Fallacy number 364- A program developed for a completely different purpose counts no matter what! In reality though PS is a SERVER program designed for SERVERS and used by these things called ADMINS that are actually paid real money to learn these things! Now I have been building and selling computers since before there ever was a Windows and you know what i've never seen? I've never seen powershell installed on a desktop and I've certainly never seen any OEM include it. but I've seen a ton of Linux distros that put bash right on the desktop or in the quicklaunch position, probably because they know you'll need it often.
So in other words it geekery "I'm better than thou" bullshit. this is something I've complained about for years but geeks never seem to get, having a GOOD UI, with real ease of use, this is NOT a bad thing folks! its not like a good UI would somehow make your precious Bash disappear, you could still start up in single user mode and bash away if that's what made you happy, it would just make your OS more accessible to more people. Wouldn't that be a good thing? Wouldn't that be nice? Or is FOSS just another clique with the whole "Us VS them" BS.
i'm sorry but you are incorrect. I ran Vista on what was a pretty nice machine at the time, an Intel Pentium D 2.66Ghz, 2Gb of RAM, and a Geforce 7600GS and the thing was a dog, it would have "senior moments" and forget the network shares and not see them before being rebooted, would drag down the entire system when doing simple multitasking like watching a movie while doing a file transfer, and this was seen all the way through SP1 which is when i finally gave up on the POS. Now that exact same machine is running Win 7 Home and has been since Oct 09, and its fast, it runs great on the network, nothing about the hardware has been changed, still the same Pentium D, still the same GPU, same everything but when I use that machine its like night and day. The performance of Vista was so bad it got to be a running joke at the shop, when someone would come in with Vista we'd say "I'm sorry" and make a little tisk tisk noise. Take any of those machines and slap Win 7 on them (which I have done quite often) and all I get from customers is "Wow, this is like a new machine, thanks!". so calling Win 7 no better than Vista is simply incorrect, its like saying WinXP is no better than WinME, there really is no comparison.
As for win 8, anybody smell that? that stench of fail that is practically leaking from the thing like a silent but deadly fart? I've been running the dev preview on an Athlon X2 i have sitting in the corner of the shop, now this baby has 3gb of RAM, fast 200gb SATA, its not a bad machine at all, but everyone who has tried it, more than 200 so far, has HATED IT with a capital H! this is the same stupidity we saw with winMo only in reverse, instead of tying the desktop metaphor to mobile we are seeing the mobile metaphor tied to desktop and its still a failwhale. Honestly after spending 3 days with it as my primary OS I couldn't stand it anymore, without a touchscreen its just painful to use.
And what person is gonna want a Win 8 ARM that doesn't run Windows programs? THIS, this right here, is the reason we need to call Captain Obvious to save the day. MSFT simply refuses to believe that the ONLY reason people use Windows is WINDOWS PROGRAMS which as we see in TFA simply won't run on ARM. Here we see MSFT vainly believe if they Ape the Apple philosophy they can get Apple iMoney, but its so full of fail its unreal. Without the lock on x86 people simply won't buy windows, and why should they? apple has nicer designs, android is cheaper, they have NO selling point for Win 8. Mark my words its gonna make Vista look like 95, its gonna go down so hard it'll finally kill those WinME and Bob jokes. in the future people will say "Its a Win 8 level of fail!" to describe projects that have no chance. maybe we'll get lucky and this turkey will get Ballmer finally fired and they can bring Allchin or Ozzie back to right the ship, because this is just a disaster and even the shills like the Yahoo product girl, whose answer to every product is "Buy it! Buy it now!" said of Win 8" Uhhh...wait until you get something with a touchscreen before getting it" which for her was the equivalent of "My eyes! The goggles they do nothing!"
Thank you. This is what amazes me about those that have a perception bubble regarding Intel, as you said it isn't about running Intel chips faster its about tying a boat anchor to anything that is NOT Intel and its even worse than that. Did you know that Intel does the same thing to the Pentium 3? to me this is the smoking gun, the proof that removes ALL doubt that its benchmark rigging. You see the Pentium 3 was stomping the early P4 by nearly 40%, because the super long pipes made cache misses painfully slow.
Now you can take the EXACT SAME CODE and compile it with an open compiler like GCC and you'll see that a first gen P4 will score slower than a late model P3, it was so pronounced that a 1.1GHz P3 would stomp a 1.7GHz P4, the cache misses caused that big a penalty. yet to take that same code and compile it with ICC and wham! suddenly that same P4 is scoring more than 40% higher than the P3! this is thanks to the ICC being rigged to only look at CPUID, if it has the P4 or greater CPUID it will run full SEE without even bothering to check further, but if it gives a CPUID of a P3 (Which IIRC was simply Intel and a model number, like 586) or AMD or Via it will automatically dump the entire code path into X87 mode, again without bothering to check for the standard CPU feature bits which have been standard for over 20 years.
Now Patch86 I don't see how anybody can apologize or excuse it when we have such an obvious smoking gun, because if Intel was only concerned about SSE support how would they not know what their own pentium 3 supported? there is only one answer that fits the facts, its that intel purposely and with malice of forethought rigged their compiler so that any code, including ALL of the popular benchmarks, would show the chips Intel wanted to push as scoring better than they would in a non rigged test. this is no different and just as blatant as the "quack.exe" rigging that Nvidia did with their FX series drivers, only it isn't as easy for people to test themselves as only Via has a CPUID that can be changed on the fly. But to test it all you have to do is compile the same code on both the GCC and ICC compilers and see for yourself, the ICC one will run slower on ALL AMD, Via, and Pentium 3 CPUs, whereas the GCC will run equally on all. this is as blatant a rigging as one could get and I only hope that you will do as I do and point out this fact whenever you see reviews where comments are allowed. And I'm no AMD fanboi, in fact until this came out i was a lifelong Intel man but I can't support obvious market rigging and corruption, I just can't. But its bad enough I can tell when a program is compiled with ICC, because it acts like a slug even on this Phenom X6 I have now, pretty obvious IMHO.
While this is true, and my Trace Elliot (one of the last ones when it was still a Brit company, before it got bought out by Peavey) does does this to an extent, you really do need a little compression on a bass to even out the string response. I have a really nice Squire Pro tone 5 (the one that made them quit the Pro tone series because it was cutting into Fender sales) and an American Fender JP90 and even though both of these have really nice pickups the dynamics on fast runs, especially when you are finger picking which is how i prefer to play, can cause some serious spikes. So I have a little Zoom B1X ( yes its cheap but its 32 bit and since i'm only using it for compression and the occasional fuzz is super clean) and I've found both musicians and ordinary folks can tell when I don't have it on. i'll get comments like "What happened? You usually sound deep and punchy" or something like that when I don't kick on the Zoom. it really gives a nice warmth to the low notes while keeping the highs from being too piercing.
So while I don't care for compression on guitar or being used for the entire mix I think for the bass a little compression, not too much as it'll get that squashed sound, but just a little to even everything out really gives a bass a nice clean attack.
BTW here is some proof and note this is only a single run with a single benchmark software, they didn't investigate further. other sites have run both games and other benchmarks and found the same or worse. Pay particular attention to the memory subsystem test, when it is changed from 'Centaur Hauls' to "Genuine Intel' the test suddenly gives the Via chip a 48% increase in score!
I just wish i could find the site again where a programmer took apart the code and saw what it was doing (maybe somebody can find me a link please?) and here is what he found: If CPUID = Genuine Intel then have full SSE support, if CPUID = Authentic AMD then force code to run in X87 mode. since X87 has been depreciated since the late 90s we are talking about tying a fricking boat anchor to anything that uses ICC and runs on AMD or Via!
To me this is the smoking gun that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, and for those that say "But but..maybe they are afraid that AMD doesn't have full SSE support!" riddle me this...why does it do the SAME TRICK to a Pentium 3? I can answer that, because in 2002 the Pentium 3 would score more than 30% higher than the first generation P4 Netburst because naturally those long pipes made cache misses a serious problem. After the ICC was rigged guess what happened? in ALL the benchmarks suddenly the P4 scored more than 40% HIGHER than the P3! Now nobody noticed at the time because that was when the new P4 was released and everyone figured they got the bugs out, but that programmer that took the code apart ran a benchmark on the same second gen P4 alongside a last gen P3 and found with the cripple code disabled the P3 again stomped the second gen P4. this leaves NO doubt, the ICC cripple code was designed to rig benchmarks and make the Athlon and any chip Intel wasn't pushing look worse than the P4 which we all know now to be false. When the OEMs started using Athlon they simply paid the OEMs bribes not to sell AMD chips, again how can anyone not call it what it is? This is even more blatant than MSFT charging for Windows based on how many machines they sold with competitor's OSes!
Uhhh...don't shop at scammer heaven, aka eBay? And I have NEVER had a single hassle from ANY of the big three, Tiger, Newegg, or Amazon and frankly i rarely even have to worry about return time since they will next day the replacement before mine ever gets in the mail and then will simply charge me if I don't get the old one back, since i'm sending it back anyway its not like I care about that. here let me give a better example:
I order a barebone kit for my dad, its a $199 quadcore deal. Somebody screws up and ships a 65w board with a 95w chip. I pop on the Tiger chat and they say "Opps, hang on a minute, let me get the board supplier on the phone just to make sure they didn't mislabel the board" and she pops back up in a second 'Nope, you're right that won't work, we'll rush you out a new board, just ship that one back in the box we send the new one in" and when it got there the next day they already had the RAM sitting in the bottom of the box, all I had to do was slap it on and waltz across the street to the UPS store, easy peasy. The board they sent BTW was a LOT nicer than the one that originally came but dad prefers ATI graphics chips so he just popped on and ordered an ATI board and handed it to me, so my GF is getting a new quad when she comes down I built around the new board. But I've NEVER had to wait longer than 3 days, most they next day at no extra charge. And the second the new board was at their warehouse they gave dad creedit for the return so that new Nvidia board cost $0.00 even though as I said it was a nicer board than the Zotac that originally came with the kit.
So the simple answer is "if its too good to be true, they're a scammer" and call it a day. i haven't touched ebay since they bought paypal and everyone i know that has has regretted it, chips with bent pins, HDDs that have click of doom, total scammers. And Amazon is frankly wonderful for books, my mom loves cheesy paperback horror, the Mercy Thompson series and anything by Patrica Briggs and friends, and i get them there at usually more than half off and even supersaver is usually 3 day turnaround and i'm in the middle of mudsuck AR. As I said the ONLY time I had a book not show up Amazon rushed out brand new copies (even though we had ordered used) and had them shipped next day, hassle free. as for your "RMA process" hitting print is hard for you? Because that is all I've ever done, pop on the chat, say i need an RMA and why, and they pop up the RMA and say "just print this and stick it on the box" and then they give me credit for the shipping on my account, which since i'm always needing another thumbstick or power supply or burner is just fine by me. So I honestly don't see how it could be any nicer, short of them sending $1000 hookers to hand me the items on a silver platter but my GF would probably object to that LOL.
Actually I have a better choice, one that fits their boneheaded moves of late. Picture this, Steve Ballmer with his tongue out wearing an "I Heart Apple!" beanie, since every damned thing that monkey has done has been a "me too! oh oh me too!" for at least the past five years. lets look at this shall we? Hmmm...locked down OS, App store, making everything go through corporate....where have I see this before? Could it be...I don't know....iPad?
For all those zealots that think I'm some sort of "M$ Ninja" being paid to sell MSFT crap let me blow their perception bubbles apart...Windows 8 is gonna be the biggest flop since Bob, not even Vista failed as badly as Win 8 is gonna fail, its a touchscreen desktop when less than 0.2% of the world's desktop and laptops are actually being sold with touchscreens, and when a 17 inch touchscreen is $300 and a 25 inch widescreen monitor is $150 that isn't gonna change between now and release in Oct, and NOBODY is gonna want a Windows 8 ARM device that looks like Windows but doesn't actually run Windows programs! All this is is the exact opposite of what they have tried and failed with for a decade. remember how they made WinMo look like XP, right down to the start button? remember how it flopped? Well now they are just gonna take the WinPhone UI and slap it on the desktop! How fricking stupid can you get, did Apple slap iOS onto the Mac? NO of course not. Why? Because the devices have completely different inputs therefor requiring completely different UIs! this is OS 101 stuff people!
So fear not FOSS lovers, this isn't the 90s and a year after Win 8 launch you'll be able to find this crap in the bargain bin right next to the Zune and kin and Vista boxes in the "shit nobody wants even when its cheap" section. I sell to normal people, the 99% of the population that aren't geeks or power users, just average folks. So far i've shown Win 8 to nearly 200 people and do you know how many positives I've gotten? ZERO. The closest i got to a positive was this exchange: Why that looks like a nice cell phone, is that Android? i heard its really nice...what do you mean its Windows? Windows what? Why that is just stupid! Why would I want a cell phone on my computer?" and out of the mouth of Ms Pipkin comes wisdom. Everyone who sees it thinks its a cell phone and everyone who tries it quickly becomes frustrated because without a touchscreen its about as fun as trying to control your phone using nothing but a keyboard.
so no SuricouRaven we don't need the Borg back, the Borg were actually scary. what we need is an icon showing Ballmer for what he is, a biog fricking clown of a CO with an Apple fetish. Ironic that every time i put Ballmer spellcheck wants to correct it to ballgirl, as that pretty much is what he is, someone chasing after the balls Apple hits.
And you just made yourself part of the problem by hurling insults. Using words like denialism or truthism to discredit those that speak out frankly is wrong, no matter what you believe. if you think they are wrong simply say 'you are wrong, here is the links that show this" and move on, its simple, easy, and doesn't turn any discussion into crap slinging which is what insults are.
And again as we saw with the ice ring correlation does not equal causation. Anybody that would have looked at the before and after of that glacier would have automatically said 'Its proof of AGW!" whereas if one would have dug a little deeper i'm sure the constant trucks pulling away from it fully loaded left some pretty deep tracks. Again it is better to discuss these things rationally instead of simply calling each other names. if they refuse to listen even after you have provided links without them providing any citation to refute yours simply point out they have a perception bubble and refuse to listen to reason and move on.
Because reviews from actual geeks is usually worth more than hands on? I mean holding that Seagate 1.5Tb would have taught me nothing but over a dozen reviews that were 'Holy crap i bought a dozen of these and they all choked and died hard in less than two months!" tells me quite a lot. Take the new netbook I got, most places had it listed as having win 7 32 bit and with a max RAM of 4Gb, but Amazon had as its first review a guy that pointed out it was actually Win 7 X64 and oh it takes 8Gb and here is the link. it was only $6 difference between the 4gb stick and a matched pair at that time so I bought and can say i'm really happy with my EEE. Handling it frankly wouldn't have told me anything more than i already knew since i had handled 12 inch netbooks before and had already tried out a customer's older EEE so i knew what to expect. it was online where they had not only the info about it actually being 64 bit and a link to the matched pair but even a tutorial on how to take the unit apart if you'd like to change out the HDD for an SSD. The first reviewer had actually done that and according to him with 8gb of RAM and an SSD the EEE handles more like a CULV than a netbook.
so I can see wanting to do your shopping online because handling it only tells you about size and feel, it tells you nothing about whether the unit sucks power, or dies 5 minutes after you get it home, runs too hot to watch HD video or struggles with some kinds of content, all that you can find out from reviews. Hell I had a real nice back and forth on a review I did for a Deneb X4, I even ran a couple of programs for the guy and timed them just so he'd know what he was looking at, and i'd probably do the same thing for someone with my new Thuban if they asked on my review, you just can't get that kinda thing offline.
I can actually answer how they stay in business....DIYers with their balls in a vice. i have an engineering friend and i don't know how many times the shack has bent him over because he needed a spool of solder or resistor or some other little thing for a project that the deadline was looming on and he'd rather get the bite took out of his wallet than risk not getting paid. Since these little projects he whips off for the local college can easily net him a thousand or more a pop can't say as i blame him, but man do they gouge on that kind of stuff.
And I think you just nailed why these stores are going down, its a total crapshoot as to what kind of service you're gonna get. for electronics in my area we have two Best buys and a Staples. Now the first best buy, the farther away one naturally, actually has helpful staff, will help you find what you are looking for and if you seem interested in a new PC they will often throw in a little swag just to seal the deal, like a sleeve for that netbook or a little bookbag to carry your laptop, its just little stuff but it does make you feel better about buying there. Now the closer best buy is like a ghost town, if they didn't have RFID tags you could carry off half the store without ever seeing anybody. and if you do see an employee they do this almost comical trying to pretend they don't see you, this "Quick! look the other way and move at a brisk pace away from them!" kinda thing. And the staples? God that store is total crap. there is NOT A SINGLE THING on the shelves they will sell you, not one, its ALL bait and switch. that printer? that monitor? laptop? desktop? anything? all you get is "Nope outta stock, but we do have" and they will point out something that is nearly double the price. and that is of course not counting the fact that their prices sucked to begin with, but i guess a 40% markup isn't enough for the manager of that location, its 70% or nothing. No wonder their parking lot always looks like the place is abandoned.
So frankly i don't blame people for just not buying offline, frankly even if the price was a little higher I'd rather deal with amazon. with amazon i have a problem and its "No problem, we'll fix it" and its hassle free. When my sister bought some books and they just disappeared thanks to the thieving local post office (tracking showed it getting there then nothing, just gone) they never said a word other than "We're sorry we'll fix it" and had new replacements shot out there by fed ex in just two days. When i ordered a PC case that ended up looking like it was used as a tire chuck they said 'Don't bother sending it back, we'll send you another one" and there it was, no muss or fuss. Between them, Newegg and Tigerdirect I rarely even shop local for anything other than groceries anymore and even though the prices ARE cheaper online even if they were 20% higher I'd still buy thanks to hassle free shopping. Maybe if the shops would take a "customer is always right" attitude about service instead of having such high turnover and taking clueless workers because they are cheap maybe their business would go up.
Its actually quite simple, Intel got away with rigging the markets. First they bribed the OEMs to take the P4 and kill the Athlon which is why when the Athlon was stomping the P4 you couldn't find hardly a single Athlon but you could find Duron/Sempron because part of their bribes were based on how many you sold of the competitor's chips and they were given a higher quota of the weak chips. Now how anybody, when one of the former CEOs called Intel kickbacks "like cocaine' and during the MHz wars there were several quarters that dell wouldn't have shown a profit without Intel kickbacks, how anybody can say they shouldn't get busted for that is beyond me, this is even worse than what MSFT was doing with the OEMs.
Secondly to this very day you can take a Via CPU (the only chip that lets you change CPUID) and any of the major benchmarks, change the CPUID to Intel and watch the chip score 30% or higher than the exact same CPU which is because Intel rigs their compiler. this is also well known and documented and goes back years, for those that haven't read it here is a link to get you started. BTW note that even though they were supposed to remove the "cripple AMD" function instead all they did was documented it, and certainly not in any easy way to find, at least not on the compiler website last i checked. To compare this would be like rigging Windows so that when FOSS code is run it hangs and drags down the FOSS programs to make them inferior to MSFT's own programs. this is still affecting reviews to this day such as this quote I remember from a review of netbooks "The benchmarks we ran all say the Atom 525 beats the E350 by a very large margin but for some reason the real world tests don't seem to bare this out" sorry i can't remember offhand where, i believe netbookreviews was the name of the blog.
Both of these frankly should have gotten Intel seriously busted for antitrust but instead they were able to slip a check for 1.25 billion to AMD, which frankly was far less than they made by crippling their competitor and forcing AMD to sell its fabs just to stay afloat, and all the problems at least in the US went bye bye just like TFA. I was someone that bought Intel exclusively since the 386Dx but i also believe in having a fair market and I simply can't support outright market rigging of this level. Frankly Intel should have been busted just like MSFT and been watched like a hawk for a decade to make sure they couldn't pull this kind of crap. i only hope the EU busts the hell out of them because its obvious in this "corporation yay!" climate we have in the government now there is no way Intel has to worry about the USA saying anything, no matter what they do. hell if the MSFT antitrust came up in today's climate not only would they not have been busted, they probably would have been rewarded with more tax breaks!
You'd think with one party supposedly championing the free market as the solution to everything they'd care about someone subverting it but i guess the only free market they care about is the one where they can sell their services to the highest bidder.
You can also make a killer cake with it. start with a yellow cake mix and mix in a handful of semisweet chocolate chips, as its cooking you poke some holes with a toothpick and drop some chocolate chips (or you can use M&Ms for color) into the holes so they make these nice chocolate streaks, and then when you pull it out and the cake is still hot spread a layer of marshmallow fluff so that as it cools it evens out the fluff and makes a nice smooth top. Seriously rich though, best to cut it with some vanilla ice cream when you serve it as it cuts the sweetness.
As for TFA considering the kinds of things people put on their FB this really doesn't surprise me. Privacy has been replaced by "look at me look at meee!" for awhile now as far as the public is concerned and I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of folks go "Ooooh free stuff!" and jump on board. It still amazes me how many treat computers as these magical black boxes and are then shocked at how trivially i can find out their surfing habits. i don't know how many times i've had a customer say 'I wish i could remember the name of the site i was on when it happened so i can show you" and when i pull up their browsing history and go right to it they are always "holy crap, how did you do that? are you some sort of hacker?" which is why we PC repair guys pretty much wear this face exclusively during working hours.
You forgot "Everybody sees Pink Floyd and figure there might be some cool bootlegs on the site and stampede the thing". Personally this is one thing i love about being a normal indie musician, we can just not compress the living crap out of our music. I'm happy to say the only compression I've ever used is a pedal to even out the string response on my basses and most of the local artists agree with me that compressing the hell out of the sound is crap. Better to just turn the volume down a little and have plenty of headroom for the instruments instead of squishing everything just so you can turn the volume up a little higher. This is especially true when you like to play three piece like i do as its the gaps between instruments that lets it "breathe" for lack of a better word and lets me and the drums get a nice chunky backbeat going while the guitar and vocals kinda float on the top.
Now while I agree with him on acoustics sadly most of us can't afford the kind of spaces required for that, especially for recording. That is why for us DIYers I'd say the local studio has the best compromise, with each instrument separated in soundproof doghouses and a clear plexi booth for the drummer so you can play together and get that live feel without having everyone stepping on each other tracks. Sure it would be nice if we could pipe the instruments to amps in their own large rooms to get some natural depth but those kinds of spaces are seriously costly so you do what you got to do. That said a good mike along with a DI mixed in does give a nice full sound even when you are using isolation boxes, at least IMHO.
Yes but as we have sen the "ZOMG the sky is falling!" predictions have been wrong before. Also what if some of the problems ARE man made but different that what you think? they recently busted a truck (Sorry i can't find the link, maybe someone here has better Google FU that I?) that was hauling tons of glacial ice and it looks now to be part of an ice smuggling ring. If someone would have simply looked at the numbers on that glacier they would have said it was proof of AGW when in reality it was just being carted off to make bottled water.
But in the end let us remember that good science should allow and indeed welcome skeptics because that is how theories get better, by going over the data, finding flaws, fixing them, doing studies, this is how we learn folks. Frankly i don't trust anybody that starts calling names when someone has a different viewpoint like "Deniers" as they are simply derailing any chance at discussion and smells too much like yelling apostate to me.
Ask and ye shall receive Mr AC... Bam! This is the latest one with the XP mini and Linux live CDs built in as well as the ability to run straight from Windows without needing to boot the CD. that said the mini XP image is a great way to troubleshoot a system and it gives you a handy launcher with all the tools sorted by category. neat, clean, easy to use. Enjoy!
So your answer is to just let the corps do what they want without even having to bother with the bribes? you DO realize that with a jug of milk at $4 the corps are pushing the conservatives to do away with the minimum wage even though thanks to the feds rampant inflation of the money what they are being paid now is worth less than it was in 1963? Or look at what happened with the banks after Glass Stegall ended, banks now treat Wall street like Las Vegas with nicer outfits.
I'd say the ONLY thing we agree on is a smaller fed because i want that power back in the hands of the states so that We, The People can have control again. But we don't need less regulation we need more regulation and the ones we have now strictly enforced. We also need to replace "free" trade which is anything but with China manipulating its currency and replace it with fair trade, and we need to punish corps that have sent 42,400 factories overseas since 2001. here are a few more facts for you, here is the source and please remember that as with glass Stegall in the past 20 years the government has been gutting regulations left and right so by your accounts it should be great here since the businesses are free to do as they will, instead we have:
1.-43.6 Americans living in poverty, the highest number in the entire 51 years of record keeping, 2.-4 million more join them a year. 3.-In 2000 11 percent were living in poverty, by 2009 that had jumped to 14 percent. 3.- The US poverty rate is now the third worse on the entire planet 4.-More than 50 million are now without health insurance, so they will be going to our ERs and dragging down the system. 5.-Now there are more than 40 million Americans on food stamps and these numbers are two years old, its even worse now. 6.-And for something closer to us geeks manufacturing in the computer industry, our tech that is supposed to save us, is now actually lower than it was in 1975.
Look at the numbers for yourself. Since Reagan we've had one corporate ass kissing POTUS after another and while the regulations have either disappeared or are simply not enforced the businesses haven't used that to become "job creators" unless you count jobs in Bangalore and Beijing. Hell the "job czar" that Nobama hired not only didn't pay any taxes with his megacorp he actually got 1.2 billion in rebates back only to use that money to close one of the last factories they had in the USA and send it to India. he even had the gall to brag "These aren't the low skill low wages jobs i'm sending, these are the good high wage jobs. We're doing this because India is where the money is and we want the jobs to be where there are customers". We Mr Prick CEO maybe if you and your friends hadn't systematically gutted our manufacturing base over the past 30 years we might actually HAVE money to buy your products, ever think of that?
No my friend we need to drop the hammer on these corps and when they offshore throw their CEOs and their families out with it, let them live in China and breathe through a mask. After all its good enough for their employees right?
Don't forget the story of the Golem which IIRC goes back to ancient Jewish mythology involving the power of creation. But if I wanted to compare a story to Frankenstein that would be it, someone who believes they are smart enough to wield the power of creation and ultimately creates a soulless monster that again IIRC (Man its been years and years since i read the original) ultimately destroys its creator. Wasn't there also a story about a great mechanical man created by the Gods to protect an island back in the days of the ancient Greek morality plays? again excuse if i'm missing details as its been a good 25+ years since i read any of those ancient stories.
What always amazed me wasn't the sci fi from ancient times but science fact that we lost, everything from hand grenades that could be fire or smoke grenades, a form of napalm in Greek fire, hell the Romans even had taxis that charged by the mile and used lithium baths for mental health treatment.
Actually IIRC they were using an old Indeo codec to super compress the video because the video chip in the Genesis could only render something like 64 colors at a time when streaming and the bandwidth was severely limited because the system was never built for streaming so to keep 30FPS they really had to compress the living shit out of everything. We all forget how truly badly they compressed the thing, just look up some screenshots of sewer shark and night trap to see how truly awful the compression was. Add in the fact it cost so much to shoot the footage back then you ended up with a recipe for disaster where you had "games" like what came out of digital pictures at the time.
If you haven't tried them though I'd strongly suggest you get an emulator along with the ISOs of Lunar, Eternal Champions, and Sonic CD. Those 3 will show you what could have been done with that system with just a little thought, ET had extra characters and moves along with a FMV ending for each character, Lunar had a huge story that even a supercart like Phantasy Star Generations would have been impossible to hold, and Sonic used the CD to create huge worlds with tons of new and hidden areas to explore. if they would have waited and released the CD and 32x as a single unit at a reasonable price and had the devs focus on packing more gaming instead of FMV maybe Sega would still be in the hardware game. i know after getting burned for over $200 for the CD only to have Sega abandon it I didn't get another Sega console until the Dreamcast was going out of business and the local stores were selling them with a couple of games for $40 just to unload them. i still have that Dreamcast BTW, while i never play DC games on it it makes a hell of a emulator box, great for playing NES, SNES, and Genesis games on.
Notice how I got modded down for not waving the flag? I wonder which fanboi did the modding, an Appleite, a Googler, a Softie or a FOSSie? As for your post, let me say i so rarely get to use this in a sentence...WHOOSH! Kinda missed the point didn't ya friend? the point was it doesn't matter how YOU feel about privacy as all your friends will happily post tons of info about you even if you avoid these services like the plague!
Just by following your FB friends and cross linking the data it would be trivially easy to build quite a bit of info about you even if you never touched Google or FB in your life and because so many of your friends and family use this you don't really have a choice, there is no opt out when it comes to keeping your family and friends from posting about you. these things have become like giant online diaries where people put every single thing that happens to them and if you are part of that life well congrats, you are now being datamined. And again that is if you opt out of the whole thing, but who doesn't Google? Who doesn't have a FB page? Its so bad the "Key of Awesome" did a parody called "The man without a Facebook" which showed this strange solitary creature with no FB! Gasp!
Actually there is a MUCH better tool friend, I'd suggest Hiren's Boot CD instead. not only does it have Dban as well as a good dozen or more HDD utilities but it has just about every tool you'd ever need from password reset to system info to testing of all major components. It really is a Swiss army knife of system tools and can be run off the CD in Windows so you can use the tools without needing to boot off the disc first. Truly a great tool to have.
I agree that Newegg should be told, as they may have a problem in their supply chain. Who knows what company they are buying these refurbs from and I'm sure they have in the contract they are supposed to be zeroed and testing prior to shipment. That said I always give any new drives a quick zeroing out just in case, you never know even on a new drive if some manufacturer in China is gonna have a bug on that machine that is formatting the drives and then a quick runthrough with spinrite on level I just to make sure they are good. For those who have never used the program spinrite on level I simply bypasses the firmware so the drive can't replace bad sectors with spares and then does a simple write/read/erase where it writes to each sector once and ensures that it can read the data before going on to the next. if a drive can't do a simple read/write without significant bad sectors it simply isn't worth trusting data to.
But I've had quite good luck with refurbs from both Newegg and Tigerdirect and if a drive passes spinrite level I it'll be no more risky IMHO than any other drive. You'd be amazed though at how many companies sell or toss drives with data on them, I had a friend working at one of the big telecos as a temp hand for their big computer upgrade and he calls me and says "Hey bud, you still got your truck? good why don't you come out here and bring it around back, they are just chunking their previous systems and most are loaded to the gills with excellent hardware and they said anybody that wants to can help themselves" so when i get there he loads what can't be more than 3 year old Dell workstations nearly to overflowing in my truck, around 60 in all. I get them back to the shop and go to fire one up to see what the BIOS says and missing the BIOS prompt it starts to boot! Sure enough the full OS is there, no password, and there is still all kinds of customer data on these things! I of course Dbanned the drives but if I would have been a bad guy it would have been like Xmas.
If what I saw was typical no wonder we have so many data breaches, but it really doesn't surprise me this guy ended up with drives that had data, picking up off lease systems I find that kind of thing all the time.
Oh come on now! Surely even the blind would notice/. has become a bunch of perception bubbles and flag waving, yes? As far as I've been able to figure it here is the current score, its Linux yay, Microsoft boo, Apple yay unless its against FOSS then its a battle royale with cheese between the FOSSies and Appleites, Canonical was yay and now they are boo, Open office was yay until it got bought by oracle which it then inherited Oracle's boo, Android yay, Google yay always no matter what because they "do no evil" snicker, HTC yay, Nokia boo, if i left out any yays or boos please feel free to fill them in.
Anyone that wants to karma whore can simply post anything that fits a yay on an approved subject, even if it makes no sense like saying "Just use Linux" when TFA is about a book review of Oracle DB management, and to get modded down all you have to do is risk popping a perception bubble by pointing out something no matter how obvious, watch as i go for a triple pop: Apple is too expensive and is using patents to try to block competition, Win 8 is a seriously stupid design that depends on touchscreens that the majority of computers won't have by Oct and I'd say what Google is doing would qualify as evil. Oh and in case you ain't noticed AC we have some lovers of perception bubbles making hundreds of accounts so they can modbomb anybody that doesn't wave the appropriate flag.
As for TFA can we all agree that Google is the new MSFT on the "Danger Will Robinson!" scale? Old Ballmer's head would asplode if the moron had an original thought and has such a hard on for trying to be Apple i bet he can't look at an iPad without having naughty thoughts. Meanwhile Google is gonna end up with so damned much info on the population and individuals that every three letter agency is just gonna be drooling at the thought of checking out their files and with the amount of secrets they'll be able to gather because so many people treat the Internet as this magical place where if there is nobody around it must not be known that someone like Nixon wouldn't have to risk planting bugs anymore, they'd just find out all the dirt they want from Google. Between Google and FB you might as well have a camera on your butt 24/7 because even if you avoid it your friends will be happy to plaster info about you on their pages.
So while I wish EPIC luck I'm afraid its a little too little, its a little too late as good luck convincing the public that everything they do on a PC or post to FB can be traced even if they set their FB status to private. Seems like it'd be a good way to shut down anybody that gets uppity though, the next one that tries to organize some tea party or occupy thing could easily get a call and be told "Do you REALLY want all your friends to know you are into midgets, shemales and granny gangbangs? if not then quit doing what you are doing" and watch them STFU but quick.
Oh I believe you friend and what's more i can tell you why, its cosmic rays. Even on earth there are enough cosmic rays that you WILL get bit flips even in the best shielded chips, you just get less flips the better shielded the chip is. I have a friend that is a retired NASA engineer, he designed and helped build most of the models and mockups and he said even with the hardened chips they had a formula to figure how much ECC to build into the system based on worst case scenarios for cosmic rays. You should look up the Google study on ECC and bit flips, they figured there was something like 3000+ bit flips a month in your average PC and the OS simply compensates for the error or reruns the code. of course in space you can't really afford to do that which is why they have to have everything extra hardened because even with ECC there is so many rays out there that your code would be salad.
Anyway if you are interested in that kind of thing, look up the Google paper as they did a multi year study on their server farms and came up with all kinds of interesting data. But I believe you, my friend still makes rockets and robots for NASA competition entries for the local college and I've seen bit flip with those small fast embedded chips they use for the instruments. You just have to code in a "fudge factor" as he put it and if you win the competition you can always use more hardened chips.
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Fallacy number 364- A program developed for a completely different purpose counts no matter what! In reality though PS is a SERVER program designed for SERVERS and used by these things called ADMINS that are actually paid real money to learn these things! Now I have been building and selling computers since before there ever was a Windows and you know what i've never seen? I've never seen powershell installed on a desktop and I've certainly never seen any OEM include it. but I've seen a ton of Linux distros that put bash right on the desktop or in the quicklaunch position, probably because they know you'll need it often.
So in other words it geekery "I'm better than thou" bullshit. this is something I've complained about for years but geeks never seem to get, having a GOOD UI, with real ease of use, this is NOT a bad thing folks! its not like a good UI would somehow make your precious Bash disappear, you could still start up in single user mode and bash away if that's what made you happy, it would just make your OS more accessible to more people. Wouldn't that be a good thing? Wouldn't that be nice? Or is FOSS just another clique with the whole "Us VS them" BS.
i'm sorry but you are incorrect. I ran Vista on what was a pretty nice machine at the time, an Intel Pentium D 2.66Ghz, 2Gb of RAM, and a Geforce 7600GS and the thing was a dog, it would have "senior moments" and forget the network shares and not see them before being rebooted, would drag down the entire system when doing simple multitasking like watching a movie while doing a file transfer, and this was seen all the way through SP1 which is when i finally gave up on the POS. Now that exact same machine is running Win 7 Home and has been since Oct 09, and its fast, it runs great on the network, nothing about the hardware has been changed, still the same Pentium D, still the same GPU, same everything but when I use that machine its like night and day. The performance of Vista was so bad it got to be a running joke at the shop, when someone would come in with Vista we'd say "I'm sorry" and make a little tisk tisk noise. Take any of those machines and slap Win 7 on them (which I have done quite often) and all I get from customers is "Wow, this is like a new machine, thanks!". so calling Win 7 no better than Vista is simply incorrect, its like saying WinXP is no better than WinME, there really is no comparison.
As for win 8, anybody smell that? that stench of fail that is practically leaking from the thing like a silent but deadly fart? I've been running the dev preview on an Athlon X2 i have sitting in the corner of the shop, now this baby has 3gb of RAM, fast 200gb SATA, its not a bad machine at all, but everyone who has tried it, more than 200 so far, has HATED IT with a capital H! this is the same stupidity we saw with winMo only in reverse, instead of tying the desktop metaphor to mobile we are seeing the mobile metaphor tied to desktop and its still a failwhale. Honestly after spending 3 days with it as my primary OS I couldn't stand it anymore, without a touchscreen its just painful to use.
And what person is gonna want a Win 8 ARM that doesn't run Windows programs? THIS, this right here, is the reason we need to call Captain Obvious to save the day. MSFT simply refuses to believe that the ONLY reason people use Windows is WINDOWS PROGRAMS which as we see in TFA simply won't run on ARM. Here we see MSFT vainly believe if they Ape the Apple philosophy they can get Apple iMoney, but its so full of fail its unreal. Without the lock on x86 people simply won't buy windows, and why should they? apple has nicer designs, android is cheaper, they have NO selling point for Win 8. Mark my words its gonna make Vista look like 95, its gonna go down so hard it'll finally kill those WinME and Bob jokes. in the future people will say "Its a Win 8 level of fail!" to describe projects that have no chance. maybe we'll get lucky and this turkey will get Ballmer finally fired and they can bring Allchin or Ozzie back to right the ship, because this is just a disaster and even the shills like the Yahoo product girl, whose answer to every product is "Buy it! Buy it now!" said of Win 8" Uhhh...wait until you get something with a touchscreen before getting it" which for her was the equivalent of "My eyes! The goggles they do nothing!"
Thank you. This is what amazes me about those that have a perception bubble regarding Intel, as you said it isn't about running Intel chips faster its about tying a boat anchor to anything that is NOT Intel and its even worse than that. Did you know that Intel does the same thing to the Pentium 3? to me this is the smoking gun, the proof that removes ALL doubt that its benchmark rigging. You see the Pentium 3 was stomping the early P4 by nearly 40%, because the super long pipes made cache misses painfully slow.
Now you can take the EXACT SAME CODE and compile it with an open compiler like GCC and you'll see that a first gen P4 will score slower than a late model P3, it was so pronounced that a 1.1GHz P3 would stomp a 1.7GHz P4, the cache misses caused that big a penalty. yet to take that same code and compile it with ICC and wham! suddenly that same P4 is scoring more than 40% higher than the P3! this is thanks to the ICC being rigged to only look at CPUID, if it has the P4 or greater CPUID it will run full SEE without even bothering to check further, but if it gives a CPUID of a P3 (Which IIRC was simply Intel and a model number, like 586) or AMD or Via it will automatically dump the entire code path into X87 mode, again without bothering to check for the standard CPU feature bits which have been standard for over 20 years.
Now Patch86 I don't see how anybody can apologize or excuse it when we have such an obvious smoking gun, because if Intel was only concerned about SSE support how would they not know what their own pentium 3 supported? there is only one answer that fits the facts, its that intel purposely and with malice of forethought rigged their compiler so that any code, including ALL of the popular benchmarks, would show the chips Intel wanted to push as scoring better than they would in a non rigged test. this is no different and just as blatant as the "quack.exe" rigging that Nvidia did with their FX series drivers, only it isn't as easy for people to test themselves as only Via has a CPUID that can be changed on the fly. But to test it all you have to do is compile the same code on both the GCC and ICC compilers and see for yourself, the ICC one will run slower on ALL AMD, Via, and Pentium 3 CPUs, whereas the GCC will run equally on all. this is as blatant a rigging as one could get and I only hope that you will do as I do and point out this fact whenever you see reviews where comments are allowed. And I'm no AMD fanboi, in fact until this came out i was a lifelong Intel man but I can't support obvious market rigging and corruption, I just can't. But its bad enough I can tell when a program is compiled with ICC, because it acts like a slug even on this Phenom X6 I have now, pretty obvious IMHO.
While this is true, and my Trace Elliot (one of the last ones when it was still a Brit company, before it got bought out by Peavey) does does this to an extent, you really do need a little compression on a bass to even out the string response. I have a really nice Squire Pro tone 5 (the one that made them quit the Pro tone series because it was cutting into Fender sales) and an American Fender JP90 and even though both of these have really nice pickups the dynamics on fast runs, especially when you are finger picking which is how i prefer to play, can cause some serious spikes. So I have a little Zoom B1X ( yes its cheap but its 32 bit and since i'm only using it for compression and the occasional fuzz is super clean) and I've found both musicians and ordinary folks can tell when I don't have it on. i'll get comments like "What happened? You usually sound deep and punchy" or something like that when I don't kick on the Zoom. it really gives a nice warmth to the low notes while keeping the highs from being too piercing.
So while I don't care for compression on guitar or being used for the entire mix I think for the bass a little compression, not too much as it'll get that squashed sound, but just a little to even everything out really gives a bass a nice clean attack.
BTW here is some proof and note this is only a single run with a single benchmark software, they didn't investigate further. other sites have run both games and other benchmarks and found the same or worse. Pay particular attention to the memory subsystem test, when it is changed from 'Centaur Hauls' to "Genuine Intel' the test suddenly gives the Via chip a 48% increase in score!
I just wish i could find the site again where a programmer took apart the code and saw what it was doing (maybe somebody can find me a link please?) and here is what he found: If CPUID = Genuine Intel then have full SSE support, if CPUID = Authentic AMD then force code to run in X87 mode. since X87 has been depreciated since the late 90s we are talking about tying a fricking boat anchor to anything that uses ICC and runs on AMD or Via!
To me this is the smoking gun that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, and for those that say "But but..maybe they are afraid that AMD doesn't have full SSE support!" riddle me this...why does it do the SAME TRICK to a Pentium 3? I can answer that, because in 2002 the Pentium 3 would score more than 30% higher than the first generation P4 Netburst because naturally those long pipes made cache misses a serious problem. After the ICC was rigged guess what happened? in ALL the benchmarks suddenly the P4 scored more than 40% HIGHER than the P3! Now nobody noticed at the time because that was when the new P4 was released and everyone figured they got the bugs out, but that programmer that took the code apart ran a benchmark on the same second gen P4 alongside a last gen P3 and found with the cripple code disabled the P3 again stomped the second gen P4. this leaves NO doubt, the ICC cripple code was designed to rig benchmarks and make the Athlon and any chip Intel wasn't pushing look worse than the P4 which we all know now to be false. When the OEMs started using Athlon they simply paid the OEMs bribes not to sell AMD chips, again how can anyone not call it what it is? This is even more blatant than MSFT charging for Windows based on how many machines they sold with competitor's OSes!
Uhhh...don't shop at scammer heaven, aka eBay? And I have NEVER had a single hassle from ANY of the big three, Tiger, Newegg, or Amazon and frankly i rarely even have to worry about return time since they will next day the replacement before mine ever gets in the mail and then will simply charge me if I don't get the old one back, since i'm sending it back anyway its not like I care about that. here let me give a better example:
I order a barebone kit for my dad, its a $199 quadcore deal. Somebody screws up and ships a 65w board with a 95w chip. I pop on the Tiger chat and they say "Opps, hang on a minute, let me get the board supplier on the phone just to make sure they didn't mislabel the board" and she pops back up in a second 'Nope, you're right that won't work, we'll rush you out a new board, just ship that one back in the box we send the new one in" and when it got there the next day they already had the RAM sitting in the bottom of the box, all I had to do was slap it on and waltz across the street to the UPS store, easy peasy. The board they sent BTW was a LOT nicer than the one that originally came but dad prefers ATI graphics chips so he just popped on and ordered an ATI board and handed it to me, so my GF is getting a new quad when she comes down I built around the new board. But I've NEVER had to wait longer than 3 days, most they next day at no extra charge. And the second the new board was at their warehouse they gave dad creedit for the return so that new Nvidia board cost $0.00 even though as I said it was a nicer board than the Zotac that originally came with the kit.
So the simple answer is "if its too good to be true, they're a scammer" and call it a day. i haven't touched ebay since they bought paypal and everyone i know that has has regretted it, chips with bent pins, HDDs that have click of doom, total scammers. And Amazon is frankly wonderful for books, my mom loves cheesy paperback horror, the Mercy Thompson series and anything by Patrica Briggs and friends, and i get them there at usually more than half off and even supersaver is usually 3 day turnaround and i'm in the middle of mudsuck AR. As I said the ONLY time I had a book not show up Amazon rushed out brand new copies (even though we had ordered used) and had them shipped next day, hassle free. as for your "RMA process" hitting print is hard for you? Because that is all I've ever done, pop on the chat, say i need an RMA and why, and they pop up the RMA and say "just print this and stick it on the box" and then they give me credit for the shipping on my account, which since i'm always needing another thumbstick or power supply or burner is just fine by me. So I honestly don't see how it could be any nicer, short of them sending $1000 hookers to hand me the items on a silver platter but my GF would probably object to that LOL.
Actually I have a better choice, one that fits their boneheaded moves of late. Picture this, Steve Ballmer with his tongue out wearing an "I Heart Apple!" beanie, since every damned thing that monkey has done has been a "me too! oh oh me too!" for at least the past five years. lets look at this shall we? Hmmm...locked down OS, App store, making everything go through corporate....where have I see this before? Could it be...I don't know....iPad?
For all those zealots that think I'm some sort of "M$ Ninja" being paid to sell MSFT crap let me blow their perception bubbles apart...Windows 8 is gonna be the biggest flop since Bob, not even Vista failed as badly as Win 8 is gonna fail, its a touchscreen desktop when less than 0.2% of the world's desktop and laptops are actually being sold with touchscreens, and when a 17 inch touchscreen is $300 and a 25 inch widescreen monitor is $150 that isn't gonna change between now and release in Oct, and NOBODY is gonna want a Windows 8 ARM device that looks like Windows but doesn't actually run Windows programs! All this is is the exact opposite of what they have tried and failed with for a decade. remember how they made WinMo look like XP, right down to the start button? remember how it flopped? Well now they are just gonna take the WinPhone UI and slap it on the desktop! How fricking stupid can you get, did Apple slap iOS onto the Mac? NO of course not. Why? Because the devices have completely different inputs therefor requiring completely different UIs! this is OS 101 stuff people!
So fear not FOSS lovers, this isn't the 90s and a year after Win 8 launch you'll be able to find this crap in the bargain bin right next to the Zune and kin and Vista boxes in the "shit nobody wants even when its cheap" section. I sell to normal people, the 99% of the population that aren't geeks or power users, just average folks. So far i've shown Win 8 to nearly 200 people and do you know how many positives I've gotten? ZERO. The closest i got to a positive was this exchange: Why that looks like a nice cell phone, is that Android? i heard its really nice...what do you mean its Windows? Windows what? Why that is just stupid! Why would I want a cell phone on my computer?" and out of the mouth of Ms Pipkin comes wisdom. Everyone who sees it thinks its a cell phone and everyone who tries it quickly becomes frustrated because without a touchscreen its about as fun as trying to control your phone using nothing but a keyboard.
so no SuricouRaven we don't need the Borg back, the Borg were actually scary. what we need is an icon showing Ballmer for what he is, a biog fricking clown of a CO with an Apple fetish. Ironic that every time i put Ballmer spellcheck wants to correct it to ballgirl, as that pretty much is what he is, someone chasing after the balls Apple hits.
And you just made yourself part of the problem by hurling insults. Using words like denialism or truthism to discredit those that speak out frankly is wrong, no matter what you believe. if you think they are wrong simply say 'you are wrong, here is the links that show this" and move on, its simple, easy, and doesn't turn any discussion into crap slinging which is what insults are.
And again as we saw with the ice ring correlation does not equal causation. Anybody that would have looked at the before and after of that glacier would have automatically said 'Its proof of AGW!" whereas if one would have dug a little deeper i'm sure the constant trucks pulling away from it fully loaded left some pretty deep tracks. Again it is better to discuss these things rationally instead of simply calling each other names. if they refuse to listen even after you have provided links without them providing any citation to refute yours simply point out they have a perception bubble and refuse to listen to reason and move on.
Because reviews from actual geeks is usually worth more than hands on? I mean holding that Seagate 1.5Tb would have taught me nothing but over a dozen reviews that were 'Holy crap i bought a dozen of these and they all choked and died hard in less than two months!" tells me quite a lot. Take the new netbook I got, most places had it listed as having win 7 32 bit and with a max RAM of 4Gb, but Amazon had as its first review a guy that pointed out it was actually Win 7 X64 and oh it takes 8Gb and here is the link. it was only $6 difference between the 4gb stick and a matched pair at that time so I bought and can say i'm really happy with my EEE. Handling it frankly wouldn't have told me anything more than i already knew since i had handled 12 inch netbooks before and had already tried out a customer's older EEE so i knew what to expect. it was online where they had not only the info about it actually being 64 bit and a link to the matched pair but even a tutorial on how to take the unit apart if you'd like to change out the HDD for an SSD. The first reviewer had actually done that and according to him with 8gb of RAM and an SSD the EEE handles more like a CULV than a netbook.
so I can see wanting to do your shopping online because handling it only tells you about size and feel, it tells you nothing about whether the unit sucks power, or dies 5 minutes after you get it home, runs too hot to watch HD video or struggles with some kinds of content, all that you can find out from reviews. Hell I had a real nice back and forth on a review I did for a Deneb X4, I even ran a couple of programs for the guy and timed them just so he'd know what he was looking at, and i'd probably do the same thing for someone with my new Thuban if they asked on my review, you just can't get that kinda thing offline.
I can actually answer how they stay in business....DIYers with their balls in a vice. i have an engineering friend and i don't know how many times the shack has bent him over because he needed a spool of solder or resistor or some other little thing for a project that the deadline was looming on and he'd rather get the bite took out of his wallet than risk not getting paid. Since these little projects he whips off for the local college can easily net him a thousand or more a pop can't say as i blame him, but man do they gouge on that kind of stuff.
And I think you just nailed why these stores are going down, its a total crapshoot as to what kind of service you're gonna get. for electronics in my area we have two Best buys and a Staples. Now the first best buy, the farther away one naturally, actually has helpful staff, will help you find what you are looking for and if you seem interested in a new PC they will often throw in a little swag just to seal the deal, like a sleeve for that netbook or a little bookbag to carry your laptop, its just little stuff but it does make you feel better about buying there. Now the closer best buy is like a ghost town, if they didn't have RFID tags you could carry off half the store without ever seeing anybody. and if you do see an employee they do this almost comical trying to pretend they don't see you, this "Quick! look the other way and move at a brisk pace away from them!" kinda thing. And the staples? God that store is total crap. there is NOT A SINGLE THING on the shelves they will sell you, not one, its ALL bait and switch. that printer? that monitor? laptop? desktop? anything? all you get is "Nope outta stock, but we do have" and they will point out something that is nearly double the price. and that is of course not counting the fact that their prices sucked to begin with, but i guess a 40% markup isn't enough for the manager of that location, its 70% or nothing. No wonder their parking lot always looks like the place is abandoned.
So frankly i don't blame people for just not buying offline, frankly even if the price was a little higher I'd rather deal with amazon. with amazon i have a problem and its "No problem, we'll fix it" and its hassle free. When my sister bought some books and they just disappeared thanks to the thieving local post office (tracking showed it getting there then nothing, just gone) they never said a word other than "We're sorry we'll fix it" and had new replacements shot out there by fed ex in just two days. When i ordered a PC case that ended up looking like it was used as a tire chuck they said 'Don't bother sending it back, we'll send you another one" and there it was, no muss or fuss. Between them, Newegg and Tigerdirect I rarely even shop local for anything other than groceries anymore and even though the prices ARE cheaper online even if they were 20% higher I'd still buy thanks to hassle free shopping. Maybe if the shops would take a "customer is always right" attitude about service instead of having such high turnover and taking clueless workers because they are cheap maybe their business would go up.
Its actually quite simple, Intel got away with rigging the markets. First they bribed the OEMs to take the P4 and kill the Athlon which is why when the Athlon was stomping the P4 you couldn't find hardly a single Athlon but you could find Duron/Sempron because part of their bribes were based on how many you sold of the competitor's chips and they were given a higher quota of the weak chips. Now how anybody, when one of the former CEOs called Intel kickbacks "like cocaine' and during the MHz wars there were several quarters that dell wouldn't have shown a profit without Intel kickbacks, how anybody can say they shouldn't get busted for that is beyond me, this is even worse than what MSFT was doing with the OEMs.
Secondly to this very day you can take a Via CPU (the only chip that lets you change CPUID) and any of the major benchmarks, change the CPUID to Intel and watch the chip score 30% or higher than the exact same CPU which is because Intel rigs their compiler. this is also well known and documented and goes back years, for those that haven't read it here is a link to get you started. BTW note that even though they were supposed to remove the "cripple AMD" function instead all they did was documented it, and certainly not in any easy way to find, at least not on the compiler website last i checked. To compare this would be like rigging Windows so that when FOSS code is run it hangs and drags down the FOSS programs to make them inferior to MSFT's own programs. this is still affecting reviews to this day such as this quote I remember from a review of netbooks "The benchmarks we ran all say the Atom 525 beats the E350 by a very large margin but for some reason the real world tests don't seem to bare this out" sorry i can't remember offhand where, i believe netbookreviews was the name of the blog.
Both of these frankly should have gotten Intel seriously busted for antitrust but instead they were able to slip a check for 1.25 billion to AMD, which frankly was far less than they made by crippling their competitor and forcing AMD to sell its fabs just to stay afloat, and all the problems at least in the US went bye bye just like TFA. I was someone that bought Intel exclusively since the 386Dx but i also believe in having a fair market and I simply can't support outright market rigging of this level. Frankly Intel should have been busted just like MSFT and been watched like a hawk for a decade to make sure they couldn't pull this kind of crap. i only hope the EU busts the hell out of them because its obvious in this "corporation yay!" climate we have in the government now there is no way Intel has to worry about the USA saying anything, no matter what they do. hell if the MSFT antitrust came up in today's climate not only would they not have been busted, they probably would have been rewarded with more tax breaks!
You'd think with one party supposedly championing the free market as the solution to everything they'd care about someone subverting it but i guess the only free market they care about is the one where they can sell their services to the highest bidder.
You can also make a killer cake with it. start with a yellow cake mix and mix in a handful of semisweet chocolate chips, as its cooking you poke some holes with a toothpick and drop some chocolate chips (or you can use M&Ms for color) into the holes so they make these nice chocolate streaks, and then when you pull it out and the cake is still hot spread a layer of marshmallow fluff so that as it cools it evens out the fluff and makes a nice smooth top. Seriously rich though, best to cut it with some vanilla ice cream when you serve it as it cuts the sweetness.
As for TFA considering the kinds of things people put on their FB this really doesn't surprise me. Privacy has been replaced by "look at me look at meee!" for awhile now as far as the public is concerned and I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of folks go "Ooooh free stuff!" and jump on board. It still amazes me how many treat computers as these magical black boxes and are then shocked at how trivially i can find out their surfing habits. i don't know how many times i've had a customer say 'I wish i could remember the name of the site i was on when it happened so i can show you" and when i pull up their browsing history and go right to it they are always "holy crap, how did you do that? are you some sort of hacker?" which is why we PC repair guys pretty much wear this face exclusively during working hours.
You forgot "Everybody sees Pink Floyd and figure there might be some cool bootlegs on the site and stampede the thing". Personally this is one thing i love about being a normal indie musician, we can just not compress the living crap out of our music. I'm happy to say the only compression I've ever used is a pedal to even out the string response on my basses and most of the local artists agree with me that compressing the hell out of the sound is crap. Better to just turn the volume down a little and have plenty of headroom for the instruments instead of squishing everything just so you can turn the volume up a little higher. This is especially true when you like to play three piece like i do as its the gaps between instruments that lets it "breathe" for lack of a better word and lets me and the drums get a nice chunky backbeat going while the guitar and vocals kinda float on the top.
Now while I agree with him on acoustics sadly most of us can't afford the kind of spaces required for that, especially for recording. That is why for us DIYers I'd say the local studio has the best compromise, with each instrument separated in soundproof doghouses and a clear plexi booth for the drummer so you can play together and get that live feel without having everyone stepping on each other tracks. Sure it would be nice if we could pipe the instruments to amps in their own large rooms to get some natural depth but those kinds of spaces are seriously costly so you do what you got to do. That said a good mike along with a DI mixed in does give a nice full sound even when you are using isolation boxes, at least IMHO.
Yes but as we have sen the "ZOMG the sky is falling!" predictions have been wrong before. Also what if some of the problems ARE man made but different that what you think? they recently busted a truck (Sorry i can't find the link, maybe someone here has better Google FU that I?) that was hauling tons of glacial ice and it looks now to be part of an ice smuggling ring. If someone would have simply looked at the numbers on that glacier they would have said it was proof of AGW when in reality it was just being carted off to make bottled water.
But in the end let us remember that good science should allow and indeed welcome skeptics because that is how theories get better, by going over the data, finding flaws, fixing them, doing studies, this is how we learn folks. Frankly i don't trust anybody that starts calling names when someone has a different viewpoint like "Deniers" as they are simply derailing any chance at discussion and smells too much like yelling apostate to me.
Ask and ye shall receive Mr AC... Bam! This is the latest one with the XP mini and Linux live CDs built in as well as the ability to run straight from Windows without needing to boot the CD. that said the mini XP image is a great way to troubleshoot a system and it gives you a handy launcher with all the tools sorted by category. neat, clean, easy to use. Enjoy!
So your answer is to just let the corps do what they want without even having to bother with the bribes? you DO realize that with a jug of milk at $4 the corps are pushing the conservatives to do away with the minimum wage even though thanks to the feds rampant inflation of the money what they are being paid now is worth less than it was in 1963? Or look at what happened with the banks after Glass Stegall ended, banks now treat Wall street like Las Vegas with nicer outfits.
I'd say the ONLY thing we agree on is a smaller fed because i want that power back in the hands of the states so that We, The People can have control again. But we don't need less regulation we need more regulation and the ones we have now strictly enforced. We also need to replace "free" trade which is anything but with China manipulating its currency and replace it with fair trade, and we need to punish corps that have sent 42,400 factories overseas since 2001. here are a few more facts for you, here is the source and please remember that as with glass Stegall in the past 20 years the government has been gutting regulations left and right so by your accounts it should be great here since the businesses are free to do as they will, instead we have:
1.-43.6 Americans living in poverty, the highest number in the entire 51 years of record keeping, 2.-4 million more join them a year. 3.-In 2000 11 percent were living in poverty, by 2009 that had jumped to 14 percent. 3.- The US poverty rate is now the third worse on the entire planet 4.-More than 50 million are now without health insurance, so they will be going to our ERs and dragging down the system. 5.-Now there are more than 40 million Americans on food stamps and these numbers are two years old, its even worse now. 6.-And for something closer to us geeks manufacturing in the computer industry, our tech that is supposed to save us, is now actually lower than it was in 1975.
Look at the numbers for yourself. Since Reagan we've had one corporate ass kissing POTUS after another and while the regulations have either disappeared or are simply not enforced the businesses haven't used that to become "job creators" unless you count jobs in Bangalore and Beijing. Hell the "job czar" that Nobama hired not only didn't pay any taxes with his megacorp he actually got 1.2 billion in rebates back only to use that money to close one of the last factories they had in the USA and send it to India. he even had the gall to brag "These aren't the low skill low wages jobs i'm sending, these are the good high wage jobs. We're doing this because India is where the money is and we want the jobs to be where there are customers". We Mr Prick CEO maybe if you and your friends hadn't systematically gutted our manufacturing base over the past 30 years we might actually HAVE money to buy your products, ever think of that?
No my friend we need to drop the hammer on these corps and when they offshore throw their CEOs and their families out with it, let them live in China and breathe through a mask. After all its good enough for their employees right?
Don't forget the story of the Golem which IIRC goes back to ancient Jewish mythology involving the power of creation. But if I wanted to compare a story to Frankenstein that would be it, someone who believes they are smart enough to wield the power of creation and ultimately creates a soulless monster that again IIRC (Man its been years and years since i read the original) ultimately destroys its creator. Wasn't there also a story about a great mechanical man created by the Gods to protect an island back in the days of the ancient Greek morality plays? again excuse if i'm missing details as its been a good 25+ years since i read any of those ancient stories.
What always amazed me wasn't the sci fi from ancient times but science fact that we lost, everything from hand grenades that could be fire or smoke grenades, a form of napalm in Greek fire, hell the Romans even had taxis that charged by the mile and used lithium baths for mental health treatment.
Actually IIRC they were using an old Indeo codec to super compress the video because the video chip in the Genesis could only render something like 64 colors at a time when streaming and the bandwidth was severely limited because the system was never built for streaming so to keep 30FPS they really had to compress the living shit out of everything. We all forget how truly badly they compressed the thing, just look up some screenshots of sewer shark and night trap to see how truly awful the compression was. Add in the fact it cost so much to shoot the footage back then you ended up with a recipe for disaster where you had "games" like what came out of digital pictures at the time.
If you haven't tried them though I'd strongly suggest you get an emulator along with the ISOs of Lunar, Eternal Champions, and Sonic CD. Those 3 will show you what could have been done with that system with just a little thought, ET had extra characters and moves along with a FMV ending for each character, Lunar had a huge story that even a supercart like Phantasy Star Generations would have been impossible to hold, and Sonic used the CD to create huge worlds with tons of new and hidden areas to explore. if they would have waited and released the CD and 32x as a single unit at a reasonable price and had the devs focus on packing more gaming instead of FMV maybe Sega would still be in the hardware game. i know after getting burned for over $200 for the CD only to have Sega abandon it I didn't get another Sega console until the Dreamcast was going out of business and the local stores were selling them with a couple of games for $40 just to unload them. i still have that Dreamcast BTW, while i never play DC games on it it makes a hell of a emulator box, great for playing NES, SNES, and Genesis games on.
Notice how I got modded down for not waving the flag? I wonder which fanboi did the modding, an Appleite, a Googler, a Softie or a FOSSie? As for your post, let me say i so rarely get to use this in a sentence...WHOOSH! Kinda missed the point didn't ya friend? the point was it doesn't matter how YOU feel about privacy as all your friends will happily post tons of info about you even if you avoid these services like the plague!
Just by following your FB friends and cross linking the data it would be trivially easy to build quite a bit of info about you even if you never touched Google or FB in your life and because so many of your friends and family use this you don't really have a choice, there is no opt out when it comes to keeping your family and friends from posting about you. these things have become like giant online diaries where people put every single thing that happens to them and if you are part of that life well congrats, you are now being datamined. And again that is if you opt out of the whole thing, but who doesn't Google? Who doesn't have a FB page? Its so bad the "Key of Awesome" did a parody called "The man without a Facebook" which showed this strange solitary creature with no FB! Gasp!
Actually there is a MUCH better tool friend, I'd suggest Hiren's Boot CD instead. not only does it have Dban as well as a good dozen or more HDD utilities but it has just about every tool you'd ever need from password reset to system info to testing of all major components. It really is a Swiss army knife of system tools and can be run off the CD in Windows so you can use the tools without needing to boot off the disc first. Truly a great tool to have.
I agree that Newegg should be told, as they may have a problem in their supply chain. Who knows what company they are buying these refurbs from and I'm sure they have in the contract they are supposed to be zeroed and testing prior to shipment. That said I always give any new drives a quick zeroing out just in case, you never know even on a new drive if some manufacturer in China is gonna have a bug on that machine that is formatting the drives and then a quick runthrough with spinrite on level I just to make sure they are good. For those who have never used the program spinrite on level I simply bypasses the firmware so the drive can't replace bad sectors with spares and then does a simple write/read/erase where it writes to each sector once and ensures that it can read the data before going on to the next. if a drive can't do a simple read/write without significant bad sectors it simply isn't worth trusting data to.
But I've had quite good luck with refurbs from both Newegg and Tigerdirect and if a drive passes spinrite level I it'll be no more risky IMHO than any other drive. You'd be amazed though at how many companies sell or toss drives with data on them, I had a friend working at one of the big telecos as a temp hand for their big computer upgrade and he calls me and says "Hey bud, you still got your truck? good why don't you come out here and bring it around back, they are just chunking their previous systems and most are loaded to the gills with excellent hardware and they said anybody that wants to can help themselves" so when i get there he loads what can't be more than 3 year old Dell workstations nearly to overflowing in my truck, around 60 in all. I get them back to the shop and go to fire one up to see what the BIOS says and missing the BIOS prompt it starts to boot! Sure enough the full OS is there, no password, and there is still all kinds of customer data on these things! I of course Dbanned the drives but if I would have been a bad guy it would have been like Xmas.
If what I saw was typical no wonder we have so many data breaches, but it really doesn't surprise me this guy ended up with drives that had data, picking up off lease systems I find that kind of thing all the time.
Oh come on now! Surely even the blind would notice /. has become a bunch of perception bubbles and flag waving, yes? As far as I've been able to figure it here is the current score, its Linux yay, Microsoft boo, Apple yay unless its against FOSS then its a battle royale with cheese between the FOSSies and Appleites, Canonical was yay and now they are boo, Open office was yay until it got bought by oracle which it then inherited Oracle's boo, Android yay, Google yay always no matter what because they "do no evil" snicker, HTC yay, Nokia boo, if i left out any yays or boos please feel free to fill them in.
Anyone that wants to karma whore can simply post anything that fits a yay on an approved subject, even if it makes no sense like saying "Just use Linux" when TFA is about a book review of Oracle DB management, and to get modded down all you have to do is risk popping a perception bubble by pointing out something no matter how obvious, watch as i go for a triple pop: Apple is too expensive and is using patents to try to block competition, Win 8 is a seriously stupid design that depends on touchscreens that the majority of computers won't have by Oct and I'd say what Google is doing would qualify as evil. Oh and in case you ain't noticed AC we have some lovers of perception bubbles making hundreds of accounts so they can modbomb anybody that doesn't wave the appropriate flag.
As for TFA can we all agree that Google is the new MSFT on the "Danger Will Robinson!" scale? Old Ballmer's head would asplode if the moron had an original thought and has such a hard on for trying to be Apple i bet he can't look at an iPad without having naughty thoughts. Meanwhile Google is gonna end up with so damned much info on the population and individuals that every three letter agency is just gonna be drooling at the thought of checking out their files and with the amount of secrets they'll be able to gather because so many people treat the Internet as this magical place where if there is nobody around it must not be known that someone like Nixon wouldn't have to risk planting bugs anymore, they'd just find out all the dirt they want from Google. Between Google and FB you might as well have a camera on your butt 24/7 because even if you avoid it your friends will be happy to plaster info about you on their pages.
So while I wish EPIC luck I'm afraid its a little too little, its a little too late as good luck convincing the public that everything they do on a PC or post to FB can be traced even if they set their FB status to private. Seems like it'd be a good way to shut down anybody that gets uppity though, the next one that tries to organize some tea party or occupy thing could easily get a call and be told "Do you REALLY want all your friends to know you are into midgets, shemales and granny gangbangs? if not then quit doing what you are doing" and watch them STFU but quick.
Oh I believe you friend and what's more i can tell you why, its cosmic rays. Even on earth there are enough cosmic rays that you WILL get bit flips even in the best shielded chips, you just get less flips the better shielded the chip is. I have a friend that is a retired NASA engineer, he designed and helped build most of the models and mockups and he said even with the hardened chips they had a formula to figure how much ECC to build into the system based on worst case scenarios for cosmic rays. You should look up the Google study on ECC and bit flips, they figured there was something like 3000+ bit flips a month in your average PC and the OS simply compensates for the error or reruns the code. of course in space you can't really afford to do that which is why they have to have everything extra hardened because even with ECC there is so many rays out there that your code would be salad.
Anyway if you are interested in that kind of thing, look up the Google paper as they did a multi year study on their server farms and came up with all kinds of interesting data. But I believe you, my friend still makes rockets and robots for NASA competition entries for the local college and I've seen bit flip with those small fast embedded chips they use for the instruments. You just have to code in a "fudge factor" as he put it and if you win the competition you can always use more hardened chips.