And the simple fact is i'm sure we do the same thing duh! Universities are where one often begins to question the way things are for the first time. You are a young adult, in some ways grown and others not, and many cling to idealism before that lovely jaded cynicism that so many of us have seeps in. Remember its a lot harder to recruit someone who just blindly accepts things at face value, easier when they begin to question why things are the way they are. I do find it ironic that the same things that help someone grow as a person can be labeled as "potentially subversive" depending on which flag you are waving.
The elephant in the room nobody talks about is the energy return ratio, IIRC gas gets you around 30 EOI (I believe that is the correct term) for every unit of energy you expend. frankly we just don't have anything else that gives close to that ratio. all you are doing with the electrics is moving where the energy is made, and with a coal plant it wouldn't surprise me if its worse. then you have to figure in the impact of mining all that l-Ion, disposal of batteries, how long the batteries will last in real summers and winters VS garages (since most don't have garages), etc.
Personally I think a better direction if we truly anted to save energy is we need a true "people's car' that gets say 40MPG and sells for preferably under $10k. you could then offer a cash for clunkers style program to help the really poor get rid of all those gas hogs that are currently on the road, that would do MUCH more IMHO than some $40K+ hybrid that few will be likely to buy.
"Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's" Matthew 22:21. I still haven't figured how anyone twists that into "make my donations tax deductible!", probably the same way they twisted the eye of a needle to be some side door to make rich folks feel better about themselves.
But if every business pushes an agenda that is a lie, when does it officially become newspeak? Lets be honest folks...how many here think that the average white person, just minding their own business, would walk through say Harlem or Watts or any other major big city all black neighborhood unscathed? Now what if it were the other way? in most places the worst that would happen to the black man would be a cop asking him what he was doing which is a far cry from ending up beaten or dead. Can't blame it on poverty either because WV is the poorest state in the nation and also has one of the lowest crimes rates as well.
AG Holder has the balls to call us cowards for not talking about race, even after crap like this? Then lets talk about race and the real problems we are seeing in America. there is a good reason why places like Harlem were once considered jewels and are now hellholes, its because 50 years of welfare rewarding destructive behavior like having multiple children by multiple partners combined with a black culture that glorifies violence, drugs, weapons, and the treatment of women as nothing more than sperm receptacles and punching bags has destroyed the black community!
How sad that nobody can speak anything but PC Newspeak anymore, no matter how many facts and figures you can provide to back it up. How many know that the AP refuses to publish the race if the attacker is black and the victim white? How many here even heard about the white kid that was doused in gas and set on fire by black kids shouting "Kill whitey for Trayvon"? How sad is it that Klan has nothing on "thug life!" culture when it comes to killing black people?
Until more are willing to point out that the combination of "thug life!" culture and welfare teaching a complete lack of values is creating the very situations that the racists used to use as propaganda I expect we will see nothing more than PC newspeak while those same elites that publish their PC mags quietly go back to their all white gated communities with armed guards, ignoring the mass slaughters, rapes, and robberies happening thanks to the rise of the violent urban ghettos.
The problem isn't the targeted killing IMHO the problem is they should have been tried in absentia. We have the system to try people in absentia for JUST THIS REASON so that criminals can't simply jump borders to escape their crimes. Sadly the only one I saw who pointed this out, even going so far as to repeatedly tell both the left and right "You don't go shredding the constitution just to get a bad guy, I don't care how bad he is" was Glenn Beck. This was the only time i agreed with him but on this one topic he was 100% correct.
What we have here is now two administrations that refuse to follow the rule of law and frankly should be looked upon as criminal. we have had a set of procedures for dealing with just such cases for decades now and it is nothing but arrogance to ignore the law when it would have been trivial to give those like Anwar al-Awlaki their day in court whether they were here or not.
Anyone else remember the ads with The Shat? My first real PC (I had an Altair for a little while but with nothing but switches there wasn't much a kid could do with one of those) was a VIC and it gave birth to a lifetime love of computing which has been passed down to my boys, both of whom had PCs before they were in grade school. With the VIC there was just soo much to do! there were programs in every mag you could type in and run, tons of docs and specs that would let you PEEK and POKE and get really deep into the guts...as much as i love my AMD Hexacore there is simply no way i could ever learn the deep levels like i did with the VIC, there are just too many layers of abstraction between you and the bare metal now.
So goodbye Jack, you gave this guy a hell of a lot of fond memories from Commodore and Atari (he later bought Atari after Commodore and put out the Atari computers of the late 80s) and for many of us a lifetime of tech love was born from those fugly beige keyboards.I agree that old Jack should ALWAYS be mentioned right there besides Gates and Jobs as he was THE guy that made computers truly affordable to the masses. look up what the prices of the first gen Macs and the IBM 5150 were in the 80s in today's dollars and you'll see there was no way in hell the Average Joe was owning one. Hell I didn't even see my first Apple up close until going over to a rich guy's house in 89 and most of the SMBs were running Trash 80s and C64s until the clones made small business computing really affordable on x86 which i would argue is again because of Jack Tramiel starting the price wars. RIP computer man, the world wouldn't be what it is today without your contributions.
The Chromium base they are using is freely downloadable from their servers as per the GPL the ONLY changes that aren't available are the security connections which allow them to filter phishing and malware attacks which DUH! I do NOT want everybody and their dog to know how they are blocking the fucking bugs or the malware will just go around them!
So go compile something and STFU, you can compile the whole thing off their FTP server and there is less than 10% difference between Dragon and Chromium, or is Chromium not good enough either? damned FOSSies, just like Moonies in their religious crazies.
Actually its been real for quite a long time, they just used the classic "use it against a bad guy and the populace won't scream..until its too late" trick and it worked quite well. There are two men currently in prison for thoughtcrime, there are probably more but there are at least two that i know of. 1 is the guy that wrote the 'pro pedo" book, this book is nothing but his thoughts on the subject, no pictures, no "hey you should go out and rape kids" incitement, just his thoughts written down, now he's in prison...thoughtcrime. The other wrote down his fantasies of having sex with 14 year old girls on the advice of his therapist who wanted him to write down his fantasies in detail so they could break them down in therapy, now he is in prison too. again no pictures, no evidence that he actually did anything other than write his thoughts down...thoughtcrime.
It never ceases to amaze me how much of the populace will let any trully horrific law through or allow virtually any crushing of our civil liberties as long as you make sure the FIRST few targets are of a group they hate, be it communists, racists, terrorists, pedos, etc. So sad that so many years after "first they came for the communists" was written so many still don't understand that this is a classic tactic, use the power against someone that nobody will defend and then by the time they use it on you its been part of the system so long nobody balks.
We have seen the enemy...and it is us. Too many simply won't stand up if the target is someone they can't stand so that all of this horrible shit can seep into the system and eventually be used against us all. Once upon a time the NSA was mainly tasked with rooting out foreign spies which at the time was a real and credible threat...now they are used against us. nobody watched them, or kept them in check, or complained when their powers grew, so here we are.
Which is why we need a "use it or lose it" clause to copyrights and patents. Anybody who likes classic PCs games can tell you we are about to lose an entire generation of games, as more and more of the Win9X era games become unplayable. Its sad that I can play the DOS games all day long but more and more of the Win9X era games are becoming completely unplayable due to the fact they used hacks to get more performance and/or old DRM crap that no longer functions.
What we need is someone to do for Win9X what the DOSBox guys did for DOS, give us an emulator that can recreate what would be a perfect gaming PC of the time, something like a 1GHz P3 with a Geforce 4 or something similar. Kinda sad that so many games i enjoyed from that era are gone now, it doesn't matter how much CPU I have as even with a VM they just won't run correctly.
But I think you are wrong on the tech being fleeting, at least in x86. the whole reason why MSFT is about to throw Windows under a bus with win 8 to try to get into the ARM based phone market is the simple fact that PCs have become "good enough" for what the masses do with them and have been good enough for several years now. What is the point of replacing that Athlon X2 or Pentium D if all they do is FB, webmail, and watch YouTube? Frankly the only reason a lot of my customers upgraded at all was because XP is getting close to EOL and they decided they might as well have me build them a new one rather than just buy Win 7.
I'm guessing within 5 years, maybe less, we'll see the same thing happen with ARM, as the chips get 'good enough" for the masses and it makes less and less sense to upgrade. Hell I bet that many wouldn't be upgrading now if the networks didn't offer smartphones like free candy to get them to sign. Let the rare earth metals go up so the networks won't eat the costs anymore and i bet a lot of folks will just stay with what they have.
While i'm sure the chip manufacturers will keep coming out with new designs i rapidly see a day coming where the only time you replace is when the previous one dies. There just haven't been any "killer apps" that would force a consumer wide upgrade in quite awhile and considering how much toxic material these things end up putting in the landfills i have to say i'm looking forward to that day myself.
What amazes me is how long some of these chips have lasted. There are STILL variants on the Z80 in production and Intel only quit making the 386 in 2009. the z80s are used a lot in little MP3 players and I heard the 386 was popular for military applications as an embedded CPU. I don't think anybody still uses the MOS 6502 though.
It just goes to show that if a design is well made it can still find uses even after all these years. I wonder if in 30 years AMD will still have some division making Bobcats for embedded devices or Intel will have someone cranking out CULV Core2Duos for some industrial design.
Even better answer...don't. Seriously the power draw of anything he can cook up (unless he builds his own raspberry Pi based unit) will be nuts compared to the already built. I've had plenty of happy customers with the Nbox and Nbox HD, both are simple enough your average 6 year old can use them and its $25 for the Nbox and $60 for the Nbox HD. The only thing you need to know is use an external drive with its own PSU as the nbox doesn't put enough power over USB to drive laptop drives. But they are cheap, easy to use, VERY low power, and have both USB and SD slots which is great for when i want to take a movie over to watch with my dad as i can just slap it on an SD and drop it in my pocket.
Now if you want to go HTPC well there has never been a better time as tiger has been selling AMD kits crazy cheap on account of the impending socket change. You can get a fully loaded triple for like $220 bucks right now and the AMD IGP supports just about every time of codec you can name.
If you want even cheaper there are several kits at newegg based on the Brazos platform which gives you a dual core APU that has 2 bobcat cores and an AMD HD6320 GPU. The Brazos platform is great, in fact i liked it enough i sold my laptop for a EEE netbook and just love it. I've also built several HTPCs out of Brazos and its just a great little unit. If you want to go Linux its been supported OOTB since Ubuntu 10.04 so no worries, i'm pretty sure the XBMC Linux build supports it as well. And of course if you want to go Win 7 it has full support for DXVA and can even play some older games like L4D and Crysis with the graphics lowered.
So if all you are wanting is a video player just get a prebuilt like Nbox HD unless you want to build a pi based, or if you want a full fledged HTPC look at the Brazos followed by one of the Athlon kits, just depending on how much power and money you are willing to spend. Brazos is only 18w so its the lowest powered HTPC i know of but with a little underclocking and a good board with the ability to turn off phases you can get an Athlon down to sub 50w.
Wouldn't that cut out programmers that are unfamiliar with the language they used? I mean if I were an old BASIC and FORTRAN programmer and you gave me a Java question I doubt seriously any of my experience would apply. So how do you make the question generic enough that the average programmer can answer it without making it easy for a computer to answer?
Frankly though anything would have to be better than those damned twisted words, I've seen sites where i have had to hit refresh 2 dozen times to get a legible test as they used upper AND lower AND numbers and then twisted them so the whole thing looks like badly written Mandarin Chinese.
Wow you don't even have the capability of thought do you? How's the koolaid, is it cherry? I say i switched my users from one FOSS browser to ANOTHER FOSS BROWSER and suddenly I'm shilling for...what? the FBI? Those black helicopters that have been following you?
Frankly i hope Microsoft cuts you a check because its tards like you that make FOSS look like a bunch of loonies, get some help nutball.
Weird question: Do you surf porn? Does that HTTPS trick stop the Firefox porn bug? Because one of the reasons I switched my users away from FF was the FF porn bug. Don't ask me to give an in depth explanation as I'm not an HTML guy but from what i could pick up here is how it basically works: Dude looks at porn, porn page has script that opens a hidden iFrame and uses FF autocomplete to log into their Yahoo mail and then spam the address book. From my tests with a couple of fake yahoo accounts it ONLY seems to work on FF and on the new yahoo layout, no other combo like Chrome and Gmail, IE and Hotmail seems to work. If you want to see how many sites have that bug now put a master password on your password list and see how many times the master password dialog pops up, on several porn sites its pretty much pop up city. Since so many of the guys kept sending me "How come I'm spamming and i don't have a bug?" I switched them to Comodo Dragon as it works with low rights mode and doesn't have the bug.
As for TFA what does anyone expect? TINSTAAFL and with the economy in the shitter hotels are frankly doing lousy business and i'm sure those ads make their "free Wifi" truly free for the hotel, so surprise surprise they add the ads. would you rather have this, or have to pay for the Wifi, or have it like AT&T where every so many minutes you are stopped cold and forced to watch a commercial? Personally I'd choose door #1, but of course I've got ABP in Dragon so it don't affect me either way.
Damn and I thought I was old because my first three machines were an Altair, followed by a Trash 80 and a VIC.
You know what i think made as much if not more of an effect on modern computers? RAM. I remember when a Mb RAM chip would cost you more than a car, and I don't give a crap how powerful your CPU is if you are always waiting on some slow media, be it drum or tape or HDD, to feed the chip then its gonna be hamstringed by the slower media. Now even my $350 netbook has 8Gb of RAM simply because its so cheap, and the smallest computer used by the family on a daily basis is 4Gb.
Sure having multicores is nice (my kids just love the new AMD hexa and quad I built them because they never slow no matter how much crap they throw at them) but what good are they if you can't keep the chips fed? Between the huge memory on even low end systems and GP-GPUs allowing us to send certain tasks to the even more insanely fast RAM on the GPU I'd say the price of RAM really changed everything more than the chips did. After all we made leaps and bounds in the 80s but this wasn't nearly as obvious simply because it was hard for programs to take advantage when they were RAM starved. Now with plenty of RAM to buffer even my dinky little AMD netbook plays HD video and even lets me play some L4D or GTA:VC, simply because the RAM is there. Can you imagine trying to do even 1/10th of what we do now with 16Mb of RAM?
Pesticide is sprayed on corn, corn gets processed, pesticide gets into HFCS, HFCS with pesticide gets into bees....sounds pretty straightforward to me. Anybody whose done any farming knows no matter how powerful your cleaning methods are you will never gets a vegetable or fruit 100% clean which is why we didn't use pesticides on our small family plots, you can wash until hell freezes over but it gets down into the plant, no way around it.
I personally think all these GMOs and pesticides is probably why we have so many that are feeling generally "lousy" in these parts, it always seem to come around plating time when the stuff gets thick in the air. Not a decade ago we'd all practically roll around in pollen the stuff was so thick so that isn't it, and more and more people i know are having a harder and harder time tolerating foods they have always eaten like corn and tomatoes. I personally think they have tested all this crap by itself and not tested what happens when everybody is piled on with 40 other chemicals on top.
Am I the only one that HATES those stupid "R U a Human?" tests? I swear some of them have gotten so damned ridiculous on the word twisting i just write a nasty note to the contact with a JPG of some of their "tests" saying "You tell ME WTF this is supposed to be? is it a 7 or a T? O or 0? Your tests suck" and I've actually gotten a few responses along the lines of "Geez i hadn't tried it since we started using those and didn't know they were THAT bad".
Look I appreciate you want to keep the bots and crap off your sites, i really do, but this stuff is just getting nuts. There has GOT to be a better way than all these hoop jumps because frankly the spammers will just pay some schmuck in Asia a few cents a hundred to spend all damned day cracking your crap while your actual users get fed up and move on.
Yeah I remember that speech, it was more condensed by Nixon in his "if the President does it it isn't illegal" and was just as scummy. Isn't it sad we went from actually impeaching a president (or getting close enough he bailed at least) to two parties filled with cowards and shills that won't do anything but line their own pockets? anybody who has read some of the Wikileaks on the wars in the ME knows that in many ways we are making Nazis and the Red Army look like Care Bears, we just pass the REALLY nasty jobs to the mercs.
Thanks, i'll have to remember that "building a 747 in 1906" bit as that is just about the perfect description I've seen of the whole electric car mess. And how quickly everyone forgets this is our SECOND go round, they tried to push the same thing in the 90s and it failed then too. instead i get modded down for pointing out what should be common sense, that you can't force a tech that isn't ready, and sadly some even saw it as a "Bush VS Obama" debate as the poster below you which of course had nothing to do with anything, as its more about the government trying to force change that just isn't ready. We saw what happened with CAFE, the government tried to force small cars when they were boxy POSes and instead everyone bought SUVs which were bigger hogs than the stationwagons we had previously.
I saw a consumer advocate on "money matters" arguing with congress about this and was amazed at how much they didn't understand even the most basic tenants of the free market. he said "I pointed to study after study that showed the average consumer does NOT want a teeny tiny electric 2 seater, that they at least want something big enough they don't feel cramped and have the ability to haul their friends and family in, so what were their questions? "How can we make them take the two seater" well you can't, you are just throwing money away because people won't buy what doesn't work for them" and that was it in a nutshell, a bunch of bureaucratic clueless sitting in a committee deciding that this "green thing" makes for a good soundbite so they blow piles of money on something that nobody wants.
It doesn't take long to find out who makes the quality parts, especially if you eat your own dog food. For example do NOT buy ECS if you are ever wanting to upgrade the CPU, as only what is out at the time will be supported PERIOD. oh they'll update their lists but they won't update their BIOS/UEFI and without the update you'll find the chips won't run correctly. For fans ALWAYS use bearings, never sleeves as the sleeves wear out and get noisy as hell quickly, Also it doesn't hurt to have a couple of gamer customers that turn everything to 11, if a company's products survive them then they are pretty good.
For boards i use Asrock or Gigabyte, but you have to know that the secret of Asrock is that they usually have the defaults too OCed so drop them or at least know the specs of the parts you are using. RAM Kingston or Corsair, although I've found some of the better built (look for the heat spreader) RAM by Patriot is pretty good although it won't OC, I use AMD chips because I don't like the whole Intel OEM bribery bit although that will soon probably change as they don't have a product that can compete with Thuban (I've seen insane OCing with Thuban on air, whereas the BD line is just another P4 netburst mess) and for HDDs I preferred Samsung, especially their EcoDrives as those things would take INSANE amounts of abuse, we are talking construction trailers and warehouses, and keep going but now that its just SG and WD its really just a coin flip as they both have bad batches. Oh and for graphics I prefer ATI/AMD and usually go Sapphire or Gigabyte, both have great warranties and make great boards.
So there you go, a little luck, a LOT of dogfooding, and having some customers that can kill a Sherman tank with a toothbrush have helped me come up with what so far has been a pretty damned solid build.
So don't stare at them? I never understood this whole straight males being afraid of gays thing, I'm a straight male and when some guy would make a pass i'd just say 'Thanks for the compliment, don't play for that team" and walk on by. Is that REALLY so hard? i mean you don't see the women freaking the hell out if they see a lesbian couple do you?
Because sadly this selfish attitude shows that you are SMART and we are currently being wiped out by the STUPID breeding at numbers more than 8-1 last i checked. Did you know we have lowered the definition of retarded not once, but twice in the last 60 years? too many were falling under the definition.
Sadly what we are seeing is idiocracy was actually a prediction ala 1984 and its one that is becoming more true every day. Smart people have one kid if they have any while stupid have half a dozen or more. Hell my family is just as guilty, both my parents had over 140 IQ and they had 2 kids, my late sister had 2, I had none. meanwhile one only has to walk down the street in the average city to see we are ass deep in tarded.
It was a one off homebrew. Back then you could get a hell of a lot of chips straight from the manufacturers and guys would often cook up these 'one offs" mixing and matching all kinds of parts and then stuff them into Altair style cases. I don't think there was a COTS 16 bit PC until the mid 80s though.
man kids today don't know how easy they have it, why even the COTS computers of the day basically just gave you a cursor prompt and you were on your own, if you wanted it to actually do anything you had to write it yourself. I don't know how many hours I wasted on that trash 80 and VIC cooking up cool weird little programs ans saving them to datasettes.
Oh Lord, don't remind me, I used to have to clean up the crap. Man we have got it SO good now compared to the inboxes literally exploding with Viagra and porn spam. hell I use the gmail address tied to this UID as a spam dump and frankly...it almost never gets any spam, no matter how many places I leave it at. pretty amazing but then again the only spam I've seen in my yahoo in years has been the occasional one thanks to someone looking at porn videos with Firefox.
As for TFA, I wonder how many just moved to txt spam? because i must have been asked 2 dozen times this week about the "$1000 Walmart gift card" SMS spam that is going around, they must have sent that thing to every smart phone on the planet. What amazes me is that people that wouldn't fall for an email spam probably would have fallen for this one if I hadn't warned them off, i guess because txt spam is still too new for many.
And that is why the east is gonna slaughter the west in a nutshell. funny how history repeats itself huh? we in the USA ignored the old world copyrights and patents and stood on the shoulders of giants to make new products, now our corps are big and fat and would rather sue than innovate so somebody else comes along and does the exact same thing we did.
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And the simple fact is i'm sure we do the same thing duh! Universities are where one often begins to question the way things are for the first time. You are a young adult, in some ways grown and others not, and many cling to idealism before that lovely jaded cynicism that so many of us have seeps in. Remember its a lot harder to recruit someone who just blindly accepts things at face value, easier when they begin to question why things are the way they are. I do find it ironic that the same things that help someone grow as a person can be labeled as "potentially subversive" depending on which flag you are waving.
The elephant in the room nobody talks about is the energy return ratio, IIRC gas gets you around 30 EOI (I believe that is the correct term) for every unit of energy you expend. frankly we just don't have anything else that gives close to that ratio. all you are doing with the electrics is moving where the energy is made, and with a coal plant it wouldn't surprise me if its worse. then you have to figure in the impact of mining all that l-Ion, disposal of batteries, how long the batteries will last in real summers and winters VS garages (since most don't have garages), etc.
Personally I think a better direction if we truly anted to save energy is we need a true "people's car' that gets say 40MPG and sells for preferably under $10k. you could then offer a cash for clunkers style program to help the really poor get rid of all those gas hogs that are currently on the road, that would do MUCH more IMHO than some $40K+ hybrid that few will be likely to buy.
"Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's" Matthew 22:21. I still haven't figured how anyone twists that into "make my donations tax deductible!", probably the same way they twisted the eye of a needle to be some side door to make rich folks feel better about themselves.
But if every business pushes an agenda that is a lie, when does it officially become newspeak? Lets be honest folks...how many here think that the average white person, just minding their own business, would walk through say Harlem or Watts or any other major big city all black neighborhood unscathed? Now what if it were the other way? in most places the worst that would happen to the black man would be a cop asking him what he was doing which is a far cry from ending up beaten or dead. Can't blame it on poverty either because WV is the poorest state in the nation and also has one of the lowest crimes rates as well.
AG Holder has the balls to call us cowards for not talking about race, even after crap like this? Then lets talk about race and the real problems we are seeing in America. there is a good reason why places like Harlem were once considered jewels and are now hellholes, its because 50 years of welfare rewarding destructive behavior like having multiple children by multiple partners combined with a black culture that glorifies violence, drugs, weapons, and the treatment of women as nothing more than sperm receptacles and punching bags has destroyed the black community!
How sad that nobody can speak anything but PC Newspeak anymore, no matter how many facts and figures you can provide to back it up. How many know that the AP refuses to publish the race if the attacker is black and the victim white? How many here even heard about the white kid that was doused in gas and set on fire by black kids shouting "Kill whitey for Trayvon"? How sad is it that Klan has nothing on "thug life!" culture when it comes to killing black people?
Until more are willing to point out that the combination of "thug life!" culture and welfare teaching a complete lack of values is creating the very situations that the racists used to use as propaganda I expect we will see nothing more than PC newspeak while those same elites that publish their PC mags quietly go back to their all white gated communities with armed guards, ignoring the mass slaughters, rapes, and robberies happening thanks to the rise of the violent urban ghettos.
The problem isn't the targeted killing IMHO the problem is they should have been tried in absentia. We have the system to try people in absentia for JUST THIS REASON so that criminals can't simply jump borders to escape their crimes. Sadly the only one I saw who pointed this out, even going so far as to repeatedly tell both the left and right "You don't go shredding the constitution just to get a bad guy, I don't care how bad he is" was Glenn Beck. This was the only time i agreed with him but on this one topic he was 100% correct.
What we have here is now two administrations that refuse to follow the rule of law and frankly should be looked upon as criminal. we have had a set of procedures for dealing with just such cases for decades now and it is nothing but arrogance to ignore the law when it would have been trivial to give those like Anwar al-Awlaki their day in court whether they were here or not.
Anyone else remember the ads with The Shat? My first real PC (I had an Altair for a little while but with nothing but switches there wasn't much a kid could do with one of those) was a VIC and it gave birth to a lifetime love of computing which has been passed down to my boys, both of whom had PCs before they were in grade school. With the VIC there was just soo much to do! there were programs in every mag you could type in and run, tons of docs and specs that would let you PEEK and POKE and get really deep into the guts...as much as i love my AMD Hexacore there is simply no way i could ever learn the deep levels like i did with the VIC, there are just too many layers of abstraction between you and the bare metal now.
So goodbye Jack, you gave this guy a hell of a lot of fond memories from Commodore and Atari (he later bought Atari after Commodore and put out the Atari computers of the late 80s) and for many of us a lifetime of tech love was born from those fugly beige keyboards.I agree that old Jack should ALWAYS be mentioned right there besides Gates and Jobs as he was THE guy that made computers truly affordable to the masses. look up what the prices of the first gen Macs and the IBM 5150 were in the 80s in today's dollars and you'll see there was no way in hell the Average Joe was owning one. Hell I didn't even see my first Apple up close until going over to a rich guy's house in 89 and most of the SMBs were running Trash 80s and C64s until the clones made small business computing really affordable on x86 which i would argue is again because of Jack Tramiel starting the price wars. RIP computer man, the world wouldn't be what it is today without your contributions.
The Chromium base they are using is freely downloadable from their servers as per the GPL the ONLY changes that aren't available are the security connections which allow them to filter phishing and malware attacks which DUH! I do NOT want everybody and their dog to know how they are blocking the fucking bugs or the malware will just go around them!
So go compile something and STFU, you can compile the whole thing off their FTP server and there is less than 10% difference between Dragon and Chromium, or is Chromium not good enough either? damned FOSSies, just like Moonies in their religious crazies.
Actually its been real for quite a long time, they just used the classic "use it against a bad guy and the populace won't scream..until its too late" trick and it worked quite well. There are two men currently in prison for thoughtcrime, there are probably more but there are at least two that i know of. 1 is the guy that wrote the 'pro pedo" book, this book is nothing but his thoughts on the subject, no pictures, no "hey you should go out and rape kids" incitement, just his thoughts written down, now he's in prison...thoughtcrime. The other wrote down his fantasies of having sex with 14 year old girls on the advice of his therapist who wanted him to write down his fantasies in detail so they could break them down in therapy, now he is in prison too. again no pictures, no evidence that he actually did anything other than write his thoughts down...thoughtcrime.
It never ceases to amaze me how much of the populace will let any trully horrific law through or allow virtually any crushing of our civil liberties as long as you make sure the FIRST few targets are of a group they hate, be it communists, racists, terrorists, pedos, etc. So sad that so many years after "first they came for the communists" was written so many still don't understand that this is a classic tactic, use the power against someone that nobody will defend and then by the time they use it on you its been part of the system so long nobody balks.
We have seen the enemy...and it is us. Too many simply won't stand up if the target is someone they can't stand so that all of this horrible shit can seep into the system and eventually be used against us all. Once upon a time the NSA was mainly tasked with rooting out foreign spies which at the time was a real and credible threat...now they are used against us. nobody watched them, or kept them in check, or complained when their powers grew, so here we are.
Which is why we need a "use it or lose it" clause to copyrights and patents. Anybody who likes classic PCs games can tell you we are about to lose an entire generation of games, as more and more of the Win9X era games become unplayable. Its sad that I can play the DOS games all day long but more and more of the Win9X era games are becoming completely unplayable due to the fact they used hacks to get more performance and/or old DRM crap that no longer functions.
What we need is someone to do for Win9X what the DOSBox guys did for DOS, give us an emulator that can recreate what would be a perfect gaming PC of the time, something like a 1GHz P3 with a Geforce 4 or something similar. Kinda sad that so many games i enjoyed from that era are gone now, it doesn't matter how much CPU I have as even with a VM they just won't run correctly.
But I think you are wrong on the tech being fleeting, at least in x86. the whole reason why MSFT is about to throw Windows under a bus with win 8 to try to get into the ARM based phone market is the simple fact that PCs have become "good enough" for what the masses do with them and have been good enough for several years now. What is the point of replacing that Athlon X2 or Pentium D if all they do is FB, webmail, and watch YouTube? Frankly the only reason a lot of my customers upgraded at all was because XP is getting close to EOL and they decided they might as well have me build them a new one rather than just buy Win 7.
I'm guessing within 5 years, maybe less, we'll see the same thing happen with ARM, as the chips get 'good enough" for the masses and it makes less and less sense to upgrade. Hell I bet that many wouldn't be upgrading now if the networks didn't offer smartphones like free candy to get them to sign. Let the rare earth metals go up so the networks won't eat the costs anymore and i bet a lot of folks will just stay with what they have.
While i'm sure the chip manufacturers will keep coming out with new designs i rapidly see a day coming where the only time you replace is when the previous one dies. There just haven't been any "killer apps" that would force a consumer wide upgrade in quite awhile and considering how much toxic material these things end up putting in the landfills i have to say i'm looking forward to that day myself.
What amazes me is how long some of these chips have lasted. There are STILL variants on the Z80 in production and Intel only quit making the 386 in 2009. the z80s are used a lot in little MP3 players and I heard the 386 was popular for military applications as an embedded CPU. I don't think anybody still uses the MOS 6502 though.
It just goes to show that if a design is well made it can still find uses even after all these years. I wonder if in 30 years AMD will still have some division making Bobcats for embedded devices or Intel will have someone cranking out CULV Core2Duos for some industrial design.
Even better answer...don't. Seriously the power draw of anything he can cook up (unless he builds his own raspberry Pi based unit) will be nuts compared to the already built. I've had plenty of happy customers with the Nbox and Nbox HD, both are simple enough your average 6 year old can use them and its $25 for the Nbox and $60 for the Nbox HD. The only thing you need to know is use an external drive with its own PSU as the nbox doesn't put enough power over USB to drive laptop drives. But they are cheap, easy to use, VERY low power, and have both USB and SD slots which is great for when i want to take a movie over to watch with my dad as i can just slap it on an SD and drop it in my pocket.
Now if you want to go HTPC well there has never been a better time as tiger has been selling AMD kits crazy cheap on account of the impending socket change. You can get a fully loaded triple for like $220 bucks right now and the AMD IGP supports just about every time of codec you can name.
If you want even cheaper there are several kits at newegg based on the Brazos platform which gives you a dual core APU that has 2 bobcat cores and an AMD HD6320 GPU. The Brazos platform is great, in fact i liked it enough i sold my laptop for a EEE netbook and just love it. I've also built several HTPCs out of Brazos and its just a great little unit. If you want to go Linux its been supported OOTB since Ubuntu 10.04 so no worries, i'm pretty sure the XBMC Linux build supports it as well. And of course if you want to go Win 7 it has full support for DXVA and can even play some older games like L4D and Crysis with the graphics lowered.
So if all you are wanting is a video player just get a prebuilt like Nbox HD unless you want to build a pi based, or if you want a full fledged HTPC look at the Brazos followed by one of the Athlon kits, just depending on how much power and money you are willing to spend. Brazos is only 18w so its the lowest powered HTPC i know of but with a little underclocking and a good board with the ability to turn off phases you can get an Athlon down to sub 50w.
Wouldn't that cut out programmers that are unfamiliar with the language they used? I mean if I were an old BASIC and FORTRAN programmer and you gave me a Java question I doubt seriously any of my experience would apply. So how do you make the question generic enough that the average programmer can answer it without making it easy for a computer to answer?
Frankly though anything would have to be better than those damned twisted words, I've seen sites where i have had to hit refresh 2 dozen times to get a legible test as they used upper AND lower AND numbers and then twisted them so the whole thing looks like badly written Mandarin Chinese.
Wow you don't even have the capability of thought do you? How's the koolaid, is it cherry? I say i switched my users from one FOSS browser to ANOTHER FOSS BROWSER and suddenly I'm shilling for...what? the FBI? Those black helicopters that have been following you?
Frankly i hope Microsoft cuts you a check because its tards like you that make FOSS look like a bunch of loonies, get some help nutball.
Weird question: Do you surf porn? Does that HTTPS trick stop the Firefox porn bug? Because one of the reasons I switched my users away from FF was the FF porn bug. Don't ask me to give an in depth explanation as I'm not an HTML guy but from what i could pick up here is how it basically works: Dude looks at porn, porn page has script that opens a hidden iFrame and uses FF autocomplete to log into their Yahoo mail and then spam the address book. From my tests with a couple of fake yahoo accounts it ONLY seems to work on FF and on the new yahoo layout, no other combo like Chrome and Gmail, IE and Hotmail seems to work. If you want to see how many sites have that bug now put a master password on your password list and see how many times the master password dialog pops up, on several porn sites its pretty much pop up city. Since so many of the guys kept sending me "How come I'm spamming and i don't have a bug?" I switched them to Comodo Dragon as it works with low rights mode and doesn't have the bug.
As for TFA what does anyone expect? TINSTAAFL and with the economy in the shitter hotels are frankly doing lousy business and i'm sure those ads make their "free Wifi" truly free for the hotel, so surprise surprise they add the ads. would you rather have this, or have to pay for the Wifi, or have it like AT&T where every so many minutes you are stopped cold and forced to watch a commercial? Personally I'd choose door #1, but of course I've got ABP in Dragon so it don't affect me either way.
Damn and I thought I was old because my first three machines were an Altair, followed by a Trash 80 and a VIC.
You know what i think made as much if not more of an effect on modern computers? RAM. I remember when a Mb RAM chip would cost you more than a car, and I don't give a crap how powerful your CPU is if you are always waiting on some slow media, be it drum or tape or HDD, to feed the chip then its gonna be hamstringed by the slower media. Now even my $350 netbook has 8Gb of RAM simply because its so cheap, and the smallest computer used by the family on a daily basis is 4Gb.
Sure having multicores is nice (my kids just love the new AMD hexa and quad I built them because they never slow no matter how much crap they throw at them) but what good are they if you can't keep the chips fed? Between the huge memory on even low end systems and GP-GPUs allowing us to send certain tasks to the even more insanely fast RAM on the GPU I'd say the price of RAM really changed everything more than the chips did. After all we made leaps and bounds in the 80s but this wasn't nearly as obvious simply because it was hard for programs to take advantage when they were RAM starved. Now with plenty of RAM to buffer even my dinky little AMD netbook plays HD video and even lets me play some L4D or GTA:VC, simply because the RAM is there. Can you imagine trying to do even 1/10th of what we do now with 16Mb of RAM?
Pesticide is sprayed on corn, corn gets processed, pesticide gets into HFCS, HFCS with pesticide gets into bees....sounds pretty straightforward to me. Anybody whose done any farming knows no matter how powerful your cleaning methods are you will never gets a vegetable or fruit 100% clean which is why we didn't use pesticides on our small family plots, you can wash until hell freezes over but it gets down into the plant, no way around it.
I personally think all these GMOs and pesticides is probably why we have so many that are feeling generally "lousy" in these parts, it always seem to come around plating time when the stuff gets thick in the air. Not a decade ago we'd all practically roll around in pollen the stuff was so thick so that isn't it, and more and more people i know are having a harder and harder time tolerating foods they have always eaten like corn and tomatoes. I personally think they have tested all this crap by itself and not tested what happens when everybody is piled on with 40 other chemicals on top.
Am I the only one that HATES those stupid "R U a Human?" tests? I swear some of them have gotten so damned ridiculous on the word twisting i just write a nasty note to the contact with a JPG of some of their "tests" saying "You tell ME WTF this is supposed to be? is it a 7 or a T? O or 0? Your tests suck" and I've actually gotten a few responses along the lines of "Geez i hadn't tried it since we started using those and didn't know they were THAT bad".
Look I appreciate you want to keep the bots and crap off your sites, i really do, but this stuff is just getting nuts. There has GOT to be a better way than all these hoop jumps because frankly the spammers will just pay some schmuck in Asia a few cents a hundred to spend all damned day cracking your crap while your actual users get fed up and move on.
Yeah I remember that speech, it was more condensed by Nixon in his "if the President does it it isn't illegal" and was just as scummy. Isn't it sad we went from actually impeaching a president (or getting close enough he bailed at least) to two parties filled with cowards and shills that won't do anything but line their own pockets? anybody who has read some of the Wikileaks on the wars in the ME knows that in many ways we are making Nazis and the Red Army look like Care Bears, we just pass the REALLY nasty jobs to the mercs.
Thanks, i'll have to remember that "building a 747 in 1906" bit as that is just about the perfect description I've seen of the whole electric car mess. And how quickly everyone forgets this is our SECOND go round, they tried to push the same thing in the 90s and it failed then too. instead i get modded down for pointing out what should be common sense, that you can't force a tech that isn't ready, and sadly some even saw it as a "Bush VS Obama" debate as the poster below you which of course had nothing to do with anything, as its more about the government trying to force change that just isn't ready. We saw what happened with CAFE, the government tried to force small cars when they were boxy POSes and instead everyone bought SUVs which were bigger hogs than the stationwagons we had previously.
I saw a consumer advocate on "money matters" arguing with congress about this and was amazed at how much they didn't understand even the most basic tenants of the free market. he said "I pointed to study after study that showed the average consumer does NOT want a teeny tiny electric 2 seater, that they at least want something big enough they don't feel cramped and have the ability to haul their friends and family in, so what were their questions? "How can we make them take the two seater" well you can't, you are just throwing money away because people won't buy what doesn't work for them" and that was it in a nutshell, a bunch of bureaucratic clueless sitting in a committee deciding that this "green thing" makes for a good soundbite so they blow piles of money on something that nobody wants.
It doesn't take long to find out who makes the quality parts, especially if you eat your own dog food. For example do NOT buy ECS if you are ever wanting to upgrade the CPU, as only what is out at the time will be supported PERIOD. oh they'll update their lists but they won't update their BIOS/UEFI and without the update you'll find the chips won't run correctly. For fans ALWAYS use bearings, never sleeves as the sleeves wear out and get noisy as hell quickly, Also it doesn't hurt to have a couple of gamer customers that turn everything to 11, if a company's products survive them then they are pretty good.
For boards i use Asrock or Gigabyte, but you have to know that the secret of Asrock is that they usually have the defaults too OCed so drop them or at least know the specs of the parts you are using. RAM Kingston or Corsair, although I've found some of the better built (look for the heat spreader) RAM by Patriot is pretty good although it won't OC, I use AMD chips because I don't like the whole Intel OEM bribery bit although that will soon probably change as they don't have a product that can compete with Thuban (I've seen insane OCing with Thuban on air, whereas the BD line is just another P4 netburst mess) and for HDDs I preferred Samsung, especially their EcoDrives as those things would take INSANE amounts of abuse, we are talking construction trailers and warehouses, and keep going but now that its just SG and WD its really just a coin flip as they both have bad batches. Oh and for graphics I prefer ATI/AMD and usually go Sapphire or Gigabyte, both have great warranties and make great boards.
So there you go, a little luck, a LOT of dogfooding, and having some customers that can kill a Sherman tank with a toothbrush have helped me come up with what so far has been a pretty damned solid build.
So don't stare at them? I never understood this whole straight males being afraid of gays thing, I'm a straight male and when some guy would make a pass i'd just say 'Thanks for the compliment, don't play for that team" and walk on by. Is that REALLY so hard? i mean you don't see the women freaking the hell out if they see a lesbian couple do you?
Because sadly this selfish attitude shows that you are SMART and we are currently being wiped out by the STUPID breeding at numbers more than 8-1 last i checked. Did you know we have lowered the definition of retarded not once, but twice in the last 60 years? too many were falling under the definition.
Sadly what we are seeing is idiocracy was actually a prediction ala 1984 and its one that is becoming more true every day. Smart people have one kid if they have any while stupid have half a dozen or more. Hell my family is just as guilty, both my parents had over 140 IQ and they had 2 kids, my late sister had 2, I had none. meanwhile one only has to walk down the street in the average city to see we are ass deep in tarded.
It was a one off homebrew. Back then you could get a hell of a lot of chips straight from the manufacturers and guys would often cook up these 'one offs" mixing and matching all kinds of parts and then stuff them into Altair style cases. I don't think there was a COTS 16 bit PC until the mid 80s though.
man kids today don't know how easy they have it, why even the COTS computers of the day basically just gave you a cursor prompt and you were on your own, if you wanted it to actually do anything you had to write it yourself. I don't know how many hours I wasted on that trash 80 and VIC cooking up cool weird little programs ans saving them to datasettes.
Oh Lord, don't remind me, I used to have to clean up the crap. Man we have got it SO good now compared to the inboxes literally exploding with Viagra and porn spam. hell I use the gmail address tied to this UID as a spam dump and frankly...it almost never gets any spam, no matter how many places I leave it at. pretty amazing but then again the only spam I've seen in my yahoo in years has been the occasional one thanks to someone looking at porn videos with Firefox.
As for TFA, I wonder how many just moved to txt spam? because i must have been asked 2 dozen times this week about the "$1000 Walmart gift card" SMS spam that is going around, they must have sent that thing to every smart phone on the planet. What amazes me is that people that wouldn't fall for an email spam probably would have fallen for this one if I hadn't warned them off, i guess because txt spam is still too new for many.
And that is why the east is gonna slaughter the west in a nutshell. funny how history repeats itself huh? we in the USA ignored the old world copyrights and patents and stood on the shoulders of giants to make new products, now our corps are big and fat and would rather sue than innovate so somebody else comes along and does the exact same thing we did.