Well if you want to keep the Gecko engine there is Pale moon, IceDragon, and Waterfox. If you want to switch to something else there is Dragon (what I use, nice and with some extra security features), Chrome/Chromium, Safari, Opera,QTWeb if you need cross platform, that's the nice thing about what we have now, no more "This site only works in IE" crap and plenty of choices.
I give my customers a choice of Dragon or IceDragon because i give them Comodo AV and have had good luck with their free stuff, but any of the above will do the job and most will offer to transfer over your passwords and bookmarks, easy peasy.
How's that? I needed a good work truck that will last, the Vulcan is known to be able to get insane amounts of mileage with little to no work on the engine. The truck forums are littered with guys over 300k on their Vulcan Rangers and Explorers, its just one of the most solid built motors ever put out.
I have to wonder if its something else besides society...like the chemicals. After all look at the great depression, you had people seriously hurting but you didn't have wolf packs or people just going around bashing heads to have something to do.
But for the past 50 years everything we have eaten and drank has been full of chemicals, from hormones to plastics. They say you can give a newborn a blood test and find PBH in their bloodstream before they have taken their first bite, because the shit is in the mother's blood and get passed on.
So I have to wonder if what we are seeing is the chemical toxicity finally reaching dangerous proportions. After all what is the human mind but a bunch of chemicals and electrical impulses? Who knows what generations of constant exposure to all these chemicals are doing, or if there are groups or races in our population that are more susceptible to its effects than others. This is something that needs to be scientifically studied but sadly the PC police will never allow it, look at how those wolf packs are called "flash mobs" instead of telling the truth, large mobs of black youth just deciding to act like predators.
But with the constant barrage of chemicals in our food and drink I just don't see how you could throw all these chemicals into chemical beings such as we without having an effect of some sort.
What's with all the nerd rage over Silverlight? Ever been to that web page where they built an OS in Silverlight that runs in your browser? Its cool as hell! Hell if the FOSSies wouldn't have taken pitchforks to moonlight you'd have a nice cross platform framework that could do some very cool stuff.
Would it fit every use case? Nope, but that is true of ANY framework, but what's bad about having more tools in your toolbox?
As for TFA that's nice, but the performance of Firefox compared to the Chromium based has been so piss poor for the last several versions I moved all my customers off Firefox awhile back. And don't tell me it runs nice on your Core i7 with an SSD, I have to support a wide range of customers with all kinds of hardware, from late model P4s and Pentium Ds to netbooks to the latest multicores and FF hits the hard drive harder, is more likely to hang, you can really tell the devs have cared more about the GUI and their side projects like MozOS than they do FF of late.
Up to the 4.x branch they were making steady but measurable progress. You could tell each version was getting better and I looked forward to upgrading FF. Then around 5 they just went off the rails. Hell I can get an extra hour on my netbook by NOT using Firefox, and on my nettop I can sit there and watch FF slam the CPU to 100% on load, slam to 100% on new tab, hell it can slam the CPU to 100% scrolling the bookmarks, which I admit I have a ton of 'em, but Dragon and the other Chromium based just don't do that.
It is sometimes called "the knockout game". Basically what happens is half a dozen punks pick someone at random and you get "points" based on whether you can knock them out with a single hit. Of course once the person is "knocked the fuck out" they then proceed to rob them...if they are lucky. Some just stomp the hell out of them.
And then there is flash mobbing which I think that damned PC term needs to be thrown out and call it what it is...wolf packs, because that is what they are, they are like a pack of wolves preying upon the weak. If you'll look at that list for every one that did it for robbery you have another that just stomped the shit out of some random person just for the fuck of it.
So i think it would be pretty hard not to argue that there are plenty that would blind a pilot and risk a plane crash simply because they are sick little douchebags. As I said in the original post look at those that throw brick off of overpasses, just to cause accidents and make people suffer. No profit, no gain, just sick little fucks being evil that's all.
" If they actually understood it and realized the danger and the risk (legal) they wouldn't have done it"
What planet do YOU live on AC? Because it obviously ain't Earth, which is crawling with douchebags. Ever hear of "Knockout Kings"? Or of people throwing bricks from overpasses? There have been enough PSAs on this that they know EXACTLY what they are doing, the just don't give a fuck and figure they can get away with it because "Herpa derp, how is that guy in that airplane gonna find me? Snort"
And I looove how your answer is take away innocent people's homes, you HONESTLY think that's gonna keep douchebags from doing this? These things can be seen for miles ya know. What are you gonna do, knock down everything within a 6 mile radius of the airport?
You can buy 800MHz ARM chips for $4 a pop from China so give me a break, surely to have a basic controller (remember it will be ONLY for allowing the drive to be read, NOT written to) wouldn't add more than $8 a pop and being able to brag you can always get your data back would be a hell of a selling point.
They could even get together as an SSD consortium and place specs to make it universal, like SMART for HDDs. Seems like a no brainer to me.
Thanks for bringing that up evilviper because that one has always puzzled me...WTF is it with Ronnie Reagan and the right wing? He was a SHITTY president! Doesn't anyone remember the homeless vets sleeping on the grates in front of the White House? Or how he said "deficits don't matter" and proceeded to TRIPLE the debt under his watch? Iran/Contra? CIA drug running? Hello?
Why in the world do they choose HIM of all people? Hell if I were gonna choose a rep president to be proud of it would be somebody like Ike, at least he was a soldier and did great things for the country like the national freeway system.
Exactly, screw the boxes, if they come through fine and if something breaks you can always hit the net and order another,its the data you have to worry about.
I don't know how much of a markup there would be where he is at but you can get 128Gb flash sticks now for something like $90 USD off of NewEgg. One or two of those on your keyring and you can keep a copy of your data on you the entire trip so if anything happens to the container or the drives he'd not lose anything.
And if the PC is gonna take 8 weeks to get to him he's gonna need something in the meantime, unless he has a laptop he is bringing. If it were me I'd pick up one of those cheap little Atom netbooks, plenty of space, cheap, and will be more than enough power for basic web surfing and the like. Then when he gets all his stuff and sees everything works he can keep it or sell it and get most of his money back out of the deal.
Because its paid for and I often have to haul loads which wouldn't fit in a car?
And don't worry comrade, if the PIIGS don't bankrupt you I'm sure Big Brother will be happy to tell you what to eat, drink, and smoke so you don't take "more than your fair share" and enjoy the ever longer waits.
Considering the entire EU looks like a loud fart could cause the whole thing to collapse? i really wouldn't be bragging buddy.
It is so nice to see that there are still people who can see this for what it is, and that is control. And for those who think it is actually about insurance or healthcare costs? Go to the next public appearance of any of your elected officials and offer them this "modest proposal" and see what happens:
"I will sign a contract in front of a judge and 3 witnesses that says if I EVER get cancer, heart disease, or any other disease directly connected to smoking and/or drinking I will receive NOTHING but morphine, which is one of the cheapest painkillers we have, and in return you remove ALL sin taxes from me...deal?"
I have made this modest proposal to several politicians, both D and R, and NOT ONE, not a single one, would agree or even say I should have the right to choose. Make NO mistake, this isn't about insurance or healthcare, its about control. its about those that think they are smarter than you, know better than you, and believe they have the right to decide what you do with your own body.
Remember folks the nanny state NEVER stops, it keeps coming up with new ways to control you. First will be the smokers, then the fatties, then those that like red meat, it'll never stop, it'll just keep on coming.
Well if anybody needed proof that the "Cult Of Mac" was a real phenomena? Well...there ya go. Can you picture anybody doing that for Google or Microsoft? not a chance in hell.
That's why I even though I don't care for Apple products I always give Steve Jobs credit, other people built companies, he built a happening with fans every bit as crazed as Star Wars nerds and Trekkies. Considering that he did it not once but twice, and the second time everyone said the company was dead, might as well "return the money to the stockholders' because its going nowhere but down the toilet? That is pretty damned impressive.
Well that's what happens when you let your politicians gouge the living hell out of you with taxes. We don't have any VAR taxes bleeding us dry either, but that doesn't mean we are just gonna sit back and let them start piling taxes on. Maybe its time that you in the EU made your own TEA (Taxed Enough Already) party and let the politicians know you're tired of their hands in your wallet?
As for the gas prices here, $3.59 a gallon in north central AR. I'm just glad i don't have to work in the state capital anymore, my Ranger has a Vulcan V6 that only gets around 16 MPG so if this keeps up I'm already gonna have to slap another $15 on my service call fee. I have to wonder though if this isn't big oil's way of trying to give old Mittens a boost, nothing makes people want to "throw the bums out" like high gas prices.
I'd just like to add that all of you going "yay!" about this? remember the nanny state NEVER stops, and the smokers are the canaries in the coal mine. Don't forget there have already been states talking about "fat taxes" and "sweet taxes" to try to decide what YOU are allowed to eat and drink. Think it will stop there? How about a fine for every pound you are overweight, or a fine for every percent you are over ideal BMI? A fine if you have high blood pressure? After all you might be costing the dear insurance companies which we ALL will have to pay for!
Remember folks the nanny state NEVER stops, they think you don't deserve to have ANY say, Big Brother is wise, Big Brother knows what is best.
BWA HA HA HA HA HA...oh wait, you were serious? BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
I take it you never ran BeOS or OS/2 back in the day, did you? Stomped the living shit out of Win 3.x by a country mile! Both could multitask, something Windows 3.x couldn't seem to do without crapping out, hell BeOS you could sit there and play music AND work on pages AND edit video at the same time!
But since you were dumb enough to bring it up MSFT was a perfect example of how your free market doesn't work, they said "You'll take our OS and NOT sell anybody else's or we'll fuck you HARD" so bye bye BeOS and OS/2. Intel did the exact same thing, which is why when the Athlon 64 was using 40% less power while stomping the hell out of the power piggie P4 you couldn't find a single Dell or Compaq with Athlon chips. One of the OEMs compared the Intel bribes to cocaine as a matter of fact.
So sorry friend but your free market fantasy is about as close to reality as John Galt and Andrew Ryan are to real people, its total bullshit, always HAS been bullshit, and never once, not a single time, can you show us that it has EVER worked.
Dude you DO realize you are simply arguing the exact same thing the communists did? 'Oh its not the system, its the people IN the system!" well no shit, if you could get everybody to hug and be friendly you wouldn't need any regulations now would ya?
What amazes me is how few of you "free market is God" types will accept the fact that we already tried that and it was called "the age of the robber barons" by historians. look it up, they didn't regulate shit, hell you could sell rat poison to babies, no rules at all. No food regulations, business regulations, environmental regulations, it was total free for all...so what happened? Those at the top simply bought their own army and police and did whatever the fuck they wanted. You had sweatshops and child labor and monopolies up the ass..NOT because the government did shit, just because those at the top made these nice little cartels called "trusts" that let them control everything. Railroads, cattle, oil, shipping, all owned by trusts or big cheeses like Morgan and Rockefeller and those that tried to start anything to compete? if they were lucky they were crushed like a bug, if not a Pinkerton would just burn their place to the ground.
So sorry Doc, your libertarian pipe dream is just that, it depends on those with wealth NOT being douchebags, yet we've seen time and time again capitalism rewards the sociopaths among us.
That still don't explain why they don't have a backup emergency controller, something that will come on if the main controller fails, mark the whole drive as read only and say 'Your controller has failed, get your data off NOW".
Because right now the SSD OEMs are really shooting themselves in the face as it only takes one "flip the switch and poof! Your data is gone" to turn people off your product for years. like I said we really don't care about the drive, that's easily replaced. the data? Not so much.
I'm sorry AC but you are so full of shit your eyes are brown. You see we already tried pure capitalism and what happened was the "gilded age" or as many of us called it "The age of the robber barons".
Its actually very simple AC, lets say you, me, and a half a dozen of our rich friends decide to pretty much own this country. Now YOU are in cattle and coal and ME, I own the railroads. Now if someone tries to compete with you I simply charge them 5 times what I charge you per head of cattle to use my railroads and voila! they go broke and you buy them out for a song. in return you scratch my back by giving me a much lower price than you charge my competition for beef, so while they serve hamburger I'm serving steak and sell me coal at one price and my competition? they get it 5 times higher. Again we BOTH make out like bandits and we can kick back and smoke our cigars and laugh at the peasants.
Those who haven't looked at their history and actually believe the "free market" horseshit really needs to read up on the age of the robber barons, because it was as close to 100% pure unfiltered capitalism as you could get, damned near libertarian heaven. You had people working in sweatshops for pennies, child labor, a handful of guys owning every damned thing, hell they even bought their own military and police to enforce their own laws!
this is why capitalism, like every other ism, simply doesn't work. All it takes is time and those that already have wealth will continue to build larger and larger piles of money until it gets to the point they can have pure monopolies. Read up on Standard Oil to see just one example. All it takes is a handful of the uber rich talking over cigars and brandy and soon you have a nice little cartel controlling everything and crushing any competition that dares to interfere with profits. Again read your history, look up Teddy Roosevelt and the busting of the trusts. those trust pretty much owned the whole damned country, didn't need government to do it either, just a handful of rich old guys getting together and slicing up the pie.
Ya know, I really can't blame ya there. I have a perfectly working B&W G3 sitting in the closet in the shop...runs Panther or something, haven't checked in awhile, that I am keeping just for that beautiful case. I figure I'll rewire the PSU (I hear you have to swap a couple of lines) and put an AMD E350 miniboard in it and make it into an artsy fartsy office box. Say what you will about Apple but you just gotta love their cases, so pretty.
If you don't mind a little advice geeks has a Liano quad for $96 which you could pair with a cheap FM1 board and it would probably fit that case great. Too big for my B&W but those Power macs had more room and that would give you a nice quad with GPU for dirt cheap, and of course that sweet case to put it in.
Actually I'd say you are both right and both wrong. yes parts like cheap HDDs, cheap DVDs, cheap SSDs, hell cheap everything, do die a hell of a lot quicker but are cheaper as a result the reason most stuff gets shitcanned is you can't get the parts at a price that makes it worth fixing. hell I have 2 laptops sitting in the shop closet right now, one a nice C2D 17 inch, the other a nice Athlon dual core netbook (boy you can't find netbooks with real Athlons anymore) and in both cases the cost of replacement parts? Cost more than they are worth. I'm gonna take the Athlon over to an engineer friend as a last ditch attempt to save it (customer fried the power input by cutting the power cable with his chair) but the replacement board costs more than the entire unit would on the used market and have you ever priced a 17 inch laptop screen? Holy shit do they gouge the hell out of you!
This is why I've always preferred desktops and tell customers not to sink a lot of money in laptops, because at least with the desktops you are talking bog standard parts made by a half a dozen companies and the competition keeps prices low. Motherboards, GPUs, CPUs, drives, its all plentiful and cheap. With the damned laptops its all proprietary as hell, nothing fits anything else, and because of that the OEMs, which don't want you to fix anything but buy a new one anyway, can gouge the living hell out of you on replacement parts.
I just hope my engineer buddy can save the netbook, as a real Athlon dual with a real separate GPU with 128Mb of its own VRAM in a 12 inch FF? Man you just can't find something like that anymore.
Now you would think that was the case unixsc, but it ain't. i have some gamer customers that buy new SSDs pretty much constantly because they want to biggest and baddest (hell one has his grandma on a skulltrail, that was the weakest hand me down he had, swear to God) but its NOT the cells dying that bites you right in the ass, its the controller.
In fact that has been one has kept me from recommending SSDs for anything but mobile, and even those only for those that are willing to stick to a backup schedule, because I can tell you the SSD OEMs are still having some SERIOUS issues with the controller chips.
Now maybe its like how Seagate drives above 700Gb suck because they used cheapo ARM controllers and crappy code from their Maxtor buyout, maybe they have a vendor in the chain cutting corners on QA and QC, who knows, but I can tell you for some damned reason and it don't seem to matter who made the drive that the controller will fail long before the drive has lost enough cells to be worthless. And this is a BIG problem as with the cells when they die they just become read only but when that controller fails you flip the switch and there is just nothing, it doesn't even show up in BIOS or give you any warning at all, seriously nasty.
That's why while I'll put one in my netbook after the holidays, since I'll have an OS image and I won't have any data on the thing I can't easily replace, I'd be reluctant to put one in my desktop. I use this for work as well as play and flipping the switch one morning and have it go tits up? NOT good.
If you are an engineer at an SSD company I'd like to ask you a question that has been bugging me for awhile...WTF is it with the controller chips and just dying? I've got gamer customers that buy all the big name SSDs trying to stay top dog on the benches and frankly no matter what brand you buy its NOT the cells dying that bites you in the ass, its the controller chips.
Hell if it was just the cells dying? I honestly wouldn't care because as others have pointed out when the cells die you basically have a DVD ROM, you can still get the data that was there off, you just can't write more data to it. But when the controller dies? Give it up chuck, everything you had is gone, bye bye, adios muchacho.
So why can't the OEMs seem to fix the controller issues? Or at the very least have a backup controller that will insure the drive fails to read only? It just seems to me like a problem that should have been licked by now but you hit the forums or check Google and you'll see there is still plenty of folks getting bit in the ass by this issue. I'm sure i speak for most folks when i say I don't give a rat's ass about the drive, that's easily replaceable but my data? Is not.
With processors the thing you have to worry about with die shrinks is electrons jumping the gates, which is why each die shrink from Intel and AMD has taken longer and longer to pull off. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if even with all their money Intel isn't able to pull off the 6nm they have listed on their roadmap. But as long as they aren't jumping the gate you'll actually gain in less heat and power because it has less distance to travel.
With NAND, especially the MLC stuff everybody is cranking out now, as you shrink the failure rate for cells starts going WAY up. Now this can be overcome, if the shrink lets you put in 4 times the cells and only 1 out of say 6 cells dies prematurely? Well its all good. Also the shrinks let you put more spare cells into the case which again can help mitigate the cells failing sooner.
In the end I'd tell you like I tell my customers though...just don't trust the damned things. I've had gamer customers spend crazy amounts of money on SSDs and frankly they don't last a damned bit longer than the cheapos, whereas I've still got a 300Mb HDD that runs great, not that I have a use for something that small anymore. If you are gonna get an SSD make DAMN SURE you've got backups and have a sensible backups schedule in place, preferably on a big fat slow 5400RPM HDD as I've found that the slower drives, especially for externals, have a lot less heat issues and are pretty reliable. At least with modern HDDs one does tend to get a warning before it's tits up, I can't say the same for SSDs which tend to just die without warning.
That said after the holidays I plan to grab one of the after XMas sale 128Gb drives for my netbook, I dread having to disassemble the thing to put in the SSD but from all the reviews it is well worth it for my particular model. One place where SSDs make a lot of sense is in mobile, no motor sucking power and the much faster load times help with the slower CPUs found in netbooks and laptops. Just remember to always have backups, good advice in any case, and you should be good.
Pictures, videos, and music? I can tell you I've had to swap out drives for a LOT of customers because of those three, HD cams and camcorders are frankly dirt cheap now and when mamma is filming everything junior does? Tends to suck up some space. Ripping your CD collections to your PC is pretty old hat now, even my older customers had either already ripped their music or asked me while I had it in there to show them how to rip their music and 20 years worth of CDs? Again not easy on the space.
This is what i tell my customers when it comes to SSDs...if its gonna go in a laptop, where you have everything backed up to a USB drive and need the extra battery life and improved performance? Sure SSD works there. if its gonna go in a desktop as an OS drive while leaving the HDD for backups and data? Again not a bad use case. if its something mission critical or is gonna seriously hurt if the drive controller fries and is down for a few days while we get a replacement? then no, that isn't a smart idea.
Both style of drives have their place, and with Win 7 having superfetch as long as you have plenty of RAM the only real gains you'll see is boot. Again this is GREAT for mobile, where you are dealing with slower CPUs and spinning that drive sucks power, but desktops? Meh, its okay, for the average person with average PC usage its really not gonna make a big difference in their lives.
Well if you like Native American art because its part of your heritage WTF else are you gonna buy but southwestern? i mean its common sense 101, you can only buy what is for sale and its damned near impossible to find any plains people art, even right smack dab in the middle of plains people country. She grew up within 30 miles of the rez, her mom was born and raised on the rez, but nobody makes that stuff on the rez anymore, not even for the tourists. All you ever see is the same SW stuff you can get out of any catalog, no different than what you see in any average mall.
So again if you want native American themed stuff? Gotta buy what's for sale and that's pretty much SW art or nothing. I'm sure if she could find any plains art in any price other than antique markup she'd be happy to buy, but you simply can't find it anymore. That would be like complaining a black person bought tribal African art when they actually came from the Caribbean, you gotta take what you can get.
Personally we've both quit giving a fuck about being PC anyway, so now when someone walks up to her for the bazillionth time and starts speaking Spanish at her she just says "me no Mexican, me Indian, My kind scalp your kind" which of course causes me to die laughing at the looks on their faces every single time. Seriously why the fuck do you care? What does it matter? if it makes her happy who gives a rat's ass if her people didn't make their art in that exact style? It makes her happy, looks better than my hanging basses and rock posters on the wall, so its all good as far as I'm concerned.
geez, like I really wouldn't know where my own GF came from, ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
Well if you want to keep the Gecko engine there is Pale moon, IceDragon, and Waterfox. If you want to switch to something else there is Dragon (what I use, nice and with some extra security features), Chrome/Chromium, Safari, Opera,QTWeb if you need cross platform, that's the nice thing about what we have now, no more "This site only works in IE" crap and plenty of choices.
I give my customers a choice of Dragon or IceDragon because i give them Comodo AV and have had good luck with their free stuff, but any of the above will do the job and most will offer to transfer over your passwords and bookmarks, easy peasy.
How's that? I needed a good work truck that will last, the Vulcan is known to be able to get insane amounts of mileage with little to no work on the engine. The truck forums are littered with guys over 300k on their Vulcan Rangers and Explorers, its just one of the most solid built motors ever put out.
I have to wonder if its something else besides society...like the chemicals. After all look at the great depression, you had people seriously hurting but you didn't have wolf packs or people just going around bashing heads to have something to do.
But for the past 50 years everything we have eaten and drank has been full of chemicals, from hormones to plastics. They say you can give a newborn a blood test and find PBH in their bloodstream before they have taken their first bite, because the shit is in the mother's blood and get passed on.
So I have to wonder if what we are seeing is the chemical toxicity finally reaching dangerous proportions. After all what is the human mind but a bunch of chemicals and electrical impulses? Who knows what generations of constant exposure to all these chemicals are doing, or if there are groups or races in our population that are more susceptible to its effects than others. This is something that needs to be scientifically studied but sadly the PC police will never allow it, look at how those wolf packs are called "flash mobs" instead of telling the truth, large mobs of black youth just deciding to act like predators.
But with the constant barrage of chemicals in our food and drink I just don't see how you could throw all these chemicals into chemical beings such as we without having an effect of some sort.
What's with all the nerd rage over Silverlight? Ever been to that web page where they built an OS in Silverlight that runs in your browser? Its cool as hell! Hell if the FOSSies wouldn't have taken pitchforks to moonlight you'd have a nice cross platform framework that could do some very cool stuff.
Would it fit every use case? Nope, but that is true of ANY framework, but what's bad about having more tools in your toolbox?
As for TFA that's nice, but the performance of Firefox compared to the Chromium based has been so piss poor for the last several versions I moved all my customers off Firefox awhile back. And don't tell me it runs nice on your Core i7 with an SSD, I have to support a wide range of customers with all kinds of hardware, from late model P4s and Pentium Ds to netbooks to the latest multicores and FF hits the hard drive harder, is more likely to hang, you can really tell the devs have cared more about the GUI and their side projects like MozOS than they do FF of late.
Up to the 4.x branch they were making steady but measurable progress. You could tell each version was getting better and I looked forward to upgrading FF. Then around 5 they just went off the rails. Hell I can get an extra hour on my netbook by NOT using Firefox, and on my nettop I can sit there and watch FF slam the CPU to 100% on load, slam to 100% on new tab, hell it can slam the CPU to 100% scrolling the bookmarks, which I admit I have a ton of 'em, but Dragon and the other Chromium based just don't do that.
It is sometimes called "the knockout game". Basically what happens is half a dozen punks pick someone at random and you get "points" based on whether you can knock them out with a single hit. Of course once the person is "knocked the fuck out" they then proceed to rob them...if they are lucky. Some just stomp the hell out of them.
And then there is flash mobbing which I think that damned PC term needs to be thrown out and call it what it is...wolf packs, because that is what they are, they are like a pack of wolves preying upon the weak. If you'll look at that list for every one that did it for robbery you have another that just stomped the shit out of some random person just for the fuck of it.
So i think it would be pretty hard not to argue that there are plenty that would blind a pilot and risk a plane crash simply because they are sick little douchebags. As I said in the original post look at those that throw brick off of overpasses, just to cause accidents and make people suffer. No profit, no gain, just sick little fucks being evil that's all.
" If they actually understood it and realized the danger and the risk (legal) they wouldn't have done it"
What planet do YOU live on AC? Because it obviously ain't Earth, which is crawling with douchebags. Ever hear of "Knockout Kings"? Or of people throwing bricks from overpasses? There have been enough PSAs on this that they know EXACTLY what they are doing, the just don't give a fuck and figure they can get away with it because "Herpa derp, how is that guy in that airplane gonna find me? Snort"
And I looove how your answer is take away innocent people's homes, you HONESTLY think that's gonna keep douchebags from doing this? These things can be seen for miles ya know. What are you gonna do, knock down everything within a 6 mile radius of the airport?
You can buy 800MHz ARM chips for $4 a pop from China so give me a break, surely to have a basic controller (remember it will be ONLY for allowing the drive to be read, NOT written to) wouldn't add more than $8 a pop and being able to brag you can always get your data back would be a hell of a selling point.
They could even get together as an SSD consortium and place specs to make it universal, like SMART for HDDs. Seems like a no brainer to me.
Thanks for bringing that up evilviper because that one has always puzzled me...WTF is it with Ronnie Reagan and the right wing? He was a SHITTY president! Doesn't anyone remember the homeless vets sleeping on the grates in front of the White House? Or how he said "deficits don't matter" and proceeded to TRIPLE the debt under his watch? Iran/Contra? CIA drug running? Hello?
Why in the world do they choose HIM of all people? Hell if I were gonna choose a rep president to be proud of it would be somebody like Ike, at least he was a soldier and did great things for the country like the national freeway system.
Exactly, screw the boxes, if they come through fine and if something breaks you can always hit the net and order another,its the data you have to worry about.
I don't know how much of a markup there would be where he is at but you can get 128Gb flash sticks now for something like $90 USD off of NewEgg. One or two of those on your keyring and you can keep a copy of your data on you the entire trip so if anything happens to the container or the drives he'd not lose anything.
And if the PC is gonna take 8 weeks to get to him he's gonna need something in the meantime, unless he has a laptop he is bringing. If it were me I'd pick up one of those cheap little Atom netbooks, plenty of space, cheap, and will be more than enough power for basic web surfing and the like. Then when he gets all his stuff and sees everything works he can keep it or sell it and get most of his money back out of the deal.
Because its paid for and I often have to haul loads which wouldn't fit in a car?
And don't worry comrade, if the PIIGS don't bankrupt you I'm sure Big Brother will be happy to tell you what to eat, drink, and smoke so you don't take "more than your fair share" and enjoy the ever longer waits.
Considering the entire EU looks like a loud fart could cause the whole thing to collapse? i really wouldn't be bragging buddy.
It is so nice to see that there are still people who can see this for what it is, and that is control. And for those who think it is actually about insurance or healthcare costs? Go to the next public appearance of any of your elected officials and offer them this "modest proposal" and see what happens:
"I will sign a contract in front of a judge and 3 witnesses that says if I EVER get cancer, heart disease, or any other disease directly connected to smoking and/or drinking I will receive NOTHING but morphine, which is one of the cheapest painkillers we have, and in return you remove ALL sin taxes from me...deal?"
I have made this modest proposal to several politicians, both D and R, and NOT ONE, not a single one, would agree or even say I should have the right to choose. Make NO mistake, this isn't about insurance or healthcare, its about control. its about those that think they are smarter than you, know better than you, and believe they have the right to decide what you do with your own body.
Remember folks the nanny state NEVER stops, it keeps coming up with new ways to control you. First will be the smokers, then the fatties, then those that like red meat, it'll never stop, it'll just keep on coming.
Well if anybody needed proof that the "Cult Of Mac" was a real phenomena? Well...there ya go. Can you picture anybody doing that for Google or Microsoft? not a chance in hell.
That's why I even though I don't care for Apple products I always give Steve Jobs credit, other people built companies, he built a happening with fans every bit as crazed as Star Wars nerds and Trekkies. Considering that he did it not once but twice, and the second time everyone said the company was dead, might as well "return the money to the stockholders' because its going nowhere but down the toilet? That is pretty damned impressive.
Well that's what happens when you let your politicians gouge the living hell out of you with taxes. We don't have any VAR taxes bleeding us dry either, but that doesn't mean we are just gonna sit back and let them start piling taxes on. Maybe its time that you in the EU made your own TEA (Taxed Enough Already) party and let the politicians know you're tired of their hands in your wallet?
As for the gas prices here, $3.59 a gallon in north central AR. I'm just glad i don't have to work in the state capital anymore, my Ranger has a Vulcan V6 that only gets around 16 MPG so if this keeps up I'm already gonna have to slap another $15 on my service call fee. I have to wonder though if this isn't big oil's way of trying to give old Mittens a boost, nothing makes people want to "throw the bums out" like high gas prices.
I'd just like to add that all of you going "yay!" about this? remember the nanny state NEVER stops, and the smokers are the canaries in the coal mine. Don't forget there have already been states talking about "fat taxes" and "sweet taxes" to try to decide what YOU are allowed to eat and drink. Think it will stop there? How about a fine for every pound you are overweight, or a fine for every percent you are over ideal BMI? A fine if you have high blood pressure? After all you might be costing the dear insurance companies which we ALL will have to pay for!
Remember folks the nanny state NEVER stops, they think you don't deserve to have ANY say, Big Brother is wise, Big Brother knows what is best.
BWA HA HA HA HA HA...oh wait, you were serious? BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
I take it you never ran BeOS or OS/2 back in the day, did you? Stomped the living shit out of Win 3.x by a country mile! Both could multitask, something Windows 3.x couldn't seem to do without crapping out, hell BeOS you could sit there and play music AND work on pages AND edit video at the same time!
But since you were dumb enough to bring it up MSFT was a perfect example of how your free market doesn't work, they said "You'll take our OS and NOT sell anybody else's or we'll fuck you HARD" so bye bye BeOS and OS/2. Intel did the exact same thing, which is why when the Athlon 64 was using 40% less power while stomping the hell out of the power piggie P4 you couldn't find a single Dell or Compaq with Athlon chips. One of the OEMs compared the Intel bribes to cocaine as a matter of fact.
So sorry friend but your free market fantasy is about as close to reality as John Galt and Andrew Ryan are to real people, its total bullshit, always HAS been bullshit, and never once, not a single time, can you show us that it has EVER worked.
Dude you DO realize you are simply arguing the exact same thing the communists did? 'Oh its not the system, its the people IN the system!" well no shit, if you could get everybody to hug and be friendly you wouldn't need any regulations now would ya?
What amazes me is how few of you "free market is God" types will accept the fact that we already tried that and it was called "the age of the robber barons" by historians. look it up, they didn't regulate shit, hell you could sell rat poison to babies, no rules at all. No food regulations, business regulations, environmental regulations, it was total free for all...so what happened? Those at the top simply bought their own army and police and did whatever the fuck they wanted. You had sweatshops and child labor and monopolies up the ass..NOT because the government did shit, just because those at the top made these nice little cartels called "trusts" that let them control everything. Railroads, cattle, oil, shipping, all owned by trusts or big cheeses like Morgan and Rockefeller and those that tried to start anything to compete? if they were lucky they were crushed like a bug, if not a Pinkerton would just burn their place to the ground.
So sorry Doc, your libertarian pipe dream is just that, it depends on those with wealth NOT being douchebags, yet we've seen time and time again capitalism rewards the sociopaths among us.
That still don't explain why they don't have a backup emergency controller, something that will come on if the main controller fails, mark the whole drive as read only and say 'Your controller has failed, get your data off NOW".
Because right now the SSD OEMs are really shooting themselves in the face as it only takes one "flip the switch and poof! Your data is gone" to turn people off your product for years. like I said we really don't care about the drive, that's easily replaced. the data? Not so much.
I'm sorry AC but you are so full of shit your eyes are brown. You see we already tried pure capitalism and what happened was the "gilded age" or as many of us called it "The age of the robber barons".
Its actually very simple AC, lets say you, me, and a half a dozen of our rich friends decide to pretty much own this country. Now YOU are in cattle and coal and ME, I own the railroads. Now if someone tries to compete with you I simply charge them 5 times what I charge you per head of cattle to use my railroads and voila! they go broke and you buy them out for a song. in return you scratch my back by giving me a much lower price than you charge my competition for beef, so while they serve hamburger I'm serving steak and sell me coal at one price and my competition? they get it 5 times higher. Again we BOTH make out like bandits and we can kick back and smoke our cigars and laugh at the peasants.
Those who haven't looked at their history and actually believe the "free market" horseshit really needs to read up on the age of the robber barons, because it was as close to 100% pure unfiltered capitalism as you could get, damned near libertarian heaven. You had people working in sweatshops for pennies, child labor, a handful of guys owning every damned thing, hell they even bought their own military and police to enforce their own laws!
this is why capitalism, like every other ism, simply doesn't work. All it takes is time and those that already have wealth will continue to build larger and larger piles of money until it gets to the point they can have pure monopolies. Read up on Standard Oil to see just one example. All it takes is a handful of the uber rich talking over cigars and brandy and soon you have a nice little cartel controlling everything and crushing any competition that dares to interfere with profits. Again read your history, look up Teddy Roosevelt and the busting of the trusts. those trust pretty much owned the whole damned country, didn't need government to do it either, just a handful of rich old guys getting together and slicing up the pie.
Ya know, I really can't blame ya there. I have a perfectly working B&W G3 sitting in the closet in the shop...runs Panther or something, haven't checked in awhile, that I am keeping just for that beautiful case. I figure I'll rewire the PSU (I hear you have to swap a couple of lines) and put an AMD E350 miniboard in it and make it into an artsy fartsy office box. Say what you will about Apple but you just gotta love their cases, so pretty.
If you don't mind a little advice geeks has a Liano quad for $96 which you could pair with a cheap FM1 board and it would probably fit that case great. Too big for my B&W but those Power macs had more room and that would give you a nice quad with GPU for dirt cheap, and of course that sweet case to put it in.
Actually I'd say you are both right and both wrong. yes parts like cheap HDDs, cheap DVDs, cheap SSDs, hell cheap everything, do die a hell of a lot quicker but are cheaper as a result the reason most stuff gets shitcanned is you can't get the parts at a price that makes it worth fixing. hell I have 2 laptops sitting in the shop closet right now, one a nice C2D 17 inch, the other a nice Athlon dual core netbook (boy you can't find netbooks with real Athlons anymore) and in both cases the cost of replacement parts? Cost more than they are worth. I'm gonna take the Athlon over to an engineer friend as a last ditch attempt to save it (customer fried the power input by cutting the power cable with his chair) but the replacement board costs more than the entire unit would on the used market and have you ever priced a 17 inch laptop screen? Holy shit do they gouge the hell out of you!
This is why I've always preferred desktops and tell customers not to sink a lot of money in laptops, because at least with the desktops you are talking bog standard parts made by a half a dozen companies and the competition keeps prices low. Motherboards, GPUs, CPUs, drives, its all plentiful and cheap. With the damned laptops its all proprietary as hell, nothing fits anything else, and because of that the OEMs, which don't want you to fix anything but buy a new one anyway, can gouge the living hell out of you on replacement parts.
I just hope my engineer buddy can save the netbook, as a real Athlon dual with a real separate GPU with 128Mb of its own VRAM in a 12 inch FF? Man you just can't find something like that anymore.
Now you would think that was the case unixsc, but it ain't. i have some gamer customers that buy new SSDs pretty much constantly because they want to biggest and baddest (hell one has his grandma on a skulltrail, that was the weakest hand me down he had, swear to God) but its NOT the cells dying that bites you right in the ass, its the controller.
In fact that has been one has kept me from recommending SSDs for anything but mobile, and even those only for those that are willing to stick to a backup schedule, because I can tell you the SSD OEMs are still having some SERIOUS issues with the controller chips.
Now maybe its like how Seagate drives above 700Gb suck because they used cheapo ARM controllers and crappy code from their Maxtor buyout, maybe they have a vendor in the chain cutting corners on QA and QC, who knows, but I can tell you for some damned reason and it don't seem to matter who made the drive that the controller will fail long before the drive has lost enough cells to be worthless. And this is a BIG problem as with the cells when they die they just become read only but when that controller fails you flip the switch and there is just nothing, it doesn't even show up in BIOS or give you any warning at all, seriously nasty.
That's why while I'll put one in my netbook after the holidays, since I'll have an OS image and I won't have any data on the thing I can't easily replace, I'd be reluctant to put one in my desktop. I use this for work as well as play and flipping the switch one morning and have it go tits up? NOT good.
If you are an engineer at an SSD company I'd like to ask you a question that has been bugging me for awhile...WTF is it with the controller chips and just dying? I've got gamer customers that buy all the big name SSDs trying to stay top dog on the benches and frankly no matter what brand you buy its NOT the cells dying that bites you in the ass, its the controller chips.
Hell if it was just the cells dying? I honestly wouldn't care because as others have pointed out when the cells die you basically have a DVD ROM, you can still get the data that was there off, you just can't write more data to it. But when the controller dies? Give it up chuck, everything you had is gone, bye bye, adios muchacho.
So why can't the OEMs seem to fix the controller issues? Or at the very least have a backup controller that will insure the drive fails to read only? It just seems to me like a problem that should have been licked by now but you hit the forums or check Google and you'll see there is still plenty of folks getting bit in the ass by this issue. I'm sure i speak for most folks when i say I don't give a rat's ass about the drive, that's easily replaceable but my data? Is not.
With processors the thing you have to worry about with die shrinks is electrons jumping the gates, which is why each die shrink from Intel and AMD has taken longer and longer to pull off. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if even with all their money Intel isn't able to pull off the 6nm they have listed on their roadmap. But as long as they aren't jumping the gate you'll actually gain in less heat and power because it has less distance to travel.
With NAND, especially the MLC stuff everybody is cranking out now, as you shrink the failure rate for cells starts going WAY up. Now this can be overcome, if the shrink lets you put in 4 times the cells and only 1 out of say 6 cells dies prematurely? Well its all good. Also the shrinks let you put more spare cells into the case which again can help mitigate the cells failing sooner.
In the end I'd tell you like I tell my customers though...just don't trust the damned things. I've had gamer customers spend crazy amounts of money on SSDs and frankly they don't last a damned bit longer than the cheapos, whereas I've still got a 300Mb HDD that runs great, not that I have a use for something that small anymore. If you are gonna get an SSD make DAMN SURE you've got backups and have a sensible backups schedule in place, preferably on a big fat slow 5400RPM HDD as I've found that the slower drives, especially for externals, have a lot less heat issues and are pretty reliable. At least with modern HDDs one does tend to get a warning before it's tits up, I can't say the same for SSDs which tend to just die without warning.
That said after the holidays I plan to grab one of the after XMas sale 128Gb drives for my netbook, I dread having to disassemble the thing to put in the SSD but from all the reviews it is well worth it for my particular model. One place where SSDs make a lot of sense is in mobile, no motor sucking power and the much faster load times help with the slower CPUs found in netbooks and laptops. Just remember to always have backups, good advice in any case, and you should be good.
Pictures, videos, and music? I can tell you I've had to swap out drives for a LOT of customers because of those three, HD cams and camcorders are frankly dirt cheap now and when mamma is filming everything junior does? Tends to suck up some space. Ripping your CD collections to your PC is pretty old hat now, even my older customers had either already ripped their music or asked me while I had it in there to show them how to rip their music and 20 years worth of CDs? Again not easy on the space.
This is what i tell my customers when it comes to SSDs...if its gonna go in a laptop, where you have everything backed up to a USB drive and need the extra battery life and improved performance? Sure SSD works there. if its gonna go in a desktop as an OS drive while leaving the HDD for backups and data? Again not a bad use case. if its something mission critical or is gonna seriously hurt if the drive controller fries and is down for a few days while we get a replacement? then no, that isn't a smart idea.
Both style of drives have their place, and with Win 7 having superfetch as long as you have plenty of RAM the only real gains you'll see is boot. Again this is GREAT for mobile, where you are dealing with slower CPUs and spinning that drive sucks power, but desktops? Meh, its okay, for the average person with average PC usage its really not gonna make a big difference in their lives.
Well if you like Native American art because its part of your heritage WTF else are you gonna buy but southwestern? i mean its common sense 101, you can only buy what is for sale and its damned near impossible to find any plains people art, even right smack dab in the middle of plains people country. She grew up within 30 miles of the rez, her mom was born and raised on the rez, but nobody makes that stuff on the rez anymore, not even for the tourists. All you ever see is the same SW stuff you can get out of any catalog, no different than what you see in any average mall.
So again if you want native American themed stuff? Gotta buy what's for sale and that's pretty much SW art or nothing. I'm sure if she could find any plains art in any price other than antique markup she'd be happy to buy, but you simply can't find it anymore. That would be like complaining a black person bought tribal African art when they actually came from the Caribbean, you gotta take what you can get.
Personally we've both quit giving a fuck about being PC anyway, so now when someone walks up to her for the bazillionth time and starts speaking Spanish at her she just says "me no Mexican, me Indian, My kind scalp your kind" which of course causes me to die laughing at the looks on their faces every single time. Seriously why the fuck do you care? What does it matter? if it makes her happy who gives a rat's ass if her people didn't make their art in that exact style? It makes her happy, looks better than my hanging basses and rock posters on the wall, so its all good as far as I'm concerned.
geez, like I really wouldn't know where my own GF came from, ridiculous.