First VIA drops Chipsets, and now Abit drops boards. Couldn't happen to a better MB manufacturer.
Worst board I ever owned was an Abit KT7A. To this day I'm convinced that Abit Golden Sampled the reviews of that board.
My KT7A was blue screen after Kernel Panic after lockup, And half the time, it would corrupt the drive even though it would pass every hard drive, Processor and Memory test known to man. Abit Finally put out a BIOS that removed the suck from it, but it was pretty much EOL when it came out and cut 1/4th of it's speed. Finally I said the Hell with it, got a NForce based MSI K7N420 and all of the crashes magically disappeared even when pushed to it's absolute bandwidth limit. Never looked back from there.
Another friend of mine bought an Abit board (I can't remember what it was, it was a socket 370 MB) and it wouldn't boot from a floppy disk or CDROM but would boot from a hard disk. RAM and CPU tested OK in an Gigabyte board, so we RMA'd the board and got another one with the exact same problem. Took them 4 months to update the bios for it, and good luck installing the BIOS update when it can't boot from 2 of the three boot medias. Good thing he had a internal zip drive handy.
Only Board they had worth anything was the BE6, and I'd take an Aopen AX6BC over that board anyday. The AX6BC line is still the most stable board line I've ever seen. I've seen lightning strikes take out most components in a system but the AX6BC still survived.
Same thing here. Nothing but Problems with K6 and Athlon based VIA Chipsets. Especially the KT7A. To this day I'm convinced that Abit Golden Sampled the reviews of that board.
My KT7A was blue screen after Kernel Panic after lockup, And half the time, it would corrupt the drive even though it would pass every hard drive, Processor and Memory test known to man. Abit Finally put out a BIOS that removed the suck from it, but it was pretty much EOL when it came out and cut 1/4th of it's speed. Finally I said the Hell with it, got a NForce based K7N420 and all of the crashes magically disappeared even when pushed to it's absolute bandwidth limit. Never looked back from there.
I still say to this day that Nvidia made AMD what it is today, because no Business would dare touch an Athlon when there was no 1st party chipsets and all the other 3rd party chipsets (VIA, ALI, SIS) sucked big time. Nvidia was the first Chipset to really show off what an AMD was really capable of stability wise, of course back then Nvidia had a rock solid Driver staff. I'm not too sure about that now.
The last VIA I touched was a Mini-ITX board, and it was surprisingly stable, but I didn't really push it to crash Like I did with other boards. Maybe they finally worked the bugs out, or maybe it's for the best for them to focus on the low power market. Now if they would just make a complete "System on a chip" they would be all set.
If the Laptop has a TPM chip (many Lenovo Systems do and some Dell's I beleive) Go with something that takes advantage of that hardware. Bitlocker and PGP support it. I'm not too sure about Truecrypt.
Also, if the Hard drive and laptop supports setting a password (Almost all modern drives do. Most laptops do as well) Set a password. Especially if the Drive itself supports native encryption. This adds an extra layer of protection over software Data encryption. Also keep in mind that Native Hard drive encryption is OS agnostic and is usually faster and better overall than many software encryption packages.
Although keep in mind that every protection layer adds more complexity and reduces speed. This is especially true when it comes to data recovery. Make sure your boss understands that if something happens to the laptop, especially Hard Drive damage, The Data on the drive should be considered unsalvagable. Keeping a backup in a secure location (Say a Safe in the Main office also encrypted) is a very good idea.
Considering that TDK broke the 2nd Week record, I'd say that it pretty much shoots down that "piracy kills sales" theory.
Another thing. I saw a Pirate version of TDK after seeing it the first day. I can say without any doubt that the Pirate version ruins this movie. If you watched this movie pirated, you'll probably think it sucks. It just doesn't work the same as it does in the theater, since they use detailed shots and surround sound extensively to build up tension and effect, especially in the shock moments of the film. Basically, this movie deserves your money, so do yourself a favor and watch it in a Theater.
The three things that is killing palm
on
What Happened To Palm?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
1) Spinning off the Palm software division. One of the reasons Palm worked so well was that it's hardware and software were tightly integrated. Removing that integration turned them into just another PDA/Smartphone manufacturer with nothing different to offer. Add to that a hardware third party (the only reason they split in the first place) that basically imploded and a buyout of the software division, and you got a disaster on your hands.
2) Axing off Hotsync Server. I had more execs wanting this function than I could count just so their secretaries could update their calendars on the fly. So when they couldn't get it because Palm decided it wasn't important enough, they switched to Outlook, since Exchange could share calendars over the network. Add to that the frustration of getting a Palm to sync with Outlook without duplicating something and you got a recipe to can your palm with something that syncs right, like Windows mobile or RIM.
3) Switching from Dragonball to Xscale. My Kyocera 6035 smartphone is over 6 years old. Personally, I usually get 7 days use out of my phone before I have to recharge it, and thats with a 6 year old battery. New it used to go for 2-3 weeks with moderate usage. Show me a Palm phone that could get 3-5 days without a charge out of the box. The Dragonball processors were not the fastest chips out there, but were unbeatable in the energy usage department. When Palm switched, the devices got fatter, bigger, and sucked battery life like water, All without offering a big benefit vs older Palms. I guess you now got more memory and more functionality available but what difference does it make to the exec that just using it for his calendar and contacts? All he knows is that his palm's battery lasts 1/4 of the amount of time of his old m515 and is twice as thick. So he tosses the palm to his secretary and goes out and gets that blackberry that everyone is talking about.
If F-secure had an OSX version of their security products I would agree with you, but at this time they do not offer any protection for OSX.
I know because we looked into it recently for students that have Macs on campus (we Use F-Secure Client Security here) and they flat out told us there is no F-Secure for OSX nor would there be, because it makes no business sense to spend the resources to build Protection for OSX when Apple itself tells it's userbase to (foolishly) not worry about viruses because OSX doesn't get them.
If you're looking for a virus company with an OSX agenda, look at Symantec, McAfee, Sophos, or Securemac, which are the few AV vendors still making Antivirus products for the mac.
OSX is so secure It's impossible for Safari to go a malicious Website and download a malicious installer to your Mac's "downloads" directory disquised as a legitimate installer (say Firefox 3) and remotely root your box using this local exploit and install a rootkit or virus when you confuse it with the legitimate installer.
If your looking for a great subnotebook at a good price but not looking for high specs, then go for a Thinkpad 240
They usually go on ebay for around $100. Spec wise, They have anywhere from a celeron 300 to a pentium 500. and can officially support 192MB of RAM and unofficially 320MB of ram using speical low density 256MB sticks.
Caveats are they are very hard to get OS'es on them due to the fact they don't support usb booting or have a CDROM. Supposedly they can boot from a PCMCIA CDROM but I never tried. If you like floppies and know enough DOS to detect a USB CDROM, it's not that difficult to get Windows XP on it. Linux is a pain to install without another laptop at your disposal, but it's doable and runs well on it. I just wish someone would make a linux install floppy that would detect usb devices and boot from whatever drive it finds. it would make this install infinitely easier.
The best part is they pull off the Macbook Air Envelope trick as well. It's great going to apple guys, pull it out of an envelope and say "Way to catch up to IBM, and it only took you guys 7 years. It isn't going to take 7 yeart to add a cdrom and a few more USB ports like the X300 is it?"
If scientists are going to start blaming a group of people over global warming, here's my satirial chance.
1) Obese people consume 18% more food energy, which means that they consume 18% more Cows then the rest of the population. 2) Cows are a powerful source of Greenhouse gas. Google "Cow Emissions" to be enlightened. 3) In 2008, there are roughtly 96.7 million cows in the US alone, since Fat people consume 18% more than average, assuming that half of these said cows are eaten (48.35 million), Fat people alone will eat roughtly 8.703 million more cows per year then the average people. 4) A Cow roughtly produces 25 to 130 gallons of methane a day, which comes out to 9,125 to 47,450 gallons of methane per year. Since fat people consume 8.7 million cows per year, Fat people alone save the planet from roughly 79 to 412 billion gallons of methane per year. 5) Vegetarians do not eat cows, therefore they do not do their part in reducing greenhouse emitting cow gas. In fact, Vegetarians eat plants. plants not only produce oxygen, but also absorb Carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. 6) luckily, Fat people pick up the slack for the vegetarians by eating the Vegetarians' share of cows.
So in conclusion, Fat people are saving the environment by eating cows where Vegetarians are destroying the environment by eating plants.
They must of read my post from a few months back and started to implement it. Now all they have to do is ban technology and electricity and they'll be set.
At least they started to make amends to the music and movie industries, but they have a long way to go.
Using a 1-900 forces a US site user to be in the US. So all that India Captcha farming the spammer's got doesn't do you any good if they're not in the US. And to setup phone routing so that those Indian captcha farmers can call the US isn't going to be cheap either.
other countries, such as Australia, UK, Japan, ETC would have their own phone registration system tied to their country code, and if the country doesn't have a pay per call system, just use a regular number and you'll have to keep a more vigilant eye out for registration abuse.
Just to add to the GP. It doesn't have to be 1-900. It's just that 1-900 assures that there's a cost involved which deters mass registration (especially if the chances of success are low like in these cases). 1-800 would cost the host company too much and have no bulk penalties to the spammer. a standard phone number would be cheaper to the host and could have long distance charges and the like to have a cost, but with cheap unlimited calling plans and VOIP it would be the same as 1-800 to those spammers. SMS is also an option since most people pay for SMS (And it should stay that way for this very reason even if it's reduced to just $.01 an SMS. The Second SMS goes unlimited free, say hello to spam.), just not as secure since you can't talk to a computer to say what the picture was. although texting it would probably work well.
I'm actually surpried no one uses this. Google was close with their SMS registration but this could work just as well.
when you register, it gives you 2 easy to read captcha's (a verification number and password if you will), a simple picture and a 1-900 number thats $1.00 a call. When you dial it, it asks you to enter your verification number. then it asks for the password, which you would have to decode from the phone. (IE the password is vndka and you would have to enter 86352) finally it asks you what the picture is and you would have to say it (if the picture is a cat, you would say Cat, the 1-900 number then says "did you say cat?" in which you say yes or no. if it's a cat you're registered if not it says sorry, asks you to refresh your registration page to get a new challenge password and picture and hangs up.
The big advantage to this is it would be hard to script the phone conversation since you can change the prompt timing with random hold times and other voice information, and no spammer would want to pay the $1.00 a registration via script especially if there's any chance the script could fail. Of course a problem with this is a bot using your PC to ram up your phone bill, But it's not anything new in the spyware business since dialers have been around for years and if their already in your box dialing, they might as well skip spamming altogether and have you dial an offshore 1-900 in the middle of the night for $99.95 a minute.
There are many reasons soundstorm died. But there are two major ones.
1) very few MB manufactures did soundstorm right. Most of them tacked on cheap DSP's which would negate soundstorm quality. Fortunately if you had a digital speaker system you could get around this issue and talk directly to the MCP-T.
2) Nvidia didn't cover themselves. Basically they licenced part of their technology from Sensaura. Creative saw this so they did what they do best and bought them. This halted development of soundstorm drivers and eventually soundstorm itself. if Nvidia bought out Sensaura I doubt soundstorm would have been shelved. Apparently they learned something since they didn't mess around with Aegia once Intel bought Havok and basically killed off GPU software accelerated physics. They bought Aegia for it's software and are integrating it into their cards now.
For a *nix environment, even if malware got in through the user's browser, it still needs an escalation of privleges to do real bad harm. Without it, the damage is largely contained to the data in the user's directory.
And that's exactly what virus writers want you to believe.
So all they have to do is make Virus X, Which happily infects your Mac from your userspace directory and checks a botnet every day or so for marching orders. From there they can Spam us, or DOS us, or wait until they find a local permission escalation exploit in OSX, download a rootkit installer and 0wn you, or whatever other form of Internet mayhem you can think of, all from your user account.
Just because it's doesn't have full access to your system doesn't mean it can't do damage.
Most likely if FIOS is around, the local Cable Co. is probably price matching Verizon's FIOS Service. Possibly beating Verizon's price. Although be warned. Depending on the Cable Co, it could be worse service than what Verizon is giving you.
Verizon's tech service has been going downhill for awile. My first experience with it was they couldn't hook up a friends house for some reason because he's close to a state border. After dicking with Verizon for two months of appointment cancellations and broken activation promises he called the Cable Co. (in this case, Adelphia) and had Broadband in his house in three days. Then when he canceled the DSL service he never received, they charged him for two months of service and a breach of contract for service he never received.
Another example is two weeks ago I was working on a PC who already had Verizon. He was on the basic plan and I recommended that he upgrade to the power plan. He called them and asked for the upgrade from basic to power and they said it would take a few days (Vs Time Warner's and Armstrong's "call to upgrade and get the speed instantly" support) A few days later, he gets an e-mail that welcomes him to Verizon and happily tells him that he's now paying the power plan price for basic tier service. In other words. Verizon happily raised his bill $10 a month for the exact same level of DSL service he was already receiving. Thankfully he got that strengthened out after talking to a billing rep during his work hour since billing closes at 5PM and tech support had no clue what was going on.
If fabless companies are so worried about overseas manufacturing, then why not use a fab that is inside the country your company resides in? That way, you can sue the living hell out of them when they do sell / steal your plans.
I would think that building the Chips in the US or Europe where the fabs are more reputable would be a better cost effective solution than sending it to an orient fab and watch it pump out pirate chips left and right, or relying on some sort of activation scheme that these pirate hardware companies would most likely reverse engineer out of them anyway.
Frankly, the point is to sell a few mobo's based on a gimmick, because it's not any more green than most of their other boards.
Green wise, This technology, if put in use on all the boards MSI made (In the thousands if not millions) and the power that was saved from each and every board (vs a cooling fan) was magically combined into one source, might save enough power vs a chipset fan to possibly power a single two story house at least and a 10 house block at most. When you factor in that most of MSI boards already have very efficient passive fan free cooling systems on them, the impact is even smaller.
That being said, what makes this tech interesting is that it's performance and power is based on the chip temperature itself, When the chip is hotter, it's running faster and when it cooler the fan either runs slower or stops. This means that the temperature of the chip stays more even during use, which would extend the life of the board and chip since there is less heat expansion going on vs a electric fan. The second advantage is that this system also would work when the computer is turned off, which would cool the chip and remove residue heat build up back down to a safe level even when there is no power to the PC. Third, if this could be scaled to laptop level cooling solutions, would benefit laptops greatly since there is no Power draw to cool the laptop. a single watt saved on laptop cooling should result in longer battery life.
it doesn't matter. Have a computer lab in the college? well that can be used to download music or burn CD's or even make an MP3 file using the sound card's line in jack. you better have that policy in place to spy / restrict that lab to only authorized personnel. Of course I guess you can disable the Internet and sound card and CDROM's and USB ports so that it's basicially a dumb terminal, or use DOS 6.22 (Can't use Windows. Sound recorder is there and it makes it easy to pirate. Maybe Windows 386 would work.)
And remember. They can pirate with that Stereo in their room. So once they do pirate the music using their liability free network connection, they can burn it to CD and play it in their stereos and BAM! Everyone in that Dorm that heard it is a pirate! You better have a policy to arrest that guy, since he used your power grid to broadcast his pirate booty to the entire dorm. Maybe fine the entire dorm since someone may hum or whistle it down the hall.
Frankly there's only two ways you can stop piracy from happening on college grounds.
1) Buy everyone in the school music accounts to download music thus rasing the tutition, Which enrages students and punishes students who prefer going to buy their music at music stores, and will ultimetly result in retention levels dropping in an already competitive market as it is.
Or
2) The Amish Method. Cut the internet cable since there's nothing on the market that can assure 100% piracy free internet, ban all computers since they can make MP3's using a line in jack and a CD player, and ultimely ban electric power from everywhere on campus, since they could possibly use electricy to copy a tape with a boombox or operate an electric guitar.
At least the english, math and history professors would be happy with #2, since calculators would be banned and people would have to be forced to write their thesis's on parchment. Of course, Victrolas would have to be banned too, but it's hard finding a wind up one these days. Maybe they'll come back in vogue.
Generally, I liked the premise of this film, but the shaky cam literialy killed it for me. After 45-60 minutes of non stop camera going in every direction possible, you just can't watch it without losing your head, and you tend to just zone out and listen at the rest of the film. One of my friends literaly couldn't breathe for a few minutes due to the vertigo.
At some point they should have made him turn on steadycam or maybe they should have made Hud a Video Camera professional by trade to explain some more camera steadiness in the film.
It wouldn't surprise me if they make a Cloverfield "Vertigo free edition" When it comes out on DVD and hopefully if they make a sequel, they'll use a news crew team to tell the story. At least I would hope their camera shots would be less all over the place.
On an kinda off topic note, this is why I like full size video cameras over handheld ones. The full size camers were infinetly easier to keep steady over the handheld ones. and with today's tech they could be a lot lighter and easier to use. (not to mention hold a full size hard drive or DVD) At least they make the sholder mounts for the handheld ones I guess.
Back in September when we adopted Office 2007 where I work, I was concerned that this would be a big problem, since office 2007 does the same thing and 2003 SP3 just adds that functionality to 2003.
After 3 months, I can say that we ran into this problem 1 time. That's pretty good considering that many of the college professors have documents dating back over 10-15 years. In fact this particular professor wanted to open this DOS Word 3 document to re-import it into a newer document he already had that he accidentally deleted some the original text from.
Opera doesn't care about Bloat. they just want to be integrated even though no other OS forces this on it's users.
Simply put, third party app developers aren't going to be happy with MS until they implement some sort of Marketplace / Ubuntu Software catalog like functionality, where people can search and automatically install software just by clicking a checkmark. And even then, they'll flip out because "their" Icon isn't already there or MS didn't allow them to join, ETC.
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First VIA drops Chipsets, and now Abit drops boards. Couldn't happen to a better MB manufacturer.
Worst board I ever owned was an Abit KT7A. To this day I'm convinced that Abit Golden Sampled the reviews of that board.
My KT7A was blue screen after Kernel Panic after lockup, And half the time, it would corrupt the drive even though it would pass every hard drive, Processor and Memory test known to man. Abit Finally put out a BIOS that removed the suck from it, but it was pretty much EOL when it came out and cut 1/4th of it's speed. Finally I said the Hell with it, got a NForce based MSI K7N420 and all of the crashes magically disappeared even when pushed to it's absolute bandwidth limit. Never looked back from there.
Another friend of mine bought an Abit board (I can't remember what it was, it was a socket 370 MB) and it wouldn't boot from a floppy disk or CDROM but would boot from a hard disk. RAM and CPU tested OK in an Gigabyte board, so we RMA'd the board and got another one with the exact same problem. Took them 4 months to update the bios for it, and good luck installing the BIOS update when it can't boot from 2 of the three boot medias. Good thing he had a internal zip drive handy.
Only Board they had worth anything was the BE6, and I'd take an Aopen AX6BC over that board anyday. The AX6BC line is still the most stable board line I've ever seen. I've seen lightning strikes take out most components in a system but the AX6BC still survived.
Same thing here. Nothing but Problems with K6 and Athlon based VIA Chipsets. Especially the KT7A. To this day I'm convinced that Abit Golden Sampled the reviews of that board.
My KT7A was blue screen after Kernel Panic after lockup, And half the time, it would corrupt the drive even though it would pass every hard drive, Processor and Memory test known to man. Abit Finally put out a BIOS that removed the suck from it, but it was pretty much EOL when it came out and cut 1/4th of it's speed. Finally I said the Hell with it, got a NForce based K7N420 and all of the crashes magically disappeared even when pushed to it's absolute bandwidth limit. Never looked back from there.
I still say to this day that Nvidia made AMD what it is today, because no Business would dare touch an Athlon when there was no 1st party chipsets and all the other 3rd party chipsets (VIA, ALI, SIS) sucked big time. Nvidia was the first Chipset to really show off what an AMD was really capable of stability wise, of course back then Nvidia had a rock solid Driver staff. I'm not too sure about that now.
The last VIA I touched was a Mini-ITX board, and it was surprisingly stable, but I didn't really push it to crash Like I did with other boards. Maybe they finally worked the bugs out, or maybe it's for the best for them to focus on the low power market. Now if they would just make a complete "System on a chip" they would be all set.
If the Laptop has a TPM chip (many Lenovo Systems do and some Dell's I beleive) Go with something that takes advantage of that hardware. Bitlocker and PGP support it. I'm not too sure about Truecrypt.
Also, if the Hard drive and laptop supports setting a password (Almost all modern drives do. Most laptops do as well) Set a password. Especially if the Drive itself supports native encryption. This adds an extra layer of protection over software Data encryption. Also keep in mind that Native Hard drive encryption is OS agnostic and is usually faster and better overall than many software encryption packages.
Although keep in mind that every protection layer adds more complexity and reduces speed. This is especially true when it comes to data recovery. Make sure your boss understands that if something happens to the laptop, especially Hard Drive damage, The Data on the drive should be considered unsalvagable. Keeping a backup in a secure location (Say a Safe in the Main office also encrypted) is a very good idea.
Considering that TDK broke the 2nd Week record, I'd say that it pretty much shoots down that "piracy kills sales" theory.
Another thing. I saw a Pirate version of TDK after seeing it the first day. I can say without any doubt that the Pirate version ruins this movie. If you watched this movie pirated, you'll probably think it sucks. It just doesn't work the same as it does in the theater, since they use detailed shots and surround sound extensively to build up tension and effect, especially in the shock moments of the film. Basically, this movie deserves your money, so do yourself a favor and watch it in a Theater.
1) Spinning off the Palm software division. One of the reasons Palm worked so well was that it's hardware and software were tightly integrated. Removing that integration turned them into just another PDA/Smartphone manufacturer with nothing different to offer. Add to that a hardware third party (the only reason they split in the first place) that basically imploded and a buyout of the software division, and you got a disaster on your hands.
2) Axing off Hotsync Server. I had more execs wanting this function than I could count just so their secretaries could update their calendars on the fly. So when they couldn't get it because Palm decided it wasn't important enough, they switched to Outlook, since Exchange could share calendars over the network. Add to that the frustration of getting a Palm to sync with Outlook without duplicating something and you got a recipe to can your palm with something that syncs right, like Windows mobile or RIM.
3) Switching from Dragonball to Xscale. My Kyocera 6035 smartphone is over 6 years old. Personally, I usually get 7 days use out of my phone before I have to recharge it, and thats with a 6 year old battery. New it used to go for 2-3 weeks with moderate usage. Show me a Palm phone that could get 3-5 days without a charge out of the box. The Dragonball processors were not the fastest chips out there, but were unbeatable in the energy usage department. When Palm switched, the devices got fatter, bigger, and sucked battery life like water, All without offering a big benefit vs older Palms. I guess you now got more memory and more functionality available but what difference does it make to the exec that just using it for his calendar and contacts? All he knows is that his palm's battery lasts 1/4 of the amount of time of his old m515 and is twice as thick. So he tosses the palm to his secretary and goes out and gets that blackberry that everyone is talking about.
If F-secure had an OSX version of their security products I would agree with you, but at this time they do not offer any protection for OSX.
I know because we looked into it recently for students that have Macs on campus (we Use F-Secure Client Security here) and they flat out told us there is no F-Secure for OSX nor would there be, because it makes no business sense to spend the resources to build Protection for OSX when Apple itself tells it's userbase to (foolishly) not worry about viruses because OSX doesn't get them.
If you're looking for a virus company with an OSX agenda, look at Symantec, McAfee, Sophos, or Securemac, which are the few AV vendors still making Antivirus products for the mac.
It's a good thing that it's only a local exploit.
OSX is so secure It's impossible for Safari to go a malicious Website and download a malicious installer to your Mac's "downloads" directory disquised as a legitimate installer (say Firefox 3) and remotely root your box using this local exploit and install a rootkit or virus when you confuse it with the legitimate installer.
Oh wait...
If hollywood has taught me anything, we'll just get another Arnold Schwarzenegger.
At least then he can Terminate and Governate at the same time.
If your looking for a great subnotebook at a good price but not looking for high specs, then go for a Thinkpad 240
They usually go on ebay for around $100. Spec wise, They have anywhere from a celeron 300 to a pentium 500. and can officially support 192MB of RAM and unofficially 320MB of ram using speical low density 256MB sticks.
Caveats are they are very hard to get OS'es on them due to the fact they don't support usb booting or have a CDROM. Supposedly they can boot from a PCMCIA CDROM but I never tried. If you like floppies and know enough DOS to detect a USB CDROM, it's not that difficult to get Windows XP on it. Linux is a pain to install without another laptop at your disposal, but it's doable and runs well on it. I just wish someone would make a linux install floppy that would detect usb devices and boot from whatever drive it finds. it would make this install infinitely easier.
The best part is they pull off the Macbook Air Envelope trick as well. It's great going to apple guys, pull it out of an envelope and say "Way to catch up to IBM, and it only took you guys 7 years. It isn't going to take 7 yeart to add a cdrom and a few more USB ports like the X300 is it?"
If scientists are going to start blaming a group of people over global warming, here's my satirial chance.
1) Obese people consume 18% more food energy, which means that they consume 18% more Cows then the rest of the population.
2) Cows are a powerful source of Greenhouse gas. Google "Cow Emissions" to be enlightened.
3) In 2008, there are roughtly 96.7 million cows in the US alone, since Fat people consume 18% more than average, assuming that half of these said cows are eaten (48.35 million), Fat people alone will eat roughtly 8.703 million more cows per year then the average people.
4) A Cow roughtly produces 25 to 130 gallons of methane a day, which comes out to 9,125 to 47,450 gallons of methane per year. Since fat people consume 8.7 million cows per year, Fat people alone save the planet from roughly 79 to 412 billion gallons of methane per year.
5) Vegetarians do not eat cows, therefore they do not do their part in reducing greenhouse emitting cow gas. In fact, Vegetarians eat plants. plants not only produce oxygen, but also absorb Carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.
6) luckily, Fat people pick up the slack for the vegetarians by eating the Vegetarians' share of cows.
So in conclusion, Fat people are saving the environment by eating cows where Vegetarians are destroying the environment by eating plants.
Isn't science funny!
If its The Microsoft Matrix" I'd watch it.
They must of read my post from a few months back and started to implement it. Now all they have to do is ban technology and electricity and they'll be set.
At least they started to make amends to the music and movie industries, but they have a long way to go.
Exactly. Thats the beauty of this system.
Using a 1-900 forces a US site user to be in the US. So all that India Captcha farming the spammer's got doesn't do you any good if they're not in the US. And to setup phone routing so that those Indian captcha farmers can call the US isn't going to be cheap either.
other countries, such as Australia, UK, Japan, ETC would have their own phone registration system tied to their country code, and if the country doesn't have a pay per call system, just use a regular number and you'll have to keep a more vigilant eye out for registration abuse.
Just to add to the GP. It doesn't have to be 1-900. It's just that 1-900 assures that there's a cost involved which deters mass registration (especially if the chances of success are low like in these cases). 1-800 would cost the host company too much and have no bulk penalties to the spammer. a standard phone number would be cheaper to the host and could have long distance charges and the like to have a cost, but with cheap unlimited calling plans and VOIP it would be the same as 1-800 to those spammers. SMS is also an option since most people pay for SMS (And it should stay that way for this very reason even if it's reduced to just $.01 an SMS. The Second SMS goes unlimited free, say hello to spam.), just not as secure since you can't talk to a computer to say what the picture was. although texting it would probably work well.
I'm actually surpried no one uses this. Google was close with their SMS registration but this could work just as well.
when you register, it gives you 2 easy to read captcha's (a verification number and password if you will), a simple picture and a 1-900 number thats $1.00 a call. When you dial it, it asks you to enter your verification number. then it asks for the password, which you would have to decode from the phone. (IE the password is vndka and you would have to enter 86352) finally it asks you what the picture is and you would have to say it (if the picture is a cat, you would say Cat, the 1-900 number then says "did you say cat?" in which you say yes or no. if it's a cat you're registered if not it says sorry, asks you to refresh your registration page to get a new challenge password and picture and hangs up.
The big advantage to this is it would be hard to script the phone conversation since you can change the prompt timing with random hold times and other voice information, and no spammer would want to pay the $1.00 a registration via script especially if there's any chance the script could fail. Of course a problem with this is a bot using your PC to ram up your phone bill, But it's not anything new in the spyware business since dialers have been around for years and if their already in your box dialing, they might as well skip spamming altogether and have you dial an offshore 1-900 in the middle of the night for $99.95 a minute.
There are many reasons soundstorm died. But there are two major ones.
1) very few MB manufactures did soundstorm right. Most of them tacked on cheap DSP's which would negate soundstorm quality. Fortunately if you had a digital speaker system you could get around this issue and talk directly to the MCP-T.
2) Nvidia didn't cover themselves. Basically they licenced part of their technology from Sensaura. Creative saw this so they did what they do best and bought them. This halted development of soundstorm drivers and eventually soundstorm itself. if Nvidia bought out Sensaura I doubt soundstorm would have been shelved. Apparently they learned something since they didn't mess around with Aegia once Intel bought Havok and basically killed off GPU software accelerated physics. They bought Aegia for it's software and are integrating it into their cards now.
For a *nix environment, even if malware got in through the user's browser, it still needs an escalation of privleges to do real bad harm. Without it, the damage is largely contained to the data in the user's directory.
And that's exactly what virus writers want you to believe.
So all they have to do is make Virus X, Which happily infects your Mac from your userspace directory and checks a botnet every day or so for marching orders. From there they can Spam us, or DOS us, or wait until they find a local permission escalation exploit in OSX, download a rootkit installer and 0wn you, or whatever other form of Internet mayhem you can think of, all from your user account.
Just because it's doesn't have full access to your system doesn't mean it can't do damage.
If you got a Cable Co. in your area. Jump to it.
Most likely if FIOS is around, the local Cable Co. is probably price matching Verizon's FIOS Service. Possibly beating Verizon's price. Although be warned. Depending on the Cable Co, it could be worse service than what Verizon is giving you.
Verizon's tech service has been going downhill for awile. My first experience with it was they couldn't hook up a friends house for some reason because he's close to a state border. After dicking with Verizon for two months of appointment cancellations and broken activation promises he called the Cable Co. (in this case, Adelphia) and had Broadband in his house in three days. Then when he canceled the DSL service he never received, they charged him for two months of service and a breach of contract for service he never received.
Another example is two weeks ago I was working on a PC who already had Verizon. He was on the basic plan and I recommended that he upgrade to the power plan. He called them and asked for the upgrade from basic to power and they said it would take a few days (Vs Time Warner's and Armstrong's "call to upgrade and get the speed instantly" support) A few days later, he gets an e-mail that welcomes him to Verizon and happily tells him that he's now paying the power plan price for basic tier service. In other words. Verizon happily raised his bill $10 a month for the exact same level of DSL service he was already receiving. Thankfully he got that strengthened out after talking to a billing rep during his work hour since billing closes at 5PM and tech support had no clue what was going on.
If fabless companies are so worried about overseas manufacturing, then why not use a fab that is inside the country your company resides in? That way, you can sue the living hell out of them when they do sell / steal your plans.
I would think that building the Chips in the US or Europe where the fabs are more reputable would be a better cost effective solution than sending it to an orient fab and watch it pump out pirate chips left and right, or relying on some sort of activation scheme that these pirate hardware companies would most likely reverse engineer out of them anyway.
Frankly, the point is to sell a few mobo's based on a gimmick, because it's not any more green than most of their other boards.
Green wise, This technology, if put in use on all the boards MSI made (In the thousands if not millions) and the power that was saved from each and every board (vs a cooling fan) was magically combined into one source, might save enough power vs a chipset fan to possibly power a single two story house at least and a 10 house block at most. When you factor in that most of MSI boards already have very efficient passive fan free cooling systems on them, the impact is even smaller.
That being said, what makes this tech interesting is that it's performance and power is based on the chip temperature itself, When the chip is hotter, it's running faster and when it cooler the fan either runs slower or stops. This means that the temperature of the chip stays more even during use, which would extend the life of the board and chip since there is less heat expansion going on vs a electric fan. The second advantage is that this system also would work when the computer is turned off, which would cool the chip and remove residue heat build up back down to a safe level even when there is no power to the PC. Third, if this could be scaled to laptop level cooling solutions, would benefit laptops greatly since there is no Power draw to cool the laptop. a single watt saved on laptop cooling should result in longer battery life.
it doesn't matter. Have a computer lab in the college? well that can be used to download music or burn CD's or even make an MP3 file using the sound card's line in jack. you better have that policy in place to spy / restrict that lab to only authorized personnel. Of course I guess you can disable the Internet and sound card and CDROM's and USB ports so that it's basicially a dumb terminal, or use DOS 6.22 (Can't use Windows. Sound recorder is there and it makes it easy to pirate. Maybe Windows 386 would work.)
And remember. They can pirate with that Stereo in their room. So once they do pirate the music using their liability free network connection, they can burn it to CD and play it in their stereos and BAM! Everyone in that Dorm that heard it is a pirate! You better have a policy to arrest that guy, since he used your power grid to broadcast his pirate booty to the entire dorm. Maybe fine the entire dorm since someone may hum or whistle it down the hall.
Frankly there's only two ways you can stop piracy from happening on college grounds.
1) Buy everyone in the school music accounts to download music thus rasing the tutition, Which enrages students and punishes students who prefer going to buy their music at music stores, and will ultimetly result in retention levels dropping in an already competitive market as it is.
Or
2) The Amish Method. Cut the internet cable since there's nothing on the market that can assure 100% piracy free internet, ban all computers since they can make MP3's using a line in jack and a CD player, and ultimely ban electric power from everywhere on campus, since they could possibly use electricy to copy a tape with a boombox or operate an electric guitar.
At least the english, math and history professors would be happy with #2, since calculators would be banned and people would have to be forced to write their thesis's on parchment. Of course, Victrolas would have to be banned too, but it's hard finding a wind up one these days. Maybe they'll come back in vogue.
Generally, I liked the premise of this film, but the shaky cam literialy killed it for me. After 45-60 minutes of non stop camera going in every direction possible, you just can't watch it without losing your head, and you tend to just zone out and listen at the rest of the film. One of my friends literaly couldn't breathe for a few minutes due to the vertigo.
At some point they should have made him turn on steadycam or maybe they should have made Hud a Video Camera professional by trade to explain some more camera steadiness in the film.
It wouldn't surprise me if they make a Cloverfield "Vertigo free edition" When it comes out on DVD and hopefully if they make a sequel, they'll use a news crew team to tell the story. At least I would hope their camera shots would be less all over the place.
On an kinda off topic note, this is why I like full size video cameras over handheld ones. The full size camers were infinetly easier to keep steady over the handheld ones. and with today's tech they could be a lot lighter and easier to use. (not to mention hold a full size hard drive or DVD) At least they make the sholder mounts for the handheld ones I guess.
yes.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922849 has the registry change details. You basically change a registry switch and it opened no problem afterwards.
Back in September when we adopted Office 2007 where I work, I was concerned that this would be a big problem, since office 2007 does the same thing and 2003 SP3 just adds that functionality to 2003.
After 3 months, I can say that we ran into this problem 1 time. That's pretty good considering that many of the college professors have documents dating back over 10-15 years. In fact this particular professor wanted to open this DOS Word 3 document to re-import it into a newer document he already had that he accidentally deleted some the original text from.
Opera doesn't care about Bloat. they just want to be integrated even though no other OS forces this on it's users.
Simply put, third party app developers aren't going to be happy with MS until they implement some sort of Marketplace / Ubuntu Software catalog like functionality, where people can search and automatically install software just by clicking a checkmark. And even then, they'll flip out because "their" Icon isn't already there or MS didn't allow them to join, ETC.