I'm sorry, but this is about the difference between idiots and merely ignorant users. They both don't really know how it works, the difference is that the idiot will go ahead and do the craziest things "because it just might work" while an ignorant user will try to get help first before he destroys something. An ignorant user KNOWS he's out of his league. We all make mistakes and destroy things once in a while, but the true idiot is the one that thinks that he knows all about something when he doesn't know the first thing and then goes ahead and proves it.
The advertizers have no way of determining if you actually see the banner, just downloading it is good enough for that. And most banners are paid for based on the number of downloads (impressions). I'm sure if enough people start doing this, the click through rate will fall through the bottom and they (the advertizing scum) will change their rules again.
People don't care too much when the cpu's of AMD and Intel are comparable. Even the fact that Intels processors are now generally much slower won't bother the average person too much. But the real problem for Intel is the heat their current lineup generates. I daily encounter average joes who bought a cheap Intel based machine. And the one thing they're always complaining about is the dreadful noise that those pc's make. When idle, there's not much noise. But when they dare start using the processor, you get something akin to a starting jet engine.
Those peope all feel they've been cheated by the company that build the pc's, and when I explain that it's due to the Intel Inside that their ears are bleeding, they swear up and down that they will never get another Intel again. Apparently at least one huge German manufacturer (Medion) got so many complaints about the noise that their new models are all Athlon64's. This one manufacturer is huge in my country, selling an awful lot of pc's through discount malls around here.
In fact, I think the absurd levels of heat produced by Intels P4 line are why AMD has trouble supplying the lower models like 3000+ single core and 3800+ dual core at the moment. There's been a substantial shift from Intel to AMD, even Dell seems to be at last considering AMD for servers.
Back to the general public : they may be slow to change of opinion, but the last few years have not been good for Intel, up until the point that even the general public is disappointed with them. And that won't change back overnight. They might be slow to change opinion, but that goes both ways.
I have to side with the grand parent. If the price difference with the normal price was only a few tens of cents, it's entirely possible to claim you didn't know this was the wrong price. But a tenth of the normal price ? For something almost vital to most people that is in that period almost daily in the news due to price rises ? You'd have to claim to be an utter imbecile (literally, not able to live in and understand the rules of society) to justify that. "I didn't know" is an excuse that rarely holds in law, and most certainly not when any sane person would know something was wrong.
Sony deserves all they get and more because their insidious DRM can and will most certainly mess up a reasonably secured Windows PC, not just the unsecured ones. Only now that the big antivirus firms dare risk the wrath of Sonyzilla by updating their antivirus definitions, only now have end users a way to prevent its installation, next to disabling autoplay (which breaks a lot of other things). Sony has pioneered a new way for malware to spread, through mass produced music cds. Much of the backlash is simply people wanting to protect their pc's from a wave of new and much, much harder to remove malware. I can most certainly understand their trying to protect their machines from out of control corporations
Sure, some people will blame anything they get on Sony, but still that's wholly Sony's fault. They crossed the line and they will pay for it.
IIRC the stealth fighter that was downed in Serbia was hit by random AA fire (according to my news sources at the time anyway). The Serbians just started shooting wildly in the air during raids and it got them lucky once in the entire campaign, no more, no less.
Jersusalem (I don't remember which variant) was a buggy piece of crap, it's unique selling point( hehe) was that it kept reinfecting executables over and over, making them grow longer and longer. When your 2 Kbytes hard drive park utility takes 2 minutes to load on a XT machine, you kinda get the hint something's wrong. Some programs had 60 copies of the virus in them.
You stopped after two cities because you ran out of bombs. There were only three bombs made, one was used in the first test, the two others dropped on civilians. But you have a point, I wouldn't call that decadent, it was clearly still in the barbaric phase.
Safe mode won't necessarily work for the most aggressive spyware (like CoolWebSearch), but if you can determine the filename of the protector program (the 'daemon'), you should be able to erase it in the repair console (which you get by booting from a XP cd and choosing R), since that's the most barebones boot of XP.
Are you talking about a TX chipset ? That one was limited to caching only the first 64 Mb of ram. Or are you talking about older chipsets like the VX, which won't accept chip densities higher than 16 Mbit ? In that case, you CAN use 128 Mb, you just need double height (32x16 Mbit chips) sdram dimms. Sure, they're hard to find, but they do exist and will work even in the earliest dimm sockets.
I *always* insist on them writing it down while I demonstrate, just like I *always* demonstrate how to use their security programs. However, people seem to fall into these categories :
1) Promises to update the antispyware and scan regularly, but doesn't do anything
2) Promises the same and actually scans but can't seem to grasp the idea of getting new updates or the scan will be useless.
3) Promises the same and actually updates and scans like I told him
Percentages for these three seem to be 50-40-10. Really. After all the trouble I take to explain something for the hundredth time, I'm actually surprised when eventually one of them does exactly what I tell him.
Since you're running Blackice software, did you get hit by the Witty worm that used an exploit in Blackice ? AFAIK that was the first real damaging virus/worm in a long, long time and many people lost data to it, plus it spread like wildfire IIRC.
How much memory did that 233 have ? In my experience it's the memory requirements for XP that cause trouble. Anything less than 256Mb and don't even think about it. However I already have a running P2-233 with 256 Mb memory and it does its job just fine. Emailing, surfing, messenger,... heck it even plays mp3's fine (as long as you use a good optimized player like the Winamp 2.x series).
On the other hand, I've encountered many, many machines with P4 cpu's > 2 Gigahertz sold by chains like Packard Bell that only had 128Mb ram and XP came with the system. Guess what, after a few months of use (and a few spyware programs ofcourse:) ) they were crawling like hell and much much slower in use than the P2-233. I've seen one Packard Bell that had XP and 128 Mb memory, of which 32 Mb was reserved for the crappy internal video. You try running XP on 96Mb and you'll learn the meaning of slow. To this date I cannot understand what Packard Bell was thinking selling systems like that.
Um, no we don't. Belgium has a few nukes designed to be carried by planes, yes, but they and the missiles of a decade back (now gone) were placed by the US and are their sole property and responsability (through NATO). We don't have nukes of our own, nor do we have the capability to build them. Just a heads up before Bush decides to invade us too...
What you could do is a simple triage. For everyone, fix their problems once, for free. Then see how long it takes for them to come back with new problems (there's a big difference between yearly and monthly), what their attitude is about it ("It's all your fault!" vs. "I'm terribly sorry that I ruined your fine work with my immense clumsiness, please please please help me") and most importantly, how they learnt from the previous time. Simply dump those who cannot learn even a few simple things, those who blame you for their own faults and the disasters-at-the-keyboard that manage to fully wreck their pc every two-three months.
Pick your "clients" among your family/friends carefully, and you will have a lot more spare time AND some family members who will think you're the incarnation of technical prowess and charity on earth.
Just about every european money, and now the Euro too, has a different size for every denomination. The denominations get bigger as they increase in value, which makes it easier for blind people to recognise them. Doesn't the US use this concept too ?
Intel is not struggling. They can keep pumping out crap processors for years and years, and the usual suspects (big OEM's, company purchasing departments staffed by beancounters and Johnny Clueless Consumer) will keep on buying them because "Intel is good and stable". There is a definite lag between perception of quality and the true quality of Intel chips (probably true for a lot of other markets). This is because Intel has been king of the hill for decades, AMD's rise is only recent and therefore just does not register on the radar of the dinosaurs. Sure it's changing, but don't expect AMD to trounce Intel anytime soon. They've built up a gigantic momentum through the years and it'll take more than a few flopped architectures (Itanium and P4 Netburst) to make a dent into this.
And they managed to screw up even further. Read that text, and imagine you're an innocent (horny) teenager who initially wanted to go to the Idol site. But what's this ? "there is a US site with a similar address which contains adult content which is not suitable for minors". Wow ! Take me there man ! [clicky] Ewwwwwww ! That's GAY ! [cue millions of (male) teenagers getting sick].
Because they're stuck with hot, expensive, slow processors (in comparison to the Athlon64) which have reached their architecture limit in clock frequency. They already announced that there will be no real 4 Gigahertz P4. They dumped all development of the P4 line to go back to the Pentium M core (a continuation of the P3 in itself). In the meantime they need SOMETHING to shift processors, so they've simply thrown everything and the kitchen sink in new chipsets (which will also bring in some money), including DDR2, PCI Express and the new pinless chip format. Intel caught the video card makers by surprise by first switching to PCI-e much sooner than expected, and on top of that making it an agressive switch (they deliberately left out AGP compatibility so if you want to use DDR2 for example, you'll also need a PCI-e video card). This is why there are serious shortages of PCI-e cards, AND why the AMD chipset makers are racing to provide PCI-e themselves.
Don't get me wrong, chipzilla won't go under in the next decade even if they keep up their current string of half assed and moronic decisions, but right now they're scared and PCI-e is simply one way to try to keep their market share by ways other than making their current stalled netburst architecture a little faster.
For other examples of their panicky looting of their cache of speed enhancing tricks, see hyperthreading and the Xeon processors they sell as "Pentium 4 Extremely Expensive Edition"
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I'm sorry, but this is about the difference between idiots and merely ignorant users. They both don't really know how it works, the difference is that the idiot will go ahead and do the craziest things "because it just might work" while an ignorant user will try to get help first before he destroys something. An ignorant user KNOWS he's out of his league. We all make mistakes and destroy things once in a while, but the true idiot is the one that thinks that he knows all about something when he doesn't know the first thing and then goes ahead and proves it.
The advertizers have no way of determining if you actually see the banner, just downloading it is good enough for that. And most banners are paid for based on the number of downloads (impressions). I'm sure if enough people start doing this, the click through rate will fall through the bottom and they (the advertizing scum) will change their rules again.
People don't care too much when the cpu's of AMD and Intel are comparable. Even the fact that Intels processors are now generally much slower won't bother the average person too much. But the real problem for Intel is the heat their current lineup generates. I daily encounter average joes who bought a cheap Intel based machine. And the one thing they're always complaining about is the dreadful noise that those pc's make. When idle, there's not much noise. But when they dare start using the processor, you get something akin to a starting jet engine.
Those peope all feel they've been cheated by the company that build the pc's, and when I explain that it's due to the Intel Inside that their ears are bleeding, they swear up and down that they will never get another Intel again. Apparently at least one huge German manufacturer (Medion) got so many complaints about the noise that their new models are all Athlon64's. This one manufacturer is huge in my country, selling an awful lot of pc's through discount malls around here.
In fact, I think the absurd levels of heat produced by Intels P4 line are why AMD has trouble supplying the lower models like 3000+ single core and 3800+ dual core at the moment. There's been a substantial shift from Intel to AMD, even Dell seems to be at last considering AMD for servers.
Back to the general public : they may be slow to change of opinion, but the last few years have not been good for Intel, up until the point that even the general public is disappointed with them. And that won't change back overnight. They might be slow to change opinion, but that goes both ways.
I have to side with the grand parent. If the price difference with the normal price was only a few tens of cents, it's entirely possible to claim you didn't know this was the wrong price. But a tenth of the normal price ? For something almost vital to most people that is in that period almost daily in the news due to price rises ? You'd have to claim to be an utter imbecile (literally, not able to live in and understand the rules of society) to justify that. "I didn't know" is an excuse that rarely holds in law, and most certainly not when any sane person would know something was wrong.
Sony deserves all they get and more because their insidious DRM can and will most certainly mess up a reasonably secured Windows PC, not just the unsecured ones. Only now that the big antivirus firms dare risk the wrath of Sonyzilla by updating their antivirus definitions, only now have end users a way to prevent its installation, next to disabling autoplay (which breaks a lot of other things). Sony has pioneered a new way for malware to spread, through mass produced music cds. Much of the backlash is simply people wanting to protect their pc's from a wave of new and much, much harder to remove malware. I can most certainly understand their trying to protect their machines from out of control corporations
Sure, some people will blame anything they get on Sony, but still that's wholly Sony's fault. They crossed the line and they will pay for it.
IIRC the stealth fighter that was downed in Serbia was hit by random AA fire (according to my news sources at the time anyway). The Serbians just started shooting wildly in the air during raids and it got them lucky once in the entire campaign, no more, no less.
Jersusalem (I don't remember which variant) was a buggy piece of crap, it's unique selling point( hehe) was that it kept reinfecting executables over and over, making them grow longer and longer. When your 2 Kbytes hard drive park utility takes 2 minutes to load on a XT machine, you kinda get the hint something's wrong. Some programs had 60 copies of the virus in them.
You stopped after two cities because you ran out of bombs. There were only three bombs made, one was used in the first test, the two others dropped on civilians. But you have a point, I wouldn't call that decadent, it was clearly still in the barbaric phase.
You wouldn't get shot beacuse your constables do not carry guns
Neither do the civilians AND almost all criminals. In the end, it all evens out.
Safe mode won't necessarily work for the most aggressive spyware (like CoolWebSearch), but if you can determine the filename of the protector program (the 'daemon'), you should be able to erase it in the repair console (which you get by booting from a XP cd and choosing R), since that's the most barebones boot of XP.
Are you talking about a TX chipset ? That one was limited to caching only the first 64 Mb of ram. Or are you talking about older chipsets like the VX, which won't accept chip densities higher than 16 Mbit ? In that case, you CAN use 128 Mb, you just need double height (32x16 Mbit chips) sdram dimms. Sure, they're hard to find, but they do exist and will work even in the earliest dimm sockets.
I *always* insist on them writing it down while I demonstrate, just like I *always* demonstrate how to use their security programs. However, people seem to fall into these categories :
1) Promises to update the antispyware and scan regularly, but doesn't do anything
2) Promises the same and actually scans but can't seem to grasp the idea of getting new updates or the scan will be useless.
3) Promises the same and actually updates and scans like I told him
Percentages for these three seem to be 50-40-10. Really. After all the trouble I take to explain something for the hundredth time, I'm actually surprised when eventually one of them does exactly what I tell him.
Since you're running Blackice software, did you get hit by the Witty worm that used an exploit in Blackice ? AFAIK that was the first real damaging virus/worm in a long, long time and many people lost data to it, plus it spread like wildfire IIRC.
:)
Just curious
How much memory did that 233 have ? In my experience it's the memory requirements for XP that cause trouble. Anything less than 256Mb and don't even think about it. However I already have a running P2-233 with 256 Mb memory and it does its job just fine. Emailing, surfing, messenger,... heck it even plays mp3's fine (as long as you use a good optimized player like the Winamp 2.x series).
:) ) they were crawling like hell and much much slower in use than the P2-233. I've seen one Packard Bell that had XP and 128 Mb memory, of which 32 Mb was reserved for the crappy internal video. You try running XP on 96Mb and you'll learn the meaning of slow. To this date I cannot understand what Packard Bell was thinking selling systems like that.
On the other hand, I've encountered many, many machines with P4 cpu's > 2 Gigahertz sold by chains like Packard Bell that only had 128Mb ram and XP came with the system. Guess what, after a few months of use (and a few spyware programs ofcourse
Um, no we don't. Belgium has a few nukes designed to be carried by planes, yes, but they and the missiles of a decade back (now gone) were placed by the US and are their sole property and responsability (through NATO). We don't have nukes of our own, nor do we have the capability to build them. Just a heads up before Bush decides to invade us too...
What you could do is a simple triage. For everyone, fix their problems once, for free. Then see how long it takes for them to come back with new problems (there's a big difference between yearly and monthly), what their attitude is about it ("It's all your fault!" vs. "I'm terribly sorry that I ruined your fine work with my immense clumsiness, please please please help me") and most importantly, how they learnt from the previous time. Simply dump those who cannot learn even a few simple things, those who blame you for their own faults and the disasters-at-the-keyboard that manage to fully wreck their pc every two-three months.
Pick your "clients" among your family/friends carefully, and you will have a lot more spare time AND some family members who will think you're the incarnation of technical prowess and charity on earth.
The Uk isn't part of the euro zone last time I checked, so no need for euros to pay the lawyers.
Just about every european money, and now the Euro too, has a different size for every denomination. The denominations get bigger as they increase in value, which makes it easier for blind people to recognise them. Doesn't the US use this concept too ?
Did you check this program out ? CWShredder, now being developed by InterMute (the original author just couldn't keep up with the new CWS variants).
That formula would give a divide by zero with some of the people I know :D
The difference is that Kazaa has angered the RIAA mob. As long as the neo nazis keep spreading hate instead of music, they're fine.
Intel is not struggling. They can keep pumping out crap processors for years and years, and the usual suspects (big OEM's, company purchasing departments staffed by beancounters and Johnny Clueless Consumer) will keep on buying them because "Intel is good and stable". There is a definite lag between perception of quality and the true quality of Intel chips (probably true for a lot of other markets). This is because Intel has been king of the hill for decades, AMD's rise is only recent and therefore just does not register on the radar of the dinosaurs. Sure it's changing, but don't expect AMD to trounce Intel anytime soon. They've built up a gigantic momentum through the years and it'll take more than a few flopped architectures (Itanium and P4 Netburst) to make a dent into this.
And they managed to screw up even further. Read that text, and imagine you're an innocent (horny) teenager who initially wanted to go to the Idol site. But what's this ? "there is a US site with a similar address which contains adult content which is not suitable for minors". Wow ! Take me there man ! [clicky] Ewwwwwww ! That's GAY ! [cue millions of (male) teenagers getting sick].
Because they're stuck with hot, expensive, slow processors (in comparison to the Athlon64) which have reached their architecture limit in clock frequency. They already announced that there will be no real 4 Gigahertz P4. They dumped all development of the P4 line to go back to the Pentium M core (a continuation of the P3 in itself). In the meantime they need SOMETHING to shift processors, so they've simply thrown everything and the kitchen sink in new chipsets (which will also bring in some money), including DDR2, PCI Express and the new pinless chip format. Intel caught the video card makers by surprise by first switching to PCI-e much sooner than expected, and on top of that making it an agressive switch (they deliberately left out AGP compatibility so if you want to use DDR2 for example, you'll also need a PCI-e video card). This is why there are serious shortages of PCI-e cards, AND why the AMD chipset makers are racing to provide PCI-e themselves.
Don't get me wrong, chipzilla won't go under in the next decade even if they keep up their current string of half assed and moronic decisions, but right now they're scared and PCI-e is simply one way to try to keep their market share by ways other than making their current stalled netburst architecture a little faster.
For other examples of their panicky looting of their cache of speed enhancing tricks, see hyperthreading and the Xeon processors they sell as "Pentium 4 Extremely Expensive Edition"