Surprise surprise the AC picked the pink one. Women nitpick the shit out of everything so is it any wonder the pink one is under review? the rest are for sale, in fact if you don't mind taking the neon yellow one? You can get an unlocked quad core winphone with a GB of RAM and a microSD slot for $85 shipped.
Works great, been running it for about a year now and it shuts down the tracks hard. What I like is it gives YOU control over each tracker so that if there is a site you need it on just for a minute to say load the comments? you can do that. great tool.
Check out the unlocked BLU WinPhones if the current Nokia phones don't do it for ya. I have the Android version and they are great phones, quad cores, a Gb of RAM, runs on nearly all carriers,good battery life with MicroSD slot, just great little phones IMHO. As soon as I get the move over I'll probably pick up one for the wife, one thing she dislikes about her Nokia is the camera and the camera on mine has been great. Oh and their prices kick ass, $130 for an unlocked 5in quad? You just can't beat that.
And I agree on the UI, cut and paste works perfect, the UI is a hell of a lot more responsive, if there aren't some killer ROMs released for mine by the time it gets long in the tooth I'll probably join her in the WinPhone camp, I don't care for the latest Windows desktop, but the phones? Work great!
I really don't see why so many are ragging on the WinPhone. How many here have actually used one? The wife has one and its quite nice, the UI was easier for her to pick up than either my Android 4.4 or the iPhone 5 she had previously, its got good battery life, excellent speech to text (frankly more accurate than my Android), comfortable in the hand, decent screen, the only real complaint I could level at the thing is that they don't have a flagship that compares with the latest Galaxy or iPhone but if you compare like hardware to like hardware? they run very nicely.
Oh and as an added bonus since MSFT handles all the updates we don't have to worry about the carrier abandoning her or having to find a hacked ROM as I did on my HTC because the phone had support end 3 minutes after it left the factory, in fact hers is on the first round release list so she should get Win10 on release. Previous updates have been as easy as "push button, let phone reboot" without having to actively hunt or did as I had to and look for ROMs with my previous phone. Hell I would have probably went with WinPhone but I like to get customized ROMs with speed tweaks and the like and that is the one place Android has a real leg up, at least for me, but then again I'm not the average phone user.
My current phone (A BLU Studio Mini LTE) has gotten the 4.4.2 update, will it get 5 without me having to find a hacked ROM? Who knows, probably not if history is an indicator, and I've had Android phones that never got a single update from the carrier and were just left to rot. At least with the Lumia that gamble is gone and if they release a flagship phone I have zero doubt I'll be getting one for the wife, she just loves how easy and reliable her WinPhone is.
Actually its really not that hard, what is hard is altering the system in such a way that the weakest part of the system, the user, can't work to help the malware by trying to by pass your security layers.
I have systems out in the field that have been running since 09 with zero malware (I'd have systems at the decade mark but my XP X64 systems were upgraded to Win 7 X64) but those users actually listen to me and if their system says "Do not do that" then they DO NOT DO THAT and that simple thing does more to insure the security than any tool you can come up with.
If anybody wants to know how to make a Windows system that the PEBKAC will have to go out of their way to fuck shit up? Here is how you do it...1.- You put the user in a browser that has online backup (you'll see why in a minute), I use Comodo Dragon and Pale Moon but you can use Chrome, Firefox, any browser that will backup their bookmarks and settings online. 2.- You install ABP. This neuters the #1 source of attacks, malware infected ads. 3.- You install Comodo Internet Security and have it set up to place the browser by default in a low rights sandbox. This insures that anything on a page that isn't stopped dead by #2 is shut down, for extra security you can use the built in Comodo DNS to block known malware sites, that is up to you. BTW Comodo IS was one of only a couple AVs that flagged the government malware toolkit that made all the news recently, IIRC the other 2 were the pay version of Adaware and Eset. 4.- Install any programs they must have, have everything set tyo auto update including Windows, the usual. 5.- the final step is more to insure if they let some stupid relative that actively attacks your security (you'd be surprised how many times over the years I've seen somebody get on a system and find they can't look at their "free porn" because the system blocked "Iz_Not_Viruz_Iz_Codec.exe" so they actively attack the security so they can get the malware installed) you install Paragon Backup & Recovery Free, set up a hidden backup capsule with a locked copy of your clean install (this takes the place of an OEM recovery partition) and set up a differential backup schedule of your choice. Depending on the space you use for the capsule they can easily go back a month or two, but I find 3 weeks is usually enough to cover the visiting dumbass relative.
And there you have it, a system where the most dangerous attack vectors (the browser and online adverts) are sandboxed and shut down, the Comodo IS HIPS monitoring everything else closely, and if somebody gets on and actively attacks the system through their own stupidity you have a "push button to undo dumbass" button so you don't have to worry about having to do a wipe and reinstall. It doesn't even cause a real performance hit, I have several customers that have this setup on their gaming computers and are quite happy with it. the nice thing about this setup is the user doesn't have to do anything proactive to be secure as they are already sandboxed with ads blocked by default so as long as they do not actively attack the security? Well not to toot my own horn too loudly but I've taken a box with Win 7 RTM, no SPs or patches, and after setting up the system I've taken it to a pile of porn topsites and game ROM sites and afterwards scanned it with multiple scanners, both on and offline, and never found anything more dangerous than a cookie. The pages that had malware that wasn't ads was quickly shut down by Comodo before loading with a big red "This site contains malware" so all an end user would have to do is simply heed the warning and not go there. it really don't get much simpler from an end user perspective.
You are paying on average 100% to 200% MORE for...what? An average of 8-12% in only SOME games, which are the ones compiled with the crippler.
If somebody offered you a car for 200% more that went 10% faster only on some roads...would you take it? For a stereo that is 12% louder on certain songs? Of course not because you are not getting your moneys worth and if you are spending less than a grand on your system (because AMD doesn't have any ultra high tier $500+ chips therefor Intel doesn't have any competition) then that is exactly what you are doing.
Show me a single game, just one, that can't get easily 30FPS-60FPS+ on an AMD FX8 with a decent GPU like the R9 280 or 290...I seriously doubt you can, because I play War Thunder and World Of Warships with bling cranked and even with shells flying from over a Km away from every direction and tracers lighting up the sky? I have yet to fall below 30FPS at 1080P. And with the money I saved I get to have better parts than you have for the same money, be it better GPU, more RAM, a faster SSD, and these things will let me win in a head to head shootout as almost no modern games are CPU locked anymore. this is what that Intel fanboy found out when he bragged his...snicker...i3 4130 could compete with an FX8320E. He spent almost the exact same amount as me, in fact my system was $18 cheaper, yet I had 16GB to his 8GB and my R9 280 is a full tier higher than his 750Ti, which he had to take as he had to get a weaksauce shitty PSU to try to save a few bucks to get his...snicker...i3 "beast"...bwa ha ha ha ha...sorry, hearing somebody brag about his i3 hoopty was funny as hell!
Finally as for filing charges? In case you haven't figured it out our government is as corrupt as any banana republic., Even former POTUS Jimmy Carter came out and said flat footed the USA is no longer a democracy but an oligarchy, where all that matters is how much you can kick back in contributions. But what you CAN do is refuse to support corruption, and the evidence is readily available, in fact even Intel admitted they rig benchmarks and will pay you $15 to settle a class action (one of several they have had to pay, and they are currently being investigated by the EU and a dozen other countries for corrupt practices, just FYI) where they...wait for it, see if this sounds familiar...paid benchmark companies to use the cripple compiler which then fudged the shit out of the numbers and made the dog slow P4 appear to be faster than the now recognized as superior Athlon64.
But don't take my word for it, look up "Intel cripples compiler" and see for yourself. One researcher even took a Via CPU (the only CPU that allows you to change the CPUID on the fly) and by simply changing the CPUID from"centaur hauls" to "genuine Intel" can you guess what happened? The exact same CPU, exact same test...35% higher score! And fewer and fewer games are being affected by this, as not only has users complaining caused more devs to avoid ICC but modders are releasing mods all the time that remove the cripple flag.
So if you spent less than a grand on your system? you just spent more for less while supporting corruption, simple as that. Look at the links I posted, in real world applications you see the A series trading blows with i5s (despite that being half the price) and the FX8350s trading blows with i7s (despite those being nearly 2 and a half times more expensive) and if you intend to do anything besides just game, like streaming your play or running ventrillo? Then the AMD wins, and usually by a large margin. And I can personally back this up as I like to record my gameplay so I can save my best kills, with no hardware acceleration, software recording only? Still staying above 30FPS with the bling cranked, even when I record 2- 3 hours of footage at a time. I have zero slowdowns or dropped frames despite all the chaos.
Don't just buy the BS you are being handed friend, try 'em yourself and I bet my last buck in a side by side test running the same games you will tell NO difference...but your wallet will.
"Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains."
"But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
...Thomas Jefferson
When in doubt children go back to the founding fathers, they were the revolutionaries of their time and saw a LOT of this shit coming and did their best to stop it. It was only by decades of perverting the law of the land, through treasonous bribery and outright corruption, that this country was able to get into such a state.
Just FYI but by simply changing from the Intel Cripple Compiler to GCC? You "magically" get AMD chips costing a third of the price trading blows with i5s and i7s, wow, isn't that amazing? And if you use real world applications (instead of benchmarks that use the Cripple Compilers) we again see the exact same results with AMD chips costing a third of the price trading blows with Intel chips. the AMD better on multithreaded and the Intel better on single thread, as one would expect.
So what can we take away from this? Its quite obvious, one company has been allowed to rip people off by manipulating the market with rigged tests (because if the tests were legit they would have to price their products more competitively with AMD) and if you ignore the rigged benches you'll find that $130 AMD competes quite well with that $300 Intel.
I've been able to back this up with what I've seen at the shop, with the i5s and i7s that have come in trading blows with the much cheaper FX8xxx chips. In fact I was so impressed by the performance of the FX8 chips when it came time to upgrade my own system I chose the FX8320E, it trivially OCs to the higher 8350 while using less power when I don't need the extra speed, and it blows through transcodes and games like a boss. Final cost for it, an R9 280, 16Gb of RAM, and a really nice Asus gamer board? $516 shipped. The kind of system you'd put together on the Intel side for that money would be along the lines of an i3, not even in the same class.
The other guy nailed it, picture the cops giving you the bird and just keeping your stuff, they don't need a legal reason. Look up "civil forfeiture medical marijuana" and you'll get to see videos of cops just coming in and stealing shit from pot stores where pot stores are legal and regulated and fucking laughing about it on camera!
Welcome to fascism, where rights are only for the elite and for everybody else there is only the iron boot. the ONLY REASON you have anything right now is because some cop hasn't decided he wants to take it PERIOD. in the majority of states a cop can walk right in, cook up some obviously bogus charge, and take everything you own and never give it back. No trial, no judge, they just take what they want.
That explains the first 2 alright...don't explain the third one that was over a block away they tried to claim some "burning debris" landing on top (which video showed really wasn't much at all) managed to drop it straight down. Again we are talking burning debris landing on top of the building and causing it to pancake straight down exactly like the first two....oh and that just so happened to be the building where all the evidence was being held for a major part of the Worldcom scandal involving federal officials...damned shame.
Even if you buy the first two, the third one not getting hit by shit and dropping? If that don't set off your bullshit-o-meter then you'll believe anything.
But again you are assuming the cops give a fuck about the truth instead of just getting SOMEBODY. Look at the German guy that was running an exit node, he had his gear snatched by the cops and I don't think he ever did get it back even though he was found not to have been doing anything. Remember only a few states here in the US have stopped the "civil forfeiture" legalized stealing so even if they let you go they can still keep your stuff and if you are like most geeks here that is thousands to tens of thousands worth of gear, poof!
And again please read the article I linked to, any PC tech could have told you in under 3 minutes that the guy was innocent as his PC was making dozens of connections a second and downloading lists of material on command from the outside, a classic bot. What happened to him? He lost his job,had his reputation destroyed, 2 years of his life in court, and over $150K in lawyers fees, none of which he will EVER get back.
So just remember you can't use logic and common sense here, we are talking POLITICS, which is why my friend is trying to get the hell out of his job at the crime lab. If somebody gets busted, even if its obviously bogus? Why that makes the front page and helps the prosecutor in his run for whatever office he desires, if its thrown out a couple years later? He done got a new job and the retraction is on page 12, for him its all upsides and no down. Think he gives a fuck if he destroys an innocent life or two? Not a chance, all he cares about is becoming a senator or congressman or governor.
Thanks again for proving my point as you cannot name a single feature without simply parroting "free and open" over and over.
And I'm sorry but I have all of computer history on my side, from Linux on the desktop (which has never gone beyond 2% in 22 years, despite the competition cost over $100 USD) to Open Pandora game consoles, From OpenMoko to that open GPU that is on life support if the only thing you have is your definition of free and open you are DEAD, because NO CONSUMER CARES nor will they take a shoddy half ass worse.in.every.way. experience so they can have something "free and open".
So lets hear it, I gave you a list of features that the competition has...can you name ONE THING, just one, that a consumer that is NOT a developer will give a single flying flipping fuck about? I'm betting you can't, which means we'll be here reading about the death of FXOS in a year or two, when Moz gets tired of pissing money down a rat hole for something nobody cares about. Hell they can't even try for the "free as in beer" angle as any company can sign up and get Android and WinPhone for free, BOTH of which has more and better quality apps.
I don't think it would matter as they were a corp with money and you are most likely not. Like it or not according to a friend who works at the state crime lab running something like a Tor exit node or Freenet and you can be charged with child porn distribution whether you ever had access to the offending material or not.
The way it was explained to me was like this.."imagine I give you a safe to carry to the next town. this safe is locked, you have NO way to access this safe or know the contents. Now the cops pull you over, break open the safe and find CP. The ways the laws are currently written you are guilty of distribution even though you had no way of accessing or knowing because you chose to carry the safe no different than how you chose to run Freenet or Tor".
Now is this wrong and fucked up? Sure it is but the way the CP laws are written you WILL be looking at a couple years of court, costing tens to hundreds of thousands, and of course you'll have your reputation destroyed, probably lose your job, and will most likely never see any of your electronic equipment ever again. If you don't believe this just look at guys getting their lives destroyed over a virus infected computer which any Geek Squad could have detected in 5 minutes or less. What is more you can go to Wikileaks and look up "confessions of a child pornographer" and read that he BRAGS about this exact attack, which he does because he thinks its "funny" and leaves cops chasing innocents instead of his customers. What does the prosecutor say when shown the evidence " He infected his PC on purpose as an excuse" showing the cops do not give a single flying fuck whether they get the right person or not, just that they get somebody. The reason why is simple, prosecutors wanna be governor some day and by showing you are "tough on perverts" you can get votes, no reporter ever checks to see if those busts were actually legit or not.
So I would strongly think twice if you use this software and ask yourself "can I afford a couple years of my life gone in court, and the risk of decades in prison? Is there anybody that counts on me for income?" because thanks to the fucked up red scare vague as fuck laws we have in the US when it comes to CP that is what you are risking by running this software.
Thank you for perfectly illustrating my point as you can't name a single thing a consumer would care about and keep having to harp on and on (even slumming in FUDLand for a bit) about "free and open", thus proving my point better than I ever could that FXOS is a dead man walking, thanks.
As others have said if you believe what you are saying? Put up or shut up, name some features that a consumer would care about that have absolutely NOTHING to do with, or depend on, the words "free" or "open". If you can't or don't respond? You have perfectly proven my point yet again, thx in advance.
What good would opening up Symbian have done? It would have been like opening Windows 3.11 in 2005, it was a dead end arch that could never be made to compete.
What killed Nokia is the same thing that killed Palm and so many others, what I call "sat on ass" syndrome, in that when they were on top they sat on ass instead of looking forward and by the time they realized they needed to think ahead? They did like 90s Apple pre Jobs and just threw shit at the wall hoping something would work. They ended up with something like 3 different OSes at one point, Symbian, Meego (which needed a good 2 years to be able to compete with what Apple and Google had out then, if the devs are to be believed) and the Java one, all fighting and headhunting and backstabbing...yeah they were fucked long before Elop showed up.
If the ONLY thing your product has to offer over the competition is your personal definition of "open" then YOU WILL LOSE, because nobody cares about your definition of "open" when your product is inferior in every.single.way. when compared to the other choices.
Apple has the walled garden which offers a unified user experience, Android has the app support and wide choice of devices your apps will run on, even MSFT has an advantage in the "bang for the buck" of their quite affordable offerings and the ability to integrate it into your Windows 10 desktop...what does FXOS have? It has Mozilla's definition of "open" which last I checked doesn't even jive with the GPL version of the same word...yep, not got a chance.
We have seen this time and time again, from "open" phones to "open" game consoles to "open" tablets and in every case? The results are the same, either death or usage numbers so low as to be below the margin for error. FXOS will peter out, the slow death of fading relevance and lack of support because of the simple fact that it has nothing to offer the consumer other than the Moz definition of "open".
If you don't want a crippled DRM stick? Then accept you are gonna need an HTPC. You can get one of the Chinese ARM boxes but I find they are rather limited on the amount of software you can run on 'em, a better choice IMHO would be to get one of the AMD Socket AM1 chips which is what I've been using at the shop. Crazy low power (average around 8w-12w according to kill-a-watt), GPU powerful enough to do 1080P with no sweat or lagging, and if you don't want to spend $$$ on an OS you can slap on OpenELEC and have a 10 foot UI OOTB.
But if all you want is the cheap stick? You are gonna have to accept they are nothing but DRM delivery medium, your only real choices are the cheapo Chinese ARM nettops (which again severely limited on apps, no OS updates make them vulnerable to hack, limited playback and media options) or go with a full blown HTPC. Considering that HDMI makes everything plug and play, the AM1 makes an APU powerful enough and ULV while being cheap easy to come by, and the sheer amount of options an HTPC gives you from serving media to your entire house by slapping a multi TB drive and having your entire media library always accessible to streaming and casual gaming makes the HTPC a no brainer IMHO. I know a lot of my HTPC customers start with the sticks then quickly get tired of the limitations and want to "trade up" to something with more options.
Try one, I bet you'll find it does all you want it to do.
So "as long as you do nothing wrong you have nothing to worry about"...is that REALLY your position? You DO know you are a felon, right? You are, I am, pretty much everybody is as You commit three felonies a day and the ONLY reason they do not go after you is how much work it would take. Now you have all these SJWs pushing for pretty much anything they find personally offensive (oh I forgot "trigger warning") to be labeled as "hate speech", you have people being investigated by Homeland for making a bad joke or daring to be seen with a sign at a protest, you have CEOs of media cartels saying every song you listen to without giving them money is theft...you really think we should make things EASIER for the state and the cartels?
If you are gonna keep that position I hope you are VERY careful with what you say, what you write, and watch, because all it will take is someone with a tiny bit of power deciding they do not like you. I personally don't have nearly as much faith in the government and cartels as you do, so I'll pass for as long as I can and buy a VPN to idoncareistan when I no longer can, thanks anyway.
That is because being "Windows ME Ready" meant that you had all WDM drivers. You see what I found the fatal flaw with WinME was some numbnuts at MSFT decided that BOTH WDM and VXD drivers should be supported...what a fuck up! If you mixed WDM and VXD drivers? It was pretty much guaranteed to shit itself and BSOD then only question was WHEN it would happen. I saw PCs at the shop (those Mini HPs with the CD holder on the top, can't recall the model ATM) that you could literally set your watch by, it would crash ME in less than 20 minutes from first boot every time. Replace the VXD only built in sound with a WDM card? Magically ran just fine.
So count yourself lucky, all WDM was a rarity when it came to ME thanks to all the Win98 parts the OEMs had, most were a mix of the two which is why IMHO Windows ME became so hated.
And you don't see a PROBLEM with this? You DO know you are advocating giving every single device a "digital fingerprint" which will be trivial for the governments and media cartels to use against you, yes?
You say something that offends a special snowflake of a protected class (thereby committing thoughtcrime...err "hate speech") online, watch a video some cartel thinks you should have paid them $$$ to watch (which is very likely they shared for that very reason) and no problem, simply look at the IP V6 and you'll know exactly who that evildoer was and what device they used at the time!
I'm sorry but with all the truly evil fascist shit we've seen from our corporate overlords and their government puppets I really do NOT trust them with that kind of power. Remember citizen you have committed three felonies today and the only thing stopping them from busting you for it and ruining your life? Is how much resources it would take to prove it. Lets not make it any easier for them,mmkay?
Am I the only one that sees IP V6 as a "cure" worse than the disease? From everything I've seen it looks like a police state and media cartels wet dream, the ability to assign a unique address to every.single.device like a digital fingerprint so they can trivially trace back every statement, every video watched, every move, for later prosecution? Am I the only one having a problem with this idea, or is the idea of always being under the all seeing electric eye something the young folks simply accept and don't care about?
Anybody who actually watches the man speak can see he is a classic "stuck in a time" kind of guy, which doesn't really work in a field that changes as insanely fast as computing does.
Ever know a guy whose music tastes is stuck in their teens/early 20s so they listen to ONLY music from that period? Yeah well seeing RMS address a room of 20 somethings as "hackers" (which is his standard greeting BTW) like it was 1974 and he was in a computer club meeting? yeah it felt exactly like that, watching Disco Dan talking about going to a BOC concert or seeing Foghat on some oldies tour, a guy stuck in time that refuses to accept that it isn't 1975 and computing is actually for the masses instead of a handful willing to write their own compilers and copying code from the back of Byte magazine.
I love how they use your bandwidth to send Windows Updates to others unless you know where to opt out, I'm sure there are gonna be a LOT of users on metered connections gonna be having a heart attack next month when they get their bill!
I'm advising my customers to avoid Win 10 for now, look I REALLY wanted to like Win 10, I really did, but it seems to be more of the ham fisted stupid shit we've been getting since Win 8 instead of a return to Win 7 greatness. the settings/control panel frankenstein clusterfuck, the datamining that makes Google look like they are privacy focused, I just haven't seen a thing that can't be had better by simply slapping Win 7 on an SSD. Even their "whiz bang" features like Cortana are slow, have a bad learning curve, and demand you give away pretty much any privacy to use the thing.
Sorry MSFT but at this point I'm even advising my Windows 8 customers to stay away, in fact Windows 8 plus Classic Shell is frankly better, with all the speed ups without the datamining and nickel and diming and you can grab Win 8 for $65 on Amazon, if you need a Windows OS and don't have the excellent Win 7 that is what I'd point customers to, Win 10 is just not worth what you give up.
BTW anybody else notice the insane astroturfing going on by MSFT trying to keep 10 from becoming another 8? Even sites like El Reg is seeing accounts that were dormant since the Win 8 release suddenly shooting down any complaints and singing the praises of Win 10 in market speak. Normally I condemn any talk of shills and astroturfing because...well I had customers that liked Windows ME, and there is everything from AMC Matador to Zune fanclubs because there will always be somebody who likes it no matter what it is, but just like previous ads by MSFT its just so.....well hamfisted and obvious, you can almost see the PHB standing behind the typist telling them to stay "on message" while going down a print out of a PPT with buzz words like "social integration" and "unified user experience". C'mon MSFT, if you are gonna turf at least do it well, half assed turfing is just lame.
Not on the AMD side as far as "bang for the buck" is concerned. In 2007 I paid $140 for a quad core CPU and last month I paid $132 for an octocore. Blows through transcodes like a boss and at $362 for the processor AND a gamer board AND 16GB of RAM? Its still got the bang for the buck like they did in 07.
I fricking HATED Windows 8/8.1 with a fiery passion but I hate to say it but...it WAS better than 10, why? Have you LOOKED at the fricking EULA for Windows 10? The datamining is fricking insane, it makes Google look like fricking privacy lovers by comparison!
I knew when they said it was "free" there would have to be a catch, but I figured it'd be another ham handed attempt to push Windows other products but daaayyum, if you don't spend the first hour removing apps and turning shit off you might as well just send all your data straight to fricking MSFT!
Slashdot Mirror
Surprise surprise the AC picked the pink one. Women nitpick the shit out of everything so is it any wonder the pink one is under review? the rest are for sale, in fact if you don't mind taking the neon yellow one? You can get an unlocked quad core winphone with a GB of RAM and a microSD slot for $85 shipped.
Works great, been running it for about a year now and it shuts down the tracks hard. What I like is it gives YOU control over each tracker so that if there is a site you need it on just for a minute to say load the comments? you can do that. great tool.
Check out the unlocked BLU WinPhones if the current Nokia phones don't do it for ya. I have the Android version and they are great phones, quad cores, a Gb of RAM, runs on nearly all carriers,good battery life with MicroSD slot, just great little phones IMHO. As soon as I get the move over I'll probably pick up one for the wife, one thing she dislikes about her Nokia is the camera and the camera on mine has been great. Oh and their prices kick ass, $130 for an unlocked 5in quad? You just can't beat that.
And I agree on the UI, cut and paste works perfect, the UI is a hell of a lot more responsive, if there aren't some killer ROMs released for mine by the time it gets long in the tooth I'll probably join her in the WinPhone camp, I don't care for the latest Windows desktop, but the phones? Work great!
I really don't see why so many are ragging on the WinPhone. How many here have actually used one? The wife has one and its quite nice, the UI was easier for her to pick up than either my Android 4.4 or the iPhone 5 she had previously, its got good battery life, excellent speech to text (frankly more accurate than my Android), comfortable in the hand, decent screen, the only real complaint I could level at the thing is that they don't have a flagship that compares with the latest Galaxy or iPhone but if you compare like hardware to like hardware? they run very nicely.
Oh and as an added bonus since MSFT handles all the updates we don't have to worry about the carrier abandoning her or having to find a hacked ROM as I did on my HTC because the phone had support end 3 minutes after it left the factory, in fact hers is on the first round release list so she should get Win10 on release. Previous updates have been as easy as "push button, let phone reboot" without having to actively hunt or did as I had to and look for ROMs with my previous phone. Hell I would have probably went with WinPhone but I like to get customized ROMs with speed tweaks and the like and that is the one place Android has a real leg up, at least for me, but then again I'm not the average phone user.
My current phone (A BLU Studio Mini LTE) has gotten the 4.4.2 update, will it get 5 without me having to find a hacked ROM? Who knows, probably not if history is an indicator, and I've had Android phones that never got a single update from the carrier and were just left to rot. At least with the Lumia that gamble is gone and if they release a flagship phone I have zero doubt I'll be getting one for the wife, she just loves how easy and reliable her WinPhone is.
Actually its really not that hard, what is hard is altering the system in such a way that the weakest part of the system, the user, can't work to help the malware by trying to by pass your security layers.
I have systems out in the field that have been running since 09 with zero malware (I'd have systems at the decade mark but my XP X64 systems were upgraded to Win 7 X64) but those users actually listen to me and if their system says "Do not do that" then they DO NOT DO THAT and that simple thing does more to insure the security than any tool you can come up with.
If anybody wants to know how to make a Windows system that the PEBKAC will have to go out of their way to fuck shit up? Here is how you do it...1.- You put the user in a browser that has online backup (you'll see why in a minute), I use Comodo Dragon and Pale Moon but you can use Chrome, Firefox, any browser that will backup their bookmarks and settings online. 2.- You install ABP. This neuters the #1 source of attacks, malware infected ads. 3.- You install Comodo Internet Security and have it set up to place the browser by default in a low rights sandbox. This insures that anything on a page that isn't stopped dead by #2 is shut down, for extra security you can use the built in Comodo DNS to block known malware sites, that is up to you. BTW Comodo IS was one of only a couple AVs that flagged the government malware toolkit that made all the news recently, IIRC the other 2 were the pay version of Adaware and Eset. 4.- Install any programs they must have, have everything set tyo auto update including Windows, the usual. 5.- the final step is more to insure if they let some stupid relative that actively attacks your security (you'd be surprised how many times over the years I've seen somebody get on a system and find they can't look at their "free porn" because the system blocked "Iz_Not_Viruz_Iz_Codec.exe" so they actively attack the security so they can get the malware installed) you install Paragon Backup & Recovery Free, set up a hidden backup capsule with a locked copy of your clean install (this takes the place of an OEM recovery partition) and set up a differential backup schedule of your choice. Depending on the space you use for the capsule they can easily go back a month or two, but I find 3 weeks is usually enough to cover the visiting dumbass relative.
And there you have it, a system where the most dangerous attack vectors (the browser and online adverts) are sandboxed and shut down, the Comodo IS HIPS monitoring everything else closely, and if somebody gets on and actively attacks the system through their own stupidity you have a "push button to undo dumbass" button so you don't have to worry about having to do a wipe and reinstall. It doesn't even cause a real performance hit, I have several customers that have this setup on their gaming computers and are quite happy with it. the nice thing about this setup is the user doesn't have to do anything proactive to be secure as they are already sandboxed with ads blocked by default so as long as they do not actively attack the security? Well not to toot my own horn too loudly but I've taken a box with Win 7 RTM, no SPs or patches, and after setting up the system I've taken it to a pile of porn topsites and game ROM sites and afterwards scanned it with multiple scanners, both on and offline, and never found anything more dangerous than a cookie. The pages that had malware that wasn't ads was quickly shut down by Comodo before loading with a big red "This site contains malware" so all an end user would have to do is simply heed the warning and not go there. it really don't get much simpler from an end user perspective.
You are paying on average 100% to 200% MORE for...what? An average of 8-12% in only SOME games, which are the ones compiled with the crippler.
If somebody offered you a car for 200% more that went 10% faster only on some roads...would you take it? For a stereo that is 12% louder on certain songs? Of course not because you are not getting your moneys worth and if you are spending less than a grand on your system (because AMD doesn't have any ultra high tier $500+ chips therefor Intel doesn't have any competition) then that is exactly what you are doing.
Show me a single game, just one, that can't get easily 30FPS-60FPS+ on an AMD FX8 with a decent GPU like the R9 280 or 290...I seriously doubt you can, because I play War Thunder and World Of Warships with bling cranked and even with shells flying from over a Km away from every direction and tracers lighting up the sky? I have yet to fall below 30FPS at 1080P. And with the money I saved I get to have better parts than you have for the same money, be it better GPU, more RAM, a faster SSD, and these things will let me win in a head to head shootout as almost no modern games are CPU locked anymore. this is what that Intel fanboy found out when he bragged his...snicker...i3 4130 could compete with an FX8320E. He spent almost the exact same amount as me, in fact my system was $18 cheaper, yet I had 16GB to his 8GB and my R9 280 is a full tier higher than his 750Ti, which he had to take as he had to get a weaksauce shitty PSU to try to save a few bucks to get his...snicker...i3 "beast"...bwa ha ha ha ha...sorry, hearing somebody brag about his i3 hoopty was funny as hell!
Finally as for filing charges? In case you haven't figured it out our government is as corrupt as any banana republic., Even former POTUS Jimmy Carter came out and said flat footed the USA is no longer a democracy but an oligarchy, where all that matters is how much you can kick back in contributions. But what you CAN do is refuse to support corruption, and the evidence is readily available, in fact even Intel admitted they rig benchmarks and will pay you $15 to settle a class action (one of several they have had to pay, and they are currently being investigated by the EU and a dozen other countries for corrupt practices, just FYI) where they...wait for it, see if this sounds familiar...paid benchmark companies to use the cripple compiler which then fudged the shit out of the numbers and made the dog slow P4 appear to be faster than the now recognized as superior Athlon64.
But don't take my word for it, look up "Intel cripples compiler" and see for yourself. One researcher even took a Via CPU (the only CPU that allows you to change the CPUID on the fly) and by simply changing the CPUID from"centaur hauls" to "genuine Intel" can you guess what happened? The exact same CPU, exact same test...35% higher score! And fewer and fewer games are being affected by this, as not only has users complaining caused more devs to avoid ICC but modders are releasing mods all the time that remove the cripple flag.
So if you spent less than a grand on your system? you just spent more for less while supporting corruption, simple as that. Look at the links I posted, in real world applications you see the A series trading blows with i5s (despite that being half the price) and the FX8350s trading blows with i7s (despite those being nearly 2 and a half times more expensive) and if you intend to do anything besides just game, like streaming your play or running ventrillo? Then the AMD wins, and usually by a large margin. And I can personally back this up as I like to record my gameplay so I can save my best kills, with no hardware acceleration, software recording only? Still staying above 30FPS with the bling cranked, even when I record 2- 3 hours of footage at a time. I have zero slowdowns or dropped frames despite all the chaos.
Don't just buy the BS you are being handed friend, try 'em yourself and I bet my last buck in a side by side test running the same games you will tell NO difference...but your wallet will.
"Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains."
"But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
...Thomas Jefferson
When in doubt children go back to the founding fathers, they were the revolutionaries of their time and saw a LOT of this shit coming and did their best to stop it. It was only by decades of perverting the law of the land, through treasonous bribery and outright corruption, that this country was able to get into such a state.
Just FYI but by simply changing from the Intel Cripple Compiler to GCC? You "magically" get AMD chips costing a third of the price trading blows with i5s and i7s, wow, isn't that amazing? And if you use real world applications (instead of benchmarks that use the Cripple Compilers) we again see the exact same results with AMD chips costing a third of the price trading blows with Intel chips. the AMD better on multithreaded and the Intel better on single thread, as one would expect.
So what can we take away from this? Its quite obvious, one company has been allowed to rip people off by manipulating the market with rigged tests (because if the tests were legit they would have to price their products more competitively with AMD) and if you ignore the rigged benches you'll find that $130 AMD competes quite well with that $300 Intel.
I've been able to back this up with what I've seen at the shop, with the i5s and i7s that have come in trading blows with the much cheaper FX8xxx chips. In fact I was so impressed by the performance of the FX8 chips when it came time to upgrade my own system I chose the FX8320E, it trivially OCs to the higher 8350 while using less power when I don't need the extra speed, and it blows through transcodes and games like a boss. Final cost for it, an R9 280, 16Gb of RAM, and a really nice Asus gamer board? $516 shipped. The kind of system you'd put together on the Intel side for that money would be along the lines of an i3, not even in the same class.
The other guy nailed it, picture the cops giving you the bird and just keeping your stuff, they don't need a legal reason. Look up "civil forfeiture medical marijuana" and you'll get to see videos of cops just coming in and stealing shit from pot stores where pot stores are legal and regulated and fucking laughing about it on camera!
Welcome to fascism, where rights are only for the elite and for everybody else there is only the iron boot. the ONLY REASON you have anything right now is because some cop hasn't decided he wants to take it PERIOD. in the majority of states a cop can walk right in, cook up some obviously bogus charge, and take everything you own and never give it back. No trial, no judge, they just take what they want.
That explains the first 2 alright...don't explain the third one that was over a block away they tried to claim some "burning debris" landing on top (which video showed really wasn't much at all) managed to drop it straight down. Again we are talking burning debris landing on top of the building and causing it to pancake straight down exactly like the first two....oh and that just so happened to be the building where all the evidence was being held for a major part of the Worldcom scandal involving federal officials...damned shame.
Even if you buy the first two, the third one not getting hit by shit and dropping? If that don't set off your bullshit-o-meter then you'll believe anything.
But again you are assuming the cops give a fuck about the truth instead of just getting SOMEBODY. Look at the German guy that was running an exit node, he had his gear snatched by the cops and I don't think he ever did get it back even though he was found not to have been doing anything. Remember only a few states here in the US have stopped the "civil forfeiture" legalized stealing so even if they let you go they can still keep your stuff and if you are like most geeks here that is thousands to tens of thousands worth of gear, poof!
And again please read the article I linked to, any PC tech could have told you in under 3 minutes that the guy was innocent as his PC was making dozens of connections a second and downloading lists of material on command from the outside, a classic bot. What happened to him? He lost his job,had his reputation destroyed, 2 years of his life in court, and over $150K in lawyers fees, none of which he will EVER get back.
So just remember you can't use logic and common sense here, we are talking POLITICS, which is why my friend is trying to get the hell out of his job at the crime lab. If somebody gets busted, even if its obviously bogus? Why that makes the front page and helps the prosecutor in his run for whatever office he desires, if its thrown out a couple years later? He done got a new job and the retraction is on page 12, for him its all upsides and no down. Think he gives a fuck if he destroys an innocent life or two? Not a chance, all he cares about is becoming a senator or congressman or governor.
Thanks again for proving my point as you cannot name a single feature without simply parroting "free and open" over and over.
And I'm sorry but I have all of computer history on my side, from Linux on the desktop (which has never gone beyond 2% in 22 years, despite the competition cost over $100 USD) to Open Pandora game consoles, From OpenMoko to that open GPU that is on life support if the only thing you have is your definition of free and open you are DEAD, because NO CONSUMER CARES nor will they take a shoddy half ass worse.in.every.way. experience so they can have something "free and open".
So lets hear it, I gave you a list of features that the competition has...can you name ONE THING, just one, that a consumer that is NOT a developer will give a single flying flipping fuck about? I'm betting you can't, which means we'll be here reading about the death of FXOS in a year or two, when Moz gets tired of pissing money down a rat hole for something nobody cares about. Hell they can't even try for the "free as in beer" angle as any company can sign up and get Android and WinPhone for free, BOTH of which has more and better quality apps.
I don't think it would matter as they were a corp with money and you are most likely not. Like it or not according to a friend who works at the state crime lab running something like a Tor exit node or Freenet and you can be charged with child porn distribution whether you ever had access to the offending material or not.
The way it was explained to me was like this.."imagine I give you a safe to carry to the next town. this safe is locked, you have NO way to access this safe or know the contents. Now the cops pull you over, break open the safe and find CP. The ways the laws are currently written you are guilty of distribution even though you had no way of accessing or knowing because you chose to carry the safe no different than how you chose to run Freenet or Tor".
Now is this wrong and fucked up? Sure it is but the way the CP laws are written you WILL be looking at a couple years of court, costing tens to hundreds of thousands, and of course you'll have your reputation destroyed, probably lose your job, and will most likely never see any of your electronic equipment ever again. If you don't believe this just look at guys getting their lives destroyed over a virus infected computer which any Geek Squad could have detected in 5 minutes or less. What is more you can go to Wikileaks and look up "confessions of a child pornographer" and read that he BRAGS about this exact attack, which he does because he thinks its "funny" and leaves cops chasing innocents instead of his customers. What does the prosecutor say when shown the evidence " He infected his PC on purpose as an excuse" showing the cops do not give a single flying fuck whether they get the right person or not, just that they get somebody. The reason why is simple, prosecutors wanna be governor some day and by showing you are "tough on perverts" you can get votes, no reporter ever checks to see if those busts were actually legit or not.
So I would strongly think twice if you use this software and ask yourself "can I afford a couple years of my life gone in court, and the risk of decades in prison? Is there anybody that counts on me for income?" because thanks to the fucked up red scare vague as fuck laws we have in the US when it comes to CP that is what you are risking by running this software.
Thank you for perfectly illustrating my point as you can't name a single thing a consumer would care about and keep having to harp on and on (even slumming in FUDLand for a bit) about "free and open", thus proving my point better than I ever could that FXOS is a dead man walking, thanks.
As others have said if you believe what you are saying? Put up or shut up, name some features that a consumer would care about that have absolutely NOTHING to do with, or depend on, the words "free" or "open". If you can't or don't respond? You have perfectly proven my point yet again, thx in advance.
What good would opening up Symbian have done? It would have been like opening Windows 3.11 in 2005, it was a dead end arch that could never be made to compete.
What killed Nokia is the same thing that killed Palm and so many others, what I call "sat on ass" syndrome, in that when they were on top they sat on ass instead of looking forward and by the time they realized they needed to think ahead? They did like 90s Apple pre Jobs and just threw shit at the wall hoping something would work. They ended up with something like 3 different OSes at one point, Symbian, Meego (which needed a good 2 years to be able to compete with what Apple and Google had out then, if the devs are to be believed) and the Java one, all fighting and headhunting and backstabbing...yeah they were fucked long before Elop showed up.
If the ONLY thing your product has to offer over the competition is your personal definition of "open" then YOU WILL LOSE, because nobody cares about your definition of "open" when your product is inferior in every.single.way. when compared to the other choices.
Apple has the walled garden which offers a unified user experience, Android has the app support and wide choice of devices your apps will run on, even MSFT has an advantage in the "bang for the buck" of their quite affordable offerings and the ability to integrate it into your Windows 10 desktop...what does FXOS have? It has Mozilla's definition of "open" which last I checked doesn't even jive with the GPL version of the same word...yep, not got a chance.
We have seen this time and time again, from "open" phones to "open" game consoles to "open" tablets and in every case? The results are the same, either death or usage numbers so low as to be below the margin for error. FXOS will peter out, the slow death of fading relevance and lack of support because of the simple fact that it has nothing to offer the consumer other than the Moz definition of "open".
If you don't want a crippled DRM stick? Then accept you are gonna need an HTPC. You can get one of the Chinese ARM boxes but I find they are rather limited on the amount of software you can run on 'em, a better choice IMHO would be to get one of the AMD Socket AM1 chips which is what I've been using at the shop. Crazy low power (average around 8w-12w according to kill-a-watt), GPU powerful enough to do 1080P with no sweat or lagging, and if you don't want to spend $$$ on an OS you can slap on OpenELEC and have a 10 foot UI OOTB.
But if all you want is the cheap stick? You are gonna have to accept they are nothing but DRM delivery medium, your only real choices are the cheapo Chinese ARM nettops (which again severely limited on apps, no OS updates make them vulnerable to hack, limited playback and media options) or go with a full blown HTPC. Considering that HDMI makes everything plug and play, the AM1 makes an APU powerful enough and ULV while being cheap easy to come by, and the sheer amount of options an HTPC gives you from serving media to your entire house by slapping a multi TB drive and having your entire media library always accessible to streaming and casual gaming makes the HTPC a no brainer IMHO. I know a lot of my HTPC customers start with the sticks then quickly get tired of the limitations and want to "trade up" to something with more options.
Try one, I bet you'll find it does all you want it to do.
So "as long as you do nothing wrong you have nothing to worry about"...is that REALLY your position? You DO know you are a felon, right? You are, I am, pretty much everybody is as You commit three felonies a day and the ONLY reason they do not go after you is how much work it would take. Now you have all these SJWs pushing for pretty much anything they find personally offensive (oh I forgot "trigger warning") to be labeled as "hate speech", you have people being investigated by Homeland for making a bad joke or daring to be seen with a sign at a protest, you have CEOs of media cartels saying every song you listen to without giving them money is theft...you really think we should make things EASIER for the state and the cartels?
If you are gonna keep that position I hope you are VERY careful with what you say, what you write, and watch, because all it will take is someone with a tiny bit of power deciding they do not like you. I personally don't have nearly as much faith in the government and cartels as you do, so I'll pass for as long as I can and buy a VPN to idoncareistan when I no longer can, thanks anyway.
That is because being "Windows ME Ready" meant that you had all WDM drivers. You see what I found the fatal flaw with WinME was some numbnuts at MSFT decided that BOTH WDM and VXD drivers should be supported...what a fuck up! If you mixed WDM and VXD drivers? It was pretty much guaranteed to shit itself and BSOD then only question was WHEN it would happen. I saw PCs at the shop (those Mini HPs with the CD holder on the top, can't recall the model ATM) that you could literally set your watch by, it would crash ME in less than 20 minutes from first boot every time. Replace the VXD only built in sound with a WDM card? Magically ran just fine.
So count yourself lucky, all WDM was a rarity when it came to ME thanks to all the Win98 parts the OEMs had, most were a mix of the two which is why IMHO Windows ME became so hated.
And you don't see a PROBLEM with this? You DO know you are advocating giving every single device a "digital fingerprint" which will be trivial for the governments and media cartels to use against you, yes?
You say something that offends a special snowflake of a protected class (thereby committing thoughtcrime...err "hate speech") online, watch a video some cartel thinks you should have paid them $$$ to watch (which is very likely they shared for that very reason) and no problem, simply look at the IP V6 and you'll know exactly who that evildoer was and what device they used at the time!
I'm sorry but with all the truly evil fascist shit we've seen from our corporate overlords and their government puppets I really do NOT trust them with that kind of power. Remember citizen you have committed three felonies today and the only thing stopping them from busting you for it and ruining your life? Is how much resources it would take to prove it. Lets not make it any easier for them,mmkay?
Am I the only one that sees IP V6 as a "cure" worse than the disease? From everything I've seen it looks like a police state and media cartels wet dream, the ability to assign a unique address to every.single.device like a digital fingerprint so they can trivially trace back every statement, every video watched, every move, for later prosecution? Am I the only one having a problem with this idea, or is the idea of always being under the all seeing electric eye something the young folks simply accept and don't care about?
Anybody who actually watches the man speak can see he is a classic "stuck in a time" kind of guy, which doesn't really work in a field that changes as insanely fast as computing does.
Ever know a guy whose music tastes is stuck in their teens/early 20s so they listen to ONLY music from that period? Yeah well seeing RMS address a room of 20 somethings as "hackers" (which is his standard greeting BTW) like it was 1974 and he was in a computer club meeting? yeah it felt exactly like that, watching Disco Dan talking about going to a BOC concert or seeing Foghat on some oldies tour, a guy stuck in time that refuses to accept that it isn't 1975 and computing is actually for the masses instead of a handful willing to write their own compilers and copying code from the back of Byte magazine.
I love how they use your bandwidth to send Windows Updates to others unless you know where to opt out, I'm sure there are gonna be a LOT of users on metered connections gonna be having a heart attack next month when they get their bill!
I'm advising my customers to avoid Win 10 for now, look I REALLY wanted to like Win 10, I really did, but it seems to be more of the ham fisted stupid shit we've been getting since Win 8 instead of a return to Win 7 greatness. the settings/control panel frankenstein clusterfuck, the datamining that makes Google look like they are privacy focused, I just haven't seen a thing that can't be had better by simply slapping Win 7 on an SSD. Even their "whiz bang" features like Cortana are slow, have a bad learning curve, and demand you give away pretty much any privacy to use the thing.
Sorry MSFT but at this point I'm even advising my Windows 8 customers to stay away, in fact Windows 8 plus Classic Shell is frankly better, with all the speed ups without the datamining and nickel and diming and you can grab Win 8 for $65 on Amazon, if you need a Windows OS and don't have the excellent Win 7 that is what I'd point customers to, Win 10 is just not worth what you give up.
BTW anybody else notice the insane astroturfing going on by MSFT trying to keep 10 from becoming another 8? Even sites like El Reg is seeing accounts that were dormant since the Win 8 release suddenly shooting down any complaints and singing the praises of Win 10 in market speak. Normally I condemn any talk of shills and astroturfing because...well I had customers that liked Windows ME, and there is everything from AMC Matador to Zune fanclubs because there will always be somebody who likes it no matter what it is, but just like previous ads by MSFT its just so.....well hamfisted and obvious, you can almost see the PHB standing behind the typist telling them to stay "on message" while going down a print out of a PPT with buzz words like "social integration" and "unified user experience". C'mon MSFT, if you are gonna turf at least do it well, half assed turfing is just lame.
Not on the AMD side as far as "bang for the buck" is concerned. In 2007 I paid $140 for a quad core CPU and last month I paid $132 for an octocore. Blows through transcodes like a boss and at $362 for the processor AND a gamer board AND 16GB of RAM? Its still got the bang for the buck like they did in 07.
I fricking HATED Windows 8/8.1 with a fiery passion but I hate to say it but...it WAS better than 10, why? Have you LOOKED at the fricking EULA for Windows 10? The datamining is fricking insane, it makes Google look like fricking privacy lovers by comparison!
I knew when they said it was "free" there would have to be a catch, but I figured it'd be another ham handed attempt to push Windows other products but daaayyum, if you don't spend the first hour removing apps and turning shit off you might as well just send all your data straight to fricking MSFT!