"$200 for a 2.8GHz P4 with 1GB of RAM. It is the only way I can keep up a 25% turn-over rate and stay under budget."
Alternatively, about $250 plus an hour to assemble it and install Linux will get you a dual-core Atom with 2GB of RAM and a 100+GB-ish hard drive; you'll probably save the difference in reduced power usage over the next couple of years, given how power-hungry P4s were.
"Because you believe the conservatives are going to do any better?"
When the Conservatives tried to push through ID cards in the 90s, they had the massed might of the media and the raving lefties against them; when Labour did so, the same people rolled over and supported them. The total lack of opposition is the reason why police state measures from Labour is far more scary than the Conservatives.
The funny part is that Labour have now imposed ID cards that the Conservatives will probably inherit after the next election, if they don't follow through on their claims that they'll scrap the whole thing.
"If the party voted him to be their leader, how exactly was he not elected to that role?"
If Obama resigned and the Democrats voted to replace him with Hilary Clinton, do you think Americans would be happy about that? (Yes, I know there's a defined rule of succession in America, I'm using that as an example).
The 22% of British voters who elected the Labour party voted for the Labour party run by Tony Blair, and then soon afterwards they were left with the Labour Party run by Gordon Brown. How can you consider that a good thing?
"I'm growing weary of hearing Britons whine about your surveillance soceity while you keep electing the same assholes who are busy setting it up."
78% of Britons did not vote for Labour in the last election. More than three quarters of Britons did not want them, but they got them anyway.
If you understood that minor little fact, and that the Tory party got more votes than Labour in England but lost to Labour nation-wide because of Scottish Labour voters, and that the current Prime Minister was not elected to that role but merely placed there by his party, then you might understand why so many Britons -- particularly the English majority, who are now the only ones who don't have their own Parliament -- are a bit upset with their government.
"Or, you know, how if you set a bomb off on a train, the whole thing plummets to the ground and kills everyone on board."
Set off a bomb at a critical point on a 500mph train (or even a 180mph Japanese bullet-train) and see how many people survive the crash. And remember that, unlike an airliner, a mangled train splattered across the tracks would prevent any other trains traveling on that route until the mess is cleared up and any damage repaired.
If high-speed trains were to take off, there'd be at least as much security theater as there is today on airliners; if nothing else, the government would have to find some kind of new jobs for all the security theater employees who would no longer be at the airports.
Rail sucks for numerous reasons. Fast rail competitive with airlines really, really sucks; rail that can safely carry people at 500mph would be insanely, absurdly expensive, because you can't afford a single failure if you're going to kill hundreds of people in a derailment. Worse than that, rail is much harder to protect against even low-grade attackers because it only takes one whacko deliberately damaging the rails in the middle of nowhere to cause such a disaster.
Finding an alternate affordable fuel source for airliners is going to be much easier than making fast trains that are competitive with airliners. Trains are an attempt to use a 19th century solution for 21st century problems.
"Why the hell do the British trust their gov't so much?"
Many don't. But what do you suggest they do about it? The current government was elected by 22% of voters, so even with the vast majority not voting for them they got enough seats in Parliament to push through any authoritarian measures they choose.
The smart people are getting the hell out of the UK before the doors are closed.
"I think the BBC is one of, if not the, most impartial news source around, personally."
The BBC is a den of raving lefties sucking up British tax money. If you think it's impartial, you're probably a raving lefty too.
The BBC has two priorities, in order:
1. Keep that tax money coming in. 2. Push their raving lefty ideology.
The only time they may seem 'impartial' is when they're following priority 1 rather than priority 2 (e.g. not pushing too much lefty claptrap when there's a Tory government).
"Some think they know better what updates to install than Microsoft suggests."
When updates stop breaking other software, and Microsoft stop bundling DRM as 'critical updates', then I suspect people will start trusting Microsoft to tell them what updates to install.
Personally I like to see what Microsoft are doing to my computer before I install it.
"AMD is still doing OK on price to performance, but what I think is hurting them is that the margins are not the same, because CPU's as a whole are just so cheap now"
$1500 for an Intel Quad-Core 'Extreme' CPU is 'just so cheap'? You must earn a lot more than I do.
The only reason AMD CPUs look cheap is because AMD don't have anything at all to compete with Intel's desktop CPUs at the high end; they'd love to be able to charge $1500 for their fastest desktop CPUs, but no-one would pay it.
"One thing I absolutely despise with the AV scanners is just that -- the scanning, that eats up performance both disk-wise and cpu-wise, and always seem to run at the wrong times -- when I am using the machine!"
Funny, isn't it? Windows Defender takes eight and a half hours to scan my 2.5 terabytes of disks, and if I haven't run it for a few days it will start an automatic scan a few minutes after I boot up the PC.
Surely that's the absolutley stupidest possible time for a scanner to run? If I've just booted up the PC it's because I WANT TO USE IT TO DO SOMETHING USEFUL, and not because I want to wait eight hours for a scanner to run. Particularly not a scanner that warns me that I have a malware infection in a.wav file from a game that was released in the 1990s.
Any time my Windows PC slows to a crawl, I can almost guarantee it's because Microsoft have decided that while I'm playing a game is a really, really good time to decide to start an eight hour disk scan.
"And who's going to cover the costs of broken NDAs, exactly?"
Tough. If you refuse to release the source for your driver, you can hardly complain when other people won't maintain it for you.
"A stable ABI is a damn good thing"
A stable ABI (more precisely, roughly three thousand and twenty three old, outdated APIs that Microsoft no longer update but can't get rid of) is the primary reason why Windows is such a fuckup. I'm very, very glad that Linux doesn't follow the same philosophy, because the old crap can be thrown out; and that works, because people can just fix the source code and recompile it.
That's not to say that you should throw out your whole driver model just to support DRM, as Vista did, but when there are good technical reasons to make major changes you should do so.
"manufacturers surely want their hardware to work well in what is to become the next major operating system that over 90% of the world's population uses."
XP, you mean?
Fortunately the company I worked for at the time dumped Windows for Linux shortly before Vista was released, because trying to port the drivers from XP to Vista was hell, particularly when so many of the changes were really only needed for supporting DRM.
Either way, no company in their right mind was going to put rewriting their drivers for a new API in a new OS that few people would use over supporting current customers on XP; Microsoft really shot themselves in the ass on that one.
"well, if you designed your driver in a way that doesn't fit the model the Linux bigwigs want, there is little to no way it will be accepted"
So, uh, design your driver in a standard way that's compatible with the kernel development model. Or stop whining if you choose to make life difficult for yourself.
I suspect most of the overhead is X, which used to barely run in 256 color mode on an 8MB system in the 486 days.
A year or so back we were running ARM Linux with a custom GUI and HD video playback in 32MB (probably using around 20MB just for framebuffers), so 8MB for a kiosk application should be doable. You're unlikely to find such a system out of the box though.
You and your 'if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear' mates are the reason why Britain will be a fascist hell-hole in ten years. Having emigrated a couple of years ago, in no small part because of your beloved 'security' measures, I dread having to go back in case next time I can't get out again.
"Sure, I've been hacked off for getting three points on my driving license and a £60 fine for driving at 7mph over the speed limit past a speed camera"
Then you're a criminal retard; you claim in one sentence that you're law-abiding, and then in the next state that you break the law. How stupid can you get?
You're willing to hand the keys to total surveillance of the British people over to the government in the hope that it will reduce spam and 'nuisance calls'? Are you fucking insane?
Even if you're crazy enough to trust Labour, what the fuck do you think a party like the BNP will do if they're ever elected and have these kind of surveillance measures in place? And don't say it can't happen; the neo-Nazis are gaining power across Europe, and a major European recession will lead to a major backlash looking for scapegoats.
"That surely will motivate people to work harder and develop new products/processes so that others with better means will reap the rewards in their place!"
People work hard and develop new products because they make money from doing so; and few 'people' who develop those products actually make money from patents, it's primarily a means for companies to keep new competitors out of their markets.
I used to work in an area of IT where patenting hardware elements was common; the end result was that pretty much every company had a cross-licensing deal with every other company because none of them could function effectively without access to other patents in the industry. So patent lawyers made a lot of money so that the companies could do what they would have been able to do without patent laws.
As for 'original/innovative', I don't remember seeing a single patent in that industry that wasn't clearly built on ideas that had come before; the number of truly innovative and original ideas is tiny.
I'm sorry, but anyone arguing in favor of not putting up big warnings when a browser sees a self-signed cert is a dumb-ass. It's that simple.
Encryption without authentication is worthless to anyone who cares about security; if you don't know who you're communicating with, what's the point of encryption? For all you know, they're the very people you're trying to hide from.
If you want weak, easily-eavesdropped point-to-point encryption then SSL is a lousy place to do it. You should be calling for widespread use of IPSEC and similar protocols which will encrypt everything for you automatically with at least as much security as self-signed certs (i.e. none or greater); and if you don't understand this, you shouldn't even be discussing network security.
"simply removing eavesdroppers would be a step in the right direction."
Yes. Whereas self-signed certs let the eavesdropper send you a certificate which makes you think your connection is secure when in reality they're listening to everything you send.
"And I'm pretty sure you weren't editing at a very high resolution on a 650mhz CPU, which is the main problem with video editing"
I'm sure that HD editing would suck; but I edited a feature-length DV movie on a PII-350 with 256MB of RAM... I'd hope that an Atom would be faster than that was.
Slashdot Mirror
"Do you mean the miniseries, that told the story of the end of the world and the horrors that accompanied it?"
I guess that's the one. But it mostly seemed to involve people doing soap-opera things on spaceships while the world exploded around them.
"However, the last few seasons have been fairly "meh" for me because it has turned almost completely into a soap opera."
Personally I thought the first episode was a soap opera; that's why I never watched anything beyond it. Didn't realise it was even still going.
"$200 for a 2.8GHz P4 with 1GB of RAM. It is the only way I can keep up a 25% turn-over rate and stay under budget."
Alternatively, about $250 plus an hour to assemble it and install Linux will get you a dual-core Atom with 2GB of RAM and a 100+GB-ish hard drive; you'll probably save the difference in reduced power usage over the next couple of years, given how power-hungry P4s were.
"Because you believe the conservatives are going to do any better?"
When the Conservatives tried to push through ID cards in the 90s, they had the massed might of the media and the raving lefties against them; when Labour did so, the same people rolled over and supported them. The total lack of opposition is the reason why police state measures from Labour is far more scary than the Conservatives.
The funny part is that Labour have now imposed ID cards that the Conservatives will probably inherit after the next election, if they don't follow through on their claims that they'll scrap the whole thing.
"If the party voted him to be their leader, how exactly was he not elected to that role?"
If Obama resigned and the Democrats voted to replace him with Hilary Clinton, do you think Americans would be happy about that? (Yes, I know there's a defined rule of succession in America, I'm using that as an example).
The 22% of British voters who elected the Labour party voted for the Labour party run by Tony Blair, and then soon afterwards they were left with the Labour Party run by Gordon Brown. How can you consider that a good thing?
"I'm growing weary of hearing Britons whine about your surveillance soceity while you keep electing the same assholes who are busy setting it up."
78% of Britons did not vote for Labour in the last election. More than three quarters of Britons did not want them, but they got them anyway.
If you understood that minor little fact, and that the Tory party got more votes than Labour in England but lost to Labour nation-wide because of Scottish Labour voters, and that the current Prime Minister was not elected to that role but merely placed there by his party, then you might understand why so many Britons -- particularly the English majority, who are now the only ones who don't have their own Parliament -- are a bit upset with their government.
"Producing services is the sign of a much more advanced economy."
Hair-dressing is more advanced than designing and building CPUs or hypersonic airliners?
You learn something new every day...
"Or, you know, how if you set a bomb off on a train, the whole thing plummets to the ground and kills everyone on board."
Set off a bomb at a critical point on a 500mph train (or even a 180mph Japanese bullet-train) and see how many people survive the crash. And remember that, unlike an airliner, a mangled train splattered across the tracks would prevent any other trains traveling on that route until the mess is cleared up and any damage repaired.
If high-speed trains were to take off, there'd be at least as much security theater as there is today on airliners; if nothing else, the government would have to find some kind of new jobs for all the security theater employees who would no longer be at the airports.
Rail sucks for numerous reasons. Fast rail competitive with airlines really, really sucks; rail that can safely carry people at 500mph would be insanely, absurdly expensive, because you can't afford a single failure if you're going to kill hundreds of people in a derailment. Worse than that, rail is much harder to protect against even low-grade attackers because it only takes one whacko deliberately damaging the rails in the middle of nowhere to cause such a disaster.
Finding an alternate affordable fuel source for airliners is going to be much easier than making fast trains that are competitive with airliners. Trains are an attempt to use a 19th century solution for 21st century problems.
"And don't forget -- this is an Intel power rating, which means "typical use"."
Uh, isn't that backwards? Unless something's changed recently I believe the Intel TDP _is_ 'worst case', whereas AMDs figures are for 'typical use'.
"Why the hell do the British trust their gov't so much?"
Many don't. But what do you suggest they do about it? The current government was elected by 22% of voters, so even with the vast majority not voting for them they got enough seats in Parliament to push through any authoritarian measures they choose.
The smart people are getting the hell out of the UK before the doors are closed.
"I think the BBC is one of, if not the, most impartial news source around, personally."
The BBC is a den of raving lefties sucking up British tax money. If you think it's impartial, you're probably a raving lefty too.
The BBC has two priorities, in order:
1. Keep that tax money coming in.
2. Push their raving lefty ideology.
The only time they may seem 'impartial' is when they're following priority 1 rather than priority 2 (e.g. not pushing too much lefty claptrap when there's a Tory government).
"Some think they know better what updates to install than Microsoft suggests."
When updates stop breaking other software, and Microsoft stop bundling DRM as 'critical updates', then I suspect people will start trusting Microsoft to tell them what updates to install.
Personally I like to see what Microsoft are doing to my computer before I install it.
"AMD is still doing OK on price to performance, but what I think is hurting them is that the margins are not the same, because CPU's as a whole are just so cheap now"
$1500 for an Intel Quad-Core 'Extreme' CPU is 'just so cheap'? You must earn a lot more than I do.
The only reason AMD CPUs look cheap is because AMD don't have anything at all to compete with Intel's desktop CPUs at the high end; they'd love to be able to charge $1500 for their fastest desktop CPUs, but no-one would pay it.
"The police have relied on such comms data from telephone systems for decades to help catch the bad guys ..."
Irish police have been tapping every phone call in the country for decades just in case the caller might be a crook?
Damn, I'm so glad I don't live there then.
"One thing I absolutely despise with the AV scanners is just that -- the scanning, that eats up performance both disk-wise and cpu-wise, and always seem to run at the wrong times -- when I am using the machine!"
Funny, isn't it? Windows Defender takes eight and a half hours to scan my 2.5 terabytes of disks, and if I haven't run it for a few days it will start an automatic scan a few minutes after I boot up the PC.
Surely that's the absolutley stupidest possible time for a scanner to run? If I've just booted up the PC it's because I WANT TO USE IT TO DO SOMETHING USEFUL, and not because I want to wait eight hours for a scanner to run. Particularly not a scanner that warns me that I have a malware infection in a .wav file from a game that was released in the 1990s.
Any time my Windows PC slows to a crawl, I can almost guarantee it's because Microsoft have decided that while I'm playing a game is a really, really good time to decide to start an eight hour disk scan.
"And who's going to cover the costs of broken NDAs, exactly?"
Tough. If you refuse to release the source for your driver, you can hardly complain when other people won't maintain it for you.
"A stable ABI is a damn good thing"
A stable ABI (more precisely, roughly three thousand and twenty three old, outdated APIs that Microsoft no longer update but can't get rid of) is the primary reason why Windows is such a fuckup. I'm very, very glad that Linux doesn't follow the same philosophy, because the old crap can be thrown out; and that works, because people can just fix the source code and recompile it.
That's not to say that you should throw out your whole driver model just to support DRM, as Vista did, but when there are good technical reasons to make major changes you should do so.
"manufacturers surely want their hardware to work well in what is to become the next major operating system that over 90% of the world's population uses."
XP, you mean?
Fortunately the company I worked for at the time dumped Windows for Linux shortly before Vista was released, because trying to port the drivers from XP to Vista was hell, particularly when so many of the changes were really only needed for supporting DRM.
Either way, no company in their right mind was going to put rewriting their drivers for a new API in a new OS that few people would use over supporting current customers on XP; Microsoft really shot themselves in the ass on that one.
"well, if you designed your driver in a way that doesn't fit the model the Linux bigwigs want, there is little to no way it will be accepted"
So, uh, design your driver in a standard way that's compatible with the kernel development model. Or stop whining if you choose to make life difficult for yourself.
I suspect most of the overhead is X, which used to barely run in 256 color mode on an 8MB system in the 486 days.
A year or so back we were running ARM Linux with a custom GUI and HD video playback in 32MB (probably using around 20MB just for framebuffers), so 8MB for a kiosk application should be doable. You're unlikely to find such a system out of the box though.
"...I don't see why this is such a bad idea."
Then you're a retard.
You and your 'if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear' mates are the reason why Britain will be a fascist hell-hole in ten years. Having emigrated a couple of years ago, in no small part because of your beloved 'security' measures, I dread having to go back in case next time I can't get out again.
"Sure, I've been hacked off for getting three points on my driving license and a £60 fine for driving at 7mph over the speed limit past a speed camera"
Then you're a criminal retard; you claim in one sentence that you're law-abiding, and then in the next state that you break the law. How stupid can you get?
You're willing to hand the keys to total surveillance of the British people over to the government in the hope that it will reduce spam and 'nuisance calls'? Are you fucking insane?
Even if you're crazy enough to trust Labour, what the fuck do you think a party like the BNP will do if they're ever elected and have these kind of surveillance measures in place? And don't say it can't happen; the neo-Nazis are gaining power across Europe, and a major European recession will lead to a major backlash looking for scapegoats.
"That surely will motivate people to work harder and develop new products/processes so that others with better means will reap the rewards in their place!"
People work hard and develop new products because they make money from doing so; and few 'people' who develop those products actually make money from patents, it's primarily a means for companies to keep new competitors out of their markets.
I used to work in an area of IT where patenting hardware elements was common; the end result was that pretty much every company had a cross-licensing deal with every other company because none of them could function effectively without access to other patents in the industry. So patent lawyers made a lot of money so that the companies could do what they would have been able to do without patent laws.
As for 'original/innovative', I don't remember seeing a single patent in that industry that wasn't clearly built on ideas that had come before; the number of truly innovative and original ideas is tiny.
I'm sorry, but anyone arguing in favor of not putting up big warnings when a browser sees a self-signed cert is a dumb-ass. It's that simple.
Encryption without authentication is worthless to anyone who cares about security; if you don't know who you're communicating with, what's the point of encryption? For all you know, they're the very people you're trying to hide from.
If you want weak, easily-eavesdropped point-to-point encryption then SSL is a lousy place to do it. You should be calling for widespread use of IPSEC and similar protocols which will encrypt everything for you automatically with at least as much security as self-signed certs (i.e. none or greater); and if you don't understand this, you shouldn't even be discussing network security.
"simply removing eavesdroppers would be a step in the right direction."
Yes. Whereas self-signed certs let the eavesdropper send you a certificate which makes you think your connection is secure when in reality they're listening to everything you send.
"And I'm pretty sure you weren't editing at a very high resolution on a 650mhz CPU, which is the main problem with video editing"
I'm sure that HD editing would suck; but I edited a feature-length DV movie on a PII-350 with 256MB of RAM... I'd hope that an Atom would be faster than that was.