And how many times have we heard those EXACT SAME WORDS said about everything from browsers to sandboxes like the JVM? This isn't like the old days ya know, they don't have to take over the system, hell they don't even have to make a permanent anything on the host PC for what they want to do, again see the Yahoo Porn Bug I wrote about. With that there isn't a drop of code left on the victim's PC which is why it took me awhile to figure out what they were doing, but all they cared about was sending spam through as many address books as they could and this bug allows that without having to do much of anything, much less actually get to bare metal.
And finally don't forget that both Nvidia and AMD are rallying around GP-GPU and OpenCL so that you will be able to use that hardware for pretty much anything, heck a $45 HD4850 has something like 800 stream processors on it, the $100 HD7770 has 640 plus a GB of GDDR 5, so with GP-GPU code there really isn't any reason why they couldn't be playing the game WHILE doing something nasty in the background, hell any slowdowns and the user will blame it on the game or the system anyway.
So I wouldn't be so quick to poo poo this if I were you, malware is a billion dollar business and this will open up access to a LOT of GPUs with a LOT of processing power just ripe to be used...somebody is gonna crack this, the only question in my mind is when. Hell with Google and MSFT pouring mountains of cash into it we still haven't solved the problem of how to run net code on CPUs without getting malware, you think GPUs are gonna get a free pass?
But my point is thanks to the ever dropping costs of CG and the fact that Michael bay could put out such dreck and make a fuckton of money (I mean how in the fuck did Skids and Mudflap get past censors? All he needed to do was have them eat fried chicken and watermelon to complete the stereotype) that studios are MUCH more likely to go "Meh, its stupid as fuck but hey, works for Michael!" and greenlight this shit.
Now we can debate whether its the CGI or the rise of the Bay that is the root of the problem but either way whereas in the past there was plenty of smaller crap movies now we are seeing just as many 100 million budget crap movies as we used to see crap low budget junk. The new Die Hard (Oh God THAT is painful, don't watch it, its worse than a cartoon) or Battleship, Terminator Salvation which you just KNOW was sold based on the Arnie CGI demo, things that My God, anybody could just sit and read the script and go "Are you shitting me? that is just retarded!" seem to get greenlit left and right and like Yahtzee at ZP said about the force with Star Wars CGI has become the "all purpose plot cavity filler". Movie have NO plots, lousy dialog, and characters nobody can like? "Well just dump a shitload of CGI on the screen and hope those slackjawed locals buy it!" seems to be the rule in Hollywood these days, bad CGI is spreading worse than Twilight ripoffs on the landscape.
Yeah yeah, wasn't that the same tune you guys sang for the last THREE console revs? And it took PCs maybe a year before games looked better on PC?
And who gives a rat's ass about unified memory when the PC has 8GB and the GPU another GB of its own? Unless they are gonna replace hard drives with SSDs and use exotic memory like SRAM (which from the specs again its just an HTPC with some buzzword bingo covering the fact its just an HTPC) you are STILL limited by how fast the hard drive or Blu Ray can spin, and with even low end machines coming with 8GB of DDR 3 nowadays frankly memory ain't shit, if anything in a year the PCs will be having to drag down their graphics because of the consoles.
Again look up the specs on Bobcat which is all Jaguar is, its just not a powerful chip, you can dance around and throw bullshit all day long but that ain't gonna make a Pinto into a Porsche Hoss. The Bobcat/Jaguar was made to compete with ATOM, Not even the Celeron, the fricking Atom, and all the buzzwords in the world ain't gonna change that fact.
Considering the fact that Windows has had low rights mode for 6 years now and Firefox STILL doesn't support it? I don't know how much I'd trust running GPU code on their browser. Heck I don't know if I'd trust it on ANY browser but at least the Chromium based do sandboxing and use low rights mode to help minimize the risk.
Just see my "Yahoo porn bug" to see why supporting low rights mode is good and not supporting it is bad, that trick that allows spammers to send spam to every address in someone's Yahoo email ONLY works on Firefox, not on Chromium based nor IE, because in those browsers the browser has less rights than the user.
Lets face it we really only have 3 major GPU vendors now and modern GPUs have processors, memory, and firmware, so they are just ripe for being the next big attack vector. Running code from any old website straight onto the GPU is just asking for it IMHO, just as Flash games were often used as an attack vector in the past anything that lets you get close enough to bare metal to get "near native" speeds is gonna be a nasty security risk.
Exactly and this guy is ONLY wanting to keep local LEOs out of his video, not the fricking CIA, so its not like he needs to go nuts with the crypto. I have dealt with LEOs in the past and anything harder than an NTFS password will usually stump them, heck a 64bit AES key for the Truecrypt would be enough for his purposes which is just to keep the cops from getting the data.
Of course they could always just rip out and stomp the SSD but they could do that with ANY system short of an always on broadcasting offsite (which would be insanely expensive to do) but for the parameters set by the ask Slashdot this would fit the bill nicely.
The whole argument is moot because the E350 was what was used in the last gen EEE netbooks, one of which I have, they get 5+ hours on a 6 cell and that 16w is MAX load and NOT idle. If I can get 5+ hours on a 6 cell then frankly running it off a car battery? NOT a big deal, as I said I have a friend that does these installs for a living and they really don't take much juice at all.
Yeah but to be fair we ARE talking about just keeping the average police force out of them, not like we are talking about the FBI or CIA. You could probably get by with half of that and would stump the shit out of your average police force no problem, and let us not forget you also have a GP-GPU that can be used for other things...like say Crypto.
Would he have better performance with an ULV Intel quad setup? Surely, but when I deal with a problem such as this I try to treat them like I would a customer and weigh all the factors including price. A board with a ULV Intel dual or quad is easily 5 TIMES the cost of the Bobcat so I was looking at something that would do the job AND be easily affordable. Sure if money is no object? ULV AMD or Intel quad will curbstomp the Bobcat, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find anything at the price point of the Bobcat (just looked at the Bobcat E350 boards on Amazon and they start at $70 USD) that will give you the same performance, the Pi certainly isn't gonna compete which is what the suggestion was.
Thank you as that was what I was going for, sorry if words (oh irony how you love to tweak my nose) fails me in this instance. And maybe richness isn't the best way to describe it, more like how Eskimos have so many words for snow and a modern person? Really doesn't need that many.
We are talking about trying to translate the language of a hunter/gatherer society into a modern language and we just don't have a vocabulary that is designed for that, sure you can make a "kinda sorta" translation but a lot of the nuance is lost.For an example look at "A Christmas Carol" which practically every version you have ever seen performed leaves out the long rambling diatribes against the Sabbatists, sorry if I don't spell that right but my spellcheck is going "WTF is that?" which just shows you how little that word is even used, but back in the days of a Xmas carol that was a BIG deal because the poor worked from sun up to sun down 6 days a week and shops closed at dark. So there you have something that isn't even 2 centuries old and you already have concepts that we in the modern world can't relate to...and you expect to do BETTER with a 1400+ year old book where spelling errors were considered "the hand of God" and not allowed to be corrected? Really? I'm sorry but I have to call bullshit.
Finally frankly there really aren't even any "true" Christians around, what modern folks call Christianity is frankly more of a "salad bar" religion because there are many things in there a modern man would honestly find offense with, take the rules on how to treat your slaves or beat your wife, if one were to strictly follow the "rules" as laid out in the bible frankly they'd be more like the modern taliban than what we see as a church. Life back then was short, brutal, and nasty, and the book was written by those living in those conditions. Trying to put that into a modern language without losing a lot in the translation? Just not gonna happen, I'm sorry but there are words and concepts in there that we as a society haven't really dealt with in centuries so we just don't have the vocabulary to describe them. Why should we when we don't live that way anymore?
Uhhh...1.2 BILLION Muslims AND GROWING, if anything the batshit isn't fading away, its spreading like AIDS. Hell look at the USSR, they ban the stuff for 80 years and you had different religions living side by side in relative peace, they say "Okay you have religious freedom now" and what happens? "My God is better than yours Ie ie ie ie ye!"
As long as you have the ignorant and those that refuse to think then this shit WILL be dangerous, that is all there is to it. Again we'd be better off if we just wiped the whole damned thing out, get rid of the centuries of bigotry and hate and started again. Oh and I love how the Xtians say they are so more civilized than the Muslims...ummm, did you forget your churches were saying "Niggers need to be kept in their place!" and using the bible to justify it? Look up "the curse of Ham" and see how pretty much ANY hatred and bigotry can be excused using the "good book".
Besides lets be honest folks...its an HTPC. Both MSFT and Sony have gone with low power HTPC chips from AMD...so why not just build an HTPC and have control of the system?
Hell you can buy a nice AMD Hexacore for $300 that will curbstomp the chip in the Sony and MSFT consoles, just slap whatever GPU you prefer (If you want to save money the HD4850s are dirt cheap and play most games at 1080P and med/high settings, spend a little more you can get the HD7770 and double the memory and boost the performance by 50%) and whatever OS suits your fancy, I prefer Win 7 but on an HTPC Windows 8 actually works nice as those big ass tiles are easy to hit with a remote and since Valve has ported Steam Linux is always an option, and unlike the consoles its YOURS, want multiple OSes? RUN IT. Want to buy games from a dozen different vendors? DO IT. Nobody has control over the hardware but YOU.
I could understand the consoles in the past because it was hard to hook a PC to a TV for the average Joes and the consoles used exotic chips that gave them advantages in some areas...but its an AMD Jaguar folks, a bog standard X86 netbook chip, all they did was bolt 2 jaguar quads together and there ya go. I built a system just like the one linked for my oldest and it just blows through games like they were nothing WHILE playing his tunes AND having his chat running AND his browser loaded in the background, it never bogs down. And hooking a PC to a TV is as simple as an HDMI cable now, my mom could do it, it will detect the TV and do all the setup and Bob's your uncle. And if you want the little case? They make VCR looking cases you can use if that is what melts your butter but I've built several HTPCs and when folks see how nice the new cases look they usually just skip the HTPC case.
So I don't get it this time, like Jim Sterling said about the current consoles they are just crappy PCs with all the hassles like long updates and online passes but none of the upsides like cheaper prices and better MP...so why? Its not like you can't plug a wireless controller into a PC, Valve has big picture mode now which makes driving with a wireless thumbstick or remote easy peasy, the games are cheaper, MP lasts longer, hell you can still fire up Counterstrike Classic and be blasting away with dozens of folks inside of 4 minutes, and the best reason it leaves YOU in control of your system, so why? Why get worse prices and all the BS from Sony and MSFT along with gimped hardware? The sad part is when MSFT and Sony move to the Xbox 5 and PS5 they'll abandon the systems but thanks to DMCA they'll make sure nobody can just put out a simple unlock so all that bog standard X86 hardware will be dumpster bait...why put up with that?
What I want to know is how they and MSFT expect to get all this performance....out of an AMD Jaguar. Now this is coming from somebody who has been selling AMD exclusively for five years, I don't own Intel anything and am typing this on a Thuban X6, but its...a Jaguar.
For those that don't know Jaguar is the replacement for Bobcat which is a NETBOOK chip designed to compete with the Atom. Now as somebody who owns a Bobcat netbook I can tell you that thanks to being out of order and having a hell of a lot nicer IGP it'll stomp the Atom nicely but an Athlon would curbstomp it HARD, much less a Phenom or FX. So why oh why would you put a netbook chip into your console? And from what I've been reading the Jag looks to be another FX style "half core" which means its only a quad with kinda sorta hyperthreading...why? Why would you want to put a gimped chip in your system when there are so many better choices? Hell Liano would bitchslap the Jag.
Maybe its true they are planning to compete on price, maybe they want to get it out the door ASAP because they are scared of Valve which I have to admit I understand, from the sound of the Valve plan they are gonna try something completely different, with a low/mid/high specs and dozens of companies making their own flavors so they'll be able to hit pretty much any price point...who knows. I just don't get the Jag. I mean if this was an HTPC, or built into a TV? Yeah it'd make a great media player, I just don't see how they are gonna do all the physics heavy 1080p gaming folks are gonna expect with a Jag. I have a feeling a year after launch the devs are gonna be slamming into the limits of the Jag. Again nothing against AMD but this would be like looking at Intel's entire line up and saying "Yes for our heavy processing system we'll use the Atom"..WTF?
Jane the whole argument is going off bad math, the Bobcat E350 uses 16w under load NOT when idle, when idle less than 5w, and if you aren't using the IGP when idle less than 3w. So you can have all the power of the dual core Bobcat with the idle power damned close to the Pi but having much better performance.
Remember this guy is wanting to record probably two video streams at a decent enough res they could be uploaded to youtube or even used in court, I seriously doubt a single Pi would be able to handle that much streaming data. The bobcat on the other hand has two out of order X86 cores so it could handle it no problem, in fact I've been using those Bobcats as replacement boards for shops that still have P4 systems and while giving them a nice speed boost it uses less power than the fans for the P4s did by themselves, much less the actual computer.
So if you ever need to upgrade a PC on the cheap i highly recommend, you can get an E350 board for less than $80 and they'll bolt into just about any case, I plan to replace my aging Sempron nettop I use at the shop with one, just yank the old board and pop that one in. Not only is it an easy job but it'll do 1080p and most will hold 8GB of DDR 3 while using even less power than my Sempron, its really a sweet little unit.
Not to mention the other guy threw everybody off by saying an E350 pulled 16w at idle when that is at load, it pulls something like 3w at idle, less if you aren't using the IGP.
if one were to go completely GUI free and headless I doubt it would even pull 6w under load as its the IGP that pulls the most power on a Bobcat so it wouldn't be hard on the car at all. That said there is a program out there that will let you lower the P-States on a Bobcat so that when it drops into a low power state it REALLY drops, so I don't see why you couldn't keep the GUI to have it...ohh play videos or MP3s as well? That is what the folks that have my friend have them installed for, great for dealing with kids on long car rides and they are REALLY cheap, you can buy the board alone for like $70 USD on Amazon or the board in a small HTPC case with PSU for $129, they are really cheap, great for projects like this. Hell they are good enough I have been using them as a replacement for all those old P4 office boxes many businesses still have, the Bobcat dual gives them a nice performance boost while using less power than the P4 did at idle.
Look at your figures again, the E350 draws 16w when UNDER LOAD, it draws less than 5w at idle. It was made to compete with the Atom, which if you don't mind a serious performance hit you can use one of those.
Frankly the only difficult part in this would be having to run a touchscreen to the front for inputting the password because he wants the security, otherwise as i said I have a friend that makes his living doing this and so far nobody has had any complaints about their car battery going dead from it.
This is why I have to LMAO at those that take the bible literally and only read English...hello, bad translations abound! The ancient languages had many words that had different meanings based on context, or similar but different meaning based on phrasing, they were rich, deep, and complex as hell and frankly modern English...isn't. Its like trying to carve the Venus de Milo by shooting a block of granite with high explosive rounds. Sure you might end up with kinda sorta a similar shape but all the little nuances? Not a chance in hell.
At the end of the day though it truly saddens me that here we are in the 21st century and we still have hatred, bigotry, even murders, based on what some goat herders wrote on a sheep's ass a couple of thousand years ago to explain a world he didn't understand. i mean I can produce works just as old saying the sun is Ra in a chariot but we don't actually believe that, nor do we kill anybody who doesn't believe that, yet there are people getting slaughtered every. single. day. over the stupid shit written hundreds or even thousands of years ago by fricking goat herders. personally I think we'd all be better off if we threw every last book on the fire, just wiped it all from the face of history, because its obvious as long as it exists there are gonna be fruitcakes taking that shit seriously enough to kill.
Yeah but its frankly even making good movies lazy, like using CGI blood (which I have yet to see not look fake as hell) so they can change the rating of the movie in post. And honestly a great director can make do and make a great movie without CGI, look at the first Terminator which was all practical effects, it STILL looks good to this day, compare it with the fight scene between Neo and the hundred Smiths in Reloaded and your mind screams "Bad PlayStation game!" because CGI never seems to age well.
But sadly the main side effect we are seeing is the "Michael Bay" effect, movies that obviously have NO plot, lousy characters and clunky dialog getting greenlit because CGI makes the costs reasonable and they are all hoping to be the next Transformers. Before while there were big budget bombs, your Heaven's Gates and Ishtars frankly the studios were more conservative because practical effects seriously ramped up costs but now because they can have a computer just crap shit on a screen frankly movies that in the past would have been told "Go rewrite that shit and bring it back when it don't suck" get told "Meh, throw some cool shit on the screen and it'll sell".
I mean how many movies have YOU seen where this sentence applies "Effects were good, movie sucked ass" as a perfect description? I don't know about you but I've seen a LOT of movies that fit that description and I bet a good half of them wouldn't have been greenlit if it weren't for cheap CGI.
No prob on the formatting, and I'm glad that Linux works for you, made me want to pull my damned hair out. Since you are on Linux you might want to try QTWeb which is what I used when I was cross platform, built in adblock and privacy mode as well as Flash support, its nice.
As for Infinite it sounds like it'll be my cup o' tea, but first I have to pick up Borderlands II (waiting for them to get finished putting out DLC and lvl cap boosts) because that is the first time since Bioshock I've had the AI give me a really good fight. First time I ran into a large Skag nest and saw the small ones hitting my front and sides while the big guys ran off I thought "Where are they going? Nooo, you don't think?" and sure enough I turned around just in time to get a 3D up close view of a giant Skag mouth about to use my head like a giant Pez dispenser. My youngest HATES first person shooters but after watching me play it 5 minutes he was like "You know, that really looks like fun" and now he is hooked.
No splicers and Little Sisters kinda sucks though, those are just so iconic. BTW if you haven't heard Little Sister by Miracle of Sound check it out, why they don't hire this guy to write the themes for some of the games is beyond me. His songs for Borderlands and Left For Dead as especially catchy, I have caught my oldest singing them into his mike as we are playing MP, I warn you they are catchy and stick in your head!
Nooo, I'm saying if you act like an asshole don't be surprised if some people act like an asshole right back. Its sad that basic common courtesy has become practically an alien concept in our "me me me" culture but there ya go. Personally I'm an agnostic but I have no problem hanging with anybody of any religion because I make it clear if they don't try to shove their crap on me I won't try to shove mine on them and we all get along just fine.
They were NOT doing this because of some deeply held belief, this I will bet my last dollar was done JUST to start shit. And while I would never support members of the USPS stooping to this bozo's level I will say I can understand it, you act like a dick and some will act like a dick right back.
Too much work, too hard to insure you always have a signal. The answer to this one is actually pretty simple...carputer. You can either DIY with one of several kits or a friend of mine has made a good living installing mini-HTPC boxes based on Bobcat chips in trunks, its really not hard and these chips are ultra low power so its not a drain. Add an SSD using Truecrypt and voila! The cops pull the plug to get the SSD out and all they have is a brick without your Truecrypt password. There are plenty of little 5 inch touchscreens you can mount in the front so you can input your password as you are starting up and if you decide you want to keep anything you recorded 5 minutes with a portadrive and Bob's your uncle.
This ask Slashdot frankly ain't hard, hand me $600 plus the cost of the parts and I can have it done over a weekend, going DIY if you don't have exp in this kind of deal will take a little longer but if you can follow instructions and use basic common sense? Really not that hard. You can go wireless to the carputer (costs more) or you can run the wires around the door frames (cheaper but more of a PITA) to the cameras and an AMD bobcat with a stripped down OS like Win 7 Tiny or Puppy Linux can easily record a couple of cameras no problem, its a 1.7GHz dual core after all. So its really not hard, just takes a little time and depending on how fancy he wants to get it can cost anywhere from $500-$1500, price depending on how many cams, the quality, what kind of extra features like being able to playback video or surf on the carputer, etc.
Nice to see I'm not the only one to think that, I'll put this right next to "Ubuntu Satanic Edition" (no shit, look it up, complete with pentagrams and death metal) on the "We named this just to be "controversial" and "edgy" because that is what our focus group said it was" pile.
Honestly friend? The IE upgrades don't even matter except for business and BYOD is quickly making it irrelevant even there. It is VERY rare now that I see a PC where the default browser is IE anymore, after MSFT screwed XP users by refusing to backport it didn't surprise me that between that and how mainstream that Chrome and Firefox has gotten IE has been dropping like a stone.
So for MY users and customers all that really matters is the security patches, although honestly I think we are gonna see a crapload of XP systems still running after Apr 2014. I know that if another low power desktop doesn't pop into the shop at a cheap price between now and then that old Sempron I've been using as a netbox will be staying because it only uses 35w under load and does what I need it to. I tried Win 7 on it but I could never get a driver that was stable for the Ethernet nor sound and I have no desire to fill the system up with cards. While I have gotten my customers off of XP I know the other less scrupulous shops are still selling XP boxes right now, so it will be interesting to see what happens.
Well the guys in combat weren't always the smartest but in the previous games made sense...they were completely batshit. I mean you only had to hide and listen for a little while to hear that their minds were as warped as their bodies and since they too had Plasmid power i could see them thinking their powers would cover their behind. After all if I could throw fricking fireballs I'd probably be a little sloppy and arrogant too.
But if the AI is just okay? That I can handle. For instance the bad guys in the Borderlands games are kinda predictable but they can still give you a damned good fight. Do you feel in any way challenged by the enemies? Have you had any "Oh shit, run for cover, RUN!" moments in the game? The first time I accidently shot a Big Daddy when I wasn't ready made me haul some behind with my heart racing, the only game I've felt the same with since the Bioshock games is Borderlands and the first time I popped over a hill and literally landed in a nest of Alpha Skags.... man I ran like a girl because I was soooo not armed for that encounter!
So I'm not asking for award winning AI here, I'm really not that hard to please honestly, all I ask is that the bad guys aren't so stupid I just stand there going "Really? You are REALLY gonna do that?". If you need an example for comparison FEAR 3 where I could walk right up to an enemy from the side and they would continue to stay behind cover that not only did nothing but I could just walk up and club their stupid asses.
If the AI doesn't ruin the mood, blow the immersion, or get on your nerves by their thumb up their asses stupidity? I'm really not that hard to please, I'm really not. Just don't make the bad guys Far Cry II stupid and I'll play, all that matters in the end is "is it fun?" and if that answer is yes? I'm in.
And if you are on Windows? Try Comodo Dragon as its also based on Chromium but is frankly rock solid, I give it and IceDragon (their version of Firefox) out to my customers and use them myself, very well built. Oh and as a bonus if you use their free Internet Security it will automatically connect with the browser and sandbox it so you really don't have to worry about web based threats. Since I started handing it out to customers frankly the only infections I see now are when they are duped to download and install the malware, Comodo will do everything but reach out and knock the keyboard out their hands trying to stop them, but some people just want to see the dancing bunnies more than stay virus free, so I can't blame the AV and browser for that.
I'm sorry but bullshit, CGI has made selling ideas that frankly would have NEVER been green lighted if they actually had to pay for practical effects and THAT is the problem. For every LOTR where CGI allowed a director to make a great movie you have a Terminator Salvation where you just KNOW that movie was sold on the Arnie CGI bot.
As for Battleship? Watch American Warships, while the effects are worse frankly its a better movie and it was a mockbuster of battleship! Frankly if they would have JUST used the old guys, which really wouldn't be hard, imagine them hearing about how the destroyers went down taking down the other ships so its only them between the aliens and the target? it might have been enjoyable. Frankly when I saw the aliens shooting PEGS, fricking pegs at the other ship in the previews? All I wanted was a FUN movie, not a great movie, just a popcorn muncher. Instead Kitsch's character is just sooo fucking DUMB and such a douchebag you really want to smack him, and his "crew"? Green recruits know more about how to act military more than these clowns, its just awful.
To me what is truly scary is how CGI has allowed moviemakers to be lazy and/or cynical when they make their films. Not sure if you want this movie to be a PG-13 or a hard R? No worries, we'll make all the blood using CGI instead of practical effects, that way we can add as much or as little as we want in post, its not like that EVER looks horribly fake. Not able to come up with a good plot or characters anybody will give a shit about? No worries, just pull a Michael Bay and dump a shitload of bad looking CGI and explosions, that's all them slack jawed movie goers will understand anyway...sigh.
Done right CGI can be just incredible, take The Avengers, in that while there was a lot of CGI it didn't overwhelm the story, same with LOTR, done right it can make us feel for creatures that don't exist or believe in fantastical worlds, done badly it just hurts, Battleship kind of hurts.
Did you even BOTHER reading what you linked to? Asking for new features? Do you HONESTLY think that Microsoft give a shit if YOU want a new feature and you aren't the head of IT at something like GE or Ford, who frankly are big enough they can get MSFT to add any damned feature they want whenever they want? Complimentary support? Who the hell has EVER used that? Have YOU ever used that? Has anybody that you know EVER used that? And finally paid support...again you know ANYBODY that has actually hired MSFT to fix a bug that does NOT work at a fortune 500 company?
So I'm sorry friend but as the PC shop guy who has been doing this for...sigh...nearly a quarter century I have to call bullshit, nobody cares about anything but the security patches. Hell the only reason they care about those is there tends to be several holes that are found close to EOL that MSFT never bothers to fix, there was something like 23 holes in Win98 that never got patched, 17 or 18 in win2K found close to EOL that never got fixed (not to mention never releasing SP5 so the fans had to make it themselves) and I'm sure a month or two before XP is due to kick the bucket it'll be found to have about a dozen major holes that MSFT will go "Meh, its dead in a month anyway" and just won't care.
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And how many times have we heard those EXACT SAME WORDS said about everything from browsers to sandboxes like the JVM? This isn't like the old days ya know, they don't have to take over the system, hell they don't even have to make a permanent anything on the host PC for what they want to do, again see the Yahoo Porn Bug I wrote about. With that there isn't a drop of code left on the victim's PC which is why it took me awhile to figure out what they were doing, but all they cared about was sending spam through as many address books as they could and this bug allows that without having to do much of anything, much less actually get to bare metal.
And finally don't forget that both Nvidia and AMD are rallying around GP-GPU and OpenCL so that you will be able to use that hardware for pretty much anything, heck a $45 HD4850 has something like 800 stream processors on it, the $100 HD7770 has 640 plus a GB of GDDR 5, so with GP-GPU code there really isn't any reason why they couldn't be playing the game WHILE doing something nasty in the background, hell any slowdowns and the user will blame it on the game or the system anyway.
So I wouldn't be so quick to poo poo this if I were you, malware is a billion dollar business and this will open up access to a LOT of GPUs with a LOT of processing power just ripe to be used...somebody is gonna crack this, the only question in my mind is when. Hell with Google and MSFT pouring mountains of cash into it we still haven't solved the problem of how to run net code on CPUs without getting malware, you think GPUs are gonna get a free pass?
But my point is thanks to the ever dropping costs of CG and the fact that Michael bay could put out such dreck and make a fuckton of money (I mean how in the fuck did Skids and Mudflap get past censors? All he needed to do was have them eat fried chicken and watermelon to complete the stereotype) that studios are MUCH more likely to go "Meh, its stupid as fuck but hey, works for Michael!" and greenlight this shit.
Now we can debate whether its the CGI or the rise of the Bay that is the root of the problem but either way whereas in the past there was plenty of smaller crap movies now we are seeing just as many 100 million budget crap movies as we used to see crap low budget junk. The new Die Hard (Oh God THAT is painful, don't watch it, its worse than a cartoon) or Battleship, Terminator Salvation which you just KNOW was sold based on the Arnie CGI demo, things that My God, anybody could just sit and read the script and go "Are you shitting me? that is just retarded!" seem to get greenlit left and right and like Yahtzee at ZP said about the force with Star Wars CGI has become the "all purpose plot cavity filler". Movie have NO plots, lousy dialog, and characters nobody can like? "Well just dump a shitload of CGI on the screen and hope those slackjawed locals buy it!" seems to be the rule in Hollywood these days, bad CGI is spreading worse than Twilight ripoffs on the landscape.
Yeah yeah, wasn't that the same tune you guys sang for the last THREE console revs? And it took PCs maybe a year before games looked better on PC?
And who gives a rat's ass about unified memory when the PC has 8GB and the GPU another GB of its own? Unless they are gonna replace hard drives with SSDs and use exotic memory like SRAM (which from the specs again its just an HTPC with some buzzword bingo covering the fact its just an HTPC) you are STILL limited by how fast the hard drive or Blu Ray can spin, and with even low end machines coming with 8GB of DDR 3 nowadays frankly memory ain't shit, if anything in a year the PCs will be having to drag down their graphics because of the consoles.
Again look up the specs on Bobcat which is all Jaguar is, its just not a powerful chip, you can dance around and throw bullshit all day long but that ain't gonna make a Pinto into a Porsche Hoss. The Bobcat/Jaguar was made to compete with ATOM, Not even the Celeron, the fricking Atom, and all the buzzwords in the world ain't gonna change that fact.
Considering the fact that Windows has had low rights mode for 6 years now and Firefox STILL doesn't support it? I don't know how much I'd trust running GPU code on their browser. Heck I don't know if I'd trust it on ANY browser but at least the Chromium based do sandboxing and use low rights mode to help minimize the risk.
Just see my "Yahoo porn bug" to see why supporting low rights mode is good and not supporting it is bad, that trick that allows spammers to send spam to every address in someone's Yahoo email ONLY works on Firefox, not on Chromium based nor IE, because in those browsers the browser has less rights than the user.
Lets face it we really only have 3 major GPU vendors now and modern GPUs have processors, memory, and firmware, so they are just ripe for being the next big attack vector. Running code from any old website straight onto the GPU is just asking for it IMHO, just as Flash games were often used as an attack vector in the past anything that lets you get close enough to bare metal to get "near native" speeds is gonna be a nasty security risk.
Exactly and this guy is ONLY wanting to keep local LEOs out of his video, not the fricking CIA, so its not like he needs to go nuts with the crypto. I have dealt with LEOs in the past and anything harder than an NTFS password will usually stump them, heck a 64bit AES key for the Truecrypt would be enough for his purposes which is just to keep the cops from getting the data.
Of course they could always just rip out and stomp the SSD but they could do that with ANY system short of an always on broadcasting offsite (which would be insanely expensive to do) but for the parameters set by the ask Slashdot this would fit the bill nicely.
The whole argument is moot because the E350 was what was used in the last gen EEE netbooks, one of which I have, they get 5+ hours on a 6 cell and that 16w is MAX load and NOT idle. If I can get 5+ hours on a 6 cell then frankly running it off a car battery? NOT a big deal, as I said I have a friend that does these installs for a living and they really don't take much juice at all.
Yeah but to be fair we ARE talking about just keeping the average police force out of them, not like we are talking about the FBI or CIA. You could probably get by with half of that and would stump the shit out of your average police force no problem, and let us not forget you also have a GP-GPU that can be used for other things...like say Crypto.
Would he have better performance with an ULV Intel quad setup? Surely, but when I deal with a problem such as this I try to treat them like I would a customer and weigh all the factors including price. A board with a ULV Intel dual or quad is easily 5 TIMES the cost of the Bobcat so I was looking at something that would do the job AND be easily affordable. Sure if money is no object? ULV AMD or Intel quad will curbstomp the Bobcat, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find anything at the price point of the Bobcat (just looked at the Bobcat E350 boards on Amazon and they start at $70 USD) that will give you the same performance, the Pi certainly isn't gonna compete which is what the suggestion was.
Thank you as that was what I was going for, sorry if words (oh irony how you love to tweak my nose) fails me in this instance. And maybe richness isn't the best way to describe it, more like how Eskimos have so many words for snow and a modern person? Really doesn't need that many.
We are talking about trying to translate the language of a hunter/gatherer society into a modern language and we just don't have a vocabulary that is designed for that, sure you can make a "kinda sorta" translation but a lot of the nuance is lost.For an example look at "A Christmas Carol" which practically every version you have ever seen performed leaves out the long rambling diatribes against the Sabbatists, sorry if I don't spell that right but my spellcheck is going "WTF is that?" which just shows you how little that word is even used, but back in the days of a Xmas carol that was a BIG deal because the poor worked from sun up to sun down 6 days a week and shops closed at dark. So there you have something that isn't even 2 centuries old and you already have concepts that we in the modern world can't relate to...and you expect to do BETTER with a 1400+ year old book where spelling errors were considered "the hand of God" and not allowed to be corrected? Really? I'm sorry but I have to call bullshit.
Finally frankly there really aren't even any "true" Christians around, what modern folks call Christianity is frankly more of a "salad bar" religion because there are many things in there a modern man would honestly find offense with, take the rules on how to treat your slaves or beat your wife, if one were to strictly follow the "rules" as laid out in the bible frankly they'd be more like the modern taliban than what we see as a church. Life back then was short, brutal, and nasty, and the book was written by those living in those conditions. Trying to put that into a modern language without losing a lot in the translation? Just not gonna happen, I'm sorry but there are words and concepts in there that we as a society haven't really dealt with in centuries so we just don't have the vocabulary to describe them. Why should we when we don't live that way anymore?
Uhhh...1.2 BILLION Muslims AND GROWING, if anything the batshit isn't fading away, its spreading like AIDS. Hell look at the USSR, they ban the stuff for 80 years and you had different religions living side by side in relative peace, they say "Okay you have religious freedom now" and what happens? "My God is better than yours Ie ie ie ie ye!"
As long as you have the ignorant and those that refuse to think then this shit WILL be dangerous, that is all there is to it. Again we'd be better off if we just wiped the whole damned thing out, get rid of the centuries of bigotry and hate and started again. Oh and I love how the Xtians say they are so more civilized than the Muslims...ummm, did you forget your churches were saying "Niggers need to be kept in their place!" and using the bible to justify it? Look up "the curse of Ham" and see how pretty much ANY hatred and bigotry can be excused using the "good book".
Besides lets be honest folks...its an HTPC. Both MSFT and Sony have gone with low power HTPC chips from AMD...so why not just build an HTPC and have control of the system?
Hell you can buy a nice AMD Hexacore for $300 that will curbstomp the chip in the Sony and MSFT consoles, just slap whatever GPU you prefer (If you want to save money the HD4850s are dirt cheap and play most games at 1080P and med/high settings, spend a little more you can get the HD7770 and double the memory and boost the performance by 50%) and whatever OS suits your fancy, I prefer Win 7 but on an HTPC Windows 8 actually works nice as those big ass tiles are easy to hit with a remote and since Valve has ported Steam Linux is always an option, and unlike the consoles its YOURS, want multiple OSes? RUN IT. Want to buy games from a dozen different vendors? DO IT. Nobody has control over the hardware but YOU.
I could understand the consoles in the past because it was hard to hook a PC to a TV for the average Joes and the consoles used exotic chips that gave them advantages in some areas...but its an AMD Jaguar folks, a bog standard X86 netbook chip, all they did was bolt 2 jaguar quads together and there ya go. I built a system just like the one linked for my oldest and it just blows through games like they were nothing WHILE playing his tunes AND having his chat running AND his browser loaded in the background, it never bogs down. And hooking a PC to a TV is as simple as an HDMI cable now, my mom could do it, it will detect the TV and do all the setup and Bob's your uncle. And if you want the little case? They make VCR looking cases you can use if that is what melts your butter but I've built several HTPCs and when folks see how nice the new cases look they usually just skip the HTPC case.
So I don't get it this time, like Jim Sterling said about the current consoles they are just crappy PCs with all the hassles like long updates and online passes but none of the upsides like cheaper prices and better MP...so why? Its not like you can't plug a wireless controller into a PC, Valve has big picture mode now which makes driving with a wireless thumbstick or remote easy peasy, the games are cheaper, MP lasts longer, hell you can still fire up Counterstrike Classic and be blasting away with dozens of folks inside of 4 minutes, and the best reason it leaves YOU in control of your system, so why? Why get worse prices and all the BS from Sony and MSFT along with gimped hardware? The sad part is when MSFT and Sony move to the Xbox 5 and PS5 they'll abandon the systems but thanks to DMCA they'll make sure nobody can just put out a simple unlock so all that bog standard X86 hardware will be dumpster bait...why put up with that?
What I want to know is how they and MSFT expect to get all this performance....out of an AMD Jaguar. Now this is coming from somebody who has been selling AMD exclusively for five years, I don't own Intel anything and am typing this on a Thuban X6, but its...a Jaguar.
For those that don't know Jaguar is the replacement for Bobcat which is a NETBOOK chip designed to compete with the Atom. Now as somebody who owns a Bobcat netbook I can tell you that thanks to being out of order and having a hell of a lot nicer IGP it'll stomp the Atom nicely but an Athlon would curbstomp it HARD, much less a Phenom or FX. So why oh why would you put a netbook chip into your console? And from what I've been reading the Jag looks to be another FX style "half core" which means its only a quad with kinda sorta hyperthreading...why? Why would you want to put a gimped chip in your system when there are so many better choices? Hell Liano would bitchslap the Jag.
Maybe its true they are planning to compete on price, maybe they want to get it out the door ASAP because they are scared of Valve which I have to admit I understand, from the sound of the Valve plan they are gonna try something completely different, with a low/mid/high specs and dozens of companies making their own flavors so they'll be able to hit pretty much any price point...who knows. I just don't get the Jag. I mean if this was an HTPC, or built into a TV? Yeah it'd make a great media player, I just don't see how they are gonna do all the physics heavy 1080p gaming folks are gonna expect with a Jag. I have a feeling a year after launch the devs are gonna be slamming into the limits of the Jag. Again nothing against AMD but this would be like looking at Intel's entire line up and saying "Yes for our heavy processing system we'll use the Atom"..WTF?
Jane the whole argument is going off bad math, the Bobcat E350 uses 16w under load NOT when idle, when idle less than 5w, and if you aren't using the IGP when idle less than 3w. So you can have all the power of the dual core Bobcat with the idle power damned close to the Pi but having much better performance.
Remember this guy is wanting to record probably two video streams at a decent enough res they could be uploaded to youtube or even used in court, I seriously doubt a single Pi would be able to handle that much streaming data. The bobcat on the other hand has two out of order X86 cores so it could handle it no problem, in fact I've been using those Bobcats as replacement boards for shops that still have P4 systems and while giving them a nice speed boost it uses less power than the fans for the P4s did by themselves, much less the actual computer.
So if you ever need to upgrade a PC on the cheap i highly recommend, you can get an E350 board for less than $80 and they'll bolt into just about any case, I plan to replace my aging Sempron nettop I use at the shop with one, just yank the old board and pop that one in. Not only is it an easy job but it'll do 1080p and most will hold 8GB of DDR 3 while using even less power than my Sempron, its really a sweet little unit.
Not to mention the other guy threw everybody off by saying an E350 pulled 16w at idle when that is at load, it pulls something like 3w at idle, less if you aren't using the IGP.
if one were to go completely GUI free and headless I doubt it would even pull 6w under load as its the IGP that pulls the most power on a Bobcat so it wouldn't be hard on the car at all. That said there is a program out there that will let you lower the P-States on a Bobcat so that when it drops into a low power state it REALLY drops, so I don't see why you couldn't keep the GUI to have it...ohh play videos or MP3s as well? That is what the folks that have my friend have them installed for, great for dealing with kids on long car rides and they are REALLY cheap, you can buy the board alone for like $70 USD on Amazon or the board in a small HTPC case with PSU for $129, they are really cheap, great for projects like this. Hell they are good enough I have been using them as a replacement for all those old P4 office boxes many businesses still have, the Bobcat dual gives them a nice performance boost while using less power than the P4 did at idle.
Look at your figures again, the E350 draws 16w when UNDER LOAD, it draws less than 5w at idle. It was made to compete with the Atom, which if you don't mind a serious performance hit you can use one of those.
Frankly the only difficult part in this would be having to run a touchscreen to the front for inputting the password because he wants the security, otherwise as i said I have a friend that makes his living doing this and so far nobody has had any complaints about their car battery going dead from it.
This is why I have to LMAO at those that take the bible literally and only read English...hello, bad translations abound! The ancient languages had many words that had different meanings based on context, or similar but different meaning based on phrasing, they were rich, deep, and complex as hell and frankly modern English...isn't. Its like trying to carve the Venus de Milo by shooting a block of granite with high explosive rounds. Sure you might end up with kinda sorta a similar shape but all the little nuances? Not a chance in hell.
At the end of the day though it truly saddens me that here we are in the 21st century and we still have hatred, bigotry, even murders, based on what some goat herders wrote on a sheep's ass a couple of thousand years ago to explain a world he didn't understand. i mean I can produce works just as old saying the sun is Ra in a chariot but we don't actually believe that, nor do we kill anybody who doesn't believe that, yet there are people getting slaughtered every. single. day. over the stupid shit written hundreds or even thousands of years ago by fricking goat herders. personally I think we'd all be better off if we threw every last book on the fire, just wiped it all from the face of history, because its obvious as long as it exists there are gonna be fruitcakes taking that shit seriously enough to kill.
Yeah but its frankly even making good movies lazy, like using CGI blood (which I have yet to see not look fake as hell) so they can change the rating of the movie in post. And honestly a great director can make do and make a great movie without CGI, look at the first Terminator which was all practical effects, it STILL looks good to this day, compare it with the fight scene between Neo and the hundred Smiths in Reloaded and your mind screams "Bad PlayStation game!" because CGI never seems to age well.
But sadly the main side effect we are seeing is the "Michael Bay" effect, movies that obviously have NO plot, lousy characters and clunky dialog getting greenlit because CGI makes the costs reasonable and they are all hoping to be the next Transformers. Before while there were big budget bombs, your Heaven's Gates and Ishtars frankly the studios were more conservative because practical effects seriously ramped up costs but now because they can have a computer just crap shit on a screen frankly movies that in the past would have been told "Go rewrite that shit and bring it back when it don't suck" get told "Meh, throw some cool shit on the screen and it'll sell".
I mean how many movies have YOU seen where this sentence applies "Effects were good, movie sucked ass" as a perfect description? I don't know about you but I've seen a LOT of movies that fit that description and I bet a good half of them wouldn't have been greenlit if it weren't for cheap CGI.
No prob on the formatting, and I'm glad that Linux works for you, made me want to pull my damned hair out. Since you are on Linux you might want to try QTWeb which is what I used when I was cross platform, built in adblock and privacy mode as well as Flash support, its nice.
As for Infinite it sounds like it'll be my cup o' tea, but first I have to pick up Borderlands II (waiting for them to get finished putting out DLC and lvl cap boosts) because that is the first time since Bioshock I've had the AI give me a really good fight. First time I ran into a large Skag nest and saw the small ones hitting my front and sides while the big guys ran off I thought "Where are they going? Nooo, you don't think?" and sure enough I turned around just in time to get a 3D up close view of a giant Skag mouth about to use my head like a giant Pez dispenser. My youngest HATES first person shooters but after watching me play it 5 minutes he was like "You know, that really looks like fun" and now he is hooked.
No splicers and Little Sisters kinda sucks though, those are just so iconic. BTW if you haven't heard Little Sister by Miracle of Sound check it out, why they don't hire this guy to write the themes for some of the games is beyond me. His songs for Borderlands and Left For Dead as especially catchy, I have caught my oldest singing them into his mike as we are playing MP, I warn you they are catchy and stick in your head!
Nooo, I'm saying if you act like an asshole don't be surprised if some people act like an asshole right back. Its sad that basic common courtesy has become practically an alien concept in our "me me me" culture but there ya go. Personally I'm an agnostic but I have no problem hanging with anybody of any religion because I make it clear if they don't try to shove their crap on me I won't try to shove mine on them and we all get along just fine.
They were NOT doing this because of some deeply held belief, this I will bet my last dollar was done JUST to start shit. And while I would never support members of the USPS stooping to this bozo's level I will say I can understand it, you act like a dick and some will act like a dick right back.
Too much work, too hard to insure you always have a signal. The answer to this one is actually pretty simple...carputer. You can either DIY with one of several kits or a friend of mine has made a good living installing mini-HTPC boxes based on Bobcat chips in trunks, its really not hard and these chips are ultra low power so its not a drain. Add an SSD using Truecrypt and voila! The cops pull the plug to get the SSD out and all they have is a brick without your Truecrypt password. There are plenty of little 5 inch touchscreens you can mount in the front so you can input your password as you are starting up and if you decide you want to keep anything you recorded 5 minutes with a portadrive and Bob's your uncle.
This ask Slashdot frankly ain't hard, hand me $600 plus the cost of the parts and I can have it done over a weekend, going DIY if you don't have exp in this kind of deal will take a little longer but if you can follow instructions and use basic common sense? Really not that hard. You can go wireless to the carputer (costs more) or you can run the wires around the door frames (cheaper but more of a PITA) to the cameras and an AMD bobcat with a stripped down OS like Win 7 Tiny or Puppy Linux can easily record a couple of cameras no problem, its a 1.7GHz dual core after all. So its really not hard, just takes a little time and depending on how fancy he wants to get it can cost anywhere from $500-$1500, price depending on how many cams, the quality, what kind of extra features like being able to playback video or surf on the carputer, etc.
Nice to see I'm not the only one to think that, I'll put this right next to "Ubuntu Satanic Edition" (no shit, look it up, complete with pentagrams and death metal) on the "We named this just to be "controversial" and "edgy" because that is what our focus group said it was" pile.
Honestly friend? The IE upgrades don't even matter except for business and BYOD is quickly making it irrelevant even there. It is VERY rare now that I see a PC where the default browser is IE anymore, after MSFT screwed XP users by refusing to backport it didn't surprise me that between that and how mainstream that Chrome and Firefox has gotten IE has been dropping like a stone.
So for MY users and customers all that really matters is the security patches, although honestly I think we are gonna see a crapload of XP systems still running after Apr 2014. I know that if another low power desktop doesn't pop into the shop at a cheap price between now and then that old Sempron I've been using as a netbox will be staying because it only uses 35w under load and does what I need it to. I tried Win 7 on it but I could never get a driver that was stable for the Ethernet nor sound and I have no desire to fill the system up with cards. While I have gotten my customers off of XP I know the other less scrupulous shops are still selling XP boxes right now, so it will be interesting to see what happens.
Well the guys in combat weren't always the smartest but in the previous games made sense...they were completely batshit. I mean you only had to hide and listen for a little while to hear that their minds were as warped as their bodies and since they too had Plasmid power i could see them thinking their powers would cover their behind. After all if I could throw fricking fireballs I'd probably be a little sloppy and arrogant too.
But if the AI is just okay? That I can handle. For instance the bad guys in the Borderlands games are kinda predictable but they can still give you a damned good fight. Do you feel in any way challenged by the enemies? Have you had any "Oh shit, run for cover, RUN!" moments in the game? The first time I accidently shot a Big Daddy when I wasn't ready made me haul some behind with my heart racing, the only game I've felt the same with since the Bioshock games is Borderlands and the first time I popped over a hill and literally landed in a nest of Alpha Skags.... man I ran like a girl because I was soooo not armed for that encounter!
So I'm not asking for award winning AI here, I'm really not that hard to please honestly, all I ask is that the bad guys aren't so stupid I just stand there going "Really? You are REALLY gonna do that?". If you need an example for comparison FEAR 3 where I could walk right up to an enemy from the side and they would continue to stay behind cover that not only did nothing but I could just walk up and club their stupid asses.
If the AI doesn't ruin the mood, blow the immersion, or get on your nerves by their thumb up their asses stupidity? I'm really not that hard to please, I'm really not. Just don't make the bad guys Far Cry II stupid and I'll play, all that matters in the end is "is it fun?" and if that answer is yes? I'm in.
And if you are on Windows? Try Comodo Dragon as its also based on Chromium but is frankly rock solid, I give it and IceDragon (their version of Firefox) out to my customers and use them myself, very well built. Oh and as a bonus if you use their free Internet Security it will automatically connect with the browser and sandbox it so you really don't have to worry about web based threats. Since I started handing it out to customers frankly the only infections I see now are when they are duped to download and install the malware, Comodo will do everything but reach out and knock the keyboard out their hands trying to stop them, but some people just want to see the dancing bunnies more than stay virus free, so I can't blame the AV and browser for that.
I'm sorry but bullshit, CGI has made selling ideas that frankly would have NEVER been green lighted if they actually had to pay for practical effects and THAT is the problem. For every LOTR where CGI allowed a director to make a great movie you have a Terminator Salvation where you just KNOW that movie was sold on the Arnie CGI bot.
As for Battleship? Watch American Warships, while the effects are worse frankly its a better movie and it was a mockbuster of battleship! Frankly if they would have JUST used the old guys, which really wouldn't be hard, imagine them hearing about how the destroyers went down taking down the other ships so its only them between the aliens and the target? it might have been enjoyable. Frankly when I saw the aliens shooting PEGS, fricking pegs at the other ship in the previews? All I wanted was a FUN movie, not a great movie, just a popcorn muncher. Instead Kitsch's character is just sooo fucking DUMB and such a douchebag you really want to smack him, and his "crew"? Green recruits know more about how to act military more than these clowns, its just awful.
To me what is truly scary is how CGI has allowed moviemakers to be lazy and/or cynical when they make their films. Not sure if you want this movie to be a PG-13 or a hard R? No worries, we'll make all the blood using CGI instead of practical effects, that way we can add as much or as little as we want in post, its not like that EVER looks horribly fake. Not able to come up with a good plot or characters anybody will give a shit about? No worries, just pull a Michael Bay and dump a shitload of bad looking CGI and explosions, that's all them slack jawed movie goers will understand anyway...sigh.
Done right CGI can be just incredible, take The Avengers, in that while there was a lot of CGI it didn't overwhelm the story, same with LOTR, done right it can make us feel for creatures that don't exist or believe in fantastical worlds, done badly it just hurts, Battleship kind of hurts.
Did you even BOTHER reading what you linked to? Asking for new features? Do you HONESTLY think that Microsoft give a shit if YOU want a new feature and you aren't the head of IT at something like GE or Ford, who frankly are big enough they can get MSFT to add any damned feature they want whenever they want? Complimentary support? Who the hell has EVER used that? Have YOU ever used that? Has anybody that you know EVER used that? And finally paid support...again you know ANYBODY that has actually hired MSFT to fix a bug that does NOT work at a fortune 500 company?
So I'm sorry friend but as the PC shop guy who has been doing this for...sigh...nearly a quarter century I have to call bullshit, nobody cares about anything but the security patches. Hell the only reason they care about those is there tends to be several holes that are found close to EOL that MSFT never bothers to fix, there was something like 23 holes in Win98 that never got patched, 17 or 18 in win2K found close to EOL that never got fixed (not to mention never releasing SP5 so the fans had to make it themselves) and I'm sure a month or two before XP is due to kick the bucket it'll be found to have about a dozen major holes that MSFT will go "Meh, its dead in a month anyway" and just won't care.