Not until she is on trial. The 5th only applies to the person(s) on trial.
This is simply not true. Anyone whose testimony might incriminate themselves can take the Fifth, whether it's their trial, someone else's trial, or a grand jury proceeding. The only way the government can get around this is by granting immunity; if they do this, then incrimination is no longer an issue and the witness can be compelled to testify.
To take one well-known example, Mark Fuhrman took the Fifth at the O.J. Simpson criminal trial. Fuhrman was asked if he had ever falsified police reports or planted evidence. If he had answered no, he might well have been committing perjury, and if he had answered yes, then he would have been implicating himself in criminal activity. So he took the Fifth. And he was legally able to do this even though he wasn't the one on trial.
Suppose Bob may have committed a crime, and Alice is known not to be an accomplice but appears to have been a witness. If the courts ask both Bob and Alice the same question -- "Did Bob do it?" -- and both of them refuse to answer, then Bob's right to remain silent is protected under the Fifth Amendment, but Alice can be sent to jail -- despite the fact that Bob may have been guilty, but Alice is innocent!
If the government thinks that Alice knows whether Bob did it or not, then she might very well also be a suspected accomplice. She would be well within her rights to plead the Fifth until and unless she was offered immunity.
Am I the only system builder who is a bit nervous about having a metal tower weighing 2 pounds or more hanging off the motherboard? I know it's bolted in with a backplane, but still, I'm always worried an unexpected jolt to the case could crack the board. Some of SilverStone's cases (such as the TJ-08E and FT-04) have little supporting stands to hold up the heatsink; I'd like to see this more widely adopted.
While I'm at it, why does seemingly every tower manufactrer use paperclips to hold on the fan(s)? What's wrong with screws? I don't really trust these flimsy things to hold up.
Can any Chromium-based browsers do real ad blocking? That's the main thing keeping me on Firefox these days. Adblock Plus on Firefox can keep embedded ad images and crap from even loading at all, but the last time I checked, Chrome could only hide them from view (you're still wasting your bandwidth and risking your privacy downloading the ad garbage from their domain). Has that changed?
You'd have to be a fucking moron to use them at all. Why would anybody with a brain give their banking information to this company, even for a "low value" account?
That's why you don't give them your normal bank account. Instead you create a separate checking account (which you can get from some banks with no monthly fee) and link that account to PayPal. Regularly transfer the money from that account into your real account. That way, if PayPal does decide to do something stupid, the amount of damage they can do is strictly limited.
If you're an eBay seller, this is the only sensible way to go.
The CEO has a fiduciary duty to his company and its shareholders. Elop pretty obviously violated that duty by acting in the best interests of MS, not Nokia. It seems to me that there would be strong grounds for a Nokia shareholder lawsuit against Elop personally, and possibly against MS as well. Discovery proceedings could be quite interesting – civil attorneys can demand just about any relevant documents, emails, and so forth. Unless everything was done verbally with no record, there ought to be some evidence of Elop's malfeasance.
Word did not crush Word Perfect. Microsoft [ab]used their Windows monopoly to harm a competing product.
Please. The problem is that the WordPerfect developers and management saw GUIs as a fad, and were too late to the party. Much like Microsoft has done with the phone and tablet markets, in fact.
No version of WordPerfect for Windows was even released at all until 2 full years after MS Winword came out. Granted, the MS programmers had some advantages since they were working for the same company and had access to staff on the other side of the building to ask questions and get help, but plenty of other companies had working Windows software out quicker than that.
WordPerfect also had crappy management. The free online book "Almost Perfect" was written by one of the top brass – he doesn't seem to realize how bad it makes him look. He treated his employees like garbage – button-down Mormon 9-to-5 crap with mediocre salaries, few opportunities for advancement, and no profit sharing. In the dot-com era, how did he think this was going to work out?
This wouldn't be the first time that MS has come from behind: Word utterly crushed Word Perfect to become the standard in the early 90s, Excel pushed Lotus 1-2-3 into has-been status, Internet Explorer killed Netscape as a viable company, and people were surprised when MS released the Xbox and went on to make a fortune in the console industry.
There are some important differences you're overlooking. WordPerfect and Lotus fell off the radar because they completely botched the transition from text mode to GUI when that was the way the industry was trending. Of course, the fact that Microsoft controlled the most popular GUI helped them here. With Netscape, we're all familiar with the dirty tricks they used, but these tricks relied on the fact that they were leveraging their OS monopoly to kick out competition in the browser arena. They have no comparable leverage in smartphones/tablets. As for the Xbox, they managed to become a competitor – one of three players, not an overwhelming victor. And there's no evidence that they have actually made a net profit on consoles, especially when you consider the time value of money. MS stockholders might well have been better off if all the money spent on the Xbox series had instead been returned as dividends.
Worse, IB-E has thermal compound between die and heatspreader, same as IB vs. SB.
Source? I thought a while back someone pulled the lid off a Ivy Bridge-E CPU engineering sample and found that it was soldered (the CPU was destroyed in the process). There were photos of this posted on a couple of sites.
Intel segments the desktop and server market with ECC functionality. Xeons support ECC, everything else does *not*. So unless this new chip supports ECC, you're off your rocker thinking this is a repurposed server chip.
The same die is used for both chips; it's just that the ECC functionality is fused off in the non-Xeon parts binned for desktop use.
By the way, it's not strictly true that Xeons are the only Intel parts that support ECC. Ivy Bridge Celerons and Pentiums have this feature as well (if you use a compatible server motherboard). It was fused off on the mainstream desktop quad core parts because they wanted people to buy Xeon E3's instead.
Steamroller FX chips aren't even on the roadmap at this time. That doesn't mean that they will never come, but AMD is clearly prioritizing their APUs over enthusiast-oriented chips at this time.
OEM's have always been installing third party software in an attempt to improve upon Windows and differentiate themselves from each other.
Well, yes, but most of that was just crapware, not a real attempt to add value. The Lenovo and Acer modifications seem to be addressing actual user needs – replacing lost functionality which really should still be part of the core OS.
I don't remember any OEMs creating hacks that made Windows 95 look and work like Windows 3.1. That's because people actually liked '95 better.
No they didn't lie. You can set things up that way-simply set up your servers in multiple data centers(AWS availability zones) and load balance between them. It's foolish to just throw things up in the cloud and think magically I won't ever have to worry about downtime ever again.
But that was one of the big promises of "the cloud": that you'd never have to worry about the nitty-gritty of network administration again, your provider would handle all that for you. If that isn't the case, then you gain nothing and might as well host the data yourself.
The start button takes you back to the Metro screen, not anything remotely like the start menu, and all the hot corners and charms crap are still there.
You're right about the Start button still not exhibiting correct behavior, but Windows 8.1 does permit hot corners to be disabled without needing third-party add-ons. See here for details. Also, Windows 8.1 allows booting straight into the desktop as an option, whereas Windows 8 would only boot to the Metro start screen unless you used a third-party add-on.
Hopefully Windows 9 will bring back the real Start Menu, add an option to completely hide all traces of Metro for desktop users, and bring back the much nicer Aero theme as an option. Without Ballmer, there's some hope.
Not to mention the centered title bar text. Which was done in Windows 3.1, but not Windows 95, NT, or any subsequent release until 8. So every experienced Windows user will spend a few extra fractions of a second every time we look for the window title.
MS doesn't need a "catch-up artist"; they need a rollback artist. They just need to roll back the dumb mistakes of the last couple of years. Announcing that Win9 will be based on Win7 (and thus that Win8 was a mistake which won't be repeated) would win them back quite a bit of the goodwill they lost. Adding back the option to use menus instead of the Ribbon in MS Office might help, as well. (I actually like the MS Office Ribbon now that I've gotten used to it, but many long-time users with experience with the old menu system hate it, and their preferences should be respected, too.)
MS's sales pitch should be something along these lines: "Apple products are nice toys for home users, but when you need to get real work done, you come to us." Their competitive advantage is in the business world, where they get to sell lots of different products because they interoperate well and maintain backward compatibility. Focus on that and stop chasing consumer fads.
MS Office is "bloated" because it has a lot of features you don't use, but someone else does. You'd be surprised just how many businesses have Excel or Access "programs" as a major part of their daily workflows. This is why MS Office's competitors haven't made much headway.
Which is why Win8/Metro was such a dumb idea. Businesses hate it.
Death knell for Metro
on
Ballmer To Retire
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I think this "retirement" (which probably wasn't as voluntary as Ballmer and MS are pretending) spells doom for Metro, at least on the desktop. Virtually no one outside of MS actually likes it. The only reason why they haven't backed down on Metro on the desktop before now is that it is Ballmer's baby and he doesn't want to admit he screwed up. The next CEO will likely not have any such attachment, and will probably be much more willing to ditch Metro in response to market demands – or at least allow it to be an option that can be turned off completely, for a Win7-style experience.
Microsoft's foray into portable devices has been an abject failure. The smartest thing to do would be to focus on the business licenses that actually bring in the big bucks. That means stability, familiarity, and backwards compatibility – not flashy touch BS meant to appeal to non-technical home users.
By using the so-called nanofluid, Zalman believes it can offer better cooling
Belief shouldn't have anything to do with it. Let's see the numbers – how does this compare to other closed-loop liquid cooling systems in terms of thermals and noise? I'll reserve judgment until I see Anandtech, Tom's, or some other reputable site review this in comparison with other cooling devices.
I'd be willing to consider TLC despite its drawbacks if the price was considerably lower than with MLC-based drives, but that's currently not the case. The Samsung 840 EVO costs about $185 for the 250GB model, while the 840 Pro (using MLC) is about $230-$250. So we're talking about 75 cents a gigabyte for TLC, and about a buck a gigabyte for MLC. I'm willing to take the 25% cost hit for far better endurance. In my opinion, TLC really needs to get down to 25-40 cents a gigabyte before it would be worth it. If we could get a 640GB TLC drive in the $160-$200 price range, then that would be worth going for. But the current offerings? No.
What makes the controller chips in a SSD fail so often?
Intel and Samsung controllers are pretty reliable. Most SSDs from other vendors use either Corsair or Marvell controllers.
Marvell doesn't provide firmware at all, so vendors have to write their own. Many of these vendors are small companies with little in-house expertise, and what effort they do put in to their firmware is often devoted to focusing on speed (so they appear at the top of review sites' benchmarks) rather than stability.
Sandforce is at the other end of the spectrum: they don't provide their firmware source to anyone, and it's pretty much take-it-or-leave-it. (Even Intel had to jump through a whole bunch of hoops to get some stability bugs fixed when they adopted Sandforce controllers for their consumer-grade SSDs.) But the real problem is that the original Sandforce firmware developers were paranoid, and thought every other vendor wanted to steal their precious, precious ideas. So they designed the controller so that if anything electrically out of the ordinary happened, it would be interpreted as a hacking attempt, and the drive would go into "panic mode" (bricking), from which only Sandforce could recover it – and they'd be very reluctant to do this for end users, and even if they did, you'd still lose all your data.
Sandforce has since been sold to LSI, and I think stability is better now than it once was, but I still wouldn't want to risk it.
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Not until she is on trial. The 5th only applies to the person(s) on trial.
This is simply not true. Anyone whose testimony might incriminate themselves can take the Fifth, whether it's their trial, someone else's trial, or a grand jury proceeding. The only way the government can get around this is by granting immunity; if they do this, then incrimination is no longer an issue and the witness can be compelled to testify.
To take one well-known example, Mark Fuhrman took the Fifth at the O.J. Simpson criminal trial. Fuhrman was asked if he had ever falsified police reports or planted evidence. If he had answered no, he might well have been committing perjury, and if he had answered yes, then he would have been implicating himself in criminal activity. So he took the Fifth. And he was legally able to do this even though he wasn't the one on trial.
Suppose Bob may have committed a crime, and Alice is known not to be an accomplice but appears to have been a witness. If the courts ask both Bob and Alice the same question -- "Did Bob do it?" -- and both of them refuse to answer, then Bob's right to remain silent is protected under the Fifth Amendment, but Alice can be sent to jail -- despite the fact that Bob may have been guilty, but Alice is innocent!
If the government thinks that Alice knows whether Bob did it or not, then she might very well also be a suspected accomplice. She would be well within her rights to plead the Fifth until and unless she was offered immunity.
Am I the only system builder who is a bit nervous about having a metal tower weighing 2 pounds or more hanging off the motherboard? I know it's bolted in with a backplane, but still, I'm always worried an unexpected jolt to the case could crack the board. Some of SilverStone's cases (such as the TJ-08E and FT-04) have little supporting stands to hold up the heatsink; I'd like to see this more widely adopted.
While I'm at it, why does seemingly every tower manufactrer use paperclips to hold on the fan(s)? What's wrong with screws? I don't really trust these flimsy things to hold up.
Can any Chromium-based browsers do real ad blocking? That's the main thing keeping me on Firefox these days. Adblock Plus on Firefox can keep embedded ad images and crap from even loading at all, but the last time I checked, Chrome could only hide them from view (you're still wasting your bandwidth and risking your privacy downloading the ad garbage from their domain). Has that changed?
You'd have to be a fucking moron to use them at all. Why would anybody with a brain give their banking information to this company, even for a "low value" account?
That's why you don't give them your normal bank account. Instead you create a separate checking account (which you can get from some banks with no monthly fee) and link that account to PayPal. Regularly transfer the money from that account into your real account. That way, if PayPal does decide to do something stupid, the amount of damage they can do is strictly limited.
If you're an eBay seller, this is the only sensible way to go.
Why do people use PayPal at all?
Because they want to buy and sell stuff on eBay?
The CEO has a fiduciary duty to his company and its shareholders. Elop pretty obviously violated that duty by acting in the best interests of MS, not Nokia. It seems to me that there would be strong grounds for a Nokia shareholder lawsuit against Elop personally, and possibly against MS as well. Discovery proceedings could be quite interesting – civil attorneys can demand just about any relevant documents, emails, and so forth. Unless everything was done verbally with no record, there ought to be some evidence of Elop's malfeasance.
Word did not crush Word Perfect. Microsoft [ab]used their Windows monopoly to harm a competing product.
Please. The problem is that the WordPerfect developers and management saw GUIs as a fad, and were too late to the party. Much like Microsoft has done with the phone and tablet markets, in fact.
No version of WordPerfect for Windows was even released at all until 2 full years after MS Winword came out. Granted, the MS programmers had some advantages since they were working for the same company and had access to staff on the other side of the building to ask questions and get help, but plenty of other companies had working Windows software out quicker than that.
WordPerfect also had crappy management. The free online book "Almost Perfect" was written by one of the top brass – he doesn't seem to realize how bad it makes him look. He treated his employees like garbage – button-down Mormon 9-to-5 crap with mediocre salaries, few opportunities for advancement, and no profit sharing. In the dot-com era, how did he think this was going to work out?
This wouldn't be the first time that MS has come from behind: Word utterly crushed Word Perfect to become the standard in the early 90s, Excel pushed Lotus 1-2-3 into has-been status, Internet Explorer killed Netscape as a viable company, and people were surprised when MS released the Xbox and went on to make a fortune in the console industry.
There are some important differences you're overlooking. WordPerfect and Lotus fell off the radar because they completely botched the transition from text mode to GUI when that was the way the industry was trending. Of course, the fact that Microsoft controlled the most popular GUI helped them here. With Netscape, we're all familiar with the dirty tricks they used, but these tricks relied on the fact that they were leveraging their OS monopoly to kick out competition in the browser arena. They have no comparable leverage in smartphones/tablets. As for the Xbox, they managed to become a competitor – one of three players, not an overwhelming victor. And there's no evidence that they have actually made a net profit on consoles, especially when you consider the time value of money. MS stockholders might well have been better off if all the money spent on the Xbox series had instead been returned as dividends.
Worse, IB-E has thermal compound between die and heatspreader, same as IB vs. SB.
Source? I thought a while back someone pulled the lid off a Ivy Bridge-E CPU engineering sample and found that it was soldered (the CPU was destroyed in the process). There were photos of this posted on a couple of sites.
Intel segments the desktop and server market with ECC functionality. Xeons support ECC, everything else does *not*. So unless this new chip supports ECC, you're off your rocker thinking this is a repurposed server chip.
The same die is used for both chips; it's just that the ECC functionality is fused off in the non-Xeon parts binned for desktop use.
By the way, it's not strictly true that Xeons are the only Intel parts that support ECC. Ivy Bridge Celerons and Pentiums have this feature as well (if you use a compatible server motherboard). It was fused off on the mainstream desktop quad core parts because they wanted people to buy Xeon E3's instead.
The 4820K doesn't support ECC RAM, though.
Steamroller FX chips aren't even on the roadmap at this time. That doesn't mean that they will never come, but AMD is clearly prioritizing their APUs over enthusiast-oriented chips at this time.
OEM's have always been installing third party software in an attempt to improve upon Windows and differentiate themselves from each other.
Well, yes, but most of that was just crapware, not a real attempt to add value. The Lenovo and Acer modifications seem to be addressing actual user needs – replacing lost functionality which really should still be part of the core OS.
I don't remember any OEMs creating hacks that made Windows 95 look and work like Windows 3.1. That's because people actually liked '95 better.
No they didn't lie. You can set things up that way-simply set up your servers in multiple data centers(AWS availability zones) and load balance between them. It's foolish to just throw things up in the cloud and think magically I won't ever have to worry about downtime ever again.
But that was one of the big promises of "the cloud": that you'd never have to worry about the nitty-gritty of network administration again, your provider would handle all that for you. If that isn't the case, then you gain nothing and might as well host the data yourself.
It's a multi-CPU system?
The start button takes you back to the Metro screen, not anything remotely like the start menu, and all the hot corners and charms crap are still there.
You're right about the Start button still not exhibiting correct behavior, but Windows 8.1 does permit hot corners to be disabled without needing third-party add-ons. See here for details. Also, Windows 8.1 allows booting straight into the desktop as an option, whereas Windows 8 would only boot to the Metro start screen unless you used a third-party add-on.
Hopefully Windows 9 will bring back the real Start Menu, add an option to completely hide all traces of Metro for desktop users, and bring back the much nicer Aero theme as an option. Without Ballmer, there's some hope.
Not to mention the centered title bar text. Which was done in Windows 3.1, but not Windows 95, NT, or any subsequent release until 8. So every experienced Windows user will spend a few extra fractions of a second every time we look for the window title.
MS doesn't need a "catch-up artist"; they need a rollback artist. They just need to roll back the dumb mistakes of the last couple of years. Announcing that Win9 will be based on Win7 (and thus that Win8 was a mistake which won't be repeated) would win them back quite a bit of the goodwill they lost. Adding back the option to use menus instead of the Ribbon in MS Office might help, as well. (I actually like the MS Office Ribbon now that I've gotten used to it, but many long-time users with experience with the old menu system hate it, and their preferences should be respected, too.)
MS's sales pitch should be something along these lines: "Apple products are nice toys for home users, but when you need to get real work done, you come to us." Their competitive advantage is in the business world, where they get to sell lots of different products because they interoperate well and maintain backward compatibility. Focus on that and stop chasing consumer fads.
The truth is Office is bloated.
MS Office is "bloated" because it has a lot of features you don't use, but someone else does. You'd be surprised just how many businesses have Excel or Access "programs" as a major part of their daily workflows. This is why MS Office's competitors haven't made much headway.
Microsoft is a B2B company, not a B2C company.
Which is why Win8/Metro was such a dumb idea. Businesses hate it.
I think this "retirement" (which probably wasn't as voluntary as Ballmer and MS are pretending) spells doom for Metro, at least on the desktop. Virtually no one outside of MS actually likes it. The only reason why they haven't backed down on Metro on the desktop before now is that it is Ballmer's baby and he doesn't want to admit he screwed up. The next CEO will likely not have any such attachment, and will probably be much more willing to ditch Metro in response to market demands – or at least allow it to be an option that can be turned off completely, for a Win7-style experience.
Microsoft's foray into portable devices has been an abject failure. The smartest thing to do would be to focus on the business licenses that actually bring in the big bucks. That means stability, familiarity, and backwards compatibility – not flashy touch BS meant to appeal to non-technical home users.
By using the so-called nanofluid, Zalman believes it can offer better cooling
Belief shouldn't have anything to do with it. Let's see the numbers – how does this compare to other closed-loop liquid cooling systems in terms of thermals and noise? I'll reserve judgment until I see Anandtech, Tom's, or some other reputable site review this in comparison with other cooling devices.
I'd be willing to consider TLC despite its drawbacks if the price was considerably lower than with MLC-based drives, but that's currently not the case. The Samsung 840 EVO costs about $185 for the 250GB model, while the 840 Pro (using MLC) is about $230-$250. So we're talking about 75 cents a gigabyte for TLC, and about a buck a gigabyte for MLC. I'm willing to take the 25% cost hit for far better endurance. In my opinion, TLC really needs to get down to 25-40 cents a gigabyte before it would be worth it. If we could get a 640GB TLC drive in the $160-$200 price range, then that would be worth going for. But the current offerings? No.
What makes the controller chips in a SSD fail so often?
Intel and Samsung controllers are pretty reliable. Most SSDs from other vendors use either Corsair or Marvell controllers.
Marvell doesn't provide firmware at all, so vendors have to write their own. Many of these vendors are small companies with little in-house expertise, and what effort they do put in to their firmware is often devoted to focusing on speed (so they appear at the top of review sites' benchmarks) rather than stability.
Sandforce is at the other end of the spectrum: they don't provide their firmware source to anyone, and it's pretty much take-it-or-leave-it. (Even Intel had to jump through a whole bunch of hoops to get some stability bugs fixed when they adopted Sandforce controllers for their consumer-grade SSDs.) But the real problem is that the original Sandforce firmware developers were paranoid, and thought every other vendor wanted to steal their precious, precious ideas. So they designed the controller so that if anything electrically out of the ordinary happened, it would be interpreted as a hacking attempt, and the drive would go into "panic mode" (bricking), from which only Sandforce could recover it – and they'd be very reluctant to do this for end users, and even if they did, you'd still lose all your data.
Sandforce has since been sold to LSI, and I think stability is better now than it once was, but I still wouldn't want to risk it.