Ever been outside the US? I have. All you ever hear is "Yankee Go home.....and take us with you"
You see the problem with being spoon fed a steady diet of Revisionist Berkeley Marxist inspired horseshit is it blinds you to the reality of the utter disgrace and dysfunction most of the regimes in the world are. Oh I am sure you have a Hugo Chavez poster and Che T-shirt and you chatter about the evil empire what is America to all your friends down at Starbucks, and that's fine. Being retarded isn't a sin, being proud of it is.
Right, the millions of people who supported the Ayatollah in 1979, the millions who supported the mass executions of hundreds of thousands of people in the months following and the millions of people who openly and fervently supported the mass human wave attacks of a million unarmed children against the Iraqi army in the 1980's all applaud your liberal guilt and mindless cheering of the common man.
Moreover the the fact that the police in Iran openly execute up to 10 people a day for the crime of 'being gay' or 'getting raped', or simply talking back and they do this with the full faith and support of a majority of the population there only drives the point home more.
If some huge percentage of the populace were against the regime, why is it that it's still around and barely 25% of the population of Iran has any living memory of a country BEFORE the Islamic Revolution? Why is that, oh ye of hand wringing Che T-shirt wearing fucking stupidity?
It's supposed to save daylight. From days of yore, it's supposed to let you till the soil in the light for more hours.
Of course if you want to end DST, pitch it as a danger for the Chiiiiilllllllllddddrrrrrreeennnnnnnnnnn!!!!!!!!! that is, sell it as a problem for early morning bustops and how your snowflakes will all get run down in the dark.
As a Sprint customer I have to guess that not only is their billing system UN-auditable but that Sprint doesn't have clear understanding of exactly what monies they collect and from whom. In the 4 years I've been a Sprint subscriber I've thrashed through at least 3 dozen billing errors. If someone wanted to steal identities it couldn't be that hard given the absolute anarchy and dysfunction of their billing system and its interaction with customer service.
Right when CRT screens above 21" for PC monitors became price value worthy, PC makers stopped selling them. Now your monitor costs more than your PC. So when can we see a corresponding price drop in LCDs. A year ago the 25% drop year over year for the previous few years came to an abrupt halt and prices have remained stable for more than 12 months.
Those are actually fairly minor engineering tweaks. Any cash register in America has a water resistant keyboard I bet. And those are designed for people who can barely read. I have a rollup rubber keyboard around here. I bet it costs $8-10 to make, tops. As far as the power is concerned, what of it? A 6-cell LION should work at least 90 minutes. By throttling the system down aggressively you could stretch that to several hours. The reason most people hate battery life is because of the performance they demand out of the machine. Temper that a bit, use C7 processors, etc and you have a very power miserly machine.
Look the point is this, in order to come up with a cheap durable functional laptop you really don't have to reinvent it. Seriously, how expensive would it be to retrofit a foam shell around your laptop to make it more bump resistant? $7. You don't need a specially designed machine that's as closed down and limited as a cell phone either.
The EEE is a commercial product which means they're trying to maximize their margin on it, however small that is. That means that compared to a XO type machine which is not intended to make money, the EEE either has self limited functions and capabilities or it costs slightly more than it should. This is really what doomed the OLPC project from the start - this need to create some kind of revolutionary leap forward when none is needed. You could have spent the money creating a foundation to gather up old laptops, refurbing them, applying whatever cost effective field tweaks you could and sending them back out. Is it perfect? No. But it could have been running for a year already. And guess what, even when I drop a laptop it's still broken. Misuse happens and resilience is not guaranteed.
No but ruggedness shouldn't be a key driver in the decision process. Why? Because you don't actually know what those requirements look like. For every 7 year old who drops a laptop there's probably some third world kid who's going to drop it in the river or have to wrestle it away from a dingo or something. In other words, rugged is as rugged does.
And until about 3 months ago were looking to sell themselves out of it. Election systems were never a money maker for Diebold and conspiracy theories notwithstanding, they have a fairly good record outside of the US. However they don't make much money in it. They also don't spend much money addressing public concerns which in any other venue would make sense, financially. But they're discovering that in the US election systems are like a public trust and require more investment than return.
AV and malware tools don't have a standard definition or usage for what constitutes an actual problem so you're left up to each individual tool telling you which problems it finds.
Maybe it only finds the problems it can find, maybe it only tells you about the problems it can fix. Maybe the definition of 'fix' is up in the air too. For too long the AV vendors have created products that can't be compared head to head reliably. They ALL claim to do something called AV scanning, but no one can really tell you what that is and how or if they are any good at it. They can't even standardize on a taxonomy for what an infection is or is called.
And without that standardization no tool can tell you about what it DOESN'T know, its unknown unknowns so to speak.
For example, if the AV company is telling me I can't even know whether my machine has been botnet'ed then how can I trust them to tell me it is or how good their coverage is?
I'll give you another example from the Department of Redundancy. For years I used both Ad-Aware and Spybot until about 18 months ago when I finally discovered that all they were doing was erasing cookies. They never found anything on any machine running an firewall and a real time AV scanner (such as AVAST or McAfee SCF). They were completely useless and I could duplicate their function by erasing cookies myself.
And then I popped on Wireshark and did a long capture of the outgoing traffic to verify these machines weren't sending out packets I didn't know about. If I've been botnet'ed then it's hiding the traffic from a wirescanner too, which is unlikely.
So I have to conclude that this massive problem of malware and botnets is like having unprotected sex in a Mexican whorehouse. Most people don't do it but the people who do are clearly performing some stupid shit to get themselves in trouble. Ordinary good practice would, I think eliminate almost all malware and botnet activity.
So when the AV companies come telling you that only their product can fix what ails you, be skeptical. I bet any normal safe practices would accomplish the same thing.
So why not get a 4 year old laptop? I doubt my T40 Thinkpad is worth more than $350. It has a Centrino 1.5Ghz, (originally 512MB RAM since doubled), a CDRW/DVD player, built in 802.11b (easily replaced with a $4 PCCard adapter, an 80GB drive. Plus it's not a clunky heavy machine like am R41 Thinkpad, albeit a 7 year old could easily drop it.
And for what it's worth, GAMERZ D00DZ at/., my Fortune 50 company has decided not to upgrade any machines >900Mhz for at least another year. So if that's good enough for corporate apps it's good enough for 7 year olds. In other words you could get a 5 year old laptop worth maybe $300 or slightly less and compare that to one of these machines.
Assuming everyday retail pricing and not some line up outside the store at 2am for 8 hrs super sale nonsense (although it's hard to understand what Walmart means when they say "Out of Stock" AND "Coming Soon" for the same item at the same time.)
In either case, a hundred dollars less than that or $300 is significant. After all most people use their machine for email, school/work papers, browsing and syncing their iPod. And if you need more than 60GB storage I guess you can some of those savings and get a NAS on your home network but 60GB is quite a bit a room for almost everyone. $300 is less than the iPod you sync it with. $300 is less than some geeks spend on a phone.
I would run out and get my wife a $300 laptop today if I could.
No it's not that. I just don't pay attention to screeching assholes who truly believe that their half assed uninformed OPINION based on their own little corner of the world is the Gospel Fucking Truth, and then they get angry when I don't prostrate myself at their feet at the epiphany of it all.
Fuck them - I said what I said. If GAMERZ don't get it, then fuck em. Fuck em and their $3000 rigs. It's just a boy toy glittery object is all. They can defend it at get all self righteous but it's just a toy. A high powered toy. I don't want them dragging the rest of us along THEIR upgrade path. So fuck em.
Another turn of Bob Barker's The Price is Right Wheel o Windows is a waste of effort unless it leaps ahead into outerspace in relation to the current feature set.
It has to run virtualization out of the box. It has to allow for per process and per CPU throttling. It has to run real time back up, support dedicated inline encryption and security subsystems. It has to support 16x more RAM and an order of magnitude larger AD spaces. It has to support virtualized patches, a journalled file system, a file system that spans physical volumes.
THAT's what solid improvement looks like, not fixing 70% of what they left out or broke before and calling that a new version.
No no no no no no no. This year's laptop does not 'do' 4 or 8 or 16x more or better 'work'. It doesn't. It simply does the same thing with marginally more glittery gewgaws a bit faster accounting for the corresponding growth in overhead.
It's like having bigger open windows in your house in the summer and having to buy ever larger central air conditioning units to compensate for your new and improved larger open windows.
I have no truck with better performance. The problem is we DON'T DO ANYTHING with it. We don't use one core as a dedicated security and encryption subsystem. We don't effectively use our 1GB baseline RAM footprints to create an out of the box virtualization enviroment. We're STILL running out and buying video adapters or buying motherboards with video chips in lieu of carving out a piece of one of those cores and using that as the soft video processor. We're still not running a storage subsystem that spans physical volumes (in Windows). All we're doing is pulling out rulers and measuring our dicks.
I don't even own a dual core machine and now there's going to be Windows Craving 6-core machines that run Vista Ultra Quantum Home Edition!
I feel like they would do us all a favor if they just told us the date that none of the software we'll need to run will stop operating on 'old' hardware. I can hardly wait for my HS Jr. to go off to college and they tell me I need yet another $2400 laptop as a requirement.
It may well bring out a new Gen Xbox but given the overheating problems of the current box this new gen box will have to be essentially a full blown computer with something approaching a closed loop liquid cooling system aka, a 'Gamerz' PC.
Adding a BR player at this point has GOT to cost well north of $250 minimum perhaps more than $300. Are you willing to add $300 to the cost of an Xbox? I'm not. I'll just get a Wal*Mart Sony BDP-S300 $370 BR standalone player.
There is no executive no matter how talented who's absence would create a problem this large. The senior suit leaves and all of a sudden the minions of program managers and bit heads running the company's #1 product release all go insane on the same day?
Tell you what - HIS boss, whoever that is, as well as all the direct reports to that now gone suit should be fired w/o hesitation. Whether you like MS or hate them, this is textbook how not to develop and release a product so either someone's lying or, if this is really how MS functions then it speaks volumes for what's profoundly wrong with MS and why all their major releases are screwed up a little bit.
And their somewhat ignorant adherence to what someone else tells them the law is supposed to look like. Chez was fired precisely because of the blockheaded slavish unimaginative 'product' oriented apparachik mentality so prevalent in the/. set. Yup there's a rule.
Guess what - 'rules' are why your media are worthless shitpiles now. Good luck with that. Maybe you can 20 more years of Bush inspired spineless mediocrity....because those are the rules.
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Ever been outside the US? I have. All you ever hear is "Yankee Go home.....and take us with you"
You see the problem with being spoon fed a steady diet of Revisionist Berkeley Marxist inspired horseshit is it blinds you to the reality of the utter disgrace and dysfunction most of the regimes in the world are. Oh I am sure you have a Hugo Chavez poster and Che T-shirt and you chatter about the evil empire what is America to all your friends down at Starbucks, and that's fine. Being retarded isn't a sin, being proud of it is.
Right, the millions of people who supported the Ayatollah in 1979, the millions who supported the mass executions of hundreds of thousands of people in the months following and the millions of people who openly and fervently supported the mass human wave attacks of a million unarmed children against the Iraqi army in the 1980's all applaud your liberal guilt and mindless cheering of the common man.
Moreover the the fact that the police in Iran openly execute up to 10 people a day for the crime of 'being gay' or 'getting raped', or simply talking back and they do this with the full faith and support of a majority of the population there only drives the point home more.
If some huge percentage of the populace were against the regime, why is it that it's still around and barely 25% of the population of Iran has any living memory of a country BEFORE the Islamic Revolution? Why is that, oh ye of hand wringing Che T-shirt wearing fucking stupidity?
Why is that?
An ignorant populace is a stupid unproductive populace. It couldn't happen to a more deserving place.
I have an IBM G74 I can't give away.
This should be interesting.
It's supposed to save daylight. From days of yore, it's supposed to let you till the soil in the light for more hours.
Of course if you want to end DST, pitch it as a danger for the Chiiiiilllllllllddddrrrrrreeennnnnnnnnnn!!!!!!!!! that is, sell it as a problem for early morning bustops and how your snowflakes will all get run down in the dark.
As a Sprint customer I have to guess that not only is their billing system UN-auditable but that Sprint doesn't have clear understanding of exactly what monies they collect and from whom. In the 4 years I've been a Sprint subscriber I've thrashed through at least 3 dozen billing errors. If someone wanted to steal identities it couldn't be that hard given the absolute anarchy and dysfunction of their billing system and its interaction with customer service.
Right when CRT screens above 21" for PC monitors became price value worthy, PC makers stopped selling them. Now your monitor costs more than your PC. So when can we see a corresponding price drop in LCDs. A year ago the 25% drop year over year for the previous few years came to an abrupt halt and prices have remained stable for more than 12 months.
Thanks for the 'upgrade', dudes.
Those are actually fairly minor engineering tweaks. Any cash register in America has a water resistant keyboard I bet. And those are designed for people who can barely read. I have a rollup rubber keyboard around here. I bet it costs $8-10 to make, tops. As far as the power is concerned, what of it? A 6-cell LION should work at least 90 minutes. By throttling the system down aggressively you could stretch that to several hours. The reason most people hate battery life is because of the performance they demand out of the machine. Temper that a bit, use C7 processors, etc and you have a very power miserly machine.
Look the point is this, in order to come up with a cheap durable functional laptop you really don't have to reinvent it. Seriously, how expensive would it be to retrofit a foam shell around your laptop to make it more bump resistant? $7. You don't need a specially designed machine that's as closed down and limited as a cell phone either.
The EEE is a commercial product which means they're trying to maximize their margin on it, however small that is. That means that compared to a XO type machine which is not intended to make money, the EEE either has self limited functions and capabilities or it costs slightly more than it should. This is really what doomed the OLPC project from the start - this need to create some kind of revolutionary leap forward when none is needed. You could have spent the money creating a foundation to gather up old laptops, refurbing them, applying whatever cost effective field tweaks you could and sending them back out. Is it perfect? No. But it could have been running for a year already. And guess what, even when I drop a laptop it's still broken. Misuse happens and resilience is not guaranteed.
No but ruggedness shouldn't be a key driver in the decision process. Why? Because you don't actually know what those requirements look like. For every 7 year old who drops a laptop there's probably some third world kid who's going to drop it in the river or have to wrestle it away from a dingo or something. In other words, rugged is as rugged does.
And until about 3 months ago were looking to sell themselves out of it. Election systems were never a money maker for Diebold and conspiracy theories notwithstanding, they have a fairly good record outside of the US. However they don't make much money in it. They also don't spend much money addressing public concerns which in any other venue would make sense, financially. But they're discovering that in the US election systems are like a public trust and require more investment than return.
AV and malware tools don't have a standard definition or usage for what constitutes an actual problem so you're left up to each individual tool telling you which problems it finds.
Maybe it only finds the problems it can find, maybe it only tells you about the problems it can fix. Maybe the definition of 'fix' is up in the air too. For too long the AV vendors have created products that can't be compared head to head reliably. They ALL claim to do something called AV scanning, but no one can really tell you what that is and how or if they are any good at it. They can't even standardize on a taxonomy for what an infection is or is called.
And without that standardization no tool can tell you about what it DOESN'T know, its unknown unknowns so to speak.
For example, if the AV company is telling me I can't even know whether my machine has been botnet'ed then how can I trust them to tell me it is or how good their coverage is?
I'll give you another example from the Department of Redundancy. For years I used both Ad-Aware and Spybot until about 18 months ago when I finally discovered that all they were doing was erasing cookies. They never found anything on any machine running an firewall and a real time AV scanner (such as AVAST or McAfee SCF). They were completely useless and I could duplicate their function by erasing cookies myself.
And then I popped on Wireshark and did a long capture of the outgoing traffic to verify these machines weren't sending out packets I didn't know about. If I've been botnet'ed then it's hiding the traffic from a wirescanner too, which is unlikely.
So I have to conclude that this massive problem of malware and botnets is like having unprotected sex in a Mexican whorehouse. Most people don't do it but the people who do are clearly performing some stupid shit to get themselves in trouble. Ordinary good practice would, I think eliminate almost all malware and botnet activity.
So when the AV companies come telling you that only their product can fix what ails you, be skeptical. I bet any normal safe practices would accomplish the same thing.
So why not get a 4 year old laptop? I doubt my T40 Thinkpad is worth more than $350. It has a Centrino 1.5Ghz, (originally 512MB RAM since doubled), a CDRW/DVD player, built in 802.11b (easily replaced with a $4 PCCard adapter, an 80GB drive. Plus it's not a clunky heavy machine like am R41 Thinkpad, albeit a 7 year old could easily drop it.
/., my Fortune 50 company has decided not to upgrade any machines >900Mhz for at least another year. So if that's good enough for corporate apps it's good enough for 7 year olds. In other words you could get a 5 year old laptop worth maybe $300 or slightly less and compare that to one of these machines.
And for what it's worth, GAMERZ D00DZ at
It's too expensive for a general rollout. It will be the executive only Thinkpad model.
Assuming everyday retail pricing and not some line up outside the store at 2am for 8 hrs super sale nonsense (although it's hard to understand what Walmart means when they say "Out of Stock" AND "Coming Soon" for the same item at the same time.)
In either case, a hundred dollars less than that or $300 is significant. After all most people use their machine for email, school/work papers, browsing and syncing their iPod. And if you need more than 60GB storage I guess you can some of those savings and get a NAS on your home network but 60GB is quite a bit a room for almost everyone. $300 is less than the iPod you sync it with. $300 is less than some geeks spend on a phone.
I would run out and get my wife a $300 laptop today if I could.
No it's not that. I just don't pay attention to screeching assholes who truly believe that their half assed uninformed OPINION based on their own little corner of the world is the Gospel Fucking Truth, and then they get angry when I don't prostrate myself at their feet at the epiphany of it all.
Fuck them - I said what I said. If GAMERZ don't get it, then fuck em. Fuck em and their $3000 rigs. It's just a boy toy glittery object is all. They can defend it at get all self righteous but it's just a toy. A high powered toy. I don't want them dragging the rest of us along THEIR upgrade path. So fuck em.
Ok I give up. Run all 6 cores to support Office, iTunes and a browser. You win.
Another turn of Bob Barker's The Price is Right Wheel o Windows is a waste of effort unless it leaps ahead into outerspace in relation to the current feature set.
It has to run virtualization out of the box. It has to allow for per process and per CPU throttling. It has to run real time back up, support dedicated inline encryption and security subsystems. It has to support 16x more RAM and an order of magnitude larger AD spaces. It has to support virtualized patches, a journalled file system, a file system that spans physical volumes.
THAT's what solid improvement looks like, not fixing 70% of what they left out or broke before and calling that a new version.
No no no no no no no. This year's laptop does not 'do' 4 or 8 or 16x more or better 'work'. It doesn't. It simply does the same thing with marginally more glittery gewgaws a bit faster accounting for the corresponding growth in overhead.
It's like having bigger open windows in your house in the summer and having to buy ever larger central air conditioning units to compensate for your new and improved larger open windows.
I have no truck with better performance. The problem is we DON'T DO ANYTHING with it. We don't use one core as a dedicated security and encryption subsystem. We don't effectively use our 1GB baseline RAM footprints to create an out of the box virtualization enviroment. We're STILL running out and buying video adapters or buying motherboards with video chips in lieu of carving out a piece of one of those cores and using that as the soft video processor. We're still not running a storage subsystem that spans physical volumes (in Windows). All we're doing is pulling out rulers and measuring our dicks.
I don't even own a dual core machine and now there's going to be Windows Craving 6-core machines that run Vista Ultra Quantum Home Edition!
I feel like they would do us all a favor if they just told us the date that none of the software we'll need to run will stop operating on 'old' hardware. I can hardly wait for my HS Jr. to go off to college and they tell me I need yet another $2400 laptop as a requirement.
It may well bring out a new Gen Xbox but given the overheating problems of the current box this new gen box will have to be essentially a full blown computer with something approaching a closed loop liquid cooling system aka, a 'Gamerz' PC.
Adding a BR player at this point has GOT to cost well north of $250 minimum perhaps more than $300. Are you willing to add $300 to the cost of an Xbox? I'm not. I'll just get a Wal*Mart Sony BDP-S300 $370 BR standalone player.
There is no executive no matter how talented who's absence would create a problem this large. The senior suit leaves and all of a sudden the minions of program managers and bit heads running the company's #1 product release all go insane on the same day?
Tell you what - HIS boss, whoever that is, as well as all the direct reports to that now gone suit should be fired w/o hesitation. Whether you like MS or hate them, this is textbook how not to develop and release a product so either someone's lying or, if this is really how MS functions then it speaks volumes for what's profoundly wrong with MS and why all their major releases are screwed up a little bit.
And their somewhat ignorant adherence to what someone else tells them the law is supposed to look like. Chez was fired precisely because of the blockheaded slavish unimaginative 'product' oriented apparachik mentality so prevalent in the /. set. Yup there's a rule.
Guess what - 'rules' are why your media are worthless shitpiles now. Good luck with that. Maybe you can 20 more years of Bush inspired spineless mediocrity....because those are the rules.
Skinning a hide
Crushing a Mastadon with a bolder
Killing your enemies & impregnating their women
Being a Sun God