Bah! yet again Microsoft leads the way with everything from the little squeaker to Nuclear farts (which are PROFESSIONAL nuclear farts no less) to finally The Ultimate Fart! and all of them will cost you money! Never let it be said that Microsoft can't make the WinPhone just as stupid as everyone else!
It won't help and here's why: You have people packed like rats in the megacities like LA and NYC which will be a breeding ground for any new nasty. With the rate of travel if a new nasty does get loose which if anything we have seen when you have lots of poor (like now) with little access to medicine and healthcare (again like now) and who don't see a doctor until they are practically dead (ditto) you have a perfect storm for some new nasty. And finally you have the antibiotics being ruined by big ranching using it to fatten up the animals, again adding to the risk.
In the end that bit in the Matrix about humans and viruses is both true and false. true we do outbreed our environment but then mother nature seems to come up with its own answer and that is some bug that thins the herd and basically hits the reset button. With the speed of travel and borders that leak like sieves the bug that would have just wiped out an area a hundred and fifty years ago can easily wipe out a continent or more. its just a matter of when and where. personally my money is on some idiot cutting down trees in the rainforest running across some bug man hasn't been exposed to yet and giving us another black death.
"I think the puppet on the left shares my beliefs, i think the puppet on the right is more to my liking...hey wait a minute there's one guy controlling BOTH puppets!" from the late great often stolen from Bill Hicks. Sad the man has been gone more than 20 years and if anything his words are MORE true than they have ever been. But if you think Nobama or Mittens or Santwhorum give a flying fuck about anybody but themselves and their corporate masters you've drank too much koolaid.
I know I shouldn't respond to an AC but the wrongness was threatening to cause a singularity. For such an argument to hold you would need to show the sum total they have spent on projects and what the outcome was. Now if they have spent several billion on thousands of projects and that is the only two that came to fruition? one could easily argue that its stupid to give them more money for such a lousy ROI. BTW there was the SAGES system which was build by DOD before DARPA was ever born and one could argue that those first digital transmissions over phone lines was the actual birth of the net and what DARPA did was simply the next logical step.
Because the fed works so well with everything else? this would also kill local initiatives dead. for example since the city I live in is VERY good at not trying to extend a tax and kills it at the voter approved time it wasn't difficult for them to come before the people and say 'It would be helpful if we had a main linkup between the business district and the freeway that would allow one to go from one end to another while bypassing the most congested parts of town thereby moving the large trucks off the main drag" and they got a 2c sales tax for 4 years approved which paid for the linkup.
So allow me to say a hearty "Hell no!" to a national sales tax. I still have at least some measure of say in local politics and can use grass roots to affect the outcome. As we have seen time and time again unless your last name is Gates you can give it up when it comes to affecting the fed, you just replace one shill with another. that 7% would quickly become 7,8,9,10,11,etc as they came up with one excuse after another to pass their spending off on the poor, meanwhile the rich would just do their large purchases overseas and keep their money in the Caymans like old Mittens does.
Before the age of millisecond trading when one had to actually plan these things and hold a stock for longer than minutes? the problem is the stock market simply wasn't built for what its currently being used for, look up its history and you'll see it was about INVESTING in a business you thought would make money in the LONG run. this let businesses have much needed capital to expand and grow, which benefited both the investor and the economy as a whole.
What you have with all the computers and day traders is essentially a giant leech on the economy, with the current system you would be rewarded if you set fire to your business for the insurance or fired all of the employees because the stock would shoot up for a few hours or days and this would allow the leeches to make money while the CxOs cashed out their golden parachutes. In my own area the local teleco and cableco haven't invested in a single foot of line in over 15 years, because this investment would cause the stock price to go down. Instead the CxOs simply cash out the increased profits from gouging the customers and use what's left to buy smaller companies and gut them, thus growing again by leeching NOT investing. this whole system in its current form is completely broken and i predict a total market collapse within the next decade, the economic crisis across the west is just the canary in the coal mine.
Love your UID BTW, my original Pentium 100 gamer machine is still working 5 days a week as a C&C controller for a custom lathe that only has an ISA card for a controller, man they don't make 'em like that anymore.
But I agree with your points completely. I may have a 1Tb external that holds my data and disk images, along with constantly backing up data to DVDs but that don't mean I'm willing to deal with the downtime of having an SSD crap itself just for some speed boost I won't notice except in certain situations, like booting which I almost never do anymore. Hell i don't even boot my netbook, it hibernates.
With that in mind I recommend if you can find any the Samsung Ecogreen drives you snatch a couple. I tested out both the 1Tb and 2Tb drives in some seriously rough conditions, we are talking factory floor and construction trailers, and by lowering the spin from 7200 to 5400 these drives are damned near indestructible in normal use. I was so impressed i actually replaced all my drives with Ecodrives INCLUDING the boot drives and found that the increased cache keeps there from being any real performance penalty in using these as OS drives. It also runs waaaaay cooler than any 7200 drive I've ever seen, with the high on my Seagate drives being 122F and the Ecodrives topping at 106F with no additional fans whereas with the Seagates i had a fan mounted in the carriage for each drive just to keep them from getting crazy hot. they even bench better than the 8Mb 7200 Seagate, with the Seagate scoring 106Mbps and the Ecodrive scoring 134Mbps. If you want a long lasting drive that is cool, quiet, runs great and has plenty of storage I highly recommend you grab one of the Samsung drives before they are all gone.
Well I can tell you a friend was hired to make models for the wildcatters and what he learned and showed me was quite disturbing. he was handed pretty much all the data on the area so he could make his models of the geology they would be working with and when he laid a copy of the map the local college had of earthquakes and the map he got from the wildcatters he could overlay them and it was a perfect match, one for one with the wells. Also this is an area with tons of bedrock, and the highest quake measure by the local college since they started setting up stations and taking readings right after WWII was in the 1.9 range with one 3 every twenty years or so, after the wildcatters it was tons of 3s and some 4s and the machines are registering tons of hits so this fracking is really causing some slippage down below.
The final problem which my friend was bit in the ass by and which is REALLY SCARY is that these groups have already set up a way to avoid paying damages if they cause an environmental disaster which means not only do they have ZERO reason to give a fuck about environmental safety but that they are already expecting shit to go bad and are prepped for it. How did they pull this off you ask? Simple they have set up shell corps that own ALL the assets, from the mineral rights and drilling equipment down to the office furniture and then the drilling "company" which is just a front leases the equipment from the shell. As my friend found out when this bunch ran up a couple of bills and people starting trying to sue they simply burn the front company and are back in business the next day with a new front company!
Mark my words at best we are looking at future superfund sites that We, The People will get stuck with while the money men laugh their asses off while walking away counting the cash and at worst we are gonna have our very own Bhopal when these guys set off a major quake or poison all the water for an entire area for decades to come. Thanks to the far right gutting regulations left and right and dodges like the above there simply is NO incentive for them to give a flying fuck. I'm all for increasing domestic production but I don't want us to become another China, with land poisoned and water that you can light on fire. We HAVE to have the regulations in place to make those that drill responsible for any messes they make WITHOUT EXCEPTIONS or they will simply not give a fuck.
Well I can only speak about the one debunking I saw and i thought Randi was kinda bullshit. I mean for the dousing debunking he stuck these guys on the second floor of a building while switching water pipes with an airgap of a fricking story? WTF does that prove? that would be like proving fire doesn't exist by giving someone a piece of paper sealing in a vacuum and saying "Light that with this match bitch". A much more fair test would have had them simply walk across the grounds while trying to find a known underground water source in an area that otherwise didn't have water, like say a large buried pipe and then comparing their results with a control group that merely guessed at where the water was and compared results. I'm all for debunking but lets be fair in the methods.
Because Seagate and WD have a nice MAD thing going on since each company has bought out half the former competitors (Hitachi and Samsung being the last two they bought up) so each side knows the other would bury them in patents in court. With flash there is still enough players and patents out there not owned by a megacorp to make it turn nasty, just look at how a little company that most had probably never heard of called rambus was able to troll the RAM market for years.
I say give it a decade though, and all of the bit players will be bought up by a couple of the big dogs and you'll end up with another MAD situation. Look at how even when AMD and Intel were tying up in court neither went after the other's core X86 patents because each would have enough patents that could hurt the other both companies would be screwed, or how ATI and now AMD and Nvidia haven't really gone after each other over core patents as just like with Intel and AMD its better in the long run to simply cross license under RAND than risk having their products tied in litigation for half a decade.
Sadly this is why unlike in the old days you simply can't have a lot of competition in a market, because as the smaller ones have trouble competing they end up becoming patent trolls. You know that is a serious threat when there are plenty of firms that do nothing but buy up patents for trolling which is why i think there needs to be some sort of "Use it or lose it" clause to keep this trolling from dragging down the system.
Well because having a netbook weigh 2.8 pounds instead of 60 is nice? you are also forgetting the enemy of all things electronic, and that's heat with a capital H. Even fitting more than 2 drives in your typical mATX case can be tricky unless you make two of the drives the slower green drives as the heat quickly shoots into dangerous territory without putting enough fans in that sucker that it sounds like an F15, putting a dozen 80gb drives in RAID would be a cooling nightmare.
Ultimately i think the answer will lie with hybrids but hopefully with a twist in that there should be a way to upgrade/replace the NAND on the unit but even if there isn't at least with the hybrid once the NAND is gone you still have your data as the hybrids copy the data while leaving the original on the HDD, kinda like what MSFT did with Readyboost. This way you can have the higher speed of NAND while having the data safe on the HDD and still have plenty of capacity. I just don't know why they are using such small NAND caches, it seems to me 64Mb of RAM feeding 16gb of NAND and a 500Gb or better HDD would be the best outcome.
The problem with SSDs is the hot/crazy scale where you get hot performance but crazy failure rates but for this tech to get the economies of scale needed to lower prices there simply can't be a hot/crazy scale as it needs to at LEAST be as reliable as the tech it wants to replace and right now its anything but. Sure a geek knows to "backup backup backup" but consumers don't and those are the ones getting burnt by SSDs. Hell notice how quickly Tiger and Newegg switched back to HDDs for their kits instead of using SSDs? Want to bet it was getting too many complaints about failures?
And to make matters worse they don't "fail gracefully" as the old spinning rust does. honestly i can't remember a HDD that failed without warning in the past....oh hell the last one was probably a Deathstar around 2000, no thanks to SMART you'll usually get SOME kind of indication, be it SMART or noise or weird errors, something, and then you can get your data off. My gamer customers went back to running raptors in RAID because they bought SSDs and lost data, just one day they flipped the switch and poof! No drive even in BIOS and no way for me to get a single byte of data back.
So no thanks, until and unless you can give me a drive that works 5 years without fail (And NO I don't give a crap about your warranty unless it covers data, does it? No? Then i don't care and neither will my customers as its not the drive we give a crap about, its our stuff) then me and my customers will stick with the spinning rust. Hell with Win 7 there is no need to boot, superfetch will load all your apps when you need them into RAM based on usage patterns, and with cameras and video sucking up ever more space what does SSD have to offer really? Maybe in servers where IOPS is king, but normal users already have machines MUCH faster than they are, SSD really offers them no benefits over spinning rust IMHO. Hell the new 2.5s even park the heads at the slightest movement so they don't fail like the bad old days. Better to simply use a super fast SDHC for readyboost in that laptop or get a hybrid than to risk losing all your stuff. At least in the hybrid if the NAND fails you still have a HDD that you can still get your stuff off of.
Not to mention there is ZERO reliable sources backing this thing up, not the name of the mother, not anybody from the school nothing. Smells like the conservatives couldn't milk anymore out of Obamacare (Which BTW I hope you like losing in November, that stunt where you cheered the thought of a young man dying because he didn't have the money for insurance at the debates was priceless, all those rich people cheering makes Willie Horton look like a bad joke) so they needed to find another nannystate angle.
BTW notice how anything that helps the poor is bad and labeled "socialism" which to the right is like kiddie fiddler, but anything that helps Wall Street like gutting regulations, H1-Bs, or corporate handouts is being good and fair? Yes a program that makes sure little kids have good food to eat is horrible! Why I might have to pay some taxes to feed those little bastards! I'm shocked they didn't call for the abolition of school lunch programs even though we now have charities that are trying to provide the other two meals because we have millions of starving kids in the USA right now. How sad that in less than 20 years we have backslid to the point in many ways the poor are worse off than they were when Kennedy tour Appalachia. Never underestimate greed though, as those cheering rich people at the debate showed. if it came down to a million dead or raising their taxes 10% they'd be paying for mass graves to be dug by illegals, how fucking pathetic.
A +5 for THAT? Really? Might want to look up the shortages of just about EVERY drug across the board that is no longer in patent protection. The drug companies have been quietly dropping more and more generics because thanks to Wall Street becoming Vegas with nicer clothes if you don't make iMoney your stock price will be crap. With such a high barrier to entry the invisible hand BS just won't fly in big pharma so if they don't do something you won't have to worry about generics soon as there simply won't be any. the biggest companies buy out the smaller generic companies and then either quit making the generics or slightly change the formula and get another patent. This is why we should have a "national pharma" that creates nothing but no longer patented drugs at 15% above costs. This would give us the generics we need and within a few years would be one of the few branches of government that actually MADE money instead of merely spending it.
Question: As someone who has never run WM what advantages does it have over more supported lightweight DEs like XFCE or LXDE? Because those are well supported with many apps that integrate well and are VERY light on resources whereas this has been dead for ages so naturally application support for the look and feel of WM i'm sure is sorely lacking.
Not saying its not a good WM, hell if someone went to the trouble to bring it back for the dead i'm sure it has SOME good points, i simply don't know what they are. What distros support WM? Which ones have the latest version talked about in TFA? Are there any distros that prepackage it in a light distro like Vector does with IceWM and JWM? Virtualbox images? BTW anybody that prefers KDE 3.x would do well to try Vector Linux and their "Classic KDE" release, its pretty good.
Actually you can by simply making sure the users can't run custom code on their device, or do you know a secret way to hack that tiVo? THIS, this right here, is why FOSS don't mean shit in mobile. With PCs you have a handful of bog standard parts and good luck anybody locking you out of the hardware, with phones all it takes is code signing or efuses to make that device a brick unless you do what the OEM tells you in the approved manner. After all, what good is having the code to modify if you can't actually run the modified code on anything but a simulator?
It was the networks that killed WebOS, nobody else. hell they practically give away nice android phones, even Walmart has a nice android offering on their Straight Talk pay as you go line. I've tried friend's straight talk droid, its quite nice and like $129 without a contract. Where HP failed was in royally kissing the ass of the networks, if they could have gotten them to sell the Pre at like $60 with contract we'd see them everywhere, same reason why WinPhone is going nowhere as nobody is offering it cheap.
Simple it went out of patent protection so the companies won't make it anymore. this is why I believe we need state run pharma companies whose job it is to make no longer patented drugs. I've spoken with my doctor who tries to stay at the cutting edge because so many things come down the pipe for psoriatic arthritis and according to him many of the drugs that work well but don't have 8000% profit margins are being quietly dumped. Welcome to the future where the drug that works will be canceled for a drug that doesn't because they can make coke and hookers money on the second.
God don't ever go down to the southern delta bottoms then bud, your head would asplode! There a sentence like "I'ma fixing ta get right on that, probably tamarrah" would be perfectly acceptable. What many have labeled "ebonics" is simply MS delta bottom speech which if you don't know how "is and be" replace about a dozen words depending on context you'll probably need a translator. Hell I've lived in the south all my life and even i need a translator once I get around Yazoo MS.
Zero and here is why: Geeks think like geeks and NOT the public and sure as hell nothing like consumers. For those that may have missed it let me give you the opportunity to see through the eyes of the consumer:
A Phone is NOT a computer but "A screen i poke that makes calls, plays angry birds and lets me Google and comes with my contract" which is why they don't care how locked down it is, they toss when they get a new contract and figure since phone A is different than phone B nothing will work from one to the other but the SIM card.
A tablet is NOT a computer but "A big phone I can't call on that I poke that surfs and lets me watch movies" so they will have NO desire to run Windows on it, because windows runs on computers and that is NOT a computer.
Finally the reason Linux and ARM are failwhales on the netbook space is because there is no such thing as a netbook it is instead a "baby laptop and babies can do everything a big computer can do only slower, because babies are smaller than big people" got it?
So MSFT can shoot themselves in the face with Windows 8, aka "Ballmer wants to be Apple so damned bad he's gonna fuck the desktop trying to build a WinPad" all they want, it just won't matter. to the public MSFT makes ONE thing, and that is "The thing that lets me run my programs and has a keyboard and is called Windows" and frankly they don't have a fricking clue if its XP or 7, its just Windows. MSFT has been trying to sell tablets for a decade now and gotten nowhere because people are hostile if you break their perceptions. i have allowed over 200 customers to play with Win 8 here at the shop and down to a man THEY ALL HATE IT because "That's not Windows its a cell phone!" and therefor isn't what they expect nor want. Pads and cell phones are supposed to act like phones and NOT like Windows, and when they hear the word "Windows" they want a desktop or a laptop/"baby laptop" and THAT IS IT.
So all the Linux guys can quit freaking about "ZOMFG they are locking down Win 8 so I can't hack it" because this thing is gonna make MSFT Bob look like a good idea. the quicker MSFT just accepts they are the new IBM, with a well paying niche they are gonna be in forever, the better. because if people want an iShiny they'll buy an iShiny and if they want Windows they damned well better get a keyboard and mouse/trackpad with the thing along with a desktop and start button or they WILL be pissed.
Noooo...they should embrace the valve model and realize while you will NEVER get rid of piracy you CAN turn a hell of a lot of those pirates into customers by embracing the big three concept, which is make it simple, make it easy, make it cheap. I knew a LOT of game pirates, yet almost none of them actually pirate games anymore...why? because of Steam, Steam makes it simple as "push button to get game" and makes it easy with instant patching and matchmaking, and more importantly they make it cheap with constant promos and sales to entice those that wouldn't pay full price.
You could do the same with TV and movies VERY easily, there is no damned reason why i shouldn't be able to buy an AVI of any episode of any show for say 25c. that roughly figures up to about what you'd pay for a box set on Amazon and if you showed the episode free in the clear in the first place you sure as hell aren't gonna affect piracy by giving me an AVI that would actually play on my dad's media tank. Same thing for movies, why should I be able to buy that 4 year old movie out of the Walmart bargain bin for $4 but a digital copy costs something like $20 and is DRMed out the ass? if its on DVD you sure as hell aren't affecting piracy by selling me an AVI because the pirates will have uploaded it years ago.
This is no different than how the RIAA kept shooting themselves in the face screaming " Music downloads will kill music!" and now are setting record profits thanks to iTunes. In fact as valve showed when they mad over 1700% PROFITS by selling L4D at $1.99 if the RIAA would lower that MP3 down to say a quarter a song they would be raking in truckloads of money and wiping out the pirates. So my friend this has NOTHING to do with pirates, it has to do with control and the ability to sell an infinite resource as a scare commodity and therefor charge assraping prices. go DIAF media companies, we won't miss you.
Yep as someone that services and builds PCs 6 days a week I can tell you for home users the most popular is.....drumroll....plain old P2P. That's right, your fasttracks, your Gnucleus, although BT has gained some simply because of the high profile of TPB and the clients that are simple enough your grandma could use them. Next round i predict semi anon software that your grandma can run where they mix in some plausible deniability using encrypted cache stores just to make it extra painful for the *.A.As and may i say i hope it hurts.
Those bastards screw the artists, see meatloaf going bankrupt fighting the record companies for nearly 20 years because they had the brass balls to claim bat out of hell 1 never made a dime. Yeah the album that set a record for longest run on the top 200 never made a dime, and if you tickle my balls they play jingle bells. hell look at Cheap trick having to sue right now because the record company refuses to give them a cent of digital downloads because those didn't exist in the 70s therefor the record companies say tough shit. Pretty much ALL the major artists of the 70s aren't seeing a dime on iTunes, the record companies pocket every cent.
So until We, The People as well as the artists are given a seat at the bargaining table as a musician please rob these fuckers blind. Living a stone's throw from Memphis I've seen many a kid sign the record contracts with stars in their eyes only to get robbed blind by the record companies who take everything and use Hollywood accounting to give the kid a bill even if the album sells a million and they recorded it themselves. Honestly the fucking mob are more honest than those bastards and this whole thing is NOT about piracy, its about control and making sure they can continue to rob the artists. Hell artists got a bigger cut in the 1950s as a percentage than now, and thanks to "forever minus a single day" copyrights they can continue to rob the artist even after they are dead. But now they are scared, the combo of digital recording and the tubes mean new artists can just sign profit sharing deals with promotion companies and bypass the system, and thanks to digital they can't keep selling you the White Album like they did with album to 8 track to cassette to CD, this frightens them. Good DIAF you back stabbing leeches.
Lucky bastard, i'm allergic to Sulfa AND *cillin's AND Levaquin, luckily someone showed me a trick around Levaquin reactions by taking a couple of benadryl first. Frankly you should be glad you have something that works as I've pretty much kept a sinus infection for the past couple of years and after trying everything finally was told that pretty much all drugs for the treatment of psoriatic arthritis has as a side effect permanent sinus infection. Wonderful. And the only thing that ever killed the damned thing (erythromycin) you can't ever seem to find anymore. Just great.
And there are people that actually build their own machines and use linux as their primary OS, but they are like 0.03% of the population at best...your point friend? just because YOU, an ubergeek, has figured out a way to actually use the thing for all this stuff DOES NOT MEAN the rest of the planet has. hell i hate to break the news to ya but the vast majority wouldn't even know what a VPN was! don't believe me, ask the next bunch of folks you are in line with at the minimart, and then ask them what they think of pads and what they would use them for. I think you'll get your mind blown when they say games and watching videos.
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Bah! yet again Microsoft leads the way with everything from the little squeaker to Nuclear farts (which are PROFESSIONAL nuclear farts no less) to finally The Ultimate Fart! and all of them will cost you money! Never let it be said that Microsoft can't make the WinPhone just as stupid as everyone else!
It won't help and here's why: You have people packed like rats in the megacities like LA and NYC which will be a breeding ground for any new nasty. With the rate of travel if a new nasty does get loose which if anything we have seen when you have lots of poor (like now) with little access to medicine and healthcare (again like now) and who don't see a doctor until they are practically dead (ditto) you have a perfect storm for some new nasty. And finally you have the antibiotics being ruined by big ranching using it to fatten up the animals, again adding to the risk.
In the end that bit in the Matrix about humans and viruses is both true and false. true we do outbreed our environment but then mother nature seems to come up with its own answer and that is some bug that thins the herd and basically hits the reset button. With the speed of travel and borders that leak like sieves the bug that would have just wiped out an area a hundred and fifty years ago can easily wipe out a continent or more. its just a matter of when and where. personally my money is on some idiot cutting down trees in the rainforest running across some bug man hasn't been exposed to yet and giving us another black death.
"I think the puppet on the left shares my beliefs, i think the puppet on the right is more to my liking...hey wait a minute there's one guy controlling BOTH puppets!" from the late great often stolen from Bill Hicks. Sad the man has been gone more than 20 years and if anything his words are MORE true than they have ever been. But if you think Nobama or Mittens or Santwhorum give a flying fuck about anybody but themselves and their corporate masters you've drank too much koolaid.
I know I shouldn't respond to an AC but the wrongness was threatening to cause a singularity. For such an argument to hold you would need to show the sum total they have spent on projects and what the outcome was. Now if they have spent several billion on thousands of projects and that is the only two that came to fruition? one could easily argue that its stupid to give them more money for such a lousy ROI. BTW there was the SAGES system which was build by DOD before DARPA was ever born and one could argue that those first digital transmissions over phone lines was the actual birth of the net and what DARPA did was simply the next logical step.
Because the fed works so well with everything else? this would also kill local initiatives dead. for example since the city I live in is VERY good at not trying to extend a tax and kills it at the voter approved time it wasn't difficult for them to come before the people and say 'It would be helpful if we had a main linkup between the business district and the freeway that would allow one to go from one end to another while bypassing the most congested parts of town thereby moving the large trucks off the main drag" and they got a 2c sales tax for 4 years approved which paid for the linkup.
So allow me to say a hearty "Hell no!" to a national sales tax. I still have at least some measure of say in local politics and can use grass roots to affect the outcome. As we have seen time and time again unless your last name is Gates you can give it up when it comes to affecting the fed, you just replace one shill with another. that 7% would quickly become 7,8,9,10,11,etc as they came up with one excuse after another to pass their spending off on the poor, meanwhile the rich would just do their large purchases overseas and keep their money in the Caymans like old Mittens does.
Before the age of millisecond trading when one had to actually plan these things and hold a stock for longer than minutes? the problem is the stock market simply wasn't built for what its currently being used for, look up its history and you'll see it was about INVESTING in a business you thought would make money in the LONG run. this let businesses have much needed capital to expand and grow, which benefited both the investor and the economy as a whole.
What you have with all the computers and day traders is essentially a giant leech on the economy, with the current system you would be rewarded if you set fire to your business for the insurance or fired all of the employees because the stock would shoot up for a few hours or days and this would allow the leeches to make money while the CxOs cashed out their golden parachutes. In my own area the local teleco and cableco haven't invested in a single foot of line in over 15 years, because this investment would cause the stock price to go down. Instead the CxOs simply cash out the increased profits from gouging the customers and use what's left to buy smaller companies and gut them, thus growing again by leeching NOT investing. this whole system in its current form is completely broken and i predict a total market collapse within the next decade, the economic crisis across the west is just the canary in the coal mine.
Love your UID BTW, my original Pentium 100 gamer machine is still working 5 days a week as a C&C controller for a custom lathe that only has an ISA card for a controller, man they don't make 'em like that anymore.
But I agree with your points completely. I may have a 1Tb external that holds my data and disk images, along with constantly backing up data to DVDs but that don't mean I'm willing to deal with the downtime of having an SSD crap itself just for some speed boost I won't notice except in certain situations, like booting which I almost never do anymore. Hell i don't even boot my netbook, it hibernates.
With that in mind I recommend if you can find any the Samsung Ecogreen drives you snatch a couple. I tested out both the 1Tb and 2Tb drives in some seriously rough conditions, we are talking factory floor and construction trailers, and by lowering the spin from 7200 to 5400 these drives are damned near indestructible in normal use. I was so impressed i actually replaced all my drives with Ecodrives INCLUDING the boot drives and found that the increased cache keeps there from being any real performance penalty in using these as OS drives. It also runs waaaaay cooler than any 7200 drive I've ever seen, with the high on my Seagate drives being 122F and the Ecodrives topping at 106F with no additional fans whereas with the Seagates i had a fan mounted in the carriage for each drive just to keep them from getting crazy hot. they even bench better than the 8Mb 7200 Seagate, with the Seagate scoring 106Mbps and the Ecodrive scoring 134Mbps. If you want a long lasting drive that is cool, quiet, runs great and has plenty of storage I highly recommend you grab one of the Samsung drives before they are all gone.
Well I can tell you a friend was hired to make models for the wildcatters and what he learned and showed me was quite disturbing. he was handed pretty much all the data on the area so he could make his models of the geology they would be working with and when he laid a copy of the map the local college had of earthquakes and the map he got from the wildcatters he could overlay them and it was a perfect match, one for one with the wells. Also this is an area with tons of bedrock, and the highest quake measure by the local college since they started setting up stations and taking readings right after WWII was in the 1.9 range with one 3 every twenty years or so, after the wildcatters it was tons of 3s and some 4s and the machines are registering tons of hits so this fracking is really causing some slippage down below.
The final problem which my friend was bit in the ass by and which is REALLY SCARY is that these groups have already set up a way to avoid paying damages if they cause an environmental disaster which means not only do they have ZERO reason to give a fuck about environmental safety but that they are already expecting shit to go bad and are prepped for it. How did they pull this off you ask? Simple they have set up shell corps that own ALL the assets, from the mineral rights and drilling equipment down to the office furniture and then the drilling "company" which is just a front leases the equipment from the shell. As my friend found out when this bunch ran up a couple of bills and people starting trying to sue they simply burn the front company and are back in business the next day with a new front company!
Mark my words at best we are looking at future superfund sites that We, The People will get stuck with while the money men laugh their asses off while walking away counting the cash and at worst we are gonna have our very own Bhopal when these guys set off a major quake or poison all the water for an entire area for decades to come. Thanks to the far right gutting regulations left and right and dodges like the above there simply is NO incentive for them to give a flying fuck. I'm all for increasing domestic production but I don't want us to become another China, with land poisoned and water that you can light on fire. We HAVE to have the regulations in place to make those that drill responsible for any messes they make WITHOUT EXCEPTIONS or they will simply not give a fuck.
Well I can only speak about the one debunking I saw and i thought Randi was kinda bullshit. I mean for the dousing debunking he stuck these guys on the second floor of a building while switching water pipes with an airgap of a fricking story? WTF does that prove? that would be like proving fire doesn't exist by giving someone a piece of paper sealing in a vacuum and saying "Light that with this match bitch". A much more fair test would have had them simply walk across the grounds while trying to find a known underground water source in an area that otherwise didn't have water, like say a large buried pipe and then comparing their results with a control group that merely guessed at where the water was and compared results. I'm all for debunking but lets be fair in the methods.
Because Seagate and WD have a nice MAD thing going on since each company has bought out half the former competitors (Hitachi and Samsung being the last two they bought up) so each side knows the other would bury them in patents in court. With flash there is still enough players and patents out there not owned by a megacorp to make it turn nasty, just look at how a little company that most had probably never heard of called rambus was able to troll the RAM market for years.
I say give it a decade though, and all of the bit players will be bought up by a couple of the big dogs and you'll end up with another MAD situation. Look at how even when AMD and Intel were tying up in court neither went after the other's core X86 patents because each would have enough patents that could hurt the other both companies would be screwed, or how ATI and now AMD and Nvidia haven't really gone after each other over core patents as just like with Intel and AMD its better in the long run to simply cross license under RAND than risk having their products tied in litigation for half a decade.
Sadly this is why unlike in the old days you simply can't have a lot of competition in a market, because as the smaller ones have trouble competing they end up becoming patent trolls. You know that is a serious threat when there are plenty of firms that do nothing but buy up patents for trolling which is why i think there needs to be some sort of "Use it or lose it" clause to keep this trolling from dragging down the system.
Well because having a netbook weigh 2.8 pounds instead of 60 is nice? you are also forgetting the enemy of all things electronic, and that's heat with a capital H. Even fitting more than 2 drives in your typical mATX case can be tricky unless you make two of the drives the slower green drives as the heat quickly shoots into dangerous territory without putting enough fans in that sucker that it sounds like an F15, putting a dozen 80gb drives in RAID would be a cooling nightmare.
Ultimately i think the answer will lie with hybrids but hopefully with a twist in that there should be a way to upgrade/replace the NAND on the unit but even if there isn't at least with the hybrid once the NAND is gone you still have your data as the hybrids copy the data while leaving the original on the HDD, kinda like what MSFT did with Readyboost. This way you can have the higher speed of NAND while having the data safe on the HDD and still have plenty of capacity. I just don't know why they are using such small NAND caches, it seems to me 64Mb of RAM feeding 16gb of NAND and a 500Gb or better HDD would be the best outcome.
The problem with SSDs is the hot/crazy scale where you get hot performance but crazy failure rates but for this tech to get the economies of scale needed to lower prices there simply can't be a hot/crazy scale as it needs to at LEAST be as reliable as the tech it wants to replace and right now its anything but. Sure a geek knows to "backup backup backup" but consumers don't and those are the ones getting burnt by SSDs. Hell notice how quickly Tiger and Newegg switched back to HDDs for their kits instead of using SSDs? Want to bet it was getting too many complaints about failures?
And to make matters worse they don't "fail gracefully" as the old spinning rust does. honestly i can't remember a HDD that failed without warning in the past....oh hell the last one was probably a Deathstar around 2000, no thanks to SMART you'll usually get SOME kind of indication, be it SMART or noise or weird errors, something, and then you can get your data off. My gamer customers went back to running raptors in RAID because they bought SSDs and lost data, just one day they flipped the switch and poof! No drive even in BIOS and no way for me to get a single byte of data back.
So no thanks, until and unless you can give me a drive that works 5 years without fail (And NO I don't give a crap about your warranty unless it covers data, does it? No? Then i don't care and neither will my customers as its not the drive we give a crap about, its our stuff) then me and my customers will stick with the spinning rust. Hell with Win 7 there is no need to boot, superfetch will load all your apps when you need them into RAM based on usage patterns, and with cameras and video sucking up ever more space what does SSD have to offer really? Maybe in servers where IOPS is king, but normal users already have machines MUCH faster than they are, SSD really offers them no benefits over spinning rust IMHO. Hell the new 2.5s even park the heads at the slightest movement so they don't fail like the bad old days. Better to simply use a super fast SDHC for readyboost in that laptop or get a hybrid than to risk losing all your stuff. At least in the hybrid if the NAND fails you still have a HDD that you can still get your stuff off of.
Not to mention there is ZERO reliable sources backing this thing up, not the name of the mother, not anybody from the school nothing. Smells like the conservatives couldn't milk anymore out of Obamacare (Which BTW I hope you like losing in November, that stunt where you cheered the thought of a young man dying because he didn't have the money for insurance at the debates was priceless, all those rich people cheering makes Willie Horton look like a bad joke) so they needed to find another nannystate angle.
BTW notice how anything that helps the poor is bad and labeled "socialism" which to the right is like kiddie fiddler, but anything that helps Wall Street like gutting regulations, H1-Bs, or corporate handouts is being good and fair? Yes a program that makes sure little kids have good food to eat is horrible! Why I might have to pay some taxes to feed those little bastards! I'm shocked they didn't call for the abolition of school lunch programs even though we now have charities that are trying to provide the other two meals because we have millions of starving kids in the USA right now. How sad that in less than 20 years we have backslid to the point in many ways the poor are worse off than they were when Kennedy tour Appalachia. Never underestimate greed though, as those cheering rich people at the debate showed. if it came down to a million dead or raising their taxes 10% they'd be paying for mass graves to be dug by illegals, how fucking pathetic.
A +5 for THAT? Really? Might want to look up the shortages of just about EVERY drug across the board that is no longer in patent protection. The drug companies have been quietly dropping more and more generics because thanks to Wall Street becoming Vegas with nicer clothes if you don't make iMoney your stock price will be crap. With such a high barrier to entry the invisible hand BS just won't fly in big pharma so if they don't do something you won't have to worry about generics soon as there simply won't be any. the biggest companies buy out the smaller generic companies and then either quit making the generics or slightly change the formula and get another patent. This is why we should have a "national pharma" that creates nothing but no longer patented drugs at 15% above costs. This would give us the generics we need and within a few years would be one of the few branches of government that actually MADE money instead of merely spending it.
Question: As someone who has never run WM what advantages does it have over more supported lightweight DEs like XFCE or LXDE? Because those are well supported with many apps that integrate well and are VERY light on resources whereas this has been dead for ages so naturally application support for the look and feel of WM i'm sure is sorely lacking.
Not saying its not a good WM, hell if someone went to the trouble to bring it back for the dead i'm sure it has SOME good points, i simply don't know what they are. What distros support WM? Which ones have the latest version talked about in TFA? Are there any distros that prepackage it in a light distro like Vector does with IceWM and JWM? Virtualbox images? BTW anybody that prefers KDE 3.x would do well to try Vector Linux and their "Classic KDE" release, its pretty good.
Actually you can by simply making sure the users can't run custom code on their device, or do you know a secret way to hack that tiVo? THIS, this right here, is why FOSS don't mean shit in mobile. With PCs you have a handful of bog standard parts and good luck anybody locking you out of the hardware, with phones all it takes is code signing or efuses to make that device a brick unless you do what the OEM tells you in the approved manner. After all, what good is having the code to modify if you can't actually run the modified code on anything but a simulator?
It was the networks that killed WebOS, nobody else. hell they practically give away nice android phones, even Walmart has a nice android offering on their Straight Talk pay as you go line. I've tried friend's straight talk droid, its quite nice and like $129 without a contract. Where HP failed was in royally kissing the ass of the networks, if they could have gotten them to sell the Pre at like $60 with contract we'd see them everywhere, same reason why WinPhone is going nowhere as nobody is offering it cheap.
Simple it went out of patent protection so the companies won't make it anymore. this is why I believe we need state run pharma companies whose job it is to make no longer patented drugs. I've spoken with my doctor who tries to stay at the cutting edge because so many things come down the pipe for psoriatic arthritis and according to him many of the drugs that work well but don't have 8000% profit margins are being quietly dumped. Welcome to the future where the drug that works will be canceled for a drug that doesn't because they can make coke and hookers money on the second.
God don't ever go down to the southern delta bottoms then bud, your head would asplode! There a sentence like "I'ma fixing ta get right on that, probably tamarrah" would be perfectly acceptable. What many have labeled "ebonics" is simply MS delta bottom speech which if you don't know how "is and be" replace about a dozen words depending on context you'll probably need a translator. Hell I've lived in the south all my life and even i need a translator once I get around Yazoo MS.
Personally I'd rather have that than "I Wuv U sweetie weetie snookums" any damned day of the week, thanks ever so.
Zero and here is why: Geeks think like geeks and NOT the public and sure as hell nothing like consumers. For those that may have missed it let me give you the opportunity to see through the eyes of the consumer:
A Phone is NOT a computer but "A screen i poke that makes calls, plays angry birds and lets me Google and comes with my contract" which is why they don't care how locked down it is, they toss when they get a new contract and figure since phone A is different than phone B nothing will work from one to the other but the SIM card.
A tablet is NOT a computer but "A big phone I can't call on that I poke that surfs and lets me watch movies" so they will have NO desire to run Windows on it, because windows runs on computers and that is NOT a computer.
Finally the reason Linux and ARM are failwhales on the netbook space is because there is no such thing as a netbook it is instead a "baby laptop and babies can do everything a big computer can do only slower, because babies are smaller than big people" got it?
So MSFT can shoot themselves in the face with Windows 8, aka "Ballmer wants to be Apple so damned bad he's gonna fuck the desktop trying to build a WinPad" all they want, it just won't matter. to the public MSFT makes ONE thing, and that is "The thing that lets me run my programs and has a keyboard and is called Windows" and frankly they don't have a fricking clue if its XP or 7, its just Windows. MSFT has been trying to sell tablets for a decade now and gotten nowhere because people are hostile if you break their perceptions. i have allowed over 200 customers to play with Win 8 here at the shop and down to a man THEY ALL HATE IT because "That's not Windows its a cell phone!" and therefor isn't what they expect nor want. Pads and cell phones are supposed to act like phones and NOT like Windows, and when they hear the word "Windows" they want a desktop or a laptop/"baby laptop" and THAT IS IT.
So all the Linux guys can quit freaking about "ZOMFG they are locking down Win 8 so I can't hack it" because this thing is gonna make MSFT Bob look like a good idea. the quicker MSFT just accepts they are the new IBM, with a well paying niche they are gonna be in forever, the better. because if people want an iShiny they'll buy an iShiny and if they want Windows they damned well better get a keyboard and mouse/trackpad with the thing along with a desktop and start button or they WILL be pissed.
Noooo...they should embrace the valve model and realize while you will NEVER get rid of piracy you CAN turn a hell of a lot of those pirates into customers by embracing the big three concept, which is make it simple, make it easy, make it cheap. I knew a LOT of game pirates, yet almost none of them actually pirate games anymore...why? because of Steam, Steam makes it simple as "push button to get game" and makes it easy with instant patching and matchmaking, and more importantly they make it cheap with constant promos and sales to entice those that wouldn't pay full price.
You could do the same with TV and movies VERY easily, there is no damned reason why i shouldn't be able to buy an AVI of any episode of any show for say 25c. that roughly figures up to about what you'd pay for a box set on Amazon and if you showed the episode free in the clear in the first place you sure as hell aren't gonna affect piracy by giving me an AVI that would actually play on my dad's media tank. Same thing for movies, why should I be able to buy that 4 year old movie out of the Walmart bargain bin for $4 but a digital copy costs something like $20 and is DRMed out the ass? if its on DVD you sure as hell aren't affecting piracy by selling me an AVI because the pirates will have uploaded it years ago.
This is no different than how the RIAA kept shooting themselves in the face screaming " Music downloads will kill music!" and now are setting record profits thanks to iTunes. In fact as valve showed when they mad over 1700% PROFITS by selling L4D at $1.99 if the RIAA would lower that MP3 down to say a quarter a song they would be raking in truckloads of money and wiping out the pirates. So my friend this has NOTHING to do with pirates, it has to do with control and the ability to sell an infinite resource as a scare commodity and therefor charge assraping prices. go DIAF media companies, we won't miss you.
Yep as someone that services and builds PCs 6 days a week I can tell you for home users the most popular is.....drumroll....plain old P2P. That's right, your fasttracks, your Gnucleus, although BT has gained some simply because of the high profile of TPB and the clients that are simple enough your grandma could use them. Next round i predict semi anon software that your grandma can run where they mix in some plausible deniability using encrypted cache stores just to make it extra painful for the *.A.As and may i say i hope it hurts.
Those bastards screw the artists, see meatloaf going bankrupt fighting the record companies for nearly 20 years because they had the brass balls to claim bat out of hell 1 never made a dime. Yeah the album that set a record for longest run on the top 200 never made a dime, and if you tickle my balls they play jingle bells. hell look at Cheap trick having to sue right now because the record company refuses to give them a cent of digital downloads because those didn't exist in the 70s therefor the record companies say tough shit. Pretty much ALL the major artists of the 70s aren't seeing a dime on iTunes, the record companies pocket every cent.
So until We, The People as well as the artists are given a seat at the bargaining table as a musician please rob these fuckers blind. Living a stone's throw from Memphis I've seen many a kid sign the record contracts with stars in their eyes only to get robbed blind by the record companies who take everything and use Hollywood accounting to give the kid a bill even if the album sells a million and they recorded it themselves. Honestly the fucking mob are more honest than those bastards and this whole thing is NOT about piracy, its about control and making sure they can continue to rob the artists. Hell artists got a bigger cut in the 1950s as a percentage than now, and thanks to "forever minus a single day" copyrights they can continue to rob the artist even after they are dead. But now they are scared, the combo of digital recording and the tubes mean new artists can just sign profit sharing deals with promotion companies and bypass the system, and thanks to digital they can't keep selling you the White Album like they did with album to 8 track to cassette to CD, this frightens them. Good DIAF you back stabbing leeches.
Lucky bastard, i'm allergic to Sulfa AND *cillin's AND Levaquin, luckily someone showed me a trick around Levaquin reactions by taking a couple of benadryl first. Frankly you should be glad you have something that works as I've pretty much kept a sinus infection for the past couple of years and after trying everything finally was told that pretty much all drugs for the treatment of psoriatic arthritis has as a side effect permanent sinus infection. Wonderful. And the only thing that ever killed the damned thing (erythromycin) you can't ever seem to find anymore. Just great.
And there are people that actually build their own machines and use linux as their primary OS, but they are like 0.03% of the population at best...your point friend? just because YOU, an ubergeek, has figured out a way to actually use the thing for all this stuff DOES NOT MEAN the rest of the planet has. hell i hate to break the news to ya but the vast majority wouldn't even know what a VPN was! don't believe me, ask the next bunch of folks you are in line with at the minimart, and then ask them what they think of pads and what they would use them for. I think you'll get your mind blown when they say games and watching videos.