Personally I think Crysis is a big wank fest for those "Must have teh benchmarks!" dumbasses with more money than sense myself.
After bumpgate on the Nvidia side and the compiler and bribery scandals on the Intel side I put my money where my mouth was and went full on AMD in my shop and my customers as I couldn't be happier. Lately I've been leaning towards the HD48xx series, which give frankly insane amounts of bang for the buck for around $60 for the HD4830 (which you can flash and turn into an HD4850 if you're brave) and the HD4850 for $75 which is just nuts for a 256bit wide pipeline.
But I can see why Nvidia stooped to this, their way of designing chips is frankly getting too expensive. The AMD way of designing the midrange chips as the main GPU and then simply going X2 for the high end and flipping off some cores in software for the low end if the smarter way to go IMHO, as it costs less which can then be passed on to the consumer. Meh until the next console refresh it won't matter anyway as those $60 chips like I'm selling crank out the purty on all the latest games at 1080p.
Cranking the tesselation on dividers and under the ground where it can't be seen is just lame though, and you'd think they would have more pride than to do a quack.exe in this day and age. Guess not.
You don't even need that friend, all you need is to bribe the weakest link, the dispatcher. being someone who enjoys some good quality happy herb I got to know several dealers and they all got updates from the PD dispatch. they have a nice little system going with a simple text message on their cell alerting them to cops in their area, a second code for if the cops are heading towards their place. hell they even know where the cops are going before the cops do!
As for TFA we wouldn't even need this shit if we would get rid of those stupid as hell sin laws and just worry about violent criminals. but considering how the corps have figured out how to cash in with private prisons good luck on that ever happening.
Uhhh...because this is another case of Quack.exe? look at the facts: You have a highly intensive programming trick used for no fucking reason on completely stupid shit like concrete dividers. Have you EVER said to yourself 'Boy this game would have totally had me if it had only rendered the concrete dividers in such loving detail I can make out the scuff marks from the boot of the guy who last leaned on it'?
Then you have this SAME technique used to slam the GPU even when it isn't on the screen or will EVER be seen, such as rendering highly tesselated water being rendered underneath the land. This isn't Minecraft, they can't dig their way down to actually see the fricking water!
Then it turns out that this game, which has often been used as the standard for benchmarks, by loading up the game with worthless crap the user can't even see will surprise surprise...run better only on certain Nvidia GPUs.
I don't think we need to call in Kojack to crack this case folks. Nvidia used their position to make another Quack.exe so that the benches made using this game will score higher on their GPUs, by loading the game up with invisible crap that slams the GPU in a way they designed theirs to take better than the competition. Hell I wouldn't be surprised if they tesselated the manhole covers just to get the count up! The sad part is like the Intel compiler (which is STILL rigged BTW) most gamers won't know they are being had unless someone points out the BS that is going down behind the scenes.
Riiight. Explain Mac Guardian then. Or the fact that OSX bites it in pwn to own first every. single. time. Protip: the first one to drop a machine get 10,000 USD so they are gonna go for the easiest target so they can get paid and since Windows Vista that AIN'T Windows. you might want to read this before you start touting Apple security.
As for TFA, is anyone surprised? MSFT has caught so much flak for holes in IE they really don't have much of a choice anymore they pretty much HAVE TO lock it down. It still won't get me to use it or recommend it to my users though. I hate the UI and after getting burnt by IE 6 and seeing how they are trying to tie IE to which OS you have instead of actually supporting those still not EOL'ed I think I'll pass.
I do have to give MSFT credit for one thing though...low rights mode. that was really smart and one of the reasons why I use a Chromium based browser (Comodo Dragon) and give it to my clients, as having the browser at the lowest possible permissions simply makes good sense. Why FF hasn't implemented this after FOUR YEARS is beyond me.
But since switching my users over to Windows 7 and The Dragon along with ABP I have watched the infection rates drop off the charts. So far I've only seen a single infection with that combo and that was from a moran who not only refused to listen to his AV but actually DISABLED IT when it wouldn't let him instal 'teh new Limewire". Which of course is nothing but a bunch of trojan downloaders with a badly skinned Gnucleus.
IE may win awards at blocking certain types but by abandoning IE after 6 for so long and leaving the web a mess they have years of bad will they are gonna have to overcome.Maybe once XP and Vista are EOL so that there is only one OS and only one IE to support things will be better, but for those that have to admin multiple flavors of Windows IE is just a PITA.
That was pretty standard in the 60s and 70s. As I said my grandfather was on one of the forward bases (Rammstein maybe? It has been too many years and sadly he is no longer with us to ask) and told me they often got MiGs and Su- series warplanes brought to us by defecting pilots. He once told me there was one year and a half period where his base looked like a Soviet station for all the MiGs that had been landed there!
As for the other poster shocked we are paying a billion a year to a country that is screwing us? Well duh, welcome to America, where we can shell out to every third world "el presidente" whether they fuck us over or not while your fellow Americans live in cars on in tent cities like something out of Brazil. Those "flash mobs" I truly believe are just the canaries in the coal mine, our very own Arab spring is coming. too many are out of work and thanks to the teabaggers help from Washington in the form of a new WPA or even unemployment extensions simply won't be coming. it will be interesting to see how the teabaggers and the rest of those in DC with a "let them eat cake" attitude react when the city is burning.
Hell it won't even be that, it'll be some Android theme they found on some back alley Android fanboy page, probably the fanboy's idea of a cross between iOS and Win 7. You can count on reflective surfaces, the machine being waaaaay underpowered and waaaay overpriced. And finally you will be able to get the same hardware running vanilla Android for less than half what these bozos want at Chinamart, which is where I'm sure they got their "products".
These guys are nothing but ripoff artists. They ripped off the crunchpad and now they've found a deal on some gear at Chinamart and I have no doubt ripped off someone's Android skin and is hawking that at double the money. I give them 4 to 6 months to blow through any cash they were able to get out of dumbass investors before they close the doors and blow away like a fart on the breeze.
I'd say whether it would be ruined or not at least in films (sadly I just don't have time to curl up with a book, barely have time to see maybe 1 movie a month) is whether or not it is a really good twist ( Six Sense) or a lame one you can see coming a mile away (Everything else directed by M Night).
Frankly VERY few movies have a twist good enough that finding out will ruin the thing, most are so telegraphed that frankly who cares. I mean who didn't see the twist coming in say Unbreakable a fricking mile away? Usually if the story is even halfway decent one can forgive a lame twist especially since M Night made the damned things so common.
What amazes me is people act shocked! Shocked I tell you! That this shit is going down. Well surprise surprise it has been standard operating procedure of ALL nations for as far back as I can remember.
My grandfather spent most of his 25 years in the USAF stationed in West Germany and he used to joke if the USSR wanted to take out the bases in West Germany all they'd have to do is send single planes because they had standing orders do not shoot at single Russian planes. Why? Because we had a standing bounty on any new Soviet planes and we wanted to make sure any pilot knew we'd be happy to give him shelter and a check if he brought us Soviet gear and intel.
On the flip side the Russians stole from us, the TU4 was a reverse engineered B29 and they paid the Chinese to get their hands on one of the first sidewinders when one lodged but didn't blow in a Chinese MiG fighting an F86 from Taiwan. Their copy the Atoll was such a ripoff the parts between it and the sidewinder could be swapped and it would still function perfectly. And of course the Chinese are no stranger to snatching USA stealth tech, they paid dirt farmers in Kosovo to dig up the F117 that crashed there in the 90s. And of course the Israelis stole the Mirage from France to create the Nesher.
Hell I could go on all day with the list of how much tech has been stolen from the various governments by other governments. that is just how the game is played. Frankly we shouldn't have been trying to make deals with Pakistan in the first place, as they have been supplying the Taliban with funds we paid them and their long running feud with India isn't gonna make them think to highly of us when we send more jobs there.
But to think that pissing them off made a difference is ignoring history including the history of Pakistan who has traditionally sold and stole tech whenever it could, just like everyone else. the only difference is pissing them off made them let it leak instead of just quietly handing the stuff to the Chinese. This is just how the game is played folks and you can bet your last dollar if Pakistan or China comes up with something new using this tech and won't let us have it? We'll just steal the shit from them just like how they stole the original from us. With this kind of stuff you ain't got no friends, you just got people you hope will play ball for a little while.
Try one of the Chromium based (I use Dragon but there are plenty to choose from) as they have really been gaining in extensions since Moz started pulling their little "stunts" as of late and unlike Firefox when they update extensions do NOT break!
Frankly I don't know what has gotten into Moz, do they WANT to go out of business, is that it? Do they want everyone to dump them for Chrome? Because it sure as hell seems like it. The only real selling point they have anymore is the extensions and what user loyalty they have left and they seem determined to destroy both!
And yes version numbers ARE important! I have a customer whom I had to send exactly one version back on Comodo Dragon because she has added some funky app to her FB page that doesn't work in the latest Dragon. I'm sure when the next version of Dragon comes out they'll have it fixed and since the latest release was a feature release no big deal on sending her back one version. She is already on Windows 7 with ABP so she is in low rights mode and without ads the odds of her having any kind of malware from being a single version behind is trivial I told her to simply stay on the previous version until the next release which I will email her the okay to update to.
So yes version number ARE important! Thanks to the version number embedded into the installers I was able to quickly find the previous version to get her back up and running. Will they get rid of those as well?
Frankly it wouldn't surprise me as I've found that since the 3.6.x branch that FF has been unsuitable for purpose. I have to support everything from netbooks and older P4 office boxes to the latest multicores and FF runs like shit on anything less than a P4 3GHz with HT and 2Gb of RAM and that is just insane for a web browser! WTF Moz? The FF from 4 up slams the CPU when opening a new tab, for up to 2 minutes it can vapor lock a PC if the new tab being launched contains video, left alone with NO interaction on the part of the user the memory footprint will grow until it starts slamming the swap, it is just fricking nuts!
IMHO the moves as of late have shown that Moz has become Netscape all over again, arrogant with a "fuck you!" attitude but without the code being able to back that bad attitude up. The Chromium based run rings around it, don't slam the CPU or force the machine to lose responsiveness, and don't suck memory like a wino does Wild Irish Rose.
Another gave a basic answer as to a Win(Insert device) but I'd add the key to a Win-Device is that nearly the entire thing is software with minimum control chips. If you have a softmodem (also called a WinModem) look at the amount of chips then look up pics of the first PCI modems and see the difference. in the case of a Win-device pretty much everything is being handled in software NOT hardware.
As for Apple? Well duh there margins are so high they don't need to hustle extra crap! look up the numbers and you'll see that Apple has the highest margins in the biz. the nearest competitors aren't even close.
By having margins as high as they do they can easily make shit like in TFA because they don't need the money and hustling would frankly go against Jobs style aesthetic. compare this to the guys like Epson and Lexmark where they are often making pennies if they don't sell for a loss and hope to make it up on ink. Do you know what the average profit is on a low end dell? $8. Hell Apple wouldn't package their trash and sell it to you for such a low margin!
Uh huh. you DO realize that there are BILLIONS to be made from the biggest scam since CDOs, which of course i'm referring to carbon credits, aka "indulgences for the 21st century" yes? That Mr "inconvenient truth" as set himself to become a carbon billionaire by leeching off the west with said scam, yes?
Or that rev Al also farts around in a personal Lear jet and has a house with an indoor basketball court that sucks down more AC than 30 single family dwellings while telling you that YOU must pay? That he also has the giant brass balls to say those very same energy pigs are 'carbon neutral" because he pays himself with credits from his own company which would be like me moving money from my left to right pocket and calling it "wealth redistribution" and demanding and GETTING a tax credit for doing so?
Old Rev Al Gore is just ONE example of the leeches set to make a killing from this. If you'd like I can show you the same person who helped to invent CDOs is now helping to create carbon derivatives or let you see that Goldman Sachs, kings of leeches are all ready to blow some carbon bubbles but why bother? you'll just deny it and mod me down, yes?
Anyone that thinks this whole thing doesn't come down to $$$ is frankly a fool. And notice how NEVER, not once, have you EVER seen Al Gore and friends come out in favor of heavy tariffs for China and India, who both have said they won't play the carbon game? Why is that? Because they make money off of them silly! In the end it all comes down to 'More monies for teh RICH nom nom nom" while yet again fucking the poor and if you think these people actually give a flying fuck about saving the planet I have a nice bridge to nowhere you might be interested in.
Exactly and Intel as in TFA has a history of "pre crippling" the hardware you buy from them. it was a real PITA for me when XP Mode first came out as it was hell trying to tell which Intel chips supported virtualization and which didn't.
This is one of the reasons I recommend folks switch to AMD. with the AMD chips ALL the features are supported by ALL the CPUs, even the newer Semprons have virtualization and with most of the new boards you can take your chances and see if the dual you got is a triple or quad that they just turned off a couple of cores to make quota or if they were bad cores because unlike Intel they don't cut the traces. in some chips there have been reports of even turning on the L3 cache that was turned off to make a Phenom into an Athlon.
After the virtualization bullshit, the bribery, and finally the compiler scandal I decided to put my money where my mouth was and after being a lifelong Intel man switched my home and shop to AMD exclusively and frankly myself and my customers couldn't be happier. Unless you are in one of those rare niches (granted more geeks here may fit than most places) where you literally squeeze every chip for every MHz of power the AMD chips are frankly insanely overpowered for most tasks and dirt cheap to boot. No wondering if chip X supports feature Y, they all support everything, and you can build a quite nice quad for less than $400.
So don't support the pre crippled bullshit go AMD. I've found so far in my own personal tests the only thing AMD does is turn off cores to fit price points and they are often trivial to turn back on for $0, making them an even better deal if you don't mind taking the chance that the dual or triple you bought is actually a dual or triple because of a bad yield. I've found at least in my shop about 1/3rd of the ones turned off are done so because it had a bad core. But frankly the new Athlon and Phenom quads are so cheap and so overpowered for what most folks do that I don't even bother with less anymore.
But it is certainly better IMHO to give the customer a chance at a free upgrade than it is to nickel and dime them like Intel. You should have seen the look on my last triple core customer's face when I told him he got a free upgrade to a quad. Talk about a happy customer!
Actually that bit of philosophy dumbass came from Plato and was used to illustrate why one shouldn't automatically accept preconceived notions. But your stupid ass post just goes to show what is wrong in the USA right now, putting out total dipshits that can't even comprehend basic philosophy unless it is wrapped in red/blue bullshit. Thanks for reminding me why I think so little of my fellow Americans.
Any programs you use they don't got? Just fill in the box at the bottom and if they get more than a couple of requests for it they'll slap it on the list. The klite pack? That was one I requested. They are pretty good about adding new apps to the list although if you want a good PDF reader I'd suggest Sumatra. It is ultra light and super fast, really nice.
I'll be suggesting the Comodo Dragon browser after I finish this BTW, so if that is the Comodo you're looking for it might get added quickly. If you are talking Comodo AV I'd suggest Avast which is on the list there, as it seems less fiddly than Comodo and thus makes it easier for the non geeks to use. But I'm glad it helped as Ninite really cut down on my build times. Just install the OS and any discs they want installed, then run Ninite and voila! Fully loaded PC with everything from flash and.NET to messenger and klite, all from a single installer with NO toolbars or clicky clicky BS. Fricking brilliant. And if you wonder how they make their money for $30 a year they give you the ability to set your own repo that syncs with theirs, great for SMBs.
But this makes me think of something I've been puzzling over for awhile now....WTF is wrong with BSD? Seriously, is it broken? Is it shit? Is it a hard to use incompatible mess, what?
Because I just don't get why if you don't want to play the GPL game you'd even bother with GPL code when BSD is right there. hell it is good enough for Apple, it was good enough for MSFT when they needed a temporary TCP/IP stack to get the original WIN NT out the door on time, so WTF? If these companies don't want to play the GPL game then just don't mess with GPL code, is that so damned hard? To me it is almost like a klepto, that just can't be happy unless they are snatching something.
Either use BSD or just buy off the developer so they'll give you a non GPL license to their code, is that really so hard to follow? It seems to me a hell of a lot more logical than all the hoop jumping and possible bad press when someone finds out they ripped GPL like in TFA.
PC repair maybe? I know my old boss would never warn me before giving me the PC of "latino guy" or "buttgirl" to fix. Thanks a lot Doug, asshole. Latino guy would always end up with porn bugs for gay sites, usually some Latino oiled up nasty shit, and buttgirl?/Shivers at the horror/ Old buttgirl had a BF that had to weigh a good 350 and was hairy as a damned wookie and she would take all these thong pics of his big old hairy ass and make them her wallpapers, the icons for folders, her screensavers...fuck that was rough. the shit we PC guys get to see sometimes, like the gal that had dildos that i swear needed their own fricking gun rack...eek!
As for TFA...people still use Blackberry? I thought everyone had switched to iPhone and Android by now. If MSFT has any brains left at that outfit they'll make sure to have excellent AD and GPU support in their Nokia WinPhones and will drive the final nail in the coffin that is RIM. Frankly TFA doesn't surprise me as that company has just gone from one mistake after another lately and having a serious security hole just seems like the icing on the cake.
Once upon a time everywhere I went it was crackberries, but now all I ever see is iPhones and the HTC Androids. If a security hole appears but nobody is there to exploit it, does it still count?
I'd like to add something: WTF is it with Google spamming Chrome lately? I had a customer who didn't have the net and won't have it switched on for about another week and I needed some freeware to get him ready. Now normally I use Ninite (fricking brilliant BTW) to install all the little "must have" freeware stuff but as I said this guy didn't have his net up and running yet so I just downloaded the installers.
It seemed like every other fricking installer tried to dump chrome on his machine! WTF Google? it was bad enough when Sun used to pull that shit with Java, but now you gotta pull that crap too? Surely you have enough damned share you don't gotta spam your browser!
I can see why the EU and the DoJ are looking at them for possible antitrust. I mean you have them favoring their own sites in search, them being accused of dumping Android below cost while ignoring everyone else's patents, the whole Streetview datamining mess, and now they are dumping Chrome on anybody that doesn't pay attention and goes "clicky clicky" on popular freeware like CCleaner.
I mean for Pete's sake you're already at 90%+ do you really need to do spam dumping of your browser? It isn't like you can't push the thing on a website, say one that everybody and their dog uses daily when they need to find stuff?
You really should try both side by side. I use Yahoo (I like the UI better) and Google and frankly lately Google doeth sucketh the big wet titty on certain searches. Reviews? you end up with a dozen shopping sites that have stuck the word "review" in their page. With Yahoo I actually find a review for what I'm looking for within the top three searches. Looking for something a little old, like say info about some part that landed in your lap? Again i find mostly eBay and shopping crap on Google, Yahoo I actually find the OEM along with drivers.
The problem with Google is two fold. One they favor their own sites whenever possible, which means they are more likely to give you crap from their sites than something useful from a potential competitor. two the SEO spammers have long since figured out Google's games, which is why shopping sites put keywords like reviews even when there isn't a review within a hundred miles of their site.
So you stick with Google if that is what makes you happy and works for you, but using both I'd say the Yahoo/Bing searches at least for the stuff i'm searching for is better. Plus competition is always a good thing and frankly the amount of data Google is gaining is more than a little scary to me. i think i'd rather have any data I generate spread out through enough competing sites a single company won't be able to tell what I had for breakfast this morning. thanks anyway.
Uhhhh...we're humans, we do that shit. Hell look at caloric, once upon a time a magical substance that was basically "bottled heat" that many believed they had measured.
You see it is simple: You wanna irritate the living hell out of a scientist? show him/her their math don't work. The scientists have been using "fudge factors" for as long as the religious have been using the "God of the gaps" and it both cases when the real answer smacks us upside the head, which can take a mighty long while but does eventually happen, we go "Ohhhh...so THAT is why!".
Welcome to humanity, where having a bunch of question marks just doesn't really do it for a lot of our fellow talking monkeys. The truly wise man knows that he don't know shit, keeps us from being surprised all that often when something totally new comes out of left field..
And the difference between this and a USB HID is.....what exactly? the whole point of HID was that you can write and submit pretty much anything to the USB-IF and once accepted it would "just work" without drivers. This is why you don't need drivers anymore for mice, keyboards, game controllers, even UPS units can have themselves declared under USB HID.
So I don't really see how it would be a great stretch to add printers to that, certainly not enough to deserve a patent. After all the only reason why the printer companies haven't already done that is they are making piles of money off the crap they install with the printer drivers. The last one I installed for a customer had links to buy ink and photo paper, to send prints to anywhere in the USA, hell even digital photo frames.
So unless there is a lot more to it than that I don't see the big whoop. The only reason why Apple is doing it first is unlike with WinPrinters Apple makes enough on hardware they don't have to try to hustle the customers to buy more junk after the sale.
Simple: Drug company presents its books with the costs required to make the drug, test the drug, etc and after it has been verified that it is so then the company is given a flat percentage of each sale until it reaches cost + 40%. It isn't like you can buy most drugs without prescription and this would allow them to make a standardized amount before the drug becomes generic without costing lives.
Yeah but Google frankly deserves it. They are making enough money off of Android search if they threw even 20% of that back into looking for prior art to kill these patents? The world would be a better place. Hell Google has enough geek cred if they would offer "prior art bounties" with a list of what is being used they could get a lot of the work done for peanuts!
If this don't stick a damned fork in the whole "do no evil" bullshit frankly I don't know what will. They make money off Android search and then throw the OEM under a bus when the shit gets rough, what exactly more do you need to call something evil? The CEO snorting ground kittens? The whole "do no evil" should now be relegated to the same bin as "get the facts!" and Think Different" in the BS marketing dept.
Sadly you watch as the fanboys will rush to defend them, when you and i both know that they have made out like fricking bandits on their "free OS", made from FOSS code which I bet they didn't even throw the actual developers of that code a $20 and a T-shirt as a thank you, and now that the shit is getting real they'll let the OEMs take the hit while they slink off with the truck load o' cash. I don't see how anyone could call that anything BUT evil, lowdown, and just plain sorry.
What other systems? That covers every version of Windows still supported! If you mean Linux well duh, who is gonna do the extra work to support a 1% share OS that is a royal PITA to support? Do you support Apt or RPM? Will the version you just released work with the kernel that came out yesterday, or will you have to start over again because Linus Goatse'd the kernel for fun?
It is based on Chromium so it is FOSS, I'm sure if you look around their website you'll find the code. if you are on Linux I'm sure you know the compiler dance, hell I bet you have a compiler installed as SOP don't ya? So feel free to make a Debian or whatever Linux flavor you use version, just don't expect support.
Frankly though you really shouldn't be surprised as Linux is anything but stable ATM with all the changes from the kernel to the windowing system to the DEs all getting major overhauls. Comodo is pretty conservative with their releases and Linux is anything but conservative ATM. But the nice thing about FOSS is you can DIY right? So why don't you? That's what I got told when I asked for a feature or bug fix, so it must be SOP in Linux. Have fun!
BTW if you get tired of that kind of "fun" deals.woot! often has sales on Win 7 HP, usually $75 for a single or $100 for the triple pack. Quite an awesome OS BTW, and supported until 2020 so no worries there. Frankly even LTS can't hold a candle to the MSFT support cycles. And if you are on Mac I'm sure you have bootcamp like all my Mac customers do, just install it there. Oh and if you meant Windows X64? runs like a champ, I'm typing this on Win 7 HP X64 in Comodo Dragon, purrs like a big old kitteh.
Welcome to the wonderful world of cherry picking friend, where they will not only not provide you service but will SHUT YOU DOWN if you try to DIY. I know because a friend had his business stuck in a similar sitch, so he talked his partner into going in on a T-1 and renting access to those around him. The teleco got wind and pulled his plug with a "just try to sue us buddy!". His lawyer said "Oh sure you'll win, but it will cost a couple of million easy in lawyers fees and a good decade or more out of your life" so they shut down and moved away. Those nearly 400 homes? STILL nothing but dialup to this very day.
So get used to it, thanks to the corrupt cabal in DC giving the duopoly a blank check to do anything they want cherry picking is the order of the day and if the city tries to run their own lines? they get sued even though the duopoly has NO intention of serving them! Like too much in this country we pay incredibly high prices for subpar service so some CEO can have extra hookers and blow. SNAFU my friend SNAFU.
Except if you read TFA you'll see the guy used Debian 1.3 which I believe is old enough to actually support a 386 OOTB. I have to agree with the other posters I don't see how this can be in any way called a "hack".
What's next, an article about installing Win 95 on a Pentium I? Hell I have an old B&W G3 in the closet maybe I should write an article about installing an older PPC distro on it, get me some money from page views. I wouldn't even call it a "hack" to do what I'll probably do with it, which is install an AMD dual core in the case. This is just using an OS as it was intended on hardware it was designed for, nothing more.
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Personally I think Crysis is a big wank fest for those "Must have teh benchmarks!" dumbasses with more money than sense myself.
After bumpgate on the Nvidia side and the compiler and bribery scandals on the Intel side I put my money where my mouth was and went full on AMD in my shop and my customers as I couldn't be happier. Lately I've been leaning towards the HD48xx series, which give frankly insane amounts of bang for the buck for around $60 for the HD4830 (which you can flash and turn into an HD4850 if you're brave) and the HD4850 for $75 which is just nuts for a 256bit wide pipeline.
But I can see why Nvidia stooped to this, their way of designing chips is frankly getting too expensive. The AMD way of designing the midrange chips as the main GPU and then simply going X2 for the high end and flipping off some cores in software for the low end if the smarter way to go IMHO, as it costs less which can then be passed on to the consumer. Meh until the next console refresh it won't matter anyway as those $60 chips like I'm selling crank out the purty on all the latest games at 1080p.
Cranking the tesselation on dividers and under the ground where it can't be seen is just lame though, and you'd think they would have more pride than to do a quack.exe in this day and age. Guess not.
You don't even need that friend, all you need is to bribe the weakest link, the dispatcher. being someone who enjoys some good quality happy herb I got to know several dealers and they all got updates from the PD dispatch. they have a nice little system going with a simple text message on their cell alerting them to cops in their area, a second code for if the cops are heading towards their place. hell they even know where the cops are going before the cops do!
As for TFA we wouldn't even need this shit if we would get rid of those stupid as hell sin laws and just worry about violent criminals. but considering how the corps have figured out how to cash in with private prisons good luck on that ever happening.
Uhhh...because this is another case of Quack.exe? look at the facts: You have a highly intensive programming trick used for no fucking reason on completely stupid shit like concrete dividers. Have you EVER said to yourself 'Boy this game would have totally had me if it had only rendered the concrete dividers in such loving detail I can make out the scuff marks from the boot of the guy who last leaned on it'?
Then you have this SAME technique used to slam the GPU even when it isn't on the screen or will EVER be seen, such as rendering highly tesselated water being rendered underneath the land. This isn't Minecraft, they can't dig their way down to actually see the fricking water!
Then it turns out that this game, which has often been used as the standard for benchmarks, by loading up the game with worthless crap the user can't even see will surprise surprise...run better only on certain Nvidia GPUs.
I don't think we need to call in Kojack to crack this case folks. Nvidia used their position to make another Quack.exe so that the benches made using this game will score higher on their GPUs, by loading the game up with invisible crap that slams the GPU in a way they designed theirs to take better than the competition. Hell I wouldn't be surprised if they tesselated the manhole covers just to get the count up! The sad part is like the Intel compiler (which is STILL rigged BTW) most gamers won't know they are being had unless someone points out the BS that is going down behind the scenes.
Riiight. Explain Mac Guardian then. Or the fact that OSX bites it in pwn to own first every. single. time. Protip: the first one to drop a machine get 10,000 USD so they are gonna go for the easiest target so they can get paid and since Windows Vista that AIN'T Windows. you might want to read this before you start touting Apple security.
As for TFA, is anyone surprised? MSFT has caught so much flak for holes in IE they really don't have much of a choice anymore they pretty much HAVE TO lock it down. It still won't get me to use it or recommend it to my users though. I hate the UI and after getting burnt by IE 6 and seeing how they are trying to tie IE to which OS you have instead of actually supporting those still not EOL'ed I think I'll pass.
I do have to give MSFT credit for one thing though...low rights mode. that was really smart and one of the reasons why I use a Chromium based browser (Comodo Dragon) and give it to my clients, as having the browser at the lowest possible permissions simply makes good sense. Why FF hasn't implemented this after FOUR YEARS is beyond me.
But since switching my users over to Windows 7 and The Dragon along with ABP I have watched the infection rates drop off the charts. So far I've only seen a single infection with that combo and that was from a moran who not only refused to listen to his AV but actually DISABLED IT when it wouldn't let him instal 'teh new Limewire". Which of course is nothing but a bunch of trojan downloaders with a badly skinned Gnucleus.
IE may win awards at blocking certain types but by abandoning IE after 6 for so long and leaving the web a mess they have years of bad will they are gonna have to overcome.Maybe once XP and Vista are EOL so that there is only one OS and only one IE to support things will be better, but for those that have to admin multiple flavors of Windows IE is just a PITA.
That was pretty standard in the 60s and 70s. As I said my grandfather was on one of the forward bases (Rammstein maybe? It has been too many years and sadly he is no longer with us to ask) and told me they often got MiGs and Su- series warplanes brought to us by defecting pilots. He once told me there was one year and a half period where his base looked like a Soviet station for all the MiGs that had been landed there!
As for the other poster shocked we are paying a billion a year to a country that is screwing us? Well duh, welcome to America, where we can shell out to every third world "el presidente" whether they fuck us over or not while your fellow Americans live in cars on in tent cities like something out of Brazil. Those "flash mobs" I truly believe are just the canaries in the coal mine, our very own Arab spring is coming. too many are out of work and thanks to the teabaggers help from Washington in the form of a new WPA or even unemployment extensions simply won't be coming. it will be interesting to see how the teabaggers and the rest of those in DC with a "let them eat cake" attitude react when the city is burning.
Hell it won't even be that, it'll be some Android theme they found on some back alley Android fanboy page, probably the fanboy's idea of a cross between iOS and Win 7. You can count on reflective surfaces, the machine being waaaaay underpowered and waaaay overpriced. And finally you will be able to get the same hardware running vanilla Android for less than half what these bozos want at Chinamart, which is where I'm sure they got their "products".
These guys are nothing but ripoff artists. They ripped off the crunchpad and now they've found a deal on some gear at Chinamart and I have no doubt ripped off someone's Android skin and is hawking that at double the money. I give them 4 to 6 months to blow through any cash they were able to get out of dumbass investors before they close the doors and blow away like a fart on the breeze.
I'd say whether it would be ruined or not at least in films (sadly I just don't have time to curl up with a book, barely have time to see maybe 1 movie a month) is whether or not it is a really good twist ( Six Sense) or a lame one you can see coming a mile away (Everything else directed by M Night).
Frankly VERY few movies have a twist good enough that finding out will ruin the thing, most are so telegraphed that frankly who cares. I mean who didn't see the twist coming in say Unbreakable a fricking mile away? Usually if the story is even halfway decent one can forgive a lame twist especially since M Night made the damned things so common.
What amazes me is people act shocked! Shocked I tell you! That this shit is going down. Well surprise surprise it has been standard operating procedure of ALL nations for as far back as I can remember.
My grandfather spent most of his 25 years in the USAF stationed in West Germany and he used to joke if the USSR wanted to take out the bases in West Germany all they'd have to do is send single planes because they had standing orders do not shoot at single Russian planes. Why? Because we had a standing bounty on any new Soviet planes and we wanted to make sure any pilot knew we'd be happy to give him shelter and a check if he brought us Soviet gear and intel.
On the flip side the Russians stole from us, the TU4 was a reverse engineered B29 and they paid the Chinese to get their hands on one of the first sidewinders when one lodged but didn't blow in a Chinese MiG fighting an F86 from Taiwan. Their copy the Atoll was such a ripoff the parts between it and the sidewinder could be swapped and it would still function perfectly. And of course the Chinese are no stranger to snatching USA stealth tech, they paid dirt farmers in Kosovo to dig up the F117 that crashed there in the 90s. And of course the Israelis stole the Mirage from France to create the Nesher.
Hell I could go on all day with the list of how much tech has been stolen from the various governments by other governments. that is just how the game is played. Frankly we shouldn't have been trying to make deals with Pakistan in the first place, as they have been supplying the Taliban with funds we paid them and their long running feud with India isn't gonna make them think to highly of us when we send more jobs there.
But to think that pissing them off made a difference is ignoring history including the history of Pakistan who has traditionally sold and stole tech whenever it could, just like everyone else. the only difference is pissing them off made them let it leak instead of just quietly handing the stuff to the Chinese. This is just how the game is played folks and you can bet your last dollar if Pakistan or China comes up with something new using this tech and won't let us have it? We'll just steal the shit from them just like how they stole the original from us. With this kind of stuff you ain't got no friends, you just got people you hope will play ball for a little while.
Try one of the Chromium based (I use Dragon but there are plenty to choose from) as they have really been gaining in extensions since Moz started pulling their little "stunts" as of late and unlike Firefox when they update extensions do NOT break!
Frankly I don't know what has gotten into Moz, do they WANT to go out of business, is that it? Do they want everyone to dump them for Chrome? Because it sure as hell seems like it. The only real selling point they have anymore is the extensions and what user loyalty they have left and they seem determined to destroy both!
And yes version numbers ARE important! I have a customer whom I had to send exactly one version back on Comodo Dragon because she has added some funky app to her FB page that doesn't work in the latest Dragon. I'm sure when the next version of Dragon comes out they'll have it fixed and since the latest release was a feature release no big deal on sending her back one version. She is already on Windows 7 with ABP so she is in low rights mode and without ads the odds of her having any kind of malware from being a single version behind is trivial I told her to simply stay on the previous version until the next release which I will email her the okay to update to.
So yes version number ARE important! Thanks to the version number embedded into the installers I was able to quickly find the previous version to get her back up and running. Will they get rid of those as well?
Frankly it wouldn't surprise me as I've found that since the 3.6.x branch that FF has been unsuitable for purpose. I have to support everything from netbooks and older P4 office boxes to the latest multicores and FF runs like shit on anything less than a P4 3GHz with HT and 2Gb of RAM and that is just insane for a web browser! WTF Moz? The FF from 4 up slams the CPU when opening a new tab, for up to 2 minutes it can vapor lock a PC if the new tab being launched contains video, left alone with NO interaction on the part of the user the memory footprint will grow until it starts slamming the swap, it is just fricking nuts!
IMHO the moves as of late have shown that Moz has become Netscape all over again, arrogant with a "fuck you!" attitude but without the code being able to back that bad attitude up. The Chromium based run rings around it, don't slam the CPU or force the machine to lose responsiveness, and don't suck memory like a wino does Wild Irish Rose.
Another gave a basic answer as to a Win(Insert device) but I'd add the key to a Win-Device is that nearly the entire thing is software with minimum control chips. If you have a softmodem (also called a WinModem) look at the amount of chips then look up pics of the first PCI modems and see the difference. in the case of a Win-device pretty much everything is being handled in software NOT hardware.
As for Apple? Well duh there margins are so high they don't need to hustle extra crap! look up the numbers and you'll see that Apple has the highest margins in the biz. the nearest competitors aren't even close.
By having margins as high as they do they can easily make shit like in TFA because they don't need the money and hustling would frankly go against Jobs style aesthetic. compare this to the guys like Epson and Lexmark where they are often making pennies if they don't sell for a loss and hope to make it up on ink. Do you know what the average profit is on a low end dell? $8. Hell Apple wouldn't package their trash and sell it to you for such a low margin!
Uh huh. you DO realize that there are BILLIONS to be made from the biggest scam since CDOs, which of course i'm referring to carbon credits, aka "indulgences for the 21st century" yes? That Mr "inconvenient truth" as set himself to become a carbon billionaire by leeching off the west with said scam, yes?
Or that rev Al also farts around in a personal Lear jet and has a house with an indoor basketball court that sucks down more AC than 30 single family dwellings while telling you that YOU must pay? That he also has the giant brass balls to say those very same energy pigs are 'carbon neutral" because he pays himself with credits from his own company which would be like me moving money from my left to right pocket and calling it "wealth redistribution" and demanding and GETTING a tax credit for doing so?
Old Rev Al Gore is just ONE example of the leeches set to make a killing from this. If you'd like I can show you the same person who helped to invent CDOs is now helping to create carbon derivatives or let you see that Goldman Sachs, kings of leeches are all ready to blow some carbon bubbles but why bother? you'll just deny it and mod me down, yes?
Anyone that thinks this whole thing doesn't come down to $$$ is frankly a fool. And notice how NEVER, not once, have you EVER seen Al Gore and friends come out in favor of heavy tariffs for China and India, who both have said they won't play the carbon game? Why is that? Because they make money off of them silly! In the end it all comes down to 'More monies for teh RICH nom nom nom" while yet again fucking the poor and if you think these people actually give a flying fuck about saving the planet I have a nice bridge to nowhere you might be interested in.
Exactly and Intel as in TFA has a history of "pre crippling" the hardware you buy from them. it was a real PITA for me when XP Mode first came out as it was hell trying to tell which Intel chips supported virtualization and which didn't.
This is one of the reasons I recommend folks switch to AMD. with the AMD chips ALL the features are supported by ALL the CPUs, even the newer Semprons have virtualization and with most of the new boards you can take your chances and see if the dual you got is a triple or quad that they just turned off a couple of cores to make quota or if they were bad cores because unlike Intel they don't cut the traces. in some chips there have been reports of even turning on the L3 cache that was turned off to make a Phenom into an Athlon.
After the virtualization bullshit, the bribery, and finally the compiler scandal I decided to put my money where my mouth was and after being a lifelong Intel man switched my home and shop to AMD exclusively and frankly myself and my customers couldn't be happier. Unless you are in one of those rare niches (granted more geeks here may fit than most places) where you literally squeeze every chip for every MHz of power the AMD chips are frankly insanely overpowered for most tasks and dirt cheap to boot. No wondering if chip X supports feature Y, they all support everything, and you can build a quite nice quad for less than $400.
So don't support the pre crippled bullshit go AMD. I've found so far in my own personal tests the only thing AMD does is turn off cores to fit price points and they are often trivial to turn back on for $0, making them an even better deal if you don't mind taking the chance that the dual or triple you bought is actually a dual or triple because of a bad yield. I've found at least in my shop about 1/3rd of the ones turned off are done so because it had a bad core. But frankly the new Athlon and Phenom quads are so cheap and so overpowered for what most folks do that I don't even bother with less anymore.
But it is certainly better IMHO to give the customer a chance at a free upgrade than it is to nickel and dime them like Intel. You should have seen the look on my last triple core customer's face when I told him he got a free upgrade to a quad. Talk about a happy customer!
Actually that bit of philosophy dumbass came from Plato and was used to illustrate why one shouldn't automatically accept preconceived notions. But your stupid ass post just goes to show what is wrong in the USA right now, putting out total dipshits that can't even comprehend basic philosophy unless it is wrapped in red/blue bullshit. Thanks for reminding me why I think so little of my fellow Americans.
Any programs you use they don't got? Just fill in the box at the bottom and if they get more than a couple of requests for it they'll slap it on the list. The klite pack? That was one I requested. They are pretty good about adding new apps to the list although if you want a good PDF reader I'd suggest Sumatra. It is ultra light and super fast, really nice.
I'll be suggesting the Comodo Dragon browser after I finish this BTW, so if that is the Comodo you're looking for it might get added quickly. If you are talking Comodo AV I'd suggest Avast which is on the list there, as it seems less fiddly than Comodo and thus makes it easier for the non geeks to use. But I'm glad it helped as Ninite really cut down on my build times. Just install the OS and any discs they want installed, then run Ninite and voila! Fully loaded PC with everything from flash and .NET to messenger and klite, all from a single installer with NO toolbars or clicky clicky BS. Fricking brilliant. And if you wonder how they make their money for $30 a year they give you the ability to set your own repo that syncs with theirs, great for SMBs.
But this makes me think of something I've been puzzling over for awhile now....WTF is wrong with BSD? Seriously, is it broken? Is it shit? Is it a hard to use incompatible mess, what?
Because I just don't get why if you don't want to play the GPL game you'd even bother with GPL code when BSD is right there. hell it is good enough for Apple, it was good enough for MSFT when they needed a temporary TCP/IP stack to get the original WIN NT out the door on time, so WTF? If these companies don't want to play the GPL game then just don't mess with GPL code, is that so damned hard? To me it is almost like a klepto, that just can't be happy unless they are snatching something.
Either use BSD or just buy off the developer so they'll give you a non GPL license to their code, is that really so hard to follow? It seems to me a hell of a lot more logical than all the hoop jumping and possible bad press when someone finds out they ripped GPL like in TFA.
PC repair maybe? I know my old boss would never warn me before giving me the PC of "latino guy" or "buttgirl" to fix. Thanks a lot Doug, asshole. Latino guy would always end up with porn bugs for gay sites, usually some Latino oiled up nasty shit, and buttgirl? /Shivers at the horror/ Old buttgirl had a BF that had to weigh a good 350 and was hairy as a damned wookie and she would take all these thong pics of his big old hairy ass and make them her wallpapers, the icons for folders, her screensavers...fuck that was rough. the shit we PC guys get to see sometimes, like the gal that had dildos that i swear needed their own fricking gun rack...eek!
As for TFA...people still use Blackberry? I thought everyone had switched to iPhone and Android by now. If MSFT has any brains left at that outfit they'll make sure to have excellent AD and GPU support in their Nokia WinPhones and will drive the final nail in the coffin that is RIM. Frankly TFA doesn't surprise me as that company has just gone from one mistake after another lately and having a serious security hole just seems like the icing on the cake.
Once upon a time everywhere I went it was crackberries, but now all I ever see is iPhones and the HTC Androids. If a security hole appears but nobody is there to exploit it, does it still count?
I'd like to add something: WTF is it with Google spamming Chrome lately? I had a customer who didn't have the net and won't have it switched on for about another week and I needed some freeware to get him ready. Now normally I use Ninite (fricking brilliant BTW) to install all the little "must have" freeware stuff but as I said this guy didn't have his net up and running yet so I just downloaded the installers.
It seemed like every other fricking installer tried to dump chrome on his machine! WTF Google? it was bad enough when Sun used to pull that shit with Java, but now you gotta pull that crap too? Surely you have enough damned share you don't gotta spam your browser!
I can see why the EU and the DoJ are looking at them for possible antitrust. I mean you have them favoring their own sites in search, them being accused of dumping Android below cost while ignoring everyone else's patents, the whole Streetview datamining mess, and now they are dumping Chrome on anybody that doesn't pay attention and goes "clicky clicky" on popular freeware like CCleaner.
I mean for Pete's sake you're already at 90%+ do you really need to do spam dumping of your browser? It isn't like you can't push the thing on a website, say one that everybody and their dog uses daily when they need to find stuff?
You really should try both side by side. I use Yahoo (I like the UI better) and Google and frankly lately Google doeth sucketh the big wet titty on certain searches. Reviews? you end up with a dozen shopping sites that have stuck the word "review" in their page. With Yahoo I actually find a review for what I'm looking for within the top three searches. Looking for something a little old, like say info about some part that landed in your lap? Again i find mostly eBay and shopping crap on Google, Yahoo I actually find the OEM along with drivers.
The problem with Google is two fold. One they favor their own sites whenever possible, which means they are more likely to give you crap from their sites than something useful from a potential competitor. two the SEO spammers have long since figured out Google's games, which is why shopping sites put keywords like reviews even when there isn't a review within a hundred miles of their site.
So you stick with Google if that is what makes you happy and works for you, but using both I'd say the Yahoo/Bing searches at least for the stuff i'm searching for is better. Plus competition is always a good thing and frankly the amount of data Google is gaining is more than a little scary to me. i think i'd rather have any data I generate spread out through enough competing sites a single company won't be able to tell what I had for breakfast this morning. thanks anyway.
Uhhhh...we're humans, we do that shit. Hell look at caloric, once upon a time a magical substance that was basically "bottled heat" that many believed they had measured.
You see it is simple: You wanna irritate the living hell out of a scientist? show him/her their math don't work. The scientists have been using "fudge factors" for as long as the religious have been using the "God of the gaps" and it both cases when the real answer smacks us upside the head, which can take a mighty long while but does eventually happen, we go "Ohhhh...so THAT is why!".
Welcome to humanity, where having a bunch of question marks just doesn't really do it for a lot of our fellow talking monkeys. The truly wise man knows that he don't know shit, keeps us from being surprised all that often when something totally new comes out of left field..
And the difference between this and a USB HID is.....what exactly? the whole point of HID was that you can write and submit pretty much anything to the USB-IF and once accepted it would "just work" without drivers. This is why you don't need drivers anymore for mice, keyboards, game controllers, even UPS units can have themselves declared under USB HID.
So I don't really see how it would be a great stretch to add printers to that, certainly not enough to deserve a patent. After all the only reason why the printer companies haven't already done that is they are making piles of money off the crap they install with the printer drivers. The last one I installed for a customer had links to buy ink and photo paper, to send prints to anywhere in the USA, hell even digital photo frames.
So unless there is a lot more to it than that I don't see the big whoop. The only reason why Apple is doing it first is unlike with WinPrinters Apple makes enough on hardware they don't have to try to hustle the customers to buy more junk after the sale.
Simple: Drug company presents its books with the costs required to make the drug, test the drug, etc and after it has been verified that it is so then the company is given a flat percentage of each sale until it reaches cost + 40%. It isn't like you can buy most drugs without prescription and this would allow them to make a standardized amount before the drug becomes generic without costing lives.
Yeah but Google frankly deserves it. They are making enough money off of Android search if they threw even 20% of that back into looking for prior art to kill these patents? The world would be a better place. Hell Google has enough geek cred if they would offer "prior art bounties" with a list of what is being used they could get a lot of the work done for peanuts!
If this don't stick a damned fork in the whole "do no evil" bullshit frankly I don't know what will. They make money off Android search and then throw the OEM under a bus when the shit gets rough, what exactly more do you need to call something evil? The CEO snorting ground kittens? The whole "do no evil" should now be relegated to the same bin as "get the facts!" and Think Different" in the BS marketing dept.
Sadly you watch as the fanboys will rush to defend them, when you and i both know that they have made out like fricking bandits on their "free OS", made from FOSS code which I bet they didn't even throw the actual developers of that code a $20 and a T-shirt as a thank you, and now that the shit is getting real they'll let the OEMs take the hit while they slink off with the truck load o' cash. I don't see how anyone could call that anything BUT evil, lowdown, and just plain sorry.
What other systems? That covers every version of Windows still supported! If you mean Linux well duh, who is gonna do the extra work to support a 1% share OS that is a royal PITA to support? Do you support Apt or RPM? Will the version you just released work with the kernel that came out yesterday, or will you have to start over again because Linus Goatse'd the kernel for fun?
It is based on Chromium so it is FOSS, I'm sure if you look around their website you'll find the code. if you are on Linux I'm sure you know the compiler dance, hell I bet you have a compiler installed as SOP don't ya? So feel free to make a Debian or whatever Linux flavor you use version, just don't expect support.
Frankly though you really shouldn't be surprised as Linux is anything but stable ATM with all the changes from the kernel to the windowing system to the DEs all getting major overhauls. Comodo is pretty conservative with their releases and Linux is anything but conservative ATM. But the nice thing about FOSS is you can DIY right? So why don't you? That's what I got told when I asked for a feature or bug fix, so it must be SOP in Linux. Have fun!
BTW if you get tired of that kind of "fun" deals.woot! often has sales on Win 7 HP, usually $75 for a single or $100 for the triple pack. Quite an awesome OS BTW, and supported until 2020 so no worries there. Frankly even LTS can't hold a candle to the MSFT support cycles. And if you are on Mac I'm sure you have bootcamp like all my Mac customers do, just install it there. Oh and if you meant Windows X64? runs like a champ, I'm typing this on Win 7 HP X64 in Comodo Dragon, purrs like a big old kitteh.
Welcome to the wonderful world of cherry picking friend, where they will not only not provide you service but will SHUT YOU DOWN if you try to DIY. I know because a friend had his business stuck in a similar sitch, so he talked his partner into going in on a T-1 and renting access to those around him. The teleco got wind and pulled his plug with a "just try to sue us buddy!". His lawyer said "Oh sure you'll win, but it will cost a couple of million easy in lawyers fees and a good decade or more out of your life" so they shut down and moved away. Those nearly 400 homes? STILL nothing but dialup to this very day.
So get used to it, thanks to the corrupt cabal in DC giving the duopoly a blank check to do anything they want cherry picking is the order of the day and if the city tries to run their own lines? they get sued even though the duopoly has NO intention of serving them! Like too much in this country we pay incredibly high prices for subpar service so some CEO can have extra hookers and blow. SNAFU my friend SNAFU.
Except if you read TFA you'll see the guy used Debian 1.3 which I believe is old enough to actually support a 386 OOTB. I have to agree with the other posters I don't see how this can be in any way called a "hack".
What's next, an article about installing Win 95 on a Pentium I? Hell I have an old B&W G3 in the closet maybe I should write an article about installing an older PPC distro on it, get me some money from page views. I wouldn't even call it a "hack" to do what I'll probably do with it, which is install an AMD dual core in the case. This is just using an OS as it was intended on hardware it was designed for, nothing more.