But maybe its just me, but the newer games don't really seem to have much of a chance for aquiring a "bag of tricks' because everyone just runs like a chicken with their head cut off. that is what I miss about MechWarrior 3/4, i used to get accused of cheating until i would tell them my exact loadout and they were always "Uhhh...what the hell? you only got one shot!" but that was the point, i stripped down my mech and made it into a walking blunderbuss. no secondary weapons, no lasers, just one big ass shot. if i missed and my teammates didn't cover me i was toast but if i hit you...ohhh mama...even the biggest assualts would be hurting and anything medium or below was dead meat.
Working here at my little shop though i know what you mean, between the shop, working on the new album with my new band, my GF, and spending time with the boys i just don't get to blast like I used to. hell i think more than a third of the Steam Xmas sale games i got along with the GOG Xmas sale games i picked up i haven't even gotten a chance to fire up yet and with the GF about to use her vacation time so we can have a week just the two of us before the grandbaby is born I just don't have the time to spend hours learning, although like I said from what I saw games like TF2 are more chicken with their head cut off. But you don't realize how bad time catches up until you hit the big 4.0. and you fire up a game you used to rule like HL:DM with your two college bound boys and find them handing you your ass on a platter. Man it was worse than schooling, it was bitch slapping time.
While everyone here makes jokes that won't change the fact the H1-B is completely wiping out our ability to compete. the H1-Bs all go home and help THEIR countries to compete while our young folks are rightly steering clear of anything to do with tech fields because they can't shell out $70K+ for a degree to face off with someone who gets paid less than 30k a year off the boat, its no different than how Japan used product dumping to wipe out our electronics industry in the 80s, because with the H1-B their degrees cost a pittance compared to ours so one simply can't sell one's abilities with an artificially depressed market without going broke.
the H1-B was originally a good idea, meant to make up for shortfalls in the workforce while giving our students time to take the courses and be able to meet future demands, instead what we ended up with is this. Its time to end the H1-B as well as implement the E-verify so that our blue collar workers likewise compete on an equal playing field. Enough is enough and with so many out of work importing workers is insanity.
Because as we saw with that guy thrown in jail for a thumb.db literally landing on the wrong page can land you in PMITA prison? hell nowadays even a click on a link stuck on here by a troll could be enough to land you in PMITA prison because some really scummy trolls treat CP as the new goatse and we've had those kinds of links posted right here on/. so you're idea of a web crawler randomly clicking links, unless it ran completely in RAM and never touched the drive could be VERY dangerous friend.
Well then I'd have to give a point for the Commodore as we could get some cool sounds out of the VIC and C64. Weird though that they would build something for home users with ZERO sound at all though since the VCS could even do bleeps and bloops in 77. Was it the chip was just too slow, or was the addition of sound too expensive? Man i give them guys credit for how much they could squeeze into the bad joke of a memory space because as someone who started on the VIC and Trash 80 i can say that is one thing I do NOT miss and that's having to fight for every byte.
But looking back it really amazes me how far we have come. I mean if you would have told me when i was writing pong games on my VIC that one day I'd have a micro portable called a "netbook" that only weighs 3 pounds, has dual 1600MHz CPUs with 8Gb, actual Gbs of RAM and 320 gb of space instead of squeezing everything onto a datasette and the whole smash would cost just $350 i'd have asked you to quit hogging whatever you were smoking. I do think its kinda wasteful how badly some of the programs behave now when it comes to resources though, it seems today programmers don't optimize shit anymore and just throw more RAM at it. Can you imagine how fast programs would run today if programmers were even half as thrifty as they were back then?
But how badly will it be filtered and monitored? because if NC is anything like the rest of the south the busybodies will make sure you can't even look up breast cancer because it has breast in it. that is one thing i'll give you coast dwellers, you don't see to have near the problem with busybodies as we do in the bible belt.
"You don't invite your neighbors over for dinner until you know whether they are cannibals or not" was that Asimov or Clarke that said that? I think if aliens ever bothered to show up frankly it wouldn't be close encounters OR ID4, simply because any race with technology so far advanced that FTL travel was possible could have all the resources they could ever desire at their fingertips. nope most likely what we'd get is tourists doing their own Gorillas in the mist.
as for TFA frankly i'm more curious about what we have in our backyard myself. With Ganymede and Europa both looking like there might be liquid water they are probably the best chance at non terrestrial life we are gonna see in several lifetimes so personally i'd love to see some probes sent to take samples and see what's out there. Sadly the USA is broke and NASA has their budget slashed every time we turn around so its up to the EU, India, or China to take that next step. C'mon China, you're flush with cash, wouldn't a Chinese flag look good on Europa?
Well it looks like they could use some more bytes as I click on TFA (I know I know...but I'm bored) and it says "509 Bandwidth Limit Exceeded" so it looks like despite our falling numbers we can still cause a good old fashioned Slashdotting.
Now for those of us that never got to have a ZX back in the day a few questions: How did it stack up to the other systems of the day? The Trash 80, The Commodore VIC20 and C64, the Atari 400/800 and the 5150 IBM? In my area it was all VIC20s and Trash 80s so I never did get to play with one. While i love my 6 core with tons o' RAM and Tbs of HDD space as one old customer of mine that had the C128 and loves to wax nostalgic about says "You just can't know the guts of a modern machine like you could those old systems". You could really get bare metal on those old systems, could find out the location of every register, every hidden Opcode, you could really squeeze every drop of power out of those systems if you knew what you were doing.
And i know this is off topic but fuck if i know where else to ask this and we are talking about seriously old systems so here goes: Has anybody built a hardware emulation or maybe a SoC of the old C128? Because I've had zippo luck for finding the guy a C128 at a non assraping price and he has tons of his old code he'd love to play with again. He had all these really wicked things cooked up for the C128 like this robotic arm that was really slick or this cool sat tracking animation he made for one of the companies selling the big 12 footers back in the day and he's always talking about how he'd love to break all that old code back out and fiddle with it again but his system got stolen years ago so he's had bingo luck. Everything I've found has been based on the C64 not the C128 so i'm guessing it wasn't a real popular system so any links that could point me in the right direction would be appreciated.
Yeah but is this BAD thing, I think not. Having more tools and choices is a good thing IMHO as competition makes for better tools all around. Maybe their setup will produce cleaner code, maybe it will be more noob friendly, maybe they'll make it butt simple to share your content with the ever growing Yahoo portal, who knows but i think it'll be nice to try once its done. After all the worse that will happen is it'll bomb then as you pointed out we still have more choices.
And now OT but since we are talking about Yahoo just a little something i noticed here at the shop. You know how we all HATE the damned Yahoo Portal, how we think its a cluttered mess? Well it looks like we geeks are in the minority on that one as damned near every box coming through my shop now has that damned thing set as the home page. Talking to my customers basically what Yahoo has done, which i'd say is pretty damned smart, is to replace the morning paper with their home page. Because talking to my customers that is how they treat Yahoo, they sit in front of their PC while they doctor their coffee and "read the Yahoo". they check their mail, read the news, check the sports scores, all the things they used to do with the morning paper they use Yahoo now.
So who knows, maybe they are on to something, because if they can make it easy to not only share your content with the various mobile phones but also easily get it on the Yahoo Portal so people can read your stuff with their "morning yahoo' I could see it finding an audeience, after all that's a lot of home users sitting in front of that thing every morning.
Ahhh...been there friend, been there. Had a company that didn't want to listen to me and went Dell small business and got the same jerking around, finally they called me and said "We've canceled it and are stuck, help please?" and did a variation of what you did only i prefer Tigerdirect barebones. even figuring in my labor they ended up getting nicer systems a good 20% cheaper and as i told them that meant for each five systems i could build them a spare for the same money they were paying so fuck dell support. They ended up with with nicer AMD triples and quads instead of the bottom of the line Pentium duals Dell had quoted them and used the money they saved by doing it my way to add better graphics to the main graphics editing workstations and adding a spare. Talked to the guy the other week when i walked by his printing business and he said the systems i built him ran so good he ended up taking the spare home and giving it to his wife because he figured with my fast turnaround if anything ever died he'd just next day a barebone and pay me a little extra to rush build.
Ya see running a little mom & pop PC shop HERE is what i don't like about the OEMs...unless you get assraped on the price frankly the parts they use are just garbage. You actually got off lucky friend because I've seen those entry level servers and desktops have PSUs that barely had enough power to feed the system so if anything changed it would fry, we are talking 250w PSUs on a machine drawing 238w, fans that are woefully underpowered that make the systems prone to overheat, cases so small to save on metal that they were like little toaster ovens, just real garbage. I've got 3 off lease dells sitting in the shop i'm gonna end up dumping on CL simply because the specs on those things royally suck and the upgrade options nonexistent.
As I told the owner of the print shop every single system i built can easily have a 6 core dropped in, can hold 16gb of RAM, have cases roomy enough and PSUs big enough he can drop in 3 more HDDs without even a second thought, has solid caps so they'll last for bloody ages, hell most of my builds just end up passed from hand to hand as their needs outgrow it they just pass it to friends/relatives. I often make reference in my posts for "things being easy enough for Suzy the checkout girl" because she sticks in my mind, I was checking out at the local grocery when she spoke up and said "Hey i heard you fix computers and i have one that was give to me and is a little slow, would you mind following me to my car just to see what you think?" and when i saw it I busted out laughing until i saw the poor thing start to cry. i told her 'i'm not laughing at you honey, i'm laughing because i built this baby nearly a decade ago. See these are my initials on the bottom" and damned if that thing hadn't gone through her bosses entire family before ending up with her! I slapped a late model P4 and board in there for her cheap and last I heard that old dino is still chugging along, working for her and her kids 7 days a week!
So I know exactly what you felt friend, I've dealt with support hell from the OEMs enough to know the money and hassle i save by just going DIY for my customers makes it a no brainer. again unless you spend insane amounts on contracts and boxes their "support" is beyond worthless IMHO, I've dealt with enough Indian tech support to know that's a fact. one of the things i loved about the consulting job i held at the capital was we had a little indian gal working the desk and when we'd get stuck in support hell we'd hand her the phone and let her curse them in Hindi LOL! You'd think selling so many corporate systems it'd save time and hassle but frankly its cheaper and less hair pulling to just figure in the price of spares and call it a day. I'm proud to say everything i build is built like a tank and short of a lightning strike or pouring coke down the front ain't going nowhere.
I think you missed the point friend which was the taxes were ONLY that high if you just sat the money in the bank and did fuck all with it. once that money is hoarded it might as well be thrown in the fire, poof, for all the good it does. its out of effective circulation so its worthless to the economy.
But you see there were all these provisions that meant if you actually invested that money into job growth your taxes wouldn't be that high. Add factory capacity? that money don't count. build a new plant, or upgrade the existing one? that money don't count. So you see friend it worked as an incentive to keep that money circulating throughout the economy thus helping fuel the engine of the country. Now did you know that more than 84% of the wealth of this ENTIRE country is in the hands of the top 6%? Picture that for a moment friend, you could literally put the holders of 84% of the wealth of the ENTIRE nation in your average HS gym and have seats left over, picture that for a moment. in the 1960s the CEOs made on average 30 times more than a line worker, now its over 400% and in many cases as high as 3000%.
I would argue the reason this is is simply because you don't get penalized for hoarding anymore so hoard they do. this isn't about what's "fair' or punishing anyone, its about keeping the engine of the economy running and to do that, especially if they are gonna keep pushing this service and IP economy crap, well then you are gonna need a hell of a lot more of that money to end up in the hands of the poor and middle class who actually use their money to buy goods and services. do you HONESTLY think that 300 million Romney has sitting in an overseas account is helping the US economy one tiny bit? Rich people simply don't spend enough and without incentives to keep that money flowing they hoard. So now do you see why its required friend? no rich person was actually paying that 70% or during the time of FDR 90% but that penalty for hoarding made them invest that money back into the country and keep the engine running.
Now the engine is cold and dead because you have an economy based on consumerism and the consumers don't have jobs and are flat busted. this is what happens when those at the top simply sit on the money. look how much of our business infrastructure is simply falling apart because they would rather that money go to CEO bonuses than investment in the system. in my area even though the town is 3 times the size it was then neither the DSL or cableco has moved a single inch in more than 18 years, not an inch. they just take their ever climbing profits and stick them in their pockets. Think of how much more business there would be for everyone if they had invested and competed so that internet was everywhere and affordable? Online shopping and entertainment and education, yet in my own building I have the cable to myself because nobody can afford the $119 a month for Internet thanks to their bundling and just the net alone is over $60 a month. The lack of investment is what is helping drive a stake through the heart of this country and i apologize about the length but this is something i feel strongly about. this is a way the government could get the engine fired back up without harebrained schemes like non profitable 'green tech' that ends up being sent over the border.
But in the case you are citing you can actually see where your money went, the X360 with XBL simply has the better service, especially with matchmaking and leaderboards. Compare it to one of their own products GFWL which frankly sucks donkey balls compared to the X360 with GFWL their matchmaking is just as libel to dump 5 or 6 guys that are leveled up to infinity in with noobs, talk about mass slaughter. Really bad in games like bioshock II where which weapons you have access to depends on your level, so someone with level 50 has the killer trap plasmids and the rocket launcher whereas the noobs have the shotgun and a worthless freeze plasmid.
As for RDS frankly that is just MSFT knowing their markets as I know plenty of home users and SMBs that couldn't connect to a remote desktop if their lives depended on it. that's one of those techs where you need at least a basic understanding of the underpinnings or you are just gonna fuck yourself royally up which is why i'm glad that Windows 7 home has remote assistance instead of remote desktop. i can walk a grandma through letting me gain control through EasyConnect and in fact have done so on numerous occasions but if i tried doing that through remote desktop i'd still be dealing with the mess. If you haven't tried EasyConnect you really should, God I'd love to give the guy that invented that thing a beer as it makes dealing with family many miles away butt simple. One session with EasyConnect and the price of Windows Home looks damned cheap friend.
Finally if you want to see retarded dude you have GOT to fire up a VM and download the Win 8 dev preview, man its a fricking trainwreck! Its a fricking winPhone touchscreen UI for the desktop! What a clusterfuck, Here we are with the vast majority of desktops and laptops NOT touch enabled and it sure as hell isn't gonna change by years end yet they have made an OS that is irritating as shit if you aren't using it on a tablet ZOMFG! You'll think I'm nuts but i think its a conspiracy, I really do. I think the engineers at MSFT have gotten tired of Ballmer's "And with this latest ripoff we'll be cool and hip like Apple, yes we will! We really will! STOP LAUGHING AT ME!" bullshit and are letting him have every dumbshit idea the monkey can think up without calling Captain Obvious to the rescue because they hope another Vista trainwreck will get his monkey ass fired. Just look at his badly aping apple track record and how many of the old school engineers have been jumping ship and i really think the guys that are left are tired of his BS and are gonna purposely let Win 8, aka "Ballmer's WinTab folly' be a giant trainwreck to make the shareholders get pissed enough to fire his ass.
I mean if you said any other company was gonna royally buttfuck a billion dollar a year golden goose just so they could try to sponge off the popularity of the brand name by sticking it in a sector where they've bombed no less than 4 times now (WinMo,Zune,Kin,WinPhone 7), wouldn't you say they were batshit? dude you gotta try the dev preview just so you can say "ZOMFG what are they smoking?" One of my little old lady customers nailed it when i showed it to her and she said "That's a nice looking cell phone screen, is that Android? i heard that's quite nice....what do you mean windows? Windows what? Well that's just stupid! Why would I want a cell phone on my computer?"...I USED to just think MSFT had too many committees and that made them a little behind the curve, now i think Ballmer is turning MSFT into Dilbert with him as the PHB.
Hey i'll be happy to give you a great example of why the current system is bad, 100% true. my mom was a nurse for nearly 40 years and you know what one of the biggest procedures was for poor males? heart valve replacement. you know why? Because while the government wouldn't pay to get that tooth that had gone bad out of their head they WOULD pay for a full valve replacement. Cost of the tooth $1000 max if they needed an oral surgeon, cost of the valve replacement north of $150k.
The best argument i can make for free healthcare is simply the fact that now we are penny wise and shitloads of pound foolish, the example above being one of just dozens of stories i could tell of huge amounts blown because the government wouldn't help someone when the problem was small but would when the problem had blown out of control. I could give you horror stories on everything from bugs spreading like widlfire to cancer and in every damned case it could have been incredibly cheap to just nip that shit in the bud but because the current system rewards doing nothing on the little things instead of free clinics we have ERs packed with people that would have seen a family doc in decades past but now simply can't afford it or families buried under bills because mom or dad worked sick until they finally collapsed and ended up in the hospital for 3 weeks instead of being able to simply go to a doc and get it fixed when it would have cost a bottle of pills and a doctor's visit.
That is why i'm so proud of my oldest boy who took the loss of his mom and deciding it was a sign to make this world a better place is busting his ass in pre-med now, not to become some rich surgeon or have a fancy clinic, but because he wants to open a small town family practice and help the poor. I have no doubt he'll be the kind of doctor that'll barely keep his head above water because he'll be trading doctor visits for chicken dinners or even nothing at all and will be spending half his time hustling for the drugs his patients need but can't afford but you know what? There won't be a way in hell that I could be prouder of him for dedicating his life to making this world a better place to be for the poor.
The part that geeks never seem to grasp is that by and large the public really doesn't give a shit about this because....its a phone that does Google and plays Angry birds, that's all. you see to a GEEK its a portable computing device, with an OS and hardware that has X capabilities, but to the consumer its a screen with buttons that does Google and Angry Birds and they'll just chunk it in a drawer and get another one when their contract is up. I actually had someone on here last time jailbreaking come up say "They'll care when they see the POWER of a jailbroken device!" like 1.-There are geeks sitting on a corner going "Behold the power of the jailbreak!" with people standing around like he discovered fire, and 2.-Anybody would know WTF they were looking at or 3.- they would give a fuck.
This is also, just FYI, why ARM netbooks have zero chance whereas tablets have no problem, because likewise a tablet isn't a general computing device, its a "screen you poke that has icons and plays games" while a netbook is a "cute baby laptop' and baby laptops should do everything a big laptop does only slower, because they are babies and babies aren't as strong as big people, get it?
So if you want to sell this to the public and get the masses behind this you need to quit the "Behold the power of the jailbreak! watch and be amazed as I SSH on my cellular phone!" bullshit and start thinking like a consumer and sell it to them in ways they can understand like "With this you can download tons of stuff for free that isn't in the app store!" because folks like free stuff and can understand why getting free stuff would be good. While I agree that having this ability is good you just really need to work on your presentation more guys, maybe go by your local mom & pop PC shop and try to sell the idea to the average folks that come in there, or maybe the people that you find in your local grocery store, you know, normal folks. because so far all the arguments i've seen for jailbreaking boil down to "Frreeeedom!" or listing off some feature 99.995% of the planet has no damned clue what it even is. not the right way to go if you want the masses writing and urging lawmakers to cut that shit out. look at SOPA/PIPA which boiled down to "They'll take your YouTube and Internet radio stations!" and even grandma understood THAT was bad.
Hey Pac Man is only 13 years old according to TFA! That's great that means i'm only in my 30s again!...oh wait a tick this is Slashdot where editors never edit...:-(
You wanna know what's hard? finding out your twitch skills have gone further south than a 43 year old's D cups whose nursed 3 kids. I used to be death incarnate on games like DOOM, Mechwarrior 3 & 4, SoF 1&2, bodies would be piled up like cordwood. Then over the Xmas holiday my boys were like "Hey you've got your new netbook right? Why don't we fire up some TF2 and play together!" and boy that was a rude awakening let me tell you. the heavy, the soldier, it didn't matter what i played i got the living shit slapped out of me. I got so irritated i decided to whip out my CC and buy 3 copies of HL:DM to show these kiddies a thing or two and...ooow, I ended up with so many rockets up my ass my little Freeman is probably walking funny to this very day. Didn't help the oldest was announcing a play by play for the house while my GF laughed her ass off "Oh he's dead, and he's dead again, oh look he didn't even see the death coming that time, will he make it around the corner? nope he's dead" while the youngest made smartass remarks about how he'd "get me a walker with a controller built into the handles for my birthday"
So enjoy it while you can young ones, all of you that kick royal ass on MW or CoD just as we ruled the arcades will blink twice and the next thing you know your kids will be pimp smacking you on every game while making geriatric jokes. man it sucks getting old:-(
I'll get hate for saying it but in this case its probably an insult to the Nazis. During "Springtime for Hitler" in the mid 30s the Nazis were actually quite popular because as Hitler's bodyguard put it in the excellent BBC series "World At War" "At the time we were in a bad way, yes a very bad way. they promised us bread and jobs which seems like such a trivial thing now but then that meant a lot when you couldn't feed your family" so while the Nazis gave the boot to anybody that wasn't like them they also put the country back to work modernizing their systems whereas in America they just ship the jobs overseas or hire illegals and give you the boot. I doubt VERY seriously you'd find the US government popular with anybody but multigenerational superelite who have been making out like robber barons of old.
I'd urge everyone to read this article that drives a stake in the "job creators and lower taxes' lie, followed by this one on corporate taxes and finally some numbers that will make you sick. They are quite a good read and will help to show why we have gotten where we are. Personally i think the elite at the top are trying to condition the public to a mindset of fear so they won't have an uprising spread if they should roll the tanks. they have already seen what the Arab Springs have done to systems that had been there for years and they know they can only juggle the numbers, lie about the true unemployment figures, and print money like there is no tomorrow for so long before the thing falls down and we become another failed country like Greece. I don't know which is worse, the thought they might actually turn the tanks on us or decide that its our turn to be the bad guys and do what Germany did to Poland in South America. But I doubt the rulers at the top of the food chain will just go without a fight, nor do i think after buying the entire congress for years they will just sit by and let the people bring fairness back into the system no matter how badly we as a nation are suffering. i think its gonna get ugly folks, really ugly.
Re:So how's the Windows version coming along?
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KDE 4.8 Released
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I'm sorry but you lost me friend...how can you be patched but not be up to date with the patches? i've always considered that to be a yes or no and not a maybe kinda question. And the problem i found with simply security patches is the frankly fucked up way that a lot of software treats the kernel. you'll need software G because version F has an exploit but G won't run on kernel X but instead demands Y which means you either have to compile from source (no small task and NOT for the home users) or you have to upgrade the whole damned thing. And if it was a choice between zombie Linux and zombie Windows (which I don't want to sell zombie anything, thanks) I'd have to choose zombie Windows simply because I have yet to find a hardware compatibility list that isn't horribly out of date. Quick can you tell me if the top 5 printers in Walmart work in distro foo? Honestly i have NO clue and that's a problem. the few that DO have linux listed as supported has a bunch of catches such as "Ubuntu version X kernel Y" which frankly you've just lost my customers, you might as well have asked them the serial number of their CPU. It needs a "yes this will work" or a "no this will not work" not a "this will work if the moon is full and you dance in a circle' kind of answer. And most of the hardware lists I've seen is for frankly stuff that is no longer being sold which really doesn't help a consumer.
As for the aetheros and the nvidia i'm sorry i can't give you the model number of the card as that was sold with a laptop a year ago, I can tell you it was the model that all the forums said "oh get that it just works" only then the latest releases came out and it didn't work anymore, leaving me with my 'old distro zombie or broken machine' problem again, and the nvidia worked on first install, the upgrade took a mighty dump on the driver and left me with black screen o' death. Of course there was this huge CLI mess of a walkthrough on how to fix it by going into single user mode and doing a bunch of junk but that wouldn't have helped a customer if that was their only box or they didn't understand what single user mode was.
But I agree a Linux INSTALL is nice, its probably nicer than it has ever been. the problem is it simply doesn't STAY nice unless you lock the box in the closet and treat it like Schrodinger's cat. Because i simply can't let a box loose on the Internet with its updates and upgrades disabled, again that wouldn't be fair or honest to customers that expect whatever i sell them to "just work" and frankly the few Linux AVs out there are just scanning for windows bugs and don't do a thing about that privilege escalation we see on the front page today. That is a perfect example of what I'm talking about why you HAVE TO have the machine update, because most don't backport and I've already tried LTS to LTS and had the same problems as regular to regular.
I hate to say this but in the end i think as long as Linus Torvalds has a pulse you can give it up. he said in 1993 he'd never allow an ABI yet here it is 2012 and Solaris, BSD, OSX, Windows, hell even OS/2 has an ABI but Torvalds is a stubborn ass and if he said it dammit he's gonna stick with it. And the way the kernel on up is constantly changing you simply aren't gonna get stable drivers with a shifting kernel, anymore than you can expect to run Win2K drivers on Win 7 X64, the guts are simply too different. that is why we really need a 7 to 10 year LTS instead of this bad joke of 3 years, because nobody chunks at 3 years anymore that was during the MHz wars that 3 years became the switchover. Now I see even many businesses having PCs 5 to 6 years simply because a mulkticore is insanely overpowered for what Suzy secretary is doing and if it ain't broke don't fix it. i have boxes out in the field going on 8 years now that the customer is perfectly happy with and sees no reason to replace, so why should I have to force him because the OS won't stay running.
in the end i want to offer FOSS, I really do, but i can't put myself out of business doing so an
Exactly there is no damned point in making Sally the secretary jump through flaming security hoops if she isn't handling payroll or other sensitive information, its just being a BOFH and tying a boat anchor to her productivity. BTW I'm curious about your sig, what is it about dell servers that sucks so bad? i'm out of corporate IT thank the Gods so i haven't messed with a Dell server in ages (always preferred HP myself) but the last time i messed with them, back in the days of the Optiplex p4 office boxes, they didn't seem to be any better or worse than any other bog standard server, so what has changed? I'm sure with a sig like that it'll be a good rant but I am curious and would like to know what to warn my SMB customers if one starts thinking Dell.
Actually if you look at our history the times of the highest growth was when the top tax rate was 70% or above which makes perfect sense if you think about it. you see when you have a tax rate that high for the uber rich if they sit on the money then they don't sit on the money, they invest it instead since there was all these provisions that lowered their tax rates if they used the money to increase productivity. Now they simply set it overseas thanks to being able to electronically send it anywhere in a nanosecond or just dodge the taxes all together like the double dutch and Irish tax scams. For a good read on the subject i'd suggest this article where the author lays it out clearly and concisely and puts that 'job creators need lower taxes' myth to bed. to see what the lowest taxes on the top 1% in the history of our country has done for us follow it up with this article which again lays out the facts and shows if lower taxes on the wealthy were to actually create jobs they sure as fuck aren't being created here.
in the end its not about fair or letting some fifth generation superrich continue the dynasty, its about a government doing what its supposed to do which is promote the welfare of the entire country and not just a specific class. As Buffet so accurately put it "We have had class warfare for years and we're winning" which all you have to do is look out a window at the boarded up homes and closed factories across this once great nation to know this is true.
Or it could be that the site just blows chunks just like their petition site. seriously how can you fuck up a registration input with captcha so damned badly? Please god tell me that was donated to the gov, i'd hate to think we paid for that shite on a crusty roll.
if there is anything one should have learned about interacting with the government by now it should be its frustrating, often insanely overcomplicated for even the simplest little thing, sucks time like mad, and if you aren't real careful you'll either end up going around in circles or in a catch 22 situation. Frankly most of the nitty gritty is a giant mess that only seems to help spawn more government workers. BTW did you know that government workers now outnumber fishermen,loggers,miners,and about a half a dozen other jobs combined? Blew my mind when i read that but it makes sense, red tape breeds pencil pushers like shit breeds mushrooms. BTW if anybody can find that list of how many jobs combined are less than government workers i never thought to save it and its a pretty damned long list.
180, you stupid, spaghetti-slurping cretin - *180*! If I did a 720, I'd go completely around and end up back where I started!
Seriously though WTF does this have to do with the 720, or the mii, or the PS4 for that matter? this is just some douche blathering on about what could possibly maybe happen sometime in the future. Well i might grow wings out of my ass and fly south for the winter but that don't mean its gonna happen, especially not with sony looking for any advantage it can get against MSFT. Can you imagine how quickly Sony would jump on that? 'You can't buy used or rent games for the 720 but you can the PS4. Come over to the PS4, its nicer here" and watch the 720 sales take a dump. MSFT may be dumb but it ain't retarded...well not THAT retarded anyway, Win 8 dev preview has made me lower my estimate of the collective IQ at Redmond by a dozen points or so.
Well I wouldn't call it so much an article as an excuse to have 6 pages worth of ads by putting a blurb on each ad page. call me picky but to be called an article one really should have at least half a page per page, not a tiny blurb surrounded by an ad-apaloza. always easy to spot those pages when you have ABP because those blurbs look really lonely in the middle of that sea of white.
But you should really give the dragon a try, all the Chrome extensions like ABP and readability work great, don't have to install it as you can choose standalone which will drop it in the folder (or thumbstick) of your choosing and the Secure DNS by default is set for the browser ONLY so it doesn't change any of your system DNS settings. I've been running it since V8 and its now V17 and its if anything faster and more responsive. you can also have it copy your bookmarks and passwords from your default browser and can keep synced via Gmail so its easy peasy to have the same setup across systems. My GF just loves the fact that when she is staying with me she can just choose her profile and all her bookmarks and setting instantly update and match her dragon at home, all nice and easy.
And while i'm sure Flock/Rockmelt is okay i just never did "get it" I mean who finds using FB so difficult they need a special browser for it? its not like spamming your life to FB/Twitter/Social crapsite o' the day has ever been even slightly difficult, that's the whole reason why people end up spamming their whole lives in the stupid thing because its so easy to do. I don't think I'd ever wanna meet someone who said 'yes pushing that FB button that is embedded in every damned site on the web is just too hard! i need a special browser that is FBtastic, that's for me!"
Not to mention those places with BOFH password policies are usually less secure than no passwords at all! I'll never forget a story one of my teachers told me about taking some kids on a tour of a place with a BOFH that just kept droning on and on about how is super asshole password policies made them so super secure, finally mike got tired of it and said 'i bet you $100 and a steak dinner that you let me loose in this place for just 20 minutes i'll be in the system' and of course Mr BOFH wanted to show he was hot shit in front of the kids and so took the bet. Sure enough not 15 minutes later mike hands him a list of no less than a half a dozen passwords and usernames, all good. When the BOFH demanded to know how he did that mike just led him to the cubicles and started flipping over keyboards and sure enough the passwords were sticky noted all over the place!
like that old XKCD bit all those insane passwords do is make for really confused and frustrated users.
Seems like there ought to be an easy way to kill this thing dead, here let me try....Hey Anon guys, yoo hoo! you like doing things for the lulz, yes? And delicious irony is delicious right? Well it looks like you got a new target, please post every single bit of info you can about the morons that sponsored this bill! I bet they have clueless family members, should be easy to social engineer them, porn sites, mistress emails would be nice. Hey have fun!
Frankly I hate to say it but i'm glad my grandfather who fought and suffered like a dog in WWII for our freedoms isn't here to see all this Stasi bullshit because its just sickening, between both parties rushing to see who can wear the biggest jackboots and the corps buying ever nastier laws its quickly gonna reach a point that there is nothing you hear, see, speak, or write that isn't logged somewhere to be used against you. Talk about a chilling effect, how many would be willing to speak out against things like SOPA/PIPA or PATRIOT or anything else if all it takes is a single phone call to have your entire web history for the past two years posted on some shill's blog and spammed all over the net?
And if you lock a machine in a safe its REALLY secure but not very useful;-) The problem with security is its ALWAYS a balancing act between well secured and PITA for the person that actually needs to get their work done. I've seen both Linux with tough SELinux policies and Windows with tough GPOs that were pretty damned secure but if you had to use the damned things more than a few minutes at a time you'd want to pull your hair out.
In the end all you can do is weigh the pros and cons and make the best setup you can without being such a BOFH that you are afraid the secretaries will piss in your coffee. Because at the end of the day a computer is supposed to help the user do some work better/faster/cleaner and if its such a royal PITA that they'd rather use a pencil and paper than deal with the stupid thing there really isn't any point in having it, is there?
And I can just pop on over to newegg and buy that system right? no? Dude i don't think comparing some multimillion dollar MilSpec retina scanner to what the average person can get, which can be fooled by a gummi bear on the print and whose cameras can't "see' black people is really a fair comparison, do you? to use a/. car analogy that would be like saying "car alarms don't deter car thieves" and you say "Well the last time someone sat an alarm off on base they was hog tied by 4 MPs before they could say "ooops" yee haw'. since the average person doesn't have MPs with hog tying skills standing within earshot of the alarm on their 03 honda i kinda doubt that's a fair comparison. it was pretty obvious reading Barbra's post she was talking about what the average person gets, NOT what they have protecting the bombs at your average missile base.
Slashdot Mirror
But maybe its just me, but the newer games don't really seem to have much of a chance for aquiring a "bag of tricks' because everyone just runs like a chicken with their head cut off. that is what I miss about MechWarrior 3/4, i used to get accused of cheating until i would tell them my exact loadout and they were always "Uhhh...what the hell? you only got one shot!" but that was the point, i stripped down my mech and made it into a walking blunderbuss. no secondary weapons, no lasers, just one big ass shot. if i missed and my teammates didn't cover me i was toast but if i hit you...ohhh mama...even the biggest assualts would be hurting and anything medium or below was dead meat.
Working here at my little shop though i know what you mean, between the shop, working on the new album with my new band, my GF, and spending time with the boys i just don't get to blast like I used to. hell i think more than a third of the Steam Xmas sale games i got along with the GOG Xmas sale games i picked up i haven't even gotten a chance to fire up yet and with the GF about to use her vacation time so we can have a week just the two of us before the grandbaby is born I just don't have the time to spend hours learning, although like I said from what I saw games like TF2 are more chicken with their head cut off. But you don't realize how bad time catches up until you hit the big 4.0. and you fire up a game you used to rule like HL:DM with your two college bound boys and find them handing you your ass on a platter. Man it was worse than schooling, it was bitch slapping time.
While everyone here makes jokes that won't change the fact the H1-B is completely wiping out our ability to compete. the H1-Bs all go home and help THEIR countries to compete while our young folks are rightly steering clear of anything to do with tech fields because they can't shell out $70K+ for a degree to face off with someone who gets paid less than 30k a year off the boat, its no different than how Japan used product dumping to wipe out our electronics industry in the 80s, because with the H1-B their degrees cost a pittance compared to ours so one simply can't sell one's abilities with an artificially depressed market without going broke.
the H1-B was originally a good idea, meant to make up for shortfalls in the workforce while giving our students time to take the courses and be able to meet future demands, instead what we ended up with is this. Its time to end the H1-B as well as implement the E-verify so that our blue collar workers likewise compete on an equal playing field. Enough is enough and with so many out of work importing workers is insanity.
Because as we saw with that guy thrown in jail for a thumb.db literally landing on the wrong page can land you in PMITA prison? hell nowadays even a click on a link stuck on here by a troll could be enough to land you in PMITA prison because some really scummy trolls treat CP as the new goatse and we've had those kinds of links posted right here on /. so you're idea of a web crawler randomly clicking links, unless it ran completely in RAM and never touched the drive could be VERY dangerous friend.
Well then I'd have to give a point for the Commodore as we could get some cool sounds out of the VIC and C64. Weird though that they would build something for home users with ZERO sound at all though since the VCS could even do bleeps and bloops in 77. Was it the chip was just too slow, or was the addition of sound too expensive? Man i give them guys credit for how much they could squeeze into the bad joke of a memory space because as someone who started on the VIC and Trash 80 i can say that is one thing I do NOT miss and that's having to fight for every byte.
But looking back it really amazes me how far we have come. I mean if you would have told me when i was writing pong games on my VIC that one day I'd have a micro portable called a "netbook" that only weighs 3 pounds, has dual 1600MHz CPUs with 8Gb, actual Gbs of RAM and 320 gb of space instead of squeezing everything onto a datasette and the whole smash would cost just $350 i'd have asked you to quit hogging whatever you were smoking. I do think its kinda wasteful how badly some of the programs behave now when it comes to resources though, it seems today programmers don't optimize shit anymore and just throw more RAM at it. Can you imagine how fast programs would run today if programmers were even half as thrifty as they were back then?
But how badly will it be filtered and monitored? because if NC is anything like the rest of the south the busybodies will make sure you can't even look up breast cancer because it has breast in it. that is one thing i'll give you coast dwellers, you don't see to have near the problem with busybodies as we do in the bible belt.
"You don't invite your neighbors over for dinner until you know whether they are cannibals or not" was that Asimov or Clarke that said that? I think if aliens ever bothered to show up frankly it wouldn't be close encounters OR ID4, simply because any race with technology so far advanced that FTL travel was possible could have all the resources they could ever desire at their fingertips. nope most likely what we'd get is tourists doing their own Gorillas in the mist.
as for TFA frankly i'm more curious about what we have in our backyard myself. With Ganymede and Europa both looking like there might be liquid water they are probably the best chance at non terrestrial life we are gonna see in several lifetimes so personally i'd love to see some probes sent to take samples and see what's out there. Sadly the USA is broke and NASA has their budget slashed every time we turn around so its up to the EU, India, or China to take that next step. C'mon China, you're flush with cash, wouldn't a Chinese flag look good on Europa?
Well it looks like they could use some more bytes as I click on TFA (I know I know...but I'm bored) and it says "509 Bandwidth Limit Exceeded" so it looks like despite our falling numbers we can still cause a good old fashioned Slashdotting.
Now for those of us that never got to have a ZX back in the day a few questions: How did it stack up to the other systems of the day? The Trash 80, The Commodore VIC20 and C64, the Atari 400/800 and the 5150 IBM? In my area it was all VIC20s and Trash 80s so I never did get to play with one. While i love my 6 core with tons o' RAM and Tbs of HDD space as one old customer of mine that had the C128 and loves to wax nostalgic about says "You just can't know the guts of a modern machine like you could those old systems". You could really get bare metal on those old systems, could find out the location of every register, every hidden Opcode, you could really squeeze every drop of power out of those systems if you knew what you were doing.
And i know this is off topic but fuck if i know where else to ask this and we are talking about seriously old systems so here goes: Has anybody built a hardware emulation or maybe a SoC of the old C128? Because I've had zippo luck for finding the guy a C128 at a non assraping price and he has tons of his old code he'd love to play with again. He had all these really wicked things cooked up for the C128 like this robotic arm that was really slick or this cool sat tracking animation he made for one of the companies selling the big 12 footers back in the day and he's always talking about how he'd love to break all that old code back out and fiddle with it again but his system got stolen years ago so he's had bingo luck. Everything I've found has been based on the C64 not the C128 so i'm guessing it wasn't a real popular system so any links that could point me in the right direction would be appreciated.
Yeah but is this BAD thing, I think not. Having more tools and choices is a good thing IMHO as competition makes for better tools all around. Maybe their setup will produce cleaner code, maybe it will be more noob friendly, maybe they'll make it butt simple to share your content with the ever growing Yahoo portal, who knows but i think it'll be nice to try once its done. After all the worse that will happen is it'll bomb then as you pointed out we still have more choices.
And now OT but since we are talking about Yahoo just a little something i noticed here at the shop. You know how we all HATE the damned Yahoo Portal, how we think its a cluttered mess? Well it looks like we geeks are in the minority on that one as damned near every box coming through my shop now has that damned thing set as the home page. Talking to my customers basically what Yahoo has done, which i'd say is pretty damned smart, is to replace the morning paper with their home page. Because talking to my customers that is how they treat Yahoo, they sit in front of their PC while they doctor their coffee and "read the Yahoo". they check their mail, read the news, check the sports scores, all the things they used to do with the morning paper they use Yahoo now.
So who knows, maybe they are on to something, because if they can make it easy to not only share your content with the various mobile phones but also easily get it on the Yahoo Portal so people can read your stuff with their "morning yahoo' I could see it finding an audeience, after all that's a lot of home users sitting in front of that thing every morning.
Ahhh...been there friend, been there. Had a company that didn't want to listen to me and went Dell small business and got the same jerking around, finally they called me and said "We've canceled it and are stuck, help please?" and did a variation of what you did only i prefer Tigerdirect barebones. even figuring in my labor they ended up getting nicer systems a good 20% cheaper and as i told them that meant for each five systems i could build them a spare for the same money they were paying so fuck dell support. They ended up with with nicer AMD triples and quads instead of the bottom of the line Pentium duals Dell had quoted them and used the money they saved by doing it my way to add better graphics to the main graphics editing workstations and adding a spare. Talked to the guy the other week when i walked by his printing business and he said the systems i built him ran so good he ended up taking the spare home and giving it to his wife because he figured with my fast turnaround if anything ever died he'd just next day a barebone and pay me a little extra to rush build.
Ya see running a little mom & pop PC shop HERE is what i don't like about the OEMs...unless you get assraped on the price frankly the parts they use are just garbage. You actually got off lucky friend because I've seen those entry level servers and desktops have PSUs that barely had enough power to feed the system so if anything changed it would fry, we are talking 250w PSUs on a machine drawing 238w, fans that are woefully underpowered that make the systems prone to overheat, cases so small to save on metal that they were like little toaster ovens, just real garbage. I've got 3 off lease dells sitting in the shop i'm gonna end up dumping on CL simply because the specs on those things royally suck and the upgrade options nonexistent.
As I told the owner of the print shop every single system i built can easily have a 6 core dropped in, can hold 16gb of RAM, have cases roomy enough and PSUs big enough he can drop in 3 more HDDs without even a second thought, has solid caps so they'll last for bloody ages, hell most of my builds just end up passed from hand to hand as their needs outgrow it they just pass it to friends/relatives. I often make reference in my posts for "things being easy enough for Suzy the checkout girl" because she sticks in my mind, I was checking out at the local grocery when she spoke up and said "Hey i heard you fix computers and i have one that was give to me and is a little slow, would you mind following me to my car just to see what you think?" and when i saw it I busted out laughing until i saw the poor thing start to cry. i told her 'i'm not laughing at you honey, i'm laughing because i built this baby nearly a decade ago. See these are my initials on the bottom" and damned if that thing hadn't gone through her bosses entire family before ending up with her! I slapped a late model P4 and board in there for her cheap and last I heard that old dino is still chugging along, working for her and her kids 7 days a week!
So I know exactly what you felt friend, I've dealt with support hell from the OEMs enough to know the money and hassle i save by just going DIY for my customers makes it a no brainer. again unless you spend insane amounts on contracts and boxes their "support" is beyond worthless IMHO, I've dealt with enough Indian tech support to know that's a fact. one of the things i loved about the consulting job i held at the capital was we had a little indian gal working the desk and when we'd get stuck in support hell we'd hand her the phone and let her curse them in Hindi LOL! You'd think selling so many corporate systems it'd save time and hassle but frankly its cheaper and less hair pulling to just figure in the price of spares and call it a day. I'm proud to say everything i build is built like a tank and short of a lightning strike or pouring coke down the front ain't going nowhere.
I think you missed the point friend which was the taxes were ONLY that high if you just sat the money in the bank and did fuck all with it. once that money is hoarded it might as well be thrown in the fire, poof, for all the good it does. its out of effective circulation so its worthless to the economy.
But you see there were all these provisions that meant if you actually invested that money into job growth your taxes wouldn't be that high. Add factory capacity? that money don't count. build a new plant, or upgrade the existing one? that money don't count. So you see friend it worked as an incentive to keep that money circulating throughout the economy thus helping fuel the engine of the country. Now did you know that more than 84% of the wealth of this ENTIRE country is in the hands of the top 6%? Picture that for a moment friend, you could literally put the holders of 84% of the wealth of the ENTIRE nation in your average HS gym and have seats left over, picture that for a moment. in the 1960s the CEOs made on average 30 times more than a line worker, now its over 400% and in many cases as high as 3000%.
I would argue the reason this is is simply because you don't get penalized for hoarding anymore so hoard they do. this isn't about what's "fair' or punishing anyone, its about keeping the engine of the economy running and to do that, especially if they are gonna keep pushing this service and IP economy crap, well then you are gonna need a hell of a lot more of that money to end up in the hands of the poor and middle class who actually use their money to buy goods and services. do you HONESTLY think that 300 million Romney has sitting in an overseas account is helping the US economy one tiny bit? Rich people simply don't spend enough and without incentives to keep that money flowing they hoard. So now do you see why its required friend? no rich person was actually paying that 70% or during the time of FDR 90% but that penalty for hoarding made them invest that money back into the country and keep the engine running.
Now the engine is cold and dead because you have an economy based on consumerism and the consumers don't have jobs and are flat busted. this is what happens when those at the top simply sit on the money. look how much of our business infrastructure is simply falling apart because they would rather that money go to CEO bonuses than investment in the system. in my area even though the town is 3 times the size it was then neither the DSL or cableco has moved a single inch in more than 18 years, not an inch. they just take their ever climbing profits and stick them in their pockets. Think of how much more business there would be for everyone if they had invested and competed so that internet was everywhere and affordable? Online shopping and entertainment and education, yet in my own building I have the cable to myself because nobody can afford the $119 a month for Internet thanks to their bundling and just the net alone is over $60 a month. The lack of investment is what is helping drive a stake through the heart of this country and i apologize about the length but this is something i feel strongly about. this is a way the government could get the engine fired back up without harebrained schemes like non profitable 'green tech' that ends up being sent over the border.
But in the case you are citing you can actually see where your money went, the X360 with XBL simply has the better service, especially with matchmaking and leaderboards. Compare it to one of their own products GFWL which frankly sucks donkey balls compared to the X360 with GFWL their matchmaking is just as libel to dump 5 or 6 guys that are leveled up to infinity in with noobs, talk about mass slaughter. Really bad in games like bioshock II where which weapons you have access to depends on your level, so someone with level 50 has the killer trap plasmids and the rocket launcher whereas the noobs have the shotgun and a worthless freeze plasmid.
As for RDS frankly that is just MSFT knowing their markets as I know plenty of home users and SMBs that couldn't connect to a remote desktop if their lives depended on it. that's one of those techs where you need at least a basic understanding of the underpinnings or you are just gonna fuck yourself royally up which is why i'm glad that Windows 7 home has remote assistance instead of remote desktop. i can walk a grandma through letting me gain control through EasyConnect and in fact have done so on numerous occasions but if i tried doing that through remote desktop i'd still be dealing with the mess. If you haven't tried EasyConnect you really should, God I'd love to give the guy that invented that thing a beer as it makes dealing with family many miles away butt simple. One session with EasyConnect and the price of Windows Home looks damned cheap friend.
Finally if you want to see retarded dude you have GOT to fire up a VM and download the Win 8 dev preview, man its a fricking trainwreck! Its a fricking winPhone touchscreen UI for the desktop! What a clusterfuck, Here we are with the vast majority of desktops and laptops NOT touch enabled and it sure as hell isn't gonna change by years end yet they have made an OS that is irritating as shit if you aren't using it on a tablet ZOMFG! You'll think I'm nuts but i think its a conspiracy, I really do. I think the engineers at MSFT have gotten tired of Ballmer's "And with this latest ripoff we'll be cool and hip like Apple, yes we will! We really will! STOP LAUGHING AT ME!" bullshit and are letting him have every dumbshit idea the monkey can think up without calling Captain Obvious to the rescue because they hope another Vista trainwreck will get his monkey ass fired. Just look at his badly aping apple track record and how many of the old school engineers have been jumping ship and i really think the guys that are left are tired of his BS and are gonna purposely let Win 8, aka "Ballmer's WinTab folly' be a giant trainwreck to make the shareholders get pissed enough to fire his ass.
I mean if you said any other company was gonna royally buttfuck a billion dollar a year golden goose just so they could try to sponge off the popularity of the brand name by sticking it in a sector where they've bombed no less than 4 times now (WinMo,Zune,Kin,WinPhone 7), wouldn't you say they were batshit? dude you gotta try the dev preview just so you can say "ZOMFG what are they smoking?" One of my little old lady customers nailed it when i showed it to her and she said "That's a nice looking cell phone screen, is that Android? i heard that's quite nice....what do you mean windows? Windows what? Well that's just stupid! Why would I want a cell phone on my computer?"...I USED to just think MSFT had too many committees and that made them a little behind the curve, now i think Ballmer is turning MSFT into Dilbert with him as the PHB.
Hey i'll be happy to give you a great example of why the current system is bad, 100% true. my mom was a nurse for nearly 40 years and you know what one of the biggest procedures was for poor males? heart valve replacement. you know why? Because while the government wouldn't pay to get that tooth that had gone bad out of their head they WOULD pay for a full valve replacement. Cost of the tooth $1000 max if they needed an oral surgeon, cost of the valve replacement north of $150k.
The best argument i can make for free healthcare is simply the fact that now we are penny wise and shitloads of pound foolish, the example above being one of just dozens of stories i could tell of huge amounts blown because the government wouldn't help someone when the problem was small but would when the problem had blown out of control. I could give you horror stories on everything from bugs spreading like widlfire to cancer and in every damned case it could have been incredibly cheap to just nip that shit in the bud but because the current system rewards doing nothing on the little things instead of free clinics we have ERs packed with people that would have seen a family doc in decades past but now simply can't afford it or families buried under bills because mom or dad worked sick until they finally collapsed and ended up in the hospital for 3 weeks instead of being able to simply go to a doc and get it fixed when it would have cost a bottle of pills and a doctor's visit.
That is why i'm so proud of my oldest boy who took the loss of his mom and deciding it was a sign to make this world a better place is busting his ass in pre-med now, not to become some rich surgeon or have a fancy clinic, but because he wants to open a small town family practice and help the poor. I have no doubt he'll be the kind of doctor that'll barely keep his head above water because he'll be trading doctor visits for chicken dinners or even nothing at all and will be spending half his time hustling for the drugs his patients need but can't afford but you know what? There won't be a way in hell that I could be prouder of him for dedicating his life to making this world a better place to be for the poor.
The part that geeks never seem to grasp is that by and large the public really doesn't give a shit about this because....its a phone that does Google and plays Angry birds, that's all. you see to a GEEK its a portable computing device, with an OS and hardware that has X capabilities, but to the consumer its a screen with buttons that does Google and Angry Birds and they'll just chunk it in a drawer and get another one when their contract is up. I actually had someone on here last time jailbreaking come up say "They'll care when they see the POWER of a jailbroken device!" like 1.-There are geeks sitting on a corner going "Behold the power of the jailbreak!" with people standing around like he discovered fire, and 2.-Anybody would know WTF they were looking at or 3.- they would give a fuck.
This is also, just FYI, why ARM netbooks have zero chance whereas tablets have no problem, because likewise a tablet isn't a general computing device, its a "screen you poke that has icons and plays games" while a netbook is a "cute baby laptop' and baby laptops should do everything a big laptop does only slower, because they are babies and babies aren't as strong as big people, get it?
So if you want to sell this to the public and get the masses behind this you need to quit the "Behold the power of the jailbreak! watch and be amazed as I SSH on my cellular phone!" bullshit and start thinking like a consumer and sell it to them in ways they can understand like "With this you can download tons of stuff for free that isn't in the app store!" because folks like free stuff and can understand why getting free stuff would be good. While I agree that having this ability is good you just really need to work on your presentation more guys, maybe go by your local mom & pop PC shop and try to sell the idea to the average folks that come in there, or maybe the people that you find in your local grocery store, you know, normal folks. because so far all the arguments i've seen for jailbreaking boil down to "Frreeeedom!" or listing off some feature 99.995% of the planet has no damned clue what it even is. not the right way to go if you want the masses writing and urging lawmakers to cut that shit out. look at SOPA/PIPA which boiled down to "They'll take your YouTube and Internet radio stations!" and even grandma understood THAT was bad.
Hey Pac Man is only 13 years old according to TFA! That's great that means i'm only in my 30s again!...oh wait a tick this is Slashdot where editors never edit... :-(
You wanna know what's hard? finding out your twitch skills have gone further south than a 43 year old's D cups whose nursed 3 kids. I used to be death incarnate on games like DOOM, Mechwarrior 3 & 4, SoF 1&2, bodies would be piled up like cordwood. Then over the Xmas holiday my boys were like "Hey you've got your new netbook right? Why don't we fire up some TF2 and play together!" and boy that was a rude awakening let me tell you. the heavy, the soldier, it didn't matter what i played i got the living shit slapped out of me. I got so irritated i decided to whip out my CC and buy 3 copies of HL:DM to show these kiddies a thing or two and...ooow, I ended up with so many rockets up my ass my little Freeman is probably walking funny to this very day. Didn't help the oldest was announcing a play by play for the house while my GF laughed her ass off "Oh he's dead, and he's dead again, oh look he didn't even see the death coming that time, will he make it around the corner? nope he's dead" while the youngest made smartass remarks about how he'd "get me a walker with a controller built into the handles for my birthday"
So enjoy it while you can young ones, all of you that kick royal ass on MW or CoD just as we ruled the arcades will blink twice and the next thing you know your kids will be pimp smacking you on every game while making geriatric jokes. man it sucks getting old :-(
I'll get hate for saying it but in this case its probably an insult to the Nazis. During "Springtime for Hitler" in the mid 30s the Nazis were actually quite popular because as Hitler's bodyguard put it in the excellent BBC series "World At War" "At the time we were in a bad way, yes a very bad way. they promised us bread and jobs which seems like such a trivial thing now but then that meant a lot when you couldn't feed your family" so while the Nazis gave the boot to anybody that wasn't like them they also put the country back to work modernizing their systems whereas in America they just ship the jobs overseas or hire illegals and give you the boot. I doubt VERY seriously you'd find the US government popular with anybody but multigenerational superelite who have been making out like robber barons of old.
I'd urge everyone to read this article that drives a stake in the "job creators and lower taxes' lie, followed by this one on corporate taxes and finally some numbers that will make you sick. They are quite a good read and will help to show why we have gotten where we are. Personally i think the elite at the top are trying to condition the public to a mindset of fear so they won't have an uprising spread if they should roll the tanks. they have already seen what the Arab Springs have done to systems that had been there for years and they know they can only juggle the numbers, lie about the true unemployment figures, and print money like there is no tomorrow for so long before the thing falls down and we become another failed country like Greece. I don't know which is worse, the thought they might actually turn the tanks on us or decide that its our turn to be the bad guys and do what Germany did to Poland in South America. But I doubt the rulers at the top of the food chain will just go without a fight, nor do i think after buying the entire congress for years they will just sit by and let the people bring fairness back into the system no matter how badly we as a nation are suffering. i think its gonna get ugly folks, really ugly.
I'm sorry but you lost me friend...how can you be patched but not be up to date with the patches? i've always considered that to be a yes or no and not a maybe kinda question. And the problem i found with simply security patches is the frankly fucked up way that a lot of software treats the kernel. you'll need software G because version F has an exploit but G won't run on kernel X but instead demands Y which means you either have to compile from source (no small task and NOT for the home users) or you have to upgrade the whole damned thing. And if it was a choice between zombie Linux and zombie Windows (which I don't want to sell zombie anything, thanks) I'd have to choose zombie Windows simply because I have yet to find a hardware compatibility list that isn't horribly out of date. Quick can you tell me if the top 5 printers in Walmart work in distro foo? Honestly i have NO clue and that's a problem. the few that DO have linux listed as supported has a bunch of catches such as "Ubuntu version X kernel Y" which frankly you've just lost my customers, you might as well have asked them the serial number of their CPU. It needs a "yes this will work" or a "no this will not work" not a "this will work if the moon is full and you dance in a circle' kind of answer. And most of the hardware lists I've seen is for frankly stuff that is no longer being sold which really doesn't help a consumer.
As for the aetheros and the nvidia i'm sorry i can't give you the model number of the card as that was sold with a laptop a year ago, I can tell you it was the model that all the forums said "oh get that it just works" only then the latest releases came out and it didn't work anymore, leaving me with my 'old distro zombie or broken machine' problem again, and the nvidia worked on first install, the upgrade took a mighty dump on the driver and left me with black screen o' death. Of course there was this huge CLI mess of a walkthrough on how to fix it by going into single user mode and doing a bunch of junk but that wouldn't have helped a customer if that was their only box or they didn't understand what single user mode was.
But I agree a Linux INSTALL is nice, its probably nicer than it has ever been. the problem is it simply doesn't STAY nice unless you lock the box in the closet and treat it like Schrodinger's cat. Because i simply can't let a box loose on the Internet with its updates and upgrades disabled, again that wouldn't be fair or honest to customers that expect whatever i sell them to "just work" and frankly the few Linux AVs out there are just scanning for windows bugs and don't do a thing about that privilege escalation we see on the front page today. That is a perfect example of what I'm talking about why you HAVE TO have the machine update, because most don't backport and I've already tried LTS to LTS and had the same problems as regular to regular.
I hate to say this but in the end i think as long as Linus Torvalds has a pulse you can give it up. he said in 1993 he'd never allow an ABI yet here it is 2012 and Solaris, BSD, OSX, Windows, hell even OS/2 has an ABI but Torvalds is a stubborn ass and if he said it dammit he's gonna stick with it. And the way the kernel on up is constantly changing you simply aren't gonna get stable drivers with a shifting kernel, anymore than you can expect to run Win2K drivers on Win 7 X64, the guts are simply too different. that is why we really need a 7 to 10 year LTS instead of this bad joke of 3 years, because nobody chunks at 3 years anymore that was during the MHz wars that 3 years became the switchover. Now I see even many businesses having PCs 5 to 6 years simply because a mulkticore is insanely overpowered for what Suzy secretary is doing and if it ain't broke don't fix it. i have boxes out in the field going on 8 years now that the customer is perfectly happy with and sees no reason to replace, so why should I have to force him because the OS won't stay running.
in the end i want to offer FOSS, I really do, but i can't put myself out of business doing so an
Exactly there is no damned point in making Sally the secretary jump through flaming security hoops if she isn't handling payroll or other sensitive information, its just being a BOFH and tying a boat anchor to her productivity. BTW I'm curious about your sig, what is it about dell servers that sucks so bad? i'm out of corporate IT thank the Gods so i haven't messed with a Dell server in ages (always preferred HP myself) but the last time i messed with them, back in the days of the Optiplex p4 office boxes, they didn't seem to be any better or worse than any other bog standard server, so what has changed? I'm sure with a sig like that it'll be a good rant but I am curious and would like to know what to warn my SMB customers if one starts thinking Dell.
Actually if you look at our history the times of the highest growth was when the top tax rate was 70% or above which makes perfect sense if you think about it. you see when you have a tax rate that high for the uber rich if they sit on the money then they don't sit on the money, they invest it instead since there was all these provisions that lowered their tax rates if they used the money to increase productivity. Now they simply set it overseas thanks to being able to electronically send it anywhere in a nanosecond or just dodge the taxes all together like the double dutch and Irish tax scams. For a good read on the subject i'd suggest this article where the author lays it out clearly and concisely and puts that 'job creators need lower taxes' myth to bed. to see what the lowest taxes on the top 1% in the history of our country has done for us follow it up with this article which again lays out the facts and shows if lower taxes on the wealthy were to actually create jobs they sure as fuck aren't being created here.
in the end its not about fair or letting some fifth generation superrich continue the dynasty, its about a government doing what its supposed to do which is promote the welfare of the entire country and not just a specific class. As Buffet so accurately put it "We have had class warfare for years and we're winning" which all you have to do is look out a window at the boarded up homes and closed factories across this once great nation to know this is true.
Or it could be that the site just blows chunks just like their petition site. seriously how can you fuck up a registration input with captcha so damned badly? Please god tell me that was donated to the gov, i'd hate to think we paid for that shite on a crusty roll.
if there is anything one should have learned about interacting with the government by now it should be its frustrating, often insanely overcomplicated for even the simplest little thing, sucks time like mad, and if you aren't real careful you'll either end up going around in circles or in a catch 22 situation. Frankly most of the nitty gritty is a giant mess that only seems to help spawn more government workers. BTW did you know that government workers now outnumber fishermen,loggers,miners,and about a half a dozen other jobs combined? Blew my mind when i read that but it makes sense, red tape breeds pencil pushers like shit breeds mushrooms. BTW if anybody can find that list of how many jobs combined are less than government workers i never thought to save it and its a pretty damned long list.
180, you stupid, spaghetti-slurping cretin - *180*! If I did a 720, I'd go completely around and end up back where I started!
Seriously though WTF does this have to do with the 720, or the mii, or the PS4 for that matter? this is just some douche blathering on about what could possibly maybe happen sometime in the future. Well i might grow wings out of my ass and fly south for the winter but that don't mean its gonna happen, especially not with sony looking for any advantage it can get against MSFT. Can you imagine how quickly Sony would jump on that? 'You can't buy used or rent games for the 720 but you can the PS4. Come over to the PS4, its nicer here" and watch the 720 sales take a dump. MSFT may be dumb but it ain't retarded...well not THAT retarded anyway, Win 8 dev preview has made me lower my estimate of the collective IQ at Redmond by a dozen points or so.
Well I wouldn't call it so much an article as an excuse to have 6 pages worth of ads by putting a blurb on each ad page. call me picky but to be called an article one really should have at least half a page per page, not a tiny blurb surrounded by an ad-apaloza. always easy to spot those pages when you have ABP because those blurbs look really lonely in the middle of that sea of white.
But you should really give the dragon a try, all the Chrome extensions like ABP and readability work great, don't have to install it as you can choose standalone which will drop it in the folder (or thumbstick) of your choosing and the Secure DNS by default is set for the browser ONLY so it doesn't change any of your system DNS settings. I've been running it since V8 and its now V17 and its if anything faster and more responsive. you can also have it copy your bookmarks and passwords from your default browser and can keep synced via Gmail so its easy peasy to have the same setup across systems. My GF just loves the fact that when she is staying with me she can just choose her profile and all her bookmarks and setting instantly update and match her dragon at home, all nice and easy.
And while i'm sure Flock/Rockmelt is okay i just never did "get it" I mean who finds using FB so difficult they need a special browser for it? its not like spamming your life to FB/Twitter/Social crapsite o' the day has ever been even slightly difficult, that's the whole reason why people end up spamming their whole lives in the stupid thing because its so easy to do. I don't think I'd ever wanna meet someone who said 'yes pushing that FB button that is embedded in every damned site on the web is just too hard! i need a special browser that is FBtastic, that's for me!"
Not to mention those places with BOFH password policies are usually less secure than no passwords at all! I'll never forget a story one of my teachers told me about taking some kids on a tour of a place with a BOFH that just kept droning on and on about how is super asshole password policies made them so super secure, finally mike got tired of it and said 'i bet you $100 and a steak dinner that you let me loose in this place for just 20 minutes i'll be in the system' and of course Mr BOFH wanted to show he was hot shit in front of the kids and so took the bet. Sure enough not 15 minutes later mike hands him a list of no less than a half a dozen passwords and usernames, all good. When the BOFH demanded to know how he did that mike just led him to the cubicles and started flipping over keyboards and sure enough the passwords were sticky noted all over the place!
like that old XKCD bit all those insane passwords do is make for really confused and frustrated users.
Seems like there ought to be an easy way to kill this thing dead, here let me try....Hey Anon guys, yoo hoo! you like doing things for the lulz, yes? And delicious irony is delicious right? Well it looks like you got a new target, please post every single bit of info you can about the morons that sponsored this bill! I bet they have clueless family members, should be easy to social engineer them, porn sites, mistress emails would be nice. Hey have fun!
Frankly I hate to say it but i'm glad my grandfather who fought and suffered like a dog in WWII for our freedoms isn't here to see all this Stasi bullshit because its just sickening, between both parties rushing to see who can wear the biggest jackboots and the corps buying ever nastier laws its quickly gonna reach a point that there is nothing you hear, see, speak, or write that isn't logged somewhere to be used against you. Talk about a chilling effect, how many would be willing to speak out against things like SOPA/PIPA or PATRIOT or anything else if all it takes is a single phone call to have your entire web history for the past two years posted on some shill's blog and spammed all over the net?
And if you lock a machine in a safe its REALLY secure but not very useful ;-) The problem with security is its ALWAYS a balancing act between well secured and PITA for the person that actually needs to get their work done. I've seen both Linux with tough SELinux policies and Windows with tough GPOs that were pretty damned secure but if you had to use the damned things more than a few minutes at a time you'd want to pull your hair out.
In the end all you can do is weigh the pros and cons and make the best setup you can without being such a BOFH that you are afraid the secretaries will piss in your coffee. Because at the end of the day a computer is supposed to help the user do some work better/faster/cleaner and if its such a royal PITA that they'd rather use a pencil and paper than deal with the stupid thing there really isn't any point in having it, is there?
And I can just pop on over to newegg and buy that system right? no? Dude i don't think comparing some multimillion dollar MilSpec retina scanner to what the average person can get, which can be fooled by a gummi bear on the print and whose cameras can't "see' black people is really a fair comparison, do you? to use a /. car analogy that would be like saying "car alarms don't deter car thieves" and you say "Well the last time someone sat an alarm off on base they was hog tied by 4 MPs before they could say "ooops" yee haw'. since the average person doesn't have MPs with hog tying skills standing within earshot of the alarm on their 03 honda i kinda doubt that's a fair comparison. it was pretty obvious reading Barbra's post she was talking about what the average person gets, NOT what they have protecting the bombs at your average missile base.