Yeah you THINK its funny, but we are about to get a ring side seat for the biggest trainwreck since....hell i can't even think of a trainwreck that big. Its gonna finally put those MS Bob and WinME jokes to rest, let me put it that way. I mean have you TRIED metro? Its a fricking smart phone UI that MSFT expects users to run on a fricking non touch enabled desktop! Even the Yahoo product shill who answers everything with "Buy it now! you should really buy it! Seriously buy it now!" after trying it said 'Uhhhh...you should probably wait until you have something touch enabled and get it then" which for her is "My eyes! the goggles they do nothing!" and all because every single mobile attempt by MSFT has been a disaster. I mean for the love of God they are gonna have Windows 8 on ARM! You are gonna have a version of Windows that won't actually run Windows programs! Do you have ANY idea how massive the returns on all those "Windows tablets" is gonna be?
I think this just proves what I've been saying for ages, Ballmer is a shitty CEO that has zero common sense, much less vision, and that the mobile division should have been spun off so they wouldn't be held back by the lumbering PHB dominated desktop division as it would have protected them both from that dreaded buzzword "synergy". I mean his whole damned plan hinges on developers being so damned stupid they'll waste their time developing Metro apps just so they'll have something to sell on the WinARM app store! When we all know that for anything more complex than a fart app you're gonna have to write two versions, one for x86 and one for ARM as those two platforms are as different as night and day when it comes to IPC and memory constraints. And all so Ballmer can go "and with this we'll FINALLY get a big chunk of the pie now owned by Apple and Google and we'll be as sexy and hip as they are! yes we will! We really really will! STOP LAUGHING AT ME!"
Allow me to end with this heartfelt apology to the Appleites: Remember when we all laughed our asses off when you were stuck with the Pepsi CEO, you know, the one that went from one lame idea to another, with just this big sprawling mess of fail? yeah well..I'm sorry alright? Jokes over, ha ha...its not funny anymore! Hey fairs fair, you got Jobs back, can we have Bill back please? The sweaty monkey has gone crazy!
Well if Mint is actually spending money to try to offer a better product then i humbly apologize, its not CntOS which is just stripping out the copyrighted material in a product they USED to pay for and handing it out to their customers. That doesn't change the fact that for all the community's big talk of "Support us and we'll support you!" that CentOS is now on 2/3rds of the servers out there, just proving that communism is a giant failwhale and that greed wins out in the end. Because there is NO company that gives more back than RH, yet the very same community they give to then rip them as much as they possibly can. and look at Canonical? how many millions did Shuttleworth sink into trying to give a Linux that worked for the masses? in the end they'll have to close their doors and join the ranks of Xandros, linspire, gOS, novell, in the "We were never able to make a penny" group.
In the end I think it comes down to a complete failure of ideology, in that its been proven time and time again communism doesn't work and that's what RMS wants with the GPL, a communist utopia. the ONLY reason that Linux works in servers is because MSFT has a truly byzantine licensing schema and truly insane prices for server OSes which makes it easy for a company like Red hat to sell their product because when you have a thousand servers its cheaper to pay for Red hat support than it is to pay for MSFT licenses. But this is also why it will NEVER work on the desktop, because the desktop suffers from what I call the "busted shitters" problem which is also a problem the communists had, going so far as to have to order soldiers on 'potato duty" to get the lousy jobs done.
You see in servers a company has a problem, problem costs company money, so they pay to fix the problem. in desktops because anybody can copy what you've done there simply isn't any money to be made fixing problems as Canonical is finding out and when you rely on volunteers the busted shitters simply don't get done. its simply human nature, everyone wants to be the artist, nobody wants to be the guy that cleans and fixes the busted shitter. Now there are some seriously busted shitters in Linux on the desktop that anybody but a zealot would be willing to admit is true, just a few off the top of my head are the lousy driver model that practically guarantees multiple broken drivers each release cycle, lousy QA and regression testing, incomplete docs that are either practically worthless lists of CLI use flags or worse a "to be done' placeholder, lack of consistency of UI, these are all SERIOUS problems, yet they never get fixed, why? Because they are ALL busted shitters. They will require months or even years of long, boring, dull, thankless, truly shitty work to be done. Now again its simply human nature that if i'm donating my time I'm gonna want to do something i enjoy, and we humans are creative creatures which is why you'll see new release after new release of software with frankly show stopping bugs. Making something new is exciting, fixing bugs is not.
In the end without a complete rewrite of the GPL (which RMS will die before allowing) so that a company can actually charge money for doing these thankless jobs they just don't get done and THAT is why Linux is frankly going nowhere on desktops. even the best estimate in favor of Linux I could find has Linux at 4.9% and that is skewed by being strictly the most geeker heavy sites on the web. think about that for a moment, 20 years, countless man hours, and Linux is BARELY beating Vista which was the most reviled and hated MSFT OS since WinME. If that isn't proof the current model simply doesn't work i don't know what does. With each release both Windows and OSX gets better and if anything I'd argue that Linux is backsliding. Linux USED to laugh about how Windows had to install clean, while ignoring the fact that Windows has such a long tail when it comes to support that most will outgrow their hardware before they need to upgrade, but they
Dude at least you got something playable. have you TRIED any of the big name shooters out lately? hell you could spend your life making Mr Plinkett style videos just dissecting all the wrongness that is modern FPSes. When i heard about a new far Cry I was all "Sweet! More hunting smart enemies in the jungle!" and then i played it and was...ohhh. looks beautiful and is about as fun as a trip to the DMV. hell that is pretty much a description of FPS games for the last 5 years unless all you give a shit about is running as fast as you can and teabagging, in which case 'Call of Warfare: Gears of Killzone now with more game breaking DLC' would be up your alley. they LOOK truly great, but its just the SSDD, same weapons, same shitty AI, same lousy cookie cutter level design, how you can take hunting a smart predator like man and make it into as boring as filling out your taxes i'll never know but they do it time and time again.
Personally i blame assholes like Epic pushing the bling bling engines making everything into a bling fest. its gotten to the point the graphics are now a crutch. Its like "Hey we don't have any good ideas, our level design sucks, and the alpha testers say they'd rather play minesweeper than our game, what should we do?" and instead of someone saying "Come up with good ideas, a better story, more rewarding level design, etc' they say "LENS FLARES! That's the ticket! Oh and bloom! Don't forget stupid physics puzzles! Gotta have those because Valve throws a 2 minute physics puzzle into every HL so we gotta have one too! oh oh oh and bullet decals! We am so smart!" and what you end up with is yet another 'Call of Warfare: Gears of Killzone' or even worse a Kane and Lynch II.
So be happy friend, even in your dumbest games RPGs usually are at least NOT BORING, whereas my beloved shooters have been so bad of late I just have to keep going back to the classics. And don't even mention space sims where there hasn't been anything really epic since Freelancer IMHO. But I play these new games and they just scream "We didn't have an original thought so here's the latest unreal engine tricks!". Kinda sad when I can fire up a game like No One Lives Forever I or II or Bioshock and have more fun per minute than a half a dozen of the new cookie cutter games put together.
Thank you for living proof that FOSSies are batshit. you still think that I'm a guy that I can't even get along with and to this very day we don't agree on anything OTHER than the fact you're batshit? delusional much? but if its a pimp slapping of your craptastic OS you want, enjoy! See that's the nice thing about reality, while all you have is insults I have facts! Where are YOUR facts? oh right, they don't exist:-(
Get ready, heretheycome! Kinda makes that koolaid just a little bitter now, don't it? I believe in using the best tool for the job, but to say Linux is secure or better than any other complex OS is frankly bullshit. Hell I was talking to a 15 year Linux admin on one of the other sites that had gotten so sick of Linux fuckups they were going to BSD and if THAT didn't "just work" they were gonna wash their hands of FLOSS on the desktop and just go Mac.
BTW if you'd like a little more food for thought, what OS was 3 of the 4 CAs running that were compromised? takea lookand see. Maybe they just had configs? Surely someone with knowledge would be safe right? Guess again and its not a flukeby any means.
Would you like some more reality? well here it comes! Isn't it sad, how like a frightened child afraid to look under the bed, you cower at the truth? if your driver model isn't shit then why does Dell have to run their own repos even though we are talking a teeny tiny subset of hardware? Oh right because Linux shits itself and dies if you use the default repos! Man that is some excellent product you got there! you think I can get better QA than the third largest OEM on the planet? What, you expect me to tell paying customers "Go to the forum, kiss some loser ass, and maybe, just maybe, in a few days someone will have mercy and give you a big pile of bullshit that may or may not make your sound work again"?
Uhhh...if Microsoft says "We don't actually sell a license that allows what they are doing" then what else is there really to say? i mean i can buy a VLK of Windows but that doesn't give me the right to set up a "free Windows for everyone LOL!" website and pass that VLK key to anybody and everybody. Every single license, yes even GPL, has rules and limitations and if the guys whose license it is says "You can't do that" well then most likely you can't.
If you are using other people's computers (which it certainly didn't sound like when you first posted which sounds like you are just looking for excuses now) then I'd suggest one of the bazillion free file managers that can be run completely from USB. There are several but Xplorer II Lite sounds like it would be right up your alley, it uses a classic two pane that has been around since the days of Norton commander.
Again there is absolutely NO REASON to "put up" with anything in windows, as it literally takes seconds to change and is much faster and more consistent to change than any *NIX. So the only excuse you have is 1.-you are lazy or 2.-You are just looking for something to complain about . i have a feeling its the latter myself.
Learn how to read FOSSie, its as far as the user is concerned there is no command line in Windows. You just sound like a moron when you can't even quote correctly. Just because you can't imagine in your perception bubble an OS that doesn't have to lean on CLI as a crutch doesn't mean everyone else has to live in such a backward ass world. Go write some Long PHP Codes and let the grownups talk, kay?
As for TFA how many companies are ALREADY going broke because of the graphics requirements of a single game? How many companies have we seen go under because all it takes is ONE flop with a 100 million dollar plus cost to torpedo a company?
And lets be honest folks, how many games have you played that this sentence is applicable "The graphics were great but the game sucked". Hell I'd be happy to play games that are at far Cry I level or even No One Live Forever II level of graphics if it has an engaging story, characters we can root for, good weapons that are nicely balanced, imaginative level design, hell give us SOMETHING besides just bling bling graphics. give us something fresh or a new take on an old idea and we'll be happy to put up with less impressive graphics, hell look at Terraria or Minecraft, both of those are wicked fun. the graphics in the Portal series aren't very impressive but the humor is damned funny and the puzzles fun. here is a game I keep coming back to everyone should try...Just Cause II. Does it have the most impressive visuals? no although it is pretty to look at, but what makes it fun is the completely bullshit reality thanks to the grappler. Rico handles like a cross between Spiderman and a totally batshit insane person, grappling onto helicopters flying by and chunking the guy driving it out before using it for a strafing run and leaping out 3 seconds before it blows to hijack a car and lead the cops on a 40 car chase, just completely nuts.
In the end the designers like this guy (when was the last time Epic made a truly memorable game? Hell they are known for their engines more than anything so I can see this guy wanting to push new tech as it sells new engines) seem to forget that ultimately its a GAME and games are supposed to be FUN with a capital F. Think a minute about the games you TRULY love, the ones you go back to, do you go back to them for the graphics? or is it something else, like great gameplay or a good story? Deus Ex, System Shock, Bioshock, No One Lives Forever I&II, Soldier Of Fortune I&II, Freelancer, these are the games that I keep permanently on my HDD and none of these were the most impressive games when they came out but they are FUN and THAT is what matters.
Oh and Indy game designers? Current FPS games SUCK HARD, so there are plenty of us who'd be happy to buy your games, even if they were at No One Lives Forever II graphical quality, if you'd give us something more fun that Call of Warfare:Gears of Killzone Edition, now with extra expensive DLC. Give us more than the halo dual guns bullshit, quit copying the same weapons over and over (kitty bomb anyone?) and jamming us into linear corridors. hell games like Duke Nukem 3D and Redneck rampage gave us more interesting levels to explore than the new games! There are plenty of us who'd buy your product, and plenty of places like Steam and GOG that you can sell it on. C'mon indy guys, there are plenty of us who miss the golden age of shooters when there was always something new and different to try, weird weapons or stealth or crazy mechanics or something.
Uhhh...what's hard? Win 7 updates itself, both Comodo and Avast (I was using Avast but lately I've gone back to Comodo as i like its tougher sandboxing) have silent installers, frankly the entire system takes less than 15 minutes of actual time to install. And once installed its pretty much walk away as everything is automated, no need for input from the user at all. Frankly its one of the easiest systems ever and certainly easier than constantly doing forum hunts when Linux craps on its own drivers during the 6 month upgrade deathmarch.
I've had machines in the field running this system since Win 7 RTM in the hands of users that usually pick up more bugs than a Bangkok whore and so far they haven't been able to infect their machines so i'd say its probably the best 15 minutes I've ever spent hardening a machine. Some shops believe you should do the absolute minimum, let the users easily infect their machines multiple times for the repeat business but I've found word of mouth and referrals makes up for the lack of repeat business and more than that I can sleep well at night knowing I've done the most I can to ensure that the customer's PC stays clean and running well and knock on wood so far a 98% success rate, and you can't really count the one failure as the guy refused to listen to me and promptly uninstalled his AV when it wouldn't let him have "the new limewire" which of course was just a giant trojan package that dropped over 60 pieces of malware on his system. Some times you just can't stop stupid.
"But, having given it out as GPL, they now get access to a million geeks who will do free support and bugfixing on the code."
BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA!...oh wait, you were serious? BWA HA HA HA HA HA owww, my sides...ohh thanks, that's the hardest I've laughed in ages! Because Linux is known for having rock solid drivers that never break, snort, snicker guffaw! lets face it friend, your driver model is shit. its always been shit, and as long as Linus Torvalds has a pulse it will always BE shit, why? Because he likes it that way and because he knows that SEVER companies, which is where he makes his money, will jump through his hoops so he don't have to give a crap. this is ignoring the fact that every. other. major. OS on the ENTIRE planet has a driver ABI, BSD, Solaris, OSX, Windows, hell even OS/2. Is Linus THAT arrogant, that he thinks he's smarter than EVERY OS designer on the planet? yep. Eeeeegggoo come and it won't go away. Mark my words 3 weeks after Torvalds drops dead there WILL be an ABI and it'll be hailed as the second coming, Well unless the replacement for Linus is a follower of the great smelly one in which case they will continue with the already disproved RELIGIOUS argument against ABIs (the ONLY one I've seen provided BTW, kinda funny that an OS would have a religious movement whose job it is to maintain "purity") which is of course "ZOMFG they might provide a...gasp, shock horror...binary blob ZOMFG!" which of course ignores that the number one GPU for Linux and the most used driver in Linux is Nvidia drivers which are....survey says....binary blobs!
You want to know why hardware manufacturers ignore you THIS is why. With just FOUR count 'em FOUR drivers you can support Windows for more than 20 years, no more work required, you just need a 2K/XP/2K3 32 bit, XP X64/2k3 X64, WinVista/7/8 32bit,WinVista/7/8 64bit, and tada! you've just covered EVERY use case for your product on Windows, even the non popular and server editions. With Linux you either pay a team of driver developers to constantly update the things when Torvalds breaks them yet again, or you leave your company to the not so tender mercy of some "hacker dude" you have ZERO control over who may or may not make a decent driver out of what you give him. See AMD hiring driver guys to help the Open Source guys for an example of how that can cost you money for zero gain.
So waste your mod points, crawl back into your perception bubbles going "La la la, everything is beautiful, la la la!" but the honest ones will know I'm right. Linux has suffered from the "busted shitter" problem for years and frankly it isn't getting any better in that regard. what are the busted shitters? its the REALLY hard, thankless, shitty, long hours,crappy jobs that never get done because nobody is willing to waste years of their lives on them for free. trying to have a really functional driver model WITHOUT having ABIs is one of those busted shitter problems which is why others like BSD and Solaris adopted ABIs. But there are many busted shitters in Linux, the lousy documentation, lack of QA and regression testing, upgrades breaking bog standard hardware because of lack of oversight, hell remember when Linux USED to laugh about Windows having to install clean to upgrade? Don't laugh about that now that all the distros tell you to do the same thing huh? that's the busted shitter problem in a nutshell.
IMHO the sad part is things didn't have to be this way, the community could accept the busted shitter problem and work to route around the damage. tell Torvalds it ain't 1993 anymore and to either come up with a way to magically fix the driver issues or STFU and give you an ABI, take up collections to offer bounties for really nasty busted shitters like upgrades breaking bog standard hardware or lack of docs, but instead its a giant perception bubblepaloza, where everyone trips over themselves to talk about how "leet" they are and just can't seem to understand why after 20 years Linux is still lower than the margin for error on the desktop. I mean you
Well I have one of their canvas 2.5 portable drives (I swapped a 200Gb 3.5 and enclosure even steven for a 320gb since the guy went and bought it for his media tank not realizing those little media boxes don't put out enough power on their USB port to drive a laptop drive) and i have to say its a great little drive, doesn't get hot no matter how much i use it, whisper quiet, if they can bring those qualities to the 3.5 inchers I'll be happy to give them all my business. I'll still miss the Samsung ecodrives though, fast, quiet, and only 85f under load, what's not to like?
Well you didn't hear this from me but you CAN run Win 7 on a P4, in fact I've run it on as low as a Sempron 1.8GHz with 1.5Gb of RAM. What you'll want is a copy of "Windows 7 Tiny Edition" which is a hacked gamer edition that has incredibly low system requirements. Slap any Win 7 compatible AGP card (The Geforce 7 series is plentiful and cheap, as is the Radeon HD24xx cards) and you have a pretty decent little Win 7 box. the only thing you really need to change is to set up a normal limited user (since its a gamer version it defaults to admin like XP) but other than that its really sweet. why MSFT doesn't hire the tiny guy I'll never know as frankly he kicks both the embedded and WinFLP editions right in the ass while having better app compatibility than either of those.
BTW just out of curiosity...why are you still on Pentium 4? you can pick up a bottom of the line E350 board for less than $80, slap a $20 RAM stick and you have a system that'll run rings around any Pentium 4 while only sucking 16w under load. Unless you are getting your electricity for free the switch will pay for itself quite quickly and the built in HD6310 GPU is great for video and can even do some gaming. I've built several office machines with them and even sold my full size laptop for an E350 netbook, it really is a sweet chip and you can't beat a dual core with 4gb of RAM for less than $100. There is even OOTB support in Linux from Ubuntu or mint from version 10.04 and up. give it a try, i bet you'll like it.
Normally I don't respond to ACs but i just thought I'd point out an error, as while the Geforce did abandon AGP at the 7 series (not 6 as i actually have a 7600GS AGP in the closet) the Radeon cards went on MUCH longer, finally ended with the HD 3xxx series. the largest AGP card you can buy is I believe the HD3650 AGP, which isn't easy to find but the HD2xxx cards are quite plentiful. There are also Win98 drivers out there for both cards so both can make great classic gaming boxes. I actually have a Radeon X1950 along with a P4 3.6Ghz with HT and an old Intel board one these days i'll turn into a Win9x box as sadly that is one thing you ARE correct on, some of those games are so tied to Win9x you'll never get them to run anywhere else. Peace.
Hell you may have luck, a few chips such as the Pentium Ds and early Core chips don't seem to have the trouble playing them. This is why I think to have patents and copyrights on software you should be required to put the source code in escrow and then if the company refuses to support their customers with patches to allow the games to play the code should be released as we are losing a LOT of Win9x era games to the ravages of time, software too. There was just so many hacks and tricks they could do then because you could basically shove Win9X out of the way and access the hardware directly that trying to get these games running now is an exercise in futility.
While we have DOSBox for the DOS games nothing seems to be able to fill that role for Win9X era games and even heavily modified version (like the GOG i76 release which I have) sadly can only do so much without the source code. I had hoped when I saw how well they had Redneck Rampage running (runs beautifully on Win 7 X64 BTW, and a real hoot, you should give it and Blood a spin if you haven't because they are both a blast and run great!) that they could pull off a similar miracle with i76 but it was not to be. you might have luck with MW3 since i haven't tried it since i couldn't get it to run even on XP (the infamous bouncing bug) but I wouldn't get my hopes up.
But while others may bitch about Windows backwards compatibility frankly i love it and believe its one of Windows great strengths because i'm constantly amazed by how many games WILL run without hoop jumping, such as a couple of my favorite guilty pleasures No One Lives Forever I&II and Soldier Of Fortune I&II which run beautifully, along with my old Medal Of Honor games like Allied and Breakthrough, even the older cheese fests like Postal II, Judge Dread, and Rogue Trooper. all run happily even though when they came out there was no such thing as 64 bit X86 and machines with 6 cores and 8Gb of RAM (not to mention a half a Gb on the card) would have been a supercomputer. So give them a try friend, worse that will happen is they won't go but other than those two most of my old games have run without a hitch.
Uhhh...you DO know that pretty much anything and everything is infinitely tweakable on Windows, yes? it has this thing called a "registry" that makes passing tweaks between folks beyond simple and easy, and there are even several tools called...get this..."tweakers" that are designed to do just that, tweak Windows!
Now the one you'll want to try is called "Ultimate Windows Tweaker" as that's pretty much what it is, a HUGE collection of tweaks so if any of the defaults don't butter your bread? just tweak them. although you DO know you can just right click anywhere in the breadcrumb and get the EXACT path copied as text, yes? its just THAT simple. I use it all the time to tell clients whom I don't have the time (or they don't have a decent connection) where to find something. Otherwise i just remote in which is like a Godsend let me tell you! With Remote Assistance and EasyConnect any of my customers can call or pop up a chat window and say "Help me!" and BAM! There I am, i can walk a grandma through giving me full control in less than 5 minutes flat. they are more than happy to pay my $35 fee for having a magical "Tech in a box" that can do anything from set up their new printer to decrapify that new netbook their BF got them as a gift and set up Homegroup so they can share and print everywhere.
So if you don't like it? Then change it! I guarantee you that anything that could possibly bug you has already been run into by someone else and they have a tweak that changes it, easy peasy. Even Linux isn't as easy to tweak as Windows simply because what works on Ubuntu may not work on say PC Linux OS whereas most Windows tweaks can be done by anybody with that version, hell many work across multiple versions like the weird occasional "no sound device" bug you come across with certain funky chipsets that I can fix in seconds with a simple reg file that works on any NT based Windows from 2K to Win 7 X64. Hell if you don't like the GUI you can even rip out the DE for AstonShell (not free but worth the $30) that'll give you tons of choices in shells, you can even have it like a MAc or KDE if that's what melts your butter! So if breadcrumbs ain't your thing just change it friend, 30 seconds in Google and you'll never have to mess with that anymore.
I'll get hate from the keepers of the perception bubbles but I've long past giving a fuck so here goes...why the fuck should ANY company give you anything? AMD did, they did EXACTLY what you asked for TO THE LETTER. What were your words? what did you tell everyone? "Why if you'll just give us the specs we'll not only support you but we'll help make the drivers better, its a win/win!" so what did AMD do? not only did they give you every spec they are legally allowed to (they of course can't give the parts of HDMI protected path as they don't own that) but they actually bent over backwards for the community, not only rushing the specs out as quick as they could but actually hiring devs to help the open source driver developers! And what did they get for their trouble? Did they get the support of the community? Nope you see every Linux forum filled with "LOL buy Nvidia" which is a company that not only don't give you shit but drops supports for cards quicker than anybody!
So the simple fact is frankly no company should bother to support Linux unless they are gonna obviously get something out of it up front because your words and your actions are diametrically opposed to one another. you say "We support the companies that support us!" yet more than 2/3rds of the web servers out there are running CentOS, which is a "leecher" OS made by a hardware company that USED to buy RHEL for their products and then decided they'd just rather not pay, oh and before anyone brings up Red hat not saying anything, what do you expect them to say? "Hey douchebags quit ripping us off, we're trying to HELP you"? With the self entitled nature of the community they be blackballed and boycotted before they had even lifted their fingers from the send key! And then there is of course AMD which is a great example to all those companies sitting on the fence NOT to support you, as not only didn't their sales improve any but you now have the BSD guy posting "Hey we've found bugs!" which i'm sure is gonna help their sales a lot.
So frankly you shouldn't say shit when Nvidia or any other company gives you the short end of the stick, because when companies DO listen and do as you ask they find all their hard work is for naught. Hell look at how much money Canonical has burned through trying to give you a hassle free desktop only to get "LOL use mint" which is just like CentOS, another leecher. What do you think happens to mint when Canonical goes under and they can't leech anymore? It becomes another "Bob's distro" and falls even further behind the competition. What's sad is the IDEA of FOSS was a good one, everyone working together to make nice things that everyone can use. The sad reality is just another example that without real leadership you end up with a bunch of douchebaggery and everyone doing their own thing and nobody caring about anyone but themselves and their own little chiefdom.
Can someone please explain which OS it was running, which version, any AV, you know, more details than a fricking tweet? I know we don't generally actually READ TFA but hell this might as well have been "Chrome got pwned by a man doing a thing" for all the lack of details!
Now as for Chrome getting hacked well anything CAN be hacked if you have enough of a reason to go after it and i think Google made themselves a nice juicy target on purpose to get the data before any blackhats so kudos to them and the hackers. i know anecdotes aren't data but at least for myself and my customers and family the combo of Comodo Dragon (Chromium based) with either Avast Free or Comodo IS and Win 7 has been pretty much hack AND idiot proof, no small task. Just for shits and giggles i tried to infect a machine I was gonna wipe anyway, threw it at every topsite and crapsite and junksite I could find and...nothing, nada zip zilch. of course that wasn't just Chromium protecting it it also had Win 7 and low rights mode with DEP and ASLR, it had Comodo SecureDNS filtering known malware dumps, it had the sandboxing that is built into Avast and Comodo IS (tried both to make sure and they seem about equal on everything from protection to RAM usage so its more a taste thing or if you need to protect a business as Comodo is free for business use) and finally ABP blocked many of the ads that are the biggest source of malware, at least from what I've seen.
So a little more info would be nice, I'd like to know if there is something I need to tweak in my system or not.
Oh Lord, please don't say that name! Poor Jim is still rocking himself in the corner going "It just won't uninstall! Why won't it uninstall? It just won't go away" after the last wave of Norton infected laptops came through and we have finally got his mumbling quieted down, please don't give Jim a flashback!
As for TFA this is why I recommend the combo of Win 7 with either Avast or Comodo IS along with Comodo Dragon with ABP. Windows 7 has DEP and ASLR along with UAC and Comodo Dragon is able to take advantage of the low rights mode for browsers built in, ABP blocks the ads that are the source of many an infection, Avast and Comodo IS have built in sandboxing which adds another layer of protection but while Avast has a simpler UI for home users Comodo IS is free for business AND home so its really a preference thing.
With this combo I took an offlease i was planning to wipe anyway and tried my damnedest to infect the thing. I went to every crapsite and topsite and "punch the monkey to win an iPod" and scammer haven i could find and afterwards ran a half a dozen offline scans, nothing. Zip zero zilch nada. Most of the nasty sites were blocked by the Comodo SecureDNS option in Dragon and when I turned that off both Avast and Comodo IS blocked the sites from loading the malware so I'd say that is a resounding success. i know i have customers (as well as family, ugh) that can pick up bugs like a Bangkok Whore on a Saturday night yet since switching them over to this combo they have been completely bug free, and with them that's saying a lot.
What's wrong with Win 7? While I can't stand Metro, thought Vista was too damned buggy, and hated the Fisher Price UI of WinXP I'd have to say I find Win 7 to be VERY nice, right up there with my beloved XP X64 and Win2K. How we lived without breadcrumbs and jumplists is beyond me, going back to any previous version now feels like going back to Win9x as losing those features really sucks.
Speaking of Win9X are they still working on a Windows version? I heard rumors a couple of years back and the one thing I miss about XP was its great Win9X support for old games. How good is Wine on its DirectX 6/7/8 support? Can it run the more PITA games like Mechwarrior 3 and i76? I really miss those games but I always end up with the "jumping bug" on MW3 and i76 has some serious timing issues if you aren't running a single core or running below 2GHz. Has anyone cooked up a "Wine in a box" LiveCD for gaming so one doesn't have to install a whole OS just to run it? How good is its hardware acceleration? I haven't had a chance to run it since I sold my dual boot XP/Xandros laptop in 09 so I'm a little behind here. Is its support for the older stuff better than XP?
But it IS a tradeoff Blanche, it is. You see most folks are embracing the wonder that is "The Internet" and all the TV movies and other entertainment that this wonderful medium has to offer and Intel GPUs...well they suck REALLY hard.
But here is the dirty little secret AMD knows that Intel doesn't want you to hear, going so far as to shoot their Atom division in the face by killing off the Nvidia chipset business and hobbling Atom with insanely shitty rules like "Only 10 inches with crappy resolution" and "Only 2Gb of RAM" and the secret is this...Most folks simply aren't slamming even 5 year old chips hard enough to worry about, much less the newer ones. You see chips passed "Good enough" for the vast majority once we hit dual cores, so the fact that AMD's chips are 30% slower really doesn't matter if the user is only using less than half the power available anyway. And having that really nice GPU makes everything nice and smooth, with great HD video and even gaming if you so desire, although the majority isn't playing heavy CPU slamming games but crap like Farmville and Mob Wars
This is why both my desktop and netbook are AMD and I sold my full size for the netbook because i found when I was mobile I simply wasn't hitting the CPU hard enough to matter. My Thuban X6 has OCing headroom up the wazoo should I ever need it but with most games barely hitting dual cores and transcoding on 6 cores being so sweet i doubt I'll need it and the E350? Man whomever designed that chip needs to be given a Corvette and a raise by AMD because that thing is bloody brilliant! 6 hours playing HD video at default voltages (BTW if you have an E or C series check out Brazos Tweaker as you can add 20%-30% battery life by using it) and the ability to just pop in an HDMI cable for full 1080p goodness, hell it even plays L4D, Bioshock II, and GTA:VC (I could play the newer GTA games but I don't care for them) and all while staying cool to the touch and quiet as a churchmouse. The OEMs have taken notice (now that Intel isn't bribing them not to anymore) and you can see everything from HTPCs to laptops and netbooks to all in ones and desktops running Brazos. In fact last time I walked into my local Walmart Supercenter there were only 2 Intel units, both of which were bottom o' the line Atoms, the rest of the store? All AMD Fusions. I've built several office boxes (the traditional stronghold of Intel) with the E350 and the employees just love them, whisper quiet while giving them plenty of power for their everyday tasks.
Where Intel screwed the pooch was being too greedy. they SHOULD have made a deal with Nvidia to ensure plenty of new GPUs for their chips and instead they wiped out the entire Nvidia chipset business and made many of their chips simply overpriced and underperforming, especially in the laptop arena where you can't add a discrete. ION and Optimus was the perfect answer, with the low power shitty Intel chip for when you were on battery and the Nvidia chip when you were plugged in but now that the option is gone frankly I wouldn't touch Intel on a mobile unless it had a discrete and i warn my customers of the same. As we get more and more multimedia heavy folks want good graphics with smooth video and nice gaming and intel just don't have that. You can buy an AMD A series for probably half of what this chip is gonna cost, an E series for like one fifth, and while you won't notice the CPU unless you are doing number crunching or some other task one doesn't do on a mobile often you WILL notice the much nicer graphics. Intel just went the wrong direction on this IMHO and will pay the price.
Sadly all that would happen is yet more power grabs by congress critters (That tidal wave caused lawlessness! We need the "We can do whatever we want act of 2040 NOW!" passed ZOMFG!) followed by some MIC getting some trillion dollar contract to build some giant bling bling with lasers or nukes or something that will turn out to not do a damned thing but give some CEOs more hookers and blow money.
I don't know why someone didn't make it into a movie, talk about a kick ass plot! I can even see the tagline "The gang thought they were the alpha predators, the top of the food chain...they thought wrong". With a good director it would make a kick ass horror movie, completely different from the same old crap we've seen time and time again.
Good to know, I've been using a lot of 250Gb and 400gb thanks to the flood. So anybody know of a better HDD killer? something you can just launch and leave running that will seriously foobar a dying drive? Because i have yet to find anything that'll pimp slap a drive like spinrite does, especially level 3 and level 4 as it does multiple read/writes per sector and really smacks the disc. Anybody know of a good disc wiper that really does a beat down? because as others have noted unless you really kick the crap out of the drive they make you jump through the hoops so what you want is something that just beats the shit out of a dying drive so all their stupid diagnostics shows foobar.
I don't know about him but I've found the Samsungs great for quiet, both the Spinpoint and the Ecodrives. And amazingly the ecodrives with their big caches actually beat the Seagate 400Gb drives i had previously in several benches so they obviously know how to use thei cache for maximum effect. I'd say the spinpoint is about as quiet as a WD blue and the Ecodrive you honestly can't tell the PC is on with those, just great drives
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At least it'll be easy to get to the customer service line of your carrier, you'll just give the phone the finger.
Yeah you THINK its funny, but we are about to get a ring side seat for the biggest trainwreck since....hell i can't even think of a trainwreck that big. Its gonna finally put those MS Bob and WinME jokes to rest, let me put it that way. I mean have you TRIED metro? Its a fricking smart phone UI that MSFT expects users to run on a fricking non touch enabled desktop! Even the Yahoo product shill who answers everything with "Buy it now! you should really buy it! Seriously buy it now!" after trying it said 'Uhhhh...you should probably wait until you have something touch enabled and get it then" which for her is "My eyes! the goggles they do nothing!" and all because every single mobile attempt by MSFT has been a disaster. I mean for the love of God they are gonna have Windows 8 on ARM! You are gonna have a version of Windows that won't actually run Windows programs! Do you have ANY idea how massive the returns on all those "Windows tablets" is gonna be?
I think this just proves what I've been saying for ages, Ballmer is a shitty CEO that has zero common sense, much less vision, and that the mobile division should have been spun off so they wouldn't be held back by the lumbering PHB dominated desktop division as it would have protected them both from that dreaded buzzword "synergy". I mean his whole damned plan hinges on developers being so damned stupid they'll waste their time developing Metro apps just so they'll have something to sell on the WinARM app store! When we all know that for anything more complex than a fart app you're gonna have to write two versions, one for x86 and one for ARM as those two platforms are as different as night and day when it comes to IPC and memory constraints. And all so Ballmer can go "and with this we'll FINALLY get a big chunk of the pie now owned by Apple and Google and we'll be as sexy and hip as they are! yes we will! We really really will! STOP LAUGHING AT ME!"
Allow me to end with this heartfelt apology to the Appleites: Remember when we all laughed our asses off when you were stuck with the Pepsi CEO, you know, the one that went from one lame idea to another, with just this big sprawling mess of fail? yeah well..I'm sorry alright? Jokes over, ha ha...its not funny anymore! Hey fairs fair, you got Jobs back, can we have Bill back please? The sweaty monkey has gone crazy!
Well if Mint is actually spending money to try to offer a better product then i humbly apologize, its not CntOS which is just stripping out the copyrighted material in a product they USED to pay for and handing it out to their customers. That doesn't change the fact that for all the community's big talk of "Support us and we'll support you!" that CentOS is now on 2/3rds of the servers out there, just proving that communism is a giant failwhale and that greed wins out in the end. Because there is NO company that gives more back than RH, yet the very same community they give to then rip them as much as they possibly can. and look at Canonical? how many millions did Shuttleworth sink into trying to give a Linux that worked for the masses? in the end they'll have to close their doors and join the ranks of Xandros, linspire, gOS, novell, in the "We were never able to make a penny" group.
In the end I think it comes down to a complete failure of ideology, in that its been proven time and time again communism doesn't work and that's what RMS wants with the GPL, a communist utopia. the ONLY reason that Linux works in servers is because MSFT has a truly byzantine licensing schema and truly insane prices for server OSes which makes it easy for a company like Red hat to sell their product because when you have a thousand servers its cheaper to pay for Red hat support than it is to pay for MSFT licenses. But this is also why it will NEVER work on the desktop, because the desktop suffers from what I call the "busted shitters" problem which is also a problem the communists had, going so far as to have to order soldiers on 'potato duty" to get the lousy jobs done.
You see in servers a company has a problem, problem costs company money, so they pay to fix the problem. in desktops because anybody can copy what you've done there simply isn't any money to be made fixing problems as Canonical is finding out and when you rely on volunteers the busted shitters simply don't get done. its simply human nature, everyone wants to be the artist, nobody wants to be the guy that cleans and fixes the busted shitter. Now there are some seriously busted shitters in Linux on the desktop that anybody but a zealot would be willing to admit is true, just a few off the top of my head are the lousy driver model that practically guarantees multiple broken drivers each release cycle, lousy QA and regression testing, incomplete docs that are either practically worthless lists of CLI use flags or worse a "to be done' placeholder, lack of consistency of UI, these are all SERIOUS problems, yet they never get fixed, why? Because they are ALL busted shitters. They will require months or even years of long, boring, dull, thankless, truly shitty work to be done. Now again its simply human nature that if i'm donating my time I'm gonna want to do something i enjoy, and we humans are creative creatures which is why you'll see new release after new release of software with frankly show stopping bugs. Making something new is exciting, fixing bugs is not.
In the end without a complete rewrite of the GPL (which RMS will die before allowing) so that a company can actually charge money for doing these thankless jobs they just don't get done and THAT is why Linux is frankly going nowhere on desktops. even the best estimate in favor of Linux I could find has Linux at 4.9% and that is skewed by being strictly the most geeker heavy sites on the web. think about that for a moment, 20 years, countless man hours, and Linux is BARELY beating Vista which was the most reviled and hated MSFT OS since WinME. If that isn't proof the current model simply doesn't work i don't know what does. With each release both Windows and OSX gets better and if anything I'd argue that Linux is backsliding. Linux USED to laugh about how Windows had to install clean, while ignoring the fact that Windows has such a long tail when it comes to support that most will outgrow their hardware before they need to upgrade, but they
Dude at least you got something playable. have you TRIED any of the big name shooters out lately? hell you could spend your life making Mr Plinkett style videos just dissecting all the wrongness that is modern FPSes. When i heard about a new far Cry I was all "Sweet! More hunting smart enemies in the jungle!" and then i played it and was...ohhh. looks beautiful and is about as fun as a trip to the DMV. hell that is pretty much a description of FPS games for the last 5 years unless all you give a shit about is running as fast as you can and teabagging, in which case 'Call of Warfare: Gears of Killzone now with more game breaking DLC' would be up your alley. they LOOK truly great, but its just the SSDD, same weapons, same shitty AI, same lousy cookie cutter level design, how you can take hunting a smart predator like man and make it into as boring as filling out your taxes i'll never know but they do it time and time again.
Personally i blame assholes like Epic pushing the bling bling engines making everything into a bling fest. its gotten to the point the graphics are now a crutch. Its like "Hey we don't have any good ideas, our level design sucks, and the alpha testers say they'd rather play minesweeper than our game, what should we do?" and instead of someone saying "Come up with good ideas, a better story, more rewarding level design, etc' they say "LENS FLARES! That's the ticket! Oh and bloom! Don't forget stupid physics puzzles! Gotta have those because Valve throws a 2 minute physics puzzle into every HL so we gotta have one too! oh oh oh and bullet decals! We am so smart!" and what you end up with is yet another 'Call of Warfare: Gears of Killzone' or even worse a Kane and Lynch II.
So be happy friend, even in your dumbest games RPGs usually are at least NOT BORING, whereas my beloved shooters have been so bad of late I just have to keep going back to the classics. And don't even mention space sims where there hasn't been anything really epic since Freelancer IMHO. But I play these new games and they just scream "We didn't have an original thought so here's the latest unreal engine tricks!". Kinda sad when I can fire up a game like No One Lives Forever I or II or Bioshock and have more fun per minute than a half a dozen of the new cookie cutter games put together.
Thank you for living proof that FOSSies are batshit. you still think that I'm a guy that I can't even get along with and to this very day we don't agree on anything OTHER than the fact you're batshit? delusional much? but if its a pimp slapping of your craptastic OS you want, enjoy! See that's the nice thing about reality, while all you have is insults I have facts! Where are YOUR facts? oh right, they don't exist :-(
Get ready, here they come! Kinda makes that koolaid just a little bitter now, don't it? I believe in using the best tool for the job, but to say Linux is secure or better than any other complex OS is frankly bullshit. Hell I was talking to a 15 year Linux admin on one of the other sites that had gotten so sick of Linux fuckups they were going to BSD and if THAT didn't "just work" they were gonna wash their hands of FLOSS on the desktop and just go Mac.
BTW if you'd like a little more food for thought, what OS was 3 of the 4 CAs running that were compromised? take a look and see. Maybe they just had configs? Surely someone with knowledge would be safe right? Guess again and its not a fluke by any means.
Would you like some more reality? well here it comes! Isn't it sad, how like a frightened child afraid to look under the bed, you cower at the truth? if your driver model isn't shit then why does Dell have to run their own repos even though we are talking a teeny tiny subset of hardware? Oh right because Linux shits itself and dies if you use the default repos! Man that is some excellent product you got there! you think I can get better QA than the third largest OEM on the planet? What, you expect me to tell paying customers "Go to the forum, kiss some loser ass, and maybe, just maybe, in a few days someone will have mercy and give you a big pile of bullshit that may or may not make your sound work again"?
Bleeding yet douchey? want some more? nice thing about having the truth on your side, you can keep throwing punches all day! How about how a decade old Windows beat the shit out of Linux on netbooks or how ASUS has given up on your bullshit or how about Walmart running away from linux as fast as it can? You got the crazy koolaid drunk enough to say they ALL are paid shills because they won't do your forum dance or CLI horseshit? Meanwhile your "hero" Torvalds the great says Plans? We don't need no steenkin plans!. Why don't you tell them that at work next week, see how quick you get a pink slip? More? How about you actually have the balls to celebrate getting a whole 1% market share while you are actually lower than JavaME and there is a whole website dedicated To your bullshit and excuses .
You see you whiny little delusional mama's boy, I'm your worst fucking nightmare...a retaile
Uhhh...if Microsoft says "We don't actually sell a license that allows what they are doing" then what else is there really to say? i mean i can buy a VLK of Windows but that doesn't give me the right to set up a "free Windows for everyone LOL!" website and pass that VLK key to anybody and everybody. Every single license, yes even GPL, has rules and limitations and if the guys whose license it is says "You can't do that" well then most likely you can't.
Didn't you pay attention? if it is one thing that ST:TNG taught us is that EVERYTHING can have the polarity reversed for a hell of a boost!
If you are using other people's computers (which it certainly didn't sound like when you first posted which sounds like you are just looking for excuses now) then I'd suggest one of the bazillion free file managers that can be run completely from USB. There are several but Xplorer II Lite sounds like it would be right up your alley, it uses a classic two pane that has been around since the days of Norton commander.
Again there is absolutely NO REASON to "put up" with anything in windows, as it literally takes seconds to change and is much faster and more consistent to change than any *NIX. So the only excuse you have is 1.-you are lazy or 2.-You are just looking for something to complain about . i have a feeling its the latter myself.
Learn how to read FOSSie, its as far as the user is concerned there is no command line in Windows. You just sound like a moron when you can't even quote correctly. Just because you can't imagine in your perception bubble an OS that doesn't have to lean on CLI as a crutch doesn't mean everyone else has to live in such a backward ass world. Go write some Long PHP Codes and let the grownups talk, kay?
As for TFA how many companies are ALREADY going broke because of the graphics requirements of a single game? How many companies have we seen go under because all it takes is ONE flop with a 100 million dollar plus cost to torpedo a company?
And lets be honest folks, how many games have you played that this sentence is applicable "The graphics were great but the game sucked". Hell I'd be happy to play games that are at far Cry I level or even No One Live Forever II level of graphics if it has an engaging story, characters we can root for, good weapons that are nicely balanced, imaginative level design, hell give us SOMETHING besides just bling bling graphics. give us something fresh or a new take on an old idea and we'll be happy to put up with less impressive graphics, hell look at Terraria or Minecraft, both of those are wicked fun. the graphics in the Portal series aren't very impressive but the humor is damned funny and the puzzles fun. here is a game I keep coming back to everyone should try...Just Cause II. Does it have the most impressive visuals? no although it is pretty to look at, but what makes it fun is the completely bullshit reality thanks to the grappler. Rico handles like a cross between Spiderman and a totally batshit insane person, grappling onto helicopters flying by and chunking the guy driving it out before using it for a strafing run and leaping out 3 seconds before it blows to hijack a car and lead the cops on a 40 car chase, just completely nuts.
In the end the designers like this guy (when was the last time Epic made a truly memorable game? Hell they are known for their engines more than anything so I can see this guy wanting to push new tech as it sells new engines) seem to forget that ultimately its a GAME and games are supposed to be FUN with a capital F. Think a minute about the games you TRULY love, the ones you go back to, do you go back to them for the graphics? or is it something else, like great gameplay or a good story? Deus Ex, System Shock, Bioshock, No One Lives Forever I&II, Soldier Of Fortune I&II, Freelancer, these are the games that I keep permanently on my HDD and none of these were the most impressive games when they came out but they are FUN and THAT is what matters.
Oh and Indy game designers? Current FPS games SUCK HARD, so there are plenty of us who'd be happy to buy your games, even if they were at No One Lives Forever II graphical quality, if you'd give us something more fun that Call of Warfare:Gears of Killzone Edition, now with extra expensive DLC. Give us more than the halo dual guns bullshit, quit copying the same weapons over and over (kitty bomb anyone?) and jamming us into linear corridors. hell games like Duke Nukem 3D and Redneck rampage gave us more interesting levels to explore than the new games! There are plenty of us who'd buy your product, and plenty of places like Steam and GOG that you can sell it on. C'mon indy guys, there are plenty of us who miss the golden age of shooters when there was always something new and different to try, weird weapons or stealth or crazy mechanics or something.
Uhhh...what's hard? Win 7 updates itself, both Comodo and Avast (I was using Avast but lately I've gone back to Comodo as i like its tougher sandboxing) have silent installers, frankly the entire system takes less than 15 minutes of actual time to install. And once installed its pretty much walk away as everything is automated, no need for input from the user at all. Frankly its one of the easiest systems ever and certainly easier than constantly doing forum hunts when Linux craps on its own drivers during the 6 month upgrade deathmarch.
I've had machines in the field running this system since Win 7 RTM in the hands of users that usually pick up more bugs than a Bangkok whore and so far they haven't been able to infect their machines so i'd say its probably the best 15 minutes I've ever spent hardening a machine. Some shops believe you should do the absolute minimum, let the users easily infect their machines multiple times for the repeat business but I've found word of mouth and referrals makes up for the lack of repeat business and more than that I can sleep well at night knowing I've done the most I can to ensure that the customer's PC stays clean and running well and knock on wood so far a 98% success rate, and you can't really count the one failure as the guy refused to listen to me and promptly uninstalled his AV when it wouldn't let him have "the new limewire" which of course was just a giant trojan package that dropped over 60 pieces of malware on his system. Some times you just can't stop stupid.
"But, having given it out as GPL, they now get access to a million geeks who will do free support and bugfixing on the code."
BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA!...oh wait, you were serious? BWA HA HA HA HA HA owww, my sides...ohh thanks, that's the hardest I've laughed in ages! Because Linux is known for having rock solid drivers that never break, snort, snicker guffaw! lets face it friend, your driver model is shit. its always been shit, and as long as Linus Torvalds has a pulse it will always BE shit, why? Because he likes it that way and because he knows that SEVER companies, which is where he makes his money, will jump through his hoops so he don't have to give a crap. this is ignoring the fact that every. other. major. OS on the ENTIRE planet has a driver ABI, BSD, Solaris, OSX, Windows, hell even OS/2. Is Linus THAT arrogant, that he thinks he's smarter than EVERY OS designer on the planet? yep. Eeeeegggoo come and it won't go away. Mark my words 3 weeks after Torvalds drops dead there WILL be an ABI and it'll be hailed as the second coming, Well unless the replacement for Linus is a follower of the great smelly one in which case they will continue with the already disproved RELIGIOUS argument against ABIs (the ONLY one I've seen provided BTW, kinda funny that an OS would have a religious movement whose job it is to maintain "purity") which is of course "ZOMFG they might provide a...gasp, shock horror...binary blob ZOMFG!" which of course ignores that the number one GPU for Linux and the most used driver in Linux is Nvidia drivers which are....survey says....binary blobs!
You want to know why hardware manufacturers ignore you THIS is why. With just FOUR count 'em FOUR drivers you can support Windows for more than 20 years, no more work required, you just need a 2K/XP/2K3 32 bit, XP X64/2k3 X64, WinVista/7/8 32bit,WinVista/7/8 64bit, and tada! you've just covered EVERY use case for your product on Windows, even the non popular and server editions. With Linux you either pay a team of driver developers to constantly update the things when Torvalds breaks them yet again, or you leave your company to the not so tender mercy of some "hacker dude" you have ZERO control over who may or may not make a decent driver out of what you give him. See AMD hiring driver guys to help the Open Source guys for an example of how that can cost you money for zero gain.
So waste your mod points, crawl back into your perception bubbles going "La la la, everything is beautiful, la la la!" but the honest ones will know I'm right. Linux has suffered from the "busted shitter" problem for years and frankly it isn't getting any better in that regard. what are the busted shitters? its the REALLY hard, thankless, shitty, long hours,crappy jobs that never get done because nobody is willing to waste years of their lives on them for free. trying to have a really functional driver model WITHOUT having ABIs is one of those busted shitter problems which is why others like BSD and Solaris adopted ABIs. But there are many busted shitters in Linux, the lousy documentation, lack of QA and regression testing, upgrades breaking bog standard hardware because of lack of oversight, hell remember when Linux USED to laugh about Windows having to install clean to upgrade? Don't laugh about that now that all the distros tell you to do the same thing huh? that's the busted shitter problem in a nutshell.
IMHO the sad part is things didn't have to be this way, the community could accept the busted shitter problem and work to route around the damage. tell Torvalds it ain't 1993 anymore and to either come up with a way to magically fix the driver issues or STFU and give you an ABI, take up collections to offer bounties for really nasty busted shitters like upgrades breaking bog standard hardware or lack of docs, but instead its a giant perception bubblepaloza, where everyone trips over themselves to talk about how "leet" they are and just can't seem to understand why after 20 years Linux is still lower than the margin for error on the desktop. I mean you
Well I have one of their canvas 2.5 portable drives (I swapped a 200Gb 3.5 and enclosure even steven for a 320gb since the guy went and bought it for his media tank not realizing those little media boxes don't put out enough power on their USB port to drive a laptop drive) and i have to say its a great little drive, doesn't get hot no matter how much i use it, whisper quiet, if they can bring those qualities to the 3.5 inchers I'll be happy to give them all my business. I'll still miss the Samsung ecodrives though, fast, quiet, and only 85f under load, what's not to like?
Well you didn't hear this from me but you CAN run Win 7 on a P4, in fact I've run it on as low as a Sempron 1.8GHz with 1.5Gb of RAM. What you'll want is a copy of "Windows 7 Tiny Edition" which is a hacked gamer edition that has incredibly low system requirements. Slap any Win 7 compatible AGP card (The Geforce 7 series is plentiful and cheap, as is the Radeon HD24xx cards) and you have a pretty decent little Win 7 box. the only thing you really need to change is to set up a normal limited user (since its a gamer version it defaults to admin like XP) but other than that its really sweet. why MSFT doesn't hire the tiny guy I'll never know as frankly he kicks both the embedded and WinFLP editions right in the ass while having better app compatibility than either of those.
BTW just out of curiosity...why are you still on Pentium 4? you can pick up a bottom of the line E350 board for less than $80, slap a $20 RAM stick and you have a system that'll run rings around any Pentium 4 while only sucking 16w under load. Unless you are getting your electricity for free the switch will pay for itself quite quickly and the built in HD6310 GPU is great for video and can even do some gaming. I've built several office machines with them and even sold my full size laptop for an E350 netbook, it really is a sweet chip and you can't beat a dual core with 4gb of RAM for less than $100. There is even OOTB support in Linux from Ubuntu or mint from version 10.04 and up. give it a try, i bet you'll like it.
Normally I don't respond to ACs but i just thought I'd point out an error, as while the Geforce did abandon AGP at the 7 series (not 6 as i actually have a 7600GS AGP in the closet) the Radeon cards went on MUCH longer, finally ended with the HD 3xxx series. the largest AGP card you can buy is I believe the HD3650 AGP, which isn't easy to find but the HD2xxx cards are quite plentiful. There are also Win98 drivers out there for both cards so both can make great classic gaming boxes. I actually have a Radeon X1950 along with a P4 3.6Ghz with HT and an old Intel board one these days i'll turn into a Win9x box as sadly that is one thing you ARE correct on, some of those games are so tied to Win9x you'll never get them to run anywhere else. Peace.
Hell you may have luck, a few chips such as the Pentium Ds and early Core chips don't seem to have the trouble playing them. This is why I think to have patents and copyrights on software you should be required to put the source code in escrow and then if the company refuses to support their customers with patches to allow the games to play the code should be released as we are losing a LOT of Win9x era games to the ravages of time, software too. There was just so many hacks and tricks they could do then because you could basically shove Win9X out of the way and access the hardware directly that trying to get these games running now is an exercise in futility.
While we have DOSBox for the DOS games nothing seems to be able to fill that role for Win9X era games and even heavily modified version (like the GOG i76 release which I have) sadly can only do so much without the source code. I had hoped when I saw how well they had Redneck Rampage running (runs beautifully on Win 7 X64 BTW, and a real hoot, you should give it and Blood a spin if you haven't because they are both a blast and run great!) that they could pull off a similar miracle with i76 but it was not to be. you might have luck with MW3 since i haven't tried it since i couldn't get it to run even on XP (the infamous bouncing bug) but I wouldn't get my hopes up.
But while others may bitch about Windows backwards compatibility frankly i love it and believe its one of Windows great strengths because i'm constantly amazed by how many games WILL run without hoop jumping, such as a couple of my favorite guilty pleasures No One Lives Forever I&II and Soldier Of Fortune I&II which run beautifully, along with my old Medal Of Honor games like Allied and Breakthrough, even the older cheese fests like Postal II, Judge Dread, and Rogue Trooper. all run happily even though when they came out there was no such thing as 64 bit X86 and machines with 6 cores and 8Gb of RAM (not to mention a half a Gb on the card) would have been a supercomputer. So give them a try friend, worse that will happen is they won't go but other than those two most of my old games have run without a hitch.
Uhhh...you DO know that pretty much anything and everything is infinitely tweakable on Windows, yes? it has this thing called a "registry" that makes passing tweaks between folks beyond simple and easy, and there are even several tools called...get this..."tweakers" that are designed to do just that, tweak Windows!
Now the one you'll want to try is called "Ultimate Windows Tweaker" as that's pretty much what it is, a HUGE collection of tweaks so if any of the defaults don't butter your bread? just tweak them. although you DO know you can just right click anywhere in the breadcrumb and get the EXACT path copied as text, yes? its just THAT simple. I use it all the time to tell clients whom I don't have the time (or they don't have a decent connection) where to find something. Otherwise i just remote in which is like a Godsend let me tell you! With Remote Assistance and EasyConnect any of my customers can call or pop up a chat window and say "Help me!" and BAM! There I am, i can walk a grandma through giving me full control in less than 5 minutes flat. they are more than happy to pay my $35 fee for having a magical "Tech in a box" that can do anything from set up their new printer to decrapify that new netbook their BF got them as a gift and set up Homegroup so they can share and print everywhere.
So if you don't like it? Then change it! I guarantee you that anything that could possibly bug you has already been run into by someone else and they have a tweak that changes it, easy peasy. Even Linux isn't as easy to tweak as Windows simply because what works on Ubuntu may not work on say PC Linux OS whereas most Windows tweaks can be done by anybody with that version, hell many work across multiple versions like the weird occasional "no sound device" bug you come across with certain funky chipsets that I can fix in seconds with a simple reg file that works on any NT based Windows from 2K to Win 7 X64. Hell if you don't like the GUI you can even rip out the DE for AstonShell (not free but worth the $30) that'll give you tons of choices in shells, you can even have it like a MAc or KDE if that's what melts your butter! So if breadcrumbs ain't your thing just change it friend, 30 seconds in Google and you'll never have to mess with that anymore.
I'll get hate from the keepers of the perception bubbles but I've long past giving a fuck so here goes...why the fuck should ANY company give you anything? AMD did, they did EXACTLY what you asked for TO THE LETTER. What were your words? what did you tell everyone? "Why if you'll just give us the specs we'll not only support you but we'll help make the drivers better, its a win/win!" so what did AMD do? not only did they give you every spec they are legally allowed to (they of course can't give the parts of HDMI protected path as they don't own that) but they actually bent over backwards for the community, not only rushing the specs out as quick as they could but actually hiring devs to help the open source driver developers! And what did they get for their trouble? Did they get the support of the community? Nope you see every Linux forum filled with "LOL buy Nvidia" which is a company that not only don't give you shit but drops supports for cards quicker than anybody!
So the simple fact is frankly no company should bother to support Linux unless they are gonna obviously get something out of it up front because your words and your actions are diametrically opposed to one another. you say "We support the companies that support us!" yet more than 2/3rds of the web servers out there are running CentOS, which is a "leecher" OS made by a hardware company that USED to buy RHEL for their products and then decided they'd just rather not pay, oh and before anyone brings up Red hat not saying anything, what do you expect them to say? "Hey douchebags quit ripping us off, we're trying to HELP you"? With the self entitled nature of the community they be blackballed and boycotted before they had even lifted their fingers from the send key! And then there is of course AMD which is a great example to all those companies sitting on the fence NOT to support you, as not only didn't their sales improve any but you now have the BSD guy posting "Hey we've found bugs!" which i'm sure is gonna help their sales a lot.
So frankly you shouldn't say shit when Nvidia or any other company gives you the short end of the stick, because when companies DO listen and do as you ask they find all their hard work is for naught. Hell look at how much money Canonical has burned through trying to give you a hassle free desktop only to get "LOL use mint" which is just like CentOS, another leecher. What do you think happens to mint when Canonical goes under and they can't leech anymore? It becomes another "Bob's distro" and falls even further behind the competition. What's sad is the IDEA of FOSS was a good one, everyone working together to make nice things that everyone can use. The sad reality is just another example that without real leadership you end up with a bunch of douchebaggery and everyone doing their own thing and nobody caring about anyone but themselves and their own little chiefdom.
Can someone please explain which OS it was running, which version, any AV, you know, more details than a fricking tweet? I know we don't generally actually READ TFA but hell this might as well have been "Chrome got pwned by a man doing a thing" for all the lack of details!
Now as for Chrome getting hacked well anything CAN be hacked if you have enough of a reason to go after it and i think Google made themselves a nice juicy target on purpose to get the data before any blackhats so kudos to them and the hackers. i know anecdotes aren't data but at least for myself and my customers and family the combo of Comodo Dragon (Chromium based) with either Avast Free or Comodo IS and Win 7 has been pretty much hack AND idiot proof, no small task. Just for shits and giggles i tried to infect a machine I was gonna wipe anyway, threw it at every topsite and crapsite and junksite I could find and...nothing, nada zip zilch. of course that wasn't just Chromium protecting it it also had Win 7 and low rights mode with DEP and ASLR, it had Comodo SecureDNS filtering known malware dumps, it had the sandboxing that is built into Avast and Comodo IS (tried both to make sure and they seem about equal on everything from protection to RAM usage so its more a taste thing or if you need to protect a business as Comodo is free for business use) and finally ABP blocked many of the ads that are the biggest source of malware, at least from what I've seen.
So a little more info would be nice, I'd like to know if there is something I need to tweak in my system or not.
Oh Lord, please don't say that name! Poor Jim is still rocking himself in the corner going "It just won't uninstall! Why won't it uninstall? It just won't go away" after the last wave of Norton infected laptops came through and we have finally got his mumbling quieted down, please don't give Jim a flashback!
As for TFA this is why I recommend the combo of Win 7 with either Avast or Comodo IS along with Comodo Dragon with ABP. Windows 7 has DEP and ASLR along with UAC and Comodo Dragon is able to take advantage of the low rights mode for browsers built in, ABP blocks the ads that are the source of many an infection, Avast and Comodo IS have built in sandboxing which adds another layer of protection but while Avast has a simpler UI for home users Comodo IS is free for business AND home so its really a preference thing.
With this combo I took an offlease i was planning to wipe anyway and tried my damnedest to infect the thing. I went to every crapsite and topsite and "punch the monkey to win an iPod" and scammer haven i could find and afterwards ran a half a dozen offline scans, nothing. Zip zero zilch nada. Most of the nasty sites were blocked by the Comodo SecureDNS option in Dragon and when I turned that off both Avast and Comodo IS blocked the sites from loading the malware so I'd say that is a resounding success. i know i have customers (as well as family, ugh) that can pick up bugs like a Bangkok Whore on a Saturday night yet since switching them over to this combo they have been completely bug free, and with them that's saying a lot.
What's wrong with Win 7? While I can't stand Metro, thought Vista was too damned buggy, and hated the Fisher Price UI of WinXP I'd have to say I find Win 7 to be VERY nice, right up there with my beloved XP X64 and Win2K. How we lived without breadcrumbs and jumplists is beyond me, going back to any previous version now feels like going back to Win9x as losing those features really sucks.
Speaking of Win9X are they still working on a Windows version? I heard rumors a couple of years back and the one thing I miss about XP was its great Win9X support for old games. How good is Wine on its DirectX 6/7/8 support? Can it run the more PITA games like Mechwarrior 3 and i76? I really miss those games but I always end up with the "jumping bug" on MW3 and i76 has some serious timing issues if you aren't running a single core or running below 2GHz. Has anyone cooked up a "Wine in a box" LiveCD for gaming so one doesn't have to install a whole OS just to run it? How good is its hardware acceleration? I haven't had a chance to run it since I sold my dual boot XP/Xandros laptop in 09 so I'm a little behind here. Is its support for the older stuff better than XP?
But it IS a tradeoff Blanche, it is. You see most folks are embracing the wonder that is "The Internet" and all the TV movies and other entertainment that this wonderful medium has to offer and Intel GPUs...well they suck REALLY hard.
But here is the dirty little secret AMD knows that Intel doesn't want you to hear, going so far as to shoot their Atom division in the face by killing off the Nvidia chipset business and hobbling Atom with insanely shitty rules like "Only 10 inches with crappy resolution" and "Only 2Gb of RAM" and the secret is this...Most folks simply aren't slamming even 5 year old chips hard enough to worry about, much less the newer ones. You see chips passed "Good enough" for the vast majority once we hit dual cores, so the fact that AMD's chips are 30% slower really doesn't matter if the user is only using less than half the power available anyway. And having that really nice GPU makes everything nice and smooth, with great HD video and even gaming if you so desire, although the majority isn't playing heavy CPU slamming games but crap like Farmville and Mob Wars
This is why both my desktop and netbook are AMD and I sold my full size for the netbook because i found when I was mobile I simply wasn't hitting the CPU hard enough to matter. My Thuban X6 has OCing headroom up the wazoo should I ever need it but with most games barely hitting dual cores and transcoding on 6 cores being so sweet i doubt I'll need it and the E350? Man whomever designed that chip needs to be given a Corvette and a raise by AMD because that thing is bloody brilliant! 6 hours playing HD video at default voltages (BTW if you have an E or C series check out Brazos Tweaker as you can add 20%-30% battery life by using it) and the ability to just pop in an HDMI cable for full 1080p goodness, hell it even plays L4D, Bioshock II, and GTA:VC (I could play the newer GTA games but I don't care for them) and all while staying cool to the touch and quiet as a churchmouse. The OEMs have taken notice (now that Intel isn't bribing them not to anymore) and you can see everything from HTPCs to laptops and netbooks to all in ones and desktops running Brazos. In fact last time I walked into my local Walmart Supercenter there were only 2 Intel units, both of which were bottom o' the line Atoms, the rest of the store? All AMD Fusions. I've built several office boxes (the traditional stronghold of Intel) with the E350 and the employees just love them, whisper quiet while giving them plenty of power for their everyday tasks.
Where Intel screwed the pooch was being too greedy. they SHOULD have made a deal with Nvidia to ensure plenty of new GPUs for their chips and instead they wiped out the entire Nvidia chipset business and made many of their chips simply overpriced and underperforming, especially in the laptop arena where you can't add a discrete. ION and Optimus was the perfect answer, with the low power shitty Intel chip for when you were on battery and the Nvidia chip when you were plugged in but now that the option is gone frankly I wouldn't touch Intel on a mobile unless it had a discrete and i warn my customers of the same. As we get more and more multimedia heavy folks want good graphics with smooth video and nice gaming and intel just don't have that. You can buy an AMD A series for probably half of what this chip is gonna cost, an E series for like one fifth, and while you won't notice the CPU unless you are doing number crunching or some other task one doesn't do on a mobile often you WILL notice the much nicer graphics. Intel just went the wrong direction on this IMHO and will pay the price.
Sadly all that would happen is yet more power grabs by congress critters (That tidal wave caused lawlessness! We need the "We can do whatever we want act of 2040 NOW!" passed ZOMFG!) followed by some MIC getting some trillion dollar contract to build some giant bling bling with lasers or nukes or something that will turn out to not do a damned thing but give some CEOs more hookers and blow money.
I don't know why someone didn't make it into a movie, talk about a kick ass plot! I can even see the tagline "The gang thought they were the alpha predators, the top of the food chain...they thought wrong". With a good director it would make a kick ass horror movie, completely different from the same old crap we've seen time and time again.
Good to know, I've been using a lot of 250Gb and 400gb thanks to the flood. So anybody know of a better HDD killer? something you can just launch and leave running that will seriously foobar a dying drive? Because i have yet to find anything that'll pimp slap a drive like spinrite does, especially level 3 and level 4 as it does multiple read/writes per sector and really smacks the disc. Anybody know of a good disc wiper that really does a beat down? because as others have noted unless you really kick the crap out of the drive they make you jump through the hoops so what you want is something that just beats the shit out of a dying drive so all their stupid diagnostics shows foobar.
I don't know about him but I've found the Samsungs great for quiet, both the Spinpoint and the Ecodrives. And amazingly the ecodrives with their big caches actually beat the Seagate 400Gb drives i had previously in several benches so they obviously know how to use thei cache for maximum effect. I'd say the spinpoint is about as quiet as a WD blue and the Ecodrive you honestly can't tell the PC is on with those, just great drives