Agreed, my friend has never been able to recover anything from a drive that's been zeroed/100% overwritten. They have contractors with microscopes in a clean room that they sometimes use to recover bits from the bare platters (when the drives are fucked and can't be repaired), but it's so expensive and unimaginably painfully slow that it's practically never done, and getting stuff off that's been overwritten is utterly impossible.
Speaking of which, if anyone's ever seen the analogue data coming off a drive head, you'd be amazed that even a fully working drive can have a controller that understand that gibberish. Trying to cipher deleted data out of that mess would be... challenging.
...a foregone conclusion ever since ATA Secure Erase and TRIM were introduced?
Secure Erase basically tells the SSD that all of its cells are now blank (AFAIK implementations actually zero the drive as well but I'm happy to be corrected on that); therefore as soon as anything is written to the disc, it will be written here, there and everywhere. It took about 30s to run on my first vertex and I couldn't find any trace of
TRIM support in the ATA spec, along with kernel/filesystem support, tells the disc that when file A is deleted, cells X, Y, and ABQ are now officially "empty" and that if the controller feels like it, it can zero them out, shunt other data in there, or have a mardi gras for all it cares. The same happens when a drive is formatted; OS tells drive controller "I've just formatted you" and for the sake of preserving performance the controller goes "Brilliant! I can chuck out all this shit I've been saddled with."
As soon as hard drives start intelligently erasing/shuffling bits of themselves about so that cells are utilised to their utmost efficiency this was bound to happen. Unlike spinning platters where bad blocks were reallocated only if a) the hard disc knew about it and b) the data could actually be read/recovered, it becomes terribly obvious that data on SSD's is going to be read and written and deleted completely and utterly all over the place, without sequential series of sector found in slackspace like you would on a magnetic drive.
Magnetic drives have no performance penalties for not actually erasing the data, so if you work your way around that double negative you'll see that one of the staples of digital forensics (e.g. recovering files from slack) is a by-product of people trying to make magnetic platters as fast as possible by not actually erasing stuff, because as long as the controller knows that sector is blank then it'll just be overwritten as needed. Technology has now changed sufficiently that the performance gains from new solid state tech are helped by a drive controller that erases stuff as soon as possible, since writing over an occupied cell is slower than writing over a blank one.
I'm sure there'll be new methods to mitigate the change in tech, we're just somewhat on the cusp of a completely new tech. They'll probably come to an agreement that TRIM doesn't actually delete stuff until the amount of free space in the cells reaches a certain threshold or something like that.
Disclaimer: I'm not a digital forensic scientist, but am friends with one and we discussed this problem over some exquisite cocktails a few months back. And I don't think TRIM instructions follow the exact specifications I laid out above (e.g. using Brilliant! as an ACK).
An engineering marvel for its time, the dam was built based on shoddy geology - there was a faultline running up one side of the adjacent mountain. In a nutshell, filling up the dam forced water into the fault, which eventually caused half the mountain to fall into the dam. The dam was well built enough to not break - but the water spilled out over the top and killed about 2000 people.
However, the hand-wringing of the article is a bit unwarranted. It's well known that pumping stuff in and out of rock is bound to cause seismic instabilities. Magnitude 4-5 stuff (assuming they mean moment magnitude? They don't say) is generally considered small fry.
A blatant "me too!" post; I also still use my 6310i; the things are indestructible. Before that I used a similarly tank-like 6110.
It's nearest brush with death was falling out of a second storey window on to a concrete pathway, the phone exploded into pieces and I figured it was done for. Snapped the pieces back together again and the phone booted without a hitch. It's also been dropped into a mountain stream, left outside lost under a foot of snow for three days and dropped in innumerable pints of beer.
Original battery here too, and still lasts a week on a single charge. I paid £250 for it, and simply not upgrading my phone every year via the carrier means the phone paid for itself five times over.
I bought a Nokia E52 just over a year back; nice and light, and also lasted a week on a single charge, and the ovi maps application is excellent. However, the keys were attached solely with a membrane and two of them managed to tear off when I stuck a DVD in my pocket and they rubbed against the keys. Worst thing however is that, due to a bug that's still not been fixed despite at least five firmware updates, if you enable email on your phone then there's a hidden file somewhere that will slowly eat up all the available space on your root drive, and eventually the phone will fail to boot. I've even loaded numerous file management apps and this file is nowhere to be found - the only way you can free the space is by issuing a soft reset and restoring a backup. I returned the phone as soon as I found out about it even though the Nokia rep assured me it was totally normal and easy to restore my phone from backup every six months.
Nokia's build quality and QA has now joined the "race to the bottom" also-rans in the mobile market. I've always liked their symbian platform, but it's now looking increasingly likely that even this won't differentiate nokia from the competition any more.
P.S. get HTML tags working again please slashdot. Maybe you'll add unicode support whilst you're at it. Ha!
...except when the trojan just installs itself to %appdata% instead of %windir%. I've seen plenty of malware recently that's infected NT6 machines and installed itself in a purely per-user context without ever making a UAC prompt appear (at least according to the users). UAC only seems to block access to HKLM and not HKCU.
Wouldn't be surprised if those viruses are later capable of using priv escalation exploits to install themselves or other malware under an administrative account.
This. We have the same situation at work - a bunch of applications still mandate IE6 (welcome to the enterprise gentlemen), and we're still in the middle of rolling out upgrades/replacements/citrix-ised IE6 instances before we can install IE8 by default.
Unofficial solution from users was to install chrome; a couple of people brought it in on USB sticks and it soon ended up installed on a lot of desktops. Management threw a fit so all manner of workarounds were hastily thrown together to stop users using "non-standard browsers" (despite the fact that everyone in the IT and management departments does it).
After several drive-by downloads/infections and a 40% increase in tickets submitted to the helldesk due to users complaining about "broken" websites... we're told the official fix is to "install chrome". Ha! Colleagues in business elsewhere tell me this sort of behaviour is rife, with chrome being used as a stopgap since it's easy to install and run for non-admins. Running firefox myself as chrome annoys the hell out of me and opera (as fast as chrome with the advantage of a decent ad blocker) doesn't play nice with our proxy.
Anecdotal, but this isn't my experience. I was trying to find a copy of Four Lions (easily the best comedy about suicide bombers from 2010) to clarify a scene that I'd remembered one way and a fellow TV Troper had remembered another; the DVD wasn't yet out and it was no longer on in the cinema (and in case you were wondering I paid money for both) and was delighted to find torrent sites awash with copies of the film, some with upwards of a hundred seeds. Yay! Downloaded the torrent and it started coming down at a 16Mb.
About 33% through the download, MS security essentials on my laptop (connected to the share on the linux box doing the download) that the file was infected with some trojan or other; waited for the file to finish and played it back on a linux VM. Got a message that said "you need to play this back in Windows Media Player!"; put it on a (unpatched) windows VM, played back in MPC and got the same message, played back in windows media player and lo and behold got the trojan payload. Didn't really bother to see what the trojan did, but tried a couple of the other seeds for different files. Downloaded those (again, quickly) and they were also trojaned. What surprised me the most was the complete lack of comments in any of the files I saw, even when I tracked down multiple tracker sites.
It might just be I was unlucky and started looking for it on the same day the first rips from the screener copies came out, but someone, somewhere, was providing a lot of bandwidth and servers for providing fake copies of what I thought was a non-blockbuster indie movie.
If you don't use your TV for receiving TV signals (e.g. you don't have an aerial plugged in), you don't need to pay for a TV license. The license officials will behave like cnuts and threaten to take you to court even if you do show them you don't have an aerial attached, but there's nowt they can do. The license isn't there to "tax" the owners of a TV, it's purely a fee for being able to receive BBC broadcasts.
Can't you be classified as a sex offender in the US for things as heinous as taking a slash or having sex in a public place? Something along the lines of a sexual offence being anything that's offensive and involves genitals, rather than committing a violent sexual crime (which is most people's definition of a sex offender).
TFA was light on any details, other than this being used on 43 out of 1100 people, but even if it's just for paedophiles I can't see them being able to step out of the house, since surely there are hundreds of places where children will congregate outside of schools...?
Of course, once it's used to track paedophiles I figure you can start issuing automatic tickets to the people who pissed in public if they haven't been to a registered urination point for the last 4 hours.
Not a problem! Sony now include a EULA with all their computers that states that (after you agree to the EULA by looking at a computer it's attached to, or have passed within 1AU of a computer it's attached to) grants them the right to a) install their Valued Internet Radiocast User Services software to ensure a great consumer experience and b) the right to kidnap your firstborn and manufacture them in to a superstar with a 5-album deal, with a free 6-month stay in the Sony Music Addiction Clinic for when their Sony-sponsored sense of self-entitlement/cocaine is cancelled.
Thought about buying an Ion myself, but I found the atom sucked for most non-video stuff; was crappy with XBMC and youtube bits (running XBMC on top of debian myself).
Also using an SSD, a 30GB OCZ vertex, but from my experience with the Intel drives you can safely use them for temp storage. Also got 4GB in the ASRock (which is essentially just intel and nVidia laptop components in a Mac-mini-esque chassis) and it's laughable how little of it linux + XBMC ever use:)
Surprised the atom eats so "much" power though, I'd have expected that setup not to draw any more than 10W.
The Twilight films went one better - they've got dead actors playing undead vampires with the intelligence of zombies in stories where literally nothing happens.
Commenting instead of moderating, and I agree - browser reviews appear to have devolved into "Browser X is best at Benchmark Y and Z, and is therefore the best browser!" when, as far as I can tell from my real-world usage, there are many more glaring deficiencies and advantages that are ritualistically ignored in a market where all browsers are rapidly approaching "good enough". For example:
* Firefox still eats too much memory, and still slows down to a crawl once it eats >1GB (even on a machine with 16GB RAM), but still has the unbeatable AdBlock * As you point out, Chrome eats lots of CPU, it uses a poor-man's AdBlock but it's, er, quite fast at javascript and HTML5 * Opera still doesn't play nice with certain proxies (mem leak and ever-increasing CPU usage), still has problems with rendering certain sites (not necessarily their fault) but is the only browser with decent gesture support
You just don't get browser reviews like this because it's just easy to trot out the numbers and call it a benchmark review, which makes for cheap copy and lots of page hits from "first Browser X reviews hit teh intrarwebz!". You may find the occasional site that actually reviews the browser, but they're lost in a sea of mediocre bar graphs with little to no "but what's it LIKE?!" commentary, because doing that sort of review requires you to understand and actually give a shit about what you're reviewing, and depressingly few people seem willing to put the time in.
Out of curiosity, what hardware are you using? I've just picked up one of the new ASRock Vision 3D HTPC's (great little machine for Myth/XBMC; works OotB with Linux for everything except the IR receiver, although for some reason amazon won't publish my review) that pulls 23W from the wall on a bad day, and idles at about 17W at idle. My old C2D-based mATX box pulled more like 50-60W.
But yeah, I've never been able to quantify those power usages of memory. I think they must take an absolute worst case scenario along the lines of "if every bit was flipped at once" or something like that. DIMMs even run cooler than they used to, making those ubiquitous heatspreaders all the more ephemeral.
I feel your pain; I can't stand rounded borders on windows or buttons, and so far haven't found a single theme that uses plain-jane boxes to draw, er... boxes. Guess we're two of those weird people who apparently can't see the point in round things when they're not needed. And to my eyes, they're ugly.
And yes, the default look of 80% of the themes looking like they've just emerged from a Turtle Wax avalanche doesn't help either. It took me forever to figure out how to get rid of the damned image overlay on the taskbar, which distracted me no end when I was reading it. To my eye these themes don't look polished, to me they're so self-consciously crying out for attention that they begins to take on the look of a teenager trying to be cool by growing a wispy bumfluff moustache and smoking a woodbine he purloined from his grandmother whilst bragging to the girls about how he's totally going to get some bitchin' rims for the Ford Fiesta his mum will donate to him once he hits 17.
At the end of the day, I still use KDE because it sucks less than GNOME and XFCE. But at least in windows I can use square window borders that eat up next to no screen real estate (although it's taken me no end of reg hacking to get win7 explorer to behave how I want it to). Seems to me like most developments in the UI world over the last five years have been directed towards making the desktop more blingy and less application oriented, whilst gobbling up more screen real estate, especially vertical... despite the fact that dot pitch and vertical resolution has been dropping over the last couple of years (thanks to the almost total exclusion of TFT panels that aren't 720p or 1080p - god knows how anyone can find a 15" screen with 1368x768 acceptable), to the extent we now have to have special "netbook" editions of UI's so that we can still fit in the huge blingin' icons. That's progress!/screaming old fuddy-duddy, apparently
...from the findings-obvious-to-the-lay-person-but-will-be-routinely-ignored-by-big-content-even-if-proven dept: dehydrated water still a long way from market feasibility.
Used all my mod points already, but you're at +5 already anyway. Kudos to you and your dad.
I can't understand the attitude that people can escape the fact that the vast majority of us are squeezed through a vagina and spend the next few months affixed to a teat as a "Hey! You're in the world now!" present. We're flesh-based eating/sleeping/fucking machines, and no amount of prudish social conditioning is ever going to overcome that, and those who rail against it (consciously or otherwise) almost inevitably end up entirely fubar in the head. The sooner people realise that sex is one of the most natural things for an animal to want to do, the better.
Sad thing is that even if these prudes did get laid, they'd still convince themselves they hated the experience, and will gleefully use the frustration of their pointless self-loathing to inflict their guilt on others, all the while calling people "perverts" for simply having the audacity to enjoy the sight/company of people who they find attractive.
I wonder if the animal kingdom has any parallels to this idiocy? I wonder if there's a "Bonobo's Ban Boning!" political party?
And yes, I do realise the hypocrisy in stating that my point of view is the right one, but I'm also arrogant enough to know the prudes are wrong.
And It sure and hell beats a 'Blade Runner' type of World.
Britain is already a Blade Runner world! It's perpetually raining, the colonies went to war with us because they didn't want us interfering, the workforce is run by corporate oligarchs who have their brains programmed to only think and know certain things and undercover police go around "retiring" Brazilian electricians.
Disclaimer for all about to mod me as troll: I'm British, and an ex girlfriend is an (ex) space scientist; she shifted careers a year ago due to manufacture in europe being too expensive for most prospective clients. This is just a move to get what little remains of our manufacturing exported overseas. Mod me -1 cynical instead.
The idiocy in this statement is strong, for reasons that alot of non-UK gamers might not be aware of.
Backstory is that I bought the orange box in april this year (I'm not much of a gamer), so I could give portal a whirl as I'd heard nothing but good news about it, in full knowledge that I'd have to begrudgingly install steam. Ended up loving the whole bundle, and finding that steam was alot less painless than all my other CD/DVD-based games had ever been *.
Most stuff sold via steam in the UK however, is often cheaper at retail, thanks to exchange rates, VAT, and some other things that I don't really understand - so if I'm going to pick up a game that needs steam, I'll almost always check retail before I buy it, as buying the DVD will often save me a few quid and mean I don't have to use bandwidth pulling down the initial 5GB of textures. So don't get me wrong - potentially I'm a strong contender for buying games as retail. But, as other posters have pointed out, the retail sector for games (especially PC games) have been doing plenty to actively keep me away from them.
It's next to impossible for me to pick up PC games at your stores (thanks to being relegated to a couple of shelves, one of which is the PC top 10 and the other one being a bunch of "edutainment" games marketed to parents for kids, or "100 classic card games on one DVD!" bullshit compilations), and despite being an affluent professional in his 30's you seem to train all your staff to think that all their customers are priapic teenagers that are prepared to put up with your short-back-and-smarm "well why don't you pre-order it?!?!?!?!?!?!" fucknozzle attitude if for some inexplicable reason I'm not interested in a wide range of used console beat 'em ups and footie games at the low low price of £5 below what a brand new copy costs. And even if you did have more than three interesting games in the building, how in fucking tardwarks am I meant to browse when I have one of your "can I interest you in our store-encompassing selection of shitty s/h games" mantras engaging in a futile impression to charm me every five minutes? If anything is keeping me away from your stores, it's you. The only place I've ever gotten a halfway decent selection is in the larger outlets of HMV, which are big enough to not give a crap about s/h sales anyway. 99% of the time I just buy the game from amazon, and that's cheaper still than steam or the high street.
So in the immortal words of the heavy: cry some more, little babies! Boycott steam games and you'll just make yourself more irrelevant to people who already detest the way you do business.
On top of that, steam makes a big thing about promoting all kinds of little known/indie games, both by selling them in dirt cheap bundles or by letting people play them for free for a weekend; 95% of my steam purchases so far have been these cool little indie titles, often with quirkily brilliant game mechanics. Something the high street stores do absolutely nothing to promote, therefore helping perpetuate the sausage machine of identikit FPS games. Most of the fun I've had gaming over the last year that wasn't TF2 or portal has been darwinia, defcon, braid and defence grid, none of which I'd have heard about if not for steam promoting them (inoffensively, I might add).
* Yes, I'm aware that it's "for as long as steam keeps working!". I don't pick steam games because they're the best solution, they're just the least worst for those of us that don't like to pick up gloriously non-DRM'd games off P2P. Steam is a system made by a business for gamers, GFWL is made by a business that maybe drove past the iD offices once.
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Agreed, my friend has never been able to recover anything from a drive that's been zeroed/100% overwritten. They have contractors with microscopes in a clean room that they sometimes use to recover bits from the bare platters (when the drives are fucked and can't be repaired), but it's so expensive and unimaginably painfully slow that it's practically never done, and getting stuff off that's been overwritten is utterly impossible.
Speaking of which, if anyone's ever seen the analogue data coming off a drive head, you'd be amazed that even a fully working drive can have a controller that understand that gibberish. Trying to cipher deleted data out of that mess would be... challenging.
...a foregone conclusion ever since ATA Secure Erase and TRIM were introduced?
Secure Erase basically tells the SSD that all of its cells are now blank (AFAIK implementations actually zero the drive as well but I'm happy to be corrected on that); therefore as soon as anything is written to the disc, it will be written here, there and everywhere. It took about 30s to run on my first vertex and I couldn't find any trace of
TRIM support in the ATA spec, along with kernel/filesystem support, tells the disc that when file A is deleted, cells X, Y, and ABQ are now officially "empty" and that if the controller feels like it, it can zero them out, shunt other data in there, or have a mardi gras for all it cares. The same happens when a drive is formatted; OS tells drive controller "I've just formatted you" and for the sake of preserving performance the controller goes "Brilliant! I can chuck out all this shit I've been saddled with."
As soon as hard drives start intelligently erasing/shuffling bits of themselves about so that cells are utilised to their utmost efficiency this was bound to happen. Unlike spinning platters where bad blocks were reallocated only if a) the hard disc knew about it and b) the data could actually be read/recovered, it becomes terribly obvious that data on SSD's is going to be read and written and deleted completely and utterly all over the place, without sequential series of sector found in slackspace like you would on a magnetic drive.
Magnetic drives have no performance penalties for not actually erasing the data, so if you work your way around that double negative you'll see that one of the staples of digital forensics (e.g. recovering files from slack) is a by-product of people trying to make magnetic platters as fast as possible by not actually erasing stuff, because as long as the controller knows that sector is blank then it'll just be overwritten as needed. Technology has now changed sufficiently that the performance gains from new solid state tech are helped by a drive controller that erases stuff as soon as possible, since writing over an occupied cell is slower than writing over a blank one.
I'm sure there'll be new methods to mitigate the change in tech, we're just somewhat on the cusp of a completely new tech. They'll probably come to an agreement that TRIM doesn't actually delete stuff until the amount of free space in the cells reaches a certain threshold or something like that.
Disclaimer: I'm not a digital forensic scientist, but am friends with one and we discussed this problem over some exquisite cocktails a few months back. And I don't think TRIM instructions follow the exact specifications I laid out above (e.g. using Brilliant! as an ACK).
For an even more impressive example, read about the Vajont Dam in Italy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam
An engineering marvel for its time, the dam was built based on shoddy geology - there was a faultline running up one side of the adjacent mountain. In a nutshell, filling up the dam forced water into the fault, which eventually caused half the mountain to fall into the dam. The dam was well built enough to not break - but the water spilled out over the top and killed about 2000 people.
However, the hand-wringing of the article is a bit unwarranted. It's well known that pumping stuff in and out of rock is bound to cause seismic instabilities. Magnitude 4-5 stuff (assuming they mean moment magnitude? They don't say) is generally considered small fry.
Obligatory classic Penny arcade:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2003/03/21/
A blatant "me too!" post; I also still use my 6310i; the things are indestructible. Before that I used a similarly tank-like 6110.
It's nearest brush with death was falling out of a second storey window on to a concrete pathway, the phone exploded into pieces and I figured it was done for. Snapped the pieces back together again and the phone booted without a hitch. It's also been dropped into a mountain stream, left outside lost under a foot of snow for three days and dropped in innumerable pints of beer.
Original battery here too, and still lasts a week on a single charge. I paid £250 for it, and simply not upgrading my phone every year via the carrier means the phone paid for itself five times over.
I bought a Nokia E52 just over a year back; nice and light, and also lasted a week on a single charge, and the ovi maps application is excellent. However, the keys were attached solely with a membrane and two of them managed to tear off when I stuck a DVD in my pocket and they rubbed against the keys. Worst thing however is that, due to a bug that's still not been fixed despite at least five firmware updates, if you enable email on your phone then there's a hidden file somewhere that will slowly eat up all the available space on your root drive, and eventually the phone will fail to boot. I've even loaded numerous file management apps and this file is nowhere to be found - the only way you can free the space is by issuing a soft reset and restoring a backup. I returned the phone as soon as I found out about it even though the Nokia rep assured me it was totally normal and easy to restore my phone from backup every six months.
Nokia's build quality and QA has now joined the "race to the bottom" also-rans in the mobile market. I've always liked their symbian platform, but it's now looking increasingly likely that even this won't differentiate nokia from the competition any more.
P.S. get HTML tags working again please slashdot. Maybe you'll add unicode support whilst you're at it. Ha!
...except when the trojan just installs itself to %appdata% instead of %windir%. I've seen plenty of malware recently that's infected NT6 machines and installed itself in a purely per-user context without ever making a UAC prompt appear (at least according to the users). UAC only seems to block access to HKLM and not HKCU.
Wouldn't be surprised if those viruses are later capable of using priv escalation exploits to install themselves or other malware under an administrative account.
Now I have to sever limbs and pluck out eyes before I get to the pub! This is going to ruin my evenings.
This. We have the same situation at work - a bunch of applications still mandate IE6 (welcome to the enterprise gentlemen), and we're still in the middle of rolling out upgrades/replacements/citrix-ised IE6 instances before we can install IE8 by default.
Unofficial solution from users was to install chrome; a couple of people brought it in on USB sticks and it soon ended up installed on a lot of desktops. Management threw a fit so all manner of workarounds were hastily thrown together to stop users using "non-standard browsers" (despite the fact that everyone in the IT and management departments does it).
After several drive-by downloads/infections and a 40% increase in tickets submitted to the helldesk due to users complaining about "broken" websites... we're told the official fix is to "install chrome". Ha! Colleagues in business elsewhere tell me this sort of behaviour is rife, with chrome being used as a stopgap since it's easy to install and run for non-admins. Running firefox myself as chrome annoys the hell out of me and opera (as fast as chrome with the advantage of a decent ad blocker) doesn't play nice with our proxy.
Anecdotal, but this isn't my experience. I was trying to find a copy of Four Lions (easily the best comedy about suicide bombers from 2010) to clarify a scene that I'd remembered one way and a fellow TV Troper had remembered another; the DVD wasn't yet out and it was no longer on in the cinema (and in case you were wondering I paid money for both) and was delighted to find torrent sites awash with copies of the film, some with upwards of a hundred seeds. Yay! Downloaded the torrent and it started coming down at a 16Mb.
About 33% through the download, MS security essentials on my laptop (connected to the share on the linux box doing the download) that the file was infected with some trojan or other; waited for the file to finish and played it back on a linux VM. Got a message that said "you need to play this back in Windows Media Player!"; put it on a (unpatched) windows VM, played back in MPC and got the same message, played back in windows media player and lo and behold got the trojan payload. Didn't really bother to see what the trojan did, but tried a couple of the other seeds for different files. Downloaded those (again, quickly) and they were also trojaned. What surprised me the most was the complete lack of comments in any of the files I saw, even when I tracked down multiple tracker sites.
It might just be I was unlucky and started looking for it on the same day the first rips from the screener copies came out, but someone, somewhere, was providing a lot of bandwidth and servers for providing fake copies of what I thought was a non-blockbuster indie movie.
If you don't use your TV for receiving TV signals (e.g. you don't have an aerial plugged in), you don't need to pay for a TV license. The license officials will behave like cnuts and threaten to take you to court even if you do show them you don't have an aerial attached, but there's nowt they can do. The license isn't there to "tax" the owners of a TV, it's purely a fee for being able to receive BBC broadcasts.
Wow. So there really is an evil lord sitting on an island somewhere, taking over the world by mass hypnosis.
Can't you be classified as a sex offender in the US for things as heinous as taking a slash or having sex in a public place? Something along the lines of a sexual offence being anything that's offensive and involves genitals, rather than committing a violent sexual crime (which is most people's definition of a sex offender).
TFA was light on any details, other than this being used on 43 out of 1100 people, but even if it's just for paedophiles I can't see them being able to step out of the house, since surely there are hundreds of places where children will congregate outside of schools...?
Of course, once it's used to track paedophiles I figure you can start issuing automatic tickets to the people who pissed in public if they haven't been to a registered urination point for the last 4 hours.
Not a problem! Sony now include a EULA with all their computers that states that (after you agree to the EULA by looking at a computer it's attached to, or have passed within 1AU of a computer it's attached to) grants them the right to a) install their Valued Internet Radiocast User Services software to ensure a great consumer experience and b) the right to kidnap your firstborn and manufacture them in to a superstar with a 5-album deal, with a free 6-month stay in the Sony Music Addiction Clinic for when their Sony-sponsored sense of self-entitlement/cocaine is cancelled.
Evil doesn't just happen on its own, ya know!
Thought about buying an Ion myself, but I found the atom sucked for most non-video stuff; was crappy with XBMC and youtube bits (running XBMC on top of debian myself).
Also using an SSD, a 30GB OCZ vertex, but from my experience with the Intel drives you can safely use them for temp storage. Also got 4GB in the ASRock (which is essentially just intel and nVidia laptop components in a Mac-mini-esque chassis) and it's laughable how little of it linux + XBMC ever use :)
Surprised the atom eats so "much" power though, I'd have expected that setup not to draw any more than 10W.
The Twilight films went one better - they've got dead actors playing undead vampires with the intelligence of zombies in stories where literally nothing happens.
http://www.cracked.com/article_16878_if-twilight-was-10-times-shorter-100-times-more-honest.html
Commenting instead of moderating, and I agree - browser reviews appear to have devolved into "Browser X is best at Benchmark Y and Z, and is therefore the best browser!" when, as far as I can tell from my real-world usage, there are many more glaring deficiencies and advantages that are ritualistically ignored in a market where all browsers are rapidly approaching "good enough". For example:
* Firefox still eats too much memory, and still slows down to a crawl once it eats >1GB (even on a machine with 16GB RAM), but still has the unbeatable AdBlock
* As you point out, Chrome eats lots of CPU, it uses a poor-man's AdBlock but it's, er, quite fast at javascript and HTML5
* Opera still doesn't play nice with certain proxies (mem leak and ever-increasing CPU usage), still has problems with rendering certain sites (not necessarily their fault) but is the only browser with decent gesture support
You just don't get browser reviews like this because it's just easy to trot out the numbers and call it a benchmark review, which makes for cheap copy and lots of page hits from "first Browser X reviews hit teh intrarwebz!". You may find the occasional site that actually reviews the browser, but they're lost in a sea of mediocre bar graphs with little to no "but what's it LIKE?!" commentary, because doing that sort of review requires you to understand and actually give a shit about what you're reviewing, and depressingly few people seem willing to put the time in.
Out of curiosity, what hardware are you using? I've just picked up one of the new ASRock Vision 3D HTPC's (great little machine for Myth/XBMC; works OotB with Linux for everything except the IR receiver, although for some reason amazon won't publish my review) that pulls 23W from the wall on a bad day, and idles at about 17W at idle. My old C2D-based mATX box pulled more like 50-60W.
But yeah, I've never been able to quantify those power usages of memory. I think they must take an absolute worst case scenario along the lines of "if every bit was flipped at once" or something like that. DIMMs even run cooler than they used to, making those ubiquitous heatspreaders all the more ephemeral.
Had tried QtCurve and liked it (being one of the few saner themes by default out there), but had managed to miss that option. Thanks!
I feel your pain; I can't stand rounded borders on windows or buttons, and so far haven't found a single theme that uses plain-jane boxes to draw, er... boxes. Guess we're two of those weird people who apparently can't see the point in round things when they're not needed. And to my eyes, they're ugly.
And yes, the default look of 80% of the themes looking like they've just emerged from a Turtle Wax avalanche doesn't help either. It took me forever to figure out how to get rid of the damned image overlay on the taskbar, which distracted me no end when I was reading it. To my eye these themes don't look polished, to me they're so self-consciously crying out for attention that they begins to take on the look of a teenager trying to be cool by growing a wispy bumfluff moustache and smoking a woodbine he purloined from his grandmother whilst bragging to the girls about how he's totally going to get some bitchin' rims for the Ford Fiesta his mum will donate to him once he hits 17.
At the end of the day, I still use KDE because it sucks less than GNOME and XFCE. But at least in windows I can use square window borders that eat up next to no screen real estate (although it's taken me no end of reg hacking to get win7 explorer to behave how I want it to). Seems to me like most developments in the UI world over the last five years have been directed towards making the desktop more blingy and less application oriented, whilst gobbling up more screen real estate, especially vertical... despite the fact that dot pitch and vertical resolution has been dropping over the last couple of years (thanks to the almost total exclusion of TFT panels that aren't 720p or 1080p - god knows how anyone can find a 15" screen with 1368x768 acceptable), to the extent we now have to have special "netbook" editions of UI's so that we can still fit in the huge blingin' icons. That's progress! /screaming old fuddy-duddy, apparently
Finally, governments of the world have the perfect opportunity to migrate their internet infrastructure to single-stack IPv6!
Further to the parent's point, here's the Daily Mail-O-Matic:
http://www.qwghlm.co.uk/toys/dailymail/
Will also give you a good start in creating spoof headlines for Fox. Bonus points to those who recognise the domain name.
...from the findings-obvious-to-the-lay-person-but-will-be-routinely-ignored-by-big-content-even-if-proven dept: dehydrated water still a long way from market feasibility.
Used all my mod points already, but you're at +5 already anyway. Kudos to you and your dad.
I can't understand the attitude that people can escape the fact that the vast majority of us are squeezed through a vagina and spend the next few months affixed to a teat as a "Hey! You're in the world now!" present. We're flesh-based eating/sleeping/fucking machines, and no amount of prudish social conditioning is ever going to overcome that, and those who rail against it (consciously or otherwise) almost inevitably end up entirely fubar in the head. The sooner people realise that sex is one of the most natural things for an animal to want to do, the better.
Sad thing is that even if these prudes did get laid, they'd still convince themselves they hated the experience, and will gleefully use the frustration of their pointless self-loathing to inflict their guilt on others, all the while calling people "perverts" for simply having the audacity to enjoy the sight/company of people who they find attractive.
I wonder if the animal kingdom has any parallels to this idiocy? I wonder if there's a "Bonobo's Ban Boning!" political party?
And yes, I do realise the hypocrisy in stating that my point of view is the right one, but I'm also arrogant enough to know the prudes are wrong.
And It sure and hell beats a 'Blade Runner' type of World.
Britain is already a Blade Runner world! It's perpetually raining, the colonies went to war with us because they didn't want us interfering, the workforce is run by corporate oligarchs who have their brains programmed to only think and know certain things and undercover police go around "retiring" Brazilian electricians.
Disclaimer for all about to mod me as troll: I'm British, and an ex girlfriend is an (ex) space scientist; she shifted careers a year ago due to manufacture in europe being too expensive for most prospective clients. This is just a move to get what little remains of our manufacturing exported overseas. Mod me -1 cynical instead.
The idiocy in this statement is strong, for reasons that alot of non-UK gamers might not be aware of.
Backstory is that I bought the orange box in april this year (I'm not much of a gamer), so I could give portal a whirl as I'd heard nothing but good news about it, in full knowledge that I'd have to begrudgingly install steam. Ended up loving the whole bundle, and finding that steam was alot less painless than all my other CD/DVD-based games had ever been *.
Most stuff sold via steam in the UK however, is often cheaper at retail, thanks to exchange rates, VAT, and some other things that I don't really understand - so if I'm going to pick up a game that needs steam, I'll almost always check retail before I buy it, as buying the DVD will often save me a few quid and mean I don't have to use bandwidth pulling down the initial 5GB of textures. So don't get me wrong - potentially I'm a strong contender for buying games as retail. But, as other posters have pointed out, the retail sector for games (especially PC games) have been doing plenty to actively keep me away from them.
It's next to impossible for me to pick up PC games at your stores (thanks to being relegated to a couple of shelves, one of which is the PC top 10 and the other one being a bunch of "edutainment" games marketed to parents for kids, or "100 classic card games on one DVD!" bullshit compilations), and despite being an affluent professional in his 30's you seem to train all your staff to think that all their customers are priapic teenagers that are prepared to put up with your short-back-and-smarm "well why don't you pre-order it?!?!?!?!?!?!" fucknozzle attitude if for some inexplicable reason I'm not interested in a wide range of used console beat 'em ups and footie games at the low low price of £5 below what a brand new copy costs. And even if you did have more than three interesting games in the building, how in fucking tardwarks am I meant to browse when I have one of your "can I interest you in our store-encompassing selection of shitty s/h games" mantras engaging in a futile impression to charm me every five minutes? If anything is keeping me away from your stores, it's you. The only place I've ever gotten a halfway decent selection is in the larger outlets of HMV, which are big enough to not give a crap about s/h sales anyway. 99% of the time I just buy the game from amazon, and that's cheaper still than steam or the high street.
So in the immortal words of the heavy: cry some more, little babies! Boycott steam games and you'll just make yourself more irrelevant to people who already detest the way you do business.
On top of that, steam makes a big thing about promoting all kinds of little known/indie games, both by selling them in dirt cheap bundles or by letting people play them for free for a weekend; 95% of my steam purchases so far have been these cool little indie titles, often with quirkily brilliant game mechanics. Something the high street stores do absolutely nothing to promote, therefore helping perpetuate the sausage machine of identikit FPS games. Most of the fun I've had gaming over the last year that wasn't TF2 or portal has been darwinia, defcon, braid and defence grid, none of which I'd have heard about if not for steam promoting them (inoffensively, I might add).
* Yes, I'm aware that it's "for as long as steam keeps working!". I don't pick steam games because they're the best solution, they're just the least worst for those of us that don't like to pick up gloriously non-DRM'd games off P2P. Steam is a system made by a business for gamers, GFWL is made by a business that maybe drove past the iD offices once.