I'm sorry friend but you are mistaken, unless you call sliding a single slider in UAC as some complex action. Win 7 can autosandbox the browser (your choice of IE or any Chromium based) and run it in low rights mode which is actually SAFER than surfing in Linux where running a single program in a much lower set of permissions is far from simple, and then simply add one of several free AVs that also sandbox (My two favorites are Avast and Comodo Internet Security, both work well) and frankly the user need not know anything. The OS will autoupdate, autosandbox, scan ALL pages before load, hell my 71 year old dad is as clueless about tech as they come and his PC has been on the net 24/7/365 running Win 7 since Oct 09 and hasn't has a single problem or bug, the worst problem he has had is he didn't know how to update his browser (it kept telling him there was an update but he kept pushing the X instead of the update button) and that was it.
If you want to know the REAL reason why you see much more infected Windows? let me tell you a true story about the only person i ever threw out of my shop. He comes in, buys a PC from me, and wants me to install limewire. I tell him "I'm sorry but Limewire doesn't exist anymore, they got shutdown by the feds and anything calling itself Limewire now is just a virus pretending to be the real deal. There are several alternative such as Emule and BT if you wish me to install one of those" so what does he do? He promptly goes home with his new PC, Googles "New limewire" and when the AV naturally wouldn't let him install it first he tried to disable and then he removed the AV altogether! Why did he do that? Because the program told him to! When I finally threw him out of my shop (demanding I fix it for free after he broke it by refusing to listen to my instructions or call) he was yelling "It says right there that it IS Limewire so you make it work dammit!
So if you want to know why there are plenty of infected Windows machines its because of the dancing bunnies problem. It doesn't matter how simple or secure you make the OS if the user has install rights because all you have to do is wave the right cookie, be it porn, piracy, hell I've seen users infect their PCs for a CHANCE of winning some iShiny, then all can be bypassed. MSFT thinks they are gonna fix this by going the Apple way with an appstore but it won't work, as porn and piracy won't be offered in the appstore and that will be enough of a cookie to lure victims. Whether you choose to admit it or not to run Linux you HAVE TO have more than moderate PC skills or have a full time admin (such as yourself) willing to work for free simply because you have to know how to deal with updates breaking drivers and other Linux "quirks" one simply doesn't run into on OSX or Windows. Hell simply the fact you have to install it, know what partitions are and what sizes to make them, Google for drivers that aren't included and understand how to find out the exact make/model of said hardware to properly install Linux already puts you above a good 80% of the population. if you wish to argue that let me take away install rights for all my customers who would only be allowed to let me remote in and install approved software? Windows would never get bugs either.
But that argument simply doesn't hold water when the vast majority are on their own, without so much as a geek in the family to guide them. In fact I would argue that them getting Linux installed correctly and having it fully functional for even a year would probably be impossible, since they simply wouldn't have the skills required. Linux is only friendly IF everything works OOTB AND it works after every upgrade, two situations which at least in my experience are about as likely as Santa dropping me off a dozen porn stars for Xmas.
What safer alternative is that? Its NOT fossil fuels, as we are racking up a hell of a body count right now in the ME for fossil fuels and the price in blood will go nowhere but up. Whether we like it or not folks fossil fuels is a GLOBAL market and the west has to compete with a rapidly modernizing and growing east. Look at any graph of energy usage in China and India and you'll know that fossil fuels are never gonna be cheap again. Sure you can try to create ersatz fuels like biofuels but so far the amount of energy gained for energy used (EOI is the term I believe) simply is nowhere near high enough to make it a true replacement for even the fuel we use now for vehicles, much less for running a ton of power plants on top.
Believe me friend I would like nothing better than for science to come up with some power plant that runs on some uber cheap plentiful resource and cost pennies per kilowatt, which is why I said for the future of our race we MUST continue to invest in energy research, but until that day comes we need moar power NOW, and the only things ATM that can meet the truly explosive demand for power is fossil fuels (which will involve killing lots o' brown people if the past is any indication) or nuclear. Wind solar and hydro simply can't generate even 30% of our current demand even if we devoted insane amounts of acres to them, the math? It just doesn't work.
Hell here it is Cinco de Mayo and already its been in the 90s all week here, everyone has their ACs blasting full blast just to keep from melting, where do you think we are gonna get that power? Personally i'm glad we have two reactors in my state so the price of power isn't as God awful as it is in other places but even now we are starting to hear of old people dying because they can't afford to run the AC. If the temps stay like this (which barring a volcano eruption or other cause of another little ice age i don't see it dropping any) then power prices will need to be cut by probably half just to keep from slaughtering our old people whose frail bodies simply can't take high temps. Show me this safer alternative that will give us power at that price point please, because i don't see it.
Nope, too expensive for too small a screen for a kitchen PC. As someone who has actually set a few of these up for customers I would recommend something like the HP or Gateway all-in-ones. You can get them anywhere from 19-24 inches, they have both AMD Fusion and Intel i3 units (Personally I like AMD Fusion as the price is lower while having excellent hardware acceleration for video and very low heat generation) and you can basically choose from units starting at around $350 going all the way to $800 just depending on what features you want.
so I'm sorry but the iPad isn't a good choice in this situation. Not saying there is anything wrong with it, in fact I recommend them myself for doctor's office and warehouse inventory as you can't really beat the size in those applications, but in a kitchen you want something big enough you won't have to go past the stove when you are cooking and with large enough icons you can just pop them with a knuckle in case your hands are a little messy. Just not the right device for this situation IMHO. If he wants to look at them last I checked Tigerdirect had a large selection although with the shortages of Fusion chips most of theirs are Intel i series just as this really nice Gateway for $699 which would give him a nice 23 inch 1080p with enough hard drive space you could load it with movies (great when you are stuck in the kitchen) and with built in Wifi and webcam it would be easy to integrate into his existing system and do video chat as per TFA.
One word friend..SA-2. NK has enough telephone pole sized SA-2s they could literally spam the skies and knock down this turkey. Again its a 737, not designed to do fast dodges.
And the ONLY way you would EVER see anything like this on a fighter is if they make nuke powered fighters and that sure as hell isn't gonna happen. What you seem to be thinking is that tech will magically solve the problem in the future but what you forget is just like E=MC2 things do have limits that simply can't be solved by tech. in this case the wattage required to penetrate a solid rocket are well known and simply can't be shrunk with anything short of nuclear reactions and even then the smallest you are gonna get without having a flying timebomb is something like the B-2 not the F18.
You see the simple fact is there is no way you would get enough warning and still be able to make it. like I said if you try a "bear run" and keep this thing close to the border one $60k SA-2 takes down your trillion dollar 737 and that's that. If you fly high its in SA-2 range, fly low and the Shilka quad AAA will grind it into hamburger. the only way this could work is its either in space or you have something that can fit into an F-16 which has the maneuverability which i just pointed out the math just doesn't work, you would need a reactor the size of an external pod that could crank enough power to feed a city of 5000 people, you just can't do it.
The reason why you don't see Linux desktops getting targeted is for multiple reasons, 1.-interoperability is shit, the lack of a unified platform that keeps third parties from touching Linux with a 50 foot pole also keeps away malware writers because the best they could score is say...40% of UBUNTU users, but that same attack probably wouldn't work on RHEL without serious tweaking, or on PCLOS, or on Mepis, you get the picture, 2.- Malware writers want powerful machines because the more powerful the machine the more they can remain hidden while cranking out the spam or spreading the bug. Not to slam Linux users but you DO have a shitload of "How to save that PC from the dump" articles which would give an outsider the impression they are more likely to find a P4 than an i7, and 3.-Malware writers are criminals and criminals are notorious for being lazy. they don't want to have to constantly rewrite their bug because something got fiddled with between Ubuntu maniac monkey and nutty narwhal and their shit got broke. With both Windows and Apple having quite clearly labeled life cycles this makes it easy to know how long a bug could be good for.
If you want to see how badly Linux would get pwned if it was on the radar simply look at android. it has tons of ordinary users, is using the Linux kernel, and has been royally assraped by the malware guys. in the end you simply cannot defeat reality which is thus: ALL Operating Systems are EXTREMELY complex, with literally millions of lines of code all having to interact perfectly and this isn't even counting the third party stuff. hell I doubt even Linus can tell you with 100% certainty when you launch say network manager every single call it will make and what every interaction is, its simply too complex. More than 90% of the planet are NOT geeks, hell they don't even come up to the level of a power user of any system, they know just enough to get it to function and that is it, and finally the malware guys figured out long ago its the USER that is the juiciest target, after all it is they that have the keys to the kingdom so by using social engineering they have become quite adept at getting past the defenses by having their "man/woman on the inside" aka the user, help them achieve their goals.
So it doesn't matter what OS you use, you practice safe computing you'll be fine, practice stupid computing you'll be pwned. For those that think the repos are safe might want to look at how long the repos were handing out an infected Quake 3, try a year and a half. If a malware writer truly wants to target Linux there are ways, target some of the software that isn't as heavily monitored or like I said simply target the users and you're in like flynn.
Now you watch as I get modded down for pointing out reality, to be followed by those that treat Linux as a religion (Some call them Freetards, I call them FOSSies because they remind me of Moonies) scream that it just isn't possible, that linux's magical goodness could never be tainted by malware crap...hmmm...where did I hear that before? Oh yeah those that bowed at the altar of Jobs, aka "The Cult of Mac". Wouldn't it be smarter to simply use the best tool for the job and be on your guard? But those that treat tech like ballclubs won't quit rooting for the home team, even when they strike out.
The simple fact is we DON'T have anything else, not that doesn't have serious drawbacks. 1.-Wind...can't be placed when needed, can't be ramped up during peaks, can't be controlled. 2.-Water..same problem as wind in can't easily be placed where needed, also has the problem of screwing up a lot of valuable land that could be used for farming which with a growing population is undesirable, 3.-Solar...theoretically you could use molten salt solar which would provide power at night but again no way to ramp up when needed and can't easily be placed where needed, then of course there is the huge size required to generate the same amount of power as even a small reactor.
So there you have it folks. While i'm all for research into new forms of power generation, in fact i would argue that research is vital for the survival of our race, ATM we really only have two choices and that is fossil fuels or nuclear power. We all know the drawbacks of fossil fuel generation, no need for me to list them, and for those that argue that nuclear isn't safe frankly we have no idea how safe nuclear is or isn't because all the current reactors are decades old. It would be like claiming cars aren't safe and using a 75 Pinto as the basis. Until we at least get some research reactors of decent size built with the new designs frankly we simply aren't gonna know how safe we can build a reactor but one thing we DO know is that every year our need for power grows and the renewable sources in their current designs simply won't be able to keep up.
So its up to you, keep cranking out them coal and gas burners or try the newer designs.
See this is why I love to LMAO at the FOSSies, they are so "There is but one true god!" they can't even think, its like a cross between village idiot and conspiracy nut, all rolled into one!
You want some fresh bitch slapping? Be careful what you wish for FOSSie, how about a nice kernel exploit? Or how about the guy that wrote EEEBuntu saying Ubuntu sucks which considering they are the current savior of Linux kinda tells you something. But why don't you say "Use Distro X" and then have the balls to name the X so i can show its just as big a POS, huh? BTW frankly everyone has stop giving a fuck about your OS, you aren't even newsworthy anymore really. Now its all Win 7&8, OSX&iOS, and of course Android which just shows what happens when a company bitch slaps the community and takes it away from them, why it actually fucking runs!
How sad that even with a bug spreading through OSX there are writers pointing out that's no reason to torture yourself with Linux , after all even a virus ridden OSX actually runs which is more than most distros LOL! But hey, you can always tell them they can fix it otherwise they don't need that right? LOL! And I noticed you just couldn't fricking resist screaming "Nigger!" which in FOSSie is done by screaming PaidMicrosoftShill, hey you think you could throw in one more FOSSie cliche please? Then I'll have a FOSSie Flush ROFL!
But if you didn't have cliches and your pathetic attempts at insults why then you might have to have an independent thought and realize what everybody knows that even when MSFT put out a universally reviled OS you STILL got curb stomped, does that give you ANY clues? or all they all brainwashed by those black choppers that have been following you? Hell when the Chinese were given the choice of your "free OS" or pirating Windows they chose the latter even if it meant staying on XP and using IE fricking 6, LOL! Does that ring ANY bells? A smart person would say "what are we doing wrong the other guy is doing right?" but a FOSSie who is just like a Moonie in that they blindly follow, instead says "Its all a conspiracy! They are all shills keeping the masses from true salvation!" and then you wonder why we all laugh at you because you DON'T Listen, you DON'T learn, and Torvalds could take a big steaming dump and hand it to you and you'd thank him for his generous gift. So enjoy that fresh bitchslapping loony, enjoy the fact that the world really doesn't care...but I do, I enjoy slapping you, it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.
The magnets are also great to scavenge as they'll put a magnetic charge on your screwdrivers you wouldn't believe. But it is nice to see someone get what I'm talking about because once your data is backed up those drives are "free" so any uses you find for them are just gravy.
One of the things I like to do with mine is after giving them a good testing slap them in a cheap external case and make portadrives out of them. External drive enclosures can be had for around $5 and paired with something you may not have heard of called an Nbox or Nbox HD which paired with those free drives and cheap enclosures make kick ass media tanks for your less skilled friends or relatives. Like for example I loaded one up for dad with his favorite genres of movies, or if you have a relative with kids give them one loaded with kid shows and watch how you are looked upon as a god among men.
In the end as long as your data is backed up spending hundreds on drives when you have a "free" source is frankly stupid. Better to find good uses in them like a home made NAS, media tanks, portadrives, just use your imagination.
Actually they already did and I have no doubt the OEMs told them where they could stick Win 8 if they tried that shit again, hence the dumbshit you see here. Hell why do you think there is a Win 7 Starter? Its not because netbooks can't run Win 7 HP, because mine runs Win 7 HP just fine, its because MSFT raised the price on Windows with Win 7 and when the OEMs told them they would put Linux or Chrome or anything OTHER than Windows on netbooks (because the margins are razor thin on those anyway) they cooked up the Starter crap.
Personally i think everyone that uses Windows should rejoice, because finally, FINALLY it looks like Ballmer will nuke the fridge and then the board can punt kick "Gates' little buddy" like a 30 yard field return and get someone with a brain as CEO. what we are seeing here is the same dumbshit brain dead thinking they are having at IBM, aka "Anything for share price! Gotta raise that stock!" ignorant shit. Ballmer refuses to accept the reason the stock price has been flatline, even when Win 7 was a hit is because HE IS A SHITTY CEO that nobody has any confidence in, which if you look at his track record its more flops than hits...Zune, Vista, killing playsforsure for Zune market, Kin, pushing X360 out with a billion dollar flaw...the guy is a fricking disaster.
So lets cut the bullshit and call a spade a spade..Win 8 is a cell phone OS that Ballmer thinks if he shovels onto the market he can basically force users to buy WinPhone (since his previous tries have gone over soooo well) and fool developers into writing apps for WinPhone. he has already jack the price as high as he can go without the OEMs telling him to pound sand, and still his stock price is flatline. So frankly Ballmer has his back to the wall and I say...yay! couldn't happen to a stupider PHB.
Lets all make sure we have any machines we want loaded with Win 7 and then when "Ballmer's Folly" gets released it will create a giant fart noise all the way back to Redmond where the board will hopefully shitcan this clown. And sorry if this comes off a little ranty but lets face it, Ballmer makes the PHB on Dilbert seem like a fricking genius. Yes this is just the PERFECT move when your competitors are curb stomping you, why piss off your OEMs and customers, that's the ticket!
First they came for the porn but I didn't watch porn so I didn't care, next they came for those extremist websites but I wasn't an extremist so I didn't care, next they went after the hate speech, but I wasn't hateful so I didn't care, next they came for the unpopular but I wasn't unpopular so I didn't care, then when i realized I was in a jack booted fascist state I had no way to protest or organize because they turned the internet into the fucking home shopping club and when i complained they hauled my ass away.
I admit not nearly as poetic but the sentiment is there. NEVER FORGET that there are those out there that honestly believe nothing should exist that an 8 year old can't watch and scarily enough these douchebags often end up in power.
Uhh...because the ACs entire argument was because emulation software exists and Intel hasn't sued that meant that X86 wasn't licensed? The two things aren't even remotely comparable, as i said one is an apple the other a crayon drawing of a fruit. To compare something which has a specifically granted exception under DMCA (software emulation of hardware for interoperability) VS making a knock off in hardware? Two not even close things.
The GGP may have been wrong but at the time nobody was upmodding that one so who gave a crap if he was wrong or not and upmodding someone as "insightful" when what they are posting isn't even remotely correct or even comparable is about like that Mobile guy that got modded to plus 5 for his "I like to lick butts!" comment. But whether it can be licensed or not really doesn't matter because as far as DMCA is concerned one has a built in exception if one is modeling older hardware or software to allow compatibility with new OSes which is exactly what DOSBox is. If Intel attempted to take this to court I doubt they'd have a leg to stand on as i seriously doubt one could even get older versions of DOS to run correctly on modern multicores, not to mention it would be impossible to find even a single driver for modern hardware.
so nope, sorry, not relevant to the discussion. To use a/. car analogy it would be like an article on the latest model trucks having governors and the AC piped in "Well my new boat does 40MPH!", that's nice, doesn't really have a damned thing to do with the discussion unless you count both as vehicles.
No ya don't friend, here let old Hairy help you out...Ninite to the rescue! See how easy that was? While you are giving them your choice of CCCP or Klite (I prefer Klite myself) you can go ahead and check the boxes for Flash, Java,.NET, CutePDF Printer, hell give 'em all the good stuff. simple as check boxes and run installer, oh and NO TOOLBARS or any other crap, just what you want. between that and WSUS Offline Windows couldn't be simpler to set up, hell you can even check the boxes with Ninite if you think they have the older version and it'll skip anything that is up to date. its free and easy, what could be nicer? enjoy!
Win 7 is supported until 2020 so just do what myself, my family, and my customers are doing and avoid the shitastic Win 8. I'm seriously starting to wonder if Ballmer shouldn't be scheduled for a CAT scan because the man is acting more than a little off his nut. Between the cell phone OS, trying to shove in an appstore, and now this? Why the hell would you want the POS? win 7 runs on anything from netbooks to octocores, has all the programs, has WMC and DVD, and unlike this turdfest actually has a UI that is pleasant with a keyboard and mouse.
Mark my words it'll be Vista all over again. I probably shouldn't complain as I made a mint wiping that turkey for XP off all those disgruntled users PCs but...sigh, if the OEMs don't include Win 7 discs I'm adding a 40% surcharge if I have to deal with those damned downgrade rights again. More likely the OEMs will have a shitfit like they did after Vista had been out a little while and they just pack a Win 8 disc in with the installed OS being Win 7. That way MSFT doesn't have to admit they shat out another failwhale by counting all those discs as Win 8 sales and everyone can just avoid this loser. geez what a stupid fucking idea.
I'm sorry but this is NOT insightful, because NOBODY is gonna use GEFORCE cards in supercomputers, as their FP is just too shitty. if you would have been talking about an AMD since that company is pushing their lines towards a single design (they are even switching their GPUs from VLIW to Vector to get more GPGPU performance) then yes, you would be correct. but this is Nvidia we are talking about here who have been consistently separating their GPGPU line (Tesla) and their gamer line (Geforce) and the two lines are NOT identical, nowhere even close.
So I'm sorry friend but this is NOT for supercomputers, this is for showing you have the largest ePeen on the benchmark boards or triple monitored Skyrim. If you wanted to argue they are testing designs on the gamers, kinda like how RHEL uses Fedora as a testbed? that might be possible, but nobody is gonna buy geforce cards (which the FP has gone down not up with these latest cards) to slap into supercomputers.
Citation please? because I have been using Radeons pretty much exclusively at the shop and frankly haven't seen any stability problems since the 9.x drivers. I have to give AMD credit where credit is due because before the purchase it was common knowledge that while ATI hardware kicked some ass their drivers were often shit and one would have to wait 6 months or more before the major bugs were worked out but since being bought by AMD the drivers are actually pretty nice. I mean if there were stability problems you'd have thought I'd have run into it, since I've been selling everything from APUs like Bobcat based netbooks and STBs and Liano laptops and desktops, and on the card side everything from the low rent 4650s and 5450s to the more high mid 68xx and 78xx (not much call for the ePeen cards in these parts) and frankly their drivers have been just fine. In fact I can only think of a single time I had a problem with an AMD driver and that was called by MSFT having a bad.NET patch that didn't take, once i cleaned that mess out it was all roses.
Why? Once Intel gutted Nvidia's chipset business (which I still haven't figured out why they didn't get an Antitrust investigation for that) their exit from that business was inevitable and it seems kind of stupid to have to load both sets of drivers, one for the motherboard and another for the GPU so if one went with AMD (which is what all my family PCs are and we're quite happy) it makes sense to pair it with an AMD GPU as one driver update takes care of everything.
As for TFA if you want to blow a grand on an ePeen? I'm happy for you, everybody has to have a hobby I suppose. i just don't personally see the point as all the games now are built to be released with both consoles (which are positively ancient) and the PC with the exception of a few tech demos pretending to be games so with the exceptions of trying to chase the top score on some leaderboard or a few GPGPU applications frankly one won't really notice much difference between this and even a 2 year old card on standard games at standard resolutions. Hell I'm running a seriously old HD4850 and it still doesn't drop below 30FPS on any of the newer games at the native 1600x900 my 22 inch monitor displays and i like to play shooters.
Maybe when the new consoles come out we'll see a jump, but if the rumors of the PS4 and Mii are true frankly the next gen consoles are gonna be about as powerful as last years midrange PCs so I'm just not seeing anything on the gaming front to get really jazzed about. One place I will give Nvidia props though is the tegra, they are squezing some crazy graphics power out of those chips in the teeny tiny battery limits of smartphones and that IS pretty impressive. This? Might get you on top of the leaderboard a few months until the next superwank card comes out.
But whose fault is it for not paying attention to history? Look at the history of this country and you'll see hard swings to the right during ANY economic crisis, see the 80s as just one example. hell the media likes to make socialism cracks about Obama but in the 70s he would have been labeled hard right, hell Mittens is probably more left than Obama!
When a country is in the midst of a hard right shift one does NOT act like a dumbass where it can be used against them! While I agree that it ought not be that way, that is the classic "is ought" problem and what reality IS is that one doesn't do anything during a hard right shift that they don't keep on the down low without being run over like a Mac truck. All those idiots that got fired for doing stupid shit on FB should have been fired for being such a total moron that they blast their dumbass moments all over the planet, but of course common sense is so damned rare nowadays its practically a superpower.
The sad part is you aren't far from reality, but the reality is "I have jebus so I don't need to understand anything like technology" which as someone who has worked with religious charities I can tell you that most of the people there have less understanding of even basic tech than your average 6th grader. I hate to say it but that whole thing about religious being "sheep"? kinda accurate. I mean shit I hadn't had to deal with in years, basic info like "Hey don't go around opening attachments from people you don't know" or "Don't just download any old program from some bunch you've never heard of and run it". That is why I don't do those types of charities anymore, instead giving older units to poor families because at least I don't have to treat them like someone who has never seen a PC and can simply give them a few basic rules and not have to worry about the machine getting trashed.
I wouldn't be a bit surprised if those websites were cooked up by somebody's cousin in Dreamweaver just as a favor and handed over to some deacon who knows absolutely nothing about websites other than how to change the content. For some reason religious types and tech? Do NOT go together.
Uhhh...where have YOU been? didn't you get the memo? hell the only reason SUSE has a pulse is because MSFT has spent hundreds of millions buying SUSE Linux licenses to bundle with WinServer packages so MSFT has been making money off of Linux for years now. That of course isn't counting the tons of money they make by trolling Android OEMs for the LULZ so the only real shock is that so many of those that go nuts over FOSS hasn't figured out that MSFT is making money hand over fist off all their free work.
As far as privacy? I guess you missed the memo from the head of Google saying privacy was dead too huh? Hell the users hand all their data over to FB and Twitter and Google now anyway, so why should they give a shit about phone calls? I mean have you seen the kind of dumbshit people tweet or post to FB? You got morons bragging about crimes, smoking dope or piss faced drunk, nobody has any shame or common sense anymore, I'm starting to think the conspiracy nuts are right and there is something in the water because i don't remember people being this ignorant nor as exhibitionist when I was a kid. Frankly privacy went the way of the 8-track when all the smart phones came with cameras and upload to social media features. Unless you want to pull a Michael Jackson and run around in a mask everything you do will end up on somebody's FB page anyway, just give it up.
I shouldn't respond to an AC but the mods irked me on this one, insightful? Really? One is a software emulation for interoperablility which has clear exceptions under fair use, the other is silicon as I have yet to see anyone win a case on copying hardware. Sorry mods but you blew this one, this isn't even apples and oranges, its apples and a crayon drawing of fruit.
Because sadly friend you are a geek and therefor NOT like normal people. Believe me working in a little PC shop 6 days a week I get to spend a lot of time around the normals and frankly they may as well be martians for all the geeks has in common with them. The normals want their mainstream TV and movies, sure they play their FB games or watch YouTube videos but usually the "oww my balls" kinda dumbshit. They even have this really irritating thing called "reality TV" that I swear is like crack to them but makes a geek's brain melt, really foul stuff.
This is one place where Apple and MSFT are both strong, between the deals MSFT has been making for WMC Internet TV (If you haven't fired it up on Win 7 lately you should take a look, the amount of content they have been getting is pretty heavy, they even have Star Trek:TOS and TAS for us geeks) and Apple with iTunes means that if they are working together between them they have access to pretty much all of the mainstream content folks want. If Google doesn't get the content locked up soon I wouldn't be surprised if youTube ends up nothing but rock videos and home grown crap like kitty videos.
Well I'm happy for you as it sounds like Canada has a decent system but Google "Frivolous lawsuits USA" and you'll see some real doozys, like the guy that sued a drive cleaner for a billion dollars because they messed up his pants. Oh and you should watch TV in the USA in the daytime some time, the commercial are NOTHING but ambulance chasers looking for those who want to play lawsuit lotto. Here lawsuit lotto is a VERY real threat and sadly a reason why minority unemployment is so high compared to whites as whites as less likely to be able to scream "that's racist!" and get a free spin at lawsuit lotto.
I probably shouldn't answer an AC but since the AC has been put as "insightful" I will answer with why I think he/she is wrong: If the data has already been backed up (which if you don't back up your data you're a dumbass who should be posting to yahoo Answers and not here) then frankly there is no "risk" to using drives you already have as its only a question of how long it would take to restore.
Now of course he can mirror the data on half the drives to add some redundancy but your answer of using new drives? Until WD is back up to full speed frankly that isn't possible without a LOT of extra cost. Sure you can find cheap Seagate drives but you know what? they're shit. Not badmouthing Seagate but read the reviews and you'll see that Seagate drives over 640Gb are having a crazy high failure rate. Some say they are using ARM controllers made by the Maxtor guys and those are shit, some saying its a firmware issue, I personally don't know but what I DO know is that I've had to shitcan a crazy number of Seagate drives, especially the 1Tb and 1.5Tb drives which are the only really affordable ones ATM.
Now for how to do this, I'm gonna stay out of the software side since I don't want to jump into a Windows VS Linux flamewar, I'm sure the guy has an OS he is comfortable with and will probably go that way anyway so I'll deal with the hardware. This is how we cooked up something similar at my previous shop with a shitload of SCSI drives the boss got at an auction...Buy a couple of matching cheap full size computer cases, geeks has several for pretty cheap. We then tore the cases apart leaving a couple of skeletons, how far you take them apart is up to you, one can just as easily take the side of one and the opposite side off the other and cut the bracing, the reason we did it this way will become obvious in a minute. Pick up a cheap old server board, you want one that will fit the case and has as many PCI slots as possible, you will of course fill the PCI slots with SATA adapters just like we did with SCSI. Then in our case for the final touch we wired up a $10 Walmart box fan to the side to cool all the drives we piled into that sucker. In our case we used a copy of Win2K Server since we had drivers for the SCSI cards in Win2K Server, but again software is your choice.
And there you have it! While drives were topping out at 400Gb and cost an arm and a leg we had nearly 2Tb of SCSI goodness containing every single driver for every single part for every single version of Windows from 3.1-WinXP. I don't see why someone couldn't do the same with SATA, sure PCI won't give you as much bandwidth as PCIe but if you have a decent sized amount of RAM (say 2Gb) to buffer I don't see why it wouldn't work. in the end this is about using something you already have which won't cost anything VS spending hundreds of dollars to acquire a more compact solution. Personally I'm all for using what you already have, that is why I have a drawer filled with drives from 80Gb to 400Gb that I then throw into computers that are short on space, certainly cheaper than buying a new WD drive and as I said I don't trust Seagate ATM. Personally I'm just glad I loaded up on Samsung EcoDrives right before the flood when Tiger had them cheap so I can afford to wait until the prices drop before i have to look at drives. But if he already has them, why not use them?
And as much as I really don't have a horse in this race (happy with my dumbphone and netbook since free Wifi is everywhere here) I would just like to point out that Nokia had the same problem that Apple had before Jobs, not that I think Elop has a chance in hell of pulling a Jobs miracle, in that you had too many middle managers and too many directions and ZERO focus going on. They had no less than THREE phone OSes at the time (Symbian, Maemo, and the third I can't remember the name of) while they owned the dumbphone the writing was already on the wall that smartphones were gonna wipe those out, and before someone screams Android? Not really an option, as everyone and their dog were doing it and frankly HTC and Samsung were already doing it better so choosing Android would have just made the stock crater faster.
Frankly being the head of Nokia reminds me of being the head of HP in that frankly there really aren't any "right answers" that could pull them out of the corner they backed themselves in. But where HP at least can hang on with the razor thin margins they get on desktops and laptops Nokia doesn't really have that luxury. Hell even Walmart has started offering $100 smartphones with their prepaid plans (running Android naturally) and that price is going nowhere but down. While personally I'd have went with WebOS, it had plenty of buzz, was pretty much complete and did have a damned nice UI I can understand why Elop when looking at the big picture chose to take the money MSFT was offering. Hell who knows, maybe MSFT will buy Nokia when they hit bottom, Lord knows that will probably be the only thing that saves them at this point.
Dude do NOT even get me started on the ME and all the bullshit! this is why my grandfather retired rather than going to nam, with WWII we were fighting a guy who was trying to take over the planet, with Korea he said the Koreans asked for our help, but he said Vietnam was nothing but a puppet that the CIA was jerking around and we didn't have a damned reason to be there.
Sadly I too have looked at history and this map says it all. The CIA have run amok since the end of WWII and "US interests" have become a codeword for some corp that wants cheaper bananas or to raid a country for some resource. of course that doesn't change the fact that just like with the USSR that Islam is a threat, as we have seen in EU and the UK with all the riots Islamists just don't play nice with others, but that doesn't change the fact that we shouldn't even be there in the first place. And don't even get me started on AIPAC which bribes the living shit out of congressmen and throw so much money into our campaigns that BOTH the Dem and the Rep candidate for president goes to kiss the ring before running.
Sadly to me this is proof that capitalism like all other isms are simply doomed to die, because just like communism promoted party loyalty over competences and promoted apathy and stagnation so too does capitalism promote an elite class of multinationals that attain God like powers and can literally start wars or have laws written by simple bribes and edicts. as much as I miss him I doubt seriously my grandfather would find much to be proud of what has happened to his country he fought so hard for. Maybe this is why no society lasts, the corruption gets so bad people would rather let it fall apart than try to fix it, who knows. But you can't blame any of those countries in red for not liking us none too much.
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I'm sorry friend but you are mistaken, unless you call sliding a single slider in UAC as some complex action. Win 7 can autosandbox the browser (your choice of IE or any Chromium based) and run it in low rights mode which is actually SAFER than surfing in Linux where running a single program in a much lower set of permissions is far from simple, and then simply add one of several free AVs that also sandbox (My two favorites are Avast and Comodo Internet Security, both work well) and frankly the user need not know anything. The OS will autoupdate, autosandbox, scan ALL pages before load, hell my 71 year old dad is as clueless about tech as they come and his PC has been on the net 24/7/365 running Win 7 since Oct 09 and hasn't has a single problem or bug, the worst problem he has had is he didn't know how to update his browser (it kept telling him there was an update but he kept pushing the X instead of the update button) and that was it.
If you want to know the REAL reason why you see much more infected Windows? let me tell you a true story about the only person i ever threw out of my shop. He comes in, buys a PC from me, and wants me to install limewire. I tell him "I'm sorry but Limewire doesn't exist anymore, they got shutdown by the feds and anything calling itself Limewire now is just a virus pretending to be the real deal. There are several alternative such as Emule and BT if you wish me to install one of those" so what does he do? He promptly goes home with his new PC, Googles "New limewire" and when the AV naturally wouldn't let him install it first he tried to disable and then he removed the AV altogether! Why did he do that? Because the program told him to! When I finally threw him out of my shop (demanding I fix it for free after he broke it by refusing to listen to my instructions or call) he was yelling "It says right there that it IS Limewire so you make it work dammit!
So if you want to know why there are plenty of infected Windows machines its because of the dancing bunnies problem. It doesn't matter how simple or secure you make the OS if the user has install rights because all you have to do is wave the right cookie, be it porn, piracy, hell I've seen users infect their PCs for a CHANCE of winning some iShiny, then all can be bypassed. MSFT thinks they are gonna fix this by going the Apple way with an appstore but it won't work, as porn and piracy won't be offered in the appstore and that will be enough of a cookie to lure victims. Whether you choose to admit it or not to run Linux you HAVE TO have more than moderate PC skills or have a full time admin (such as yourself) willing to work for free simply because you have to know how to deal with updates breaking drivers and other Linux "quirks" one simply doesn't run into on OSX or Windows. Hell simply the fact you have to install it, know what partitions are and what sizes to make them, Google for drivers that aren't included and understand how to find out the exact make/model of said hardware to properly install Linux already puts you above a good 80% of the population. if you wish to argue that let me take away install rights for all my customers who would only be allowed to let me remote in and install approved software? Windows would never get bugs either.
But that argument simply doesn't hold water when the vast majority are on their own, without so much as a geek in the family to guide them. In fact I would argue that them getting Linux installed correctly and having it fully functional for even a year would probably be impossible, since they simply wouldn't have the skills required. Linux is only friendly IF everything works OOTB AND it works after every upgrade, two situations which at least in my experience are about as likely as Santa dropping me off a dozen porn stars for Xmas.
What safer alternative is that? Its NOT fossil fuels, as we are racking up a hell of a body count right now in the ME for fossil fuels and the price in blood will go nowhere but up. Whether we like it or not folks fossil fuels is a GLOBAL market and the west has to compete with a rapidly modernizing and growing east. Look at any graph of energy usage in China and India and you'll know that fossil fuels are never gonna be cheap again. Sure you can try to create ersatz fuels like biofuels but so far the amount of energy gained for energy used (EOI is the term I believe) simply is nowhere near high enough to make it a true replacement for even the fuel we use now for vehicles, much less for running a ton of power plants on top.
Believe me friend I would like nothing better than for science to come up with some power plant that runs on some uber cheap plentiful resource and cost pennies per kilowatt, which is why I said for the future of our race we MUST continue to invest in energy research, but until that day comes we need moar power NOW, and the only things ATM that can meet the truly explosive demand for power is fossil fuels (which will involve killing lots o' brown people if the past is any indication) or nuclear. Wind solar and hydro simply can't generate even 30% of our current demand even if we devoted insane amounts of acres to them, the math? It just doesn't work.
Hell here it is Cinco de Mayo and already its been in the 90s all week here, everyone has their ACs blasting full blast just to keep from melting, where do you think we are gonna get that power? Personally i'm glad we have two reactors in my state so the price of power isn't as God awful as it is in other places but even now we are starting to hear of old people dying because they can't afford to run the AC. If the temps stay like this (which barring a volcano eruption or other cause of another little ice age i don't see it dropping any) then power prices will need to be cut by probably half just to keep from slaughtering our old people whose frail bodies simply can't take high temps. Show me this safer alternative that will give us power at that price point please, because i don't see it.
Nope, too expensive for too small a screen for a kitchen PC. As someone who has actually set a few of these up for customers I would recommend something like the HP or Gateway all-in-ones. You can get them anywhere from 19-24 inches, they have both AMD Fusion and Intel i3 units (Personally I like AMD Fusion as the price is lower while having excellent hardware acceleration for video and very low heat generation) and you can basically choose from units starting at around $350 going all the way to $800 just depending on what features you want.
so I'm sorry but the iPad isn't a good choice in this situation. Not saying there is anything wrong with it, in fact I recommend them myself for doctor's office and warehouse inventory as you can't really beat the size in those applications, but in a kitchen you want something big enough you won't have to go past the stove when you are cooking and with large enough icons you can just pop them with a knuckle in case your hands are a little messy. Just not the right device for this situation IMHO. If he wants to look at them last I checked Tigerdirect had a large selection although with the shortages of Fusion chips most of theirs are Intel i series just as this really nice Gateway for $699 which would give him a nice 23 inch 1080p with enough hard drive space you could load it with movies (great when you are stuck in the kitchen) and with built in Wifi and webcam it would be easy to integrate into his existing system and do video chat as per TFA.
One word friend..SA-2. NK has enough telephone pole sized SA-2s they could literally spam the skies and knock down this turkey. Again its a 737, not designed to do fast dodges.
And the ONLY way you would EVER see anything like this on a fighter is if they make nuke powered fighters and that sure as hell isn't gonna happen. What you seem to be thinking is that tech will magically solve the problem in the future but what you forget is just like E=MC2 things do have limits that simply can't be solved by tech. in this case the wattage required to penetrate a solid rocket are well known and simply can't be shrunk with anything short of nuclear reactions and even then the smallest you are gonna get without having a flying timebomb is something like the B-2 not the F18.
You see the simple fact is there is no way you would get enough warning and still be able to make it. like I said if you try a "bear run" and keep this thing close to the border one $60k SA-2 takes down your trillion dollar 737 and that's that. If you fly high its in SA-2 range, fly low and the Shilka quad AAA will grind it into hamburger. the only way this could work is its either in space or you have something that can fit into an F-16 which has the maneuverability which i just pointed out the math just doesn't work, you would need a reactor the size of an external pod that could crank enough power to feed a city of 5000 people, you just can't do it.
The reason why you don't see Linux desktops getting targeted is for multiple reasons, 1.-interoperability is shit, the lack of a unified platform that keeps third parties from touching Linux with a 50 foot pole also keeps away malware writers because the best they could score is say...40% of UBUNTU users, but that same attack probably wouldn't work on RHEL without serious tweaking, or on PCLOS, or on Mepis, you get the picture, 2.- Malware writers want powerful machines because the more powerful the machine the more they can remain hidden while cranking out the spam or spreading the bug. Not to slam Linux users but you DO have a shitload of "How to save that PC from the dump" articles which would give an outsider the impression they are more likely to find a P4 than an i7, and 3.-Malware writers are criminals and criminals are notorious for being lazy. they don't want to have to constantly rewrite their bug because something got fiddled with between Ubuntu maniac monkey and nutty narwhal and their shit got broke. With both Windows and Apple having quite clearly labeled life cycles this makes it easy to know how long a bug could be good for.
If you want to see how badly Linux would get pwned if it was on the radar simply look at android. it has tons of ordinary users, is using the Linux kernel, and has been royally assraped by the malware guys. in the end you simply cannot defeat reality which is thus: ALL Operating Systems are EXTREMELY complex, with literally millions of lines of code all having to interact perfectly and this isn't even counting the third party stuff. hell I doubt even Linus can tell you with 100% certainty when you launch say network manager every single call it will make and what every interaction is, its simply too complex. More than 90% of the planet are NOT geeks, hell they don't even come up to the level of a power user of any system, they know just enough to get it to function and that is it, and finally the malware guys figured out long ago its the USER that is the juiciest target, after all it is they that have the keys to the kingdom so by using social engineering they have become quite adept at getting past the defenses by having their "man/woman on the inside" aka the user, help them achieve their goals.
So it doesn't matter what OS you use, you practice safe computing you'll be fine, practice stupid computing you'll be pwned. For those that think the repos are safe might want to look at how long the repos were handing out an infected Quake 3, try a year and a half. If a malware writer truly wants to target Linux there are ways, target some of the software that isn't as heavily monitored or like I said simply target the users and you're in like flynn.
Now you watch as I get modded down for pointing out reality, to be followed by those that treat Linux as a religion (Some call them Freetards, I call them FOSSies because they remind me of Moonies) scream that it just isn't possible, that linux's magical goodness could never be tainted by malware crap...hmmm...where did I hear that before? Oh yeah those that bowed at the altar of Jobs, aka "The Cult of Mac". Wouldn't it be smarter to simply use the best tool for the job and be on your guard? But those that treat tech like ballclubs won't quit rooting for the home team, even when they strike out.
The simple fact is we DON'T have anything else, not that doesn't have serious drawbacks. 1.-Wind...can't be placed when needed, can't be ramped up during peaks, can't be controlled. 2.-Water..same problem as wind in can't easily be placed where needed, also has the problem of screwing up a lot of valuable land that could be used for farming which with a growing population is undesirable, 3.-Solar...theoretically you could use molten salt solar which would provide power at night but again no way to ramp up when needed and can't easily be placed where needed, then of course there is the huge size required to generate the same amount of power as even a small reactor.
So there you have it folks. While i'm all for research into new forms of power generation, in fact i would argue that research is vital for the survival of our race, ATM we really only have two choices and that is fossil fuels or nuclear power. We all know the drawbacks of fossil fuel generation, no need for me to list them, and for those that argue that nuclear isn't safe frankly we have no idea how safe nuclear is or isn't because all the current reactors are decades old. It would be like claiming cars aren't safe and using a 75 Pinto as the basis. Until we at least get some research reactors of decent size built with the new designs frankly we simply aren't gonna know how safe we can build a reactor but one thing we DO know is that every year our need for power grows and the renewable sources in their current designs simply won't be able to keep up.
So its up to you, keep cranking out them coal and gas burners or try the newer designs.
See this is why I love to LMAO at the FOSSies, they are so "There is but one true god!" they can't even think, its like a cross between village idiot and conspiracy nut, all rolled into one!
You want some fresh bitch slapping? Be careful what you wish for FOSSie, how about a nice kernel exploit? Or how about the guy that wrote EEEBuntu saying Ubuntu sucks which considering they are the current savior of Linux kinda tells you something. But why don't you say "Use Distro X" and then have the balls to name the X so i can show its just as big a POS, huh? BTW frankly everyone has stop giving a fuck about your OS, you aren't even newsworthy anymore really. Now its all Win 7&8, OSX&iOS, and of course Android which just shows what happens when a company bitch slaps the community and takes it away from them, why it actually fucking runs!
How sad that even with a bug spreading through OSX there are writers pointing out that's no reason to torture yourself with Linux , after all even a virus ridden OSX actually runs which is more than most distros LOL! But hey, you can always tell them they can fix it otherwise they don't need that right? LOL! And I noticed you just couldn't fricking resist screaming "Nigger!" which in FOSSie is done by screaming PaidMicrosoftShill, hey you think you could throw in one more FOSSie cliche please? Then I'll have a FOSSie Flush ROFL!
But if you didn't have cliches and your pathetic attempts at insults why then you might have to have an independent thought and realize what everybody knows that even when MSFT put out a universally reviled OS you STILL got curb stomped, does that give you ANY clues? or all they all brainwashed by those black choppers that have been following you? Hell when the Chinese were given the choice of your "free OS" or pirating Windows they chose the latter even if it meant staying on XP and using IE fricking 6, LOL! Does that ring ANY bells? A smart person would say "what are we doing wrong the other guy is doing right?" but a FOSSie who is just like a Moonie in that they blindly follow, instead says "Its all a conspiracy! They are all shills keeping the masses from true salvation!" and then you wonder why we all laugh at you because you DON'T Listen, you DON'T learn, and Torvalds could take a big steaming dump and hand it to you and you'd thank him for his generous gift. So enjoy that fresh bitchslapping loony, enjoy the fact that the world really doesn't care...but I do, I enjoy slapping you, it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.
The magnets are also great to scavenge as they'll put a magnetic charge on your screwdrivers you wouldn't believe. But it is nice to see someone get what I'm talking about because once your data is backed up those drives are "free" so any uses you find for them are just gravy.
One of the things I like to do with mine is after giving them a good testing slap them in a cheap external case and make portadrives out of them. External drive enclosures can be had for around $5 and paired with something you may not have heard of called an Nbox or Nbox HD which paired with those free drives and cheap enclosures make kick ass media tanks for your less skilled friends or relatives. Like for example I loaded one up for dad with his favorite genres of movies, or if you have a relative with kids give them one loaded with kid shows and watch how you are looked upon as a god among men.
In the end as long as your data is backed up spending hundreds on drives when you have a "free" source is frankly stupid. Better to find good uses in them like a home made NAS, media tanks, portadrives, just use your imagination.
Actually they already did and I have no doubt the OEMs told them where they could stick Win 8 if they tried that shit again, hence the dumbshit you see here. Hell why do you think there is a Win 7 Starter? Its not because netbooks can't run Win 7 HP, because mine runs Win 7 HP just fine, its because MSFT raised the price on Windows with Win 7 and when the OEMs told them they would put Linux or Chrome or anything OTHER than Windows on netbooks (because the margins are razor thin on those anyway) they cooked up the Starter crap.
Personally i think everyone that uses Windows should rejoice, because finally, FINALLY it looks like Ballmer will nuke the fridge and then the board can punt kick "Gates' little buddy" like a 30 yard field return and get someone with a brain as CEO. what we are seeing here is the same dumbshit brain dead thinking they are having at IBM, aka "Anything for share price! Gotta raise that stock!" ignorant shit. Ballmer refuses to accept the reason the stock price has been flatline, even when Win 7 was a hit is because HE IS A SHITTY CEO that nobody has any confidence in, which if you look at his track record its more flops than hits...Zune, Vista, killing playsforsure for Zune market, Kin, pushing X360 out with a billion dollar flaw...the guy is a fricking disaster.
So lets cut the bullshit and call a spade a spade..Win 8 is a cell phone OS that Ballmer thinks if he shovels onto the market he can basically force users to buy WinPhone (since his previous tries have gone over soooo well) and fool developers into writing apps for WinPhone. he has already jack the price as high as he can go without the OEMs telling him to pound sand, and still his stock price is flatline. So frankly Ballmer has his back to the wall and I say...yay! couldn't happen to a stupider PHB.
Lets all make sure we have any machines we want loaded with Win 7 and then when "Ballmer's Folly" gets released it will create a giant fart noise all the way back to Redmond where the board will hopefully shitcan this clown. And sorry if this comes off a little ranty but lets face it, Ballmer makes the PHB on Dilbert seem like a fricking genius. Yes this is just the PERFECT move when your competitors are curb stomping you, why piss off your OEMs and customers, that's the ticket!
Not a problem...
First they came for the porn but I didn't watch porn so I didn't care, next they came for those extremist websites but I wasn't an extremist so I didn't care, next they went after the hate speech, but I wasn't hateful so I didn't care, next they came for the unpopular but I wasn't unpopular so I didn't care, then when i realized I was in a jack booted fascist state I had no way to protest or organize because they turned the internet into the fucking home shopping club and when i complained they hauled my ass away.
I admit not nearly as poetic but the sentiment is there. NEVER FORGET that there are those out there that honestly believe nothing should exist that an 8 year old can't watch and scarily enough these douchebags often end up in power.
Uhh...because the ACs entire argument was because emulation software exists and Intel hasn't sued that meant that X86 wasn't licensed? The two things aren't even remotely comparable, as i said one is an apple the other a crayon drawing of a fruit. To compare something which has a specifically granted exception under DMCA (software emulation of hardware for interoperability) VS making a knock off in hardware? Two not even close things.
The GGP may have been wrong but at the time nobody was upmodding that one so who gave a crap if he was wrong or not and upmodding someone as "insightful" when what they are posting isn't even remotely correct or even comparable is about like that Mobile guy that got modded to plus 5 for his "I like to lick butts!" comment. But whether it can be licensed or not really doesn't matter because as far as DMCA is concerned one has a built in exception if one is modeling older hardware or software to allow compatibility with new OSes which is exactly what DOSBox is. If Intel attempted to take this to court I doubt they'd have a leg to stand on as i seriously doubt one could even get older versions of DOS to run correctly on modern multicores, not to mention it would be impossible to find even a single driver for modern hardware.
so nope, sorry, not relevant to the discussion. To use a /. car analogy it would be like an article on the latest model trucks having governors and the AC piped in "Well my new boat does 40MPH!", that's nice, doesn't really have a damned thing to do with the discussion unless you count both as vehicles.
No ya don't friend, here let old Hairy help you out...Ninite to the rescue! See how easy that was? While you are giving them your choice of CCCP or Klite (I prefer Klite myself) you can go ahead and check the boxes for Flash, Java, .NET, CutePDF Printer, hell give 'em all the good stuff. simple as check boxes and run installer, oh and NO TOOLBARS or any other crap, just what you want. between that and WSUS Offline Windows couldn't be simpler to set up, hell you can even check the boxes with Ninite if you think they have the older version and it'll skip anything that is up to date. its free and easy, what could be nicer? enjoy!
Win 7 is supported until 2020 so just do what myself, my family, and my customers are doing and avoid the shitastic Win 8. I'm seriously starting to wonder if Ballmer shouldn't be scheduled for a CAT scan because the man is acting more than a little off his nut. Between the cell phone OS, trying to shove in an appstore, and now this? Why the hell would you want the POS? win 7 runs on anything from netbooks to octocores, has all the programs, has WMC and DVD, and unlike this turdfest actually has a UI that is pleasant with a keyboard and mouse.
Mark my words it'll be Vista all over again. I probably shouldn't complain as I made a mint wiping that turkey for XP off all those disgruntled users PCs but...sigh, if the OEMs don't include Win 7 discs I'm adding a 40% surcharge if I have to deal with those damned downgrade rights again. More likely the OEMs will have a shitfit like they did after Vista had been out a little while and they just pack a Win 8 disc in with the installed OS being Win 7. That way MSFT doesn't have to admit they shat out another failwhale by counting all those discs as Win 8 sales and everyone can just avoid this loser. geez what a stupid fucking idea.
I'm sorry but this is NOT insightful, because NOBODY is gonna use GEFORCE cards in supercomputers, as their FP is just too shitty. if you would have been talking about an AMD since that company is pushing their lines towards a single design (they are even switching their GPUs from VLIW to Vector to get more GPGPU performance) then yes, you would be correct. but this is Nvidia we are talking about here who have been consistently separating their GPGPU line (Tesla) and their gamer line (Geforce) and the two lines are NOT identical, nowhere even close.
So I'm sorry friend but this is NOT for supercomputers, this is for showing you have the largest ePeen on the benchmark boards or triple monitored Skyrim. If you wanted to argue they are testing designs on the gamers, kinda like how RHEL uses Fedora as a testbed? that might be possible, but nobody is gonna buy geforce cards (which the FP has gone down not up with these latest cards) to slap into supercomputers.
Citation please? because I have been using Radeons pretty much exclusively at the shop and frankly haven't seen any stability problems since the 9.x drivers. I have to give AMD credit where credit is due because before the purchase it was common knowledge that while ATI hardware kicked some ass their drivers were often shit and one would have to wait 6 months or more before the major bugs were worked out but since being bought by AMD the drivers are actually pretty nice. I mean if there were stability problems you'd have thought I'd have run into it, since I've been selling everything from APUs like Bobcat based netbooks and STBs and Liano laptops and desktops, and on the card side everything from the low rent 4650s and 5450s to the more high mid 68xx and 78xx (not much call for the ePeen cards in these parts) and frankly their drivers have been just fine. In fact I can only think of a single time I had a problem with an AMD driver and that was called by MSFT having a bad .NET patch that didn't take, once i cleaned that mess out it was all roses.
Why? Once Intel gutted Nvidia's chipset business (which I still haven't figured out why they didn't get an Antitrust investigation for that) their exit from that business was inevitable and it seems kind of stupid to have to load both sets of drivers, one for the motherboard and another for the GPU so if one went with AMD (which is what all my family PCs are and we're quite happy) it makes sense to pair it with an AMD GPU as one driver update takes care of everything.
As for TFA if you want to blow a grand on an ePeen? I'm happy for you, everybody has to have a hobby I suppose. i just don't personally see the point as all the games now are built to be released with both consoles (which are positively ancient) and the PC with the exception of a few tech demos pretending to be games so with the exceptions of trying to chase the top score on some leaderboard or a few GPGPU applications frankly one won't really notice much difference between this and even a 2 year old card on standard games at standard resolutions. Hell I'm running a seriously old HD4850 and it still doesn't drop below 30FPS on any of the newer games at the native 1600x900 my 22 inch monitor displays and i like to play shooters.
Maybe when the new consoles come out we'll see a jump, but if the rumors of the PS4 and Mii are true frankly the next gen consoles are gonna be about as powerful as last years midrange PCs so I'm just not seeing anything on the gaming front to get really jazzed about. One place I will give Nvidia props though is the tegra, they are squezing some crazy graphics power out of those chips in the teeny tiny battery limits of smartphones and that IS pretty impressive. This? Might get you on top of the leaderboard a few months until the next superwank card comes out.
But whose fault is it for not paying attention to history? Look at the history of this country and you'll see hard swings to the right during ANY economic crisis, see the 80s as just one example. hell the media likes to make socialism cracks about Obama but in the 70s he would have been labeled hard right, hell Mittens is probably more left than Obama!
When a country is in the midst of a hard right shift one does NOT act like a dumbass where it can be used against them! While I agree that it ought not be that way, that is the classic "is ought" problem and what reality IS is that one doesn't do anything during a hard right shift that they don't keep on the down low without being run over like a Mac truck. All those idiots that got fired for doing stupid shit on FB should have been fired for being such a total moron that they blast their dumbass moments all over the planet, but of course common sense is so damned rare nowadays its practically a superpower.
The sad part is you aren't far from reality, but the reality is "I have jebus so I don't need to understand anything like technology" which as someone who has worked with religious charities I can tell you that most of the people there have less understanding of even basic tech than your average 6th grader. I hate to say it but that whole thing about religious being "sheep"? kinda accurate. I mean shit I hadn't had to deal with in years, basic info like "Hey don't go around opening attachments from people you don't know" or "Don't just download any old program from some bunch you've never heard of and run it". That is why I don't do those types of charities anymore, instead giving older units to poor families because at least I don't have to treat them like someone who has never seen a PC and can simply give them a few basic rules and not have to worry about the machine getting trashed.
I wouldn't be a bit surprised if those websites were cooked up by somebody's cousin in Dreamweaver just as a favor and handed over to some deacon who knows absolutely nothing about websites other than how to change the content. For some reason religious types and tech? Do NOT go together.
Uhhh...where have YOU been? didn't you get the memo? hell the only reason SUSE has a pulse is because MSFT has spent hundreds of millions buying SUSE Linux licenses to bundle with WinServer packages so MSFT has been making money off of Linux for years now. That of course isn't counting the tons of money they make by trolling Android OEMs for the LULZ so the only real shock is that so many of those that go nuts over FOSS hasn't figured out that MSFT is making money hand over fist off all their free work.
As far as privacy? I guess you missed the memo from the head of Google saying privacy was dead too huh? Hell the users hand all their data over to FB and Twitter and Google now anyway, so why should they give a shit about phone calls? I mean have you seen the kind of dumbshit people tweet or post to FB? You got morons bragging about crimes, smoking dope or piss faced drunk, nobody has any shame or common sense anymore, I'm starting to think the conspiracy nuts are right and there is something in the water because i don't remember people being this ignorant nor as exhibitionist when I was a kid. Frankly privacy went the way of the 8-track when all the smart phones came with cameras and upload to social media features. Unless you want to pull a Michael Jackson and run around in a mask everything you do will end up on somebody's FB page anyway, just give it up.
I shouldn't respond to an AC but the mods irked me on this one, insightful? Really? One is a software emulation for interoperablility which has clear exceptions under fair use, the other is silicon as I have yet to see anyone win a case on copying hardware. Sorry mods but you blew this one, this isn't even apples and oranges, its apples and a crayon drawing of fruit.
Because sadly friend you are a geek and therefor NOT like normal people. Believe me working in a little PC shop 6 days a week I get to spend a lot of time around the normals and frankly they may as well be martians for all the geeks has in common with them. The normals want their mainstream TV and movies, sure they play their FB games or watch YouTube videos but usually the "oww my balls" kinda dumbshit. They even have this really irritating thing called "reality TV" that I swear is like crack to them but makes a geek's brain melt, really foul stuff.
This is one place where Apple and MSFT are both strong, between the deals MSFT has been making for WMC Internet TV (If you haven't fired it up on Win 7 lately you should take a look, the amount of content they have been getting is pretty heavy, they even have Star Trek:TOS and TAS for us geeks) and Apple with iTunes means that if they are working together between them they have access to pretty much all of the mainstream content folks want. If Google doesn't get the content locked up soon I wouldn't be surprised if youTube ends up nothing but rock videos and home grown crap like kitty videos.
Well I'm happy for you as it sounds like Canada has a decent system but Google "Frivolous lawsuits USA" and you'll see some real doozys, like the guy that sued a drive cleaner for a billion dollars because they messed up his pants. Oh and you should watch TV in the USA in the daytime some time, the commercial are NOTHING but ambulance chasers looking for those who want to play lawsuit lotto. Here lawsuit lotto is a VERY real threat and sadly a reason why minority unemployment is so high compared to whites as whites as less likely to be able to scream "that's racist!" and get a free spin at lawsuit lotto.
I probably shouldn't answer an AC but since the AC has been put as "insightful" I will answer with why I think he/she is wrong: If the data has already been backed up (which if you don't back up your data you're a dumbass who should be posting to yahoo Answers and not here) then frankly there is no "risk" to using drives you already have as its only a question of how long it would take to restore.
Now of course he can mirror the data on half the drives to add some redundancy but your answer of using new drives? Until WD is back up to full speed frankly that isn't possible without a LOT of extra cost. Sure you can find cheap Seagate drives but you know what? they're shit. Not badmouthing Seagate but read the reviews and you'll see that Seagate drives over 640Gb are having a crazy high failure rate. Some say they are using ARM controllers made by the Maxtor guys and those are shit, some saying its a firmware issue, I personally don't know but what I DO know is that I've had to shitcan a crazy number of Seagate drives, especially the 1Tb and 1.5Tb drives which are the only really affordable ones ATM.
Now for how to do this, I'm gonna stay out of the software side since I don't want to jump into a Windows VS Linux flamewar, I'm sure the guy has an OS he is comfortable with and will probably go that way anyway so I'll deal with the hardware. This is how we cooked up something similar at my previous shop with a shitload of SCSI drives the boss got at an auction...Buy a couple of matching cheap full size computer cases, geeks has several for pretty cheap. We then tore the cases apart leaving a couple of skeletons, how far you take them apart is up to you, one can just as easily take the side of one and the opposite side off the other and cut the bracing, the reason we did it this way will become obvious in a minute. Pick up a cheap old server board, you want one that will fit the case and has as many PCI slots as possible, you will of course fill the PCI slots with SATA adapters just like we did with SCSI. Then in our case for the final touch we wired up a $10 Walmart box fan to the side to cool all the drives we piled into that sucker. In our case we used a copy of Win2K Server since we had drivers for the SCSI cards in Win2K Server, but again software is your choice.
And there you have it! While drives were topping out at 400Gb and cost an arm and a leg we had nearly 2Tb of SCSI goodness containing every single driver for every single part for every single version of Windows from 3.1-WinXP. I don't see why someone couldn't do the same with SATA, sure PCI won't give you as much bandwidth as PCIe but if you have a decent sized amount of RAM (say 2Gb) to buffer I don't see why it wouldn't work. in the end this is about using something you already have which won't cost anything VS spending hundreds of dollars to acquire a more compact solution. Personally I'm all for using what you already have, that is why I have a drawer filled with drives from 80Gb to 400Gb that I then throw into computers that are short on space, certainly cheaper than buying a new WD drive and as I said I don't trust Seagate ATM. Personally I'm just glad I loaded up on Samsung EcoDrives right before the flood when Tiger had them cheap so I can afford to wait until the prices drop before i have to look at drives. But if he already has them, why not use them?
And as much as I really don't have a horse in this race (happy with my dumbphone and netbook since free Wifi is everywhere here) I would just like to point out that Nokia had the same problem that Apple had before Jobs, not that I think Elop has a chance in hell of pulling a Jobs miracle, in that you had too many middle managers and too many directions and ZERO focus going on. They had no less than THREE phone OSes at the time (Symbian, Maemo, and the third I can't remember the name of) while they owned the dumbphone the writing was already on the wall that smartphones were gonna wipe those out, and before someone screams Android? Not really an option, as everyone and their dog were doing it and frankly HTC and Samsung were already doing it better so choosing Android would have just made the stock crater faster.
Frankly being the head of Nokia reminds me of being the head of HP in that frankly there really aren't any "right answers" that could pull them out of the corner they backed themselves in. But where HP at least can hang on with the razor thin margins they get on desktops and laptops Nokia doesn't really have that luxury. Hell even Walmart has started offering $100 smartphones with their prepaid plans (running Android naturally) and that price is going nowhere but down. While personally I'd have went with WebOS, it had plenty of buzz, was pretty much complete and did have a damned nice UI I can understand why Elop when looking at the big picture chose to take the money MSFT was offering. Hell who knows, maybe MSFT will buy Nokia when they hit bottom, Lord knows that will probably be the only thing that saves them at this point.
Dude do NOT even get me started on the ME and all the bullshit! this is why my grandfather retired rather than going to nam, with WWII we were fighting a guy who was trying to take over the planet, with Korea he said the Koreans asked for our help, but he said Vietnam was nothing but a puppet that the CIA was jerking around and we didn't have a damned reason to be there.
Sadly I too have looked at history and this map says it all. The CIA have run amok since the end of WWII and "US interests" have become a codeword for some corp that wants cheaper bananas or to raid a country for some resource. of course that doesn't change the fact that just like with the USSR that Islam is a threat, as we have seen in EU and the UK with all the riots Islamists just don't play nice with others, but that doesn't change the fact that we shouldn't even be there in the first place. And don't even get me started on AIPAC which bribes the living shit out of congressmen and throw so much money into our campaigns that BOTH the Dem and the Rep candidate for president goes to kiss the ring before running.
Sadly to me this is proof that capitalism like all other isms are simply doomed to die, because just like communism promoted party loyalty over competences and promoted apathy and stagnation so too does capitalism promote an elite class of multinationals that attain God like powers and can literally start wars or have laws written by simple bribes and edicts. as much as I miss him I doubt seriously my grandfather would find much to be proud of what has happened to his country he fought so hard for. Maybe this is why no society lasts, the corruption gets so bad people would rather let it fall apart than try to fix it, who knows. But you can't blame any of those countries in red for not liking us none too much.