Do I HONESTLY have to spell out "as reported by Securina based on attacks" when every single link is FOR Securina? There is not reading TFL then there is just being lazy or delusional. How such otherwise normal people can instantly turn into raving squeeing fangirls over something like an OS is frankly beyond me, but if you refuse to believe your lying eyes who am i to argue.
But to quote the great and powerful Chewbacca defense 'it makes NO sense!" If HP DID have such a contract, why not produce it when their stock started to nosedive? showing the world it had old larry by the nuts and was suing him would have caused the stock to CLIMB yes? And if oracle DID sign such a contract why even go into court knowing all HP has to do is produce the contract and that's their ass? it makes NO sense!
The ONLY way i can see this making sense is if HP has NO contract like that with oracle and they are on the hook with supporting itanium. Then lying their asses off and stretching it out in court makes perfect sense as they are trying to keep from getting sued by those people who were sold these supercomputers that aren't gonna be able to run dick when oracle walks away.
If someone else can explain how it makes sense any other way please do, but I've been scratching my noggin over this for the past half hour and it just doesn't add up the other way, at least not for me.
Question: How EXACTLY could the Itanic have been a very nice processor? Because everything i've read about the thing boils down to the entire arch was built so that it required this mythical "super compiler" that could optimize the code much better than even doing it by hand to constantly keep the long pipes fed and Intel didn't bother to actually HAVE such a compiler before shipping and in fact was never able to produce one. this of course was followed by AMD wisely capitalizing on its competitor's mistake and going for X64, thus taking out the last major selling point of Itanic which was the 64 bit registers and memory addresses (without having to use hacks like PAE that is).
So from where i'm sitting it looked like another Netburst, doomed from the start. Even the wiki says "Only a few thousand systems using the original Merced Itanium processor were sold, due to relatively poor performance, high cost and limited software availability." So right out the gate you had a chip that cost too much, delivered too little, and of course by abandoning X86 really didn't have squat to run on it. i honestly don't see how a chip that comes limping out the gate like that could be anything BUT a dead end.
If it would have delivered the performance (Athlon64, Core) or been revolutionary in price per watt or in price period (ARM) then i could agree with you. but at least from where I'm sitting Itanic was Intel's way of trying to get everyone on the planet to throw out their systems and start all over again, while at the same time being able to lock competition in the way of AMD out of the market and it failed. Given that we would be looking most likely at an Intel only world right now if it hadn't i think we should be grateful its toast.
Yes I agree Open office was horrible, but luckily there is this thing known as a "fork" or spoon or something and i hear its getting better. it may not have to go on the cart! Isn't that nice? Although I do think its rather ironic that you are calling One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison a " distributor of obnoxiously terrible software" when he is being sued by HP for NOT distributing said obnoxious terrible software.
Personally i think BOTH companies should be told to fuck right off and quit wasting the courts time. Oracle doesn't want to make software for Itanic because its a fricking dud, its a bomb, its a stinky turd, its Vista. Who can blame them for not wanting to waste money supporting a dead end system with a dwindling customers base?
And if HP wants to throw good money after bad getting Intel to continue work on the Itanic? Well this IS the same company that blew a billion for WebOS only to shitcan the developers and who took a giant bath on Touchpad. Nothing in the law says they can't be complete morons and do as many stupid things as they want with their money, despite that "maximize shareholder value" meme that is pushed everywhere with no actual basis in reality. hell if it were true Jerry Yang and the board of yahoo would be in prison now!
So if this were a sane world the judge would tell HP and oracle to please go fuck right off, or at least make their CEOs duke it out bare knuckle. my money would be on Meg BTW, old Larry has got a bit of a paunch going and I have a feeling Meg would be a biter.
Hell the scary part for me is how many are supposed to be protecting those records don't even follow best practices! My mom was a popular charge nurse at a local hospital so i got to know the IT guy and his crew pretty decently. So a few years back he goes 'Hey you wanna have a ton of machines to strip? Back up the truck" and sure enough he loads 30 or so nice boxes onto my truck. Well i figure I'll get home and find the drives gone but nope, all still there with ALL THE DATA. i thought it was nice he trusted me but more than a little scary too.
I'm also buddies with the apt super who is also the super at a bunch of office complexes in the area. he called me awhile back and said 'If you want a ton of boxes for parts get over here before the garbage man gets 'em" and sure enough the local teleco he supers for had put a mound of nice late P4s and early duals out for scrap. again when I get home with 'em and check ALL the drives are there and the CC data wasn't even encrypted!
I used to be amazed at the stories of some megacorp losing tons of data but frankly I just can't be surprised anymore, it seems like nobody bothers to do even basic due diligence. When I was working corp I got permission to give our old machines to a shelter for abused women but before a single box left my shop I had DOD 7 wiped the drive and installed a clean disc image for the shelter with their programs. the thought of just letting a box go straight from the floor to the back of someone's truck, even someone i knew, would have gave me a heart attack!
Not to mention a big part of this equation has been solved by simply having a good AV and a browser operating in low rights mode like chrome or Dragon. Since switching my users to Dragon with avast I've watched infections drop right off the chart, in fact i can't remember the last time I saw a windows 7 machine infected. Avast scans the page before load (which low rights mode would keep it from doing damage but better to nip it in the bud before low rights mode even gets a chance) and takes care of any files the user downloads, and low rights mode keeps the user safe from drive bys and zero days.
And folks here can bitch all they want but I LOVE backwards compatibility which is why you still have to have admin rights for older programs. many of my customers have older versions of software they require to work like Corel or Quicken/Quickbooks and of course everyone seems to have a few "must have" games or programs they are loathe to let go of. With BC I can get these folks onto a modern OS with ASLR, DEP, sandboxing, low rights mode, etc whereas without having support for those older programs they'd be royally boned and we'd see a hell of a lot more older machines on the net.
I mean can you imagine if XP would have completely killed BC for Win9X? instead of Win9X being dead and gone by 2002 i'd have been seeing that POS in 2007 or 08 most likely, likewise with XP to Win 7. So I don't see how they could add yet another layer (they already do file and registry vritualization in Win 7) without breaking BC completely and forcing many to stay on old versions. We even had an article here showing its less about programs anymore and more about browser exploits and zero days now.
BTW if anyone has the figures on infection based on browser i'd love to see them, as it would be interesting to see how Firefox and opera without low rights mode fare against Chromium based and IE that do. i know all the spam in my spam folder is coming from Firefox users that have Yahoo mail accounts getting bit by that hidden iFrame nasty and I haven't seen a single spam from those i switched to Dragon, but i'd love to see if there are any studies to back up what I've seen or if its just anecdotal.
Uhhh...dude? Missed the memo? ATM there are more unpatched holes for Linux than there is Windows. Can't blame you as I didn't know that either, the only way i found out was some Linux guy started ragging old APK about his HOSTS file and he laid the links on him. I copied a couple of them, here if you want to check them out yourself..
Onetwothree. i'm actually sorry i didn't think to copy the rest, he has several i had never heard of and i thought I stayed on top of such things. the only ones he had i knew about was Kernel.org getting hacked and this one where MYSQL was hacked and serving malware which i don't know how you can call that anything but typical zombie behavior.
Does that make Linux bad? nope it just makes it a complex OS with millions of lines of code. i bet my last dollar even old Torvalds himself can't tell you what every program in your typical Linux distro is doing, or even what every piece of code in the guts of the OS is calling. OSes are incredibly complex SMP aware sprawling amounts of code with tons of third party piled on top. but to sit here and say 'Linux is immune!" is as delusional as those guys that swore up and down "Macs don't get malware!" and then jumped up and down trying to argue that the definition doesn't include DNSChanger or MacDefender.
TLDR? Everyone gets pwned, Linux gets pwned a lot too. They ALL do.
Which was my point which is we have this great technological advance, the media tank, that simply can't exist without piracy because there is NO legal way of actually getting content to put on the thing! Its like that XKCD where every road you chose always ended up with piracy simply because there wasn't a legal solution. For those like my dad who have trouble keeping up with discs, have limited room to store them and VERY limited patience with hunting for his media the Nbox is a Godsend. since i got him one i must have sold 20 units and taught those folks how to rip their DVDs because they are all like "Hey you that boy that got Larry that TV thing? Can you get ME one too? how much?"
And if you have kids? oh man are those things like manna from heaven! I probably sold another 20 after one of the guys I sold one to got a second unit for his kids and went on and on to everyone that would listen how wonderful it was. no more kids crying because their favorite Dora disc got scratched, or hunting for a movie they really want to see, he simply placed the unit high enough the kids couldn't pull it down and the remote is simple enough even the 6 year old runs the Nbox for "the babies" as she calls her little sisters. i saw it with my own two eyes, her dad handed her the remote and in seconds she was whizzing through the thumbnails until she found the movie and fired it up.
So its stupid, stupid pointless and holding back technology by forcing everyone to be a pirate simply because you can't legally have content on modern devices unless you pirate. I probably sell more HTPCs and media tanks than i do office boxes right now, simply because everyone loves the convenience. you get an nbox for the kiddies, put the HTPC in the living room with all your media loaded onto it and a WDTV in the bedroom to stream off the HTPC and you have a completely wireless home system that lets you do anything and watch anywhere. it really is brilliant but I have to wonder how much farther we'd be without the MPAA tying a boat anchor to progress. I'm just glad the device manufacturers like nbox and WD are just doing like everyone else and ignoring copyrights, otherwise we'd be stuck on swapping discs for another 30 years.
Which is why I mentioned the Steam SALE. I have NEVER bought a game on steam that wasn't part of one of their sales, any other time is pointless! But is you have Steam and subscribe to GOG emails frankly you should never run out of cheap gaming goodness just by loading up when its cheap. at the rate i'm going it'll take me a good 3 months if I did NOTHING every evening but play games just to go through what i already have from Steam and GOG.
I have something like 16 games on Steam (only started Steam about 6 months ago) and over 40 on GOG and out of those there are a good 7 that I have barely played on Steam and a good 20 I've not gotten around to on GOG.
So if you plan it right, and load up when they have the crazy sales, frankly you shouldn't need to pay full price ever unless you are one of those that plays "Call of Warfare Modern duty" for the MP, which of course is only really playable if you get in in the first couple of weeks. Lucky for me the boys both want Steam games for XMas so i'm just gonna sit on the money and when the crazy Xmas sale hits me and them are gonna go nuts and load up. By the time the spring sale comes around if I'm lucky I'll have MAYBE gone through 60% of what i get for Xmas. Having too many games? Is a problem I can live with, load that 3tb up baby yeah!
Exactly. I can get 8Gb DVD DL for 40c a disc in bulk so for anything smaller I need to archive like software downloads it is MUCH cheaper than BD, and for the things I'd want the larger storage space for such as OS backups and VMs BD simply doesn't give you enough space for the price. its a lose/lose for BD as far as I'm concerned, not to mention the cheapest burners i've seen are nearly $100 a piece and frankly the BD ROMs really aren't that much better so to change out my two main machines along with at least one of my families machines so I can share data I'd be looking at $300+. finally with DVD I can hand one off to ANY customer and be pretty damned sure thye will have NO trouble reading it. I haven't seen anything but netbooks in the past 5 years that didn't come with at least a DVDROM/CDRW, most having full burners. hell DVDs burners are $17 a pop on newegg now so if one dies? who fricking cares.
What we need is those holodiscs they have been promising us for years, 200gb to 500Gb a pop at $1 to $3 a disc. slap one of these on the PCIe bus and you'd have excellent long term archival backup and i could load my 60Gb music folder, all the raw WAV tracks I've been working on, my videos, anything I'd want to store long term in a form factor and price point that would be perfect for the job. IF BD would have came in 04 and they had gotten the drive costs down to sub $50 then it could have maybe replaced DVD, but now? I still say its a dead end.
But you seem to be missing the fundamental problem mcgrew, which is this: How do you protect the user from themselves without forcing them into an Apple style walled garden where nothing that isn't corporate approved is allowed to run? Because if given the choice i'll take dealing with AV over a walled garden, thanks ever so.
As a guy that builds and fixes Windows every damned day I can tell you EXACTLY where the bugs are coming from, and the vast majority? INSTALLED BY THE USER. Do you think Linux would be safe from a user that would happily run anything they got from an email, complete with putting in their password and chmodding whatever the attacker told them to? of course not. here is the list of the most popular bugs i've seen this month along with the way they got in. you tell me where MSFT could have stopped any of them.
1.-Security tool and AV 20xx variants. These get in with a classic social engineering "ZOMG U Got Teh Viruz! Run "Is_Not_Viruz_iz_Cleanerz.exe" to kill the viruz ZOMG!" 2.- Porn codec malware. Infection source? Horny users. Uses this trick "U want teh hot lezbo teenz? We GOT teh hot lezbo teen right now! Just run "Iz_not_viruz_Iz_codec.exe' to see teh hot lezbo teenz right now!" 3.- social site malware. Infection source? again social engineering "Hey its me! I found this great new site! Just click here to load "Iz_Not_Malware_Site_Iz_cool.html" right now!"
Now in NOT A SINGLE CASE were they exploiting anything but the USER and any of these attacks could just as easily work on Mac (DNSChanger and MacDefender) or Linux (KDELook malware and infected Q3 game) by simply getting the user to go where the attacker wanted or run what the attacker wanted run. Now does this mean MSFT hasn't done dumbshit? Oh Lord No! Whomever thought XP should run as admin by default should have been publicly flogged! and IE 6 was an abomination that has made me hate IE so much to this day I refuse to allow it on a single machine I touch! I toss the links and give them both Firefox and Comodo Dragon with ABP and tell them to stay the fuck away from IE!
But XP is two and soon to be 3 versions out of date so no point in even bringing it up, hell if it weren't for contracts with corps and government they would have already taken it out back and put it down. And since Vista MSFT has been pretty damned good about using best practices, running the users without being admins, DEP and ASLR, having low rights mode (Which neither Linux nor Mac have yet) so that drivebys are that much harder to accomplish...but in the end it all comes down to freedom. If you allow the user control over their own machine that means they have the power to fuck it up, full stop. the ONLY way I've seen that could possibly remove that vector is walled gardens and personally i don't think the loss of freedom is worth the security that an app store brings, do you?
That really isn't the purpose of AV in my exp, in my exp it is great for two specific purposes. 1.- for zero day attacks that the vendor hasn't put out a patch for, Avast and Comodo are both excellent at stopping this kind of attack by monitoring pages and scan before loading to ensure nothing gets through the browser into the system. 2.-PEBKAC where you have a click happy user that simply won't or can't learn more than the most basic of things. in the case of PEBKAC the AV will often stop the user up to a point from infecting him/herself. In fact in the past 5 years I have seen exactly ONE customer whom I set up the machine for get infected and that is because the braintrust DISABLED THE AV when it wouldn't let him install "the new limewire' which is nothing but a bunch of malware wrapped around a Gnucleus client.
But there is NO OS that is secure, a modern OS is literally millions of lines of code with millions of lines of third party code piled on top. It simply isn't possible to lock that down completely, and I could provide links of Windows, Mac AND Linux getting pwned repeatedly. In the end the OS manufacturer does the best it possibly can and then it is up to the user and the software they run. i've found AV to be a good part of "defense in depth" along with sandboxing and new hardware features like ASLR and DEP.
As for TFA? As long as I can easily uninstall the crap i'm fine with it personally. MSFT SE (which is actually Giant Antispy which MSFT bought a few years back) is quiet and low resource...and crap. I've set up refurbs I was gonna wipe anyway with one running Comodo, one running Avast, and one running MSFT SE and frankly the SE got pwned HARD. It was great at blocking bugs that were downloaded like the PEBKAC new limewire above but frankly it was absolute shite on a crusty roll at stopping browser based drivebys. on pages where both Comodo and Avast caught the bug MSFT didn't even blink and happily let it load. It should be great for grandma that only checks her email and goes on FB, but personally i'd toss it for Avast or Comodo at first opportunity.
Well I'll join ya eldavojohn because i too love old Bob, he is just a hoot! And just to ensure the mods get their big girl panties in a knot, ya know who else I REALLY miss? I miss twitter dammit!
He wasn't like the boring FOSSies* we have now on Slashdot, that simply call everyone an "M$ Ninja dirty poo poo head" while screaming about some batshit crazy scenario that might actually get Linux up to 2%, nope old Twitter could take ANY story, about the most boring and unrelated bullshit, and weave such a wondrously convoluted tale that ALWAYS ended up with it being Gates in a secret lair plotting with the Illuminati to take out RMS and kill FOSS. Man I miss that, the man was truly an artist and ahead of his time. the FOSSies we have now is but a sad imitation, an Elvis impersonator compared to The King.
*.-Since there seems to be some confusion over the word FOSSie allow me to clear that confusion up. Do you like CLI and accept that Linux is a geek heavy OS? Do you like things the way they are and accept in its current form linux won't be taking out OSX and Windows? Do you use Linux because you like tinkering and frankly don't give a crap if it stays at 1%? you do? Congratulations you sir are NOT a FOSSie. A FOSSie believes he is surrounded by the enemy, that ALL that do not slurp the koolaid are "M$ Ninjas!" and must be on the "M$" which they must use because of "Voldemort syndrome" and see everyone else as being paid off by MSFT even when they are insulting MSFT products. to a FOSSie you are one of THEM unless your ONLY response to FOSS is "Gee Bob, isn't (insert FOSS product) perfect in EVERY way? why it sure is skip, its doubleplusgood, and RMS farts cure global warming!". all stats showing linux at 1% are lies, there is millions of "sekret installs" hiding from the prying all seeing eye of Sauron...err Redmond, and if the world wasn't being literally held hostage, with OEMs wetting themselves from the hitmen sent by M$ to FORCE their product onto the masses, why even grandma would be writing bash scripts and little Suzy would be reading C programming guides in the bathtub.
This makes FOSSies quite easy to spot because they are as obvious as those guys foaming at the mouth while screaming about the end of the world on a street corner. for examples please watch this post as i'm sure several FOSSies will have to post since i pointed out they are batshit, and one thing someone who is batshit can NOT tolerate is a mirror being held up, but nearly all will post AC because they've already killed their karma. To FOSS users I have nothing but love, FOSSies? I fart in your general direction, be gone or I shall taunt you some more!
And +1000 to dr Bob, keep up the artistic crazy sir, you are sadly one of the few truly great nutters we have left. old Mikey 400+ accounts called it when he said "Slashdot = stagnated". No wonder taco bailed.
Riiight, because I point out IE is a fucking joke suddenly I'm WORKING for MSFT? Are you fucking stoned, or has sucking the FOSSie koolaid rotted your brain? what kind of company would be so god damned dumb as to pay people to INSULT their fucking products?
It just proves what i've been saying for years, FOSSies have such a hard on for hating MSFT that even when someone insults them if they don't blow RMS while they are at it they must be a "M$ Ninja dirty poo poo head". You freetards are just too fucking much. I have to agree with the others and the sites making fun of your kind, there is no point talking to freetards like they are people, they are nutballs just like fucking moonies.
I don't know, to me its kinda sad as he makes the whole profession look like crazies when for certain things like back injuries real chiropractic care CAN help. I was left in pretty constant pain after a car wreck (thanks to an off duty cop LOOKING BEHIND HIM while driving 60MPH looking for a fire he had heard on his scanner. Even though I went into the ditch trying to avoid this asshole and he STILL hit me his cop buddies got together and wrote it up as no fault) and thought I'd just have to suffer the rest of my days but I got lucky that a customer turned out to be a chiropractor and in less than 30 minutes my back felt like new (hurt like hell when he did it though) and I haven't had a backache in the nearly 12 years since.
As for TFA let us all hope DARPA can buy our way out of the mess the corps have gotten us in because as Citizens united made clear corps are better people than you are and there is no way in hell they'll give the massive profits they make by stuffing the animals full of antibiotics up.
Between that and the fact that the sewers end up pumping tons of drugs into our rivers, antibiotics, painkillers, hormones, etc we are or borrowed time here. the fish absorb the drugs, the animals and us absorb the fish, and of course bugs become immune in the process. not good folks, not good.
Well let us say, just for the sake of argument (and remember these were provided by OEMs trying to get lower prices and refuse upgrades of 7 from XP on netbooks, not to mention I can get pro and will be getting 2 copies for Xmas at $39 student discount and I kinda doubt students buying a single copy get a better deal than someone buying 100,000 copies, don't you?) that you data is correct. Now that is talking about Home Premium for $50, which would make starter at around $25. Now considering on last count the average netbooks has nearly FOURTY pieces of trialware installed (just look how many programs are listed under DeCrappifier if you wish for a citation since the OEMs refuse to publish numbers) you are looking at MOST windows costing $15-$30 after the trialware payback is figured in.
Now lets look at just ONE OEM has to pay for Ubuntu. they have to run their own servers, not cheap, they have to hire a team of developers to roll their own version of Ubuntu, what do a developer with experience in rolling their own distros and writing drivers go for? $100,000 a piece? probably need a dozen to run a distro at minimum, and then you have the returns which of course can't be sold as new and as HP admitted when they were looking to sell at an average of $8 profit per unit it really doesn't take but a handful of returns to equal a giant loss. And when we are talking 400% return rates it isn't hard to figure out which OS isn't worth the effort.
This is why ASUS, the ones who created the whole Linux netbook idea, quit carrying Linux, why Windows slaughtered Linux on netbooks where if Windows pricing made a difference anywhere THAT would be the market, yet the ALL abandoned Linux completely.
It is just simple common sense. Ask yourself just ONE single question...If Linux is so great and could save OEMs money then why aren't ANY of them using it? dell hides a handful of Ubuntu machines in the back, basically to get one more checkbox on their bulletpoint list, and the rest don't do even that, why? do you HONESTLY think it is some fast conspiracy to keep your miracle free OS away from the masses? Why isn't any of the little shops like mine using it to undercut competitors?
Because the sad and nasty truth that NO amount of mod points can EVER erase, nor can that one FOSSie going around claiming everyone that doesn't kiss Linus' booty MUST be APK ever change, is this simple truth, which is Linux is free only if your time is worthless and for the OEM frankly MSFT could double their prices and they STILL won't take your OS, because in the end it would cost MORE money. more money to fix broken drivers, more money to deal with the complaints, more money to run their own repos because the default one breaks more than it fixes.
here is a nice article I found several years ago and I hope that you read it. it is a perfect explanation, better than i could EVER write, of why Linux isn't going anywhere. But instead of addressing the problems outlined the "community" will just fling insults like monkeys flinging poo and proclaim their superiority. well I suppose being the biggest failure is still being the biggest at SOMETHING, not sure if I'd brag about it though.
And yet again multiple sources ask for citation and all you can do is fling shit like a monkey. Tell me something, how does it feel to be in absolute last place with NO hope of ever getting better? Is it one of those sad stories, where with no friends you turn to something that is unpopular like you are in the hope you'll have something in common? is it that you simply have nothing better to do on weekends besides read man pages so knowing how to "kinda sorta" copypasta makes you have a warm fuzzy feeling? does using a loser in the market somehow justify your own loser state? please tell i bet its an interesting story, probably involves bullying and child abuse. BTW enjoy some failure, just to make you feel at home.
Isn't it sad, how like a frightened child afraid to look under the bed, you cower at the truth? if your driver model isn't shit then why does Dell have to run their own repos even though we are talking a teeny tiny subset of hardware? Oh right because Linux shits itself and dies if you use the default repos! Man that is some excellent product you got there! you think I can get better QA than the third largest OEM on the planet? What, you expect me to tell paying customers "Go to the forum, kiss some loser ass, and maybe, just maybe, in a few days someone will have mercy and give you a big pile of bullshit that may or may not make your sound work again"?
You see you whiny little delusional mama's boy, I'm your worst fucking nightmare...a retailer that still believes. I believe that the community doesn't have to take Torvalds shit sandwiches, I believe that things can be made better, I believe Linux can be something for more than douchebags like you that will happily take a cock slapping from linus as long as you can say you are sticking to "teh man". I believe that there can be Linux boxes on actual shelves and penguins on boxes.
So you go hide now mama's boy, you hide with your Tux blankie and keep saying your magical nigger nigger faggot, or should I say shill shill astroturfer, like it is a magical word that will make all the bad go away. But it won't change reality and the reality is your driver model is shit and more than 15 years behind everyone else and that is why retailers like me wouldn't piss on it, not some mythical money truck that sneaks up to my door in the middle of the night. So go compile something and leave the men to talk about the real world, okay little girl?
Probably more likely Intel offered some of their famous kickbacks since this was before they got caught. Jobs was always a shrewd business man and if he got Intel chips 40% cheaper thanks to a little under the table kickback from Intel I doubt he'd pass it up. Hell everyone else did it, Dell, Gateway, eMachines, why not Apple?
In the end this just supports something I've been saying for years, which is for the vast majority CPUs are long past good enough and getting into extreme overkill. I've got tons of customers on duals and triples and frankly until the machines physically die i just can't seeing them needing replacements, which is why after years of the MHz wars CPU sales have declined. I mean what are they doing that is gonna need more power? Where is the "killer app" when even Windows 7 runs just fine on a 2005 era CPU? Hell even my kids that game constantly when asked if they'd like me to replace their dual cores with something more powerful were like "Uh why bother? all our games play nice, it all is working great, if it ain't broke don't fix it".
The only ones I've seen that need cutting edge anymore are those that are doing heavy jobs like transcoding or video editing and those aren't the kinds of things one does on a laptop whose selling point is who thin it is. So I'd love to see the books, i bet Apple's BOM went down after having a little talk with Intel.
And who said we were taking it away? it is ultimately the USER that chooses what to download, and working in a PC shop i can tell you they are NOT downloading the stuff the local guys put out, but the latest Titney Spears and other corporate crap. Which was my WHOLE POINT. The indie guys were doing alright when the *.A.A only the record producers, they are doing even better now, they frankly don't need 200 year copyrights to make a living. its the leeches that haven't made anything but assraping contracts that need endless copyrights and the ONLY way to stop them now thanks to Citizens united is to bleed them dry. look at the petitions that ended up devolving into "please stop ignoring and lying to us" because those in power have made it clear they really don't give a fuck WHAT you think, you aren't bribing them.
As for the idea, enjoy. Its cheap, its fun, anybody can do it with little effort, and it really helps to build a long term fanbase. hell its even fun for the bands, I quite enjoyed picking up a Squire or some Itsabatsabuchi bass I had bought only an hour or two before and seeing what kinds of cool tones i could get out of it in a live situation. I have a Zoom bass pedal that has some really wicked tones and i'd fire that up and go Cliff Burton crazy with the thing as well as play a few of our set tunes with it and the crowd really loved it. if you have a little time before the show you can even dress it up, I used stickers and temp tattoos and glitter fingernail polish to customize anything that I was gonna play, and Brad usually kept 50s pinup stickers he'd buy in Memphis for the guitars he was gonna give away.
I still have a white Washburn with 50s pinups that I just couldn't part with, its this early 80s kinda a cross between a P-Bass and a Peavey T80 that gets some THICK ass tones and has a great neck, that night I just substituted a cheesy Kramer bass I had to beat on and kept the Washburn. Every time i play it live it never fails somebody tries to buy it off me, just because it looks so unique with those 50s pinups and glitter polish everywhere. So you never know, you may find you a sweetheart while building a fanbase, its a win/win!
It IS free as the cost of Win 7 HP has been published several times, it is $15 a copy. Now the reason ALL the home machines are loaded up with trialware is they get PAID to put in the trialware. Now if you wish to stick your head in the sand and go "la la la free as in beer" that is your choice but it isn't exactly a secret that Win 7 starter is $8 a copy and HP is $15, which is why the OEMs are only obligated to give you that amount back and not the retail price if you refuse the license.
Oh and 2011 called, it wants you to pull your head out your ass and smell the shit your shoveling. Do you REALLY want me to provide citations? Because I can you know. i can literally wallpaper the whole page with link after link after link of failure on the part of Linux. failure with drivers, massive returns, security issues, hell I could probably come up with 60 links in under 20 minutes if you'd like. Would you like that? just ask. of course last time I did that all I got was "TL:DR" which is of course the communities way of going "la la la free is in freedom!"
So if you want citations by all means just ask, i'll be happy to give you a solid page of links, all saying the same thing I've been saying, that Linux doesn't work. it doesn't work for consumers, don't work in retail, its numbers have been DECREASING in servers, from a high of 36% down to just 22% last numbers I saw, I'd be happy to post them for you if you'd like. But don't worry you can go back to patting yourselves on the back for a job not done, but don't complain when all the hardware manufacturers won't give you drivers and Windows locks you out with secureboot, because it will be your own fault.
In other words you have nothing but your fanboi bullshit and trolling but fear not because Penny Arcade even made a strip about you. Like your uniform BTW. Now go compile something while the men have a conversation, kay?
As for TFA it makes sense, they want to get some of Nintendo's casual gaming customers to go with their Call Of Warfare Modern Duty ones so hiring some guys that have cool ideas to expand the product line simply makes good business sense. Perhaps you could even use this device to help the handicapped, like using someone's limited range of motion to allow them to type or surf, and of course as we saw with Wii Fit there is a good market for those that want to get in shape. If MSFT wants the Kinect to succeed the best way to do it is to make sure it has a ton of uses and it sounds like that is what they are trying to do with TFA.
Actually as a builder I can tell you why this happened, as we builders have been spreading the word to each other at all the places we hang out. you see when Seagate bought Maxtor they got Maxtor's ultra cheap ass ARM source and that has been a disaster. like Nvidia with bumpgate Seagate refuses to admit the problem and instead has pushed out firmware that slows the drives down enough the drive can survive warranty before going tits up but Seagate won't be safe to use on anything above 500Gb (below that they are using Seagate ARM controllers, above that Maxtor) for a year to two years until the shit product gets out the channel.
I know they are high since the flood but if you need a large drive your best bests are Samsung and Hitachi drives. all of their 1Tb or better drives left in the channel are from their last 3 batches before selling out and I can tell you from my own exp and that of my fellow builders they are excellent batches. I have put EcoDrives as OS drives because the fat cache and lower heat makes for excellent boot drives, and both the Samsung and Hitachi drives I've put in hellish situations like construction trailers and they take hellish abuse and keep on purring. I was impressed enough with the Samsung EcoDrives that I have 3Tb running in my own machine, yanking my failing Seagates (surprise) and replacing them with a 1Tb EcoDrive for boot and a 2tb for data. my benches went up by 40%, even though the Seagate was 7200RPM VS 5400RPM for the Samsung, but again that is most likely due to firmware crippling trying to get the Seagate drives to survive past warranty.
Sorry you had that happen to you but if you'd have hung around NewEgg and Tiger and read the reviews you'd see we are all avoiding Seagate like the clap because of how much we've been burned. it is like the great Maxtor shitpile in 04 where every other drive was DOA and the ones that worked often wouldn't last a year. the new Seagates are just absolute garbage as you sadly found out the hard way. get Samsung or Hitachi while they last, and after those are gone the WD Caviar series.
Actually I hate to burst your bubble (and notice how I got modded down for showing the true numbers? Apparently some here don't like looking in the mirror none) but here is a little secret most don't know: Windows HP is free to OEMs so your bragging about being "free as in beer"? really pointless as is the GP. you see there is this thing called "trialware" that the OEMs are PAID to install, the cost of Windows minus this trialware on Windows HP comes out to a NEGATIVE number, therefor Windows? Costs nothing.
Here is another little dirty secret nobody wants to mention. Try looking up the "profits" for the Dell ubuntu division, you won't find the numbers anywhere, why? its actually simple its because with all the money they have to spend making ubuntu work they are in the red and if anyone thought about it they'd see why. Not only do they lose the trialware which as I pointed out for home users actually makes them money or allows them to lower the cost per unit, but with ubuntu they have to hire their own dev team AND run their own repo, because if they don't then this happens.
But please, waste your mod points and go back to standing in a circle patting yourselves on the back for what a "success" your 1.7 percent is, I'm sure MSFT and Apple are both grateful for it. You allow them to split the market and rake in massive profits, hell i'm surprised they don't send the Linux community a big old cake as a thanks. i'm sure it would be moist and delicious. But no matter how you stomp your feet or act like this guy black does not equal white, up does not equal down, and straw does not equal gold. It has been twenty damned years and you are LITERALLY lower than the margin for error in most polls. Do you really only want to be a hobbyist OS? We retailers have been begging for changes that would make it useful for the masses and instead we find a community full of shit flinging "Go back to windblowz LOL" trolls. Why do you think we ignore you? It is because YOU DO NOT LISTEN. If you ignore the train barreling down the track you deserve to get hit, try not to make a mess when that iShiny coming down the tracks followed by the 4 o'clock WinTrain runs your ass down, okay?
You want copyright? I can solve that question in a single sentence, ready? here goes : Steamboat Willie is STILL under copyright! The man has been dead longer than many here have been alive and one of his FIRST works, written when planes were made of cloth and antibiotics were but a dream is STILL under copyright. if that doesn't prove the system is completely broken and doesn't do what the constitution mandated by promoting the public good by giving ARTIST, not leeches, a limited time to profit from teir works I don't know what does.
Watch how quick honesty gets hatred Mr AC! I frankly wouldn't call EITHER Linux nor BSD a "success" when you are looking at numbers like these. hell if these numbers were from a company after TWENTY years of trying they'd be Chap 11 by now. No what Linux need extremely badly is a LEADER, someone with real vision and drive that will say "Ya know what? this is unacceptable. i'm not gonna accept 2%, hell I'm not gonna accept 5%. I'm not gonna quit until Ballmer and Cook are sitting at their desks looking at the numbers and thinking to themselves "WTF is this shit? How did THAT happen?" and Linux machines are in every damned store on the planet making both nervous as hell".
Like it or not there was a reason why guys like Gates, Jobs, and Ellison ended up on the top of the heap, and that was because they simply wouldn't settle. They would have never accepted numbers that low and then had articles written about their "success' they would have considered it a personal insult, found out what the competitors were doing to beat them, and then came out with something better and stomped the shit out of them.
As a retailer i'd love to see that day happen, i remember when there was a half a dozen different OSes and nearly as many CPUs to run them on, but that day will never get here if you continue on this path. Take that link and put in ANY date you want, you'll see the numbers are damned near flatline. Expecting the world to change and suddenly want to become geeker heavy and learn all about how the guts work just ain't gonna happen, see the iShiny or win 7 which your average 6 year old would probably have no problem running.
The way I see it there is really only two choices here, change or don't change. if you change and embrace consumers and give them what they want? You might seriously have a shot. you run faster on lower powered hardware, you don't force the user to get a new machine just to run the latest version and nobody else will be able to go lower even if you charged $5 for the OS it would still undercut anything MSFT has.
If you don't want to change that is your choice, then you'll just have to settle for a maximum of low single digits and the fact the vast majority of the planet is gonna ignore you. the OEMs, the retailers, and the users will all pretty much not care that you exist at all. but you can't eat your cake and have it too, because after 20 years the numbers clearly show you will never get the world to do things "your way" or act like you want them to. Business 101 give the customer something they want to buy and the numbers clearly show Linux hasn't done that, so I don't see how anybody can call less than 2% success. That is including the BSDs and other OSes BTW.
Slashdot Mirror
Do I HONESTLY have to spell out "as reported by Securina based on attacks" when every single link is FOR Securina? There is not reading TFL then there is just being lazy or delusional. How such otherwise normal people can instantly turn into raving squeeing fangirls over something like an OS is frankly beyond me, but if you refuse to believe your lying eyes who am i to argue.
But to quote the great and powerful Chewbacca defense 'it makes NO sense!" If HP DID have such a contract, why not produce it when their stock started to nosedive? showing the world it had old larry by the nuts and was suing him would have caused the stock to CLIMB yes? And if oracle DID sign such a contract why even go into court knowing all HP has to do is produce the contract and that's their ass? it makes NO sense!
The ONLY way i can see this making sense is if HP has NO contract like that with oracle and they are on the hook with supporting itanium. Then lying their asses off and stretching it out in court makes perfect sense as they are trying to keep from getting sued by those people who were sold these supercomputers that aren't gonna be able to run dick when oracle walks away.
If someone else can explain how it makes sense any other way please do, but I've been scratching my noggin over this for the past half hour and it just doesn't add up the other way, at least not for me.
Question: How EXACTLY could the Itanic have been a very nice processor? Because everything i've read about the thing boils down to the entire arch was built so that it required this mythical "super compiler" that could optimize the code much better than even doing it by hand to constantly keep the long pipes fed and Intel didn't bother to actually HAVE such a compiler before shipping and in fact was never able to produce one. this of course was followed by AMD wisely capitalizing on its competitor's mistake and going for X64, thus taking out the last major selling point of Itanic which was the 64 bit registers and memory addresses (without having to use hacks like PAE that is).
So from where i'm sitting it looked like another Netburst, doomed from the start. Even the wiki says "Only a few thousand systems using the original Merced Itanium processor were sold, due to relatively poor performance, high cost and limited software availability." So right out the gate you had a chip that cost too much, delivered too little, and of course by abandoning X86 really didn't have squat to run on it. i honestly don't see how a chip that comes limping out the gate like that could be anything BUT a dead end.
If it would have delivered the performance (Athlon64, Core) or been revolutionary in price per watt or in price period (ARM) then i could agree with you. but at least from where I'm sitting Itanic was Intel's way of trying to get everyone on the planet to throw out their systems and start all over again, while at the same time being able to lock competition in the way of AMD out of the market and it failed. Given that we would be looking most likely at an Intel only world right now if it hadn't i think we should be grateful its toast.
Yes I agree Open office was horrible, but luckily there is this thing known as a "fork" or spoon or something and i hear its getting better. it may not have to go on the cart! Isn't that nice? Although I do think its rather ironic that you are calling One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison a " distributor of obnoxiously terrible software" when he is being sued by HP for NOT distributing said obnoxious terrible software.
Personally i think BOTH companies should be told to fuck right off and quit wasting the courts time. Oracle doesn't want to make software for Itanic because its a fricking dud, its a bomb, its a stinky turd, its Vista. Who can blame them for not wanting to waste money supporting a dead end system with a dwindling customers base?
And if HP wants to throw good money after bad getting Intel to continue work on the Itanic? Well this IS the same company that blew a billion for WebOS only to shitcan the developers and who took a giant bath on Touchpad. Nothing in the law says they can't be complete morons and do as many stupid things as they want with their money, despite that "maximize shareholder value" meme that is pushed everywhere with no actual basis in reality. hell if it were true Jerry Yang and the board of yahoo would be in prison now!
So if this were a sane world the judge would tell HP and oracle to please go fuck right off, or at least make their CEOs duke it out bare knuckle. my money would be on Meg BTW, old Larry has got a bit of a paunch going and I have a feeling Meg would be a biter.
Hell the scary part for me is how many are supposed to be protecting those records don't even follow best practices! My mom was a popular charge nurse at a local hospital so i got to know the IT guy and his crew pretty decently. So a few years back he goes 'Hey you wanna have a ton of machines to strip? Back up the truck" and sure enough he loads 30 or so nice boxes onto my truck. Well i figure I'll get home and find the drives gone but nope, all still there with ALL THE DATA. i thought it was nice he trusted me but more than a little scary too.
I'm also buddies with the apt super who is also the super at a bunch of office complexes in the area. he called me awhile back and said 'If you want a ton of boxes for parts get over here before the garbage man gets 'em" and sure enough the local teleco he supers for had put a mound of nice late P4s and early duals out for scrap. again when I get home with 'em and check ALL the drives are there and the CC data wasn't even encrypted!
I used to be amazed at the stories of some megacorp losing tons of data but frankly I just can't be surprised anymore, it seems like nobody bothers to do even basic due diligence. When I was working corp I got permission to give our old machines to a shelter for abused women but before a single box left my shop I had DOD 7 wiped the drive and installed a clean disc image for the shelter with their programs. the thought of just letting a box go straight from the floor to the back of someone's truck, even someone i knew, would have gave me a heart attack!
Not to mention a big part of this equation has been solved by simply having a good AV and a browser operating in low rights mode like chrome or Dragon. Since switching my users to Dragon with avast I've watched infections drop right off the chart, in fact i can't remember the last time I saw a windows 7 machine infected. Avast scans the page before load (which low rights mode would keep it from doing damage but better to nip it in the bud before low rights mode even gets a chance) and takes care of any files the user downloads, and low rights mode keeps the user safe from drive bys and zero days.
And folks here can bitch all they want but I LOVE backwards compatibility which is why you still have to have admin rights for older programs. many of my customers have older versions of software they require to work like Corel or Quicken/Quickbooks and of course everyone seems to have a few "must have" games or programs they are loathe to let go of. With BC I can get these folks onto a modern OS with ASLR, DEP, sandboxing, low rights mode, etc whereas without having support for those older programs they'd be royally boned and we'd see a hell of a lot more older machines on the net.
I mean can you imagine if XP would have completely killed BC for Win9X? instead of Win9X being dead and gone by 2002 i'd have been seeing that POS in 2007 or 08 most likely, likewise with XP to Win 7. So I don't see how they could add yet another layer (they already do file and registry vritualization in Win 7) without breaking BC completely and forcing many to stay on old versions. We even had an article here showing its less about programs anymore and more about browser exploits and zero days now.
BTW if anyone has the figures on infection based on browser i'd love to see them, as it would be interesting to see how Firefox and opera without low rights mode fare against Chromium based and IE that do. i know all the spam in my spam folder is coming from Firefox users that have Yahoo mail accounts getting bit by that hidden iFrame nasty and I haven't seen a single spam from those i switched to Dragon, but i'd love to see if there are any studies to back up what I've seen or if its just anecdotal.
Uhhh...dude? Missed the memo? ATM there are more unpatched holes for Linux than there is Windows. Can't blame you as I didn't know that either, the only way i found out was some Linux guy started ragging old APK about his HOSTS file and he laid the links on him. I copied a couple of them, here if you want to check them out yourself..
One two three. i'm actually sorry i didn't think to copy the rest, he has several i had never heard of and i thought I stayed on top of such things. the only ones he had i knew about was Kernel.org getting hacked and this one where MYSQL was hacked and serving malware which i don't know how you can call that anything but typical zombie behavior.
Does that make Linux bad? nope it just makes it a complex OS with millions of lines of code. i bet my last dollar even old Torvalds himself can't tell you what every program in your typical Linux distro is doing, or even what every piece of code in the guts of the OS is calling. OSes are incredibly complex SMP aware sprawling amounts of code with tons of third party piled on top. but to sit here and say 'Linux is immune!" is as delusional as those guys that swore up and down "Macs don't get malware!" and then jumped up and down trying to argue that the definition doesn't include DNSChanger or MacDefender.
TLDR? Everyone gets pwned, Linux gets pwned a lot too. They ALL do.
Which was my point which is we have this great technological advance, the media tank, that simply can't exist without piracy because there is NO legal way of actually getting content to put on the thing! Its like that XKCD where every road you chose always ended up with piracy simply because there wasn't a legal solution. For those like my dad who have trouble keeping up with discs, have limited room to store them and VERY limited patience with hunting for his media the Nbox is a Godsend. since i got him one i must have sold 20 units and taught those folks how to rip their DVDs because they are all like "Hey you that boy that got Larry that TV thing? Can you get ME one too? how much?"
And if you have kids? oh man are those things like manna from heaven! I probably sold another 20 after one of the guys I sold one to got a second unit for his kids and went on and on to everyone that would listen how wonderful it was. no more kids crying because their favorite Dora disc got scratched, or hunting for a movie they really want to see, he simply placed the unit high enough the kids couldn't pull it down and the remote is simple enough even the 6 year old runs the Nbox for "the babies" as she calls her little sisters. i saw it with my own two eyes, her dad handed her the remote and in seconds she was whizzing through the thumbnails until she found the movie and fired it up.
So its stupid, stupid pointless and holding back technology by forcing everyone to be a pirate simply because you can't legally have content on modern devices unless you pirate. I probably sell more HTPCs and media tanks than i do office boxes right now, simply because everyone loves the convenience. you get an nbox for the kiddies, put the HTPC in the living room with all your media loaded onto it and a WDTV in the bedroom to stream off the HTPC and you have a completely wireless home system that lets you do anything and watch anywhere. it really is brilliant but I have to wonder how much farther we'd be without the MPAA tying a boat anchor to progress. I'm just glad the device manufacturers like nbox and WD are just doing like everyone else and ignoring copyrights, otherwise we'd be stuck on swapping discs for another 30 years.
Which is why I mentioned the Steam SALE. I have NEVER bought a game on steam that wasn't part of one of their sales, any other time is pointless! But is you have Steam and subscribe to GOG emails frankly you should never run out of cheap gaming goodness just by loading up when its cheap. at the rate i'm going it'll take me a good 3 months if I did NOTHING every evening but play games just to go through what i already have from Steam and GOG.
I have something like 16 games on Steam (only started Steam about 6 months ago) and over 40 on GOG and out of those there are a good 7 that I have barely played on Steam and a good 20 I've not gotten around to on GOG.
So if you plan it right, and load up when they have the crazy sales, frankly you shouldn't need to pay full price ever unless you are one of those that plays "Call of Warfare Modern duty" for the MP, which of course is only really playable if you get in in the first couple of weeks. Lucky for me the boys both want Steam games for XMas so i'm just gonna sit on the money and when the crazy Xmas sale hits me and them are gonna go nuts and load up. By the time the spring sale comes around if I'm lucky I'll have MAYBE gone through 60% of what i get for Xmas. Having too many games? Is a problem I can live with, load that 3tb up baby yeah!
Exactly. I can get 8Gb DVD DL for 40c a disc in bulk so for anything smaller I need to archive like software downloads it is MUCH cheaper than BD, and for the things I'd want the larger storage space for such as OS backups and VMs BD simply doesn't give you enough space for the price. its a lose/lose for BD as far as I'm concerned, not to mention the cheapest burners i've seen are nearly $100 a piece and frankly the BD ROMs really aren't that much better so to change out my two main machines along with at least one of my families machines so I can share data I'd be looking at $300+. finally with DVD I can hand one off to ANY customer and be pretty damned sure thye will have NO trouble reading it. I haven't seen anything but netbooks in the past 5 years that didn't come with at least a DVDROM/CDRW, most having full burners. hell DVDs burners are $17 a pop on newegg now so if one dies? who fricking cares.
What we need is those holodiscs they have been promising us for years, 200gb to 500Gb a pop at $1 to $3 a disc. slap one of these on the PCIe bus and you'd have excellent long term archival backup and i could load my 60Gb music folder, all the raw WAV tracks I've been working on, my videos, anything I'd want to store long term in a form factor and price point that would be perfect for the job. IF BD would have came in 04 and they had gotten the drive costs down to sub $50 then it could have maybe replaced DVD, but now? I still say its a dead end.
But you seem to be missing the fundamental problem mcgrew, which is this: How do you protect the user from themselves without forcing them into an Apple style walled garden where nothing that isn't corporate approved is allowed to run? Because if given the choice i'll take dealing with AV over a walled garden, thanks ever so.
As a guy that builds and fixes Windows every damned day I can tell you EXACTLY where the bugs are coming from, and the vast majority? INSTALLED BY THE USER. Do you think Linux would be safe from a user that would happily run anything they got from an email, complete with putting in their password and chmodding whatever the attacker told them to? of course not. here is the list of the most popular bugs i've seen this month along with the way they got in. you tell me where MSFT could have stopped any of them.
1.-Security tool and AV 20xx variants. These get in with a classic social engineering "ZOMG U Got Teh Viruz! Run "Is_Not_Viruz_iz_Cleanerz.exe" to kill the viruz ZOMG!" 2.- Porn codec malware. Infection source? Horny users. Uses this trick "U want teh hot lezbo teenz? We GOT teh hot lezbo teen right now! Just run "Iz_not_viruz_Iz_codec.exe' to see teh hot lezbo teenz right now!" 3.- social site malware. Infection source? again social engineering "Hey its me! I found this great new site! Just click here to load "Iz_Not_Malware_Site_Iz_cool.html" right now!"
Now in NOT A SINGLE CASE were they exploiting anything but the USER and any of these attacks could just as easily work on Mac (DNSChanger and MacDefender) or Linux (KDELook malware and infected Q3 game) by simply getting the user to go where the attacker wanted or run what the attacker wanted run. Now does this mean MSFT hasn't done dumbshit? Oh Lord No! Whomever thought XP should run as admin by default should have been publicly flogged! and IE 6 was an abomination that has made me hate IE so much to this day I refuse to allow it on a single machine I touch! I toss the links and give them both Firefox and Comodo Dragon with ABP and tell them to stay the fuck away from IE!
But XP is two and soon to be 3 versions out of date so no point in even bringing it up, hell if it weren't for contracts with corps and government they would have already taken it out back and put it down. And since Vista MSFT has been pretty damned good about using best practices, running the users without being admins, DEP and ASLR, having low rights mode (Which neither Linux nor Mac have yet) so that drivebys are that much harder to accomplish...but in the end it all comes down to freedom. If you allow the user control over their own machine that means they have the power to fuck it up, full stop. the ONLY way I've seen that could possibly remove that vector is walled gardens and personally i don't think the loss of freedom is worth the security that an app store brings, do you?
That really isn't the purpose of AV in my exp, in my exp it is great for two specific purposes. 1.- for zero day attacks that the vendor hasn't put out a patch for, Avast and Comodo are both excellent at stopping this kind of attack by monitoring pages and scan before loading to ensure nothing gets through the browser into the system. 2.-PEBKAC where you have a click happy user that simply won't or can't learn more than the most basic of things. in the case of PEBKAC the AV will often stop the user up to a point from infecting him/herself. In fact in the past 5 years I have seen exactly ONE customer whom I set up the machine for get infected and that is because the braintrust DISABLED THE AV when it wouldn't let him install "the new limewire' which is nothing but a bunch of malware wrapped around a Gnucleus client.
But there is NO OS that is secure, a modern OS is literally millions of lines of code with millions of lines of third party code piled on top. It simply isn't possible to lock that down completely, and I could provide links of Windows, Mac AND Linux getting pwned repeatedly. In the end the OS manufacturer does the best it possibly can and then it is up to the user and the software they run. i've found AV to be a good part of "defense in depth" along with sandboxing and new hardware features like ASLR and DEP.
As for TFA? As long as I can easily uninstall the crap i'm fine with it personally. MSFT SE (which is actually Giant Antispy which MSFT bought a few years back) is quiet and low resource...and crap. I've set up refurbs I was gonna wipe anyway with one running Comodo, one running Avast, and one running MSFT SE and frankly the SE got pwned HARD. It was great at blocking bugs that were downloaded like the PEBKAC new limewire above but frankly it was absolute shite on a crusty roll at stopping browser based drivebys. on pages where both Comodo and Avast caught the bug MSFT didn't even blink and happily let it load. It should be great for grandma that only checks her email and goes on FB, but personally i'd toss it for Avast or Comodo at first opportunity.
Well I'll join ya eldavojohn because i too love old Bob, he is just a hoot! And just to ensure the mods get their big girl panties in a knot, ya know who else I REALLY miss? I miss twitter dammit!
He wasn't like the boring FOSSies* we have now on Slashdot, that simply call everyone an "M$ Ninja dirty poo poo head" while screaming about some batshit crazy scenario that might actually get Linux up to 2%, nope old Twitter could take ANY story, about the most boring and unrelated bullshit, and weave such a wondrously convoluted tale that ALWAYS ended up with it being Gates in a secret lair plotting with the Illuminati to take out RMS and kill FOSS. Man I miss that, the man was truly an artist and ahead of his time. the FOSSies we have now is but a sad imitation, an Elvis impersonator compared to The King.
*.-Since there seems to be some confusion over the word FOSSie allow me to clear that confusion up. Do you like CLI and accept that Linux is a geek heavy OS? Do you like things the way they are and accept in its current form linux won't be taking out OSX and Windows? Do you use Linux because you like tinkering and frankly don't give a crap if it stays at 1%? you do? Congratulations you sir are NOT a FOSSie. A FOSSie believes he is surrounded by the enemy, that ALL that do not slurp the koolaid are "M$ Ninjas!" and must be on the "M$" which they must use because of "Voldemort syndrome" and see everyone else as being paid off by MSFT even when they are insulting MSFT products. to a FOSSie you are one of THEM unless your ONLY response to FOSS is "Gee Bob, isn't (insert FOSS product) perfect in EVERY way? why it sure is skip, its doubleplusgood, and RMS farts cure global warming!". all stats showing linux at 1% are lies, there is millions of "sekret installs" hiding from the prying all seeing eye of Sauron...err Redmond, and if the world wasn't being literally held hostage, with OEMs wetting themselves from the hitmen sent by M$ to FORCE their product onto the masses, why even grandma would be writing bash scripts and little Suzy would be reading C programming guides in the bathtub.
This makes FOSSies quite easy to spot because they are as obvious as those guys foaming at the mouth while screaming about the end of the world on a street corner. for examples please watch this post as i'm sure several FOSSies will have to post since i pointed out they are batshit, and one thing someone who is batshit can NOT tolerate is a mirror being held up, but nearly all will post AC because they've already killed their karma. To FOSS users I have nothing but love, FOSSies? I fart in your general direction, be gone or I shall taunt you some more!
And +1000 to dr Bob, keep up the artistic crazy sir, you are sadly one of the few truly great nutters we have left. old Mikey 400+ accounts called it when he said "Slashdot = stagnated". No wonder taco bailed.
Riiight, because I point out IE is a fucking joke suddenly I'm WORKING for MSFT? Are you fucking stoned, or has sucking the FOSSie koolaid rotted your brain? what kind of company would be so god damned dumb as to pay people to INSULT their fucking products?
It just proves what i've been saying for years, FOSSies have such a hard on for hating MSFT that even when someone insults them if they don't blow RMS while they are at it they must be a "M$ Ninja dirty poo poo head". You freetards are just too fucking much. I have to agree with the others and the sites making fun of your kind, there is no point talking to freetards like they are people, they are nutballs just like fucking moonies.
I don't know, to me its kinda sad as he makes the whole profession look like crazies when for certain things like back injuries real chiropractic care CAN help. I was left in pretty constant pain after a car wreck (thanks to an off duty cop LOOKING BEHIND HIM while driving 60MPH looking for a fire he had heard on his scanner. Even though I went into the ditch trying to avoid this asshole and he STILL hit me his cop buddies got together and wrote it up as no fault) and thought I'd just have to suffer the rest of my days but I got lucky that a customer turned out to be a chiropractor and in less than 30 minutes my back felt like new (hurt like hell when he did it though) and I haven't had a backache in the nearly 12 years since.
As for TFA let us all hope DARPA can buy our way out of the mess the corps have gotten us in because as Citizens united made clear corps are better people than you are and there is no way in hell they'll give the massive profits they make by stuffing the animals full of antibiotics up.
Between that and the fact that the sewers end up pumping tons of drugs into our rivers, antibiotics, painkillers, hormones, etc we are or borrowed time here. the fish absorb the drugs, the animals and us absorb the fish, and of course bugs become immune in the process. not good folks, not good.
Well let us say, just for the sake of argument (and remember these were provided by OEMs trying to get lower prices and refuse upgrades of 7 from XP on netbooks, not to mention I can get pro and will be getting 2 copies for Xmas at $39 student discount and I kinda doubt students buying a single copy get a better deal than someone buying 100,000 copies, don't you?) that you data is correct. Now that is talking about Home Premium for $50, which would make starter at around $25. Now considering on last count the average netbooks has nearly FOURTY pieces of trialware installed (just look how many programs are listed under DeCrappifier if you wish for a citation since the OEMs refuse to publish numbers) you are looking at MOST windows costing $15-$30 after the trialware payback is figured in.
Now lets look at just ONE OEM has to pay for Ubuntu. they have to run their own servers, not cheap, they have to hire a team of developers to roll their own version of Ubuntu, what do a developer with experience in rolling their own distros and writing drivers go for? $100,000 a piece? probably need a dozen to run a distro at minimum, and then you have the returns which of course can't be sold as new and as HP admitted when they were looking to sell at an average of $8 profit per unit it really doesn't take but a handful of returns to equal a giant loss. And when we are talking 400% return rates it isn't hard to figure out which OS isn't worth the effort.
This is why ASUS, the ones who created the whole Linux netbook idea, quit carrying Linux, why Windows slaughtered Linux on netbooks where if Windows pricing made a difference anywhere THAT would be the market, yet the ALL abandoned Linux completely.
It is just simple common sense. Ask yourself just ONE single question...If Linux is so great and could save OEMs money then why aren't ANY of them using it? dell hides a handful of Ubuntu machines in the back, basically to get one more checkbox on their bulletpoint list, and the rest don't do even that, why? do you HONESTLY think it is some fast conspiracy to keep your miracle free OS away from the masses? Why isn't any of the little shops like mine using it to undercut competitors?
Because the sad and nasty truth that NO amount of mod points can EVER erase, nor can that one FOSSie going around claiming everyone that doesn't kiss Linus' booty MUST be APK ever change, is this simple truth, which is Linux is free only if your time is worthless and for the OEM frankly MSFT could double their prices and they STILL won't take your OS, because in the end it would cost MORE money. more money to fix broken drivers, more money to deal with the complaints, more money to run their own repos because the default one breaks more than it fixes.
here is a nice article I found several years ago and I hope that you read it. it is a perfect explanation, better than i could EVER write, of why Linux isn't going anywhere. But instead of addressing the problems outlined the "community" will just fling insults like monkeys flinging poo and proclaim their superiority. well I suppose being the biggest failure is still being the biggest at SOMETHING, not sure if I'd brag about it though.
And yet again multiple sources ask for citation and all you can do is fling shit like a monkey. Tell me something, how does it feel to be in absolute last place with NO hope of ever getting better? Is it one of those sad stories, where with no friends you turn to something that is unpopular like you are in the hope you'll have something in common? is it that you simply have nothing better to do on weekends besides read man pages so knowing how to "kinda sorta" copypasta makes you have a warm fuzzy feeling? does using a loser in the market somehow justify your own loser state? please tell i bet its an interesting story, probably involves bullying and child abuse. BTW enjoy some failure, just to make you feel at home.
Isn't it sad, how like a frightened child afraid to look under the bed, you cower at the truth? if your driver model isn't shit then why does Dell have to run their own repos even though we are talking a teeny tiny subset of hardware? Oh right because Linux shits itself and dies if you use the default repos! Man that is some excellent product you got there! you think I can get better QA than the third largest OEM on the planet? What, you expect me to tell paying customers "Go to the forum, kiss some loser ass, and maybe, just maybe, in a few days someone will have mercy and give you a big pile of bullshit that may or may not make your sound work again"?
Bleeding yet douchey? want some more? nice thing about having the truth on your side, you can keep throwing punches all day! How about how a decade old Windows beat the shit out of Linux on netbooks or how ASUS has given up on your bullshit or how about Walmart running away from linux as fast as it can? You got the crazy koolaid drunk enough to say they ALL are paid shills because they won't do your forum dance or CLI horseshit? Meanwhile your "hero" Torvalds the great says Plans? We don't need no steenkin plans!. Why don't you tell them that at work next week, see how quick you get a pink slip? More? How about you actually have the balls to celebrate getting a whole 1% market share while you are actually lower than JavaME and there is a whole website dedicated To your bullshit and excuses .
You see you whiny little delusional mama's boy, I'm your worst fucking nightmare...a retailer that still believes. I believe that the community doesn't have to take Torvalds shit sandwiches, I believe that things can be made better, I believe Linux can be something for more than douchebags like you that will happily take a cock slapping from linus as long as you can say you are sticking to "teh man". I believe that there can be Linux boxes on actual shelves and penguins on boxes.
So you go hide now mama's boy, you hide with your Tux blankie and keep saying your magical nigger nigger faggot, or should I say shill shill astroturfer, like it is a magical word that will make all the bad go away. But it won't change reality and the reality is your driver model is shit and more than 15 years behind everyone else and that is why retailers like me wouldn't piss on it, not some mythical money truck that sneaks up to my door in the middle of the night. So go compile something and leave the men to talk about the real world, okay little girl?
Probably more likely Intel offered some of their famous kickbacks since this was before they got caught. Jobs was always a shrewd business man and if he got Intel chips 40% cheaper thanks to a little under the table kickback from Intel I doubt he'd pass it up. Hell everyone else did it, Dell, Gateway, eMachines, why not Apple?
In the end this just supports something I've been saying for years, which is for the vast majority CPUs are long past good enough and getting into extreme overkill. I've got tons of customers on duals and triples and frankly until the machines physically die i just can't seeing them needing replacements, which is why after years of the MHz wars CPU sales have declined. I mean what are they doing that is gonna need more power? Where is the "killer app" when even Windows 7 runs just fine on a 2005 era CPU? Hell even my kids that game constantly when asked if they'd like me to replace their dual cores with something more powerful were like "Uh why bother? all our games play nice, it all is working great, if it ain't broke don't fix it".
The only ones I've seen that need cutting edge anymore are those that are doing heavy jobs like transcoding or video editing and those aren't the kinds of things one does on a laptop whose selling point is who thin it is. So I'd love to see the books, i bet Apple's BOM went down after having a little talk with Intel.
And who said we were taking it away? it is ultimately the USER that chooses what to download, and working in a PC shop i can tell you they are NOT downloading the stuff the local guys put out, but the latest Titney Spears and other corporate crap. Which was my WHOLE POINT. The indie guys were doing alright when the *.A.A only the record producers, they are doing even better now, they frankly don't need 200 year copyrights to make a living. its the leeches that haven't made anything but assraping contracts that need endless copyrights and the ONLY way to stop them now thanks to Citizens united is to bleed them dry. look at the petitions that ended up devolving into "please stop ignoring and lying to us" because those in power have made it clear they really don't give a fuck WHAT you think, you aren't bribing them.
As for the idea, enjoy. Its cheap, its fun, anybody can do it with little effort, and it really helps to build a long term fanbase. hell its even fun for the bands, I quite enjoyed picking up a Squire or some Itsabatsabuchi bass I had bought only an hour or two before and seeing what kinds of cool tones i could get out of it in a live situation. I have a Zoom bass pedal that has some really wicked tones and i'd fire that up and go Cliff Burton crazy with the thing as well as play a few of our set tunes with it and the crowd really loved it. if you have a little time before the show you can even dress it up, I used stickers and temp tattoos and glitter fingernail polish to customize anything that I was gonna play, and Brad usually kept 50s pinup stickers he'd buy in Memphis for the guitars he was gonna give away.
I still have a white Washburn with 50s pinups that I just couldn't part with, its this early 80s kinda a cross between a P-Bass and a Peavey T80 that gets some THICK ass tones and has a great neck, that night I just substituted a cheesy Kramer bass I had to beat on and kept the Washburn. Every time i play it live it never fails somebody tries to buy it off me, just because it looks so unique with those 50s pinups and glitter polish everywhere. So you never know, you may find you a sweetheart while building a fanbase, its a win/win!
It IS free as the cost of Win 7 HP has been published several times, it is $15 a copy. Now the reason ALL the home machines are loaded up with trialware is they get PAID to put in the trialware. Now if you wish to stick your head in the sand and go "la la la free as in beer" that is your choice but it isn't exactly a secret that Win 7 starter is $8 a copy and HP is $15, which is why the OEMs are only obligated to give you that amount back and not the retail price if you refuse the license.
Oh and 2011 called, it wants you to pull your head out your ass and smell the shit your shoveling. Do you REALLY want me to provide citations? Because I can you know. i can literally wallpaper the whole page with link after link after link of failure on the part of Linux. failure with drivers, massive returns, security issues, hell I could probably come up with 60 links in under 20 minutes if you'd like. Would you like that? just ask. of course last time I did that all I got was "TL:DR" which is of course the communities way of going "la la la free is in freedom!"
So if you want citations by all means just ask, i'll be happy to give you a solid page of links, all saying the same thing I've been saying, that Linux doesn't work. it doesn't work for consumers, don't work in retail, its numbers have been DECREASING in servers, from a high of 36% down to just 22% last numbers I saw, I'd be happy to post them for you if you'd like. But don't worry you can go back to patting yourselves on the back for a job not done, but don't complain when all the hardware manufacturers won't give you drivers and Windows locks you out with secureboot, because it will be your own fault.
In other words you have nothing but your fanboi bullshit and trolling but fear not because Penny Arcade even made a strip about you. Like your uniform BTW. Now go compile something while the men have a conversation, kay?
As for TFA it makes sense, they want to get some of Nintendo's casual gaming customers to go with their Call Of Warfare Modern Duty ones so hiring some guys that have cool ideas to expand the product line simply makes good business sense. Perhaps you could even use this device to help the handicapped, like using someone's limited range of motion to allow them to type or surf, and of course as we saw with Wii Fit there is a good market for those that want to get in shape. If MSFT wants the Kinect to succeed the best way to do it is to make sure it has a ton of uses and it sounds like that is what they are trying to do with TFA.
Actually as a builder I can tell you why this happened, as we builders have been spreading the word to each other at all the places we hang out. you see when Seagate bought Maxtor they got Maxtor's ultra cheap ass ARM source and that has been a disaster. like Nvidia with bumpgate Seagate refuses to admit the problem and instead has pushed out firmware that slows the drives down enough the drive can survive warranty before going tits up but Seagate won't be safe to use on anything above 500Gb (below that they are using Seagate ARM controllers, above that Maxtor) for a year to two years until the shit product gets out the channel.
I know they are high since the flood but if you need a large drive your best bests are Samsung and Hitachi drives. all of their 1Tb or better drives left in the channel are from their last 3 batches before selling out and I can tell you from my own exp and that of my fellow builders they are excellent batches. I have put EcoDrives as OS drives because the fat cache and lower heat makes for excellent boot drives, and both the Samsung and Hitachi drives I've put in hellish situations like construction trailers and they take hellish abuse and keep on purring. I was impressed enough with the Samsung EcoDrives that I have 3Tb running in my own machine, yanking my failing Seagates (surprise) and replacing them with a 1Tb EcoDrive for boot and a 2tb for data. my benches went up by 40%, even though the Seagate was 7200RPM VS 5400RPM for the Samsung, but again that is most likely due to firmware crippling trying to get the Seagate drives to survive past warranty.
Sorry you had that happen to you but if you'd have hung around NewEgg and Tiger and read the reviews you'd see we are all avoiding Seagate like the clap because of how much we've been burned. it is like the great Maxtor shitpile in 04 where every other drive was DOA and the ones that worked often wouldn't last a year. the new Seagates are just absolute garbage as you sadly found out the hard way. get Samsung or Hitachi while they last, and after those are gone the WD Caviar series.
Actually I hate to burst your bubble (and notice how I got modded down for showing the true numbers? Apparently some here don't like looking in the mirror none) but here is a little secret most don't know: Windows HP is free to OEMs so your bragging about being "free as in beer"? really pointless as is the GP. you see there is this thing called "trialware" that the OEMs are PAID to install, the cost of Windows minus this trialware on Windows HP comes out to a NEGATIVE number, therefor Windows? Costs nothing.
Here is another little dirty secret nobody wants to mention. Try looking up the "profits" for the Dell ubuntu division, you won't find the numbers anywhere, why? its actually simple its because with all the money they have to spend making ubuntu work they are in the red and if anyone thought about it they'd see why. Not only do they lose the trialware which as I pointed out for home users actually makes them money or allows them to lower the cost per unit, but with ubuntu they have to hire their own dev team AND run their own repo, because if they don't then this happens.
But please, waste your mod points and go back to standing in a circle patting yourselves on the back for what a "success" your 1.7 percent is, I'm sure MSFT and Apple are both grateful for it. You allow them to split the market and rake in massive profits, hell i'm surprised they don't send the Linux community a big old cake as a thanks. i'm sure it would be moist and delicious. But no matter how you stomp your feet or act like this guy black does not equal white, up does not equal down, and straw does not equal gold. It has been twenty damned years and you are LITERALLY lower than the margin for error in most polls. Do you really only want to be a hobbyist OS? We retailers have been begging for changes that would make it useful for the masses and instead we find a community full of shit flinging "Go back to windblowz LOL" trolls. Why do you think we ignore you? It is because YOU DO NOT LISTEN. If you ignore the train barreling down the track you deserve to get hit, try not to make a mess when that iShiny coming down the tracks followed by the 4 o'clock WinTrain runs your ass down, okay?
You want copyright? I can solve that question in a single sentence, ready? here goes : Steamboat Willie is STILL under copyright! The man has been dead longer than many here have been alive and one of his FIRST works, written when planes were made of cloth and antibiotics were but a dream is STILL under copyright. if that doesn't prove the system is completely broken and doesn't do what the constitution mandated by promoting the public good by giving ARTIST, not leeches, a limited time to profit from teir works I don't know what does.
Watch how quick honesty gets hatred Mr AC! I frankly wouldn't call EITHER Linux nor BSD a "success" when you are looking at numbers like these. hell if these numbers were from a company after TWENTY years of trying they'd be Chap 11 by now. No what Linux need extremely badly is a LEADER, someone with real vision and drive that will say "Ya know what? this is unacceptable. i'm not gonna accept 2%, hell I'm not gonna accept 5%. I'm not gonna quit until Ballmer and Cook are sitting at their desks looking at the numbers and thinking to themselves "WTF is this shit? How did THAT happen?" and Linux machines are in every damned store on the planet making both nervous as hell".
Like it or not there was a reason why guys like Gates, Jobs, and Ellison ended up on the top of the heap, and that was because they simply wouldn't settle. They would have never accepted numbers that low and then had articles written about their "success' they would have considered it a personal insult, found out what the competitors were doing to beat them, and then came out with something better and stomped the shit out of them.
As a retailer i'd love to see that day happen, i remember when there was a half a dozen different OSes and nearly as many CPUs to run them on, but that day will never get here if you continue on this path. Take that link and put in ANY date you want, you'll see the numbers are damned near flatline. Expecting the world to change and suddenly want to become geeker heavy and learn all about how the guts work just ain't gonna happen, see the iShiny or win 7 which your average 6 year old would probably have no problem running.
The way I see it there is really only two choices here, change or don't change. if you change and embrace consumers and give them what they want? You might seriously have a shot. you run faster on lower powered hardware, you don't force the user to get a new machine just to run the latest version and nobody else will be able to go lower even if you charged $5 for the OS it would still undercut anything MSFT has.
If you don't want to change that is your choice, then you'll just have to settle for a maximum of low single digits and the fact the vast majority of the planet is gonna ignore you. the OEMs, the retailers, and the users will all pretty much not care that you exist at all. but you can't eat your cake and have it too, because after 20 years the numbers clearly show you will never get the world to do things "your way" or act like you want them to. Business 101 give the customer something they want to buy and the numbers clearly show Linux hasn't done that, so I don't see how anybody can call less than 2% success. That is including the BSDs and other OSes BTW.