Dude I take it you never worked corporate? You ALWAYS end up with the grunts knowing a hell of a lot more than they are supposed to, be it from some PHB just being lazy or a loudmouth to some secretary having ears like a fricking bat, there is ALWAYS plenty of info the grunts aren't supposed to know or have access to that ends up getting into their hands.
Bullshit, just because something doesn't have code for you to play with doesn't automatically make it "security by obscurity" and it has been proven time and again that many eyes like the mythical man month is just that, a myth which even a tiny bit of logic and common sense can rip apart.
For something as complex as a security related program you would have to have 1.- Users with enough years of experience in the cryptography field to actually make heads or tails of it (see the obfuscated C code contest for why this is important) and 2.- These same users, which generally are some of the most in demand guys in IT, having enough free time to check not ONLY the program itself but ALSO anything that is interacting with the code,aka the "trust the compiler" problem.
Show of hands, how many here have done a detailed in depth code audit on Firefox? LibreOffice? Gimp? I rest my case. here is probably the most FOSS heavy geek site on the net and I bet you can't even find 5 people that has so much as even looked at a line of code from the above, which is the 3 most popular FOSS apps BTW, and you won't find even one that has done an in depth code audit for any of the above. And this of course isn't even taking into account the fact that code doesn't stand still so in the time it takes you to do a code audit of say LO 4.1 there will have been 3 releases so that LO is at 4.4 and your audit is worthless and you need to start over. after all who knows what weaknesses the changes added? Maybe a change affects a system you have already audited making it now a risk?
The "having the code automatically makes it more secure" myth hangs on a simple fallacy, the fallacy that assumes because something CAN happen it already HAS happened which real life proves wrong again and again. After all theoretically somebody COULD be born that is immortal but that doesn't mean there ARE immortals walking the earth, and I bet a good 70% of the little projects that make up the average Linux distro probably haven't had their code looked at by anybody that doesn't actually work on the project, everyone just ASSUMES that it has been. Well the same thing applies to proprietary, it COULD have been made by the smartest minds in cryptography or it COULD have been made by Indian call center workers, you don't know in either case how well or poorly the program has been built until AFTER somebody breaks it.
Well at least in my neck of the woods the most popular number combo is folks SSN scarily enough. i don't know how many times I have had a customer write down their username and password so I can get in and do the work only to find its their SSN.
This is why I have been saying for years we really need smart cards or biometrics or something, as the amount of people out there using crazy simple passwords is just nuts. Their SSN, their BDay, the name of their kid or pet, people honestly don't think when it comes to passwords so i'm honestly amazed a brute force attack scored so little, i figured it would be much higher.
Built hundreds of systems, supported even more, never seen that happen with Realtek, hell never saw anything more than their stupid "HD Deck" app not run with Via, only problem I've seen on sound is some of the old Sigmatels are badly supported but that is Sigmatel, they have ALWAYS had piss poor support when it comes to their stuff.
As for Nvidia I take it you missed the behind the scenes drama? Since you did I'll fill you in, less than 4 months before the Vista RTM was to happen MSFT basically gutted a good chunk of the video subsystem so that they could come up with "Vista capable" to make Intel happy who had an assload of really shitty 9xx chips in the warehouse and knew that if none of those chips could not run on Vista they would get stuck with that shit so they pushed and MSFT caved. this of course pissed off Nvidia who already had great running drivers in Vista beta 1 and had to throw out ALL the work done and had to start from square one (because the Intel 9xx chips did a LOT of their "GPU" work in software on the CPU such as T&L which wouldn't run under the Vista driver model, hell even with the MSFT hack they couldn't run Aero on the things because it was too slow) which naturally pissed them the fuck off so they delayed releasing new drivers to give MSFT a nice support nightmare as a middle finger for changing the model less than 6 months before release.
I'm sorry if you were one of the unlucky that got burned by that but thankfully that kind of behind the scenes drama is VERY rare, in fact the only other major driver drama I can think of involves the card somebody down the thread is complaining about which is the Matrox GPUs. Did you ever see that video where Bill Gates plugs in a USB printer and Win98 gets a BSOD? Well now you know why Matrox was persona non grata at MSFT, it turned out the Matrox driver was basically hijacking a chunk of the video subsystem (against the design guidelines natch) and if anything tried to access that system in a way it didn't like, like say a wizard trying to pop up when you plugged in a printer? Crash goes the system.
You REALLY should have posted that as non AC as it REALLY deserves to be modded up! The only thing I would add is on the system builders side you also get "Hardware roulette" where you will ALWAYS lose, because no matter what hardware they tell you to get today Linus and Co WILL shit all over it in the future.
Intel? Well you can have SOME Intel but not ALL Intel because some GPUs were made by a third party that isn't "racially pure" and therefor won't work, hope you like memorizing names and numbers, most of which won't even be on the box. AMD? Well SOME chips work but not ALL chips and some of the AMD drivers get shit on quicker than other and the FOSS drivers, despite being handed the specs on a silver platter, pretty much work well only on shit you can't buy at retail any more so good luck with that. Aetheros, which for me was the final straw where I told the FOSSies to go fuck themselves, was CONSTANTLY touted as the "must have" wireless chips for Linux...until a kernel update shit all over about 25% of the Aetheros chips and now some of the work with WPA 2, some work with WPA, some will only work with WEP (fucking worthless) and others? Well if you want a connection that lasts more than 3 minutes at a time you better just open that router to the world pal, otherwise driver fall down and go boom!
Offer a product that WORKS Fossies and we system builders would be HAPPY, fucking joyful even, and would switch teams in a fucking heartbeat without a second thought. Think we LIKE MSFT? Think they treat us well? They squeeze us for every Shekel they can, nearly 40% of the cost of a low end build is fucking Windows licenses! Where the fuck do you think the "Hairyfeet Challenge" came from? Even tilting the test in FAVOR of Linux, with NO exotic hardware (hell I didn't even hook up a printer) and only HALF the support cycle of Windows and Linux still fall down and go BOOM!
We can not and WILL NOT hand out systems that will break on first update and tell our customers "Google for fixes Noob LOL!" and the simple fact is your shit IS BROKEN, the fundamental design just doesn't fucking work.
And if you are just leaving it on the server you have just left a copy for the NSA which kills the whole point of this conversation which was over encryption and security, doesn't it? I mean last I checked Gmail doesn't give you an easy way to encrypt everything AND leave it on their servers and why would they? Looking through emails to slap keywords for ads is their bread and butter.
And my argument still stands which is the reason there isn't a "clicky clicky" simple "it just works" way to have truly secured email is because the PTBs at these corps don't want it, so you won't be getting it. Sure there are ways for an uber-geek to lock it down but because of network effects he'll by default be isolating himself (because most folks he knows won't go to the trouble and nearly all of that stuff requires both ends to be secured) and a good 99.995% won't ever bother so the status quo is maintained.
And you can beat the drum for IMAP all you want friend, i work on normal folks PCs 6 days a week,have 3 being worked on right now in front of me and I can tell you that they ain't listening. No matter what OS they have, no matter what other software they use mail is ALWAYS the same, its webmail based on Yahoo or Gmail. Used to see about 20% Hotmail but their burning windows chat pissed off a lot of folks so now its pretty evenly split between yahoo and Gmail. In the last 10 years I have seen exactly TWO, that's it, just two non business users using download mail, both were retired corporate and use Outlook. There is a reason why nobody raised a big stink when Moz pulled the plug on TBird,its because download mail has gone the way of Gopher for the vast majority.
Nooo...the problem is the GPU manufacturers TRIED to work with Linux and got in return rants from kernel devs like the one that is always posted here when you point out lack of ABIs are retarded that says,and I quote, "And I hope we break non free drivers constantly!". This of course shows that FOSS is NOT a philosophy BUT A RELIGION and like religion dogma takes over and removes any chance for common sense.
In reality GPUs have many proprietary pieces that are NOT owned by the GPU manufacturers themselves, such as HDCP (owned by Intel which means AMD and Nvidia have to sign an NDA to use) and support for DVD and H.26x decoding (owned by MPEG-LA) so if you want a 100% functional GPU driver guess what? You can NOT MAKE IT FOSS because you have NO right to give away other people's property!
As for the coward who wants to know why the FOSSies piss me off? I'll tell ya why, because I have blocked ALL Linux articles so those nutballs can have all the circle jerks they want. they want to sit around and whine how nobody will jump through their hoops for their religion? Fine you have your own section, go circle jerk all you want. But that isn't good enough for the FOSSies, they have to come over to the Windows section and whine and try to sell their crazy over here and as a public service I will ALWAYS counter total bullshit with the TRUTH, and the truth is their stupid braindead retarded lack of an ABI driver design DOESN'T FUCKING WORK, it has NEVER FUCKING WORKED and it will NEVER FUCKING WORK, which is why everybody avoids that pile of asscrap!
All you have to do is see where Linux HAS made inroads to see how much their current driver design cripples them. Servers? Companies like HP pay entire dev teams millions of dollars to constantly replace the drivers Linus shits on, embedded? you only need ONE driver because embedded is designed not to be updated...hmmm, neither of those are anything at all like consumer products,are they? hell even Android, current FOSSie darling, imposes VERY strict controls from on high when it comes to drivers and wadda ya know, the fucking drivers work! Praise Jeebus its a miracle!
I am just God damned sick of FOSSies having 20+ years of reality bitchslapping them in the face but like the WBC they hang onto their little Linux bibles and say "La la la, Linus is a God, everyone just can't see his genius, you are all heathens!". That is why I call them FOSSies, because like Moonies they are religious nutballs that hang onto shit that anybody with a functioning brain could tell them will NOT work but because their "dear leader" says it does then it must, because dear leader couldn't possibly be wrong, could he?
At the end of the day nothing anybody can do or say will change the fact that the threats we are looking at now is not something the guys who originally built the Internet even imagined so no shit its easy, the thought of having to worry about big brother, billion dollar malware orgs, rogue governments and cyber attacks? never even crossed their minds!
Its the same arguments I've been making for HTML, you have this thing that was NEVER designed to do anything close to what its doing now and instead just kinda grew like a fungus, with shit being bolted on here and there so of course its gonna be vulnerable and of course its gonna be risky and leaky, its doing a job it wasn't meant to do! The Internet as originally designed was for these colleges and think tanks to share data and research, and that was pretty much it. I mean why do you think they went with 32bit addressing? Because the thought that 4 billion would ever want to use the thing wasn't even a possibility, in their wildest dreams they figured at most a couple of hundred thousand colleges and think tanks planet wide AT MOST. And because you were dealing with think tanks and colleges the idea of actually protecting or hardening anything? Never crossed their minds, they were more concerned with making it so it wouldn't fall down if Paul the janitor knocked out a power cord in the lab, security wasn't even on the agenda.
So what we really need is a new design focused on protecting the end user but sadly it'll never come to be,like HTML the monster has grown to large and is in too many places to ever be changed, the best we can do is try to bolt more shit on top in the hope we can band aid our way out of the mess. But the fact that so much private info is just floating around out there in plain text really shouldn't be surprising, it just wasn't built with security as a priority or even a concern,again no different than HTML.
Uhhh I take it you missed the memo where Ubuntu said they are going rolling release across the board so there IS NO LTS, there is just unstable and slightly LESS unstable. Second of all debian is primarily a server OS, that is where the money is spent. Finally that misses the big fucking GOTCHA when it comes to old kernels which is "Won't run shit" when it comes to new software because of the royally fucked up way software will require kernel Y and depend on framework Z and you have kernel R and framework W so you are in a world of shit.
Like it or not there is a REASON why none of the major OEMs will touch Linux anywhere except online sales and even then have 40 warnings like you are about to buy toxic waste,why even though MSFT has put out the most reviled OS since Bob that Linux hasn't gained even a half a percent, and that is because as long as the top of the org is controlled by the "FOSSie faction" that treat it NOT as an OS but a RELIGION, with one kernel dev even writing "I hope we break non free drivers constantly" it'll stay FULL OF FAIL because most folks want a system that "just works" and don't give a shit about your religious beliefs.
Personally I wish they'd do like debian and give up all pretense of giving a shit and just go "racially pure" across the board, then everyone can see just how little hardware actually runs or will stay running without flaming hoops and quit trying to push that horseshit as a viable alternative because its not. Apple is a viable alternative if you buy an all Apple ecosystem but you buy supposedly "Linux friendly" hardware and it'll get shit on just like everything else, see how everyone told you to "just buy Aetheros" for wireless only now you can't, because you see only SOME of it works and then only some of the time with certain kernels until Torvalds craps on it or the network subsystem gets tweaked for no damned good reason...fuck that noise, most of us have been things to do than keep a Windows machine just so we'll have the ability to Google WTF broke in our Linux machine with the last update.
I gave the "Hairyfeet challenge" which frankly was already tilted in Linux' favor (NO exotic hardware, only HALF the support cycle of Windows) and after a dozen different distros INCLUDING debian I gave up, I'm not wasting anymore bandwidth on what is obviously a broken design and until they fix that bullasscrap driver model there is no longer a point of even talking about it, hence why I have been blocking more and more articles than have anything to do with Linux. Funny that while we Windows users wouldn't give a shit if the FOSSies fell off the face of the earth the FOSSies sure as fuck can't let a single Windows article go without trying to push their insanity. Well go sell crazy somewhere else, we aren't buying FOSSies.
All that misses the point which is UNLIKE LINUX with windows....drumroll...the old drivers fucking work! ZOMFG its a miracle,Ballmer must be related to jeebus because i can take this circa 2004 AMD driver disc and IT STILL WORKS even in XP Sp3 with the latest patches! You try getting a nine year old driver, fuck you try getting a 4 year old driver to work in Linux and smell the fail!
That is the ABI difference, and why all OEMs treat Linux like ass cancer, because Windows only changes the driver model when there is a DAMNED good reason to and they try their damnedest NOT to break drivers, the polar opposite of Linux. In windows there is only 2 current driver models, the 2K/XP driver model and the Vista/7/8/8.x driver model...notice something there? Like how 2k and XP (and often even later as i have run XP drivers in Vista/7 for old hardware and had them run fine) can use the SAME DRIVERS and how the same goes for Vista on up?
At the end of the day that is why people would rather steal windows than take Linux for free,because once you get a Windows system running barring user stupidity (why yes i want to win a free iPod, I'll just run Iz_Not_Viruz_is_Entry.exe) or hardware failure that windows system will run, fully supported mind you, for a solid decade without a single driver problem. So AMD dropped support,who gives a fuck? Who is gonna be stupid enough to buy a $400+ card and stick it into an old Pentium 4 running Windows XP? Meanwhile any card that even had just a Vista driver will keep running past the 2020 EOL for Win 7, the 2022 for Win 8, the 2023 for 8.1, so who gives a rat's ass if it ever gets another driver when they have already squeezed as much performance as they can from the hardware?
You see the batshit Linux logic simply doesn't apply to Windows, all Windows users need is a single solid driver and it'll work for the life of the OS, hell just ask my GF, she is running an HD2400XT in windows 7 right now and that is...what? Something like a 6 or 7 year old card? Purrs like a kitten.
Yeah windows 8.1 sucks ass because Ballmer has a giant boner for cellphones but ya know what? You take a lousy $30 over to Aston Shell and tada! You now have an OS that will look and act just like windows 7 (Or OSX, or XP, hell you can even go Win9X if that turns your butter) that will be updated for TEN YEARS without having the drivers shit all over!
And the FOSSie faction better not feed us the stable kernel ABI nonsense koolaid slurping or "works for me" horseshit or I WILL wallpaper this page with everything from major OEMs like Dell to user after user finding the same thing,Torvalds and crew shitting all over the drivers.
Riddle me this FOSSie faction, if Torvalds is such a fucking genius when it comes to drivers how come NOBODY uses his design? I mean fucking NOBODY,Not BSD,Solaris, OSX,iOS,Android, fuck even OS/2 Warp had a stable ABI, you know the ONLY person who doesn't use one? The same one who is doing the same jerking off bullshit he's been doing since 1993,Linus "I'm too full of myself" Torvalds. well I'll say the same thing about him that RMS said about Jobs, I won't be glad when he's dead but I'll be DAMN glad when he's gone. Mark my words not a month after Torvalds gets his ancient smug ass out of the driver seat the next guy will bring an ABI and tada! Shit will "just work" and he'll be hailed as a fucking genius!
In a way Linux and windows have more in common now than ever, because its NOT the software that is holding it back, its the assholes running the show that screw everything up for the rest! funny that MSFT puts out the most hated OS since WinME and Linux has gained NO SHARE,not a fucking inch, hell there are more people stealing the other guy's product than will take yours for free....how much of a fucking cluebat do you gotta get hit upside the head with? if you give your product away for free and people would rather risk thousands in fines and even possible jail time to steal the other guy's wares than take yours? Then YOU SUCK and should listen to the damned people and fix that shit!
Don't know about gmail as nobody uses it here (even I only use it more as a spam dump than an actual email) but Yahoo seems to break IMAP every other week so its really not worth messing with.
So while I've been giving my customers Comodo Dragon so they avoid all the phone home crap nearly everyone else here uses Chrome and Yahoo webmail for email, nobody but nerds and some of the old office guys mess with the hassles that go along with download mail. with webmail it works on their Droid phone and iPhones, it works on their laptops, it is "clicky clicky" simple and download mail is anything but.
Its $45 a month for "unlimited" talk text and net, but the net you can feel them slow you down when you hit between 2-3GB,depending on how congested their network is at the time, which for the price? I REALLY don't give a shit because like I said I have my netbook and desktop for hardcore surfing, the Droid phone is just for little things like looking up facts when I'm out and about. Now if you want the latest and greatest phone its gonna cost you because there is no subsidies on the phones, but all I cared about is does it talk,text,and look up little things like what is showing at the multiplex well so I got A refurb Galaxy Precedent and for what i want a smartphone for it works great,I may look into Cyanogen mod down the line,but if it ain't broke?
And as for the one that says they can still "track" you? dude they don't give a rat's ass what you put in the checkbox,I have a smartass friend that puts down he is a cheerleader from Dallas, named Debbie of course, and you can buy the phones and the cards either online or just go into the store and pay cash, they REALLY don't give a shit.
In case you ain't figured it out so far Windows has always run on the "Star Trek Rule" with the first in a transition being shit followed by the next being decent, at least on the home front (personally I found both NT 4 and Win2K to be pretty solid) such as Win95 crap, Win98 great, WinME crap, WinXP great, Vista crap,Win 7 great, and so on.
But the advantage you get with Windows, that really makes a difference if you are using the PC for work and which you just don't get with Linux, is the ability to completely skip one or more releases WITHOUT suddenly being stuck on an OS without updates that can't run the latest software. Heck other than the testbed at the shop I skipped TWO releases, I skipped WinXP for the most part (Finally ended up with an XP netbox at the shop late in the game) and I skipped Vista, going from Win2K to WinXP X64 (which was just 2K3 Workstation with a different skin) and I stayed patched and able to run the latest software the entire time, in fact most software runs on XP and X64 right now without hassle.
So to me THAT right there is one of the big differences that takes Linux out of the running (well that and the piss poor driver model, but that is another rant) because if you don't stay pretty God damned close to the bleeding edge with most mainstream Linux? You are FUCKED with a capital F. You try skipping releases and suddenly the latest software won't run because it requires kernel X+3 and you have kernel X, it makes it a royal PITA and means that even if the devs go some way you don't want to go, like the mess that was Pulse Audio or the shit that was early KDE 4 and Gnome 3? Too bad, fuck you, you update or its shit time for you.
Meanwhile I've avoided Windows "LOL I Iz a Cellphone, Buy my appstorez LOL" 8 and if the fat bastard doesn't change course I'll avoid Win 8.1 just as easily and I will STILL be able to run all the latest software and games without issue, it'll "just work". Oh and in all my years I have NEVER seen Windows shit all over one of my drivers with an update, Linux has shit on the wireless and sound more times than I care to count, if its volunteers doing the QA and QC somebody needs to fire their stoner asses because they royally suck. Anybody who shits all over Realtek sound? Ought to be fucking ashamed of themselves, no excuse on screwing up the most popular sound chip on the planet, no excuses.
Citation please? Because we have seen several apps in the past few months that had "timers" on them that didn't start sending out info until it had reached a metric (been played X number of times, used for X number of months) and those seemed to get through the playstore just fine.
So unless you can provide a citation that Google is doing long term testing and simulations on EVERY app that comes through their store i gotta call bullshit, as malware is a billion dollar business so they don't make shit stupidly obvious anymore friend,which is why its so much harder to catch. Hell I have even seen malware that would tone itself down when the user started doing any real work so the system wouldn't act sluggish and give them away, damned tricky the new malware writers are, its really hard to catch some of this stuff.
If it isn't as easy to integrate into webmail as "clicky clicky" you can give it up chuck,nobody but NOBODY uses download mail anymore. Hell I have had exactly ONE customer in the past 7 years that used download mail, he is 74 years old and still uses Outlook,that's it. everybody else went yahoo and Gmail ages ago.
Yep I'm sure they got you by the balls with the fine print which is why I said screw all the bullshit and just went prepaid.
You can get the Walmart android phone for less than $100 with the "unlimited" card (yes i know their unlimited starts slowing you down between 3-5GB,I'm not gonna do that much on a dang phone,that's what the netbook and desktop are for) and if they try jacking me around? Screw 'em, plenty of other pre-paid bunches out there, no contract means they don't have me by the short hairs anymore and so far the service has been great,I'm loving it.
Uhhh, first of all he is NOT making perfect copies, he is making PARODIES ala Weird Al, and second just like Weird Al he is cutting a check to ASCAP and the record companies, of that I have NO doubt.
The only ones Zynga is cutting a check to is Chinese counterfeiters and I bet its a pretty small check at that, they sure as hell ain't giving those indie devs anything but the finger. Look up the papers EA filed against them to see how badly they have been ripping guys off, most of them you could swap the names and you wouldn't be able to tell, the rip offs are THAT close to the originals.
Yeah but the problem with dedicated servers is they ALWAYS fuck you in the end, take any EA game from as little as 4 years ago and YOU CAN'T PLAY MP because they have turned them off, they are ALL dead, whereas I can fire up Team Fortress Classic right now and be rocking a DM with the max number of players in less than 3 minutes.
So you really are getting ripped off for that convenience friend, if they wrote decent software you wouldn't NEED dedicated servers because the ones you ran would run just great. again you should try something like TF Classic or Counter Strike Classic (hell they are like less than $5 and will run on pretty much anything now) and see the difference, you can host a game with a dozen players even on a shitty DSL line and on anything decent you can be rockin' with as many guys as the software will take. How many of your CoD games will even run now? 2? 3? Probably not even 30% of the CoD games can even be played online anymore, it really is a scam to keep you always buying new copies.
BTW I wouldn't get too attached to CoD friend, because i wouldn't be surprised if in their infinite greed they end up going to a WoW style subscription, they know they have a captive audience and their CEO is a major douchebag so don't be surprised if you buy a CoD for the Xbone and then fire it up only to be told to break out your wallet. after all one of the patents MSFT filed on the Xbone was based on offering subscriptions and micropayments instantly on the console. Don't trust 'em dude, you will regret it.
Thanks and they can have my X86 units when they are prying my cold dead hands from it!
And for the moronic AC that says "in 10 years nobody will be using X86" I have YET to see a God damned cell phone that can do ANY real work, all it is is tweets for twits and social shit, and every Foleo style crap they have come up with to shoehorn a phone or tablet into a tool to do actual work has been full of fail.
Personally I think if Ballmer doesn't get his fat,stupid,buzzword loving ass out of the big chair a Steve Jobs type is gonna come along and bitchslap the business away from his dumb ass,I really do. PCs are still selling nearly half a BILLION units a year, that is some damned good business yet the fat retard is trying to burn his own business to the ground in the hopes he can force people to pay Apple money for MSFT shit and that is NOT gonna happen, no way in hell.
So the time is right for somebody to do the exact same play Jobs did, take BSD, make an easy to use GUI, hell I'd try to buy E17 outright, or maybe come up with a KDE ripoff, and get together with the OEMs and undercut the fuck out of the fat moron,say $25 a copy. for a final insult talk to the WINE guys about slapping their emulator in there to cover some of the "must haves" while they talk to Valve and the other companies about porting to the new OS. You can tell the OEMs are REALLY tired of the fat idiot fucking them over, hell Acer has done everything but call him a fucking moron and ALL of the OEMs have come out saying Windows 8 is fucking stupid and you know Intel isn't gonna walk away from all that money and I doubt AMD is either, so it really wouldn't be hard for the OEMs to pull a "gang of nine" and cut MSFT right out of the game.
So if the retard wants to jerk off to a Surface running an appstore? let 'em, the OEMs are ripe for the taking and mark my words somebody is gonna see that business is worth having and take it away from the fat bastard. if they don't fire the idiot I predict MSFT will be where RIM is now by 2020, on the ropes and dying, and as long as somebody comes along to take the business I honestly won't care, I'll be happy to line my shelves with their product and give MSFT the same finger they have been giving us system builders.
The correct answer is zero, zero annoyance. as somebody who works with the normal folks 6 days a week i can tell you a shitload of them already just blast their entire existence onto their FB page anyway, and if having everything encrypted wasn't "clicky clicky" simple or actually cost a cent compared to your Gmails and Yahoo mails? Not gonna happen, they just won't use it.
And of course the bigger bitch is that for most of this software to work you have to get both parties on it so you are stuck with a network effect to where YOU can be encrypted but it won't matter because nobody you know will go to the trouble to use the software so you won't be talking to anyone anyway.
Hell I still haven't figured out how they were able to pull off the scam that is XBL, so give MSFT credit as they managed to make piles of money convincing people they should have to pay a monthly fee just to play the games they already paid for online while everybody else has always had online MP free.
And sadly while I think its a nasty DRM box I have a feeling the Xbone is gonna be a runaway smash simply because MSFT opened up one of their money trucks and emptied it on the front lawn of the NFL and there are a LOT of guys in the USA that would buy a system that had a Goatse from Ballmer himself on the cover if it had NFL exclusives. hell I know a guy that has his CC on file with gamestop just so that EVERY NFL or NASCAR release for his console and handheld is delivered to his door on the day of release, so no matter how nasty MSFT gets he'll buy the Xbone on launch. Sadly he is far from alone, i have noticed a LOT of overlap between the X360 demographic and the frat boy "hey brah" crowd so while it may not beat the PS4 it should make MSFT a killing.
And you want to see why that is a BAD IDEA see above. With these "apps" like it or not you are giving control to a few major corps that have been repeatedly shown to work with the US government hand in glove so it really won't be hard for them to make sure only "backdoor equipped" or vulnerable to MITM apps are allowed.
This is why those that give a rat's ass about security and doesn't want everything they say or do to be public record really needs to stick with X86, leave the phones and tablets for directions and seeing what guy played third stringer on that movie you are watching. all this pushing "web and cloud" only crap does is give the corps and govs a datamining field day.
I avoid Intel since the bribery and compiler rigging came out, but if anybody wants a killer chip for an HTPC go to Starmicro and pick up one of the cheap ULV AMDs. You can pick up an Athlon X2 ULV for $33 bucks and AM3 boards are plentiful, or if you find a good deal on an AM2 board the Phenom I quad ULVs are like $65 and both make kicking HTPC chips.
But in either case the X86 units are just waaay more flexible, I even had a customer that had to wait a week for a part simply move his bobcat based HTPC into his office and use it for the wait, made a great little office box. In fact that is my biggest use for Bobcats ATM, you can swap out one of those powerhog P4s for a bobcat and get better performance than the P4 while using less power under load than the P4s did just idling. Heck grab one with a PCI slot on board and a cheap IDE card and they can keep all their old hardware, be it IDE or SATA, no worries. that kind of flexability is just damned nice to have, and for HTPCs the Bobcats and ULV AMD chips run great while keeping the costs down over the i series chips.
That has been my exp as well, most of the people these guys are labeling as "won't learn" simply get frustrated and feel like they are being talked down to because they don't understand the terms. that is why I ALWAYS tell folks "if I throw anything out there you aren't 100% clear on please say so, don't wait, it'll be MUCH easier for both of us if i just back up right then and there instead of trying to build upon something that you aren't sure about".
Hell if I could take a guy that hadn't messed with a PC since the days of punch cards and teach him to be savvy enough to spot risks, surf the net safely, AND even set up his own little home network in less than a year of off and on lessons? then anybody that is willing to learn CAN be taught. IME there is only a few that truly refuse to learn, those are easy enough to spot and those either shell out the bucks to have me do the work or head on down the road, i won't waste time on those that refuse to even try.
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Dude I take it you never worked corporate? You ALWAYS end up with the grunts knowing a hell of a lot more than they are supposed to, be it from some PHB just being lazy or a loudmouth to some secretary having ears like a fricking bat, there is ALWAYS plenty of info the grunts aren't supposed to know or have access to that ends up getting into their hands.
Bullshit, just because something doesn't have code for you to play with doesn't automatically make it "security by obscurity" and it has been proven time and again that many eyes like the mythical man month is just that, a myth which even a tiny bit of logic and common sense can rip apart.
For something as complex as a security related program you would have to have 1.- Users with enough years of experience in the cryptography field to actually make heads or tails of it (see the obfuscated C code contest for why this is important) and 2.- These same users, which generally are some of the most in demand guys in IT, having enough free time to check not ONLY the program itself but ALSO anything that is interacting with the code,aka the "trust the compiler" problem.
Show of hands, how many here have done a detailed in depth code audit on Firefox? LibreOffice? Gimp? I rest my case. here is probably the most FOSS heavy geek site on the net and I bet you can't even find 5 people that has so much as even looked at a line of code from the above, which is the 3 most popular FOSS apps BTW, and you won't find even one that has done an in depth code audit for any of the above. And this of course isn't even taking into account the fact that code doesn't stand still so in the time it takes you to do a code audit of say LO 4.1 there will have been 3 releases so that LO is at 4.4 and your audit is worthless and you need to start over. after all who knows what weaknesses the changes added? Maybe a change affects a system you have already audited making it now a risk?
The "having the code automatically makes it more secure" myth hangs on a simple fallacy, the fallacy that assumes because something CAN happen it already HAS happened which real life proves wrong again and again. After all theoretically somebody COULD be born that is immortal but that doesn't mean there ARE immortals walking the earth, and I bet a good 70% of the little projects that make up the average Linux distro probably haven't had their code looked at by anybody that doesn't actually work on the project, everyone just ASSUMES that it has been. Well the same thing applies to proprietary, it COULD have been made by the smartest minds in cryptography or it COULD have been made by Indian call center workers, you don't know in either case how well or poorly the program has been built until AFTER somebody breaks it.
Well at least in my neck of the woods the most popular number combo is folks SSN scarily enough. i don't know how many times I have had a customer write down their username and password so I can get in and do the work only to find its their SSN.
This is why I have been saying for years we really need smart cards or biometrics or something, as the amount of people out there using crazy simple passwords is just nuts. Their SSN, their BDay, the name of their kid or pet, people honestly don't think when it comes to passwords so i'm honestly amazed a brute force attack scored so little, i figured it would be much higher.
Built hundreds of systems, supported even more, never seen that happen with Realtek, hell never saw anything more than their stupid "HD Deck" app not run with Via, only problem I've seen on sound is some of the old Sigmatels are badly supported but that is Sigmatel, they have ALWAYS had piss poor support when it comes to their stuff.
As for Nvidia I take it you missed the behind the scenes drama? Since you did I'll fill you in, less than 4 months before the Vista RTM was to happen MSFT basically gutted a good chunk of the video subsystem so that they could come up with "Vista capable" to make Intel happy who had an assload of really shitty 9xx chips in the warehouse and knew that if none of those chips could not run on Vista they would get stuck with that shit so they pushed and MSFT caved. this of course pissed off Nvidia who already had great running drivers in Vista beta 1 and had to throw out ALL the work done and had to start from square one (because the Intel 9xx chips did a LOT of their "GPU" work in software on the CPU such as T&L which wouldn't run under the Vista driver model, hell even with the MSFT hack they couldn't run Aero on the things because it was too slow) which naturally pissed them the fuck off so they delayed releasing new drivers to give MSFT a nice support nightmare as a middle finger for changing the model less than 6 months before release.
I'm sorry if you were one of the unlucky that got burned by that but thankfully that kind of behind the scenes drama is VERY rare, in fact the only other major driver drama I can think of involves the card somebody down the thread is complaining about which is the Matrox GPUs. Did you ever see that video where Bill Gates plugs in a USB printer and Win98 gets a BSOD? Well now you know why Matrox was persona non grata at MSFT, it turned out the Matrox driver was basically hijacking a chunk of the video subsystem (against the design guidelines natch) and if anything tried to access that system in a way it didn't like, like say a wizard trying to pop up when you plugged in a printer? Crash goes the system.
You REALLY should have posted that as non AC as it REALLY deserves to be modded up! The only thing I would add is on the system builders side you also get "Hardware roulette" where you will ALWAYS lose, because no matter what hardware they tell you to get today Linus and Co WILL shit all over it in the future.
Intel? Well you can have SOME Intel but not ALL Intel because some GPUs were made by a third party that isn't "racially pure" and therefor won't work, hope you like memorizing names and numbers, most of which won't even be on the box. AMD? Well SOME chips work but not ALL chips and some of the AMD drivers get shit on quicker than other and the FOSS drivers, despite being handed the specs on a silver platter, pretty much work well only on shit you can't buy at retail any more so good luck with that. Aetheros, which for me was the final straw where I told the FOSSies to go fuck themselves, was CONSTANTLY touted as the "must have" wireless chips for Linux...until a kernel update shit all over about 25% of the Aetheros chips and now some of the work with WPA 2, some work with WPA, some will only work with WEP (fucking worthless) and others? Well if you want a connection that lasts more than 3 minutes at a time you better just open that router to the world pal, otherwise driver fall down and go boom!
Offer a product that WORKS Fossies and we system builders would be HAPPY, fucking joyful even, and would switch teams in a fucking heartbeat without a second thought. Think we LIKE MSFT? Think they treat us well? They squeeze us for every Shekel they can, nearly 40% of the cost of a low end build is fucking Windows licenses! Where the fuck do you think the "Hairyfeet Challenge" came from? Even tilting the test in FAVOR of Linux, with NO exotic hardware (hell I didn't even hook up a printer) and only HALF the support cycle of Windows and Linux still fall down and go BOOM!
We can not and WILL NOT hand out systems that will break on first update and tell our customers "Google for fixes Noob LOL!" and the simple fact is your shit IS BROKEN, the fundamental design just doesn't fucking work.
And if you are just leaving it on the server you have just left a copy for the NSA which kills the whole point of this conversation which was over encryption and security, doesn't it? I mean last I checked Gmail doesn't give you an easy way to encrypt everything AND leave it on their servers and why would they? Looking through emails to slap keywords for ads is their bread and butter.
And my argument still stands which is the reason there isn't a "clicky clicky" simple "it just works" way to have truly secured email is because the PTBs at these corps don't want it, so you won't be getting it. Sure there are ways for an uber-geek to lock it down but because of network effects he'll by default be isolating himself (because most folks he knows won't go to the trouble and nearly all of that stuff requires both ends to be secured) and a good 99.995% won't ever bother so the status quo is maintained.
And you can beat the drum for IMAP all you want friend, i work on normal folks PCs 6 days a week,have 3 being worked on right now in front of me and I can tell you that they ain't listening. No matter what OS they have, no matter what other software they use mail is ALWAYS the same, its webmail based on Yahoo or Gmail. Used to see about 20% Hotmail but their burning windows chat pissed off a lot of folks so now its pretty evenly split between yahoo and Gmail. In the last 10 years I have seen exactly TWO, that's it, just two non business users using download mail, both were retired corporate and use Outlook. There is a reason why nobody raised a big stink when Moz pulled the plug on TBird,its because download mail has gone the way of Gopher for the vast majority.
Nooo...the problem is the GPU manufacturers TRIED to work with Linux and got in return rants from kernel devs like the one that is always posted here when you point out lack of ABIs are retarded that says,and I quote, "And I hope we break non free drivers constantly!". This of course shows that FOSS is NOT a philosophy BUT A RELIGION and like religion dogma takes over and removes any chance for common sense.
In reality GPUs have many proprietary pieces that are NOT owned by the GPU manufacturers themselves, such as HDCP (owned by Intel which means AMD and Nvidia have to sign an NDA to use) and support for DVD and H.26x decoding (owned by MPEG-LA) so if you want a 100% functional GPU driver guess what? You can NOT MAKE IT FOSS because you have NO right to give away other people's property!
As for the coward who wants to know why the FOSSies piss me off? I'll tell ya why, because I have blocked ALL Linux articles so those nutballs can have all the circle jerks they want. they want to sit around and whine how nobody will jump through their hoops for their religion? Fine you have your own section, go circle jerk all you want. But that isn't good enough for the FOSSies, they have to come over to the Windows section and whine and try to sell their crazy over here and as a public service I will ALWAYS counter total bullshit with the TRUTH, and the truth is their stupid braindead retarded lack of an ABI driver design DOESN'T FUCKING WORK, it has NEVER FUCKING WORKED and it will NEVER FUCKING WORK, which is why everybody avoids that pile of asscrap!
All you have to do is see where Linux HAS made inroads to see how much their current driver design cripples them. Servers? Companies like HP pay entire dev teams millions of dollars to constantly replace the drivers Linus shits on, embedded? you only need ONE driver because embedded is designed not to be updated...hmmm, neither of those are anything at all like consumer products,are they? hell even Android, current FOSSie darling, imposes VERY strict controls from on high when it comes to drivers and wadda ya know, the fucking drivers work! Praise Jeebus its a miracle!
I am just God damned sick of FOSSies having 20+ years of reality bitchslapping them in the face but like the WBC they hang onto their little Linux bibles and say "La la la, Linus is a God, everyone just can't see his genius, you are all heathens!". That is why I call them FOSSies, because like Moonies they are religious nutballs that hang onto shit that anybody with a functioning brain could tell them will NOT work but because their "dear leader" says it does then it must, because dear leader couldn't possibly be wrong, could he?
At the end of the day nothing anybody can do or say will change the fact that the threats we are looking at now is not something the guys who originally built the Internet even imagined so no shit its easy, the thought of having to worry about big brother, billion dollar malware orgs, rogue governments and cyber attacks? never even crossed their minds!
Its the same arguments I've been making for HTML, you have this thing that was NEVER designed to do anything close to what its doing now and instead just kinda grew like a fungus, with shit being bolted on here and there so of course its gonna be vulnerable and of course its gonna be risky and leaky, its doing a job it wasn't meant to do! The Internet as originally designed was for these colleges and think tanks to share data and research, and that was pretty much it. I mean why do you think they went with 32bit addressing? Because the thought that 4 billion would ever want to use the thing wasn't even a possibility, in their wildest dreams they figured at most a couple of hundred thousand colleges and think tanks planet wide AT MOST. And because you were dealing with think tanks and colleges the idea of actually protecting or hardening anything? Never crossed their minds, they were more concerned with making it so it wouldn't fall down if Paul the janitor knocked out a power cord in the lab, security wasn't even on the agenda.
So what we really need is a new design focused on protecting the end user but sadly it'll never come to be,like HTML the monster has grown to large and is in too many places to ever be changed, the best we can do is try to bolt more shit on top in the hope we can band aid our way out of the mess. But the fact that so much private info is just floating around out there in plain text really shouldn't be surprising, it just wasn't built with security as a priority or even a concern,again no different than HTML.
Uhhh I take it you missed the memo where Ubuntu said they are going rolling release across the board so there IS NO LTS, there is just unstable and slightly LESS unstable. Second of all debian is primarily a server OS, that is where the money is spent. Finally that misses the big fucking GOTCHA when it comes to old kernels which is "Won't run shit" when it comes to new software because of the royally fucked up way software will require kernel Y and depend on framework Z and you have kernel R and framework W so you are in a world of shit.
Like it or not there is a REASON why none of the major OEMs will touch Linux anywhere except online sales and even then have 40 warnings like you are about to buy toxic waste,why even though MSFT has put out the most reviled OS since Bob that Linux hasn't gained even a half a percent, and that is because as long as the top of the org is controlled by the "FOSSie faction" that treat it NOT as an OS but a RELIGION, with one kernel dev even writing "I hope we break non free drivers constantly" it'll stay FULL OF FAIL because most folks want a system that "just works" and don't give a shit about your religious beliefs.
Personally I wish they'd do like debian and give up all pretense of giving a shit and just go "racially pure" across the board, then everyone can see just how little hardware actually runs or will stay running without flaming hoops and quit trying to push that horseshit as a viable alternative because its not. Apple is a viable alternative if you buy an all Apple ecosystem but you buy supposedly "Linux friendly" hardware and it'll get shit on just like everything else, see how everyone told you to "just buy Aetheros" for wireless only now you can't, because you see only SOME of it works and then only some of the time with certain kernels until Torvalds craps on it or the network subsystem gets tweaked for no damned good reason...fuck that noise, most of us have been things to do than keep a Windows machine just so we'll have the ability to Google WTF broke in our Linux machine with the last update.
I gave the "Hairyfeet challenge" which frankly was already tilted in Linux' favor (NO exotic hardware, only HALF the support cycle of Windows) and after a dozen different distros INCLUDING debian I gave up, I'm not wasting anymore bandwidth on what is obviously a broken design and until they fix that bullasscrap driver model there is no longer a point of even talking about it, hence why I have been blocking more and more articles than have anything to do with Linux. Funny that while we Windows users wouldn't give a shit if the FOSSies fell off the face of the earth the FOSSies sure as fuck can't let a single Windows article go without trying to push their insanity. Well go sell crazy somewhere else, we aren't buying FOSSies.
All that misses the point which is UNLIKE LINUX with windows....drumroll...the old drivers fucking work! ZOMFG its a miracle,Ballmer must be related to jeebus because i can take this circa 2004 AMD driver disc and IT STILL WORKS even in XP Sp3 with the latest patches! You try getting a nine year old driver, fuck you try getting a 4 year old driver to work in Linux and smell the fail!
That is the ABI difference, and why all OEMs treat Linux like ass cancer, because Windows only changes the driver model when there is a DAMNED good reason to and they try their damnedest NOT to break drivers, the polar opposite of Linux. In windows there is only 2 current driver models, the 2K/XP driver model and the Vista/7/8/8.x driver model...notice something there? Like how 2k and XP (and often even later as i have run XP drivers in Vista/7 for old hardware and had them run fine) can use the SAME DRIVERS and how the same goes for Vista on up?
At the end of the day that is why people would rather steal windows than take Linux for free,because once you get a Windows system running barring user stupidity (why yes i want to win a free iPod, I'll just run Iz_Not_Viruz_is_Entry.exe) or hardware failure that windows system will run, fully supported mind you, for a solid decade without a single driver problem. So AMD dropped support,who gives a fuck? Who is gonna be stupid enough to buy a $400+ card and stick it into an old Pentium 4 running Windows XP? Meanwhile any card that even had just a Vista driver will keep running past the 2020 EOL for Win 7, the 2022 for Win 8, the 2023 for 8.1, so who gives a rat's ass if it ever gets another driver when they have already squeezed as much performance as they can from the hardware?
You see the batshit Linux logic simply doesn't apply to Windows, all Windows users need is a single solid driver and it'll work for the life of the OS, hell just ask my GF, she is running an HD2400XT in windows 7 right now and that is...what? Something like a 6 or 7 year old card? Purrs like a kitten.
Yeah windows 8.1 sucks ass because Ballmer has a giant boner for cellphones but ya know what? You take a lousy $30 over to Aston Shell and tada! You now have an OS that will look and act just like windows 7 (Or OSX, or XP, hell you can even go Win9X if that turns your butter) that will be updated for TEN YEARS without having the drivers shit all over!
And the FOSSie faction better not feed us the stable kernel ABI nonsense koolaid slurping or "works for me" horseshit or I WILL wallpaper this page with everything from major OEMs like Dell to user after user finding the same thing,Torvalds and crew shitting all over the drivers.
Riddle me this FOSSie faction, if Torvalds is such a fucking genius when it comes to drivers how come NOBODY uses his design? I mean fucking NOBODY,Not BSD,Solaris, OSX,iOS,Android, fuck even OS/2 Warp had a stable ABI, you know the ONLY person who doesn't use one? The same one who is doing the same jerking off bullshit he's been doing since 1993,Linus "I'm too full of myself" Torvalds. well I'll say the same thing about him that RMS said about Jobs, I won't be glad when he's dead but I'll be DAMN glad when he's gone. Mark my words not a month after Torvalds gets his ancient smug ass out of the driver seat the next guy will bring an ABI and tada! Shit will "just work" and he'll be hailed as a fucking genius!
In a way Linux and windows have more in common now than ever, because its NOT the software that is holding it back, its the assholes running the show that screw everything up for the rest! funny that MSFT puts out the most hated OS since WinME and Linux has gained NO SHARE,not a fucking inch, hell there are more people stealing the other guy's product than will take yours for free....how much of a fucking cluebat do you gotta get hit upside the head with? if you give your product away for free and people would rather risk thousands in fines and even possible jail time to steal the other guy's wares than take yours? Then YOU SUCK and should listen to the damned people and fix that shit!
Don't know about gmail as nobody uses it here (even I only use it more as a spam dump than an actual email) but Yahoo seems to break IMAP every other week so its really not worth messing with.
So while I've been giving my customers Comodo Dragon so they avoid all the phone home crap nearly everyone else here uses Chrome and Yahoo webmail for email, nobody but nerds and some of the old office guys mess with the hassles that go along with download mail. with webmail it works on their Droid phone and iPhones, it works on their laptops, it is "clicky clicky" simple and download mail is anything but.
Its $45 a month for "unlimited" talk text and net, but the net you can feel them slow you down when you hit between 2-3GB,depending on how congested their network is at the time, which for the price? I REALLY don't give a shit because like I said I have my netbook and desktop for hardcore surfing, the Droid phone is just for little things like looking up facts when I'm out and about. Now if you want the latest and greatest phone its gonna cost you because there is no subsidies on the phones, but all I cared about is does it talk,text,and look up little things like what is showing at the multiplex well so I got A refurb Galaxy Precedent and for what i want a smartphone for it works great,I may look into Cyanogen mod down the line,but if it ain't broke?
And as for the one that says they can still "track" you? dude they don't give a rat's ass what you put in the checkbox,I have a smartass friend that puts down he is a cheerleader from Dallas, named Debbie of course, and you can buy the phones and the cards either online or just go into the store and pay cash, they REALLY don't give a shit.
In case you ain't figured it out so far Windows has always run on the "Star Trek Rule" with the first in a transition being shit followed by the next being decent, at least on the home front (personally I found both NT 4 and Win2K to be pretty solid) such as Win95 crap, Win98 great, WinME crap, WinXP great, Vista crap,Win 7 great, and so on.
But the advantage you get with Windows, that really makes a difference if you are using the PC for work and which you just don't get with Linux, is the ability to completely skip one or more releases WITHOUT suddenly being stuck on an OS without updates that can't run the latest software. Heck other than the testbed at the shop I skipped TWO releases, I skipped WinXP for the most part (Finally ended up with an XP netbox at the shop late in the game) and I skipped Vista, going from Win2K to WinXP X64 (which was just 2K3 Workstation with a different skin) and I stayed patched and able to run the latest software the entire time, in fact most software runs on XP and X64 right now without hassle.
So to me THAT right there is one of the big differences that takes Linux out of the running (well that and the piss poor driver model, but that is another rant) because if you don't stay pretty God damned close to the bleeding edge with most mainstream Linux? You are FUCKED with a capital F. You try skipping releases and suddenly the latest software won't run because it requires kernel X+3 and you have kernel X, it makes it a royal PITA and means that even if the devs go some way you don't want to go, like the mess that was Pulse Audio or the shit that was early KDE 4 and Gnome 3? Too bad, fuck you, you update or its shit time for you.
Meanwhile I've avoided Windows "LOL I Iz a Cellphone, Buy my appstorez LOL" 8 and if the fat bastard doesn't change course I'll avoid Win 8.1 just as easily and I will STILL be able to run all the latest software and games without issue, it'll "just work". Oh and in all my years I have NEVER seen Windows shit all over one of my drivers with an update, Linux has shit on the wireless and sound more times than I care to count, if its volunteers doing the QA and QC somebody needs to fire their stoner asses because they royally suck. Anybody who shits all over Realtek sound? Ought to be fucking ashamed of themselves, no excuse on screwing up the most popular sound chip on the planet, no excuses.
Citation please? Because we have seen several apps in the past few months that had "timers" on them that didn't start sending out info until it had reached a metric (been played X number of times, used for X number of months) and those seemed to get through the playstore just fine.
So unless you can provide a citation that Google is doing long term testing and simulations on EVERY app that comes through their store i gotta call bullshit, as malware is a billion dollar business so they don't make shit stupidly obvious anymore friend,which is why its so much harder to catch. Hell I have even seen malware that would tone itself down when the user started doing any real work so the system wouldn't act sluggish and give them away, damned tricky the new malware writers are, its really hard to catch some of this stuff.
If it isn't as easy to integrate into webmail as "clicky clicky" you can give it up chuck,nobody but NOBODY uses download mail anymore. Hell I have had exactly ONE customer in the past 7 years that used download mail, he is 74 years old and still uses Outlook,that's it. everybody else went yahoo and Gmail ages ago.
Yep I'm sure they got you by the balls with the fine print which is why I said screw all the bullshit and just went prepaid.
You can get the Walmart android phone for less than $100 with the "unlimited" card (yes i know their unlimited starts slowing you down between 3-5GB,I'm not gonna do that much on a dang phone,that's what the netbook and desktop are for) and if they try jacking me around? Screw 'em, plenty of other pre-paid bunches out there, no contract means they don't have me by the short hairs anymore and so far the service has been great,I'm loving it.
Uhhh, first of all he is NOT making perfect copies, he is making PARODIES ala Weird Al, and second just like Weird Al he is cutting a check to ASCAP and the record companies, of that I have NO doubt.
The only ones Zynga is cutting a check to is Chinese counterfeiters and I bet its a pretty small check at that, they sure as hell ain't giving those indie devs anything but the finger. Look up the papers EA filed against them to see how badly they have been ripping guys off, most of them you could swap the names and you wouldn't be able to tell, the rip offs are THAT close to the originals.
Yeah but the problem with dedicated servers is they ALWAYS fuck you in the end, take any EA game from as little as 4 years ago and YOU CAN'T PLAY MP because they have turned them off, they are ALL dead, whereas I can fire up Team Fortress Classic right now and be rocking a DM with the max number of players in less than 3 minutes.
So you really are getting ripped off for that convenience friend, if they wrote decent software you wouldn't NEED dedicated servers because the ones you ran would run just great. again you should try something like TF Classic or Counter Strike Classic (hell they are like less than $5 and will run on pretty much anything now) and see the difference, you can host a game with a dozen players even on a shitty DSL line and on anything decent you can be rockin' with as many guys as the software will take. How many of your CoD games will even run now? 2? 3? Probably not even 30% of the CoD games can even be played online anymore, it really is a scam to keep you always buying new copies.
BTW I wouldn't get too attached to CoD friend, because i wouldn't be surprised if in their infinite greed they end up going to a WoW style subscription, they know they have a captive audience and their CEO is a major douchebag so don't be surprised if you buy a CoD for the Xbone and then fire it up only to be told to break out your wallet. after all one of the patents MSFT filed on the Xbone was based on offering subscriptions and micropayments instantly on the console. Don't trust 'em dude, you will regret it.
Thanks and they can have my X86 units when they are prying my cold dead hands from it!
And for the moronic AC that says "in 10 years nobody will be using X86" I have YET to see a God damned cell phone that can do ANY real work, all it is is tweets for twits and social shit, and every Foleo style crap they have come up with to shoehorn a phone or tablet into a tool to do actual work has been full of fail.
Personally I think if Ballmer doesn't get his fat,stupid,buzzword loving ass out of the big chair a Steve Jobs type is gonna come along and bitchslap the business away from his dumb ass,I really do. PCs are still selling nearly half a BILLION units a year, that is some damned good business yet the fat retard is trying to burn his own business to the ground in the hopes he can force people to pay Apple money for MSFT shit and that is NOT gonna happen, no way in hell.
So the time is right for somebody to do the exact same play Jobs did, take BSD, make an easy to use GUI, hell I'd try to buy E17 outright, or maybe come up with a KDE ripoff, and get together with the OEMs and undercut the fuck out of the fat moron,say $25 a copy. for a final insult talk to the WINE guys about slapping their emulator in there to cover some of the "must haves" while they talk to Valve and the other companies about porting to the new OS. You can tell the OEMs are REALLY tired of the fat idiot fucking them over, hell Acer has done everything but call him a fucking moron and ALL of the OEMs have come out saying Windows 8 is fucking stupid and you know Intel isn't gonna walk away from all that money and I doubt AMD is either, so it really wouldn't be hard for the OEMs to pull a "gang of nine" and cut MSFT right out of the game.
So if the retard wants to jerk off to a Surface running an appstore? let 'em, the OEMs are ripe for the taking and mark my words somebody is gonna see that business is worth having and take it away from the fat bastard. if they don't fire the idiot I predict MSFT will be where RIM is now by 2020, on the ropes and dying, and as long as somebody comes along to take the business I honestly won't care, I'll be happy to line my shelves with their product and give MSFT the same finger they have been giving us system builders.
The correct answer is zero, zero annoyance. as somebody who works with the normal folks 6 days a week i can tell you a shitload of them already just blast their entire existence onto their FB page anyway, and if having everything encrypted wasn't "clicky clicky" simple or actually cost a cent compared to your Gmails and Yahoo mails? Not gonna happen, they just won't use it.
And of course the bigger bitch is that for most of this software to work you have to get both parties on it so you are stuck with a network effect to where YOU can be encrypted but it won't matter because nobody you know will go to the trouble to use the software so you won't be talking to anyone anyway.
Hell I still haven't figured out how they were able to pull off the scam that is XBL, so give MSFT credit as they managed to make piles of money convincing people they should have to pay a monthly fee just to play the games they already paid for online while everybody else has always had online MP free.
And sadly while I think its a nasty DRM box I have a feeling the Xbone is gonna be a runaway smash simply because MSFT opened up one of their money trucks and emptied it on the front lawn of the NFL and there are a LOT of guys in the USA that would buy a system that had a Goatse from Ballmer himself on the cover if it had NFL exclusives. hell I know a guy that has his CC on file with gamestop just so that EVERY NFL or NASCAR release for his console and handheld is delivered to his door on the day of release, so no matter how nasty MSFT gets he'll buy the Xbone on launch. Sadly he is far from alone, i have noticed a LOT of overlap between the X360 demographic and the frat boy "hey brah" crowd so while it may not beat the PS4 it should make MSFT a killing.
And you want to see why that is a BAD IDEA see above. With these "apps" like it or not you are giving control to a few major corps that have been repeatedly shown to work with the US government hand in glove so it really won't be hard for them to make sure only "backdoor equipped" or vulnerable to MITM apps are allowed.
This is why those that give a rat's ass about security and doesn't want everything they say or do to be public record really needs to stick with X86, leave the phones and tablets for directions and seeing what guy played third stringer on that movie you are watching. all this pushing "web and cloud" only crap does is give the corps and govs a datamining field day.
I avoid Intel since the bribery and compiler rigging came out, but if anybody wants a killer chip for an HTPC go to Starmicro and pick up one of the cheap ULV AMDs. You can pick up an Athlon X2 ULV for $33 bucks and AM3 boards are plentiful, or if you find a good deal on an AM2 board the Phenom I quad ULVs are like $65 and both make kicking HTPC chips.
But in either case the X86 units are just waaay more flexible, I even had a customer that had to wait a week for a part simply move his bobcat based HTPC into his office and use it for the wait, made a great little office box. In fact that is my biggest use for Bobcats ATM, you can swap out one of those powerhog P4s for a bobcat and get better performance than the P4 while using less power under load than the P4s did just idling. Heck grab one with a PCI slot on board and a cheap IDE card and they can keep all their old hardware, be it IDE or SATA, no worries. that kind of flexability is just damned nice to have, and for HTPCs the Bobcats and ULV AMD chips run great while keeping the costs down over the i series chips.
That has been my exp as well, most of the people these guys are labeling as "won't learn" simply get frustrated and feel like they are being talked down to because they don't understand the terms. that is why I ALWAYS tell folks "if I throw anything out there you aren't 100% clear on please say so, don't wait, it'll be MUCH easier for both of us if i just back up right then and there instead of trying to build upon something that you aren't sure about".
Hell if I could take a guy that hadn't messed with a PC since the days of punch cards and teach him to be savvy enough to spot risks, surf the net safely, AND even set up his own little home network in less than a year of off and on lessons? then anybody that is willing to learn CAN be taught. IME there is only a few that truly refuse to learn, those are easy enough to spot and those either shell out the bucks to have me do the work or head on down the road, i won't waste time on those that refuse to even try.