I do think it says something about the religions when the worst the guy gets for a Lego bible is banning from Sam's Club for being racy. if he would have tried it with the Koran he'd be hiding in some bunker in Omaha with a 9mm under his pillow just to keep the crazies from killing him. hell look at how completely batshit they went over some Danish cartoons, whereas Ghastly had the "Drunk and bitter Jesus" comic for years and nobody said shit.
Riiight, because "voting" actually does shit! I don't know about where you live but even in the state races its strictly Coke VS Pepsi, with the only thing you get to "choose" is which corporate ass kisser gets the nod. We elected a dem for years but she turned out to be a corporate ass kissing DINO, so we elected a rep and what did we get, a corporate ass kissing RINO!
I'd love to hear how voting is magically supposed to do squat when on the state or even on the local level you don't get to vote for anyone that hasn't kissed the ring and cashed the checks.
That is why I have to love the little hacker that makes the "Tiny (insert Windows)" editions. I have plenty of Windows XP CALs around the shop and TinyXP runs on 64Mb of RAM quite nicely so you'd be surprised how well it'll run on one of the older machines. I usually give away the older boxes to charity, places that help abused women and the like, it gives me a warm fuzzy when they tell me about some girl with a face full of scars that is trying to start fresh but doesn't have anything that I'm able to hand a nice running 1GHz with all the trimmings. Of course I kept the sweet 1.8GHz Sempron with the card reader on it, makes a hell of a low power nettop. I have it sitting in the corner for web browsing and as a 24/7 downloader, can't even hear the thing its so quiet.
If you are looking for something a little more cutting edge and probably not one you have heard of there is QTWeb which is built with QT and Webkit. I don't have any Win9X boxes ATM (kinda up to my ass in 05-07 XP boxes I scored for free) so I can't tell you how well she'll fire, but its portable so it should be as easy as 'unzip and go". you might also want to look up the last version of KLite for Win9x (245 I believe) because that had an excellent low resource version of Media Player Classic that made for a great SD video player on even 400MHz boxes.
As for as DOS? For me its DOSBox FTW. Much more customizable than real DOS, I can even add a nice GUI if I want to load a box with old abandonware before handing it off to one of those abused women that have kids (I basically copied the entire Home Of The Underdogs onto a DVD when it was still up and running) and the rumor is it is about to have Voodoo support so it'll have DirectX acceleration with no fiddling. That will be great for me as those 16Mb - 64Mb early Nvidia cards are as common as dirt here. Hell I stuck a 32Mb Vanta in that Sempron so she'd support 1600x900 for my LCD, purrs like a kitten.
Finally before i get off here and take a nap before the big feast with the fam, if you like to refurb and play with older gear you really ought to try the Craigslist Free section and get on Freecycle. Hell I have a really nice B&W Apple G3 with Panther I got with a nice 19 inch CRT and wireless setup simply because a gal on freecycle got a netbook and didn't know what to do with the thing. sadly the Apple doesn't seem to accept USB to PS2 so I can't run it on my KVM, so I may after the silly season take one of these Pentium Ds or AM2+boards I have lying around and make a WinPC out of it. Give Steve credit, his designers did make some beautiful boxes. shame I can't get it to work with the KVM though, I would have liked playing with OSX on PPC.
We've had that problem here with the local cableco. I've had customers come to me saying "They say if I want to watch netflix I need to get the high end package" while they neglect to tell them the standard home package (which is nearly $80 cheaper for the 3 piece bundle and nearly $120 cheaper by itself) is now thanks to their FINALLY switching to digital TV between 12Mbps and 20Mbps with it only slowing to the former number in the worst, most congested part of the day.
And of course with Black Friday tomorrow let us not forget Worst Buy, where I had a friend try to do a little temp work to get some extra scratch and had to quit in disgust because he said it was made clear his job was basically to lie about the performance of the lower end machines so grandma wouldn't feel safe unless she bought some $1000 gamer rig. I've noticed that quite often in the electronics depts. Kinda sad when the kids working the Wally World actually give me the warm fuzzy feeling simply because they don't know shit and will just give you an answer like "I don't know, it looks nice and you can play with the display model to see if you like it".
I'm just amazed at how much complete bullshit these bunches are allowed to get away with now. I had a customer last year that needed some LCDs NOW and asked me to accompany him to the local staples because he didn't know anything about features. i got so damned disgusted at the obvious bait and switch (basically every monitor they had on display below $200 was "not in stock") that I told him to just get in my truck and I'd personally drive him the 30 minutes to the state capital just to keep him from getting ripped off. I should probably thank staples for being douchebags though, he was so grateful i was willing to help him outfit his office after the fire and keep him from getting ripped off he bought 6 monitors instead of 5 and when I went to load them in his van he said "Leave the last one in the truck, its yours". Still its a shame that stores are allowed such douchebaggery nowadays. But I got not only the nice dell 20 inch for the shop but an extra $1000 in work setting up the office as well as his home, and another $3k in referrals, so thanks staples, thanks for being absolute douchenozzles.
Oh no problem friend, if you need to support old hardware or OSes old hairyfeet is your go to guy!
The best browser I've found for Win9x is Kmeleon which is built on the Gecko engine but uses win32 instead of XUL so you get more speed. there is a tutorial but basically all you need is VCRedist, no KernEx hack required. i've ran it myself when testing older machines i've had to support, it works pretty damned good. you may have to hack it a bit to get ABP installed but it is rock solid.
But if you need any advice on win9X or Win2K old Hairy is your man, you wouldn't believe some of the older stuff i've had to support. the oldest was a box I had to build out of an ancient gamer rig I had in my shed for a place that required DOS 3 for an ISA controller on a C&C Lathe. Man talk about having stretch my brain to remember my old DOS foo!
What I've always wondered is why nobody has really embraced the multimedia and linkability when it comes to these things. Before they killed it MSFT had some cool ideas with Encarta that I thought would have been great for eBooks. Imagine say Stephen Hawking's book having computerized demonstrations of some of the more headier subjects to help you get your head around it, or having a "would you like to know more?" style link that would take you to something like YouTube where a video lecture for the subject you were reading was stored.
if the publishers were to embrace this i could see them really expanding the audience for eBooks. Being able to click a link and have the author's thoughts on a character or have the book reconfig itself to be the original unedited version would be quite awesome. kinda stupid IMHO to treat ones and zeroes like dead tree databases when they can do so much more.
According to statcounter more than 18%, more than any other version combined. The funny part is "other" now has MORE than Firefox. Since Chrome has its own bar i have to wonder if its the chromium based like dragon, or do they report as chrome?
Sorry I should have been more clear, I posted the 30 million number to make fun of it since from the looks of it the game companies count everyone who has ever bought a GPU as a "gamer". Now considering I personally have sold more low end GPUs to folks wanting smooth video than high end gamer chips i find it funny that they seem to count all those HD4350s and bottom of the barrel Geforces as "gamer chips".
The part of the equation you are missing is multimedia. Not only does Brazos do low level gaming quite well but the new UVD 3 accelerates practically every format out there. I get more than 6 hours watching 720p video on mine and even on the action sequences i'm barely hitting 15% CPU.
so while the i3 is great if you are looking for a low cost office box, or intend to put a discrete to make up for the shitty Intel GPU, for portable I'd still go with brazos, especially the E series. I haven't really seen any 12 inch netbooks running the i3s and certainly not at 3 pounds with a 6 cell. That makes brazos portable as hell and with Intel (at least last i checked, may be different now) holding back the more advanced features for the higher SKUs brazos is pretty much the only chip where you can get all the features AND multimedia AND gaming in a sub 3.5 pound and sub $400 price point. I loaded my EEE up with 8gb of RAM (Thanks for including the X64 version of Win 7 HP ASUS!) and with AMD-V I can even use it to run portable VMs quite nicely. Its quite cool to have a portable XP VM that I can use to interact with a possibly infected system and just roll back the VM at the end.
A little advice? If given the choice take the E series. the C series while a nice netbook chip is pretty much ONLY a netbook chip. that is for anything other than websurfing or 720P video it'll be skippy, 1GHz is just too low a clockspeed. the E series has HDMI which will do 1080P (I tested it myself with a 1080P DivX rip) and the battery difference is frankly almost non existent, we are talking an extra 23 minutes on the last tests I saw. I already get 6 hours watching 720P on Win 7 HP and if I just want to surf or listen to music Expressgate boost that to nearly 7 and a half. Also if you may want to game down the road the E series will play TF2 and L4d and WoW no problem, the C series struggles again thanks to its low clocks. Its cheap price though makes it kick ass for some of my customers, like Ms Pippin that only uses it to surf and watch YouTube.
But frankly I don't agree with the iPad, i think its a fad. While I have met a few businesses that have found uses for it, such as inventory taking, I had several home customers buy the thing and basically it ended up a very expensive digital photoframe. They may fire it up from time to time to check their webmail but the lack of a keyboard makes texting not very fun for them. those that bought the netbooks with AMD APUs on the other hand are quite happy and use them constantly. even my landlady is looking to buy the C series on BF as stocking stuffers, as she carries hers in her purse everywhere and just loves the far out of it. She got a SIM and a data plan for hers and now wherever she goes she has the web at her fingertips, the thing pulls duty as everything from a GPS to a video player to IM in a box.
And honestly I don't see how much thinner you'd want the thing, as there is only so thin you can get before it gets flexy and flimsy. remember one of the selling points is price so nobody is gonna pay Macbook Air money for one to have the thing made out of metal. And honestly how much battery do you need? Mine gets 6 hours under Win 7 X64 HP, 7 and a half under Expressgate, and that is with the standard 6 cell. if I didn't mind adding some bulk there is a 10 cell that is supposed to get something like 10 hours under Windows and 13 under Expressgate. But with the 6 cell only weighing in at 3 pounds for the whole netbook frankly i haven't found any cases where I'd need more than 6 hours away from a plug, camping maybe? Any other time I can always plug it into the truck, although I haven't needed to.
Oh I agree that ultimately ALL drugs should be legal, but that still doesn't change the fact that at its very core heavy drug addiction is about broken people.
Let me give an example from my own family, my ex brother in law. I ended up raising my sister's kids when after the birth of the second she found she had a fatal disease similar to ALS because halfway through the pregnancy he got a taste of drugs at work and that was all she wrote, last I heard he had hep C and was back in jail for trying to rip off an ATM, but why was he so easily.succumbed?
It was because meeting his family it was quite clear he was an unwanted child, all they really wanted was his older brother and he was the "mistake". Add to this the fact that his family ignored him and never bothered to give a shit along with the teachers doing the same so he was also illiterate and you can easily see why without therapy he was doomed. How many could go through life knowing your own parents wouldn't care if you died?
Finally while I agree that legalizing will reduce a HELL of a lot of crime I have seen in my own family that the whole "nature/nuture" thing is bullshit and the correct answer is nature. i know this because of my cousin Rock. He was adopted when he was 6 weeks old, his parents NEVER treated him any different than his biological brother that came a year later, in fact many in the family didn't know that he wasn't their biological. yet almost from the time he turned 12 he was frankly a monster, torturing animals, stealing, finally trying to find out if it was a medical cause they sued the court and had the records unsealed...
HIS PARENTS WERE MURDERERS! I swear to fricking God we all shit when we found out. His dad was an honest to goodness AX MURDERER that got pissed at a guy in a bar, calmly walked out to his car, got an axe out of the trunk, and proceeded to chop the fuck out of the guy right there in the bar! And his mom? Fricking slit the throat of a John whom she thought had more money on him and rifled through his pockets while he bled out. She had the baby in prison!
So while I agree that legalization is our only choice, because nearly a century of prohibition hasn't worked, I have to say DNA DOES play a part, a pretty damned big one. His adopted parents were the sweetest folks you'd want to meet, their biological ended up a writer for a small town sports mag, meanwhile Rock is doing double life for shooting a drug dealer for a couple of hundred in cash and his stash. The kid has been in prison longer than he has been out! ironically he is now in the same pen where his dad died while doing life 20 years earlier.
Not to mention Novell seems to have an awfully short memory on how long it took MS Office to gain traction. Remember folks we are talking OFFICE software, offices tend to be pretty damned conservative and don't just change software willy nilly. Hell look at how many corps are still running XP even though its two versions behind!
Well I was working corp and SMB at that time and I can tell you MS Office really didn't start to gain any great traction until Office 97 and didn't cement their place until Office 2K/XP in 200/01 respectively. The reason WP bombed was because like MANY software companies at the time they tried to put out not a Windows program but a DOS program with an updated GUI to look like a Windows program. Remember that there was a BIG difference here folks, DOS is a 16 bit single tasking OS whereas Windows 95 was a 16/32 bit hybrid OS with multitasking and Win98 was a 32bit OS with some legacy 16 bit and a DOS bootloader. I can tell you those companies that tried to put out DOS programs with only a GUI makeover ended up with misbehaving piles of shit because they expected to be the only thing running and thus could stomp all over the memory and that just didn't work with Windows. if you did that you got a HELL of a lot of crashes and hangs!
So they had a solid TWO YEARS which is like a decade in software years to make a new version and IIRC they didn't put out a truly solid Windows version until almost 2001, which by then nobody gave a shit. I had customers that tried to hang onto WP but it simply was too buggy in a Windows environment compared to DOS so when office 97 came along and everyone talked about how it didn't crap itself and die like WP they reluctantly switched. hell last I heard the law firms are STILL on WP, that bunch is so conservative that it'll probably be another decade before anybody starts using MS Office. I know that when i quit doing corp in 05 the law offices were hanging onto WP and I saw no signs it was going anywhere.
TL:DR? Novell had PLENTY of time to come out with a new product but instead hung onto the old code for too long and by the time they saw the train it ran them over.
Well if you were doing it just because you are old, since DOS hasn't been around in a decade? I apologize but you should just use MS or MSFT, because M$ belongs to the FOSSies now, a bunch of absolute batshit zealots that honestly can't even type the word microsoft, much less say it. I had one tell me last week I MUST be a "M$ Ninja Shill!" for saying IE SUCKS! Shows you the insane troll logic they use when INSULTING a product is suddenly shilling FOR said product. i guess the only thing you are allowed to say in front of a FOSSie is "ZOMG Gates eats babies!" or some shit.
As for Avast? Lord let me count the ways. 1.-Has sandboxing built in for ANY app, and you can even tell it to sandbox ALL the apps by default, or you can pick and choose. 2.-Has a built in "scan before load" web shield that stops drive bys cold, in my own tests I found that MSE would happily let the code load and run while Avast screamed and killed it before the page ever loaded. 3.- butt simple to customize the protection for the user, for example i don't use IM or P2P so that cut a good 20% off the memory footprint. by customizing it to the user it will often be a LOT less than MSE. 4.- stops IM and P2P bugs cold, again MSE only seems to catch something if the user tries to run the file, autoloader bugs seem to be able to slip past. in fact from what I've seen MSE (which was actually Giant AntiSpy before being bought by MSFT) really only works on things the user RUNS, not drive bys or autoload malware pages. 5.- It seems to slam the CPU a LOT less when scanning, including large file scans. 6.- Has a gamer mode that is as easy to activate as right clicking on the icon that will keep everything it does in the background, MSE doesn't care what you are running and will happily start a weekly scan right in the middle of their MMO.
heck I could go on all day but since its free why bother? try it yourself. I put it and Comodo right at the top, Comodo for those that like to fiddle or for XP users as it has an excellent two way firewall, and Avast for grandma and Win 7 users. If you want a butt simple way to give it to them just have them uninstall MSE and send them this link. Also great for those "always install" programs like flash or LibreOffice or Klite Codecs. Oh and no toolbars, even on programs that try to shove them or chrome down your throat, always of the good.
Man that fucking sucks dude! can't you get someone in the states to buy and ship you one? Because we have the C series all day at a little over $200 and there is like a half a dozen E-350 models for $300. Like I said I added an 8Gb RAM upgrade (that is sweeeeet BTW, loads all the video in RAM and has all my apps ready to go right out the gate, cuts down on HDD spin time as well) and a carrying case for a hair under $350 USD.
BTW if you get one? Get the EEE model as Expressgate is kick ass! Its like having TWO OSes, a WebOS for when all you want is to check email or surf or listen to what's on the HDD, has a really nice app store with tons of books and games, and gives you about an hour and a half extra on the battery. for me that equals a hair under 7 hours and i still had 15% when i shut her down. it also comes with a full Win 7 HP X64 so you can load that puppy up with RAM and be kicking it! That gives me a half a Gb just for the GPU and more RAM for the OS than I can even use, but what the hey, it was $31 USD.
So hey i'm really sorry, hope you find someone in the states to hook you up. if it is any consolation our political system is completely owned by the megacorps now., or and bandwidth isn't great, although I am getting 12MBps unlimited with phone and TV for $104 so i can't complain.
Not to mention nobody wants to spend the incredible amount of money it would take to fix broken people, instead they'd rather let their friends make money on both ends thanks to privatization of everything from the military to the prisons.
I once saw a show with this monk, damned if I can think of the name of it, that spent all his time with junkies. he said if you talked to them, I mean REALLY sat down and talked to them, nearly all of them had ONE THING, one single thing that they just couldn't face. After all nobody wakes up and says "I want lots of sores and my teeth falling out" now do they? He gave as an example one junkie where after talking to her it turned out her parents had thrown her to the street after her sister was killed in her car, so he paid to fly her halfway around the world and went with her to her parents graves so she could get it off her chest. less than a year later she was clean and working.
Recreational "party" drugs like pot should frankly be legal but when you have people that will literally go commit a crime just to get thrown in prison because they can't get their drug of choice on the outside? There is something in that person's life they simply cannot face. Sadly one of the guys i hung out with in HS is now living under a bridge somewhere, it turned out his mom was getting him fried at the age of 8 and fucking johns in front of him. can anybody blame the guy for staying stoned?
Oh Lord McGrew, bless your little optimistic heart! Ya know how long i been building boxes and selling PCs? Let me put it THIS way, remember Hot Dog stand? I used to sell the OS that theme came from! And I can tell you education will never work because in the end you have the dancing bunny problem where all the attacker has to do is go "Don't you want to see the bunny? Everyone else got to see the bunny, don't you want to see it too?" and they will throw common sense right in the shitter every. single. time.
Hell for the first time last year i actually told a customer to fuck off and take his business elsewhere and I had NEVER done that before. He was pissed because I refused to fix a PC he broke by doing what I said "DON'T DO THAT!" and apparently i'm supposed to make a PC that will tell him to go fuck himself without actually taking his right to be a dipshit away. What did I tell him not to do? I told him that Limewire was put out of business over 2 years ago and anything on the net claiming to be limewire was malware. So you guessed it he decided BT was "too hard" and went right out and downloaded "the new limewire" which was just a pile of malware with a gnucleus client attached. He even went so far as to UNINSTALL THE AV because it "wouldn't let him run his program". Well no shit, really? Bad AV, not letting him run malware like that!
We are both on the same page with browser bugs and XP though, that is why I don't allow Adobe PDF reader (use Sumatra instead) and have sandboxing in avast on if on XP and have them use Comodo Dragon with ABP on 7 to take advantage of Low rights mode. Since you ain't heard of it i'll break it down, its bloody brilliant and REALLY cuts down the risk of net based infections. sadly it doesn't work in Opera or FF ONLY on Chromium based like Dragon or IE. What it does is automatically put the browser at a LOWER permission than the user, even lower in some respects to the guest. it only gives the browser limited access to a handful of folders and even then on limited permissions. Sadly the only FF workaround posted basically crippled low rights mode and made it worthless. but I purposely went to some of those "loook at the hot lesboz!" topsites with a machine I was gonna wipe that I installed win 7, using both Dragon and FF. Avast popped up with nearly a dozen drivebys that FF tried to load, not a peep from Dragon because in low rights mode the code just couldn't run, the permissions were too low.
Believe me I used to work corp and ya know XP there? Not a threat. had a customer that only recently retired his Win2K boxes, not a single bug. you lock it down with GPOs and don't allow IE to even be on the machine? Cuts those infections right on off. What worries me are all those off lease and refurbs i'm gonna be getting pallet loads of with XP. I REALLY need to find someone who'll give me a decent price on Win 7 Starter. I tried every "user friendly" Linux out there and not a single one passed my 3 year update simulation without one or more drivers biting it so I really don't have a choice, Win 7 starter it is. with the ASUS hack for getting around the wallpaper thing it is actually a nice OS for those late P4s and early dual cores.
Oh and finally you ain't telling me shit about drivers, I've been having to teach my boys. I swear i carry BC powders in case i have a heart attack NOT from them learning how to drive, but from all the fucking morons driving 80 MPH while playing with their cell phone. First thing i taught them is college or not they talk on the cell while driving i'm taking the keys. i was proud as hell to be driving down the street the other day only to see the oldest ahead of me and pull into a lot so he could take a call.
But if you think education will EVER work i have a nice bridge you might be interested in. Working with consumers all day I can tell you that the clueless? out number the rest of us by about 100,000 to one.
Sorry I don't have the first one, as that one was REALLY out there, but here is one where he not only accuses me of being you, but that I have some "war room' where I keep files on him for "attacks" Oooookay persecution complex anyone?
I just wish I'd saved his post I ragged him for it was SOOOO funny! I swear to God he said ALL windows users use "Start>>>Run" to launch ALL their programs and THAT is why having constant CLI in Linux was okay! Hell for the last 2 years of the run HP windows Home machines DIDN'T HAVE A START>>>RUN because somebody at the factory goofed and left it off the image and nobody noticed because hey, nobody but admins use that! Hell if I hadn't have been trying to do IPConf on some home units I got on a palette even I wouldn't have noticed!
Oh and it frankly doesn't surprise me that you posting how to remove malware gets him pissed, he is the classic "Must use teh FOSS" type of batshit where the ONLY correct answer is "Use Linux" to ANY question. Even when you point out something doesn't work with a dozen citations he'll just fling poo and call you a "Sekret M$ Ninja!" These guys are so batshit I had one last week accuse me of being an M$ Ninja for Saying IE was shit and I STILL haven't figured out how insulting a product is supposed to be shilling FOR the product. shows the insane troll logic these types run under I guess. I suppose the only answer you could give he'd approve of was 'ZOMFG Windows eats babies, Linux loves you!" Ya know, I thought when I came up with the FOSSie thing I thought it was just a parody, now? not so sure. they do strike me as more like Moonies than even fanbois.
I don't know whether to laugh or be worried someone so batshit is running loose out there. you can read by that link he is practically foaming by the end of it and total loses it, ignores more than 20 citations i provided backing up my position with the sentence 'You are a fucking liar!" like suddenly i now control PC World.AU, Cnet, oh and 4 of the links were/. articles so apparently I must also sekretly be Taco AND Timothy AND two other guys as well as YOU and myself. Wow i must keep busy, i hope MSFT sends me some $1000 hookers on that invisible money truck that never gets here.
So while like you I don't have proof considering the guy's postings are as easy to spot as a monkey flinging poo on a street corner and it wasn't until i pointed out his bullshit that I got stalked by the "mysterious" die fucker die AC frankly I really don't think it takes Kojak to crack "The Case Of The Batshit FOSSie" Considering it is ALWAYS exactly TWO minutes between one of his rants and the AC "fucking die" posts we can even see that Linux has lousy browser performance from the amount of time it takes him to log off, LOL! Peace bro.
Oh thanks Larry, I so rarely get to use this in a sentence...WHOOSH! Might want to look up one of the movies high in the geeker lexicon "Pirates of Silicon Valley" since that was a word for word quote from one of the most pivotal scenes.
Oh and for that not being true? Go to Youtube and look up "The History of Apple" and watch the gal in charge of PARC demos where she says, and I quote "I made a company head order me and sign off that he had ordered me before i would give Steve and his friends a demo. I KNEW we were giving away the store by letting Steve Jobs look at it, but they just wouldn't listen".
I mean sure he licensed some of the tech for chump change, but that was no different than gates giving the kid that wrote QDOS $50k for his OS knowing he had sold the thing for a mint to IBM. Jobs knew he could slaughter with it, acted like it wasn't a big deal, and helped himself. Even he admitted there was two other revolutionary techs he should have also snatched but in his words 'I was so blown away by the GUI I didn't even see it". Those were of course email and Ethernet networking, both of which PARC had running in 1972.
No but he IS touching on something that we retailers could have told you is one of the biggest reasons for the slowdown in PC sales, and that is for the vast majority PCs are good enough for the jobs they have.
Look at one of the big sellers around here which is backed up by AMD having trouble filling all the orders...brazos. is brazos gonna compete with some Ivy bridge desktop replacement? not a chance in hell. Then why is it selling like crazy? For the same reason i sold my laptop and bought a Brazos EEE PC, and that is the jobs people have on the go aren't that computationally heavy and therefor the battery life and price make a bigger difference. in my own case i'm not transcoding video on the road, i'm accessing my webmail, watching HD movies, listening to music, maybe some light gaming. What in that list needs a monster PC?
I've found with my years of working PC retail that I'd be considered a "hardcore user" compared to most since i have a Deneb quad at home and actually DO play shooters and transcode as well as multitrack audio editing AT HOME but most of my customers, what do THEY do with a PC? they go to Facebook, play Farmville, check their webmail, watch YouTube, maybe do a little MS Word editing or play some game they got off the Walmart "300 games for Windows" rack. Now what there needs a giant CPU? Not a damned thing, in fact even the Brazos chip while running a full Windows 7 HP spends most of its time idle. hell i found playing full HD videos the CPU was barely hitting 15% with the GPU roughly the same depending on the action. Having the decoding in silicon drops the hell out of power usage.
So while the guys that run gamer sites or live for benchmarks will scoff frankly the average user, which outnumbers them by a 100,000 to one (last number on hardcore PC gamers I saw put the number at 30 million) and they won't give a crap that Brazos is 'long in the tooth" or that Thuban isn't king of the hill because "Will you look at that price? And look at how nicely videos play, woo hoo!"
This is why I really wasn't surprised when I walked into my local Walmart, a place that just a couple of years ago you were lucky to find a single Sempron in the back, to find that more than 2/3rds of the units had bright red AMD Fusion stickers. Hell I paid $350 for A Brazos EEE that gets 6 hours watching HD video, plays L4D or TF2, has 320Gb HDD to hold my music and movies, and that is INCLUDING an 8Gb RAM upgrade and a nice carrying case to put it in. Hell if AMD can keep prices THAT low nobody but the niche hardcore users will give a shit.
I know I can't keep the AMD desktops and netbooks in simply because the price is so much lower. For the jobs the average Joe has the AMD platforms are more than "good enough" and even someone like me who thought I'd always lug a 20 pound desktop replacement has found that I don't frankly miss it. 3 pounds, 6 hours 720P HD, light gaming and all for $350? Sold AMD, thanks for taking my money.
Oh please, Win 7 is better on RAM management, better about UAC (and doesn't bug the fuck out of you for something simple like throwing crap in the trash), better because of libraries, better taskbar, better with devices and printers, better by having Action Center that doesn't bug you with pop ups, Aero Snap and Shake, hell its better in just about every way! I ran Vista up to SP1 and frankly it was a turd, buggy, memory hogging, lousy with shares, it sucked the big wet titty and i sure as hell wouldn't use the piggie for VMs!
As for TFA...man this really sucks. i knew AMD was having serious trouble with GloFlo (reports were Liano was getting less than 40% good chips per wafer) but damn. maybe it'll turn out to be a good thing they sold GloFlo in the first place. Of course the MAJOR downside is they are gonna have to compete with all TSMCs other customers and that could seriously hurt yields and couldn't come at a worst time, with Brazos chips selling as fast as they can crank them in everything from netbooks to all in ones to HTPCs.
I just hope they have GloFlo keep cranking out the Thuban and Zacate chips until they can get TSMC up to speed. I'm sure that GloFlo will need the business and AMD sure as hell needs the chips. this would royally suck if we had an AMD chip shortage to go with the HDD shortage...I wonder if i should be upping my timeframe on snatching a Thuban?
Dude you are quoting from Steve Jobs biography for God's sake! You couldn't be any more the definition of fanboi if you made that high pitched squee noise when you see an Apple product! I have seen some pretty damned fanatical Linux and Windows fanbois here but have NEVER seen them quote from Torvalds or Gates biographies! For the love of all that is decent and pure in the world STEP AWAY FROM THE IPAD!
Get real, would ya? You and I are both like guys who had this rich neighbor - Xerox - who left the door open all the time. And you go sneakin' in to steal a TV set. Only when you get there, you realize that I got there first. I got the loot, Steve! And you're yellin'? "That's not fair. I wanted to try to steal it first." You're too late.
I wonder if this means that AMD Air might not be such a dead deal after all? I doubt AMD is gonna suddenly intervene in Sept just out of the goodness of their hearts, especially when Apple is using intel chips. If the ruling is true AMD could royally fuck Apple if they wanted to, S3 texture compression is the basis of a hell of a lot in graphics nowadays. After all those patents are why Linux doesn't have full OpenGL support by default, because while OpenGL is royalty free those patents aren't.
So why would AMD jump in to help Apple, whose never bought a single chip they make? The only reason i can think of is a possible future product using AMD chips. otherwise it would be in their best interests to let Apple get screwed, or at least hit them up for a big fat licensing fee.
Aw geez APK, while I appreciate you trying to point out FOSSie bullshit when you see it, you DO know that crazy guy is gonna follow me around for a month accusing me of being you again, right? hell last month he followed me around for damned near a month posting as AC "die you fat fucker die" over and over again, and when you show up even on the same page as me much less the same thread he REALLY goes off his meds. I mean hell the guy is using half of one of my sentences as his fricking sig, if THAT ain't batshit I don't know what is.
Besides I honestly think the FOSSies won't be worth bothering with much longer. The number of FOSS programmers is tanking, Linux server has dropped 15% in less than 2 years, all the DE breakage has got old time Linux admins I talk to so damned fed up they are switching to Macs, and finally I'm betting Google locks down Android with code signing so that they can secure their appstore and play protected H.264 which they can't do with an open kernel.
So let the crazy FOSSies cook up their "M$ Ninja!" conspiracy stories and leave them to rot. After BSD crapped itself on the last batch of refurbs I personally washed my hands of the whole mess and don't even bother posting on Linux articles anymore, I'm already hunting down somebody who can sell me Win 7 Starter and just calling it a day. FOSS was a nice idea but then like politics the batshit loons took over and made it more about poo flinging and squeeing fangirl crap than about OSes.
Hell they aren't even sane enough to poke fun of anymore, like old Twitter who could cook up great fantasies where Linux conquered the world. Instead you get like what I got last week, where I said IE was a bad joke I don't allow on my systems and was accused of "Sekrectly being an M$ Ninja!" for INSULTING the product! I guess if you don't say windows kills babies or something you must be "one of them". THAT level of batshit ain't even fun to laugh at, its just rather sad and more than a little scary. Peace bro.
Because it cuts out half the letters? Plus it keeps the hardcore FOSSies from foaming at the mouth and screaming "He's an M$ Ninja!" as much if you don't spell it out. If you don't believe me you should look up my posts for last month, where I had a FOSSie for 3 weeks following me just posting "Die fat fucker die" over and over AND over, or the one who accuses me regularly of being either secretly working for Microsoft from the west coast (when I've never even been farther west than OK in my life), or lately he has convinced himself I must be APK, even though Anthony is quite well known at CNet, a Delphi programmer (which I've never even seen Delphi code so would have NO fucking clue there) and has been here far longer than I have, not to mention old APK has a VERY distinct writing style which is nothing like mine..
But you go right ahead and keeping writing Microsoft on posts, and you too will soon be told you are a "sekret M$ Ninja!" hiding in a burrow in Redmond being paid slave wages to post for MSFT, even when the post is INSULTING Microsoft software. I swear to God that happened to me last week, I said IE was a bad joke and was accused of secretly working for MSFT because I didn't say IE kills babies or something, who the hell knows what goes on in the mind of a FOSSie.
Do the OTHER AV companies get to be sued as well? How about Linux, after all companies could be selling AV products if they didn't have that pesky SE thingie!
I just LOVE how for some there is NEVER a right answer for MSFT, except maybe kill themselves on an altar to RMS. First everyone complains about lack of security so what do they do? make the user a user and not an admin, so the software companies complain!
Now here they are trying to make it easy for grandma (and knowing the OEMs will just strip it out for trialware anyway) and what do you do? you com plain that MSFT should be sued if they get a false positive when EVERY AV has gotten false positives in the past!
Frankly you are getting your panties in a knot over nothing friend, as who is ever gonna see this AV? it'll be like Windows Defender, a last resort for someone who has absolutely nothing which will be damned few! the OEMs will put trialware, the system builders like me will put a decent free AV like Avast or Comodo, so the ONLY ones that will see this are ones that bought a retail copy and installed it themselves....seriously how many is that? Single digits? In the big picture this thing isn't even a blip on the radar. BTW you DO know about Windows Defender, right? why aren't you screaming about it as well? After all it keeps spyware companies from making money off of adware, the horror!
BTW its nice to see a FOSSie that can actually ALMOST write like a normal person, but then you had to fuck up and do the whole "M$" thing. Got bit by Voldemort syndrome huh? don't feel bad, Voldemort syndrome is a crippling disease that affects a LOT of FOSSies, just go see Pogson over at LinuxInsider, he has been posting there for FIVE YEARS and has YET to be able to say Microsoft or MSFT or even MS! I hear he starts foaming and screaming "free as in freedom!" if he gets more than one letter in their name written, so don't feel bad.
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I do think it says something about the religions when the worst the guy gets for a Lego bible is banning from Sam's Club for being racy. if he would have tried it with the Koran he'd be hiding in some bunker in Omaha with a 9mm under his pillow just to keep the crazies from killing him. hell look at how completely batshit they went over some Danish cartoons, whereas Ghastly had the "Drunk and bitter Jesus" comic for years and nobody said shit.
Riiight, because "voting" actually does shit! I don't know about where you live but even in the state races its strictly Coke VS Pepsi, with the only thing you get to "choose" is which corporate ass kisser gets the nod. We elected a dem for years but she turned out to be a corporate ass kissing DINO, so we elected a rep and what did we get, a corporate ass kissing RINO!
I'd love to hear how voting is magically supposed to do squat when on the state or even on the local level you don't get to vote for anyone that hasn't kissed the ring and cashed the checks.
That is why I have to love the little hacker that makes the "Tiny (insert Windows)" editions. I have plenty of Windows XP CALs around the shop and TinyXP runs on 64Mb of RAM quite nicely so you'd be surprised how well it'll run on one of the older machines. I usually give away the older boxes to charity, places that help abused women and the like, it gives me a warm fuzzy when they tell me about some girl with a face full of scars that is trying to start fresh but doesn't have anything that I'm able to hand a nice running 1GHz with all the trimmings. Of course I kept the sweet 1.8GHz Sempron with the card reader on it, makes a hell of a low power nettop. I have it sitting in the corner for web browsing and as a 24/7 downloader, can't even hear the thing its so quiet.
If you are looking for something a little more cutting edge and probably not one you have heard of there is QTWeb which is built with QT and Webkit. I don't have any Win9X boxes ATM (kinda up to my ass in 05-07 XP boxes I scored for free) so I can't tell you how well she'll fire, but its portable so it should be as easy as 'unzip and go". you might also want to look up the last version of KLite for Win9x (245 I believe) because that had an excellent low resource version of Media Player Classic that made for a great SD video player on even 400MHz boxes.
As for as DOS? For me its DOSBox FTW. Much more customizable than real DOS, I can even add a nice GUI if I want to load a box with old abandonware before handing it off to one of those abused women that have kids (I basically copied the entire Home Of The Underdogs onto a DVD when it was still up and running) and the rumor is it is about to have Voodoo support so it'll have DirectX acceleration with no fiddling. That will be great for me as those 16Mb - 64Mb early Nvidia cards are as common as dirt here. Hell I stuck a 32Mb Vanta in that Sempron so she'd support 1600x900 for my LCD, purrs like a kitten.
Finally before i get off here and take a nap before the big feast with the fam, if you like to refurb and play with older gear you really ought to try the Craigslist Free section and get on Freecycle. Hell I have a really nice B&W Apple G3 with Panther I got with a nice 19 inch CRT and wireless setup simply because a gal on freecycle got a netbook and didn't know what to do with the thing. sadly the Apple doesn't seem to accept USB to PS2 so I can't run it on my KVM, so I may after the silly season take one of these Pentium Ds or AM2+boards I have lying around and make a WinPC out of it. Give Steve credit, his designers did make some beautiful boxes. shame I can't get it to work with the KVM though, I would have liked playing with OSX on PPC.
We've had that problem here with the local cableco. I've had customers come to me saying "They say if I want to watch netflix I need to get the high end package" while they neglect to tell them the standard home package (which is nearly $80 cheaper for the 3 piece bundle and nearly $120 cheaper by itself) is now thanks to their FINALLY switching to digital TV between 12Mbps and 20Mbps with it only slowing to the former number in the worst, most congested part of the day.
And of course with Black Friday tomorrow let us not forget Worst Buy, where I had a friend try to do a little temp work to get some extra scratch and had to quit in disgust because he said it was made clear his job was basically to lie about the performance of the lower end machines so grandma wouldn't feel safe unless she bought some $1000 gamer rig. I've noticed that quite often in the electronics depts. Kinda sad when the kids working the Wally World actually give me the warm fuzzy feeling simply because they don't know shit and will just give you an answer like "I don't know, it looks nice and you can play with the display model to see if you like it".
I'm just amazed at how much complete bullshit these bunches are allowed to get away with now. I had a customer last year that needed some LCDs NOW and asked me to accompany him to the local staples because he didn't know anything about features. i got so damned disgusted at the obvious bait and switch (basically every monitor they had on display below $200 was "not in stock") that I told him to just get in my truck and I'd personally drive him the 30 minutes to the state capital just to keep him from getting ripped off. I should probably thank staples for being douchebags though, he was so grateful i was willing to help him outfit his office after the fire and keep him from getting ripped off he bought 6 monitors instead of 5 and when I went to load them in his van he said "Leave the last one in the truck, its yours". Still its a shame that stores are allowed such douchebaggery nowadays. But I got not only the nice dell 20 inch for the shop but an extra $1000 in work setting up the office as well as his home, and another $3k in referrals, so thanks staples, thanks for being absolute douchenozzles.
Oh no problem friend, if you need to support old hardware or OSes old hairyfeet is your go to guy!
The best browser I've found for Win9x is Kmeleon which is built on the Gecko engine but uses win32 instead of XUL so you get more speed. there is a tutorial but basically all you need is VCRedist, no KernEx hack required. i've ran it myself when testing older machines i've had to support, it works pretty damned good. you may have to hack it a bit to get ABP installed but it is rock solid.
But if you need any advice on win9X or Win2K old Hairy is your man, you wouldn't believe some of the older stuff i've had to support. the oldest was a box I had to build out of an ancient gamer rig I had in my shed for a place that required DOS 3 for an ISA controller on a C&C Lathe. Man talk about having stretch my brain to remember my old DOS foo!
What I've always wondered is why nobody has really embraced the multimedia and linkability when it comes to these things. Before they killed it MSFT had some cool ideas with Encarta that I thought would have been great for eBooks. Imagine say Stephen Hawking's book having computerized demonstrations of some of the more headier subjects to help you get your head around it, or having a "would you like to know more?" style link that would take you to something like YouTube where a video lecture for the subject you were reading was stored.
if the publishers were to embrace this i could see them really expanding the audience for eBooks. Being able to click a link and have the author's thoughts on a character or have the book reconfig itself to be the original unedited version would be quite awesome. kinda stupid IMHO to treat ones and zeroes like dead tree databases when they can do so much more.
According to statcounter more than 18%, more than any other version combined. The funny part is "other" now has MORE than Firefox. Since Chrome has its own bar i have to wonder if its the chromium based like dragon, or do they report as chrome?
Sorry I should have been more clear, I posted the 30 million number to make fun of it since from the looks of it the game companies count everyone who has ever bought a GPU as a "gamer". Now considering I personally have sold more low end GPUs to folks wanting smooth video than high end gamer chips i find it funny that they seem to count all those HD4350s and bottom of the barrel Geforces as "gamer chips".
The part of the equation you are missing is multimedia. Not only does Brazos do low level gaming quite well but the new UVD 3 accelerates practically every format out there. I get more than 6 hours watching 720p video on mine and even on the action sequences i'm barely hitting 15% CPU.
so while the i3 is great if you are looking for a low cost office box, or intend to put a discrete to make up for the shitty Intel GPU, for portable I'd still go with brazos, especially the E series. I haven't really seen any 12 inch netbooks running the i3s and certainly not at 3 pounds with a 6 cell. That makes brazos portable as hell and with Intel (at least last i checked, may be different now) holding back the more advanced features for the higher SKUs brazos is pretty much the only chip where you can get all the features AND multimedia AND gaming in a sub 3.5 pound and sub $400 price point. I loaded my EEE up with 8gb of RAM (Thanks for including the X64 version of Win 7 HP ASUS!) and with AMD-V I can even use it to run portable VMs quite nicely. Its quite cool to have a portable XP VM that I can use to interact with a possibly infected system and just roll back the VM at the end.
A little advice? If given the choice take the E series. the C series while a nice netbook chip is pretty much ONLY a netbook chip. that is for anything other than websurfing or 720P video it'll be skippy, 1GHz is just too low a clockspeed. the E series has HDMI which will do 1080P (I tested it myself with a 1080P DivX rip) and the battery difference is frankly almost non existent, we are talking an extra 23 minutes on the last tests I saw. I already get 6 hours watching 720P on Win 7 HP and if I just want to surf or listen to music Expressgate boost that to nearly 7 and a half. Also if you may want to game down the road the E series will play TF2 and L4d and WoW no problem, the C series struggles again thanks to its low clocks. Its cheap price though makes it kick ass for some of my customers, like Ms Pippin that only uses it to surf and watch YouTube.
But frankly I don't agree with the iPad, i think its a fad. While I have met a few businesses that have found uses for it, such as inventory taking, I had several home customers buy the thing and basically it ended up a very expensive digital photoframe. They may fire it up from time to time to check their webmail but the lack of a keyboard makes texting not very fun for them. those that bought the netbooks with AMD APUs on the other hand are quite happy and use them constantly. even my landlady is looking to buy the C series on BF as stocking stuffers, as she carries hers in her purse everywhere and just loves the far out of it. She got a SIM and a data plan for hers and now wherever she goes she has the web at her fingertips, the thing pulls duty as everything from a GPS to a video player to IM in a box.
And honestly I don't see how much thinner you'd want the thing, as there is only so thin you can get before it gets flexy and flimsy. remember one of the selling points is price so nobody is gonna pay Macbook Air money for one to have the thing made out of metal. And honestly how much battery do you need? Mine gets 6 hours under Win 7 X64 HP, 7 and a half under Expressgate, and that is with the standard 6 cell. if I didn't mind adding some bulk there is a 10 cell that is supposed to get something like 10 hours under Windows and 13 under Expressgate. But with the 6 cell only weighing in at 3 pounds for the whole netbook frankly i haven't found any cases where I'd need more than 6 hours away from a plug, camping maybe? Any other time I can always plug it into the truck, although I haven't needed to.
Oh I agree that ultimately ALL drugs should be legal, but that still doesn't change the fact that at its very core heavy drug addiction is about broken people.
Let me give an example from my own family, my ex brother in law. I ended up raising my sister's kids when after the birth of the second she found she had a fatal disease similar to ALS because halfway through the pregnancy he got a taste of drugs at work and that was all she wrote, last I heard he had hep C and was back in jail for trying to rip off an ATM, but why was he so easily .succumbed?
It was because meeting his family it was quite clear he was an unwanted child, all they really wanted was his older brother and he was the "mistake". Add to this the fact that his family ignored him and never bothered to give a shit along with the teachers doing the same so he was also illiterate and you can easily see why without therapy he was doomed. How many could go through life knowing your own parents wouldn't care if you died?
Finally while I agree that legalizing will reduce a HELL of a lot of crime I have seen in my own family that the whole "nature/nuture" thing is bullshit and the correct answer is nature. i know this because of my cousin Rock. He was adopted when he was 6 weeks old, his parents NEVER treated him any different than his biological brother that came a year later, in fact many in the family didn't know that he wasn't their biological. yet almost from the time he turned 12 he was frankly a monster, torturing animals, stealing, finally trying to find out if it was a medical cause they sued the court and had the records unsealed...
HIS PARENTS WERE MURDERERS! I swear to fricking God we all shit when we found out. His dad was an honest to goodness AX MURDERER that got pissed at a guy in a bar, calmly walked out to his car, got an axe out of the trunk, and proceeded to chop the fuck out of the guy right there in the bar! And his mom? Fricking slit the throat of a John whom she thought had more money on him and rifled through his pockets while he bled out. She had the baby in prison!
So while I agree that legalization is our only choice, because nearly a century of prohibition hasn't worked, I have to say DNA DOES play a part, a pretty damned big one. His adopted parents were the sweetest folks you'd want to meet, their biological ended up a writer for a small town sports mag, meanwhile Rock is doing double life for shooting a drug dealer for a couple of hundred in cash and his stash. The kid has been in prison longer than he has been out! ironically he is now in the same pen where his dad died while doing life 20 years earlier.
Not to mention Novell seems to have an awfully short memory on how long it took MS Office to gain traction. Remember folks we are talking OFFICE software, offices tend to be pretty damned conservative and don't just change software willy nilly. Hell look at how many corps are still running XP even though its two versions behind!
Well I was working corp and SMB at that time and I can tell you MS Office really didn't start to gain any great traction until Office 97 and didn't cement their place until Office 2K/XP in 200/01 respectively. The reason WP bombed was because like MANY software companies at the time they tried to put out not a Windows program but a DOS program with an updated GUI to look like a Windows program. Remember that there was a BIG difference here folks, DOS is a 16 bit single tasking OS whereas Windows 95 was a 16/32 bit hybrid OS with multitasking and Win98 was a 32bit OS with some legacy 16 bit and a DOS bootloader. I can tell you those companies that tried to put out DOS programs with only a GUI makeover ended up with misbehaving piles of shit because they expected to be the only thing running and thus could stomp all over the memory and that just didn't work with Windows. if you did that you got a HELL of a lot of crashes and hangs!
So they had a solid TWO YEARS which is like a decade in software years to make a new version and IIRC they didn't put out a truly solid Windows version until almost 2001, which by then nobody gave a shit. I had customers that tried to hang onto WP but it simply was too buggy in a Windows environment compared to DOS so when office 97 came along and everyone talked about how it didn't crap itself and die like WP they reluctantly switched. hell last I heard the law firms are STILL on WP, that bunch is so conservative that it'll probably be another decade before anybody starts using MS Office. I know that when i quit doing corp in 05 the law offices were hanging onto WP and I saw no signs it was going anywhere.
TL:DR? Novell had PLENTY of time to come out with a new product but instead hung onto the old code for too long and by the time they saw the train it ran them over.
Well if you were doing it just because you are old, since DOS hasn't been around in a decade? I apologize but you should just use MS or MSFT, because M$ belongs to the FOSSies now, a bunch of absolute batshit zealots that honestly can't even type the word microsoft, much less say it. I had one tell me last week I MUST be a "M$ Ninja Shill!" for saying IE SUCKS! Shows you the insane troll logic they use when INSULTING a product is suddenly shilling FOR said product. i guess the only thing you are allowed to say in front of a FOSSie is "ZOMG Gates eats babies!" or some shit.
As for Avast? Lord let me count the ways. 1.-Has sandboxing built in for ANY app, and you can even tell it to sandbox ALL the apps by default, or you can pick and choose. 2.-Has a built in "scan before load" web shield that stops drive bys cold, in my own tests I found that MSE would happily let the code load and run while Avast screamed and killed it before the page ever loaded. 3.- butt simple to customize the protection for the user, for example i don't use IM or P2P so that cut a good 20% off the memory footprint. by customizing it to the user it will often be a LOT less than MSE. 4.- stops IM and P2P bugs cold, again MSE only seems to catch something if the user tries to run the file, autoloader bugs seem to be able to slip past. in fact from what I've seen MSE (which was actually Giant AntiSpy before being bought by MSFT) really only works on things the user RUNS, not drive bys or autoload malware pages. 5.- It seems to slam the CPU a LOT less when scanning, including large file scans. 6.- Has a gamer mode that is as easy to activate as right clicking on the icon that will keep everything it does in the background, MSE doesn't care what you are running and will happily start a weekly scan right in the middle of their MMO.
heck I could go on all day but since its free why bother? try it yourself. I put it and Comodo right at the top, Comodo for those that like to fiddle or for XP users as it has an excellent two way firewall, and Avast for grandma and Win 7 users. If you want a butt simple way to give it to them just have them uninstall MSE and send them this link. Also great for those "always install" programs like flash or LibreOffice or Klite Codecs. Oh and no toolbars, even on programs that try to shove them or chrome down your throat, always of the good.
Man that fucking sucks dude! can't you get someone in the states to buy and ship you one? Because we have the C series all day at a little over $200 and there is like a half a dozen E-350 models for $300. Like I said I added an 8Gb RAM upgrade (that is sweeeeet BTW, loads all the video in RAM and has all my apps ready to go right out the gate, cuts down on HDD spin time as well) and a carrying case for a hair under $350 USD.
BTW if you get one? Get the EEE model as Expressgate is kick ass! Its like having TWO OSes, a WebOS for when all you want is to check email or surf or listen to what's on the HDD, has a really nice app store with tons of books and games, and gives you about an hour and a half extra on the battery. for me that equals a hair under 7 hours and i still had 15% when i shut her down. it also comes with a full Win 7 HP X64 so you can load that puppy up with RAM and be kicking it! That gives me a half a Gb just for the GPU and more RAM for the OS than I can even use, but what the hey, it was $31 USD.
So hey i'm really sorry, hope you find someone in the states to hook you up. if it is any consolation our political system is completely owned by the megacorps now., or and bandwidth isn't great, although I am getting 12MBps unlimited with phone and TV for $104 so i can't complain.
Not to mention nobody wants to spend the incredible amount of money it would take to fix broken people, instead they'd rather let their friends make money on both ends thanks to privatization of everything from the military to the prisons.
I once saw a show with this monk, damned if I can think of the name of it, that spent all his time with junkies. he said if you talked to them, I mean REALLY sat down and talked to them, nearly all of them had ONE THING, one single thing that they just couldn't face. After all nobody wakes up and says "I want lots of sores and my teeth falling out" now do they? He gave as an example one junkie where after talking to her it turned out her parents had thrown her to the street after her sister was killed in her car, so he paid to fly her halfway around the world and went with her to her parents graves so she could get it off her chest. less than a year later she was clean and working.
Recreational "party" drugs like pot should frankly be legal but when you have people that will literally go commit a crime just to get thrown in prison because they can't get their drug of choice on the outside? There is something in that person's life they simply cannot face. Sadly one of the guys i hung out with in HS is now living under a bridge somewhere, it turned out his mom was getting him fried at the age of 8 and fucking johns in front of him. can anybody blame the guy for staying stoned?
Oh Lord McGrew, bless your little optimistic heart! Ya know how long i been building boxes and selling PCs? Let me put it THIS way, remember Hot Dog stand? I used to sell the OS that theme came from! And I can tell you education will never work because in the end you have the dancing bunny problem where all the attacker has to do is go "Don't you want to see the bunny? Everyone else got to see the bunny, don't you want to see it too?" and they will throw common sense right in the shitter every. single. time.
Hell for the first time last year i actually told a customer to fuck off and take his business elsewhere and I had NEVER done that before. He was pissed because I refused to fix a PC he broke by doing what I said "DON'T DO THAT!" and apparently i'm supposed to make a PC that will tell him to go fuck himself without actually taking his right to be a dipshit away. What did I tell him not to do? I told him that Limewire was put out of business over 2 years ago and anything on the net claiming to be limewire was malware. So you guessed it he decided BT was "too hard" and went right out and downloaded "the new limewire" which was just a pile of malware with a gnucleus client attached. He even went so far as to UNINSTALL THE AV because it "wouldn't let him run his program". Well no shit, really? Bad AV, not letting him run malware like that!
We are both on the same page with browser bugs and XP though, that is why I don't allow Adobe PDF reader (use Sumatra instead) and have sandboxing in avast on if on XP and have them use Comodo Dragon with ABP on 7 to take advantage of Low rights mode. Since you ain't heard of it i'll break it down, its bloody brilliant and REALLY cuts down the risk of net based infections. sadly it doesn't work in Opera or FF ONLY on Chromium based like Dragon or IE. What it does is automatically put the browser at a LOWER permission than the user, even lower in some respects to the guest. it only gives the browser limited access to a handful of folders and even then on limited permissions. Sadly the only FF workaround posted basically crippled low rights mode and made it worthless. but I purposely went to some of those "loook at the hot lesboz!" topsites with a machine I was gonna wipe that I installed win 7, using both Dragon and FF. Avast popped up with nearly a dozen drivebys that FF tried to load, not a peep from Dragon because in low rights mode the code just couldn't run, the permissions were too low.
Believe me I used to work corp and ya know XP there? Not a threat. had a customer that only recently retired his Win2K boxes, not a single bug. you lock it down with GPOs and don't allow IE to even be on the machine? Cuts those infections right on off. What worries me are all those off lease and refurbs i'm gonna be getting pallet loads of with XP. I REALLY need to find someone who'll give me a decent price on Win 7 Starter. I tried every "user friendly" Linux out there and not a single one passed my 3 year update simulation without one or more drivers biting it so I really don't have a choice, Win 7 starter it is. with the ASUS hack for getting around the wallpaper thing it is actually a nice OS for those late P4s and early dual cores.
Oh and finally you ain't telling me shit about drivers, I've been having to teach my boys. I swear i carry BC powders in case i have a heart attack NOT from them learning how to drive, but from all the fucking morons driving 80 MPH while playing with their cell phone. First thing i taught them is college or not they talk on the cell while driving i'm taking the keys. i was proud as hell to be driving down the street the other day only to see the oldest ahead of me and pull into a lot so he could take a call.
But if you think education will EVER work i have a nice bridge you might be interested in. Working with consumers all day I can tell you that the clueless? out number the rest of us by about 100,000 to one.
Sorry I don't have the first one, as that one was REALLY out there, but here is one where he not only accuses me of being you, but that I have some "war room' where I keep files on him for "attacks" Oooookay persecution complex anyone?
I just wish I'd saved his post I ragged him for it was SOOOO funny! I swear to God he said ALL windows users use "Start>>>Run" to launch ALL their programs and THAT is why having constant CLI in Linux was okay! Hell for the last 2 years of the run HP windows Home machines DIDN'T HAVE A START>>>RUN because somebody at the factory goofed and left it off the image and nobody noticed because hey, nobody but admins use that! Hell if I hadn't have been trying to do IPConf on some home units I got on a palette even I wouldn't have noticed!
Oh and it frankly doesn't surprise me that you posting how to remove malware gets him pissed, he is the classic "Must use teh FOSS" type of batshit where the ONLY correct answer is "Use Linux" to ANY question. Even when you point out something doesn't work with a dozen citations he'll just fling poo and call you a "Sekret M$ Ninja!" These guys are so batshit I had one last week accuse me of being an M$ Ninja for Saying IE was shit and I STILL haven't figured out how insulting a product is supposed to be shilling FOR the product. shows the insane troll logic these types run under I guess. I suppose the only answer you could give he'd approve of was 'ZOMFG Windows eats babies, Linux loves you!" Ya know, I thought when I came up with the FOSSie thing I thought it was just a parody, now? not so sure. they do strike me as more like Moonies than even fanbois.
I don't know whether to laugh or be worried someone so batshit is running loose out there. you can read by that link he is practically foaming by the end of it and total loses it, ignores more than 20 citations i provided backing up my position with the sentence 'You are a fucking liar!" like suddenly i now control PC World.AU, Cnet, oh and 4 of the links were /. articles so apparently I must also sekretly be Taco AND Timothy AND two other guys as well as YOU and myself. Wow i must keep busy, i hope MSFT sends me some $1000 hookers on that invisible money truck that never gets here.
So while like you I don't have proof considering the guy's postings are as easy to spot as a monkey flinging poo on a street corner and it wasn't until i pointed out his bullshit that I got stalked by the "mysterious" die fucker die AC frankly I really don't think it takes Kojak to crack "The Case Of The Batshit FOSSie" Considering it is ALWAYS exactly TWO minutes between one of his rants and the AC "fucking die" posts we can even see that Linux has lousy browser performance from the amount of time it takes him to log off, LOL! Peace bro.
Oh thanks Larry, I so rarely get to use this in a sentence...WHOOSH! Might want to look up one of the movies high in the geeker lexicon "Pirates of Silicon Valley" since that was a word for word quote from one of the most pivotal scenes.
Oh and for that not being true? Go to Youtube and look up "The History of Apple" and watch the gal in charge of PARC demos where she says, and I quote "I made a company head order me and sign off that he had ordered me before i would give Steve and his friends a demo. I KNEW we were giving away the store by letting Steve Jobs look at it, but they just wouldn't listen".
I mean sure he licensed some of the tech for chump change, but that was no different than gates giving the kid that wrote QDOS $50k for his OS knowing he had sold the thing for a mint to IBM. Jobs knew he could slaughter with it, acted like it wasn't a big deal, and helped himself. Even he admitted there was two other revolutionary techs he should have also snatched but in his words 'I was so blown away by the GUI I didn't even see it". Those were of course email and Ethernet networking, both of which PARC had running in 1972.
No but he IS touching on something that we retailers could have told you is one of the biggest reasons for the slowdown in PC sales, and that is for the vast majority PCs are good enough for the jobs they have.
Look at one of the big sellers around here which is backed up by AMD having trouble filling all the orders...brazos. is brazos gonna compete with some Ivy bridge desktop replacement? not a chance in hell. Then why is it selling like crazy? For the same reason i sold my laptop and bought a Brazos EEE PC, and that is the jobs people have on the go aren't that computationally heavy and therefor the battery life and price make a bigger difference. in my own case i'm not transcoding video on the road, i'm accessing my webmail, watching HD movies, listening to music, maybe some light gaming. What in that list needs a monster PC?
I've found with my years of working PC retail that I'd be considered a "hardcore user" compared to most since i have a Deneb quad at home and actually DO play shooters and transcode as well as multitrack audio editing AT HOME but most of my customers, what do THEY do with a PC? they go to Facebook, play Farmville, check their webmail, watch YouTube, maybe do a little MS Word editing or play some game they got off the Walmart "300 games for Windows" rack. Now what there needs a giant CPU? Not a damned thing, in fact even the Brazos chip while running a full Windows 7 HP spends most of its time idle. hell i found playing full HD videos the CPU was barely hitting 15% with the GPU roughly the same depending on the action. Having the decoding in silicon drops the hell out of power usage.
So while the guys that run gamer sites or live for benchmarks will scoff frankly the average user, which outnumbers them by a 100,000 to one (last number on hardcore PC gamers I saw put the number at 30 million) and they won't give a crap that Brazos is 'long in the tooth" or that Thuban isn't king of the hill because "Will you look at that price? And look at how nicely videos play, woo hoo!"
This is why I really wasn't surprised when I walked into my local Walmart, a place that just a couple of years ago you were lucky to find a single Sempron in the back, to find that more than 2/3rds of the units had bright red AMD Fusion stickers. Hell I paid $350 for A Brazos EEE that gets 6 hours watching HD video, plays L4D or TF2, has 320Gb HDD to hold my music and movies, and that is INCLUDING an 8Gb RAM upgrade and a nice carrying case to put it in. Hell if AMD can keep prices THAT low nobody but the niche hardcore users will give a shit.
I know I can't keep the AMD desktops and netbooks in simply because the price is so much lower. For the jobs the average Joe has the AMD platforms are more than "good enough" and even someone like me who thought I'd always lug a 20 pound desktop replacement has found that I don't frankly miss it. 3 pounds, 6 hours 720P HD, light gaming and all for $350? Sold AMD, thanks for taking my money.
Oh please, Win 7 is better on RAM management, better about UAC (and doesn't bug the fuck out of you for something simple like throwing crap in the trash), better because of libraries, better taskbar, better with devices and printers, better by having Action Center that doesn't bug you with pop ups, Aero Snap and Shake, hell its better in just about every way! I ran Vista up to SP1 and frankly it was a turd, buggy, memory hogging, lousy with shares, it sucked the big wet titty and i sure as hell wouldn't use the piggie for VMs!
As for TFA...man this really sucks. i knew AMD was having serious trouble with GloFlo (reports were Liano was getting less than 40% good chips per wafer) but damn. maybe it'll turn out to be a good thing they sold GloFlo in the first place. Of course the MAJOR downside is they are gonna have to compete with all TSMCs other customers and that could seriously hurt yields and couldn't come at a worst time, with Brazos chips selling as fast as they can crank them in everything from netbooks to all in ones to HTPCs.
I just hope they have GloFlo keep cranking out the Thuban and Zacate chips until they can get TSMC up to speed. I'm sure that GloFlo will need the business and AMD sure as hell needs the chips. this would royally suck if we had an AMD chip shortage to go with the HDD shortage...I wonder if i should be upping my timeframe on snatching a Thuban?
Dude you are quoting from Steve Jobs biography for God's sake! You couldn't be any more the definition of fanboi if you made that high pitched squee noise when you see an Apple product! I have seen some pretty damned fanatical Linux and Windows fanbois here but have NEVER seen them quote from Torvalds or Gates biographies! For the love of all that is decent and pure in the world STEP AWAY FROM THE IPAD!
Get real, would ya? You and I are both like guys who had this rich neighbor - Xerox - who left the door open all the time. And you go sneakin' in to steal a TV set. Only when you get there, you realize that I got there first. I got the loot, Steve! And you're yellin'? "That's not fair. I wanted to try to steal it first." You're too late.
I wonder if this means that AMD Air might not be such a dead deal after all? I doubt AMD is gonna suddenly intervene in Sept just out of the goodness of their hearts, especially when Apple is using intel chips. If the ruling is true AMD could royally fuck Apple if they wanted to, S3 texture compression is the basis of a hell of a lot in graphics nowadays. After all those patents are why Linux doesn't have full OpenGL support by default, because while OpenGL is royalty free those patents aren't.
So why would AMD jump in to help Apple, whose never bought a single chip they make? The only reason i can think of is a possible future product using AMD chips. otherwise it would be in their best interests to let Apple get screwed, or at least hit them up for a big fat licensing fee.
Aw geez APK, while I appreciate you trying to point out FOSSie bullshit when you see it, you DO know that crazy guy is gonna follow me around for a month accusing me of being you again, right? hell last month he followed me around for damned near a month posting as AC "die you fat fucker die" over and over again, and when you show up even on the same page as me much less the same thread he REALLY goes off his meds. I mean hell the guy is using half of one of my sentences as his fricking sig, if THAT ain't batshit I don't know what is.
Besides I honestly think the FOSSies won't be worth bothering with much longer. The number of FOSS programmers is tanking, Linux server has dropped 15% in less than 2 years, all the DE breakage has got old time Linux admins I talk to so damned fed up they are switching to Macs, and finally I'm betting Google locks down Android with code signing so that they can secure their appstore and play protected H.264 which they can't do with an open kernel.
So let the crazy FOSSies cook up their "M$ Ninja!" conspiracy stories and leave them to rot. After BSD crapped itself on the last batch of refurbs I personally washed my hands of the whole mess and don't even bother posting on Linux articles anymore, I'm already hunting down somebody who can sell me Win 7 Starter and just calling it a day. FOSS was a nice idea but then like politics the batshit loons took over and made it more about poo flinging and squeeing fangirl crap than about OSes.
Hell they aren't even sane enough to poke fun of anymore, like old Twitter who could cook up great fantasies where Linux conquered the world. Instead you get like what I got last week, where I said IE was a bad joke I don't allow on my systems and was accused of "Sekrectly being an M$ Ninja!" for INSULTING the product! I guess if you don't say windows kills babies or something you must be "one of them". THAT level of batshit ain't even fun to laugh at, its just rather sad and more than a little scary. Peace bro.
Because it cuts out half the letters? Plus it keeps the hardcore FOSSies from foaming at the mouth and screaming "He's an M$ Ninja!" as much if you don't spell it out. If you don't believe me you should look up my posts for last month, where I had a FOSSie for 3 weeks following me just posting "Die fat fucker die" over and over AND over, or the one who accuses me regularly of being either secretly working for Microsoft from the west coast (when I've never even been farther west than OK in my life), or lately he has convinced himself I must be APK, even though Anthony is quite well known at CNet, a Delphi programmer (which I've never even seen Delphi code so would have NO fucking clue there) and has been here far longer than I have, not to mention old APK has a VERY distinct writing style which is nothing like mine..
But you go right ahead and keeping writing Microsoft on posts, and you too will soon be told you are a "sekret M$ Ninja!" hiding in a burrow in Redmond being paid slave wages to post for MSFT, even when the post is INSULTING Microsoft software. I swear to God that happened to me last week, I said IE was a bad joke and was accused of secretly working for MSFT because I didn't say IE kills babies or something, who the hell knows what goes on in the mind of a FOSSie.
Do the OTHER AV companies get to be sued as well? How about Linux, after all companies could be selling AV products if they didn't have that pesky SE thingie!
I just LOVE how for some there is NEVER a right answer for MSFT, except maybe kill themselves on an altar to RMS. First everyone complains about lack of security so what do they do? make the user a user and not an admin, so the software companies complain!
Now here they are trying to make it easy for grandma (and knowing the OEMs will just strip it out for trialware anyway) and what do you do? you com plain that MSFT should be sued if they get a false positive when EVERY AV has gotten false positives in the past!
Frankly you are getting your panties in a knot over nothing friend, as who is ever gonna see this AV? it'll be like Windows Defender, a last resort for someone who has absolutely nothing which will be damned few! the OEMs will put trialware, the system builders like me will put a decent free AV like Avast or Comodo, so the ONLY ones that will see this are ones that bought a retail copy and installed it themselves....seriously how many is that? Single digits? In the big picture this thing isn't even a blip on the radar. BTW you DO know about Windows Defender, right? why aren't you screaming about it as well? After all it keeps spyware companies from making money off of adware, the horror!
BTW its nice to see a FOSSie that can actually ALMOST write like a normal person, but then you had to fuck up and do the whole "M$" thing. Got bit by Voldemort syndrome huh? don't feel bad, Voldemort syndrome is a crippling disease that affects a LOT of FOSSies, just go see Pogson over at LinuxInsider, he has been posting there for FIVE YEARS and has YET to be able to say Microsoft or MSFT or even MS! I hear he starts foaming and screaming "free as in freedom!" if he gets more than one letter in their name written, so don't feel bad.