Why not? Is your computer configured to automatically start executables it finds on removable media? What harm can there be in just mounting it and viewing data?
You're still trusting it's a normal USB thumdrive, and not something else entirely.
Did you know that Autorun can also be disabled in all versions of Windows since Windows 95? If I plugged a USB drive into my Windows computer, Windows would automatically attempt to mount it, but would not automatically look for something to execute something on the drive, stopping that attack vector cold.
Now, there is the possibility that a computer could somehow become infected just by accessing the disk. This happened quite a bit back in the Dos days with viruses that spread themselves via floppy disk, usually by putting a payload in the boot sector and similar tricks. However, I haven't heard of a virus spreading this way in a long time.
How about the used market? Used PCs are extremely cheap, if not often free. There is little reason to mess around with an old P2 PC system, even if it works, when you can get used P3 and P4 systems for dirt cheap or free. On the other hand, the used Mac market is insane, with crusty old iMacs selling for over $100, when I have considerably more powerful PC systems in my closet I can't even give away.
Exactly. ATI's drivers were a bit flakey around 2002 or so, but they have been very stable for me for the past several years. If anything, I'd avoid nVidia cards - I've just seen too many dead ones (though no complaints about them otherwise).
On the other hand, that.NET based configuration program that comes with the ATI drivers is an abomination - I really wish they would go back to the old style from a few years back.
Keep in mind that the Mac Pro is *the* high-end Mac. Like it or not, that means the Mac Pro has to cover all the high end PC markets, which includes things like the high end gaming PC market. It's also the only Mac that has things like expansion slots, and can take more than one disk drive. If Apple offered another tower, like the so-called xMac with options that fall more in like with what people want in a high end home computer, people wouldn't be comparing the Mac Pro to things like Alienware rigs as much.
So which name-brand computer can you buy where these things don't void the warranty? This isn't an Apple thing or even a computing thing, it's normal for any product with a warranty. You can't open a device up, destroy it and then expect that the warranty will be honored.
How many name-brand computers require a procedure that will could mangle the computer's case to do something as simple as upgrading the ram?
Open up any Mac tower system made in the last decade and it's a work of industrial design beauty -- a trained monkey could swap out processors, hard drives, memory in seconds, all without cutting your hand or unplugging seven cables.
Key words here is "Mac Tower". Have fun with the non-tower systems. And it's not like I haven't seen PC towers that come apart in a very similar fashion.
My wife has a 5-year-old LCD iMac. I just bought a 2-year-old used eMac. After boosting their RAM, both are perfectly nice little desktop machines. What is this connectivity and capability that we're supposedly missing?
Well, for starters the 5 year old iMac lacks USB 2.0 and has no way to add it. Nowadays, that's a pretty big deal, especially since Firewire was dropped on Apple's own iPod.
Of course, part of it is future proofing the computer. In 2002, I looked in amazement at the computer I just constructed, with 5 PCI slots all unused. In 2007, I new have a network card, a 2nd video card, and a USB2/Firewire card occupying 3 of the slots, and likely will end up adding a SATA card before I'm done with this computer.
So you throw out the specs for a pretty nice PC, and come out to $1200, then try to compare it to a Mac Mini? Try the Mac Pro at $2000+. Not that I would run Vista anyway, Windows XP + third party software is better than Vista and it's integrated applications.
Besides, Vista will run on much less than that, if you want it.
"Now that I moved to California, I should call my buddy in India. Hmm, what time can I call him so I don't wake him up in the middle of the night?"
Ask him when he goes to bed, and call him before that time according to any clock anywhere. Now isn't that easier?
Alternatively just use the fact that india is about 75 degrees east, and California is about 120 degrees west. That means they are roughly 195 degrees apart, and given the sun moves 15 degrees an hour, that puts him about 13 hours ahead. So call him in the middle of the night (in California). Longitude is more accurate than time zones anyway in terms of the placement of the sun in the sky.
Well, he could have used a signing statement saying that he wasn't going to follow the new rules, then follow through by not changing the clocks in the oval office. That would have shown them!
Actually, since the whole DST thing has just been proven to be pointless, the most logical thing would be to eliminate it altogether. That way, both patched and unpatched systems would not need to be changed.
The solution for those was to temporarly set them to be one time zone east for 3 weeks. Of course, some US-centric models don't allow this if you are already in eastern time.
I have a few XP boxes. The ones that are actually up to date on patches are less stable than the SP1 ones that haven't been patched in ages. Of course, I never thought that SP2 ran as well as SP1, hence the hold-out on some of my computers, but the fully patched boxes have been annoying me as of lately.
I'd like something dirt cheap to own, maintain, and use, that'll get me to 100kph on the highway (because that's the speed limit), isn't big so it'll turn on a dime, sips fuel, and doesn't have any real luxuries. My only choice is to buy something used and grit my teeth at the pumps.
The styling is pretty funky, but the Scion xB (basically a Toyota Echo made into a box) seems to meet your requirements pretty well.
So, would you consider it acceptable if the person next to you decided to enjoy his music on an airplane? And by enjoying his music, I mean pulling out an 80's style boombox and turning it up? I mean, you can always wear your 50 cent earplugs if you don't like the music.
The only problem with that is developers will see that they have two kinds of customers: People with the new computers that understand x86 and the new chip, and people with older legacy and/or budget computers that only have the x86 chip. In order to reach out to the most number of people with the minimum cost, the developer only develops for the x86 chip. Eventually, the new chip dies out due to lack of popularity. Either that, or the developers who want to squeeze the most of systems will use the new chip, but instead of letting the x86 chip idle, they will put that to work too. Since many programs will assume you have both, the x86 chip never actually gets phased out, and eventually the new chip just gets integrated into the x86 chip as fab technology improves (see: x87, and even GPUs now apparently).
Rome wasn't built in a day. And if you can't see the value/need to get a major label to sign onto this 1st, then there is nothing else I can say.
I guess I don't. I see this:
Hey Apple, can we have our music sold without DRM?
No.
Hey Apple, can please have our music sold without DRM?
No way.
Hey Apple, can pretty please have our music sold without DRM?
Absolutely not.
Hey, can we have our music sold without DRM?
Sure!
After Jobs made his "get rid of DRM" speech a month or two ago, they were coming out of the woodwork blasting him for being a hypocrite. Maybe these know-nothings will now realize that he couldn't make these changes on his own, he needed the labels themselves to come along.
I suppose at the time you all nice and smug, somehow knowing about this annoucement two months ago? At the time, all the "know-nothings" had put on their tinfoil hats (blocks the reality distortion field) taken a look at what Steve Jobs said, and what Steve Jobs was doing, and saw a clear disconnect between the two.
Also, it's not like Apple has started selling indie stuff DRM free yet, just EMI music. While he hopefully will open up iTMS a bit more real soon, he's still giving indie labels the middle finger at the moment.
But I'm guessing that the anti-Job reaction to his speech wasn't atually about his speech, it was more about being Microsoft lap dogs.
Along the same lines, couldn't you go out and buy two identical USB drives, and make one the decoy (put a bunch of pictures on it), and then have the other drive your P2P drive? Even if they noticed that you had been accessing another harddrive, would they be able to tell that you actually access two different ones once you hand over the decoy?
Probably the best solution would be to have a decoy computer. Set up another computer with a single harddrive. Put whatever you want on the harddrive, just make sure it boots into something so it looks legit (either that, or a dead/crashed harddrive - "Oh that thing? I've been meaning to look into it. No time."). Then use that computer with a live CD and your P2P harddrive to do all the actual file sharing. Even better - make the USB harddrive bootable and use that with the computer.
It sounds like you leave your computer on all the time, and use it for a variety of tasks, and you are looking for a machine that can do all of that while being easy on the electric bill. This hard to do, as things like high powered CPU's, high end video cards, and lots of storage tend to not be low power. I suggest you get two computers. Get a low power machine, either an old laptop or a P3 and offload all the tasks like the FTP server and the bittorrent duties to this machine, and leave it on 24/7. Old laptops work great for this, as they are built for low power and have a built in UPS. P3 systems also work well, many ex-corporate P3 class systems are quiet, low power, easy to work on, and dirt cheap. Then you get a high power machine, and only have it powered up when you need it. You can have the two computers set up next to each other, and use Synergy to run your IM/IRC on the 24/7 computer while doing whatever on the high end machine at the same time.
If you still must have it all in one desktop machine, one way to cut the power usage if you like lots of storage is to try to only have 1 HDD in the computer, and put the rest on USB/Firewire harddrives which you can then shut off when you don't need them.
Another good one in that game was that occasionally, the amount of money you spent on ship maintance would go negative, therefore the more ships you built, the more money you made.
Another bug in that game is the ability to redirect a fleet ships the turn after you retreated from a battle, when you weren't supposed to be able to.
I tried it out a while ago. I am cheap, so I, umm, acquired a copy of OSX and put it on a P4 HP computer I already owned, figuring if I liked it I would get the real deal. After hacking around a bit, I got the sound, network, etc. working. As someone else put it, I basically traded a bunch of Windows nonsense for a bunch of OS X nonsense. Except that I already know how to deal with the Windows nonsense. I quickly grew a hatred of Finder, which quite simply sucks compared to Windows Explorer. Little things like inconsistent behavior of the Home/End keys drove me crazy. On top of that, I missed software like Winamp, and other Windows programs that I already know how to use. Don't get me wrong, there were some cool things about OSX. However, ultimately, I realized that there wasn't anything that I was truly unhappy with in the Windows world, and certainly nothing that would make it worth the trouble of switching*. After the OSX partition on that computer languished for a while, I deleted it.
I have also found that my experience seems to be similar to others. After dropping a lot of money on a Mac and Mac software, there seems to be a tendency to reassure themselves that they did make the right decision and that the Mac is truly better and to make fanboyish comments on Slashdot. Of the people who haven't made the investment, a good portion of them just see the Mac as different, better in some ways, and worse in others.
*The same argument applies right now to switching to Vista from Windows 2000/XP, which I don't see doing anytime soon. Even though I do want the individual application volume controls.
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Why not? Is your computer configured to automatically start executables it finds on removable media? What harm can there be in just mounting it and viewing data?
You're still trusting it's a normal USB thumdrive, and not something else entirely.
Did you know that Autorun can also be disabled in all versions of Windows since Windows 95? If I plugged a USB drive into my Windows computer, Windows would automatically attempt to mount it, but would not automatically look for something to execute something on the drive, stopping that attack vector cold.
Now, there is the possibility that a computer could somehow become infected just by accessing the disk. This happened quite a bit back in the Dos days with viruses that spread themselves via floppy disk, usually by putting a payload in the boot sector and similar tricks. However, I haven't heard of a virus spreading this way in a long time.
How about the used market? Used PCs are extremely cheap, if not often free. There is little reason to mess around with an old P2 PC system, even if it works, when you can get used P3 and P4 systems for dirt cheap or free. On the other hand, the used Mac market is insane, with crusty old iMacs selling for over $100, when I have considerably more powerful PC systems in my closet I can't even give away.
Exactly. ATI's drivers were a bit flakey around 2002 or so, but they have been very stable for me for the past several years. If anything, I'd avoid nVidia cards - I've just seen too many dead ones (though no complaints about them otherwise).
.NET based configuration program that comes with the ATI drivers is an abomination - I really wish they would go back to the old style from a few years back.
On the other hand, that
Keep in mind that the Mac Pro is *the* high-end Mac. Like it or not, that means the Mac Pro has to cover all the high end PC markets, which includes things like the high end gaming PC market. It's also the only Mac that has things like expansion slots, and can take more than one disk drive. If Apple offered another tower, like the so-called xMac with options that fall more in like with what people want in a high end home computer, people wouldn't be comparing the Mac Pro to things like Alienware rigs as much.
So which name-brand computer can you buy where these things don't void the warranty? This isn't an Apple thing or even a computing thing, it's normal for any product with a warranty. You can't open a device up, destroy it and then expect that the warranty will be honored.
How many name-brand computers require a procedure that will could mangle the computer's case to do something as simple as upgrading the ram?
Open up any Mac tower system made in the last decade and it's a work of industrial design beauty -- a trained monkey could swap out processors, hard drives, memory in seconds, all without cutting your hand or unplugging seven cables.
Key words here is "Mac Tower". Have fun with the non-tower systems. And it's not like I haven't seen PC towers that come apart in a very similar fashion.
My wife has a 5-year-old LCD iMac. I just bought a 2-year-old used eMac. After boosting their RAM, both are perfectly nice little desktop machines. What is this connectivity and capability that we're supposedly missing?
Well, for starters the 5 year old iMac lacks USB 2.0 and has no way to add it. Nowadays, that's a pretty big deal, especially since Firewire was dropped on Apple's own iPod.
Of course, part of it is future proofing the computer. In 2002, I looked in amazement at the computer I just constructed, with 5 PCI slots all unused. In 2007, I new have a network card, a 2nd video card, and a USB2/Firewire card occupying 3 of the slots, and likely will end up adding a SATA card before I'm done with this computer.
So you throw out the specs for a pretty nice PC, and come out to $1200, then try to compare it to a Mac Mini? Try the Mac Pro at $2000+. Not that I would run Vista anyway, Windows XP + third party software is better than Vista and it's integrated applications.
Besides, Vista will run on much less than that, if you want it.
"Now that I moved to California, I should call my buddy in India. Hmm, what time can I call him so I don't wake him up in the middle of the night?"
Ask him when he goes to bed, and call him before that time according to any clock anywhere. Now isn't that easier?
Alternatively just use the fact that india is about 75 degrees east, and California is about 120 degrees west. That means they are roughly 195 degrees apart, and given the sun moves 15 degrees an hour, that puts him about 13 hours ahead. So call him in the middle of the night (in California). Longitude is more accurate than time zones anyway in terms of the placement of the sun in the sky.
Well, he could have used a signing statement saying that he wasn't going to follow the new rules, then follow through by not changing the clocks in the oval office. That would have shown them!
Actually, since the whole DST thing has just been proven to be pointless, the most logical thing would be to eliminate it altogether. That way, both patched and unpatched systems would not need to be changed.
The solution for those was to temporarly set them to be one time zone east for 3 weeks. Of course, some US-centric models don't allow this if you are already in eastern time.
I have a few XP boxes. The ones that are actually up to date on patches are less stable than the SP1 ones that haven't been patched in ages. Of course, I never thought that SP2 ran as well as SP1, hence the hold-out on some of my computers, but the fully patched boxes have been annoying me as of lately.
I'd like something dirt cheap to own, maintain, and use, that'll get me to 100kph on the highway (because that's the speed limit), isn't big so it'll turn on a dime, sips fuel, and doesn't have any real luxuries. My only choice is to buy something used and grit my teeth at the pumps.
The styling is pretty funky, but the Scion xB (basically a Toyota Echo made into a box) seems to meet your requirements pretty well.
So, would you consider it acceptable if the person next to you decided to enjoy his music on an airplane? And by enjoying his music, I mean pulling out an 80's style boombox and turning it up? I mean, you can always wear your 50 cent earplugs if you don't like the music.
The only problem with that is developers will see that they have two kinds of customers: People with the new computers that understand x86 and the new chip, and people with older legacy and/or budget computers that only have the x86 chip. In order to reach out to the most number of people with the minimum cost, the developer only develops for the x86 chip. Eventually, the new chip dies out due to lack of popularity. Either that, or the developers who want to squeeze the most of systems will use the new chip, but instead of letting the x86 chip idle, they will put that to work too. Since many programs will assume you have both, the x86 chip never actually gets phased out, and eventually the new chip just gets integrated into the x86 chip as fab technology improves (see: x87, and even GPUs now apparently).
I agree, but it's a far better solution than burning 128kbps AAC to CDR, then ripping that.
Rome wasn't built in a day. And if you can't see the value/need to get a major label to sign onto this 1st, then there is nothing else I can say.
I guess I don't. I see this:
Hey Apple, can we have our music sold without DRM?
No.
Hey Apple, can please have our music sold without DRM?
No way.
Hey Apple, can pretty please have our music sold without DRM?
Absolutely not.
Hey, can we have our music sold without DRM?
Sure!
After Jobs made his "get rid of DRM" speech a month or two ago, they were coming out of the woodwork blasting him for being a hypocrite. Maybe these know-nothings will now realize that he couldn't make these changes on his own, he needed the labels themselves to come along.
I suppose at the time you all nice and smug, somehow knowing about this annoucement two months ago? At the time, all the "know-nothings" had put on their tinfoil hats (blocks the reality distortion field) taken a look at what Steve Jobs said, and what Steve Jobs was doing, and saw a clear disconnect between the two.
Also, it's not like Apple has started selling indie stuff DRM free yet, just EMI music. While he hopefully will open up iTMS a bit more real soon, he's still giving indie labels the middle finger at the moment.
But I'm guessing that the anti-Job reaction to his speech wasn't atually about his speech, it was more about being Microsoft lap dogs.
Nice ad-hominem.
DRM-free AAC can be transcoded to MP3/OGG/WMA, which the iRiver will understand.
Along the same lines, couldn't you go out and buy two identical USB drives, and make one the decoy (put a bunch of pictures on it), and then have the other drive your P2P drive? Even if they noticed that you had been accessing another harddrive, would they be able to tell that you actually access two different ones once you hand over the decoy?
Probably the best solution would be to have a decoy computer. Set up another computer with a single harddrive. Put whatever you want on the harddrive, just make sure it boots into something so it looks legit (either that, or a dead/crashed harddrive - "Oh that thing? I've been meaning to look into it. No time."). Then use that computer with a live CD and your P2P harddrive to do all the actual file sharing. Even better - make the USB harddrive bootable and use that with the computer.
It sounds like you leave your computer on all the time, and use it for a variety of tasks, and you are looking for a machine that can do all of that while being easy on the electric bill. This hard to do, as things like high powered CPU's, high end video cards, and lots of storage tend to not be low power. I suggest you get two computers. Get a low power machine, either an old laptop or a P3 and offload all the tasks like the FTP server and the bittorrent duties to this machine, and leave it on 24/7. Old laptops work great for this, as they are built for low power and have a built in UPS. P3 systems also work well, many ex-corporate P3 class systems are quiet, low power, easy to work on, and dirt cheap. Then you get a high power machine, and only have it powered up when you need it. You can have the two computers set up next to each other, and use Synergy to run your IM/IRC on the 24/7 computer while doing whatever on the high end machine at the same time.
If you still must have it all in one desktop machine, one way to cut the power usage if you like lots of storage is to try to only have 1 HDD in the computer, and put the rest on USB/Firewire harddrives which you can then shut off when you don't need them.
Another good one in that game was that occasionally, the amount of money you spent on ship maintance would go negative, therefore the more ships you built, the more money you made.
Another bug in that game is the ability to redirect a fleet ships the turn after you retreated from a battle, when you weren't supposed to be able to.
I tried it out a while ago. I am cheap, so I, umm, acquired a copy of OSX and put it on a P4 HP computer I already owned, figuring if I liked it I would get the real deal. After hacking around a bit, I got the sound, network, etc. working. As someone else put it, I basically traded a bunch of Windows nonsense for a bunch of OS X nonsense. Except that I already know how to deal with the Windows nonsense. I quickly grew a hatred of Finder, which quite simply sucks compared to Windows Explorer. Little things like inconsistent behavior of the Home/End keys drove me crazy. On top of that, I missed software like Winamp, and other Windows programs that I already know how to use. Don't get me wrong, there were some cool things about OSX. However, ultimately, I realized that there wasn't anything that I was truly unhappy with in the Windows world, and certainly nothing that would make it worth the trouble of switching*. After the OSX partition on that computer languished for a while, I deleted it.
I have also found that my experience seems to be similar to others. After dropping a lot of money on a Mac and Mac software, there seems to be a tendency to reassure themselves that they did make the right decision and that the Mac is truly better and to make fanboyish comments on Slashdot. Of the people who haven't made the investment, a good portion of them just see the Mac as different, better in some ways, and worse in others.
*The same argument applies right now to switching to Vista from Windows 2000/XP, which I don't see doing anytime soon. Even though I do want the individual application volume controls.