no idea how WORK works.
I know how work works, and one of our government clients hired us to set up a public-access computer center. Option A was to install deep freeze, antivirus, and tons of other lockdown crap onto each PC and then manage them individually, and hope none of the hard drives failed, or image them and outline the reimaging process for their local IT manager.
Option B was to simply put it all on a terminal server and PXE boot all the machines. Something goes wrong? Pull the plug and reboot it. Thin client dies? Throw another one in there, put the PXE boot floppy in it, and fire it up. Need to deploy software? Stick it on the server. Configuration change? Do it on the server.
I think you vastly underestimate the number of different use cases out there. Perhaps you imagine that every company's IT focus is structured the same; I know of several companies that could get all of their work done with nothing but a web browser (email access, report generation, file modification)-- and i DONT mean internet explorer+activeX.
I also know of a few people who have timeshares, and use them; somehow youve come up with the notion that timeshares are unilaterally bad as well, but then we've already established that all you can see are your own needs and preferences which youve taken to be representative of everyone else.