Thanks for the response, i knew there had to be a gotcha I hadn't seen. and as a humble PC repairman I know all to well the weakest link is often not the hardware but the little meatsack in front of the keyboard. I had a teacher that was once giving a tour of a "secure server' farm and the BOFH kept going on and on about how their insane password schema made them 'hackproof" until the teacher finally got fed up and said "Tell you what, you let me loose in the place for 10 minutes and if I can't bring you a working password I'll give you $100 and buy you a steak dinner".
Well sure enough the BOFH took him up on it and in less than 10 minutes he came back with 5 passwords and user logins, including one of their master passwords that pretty much would let you pwn the whole thing. When the BOFH demanded to know how he did it, he just started walking down the aisles and flipping keyboards, sure enough passwords were sticky noted all over the place!
I guess I was just hoping security at the higher levels would be more of a technical issue than PEBKAC, but from reading your explanations I guess we all have to deal with the Forest Gumps of the world. I bet when you see some beautiful security system turned into a mess because of bad policies you feel like I do when i hand over some box i lovingly created only to have them turn it into a spyware/adware laden mess in less than a month, just like that scene in "History of The World part I" where the artist gets his work pissed on by the critic!
So you are for the Koch Bros and giving the 1% even more tax breaks? Because I hate to break the news to ya friend but the tea party hasn't been grass roots since the "tea party express" aka the Koch bros money train, rolled into the station more than a year and a half ago. You look at the platform of Cain or any other pro tea party politician and you'll find they are pretty much reading a Koch bros press release. It was a nice idea, to take back the government, but sadly it got bought out and co-opted by the money men before the second minuteman had even gone by.
As for TFA, is there gonna be an article when someone at SCO tries to do a slip and fall at the Safeway as well? While i appreciate what Groklaw did back in the day with the SCO case that was then, this is now. SCO isn't even qualified to be called a zombie, more like a little pile of shit that still wafts up the occasional bad odor.
Lets be honest folks, they have about as much of a chance of winning jack shit in court as that crazy guy that wanted millions because his pants got messed up at the cleaners. hell that guy had a better chance than SCO does, the rulings the court handed down making it really REALLY clear that they don't own shit when it comes to Unix.
But as long as sites like/. keep writing about them they'll get some gambling VC to throw them a couple of bucks, so quit helping them okay? Just ignore the shit and the sun will dry up their little stinky ass and blow them away.
Maybe I don't understand the concept, correct me if i'm wrong, but I thought true anarchy was "he who has the biggest guns makes the rules' ala Somalia? I bet if you rape a warlord's daughter predictable or not he will hang you by your intestines from the nearest bridge.
And frankly i don't see how ANY system could eliminate revenge, it is as old as time. it would be like trying to eliminate sex or vice. I remember what a local cop told me when they were taking a child molester to trial. he was given STRICT orders by the chief that if they heard so much as backfire their asses were to hit the dirt or seek shelter and forget Mr Rapist.
as for TFA how in the hell can they say this isn't a HUGE breach of the wiretap laws? it isn't like these things were picking up ONLY the suspects cell phone were they? I don't see how they could manage that without letting the suspect know by having his cell glitchy while everyone around him had working phones. And if they did just grab everybody how is this not a violation of due process? does that mean if they think their is a criminal in my town they can just listen to ALL calls until they find the right guy? me think the feds have gotten too damned power mad and think they are above the law which sadly in most cases they are right. Damned shame though, this used to be a free country.
Accept they have NOT cut out the term, they just make their shiny a little more shiny, but as you say go to their forums, its esoteric workaround city there!
Look, I've come to accept that some will never let go of their terminals, just as I doubt we'll ever see a day that Windows and OSX doesn't have some terminal buried deep in the bowels for the script heads...but that is where it belongs deep in the bowels where those that like CLI will know how to get to it and will care while the rest of the users don't know it exists.
When I first started playing in FOSS land around 03-04 you could see progress, slow and steady. But somewhere along the way, hell it may have been "the Canonical cult" to paraphrase your words that caused it, but somewhere along the line the ground went sour, things got nasty. Now what I see is more of a club mentality where when you ask a simple question like "why is there no find drivers or roll back drivers buttons? that would really help new users" instead of someone saying "You know that is a good question, why DON'T we have one of those?" and talking about the pluses and minuses of such a system you get "STFU or go back to windblowz luser LOL!".
While I haven't hung out on some of the more elderly Linux forums, I don't do so because frankly their OSes are even less consumer friendly than Ubuntu, and that is saying something. it is like we saw all this real progress on creating "A Linux for everyone" and then it just....stopped. Now it all seems to be about clics and clubs and "one tru way"ism as you put it and meanwhile retailers like me still have nothing but Windows on our shelves simply because we have NO choice, we really don't. I still can't take a bog standard barebones, take a distro even a year and a half old (even though Windows gets a minimum 7 years worth of updates), update it to current, and not have SOMETHING break. wireless, sound, networking, video, there is always SOMETHING broken. And I think that is just a damned shame. Because once anything breaks in Linux land it is "welcome to pain!" time, just one hoop jump after another. With windows nearly all (there are exceptions but rare) driver issues can be fixed by 'reinstall driver, reboot".
I mean is it REALLY so much to ask for to have a single user friendly distro that I won't have to give away lifetime support and end up losing my shirt just to keep the damned thing running and current? Is that REALLY so hard to come up with? of course all i ever get for asking that is heaps of insults so i guess the answer is yes, it is impossible with Linux in its current state.
I'd say the big advantage right now that AMD has and really needs to pursue is the mobile division which has just about the perfect combination of power+price+ energy efficiency. As I said I sold my MSI Wind (which actually was a nice netbook) and got one of the new Brazos EEE netbooks. When I was stuck at the doc's for half a day i took it with me and ended up with half the patients AND the nurses all wanting to ask questions and get a look. It has a great 720p picture, nice keyboard, even running videos for hours it barely got warm to the touch, just a really nice unit. And when everyone heard what I paid for it ($350 WITH an 8Gb of RAM upgrade AND a briefcase for it) I ended up having to write the make/model and website half a dozen times for even the nurses wanted to know where they could get one.
So I'd say they really hit it out of the park on the mobile line and I can see why they were having trouble meeting demand for the chips. They are low power, cheap, and do the things folks want to do which is play the occasional game or watch HD video. while they haven't had much luck on the desktop front with Bulldozer (I predict like the original Phenom it'll take them a little while to get the bugs out of the new design) I'd say both their mobile APUs and Phenom/Athlon mobiles are in the sweet spot when it comes to the all important Price+Performance+Efficiency.
So I'd say it isn't so much performance + rep as you say but the metric I outlined above. Folks want a good deal, with a machine that will let them play their FB games or watch HD Youtube videos while not breaking their wallet on either the price or the electric bill. my oldest decided he wanted something bigger so he got a Phenom II Mobile 17 inch and all the kids at college have been quite impressed by his. He's sent more than a half a dozen of them to me to "hook them up" with similar laptops, as it lets them do their classwork and then kick back in the lounge for a little TF2 or Second Life for the ladies.
And in the end it ALWAYS came down not to raw performance, but would it do what they wanted to do with it smoothly without breaking their bank accounts. And that is where I think AMD has the advantage, their mainstream chips are a much better deal while still giving good video and gaming performance. If you haven't tried one of the Brazos netbooks give one a spin, they really are quite good.
If you are talking about the government it is because they own the MSM through their "friends" in the highest corps and thus can get those who only know what they see on TV to defend them?
We have seen time and time again frankly flagrant abuses of power that even Nixon wouldn't have had the balls to attempt yet the MSM trip over themselves to kiss the ring. Look how there was only one reporter that would do ANY real followup on the "fast and the furious" scandal while the rest lined up to say it was nothing. hell even the right wingers who were looking for any excuse to hang Obama didn't seem to want to go after it.
The entire thing is rotten to the core folks, and OWS is only the beginning. More and more are realizing everything they see and read through the MSM is about as accurate as Soviet era Pravda and are waking up to the fact they've been had. Right now the constitution pretty much is a worthless piece of paper when considering how much attention those in power actually respect it anymore.
I've had good luck with customers and the Velocity Cruz and Archos tablets. Sure they're not speed demons, but we are talking grandma and he is worried about price. they start at $99 for the 7 inch Cruz but if its for grandma I'd probably look at the 10 inch Archos for $169.
As someone whose grandma passed away this yer I wish you all the luck in the world. We were lucky that mine was a spirited little thing that managed to stay on her feet right up until that last week of her life when she passed right after her 96th birthday.
I learned one thing though...I don't EVER want to live to be THAT old! all your friends are gone, more of the people that you knew are below ground than above, she had even lost one child and one grandchild by the end. Personally I'd rather bite the farm before everybody i know does, thanks.
TFA also doesn't point out that they already have a workaround that is as simple as clicking a button that says "fix it". No CLI mess, no trying to explain it to Suzy the checkout girl, the CLI is also listed if you want to do that, but for everyone else there is this simple fix it page.
I don't know about everyone else but I'll be testing this on my own system for a few hours and if there are no adverse effects i'll be shooting an email to my users with the link.
Actually I wouldn't call Spinrite level II a "stress test" per se, more of a basic I/O test to find what I call "lying firmware". You see i've found that on some bad batches the firmware will just release some of the reserve sectors and not say squat about it, making the drive look good initially when it is actually suffering from bad sectors OOTB.
What Spinrite Level II does is simply bypasses the firmware, does a single write followed by a single read and posts the results. Now if this were a drive that had been in use for quite awhile and had plenty of data on it this would take awhile as it will try to recover a bad sector if it has data in it, on a new drive all this does is a single basic I/O op and reports its findings. I'm sure you'll agree that if a drive can't even do a single I/O without throwing errors that drive shouldn't be trusted in a production environment or even in a home machine.
so I highly recommend Spinrite if you are gonna be dealing with many drives as while their recovery ability is top notch frankly their I/O test makes it well worth the $30 for a copy. On a clean drive this takes about 30-40 minutes per 400Gb depending on the drive speed so it really isn't long considering you are talking about trusting the integrity of your data to the drive in question. I simply keep an old 233Mhz tower server with a PCI SATA card for running spinrite as CPU speed really doesn't figure into it and even with 128Mb of RAM in the old thing Spinrite is able to completely load itself into RAM and performs just as fast as in a new machine thanks to the limit being rotational speed.
The better and more telling question would be thus: "If you remove command line from the OS, will it continue to function and will the user even know it is missing?" and the correct answer for Windows is YES as its not a vital subsystem and NO a good 98% of the users will NEVER know it is even missing. Now try that in Linux, go on, I'll wait...the OS died you say? and if anything goes wrong without CLI you have no prayer of fixing it? welcome to reality.
Here is a NASTY bit of truth that is guaranteed to make Linux users foam at the mouth but it is a fact, ready? In its current form Linux IS Windows 98, no more and NO less and I shall elaborate. What was Windows 98? it was a CLI OS (DOS) with a GUI shell, that's all. While the GUI shell was fine for basic tasks one often had to drop down to CLI to get anything complex accomplished, and there was even a way to bypass the shell completely and only use the CLI underneath.
Now what is Linux? Its a CLI OS (Bash, Korne, Bourne, you do get choices on the CLI, kinda like how you could run different DOS under Windows 2.x) and like Win9x it has a GUI shell. Like Win98 the CLI is a VITAL SUBSYSTEM and can NOT be removed because like Win98 the GUI is just a shell, it isn't vital, in fact one can run the whole thing without the shell even being loaded.
While you might consider this choice I am about to point out why this is actually a handicap that ensures that Linux in its current form will never gain squat in the vital consumer market. You see by having the GUI be a second class citizen this "cripples" for want of a better term, anything to do with the GUI. a developer can build for the GUI, he can build a barely functional GUI shell, he can ignore it completely. How many programs have you seen in Linux where there are 15 pages of CLI options and only half a page for the GUI? I bet you can find quite a few, in fact i'd bet there are more that meet this description than that are the other way around. hell you'd probably be hard pressed to find even 5 programs that have more options in the GUI than the CLI.
But the nasty truth nobody wants to admit is you'll never get home users to run CLI because as far as they are concerned that is a huge step backwards, and they would be right. If you want to have a CLI that is fine, hell with PowerShell (which isn't shipped by default with a single home machine that I'm aware of) you can script the whole damned thing, local or network. but this is if you WANT TO but it is never a HAVE TO. With Linux it is the opposite because Linux is still stuck in the "GUI optional" phase.
So like it or not what I said was the truth, as far as users are concerned there is no CLI in Windows. It is buried in the bowels of the OS, they'll never see it, never look for it, and never call on it. Can you say the same for Linux friend? can you HONESTLY say that if you made a Linux distro with NO CLI that it would be able to remain functional while updating from one of the main distro branches? hell would it even boot? probably not.
Thanks to you and Pete for explaining this subject in much closer to layman's terms than I've ever seen it tackled, it does make me think of a couple of follow up questions if you don't mind.
Since as you pointed out with Enigma (which IIRC there is still a handful of messages they still haven't cracked after all these years) there are gonna be advances coming down the pipe and that both AES 128 and RSA 1024 have expiration dates, wouldn't it be smarter to try to jump a little bit ahead of the curve? by that I mean wouldn't it be smarter to just go ahead and switch to 512 bit AES and 4096 RSA when the previous schema expires? Or is that too computationally expensive with current technology?
Which brings me to my second question: Back in the day we had math co-processors for seriously heavy number crunching and today thanks to HT on the AMD side and QP on the Intel side we once again have the ability to place a co-processor on a bus that is as fast as the CPU my second question is thus: Since from what Pete wrote (again not an expert, he may be wrong, I don't know) the majority of the key generation is being done on the server side wouldn't it be advantageous to use a "crypto co-processor" to allow much larger and thus stronger keys to be generated quicker and thus as you put it "leap ahead" in the bit race? I know Via has native crypto in their silicon and FPGAs allow one to build a custom chip easily but it just seems to me with so many black hats throwing so much power at the wall it would make sense to throw some specialized silicon at the problem instead of just more generic CPUs.
Again sorry if these are noob questions as I found out when trying to learn more about the subject that very quickly the math shot straight over my head, but these are two questions that as a layman I thought would be more of an obvious evolution, but of course I'm sure there is some hidden gotcha I'm missing which is why it isn't done.
That's weird, did you use them mainly for CDs? Because at least in my experience it is the DVD that usually goes long before the CD. I even have a few drives that'll burn DVDs really great, just won't read 'em.
As for the others notice how pissy many of the comments were? And for what, because I dared to ask why having 2 CDs couldn't be an option? tell me, how EXACTLY does that hurt Canonical? Is giving more users the opportunity to use their software a BAD thing now?
You see this was EXACTLY what I was talking about, the ground has turned sour. Whereas in 03 when I first started playing with FLOSS the community welcomed new people, they would take them under their wing. Now its more of a "This is OUR thing, go STFU and die if you aren't with the program" attitude and frankly it doesn't surprise me with such a bad attitude that FOSS is flatline. Hell just the other day a guy posted some numbers by Gartner and netcraft (sorry i didn't think to save the links) showing that despite all the hype Ubuntu hasn't helped Linux gain squat for share (currently 1.1% according to gartner) and even Linux on servers was down to 21% from a high of 32%!
The ONLY way you grow is by getting new folks into the ecosystem. They learn, they tell other folks, this is how it works folks. But it seems to me, at least from what I've been seeing and hearing the past few years, that this "FOSS is an exclusive club and you're not welcome" attitude has been spreading like a cancer. Even asking a simple question, like "Why is it there is no find drivers or roll back drivers buttons to make it easier for new users with driver issues?" can get literally mounds of vile spewage.
If you want Linux to be ONLY for geeks? that's fine, nothing wrong with hobbyist OSes, hell I was on OS/2 for years myself. But then stop pretending you actually want anyone to use Linux and quit with this "year of the Linux (insert device)" BS if you want them to go away, alright? Because you can't grow or hope to ever have a year of the Linux anything if you tell noobs to go fuck off and die, and THAT is the attitude i'm seeing from way too much of the community these last couple of years.
Its being on the bleeding edge. Sure computers chips are for the most part commodity priced now, but if you set out to build a machine ONLY with the most bleeding edge parts, like say the absolute most powerful chips made? You'll find that savings goes poof because you are on the bleeding edge.
This is where Apple has the advantage in the tablet market that they simply don't have in the PC market. you look at the Mac lineup and frankly i can't think of a time the Mac has been "bleeding edge' with regards to their chips, but Apple has been pretty damned close to absolute bleeding edge when it has come to their ARM offerings. you look at what the competitors are offering and as you say many are just horrible, because at least IMHO from playing with the things ARM seems to drop off the scale from nice to usable to shite on a crusty roll REAL quick. A 400MHz x86 can still be used for document creation and even very light office work, a 400MHz ARM? That is a truly horrible experience.
As TFA notes this is something Cook really needs to be credited for. the guy took a hell of a big gamble by paying big bucks to lock up his supply chain so he could get pretty damned fast ARM chips at prices the other guys just can't match. ARM just doesn't have a rivalry like Intel VS AMD where both are trying to be the most cutting edge and cranking out chips to beat the band. From what I've seen there are very few places cranking out truly bleeding edge performance ARM chips and a hell of a lot of places putting out shite.
This leaves Apple's competitors with a hell of a lot less choice, so in the end they put out tablets based on shitty chips or they end up higher than Apple. I personally believe though this is only temporary as Nvidia seems to be cooking up some seriously nice Tegra chips, the only question is can they come up with enough capital to crank them things out like Intel does X86.
Yeah but the problem with that is this: what's the first thing to go out on a DVD/CDRW or a DVD burner? the ability to read DVDs. I don't know how many machines I'd had through the shop that would read and burn CDs just fine but the DVD would be crapped out.
So what is wrong with giving folks choice, isn't that is what FOSS is supposed to be out, choice? Why not have a 2 CD set AND a DVD with everything but the kitchen sink, why not that?
Of course I'll probably get hate for daring to even say the user should have choice, I don't know what happened to the community but it just don't seem like a nice place anymore. Now it seems to be too many have this "You'll take this and do it our way and damned well LIKE it or STFU and go back to windblowz luser" attitude, like FOSS is an exclusive club and they're the gatekeepers or something.
I used to love keeping up with what's new and thought back in 03 that by this time we'd see Linux boxes in every store, but somewhere along the ways the ground turned sour and the community seems to me to be more about being in a club than helping FOSS spread to the masses.
Uhhh...where have YOU been? Go into Walmart, Best Buy, Staples...you see a fricking TON of AMD machines being sold. Hell last time I went in there I think more than half of the netbooks and laptops had AMD Vision stickers on them.
I thought the whole "vision" idea is damned smart but whomever they had in marketing dropped the ball. Most folks don't know gigawhatitz and megawhositz they want to know "What can I DO with the thing? and as a small retailer I can tell you THAT is what you use to sell machines in this economy! You show them how easy it is to transcode video for their mobile devices, you show them how nicely it plays Farmville and WoW and TF2, you tell them how this netbook that weighs only 3 pounds and is cheaper than the other guy's stuff lets them watch THREE hour and a half movies in HD on a charge!
Frankly the marketing bunch deserved to be fired because they had this great idea and dropped the ball. All I ever saw about vision was a sticker telling a couple of bullet points, that's it. I'd have partnered with the OEMs and retailers to have those display models playing a little cool video telling the folks all the things these chips can do FOR them. That was the mistake here folks, marketing wasn't doing their jobs!
Actually if you have been keeping up with events of late AMD has been selling so many chips that the only thing holding them back has been trouble from the manufacturing getting up to speed on the latest die shrink so I really doubt marketing when you are selling out of chips already is REALLY needed that much, do you?
I mean look at the AMD Brazos line, they have those things in everything from netbooks (here is the one I personally sold my MSI Wind for after picking up a few for customers, it hold 8Gb of RAM and is sweeeet, both on performance and battery life) to laptops like this one with B-Ray to cool HTPC designs to these really awesome all in ones which I found make pretty killer SOHO/small business and family PCs.
So actually I'd say AMD was on the right track when their CEO announced that they were slowing their desktop output to ramp up mobile chips to try to fill the demand. Frankly even if they hadn't had the problems with the supply chain I doubt seriously they'd be needing much in the way of advertising ATM. Right now with the economy down prices trumps just about everything and the bang per buck was in the AMD camp even before the APUs hit, now you have machines that'll play WoW and smooth HD video at frankly insanely cheap prices and get 6 hours on the battery for the mobiles and not heat up the house on the HTPC and all in one. Seems like a good combo to me.
Of course this isn't even bringing up the next "big thing" from the AMD camp which most of the number crunchers and programmers here ought to be drooling over and that is the switch from VLIW to vector in their APUs and GPUs which should bring floating point math a hell of a speed boost. Oh and for all you FOSS lovers out there AMD is switching to Coreboot so you'll have a system that can be open and modified from the BIOS layer on up.
I do have a question about TFA though....what was wrong with R600? Sure the 2xxx and 3xxx series didn't slaughter Nvidia but they also didn't crank the living hell out of the heat nor did they have the whole "bumpgate" issue Nvidia had at the time. Their IGP version of the 3xxx was also quite nice for HD video and the HD38xx was pretty sweet and was easy to crossfire. So while I wouldn't call it a second coming or Nvidia killer it certainly wasn't up to the level of the Nvidia 5xxx, aka the Hoover card fiasco.
Shows how old I am, I thought instantly of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music which frankly after listening to TFA I find it a little more musical than MMM myself, but that may be just me.
That is why I'd snatch up the 1Tb and 2Tb Spinpoint (VERY fast with a large cache) EcoGreen (actually beats all but the perpendiculars in my own benches while staying below 92F under load, again thanks to large cache) and the Hitatchi Deskstars. The ones left in the pipe are from the last three batches and I've bought and abused drives from all three batches, they are as solid as any enterprise drive I've owned and even with the markup are a better deal. With the large cache you can RAID 5 some Spinpoints or Ecogreens and get crazy throughput, I should know as I set up a server running EcoGreens and they are just sweet and really dropped the temps down.
But yeah I've been there and got the T-shirt, so I know about bad batches. i got bit by the IBM Deathstars, the 2005 MaxWhores, and the final bite was the 2007 WD shitfest of the first quarter of that year so i know shit batches can and DO get past QA. But as you sadly found out right now Seagate ain't worth a shit, talking to my fellow builders they have boxes full of the dead POS just like I did with the Maxtors. they are also buying as many Samsung and Hitachi as they can to ride out the bad batches of Seagates and when those run dry the EcoDrive of WD is pretty good. The Black has a little higher failure rate but nothing above 15% and can be easily vetted by giving it a good workout on first load.
A good and easy quick test that won't damage the drive is Spinrite on setting 2, which just bypasses the firmware and has each sector do a write followed by a read and reports the results. if you start finding bad sectors on that first run? Watch out, its an unstable drive. You see I've found a lot of the shit drives have what i call "Lying firmware" where it will try to cover up failures by simply letting loose some of the reserve sectors and not saying shit about it. spinrite bypasses the firmware so they can't BS it so you'll find out REAL quick if its a bad batch. And since it is only doing a simple write/read cycle it isn't putting a heavy load that could cause premature wear, just the kind of usage any drive should function doing.
But I know what its like to be in a corner and have to roll the dice, that's how I got burnt with the Maxtors. Now I ALWAYS go to the builder sites and check the reviews, as you've seen my fellow builders call out bad batches pretty loudly as nobody likes to have a new build ready for a customer and have the drive shit on you. it makes your whole business look Mickey Mouse. so check the sites, listen to the guys, and snatch as many Samsung and Hitachi drives as you can get your grubby fingers on and you'll weather out this bad batch just fine. I'm just glad i hung onto 6Tb worth of Samsungs for myself so even if the channel is flooded i won't be hurting for quite awhile.
Question: Not a crypto guy so my apologies if this sounds noobish but its just something I've been curious about. When I started out in the 80s i remember being told how strong 128bit was, followed by how strong 256bit, then 512bit, now you are saying anything less than 2048bit is shit, so my question is thus: How fast are we going through these things and with the frankly insane amounts of hardware that keep coming down the pipe is this gonna end up some sort of "bit race" between the white and black hats?
Because when I started out the thought of a machine that only weighed 3 pounds and gave you 6 hours away from an outlet yet gave you a better picture than the local movie theater and let you carry whole libraries worth of music and movies was something out of Sci-Fi yet now I have one sitting on my desk and it cost a whole $350. Now that we have OpenCL which looks like it even may replace CUDA (as Nvidia is now supporting it as well as ATI) we have the tech to load a box with a truly insane number of processors to tackle any math problem which I'm sure the black hats will be happy to jump on if they can make money with it.
so how long until 1024 and 2048 are as useless as the old 128 and 256 bit keys? How high of a number can we go to before the time to process it on an average machine makes it not worth the work? again sorry if this is obvious to a crypto guy because that is one field that is frankly over my head so this is just a question from a curious guy on the sidelines. Is there a number high enough to be uncrackable? or is it all just a matter of letting Moore's Law catch up?
Or here is a thought, just throwing it out there, how about everyone leave everyone else alone and we all take personal responsibility for our actions, how about that? you may think this is just a healthy argument but you're wrong because i've seen where this goes. The smokers turned out to be the canaries in the coal mine, as we now have nanny types advocating cranking the taxes up on sugar and red meat, what's next you getting weighed and being fined by the state if you don't match their target weight?
I so miss the days when people actually stood up for each other instead of acting like a bunch of whiny bitches trying to control each others lives. the latest excuse is "Oh you'll burden us all with increased medical costs" while fucking ignoring Jose and his 14 kids that snuck across the border and are now getting food stamps,welfare, medicare and everything else. Oh and don't say its bullshit because I know a gal that actually has to go out and check on them as part of her job with the state and she is sick of seeing whole houses filled to the brim with those who just snuck over the border as late as last week and who ONLY know how to say in English "How do I get check?". And of course she ain't allowed to say shit because according to her boss "its politics'.
But if the nanny state is so damned worried about me possibly costing them a dollar, even though they can shit money out to the whole damned third world, every "el presidente" that will toe the line AND half of Mexico, I propose this: I will sign an ironclad contract that says if ANYTHING bad happens to me the ONLY treatment I'll get is morphine which is dirt cheap, and in return you leave me the fuck alone and exempt me from your sin taxes, do we have a deal? I have actually walked up to politicians and proposed this and they hemmed and hawed and in the end it all came down to "We know what is best for you". Well kindly go fuck yourself state, you can't even balance your checkbook or keep from taking bribes long enough to do something about a sinking economy, I frankly don't trust any of you to be able to even tie your damned shoes!
As for TFA, the economy is down and Linux is going down, surprise surprise. programmers actually have bills to pay too ya know and while RMS seems to believe a communist utopia is possible (of course most of us aren't allowed to be permanent squatters at MIT, don't take my word for it, look it up, that is how he describes his living arrangements) everyone else out there is worried about keeping a roof over their head or having their job shipped to Bangalore. So no shit a software whose philosophy is "free as in beer!" is having trouble getting new programmers, they are all trying to keep their heads above water like everybody else. But hey in 25 to 30 years when the economy isn't a corpse anymore (look up the last depression, it went from 1929-1953, that's 24 years folks) I'm sure the programmers that have jobs and money won't mind donating to the cause. its just right now they are trying to keep from ending up living under an overpass and if SaaS or MSFT or frankly anybody else is offering more than Linux, which is "Thanks for your donation citizen!" then duh! That's where they are gonna go.
You SURE that isn't an Nvidia problem? Because I have dealt with plenty of Nvidia's dropping backwards compatibility but I haven't had a bit of trouble from ATI in that regard and I still play some REALLY old games like the original Command & Conquer. I even have some DOS games from GOG like Redneck Rampage but those are through DOSBox I'm sure so I have no clue whether those are hardware or software accelerated.
But you are taking me back with the rest of your post. They had some REALLY killer flightsticks when Win95 came out, along with MSFT Combat Flight Sim (although I never had a sidewinder, I had IIRC a CF F15 Flight pro) but to me the thing that proved to me DirectX was the way to go was WinQuake and the directX version of MechWarrior II. Me and my friends just sat around the PC going "Ooooh!" and drooling while we watched the demo run on those two.
So you're right, the kiddies may not remember but I sure as hell do, there was a time when St. John was in every mag and it seemed like every company out there was trying to top the others with what they could pull out of DirectX. Hell how many games did we end up with running on either a Quake or Doom engine? I thought for a while they should just say on the back of the box "Yes we are running the Quake (insert number) engine!" and while I loooved the games back then if you haven't played Just Cause II on a directX 10 card you don't know what you are missing. If I have a customer on the fence about whether he wants to have an HTPC all I have to do is fire that game up and set off a couple of charges and they are drooling while they hand me a check.
But why should we? THAT is the fundamental question. unless you expect the USA to go in and "regime change" every third world nation in Africa, and we have seen how well that usually works out, all we end up doing is giving the warlords more supplies and money for better battlewagons.
And I said Glenn Beck is batshit IMHO but that also don't change the fact the guy was probably fired for daring not to toe the company line, which was NeoCon expansionism. One of the last times I saw him on O'Rielly he was getting called every kind of idiot for daring to say we should "Be Switzerland" and stop stirring up shit in third world nations. Do you agree or disagree that the USA should stay out of the job of being "world police"?
You can think the man is nuts but still agree with him on a subject. Even a broken clock is right twice a day ya know.
No it hasn't as what he is talking about isn't NAND but MRAM which is supposed to give you the speed of DRAM with the non volatility of NAND. Its a really nice idea, that if they could get it to work would be a game changer. Imagine if instead of 2Gb-8Gb or even 16Gb of DRAM you instead had the entire storage functional as one giant RAM drive? One that you could kill the power to and have everything stay as it was with zero losses or need to refresh? Even if they could only get the prices down enough to replace DRAM imagine having your OS be "instant on/instant off" because it would just freeze in place when you pulled the plug. Things like sleep, hybrid sleep, and hibernate would go the way of the floppy!
That said they've been trying to come up with similar tech since the 60s in the form of PRAM and nobody has quite go the hang of it yet. its always too expensive, too complex, or too easily damaged. so I wouldn't hold my breath for it anymore than for holodiscs, flying cars, or Alyson Hannigan sexbots. Although frankly they can keep the flying cars, holodiscs AND the MRAM if they can just give me an Alyson Hannigan, preferably gift wrapped and wearing the BtVS S2 Vamp Willow outfit. I mean what kinds of scientists are we creating when they can send a man to the moon but can't even give us our own sexbots? C'mon scientists, prove you're worthy of those lab coats!
If you are talking about the Dreamcast you really need to check out some of the emulators and ROM collections for the DC. The fact that you didn't have to modchip it meant that while my boys have the original Xbox and PS2 gathering dust the DC stays hooked up loaded with SNES and Genesis games. Its cool to be able to bust out some Ikari warriors or General Chaos without having to blow on carts and if you hit some of the BT sites you can find pre-made ROM collections that are as simple as burn>>run for the DC. It was a great little machine.
I have to agree about the PC though, my boys probably have just about every console and handheld (the youngest especially was into consoles and handhelds) but they are all for the most part just gathering dust. Instead they just play MMOs or whatever games they have gotten from the last Steam sale. The oldest when not studying is in LOTRO and L4D II while the youngest is playing Amnesia and something called Terraria?
One thing I'll never regret though is getting the boys started at a young age on the PC, as while the other kids at the college needed lessons on managing online information and citing references the oldest is breezing through. Having computer skills really is required for modern life and I didn't realize how much I had taught the boys over the years until I started teaching a neighbor down the hall who had never before touched a computer or been online. In this day and age computer illiteracy is almost as bad as regular illiteracy and it was a real challenge to keep help from falling for scams until he was "net savvy" enough to function on his own. But with my help he was able to find a good second job through online advertisements and is even catching up with his long lost relatives back in Florida so at least it worked out alright.
And the REALLY funny part? The thing that sold MSFT on DirectX was a bad Xmas game! For those that don't remember MSFT had a primitive graphics layer called "WinG" back in the days of win 3.x but it was a fiddly little bitch. Well along came a little game that used WinG called The Lion King and wouldn't ya know it, every parent went out and bought that for their little ones thinking they'd be sitting in front of the keyboard singing "I just can't wait to be king". Well instead what they got was a bunch of serious parent cursing when WinG would shit, die, shit AND die, or just lock the whole fucking PC up hard. yeah that made all those little tykes happy.
So it wasn't long after that they announced they were gonna come up with an abstraction layer to fix all the fiddly crap that was WinG and DirectX was born, and it was good. oh I'm sure some of those out here that are cheering for ABM (anyone but MSFT) hate it but ya know what? It works and it works WELL. I mean here I am in 2011, with a quad core PC with 800 stream processors for a GPU and an X64 OS yet I can STILL fire up a game from 1998 like No One Live forever and still have it hardware accelerated in all its blocky fingered fun. Then I can go straight from that to Just Cause II with full DirectX 10 bling bling squirting wonder across my screen, no fiddling, no changing shit, just "clicky clicky" and it WORKS. Now THAT is what I'm talking about!
As for TFA I have a REALLY good suggestion for MSFT, are they listening? Yeah you see that company over there, Valve? yeah those guys? Well RIP THEM OFF as hard as you fricking can! Because while you have made extending media to the X360 from the Win 7 PC about as butt simple as can be Games For Windows Live is a steaming pile of festering shit on a crusty roll.
Just for the fuck of it I decided i'd quit playing the pirate version and just register the Bioshock II game I'd had sitting in a box for weeks, I thought "Surely they have the bugs worked out by now, so I can just register and play, right?".....oh boy, what a horrible experience! Valve if any of you guys are reading this I will NEVER EVER say a bad thing about Steam ever again, okay? first i launch the thing and it needs to update. Okay I've had the game in the box awhile, that's fair. But then it kicks me off live to update but does NOT close the game so I'm sitting there wondering WTF is going on, so I close the game and it takes a good 30 minutes to update even though i'm on a 12Mbps connection. Okay fine, I launch when its done...and it needs another update, another 30 minutes....argh! So I finally get the bullshit done, play for an hour and go to bed, a couple of days go by and I decide to play a few more levels so I launch...another update...FUCK YOU GFWL &%$&^%$!
So please MSFT, you guys are famous for ripping off good ideas right? Please take a big lesson from valve and make it all seamless and nice okay? you have all the pieces of the puzzle, you have DirectX to make it easy for porting and programming, you have the Win 7 PC that is easier than ever to use, you have the X360 with all the bugs worked out, and you have the WinPhone with Skype recently purchased. Just make it all work together nice and neat, okay? steal the best ideas from Valve and Apple and make it butt simple to manage my media, play my games, have everything all neatly linked together and seamless. Is that really too much to ask for?
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Thanks for the response, i knew there had to be a gotcha I hadn't seen. and as a humble PC repairman I know all to well the weakest link is often not the hardware but the little meatsack in front of the keyboard. I had a teacher that was once giving a tour of a "secure server' farm and the BOFH kept going on and on about how their insane password schema made them 'hackproof" until the teacher finally got fed up and said "Tell you what, you let me loose in the place for 10 minutes and if I can't bring you a working password I'll give you $100 and buy you a steak dinner".
Well sure enough the BOFH took him up on it and in less than 10 minutes he came back with 5 passwords and user logins, including one of their master passwords that pretty much would let you pwn the whole thing. When the BOFH demanded to know how he did it, he just started walking down the aisles and flipping keyboards, sure enough passwords were sticky noted all over the place!
I guess I was just hoping security at the higher levels would be more of a technical issue than PEBKAC, but from reading your explanations I guess we all have to deal with the Forest Gumps of the world. I bet when you see some beautiful security system turned into a mess because of bad policies you feel like I do when i hand over some box i lovingly created only to have them turn it into a spyware/adware laden mess in less than a month, just like that scene in "History of The World part I" where the artist gets his work pissed on by the critic!
So you are for the Koch Bros and giving the 1% even more tax breaks? Because I hate to break the news to ya friend but the tea party hasn't been grass roots since the "tea party express" aka the Koch bros money train, rolled into the station more than a year and a half ago. You look at the platform of Cain or any other pro tea party politician and you'll find they are pretty much reading a Koch bros press release. It was a nice idea, to take back the government, but sadly it got bought out and co-opted by the money men before the second minuteman had even gone by.
As for TFA, is there gonna be an article when someone at SCO tries to do a slip and fall at the Safeway as well? While i appreciate what Groklaw did back in the day with the SCO case that was then, this is now. SCO isn't even qualified to be called a zombie, more like a little pile of shit that still wafts up the occasional bad odor.
Lets be honest folks, they have about as much of a chance of winning jack shit in court as that crazy guy that wanted millions because his pants got messed up at the cleaners. hell that guy had a better chance than SCO does, the rulings the court handed down making it really REALLY clear that they don't own shit when it comes to Unix.
But as long as sites like /. keep writing about them they'll get some gambling VC to throw them a couple of bucks, so quit helping them okay? Just ignore the shit and the sun will dry up their little stinky ass and blow them away.
Maybe I don't understand the concept, correct me if i'm wrong, but I thought true anarchy was "he who has the biggest guns makes the rules' ala Somalia? I bet if you rape a warlord's daughter predictable or not he will hang you by your intestines from the nearest bridge.
And frankly i don't see how ANY system could eliminate revenge, it is as old as time. it would be like trying to eliminate sex or vice. I remember what a local cop told me when they were taking a child molester to trial. he was given STRICT orders by the chief that if they heard so much as backfire their asses were to hit the dirt or seek shelter and forget Mr Rapist.
as for TFA how in the hell can they say this isn't a HUGE breach of the wiretap laws? it isn't like these things were picking up ONLY the suspects cell phone were they? I don't see how they could manage that without letting the suspect know by having his cell glitchy while everyone around him had working phones. And if they did just grab everybody how is this not a violation of due process? does that mean if they think their is a criminal in my town they can just listen to ALL calls until they find the right guy? me think the feds have gotten too damned power mad and think they are above the law which sadly in most cases they are right. Damned shame though, this used to be a free country.
Accept they have NOT cut out the term, they just make their shiny a little more shiny, but as you say go to their forums, its esoteric workaround city there!
Look, I've come to accept that some will never let go of their terminals, just as I doubt we'll ever see a day that Windows and OSX doesn't have some terminal buried deep in the bowels for the script heads...but that is where it belongs deep in the bowels where those that like CLI will know how to get to it and will care while the rest of the users don't know it exists.
When I first started playing in FOSS land around 03-04 you could see progress, slow and steady. But somewhere along the way, hell it may have been "the Canonical cult" to paraphrase your words that caused it, but somewhere along the line the ground went sour, things got nasty. Now what I see is more of a club mentality where when you ask a simple question like "why is there no find drivers or roll back drivers buttons? that would really help new users" instead of someone saying "You know that is a good question, why DON'T we have one of those?" and talking about the pluses and minuses of such a system you get "STFU or go back to windblowz luser LOL!".
While I haven't hung out on some of the more elderly Linux forums, I don't do so because frankly their OSes are even less consumer friendly than Ubuntu, and that is saying something. it is like we saw all this real progress on creating "A Linux for everyone" and then it just....stopped. Now it all seems to be about clics and clubs and "one tru way"ism as you put it and meanwhile retailers like me still have nothing but Windows on our shelves simply because we have NO choice, we really don't. I still can't take a bog standard barebones, take a distro even a year and a half old (even though Windows gets a minimum 7 years worth of updates), update it to current, and not have SOMETHING break. wireless, sound, networking, video, there is always SOMETHING broken. And I think that is just a damned shame. Because once anything breaks in Linux land it is "welcome to pain!" time, just one hoop jump after another. With windows nearly all (there are exceptions but rare) driver issues can be fixed by 'reinstall driver, reboot".
I mean is it REALLY so much to ask for to have a single user friendly distro that I won't have to give away lifetime support and end up losing my shirt just to keep the damned thing running and current? Is that REALLY so hard to come up with? of course all i ever get for asking that is heaps of insults so i guess the answer is yes, it is impossible with Linux in its current state.
I'd say the big advantage right now that AMD has and really needs to pursue is the mobile division which has just about the perfect combination of power+price+ energy efficiency. As I said I sold my MSI Wind (which actually was a nice netbook) and got one of the new Brazos EEE netbooks. When I was stuck at the doc's for half a day i took it with me and ended up with half the patients AND the nurses all wanting to ask questions and get a look. It has a great 720p picture, nice keyboard, even running videos for hours it barely got warm to the touch, just a really nice unit. And when everyone heard what I paid for it ($350 WITH an 8Gb of RAM upgrade AND a briefcase for it) I ended up having to write the make/model and website half a dozen times for even the nurses wanted to know where they could get one.
So I'd say they really hit it out of the park on the mobile line and I can see why they were having trouble meeting demand for the chips. They are low power, cheap, and do the things folks want to do which is play the occasional game or watch HD video. while they haven't had much luck on the desktop front with Bulldozer (I predict like the original Phenom it'll take them a little while to get the bugs out of the new design) I'd say both their mobile APUs and Phenom/Athlon mobiles are in the sweet spot when it comes to the all important Price+Performance+Efficiency.
So I'd say it isn't so much performance + rep as you say but the metric I outlined above. Folks want a good deal, with a machine that will let them play their FB games or watch HD Youtube videos while not breaking their wallet on either the price or the electric bill. my oldest decided he wanted something bigger so he got a Phenom II Mobile 17 inch and all the kids at college have been quite impressed by his. He's sent more than a half a dozen of them to me to "hook them up" with similar laptops, as it lets them do their classwork and then kick back in the lounge for a little TF2 or Second Life for the ladies.
And in the end it ALWAYS came down not to raw performance, but would it do what they wanted to do with it smoothly without breaking their bank accounts. And that is where I think AMD has the advantage, their mainstream chips are a much better deal while still giving good video and gaming performance. If you haven't tried one of the Brazos netbooks give one a spin, they really are quite good.
If you are talking about the government it is because they own the MSM through their "friends" in the highest corps and thus can get those who only know what they see on TV to defend them?
We have seen time and time again frankly flagrant abuses of power that even Nixon wouldn't have had the balls to attempt yet the MSM trip over themselves to kiss the ring. Look how there was only one reporter that would do ANY real followup on the "fast and the furious" scandal while the rest lined up to say it was nothing. hell even the right wingers who were looking for any excuse to hang Obama didn't seem to want to go after it.
The entire thing is rotten to the core folks, and OWS is only the beginning. More and more are realizing everything they see and read through the MSM is about as accurate as Soviet era Pravda and are waking up to the fact they've been had. Right now the constitution pretty much is a worthless piece of paper when considering how much attention those in power actually respect it anymore.
I've had good luck with customers and the Velocity Cruz and Archos tablets. Sure they're not speed demons, but we are talking grandma and he is worried about price. they start at $99 for the 7 inch Cruz but if its for grandma I'd probably look at the 10 inch Archos for $169.
As someone whose grandma passed away this yer I wish you all the luck in the world. We were lucky that mine was a spirited little thing that managed to stay on her feet right up until that last week of her life when she passed right after her 96th birthday.
I learned one thing though...I don't EVER want to live to be THAT old! all your friends are gone, more of the people that you knew are below ground than above, she had even lost one child and one grandchild by the end. Personally I'd rather bite the farm before everybody i know does, thanks.
TFA also doesn't point out that they already have a workaround that is as simple as clicking a button that says "fix it". No CLI mess, no trying to explain it to Suzy the checkout girl, the CLI is also listed if you want to do that, but for everyone else there is this simple fix it page.
I don't know about everyone else but I'll be testing this on my own system for a few hours and if there are no adverse effects i'll be shooting an email to my users with the link.
Actually I wouldn't call Spinrite level II a "stress test" per se, more of a basic I/O test to find what I call "lying firmware". You see i've found that on some bad batches the firmware will just release some of the reserve sectors and not say squat about it, making the drive look good initially when it is actually suffering from bad sectors OOTB.
What Spinrite Level II does is simply bypasses the firmware, does a single write followed by a single read and posts the results. Now if this were a drive that had been in use for quite awhile and had plenty of data on it this would take awhile as it will try to recover a bad sector if it has data in it, on a new drive all this does is a single basic I/O op and reports its findings. I'm sure you'll agree that if a drive can't even do a single I/O without throwing errors that drive shouldn't be trusted in a production environment or even in a home machine.
so I highly recommend Spinrite if you are gonna be dealing with many drives as while their recovery ability is top notch frankly their I/O test makes it well worth the $30 for a copy. On a clean drive this takes about 30-40 minutes per 400Gb depending on the drive speed so it really isn't long considering you are talking about trusting the integrity of your data to the drive in question. I simply keep an old 233Mhz tower server with a PCI SATA card for running spinrite as CPU speed really doesn't figure into it and even with 128Mb of RAM in the old thing Spinrite is able to completely load itself into RAM and performs just as fast as in a new machine thanks to the limit being rotational speed.
The better and more telling question would be thus: "If you remove command line from the OS, will it continue to function and will the user even know it is missing?" and the correct answer for Windows is YES as its not a vital subsystem and NO a good 98% of the users will NEVER know it is even missing. Now try that in Linux, go on, I'll wait...the OS died you say? and if anything goes wrong without CLI you have no prayer of fixing it? welcome to reality.
Here is a NASTY bit of truth that is guaranteed to make Linux users foam at the mouth but it is a fact, ready? In its current form Linux IS Windows 98, no more and NO less and I shall elaborate. What was Windows 98? it was a CLI OS (DOS) with a GUI shell, that's all. While the GUI shell was fine for basic tasks one often had to drop down to CLI to get anything complex accomplished, and there was even a way to bypass the shell completely and only use the CLI underneath.
Now what is Linux? Its a CLI OS (Bash, Korne, Bourne, you do get choices on the CLI, kinda like how you could run different DOS under Windows 2.x) and like Win9x it has a GUI shell. Like Win98 the CLI is a VITAL SUBSYSTEM and can NOT be removed because like Win98 the GUI is just a shell, it isn't vital, in fact one can run the whole thing without the shell even being loaded.
While you might consider this choice I am about to point out why this is actually a handicap that ensures that Linux in its current form will never gain squat in the vital consumer market. You see by having the GUI be a second class citizen this "cripples" for want of a better term, anything to do with the GUI. a developer can build for the GUI, he can build a barely functional GUI shell, he can ignore it completely. How many programs have you seen in Linux where there are 15 pages of CLI options and only half a page for the GUI? I bet you can find quite a few, in fact i'd bet there are more that meet this description than that are the other way around. hell you'd probably be hard pressed to find even 5 programs that have more options in the GUI than the CLI.
But the nasty truth nobody wants to admit is you'll never get home users to run CLI because as far as they are concerned that is a huge step backwards, and they would be right. If you want to have a CLI that is fine, hell with PowerShell (which isn't shipped by default with a single home machine that I'm aware of) you can script the whole damned thing, local or network. but this is if you WANT TO but it is never a HAVE TO. With Linux it is the opposite because Linux is still stuck in the "GUI optional" phase.
So like it or not what I said was the truth, as far as users are concerned there is no CLI in Windows. It is buried in the bowels of the OS, they'll never see it, never look for it, and never call on it. Can you say the same for Linux friend? can you HONESTLY say that if you made a Linux distro with NO CLI that it would be able to remain functional while updating from one of the main distro branches? hell would it even boot? probably not.
Thanks to you and Pete for explaining this subject in much closer to layman's terms than I've ever seen it tackled, it does make me think of a couple of follow up questions if you don't mind.
Since as you pointed out with Enigma (which IIRC there is still a handful of messages they still haven't cracked after all these years) there are gonna be advances coming down the pipe and that both AES 128 and RSA 1024 have expiration dates, wouldn't it be smarter to try to jump a little bit ahead of the curve? by that I mean wouldn't it be smarter to just go ahead and switch to 512 bit AES and 4096 RSA when the previous schema expires? Or is that too computationally expensive with current technology?
Which brings me to my second question: Back in the day we had math co-processors for seriously heavy number crunching and today thanks to HT on the AMD side and QP on the Intel side we once again have the ability to place a co-processor on a bus that is as fast as the CPU my second question is thus: Since from what Pete wrote (again not an expert, he may be wrong, I don't know) the majority of the key generation is being done on the server side wouldn't it be advantageous to use a "crypto co-processor" to allow much larger and thus stronger keys to be generated quicker and thus as you put it "leap ahead" in the bit race? I know Via has native crypto in their silicon and FPGAs allow one to build a custom chip easily but it just seems to me with so many black hats throwing so much power at the wall it would make sense to throw some specialized silicon at the problem instead of just more generic CPUs.
Again sorry if these are noob questions as I found out when trying to learn more about the subject that very quickly the math shot straight over my head, but these are two questions that as a layman I thought would be more of an obvious evolution, but of course I'm sure there is some hidden gotcha I'm missing which is why it isn't done.
That's weird, did you use them mainly for CDs? Because at least in my experience it is the DVD that usually goes long before the CD. I even have a few drives that'll burn DVDs really great, just won't read 'em.
As for the others notice how pissy many of the comments were? And for what, because I dared to ask why having 2 CDs couldn't be an option? tell me, how EXACTLY does that hurt Canonical? Is giving more users the opportunity to use their software a BAD thing now?
You see this was EXACTLY what I was talking about, the ground has turned sour. Whereas in 03 when I first started playing with FLOSS the community welcomed new people, they would take them under their wing. Now its more of a "This is OUR thing, go STFU and die if you aren't with the program" attitude and frankly it doesn't surprise me with such a bad attitude that FOSS is flatline. Hell just the other day a guy posted some numbers by Gartner and netcraft (sorry i didn't think to save the links) showing that despite all the hype Ubuntu hasn't helped Linux gain squat for share (currently 1.1% according to gartner) and even Linux on servers was down to 21% from a high of 32%!
The ONLY way you grow is by getting new folks into the ecosystem. They learn, they tell other folks, this is how it works folks. But it seems to me, at least from what I've been seeing and hearing the past few years, that this "FOSS is an exclusive club and you're not welcome" attitude has been spreading like a cancer. Even asking a simple question, like "Why is it there is no find drivers or roll back drivers buttons to make it easier for new users with driver issues?" can get literally mounds of vile spewage.
If you want Linux to be ONLY for geeks? that's fine, nothing wrong with hobbyist OSes, hell I was on OS/2 for years myself. But then stop pretending you actually want anyone to use Linux and quit with this "year of the Linux (insert device)" BS if you want them to go away, alright? Because you can't grow or hope to ever have a year of the Linux anything if you tell noobs to go fuck off and die, and THAT is the attitude i'm seeing from way too much of the community these last couple of years.
Its being on the bleeding edge. Sure computers chips are for the most part commodity priced now, but if you set out to build a machine ONLY with the most bleeding edge parts, like say the absolute most powerful chips made? You'll find that savings goes poof because you are on the bleeding edge.
This is where Apple has the advantage in the tablet market that they simply don't have in the PC market. you look at the Mac lineup and frankly i can't think of a time the Mac has been "bleeding edge' with regards to their chips, but Apple has been pretty damned close to absolute bleeding edge when it has come to their ARM offerings. you look at what the competitors are offering and as you say many are just horrible, because at least IMHO from playing with the things ARM seems to drop off the scale from nice to usable to shite on a crusty roll REAL quick. A 400MHz x86 can still be used for document creation and even very light office work, a 400MHz ARM? That is a truly horrible experience.
As TFA notes this is something Cook really needs to be credited for. the guy took a hell of a big gamble by paying big bucks to lock up his supply chain so he could get pretty damned fast ARM chips at prices the other guys just can't match. ARM just doesn't have a rivalry like Intel VS AMD where both are trying to be the most cutting edge and cranking out chips to beat the band. From what I've seen there are very few places cranking out truly bleeding edge performance ARM chips and a hell of a lot of places putting out shite.
This leaves Apple's competitors with a hell of a lot less choice, so in the end they put out tablets based on shitty chips or they end up higher than Apple. I personally believe though this is only temporary as Nvidia seems to be cooking up some seriously nice Tegra chips, the only question is can they come up with enough capital to crank them things out like Intel does X86.
Yeah but the problem with that is this: what's the first thing to go out on a DVD/CDRW or a DVD burner? the ability to read DVDs. I don't know how many machines I'd had through the shop that would read and burn CDs just fine but the DVD would be crapped out.
So what is wrong with giving folks choice, isn't that is what FOSS is supposed to be out, choice? Why not have a 2 CD set AND a DVD with everything but the kitchen sink, why not that?
Of course I'll probably get hate for daring to even say the user should have choice, I don't know what happened to the community but it just don't seem like a nice place anymore. Now it seems to be too many have this "You'll take this and do it our way and damned well LIKE it or STFU and go back to windblowz luser" attitude, like FOSS is an exclusive club and they're the gatekeepers or something.
I used to love keeping up with what's new and thought back in 03 that by this time we'd see Linux boxes in every store, but somewhere along the ways the ground turned sour and the community seems to me to be more about being in a club than helping FOSS spread to the masses.
Uhhh...where have YOU been? Go into Walmart, Best Buy, Staples...you see a fricking TON of AMD machines being sold. Hell last time I went in there I think more than half of the netbooks and laptops had AMD Vision stickers on them.
I thought the whole "vision" idea is damned smart but whomever they had in marketing dropped the ball. Most folks don't know gigawhatitz and megawhositz they want to know "What can I DO with the thing? and as a small retailer I can tell you THAT is what you use to sell machines in this economy! You show them how easy it is to transcode video for their mobile devices, you show them how nicely it plays Farmville and WoW and TF2, you tell them how this netbook that weighs only 3 pounds and is cheaper than the other guy's stuff lets them watch THREE hour and a half movies in HD on a charge!
Frankly the marketing bunch deserved to be fired because they had this great idea and dropped the ball. All I ever saw about vision was a sticker telling a couple of bullet points, that's it. I'd have partnered with the OEMs and retailers to have those display models playing a little cool video telling the folks all the things these chips can do FOR them. That was the mistake here folks, marketing wasn't doing their jobs!
Actually if you have been keeping up with events of late AMD has been selling so many chips that the only thing holding them back has been trouble from the manufacturing getting up to speed on the latest die shrink so I really doubt marketing when you are selling out of chips already is REALLY needed that much, do you?
I mean look at the AMD Brazos line, they have those things in everything from netbooks (here is the one I personally sold my MSI Wind for after picking up a few for customers, it hold 8Gb of RAM and is sweeeet, both on performance and battery life) to laptops like this one with B-Ray to cool HTPC designs to these really awesome all in ones which I found make pretty killer SOHO/small business and family PCs.
So actually I'd say AMD was on the right track when their CEO announced that they were slowing their desktop output to ramp up mobile chips to try to fill the demand. Frankly even if they hadn't had the problems with the supply chain I doubt seriously they'd be needing much in the way of advertising ATM. Right now with the economy down prices trumps just about everything and the bang per buck was in the AMD camp even before the APUs hit, now you have machines that'll play WoW and smooth HD video at frankly insanely cheap prices and get 6 hours on the battery for the mobiles and not heat up the house on the HTPC and all in one. Seems like a good combo to me.
Of course this isn't even bringing up the next "big thing" from the AMD camp which most of the number crunchers and programmers here ought to be drooling over and that is the switch from VLIW to vector in their APUs and GPUs which should bring floating point math a hell of a speed boost. Oh and for all you FOSS lovers out there AMD is switching to Coreboot so you'll have a system that can be open and modified from the BIOS layer on up.
I do have a question about TFA though....what was wrong with R600? Sure the 2xxx and 3xxx series didn't slaughter Nvidia but they also didn't crank the living hell out of the heat nor did they have the whole "bumpgate" issue Nvidia had at the time. Their IGP version of the 3xxx was also quite nice for HD video and the HD38xx was pretty sweet and was easy to crossfire. So while I wouldn't call it a second coming or Nvidia killer it certainly wasn't up to the level of the Nvidia 5xxx, aka the Hoover card fiasco.
Shows how old I am, I thought instantly of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music which frankly after listening to TFA I find it a little more musical than MMM myself, but that may be just me.
That is why I'd snatch up the 1Tb and 2Tb Spinpoint (VERY fast with a large cache) EcoGreen (actually beats all but the perpendiculars in my own benches while staying below 92F under load, again thanks to large cache) and the Hitatchi Deskstars. The ones left in the pipe are from the last three batches and I've bought and abused drives from all three batches, they are as solid as any enterprise drive I've owned and even with the markup are a better deal. With the large cache you can RAID 5 some Spinpoints or Ecogreens and get crazy throughput, I should know as I set up a server running EcoGreens and they are just sweet and really dropped the temps down.
But yeah I've been there and got the T-shirt, so I know about bad batches. i got bit by the IBM Deathstars, the 2005 MaxWhores, and the final bite was the 2007 WD shitfest of the first quarter of that year so i know shit batches can and DO get past QA. But as you sadly found out right now Seagate ain't worth a shit, talking to my fellow builders they have boxes full of the dead POS just like I did with the Maxtors. they are also buying as many Samsung and Hitachi as they can to ride out the bad batches of Seagates and when those run dry the EcoDrive of WD is pretty good. The Black has a little higher failure rate but nothing above 15% and can be easily vetted by giving it a good workout on first load.
A good and easy quick test that won't damage the drive is Spinrite on setting 2, which just bypasses the firmware and has each sector do a write followed by a read and reports the results. if you start finding bad sectors on that first run? Watch out, its an unstable drive. You see I've found a lot of the shit drives have what i call "Lying firmware" where it will try to cover up failures by simply letting loose some of the reserve sectors and not saying shit about it. spinrite bypasses the firmware so they can't BS it so you'll find out REAL quick if its a bad batch. And since it is only doing a simple write/read cycle it isn't putting a heavy load that could cause premature wear, just the kind of usage any drive should function doing.
But I know what its like to be in a corner and have to roll the dice, that's how I got burnt with the Maxtors. Now I ALWAYS go to the builder sites and check the reviews, as you've seen my fellow builders call out bad batches pretty loudly as nobody likes to have a new build ready for a customer and have the drive shit on you. it makes your whole business look Mickey Mouse. so check the sites, listen to the guys, and snatch as many Samsung and Hitachi drives as you can get your grubby fingers on and you'll weather out this bad batch just fine. I'm just glad i hung onto 6Tb worth of Samsungs for myself so even if the channel is flooded i won't be hurting for quite awhile.
Question: Not a crypto guy so my apologies if this sounds noobish but its just something I've been curious about. When I started out in the 80s i remember being told how strong 128bit was, followed by how strong 256bit, then 512bit, now you are saying anything less than 2048bit is shit, so my question is thus: How fast are we going through these things and with the frankly insane amounts of hardware that keep coming down the pipe is this gonna end up some sort of "bit race" between the white and black hats?
Because when I started out the thought of a machine that only weighed 3 pounds and gave you 6 hours away from an outlet yet gave you a better picture than the local movie theater and let you carry whole libraries worth of music and movies was something out of Sci-Fi yet now I have one sitting on my desk and it cost a whole $350. Now that we have OpenCL which looks like it even may replace CUDA (as Nvidia is now supporting it as well as ATI) we have the tech to load a box with a truly insane number of processors to tackle any math problem which I'm sure the black hats will be happy to jump on if they can make money with it.
so how long until 1024 and 2048 are as useless as the old 128 and 256 bit keys? How high of a number can we go to before the time to process it on an average machine makes it not worth the work? again sorry if this is obvious to a crypto guy because that is one field that is frankly over my head so this is just a question from a curious guy on the sidelines. Is there a number high enough to be uncrackable? or is it all just a matter of letting Moore's Law catch up?
Or here is a thought, just throwing it out there, how about everyone leave everyone else alone and we all take personal responsibility for our actions, how about that? you may think this is just a healthy argument but you're wrong because i've seen where this goes. The smokers turned out to be the canaries in the coal mine, as we now have nanny types advocating cranking the taxes up on sugar and red meat, what's next you getting weighed and being fined by the state if you don't match their target weight?
I so miss the days when people actually stood up for each other instead of acting like a bunch of whiny bitches trying to control each others lives. the latest excuse is "Oh you'll burden us all with increased medical costs" while fucking ignoring Jose and his 14 kids that snuck across the border and are now getting food stamps,welfare, medicare and everything else. Oh and don't say its bullshit because I know a gal that actually has to go out and check on them as part of her job with the state and she is sick of seeing whole houses filled to the brim with those who just snuck over the border as late as last week and who ONLY know how to say in English "How do I get check?". And of course she ain't allowed to say shit because according to her boss "its politics'.
But if the nanny state is so damned worried about me possibly costing them a dollar, even though they can shit money out to the whole damned third world, every "el presidente" that will toe the line AND half of Mexico, I propose this: I will sign an ironclad contract that says if ANYTHING bad happens to me the ONLY treatment I'll get is morphine which is dirt cheap, and in return you leave me the fuck alone and exempt me from your sin taxes, do we have a deal? I have actually walked up to politicians and proposed this and they hemmed and hawed and in the end it all came down to "We know what is best for you". Well kindly go fuck yourself state, you can't even balance your checkbook or keep from taking bribes long enough to do something about a sinking economy, I frankly don't trust any of you to be able to even tie your damned shoes!
As for TFA, the economy is down and Linux is going down, surprise surprise. programmers actually have bills to pay too ya know and while RMS seems to believe a communist utopia is possible (of course most of us aren't allowed to be permanent squatters at MIT, don't take my word for it, look it up, that is how he describes his living arrangements) everyone else out there is worried about keeping a roof over their head or having their job shipped to Bangalore. So no shit a software whose philosophy is "free as in beer!" is having trouble getting new programmers, they are all trying to keep their heads above water like everybody else. But hey in 25 to 30 years when the economy isn't a corpse anymore (look up the last depression, it went from 1929-1953, that's 24 years folks) I'm sure the programmers that have jobs and money won't mind donating to the cause. its just right now they are trying to keep from ending up living under an overpass and if SaaS or MSFT or frankly anybody else is offering more than Linux, which is "Thanks for your donation citizen!" then duh! That's where they are gonna go.
You SURE that isn't an Nvidia problem? Because I have dealt with plenty of Nvidia's dropping backwards compatibility but I haven't had a bit of trouble from ATI in that regard and I still play some REALLY old games like the original Command & Conquer. I even have some DOS games from GOG like Redneck Rampage but those are through DOSBox I'm sure so I have no clue whether those are hardware or software accelerated.
But you are taking me back with the rest of your post. They had some REALLY killer flightsticks when Win95 came out, along with MSFT Combat Flight Sim (although I never had a sidewinder, I had IIRC a CF F15 Flight pro) but to me the thing that proved to me DirectX was the way to go was WinQuake and the directX version of MechWarrior II. Me and my friends just sat around the PC going "Ooooh!" and drooling while we watched the demo run on those two.
So you're right, the kiddies may not remember but I sure as hell do, there was a time when St. John was in every mag and it seemed like every company out there was trying to top the others with what they could pull out of DirectX. Hell how many games did we end up with running on either a Quake or Doom engine? I thought for a while they should just say on the back of the box "Yes we are running the Quake (insert number) engine!" and while I loooved the games back then if you haven't played Just Cause II on a directX 10 card you don't know what you are missing. If I have a customer on the fence about whether he wants to have an HTPC all I have to do is fire that game up and set off a couple of charges and they are drooling while they hand me a check.
But why should we? THAT is the fundamental question. unless you expect the USA to go in and "regime change" every third world nation in Africa, and we have seen how well that usually works out, all we end up doing is giving the warlords more supplies and money for better battlewagons.
And I said Glenn Beck is batshit IMHO but that also don't change the fact the guy was probably fired for daring not to toe the company line, which was NeoCon expansionism. One of the last times I saw him on O'Rielly he was getting called every kind of idiot for daring to say we should "Be Switzerland" and stop stirring up shit in third world nations. Do you agree or disagree that the USA should stay out of the job of being "world police"?
You can think the man is nuts but still agree with him on a subject. Even a broken clock is right twice a day ya know.
No it hasn't as what he is talking about isn't NAND but MRAM which is supposed to give you the speed of DRAM with the non volatility of NAND. Its a really nice idea, that if they could get it to work would be a game changer. Imagine if instead of 2Gb-8Gb or even 16Gb of DRAM you instead had the entire storage functional as one giant RAM drive? One that you could kill the power to and have everything stay as it was with zero losses or need to refresh? Even if they could only get the prices down enough to replace DRAM imagine having your OS be "instant on/instant off" because it would just freeze in place when you pulled the plug. Things like sleep, hybrid sleep, and hibernate would go the way of the floppy!
That said they've been trying to come up with similar tech since the 60s in the form of PRAM and nobody has quite go the hang of it yet. its always too expensive, too complex, or too easily damaged. so I wouldn't hold my breath for it anymore than for holodiscs, flying cars, or Alyson Hannigan sexbots. Although frankly they can keep the flying cars, holodiscs AND the MRAM if they can just give me an Alyson Hannigan, preferably gift wrapped and wearing the BtVS S2 Vamp Willow outfit. I mean what kinds of scientists are we creating when they can send a man to the moon but can't even give us our own sexbots? C'mon scientists, prove you're worthy of those lab coats!
If you are talking about the Dreamcast you really need to check out some of the emulators and ROM collections for the DC. The fact that you didn't have to modchip it meant that while my boys have the original Xbox and PS2 gathering dust the DC stays hooked up loaded with SNES and Genesis games. Its cool to be able to bust out some Ikari warriors or General Chaos without having to blow on carts and if you hit some of the BT sites you can find pre-made ROM collections that are as simple as burn>>run for the DC. It was a great little machine.
I have to agree about the PC though, my boys probably have just about every console and handheld (the youngest especially was into consoles and handhelds) but they are all for the most part just gathering dust. Instead they just play MMOs or whatever games they have gotten from the last Steam sale. The oldest when not studying is in LOTRO and L4D II while the youngest is playing Amnesia and something called Terraria?
One thing I'll never regret though is getting the boys started at a young age on the PC, as while the other kids at the college needed lessons on managing online information and citing references the oldest is breezing through. Having computer skills really is required for modern life and I didn't realize how much I had taught the boys over the years until I started teaching a neighbor down the hall who had never before touched a computer or been online. In this day and age computer illiteracy is almost as bad as regular illiteracy and it was a real challenge to keep help from falling for scams until he was "net savvy" enough to function on his own. But with my help he was able to find a good second job through online advertisements and is even catching up with his long lost relatives back in Florida so at least it worked out alright.
And the REALLY funny part? The thing that sold MSFT on DirectX was a bad Xmas game! For those that don't remember MSFT had a primitive graphics layer called "WinG" back in the days of win 3.x but it was a fiddly little bitch. Well along came a little game that used WinG called The Lion King and wouldn't ya know it, every parent went out and bought that for their little ones thinking they'd be sitting in front of the keyboard singing "I just can't wait to be king". Well instead what they got was a bunch of serious parent cursing when WinG would shit, die, shit AND die, or just lock the whole fucking PC up hard. yeah that made all those little tykes happy.
So it wasn't long after that they announced they were gonna come up with an abstraction layer to fix all the fiddly crap that was WinG and DirectX was born, and it was good. oh I'm sure some of those out here that are cheering for ABM (anyone but MSFT) hate it but ya know what? It works and it works WELL. I mean here I am in 2011, with a quad core PC with 800 stream processors for a GPU and an X64 OS yet I can STILL fire up a game from 1998 like No One Live forever and still have it hardware accelerated in all its blocky fingered fun. Then I can go straight from that to Just Cause II with full DirectX 10 bling bling squirting wonder across my screen, no fiddling, no changing shit, just "clicky clicky" and it WORKS. Now THAT is what I'm talking about!
As for TFA I have a REALLY good suggestion for MSFT, are they listening? Yeah you see that company over there, Valve? yeah those guys? Well RIP THEM OFF as hard as you fricking can! Because while you have made extending media to the X360 from the Win 7 PC about as butt simple as can be Games For Windows Live is a steaming pile of festering shit on a crusty roll.
Just for the fuck of it I decided i'd quit playing the pirate version and just register the Bioshock II game I'd had sitting in a box for weeks, I thought "Surely they have the bugs worked out by now, so I can just register and play, right?".....oh boy, what a horrible experience! Valve if any of you guys are reading this I will NEVER EVER say a bad thing about Steam ever again, okay? first i launch the thing and it needs to update. Okay I've had the game in the box awhile, that's fair. But then it kicks me off live to update but does NOT close the game so I'm sitting there wondering WTF is going on, so I close the game and it takes a good 30 minutes to update even though i'm on a 12Mbps connection. Okay fine, I launch when its done...and it needs another update, another 30 minutes....argh! So I finally get the bullshit done, play for an hour and go to bed, a couple of days go by and I decide to play a few more levels so I launch...another update...FUCK YOU GFWL &%$&^%$!
So please MSFT, you guys are famous for ripping off good ideas right? Please take a big lesson from valve and make it all seamless and nice okay? you have all the pieces of the puzzle, you have DirectX to make it easy for porting and programming, you have the Win 7 PC that is easier than ever to use, you have the X360 with all the bugs worked out, and you have the WinPhone with Skype recently purchased. Just make it all work together nice and neat, okay? steal the best ideas from Valve and Apple and make it butt simple to manage my media, play my games, have everything all neatly linked together and seamless. Is that really too much to ask for?