Funny, when dealing with theft, I'm not overly concerned about the laptop. I'm FAR more interested in nailing the son of a bitch and stapling his micronuts to a conveyor belt headed for the wood chipper.
It should be known that a laptop thief probably won't do it just once. It's not worth it for just $200.., they do it in bulk! And frankly, if you're quick enough to bogart a laptop, you're probably into all sorts of fast-fingered businesses that are just as easy and lucrative. A cop chasing a stolen laptop is very likely to find a whole lot more, and make several arrests as it is almost never a one-man outfit.
I would love to see that open and shut case take down a big ISP. There needs to be a very real threat to these unchecked profiteers. We have enough ads on the net already, typo traffic is complete bullshit!
You mean whenever they stop printing U.S. currency and drafting junk bonds ?
AMD is non-competitive. They tried to go for the high end, missed the mark by a mile and now their only foothold is the low-to-mid-range market. They're right back where they started 40 years ago, a cheap alternative to Intel products. Product research and development is not their strong card, because since the very inception of the company, their business has relied on cloning other people's technology. They got lucky with the early Athlons, chiefly due to Intel completely bungling NetBurst. Had it not been for that bastard P4, AMD would have stayed in 2nd place, and my Q6600 would have cost five times more than I paid.
AMD sucks, but they're just strong enough to keep Intel on guard and keep them from resuming their historic pricing strategy. Beyond that, I care not for the small American chip vendor.
Seriously, who needs nukes when you can control giant death bots with your brainwaves ? It's like every bad westernized anime plot, and frankly I think it's a bit too much. That, or I don't trust the Japanese... smart is fine, and depraved can be fun, but both smart and depraved is a dangerous combination.
I don't see that 2nd scenario happening at all. If they even tried to pull off that kind of bullshit, it would only take one rebel ISP to trump them all. Heck, we'll build our own grassroots mesh if we need to, the hardware and software already exist and a surprising number of techies have the skills to pull it off.
Routers these days actually do have big red warnings right on the device. I installed a Linksys or D-Link a few months ago, it had a huge sticker covering all the ports on the back, that said, in bold yellow caps something like "Load the CD in your computer before connecting this device".
The CD would then launch an idiot-proof wizard script that collects a password and other vital information from the user. Then once everything is ready, it explicitly tells the user what to plug, and when. The entire process takes less than 2 minutes then you're on the web, with a properly encrypted and secured connection.
If an average user can't be bothered to spend those 2 very easy minutes to do it right, then I have no pity for them and I do hope someone downloads vicious beast-on-kiddie porn through their unsecured AP.
Me, I have a custom setup on my open-access AP. It's not actually open, in the sense that until you've registered for a free account, it won't let anyone out of the sandbox. I guess it's kind of like hotel wi-fi, only mine's free. I do restrict many kinds of traffic and I keep logs, so it's not a free lunch for drive-by wankers. I certainly don't expect the common Big Box customer to possess the skill and experience to cobble together such a thing, but that's because I'm in the ISP business and they're not.
The fact remains that a properly built web page should be accessible to hearing- and sight-impaired users.
I use CSS extensively, with a sprinkle of Javascript to pull off non-semantic eye-candy every now and then. My test is astoundingly simple: I disable all stylesheets, images and javascript, then look at the resulting page. If it doesn't look right as a linear, text-only document, then I need to fix it. Doing this ensures that a text-to-speech app reading the HTML will be able to make sense of the content and its structure. However, that is as far as I go. I don't go out of my way to make my pages accessible, and I certainly won't mangle perfectly good HTML to accommodate a handful of people I don't personally care about.
That's right, I said it: I don't give a damn about the blind/deaf. The fact that I, myself, may go deaf in my later years doesn't change my stance at all. I'm a bit of a darwinist in some respects, and I'm not one to hold humans above other animals. If a lion cub is born blind, chances are he won't live through his 1st birthday; that's life, and life is fair as long as you accept the parameters. The fact remains that blind humans can survive and function to a surprising degree: they can walk, talk, eat, drink, work, play chess, masturbate (you'll go blind - AH AH AH! one, one bad joke!), and in my city apparently they're allowed to drive SUVs purchased by their pimp^H^H^H^Hlinguistically-challenged life coach (AH AH AH! two, two bad jokes!)
Quite frankly, if they have a hard time getting on some web site, I say tough. They should be grateful to be alive in a society that is benevolently accommodating of their special needs. In many parts of the world, they'd be left for dead.
There are so many browsers derived from Firefox, yet the core itself is getting worse with each new release. Firefox 2.0.0.13, which I'm using, likes to go braindead at random intervals, anywhere between 10 and 45 minutes, at which point I have to restart it. The Javascript likes to use 100% CPU and freeze the whole damned browser. The whole add-on system is getting polluted with whiney half-bred gadgets that can't do anything right.
Don't get me wrong, Firefox is still my favorite, but I think there's a lot of work still to be done before we should run off adding random bling like AT&T has done. The priority should be to fix problems before creating new ones.
Yep, you said it all. These are all reasons why I don't use Limewire. I have far higher standards than these non-technical and/or prepubescent buffoons.
All this "stealing wifi" nonsense will be completely moot when we finally establish free-for-all wireless networking. It might take us a few centuries to get over this petty greed, but eventually the concept of each individual having their own private phone, internet and TV connection will be a funny paragraph in a history book.
This knee-jerk debate always comes down to one thing: broadcasting.
If you leave your front door unlocked, you're probably not standing on the porch yelling "Free house, come and get it!" and handing out name tags. If you do, then you can't turn around and claim the guests were trespassing.
If you install an unsecured Wi-Fi gateway with DHCP, the device is yelling to everyone within 100 meters "Free network, come on in" and handing out IP addresses to any takers. It is _YOUR_ responsibility for leaving it open.
The argument against locking routers down by default, is that it's too complicated for the user. Bullshit! People use locks and keys all the time for their home, car, office, filing cabinet, safe deposit box... all things of value they wouldn't want to have stolen. How is your private, personal network any different ? If you don't want people poking around your shared files and internet access, then put a freakin' lock on the thing.
I have no pity for people who fail at common sense. Just because it plugs in the wall doesn't give you an excuse to be stupid.
Ditto. Hardcore gamers tend to go with NVidia, simply because they still market "extreme" cards while ATI is quite content as the on-again/off-again king of mid-range. There's a *ton* of Geforce 6/7/8 cards that could be put to good use with FAH, coupled with some pretty scary overclocked machines.
uTorrent and Limewire are two very different beasts.
One is a BitTorrent client, the other is a self-contained P2P ecosystem. It's way easier for a norm to type something into Limewire's built-in search, than to register with a dozen BT trackers and figure out seed/leech ratios, upload quotas, ISP throttling/encryption and all those other fun things.
The fact that uTorrent is gaining so-called market share vs Limewire just means there are a lot of new BitTorrent users. It doesn't mean Limewire is losing much, nor is it at risk. I dread trying to explain BT to non-techies...
I would like to see a shift away from fancy sound cards, moving all that post-processing into the software realm. That way, each person could have their own little sonic profile, with EQ settings and effect enhancements they could carry around on a USB stick or hosted on a web site. Sit at any computer, load up your profile and it will sound exactly how you like it.
Me, I do that in my car to some extent. When I'm riding alone, the EQ is flat, the effects are switched off and the sound is balanced and tight. When I've got the wife or friends in tow, I switch to a more club-like preset with heavy bass and sharp highs, with some light dynamics for that punchy party sound. Mind you, I've plunked a generous amount of cash, blood and sweat into my car stereo, most of it compensating for the horrible acoustic environment, but I'm not dragging a quarter-rack full of gear in my trunk, most of the magic happens in software on my head unit, which means the same thing could be done on a PC very cheaply.
Okay, now what if I were spamming you, but (through some perversion of reality) there were a few of your friends using mailboxes in my domain... would you block them to dodge the spam, or would you simply tighten up your spam filter ?
Cost to the consumer, not manufacturing cost... that was my point.
People assume that widescreen is more expensive, simply because that's how it's been marketed, with all the hi-def mumbo jumbo. The fact is: it's all just real estate. If the 22" wide is 25% larger than a 19" square, then it should cost about 25% more to produce. We're not talking about dramatic technological barriers here, it's just a little more screen space.. a few hundred thousand pixels. That doesn't justify a 200% price hike, nor should it give vendors the freedom of forcing these inferior displays down our throats when perfectly good 4:3 screens have existed for over two decades.
The very first thought that entered my mind upon reading this, is to move the business off-shore.
If U.S. based e-tailers get taxed and it hurts their bottom line, they will find a nation that doesn't tax them and move all their headquarters over there. They'll probably move a lot of jobs overseas too.
Government is the one thing people don't shop around, and that's precisely why everything is so fucked up today. When the landlord hikes the rent too high, you move out into someplace cheaper. When the grocery store hikes its prices on everything in response to high immigration in the downtown core, you drive an extra mile to the cheaper one in the university district.
With everything else, you vote with your money, you control your quality of life with your money. With government, you get whatever they throw at you, and they take however much they fancy. Why the hell do we allow these things to happen ? Why would anyone pay money to the government for a non-service ? Why should you pay for politicians' problematic spending habits ? How do they return the favor ?
They don't, and you shouldn't. Fight this bill, because it is an insult and a direct attack against the very tenets that have made the internet flourish over the past decade.
It's funny how you distort the numbers precisely how salespeople do.
If your AMD processors are so fast and great, explain to me why the flagship Phenom can't beat a year-old Intel Q6600 running at what you imply is an inferior FSB clock ?
Here's my take, as a low-volume computer supplier. AMD processors look good on paper, they keep inching HyperTransport speeds up with each new platform, great! Their processors also tend to be a bit cheaper than Intels, great too! But then you have to buy high-end memory to drive them, which completely nullifies the savings from the processor for a basic system, and turns it into a penalty for a powerful workstation with tons of Ram.
I'll make my point brief: I don't sell AMD systems anymore. I glance at the price lists from time to time, and in three years I haven't managed to quote an AMD that offered better value than a similar-spec Intel.
Say all you want about theoretical limits, at the end of the day the client cares about two things:
1. How much does it cost ? 2. Will it run the apps/games I want, at the performance I want ?
Until AMD comes up with a better answer to those two questions, they can stay in the dog house.
It would stop a whole bunch of poor people from getting email. That's bad.
It would also not stop spammers from spamming. 50 cents is peanuts when you're selling pills and porn at $50+ per sucker. It would also give the spammers legal footing in that they've paid for the service, rather than exploiting security flaws.
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Funny, when dealing with theft, I'm not overly concerned about the laptop. I'm FAR more interested in nailing the son of a bitch and stapling his micronuts to a conveyor belt headed for the wood chipper.
It should be known that a laptop thief probably won't do it just once. It's not worth it for just $200.., they do it in bulk! And frankly, if you're quick enough to bogart a laptop, you're probably into all sorts of fast-fingered businesses that are just as easy and lucrative. A cop chasing a stolen laptop is very likely to find a whole lot more, and make several arrests as it is almost never a one-man outfit.
I'd like it better if ALL laptops had Computrace-like functionality built-in.
Theft is a social problem. The costs of fighting it should be borne by all, as it improves the quality of life of everyone.
+1 Maximum Winnage for the ISP joke!
I would love to see that open and shut case take down a big ISP. There needs to be a very real threat to these unchecked profiteers. We have enough ads on the net already, typo traffic is complete bullshit!
You mean whenever they stop printing U.S. currency and drafting junk bonds ?
AMD is non-competitive. They tried to go for the high end, missed the mark by a mile and now their only foothold is the low-to-mid-range market. They're right back where they started 40 years ago, a cheap alternative to Intel products. Product research and development is not their strong card, because since the very inception of the company, their business has relied on cloning other people's technology. They got lucky with the early Athlons, chiefly due to Intel completely bungling NetBurst. Had it not been for that bastard P4, AMD would have stayed in 2nd place, and my Q6600 would have cost five times more than I paid.
AMD sucks, but they're just strong enough to keep Intel on guard and keep them from resuming their historic pricing strategy. Beyond that, I care not for the small American chip vendor.
So what's the real reason for all this research ?
DUH! They want real mechas. Voltron FTW!
Seriously, who needs nukes when you can control giant death bots with your brainwaves ? It's like every bad westernized anime plot, and frankly I think it's a bit too much. That, or I don't trust the Japanese... smart is fine, and depraved can be fun, but both smart and depraved is a dangerous combination.
I don't see that 2nd scenario happening at all. If they even tried to pull off that kind of bullshit, it would only take one rebel ISP to trump them all. Heck, we'll build our own grassroots mesh if we need to, the hardware and software already exist and a surprising number of techies have the skills to pull it off.
Routers these days actually do have big red warnings right on the device. I installed a Linksys or D-Link a few months ago, it had a huge sticker covering all the ports on the back, that said, in bold yellow caps something like "Load the CD in your computer before connecting this device".
The CD would then launch an idiot-proof wizard script that collects a password and other vital information from the user. Then once everything is ready, it explicitly tells the user what to plug, and when. The entire process takes less than 2 minutes then you're on the web, with a properly encrypted and secured connection.
If an average user can't be bothered to spend those 2 very easy minutes to do it right, then I have no pity for them and I do hope someone downloads vicious beast-on-kiddie porn through their unsecured AP.
Me, I have a custom setup on my open-access AP. It's not actually open, in the sense that until you've registered for a free account, it won't let anyone out of the sandbox. I guess it's kind of like hotel wi-fi, only mine's free. I do restrict many kinds of traffic and I keep logs, so it's not a free lunch for drive-by wankers. I certainly don't expect the common Big Box customer to possess the skill and experience to cobble together such a thing, but that's because I'm in the ISP business and they're not.
The fact remains that a properly built web page should be accessible to hearing- and sight-impaired users.
I use CSS extensively, with a sprinkle of Javascript to pull off non-semantic eye-candy every now and then. My test is astoundingly simple: I disable all stylesheets, images and javascript, then look at the resulting page. If it doesn't look right as a linear, text-only document, then I need to fix it. Doing this ensures that a text-to-speech app reading the HTML will be able to make sense of the content and its structure. However, that is as far as I go. I don't go out of my way to make my pages accessible, and I certainly won't mangle perfectly good HTML to accommodate a handful of people I don't personally care about.
That's right, I said it: I don't give a damn about the blind/deaf. The fact that I, myself, may go deaf in my later years doesn't change my stance at all. I'm a bit of a darwinist in some respects, and I'm not one to hold humans above other animals. If a lion cub is born blind, chances are he won't live through his 1st birthday; that's life, and life is fair as long as you accept the parameters. The fact remains that blind humans can survive and function to a surprising degree: they can walk, talk, eat, drink, work, play chess, masturbate (you'll go blind - AH AH AH! one, one bad joke!), and in my city apparently they're allowed to drive SUVs purchased by their pimp^H^H^H^Hlinguistically-challenged life coach (AH AH AH! two, two bad jokes!)
Quite frankly, if they have a hard time getting on some web site, I say tough. They should be grateful to be alive in a society that is benevolently accommodating of their special needs. In many parts of the world, they'd be left for dead.
There are so many browsers derived from Firefox, yet the core itself is getting worse with each new release. Firefox 2.0.0.13, which I'm using, likes to go braindead at random intervals, anywhere between 10 and 45 minutes, at which point I have to restart it. The Javascript likes to use 100% CPU and freeze the whole damned browser. The whole add-on system is getting polluted with whiney half-bred gadgets that can't do anything right.
Don't get me wrong, Firefox is still my favorite, but I think there's a lot of work still to be done before we should run off adding random bling like AT&T has done. The priority should be to fix problems before creating new ones.
Or we could just have them all arrested for employment fraud. We didn't hire them to name a cake, we hired them to run our socialized services.
I'd rather see this guy get Rickrolled halfway to hell, then sued by Rick Astley for downloading his song.
Oh I would PAY to see that.
How about "JoeBidenTakingAviciousDumpOnHilaryRosen.avi" ?
Don't forget that vicious dump, it's priceless!
Yep, you said it all. These are all reasons why I don't use Limewire. I have far higher standards than these non-technical and/or prepubescent buffoons.
All this "stealing wifi" nonsense will be completely moot when we finally establish free-for-all wireless networking. It might take us a few centuries to get over this petty greed, but eventually the concept of each individual having their own private phone, internet and TV connection will be a funny paragraph in a history book.
This knee-jerk debate always comes down to one thing: broadcasting.
If you leave your front door unlocked, you're probably not standing on the porch yelling "Free house, come and get it!" and handing out name tags. If you do, then you can't turn around and claim the guests were trespassing.
If you install an unsecured Wi-Fi gateway with DHCP, the device is yelling to everyone within 100 meters "Free network, come on in" and handing out IP addresses to any takers. It is _YOUR_ responsibility for leaving it open.
The argument against locking routers down by default, is that it's too complicated for the user. Bullshit! People use locks and keys all the time for their home, car, office, filing cabinet, safe deposit box... all things of value they wouldn't want to have stolen. How is your private, personal network any different ? If you don't want people poking around your shared files and internet access, then put a freakin' lock on the thing.
I have no pity for people who fail at common sense. Just because it plugs in the wall doesn't give you an excuse to be stupid.
Ditto. Hardcore gamers tend to go with NVidia, simply because they still market "extreme" cards while ATI is quite content as the on-again/off-again king of mid-range. There's a *ton* of Geforce 6/7/8 cards that could be put to good use with FAH, coupled with some pretty scary overclocked machines.
It's not tax evasion if it's a valid corporate strategy to "increase shareholder value"
uTorrent and Limewire are two very different beasts.
One is a BitTorrent client, the other is a self-contained P2P ecosystem. It's way easier for a norm to type something into Limewire's built-in search, than to register with a dozen BT trackers and figure out seed/leech ratios, upload quotas, ISP throttling/encryption and all those other fun things.
The fact that uTorrent is gaining so-called market share vs Limewire just means there are a lot of new BitTorrent users. It doesn't mean Limewire is losing much, nor is it at risk. I dread trying to explain BT to non-techies...
I would like to see a shift away from fancy sound cards, moving all that post-processing into the software realm. That way, each person could have their own little sonic profile, with EQ settings and effect enhancements they could carry around on a USB stick or hosted on a web site. Sit at any computer, load up your profile and it will sound exactly how you like it.
Me, I do that in my car to some extent. When I'm riding alone, the EQ is flat, the effects are switched off and the sound is balanced and tight. When I've got the wife or friends in tow, I switch to a more club-like preset with heavy bass and sharp highs, with some light dynamics for that punchy party sound. Mind you, I've plunked a generous amount of cash, blood and sweat into my car stereo, most of it compensating for the horrible acoustic environment, but I'm not dragging a quarter-rack full of gear in my trunk, most of the magic happens in software on my head unit, which means the same thing could be done on a PC very cheaply.
Okay, now what if I were spamming you, but (through some perversion of reality) there were a few of your friends using mailboxes in my domain... would you block them to dodge the spam, or would you simply tighten up your spam filter ?
Same shit, different domain name.
Cost to the consumer, not manufacturing cost... that was my point.
People assume that widescreen is more expensive, simply because that's how it's been marketed, with all the hi-def mumbo jumbo. The fact is: it's all just real estate. If the 22" wide is 25% larger than a 19" square, then it should cost about 25% more to produce. We're not talking about dramatic technological barriers here, it's just a little more screen space.. a few hundred thousand pixels. That doesn't justify a 200% price hike, nor should it give vendors the freedom of forcing these inferior displays down our throats when perfectly good 4:3 screens have existed for over two decades.
The very first thought that entered my mind upon reading this, is to move the business off-shore.
If U.S. based e-tailers get taxed and it hurts their bottom line, they will find a nation that doesn't tax them and move all their headquarters over there. They'll probably move a lot of jobs overseas too.
Government is the one thing people don't shop around, and that's precisely why everything is so fucked up today. When the landlord hikes the rent too high, you move out into someplace cheaper. When the grocery store hikes its prices on everything in response to high immigration in the downtown core, you drive an extra mile to the cheaper one in the university district.
With everything else, you vote with your money, you control your quality of life with your money. With government, you get whatever they throw at you, and they take however much they fancy. Why the hell do we allow these things to happen ? Why would anyone pay money to the government for a non-service ? Why should you pay for politicians' problematic spending habits ? How do they return the favor ?
They don't, and you shouldn't. Fight this bill, because it is an insult and a direct attack against the very tenets that have made the internet flourish over the past decade.
It's funny how you distort the numbers precisely how salespeople do.
If your AMD processors are so fast and great, explain to me why the flagship Phenom can't beat a year-old Intel Q6600 running at what you imply is an inferior FSB clock ?
Here's my take, as a low-volume computer supplier. AMD processors look good on paper, they keep inching HyperTransport speeds up with each new platform, great! Their processors also tend to be a bit cheaper than Intels, great too! But then you have to buy high-end memory to drive them, which completely nullifies the savings from the processor for a basic system, and turns it into a penalty for a powerful workstation with tons of Ram.
I'll make my point brief: I don't sell AMD systems anymore. I glance at the price lists from time to time, and in three years I haven't managed to quote an AMD that offered better value than a similar-spec Intel.
Say all you want about theoretical limits, at the end of the day the client cares about two things:
1. How much does it cost ?
2. Will it run the apps/games I want, at the performance I want ?
Until AMD comes up with a better answer to those two questions, they can stay in the dog house.
That wouldn't solve anything.
It would stop a whole bunch of poor people from getting email. That's bad.
It would also not stop spammers from spamming. 50 cents is peanuts when you're selling pills and porn at $50+ per sucker. It would also give the spammers legal footing in that they've paid for the service, rather than exploiting security flaws.