Actually we should have ditched it a decade earlier as it was a dead end and never fulfilled its original purpose. What i don't understand is why we aren't working on man rating the Delta IV or Atlas V as those rockets have been pretty damned successful and would take less time than the clusterfuck that was the Orion program since you'd be starting off with a well vetted system.
Sadly though without the Cold War to keep their butts in line we'll just have to let private enterprise take care of it because anything built by the government will be met with demands by Congressman Porkus and Senator Kickbackman to have pieces put in their districts so they can "bring home the bacon" or they'll withhold funding so we end up with the thing splattered like a shotgun blast all over the country and costs shooting through the roof. sadly its pretty damned clear now that congress can't do jack shit for the good of the nation anymore, its just a bunch of piggies all squealing and shoving and fighting for the biggest portion of the trough, country be damned.
So the Ruskies follow the Ballmer Peak when it comes to rocket building?
Personally i though Gerald Bull had the right idea for launching unmanned payloads when he came up with the idea of using something similar to HAARP as a "space gun" but he simply didn't have the technology to make it work. Now that we have both rail and coil guns it should be easier to accomplish and ultimately lower the cost of putting objects into space. you could build the barrel on the side of one of those South Pacific islands we've had since WWII, build a small reactor to power the thing, maybe even use a small rocket for the final push after the energy from the firing has been expended so you won't have to build as big a gun.
Ultimately I think we need to be trying radical new ideas as both us and the ruskies are basically using the same tech we stole off the Nazis at the end of WWII. We are never gonna get very far using nothing but chemical rockets and the cost per pound even after improvements is frankly nuts so we need to be working on tech that will let us launch material cheaply and effectively so we can then look beyond the moon towards mars and maybe even the outer planets. If we could send up the pieces via space gun we could then assemble the rocket in LEO and with a little luck we might even end up with a Mars base in our lifetime, but sticking with chemical rockets I doubt we're gonna be able to move the amount of cargo we'd need to be moving to make longer trips feasible.
First of all there is no "Home ultimate" there is Home, there is Ultimate, but no Home Ultimate. And with MSFT OSes the standard convention is "Name Of OS/Name of version" so it would be Vista Home or Vista Ultimate. Funny thing is you screw yourself on support if you buy Ultimate as MSFT only gives 5 years for consumer OSes and 10 for Business so you'd be better off just getting pro and saving a hundred bucks.
Now as for Apple? Its not iCrap its iShiny which hilariously the Macs spellchecker sees NO problem with which disturbed one of those Macbook owners when he typed it in and saw its true. As for why they get away with it Jobs thought of that and old Steve is looked upon as a mythical figure to Apple heads.
And finally as to your list, Amarok is a shitty name (WTF is an Amarok? I bet if you asked a dozen people they'd have NO clue what that is), Firefox was a third choice they got stuck with when they were threatened with lawsuits first for Phoenix and then for Firebird, BTW their icon sucks as I've had people tell me it looks like a tadpole or a fetus, and I won't even mention the Gimp which always gets the "bring out the gimp!" jokes and sometimes even the whole spiel from Pulp Fiction.
Frankly though in the end I think its not so much the names that screw FOSS and makes sure its always a teeny niche but the consistency. We can joke about the iShiny but everything in the iShiny follows pretty consistent rules, same as Windows programs follow Windows conventions. there really aren't any standards as far as UI with FOSS goes, its too many guys scratching itches and doing their own thing and none of it feels like its really meant to go together because...well its not.
In the end I think the whole FOSS community needs to sit down and hash out some standards and stick to them. standards on which toolkit to use, which icon sets, make everything nice and consistent, so that frankly it won't matter WHAT anything is called it'll be "If you've learned one FOSS program you know them all" thanks to everyone following the standard. the LSB tried to get everyone on board but sadly the developers ignored them, maybe in 4 or 5 years someone else will try again and get it to stick.
Oh I agree if its crunch time (and ACTUAL crunch time, not just using that as an excuse to crack the whip every 6 months) or shit hits the fan and they need all hands? then you'd be the prick not to help. But we ALL know when they are saying mat to your welcome, when they don't appreciate shit, we ALL know this. You know in your gut and in your bones when they are trying to push it and THAT is when you have to stand up for yourself.
So while I agree that you can be a prick the other way the ONLY reason companies get away with this horseshit is thanks to the meek ones that don't make waves. Hell in my line of work, PC retail and repair, you REALLY have to watch it as many of these companies will set some poor idiot up to be the patsy and make him install hot software (without leaving any paper trails of course) so if they get BSAA'd they can blame it all on him. I even had one place tell me flat footed they wanted me to set up a Win2K3 server with WSUS on it so they could point all the machines they sold at that instead of Windows Update so they wouldn't get WGA'd. Needless to say I laughed and just walked out the door.
But there is a reason why that old saying has been told here in the south for ages, and that's because its true. if you don't have a backbone and stand up for yourself when you say welcome they WILL say mat and walk right on over you. in the end that guy ain't doing his family no good because he'll never get promoted, never get a raise, never get anything but more work dumped on him simply because he is afraid to stand up for himself and these douches can smell fear a mile off.
If you haven't tried it Hiram's Boot CD is like a Swiss Army knife for repairmen and anybody else that needs to work on a PC and it includes DBAN as well as...hell look at the list, the better question would be "What DON'T it have?" . But I personally use the Diskwipe utility as it completely erases the drive with random ones and zeroes so when its gone its gone. pretty quick too i might add.
But you need to work on a box just boot Hiram either off CD or stick and there you go, just about every tool you could need in a single place. Enjoy and Merry Xmas!
There is an old saying around here "You say welcome and they say mat and walk right over you". You won't be getting the raise, or the bonus, or frankly anything other than what you are getting now because they don't respect a pussy that won't stand up for himself. hell I've seen it happen waaaay too many times to count, they end up being the poor loser stuck in the corner that is always passed by, never gets anything but more work dumped on them, while guys half as knowledgeable get the raise and promotions because they stand up for themselves.
If you want to be the company's bitch that's your choice friend but you'll only get as much respect as you have for yourself. The meek get run over by the strong, that's just the way it goes.
Problem was that was the default behavior on WMP 7-9. It doesn't do this anymore but you'd be surprised how many "XP Pirate Edition" boxes are out there with updates disabled so they don't get WGA'd.
Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if a good 70%+ of the zombies out there are pirate Windows, which is why i say MSFT's answer to piracy was brain dead. The correct move would have been to have a $50 special for Windows home which until they stupidly got rid of it Win 7 HP was replacing pirated Windows left and right thanks to the $50 price tag. MSFT needs to learn there is a price that above which the pirated version becomes a more attractive deal and I'd say that price is over $50 for Home.
Another good idea would be to take some old 90s box and use it to show the kids how it actually works as kids today often look at tech as "black boxes' so giving them some basics can be helpful.
An engineering friend was asked to cook something up and he made a plexiglass top for an old 10gb HDD so the kids could see the drive actually work as it loaded the OS and programs, and had some posters made with graphics showing each step from the time you push the button until you are able to use the computer. It had all the steps from BIOS to OS and explained how all computers are in the end nothing but ones and zeroes and had set up a bank of LEDs that illustrated this, pretty neat i thought.
Anyway just remember that kids aren't like we were, we got to use PEEK and POKE and got to see closer to the bare metal but they've completely grown up with GUIs so often they simply don't understand what is going on in the machine. Set up a few demos, show them how a couple of lines changed in say a DOOM wad (dating myself here) can change what is presented on the screen,bring up a WYSIWYG editor and show them how lines of code are turned into the web pages they see every day. Remember that while teaching them how to work office programs or whatever is all well and good you have a young mind there that needs stimulating and nothing stimulates like a hands on lesson!
Basically any file type that can have a link to a webpage embedded, I believe both.MPG and.WMV are capable of this and a player that will launch the link without asking which WMP 9 was the last WMP I believe that would launch a weblink without asking but I'm sure there were others. Basically how it works is like this: You try to play infected video, video launches default browser to embedded website and then if the browser is unpatched or has any known vulnerabilities you get hit with a driveby. I used to see this trick often here at the shop in the era of fastrack and Limewire, people would look for the latest blockbuster and not think about formatting and get screwed.
As for TFA? Frankly don't surprise me as I've seen the same thing from Best Buy in my area which just reshrinkwraps returned items and will just put them back on the shelf. Funny part is I found out when a local preacher went there and bought an external drive and when first plugged into Windows it asked if he wanted it to play the videos. Well the old guy thought it must be some "Welcome to your new drive" kind of thing and launched it only to be looking at a gangbang vid. Needless to say he freaked and brought it to me thinking his PC must have been hacked!
Frankly anything these big box retailers do anymore really doesn't surprise me which is why i tell folks to ask around and see if the people that have bought from them before were happy. I'm happy to point any potential customers towards previous customers if they want to ask, because i'm proud of my work, but I've seen some of these places...wow is all I got to say. Hell i know so many horror stories from some of these places it ain't even funny, parts ending up "missing" from the PC when they took it to get cleaned, a PC going in for an OS upgrade only to come out with a cheaper graphics card than what it went in with, and stolen RAM is practically SOP in some places. Finally just like in TFA I've seen parts so obviously used sold to customers as new, hell some they didn't even bother blowing dust out the fan or like with the preacher even emptying the drive first.
So I hope they get seriously busted for this and get hit with MASSIVE fines, otherwise they'll just consider it the cost of doing business and continue. I just couldn't do it myself, I take pride in the things I sell and build and try to get the customer the best deal I can. If something is used I tell them upfront and tell them the price difference and let them decide. Of course all drives going through my place are wiped first!
Is that so? Frankly I haven't pirated in years and neither has anyone I know, since the triple score of Amazon+GOG+Steam makes games cheaper than the bandwidth and hassle of pirating anymore. Hell I've even been buying up old games i pirated back in the day simply because its less hassle to have them all loaded in Steam.
I mean when you can buy games like Just Cause II with ALL the DLC for $7 on Steam, Max Payne I & II for $3, and I got all the HL:2 series for $5? Why would you bother pirating, dealing with cracks, worrying about possible malware, losing MP, what's the point?
Frankly the only piracy I see (other than the numbers publishers pull out their ass to ask for more draconian policies) is the kids that are too broke to buy squat and those that are making a statement like what happened with Spore and Assassins Creed over their frankly insane DRM. Everybody else just seems to be hitting the big 3 I just listed and have more games than they know what to do with for less than a meal for 4 at the Mickey D's.
Oh just FYI the biggest pirates i know have hacked X360s they got off CL. they have the hacked one loaded with pirated games and keep their real X360 for the few they want to play online. Considering how badly the consoles get screwed on price compared to PC gamers I'm really not surprised, you aren't buying 3 or 4 good games for $5 for a console anywhere but a yard sale.
Is that USD? Because I just looked in both Google and yahoo shopping and all the HD6850s I'm seeing are nearly $200. Personally I'm hoping for another steal like the HD4850s which i got at $60 a piece over a year ago, but I'd happily pay $100 for a 6850 if i could find one but that doesn't look to be the case.
Sorry but I CAN tell the differences between say 32FPS and 40. Now on 40 up things are smooth but at 25-35 for me at least there tends to be a noticeable pop and jerk as i call it where things don't scroll smoothly. Watch a game like Just Cause II at 29-32FPS and you'll see little jerks and pops where things just don't "flow" for lack of a better word. But with my HD4850 I'm getting 60FPS with a min of 43FPS when there is a lot of fire and I can really tell the difference.
its the whole immersion thing, the smoother the world moves the easier it is to suspend disbelief....well at least until I hookshot into the ground from a burning chopper and walk away without so much as a limp but hey, its a game right? Now if you'll excuse me I got the DLC on the Steam sale and I think I wanna see how quickly villagers get out of the way of my new monster truck. "Up on the sidewalk... bonk bonk bonk" sometimes you just gotta stop and smell the senseless death ya know?
Alright tell me how EXACTLY you are gonna do code injection with low rights mode, DEP AND ASLR? Because to do code injection you have to know WHERE the target is in memory and ASLR makes that random so you are trying to hit a dartboard bullseye with a live bumblebee.
If we were talking about XP I'd agree with your friend, but the only real nasty you need to worry about on modern Windows is Adobe who frankly pisses all over the concept of least permissions and doesn't support squat in the way of security. that is why the first thing I do when my customer gets a new laptop is wipe out Adbobe Reader because it is the biggest attack vector bar none.
But you can't really blame Windows for a vendor that takes the best practices data sheet and wipes their ass with it, especially when so many businesses refuse to use anything else. But the combo of ASLR, DEP, and low rights mode makes for a pretty damned hard nut to crack which as I said i tried my damnedest to infect it and couldn't get a single driveby, all they could do was crash the browser.
Not really, I've set several Radeon cards up for guys using CAD and programs like Solidworks and frankly they work just fine. it all comes down to making sure the GPU supports the same OpenGL that the application supports since all those CAD and engineering programs use OpenGL, but as long as that matches up you're good to go.
BTW if anyone is wondering SolidWorks seems to play nice with any Radeon HD46xx or better and flies on the HD4850 which can be had dirt cheap. Really takes a load of the CPU when you have a lot of little pieces in an assembly to have the rendering done by the GPU.
Actually if you look around you can get an HD4850 for around $60 these days and frankly its overkill for a good 75%+ of the games out there.
Personally i'm kinda glad the consoles have long tails these days as some of us don't care for spending a $150+ every year just to be able to play the latest games. That's the way it was in the late 90s/ early 00s and frankly it seemed like just as I got my machine the way I liked it out would come games requiring a new card to run and there we go again. I've had my HD4850 for a couple of years now and frankly the graphics are plenty jaw dropping as it is. If I want to impress someone all I have to do is fire up Just Cause II and set some remote charges on the stacks and let them go. Seeing my character do the "Cool guys don't watch explosions" bit while the world crumbles behind him with all the smoke and particle effects is frankly pretty impressive.
But don't worry there will ALWAYS be those 'must win teh benches!" types buying crazy priced cards and there will always be new features they can push us like 3D and Eyefinity. In the next year or so the new consoles will come out and I'll grab a 6850 when the price drops below $100 and I'll be set for another 3 or 4 years, hell of a lot nicer than sinking a couple of hundred a year on my GPU. With 2 boys that also game buying three cards at $150+ a piece gets pretty expensive so I'm happy with the way things are. Go AMD and keep cranking out good sub $100 cards please!
Sorry if that link wasn't clear enough of RMS' intent, maybe this one will be more clear. How about a quote "Using the ordinary GPL for a library gives free software developers an advantage over proprietary developers: a library that they can use, while proprietary developers cannot use it" RMS.
Hell I can produce a couple dozen more easily if you'd like, it isn't like RMS is exactly shy on the subject. Again NOT FUD if the entire goal as stated by RMS is to block non free software which he has made perfectly clear time after time AFTER time is his goal and he IS the one writing the license you know.
Don't really understand low rights mode there do you MR AC? the whole point is the combo of ASLR and DEP with low rights mode means they CAN'T be doing any buffer overflows because they simply can't get enough rights to run the code. hell just for the fun of it when I recently had a box I was gonna have to wipe anyway i TRIED to get it infected. i turned off ABP, made sure there wasn't a functional AV, and went nuts on clicking every link i could find on "Look at teh titties!" topsites and other sources of malware. End result? Nothing, zip nada squat. oh they managed to crash the browser a few times but that was it. Then I tried the same trick with FF 7 which of course FF doesn't support low rights mode and the machine ended up with more than 60 new malware nasties running by the time I quit.
So what you are trying to claim simply doesn't work because you just can't pull it off. you can crash the browser, but that'll be all you'll be able to do as you have no idea where in memory to target and can't get high enough rights to do much of anything. So you might as well be saying "if I grew wings out of my ass i could fly over your house and drop a rock on you and KILL YOU!" which i'm sure you could be I REALLY want to see you pull that first part off friend, because i personally don't see it happening.
Well of course it didn't because it KNOWS its iShiny! Its all glossy and sleek and iShiny as hell!
But lets be honest friend, let the fangirls mode me down like they did the parent posting as i just don't care, but you can just SMELL the fail with Win 8 can't you? its so damned obvious that the poor little sweaty monkey is practically wearing an "I heart Apple!" T-shirt and hugging an iShiny with a Winsticker on the back every night so desperate is he to have a WinShiny mobile that kicks ass. I don't even want to know how many billions he has shat down the toilet trying to get into mobile while the dumbass ignore the most obvious which is the reason people run Windows is not because they give a flying crap about MSFT but they want and need to run WINDOWS PROGRAMS which just won't work on the ARM chip.
As for the other poster, obviously a.NET or Silverlight dev, who got his panties in a twist that are being kicked to the curb because Ballmer and a winTab iShiny? look friend don't blame me, I think.NET is just fine and Silverlight is pretty damned powerful but the people that actually know how to write in those languages are X86 PROGRAMMERS and all Ballmer give a flying fuck about right now is obviously ARM based touchscreens. i mean have you SEEN Win 8? that thing is practically fucking useless on ANYTHING but a touchscreen! Now how many touchscreens you got hooked to your X86 computers? thought so.
Its just sad to see a large corp like that hit the skids and go to shit thanks to one man's obsession. it reminds me of the Pepsi guy years at Apple where he basically bet the whole damned farm on the look and feel lawsuit and didn't have a backup plan and the whole company hit the skids when they lost. here you have Ballmer willing to take a giant shit on one of the biggest consistent cash cows in history simply because he wants folks to toss a WinShiny every time a new one comes out like they do with iShiny but lets face it, MSFT has NEVER had that kind of slavish loyalty, not when Gates run it and sure as fuck not now.
final prediction: Win 8 becomes Ballmer's folly, possibly getting him pink slipped (Please God please!) and the WinShiny dreams goes down as the worst failure since MSFT Bob and like Bob will be talked about in laughter for decades. Mobile will be split between Apple and Google, with MSFT buying RIM and becoming the business man's cell phone while their consumer phones destroy what's left of Nokia. Meanwhile Macbook owners will still be startled to find macs see no problem with the word iShiny because...well they are! So wave your iShiny silver flag with pride, this is one battle that MSFT isn't gonna be able to buy a win and this is coming from someone without a single iShiny or droid in sight. I can just smell the fail leaking out of Win 8 like the wafting of a porta potty in July.
Well it looks like the gotcha with regards to FAT patents is U.S. Patent 5,745,902 which covers long to short file names in FAT and was filed in July of 92 so shouldn't it be dead by July next year?
The bigger problem is ExFAT which i'm already starting to see thumbsticks formatted in and wouldn't be surprised if before long memory cards and other NAND flash comes in ExFAT. Now with ExFAT since they have it patented up the ying yang and most of those patents are from the mid 00s you are looking at late 2026 or thereabouts before anybody that hasn't got a license can use them.
But you could have your cake and eat it too in this instance can't you? Because at least to me, and I'm not a security expert so I may be missing something, that this would be a perfect use for smartcards or those USB dongles we had to deal with back in the day. Then you can have two factor authentication by having them plug in the smartcard or dongle AND have to input the password so unless someone managed to hack SSL AND the encryption used by the dongle AND get the password it wouldn't work, correct?
How is it patent trolling? I was always told patent trolling is done by those that don't actually have a product and use patents simply to collect fees. Did MSFT get rid of WinPhone 7 and i missed the memo?
Frankly MSFT and Oracle and Intel and all these companies aren't to blame, its the USPTO for letting you patent any brain fart you can come up with so they can collect fees. After all every one they reject they don't get paid for. Instead it should be set up where they pay a set fee REGARDLESS of whether they get a patent or not, basically paying for the USPTOs time in the matter. Then they can take those fees, hire some experts in the fields, and throw a good 98% of these patents where they belong which is right in the round filing cabinet.
But you can't blame one company for pulling the same shit everyone else is doing, look at Apple and how many fangirls we had rush to explain Apple was simply protecting their incredible innovation because gosh, nobody could think up a square with pretty icons!
That is what I don't get, is there like a rule that FOSS projects HAVE to have shitty names? We should probably have a little contest called "list every horrible FOSS project name" just to see how long it'll get, probably several pages if you use single spacing.
What would have been wrong with simply calling it "Freedom Office"? Or doing something about its speed issues so you could call it Speedy Office or Zippy Office? Hell there has to be a thousand names they could have used that would have been better than Liber which is how I here it mostly pronounced, just as everyone I talk to seem to call it LIEnux as in Linus.
C'mon FOSS guys, I know you probably think you're being cute with these names but it really just hurts getting people to use your product. Now I just call it "A different version of Open Office" rather than deal with the pronunciation of Libre. Sure with as many FOSS guys that are out there somebody could come up with a better name, maybe a contest?
Its not FUD when RMS himself says the goal of GPL is to destroy non free software and RMS makes it clear he WANTS GPL to be "viral" and cause businesses to be forced to open up their code, as his whole goal is to destroy non free software.
So yes having a more permissive license is of the good, it means that companies that might need a document engine or spreadsheet engine can easily use OO.o as a base without worrying of running afoul of the GPL. Remember that like it or not RMS IS a militant, always has been, and with each version of GPL he tries his damnedest to close any and all possible loopholes that would allow a non free company to use it.
The sad part is until they fire Ballmer who is determined to kill the golden gooses MSFT is in REAL trouble, hell look at the GUI for Windows 8, which is really NOTHING but WinTab being shoved down all their home and business users just so Ballmer can dream of having his very own iPad. I bet you hand that man an iShiny he lovingly caresses it before it sinks in that he don't make it and throws it against the wall!
MSFT needs to accept the fact that they are the new IBM. IBM makes shitloads of money but they will NEVER be "the company" that everyone looks to, old "big blue" as the late Jobs put it, ever again. MSFT has three golden gooses that despite the zealot FOSSIes and iUsers dreams will NEVER go away and will be billion dollar businesses for probably ever as long as they keep updating to support the latest hardware. I'm of course talking and Windows and Office and WinServer which together makes a pretty damned nice solution to most business problems. And of course Windows in the home won't be going anywhere, I'm guessing when Win8 aka "Holy shit you thought Vista was bad look at this!" hits folks will simply stay with Win 7 and call it a day.
They just have to accept they will NEVER be "the company" again like they were in the 90s, where people that didn't even have computers lined up to buy Win95 because they were sure they'd need it. Those days are gone, they missed the mobile boat which has done sailed under twin flags on iShiny and Googledroid. You see I'm willing to bet my last dollar if you could get him to talk off the record he honestly believes that by trying to shoehorn the Windows name onto a cell phone GUI'd OS he can trick developers into writing for WinPhone and WinTab, hence why he is cutting his nose off to spite his face on.NET and Silverlight simply because he can't figure out how to get them to run fast on ARM.
But YOU know it won't work, I know it won't work, and any developer stupid enough to fall for such an obvious ploy is too dumb to write any code worth having anyway. They've thrown billions at the consumer market trying to be the iShiny and its been a MASSIVE fail, just as even after buying all of Yahoo's search they'll never get better than a distance second against Google.
TLDR? The ship has sailed, you've missed the boat, accept this and enjoy your billions in steady profits on X86 for all eternity, because otherwise you are just shitting money down the toilet like all those MMOs that fold after they find out they will NEVER be WoW.
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Actually we should have ditched it a decade earlier as it was a dead end and never fulfilled its original purpose. What i don't understand is why we aren't working on man rating the Delta IV or Atlas V as those rockets have been pretty damned successful and would take less time than the clusterfuck that was the Orion program since you'd be starting off with a well vetted system.
Sadly though without the Cold War to keep their butts in line we'll just have to let private enterprise take care of it because anything built by the government will be met with demands by Congressman Porkus and Senator Kickbackman to have pieces put in their districts so they can "bring home the bacon" or they'll withhold funding so we end up with the thing splattered like a shotgun blast all over the country and costs shooting through the roof. sadly its pretty damned clear now that congress can't do jack shit for the good of the nation anymore, its just a bunch of piggies all squealing and shoving and fighting for the biggest portion of the trough, country be damned.
So the Ruskies follow the Ballmer Peak when it comes to rocket building?
Personally i though Gerald Bull had the right idea for launching unmanned payloads when he came up with the idea of using something similar to HAARP as a "space gun" but he simply didn't have the technology to make it work. Now that we have both rail and coil guns it should be easier to accomplish and ultimately lower the cost of putting objects into space. you could build the barrel on the side of one of those South Pacific islands we've had since WWII, build a small reactor to power the thing, maybe even use a small rocket for the final push after the energy from the firing has been expended so you won't have to build as big a gun.
Ultimately I think we need to be trying radical new ideas as both us and the ruskies are basically using the same tech we stole off the Nazis at the end of WWII. We are never gonna get very far using nothing but chemical rockets and the cost per pound even after improvements is frankly nuts so we need to be working on tech that will let us launch material cheaply and effectively so we can then look beyond the moon towards mars and maybe even the outer planets. If we could send up the pieces via space gun we could then assemble the rocket in LEO and with a little luck we might even end up with a Mars base in our lifetime, but sticking with chemical rockets I doubt we're gonna be able to move the amount of cargo we'd need to be moving to make longer trips feasible.
First of all there is no "Home ultimate" there is Home, there is Ultimate, but no Home Ultimate. And with MSFT OSes the standard convention is "Name Of OS/Name of version" so it would be Vista Home or Vista Ultimate. Funny thing is you screw yourself on support if you buy Ultimate as MSFT only gives 5 years for consumer OSes and 10 for Business so you'd be better off just getting pro and saving a hundred bucks.
Now as for Apple? Its not iCrap its iShiny which hilariously the Macs spellchecker sees NO problem with which disturbed one of those Macbook owners when he typed it in and saw its true. As for why they get away with it Jobs thought of that and old Steve is looked upon as a mythical figure to Apple heads.
And finally as to your list, Amarok is a shitty name (WTF is an Amarok? I bet if you asked a dozen people they'd have NO clue what that is), Firefox was a third choice they got stuck with when they were threatened with lawsuits first for Phoenix and then for Firebird, BTW their icon sucks as I've had people tell me it looks like a tadpole or a fetus, and I won't even mention the Gimp which always gets the "bring out the gimp!" jokes and sometimes even the whole spiel from Pulp Fiction.
Frankly though in the end I think its not so much the names that screw FOSS and makes sure its always a teeny niche but the consistency. We can joke about the iShiny but everything in the iShiny follows pretty consistent rules, same as Windows programs follow Windows conventions. there really aren't any standards as far as UI with FOSS goes, its too many guys scratching itches and doing their own thing and none of it feels like its really meant to go together because...well its not.
In the end I think the whole FOSS community needs to sit down and hash out some standards and stick to them. standards on which toolkit to use, which icon sets, make everything nice and consistent, so that frankly it won't matter WHAT anything is called it'll be "If you've learned one FOSS program you know them all" thanks to everyone following the standard. the LSB tried to get everyone on board but sadly the developers ignored them, maybe in 4 or 5 years someone else will try again and get it to stick.
Oh I agree if its crunch time (and ACTUAL crunch time, not just using that as an excuse to crack the whip every 6 months) or shit hits the fan and they need all hands? then you'd be the prick not to help. But we ALL know when they are saying mat to your welcome, when they don't appreciate shit, we ALL know this. You know in your gut and in your bones when they are trying to push it and THAT is when you have to stand up for yourself.
So while I agree that you can be a prick the other way the ONLY reason companies get away with this horseshit is thanks to the meek ones that don't make waves. Hell in my line of work, PC retail and repair, you REALLY have to watch it as many of these companies will set some poor idiot up to be the patsy and make him install hot software (without leaving any paper trails of course) so if they get BSAA'd they can blame it all on him. I even had one place tell me flat footed they wanted me to set up a Win2K3 server with WSUS on it so they could point all the machines they sold at that instead of Windows Update so they wouldn't get WGA'd. Needless to say I laughed and just walked out the door.
But there is a reason why that old saying has been told here in the south for ages, and that's because its true. if you don't have a backbone and stand up for yourself when you say welcome they WILL say mat and walk right on over you. in the end that guy ain't doing his family no good because he'll never get promoted, never get a raise, never get anything but more work dumped on him simply because he is afraid to stand up for himself and these douches can smell fear a mile off.
If you haven't tried it Hiram's Boot CD is like a Swiss Army knife for repairmen and anybody else that needs to work on a PC and it includes DBAN as well as...hell look at the list, the better question would be "What DON'T it have?" . But I personally use the Diskwipe utility as it completely erases the drive with random ones and zeroes so when its gone its gone. pretty quick too i might add.
But you need to work on a box just boot Hiram either off CD or stick and there you go, just about every tool you could need in a single place. Enjoy and Merry Xmas!
There is an old saying around here "You say welcome and they say mat and walk right over you". You won't be getting the raise, or the bonus, or frankly anything other than what you are getting now because they don't respect a pussy that won't stand up for himself. hell I've seen it happen waaaay too many times to count, they end up being the poor loser stuck in the corner that is always passed by, never gets anything but more work dumped on them, while guys half as knowledgeable get the raise and promotions because they stand up for themselves.
If you want to be the company's bitch that's your choice friend but you'll only get as much respect as you have for yourself. The meek get run over by the strong, that's just the way it goes.
Problem was that was the default behavior on WMP 7-9. It doesn't do this anymore but you'd be surprised how many "XP Pirate Edition" boxes are out there with updates disabled so they don't get WGA'd.
Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if a good 70%+ of the zombies out there are pirate Windows, which is why i say MSFT's answer to piracy was brain dead. The correct move would have been to have a $50 special for Windows home which until they stupidly got rid of it Win 7 HP was replacing pirated Windows left and right thanks to the $50 price tag. MSFT needs to learn there is a price that above which the pirated version becomes a more attractive deal and I'd say that price is over $50 for Home.
Another good idea would be to take some old 90s box and use it to show the kids how it actually works as kids today often look at tech as "black boxes' so giving them some basics can be helpful.
An engineering friend was asked to cook something up and he made a plexiglass top for an old 10gb HDD so the kids could see the drive actually work as it loaded the OS and programs, and had some posters made with graphics showing each step from the time you push the button until you are able to use the computer. It had all the steps from BIOS to OS and explained how all computers are in the end nothing but ones and zeroes and had set up a bank of LEDs that illustrated this, pretty neat i thought.
Anyway just remember that kids aren't like we were, we got to use PEEK and POKE and got to see closer to the bare metal but they've completely grown up with GUIs so often they simply don't understand what is going on in the machine. Set up a few demos, show them how a couple of lines changed in say a DOOM wad (dating myself here) can change what is presented on the screen,bring up a WYSIWYG editor and show them how lines of code are turned into the web pages they see every day. Remember that while teaching them how to work office programs or whatever is all well and good you have a young mind there that needs stimulating and nothing stimulates like a hands on lesson!
Basically any file type that can have a link to a webpage embedded, I believe both .MPG and .WMV are capable of this and a player that will launch the link without asking which WMP 9 was the last WMP I believe that would launch a weblink without asking but I'm sure there were others. Basically how it works is like this: You try to play infected video, video launches default browser to embedded website and then if the browser is unpatched or has any known vulnerabilities you get hit with a driveby. I used to see this trick often here at the shop in the era of fastrack and Limewire, people would look for the latest blockbuster and not think about formatting and get screwed.
As for TFA? Frankly don't surprise me as I've seen the same thing from Best Buy in my area which just reshrinkwraps returned items and will just put them back on the shelf. Funny part is I found out when a local preacher went there and bought an external drive and when first plugged into Windows it asked if he wanted it to play the videos. Well the old guy thought it must be some "Welcome to your new drive" kind of thing and launched it only to be looking at a gangbang vid. Needless to say he freaked and brought it to me thinking his PC must have been hacked!
Frankly anything these big box retailers do anymore really doesn't surprise me which is why i tell folks to ask around and see if the people that have bought from them before were happy. I'm happy to point any potential customers towards previous customers if they want to ask, because i'm proud of my work, but I've seen some of these places...wow is all I got to say. Hell i know so many horror stories from some of these places it ain't even funny, parts ending up "missing" from the PC when they took it to get cleaned, a PC going in for an OS upgrade only to come out with a cheaper graphics card than what it went in with, and stolen RAM is practically SOP in some places. Finally just like in TFA I've seen parts so obviously used sold to customers as new, hell some they didn't even bother blowing dust out the fan or like with the preacher even emptying the drive first.
So I hope they get seriously busted for this and get hit with MASSIVE fines, otherwise they'll just consider it the cost of doing business and continue. I just couldn't do it myself, I take pride in the things I sell and build and try to get the customer the best deal I can. If something is used I tell them upfront and tell them the price difference and let them decide. Of course all drives going through my place are wiped first!
Is that so? Frankly I haven't pirated in years and neither has anyone I know, since the triple score of Amazon+GOG+Steam makes games cheaper than the bandwidth and hassle of pirating anymore. Hell I've even been buying up old games i pirated back in the day simply because its less hassle to have them all loaded in Steam.
I mean when you can buy games like Just Cause II with ALL the DLC for $7 on Steam, Max Payne I & II for $3, and I got all the HL:2 series for $5? Why would you bother pirating, dealing with cracks, worrying about possible malware, losing MP, what's the point?
Frankly the only piracy I see (other than the numbers publishers pull out their ass to ask for more draconian policies) is the kids that are too broke to buy squat and those that are making a statement like what happened with Spore and Assassins Creed over their frankly insane DRM. Everybody else just seems to be hitting the big 3 I just listed and have more games than they know what to do with for less than a meal for 4 at the Mickey D's.
Oh just FYI the biggest pirates i know have hacked X360s they got off CL. they have the hacked one loaded with pirated games and keep their real X360 for the few they want to play online. Considering how badly the consoles get screwed on price compared to PC gamers I'm really not surprised, you aren't buying 3 or 4 good games for $5 for a console anywhere but a yard sale.
Is that USD? Because I just looked in both Google and yahoo shopping and all the HD6850s I'm seeing are nearly $200. Personally I'm hoping for another steal like the HD4850s which i got at $60 a piece over a year ago, but I'd happily pay $100 for a 6850 if i could find one but that doesn't look to be the case.
Sorry but I CAN tell the differences between say 32FPS and 40. Now on 40 up things are smooth but at 25-35 for me at least there tends to be a noticeable pop and jerk as i call it where things don't scroll smoothly. Watch a game like Just Cause II at 29-32FPS and you'll see little jerks and pops where things just don't "flow" for lack of a better word. But with my HD4850 I'm getting 60FPS with a min of 43FPS when there is a lot of fire and I can really tell the difference.
its the whole immersion thing, the smoother the world moves the easier it is to suspend disbelief....well at least until I hookshot into the ground from a burning chopper and walk away without so much as a limp but hey, its a game right? Now if you'll excuse me I got the DLC on the Steam sale and I think I wanna see how quickly villagers get out of the way of my new monster truck. "Up on the sidewalk... bonk bonk bonk" sometimes you just gotta stop and smell the senseless death ya know?
Alright tell me how EXACTLY you are gonna do code injection with low rights mode, DEP AND ASLR? Because to do code injection you have to know WHERE the target is in memory and ASLR makes that random so you are trying to hit a dartboard bullseye with a live bumblebee.
If we were talking about XP I'd agree with your friend, but the only real nasty you need to worry about on modern Windows is Adobe who frankly pisses all over the concept of least permissions and doesn't support squat in the way of security. that is why the first thing I do when my customer gets a new laptop is wipe out Adbobe Reader because it is the biggest attack vector bar none.
But you can't really blame Windows for a vendor that takes the best practices data sheet and wipes their ass with it, especially when so many businesses refuse to use anything else. But the combo of ASLR, DEP, and low rights mode makes for a pretty damned hard nut to crack which as I said i tried my damnedest to infect it and couldn't get a single driveby, all they could do was crash the browser.
Not really, I've set several Radeon cards up for guys using CAD and programs like Solidworks and frankly they work just fine. it all comes down to making sure the GPU supports the same OpenGL that the application supports since all those CAD and engineering programs use OpenGL, but as long as that matches up you're good to go.
BTW if anyone is wondering SolidWorks seems to play nice with any Radeon HD46xx or better and flies on the HD4850 which can be had dirt cheap. Really takes a load of the CPU when you have a lot of little pieces in an assembly to have the rendering done by the GPU.
Actually if you look around you can get an HD4850 for around $60 these days and frankly its overkill for a good 75%+ of the games out there.
Personally i'm kinda glad the consoles have long tails these days as some of us don't care for spending a $150+ every year just to be able to play the latest games. That's the way it was in the late 90s/ early 00s and frankly it seemed like just as I got my machine the way I liked it out would come games requiring a new card to run and there we go again. I've had my HD4850 for a couple of years now and frankly the graphics are plenty jaw dropping as it is. If I want to impress someone all I have to do is fire up Just Cause II and set some remote charges on the stacks and let them go. Seeing my character do the "Cool guys don't watch explosions" bit while the world crumbles behind him with all the smoke and particle effects is frankly pretty impressive.
But don't worry there will ALWAYS be those 'must win teh benches!" types buying crazy priced cards and there will always be new features they can push us like 3D and Eyefinity. In the next year or so the new consoles will come out and I'll grab a 6850 when the price drops below $100 and I'll be set for another 3 or 4 years, hell of a lot nicer than sinking a couple of hundred a year on my GPU. With 2 boys that also game buying three cards at $150+ a piece gets pretty expensive so I'm happy with the way things are. Go AMD and keep cranking out good sub $100 cards please!
Sorry if that link wasn't clear enough of RMS' intent, maybe this one will be more clear. How about a quote "Using the ordinary GPL for a library gives free software developers an advantage over proprietary developers: a library that they can use, while proprietary developers cannot use it" RMS.
Hell I can produce a couple dozen more easily if you'd like, it isn't like RMS is exactly shy on the subject. Again NOT FUD if the entire goal as stated by RMS is to block non free software which he has made perfectly clear time after time AFTER time is his goal and he IS the one writing the license you know.
So if the environmentalists block it the datacenter will be pining for the fjords then?
Don't really understand low rights mode there do you MR AC? the whole point is the combo of ASLR and DEP with low rights mode means they CAN'T be doing any buffer overflows because they simply can't get enough rights to run the code. hell just for the fun of it when I recently had a box I was gonna have to wipe anyway i TRIED to get it infected. i turned off ABP, made sure there wasn't a functional AV, and went nuts on clicking every link i could find on "Look at teh titties!" topsites and other sources of malware. End result? Nothing, zip nada squat. oh they managed to crash the browser a few times but that was it. Then I tried the same trick with FF 7 which of course FF doesn't support low rights mode and the machine ended up with more than 60 new malware nasties running by the time I quit.
So what you are trying to claim simply doesn't work because you just can't pull it off. you can crash the browser, but that'll be all you'll be able to do as you have no idea where in memory to target and can't get high enough rights to do much of anything. So you might as well be saying "if I grew wings out of my ass i could fly over your house and drop a rock on you and KILL YOU!" which i'm sure you could be I REALLY want to see you pull that first part off friend, because i personally don't see it happening.
Well of course it didn't because it KNOWS its iShiny! Its all glossy and sleek and iShiny as hell!
But lets be honest friend, let the fangirls mode me down like they did the parent posting as i just don't care, but you can just SMELL the fail with Win 8 can't you? its so damned obvious that the poor little sweaty monkey is practically wearing an "I heart Apple!" T-shirt and hugging an iShiny with a Winsticker on the back every night so desperate is he to have a WinShiny mobile that kicks ass. I don't even want to know how many billions he has shat down the toilet trying to get into mobile while the dumbass ignore the most obvious which is the reason people run Windows is not because they give a flying crap about MSFT but they want and need to run WINDOWS PROGRAMS which just won't work on the ARM chip.
As for the other poster, obviously a .NET or Silverlight dev, who got his panties in a twist that are being kicked to the curb because Ballmer and a winTab iShiny? look friend don't blame me, I think .NET is just fine and Silverlight is pretty damned powerful but the people that actually know how to write in those languages are X86 PROGRAMMERS and all Ballmer give a flying fuck about right now is obviously ARM based touchscreens. i mean have you SEEN Win 8? that thing is practically fucking useless on ANYTHING but a touchscreen! Now how many touchscreens you got hooked to your X86 computers? thought so.
Its just sad to see a large corp like that hit the skids and go to shit thanks to one man's obsession. it reminds me of the Pepsi guy years at Apple where he basically bet the whole damned farm on the look and feel lawsuit and didn't have a backup plan and the whole company hit the skids when they lost. here you have Ballmer willing to take a giant shit on one of the biggest consistent cash cows in history simply because he wants folks to toss a WinShiny every time a new one comes out like they do with iShiny but lets face it, MSFT has NEVER had that kind of slavish loyalty, not when Gates run it and sure as fuck not now.
final prediction: Win 8 becomes Ballmer's folly, possibly getting him pink slipped (Please God please!) and the WinShiny dreams goes down as the worst failure since MSFT Bob and like Bob will be talked about in laughter for decades. Mobile will be split between Apple and Google, with MSFT buying RIM and becoming the business man's cell phone while their consumer phones destroy what's left of Nokia. Meanwhile Macbook owners will still be startled to find macs see no problem with the word iShiny because...well they are! So wave your iShiny silver flag with pride, this is one battle that MSFT isn't gonna be able to buy a win and this is coming from someone without a single iShiny or droid in sight. I can just smell the fail leaking out of Win 8 like the wafting of a porta potty in July.
Well it looks like the gotcha with regards to FAT patents is U.S. Patent 5,745,902 which covers long to short file names in FAT and was filed in July of 92 so shouldn't it be dead by July next year?
The bigger problem is ExFAT which i'm already starting to see thumbsticks formatted in and wouldn't be surprised if before long memory cards and other NAND flash comes in ExFAT. Now with ExFAT since they have it patented up the ying yang and most of those patents are from the mid 00s you are looking at late 2026 or thereabouts before anybody that hasn't got a license can use them.
But you could have your cake and eat it too in this instance can't you? Because at least to me, and I'm not a security expert so I may be missing something, that this would be a perfect use for smartcards or those USB dongles we had to deal with back in the day. Then you can have two factor authentication by having them plug in the smartcard or dongle AND have to input the password so unless someone managed to hack SSL AND the encryption used by the dongle AND get the password it wouldn't work, correct?
How is it patent trolling? I was always told patent trolling is done by those that don't actually have a product and use patents simply to collect fees. Did MSFT get rid of WinPhone 7 and i missed the memo?
Frankly MSFT and Oracle and Intel and all these companies aren't to blame, its the USPTO for letting you patent any brain fart you can come up with so they can collect fees. After all every one they reject they don't get paid for. Instead it should be set up where they pay a set fee REGARDLESS of whether they get a patent or not, basically paying for the USPTOs time in the matter. Then they can take those fees, hire some experts in the fields, and throw a good 98% of these patents where they belong which is right in the round filing cabinet.
But you can't blame one company for pulling the same shit everyone else is doing, look at Apple and how many fangirls we had rush to explain Apple was simply protecting their incredible innovation because gosh, nobody could think up a square with pretty icons!
That is what I don't get, is there like a rule that FOSS projects HAVE to have shitty names? We should probably have a little contest called "list every horrible FOSS project name" just to see how long it'll get, probably several pages if you use single spacing.
What would have been wrong with simply calling it "Freedom Office"? Or doing something about its speed issues so you could call it Speedy Office or Zippy Office? Hell there has to be a thousand names they could have used that would have been better than Liber which is how I here it mostly pronounced, just as everyone I talk to seem to call it LIEnux as in Linus.
C'mon FOSS guys, I know you probably think you're being cute with these names but it really just hurts getting people to use your product. Now I just call it "A different version of Open Office" rather than deal with the pronunciation of Libre. Sure with as many FOSS guys that are out there somebody could come up with a better name, maybe a contest?
Its not FUD when RMS himself says the goal of GPL is to destroy non free software and RMS makes it clear he WANTS GPL to be "viral" and cause businesses to be forced to open up their code, as his whole goal is to destroy non free software.
So yes having a more permissive license is of the good, it means that companies that might need a document engine or spreadsheet engine can easily use OO.o as a base without worrying of running afoul of the GPL. Remember that like it or not RMS IS a militant, always has been, and with each version of GPL he tries his damnedest to close any and all possible loopholes that would allow a non free company to use it.
The sad part is until they fire Ballmer who is determined to kill the golden gooses MSFT is in REAL trouble, hell look at the GUI for Windows 8, which is really NOTHING but WinTab being shoved down all their home and business users just so Ballmer can dream of having his very own iPad. I bet you hand that man an iShiny he lovingly caresses it before it sinks in that he don't make it and throws it against the wall!
MSFT needs to accept the fact that they are the new IBM. IBM makes shitloads of money but they will NEVER be "the company" that everyone looks to, old "big blue" as the late Jobs put it, ever again. MSFT has three golden gooses that despite the zealot FOSSIes and iUsers dreams will NEVER go away and will be billion dollar businesses for probably ever as long as they keep updating to support the latest hardware. I'm of course talking and Windows and Office and WinServer which together makes a pretty damned nice solution to most business problems. And of course Windows in the home won't be going anywhere, I'm guessing when Win8 aka "Holy shit you thought Vista was bad look at this!" hits folks will simply stay with Win 7 and call it a day.
They just have to accept they will NEVER be "the company" again like they were in the 90s, where people that didn't even have computers lined up to buy Win95 because they were sure they'd need it. Those days are gone, they missed the mobile boat which has done sailed under twin flags on iShiny and Googledroid. You see I'm willing to bet my last dollar if you could get him to talk off the record he honestly believes that by trying to shoehorn the Windows name onto a cell phone GUI'd OS he can trick developers into writing for WinPhone and WinTab, hence why he is cutting his nose off to spite his face on .NET and Silverlight simply because he can't figure out how to get them to run fast on ARM.
But YOU know it won't work, I know it won't work, and any developer stupid enough to fall for such an obvious ploy is too dumb to write any code worth having anyway. They've thrown billions at the consumer market trying to be the iShiny and its been a MASSIVE fail, just as even after buying all of Yahoo's search they'll never get better than a distance second against Google.
TLDR? The ship has sailed, you've missed the boat, accept this and enjoy your billions in steady profits on X86 for all eternity, because otherwise you are just shitting money down the toilet like all those MMOs that fold after they find out they will NEVER be WoW.