What I don't get is why we try to bring them down when they are already in space. wouldn't the smarter move be to just point them outwards and tell them to burn until they run out of gas. After all it IS space we are talking about here, one big black empty pile of nothing.
I mean if you didn't want the drifting through the cosmos for some reason you got a big fireball in the center and Jupiter the other way to aim at, but in the end who cares as long as it is away from us right? It seems better than polluting the Pacific with space crap constantly.
Of course the BIG problem is gonna be cleaning up all the little pieces of dead shit along with dead birds we have polluting everywhere. From what i've read all the little pieces of metal, paint chips, dead birds, boosters, and all the other assorted crap is damned near reaching critical levels for the good orbits. We are really gonna have to get together as a planet and work out a way to clean that mess up! Did you know the Vanguard sat we put up there in 1958 is STILL up there? it is amazing how much garbage there is between the USA, Russians, and of course them dumbass Chinese blowing that one up and making a huge fucking mess.
If we don't clean that mess up soon frankly it isn't gonna matter where we WANT to de-orbit birds to, as they are gonna get so trashed that we'll lose control of them long before their life was up anyway.
Actually if you want to get technical what we have is an oligarchy. You see when "election" time comes you are given the "choice" of richer shitass A or rich shitass B, neither one of which would piss on you if you were on fire if you can't afford 10,000 a plate lunches to bribe...err contribute to their campaign. The sad part if they could just run a picture of Goatse beside the letter D or R and you'd have the same effect, one of the Goatse pics would get more votes than the other followed by it promptly ignoring you.
I mean if you read the polls the American people are against torture, want the troops out, don't wanna fuck the poor and elderly, wanna raise taxes on the 1%ers, don't want a huge military if it is gonna gut social programs, don't want us in Libya, do you see ANY of that being implemented? Instead the corporate masters will invent some "issue" they really don't give a flying fuck about just to give the talking heads something to stir up the rabble, like gay marriage, while they continue to get whatever the fuck they want by just buying the laws.
Sad but true comrade, sad but true. the late Bill Hick nailed it nearly 20 years ago: "Well I believe the puppet on the left shares my beliefs, well I believe the puppet on the right shares my views....hey wait a minute, there is one guy working both puppets!"
Don't worry comrade citizen, if we have learned anything it is that the one group more powerful than the greedy bloodsucking corporations is the greedy bloodsucking lawyers. Expect to see the leeches destroy the whole "click away lawsuits" in court, hell maybe even in congress. Or are you forgetting how many congress critters are greedy bloodsucking lawyers?
Did you miss the if you were slamming it part of the sentence? I've actually worked with these chips and like I said liked them enough I have a EEE netbook with one on the way and i found there was only really two ways to slam it hard enough to get it that high. 1.-Load up a game far more advanced than the machine should be running, like say Starcraft II or Bioshock II with settings maxed, or try to do multi-transforms with Virtualdub on the chip.
Now be honest: How many people are actually gonna try either of those? how many who would seriously think about ARM on the desktop would try either of those? To use a/. car analogy it would be like saying the Prius is a bad car because it lugs when you are trying to drag a boat. Duh don't drag a boat with a Prius!
But if you are talking everyday surfing and basic office tasks, you know the kind of thing one would reasonably use something like that for? We are talking between 6w and 9w, less than the cable modem. It doesn't even really jump when doing HD because the Radeon 6310 takes the hand off and does the decoding in graphics hardware instead of slamming the general purpose CPU.
Anyway here is a nice article about Brazos and gives all the details and some cool benches. TLDR? More powerful than Atom+ION while using less power. For a low power desktop it is just about as nice as one could ask for.
Well all I know is from a friend that works forensics at the state crime lab, but they don't take drives apart, they just image them and then use image based tools to scan for files, that way they preserve the chain of evidence. Adam tries to hire me every time we do lunch, but....fuck that. I don't think I could handle looking at pedo shit all damned day, that would mess my head up. i know he goes to a state paid for shrink twice a week to 'data dump" as he calls it, but I don't think I could handle looking at raped kids all damned day and I sure as fuck couldn't be all cool on the stand like he is when he is faced with some guy that raped his 9 year old and took pics.
Anyway I didn't know how different what the feds did compared to what my buddy Adam does, thanks for the info. while i'm glad there are guys like him that CAN do that shit, i honestly don't think I could do it. I may love puzzles and beating a problem machine but not when the payoff is two hours of kids getting raped...fuck that. I just want to make sure any of these bulk drives that come through my shop don't have something nasty on them before i stick them in my spares bin, that's all.l
Then what you want already exists in x86 form, its called Brazos and to use that old John Romero quote it would "Make ARM its bitch" hands down. No fans, small enough you can just bolt it to the back of the monitor, yet it has a dual core APU with Radeon 6310 so it'll stomp at multimedia and HD. Oh and it MAXES OUT at 28w, and that is if you slam the living hell out of it, most of the time its below 6w, which is less than the modem you use to get the net into your house.
So sorry, already exists without having to deal with porting everything to a cell phone chip. I have sold several of the laptop version and its damned nice and gets around 6 hours on a 6 cell battery. i liked it so much I ordered a EEE version for myself, that baby will hold 8Gb of RAM and only cost me $340 counting the extra 4Gb stick. I thought about 8Gb but WTF? When will I need 8Gb in a netbook? Great for multimedia BTW, and has both HDMI out and USB 3. Gotta love the new AMD APUs, sweet, fast, and cheap, just my combination.
Well I've dealt with them thanks to the gamer clients, and when they fail...wow. I mean even BIOS don't read it, its just gone, poof. We aren't talking cheap drives either, they were the biggest most expensive things they made at the time (one was Intel and I think the other OCZ, it was whatever rated #1 on the benches the week they bought them, as benches is ALL they ever cared about) and they didn't seem to last no time. One got something like 8 months, the other a little under a year. For $400+ drives mind you.
Personally i think its just the tech is too new and they haven't gotten the bugs out. I'm old enough to remember the first generations of HDD and they were flaky as hell too, with drives that would just bite it at the drop of a hat. Nowadays though the tech is mature, been mature for ages, so we just don't see that. I have a drawer filled with drives going back to 40Gb (I ended up giving all the sub 20Gb to an engineer so he could yank the magnets, even though they worked WTF was I gonna do with a 400mb HDD?) and they ALL work just fine.
It is like the hot/crazy scale. you want the hotness? you gotta deal with the crazy. I just don't really see the point ATM with RAM being so cheap. I mean my $300 netbook is gonna have 6Gb of RAM in it! Cost to add a 4gb stick? $23. I'd get the other 4Gb and max it out, but what's the point? with Superfetch i'll already have anything I'd want to run on a brazos dual core loaded into RAM and waiting for me, and RAM is still waaaay faster than an SSD. the only thing I can see it good for is booting, and who boots anymore?
Give them another 3 or 4 years to work the bugs out THEN look at SSDs I say. By then the price per Gb will be crazy cheap, and you won't have to sit there wondering if today is the day your drive bites it.
You CAN use sunscreen, which is VERY cheap. What are you gonna do if the guy next to you collapses because of an attack because he can't afford his meds? you gonna use NYC CPR and go "get the fuck up or you are gonna fuckin die"?. If we can blow billions dropping Tomahawks on brown people then we can either pay the difference and show the old folks who worked so damned hard for this country for years we care, or we need to STFU and let them have the old inhalers back.
This is just another case of passing regulation with NO way to pay for it and dumping it off on the people. Did they ask YOU to vote on this? Did anyone ask YOU what you thought? Because they sure as fuck didn't ask me or my fellow Americans if we wanted to gouge old folks for inhalers. bet the drugs companies are probably gonna make another 200% profit out of this, just you watch. anything they say is for the environment? Somebody is making out like a bandit. it has become a code word like terrist/for teh childrenz.
I'm sorry but.....why? WTF would you want ARM on the desktop? Are you living in a mud hut in Zambundi and don't have any electricity to spare for a desktop?
Lets be honest folks, the big selling point of ARM is how cheap it is on batteries. Well guess what you do NOT need when you are inside? Why that would be a battery! See that plug on the wall right in front of you?
Cycle for cycle x86 stomps the living shit out of ARM, it just uses more power to do so than most mobiles can afford due to the fact we haven't had a real breakthrough in battery tech in ages. Well that and the fashionistas at Apple have made iSliver batteries the "in" thing in which means you have to power the thing on a battery the width of a tic tac. I don't care if you put 8 cores on the thing, a bottom o' the line AMD quad, even the low power AMD quads, will stomp the living shit out of ARM. drop in an i series and it isn't even funny how badly it gets stomped.
Like everything else it is about using the right tool for the job. ARM royally kicks ass in mobile, embedded, and in places where you need a device that'll take milspec levels of abuse due to the fact you can run it fanless. X86 kicks ass in desktop and laptop where you want more performance and don't mind giving up some battery life for it. But ARM on the desktop makes about as much sense as stuffing an i series into your phone, that is none at all. The majority of code out there is x86, even on Linux x86 outnumbers ARM code by a pretty wide margin. So unless you just really really REALLY want the Droid version of Angry birds on your desktop it just seems more than a little stupid to be running a mobile chip in a place where you are right beside a plug in.
Yes but there is one little thing everyone seems to be missing...this will KILL PEOPLE DEAD and that is NOT any 'guessing" or "estimates" or anything else but a cold hard fact. We already have too damned many old folks in this country and poor folks that have to choose between having medicine and food, you think TRIPLING the cost is just hunky dory?
Either the government should be force to eat the difference or they should STFU, simple as that. this isn't some theoretical thing here, a severe asthma attack can KILL YOU and many will now not be able to afford their meds. of course considering the whole "cheering the poor dying" we had at the republican debates not too long ago frankly anything that helps waste poor folks would probably be seen as a win by certain political movements.
Bimbo Newton Crosby. this is even worse than the ribbon stupidity, because at least with that noobs like it, although there are a hell of a lot more experienced office users than noobs. You don't know how many told me variants on "oh thank God!" when i told them their old copy of Office 2K or 2K3 would run on Windows 7.
To me the sad part if the Win 7 UI is probably the best damned UI MSFT has ever made. the search integrated into everything makes it simple for guys like my dad to find things while making it a hell of a lot faster than the old start>programs>drill down method for old hands. then taskbar jumplists and breadcrumbs just add to the speed. Even my old engineer customer, who has hung onto the Win2K UI all through XP has talked about how much quicker it is for him to get to the features he wants with Windows 7.
Leave it to the sweaty monkey, the worst CEO since the sugar water guy, to cock up what is a truly brilliant design instead of building on what is already great. The win 7/8/9 legacy could be a dynasty like Win2K/XP was, but instead Ballmer is gonna royally screw the pooch, all because he has Apple envy so bad it hurts.
I still think the Gates borg needs to be replaced by Ballmer with his tongue out wearing an "I Ape Apple!" beanie, as that is sadly the direction he is determined to go, customers be damned. Just look at Kin and Zune. the only nice thing I can say about win 8 is hopefully when it bombs Ballmer will be forced out, and they can bring back Ozzie or one of the Office Team to run things and turn this ship around. The only focus groups i can see liking Metro would be ones like that one customer who thinks it was a cell phone!
The problem I had wasn't the screwed up, we're human, shit happens. it isn't fun but i'm not getting my panties in a wad because someone screwed up feeding a DB, it happens. no what royally pissed me off is how many believe the machine never is wrong and will argue up and down that the machine is right and you don't know your own data! I think I know where I live, thanks dumbass. I even argued with AT&T once for an hour because they swore up and down my building, which is a historic landmark and been there since after the civil war, didn't exist because their computer said so!
But believe you me i know about having generic data. I found out that Kevin is the equivalent of Joe to the Irish and with a VERY common Irish last name I might as well have been Joe Smith or Maria Sanchez. I just wish when confronted with the facts that so many wouldn't just droolingly look at the God PC to tell them what is right. if there is ANYTHING we geeks know to be 100% true its garbage in garbage out, yet so many Sally Secretary types just refuse to believe anything Mr computer doesn't tell them is so, no matter how much paperwork and data you show them. THAT is the frustrating as hell part!
The only way I finally got shit straightened out at the bank was to quit the one I was at and go to a little bank across town. Naturally they had another with the same name but the girls there are smart enough to know if they are unsure to go "Is this pickup truck Kevin or sportscar Kevin?" because the other Kevin has a Mustang and I have a Ranger. Kinda sad that with us having different parent names, DOB, and all that jazz they go by vehicles, but I guess its just human nature to go by names and he and I have used the drive through enough they know us by our wheels. Once in a while I'll get stuck behind him at the drive through and yell "Whazzup sportscar me?" and he'll laugh and yell back "Wash your damned truck, you're making us look bad!". Yeah yeah, some of us have better things to do sportscar me.
Yeah the way I was told the hybrids work is the firmware watches what the OS does and uses the SSD as a big buffer cache, so that the drive can stay spun down longer and can just stream writes instead of start/stop on every little thing. But since it is all controlled by the firmware who the hell knows what it will report back if you try to zero it or even if you CAN zero it out, as to the OS the cache doesn't exist, its just the HDD. I don't think the cache is even counted in drive space so you can't just load it to the top with zeroes either.
Anyway the wipe I do is a variation on the zero wipe, it is a two pass, the first all zeroes, the second random noise generated by the program. From what I was told the program (Easttec Eraser) writes random patterns, A0-FF, ones and zeroes, similar to the data a memtest would use, all broken down into binary of course, so what you get is a big pile of total gibberish. All I know is I tried a couple of tools like Recuva on one I ran Eraser on and it got a big fat nothing. I just wasn't sure how much better the tools the feds use are for such things. It seems like there is a lot of voodoo and superstition when it comes to HDDs ever since Guttman came out with his formula.
I was hoping that was enough though, as anything deeper takes an insane amount of time. the two pass takes about 2 hours on a 300gb, whereas the 7 pass DoD can take the better part of a day. When you have a dozen drives waiting to be wiped and only one machine for wiping they can pile up if you go nuts with it. Thanks for the info though, its good to know.
Well according to this answer by a developer you CAN use an SSD for readyboost, its just isn't as straight forward and you can't use the whole drive. personally I've been avoiding SSDs until they get the bugs out as the experience from my gamer customers (who spent waaaay more than i would have for top o' the line SSDs) is that Jeff Atwood at coding horror is correct that SSDs should be judged on a hot/crazy scale as while they are crazy fast the fail crazy often.
To me it isn't THAT they fail it is HOW they fail that has me avoiding them. With HDDs I can't remember the last time I had an HDD that failed without plenty of clear warnings something was up. Windows delayed write fails, or SMART errors, temp going nuts, there was ALWAYS a clear warning that there was trouble in HDD town. With both of the gamers there was NO WARNING with the SSDs, they just flipped the switch and....nothing. With the HDDs I was always able to get the data off before they bought the farm, minus a few bad sectors of course, but with the SSDs it was like they didn't exist, it was just...nothing.
so while using it as a cache (as long as the cache is ALWAYS backed up like Readyboost) sounds fine i really can't see recommending an SSD until they get the bugs out. you would have to spend all your time running back ups or RAIDing the drive constantly to remove the risk, and that is just more trouble than its worth. Besides with Superfetch and Readyboost if you have a large amount of RAM (and what geek don't right? hell even my netbook is gonna have 6Gb on it) then everything you use often is already preloaded into RAM so unless you boot daily i doubt you'd see much difference, as nothing yet beats RAM speed.
Not to mention Win 8 is gonna be a WinME sized Vistabomb so any OEM that doesn't make it trivial to put Windows 7 on it will be committing suicide. I mean have you SEEN the Metro UI? Its a fricking cell phone OS! I have shown the screencaps to over 100 of my customers, a good sampling of everything from artists and engineers to carpenters and housewives and NOT A SINGLE ONE has had anything positive to say or would like to run it. The closest I got was this conversation: "That is a nice looking cell phone, is it Android? I've heard of that, its supposed to be good....what do you mean its Windows? windows what? THAT is the new Windows? that's just stupid! Its a cell phone! why would I want my computer to act like a cell phone?"
Mark my words, Win 8 is gonna clear the room faster than a gassy fat guy after a chili cook off, guys like me will spend a good year or more being paid to rip the damned thing out like we did with Vista, and the ONLY nice thing is Ballmer may FINALLY be forced to "pursue other interests" and then hopefully they can get a CEO with a clue, maybe Ozzie or one of the Office team to right the ship.
I could understand that with something like a book of the month club, but the bank and electric company? Or the CC bunches? Surely is ANYONE has enough data to tell two people with similar names apart it would be them. And it was even worse because this is a heavily Irish area and I have the equivalent of John Smith for Irish. It would be like assuming every Mexican girl named Maria is the same gal.
And while I'm sure that's true about the death cert, you'd have to admit it would be a cool if not incredibly morbid wall hanging. And while i'm sorry the guy is gone now there are only three other guys in my town with the same first and last but luckily for me their families don't match up like he and I did so i'm not getting hassled anymore. But for awhile there it was truly maddening!
More likely they figured he was a noob and just wanted him to buy what they had to sell or piss off. I know as a PC retailer if you asked for one of my whiteboxes (actually black, i hate the beige box color) with NO OS I would grill you on a few of the basics before I would sell you one. Even building custom PCs the margins are pretty tight, for a fully loaded PC I'm only making around $70-$75 so it really doesn't take too long for a single dipshit to blow through my profits with dumb questions. I've had a few ask for no OS boxes and IMNSHO every single time it was because goober had himself a "Windows Pirate Edition" disc and thought that made him skilled. I dealt with one one time and told him by the third call that if he couldn't figure it out he could pay me to put on a real OS, otherwise he was on his own, as I don't support naked PCs.
So I could see them making up some ID10T level bullshit to get rid of goober and his 'Win 7 Xtreme Gamer Edition" pirate CD, because those type of dumbasses just suck time like crazy and are too damned cheap to pay for an OS.
I'm sorry but didn't you get the memo? The government has been just as nasty as any other bad guy for a number of years now, and hadn't paid attention to that little piece of paper called the constitution since Hoover and COINTELPRO. I mean when they went so far as to drug and execute an American on American soil because he advocated views the government didn't like? I'd say all bets are off after that comrade.
And I'd be worried about that whole "catch a pedo" remark too, as that is how they ramrod new nasty laws into effect, by saying its to "save the children/protect us from terrorists" For example just look at the guy now in jail for writing the "pro pedo' book, no children touched, no pictures, just his thoughts on a page. Seems I remember someone writing about a time when people will be arrested for thoughts somewhere, or for one the feds pull how about how they set up "pedo honeypots" but then didn't bother capturing the fricking referrer so that if some troll rickrolled you with a link to that site you could be in jail right now! Hell if I remember correctly the judge even ruled that it didn't matter that there was no actual CP anywhere on their honeypot because simply accessing the site was proof of intent!
So I'm sorry friend, but the government has been evil and/or batshit insane for quite awhile now. Presidents and politicians come and go, but the three letter guys? They are always there, with too damned little oversight (if there is any at all) and too damned much power. I wish I was a tinfoil hatter, but anyone who has watched the moves this country has been doing for the past couple of decades and which accelerated like mad after 9/11 knows they are drunk on power and rules don't seem to matter much anymore.
Tell me about misinfo! I had to deal with it for about two years because of my "doppelganger" as I called him. The guy lived on the other side of town, but he had the same first, last name and middle name (his middle was spelled differently but was the same name) , he had a sister with the same name as mine, and both of his parents had the same names as mine, only they were a couple of years younger than my parents.
I found out it was ending when my landlady used her key to get into my apt one morning and I got woke up in bed with "OMG thank goodness you aren't dead!" needless to say sitting there in my boxers i thought the sweet old lady had flipped her lid, but she told me that "I" had died in a car wreck that night and it had been reported that morning. when she heard it she rushed over to see if it was true and hopefully find a number for my family. Reading an obit for "yourself" was more than a little unnerving.
But you would think businesses would go by more than name, but I got his bank statements (and he got mine), CC reports and offers for him (and I'm sure ditto for him and my data) it just went on and on. I finally had to leave my bank because they thought sure I had to be "pulling something" to have two accounts under personal with two different addresses and contact numbers until finally in frustration i called the guy up (because i didn't want to have them close HIS account too) and had him show up and we both whipped out our IDs.
It was strange as hell though to have someone who was the polar opposite of me (he was a little guy and a hillbilly, and i'm a 6 foot biker type) running around with MY name and so damned many similar details.
Or why not just use Wubi and have a full functional Linux and call it a day? Either Wubi or CoLinux would give him the full Linux bash CLI, all the latest and greatest, and if he has permissions to install SUA then he can install CoLinux or Wubi.
I can see why MSFT is killing it, because in this age of even Sempron CPUs have virtualization support, and you having the choice of Wubi, CoLinux, or the VM of your choice, why would you use the ancient SUA? i bet to the user base for SUA can be counted in the dozens, it just wasn't popular to start with and certainly hasn't gotten more popular as its gotten outdated.
Just let it die already and use one of the modern Linux choices I listed above friend.
Actually there sadly was a reason why both Intel and AMD started locking down the regular consumer level chips (although AMD still can be cranked with an unlocker board) and that is because of douchebaggery by some of my fellow whitebox builders.
I don't know how many times I ran into machines in the late 90s with both Intel and AMD chips where some customer would bring a PC to me and say "My expensive new PC is acting funny!" and I would find some asshole had OCed the shit out of it and sold a lower chip as a higher one. There was even some out there where the chips had traces cut and other traces soldered so that an AMD Geode would read as an AMD Athlon. Of course it didn't run worth a shit for more than a few weeks, just long enough for the douche to get their money, but it happened.
So I support splitting the gamer chips from the consumer ones. Granny don't know shit about OCing and this helps to keep her from getting jacked by assholes making a slow chip into a fast one that will become unstable, while at the same time it lets the gamers have the highest quality chips that have binned at the highest speeds for them to go nuts with. Besides at least on the AMD side the difference between the BE and the regular is usually pretty negligible price wise. When I bought my Deneb quad it was a whole $40 if I wanted BE but since I don't OC (I actually underclock a little when not gaming to keep the chips nice and cool during long transcodes, as the difference in speed isn't much but the heat is) I saved the whole $40. hell last I checked you could get the highest Thuban 6 core for something like $189, so it isn't a big jump here.
So that mean hybrid drives are right out huh? With those the OS doesn't access the SSD part, its all controlled by firmware, so I doubt one could even zero out something that had been put in the SSD cache.
Like I said my main worry was all the used drives I get coming through my door. I get drives from customers when they upgrade, i get drives from dead boxes and other shops, sometimes I buy a lot of drives from somewhere. So I have NO clue as to what has been on a good 80% of the drives before i got them, it could have been owned by the Unibomber for all i know. I just plug them into an old box I keep in the corner for drive wiping and recovery and just zero it out with random junk.
anyway thanks for the info, while I doubt i'll be getting any used SSDs anytime soon (from what I've seen they tend to die hard) it is nice to know that what i'm doing as SOP should be enough that if some cop traced some nutball's PC back to one I got in the lot they won't be finding crap on anything in my spare drawer.
But that doesn't change the fact that if you support FOSS you better buy ATI, otherwise you're just being a hypocrite and hurting yourselves. I mean you have two companies, one gives you nothing but a proprietary package, the other gives you the choice of a proprietary package or one based on every scrap of spec they can legally give to the community.
So you tell me, which is acting better towards FOSS, the one that gives nothing, or the one that gives everything they can without being arrested? Because thanks to DMCA their hands are tied when it comes to anything that is part of protected path, that encryption schema doesn't belong to them and I'm sure they not only signed NDAs up the butt to get it but they'd have the feds paying a visit if they broke HDMI.
The sad part is we are never gonna have truly free and open specs as long as big media can write blank checks and get the boot of the fed ready to kick your ass to protect DRM. And thanks to Citizens United they don't even have to be subtle about it, their PAC can just write a check and buy any politician free and legal.
But at least with AMD they are trying, both by giving the specs and by paying developers to work with the community. Doesn't that effort deserve to be rewarded by the community?
That is what I want too but I'm sure you'll admit that government regulation has to be carefully administered or else you get nothing but a rigged game. Look at Wall street, thanks to bail outs THEY can take risks that YOU can't, because they have the power of the US government making their losses a public burden and their profits their private gains. Is that fair? no of course not.
So if MSFT wanted to offer contracts that said your CEO had to wear a bunny costume and do the developer dance, then they should have been allowed to do that. They should have NEVER been busted for offering discounts for those that didn't sell Linux or BeOS, because exclusives have been offered and been part of the market for ages. companies like Best Buy and Newegg get exclusive pricing all the time for featuring a product. Sony and MSFT pay good money to get exclusives for their consoles. Should they have been busted for that? again of course not.
This is what bugs the shit out of me about/. of late. not talking about you but so many here have become sooo polarized in an "us VS them" mentality the ONLY response they find acceptable is "Gee isn't product X swell?" or you get called filthy names. for the record I thought the DoJ didn't go far enough and MSFT should have been busted up. I think the same should happen to intel now, or at the very least they get busted at least as bad as MSFT did.
But trying to bust them for what they OFFERED in their contracts is WRONG with a capital W. Nobody put a gun to anyone's head and said they had to take those contracts, they were free to negotiate or walk away. What they should have been busted for is the rigging of their products and in Intel's case outright bribery. it is one thing to offer a contract that gives a better deal if you buy solely from me, it is quite another to give you kickbacks for screwing my competitors.
Yeah that is all we need, more DRM bling bling overbloated BS. Thanks a lot. And why do we need it? Do we REALLY want to make BIOS more friendly? Hell I deal with users all day and even without fiddling with the BIOS those suckers can tear up a Sherman tank with a toothbrush I so DO NOT WANT some GUI that makes it easy for them to mess with shit as low level as the BIOS!
Lets just hope that the companies that make BIOS like Award and Phoenix keep selling to the Chinese so we can still get good old fashioned BIOS. I have enough of a PITA dealing with proprietary laptop crap and even worse proprietary cell phone crap I sooooo do not want proprietary crap in my fricking boot sequence!
The only nice thing about this crap is if the OEMs lock the shit out of it it should give more business to whitebox guys like me to rip out their horseshit for a good old unlocked motherboard. Can you imagine the stink if they would have made Vista the ONLY choice on all those machines in 07-08? And I have yet to have a single customer look at screencaps and say they want metro. Every single one has so far said variations on a theme "Why would I want a cell phone desktop?" so I have a feeling if they don't lock it down Win 8 will be going the way of Vista.
If they lock it down, can we have MSFT back under antitrust, please?
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What I don't get is why we try to bring them down when they are already in space. wouldn't the smarter move be to just point them outwards and tell them to burn until they run out of gas. After all it IS space we are talking about here, one big black empty pile of nothing.
I mean if you didn't want the drifting through the cosmos for some reason you got a big fireball in the center and Jupiter the other way to aim at, but in the end who cares as long as it is away from us right? It seems better than polluting the Pacific with space crap constantly.
Of course the BIG problem is gonna be cleaning up all the little pieces of dead shit along with dead birds we have polluting everywhere. From what i've read all the little pieces of metal, paint chips, dead birds, boosters, and all the other assorted crap is damned near reaching critical levels for the good orbits. We are really gonna have to get together as a planet and work out a way to clean that mess up! Did you know the Vanguard sat we put up there in 1958 is STILL up there? it is amazing how much garbage there is between the USA, Russians, and of course them dumbass Chinese blowing that one up and making a huge fucking mess.
If we don't clean that mess up soon frankly it isn't gonna matter where we WANT to de-orbit birds to, as they are gonna get so trashed that we'll lose control of them long before their life was up anyway.
Actually if you want to get technical what we have is an oligarchy. You see when "election" time comes you are given the "choice" of richer shitass A or rich shitass B, neither one of which would piss on you if you were on fire if you can't afford 10,000 a plate lunches to bribe...err contribute to their campaign. The sad part if they could just run a picture of Goatse beside the letter D or R and you'd have the same effect, one of the Goatse pics would get more votes than the other followed by it promptly ignoring you.
I mean if you read the polls the American people are against torture, want the troops out, don't wanna fuck the poor and elderly, wanna raise taxes on the 1%ers, don't want a huge military if it is gonna gut social programs, don't want us in Libya, do you see ANY of that being implemented? Instead the corporate masters will invent some "issue" they really don't give a flying fuck about just to give the talking heads something to stir up the rabble, like gay marriage, while they continue to get whatever the fuck they want by just buying the laws.
Sad but true comrade, sad but true. the late Bill Hick nailed it nearly 20 years ago: "Well I believe the puppet on the left shares my beliefs, well I believe the puppet on the right shares my views....hey wait a minute, there is one guy working both puppets!"
Don't worry comrade citizen, if we have learned anything it is that the one group more powerful than the greedy bloodsucking corporations is the greedy bloodsucking lawyers. Expect to see the leeches destroy the whole "click away lawsuits" in court, hell maybe even in congress. Or are you forgetting how many congress critters are greedy bloodsucking lawyers?
Did you miss the if you were slamming it part of the sentence? I've actually worked with these chips and like I said liked them enough I have a EEE netbook with one on the way and i found there was only really two ways to slam it hard enough to get it that high. 1.-Load up a game far more advanced than the machine should be running, like say Starcraft II or Bioshock II with settings maxed, or try to do multi-transforms with Virtualdub on the chip.
Now be honest: How many people are actually gonna try either of those? how many who would seriously think about ARM on the desktop would try either of those? To use a /. car analogy it would be like saying the Prius is a bad car because it lugs when you are trying to drag a boat. Duh don't drag a boat with a Prius!
But if you are talking everyday surfing and basic office tasks, you know the kind of thing one would reasonably use something like that for? We are talking between 6w and 9w, less than the cable modem. It doesn't even really jump when doing HD because the Radeon 6310 takes the hand off and does the decoding in graphics hardware instead of slamming the general purpose CPU.
Anyway here is a nice article about Brazos and gives all the details and some cool benches. TLDR? More powerful than Atom+ION while using less power. For a low power desktop it is just about as nice as one could ask for.
Well all I know is from a friend that works forensics at the state crime lab, but they don't take drives apart, they just image them and then use image based tools to scan for files, that way they preserve the chain of evidence. Adam tries to hire me every time we do lunch, but....fuck that. I don't think I could handle looking at pedo shit all damned day, that would mess my head up. i know he goes to a state paid for shrink twice a week to 'data dump" as he calls it, but I don't think I could handle looking at raped kids all damned day and I sure as fuck couldn't be all cool on the stand like he is when he is faced with some guy that raped his 9 year old and took pics.
Anyway I didn't know how different what the feds did compared to what my buddy Adam does, thanks for the info. while i'm glad there are guys like him that CAN do that shit, i honestly don't think I could do it. I may love puzzles and beating a problem machine but not when the payoff is two hours of kids getting raped...fuck that. I just want to make sure any of these bulk drives that come through my shop don't have something nasty on them before i stick them in my spares bin, that's all.l
Then what you want already exists in x86 form, its called Brazos and to use that old John Romero quote it would "Make ARM its bitch" hands down. No fans, small enough you can just bolt it to the back of the monitor, yet it has a dual core APU with Radeon 6310 so it'll stomp at multimedia and HD. Oh and it MAXES OUT at 28w, and that is if you slam the living hell out of it, most of the time its below 6w, which is less than the modem you use to get the net into your house.
So sorry, already exists without having to deal with porting everything to a cell phone chip. I have sold several of the laptop version and its damned nice and gets around 6 hours on a 6 cell battery. i liked it so much I ordered a EEE version for myself, that baby will hold 8Gb of RAM and only cost me $340 counting the extra 4Gb stick. I thought about 8Gb but WTF? When will I need 8Gb in a netbook? Great for multimedia BTW, and has both HDMI out and USB 3. Gotta love the new AMD APUs, sweet, fast, and cheap, just my combination.
Well I've dealt with them thanks to the gamer clients, and when they fail...wow. I mean even BIOS don't read it, its just gone, poof. We aren't talking cheap drives either, they were the biggest most expensive things they made at the time (one was Intel and I think the other OCZ, it was whatever rated #1 on the benches the week they bought them, as benches is ALL they ever cared about) and they didn't seem to last no time. One got something like 8 months, the other a little under a year. For $400+ drives mind you.
Personally i think its just the tech is too new and they haven't gotten the bugs out. I'm old enough to remember the first generations of HDD and they were flaky as hell too, with drives that would just bite it at the drop of a hat. Nowadays though the tech is mature, been mature for ages, so we just don't see that. I have a drawer filled with drives going back to 40Gb (I ended up giving all the sub 20Gb to an engineer so he could yank the magnets, even though they worked WTF was I gonna do with a 400mb HDD?) and they ALL work just fine.
It is like the hot/crazy scale. you want the hotness? you gotta deal with the crazy. I just don't really see the point ATM with RAM being so cheap. I mean my $300 netbook is gonna have 6Gb of RAM in it! Cost to add a 4gb stick? $23. I'd get the other 4Gb and max it out, but what's the point? with Superfetch i'll already have anything I'd want to run on a brazos dual core loaded into RAM and waiting for me, and RAM is still waaaay faster than an SSD. the only thing I can see it good for is booting, and who boots anymore?
Give them another 3 or 4 years to work the bugs out THEN look at SSDs I say. By then the price per Gb will be crazy cheap, and you won't have to sit there wondering if today is the day your drive bites it.
You CAN use sunscreen, which is VERY cheap. What are you gonna do if the guy next to you collapses because of an attack because he can't afford his meds? you gonna use NYC CPR and go "get the fuck up or you are gonna fuckin die"?. If we can blow billions dropping Tomahawks on brown people then we can either pay the difference and show the old folks who worked so damned hard for this country for years we care, or we need to STFU and let them have the old inhalers back.
This is just another case of passing regulation with NO way to pay for it and dumping it off on the people. Did they ask YOU to vote on this? Did anyone ask YOU what you thought? Because they sure as fuck didn't ask me or my fellow Americans if we wanted to gouge old folks for inhalers. bet the drugs companies are probably gonna make another 200% profit out of this, just you watch. anything they say is for the environment? Somebody is making out like a bandit. it has become a code word like terrist/for teh childrenz.
I'm sorry but.....why? WTF would you want ARM on the desktop? Are you living in a mud hut in Zambundi and don't have any electricity to spare for a desktop?
Lets be honest folks, the big selling point of ARM is how cheap it is on batteries. Well guess what you do NOT need when you are inside? Why that would be a battery! See that plug on the wall right in front of you?
Cycle for cycle x86 stomps the living shit out of ARM, it just uses more power to do so than most mobiles can afford due to the fact we haven't had a real breakthrough in battery tech in ages. Well that and the fashionistas at Apple have made iSliver batteries the "in" thing in which means you have to power the thing on a battery the width of a tic tac. I don't care if you put 8 cores on the thing, a bottom o' the line AMD quad, even the low power AMD quads, will stomp the living shit out of ARM. drop in an i series and it isn't even funny how badly it gets stomped.
Like everything else it is about using the right tool for the job. ARM royally kicks ass in mobile, embedded, and in places where you need a device that'll take milspec levels of abuse due to the fact you can run it fanless. X86 kicks ass in desktop and laptop where you want more performance and don't mind giving up some battery life for it. But ARM on the desktop makes about as much sense as stuffing an i series into your phone, that is none at all. The majority of code out there is x86, even on Linux x86 outnumbers ARM code by a pretty wide margin. So unless you just really really REALLY want the Droid version of Angry birds on your desktop it just seems more than a little stupid to be running a mobile chip in a place where you are right beside a plug in.
Yes but there is one little thing everyone seems to be missing...this will KILL PEOPLE DEAD and that is NOT any 'guessing" or "estimates" or anything else but a cold hard fact. We already have too damned many old folks in this country and poor folks that have to choose between having medicine and food, you think TRIPLING the cost is just hunky dory?
Either the government should be force to eat the difference or they should STFU, simple as that. this isn't some theoretical thing here, a severe asthma attack can KILL YOU and many will now not be able to afford their meds. of course considering the whole "cheering the poor dying" we had at the republican debates not too long ago frankly anything that helps waste poor folks would probably be seen as a win by certain political movements.
Bimbo Newton Crosby. this is even worse than the ribbon stupidity, because at least with that noobs like it, although there are a hell of a lot more experienced office users than noobs. You don't know how many told me variants on "oh thank God!" when i told them their old copy of Office 2K or 2K3 would run on Windows 7.
To me the sad part if the Win 7 UI is probably the best damned UI MSFT has ever made. the search integrated into everything makes it simple for guys like my dad to find things while making it a hell of a lot faster than the old start>programs>drill down method for old hands. then taskbar jumplists and breadcrumbs just add to the speed. Even my old engineer customer, who has hung onto the Win2K UI all through XP has talked about how much quicker it is for him to get to the features he wants with Windows 7.
Leave it to the sweaty monkey, the worst CEO since the sugar water guy, to cock up what is a truly brilliant design instead of building on what is already great. The win 7/8/9 legacy could be a dynasty like Win2K/XP was, but instead Ballmer is gonna royally screw the pooch, all because he has Apple envy so bad it hurts.
I still think the Gates borg needs to be replaced by Ballmer with his tongue out wearing an "I Ape Apple!" beanie, as that is sadly the direction he is determined to go, customers be damned. Just look at Kin and Zune. the only nice thing I can say about win 8 is hopefully when it bombs Ballmer will be forced out, and they can bring back Ozzie or one of the Office Team to run things and turn this ship around. The only focus groups i can see liking Metro would be ones like that one customer who thinks it was a cell phone!
The problem I had wasn't the screwed up, we're human, shit happens. it isn't fun but i'm not getting my panties in a wad because someone screwed up feeding a DB, it happens. no what royally pissed me off is how many believe the machine never is wrong and will argue up and down that the machine is right and you don't know your own data! I think I know where I live, thanks dumbass. I even argued with AT&T once for an hour because they swore up and down my building, which is a historic landmark and been there since after the civil war, didn't exist because their computer said so!
But believe you me i know about having generic data. I found out that Kevin is the equivalent of Joe to the Irish and with a VERY common Irish last name I might as well have been Joe Smith or Maria Sanchez. I just wish when confronted with the facts that so many wouldn't just droolingly look at the God PC to tell them what is right. if there is ANYTHING we geeks know to be 100% true its garbage in garbage out, yet so many Sally Secretary types just refuse to believe anything Mr computer doesn't tell them is so, no matter how much paperwork and data you show them. THAT is the frustrating as hell part!
The only way I finally got shit straightened out at the bank was to quit the one I was at and go to a little bank across town. Naturally they had another with the same name but the girls there are smart enough to know if they are unsure to go "Is this pickup truck Kevin or sportscar Kevin?" because the other Kevin has a Mustang and I have a Ranger. Kinda sad that with us having different parent names, DOB, and all that jazz they go by vehicles, but I guess its just human nature to go by names and he and I have used the drive through enough they know us by our wheels. Once in a while I'll get stuck behind him at the drive through and yell "Whazzup sportscar me?" and he'll laugh and yell back "Wash your damned truck, you're making us look bad!". Yeah yeah, some of us have better things to do sportscar me.
Yeah the way I was told the hybrids work is the firmware watches what the OS does and uses the SSD as a big buffer cache, so that the drive can stay spun down longer and can just stream writes instead of start/stop on every little thing. But since it is all controlled by the firmware who the hell knows what it will report back if you try to zero it or even if you CAN zero it out, as to the OS the cache doesn't exist, its just the HDD. I don't think the cache is even counted in drive space so you can't just load it to the top with zeroes either.
Anyway the wipe I do is a variation on the zero wipe, it is a two pass, the first all zeroes, the second random noise generated by the program. From what I was told the program (Easttec Eraser) writes random patterns, A0-FF, ones and zeroes, similar to the data a memtest would use, all broken down into binary of course, so what you get is a big pile of total gibberish. All I know is I tried a couple of tools like Recuva on one I ran Eraser on and it got a big fat nothing. I just wasn't sure how much better the tools the feds use are for such things. It seems like there is a lot of voodoo and superstition when it comes to HDDs ever since Guttman came out with his formula.
I was hoping that was enough though, as anything deeper takes an insane amount of time. the two pass takes about 2 hours on a 300gb, whereas the 7 pass DoD can take the better part of a day. When you have a dozen drives waiting to be wiped and only one machine for wiping they can pile up if you go nuts with it. Thanks for the info though, its good to know.
Well according to this answer by a developer you CAN use an SSD for readyboost, its just isn't as straight forward and you can't use the whole drive. personally I've been avoiding SSDs until they get the bugs out as the experience from my gamer customers (who spent waaaay more than i would have for top o' the line SSDs) is that Jeff Atwood at coding horror is correct that SSDs should be judged on a hot/crazy scale as while they are crazy fast the fail crazy often.
To me it isn't THAT they fail it is HOW they fail that has me avoiding them. With HDDs I can't remember the last time I had an HDD that failed without plenty of clear warnings something was up. Windows delayed write fails, or SMART errors, temp going nuts, there was ALWAYS a clear warning that there was trouble in HDD town. With both of the gamers there was NO WARNING with the SSDs, they just flipped the switch and....nothing. With the HDDs I was always able to get the data off before they bought the farm, minus a few bad sectors of course, but with the SSDs it was like they didn't exist, it was just...nothing.
so while using it as a cache (as long as the cache is ALWAYS backed up like Readyboost) sounds fine i really can't see recommending an SSD until they get the bugs out. you would have to spend all your time running back ups or RAIDing the drive constantly to remove the risk, and that is just more trouble than its worth. Besides with Superfetch and Readyboost if you have a large amount of RAM (and what geek don't right? hell even my netbook is gonna have 6Gb on it) then everything you use often is already preloaded into RAM so unless you boot daily i doubt you'd see much difference, as nothing yet beats RAM speed.
Not to mention Win 8 is gonna be a WinME sized Vistabomb so any OEM that doesn't make it trivial to put Windows 7 on it will be committing suicide. I mean have you SEEN the Metro UI? Its a fricking cell phone OS! I have shown the screencaps to over 100 of my customers, a good sampling of everything from artists and engineers to carpenters and housewives and NOT A SINGLE ONE has had anything positive to say or would like to run it. The closest I got was this conversation: "That is a nice looking cell phone, is it Android? I've heard of that, its supposed to be good....what do you mean its Windows? windows what? THAT is the new Windows? that's just stupid! Its a cell phone! why would I want my computer to act like a cell phone?"
Mark my words, Win 8 is gonna clear the room faster than a gassy fat guy after a chili cook off, guys like me will spend a good year or more being paid to rip the damned thing out like we did with Vista, and the ONLY nice thing is Ballmer may FINALLY be forced to "pursue other interests" and then hopefully they can get a CEO with a clue, maybe Ozzie or one of the Office team to right the ship.
I could understand that with something like a book of the month club, but the bank and electric company? Or the CC bunches? Surely is ANYONE has enough data to tell two people with similar names apart it would be them. And it was even worse because this is a heavily Irish area and I have the equivalent of John Smith for Irish. It would be like assuming every Mexican girl named Maria is the same gal.
And while I'm sure that's true about the death cert, you'd have to admit it would be a cool if not incredibly morbid wall hanging. And while i'm sorry the guy is gone now there are only three other guys in my town with the same first and last but luckily for me their families don't match up like he and I did so i'm not getting hassled anymore. But for awhile there it was truly maddening!
More likely they figured he was a noob and just wanted him to buy what they had to sell or piss off. I know as a PC retailer if you asked for one of my whiteboxes (actually black, i hate the beige box color) with NO OS I would grill you on a few of the basics before I would sell you one. Even building custom PCs the margins are pretty tight, for a fully loaded PC I'm only making around $70-$75 so it really doesn't take too long for a single dipshit to blow through my profits with dumb questions. I've had a few ask for no OS boxes and IMNSHO every single time it was because goober had himself a "Windows Pirate Edition" disc and thought that made him skilled. I dealt with one one time and told him by the third call that if he couldn't figure it out he could pay me to put on a real OS, otherwise he was on his own, as I don't support naked PCs.
So I could see them making up some ID10T level bullshit to get rid of goober and his 'Win 7 Xtreme Gamer Edition" pirate CD, because those type of dumbasses just suck time like crazy and are too damned cheap to pay for an OS.
I'm sorry but didn't you get the memo? The government has been just as nasty as any other bad guy for a number of years now, and hadn't paid attention to that little piece of paper called the constitution since Hoover and COINTELPRO. I mean when they went so far as to drug and execute an American on American soil because he advocated views the government didn't like? I'd say all bets are off after that comrade.
And I'd be worried about that whole "catch a pedo" remark too, as that is how they ramrod new nasty laws into effect, by saying its to "save the children/protect us from terrorists" For example just look at the guy now in jail for writing the "pro pedo' book, no children touched, no pictures, just his thoughts on a page. Seems I remember someone writing about a time when people will be arrested for thoughts somewhere, or for one the feds pull how about how they set up "pedo honeypots" but then didn't bother capturing the fricking referrer so that if some troll rickrolled you with a link to that site you could be in jail right now! Hell if I remember correctly the judge even ruled that it didn't matter that there was no actual CP anywhere on their honeypot because simply accessing the site was proof of intent!
So I'm sorry friend, but the government has been evil and/or batshit insane for quite awhile now. Presidents and politicians come and go, but the three letter guys? They are always there, with too damned little oversight (if there is any at all) and too damned much power. I wish I was a tinfoil hatter, but anyone who has watched the moves this country has been doing for the past couple of decades and which accelerated like mad after 9/11 knows they are drunk on power and rules don't seem to matter much anymore.
Tell me about misinfo! I had to deal with it for about two years because of my "doppelganger" as I called him. The guy lived on the other side of town, but he had the same first, last name and middle name (his middle was spelled differently but was the same name) , he had a sister with the same name as mine, and both of his parents had the same names as mine, only they were a couple of years younger than my parents.
I found out it was ending when my landlady used her key to get into my apt one morning and I got woke up in bed with "OMG thank goodness you aren't dead!" needless to say sitting there in my boxers i thought the sweet old lady had flipped her lid, but she told me that "I" had died in a car wreck that night and it had been reported that morning. when she heard it she rushed over to see if it was true and hopefully find a number for my family. Reading an obit for "yourself" was more than a little unnerving.
But you would think businesses would go by more than name, but I got his bank statements (and he got mine), CC reports and offers for him (and I'm sure ditto for him and my data) it just went on and on. I finally had to leave my bank because they thought sure I had to be "pulling something" to have two accounts under personal with two different addresses and contact numbers until finally in frustration i called the guy up (because i didn't want to have them close HIS account too) and had him show up and we both whipped out our IDs.
It was strange as hell though to have someone who was the polar opposite of me (he was a little guy and a hillbilly, and i'm a 6 foot biker type) running around with MY name and so damned many similar details.
Or why not just use Wubi and have a full functional Linux and call it a day? Either Wubi or CoLinux would give him the full Linux bash CLI, all the latest and greatest, and if he has permissions to install SUA then he can install CoLinux or Wubi.
I can see why MSFT is killing it, because in this age of even Sempron CPUs have virtualization support, and you having the choice of Wubi, CoLinux, or the VM of your choice, why would you use the ancient SUA? i bet to the user base for SUA can be counted in the dozens, it just wasn't popular to start with and certainly hasn't gotten more popular as its gotten outdated.
Just let it die already and use one of the modern Linux choices I listed above friend.
Actually there sadly was a reason why both Intel and AMD started locking down the regular consumer level chips (although AMD still can be cranked with an unlocker board) and that is because of douchebaggery by some of my fellow whitebox builders.
I don't know how many times I ran into machines in the late 90s with both Intel and AMD chips where some customer would bring a PC to me and say "My expensive new PC is acting funny!" and I would find some asshole had OCed the shit out of it and sold a lower chip as a higher one. There was even some out there where the chips had traces cut and other traces soldered so that an AMD Geode would read as an AMD Athlon. Of course it didn't run worth a shit for more than a few weeks, just long enough for the douche to get their money, but it happened.
So I support splitting the gamer chips from the consumer ones. Granny don't know shit about OCing and this helps to keep her from getting jacked by assholes making a slow chip into a fast one that will become unstable, while at the same time it lets the gamers have the highest quality chips that have binned at the highest speeds for them to go nuts with. Besides at least on the AMD side the difference between the BE and the regular is usually pretty negligible price wise. When I bought my Deneb quad it was a whole $40 if I wanted BE but since I don't OC (I actually underclock a little when not gaming to keep the chips nice and cool during long transcodes, as the difference in speed isn't much but the heat is) I saved the whole $40. hell last I checked you could get the highest Thuban 6 core for something like $189, so it isn't a big jump here.
So that mean hybrid drives are right out huh? With those the OS doesn't access the SSD part, its all controlled by firmware, so I doubt one could even zero out something that had been put in the SSD cache.
Like I said my main worry was all the used drives I get coming through my door. I get drives from customers when they upgrade, i get drives from dead boxes and other shops, sometimes I buy a lot of drives from somewhere. So I have NO clue as to what has been on a good 80% of the drives before i got them, it could have been owned by the Unibomber for all i know. I just plug them into an old box I keep in the corner for drive wiping and recovery and just zero it out with random junk.
anyway thanks for the info, while I doubt i'll be getting any used SSDs anytime soon (from what I've seen they tend to die hard) it is nice to know that what i'm doing as SOP should be enough that if some cop traced some nutball's PC back to one I got in the lot they won't be finding crap on anything in my spare drawer.
But that doesn't change the fact that if you support FOSS you better buy ATI, otherwise you're just being a hypocrite and hurting yourselves. I mean you have two companies, one gives you nothing but a proprietary package, the other gives you the choice of a proprietary package or one based on every scrap of spec they can legally give to the community.
So you tell me, which is acting better towards FOSS, the one that gives nothing, or the one that gives everything they can without being arrested? Because thanks to DMCA their hands are tied when it comes to anything that is part of protected path, that encryption schema doesn't belong to them and I'm sure they not only signed NDAs up the butt to get it but they'd have the feds paying a visit if they broke HDMI.
The sad part is we are never gonna have truly free and open specs as long as big media can write blank checks and get the boot of the fed ready to kick your ass to protect DRM. And thanks to Citizens United they don't even have to be subtle about it, their PAC can just write a check and buy any politician free and legal.
But at least with AMD they are trying, both by giving the specs and by paying developers to work with the community. Doesn't that effort deserve to be rewarded by the community?
That is what I want too but I'm sure you'll admit that government regulation has to be carefully administered or else you get nothing but a rigged game. Look at Wall street, thanks to bail outs THEY can take risks that YOU can't, because they have the power of the US government making their losses a public burden and their profits their private gains. Is that fair? no of course not.
So if MSFT wanted to offer contracts that said your CEO had to wear a bunny costume and do the developer dance, then they should have been allowed to do that. They should have NEVER been busted for offering discounts for those that didn't sell Linux or BeOS, because exclusives have been offered and been part of the market for ages. companies like Best Buy and Newegg get exclusive pricing all the time for featuring a product. Sony and MSFT pay good money to get exclusives for their consoles. Should they have been busted for that? again of course not.
This is what bugs the shit out of me about /. of late. not talking about you but so many here have become sooo polarized in an "us VS them" mentality the ONLY response they find acceptable is "Gee isn't product X swell?" or you get called filthy names. for the record I thought the DoJ didn't go far enough and MSFT should have been busted up. I think the same should happen to intel now, or at the very least they get busted at least as bad as MSFT did.
But trying to bust them for what they OFFERED in their contracts is WRONG with a capital W. Nobody put a gun to anyone's head and said they had to take those contracts, they were free to negotiate or walk away. What they should have been busted for is the rigging of their products and in Intel's case outright bribery. it is one thing to offer a contract that gives a better deal if you buy solely from me, it is quite another to give you kickbacks for screwing my competitors.
Yeah that is all we need, more DRM bling bling overbloated BS. Thanks a lot. And why do we need it? Do we REALLY want to make BIOS more friendly? Hell I deal with users all day and even without fiddling with the BIOS those suckers can tear up a Sherman tank with a toothbrush I so DO NOT WANT some GUI that makes it easy for them to mess with shit as low level as the BIOS!
Lets just hope that the companies that make BIOS like Award and Phoenix keep selling to the Chinese so we can still get good old fashioned BIOS. I have enough of a PITA dealing with proprietary laptop crap and even worse proprietary cell phone crap I sooooo do not want proprietary crap in my fricking boot sequence!
The only nice thing about this crap is if the OEMs lock the shit out of it it should give more business to whitebox guys like me to rip out their horseshit for a good old unlocked motherboard. Can you imagine the stink if they would have made Vista the ONLY choice on all those machines in 07-08? And I have yet to have a single customer look at screencaps and say they want metro. Every single one has so far said variations on a theme "Why would I want a cell phone desktop?" so I have a feeling if they don't lock it down Win 8 will be going the way of Vista.
If they lock it down, can we have MSFT back under antitrust, please?