It is a shame you posted AC but just in case you look back I have to ask, why PPC? Why not ARM? It seems like using PPC would significantly jack up the prices and Apple DID switch away from PPC for a reason, it was because those chips are simply too hot for mobile while having decent speed.
OTOH something like the Tegra Kal El would seem like a perfect fit for amiga. Plenty of threading, powerful GPU, and low power so you could make nice laptops and netbooks with it. so what advantages do you think PPC would bring over ARM?
And the fact that some folks are willing to pay 2 grand to run AmigaOS over OSX bothers you.....why exactly? hell i knew a guy that would pay frankly crazy money for authentic 70s bell bottoms in his size, why? because he REALLY liked bell bottoms and thought they were worth the money to him.
And that's capitalism 101 friend, if there are enough folks willing to pay the cost (I bet even at 2 grand those guys ain't making much of anything off of those simply due to the fact they are buying in such low quantities) to keep those guys afloat and it makes them happy? Good for them. I have a customer that is having me keep an eye out for a Commodore 128 and i'm sure he'll end up paying more than a new PC to get it, why? Because he LIKED his 128 and misses it.
If there are enough folks out there that miss Amiga enough to keep a little shop open selling new Amigas personally i'm all for it, I wish them nothing but luck. our whole system is based on finding a market and making a profit by serving it, sure they won't get rich but if they can pay their bills and make a few bucks why not? Hell there is a bunch that sells cassette players for PCs, if there is a market and a little money to be made somebody will make it, why not a classic OS company?
Actually I'd say that was a legitimate concern seeing as how we recently had a Commodore released that was just your standard Atom nettop in a commodore case.
As for TFA I wish them luck. I'm sure that Amiga fans are a tiny niche but that doesn't mean they can't be a profitable market to serve. if these guys can make a good living by giving Amiga fans what they want? More power to 'em I say, variety spice and all that.
Bets on how long until they are busted for antitrust? although frankly after Intel got away with bribery AND compiler rigging (which they are still doing BTW) frankly I think our DoJ is as worthless as tits on a boar hog.
But between double standards for themselves and the rumor they are looking at buying Yahoo which would give them pretty much the entire webmail market (FYI Yahoo email has over 300 million unique users, about double what Gmail has in the US as well, its the one thing Yahoo is #1 on) frankly Google is starting to scare me. they have more info on everyone than most spook factories could ever dream of, thanks to their tax dodging they have huge amounts of capital they can wave around, and frankly their RDF makes the one the late Jobs had look like a tinker toy.
Frankly apple? Really doesn't scare me. Their desire for crazy high margins makes sure they stay at the top end and never really venture below the mid to high price range but Google? Android is showing up on everything from low rent tablets and TVs to the latest high end stuff, all that data...yeah MSFT will end up IBM, big in business but not really going much past their core markets, Apple will continue to be the boutique high end brand, but Google could easily become another "ultrasupermegacorp' like MSFT was in the 90s and we all know how nice they turned out to be for competition. Ballmer can throw chairs and want to fucking kill Google but Google is the 8000 pound gorilla and can fucking kill anybody it wants now. that much power in ANY hands i find a little scary.
Then frankly they're doin it wrong. Hell Morgan Freeman seems to narrate everything these days anyway so i bet a system based on his or James Earl Jones would be quite nice. of course being a geek i think a GPS based on the Shat would be cool although you wouldn't be setting any speed records with the thing "The turn...will be coming...up ahead" "WHAT...do you think you're doing? I said....to turn right....at the corner".
That said all computer voices should be based on Majel Barrett- Roddenberry IMHO. She could be soothing authoritative OR sarcastic and still made the computers in ST sound cool.. That or the goddess of all things cute and adorable Alyson Hannigan.
Personally I wouldn't give a shit if they made it sound like Roseanna Barr if they could just do something about that damned stammer. you know the one, where the voice goes up or down in the wrong spots? I have yet to hear an automated system where they have that completely licked.
Not a problem friend, glad to help. if you don't mind a bit o' advice? sign up for their newsletter as they offer some crazy sales only to those that sign up. my friend got this huge tube full of NOS chips for something like $6 because he got the newsletter and the chips normally went for a buck a piece, they also has some crazy cheap "grab bags" where they just fill it with caps and LEDs and motors and all kinds of stuff for less than $10.
So if you like to DIY you really can't go wrong with those guys. you need to know your parts a bit as their descriptions leave something to be desired, but then again this ain't Amazon and they assume any guys buying stepper motors and NOS Motorola 68xxx series chips know their stuff. Oh and if you are wondering according to my fiend their quality is top notch, lots of TI and other top shelf brands, especially on their chips and caps.
if your wife doesn't like you having the CC you ought to see my friends workshop, he has those ace hardware style see through plastic drawer stacks from floor to ceiling in a workroom roughly the size of two normal bedrooms put together. i swear in his workshop he could probably build a couple of bots just from the stuff he has in the drawers. BTW you might want to try talking to your local mom&pop PC shop as well, you can get a lot of stuff cheap or free. that is how he and I got to be friends, he'd come by and rummage through my junk bins looking for stuff to strip. Now i just hand him any dead laptops or dead parts and he strips any chips he wants from them, and in return when i need solder work done or need the guts replaced on one his my basses he does it free. Works out great for the both of us, he gets plenty of parts, i get free solder work, its a win/win! I bet if you yakked at your local shop you'd find a treasure trove of parts you can strip for a little of nothing and could probably work out a similar deal with the shop owner. Most of us are pack rats and would much rather give parts to someone that can make use than trash 'em.
Riiiight, so the words 'public pretender' are just a myth, correct? I live down the street for our courthouse and have sat there and watched public pretenders in action. down to a man they always make their clients plead guilty and since their clients are uneducated and poor they listen to "their' lawyer and get fucked. the best example i can describe is what i saw happen to a guy I went to HS with. he got busted for selling a bag of weed, his parents scraped up enough to get a lawyer who said "No problem, we'll get you off" but they ran out of money before trial. So what happens? they assign him the very same lawyer as a public pretender only now that he isn't getting paid the tune has changed. suddenly he won't do shit or say anything but "plead guilty" which Mr uneducated dumbass does, he gets 3 years.
The moral of the story boys and girls? if YOU are paying the lawyer he is working FOR YOU. if the STATE pays the lawyer he is working for THE STATE, end of story. While there may be one or two good apples out there I can honestly say that after sitting in that courtroom every chance I could get to see how our 'justice" system worked I can't think of a SINGLE time that the public pretender didn't have his client plead guilty, not one. They simply won't expend the effort if they ain't getting paid friend, just won't do the work.
Oh I agree completely for an extremely specialized application they are great, but you're not gonna try to run an OS in that instance on them are you?
I have a customer, hell of a nice guy and a retired NASA engineer (he made most of the full scale mockups for the shuttle. getting to hold some of the actual shuttle blueprints? VERY cool) that keeps boxes full of TTL chips along with all his old 8 bit chip bibles specifially for running stepper motors for robotics. he helps out the local college with designs on robots for NASA contests. they've been cooking up one for a new Mars rover competition and it is really slick. i'll probably get to do some of the wireless networking and C&C for it, again VERY cool.
For little weird parts like that I'd suggest a little site i tripped over years ago called BG Micro which is just wonderful for the DIYers out there. you can get really good deals on chips, caps, LEDs, all kinds of stuff. while i don't get to use it that often my engineer friend practically lives on that site and says their service and support are really top notch.
so for the DIYers out there I highly recommend. he is constantly buying caps by the bag and chips by the tube from there and says for prototyping and breadboarding new designs you really can't beat their stuff. i remember the first time i showed him that site, he must have bought over $100 just in odds and ends, you'd have thought he was a kid in a candy store.
But that was a plane not ZOMG radiation. When you are dealing with NBC threats you are dealing with the "invisible death" problem as i call it. With a plane, gun, bomb, etc you have something that is easy for folks to visualize which gives them the false illusion of control and that helps to calm them. they think "I can run, I can dodge, i can duck under that awning" and this gives them comfort.
With NBC you have invisible death, where until you start puking blood you wouldn't know if you were surrounded by it which scares the fuck out of the human animal. Look at outbreaks of disease in Africa where they tried to quarantine. Even though they were risking the lives of possibly millions by spreading the disease many would try to run the blockades, why? because as long as THEY feel healthy right that second they think "if i don't get away from this it'll get me too!" and because they can't see the threat they felt out of control and that again scares the shit out of folks and a scared cornered animal is the most dangerous.
So while I agree the actual risk would be small this is one area where if it came down in a major city I'd want the gov to lie their asses off. Say its the busted ass end of some commercial bird and just not let the people know shit. because folks react a hell of a lot differently when it comes to threats they can see and those they can't.
While i'm not the other guy for curiosity I decided to see what i could find and while not $1, I did find one at $6.45 which I'd say add in a buck's worth of memory and an I/O chip and you are looking at less than $8 without bulk discount for something more powerful than what many of us old timers ran Win95 on.
So I gotta agree with the guy. the combo of Moore's law plus cheap China chips and ARM makes those little crap chips end up in the "more trouble than they are worth" bin when you figure in the cost of having to write it yourself VS having the entire FOSS ecosystem at your fingertips ready to run.
Besides what about future features? just because all you can think of today to do with it is foo doesn't mean one of your customers won't come to you and say "how much would it cost to get you to make it do bar for us?". for an example look at security system and the net. just a few years ago as long as the cams recorded everyone was happy, now folks want to be able to access their camera from their Droid or iPhone to make sure everything is okay. a decent chip like the one I linked to with the ability to add a daughterboard or some other form of I/O should be trival to add that functionality to, but an 8 bit CPU? Would be just too stressed.
In the end this little baby 8 bit chips seem at least to me to be more for "we do it because we can" than anything else. With 32bit ARM chips so cheap it seems nuts to waste all that time cooking up your own solutions to deal with such CPU and memory restraint than it is just to buy one of the bazillion COTS boards being offered in bulk from China.
Uhhh...miss the first part of his post where it said " I want to be able to set the limit lower." he's not advocating MSFT set a lower bound, he's advocating the user himself/herself have the CHOICE to have a lower bound. sounds like a good and reasonable request to me.
Has anybody else been getting spam from friends that use yahoo? Now I'm no security expert but from what I've been able to gather this is their MO. They get the user to load the page in Firefox (doesn't seem to work in Chromium, don't know about IE as i don't have a test bed set up ATM), usually by offering a porn video (seems to be hitting the tube sites pretty heavily) which then I believe (not sure of exact mechanism ) loads a hidden iFrame that logs in to the Yahoo and puts a standard spam message (check this out, make money, etc) and sends to all. it doesn't seem to be sending the login credentials anywhere and only seems to work in Firefox. i was just wondering if anybody else has seen this.
But as for TFA you nailed it, spammers don't need office. they can just do as i just laid out and spam the living hell out of anyone who has a friend with the combo of FF and Yahoo. again not a security expert but from my own tests on a box I was getting ready to wipe it doesn't seem to affect gmail (didn't try hotmail, just made a throwaway gmail and yahoo) and it doesn't seem to affect Chromium based or Opera (the IE on this box was old so i didn't think it would have been a fair test) just the combo of yahoo and Firefox.
Those who want to test it themselves here is what I did, sorry i couldn't nail it down to a specific page, but i think it may be an ad they are using as it seems to be kinda random. Have a copy of Firefox WITHOUT your regular yahoo account, in fact just to be safe make sure your cache has been emptied or even better in a VM, set up a fake yahoo and put an account you can control as one of the addresses in that account, and go to a couple of tube sites and start clicking link while monitoring the account you have in the new account's address book. I used xHamster and Tube8 and just started clicking links. In less than 20 minutes i started getting spams from that new account, again ONLY if I used FF and yahoo, no other combo.
Anyway i thought I'd better send up a red flag just in case my users aren't the only ones seeing this and FYI it did NOT seem to be stopped by ABP! didn't try NoScript, too much of a PITA for my users. They really need a "just play the video' button in NoScript IMHO.
But the big IF there is IF they can control re-entry which is not always the case. what if it goes down in Miami? New York? if any of these comes down in a major city the impact with the buildings will spread the shit far and wide, it would be a mess. And that of course isn't counting the loss of life from the pure panic that happens when you say the word radiation around the public. sure the device itself in a worst case would give less than a hundred people cancer, but how many will literally stomp their fellow man to death trying to get away from the ZOMG radiation?
While i agree there is a reason for having them frankly our past history with cleaning up after ourselves doesn't give me much confidence friend. Did you see that pic of just the known debris? You are basically driving a ball of radiation through a minefield and hoping like hell you don't hit something that causes you to lose control. hell look at the spectacular wipeout of that Iridium sat, with the price of those things if they couldn't prevent that, what is to keep one of these reactors from hitting Denver?
Sure there is, you have PLENTY of choices! you can pay to upgrade (what MSFT hopes for) or you can use LibreOffice, or even Koffice which now runs on Windows too i do believe, or Google docs, and i'm sure there are plenty of others.
I'm sure i'll get hate for this but its the truth, we've seen the "one size fits all" approach and it sucks because what you get is Apple, the most expensive version or none at all. I've seen plenty of small businesses using Windows Home Premium and why not? The features in Pro are not the features their particular business uses so they save some money by going Home. Its the same thing here, those that don't spam the hell out of everyone with constant emails? They can go for the cheaper version. Those that need more? Can pay more or use another SAAS or even use a fat client.
You'd think as supposedly libertarian leaning as/. is you'd think folks would be happy about this. This isn't some all or nothing, you can choose not to crank out the emails and save money, you can choose to pay more, you can use other software, or you can use a fat client. sounds like control of the final decision is in the hands of the consumer, isn't that what we want?
I always liked the way Gabe Newell put it, it was something along the lines of "piracy grows because they offer a better product than you do". And you know what? he's right. i know I've personally been bit in the ass by games i bought back in the day that if i try to run them the legit way they won't run, not because the code won't run on a 64 bit OS, nope its because their shitty DRM wants to jam 32 bit kernel hooks into my 64bit kernel. The pirate version? it don't do that. it don't phone home, it don't make me set up accounts with some service i don't want like GFWL, oh and some of the older versions of Starforce and SecuROM will happily jam 32bit code hooks into a 64bit OS and then just to make it fun their uninstaller can't remove it, not even the sanctioned tools they offer on their site. fun huh?
As for TFA, i have no problem getting rid of CP the problem I have is whose definition do we use. Remember so far we've seen kids busted for taking pics of their own genitals, we've seen a guy get prison time for comics, and at least two thrown in jail for words on a page. No pics, no actual kids involved, just words on a page. Now wasn't there someone who wrote about a day coming when one could be arrested for thoughts? i'd say getting busted for words on a page would fit that description, wouldn't you?
So while I'm sure the Anons took out some legit targets the libertarian in me worries about how the definition keeps growing and the words keep getting twisted. it is like old Carlin used to talk about how shell shock became PTSD, which sounds like PMS, in this case we've seen rapist turn into "sex offender' which has been stretched so far to mean anything you can do with your junk including taking a pee, and CP went from kids being raped to cartoons to words on a page. Scary stuff folks and if you use the "Simpsons standard" frankly there probably isn't two guys here that wouldn't go to PMITA prison. Got any vampire books, what are vampires? Undead teen hotties that use sexual attraction to prey upon the living...sounds Lolita to me! Book 'em! after all the Simpsons would be pushing late 30s for the youngest at least yet they threw a guy in jail for Simpsons porn, and they are about as "real" as vampires..
No, we just get to spend more than that as our cell minutes (nobody has home phones here anymore) get sucked up by horrible elevator music and some stupid computer saying "please hold' for 3 HOURS only to get some tier one numbnuts who thinks reboot is a magic word.
And yes the home version IS free, the Pro and Ultimate? The price is $25 for Pro, $65 for Ultimate. I actually got to talk to one of the guys that worked making the images and he broke it down. for the Home version they load the crap out of it with trialware, the companies that make the trialware often get as many as 40% pay through, that is 40% of the people choose to keep the Norton or whatever crap, so they pay plenty. According to him they actually make about $16 on a copy of Windows Home, but they often use that to help lower the price. Dell and HP makes about 8 BUCKS on those $300 specials so anything that will lower the price? they'll do it. that is why Linux is MORE expensive, because Linux don't have companies pushing crapware. They don't make nearly as much on pro because that is the SMB dept and they catch holy hell if they crapify the hell out of the install, but they do usually manage to stick plugs for at least their own supply chain, such as "buy HP ink" and the like, they just don't get paid for it like with Home.
But saying "its part of the ecosystem" is a cop out. I mean there are people wasting their lives watching snookie, are YOU watching snookie? probably not, but saying 'its part of the ecosystem' is like saying "everyone watches snookie" because you are blaming the whole system for STUPID people. But you know what? I've met "dee dee dee" dumbasses in ALL walks and using ALL oses, that don't make the OSes bad. You have Linux guys that run royal PITA versions of Linux just to have 'purity of essence" and won't even allow binary blobs, even if it cripples their hardware, would you say that was smart? probably not but i wouldn't blame the OS.
I've had plenty of SMBs and SOHO that have been running XP close to a decade with NO dee dee dee dumbshit. No rocket scientists, just using good old fashioned common sense. Don't run attachments from strangers, don't go hanging around crack sites, don't load a bunch of "free smilies!" style crap. Hell I had a customer that JUST NOW retired his beloved win2K box, he had been running win2K since 99, we are talking 12 YEARS of service, not a single problem. Hell he'd probably still be running it if he hadn't gotten into SolidWorks and that sucker needs all the RAM and GPU it can get.
So just don't blame the tool for the monkey using it, it isn't fair, anymore than it would be for me to blame Linux when I saw an ID10T decide he didn't like apt and just loaded his apps from Freshmeat and put himself in dependency hell. Now I agree that you have the right to blame MSFT for XP, whomever thought running as admin was a bright should have been sent to Greenland and made to build PCs out of ice, but that was two versions ago, three if you count XP X64 which was a great OS. Now just like Linux you run as a user, just like Linux you have to elevate to do anything that requires system level permissions, in fact one thing MSFT has gotten right that Linux hasn't done yet is the browser automatically runs lower than user which makes it pretty damned hard to get anything to stick, especially if you swap IE for Chrome.
But we don't blame stanley when some numbnuts decides hammering his penis was a bright idea, and you really shouldn't blame MSFT because some dipshit decides to click "yeah, give ALL my permissions and rights to this program" so they can haz LOLCatz. BTW have you ever seen the security tool EULA? it actually spells out EXACTLY how they are gonna get you, complete with the data gathering and install third party extra crap, and they click anyway! But you can't babyproof the world without taking some rights away from the user, see Windows 8 secure boot for an example.
Notice one of the butthurt FOSSies must have gotten a little modpoints, since they are following me around modding everything down. Don't you just love religious whackos?
But as i was saying I've seen the hard way what happens to those that keep all their eggs in one basket. I had a customer come back from a trip to find his house burnt to the cinderblocks, ALL his data, ALL his pictures, ALL his memories, gone. all because he wouldn't listen to me. I also saw two bit by trying to use RAID 1 as a backup just like the poster above us, one got a power spike and the whole filesystem was corrupted (while you are right that NTFS is easier to recover from than EXT if the controller starts grinding data into tofu and it isn't caught quickly? its a mess) and another got a REALLY nasty Security tool variant that infected ALL his files with garbage and made a huge mess. He got back maybe 40%, the rest was just too nasty or messed up.
That is why I ALWAYS tell my customers to have "defense in depth". for crap they don't care about, like the old movies I have on my 2Tb? any old backup will do, I have them on spindles in the closet on DVD-R but if they were to go? No big they are replaceable. OS images? I switch an external drive between my apt and my shop weekly so the most I'd lose is a week. the things that are near and dear, such as pics of my late sister? those are backed up on drives AND on DVD AND in the cloud. I could have my apt and shop stripped bare tomorrow and not lose a single one.
in the end it comes down to "how important is the data" and THAT is what you need to think about. I have huge hard drives i don't back up often, if at all, but its all junk. Wallpapers, scratchpad for my multitracking and video editing,, things i'm too lazy to break out the disc for, games, all can be easily and cheaply if not freely replaced, so no worries there. since i don't care for re-installing all my apps my OSes are backed up onto each other (for example the Nettop backed onto the quad, the quad backed to the nettop, the netbook on both) AND they are also backed up externally. And finally for family photos i have drives PLUS discs PLUS web, ensuring i never lose anything. with my system I honestly haven't lost a thing I didn't wipe since the late 90s. Even a full on HDD death 3 years ago only took me down for 1 hour, the time it took to get another drive from the shop and reload my image.
I don't think so, after all nobody is saying "you gotta get that part TODAY Johnson!" are they? you could use one of those Russian Hall Effect thruster which IIRC are pretty power efficient for their size, then as the other poster said have a 'scrap yard" where drones take them apart.
But IMHO if they are gonna do that then we are gonna need to get together with the other sat producing countries and work on a modular design for future birds. that would make this MUCH easier to do and while i'm sure that with the right design even the dead birds already up there could be stripped with modular designs it could be a hell of a lot easier.
Personally i'm all for it. anything that will cut down on the clutter up there while getting real use out of what was once junk is a great idea in my book. if this works we then need to focus on "clearing the neighborhood" of all the bits and pieces that have been piling up since the 1950s. Has anybody seen the picture of just the crap we're tracking? its towards the bottom half of the page. I didn't know until i landed on this we have 13 reactor cores and 32 nuclear generators in orbits below 1700km. we REALLY need to be cleaning this mess up!
Dude it don't matter if you are USA or not, tech support bites. look up "Foamy tech support" to see a great little cartoon that NAILS it. I just miss having a little Indian coworker, as handing the phone over to Sakar and saying "YOU deal with this idiot" as just sooooo satisfying. To watch this little 90 pound woman start cursing in Hindi in between "NO YOU DO NOT TELL ME REBOOT!" damned near made the BS worth it.
But again no worries on windows 8, if nothing else the Chinese will be happy to sell you unlocked boards and lappys, and guys like me will be happy to build or acquire them for you. Where there is money to be made somebody WILL make it, and again if MSFT doesn't make it "granny easy" then IT depts WILL avoid those models and OEMs will have a living shitfit. Most likely it will be as simple as run this free "MSFT preboot environment CD" that flips the switch to off. that way they wash their hands of it, they CYA and you can do what you like. Which lets face it, it ain't like you are gonna get shit for support anyway, whether you run windows or not. Haven't seen a decent tech support in nearly a decade.
As for PEBKAC, but whose fault is that? you think if anyone actually had to pay a dime for Linux programs cracks wouldn't exist? hell look at Android malware, its just human nature. if Joe Blow can get a "wink wink" copy from a friend/relative/smart neighbor they WILL, risks be damned. And Windows 7 you specifically have to elevate NO different than linux
Here nearly all PCs come with windows, but since its free who cares? oh and despite the FUD here is a little secret: Windows IS free because the OEMs make more money off the trialware than the Windows license costs. that is why Dell will only give you $15 for your Win pro license, as that is all they are paying
So if it costs you nothing, hell if you are just loading Linux it doesn't even cost you the time to remove the trialware, who cares? give the license away to somebody. Its not like MSFT cares either, as long as its a legit license its all good. hell I've even called on licenses where a customer tried to fix it their self and boned up the thing, did MSFT care? Nope they just gave me another key. But if you TRULY want a "windows free" machine it isn't like you don't have choice, there is ZaReason and System76 just off the top of my head. One of those (I think System76) will even send you a pair of ubuntu stickers for free to replace the Winkey on your old machine, even if you didn't buy it from them. again where there is money to be made? SOMEBODY will make it. Its just with niche OSes it takes a little longer to find. Hell there is even a company still selling OS/2, did you know that? they call it ecomstation now, but its just good old OS/2 warp with some support for newer hardware added.
So you have plenty of choice friend, its just as with ANY niche product one has to take a little longer to look. But I bet 5 minutes with google will find several whitebox vendors that would happily sell you windows free machines, just don't expect them to be cheaper simply because trialware makes the OEMs money. hell if i could figure out a way to do so profitably I'd be happy to build the thing for ya, just as I build custom machines for my customers. they hand me the money and tell me what they want on it and just like subway i make it fresh and ready to go. its just my customers always ask for Windows, but money is money and if they wanted Linux? that's what they'd get.
Yeah but how much business are they losing? because i'm betting the amount of folks that have to have it NOW and are willing to be gouged is a hell of a lot lower than the normal consumer base. if you sell 20 thousand drives at 10% markup but only sell 1500 drives at 40% markup you're still losing business.
BTW if anybody needs an external geeks has a nice 2Tb with eSata and Firewire for $120 which ain't bad for all three connections. They also have a 2Tb refurb for $78 which I've found if you give 'em a 48 hour stress test (I recommend spinrite on level 4) you'll know if they are good or not.
Until the HDD manufacturers get their shit together Geeks and a few of the "off the beaten path" retailers look to be your best bet. I'm just glad I bought all the HDDs I needed when i found out Samsung was selling off their HDD division. I really love the hell out of their EcoDrives and if you run across one I highly recommend them. even in cramped machines they stay under 80f and I've found with their fat cache they often bench better than all but the new perpendicular 7200RPM drives. I even replaced my 7200RPM Seagate for an EcoDrive and my benches went from 93 to 131. Great drives and its a damned shame this mess will make the last drives disappear all that much quicker.
I believe that WHOOSH is for you friend, or can't you read? Did you miss the 1Tb for OS images part? The rest? Its crap, old movies i don't want to dig out the disc to, my music (which has back ups on disc and drive), scratch space for my multitrack editing (again don't give a fuck, original tracks backed up) and various shit that i just haven't gotten around to tossing, oh and a couple of hundred Gb from Steam and GOG (can redownload anytime, no worries there)
So for the less than 1Tb that ACTUALLY MATTERS? got multiple backups, everything else? easily replaced crap. Now lets look at YOUR solution. One bug, one OS malfunction, hell one hardware glitch, and you are royally fucked sir, you are up shit creek without even your hands to paddle. anything that is mission critical? I have backed up not only on HDD, but DL-DVD AND offsite. worst case scenario? i'm back up in less than a couple of hours, depending on what dies and what needs replaced. Hell I even have a spare board at the shop so if the mobo takes a shit I won't have my full 8Gb but i'll be up in under 40 minutes flat.
But I don't know how greatly i can stress this MIRROR IS NOT BACKUP because anything that affects one affects the other for good OR ill. Hell don't believe me, you keep right on doing what you are doing. I had a couple of customers just like you, they got bit right in the ass. One got a bug that fucked the whole thing, the other got a power spike that caused the controller to take a big shit on the file system. neither one got back even half their data, it was a mess.
so please, keep on doing what you are doing friend. guys like you make guys like me a LOT of money when your 'solution" goes tits up and you can't get your data back. its like that old car commercial " you can pay me now, or you can pay me later". You pay a little up front to have a PROPER solution,in this case it can be as cheap as a USB enclosure and the free software I showed you, along with a little time, or you pay someone like me to try to get your data back, whichever floats your boat friend, whichever floats your boat.
Must be nice to have hope and all, but in my state we have the corp hq of Wally World, so we're just fucked and have been for several decades now. We vote for Ds its a corp kissing DINO, we vote for Rs its a corp shilling RINO, hell I just vote green across the board now, at least that way I didn't personally vote for a corp stooge.
as for TFA? Thanks to the people of the states that elected congressmen that actually do their job, for those of us without that option its much appreciated. Thanks.
Well you should be quite happy with MSFT then, since all those corporate contracts and government jobs mean they can only get SO evil before they get their choke chain yanked. as I was telling one guy on the Linux forum who was freaking over Win 8 having secure boot (which they just ripped from ChromeOS BTW) there is NO WAY IN HELL they'll be able to stop other OSes from being installed simply because all those fat software assurance and MSDNs would be flushed down the shitter if the corps can't go back to older Windows. And if older Windows runs? Then Linux runs.
And you sir are a brave man if you are trusting all your data to an SSD, i really hope you got backups. I've found the hot/crazy scale is a little too far on the crazy side for me and my customers ATM, maybe in another 5 years when they get the bugs out. Frankly ATM I honestly don't see much point with win 7 anyway, it prefetches everything I run and has it waiting in RAM so the only time the HDD really comes into play is when I'm doing my multitrack editing or video transcoding and I sure as hell wouldn't want to waste THAT amount of space on an SSD with the prices above $1 a Gb. I'd look into one for my EEE netbook but frankly with the new hibernate it is so fast to start I honestly have it started before i can reach my mouse anyway, and what good would be faster than that? Sadly the machines get faster but my reaction time if anything gets slower, aging sucks.
As for what you've seen on windows? That is a PERFECT example of PEBKAC. the ONLY reason that exists is because of dumbasses. This is an actual conversation i had with a former customer "Me-Don't open that password protected zip file, its a virus! Velma-Oh you worry too much, its from my BFF Kim see? she wouldn't do anything bad!" can you guess what she did? if you guess boned the whole system, you get a cookie! That is why this face comes with the job.
But you will be happy to know that if you don't go around installing "free smilies" and other total dumbshit? Windows 7 is solid as a rock. mine has been running since Oct 09, been through two RAM upgrades, three HDD upgrades, and two GPU upgrades, and has just purred like a kitten. no reactivating or other bullshit, just keeps on humming. But your final answer just shows what I mean, how often is the 99% of the planet that buys PCs ever gonna need to spawn a thread? hell how many of them would even know what a thread is?
I do agree about Apple and mobile in general though, I find it troubling too. Maybe i'm spoiled but I've run BSD and OS/2, I've run win9x and was even tortured by WinME and Vista (Where is my apology and free Windows 7 license Ballmer? You sweaty bastard!) and through it all I HAD CHOICE. i could stay or go, i could send my data to and fro, in the end I was the one in control NOT the corp. what worries me about the cell phones is it looks like they could become the new laptop and if they do? your data ain't yours anymore, its theirs. And the way they can bribe congress for new laws it frankly wouldn't surprise me if we got some "network protection act" that made hacking phones a crime. Hell if they can make copyrights more than two lifetimes long anything is possible. like 'em or not MSFT and the clones made hardware nice and open so you can run what you want, the phones are more and more looking like black boxes with pretty screens and that is truly troubling. BTW did you hear they are talking about killing dumb phones? soon you won't even have a choice, it'll be that or nothing.
Sure thing friend, here you go...Bam! It even comes with a linux based ISO to restore so if you bone your OS, a virus infects you (which WILL toast your mirror as well) or any other nasty thing happens its easy peasy to restore. oh and 100% free, so enjoy!
As for TFA I'm glad I loaded my machines up with Samsung drives when I heard they were selling their HDD division. I got 3Tb on the main machine, another 2Tb on the other, and a 1Tb external just for OS images and ISOs, I'm a happy camper with plenty of space!
Riiiight, it don't have a thing to do with all that oil, and the shitload of minerals found under Afghanistan, perish the thought! Nope just helping brown people because inside every brown person is an American just waiting to get out....it seems like I've heard that before somewhere.
Oh and after the year is up they won't be "troops" they'll be advisers! yeah, that's the ticket!
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It is a shame you posted AC but just in case you look back I have to ask, why PPC? Why not ARM? It seems like using PPC would significantly jack up the prices and Apple DID switch away from PPC for a reason, it was because those chips are simply too hot for mobile while having decent speed.
OTOH something like the Tegra Kal El would seem like a perfect fit for amiga. Plenty of threading, powerful GPU, and low power so you could make nice laptops and netbooks with it. so what advantages do you think PPC would bring over ARM?
And the fact that some folks are willing to pay 2 grand to run AmigaOS over OSX bothers you.....why exactly? hell i knew a guy that would pay frankly crazy money for authentic 70s bell bottoms in his size, why? because he REALLY liked bell bottoms and thought they were worth the money to him.
And that's capitalism 101 friend, if there are enough folks willing to pay the cost (I bet even at 2 grand those guys ain't making much of anything off of those simply due to the fact they are buying in such low quantities) to keep those guys afloat and it makes them happy? Good for them. I have a customer that is having me keep an eye out for a Commodore 128 and i'm sure he'll end up paying more than a new PC to get it, why? Because he LIKED his 128 and misses it.
If there are enough folks out there that miss Amiga enough to keep a little shop open selling new Amigas personally i'm all for it, I wish them nothing but luck. our whole system is based on finding a market and making a profit by serving it, sure they won't get rich but if they can pay their bills and make a few bucks why not? Hell there is a bunch that sells cassette players for PCs, if there is a market and a little money to be made somebody will make it, why not a classic OS company?
Actually I'd say that was a legitimate concern seeing as how we recently had a Commodore released that was just your standard Atom nettop in a commodore case.
As for TFA I wish them luck. I'm sure that Amiga fans are a tiny niche but that doesn't mean they can't be a profitable market to serve. if these guys can make a good living by giving Amiga fans what they want? More power to 'em I say, variety spice and all that.
Bets on how long until they are busted for antitrust? although frankly after Intel got away with bribery AND compiler rigging (which they are still doing BTW) frankly I think our DoJ is as worthless as tits on a boar hog.
But between double standards for themselves and the rumor they are looking at buying Yahoo which would give them pretty much the entire webmail market (FYI Yahoo email has over 300 million unique users, about double what Gmail has in the US as well, its the one thing Yahoo is #1 on) frankly Google is starting to scare me. they have more info on everyone than most spook factories could ever dream of, thanks to their tax dodging they have huge amounts of capital they can wave around, and frankly their RDF makes the one the late Jobs had look like a tinker toy.
Frankly apple? Really doesn't scare me. Their desire for crazy high margins makes sure they stay at the top end and never really venture below the mid to high price range but Google? Android is showing up on everything from low rent tablets and TVs to the latest high end stuff, all that data...yeah MSFT will end up IBM, big in business but not really going much past their core markets, Apple will continue to be the boutique high end brand, but Google could easily become another "ultrasupermegacorp' like MSFT was in the 90s and we all know how nice they turned out to be for competition. Ballmer can throw chairs and want to fucking kill Google but Google is the 8000 pound gorilla and can fucking kill anybody it wants now. that much power in ANY hands i find a little scary.
Then frankly they're doin it wrong. Hell Morgan Freeman seems to narrate everything these days anyway so i bet a system based on his or James Earl Jones would be quite nice. of course being a geek i think a GPS based on the Shat would be cool although you wouldn't be setting any speed records with the thing "The turn...will be coming...up ahead" "WHAT...do you think you're doing? I said....to turn right....at the corner".
That said all computer voices should be based on Majel Barrett- Roddenberry IMHO. She could be soothing authoritative OR sarcastic and still made the computers in ST sound cool.. That or the goddess of all things cute and adorable Alyson Hannigan.
Personally I wouldn't give a shit if they made it sound like Roseanna Barr if they could just do something about that damned stammer. you know the one, where the voice goes up or down in the wrong spots? I have yet to hear an automated system where they have that completely licked.
Not a problem friend, glad to help. if you don't mind a bit o' advice? sign up for their newsletter as they offer some crazy sales only to those that sign up. my friend got this huge tube full of NOS chips for something like $6 because he got the newsletter and the chips normally went for a buck a piece, they also has some crazy cheap "grab bags" where they just fill it with caps and LEDs and motors and all kinds of stuff for less than $10.
So if you like to DIY you really can't go wrong with those guys. you need to know your parts a bit as their descriptions leave something to be desired, but then again this ain't Amazon and they assume any guys buying stepper motors and NOS Motorola 68xxx series chips know their stuff. Oh and if you are wondering according to my fiend their quality is top notch, lots of TI and other top shelf brands, especially on their chips and caps.
if your wife doesn't like you having the CC you ought to see my friends workshop, he has those ace hardware style see through plastic drawer stacks from floor to ceiling in a workroom roughly the size of two normal bedrooms put together. i swear in his workshop he could probably build a couple of bots just from the stuff he has in the drawers. BTW you might want to try talking to your local mom&pop PC shop as well, you can get a lot of stuff cheap or free. that is how he and I got to be friends, he'd come by and rummage through my junk bins looking for stuff to strip. Now i just hand him any dead laptops or dead parts and he strips any chips he wants from them, and in return when i need solder work done or need the guts replaced on one his my basses he does it free. Works out great for the both of us, he gets plenty of parts, i get free solder work, its a win/win! I bet if you yakked at your local shop you'd find a treasure trove of parts you can strip for a little of nothing and could probably work out a similar deal with the shop owner. Most of us are pack rats and would much rather give parts to someone that can make use than trash 'em.
Riiiight, so the words 'public pretender' are just a myth, correct? I live down the street for our courthouse and have sat there and watched public pretenders in action. down to a man they always make their clients plead guilty and since their clients are uneducated and poor they listen to "their' lawyer and get fucked. the best example i can describe is what i saw happen to a guy I went to HS with. he got busted for selling a bag of weed, his parents scraped up enough to get a lawyer who said "No problem, we'll get you off" but they ran out of money before trial. So what happens? they assign him the very same lawyer as a public pretender only now that he isn't getting paid the tune has changed. suddenly he won't do shit or say anything but "plead guilty" which Mr uneducated dumbass does, he gets 3 years.
The moral of the story boys and girls? if YOU are paying the lawyer he is working FOR YOU. if the STATE pays the lawyer he is working for THE STATE, end of story. While there may be one or two good apples out there I can honestly say that after sitting in that courtroom every chance I could get to see how our 'justice" system worked I can't think of a SINGLE time that the public pretender didn't have his client plead guilty, not one. They simply won't expend the effort if they ain't getting paid friend, just won't do the work.
Oh I agree completely for an extremely specialized application they are great, but you're not gonna try to run an OS in that instance on them are you?
I have a customer, hell of a nice guy and a retired NASA engineer (he made most of the full scale mockups for the shuttle. getting to hold some of the actual shuttle blueprints? VERY cool) that keeps boxes full of TTL chips along with all his old 8 bit chip bibles specifially for running stepper motors for robotics. he helps out the local college with designs on robots for NASA contests. they've been cooking up one for a new Mars rover competition and it is really slick. i'll probably get to do some of the wireless networking and C&C for it, again VERY cool.
For little weird parts like that I'd suggest a little site i tripped over years ago called BG Micro which is just wonderful for the DIYers out there. you can get really good deals on chips, caps, LEDs, all kinds of stuff. while i don't get to use it that often my engineer friend practically lives on that site and says their service and support are really top notch.
so for the DIYers out there I highly recommend. he is constantly buying caps by the bag and chips by the tube from there and says for prototyping and breadboarding new designs you really can't beat their stuff. i remember the first time i showed him that site, he must have bought over $100 just in odds and ends, you'd have thought he was a kid in a candy store.
But that was a plane not ZOMG radiation. When you are dealing with NBC threats you are dealing with the "invisible death" problem as i call it. With a plane, gun, bomb, etc you have something that is easy for folks to visualize which gives them the false illusion of control and that helps to calm them. they think "I can run, I can dodge, i can duck under that awning" and this gives them comfort.
With NBC you have invisible death, where until you start puking blood you wouldn't know if you were surrounded by it which scares the fuck out of the human animal. Look at outbreaks of disease in Africa where they tried to quarantine. Even though they were risking the lives of possibly millions by spreading the disease many would try to run the blockades, why? because as long as THEY feel healthy right that second they think "if i don't get away from this it'll get me too!" and because they can't see the threat they felt out of control and that again scares the shit out of folks and a scared cornered animal is the most dangerous.
So while I agree the actual risk would be small this is one area where if it came down in a major city I'd want the gov to lie their asses off. Say its the busted ass end of some commercial bird and just not let the people know shit. because folks react a hell of a lot differently when it comes to threats they can see and those they can't.
While i'm not the other guy for curiosity I decided to see what i could find and while not $1, I did find one at $6.45 which I'd say add in a buck's worth of memory and an I/O chip and you are looking at less than $8 without bulk discount for something more powerful than what many of us old timers ran Win95 on.
So I gotta agree with the guy. the combo of Moore's law plus cheap China chips and ARM makes those little crap chips end up in the "more trouble than they are worth" bin when you figure in the cost of having to write it yourself VS having the entire FOSS ecosystem at your fingertips ready to run.
Besides what about future features? just because all you can think of today to do with it is foo doesn't mean one of your customers won't come to you and say "how much would it cost to get you to make it do bar for us?". for an example look at security system and the net. just a few years ago as long as the cams recorded everyone was happy, now folks want to be able to access their camera from their Droid or iPhone to make sure everything is okay. a decent chip like the one I linked to with the ability to add a daughterboard or some other form of I/O should be trival to add that functionality to, but an 8 bit CPU? Would be just too stressed.
In the end this little baby 8 bit chips seem at least to me to be more for "we do it because we can" than anything else. With 32bit ARM chips so cheap it seems nuts to waste all that time cooking up your own solutions to deal with such CPU and memory restraint than it is just to buy one of the bazillion COTS boards being offered in bulk from China.
Uhhh...miss the first part of his post where it said " I want to be able to set the limit lower." he's not advocating MSFT set a lower bound, he's advocating the user himself/herself have the CHOICE to have a lower bound. sounds like a good and reasonable request to me.
Has anybody else been getting spam from friends that use yahoo? Now I'm no security expert but from what I've been able to gather this is their MO. They get the user to load the page in Firefox (doesn't seem to work in Chromium, don't know about IE as i don't have a test bed set up ATM), usually by offering a porn video (seems to be hitting the tube sites pretty heavily) which then I believe (not sure of exact mechanism ) loads a hidden iFrame that logs in to the Yahoo and puts a standard spam message (check this out, make money, etc) and sends to all. it doesn't seem to be sending the login credentials anywhere and only seems to work in Firefox. i was just wondering if anybody else has seen this.
But as for TFA you nailed it, spammers don't need office. they can just do as i just laid out and spam the living hell out of anyone who has a friend with the combo of FF and Yahoo. again not a security expert but from my own tests on a box I was getting ready to wipe it doesn't seem to affect gmail (didn't try hotmail, just made a throwaway gmail and yahoo) and it doesn't seem to affect Chromium based or Opera (the IE on this box was old so i didn't think it would have been a fair test) just the combo of yahoo and Firefox.
Those who want to test it themselves here is what I did, sorry i couldn't nail it down to a specific page, but i think it may be an ad they are using as it seems to be kinda random. Have a copy of Firefox WITHOUT your regular yahoo account, in fact just to be safe make sure your cache has been emptied or even better in a VM, set up a fake yahoo and put an account you can control as one of the addresses in that account, and go to a couple of tube sites and start clicking link while monitoring the account you have in the new account's address book. I used xHamster and Tube8 and just started clicking links. In less than 20 minutes i started getting spams from that new account, again ONLY if I used FF and yahoo, no other combo.
Anyway i thought I'd better send up a red flag just in case my users aren't the only ones seeing this and FYI it did NOT seem to be stopped by ABP! didn't try NoScript, too much of a PITA for my users. They really need a "just play the video' button in NoScript IMHO.
But the big IF there is IF they can control re-entry which is not always the case. what if it goes down in Miami? New York? if any of these comes down in a major city the impact with the buildings will spread the shit far and wide, it would be a mess. And that of course isn't counting the loss of life from the pure panic that happens when you say the word radiation around the public. sure the device itself in a worst case would give less than a hundred people cancer, but how many will literally stomp their fellow man to death trying to get away from the ZOMG radiation?
While i agree there is a reason for having them frankly our past history with cleaning up after ourselves doesn't give me much confidence friend. Did you see that pic of just the known debris? You are basically driving a ball of radiation through a minefield and hoping like hell you don't hit something that causes you to lose control. hell look at the spectacular wipeout of that Iridium sat, with the price of those things if they couldn't prevent that, what is to keep one of these reactors from hitting Denver?
Sure there is, you have PLENTY of choices! you can pay to upgrade (what MSFT hopes for) or you can use LibreOffice, or even Koffice which now runs on Windows too i do believe, or Google docs, and i'm sure there are plenty of others.
I'm sure i'll get hate for this but its the truth, we've seen the "one size fits all" approach and it sucks because what you get is Apple, the most expensive version or none at all. I've seen plenty of small businesses using Windows Home Premium and why not? The features in Pro are not the features their particular business uses so they save some money by going Home. Its the same thing here, those that don't spam the hell out of everyone with constant emails? They can go for the cheaper version. Those that need more? Can pay more or use another SAAS or even use a fat client.
You'd think as supposedly libertarian leaning as /. is you'd think folks would be happy about this. This isn't some all or nothing, you can choose not to crank out the emails and save money, you can choose to pay more, you can use other software, or you can use a fat client. sounds like control of the final decision is in the hands of the consumer, isn't that what we want?
I always liked the way Gabe Newell put it, it was something along the lines of "piracy grows because they offer a better product than you do". And you know what? he's right. i know I've personally been bit in the ass by games i bought back in the day that if i try to run them the legit way they won't run, not because the code won't run on a 64 bit OS, nope its because their shitty DRM wants to jam 32 bit kernel hooks into my 64bit kernel. The pirate version? it don't do that. it don't phone home, it don't make me set up accounts with some service i don't want like GFWL, oh and some of the older versions of Starforce and SecuROM will happily jam 32bit code hooks into a 64bit OS and then just to make it fun their uninstaller can't remove it, not even the sanctioned tools they offer on their site. fun huh?
As for TFA, i have no problem getting rid of CP the problem I have is whose definition do we use. Remember so far we've seen kids busted for taking pics of their own genitals, we've seen a guy get prison time for comics, and at least two thrown in jail for words on a page. No pics, no actual kids involved, just words on a page. Now wasn't there someone who wrote about a day coming when one could be arrested for thoughts? i'd say getting busted for words on a page would fit that description, wouldn't you?
So while I'm sure the Anons took out some legit targets the libertarian in me worries about how the definition keeps growing and the words keep getting twisted. it is like old Carlin used to talk about how shell shock became PTSD, which sounds like PMS, in this case we've seen rapist turn into "sex offender' which has been stretched so far to mean anything you can do with your junk including taking a pee, and CP went from kids being raped to cartoons to words on a page. Scary stuff folks and if you use the "Simpsons standard" frankly there probably isn't two guys here that wouldn't go to PMITA prison. Got any vampire books, what are vampires? Undead teen hotties that use sexual attraction to prey upon the living...sounds Lolita to me! Book 'em! after all the Simpsons would be pushing late 30s for the youngest at least yet they threw a guy in jail for Simpsons porn, and they are about as "real" as vampires..
No, we just get to spend more than that as our cell minutes (nobody has home phones here anymore) get sucked up by horrible elevator music and some stupid computer saying "please hold' for 3 HOURS only to get some tier one numbnuts who thinks reboot is a magic word.
And yes the home version IS free, the Pro and Ultimate? The price is $25 for Pro, $65 for Ultimate. I actually got to talk to one of the guys that worked making the images and he broke it down. for the Home version they load the crap out of it with trialware, the companies that make the trialware often get as many as 40% pay through, that is 40% of the people choose to keep the Norton or whatever crap, so they pay plenty. According to him they actually make about $16 on a copy of Windows Home, but they often use that to help lower the price. Dell and HP makes about 8 BUCKS on those $300 specials so anything that will lower the price? they'll do it. that is why Linux is MORE expensive, because Linux don't have companies pushing crapware. They don't make nearly as much on pro because that is the SMB dept and they catch holy hell if they crapify the hell out of the install, but they do usually manage to stick plugs for at least their own supply chain, such as "buy HP ink" and the like, they just don't get paid for it like with Home.
But saying "its part of the ecosystem" is a cop out. I mean there are people wasting their lives watching snookie, are YOU watching snookie? probably not, but saying 'its part of the ecosystem' is like saying "everyone watches snookie" because you are blaming the whole system for STUPID people. But you know what? I've met "dee dee dee" dumbasses in ALL walks and using ALL oses, that don't make the OSes bad. You have Linux guys that run royal PITA versions of Linux just to have 'purity of essence" and won't even allow binary blobs, even if it cripples their hardware, would you say that was smart? probably not but i wouldn't blame the OS.
I've had plenty of SMBs and SOHO that have been running XP close to a decade with NO dee dee dee dumbshit. No rocket scientists, just using good old fashioned common sense. Don't run attachments from strangers, don't go hanging around crack sites, don't load a bunch of "free smilies!" style crap. Hell I had a customer that JUST NOW retired his beloved win2K box, he had been running win2K since 99, we are talking 12 YEARS of service, not a single problem. Hell he'd probably still be running it if he hadn't gotten into SolidWorks and that sucker needs all the RAM and GPU it can get.
So just don't blame the tool for the monkey using it, it isn't fair, anymore than it would be for me to blame Linux when I saw an ID10T decide he didn't like apt and just loaded his apps from Freshmeat and put himself in dependency hell. Now I agree that you have the right to blame MSFT for XP, whomever thought running as admin was a bright should have been sent to Greenland and made to build PCs out of ice, but that was two versions ago, three if you count XP X64 which was a great OS. Now just like Linux you run as a user, just like Linux you have to elevate to do anything that requires system level permissions, in fact one thing MSFT has gotten right that Linux hasn't done yet is the browser automatically runs lower than user which makes it pretty damned hard to get anything to stick, especially if you swap IE for Chrome.
But we don't blame stanley when some numbnuts decides hammering his penis was a bright idea, and you really shouldn't blame MSFT because some dipshit decides to click "yeah, give ALL my permissions and rights to this program" so they can haz LOLCatz. BTW have you ever seen the security tool EULA? it actually spells out EXACTLY how they are gonna get you, complete with the data gathering and install third party extra crap, and they click anyway! But you can't babyproof the world without taking some rights away from the user, see Windows 8 secure boot for an example.
Notice one of the butthurt FOSSies must have gotten a little modpoints, since they are following me around modding everything down. Don't you just love religious whackos?
But as i was saying I've seen the hard way what happens to those that keep all their eggs in one basket. I had a customer come back from a trip to find his house burnt to the cinderblocks, ALL his data, ALL his pictures, ALL his memories, gone. all because he wouldn't listen to me. I also saw two bit by trying to use RAID 1 as a backup just like the poster above us, one got a power spike and the whole filesystem was corrupted (while you are right that NTFS is easier to recover from than EXT if the controller starts grinding data into tofu and it isn't caught quickly? its a mess) and another got a REALLY nasty Security tool variant that infected ALL his files with garbage and made a huge mess. He got back maybe 40%, the rest was just too nasty or messed up.
That is why I ALWAYS tell my customers to have "defense in depth". for crap they don't care about, like the old movies I have on my 2Tb? any old backup will do, I have them on spindles in the closet on DVD-R but if they were to go? No big they are replaceable. OS images? I switch an external drive between my apt and my shop weekly so the most I'd lose is a week. the things that are near and dear, such as pics of my late sister? those are backed up on drives AND on DVD AND in the cloud. I could have my apt and shop stripped bare tomorrow and not lose a single one.
in the end it comes down to "how important is the data" and THAT is what you need to think about. I have huge hard drives i don't back up often, if at all, but its all junk. Wallpapers, scratchpad for my multitracking and video editing,, things i'm too lazy to break out the disc for, games, all can be easily and cheaply if not freely replaced, so no worries there. since i don't care for re-installing all my apps my OSes are backed up onto each other (for example the Nettop backed onto the quad, the quad backed to the nettop, the netbook on both) AND they are also backed up externally. And finally for family photos i have drives PLUS discs PLUS web, ensuring i never lose anything. with my system I honestly haven't lost a thing I didn't wipe since the late 90s. Even a full on HDD death 3 years ago only took me down for 1 hour, the time it took to get another drive from the shop and reload my image.
I don't think so, after all nobody is saying "you gotta get that part TODAY Johnson!" are they? you could use one of those Russian Hall Effect thruster which IIRC are pretty power efficient for their size, then as the other poster said have a 'scrap yard" where drones take them apart.
But IMHO if they are gonna do that then we are gonna need to get together with the other sat producing countries and work on a modular design for future birds. that would make this MUCH easier to do and while i'm sure that with the right design even the dead birds already up there could be stripped with modular designs it could be a hell of a lot easier.
Personally i'm all for it. anything that will cut down on the clutter up there while getting real use out of what was once junk is a great idea in my book. if this works we then need to focus on "clearing the neighborhood" of all the bits and pieces that have been piling up since the 1950s. Has anybody seen the picture of just the crap we're tracking? its towards the bottom half of the page. I didn't know until i landed on this we have 13 reactor cores and 32 nuclear generators in orbits below 1700km. we REALLY need to be cleaning this mess up!
Dude it don't matter if you are USA or not, tech support bites. look up "Foamy tech support" to see a great little cartoon that NAILS it. I just miss having a little Indian coworker, as handing the phone over to Sakar and saying "YOU deal with this idiot" as just sooooo satisfying. To watch this little 90 pound woman start cursing in Hindi in between "NO YOU DO NOT TELL ME REBOOT!" damned near made the BS worth it.
But again no worries on windows 8, if nothing else the Chinese will be happy to sell you unlocked boards and lappys, and guys like me will be happy to build or acquire them for you. Where there is money to be made somebody WILL make it, and again if MSFT doesn't make it "granny easy" then IT depts WILL avoid those models and OEMs will have a living shitfit. Most likely it will be as simple as run this free "MSFT preboot environment CD" that flips the switch to off. that way they wash their hands of it, they CYA and you can do what you like. Which lets face it, it ain't like you are gonna get shit for support anyway, whether you run windows or not. Haven't seen a decent tech support in nearly a decade.
As for PEBKAC, but whose fault is that? you think if anyone actually had to pay a dime for Linux programs cracks wouldn't exist? hell look at Android malware, its just human nature. if Joe Blow can get a "wink wink" copy from a friend/relative/smart neighbor they WILL, risks be damned. And Windows 7 you specifically have to elevate NO different than linux
Here nearly all PCs come with windows, but since its free who cares? oh and despite the FUD here is a little secret: Windows IS free because the OEMs make more money off the trialware than the Windows license costs. that is why Dell will only give you $15 for your Win pro license, as that is all they are paying
So if it costs you nothing, hell if you are just loading Linux it doesn't even cost you the time to remove the trialware, who cares? give the license away to somebody. Its not like MSFT cares either, as long as its a legit license its all good. hell I've even called on licenses where a customer tried to fix it their self and boned up the thing, did MSFT care? Nope they just gave me another key. But if you TRULY want a "windows free" machine it isn't like you don't have choice, there is ZaReason and System76 just off the top of my head. One of those (I think System76) will even send you a pair of ubuntu stickers for free to replace the Winkey on your old machine, even if you didn't buy it from them. again where there is money to be made? SOMEBODY will make it. Its just with niche OSes it takes a little longer to find. Hell there is even a company still selling OS/2, did you know that? they call it ecomstation now, but its just good old OS/2 warp with some support for newer hardware added.
So you have plenty of choice friend, its just as with ANY niche product one has to take a little longer to look. But I bet 5 minutes with google will find several whitebox vendors that would happily sell you windows free machines, just don't expect them to be cheaper simply because trialware makes the OEMs money. hell if i could figure out a way to do so profitably I'd be happy to build the thing for ya, just as I build custom machines for my customers. they hand me the money and tell me what they want on it and just like subway i make it fresh and ready to go. its just my customers always ask for Windows, but money is money and if they wanted Linux? that's what they'd get.
Yeah but how much business are they losing? because i'm betting the amount of folks that have to have it NOW and are willing to be gouged is a hell of a lot lower than the normal consumer base. if you sell 20 thousand drives at 10% markup but only sell 1500 drives at 40% markup you're still losing business.
BTW if anybody needs an external geeks has a nice 2Tb with eSata and Firewire for $120 which ain't bad for all three connections. They also have a 2Tb refurb for $78 which I've found if you give 'em a 48 hour stress test (I recommend spinrite on level 4) you'll know if they are good or not.
Until the HDD manufacturers get their shit together Geeks and a few of the "off the beaten path" retailers look to be your best bet. I'm just glad I bought all the HDDs I needed when i found out Samsung was selling off their HDD division. I really love the hell out of their EcoDrives and if you run across one I highly recommend them. even in cramped machines they stay under 80f and I've found with their fat cache they often bench better than all but the new perpendicular 7200RPM drives. I even replaced my 7200RPM Seagate for an EcoDrive and my benches went from 93 to 131. Great drives and its a damned shame this mess will make the last drives disappear all that much quicker.
I believe that WHOOSH is for you friend, or can't you read? Did you miss the 1Tb for OS images part? The rest? Its crap, old movies i don't want to dig out the disc to, my music (which has back ups on disc and drive), scratch space for my multitrack editing (again don't give a fuck, original tracks backed up) and various shit that i just haven't gotten around to tossing, oh and a couple of hundred Gb from Steam and GOG (can redownload anytime, no worries there)
So for the less than 1Tb that ACTUALLY MATTERS? got multiple backups, everything else? easily replaced crap. Now lets look at YOUR solution. One bug, one OS malfunction, hell one hardware glitch, and you are royally fucked sir, you are up shit creek without even your hands to paddle. anything that is mission critical? I have backed up not only on HDD, but DL-DVD AND offsite. worst case scenario? i'm back up in less than a couple of hours, depending on what dies and what needs replaced. Hell I even have a spare board at the shop so if the mobo takes a shit I won't have my full 8Gb but i'll be up in under 40 minutes flat.
But I don't know how greatly i can stress this MIRROR IS NOT BACKUP because anything that affects one affects the other for good OR ill. Hell don't believe me, you keep right on doing what you are doing. I had a couple of customers just like you, they got bit right in the ass. One got a bug that fucked the whole thing, the other got a power spike that caused the controller to take a big shit on the file system. neither one got back even half their data, it was a mess.
so please, keep on doing what you are doing friend. guys like you make guys like me a LOT of money when your 'solution" goes tits up and you can't get your data back. its like that old car commercial " you can pay me now, or you can pay me later". You pay a little up front to have a PROPER solution,in this case it can be as cheap as a USB enclosure and the free software I showed you, along with a little time, or you pay someone like me to try to get your data back, whichever floats your boat friend, whichever floats your boat.
Must be nice to have hope and all, but in my state we have the corp hq of Wally World, so we're just fucked and have been for several decades now. We vote for Ds its a corp kissing DINO, we vote for Rs its a corp shilling RINO, hell I just vote green across the board now, at least that way I didn't personally vote for a corp stooge.
as for TFA? Thanks to the people of the states that elected congressmen that actually do their job, for those of us without that option its much appreciated. Thanks.
Well you should be quite happy with MSFT then, since all those corporate contracts and government jobs mean they can only get SO evil before they get their choke chain yanked. as I was telling one guy on the Linux forum who was freaking over Win 8 having secure boot (which they just ripped from ChromeOS BTW) there is NO WAY IN HELL they'll be able to stop other OSes from being installed simply because all those fat software assurance and MSDNs would be flushed down the shitter if the corps can't go back to older Windows. And if older Windows runs? Then Linux runs.
And you sir are a brave man if you are trusting all your data to an SSD, i really hope you got backups. I've found the hot/crazy scale is a little too far on the crazy side for me and my customers ATM, maybe in another 5 years when they get the bugs out. Frankly ATM I honestly don't see much point with win 7 anyway, it prefetches everything I run and has it waiting in RAM so the only time the HDD really comes into play is when I'm doing my multitrack editing or video transcoding and I sure as hell wouldn't want to waste THAT amount of space on an SSD with the prices above $1 a Gb. I'd look into one for my EEE netbook but frankly with the new hibernate it is so fast to start I honestly have it started before i can reach my mouse anyway, and what good would be faster than that? Sadly the machines get faster but my reaction time if anything gets slower, aging sucks.
As for what you've seen on windows? That is a PERFECT example of PEBKAC. the ONLY reason that exists is because of dumbasses. This is an actual conversation i had with a former customer "Me-Don't open that password protected zip file, its a virus! Velma-Oh you worry too much, its from my BFF Kim see? she wouldn't do anything bad!" can you guess what she did? if you guess boned the whole system, you get a cookie! That is why this face comes with the job.
But you will be happy to know that if you don't go around installing "free smilies" and other total dumbshit? Windows 7 is solid as a rock. mine has been running since Oct 09, been through two RAM upgrades, three HDD upgrades, and two GPU upgrades, and has just purred like a kitten. no reactivating or other bullshit, just keeps on humming. But your final answer just shows what I mean, how often is the 99% of the planet that buys PCs ever gonna need to spawn a thread? hell how many of them would even know what a thread is?
I do agree about Apple and mobile in general though, I find it troubling too. Maybe i'm spoiled but I've run BSD and OS/2, I've run win9x and was even tortured by WinME and Vista (Where is my apology and free Windows 7 license Ballmer? You sweaty bastard!) and through it all I HAD CHOICE. i could stay or go, i could send my data to and fro, in the end I was the one in control NOT the corp. what worries me about the cell phones is it looks like they could become the new laptop and if they do? your data ain't yours anymore, its theirs. And the way they can bribe congress for new laws it frankly wouldn't surprise me if we got some "network protection act" that made hacking phones a crime. Hell if they can make copyrights more than two lifetimes long anything is possible. like 'em or not MSFT and the clones made hardware nice and open so you can run what you want, the phones are more and more looking like black boxes with pretty screens and that is truly troubling. BTW did you hear they are talking about killing dumb phones? soon you won't even have a choice, it'll be that or nothing.
Sure thing friend, here you go...Bam! It even comes with a linux based ISO to restore so if you bone your OS, a virus infects you (which WILL toast your mirror as well) or any other nasty thing happens its easy peasy to restore. oh and 100% free, so enjoy!
As for TFA I'm glad I loaded my machines up with Samsung drives when I heard they were selling their HDD division. I got 3Tb on the main machine, another 2Tb on the other, and a 1Tb external just for OS images and ISOs, I'm a happy camper with plenty of space!
Riiiight, it don't have a thing to do with all that oil, and the shitload of minerals found under Afghanistan, perish the thought! Nope just helping brown people because inside every brown person is an American just waiting to get out....it seems like I've heard that before somewhere.
Oh and after the year is up they won't be "troops" they'll be advisers! yeah, that's the ticket!