Uhhh...tell me how EXACTLY telling the equivalent of "water is wet" a MSFT propaganda piece? You sir might want to read this article on OSNews by the title of OS X - Safe, Yet Horribly Insecure or is OSNews MSFT propaganda? it points out the Apple implementations of serveral technologies, when it has them, simply aren't up to snuff. Technologies such as DEP and ASLR either are not implemented or are implemented poorly.
Now Apple was able to get away with that with relative impunity simple because they weren't worth the effort as malware writers like most criminals are a lazy sort of creature and will ALWAYS go for the biggest bang for the least work. It is like that old saying, you rob banks because that is where the money is. You attack Windows because it has been trivially easy to get little Suzy to run your "LOL_Kittehs.screensaver.exe" trojan nasty.
Is this REALLY so surprising? It isn't like any of the other OSes have held up very well when being targeted either. On OSX you had MacDefender followed by MacGuardian which caused Apple to give their infamous order to the Applecare guys "Do NOT say the word Malware and do NOT help those....people!" and on the Linux side we've seen Android pounded pretty regularly as well as the KDELook screensaver bug someone put out for shits and giggles awhile back, as well as this article that shows how trivial it is to infect Linux if you get the user to help you which is how nearly all modern nasties spread nowadays.
So why hasn't Linux and OSX been pounded before now? it ain't brain surgery folks it is because it just wasn't worth the effort for sub double digit userbases. And before some Linux fanboi trots out the old "but but but...Linux is used on servers!" I would point out you don't see Linux admins running "LOL_Kitteh.Screensaver.py" and if you do they should be given a nice white jacket and placed somewhere where they can't hurt anyone. We are talking DESKTOPS, not servers, routers, your toaster, or your remote controlled Linux thermostat. DESKTOPS are were the money is at for malware writers, because they have nice fat broadband connections they don't monitor for shit, they are MUCH more likely to be clueless about best security practices, much more likely to run funny software from the net if you wave a cookie in front of them, etc. it is simply easy money whereas grizzled non-sociable Linux admins don't play that.
So saying Windows is targeted because that is where the money is at is no different than saying the sky is blue and water is wet. If you want an easy target grandma on WinXP is about as easy as you can get. to their credit someone at MSFT FINALLY got hit with the clue stick and the whole "Hey lets all run as admins!" bullshit finally died with Vista, and now that I've switched the majority of my customers and family to Windows 7 I've seen infection rates go waaaaaay down. Did I magically give them a brain transplant? did my years of bashing my head against the wall trying to teach them best security practices FINALLY get through their heads? oh hell no! It is the fact MSFT makes the default a regular user now and has tech like ASLR, DEP, file and registry virtualization, and you can even do as I did and add SEHOP from Server 2K8 to Windows 7 to lock it down even tighter. this with a good sandboxing AV like Comodo or Avast free and we finally have a decent OS that is pretty locked down.
Now that Windows will be getting harder as XP is replaced by 7 it will be OSX's turn to start to worry. Apple being hip has gotten through to some who saw after MacDefender there is money there, and like blood in the water to sharks they WILL come.
I love how I get modded down simply for explaining the guy's position, even though I made it quite clear that BOTH Thurott and Nichols are trolls and thus nearly always full of shit.
The only problem I have with Google is this: They offer this "free" software, be it chrome, Android, WebM, whatever, to all these OEMs and then are happy to make big profits on the search but if someone like oh say MPEG-LA shows up with a lawsuit its "hey, where did Google go?".
Personally i think software patents are bullshit but by throwing the OEMs under a bus Google is doing a disservice to EVERYONE. Google has enough cash not only can they send the attack lawyers like the fricking Nasgul coming off the mountain they can afford to pay an army of geeks to go through every patent with a fine tooth comb. they also have the geek cred if they put out a web wide call for prior art they'd have geeks the world over busting their asses to help.
but instead of using "Do No Evil" as "Do Some Good" they instead take the sackfuls o' cash and let the OEMs get run over. If you truly want FOSS to succeed we all need to get together and let google know we'll be boycotting the living hell out of them until they start standing behind their products and using their power to help us out. We are the geeks, people listen to us. it would be trivial to get folks to switch to bing, or yahoo, or Ask, or whatever. frankly there isn't much of a difference. But I bet if the geeks got together and called for a "No More Google" boycott and their numbers started dropping? Then maybe they'd throw their weight into backing the OEMs which would help us ALL by putting the brakes on these patent trolls.
Yeah good luck with that! you get a prosecutor with an agenda and life can turn to shit REAL quick friend. We had one of those in my area a few years back, a female who was a classic 'All those with a penis are rapist scum"no matter if there was anything...like oh say EVIDENCE, or even if the police believed it, nope if you had a penis you were rapist scum.
Once the women realized it was that way it got to the point every. damned. divorce. the woman would either scream rape herself or if she had a daughter get her to scream rape because it was common knowledge that no matter what was found she'd go after your soon to be ex like a pitbull and while he was tied up in court? Kinda hard to fight those divorce proceedings. had it happen to a friend of mine, he treated the daughter from her first marriage like it was his own kid, made her keep her grades up, she couldn't go out partying all night, etc. So grandma promises the bitch if she'll scream rape granny will buy her a new car. it didn't matter that the cops were so fed up with superbitch they actually testified FOR THE DEFENSE that the girl changed her story more than a half a dozen times, nope she drug his ass into court for over a year and the lawyer bills cost him a home that had been in the family three generations. After he had been crushed by that his wife (who had been hiding her assets for awhile) used a superlawyer to tear him a new one and get sole custody of his son, which she promptly took overseas, never for him to see again.
So if this prosecutor has a hard on for busting this guy? i hope he has a couple of years on his calendar free and plenty of money in the bank because they can turn your life into a world of shit on their whim.
Exactly MR AC, all three techs,.NET, Silverlight, and HTML 5 have their place..NET for the backend, Silverlight for cool GUI heavy stuff like this which for those that don't have Silverlight/Moonlight is an entire Web OS in a browser, and HTML 5 for quick web apps. Why everyone thinks everything has to be an "X killer" is beyond me. probably a combo of buzzword bingo and page view rankings I suppose.
As for TFA I'm sure the guys out their writing.NET code, or who have plenty of.NET code in their company are quite happy about this. One would think having more choices would be celebrated here, but I guess that isn't true unless it comes from teh Google.
Hey leave poor Nibbles alone you bastard! can't you see he is trying his little heart out? Maybe if you bought the poor little fella some real food instead of giving him the wilted lettuce from your BLT maybe he wouldn't be huffing and puffing, ya cheap bastard!
As for TFA? Let me predict what will come of it...a shitload of bad PVP arena battle bullshit, ala Q3 Arena which seems to be the standard template for FOSS games. Does the world REALLY need another teabagging fragfest? would it REALLY kill ya to make a game with story, originality, or does capture the flag give you such a stiffie you can't think of nothing else?
Seriously guys if you want folks to take FOSS gaming seriously another DM/CTF fragger crap ain't gonna do it. Carmack is nice enough to hand you the engine for free, how about marrying it to some good ideas? Why not make a spoof that takes the piss out of the current "must have teh relism" bullshit? Like instead of your screen going bloody when you get hit it turns pink and you look like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz to other players so they can see what a big girl you are as you hide and wait for your health to regen? Or a weapon for the guys that you can't stand that throws dogshit and when they get hit enough the flies overwhelm them?
Use it for something original guys, don't just make another DM,kay? Surely there are enough FOSS guys with sick black senses of humor they could cook up something wicked. How about when your teammate does something stupid you can fill up your health and ammo for bitchslapping the stupid right off his dumb ass?
And is yet more proof that without Jobs at the reins the company is going to shit. They burnt the pros with FCPx, aka iMovie Pro, by yanking all previous versions off the shelves and refusing to sell it to those that need to expand their business and need features that iMovie pro doesn't have, they did it again with the "don't say the M word (malware) and whatever you do do NOT admit it or help the customers!" bullshit, now they are sending out OSes with total shit drivers.
This should be proof to most that without Jobs sitting in his chair ready to lay the smackdown on the fuckups that the company is in serious trouble. Like him or hate him you have to give the man credit for always running a tight ship and cutting through the bullshit, and I have a feeling without the big man in charge shit is only gonna get worse.
He really should have set up a solid line of succession after the first health scare and been putting someone in the spotlight that shared his drive and vision for the company. Maybe he couldn't find the right person, maybe after getting burned by the Pepsi guy who couldn't stand the thought of risking being back stabbed again, who knows. but it looks like without Jobs driving the company things are going downhill quickly. Get better Steve, your company needs you. And this is from someone who has never owned any Apple products other than a G3 to play with the PPC arch. I just hate to see a company the man has worked so hard to build go downhill like that.
True about WU, false about the other two. the reason other programs used IE was that it was bog simple to call on the Trident engine, which in the days of dialup made it easier to make a smaller installer than carrying their own engine. they also did this for help files, gonna blame MSFT for that one?
Then there was the "U can't uninstall it!" meme which was bullshit, it was just like everything in Windows you needed third party, in this case IERadicator which I used damned near every day in my shop. it made Win9x MUCH faster if you tossed IE and replaced it with Netscape. just leave the MSHTML files so that third parties could use the engine without IE and voila!
While personally I supported MSFT getting busted (And think Intel needs to be seriously busted now) it was NOT IE that gave the smoking gun, it was the fact they were, just like Intel paying OEMs to NOT use the competition. In the case of MSFT it was the way they had the contract worded so you ONLY got the OEM discount if you sold Windows only, in the Intel case it was blatant kickbacks tied to not using AMD or Via.
but everyone makes it out to be an "IE VS Netscape" thing and it wasn't, it was just the Netscape guys screamed the loudest. it was the OEM backroom bullshit that got their balls in a sling and one could argue Netscape slit their own throats when they gave the market to IE by deciding to do a full rewrite followed by putting out the POS that was NS4. if it would have only been NS they probably could have won, it was the OEM backroom deals that got them busted.
But what he is arguing (whether right or wrong, I see Nichols or Thurott I instantly think "troll" so take it for what its worth) is that it isn't really free as Google is using the funds from one endeavor (search) to give away a second product (Android) that ties into the first and thus gives them more of a monopoly.
And one could argue that thanks to CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) that the only real competition android has is iOS and how long can Apple compete with free? At most carriers I'm seeing Smart phones handed out like candy bars, all running Android. if you want iOS it'll cost you. Sure apple sells on the hip factor now, but as the economy continues to sour how long will they be able to compete against free?
I personally think Google should have to put their money where their mouth is and if they want to give android for free? Then they should have to stand behind the product and indemnify their customers. MSFT does this, I'm sure Apple stands behind their iPhone. let Google take responsibility for their product instead of passing on the costs of litigation to the OEMs.
Actually your AC posting just proves YET AGAIN that the teabaggers (which that phrase has actually been adopted by many, I guess they don't play Halo) don't have a fucking clue as the ones working likewise want government help to ensure that a single illness doesn't wipe them out which sadly they've seen happen again, and again, AND again. I should know as my sister passed in 2007 after a long cancer fight leaving two teenage boys and bills to this day we are fighting against.
So frankly you and the other teabaggers can all DIAF for all I care. you seem to be just fine for "bailout baby bailout" when it comes to big banks, big pharma, and of course you've NEVER met a military money sink you didn't like. How many teabaggers are all for the two wars under Dubya? yet they DEMAND that they get to keep their tax breaks even though we are AT WAR and never in the ENTIRE history of this country have we been AT WAR and not had tax hikes, yet the baggers act like its a God given right.
Of course in the end its just another spin by the Kock bros on the classic "give teh rich MORE MONIES nom nom nom!" which they've been pushing for damned near 40 years. it got us trickle upon (80-88) voodoo economics (88-92) having "free trade" with those that have NO environmental or worker protections (92-00) followed by "hey the rich only control 85% of teh wealth! Lets give them BIG TAX BREAKS while starting TWO wars LOL!" (00-08) finally we are up to "Bailout the rich baby, bailout the rich!" (08-present).. Did I miss anything?
The teabagger bullshit is just another spin on the same fantasy that if you "Give teh rich MORE MONIES! nom nom nom" that this will magically trickle upon the working poor, which is total horseshit. in reality simple facts and common sense (something that is an oxymoron when it comes to teabaggers I know) says that higher taxes on the wealthy leads to lower unemployment and more job growth since if they get taxed if they keep it they invest it into businesses instead of hoarding it. The poor spend, the rich hoard. This is basic econ 101.
But please keep spouting the teabagger bullshit, i'm sure the Kock bros (misspelling intentional because they are serious pricks) sitting in the Lear jet are quite happy they have plenty of useful idiots such as yourself.
Because if you make the cache TOO big you're gonna have to provide a battery backup in case of power loss? In AR we reached 119f with the heat index (113f actual) and the handyman was up until 4:30AM replacing blown fuses and breakers (building est 1923, actually used to be a hotel on the Chitlin circuit) So I know about power losses.
So when you figure in the cost of a battery powerful enough to feed 4-8Gb of RAM as well has the HDD motor long enough to flush the cache in case of power loss you're talking a drive that quickly becomes crazy money With 128Mb of fast cache and an ARM CPU onboard a couple of watch batteries would be enough to feed it long enough to do a shutdown on loss and of course the SSD wouldn't have to worry about power failure, so you'll only have to dump 128Mb to the HDD before shutdown. With 128Mb you could dump the whole thing in a single rotation in a "scratch" file that is loaded upon restart.
Well I too haven't owned a console in years, my last was the PS 1 (NOT the PSOne, but the actual first on release day PlayStation. I bought it with BAT and Crazy Ivan) but one thing I DO know about and keep up with quite diligently is hardware, as gaming hardware has always been an interest of mine.
And I would argue the BIG difference is something you seem to have overlooked. in generations past you were dealing with multiple tasks on a SINGLE tasking CPU, or if you were lucky a CPU that could do two integer ops, aka HyperThreading. The difference now is frankly OS overhead doesn't matter because when I can pick up a quad core kit for $199 as a spare? or get a fully loaded Dell prebuilt quad for like 449? The days of the OS making a real difference when it comes to performance are long gone.
Just for shits and giggles while I had the latest Brothers in Arms loaded up and I was in a safe spot I minimized the game so I could read my CPU meter. While two cores were busy and my GPU was at around 24% load rendering the scene the other two cores and 76% GPU was sitting there twiddling its thumbs. And this isn't even a top o' the line gamer rig. We are talking a MOR AMD Phenom II 925 quad, an ATI HD4850 with 512Mb of GDDR3, 8Gb of RAM, and 3Tb of HDD space. If you take out the 3Tb and put back the dual 500Gb it came with we are talking less than $600 after MIR, less than $500 if I wouldn't have gone apeshit with RAM and went with 4Gb instead of 8Gb.
So I would argue that your thoughts on dedicated VS general purpose is true in the past, it simply isn't true now because you are comparing a dedicated Honda VS a general purpose Ferrari. We are talking so damned much overkill power now that even the most hardcore games are frankly causing the $500 PCs to yawn with boredom. Nothing really slams the system anymore because the insanely overpowered designs of current systems are built from some mythical future workload from space. Folks keep buying them because "bigger is better" but from checking PerfMon when doing a follow up to my customers homes I've found even the gamers simply aren't taxing the systems, they are just too overpowered.
So I just don't see how having a 1Kb OS is really gonna matter much when the OS has its own CPU and the games have another three to pisslefart with. Frankly the only reason games tax a system now at all is the frankly shitty poorly optimized console rips that are being handed off as PC games. When you compare the performance of a Valve title to these console rips its like night and day, with the original HL2 running quite nicely on a 7600GS. I just don't see how consoles are gonna be able to compete on graphics. Sure they'll get those that want to sit their fat ass on a couch with a controller and teabag, although even then I'd argue HTPCs are starting to take off thanks to netflix and Hulu, I have yet another customer coming to pick up another HTPC this very evening simply by word of mouth, but compete on graphics? i think that time is past and is simply never coming back. there is simply too much lead time between design and release and what we are seeing now is the biggest shift in PC design since the original Pentium nearly 20 years ago.
Well I would have agreed completely if we were talking WinXP. Running Prosumer stuff on XP was nothing but "fiddly bits' but frankly Win 7 is so damned butt simple your grandma could set up a DAW or a graphics workstation with Win 7. It has drivers for even the more esoteric stuff already loaded into Windows Update so that when you plug in the device before you can even reach for the disc Win 7 pops up with "Hey I got a driver for that. Shall I set it up for you?"
But the ones you are talking about, the equivalent of the "weekend warrior" types, I just don't see them shelling out several hundred dollars for FCPx when iMovie will do all that they will want. IMHO the difference between the pro, the prosumer, and the weekend warrior is this: The pro is doing this for a living, money is no object if it helps him be more efficient. The prosumer WANTS to be the pro, but is money constrained. The weekend warrior? Well they just want to make something that looks cool.
The problem I'd argue with FCPx is that they are priced between weekend warrior and prosumer without being clearly targeted to one or the other. it has more features than a weekend warrior is gonna care about and by losing the pros the prosumers are gonna see what the pros are using and want something similar. To me it just reeks of some "designed by committee" brainstorming session, about the polar opposite of what Jobs would have done. We'll have to wait and see what the future holds, but I predict in less than a year and a half FCPx will be all but dead, its sales dried up to nothing.
Well I'd say it is also shame. I mean who would want to get busted for sharing "Kane&Lynch II: Dog Days"? it would be like being grabbed for a Uwe Boll movie! To be fair I actually bought Kane&Lynch II (Shut up! It was only $4 with shipping!) but I sure as hell wouldn't want to share the thing. Once I added the patch that removed the stupid as hell "Jap porn" pixelation crap from the titties and the head shots (You have a game where every other word is fuck, and the whole goal is to slaughter in masse, and you care about a little blood and titties? WTF?) I figure it was worth the $4.
And since TFA doesn't seem to be loading for me ATM I have a question: Is there any comparisons in TFA between DRM and piracy? because as we saw with Spore if you take the Goatse pic as the blueprint on how to treat your customers it WILL come back to bite you in the ass. As a PC repairman I've seen first hand what some of the nastier DRM can do** So I can understand those that really want to play a game simply bypassing the bullshit. So any comparisons of DRM VS piracy? Because I bet the nastier DRM games get snatched more than the easier ones.
**-Protip: do NOT install a Starforce game on an X64 OS! Not only does it cause all kinds of glitches because it tries to jam 32 bit code into a 64 bit kernel but the uninstaller does NOT work on X64! the only way to remove is to boot into another install and remove it manually or hope you have a system restore before you put that crap in!
Hell I've been thinking this for years and it wouldn't even have to be that "smart" of a storage system, just have the SSD as the first partition with the drive making a differential in a hidden partition on the HDD with failover so if the SSD goes tits up it would just function as a HDD.
To me the perfect drive would be thus...128Mb ultra fast RAM (probably DDR 3) as a cache followed by 120Gb-240Gb SSD followed by 2Tb onboard HDD. The fat cache would allow for intelligent disk queuing while helping to keep the HDD writes from bottlenecking the SSD, as I said a hidden partition with failover would keep you from worrying about SSD failure, and with 1.5Tb (after removing the hidden partition space) you'd have plenty of room for your non OS files, all in a convenient 3.5 or 2.5 form factor.
Question: What is wrong with Powershell ? While I'll be the first to admit that if you were a terminal guy the old CMD really didn't offer much, but on the flip side unless you were an admin there really wasn't much use for it and even then most of what you'd want a term for could be done with AD and GPOs, but give MSFT credit where credit is due, they listened when guys said they wanted a terminal and came out with Powershell which is really quite good.
But it seems like if your a programmer or terminal guy you should have NO problem picking up Powershell. It even has a very extensive set of help data based on the Man page layout so you ought to be able to pick it up no problem. You can automate pretty much everything with scripts, run them locally or remote, embed them, what more can you ask for from a scripting language and shell?
I haven't been heavily into scripting since the days of DOS batch files but if I can pick it up i'm sure a guy like you with much more scripting experience will take to it like a duck to water.
And I'm sure I'll get hate for saying this but I'd say ATM that Windows is better than Linux, at least for average folks, simply because Torvalds is an asshole and won't allow a stable ABI like BSD, OSX, Windows, Solaris, and OS/2 have had for ages. I'd love nothing more than to have nice low cost off lease Linux boxes right next to the Windows ones, especially with the WinXP EOL hanging over so many PCs like a sword of Damocles, but until I can actually get an OS to survive the 6 month upgrade without one or more drivers taking a big old steaming dump? I just can't do it, the support costs would kill me. I have XP boxes that have been in the field since 2003 with ZERO need for me except for hardware upgrades, but with Linux? I've tried Mepis, Ubuntu/Mint, and PCLOS and in ALL of the above the upgrades have caused one or more drivers to take a big runny poo.
Finally to those I always get with the "ur doin it wrong, u must have tried Linux 6 years ago" etc I say this: Take ANY distro, your choice, and download the ISO from 5 years ago. Make sure ALL the drivers are functioning correctly, then upgrade it to the current version. NOW see how many drivers are 100% functioning. I bet you'll find a broken mess just like I did. with Windows the 2k/XP/2K3 driver model got 14 YEARS of support, the Vista/7 driver model is supported until 2020 on win 7 so if you count from Vista release that's another 14 years. Folks just don't have the money to pay me for support contracts nor do they change out their boxes every 6 months. If it can't survive even 6 years in the field? I just can't sell it, it would kill my rep. Sorry.
But I'd say the bitch with trying to snatch the Prosumer (that is what I call 'em, you can call them what you like) dollar is this: For those guys they are often money constrained and you can do it cheaper on Windows as I and several of my customers have found out. I have some graphics guys and some music guys in my customer base and frankly you can get a nice AMD quad fully loaded for less than a third of what the most basic Mac pro cost and as you pointed out the updates on the Mac pro line are now few and far between and I wouldn't even be surprised if it ends up being dropped. And on Windows 7 you can buy prosumer sound gear or big fat graphics cards with big pipes and plenty of vRAM for a hell of a lot cheaper than an Apple equivalent.
But to me the biggest fuckup of this whole thing is how much buzz they are losing. Apple under Jobs has always been about buzz, because buzz is what keeps them from being just another Intel OEM and moves them into hip territory. I can't count how many "behind the screens" type of programs I saw where you clearly saw they were using Apple gear for editing. That implanted firmly into the minds of those starting out in the biz "you want to be a pro? You use Apple" as well as making the consumers feel more superior about their MacBooks because "hey they make movies and shows on Macs!"
But now mark my words with them giving the finger to the professionals with iMovie Pro aka FCPx and as you pointed out killing X-Serve, which was bought by many pros for FCP Server and killing previous versions of FCP so if they need to add workstations they are SOL? Well one thing you can NOT fault MSFT for is being unclear about roadmaps. if anything MSFT has been insanely detailed with roadmaps, you can find out before purchase almost to the hour how long you have on support and the third party pro software is quite plentiful. In the coming years you'll see big fat WinFlags on the "behind the screens" shows and the buzz that came with being "the machines on which movies are made" will evaporate.
I'd just say this is yet more proof without Jobs leadership at the helm apple is a trainwreck waiting to happen. They are pretty much coasting now on products that were in the pipe when Steve was there, but what happens when they run out? Jobs was king at spotting new markets that weren't being treated right and taking them over with superior designs. Just look at iPod, there were MP3 players all over the place but the designs sucked ass! Same with the iPhone and iPad.
While I've never been an Apple guy (I have a G3 B&W I got for free that I sometimes play with but am seriously thinking of gutting to make a bad ass AMD quad into the case) I do have to give credit where credit is due. Despite what the local Linux loonie here on/. who thinks "ur a sekret M$ Ninja!" I do sincerely hope that Jobs comes out okay and takes control back at Apple, although the odds sadly aren't good for that type of cancer. But just seeing how badly the place runs without him I feel sorry for anybody that truly needs Apple products to function without the man and his vision at the helm. I doubt very seriously he would have burnt the market like what has been done with FCP, he knows the value of being hip too well.
Yeah what idiot in the animal kingdom gonna mess with this baaaad mofo, he's a rat with a mohawk! The fact that its poison just shows he's a rat that takes NO shit from nobody. I bet he's got a little switchblade to, just ready to stab your ass if you piss him off. he's a baaaad little rat dude!
Just going by screenshots huh? I'd agree with WinXP, the "Fisher price UI" wasn't any real improvement over Win2K it was just....blue. But Win 7 is leaps and bounds better than any other GUI MSFT has ever put out, and here is why: It lets the ones who can just barely get around a desktop like my dad get MUCH more functionality out of their computer.
For example he typed "mic" to find out how to set up his microphone and under related concepts it gave him a nice tutorial on speech recognition which he didn't even know Win 7 had. In just 6 months of using Win 7 he has found more features and gotten more use out of his OS than the whole previous 9 years on XP put together. At the same time it lets old hands like me get our work done MUCH quicker, thanks to breadcrumbs and libraries, instant search and jumplists. Having all the folders I have been using lately be as easy to get to as a single right click on the explorer icon? That is DAMN handy right there! My only fear is the sweaty monkey will go "oh oh oh...we don't look enough like teh Apple! And I love teh Apple! Make Win 8 more like teh Apple!" and cock things all up. Luckily for us Windows users and VARs Windows 7 is supported until 2020 so if there is a bad release like Vista? We can easily skip it.
As for TFA while I'm sure I'll get hate for daring to point out this emperor is kinda nekked I really lost any respect I had for the guy after reading this article with linus in his own words. His attitude when it comes to the kernel is "Plans? We don't need no steenkin plans! We gonna let it grow like a virus LOL!"...yeah Linus its called the clap! No damned wonder I could'nt ever get half my drivers to function past a single upgrade cycle and why Linux Linux is stuck at 1% with so many retailers like myself becoming frustrated and giving up on Linux. Can you imagine if you went to YOUR BOSS and told him "we don't need no steenkin plans!" on a multimillion dollar project? Yeah that would go over well.
Question: If your money is THAT unstable, and they are already paying you in USD, then why isn't everyone just using USD? It seems like the logical thing to do and it wouldn't be the first time a non US country has used USD, usually because of the same thing you're going through.
As for TFA they really need to nip this shit in the bud, because we ALL know what will happen if they allow this. The next thing we hear will be some chopper or piper cub will end up crashing because some drone was chasing Titney Spears and didn't notice the plane it was heading straight towards while trying to get some great tit shots for the cover of the rag mag.
Sadly I'd say a good 85%+ of the media in the USA right now is celebrity chasers and something like this, where they would have the ultimate "electric eye" to spy on when Lohan falls of the wagon or the next reality star pukes in front of some club? Oh yeah no risk of abuse with THAT idea.
That would be true IF the PCs weren't already 3 generations ahead and from the looks of the timetable with already be at octacore CPUs and a full 5, maybe 6 generations ahead of the GPU on the day of release.
It just isn't like the old days were a PC would gain a few hundred MHz or add a couple dozen shaders in between consoles anymore. Now we are talking HUGE fundamental shifts in design on the PC which the consoles are WAY behind before they are even released!
Take the Nintendo one for example, since that is the only GPU that we are currently sure of. the leaks say it is gonna be an HD4830, now that is not only nearly 3 generations behind NOW, with GDDR3 while everyone else is at GDDR5, but even as we speak AMD is switching from VLIW to vector based GPUs which will be the chips that are out by spring most likely. With Vector based they will be able to act like a "HyperCPU/GPU hybrid" with cache coherency with the CPU and the ability to do FP and physics faster than anything we've seen so far, and that is just the integrated! With the discrete you'll be able to use the APU for Physics and AI while the discrete does textures and rendering, giving frankly insane levels of polygon pushing with everything cranked to 11.
So by the time this console comes out it will be at least 3 generations, probably 4 behind, and be running the old arch that isn't even DX11 while the new arch gives a crazy amount of new features and power that this machine will NEVER be able to use. I don't care if the OS is 1Kb and the games are all running bare metal, you just can't make up for that big a difference in silicon. The problem is we are looking at 3 to 4 years from drawing board to shelf and in that time the PC has made huge strides. look at the last gen, when the X360 was released PCs were JUST starting to be dual core, and in less than 4 years you had cheap 6 cores and you could get quads for $199 in kit form. On the GPU side we went from the 7xxx series to Fermi. That is just too big a leap for the consoles to keep up with friend.
Uhhh...I don't know where you got your info from pal, but in case you ain't heard they yanked ALL previous versions off the shelves a full week before the release of FCPx, aka iMovie pro. That means if you want to grow your business? Sucks to be you! Need more workstations for this flick you're working on? tough shit pal, better hit the eBay and prepare to be assraped by the profiteers!
I'd agree with you completely IF and ONLY IF they had allowed the previous version to be sold and supported ALONG with the new. but they haven't, they have made it clear "take it or leave it" and mark my words they WILL leave it. You do NOT just yank a piece of software that companies are counting on to make money with a half ass new release with seriously missing features like lack of tape support. from what I've seen and read the new FCPx is priced and featured more like an iMovie pro than a FCP, and as I said those that needed FCPs features and don't have enough machines? Go pound sand is the word from Apple. NOT the attitude one should have and I bet it wouldn't have been done that way under Jobs.
Personally I'd like to know what the "post war privacy abuses" that TFA is speaking of that turned Germany so pro privacy. Are they talking about how the USA forced them to go through De-Nazification? Because what were we supposed to do? They WERE Nazis after all. Considering we'd had two world wars involving Germany in 30 years you can see why the USA might have wanted to make sure things had chilled out there.
As for TFA...meh. Anybody that thinks they have privacy in this age of supercomputers everywhere keeping up with every little CC transaction and every link you click on is probably deluding themselves. Sure I'd like it if everything was opt in only but in our heavily corporate culture if company A can make money off that info they WILL make money off that info. While I'm happy for the Germans i seriously doubt with all the attention whores we have in the USA anything that would ban FB would ever fly. hell the farmville withdrawal of millions of females across the country would probably drag things to a screeching halt!
Personally I'm more worried about what kind of pics my exGFs have pasted of me on their FB accounts. I mean that's all I'd need, have some potential client try to Google me and find some pic of me snoozing with bed hair and a caption that read "What a bastard!"
Want to hear the sad part? On several games I bought the game, have it still in the shrink wrap, and instead only play the pirated version. Why? Because sadly the pirated version is better because the pirates manage to strip out all the DRM horseshit so I can just play the damned game!
But I agree with you 100% if they think their fancy bitchslapping is gonna stop the pirates they need to wake the hell up! The pirates have been around since the days of BBS, when they would pass around floppy images over 300 baud modems. They went from that to rips, to full CDs, now to 10Gb+ full DVD rips. You can go to PTB and find working versions of their last "must be online to play SP" games, they think now will be different?
All it does is keep guys like me, who were sitting here all ready and happy to hand over my CC, from buying their games. I was all set to buy the Bioshock II SP DLC recently, but when I found I'd have to install the DRM crippled version because it wouldn't take my legit key without the DRM? fuck that, I gave the MSFT points to a nephew and closed the account. Being a PC repairman I have seen their DRM tear into an OS worse than ANY malware, even burning up DVD burners by throwing them into PIO mode. I have seen it throw all kinds of nasty errors, like did you know that if you install a Starforce game onto a 64bit OS not only will Starforce cause all kinds of nastiness but you CAN NOT remove it? The uninstaller is 32bit and doesn't work on X64! And on top of that the Starforce code is 32bit yet it tries to shoehorn itself into a 64bit kernel which as I'm sure you know is a BIG no no.
So all they are doing is hurting their own sales. The pirates still get their games, just guys like me take our CCs and go somewhere else. I have over 35 games on GOG right now, and I've gotten around to playing maybe 12, and finishing maybe 4. Why? Because even though I haven't played the ones I have when they have a sale I'm so happy they treat me like a customer and NOT scum I'm happy to throw them some more money! Give us a good value, don't treat us like scum, and watch the money roll in. Why is that soooo damned hard for them to understand?
Well let your old neighborhood PC repairman help ya out with that bud. Here ya go, a little gem called HD Tune which you can install (or put on a flash as a portable if you like) which will not only give you an error scanner but with also give you a full SMART report including ANY changes that have occurred. Quite useful for spotting those problems loooong before they become a problem.
if you'd like it along with many other useful tools you might want to try Kel's CPL Bonus Pack which gives you not only HD Tune but over a dozen great tools right in the Windows CPL, like the HP USB bootable format tool, CPU/GPU-Z, one click driver backup, just a ton of nice features. It works on everything from Win2K-Win 7 X64 BTW, it'll just put them under 32 bit control panel on the X64 OSes but otherwise work perfectly.
And finally if you have a 4Gb or greater flash lying around (and what geek doesn't?) then I'd suggest computer repair utility toolkit v2. Now it is about 2 years old since the FOSS guys had a shitfit and made them take it down, but since this is the net and nothing ever disappears here you go. Simply update the apps and voila! A full toolkit that does just about everything, hardware, software, malware, tweaks, you name it, all with a nice launcher (which is easy to add your own apps to) on a stick.
Anyway i've found with the right tools NO HDD failure should frankly be unexpected...well unless you drop it of course. Otherwise with the above you'll get a heads up weeks in advance which gives you plenty of time to hit Newegg and get a replacement. Enjoy!
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Uhhh...tell me how EXACTLY telling the equivalent of "water is wet" a MSFT propaganda piece? You sir might want to read this article on OSNews by the title of OS X - Safe, Yet Horribly Insecure or is OSNews MSFT propaganda? it points out the Apple implementations of serveral technologies, when it has them, simply aren't up to snuff. Technologies such as DEP and ASLR either are not implemented or are implemented poorly.
Now Apple was able to get away with that with relative impunity simple because they weren't worth the effort as malware writers like most criminals are a lazy sort of creature and will ALWAYS go for the biggest bang for the least work. It is like that old saying, you rob banks because that is where the money is. You attack Windows because it has been trivially easy to get little Suzy to run your "LOL_Kittehs.screensaver.exe" trojan nasty.
Is this REALLY so surprising? It isn't like any of the other OSes have held up very well when being targeted either. On OSX you had MacDefender followed by MacGuardian which caused Apple to give their infamous order to the Applecare guys "Do NOT say the word Malware and do NOT help those....people!" and on the Linux side we've seen Android pounded pretty regularly as well as the KDELook screensaver bug someone put out for shits and giggles awhile back, as well as this article that shows how trivial it is to infect Linux if you get the user to help you which is how nearly all modern nasties spread nowadays.
So why hasn't Linux and OSX been pounded before now? it ain't brain surgery folks it is because it just wasn't worth the effort for sub double digit userbases. And before some Linux fanboi trots out the old "but but but...Linux is used on servers!" I would point out you don't see Linux admins running "LOL_Kitteh.Screensaver.py" and if you do they should be given a nice white jacket and placed somewhere where they can't hurt anyone. We are talking DESKTOPS, not servers, routers, your toaster, or your remote controlled Linux thermostat. DESKTOPS are were the money is at for malware writers, because they have nice fat broadband connections they don't monitor for shit, they are MUCH more likely to be clueless about best security practices, much more likely to run funny software from the net if you wave a cookie in front of them, etc. it is simply easy money whereas grizzled non-sociable Linux admins don't play that.
So saying Windows is targeted because that is where the money is at is no different than saying the sky is blue and water is wet. If you want an easy target grandma on WinXP is about as easy as you can get. to their credit someone at MSFT FINALLY got hit with the clue stick and the whole "Hey lets all run as admins!" bullshit finally died with Vista, and now that I've switched the majority of my customers and family to Windows 7 I've seen infection rates go waaaaaay down. Did I magically give them a brain transplant? did my years of bashing my head against the wall trying to teach them best security practices FINALLY get through their heads? oh hell no! It is the fact MSFT makes the default a regular user now and has tech like ASLR, DEP, file and registry virtualization, and you can even do as I did and add SEHOP from Server 2K8 to Windows 7 to lock it down even tighter. this with a good sandboxing AV like Comodo or Avast free and we finally have a decent OS that is pretty locked down.
Now that Windows will be getting harder as XP is replaced by 7 it will be OSX's turn to start to worry. Apple being hip has gotten through to some who saw after MacDefender there is money there, and like blood in the water to sharks they WILL come.
I love how I get modded down simply for explaining the guy's position, even though I made it quite clear that BOTH Thurott and Nichols are trolls and thus nearly always full of shit.
The only problem I have with Google is this: They offer this "free" software, be it chrome, Android, WebM, whatever, to all these OEMs and then are happy to make big profits on the search but if someone like oh say MPEG-LA shows up with a lawsuit its "hey, where did Google go?".
Personally i think software patents are bullshit but by throwing the OEMs under a bus Google is doing a disservice to EVERYONE. Google has enough cash not only can they send the attack lawyers like the fricking Nasgul coming off the mountain they can afford to pay an army of geeks to go through every patent with a fine tooth comb. they also have the geek cred if they put out a web wide call for prior art they'd have geeks the world over busting their asses to help.
but instead of using "Do No Evil" as "Do Some Good" they instead take the sackfuls o' cash and let the OEMs get run over. If you truly want FOSS to succeed we all need to get together and let google know we'll be boycotting the living hell out of them until they start standing behind their products and using their power to help us out. We are the geeks, people listen to us. it would be trivial to get folks to switch to bing, or yahoo, or Ask, or whatever. frankly there isn't much of a difference. But I bet if the geeks got together and called for a "No More Google" boycott and their numbers started dropping? Then maybe they'd throw their weight into backing the OEMs which would help us ALL by putting the brakes on these patent trolls.
Yeah good luck with that! you get a prosecutor with an agenda and life can turn to shit REAL quick friend. We had one of those in my area a few years back, a female who was a classic 'All those with a penis are rapist scum"no matter if there was anything...like oh say EVIDENCE, or even if the police believed it, nope if you had a penis you were rapist scum.
Once the women realized it was that way it got to the point every. damned. divorce. the woman would either scream rape herself or if she had a daughter get her to scream rape because it was common knowledge that no matter what was found she'd go after your soon to be ex like a pitbull and while he was tied up in court? Kinda hard to fight those divorce proceedings. had it happen to a friend of mine, he treated the daughter from her first marriage like it was his own kid, made her keep her grades up, she couldn't go out partying all night, etc. So grandma promises the bitch if she'll scream rape granny will buy her a new car. it didn't matter that the cops were so fed up with superbitch they actually testified FOR THE DEFENSE that the girl changed her story more than a half a dozen times, nope she drug his ass into court for over a year and the lawyer bills cost him a home that had been in the family three generations. After he had been crushed by that his wife (who had been hiding her assets for awhile) used a superlawyer to tear him a new one and get sole custody of his son, which she promptly took overseas, never for him to see again.
So if this prosecutor has a hard on for busting this guy? i hope he has a couple of years on his calendar free and plenty of money in the bank because they can turn your life into a world of shit on their whim.
Exactly MR AC, all three techs, .NET, Silverlight, and HTML 5 have their place. .NET for the backend, Silverlight for cool GUI heavy stuff like this which for those that don't have Silverlight/Moonlight is an entire Web OS in a browser, and HTML 5 for quick web apps. Why everyone thinks everything has to be an "X killer" is beyond me. probably a combo of buzzword bingo and page view rankings I suppose.
As for TFA I'm sure the guys out their writing .NET code, or who have plenty of .NET code in their company are quite happy about this. One would think having more choices would be celebrated here, but I guess that isn't true unless it comes from teh Google.
Hey leave poor Nibbles alone you bastard! can't you see he is trying his little heart out? Maybe if you bought the poor little fella some real food instead of giving him the wilted lettuce from your BLT maybe he wouldn't be huffing and puffing, ya cheap bastard!
As for TFA? Let me predict what will come of it...a shitload of bad PVP arena battle bullshit, ala Q3 Arena which seems to be the standard template for FOSS games. Does the world REALLY need another teabagging fragfest? would it REALLY kill ya to make a game with story, originality, or does capture the flag give you such a stiffie you can't think of nothing else?
Seriously guys if you want folks to take FOSS gaming seriously another DM/CTF fragger crap ain't gonna do it. Carmack is nice enough to hand you the engine for free, how about marrying it to some good ideas? Why not make a spoof that takes the piss out of the current "must have teh relism" bullshit? Like instead of your screen going bloody when you get hit it turns pink and you look like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz to other players so they can see what a big girl you are as you hide and wait for your health to regen? Or a weapon for the guys that you can't stand that throws dogshit and when they get hit enough the flies overwhelm them?
Use it for something original guys, don't just make another DM,kay? Surely there are enough FOSS guys with sick black senses of humor they could cook up something wicked. How about when your teammate does something stupid you can fill up your health and ammo for bitchslapping the stupid right off his dumb ass?
And is yet more proof that without Jobs at the reins the company is going to shit. They burnt the pros with FCPx, aka iMovie Pro, by yanking all previous versions off the shelves and refusing to sell it to those that need to expand their business and need features that iMovie pro doesn't have, they did it again with the "don't say the M word (malware) and whatever you do do NOT admit it or help the customers!" bullshit, now they are sending out OSes with total shit drivers.
This should be proof to most that without Jobs sitting in his chair ready to lay the smackdown on the fuckups that the company is in serious trouble. Like him or hate him you have to give the man credit for always running a tight ship and cutting through the bullshit, and I have a feeling without the big man in charge shit is only gonna get worse.
He really should have set up a solid line of succession after the first health scare and been putting someone in the spotlight that shared his drive and vision for the company. Maybe he couldn't find the right person, maybe after getting burned by the Pepsi guy who couldn't stand the thought of risking being back stabbed again, who knows. but it looks like without Jobs driving the company things are going downhill quickly. Get better Steve, your company needs you. And this is from someone who has never owned any Apple products other than a G3 to play with the PPC arch. I just hate to see a company the man has worked so hard to build go downhill like that.
True about WU, false about the other two. the reason other programs used IE was that it was bog simple to call on the Trident engine, which in the days of dialup made it easier to make a smaller installer than carrying their own engine. they also did this for help files, gonna blame MSFT for that one?
Then there was the "U can't uninstall it!" meme which was bullshit, it was just like everything in Windows you needed third party, in this case IERadicator which I used damned near every day in my shop. it made Win9x MUCH faster if you tossed IE and replaced it with Netscape. just leave the MSHTML files so that third parties could use the engine without IE and voila!
While personally I supported MSFT getting busted (And think Intel needs to be seriously busted now) it was NOT IE that gave the smoking gun, it was the fact they were, just like Intel paying OEMs to NOT use the competition. In the case of MSFT it was the way they had the contract worded so you ONLY got the OEM discount if you sold Windows only, in the Intel case it was blatant kickbacks tied to not using AMD or Via.
but everyone makes it out to be an "IE VS Netscape" thing and it wasn't, it was just the Netscape guys screamed the loudest. it was the OEM backroom bullshit that got their balls in a sling and one could argue Netscape slit their own throats when they gave the market to IE by deciding to do a full rewrite followed by putting out the POS that was NS4. if it would have only been NS they probably could have won, it was the OEM backroom deals that got them busted.
But what he is arguing (whether right or wrong, I see Nichols or Thurott I instantly think "troll" so take it for what its worth) is that it isn't really free as Google is using the funds from one endeavor (search) to give away a second product (Android) that ties into the first and thus gives them more of a monopoly.
And one could argue that thanks to CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) that the only real competition android has is iOS and how long can Apple compete with free? At most carriers I'm seeing Smart phones handed out like candy bars, all running Android. if you want iOS it'll cost you. Sure apple sells on the hip factor now, but as the economy continues to sour how long will they be able to compete against free?
I personally think Google should have to put their money where their mouth is and if they want to give android for free? Then they should have to stand behind the product and indemnify their customers. MSFT does this, I'm sure Apple stands behind their iPhone. let Google take responsibility for their product instead of passing on the costs of litigation to the OEMs.
Actually your AC posting just proves YET AGAIN that the teabaggers (which that phrase has actually been adopted by many, I guess they don't play Halo) don't have a fucking clue as the ones working likewise want government help to ensure that a single illness doesn't wipe them out which sadly they've seen happen again, and again, AND again. I should know as my sister passed in 2007 after a long cancer fight leaving two teenage boys and bills to this day we are fighting against.
So frankly you and the other teabaggers can all DIAF for all I care. you seem to be just fine for "bailout baby bailout" when it comes to big banks, big pharma, and of course you've NEVER met a military money sink you didn't like. How many teabaggers are all for the two wars under Dubya? yet they DEMAND that they get to keep their tax breaks even though we are AT WAR and never in the ENTIRE history of this country have we been AT WAR and not had tax hikes, yet the baggers act like its a God given right.
Of course in the end its just another spin by the Kock bros on the classic "give teh rich MORE MONIES nom nom nom!" which they've been pushing for damned near 40 years. it got us trickle upon (80-88) voodoo economics (88-92) having "free trade" with those that have NO environmental or worker protections (92-00) followed by "hey the rich only control 85% of teh wealth! Lets give them BIG TAX BREAKS while starting TWO wars LOL!" (00-08) finally we are up to "Bailout the rich baby, bailout the rich!" (08-present).. Did I miss anything?
The teabagger bullshit is just another spin on the same fantasy that if you "Give teh rich MORE MONIES! nom nom nom" that this will magically trickle upon the working poor, which is total horseshit. in reality simple facts and common sense (something that is an oxymoron when it comes to teabaggers I know) says that higher taxes on the wealthy leads to lower unemployment and more job growth since if they get taxed if they keep it they invest it into businesses instead of hoarding it. The poor spend, the rich hoard. This is basic econ 101.
But please keep spouting the teabagger bullshit, i'm sure the Kock bros (misspelling intentional because they are serious pricks) sitting in the Lear jet are quite happy they have plenty of useful idiots such as yourself.
Because if you make the cache TOO big you're gonna have to provide a battery backup in case of power loss? In AR we reached 119f with the heat index (113f actual) and the handyman was up until 4:30AM replacing blown fuses and breakers (building est 1923, actually used to be a hotel on the Chitlin circuit) So I know about power losses.
So when you figure in the cost of a battery powerful enough to feed 4-8Gb of RAM as well has the HDD motor long enough to flush the cache in case of power loss you're talking a drive that quickly becomes crazy money With 128Mb of fast cache and an ARM CPU onboard a couple of watch batteries would be enough to feed it long enough to do a shutdown on loss and of course the SSD wouldn't have to worry about power failure, so you'll only have to dump 128Mb to the HDD before shutdown. With 128Mb you could dump the whole thing in a single rotation in a "scratch" file that is loaded upon restart.
Well I too haven't owned a console in years, my last was the PS 1 (NOT the PSOne, but the actual first on release day PlayStation. I bought it with BAT and Crazy Ivan) but one thing I DO know about and keep up with quite diligently is hardware, as gaming hardware has always been an interest of mine.
And I would argue the BIG difference is something you seem to have overlooked. in generations past you were dealing with multiple tasks on a SINGLE tasking CPU, or if you were lucky a CPU that could do two integer ops, aka HyperThreading. The difference now is frankly OS overhead doesn't matter because when I can pick up a quad core kit for $199 as a spare? or get a fully loaded Dell prebuilt quad for like 449? The days of the OS making a real difference when it comes to performance are long gone.
Just for shits and giggles while I had the latest Brothers in Arms loaded up and I was in a safe spot I minimized the game so I could read my CPU meter. While two cores were busy and my GPU was at around 24% load rendering the scene the other two cores and 76% GPU was sitting there twiddling its thumbs. And this isn't even a top o' the line gamer rig. We are talking a MOR AMD Phenom II 925 quad, an ATI HD4850 with 512Mb of GDDR3, 8Gb of RAM, and 3Tb of HDD space. If you take out the 3Tb and put back the dual 500Gb it came with we are talking less than $600 after MIR, less than $500 if I wouldn't have gone apeshit with RAM and went with 4Gb instead of 8Gb.
So I would argue that your thoughts on dedicated VS general purpose is true in the past, it simply isn't true now because you are comparing a dedicated Honda VS a general purpose Ferrari. We are talking so damned much overkill power now that even the most hardcore games are frankly causing the $500 PCs to yawn with boredom. Nothing really slams the system anymore because the insanely overpowered designs of current systems are built from some mythical future workload from space. Folks keep buying them because "bigger is better" but from checking PerfMon when doing a follow up to my customers homes I've found even the gamers simply aren't taxing the systems, they are just too overpowered.
So I just don't see how having a 1Kb OS is really gonna matter much when the OS has its own CPU and the games have another three to pisslefart with. Frankly the only reason games tax a system now at all is the frankly shitty poorly optimized console rips that are being handed off as PC games. When you compare the performance of a Valve title to these console rips its like night and day, with the original HL2 running quite nicely on a 7600GS. I just don't see how consoles are gonna be able to compete on graphics. Sure they'll get those that want to sit their fat ass on a couch with a controller and teabag, although even then I'd argue HTPCs are starting to take off thanks to netflix and Hulu, I have yet another customer coming to pick up another HTPC this very evening simply by word of mouth, but compete on graphics? i think that time is past and is simply never coming back. there is simply too much lead time between design and release and what we are seeing now is the biggest shift in PC design since the original Pentium nearly 20 years ago.
Well I would have agreed completely if we were talking WinXP. Running Prosumer stuff on XP was nothing but "fiddly bits' but frankly Win 7 is so damned butt simple your grandma could set up a DAW or a graphics workstation with Win 7. It has drivers for even the more esoteric stuff already loaded into Windows Update so that when you plug in the device before you can even reach for the disc Win 7 pops up with "Hey I got a driver for that. Shall I set it up for you?"
But the ones you are talking about, the equivalent of the "weekend warrior" types, I just don't see them shelling out several hundred dollars for FCPx when iMovie will do all that they will want. IMHO the difference between the pro, the prosumer, and the weekend warrior is this: The pro is doing this for a living, money is no object if it helps him be more efficient. The prosumer WANTS to be the pro, but is money constrained. The weekend warrior? Well they just want to make something that looks cool.
The problem I'd argue with FCPx is that they are priced between weekend warrior and prosumer without being clearly targeted to one or the other. it has more features than a weekend warrior is gonna care about and by losing the pros the prosumers are gonna see what the pros are using and want something similar. To me it just reeks of some "designed by committee" brainstorming session, about the polar opposite of what Jobs would have done. We'll have to wait and see what the future holds, but I predict in less than a year and a half FCPx will be all but dead, its sales dried up to nothing.
It's feeling better! Java feels happy, Java feels happy....thunk. Time to put Java on the cart me thinks.
Well I'd say it is also shame. I mean who would want to get busted for sharing "Kane&Lynch II: Dog Days"? it would be like being grabbed for a Uwe Boll movie! To be fair I actually bought Kane&Lynch II (Shut up! It was only $4 with shipping!) but I sure as hell wouldn't want to share the thing. Once I added the patch that removed the stupid as hell "Jap porn" pixelation crap from the titties and the head shots (You have a game where every other word is fuck, and the whole goal is to slaughter in masse, and you care about a little blood and titties? WTF?) I figure it was worth the $4.
And since TFA doesn't seem to be loading for me ATM I have a question: Is there any comparisons in TFA between DRM and piracy? because as we saw with Spore if you take the Goatse pic as the blueprint on how to treat your customers it WILL come back to bite you in the ass. As a PC repairman I've seen first hand what some of the nastier DRM can do** So I can understand those that really want to play a game simply bypassing the bullshit. So any comparisons of DRM VS piracy? Because I bet the nastier DRM games get snatched more than the easier ones.
**-Protip: do NOT install a Starforce game on an X64 OS! Not only does it cause all kinds of glitches because it tries to jam 32 bit code into a 64 bit kernel but the uninstaller does NOT work on X64! the only way to remove is to boot into another install and remove it manually or hope you have a system restore before you put that crap in!
Hell I've been thinking this for years and it wouldn't even have to be that "smart" of a storage system, just have the SSD as the first partition with the drive making a differential in a hidden partition on the HDD with failover so if the SSD goes tits up it would just function as a HDD.
To me the perfect drive would be thus...128Mb ultra fast RAM (probably DDR 3) as a cache followed by 120Gb-240Gb SSD followed by 2Tb onboard HDD. The fat cache would allow for intelligent disk queuing while helping to keep the HDD writes from bottlenecking the SSD, as I said a hidden partition with failover would keep you from worrying about SSD failure, and with 1.5Tb (after removing the hidden partition space) you'd have plenty of room for your non OS files, all in a convenient 3.5 or 2.5 form factor.
Question: What is wrong with Powershell ? While I'll be the first to admit that if you were a terminal guy the old CMD really didn't offer much, but on the flip side unless you were an admin there really wasn't much use for it and even then most of what you'd want a term for could be done with AD and GPOs, but give MSFT credit where credit is due, they listened when guys said they wanted a terminal and came out with Powershell which is really quite good.
But it seems like if your a programmer or terminal guy you should have NO problem picking up Powershell. It even has a very extensive set of help data based on the Man page layout so you ought to be able to pick it up no problem. You can automate pretty much everything with scripts, run them locally or remote, embed them, what more can you ask for from a scripting language and shell? I haven't been heavily into scripting since the days of DOS batch files but if I can pick it up i'm sure a guy like you with much more scripting experience will take to it like a duck to water.
And I'm sure I'll get hate for saying this but I'd say ATM that Windows is better than Linux, at least for average folks, simply because Torvalds is an asshole and won't allow a stable ABI like BSD, OSX, Windows, Solaris, and OS/2 have had for ages. I'd love nothing more than to have nice low cost off lease Linux boxes right next to the Windows ones, especially with the WinXP EOL hanging over so many PCs like a sword of Damocles, but until I can actually get an OS to survive the 6 month upgrade without one or more drivers taking a big old steaming dump? I just can't do it, the support costs would kill me. I have XP boxes that have been in the field since 2003 with ZERO need for me except for hardware upgrades, but with Linux? I've tried Mepis, Ubuntu/Mint, and PCLOS and in ALL of the above the upgrades have caused one or more drivers to take a big runny poo.
Finally to those I always get with the "ur doin it wrong, u must have tried Linux 6 years ago" etc I say this: Take ANY distro, your choice, and download the ISO from 5 years ago. Make sure ALL the drivers are functioning correctly, then upgrade it to the current version. NOW see how many drivers are 100% functioning. I bet you'll find a broken mess just like I did. with Windows the 2k/XP/2K3 driver model got 14 YEARS of support, the Vista/7 driver model is supported until 2020 on win 7 so if you count from Vista release that's another 14 years. Folks just don't have the money to pay me for support contracts nor do they change out their boxes every 6 months. If it can't survive even 6 years in the field? I just can't sell it, it would kill my rep. Sorry.
But I'd say the bitch with trying to snatch the Prosumer (that is what I call 'em, you can call them what you like) dollar is this: For those guys they are often money constrained and you can do it cheaper on Windows as I and several of my customers have found out. I have some graphics guys and some music guys in my customer base and frankly you can get a nice AMD quad fully loaded for less than a third of what the most basic Mac pro cost and as you pointed out the updates on the Mac pro line are now few and far between and I wouldn't even be surprised if it ends up being dropped. And on Windows 7 you can buy prosumer sound gear or big fat graphics cards with big pipes and plenty of vRAM for a hell of a lot cheaper than an Apple equivalent.
But to me the biggest fuckup of this whole thing is how much buzz they are losing. Apple under Jobs has always been about buzz, because buzz is what keeps them from being just another Intel OEM and moves them into hip territory. I can't count how many "behind the screens" type of programs I saw where you clearly saw they were using Apple gear for editing. That implanted firmly into the minds of those starting out in the biz "you want to be a pro? You use Apple" as well as making the consumers feel more superior about their MacBooks because "hey they make movies and shows on Macs!"
But now mark my words with them giving the finger to the professionals with iMovie Pro aka FCPx and as you pointed out killing X-Serve, which was bought by many pros for FCP Server and killing previous versions of FCP so if they need to add workstations they are SOL? Well one thing you can NOT fault MSFT for is being unclear about roadmaps. if anything MSFT has been insanely detailed with roadmaps, you can find out before purchase almost to the hour how long you have on support and the third party pro software is quite plentiful. In the coming years you'll see big fat WinFlags on the "behind the screens" shows and the buzz that came with being "the machines on which movies are made" will evaporate.
I'd just say this is yet more proof without Jobs leadership at the helm apple is a trainwreck waiting to happen. They are pretty much coasting now on products that were in the pipe when Steve was there, but what happens when they run out? Jobs was king at spotting new markets that weren't being treated right and taking them over with superior designs. Just look at iPod, there were MP3 players all over the place but the designs sucked ass! Same with the iPhone and iPad.
While I've never been an Apple guy (I have a G3 B&W I got for free that I sometimes play with but am seriously thinking of gutting to make a bad ass AMD quad into the case) I do have to give credit where credit is due. Despite what the local Linux loonie here on /. who thinks "ur a sekret M$ Ninja!" I do sincerely hope that Jobs comes out okay and takes control back at Apple, although the odds sadly aren't good for that type of cancer. But just seeing how badly the place runs without him I feel sorry for anybody that truly needs Apple products to function without the man and his vision at the helm. I doubt very seriously he would have burnt the market like what has been done with FCP, he knows the value of being hip too well.
Yeah what idiot in the animal kingdom gonna mess with this baaaad mofo, he's a rat with a mohawk! The fact that its poison just shows he's a rat that takes NO shit from nobody. I bet he's got a little switchblade to, just ready to stab your ass if you piss him off. he's a baaaad little rat dude!
Just going by screenshots huh? I'd agree with WinXP, the "Fisher price UI" wasn't any real improvement over Win2K it was just....blue. But Win 7 is leaps and bounds better than any other GUI MSFT has ever put out, and here is why: It lets the ones who can just barely get around a desktop like my dad get MUCH more functionality out of their computer.
For example he typed "mic" to find out how to set up his microphone and under related concepts it gave him a nice tutorial on speech recognition which he didn't even know Win 7 had. In just 6 months of using Win 7 he has found more features and gotten more use out of his OS than the whole previous 9 years on XP put together. At the same time it lets old hands like me get our work done MUCH quicker, thanks to breadcrumbs and libraries, instant search and jumplists. Having all the folders I have been using lately be as easy to get to as a single right click on the explorer icon? That is DAMN handy right there! My only fear is the sweaty monkey will go "oh oh oh...we don't look enough like teh Apple! And I love teh Apple! Make Win 8 more like teh Apple!" and cock things all up. Luckily for us Windows users and VARs Windows 7 is supported until 2020 so if there is a bad release like Vista? We can easily skip it.
As for TFA while I'm sure I'll get hate for daring to point out this emperor is kinda nekked I really lost any respect I had for the guy after reading this article with linus in his own words. His attitude when it comes to the kernel is "Plans? We don't need no steenkin plans! We gonna let it grow like a virus LOL!"...yeah Linus its called the clap! No damned wonder I could'nt ever get half my drivers to function past a single upgrade cycle and why Linux Linux is stuck at 1% with so many retailers like myself becoming frustrated and giving up on Linux. Can you imagine if you went to YOUR BOSS and told him "we don't need no steenkin plans!" on a multimillion dollar project? Yeah that would go over well.
Question: If your money is THAT unstable, and they are already paying you in USD, then why isn't everyone just using USD? It seems like the logical thing to do and it wouldn't be the first time a non US country has used USD, usually because of the same thing you're going through.
As for TFA they really need to nip this shit in the bud, because we ALL know what will happen if they allow this. The next thing we hear will be some chopper or piper cub will end up crashing because some drone was chasing Titney Spears and didn't notice the plane it was heading straight towards while trying to get some great tit shots for the cover of the rag mag.
Sadly I'd say a good 85%+ of the media in the USA right now is celebrity chasers and something like this, where they would have the ultimate "electric eye" to spy on when Lohan falls of the wagon or the next reality star pukes in front of some club? Oh yeah no risk of abuse with THAT idea.
That would be true IF the PCs weren't already 3 generations ahead and from the looks of the timetable with already be at octacore CPUs and a full 5, maybe 6 generations ahead of the GPU on the day of release.
It just isn't like the old days were a PC would gain a few hundred MHz or add a couple dozen shaders in between consoles anymore. Now we are talking HUGE fundamental shifts in design on the PC which the consoles are WAY behind before they are even released!
Take the Nintendo one for example, since that is the only GPU that we are currently sure of. the leaks say it is gonna be an HD4830, now that is not only nearly 3 generations behind NOW, with GDDR3 while everyone else is at GDDR5, but even as we speak AMD is switching from VLIW to vector based GPUs which will be the chips that are out by spring most likely. With Vector based they will be able to act like a "HyperCPU/GPU hybrid" with cache coherency with the CPU and the ability to do FP and physics faster than anything we've seen so far, and that is just the integrated! With the discrete you'll be able to use the APU for Physics and AI while the discrete does textures and rendering, giving frankly insane levels of polygon pushing with everything cranked to 11.
So by the time this console comes out it will be at least 3 generations, probably 4 behind, and be running the old arch that isn't even DX11 while the new arch gives a crazy amount of new features and power that this machine will NEVER be able to use. I don't care if the OS is 1Kb and the games are all running bare metal, you just can't make up for that big a difference in silicon. The problem is we are looking at 3 to 4 years from drawing board to shelf and in that time the PC has made huge strides. look at the last gen, when the X360 was released PCs were JUST starting to be dual core, and in less than 4 years you had cheap 6 cores and you could get quads for $199 in kit form. On the GPU side we went from the 7xxx series to Fermi. That is just too big a leap for the consoles to keep up with friend.
Uhhh...I don't know where you got your info from pal, but in case you ain't heard they yanked ALL previous versions off the shelves a full week before the release of FCPx, aka iMovie pro. That means if you want to grow your business? Sucks to be you! Need more workstations for this flick you're working on? tough shit pal, better hit the eBay and prepare to be assraped by the profiteers!
I'd agree with you completely IF and ONLY IF they had allowed the previous version to be sold and supported ALONG with the new. but they haven't, they have made it clear "take it or leave it" and mark my words they WILL leave it. You do NOT just yank a piece of software that companies are counting on to make money with a half ass new release with seriously missing features like lack of tape support. from what I've seen and read the new FCPx is priced and featured more like an iMovie pro than a FCP, and as I said those that needed FCPs features and don't have enough machines? Go pound sand is the word from Apple. NOT the attitude one should have and I bet it wouldn't have been done that way under Jobs.
Personally I'd like to know what the "post war privacy abuses" that TFA is speaking of that turned Germany so pro privacy. Are they talking about how the USA forced them to go through De-Nazification? Because what were we supposed to do? They WERE Nazis after all. Considering we'd had two world wars involving Germany in 30 years you can see why the USA might have wanted to make sure things had chilled out there.
As for TFA...meh. Anybody that thinks they have privacy in this age of supercomputers everywhere keeping up with every little CC transaction and every link you click on is probably deluding themselves. Sure I'd like it if everything was opt in only but in our heavily corporate culture if company A can make money off that info they WILL make money off that info. While I'm happy for the Germans i seriously doubt with all the attention whores we have in the USA anything that would ban FB would ever fly. hell the farmville withdrawal of millions of females across the country would probably drag things to a screeching halt!
Personally I'm more worried about what kind of pics my exGFs have pasted of me on their FB accounts. I mean that's all I'd need, have some potential client try to Google me and find some pic of me snoozing with bed hair and a caption that read "What a bastard!"
Want to hear the sad part? On several games I bought the game, have it still in the shrink wrap, and instead only play the pirated version. Why? Because sadly the pirated version is better because the pirates manage to strip out all the DRM horseshit so I can just play the damned game!
But I agree with you 100% if they think their fancy bitchslapping is gonna stop the pirates they need to wake the hell up! The pirates have been around since the days of BBS, when they would pass around floppy images over 300 baud modems. They went from that to rips, to full CDs, now to 10Gb+ full DVD rips. You can go to PTB and find working versions of their last "must be online to play SP" games, they think now will be different?
All it does is keep guys like me, who were sitting here all ready and happy to hand over my CC, from buying their games. I was all set to buy the Bioshock II SP DLC recently, but when I found I'd have to install the DRM crippled version because it wouldn't take my legit key without the DRM? fuck that, I gave the MSFT points to a nephew and closed the account. Being a PC repairman I have seen their DRM tear into an OS worse than ANY malware, even burning up DVD burners by throwing them into PIO mode. I have seen it throw all kinds of nasty errors, like did you know that if you install a Starforce game onto a 64bit OS not only will Starforce cause all kinds of nastiness but you CAN NOT remove it? The uninstaller is 32bit and doesn't work on X64! And on top of that the Starforce code is 32bit yet it tries to shoehorn itself into a 64bit kernel which as I'm sure you know is a BIG no no.
So all they are doing is hurting their own sales. The pirates still get their games, just guys like me take our CCs and go somewhere else. I have over 35 games on GOG right now, and I've gotten around to playing maybe 12, and finishing maybe 4. Why? Because even though I haven't played the ones I have when they have a sale I'm so happy they treat me like a customer and NOT scum I'm happy to throw them some more money! Give us a good value, don't treat us like scum, and watch the money roll in. Why is that soooo damned hard for them to understand?
Well let your old neighborhood PC repairman help ya out with that bud. Here ya go, a little gem called HD Tune which you can install (or put on a flash as a portable if you like) which will not only give you an error scanner but with also give you a full SMART report including ANY changes that have occurred. Quite useful for spotting those problems loooong before they become a problem.
if you'd like it along with many other useful tools you might want to try Kel's CPL Bonus Pack which gives you not only HD Tune but over a dozen great tools right in the Windows CPL, like the HP USB bootable format tool, CPU/GPU-Z, one click driver backup, just a ton of nice features. It works on everything from Win2K-Win 7 X64 BTW, it'll just put them under 32 bit control panel on the X64 OSes but otherwise work perfectly.
And finally if you have a 4Gb or greater flash lying around (and what geek doesn't?) then I'd suggest computer repair utility toolkit v2. Now it is about 2 years old since the FOSS guys had a shitfit and made them take it down, but since this is the net and nothing ever disappears here you go. Simply update the apps and voila! A full toolkit that does just about everything, hardware, software, malware, tweaks, you name it, all with a nice launcher (which is easy to add your own apps to) on a stick.
Anyway i've found with the right tools NO HDD failure should frankly be unexpected...well unless you drop it of course. Otherwise with the above you'll get a heads up weeks in advance which gives you plenty of time to hit Newegg and get a replacement. Enjoy!