All they are gonna do with this bullshit is make kiddie fiddlers happy. Why? Because a true darkweb has ZERO censorship of ANY kind, that's kinda the point.
First the geeks will get tired of the bullshit, that is how it ALWAYS starts, from the first P2P on it always starts with geeks getting tired of bullshit because they can handle fiddly buggy DIY kinda software which is what most first gen stuff is. Then the programmers among the geeks decide the code sucks, or the UI sucks, or both, and they start making it better. Always trust a programmer to scratch itches wherever possible and they HATE bad design. Once they've made things better then come the power users, not as skilled as the geeks but smarter than the noobs the power users are helpful in their own way because they work as a bridge between the geeks and the noobs and point out the problems noobs are gonna have with the software. Once those start to get ironed out here come the noobs because by this time word has gotten out there is a place where you can bypass the bullshit and we humans like to bypass bullshit whenever possible.
So what we will end up with is some Freenet or I2P become the next Limewire. You think they would learn by now that the Internet will always route around damage, they've been playing whack a mole for what? 20 damned years now? you'd think they'd get the clue that they're doin it wrong if millions upon millions of people are going through all the trouble to bypass their bullshit. Of course look how many damned years it took for the record companies to get hit with the cluebat and now they are cashing record checks from iTunes and Amazon on MP3 sales, yet the movie companies are still charging ass raping prices on single episodes of shows (last I checked just for a single season of a series it was over $100 and it was all DRM tastic) and have made it illegal to rip your new movie to your iPod.
so here we go again, time to route around some damage. i'm sure they'll keep throwing money and bribing congress until SOPA/PIPA and any other draconian law they want is passed, and then slowly but surely the darkweb will become the web and the former web will just be the home shopping network. So get to work geeks, we're counting on you.
If it works as "well" as some of the other camera software I wouldn't bet the farm on it buddy. of course trying to support people with physical problems is a royal bitch anyway, I ended up having to get one of those graphics pads with a ton of shortcuts for a relative who has some days of trouble typing because every kind of voice recognition software i tried couldn't make heads or tails out of what he said because his breathing treatments caused just enough changes to his voice day to day to throw the software off.
Personally though I've had nothing but good luck with Asus laptops and netbooks so I say if anybody can pull it off they can. if you haven't tried one of their ExpressGate enabled laptops or netbooks you really should, its brilliant, I get anywhere from 7 to 8 hours on EG on my 1215B depending on Wifi strength and over 6 hours on Win 7 HP X64, this on a 6 cell that weighs only 3 pounds, hell thanks to the AMD E-350 having hardware acceleration its nearly 6 hours watching 720p HD video, great when I'm stuck at the doctor's office, and the whole thing only cost me $350 with 8gb of RAM and a nice little carrying case. Even after the flooding you can pick up the same model for like $450 so if they can do that and still make a profit while handing out Home instead of crappy Starter I'm sure if anyone can make it work Asus can.
Funnily enough the only thing i don't really care for is the webcam on my 1215b as its seriously low res but i suppose its good enough for video chat but I'm sure a higher res camera would have made the price jump. of course i doubt MSFT is giving this tech away for free so i wonder how much having kinect built in will bump the price, its not like MSFT can make it up on games like they can with the X360. asus does have their own gamestore built into expressgate though, i wonder if they'll hack kinect to work with EG? Kinda ironic if they do as expressgate is Linux based and you know how most diehard Linux users would rather chew on broken glass than have MSFT anything on their systems. Just as well that Asus doesn't sell Linux EEEs anymore I guess, this would probably get them boycotted. I suppose it would make for an interesting social experiment though, announce a new Linux laptop with built in kinect and see if the simultaneous desire to cheer and boo would cause the diehards head to asplode.
If you haven't watch "How NOT to hire an American" please do and pay attention, and then look in the local tech ads. Sadly you'll see that has become the how to playbook for the H1-b disease and you'll be able to spot it easy peasy once you know what you are looking for. they do the same things outlined in the video, such as ask for experience that can't be had (such as 10 years experience with a tech that's only been out 5 years) or ask for pie in the sky experience reqs for a job that pays one fifth what someone with that level of exp would actually get (such as 10 years project management, 5 years each in C, C++, Java, and.NET for a job that pays $19k a year) and then of course if any American is desperate enough to apply they'll just keep upping the ante on what they "require' until they can disqualify him and hire an H1-B. And look up "H1-B abuse" and you'll find story after story of abuse, last numbers I saw estimated more than 45% of the H1-Bs currently in this country were being underpaid and/or were being brought in for jobs where Americans were plentiful, just not at the pittance they wanted to pay.
I do NOT have a problem with immigrants, my own family came over during the potato famine. What I DO have a problem with is using scabs to try to turn every job into a McJob. we will NEVER have a vibrant American tech workforce if they can plainly see that they will have to pay $60k+ for a degree then be expected to compete with some guy the corp can pay $22k a year, its no different to what the illegals are doing to the blue collar sectors, where construction jobs that USED to pay well enough a man could feed his family now pay less than the manager at micky D and where you can yell "Immigra!" at any construction site and watch the workforce scatter like deer. You might also want to look at this sad memorial of the dead Americans killed by big corps quest for low wages. On just that one page you now have more Americans dead than were lost at the towers, all thanks to greed.
Well when you are dealing with home users you had damned well better have third party software updated or else you've got a zombie and THAT in a nutshell is the problem i've always had with Linux. Way too much software is "You need kernel Y to run our new software G which you need because a zero day is out for version F but FYI kernel y will break your sound" And I've tried stable to stable but the ONLY one I had that work on was Debian and frankly Debian is more of a server that plays a little at being a desktop than a desktop. support for plug and play or supporting grandma's new phone that she needs to get the pictures off of simply isn't there unless you use one of the clusterfuck always broken editions like Ubuntu. BTW FYI have you seen the "brilliant" new direction Canonical is going for ubuntu? Voice control! Now whether your desktop works are not will depend on how your sinuses are doing today! lord its like the entire planet has a stupid virus spreading like a zombie plague, mindless tards going "Twitter, Facebook, LOL, shiny stuff".
And if stupidity died tomorrow? i'd have a bloody party that's what I'd do. i could concentrate on hardware and working on my music instead of constant brain sucking dumbshit on all sides. if we were lucky it'd spread to the OS builders and tomorrow MSFT would announce "We're sorry, we see what we did there, we'll go back to having a business version and a home because someone pointed out businesses don't care about gaming and twitter, our bad" and the Linux camp would announce "Ooops, sorry about that, we see why home users would have serious trouble with our products so now we're releasing the "it just fucking works" edition that gets a solid 10 years worth of updates with ZERO breakage and no making you upgrade just to get the latest software patched, for the new version we'll call IJFW for short we're having an ABI with a central repo where all drivers will be housed so if little Suzy plugs in ANY device it'll instantly install the drivers because IJFW and the focus will be on hand holding and wizards and big fat bloody icons even your grandmom could hit. Server and embedded of course won't be changed because those guys would get seriously pissed, have a nice day" and then i could just slap a copy of IJFW Linux on all these off lease instead of scrambling for Win 7 starter CALs which FYI good fucking luck buying those in lots of less than 10,000. No damned wonder Win 7 Pirate edition is damned popular with the shops.
Finally as for magical thinking which I've harped on against for years, that is why i had to get out of corporate. Corp pays better but I looked like a corpse and I kept a headache dealing with all the PHBs who knew just enough to be REALLY dangerous. when i told the boys I was thinking of quitting and it would involve a cut in pay they were like "Please do, we can live with less but we lost mom and dad already we can't lose you too" which needless to say was a big fucking wakeup call. but all day it was one magical thinking problem after another, they'd hire some nitwit because he underbid everyone while selling snake oil, or they'd pay too much for some whiz bang new toy and think it magically meant they cut cut IT staff and funding because "With this (insert magical device like HIPS, firewall, AV, etc) our security problems are over!". Last one I dealt with was a law firm i did as a hired gun, bought them some nice bog standard HP desktops running into an HP file server, had it all wired through a nice Sonicwall with a T1, it ran like a Swiss watch. i tell them 'I don't have the time to be your full time IT guy, but here is the number of a couple of guys i know that are top notch" well not 6 months later i get called back because they have "serious trouble" and when I get there...fuck.
A bean counting PHB decided my guys were "too expensive" and he "knew someone which was a whiz at computers" and managed to get himself a promotion thank to the money he "saved" the company. The dumb fucker he brings in decides my systems are 'too slow' and
I have to agree with the other poster you don't start someone on MP with the movies, frankly they just weren't as good as the series. i would start them with one of the many best of compilations, that will give you all the classics like cheese sketch, dead parrot, lumberjack, I started my boys out on MP that way and now both love the Python. Man the local college kids STILL eat up MP, my oldest says you can stop anywhere on the campus and go "I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay" and 50 kids will call back "He sleeps all night and he works all day". But I'd give them a best of MP along with French and Saunders, followed by are You Being Served. I have yet to find anybody who doesn't like Sloakum and Humphries. That will give them a nice taste of the best bits and from there they can decide where their tastes lie, my youngest loves Served while the oldest loves Red Dwarf and both love Python.
Not to mention everybody seems to forget the "hey its cold as hell!" weather many of us grew up with was called by a thing now known as the "little ice age" which was naturally COLDER than the average. i would also point out this little blue ball has been, and always will be, one violent chaotic mutha when it comes to weather shifts, see the medieval warming period for a nice long period of freaky warm weather which i think I can state without fear of contradiction was NOT caused by SUVs.
Finally allow me to say if you believe a damned word from that hypocrite rev Al gore you need your head examined. not only has he set himself up to be a carbon billionaire but the man lives in a house sucking more energy than a dozen family dwellings, with an indoor basketball court and enough AC blasting to equal the carbon footprint of a couple of dozen families, the man has a fleet of SUVs while he tells your peasant ass to ride the bus and has the brass balls to say farting around in his own personal Lear jet as well as all of the above makes him carbon NEUTRAL...because he pays himself carbon credits from his own company. that would be like me moving money from my left to right pocket, calling it wealth redistribution, and then demanding you change your lifestyle to reimburse me for my "loss". Oh and just FYI but the same one that created credit default swaps, aka instant bailouts or economy killers. Guess what her new job is? why its writing the rules for carbon derivities which i'm sure when she's done while you'll pay more for...well everything, her good friends at Goldman Sachs and Mr Gore could switch to coal burning and end up getting paid for being "green" just as she sold junk housing mortgages as AAA investments.
So if you want to cut down because its better for the air fine and dandy, maybe you should look to Ed Begly Jr who lives a shining example of how the individual can significantly lower their footprint. But please watch this video and don't fall for the hucksters like Rev Al and his religion of Crap & Trade. the ONLY thing Al Gore gives a shit about is Al Gore or he wouldn't be blowing through energy like shit through a goose and living in a house that would make Hugh Hefner blush while driving a fleet worthy of a third world dictator. The only inconvenient truth is Al Gore has set up a scam that will make him tankers full of money and wants YOU to pay for it, its a reverse Robin Hood, take from the poor to give to the rich. And you notice Rev Al has NEVER, not even once, said a single word about possibly maybe stopping China's MFN status and limiting imports while they are polluting so bad we can detect it on the west coast? why is that? maybe because his portfolio is making mad MONIES from china, just like his friends? this isn't about left or right folks, this is about scammers and the scams they pull. Again no problem with simply setting goals and limits, look at how much cleaner our air is now compared to the 70s, it CAN be done without cutting Al Gore a check.
Well I agree the whole is ALWAYS better but sadly Graham's gone so we have to take what we can get and even Python on their worst days you have to admit was world's better than the stoner and romcom crap we've been getting of late. I agree Chapman was seriously a dark writer and Idle with his wordplay needs to be there but frankly we've had such horrible shit, we're talking nothing but fuck jokes and fart jokes and dope jokes that even if they are just a third as witty as they were during the olden days they'll still kick ass. sadly even the Brit humor seems to have gone downhill with everything being "lowest common denominator" which sadly these days is about as witty and intelligent as beavis and butthead.
So while I will always probably picture Chapman first when i think of Python, usually his colonel in the tutu telling everyone to "stop right this minute its much too silly!" along with the pepperpots honestly after seeing what passes for comedy these days having ANY new Python will be so damned refreshing after a sea of bodily functions bits it'll seem like Xmas to me.
Well if you happen to come across a used C128 that isn't assraping priced holler would ya? i got an ex NASA engineer that has some killer code and specs for a robotic arm he built using one of those as the brain but his got stolen at a trade show in Dallas years ago and i told him i'd keep an eye out. I'm "lucky" in that I've gotten to be buddies with the building super who also does a LOT of work for the city and local colleges so he keeps an eye out and is constantly bringing me free loads of off lease desktops and laptops. Sometimes they are missing the hard drives but other than that most of them are intact and easy peasy to refurb, just pulled a 300gb Seagate SATA for my personal pile and replaced my slowly dying Plextor with a brand new LG burner out of the last batch.
Ever since i Frankensteined the best parts of the bunch into a new box for Keith the super, who i swear to god was using a circa 1997 Pentium II 400Mhz as his office box I'm officially on his "cool" list and he goes out of his way to load me up so I'm never at a shortage of parts, got two late model P4s done ready for CL and another i'm just waiting on a drive for. I put him together a nice socket 775 3.06 GHz P4 with HT along with an 80Gb HDD and an old Geforce 7600GS so he could hook it to his widescreen and watch movies with it so he's a seriously happy camper. He's supposed to bring me another big load of laptops and since his GF wants one (and I told him like the desktops i'd slap him together the best of the bunch and hand it over for free) so i'm sure i'll be getting another load of the good stuff, again for a whole $0 and just letting Keith have a good one for his gal. i can't complain as i took the money i made off the last load and built my GF a sweeeet AMD quad, i was upgrading my quad to a Thuban 6 core anyway so i used my old quad and a new board and case to make her a truly beautiful win 7 HP box, 4gb of RAM, 600Gb HDD, 16x DVD burner like new i got out of the last load along with one of those 24 in 1 card readers that replace the floppy slot, and had enough cash left over to get her a wireless keyboard and mouse, new stereo speakers, and a webcam.
As for weird ICs i'll have to ask my NASA engineer bud, he has a ton of ICs in his workshop. he builds bots and rocket for the local college to compete in NASA contests, way cool. have you tried BGMicro yet? if they don't have it you can shoot them an email and if they come across they'll shoot you a heads up. my engineer bud buys a ton of TTL chips and all kinds of ICs from them, great company with cheap prices. if you like to do your own protoboarding and stuff like that check out their specials like the "big bag o' chips" as my bud has bought several of those and come out with some seriously rare and expensive ICs and chips out of those. Basically anything they don't have enough of to offer in their catalog they'll throw with a bunch of other stuff in a big bag and sell cheap. last one he picked up had a ton of sweet TI chips that were just perfect for stepper motor controllers along with some excellent timing circuits and he got the whole bag for like $8 with shipping. Their LEDs are also dirt cheap and kick ass, REALLY bright. they even sell bundles harvested from state street signs and MAN are those suckers bright!
But get to know you're local mom & pops because ya never know when we'll have that weird part. When RDRAM was cutting edge I was the head guy at Doug's PC Service plus and we had a slot in our RAM bin just filled with RDRAM, it turned out one of the shops in the next town had an owner that was cranking out sat descramblers and fake copies of Windows so good they even had the hologram (I found this out when i had stopped in the shop to ask the kid running the place if he had any whitebox cases as i had a rush order and the next thing i know the FBI in full BA kicks in the door and i'm staring at an M16, not fun!) and when the guy evaded capture (and it turned out had sold all the local cops PCs, ha ha!) the cops s
I'd know what to do with at least one of them: "Rockers Independent Alliance Association or RIAA, dedicated to being a one stop shop to help independent artists connect with fans and each other and promote the freedom of music while still letting the artist make a living by helping set up tours, the selling of promo items, and generally helping both fans and artists enjoy the wonder that is music" sounds like a good idea to me.
Seriously though if they can get Cleese, Palin,Idle and Jones they should be able to capture the feel of the original. Gilliam was mostly animation and as Cleese put it "Graham added fire to the engine but he could never be the engine" as Chapman's function during writing was to be their sense of what was funny. The famous dead parrot was originally a broken toaster and it was Chapman that said 'How can we make this madder?" and got them thinking crazier until they came up with the Norwegian Blue, lovely plumage it has. Not that it won't be missing Chapman, Cleese said "he was always the best actor of the group" which is why he was the lead in LoB and HG, and his ability to deadpan....who can forget his "This is getting silly! stop that!" Major wearing a tutu? But if the guys are actually working together (according to TFA they haven't got Idle on board yet) like in the old days it ought to be better than a good 99.95% of the tripe coming out of Hollywood now. Maybe we can hope that this will start a revival of good silly yet thinking comedy again? Man after all the RomComs and stoner comedies the Pythons will be like a breath of fresh air after touring a sewage treatment plant.
Well as someone who has to explain things to consumers all day all i want to know is this: Can my customers fire up their bog standard B/G/N Wifi enabled laptops and netbooks and hook up with as simple and painless a procedure as normal Wifi? if the answer is yes i'm all for it and if its no they need to STFU and get out of here with that shit. From reading TFA it looks like a STFU and GTFO kind of deal, needing new cards and will confuse the hell out of my customers who think (and rightly so since they have backwards compatibility) that "Wifi is Wifi".
Good on your dad as well. I call them mine but they were my late sister's, may she rest in piece, right after the second was born we find out she's terminal and her husband says "I can't deal with this" and just walks away, never to be seen again. There i was, swore i'd never have kids, and I get a newborn and one barely two while my mom retires to take care of sis full time. they gave her 3-5 years, she managed to hang on bedridden for 14 years so she'd be sure she'd get to see them graduate HS.
But now the oldest is on the Dean's list, has so impressed the local minister with his work ethic he's gushed to all the PTBs about 'how great it would be to have a young man with such strong faith and work ethics helping on the mission' that he's pulled strings and now the boy will be getting most of his education for free which is nice, he says he has no time for dating but when i go up there i can see the gals drooling over him so i don't think he'll have a problem in that dept, I'm sure he'll find a gal just as boring as he is and they'll have little boring kids and lead a totally boring life and be happy LOL! How a wild old bass playing biker like me could raise two straight arrows i'll never know LOL!
I prefer to call it "all go to hell except cave 76!" after the classic mel brooks bit as it cuts to the heart of the matter and shows they are no better than a caveman fighting over "their" turf. oh and I was told we should call fanbois "those with perception bubbles' as its nicer. I always preferred " elitist assholes having a giant circle jerk" but i'm told that is a little on the crude side and one should always try to improve one's vocabulary.
And I wasn't trying to disparage Linux, i personally like it for embedded and webservers, i was simply trying to beat to the punch the obvious "Freetard" posts we get on any windows subject. you know the ones, bullshit like "Linux never gets viruses!" or the completely pointless "Use Linux' when the entire TFA has nothing whatever to do with Linux or FOSS. hell i had one just yesterday when i pointed out i couldn't sell Linux boxes to consumers because the upgrades ALWAYS seem to break drivers "Well just disable upgrades, its not like you need them!" and it was like i could just FEEL the stupid and his perception bubble pouring through the cable, sad that in this day and age when we had JUST had a posting on distros scrambling to issue patches for a zero day privilege escalation in Linux I would get a posting like that. just as i've sat he literally gobsmacked when i get a iKoolaid drinker that will argue up and down that "Macs don't have viruses" because apparently if the user has to do anything at all then it "don't count'. talk about splitting hairs with a laser!
In the end its that kind of dumbshit we PC shops have to deal with 6 days a damned week, every time you think "surely they can't do anything dumber right?" someone will come along and prove they are a bigger idiot. And the sad part is despite all this great security in all three major OSes frankly the malware guys can be lazier than ever because thanks to social engineering you'll have thousands just like that one i had to run out my shop because all they had to do was stick the label "New limewire!" on their malware and they had dipshits lining up to disable their AVs and pwn their machines. I had to find a new free porn site just to give to male customers to keep them from constantly falling for "Iz-Not_Viruz_iz_Porn_Codex" trick, and I hate to say it but thank God for FB as it keeps the females from downloading infected match 3 games, instead they click like little hamsters slamming the button for a pellet on farmville.
I will say that working for home users is 1000% better than working corporate because at least home users KNOW they don't know and will defer to you, so much better than dealing with PHBs that know enough to be dangerous. I actually have a friend still in corporate that ended up being drug up to regional one time and having to appeal to the district manager because his immediate boss told him, I swear to fricking God, that "You have NO RIGHT to tell me who i can and can't speak to, you will give me my COMPLETE emails from Melissa this second or your fired!" lucky for him the regional head wasn't a moron and simply said 'He isn't talking about that virus going around, is he?" and he ended up getting a $100 bonus that week and a free steak dinner from the district guy for him and his wife but he still could have lost his job because PHB Pudfucker couldn't stand the thought his fat ass might miss out on some tail and was willing to infect the entire network just in the hope some woman would take to him, sad but true. He can frankly keep that risking his job bullshit, the worse stress i get now is my dad's GF calling me up going "Who is this bitch on his chat?" and then when I have her paste me the logs i find out its just a spambot that is pumping porn sites that his GF has been cussing for a good two hours. When dad found out his GF thought some random spambot was a rival and wasted two hours cussing a toaster i thought he'd choke he laughed so hard, but like he said 'Well at least we know she ain't broke her PC this week'.
You should have tried your local mom and pop PC shop. You wanna find weird shit WE are the place to go, and we usually have plenty of boards and will be happy to cut ya a deal. At my shop i have everything from a PITA old Compaq Deskpro SFF 733Mhz sitting in the closet (I really need to chunk the bitch, but its doing this weird beep code and dammit i want to know what it is but none of the usual lists cover it) to several athlon and Pentium 4 (I'll get rid of those on CL) to just about every kind of part and board and card, all piled in boxes. hell i even got some old Matrox PCI cards in one of 'em somewhere. We are the world's worst not to chunk if it works because ya never know, I sold one of those Matrox cards last year to a guy that didn't want to give up his Win2k office box and the matrox worked perfectly with it and I ended up selling my circa 1996 gamer PCs to a local lumber mill a few years back for a nice profit because they have a $85,000 C&C lathe that only takes commands from an ISA board and DOS 3.
So before you get shafted paying full price again next time give your local mom and pop shop a holler. We love guys that DIY and actually talk the talk as we get so damned many clueless users every damned day its nice to have someone who can talk turkey. hell bullshit with us a little while we'll cut ya a good deal. hell I sold the last of my RDRAM to a former teacher for like $30, you'd have thought he won the lotto the way he was jumping up and down when i told him what i'd let him have it for but I didn't want the crap and i figured anybody dealing with RDRAM had a big enough cross to bear without me trying to stiff 'em.
I have to wonder if he is a bot, which i still think mickey incremental UID is. Just like "Mikey" has the same script over and over, the "Use piece of original text + pathetic" so too do this one just copy pasta over and over. Surely a real troll would throw a change up now and then, or change a line or two.
As for TFA before any of the lame "Use Linux" karma whores show up as someone who actually fixes the thing when they get pwned 6 days a week I'd just like to point out that since XP SP2 a lot of the machines getting pwned were PEBKAC and after Vista the vast majority were PEBKAC and with 7 its almost 100% PEBKAC and sadly no OS can magically protect you from stupid people.
Here is the main causes of infections, at least walking into my shop but talking to other shopkeeps they are seeing the same: 1.- The "you want teh hot lesbos? you need to run our Iz_not_Viruz_iz_codec.exe to play teh vidz!" 2.- The "ZOMG you got teh viruz! To fix run our Iz_not_Viruz_iz_cleanerz.exe to get rid of it ZOMG!" 3.-The "Use the new Limewire (Iz_not_Viruz_iz_Limewirez) to download teh latest Titney_Spearz.mp3.exe tunez today!" and 4.-"Hey my BFF sent me a funny cat video in chat! It says I should run Iz_not_Viruz_iz_LOLCatz to see teh kittiez!"
Notice how in ALL of the above you don't need an exploit, and in fact you could replace.exe with.sh and pwn a Linux machine just as easily? before anyone says 'they'd need root!" you need that with Windows now too remember? the users happily give it root because they want the cookie, or the porn, or the silly cat video. As both the hardware and software gets better with security with features like ASLR,DEP, low rights mode browsing by default, etc the malware guys figured out the best way to beat security is....don't bother, just let the moron behind the desk do it FOR you. And as we saw with MacDefender and the KDELook bug it really doesn't matter what OS, as long as you offer the right cookie. For those that don't live in perception bubbles allow me to offer you "How to write a linux virus Part 1 and part 2 which actually explains better than I can basic social engineering tricks that work just about anywhere.
Now working with customers since before there even WAS a Windows or Linux i've realized that its pretty much impossible to make a hack proof OS that is useful to the masses. i can make it harder, much harder to pwn, by putting Comodo CIS or Avast Free along with switching them to a low rights mode browser like Chromium or Dragon, I can even make it easier to recover if they think they made a boo boo by installing comodo time machine in its own hidden partition, but in the end the simple fact is if the user has install rights you are at the mercy of the user and whether or not they have taken a stupid pill today, full stop. And believe me folks there are some doozies out there, i had to order one guy out of my shop and threaten to call the cops because he kept demanding i fix that new machine i just sold him for free since it was pwned in less than 24 hours. How did that happen? did I miss something? Nope after i told him flat footed that limewire was shut down by the feds years ago and anything that said it was Limewire was a virus he promptly went home, got on the web, and when the AV refused to let him install "the new limewire' he promptly first tried to disable followed by uninstalling said AV, then was shocked, shocked i tell you! that he ended up with 100+ pieces of malware. His argument was 'It says right there that there is a new limewire so dammit you should make it work!"
so remember folks when you hear all these woogy boogy here is a bug stories that there are tons of folks that have been running for ages and in fact will have a machine go through its entire life cycle without so much as adware and that these guys have figured out there are literally hundreds of thousands like my
Uhhh...you DO realize that most likely for the price you paid for that RDRAM you could have just shitcanned the board and put a MUCH nicer board in its place? I had a similar situation about a year and a half ago, I just Craigslisted the board under free stuff, slapped in a cheap socket 775 along with a $15 Pentium D and a gb of RAM and it was STILL cheaper than buying that POS RDRAM and i ended up with a much nicer system. hell if you don't want to go to that much effort you can buy those AMD E-350 system boards starting at like $80 and that has a dual core CPU and HD6310 GPU, just slap a $15 DDR 3 stick and you got a dual core that'll play 1080p and is small enough you can drop that sucker into even the SFF cases. I did that with some office boxes the customer didn't want to have to buy whole new systems to replace and it worked like a charm, quiet as a churchmouse and does any task your average SMB is using floor PCs for.
So trust me friend, as a born packrat i know how it hurts to shitcan functional gear but you gotta know when to hold and know when to fold and RDRAM is a fold situation. if you don't want it going to the dump offer the parts on freecycle or CL and let someone have it for spare parts, don't throw good money after bad friend.
I don't think a world without IP laws would hurt ARM at all, look at the Zilog Z80. the Zilog corp made only a tiny fraction of the Z80s and many were made without a license from Zilog but the abundance of Z80 chips at insanely cheap prices and the huge piles of code that were written for that chip keep Zilog selling chips to this very day. i mean think about that for a minute, a chip made when Reagan was president and everyone listened to music on cassettes is STILL selling. Because so many engineers and programmers know that chip its still used quite a lot in embedded applications, why just the other day a customer handed me a dead MP3 player after i helped them load their tunes onto their nw one and for the hell of it i cracked it open and yup, Z80.
As for TFA sadly you are right, like SCO they will lumber for years in a zombie state, getting VCs to throw them some more bucks every time they can get a judge to even hint he might agree with them, only to finally peter out and die. And after their patenting of the things they heard in the DRAM meetings I say couldn't happen to a shittier company, die Rambus you suck. I wonder how many companies and how much tech could have been offered under RAND but the corps were afraid they'd get "a Rambus pulled on them' if they collaborated?
Don't worry they'll just label it a "*Space kitten*" and then make ads calling for its protection and try to get hipster celebs on board.
*._ for those that don't get the joke please look up "PETA Seakittens" for a shocking example of how a group once upon a time was for the ethical treatment of food animals past the batshit exit about 30 miles back...wow.
Not to mention when they weren't patent trolls they were frankly shitty at business. RDRAM sucked, it cost too much to manufacture, needed dummy chips to fill empty slots, didn't scale well, it just wasn't a great design. Frankly after even Intel gave up on RDRAM patent trolling was pretty much all they had left. Good riddance Rambus, all of us will be glad when you are gone.
I don't know about him but I'm friends with one of the engineers that designed the shuttle mockups (really cool stuff, he has a great shot of him pushing a 25+ ton model all by himself because it was so perfectly balanced, also got to hold some of the actual blueprints for the shuttle interior cargo hold he rescued from the trash) and he sadi too many politicians were involved and i for one believe him. you look at the map of where the shuttle parts were being built and it looked like a shotgun blast on the map of the USA because so many politicians wanted a piece of the action so him saying that nothing got approved that would hurt Congressman Porkus from bringing home the bacon rings true to me. After all look at how many bridges to nowhere and other completely pointless projects we've had over the years because it brought money in to the right senator's or congressman's district. Sadly that is the problem with large government projects, suddenly all the congressmen are squealing like little piggies and fighting for a spot at the trough, nobody gives a crap about the good of the country, just the good it'll do their re-election campaign.
So why don't we work on man rating Atlas or Delta? It seems like we could get that off the ground a hell of a lot quicker than that "we'll recycle old shuttle parts!" clusterfuck that was constellation. Its pretty obvious there needs to be a not only plan B but a plan C and D if we are gonna keep going out there and both atlas and Delta have been used for ages and is well tested tech.
Personally though i think we should just wash our hands of the whole "meatbags is spaaaace!" idea until we can come up with some better engine tech than overgrown V2s and just let the bots handle it. As we have seen with the NASA small missions you can get a HELL of a lot of real hard science done for a hell of a lot cheaper than sending meatbags up for even a week, we're talking years worth of data about everything from how our sun works to closer looks at the farthest planets. until we develop some better engine tech, which can be tested on the probes so nobody screams if it blows up the first couple of tries, it just seems to me the smarter money would be to use our limited budgets and resources on probes than trying to act like its still the sixties. hell the only reason we were willing to blow metric fuckloads of money on it then was so we could give the Ruskies a collective teabagging and say "In your FACE Boris! you see that moon over your head? it has an American flag on it giving you the finger so bite it!". Now that the cold war is over the whole thing, while a nice notch in the history books, just seems pointless to continue when all we'll have to show for it is some pictures off some astronaut's Nikon of LEO, like we don't have a bazillion shots of the blue marble. Quit wasting money on matbags and get to cranking out probes to send all over our little corner to learn all we can, doesn't that sound like a better plan?
Re:So how's the Windows version coming along?
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KDE 4.8 Released
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Well that comes down to the fact you pretty much have to use a third party browser in Linux if you want modern features like ABP and then its way too easy to end up in the "software F needs kernel Y" pit of hell, although i agree Ubuntu has that problem in spades. oh and the problem with HP printers, at least around here, is if you don't buy them with an HP PC they tend to be double the price of everyone else. Kinda hard to explain to someone why they are gonna have to pay twice as much as the rest of their family and get royally assraped on ink as the Walgreen's won't refill HP carts. I just threw out a practically new HP printer because the price of the carts made it cheaper to chunk and get a Dell since they could get Dell compatible refills for $12.
While i'm glad Linux works for you the driver and hardware situation ends up making it a money loser ATM, in retail its not like i can shove them out the door and say 'all sales are final STFU" like they can online and since it looks like nobody is gonna step up to the plate before the great XP dieoff is over that means it'll be 2020 before it gets another shot. its a damned shame though, as this could be the time to really expose Linux to the masses and help a lot of working poor folks with off lease machines but trying to keep everything functional and stable and finding compatible hardware ends up making it cost more than a copy of Windows. maybe we'll get lucky and Torvalds will be retired by 2020, but i have a feeling if they miss this shot the vast majority will be on locked down ipads and iphones by 2020 and it won't matter much for anybody but servers, damned shame.
That's why I had both my boys assemble their own PCs, it wasn't quite the feat soldering one together was but it gave me a really good chance to explain each piece and its function as they put it together and helped them get a better grasp of the machine as a whole. of course there is also the pride involved of firing up a machine you build from a pile of parts and hearing it whir and come to life, but if anyone's kids need a PC I'd highly recommend one of the tiger barebone kits and a little of your time, its worth it IMHO.
Exactly, this would be like claiming you were intending to counterfeit Windows because you downloaded the Win2K source code that hit the net awhile back. Hell who HASN'T looked at the anarchist cookbook just to see what the fuss was about? Most of the same stuff they listed in the book you've seen in movies about hitmen, I remember one using the whole 'rig a light bulb with Joy liquid and gas to make a timed bomb' trick, i think it was a Charles Bronson movie. this is no different than demanding libraries give out a list of everyone who has ever checked out 'The Catcher In The Rye' because some nutball had a copy when they went apeshit. If they found him with a bomb lab in his kitchen fine and dandy, otherwise its "ZOMFG he can read! that's no good, he might have thoughts and stuff ZOMFG!" Allow me to say though thanks to the UK, every time I think the USA is the douchebag jackboot country you gotta come along and top us, thus making us feel a little better about our country, so thanks.
Troll? I take it nobody has actually been to the bible belt here I take it? Think it got that name because people hold their pants up with the King James? its because the preachers have a royal screaming shitfit if little Johnny sees a titty (yet lots of violence is just fine, never understood how that works) and the church can have the busybodies out in force if they sense a "decline in morality'. bet my last buck this Wifi is gonna be more restricted than any college or even business wifi because if its one thing southern politicians don't want to be seen as its helping promote porn in any way. look at that library in OKC that is being sued because you can't look up Wicca or GLAAD or anything that isn't WASP because its filtered. lets ask the NC users, how filtered is your local library? because you know they ain't gonna allow the line to be less filtered than the library.
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All they are gonna do with this bullshit is make kiddie fiddlers happy. Why? Because a true darkweb has ZERO censorship of ANY kind, that's kinda the point.
First the geeks will get tired of the bullshit, that is how it ALWAYS starts, from the first P2P on it always starts with geeks getting tired of bullshit because they can handle fiddly buggy DIY kinda software which is what most first gen stuff is. Then the programmers among the geeks decide the code sucks, or the UI sucks, or both, and they start making it better. Always trust a programmer to scratch itches wherever possible and they HATE bad design. Once they've made things better then come the power users, not as skilled as the geeks but smarter than the noobs the power users are helpful in their own way because they work as a bridge between the geeks and the noobs and point out the problems noobs are gonna have with the software. Once those start to get ironed out here come the noobs because by this time word has gotten out there is a place where you can bypass the bullshit and we humans like to bypass bullshit whenever possible.
So what we will end up with is some Freenet or I2P become the next Limewire. You think they would learn by now that the Internet will always route around damage, they've been playing whack a mole for what? 20 damned years now? you'd think they'd get the clue that they're doin it wrong if millions upon millions of people are going through all the trouble to bypass their bullshit. Of course look how many damned years it took for the record companies to get hit with the cluebat and now they are cashing record checks from iTunes and Amazon on MP3 sales, yet the movie companies are still charging ass raping prices on single episodes of shows (last I checked just for a single season of a series it was over $100 and it was all DRM tastic) and have made it illegal to rip your new movie to your iPod.
so here we go again, time to route around some damage. i'm sure they'll keep throwing money and bribing congress until SOPA/PIPA and any other draconian law they want is passed, and then slowly but surely the darkweb will become the web and the former web will just be the home shopping network. So get to work geeks, we're counting on you.
If it works as "well" as some of the other camera software I wouldn't bet the farm on it buddy. of course trying to support people with physical problems is a royal bitch anyway, I ended up having to get one of those graphics pads with a ton of shortcuts for a relative who has some days of trouble typing because every kind of voice recognition software i tried couldn't make heads or tails out of what he said because his breathing treatments caused just enough changes to his voice day to day to throw the software off.
Personally though I've had nothing but good luck with Asus laptops and netbooks so I say if anybody can pull it off they can. if you haven't tried one of their ExpressGate enabled laptops or netbooks you really should, its brilliant, I get anywhere from 7 to 8 hours on EG on my 1215B depending on Wifi strength and over 6 hours on Win 7 HP X64, this on a 6 cell that weighs only 3 pounds, hell thanks to the AMD E-350 having hardware acceleration its nearly 6 hours watching 720p HD video, great when I'm stuck at the doctor's office, and the whole thing only cost me $350 with 8gb of RAM and a nice little carrying case. Even after the flooding you can pick up the same model for like $450 so if they can do that and still make a profit while handing out Home instead of crappy Starter I'm sure if anyone can make it work Asus can.
Funnily enough the only thing i don't really care for is the webcam on my 1215b as its seriously low res but i suppose its good enough for video chat but I'm sure a higher res camera would have made the price jump. of course i doubt MSFT is giving this tech away for free so i wonder how much having kinect built in will bump the price, its not like MSFT can make it up on games like they can with the X360. asus does have their own gamestore built into expressgate though, i wonder if they'll hack kinect to work with EG? Kinda ironic if they do as expressgate is Linux based and you know how most diehard Linux users would rather chew on broken glass than have MSFT anything on their systems. Just as well that Asus doesn't sell Linux EEEs anymore I guess, this would probably get them boycotted. I suppose it would make for an interesting social experiment though, announce a new Linux laptop with built in kinect and see if the simultaneous desire to cheer and boo would cause the diehards head to asplode.
If you haven't watch "How NOT to hire an American" please do and pay attention, and then look in the local tech ads. Sadly you'll see that has become the how to playbook for the H1-b disease and you'll be able to spot it easy peasy once you know what you are looking for. they do the same things outlined in the video, such as ask for experience that can't be had (such as 10 years experience with a tech that's only been out 5 years) or ask for pie in the sky experience reqs for a job that pays one fifth what someone with that level of exp would actually get (such as 10 years project management, 5 years each in C, C++, Java, and .NET for a job that pays $19k a year) and then of course if any American is desperate enough to apply they'll just keep upping the ante on what they "require' until they can disqualify him and hire an H1-B. And look up "H1-B abuse" and you'll find story after story of abuse, last numbers I saw estimated more than 45% of the H1-Bs currently in this country were being underpaid and/or were being brought in for jobs where Americans were plentiful, just not at the pittance they wanted to pay.
I do NOT have a problem with immigrants, my own family came over during the potato famine. What I DO have a problem with is using scabs to try to turn every job into a McJob. we will NEVER have a vibrant American tech workforce if they can plainly see that they will have to pay $60k+ for a degree then be expected to compete with some guy the corp can pay $22k a year, its no different to what the illegals are doing to the blue collar sectors, where construction jobs that USED to pay well enough a man could feed his family now pay less than the manager at micky D and where you can yell "Immigra!" at any construction site and watch the workforce scatter like deer. You might also want to look at this sad memorial of the dead Americans killed by big corps quest for low wages. On just that one page you now have more Americans dead than were lost at the towers, all thanks to greed.
Well when you are dealing with home users you had damned well better have third party software updated or else you've got a zombie and THAT in a nutshell is the problem i've always had with Linux. Way too much software is "You need kernel Y to run our new software G which you need because a zero day is out for version F but FYI kernel y will break your sound" And I've tried stable to stable but the ONLY one I had that work on was Debian and frankly Debian is more of a server that plays a little at being a desktop than a desktop. support for plug and play or supporting grandma's new phone that she needs to get the pictures off of simply isn't there unless you use one of the clusterfuck always broken editions like Ubuntu. BTW FYI have you seen the "brilliant" new direction Canonical is going for ubuntu? Voice control! Now whether your desktop works are not will depend on how your sinuses are doing today! lord its like the entire planet has a stupid virus spreading like a zombie plague, mindless tards going "Twitter, Facebook, LOL, shiny stuff".
And if stupidity died tomorrow? i'd have a bloody party that's what I'd do. i could concentrate on hardware and working on my music instead of constant brain sucking dumbshit on all sides. if we were lucky it'd spread to the OS builders and tomorrow MSFT would announce "We're sorry, we see what we did there, we'll go back to having a business version and a home because someone pointed out businesses don't care about gaming and twitter, our bad" and the Linux camp would announce "Ooops, sorry about that, we see why home users would have serious trouble with our products so now we're releasing the "it just fucking works" edition that gets a solid 10 years worth of updates with ZERO breakage and no making you upgrade just to get the latest software patched, for the new version we'll call IJFW for short we're having an ABI with a central repo where all drivers will be housed so if little Suzy plugs in ANY device it'll instantly install the drivers because IJFW and the focus will be on hand holding and wizards and big fat bloody icons even your grandmom could hit. Server and embedded of course won't be changed because those guys would get seriously pissed, have a nice day" and then i could just slap a copy of IJFW Linux on all these off lease instead of scrambling for Win 7 starter CALs which FYI good fucking luck buying those in lots of less than 10,000. No damned wonder Win 7 Pirate edition is damned popular with the shops.
Finally as for magical thinking which I've harped on against for years, that is why i had to get out of corporate. Corp pays better but I looked like a corpse and I kept a headache dealing with all the PHBs who knew just enough to be REALLY dangerous. when i told the boys I was thinking of quitting and it would involve a cut in pay they were like "Please do, we can live with less but we lost mom and dad already we can't lose you too" which needless to say was a big fucking wakeup call. but all day it was one magical thinking problem after another, they'd hire some nitwit because he underbid everyone while selling snake oil, or they'd pay too much for some whiz bang new toy and think it magically meant they cut cut IT staff and funding because "With this (insert magical device like HIPS, firewall, AV, etc) our security problems are over!". Last one I dealt with was a law firm i did as a hired gun, bought them some nice bog standard HP desktops running into an HP file server, had it all wired through a nice Sonicwall with a T1, it ran like a Swiss watch. i tell them 'I don't have the time to be your full time IT guy, but here is the number of a couple of guys i know that are top notch" well not 6 months later i get called back because they have "serious trouble" and when I get there...fuck.
A bean counting PHB decided my guys were "too expensive" and he "knew someone which was a whiz at computers" and managed to get himself a promotion thank to the money he "saved" the company. The dumb fucker he brings in decides my systems are 'too slow' and
I have to agree with the other poster you don't start someone on MP with the movies, frankly they just weren't as good as the series. i would start them with one of the many best of compilations, that will give you all the classics like cheese sketch, dead parrot, lumberjack, I started my boys out on MP that way and now both love the Python. Man the local college kids STILL eat up MP, my oldest says you can stop anywhere on the campus and go "I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay" and 50 kids will call back "He sleeps all night and he works all day". But I'd give them a best of MP along with French and Saunders, followed by are You Being Served. I have yet to find anybody who doesn't like Sloakum and Humphries. That will give them a nice taste of the best bits and from there they can decide where their tastes lie, my youngest loves Served while the oldest loves Red Dwarf and both love Python.
Not to mention everybody seems to forget the "hey its cold as hell!" weather many of us grew up with was called by a thing now known as the "little ice age" which was naturally COLDER than the average. i would also point out this little blue ball has been, and always will be, one violent chaotic mutha when it comes to weather shifts, see the medieval warming period for a nice long period of freaky warm weather which i think I can state without fear of contradiction was NOT caused by SUVs.
Finally allow me to say if you believe a damned word from that hypocrite rev Al gore you need your head examined. not only has he set himself up to be a carbon billionaire but the man lives in a house sucking more energy than a dozen family dwellings, with an indoor basketball court and enough AC blasting to equal the carbon footprint of a couple of dozen families, the man has a fleet of SUVs while he tells your peasant ass to ride the bus and has the brass balls to say farting around in his own personal Lear jet as well as all of the above makes him carbon NEUTRAL...because he pays himself carbon credits from his own company. that would be like me moving money from my left to right pocket, calling it wealth redistribution, and then demanding you change your lifestyle to reimburse me for my "loss". Oh and just FYI but the same one that created credit default swaps, aka instant bailouts or economy killers. Guess what her new job is? why its writing the rules for carbon derivities which i'm sure when she's done while you'll pay more for...well everything, her good friends at Goldman Sachs and Mr Gore could switch to coal burning and end up getting paid for being "green" just as she sold junk housing mortgages as AAA investments.
So if you want to cut down because its better for the air fine and dandy, maybe you should look to Ed Begly Jr who lives a shining example of how the individual can significantly lower their footprint. But please watch this video and don't fall for the hucksters like Rev Al and his religion of Crap & Trade. the ONLY thing Al Gore gives a shit about is Al Gore or he wouldn't be blowing through energy like shit through a goose and living in a house that would make Hugh Hefner blush while driving a fleet worthy of a third world dictator. The only inconvenient truth is Al Gore has set up a scam that will make him tankers full of money and wants YOU to pay for it, its a reverse Robin Hood, take from the poor to give to the rich. And you notice Rev Al has NEVER, not even once, said a single word about possibly maybe stopping China's MFN status and limiting imports while they are polluting so bad we can detect it on the west coast? why is that? maybe because his portfolio is making mad MONIES from china, just like his friends? this isn't about left or right folks, this is about scammers and the scams they pull. Again no problem with simply setting goals and limits, look at how much cleaner our air is now compared to the 70s, it CAN be done without cutting Al Gore a check.
Well I agree the whole is ALWAYS better but sadly Graham's gone so we have to take what we can get and even Python on their worst days you have to admit was world's better than the stoner and romcom crap we've been getting of late. I agree Chapman was seriously a dark writer and Idle with his wordplay needs to be there but frankly we've had such horrible shit, we're talking nothing but fuck jokes and fart jokes and dope jokes that even if they are just a third as witty as they were during the olden days they'll still kick ass. sadly even the Brit humor seems to have gone downhill with everything being "lowest common denominator" which sadly these days is about as witty and intelligent as beavis and butthead.
So while I will always probably picture Chapman first when i think of Python, usually his colonel in the tutu telling everyone to "stop right this minute its much too silly!" along with the pepperpots honestly after seeing what passes for comedy these days having ANY new Python will be so damned refreshing after a sea of bodily functions bits it'll seem like Xmas to me.
Well if you happen to come across a used C128 that isn't assraping priced holler would ya? i got an ex NASA engineer that has some killer code and specs for a robotic arm he built using one of those as the brain but his got stolen at a trade show in Dallas years ago and i told him i'd keep an eye out. I'm "lucky" in that I've gotten to be buddies with the building super who also does a LOT of work for the city and local colleges so he keeps an eye out and is constantly bringing me free loads of off lease desktops and laptops. Sometimes they are missing the hard drives but other than that most of them are intact and easy peasy to refurb, just pulled a 300gb Seagate SATA for my personal pile and replaced my slowly dying Plextor with a brand new LG burner out of the last batch.
Ever since i Frankensteined the best parts of the bunch into a new box for Keith the super, who i swear to god was using a circa 1997 Pentium II 400Mhz as his office box I'm officially on his "cool" list and he goes out of his way to load me up so I'm never at a shortage of parts, got two late model P4s done ready for CL and another i'm just waiting on a drive for. I put him together a nice socket 775 3.06 GHz P4 with HT along with an 80Gb HDD and an old Geforce 7600GS so he could hook it to his widescreen and watch movies with it so he's a seriously happy camper. He's supposed to bring me another big load of laptops and since his GF wants one (and I told him like the desktops i'd slap him together the best of the bunch and hand it over for free) so i'm sure i'll be getting another load of the good stuff, again for a whole $0 and just letting Keith have a good one for his gal. i can't complain as i took the money i made off the last load and built my GF a sweeeet AMD quad, i was upgrading my quad to a Thuban 6 core anyway so i used my old quad and a new board and case to make her a truly beautiful win 7 HP box, 4gb of RAM, 600Gb HDD, 16x DVD burner like new i got out of the last load along with one of those 24 in 1 card readers that replace the floppy slot, and had enough cash left over to get her a wireless keyboard and mouse, new stereo speakers, and a webcam.
As for weird ICs i'll have to ask my NASA engineer bud, he has a ton of ICs in his workshop. he builds bots and rocket for the local college to compete in NASA contests, way cool. have you tried BGMicro yet? if they don't have it you can shoot them an email and if they come across they'll shoot you a heads up. my engineer bud buys a ton of TTL chips and all kinds of ICs from them, great company with cheap prices. if you like to do your own protoboarding and stuff like that check out their specials like the "big bag o' chips" as my bud has bought several of those and come out with some seriously rare and expensive ICs and chips out of those. Basically anything they don't have enough of to offer in their catalog they'll throw with a bunch of other stuff in a big bag and sell cheap. last one he picked up had a ton of sweet TI chips that were just perfect for stepper motor controllers along with some excellent timing circuits and he got the whole bag for like $8 with shipping. Their LEDs are also dirt cheap and kick ass, REALLY bright. they even sell bundles harvested from state street signs and MAN are those suckers bright!
But get to know you're local mom & pops because ya never know when we'll have that weird part. When RDRAM was cutting edge I was the head guy at Doug's PC Service plus and we had a slot in our RAM bin just filled with RDRAM, it turned out one of the shops in the next town had an owner that was cranking out sat descramblers and fake copies of Windows so good they even had the hologram (I found this out when i had stopped in the shop to ask the kid running the place if he had any whitebox cases as i had a rush order and the next thing i know the FBI in full BA kicks in the door and i'm staring at an M16, not fun!) and when the guy evaded capture (and it turned out had sold all the local cops PCs, ha ha!) the cops s
I'd know what to do with at least one of them: "Rockers Independent Alliance Association or RIAA, dedicated to being a one stop shop to help independent artists connect with fans and each other and promote the freedom of music while still letting the artist make a living by helping set up tours, the selling of promo items, and generally helping both fans and artists enjoy the wonder that is music" sounds like a good idea to me.
....its..../falls over/
Seriously though if they can get Cleese, Palin,Idle and Jones they should be able to capture the feel of the original. Gilliam was mostly animation and as Cleese put it "Graham added fire to the engine but he could never be the engine" as Chapman's function during writing was to be their sense of what was funny. The famous dead parrot was originally a broken toaster and it was Chapman that said 'How can we make this madder?" and got them thinking crazier until they came up with the Norwegian Blue, lovely plumage it has. Not that it won't be missing Chapman, Cleese said "he was always the best actor of the group" which is why he was the lead in LoB and HG, and his ability to deadpan....who can forget his "This is getting silly! stop that!" Major wearing a tutu? But if the guys are actually working together (according to TFA they haven't got Idle on board yet) like in the old days it ought to be better than a good 99.95% of the tripe coming out of Hollywood now. Maybe we can hope that this will start a revival of good silly yet thinking comedy again? Man after all the RomComs and stoner comedies the Pythons will be like a breath of fresh air after touring a sewage treatment plant.
Well as someone who has to explain things to consumers all day all i want to know is this: Can my customers fire up their bog standard B/G/N Wifi enabled laptops and netbooks and hook up with as simple and painless a procedure as normal Wifi? if the answer is yes i'm all for it and if its no they need to STFU and get out of here with that shit. From reading TFA it looks like a STFU and GTFO kind of deal, needing new cards and will confuse the hell out of my customers who think (and rightly so since they have backwards compatibility) that "Wifi is Wifi".
Good on your dad as well. I call them mine but they were my late sister's, may she rest in piece, right after the second was born we find out she's terminal and her husband says "I can't deal with this" and just walks away, never to be seen again. There i was, swore i'd never have kids, and I get a newborn and one barely two while my mom retires to take care of sis full time. they gave her 3-5 years, she managed to hang on bedridden for 14 years so she'd be sure she'd get to see them graduate HS.
But now the oldest is on the Dean's list, has so impressed the local minister with his work ethic he's gushed to all the PTBs about 'how great it would be to have a young man with such strong faith and work ethics helping on the mission' that he's pulled strings and now the boy will be getting most of his education for free which is nice, he says he has no time for dating but when i go up there i can see the gals drooling over him so i don't think he'll have a problem in that dept, I'm sure he'll find a gal just as boring as he is and they'll have little boring kids and lead a totally boring life and be happy LOL! How a wild old bass playing biker like me could raise two straight arrows i'll never know LOL!
I prefer to call it "all go to hell except cave 76!" after the classic mel brooks bit as it cuts to the heart of the matter and shows they are no better than a caveman fighting over "their" turf. oh and I was told we should call fanbois "those with perception bubbles' as its nicer. I always preferred " elitist assholes having a giant circle jerk" but i'm told that is a little on the crude side and one should always try to improve one's vocabulary.
And I wasn't trying to disparage Linux, i personally like it for embedded and webservers, i was simply trying to beat to the punch the obvious "Freetard" posts we get on any windows subject. you know the ones, bullshit like "Linux never gets viruses!" or the completely pointless "Use Linux' when the entire TFA has nothing whatever to do with Linux or FOSS. hell i had one just yesterday when i pointed out i couldn't sell Linux boxes to consumers because the upgrades ALWAYS seem to break drivers "Well just disable upgrades, its not like you need them!" and it was like i could just FEEL the stupid and his perception bubble pouring through the cable, sad that in this day and age when we had JUST had a posting on distros scrambling to issue patches for a zero day privilege escalation in Linux I would get a posting like that. just as i've sat he literally gobsmacked when i get a iKoolaid drinker that will argue up and down that "Macs don't have viruses" because apparently if the user has to do anything at all then it "don't count'. talk about splitting hairs with a laser!
In the end its that kind of dumbshit we PC shops have to deal with 6 days a damned week, every time you think "surely they can't do anything dumber right?" someone will come along and prove they are a bigger idiot. And the sad part is despite all this great security in all three major OSes frankly the malware guys can be lazier than ever because thanks to social engineering you'll have thousands just like that one i had to run out my shop because all they had to do was stick the label "New limewire!" on their malware and they had dipshits lining up to disable their AVs and pwn their machines. I had to find a new free porn site just to give to male customers to keep them from constantly falling for "Iz-Not_Viruz_iz_Porn_Codex" trick, and I hate to say it but thank God for FB as it keeps the females from downloading infected match 3 games, instead they click like little hamsters slamming the button for a pellet on farmville.
I will say that working for home users is 1000% better than working corporate because at least home users KNOW they don't know and will defer to you, so much better than dealing with PHBs that know enough to be dangerous. I actually have a friend still in corporate that ended up being drug up to regional one time and having to appeal to the district manager because his immediate boss told him, I swear to fricking God, that "You have NO RIGHT to tell me who i can and can't speak to, you will give me my COMPLETE emails from Melissa this second or your fired!" lucky for him the regional head wasn't a moron and simply said 'He isn't talking about that virus going around, is he?" and he ended up getting a $100 bonus that week and a free steak dinner from the district guy for him and his wife but he still could have lost his job because PHB Pudfucker couldn't stand the thought his fat ass might miss out on some tail and was willing to infect the entire network just in the hope some woman would take to him, sad but true. He can frankly keep that risking his job bullshit, the worse stress i get now is my dad's GF calling me up going "Who is this bitch on his chat?" and then when I have her paste me the logs i find out its just a spambot that is pumping porn sites that his GF has been cussing for a good two hours. When dad found out his GF thought some random spambot was a rival and wasted two hours cussing a toaster i thought he'd choke he laughed so hard, but like he said 'Well at least we know she ain't broke her PC this week'.
You should have tried your local mom and pop PC shop. You wanna find weird shit WE are the place to go, and we usually have plenty of boards and will be happy to cut ya a deal. At my shop i have everything from a PITA old Compaq Deskpro SFF 733Mhz sitting in the closet (I really need to chunk the bitch, but its doing this weird beep code and dammit i want to know what it is but none of the usual lists cover it) to several athlon and Pentium 4 (I'll get rid of those on CL) to just about every kind of part and board and card, all piled in boxes. hell i even got some old Matrox PCI cards in one of 'em somewhere. We are the world's worst not to chunk if it works because ya never know, I sold one of those Matrox cards last year to a guy that didn't want to give up his Win2k office box and the matrox worked perfectly with it and I ended up selling my circa 1996 gamer PCs to a local lumber mill a few years back for a nice profit because they have a $85,000 C&C lathe that only takes commands from an ISA board and DOS 3.
So before you get shafted paying full price again next time give your local mom and pop shop a holler. We love guys that DIY and actually talk the talk as we get so damned many clueless users every damned day its nice to have someone who can talk turkey. hell bullshit with us a little while we'll cut ya a good deal. hell I sold the last of my RDRAM to a former teacher for like $30, you'd have thought he won the lotto the way he was jumping up and down when i told him what i'd let him have it for but I didn't want the crap and i figured anybody dealing with RDRAM had a big enough cross to bear without me trying to stiff 'em.
I have to wonder if he is a bot, which i still think mickey incremental UID is. Just like "Mikey" has the same script over and over, the "Use piece of original text + pathetic" so too do this one just copy pasta over and over. Surely a real troll would throw a change up now and then, or change a line or two.
As for TFA before any of the lame "Use Linux" karma whores show up as someone who actually fixes the thing when they get pwned 6 days a week I'd just like to point out that since XP SP2 a lot of the machines getting pwned were PEBKAC and after Vista the vast majority were PEBKAC and with 7 its almost 100% PEBKAC and sadly no OS can magically protect you from stupid people.
Here is the main causes of infections, at least walking into my shop but talking to other shopkeeps they are seeing the same: 1.- The "you want teh hot lesbos? you need to run our Iz_not_Viruz_iz_codec.exe to play teh vidz!" 2.- The "ZOMG you got teh viruz! To fix run our Iz_not_Viruz_iz_cleanerz.exe to get rid of it ZOMG!" 3.-The "Use the new Limewire (Iz_not_Viruz_iz_Limewirez) to download teh latest Titney_Spearz.mp3.exe tunez today!" and 4.-"Hey my BFF sent me a funny cat video in chat! It says I should run Iz_not_Viruz_iz_LOLCatz to see teh kittiez!"
Notice how in ALL of the above you don't need an exploit, and in fact you could replace .exe with .sh and pwn a Linux machine just as easily? before anyone says 'they'd need root!" you need that with Windows now too remember? the users happily give it root because they want the cookie, or the porn, or the silly cat video. As both the hardware and software gets better with security with features like ASLR,DEP, low rights mode browsing by default, etc the malware guys figured out the best way to beat security is....don't bother, just let the moron behind the desk do it FOR you. And as we saw with MacDefender and the KDELook bug it really doesn't matter what OS, as long as you offer the right cookie. For those that don't live in perception bubbles allow me to offer you "How to write a linux virus Part 1 and part 2 which actually explains better than I can basic social engineering tricks that work just about anywhere.
Now working with customers since before there even WAS a Windows or Linux i've realized that its pretty much impossible to make a hack proof OS that is useful to the masses. i can make it harder, much harder to pwn, by putting Comodo CIS or Avast Free along with switching them to a low rights mode browser like Chromium or Dragon, I can even make it easier to recover if they think they made a boo boo by installing comodo time machine in its own hidden partition, but in the end the simple fact is if the user has install rights you are at the mercy of the user and whether or not they have taken a stupid pill today, full stop. And believe me folks there are some doozies out there, i had to order one guy out of my shop and threaten to call the cops because he kept demanding i fix that new machine i just sold him for free since it was pwned in less than 24 hours. How did that happen? did I miss something? Nope after i told him flat footed that limewire was shut down by the feds years ago and anything that said it was Limewire was a virus he promptly went home, got on the web, and when the AV refused to let him install "the new limewire' he promptly first tried to disable followed by uninstalling said AV, then was shocked, shocked i tell you! that he ended up with 100+ pieces of malware. His argument was 'It says right there that there is a new limewire so dammit you should make it work!"
so remember folks when you hear all these woogy boogy here is a bug stories that there are tons of folks that have been running for ages and in fact will have a machine go through its entire life cycle without so much as adware and that these guys have figured out there are literally hundreds of thousands like my
Uhhh...you DO realize that most likely for the price you paid for that RDRAM you could have just shitcanned the board and put a MUCH nicer board in its place? I had a similar situation about a year and a half ago, I just Craigslisted the board under free stuff, slapped in a cheap socket 775 along with a $15 Pentium D and a gb of RAM and it was STILL cheaper than buying that POS RDRAM and i ended up with a much nicer system. hell if you don't want to go to that much effort you can buy those AMD E-350 system boards starting at like $80 and that has a dual core CPU and HD6310 GPU, just slap a $15 DDR 3 stick and you got a dual core that'll play 1080p and is small enough you can drop that sucker into even the SFF cases. I did that with some office boxes the customer didn't want to have to buy whole new systems to replace and it worked like a charm, quiet as a churchmouse and does any task your average SMB is using floor PCs for.
So trust me friend, as a born packrat i know how it hurts to shitcan functional gear but you gotta know when to hold and know when to fold and RDRAM is a fold situation. if you don't want it going to the dump offer the parts on freecycle or CL and let someone have it for spare parts, don't throw good money after bad friend.
I don't think a world without IP laws would hurt ARM at all, look at the Zilog Z80. the Zilog corp made only a tiny fraction of the Z80s and many were made without a license from Zilog but the abundance of Z80 chips at insanely cheap prices and the huge piles of code that were written for that chip keep Zilog selling chips to this very day. i mean think about that for a minute, a chip made when Reagan was president and everyone listened to music on cassettes is STILL selling. Because so many engineers and programmers know that chip its still used quite a lot in embedded applications, why just the other day a customer handed me a dead MP3 player after i helped them load their tunes onto their nw one and for the hell of it i cracked it open and yup, Z80.
As for TFA sadly you are right, like SCO they will lumber for years in a zombie state, getting VCs to throw them some more bucks every time they can get a judge to even hint he might agree with them, only to finally peter out and die. And after their patenting of the things they heard in the DRAM meetings I say couldn't happen to a shittier company, die Rambus you suck. I wonder how many companies and how much tech could have been offered under RAND but the corps were afraid they'd get "a Rambus pulled on them' if they collaborated?
Don't worry they'll just label it a "*Space kitten*" and then make ads calling for its protection and try to get hipster celebs on board.
*._ for those that don't get the joke please look up "PETA Seakittens" for a shocking example of how a group once upon a time was for the ethical treatment of food animals past the batshit exit about 30 miles back...wow.
Not to mention when they weren't patent trolls they were frankly shitty at business. RDRAM sucked, it cost too much to manufacture, needed dummy chips to fill empty slots, didn't scale well, it just wasn't a great design. Frankly after even Intel gave up on RDRAM patent trolling was pretty much all they had left. Good riddance Rambus, all of us will be glad when you are gone.
I don't know about him but I'm friends with one of the engineers that designed the shuttle mockups (really cool stuff, he has a great shot of him pushing a 25+ ton model all by himself because it was so perfectly balanced, also got to hold some of the actual blueprints for the shuttle interior cargo hold he rescued from the trash) and he sadi too many politicians were involved and i for one believe him. you look at the map of where the shuttle parts were being built and it looked like a shotgun blast on the map of the USA because so many politicians wanted a piece of the action so him saying that nothing got approved that would hurt Congressman Porkus from bringing home the bacon rings true to me. After all look at how many bridges to nowhere and other completely pointless projects we've had over the years because it brought money in to the right senator's or congressman's district. Sadly that is the problem with large government projects, suddenly all the congressmen are squealing like little piggies and fighting for a spot at the trough, nobody gives a crap about the good of the country, just the good it'll do their re-election campaign.
So why don't we work on man rating Atlas or Delta? It seems like we could get that off the ground a hell of a lot quicker than that "we'll recycle old shuttle parts!" clusterfuck that was constellation. Its pretty obvious there needs to be a not only plan B but a plan C and D if we are gonna keep going out there and both atlas and Delta have been used for ages and is well tested tech.
Personally though i think we should just wash our hands of the whole "meatbags is spaaaace!" idea until we can come up with some better engine tech than overgrown V2s and just let the bots handle it. As we have seen with the NASA small missions you can get a HELL of a lot of real hard science done for a hell of a lot cheaper than sending meatbags up for even a week, we're talking years worth of data about everything from how our sun works to closer looks at the farthest planets. until we develop some better engine tech, which can be tested on the probes so nobody screams if it blows up the first couple of tries, it just seems to me the smarter money would be to use our limited budgets and resources on probes than trying to act like its still the sixties. hell the only reason we were willing to blow metric fuckloads of money on it then was so we could give the Ruskies a collective teabagging and say "In your FACE Boris! you see that moon over your head? it has an American flag on it giving you the finger so bite it!". Now that the cold war is over the whole thing, while a nice notch in the history books, just seems pointless to continue when all we'll have to show for it is some pictures off some astronaut's Nikon of LEO, like we don't have a bazillion shots of the blue marble. Quit wasting money on matbags and get to cranking out probes to send all over our little corner to learn all we can, doesn't that sound like a better plan?
Well that comes down to the fact you pretty much have to use a third party browser in Linux if you want modern features like ABP and then its way too easy to end up in the "software F needs kernel Y" pit of hell, although i agree Ubuntu has that problem in spades. oh and the problem with HP printers, at least around here, is if you don't buy them with an HP PC they tend to be double the price of everyone else. Kinda hard to explain to someone why they are gonna have to pay twice as much as the rest of their family and get royally assraped on ink as the Walgreen's won't refill HP carts. I just threw out a practically new HP printer because the price of the carts made it cheaper to chunk and get a Dell since they could get Dell compatible refills for $12.
While i'm glad Linux works for you the driver and hardware situation ends up making it a money loser ATM, in retail its not like i can shove them out the door and say 'all sales are final STFU" like they can online and since it looks like nobody is gonna step up to the plate before the great XP dieoff is over that means it'll be 2020 before it gets another shot. its a damned shame though, as this could be the time to really expose Linux to the masses and help a lot of working poor folks with off lease machines but trying to keep everything functional and stable and finding compatible hardware ends up making it cost more than a copy of Windows. maybe we'll get lucky and Torvalds will be retired by 2020, but i have a feeling if they miss this shot the vast majority will be on locked down ipads and iphones by 2020 and it won't matter much for anybody but servers, damned shame.
That's why I had both my boys assemble their own PCs, it wasn't quite the feat soldering one together was but it gave me a really good chance to explain each piece and its function as they put it together and helped them get a better grasp of the machine as a whole. of course there is also the pride involved of firing up a machine you build from a pile of parts and hearing it whir and come to life, but if anyone's kids need a PC I'd highly recommend one of the tiger barebone kits and a little of your time, its worth it IMHO.
Exactly, this would be like claiming you were intending to counterfeit Windows because you downloaded the Win2K source code that hit the net awhile back. Hell who HASN'T looked at the anarchist cookbook just to see what the fuss was about? Most of the same stuff they listed in the book you've seen in movies about hitmen, I remember one using the whole 'rig a light bulb with Joy liquid and gas to make a timed bomb' trick, i think it was a Charles Bronson movie. this is no different than demanding libraries give out a list of everyone who has ever checked out 'The Catcher In The Rye' because some nutball had a copy when they went apeshit. If they found him with a bomb lab in his kitchen fine and dandy, otherwise its "ZOMFG he can read! that's no good, he might have thoughts and stuff ZOMFG!" Allow me to say though thanks to the UK, every time I think the USA is the douchebag jackboot country you gotta come along and top us, thus making us feel a little better about our country, so thanks.
Troll? I take it nobody has actually been to the bible belt here I take it? Think it got that name because people hold their pants up with the King James? its because the preachers have a royal screaming shitfit if little Johnny sees a titty (yet lots of violence is just fine, never understood how that works) and the church can have the busybodies out in force if they sense a "decline in morality'. bet my last buck this Wifi is gonna be more restricted than any college or even business wifi because if its one thing southern politicians don't want to be seen as its helping promote porn in any way. look at that library in OKC that is being sued because you can't look up Wicca or GLAAD or anything that isn't WASP because its filtered. lets ask the NC users, how filtered is your local library? because you know they ain't gonna allow the line to be less filtered than the library.