Actually Pearl Harbor can be laid square at the feet of FDR who ignored the will of the people to start a war, sound familiar? I would urge everyone to read Herbert Hoover's biography, its free and online in several places, where he lays out how FDR went out of his way to insult the Japanese at every turn and give them NO way out that would allow them to save face because he had a raging hard on for starting a war the people had made VERY clear they DID NOT WANT. he also sold out all of Eastern Europe to Stalin who he gushed all over thus condemning millions to a life of fear if they got to live at all. FDR even said in his own words he was gonna "tighten the noose" around the neck of Japan until they had no choice but to fight back and when they sent envoys to try to negotiate before Pearl harbor he would go out of his way to insult them like ignoring their requests for an audience for weeks.
So it had nothing to do with interventionalist and everything to do with a warmonger that wouldn't be happy until he got his war. Now whether you supported WWII or not is irrelevant, if FDR thought we should fight he should have laid out the reasons to the American people and let them decide, instead he simply ignored how they repeatedly said they did not want their sons dying in Europe and the Pacific and kept bitchslapping both Germany and Japan until they got tired of it. Hoover also lays out how many were telling FDR including him that getting involved at that time in any capacity was not only foolish but gave Stalin all the cards because if the USA would have stayed out Stalin and Hitler would have wiped each other out and Japan was buried in a quagmire in China that was keeping the factions all turned on each other and keeping the communists from gaining an upper hand. Read the book, its quite enlightening.
As for TFA my hope is that a republican congress and Nobama as POTUS will equal such gridlock that frankly nothing gets done, sadly that appears to be our best outcome at this point. Mittens couldn't be elected dogcatcher and Nobama has made it clear the only hope and change you are getting is he hopes you don't notice the only change from the previous administration is the name on the letterhead. He has made it clear he doesn't care what the people think, don't give a shit about the poor, loves war as much if not more than Dubya, definitely craves power worse than Dubya, and has declared that thanks to war powers which he says congress can't restrict he can pretty much have anyone labeled an enemy combatant and dealt with without trial, a move even Dubya wouldn't have had the balls to try.
So frankly our best hope is complete gridlock. BOTH parties kiss the ring of the corporate masters, BOTH parties are in love with more police state tactics, but both parties hate each other enough that neither can stand the other getting anything done so having congress in the Rep hands while the POTUS is a Dem seems to be the surest way to have complete gridlock. sad that that is the best we can hope for huh? But the MSM has been declaring Mittens the winner for months now and i have no doubt they will get their way and Mittens big fat shill mouth ensures he doesn't have a prayer.
Uhhh...what planet you been living on friend? PATRIOT, Gitmo, these ring any bells? BOTH sides happen to loooove the way they look in jackboots friend, the ONLY difference is what excuse they use to take freedoms from you, one to protect their corporate masters precious copyrights and the other to get them thar terrist.
That is why you need to urge everyone around you to vote third party right down the middle. in my own state the greens pick up more seats each election so you can slowly but surely make a third party viable in your neck of the woods. But if you think Mittens and his paying 15% taxes while talking about how he ain't worried about them poor people none cause they got safety nets, which ignores the fact that the nets have holes the size of Texas, if you think he will be ANY better than worthless Nobama you might be interested in this bridge to nowhere i have for sale. Both Mittens and Nobama are total sellouts!
Not that it matters because the MSM will pick your next POTUS just as it has for decades and they have spoken that the rep WILL be Mittens, who doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell. McSame will have put up better numbers than Mittens when the final count is done, mark my words. Not only is mittens too smarmy he's been uberrich for so long he can't help opening his big fucking mouth and telling folks what he really thinks which frankly isn't very nice like his "More people need to be foreclosed on, it'll be good for the banks to clear out the stragglers" or his little smartass "I'm unemployed too" horseshit. The man couldn't be elected dogcatcher which is EXACTLY why the SOPA loving MSM picked him, he's born to lose.
Ultimately it comes down to a hard fact of life MSFT doesn't want to accept, which is this: If you aren't running Windows applications frankly there is NO point in running Windows! Its the x86 ecosystem that gives MSFT its power and that's exactly what they do NOT have on ARM. Why would an OEM pay MSFT for an OS when they can have Android or WebOS for absolutely free? Without Windows apps to bring in the value add frankly the answer is no reason at all. Add to that the win 8 GUI is touchscreen only for the most part, if you've tried the dev preview (which i urge everyone to do, words and pics just don't describe the horror) then you'll know that without touch frankly its painful. Even the gal doing product plugs on yahoo, who is always a bubbly 'Buy it! Buy it now!" kinda shill says 'Wait until you buy a touch screen device with Windows 8" because even she admitted that while win 8 will work without touch, frankly it wasn't nice to use.
As for AMD I'd argue that they can do that NOW without wasting huge bucks on ARM, and that is with Brazos. They already have the C series down to less than 8w and the E series which frankly as someone who owns an E350 is pretty powerful down to a MAX of 18w and most of the time is less than 10w and that is on a 40nm fab. Even if they didn't change a thing just the power they'd save by going to 32nm which IIRC TSMC already has up and running they'd easily get it into phone and tablet range and 22nm will make it competitive with most smart phones with ARM easily. again that's if they don't change a thing but in point of fact AMD is about to switch the GPU component to a vector based instead of its current VLIW which will add up to some pretty significant savings on power, while allowing the GPU to behave like a super floating point when not gaming. this would allow them to probably halve the amount of FP units while still being more powerful than current offerings.
So I'd argue frankly that AMD doesn't need ARM and would be stupid to waste money in such a crowded space chasing fads. As I said the only thing I would do different from their current roadmap is bring back AM3 since GloFlo was producing pretty significant yields on Thuban and simply turn off cores to cover the Phenom/Athlon spaces. This with the C/E series and Bulldozer would give them more of a top to bottom approach and then i would phase out Thuban when Piledriver comes out if they get the performance problems licked. Because as it is now frankly my 95w Thuban can spank the top of the line Bulldozer yet cost nearly 40% cheaper than a BD based setup. Because of the lower yields honestly BD simply isn't a competitive chip and unless you are a diehard AMD fan it would simply be pointless to go BD over Sandy/Ivybridge as BD gets too close to Intel's lower end chips that spank BD. thuban and Phenom/Athlon at least gave them something competitive due to the lower price which gave excellent bang for the buck. But other than this i think AMD should simply stay the course, fix the design on BD, and crank out Brazos while getting Brazos II with the vector GPU out the door ASAP. The Brazos II I'm willing to bet my last buck will be low enough power one could put it in any device you'd like and still get decent battery life. WinARM is honestly an abortion, its an OS looking for an audience that simply isn't there, and the Win 8 touch UI required to make that abortion will sink Win 8 as an OS just like the bloat sank Vista.
Is 6 months ago new enough for you? i tried going LTS to LTS just to shut up a "If you use LTS that won't happen!" irritant on LinuxInsider and watched as PulseAudio puked on the sound and the graphics wouldn't go native resolution without needing....drumroll...CLI to fix!
I need to write down a list sometime of all the different versions i've tried, last count I was into double digits and frankly Linux just don't upgrade worth a crap. personally i blame Linus who is so damned arrogant he thinks he's smarter than the devs of BSD, Solaris, eComstation, OSX, and Windows because he seems to think he don't need a stable ABI for drivers...WRONG. Sure if you know the make/model/rev of EVERY piece of hardware you own AND have the ability to tweak some "fix" because it was written for Rev B firmware C and you have Rev F firmware H then you can fix it, but again you've just eliminated a good 99% of the planet. if you'd like I can give you the link to LinuxInsider where an actual Linux server admin with many years of administration has given up on Linux and is going BSD because when she upgraded OpenSUSE it puked and left her without a working machine at home for a week and wasted two years worth of emails. Sure she had backups but the point is if even SHE can't make Linux do an in place upgrade without borkage, what chance does Suzy the checkout girl who barely knows how to turn on a PC gonna have?
The answer is none and THAT is the problem. Perhaps you'd like to read an article I wrote back in 2009 pointing out what I needed to sell Linux to consumers and SMBs. Also note that not a single idea, all of which were basic common sense stuff, has been implemented in any Linux distro that i know of. Now I'm just a humble retailer I don't have several million to throw at the problem like Shuttleworth, all I can do is point out on forums what is wrong and hope somebody listens. instead i either get accused of being an M$ ninja or get told "Go back to winblowz Winfag". so don't be surprised when Linux goes exactly nowhere on the desktop. we retailers have done everything short of handing you a map and a GPS unit and all we've gotten for our troubles is insulted or ignored. But when people would rather risk pirating the other guy's OS than take your 100% free one its time to ask yourself a fundamental question: "What is the other guy doing right that I'm doing wrong?" and I've laid out in that article several examples which sadly nobody will heed.
Didn't a family member of one of the Kaspersky Lab head honchos get snatched by the Russian mob? Frankly they may be afraid to push for enforcement as you say, afraid they will find a loved one in a ditch. There is a good reason why Eastern EU is used so much by malware guys, its because there is still a lot of pretty wild west lawlessness there where you can get by with pretty much anything as long as you have the cash. I can't blame the Kaspersky Lab guys for not getting too nasty with someone that close to their homes. The creator of the botnet also formerly worked at an AV firm which obviously gave him good general knowledge on how to get around AV scanners.
And let me just say before we get the usual "Herp Derp use Linux" karma whoring that 1.- the number one source of infections since Vista has been the USER who bypasses the security for the malware, and 2.- Linuxis notimmune to vulnerabilities. Hell even Kernel.org and MySQL have been pwned before.
In the end it simply comes down to the fact that criminals are lazy, hell if they weren't they'd be working honest jobs. With over half a billion Windows machines if you even get 1% you've just made yourself a huge payday whereas with Linux you'd have to hit a much bigger percentage to get the same payout. but as we saw with both OSX and the MacDefender and Android which is of course Linux based and all the bugs its got that if you get enough numbers you'll get pwned like everybody else. Operating systems nowadays are some of the most complicated pieces of code on the planet PERIOD. Hell I doubt even Linus Torvalds could tell you with 100% certainty what even a tenth of the code on your average distro is actually calling when you launch so the odds of ANY OS being immune to these kinds of attacks is frankly laughable. Sure you CAN make one damned near immune, by using SELinux or GPOs, but the resulting system will be painful to use and nobody will want to run it.
What should I do with the nightlies? Does it have some built in tester tools? because the big tax rebate sales are coming right right ATM but as soon as they are over i wouldn't mind throwing it on the Sempron and the E350 when its plugged in, its just as I said I can't use it on the battery as it drains it too fast. I've bookmarked it so i can come back after I've unloaded the sales machines and can find it again easily. BTW I don't know if this is correct or helps any but I think it may have something to do with Google Analytic and Flash as I've noticed if I have a page with flash and it really starts grinding on the CPU and pounding the HDD I'll look and it is Google Analytic that FF says its loading. this combo seems to really pound the system hard, maybe its one of those rare corner cases where the combo of AMD chips plus that particular code causes a hang, maybe its the particular codec that is in the flash as I never thought to check whether its H.264 or VP6, but I can tell you when I hit that particular combo it can slam so hard I have to ctrl-shft-esc and kill FF that way because it'll slam the CPU too hard for me to get it to respond.
Wish I could be of more help but I'm just a humble bass playing fixit guy, my thing has always been hardware not software. Do you think it could be the GPU? As come to think of it I had the same problem with my youngest boy even though he has a Pentium D, the only thing we have in common is HD4850 GPUs, everything else is completely different. When i switched him from FF to Dragon he too lost the hanging and grinding problem, is FF using some sort of GPU acceleration in the release branch? Again sorry if that's a dumb question but with dozens of regulars and the walk ins i just haven't had time to keep up with software development. I remember reading that Chromium was gonna go GPU which is what made me think of it. but after the sale I'd be happy to slap it on the Sempron and maybe the E350 if I have time to use it plugged in, its mostly my service call netbook.
I'll give you the warning sign to look for APK, the one that says we are ALL gonna have to jump to the darknets and risk prison time just to be free. When you see Nancy Grace start talking about how tools like TrueCrypt and non government approved VPNs are "Letting kiddie fiddlers molest little kids ZOMFG!" you'll know its the death of privacy. they have learned that trying to force this stuff by congress with bits like SOPA/PIPA isn't easy because of the net, so mark my words just as they had all the MSM tripping over themselves to discredit WikiLeaks they'll use Grace and the other shills for the power whores "sell" the change as being needed to protect us from that bad old (insert terrorist, hacker, kiddie fiddler).
Hell you can already go to prison now for thoughtcrime, did you know that? look up the "pro pedo" book. the man wrote his thought in book form and is now in prison . That's all, no pictures, no yelling fire in a theater, simply the man's thoughts on the subject in a book. No matter how odious you find the subject the fact that a man lost his freedom for having his thoughts on paper scares the shit out of me as it should everyone here.
How long before OUR thoughts on a subject written down, like on this very site, can and will be used against you? THAT is the true chilling effect, because all it will take is a couple of poor schmucks like you or me or Joe Blow being given 60 years for "giving aid to piracy" or conspiracy or some other nebulous charge before everyone will be too damned scared to say anything but "Gee don't you love El Presidente? i sure do, El Presidente is the best!". I stand by every post i make but i don't kid myself into believing that is the safe thing to do like I did a decade ago and just like Watergate with enough data on you they can twist and turn it and make you look like such a monster nobody will come to your aid. look at my sentence above, it could be twisted into saying I'm pro pedo when i was simply pointing out the loss of free speech. Scary time we are living in my friends, scary times. I believe we are gonna see more McCarthy style witchhunts in our future and who knows if it'll be us geeks that are the target.
Actually i think Win 8 ARM, aka WinTab, is gonna be such a huge fucking flop it will finally put the MSFT Bob jokes to rest. The reason Linux isn't gaining is because it doesn't have the apps number one, and number two frankly the geeks refuse to make it a user friendly OS. Tell me where are the find drivers and rollback drivers buttons? oh right they don't exist even though MSFT had those 12 years ago. A single button push equivalent to last known good config in case that upgrade craps on my system? oh yeah that don't exist either.
Linux is ONLY good for programmers and those that have the skills to do systemic step by step troubleshooting of highly complex systems, which just eliminated a good 99% of the population. I have tried over a dozen "user friendly distros" here at the shop, and with both LTS to LTS and regular to regular Linux frankly sucks ass when it comes to not shitting on its own drivers. kinda sad when i was told "Oh you have to do a completely clean install" which when I started trying Linux in 04 was something they used to make fun of MSFT for, but at least you get a decade of updates with each MSFT OS, well except for Vista but that thing bombed and most abandoned it like WinME.
But it might surprise you that despite many of the FOSSies, which is a name I use to separate the zealots from the normal Linux users which are actually sane and decent folk, claims that I "must be an M$ Ninja!" that i think Windows 8, both in x86 AND ARM variants, is gonna bomb so badly it'll make WinVista look like Win95. Its a cell phone GUI designed for touch screens which 99% of the machines simply won't have due to the high cost of touch screens. i mean when you can get a 24 inch LCD for less than $150 but a 17 inch touch enabled costs over $300? Touch support for desktops and laptops simply won't be there. And WinARM will bomb because number one, OEMs can have Android for free, and number two the most important reason you have a version of Windows that WON'T RUN WINDOWS PROGRAMS so it'll just cause confusion and have a shitload of tablets being returned and sold for a loss. Funnily enough I think the Linux guys will be the big buyers of Win 8 ARM, because once all those tablets hit the market at TouchPad pricing because of the returns I'm sure the linux guys will figure out how to boot them off of SDHC and they'll be the new TouchPad playtoy for geeks.
And you don't think they'd be on the hook for millions of dollars if they say used it in the PS4 and by giving out the changes made the PS4 a pirate's paradise? Now who is bullshitting. You have to remember that all the hackers out there aren't white hats wanting to pet kittens and hug bunnies, some of them out there want to snatch as much as they can, others will fuck your shit up just for the LULZ, and there are reason for a company to want to lock down a device. look at all the shitfits over Win 8 putting the lock on the WinARM bootloader, but notice how nobody said anything about how Win 7 has become so widely pirated (Hint...its the bootloader) so anyone with eyes can see why a company would want to lock down the way they got hacked the last time.
Frankly with the emergence of appstores i wouldn't be surprised if Sony or any other major corp would want a tool like Busybox but want a way to lock it down, just look at the hell Android has had with malware and piracy. While the GPL is fine for SOME use cases it simply isn't the perfect match for ALL use cases which is why we have everything from BSD to proprietary licenses. So frankly I don't see what the problem is, it isn't like Sony has any control over BusyBox, it'll still be there tomorrow, and if you don't like what Sony is doing simply don't buy their products. of course when you consider the fact Sony has posted its fourth losing year in a row that may not be a problem for too much longer as i doubt even Sony can afford to bleed cash forever. If the Vita flops, which considering the 3DS gave Nintendo its first losing year in ages is quite possible, frankly Sony may not being doing too much new anything for awhile.
Sorry to burst your little smarmy bubble Mr AC, but the gmail is a spamdump i use on all these sites precisely so I can let anybody contact me without giving a shit about my real email. According to gmail my name is igna and i'm a member of the Swedish bikini team, I kinda doubt that the combo of completely random bullshit i put in there plus the huge amount of spam i get for using that as my default "I don't give a piss" email address is really gonna give them any dirt, if anything the huge noise to signal ratio would most likely make it completely worthless. All they can tell from it is I sign up for freeware and every marketer on the planet has that address, big whoop.
The problem with ARM is there are literally millions of x86 programs that have become an integral part of peoples lives, this is also why even though Linux has been getting better each year it fails to find any real gains. Everything from that camera that came with the photo software your Aunt Sue loves to Corel and Photoshop, from that bain of Linux geeks MS Office to Quickbooks/Quicken which is God in small business and rightly so.
The reason ARM is able to gain so much in mobile is because frankly geeks have never understood how normal users think, as someone who has to understand their needs or go out of business i think i can shed some light. you see to a geek that Droid or iPhone is a general computing device, to a normal user it doesn't even have an OS, its just "A screen with buttons i can google and play games on that I'll chunk when the contract is up" and that's it. they have been conditioned that nothing is compatible so assume when they chunk the phone the only thing they'll keep is the SIM card and that's that. Creates a lot of waste but is great for the carrier. Tablets to the consumer is the same, its a large mostly disposable flatscreen TV that can let them Google. There is no real attachment there, no real desire by the majority to develop long term rapport with programs. this is why ARM netbooks went nowhere because to them a netbook is NOT just a general computing device, its a "baby laptop that should do everything my big laptop does only slower, because babies are smaller than grownups" see how that works?
I think where AMD is on the right track and has a real shot is Fusion. Not 3 years ago i could walk into the local Walmart or staples and i'd be lucky if there was a single AMD machine, usually the cheapest machine in the house. Now I see AMD Fusion netbooks, laptops, all in ones, and even desktops, some going up to nearly $1000 in price and talking to some of the guys that i know working there they are brisk sellers. More and more the PC is not only the office machine, its also an entertainment center With the AMD Fusion chips not only do you get great battery life/lower electric bills, like my EEE E350 that gets 6 hours playing 720p and lets me HDMI into any 1080p set and watch videos, but you also get to have all your programs that you know and are familiar with and which frankly there is often no FOSS equivalent and probably never will be. There is no FOSS software that matches the features of Quickbooks or photoshop, and certainly nothing like the little quilting app I installed the other day for a customer on her new Acer AMD C60 netbook. while FOSS users would probably think its stupid and not waste time for her its a "must have" because it helps her to work up the patterns she is gonna use on her next quilt and to visualize what it will look like.
So I think the future is bright IF, and that's a BIG IF, AMD continues to play it smart. the new Vector based GPUs will lower the power footprint even lower while letting the APU use the GPU cores like a super fast floating point which will give any program using floating point a nice kick in the ass, and considering they've had to lower desktop output to keep up with all the orders for the Bobcat chips shows the OEMs think its the right path too. you can now get those chips in every form factor you can name, from HTPC to iMac style to netbooks and laptops. While i'm sure AMD never considered it a desktop chip the OEMs found that its more than good enough for the average user and its selling quite briskly so they made a good call there.
Finally there is one place where AMD has already fucked up, and that's the recent killing of the entire AM3 line. While consolidating to a few chips would have been smart IMHO killing the AM3 Stars chips when Bulldozer has neither the yields nor performance to take its place was just stupid. if you have an AM3 board I'd suggest you pop over to tigerdirect where they are selling Thu
Besides didn't anybody learn ANYTHING from Watergate? The whole point of that break in was to dig dirt that could then be thrown at the opposition. Now imagine they have a nice little list of every website you've been to for say the last 5 years and you start stirring up trouble. Lets say you start a local occupy chapter, or you start a grass roots campaign to get some crooked official impeached or block some odious bill the megacorps want passed. Do you REALLY want every single thing you have ever typed and every single website you've ever visited to be sitting there in a file waiting for them to distort it? I can just imagine the kind of stuff they could throw at me since I keep a list of "look at teh titties!" topsites and "Free viagra!" crapsites I use to test various free antivirus and antimalware solutions on these off lease boxes I have around. It makes it easy for me to idiot proof boxes for my customers but in the right hands i'm sure they could make me into some giant perv.
All movements that get anywhere anymore start at the grass roots and gain popular support. Having access to all this info would have made someone like Nixon cream himself in delight, as it would be easy to warp and twist even the most innocent thing into something they could use against you. hell working PC sales and repair i can't tell you the number of times I've seen truly innocent mistakes get someone's PC turned into a spambot or infected with a porn bug. Like if you would have seen the traffic logs of a local minister two years ago you would have thought him to be a giant perv but the poor schmuck bought one of those USB external drives with a preloaded malware and when he saw the.exe sitting on the drive he thought it was some free software that came with the drive and ran it. it turned out to be a clickjacker bug that was throwing popups to every kind of topsite and crapsite known to man to crank up the clicks.
Now what if that minister had been trying to build a grassroots support for an investigation into something like say Fast & Furious? Or for some dirty dealing at the Fed? Frankly with the history of the three letter agencies in this country I don't trust them any farther than i can throw them and the LAST thing we need to do is make it even easier for them to build up dossiers on everybody. Between their own dirty dealings and getting in bed with megacorps frankly i'd be less worried about a hacker like you getting it than some corp or 3 letter agency deciding they needed to smack down a few peons that were getting uppity.
Honestly I don't know if I'd be comfortable putting a programming language i don't know or use on my systems, these machines make me money by ordering parts, transcoding home movies to DVD, etc and when i typed "Python malware' into Yahoo I got over 700,000 hits including ones that steal CC numbers. Since i don't use the language and have no idea what it hooks into or where it would frankly be hell to try to isolate it and lock it down.
I'm sure as someone who probably uses python in your job you might find this silly, but i know plenty of guys that use Adobe products without risk either, because they stay on top of it. i simply don't have the time to learn where the hooks are or subscribe to the mailing lists for a language I'll never use in any other capacity. Just not much uses for programming skills in home and SMB PC sales and repair, sorry.
The specs for my personal systems are posted above and as i said they did fix it a little in FF 10 but not nearly enough IMHO. run Comodo Dragon or QTWeb next to FF and use any true memory tool like Process Explorer to check resources. Frankly you're not really gonna notice much on a quad like what you have because you have so many cycles to spare, turn off a couple of cores and underclock it a little so it is more like one of the ULV chips and then you'll probably get a taste. Since the Intel compiler rigging and bribery came out I've been an AMD only shop so I've had my hands on a lot more AMD chips than you most likely have friend and frankly if you have an overpowered chip like my 1035T you don't notice it simply because you can waste a hell of a lot of cycles before you drag down the system but try it on an AMD C or E series ULV or one of the Semprons or ULV Phenoms and you will see a difference.
Again YMMV, hell it may be that FF simply doesn't like certain sockets or AMD designs, hell if i know, i'm just reporting what I've seen with my shop and with my customers, most of whom bought the MOR triples and quads along with C and E series netbooks/laptops.
THIS gets a +5? Seriously? For what is basically a fancily worded "M$ Sux" post? How about a little more information since you are "someone who has spent a great amount of time trying to manage a Hyper-V infrastructure" and tell us WHY it is abysmal, huh Tohuw? Was it the tools? Did it use too much resources? Not support feature X that you required?
At least when i say i'm disliking a product i list what has been going wrong for me so that others can see if they are experiencing the same, just saying "This sux' doesn't tell us jack shit about anything, other than you don't like a product.
I'd say its just another victim of Steve Ballmer's "ZOMFG I Want to be the head of Apple soooo bad!" lack of vision. if you look at what MSFT has been doing the past few years its pretty obvious Ballmer has a raging boner for Apple products and wants to be "cool" so bad it hurts. I mean they could have easily taken the business mobile spot away from RIM thanks to AD and Exchange to tie the mobile devices to but instead he has blown boatloads of cash trying to buy his way into the consumer space with abortions like the Kin and Zune. I have no doubt any project there that can't in some way, shape, or form bring the name Apple into the conversation in 3 sentences or less isn't gonna be getting any love and hyper-V is for a market that Apple doesn't give a shit about so Ballmer don't give a shit about.
I'd say the only real hope MSFT has right now is that after Ballmer pours gas on another giant pile of money and lights it up with the trainwreck that is Windows 8, a cell phone UI that requires touch to be worth a fuck yet is gonna be aimed at a market where a good 98%+ of desktops and laptops will NOT be touch enabled will finally cause Ballmer to be forced by the board to 'pursue other interests' and they bring back in someone who knows what the fuck they are doing like Ozzie or Allchin. Frankly Ballmer should have spun off the business division if he wanted to play the "Oh oh oh lets be just like Apple!" game so they could continue to develop what businesses want without having to tie into Steve's "vision" but no, that would require sense. hyper-V sounded like a good idea but as long as the Steve Jobs wannabe is in the big chair it simply won't get the support that it deserves. This is from someone that doesn't own a single Apple product BTW, but even I can see what an obsession Apple has become to Ballmer. If Apple announced they were coming out with an iCrap digital toilet it wouldn't be 60 days before Ballmer would be announcing the WinCrapper, kinda sad really.
They are made of people but headed by this cabal known as the board of directors, these same "people" are boards on several corps and will often be on each other's boards so you have this good old boy system where they "reward' each other with ever higher salaries and bonuses. then there are the shareholders which thanks to day traders turning Wall street into Vegas with nicer clothes frankly would cheer if you burned the buildings down for the insurance if it caused the stock to jump 40 points. Hell look at how MSFT recently had one of its best quarters EVAR and the stock barely moved because the day traders expect corps to make iMoney or GTFO. TLDR? If the company is private they may/may not have morals but once that IPO is done its all bottom line or watch your stock tank.
as for TFA while i don't care for Google's privacy policies i hope they rip the record company a new one because somebody need to nip this Schrodinger's cat bullshit in the bud. you see they and the game companies are trying to do an end run around the law by claiming the protections of TWO states but the liabilities of NEITHER and that shit needs to DIAF. on the one hand they say 'Oh noooo, you didn't buy a disc, you bought a license to use the content! so there is no first sale rights here!" and you go "Okay, well now my disc is scratched so i'm downloading a copy since I have a license to that content" and they go "oh noooo, you don't have a license, you had a disc! That means if its scratched or broken you have to buy a new one!" BULLSHIT, fucking total stinking bullshit! NOWHERE do we allpw a corp to claim TWO states while accepting the liabilities of neither state! Either its content or its media but NOT BOTH because each of those states have clear legal liabilities associated with them. The right of first sale is one of our cornerstones of capitalism and we have ages worth of contract law dealing with licenses that clearly state what their responsibilities are in that situation, these buttmonkey's just want to eat their cake and have it too and that shit needed to end 3 seconds after they came up with it. the court needs to lay out clearly and without doubt once they claim its X they have the responsibilities of X PERIOD.
Okay I gotta ask.....why? The E series is a horrible chip, loses in every metric and you could have simply underclocked a standard chip and not only would it have been cheaper you would have saved on electricity while having the ability to ramp up if needed. Frankly the only E series i touch is when a customer has a socket AM2 board and they want a cheap upgrade as Starmicro has some E series quads dirt cheap and if the customer just wants a render box or video converter better to have 4 slower cores than 3 faster for that use case. But that is a truly awful chip for gaming, gets awful scores and frankly doesn't save as much power as an underclocked Athlon or Deneb Phenom II.
But if you are truly concerned about your electric bill (one thing I don't have to worry about thank goodness as its thrown in along with water and garbage with my apt) then the Thuban and the Asrock would be the better choice and in fact I'd take the Pepsi challenge against your 910e and i'm confident I'd win, how? Because Asrock has ACC and an OC dashboard that lets me not only OC but to UC and turn off cores at will. my 6 can be anything from a single to a 6 core, and any speed from 1.6Ghz-3.5GHz simply by using ACC. The only place you'd beat me is in the GPU power dept but then again my HD4850 is more powerful by a good 50% while only costing $51 at geeks new.
So I just don't get why you'd have chosen THAT chip of all things, you'll probably start hitting bottlenecks on the CPU pretty quick and the lack of headroom for OCing means there simply won't be any place to go. I just hope you got a steal on the chip because like the first gen Phenoms they really don't fit any niche well, too much power to be considered truly low power but not enough headroom to be considered mainstream. BTW if you need cheap chips for upgrades i've been shopping with the Starmicro guys for years, they are a great bunch and I've never had a bit of trouble with their chips. they were even nice enough to call when the chip I had ordered was sold out and offered me a more expensive chip for the same price and just wanted to make sure it would fit, that's nice. Plus you gotta love a place with $15 Pentium Ds and $20 Athlon Mobiles. You can drop them socket 754 athlon mobiles in just about any socket 754 system and get a REALLY low power nettop out of it, very nice.
Dude you ought to snatch one of the Thubans while tiger has them so cheap. Hell they have the 1035T for $105 bucks after rebate and you can get the full kit for less than $300, its sweet dude, real sweet. if your board can't take the Thuban and you have DDR 2 i'd get the Asrock A770DE+, that's what i picked up since i had 8gb of DDR 2 from my ECS quad (damned lying ECS bastards saying their board would take a Thuban when it wouldn't) or if you've only got 2gb you can get an Asrock DDR 3 board for like $30 and 4gb of RAM at Newegg is like $20.
As for your post the reason why the consoles don't struggle is not only is the code a LOT more heavily optimized (since they know EXACTLY how much and what kind they have of CPU, RAM, GPU, etc) but the OS is practically non existent, its pretty much there to enforce DRM and that's about it. My Win 7 HP X64 takes about 800Mb with all the bling turned on but since I have 8Gb I don't give a crap but on a console frankly if it takes up 80Mb for the OS during gameplay it'd be considered bloated. Its a hell of a lot closer to running bare metal than a PC.
BTW you didn't hear this from me but if you have an older system you want to game on and need to squeeze every watt of power out of it? Look up on TPB or the Mule or P2P of your choice "Windows 7 Tiny edition" and give it a try, you are talking a version of Win 7 that takes less than 200Mb of RAM running while having Windows 7's better memory management. Add a cheap fast 4Gb flash stick (for Readyboost which will make it act similar to a hybrid) and you have a stripped to the bone system that is great for gaming. Frankly I don't know why MSFT don't hire that tiny guy because I've tried every tiny version as well as WinFLP and winEmbedded and the tiny guy stomps the dogshit out of both WinFLP and Embedded while being compatible with more apps.
But if you can scrape up the cash dude i'd snatch one of those Thubans while you can, AMD has stopped making all AM3 chips and the Thubans frankly stomp bulldozer on most benches. If nothing else snatch the CPU and you can always buy a part here and a part there to finish her out, but believe me those 1035T chips? Man i loooove mine, sweet performance and with a good aircooler you can easily OC up to around 3.5GHz-3.6GHz if you want, but having Turbocore ramp up to 3.1GHz on games is good enough for me. Peace out.
Uhhh...I didn't say there wouldn't be ANY guys that could use this, I'd said there would be very little because frankly most are playing BF3 and not a hardcore FS. Have you LOOKED at the Steam hardware survey lately? I mean you may have triple 2500 resolution monitors but that just makes you 0.01 percent of the population. The biggest settings are 12x10, 16x9, and 16x10 last i checked, the majority were dual cores but quads were climbing while we 6 core players are still a tiny minority (which when you can get a full AMD 6 core barebone for $299 at tiger i have no idea why more don't jump on, but that's another story) and the VAST majority are on single cards in the $100-$150 range.
So while you might want to spend the bones on a card that fast because you have a niche case, just like those guys that buy triple 5xxx cards for bitcoin mining that doesn't change the fact its a niche case. Frankly at the resolutions the majority of gamers (myself included at 1600x900) are playing at even my $60 HD4850 can go high to max on most games and not stutter.
BTW if you are doing a commercial FS on your own do me a favor, could you add the armed version of the Loach chopper? you never see anybody do those cool fast and light choppers, always the big bitches that are complex as fuck like the Blackshark or Hind or Apache, but there is something to be said about a fast and light run and gun that's just plain fun. Oh and if you can have an arcade mode for those of us that don't have time to go to virtual flight school that would be nice, thanks.
Which one? i have the Sempron Paris core 1.8Ghz wchich according to CPU-Z has SSE2 as well as 3DNow, although i'm probably gonna throw a mobile Athlon in there just because i know a place i can get mobile socket 754 chips cheap, I have an E-350 which has all of the latest features up to SSE4A I believe, that's a 1.6Ghz Dual core APU with Radeon 6310, and finally there is the Thuban 1035T in my gamer box which is a 6 core with SSE4a as well. the Sempron is XP Home, the E350 and Thuban are Windows 7 HP X64.
Now you can't tell squat on the Thuban because the thing is so insanely overpowered and has turbocore so frankly i can run a half a dozen CPU hogging apps and it doesn't even flinch, but on the E350 and the Sempron you can definitely tell the difference between Comodo Dragon or QTWeb and FF because I have AnVir Task Manager on the Sempron and on the E350 i have AllCPUMeter and on both of those you can watch the FF just pound the CPU and the longer i use it the worse it gets on RAM, even when i close tabs. Both Dragon and QTWeb use a little more memory per tab but when you close a tab you get that memory back, with FF it seems to gain a little with each tab you open no matter if you close it or not.
So its not SSE as both have SSE2 and I posted previously i also tried Pale Moon and saw similar results, and it can't be the OS because we have two different OSes, and it can't be the AV because I have Avast Free on one and MSE on the other. Believe me friend if it were something simple i would have tripped over it, I've removed and/or disabled extensions, tried FF straight and with the release mem on minimize trick, but I can launch FF on a P4 right next to the E350 and even though the E350 is a newer chip with more RAM the Pentium 4 will often win with FF, whereas both Dragon and QTWeb seem to be CPU agnostic. I don't know what the hell causes it but its bad enough my youngest was like "I don't know what you did to my machine, but its like a new system!" and all I did was install Dragon on his early Athlon X2 system and set it for default instead of FF.
Its a head scratcher but I've got enough machines going through the shop that I can tell you its pretty widespread, frankly the ONLY customer of mine with an AMD I didn't see it on was the one that has an X3 and that seems to be that FF doesn't know what to make of an odd core so it sticks to dual and leaves his third alone. The rest have X2s or more often X4s and i heard nothing but complaints after FF 4 which is why I ended up switching them to Dragon. Not trying to plug Dragon as frankly i miss the days of FF and frankly don't like the Chromium GUI as much as the older FF GUI which I've kept but it just makes web surfing a total drag on the Sempron and E350 and its too much hassle to switch back and forth so lately I've been strictly Dragon and only playing with FF when a new version comes out. So far though while 8-10 did see a drop in CPU spiking frankly its still a good 20%+ higher than dragon or QTWeb and I can't take that kind of hit when it comes to battery life.
I thought the Russians solved this problem with their Hall Effect Thrusters which they have been using in space since the early 70s? So there you have it, its proven mature tech that has been used in space and i'm sure the Russians have most if not all the bugs worked out. hell we buy many of our rocket engines from them anyway, not to mention hitch rides with them, i'm sure we can buy some HETs that will be suitable for purpose.
The really great thing about this idea IMHO is how much money we could save if we turned the ISS into basically a "space fixit shop" so that the next time Hubble or some majorly expensive sat starts malfunctioning we could have the space tug pull it up to the ISS where they could work on it instead of trying to go out to where it is and work on it there. Hell when not pulling sats maybe we can tie some sort of net or sticky material to try to clean up the massive amount of floating debris we have out there right now, making it better all around for our sats and ships.
.
I'd just like to say if any NASA guys are reading this I really like the new direction you've taken. Instead of wasting tons of money on meatbags in space between the probes and ideas like this it looks like you guys are back to being the goto guys for hard science and that's just great. We probably learn more real facts from a single one of your probes than a dozen LEO trips at a hell of a lot less cost and ideas like this just shows you can still come up with some really cool ideas without them involving meatbags in space. I just hope you guys get the funding for this because the amount we could save long term if we could repair sats easily from the ISS would make this worth every penny IMHO.
I care because I just updated it across my systems and they STILL haven't fixed the major issues which are keeping me off Firefox as my main browser. I USED to use FF as my main, even before it was called FF, and the Moz suite before that. Remember what their mission statement was when they got us off the suite? To be "A light and fast standards complaint browser"? Remember that? Well since FF 4 its frankly sucked ass on AMD CPUs. Now the devs swear they aren't using the Intel Cripple Compiler but whatever they did in FF 4 seriously screwed AMD chips. And whatever it is has GOT to be in the main code as i've tried Pale moon, both x86 and x64 and the same problem is there. On launch it thrashes the hell out of the drive and launching an SD video, which plays just fine in Comodo Dragon with the standard non IE Flash, causes FF to slam the hell out of the CPU.
For some reason this behavior isn't nearly as bad on Intel chips though which makes me think somebody goofed up somewhere. I mean when a first gen P4 is using less resources than a brand new AMD dual? Something is wrong here fellas. And why does it STILL need admin to update? I will give them credit for one thing though, they have managed to cut it down to where it only slams the CPU to 88-90% instead of a full 100% between FF 8 and FF 10, but when I can gain nearly an hour on my AMD netbook by simply using Comodo Dragon there is something wrong somewhere. I'm not a coder so I can't point out a specific line but if I had to guess i'd say its gecko. This kind of stuff didn't happen nearly as often before Chrome came out but since then its been benchmark bingo between those two and I think gecko has been stretched to its limit. That still doesn't explain why it plays nicer on an old P4 than on a new AMD though. Hell maybe they ought to use Webkit? I don't know. All I do know is in my own tests on real world web pages (FB, Yahoo and Gmail, slashdot, a couple of different tube sites, just basic crap folks use every day) I always end up with Opera first, QTWeb and Dragon trading second, FF and IE bringing up the rear. YMMV but at least on the sites i use the benchmarks and real world don't match.
But I'll keep trying each new version, hoping the next one is the charm, simply because even though I doubt its needed with low rights mode and Secure DNS I still miss the fine grained controls of NoScript. But at least on the low power AMD chips like the e series, the Semprons, and the Brazos APUs its just painful to use FF for any length of time whereas Opera, QTWeb, and Dragon all give a quite usable web surfing environment, even on this 1.8GHz Sempron I keep at the shop for a nettop. And i'm certainly not gonna just toss a machine that surfs perfectly well on the browsers i mentioned so i can throw together a pentium D just to make FF happy. I do wish them nothing but luck and hope they fix whatever has gone wrong so that I can give FF out again on my handy freeware discs i give out with each sale.
What if the feds were using them as a honeypot for their corporate masters? Many of the servers were in the USA weren't they? trivially easy to get a "STFU" warrant that lets them monitor any traffic they want in the states. What better way to scare the peasant than for the Mafiaa to announce in a few months 'Did you use the hugely popular Megaupload for illegal files? Well you may be getting a lawsuit from us! hell we might be watching you right now...boo!". That kind of setup would be right up their alley and of course the feds under Obama kiss the ring just like they did under Dubya.
After all i'm sure they know the real pirates have moved on to the darkweb by now, which is where I figure we'll all end up as the corps turn the original web into a giant home shopping network with big brother cams everywhere, but if they scare the peasants they can sell more DVDs of the latest stinkbomb instead of having one guy download it and tell everyone else 'ZOMFG it sucks like Uwe Boll!"
Well in my area they have a little joke "Why does the sheriff bust so many meth labs, cus he don't like the competition" rimshot. Rumor has it the last one that tried to snitch around here on any of the local cops ops ended up having a Fargo pulled on him if you know what i mean. Next county over they had a body that was shot, stabbed, choked, beaten and finally thrown off a bridge. Cause of death? Suicide. Easy way to solve problems when you have the coroner in your pocket, its all just suicides. this is the same area where a couple of years back they got the coroner to sign off that a couple of kids had "got so intoxicated on pot they fell asleep on the railroad tracks and didn't wake up when the train came' while just ignoring the fact the engineer said the kids had been covered in a police tarp when he hit them and neither one had moved an inch with him blasting on his horn.
So yeah, thinking local is ANY better than state or federal just means they don't know the local scene all that well. In most of these small towns you have multigenerational dynasties that have controlled things since before the civil war, the same families and their friends going back decades, hell my mom talks about when she was a kid working a local diner in the 50s she'd see the sheriff come in like clockwork every Friday to pick up his payoff for the diner selling speed to truckers out the back. Where there is money to be gained off illegal activities you are gonna have corruption, and if you think you can change it through legal channels you might want to ask that guy that got Fargo'd,but I don't think he'll say much.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually Pearl Harbor can be laid square at the feet of FDR who ignored the will of the people to start a war, sound familiar? I would urge everyone to read Herbert Hoover's biography, its free and online in several places, where he lays out how FDR went out of his way to insult the Japanese at every turn and give them NO way out that would allow them to save face because he had a raging hard on for starting a war the people had made VERY clear they DID NOT WANT. he also sold out all of Eastern Europe to Stalin who he gushed all over thus condemning millions to a life of fear if they got to live at all. FDR even said in his own words he was gonna "tighten the noose" around the neck of Japan until they had no choice but to fight back and when they sent envoys to try to negotiate before Pearl harbor he would go out of his way to insult them like ignoring their requests for an audience for weeks.
So it had nothing to do with interventionalist and everything to do with a warmonger that wouldn't be happy until he got his war. Now whether you supported WWII or not is irrelevant, if FDR thought we should fight he should have laid out the reasons to the American people and let them decide, instead he simply ignored how they repeatedly said they did not want their sons dying in Europe and the Pacific and kept bitchslapping both Germany and Japan until they got tired of it. Hoover also lays out how many were telling FDR including him that getting involved at that time in any capacity was not only foolish but gave Stalin all the cards because if the USA would have stayed out Stalin and Hitler would have wiped each other out and Japan was buried in a quagmire in China that was keeping the factions all turned on each other and keeping the communists from gaining an upper hand. Read the book, its quite enlightening.
As for TFA my hope is that a republican congress and Nobama as POTUS will equal such gridlock that frankly nothing gets done, sadly that appears to be our best outcome at this point. Mittens couldn't be elected dogcatcher and Nobama has made it clear the only hope and change you are getting is he hopes you don't notice the only change from the previous administration is the name on the letterhead. He has made it clear he doesn't care what the people think, don't give a shit about the poor, loves war as much if not more than Dubya, definitely craves power worse than Dubya, and has declared that thanks to war powers which he says congress can't restrict he can pretty much have anyone labeled an enemy combatant and dealt with without trial, a move even Dubya wouldn't have had the balls to try.
So frankly our best hope is complete gridlock. BOTH parties kiss the ring of the corporate masters, BOTH parties are in love with more police state tactics, but both parties hate each other enough that neither can stand the other getting anything done so having congress in the Rep hands while the POTUS is a Dem seems to be the surest way to have complete gridlock. sad that that is the best we can hope for huh? But the MSM has been declaring Mittens the winner for months now and i have no doubt they will get their way and Mittens big fat shill mouth ensures he doesn't have a prayer.
Uhhh...what planet you been living on friend? PATRIOT, Gitmo, these ring any bells? BOTH sides happen to loooove the way they look in jackboots friend, the ONLY difference is what excuse they use to take freedoms from you, one to protect their corporate masters precious copyrights and the other to get them thar terrist.
That is why you need to urge everyone around you to vote third party right down the middle. in my own state the greens pick up more seats each election so you can slowly but surely make a third party viable in your neck of the woods. But if you think Mittens and his paying 15% taxes while talking about how he ain't worried about them poor people none cause they got safety nets, which ignores the fact that the nets have holes the size of Texas, if you think he will be ANY better than worthless Nobama you might be interested in this bridge to nowhere i have for sale. Both Mittens and Nobama are total sellouts!
Not that it matters because the MSM will pick your next POTUS just as it has for decades and they have spoken that the rep WILL be Mittens, who doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell. McSame will have put up better numbers than Mittens when the final count is done, mark my words. Not only is mittens too smarmy he's been uberrich for so long he can't help opening his big fucking mouth and telling folks what he really thinks which frankly isn't very nice like his "More people need to be foreclosed on, it'll be good for the banks to clear out the stragglers" or his little smartass "I'm unemployed too" horseshit. The man couldn't be elected dogcatcher which is EXACTLY why the SOPA loving MSM picked him, he's born to lose.
Ultimately it comes down to a hard fact of life MSFT doesn't want to accept, which is this: If you aren't running Windows applications frankly there is NO point in running Windows! Its the x86 ecosystem that gives MSFT its power and that's exactly what they do NOT have on ARM. Why would an OEM pay MSFT for an OS when they can have Android or WebOS for absolutely free? Without Windows apps to bring in the value add frankly the answer is no reason at all. Add to that the win 8 GUI is touchscreen only for the most part, if you've tried the dev preview (which i urge everyone to do, words and pics just don't describe the horror) then you'll know that without touch frankly its painful. Even the gal doing product plugs on yahoo, who is always a bubbly 'Buy it! Buy it now!" kinda shill says 'Wait until you buy a touch screen device with Windows 8" because even she admitted that while win 8 will work without touch, frankly it wasn't nice to use.
As for AMD I'd argue that they can do that NOW without wasting huge bucks on ARM, and that is with Brazos. They already have the C series down to less than 8w and the E series which frankly as someone who owns an E350 is pretty powerful down to a MAX of 18w and most of the time is less than 10w and that is on a 40nm fab. Even if they didn't change a thing just the power they'd save by going to 32nm which IIRC TSMC already has up and running they'd easily get it into phone and tablet range and 22nm will make it competitive with most smart phones with ARM easily. again that's if they don't change a thing but in point of fact AMD is about to switch the GPU component to a vector based instead of its current VLIW which will add up to some pretty significant savings on power, while allowing the GPU to behave like a super floating point when not gaming. this would allow them to probably halve the amount of FP units while still being more powerful than current offerings.
So I'd argue frankly that AMD doesn't need ARM and would be stupid to waste money in such a crowded space chasing fads. As I said the only thing I would do different from their current roadmap is bring back AM3 since GloFlo was producing pretty significant yields on Thuban and simply turn off cores to cover the Phenom/Athlon spaces. This with the C/E series and Bulldozer would give them more of a top to bottom approach and then i would phase out Thuban when Piledriver comes out if they get the performance problems licked. Because as it is now frankly my 95w Thuban can spank the top of the line Bulldozer yet cost nearly 40% cheaper than a BD based setup. Because of the lower yields honestly BD simply isn't a competitive chip and unless you are a diehard AMD fan it would simply be pointless to go BD over Sandy/Ivybridge as BD gets too close to Intel's lower end chips that spank BD. thuban and Phenom/Athlon at least gave them something competitive due to the lower price which gave excellent bang for the buck. But other than this i think AMD should simply stay the course, fix the design on BD, and crank out Brazos while getting Brazos II with the vector GPU out the door ASAP. The Brazos II I'm willing to bet my last buck will be low enough power one could put it in any device you'd like and still get decent battery life. WinARM is honestly an abortion, its an OS looking for an audience that simply isn't there, and the Win 8 touch UI required to make that abortion will sink Win 8 as an OS just like the bloat sank Vista.
Is 6 months ago new enough for you? i tried going LTS to LTS just to shut up a "If you use LTS that won't happen!" irritant on LinuxInsider and watched as PulseAudio puked on the sound and the graphics wouldn't go native resolution without needing....drumroll...CLI to fix!
I need to write down a list sometime of all the different versions i've tried, last count I was into double digits and frankly Linux just don't upgrade worth a crap. personally i blame Linus who is so damned arrogant he thinks he's smarter than the devs of BSD, Solaris, eComstation, OSX, and Windows because he seems to think he don't need a stable ABI for drivers...WRONG. Sure if you know the make/model/rev of EVERY piece of hardware you own AND have the ability to tweak some "fix" because it was written for Rev B firmware C and you have Rev F firmware H then you can fix it, but again you've just eliminated a good 99% of the planet. if you'd like I can give you the link to LinuxInsider where an actual Linux server admin with many years of administration has given up on Linux and is going BSD because when she upgraded OpenSUSE it puked and left her without a working machine at home for a week and wasted two years worth of emails. Sure she had backups but the point is if even SHE can't make Linux do an in place upgrade without borkage, what chance does Suzy the checkout girl who barely knows how to turn on a PC gonna have?
The answer is none and THAT is the problem. Perhaps you'd like to read an article I wrote back in 2009 pointing out what I needed to sell Linux to consumers and SMBs. Also note that not a single idea, all of which were basic common sense stuff, has been implemented in any Linux distro that i know of. Now I'm just a humble retailer I don't have several million to throw at the problem like Shuttleworth, all I can do is point out on forums what is wrong and hope somebody listens. instead i either get accused of being an M$ ninja or get told "Go back to winblowz Winfag". so don't be surprised when Linux goes exactly nowhere on the desktop. we retailers have done everything short of handing you a map and a GPS unit and all we've gotten for our troubles is insulted or ignored. But when people would rather risk pirating the other guy's OS than take your 100% free one its time to ask yourself a fundamental question: "What is the other guy doing right that I'm doing wrong?" and I've laid out in that article several examples which sadly nobody will heed.
Didn't a family member of one of the Kaspersky Lab head honchos get snatched by the Russian mob? Frankly they may be afraid to push for enforcement as you say, afraid they will find a loved one in a ditch. There is a good reason why Eastern EU is used so much by malware guys, its because there is still a lot of pretty wild west lawlessness there where you can get by with pretty much anything as long as you have the cash. I can't blame the Kaspersky Lab guys for not getting too nasty with someone that close to their homes. The creator of the botnet also formerly worked at an AV firm which obviously gave him good general knowledge on how to get around AV scanners.
And let me just say before we get the usual "Herp Derp use Linux" karma whoring that 1.- the number one source of infections since Vista has been the USER who bypasses the security for the malware, and 2.- Linux is not immune to vulnerabilities. Hell even Kernel.org and MySQL have been pwned before.
In the end it simply comes down to the fact that criminals are lazy, hell if they weren't they'd be working honest jobs. With over half a billion Windows machines if you even get 1% you've just made yourself a huge payday whereas with Linux you'd have to hit a much bigger percentage to get the same payout. but as we saw with both OSX and the MacDefender and Android which is of course Linux based and all the bugs its got that if you get enough numbers you'll get pwned like everybody else. Operating systems nowadays are some of the most complicated pieces of code on the planet PERIOD. Hell I doubt even Linus Torvalds could tell you with 100% certainty what even a tenth of the code on your average distro is actually calling when you launch so the odds of ANY OS being immune to these kinds of attacks is frankly laughable. Sure you CAN make one damned near immune, by using SELinux or GPOs, but the resulting system will be painful to use and nobody will want to run it.
What should I do with the nightlies? Does it have some built in tester tools? because the big tax rebate sales are coming right right ATM but as soon as they are over i wouldn't mind throwing it on the Sempron and the E350 when its plugged in, its just as I said I can't use it on the battery as it drains it too fast. I've bookmarked it so i can come back after I've unloaded the sales machines and can find it again easily. BTW I don't know if this is correct or helps any but I think it may have something to do with Google Analytic and Flash as I've noticed if I have a page with flash and it really starts grinding on the CPU and pounding the HDD I'll look and it is Google Analytic that FF says its loading. this combo seems to really pound the system hard, maybe its one of those rare corner cases where the combo of AMD chips plus that particular code causes a hang, maybe its the particular codec that is in the flash as I never thought to check whether its H.264 or VP6, but I can tell you when I hit that particular combo it can slam so hard I have to ctrl-shft-esc and kill FF that way because it'll slam the CPU too hard for me to get it to respond.
Wish I could be of more help but I'm just a humble bass playing fixit guy, my thing has always been hardware not software. Do you think it could be the GPU? As come to think of it I had the same problem with my youngest boy even though he has a Pentium D, the only thing we have in common is HD4850 GPUs, everything else is completely different. When i switched him from FF to Dragon he too lost the hanging and grinding problem, is FF using some sort of GPU acceleration in the release branch? Again sorry if that's a dumb question but with dozens of regulars and the walk ins i just haven't had time to keep up with software development. I remember reading that Chromium was gonna go GPU which is what made me think of it. but after the sale I'd be happy to slap it on the Sempron and maybe the E350 if I have time to use it plugged in, its mostly my service call netbook.
I'll give you the warning sign to look for APK, the one that says we are ALL gonna have to jump to the darknets and risk prison time just to be free. When you see Nancy Grace start talking about how tools like TrueCrypt and non government approved VPNs are "Letting kiddie fiddlers molest little kids ZOMFG!" you'll know its the death of privacy. they have learned that trying to force this stuff by congress with bits like SOPA/PIPA isn't easy because of the net, so mark my words just as they had all the MSM tripping over themselves to discredit WikiLeaks they'll use Grace and the other shills for the power whores "sell" the change as being needed to protect us from that bad old (insert terrorist, hacker, kiddie fiddler).
Hell you can already go to prison now for thoughtcrime, did you know that? look up the "pro pedo" book. the man wrote his thought in book form and is now in prison . That's all, no pictures, no yelling fire in a theater, simply the man's thoughts on the subject in a book. No matter how odious you find the subject the fact that a man lost his freedom for having his thoughts on paper scares the shit out of me as it should everyone here.
How long before OUR thoughts on a subject written down, like on this very site, can and will be used against you? THAT is the true chilling effect, because all it will take is a couple of poor schmucks like you or me or Joe Blow being given 60 years for "giving aid to piracy" or conspiracy or some other nebulous charge before everyone will be too damned scared to say anything but "Gee don't you love El Presidente? i sure do, El Presidente is the best!". I stand by every post i make but i don't kid myself into believing that is the safe thing to do like I did a decade ago and just like Watergate with enough data on you they can twist and turn it and make you look like such a monster nobody will come to your aid. look at my sentence above, it could be twisted into saying I'm pro pedo when i was simply pointing out the loss of free speech. Scary time we are living in my friends, scary times. I believe we are gonna see more McCarthy style witchhunts in our future and who knows if it'll be us geeks that are the target.
Actually i think Win 8 ARM, aka WinTab, is gonna be such a huge fucking flop it will finally put the MSFT Bob jokes to rest. The reason Linux isn't gaining is because it doesn't have the apps number one, and number two frankly the geeks refuse to make it a user friendly OS. Tell me where are the find drivers and rollback drivers buttons? oh right they don't exist even though MSFT had those 12 years ago. A single button push equivalent to last known good config in case that upgrade craps on my system? oh yeah that don't exist either.
Linux is ONLY good for programmers and those that have the skills to do systemic step by step troubleshooting of highly complex systems, which just eliminated a good 99% of the population. I have tried over a dozen "user friendly distros" here at the shop, and with both LTS to LTS and regular to regular Linux frankly sucks ass when it comes to not shitting on its own drivers. kinda sad when i was told "Oh you have to do a completely clean install" which when I started trying Linux in 04 was something they used to make fun of MSFT for, but at least you get a decade of updates with each MSFT OS, well except for Vista but that thing bombed and most abandoned it like WinME.
But it might surprise you that despite many of the FOSSies, which is a name I use to separate the zealots from the normal Linux users which are actually sane and decent folk, claims that I "must be an M$ Ninja!" that i think Windows 8, both in x86 AND ARM variants, is gonna bomb so badly it'll make WinVista look like Win95. Its a cell phone GUI designed for touch screens which 99% of the machines simply won't have due to the high cost of touch screens. i mean when you can get a 24 inch LCD for less than $150 but a 17 inch touch enabled costs over $300? Touch support for desktops and laptops simply won't be there. And WinARM will bomb because number one, OEMs can have Android for free, and number two the most important reason you have a version of Windows that WON'T RUN WINDOWS PROGRAMS so it'll just cause confusion and have a shitload of tablets being returned and sold for a loss. Funnily enough I think the Linux guys will be the big buyers of Win 8 ARM, because once all those tablets hit the market at TouchPad pricing because of the returns I'm sure the linux guys will figure out how to boot them off of SDHC and they'll be the new TouchPad playtoy for geeks.
And you don't think they'd be on the hook for millions of dollars if they say used it in the PS4 and by giving out the changes made the PS4 a pirate's paradise? Now who is bullshitting. You have to remember that all the hackers out there aren't white hats wanting to pet kittens and hug bunnies, some of them out there want to snatch as much as they can, others will fuck your shit up just for the LULZ, and there are reason for a company to want to lock down a device. look at all the shitfits over Win 8 putting the lock on the WinARM bootloader, but notice how nobody said anything about how Win 7 has become so widely pirated (Hint...its the bootloader) so anyone with eyes can see why a company would want to lock down the way they got hacked the last time.
Frankly with the emergence of appstores i wouldn't be surprised if Sony or any other major corp would want a tool like Busybox but want a way to lock it down, just look at the hell Android has had with malware and piracy. While the GPL is fine for SOME use cases it simply isn't the perfect match for ALL use cases which is why we have everything from BSD to proprietary licenses. So frankly I don't see what the problem is, it isn't like Sony has any control over BusyBox, it'll still be there tomorrow, and if you don't like what Sony is doing simply don't buy their products. of course when you consider the fact Sony has posted its fourth losing year in a row that may not be a problem for too much longer as i doubt even Sony can afford to bleed cash forever. If the Vita flops, which considering the 3DS gave Nintendo its first losing year in ages is quite possible, frankly Sony may not being doing too much new anything for awhile.
Sorry to burst your little smarmy bubble Mr AC, but the gmail is a spamdump i use on all these sites precisely so I can let anybody contact me without giving a shit about my real email. According to gmail my name is igna and i'm a member of the Swedish bikini team, I kinda doubt that the combo of completely random bullshit i put in there plus the huge amount of spam i get for using that as my default "I don't give a piss" email address is really gonna give them any dirt, if anything the huge noise to signal ratio would most likely make it completely worthless. All they can tell from it is I sign up for freeware and every marketer on the planet has that address, big whoop.
The problem with ARM is there are literally millions of x86 programs that have become an integral part of peoples lives, this is also why even though Linux has been getting better each year it fails to find any real gains. Everything from that camera that came with the photo software your Aunt Sue loves to Corel and Photoshop, from that bain of Linux geeks MS Office to Quickbooks/Quicken which is God in small business and rightly so.
The reason ARM is able to gain so much in mobile is because frankly geeks have never understood how normal users think, as someone who has to understand their needs or go out of business i think i can shed some light. you see to a geek that Droid or iPhone is a general computing device, to a normal user it doesn't even have an OS, its just "A screen with buttons i can google and play games on that I'll chunk when the contract is up" and that's it. they have been conditioned that nothing is compatible so assume when they chunk the phone the only thing they'll keep is the SIM card and that's that. Creates a lot of waste but is great for the carrier. Tablets to the consumer is the same, its a large mostly disposable flatscreen TV that can let them Google. There is no real attachment there, no real desire by the majority to develop long term rapport with programs. this is why ARM netbooks went nowhere because to them a netbook is NOT just a general computing device, its a "baby laptop that should do everything my big laptop does only slower, because babies are smaller than grownups" see how that works?
I think where AMD is on the right track and has a real shot is Fusion. Not 3 years ago i could walk into the local Walmart or staples and i'd be lucky if there was a single AMD machine, usually the cheapest machine in the house. Now I see AMD Fusion netbooks, laptops, all in ones, and even desktops, some going up to nearly $1000 in price and talking to some of the guys that i know working there they are brisk sellers. More and more the PC is not only the office machine, its also an entertainment center With the AMD Fusion chips not only do you get great battery life/lower electric bills, like my EEE E350 that gets 6 hours playing 720p and lets me HDMI into any 1080p set and watch videos, but you also get to have all your programs that you know and are familiar with and which frankly there is often no FOSS equivalent and probably never will be. There is no FOSS software that matches the features of Quickbooks or photoshop, and certainly nothing like the little quilting app I installed the other day for a customer on her new Acer AMD C60 netbook. while FOSS users would probably think its stupid and not waste time for her its a "must have" because it helps her to work up the patterns she is gonna use on her next quilt and to visualize what it will look like.
So I think the future is bright IF, and that's a BIG IF, AMD continues to play it smart. the new Vector based GPUs will lower the power footprint even lower while letting the APU use the GPU cores like a super fast floating point which will give any program using floating point a nice kick in the ass, and considering they've had to lower desktop output to keep up with all the orders for the Bobcat chips shows the OEMs think its the right path too. you can now get those chips in every form factor you can name, from HTPC to iMac style to netbooks and laptops. While i'm sure AMD never considered it a desktop chip the OEMs found that its more than good enough for the average user and its selling quite briskly so they made a good call there.
Finally there is one place where AMD has already fucked up, and that's the recent killing of the entire AM3 line. While consolidating to a few chips would have been smart IMHO killing the AM3 Stars chips when Bulldozer has neither the yields nor performance to take its place was just stupid. if you have an AM3 board I'd suggest you pop over to tigerdirect where they are selling Thu
Besides didn't anybody learn ANYTHING from Watergate? The whole point of that break in was to dig dirt that could then be thrown at the opposition. Now imagine they have a nice little list of every website you've been to for say the last 5 years and you start stirring up trouble. Lets say you start a local occupy chapter, or you start a grass roots campaign to get some crooked official impeached or block some odious bill the megacorps want passed. Do you REALLY want every single thing you have ever typed and every single website you've ever visited to be sitting there in a file waiting for them to distort it? I can just imagine the kind of stuff they could throw at me since I keep a list of "look at teh titties!" topsites and "Free viagra!" crapsites I use to test various free antivirus and antimalware solutions on these off lease boxes I have around. It makes it easy for me to idiot proof boxes for my customers but in the right hands i'm sure they could make me into some giant perv.
All movements that get anywhere anymore start at the grass roots and gain popular support. Having access to all this info would have made someone like Nixon cream himself in delight, as it would be easy to warp and twist even the most innocent thing into something they could use against you. hell working PC sales and repair i can't tell you the number of times I've seen truly innocent mistakes get someone's PC turned into a spambot or infected with a porn bug. Like if you would have seen the traffic logs of a local minister two years ago you would have thought him to be a giant perv but the poor schmuck bought one of those USB external drives with a preloaded malware and when he saw the .exe sitting on the drive he thought it was some free software that came with the drive and ran it. it turned out to be a clickjacker bug that was throwing popups to every kind of topsite and crapsite known to man to crank up the clicks.
Now what if that minister had been trying to build a grassroots support for an investigation into something like say Fast & Furious? Or for some dirty dealing at the Fed? Frankly with the history of the three letter agencies in this country I don't trust them any farther than i can throw them and the LAST thing we need to do is make it even easier for them to build up dossiers on everybody. Between their own dirty dealings and getting in bed with megacorps frankly i'd be less worried about a hacker like you getting it than some corp or 3 letter agency deciding they needed to smack down a few peons that were getting uppity.
Honestly I don't know if I'd be comfortable putting a programming language i don't know or use on my systems, these machines make me money by ordering parts, transcoding home movies to DVD, etc and when i typed "Python malware' into Yahoo I got over 700,000 hits including ones that steal CC numbers. Since i don't use the language and have no idea what it hooks into or where it would frankly be hell to try to isolate it and lock it down.
I'm sure as someone who probably uses python in your job you might find this silly, but i know plenty of guys that use Adobe products without risk either, because they stay on top of it. i simply don't have the time to learn where the hooks are or subscribe to the mailing lists for a language I'll never use in any other capacity. Just not much uses for programming skills in home and SMB PC sales and repair, sorry.
The specs for my personal systems are posted above and as i said they did fix it a little in FF 10 but not nearly enough IMHO. run Comodo Dragon or QTWeb next to FF and use any true memory tool like Process Explorer to check resources. Frankly you're not really gonna notice much on a quad like what you have because you have so many cycles to spare, turn off a couple of cores and underclock it a little so it is more like one of the ULV chips and then you'll probably get a taste. Since the Intel compiler rigging and bribery came out I've been an AMD only shop so I've had my hands on a lot more AMD chips than you most likely have friend and frankly if you have an overpowered chip like my 1035T you don't notice it simply because you can waste a hell of a lot of cycles before you drag down the system but try it on an AMD C or E series ULV or one of the Semprons or ULV Phenoms and you will see a difference.
Again YMMV, hell it may be that FF simply doesn't like certain sockets or AMD designs, hell if i know, i'm just reporting what I've seen with my shop and with my customers, most of whom bought the MOR triples and quads along with C and E series netbooks/laptops.
THIS gets a +5? Seriously? For what is basically a fancily worded "M$ Sux" post? How about a little more information since you are "someone who has spent a great amount of time trying to manage a Hyper-V infrastructure" and tell us WHY it is abysmal, huh Tohuw? Was it the tools? Did it use too much resources? Not support feature X that you required?
At least when i say i'm disliking a product i list what has been going wrong for me so that others can see if they are experiencing the same, just saying "This sux' doesn't tell us jack shit about anything, other than you don't like a product.
I'd say its just another victim of Steve Ballmer's "ZOMFG I Want to be the head of Apple soooo bad!" lack of vision. if you look at what MSFT has been doing the past few years its pretty obvious Ballmer has a raging boner for Apple products and wants to be "cool" so bad it hurts. I mean they could have easily taken the business mobile spot away from RIM thanks to AD and Exchange to tie the mobile devices to but instead he has blown boatloads of cash trying to buy his way into the consumer space with abortions like the Kin and Zune. I have no doubt any project there that can't in some way, shape, or form bring the name Apple into the conversation in 3 sentences or less isn't gonna be getting any love and hyper-V is for a market that Apple doesn't give a shit about so Ballmer don't give a shit about.
I'd say the only real hope MSFT has right now is that after Ballmer pours gas on another giant pile of money and lights it up with the trainwreck that is Windows 8, a cell phone UI that requires touch to be worth a fuck yet is gonna be aimed at a market where a good 98%+ of desktops and laptops will NOT be touch enabled will finally cause Ballmer to be forced by the board to 'pursue other interests' and they bring back in someone who knows what the fuck they are doing like Ozzie or Allchin. Frankly Ballmer should have spun off the business division if he wanted to play the "Oh oh oh lets be just like Apple!" game so they could continue to develop what businesses want without having to tie into Steve's "vision" but no, that would require sense. hyper-V sounded like a good idea but as long as the Steve Jobs wannabe is in the big chair it simply won't get the support that it deserves. This is from someone that doesn't own a single Apple product BTW, but even I can see what an obsession Apple has become to Ballmer. If Apple announced they were coming out with an iCrap digital toilet it wouldn't be 60 days before Ballmer would be announcing the WinCrapper, kinda sad really.
They are made of people but headed by this cabal known as the board of directors, these same "people" are boards on several corps and will often be on each other's boards so you have this good old boy system where they "reward' each other with ever higher salaries and bonuses. then there are the shareholders which thanks to day traders turning Wall street into Vegas with nicer clothes frankly would cheer if you burned the buildings down for the insurance if it caused the stock to jump 40 points. Hell look at how MSFT recently had one of its best quarters EVAR and the stock barely moved because the day traders expect corps to make iMoney or GTFO. TLDR? If the company is private they may/may not have morals but once that IPO is done its all bottom line or watch your stock tank.
as for TFA while i don't care for Google's privacy policies i hope they rip the record company a new one because somebody need to nip this Schrodinger's cat bullshit in the bud. you see they and the game companies are trying to do an end run around the law by claiming the protections of TWO states but the liabilities of NEITHER and that shit needs to DIAF. on the one hand they say 'Oh noooo, you didn't buy a disc, you bought a license to use the content! so there is no first sale rights here!" and you go "Okay, well now my disc is scratched so i'm downloading a copy since I have a license to that content" and they go "oh noooo, you don't have a license, you had a disc! That means if its scratched or broken you have to buy a new one!" BULLSHIT, fucking total stinking bullshit! NOWHERE do we allpw a corp to claim TWO states while accepting the liabilities of neither state! Either its content or its media but NOT BOTH because each of those states have clear legal liabilities associated with them. The right of first sale is one of our cornerstones of capitalism and we have ages worth of contract law dealing with licenses that clearly state what their responsibilities are in that situation, these buttmonkey's just want to eat their cake and have it too and that shit needed to end 3 seconds after they came up with it. the court needs to lay out clearly and without doubt once they claim its X they have the responsibilities of X PERIOD.
Okay I gotta ask.....why? The E series is a horrible chip, loses in every metric and you could have simply underclocked a standard chip and not only would it have been cheaper you would have saved on electricity while having the ability to ramp up if needed. Frankly the only E series i touch is when a customer has a socket AM2 board and they want a cheap upgrade as Starmicro has some E series quads dirt cheap and if the customer just wants a render box or video converter better to have 4 slower cores than 3 faster for that use case. But that is a truly awful chip for gaming, gets awful scores and frankly doesn't save as much power as an underclocked Athlon or Deneb Phenom II.
But if you are truly concerned about your electric bill (one thing I don't have to worry about thank goodness as its thrown in along with water and garbage with my apt) then the Thuban and the Asrock would be the better choice and in fact I'd take the Pepsi challenge against your 910e and i'm confident I'd win, how? Because Asrock has ACC and an OC dashboard that lets me not only OC but to UC and turn off cores at will. my 6 can be anything from a single to a 6 core, and any speed from 1.6Ghz-3.5GHz simply by using ACC. The only place you'd beat me is in the GPU power dept but then again my HD4850 is more powerful by a good 50% while only costing $51 at geeks new.
So I just don't get why you'd have chosen THAT chip of all things, you'll probably start hitting bottlenecks on the CPU pretty quick and the lack of headroom for OCing means there simply won't be any place to go. I just hope you got a steal on the chip because like the first gen Phenoms they really don't fit any niche well, too much power to be considered truly low power but not enough headroom to be considered mainstream. BTW if you need cheap chips for upgrades i've been shopping with the Starmicro guys for years, they are a great bunch and I've never had a bit of trouble with their chips. they were even nice enough to call when the chip I had ordered was sold out and offered me a more expensive chip for the same price and just wanted to make sure it would fit, that's nice. Plus you gotta love a place with $15 Pentium Ds and $20 Athlon Mobiles. You can drop them socket 754 athlon mobiles in just about any socket 754 system and get a REALLY low power nettop out of it, very nice.
Dude you ought to snatch one of the Thubans while tiger has them so cheap. Hell they have the 1035T for $105 bucks after rebate and you can get the full kit for less than $300, its sweet dude, real sweet. if your board can't take the Thuban and you have DDR 2 i'd get the Asrock A770DE+, that's what i picked up since i had 8gb of DDR 2 from my ECS quad (damned lying ECS bastards saying their board would take a Thuban when it wouldn't) or if you've only got 2gb you can get an Asrock DDR 3 board for like $30 and 4gb of RAM at Newegg is like $20.
As for your post the reason why the consoles don't struggle is not only is the code a LOT more heavily optimized (since they know EXACTLY how much and what kind they have of CPU, RAM, GPU, etc) but the OS is practically non existent, its pretty much there to enforce DRM and that's about it. My Win 7 HP X64 takes about 800Mb with all the bling turned on but since I have 8Gb I don't give a crap but on a console frankly if it takes up 80Mb for the OS during gameplay it'd be considered bloated. Its a hell of a lot closer to running bare metal than a PC.
BTW you didn't hear this from me but if you have an older system you want to game on and need to squeeze every watt of power out of it? Look up on TPB or the Mule or P2P of your choice "Windows 7 Tiny edition" and give it a try, you are talking a version of Win 7 that takes less than 200Mb of RAM running while having Windows 7's better memory management. Add a cheap fast 4Gb flash stick (for Readyboost which will make it act similar to a hybrid) and you have a stripped to the bone system that is great for gaming. Frankly I don't know why MSFT don't hire that tiny guy because I've tried every tiny version as well as WinFLP and winEmbedded and the tiny guy stomps the dogshit out of both WinFLP and Embedded while being compatible with more apps.
But if you can scrape up the cash dude i'd snatch one of those Thubans while you can, AMD has stopped making all AM3 chips and the Thubans frankly stomp bulldozer on most benches. If nothing else snatch the CPU and you can always buy a part here and a part there to finish her out, but believe me those 1035T chips? Man i loooove mine, sweet performance and with a good aircooler you can easily OC up to around 3.5GHz-3.6GHz if you want, but having Turbocore ramp up to 3.1GHz on games is good enough for me. Peace out.
Uhhh...I didn't say there wouldn't be ANY guys that could use this, I'd said there would be very little because frankly most are playing BF3 and not a hardcore FS. Have you LOOKED at the Steam hardware survey lately? I mean you may have triple 2500 resolution monitors but that just makes you 0.01 percent of the population. The biggest settings are 12x10, 16x9, and 16x10 last i checked, the majority were dual cores but quads were climbing while we 6 core players are still a tiny minority (which when you can get a full AMD 6 core barebone for $299 at tiger i have no idea why more don't jump on, but that's another story) and the VAST majority are on single cards in the $100-$150 range.
So while you might want to spend the bones on a card that fast because you have a niche case, just like those guys that buy triple 5xxx cards for bitcoin mining that doesn't change the fact its a niche case. Frankly at the resolutions the majority of gamers (myself included at 1600x900) are playing at even my $60 HD4850 can go high to max on most games and not stutter.
BTW if you are doing a commercial FS on your own do me a favor, could you add the armed version of the Loach chopper? you never see anybody do those cool fast and light choppers, always the big bitches that are complex as fuck like the Blackshark or Hind or Apache, but there is something to be said about a fast and light run and gun that's just plain fun. Oh and if you can have an arcade mode for those of us that don't have time to go to virtual flight school that would be nice, thanks.
Which one? i have the Sempron Paris core 1.8Ghz wchich according to CPU-Z has SSE2 as well as 3DNow, although i'm probably gonna throw a mobile Athlon in there just because i know a place i can get mobile socket 754 chips cheap, I have an E-350 which has all of the latest features up to SSE4A I believe, that's a 1.6Ghz Dual core APU with Radeon 6310, and finally there is the Thuban 1035T in my gamer box which is a 6 core with SSE4a as well. the Sempron is XP Home, the E350 and Thuban are Windows 7 HP X64.
Now you can't tell squat on the Thuban because the thing is so insanely overpowered and has turbocore so frankly i can run a half a dozen CPU hogging apps and it doesn't even flinch, but on the E350 and the Sempron you can definitely tell the difference between Comodo Dragon or QTWeb and FF because I have AnVir Task Manager on the Sempron and on the E350 i have AllCPUMeter and on both of those you can watch the FF just pound the CPU and the longer i use it the worse it gets on RAM, even when i close tabs. Both Dragon and QTWeb use a little more memory per tab but when you close a tab you get that memory back, with FF it seems to gain a little with each tab you open no matter if you close it or not.
So its not SSE as both have SSE2 and I posted previously i also tried Pale Moon and saw similar results, and it can't be the OS because we have two different OSes, and it can't be the AV because I have Avast Free on one and MSE on the other. Believe me friend if it were something simple i would have tripped over it, I've removed and/or disabled extensions, tried FF straight and with the release mem on minimize trick, but I can launch FF on a P4 right next to the E350 and even though the E350 is a newer chip with more RAM the Pentium 4 will often win with FF, whereas both Dragon and QTWeb seem to be CPU agnostic. I don't know what the hell causes it but its bad enough my youngest was like "I don't know what you did to my machine, but its like a new system!" and all I did was install Dragon on his early Athlon X2 system and set it for default instead of FF.
Its a head scratcher but I've got enough machines going through the shop that I can tell you its pretty widespread, frankly the ONLY customer of mine with an AMD I didn't see it on was the one that has an X3 and that seems to be that FF doesn't know what to make of an odd core so it sticks to dual and leaves his third alone. The rest have X2s or more often X4s and i heard nothing but complaints after FF 4 which is why I ended up switching them to Dragon. Not trying to plug Dragon as frankly i miss the days of FF and frankly don't like the Chromium GUI as much as the older FF GUI which I've kept but it just makes web surfing a total drag on the Sempron and E350 and its too much hassle to switch back and forth so lately I've been strictly Dragon and only playing with FF when a new version comes out. So far though while 8-10 did see a drop in CPU spiking frankly its still a good 20%+ higher than dragon or QTWeb and I can't take that kind of hit when it comes to battery life.
I thought the Russians solved this problem with their Hall Effect Thrusters which they have been using in space since the early 70s? So there you have it, its proven mature tech that has been used in space and i'm sure the Russians have most if not all the bugs worked out. hell we buy many of our rocket engines from them anyway, not to mention hitch rides with them, i'm sure we can buy some HETs that will be suitable for purpose.
The really great thing about this idea IMHO is how much money we could save if we turned the ISS into basically a "space fixit shop" so that the next time Hubble or some majorly expensive sat starts malfunctioning we could have the space tug pull it up to the ISS where they could work on it instead of trying to go out to where it is and work on it there. Hell when not pulling sats maybe we can tie some sort of net or sticky material to try to clean up the massive amount of floating debris we have out there right now, making it better all around for our sats and ships.
. I'd just like to say if any NASA guys are reading this I really like the new direction you've taken. Instead of wasting tons of money on meatbags in space between the probes and ideas like this it looks like you guys are back to being the goto guys for hard science and that's just great. We probably learn more real facts from a single one of your probes than a dozen LEO trips at a hell of a lot less cost and ideas like this just shows you can still come up with some really cool ideas without them involving meatbags in space. I just hope you guys get the funding for this because the amount we could save long term if we could repair sats easily from the ISS would make this worth every penny IMHO.
I care because I just updated it across my systems and they STILL haven't fixed the major issues which are keeping me off Firefox as my main browser. I USED to use FF as my main, even before it was called FF, and the Moz suite before that. Remember what their mission statement was when they got us off the suite? To be "A light and fast standards complaint browser"? Remember that? Well since FF 4 its frankly sucked ass on AMD CPUs. Now the devs swear they aren't using the Intel Cripple Compiler but whatever they did in FF 4 seriously screwed AMD chips. And whatever it is has GOT to be in the main code as i've tried Pale moon, both x86 and x64 and the same problem is there. On launch it thrashes the hell out of the drive and launching an SD video, which plays just fine in Comodo Dragon with the standard non IE Flash, causes FF to slam the hell out of the CPU.
For some reason this behavior isn't nearly as bad on Intel chips though which makes me think somebody goofed up somewhere. I mean when a first gen P4 is using less resources than a brand new AMD dual? Something is wrong here fellas. And why does it STILL need admin to update? I will give them credit for one thing though, they have managed to cut it down to where it only slams the CPU to 88-90% instead of a full 100% between FF 8 and FF 10, but when I can gain nearly an hour on my AMD netbook by simply using Comodo Dragon there is something wrong somewhere. I'm not a coder so I can't point out a specific line but if I had to guess i'd say its gecko. This kind of stuff didn't happen nearly as often before Chrome came out but since then its been benchmark bingo between those two and I think gecko has been stretched to its limit. That still doesn't explain why it plays nicer on an old P4 than on a new AMD though. Hell maybe they ought to use Webkit? I don't know. All I do know is in my own tests on real world web pages (FB, Yahoo and Gmail, slashdot, a couple of different tube sites, just basic crap folks use every day) I always end up with Opera first, QTWeb and Dragon trading second, FF and IE bringing up the rear. YMMV but at least on the sites i use the benchmarks and real world don't match.
But I'll keep trying each new version, hoping the next one is the charm, simply because even though I doubt its needed with low rights mode and Secure DNS I still miss the fine grained controls of NoScript. But at least on the low power AMD chips like the e series, the Semprons, and the Brazos APUs its just painful to use FF for any length of time whereas Opera, QTWeb, and Dragon all give a quite usable web surfing environment, even on this 1.8GHz Sempron I keep at the shop for a nettop. And i'm certainly not gonna just toss a machine that surfs perfectly well on the browsers i mentioned so i can throw together a pentium D just to make FF happy. I do wish them nothing but luck and hope they fix whatever has gone wrong so that I can give FF out again on my handy freeware discs i give out with each sale.
What if the feds were using them as a honeypot for their corporate masters? Many of the servers were in the USA weren't they? trivially easy to get a "STFU" warrant that lets them monitor any traffic they want in the states. What better way to scare the peasant than for the Mafiaa to announce in a few months 'Did you use the hugely popular Megaupload for illegal files? Well you may be getting a lawsuit from us! hell we might be watching you right now...boo!". That kind of setup would be right up their alley and of course the feds under Obama kiss the ring just like they did under Dubya.
After all i'm sure they know the real pirates have moved on to the darkweb by now, which is where I figure we'll all end up as the corps turn the original web into a giant home shopping network with big brother cams everywhere, but if they scare the peasants they can sell more DVDs of the latest stinkbomb instead of having one guy download it and tell everyone else 'ZOMFG it sucks like Uwe Boll!"
Well in my area they have a little joke "Why does the sheriff bust so many meth labs, cus he don't like the competition" rimshot. Rumor has it the last one that tried to snitch around here on any of the local cops ops ended up having a Fargo pulled on him if you know what i mean. Next county over they had a body that was shot, stabbed, choked, beaten and finally thrown off a bridge. Cause of death? Suicide. Easy way to solve problems when you have the coroner in your pocket, its all just suicides. this is the same area where a couple of years back they got the coroner to sign off that a couple of kids had "got so intoxicated on pot they fell asleep on the railroad tracks and didn't wake up when the train came' while just ignoring the fact the engineer said the kids had been covered in a police tarp when he hit them and neither one had moved an inch with him blasting on his horn.
So yeah, thinking local is ANY better than state or federal just means they don't know the local scene all that well. In most of these small towns you have multigenerational dynasties that have controlled things since before the civil war, the same families and their friends going back decades, hell my mom talks about when she was a kid working a local diner in the 50s she'd see the sheriff come in like clockwork every Friday to pick up his payoff for the diner selling speed to truckers out the back. Where there is money to be gained off illegal activities you are gonna have corruption, and if you think you can change it through legal channels you might want to ask that guy that got Fargo'd,but I don't think he'll say much.