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User: Luckyo

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  1. He takes it in for yearly checks. If you discount the fact that these require workers on salary that needs to be paid and spare parts that need to be mined, refined and built, yes, you could call the actual support "free". He just pays for parts and worker to perform check and install.

  2. Actually that's incorrect. What they do is refurbish stuff with spare parts that came from other returns and send it back to you if it's an expensive business grade laptop. I've seen old laptops refurbished and working just fine for pennies, instead of spending four figures replacing them. And a lot of stuff inside of a laptop is actually not proprietary, and even parts that are can usually be bought from resellers.

  3. No. I understand that when you're rich and don't give a damn about money, it will be "easier to upgrade".

    Most of the world is not rich. I don't count myself as rich either. Reasonably wealthy, but not so hilarious over the top that I would burn money. Neither in the fireplace or pointless upgrades of things that work fine.

  4. Cool story. Let's start with coal plants and driving lessons then?

  5. I'm not talking about caching. I'm talking about OS overhead. Which is enormous on 7. There's a reason why most games state on their minimum requirements slate: "XP - x GB ram, 7 - x+1 GB RAM"

    That one extra gigabyte is needed for increased OS overhead. Not caching.

  6. Corporations just have their salaried employees replace the faulty parts. It's not hard to unglue and unscrew the old fan and glue a new one and cost is minimal - as worker is already on salary and replacement fan costs pennies.

    Broken hinges on the laptop are obviously more of a problem. But most companies have a service contract with either laptop manufacturer or maintenance company where they just ship it for repairs or replacement. And as contract is usually in bulk, they get the cheapest refurbished replacement. Which often runs the same XP.

    I just do the stuff I do because I don't want to spend the extra money when I can jury rig a solution that is good enough with parts I have on hand. Not being an IT support person, I don't have access to quite the same resources.

  7. Actually both match pretty well in this case. Car security becomes noticeably better. Cars become easier to drive and more resilient to accidents even if they do occur.

    Hardware lifespan is also similar. You may notice that a lot of XP systems out there run hardware that is closer to double digits than zero in years. And hardware both works fine and functions in the way it needs to.

    Heck, I'm typing this out while there's a machine bought in 2003 sitting next to me. It's a laptop that runs XP. It works perfectly fine except for the fact that screen hinges are broken so I have the screen lean on the wall. And that thing has been everywhere with me in my crazy university days, to the point where it's cooling system is completely borked - heat pipe is blocked and I have visibly protruding plastic from where the heat pipe is blocked on surface. It still works though!

    And I have given several of my old desktops away, and as far as I know, at least two of those bought in early 2000s are still running fine. Which surprised me greatly at first, because I actually brutally overclocked one of those systems when it was in my hands and I honestly expected it to fail in about four years, especially GPU fan on it broke and I didn't notice for a few days, just wondering why my games started to occasionally crash. It's gone for over double that with no signs of problems, though it's not longer overclocked and I had to replace GFX card as it eventually got ran into the grounds a few years after the whole "gaming on overclocked GPU with broken fan" adventure. For a few years after that I had a damn 120mm case fan strapped to the card with metal wires believe it or not and it still took about six years to break down and replacement card cost me something like 30€ and that one still works.

    They don't make hardware like that any more I guess, with smaller and less durable transistors. Hey, one more reason not to upgrade! =D

  8. Mine runs stuff on the background too. And it still runs fine with 4GB RAM.

    Something must be very much broken on your system to consume 16GB.

  9. Re:No, this is smart. This is to keep the customer on Microsoft Extends Updates For Windows XP Security Products Until July 2015 · · Score: 1

    So if I don't update, I can expect to get my computer owned? One that is behind NAT, software firewall, running up to date 3rd party software?

    Yo I have land on the moon to sell you. Cheap.

  10. Re:No, this is smart. This is to keep the customer on Microsoft Extends Updates For Windows XP Security Products Until July 2015 · · Score: 1

    Newsflash: these script kiddies still need a vector.

  11. My father still drives his 1997 Opel Vectra. It's at almost 500.000km driven without a single major fault to date and it works like a fine-tuned clock. He could afford a high end audi if he wanted to, but he finds that his Opel serves his needs better.

    People like you are plentiful at his workplace. He's been telling me how recently one colleague kept nagging him about his "German Lada" and talking about his own new car and how my father should also get a new one for largely similar reasons as you list such as "world has moved on from those crappy Opels of 90s".

    Two years later, colleague's new car has had one flaw discovered where it sometimes fails to start due to onboard computer problem. No technicians could find a fix that would totally remove the problem. Car works, it just occasionally bugs out and won't start for a time.

    All this while, my fathers old Opel keeps on trucking. He has to drive approximately 1000km weekly to his workplace for workweek and back to my mother's for weekends, so reliable car is absolutely vital to him.

    So tell me, why should he update? Because you sure as hell sound like that guy with shiny new car who has no clue with your "world has moved on" quip.

  12. Re:No, this is smart. This is to keep the customer on Microsoft Extends Updates For Windows XP Security Products Until July 2015 · · Score: 1

    In other words: can be fixed by browser vendor by modifying the renderer but it's easier to fix by OS vendor. After OS vendor stops updates, browser vendors will handle the updates.

    As for getting "owned quickly", I ran a vanilla XP machine for over two years after WAU borked itself trying to install SP1. I think two years is good enough not to count as "owned quickly".

  13. Re:Here's hoping... on Winamp Purchased By Radionomy · · Score: 1

    They are good quality, and they are sanely priced. They don't offer solid gold plated connectors or snake oil excreting control panels though, which is clearly what you are looking for.

    Different kicks for different people.

  14. Re:No, this is smart. This is to keep the customer on Microsoft Extends Updates For Windows XP Security Products Until July 2015 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Actually he's correct and you're the one with no clue. Modern attack vectors are not the OS holes - they are browser holes, email software holes, PDF reader holes and so on. In fact, essentially all OS holes that can be exploited directly without third party are secured by a solid third party firewall.

    All these will continue to be updated. In fact, as long as your friend runs solid 3rd party firewall software, he'll cruise for years after microsoft kills support, simply because he'll keep infection vectors closed. OS can have all the vulnerabilities it wants, as long as all the vectors to hit them are closed, you're safe. And that's where that 3rd party support is far, far more important than microsoft's support will ever be.

  15. Re:*sigh* on Microsoft Extends Updates For Windows XP Security Products Until July 2015 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Actually most modern games still run on 4GB RAM just fine even on w7 64bit. There is a very small subset of games that do require more, most of them terribly optimized and usually still in alpha/early beta.

    Extra RAM on windows mainly helps mitigate memory leaks and hide the fact that Vista/7 is a huge memory hog with massively greater RAM requirements for OS overhead than XP ever was. Which doesn't impact you if you stay on XP. Microsoft also claims it helps caching, and to a certain extent it does. But in most cases, this advantage is negligible.

    So more RAM makes sense on 7. But XP? Not so much. Which is another reason NOT to move from XP.

  16. Re:Here's hoping... on Winamp Purchased By Radionomy · · Score: 1

    Placebo effect. Tiny speakers embedded in modern TVs are simply incapable of quality you suggest they are capable of due to size limitations.

    Unless something in your setup is faulty/set in a wrong way which is somehow fixed by switching to 192kHz output, both should sound pretty much the same on the TV speakers.

    You could argue that you can hear the difference on expensive Hi-Fi speakers. That is possible if you have trained ears and proper setup. But not embedded TV ones.

  17. Re:Here's hoping... on Winamp Purchased By Radionomy · · Score: 1

    This is me laughing at your monitor speakers "sounding better because of 192khz audio". The small tinny crap that comes with monitors being able to produce better sound under those conditions is right up there with healing effect of snake oil.

  18. Re:Here's hoping... on Winamp Purchased By Radionomy · · Score: 1

    Not going to help much. Lion's share of interference is inside the box. Not on the cables. Going digital on cable connection will help, but it will do nothing to mitigate the signal interference that hits inside the tower.

  19. Re:Here's hoping... on Winamp Purchased By Radionomy · · Score: 1

    I have 500€ speaker set and a high quality sound card. In fact I always had one since I bought my first machine because I can hear the difference between motherboard-based codecs and discreet sound card very clearly.

    I have 24/96 output enabled on sound card and speakers accept and show incoming 24/96 input. There is no meaningful difference between that and windows default outputs. I cannot hear the difference.

    So I'm going to go with "see a psychiatrist, you are hallucinating" as an answer to your "luddite".

  20. Re:What a surprise on Khosla, Romm Fire Back At '60 Minutes' Cleantech Exposé · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I still find some press trustworthy in a general sense (i.e. identify that particular publication's interests, and look in them for articles about things that aren't about it).

    Also there's the whole "I like the old BBC foreign reporters who openly reported truth about Falkalands War in face of massive opposition from everyone in their country from government to right wing press".
    Sadly most of these guys now work for Al-Jazeera after UK bureaucrats finally got their dream of firing all those inconvenient people when BBC was downsized a few years ago. Incidentally Al-Jazeera was trying to build up its own english language publication at the same time, so most of them ended up there. And for a while, the stuff they reported on was absolutely amazing. You'd get videos on Al-Jazeera of all those same middle aged brit reporters right in the middle of conflict zone reporting on various massively inconvenient facts. Even to their employer.

    You still do, but sadly they came down on them now quite a bit, but it's still functional as yet another counter-balance to propaganda machine we have here in the West.

  21. Re:Here's hoping... on Winamp Purchased By Radionomy · · Score: 1

    24/192 for home system is... why would it even exist?

    Hell, 24/96 output support is already a massive overkill for anything that is in a tower simply due to the fact that you'd need to start isolating your dedicated sound card from the rest of the tower to avoid interference not to mention having four to five digit costing speakers to get to hear it. And you are playing 24/192?

  22. Re:It's about lock-in on Winamp Purchased By Radionomy · · Score: 1

    This is one thing that confuses me greatly about the whole affair. I haven't updated winamp in ages. Why would I? It has no access to internet, and I have all plug-ins I need and they all work.

    About the only problem is updates for future operating systems, and it would indeed suck if MS released an actually functional desktop windows after 7 that somehow broken winamp functionality and it would get fixed.

    But as it stands, for foreseeable future there's little need to ever update winamp. My help>about in winamp says that I'm using a build from december 9th 2011. That's over two years old!

  23. Re:Won't work very well. on Japan To Tax Online Sales Of Foreign-Made Content · · Score: 1

    And at the same time, they're paying good money to their workers in Japan.

    Are you sure you want to stick with your hypothesis?

  24. Re:Cause and effect may be backwards on Daily Pot Use Tied To Age of First Psychotic Episode · · Score: 1

    Let me simplify. There are far fewer studies on cannabis than tobacco for one simple reason: number of users and illegality of usage. That makes conducting reliable studies on people with similar level of impact pretty much impossible.

    So it remains "anecdotal". Which in this case means "doctors actually working with patients keep consistently seeing the effect but clinical studies find it hard to pinpoint due to low pool of potential candidates for testing".

  25. Re:Math, do it. on Doctors Say Food Stamp Cuts Could Cause Higher Healthcare Costs · · Score: 1

    Other countries that do not have such programs, or crippling poverty and hunger employ a significantly greater amount of socialism in their economic systems than US, hence reducing the income disparity enabling those on the lower end of the earning spectrum to be able to buy their own food.