Exactly, this is a malware writer's wet dream. You have an embedded OS with some NAND for updates where you can store your code, a browser, and a 24/7 Internet connection. Talk about a perfect spambot!
And of course since its a device not normally associated by the public with malware they will be easy prey, I've been seeing that myself at the shop as people that would never fall for traditional spam and malware get bit by the new phone attacks because "Its a phone, not a PC" and i'm sure they'll be the same way with TV attacks.
Well between those and units based off cheap PCs (which i see quite often as well) the days of POS being a high margin business are coming to an end and IBM knows it. from the looks of things the future will be small ARM and X86 based touch screens all made from commodity parts and as cheaply as possible.
Frankly this is a smart move unless IBM is willing to play in cutthroat markets which we've seen no indication of, I mean who know would have thought that IBM staying in PCs would have been a good idea when Dell and HP are making on average $8 a unit on the low end which is their biggest sellers? Surviving on scraps is just not something big blue cares to do so they are bailing while the bailing is good. If anything is shocking its the fact they got someone to pay that much money for their POS business.
And the difference between Steam and every other modern game with Internet phone home is.....what exactly? Are you saying you don't play ANY games at all? if so what are you posting for? or are you using a console which is just "DRM in a box" that is locked down so tight you can't do anything with the hardware without permission?
The simple fact is the ONLY time I have heard of Valve EVER taking away a game was when someone was using cheats to destroy the game for everyone else. anyone who has had to deal with some douchebag using aimbots and wallhacks is frankly damned glad Valve punts the cheaters. if it bothers you so much any P2P program will give you a hack for any Steam game in seconds again NO different from any retail game.
So if all you want to play is nethack that is your choice, but when the choices are nothing but old games, DRMed all to hell discs that you can't get replaced if it gets even a teeny scratch and the company can pull the plug at ANY time, or Steam where i have never heard of a single person that lost a game for anything but being a prick the average Joe is gonna choose Steam and the numbers reflect that. Like it or not the bankloads of money Valve has been making show they have "got it right" for the vast majority. if that doesn't fit you then maybe you should pick a new hobby as gaming is obviously not for you anymore.
Wow, don't know your history much do you? America from the start taxed the living hell out of imports and in fact was VERY isolationist for most of its history, right up until WWII, after that since the EU and Asia was in ruins the USA made out like bandits since they were the only real functional manufacturing center left intact. But then some real rich pricks decided that "free trade" meant treating countries with NO environmental or worker regulations as equals to the USA and you have the decline we have now, because you simply can't compete with countries that are allowed to dump toxic waste into their rivers and treat their workers like dogs while actually having regulations.
As for TFA another Tesla, a toy that will make rich folks feel "green" and smug. Good for them but it doesn't do jack shit for the majority of Americans and especially the working poor who could actually use such a thing. After all if you are making 100K a year is a couple of bucks on the electric bill REALLY gonna bother you?
That's not the gas to move the thing, read the wiki its just the gas to run the fricking radar dome! At least with your jet aircraft once it gets to the area it can use missiles without using more fuel to fire it but with this thing with every single second of use, even when its just parked, its literally blasting through pounds of fuel per minute....and THIS is supposed to be what we use in case of a war with a power that has enough tech to launch multiple MIRVs at us? How are you gonna feed this thing?
Wow, every time someone might possibly think you're not completely batshit...you have to open you crazy hole and remove ALL doubts. Tell me is that statue of RMS whispering to you again? is it telling you to kill that scary troll that keeps coming into your room? that's actually your mom and would be bad,mmmkay?
And you just pointed out the answer, just look at Valve. With Steam what you have is a lot like the old disc based copy protection, there are a bazillion cracks out there but its just enough to keep it from being absurdly trivial for Joe Average to hand out the games to all his friends and in return the sales make it so damned cheap frankly it isn't worth the effort to pirate for a lot of people.
What the whole insane IP mess has done is made these douchebags think their "IP" is so damned precious they should be able to just avoid that whole "market pricing" thing and charge the absolute most assraping price they can slap on it. All piracy is is a sign from the market that the prices are wrong. humans are lazy creatures and if you hit the sweet spot on the price many will simply not bother as it'll be cheaper and easier to buy than to pirate. I have probably 40 games in Steam and another 40 from GOG, could i have not pirated them all? Sure but it wouldn't have been as easy as "push button and get game" and the prices were so low, why bother?
But instead what we get is nothing but DRMed up the ass garbage that makes the pirated version the better value. its like what Wil Wheaton pointed out when he bought some Dr Who off of Amazon and found it didn't work when he crossed the border for a show even though he had already "bought" the content "If I would have just pirated it I could be watching Dr Who right now". make it easy, make it convenient, make it cheap. miss any of the three and the pirated version will be the better version.
Personally if it were anybody BUT Sony i would say this would be an incredible breakthrough for SMBs and consumers if they could hit the right price point, say $75 for the recorder and less than $10 for the discs?
Imagine how much easier it would be to get everyone to back up and use offsite backups if all they had to do was pop in a cart and push a button, and when finished pop it in their bag and carry it home or to a relatives? USB HDDs are okay but they really aren't that hot for long term storage as they need to be spun up occasionally and aren't that easy to tote, but with this you could do a weekly differential and just cart it home. Most folks don't realize how important having those backups until you have to tell someone like i did the other day that they had lost ALL their pictures because the drive was toasted. With something like this one could just have it backup nightly and when full put it somewhere safe like a safety deposit box.
I just hope somebody comes out with something like this soon. the amount of data folks are coming up with with all these high def cameras and camcorders is just nuts and USB HDDs just aren't good for long term storage and SSDs and Flash is still too high per Gb, whereas something like this, even if it were WORM would be truly great if the price point were right. But until then it looks like for long term storage those of us who can't afford tape drives will be stuck with DVD.
I'd say the first of those two is the big "Uh oh" with Google drive, after all you could always encrypt your stuff before you sent it. But as we have seen with Google its either a megahit or its dead, there really is no in between with that company so i would be seriously leery of wanting to store my stuff with them until I saw whether or not its gonna last.
Of course all of these cloud storage bunches that aren't targeting businesses is gonna end up screwed anyway as it looks like the ISPs are just gonna cap the ever loving shit out of anything they aren't getting a cut of.....err i mean "hosting in their local datacenter" so unless they are gonna set up a branch on every local ISP this whole "in the cloud" thing will come screeching to a halt the first time someone gets that insane bill for going over their caps. i know in my area its $1.50 a Gb if you go over so its much cheaper just to slap everything on a USB drive and cart it offsite than it is to deal with the overcharges.
Not to mention how long can you feed the thing gas? The wiki says that pig is sucking down on SIX 3.6Mw generators and there are plans to add two more of those hogs on top of those 6. i'm sorry but if there were EVER a case for nuclear power that giant power hog would be it. if we were in an actual war situation how long would we be able to keep feeding that thing with all the other fuel needs of the country and military?
While i think drones are a good idea that thing is just too much of a piggy on conventional fuel. Instead we need more like that giant flying wing NASA was showing off, something solar powered that can stay up for weeks on end. park those suckers over anyone like NK that you are worried about, but sucking down as much gas as that oil rig radar? i just don't see that as a long term viable system, not with the cost of oil rising.
Nice to see i'm not the only one sick of this. How many games have you played lately that could be described like this "The graphics were great but the game sucked"? Games, especially FPS, have been stuck in "Halo Mode" for too damned long. Hell they even took a big shit on DNF by making duke just another 2 weapon Halo clone.
Give us something cool dammit! Smart AI like the first Far Cry, funny story and cool weapons (kitty bomb anyone?) like No One Lives Forever I&II, cool damage models like in Soldier Of Fortune I&II, hell even randomized level design like in Nosferatu!
Looking over my PC while there are a ton of new games there are several old ones that I keep coming back to, the ones listed above along with Sacred and Divine Divinity (for my Diablo hack and slash fix),Freelancer and Freespace (for my Star Wars pilot fix) and the FPS listed above along with F.E.A.R, Blood (tons of humor and 80s horror references) and Redneck Rampage (who don't like having a titty gun and dynamite arrows?) simply because i'm so damned sick of "Call Of Honor: Halo Of Killzone Edition, now with extra expensive DLC"...its just boring, its boring, levels are all straight lines, they suck. How sad is it that games like DN3D and Redneck have more expansive levels with things to do than a modern shooter?
BTW for those sick of the same old Halo crap you might want to check out Good Old Games for some classic gaming goodness. All DRM free, they always seem to be having a sale, and many will run on Linux as well. When you are bored to tears with the crap that has been coming out lately give GOG a spin, show the devs there that having great games DRM free is the right strategy.
What is sad is once upon a time, before Sony became one of the media cartels, Sony products were once the height of quality. If the OLD Sony were to be the one offering this? i'd jump on in a heartbeat as we really do need a nice long term storage for consumers to replace DVDs. But this is the NEW Sony which means it will be filled to the brim with DRM crap that will make it crippled and buggy. No thanks Sony.
One of the things I like about Comodo Dragon is that is the default setting, so no need to try to walk someone through killing third party cookies. With Dragon and ABP everything "just works" .
I never understood why when things were getting nice and stable both KDE and GNOME would suddenly shitcan all that work. i mean what was wrong with them? They both looked nice, ran fine, were low resource, so what was wrong with what they had? Could they just not live without an assload of bling like OSX and Windows has gotten?
BTW for those that prefer the KDE way of doing things Vector Linux has a "KDE Classic" edition based on 3.5.10 that is nice.
I agree that it SHOULDN'T be a hard problem....but it is, at least from what I've seen the IPV6 routers frankly have NOT been very user friendly. Sadly it looks like it'll be the 80s all over again as it takes awhile for common sense designs to come out and until then its gonna be a royal clusterfuck.
Hell look at what should be so damned simple (and would have been if they wouldn't have taken a dump on backwards compatibility) which is having both an IPV4 and an IPV6 address. If they would have went with a sane design one could simply use IPV6 for both but as it is now either you use IPv4 primarily and IPV6 is useless or you use IPV6 and have to wait for a timeout before it switches over to IPV4.
And Linux isn't magic, it can be royally fucked up just as badly as any other embedded OS, it all comes down to the implementation which so far most I've seen are really either piss poor or insanely expensive. But until we end up with sub $50 routers that I can just slap on a network and it "just works' I honestly don't see IPV4 going anywhere. Hell just look at how many IPV4 only routers are being sold right now on Tiger and Newegg, all those trendnet and zonenet routers will end up in some landfill because there is simply no way to upgrade the damned things.
Anyway you slice it the switchover is gonna be a mess, there is just no damned way around it. The corps don't want to spend any money so the experience just isn't there, pretty much ALL of the consumer level stuff is gonna have to be thrown in the garbage, that millions of devices that are gonna be chunked, and the stuff that is currently out there that supports IPV6 is overpriced and/or badly designed and unintuitive. Anyway you slice it its gonna be a mess and having it happen when the economy is a corpse will just make it that much worse.
But you do NOT kill a good product line for a new line that gets curb stomped by the previous product! Check out the benches and pretty much the ONLY task where the BD chips can beat thuban is in integer heavy loads...which is a task that almost never comes up in consumer typical workloads! Its overpriced AND underpowered which is really not a good combo. Hell I know guys that were die hard AMD fanboys and after BD they finally gave up and went Intel.
Frankly I'll keep selling AMD as long as I can get AM3 and AM3+ boards cheap but if they don't come up with something that beats Thuban by at LEAST 30% by the time Thuban stocks run out I'll too have to go Intel. The Bulldozer is frankly a lousy chip for consumers and gets beaten by both the low end Intel AND the previous Deneb and Thuban chips.
And I hope you are right because from what I've seen the BD design is a clusterfuck. Trying to remove floating point when damned near every load a consumer has IS floating point heavy? That's just retarded. BTW did you know that if you disable half the "cores" in BD you get a 25% speed INCREASE instead of a hit? That tells me that what they are trying to push as a 6 core is really a 3, and their quads are duals, yet they are trying to sell them at quad and 6 prices when the performance just isn't there. And the worst part is if the rumors are true the performance hit will ONLY be fixed in Windows 8....which is gonna be Vista the second coming from how reviled it is.
Frankly AMD's problem is not Intel but their own retarded roadmap. Thuban and Zosma were not only making money but gave them nearly 100% yields because they could simply disable bad cores and/or cache and sell them as lower SKUs, and Brazos is beloved by the OEMs and the consumers, showing up in desktops, netbooks, laptops, and all in ones. So what do they do? Kill the Krishna upgrade to Brazos AND kill Thuban which shot to shit their entire AM3 line and the only chips they have to replace them are BD which sucks ass or Liano which is just a Stars core jammed with a GPU. It seems like they bet the entire farm on a chip that was having as many problems as Phenom I and i only hope they can survive yet another failure. Lets be honest Brazos is a good design but they can't ride it for 3 or 4 years like they did with Phenom, it needs an increase in cores or a speed bump.
I just hate to see AMD keep shooting themselves in the face when now more than ever we need competition to keep Intel from screwing the market price wise. They were in the black, both their CPUs and GPUs were making profits, why would Dirk do something so damned retarded?
Why do you say that? As long as they are well maintained and stress tested they should be fine and the cost of trying to restart the lines and make B52s would be like trying to build new Saturn 5s, it would be damned near impossible. So its not like we have a choice really, its either keep them running or have no bombers at all because all our contractors can seem to do anymore is pad bills, they certainly can't build a decent plane to save their asses.;
This is a good example though of why you should keep lines running with either small orders or foreign orders if its something you don't have a replacement for. Look at the C130, those lines have been running for ages and why not? Its a great air truck, it can firefight, be used as a gunship, as a rescue plane for disasters, you can damned near land a C130 anywhere, its a good design.
The problem is the B52 was a good design but all the designs cooked up to replace it were white elephants. They blew through too much fuel, were too fussy, cost too much per unit, again the only thing the contractors were good for was padding the bill. That is why we should go back to the way we did it before and during WWII where we put out a spec but we do not pay shit UNTIL a prototype passes muster and gets accepted. Because as it is now they can make more money by stringing the military along as long as possible, who cares if it gets canceled? they still get paid.
Because sadly here in the USA each one of those "nifty ideas" is probably copyrighted and/or patented up the ass so you'll spend more time in court than you do working on your new program?
And the fact that every geek here is screaming "firewall!" just illustrates what a Star trek problem truly is. You see because YOU have no problem with firewalls you automatically assume that the CONSUMERS won't have a problem either. you know what they say about assume right?
As someone who deals with consumers 6 days a week i can tell you handing the average home user a firewall is like handing a monkey a wrench and letting them loose in a bomb factory. Sure there might not be a giant boom, but IRL you'll be lucky if the chimp don't blow the place sky high.
so you either need to add a shitload of support costs or do a major redesign of the entire firewall concept to make it user friendly. while I wish you luck I can tell you it'll probably end up like most IPV6/V4 dual setups I've seen, broken.
I don't know about that. Sorry i can't remember the quote exactly or whom it was from but it went along the lines of "Give me two sentences written by a truly innocent man and I will find something with which to hang him" and with THAT much knowledge gathered frankly they could make anyone look like anything from a pervert to an idiot to a monster, just by leaving out pieces or removing context.
In any case knowledge is power and having that much data about individuals controlled by a single company is frankly more than a little scary. Of course the head of a company that just changed their privacy policy to make it even easier to track anywhere you go preaching about Internet freedom is more than a little ironic in my book. Pot, meet kettle, i hear you have a lot in common.
While the announcement in and of itself isn't that big a whoop it does bring up a more interesting question: Which will be more important in the future, the CPU or the GPU?
As we have seen with the Brazos platform as well as liano (I believe bulldozer is a server chip they tried to push into a consumer market that it simply wasn't designed for because they needed product) it appears that AMD believes it is the GPU that will be of primary importance. As someone who deals with consumers 6 days a week I can see their reasoning, as more and more of my customers are more concerned with multimedia than raw number crunching and lets face it after dual cores PCs became "good enough" for the uses that the average consumer has. i have built several E350 based units for office as well as home and the extremely low power while having "good enough" CPU and hardware accelerated video does make for a nice platform. As we have read the next push from AMD will be switching the GPU from VLIW to vector based which since it will be built into the core would allow the GPU to behave as a "super floating point" thus meaning the CPU can be even simpler
Then you have the Intel stance which is to pare what they consider a "good enough" GPU with a high performance CPU. this design too has merits as if you have a powerful enough CPU then what the GPU does can often be done by the CPU instead. There is also the question of how much pure number crunching can be done on the GPU VS the CPU as it will take time to learn how to program for the GPU (although OpenCL may help in this regard) whereas the CPU is known by developers and thus easier to program for.
So I'd say that is an interesting question, whether to go for the power in the GPU or in the CPU. Using myself and my customers I'd say AMD has a good strategy for the consumer market whereas Intel has a good strategy for the business. After all Suzy the checkout girl isn't manipulating huge spreadsheets or dealing in large databases but there are plenty of business uses for having serious number crunching ability. I could easily see the split happening along those lines, with the consumer units, be it netbook/nettop, laptop, or desktop being AMD while the workstations and business laptops belong to Intel but i think it will be interesting in the next few years to see how it shapes up.
I will say whomever at AMD killed the Phenom/Athlon lines was an idiot and should get a good firing, the BD design simply isn't good for the consumer, its too expensive with frankly less bang for the buck than the Thuban and Deneb chips which often curb stomp it in all but its highest SKU and its pretty obvious that while its a good server design (as integer heavy highly threaded loads are more prevalent there) its simply not a good deal for consumers. I would have stuck with Bobcat on mobile, maybe adding a 4 core version for the more midrange machines, and kept Thuban (since it can fit everything that used to be covered by Phenom/Athlon simply by flipping off cores and/or cache which also made it a more attractive target for those who wished to try turning on disabled cores) and waited to see if integrating a vector based GPU would bring the increased performance to replace Thuban.
But in either case the next couple of years should be interesting as we see which strategy pays off and for which markets.
Complaining about/. being buggy is like complaining that stupid puppy just piddled on the carpet. Lets face it/. has NEVER been well coded, even version 1.0 was buggy as shit. You'd think a site for nerds would actually care about such things but they seem to be taking the FB "Throw more bling at it" approach so good luck with that.
After struggling for a month with the new layout I went to the "low bandwidth" version which even though I'm on 20Mbps cable frankly runs a thousand times better than the new layout. Its still not great, I still find it loads slower in some cases than even a video heavy site which is inexcusable, but at least it don't suck as much ass as the new layout. I guess its better to have the puppy to piddle on the linoleum where its easier to deal with than the carpet.
Because i don't know if you could hit the key $10k price point at 60MPG and the price point is critical. You see the people making $100K+ don't really have to worry about fuel, they can be green or not, doesn't really matter, what DOES matter is the average age of a vehicle driven by the working poor which is 11+ years and the average MPG which again because of the working poor is barely 20MPG. Hell I often do better than most in my area yet I'm driving a 99 Ranger which is an absolute pig on gas, why? Because when you have two kids including one in college and the price of food rises daily one simply can't afford to go make payments on a $35k+ vehicle right now, not with the risk that the economy could sour tomorrow.
So by all means if you can build a car that gets 60MPG for $10K? Then 100% behind you, that is what we need. But we must never forget the goal is not to make another rich people's toy but a true people's car and with the economy so terrible the price point MUST be so that everyone can afford it. With a $10k price point and a cash for clunkers program even someone making minimum wage would be able to afford this car and by taking all those big gas sucking cars off the road it would significantly lower or dependence on unstable foreign oil.
Personally i look at it as a national security issue and think it should be treated as such. After all how many trillions have we blown securing ME oil? Imagine if you halved US gas usage in under 3 years. i truly believe this is possible, its truly a realistic goal, one simply has to be willing to do something about it. sadly our politicians are whores and all we will get is more Solyanda bullshit that enriches a few and helps even less.
I wasn't trying to compare you to make some sort of value judgement and if that offended it was not my intent, I was simply pointing out that by having someone associated with a project have their own slashdot account it not only makes it easier to ask questions and to see your posts (since ACs are automatically placed at 0 instead of 1 to a normal non trolling account) but that it keeps people from not knowing whether they are dealing with the real deal or a troll.
Now as for whether REing in this particular case would be legal i have to wonder because as far as I know while REing is of course perfectly legal when it comes to hardware I've never heard of software being covered by this ruling. the thing that worries me about this case (which you can see if you read the case of Jazz Photo V USITC when it comes to exhaustion doctrine since the USA uses a "territorial exhaustion doctrine" ) which may or may not apply if you are not based in the USA depending on how you want to read it (frankly just trying to read legalese gives me a migraine) so the question as to whether the rights Nvidia bought to H.264 would cover your project or not is debatable.
Of course none of this would matter if we are only talking about Nvidia because after AMD opened up the specs i seriously doubt they would outright attack FOSS and risk all those workstation and HPC sales. But the real elephant in the room is how you are gonna support H.264, which is quickly becoming the de facto ruler of web video, without stepping into that whole H.264 patent minefield? After all from what we have seen MPEG-LA can be VERY aggressive when it comes to its patents, and from a glance at their patents its gonna be pretty damned hard to do anything with H.264 without tripping on their patents.
So I wish you nothing but luck, I can't even imagine how insanely difficult it must be to use clean room REing to try to gain control over something as complex as a modern GPU but I hope you have a lawyer you can talk to about the legal implications when you get closer to feature parity thanks to the H.264 minefield. Of course if the rumors are true that H.265 will have DRM by default the entire thing might be moot anyway as its a DMCA violation to even attempt to circumvent DRM even if its just to allow the user to use what they have paid for. But I wish you luck, with something so insanely complicated and powerful you are gonna have an incredibly difficult road ahead, i only wish that legal issues didn't even need to be considered. Kinda sad that the USA used to be a hotbed of innovation and now its pretty much SOP to be based in China or the EU or anywhere BUT the USA just to stay out of the copyrights and patents minefields.
On a final note your comment about "sane countries"? Remember ICE can get you pretty much anywhere on the planet as megaupload found out. If things keep going the way they have been frankly I'd probably just block USA IP addresses if it were me, I wouldn't want to take the risk of getting my door kicked in because some corp got their panties in a wad.
Actually its this kind of stupidity that has always had me hating IPV6. Frankly they should have included backwards compatibility with IPV4 private networks because who in the hell is EVER gonna have more devices than a class A private address can provide?
Which brings us to the second stupid ass move with IPV6 the removal of NAT. That was stupid because it relies on what i call "Star trek thinking" where they only see the bright side of life, never the dark. engineer: "With IPV6 you'll have so many addresses you won't NEED NAT so everything can just be online!" Me-What about those of us who don't want to have everything online ALL the time, but don't want to switch back and forth between private and public addresses? What about the security risk as now I'll have to worry about the possibility of security weaknesses in every damned device like TVs, game machines, PMPs, etc? Engineer: "-------". Whether you love it or hate it you have to admit NAT WORKS, it makes it a hell of a lot harder to target an individual device on a network.
But Apple has probably figured out what I could have told them years ago, that without backwards compatibility getting IPV4 and IPV6 to play nice is a giant PITA. Because so few use it either you default to IPV4 in which case you are just dragging around IPV6 for nothing, or you default to IPV6 in which case you have to wait for it to time out before switching to IPV4 which just slows every damned thing down. why they couldn't have encapsulated the IPV4 address INSIDE the IPV6 so that one could simply use IPV6 is anyone's guess but I bet Apple has done some surveys and found nobody is using the thing and it makes things more of a PITA. Considering Apple's "It just works" mantra making something a bigger PITA simply isn't on the agenda so no wonder they are scaling back support.
BTW everyone here should pray that IPV4 lasts as long as possible because when the switch is flipped? May God have mercy upon your data packets because frankly the flyover states is gonna be fucked. The corps have royally screwed IT for so long when it comes to pay and hours most of the older guys rather than deal with the massive headaches that IPV6 will bring are just quietly getting other jobs and because again the corps are greedy shits the kids they are hiring to replace them just don't have the experience which is gonna make troubleshooting a nightmare. Then add in the fact with so few using it its a royal PITA to get any real hands on so when that switch is pulled shit that would have taken a few hours tops under IPV4 to fix will take days or even weeks under IPV6 simply because the experience isn't there. Anybody remember the clusterfuck that civilian Internet was during the 80s? How shit would just break and even the tech support was "uuuhhhh"? Frankly this is just one more reason I'm glad I'm out of corp IT because i wouldn't wish this trainwreck on my worst enemy and I don't blame Apple for just wanting to skip it when it just adds cost and shows no benefits to the majority of their customers whom I'm sure aren't using it.
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Exactly, this is a malware writer's wet dream. You have an embedded OS with some NAND for updates where you can store your code, a browser, and a 24/7 Internet connection. Talk about a perfect spambot!
And of course since its a device not normally associated by the public with malware they will be easy prey, I've been seeing that myself at the shop as people that would never fall for traditional spam and malware get bit by the new phone attacks because "Its a phone, not a PC" and i'm sure they'll be the same way with TV attacks.
Well between those and units based off cheap PCs (which i see quite often as well) the days of POS being a high margin business are coming to an end and IBM knows it. from the looks of things the future will be small ARM and X86 based touch screens all made from commodity parts and as cheaply as possible.
Frankly this is a smart move unless IBM is willing to play in cutthroat markets which we've seen no indication of, I mean who know would have thought that IBM staying in PCs would have been a good idea when Dell and HP are making on average $8 a unit on the low end which is their biggest sellers? Surviving on scraps is just not something big blue cares to do so they are bailing while the bailing is good. If anything is shocking its the fact they got someone to pay that much money for their POS business.
And the difference between Steam and every other modern game with Internet phone home is.....what exactly? Are you saying you don't play ANY games at all? if so what are you posting for? or are you using a console which is just "DRM in a box" that is locked down so tight you can't do anything with the hardware without permission?
The simple fact is the ONLY time I have heard of Valve EVER taking away a game was when someone was using cheats to destroy the game for everyone else. anyone who has had to deal with some douchebag using aimbots and wallhacks is frankly damned glad Valve punts the cheaters. if it bothers you so much any P2P program will give you a hack for any Steam game in seconds again NO different from any retail game.
So if all you want to play is nethack that is your choice, but when the choices are nothing but old games, DRMed all to hell discs that you can't get replaced if it gets even a teeny scratch and the company can pull the plug at ANY time, or Steam where i have never heard of a single person that lost a game for anything but being a prick the average Joe is gonna choose Steam and the numbers reflect that. Like it or not the bankloads of money Valve has been making show they have "got it right" for the vast majority. if that doesn't fit you then maybe you should pick a new hobby as gaming is obviously not for you anymore.
Wow, don't know your history much do you? America from the start taxed the living hell out of imports and in fact was VERY isolationist for most of its history, right up until WWII, after that since the EU and Asia was in ruins the USA made out like bandits since they were the only real functional manufacturing center left intact. But then some real rich pricks decided that "free trade" meant treating countries with NO environmental or worker regulations as equals to the USA and you have the decline we have now, because you simply can't compete with countries that are allowed to dump toxic waste into their rivers and treat their workers like dogs while actually having regulations.
As for TFA another Tesla, a toy that will make rich folks feel "green" and smug. Good for them but it doesn't do jack shit for the majority of Americans and especially the working poor who could actually use such a thing. After all if you are making 100K a year is a couple of bucks on the electric bill REALLY gonna bother you?
That's not the gas to move the thing, read the wiki its just the gas to run the fricking radar dome! At least with your jet aircraft once it gets to the area it can use missiles without using more fuel to fire it but with this thing with every single second of use, even when its just parked, its literally blasting through pounds of fuel per minute....and THIS is supposed to be what we use in case of a war with a power that has enough tech to launch multiple MIRVs at us? How are you gonna feed this thing?
Wow, every time someone might possibly think you're not completely batshit...you have to open you crazy hole and remove ALL doubts. Tell me is that statue of RMS whispering to you again? is it telling you to kill that scary troll that keeps coming into your room? that's actually your mom and would be bad,mmmkay?
And you just pointed out the answer, just look at Valve. With Steam what you have is a lot like the old disc based copy protection, there are a bazillion cracks out there but its just enough to keep it from being absurdly trivial for Joe Average to hand out the games to all his friends and in return the sales make it so damned cheap frankly it isn't worth the effort to pirate for a lot of people.
What the whole insane IP mess has done is made these douchebags think their "IP" is so damned precious they should be able to just avoid that whole "market pricing" thing and charge the absolute most assraping price they can slap on it. All piracy is is a sign from the market that the prices are wrong. humans are lazy creatures and if you hit the sweet spot on the price many will simply not bother as it'll be cheaper and easier to buy than to pirate. I have probably 40 games in Steam and another 40 from GOG, could i have not pirated them all? Sure but it wouldn't have been as easy as "push button and get game" and the prices were so low, why bother?
But instead what we get is nothing but DRMed up the ass garbage that makes the pirated version the better value. its like what Wil Wheaton pointed out when he bought some Dr Who off of Amazon and found it didn't work when he crossed the border for a show even though he had already "bought" the content "If I would have just pirated it I could be watching Dr Who right now". make it easy, make it convenient, make it cheap. miss any of the three and the pirated version will be the better version.
Personally if it were anybody BUT Sony i would say this would be an incredible breakthrough for SMBs and consumers if they could hit the right price point, say $75 for the recorder and less than $10 for the discs?
Imagine how much easier it would be to get everyone to back up and use offsite backups if all they had to do was pop in a cart and push a button, and when finished pop it in their bag and carry it home or to a relatives? USB HDDs are okay but they really aren't that hot for long term storage as they need to be spun up occasionally and aren't that easy to tote, but with this you could do a weekly differential and just cart it home. Most folks don't realize how important having those backups until you have to tell someone like i did the other day that they had lost ALL their pictures because the drive was toasted. With something like this one could just have it backup nightly and when full put it somewhere safe like a safety deposit box.
I just hope somebody comes out with something like this soon. the amount of data folks are coming up with with all these high def cameras and camcorders is just nuts and USB HDDs just aren't good for long term storage and SSDs and Flash is still too high per Gb, whereas something like this, even if it were WORM would be truly great if the price point were right. But until then it looks like for long term storage those of us who can't afford tape drives will be stuck with DVD.
I'd say the first of those two is the big "Uh oh" with Google drive, after all you could always encrypt your stuff before you sent it. But as we have seen with Google its either a megahit or its dead, there really is no in between with that company so i would be seriously leery of wanting to store my stuff with them until I saw whether or not its gonna last.
Of course all of these cloud storage bunches that aren't targeting businesses is gonna end up screwed anyway as it looks like the ISPs are just gonna cap the ever loving shit out of anything they aren't getting a cut of.....err i mean "hosting in their local datacenter" so unless they are gonna set up a branch on every local ISP this whole "in the cloud" thing will come screeching to a halt the first time someone gets that insane bill for going over their caps. i know in my area its $1.50 a Gb if you go over so its much cheaper just to slap everything on a USB drive and cart it offsite than it is to deal with the overcharges.
Not to mention how long can you feed the thing gas? The wiki says that pig is sucking down on SIX 3.6Mw generators and there are plans to add two more of those hogs on top of those 6. i'm sorry but if there were EVER a case for nuclear power that giant power hog would be it. if we were in an actual war situation how long would we be able to keep feeding that thing with all the other fuel needs of the country and military?
While i think drones are a good idea that thing is just too much of a piggy on conventional fuel. Instead we need more like that giant flying wing NASA was showing off, something solar powered that can stay up for weeks on end. park those suckers over anyone like NK that you are worried about, but sucking down as much gas as that oil rig radar? i just don't see that as a long term viable system, not with the cost of oil rising.
Nice to see i'm not the only one sick of this. How many games have you played lately that could be described like this "The graphics were great but the game sucked"? Games, especially FPS, have been stuck in "Halo Mode" for too damned long. Hell they even took a big shit on DNF by making duke just another 2 weapon Halo clone.
Give us something cool dammit! Smart AI like the first Far Cry, funny story and cool weapons (kitty bomb anyone?) like No One Lives Forever I&II, cool damage models like in Soldier Of Fortune I&II, hell even randomized level design like in Nosferatu!
Looking over my PC while there are a ton of new games there are several old ones that I keep coming back to, the ones listed above along with Sacred and Divine Divinity (for my Diablo hack and slash fix),Freelancer and Freespace (for my Star Wars pilot fix) and the FPS listed above along with F.E.A.R, Blood (tons of humor and 80s horror references) and Redneck Rampage (who don't like having a titty gun and dynamite arrows?) simply because i'm so damned sick of "Call Of Honor: Halo Of Killzone Edition, now with extra expensive DLC"...its just boring, its boring, levels are all straight lines, they suck. How sad is it that games like DN3D and Redneck have more expansive levels with things to do than a modern shooter?
BTW for those sick of the same old Halo crap you might want to check out Good Old Games for some classic gaming goodness. All DRM free, they always seem to be having a sale, and many will run on Linux as well. When you are bored to tears with the crap that has been coming out lately give GOG a spin, show the devs there that having great games DRM free is the right strategy.
What is sad is once upon a time, before Sony became one of the media cartels, Sony products were once the height of quality. If the OLD Sony were to be the one offering this? i'd jump on in a heartbeat as we really do need a nice long term storage for consumers to replace DVDs. But this is the NEW Sony which means it will be filled to the brim with DRM crap that will make it crippled and buggy. No thanks Sony.
One of the things I like about Comodo Dragon is that is the default setting, so no need to try to walk someone through killing third party cookies. With Dragon and ABP everything "just works" .
I never understood why when things were getting nice and stable both KDE and GNOME would suddenly shitcan all that work. i mean what was wrong with them? They both looked nice, ran fine, were low resource, so what was wrong with what they had? Could they just not live without an assload of bling like OSX and Windows has gotten?
BTW for those that prefer the KDE way of doing things Vector Linux has a "KDE Classic" edition based on 3.5.10 that is nice.
I agree that it SHOULDN'T be a hard problem....but it is, at least from what I've seen the IPV6 routers frankly have NOT been very user friendly. Sadly it looks like it'll be the 80s all over again as it takes awhile for common sense designs to come out and until then its gonna be a royal clusterfuck.
Hell look at what should be so damned simple (and would have been if they wouldn't have taken a dump on backwards compatibility) which is having both an IPV4 and an IPV6 address. If they would have went with a sane design one could simply use IPV6 for both but as it is now either you use IPv4 primarily and IPV6 is useless or you use IPV6 and have to wait for a timeout before it switches over to IPV4.
And Linux isn't magic, it can be royally fucked up just as badly as any other embedded OS, it all comes down to the implementation which so far most I've seen are really either piss poor or insanely expensive. But until we end up with sub $50 routers that I can just slap on a network and it "just works' I honestly don't see IPV4 going anywhere. Hell just look at how many IPV4 only routers are being sold right now on Tiger and Newegg, all those trendnet and zonenet routers will end up in some landfill because there is simply no way to upgrade the damned things.
Anyway you slice it the switchover is gonna be a mess, there is just no damned way around it. The corps don't want to spend any money so the experience just isn't there, pretty much ALL of the consumer level stuff is gonna have to be thrown in the garbage, that millions of devices that are gonna be chunked, and the stuff that is currently out there that supports IPV6 is overpriced and/or badly designed and unintuitive. Anyway you slice it its gonna be a mess and having it happen when the economy is a corpse will just make it that much worse.
But you do NOT kill a good product line for a new line that gets curb stomped by the previous product! Check out the benches and pretty much the ONLY task where the BD chips can beat thuban is in integer heavy loads...which is a task that almost never comes up in consumer typical workloads! Its overpriced AND underpowered which is really not a good combo. Hell I know guys that were die hard AMD fanboys and after BD they finally gave up and went Intel.
Frankly I'll keep selling AMD as long as I can get AM3 and AM3+ boards cheap but if they don't come up with something that beats Thuban by at LEAST 30% by the time Thuban stocks run out I'll too have to go Intel. The Bulldozer is frankly a lousy chip for consumers and gets beaten by both the low end Intel AND the previous Deneb and Thuban chips.
And I hope you are right because from what I've seen the BD design is a clusterfuck. Trying to remove floating point when damned near every load a consumer has IS floating point heavy? That's just retarded. BTW did you know that if you disable half the "cores" in BD you get a 25% speed INCREASE instead of a hit? That tells me that what they are trying to push as a 6 core is really a 3, and their quads are duals, yet they are trying to sell them at quad and 6 prices when the performance just isn't there. And the worst part is if the rumors are true the performance hit will ONLY be fixed in Windows 8....which is gonna be Vista the second coming from how reviled it is.
Frankly AMD's problem is not Intel but their own retarded roadmap. Thuban and Zosma were not only making money but gave them nearly 100% yields because they could simply disable bad cores and/or cache and sell them as lower SKUs, and Brazos is beloved by the OEMs and the consumers, showing up in desktops, netbooks, laptops, and all in ones. So what do they do? Kill the Krishna upgrade to Brazos AND kill Thuban which shot to shit their entire AM3 line and the only chips they have to replace them are BD which sucks ass or Liano which is just a Stars core jammed with a GPU. It seems like they bet the entire farm on a chip that was having as many problems as Phenom I and i only hope they can survive yet another failure. Lets be honest Brazos is a good design but they can't ride it for 3 or 4 years like they did with Phenom, it needs an increase in cores or a speed bump.
I just hate to see AMD keep shooting themselves in the face when now more than ever we need competition to keep Intel from screwing the market price wise. They were in the black, both their CPUs and GPUs were making profits, why would Dirk do something so damned retarded?
Why do you say that? As long as they are well maintained and stress tested they should be fine and the cost of trying to restart the lines and make B52s would be like trying to build new Saturn 5s, it would be damned near impossible. So its not like we have a choice really, its either keep them running or have no bombers at all because all our contractors can seem to do anymore is pad bills, they certainly can't build a decent plane to save their asses.;
This is a good example though of why you should keep lines running with either small orders or foreign orders if its something you don't have a replacement for. Look at the C130, those lines have been running for ages and why not? Its a great air truck, it can firefight, be used as a gunship, as a rescue plane for disasters, you can damned near land a C130 anywhere, its a good design.
The problem is the B52 was a good design but all the designs cooked up to replace it were white elephants. They blew through too much fuel, were too fussy, cost too much per unit, again the only thing the contractors were good for was padding the bill. That is why we should go back to the way we did it before and during WWII where we put out a spec but we do not pay shit UNTIL a prototype passes muster and gets accepted. Because as it is now they can make more money by stringing the military along as long as possible, who cares if it gets canceled? they still get paid.
Because sadly here in the USA each one of those "nifty ideas" is probably copyrighted and/or patented up the ass so you'll spend more time in court than you do working on your new program?
And the fact that every geek here is screaming "firewall!" just illustrates what a Star trek problem truly is. You see because YOU have no problem with firewalls you automatically assume that the CONSUMERS won't have a problem either. you know what they say about assume right?
As someone who deals with consumers 6 days a week i can tell you handing the average home user a firewall is like handing a monkey a wrench and letting them loose in a bomb factory. Sure there might not be a giant boom, but IRL you'll be lucky if the chimp don't blow the place sky high.
so you either need to add a shitload of support costs or do a major redesign of the entire firewall concept to make it user friendly. while I wish you luck I can tell you it'll probably end up like most IPV6/V4 dual setups I've seen, broken.
I don't know about that. Sorry i can't remember the quote exactly or whom it was from but it went along the lines of "Give me two sentences written by a truly innocent man and I will find something with which to hang him" and with THAT much knowledge gathered frankly they could make anyone look like anything from a pervert to an idiot to a monster, just by leaving out pieces or removing context.
In any case knowledge is power and having that much data about individuals controlled by a single company is frankly more than a little scary. Of course the head of a company that just changed their privacy policy to make it even easier to track anywhere you go preaching about Internet freedom is more than a little ironic in my book. Pot, meet kettle, i hear you have a lot in common.
While the announcement in and of itself isn't that big a whoop it does bring up a more interesting question: Which will be more important in the future, the CPU or the GPU?
As we have seen with the Brazos platform as well as liano (I believe bulldozer is a server chip they tried to push into a consumer market that it simply wasn't designed for because they needed product) it appears that AMD believes it is the GPU that will be of primary importance. As someone who deals with consumers 6 days a week I can see their reasoning, as more and more of my customers are more concerned with multimedia than raw number crunching and lets face it after dual cores PCs became "good enough" for the uses that the average consumer has. i have built several E350 based units for office as well as home and the extremely low power while having "good enough" CPU and hardware accelerated video does make for a nice platform. As we have read the next push from AMD will be switching the GPU from VLIW to vector based which since it will be built into the core would allow the GPU to behave as a "super floating point" thus meaning the CPU can be even simpler
Then you have the Intel stance which is to pare what they consider a "good enough" GPU with a high performance CPU. this design too has merits as if you have a powerful enough CPU then what the GPU does can often be done by the CPU instead. There is also the question of how much pure number crunching can be done on the GPU VS the CPU as it will take time to learn how to program for the GPU (although OpenCL may help in this regard) whereas the CPU is known by developers and thus easier to program for.
So I'd say that is an interesting question, whether to go for the power in the GPU or in the CPU. Using myself and my customers I'd say AMD has a good strategy for the consumer market whereas Intel has a good strategy for the business. After all Suzy the checkout girl isn't manipulating huge spreadsheets or dealing in large databases but there are plenty of business uses for having serious number crunching ability. I could easily see the split happening along those lines, with the consumer units, be it netbook/nettop, laptop, or desktop being AMD while the workstations and business laptops belong to Intel but i think it will be interesting in the next few years to see how it shapes up.
I will say whomever at AMD killed the Phenom/Athlon lines was an idiot and should get a good firing, the BD design simply isn't good for the consumer, its too expensive with frankly less bang for the buck than the Thuban and Deneb chips which often curb stomp it in all but its highest SKU and its pretty obvious that while its a good server design (as integer heavy highly threaded loads are more prevalent there) its simply not a good deal for consumers. I would have stuck with Bobcat on mobile, maybe adding a 4 core version for the more midrange machines, and kept Thuban (since it can fit everything that used to be covered by Phenom/Athlon simply by flipping off cores and/or cache which also made it a more attractive target for those who wished to try turning on disabled cores) and waited to see if integrating a vector based GPU would bring the increased performance to replace Thuban.
But in either case the next couple of years should be interesting as we see which strategy pays off and for which markets.
Complaining about /. being buggy is like complaining that stupid puppy just piddled on the carpet. Lets face it /. has NEVER been well coded, even version 1.0 was buggy as shit. You'd think a site for nerds would actually care about such things but they seem to be taking the FB "Throw more bling at it" approach so good luck with that.
After struggling for a month with the new layout I went to the "low bandwidth" version which even though I'm on 20Mbps cable frankly runs a thousand times better than the new layout. Its still not great, I still find it loads slower in some cases than even a video heavy site which is inexcusable, but at least it don't suck as much ass as the new layout. I guess its better to have the puppy to piddle on the linoleum where its easier to deal with than the carpet.
Because i don't know if you could hit the key $10k price point at 60MPG and the price point is critical. You see the people making $100K+ don't really have to worry about fuel, they can be green or not, doesn't really matter, what DOES matter is the average age of a vehicle driven by the working poor which is 11+ years and the average MPG which again because of the working poor is barely 20MPG. Hell I often do better than most in my area yet I'm driving a 99 Ranger which is an absolute pig on gas, why? Because when you have two kids including one in college and the price of food rises daily one simply can't afford to go make payments on a $35k+ vehicle right now, not with the risk that the economy could sour tomorrow.
So by all means if you can build a car that gets 60MPG for $10K? Then 100% behind you, that is what we need. But we must never forget the goal is not to make another rich people's toy but a true people's car and with the economy so terrible the price point MUST be so that everyone can afford it. With a $10k price point and a cash for clunkers program even someone making minimum wage would be able to afford this car and by taking all those big gas sucking cars off the road it would significantly lower or dependence on unstable foreign oil.
Personally i look at it as a national security issue and think it should be treated as such. After all how many trillions have we blown securing ME oil? Imagine if you halved US gas usage in under 3 years. i truly believe this is possible, its truly a realistic goal, one simply has to be willing to do something about it. sadly our politicians are whores and all we will get is more Solyanda bullshit that enriches a few and helps even less.
I wasn't trying to compare you to make some sort of value judgement and if that offended it was not my intent, I was simply pointing out that by having someone associated with a project have their own slashdot account it not only makes it easier to ask questions and to see your posts (since ACs are automatically placed at 0 instead of 1 to a normal non trolling account) but that it keeps people from not knowing whether they are dealing with the real deal or a troll.
Now as for whether REing in this particular case would be legal i have to wonder because as far as I know while REing is of course perfectly legal when it comes to hardware I've never heard of software being covered by this ruling. the thing that worries me about this case (which you can see if you read the case of Jazz Photo V USITC when it comes to exhaustion doctrine since the USA uses a "territorial exhaustion doctrine" ) which may or may not apply if you are not based in the USA depending on how you want to read it (frankly just trying to read legalese gives me a migraine) so the question as to whether the rights Nvidia bought to H.264 would cover your project or not is debatable.
Of course none of this would matter if we are only talking about Nvidia because after AMD opened up the specs i seriously doubt they would outright attack FOSS and risk all those workstation and HPC sales. But the real elephant in the room is how you are gonna support H.264, which is quickly becoming the de facto ruler of web video, without stepping into that whole H.264 patent minefield? After all from what we have seen MPEG-LA can be VERY aggressive when it comes to its patents, and from a glance at their patents its gonna be pretty damned hard to do anything with H.264 without tripping on their patents.
So I wish you nothing but luck, I can't even imagine how insanely difficult it must be to use clean room REing to try to gain control over something as complex as a modern GPU but I hope you have a lawyer you can talk to about the legal implications when you get closer to feature parity thanks to the H.264 minefield. Of course if the rumors are true that H.265 will have DRM by default the entire thing might be moot anyway as its a DMCA violation to even attempt to circumvent DRM even if its just to allow the user to use what they have paid for. But I wish you luck, with something so insanely complicated and powerful you are gonna have an incredibly difficult road ahead, i only wish that legal issues didn't even need to be considered. Kinda sad that the USA used to be a hotbed of innovation and now its pretty much SOP to be based in China or the EU or anywhere BUT the USA just to stay out of the copyrights and patents minefields.
On a final note your comment about "sane countries"? Remember ICE can get you pretty much anywhere on the planet as megaupload found out. If things keep going the way they have been frankly I'd probably just block USA IP addresses if it were me, I wouldn't want to take the risk of getting my door kicked in because some corp got their panties in a wad.
Actually its this kind of stupidity that has always had me hating IPV6. Frankly they should have included backwards compatibility with IPV4 private networks because who in the hell is EVER gonna have more devices than a class A private address can provide?
Which brings us to the second stupid ass move with IPV6 the removal of NAT. That was stupid because it relies on what i call "Star trek thinking" where they only see the bright side of life, never the dark. engineer: "With IPV6 you'll have so many addresses you won't NEED NAT so everything can just be online!" Me-What about those of us who don't want to have everything online ALL the time, but don't want to switch back and forth between private and public addresses? What about the security risk as now I'll have to worry about the possibility of security weaknesses in every damned device like TVs, game machines, PMPs, etc? Engineer: "-------". Whether you love it or hate it you have to admit NAT WORKS, it makes it a hell of a lot harder to target an individual device on a network.
But Apple has probably figured out what I could have told them years ago, that without backwards compatibility getting IPV4 and IPV6 to play nice is a giant PITA. Because so few use it either you default to IPV4 in which case you are just dragging around IPV6 for nothing, or you default to IPV6 in which case you have to wait for it to time out before switching to IPV4 which just slows every damned thing down. why they couldn't have encapsulated the IPV4 address INSIDE the IPV6 so that one could simply use IPV6 is anyone's guess but I bet Apple has done some surveys and found nobody is using the thing and it makes things more of a PITA. Considering Apple's "It just works" mantra making something a bigger PITA simply isn't on the agenda so no wonder they are scaling back support.
BTW everyone here should pray that IPV4 lasts as long as possible because when the switch is flipped? May God have mercy upon your data packets because frankly the flyover states is gonna be fucked. The corps have royally screwed IT for so long when it comes to pay and hours most of the older guys rather than deal with the massive headaches that IPV6 will bring are just quietly getting other jobs and because again the corps are greedy shits the kids they are hiring to replace them just don't have the experience which is gonna make troubleshooting a nightmare. Then add in the fact with so few using it its a royal PITA to get any real hands on so when that switch is pulled shit that would have taken a few hours tops under IPV4 to fix will take days or even weeks under IPV6 simply because the experience isn't there. Anybody remember the clusterfuck that civilian Internet was during the 80s? How shit would just break and even the tech support was "uuuhhhh"? Frankly this is just one more reason I'm glad I'm out of corp IT because i wouldn't wish this trainwreck on my worst enemy and I don't blame Apple for just wanting to skip it when it just adds cost and shows no benefits to the majority of their customers whom I'm sure aren't using it.