Actually its worse than that because the people you would THINK are using it "as a toy", your retirees, kids, etc do NOT use a PC like they do a tablet thus making Win 8 a failure for them as well!
I should know as these folks are my bread and butter and NOT A SINGLE ONE uses ONLY one app at a time, hell even the little old ladies have their little chat programs AND their browser with multiple tabs going at the same time.
The problem with win 8 is they tried to make a "one size fits all" and anybody can tell you that one size fits all fits nobody WELL. The people who use it on a phone are gonna find the desktop stupid and pointless, ditto those on a tablet, while the desktop and laptop users are just confused and irritated because they can't even do simple tasks on the damned thing without fighting its cellphone design.
so I have to agree with the video in TFA, this is bad enough it deserves a product recall and I didn't even say that about Vista. With Vista by SP2 it was usable, not great but it worked, and even at RTM with some tweaking you could more or less get it decently stable and functional. i tried the start addons and the like and it still can't fix the fundamental stupidity, for example a start replacement can't do shit about how the settings are randomly splattered between desktop and metro. It also made some truly fucking retarded choices such as NO product key so if your hard drive dies? tough shit, get on the phone to MSFT as you can't even burn a restore disc with Win 8, its impossible. The whole thing is just broken, no other way to look at it, its broken.
That is security by obscurity and if you are gonna argue in favor of that you might as well go over to eComstation and pick up a copy of OS/2, after all NOBODY is writing bugs for OS/2!
For the rest of us there comes a point when all the bullshit isn't worth it, and I'd say having to run a VM, set up a shared folder for the VM to save any files you may need to download, and all that other crap just isn't worth it. if I had to go through all the bullshit of a VM just to surf then 9 times out of 10 i just wouldn't surf at all. Sure that would be even safer but then I'd miss out on the reason for having Internet in the first place.
But compare this to my method which I have not only been using myself but been giving to my customers including some that jack and squat about security, the kind that can't tell a good site from bad, a risky link from a non risk, how many infections have I had to clean? ZERO, zip nada squat bumpkiss. Sure theoretically there are exploits that can both get out of a sandbox and get out of low rights mode, hell there are exploits that can jump a VM as well, but from what i've seen they just ain't being encountered in the wild. Now maybe there is too many low hanging fruit for the malware writers to go through the trouble, maybe its too big a PITA to mess with, who knows. but I know MY method can be run by your grandma with absolutely ZERO training (since all you do is surf, everything is done automatically) and as long as I continue to get the results i have I'll stick with a low rights mode sandboxed browser, thanks.
Oh you can bet your last dollar they are ALL talking to Google right now about ChromeOS and Android. There is not a SINGLE positive indicator with Windows 8, even with a $40 price tag copies have not sold for shit, PCs with Win 8 haven't sold for shit, yet will Ballmer listen? Nope because he thinks you can slap a paint job on a Pinto and make it into a Porsche and it WILL NEVER EVER WORK. PC buyers buy on price, did he forget his little "redhead goes shopping" ad they had for Win 7?
And as one of the usability experts in TFA said so damned perfectly PCs are a content CREATION as well as consumption device but Win 8 is strictly designed for consumption which people can do just as well on their phones or tablets. But this goes back to Ballmer's delusion because he doesn't understand that nobody gives a shit about Windows and its certainly not a brand that anybody is gonna pay top dollar for, it sure as hell isn't gonna make you feel all warm and fuzzy because you have...Windows. No its the programs stupid! The ONLY reason people use Windows is because of the bazillion X86 programs they have they want to run, year after year of Windows software that people DO care about, but which Windows 8 makes a royal PITA to use if it'll even run at all...sigh.
If the board don't stop hitting the crack pipe and wake the fuck up and fire Ballmer's fat ass they ain't gonna have to worry about what PCs the OEMs sell because their software? won't be on it, and can you blame 'em? MSFT under Ballmer is making their own hardware (like somebody we know) to sell in their own stores (I could point out what a ripoff this is, but who hasn't figured this out yet?) so every. single. dime. that the OEMs give MSFT is gonna be used to try to put them out of business...would YOU give a shit what MSFT wanted if you were an OEM?
Any retailer will tell you Windows has a "sweet spot" of $350-$650 and THAT IS IT. You can't sell touchscreens at that price and make a cent, not with MSFT gouging on licenses and putting out a royal stinkbomb of an OS. And now Ballmer thinks they are gonna clean up with a tablet that is twice as heavy and bulky as an iPad, is gonna sound like an F15 taking off, have shitty battery life, and oh yeah costs MORE than the newest iPad by several hundred?
The OEMs are right, all they would get if they cranked out high end touchscreen laptops is another warehouse full of unsold gear that is worth less every day, they could put them right next to those piles of Ultrabooks Intel convinced them would sell like hotcakes. WinPro tablet is gonna bomb HARD, it'll sell to a few business niches but not enough to make it a profitable line, and this can just be added to the 40+ billion Ballmer has shat down the drain over the past 6 years on failed ventures. Everybody talked about Elop being a mole but if I didn't know better I'd swear Ballmer was working for Google because he couldn't destroy MSFT any quicker if he took a flamethrower to the thing.
Funny Crosshair as I would say it is LACK of regulations that caused this mess. When the fed forced ma bell to open up their lines suddenly dialup went from an expensive hobby VERY few could enjoy to something so cheap many places would give you free time limited dialup in the hopes of selling you other services.
Then along comes Reagan and the DEregulators and suddenly it isn't illegal for these corps to just buy up the competition, or to buy services and media cartels that would put them in obvious conflict of interest and WHAM...now instead of competing they just buy out the competition and close it down or do like AT&T has done in most places which is divide the place up with the cablecos so they "cherry pick" the places they give a shit about and the rest? Fuck 'em if they don't like dialup. When my mom built her place she was less than a block from the cable junction, guess how many feet they've run since then? ZERO.
ALL of the places that have truly crazy speeds the lines were NOT done by private corps they were done by governments, either nationally or local co-ops. As we saw during the age of the robber barons a "free market" simply cannot exist as those with money without regulation will simply buy up all competition until they are the only game in town. And if the rumors are true that AT&T is thinking about walking away from landlines (since they can assrape much more with wireless than they ever could from landlines) then things will only be getting worse from here on in.
What we NEED is a national broadband initiative where We, The People have it laid down just like we had freeways built and then the various corps can COMPETE by leasing the line and selling us service. If they want a monopoly? Then they better lay FTTH to an area before we get there and they'll be given X number of years as the only game in town in return for laying the lines, otherwise they can fuck right off.
But we already tried completely unregulated markets, in the late 1800s you could do whatever you wanted, dump toxins, work children, hell there wasn't jack shit for regulation...what happened? A handful of rich scumbags got together and formed trusts and carved the entire country up. For a truly free market to work you'd have to have players that AREN'T sociopathic scumbags but history proves that is never gonna be, the more regulations you remove the worse things get, NOT better. Perhaps Cornel West can explain it better.
How EXACTLY were "Commercial game companies were taking advantage of Free Software long before most people ever heard of it or called it OSS or FOSS" because I've been gaming since the days of DOS and frankly FOSS had little to nothing to do with gaming then and little to nothing to do with gaming now. The closest i can come up with is some games have the OPTION of using OpenGL but that's all it was, an option, and OpenGL itself wasn't really designed for gaming in the first place (it was developed by SGI for film and TV graphics work) so I don't see how FOSS has jack squat to do with gaming.
I'd also like to hear how you expect triple A titles to be developed since obviously the blessed three don't work as you haven't seen squat from the FOSS community when it comes to top tier games. Its obvious that people want these games, they ARE a billion dollar business after all, and I'd love to hear how you expect to pay the salaries of a team of 100 for the 2+ years required to create a top tier game. Or do you expect us to take Tux racer and like it?
But I bet you won't answer because then you'd have to face the truth which is thus: There is a REASON why more than 90% of the software written today is NOT FOSS, and that is because more than 90% of the software being created doesn't fit into the blessed three and therefor won't get written under FOSS. Think its a coincidence that after twenty years the BEST replacement the FOSS community can come up with for Photoshop is something made by a kid as a class project? That is what Gimp is you know, it was written for a class project by a hobbyist. or the best you can come up with for Quicken/Quickbooks is GNUCash that doesn't even have 5% of the features of that which is supposed to replace? Because nearly all software written for the end user does NOT fit under the blessed three and therefor it will ONLY be written by some hobbyist if its written at all, most won't be written at all.
Yeah and it didn't work either. You can't take out an enemy by just throwing bodies at him if he has superior firepower unless he is suffering from severe ammo constraints or having a LOT of weapon failures and with the Finns neither was the case.
My great uncle was a marine during the Pacific campaign and he said what always disturbed him was how after one Banzai charge failed they would end up regrouping and doing it again sometimes in a different spot, sometimes they would be trying to charge over the bodies of the previous charge.
He said frankly when it came to the bases the grunts didn't even have to use their BARs or M1s hardly at all because he said "We might not have toilet paper but one thing we had a shitload of was the 50 cals" so they had those things mounted everywhere and on everything. Boats, jeeps, trucks, you name it there was one or more 50 cals on it and he said they had plenty of 50s manning the perimeters, which is why he just couldn't understand why they'd ever charge more than once. According to him he said those 50s would just obliterate an entire company in seconds, they would have every area with crossfire support and it wasn't even a fight, it was a slaughter.
To quote Mel Brooks "Bullshit bullshit aaaaannnnd bullshit". if you want a shortened way? Use MSFT, it even lets you be snarky as its the stock ticker and you can claim its because "they only care about the stock price instead of putting out a good product" so you can be just as douchey and stupid as you want and people will still understand WTF you are posting.
But the "M$" bullshit is not only from fucking DOS which hasn't even been a product for 20 damned years but it was fucking retarded even THEN. Its just as fucking retarded as writing "Lunix" and deserves to get fucking smacked down for being stupid. And read the guys post dude, i'm assuming you didn't or you wouldn't be trying to apologize for him because it was a classic FOSSie douchebag rant, no different than the douchebag Mac users that insinuate if you aren't using Macs you're either too stupid or too poor, or the Win 8 douchebags that insinuate anybody that doesn't want a cellphone for an OS is too stupid to work it.
But this is SUPPOSED to be a site FOR geeks and BY geeks and I'm pretty sure that in an article on Windows if somebody types MS everyone isn't gonna go "Why is he talking about Mississippi having a vulnerability?" but of course it was NOT about having a short way to type Microsoft, it was another coward that couldn't wait to wave his little dick and brag about his magical OS that he doesn't even understand. Magical thinking has no place on a site about tech and frankly that kind of horseshit needs to be nipped in the bud whenever possible.
Because hopefully in the office the air is filtered and you aren't practically soaking in cancer like you are in a Chinese factory?
Remember the REASON why so many corps moved to China is that they have practically ZERO worker safety reqs so I wouldn't be surprised that those that work in a Chinese factory at 20 won't be breathing their last breaths while riddled with cancer before age 50. Have you ever seen the list of toxic chemicals used to create a PC or a cell phone?
To say that its only about the money would be like crying "Why won't anybody take this coal mining job? what's a little black lung and cancer between friends?" yeah can't really say i blame the kids after busting their hump to get an education to not want to end up spending 5 days a week doing 12 hour days in cancer city, no matter the pay.
Huh...really? My bank doesn't do that as long as I use one of their ATMs. if I use somebody else's ATM I get hit with something like $3 for the transaction but if I use those connected with my bank it doesn't cost a dime. Makes it worth it to me to drive the 6 blocks to my nearest branch ATM than to use the one across the street from my house as i'm not gonna use up $3 in gas going 6 blocks.
Maybe you need to check around and see if any banks in your area have a similar deal because i don't know how many times i have told folks to take a good look at all the fees their banks charge and they find they were being nickeled and dimed to death. Mine doesn't charge anything for using their ATMs, only charges me a buck a month for the debit card, and that's pretty much it as far as fees go.
The moral of that story is don't use the large banks which I've found generally have shittier service and higher fees anyway. In just about every town in America you have smaller banks and co-ops and they not only have lower fees (my bank charges a whole $1 a month for my debit card flat fee) but they tend to have better service.
So just do your homework and I bet you'll find there are plenty of banks in your area that will be happy to take your business without screwing you on fees.
Not to mention we tortured people that anybody with a fucking brain would know wouldn't be told jack shit. We tortured the cab driver the Taliban grabbed and used to ferry around some of their high level guys...he was a fucking CAB DRIVER, do they think that the world works like a James Bond film? that the villain is just gonna monologue their plans to some dumb shit that doesn't have squat to do with anything? Of course not he was told "STFU and drive until I say stop" and that was it. It would be like torturing Romney's garbageman to find out what his campaign plans are, how the hell is he supposed to know this? You think he goes out for a beer with Romney or something?
And THIS is why i'm so saddened and disgusted by the people in this country not saying shit about Assange and letting our leaders keep him locked in a room in that embassy because you read the shit that was posted on Wikileaks and its pretty damned obvious that several high level members of our government frankly should be brought up to the Hague for war crimes. Its disgusting the shit that our government and those hired by our government have been doing in these countries, shit just as evil as during the worst days of the Vietnam war (which you noticed the press didn't make shit about the government FINALLY coming clean and admitting The Gulf Of Tonkin was a false flag) only now the evil bastards at the top learned from their mistakes in Vietnam and simply bought up all the MSM. So now instead of anybody saying shit about this stream of information proving multiple war crimes we get "Assange is a dirty pervo rapist who need to be sent to Gitmo". you know what? I don't give a rat's ass if Assange spends his weekends pushing little old ladies down the stairs as HE ain't killing thousands of people and starting shit all over the planet!
I urge everyone to watch the end of America by Naomi Wolf. She isn't some whacko here, she is a quiet little conservative Jewish girl (I personally think she is a little TOO conservative when it comes to the conclusions) who is now on the watchlist for daring to speak about our rights under the constitution. That's right folks, simply giving a lecture about what the declaration of independence and constitution says is enough to have you put on the list. In this video she shows several examples in history of free societies that became non free overnight, and she gives a step by step account of how it happens. She calls it the "universal playbook" that has been used by everyone from Stalin to Franco and watch how many of those plays are already either in motion here or have already been used. And one of the final steps she lists is a society creating a framework to where people can be tortured outside the rule of law. Why is this one of the last steps? Because it always starts small and gets bigger. Hitler started with only communists, Stalin started with the kulaks, in EVERY case she shows how these extra judicial systems grow like a cancer to cover more and more "undesirable elements".
so we need to seriously wake the fuck up, stop letting the MSM divert us with bullshit like Assange and start demanding that they go after the big issues like the tortures, bombings, and all the other nasty evil shit that has been and is being done in our name and with our money.
Because the carriers are gonna buttfuck us with ever worsening caps instead of spending any of their massive profits to lay the lines we already paid 200 billion plus to have laid down?
All this "in the cloud" horseshit requires that we have a steady, reliable, fast and CAP FREE net connection or at least caps that are sane and which go UP in time. What we are seeing is the exact opposite with many places giving crappy caps to start with and as they oversell the shit out of their lines the caps get smaller NOT bigger. Everybody said "Oh the carriers won't want to lose all that business with the 6 strikes law" bullshit the carriers WANT THE EXCUSE because it gives them a legal reason to punt anybody that dares uses even half of what they pay for since they can just say "Oh he's a pirate...what? Prove me wrong!" and will kick you to the curb.
All this cloud shit is gonna die a VERY ugly death as the carriers cut the bandwidth, in my own area the carriers steer the shit out of you, use THEIR VoIP? NO cap, Vonage? Cap. Use THEIR PPV? NO cap, Netflix? Cap. These carriers, who ALL have interest in media companies BTW, sure as fuck ain't gonna want people spending all their time on the net instead of buying TV packages so any of this stuff that they don't get a check from is gonna be so bandwidth starved it'll end up costing you more to play some game in the browser than it would to just go buy a fucking boxed game and have it shipped.
I have seen the future that this corporatism shall bring and it does truly suck. i know I ended up paying more in bandwidth charges than I did for the fucking games i bought during the big Steam Xmas sale, I don't even want to know how much of a bill I would have gotten if everything was run over the net.
Have you SEEN how shitty the air is in China? Where do you think that foulness is coming from? People are making the mistake of thinking like an American with our clean and more or less safe working conditions to those in China where its such a nasty grimy dead end job that they had to put nets around Foxconn to catch the jumping workers, remember?
Then you should be mad at the CC companies and banks who have been sticking it to ALL OF US whether we used cash or credit than to the store who is trying NOT to assrape you if you pay with cash.
The whole point of the suit was the banks and CC companies said "Fuck 'em, just raise prices across the board 3% and we'll BOTH make out" to hide the fees. Me personally I'd be MORE likely to shop there as I could always use my debit or hit one of the bazillion ATMs in town and not get stuck with the fees that we were ALREADY BEING SADDLED WITH thanks to these asswipe companies.
But you can get a similar advantage without all the bullshit by simply having the browser in low rights mode and sandboxed, this way they would have to both find a way to escalate the privileges AND get out of the sandbox to do anything.
As far as low rights mode browsers any of the Webkit based as well as IE will do (although I would be hesitant to use IE simply because of how big a bullseye is painted on it by black hats) and as for automatic sandboxing of the browser I'm pretty sure Avast Free does this and I know Comodo AV Free does this by default so its really not hard to run a browser securely without needing a VM.
Ironically many of the strategies that the Japs used against us that look so stupid now actually worked against the Chinese but the Japanese military doctrine was so strict and unyielding that it just didn't take into account how vastly different the situation with the Chinese was compared to the Americans. The Banzai charge would work against the Chinese because they were armed with bolt action rifles that weren't in the best shape to start with so the Chinese couldn't hope to get more than a couple of poorly aimed shots off before the charge was upon them while the Americans with the BAR and M1 could just keep pouring on the fire.
This was a problem the Nazis also ran into in Stalingrad where the Nazi foot soldiers were armed with K98 bolt action rifles and ran smack dab into entire companies carrying the PPSh-41 which could just spew lead and in the close quarters fighting made up for their lack of accuracy with just punishing firepower.
As for TFA considering how long ASLR has lasted without an exploit I'd say it held up pretty well but of course one should never put all your eggs in one basket and ASLR is just one piece, along with a good AV, sandboxing of the browser (the biggest attack vector IMHO) and plain old common sense, when it comes to keeping a system safe.
Especially for those of us that went AM3 as I built my system with a dual in 08, went to a quad in 10, and then finally ended up with a hexacore this time last year all while keeping the majority of my system along the way.
And you are right on the power draw which is why I tell those that are still on late model P4s or Pentium Ds that even though the machine may be working for them now its costing them serious money in the long run. The advances when it comes to power saving while still giving you the horsepower when you need it is just nuts, I replaced an office building full of Pentium Ds with Phenom low powers and not only did their performance more than double but it cut their power bill nearly in half. The deeper sleep states of the chips, the way the modern GPUs can lower the GPU and memory clocks when not being stressed, you are quite right that you can have a cool and quiet machine that still games quite well today.
But what clinches it for me and most of my customers is the price. I have been a gamer since the days of DOS and from 95-07 or so being a PC gamer was one of the more expensive hobbies, I know that there was one 5 year stretch there were I was replacing my system yearly just so I could play the latest games in LOWERED detail because the speeds were jumping so damned quickly. Now that a AAA title can cost up to 100 million to make we just aren't seeing those huge leaps anymore (and I doubt we will when the new consoles show up as its the cost more than the hardware that has limited game devs) it has become REALLY affordable to game. You can buy a card for less than $100 that will run most if not all of the games out there at the standard 1080P resolution with great graphics, its just not that expensive to be a PC gamer anymore.
Then you finally add all the non gaming features added to the new cards, the hardware decoding of all the major video formats for example which further lowers power usage by taking the load off the CPU, or how most cards today have HDMI so you can just plug them into any TV and have an HTPC set up in moments? Frankly there really is no reason not to have a discrete GPU in your average desktop if it'll take one. BTW if you ever want to have a killer HTPC file2folder GUI plus Media Center Master is the one two punch that turns any Win 7 PC into a kick fucking ass HTPC, file2folder GUI will set up the folder structure MCM needs and MCM downloads all the metadata from IMDB so when you fire up Windows Media Center and choose Movie Library it'll have all the artwork, synopsis, cast lists, it really makes a movie library from a folder full of flicks,just top notch.
First of all a public service announcement: To everyone that writes "M$" in 2013...This...Is...YOU! and this is what everyone sees and instantly dismisses when you write that lame ass M$ in 2013. You could write the most brilliant post in the history of Slashdot but a good 80%+ will NEVER read it because they see M$ and think "douchebag" and move on. So don't waste your time unless you want people posting your group photo as the very next post.
Second of all lets get something VERY clear for those that don't seem to understand how these things work, okay? ALL OPERATING SYSTEMS that would be what we consider "modern" are some of the most complex pieces of software EVER written, we are talking millions of LOC in the kernel alone and thousands of little sub-programs that ALL have to work in concert to give the user the illusion that its all one program that "just works". Is Linux even close to immune? Not only is that a big NO but to even suggest it is is a symptom of what is known as "magical thinking" such as "If you buy (product X) then you will magically be safe!". We in IT have seen magical thinking used to sell everything from OSes to firewalls to routers and reality will blow holes in that lie every single time.
So if Linux is vulnerable why don't we see Linux attacks in the news? We do only they are called "Android attacks" and in fact its predicted that later in the year Android will reach the one million infected mark which considering that Android isn't even a decade old is pretty impressive.
Look its actually VERY simple, and evidence has bore this out time and time again. Criminals ARE LAZY and want to do the least amount of work for the biggest bang so they want to go after the biggest targets to yield the most infections they possibly can. I mean writing a OS/2 virus today would probably be the most trivial thing in the world yet you don't see anybody doing it, why? Because the fact is even though eComstation still sells OS/2 there are too few using it to make it a juicy target. But the malware writers WILL go where the targets are, used to be it was always Windows, then Vista bombs and everyone in the press starts talking about how Mac adoption is climbing, what happens? Mac Guardian and Mac Defender. Android phones and tablets explode in usage, what happens? Thousands of Android malware released weekly.
So anybody who thinks their OS is gonna magically protect them from malware because "(product X) doesn't get bugs!" is merely deluding themselves with magical thinking. There are even articles that helpfully helpfully explain this and point out how switching platforms just for the sake of magical thinking (in the article OSX for Linux but you can insert any from and to in there and it still fits) just doesn't work. Be it Linux, Mac, or Windows you can find plenty of bugs, I could spend 5 minutes and cover this page in reports of bugs for all 3, I already listed the 2 biggest Mac bugs of recent memory, TFA is a Windows bug, and just off the top of my head there was the KDELook theme bug and the infected Quake 3 that was served up by most repos for a year and a half on Linux. NO OS is safe, NO OS is immune, and if you are gonna claim security by obscurity is actual security you might as well run Win95 or BeOS because hey, there aren't any bugs circulating targeting those OSes either.
Oh its worse than that now, in the old days you'd have one or two high level bug writers that could dig up exploits for major components like this, then there were the script kiddies that were just looking at what the last set of patches were plugging then writing a bug based around those patches.
But thanks to virus kits and a thriving black market for bugs what we have now is a variation of the smart cow problem in that by the time most companies find out there is a new bug targeting a critical subsystem its already been sold, added to one or more virus kits, and a dozen plus variations already are up and running in the wild. This makes it a LOT harder to plug a hole when found because it has spread all over the underground and is used by dozens of other black hats as the foot in the door to come up with a dozen other ways to get their payload ran. If a black hat had found this and sold it on the black market we would have probably gotten a half a dozen or more zero days out of it, using this hack to then target Adobe Flash or Reader or Java or who knows what else as they evolve the attacks so damned quickly nowadays.
Riiight, get rid of the people here LEGALLY and the fact that you don'tr actually have to pay insurance, workman's comp, or even minimum wage has NOTHING at all to do with it, right?
Horseshit, total horseshit. And look at the crime rates in those states that have the "open border" policy and you'll see for every guy that just wants to feed his family you get a dozen MS13 and La Raza members who are here to take everything they can and fuck your laws white boy.
So before you give us that same tired old "illegals work harder" horseshit maybe you should write a letter to the families of all the crime victims of illegals and take a GOOD fucking look at that list, every one of those people paid the price for your cheapskate labor, scumbag.
Well since I'm the guy everybody is responding to i think I can answer that and I would say Google falls squarely under the "selling support" category, its just not the end user that is being supported but the website devs and ad companies. They provide the infrastructure for Gmail, Google Play, Google docs, search and all the other proprietary bits that OEMs carry on Android phones and provide a way for advertisers to get to those eyeballs so I don't see how anybody could argue that Google doesn't sell support.
Also in their last SCC filing they made it quite clear that they are an AD company and more than 90% of their revenue comes from ads so I don't see how they could be argued to be a "FOSS company" when those ad networks as well as their search engine is built on proprietary software, the FOSS software is as another pointed out simply the bait to get what their primary goal is which is more eyes to see their ads. Any FOSS used is strictly incidental and unlike say Red Hat or MariaDB if you removed all the FOSS bits from Google it really wouldn't hurt them in the long run as they could just buy some company like RIM and offer that instead and not really have to change their core business model any.
Sorry I don't have time to look it up but I believe it was Oregon so "Oregon farmer sued Monsanto" or something similar ought to find it. In the case i'm talking about the guy was growing ORGANIC crops so naturally didn't want ANY of Monsanto's shit and when Monsanto's shit showed up in his crops (causing him to lose the organic label, a death sentence for somebody trying to sell organically raised crops as they are more expensive to grow than Monsanto shit) he tried to sue Monsanto only for Monsanto to turn around and sue HIM for infringing on their IP and ended up winning but off the top of my head I can't remember if he was forced to trash the crop or give Monsanto a cut.
Wait...lol wut? You're not serious right? 5 years ago we were firmly in PCIe territory, I should know as I have a couple of Pentium D Media Center PCs sitting at the shop and they are PCIe so its not like dropping a new GPU would take more than 5 minutes. Pop out old card, pop in new card, there ya go.
Remember unixsc we are talking FIVE years ago, that is 2007 NOT 2004. hell even by 2004 I was seeing a lot of hybrid where they had both a PCIe slot and an AGP slot, the Asrock boards at the time had both DDR 1 and DDR 2 as well as AGP and PCIe so you could use the parts you had on hand and then switch to the newer tech later. The ONLY problem I've seen is a few of the newer cards that are PCI 3.0 aren't backwards compatible with 2.0 like they are supposed to be but those seem to be the "OCed from the factory" boards which i tell folks to avoid anyway, just too likely to become unstable over time and to burn out quicker.
If you were my customer unixsc and asked about gaming I would simply find out your budget and pick the card that best fit that budget. If you wanted to spend as little as possible the HD4850 can be found on the web for as low as $30 and even though that card is considered legacy it'll play most of the games out there nicely, if not in full bling mode. Moving up from there in the $70-$100 price range is the HD7750 and HD7770, this card will play most games with high or near high bling and finally in the $130-$150 range is the HD5850 and HD6850, there is some argument over which card is faster but both of them are monsters that will just chew through scenery.
So I would argue pretty much anybody with a desktop that has PCIe can game, there are cards out there covering just about any price point and budget while letting you play most if not all the games out there. Its really a great time to game on PC, the hardware is cheap, Steam makes the games cheap, its just never been easier.
Why? Our border is such a bad fucking joke you could just walk a bomb across the thing along with the dope and slaves brought over it annually, they won't do shit about the scumbag companies that will hire Paco for $3 an hour and make him work in unsafe conditions (and don't give me that "Paco only takes jobs Americans don't want" horseshit, in my area construction USED to be a way a guy who wasn't cut out for college could feed his family. Now you can drive by any site and yell "Immigra!" and watch them scatter like fucking deer and guess who gets stuck for his care when the scumbag contractor puts his ass on a rickety ladder in high winds and he fucks himself up? That would be YOU through higher hospital bills) and they have completely wiped out several professions. Being an IT worker USED to be a good job but between H1-Bs and offshoring I wouldn't recommend my worst enemy go into IT now.
The whole thing is a fucking scam that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy as degrees cost us a high 5 digits to get yet they expect us to "compete" with some guy that paid like $5k for HIS degree (if he even has one, so many of those body mills just lie their asses off, you could ask for somebody with 40 years of.NET and they'd send someone right over) so nobody with a functioning brain will go into those fields because they see it ends up 400 guys competing with each other for one fake job ( see this video for examples. Once you know what to look for you can check your local paper and will find dozens if not hundreds of fake jobs) so the bloodsucking leech of a corp goes "See? We can't get somebody with a dozen degrees to work for less than the guy that cleans puke at the Chuck E Cheese so we NEED more green cards and H1-Bs! Sob!" and write a fucking check to our joke known as "public servants" and there you go, the systematic gutting of the American middle class.
Remember the words of Thomas Jefferson who could see this stuff was coming: "Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains."
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Actually its worse than that because the people you would THINK are using it "as a toy", your retirees, kids, etc do NOT use a PC like they do a tablet thus making Win 8 a failure for them as well! I should know as these folks are my bread and butter and NOT A SINGLE ONE uses ONLY one app at a time, hell even the little old ladies have their little chat programs AND their browser with multiple tabs going at the same time.
The problem with win 8 is they tried to make a "one size fits all" and anybody can tell you that one size fits all fits nobody WELL. The people who use it on a phone are gonna find the desktop stupid and pointless, ditto those on a tablet, while the desktop and laptop users are just confused and irritated because they can't even do simple tasks on the damned thing without fighting its cellphone design.
so I have to agree with the video in TFA, this is bad enough it deserves a product recall and I didn't even say that about Vista. With Vista by SP2 it was usable, not great but it worked, and even at RTM with some tweaking you could more or less get it decently stable and functional. i tried the start addons and the like and it still can't fix the fundamental stupidity, for example a start replacement can't do shit about how the settings are randomly splattered between desktop and metro. It also made some truly fucking retarded choices such as NO product key so if your hard drive dies? tough shit, get on the phone to MSFT as you can't even burn a restore disc with Win 8, its impossible. The whole thing is just broken, no other way to look at it, its broken.
That is security by obscurity and if you are gonna argue in favor of that you might as well go over to eComstation and pick up a copy of OS/2, after all NOBODY is writing bugs for OS/2!
For the rest of us there comes a point when all the bullshit isn't worth it, and I'd say having to run a VM, set up a shared folder for the VM to save any files you may need to download, and all that other crap just isn't worth it. if I had to go through all the bullshit of a VM just to surf then 9 times out of 10 i just wouldn't surf at all. Sure that would be even safer but then I'd miss out on the reason for having Internet in the first place.
But compare this to my method which I have not only been using myself but been giving to my customers including some that jack and squat about security, the kind that can't tell a good site from bad, a risky link from a non risk, how many infections have I had to clean? ZERO, zip nada squat bumpkiss. Sure theoretically there are exploits that can both get out of a sandbox and get out of low rights mode, hell there are exploits that can jump a VM as well, but from what i've seen they just ain't being encountered in the wild. Now maybe there is too many low hanging fruit for the malware writers to go through the trouble, maybe its too big a PITA to mess with, who knows. but I know MY method can be run by your grandma with absolutely ZERO training (since all you do is surf, everything is done automatically) and as long as I continue to get the results i have I'll stick with a low rights mode sandboxed browser, thanks.
That have a similar free app that will disable the touchpad while typing in Windows called TouchpadPal.
Oh you can bet your last dollar they are ALL talking to Google right now about ChromeOS and Android. There is not a SINGLE positive indicator with Windows 8, even with a $40 price tag copies have not sold for shit, PCs with Win 8 haven't sold for shit, yet will Ballmer listen? Nope because he thinks you can slap a paint job on a Pinto and make it into a Porsche and it WILL NEVER EVER WORK. PC buyers buy on price, did he forget his little "redhead goes shopping" ad they had for Win 7?
And as one of the usability experts in TFA said so damned perfectly PCs are a content CREATION as well as consumption device but Win 8 is strictly designed for consumption which people can do just as well on their phones or tablets. But this goes back to Ballmer's delusion because he doesn't understand that nobody gives a shit about Windows and its certainly not a brand that anybody is gonna pay top dollar for, it sure as hell isn't gonna make you feel all warm and fuzzy because you have...Windows. No its the programs stupid! The ONLY reason people use Windows is because of the bazillion X86 programs they have they want to run, year after year of Windows software that people DO care about, but which Windows 8 makes a royal PITA to use if it'll even run at all...sigh.
If the board don't stop hitting the crack pipe and wake the fuck up and fire Ballmer's fat ass they ain't gonna have to worry about what PCs the OEMs sell because their software? won't be on it, and can you blame 'em? MSFT under Ballmer is making their own hardware (like somebody we know) to sell in their own stores (I could point out what a ripoff this is, but who hasn't figured this out yet?) so every. single. dime. that the OEMs give MSFT is gonna be used to try to put them out of business...would YOU give a shit what MSFT wanted if you were an OEM?
Any retailer will tell you Windows has a "sweet spot" of $350-$650 and THAT IS IT. You can't sell touchscreens at that price and make a cent, not with MSFT gouging on licenses and putting out a royal stinkbomb of an OS. And now Ballmer thinks they are gonna clean up with a tablet that is twice as heavy and bulky as an iPad, is gonna sound like an F15 taking off, have shitty battery life, and oh yeah costs MORE than the newest iPad by several hundred?
The OEMs are right, all they would get if they cranked out high end touchscreen laptops is another warehouse full of unsold gear that is worth less every day, they could put them right next to those piles of Ultrabooks Intel convinced them would sell like hotcakes. WinPro tablet is gonna bomb HARD, it'll sell to a few business niches but not enough to make it a profitable line, and this can just be added to the 40+ billion Ballmer has shat down the drain over the past 6 years on failed ventures. Everybody talked about Elop being a mole but if I didn't know better I'd swear Ballmer was working for Google because he couldn't destroy MSFT any quicker if he took a flamethrower to the thing.
Funny Crosshair as I would say it is LACK of regulations that caused this mess. When the fed forced ma bell to open up their lines suddenly dialup went from an expensive hobby VERY few could enjoy to something so cheap many places would give you free time limited dialup in the hopes of selling you other services.
Then along comes Reagan and the DEregulators and suddenly it isn't illegal for these corps to just buy up the competition, or to buy services and media cartels that would put them in obvious conflict of interest and WHAM...now instead of competing they just buy out the competition and close it down or do like AT&T has done in most places which is divide the place up with the cablecos so they "cherry pick" the places they give a shit about and the rest? Fuck 'em if they don't like dialup. When my mom built her place she was less than a block from the cable junction, guess how many feet they've run since then? ZERO.
ALL of the places that have truly crazy speeds the lines were NOT done by private corps they were done by governments, either nationally or local co-ops. As we saw during the age of the robber barons a "free market" simply cannot exist as those with money without regulation will simply buy up all competition until they are the only game in town. And if the rumors are true that AT&T is thinking about walking away from landlines (since they can assrape much more with wireless than they ever could from landlines) then things will only be getting worse from here on in.
What we NEED is a national broadband initiative where We, The People have it laid down just like we had freeways built and then the various corps can COMPETE by leasing the line and selling us service. If they want a monopoly? Then they better lay FTTH to an area before we get there and they'll be given X number of years as the only game in town in return for laying the lines, otherwise they can fuck right off.
But we already tried completely unregulated markets, in the late 1800s you could do whatever you wanted, dump toxins, work children, hell there wasn't jack shit for regulation...what happened? A handful of rich scumbags got together and formed trusts and carved the entire country up. For a truly free market to work you'd have to have players that AREN'T sociopathic scumbags but history proves that is never gonna be, the more regulations you remove the worse things get, NOT better. Perhaps Cornel West can explain it better.
How EXACTLY were "Commercial game companies were taking advantage of Free Software long before most people ever heard of it or called it OSS or FOSS" because I've been gaming since the days of DOS and frankly FOSS had little to nothing to do with gaming then and little to nothing to do with gaming now. The closest i can come up with is some games have the OPTION of using OpenGL but that's all it was, an option, and OpenGL itself wasn't really designed for gaming in the first place (it was developed by SGI for film and TV graphics work) so I don't see how FOSS has jack squat to do with gaming.
I'd also like to hear how you expect triple A titles to be developed since obviously the blessed three don't work as you haven't seen squat from the FOSS community when it comes to top tier games. Its obvious that people want these games, they ARE a billion dollar business after all, and I'd love to hear how you expect to pay the salaries of a team of 100 for the 2+ years required to create a top tier game. Or do you expect us to take Tux racer and like it?
But I bet you won't answer because then you'd have to face the truth which is thus: There is a REASON why more than 90% of the software written today is NOT FOSS, and that is because more than 90% of the software being created doesn't fit into the blessed three and therefor won't get written under FOSS. Think its a coincidence that after twenty years the BEST replacement the FOSS community can come up with for Photoshop is something made by a kid as a class project? That is what Gimp is you know, it was written for a class project by a hobbyist. or the best you can come up with for Quicken/Quickbooks is GNUCash that doesn't even have 5% of the features of that which is supposed to replace? Because nearly all software written for the end user does NOT fit under the blessed three and therefor it will ONLY be written by some hobbyist if its written at all, most won't be written at all.
Yeah and it didn't work either. You can't take out an enemy by just throwing bodies at him if he has superior firepower unless he is suffering from severe ammo constraints or having a LOT of weapon failures and with the Finns neither was the case.
My great uncle was a marine during the Pacific campaign and he said what always disturbed him was how after one Banzai charge failed they would end up regrouping and doing it again sometimes in a different spot, sometimes they would be trying to charge over the bodies of the previous charge.
He said frankly when it came to the bases the grunts didn't even have to use their BARs or M1s hardly at all because he said "We might not have toilet paper but one thing we had a shitload of was the 50 cals" so they had those things mounted everywhere and on everything. Boats, jeeps, trucks, you name it there was one or more 50 cals on it and he said they had plenty of 50s manning the perimeters, which is why he just couldn't understand why they'd ever charge more than once. According to him he said those 50s would just obliterate an entire company in seconds, they would have every area with crossfire support and it wasn't even a fight, it was a slaughter.
To quote Mel Brooks "Bullshit bullshit aaaaannnnd bullshit". if you want a shortened way? Use MSFT, it even lets you be snarky as its the stock ticker and you can claim its because "they only care about the stock price instead of putting out a good product" so you can be just as douchey and stupid as you want and people will still understand WTF you are posting.
But the "M$" bullshit is not only from fucking DOS which hasn't even been a product for 20 damned years but it was fucking retarded even THEN. Its just as fucking retarded as writing "Lunix" and deserves to get fucking smacked down for being stupid. And read the guys post dude, i'm assuming you didn't or you wouldn't be trying to apologize for him because it was a classic FOSSie douchebag rant, no different than the douchebag Mac users that insinuate if you aren't using Macs you're either too stupid or too poor, or the Win 8 douchebags that insinuate anybody that doesn't want a cellphone for an OS is too stupid to work it.
But this is SUPPOSED to be a site FOR geeks and BY geeks and I'm pretty sure that in an article on Windows if somebody types MS everyone isn't gonna go "Why is he talking about Mississippi having a vulnerability?" but of course it was NOT about having a short way to type Microsoft, it was another coward that couldn't wait to wave his little dick and brag about his magical OS that he doesn't even understand. Magical thinking has no place on a site about tech and frankly that kind of horseshit needs to be nipped in the bud whenever possible.
Because hopefully in the office the air is filtered and you aren't practically soaking in cancer like you are in a Chinese factory?
Remember the REASON why so many corps moved to China is that they have practically ZERO worker safety reqs so I wouldn't be surprised that those that work in a Chinese factory at 20 won't be breathing their last breaths while riddled with cancer before age 50. Have you ever seen the list of toxic chemicals used to create a PC or a cell phone?
To say that its only about the money would be like crying "Why won't anybody take this coal mining job? what's a little black lung and cancer between friends?" yeah can't really say i blame the kids after busting their hump to get an education to not want to end up spending 5 days a week doing 12 hour days in cancer city, no matter the pay.
Huh...really? My bank doesn't do that as long as I use one of their ATMs. if I use somebody else's ATM I get hit with something like $3 for the transaction but if I use those connected with my bank it doesn't cost a dime. Makes it worth it to me to drive the 6 blocks to my nearest branch ATM than to use the one across the street from my house as i'm not gonna use up $3 in gas going 6 blocks.
Maybe you need to check around and see if any banks in your area have a similar deal because i don't know how many times i have told folks to take a good look at all the fees their banks charge and they find they were being nickeled and dimed to death. Mine doesn't charge anything for using their ATMs, only charges me a buck a month for the debit card, and that's pretty much it as far as fees go.
The moral of that story is don't use the large banks which I've found generally have shittier service and higher fees anyway. In just about every town in America you have smaller banks and co-ops and they not only have lower fees (my bank charges a whole $1 a month for my debit card flat fee) but they tend to have better service.
So just do your homework and I bet you'll find there are plenty of banks in your area that will be happy to take your business without screwing you on fees.
Not to mention we tortured people that anybody with a fucking brain would know wouldn't be told jack shit. We tortured the cab driver the Taliban grabbed and used to ferry around some of their high level guys...he was a fucking CAB DRIVER, do they think that the world works like a James Bond film? that the villain is just gonna monologue their plans to some dumb shit that doesn't have squat to do with anything? Of course not he was told "STFU and drive until I say stop" and that was it. It would be like torturing Romney's garbageman to find out what his campaign plans are, how the hell is he supposed to know this? You think he goes out for a beer with Romney or something?
And THIS is why i'm so saddened and disgusted by the people in this country not saying shit about Assange and letting our leaders keep him locked in a room in that embassy because you read the shit that was posted on Wikileaks and its pretty damned obvious that several high level members of our government frankly should be brought up to the Hague for war crimes. Its disgusting the shit that our government and those hired by our government have been doing in these countries, shit just as evil as during the worst days of the Vietnam war (which you noticed the press didn't make shit about the government FINALLY coming clean and admitting The Gulf Of Tonkin was a false flag) only now the evil bastards at the top learned from their mistakes in Vietnam and simply bought up all the MSM. So now instead of anybody saying shit about this stream of information proving multiple war crimes we get "Assange is a dirty pervo rapist who need to be sent to Gitmo". you know what? I don't give a rat's ass if Assange spends his weekends pushing little old ladies down the stairs as HE ain't killing thousands of people and starting shit all over the planet!
I urge everyone to watch the end of America by Naomi Wolf. She isn't some whacko here, she is a quiet little conservative Jewish girl (I personally think she is a little TOO conservative when it comes to the conclusions) who is now on the watchlist for daring to speak about our rights under the constitution. That's right folks, simply giving a lecture about what the declaration of independence and constitution says is enough to have you put on the list. In this video she shows several examples in history of free societies that became non free overnight, and she gives a step by step account of how it happens. She calls it the "universal playbook" that has been used by everyone from Stalin to Franco and watch how many of those plays are already either in motion here or have already been used. And one of the final steps she lists is a society creating a framework to where people can be tortured outside the rule of law. Why is this one of the last steps? Because it always starts small and gets bigger. Hitler started with only communists, Stalin started with the kulaks, in EVERY case she shows how these extra judicial systems grow like a cancer to cover more and more "undesirable elements".
so we need to seriously wake the fuck up, stop letting the MSM divert us with bullshit like Assange and start demanding that they go after the big issues like the tortures, bombings, and all the other nasty evil shit that has been and is being done in our name and with our money.
Because the carriers are gonna buttfuck us with ever worsening caps instead of spending any of their massive profits to lay the lines we already paid 200 billion plus to have laid down?
All this "in the cloud" horseshit requires that we have a steady, reliable, fast and CAP FREE net connection or at least caps that are sane and which go UP in time. What we are seeing is the exact opposite with many places giving crappy caps to start with and as they oversell the shit out of their lines the caps get smaller NOT bigger. Everybody said "Oh the carriers won't want to lose all that business with the 6 strikes law" bullshit the carriers WANT THE EXCUSE because it gives them a legal reason to punt anybody that dares uses even half of what they pay for since they can just say "Oh he's a pirate...what? Prove me wrong!" and will kick you to the curb.
All this cloud shit is gonna die a VERY ugly death as the carriers cut the bandwidth, in my own area the carriers steer the shit out of you, use THEIR VoIP? NO cap, Vonage? Cap. Use THEIR PPV? NO cap, Netflix? Cap. These carriers, who ALL have interest in media companies BTW, sure as fuck ain't gonna want people spending all their time on the net instead of buying TV packages so any of this stuff that they don't get a check from is gonna be so bandwidth starved it'll end up costing you more to play some game in the browser than it would to just go buy a fucking boxed game and have it shipped.
I have seen the future that this corporatism shall bring and it does truly suck. i know I ended up paying more in bandwidth charges than I did for the fucking games i bought during the big Steam Xmas sale, I don't even want to know how much of a bill I would have gotten if everything was run over the net.
Have you SEEN how shitty the air is in China? Where do you think that foulness is coming from? People are making the mistake of thinking like an American with our clean and more or less safe working conditions to those in China where its such a nasty grimy dead end job that they had to put nets around Foxconn to catch the jumping workers, remember?
Then you should be mad at the CC companies and banks who have been sticking it to ALL OF US whether we used cash or credit than to the store who is trying NOT to assrape you if you pay with cash.
The whole point of the suit was the banks and CC companies said "Fuck 'em, just raise prices across the board 3% and we'll BOTH make out" to hide the fees. Me personally I'd be MORE likely to shop there as I could always use my debit or hit one of the bazillion ATMs in town and not get stuck with the fees that we were ALREADY BEING SADDLED WITH thanks to these asswipe companies.
But you can get a similar advantage without all the bullshit by simply having the browser in low rights mode and sandboxed, this way they would have to both find a way to escalate the privileges AND get out of the sandbox to do anything.
As far as low rights mode browsers any of the Webkit based as well as IE will do (although I would be hesitant to use IE simply because of how big a bullseye is painted on it by black hats) and as for automatic sandboxing of the browser I'm pretty sure Avast Free does this and I know Comodo AV Free does this by default so its really not hard to run a browser securely without needing a VM.
Ironically many of the strategies that the Japs used against us that look so stupid now actually worked against the Chinese but the Japanese military doctrine was so strict and unyielding that it just didn't take into account how vastly different the situation with the Chinese was compared to the Americans. The Banzai charge would work against the Chinese because they were armed with bolt action rifles that weren't in the best shape to start with so the Chinese couldn't hope to get more than a couple of poorly aimed shots off before the charge was upon them while the Americans with the BAR and M1 could just keep pouring on the fire.
This was a problem the Nazis also ran into in Stalingrad where the Nazi foot soldiers were armed with K98 bolt action rifles and ran smack dab into entire companies carrying the PPSh-41 which could just spew lead and in the close quarters fighting made up for their lack of accuracy with just punishing firepower.
As for TFA considering how long ASLR has lasted without an exploit I'd say it held up pretty well but of course one should never put all your eggs in one basket and ASLR is just one piece, along with a good AV, sandboxing of the browser (the biggest attack vector IMHO) and plain old common sense, when it comes to keeping a system safe.
Especially for those of us that went AM3 as I built my system with a dual in 08, went to a quad in 10, and then finally ended up with a hexacore this time last year all while keeping the majority of my system along the way.
And you are right on the power draw which is why I tell those that are still on late model P4s or Pentium Ds that even though the machine may be working for them now its costing them serious money in the long run. The advances when it comes to power saving while still giving you the horsepower when you need it is just nuts, I replaced an office building full of Pentium Ds with Phenom low powers and not only did their performance more than double but it cut their power bill nearly in half. The deeper sleep states of the chips, the way the modern GPUs can lower the GPU and memory clocks when not being stressed, you are quite right that you can have a cool and quiet machine that still games quite well today.
But what clinches it for me and most of my customers is the price. I have been a gamer since the days of DOS and from 95-07 or so being a PC gamer was one of the more expensive hobbies, I know that there was one 5 year stretch there were I was replacing my system yearly just so I could play the latest games in LOWERED detail because the speeds were jumping so damned quickly. Now that a AAA title can cost up to 100 million to make we just aren't seeing those huge leaps anymore (and I doubt we will when the new consoles show up as its the cost more than the hardware that has limited game devs) it has become REALLY affordable to game. You can buy a card for less than $100 that will run most if not all of the games out there at the standard 1080P resolution with great graphics, its just not that expensive to be a PC gamer anymore.
Then you finally add all the non gaming features added to the new cards, the hardware decoding of all the major video formats for example which further lowers power usage by taking the load off the CPU, or how most cards today have HDMI so you can just plug them into any TV and have an HTPC set up in moments? Frankly there really is no reason not to have a discrete GPU in your average desktop if it'll take one. BTW if you ever want to have a killer HTPC file2folder GUI plus Media Center Master is the one two punch that turns any Win 7 PC into a kick fucking ass HTPC, file2folder GUI will set up the folder structure MCM needs and MCM downloads all the metadata from IMDB so when you fire up Windows Media Center and choose Movie Library it'll have all the artwork, synopsis, cast lists, it really makes a movie library from a folder full of flicks,just top notch.
First of all a public service announcement: To everyone that writes "M$" in 2013...This...Is...YOU! and this is what everyone sees and instantly dismisses when you write that lame ass M$ in 2013. You could write the most brilliant post in the history of Slashdot but a good 80%+ will NEVER read it because they see M$ and think "douchebag" and move on. So don't waste your time unless you want people posting your group photo as the very next post.
Second of all lets get something VERY clear for those that don't seem to understand how these things work, okay? ALL OPERATING SYSTEMS that would be what we consider "modern" are some of the most complex pieces of software EVER written, we are talking millions of LOC in the kernel alone and thousands of little sub-programs that ALL have to work in concert to give the user the illusion that its all one program that "just works". Is Linux even close to immune? Not only is that a big NO but to even suggest it is is a symptom of what is known as "magical thinking" such as "If you buy (product X) then you will magically be safe!". We in IT have seen magical thinking used to sell everything from OSes to firewalls to routers and reality will blow holes in that lie every single time.
So if Linux is vulnerable why don't we see Linux attacks in the news? We do only they are called "Android attacks" and in fact its predicted that later in the year Android will reach the one million infected mark which considering that Android isn't even a decade old is pretty impressive.
Look its actually VERY simple, and evidence has bore this out time and time again. Criminals ARE LAZY and want to do the least amount of work for the biggest bang so they want to go after the biggest targets to yield the most infections they possibly can. I mean writing a OS/2 virus today would probably be the most trivial thing in the world yet you don't see anybody doing it, why? Because the fact is even though eComstation still sells OS/2 there are too few using it to make it a juicy target. But the malware writers WILL go where the targets are, used to be it was always Windows, then Vista bombs and everyone in the press starts talking about how Mac adoption is climbing, what happens? Mac Guardian and Mac Defender. Android phones and tablets explode in usage, what happens? Thousands of Android malware released weekly.
So anybody who thinks their OS is gonna magically protect them from malware because "(product X) doesn't get bugs!" is merely deluding themselves with magical thinking. There are even articles that helpfully helpfully explain this and point out how switching platforms just for the sake of magical thinking (in the article OSX for Linux but you can insert any from and to in there and it still fits) just doesn't work. Be it Linux, Mac, or Windows you can find plenty of bugs, I could spend 5 minutes and cover this page in reports of bugs for all 3, I already listed the 2 biggest Mac bugs of recent memory, TFA is a Windows bug, and just off the top of my head there was the KDELook theme bug and the infected Quake 3 that was served up by most repos for a year and a half on Linux. NO OS is safe, NO OS is immune, and if you are gonna claim security by obscurity is actual security you might as well run Win95 or BeOS because hey, there aren't any bugs circulating targeting those OSes either.
Oh its worse than that now, in the old days you'd have one or two high level bug writers that could dig up exploits for major components like this, then there were the script kiddies that were just looking at what the last set of patches were plugging then writing a bug based around those patches.
But thanks to virus kits and a thriving black market for bugs what we have now is a variation of the smart cow problem in that by the time most companies find out there is a new bug targeting a critical subsystem its already been sold, added to one or more virus kits, and a dozen plus variations already are up and running in the wild. This makes it a LOT harder to plug a hole when found because it has spread all over the underground and is used by dozens of other black hats as the foot in the door to come up with a dozen other ways to get their payload ran. If a black hat had found this and sold it on the black market we would have probably gotten a half a dozen or more zero days out of it, using this hack to then target Adobe Flash or Reader or Java or who knows what else as they evolve the attacks so damned quickly nowadays.
Riiight, get rid of the people here LEGALLY and the fact that you don'tr actually have to pay insurance, workman's comp, or even minimum wage has NOTHING at all to do with it, right?
Horseshit, total horseshit. And look at the crime rates in those states that have the "open border" policy and you'll see for every guy that just wants to feed his family you get a dozen MS13 and La Raza members who are here to take everything they can and fuck your laws white boy.
So before you give us that same tired old "illegals work harder" horseshit maybe you should write a letter to the families of all the crime victims of illegals and take a GOOD fucking look at that list, every one of those people paid the price for your cheapskate labor, scumbag.
Well since I'm the guy everybody is responding to i think I can answer that and I would say Google falls squarely under the "selling support" category, its just not the end user that is being supported but the website devs and ad companies. They provide the infrastructure for Gmail, Google Play, Google docs, search and all the other proprietary bits that OEMs carry on Android phones and provide a way for advertisers to get to those eyeballs so I don't see how anybody could argue that Google doesn't sell support.
Also in their last SCC filing they made it quite clear that they are an AD company and more than 90% of their revenue comes from ads so I don't see how they could be argued to be a "FOSS company" when those ad networks as well as their search engine is built on proprietary software, the FOSS software is as another pointed out simply the bait to get what their primary goal is which is more eyes to see their ads. Any FOSS used is strictly incidental and unlike say Red Hat or MariaDB if you removed all the FOSS bits from Google it really wouldn't hurt them in the long run as they could just buy some company like RIM and offer that instead and not really have to change their core business model any.
Sorry I don't have time to look it up but I believe it was Oregon so "Oregon farmer sued Monsanto" or something similar ought to find it. In the case i'm talking about the guy was growing ORGANIC crops so naturally didn't want ANY of Monsanto's shit and when Monsanto's shit showed up in his crops (causing him to lose the organic label, a death sentence for somebody trying to sell organically raised crops as they are more expensive to grow than Monsanto shit) he tried to sue Monsanto only for Monsanto to turn around and sue HIM for infringing on their IP and ended up winning but off the top of my head I can't remember if he was forced to trash the crop or give Monsanto a cut.
Wait...lol wut? You're not serious right? 5 years ago we were firmly in PCIe territory, I should know as I have a couple of Pentium D Media Center PCs sitting at the shop and they are PCIe so its not like dropping a new GPU would take more than 5 minutes. Pop out old card, pop in new card, there ya go.
Remember unixsc we are talking FIVE years ago, that is 2007 NOT 2004. hell even by 2004 I was seeing a lot of hybrid where they had both a PCIe slot and an AGP slot, the Asrock boards at the time had both DDR 1 and DDR 2 as well as AGP and PCIe so you could use the parts you had on hand and then switch to the newer tech later. The ONLY problem I've seen is a few of the newer cards that are PCI 3.0 aren't backwards compatible with 2.0 like they are supposed to be but those seem to be the "OCed from the factory" boards which i tell folks to avoid anyway, just too likely to become unstable over time and to burn out quicker.
If you were my customer unixsc and asked about gaming I would simply find out your budget and pick the card that best fit that budget. If you wanted to spend as little as possible the HD4850 can be found on the web for as low as $30 and even though that card is considered legacy it'll play most of the games out there nicely, if not in full bling mode. Moving up from there in the $70-$100 price range is the HD7750 and HD7770, this card will play most games with high or near high bling and finally in the $130-$150 range is the HD5850 and HD6850, there is some argument over which card is faster but both of them are monsters that will just chew through scenery.
So I would argue pretty much anybody with a desktop that has PCIe can game, there are cards out there covering just about any price point and budget while letting you play most if not all the games out there. Its really a great time to game on PC, the hardware is cheap, Steam makes the games cheap, its just never been easier.
Why? Our border is such a bad fucking joke you could just walk a bomb across the thing along with the dope and slaves brought over it annually, they won't do shit about the scumbag companies that will hire Paco for $3 an hour and make him work in unsafe conditions (and don't give me that "Paco only takes jobs Americans don't want" horseshit, in my area construction USED to be a way a guy who wasn't cut out for college could feed his family. Now you can drive by any site and yell "Immigra!" and watch them scatter like fucking deer and guess who gets stuck for his care when the scumbag contractor puts his ass on a rickety ladder in high winds and he fucks himself up? That would be YOU through higher hospital bills) and they have completely wiped out several professions. Being an IT worker USED to be a good job but between H1-Bs and offshoring I wouldn't recommend my worst enemy go into IT now.
The whole thing is a fucking scam that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy as degrees cost us a high 5 digits to get yet they expect us to "compete" with some guy that paid like $5k for HIS degree (if he even has one, so many of those body mills just lie their asses off, you could ask for somebody with 40 years of .NET and they'd send someone right over) so nobody with a functioning brain will go into those fields because they see it ends up 400 guys competing with each other for one fake job ( see this video for examples. Once you know what to look for you can check your local paper and will find dozens if not hundreds of fake jobs) so the bloodsucking leech of a corp goes "See? We can't get somebody with a dozen degrees to work for less than the guy that cleans puke at the Chuck E Cheese so we NEED more green cards and H1-Bs! Sob!" and write a fucking check to our joke known as "public servants" and there you go, the systematic gutting of the American middle class.
Remember the words of Thomas Jefferson who could see this stuff was coming: "Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains."