Then they can't put fucking VLC on a LOCKED PLATFORM LIKE WINRT can they fucknuts? You want to know why I fucking hate FOSSies and look at them as mouth breathing retards? Well here ya go, so fucking stupid they can't even READ THEIR OWN LICENSE and understand what it is. You CAN NOT put VLC on a locked platform because its a COMMUNITY PROJECT UNDER GPL, how fucking hard is that for you to understand?
Let me spell it out in little words since obviously plenty of the FOSSies can't read or at least can't comprehend their own damned license, 1.-GPL does NOT allow the program to be locked, 2.- the program can NOT be offered under a different license without removing every single bit of code that anybody OTHER than the 4 guys that run the project contributed, which means 3.-You CAN NOT HAVE VLC under an appstore because appstores don't allow the "four freedums" DUH! It would be like saying I could just start distributing Win 7 bootlegs on a streetcorner because I personally respect the 4 freedoms...well who gives a rat's ass what I want when ITS NOT MINE TO GIVE and the SAME THING applies to VLC, because its a COMMUNITY project the head of the project who just got free money for writing an app he knows will NEVER exist can't change the license of VLC anymore than I can change the license on Windows, it DOES NOT BELONG TO HIM!!!!!
Christ no wonder FOSSies are like a damned cult, just like a cult they are too fucking stupid to survive in the real world without someone spelling every little thing out for them! How in the FUCK do you think that a GPL V3 project would be allowed in ANY way, shape, or form on a locked down appstore like Win8/WinRT? Because I honestly want to read this "brilliant" explanation on how one can completely ignore the 4 freedoms and still get the program. If you have figured out a loophole for GPL V3 please share, otherwise you are just too fucking stupid to live.
And to people that are into that shit they are BOTH torture porn, end of story. nobody gives a rat's ass about "intent" because if that's all the excuse you need there are plenty of sick shit in both the bible and the koran that i can start filming tomorrow that will be sicker than anything yet put to film, so just get over it.
Free speech is free speech, either you have it or you don't, and if you think because it was written ages ago gives it a pass? Well plenty of writings equally old that can let me make movies that will make Schizophreniac 2 look like an episode of the Teletubbies.
Apparently you don't understand the problem so I'll spell it out. I have a shop, in this shop LOTS of drives are coming from all over the place. Now I don't care about the data because they are gonna be wiped and put in systems, okay? What I NEED is as simple a tool as possible, one button is fine, no button is better, that I can pop into a big old tower I have sitting in the corner with a pile of drive cages in it so that it can give me a simple pass/fail on the drives, THAT'S IT.
So you see your "solution" is worth less than nothing, I'm not gonna RAID a bunch of strange drives and then try to sell the mess, okay? with Spinrite it didn't matter if it were one drive or a half a dozen i could just pop in the disks, tell it to do a single pass on all of them, and when the tests were done all I had to do was pop the down arrow and it would give me a simple layout of the drive with red marking bad sectors and blue marking clear, easy peasy and I could tell at a glance which drives were good and which were shit and THAT is what I need, not RAID.
Uhhh...did you not see the "2TB on both WD and Seagate are shit" part of the post friend? Who cares if its the same price if the 2TB shits all over itself and dies hard in 3 months?
As I said I got through a shitload of drives at the shop, here is what I have found, Seagate above 500GB-640GB are SHIT, WD above 1TB are SHIT, and with both the 3TB are strictly roulette, you might get 3 good ones in a row followed by 5 total shit, its completely random when it comes to 3TB
So sure if you don't give a shit about your data? Go ahead and get the 2TB but don't be surprised if its a paperweight less than a year after purchase. And buying two WILL NOT SAVE YOU as these 2TB drives can crap out within hours of each other, the QC on these drives must be just horrible. the ONLY 2TB drives were I saw consistently good, in fact out of nearly 30 drives i didn't end up with a single loser, was the Samsung EcoGreen. That is why I was so pissed when I heard Samsung was selling out as the EcoGreen was my "go to" drive for any system that was gonna get heavy usage as even though its a 5400RPM drive the 32MB cache is fast enough to even use as a boot drive and they could take serious punishment and keep right on going. In fact the system I'm typing on is my home system which is a 1TB EcoGreen for OS and 2TB EcoGreen for data.
But if you actually give a shit about your data I wouldn't trust either a Seagate nor a WD 2TB right now, WD drives are a LITTLE better but frankly not much when it comes to 2TB as BOTH have truly horrible failure rates at 2TB. As I said at 1TB you can buy WD and have a pretty good shot at getting a solid drive, Seagate you're not getting shit above 640GB that isn't a total crapshoot.
If it were me and I HAD to have a 2TB drive? I'd be scouring the web for an EcoGreen right now, in fact if you can find their 1TB or 2TB drives they are worth buying, solid as a rock and low heat/noise.
There is one MAJOR difference between Chrome and Dragon when it comes to Dragon and it is this: If you don't want to use Comodo Secure DNS? It asks you on install, simply say "no" and that is that. You can also switch it on and off at will in the options whereas last I checked there is NO easy way to just switch off the phone home in Chrome.
Now that said in the end you have to trust somebody somewhere to give you DNS, unless you are gonna run your own DNS server and not only is the Comodo Secure DNS pretty dang fast but I've seen plenty of times where it has stopped a page from loading because it had been infected with malware. Sure enough I would fire up a test box at the shop and let the page load and it was malware city.
But at the end of the day you can use as much or as little of Comodo's services that you want, its all easily switchable in seconds, and it fixes the two problems you were complaining about with FF while giving you some nice extras you can take or leave. If you prefer the Gecko engine they even have their own spin on FF called Comodo IceDragon. Its nice and has similar security features but it still uses more CPU and memory than Dragon proper.
At the end of the day I'm just a little shop guy that tripped over Comodo AV one day when AVG wasn't cutting the mustard and decided to see if they had more free stuff and found they had a ton and most of it was really good. Give it a spin, if you don't care for it just toss it in the recycle bin, no muss and no fuss. Oh and if you have to deal with infected boxes like I do might want to check out Comodo Cleaning Essentials, its free, gets rid of more nasties than malwarebytes IMHO, and also runs great on a stick, its a great tool to add to your toolbox.
Frankly the only real complaint I have about any of the Comodo stuff is they no longer support Comodo Time Machine, if you can find a copy it still works great on anything up to Windows 7 (as long as you don't have a dual boot, it won't screw anything up, just won't install on a dual boot) but they quit supporting it. Frankly if you deal with virus prone people its like a gift from the Gods, it lets you set up a hidden partition with daily snapshots (you can even lock a snapshot so you can have your very own OEM hidden partition, with all the drivers and software preloaded) so if they fuck it up beyond even booting you can tell them just push the home key on boot and in 20 minutes they are back up like nothing happened. great tool, damned shame they don't support it any longer as I haven't found anything that will let you make your own hidden OEM partition like that easily.
Way to ignore the facts, here are the FACTS. FACT 1, the "company" was made up of four of the lead devs of VLC, FACT 2, the "owner" was one guy out of dozens who had written code, FACT 3 the "owner" made it clear HE WILL NEVER ALLOW VLC to be placed in ANY appstore that "doesn't support the four freedoms".
So you can waste mod point and pretend black is white and straw is gold, but the facts are that with a "community project" if they didn't make every contributor sign a waiver that gives the head of the project sole ownership (which VLC most assuredly DID NOT do) then any place the program is ported to HAS TO support all the conditions of whichever GPL version they have the program under (which I do believe is GPL V3 which has even worse conditions than GPL V2) or the program can NOT be placed there PERIOD.
So make up your mind Ms AC, either the GPL can be ignored or it can't, which is it? Considering that RMS says Android is too locked down to be called FOSS do you HONESTLY want to try to sell us that the GPL isn't gonna have a problem with the locked down winRT? As you can see here there is NO place that it says you have to give them the rights to your contributions, and since it says quite clearly its a COMMUNITY project unless every. single. one. that donated their code agrees then it CAN'T BE DONE. To say different but be like me saying if I can get one guy on the Debian team to say "sure!" I could make a completely proprietary Debian, it don't work like that.
How fucking sad is it that the Windows guy knows more about the GPL than the koolaid drinkers?
I doubt it since I seriously doubt they'd even get what is supposed owed for the thing, as you pointed out mega-yachts is a seriously niche market to start with. Every one of those things I've seen its a giant monument to the rich guy's ego, they want it to reflect THEIR tastes, so I imagine the used market for these things is pretty close to nil. I wouldn't be surprised if the family puts out a few feelers to see if they can get more for it than what is owed and if nobody wants it then it'll end up with this "artist" who'll get the fun of trying to move this fugly thing.
Mind some advice? Install Comodo Dragon on the stick instead. Not only does it have all the same extensions Chrome has (since they both use the Chromium base) but there is but a single checkbox in options that says "do not check for updates" and once it is checked it will do just that, never check for updates. it also has the Privalert built in which lets you block tracking crap with a single click and the option of Comodo Secure DNS which will block many sites that have been infected from loading. Oh and no need to hunt down a "portable" version since they ALL have the option of being portable on install, just check the box that says you want it portable and point it at your stick.
I switched my portable FF for Dragon over a year ago and I'm quite happy with it, doesn't hardly ever touch the stick, has low rights mode which FF still hasn't adding even after 5 years, its just a really nice little browser. Oh and if you DO decide some day you want to update it Comodo almost never changes its UI, in fact since Dragon 5 (currently on V23) the only thing they moved was the dragon's eye from the right side to the left, that's it. so nice for those of us that hate having to play Where's Waldo with all the damned UI changes.
Actually I'd say its more like 100% that it will NOT get put on WinRT and WinPhone and it will NOT be because of MSFT, it will be because of a douchebag developer just like we saw when they tried to port VLC to the appstore and iPhone.
This is why I predict that GPL will be dead in 5 years for all places not connected to server space, the devs will have no choice but to either go with another license or get every contributor to sign a wavier saying the head dev has sole ownership of the code. Since the hardcore GPL zealots will never agree to that, and because none of the MSFT or Apple appstores will EVER be GPL V3 compatible, the devs will have no choice but to move away from GPL to something like BSD or MPL or Apache licenses.
Again look up what happened when they tried to port VLC to the Apple appstore, i'm sure the same douchebag that threw a fit then will again wait until right before its gonna launch and throw another bitchfit and make all their work for naught. This is a problem that has been plaguing FOSS for awhile I predict is gonna finally come to a head, on one side you have the pragmatists that want as many people as possible to use FOSS and then you have what I call the "FOSSies" that wouldn't care if only a single person used GPL as long as it was "ideologically pure".
At the end of the day NO GPL apps that aren't completely owned by the dev team will make it into the appstores, since they have no more right to the code than any of us here do. The appstores don't allow you to hand it out to others for free, don't allow you to load the code without jailbreaking, therefor its gonna run afoul of the GPL redistribution clause, simple as that.
Ubuntu 11 new enough for you? And again if you are so confident step right up and take "The Hairyfeet Challenge" where we will test the distro of YOUR CHOICE against Windows, the rules are simple,
1.-It has to be a distro touted for home users, no making your own or using an expensive enterprise product that home users won't have access to, 2.-It has to have at least 1 release out at the same time Windows Vista was released, that's Jan 2007 in case you are wondering, 3.- while you will be allowed to use any CLI tools during setup (since during that portion you will be the builder NOT the customers) you must then update to current using ONLY the GUI tools.
But you won't accept the challenge and we all know why. I can install Office 2K7 and Vista RTM, update both through ALL the SPs and patches and at the end? 100% working drivers and software with no exception. Your product? WILL crap on itself and die, again with no exceptions.
Dude just look at the feedback on NewEgg and Tiger, NewEgg especially because that is where a LOT of system builders buy their drives and they often buy in bulk. You'll see feedback like "Bought 10 drives, 4 failed OOTB, its been 8 months now and all but 2 are fails and the other 2 are sounding iffy" and "Bought 4, all dead in less than a year" and it goes on and on and on.
hell look at the sale prices man, if that don't tell you Seagate has a serious problem I don't know what will! So far I've seen the same drive offered in every single sale since BF last month, they still have plenty in stock. WD drives were nearly double the price, they were sold out and backordered within A DAY, when you have the word get around it don't take long for the system builders to all get wind and start avoiding the bad batches, hell that is how I was able to avoid most of the big Maxtor mess or 2002. Even tiger has to know it, they've been selling Seagate 1TB drives for as low as $50 on sale, but more than 2/3rds of their kits? Seagate 500Gb, NOT the 1TB. This time last year you couldn't hardly find any tiger kits that were less than 1TB, even the $150 AMD dual special had a 1TB, not anymore.
Because more recent drives, say made in the last 3 years (after Seagate started having major fails in the over 640GB drives) are frankly more about CYA of the OEMs so they don't have to pay for RMAs than it is for giving you useful data. read the post above you about the guy running WD Tools and having the drive supposedly "fix itself". I have seen this exact same behavior with SeaTools and most of the time the OEMs will insist you run these tools before giving you an RMA.
In a way its similar to the horseshit HP pulled when Nvidia had bumpgate, they would demand you run this "BIOS update" that only set the fan to run at 100% which would make the laptop sound like an F15 taking off but they wouldn't let you send it back because of noise and the high revving fan would keep the chip from failing until a week or two after the warranty went out. Its the same thing with the new drive tools, instead of giving you an honest report it basically takes the data SMART is giving, which is often bullshit as I've found some of the newer drives won't even report remaps until they get above a certain "threshhold" and then tells it to just use up all the extra sectors and ignore updating the SMART data. What you get is a drive that could be making noise like an angle grinder but which will report "100%" under SMART.
To use a/. car analogy it would be like an automobile manufacturer finding out its cars leaked oil but rather than have a recall simply update the car's firmware to say the car was fine until the warranty ran out. SMART was SUPPOSED to be a VERY accurate way to gauge a drive's health, for the past 3 years or so its just been a way to turn down RMAs.
Let old Hairy fill you in dbill, WD 2TB are shit, all Seagate above 500GB are shit, avoid both, simple. Don't ask me why but both WD and Seagate have had nothing but trouble with their large capacity drives, with Seagate anything above around 640GB is like playing roulette with your data, WD has 1TB down but 2TB are just as bad as Seagate. I go through a LOT of drives here at the shop and frankly the ONLY 2TB drives which were consistently solid were the Samsung EcoGreens, good luck finding one of those now but frankly I'd take a refurb EcoGreen over a new Seagate, yes they are THAT bad and I wouldn't trust anything I cared about to a WD that was bigger than 1TB.
So the moral of the story is stick with 1TB drives, yes that sucks, yes we'd all like more room, but are you willing to risk having that 2TB of data crapped on by the drive?
Look all I can tell you is what I've seen with my own two peepers and drives that the SMART was saying "la la la, nothing wrong, la la la" I'd run Spinrite on and the screen would be RED as blood from all the bad blocks on the thing. I could run a single pass with Spinrite and tell you in less than 10 minutes if a drive was good or if it was shit and I have yet to find a single tool that will do that today. As you pointed out all SMART is today is a con by the OEMs to keep from paying for RMAs, I too have had drives that were sounding like you'd dropped them down a flight of stairs and WD Tools would just make the drive lie its ass off, that's all.
So what we need is a tool that did the same thing Spinrite did on modern drives, just something I can throw into a machine, hit a single button, and come back in an hour and see whether its a good drive or a shit drive, that's all. All I've been able to find is either a bunch of CLI crap you have to baby and keep typing shit into or GUI tools that just spit back whatever SMART tells it, neither are any use in a shop where you got 40 drives sitting in a box you need to test.
He's never said but I'm guessing he's retired now, he hasn't updated anything since 06 so there ya go.
And all these PITA GNU-Tool crap don't cut it, I need something I can throw in a drive, hit a button and move onto the next, i just don't have time to sit and baby the damned thing and I couldn't care less about the data on the drive, all I want to know is if the drive is good or not, a simple pass/fail on the drive.
So whether Spinrite was snake oil on its data recovery? Fuck if I know, never used it for that. But I can tell you that lvl 2, where it just bypassed the Smart and did a simple read/write and report worked fucking brilliant. I could pop that into a drive, hit a single button and move on, when i came back i would have a simple graph that you could see instantly whether its a pass or fail.
Actually you'll probably laugh, but guess what my Win 7 desktop is? Vista Black, the only thing i liked about Vista was the Vista Black without all the see-through crap so I simply found a Basic theme that would give me Vista black and that's on everything.
And again if MSFT wasn't run by retards this could be an easy fix, simply GIVE THE USER CHOICE. You should have the choice in Win 7 to have it in XP Blue, Vista Black, or 7 Aero, and Win 8 should have those options along with 8 Metro. That way YOU could have what YOU liked and I could have what I liked and it wouldn't fucking matter what UI we used, its just a couple of reg switches.
How about simply having a checkbox that says "trust installs by this publisher" and call it a day? why not that? on the one hand i don't want to be clicking my ass off and on the other hand i don't want shit installing silently, so why not a compromise?
I don't see how you could say it wouldn't cause a planetwide problem when you look at how a single volcano created "the year without a summer' back in the 1800s. The problem wouldn't be the asteroid itself, it would be how much debris and dust it threw up that would screw up weather patterns.
Now if it hit in the ocean, which considering two thirds of this planet is ocean? Then other than the tsunami it probably wouldn't cause too much damage, but if it hit on land? Then i could see this thing throwing enough shit into the air to drop temps and cause crop failures which in turn could lean to some serious starvation and other calamities.
What you are talking about is commonly called the "War Of The Worlds scenario" after the Orson Welles broadcast that caused such a major panic and I would say that even if NASA had a 100% certainty that it would hit they'd not tell the public until something had been done to stop it or it was nearly on top of us for precisely that reason.
As K said to J in MIB 1 "A person is smart, people are dumb, dangerous panicky animals and you know it" and that is why you simply couldn't tell the populace about such a thing, because while an individual could understand and accept it the herd would go nuts, you'd have looting and suicides and just a giant mess on your hands on TOP of the asteroid problem. That is why I always laugh when I see Michael Bay's Armageddon, it shows everybody just sitting there quietly and watching the sky when IRL we'd be seeing cities in total chaos and anarchy left and right, the public would just flip their shit.
Funny but for me its been the opposite, its been Samsung > Hitachi > WD > Seagate. Now admittedly my customers prefer 1TB and above, never had a problem with Seagates below 640GB but those above 640GB, especially the 7200RPM 1TB and 1.5TB have had high enough failure rates I just avoid them.
Know what you mean about Maxtor though, those DiamondMax drives where failure city. The worst part was there was about a year and a half where the ONLY drives you'd find in an HP or eMachine were DiamondMax so I had to deal with a LOT of systems from those companies with dead drives.
Then you sir are either the luckiest bastard on the planet or haven't bought any Seagate drives above 500Gb, because I've seen so many dead OOTB or very soon after leaving the box Segate 1TB and above drives i won't even touch them anymore.
There is a reason this guy is asking this question, its because we are now down to just 2 makers of drives and the Seagates are Russian roulette with your data. Most likely he has seen that the new Seagates are selling for as low as $50 a TB online and wants more space but can see all the horror stories in the feedback and wants some way to help mitigate the risk.
But I'm sorry friend, the only way I've found to mitigate the risk is to avoid Seagate like an STD, even with WD drives often double the price of the Seagate, because while the WDs seem to have about a 1 in 15 failure rate the Seagates depending on the size (1TB-2TB the worst, 3TB better but not great) you are looking at as low as a 1 in 3 chance of failure. With failures THAT high, which frankly I hadn't seen since the big Maxtor mess of 2002, i just would avoid Seagate for anything i gave a shit about as its just not worth the risk.
Unless you are using SLC, which is getting harder to find and more expensive every day you are really pushing your luck. The problem is the hot/crazy scale when it comes to these drives, specifically the fact that nobody has figured out how to lick the controller issue. For those that haven't run into it yet (lucky bastards) the controller issue will cause a drive to suddenly fail without ANY warning and unlike how the SSDs are always bragged on to "fail safe" into a read only mode what actually happens is when the controller fails the whole drive is completely dead, it won't even show up in BIOS/UEFI.
So until somebody figures out how to lick the controller problem, and when they do the money they make will truly be insane, or come up with the idea that i have been advocating for years of putting a second cheaper ARM controller on the board designed to take over as a read only backup while you get your data out? Well I'd be seriously leery of trusting any data I cared about to an SSD, not without spinning rust backups at the very least. The controller bug seems to bite every OEM on the ass, I have seen it from Intel to OCZ and its always the same. Push the button and poof! Data all gone with the drive. And of curse since you can't get your data off or even wipe it you have to hope they don't send it to some third world country for refurb where they help themselves to your data. Because of this I don't think my customers have even used 10% of their warranties for fear of the data falling into the wrong hands, great for the OEMs which rarely have to make good on warranties, not so good for the customer.
And those building systems that want QA on their builds, people storing their family videos and photos, hell the list could go on all day. Problem is SMART got ruined by the OEMs, its more about CYA than actually reporting the truth and the only program that bypassed the lying SMART hasn't been updated in over half a decade and can't support newer drives.
There is NO "hope" involved friend, the EOL dates are published and right there for anybody to see. I get support until Apr 2020 on that Win 7 Home I paid $50 for and the Win 7 pro I paid $100 for to use in the shop. Show me ANY Linux that will give me the same level of support at anywhere close to that price point, just 1. you can't do it because it don't exist. Either you get on the horribly broken upgrade bandwagon or you spend $1500+ just to get what I paid $50 for and THAT is why Linux is stuck at 1% and even with a bomb like Win 8 won't gain a single percentage point in share, people would rather shell out over $100 plus my costs to go to Win 7 rather than take your product for free because its simply not suitable for purpose, end of story.
And I'm still waiting on someone to take the Hairyfeet challenge, 2 years now and not a single 'challenge accepted" if that don't tell you that in their hearts they know I'm right then nothing will.
Thank you. And notice that NOT ONE will put their money where their mouth is and take the Hairyfeet Challenge? Know why? because I've already tried it with over half a dozen distros and the results are ALWAYS the same, the Vista machine has 100% working drivers and software, the Linux system will 8 times out of 10 end up in single user mode (or black screen of death as many call it) and the other 2 will have major subsystems like sound and wireless trashed beyond recovery.
At the end of the day they are trying to force a server OS into the home user space and its just not gonna work, home users aren't gonna put up with trolling forums or learning a shitload of bash commands or googling for fixes like a guy that gets paid 6 figures to deal with that shit. I know quite a few Linux admins, that admin large numbers of Linux servers for a living, know what they ALL use at home? Macbooks, some have a Windows partition for gaming but they ALL have Macbooks, why? Because they say they deal with enough of that fiddly bullshit at work, when they get home they just want to push the button and "it all just works" which Windows and OSX does, Linux don't, simple as that.
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Then they can't put fucking VLC on a LOCKED PLATFORM LIKE WINRT can they fucknuts? You want to know why I fucking hate FOSSies and look at them as mouth breathing retards? Well here ya go, so fucking stupid they can't even READ THEIR OWN LICENSE and understand what it is. You CAN NOT put VLC on a locked platform because its a COMMUNITY PROJECT UNDER GPL, how fucking hard is that for you to understand?
Let me spell it out in little words since obviously plenty of the FOSSies can't read or at least can't comprehend their own damned license, 1.-GPL does NOT allow the program to be locked, 2.- the program can NOT be offered under a different license without removing every single bit of code that anybody OTHER than the 4 guys that run the project contributed, which means 3.-You CAN NOT HAVE VLC under an appstore because appstores don't allow the "four freedums" DUH! It would be like saying I could just start distributing Win 7 bootlegs on a streetcorner because I personally respect the 4 freedoms...well who gives a rat's ass what I want when ITS NOT MINE TO GIVE and the SAME THING applies to VLC, because its a COMMUNITY project the head of the project who just got free money for writing an app he knows will NEVER exist can't change the license of VLC anymore than I can change the license on Windows, it DOES NOT BELONG TO HIM!!!!!
Christ no wonder FOSSies are like a damned cult, just like a cult they are too fucking stupid to survive in the real world without someone spelling every little thing out for them! How in the FUCK do you think that a GPL V3 project would be allowed in ANY way, shape, or form on a locked down appstore like Win8/WinRT? Because I honestly want to read this "brilliant" explanation on how one can completely ignore the 4 freedoms and still get the program. If you have figured out a loophole for GPL V3 please share, otherwise you are just too fucking stupid to live.
And to people that are into that shit they are BOTH torture porn, end of story. nobody gives a rat's ass about "intent" because if that's all the excuse you need there are plenty of sick shit in both the bible and the koran that i can start filming tomorrow that will be sicker than anything yet put to film, so just get over it.
Free speech is free speech, either you have it or you don't, and if you think because it was written ages ago gives it a pass? Well plenty of writings equally old that can let me make movies that will make Schizophreniac 2 look like an episode of the Teletubbies.
Apparently you don't understand the problem so I'll spell it out. I have a shop, in this shop LOTS of drives are coming from all over the place. Now I don't care about the data because they are gonna be wiped and put in systems, okay? What I NEED is as simple a tool as possible, one button is fine, no button is better, that I can pop into a big old tower I have sitting in the corner with a pile of drive cages in it so that it can give me a simple pass/fail on the drives, THAT'S IT.
So you see your "solution" is worth less than nothing, I'm not gonna RAID a bunch of strange drives and then try to sell the mess, okay? with Spinrite it didn't matter if it were one drive or a half a dozen i could just pop in the disks, tell it to do a single pass on all of them, and when the tests were done all I had to do was pop the down arrow and it would give me a simple layout of the drive with red marking bad sectors and blue marking clear, easy peasy and I could tell at a glance which drives were good and which were shit and THAT is what I need, not RAID.
Uhhh...did you not see the "2TB on both WD and Seagate are shit" part of the post friend? Who cares if its the same price if the 2TB shits all over itself and dies hard in 3 months?
As I said I got through a shitload of drives at the shop, here is what I have found, Seagate above 500GB-640GB are SHIT, WD above 1TB are SHIT, and with both the 3TB are strictly roulette, you might get 3 good ones in a row followed by 5 total shit, its completely random when it comes to 3TB
So sure if you don't give a shit about your data? Go ahead and get the 2TB but don't be surprised if its a paperweight less than a year after purchase. And buying two WILL NOT SAVE YOU as these 2TB drives can crap out within hours of each other, the QC on these drives must be just horrible. the ONLY 2TB drives were I saw consistently good, in fact out of nearly 30 drives i didn't end up with a single loser, was the Samsung EcoGreen. That is why I was so pissed when I heard Samsung was selling out as the EcoGreen was my "go to" drive for any system that was gonna get heavy usage as even though its a 5400RPM drive the 32MB cache is fast enough to even use as a boot drive and they could take serious punishment and keep right on going. In fact the system I'm typing on is my home system which is a 1TB EcoGreen for OS and 2TB EcoGreen for data.
But if you actually give a shit about your data I wouldn't trust either a Seagate nor a WD 2TB right now, WD drives are a LITTLE better but frankly not much when it comes to 2TB as BOTH have truly horrible failure rates at 2TB. As I said at 1TB you can buy WD and have a pretty good shot at getting a solid drive, Seagate you're not getting shit above 640GB that isn't a total crapshoot.
If it were me and I HAD to have a 2TB drive? I'd be scouring the web for an EcoGreen right now, in fact if you can find their 1TB or 2TB drives they are worth buying, solid as a rock and low heat/noise.
There is one MAJOR difference between Chrome and Dragon when it comes to Dragon and it is this: If you don't want to use Comodo Secure DNS? It asks you on install, simply say "no" and that is that. You can also switch it on and off at will in the options whereas last I checked there is NO easy way to just switch off the phone home in Chrome.
Now that said in the end you have to trust somebody somewhere to give you DNS, unless you are gonna run your own DNS server and not only is the Comodo Secure DNS pretty dang fast but I've seen plenty of times where it has stopped a page from loading because it had been infected with malware. Sure enough I would fire up a test box at the shop and let the page load and it was malware city.
But at the end of the day you can use as much or as little of Comodo's services that you want, its all easily switchable in seconds, and it fixes the two problems you were complaining about with FF while giving you some nice extras you can take or leave. If you prefer the Gecko engine they even have their own spin on FF called Comodo IceDragon. Its nice and has similar security features but it still uses more CPU and memory than Dragon proper.
At the end of the day I'm just a little shop guy that tripped over Comodo AV one day when AVG wasn't cutting the mustard and decided to see if they had more free stuff and found they had a ton and most of it was really good. Give it a spin, if you don't care for it just toss it in the recycle bin, no muss and no fuss. Oh and if you have to deal with infected boxes like I do might want to check out Comodo Cleaning Essentials, its free, gets rid of more nasties than malwarebytes IMHO, and also runs great on a stick, its a great tool to add to your toolbox.
Frankly the only real complaint I have about any of the Comodo stuff is they no longer support Comodo Time Machine, if you can find a copy it still works great on anything up to Windows 7 (as long as you don't have a dual boot, it won't screw anything up, just won't install on a dual boot) but they quit supporting it. Frankly if you deal with virus prone people its like a gift from the Gods, it lets you set up a hidden partition with daily snapshots (you can even lock a snapshot so you can have your very own OEM hidden partition, with all the drivers and software preloaded) so if they fuck it up beyond even booting you can tell them just push the home key on boot and in 20 minutes they are back up like nothing happened. great tool, damned shame they don't support it any longer as I haven't found anything that will let you make your own hidden OEM partition like that easily.
Way to ignore the facts, here are the FACTS. FACT 1, the "company" was made up of four of the lead devs of VLC, FACT 2, the "owner" was one guy out of dozens who had written code, FACT 3 the "owner" made it clear HE WILL NEVER ALLOW VLC to be placed in ANY appstore that "doesn't support the four freedoms".
So you can waste mod point and pretend black is white and straw is gold, but the facts are that with a "community project" if they didn't make every contributor sign a waiver that gives the head of the project sole ownership (which VLC most assuredly DID NOT do) then any place the program is ported to HAS TO support all the conditions of whichever GPL version they have the program under (which I do believe is GPL V3 which has even worse conditions than GPL V2) or the program can NOT be placed there PERIOD.
So make up your mind Ms AC, either the GPL can be ignored or it can't, which is it? Considering that RMS says Android is too locked down to be called FOSS do you HONESTLY want to try to sell us that the GPL isn't gonna have a problem with the locked down winRT? As you can see here there is NO place that it says you have to give them the rights to your contributions, and since it says quite clearly its a COMMUNITY project unless every. single. one. that donated their code agrees then it CAN'T BE DONE. To say different but be like me saying if I can get one guy on the Debian team to say "sure!" I could make a completely proprietary Debian, it don't work like that.
How fucking sad is it that the Windows guy knows more about the GPL than the koolaid drinkers?
I doubt it since I seriously doubt they'd even get what is supposed owed for the thing, as you pointed out mega-yachts is a seriously niche market to start with. Every one of those things I've seen its a giant monument to the rich guy's ego, they want it to reflect THEIR tastes, so I imagine the used market for these things is pretty close to nil. I wouldn't be surprised if the family puts out a few feelers to see if they can get more for it than what is owed and if nobody wants it then it'll end up with this "artist" who'll get the fun of trying to move this fugly thing.
Mind some advice? Install Comodo Dragon on the stick instead. Not only does it have all the same extensions Chrome has (since they both use the Chromium base) but there is but a single checkbox in options that says "do not check for updates" and once it is checked it will do just that, never check for updates. it also has the Privalert built in which lets you block tracking crap with a single click and the option of Comodo Secure DNS which will block many sites that have been infected from loading. Oh and no need to hunt down a "portable" version since they ALL have the option of being portable on install, just check the box that says you want it portable and point it at your stick.
I switched my portable FF for Dragon over a year ago and I'm quite happy with it, doesn't hardly ever touch the stick, has low rights mode which FF still hasn't adding even after 5 years, its just a really nice little browser. Oh and if you DO decide some day you want to update it Comodo almost never changes its UI, in fact since Dragon 5 (currently on V23) the only thing they moved was the dragon's eye from the right side to the left, that's it. so nice for those of us that hate having to play Where's Waldo with all the damned UI changes.
Actually I'd say its more like 100% that it will NOT get put on WinRT and WinPhone and it will NOT be because of MSFT, it will be because of a douchebag developer just like we saw when they tried to port VLC to the appstore and iPhone.
This is why I predict that GPL will be dead in 5 years for all places not connected to server space, the devs will have no choice but to either go with another license or get every contributor to sign a wavier saying the head dev has sole ownership of the code. Since the hardcore GPL zealots will never agree to that, and because none of the MSFT or Apple appstores will EVER be GPL V3 compatible, the devs will have no choice but to move away from GPL to something like BSD or MPL or Apache licenses.
Again look up what happened when they tried to port VLC to the Apple appstore, i'm sure the same douchebag that threw a fit then will again wait until right before its gonna launch and throw another bitchfit and make all their work for naught. This is a problem that has been plaguing FOSS for awhile I predict is gonna finally come to a head, on one side you have the pragmatists that want as many people as possible to use FOSS and then you have what I call the "FOSSies" that wouldn't care if only a single person used GPL as long as it was "ideologically pure".
At the end of the day NO GPL apps that aren't completely owned by the dev team will make it into the appstores, since they have no more right to the code than any of us here do. The appstores don't allow you to hand it out to others for free, don't allow you to load the code without jailbreaking, therefor its gonna run afoul of the GPL redistribution clause, simple as that.
Ubuntu 11 new enough for you? And again if you are so confident step right up and take "The Hairyfeet Challenge" where we will test the distro of YOUR CHOICE against Windows, the rules are simple,
1.-It has to be a distro touted for home users, no making your own or using an expensive enterprise product that home users won't have access to, 2.-It has to have at least 1 release out at the same time Windows Vista was released, that's Jan 2007 in case you are wondering, 3.- while you will be allowed to use any CLI tools during setup (since during that portion you will be the builder NOT the customers) you must then update to current using ONLY the GUI tools.
But you won't accept the challenge and we all know why. I can install Office 2K7 and Vista RTM, update both through ALL the SPs and patches and at the end? 100% working drivers and software with no exception. Your product? WILL crap on itself and die, again with no exceptions.
Dude just look at the feedback on NewEgg and Tiger, NewEgg especially because that is where a LOT of system builders buy their drives and they often buy in bulk. You'll see feedback like "Bought 10 drives, 4 failed OOTB, its been 8 months now and all but 2 are fails and the other 2 are sounding iffy" and "Bought 4, all dead in less than a year" and it goes on and on and on.
hell look at the sale prices man, if that don't tell you Seagate has a serious problem I don't know what will! So far I've seen the same drive offered in every single sale since BF last month, they still have plenty in stock. WD drives were nearly double the price, they were sold out and backordered within A DAY, when you have the word get around it don't take long for the system builders to all get wind and start avoiding the bad batches, hell that is how I was able to avoid most of the big Maxtor mess or 2002. Even tiger has to know it, they've been selling Seagate 1TB drives for as low as $50 on sale, but more than 2/3rds of their kits? Seagate 500Gb, NOT the 1TB. This time last year you couldn't hardly find any tiger kits that were less than 1TB, even the $150 AMD dual special had a 1TB, not anymore.
Because more recent drives, say made in the last 3 years (after Seagate started having major fails in the over 640GB drives) are frankly more about CYA of the OEMs so they don't have to pay for RMAs than it is for giving you useful data. read the post above you about the guy running WD Tools and having the drive supposedly "fix itself". I have seen this exact same behavior with SeaTools and most of the time the OEMs will insist you run these tools before giving you an RMA.
In a way its similar to the horseshit HP pulled when Nvidia had bumpgate, they would demand you run this "BIOS update" that only set the fan to run at 100% which would make the laptop sound like an F15 taking off but they wouldn't let you send it back because of noise and the high revving fan would keep the chip from failing until a week or two after the warranty went out. Its the same thing with the new drive tools, instead of giving you an honest report it basically takes the data SMART is giving, which is often bullshit as I've found some of the newer drives won't even report remaps until they get above a certain "threshhold" and then tells it to just use up all the extra sectors and ignore updating the SMART data. What you get is a drive that could be making noise like an angle grinder but which will report "100%" under SMART.
To use a /. car analogy it would be like an automobile manufacturer finding out its cars leaked oil but rather than have a recall simply update the car's firmware to say the car was fine until the warranty ran out. SMART was SUPPOSED to be a VERY accurate way to gauge a drive's health, for the past 3 years or so its just been a way to turn down RMAs.
Let old Hairy fill you in dbill, WD 2TB are shit, all Seagate above 500GB are shit, avoid both, simple. Don't ask me why but both WD and Seagate have had nothing but trouble with their large capacity drives, with Seagate anything above around 640GB is like playing roulette with your data, WD has 1TB down but 2TB are just as bad as Seagate. I go through a LOT of drives here at the shop and frankly the ONLY 2TB drives which were consistently solid were the Samsung EcoGreens, good luck finding one of those now but frankly I'd take a refurb EcoGreen over a new Seagate, yes they are THAT bad and I wouldn't trust anything I cared about to a WD that was bigger than 1TB.
So the moral of the story is stick with 1TB drives, yes that sucks, yes we'd all like more room, but are you willing to risk having that 2TB of data crapped on by the drive?
Look all I can tell you is what I've seen with my own two peepers and drives that the SMART was saying "la la la, nothing wrong, la la la" I'd run Spinrite on and the screen would be RED as blood from all the bad blocks on the thing. I could run a single pass with Spinrite and tell you in less than 10 minutes if a drive was good or if it was shit and I have yet to find a single tool that will do that today. As you pointed out all SMART is today is a con by the OEMs to keep from paying for RMAs, I too have had drives that were sounding like you'd dropped them down a flight of stairs and WD Tools would just make the drive lie its ass off, that's all.
So what we need is a tool that did the same thing Spinrite did on modern drives, just something I can throw into a machine, hit a single button, and come back in an hour and see whether its a good drive or a shit drive, that's all. All I've been able to find is either a bunch of CLI crap you have to baby and keep typing shit into or GUI tools that just spit back whatever SMART tells it, neither are any use in a shop where you got 40 drives sitting in a box you need to test.
He's never said but I'm guessing he's retired now, he hasn't updated anything since 06 so there ya go.
And all these PITA GNU-Tool crap don't cut it, I need something I can throw in a drive, hit a button and move onto the next, i just don't have time to sit and baby the damned thing and I couldn't care less about the data on the drive, all I want to know is if the drive is good or not, a simple pass/fail on the drive.
So whether Spinrite was snake oil on its data recovery? Fuck if I know, never used it for that. But I can tell you that lvl 2, where it just bypassed the Smart and did a simple read/write and report worked fucking brilliant. I could pop that into a drive, hit a single button and move on, when i came back i would have a simple graph that you could see instantly whether its a pass or fail.
Actually you'll probably laugh, but guess what my Win 7 desktop is? Vista Black, the only thing i liked about Vista was the Vista Black without all the see-through crap so I simply found a Basic theme that would give me Vista black and that's on everything.
And again if MSFT wasn't run by retards this could be an easy fix, simply GIVE THE USER CHOICE. You should have the choice in Win 7 to have it in XP Blue, Vista Black, or 7 Aero, and Win 8 should have those options along with 8 Metro. That way YOU could have what YOU liked and I could have what I liked and it wouldn't fucking matter what UI we used, its just a couple of reg switches.
How about simply having a checkbox that says "trust installs by this publisher" and call it a day? why not that? on the one hand i don't want to be clicking my ass off and on the other hand i don't want shit installing silently, so why not a compromise?
I don't see how you could say it wouldn't cause a planetwide problem when you look at how a single volcano created "the year without a summer' back in the 1800s. The problem wouldn't be the asteroid itself, it would be how much debris and dust it threw up that would screw up weather patterns.
Now if it hit in the ocean, which considering two thirds of this planet is ocean? Then other than the tsunami it probably wouldn't cause too much damage, but if it hit on land? Then i could see this thing throwing enough shit into the air to drop temps and cause crop failures which in turn could lean to some serious starvation and other calamities.
What you are talking about is commonly called the "War Of The Worlds scenario" after the Orson Welles broadcast that caused such a major panic and I would say that even if NASA had a 100% certainty that it would hit they'd not tell the public until something had been done to stop it or it was nearly on top of us for precisely that reason.
As K said to J in MIB 1 "A person is smart, people are dumb, dangerous panicky animals and you know it" and that is why you simply couldn't tell the populace about such a thing, because while an individual could understand and accept it the herd would go nuts, you'd have looting and suicides and just a giant mess on your hands on TOP of the asteroid problem. That is why I always laugh when I see Michael Bay's Armageddon, it shows everybody just sitting there quietly and watching the sky when IRL we'd be seeing cities in total chaos and anarchy left and right, the public would just flip their shit.
Funny but for me its been the opposite, its been Samsung > Hitachi > WD > Seagate. Now admittedly my customers prefer 1TB and above, never had a problem with Seagates below 640GB but those above 640GB, especially the 7200RPM 1TB and 1.5TB have had high enough failure rates I just avoid them.
Know what you mean about Maxtor though, those DiamondMax drives where failure city. The worst part was there was about a year and a half where the ONLY drives you'd find in an HP or eMachine were DiamondMax so I had to deal with a LOT of systems from those companies with dead drives.
Then you sir are either the luckiest bastard on the planet or haven't bought any Seagate drives above 500Gb, because I've seen so many dead OOTB or very soon after leaving the box Segate 1TB and above drives i won't even touch them anymore.
There is a reason this guy is asking this question, its because we are now down to just 2 makers of drives and the Seagates are Russian roulette with your data. Most likely he has seen that the new Seagates are selling for as low as $50 a TB online and wants more space but can see all the horror stories in the feedback and wants some way to help mitigate the risk.
But I'm sorry friend, the only way I've found to mitigate the risk is to avoid Seagate like an STD, even with WD drives often double the price of the Seagate, because while the WDs seem to have about a 1 in 15 failure rate the Seagates depending on the size (1TB-2TB the worst, 3TB better but not great) you are looking at as low as a 1 in 3 chance of failure. With failures THAT high, which frankly I hadn't seen since the big Maxtor mess of 2002, i just would avoid Seagate for anything i gave a shit about as its just not worth the risk.
Unless you are using SLC, which is getting harder to find and more expensive every day you are really pushing your luck. The problem is the hot/crazy scale when it comes to these drives, specifically the fact that nobody has figured out how to lick the controller issue. For those that haven't run into it yet (lucky bastards) the controller issue will cause a drive to suddenly fail without ANY warning and unlike how the SSDs are always bragged on to "fail safe" into a read only mode what actually happens is when the controller fails the whole drive is completely dead, it won't even show up in BIOS/UEFI.
So until somebody figures out how to lick the controller problem, and when they do the money they make will truly be insane, or come up with the idea that i have been advocating for years of putting a second cheaper ARM controller on the board designed to take over as a read only backup while you get your data out? Well I'd be seriously leery of trusting any data I cared about to an SSD, not without spinning rust backups at the very least. The controller bug seems to bite every OEM on the ass, I have seen it from Intel to OCZ and its always the same. Push the button and poof! Data all gone with the drive. And of curse since you can't get your data off or even wipe it you have to hope they don't send it to some third world country for refurb where they help themselves to your data. Because of this I don't think my customers have even used 10% of their warranties for fear of the data falling into the wrong hands, great for the OEMs which rarely have to make good on warranties, not so good for the customer.
And those building systems that want QA on their builds, people storing their family videos and photos, hell the list could go on all day. Problem is SMART got ruined by the OEMs, its more about CYA than actually reporting the truth and the only program that bypassed the lying SMART hasn't been updated in over half a decade and can't support newer drives.
There is NO "hope" involved friend, the EOL dates are published and right there for anybody to see. I get support until Apr 2020 on that Win 7 Home I paid $50 for and the Win 7 pro I paid $100 for to use in the shop. Show me ANY Linux that will give me the same level of support at anywhere close to that price point, just 1. you can't do it because it don't exist. Either you get on the horribly broken upgrade bandwagon or you spend $1500+ just to get what I paid $50 for and THAT is why Linux is stuck at 1% and even with a bomb like Win 8 won't gain a single percentage point in share, people would rather shell out over $100 plus my costs to go to Win 7 rather than take your product for free because its simply not suitable for purpose, end of story.
And I'm still waiting on someone to take the Hairyfeet challenge, 2 years now and not a single 'challenge accepted" if that don't tell you that in their hearts they know I'm right then nothing will.
Thank you. And notice that NOT ONE will put their money where their mouth is and take the Hairyfeet Challenge? Know why? because I've already tried it with over half a dozen distros and the results are ALWAYS the same, the Vista machine has 100% working drivers and software, the Linux system will 8 times out of 10 end up in single user mode (or black screen of death as many call it) and the other 2 will have major subsystems like sound and wireless trashed beyond recovery.
At the end of the day they are trying to force a server OS into the home user space and its just not gonna work, home users aren't gonna put up with trolling forums or learning a shitload of bash commands or googling for fixes like a guy that gets paid 6 figures to deal with that shit. I know quite a few Linux admins, that admin large numbers of Linux servers for a living, know what they ALL use at home? Macbooks, some have a Windows partition for gaming but they ALL have Macbooks, why? Because they say they deal with enough of that fiddly bullshit at work, when they get home they just want to push the button and "it all just works" which Windows and OSX does, Linux don't, simple as that.