Huh, never had one of those. Had one shaped like a pot leaf once, was cool to look at but uncomfortable as hell.
The point everyone seems to be missing though is there are truly great passwords all around you if you just care to look. hell flip over your keyboard or look under your laptop, you'll find a GREAT complex password. the back of your monitor, your OEM desktop, musical instruments, anything you know you are gonna keep a long time can make a great and unique password that the best software out there would take centuries to crack. since I know the serials to my basses as well as have them stored on a sheet of paper both in my closet and in my dad's I can easily recover the password if I forget it but at the same time if someone found it they'd have no clue that it was actually a password, so its really easy to have a great complex password with a minimum of effort.
Not well read i take it? Never heard of a little piece of writing called "A modest proposal" that used exaggerations to make a point? That is a couple of centuries old BTW so its not like this is some new way of pointing out incredibly dumb ideas. Oh and just FYI there are these things actually called "fat camps" so its not Godwin to say you should be putting fatties into camps, nobody said anything about Nazis or concentration.
Yeah and I can say my butt grows wings and flies south for the winter but that don't make it so. Frankly the only metro "apps", which FYI I'm REALLY starting to hate that fucking word, has been the equivalent of fart apps and angry birds, aka cheap shitty little cell phone crap. People buy that shit on a cell phone because that is all you can really run on a cell phone but we ain't talking about cell phones here, we are talking about desktops and laptops. hell even MSFT has already said MS office won't be a Metro "app" so even THEY know you can't use that shit to get actual work done, just tweets for twits and FB blogging crap and other pointless worthless tripe like we seen bundled with every damned smartphone.
I find it telling that the Metro "apps" that were bundled at least with Win 8 CP (I'm gonna install Win 8 RP this weekend if I ever get a break) was pretty much the same crap that came bundled with my dad's new smartphone, pretty much all social shit besides a weather app. Honestly I've shown win 8 CP to nearly 250 customers from all walks of life and NOBODY CARES about all the endless tweeting twitting FB Farmville endless parade of pointless garbage, hell even the teens that tried it thought it was dumb and would rather just go to FB when they wanted FB.
So I have a feeling that Metro is gonna be this big dead elephant tied to the back of Win 8 that is gonna give it a Vista style rep for being a giant piggie. You go to someplace like tigerdirect or Walmart and see what their biggest selling laptops are, they are NON touchscreen dual cores from the AMD E300- Core i3 in speeds from 1.5GHz to 1.8GHz. With speeds like that frankly all that BS in the background is just gonna make the system feel as bloated as a fat guy that just ate at Taco hell, and with thin and light being the design words of the day all that starting and stopping and background BS is gonna suck down the battery like a wino hitting a free bar.
If they gave you an option to have it on or off? i wouldn't have a problem with it, although I find the desktop in Win 8 feels like a badly thrown together afterthought, kinda like those fake Win 7 transformation packs for XP that at first glance look real enough but once you try it you find it sorely lacking, but having metro run 24/7 even when you aren't touching the damned thing is just ridiculous. remember TANSTAAFL and no matter how quickly they flip that BS on and off its still gonna need cycles to do so, cycles you wouldn't be wasting on your battery otherwise. Although i have such a low opinion of Ballmer and Sinofsky that I'll be triple checking every Windows Update that comes out close to the Win 8 launch because honestly i wouldn't put it past 'em after the Vista fail for them to put out a patch that "just by accident" ties a boat anchor to Win 7 to make Ballmer and Sinofsky's "supergigantic smartphone OS" look better by comparison.
They are also missing a VERY important point which is why going after the male is still a better strategy...brand loyalty. Frankly we men get set in our ways easily and if we find something we like we tend to stick with it. women on the other hand have ZERO brand loyalty when it comes to tech, to them its an accessory like clothes or shoes and like clothes and shoes their tastes change and out goes the device.
For example my GF has to have gone through a good 4 phones in the past two years, she'll drop it or bust it or she doesn't like the way it texts or something and its gone...poof! Buh bye phone and i honestly don't think she has EVER bought the same brand twice when it comes to tech, its whatever one of her girlfriends recommend or what catches her eye. i tend to stick with HTC as they've never given me any problems so when one dies i get another HTC so if you get me liking your brand I'll tend to stick with it.
So if all you want is a single sale then sure, it might be smart to target the women. but if you want a long term customer its smarter to target the men as we have more brand loyalty, at least from what I've seen.
And the much deeper question, and one that scares Ballmer and MSFT to their very core is the answer to this: Exactly WHY do people see this as a needless change?
And the answer to that question is why ballmer is so damned terrified he is willing to risk his cash cow desktop in a desperate last ditch Hail Mary pass to try to get into ARM. the answer is simple...PCs passed "good enough" several chips ago and are now well into "insanely overpowered' for what the masses have to do with them.
MSFT and the OEMs got spoiled rotten with the every 2 to 3 years PC change out thanks to the MHz wars but those of us in the trenches saw this coming in 06 when the first dual cores became mainstream. I have several customers on Pentium Ds and Athlon X2s, I have built office boxes using the tiny AMD E350 and have myself traded my full size laptop for an E350 netbook, why? why are they not screaming for new machines and i'm not having a fit for more performance? because frankly the jobs most have don't even stress those bottom of the line dual cores much less any mainstream system sold in the last 6 years.
So it isn't only bad financial times, although i'm sure some are also not buying because of that, but mainly its because they aren't even stressing what they have with the tasks they want to do. Hell my GF practically lives on her PC so this Xmas i built her an Athlon II X3 desktop to replace her old p4, know what I found when i had checked her performance stats? she hadn't ever gone above 45% CPU, and that is probably about as low end on the CPU spectrum as one can get in a mainstream chip.
There is just no killer apps that are stressing the CPUs anymore, and since we finally got rid of those p4 space heater laptops that would cycle themselves to death with a little TLC and common sense even a laptop or netbook can last for 5 years or more. THIS is why MSFT has suddenly gone snooker loopy, and its not tablets and phones replacing the PCs, its just people see no reason to buy a new one when their current machines are so insanely overpowered they can take everything they throw at them and not even stress the chips. there just isn't a reason to replace an X86 unit anymore until it dies which is what MSFT and the OEMs are suddenly getting wise to and having full blown panic attacks.
The other major problem is there is no way in hell to just kill metro, even if you never use it its sucking resources and cycles no matter what. this would be fine on a modern desktop, where we have so many cores and so much RAM that nobody will give a crap, but what about laptops and netbooks? Do you REALLY want to give up a decent sized chunk of your battery life for metro?
I just hope this is the straw that breaks the camel's back. for a decade now Ballmer has been practically wiping his ass with money at MSFT and not showing shit for ROI, from killing playsforsure to Zune, from rushing the X360 out with a 2 billion dollar flaw to the Kin, from rushing Vista out with show stopping bugs to the Vista capable fiasco, not to mention the shitload he pissed down the drain to Nokia just to watch WinPhone crawl out the gate and die, the man has just been an absolutely pathetic CEO. the MS Office/desktop monopoly left to him by Bill is the only consistent cash cows they have and now the man is gonna take a giant dump on one of them because he has Apple envy and thinks if he forces WinPhone onto the desktop people will buy winPhone ARM. The guy is just a true horror of a CEO and maybe when Win 8 flops and with even conservative rags like Forbes calling him out for his incompetence maybe we'll get lucky and he will finally get the pink slip.
Because I honestly don't think MSFT can survive another decade with him at the helm, i really don't. I have to wonder if Gabe from Valve cooking up a Steambox Linux is just the first of many deserters, man what i wouldn't give to have a bunch of those big corps to fund ReactOS and just take the whole thing away from the sweaty monkey because its obvious he doesn't even understand his core businesses, much less how to actually branch and grow the company.
How about answering a few questions for me? What advantages does metro give you that weren't already present in desktop gadgets? How has metro improved your workflow over Win 7? How is the current design better on a NON touch screen desktop or laptop (which is over 90% of the PCs sold ATM) than Win 7? what benefits has Win 8 given you?
Because frankly i could find nice things about every previous release of the last decade, even Vista. with Vista you had a better memory model, better support for 64 bit, and with UAC, ASLR, and DEP you had MSFT finally allowing users to run as users and not admins and still have programs function, even if UAC bugged the crap out of people too often.
But after using Win 8 at the shop for a month the ONLY nice thing I can come up to say about it is "It'll probably be decent on a cell phone or a tablet" which would be fine IF you were talking about a company that had significant share in cell phones and tablets but we're not, we're talking about a company that threw hundreds of million after WinPhone and it went absolutely nowhere fast.
So if you think win 8 is good? Fine happy for you but at least EXPLAIN why you think its good, what benefits you have seen, and please don't do like Sinofsky and pretend that the world is gonna embrace PCs as "supergigantic smartphones" and rush out to buy touchscreens! Did anybody see his last Win 8 talk? i think he said touchscreen something like 30 damned times! less than 4% of the X86 market is touchscreens but watching him talk he has honestly deluded himself into thinking folks are gonna give up those 27in monitors for some $300 17in touchscreen! I got news for ya, Sinofsky? your shit ain't THAT good, in fact my customers all think it blows.
so please don't give us esoteric workaround crap just to get back what we've lost, sell it to us, tell us what we have gained. Because other than feeling like my desktop monitor ought to have a slider keyboard like a giant cell phone i'm just not seeing any benefits where i'm sitting. hell if you are the type addicted to twitter and FB and need 24/7/365 updates there are already gadgets that do that, so even that isn't a gain.
Some do, many just dump all the crap on the desktop. since metro tiles have to be written as metro apps its gonna be shit as folks just want to dump crap on the desktop.
Sometime this weekend i'm gonna install RP on the box at the shop running Win 8 CP but i don't think it will get any better reception, they have ALL hated it, every customer that has tried it.
Frankly this release just stumps me, as i don't really know who the target is. I thought it was the teens and tweeners, the ones that live on cell phones now but they seem to get pisseed off and walk away even faster than the adults. they always say the same thing "I already HAVE a cell phone, and this is stupid, I can't find anything" and walk off.
But as far as me personally using the start menu? maybe once a week. i have my docs, along with my computer and two folders labeled my shortcuts and game shortcuts and other than the program I'm using the most this week that is all i need to get to everything. Thanks to jumplists i don't need to hardly crack open my computer to drill down to where i want to go, but then again my heaviest go to folders are in rocketdock at the bottom of the screen so I have an easier time getting where i need to go quickly. Win 8 just ties a boat anchor to my workflow and while i can use it, it certainly isn't faster or better than the Win 7 UI for me.
Hear hear! I've had to strip many a PC because there was no drive cage and no damned way to even jury rig a mount short of duct taping the damned thing. Most of those cages are a real PITA to get and cost a pretty penny if the OEM will even sell you one so its often not worth it. BTW if you end up with a bunch of otherwise good PCs like that you can get cases sans PSU for cheap at Geeks, what i do is charge a small fee for the PCs i have to rebuild that way that covers the case and shipping so it all evens out.
That is why I quit listening to this little Brit PC gadgets style podcast (Damned i wish I could think of the name, i HATE when i go blank like that) even though I loved the fact that would dish all kinds of info on CPU arches, new GPUs, all kinds of really nerdy tech talk because they got a new member and his ass laughs so damned much you want to scream "Just STFU you damned hyena, I'm trying to hear this cute but smart talk on geek stuff and the ONLY one laughing at your dumbass cracks is YOU!"
so while I never listened to the car guys if they laugh at stupid shit constantly? yeah i can see why that would be hated. Its just not fun to try to hear details in audio with some jackass braying right in front of the damned mike.
Then lets put them fatties into camps! Its for their own good, right? If you are gonna control what they put into their own bodies might as well not do it half ass, then you won't even have to look at them!
or maybe, just maybe, being a free person means you are allowed to do things other people may not approve of. with hate speech trying to control what a person says that you don't like, thoughtcrime being an actual punishable offense as we saw with the "pro pedo' book writer and the guy with the jap hentai comics, and now going as far as to dictate what anyone who doesn't have piles of money can put into their own bodies, why not cut out all the bullshit and just put 'em in camps. At the rate our liberties are being flushed it won't be speeding things up by much. But of course then rich fatties would also have to shape up, we can't have that now can we? Why the rich are so much better than the common man, can't have the laws apply to THEM, oh no, that just wouldn't be right!
Not to mention we saw the exact same thing with cigarettes, they blew through the cash like crap through a goose and many of the poor simply switched to filtered cigars which are even worse for you. in my area a pack of cigarettes is $5 a pack, filtered cigars are $1.69, so guess what the poor are buying?
In the end you want to STFU a nanny state tax and spender simply offer THIS modest proposal: I'll sign an iron clad contract that if I get cancer or any other horrible disease the ONLY thing I'll get is morphine so i don't suffer, which is cheap, and in return you drop ALL sin taxes and quit telling me how to live, deal?
I know this works because I have actually made that proposal to our local congressman I'm getting all my family and friends to vote against this November. you should have seen how quickly he started hemming and hawing because other than 'I think I'm better at spending your money than YOU are" there simply wasn't an answer he could give. if more people stand up to their elected officials and offered this decent proposal it would be easily shown for the sham that it is.
if you want to offer health care fine, do it like the EU and Canada and offer a single payer option and price controls but considering you've spent the country into giants pits of debt do NOT think you are better than the people at spending their money!
And? It does, which is why there is no damned point in Linux on the desktop. Firefox, gimp, Libre office, all the software other than server shit that nobody gives a fuck about but server nerds is already on windows.
Tell you what sparky, you name me ONE good reason, just one mind you, why ZFS would be useful on a consumer desktop. just one. you won't be able to answer that because there isn't one, its whole function is SERVER fault tolerance and to allowing the pooling of drives, both things that might be nice for your LAMP stack but completely fucking pointless on the desktop.
But if you want to pretend that everyone needs a LAMP stack, that is your business, but considering the FOSSies have had 20 damned years+ now and are still craptastic as far as the numbers go and in fact have started declining, which is even more telling as W3 schools is a nerd heavy site and even THEY aren't seen any growth, well you can't blame the OEMs and everyone else from simply not giving a crap.
Uhh...this is the SAME guy that says everyone that doesn't worship at the feet of RMS is a "sekret M$ Ninja" that works in a hidden cove in Redmond to destroy FOSS. The guy is the new twitter without any of twitter's style, he just screams "Shill" while he craps all over himself with impotent nerd rage.
And as far as loss of FOSS "freedoms"...whose fault would that be? its because the FOSS products have frankly been piss poor knockoffs of other real products that we see ourselves in the situation that we are in. Frankly the FOSSies have had 20 damned years to make a better product and the ONLY time they gained is when google bitchslapped them and took Linux away from them and made an actually usable product. Hell Gnome has ripped off Apple's OSX so badly I'm shocked they don't just use their wallpaper while they are at it which is extra hilarious as Linux is a windowing OS while OSX is an application based OS so having a top mounted menu bar doesn't even make any damned sense!
In the end its not a "conspiracy', its not MSFT hiring Ninjas to kill FOSS, its piss poor half baked products that frankly never get any better. look at ANY forum after a release and see how many "update broke my drivers" post you see, i bet my last buck they'll number in the hundreds. there is NO QA, no QC, its ALL half baked and poorly built. they can get by with this in the server space because MSFT charges ass raping prices there, but that shit just won't fly in the consumer space. And if you think I'm a "M$ Ninja" for saying this perhaps you'd like to tell this Red hat developer that says the same thing only nicer he is a "M$ Ninja". For the record MSFT hasn't even given me so much as a T-Shirt, I'm simply not slurping the FOSSie koolaid. if a product works it works, if its shit its shit, and right now Linux on the desktop is firmly in the latter category. As for why read the link above, he lays it out better than I ever could.
Well all I really care about is the TDP and how close to overheating the system is. I don't honestly care if they want to use numbers or a red butted baboon, all i care about is to know whether or not a system needs more fans.
So i honestly don't see what the problem is with just giving us some sort of simple "Yes its too hot" or "no its not too hot" since these people DID design the chips after all and know what they are designed to take. Take the HD48xx chips, if you simply looked at the temp you'd go "ZOMFG!" since they tend to idle at around 60c and hit 82-90c under load, but since AMD designed those chips to run hot and go as high as 105c without damage that isn't a big deal, so instead of freaking I simply upped the fan speed to 43% so that it would move a little more air and it tends to stay around 65-70c under load which is fine and dandy and the slightly faster fan lets my case fan pull out the excess heat.
So I honestly don't care if they give me perfect numbers in the slightest, in fact since i hate the speedfan interface i simply compared the two readings and used offset in coretemp to get me a more reasonable report. But frankly you shouldn't have to break out a laser temp gauge just to find out whether a machine needs a fan or not, hell even a green yellow red signal of some sort would give us all the info we truly need to know.
That hasn't been true for my oldest, but then again he goes to a conservative school where they value such things as charity work. Thanks to him doing charity work with one of the churches affiliated with the campus he's been pretty much given keys to the kingdom, he's now head of his frat and is pretty much getting a free ride and we are not rich or influential by ANY means.
But while that may be true of the Ivy League its not true of all the schools, and considering how many senators and congressmen and governors have gone to that school i'd say that those connections really DO help.
ASLR works just fine for me as far as I can tell, and more importantly its enabled for the browser which is the main (and at least from what I've seen pretty much only) attack vector you need to worry about. And if you want to be extra secure you should probably flip the switch for structured error handling overwrite protection which I've had for over a year now and doesn't seem to affect performance any. Maybe its because I don't buy crappy boards, maybe its i get lucky, hell if i know, but as many boxes get built that go through my shop you'd think I'd be seeing some of these ATI horror stories but I'm just not.
As far as the monthly drivers, Nvidia doesn't do monthly drivers either, they do the same thing AMD is switching to which is only putting out drivers when needed as it just makes more sense. if you haven't added support for new cards or fixed any bugs simply repacking last month's driver simply makes no sense and causes needless updates. The only move AMD has done that's bothered me on the GPU front is putting the 4xxx into legacy but even that I can understand, as there simply isn't more speed to be gained there. since Win 8 is gonna require DX11 for all the bling and i have no intention of buying Win 8 it really doesn't affect me and the drivers that are already out work just fine in Win 7.
But I honestly don't see how a browser that is running at low permissions and is already sandboxed is gonna magically be able to get through all that but NOT get through ASLR. And honestly? I can't remember the last bug I saw that wasn't PEBKAC on Vista or 7, every bug I've seen has been classic social engineering like Security tool and AV201x which lets face it, if the user runs it and gives it permissions then nothing is gonna stop them, not ASLR or DEP or anything else.
In the end i just have to do what i think is right for my customers and the higher cooling and power requirements along with the higher prices for equal performance just don't make Nvidia a good buy IMHO. They are fine if you are building a gaming rig with tons of cooling and a $300+ GPU, but the majority of my customers are in the sub $150 market with most of those falling in the $50-$100 range and in those categories frankly the Nvidia offerings are just sub par. Too much heat, too much power, not enough performance, that is what I've seen of late from Nvidia and since ASLR is enabled on the only attack vector i ever encounter i really don't see a problem. Feel free to bitch at them though, I have no problem with security getting even better, I just don't think this is as really a big a deal as they are making out. Did they even run any tests on malware with browser enabled ASLR? Because if they did i can't find the figures.
Asus is good if you are going Intel but since I've been building AMD exclusively for the past couple of years that doesn't help me any. the Asrock boards all come with core unlock which can easily turn a dual into a triple, triple to quad, I've even had customers get lucky and when i flipped the switch their quads became hexas, so its worth it for that alone, but in addition they have phase switching and Xfast which I've found does give a speedboost to USB 2 and LAN file transfers.
As far as Evga, last I looked they were Nvidia only, is that still the case? after i got burnt with a couple of cards during bumpgate I've sworn off Nvidia and found the sub $150 market (which is where the majority of my customers land) pretty much belongs to AMD when it comes to performance per dollar so that's what I've been sticking with. Both the Gigabyte and Sapphire boards have performed well so much so that me and my two boys are running Sapphire HD4850s and they purr like kittens.
so maybe I've been lucky, or maybe I've played the RMA game enough that I know which Is to dot and Ts to cross, but the above companies have never given me a bit of trouble when it comes to RMAs and I've found I've had to do RMAs on their gear surprisingly little. BTW if you ever DO use an Asrock board a word of advice: since they are gamer heavy they tend to be a little...aggressive...in their RAM timings so its best to simply go in and set the timings manually if you aren't using OCed RAM. Once you do that though its smooth sailing and their board toolset is frankly one of the best I've ever seen, from their IES power saver that controls phases to their OCing tool to Xfast its all well written and very stable. It also seems to be better than most when it comes to getting the most out of Turbocore, since they monitor the heat and voltages so tightly I tend to get an extra 100MHz to 300MHz out of turbocore just by leaving it to automatic. Can't complain about getting free speed, especially when its hassle free.
Please don't do that. you'd be surprised how many people out there can't afford a PC at all and how many guys there are like me that donate their time refurbing give aways from businesses so that those poor folks can have a PC. I have yet to see ANYONE recover squat from a spinning rust drive wiped with DoD-3, which is what I use on all donations, so please don't destroy the drives because with the price of HDDs still so high that just means that many more machines can't be refurbed to help the poor. Do a DoD-3 and then use whatever software you wish to try to recover but you won't find anything, then donate it, if you don't know about anyone like me your local churches or Freecycle will be glad to help.
But so far if things continue as they have been frankly you won't have to give away that SSD, it'll already be dead before you get a chance. The amount of failures from SSDs is just insane, every one of my gamer customers that tried to switch ended going with the hybrids or raptors simply because of how quickly they die.
But when it comes to HDDs please just do a DoD-3, there are folks out there that would look upon that old P4 or early dual as a real blessing, thanks.
Mine is huge but then again I found an easy way to get a huge password...anybody seen how big the serial is on your average bass? Its got uppercase, lowercase, numbers and symbols and its pretty long and since I know my babies and never sell them its a pretty easy set of long passwords to keep up with.
As for Gibson...sigh...is the man EVER gonna update Spinrite? While i was never big on using it for data recovery it made a pretty damned awesome stress tester for hard drives but since he hasn't updated it in years it won't support HDDs over...either 500Gb or 600Gb, I can't remember which. which sucks because Spinrite was a great way to find out if a drive was toast or could be salvaged as a USB drive or was good. you'd be surprised how many drives would have one or two bad sectors that for some reason Windows refused to mark as bad but were otherwise good and could be used for years as external video drives or oversized USB flash drives. With Spinrite you'd just pop it on a box in a corner and let it run a day, it'd bypass the firmware, do the number of read/writes you set, and any sectors that didn't return the correct value would be flagged as bad by the firmware, never to be touched by windows again. it really was a great little tool and sadly I've yet to find a tool that did that one little job as well as Spinrite.
Which brings up something I've been wondering about...is it even POSSIBLE to overwrite a file if its on an SSD? Sure its easy enough to do on a HDD without having to wipe the whole drive, but since the SSD basically "lies" to the OS about where the data is actually at so it can perform wear leveling is it even possible to overwrite just a few files on an SSD with random data, or would one have to format the whole thing?
As for TFA just more proof it was written by a government and NOT a criminal, because a criminal would have been more likely just to wipe the whole drive just to be pricks. Lets face it when it comes to malware we have a lot more cases of the writers being pricks than we do of them being nice, so it just makes me think even more these new bugs are just government works for hire.
Do they lie too? The one thing I don't like about my Thuban is I have to use Speedfan to monitor temps instead of coretemp because coretemp will report a good 30 degrees F too low. I don't know if the Coretemp guys are correct that the Phenom II senors fudge numbers but for some reason SF reports the correct temps while CT does not. Right now CT says my X6 is at 72f, which is 2 degrees below room temp so I know that's BS, yet I fire up SF and it says a much more believable 112F.
So I would be interested to hear whether you have done any readings to see if the data you are getting is accurate. I don't mess with my AMD HD4850 GPU much, other than speeding up the fan because the default settings were IMHO too low, but hearing from someone actually in charge of writing monitoring software could shed some light on this.
And I've had 3 Seagates turn to shit whereas the Samsung have never let me down...its called luck of the draw folks. they crank these things out like flapjacks and bad ones get out all the time, which is why I judge a company not by whether or not they put out the occasional dud but what they DO about said dud and what kind of service you get. that is why I use Sapphire and Gigabyte cards, Gigabyte and Asrock boards, and I guess that now Samsung is gone I'll be stuck with WD hard drives. Not because these companies have never handed me a dud, but because when they DID hand me a dud they said "our bad" and worked to quickly replace it and THAT should be what matters folks, not whether a bad one slips through QA.
Laptop or desktop? if its desktop there is a setting in BIOS, on mine its called "Repost video on STR resume" and that simply refreshes the video on wake up and there you go. if its a laptop then you simply have to stick with whatever driver works as the OEMs strip the living shit out of the BIOS they put into laps and netbooks. i think its sorry but only the high end gamer laptops have a full BIOS while the rest may as not even have access considering how damned useless they are.
And why would you have to upgrade? you STILL HAVE ASLR just not on the GPU which we haven't seen any malware so far that I'm aware of attacking specific GPUs. I doubt very seriously one would be able to play any games with system wide ASLR on anyway as it would most likely cause all that buggy game code to crash and crap itself anyway, and if you are on win 7 and using a browser that supports low rights mode like IE or any of the Chromium based your biggest attack vector is already sandboxed.
so this would be like getting upset your GPU can't do double precision FP like a workstation card does. Most people are never gonna be doing anything where they would need that particular feature so it just hasn't been a big priority. I can tell you that as a shop owner the biggest bugs being spread ATM are ALL PEBKAC based, mainly variants on Security Tool and AV201x bugs. If your browser is in low rights mode and you aren't one of those morons that will run an exe just because some website says "U got teh viruz ZOMFG!" then frankly you don't have a damned thing to worry about. Windows still uses ASLR just not on the GPU, big whoop. I'd love to see a FRAPS on system wide ASLR before and after because i have a feeling it would be tying a boat anchor to most AAA games, if they even run at all.
Also since he has a Thuban (the same chip series I have) if he was on Windows there is an excellent OC utility that would let him set the target speed for turbo core so that when he is running a heavily single threaded app like WoW his core speed would shoot up under turbo to give him more performance. My board came with an even nicer OCer (Asrock if anyone is interested, great tool set they provide with their boards) so that when i'm using single threaded apps it'll shoot up from 2.6GHz to 3.1GHz which is a pretty damned big speed boost. Luckily I have a hyper N520 cooler so its no biggie as its great on keeping the chip chilled but I wouldn't try it with the stock cooler. Not saying Linux is bad for this, just that it doesn't have any tools that I'm aware of that allow the shifting of turbo on the fly based on load like the Windows OCing tools do.
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Huh, never had one of those. Had one shaped like a pot leaf once, was cool to look at but uncomfortable as hell.
The point everyone seems to be missing though is there are truly great passwords all around you if you just care to look. hell flip over your keyboard or look under your laptop, you'll find a GREAT complex password. the back of your monitor, your OEM desktop, musical instruments, anything you know you are gonna keep a long time can make a great and unique password that the best software out there would take centuries to crack. since I know the serials to my basses as well as have them stored on a sheet of paper both in my closet and in my dad's I can easily recover the password if I forget it but at the same time if someone found it they'd have no clue that it was actually a password, so its really easy to have a great complex password with a minimum of effort.
Not well read i take it? Never heard of a little piece of writing called "A modest proposal" that used exaggerations to make a point? That is a couple of centuries old BTW so its not like this is some new way of pointing out incredibly dumb ideas. Oh and just FYI there are these things actually called "fat camps" so its not Godwin to say you should be putting fatties into camps, nobody said anything about Nazis or concentration.
Yeah and I can say my butt grows wings and flies south for the winter but that don't make it so. Frankly the only metro "apps", which FYI I'm REALLY starting to hate that fucking word, has been the equivalent of fart apps and angry birds, aka cheap shitty little cell phone crap. People buy that shit on a cell phone because that is all you can really run on a cell phone but we ain't talking about cell phones here, we are talking about desktops and laptops. hell even MSFT has already said MS office won't be a Metro "app" so even THEY know you can't use that shit to get actual work done, just tweets for twits and FB blogging crap and other pointless worthless tripe like we seen bundled with every damned smartphone.
I find it telling that the Metro "apps" that were bundled at least with Win 8 CP (I'm gonna install Win 8 RP this weekend if I ever get a break) was pretty much the same crap that came bundled with my dad's new smartphone, pretty much all social shit besides a weather app. Honestly I've shown win 8 CP to nearly 250 customers from all walks of life and NOBODY CARES about all the endless tweeting twitting FB Farmville endless parade of pointless garbage, hell even the teens that tried it thought it was dumb and would rather just go to FB when they wanted FB.
So I have a feeling that Metro is gonna be this big dead elephant tied to the back of Win 8 that is gonna give it a Vista style rep for being a giant piggie. You go to someplace like tigerdirect or Walmart and see what their biggest selling laptops are, they are NON touchscreen dual cores from the AMD E300- Core i3 in speeds from 1.5GHz to 1.8GHz. With speeds like that frankly all that BS in the background is just gonna make the system feel as bloated as a fat guy that just ate at Taco hell, and with thin and light being the design words of the day all that starting and stopping and background BS is gonna suck down the battery like a wino hitting a free bar.
If they gave you an option to have it on or off? i wouldn't have a problem with it, although I find the desktop in Win 8 feels like a badly thrown together afterthought, kinda like those fake Win 7 transformation packs for XP that at first glance look real enough but once you try it you find it sorely lacking, but having metro run 24/7 even when you aren't touching the damned thing is just ridiculous. remember TANSTAAFL and no matter how quickly they flip that BS on and off its still gonna need cycles to do so, cycles you wouldn't be wasting on your battery otherwise. Although i have such a low opinion of Ballmer and Sinofsky that I'll be triple checking every Windows Update that comes out close to the Win 8 launch because honestly i wouldn't put it past 'em after the Vista fail for them to put out a patch that "just by accident" ties a boat anchor to Win 7 to make Ballmer and Sinofsky's "supergigantic smartphone OS" look better by comparison.
They are also missing a VERY important point which is why going after the male is still a better strategy...brand loyalty. Frankly we men get set in our ways easily and if we find something we like we tend to stick with it. women on the other hand have ZERO brand loyalty when it comes to tech, to them its an accessory like clothes or shoes and like clothes and shoes their tastes change and out goes the device.
For example my GF has to have gone through a good 4 phones in the past two years, she'll drop it or bust it or she doesn't like the way it texts or something and its gone...poof! Buh bye phone and i honestly don't think she has EVER bought the same brand twice when it comes to tech, its whatever one of her girlfriends recommend or what catches her eye. i tend to stick with HTC as they've never given me any problems so when one dies i get another HTC so if you get me liking your brand I'll tend to stick with it.
So if all you want is a single sale then sure, it might be smart to target the women. but if you want a long term customer its smarter to target the men as we have more brand loyalty, at least from what I've seen.
And the much deeper question, and one that scares Ballmer and MSFT to their very core is the answer to this: Exactly WHY do people see this as a needless change?
And the answer to that question is why ballmer is so damned terrified he is willing to risk his cash cow desktop in a desperate last ditch Hail Mary pass to try to get into ARM. the answer is simple...PCs passed "good enough" several chips ago and are now well into "insanely overpowered' for what the masses have to do with them.
MSFT and the OEMs got spoiled rotten with the every 2 to 3 years PC change out thanks to the MHz wars but those of us in the trenches saw this coming in 06 when the first dual cores became mainstream. I have several customers on Pentium Ds and Athlon X2s, I have built office boxes using the tiny AMD E350 and have myself traded my full size laptop for an E350 netbook, why? why are they not screaming for new machines and i'm not having a fit for more performance? because frankly the jobs most have don't even stress those bottom of the line dual cores much less any mainstream system sold in the last 6 years.
So it isn't only bad financial times, although i'm sure some are also not buying because of that, but mainly its because they aren't even stressing what they have with the tasks they want to do. Hell my GF practically lives on her PC so this Xmas i built her an Athlon II X3 desktop to replace her old p4, know what I found when i had checked her performance stats? she hadn't ever gone above 45% CPU, and that is probably about as low end on the CPU spectrum as one can get in a mainstream chip.
There is just no killer apps that are stressing the CPUs anymore, and since we finally got rid of those p4 space heater laptops that would cycle themselves to death with a little TLC and common sense even a laptop or netbook can last for 5 years or more. THIS is why MSFT has suddenly gone snooker loopy, and its not tablets and phones replacing the PCs, its just people see no reason to buy a new one when their current machines are so insanely overpowered they can take everything they throw at them and not even stress the chips. there just isn't a reason to replace an X86 unit anymore until it dies which is what MSFT and the OEMs are suddenly getting wise to and having full blown panic attacks.
The other major problem is there is no way in hell to just kill metro, even if you never use it its sucking resources and cycles no matter what. this would be fine on a modern desktop, where we have so many cores and so much RAM that nobody will give a crap, but what about laptops and netbooks? Do you REALLY want to give up a decent sized chunk of your battery life for metro?
I just hope this is the straw that breaks the camel's back. for a decade now Ballmer has been practically wiping his ass with money at MSFT and not showing shit for ROI, from killing playsforsure to Zune, from rushing the X360 out with a 2 billion dollar flaw to the Kin, from rushing Vista out with show stopping bugs to the Vista capable fiasco, not to mention the shitload he pissed down the drain to Nokia just to watch WinPhone crawl out the gate and die, the man has just been an absolutely pathetic CEO. the MS Office/desktop monopoly left to him by Bill is the only consistent cash cows they have and now the man is gonna take a giant dump on one of them because he has Apple envy and thinks if he forces WinPhone onto the desktop people will buy winPhone ARM. The guy is just a true horror of a CEO and maybe when Win 8 flops and with even conservative rags like Forbes calling him out for his incompetence maybe we'll get lucky and he will finally get the pink slip.
Because I honestly don't think MSFT can survive another decade with him at the helm, i really don't. I have to wonder if Gabe from Valve cooking up a Steambox Linux is just the first of many deserters, man what i wouldn't give to have a bunch of those big corps to fund ReactOS and just take the whole thing away from the sweaty monkey because its obvious he doesn't even understand his core businesses, much less how to actually branch and grow the company.
How about answering a few questions for me? What advantages does metro give you that weren't already present in desktop gadgets? How has metro improved your workflow over Win 7? How is the current design better on a NON touch screen desktop or laptop (which is over 90% of the PCs sold ATM) than Win 7? what benefits has Win 8 given you?
Because frankly i could find nice things about every previous release of the last decade, even Vista. with Vista you had a better memory model, better support for 64 bit, and with UAC, ASLR, and DEP you had MSFT finally allowing users to run as users and not admins and still have programs function, even if UAC bugged the crap out of people too often.
But after using Win 8 at the shop for a month the ONLY nice thing I can come up to say about it is "It'll probably be decent on a cell phone or a tablet" which would be fine IF you were talking about a company that had significant share in cell phones and tablets but we're not, we're talking about a company that threw hundreds of million after WinPhone and it went absolutely nowhere fast.
So if you think win 8 is good? Fine happy for you but at least EXPLAIN why you think its good, what benefits you have seen, and please don't do like Sinofsky and pretend that the world is gonna embrace PCs as "supergigantic smartphones" and rush out to buy touchscreens! Did anybody see his last Win 8 talk? i think he said touchscreen something like 30 damned times! less than 4% of the X86 market is touchscreens but watching him talk he has honestly deluded himself into thinking folks are gonna give up those 27in monitors for some $300 17in touchscreen! I got news for ya, Sinofsky? your shit ain't THAT good, in fact my customers all think it blows.
so please don't give us esoteric workaround crap just to get back what we've lost, sell it to us, tell us what we have gained. Because other than feeling like my desktop monitor ought to have a slider keyboard like a giant cell phone i'm just not seeing any benefits where i'm sitting. hell if you are the type addicted to twitter and FB and need 24/7/365 updates there are already gadgets that do that, so even that isn't a gain.
Some do, many just dump all the crap on the desktop. since metro tiles have to be written as metro apps its gonna be shit as folks just want to dump crap on the desktop.
Sometime this weekend i'm gonna install RP on the box at the shop running Win 8 CP but i don't think it will get any better reception, they have ALL hated it, every customer that has tried it.
Frankly this release just stumps me, as i don't really know who the target is. I thought it was the teens and tweeners, the ones that live on cell phones now but they seem to get pisseed off and walk away even faster than the adults. they always say the same thing "I already HAVE a cell phone, and this is stupid, I can't find anything" and walk off.
But as far as me personally using the start menu? maybe once a week. i have my docs, along with my computer and two folders labeled my shortcuts and game shortcuts and other than the program I'm using the most this week that is all i need to get to everything. Thanks to jumplists i don't need to hardly crack open my computer to drill down to where i want to go, but then again my heaviest go to folders are in rocketdock at the bottom of the screen so I have an easier time getting where i need to go quickly. Win 8 just ties a boat anchor to my workflow and while i can use it, it certainly isn't faster or better than the Win 7 UI for me.
Hear hear! I've had to strip many a PC because there was no drive cage and no damned way to even jury rig a mount short of duct taping the damned thing. Most of those cages are a real PITA to get and cost a pretty penny if the OEM will even sell you one so its often not worth it. BTW if you end up with a bunch of otherwise good PCs like that you can get cases sans PSU for cheap at Geeks, what i do is charge a small fee for the PCs i have to rebuild that way that covers the case and shipping so it all evens out.
That is why I quit listening to this little Brit PC gadgets style podcast (Damned i wish I could think of the name, i HATE when i go blank like that) even though I loved the fact that would dish all kinds of info on CPU arches, new GPUs, all kinds of really nerdy tech talk because they got a new member and his ass laughs so damned much you want to scream "Just STFU you damned hyena, I'm trying to hear this cute but smart talk on geek stuff and the ONLY one laughing at your dumbass cracks is YOU!"
so while I never listened to the car guys if they laugh at stupid shit constantly? yeah i can see why that would be hated. Its just not fun to try to hear details in audio with some jackass braying right in front of the damned mike.
Then lets put them fatties into camps! Its for their own good, right? If you are gonna control what they put into their own bodies might as well not do it half ass, then you won't even have to look at them!
or maybe, just maybe, being a free person means you are allowed to do things other people may not approve of. with hate speech trying to control what a person says that you don't like, thoughtcrime being an actual punishable offense as we saw with the "pro pedo' book writer and the guy with the jap hentai comics, and now going as far as to dictate what anyone who doesn't have piles of money can put into their own bodies, why not cut out all the bullshit and just put 'em in camps. At the rate our liberties are being flushed it won't be speeding things up by much. But of course then rich fatties would also have to shape up, we can't have that now can we? Why the rich are so much better than the common man, can't have the laws apply to THEM, oh no, that just wouldn't be right!
Not to mention we saw the exact same thing with cigarettes, they blew through the cash like crap through a goose and many of the poor simply switched to filtered cigars which are even worse for you. in my area a pack of cigarettes is $5 a pack, filtered cigars are $1.69, so guess what the poor are buying?
In the end you want to STFU a nanny state tax and spender simply offer THIS modest proposal: I'll sign an iron clad contract that if I get cancer or any other horrible disease the ONLY thing I'll get is morphine so i don't suffer, which is cheap, and in return you drop ALL sin taxes and quit telling me how to live, deal?
I know this works because I have actually made that proposal to our local congressman I'm getting all my family and friends to vote against this November. you should have seen how quickly he started hemming and hawing because other than 'I think I'm better at spending your money than YOU are" there simply wasn't an answer he could give. if more people stand up to their elected officials and offered this decent proposal it would be easily shown for the sham that it is.
if you want to offer health care fine, do it like the EU and Canada and offer a single payer option and price controls but considering you've spent the country into giants pits of debt do NOT think you are better than the people at spending their money!
And? It does, which is why there is no damned point in Linux on the desktop. Firefox, gimp, Libre office, all the software other than server shit that nobody gives a fuck about but server nerds is already on windows.
Tell you what sparky, you name me ONE good reason, just one mind you, why ZFS would be useful on a consumer desktop. just one. you won't be able to answer that because there isn't one, its whole function is SERVER fault tolerance and to allowing the pooling of drives, both things that might be nice for your LAMP stack but completely fucking pointless on the desktop.
But if you want to pretend that everyone needs a LAMP stack, that is your business, but considering the FOSSies have had 20 damned years+ now and are still craptastic as far as the numbers go and in fact have started declining, which is even more telling as W3 schools is a nerd heavy site and even THEY aren't seen any growth, well you can't blame the OEMs and everyone else from simply not giving a crap.
Uhh...this is the SAME guy that says everyone that doesn't worship at the feet of RMS is a "sekret M$ Ninja" that works in a hidden cove in Redmond to destroy FOSS. The guy is the new twitter without any of twitter's style, he just screams "Shill" while he craps all over himself with impotent nerd rage.
And as far as loss of FOSS "freedoms"...whose fault would that be? its because the FOSS products have frankly been piss poor knockoffs of other real products that we see ourselves in the situation that we are in. Frankly the FOSSies have had 20 damned years to make a better product and the ONLY time they gained is when google bitchslapped them and took Linux away from them and made an actually usable product. Hell Gnome has ripped off Apple's OSX so badly I'm shocked they don't just use their wallpaper while they are at it which is extra hilarious as Linux is a windowing OS while OSX is an application based OS so having a top mounted menu bar doesn't even make any damned sense!
In the end its not a "conspiracy', its not MSFT hiring Ninjas to kill FOSS, its piss poor half baked products that frankly never get any better. look at ANY forum after a release and see how many "update broke my drivers" post you see, i bet my last buck they'll number in the hundreds. there is NO QA, no QC, its ALL half baked and poorly built. they can get by with this in the server space because MSFT charges ass raping prices there, but that shit just won't fly in the consumer space. And if you think I'm a "M$ Ninja" for saying this perhaps you'd like to tell this Red hat developer that says the same thing only nicer he is a "M$ Ninja". For the record MSFT hasn't even given me so much as a T-Shirt, I'm simply not slurping the FOSSie koolaid. if a product works it works, if its shit its shit, and right now Linux on the desktop is firmly in the latter category. As for why read the link above, he lays it out better than I ever could.
Well all I really care about is the TDP and how close to overheating the system is. I don't honestly care if they want to use numbers or a red butted baboon, all i care about is to know whether or not a system needs more fans.
So i honestly don't see what the problem is with just giving us some sort of simple "Yes its too hot" or "no its not too hot" since these people DID design the chips after all and know what they are designed to take. Take the HD48xx chips, if you simply looked at the temp you'd go "ZOMFG!" since they tend to idle at around 60c and hit 82-90c under load, but since AMD designed those chips to run hot and go as high as 105c without damage that isn't a big deal, so instead of freaking I simply upped the fan speed to 43% so that it would move a little more air and it tends to stay around 65-70c under load which is fine and dandy and the slightly faster fan lets my case fan pull out the excess heat.
So I honestly don't care if they give me perfect numbers in the slightest, in fact since i hate the speedfan interface i simply compared the two readings and used offset in coretemp to get me a more reasonable report. But frankly you shouldn't have to break out a laser temp gauge just to find out whether a machine needs a fan or not, hell even a green yellow red signal of some sort would give us all the info we truly need to know.
That hasn't been true for my oldest, but then again he goes to a conservative school where they value such things as charity work. Thanks to him doing charity work with one of the churches affiliated with the campus he's been pretty much given keys to the kingdom, he's now head of his frat and is pretty much getting a free ride and we are not rich or influential by ANY means.
But while that may be true of the Ivy League its not true of all the schools, and considering how many senators and congressmen and governors have gone to that school i'd say that those connections really DO help.
ASLR works just fine for me as far as I can tell, and more importantly its enabled for the browser which is the main (and at least from what I've seen pretty much only) attack vector you need to worry about. And if you want to be extra secure you should probably flip the switch for structured error handling overwrite protection which I've had for over a year now and doesn't seem to affect performance any. Maybe its because I don't buy crappy boards, maybe its i get lucky, hell if i know, but as many boxes get built that go through my shop you'd think I'd be seeing some of these ATI horror stories but I'm just not.
As far as the monthly drivers, Nvidia doesn't do monthly drivers either, they do the same thing AMD is switching to which is only putting out drivers when needed as it just makes more sense. if you haven't added support for new cards or fixed any bugs simply repacking last month's driver simply makes no sense and causes needless updates. The only move AMD has done that's bothered me on the GPU front is putting the 4xxx into legacy but even that I can understand, as there simply isn't more speed to be gained there. since Win 8 is gonna require DX11 for all the bling and i have no intention of buying Win 8 it really doesn't affect me and the drivers that are already out work just fine in Win 7.
But I honestly don't see how a browser that is running at low permissions and is already sandboxed is gonna magically be able to get through all that but NOT get through ASLR. And honestly? I can't remember the last bug I saw that wasn't PEBKAC on Vista or 7, every bug I've seen has been classic social engineering like Security tool and AV201x which lets face it, if the user runs it and gives it permissions then nothing is gonna stop them, not ASLR or DEP or anything else.
In the end i just have to do what i think is right for my customers and the higher cooling and power requirements along with the higher prices for equal performance just don't make Nvidia a good buy IMHO. They are fine if you are building a gaming rig with tons of cooling and a $300+ GPU, but the majority of my customers are in the sub $150 market with most of those falling in the $50-$100 range and in those categories frankly the Nvidia offerings are just sub par. Too much heat, too much power, not enough performance, that is what I've seen of late from Nvidia and since ASLR is enabled on the only attack vector i ever encounter i really don't see a problem. Feel free to bitch at them though, I have no problem with security getting even better, I just don't think this is as really a big a deal as they are making out. Did they even run any tests on malware with browser enabled ASLR? Because if they did i can't find the figures.
Asus is good if you are going Intel but since I've been building AMD exclusively for the past couple of years that doesn't help me any. the Asrock boards all come with core unlock which can easily turn a dual into a triple, triple to quad, I've even had customers get lucky and when i flipped the switch their quads became hexas, so its worth it for that alone, but in addition they have phase switching and Xfast which I've found does give a speedboost to USB 2 and LAN file transfers.
As far as Evga, last I looked they were Nvidia only, is that still the case? after i got burnt with a couple of cards during bumpgate I've sworn off Nvidia and found the sub $150 market (which is where the majority of my customers land) pretty much belongs to AMD when it comes to performance per dollar so that's what I've been sticking with. Both the Gigabyte and Sapphire boards have performed well so much so that me and my two boys are running Sapphire HD4850s and they purr like kittens.
so maybe I've been lucky, or maybe I've played the RMA game enough that I know which Is to dot and Ts to cross, but the above companies have never given me a bit of trouble when it comes to RMAs and I've found I've had to do RMAs on their gear surprisingly little. BTW if you ever DO use an Asrock board a word of advice: since they are gamer heavy they tend to be a little...aggressive...in their RAM timings so its best to simply go in and set the timings manually if you aren't using OCed RAM. Once you do that though its smooth sailing and their board toolset is frankly one of the best I've ever seen, from their IES power saver that controls phases to their OCing tool to Xfast its all well written and very stable. It also seems to be better than most when it comes to getting the most out of Turbocore, since they monitor the heat and voltages so tightly I tend to get an extra 100MHz to 300MHz out of turbocore just by leaving it to automatic. Can't complain about getting free speed, especially when its hassle free.
Please don't do that. you'd be surprised how many people out there can't afford a PC at all and how many guys there are like me that donate their time refurbing give aways from businesses so that those poor folks can have a PC. I have yet to see ANYONE recover squat from a spinning rust drive wiped with DoD-3, which is what I use on all donations, so please don't destroy the drives because with the price of HDDs still so high that just means that many more machines can't be refurbed to help the poor. Do a DoD-3 and then use whatever software you wish to try to recover but you won't find anything, then donate it, if you don't know about anyone like me your local churches or Freecycle will be glad to help.
But so far if things continue as they have been frankly you won't have to give away that SSD, it'll already be dead before you get a chance. The amount of failures from SSDs is just insane, every one of my gamer customers that tried to switch ended going with the hybrids or raptors simply because of how quickly they die.
But when it comes to HDDs please just do a DoD-3, there are folks out there that would look upon that old P4 or early dual as a real blessing, thanks.
Mine is huge but then again I found an easy way to get a huge password...anybody seen how big the serial is on your average bass? Its got uppercase, lowercase, numbers and symbols and its pretty long and since I know my babies and never sell them its a pretty easy set of long passwords to keep up with.
As for Gibson...sigh...is the man EVER gonna update Spinrite? While i was never big on using it for data recovery it made a pretty damned awesome stress tester for hard drives but since he hasn't updated it in years it won't support HDDs over...either 500Gb or 600Gb, I can't remember which. which sucks because Spinrite was a great way to find out if a drive was toast or could be salvaged as a USB drive or was good. you'd be surprised how many drives would have one or two bad sectors that for some reason Windows refused to mark as bad but were otherwise good and could be used for years as external video drives or oversized USB flash drives. With Spinrite you'd just pop it on a box in a corner and let it run a day, it'd bypass the firmware, do the number of read/writes you set, and any sectors that didn't return the correct value would be flagged as bad by the firmware, never to be touched by windows again. it really was a great little tool and sadly I've yet to find a tool that did that one little job as well as Spinrite.
Steve if you read this update Spinrite already!
Which brings up something I've been wondering about...is it even POSSIBLE to overwrite a file if its on an SSD? Sure its easy enough to do on a HDD without having to wipe the whole drive, but since the SSD basically "lies" to the OS about where the data is actually at so it can perform wear leveling is it even possible to overwrite just a few files on an SSD with random data, or would one have to format the whole thing?
As for TFA just more proof it was written by a government and NOT a criminal, because a criminal would have been more likely just to wipe the whole drive just to be pricks. Lets face it when it comes to malware we have a lot more cases of the writers being pricks than we do of them being nice, so it just makes me think even more these new bugs are just government works for hire.
Do they lie too? The one thing I don't like about my Thuban is I have to use Speedfan to monitor temps instead of coretemp because coretemp will report a good 30 degrees F too low. I don't know if the Coretemp guys are correct that the Phenom II senors fudge numbers but for some reason SF reports the correct temps while CT does not. Right now CT says my X6 is at 72f, which is 2 degrees below room temp so I know that's BS, yet I fire up SF and it says a much more believable 112F.
So I would be interested to hear whether you have done any readings to see if the data you are getting is accurate. I don't mess with my AMD HD4850 GPU much, other than speeding up the fan because the default settings were IMHO too low, but hearing from someone actually in charge of writing monitoring software could shed some light on this.
And I've had 3 Seagates turn to shit whereas the Samsung have never let me down...its called luck of the draw folks. they crank these things out like flapjacks and bad ones get out all the time, which is why I judge a company not by whether or not they put out the occasional dud but what they DO about said dud and what kind of service you get. that is why I use Sapphire and Gigabyte cards, Gigabyte and Asrock boards, and I guess that now Samsung is gone I'll be stuck with WD hard drives. Not because these companies have never handed me a dud, but because when they DID hand me a dud they said "our bad" and worked to quickly replace it and THAT should be what matters folks, not whether a bad one slips through QA.
Laptop or desktop? if its desktop there is a setting in BIOS, on mine its called "Repost video on STR resume" and that simply refreshes the video on wake up and there you go. if its a laptop then you simply have to stick with whatever driver works as the OEMs strip the living shit out of the BIOS they put into laps and netbooks. i think its sorry but only the high end gamer laptops have a full BIOS while the rest may as not even have access considering how damned useless they are.
And why would you have to upgrade? you STILL HAVE ASLR just not on the GPU which we haven't seen any malware so far that I'm aware of attacking specific GPUs. I doubt very seriously one would be able to play any games with system wide ASLR on anyway as it would most likely cause all that buggy game code to crash and crap itself anyway, and if you are on win 7 and using a browser that supports low rights mode like IE or any of the Chromium based your biggest attack vector is already sandboxed.
so this would be like getting upset your GPU can't do double precision FP like a workstation card does. Most people are never gonna be doing anything where they would need that particular feature so it just hasn't been a big priority. I can tell you that as a shop owner the biggest bugs being spread ATM are ALL PEBKAC based, mainly variants on Security Tool and AV201x bugs. If your browser is in low rights mode and you aren't one of those morons that will run an exe just because some website says "U got teh viruz ZOMFG!" then frankly you don't have a damned thing to worry about. Windows still uses ASLR just not on the GPU, big whoop. I'd love to see a FRAPS on system wide ASLR before and after because i have a feeling it would be tying a boat anchor to most AAA games, if they even run at all.
Also since he has a Thuban (the same chip series I have) if he was on Windows there is an excellent OC utility that would let him set the target speed for turbo core so that when he is running a heavily single threaded app like WoW his core speed would shoot up under turbo to give him more performance. My board came with an even nicer OCer (Asrock if anyone is interested, great tool set they provide with their boards) so that when i'm using single threaded apps it'll shoot up from 2.6GHz to 3.1GHz which is a pretty damned big speed boost. Luckily I have a hyper N520 cooler so its no biggie as its great on keeping the chip chilled but I wouldn't try it with the stock cooler. Not saying Linux is bad for this, just that it doesn't have any tools that I'm aware of that allow the shifting of turbo on the fly based on load like the Windows OCing tools do.