Well I don't know why I was downmodded for pointing out the obvious, but as far as me when I had locked down systems I would use DVDs. I had the system set up so I could put in a password and re-enable the drivers for the DVD, then update through DVD. It worked great and we never had a bug.
Uhhh...and the ISP is gonna give a shit....why exactly? if its like most places in the USA they know they have you by the short hairs, where you gonna go? Shitty satnet? Assraping cellular? Most places have one, maybe 2 choices if you are lucky and the ISPs KNOW THIS. In my area they can assrape me with caps, CG-NAT and any other shitty thing all they want because they know its a choice of them or a 2Mbps on a good day DSL that the carrier (AT&T may they rot in hell) have made clear its a DO NOT FIX.
BTW all of those that have DSL? May want to be looking for an exit as the rumor is that AT&T is seriously looking at bailing on DSL. The reason being they are making assraping money on wireless and they don't want to spend any money upgrading the landlines when they can force everybody onto shitty data plans. Boy that "free market" really works huh? If they do pull out it will leave the cableco with a monopoly on landline Internet in many places and you think you are getting buttfucked now? Oh boy just you wait. Already mine has started playing "the cap game" which is REAL fun. Use their VoIP? No cap, Vonage? Cap. Use Windows all the updates have no cap, Linux or Mac? Cap city,use their PPV? No cap, Netflix? You get the picture.
Why was this labeled troll and not insightful? All these "gun laws" ignore a simple and obvious fact, which is this: Criminals? they don't follow your laws, hence WHY THEY ARE CALLED CRIMINALS!!!
Here are three little facts that blows these stupid gun laws right to shit, 1.- Biggest body count by less than 5 persons? OKC, weapon? Diesel and fertilizer, recipe can be found anywhere on the net. 2.-Toughest gun laws are mexican, can't own a gun legally there, are the criminals throwing rocks at each other? nope they are building technicals and have better guns than the Mexican military. Finally 3.- The surpreme court ruled in Gonzales V Castle Rock that the police have NO obligation to protect you, NONE. Hell they don't even have to show up at all if they don't feel like it. in that case the woman did EXACTLY what the gun law advocates say to do, she called the cops. when they showed up FOUR HOURS LATER the kids were dead, call the meat wagon. the court said that is just fine because the police are NOT THERE to serve and protect YOU, they are to serve and protect THE STATE. Their answer to what happens to you? DEFEND YOURSELF. How are you gonna do that without a gun? Throw a lamp at the intruder?
So I'm sorry but your own court system has said the ONLY one there to defend you IS YOU, the biggest body count by what we would call the "lone nut" didn't even use a gun, and the place with the toughest gun laws have the criminals ruling the place. yeah...I think the gun banners arguments are pretty fucking blown to shit. one final note, you have been using everything from milsats to gunships trying to stop drugs across the border and its been a MASSIVE FAIL, you honestly think guns would be ANY harder to smuggle than dope? An AK47 in the former USSR goes for less than $100 USD, a criminal will pay 10 times that...tada! You have dealers risking their lives for less profit margins than that, think they just won't go into the gun biz?
Superior? Can I have what you're smoking? The ONLY place where Nvidia is even or a little ahead is in the uppermost "no matter what the cost make it so" tier which frankly isn't worth as much as you think, because the vast majority won't spend $500+ on a GPU so they can be the top of some leaderboard a good 99% of the planet doesn't even know exists.
You see even in that top tier nvidia doesn't make as much because somebody at AMD had a brilliant idea when they bought ATI. They looked at the books and saw that a good 85% of the sales were right smack dab in the middle of the curve but they were spending most of their money to get to the extreme right of the curve and said "Hey this is stupid, design for the middle, add more chips to get to the right". So now instead of spending the crazy money like Nvidia does making an "uber" chip and then figuring out how they can cut it down to fit the mainstream and value markets AND at the same time figure out how to salvage the failed chips to use in lower tiers AMD simply designs a $200 chip that is easy to manufacture and easy to simply turn off some cores either in hardware or software to fit the lower tiers, and just add another core to fit the higher tier.
It is THIS reason why AMD ended up pulling a hat trick when it comes to the next gen consoles, if they would have went Nvidia even if they bought a mid tier chip they would have had this big bulky thing because Nvidia builds monster chips and cuts them down, whereas with AMD they could buy a mid tier chip that is designed to be a mid tier chip from the ground up, this equals less waste, less heat, less space, and less cost. So while AMD will keep putting out new X2s just to take the crown for a while each rev they will make more money than Nvidia because its simply easier to make a mid tier chip cover all tiers than it is to build an uber chip and scale it down.
Uhhh...Why have USB slots on the PCs in the first place? Its really not that hard to just epoxy some plugs into the slots in the back and pull the cable to the front ya know. Even if they did do what you say its still possible an enemy might in the future blackmail an employee into plugging a drive in, can't do that if its common knowledge there ain't no USB slots on their machines.
If it were me while I was at it I'd set a GPO blocking Windows from enabling any CDROM or floppy drives along with the USB drivers so even if somebody in some out of the way place cracked the case open and reconnected the headers it wouldn't do any good as Windows wouldn't load the drivers.
Neil DeGrasse gave a nice talk involving the theory of pan spermia and I have to say it makes a lot of sense. Mars was a wet fertile place for quite a long time before earth was, it was bombarded by large asteroids that threw chunks of mars into space, and bacteria can survive in a lot worse conditions than space and re-entry produce.
If you would have bothered to click the link you would have seen they were only rehashing what two major security firms were saying after taking a look at the code. Don't let that get in the way of your fanboi bleeting, don't forget to call it "M$" and scream about how much you love teh Google and teh FOSS for max whoreage.
The difference you seem to be glossing over is the man chose to make those recordings whereas stitching some old footage together to make the monkey dance so his old backup group can try to recapture the days they were getting big checks is...well its fucking sleazy.
I don't know why that was labeled funny, should have gotten insightful. When you look at what its system reqs are VS what its actually rendering and then compare it to the latest Unreal or Source engines its just not that great folks.
I've seen Doom 3 get a case of "the chugs" when a scene gets hectic but when you look at what is going on in the scene other than a few lighting effects its just not doing that much, certainly not enough to get a case of the chugs. The Doom 3 engine always reminds me of the CryEngine in that way, sure you can get a pretty nice scene made by using it but it'll suck more resources and will be more likely to bog than the Unreal and Source engine games even when doing less on screen than those 2.
There is a reason why everybody used Unreal engines all these years and the ID Tech 4 never got used for much of anything folks, its just not a great engine.
All jokes aside is it just me or is it sad we have to point out to fricking scientists doing these studies that "correlation does not equal causation" like they are noobs? I'm sorry but I find it hard to believe that any scientist is soooo dumb they have never heard that, so I'm wondering who paid for the initial study and what agenda were they pushing.
Sadly we have seen over and over again scientists are just as much for sale as any ad exec and for the right price will be happy to go along with whatever they are told. The initial study wouldn't happen to have been done by big pharma, who would stand to lose billions if people could feel good from a simple plant anybody could grow instead of getting from a pill by any chance?
It used to be said never blame malice what can be explained by stupidity but I'm starting to see a new trend, never blame stupidity on what can be explained by corporate payoffs.
There is kinda a big difference between doing a retelling of Bonnie and Clyde and say making a zombie Elvis dance like a monkey so some sleazy producer can wrong a few more pennies out of the property. Don't say they won't either because Elvis' old backup band was using a digital Elvis to "tour" with him, really sleazy IMHO.
Its the same old same, bad software becomes popular, we have to keep bad software,lots of fixes and band aids when what we need is to move away from the bad software, simple as that. Oh and FYI but according to ZDNet this is strictly a band aid and the actual fix could take 2 years and that is if no more bugs are found. What are the odds of that?
A better question would be when is somebody gonna step up and stop slapping band aids on the bullet wound that is JavaScript and come up with something better. JavaScript was never designed for security, nor really built for all this "Web 3.0" crap and the way the web has evolved either you fuck the website owners or you risk getting pwned. You block all ads with ABP like I do by default for my users? The rate of infection drops right off the scale, pretty much the only infections you see after that is when they choose to download something funky.
Frankly its time to come up with something new, something designed with security in mind and by default sandboxing that won't allow a single webpage to call 3 dozen other addresses just to build the page. HTML V5 is a mess and worse than Flash in every single way, CPU, memory, bandwidth, its just terrible, and you feel sorry for these little sites that say "please don't block us" but as long as they keep getting ads from third parties with no control or accountability what else can you do?
The mess that is Java is just a symptom of a much larger problem, that website builders want and need to do more than plain JavaScript can do but at the same time the way you can just drop a link into any website and have it call up a malware server halfway around the world and have it dump shit right onto your PC is totally fucked up. We sent guys to the fricking moon, surely we can come up with a new language that will give website builders the tools they need without making it so damned easy to infect a machine.
You are welcome and the only advice I would add is thus: If you DO buy the unit you might want to think about upgrading with the fastest RAM the unit will take which IIRC is 1333. The reason why is because RAM is quite cheap now (I maxed my fusion netbook out with 8GB of 1333 for just $40) and you really can tell a difference when it comes to performance since the Fusion line has the CPU and GPU both using the same memory.
That said if its for your mom it will probably be several orders of magnitude faster than she will ever need anyway. The 1.5GHz quad will speed up to a 2.4GHz dual when under single threaded loads and it handles great, both customers are VERY happy with it. As I said one is gaming with it and the other comes home from work and plugs it into his widescreen TV along with a Lenovo mini-remote and uses it as a full blown HTPC, does the job just great. It really is a nice laptop and at $400 its a steal.
Weeellll...The problem I have is while Abe Lincoln Vamp Hunter made Lincoln out to be cool, you could destroy a person's previous rep REAL quick by just filling the channel with Schlock. How many of the kids today have seen any of Monroe's work? Now imagine the new digital Monroe becomes a queen of the gangbang movie? A Zombie Elvis forced to sing with Marilyn Manson, even though Elvis never cursed in his movies or songs?
There needs to be some sort of standards or a long enough time limit that the majority will no longer be known artists but historical figures, otherwise once this tech gets cheap (and it will) you'll have scummy producers getting "star power" by ruining the reps of the dead who can't even fight back. To me its just a little too close to grave robbing, like digging up their bodies to stick them in a sideshow. Imagine how Brandon Lee's kid would feel to see a digital daddy, complete with bullet holes and decay, being the "lead" in a zombified Crow remake.
Did not read before posting, did you? if you had you would have seen I said quite clearly it was NOT directed at you but the blatant hypocrisy of the FOSSie faction. MSFT locks the OS through UEFI? "ZOMFG where is antitrust? Whargarbl!" Google locks THEIR OS with UEFI?/crickets chirping/
If I felt like bothering Slashdot has carried articles of Oracle and Sun doing THE EXACT SAME SHIT and the threads was FULL of FOSSIes having a royal shitfit, Google? The FOSSies trip all over themselves to apologize like a battered wife, "he don't mean it, he's just going through a bad time".
Nothing I hate more than a God Damned hypocrite and I hate to fucking say it since I really do loathe the man but this is one place where I give RMS credit, he has NEVER waffled and he pointed out when Google was being a douche just as he pointed to Apple and MSFT when they were being douches, its too bad that even St. iGNUcious can't get the FOSSies to quit fawning over Google like a bunch of 14 year old girls over Justin Bieber.
I'm sorry but yes there IS a lot of sleaze when it comes to networking, because I have seen guys who majored in tapping babes and kegs in college get sweet fucking jobs because they went to the same frat as some high muckety muck in the company and then I'd point them to a fricking awesome coder or a bad ass networking guy, someone who could do more useful work in a fricking day than the fratboy will do in half a fucking year, and they not even get a shot because they don't know the "right" people.
Call me naive, call me a fool, but I think you should be hired based on your talent and whether you are right for the job NOT based on you kissing the right ass. Its bullshit like "networking" that makes companies into Dilbert spoofs, filled with PHBs and lazy Wally types because they knew the right ass to kiss to get the job.
Then you had NO RIGHT to bitch about Open Office or Java or anything else that tells you to piss off when it comes to user contributions, after all you have the source so you can just fork it!
Wanna know why I hate FOSSies? Its THIS, this right here, the blatant hypocrisy that runs through the community like a cancer. Its total fangirl bullshit, some companies are labeled "good" no matter what they do, some are labeled evil, again no matter what they do, and logic and evidence? has no place in hypocrisy land. I could find article after article nailing Sun and Oracle for the EXACT SAME SHIT that Google is doing, but because Google pays a little lip service to FOSS and says "do no evil" the FOSSies will find ANY excuse they can to cover bad behavior by Google, even when the same behavior is condemned when others do it.
Nothing I hate worse than fucking hypocrites and that isn't aimed at you, its aimed at the FOSSies that have a screaming shitfit if anybody but Google were to pull this crap. Look at how they screamed bloody murder at MSFT and SecureBoot, checked the new ChromeBooks? They locked the bootloader, you can't do shit without a shitload of CLI hacking to get around the locked boot, hear them scream? Nope, because Google is God and can do anything, fucking hypocrites.
Well I'm of 2 minds on this. On the one hand yes copyrights are stupid and a waste now, they should go back to the original terms set forth by the founding fathers. if you can't make money off an idea in 25 years you suck at business and somebody else needs to have a shot at it.
That said the "Zombie Tu Pac" thing has me kinda disturbed. Originally I thought "25 years and that it" but imagine if this tech continues to get better, how would say the family of Monroe like it if they put a digital her in a gangbang or torture porn like A Serbian Film? While I'm all for copyrights ending in a decent period of time I think likenesses should be a different story as it will soon be possible to completely obliterate someone's legacy by cranking out new schlock using a digital version of them and if they are dead they can't even fight back.
So as long as a person's likeness is considered trademark and not copyright and is protected from being exploited by tech I'd be happy to support copyrights going back to the original 25 years.
Actually its such a failwhale I seriously doubt it'll even get third, more likely a distant fourth. first will be either iOS or Android 4, next will be the one of those two who doesn't have the top spot that week, followed by Android 2.x which while starting to finally die out still has a pretty good share, and finally MSFT WinRT. Honestly if you count the Symbian units still being sold most likely MSFT would make fifth since the sales of Surface are so bad they had to cut their order in half and it looks like they sold less than a million units for the fourth quarter, that is just terrible numbers.
Seriously how many negative indicators is it gonna take for the board to put down the crack pipe and fire the Ballmernator? The man has wasted something like 40 BILLION in the past 6 years on failed ventures, his few successes certainly haven't even wiped all the red ink from his bad moves, much less made a profit, honestly they would have had a better return with no strategy at all, just putting the money into T-Bills or blue chip stocks. When even Forbes is calling the 00s "MSFT's lost decade" and naming the Ballmernator worst CEO, how much more proof do you really need? the man is an unmitigated disaster and I bet if you compared how much money the Pepsi guy lost for Apple with what Ballmer has blown on harebrained ideas like Zune, Kin, Sidekick, Bing, etc Ballmer would make the Pepsi guy look like Steve jobs, he is THAT bad.
Except this "option" will take a good $150+ out of your wallet. let us be glad that AMD is still in the game and for the vast majority the chips they make are long past "good enough" because i don't know about everybody else but i don't want to end up stuck with an overpriced "feature" I'll never use, an OS that I think is a step backwards, and the whole thing made to please Wall street and not me.
You can get a really nice AMD Fusion quad laptop for around $400, picked up a couple for customers and I have to say they are pretty damned nice. Build quality was good, the new turbocore on both the CPU and GPU allowed the system to behave like a really fast single or dual on lightly threaded loads, played 1080P over HDMI smooth as butter, and one of the two customers has moved most of his Steam games over to it and is VERY pleased with the framerate and picture quality in his games. And I even found them with Windows 7 instead of "LOL I Iz a Cellphone LOL" Metrosexual. If anybody is looking for a laptop I'd highly recommend them, here is the link and it actually comes with 1600x900 instead of 1366x768, never thought I'd see another budget laptop with anything higher than 1366.
But touch on a convertible is fine, touch on a laptop is dumb. Most folks sit them on a desk which makes poking the screen uncomfortable as hell after a little while, why MSFT insists that they can push touch on anything you don't hold like a book is beyond me,stupid is as stupid does I suppose.
We in the USA control most of the guts the Internet runs on like DNS and as you saw with NZ American money buys politicians just as good over there as it does over here. Anybody who thinks the reach of the multinationals ends at any border is just delusional, as Thomas Jefferson wrote: "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." and if you think they will keep their fucking and penny squeezing confined to the USA, which they frankly have already just about bled dry? Well I have a bridge you might be interested in, it goes to nowhere so has really low wear!
Good Lord you can't even get the fucking lingo right with it staring you in the face. For your complete fangirl failure here is your sign and so you might actually learn something here is the definition so you may at least learn from your fail.
Uhhh..the one I was responding to said "Win 8 and IE are design choices" implying its a personal taste kinda thing, sorry if it looked like I was responding directly to you but everybody knows/. when it comes to layout be fucked up. But I was simply pointing out that it is NOT a "personal taste thing" if your UI is completely non-intuitive and non-discoverable because ultimately the UI is NOT about going "Look at how fucking brilliant I am! LOVE ME LIKE APPLE!" but letting the users actually get to what they need for work or play and after the shining brilliance of Win 7, which honestly was the first one since Win2K that actually impressed me, to go backwards 25 years to one program at a time and primary colors and the "learn this cheat sheet" keyboard commands was just fucking astounding in its levels of fail. While I agree with everything you said running a little shop I have a much better test, its called "can the average person walking through my door use this?" and with all Windows pre 8, along with OSX, iOS, and Android the answer was "yes they can".
As for IE I don't give a rat's ass if they made it safe as houses, they broke the cardinal rule as far as I am concerned by not backporting. MSFT may be under the delusion that when someone goes to buy a PC they throw away every PC in their home and buy all new computers with the latest hotness but I can tell you that is FAR from the truth. What actually happens is they upgrade in stages, usually the laptop wears out first and then once they have gotten a feel for the new OS in the laptop they then want the desktop in the den replaced so they can have the same experience in both machines. By not backporting to their STILL SUPPORTED OSes they have made it so the first thing I do on a new install is remove the IE icons and replace the browser with Dragon and IceDragon (I like the better security features and it integrates nicely with Comodo AV sandboxing) because otherwise I get pissed off customers because in this day and age folks are simply used to having one browser work multiple places and to suddenly have to use different browsers with different UIs based on what version of the OS you have? Really don't cut it. To steal a line from Tron Legacy "I stand for the users" and its my job to make things as easy and comfortable as possible and having such a wide difference between XP/Vista/7/8 really don't cut it anymore.
And while I agree about WinXP for fucks sake Vista is built on the new design and supported for another 4 years, they really have no excuse. Hell if folks wouldn't have pitched a shitfit the version of IE built for Win 8 (IE 11? 12? Can't remember off the top of my head) wouldn't have been backported either! That is just fucking lazy or retarded, whether you choose to believe the IE team is too lazy to backport or so retarded that they think withholding IE will force the corps to take Win 8 when the Win 7 rollouts just started in earnest is you choice, either way IE firmly in the "do not ever use" column as far as my users are concerned. Of course some may be thinking I'm biased in this as MSFT fucking killed Internet TV in Win 7 on the month before Win 8 release day, wouldn't be trying to cripple Win 7 to make Win 8 look better there would ya MSFT?
Finally as far as one browser to rule them all. History, repeat, doomed. Has everyone forgotten IE 6? How a zero day would spread like fucking skynet across the globe because everybody and their dog and their dog's rubber bone ALL had the same version of IE? It was a BAD idea when MSFT pushed it and they deserved to be spanked by antitrust, its a bad idea when Google does it with browsers being redirected into shitty mode if they ain't Webkit and they deserve an antitrust spanking as well. I give NO company a pass because of their name, the fangirls can boo all the fucking want but if a practice is shitty or a product terrible? I WILL call you out, period.
Uhhh...since when does having a non mainline spin off count as being "open to user additions"? Has the world suddenly gone crazy or is this just another "We let them get away with it because they are Google and said 'do no evil' which we totally bought" kinda thing? That would be like saying "Oh anybody can contribute to Solaris, here is Open Indiana!"...well does the mainline users get their code from Open Indiana? No. Does the mainline branch take all their code from Open Indiana, like how Red Hat uses Fedora as a testing ground? No. Well then they ain't contributing to the mainline project are they?
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Well I don't know why I was downmodded for pointing out the obvious, but as far as me when I had locked down systems I would use DVDs. I had the system set up so I could put in a password and re-enable the drivers for the DVD, then update through DVD. It worked great and we never had a bug.
Uhhh...and the ISP is gonna give a shit....why exactly? if its like most places in the USA they know they have you by the short hairs, where you gonna go? Shitty satnet? Assraping cellular? Most places have one, maybe 2 choices if you are lucky and the ISPs KNOW THIS. In my area they can assrape me with caps, CG-NAT and any other shitty thing all they want because they know its a choice of them or a 2Mbps on a good day DSL that the carrier (AT&T may they rot in hell) have made clear its a DO NOT FIX.
BTW all of those that have DSL? May want to be looking for an exit as the rumor is that AT&T is seriously looking at bailing on DSL. The reason being they are making assraping money on wireless and they don't want to spend any money upgrading the landlines when they can force everybody onto shitty data plans. Boy that "free market" really works huh? If they do pull out it will leave the cableco with a monopoly on landline Internet in many places and you think you are getting buttfucked now? Oh boy just you wait. Already mine has started playing "the cap game" which is REAL fun. Use their VoIP? No cap, Vonage? Cap. Use Windows all the updates have no cap, Linux or Mac? Cap city,use their PPV? No cap, Netflix? You get the picture.
Why was this labeled troll and not insightful? All these "gun laws" ignore a simple and obvious fact, which is this: Criminals? they don't follow your laws, hence WHY THEY ARE CALLED CRIMINALS!!!
Here are three little facts that blows these stupid gun laws right to shit, 1.- Biggest body count by less than 5 persons? OKC, weapon? Diesel and fertilizer, recipe can be found anywhere on the net. 2.-Toughest gun laws are mexican, can't own a gun legally there, are the criminals throwing rocks at each other? nope they are building technicals and have better guns than the Mexican military. Finally 3.- The surpreme court ruled in Gonzales V Castle Rock that the police have NO obligation to protect you, NONE. Hell they don't even have to show up at all if they don't feel like it. in that case the woman did EXACTLY what the gun law advocates say to do, she called the cops. when they showed up FOUR HOURS LATER the kids were dead, call the meat wagon. the court said that is just fine because the police are NOT THERE to serve and protect YOU, they are to serve and protect THE STATE. Their answer to what happens to you? DEFEND YOURSELF. How are you gonna do that without a gun? Throw a lamp at the intruder?
So I'm sorry but your own court system has said the ONLY one there to defend you IS YOU, the biggest body count by what we would call the "lone nut" didn't even use a gun, and the place with the toughest gun laws have the criminals ruling the place. yeah...I think the gun banners arguments are pretty fucking blown to shit. one final note, you have been using everything from milsats to gunships trying to stop drugs across the border and its been a MASSIVE FAIL, you honestly think guns would be ANY harder to smuggle than dope? An AK47 in the former USSR goes for less than $100 USD, a criminal will pay 10 times that...tada! You have dealers risking their lives for less profit margins than that, think they just won't go into the gun biz?
Superior? Can I have what you're smoking? The ONLY place where Nvidia is even or a little ahead is in the uppermost "no matter what the cost make it so" tier which frankly isn't worth as much as you think, because the vast majority won't spend $500+ on a GPU so they can be the top of some leaderboard a good 99% of the planet doesn't even know exists.
You see even in that top tier nvidia doesn't make as much because somebody at AMD had a brilliant idea when they bought ATI. They looked at the books and saw that a good 85% of the sales were right smack dab in the middle of the curve but they were spending most of their money to get to the extreme right of the curve and said "Hey this is stupid, design for the middle, add more chips to get to the right". So now instead of spending the crazy money like Nvidia does making an "uber" chip and then figuring out how they can cut it down to fit the mainstream and value markets AND at the same time figure out how to salvage the failed chips to use in lower tiers AMD simply designs a $200 chip that is easy to manufacture and easy to simply turn off some cores either in hardware or software to fit the lower tiers, and just add another core to fit the higher tier.
It is THIS reason why AMD ended up pulling a hat trick when it comes to the next gen consoles, if they would have went Nvidia even if they bought a mid tier chip they would have had this big bulky thing because Nvidia builds monster chips and cuts them down, whereas with AMD they could buy a mid tier chip that is designed to be a mid tier chip from the ground up, this equals less waste, less heat, less space, and less cost. So while AMD will keep putting out new X2s just to take the crown for a while each rev they will make more money than Nvidia because its simply easier to make a mid tier chip cover all tiers than it is to build an uber chip and scale it down.
Uhhh...Why have USB slots on the PCs in the first place? Its really not that hard to just epoxy some plugs into the slots in the back and pull the cable to the front ya know. Even if they did do what you say its still possible an enemy might in the future blackmail an employee into plugging a drive in, can't do that if its common knowledge there ain't no USB slots on their machines.
If it were me while I was at it I'd set a GPO blocking Windows from enabling any CDROM or floppy drives along with the USB drivers so even if somebody in some out of the way place cracked the case open and reconnected the headers it wouldn't do any good as Windows wouldn't load the drivers.
Neil DeGrasse gave a nice talk involving the theory of pan spermia and I have to say it makes a lot of sense. Mars was a wet fertile place for quite a long time before earth was, it was bombarded by large asteroids that threw chunks of mars into space, and bacteria can survive in a lot worse conditions than space and re-entry produce.
If you would have bothered to click the link you would have seen they were only rehashing what two major security firms were saying after taking a look at the code. Don't let that get in the way of your fanboi bleeting, don't forget to call it "M$" and scream about how much you love teh Google and teh FOSS for max whoreage.
The difference you seem to be glossing over is the man chose to make those recordings whereas stitching some old footage together to make the monkey dance so his old backup group can try to recapture the days they were getting big checks is...well its fucking sleazy.
I don't know why that was labeled funny, should have gotten insightful. When you look at what its system reqs are VS what its actually rendering and then compare it to the latest Unreal or Source engines its just not that great folks.
I've seen Doom 3 get a case of "the chugs" when a scene gets hectic but when you look at what is going on in the scene other than a few lighting effects its just not doing that much, certainly not enough to get a case of the chugs. The Doom 3 engine always reminds me of the CryEngine in that way, sure you can get a pretty nice scene made by using it but it'll suck more resources and will be more likely to bog than the Unreal and Source engine games even when doing less on screen than those 2.
There is a reason why everybody used Unreal engines all these years and the ID Tech 4 never got used for much of anything folks, its just not a great engine.
All jokes aside is it just me or is it sad we have to point out to fricking scientists doing these studies that "correlation does not equal causation" like they are noobs? I'm sorry but I find it hard to believe that any scientist is soooo dumb they have never heard that, so I'm wondering who paid for the initial study and what agenda were they pushing.
Sadly we have seen over and over again scientists are just as much for sale as any ad exec and for the right price will be happy to go along with whatever they are told. The initial study wouldn't happen to have been done by big pharma, who would stand to lose billions if people could feel good from a simple plant anybody could grow instead of getting from a pill by any chance?
It used to be said never blame malice what can be explained by stupidity but I'm starting to see a new trend, never blame stupidity on what can be explained by corporate payoffs.
There is kinda a big difference between doing a retelling of Bonnie and Clyde and say making a zombie Elvis dance like a monkey so some sleazy producer can wrong a few more pennies out of the property. Don't say they won't either because Elvis' old backup band was using a digital Elvis to "tour" with him, really sleazy IMHO.
Its the same old same, bad software becomes popular, we have to keep bad software,lots of fixes and band aids when what we need is to move away from the bad software, simple as that. Oh and FYI but according to ZDNet this is strictly a band aid and the actual fix could take 2 years and that is if no more bugs are found. What are the odds of that?
A better question would be when is somebody gonna step up and stop slapping band aids on the bullet wound that is JavaScript and come up with something better. JavaScript was never designed for security, nor really built for all this "Web 3.0" crap and the way the web has evolved either you fuck the website owners or you risk getting pwned. You block all ads with ABP like I do by default for my users? The rate of infection drops right off the scale, pretty much the only infections you see after that is when they choose to download something funky.
Frankly its time to come up with something new, something designed with security in mind and by default sandboxing that won't allow a single webpage to call 3 dozen other addresses just to build the page. HTML V5 is a mess and worse than Flash in every single way, CPU, memory, bandwidth, its just terrible, and you feel sorry for these little sites that say "please don't block us" but as long as they keep getting ads from third parties with no control or accountability what else can you do?
The mess that is Java is just a symptom of a much larger problem, that website builders want and need to do more than plain JavaScript can do but at the same time the way you can just drop a link into any website and have it call up a malware server halfway around the world and have it dump shit right onto your PC is totally fucked up. We sent guys to the fricking moon, surely we can come up with a new language that will give website builders the tools they need without making it so damned easy to infect a machine.
You are welcome and the only advice I would add is thus: If you DO buy the unit you might want to think about upgrading with the fastest RAM the unit will take which IIRC is 1333. The reason why is because RAM is quite cheap now (I maxed my fusion netbook out with 8GB of 1333 for just $40) and you really can tell a difference when it comes to performance since the Fusion line has the CPU and GPU both using the same memory.
That said if its for your mom it will probably be several orders of magnitude faster than she will ever need anyway. The 1.5GHz quad will speed up to a 2.4GHz dual when under single threaded loads and it handles great, both customers are VERY happy with it. As I said one is gaming with it and the other comes home from work and plugs it into his widescreen TV along with a Lenovo mini-remote and uses it as a full blown HTPC, does the job just great. It really is a nice laptop and at $400 its a steal.
Weeellll...The problem I have is while Abe Lincoln Vamp Hunter made Lincoln out to be cool, you could destroy a person's previous rep REAL quick by just filling the channel with Schlock. How many of the kids today have seen any of Monroe's work? Now imagine the new digital Monroe becomes a queen of the gangbang movie? A Zombie Elvis forced to sing with Marilyn Manson, even though Elvis never cursed in his movies or songs?
There needs to be some sort of standards or a long enough time limit that the majority will no longer be known artists but historical figures, otherwise once this tech gets cheap (and it will) you'll have scummy producers getting "star power" by ruining the reps of the dead who can't even fight back. To me its just a little too close to grave robbing, like digging up their bodies to stick them in a sideshow. Imagine how Brandon Lee's kid would feel to see a digital daddy, complete with bullet holes and decay, being the "lead" in a zombified Crow remake.
Did not read before posting, did you? if you had you would have seen I said quite clearly it was NOT directed at you but the blatant hypocrisy of the FOSSie faction. MSFT locks the OS through UEFI? "ZOMFG where is antitrust? Whargarbl!" Google locks THEIR OS with UEFI? /crickets chirping/
If I felt like bothering Slashdot has carried articles of Oracle and Sun doing THE EXACT SAME SHIT and the threads was FULL of FOSSIes having a royal shitfit, Google? The FOSSies trip all over themselves to apologize like a battered wife, "he don't mean it, he's just going through a bad time".
Nothing I hate more than a God Damned hypocrite and I hate to fucking say it since I really do loathe the man but this is one place where I give RMS credit, he has NEVER waffled and he pointed out when Google was being a douche just as he pointed to Apple and MSFT when they were being douches, its too bad that even St. iGNUcious can't get the FOSSies to quit fawning over Google like a bunch of 14 year old girls over Justin Bieber.
I'm sorry but yes there IS a lot of sleaze when it comes to networking, because I have seen guys who majored in tapping babes and kegs in college get sweet fucking jobs because they went to the same frat as some high muckety muck in the company and then I'd point them to a fricking awesome coder or a bad ass networking guy, someone who could do more useful work in a fricking day than the fratboy will do in half a fucking year, and they not even get a shot because they don't know the "right" people.
Call me naive, call me a fool, but I think you should be hired based on your talent and whether you are right for the job NOT based on you kissing the right ass. Its bullshit like "networking" that makes companies into Dilbert spoofs, filled with PHBs and lazy Wally types because they knew the right ass to kiss to get the job.
Then you had NO RIGHT to bitch about Open Office or Java or anything else that tells you to piss off when it comes to user contributions, after all you have the source so you can just fork it!
Wanna know why I hate FOSSies? Its THIS, this right here, the blatant hypocrisy that runs through the community like a cancer. Its total fangirl bullshit, some companies are labeled "good" no matter what they do, some are labeled evil, again no matter what they do, and logic and evidence? has no place in hypocrisy land. I could find article after article nailing Sun and Oracle for the EXACT SAME SHIT that Google is doing, but because Google pays a little lip service to FOSS and says "do no evil" the FOSSies will find ANY excuse they can to cover bad behavior by Google, even when the same behavior is condemned when others do it.
Nothing I hate worse than fucking hypocrites and that isn't aimed at you, its aimed at the FOSSies that have a screaming shitfit if anybody but Google were to pull this crap. Look at how they screamed bloody murder at MSFT and SecureBoot, checked the new ChromeBooks? They locked the bootloader, you can't do shit without a shitload of CLI hacking to get around the locked boot, hear them scream? Nope, because Google is God and can do anything, fucking hypocrites.
Well I'm of 2 minds on this. On the one hand yes copyrights are stupid and a waste now, they should go back to the original terms set forth by the founding fathers. if you can't make money off an idea in 25 years you suck at business and somebody else needs to have a shot at it.
That said the "Zombie Tu Pac" thing has me kinda disturbed. Originally I thought "25 years and that it" but imagine if this tech continues to get better, how would say the family of Monroe like it if they put a digital her in a gangbang or torture porn like A Serbian Film? While I'm all for copyrights ending in a decent period of time I think likenesses should be a different story as it will soon be possible to completely obliterate someone's legacy by cranking out new schlock using a digital version of them and if they are dead they can't even fight back.
So as long as a person's likeness is considered trademark and not copyright and is protected from being exploited by tech I'd be happy to support copyrights going back to the original 25 years.
Actually its such a failwhale I seriously doubt it'll even get third, more likely a distant fourth. first will be either iOS or Android 4, next will be the one of those two who doesn't have the top spot that week, followed by Android 2.x which while starting to finally die out still has a pretty good share, and finally MSFT WinRT. Honestly if you count the Symbian units still being sold most likely MSFT would make fifth since the sales of Surface are so bad they had to cut their order in half and it looks like they sold less than a million units for the fourth quarter, that is just terrible numbers.
Seriously how many negative indicators is it gonna take for the board to put down the crack pipe and fire the Ballmernator? The man has wasted something like 40 BILLION in the past 6 years on failed ventures, his few successes certainly haven't even wiped all the red ink from his bad moves, much less made a profit, honestly they would have had a better return with no strategy at all, just putting the money into T-Bills or blue chip stocks. When even Forbes is calling the 00s "MSFT's lost decade" and naming the Ballmernator worst CEO, how much more proof do you really need? the man is an unmitigated disaster and I bet if you compared how much money the Pepsi guy lost for Apple with what Ballmer has blown on harebrained ideas like Zune, Kin, Sidekick, Bing, etc Ballmer would make the Pepsi guy look like Steve jobs, he is THAT bad.
Except this "option" will take a good $150+ out of your wallet. let us be glad that AMD is still in the game and for the vast majority the chips they make are long past "good enough" because i don't know about everybody else but i don't want to end up stuck with an overpriced "feature" I'll never use, an OS that I think is a step backwards, and the whole thing made to please Wall street and not me.
You can get a really nice AMD Fusion quad laptop for around $400, picked up a couple for customers and I have to say they are pretty damned nice. Build quality was good, the new turbocore on both the CPU and GPU allowed the system to behave like a really fast single or dual on lightly threaded loads, played 1080P over HDMI smooth as butter, and one of the two customers has moved most of his Steam games over to it and is VERY pleased with the framerate and picture quality in his games. And I even found them with Windows 7 instead of "LOL I Iz a Cellphone LOL" Metrosexual. If anybody is looking for a laptop I'd highly recommend them, here is the link and it actually comes with 1600x900 instead of 1366x768, never thought I'd see another budget laptop with anything higher than 1366.
But touch on a convertible is fine, touch on a laptop is dumb. Most folks sit them on a desk which makes poking the screen uncomfortable as hell after a little while, why MSFT insists that they can push touch on anything you don't hold like a book is beyond me,stupid is as stupid does I suppose.
We in the USA control most of the guts the Internet runs on like DNS and as you saw with NZ American money buys politicians just as good over there as it does over here. Anybody who thinks the reach of the multinationals ends at any border is just delusional, as Thomas Jefferson wrote: "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." and if you think they will keep their fucking and penny squeezing confined to the USA, which they frankly have already just about bled dry? Well I have a bridge you might be interested in, it goes to nowhere so has really low wear!
Good Lord you can't even get the fucking lingo right with it staring you in the face. For your complete fangirl failure here is your sign and so you might actually learn something here is the definition so you may at least learn from your fail.
Uhhh..the one I was responding to said "Win 8 and IE are design choices" implying its a personal taste kinda thing, sorry if it looked like I was responding directly to you but everybody knows /. when it comes to layout be fucked up. But I was simply pointing out that it is NOT a "personal taste thing" if your UI is completely non-intuitive and non-discoverable because ultimately the UI is NOT about going "Look at how fucking brilliant I am! LOVE ME LIKE APPLE!" but letting the users actually get to what they need for work or play and after the shining brilliance of Win 7, which honestly was the first one since Win2K that actually impressed me, to go backwards 25 years to one program at a time and primary colors and the "learn this cheat sheet" keyboard commands was just fucking astounding in its levels of fail. While I agree with everything you said running a little shop I have a much better test, its called "can the average person walking through my door use this?" and with all Windows pre 8, along with OSX, iOS, and Android the answer was "yes they can" .
As for IE I don't give a rat's ass if they made it safe as houses, they broke the cardinal rule as far as I am concerned by not backporting. MSFT may be under the delusion that when someone goes to buy a PC they throw away every PC in their home and buy all new computers with the latest hotness but I can tell you that is FAR from the truth. What actually happens is they upgrade in stages, usually the laptop wears out first and then once they have gotten a feel for the new OS in the laptop they then want the desktop in the den replaced so they can have the same experience in both machines. By not backporting to their STILL SUPPORTED OSes they have made it so the first thing I do on a new install is remove the IE icons and replace the browser with Dragon and IceDragon (I like the better security features and it integrates nicely with Comodo AV sandboxing) because otherwise I get pissed off customers because in this day and age folks are simply used to having one browser work multiple places and to suddenly have to use different browsers with different UIs based on what version of the OS you have? Really don't cut it. To steal a line from Tron Legacy "I stand for the users" and its my job to make things as easy and comfortable as possible and having such a wide difference between XP/Vista/7/8 really don't cut it anymore.
And while I agree about WinXP for fucks sake Vista is built on the new design and supported for another 4 years, they really have no excuse. Hell if folks wouldn't have pitched a shitfit the version of IE built for Win 8 (IE 11? 12? Can't remember off the top of my head) wouldn't have been backported either! That is just fucking lazy or retarded, whether you choose to believe the IE team is too lazy to backport or so retarded that they think withholding IE will force the corps to take Win 8 when the Win 7 rollouts just started in earnest is you choice, either way IE firmly in the "do not ever use" column as far as my users are concerned. Of course some may be thinking I'm biased in this as MSFT fucking killed Internet TV in Win 7 on the month before Win 8 release day, wouldn't be trying to cripple Win 7 to make Win 8 look better there would ya MSFT?
Finally as far as one browser to rule them all. History, repeat, doomed. Has everyone forgotten IE 6? How a zero day would spread like fucking skynet across the globe because everybody and their dog and their dog's rubber bone ALL had the same version of IE? It was a BAD idea when MSFT pushed it and they deserved to be spanked by antitrust, its a bad idea when Google does it with browsers being redirected into shitty mode if they ain't Webkit and they deserve an antitrust spanking as well. I give NO company a pass because of their name, the fangirls can boo all the fucking want but if a practice is shitty or a product terrible? I WILL call you out, period.
Uhhh...since when does having a non mainline spin off count as being "open to user additions"? Has the world suddenly gone crazy or is this just another "We let them get away with it because they are Google and said 'do no evil' which we totally bought" kinda thing? That would be like saying "Oh anybody can contribute to Solaris, here is Open Indiana!"...well does the mainline users get their code from Open Indiana? No. Does the mainline branch take all their code from Open Indiana, like how Red Hat uses Fedora as a testing ground? No. Well then they ain't contributing to the mainline project are they?