You can get sub-$500 laptops with SSDs but they're all extremely low-capacity (the HP Stream 11 is $200 and has a minuscule 32GB SSD with ~8GB already eaten with a "recovery partition") and often are netbook-esque machines with drives that cost way too much to upgrade because they're not 2.5" SATA form factor. I have made a fair amount of money buying $350 laptops, slapping a $60 120GB or 128GB SSD in place of the 750GB 5400RPM drive, doing a fresh junkless reinstall of Windows, and reselling the units for $500. When you show someone a cheap-ish laptop with an SSD booting up to a fully started desktop in 20 seconds, they literally see the value of SSD technology.
As you've pointed out, no major manufacturer seems to currently offer a low- to mid-range ($300-$500) laptop with a reasonable SSD as standard equipment. If they did, they couldn't milk the margins on SSD upgrades for their overpriced "enthusiast" laptops. Laptop makers tend to have thin margins on the cheap machines at their base model specifications and make most of their (consumer-grade) profits on sales of accessories (AC adapters, extended-life batteries) and heavy markups for each bullet-point in their "customize this computer" system upgrades.
In my experience, most people also fall into two data usage categories: people with 0GB-50GB of data (mostly iTunes libraries, Word docs, and maybe a few photos) and people with well over 100GB of data (media professionals, obsessive family photo shutterbugs, heavy gamers, people who would download a torrent of "the entire bloody internet," etc.) The majority of them fall into the first category and the ones in the second category will usually spend a lot more money on equipment because they're a different class of user and they know more about computers and how to meet their needs.
That doesn't make much sense from a business perspective. Having certifications doesn't automatically make someone an idiot trying to compromise for their lack of knowledge and experience. Sure, it's of limited value (especially A+ and the like) but having an A+ certification doesn't negate a person's capabilities. Why would you actively avoid someone who listed the certifications they've obtained?
I've been wondering lately if any of the CompTIA certs really matter to companies anymore. When I took the A+ exam many many moons ago, I found questions with no valid answer given, questions with multiple valid answers, and I completed both of the 90-minute tests in about 80 minutes. I was not impressed, but things may have changed in the decade or so since then. Do CompTIA certs matter to anyone other than Geek Squad and the like?
Discrimination against (and abuse/marginalization/humiliation of) men has long been considered socially acceptable, and I'd go so far as to say that it has even been encouraged. Men will destroy other men to obtain the favor of women and many women use this behavioral tendency to control men. It's been going on since before almost everyone reading Slashdot was born. Here's one article on the subject; it's an excellent read which I will only excerpt a tiny part of.
"It was in this atmosphere that Admiral Charles Penrose Fitzgerald organized a group of thirty women to help “convince” the men of Britain to join in the fight against the German enemy. It was the tactical objective of this group to shame civilian men into joining the armed services. This aim was to be accomplished by public humiliation -- the women handing out white feathers to any man who did not wear a uniform. “The Order of the White Feather” and their recruiting methods quickly spread across Britain. Women of all backgrounds contributed their influence to the war effort (Gullace, "White Feathers" 178). The zeal and the scope of this gendered phenomenon was paralleled only by the contemporaneous movement for suffrage -- a movement which, right before the war, had reached a radical pitch. It is in the radical nature of “The White Feather Brigade” -- the confrontational method which was employed by these women toward men -- that a tactical tie is evidenced between the pro-suffrage and pro-enlistment movements. It is in the motives and movements of Emmeline Pankhurst that an ideological connection is discovered between the feminine pro-war demonstration of the “White Feather Girls” and the Suffragists."
> "Call him a bunch of nasty names! Bring up the behavior of shitty truly oppressive countries as if they have any relevance to issues in Western societies! Pull up in a dump truck full of logical fallacies and pull the lever!!! PROBLEM SOLVED."
Whether I am insane or not, you're clearly lacking any remotely logical arguments. Do you wish to continue "debating" by pounding the table and screaming?
Isn't it interesting that the bullying forces of third-wave "Tumblr feminism" have brought this type of behavior about? The ridiculous push to forcibly stuff more women into "tech" by whatever means necessary is no different than the highly restrictive (and largely eliminated for at least two decades) gender roles these people claim to be attempting to destroy. What they're doing is not liberating women. It's simply redefining what women's forced gender roles "should" be and stripping women of their agency in the process. The Tumblr feminists are the ones that need to "shut up and listen" to the women that are saying "this is what I want to do with my life." Who are they to force a different path upon them?
We live in a society where moral crusaders demand that women be liberated from their chains by wearing a different set of chains.
I don't think any sane and relatively decent person actually wants to be a CEO of a large corporation, or at least not for very long. The personal sacrifices are high and the way you have to act towards other people can be difficult to live with.
When people can discuss "toxic femininity" without fear of vigilantes getting them fired, you can come back and tell us about the wonders of equality. Until then, men are the more oppressed sex, as evidenced by the fact that it's socially acceptable to talk shit about them but it's not okay to behave that way towards women.
The article uses a bone stock FX-9590 against very heavily overclocked (around 150% of factory maximum specs) and water-cooled Intel setups, plus saddles the AMD chip with high RAM latencies even compared to the Intel chips using the same frequency of DDR3 RAM. I'm aware that the 9590 is essentially an FX-8370 that binned very well and got a clock boost from the factory because of it, but AMD has had these chips up to 8.7 GHz and HardOCP tested it at bone stock with poorly configured RAM. They could have at least given the AMD chip some overclocking, fancy cooling, and the same RAM latency figures. That would have been more apples-to-apples.
Until the stock performance numbers divided by the price come out higher on the Intel side, the AMD is the better value if you don't want to heavily overclock your chip and void your warranty. Intel has always had faster CPUs available than AMD, but they have always carried a significantly higher price tag. I'd prefer to have that money to buy something else like an SSD or more RAM. For other people, low power consumption or higher maximum performance may matter far more to them than the price tag, and I don't begrudge their choice to get Intel chips because that's what meets their needs.
A $2 screen guard protects your $200 phone investment. The guard isn't an investment, it's a cheap and disposable item whose only purpose is to minimize damage to the much more expensive product it's attached to. Of course a $200 lavish dinner is not an investment; if you've got $200 to blow on one meal, your threshold for what is a disposable item and what is not is higher than that of an average person.
An "investment" in colloquial usage within the context of retail goods is obtaining something that you need to remain working for a significant period of time. If something is relatively very cheap, the financial barrier to replacing it is low, thus if it breaks you just go get another one. If something is relatively expensive (let's say a $1200 computer which you had to save money for three months to afford) then you can't replace it easily if it breaks, so you purchase carefully and with greater importance placed on long term reliability. That's the only reason the purchase of a consumer good that will only ever depreciate in market value is called "an investment." Contrary to your assertions that "price based definition makes no sense, does not fit reality, and is totally stupid," it does in fact make perfect sense, is based entirely in reality, and is quite correct.
That 220W CPU beats most of Intel's high-end consumer grade offerings in everything but finding prime numbers and pi digits once you start dividing the real-world performance numbers by the cost of the chip. If you absolutely need to get maximum performance from a single die (in which case you're probably looking at server processors anyway), the massive price premium of Intel chips may be worth it, but the 220W AMD chip is a much better deal. I constantly read arguments stating that Intel is better than AMD because of their superior processes and lower power consumption. While impressive and certainly helpful if you're looking for a low-wattage CPU for a laptop or tablet (I chose a ULV i3 for my laptop), on a desktop I just want to process some video and crank some data through 7-Zip, and AMD's offering costs way less while offering the same effective performance. https://nctritech.files.wordpr...
Anything that's over $1000 is an investment. Hell, anything over $100 is probably an investment. My phone was $199; I consider it to be an investment, and I've had it for almost two years. $200 laser printer? Investment. Now the $45 Raspberry Pi? That's not an investment, that's a toy, and it is priced accordingly.
I use a version number in the classic (and very useful) major.minor.revision scheme, but I also use a chronologically sortable date code to the right of it. Best of both worlds. There's no reason to be limited to "date codes that don't say when you break stuff" or "version numbers that seem arbitrary." When the programs are started, they emit "Program that Does Stuff to Your Cookies 3.4.15 (2014-11-22)" and even if the version number doesn't ring a bell, the date code tells me "that's the day you accidentally typed a backtick and divided by zero."
Having seen this passive-aggressive horseshit so many times in the past, this post made me genuinely laugh out loud. I never understood what people who say "I won't visit anymore!" thought was going to change. People are, by default, in the ignored background until they speak up.
There is no need to be rude or presumptive about my level of education. I shall explain what I meant in more depth to clear up any misunderstandings.
OP said: "So if you can spy on the traffic from the user to the tor entry node, and can spy on the traffic leaving the tor exit node at the same time... then you can tell that the traffic you saw going to the entry node is linked to the traffic leaving the exit node"
You said: "If you can correlate the server-->exit node flow to a specific entry node-->client flow, you've just identified the client outside of Tor."
Distinction Without a Difference - The assertion that a position is different from another position based on the language when, in fact, both positions are exactly the same -- at least in practice or practical terms.
Your provided links show that "packet sniffing" and "traffic flow analysis" are not different concepts in practice. The difference is in how the collected data is analyzed or for what purpose. For the purposes of this discussion where analysis of collected packets is for identical purposes, this is also a distinction without a difference. "A packet analyzer...is a computer program or a piece of computer hardware that can intercept and log traffic passing over a digital network or part of a network." "NetFlow is a feature that was introduced on Cisco routers that provides the ability to collect IP network traffic as it enters or exits an interface."
If you feel I have misinterpreted your statements, I would appreciate additional feedback.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I forgot to mention: take the hard drive it comes with, buy a USB 3.0 external drive enclosure, and you've got yourself a drive to do backups to!
You can get sub-$500 laptops with SSDs but they're all extremely low-capacity (the HP Stream 11 is $200 and has a minuscule 32GB SSD with ~8GB already eaten with a "recovery partition") and often are netbook-esque machines with drives that cost way too much to upgrade because they're not 2.5" SATA form factor. I have made a fair amount of money buying $350 laptops, slapping a $60 120GB or 128GB SSD in place of the 750GB 5400RPM drive, doing a fresh junkless reinstall of Windows, and reselling the units for $500. When you show someone a cheap-ish laptop with an SSD booting up to a fully started desktop in 20 seconds, they literally see the value of SSD technology.
As you've pointed out, no major manufacturer seems to currently offer a low- to mid-range ($300-$500) laptop with a reasonable SSD as standard equipment. If they did, they couldn't milk the margins on SSD upgrades for their overpriced "enthusiast" laptops. Laptop makers tend to have thin margins on the cheap machines at their base model specifications and make most of their (consumer-grade) profits on sales of accessories (AC adapters, extended-life batteries) and heavy markups for each bullet-point in their "customize this computer" system upgrades.
In my experience, most people also fall into two data usage categories: people with 0GB-50GB of data (mostly iTunes libraries, Word docs, and maybe a few photos) and people with well over 100GB of data (media professionals, obsessive family photo shutterbugs, heavy gamers, people who would download a torrent of "the entire bloody internet," etc.) The majority of them fall into the first category and the ones in the second category will usually spend a lot more money on equipment because they're a different class of user and they know more about computers and how to meet their needs.
Dear publishers who totally missed the point,
Fuck you.
Sincerely,
Everyone who proactively chose to install ABP and thus won't buy shit from your ads in the first place, you dolts.
That doesn't make much sense from a business perspective. Having certifications doesn't automatically make someone an idiot trying to compromise for their lack of knowledge and experience. Sure, it's of limited value (especially A+ and the like) but having an A+ certification doesn't negate a person's capabilities. Why would you actively avoid someone who listed the certifications they've obtained?
I've been wondering lately if any of the CompTIA certs really matter to companies anymore. When I took the A+ exam many many moons ago, I found questions with no valid answer given, questions with multiple valid answers, and I completed both of the 90-minute tests in about 80 minutes. I was not impressed, but things may have changed in the decade or so since then. Do CompTIA certs matter to anyone other than Geek Squad and the like?
Discrimination against (and abuse/marginalization/humiliation of) men has long been considered socially acceptable, and I'd go so far as to say that it has even been encouraged. Men will destroy other men to obtain the favor of women and many women use this behavioral tendency to control men. It's been going on since before almost everyone reading Slashdot was born. Here's one article on the subject; it's an excellent read which I will only excerpt a tiny part of.
"White Feather" Feminism: The Recalcitrant Progeny of Radical Suffragist and Conservative Pro-War Britain
"It was in this atmosphere that Admiral Charles Penrose Fitzgerald organized a group of thirty women to help “convince” the men of Britain to join in the fight against the German enemy. It was the tactical objective of this group to shame civilian men into joining the armed services. This aim was to be accomplished by public humiliation -- the women handing out white feathers to any man who did not wear a uniform. “The Order of the White Feather” and their recruiting methods quickly spread across Britain. Women of all backgrounds contributed their influence to the war effort (Gullace, "White Feathers" 178). The zeal and the scope of this gendered phenomenon was paralleled only by the contemporaneous movement for suffrage -- a movement which, right before the war, had reached a radical pitch. It is in the radical nature of “The White Feather Brigade” -- the confrontational method which was employed by these women toward men -- that a tactical tie is evidenced between the pro-suffrage and pro-enlistment movements. It is in the motives and movements of Emmeline Pankhurst that an ideological connection is discovered between the feminine pro-war demonstration of the “White Feather Girls” and the Suffragists."
> "Call him a bunch of nasty names! Bring up the behavior of shitty truly oppressive countries as if they have any relevance to issues in Western societies! Pull up in a dump truck full of logical fallacies and pull the lever!!! PROBLEM SOLVED."
Whether I am insane or not, you're clearly lacking any remotely logical arguments. Do you wish to continue "debating" by pounding the table and screaming?
Isn't it interesting that the bullying forces of third-wave "Tumblr feminism" have brought this type of behavior about? The ridiculous push to forcibly stuff more women into "tech" by whatever means necessary is no different than the highly restrictive (and largely eliminated for at least two decades) gender roles these people claim to be attempting to destroy. What they're doing is not liberating women. It's simply redefining what women's forced gender roles "should" be and stripping women of their agency in the process. The Tumblr feminists are the ones that need to "shut up and listen" to the women that are saying "this is what I want to do with my life." Who are they to force a different path upon them?
We live in a society where moral crusaders demand that women be liberated from their chains by wearing a different set of chains.
The irony. It burns.
An opinionated article on Slate is not a scientifically valid source. This article is what some refer to as "feelz over reals."
I would, if I had such a burden to bear. I'm sufficiently closer to the "sane" point on that spectrum ;-) though my wallet is not so fat for it.
I don't think any sane and relatively decent person actually wants to be a CEO of a large corporation, or at least not for very long. The personal sacrifices are high and the way you have to act towards other people can be difficult to live with.
When people can discuss "toxic femininity" without fear of vigilantes getting them fired, you can come back and tell us about the wonders of equality. Until then, men are the more oppressed sex, as evidenced by the fact that it's socially acceptable to talk shit about them but it's not okay to behave that way towards women.
http://www.psychologytoday.com...
http://www.parenting.com/artic...
Also, a documentary that examines and discusses the subject in depth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The article uses a bone stock FX-9590 against very heavily overclocked (around 150% of factory maximum specs) and water-cooled Intel setups, plus saddles the AMD chip with high RAM latencies even compared to the Intel chips using the same frequency of DDR3 RAM. I'm aware that the 9590 is essentially an FX-8370 that binned very well and got a clock boost from the factory because of it, but AMD has had these chips up to 8.7 GHz and HardOCP tested it at bone stock with poorly configured RAM. They could have at least given the AMD chip some overclocking, fancy cooling, and the same RAM latency figures. That would have been more apples-to-apples.
Here's a review that tested all the chips at stock settings with more typical RAM configurations. It's also the article from which the price-to-performance bar chart was derived (compared against Newegg retail prices) and is representative of what a typical system builder who is not taking the risks involved in overclocking can expect from the hardware. Here are a few more benchmarks of x264 which is what I cared about when buying a desktop CPU.
Until the stock performance numbers divided by the price come out higher on the Intel side, the AMD is the better value if you don't want to heavily overclock your chip and void your warranty. Intel has always had faster CPUs available than AMD, but they have always carried a significantly higher price tag. I'd prefer to have that money to buy something else like an SSD or more RAM. For other people, low power consumption or higher maximum performance may matter far more to them than the price tag, and I don't begrudge their choice to get Intel chips because that's what meets their needs.
A $2 screen guard protects your $200 phone investment. The guard isn't an investment, it's a cheap and disposable item whose only purpose is to minimize damage to the much more expensive product it's attached to. Of course a $200 lavish dinner is not an investment; if you've got $200 to blow on one meal, your threshold for what is a disposable item and what is not is higher than that of an average person.
An "investment" in colloquial usage within the context of retail goods is obtaining something that you need to remain working for a significant period of time. If something is relatively very cheap, the financial barrier to replacing it is low, thus if it breaks you just go get another one. If something is relatively expensive (let's say a $1200 computer which you had to save money for three months to afford) then you can't replace it easily if it breaks, so you purchase carefully and with greater importance placed on long term reliability. That's the only reason the purchase of a consumer good that will only ever depreciate in market value is called "an investment." Contrary to your assertions that "price based definition makes no sense, does not fit reality, and is totally stupid," it does in fact make perfect sense, is based entirely in reality, and is quite correct.
That 220W CPU beats most of Intel's high-end consumer grade offerings in everything but finding prime numbers and pi digits once you start dividing the real-world performance numbers by the cost of the chip. If you absolutely need to get maximum performance from a single die (in which case you're probably looking at server processors anyway), the massive price premium of Intel chips may be worth it, but the 220W AMD chip is a much better deal. I constantly read arguments stating that Intel is better than AMD because of their superior processes and lower power consumption. While impressive and certainly helpful if you're looking for a low-wattage CPU for a laptop or tablet (I chose a ULV i3 for my laptop), on a desktop I just want to process some video and crank some data through 7-Zip, and AMD's offering costs way less while offering the same effective performance. https://nctritech.files.wordpr...
I would like to sign up to your mailing list for more information on this subject.
Anything that's over $1000 is an investment. Hell, anything over $100 is probably an investment. My phone was $199; I consider it to be an investment, and I've had it for almost two years. $200 laser printer? Investment. Now the $45 Raspberry Pi? That's not an investment, that's a toy, and it is priced accordingly.
A good engineer would offer to build them one that goes to 12.
I use a version number in the classic (and very useful) major.minor.revision scheme, but I also use a chronologically sortable date code to the right of it. Best of both worlds. There's no reason to be limited to "date codes that don't say when you break stuff" or "version numbers that seem arbitrary." When the programs are started, they emit "Program that Does Stuff to Your Cookies 3.4.15 (2014-11-22)" and even if the version number doesn't ring a bell, the date code tells me "that's the day you accidentally typed a backtick and divided by zero."
Thank you for this post. You said it better than I think I could have, and didn't have to put anyone down or insult them in the process. /thread
Having seen this passive-aggressive horseshit so many times in the past, this post made me genuinely laugh out loud. I never understood what people who say "I won't visit anymore!" thought was going to change. People are, by default, in the ignored background until they speak up.
I understand where you were/are coming from now. Thanks.
There is no need to be rude or presumptive about my level of education. I shall explain what I meant in more depth to clear up any misunderstandings.
OP said: "So if you can spy on the traffic from the user to the tor entry node, and can spy on the traffic leaving the tor exit node at the same time... then you can tell that the traffic you saw going to the entry node is linked to the traffic leaving the exit node"
You said: "If you can correlate the server-->exit node flow to a specific entry node-->client flow, you've just identified the client outside of Tor."
Distinction Without a Difference - The assertion that a position is different from another position based on the language when, in fact, both positions are exactly the same -- at least in practice or practical terms.
Your provided links show that "packet sniffing" and "traffic flow analysis" are not different concepts in practice. The difference is in how the collected data is analyzed or for what purpose. For the purposes of this discussion where analysis of collected packets is for identical purposes, this is also a distinction without a difference. "A packet analyzer...is a computer program or a piece of computer hardware that can intercept and log traffic passing over a digital network or part of a network." "NetFlow is a feature that was introduced on Cisco routers that provides the ability to collect IP network traffic as it enters or exits an interface."
If you feel I have misinterpreted your statements, I would appreciate additional feedback.
Go to the URL bar and hit enter. It's blocking access because of the HTTP referrer.