It would have been funnier if it had been an Apple, then the husband would have a reason for saying "Honey you're holding it wrong".
I just don't get why this is considered "news" as this is about as real and legally binding as the Japanese guy that "married" his love pillow. I'd say the only thing that could be considered "news" was that there was a woman willing to put up with his robo-bullshit, and even then it is only news to the guy's family (who are probably on their knees thanking whatever deity they believe in there was someone willing to marry the putz).
Actually I can be accused of a lot of things but NIMBY isn't one of them. I live less than an hour from two nuclear reactors and supported them wholeheartedly.
The only thing with regards to energy I didn't support is all the natural gas wildcatting in the area, and that is because an engineer friend showed me the before and after earthquake charts. Basically this area never had above a 1.2 and those were maybe once every 20 years, now we are having 3.x quakes almost daily, and the wildcatters have a nice little scam where they have a shell corp already made up and waiting so if they get hit with any real bills they sell the assets to the shell corp for a few bucks and then dissolve the company. makes sure they have all the profits, none of the liability.
But I'd say the problem even more than politicians is the MSM, who look for any kind of horror spin they can put on anything. They're the first to point out what a horrible thing X will be, be it an eyesore, noisy, messy, etc and the "people" and I use that term for some of these reality TV watching knuckle draggers loosely, believe what they are told. Hell look at how even today more than 40% of the American public believe Iraq was over 9/11!
If the MSM would say "Look, you want AC, right? You want fridges and PS3s and all that over stuff then you HAVE to allow power plants to be built to supply all that power you are using" then you'd see NIMBY dry up and blow away like a fart on the breeze. but protesters make for good TV, even if it fucks the country they don't care as long as they score in the ratings.
Actually even having the source doesn't help without a stable ABI, as I tried following the advice and only using open drivers...what happened? The sound and network shit itself and died! We are talking bog standard Realtek chips, the same shit that is on a good 90% of the hardware currently sold, but when the 6 month upgrade was applied POW bye bye sound and network. This doesn't count the Intel "This driver is flaky this way, that driver is flaky that way" BS, nor does it count the open source Nvidia and ATI drivers I tried, one of which gave me black screen o' death, the other would flash the screen on and off after the upgrade like a cable was loose.
Why the community which prides itself on geeks can't seem to do basic math is beyond me. You have X number of people currently qualified to maintain kernel drivers, you have Y times tens of thousands of drivers. Simple math will tell you even if the kernel devs stayed up 24/7 and did NOTHING but fix drivers all that time they will always be behind! With a stable ABI both free and non free could be "write once, use for years" which would free up the kernel devs for QA, reverse engineering those OEMs that won't give Linux a driver, working on features, etc.
I think the problem is Linux geeks think because something is easy for them then others will find it easy as well and nothing could be further from the truth. if you want the world to adopt Linux then you have to give the world what it wants, NOT expect the world to adapt to you. Joe Public will NOT learn Bash, nor will he trawl forums, nor will he deal with broken drivers every 6 months. I like Linux, I really do. It has some damned nice DEs and plenty of software, it also does the jobs most home users want a PC for.
But until I can sell a Linux PC and KNOW it will "just work" a year from now with ZERO intervention from myself? Well sadly the cost of Windows HP is actually cheaper than dealing with Linux is for me and my shop.
Dude all of the above except for Comodo Dragon and the MSFT patch is on Ninite, where all you have to do is check the fucking box and if check the fucking box is REALLY so damned hard for you? Then I would suggest you shouldn't even be on a PC. How about a nice ARM tablet where you never get any updates? probably be much safer for you.
Ninite has Flash, Messenger, Klite DXVA codecs, Avast free, it is all as simple as 'check the box". You have a single reboot for Avast free, big fricking whoop. If anything I'd argue that compared to WinXP and the brain dead "Hey lets design everything to run as admin!" bullshit win 7 is a breeze and a joy to work with. Thanks to Win 7 having the drivers integrated into WU I spend more time setting up users for my customers than I do installing or tweaking the OS.
And there is a simple way to mitigate that, it is called defense in depth. So far I haven't had a single Win 7 PC I did defense in depth on get infected. Here is what I do..I install Avast Free (which gives sandboxing and scans pages BEFORE load) along with Malware bytes and finally I add support for Structured Exception Handling Overwrite Protection and so far not a single bug.
I also do NOT install Java as I've found the vast majority have no use for Java, I use Sumatra PDF instead of Adobe (Sumatra is a simple PDF reader without support for a lot of the "features" that Adobe gets pwned for) and finally if they get a page saying "You need the latest flash" I have a bookmark already made for them on the bookmarks toolbar of Comodo Dragon (Chromium based that uses its own secure DNS that is separate from the OSes DNS, which helps block exploit pages) to take them to Ninite which is like a repo for Windows third party software and always has the latest and greatest. i tell them if after updating from Ninite the site still says it wants to install Flash it is malware and avoid it.
These additions take maybe another 20 minutes on a new build but is WELL worth it IMHO. I have some customers that on XP would get more viruses than a Bangkok Whore no matter what I did, but now with Windows 7 they are clean as a whistle, just to make sure I have scanned with several boot CDs with the latest defs and nothing, clean machines.
I just hope MSFT doesn't cock this up with Windows 8. Windows 7 is solid, easy to use, and easy to lock down. i'm just glad Win 7 is supported until 2020 so that I can avoid Win 8 if it turns out to be another Vista!
The problem is (and this is NOT a Godwin, this is an analogy to their infrastructure not their evil) we have a propaganda machine that makes the ones the Nazis had in the 30s look like some kid with leaflets. look at how quickly the government got the MSM to label Assange a "dirty rapist terrorist monster" while NOT A SINGLE ONE said a damned thing about the cable showing we had a contractor selling 9 year old boys as fucktoys to get a contract, and they had done the same to 11 year old girls in Kosovo and our ONLY concern was how to cover it up, no busting the bastards, no getting the kids back, just cover it up.
It is THIS, this right here, that is gonna cause us to be fucked. The Hiroshima bomb power of the MSM when they get together to spread propaganda. If they want to eliminate ANY right to privacy or anything else all they need to do is have Nancy Grace stand there and say "This (insert thing the government wants removed) is a haven for pedos and terrorists!" and its bye bye. Hell thanks to the power of propaganda 3 years after Dubya left office a full 40% of Americans STILL believe that Iraq had something to do with 9/11. That is what Goebbels proved years ago, you give them a truth, a half truth, and a complete lie, and they will swallow the whole thing. I'm afraid you're right, we're soooo doomed!
Sorry to burst your bubble but yes Linux only has 1% and if you will bother to read this link they have the numbers from several sources to back it up.
And why is that so hard to believe? I frankly have yet to see a single Linux install on any of my test beds survive the 6 month upgrade deathmarch without 1 or more drivers shitting themselves, there is no "rollback driver" or any other simple user friendly way to fix drivers when they break (with Windows it is "reinstall driver, reboot" and that is if a driver breaks, I honestly haven't seen it in years) but instead you have to trawl some forum, hope they have a fix, tweak said fix because it is for hardware b rev g and you have hardware d rev j and then IF you manage to pull off that, and put it all perfectly in a 70s era term, with NO spellcheck or autocomplete? Well then you might have your drivers back up...until the 6 month upgrade happens all over again.
In my shop I tried ubuntu/Mint, I tried Mepis, and I tried PCLOS, and in ALL of the above the drivers shit themselves. As one Linux user told me "Oh it happens, Linux guys just accept it and learn to deal" but you know what? Joe and sally average will not deal with that bullshit nor will the trawl forums for fixes, nor will they deal with a 70s era term.
Quit acting like the terminal gives you magical gonad powers and make it friendly for the masses and you know what? they WILL come. But sadly after dealing with the Linux community for years it is pretty damned obvious they will accept nothing less than the world doing things their way and it is never ever not in a million fucking years gonna happen, okay? Vista was a dog and you STILL didn't gain shit, instead a company with a $1000 price of entry gained like mad. If a product that costs $1000 stomps your product which costs ZERO dollars? That should be a big old clue stick whacking you in the head.
Now waste your mod points but it won't make up equal down, black equal white, nor will it make my words any less true. Fix the God Damned driver model already!
Wow are you REALLY that clueless? And what is with the Unix looking text? afraid of HTML or something?
Since you seem to need it explained i'll spell it out...You have a party that at EVERY SINGLE TURN tries to fuck the poor, be it cuts in medicaid/care, social security, freezes to cost of living, giving bailout to companies sending jobs overseas (look up "GE India bailout" if you wish to read about it) and generally kicking the dogshit out of the poor at every single opportunity...yet you have the poor going "please sir, can you kick me a little harder?". And my analogy is quite sound thank you. In BOTH cases you have a group that obviously looks upon a certain group with hatred, yet in this case you have the group being spit upon championing the spitters which makes about as much sense as "Blacks for the Klan" since in both cases you would be supporting someone that HATES you. And how can you describe it as anything less than hate, when most poor that are getting any assistance are living like animals on a pittance and the right wingers want to take the pittance away?
And by your post I can see you are part of the "Lets give teh rich MORE MONIES nom nom nom" party, also known as the "we're so full of shit you can smell us before you see us party" so frankly I shouldn't be surprised. Whats a matter, can't get Faux Newz to come in? Lets see how your philosophy has worked...we had trickle upon (81-88), voodoo economics (88-92) Lets give free trade status to those with NO environmental or workers regulations (92-00) the "Hey the rich only control 80% of the wealth, lets give them all MASSIVE tax breaks while starting TWO wars!" plan (00-08) and finally bailout the rich baby, bailout the rich (08-present).
If your philosophy wasn't completely full of shit we should be living in paradise, yet here we all, falling apart. your next excuse will be we "didn't let the free market work" which ironically is the excuse the communists used when their shit didn't work either. contrary to your 40+ year plan of "let teh rich have MORE MONIES nom nom nom" studies and common sense shows that higher taxes on the wealthy lead to jobs and growth for the economy since if they'll get taxed if they keep it they invest it in businesses rather than hoard it which takes it OUT of the economy and makes it 'dead money".
Are the Dems saints, not by a looong shot and too many subscribe to your "MORE MONIES nom nom nom" plan for destroying the country, but at least they don't go out of their way to kick the shit out of the peasants. The symbol for the right wing should be changed from an elephant to the monopoly man lighting a cigar with a $100 bill while kicking a poor person down a flight of stairs. that would be closer to the reality of your party.
Want to wipe out piracy in the west overnight? here is how you do it...Win 7 Starter for $35, Win 7 Home Premium upgrade for $50! Tada, piracy eliminated overnight. The bitch is I wouldn't be surprised if piracy is part of the MSFT business model. As in TFA pirated machines often get malware, the PC slows down, they find out that Best buy wants OMFG! crazy money to clean the thing and end up buying a new PC. Most folks don't realize the little mom & pop shops like mine do wipe and reinstalls for $50 and one look at how much a Worst Buy wants it is bye bye working PC and hello new laptop.
Of course once they get the fools on the laptop treadmill that's their ass, because those low end laptops last on average about 2 years IF you baby them and because they are nothing but proprietary good fucking luck getting affordable parts. I already tell people if they try to bring in a laptop no hardware fixes, as the price will end up being more than I can get them another POS laptop on sale.
So frankly I seriously wonder if piracy is part of the MSFT business plan here in the states, because they sure as hell do encourage it with the price gouging. The bitch is the pirate version is better like so many other bits of 1s and 0s. You should try "Windows Tiny7" sometime, just to test it I put it on a 1.5GHz with 512Mb of SDRAM and damned if the thing wasn't peppy. It had all the security features like UAC and was using just 256Mb of RAM on the desktop. They really should hire that guy, he makes WinFLP and Embedded look bad.
Funny but like cockroaches I doubt it would hurt those buggers.
But this shows exactly what is wrong with NIMBY bullshit. Instead of somewhere like Yucca where scientists had studied the problem and come up with a deep, dry, solid hole in the middle of nowhere you are gonna have a bunch of states, probably in the south as our economy is beyond rotten, which is probably THE worst possible place you could put the stuff thanks to all the rain and tornadoes!
It is time we told the NIMBYs to STFU and let scientists instead of politicians work to solve the problems. Because if we don't do something about the NIMBYs frankly won't a damned thing get built because it will always piss off someone.
The NIMBYs say " We don't want to store the waste for nuclear (use reprocessing and cut down on the waste is what we should do, but heaven forbid that might be smart) and we don't want solar because its an eyesore, or wind because it is noisy, or coal because it is messy, but you damned well better make sure you give us enough power to blast our ACs all summer!"
The NIMBYs remind me of those damned teabaggers, who cheer the three wars while at the same time demanding their taxes stay low like it is their God given right to more MONIES! Nom nom nom. Where do they think the money for the three wars they are cheering is gonna come from, Chinese Santa Claus?
Haven't you noticed, that is the answer to EVERYTHING according to the right wing, it is like the number 42 to them. No jobs? Give teh rich more MONIES nom nom nom! People can't afford healthcare? More MONIES for teh rich nom nom nom! Budget crisis, multiple wars, factories sent to India, illegals burning the flag and overloading the hospitals, inner cities falling apart, infrastructure failing? Why to cure ALL of those problems all you have to do is....give teh rich more MONIES nom nom nom!
What amazes me is how many people buy their bullshit. You should come to the south sometime, where you will see McCain signs in front of tarpaper shacks, it really is fucking amazing. it would be like black folks giving money to the Klan, here is a group that has done their damnedest to screw poor folks at EVERY opportunity, yet those same same poor folks will go "please sir, will you kick me again?". I just don't get it. Here we have the teabaggers trying to RUIN the credit rating of this country, which will cause rampant inflation, yet I still hear poor folks saying "It is Obama's fault".
The difference is if UAC is active and you are using a Chromium based or IE so that you have low rights mode (WTF Firefox? it has been FOUR YEARS already, get on the ball!) it is actually pretty damned hard to infect Windows 7 without getting the user actively involved. Of course getting the average user to help you install malware is trivially easy, even after all these years of MSFT trying to warn people not just to run any old thing they find on the net.
But as someone who fixes machines 6 days a week I can tell you that the infection rate once I got most of my customers to switch to 7 went waaaay down. And Windows 7 doesn't really take much more than XP I have several family members on late model P4s with 1Gb of RAM that Win 7 is running just fine on. They don't have Aero but who cares.
But I have to agree about TFA and pirated Windows. Ballmer, in yet another proof of his incompetence killed the $50 Windows 7 HP upgrade which frankly was the best weapon against piracy I'd ever seen. Guys that had been running pirated Windows for years went legit thanks to that affordable upgrade path. But now that it is gone I'm seeing "Xp Pro Corp SP3 Razr1911 Edition" machines again alongside the pirated Windows 7 machines on Craigslist. you can always spot the pirated versions BTW, as they ALWAYS use the most expensive SKU. When you have a PC that isn't worth $120 running a $200+ copy of Windows Ultimate? yeah its pirated.
The thing is while the pirates know about Autopatcher and WSUS Offline the folks they are selling these machines to don't and since they won't pass WGA (the Windows 7 hack lasted for awhile but I'm now seeing folks that bought PCs with Win 7 off of CL coming in with WGA warnings) most are simply disabling Windows Updates. Folks don't know nor realize it is off and just think their PC is slowing down because "it is getting older" instead of the truth, it is has more viruses than a Bangkok Whore.
I hate to break the news to ya pal but governments haven't needed MSFT to provide backdoors in years. As someone who spends 6 days a week fixing the things I can tell you foolproof way to get into a good 90%+ of the machines out there. 1.- For the guys a webpage that says "Hey want to look at teh titiez! Just run our Iz_Not_Backdoor_Iz-Codec.exe to get teh free pronz!" 2.-For the ladies a chat window that pops up "Hey you just got to see teh cute kitteh videoz!" which takes them to a malware laden page, and 3.- for the old folks a page that looks like Windows Update that says "ZOMG you got teh viruz ZOMG! Run Iz_Not_Backdoor_Iz-cleaner to kill it ZOMG!" and voila! you have just pwned any damned machine you want.
I wish it weren't so but I have actually seen a user uninstall the AV because it wouldn't let him install malware so sadly i know it is true. Linux or Mac OSX wouldn't help either because all you'd have to do is send Iz_Not_Backdoor_Iz- stuff _u_want.sh with helpful instructions on how to run it and they WILL run it as long as they think they are getting something, titties, free movies, kitteh pictures, or protection from a mythical bug.
As for TFA? Give it up friend. The governments have done gotten spooked by the Arab springs so I doubt very seriously if your "unbreakable" encryption exists they will allow YOU to have it. Hell I'm waiting for them to have Nancy grace and the other talking heads start talking about how "Encryption is nothing but a haven for perverts and terrorists!" complete with a couple of pedos that "got away with it" thanks to having encryption. I figure if they do go after it they'll go after TrueCrypt first, that one is too easy to use.
We all make jokes about Pakistan trying to ban encryption but with all the big brother bullshit we see being passed how long until the west joins them?
As WrongSizeGlass pointed out I was lumping those in with Libya as "collateral actions" which is how they are written off on the budget, with missiles at 1.5 million a pop on average being shot like left over bottle rockets on July 5th.
But if you want to see where we are blowing money like shit through a goose it AIN'T the poor, who haven't be given a cost of living increase in years and I wouldn't be surprised if they never get one again. No it is the military industrial complex with their friends the teabaggers and their "give teh rich more MONIES! Nom nom nom" demanding ever lower taxes like it is a God given right even while they cheer three wars. Apparently wars are great as long as THEY don't have to pay for them and can profit nicely from their stock in Raytheon.
But I figure a few more factories get sent to India, a few more demonstrations of the illegals burning the flag and demanding the non Mexican people get out of the west coast, and we'll be having us a nice race and class war. Most folks are barely hanging on now, and when the bubble bursts on the education and retirement mess you will have teeming masses of starving pissed off people. As the Mexicans have shown the melting pot no longer exists, it is "fuck you gimmie what I want" and frankly most folks in the flyover states wouldn't piss on a rich person if they were on fire.
Things are gonna get ugly folks, I figure we have less than a decade before the hyperinflation hits from the presses cranking 24/7 and when folks have to pay $50 for a loaf of bread the shit WILL hit the fan.
Well if we didn't have as another poster put it "more people in prison than the rest of the world combined' (not sure if that is true but frankly wouldn't surprise me) and create criminals by giving folks records for dope which ensures they will NEVER be able to have a real job, well maybe the guards wouldn't be having to deal with teeming masses of prisoners in an emergency. Maybe when the whole system collapses like a house of cards thanks to blowing $$$$$ on 3 wars while giving tax breaks we'll start acting like sensible human beings and realize that "sin" crimes belong in the pulpit not the law books.
As for TFA WHAT THE FUCK? Why in the name of all that is good is ANY of the systems hooked to the net? What, the warden can't live without YouTube? If there was a system that should never ever in a million years be let loose on the net it is THAT one, as every troll on the planet would just looove to open all the cells "just for the LULZ". But what do I expect when prisons are now for profit human processing units instead of what they were supposed to be, which was a way for the state to keep the violent away from the rest of society.
You know this country is fucked when I look at my local paper and the only places hiring are the prisons and the MickeyDs. This just goes to show the former isn't even run as well as the latter, how fucking sad is that?
Well considering the fact that NEVER in our history have we been at war and NOT raised taxes and we are currently in THREE wars...I think I know what the problem is! I'm not rocket scientist but 800 MILLION a day blown down rat holes shooting at brown people could be a large part of the problem me thinks.
Add to that money sinks like the Gerald Ford Aircraft carrier (uneeded, Enterprise was recently refit and is in good shape, not to mention we already have 11, more than quadruple what anyone else has) and the F35 which is insanely over budget and still isn't ready? The teabaggers may want to blame this on the poor but if we got rid of the 700+ overseas bases (uneeded, we can get to anywhere on the planet and drop bombs with our long range bombers and aircraft carriers) along with the three wars pissing money down a rathole and use our troops at home to deal with the giant leaking sieve of a border I think they'd see significant savings.
Of course that wouldn't fit into the ultimate right wing fantasy, the mantra of "Give teh rich more MONIES! Nom nom nom" which they've been pushing like trickle upon for 30+ years and ran the country into the shitter with. Sadly studies along with common sense shows higher taxes on the wealthy increases employment and growth since if they get taxed if they kep it they are more likely to INVEST it into business rather than hoard, which takes it out of the economy and is "dead money". But instead we'll hear it all blamed on those dirty peasants and their little checks putting food into their dirty little mouths. The cure? Why "Give teh rich more MONIES! Nom nom nom" of course!
And just think of the money you'll save on suicide netting!
Seriously though it is time for we humans to face a cold hard fact of reality, and that is the days of trading labor for capital are over and there is NOTHING that the capitalists can do to change that. We are playing IQ musical chairs with larger and larger amounts of people simply never getting a seat because thew reality is the machine can do it better than any human ever could. The machine won't get tired, won't get sick,, don't get hurt or need overtime.
The jobs that just 30 years ago would have employed a large piece of the population can be done today by the amount of people that would fill a small HS gym with seats left over. The average person has an IQ of 105 so you simply can't make the entire population rocket scientists, and I would argue that like housing the next bubble that will be bursting will be the education racket, with large masses of our youth buried under crushing debt they will never be able to pay destroying their credit rating and further depressing the economy.
So we are gonna have to make some hard choices here: Do we create millions of "make work" jobs, the equivalent of putting paper A into slot B just to justify paying the masses? Do you go on the road we are currently on, with an ever growing gap between the haves and have nots pretty much guaranteeing an Arab Spring in our future? Or do we pay people NOT to work the way we pay farmers not to grow crops?
Because we have already lost industrial, one of the last places for those with a strong back to work, and is there any job at your local MickeyD that couldn't be done by an automated assembly line? Of course not but the fast food industry is a classic example of "make work" where the only reason they haven't automated is because the state is covering for their pathetic wages in the form over government assistance. If the corporate handouts were to end (which with declining tax revenues thanks to the rich using scams like the "double dutch" and the honest folks not having jobs will have to happen sooner or later) then the fast food industry WILL become automated, just as Wendy's now uses call centers instead of hiring someone to work the window at each location.
We are just gonna have to face the fact that like slavery and suffrage the days of trading labor for capital have run its course. Unless we want to become Luddites and smash the machines we WILL have to find a way for the masses to survive. While I'm sure many teabaggers wouldn't mind going back to the 1840s where the poor died in the streets that simply isn't gonna happen, look to the Arab Springs to see what happens when you ignore the masses for too long. It is time to accept capitalism is dead and move on, to ignore this fact is to proceed at our own peril.
I'm afraid it is YOU sir that are wrong, and I'd think if what you say is true my 20+ years building and repairing PCs I would have seen this. in fact in my ENTIRE 20 years I can name exactly TWO cases, just two, where what you said was true. One was the IBM Deathstars where they had cheaped out on the lube for the motor and it would cook, and the other was the circa 2004 Maxtor Diamondmax where they used an early green solder that turned out to give after repeated heat cycles. In both of those cases you have poof!
But I've replaced more drives than you've probably had hot meals, hell I got a fricking cabinet stuffed full just of sub 200Gb HDDs that were working pulls from customer upgrades, and I just took a box of dead sub 100Gb HDDs over to an engineer friend who strips them for the rare earth magnets. in EVERY. SINGLE. CASE. of failure, every single one, there were warning signs. the drive would run hot, make noise, throw delayed write errors, have SMART warnings at POST, something. And even more importantly once you got a warning I had time to get the data off. Sometimes I had to spinrite the drive to move the data to good sectors, one I even had to stick in a freezer in a plastic bag to chill the failing motor before doing a quick snatch and grab of the data, but in EVERY case I was able to get back a good 75%+ of the original data.
Now I have found both through my gamer customers and talking to other shop owners that with SSDs the opposite is true. When an SSD fails 9 times out of 10 your only clue that something is going is you turn on the machine and....nothing. About half the time it won't even show up in BIOS which makes me believe they have a serious flaw in the Sandforce controller chips, but even in the cases where you can see the drive in BIOS you can rarely get any real amount of data off.
in the end it comes down to how much money and time you can afford to blow. Constant backups take time and resources, RMAs cost on average $40 for shipping and a good 3 week wait for processing and return, and depending on how much was done since the previous backup and whether or not you have a spare onsite we are talking several hours there. For many that is simply unacceptable, especially if the PC is used for any actual work. And considering the SSD manufacturers need Joe Public to go SSD to get the economies of scale required to lower the price having a high failure rate with NO warning at all really isn't helping their case.
Here is the difference in your examples and WebM...Bink and Vorbis for gaming? Most games come on discs so nobody gives a crap about file sizes and as you pointed out they are free so happy slappy for the developers. I would argue even on DLC that nobody gives a shit about file sizes as the textures are a hell of a lot bigger than any Bink video or Vorbis audio they have.
As for DivX? One word: PIRACY, damned near every single video on P2P is a DivX or Xvid encoded.avi file nowadays and while some are.mkvs the.avis still out number them by a pretty good amount. Now when folks snatch a video being able to just slap it on a disc and play it on their DVD is nice no? This is a nice little feature and you'd be surprised how many people look for the DivX label which is how the DivX corp gets paid.
But for WebM you have NONE of those advantages and quite a few liabilities. Google has already made it clear they won't indemnify nobody and sure as hell won't back you up with lawyers so there goes the free argument. In streaming file sizes DO matter and again WebM sucks compared to H.26x, and as for piracy the only format coming close to.avi is H.264+AAC.mkv files which Surprise! Are the latest DivX format and thus play on the latest DVD players.
Like Theora and Vorbis before it the ONLY selling point WebM has is it is supposedly "kinda sorta" free, but unlike Vorbis frankly has no secondary usage. The bandwidth you'd use hosting WebM videos would end up costing you more than an H.264 license, so why would you bother?
And I'm sure I'll get hate for making this comparison but it really is like Linux on the desktop. the big selling point is "free as in beer" but with the driver model so fucked up the only way it is "free as in beer" is if your time is worthless AND you have the skills to do the forum dance every six months along with being able to tweak said "fixes" so you can get your hardware back up. The cost in sheer frustration for home users or in money for hiring a guy like me to fix the damned thing every 6 months means in less than a year it is cheaper just to buy that OEM Windows 7 HP.
So I'd say you really need to be better, not just a "kinda sorta" replacement if you want to sell to the masses. No corp is gonna touch WebM with Google refusing to back it up, and home users are better off with H.264 and DivX. So there really is no compelling reason to go with WebM, none at all.
IIRC WD bought Samsung's drive business, and Seagate Hitachi. It may be the other way around. Either way bye bye two of my favorite manufacturers. If I was you I'd look into snatching another drive before they run out. As soon as this customer pays me next week (just waiting on his wireless card so I can finish up his build) I'm gonna grab me the 2Tb Samsung EcoDrive while they are still out there. They really are top notch.
And as for the poster that says Seagate is all "anecdotes"? Bullshit, total bullshit. Go to Newegg, go to Tigerdirect. look at the comments for ANY Seagate above 750Gb and you'll see fail after fail after fail. Seagate just can't seem to build anything over 750Gb that doesn't end up killing itself. some are saying their firmware code is shite, some are saying their are cheaping out on the motors, personally I don't give a shit WHAT is causing it, all I know is that 3 different Seagates with different batch numbers ALL shit themselves barely 4 months down the line. Considering I have not seen a failure of a Samsung or Hitachi drive in ages having three in a row by a single manufacturer was enough for me.
So if you like Hitachi snatch while you can friend, as they and Samsung will be no more by Oct. Both WD and Seagate said they'll honor the warranties so no loss there, and as I said I've not had a lick of trouble with drives from either company. they will be missed.
Well if you read TFA (I know, but I got bored) it says they are slashing the price from the original $299 to $99. So if you don't mind not getting support when they end up bailing out it might be a pretty sweet deal. Anybody know what the specs on the thing are? How hackable is it?
Actually I'd say they have already licked the 3.5 heat problem by dropping the speed to 5400 or 5900 RPM. As TFA shows once you get to a certain level of density the slower speed drives keep up quite nicely with the faster drives, especially if it has a decent sized cache and Windows 7 is given a decent amount of RAM to use for Superfetch.
Personally I never thought I'd own a drive slower than 7200RPM, as I still had bad memories of the late 90s 5400RPM drives but after building several kits for customers that came with new 5900RPM drives as the only drive I have to say I was wrong. I took the plunge and bought a 5900RPM Samsung EcoDrive to replace my gaming drive and damned if it didn't whoop the 400Gb Seagate 7200RPM drive it replaced on benchmarks. I guess that 32Mb buffer really makes the difference.
I'm only sad we have lost Samsung and Hitachi as hard drive manufacturers as they really made great drives.I hope WD keeps their quality up as Seagate has already turned to shit since buying Maxtor. After having three Seagate Tb drives die in less than a year I wouldn't touch their crap again. So congrats WD, please don't pull a Seagate and turn to poo, okay?
Question: How EXACTLY have you seen great gains? Because frankly I've found with Windows 7 and plenty of RAM (4Gb or better, I personally run 8Gb) that all the apps are preloaded into memory and since RAM will always be faster than an SSD I just don't see the appeal. Sure boot up is faster, but who does that anymore? The only time I use anything besides hybrid sleep is when I'm adding or changing out a part. Hell with 8Gb of RAM even the executables of whatever game I'm playing at the time is preloaded, so the only wait is for the GPU to load textures , which you'd have to do with an SSD as well since nobody would be foolish enough to use an SSD for some multiGb game install.
So exactly what gains are you seeing? The only one I noticed with my gamers were the boot speed was better than the Raptor and with one having 12Gb and the other 16Gb of RAM frankly the SSD really didn't get used much besides initial boot. The fact that it failed even though Windows had most of the OS loaded into RAM just made me even more wary of SSDs, because while the gamers have more money than sense most of my customers are working stiffs and need things to last.
Personally, and I'm sure i'll get hate for daring to point out the head guy is kinda nekkid, I don't see why they are getting their panties in a bunch for because WebM sucks the big wet titty. Try running it on a netbook, you are talking a slideshow, whereas everything built in the last few years has H.264 hardware decoding so it plays great. Hell flash plays great as well on netbooks and they are the ones that are gonna win the whole "H.26x VS WebM" debate anyway since they have MUCH better tools for designers and home users.
I'm sorry but just like with Theora and Vorbis WebM is a half baked not as good "kinda sorta" solution. If the FOSS community truly want us to use free codecs then they need to get AHEAD of the game, not try to replace a de facto standard years after with another half baked solution that isn't as good as what we have. I'd suggest working on an ultra efficient Ultra HD codec, something that does higher than BD at decent sizes, and add decent 3D support while you are at it.
But frankly WebM is DOA just like Vorbis and Theora simply because it isn't as good as what we have. It takes more memory and CPU than H.26x, takes larger file sizes for the same apparent quality in picture which equals more expensive for streaming, and while even the bottom of the line netbooks and tablets have H.26x support built in from the looks of it the hardware will have to be made from scratch which means shitcan every device that isn't a multicore. It just isn't worth it for the public who frankly don't give a shit about patents because unlike copyrights (which the assholes are quick to scream DMCA! over) most folks simply will never get bit in the ass by a patent.
Actually I'd say it is because all the game developers are director wannabes and have giant boners for "cinematic experiences' which ALWAYS translates to "walk a straight line, scripted battle with big theme music to make it heroic, walk in a straight line, cinema scene" lather rinse repeat. Add to this the two gun limit regenerating health Halo bullshit and you have, to quote one of my favorite reviewers "flavorless wallpaper paste squirted out of the backsides of uncreative publishers with seriously fucked-up eating habits."
As for TFA I hate to break the news to ya Ubisoft baby but the Reloaded pirate version is usually released a week or two from the release date it is simply that nobody wants your shit since most of the crap you've been putting out is just that, crap, pirates don't bother. It would be like pirating Kane & Lynch, your PC would need a little brown bag over it to hide the shame of downloading that turdfest.
So if your goal was to put out games the pirates don't want, and which pisses off the legit customers like me so bad we won't buy it for $1, even if you threw in your entire back catalog? Mission accomplished Ubisoft. I had full intentions of buying it on release day whether it was shit or not simply because it had the 71 Pontiac Le Mans, which was the car I spent my teen years driving. But I won't deal with your always online BS so that is another $50 you won't be getting. Keep it up Ubi, maybe when you lose enough money you'll get bought by Activision, you two seem made for each other.
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It would have been funnier if it had been an Apple, then the husband would have a reason for saying "Honey you're holding it wrong".
I just don't get why this is considered "news" as this is about as real and legally binding as the Japanese guy that "married" his love pillow. I'd say the only thing that could be considered "news" was that there was a woman willing to put up with his robo-bullshit, and even then it is only news to the guy's family (who are probably on their knees thanking whatever deity they believe in there was someone willing to marry the putz).
Actually I can be accused of a lot of things but NIMBY isn't one of them. I live less than an hour from two nuclear reactors and supported them wholeheartedly.
The only thing with regards to energy I didn't support is all the natural gas wildcatting in the area, and that is because an engineer friend showed me the before and after earthquake charts. Basically this area never had above a 1.2 and those were maybe once every 20 years, now we are having 3.x quakes almost daily, and the wildcatters have a nice little scam where they have a shell corp already made up and waiting so if they get hit with any real bills they sell the assets to the shell corp for a few bucks and then dissolve the company. makes sure they have all the profits, none of the liability.
But I'd say the problem even more than politicians is the MSM, who look for any kind of horror spin they can put on anything. They're the first to point out what a horrible thing X will be, be it an eyesore, noisy, messy, etc and the "people" and I use that term for some of these reality TV watching knuckle draggers loosely, believe what they are told. Hell look at how even today more than 40% of the American public believe Iraq was over 9/11!
If the MSM would say "Look, you want AC, right? You want fridges and PS3s and all that over stuff then you HAVE to allow power plants to be built to supply all that power you are using" then you'd see NIMBY dry up and blow away like a fart on the breeze. but protesters make for good TV, even if it fucks the country they don't care as long as they score in the ratings.
Actually even having the source doesn't help without a stable ABI, as I tried following the advice and only using open drivers...what happened? The sound and network shit itself and died! We are talking bog standard Realtek chips, the same shit that is on a good 90% of the hardware currently sold, but when the 6 month upgrade was applied POW bye bye sound and network. This doesn't count the Intel "This driver is flaky this way, that driver is flaky that way" BS, nor does it count the open source Nvidia and ATI drivers I tried, one of which gave me black screen o' death, the other would flash the screen on and off after the upgrade like a cable was loose.
Why the community which prides itself on geeks can't seem to do basic math is beyond me. You have X number of people currently qualified to maintain kernel drivers, you have Y times tens of thousands of drivers. Simple math will tell you even if the kernel devs stayed up 24/7 and did NOTHING but fix drivers all that time they will always be behind! With a stable ABI both free and non free could be "write once, use for years" which would free up the kernel devs for QA, reverse engineering those OEMs that won't give Linux a driver, working on features, etc.
I think the problem is Linux geeks think because something is easy for them then others will find it easy as well and nothing could be further from the truth. if you want the world to adopt Linux then you have to give the world what it wants, NOT expect the world to adapt to you. Joe Public will NOT learn Bash, nor will he trawl forums, nor will he deal with broken drivers every 6 months. I like Linux, I really do. It has some damned nice DEs and plenty of software, it also does the jobs most home users want a PC for.
But until I can sell a Linux PC and KNOW it will "just work" a year from now with ZERO intervention from myself? Well sadly the cost of Windows HP is actually cheaper than dealing with Linux is for me and my shop.
Dude all of the above except for Comodo Dragon and the MSFT patch is on Ninite, where all you have to do is check the fucking box and if check the fucking box is REALLY so damned hard for you? Then I would suggest you shouldn't even be on a PC. How about a nice ARM tablet where you never get any updates? probably be much safer for you.
Ninite has Flash, Messenger, Klite DXVA codecs, Avast free, it is all as simple as 'check the box". You have a single reboot for Avast free, big fricking whoop. If anything I'd argue that compared to WinXP and the brain dead "Hey lets design everything to run as admin!" bullshit win 7 is a breeze and a joy to work with. Thanks to Win 7 having the drivers integrated into WU I spend more time setting up users for my customers than I do installing or tweaking the OS.
And there is a simple way to mitigate that, it is called defense in depth. So far I haven't had a single Win 7 PC I did defense in depth on get infected. Here is what I do..I install Avast Free (which gives sandboxing and scans pages BEFORE load) along with Malware bytes and finally I add support for Structured Exception Handling Overwrite Protection and so far not a single bug.
I also do NOT install Java as I've found the vast majority have no use for Java, I use Sumatra PDF instead of Adobe (Sumatra is a simple PDF reader without support for a lot of the "features" that Adobe gets pwned for) and finally if they get a page saying "You need the latest flash" I have a bookmark already made for them on the bookmarks toolbar of Comodo Dragon (Chromium based that uses its own secure DNS that is separate from the OSes DNS, which helps block exploit pages) to take them to Ninite which is like a repo for Windows third party software and always has the latest and greatest. i tell them if after updating from Ninite the site still says it wants to install Flash it is malware and avoid it.
These additions take maybe another 20 minutes on a new build but is WELL worth it IMHO. I have some customers that on XP would get more viruses than a Bangkok Whore no matter what I did, but now with Windows 7 they are clean as a whistle, just to make sure I have scanned with several boot CDs with the latest defs and nothing, clean machines.
I just hope MSFT doesn't cock this up with Windows 8. Windows 7 is solid, easy to use, and easy to lock down. i'm just glad Win 7 is supported until 2020 so that I can avoid Win 8 if it turns out to be another Vista!
The problem is (and this is NOT a Godwin, this is an analogy to their infrastructure not their evil) we have a propaganda machine that makes the ones the Nazis had in the 30s look like some kid with leaflets. look at how quickly the government got the MSM to label Assange a "dirty rapist terrorist monster" while NOT A SINGLE ONE said a damned thing about the cable showing we had a contractor selling 9 year old boys as fucktoys to get a contract, and they had done the same to 11 year old girls in Kosovo and our ONLY concern was how to cover it up, no busting the bastards, no getting the kids back, just cover it up.
It is THIS, this right here, that is gonna cause us to be fucked. The Hiroshima bomb power of the MSM when they get together to spread propaganda. If they want to eliminate ANY right to privacy or anything else all they need to do is have Nancy Grace stand there and say "This (insert thing the government wants removed) is a haven for pedos and terrorists!" and its bye bye. Hell thanks to the power of propaganda 3 years after Dubya left office a full 40% of Americans STILL believe that Iraq had something to do with 9/11. That is what Goebbels proved years ago, you give them a truth, a half truth, and a complete lie, and they will swallow the whole thing. I'm afraid you're right, we're soooo doomed!
Sorry to burst your bubble but yes Linux only has 1% and if you will bother to read this link they have the numbers from several sources to back it up.
And why is that so hard to believe? I frankly have yet to see a single Linux install on any of my test beds survive the 6 month upgrade deathmarch without 1 or more drivers shitting themselves, there is no "rollback driver" or any other simple user friendly way to fix drivers when they break (with Windows it is "reinstall driver, reboot" and that is if a driver breaks, I honestly haven't seen it in years) but instead you have to trawl some forum, hope they have a fix, tweak said fix because it is for hardware b rev g and you have hardware d rev j and then IF you manage to pull off that, and put it all perfectly in a 70s era term, with NO spellcheck or autocomplete? Well then you might have your drivers back up...until the 6 month upgrade happens all over again.
In my shop I tried ubuntu/Mint, I tried Mepis, and I tried PCLOS, and in ALL of the above the drivers shit themselves. As one Linux user told me "Oh it happens, Linux guys just accept it and learn to deal" but you know what? Joe and sally average will not deal with that bullshit nor will the trawl forums for fixes, nor will they deal with a 70s era term.
Quit acting like the terminal gives you magical gonad powers and make it friendly for the masses and you know what? they WILL come. But sadly after dealing with the Linux community for years it is pretty damned obvious they will accept nothing less than the world doing things their way and it is never ever not in a million fucking years gonna happen, okay? Vista was a dog and you STILL didn't gain shit, instead a company with a $1000 price of entry gained like mad. If a product that costs $1000 stomps your product which costs ZERO dollars? That should be a big old clue stick whacking you in the head.
Now waste your mod points but it won't make up equal down, black equal white, nor will it make my words any less true. Fix the God Damned driver model already!
Wow are you REALLY that clueless? And what is with the Unix looking text? afraid of HTML or something?
Since you seem to need it explained i'll spell it out...You have a party that at EVERY SINGLE TURN tries to fuck the poor, be it cuts in medicaid/care, social security, freezes to cost of living, giving bailout to companies sending jobs overseas (look up "GE India bailout" if you wish to read about it) and generally kicking the dogshit out of the poor at every single opportunity...yet you have the poor going "please sir, can you kick me a little harder?". And my analogy is quite sound thank you. In BOTH cases you have a group that obviously looks upon a certain group with hatred, yet in this case you have the group being spit upon championing the spitters which makes about as much sense as "Blacks for the Klan" since in both cases you would be supporting someone that HATES you. And how can you describe it as anything less than hate, when most poor that are getting any assistance are living like animals on a pittance and the right wingers want to take the pittance away?
And by your post I can see you are part of the "Lets give teh rich MORE MONIES nom nom nom" party, also known as the "we're so full of shit you can smell us before you see us party" so frankly I shouldn't be surprised. Whats a matter, can't get Faux Newz to come in? Lets see how your philosophy has worked...we had trickle upon (81-88), voodoo economics (88-92) Lets give free trade status to those with NO environmental or workers regulations (92-00) the "Hey the rich only control 80% of the wealth, lets give them all MASSIVE tax breaks while starting TWO wars!" plan (00-08) and finally bailout the rich baby, bailout the rich (08-present).
If your philosophy wasn't completely full of shit we should be living in paradise, yet here we all, falling apart. your next excuse will be we "didn't let the free market work" which ironically is the excuse the communists used when their shit didn't work either. contrary to your 40+ year plan of "let teh rich have MORE MONIES nom nom nom" studies and common sense shows that higher taxes on the wealthy lead to jobs and growth for the economy since if they'll get taxed if they keep it they invest it in businesses rather than hoard it which takes it OUT of the economy and makes it 'dead money".
Are the Dems saints, not by a looong shot and too many subscribe to your "MORE MONIES nom nom nom" plan for destroying the country, but at least they don't go out of their way to kick the shit out of the peasants. The symbol for the right wing should be changed from an elephant to the monopoly man lighting a cigar with a $100 bill while kicking a poor person down a flight of stairs. that would be closer to the reality of your party.
Want to wipe out piracy in the west overnight? here is how you do it...Win 7 Starter for $35, Win 7 Home Premium upgrade for $50! Tada, piracy eliminated overnight. The bitch is I wouldn't be surprised if piracy is part of the MSFT business model. As in TFA pirated machines often get malware, the PC slows down, they find out that Best buy wants OMFG! crazy money to clean the thing and end up buying a new PC. Most folks don't realize the little mom & pop shops like mine do wipe and reinstalls for $50 and one look at how much a Worst Buy wants it is bye bye working PC and hello new laptop.
Of course once they get the fools on the laptop treadmill that's their ass, because those low end laptops last on average about 2 years IF you baby them and because they are nothing but proprietary good fucking luck getting affordable parts. I already tell people if they try to bring in a laptop no hardware fixes, as the price will end up being more than I can get them another POS laptop on sale.
So frankly I seriously wonder if piracy is part of the MSFT business plan here in the states, because they sure as hell do encourage it with the price gouging. The bitch is the pirate version is better like so many other bits of 1s and 0s. You should try "Windows Tiny7" sometime, just to test it I put it on a 1.5GHz with 512Mb of SDRAM and damned if the thing wasn't peppy. It had all the security features like UAC and was using just 256Mb of RAM on the desktop. They really should hire that guy, he makes WinFLP and Embedded look bad.
Funny but like cockroaches I doubt it would hurt those buggers.
But this shows exactly what is wrong with NIMBY bullshit. Instead of somewhere like Yucca where scientists had studied the problem and come up with a deep, dry, solid hole in the middle of nowhere you are gonna have a bunch of states, probably in the south as our economy is beyond rotten, which is probably THE worst possible place you could put the stuff thanks to all the rain and tornadoes!
It is time we told the NIMBYs to STFU and let scientists instead of politicians work to solve the problems. Because if we don't do something about the NIMBYs frankly won't a damned thing get built because it will always piss off someone.
The NIMBYs say " We don't want to store the waste for nuclear (use reprocessing and cut down on the waste is what we should do, but heaven forbid that might be smart) and we don't want solar because its an eyesore, or wind because it is noisy, or coal because it is messy, but you damned well better make sure you give us enough power to blast our ACs all summer!"
The NIMBYs remind me of those damned teabaggers, who cheer the three wars while at the same time demanding their taxes stay low like it is their God given right to more MONIES! Nom nom nom. Where do they think the money for the three wars they are cheering is gonna come from, Chinese Santa Claus?
Haven't you noticed, that is the answer to EVERYTHING according to the right wing, it is like the number 42 to them. No jobs? Give teh rich more MONIES nom nom nom! People can't afford healthcare? More MONIES for teh rich nom nom nom! Budget crisis, multiple wars, factories sent to India, illegals burning the flag and overloading the hospitals, inner cities falling apart, infrastructure failing? Why to cure ALL of those problems all you have to do is....give teh rich more MONIES nom nom nom!
What amazes me is how many people buy their bullshit. You should come to the south sometime, where you will see McCain signs in front of tarpaper shacks, it really is fucking amazing. it would be like black folks giving money to the Klan, here is a group that has done their damnedest to screw poor folks at EVERY opportunity, yet those same same poor folks will go "please sir, will you kick me again?". I just don't get it. Here we have the teabaggers trying to RUIN the credit rating of this country, which will cause rampant inflation, yet I still hear poor folks saying "It is Obama's fault".
The difference is if UAC is active and you are using a Chromium based or IE so that you have low rights mode (WTF Firefox? it has been FOUR YEARS already, get on the ball!) it is actually pretty damned hard to infect Windows 7 without getting the user actively involved. Of course getting the average user to help you install malware is trivially easy, even after all these years of MSFT trying to warn people not just to run any old thing they find on the net. But as someone who fixes machines 6 days a week I can tell you that the infection rate once I got most of my customers to switch to 7 went waaaay down. And Windows 7 doesn't really take much more than XP I have several family members on late model P4s with 1Gb of RAM that Win 7 is running just fine on. They don't have Aero but who cares.
But I have to agree about TFA and pirated Windows. Ballmer, in yet another proof of his incompetence killed the $50 Windows 7 HP upgrade which frankly was the best weapon against piracy I'd ever seen. Guys that had been running pirated Windows for years went legit thanks to that affordable upgrade path. But now that it is gone I'm seeing "Xp Pro Corp SP3 Razr1911 Edition" machines again alongside the pirated Windows 7 machines on Craigslist. you can always spot the pirated versions BTW, as they ALWAYS use the most expensive SKU. When you have a PC that isn't worth $120 running a $200+ copy of Windows Ultimate? yeah its pirated.
The thing is while the pirates know about Autopatcher and WSUS Offline the folks they are selling these machines to don't and since they won't pass WGA (the Windows 7 hack lasted for awhile but I'm now seeing folks that bought PCs with Win 7 off of CL coming in with WGA warnings) most are simply disabling Windows Updates. Folks don't know nor realize it is off and just think their PC is slowing down because "it is getting older" instead of the truth, it is has more viruses than a Bangkok Whore.
I hate to break the news to ya pal but governments haven't needed MSFT to provide backdoors in years. As someone who spends 6 days a week fixing the things I can tell you foolproof way to get into a good 90%+ of the machines out there. 1.- For the guys a webpage that says "Hey want to look at teh titiez! Just run our Iz_Not_Backdoor_Iz-Codec.exe to get teh free pronz!" 2.-For the ladies a chat window that pops up "Hey you just got to see teh cute kitteh videoz!" which takes them to a malware laden page, and 3.- for the old folks a page that looks like Windows Update that says "ZOMG you got teh viruz ZOMG! Run Iz_Not_Backdoor_Iz-cleaner to kill it ZOMG!" and voila! you have just pwned any damned machine you want.
I wish it weren't so but I have actually seen a user uninstall the AV because it wouldn't let him install malware so sadly i know it is true. Linux or Mac OSX wouldn't help either because all you'd have to do is send Iz_Not_Backdoor_Iz- stuff _u_want.sh with helpful instructions on how to run it and they WILL run it as long as they think they are getting something, titties, free movies, kitteh pictures, or protection from a mythical bug.
As for TFA? Give it up friend. The governments have done gotten spooked by the Arab springs so I doubt very seriously if your "unbreakable" encryption exists they will allow YOU to have it. Hell I'm waiting for them to have Nancy grace and the other talking heads start talking about how "Encryption is nothing but a haven for perverts and terrorists!" complete with a couple of pedos that "got away with it" thanks to having encryption. I figure if they do go after it they'll go after TrueCrypt first, that one is too easy to use.
We all make jokes about Pakistan trying to ban encryption but with all the big brother bullshit we see being passed how long until the west joins them?
As WrongSizeGlass pointed out I was lumping those in with Libya as "collateral actions" which is how they are written off on the budget, with missiles at 1.5 million a pop on average being shot like left over bottle rockets on July 5th.
But if you want to see where we are blowing money like shit through a goose it AIN'T the poor, who haven't be given a cost of living increase in years and I wouldn't be surprised if they never get one again. No it is the military industrial complex with their friends the teabaggers and their "give teh rich more MONIES! Nom nom nom" demanding ever lower taxes like it is a God given right even while they cheer three wars. Apparently wars are great as long as THEY don't have to pay for them and can profit nicely from their stock in Raytheon.
But I figure a few more factories get sent to India, a few more demonstrations of the illegals burning the flag and demanding the non Mexican people get out of the west coast, and we'll be having us a nice race and class war. Most folks are barely hanging on now, and when the bubble bursts on the education and retirement mess you will have teeming masses of starving pissed off people. As the Mexicans have shown the melting pot no longer exists, it is "fuck you gimmie what I want" and frankly most folks in the flyover states wouldn't piss on a rich person if they were on fire.
Things are gonna get ugly folks, I figure we have less than a decade before the hyperinflation hits from the presses cranking 24/7 and when folks have to pay $50 for a loaf of bread the shit WILL hit the fan.
Well if we didn't have as another poster put it "more people in prison than the rest of the world combined' (not sure if that is true but frankly wouldn't surprise me) and create criminals by giving folks records for dope which ensures they will NEVER be able to have a real job, well maybe the guards wouldn't be having to deal with teeming masses of prisoners in an emergency. Maybe when the whole system collapses like a house of cards thanks to blowing $$$$$ on 3 wars while giving tax breaks we'll start acting like sensible human beings and realize that "sin" crimes belong in the pulpit not the law books.
As for TFA WHAT THE FUCK? Why in the name of all that is good is ANY of the systems hooked to the net? What, the warden can't live without YouTube? If there was a system that should never ever in a million years be let loose on the net it is THAT one, as every troll on the planet would just looove to open all the cells "just for the LULZ". But what do I expect when prisons are now for profit human processing units instead of what they were supposed to be, which was a way for the state to keep the violent away from the rest of society.
You know this country is fucked when I look at my local paper and the only places hiring are the prisons and the MickeyDs. This just goes to show the former isn't even run as well as the latter, how fucking sad is that?
Well considering the fact that NEVER in our history have we been at war and NOT raised taxes and we are currently in THREE wars...I think I know what the problem is! I'm not rocket scientist but 800 MILLION a day blown down rat holes shooting at brown people could be a large part of the problem me thinks.
Add to that money sinks like the Gerald Ford Aircraft carrier (uneeded, Enterprise was recently refit and is in good shape, not to mention we already have 11, more than quadruple what anyone else has) and the F35 which is insanely over budget and still isn't ready? The teabaggers may want to blame this on the poor but if we got rid of the 700+ overseas bases (uneeded, we can get to anywhere on the planet and drop bombs with our long range bombers and aircraft carriers) along with the three wars pissing money down a rathole and use our troops at home to deal with the giant leaking sieve of a border I think they'd see significant savings.
Of course that wouldn't fit into the ultimate right wing fantasy, the mantra of "Give teh rich more MONIES! Nom nom nom" which they've been pushing like trickle upon for 30+ years and ran the country into the shitter with. Sadly studies along with common sense shows higher taxes on the wealthy increases employment and growth since if they get taxed if they kep it they are more likely to INVEST it into business rather than hoard, which takes it out of the economy and is "dead money". But instead we'll hear it all blamed on those dirty peasants and their little checks putting food into their dirty little mouths. The cure? Why "Give teh rich more MONIES! Nom nom nom" of course!
And just think of the money you'll save on suicide netting!
Seriously though it is time for we humans to face a cold hard fact of reality, and that is the days of trading labor for capital are over and there is NOTHING that the capitalists can do to change that. We are playing IQ musical chairs with larger and larger amounts of people simply never getting a seat because thew reality is the machine can do it better than any human ever could. The machine won't get tired, won't get sick,, don't get hurt or need overtime.
The jobs that just 30 years ago would have employed a large piece of the population can be done today by the amount of people that would fill a small HS gym with seats left over. The average person has an IQ of 105 so you simply can't make the entire population rocket scientists, and I would argue that like housing the next bubble that will be bursting will be the education racket, with large masses of our youth buried under crushing debt they will never be able to pay destroying their credit rating and further depressing the economy.
So we are gonna have to make some hard choices here: Do we create millions of "make work" jobs, the equivalent of putting paper A into slot B just to justify paying the masses? Do you go on the road we are currently on, with an ever growing gap between the haves and have nots pretty much guaranteeing an Arab Spring in our future? Or do we pay people NOT to work the way we pay farmers not to grow crops?
Because we have already lost industrial, one of the last places for those with a strong back to work, and is there any job at your local MickeyD that couldn't be done by an automated assembly line? Of course not but the fast food industry is a classic example of "make work" where the only reason they haven't automated is because the state is covering for their pathetic wages in the form over government assistance. If the corporate handouts were to end (which with declining tax revenues thanks to the rich using scams like the "double dutch" and the honest folks not having jobs will have to happen sooner or later) then the fast food industry WILL become automated, just as Wendy's now uses call centers instead of hiring someone to work the window at each location.
We are just gonna have to face the fact that like slavery and suffrage the days of trading labor for capital have run its course. Unless we want to become Luddites and smash the machines we WILL have to find a way for the masses to survive. While I'm sure many teabaggers wouldn't mind going back to the 1840s where the poor died in the streets that simply isn't gonna happen, look to the Arab Springs to see what happens when you ignore the masses for too long. It is time to accept capitalism is dead and move on, to ignore this fact is to proceed at our own peril.
I'm afraid it is YOU sir that are wrong, and I'd think if what you say is true my 20+ years building and repairing PCs I would have seen this. in fact in my ENTIRE 20 years I can name exactly TWO cases, just two, where what you said was true. One was the IBM Deathstars where they had cheaped out on the lube for the motor and it would cook, and the other was the circa 2004 Maxtor Diamondmax where they used an early green solder that turned out to give after repeated heat cycles. In both of those cases you have poof!
But I've replaced more drives than you've probably had hot meals, hell I got a fricking cabinet stuffed full just of sub 200Gb HDDs that were working pulls from customer upgrades, and I just took a box of dead sub 100Gb HDDs over to an engineer friend who strips them for the rare earth magnets. in EVERY. SINGLE. CASE. of failure, every single one, there were warning signs. the drive would run hot, make noise, throw delayed write errors, have SMART warnings at POST, something. And even more importantly once you got a warning I had time to get the data off. Sometimes I had to spinrite the drive to move the data to good sectors, one I even had to stick in a freezer in a plastic bag to chill the failing motor before doing a quick snatch and grab of the data, but in EVERY case I was able to get back a good 75%+ of the original data.
Now I have found both through my gamer customers and talking to other shop owners that with SSDs the opposite is true. When an SSD fails 9 times out of 10 your only clue that something is going is you turn on the machine and....nothing. About half the time it won't even show up in BIOS which makes me believe they have a serious flaw in the Sandforce controller chips, but even in the cases where you can see the drive in BIOS you can rarely get any real amount of data off.
in the end it comes down to how much money and time you can afford to blow. Constant backups take time and resources, RMAs cost on average $40 for shipping and a good 3 week wait for processing and return, and depending on how much was done since the previous backup and whether or not you have a spare onsite we are talking several hours there. For many that is simply unacceptable, especially if the PC is used for any actual work. And considering the SSD manufacturers need Joe Public to go SSD to get the economies of scale required to lower the price having a high failure rate with NO warning at all really isn't helping their case.
Here is the difference in your examples and WebM...Bink and Vorbis for gaming? Most games come on discs so nobody gives a crap about file sizes and as you pointed out they are free so happy slappy for the developers. I would argue even on DLC that nobody gives a shit about file sizes as the textures are a hell of a lot bigger than any Bink video or Vorbis audio they have.
As for DivX? One word: PIRACY, damned near every single video on P2P is a DivX or Xvid encoded .avi file nowadays and while some are .mkvs the .avis still out number them by a pretty good amount. Now when folks snatch a video being able to just slap it on a disc and play it on their DVD is nice no? This is a nice little feature and you'd be surprised how many people look for the DivX label which is how the DivX corp gets paid.
But for WebM you have NONE of those advantages and quite a few liabilities. Google has already made it clear they won't indemnify nobody and sure as hell won't back you up with lawyers so there goes the free argument. In streaming file sizes DO matter and again WebM sucks compared to H.26x, and as for piracy the only format coming close to .avi is H.264+AAC .mkv files which Surprise! Are the latest DivX format and thus play on the latest DVD players.
Like Theora and Vorbis before it the ONLY selling point WebM has is it is supposedly "kinda sorta" free, but unlike Vorbis frankly has no secondary usage. The bandwidth you'd use hosting WebM videos would end up costing you more than an H.264 license, so why would you bother?
And I'm sure I'll get hate for making this comparison but it really is like Linux on the desktop. the big selling point is "free as in beer" but with the driver model so fucked up the only way it is "free as in beer" is if your time is worthless AND you have the skills to do the forum dance every six months along with being able to tweak said "fixes" so you can get your hardware back up. The cost in sheer frustration for home users or in money for hiring a guy like me to fix the damned thing every 6 months means in less than a year it is cheaper just to buy that OEM Windows 7 HP.
So I'd say you really need to be better, not just a "kinda sorta" replacement if you want to sell to the masses. No corp is gonna touch WebM with Google refusing to back it up, and home users are better off with H.264 and DivX. So there really is no compelling reason to go with WebM, none at all.
IIRC WD bought Samsung's drive business, and Seagate Hitachi. It may be the other way around. Either way bye bye two of my favorite manufacturers. If I was you I'd look into snatching another drive before they run out. As soon as this customer pays me next week (just waiting on his wireless card so I can finish up his build) I'm gonna grab me the 2Tb Samsung EcoDrive while they are still out there. They really are top notch.
And as for the poster that says Seagate is all "anecdotes"? Bullshit, total bullshit. Go to Newegg, go to Tigerdirect. look at the comments for ANY Seagate above 750Gb and you'll see fail after fail after fail. Seagate just can't seem to build anything over 750Gb that doesn't end up killing itself. some are saying their firmware code is shite, some are saying their are cheaping out on the motors, personally I don't give a shit WHAT is causing it, all I know is that 3 different Seagates with different batch numbers ALL shit themselves barely 4 months down the line. Considering I have not seen a failure of a Samsung or Hitachi drive in ages having three in a row by a single manufacturer was enough for me.
So if you like Hitachi snatch while you can friend, as they and Samsung will be no more by Oct. Both WD and Seagate said they'll honor the warranties so no loss there, and as I said I've not had a lick of trouble with drives from either company. they will be missed.
Well if you read TFA (I know, but I got bored) it says they are slashing the price from the original $299 to $99. So if you don't mind not getting support when they end up bailing out it might be a pretty sweet deal. Anybody know what the specs on the thing are? How hackable is it?
Actually I'd say they have already licked the 3.5 heat problem by dropping the speed to 5400 or 5900 RPM. As TFA shows once you get to a certain level of density the slower speed drives keep up quite nicely with the faster drives, especially if it has a decent sized cache and Windows 7 is given a decent amount of RAM to use for Superfetch.
Personally I never thought I'd own a drive slower than 7200RPM, as I still had bad memories of the late 90s 5400RPM drives but after building several kits for customers that came with new 5900RPM drives as the only drive I have to say I was wrong. I took the plunge and bought a 5900RPM Samsung EcoDrive to replace my gaming drive and damned if it didn't whoop the 400Gb Seagate 7200RPM drive it replaced on benchmarks. I guess that 32Mb buffer really makes the difference.
I'm only sad we have lost Samsung and Hitachi as hard drive manufacturers as they really made great drives.I hope WD keeps their quality up as Seagate has already turned to shit since buying Maxtor. After having three Seagate Tb drives die in less than a year I wouldn't touch their crap again. So congrats WD, please don't pull a Seagate and turn to poo, okay?
Question: How EXACTLY have you seen great gains? Because frankly I've found with Windows 7 and plenty of RAM (4Gb or better, I personally run 8Gb) that all the apps are preloaded into memory and since RAM will always be faster than an SSD I just don't see the appeal. Sure boot up is faster, but who does that anymore? The only time I use anything besides hybrid sleep is when I'm adding or changing out a part. Hell with 8Gb of RAM even the executables of whatever game I'm playing at the time is preloaded, so the only wait is for the GPU to load textures , which you'd have to do with an SSD as well since nobody would be foolish enough to use an SSD for some multiGb game install.
So exactly what gains are you seeing? The only one I noticed with my gamers were the boot speed was better than the Raptor and with one having 12Gb and the other 16Gb of RAM frankly the SSD really didn't get used much besides initial boot. The fact that it failed even though Windows had most of the OS loaded into RAM just made me even more wary of SSDs, because while the gamers have more money than sense most of my customers are working stiffs and need things to last.
Personally, and I'm sure i'll get hate for daring to point out the head guy is kinda nekkid, I don't see why they are getting their panties in a bunch for because WebM sucks the big wet titty. Try running it on a netbook, you are talking a slideshow, whereas everything built in the last few years has H.264 hardware decoding so it plays great. Hell flash plays great as well on netbooks and they are the ones that are gonna win the whole "H.26x VS WebM" debate anyway since they have MUCH better tools for designers and home users.
I'm sorry but just like with Theora and Vorbis WebM is a half baked not as good "kinda sorta" solution. If the FOSS community truly want us to use free codecs then they need to get AHEAD of the game, not try to replace a de facto standard years after with another half baked solution that isn't as good as what we have. I'd suggest working on an ultra efficient Ultra HD codec, something that does higher than BD at decent sizes, and add decent 3D support while you are at it.
But frankly WebM is DOA just like Vorbis and Theora simply because it isn't as good as what we have. It takes more memory and CPU than H.26x, takes larger file sizes for the same apparent quality in picture which equals more expensive for streaming, and while even the bottom of the line netbooks and tablets have H.26x support built in from the looks of it the hardware will have to be made from scratch which means shitcan every device that isn't a multicore. It just isn't worth it for the public who frankly don't give a shit about patents because unlike copyrights (which the assholes are quick to scream DMCA! over) most folks simply will never get bit in the ass by a patent.
Actually I'd say it is because all the game developers are director wannabes and have giant boners for "cinematic experiences' which ALWAYS translates to "walk a straight line, scripted battle with big theme music to make it heroic, walk in a straight line, cinema scene" lather rinse repeat. Add to this the two gun limit regenerating health Halo bullshit and you have, to quote one of my favorite reviewers "flavorless wallpaper paste squirted out of the backsides of uncreative publishers with seriously fucked-up eating habits."
As for TFA I hate to break the news to ya Ubisoft baby but the Reloaded pirate version is usually released a week or two from the release date it is simply that nobody wants your shit since most of the crap you've been putting out is just that, crap, pirates don't bother. It would be like pirating Kane & Lynch, your PC would need a little brown bag over it to hide the shame of downloading that turdfest.
So if your goal was to put out games the pirates don't want, and which pisses off the legit customers like me so bad we won't buy it for $1, even if you threw in your entire back catalog? Mission accomplished Ubisoft. I had full intentions of buying it on release day whether it was shit or not simply because it had the 71 Pontiac Le Mans, which was the car I spent my teen years driving. But I won't deal with your always online BS so that is another $50 you won't be getting. Keep it up Ubi, maybe when you lose enough money you'll get bought by Activision, you two seem made for each other.