Well friend you are welcome to try to have a forced orgy with my cousin, he is currently doing life in TX, although you should probably be warned that the last one that attempted that had their right eye dug out with a broken spoon by same cousin so i probably wouldn't bring any utensils or sharp objects with you.
As for TFA i think the judge is wrong and here is why: The sold the customer an object that was advertised as doing X+Y and then after taking their money told the customer that they can only do X OR Y. This would be like Ford selling you a new car with a GPS and a nice stereo and then telling you once you had paid for it "Oh BTW, we are now gonna pull one of those items, which do you want, the stereo or the GPS unit?". At the very least the judge should have ordered that Sony should have to give back the cost of the units PLUS the cost of anything they bought to go with said unit if the customer finds the above undesirable and no longer wants the unit.
I just hope the EU gives them a smackdown, sadly while the USA has become nothing but corp suckups usually the EU does protect their citizens at least a little bit.
If it were me? Comodo Dragon with the secure DNS in the browser ONLY (which is the default setting) along with ABP. Dragon has checkboxes that will import ALL her FF settings, bookmarks, passwords, etc so that she won't really need to do much, and most importanly the combo of low rights mode (which Chromium has) and the browser only secure DNS (which Chromium don't) really shuts down any malware. This with the Avast and Win 7 you already have should make you solid as a rock.
Let me put it THIS way HopefulIntern, I took a machine i was gonna wipe anyway and using the above method I TRIED to infect the machine. I went to every "hott titty teen lesbos!" topsite and clicked on EVERY link, just went nuts, and between Comodo and Avast i ended up with ZERO infections. Most sites were blocked by Dragon thanks to their secure DNS and the few that hadn't made it to their DNS DB got shut down by Avast, and low rights mode means that even IF they were to manage to get past both, which as i said i couldn't get a single bug past both, then thanks to dragon being in low rights mode there isn't any system folders or files it can get to.
as someone who has to deal with users 6 days a week i pretty much HAVE to keep up with every angle of attack because these businesses and home users are counting on me and my rep is on the line. With the above i have yet to have to fix a single box from malware getting past the defenses. for those users that listened to me and switched to Dragon plus Avast on Win 7 the ONLY thing i have to do for them now is hardware work, installing new cameras or upgrading memory and the like. Some weeks I feel like the Maytag repairman because i did my job a little TOO good, but the referrals from happy customers makes up for it and ultimately its the user that counts in my book. An uninfected computer is a happy computer, follow the above and bugs will be something that happens to the OTHER guy, not to you.
You are forgetting the x factor friend....China. i'm sure china will offer them a VERY nice deal and probably along with some nice missiles a couple of the production numbers when they start cranking these puppies off. Its common knowledge the Chinese went so far as to pay dirt farmers in Kosovo to dig up the F117 stealth that went down there just so they could learn from it, as well as paying Pakistan for the stealth chopper than went down on the Bin Laden op.
This will be quite a lesson for them on stealth tech, kinda like how a Russian scientist that later defected said that the dud sidewinder that got stuck in a Chinese aircraft and brought back intact which he said "was like a university course on modern missile design" and allowed them to build the Atoll which was so closely cloned off of sidewinder you could tear apart one and mix and match parts with sidewinder and it would shoot perfectly. The gov can make light all they want but this is a BIG fuckup and i'm sure some guys are gonna be assigned to shit duty in Greenland over this.
While I agree most ads suck ass I don't think that just because something is cheap automatically means its shit. Sure meritline is trash but i buy cheap adapters all day long from monoprice and frankly I've never had one fail, and they carry the stuff most other don't which has actually let me save things from the landfill like those old classic claky keyboards with the big DIN plugs.
I think it all comes down to HOW you advertise. for example I was actually grateful when tiger sent me a "Hey since you bought a Thuban from us we thought you might need some stuff to go with it" ad because i was having a devil of a time finding a good cooler that would fit my case and the one in the ad they sent me was just the right size. Or the nice email that Newegg sent me when I was buying parts for my GF's new Xmas PC with 15% off the rest of the parts I was gonna have to buy anyway, that was nice.
I think its more the difference of someone whom you've bought from trying to sell you things that go together VS someone just cold calling and bugging the fuck out of you that makes the difference. take junk mail, which now that i think about it I'll have to go dump my mail straight into the trash again as i'm sure the poor mail guy is getting tired of trying to stuff that shit in the box. i never use it, never even look at it, its all crap you couldn't give me if you offered it free, its just a waste. Now compare that to the emails that mom gets from Amazon that many here would call spam that she frankly loves. She likes a bunch of weird horror writers so when one of her authors, or an author recommended by one of her authors, comes out with a new book Amazon gives her a heads up. she loves that as it lets her know when the next book in one of her serials is out, what books to put on her wishlist, and it makes things easier for her.
So i don't think ads HAVE to suck ass, i just think the douchebags that have been making the flashy bling bling bullshit ads are ruining it for everyone. I like to know when a new ATI GPU or AMD CPU comes out, so i don't mind hearing about that. I don't mind when monoprice sends me an ad telling me about a sale because hey, i may need an adapter and could save a couple of bucks. what I DO mind is these ads from left field about shit i don't care about like retirement homes or female products slapping me in the face when i'm just trying to read an article, thanks ever so.
Oh Lord....Vim? You know who you remind me of? my old boss's daughter. We'd get some suit in there going "I want the guy that designed that great new banking site, i hear that fine gentleman works here?" and we'd snicker and just point to the corner and there on an old 400Mhz Gateway Astro would be Doug's 14 year old daughter, popping her gum. give that girl nothing but notepad though and she'd make a website that would make most of these "web developers" cry in shame, really top notch work.
But for me its still the myriad of little things in Linux that bite me in the ass. I asked a simple question 'How can I easy and QUICKLY remote into a customer's PC when something goes wrong?" and got half a dozen answers, each more esoteric and complex than the last. With Windows I can be in that person's computer even if they are halfway across the country in under 4 minutes. they call me, i tell them to ask for remote assistance, they give me the EasyConnect code, i put it in mine, that's it. i now have their desktop and can fix most simple problems in a couple of minutes instead of trying to walk them through it.
And your last bit is frankly what REALLY pisses me off about the community, they act like users are SOOOO hard to please, when never before have they had it easier! Most users check their webmail, they YouTube, they use FB, that's pretty much it. Some basics like printing and disc burning, big fricking whoop. But when their precious OS can't even be safely updated without "Whoops I made a stinky' how in the hell is Sally gonna use it? Even shit that Windows has had for a fricking decade is missing! Is it so damned much to ask for to have a "find drivers" and "roll back drivers" button so if Linux makes a stinky Suzy can at LEAST get a functional system back easily? What if the stinky is her wireless or Ethernet and that is all she has to get on the net with? Is she supposed to magically know that 3 pages worth of cryptic bash bullshit needed to get her connection back?
And THAT is what pisses me off, its not like we are talking about trying to get Win95 to run on a 6 core PC here, all the basic parts are there. Linux has good DEs, they have good programs, and if they didn't constantly shit all over them many items actually do have drivers now, but its just all completely piss poorly implemented. Why the fuck isn't all the basic drivers on the damned DVD? DVD blanks are 22 fricking cents, what they afraid we can't swing that for a fricking driver disc? Why isn't there a "Linux store" where you can buy hardware that is guaranteed to work and KEEP working with Linux instead of playing hardware roulette just to buy a device? Why isn't there a "help me!" button so new users can instantly pop up a forum chat window and get help when they are stuck?
You see its the little things that make ALL the difference here. it isn't that linux couldn't be a truly great OS, its that the developers are a bunch of programming nerds who don't give a crap and they are surrounded by sycophants that kiss their booty and tell them everything is wonderful even when its shit. look at the total hate MSFT got for releasing Vista as buggy as it was, and on its WORST day it ain't got shit on your average distro! if the users would rise up and say 'NO! This is NOT gonna cut it!" and threw their weight around i bet in less than 5 years Linux could be a world class desktop, but instead I get called filthy names and nothing changes but the version numbers. Its a damned shame, that's what it is, just a damned shame.
Is this for Firefox only? Because I just installed the Chrome version in Comodo Dragon and there was a single checkbox that said something like "I like Google ads, don't block those" and it was unchecked by default. Now maybe its because Dragon is based on Chromium and fools ABP into thinking its Chrome and therefor doesn't check it, but at least there is one browser out there that it doesn't default to showing ads with.
A site has to EARN my trust before i will give them a pass, Ars Technica was the last site but if they start showing bling bling shit I'll block their asses in a heartbeat. i think the problem is these ad company assholes have become such giant pricks that they just can't stand any ad that isn't as fucking irritating as Bonzi Buddy. Last time i had to run a browser without ABP i thought "Geez, people put up with this shit?" because my ears were being assaulted by loud commercial bullshit, half the screen had crap all over it, it was just a big damned mess. if they did it like the old days where there was NO DNS call, just a single GIF or JPEG link? I wouldn't have a problem with that. Hell I don't have a problem with the ad emails I get from Amazon because at least they give me ads for things i might like.
But without ABP I frankly can't stand the fricking web, its loud, noisy bling bling horseshit as far as the eye can see. Before i'll put up with that shit again i'll put every damned ad server i can find in my DNS or even run the bloated crap that is the new firefox just to get back NoScript. Hopefully though if the ABP guy becomes a dick somebody will come out with an alternative and we can go back to enjoying a peaceful quiet web again.
Well I can tell you as a guy that has to fix the PC after they fuck it up that the IE users are a HELL of a lot more likely to fall for the major social engineering scams from what I've seen. Windows has actually gotten pretty damned hard to crack so being smart little bastards the malware guys just figured out how to get the users to do the dirty work and the IE users? Easy prey.
From what I've seen the big three are, in no particular order, the "ZOMFG you got teh viruz! Run "Iz_Not_Viruz_Iz_Cleaner" to kill it ZOMFG!" that has how you get your AV 20xx and Security tool variants, the "U want teh lezboz? We GOT teh lezboz! Just run "Iz_Not_Viruz_Iz_Codek" to see all teh lezboz!" which is where many of the trojans and spambot crap comes from, and finally the "Hey U R on teh IM? I'm on teh IM to! Please check out "Iz_Not_Viruz_Iz_cute pikz" to see me!" which is where a lot of the nasty rootkit and also spambot crap.
Funny part, second biggest cause of spam? firefox users that have yahoo accounts. The malware guys have figured out how to get Firefox to load an invisible iFrame that lets them load the Yahoo account and silently spam their address book while they look at "free porn" sites thanks to infected ads. This trick doesn't seem to work on the other browsers, not even IE, and it don't seem to work with hotmail nor Gmail, just Yahoo and FF.
I've found if you want to keep a PC clean a combination of Comodo Dragon or Chromium with ABP on Windows 7 with Avast Free works like magic. win 7 has sandboxing along with ASLR and DEP, Dragon and Chromium also sandbox and use low rights mode as does IE, and Avast Free (you can also use Comodo Security Suite which is free for business as well as home, but Avast is less fiddly) does scan before load on all web pages so any nasty crap on a page never gets loaded. Personally i prefer Dragon because of the Comodo secure DNS option, which doesn't mess with the system DNS and which is damned good at blocking phishing sites. Can't comment on Opera or Safari as i haven't really put them through the paces so i don't know how well they hold up.
But of all the systems that come through my shop it never fails that the IE users are the worst infected, bar none. be that because of TFA or because of flaws in the browser I can't tell you, hell it may just be PEBKAC, but if the user has IE only i know its gonna be a nasty mess.
Thank you, and notice how one of the cowards accused me of trolling, for what? Like anything i say here is gonna make a difference one way or the other. sadly you seem to be the ONLY one that got the point of that TRUE story, which was not that movie was so important but that the jury was so clueless that frankly all they needed was something they'd seen on a movie to change their opinion!
It LITERALLY came down to being THIS simple "There are no Italians here, the only Italians I've seen are in mob movies, therefor Italians are mobsters and do crimes" and that was pretty much their line of thinking! and I wish I could find a link for it but I saw a great video where they gave the same jury two cases, both cases were IDENTICAL, they had the prosecutor and defense going from scripts, the ONLY difference? They had the same defendant in a scruffy beard and Army jacket, and the other clean cut in an expensive 3 piece suit. guess what the outcome was? You guessed it, when the ONLY difference was the appearance of the defendant they voted to convict solely on his look! And afterwards they said things like "He just looked like a criminal" or "he looked like a thug".
So I'm sorry but after seeing that and hearing about that guy nearly losing 20 years simply by being Italian I would never trust a jury! And as you said mom said there was one "hang 'em high" that tried to bully everyone into a guilty verdict and the meek just wanted out of there and didn't care. Frankly i can't even imagine throwing someone under a bus like that simply to get out of jury duty faster, but they voted 11 to 1 until the judge finally acepted there was no way my mom was gonna back down and declared a mistrial. i just hope like hell that guy took a judge trial on the second or he might be in PMITA prison as we speak!
It was 24f when I got up this morning barb, believe me i know about the fricking cold! This is supposed to be a hot and humid state, where the hell is my global warming? Do i need to go open up some freon tanks or what? i'm freezing over here!
As for why win 7 over Vista? Well for one those jumplists DO so rock! for example on my comodo Dragon i right click on its icon and BAM! There is the last 10 sites I visited whether they are open, closed, or if the program is even running or not. And having that on explorer along with it defaulting to two pane is just sooooo damned nice! Oh and FINALLY they have sane tasks at the top of each window. remember how in XP they had that lame side panel that always had the same crap, like "burn this to CD" or "email this to a friend"? Now its all contextual based on where you are and what you do often. for example I have an old Sempron with a fat HDD that I use as a file server with shares for all my major uses, like software, drivers, etc and now when i open my computer there is a handy "map network drive" button right there, easy peasy. In my media folders there is a share button so i can simply grab whatever i want shared on the network and hit the button and I'm done. its THAT kind of attention to the little things I have yet to see in Linux, those nice little polishes that makes everything nicer. While I've used Vista since the patches to me its more like a skinned XP, its not as good with memory management,its superfetch frankly isn't good, its like Windows 7's retard cousin Cleetus. Once you've used all the cool stuff in win 7 using any other Windows feels like running Win98 all over again.
And I'm sorry to hear about OpenSUSE and agree with you completely that user data is a big DO NOT SCREW WITH but to me just illustrates my point that with Linux nobody is standing up for the user, its all "do your own thing" and nobody cares if their program takes a big old shit on everyone else as long as it works FOR THEM. That is why "it works for me" is one of the most popular TMs at TMRepo because both the Linux zealots and developers use that one so damned much its practically a mantra. I've actually been accused of faking screengrabs when i posted shots of some of the things Linux was taking a poo with, like I gave a crap enough about Linux to go to that much trouble!
In the end just as i said before there are some things that should NEVER fail and if they do the OS should be looked at as broken, for example what i call the "80%" which is the hardware you find on practically every machine on the planet, Realtek sound and Ethernet, Sigmatel sound on laptops along with Realtek, the big three chip makers chips and video cards which at the very LEAST the ones over a year old should NEVER break as the hardware is well known by then, broadcom and Aetheros wireless, this stuff is as old as dirt as just as common. yet time and time again i try my "is it safe?" test with the most bog standard common hardware on the planet and by upgrade 2 its "Ooops Linux made a stinky" and crapped all over itself. Shit that frankly should be OS 101, like not breaking the sound system or having the network manager refuse to save settings, the kind of shit I honestly haven't seen on windows since 9X or Apple since system 9 just pops up over and over AND OVER again.
Like I said on LinuxInsider that if you consider your OS to be a hobby, like that 72 Camaro, something you're willing to constantly have to futz with and spend your weekends fussing over? Well Linux is fine project OS, knock yourself out. But for actually getting your work done, or having a machine that will be running 5 years from now futz free? Windows or OSX FTW in that case, Linux honestly just isn't in the same league. i mean look at the mess you had, there is NO excuse for that level of breakage!
But I wish you luck on mint, personally after trying it and Vector and getting the "Ooops I made a stinky" when i updated frankly i'm washing my hands of FOSS OSes for a couple of years, maybe by then Torvalds will reti
Well we ARE talking about cheap storage so frankly the speed shouldn't matter, you could always put a small fast SSD as the OS drive. that said the main machine i'm typing this on has a 5400RPM Samsung as the OS drive and I jumped a good 30 points in the HDDTune scores by switching from a 7200RPM Seagate, even though we are talking about a slower rotational speed. That is because the Samsung drives are damned good about utilizing their 32Mb of onboard cache when compared to the 8Mb the Seagate had.
So I'd say it all comes down to what you are gonna do with it. If you are like my "must have teh biggest ePeen and win teh benches!" gamer customers frankly the HDD shouldn't be anything but storage for your media, and with everyone else Windows 7 with a decent amount of RAM just loads all your apps into memory anyway so drive speed frankly isn't that big a whoop. i like to game and mess with audio/video editing and having 3Tb of HDD space to me is well worth having them both be Samsung EcoDrive 5400RPM, and with 8Gb of RAM frankly if anything the larger caches on the Samsungs makes them snappier than the Seagates they replaced.
You aren't thinking of all their other content, the pictures (which modern cameras can suck up space quickly) the videos, the music, the documents,etc. I've had quite a few of my "Plain Jane" customers come in and change out their 200-400gb HDDs simply because they had loaded them to the brim and needed more space.
That said if you keep an eye out you can still get decent prices on the 5400RPM drives which make great storage drives and depending on the model even great OS drives. I'm typing this on my main machine at home which i changed out the 400gb 7200RPM Seagate with 8Mb of cache for a Samsung EcoDrive 5400RPM with 32Mb of cache and my benchmark went from a top burst of 104 to 131, and it loads the desktop plenty fast while being a good 25f degrees cooler than the Seagate was.
I'm just glad i got my family and myself set before the flood so I can simply wait it out. All I have left on the SATA front is a 640Gb and an 80Gb, the 80Gb will be going in the spare office box I keep for clients and the 640Gb in it will be going in the new box I'm building my GF for Xmas. I don't even want to know what a 640gb 7200RPM SATA would cost me right now, probably more than the quad core CPU AND the 4Gb of RAM I bought for this new build put together!
You're using Vista? Why? Do you feel the need to repent for sins in a past life? Barb get Windows 7, its a little slice of heaven. Its fast, light on resources, smooth, and jumplists are a little slice of goodness pie, especially the one for explorer which remembers the last 10 folders you've opened as it makes jumping back into what you were doing a breeze! If you know any college kids you can get Win 7 pro for like $39 through the education discount and if not you can get Win 7 HP for less than $80 by just watching sellout.woot for the sales.
But what always amazed me about people listening to RMS is not ONLY is he a squatter which never graduated MIT, but they look to him as some expert on Linux when the man doesn't even surf the web he uses a fricking Daemon to have it scrape a webpage and email it to him! WTF? Linux is pretty much a web based OS and the guy everyone turns to doesn't even surf? And how can ANYBODY take the guy seriously after this bit is beyond me. He is on a fricking stage for the love of Pete, WTF is he thinking?
Frankly they can keep Saint iGNUcious or whatever he calls himself and take Torvalds as well, because what I want to see in FOSS is a gates or a Jobs to come in there, put their foot down, and FINALLY after all these damned years have a distro that puts users #1! I had hopes Shuttleworth would be the guy but its obvious now he is just gonna slap different lipstick on the same old piggy, as Ubuntu is just as flaky, just as libel for drivers to break, just as buggy as "bob's distro'.
BTW if you don't mind me asking which distro was it that took a big dump with your data? Oh and if you want a PSU super cheap go talk to your local mom and pop repair shop, we usually have a ton of them and will be happy to let you have one cheap if you'll just BS with us awhile. We get so tired of nobody being able to talk tech that we give deals to those that don't give us "I have a problem with the thing and its messed up my stuff". Gee thanks, how can I ever fail with such an accurate description?
I don't know about that, because while Bulldozer wasn't a big hit Bobcat is frankly selling so fast the CEO had them ramp down some of the desktop production to give them more Bobcats, along with ending production of all the Deneb and Thuban chips. I just walked into Walmart today and they were unpacking a pallet load of desktops loaded with e-350s (not bad at $399 with a 20 inch TFT and 500Gb HDD), and looking at their laptops and netbooks I'd say a good 80%+ were E-Series or A-Series. And of course all of the all in ones were E-350 chips. Those Bobcats are selling like hotcakes and as an owner of a EEE E-350 i can see why, its low heat, last 6 hours on a battery, plays full 1080p over HDMI and most importantly doesn't feel like its got a boat anchor tied to it like Atom does.
So this HDD shortage may turn out to be even more of a boost to AMD as by buying the cheaper AMD chips the OEMs can absorb the cost of the higher HDD without raising prices and running off customers. I'm just glad i scored my Thuban when i did because a lot of the Thubans were selling out, my guess everyone that wanted one doing like me and trying to snatch one before they ran out.
So let me leave everybody with my new happy Xmas song! "We wish you a Merry Thuban, We wish you a Merry Thuban, We wish you a Merry Thuban and a happy six corrrrreeee!"
Uhhh...Tiger is selling a 1Tb Seagate for like $60, I'm sure you can find the link on sellout.woot if you didn't get the email. While that isn't as cheap as the $35 I paid for a 1Tb Samsung frankly that isn't THAT bad a price, hell the 1.5Tb was like $99,its not gonna break the bank.
Actually that isn't a fair or correct description at all....Apple sues, MSFT uses the classic "Pay your $699 license fee you cocksmoking teabaggers!" meme which it bought from SCO.
Not to mention we already went through this in the states with them over 20+ years ago. Anybody remember "look and feel"? because that is pretty much EXACTLY what we are talking about here. Just as with look and feel Apple is claiming that generic thing A plus generic thing B equals patentable and makes about as much sense as saying "Well you can build a car with square wheels, or motorcycle handlebars, but you build a car with round wheels and a steering wheel that's mine". There isn't a damned thing on the iPad that wasn't done somewhere else first. grid of iCons? Palm. Squarish tablet? Samsung and Sony and Toshiba ALL had WinTablets with the same dimensions they just weighed more. Touch screens? older than dirt. the only thing I'd give Apple is the gestures although even with those i'd want to compare them to the gestures Opera had back in the day before i'd issue a patent.
Personally I predicted this would happen when Jobs died. like it or not apple has always been "The house that Jobs built" and just like before without a dictator running the shop and putting their foot down things break down over there. I predict they'll file more lawsuits trying to hang onto what they have, but there won't be anymore of those "holy shit, where'd THAT come from?" brand new hot products just popping out of Apple. Again like him or not you had to give the man credit, as Jobs had a vision of what he wanted and stuck with it, but I just haven't seen anything from Cook to make me think he has that same overarching vision. Instead just like under the pepsi guy they'll just be updating existing lines while suing like crazy trying to hold onto share.
They probably have one or two at the max products left in the wings from Jobs tenure, after that I bet the well runs dry.
Won't happen and here is why: cross licensing. Look at AMD and Nvidia, or Intel and AMD for examples. even when they are at each others throats they never revoked their cross licenses and you know why? Because it makes a hellish barrier of entry for everybody else. imagine if anybody could make an X86 CPU, or a GPU for that matter, you'd probably go back to the days of WinChip and Cyrix and having tons of free choice. but of course that would mean the two or three competitors we have now wouldn't be splitting the pie between themselves and a two way pie is a hell of a lot bigger than a five way pie, so they'll just sit their lawyers down at a table and cross license.
Mark my words Apple will play their "look and feel" game for awhile longer and then they'll finally, after a couple of legal spankings, sit down and cross license. Hell I wouldn't be surprised if you see Apple and MSFT get together with a cross license to 'fucking kill Google" as that is one thing they both seem to agree on if Jobs rants were true. But you get the big players to cross license you have put up a toll booth so expensive nobody with less than Warren Buffet money has a prayer in hell, and even if they take a shot they'll be tied up in court for a decade or maybe two because it doesn't really cost MSFT nor Apple squat. Any fines they get could be payed with the change in the couch compared to how much they make owning the market..
Wow Barbara I'm shocked, next you'll tell us you're using Windows 7 and liking it! But I too haven't gotten why someone who is a self admitted "squatter at MIT" is treated as this "God of programming" when frankly he had ONE idea, which was based on trying to keep the world locked in the 1970s, and since then? Not so much. Even though I think Torvalds is the cause of a lot of what is wrong with Linux by being a stubborn ass and refusing to allow a hardware ABI like all the other OSes have I will be the first to admit he knows his foo, but the only thing that RMS seems to be "good at" is telling other people what to do, that and putting GNU at the front of words.
As for TFA what advantage would giving the code away give YOU, not anyone else but just and only YOU. Unless you are planning from the start to basically have a "tin cup" donation model or sell support only, which I would argue is gonna dry up and blow away like a fart on the breeze if the economy continues to sour, then giving away the code right now is not only NOT an advantage to you but could possibly even torpedo the company if the other guy can do it cheaper by just using the patented MSFT EEE model using your code.
Hell even Google keeps their best stuff in house only, see the Google File System or their search algorithms for examples. Once you make it big THEN if you want to give away the old code like ID, or just sell hardware like AMD? Then you can give away the code, but right now i can't think of a single upsaide. the community can't even claim goodwill because AMD bent over backwards, even went so far as to hire developers to help the free drivers team, only to have every forum filled to the brim with "LOL Buy Nvidia" which made sure no other major company will make that mistake again.
Then that is YOUR FAULT for not putting on one of the many free and well functioning AVs isn't it? I'd suggest Avast or Comodo, both 100% free (Comodo is even free for business users) with sandboxing and scan before load on webpages. hell just for shits and giggles on a machine I was gonna wipe anyway I TRIED to infect it, I went to every single "Look at teh lezbos!" topsite I could find using Firefox so there would be no sandboxing on the browser, just to give the bugs a chance. Know how many bugs got through Avast? NONE, zip zero zilch nada squat.
So there is frankly NO reason to see an infected Windows machine anymore, not when we have low rights mode, DEP, ASLR, and sandboxing. BTW Avast Free takes up so little RAM and CPU I don't even notice it on the Sempron nettop, on anything built in the last 5 years its so tiny its not even worth noting. meanwhile they can run ALL the software, both FOSS and proprietary, they can update the PC for the life of the OS with NO driver breakage or DE crapping or "open up CLI and type" horseshit, it all "just works". Hell look at the numbers friend, you can't even give your product away! Doesn't that hit you with the cluebat? I mean do you honestly think every OEM and retailer on the planet wants to pay the extra cost of windows across the board?
I'd love nothing more than to have a free OS for the refurbs and off leases but linux is ONLY free if your time is worthless and my time isn't, sorry. until Torvalds retires and you get someone in charge of the kernel who isn't a douche you can give it up. BTW I predict not 3 months after Torvalds retires Linux will FINALLY get a hardware ABI, and everyone will act like its the second coming even though we retailers have been saying for years the current Linux driver model makes Win9x look like a rock solid stable OS. Don't blame me because your shit be broke, I didn't design the thing. BTW if you'd like I'll be happy to wallpaper this page with links to Linux vulnerabilities and broken driver messes, just ask.
And then if you are lucky you'll get "can you send us a doc?" and if not they'll just file 13 whatever you sent. I know most HR depts won't take anything but.doc because their software scans.doc and gives them a nice little DB to search for buzzwords and at the local college you have to send as.doc so the teacher can add their comments or you get a big fat incomplete.
Like it or not frankly the world doesn't give a crap about free as in freedom and if you try to do something different from the way everyone else does it? they aren't gonna admire you, they are gonna think you're a prick and just toss it. I didn't make the world friend i just live in it and the network effect means you better be able to deal in.doc if you are gonna be messing with business or education or have enough money that you don't care if they file 13 all your hard work.
No I'm able to actually add. let me put it THIS way: Do you honestly think if your HS football team went against the Chicago bears they would have a shot?
They pay on average $4500 a degree while YOU pay $50K+, this means they will ALWAYS be able to undercut you, same as there is no way with current safety and health regulations you can compete manufacturing against China where they can dump the waste in the river and pay peanuts for wages.
Its simply math friend, they can afford to take jobs for pay that wouldn't even cover your student loan payments, much less put food on the table or a roof over your head. With the corps in a race to the bottom and videos like "How NOT to hire an American" which i'm sure if you've seen it you'll agree that against poorly paid foreign labor the American hasn't a prayer, there is simply no point in going into IT because you'll be fighting with 300 other guys for the scraps if they don't just follow the video and not give any of you a shot.
I mean do you HONESTLY think if we tried to flood India's market with OUR IT workers they'd put up with that shit? they are spending billions on their Aerospace just so they won't have to buy anything from the USA! But as long as corps ONLY care about how much the worker costs then Americans would have to be insane to take IT in college, same as its nuts to go into construction anymore because there is one white guy and a shitload of illegals. You should yell "Immigra!" around a construction site sometime, i swear they scatter like deer.
Question: Why are you using the full size ribbon on a laptop? Because i have a 12 inch netbook, which means of course real estate is at a minimum, but Office 2K7 fits it better than my old Office 2K simply by having the mini-bar customized for my most used commands. On mine I have the usual suspects, file, save, search and replace, etc, and with about 9 commands its just a teeny tiny strip at the very top of the document.
While i agree with you about the ribbon just being a menu why more folks don't just make the mini-bar how they want it and then just flip open the ribbon when they need to do something more off the beaten path i just don't know. and i think the guy is nuts for giving up the Win 7 Aero for classic when there is just so many cool time saving features like jumplists and if he wanted the old file/edit/view menu all he had to do was hit the alt key on any explorer window and it pops right up, no biggie. Different strokes i guess but a nice feature of Win 7 is you don't HAVE to have the new if you don't want, you can go back to the fugly Win9X UI dull grey and all.
Spreadsheets, VBA, or how about having complex documents with header and footers and inserts not come out as word salad? I'm personally gonna give the LO guys a couple of years before really complaining simply because they just got handed a real mess of a monolithic code from Oracle and now they are probably gonna have to do a top to bottom rewrite and that takes time, but that doesn't excuse the problems. Like it or not the rest of the world uses MS Office and if your docs turn into word salad when they open it or you get word salad when you open theirs? its a problem.
Now if one of the Excel jocks would please come on here and explain to them why calc don't cut it I'd be grateful. i'm not a spreadsheet guy so i don't know the lingo but the spreadsheet guys at the SMBs I've worked for says calc is like a bad joke. I can say that it looks like, at least under Sun and oracle, that Writer got all the love and the rest was treated like the red headed stepchild.
Safe huh? Get ready to be slapped by some facts friend,
Get ready, heretheycome! Kinda makes that koolaid just a little bitter now, don't it? I believe in using the best tool for the job, but to say Linux is secure or better than any other complex OS is frankly bullshit. Hell I was talking to a 15 year Linux admin on one of the other sites that had gotten so sick of Linux fuckups they were going to BSD and if THAT didn't "just work" they were gonna wash their hands of FLOSS on the desktop and just go Mac.
BTW if you'd like a little more food for thought, what OS was 3 of the 4 CAs running that were compromised? takea lookand see. Maybe they just had bad configs? Surely someone with knowledge would be safe right? Guess again and its not a flukeby any means.
As for an application? How about the fucking OS? If that shits itself and dies, like what happened here (read the final straw by a 15 year plus Linux admin who just dumped your OS) I'd call THAT a problem, wouldn't you?
But it doesn't matter what I say, it doesn't matter if I wallpaper this page with links backing everything i say up 100%, because you are a FOSSie. A FOSSie refuses to believe reality and instead screams "Nigger faggot jew!" or "FUD shill astroturfer!" to all that do not bow before the bullshit effigy made in the likeness of RMS. I'm sure now instead of answering all this evidence and citations you'll just call me some names, like a frightened child who just got told Santa wasn't real. Sorry friend but i happen to live in the real world and out here? Linux works about as reliably as Windows 95.
It has NOTHING to do with preference, in fact I ran OS/2 right up to Win2K and it has EVERYTHING to do with the fact that Linux at its core is broken. there is NO QA, NO ABI, NO attempt even not to break shit, its nothing but "Doing your own thing" and too damned many cooks all spoiling the broth. I'll point out that one of the largest OEMs on the planet Dell has to run their own repos or Linux takes a big old shit and dies when you update it.
Now you tell me friend do you HONESTLY think I can get better QA than Dell? or that i have enough money to call china and have my own designs built, pay a bunch of developers to constantly write drivers to make sure said design works, and even after all that end up having to maintain my own distro because Linus going Goatse on the kernel breaks shit constantly?
FOUR drivers friend, that is ALL it takes to support windows for a good decade plus, probably closer to two thanks to the fact Windows is pretty long lasting with driver models: 2K/XP, 2K3 X64/XP X64, Win Vista/7 32 bit, WinVista/7 64 bit, tada! Now my customer is supported until 2020 with NO driver borkage. compare this to ANY Linux forum and what do you see after each upgrade, hell what did I see with my own two peepers? 'Update foo broke my drivers" is the order of the day. BSD, Solaris, windows, OSX, hell even OS/2 has a stable driver ABI but Linus thinks his shit don't stink and since he said in 1993 he wasn't gonna allow one then by god Linux will never have one! And please don't link to that treaty by one of the kernel devs because it is a RELIGIOUS treaty and he even goes so far as to say he hopes that those that use non free drivers have broken systems!
So I'm sorry friend but your OS is simply unsuitable for purpose. its a geek hacker programmer hobbyist OS, not an OS for Suzy the checkout girl or the other billions of non programmers out there. its unstable, drivers constantly shit themselves on upgrade, its DEs are in flux, hell everything from the kernel up is about as stable as the shifting sands, its a fucking mess friend. While i like the IDEA of a free OS in practice you get a shit sandwich then told "you can't complain because its free!". yeah but a free shit sandwich is STILL shit.
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Well friend you are welcome to try to have a forced orgy with my cousin, he is currently doing life in TX, although you should probably be warned that the last one that attempted that had their right eye dug out with a broken spoon by same cousin so i probably wouldn't bring any utensils or sharp objects with you.
As for TFA i think the judge is wrong and here is why: The sold the customer an object that was advertised as doing X+Y and then after taking their money told the customer that they can only do X OR Y. This would be like Ford selling you a new car with a GPS and a nice stereo and then telling you once you had paid for it "Oh BTW, we are now gonna pull one of those items, which do you want, the stereo or the GPS unit?". At the very least the judge should have ordered that Sony should have to give back the cost of the units PLUS the cost of anything they bought to go with said unit if the customer finds the above undesirable and no longer wants the unit.
I just hope the EU gives them a smackdown, sadly while the USA has become nothing but corp suckups usually the EU does protect their citizens at least a little bit.
If it were me? Comodo Dragon with the secure DNS in the browser ONLY (which is the default setting) along with ABP. Dragon has checkboxes that will import ALL her FF settings, bookmarks, passwords, etc so that she won't really need to do much, and most importanly the combo of low rights mode (which Chromium has) and the browser only secure DNS (which Chromium don't) really shuts down any malware. This with the Avast and Win 7 you already have should make you solid as a rock.
Let me put it THIS way HopefulIntern, I took a machine i was gonna wipe anyway and using the above method I TRIED to infect the machine. I went to every "hott titty teen lesbos!" topsite and clicked on EVERY link, just went nuts, and between Comodo and Avast i ended up with ZERO infections. Most sites were blocked by Dragon thanks to their secure DNS and the few that hadn't made it to their DNS DB got shut down by Avast, and low rights mode means that even IF they were to manage to get past both, which as i said i couldn't get a single bug past both, then thanks to dragon being in low rights mode there isn't any system folders or files it can get to.
as someone who has to deal with users 6 days a week i pretty much HAVE to keep up with every angle of attack because these businesses and home users are counting on me and my rep is on the line. With the above i have yet to have to fix a single box from malware getting past the defenses. for those users that listened to me and switched to Dragon plus Avast on Win 7 the ONLY thing i have to do for them now is hardware work, installing new cameras or upgrading memory and the like. Some weeks I feel like the Maytag repairman because i did my job a little TOO good, but the referrals from happy customers makes up for it and ultimately its the user that counts in my book. An uninfected computer is a happy computer, follow the above and bugs will be something that happens to the OTHER guy, not to you.
You are forgetting the x factor friend....China. i'm sure china will offer them a VERY nice deal and probably along with some nice missiles a couple of the production numbers when they start cranking these puppies off. Its common knowledge the Chinese went so far as to pay dirt farmers in Kosovo to dig up the F117 stealth that went down there just so they could learn from it, as well as paying Pakistan for the stealth chopper than went down on the Bin Laden op.
This will be quite a lesson for them on stealth tech, kinda like how a Russian scientist that later defected said that the dud sidewinder that got stuck in a Chinese aircraft and brought back intact which he said "was like a university course on modern missile design" and allowed them to build the Atoll which was so closely cloned off of sidewinder you could tear apart one and mix and match parts with sidewinder and it would shoot perfectly. The gov can make light all they want but this is a BIG fuckup and i'm sure some guys are gonna be assigned to shit duty in Greenland over this.
While I agree most ads suck ass I don't think that just because something is cheap automatically means its shit. Sure meritline is trash but i buy cheap adapters all day long from monoprice and frankly I've never had one fail, and they carry the stuff most other don't which has actually let me save things from the landfill like those old classic claky keyboards with the big DIN plugs.
I think it all comes down to HOW you advertise. for example I was actually grateful when tiger sent me a "Hey since you bought a Thuban from us we thought you might need some stuff to go with it" ad because i was having a devil of a time finding a good cooler that would fit my case and the one in the ad they sent me was just the right size. Or the nice email that Newegg sent me when I was buying parts for my GF's new Xmas PC with 15% off the rest of the parts I was gonna have to buy anyway, that was nice.
I think its more the difference of someone whom you've bought from trying to sell you things that go together VS someone just cold calling and bugging the fuck out of you that makes the difference. take junk mail, which now that i think about it I'll have to go dump my mail straight into the trash again as i'm sure the poor mail guy is getting tired of trying to stuff that shit in the box. i never use it, never even look at it, its all crap you couldn't give me if you offered it free, its just a waste. Now compare that to the emails that mom gets from Amazon that many here would call spam that she frankly loves. She likes a bunch of weird horror writers so when one of her authors, or an author recommended by one of her authors, comes out with a new book Amazon gives her a heads up. she loves that as it lets her know when the next book in one of her serials is out, what books to put on her wishlist, and it makes things easier for her.
So i don't think ads HAVE to suck ass, i just think the douchebags that have been making the flashy bling bling bullshit ads are ruining it for everyone. I like to know when a new ATI GPU or AMD CPU comes out, so i don't mind hearing about that. I don't mind when monoprice sends me an ad telling me about a sale because hey, i may need an adapter and could save a couple of bucks. what I DO mind is these ads from left field about shit i don't care about like retirement homes or female products slapping me in the face when i'm just trying to read an article, thanks ever so.
Oh Lord....Vim? You know who you remind me of? my old boss's daughter. We'd get some suit in there going "I want the guy that designed that great new banking site, i hear that fine gentleman works here?" and we'd snicker and just point to the corner and there on an old 400Mhz Gateway Astro would be Doug's 14 year old daughter, popping her gum. give that girl nothing but notepad though and she'd make a website that would make most of these "web developers" cry in shame, really top notch work.
But for me its still the myriad of little things in Linux that bite me in the ass. I asked a simple question 'How can I easy and QUICKLY remote into a customer's PC when something goes wrong?" and got half a dozen answers, each more esoteric and complex than the last. With Windows I can be in that person's computer even if they are halfway across the country in under 4 minutes. they call me, i tell them to ask for remote assistance, they give me the EasyConnect code, i put it in mine, that's it. i now have their desktop and can fix most simple problems in a couple of minutes instead of trying to walk them through it.
And your last bit is frankly what REALLY pisses me off about the community, they act like users are SOOOO hard to please, when never before have they had it easier! Most users check their webmail, they YouTube, they use FB, that's pretty much it. Some basics like printing and disc burning, big fricking whoop. But when their precious OS can't even be safely updated without "Whoops I made a stinky' how in the hell is Sally gonna use it? Even shit that Windows has had for a fricking decade is missing! Is it so damned much to ask for to have a "find drivers" and "roll back drivers" button so if Linux makes a stinky Suzy can at LEAST get a functional system back easily? What if the stinky is her wireless or Ethernet and that is all she has to get on the net with? Is she supposed to magically know that 3 pages worth of cryptic bash bullshit needed to get her connection back?
And THAT is what pisses me off, its not like we are talking about trying to get Win95 to run on a 6 core PC here, all the basic parts are there. Linux has good DEs, they have good programs, and if they didn't constantly shit all over them many items actually do have drivers now, but its just all completely piss poorly implemented. Why the fuck isn't all the basic drivers on the damned DVD? DVD blanks are 22 fricking cents, what they afraid we can't swing that for a fricking driver disc? Why isn't there a "Linux store" where you can buy hardware that is guaranteed to work and KEEP working with Linux instead of playing hardware roulette just to buy a device? Why isn't there a "help me!" button so new users can instantly pop up a forum chat window and get help when they are stuck?
You see its the little things that make ALL the difference here. it isn't that linux couldn't be a truly great OS, its that the developers are a bunch of programming nerds who don't give a crap and they are surrounded by sycophants that kiss their booty and tell them everything is wonderful even when its shit. look at the total hate MSFT got for releasing Vista as buggy as it was, and on its WORST day it ain't got shit on your average distro! if the users would rise up and say 'NO! This is NOT gonna cut it!" and threw their weight around i bet in less than 5 years Linux could be a world class desktop, but instead I get called filthy names and nothing changes but the version numbers. Its a damned shame, that's what it is, just a damned shame.
Is this for Firefox only? Because I just installed the Chrome version in Comodo Dragon and there was a single checkbox that said something like "I like Google ads, don't block those" and it was unchecked by default. Now maybe its because Dragon is based on Chromium and fools ABP into thinking its Chrome and therefor doesn't check it, but at least there is one browser out there that it doesn't default to showing ads with.
A site has to EARN my trust before i will give them a pass, Ars Technica was the last site but if they start showing bling bling shit I'll block their asses in a heartbeat. i think the problem is these ad company assholes have become such giant pricks that they just can't stand any ad that isn't as fucking irritating as Bonzi Buddy. Last time i had to run a browser without ABP i thought "Geez, people put up with this shit?" because my ears were being assaulted by loud commercial bullshit, half the screen had crap all over it, it was just a big damned mess. if they did it like the old days where there was NO DNS call, just a single GIF or JPEG link? I wouldn't have a problem with that. Hell I don't have a problem with the ad emails I get from Amazon because at least they give me ads for things i might like.
But without ABP I frankly can't stand the fricking web, its loud, noisy bling bling horseshit as far as the eye can see. Before i'll put up with that shit again i'll put every damned ad server i can find in my DNS or even run the bloated crap that is the new firefox just to get back NoScript. Hopefully though if the ABP guy becomes a dick somebody will come out with an alternative and we can go back to enjoying a peaceful quiet web again.
Well I can tell you as a guy that has to fix the PC after they fuck it up that the IE users are a HELL of a lot more likely to fall for the major social engineering scams from what I've seen. Windows has actually gotten pretty damned hard to crack so being smart little bastards the malware guys just figured out how to get the users to do the dirty work and the IE users? Easy prey.
From what I've seen the big three are, in no particular order, the "ZOMFG you got teh viruz! Run "Iz_Not_Viruz_Iz_Cleaner" to kill it ZOMFG!" that has how you get your AV 20xx and Security tool variants, the "U want teh lezboz? We GOT teh lezboz! Just run "Iz_Not_Viruz_Iz_Codek" to see all teh lezboz!" which is where many of the trojans and spambot crap comes from, and finally the "Hey U R on teh IM? I'm on teh IM to! Please check out "Iz_Not_Viruz_Iz_cute pikz" to see me!" which is where a lot of the nasty rootkit and also spambot crap.
Funny part, second biggest cause of spam? firefox users that have yahoo accounts. The malware guys have figured out how to get Firefox to load an invisible iFrame that lets them load the Yahoo account and silently spam their address book while they look at "free porn" sites thanks to infected ads. This trick doesn't seem to work on the other browsers, not even IE, and it don't seem to work with hotmail nor Gmail, just Yahoo and FF.
I've found if you want to keep a PC clean a combination of Comodo Dragon or Chromium with ABP on Windows 7 with Avast Free works like magic. win 7 has sandboxing along with ASLR and DEP, Dragon and Chromium also sandbox and use low rights mode as does IE, and Avast Free (you can also use Comodo Security Suite which is free for business as well as home, but Avast is less fiddly) does scan before load on all web pages so any nasty crap on a page never gets loaded. Personally i prefer Dragon because of the Comodo secure DNS option, which doesn't mess with the system DNS and which is damned good at blocking phishing sites. Can't comment on Opera or Safari as i haven't really put them through the paces so i don't know how well they hold up.
But of all the systems that come through my shop it never fails that the IE users are the worst infected, bar none. be that because of TFA or because of flaws in the browser I can't tell you, hell it may just be PEBKAC, but if the user has IE only i know its gonna be a nasty mess.
Thank you, and notice how one of the cowards accused me of trolling, for what? Like anything i say here is gonna make a difference one way or the other. sadly you seem to be the ONLY one that got the point of that TRUE story, which was not that movie was so important but that the jury was so clueless that frankly all they needed was something they'd seen on a movie to change their opinion!
It LITERALLY came down to being THIS simple "There are no Italians here, the only Italians I've seen are in mob movies, therefor Italians are mobsters and do crimes" and that was pretty much their line of thinking! and I wish I could find a link for it but I saw a great video where they gave the same jury two cases, both cases were IDENTICAL, they had the prosecutor and defense going from scripts, the ONLY difference? They had the same defendant in a scruffy beard and Army jacket, and the other clean cut in an expensive 3 piece suit. guess what the outcome was? You guessed it, when the ONLY difference was the appearance of the defendant they voted to convict solely on his look! And afterwards they said things like "He just looked like a criminal" or "he looked like a thug".
So I'm sorry but after seeing that and hearing about that guy nearly losing 20 years simply by being Italian I would never trust a jury! And as you said mom said there was one "hang 'em high" that tried to bully everyone into a guilty verdict and the meek just wanted out of there and didn't care. Frankly i can't even imagine throwing someone under a bus like that simply to get out of jury duty faster, but they voted 11 to 1 until the judge finally acepted there was no way my mom was gonna back down and declared a mistrial. i just hope like hell that guy took a judge trial on the second or he might be in PMITA prison as we speak!
It was 24f when I got up this morning barb, believe me i know about the fricking cold! This is supposed to be a hot and humid state, where the hell is my global warming? Do i need to go open up some freon tanks or what? i'm freezing over here!
As for why win 7 over Vista? Well for one those jumplists DO so rock! for example on my comodo Dragon i right click on its icon and BAM! There is the last 10 sites I visited whether they are open, closed, or if the program is even running or not. And having that on explorer along with it defaulting to two pane is just sooooo damned nice! Oh and FINALLY they have sane tasks at the top of each window. remember how in XP they had that lame side panel that always had the same crap, like "burn this to CD" or "email this to a friend"? Now its all contextual based on where you are and what you do often. for example I have an old Sempron with a fat HDD that I use as a file server with shares for all my major uses, like software, drivers, etc and now when i open my computer there is a handy "map network drive" button right there, easy peasy. In my media folders there is a share button so i can simply grab whatever i want shared on the network and hit the button and I'm done. its THAT kind of attention to the little things I have yet to see in Linux, those nice little polishes that makes everything nicer. While I've used Vista since the patches to me its more like a skinned XP, its not as good with memory management,its superfetch frankly isn't good, its like Windows 7's retard cousin Cleetus. Once you've used all the cool stuff in win 7 using any other Windows feels like running Win98 all over again.
And I'm sorry to hear about OpenSUSE and agree with you completely that user data is a big DO NOT SCREW WITH but to me just illustrates my point that with Linux nobody is standing up for the user, its all "do your own thing" and nobody cares if their program takes a big old shit on everyone else as long as it works FOR THEM. That is why "it works for me" is one of the most popular TMs at TMRepo because both the Linux zealots and developers use that one so damned much its practically a mantra. I've actually been accused of faking screengrabs when i posted shots of some of the things Linux was taking a poo with, like I gave a crap enough about Linux to go to that much trouble!
In the end just as i said before there are some things that should NEVER fail and if they do the OS should be looked at as broken, for example what i call the "80%" which is the hardware you find on practically every machine on the planet, Realtek sound and Ethernet, Sigmatel sound on laptops along with Realtek, the big three chip makers chips and video cards which at the very LEAST the ones over a year old should NEVER break as the hardware is well known by then, broadcom and Aetheros wireless, this stuff is as old as dirt as just as common. yet time and time again i try my "is it safe?" test with the most bog standard common hardware on the planet and by upgrade 2 its "Ooops Linux made a stinky" and crapped all over itself. Shit that frankly should be OS 101, like not breaking the sound system or having the network manager refuse to save settings, the kind of shit I honestly haven't seen on windows since 9X or Apple since system 9 just pops up over and over AND OVER again.
Like I said on LinuxInsider that if you consider your OS to be a hobby, like that 72 Camaro, something you're willing to constantly have to futz with and spend your weekends fussing over? Well Linux is fine project OS, knock yourself out. But for actually getting your work done, or having a machine that will be running 5 years from now futz free? Windows or OSX FTW in that case, Linux honestly just isn't in the same league. i mean look at the mess you had, there is NO excuse for that level of breakage!
But I wish you luck on mint, personally after trying it and Vector and getting the "Ooops I made a stinky" when i updated frankly i'm washing my hands of FOSS OSes for a couple of years, maybe by then Torvalds will reti
Well we ARE talking about cheap storage so frankly the speed shouldn't matter, you could always put a small fast SSD as the OS drive. that said the main machine i'm typing this on has a 5400RPM Samsung as the OS drive and I jumped a good 30 points in the HDDTune scores by switching from a 7200RPM Seagate, even though we are talking about a slower rotational speed. That is because the Samsung drives are damned good about utilizing their 32Mb of onboard cache when compared to the 8Mb the Seagate had.
So I'd say it all comes down to what you are gonna do with it. If you are like my "must have teh biggest ePeen and win teh benches!" gamer customers frankly the HDD shouldn't be anything but storage for your media, and with everyone else Windows 7 with a decent amount of RAM just loads all your apps into memory anyway so drive speed frankly isn't that big a whoop. i like to game and mess with audio/video editing and having 3Tb of HDD space to me is well worth having them both be Samsung EcoDrive 5400RPM, and with 8Gb of RAM frankly if anything the larger caches on the Samsungs makes them snappier than the Seagates they replaced.
You aren't thinking of all their other content, the pictures (which modern cameras can suck up space quickly) the videos, the music, the documents,etc. I've had quite a few of my "Plain Jane" customers come in and change out their 200-400gb HDDs simply because they had loaded them to the brim and needed more space.
That said if you keep an eye out you can still get decent prices on the 5400RPM drives which make great storage drives and depending on the model even great OS drives. I'm typing this on my main machine at home which i changed out the 400gb 7200RPM Seagate with 8Mb of cache for a Samsung EcoDrive 5400RPM with 32Mb of cache and my benchmark went from a top burst of 104 to 131, and it loads the desktop plenty fast while being a good 25f degrees cooler than the Seagate was.
I'm just glad i got my family and myself set before the flood so I can simply wait it out. All I have left on the SATA front is a 640Gb and an 80Gb, the 80Gb will be going in the spare office box I keep for clients and the 640Gb in it will be going in the new box I'm building my GF for Xmas. I don't even want to know what a 640gb 7200RPM SATA would cost me right now, probably more than the quad core CPU AND the 4Gb of RAM I bought for this new build put together!
You're using Vista? Why? Do you feel the need to repent for sins in a past life? Barb get Windows 7, its a little slice of heaven. Its fast, light on resources, smooth, and jumplists are a little slice of goodness pie, especially the one for explorer which remembers the last 10 folders you've opened as it makes jumping back into what you were doing a breeze! If you know any college kids you can get Win 7 pro for like $39 through the education discount and if not you can get Win 7 HP for less than $80 by just watching sellout.woot for the sales.
But what always amazed me about people listening to RMS is not ONLY is he a squatter which never graduated MIT, but they look to him as some expert on Linux when the man doesn't even surf the web he uses a fricking Daemon to have it scrape a webpage and email it to him! WTF? Linux is pretty much a web based OS and the guy everyone turns to doesn't even surf? And how can ANYBODY take the guy seriously after this bit is beyond me. He is on a fricking stage for the love of Pete, WTF is he thinking?
Frankly they can keep Saint iGNUcious or whatever he calls himself and take Torvalds as well, because what I want to see in FOSS is a gates or a Jobs to come in there, put their foot down, and FINALLY after all these damned years have a distro that puts users #1! I had hopes Shuttleworth would be the guy but its obvious now he is just gonna slap different lipstick on the same old piggy, as Ubuntu is just as flaky, just as libel for drivers to break, just as buggy as "bob's distro' .
BTW if you don't mind me asking which distro was it that took a big dump with your data? Oh and if you want a PSU super cheap go talk to your local mom and pop repair shop, we usually have a ton of them and will be happy to let you have one cheap if you'll just BS with us awhile. We get so tired of nobody being able to talk tech that we give deals to those that don't give us "I have a problem with the thing and its messed up my stuff". Gee thanks, how can I ever fail with such an accurate description?
I don't know about that, because while Bulldozer wasn't a big hit Bobcat is frankly selling so fast the CEO had them ramp down some of the desktop production to give them more Bobcats, along with ending production of all the Deneb and Thuban chips. I just walked into Walmart today and they were unpacking a pallet load of desktops loaded with e-350s (not bad at $399 with a 20 inch TFT and 500Gb HDD), and looking at their laptops and netbooks I'd say a good 80%+ were E-Series or A-Series. And of course all of the all in ones were E-350 chips. Those Bobcats are selling like hotcakes and as an owner of a EEE E-350 i can see why, its low heat, last 6 hours on a battery, plays full 1080p over HDMI and most importantly doesn't feel like its got a boat anchor tied to it like Atom does.
So this HDD shortage may turn out to be even more of a boost to AMD as by buying the cheaper AMD chips the OEMs can absorb the cost of the higher HDD without raising prices and running off customers. I'm just glad i scored my Thuban when i did because a lot of the Thubans were selling out, my guess everyone that wanted one doing like me and trying to snatch one before they ran out.
So let me leave everybody with my new happy Xmas song! "We wish you a Merry Thuban, We wish you a Merry Thuban, We wish you a Merry Thuban and a happy six corrrrreeee!"
Uhhh...Tiger is selling a 1Tb Seagate for like $60, I'm sure you can find the link on sellout.woot if you didn't get the email. While that isn't as cheap as the $35 I paid for a 1Tb Samsung frankly that isn't THAT bad a price, hell the 1.5Tb was like $99,its not gonna break the bank.
Actually that isn't a fair or correct description at all....Apple sues, MSFT uses the classic "Pay your $699 license fee you cocksmoking teabaggers!" meme which it bought from SCO.
Not to mention we already went through this in the states with them over 20+ years ago. Anybody remember "look and feel"? because that is pretty much EXACTLY what we are talking about here. Just as with look and feel Apple is claiming that generic thing A plus generic thing B equals patentable and makes about as much sense as saying "Well you can build a car with square wheels, or motorcycle handlebars, but you build a car with round wheels and a steering wheel that's mine". There isn't a damned thing on the iPad that wasn't done somewhere else first. grid of iCons? Palm. Squarish tablet? Samsung and Sony and Toshiba ALL had WinTablets with the same dimensions they just weighed more. Touch screens? older than dirt. the only thing I'd give Apple is the gestures although even with those i'd want to compare them to the gestures Opera had back in the day before i'd issue a patent.
Personally I predicted this would happen when Jobs died. like it or not apple has always been "The house that Jobs built" and just like before without a dictator running the shop and putting their foot down things break down over there. I predict they'll file more lawsuits trying to hang onto what they have, but there won't be anymore of those "holy shit, where'd THAT come from?" brand new hot products just popping out of Apple. Again like him or not you had to give the man credit, as Jobs had a vision of what he wanted and stuck with it, but I just haven't seen anything from Cook to make me think he has that same overarching vision. Instead just like under the pepsi guy they'll just be updating existing lines while suing like crazy trying to hold onto share.
They probably have one or two at the max products left in the wings from Jobs tenure, after that I bet the well runs dry.
Won't happen and here is why: cross licensing. Look at AMD and Nvidia, or Intel and AMD for examples. even when they are at each others throats they never revoked their cross licenses and you know why? Because it makes a hellish barrier of entry for everybody else. imagine if anybody could make an X86 CPU, or a GPU for that matter, you'd probably go back to the days of WinChip and Cyrix and having tons of free choice. but of course that would mean the two or three competitors we have now wouldn't be splitting the pie between themselves and a two way pie is a hell of a lot bigger than a five way pie, so they'll just sit their lawyers down at a table and cross license.
Mark my words Apple will play their "look and feel" game for awhile longer and then they'll finally, after a couple of legal spankings, sit down and cross license. Hell I wouldn't be surprised if you see Apple and MSFT get together with a cross license to 'fucking kill Google" as that is one thing they both seem to agree on if Jobs rants were true. But you get the big players to cross license you have put up a toll booth so expensive nobody with less than Warren Buffet money has a prayer in hell, and even if they take a shot they'll be tied up in court for a decade or maybe two because it doesn't really cost MSFT nor Apple squat. Any fines they get could be payed with the change in the couch compared to how much they make owning the market..
Wow Barbara I'm shocked, next you'll tell us you're using Windows 7 and liking it! But I too haven't gotten why someone who is a self admitted "squatter at MIT" is treated as this "God of programming" when frankly he had ONE idea, which was based on trying to keep the world locked in the 1970s, and since then? Not so much. Even though I think Torvalds is the cause of a lot of what is wrong with Linux by being a stubborn ass and refusing to allow a hardware ABI like all the other OSes have I will be the first to admit he knows his foo, but the only thing that RMS seems to be "good at" is telling other people what to do, that and putting GNU at the front of words.
As for TFA what advantage would giving the code away give YOU, not anyone else but just and only YOU. Unless you are planning from the start to basically have a "tin cup" donation model or sell support only, which I would argue is gonna dry up and blow away like a fart on the breeze if the economy continues to sour, then giving away the code right now is not only NOT an advantage to you but could possibly even torpedo the company if the other guy can do it cheaper by just using the patented MSFT EEE model using your code.
Hell even Google keeps their best stuff in house only, see the Google File System or their search algorithms for examples. Once you make it big THEN if you want to give away the old code like ID, or just sell hardware like AMD? Then you can give away the code, but right now i can't think of a single upsaide. the community can't even claim goodwill because AMD bent over backwards, even went so far as to hire developers to help the free drivers team, only to have every forum filled to the brim with "LOL Buy Nvidia" which made sure no other major company will make that mistake again.
Then that is YOUR FAULT for not putting on one of the many free and well functioning AVs isn't it? I'd suggest Avast or Comodo, both 100% free (Comodo is even free for business users) with sandboxing and scan before load on webpages. hell just for shits and giggles on a machine I was gonna wipe anyway I TRIED to infect it, I went to every single "Look at teh lezbos!" topsite I could find using Firefox so there would be no sandboxing on the browser, just to give the bugs a chance. Know how many bugs got through Avast? NONE, zip zero zilch nada squat.
So there is frankly NO reason to see an infected Windows machine anymore, not when we have low rights mode, DEP, ASLR, and sandboxing. BTW Avast Free takes up so little RAM and CPU I don't even notice it on the Sempron nettop, on anything built in the last 5 years its so tiny its not even worth noting. meanwhile they can run ALL the software, both FOSS and proprietary, they can update the PC for the life of the OS with NO driver breakage or DE crapping or "open up CLI and type" horseshit, it all "just works". Hell look at the numbers friend, you can't even give your product away! Doesn't that hit you with the cluebat? I mean do you honestly think every OEM and retailer on the planet wants to pay the extra cost of windows across the board?
I'd love nothing more than to have a free OS for the refurbs and off leases but linux is ONLY free if your time is worthless and my time isn't, sorry. until Torvalds retires and you get someone in charge of the kernel who isn't a douche you can give it up. BTW I predict not 3 months after Torvalds retires Linux will FINALLY get a hardware ABI, and everyone will act like its the second coming even though we retailers have been saying for years the current Linux driver model makes Win9x look like a rock solid stable OS. Don't blame me because your shit be broke, I didn't design the thing. BTW if you'd like I'll be happy to wallpaper this page with links to Linux vulnerabilities and broken driver messes, just ask.
And then if you are lucky you'll get "can you send us a doc?" and if not they'll just file 13 whatever you sent. I know most HR depts won't take anything but .doc because their software scans .doc and gives them a nice little DB to search for buzzwords and at the local college you have to send as .doc so the teacher can add their comments or you get a big fat incomplete.
Like it or not frankly the world doesn't give a crap about free as in freedom and if you try to do something different from the way everyone else does it? they aren't gonna admire you, they are gonna think you're a prick and just toss it. I didn't make the world friend i just live in it and the network effect means you better be able to deal in .doc if you are gonna be messing with business or education or have enough money that you don't care if they file 13 all your hard work.
No I'm able to actually add. let me put it THIS way: Do you honestly think if your HS football team went against the Chicago bears they would have a shot?
They pay on average $4500 a degree while YOU pay $50K+, this means they will ALWAYS be able to undercut you, same as there is no way with current safety and health regulations you can compete manufacturing against China where they can dump the waste in the river and pay peanuts for wages.
Its simply math friend, they can afford to take jobs for pay that wouldn't even cover your student loan payments, much less put food on the table or a roof over your head. With the corps in a race to the bottom and videos like "How NOT to hire an American" which i'm sure if you've seen it you'll agree that against poorly paid foreign labor the American hasn't a prayer, there is simply no point in going into IT because you'll be fighting with 300 other guys for the scraps if they don't just follow the video and not give any of you a shot.
I mean do you HONESTLY think if we tried to flood India's market with OUR IT workers they'd put up with that shit? they are spending billions on their Aerospace just so they won't have to buy anything from the USA! But as long as corps ONLY care about how much the worker costs then Americans would have to be insane to take IT in college, same as its nuts to go into construction anymore because there is one white guy and a shitload of illegals. You should yell "Immigra!" around a construction site sometime, i swear they scatter like deer.
Question: Why are you using the full size ribbon on a laptop? Because i have a 12 inch netbook, which means of course real estate is at a minimum, but Office 2K7 fits it better than my old Office 2K simply by having the mini-bar customized for my most used commands. On mine I have the usual suspects, file, save, search and replace, etc, and with about 9 commands its just a teeny tiny strip at the very top of the document.
While i agree with you about the ribbon just being a menu why more folks don't just make the mini-bar how they want it and then just flip open the ribbon when they need to do something more off the beaten path i just don't know. and i think the guy is nuts for giving up the Win 7 Aero for classic when there is just so many cool time saving features like jumplists and if he wanted the old file/edit/view menu all he had to do was hit the alt key on any explorer window and it pops right up, no biggie. Different strokes i guess but a nice feature of Win 7 is you don't HAVE to have the new if you don't want, you can go back to the fugly Win9X UI dull grey and all.
Spreadsheets, VBA, or how about having complex documents with header and footers and inserts not come out as word salad? I'm personally gonna give the LO guys a couple of years before really complaining simply because they just got handed a real mess of a monolithic code from Oracle and now they are probably gonna have to do a top to bottom rewrite and that takes time, but that doesn't excuse the problems. Like it or not the rest of the world uses MS Office and if your docs turn into word salad when they open it or you get word salad when you open theirs? its a problem.
Now if one of the Excel jocks would please come on here and explain to them why calc don't cut it I'd be grateful. i'm not a spreadsheet guy so i don't know the lingo but the spreadsheet guys at the SMBs I've worked for says calc is like a bad joke. I can say that it looks like, at least under Sun and oracle, that Writer got all the love and the rest was treated like the red headed stepchild.
Get ready, here they come! Kinda makes that koolaid just a little bitter now, don't it? I believe in using the best tool for the job, but to say Linux is secure or better than any other complex OS is frankly bullshit. Hell I was talking to a 15 year Linux admin on one of the other sites that had gotten so sick of Linux fuckups they were going to BSD and if THAT didn't "just work" they were gonna wash their hands of FLOSS on the desktop and just go Mac.
BTW if you'd like a little more food for thought, what OS was 3 of the 4 CAs running that were compromised? take a look and see. Maybe they just had bad configs? Surely someone with knowledge would be safe right? Guess again and its not a fluke by any means.
As for an application? How about the fucking OS? If that shits itself and dies, like what happened here (read the final straw by a 15 year plus Linux admin who just dumped your OS) I'd call THAT a problem, wouldn't you?
But it doesn't matter what I say, it doesn't matter if I wallpaper this page with links backing everything i say up 100%, because you are a FOSSie. A FOSSie refuses to believe reality and instead screams "Nigger faggot jew!" or "FUD shill astroturfer!" to all that do not bow before the bullshit effigy made in the likeness of RMS. I'm sure now instead of answering all this evidence and citations you'll just call me some names, like a frightened child who just got told Santa wasn't real. Sorry friend but i happen to live in the real world and out here? Linux works about as reliably as Windows 95.
It has NOTHING to do with preference, in fact I ran OS/2 right up to Win2K and it has EVERYTHING to do with the fact that Linux at its core is broken. there is NO QA, NO ABI, NO attempt even not to break shit, its nothing but "Doing your own thing" and too damned many cooks all spoiling the broth. I'll point out that one of the largest OEMs on the planet Dell has to run their own repos or Linux takes a big old shit and dies when you update it.
Now you tell me friend do you HONESTLY think I can get better QA than Dell? or that i have enough money to call china and have my own designs built, pay a bunch of developers to constantly write drivers to make sure said design works, and even after all that end up having to maintain my own distro because Linus going Goatse on the kernel breaks shit constantly?
FOUR drivers friend, that is ALL it takes to support windows for a good decade plus, probably closer to two thanks to the fact Windows is pretty long lasting with driver models: 2K/XP, 2K3 X64/XP X64, Win Vista/7 32 bit, WinVista/7 64 bit, tada! Now my customer is supported until 2020 with NO driver borkage. compare this to ANY Linux forum and what do you see after each upgrade, hell what did I see with my own two peepers? 'Update foo broke my drivers" is the order of the day. BSD, Solaris, windows, OSX, hell even OS/2 has a stable driver ABI but Linus thinks his shit don't stink and since he said in 1993 he wasn't gonna allow one then by god Linux will never have one! And please don't link to that treaty by one of the kernel devs because it is a RELIGIOUS treaty and he even goes so far as to say he hopes that those that use non free drivers have broken systems!
So I'm sorry friend but your OS is simply unsuitable for purpose. its a geek hacker programmer hobbyist OS, not an OS for Suzy the checkout girl or the other billions of non programmers out there. its unstable, drivers constantly shit themselves on upgrade, its DEs are in flux, hell everything from the kernel up is about as stable as the shifting sands, its a fucking mess friend. While i like the IDEA of a free OS in practice you get a shit sandwich then told "you can't complain because its free!". yeah but a free shit sandwich is STILL shit.