Could it be that Moz is using the Intel compiler? Because my exp is the opposite of yours but I am using AMD CPUs. If one doesn't set very specific flags on the Intel compiler it puts out crippled code for all but certain Intel approved CPUs. I have also noticed FF seems to behave a little better on X64 than X32 which may also explain why you aren't seeing it.
I can say on the AMD nettop I'm typing this on FF is unsuitable for purpose and has been since the 3.6.x branch due to CPU spikes and memory suckage.
Yeah that never seems to fail, does it? Where I'm at we are getting back to back thunderboomers and now I know why. Every time there is something cool going on in the sky it might as well carry fine print that says "Except for those in the south, who will be getting rain, heavy cloud cover, anything to make sure you don't see squat".
I think the last cool sky show I got to see was Halley's comet, everything since has been really great views of cloud cover.
Would that really be so bad? It isn't like the user would have to download all three versions, just have the browser do a check and return a CPU flag.
I'm sure I'll get grandpa jokes for saying this but IMHO this is one of the things we have been doing wrong lately. In the old days code was more optimized for the particular arch and frankly wasn't nearly as bloated. If the code can be compiled for the features of the various chips, thus giving us users better performance and less bloat? I personally am ALL for it.
But anybody that believes we truly know jack shit from THAT far back is just a fool IMHO. Hell there are still human languages we have NO clue how to read, buildings where we still haven't figured out how exactly they were able to get joints to fit that well using primitive tools, and those are things that are just centuries old, not a blip compared to this stuff.
I believe it was Plato who said something to the effect of "The wise man admits he knows nothing" and we have such a teeny tiny slice of fossils compared to the huge variety of life that has existed on this planet that anyone that says "It must have been thus and that's it" with regards to millions of years ago is just nuts. We could find a new fossil bed tomorrow that throws the whole damned record right out on its ass, we just don't know so much compared to what is out there yet to be found.
So if anything we should be teaching laymen that it is all fluid, it is all up in the air. That as we learn more our understanding grows, but one shouldn't take ANY of this as gospel. But considering how many of our fellow humans only like their lives in black and white who knows how well that would go over.
Well don't forget that with the insanity of the courts you just shoot the guy in the leg his lawyer would probably argue you were NOT in fear of your life since you DIDN'T kill him, sue your ass, and probably win too.
Sadly the way courts and juries are depending on the state you're in much better shape if you ventilate his ass than if you try to be nice and let the guy live. But you know what they say, juries are made up of 12 folks too stupid to get out of jury duty . If you kill the guy its just your story, if he lives its his as well.
Actually IIRC they tried that in the early 60s but it was a form of LSD. Didn't work out so great. Here is a link talking about it. They had a bunch of weird ass ideas in the 50s and 60s for crowd control. I also remember there were experiments with a "gay bomb" which would have given enemy soldiers such a case of the horny they would supposedly attack each other instead of fight. Weird shit our tax dollars paid for huh?
I just wonder how much nasty shit they have cooked up for us when our own Arab Spring happens. you know they have to be worried about it, you have an economy in the shitter, tons of folks without work, and the budget deal pretty much kills them extending help to the unemployed anymore. I bet they have all kinds of nasty shit just ready in case these "stop and loots' turn out to be the start of something bigger.
Never underestimate the lengths those with power will go through to keep it.
Greetings fellow Dragon user! May I suggest a few extensions? Readability makes those stupid "hey lets split the content up over a bunch of pages!" crap DIAF by rendering it all as a single page, you can even adjust how big you want the text which is great for my older customers. ABP of course to get rid of the annoying ad crap, and ForecastFox (I know, but hey they kept the name) gives you a single icon which gives you the radar and 5 day forecast with a single click and will warn you if something nasty is headed your way.
I too had been on FF forever, and on the Mozilla Suite before that, but IMHO they are really going the wrong direction at Mozilla. Instead of concentrating on making FF a great solid fast light browser like what the original intent was they have been aping the hell out of Chrome instead of caring about under the hood and it shows. It is slow, buggy, sucks CPU and memory, all in all it just isn't as nice an experience as the Dragon which you've found out.
I love how the latest Dragon lets you use the Comodo secure DNS for ONLY the Dragon, as it has kept a few of my customers away from phishing sites and is faster than most ISP DNS services to boot, at least around here. It is nice little features like that that IMHO FF should be working on, instead of mearly going "me too!" when it comes to Chrome.
Well at least you can (in theory) "Throw the bums out" of office, but the CEO of supermegacorp ain't going nowhere. In most of the USA the duopoly has cherry picked the areas they want. not live in one? Go fuck yourself buddy. My mom lives less than a mile out of town, a town that has over 60,000+ when college is in BTW, when she built her house nearly 30 years ago the cable was a block and a half away. Guess where it is now? Why its a block and a half away!
And before someone give the usual corporate bullshit of "Well if you live in a rural area" when I lived in Nashville in 03 there were areas in the center of town with NO cable or DSL access. You gonna tell me Music City USA is a corn field?
The ONLY way we will EVER get nationwide broadband is to nationalize the last mile and then let the corps rent. if they want a monopoly? fine we'll give you 15 years for every area currently not being served you run 50Mbps fiber to. Run it to the home? We'll make it 25.
As someone that has lived all over the south I can tell you there are HUGE areas that can't get shit, and we ain't talking just the rural folks either, we are talking dead center of some quite large cities. The duopoly cherry picks and if you aren't in an area they desire? Fuck you, you get nothing.
Probably because we ALL know that the days of the DoJ having any teeth at all are long gone friend. I mean if Intel didn't even get smacked down after CEOs admitted that their kickbacks were "like cocaine" and it came out that for several quarters during the price wars the ONLY profits coming into Dell were kickbacks? Or the fact that several programmers showed that the Intel compiler was rigged not only against AMD but their own P3 chips so they could push the Pentium 4 and that STILL didn't get them busted?
Lets face it, nowadays a corporation could set the competition's offices on fire and as long as they bribed...err I mean "campaign contributed" to the right people they would probably not only not get busted for it, hell they'd probably get a tax break for the gas and matches!
Glad to see I'm not the only one wondering WTF would he be doing building this for vehicles when it sounds like a perfect way to power cities instead of pumping the power down these huge lines. Imagine you could have a plant in every town over say 10,000 people, just build bigger plants for bigger towns, and then if you wanted electric cars hell we could do like the old days of trolley cars and have a rod that came up off the car for hooking to the grid. This would also get economies of scale on his side and then once he has the manufacturing down pat he could work on reducing it to car size.
As another pointed out the fact that he seems to be skipping what would be the most logical first step makes it smell funny. I have a feeling this is gonna be another one of those "5 to 10 years away" deals where people pour money into something that never quite seems to get to RTM.
I can answer that. Go to video sites that are NOT Youtube, like most of the 'Ow my balls!" kind of dumb vid sites? watch FF suck down memory like a wino sucking down MD 20/20. The Chormium based and IE seem to give mem back when you close tabs, FF? Not so much.
I have also seen cases where I had left FF running and went off to do something else and forgot about it and several hours later come back and memory had JUMPED a good 30-40%! Again it seems to be tied to whether or not you had played any videos that day.
This is why after years of having FF in my standard customer build I have replaced it with Comodo Dragon which IMHO has some nice extra features as far as security and no calling home to Google so it is the best Chromium based for me and my customers. I've always loved the FF UI but IMHO after the 3.6.xx branch FF has just gone to shit. Its memory usage is nuts, it spikes the living hell out of CPUs, especially if the tab you are launching contains video, its just a mess. I have to support everything from netbooks and late P4 office machines to multicore and I need something that will give a consistent experience. Dragon does, FF don't.
Personally I think it is the Gecko engine. I just don't think it has been able to take all the extra crap they have bolted on like plugin separation. Where FF once was a nice lean solid browser ever since Chromium came out it has been "Me too!" to the 50th power instead of just making FF the best FF it can be and I think it shows. I haven't seen memory leakage this bad since the 2.x.x branch. I hope they fix it so I can have another browser in the toolbox but right now the responsiveness and resource usage just isn't there. When it takes a good 25+ seconds to launch FF on a 2.8GHz quad with 8Gb of RAM? That is fucked up. The Dragon takes less than 5 seconds from click to typing.
Hey thanks for the link. That place has those cheap MP4 emulators low enough I'll probably just say to heck with bothering with the boy's PSP and just get one of those. All I really want it for is to play videos and maybe some Sega when i'm stuck in the doc's office.
24? Jeez. When I was that age we were running Win 3.1 and dropping to DOS to play some 2D gaming goodness and thought we were slick! Enjoy it while you can pup, because life is literally "blink twice and they want the keys". It was like one minute I was changing nappies and the next giving driving lessons. And you'll probably be talking about how "When I was young we had Windows on HARD DRIVES not this 30 bazillion TB holo crap, and OSes could get screwed up too! Little twerps and their self healing OSes, where is the learning?"
So enjoy it while you can because the time between 20-40 goes up like flash paper. And be sure to not kill yourself working, go out and smell the flowers once in awhile. You only get one spin on the wheel of life, have fun. I may never be rich but I got two happy boys and if one thing can be said it was that mucho fun was had.
Thanks for the links, I'll be giving those a shot as soon as things slow down here at the shop. As for the boys and the Wii, while like everybody else they liked the motion control thing at first but then I gave them those hand me downs (I built 2 Pentium D 2.6GHz PCs, with 200Gb HDDs and 2Gb of RAM, along with the HD48xx chips and they cost me maybe $100 a piece by salvaging the boards and cases) and once they tried TF2 and LOTRO that was it.
The sad thing is you don't realize how much age gets to ya until you get smacked in the face with it. I play shooters constantly so i thought "hey no problem, let me teach these boys how its done" and they royally bitchslapped my ass on TF2, I mean HARD. I didn't think my reaction time had gone down THAT much until I faced off against a 16 and a 19 year old in combat. Boy they slapped me around like it wasn't anything. Reminded me of playing with my late sister who was a queen of 2D fighters, she'd smack you down and then combo pile on your ass so hard your character would just lay there jerking like it was having a fit. It seemed I didn't get 20 seconds before the oldest had sniped me or the youngest had flamed me!
But I will definitely be giving those links a try, it'll be nice to get some use out of the thing instead of letting it gather dust. But once the boys went multicore and HD48xx chips I just don't see them doing much on the consoles anymore, you can fight so many more people online than you can in the consoles. I watched the oldest with his LOTRO raiding party and I swear that bunch was HUGE.
The youngest occasionally breaks out his DS but I don't think he's played his PSP or Wii since. i really need to see what can be done with a PSP as it might make a good media player for when I'm stuck in the doctor's office but I heard those require crazy priced mem sticks. But any use I can get out of gear we've already bought is a good thing and if I can load up the Genesis and SuperNES games on the Wii instead of the Dreamcast that is one less system I have to hook up when I want to have some retro fun with the boys. Hey maybe I'll be able to school them on General Chaos or Ikari warriors!
Man I'm sorry to hear that. That VAR tax really bites you in the ass huh? The only thing we have to worry about with the ultra cheap deals is the occasional boo boo. Like the $199 deal I was talking about for my dad. Somebody who put together the kit didn't read the fine print and sent a board that takes a 65w max CPU with a kit that had a 95w CPU.
But it was no biggie, they just sent me an RMA to get the money back on that board and let us pick another one. I ended up throwing a whole $9 extra in to get an AMD based board as I like their IGPs better than Nvidia and for 49 he went from a 6100 based board to an HD4250 based one. Much better chip for HD video.
So I'm really sorry to hear that, too bad you can't just jump across the pond like we do the Mexican border when we need to avoid taxes. But on the flip side I hear you folks actually have health care. Here it is so bad a guy in SC robbed a bank for $1 just so he could get medical care in prison. But as long as we have the teabaggers we won't have medical care and all the jobs will be sent to India and China but dammit we'll be able to shop! Well as long as we have a job at least.
Well allow your old pal Hairyfeet to help ya out bud. What you want is one of the excellent ATI TV tuners tied into Windows 7. I prefer the USB models but there are several PCIe that also work quite well. Once you have your cable tied in like myself and my customers have Windows will automatically load schedules for your channel listings, it is as simple as pushing a single record button to set up a recording even a week or more ahead, it really is easy peasy simple.
And frankly with today's AMD systems if you can look at pictures and hold a screwdriver going DIY is beyond simple. Just grab you one of the frankly dirt cheap kits on Tigerdirect (they have excellent Athlon quads for under $250 that work great for HTPCs) and then if you want the traditional HTPC look a mATX case that looks like a DVD player is around $50. Most of my customers frankly don't care about the case as the simple black tower either fits behind the glass of their TV cabinet or sits on the floor beside the unit and looks tasteful.
But if you have any problems or need some suggestions on where to start feel free to shoot me an email with your budget and requirements and I'll be happy to shoot you the links. You can build really nice AMD HTPCs right now for pretty damned cheap that will frankly last you a decade unless you want to play Crysis on the thing.
Don't you just love how the liberal left on/. automatically marks you are troll or flamebait without even bothering to read the evidence that might go against the "its teh man keepin them down!" PC horseshit?
Sadly look at the link I posted, read for yourselves. there are a good 50+ on that page just this year alone and the details are there for all to see. In EVERY SINGLE CASE you are talking black on white. Every single one. What does the media do? They come up with different names for it like "flash mob" which they begin to weasel word like one of the posters above who says "if it is below 12 it don't count!" and other bullshit.
But that is okay, they are gonna get to learn the hard way is all. If you look at those links what started in only the black neighborhoods of a very largely black cities is quickly spreading and they are learning you get better stuff if you hit the whitey areas. And don't you love the "its poor kids without jobs! Quit picking on them!" horseshit on of the above posted? And people wonder why the far right is gaining ever more momentum. Hell look at the pics from WI, look at the pics from ANY of those "loot and grabs". We are talking kids in $300 sneakers and brand name outfits acting like complete animals.
I am a dyed in the wool socialist and even I am beginning to lean right simply because all of the PC bullshit excuses listed in the posts above. If someone refuses to follow even the most basic rules of civilized society and instead thinks that if they get enough "Thug Life!"ers together they can have free rein? Shoot them. Put a bullet into the ones in the front of the pack and watch that shit end REAL quickly. Instead they will just make excuses while the "thug life!"ers crack heads and rob and rape, but its just whitey keepin them down, right?
Obama was trying to do the classic Keynesian response to an economy in a death spiral and that is for the government to make up for the loss of consumer spending. Well it failed, all it did was delay the inevitable. While they are afraid to say the word, like thinking if you don't say the name of the monster standing right behind you that will magically keep you safe, the simple fact is what they are gonna call a "double dip" is actually the beginnings of a worldwide depression.
In this case we have allowed the corps to ship the jobs overseas but the musical chairs with people's IQ have left more and more and more of the population behind. As technology advances ever faster the simple fact is trading money for labor will become as much of a thing of the past as 8-tracks. Even as we speak they are testing automated construction equipment that can take the raw materials and make perfect roads by using GPS and onboard mapping. Fast food jobs are "make work" that would have already been replaced by automated assembly lines if it were for government assistance making it so the food franchises can hire people below the market wage and let society make up the rest.
In the end there will simply have to be a fundamental shift in the way we do things. The traditional capitalist framework simply breaks down when you have 300 people for every job, and each year that number is gonna jump as more and more high tech jobs will begin to be phased out by the machines, just as the low tech before them. Look at some of the latest things being tested in sever tech, smart servers that know about their own conditions and can monitor and change to suit conditions and even call a tech when they detect a failing part. A job that once took thousands of skilled workers will in the end be able to be done by a handful of low wage button pushers who simply do what the machines tell them.
Sadly like all major shifts in our history this one will too likely be bloody and painful. I predict a good 20 year plus depression as those at the top despairingly cling to the idea that the old system still functions and refuse to admit they have large masses of people whose labor simply is no longer required. But short of a plague or WWIII causing a mass dying out we have simply have to accept that the old models simply no longer work in a time when even the hardest jobs can often be done safer, faster, and cheaper by the machine.
Not just them, if you want a nice warm guitar sound for recording tubes in at the very least the pre-amp stage are the way to go. Like I always say "Tubes for the guitarists, solid state for the bass" as it is hard to get the lows we 5 string players hit on a tube without fuzz. Each tech has its uses.
As for TFA, could be it be they no longer have a pony in the race? IBM still sells mainframe and that tech is a hell of a lot older than the PC. Personally I see PCs growing it simply takes a little education of the public. One of the biggest niches I got going right now is HTPCs simply because most folks didn't realize how damned easy it is to hook a modern PC to a TV. and with nice triple and even quad kits starting at $200 it really doesn't take much of an investment to set up what I call a "family center PC" where you have everything from the kids DVD ripped into.avis to the wife's FB games to hubby's shooters in one location.
With Win 7 and Netflix/Hulu loaded up , I recommend the excellent tunerfree MCE all plugged into their new 1080p TV over HDMI with a wireless keyboard/mouse or this excellent Lenovo Keymote you can easily have a damned nice system that will be rock solid and last for MANY years for less than $500.
So there is plenty of market left for PCs, it is simply the PC OEMs haven't been marketing the product well. They have been pushing craptastic laptops because they know they don't last any time at all and thus can get repeat business, but folks are getting tired of spending several hundred every couple of years because those little plastic craptastics burn up or die. As for desktops for the jobs most folks have anything dual or better is "good enough" even for MMOs and the OEMs haven't been advertising how butt simple it is to turn a PC into a media center for in most cases ZERO added cost. I personally advise my customers to let me add a cheap HD48xx just for the superior gaming and HD video trascoding, but nearly every board today can do 1080P over HDMI.
But I don't see PCs going anywhere, if anything I see them growing. Now where once there was one PC you now have several, and thanks to those media tanks like WDTV and Nbox my customers are learning how easy it is to rip their media and have it all in one location which makes them want the more powerful and versatile machines. Hell I watched a customer's 8 year old walk in from school, plop down with the keymote and had her show loaded WMC in seconds. Like her mom said "Having a single machine that is so easy to work that the kids can put on a show while I'm cooking supper? Worth every penny". When she saw how her new Nbox let her hubby have all the kids DVDs loaded into a single box in the kids room to where they wouldn't have to deal with no more crying because the little one scratched Dora again? i thought she was gonna do a happy dance. Having a good HTPC really transforms a house and makes everything "click and go" simple.
So if anything I'd say PCs are gonna grow especially as all those P4s finally die out with XP and folks look to see what kinds of extra features they can get.
Uhhh dude? Kinda a difference between simply not knowing any better and not even trying to find out if it is a problem. The CFC you gave is a perfect example of one which could be excused which is why I didn't list it, because at the time we didn't have craft capable of reaching the heights required to take samples, nor did we really have the ability to do long term studies of samples at the purity required to watch the breakdown of CFCs.
On the other hand there is the fact that historically we simply haven't given a fuck or "national interests" (read corporate bribery) have made it too damned easy to simply bury our heads in the sand and disperse new tech without real testing. See 3G and colony collapse disorder, massive GMO alteration of the world's food supply and its effect on both the environment and anything that consumes it, all the nuke testing we did in the 50s and 60s, frakking, etc.
So I would argue only a fool would claim we don't have a serious problem when it comes to new tech. We really need this stuff tested using solid science but the potential for massive profits are so great time and time again we see corners cut if not the whole long term tests not done at all before they are already shipping the shit out the door. look at BPA, which is so heavy in our food and water supply even the newborns have it in their blood. Who knows what kinds of cancers and other nasties we are gonna have from plastics in the bloodstream of every man, woman and child in the USA?
Sadly look up "flash mobbing" to see why he would want to do this. We are having this happen all over America at this very moment. I don't know if it is the same in the UK but here it seems the PC media is doing their damnedest to cover up the fact it appears to be almost exclusively a black on white hate crime. Of course they won't be charged with a hate crime as those laws apparently only work one way. I believe it was the former mayor of Baltimore that said "If a black robs a white it is a robbery, if a white robs a black it is a hate crime".
But if you'll read those reports black "thug life!"ers are using social networks to set up mass attacks and lootings. The reports all read the same "they were acting like crazed animals, they were only after white people" etc. How sad that we have gone from "I have a dream" to "nothin but a g thang baby".
But I can see why he'd want to shut them down as I have no doubt like here their police are hamstrung. If we would authorize the cops to blow the kneecaps off the first three they saw leading a "flash mob" pack? I bet that shit would end REAL quick.
Hell if they are anything like the local yokels and the county mounties they are making money both ways! In my area the above get all the federal grants to upgrade gear for the "war on (insert drug of the week)" which of course they skim the fuck off of with kickbacks and the like (hell you should have seen the jail they got a grant to build. Supposedly the thing cost 3 mil+ and the wires were hanging down and the shitters leaked on opening day. The cops wives got some nice Navigators though) and then when the feds sniff around expecting to do some busts the cops get paid AGAIN by giving the dealers the heads up LOL! I knew one who actually got his info from the dispatcher before the cops were told where to go so he actually had better info than they did, LOL!
So if it is like everything else I've seen involving government nobody really gives a shit about quality dude, it is all about skimming and kickbacks. In my area the cops supposedly get paid $30k a year, but they all live in big ass houses with pools and the wives all drive brand new navigators. You don't think they can afford that nice stuff by giving a shit about quality for the public's money do you?
Got any links for that? Because I have a Wii (It is gathering dust in the youngest boy's closet while he plays TF2) and every softmod I've seen for the thing has like a 50/50 chance of completely bricking, as in "this unit shall go no further" the wii for good. Personally I'd love to just softmod the thing and load it up with NES, SuperNES, Genesis, etc as at least then we'd get some use out of the $200 paperweight.
As it is I gave the boys a couple of dual core hand me downs with HD48xx cards and they haven't touched their consoles since. it is all LOTRO and TF2. That is one of the reason why I always preferred PC gaming over the consoles, as it is easy peasy to find a use for an old gaming machine, such as the 3GHz P4 with an X1650PRO that my mom uses for web surfing.
But if you know a way to softmod that sucker without serious risk of toasting it I'm all ears friend, I'd love to be able to pick up the GC controllers we have and fire up some classic gaming goodness.
Oooookay...that is the most weasel worded pile of BS I've read in awhile. Revolutionary spirit? Did you stand on a soapbox while composing that? It is a fucking OS not the Magna Carta! And it isn't harmed by not actually being used? WTF? So not having...ohhh I don't know....support for all the major software, hardware drivers actually written by the companies that made the software, zero retail presence AT ALL, none of that matters huh? Its just you and RMS dancing through the flowers?
And folks wonder why businesses like mine avoid Linux like the clap. you people are fucking delusional, you know that?
Well I'd put it THIS way, on the one hand they are probably just paranoid and nuts, but on the other hand the history of the human race embracing things before we really understand them and royally fucking our shit up is pretty legendary. After all we've had 'Yeah just burn as much coal as you want...hey why is my skin burning when it rains?", "Asbestos is like a miracle, look how well it protects from fires! Why is Chuck coughing up blood?" and of course "radiation is your friend! Ignore the falling hair and teeth.' and the classic "hey we'll mix these African bees with regular bees and double our yields...ow ow ow OW!"
So while I'm sure nanotech can bring us marvelous new things I can see why with our track record some might be against it. We really do tend to leap before we look.
I have to wonder if the truly obviously "What moran thought that would work?" ideas the military has (that ALWAYS seem to get some funding) aren't a cover for their black bag projects.
Think about it, nobody really investigates any further because the idea was dumb as shit from the start so of course it didn't work, the really dumb shit projects only get funded (usually) for a few years, just enough to pay for some little nasty ops, and when it is "canceled" because it is a stupid idea nobody is really surprised.
Sounds to me like a perfect way to cover for all those "really nasty we shouldn't be doing that or be there in the first place" kinds of projects. Considering our history of being happy to fuck up anyone in the world if it will let a corporation exploit a new market ( as Adam Smith tried to warn the Brits about back in his day) or get bananas.04c cheaper? Sadly it wouldn't surprise me, it wouldn't surprise me at all.
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Could it be that Moz is using the Intel compiler? Because my exp is the opposite of yours but I am using AMD CPUs. If one doesn't set very specific flags on the Intel compiler it puts out crippled code for all but certain Intel approved CPUs. I have also noticed FF seems to behave a little better on X64 than X32 which may also explain why you aren't seeing it.
I can say on the AMD nettop I'm typing this on FF is unsuitable for purpose and has been since the 3.6.x branch due to CPU spikes and memory suckage.
Yeah that never seems to fail, does it? Where I'm at we are getting back to back thunderboomers and now I know why. Every time there is something cool going on in the sky it might as well carry fine print that says "Except for those in the south, who will be getting rain, heavy cloud cover, anything to make sure you don't see squat".
I think the last cool sky show I got to see was Halley's comet, everything since has been really great views of cloud cover.
Would that really be so bad? It isn't like the user would have to download all three versions, just have the browser do a check and return a CPU flag.
I'm sure I'll get grandpa jokes for saying this but IMHO this is one of the things we have been doing wrong lately. In the old days code was more optimized for the particular arch and frankly wasn't nearly as bloated. If the code can be compiled for the features of the various chips, thus giving us users better performance and less bloat? I personally am ALL for it.
But anybody that believes we truly know jack shit from THAT far back is just a fool IMHO. Hell there are still human languages we have NO clue how to read, buildings where we still haven't figured out how exactly they were able to get joints to fit that well using primitive tools, and those are things that are just centuries old, not a blip compared to this stuff.
I believe it was Plato who said something to the effect of "The wise man admits he knows nothing" and we have such a teeny tiny slice of fossils compared to the huge variety of life that has existed on this planet that anyone that says "It must have been thus and that's it" with regards to millions of years ago is just nuts. We could find a new fossil bed tomorrow that throws the whole damned record right out on its ass, we just don't know so much compared to what is out there yet to be found.
So if anything we should be teaching laymen that it is all fluid, it is all up in the air. That as we learn more our understanding grows, but one shouldn't take ANY of this as gospel. But considering how many of our fellow humans only like their lives in black and white who knows how well that would go over.
Well don't forget that with the insanity of the courts you just shoot the guy in the leg his lawyer would probably argue you were NOT in fear of your life since you DIDN'T kill him, sue your ass, and probably win too.
Sadly the way courts and juries are depending on the state you're in much better shape if you ventilate his ass than if you try to be nice and let the guy live. But you know what they say, juries are made up of 12 folks too stupid to get out of jury duty . If you kill the guy its just your story, if he lives its his as well.
Actually IIRC they tried that in the early 60s but it was a form of LSD. Didn't work out so great. Here is a link talking about it. They had a bunch of weird ass ideas in the 50s and 60s for crowd control. I also remember there were experiments with a "gay bomb" which would have given enemy soldiers such a case of the horny they would supposedly attack each other instead of fight. Weird shit our tax dollars paid for huh?
I just wonder how much nasty shit they have cooked up for us when our own Arab Spring happens. you know they have to be worried about it, you have an economy in the shitter, tons of folks without work, and the budget deal pretty much kills them extending help to the unemployed anymore. I bet they have all kinds of nasty shit just ready in case these "stop and loots' turn out to be the start of something bigger.
Never underestimate the lengths those with power will go through to keep it.
Greetings fellow Dragon user! May I suggest a few extensions? Readability makes those stupid "hey lets split the content up over a bunch of pages!" crap DIAF by rendering it all as a single page, you can even adjust how big you want the text which is great for my older customers. ABP of course to get rid of the annoying ad crap, and ForecastFox (I know, but hey they kept the name) gives you a single icon which gives you the radar and 5 day forecast with a single click and will warn you if something nasty is headed your way.
I too had been on FF forever, and on the Mozilla Suite before that, but IMHO they are really going the wrong direction at Mozilla. Instead of concentrating on making FF a great solid fast light browser like what the original intent was they have been aping the hell out of Chrome instead of caring about under the hood and it shows. It is slow, buggy, sucks CPU and memory, all in all it just isn't as nice an experience as the Dragon which you've found out.
I love how the latest Dragon lets you use the Comodo secure DNS for ONLY the Dragon, as it has kept a few of my customers away from phishing sites and is faster than most ISP DNS services to boot, at least around here. It is nice little features like that that IMHO FF should be working on, instead of mearly going "me too!" when it comes to Chrome.
Well at least you can (in theory) "Throw the bums out" of office, but the CEO of supermegacorp ain't going nowhere. In most of the USA the duopoly has cherry picked the areas they want. not live in one? Go fuck yourself buddy. My mom lives less than a mile out of town, a town that has over 60,000+ when college is in BTW, when she built her house nearly 30 years ago the cable was a block and a half away. Guess where it is now? Why its a block and a half away!
And before someone give the usual corporate bullshit of "Well if you live in a rural area" when I lived in Nashville in 03 there were areas in the center of town with NO cable or DSL access. You gonna tell me Music City USA is a corn field?
The ONLY way we will EVER get nationwide broadband is to nationalize the last mile and then let the corps rent. if they want a monopoly? fine we'll give you 15 years for every area currently not being served you run 50Mbps fiber to. Run it to the home? We'll make it 25.
As someone that has lived all over the south I can tell you there are HUGE areas that can't get shit, and we ain't talking just the rural folks either, we are talking dead center of some quite large cities. The duopoly cherry picks and if you aren't in an area they desire? Fuck you, you get nothing.
Probably because we ALL know that the days of the DoJ having any teeth at all are long gone friend. I mean if Intel didn't even get smacked down after CEOs admitted that their kickbacks were "like cocaine" and it came out that for several quarters during the price wars the ONLY profits coming into Dell were kickbacks? Or the fact that several programmers showed that the Intel compiler was rigged not only against AMD but their own P3 chips so they could push the Pentium 4 and that STILL didn't get them busted?
Lets face it, nowadays a corporation could set the competition's offices on fire and as long as they bribed...err I mean "campaign contributed" to the right people they would probably not only not get busted for it, hell they'd probably get a tax break for the gas and matches!
Glad to see I'm not the only one wondering WTF would he be doing building this for vehicles when it sounds like a perfect way to power cities instead of pumping the power down these huge lines. Imagine you could have a plant in every town over say 10,000 people, just build bigger plants for bigger towns, and then if you wanted electric cars hell we could do like the old days of trolley cars and have a rod that came up off the car for hooking to the grid. This would also get economies of scale on his side and then once he has the manufacturing down pat he could work on reducing it to car size.
As another pointed out the fact that he seems to be skipping what would be the most logical first step makes it smell funny. I have a feeling this is gonna be another one of those "5 to 10 years away" deals where people pour money into something that never quite seems to get to RTM.
I can answer that. Go to video sites that are NOT Youtube, like most of the 'Ow my balls!" kind of dumb vid sites? watch FF suck down memory like a wino sucking down MD 20/20. The Chormium based and IE seem to give mem back when you close tabs, FF? Not so much.
I have also seen cases where I had left FF running and went off to do something else and forgot about it and several hours later come back and memory had JUMPED a good 30-40%! Again it seems to be tied to whether or not you had played any videos that day.
This is why after years of having FF in my standard customer build I have replaced it with Comodo Dragon which IMHO has some nice extra features as far as security and no calling home to Google so it is the best Chromium based for me and my customers. I've always loved the FF UI but IMHO after the 3.6.xx branch FF has just gone to shit. Its memory usage is nuts, it spikes the living hell out of CPUs, especially if the tab you are launching contains video, its just a mess. I have to support everything from netbooks and late P4 office machines to multicore and I need something that will give a consistent experience. Dragon does, FF don't.
Personally I think it is the Gecko engine. I just don't think it has been able to take all the extra crap they have bolted on like plugin separation. Where FF once was a nice lean solid browser ever since Chromium came out it has been "Me too!" to the 50th power instead of just making FF the best FF it can be and I think it shows. I haven't seen memory leakage this bad since the 2.x.x branch. I hope they fix it so I can have another browser in the toolbox but right now the responsiveness and resource usage just isn't there. When it takes a good 25+ seconds to launch FF on a 2.8GHz quad with 8Gb of RAM? That is fucked up. The Dragon takes less than 5 seconds from click to typing.
Hey thanks for the link. That place has those cheap MP4 emulators low enough I'll probably just say to heck with bothering with the boy's PSP and just get one of those. All I really want it for is to play videos and maybe some Sega when i'm stuck in the doc's office.
24? Jeez. When I was that age we were running Win 3.1 and dropping to DOS to play some 2D gaming goodness and thought we were slick! Enjoy it while you can pup, because life is literally "blink twice and they want the keys". It was like one minute I was changing nappies and the next giving driving lessons. And you'll probably be talking about how "When I was young we had Windows on HARD DRIVES not this 30 bazillion TB holo crap, and OSes could get screwed up too! Little twerps and their self healing OSes, where is the learning?"
So enjoy it while you can because the time between 20-40 goes up like flash paper. And be sure to not kill yourself working, go out and smell the flowers once in awhile. You only get one spin on the wheel of life, have fun. I may never be rich but I got two happy boys and if one thing can be said it was that mucho fun was had.
Thanks for the links, I'll be giving those a shot as soon as things slow down here at the shop. As for the boys and the Wii, while like everybody else they liked the motion control thing at first but then I gave them those hand me downs (I built 2 Pentium D 2.6GHz PCs, with 200Gb HDDs and 2Gb of RAM, along with the HD48xx chips and they cost me maybe $100 a piece by salvaging the boards and cases) and once they tried TF2 and LOTRO that was it.
The sad thing is you don't realize how much age gets to ya until you get smacked in the face with it. I play shooters constantly so i thought "hey no problem, let me teach these boys how its done" and they royally bitchslapped my ass on TF2, I mean HARD. I didn't think my reaction time had gone down THAT much until I faced off against a 16 and a 19 year old in combat. Boy they slapped me around like it wasn't anything. Reminded me of playing with my late sister who was a queen of 2D fighters, she'd smack you down and then combo pile on your ass so hard your character would just lay there jerking like it was having a fit. It seemed I didn't get 20 seconds before the oldest had sniped me or the youngest had flamed me!
But I will definitely be giving those links a try, it'll be nice to get some use out of the thing instead of letting it gather dust. But once the boys went multicore and HD48xx chips I just don't see them doing much on the consoles anymore, you can fight so many more people online than you can in the consoles. I watched the oldest with his LOTRO raiding party and I swear that bunch was HUGE.
The youngest occasionally breaks out his DS but I don't think he's played his PSP or Wii since. i really need to see what can be done with a PSP as it might make a good media player for when I'm stuck in the doctor's office but I heard those require crazy priced mem sticks. But any use I can get out of gear we've already bought is a good thing and if I can load up the Genesis and SuperNES games on the Wii instead of the Dreamcast that is one less system I have to hook up when I want to have some retro fun with the boys. Hey maybe I'll be able to school them on General Chaos or Ikari warriors!
Man I'm sorry to hear that. That VAR tax really bites you in the ass huh? The only thing we have to worry about with the ultra cheap deals is the occasional boo boo. Like the $199 deal I was talking about for my dad. Somebody who put together the kit didn't read the fine print and sent a board that takes a 65w max CPU with a kit that had a 95w CPU.
But it was no biggie, they just sent me an RMA to get the money back on that board and let us pick another one. I ended up throwing a whole $9 extra in to get an AMD based board as I like their IGPs better than Nvidia and for 49 he went from a 6100 based board to an HD4250 based one. Much better chip for HD video.
So I'm really sorry to hear that, too bad you can't just jump across the pond like we do the Mexican border when we need to avoid taxes. But on the flip side I hear you folks actually have health care. Here it is so bad a guy in SC robbed a bank for $1 just so he could get medical care in prison. But as long as we have the teabaggers we won't have medical care and all the jobs will be sent to India and China but dammit we'll be able to shop! Well as long as we have a job at least.
Well allow your old pal Hairyfeet to help ya out bud. What you want is one of the excellent ATI TV tuners tied into Windows 7. I prefer the USB models but there are several PCIe that also work quite well. Once you have your cable tied in like myself and my customers have Windows will automatically load schedules for your channel listings, it is as simple as pushing a single record button to set up a recording even a week or more ahead, it really is easy peasy simple.
And frankly with today's AMD systems if you can look at pictures and hold a screwdriver going DIY is beyond simple. Just grab you one of the frankly dirt cheap kits on Tigerdirect (they have excellent Athlon quads for under $250 that work great for HTPCs) and then if you want the traditional HTPC look a mATX case that looks like a DVD player is around $50. Most of my customers frankly don't care about the case as the simple black tower either fits behind the glass of their TV cabinet or sits on the floor beside the unit and looks tasteful.
But if you have any problems or need some suggestions on where to start feel free to shoot me an email with your budget and requirements and I'll be happy to shoot you the links. You can build really nice AMD HTPCs right now for pretty damned cheap that will frankly last you a decade unless you want to play Crysis on the thing.
Don't you just love how the liberal left on /. automatically marks you are troll or flamebait without even bothering to read the evidence that might go against the "its teh man keepin them down!" PC horseshit?
Sadly look at the link I posted, read for yourselves. there are a good 50+ on that page just this year alone and the details are there for all to see. In EVERY SINGLE CASE you are talking black on white. Every single one. What does the media do? They come up with different names for it like "flash mob" which they begin to weasel word like one of the posters above who says "if it is below 12 it don't count!" and other bullshit.
But that is okay, they are gonna get to learn the hard way is all. If you look at those links what started in only the black neighborhoods of a very largely black cities is quickly spreading and they are learning you get better stuff if you hit the whitey areas. And don't you love the "its poor kids without jobs! Quit picking on them!" horseshit on of the above posted? And people wonder why the far right is gaining ever more momentum. Hell look at the pics from WI, look at the pics from ANY of those "loot and grabs". We are talking kids in $300 sneakers and brand name outfits acting like complete animals.
I am a dyed in the wool socialist and even I am beginning to lean right simply because all of the PC bullshit excuses listed in the posts above. If someone refuses to follow even the most basic rules of civilized society and instead thinks that if they get enough "Thug Life!"ers together they can have free rein? Shoot them. Put a bullet into the ones in the front of the pack and watch that shit end REAL quickly. Instead they will just make excuses while the "thug life!"ers crack heads and rob and rape, but its just whitey keepin them down, right?
Obama was trying to do the classic Keynesian response to an economy in a death spiral and that is for the government to make up for the loss of consumer spending. Well it failed, all it did was delay the inevitable. While they are afraid to say the word, like thinking if you don't say the name of the monster standing right behind you that will magically keep you safe, the simple fact is what they are gonna call a "double dip" is actually the beginnings of a worldwide depression.
In this case we have allowed the corps to ship the jobs overseas but the musical chairs with people's IQ have left more and more and more of the population behind. As technology advances ever faster the simple fact is trading money for labor will become as much of a thing of the past as 8-tracks. Even as we speak they are testing automated construction equipment that can take the raw materials and make perfect roads by using GPS and onboard mapping. Fast food jobs are "make work" that would have already been replaced by automated assembly lines if it were for government assistance making it so the food franchises can hire people below the market wage and let society make up the rest.
In the end there will simply have to be a fundamental shift in the way we do things. The traditional capitalist framework simply breaks down when you have 300 people for every job, and each year that number is gonna jump as more and more high tech jobs will begin to be phased out by the machines, just as the low tech before them. Look at some of the latest things being tested in sever tech, smart servers that know about their own conditions and can monitor and change to suit conditions and even call a tech when they detect a failing part. A job that once took thousands of skilled workers will in the end be able to be done by a handful of low wage button pushers who simply do what the machines tell them.
Sadly like all major shifts in our history this one will too likely be bloody and painful. I predict a good 20 year plus depression as those at the top despairingly cling to the idea that the old system still functions and refuse to admit they have large masses of people whose labor simply is no longer required. But short of a plague or WWIII causing a mass dying out we have simply have to accept that the old models simply no longer work in a time when even the hardest jobs can often be done safer, faster, and cheaper by the machine.
Not just them, if you want a nice warm guitar sound for recording tubes in at the very least the pre-amp stage are the way to go. Like I always say "Tubes for the guitarists, solid state for the bass" as it is hard to get the lows we 5 string players hit on a tube without fuzz. Each tech has its uses.
As for TFA, could be it be they no longer have a pony in the race? IBM still sells mainframe and that tech is a hell of a lot older than the PC. Personally I see PCs growing it simply takes a little education of the public. One of the biggest niches I got going right now is HTPCs simply because most folks didn't realize how damned easy it is to hook a modern PC to a TV. and with nice triple and even quad kits starting at $200 it really doesn't take much of an investment to set up what I call a "family center PC" where you have everything from the kids DVD ripped into .avis to the wife's FB games to hubby's shooters in one location.
With Win 7 and Netflix/Hulu loaded up , I recommend the excellent tunerfree MCE all plugged into their new 1080p TV over HDMI with a wireless keyboard/mouse or this excellent Lenovo Keymote you can easily have a damned nice system that will be rock solid and last for MANY years for less than $500.
So there is plenty of market left for PCs, it is simply the PC OEMs haven't been marketing the product well. They have been pushing craptastic laptops because they know they don't last any time at all and thus can get repeat business, but folks are getting tired of spending several hundred every couple of years because those little plastic craptastics burn up or die. As for desktops for the jobs most folks have anything dual or better is "good enough" even for MMOs and the OEMs haven't been advertising how butt simple it is to turn a PC into a media center for in most cases ZERO added cost. I personally advise my customers to let me add a cheap HD48xx just for the superior gaming and HD video trascoding, but nearly every board today can do 1080P over HDMI.
But I don't see PCs going anywhere, if anything I see them growing. Now where once there was one PC you now have several, and thanks to those media tanks like WDTV and Nbox my customers are learning how easy it is to rip their media and have it all in one location which makes them want the more powerful and versatile machines. Hell I watched a customer's 8 year old walk in from school, plop down with the keymote and had her show loaded WMC in seconds. Like her mom said "Having a single machine that is so easy to work that the kids can put on a show while I'm cooking supper? Worth every penny". When she saw how her new Nbox let her hubby have all the kids DVDs loaded into a single box in the kids room to where they wouldn't have to deal with no more crying because the little one scratched Dora again? i thought she was gonna do a happy dance. Having a good HTPC really transforms a house and makes everything "click and go" simple.
So if anything I'd say PCs are gonna grow especially as all those P4s finally die out with XP and folks look to see what kinds of extra features they can get.
Uhhh dude? Kinda a difference between simply not knowing any better and not even trying to find out if it is a problem. The CFC you gave is a perfect example of one which could be excused which is why I didn't list it, because at the time we didn't have craft capable of reaching the heights required to take samples, nor did we really have the ability to do long term studies of samples at the purity required to watch the breakdown of CFCs.
On the other hand there is the fact that historically we simply haven't given a fuck or "national interests" (read corporate bribery) have made it too damned easy to simply bury our heads in the sand and disperse new tech without real testing. See 3G and colony collapse disorder, massive GMO alteration of the world's food supply and its effect on both the environment and anything that consumes it, all the nuke testing we did in the 50s and 60s, frakking, etc.
So I would argue only a fool would claim we don't have a serious problem when it comes to new tech. We really need this stuff tested using solid science but the potential for massive profits are so great time and time again we see corners cut if not the whole long term tests not done at all before they are already shipping the shit out the door. look at BPA, which is so heavy in our food and water supply even the newborns have it in their blood. Who knows what kinds of cancers and other nasties we are gonna have from plastics in the bloodstream of every man, woman and child in the USA?
Sadly look up "flash mobbing" to see why he would want to do this. We are having this happen all over America at this very moment. I don't know if it is the same in the UK but here it seems the PC media is doing their damnedest to cover up the fact it appears to be almost exclusively a black on white hate crime. Of course they won't be charged with a hate crime as those laws apparently only work one way. I believe it was the former mayor of Baltimore that said "If a black robs a white it is a robbery, if a white robs a black it is a hate crime".
But if you'll read those reports black "thug life!"ers are using social networks to set up mass attacks and lootings. The reports all read the same "they were acting like crazed animals, they were only after white people" etc. How sad that we have gone from "I have a dream" to "nothin but a g thang baby".
But I can see why he'd want to shut them down as I have no doubt like here their police are hamstrung. If we would authorize the cops to blow the kneecaps off the first three they saw leading a "flash mob" pack? I bet that shit would end REAL quick.
Hell if they are anything like the local yokels and the county mounties they are making money both ways! In my area the above get all the federal grants to upgrade gear for the "war on (insert drug of the week)" which of course they skim the fuck off of with kickbacks and the like (hell you should have seen the jail they got a grant to build. Supposedly the thing cost 3 mil+ and the wires were hanging down and the shitters leaked on opening day. The cops wives got some nice Navigators though) and then when the feds sniff around expecting to do some busts the cops get paid AGAIN by giving the dealers the heads up LOL! I knew one who actually got his info from the dispatcher before the cops were told where to go so he actually had better info than they did, LOL!
So if it is like everything else I've seen involving government nobody really gives a shit about quality dude, it is all about skimming and kickbacks. In my area the cops supposedly get paid $30k a year, but they all live in big ass houses with pools and the wives all drive brand new navigators. You don't think they can afford that nice stuff by giving a shit about quality for the public's money do you?
Got any links for that? Because I have a Wii (It is gathering dust in the youngest boy's closet while he plays TF2) and every softmod I've seen for the thing has like a 50/50 chance of completely bricking, as in "this unit shall go no further" the wii for good. Personally I'd love to just softmod the thing and load it up with NES, SuperNES, Genesis, etc as at least then we'd get some use out of the $200 paperweight.
As it is I gave the boys a couple of dual core hand me downs with HD48xx cards and they haven't touched their consoles since. it is all LOTRO and TF2. That is one of the reason why I always preferred PC gaming over the consoles, as it is easy peasy to find a use for an old gaming machine, such as the 3GHz P4 with an X1650PRO that my mom uses for web surfing.
But if you know a way to softmod that sucker without serious risk of toasting it I'm all ears friend, I'd love to be able to pick up the GC controllers we have and fire up some classic gaming goodness.
Oooookay...that is the most weasel worded pile of BS I've read in awhile. Revolutionary spirit? Did you stand on a soapbox while composing that? It is a fucking OS not the Magna Carta! And it isn't harmed by not actually being used? WTF? So not having...ohhh I don't know....support for all the major software, hardware drivers actually written by the companies that made the software, zero retail presence AT ALL, none of that matters huh? Its just you and RMS dancing through the flowers?
And folks wonder why businesses like mine avoid Linux like the clap. you people are fucking delusional, you know that?
Well I'd put it THIS way, on the one hand they are probably just paranoid and nuts, but on the other hand the history of the human race embracing things before we really understand them and royally fucking our shit up is pretty legendary. After all we've had 'Yeah just burn as much coal as you want...hey why is my skin burning when it rains?", "Asbestos is like a miracle, look how well it protects from fires! Why is Chuck coughing up blood?" and of course "radiation is your friend! Ignore the falling hair and teeth.' and the classic "hey we'll mix these African bees with regular bees and double our yields...ow ow ow OW!"
So while I'm sure nanotech can bring us marvelous new things I can see why with our track record some might be against it. We really do tend to leap before we look.
I have to wonder if the truly obviously "What moran thought that would work?" ideas the military has (that ALWAYS seem to get some funding) aren't a cover for their black bag projects.
Think about it, nobody really investigates any further because the idea was dumb as shit from the start so of course it didn't work, the really dumb shit projects only get funded (usually) for a few years, just enough to pay for some little nasty ops, and when it is "canceled" because it is a stupid idea nobody is really surprised.
Sounds to me like a perfect way to cover for all those "really nasty we shouldn't be doing that or be there in the first place" kinds of projects. Considering our history of being happy to fuck up anyone in the world if it will let a corporation exploit a new market ( as Adam Smith tried to warn the Brits about back in his day) or get bananas .04c cheaper? Sadly it wouldn't surprise me, it wouldn't surprise me at all.