Nice rant, except the gamers bought 2Tb drives to use while the RMA happened and are currently using those to backup the RAID 0 Raptors. Raptors like SSDs aren't really made for storage, the one with the best times is just 74Gb so even RAID 0 they are only looking at about 140Gb after formatting.
My point still stands though. even with RAID with a decent controller (not that onboard crap) you get ample warning before failure. The drive starts making noise or running hot, you get Windows delayed write errors, you get SMART warnings. None of which you get on the SSD, with the SSD you just get...poof! Bye Bye data. and it isn't the fact they have backups, big fucking whoop, it is the time required to restore that quickly becomes a royal PITA since most folks are doing weekly backups. How much has changed since YOUR last backup sir? I back mine up on a biweekly basis and even then I'd probably have several hours getting everything back just as I had it.
It is a PITA, it ruins your day, and for what? So your apps can launch quicker? so you can theoretically boot crazy fast, even though nobody really boots anymore? it just isn't worth the bullshit IMHO and until they at least figure out how to give warning before failure i'll tell my customers to avoid them. No sale.
Simple: The market starts free, a few groups become uber-powerful, then buy the laws to ensure their monopoly never has to deal with competition. See "forever minus a single day" copyright extensions, DMCA, and a million other examples.
Sadly, and as much as I thought Rand was a looney, someone should cue up her "making criminals" line because with THIS much data they can make anyone they want into a criminal at ANY time. If they pull up a log that says you visited X server on date Y 2 years ago, how do you disprove it? Hell how do you even prove the data on server Y is the same as what was on server Y 2 years ago? Look at the old Whitehouse.com to see how squatters can take a domain and turn it.
This isn't getting a warrant to access someone's PC to look for child porn, this is entirely "guilty until proven innocent" wholesale data collection. And the truly fucking sad part? I have a friend that actually works busting CP in the state crime lab and he says the child pornographers don't use the net since that dragnet that made the news a couple of years back. What do they use now? Encrypted DVDs they send each other by USPS. That's right, the fricking mail.
So I urge everyone here to vote Green or New Whig straight down the line in 2012, and to urge everyone you meet to do the same. It is obvious that BOTH the Ds and the Rs damned near to a man have been bought by the corps, and the will of the people as well as the constitution is being completely ignored by these traitors. our last hope before having our own Arab Spring is to have real third and even fourth parties in this country, and a vote for a D or an R is now a "wasted vote" because they simply no longer listen to the people anymore.
Well considering that the failure rates are bad enough Atwood at Coding Horror says SSDs should be judged on a hot/crazy scale I'd say that is a pretty bad sign. Note that he still buys them even though they keep failing, but this is a guy that spends $400 on a pair of headphones.
My problem with SSDs and why I won't recommend them to anyone but a few edge use cases (those that doing a lot of traveling with their laptop, servers where IOPS is the #1 goal) is because when they DO fail in my experience there is no warning at all and that is simply unacceptable. I have a couple of "Must rule teh benchmarkz!" gamer customers and both went SSD. These guys ain't cheap and bought the baddest SSDs they could find, price be damned. With both guys both drives failed with NO warning, not even SMART. They just turned on their machines one day and poof! Bye bye SSD. One I was able to get a small amount of the data back, the other couldn't even be detected in BIOS. Sure they both had warranties but so what? it isn't like the warranties covered downtime or the HDDs they had to buy to replace it while they waited on the RMA. both ended up selling their SSDs and going with a pair of Raptors in RAID 0.
So until they fix this major flaw I will simply tell my customers to avoid them. With HDDs I don't think I can remember a time I've had a HDD fail without ample warning. Windows delayed write failures, SMART, noise and temp of the drive, in all cases you were given ample time to get your data off the failing drive. Not so with SSD, when it goes it just goes poof! Having that risk hanging like the sword of Damocles over your head just isn't worth the speed IMHO.
Actually I can easily explain it. You see China has one of the highest rates of Windows piracy bar none and I have no doubt those machines on the floor putting the little free crap they always seem to put on drives (like backup software, or those little app launcher thingies) are running "Windows XP Corporate SP2 Reloaded Edition" and haven't seen a single patch since they downloaded the.ISO.
So all it takes is someone playing an infected CD, surfing on the thing, or even being paid by some malware group to plug in an infected drive and the Windows is pwned. After that any drive plugged into it gets infected and voila! hell it wouldn't surprise me if they made an image to flash the drives and the machine doing the imaging has more viruses than a Bangkok whore on a Saturday night. stupid is as stupid does I suppose.
They actually get infected at the factory. They have pirated Windows for the most part in China, some floor PC that does the controls for the SD duplicator is a "XP Pro Corp SP2 Reloaded" PC and they surf on it at lunch or bring in a CD from home that has a bug (Or get paid by a malware bunch to put a bug on there) and voila! Instant virus duplicator. There was a bug that went around my area recently and I traced it back to a cheapo "digital picture frame keyring" that many of the discount stores were selling at the check outs for $10. It was a security tool variant and a royal PITA. Those people found out the hard way that having autorun was stupid and those $10 keyrings cost them $60 for me to clean them.
Now as for WSUS it isn't about being able to plug in the camera, it is about plugging the giant security holes your GF has on her PC right now. Many of these malware variants used reverse engineered Windows exploits to bury themselves deep down into the OS so you really don't want to have an unpatched machine period. And as I said most likely sooner or later she will probably get on one of the cheaper DSL or WISP providers and having an unpatched machine is a disaster waiting to happen.
An ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure and WSUS Offline is free, it is simple, it is easy, and it is so brainless even your grandma can run it. Simply get a cheapo $5 4Gb flash stick and use it as a dedicated Windows update stick. When you come by to visit you simply launch it and check the box that says "reboot automatically" and hit the go button, that's it.
Finally here is an easy way to get the GF off the stink that is Norton. Simply print off the results of the latest Info World or PC World AV roundup, which will show her that in the top 5 you have no less than 3 free AVs, Adaware Free, Avast Free, and Comodo IS, and that Norton rarely even cracks the top 5 on results. You can also then point out that not only do Avast and Comodo (I'd use Comodo as Avast wants the Internet to register her free license and Comodo will give you a string that will let your register her PC offline if you simply contact them by email or phone) always land in the top 5 time after time but that the license is free for life. If she is on SS she will appreciate not shelling out $30 a year for Norton.
So listen to your old pal hairyfeet and your GF will not only have a safe PC, ready for anything the world can throw online or off, but your will look like a "Super PC Ninja" for being able to set it all up for her and will have saved her $$ and made her PC better to use as well. I can tell you as a guy with more than 20 years in the PC biz that both Comodo and Avast use less than 1/3rd the amount of CPU and RAM Norton does while giving her better security. getting her off the Norton crapfest will make it feel like a free PC upgrade!
I'm just glad my grandfather who fought against this kind of shit in WWII isn't around to witness this shit. WTH has happened to this country? When you have BOTH parties voting AGAINST the people while at the same time practically tripping over themselves to give away the future of this country to special interests for literally pennies on the dollar?
This is why I'm making a call out to every one here at/. since WE are the geeks, the smart ones, the ones our friends and relatives and coworkers listen to I urge EVERY SINGLE ONE HERE to not only vote Green and New Whig straight down the ticket but do everything in your power to get everyone you possibly can to do so as well.
A true multi party system is the only chance this country has short of our own Arab Spring and it is clear that BOTH the Ds and the Rs are not gonna listen to the will of the people. The New Whig Party is made of Iraq vets thinking we should get our boys home and the Greens believe in a true safety net for the poor along with affordable housing and health care, things I bet many here would support.
So let us change the system, so that horseshit like this won't be the status quo. I'll even give out a slogan for free "A vote for a Democrat or Republican is a wasted vote" because that is EXACTLY what it is, as they no longer listen to the will of the people. So vote Whig and Green, and push everyone in your sphere of influence to do so as well. Let 2012 be a REAL case of "Hope & Change" and not just more empty slogans!
Uhhh...dude? You DO realize that MicroSD cards, like say the one in that camera, coming with viruses is quite common nowadays, yes? And having Autorun enabled is seriously fucking dumb? And I gave one of those Kodaks to my now ex and I can tell you the reason why it asked for a net connection is it has a nice feature in the software where she could push a single button and it'll upload to FB, email family or friends, it really is a nice little feature.
Now if you know enough about tech to be hanging on a geek site like/. these instructions shouldn't be difficult so let your old pal hairyfeet show you what to do. first off you need to go to WSUS Offline and make her an offline updater. Really simple, just check the box by which OS she has and it'll download the updates from MSFT. Simply check the box by "copy updates for selected OS into" and choose where your flash stick is located and voila! An easy to carry windows update on a stick. Now for the AV I'd suggest either Comodo or Avast free, both have the ability to be updated by file and both have by default sandboxing so she shouldn't have to worry about an infected microSD or CD she gets from a friend. Simply disable the looking for updates in the options and when you come by to visit her bring the latest update on your flash. if she is offline once or twice a month should do it, no need for daily updates since she won't be dealing with zero days.
but don't think just because she isn't on the net she can't get pwned. i have senn cameras, those cheap digital frames, flash sticks, basically if it has memory and a way to launch an exe it can be infected. but follow the simple tips above and she'll have a nice safe up to date PC so if she does get the net back later on down the line (she might want to look at DSL, they don't advertise it but most have a very basic 756k hookup for sub $20 a month) she'll be ready to go and she'll be safe in the meantime.
Frankly I just wish the producers would quit taking a big old dump on the comics and games. Ghost Rider? They took an anti-hero and made him the tragic hero! And how in the fuck did they screw up Doom? Take Aliens and mix with Event Horizon and tada! Spiderman the first was good but then took a right turn into shittytown, I will give them credit for Iron Man and Nolan's Batman, both of those have been damned good.
I just have a feeling just like they are now digging through the D list movies for remakes (Rise Of The Planet of The Apes? WTF?) they will start digging out the comics that are a hell of a lot harder to translate to screen and taking a big fat dump on them trying to get another Iron Man. The one thing Hollywood has been consistent with is not knowing when to quit.
The funny part is if anything I find Spinrite even MORE useful now than under the days of the DOS, thanks to how shitty Seagate drives have gotten. You'd be surprised how many times I've had to use Spinrite 6 to "fix" a Seagate drive long enough to get the data off. When I heard that Samsung was selling out I wanted to cry, they and Hitachi were the "go to" sources for drives of late as Seagate has turned into shite on a crusty roll. If you spot one snatch yourself a Samsung EcoDrive as I have the 1Tb model and at 5900 RPM stomps the dogshit out of the Seagate 7200RPM it replaced. really top notch gear.
But its nice to see someone still remembers the old days of DOS hacking. I can still recall all the basic DOS commands in my sleep, as well as the old "Copy win9X in DOS and install from the drive" trick. You really could do some cool tricks in DOS back then thanks to having low level access. Now the closest I get to that is the fun of unlocking cores on AMD boxes, but frankly with Tigerdirect selling quads for $199 there ain't really a point in doing that anymore either. Hell at prices that cheap i'm building one just as a spare for my dad so when he or one of his friends bork their PC they can just use the spare quad while I fix their box.
So here is to DOS, to 486s, to hardware hacking, and all the other tricks these kids will never know or understand. Frankly it blows my mind that I can buy monster quads for less than the cost of my first HDD, which was a grand total of 5Mb and was heavy enough you could kill someone by dropping it on their head. Remember the old Bigfoot drives? Damn that bitch was heavy! The hilarious part is my very first "gamer" PC is still running 5 days a week as a C&C controller for a lathe at a lumber place. It was a whopping 60MHz 486 with a 200Mb HDD and a Voodoo I. damned thing still runs DOS 3 and does its job cranking out custom columns 5 days a week using a huge ass ISA card. They just don't build 'em like that anymore!
Nice to see I'm not the only one that does that, makes me think I'm not a dumbass for doing so. I'm up to something like 35 games in GOG right now and I've played MAYBE 12 of those, most for less than an hour if that. Between Amazon, Steam, and GOG I've bought more games in the past 6 months than I had in the ENTIRE 5 years beforehand. Like you thanks to being DRM free I have no worries (I keep all the files on an external 1Tb drive so they are always on hand) and their sales prices as you said are a full game for less than a Big Mac and a coke.
I just don't understand why publishers don't get this. Impulse buying is an incredibly powerful force that will often garner you sales you would have NEVER gotten before. look at me with Kane & Lynch II. Here is a game with absolutely horrible reviews, yet I still whipped on my CC and bought it, why? Because at $4 it was so cheap I couldn't resist and it is THAT effect they need to be shooting for.
All this "Lets see how badly we can fuck our customers LOL!" bullshit just isn't gonna cut it anymore. Frankly in the last 3 years I haven't bought a single game for $50 and I have NO intention of ever doing so again. Why should I, when there are so many games out there I haven't played in the under $20 impulse buy column frankly there aren't enough hours in the day to even play them all.
So stop being greedy twats game publishers and watch the money truck back up to your door. Continue trying to assrape your customers? Well there are plenty of companies happy to take my $5 that I don't need you and I have a feeling the market well show this to be the case. $50 in a dead economy isn't just greedy, its insulting.
Yeah I have to wonder how many sales they are gonna lose with this BS. I was REALLY looking forward to this game, simply because it had so many of the classic muscle cars of my childhood including my old Pontiac Le Mans. I would have been happy to pick this up on Steam, but always on DRM? Screw that. The hilarious part is 3 weeks after it comes out I'm sure there will be the Reloaded version on TPB with NO DRM, just as they figured a way around ass creed.
Ya just got to love how these megacorps don't ever seem to get it. The nasty DRM only hurts the customer and runs off potential sales, it NEVER hurts the pirates who are frankly ass deep in games as it is and have no problem waiting the whole 3 weeks for the Reloaded version. Stupid move Ubisoft but frankly with you we expect no less. But unlike many who will say "I would have bought it" ever since the trailer came out with the Le Mans I'd been waiting by Steam with my CC ready to go. Man I miss my Le Mans, sure it was a gas sucking piggy but dammit! It was FUN to drive. i miss that. With a Positrac and Quadrajet she was a sweet car to drive.
Yes but in BOTH cases you are cutting out 95% of your potential audience by being a greedy twat! Look at how when Valve sold L4D for $2 they made more profit than the entire release had made up to that point simply because EVERYBODY bought it. With digital distribution bringing unit costs to zero one can sell at an impulse buy price and rake in mountains of cash, simply by not being greedy twats.
Hell I'll give an example from my own experience: I bought Kane & Lynch II. Why would I do that when one reviewer said "It sucks so much dicks it breathes spunk instead of air"? I bought it because it was $4 and at that price I figured I could easily get more than my money's worth if no other way than laughing at it like a bad movie. And you know what? I didn't feel ripped off, in fact I thought it was worth the money and got my $4 out of it in MP and once I put in the hack that got rid of the stupid censoring of nudity and headshots I felt I got my $4 out of SP too.
If you set the price low enough you can make mountains of cash but the sheer greed of the industry, their "Lets see how much we can bleed these fuckers for!" attitude is frankly cutting off their own noses to spite their faces. Digital distribution opens up a whole new world of profit to game publishers which allows them to have infinite copies for zero added cost. If more would stop being greedy twats and put games at impulse prices, I would say $20 or less for a start and below $10 after 6 months, then frankly they would see their profits skyrocket just as Valve did on L4D as the games would be so popular practically everyone would have it. This not only makes you mountains of money on the game itself but gives you an audience for sequels and other properties which you can make even more mountains of cash off of.
But instead they'll charge $50+ for the game, nickel and dime the living shit out of the player by wanting another $30-$40 to get all the DLC, most of which was ripped from the game, and then when the games sells a pittance compared to projections they'll blame it all on "piracy" instead of accepting the fact that trying to assrape your customers in a dead economy isn't a sound business plan.
While that might be true in the corporate world in the consumer world it is the opposite. Take a look at Newegg, Tigerdirect, etc and what do you see? Nothing but IPV4 routers as far as the eye can see. Frankly the ONLY IPV6 router I've seen is the overpriced Apple one that is frankly overkill for 99% of the average home with features they'll never use!
What I want to know is why the government hasn't put a big screeching halt to this "designed for the dump" eWaste being shipped in. We did it with TVs, making sure they had digital support for a couple of years before we switched, yet here it is when we've already run out of IPV4 addresses (technically, in reality less than 35% are actually being used, the rest are squatters and old companies sitting on insane amounts of IP addresses they got grandfathered at the beginning) and yet the market is if anything piling on MORE IPV4 routers which will all have to be shitcanned.
Lets be honest folks most of the routers being released now will NEVER get so much as a single update and frankly I'd be amazed if they even have the CPU and memory capable of IPv6. These routers will all go straight into the garbage unless something is done about it because as it is now nobody is gonna buy the Apple one when they can have their choice of IPV4 wireless routers for less than a third of the Apple model and their ISPs go "IPV6? What's that?". We need to have ALL routers being sold now be dual support or not allowed to come in off the boat.
Uhhh...how EXACTLY is that flamebait? Just because someone is a scientist doesn't make them magically immune to money ya know. If carbon credits get forced upon the west (which BTW WILL destroy what little industry we have left, as China and India has already said they won't play the carbon game) we are talking a multi BILLION dollar industry, and those that support it will get mucho funds for more papers that say "You're doing the right thing!"
Conversely putting scrubbers on the ancient coal plants on the east coast and putting hard limits on the amount of carbon allowed will cost several corporations BILLIONS of dollars so they are naturally gonna likewise make sure that those that make papers that say "That's a stupid fucking idea!" get lots of money to continue making papers that say its bullshit.
The whole damned thing has become so politicized and so many leeches like Goldman Sachs are lining up to empty wallets and blow bubbles that frankly if a scientist told me it was raining outside I'd want to stick my arm out the door just to make sure. When you are talking billions of dollars to the winner? Well frankly nobody is immune to those kinds of numbers.
Where have YOU been? Thought Crime is alive and well in the USA and has been for quite awhile. For a couple of examples just look at the guy sitting in prison for writing the "pro pedo" book, which while I disagree with the man's views arresting him for putting his thoughts on paper is a pretty text book definition of Thought crime. Then there was the guy arrested for doing as his therapist told him to and writing his fantasies down in a journal, and then there was the Russian afraid to come here because he dared to write about encryption covered by the DMCA.
So you see Thought Crime is alive and well here in the USA. How sad is it that we went from "I may not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it" to actually throwing people in jail over words on a page.
This. This is why I got out of corporate, because it got to the point one was given impossible problems with NO budget and more often than not if you managed to pull it off they would just fire half the guys and expect YOU to take up the slack.
I'd say the problem is what I call "failing upwards" in that they get rewarded for fucking IT because you "Saved X on the company budget" by firing everyone that knew WTF they were doing, or cutting their budget to the bone, and then when the shit hits the bladed cooling device they have moved up either through promotion or using their "track record" to get a job at another corp thus they NEVER get the blame.
Having competent IT staff costs money that the PHBs never want to spend, so they end up firing everyone with a brain (if they ever hired them in the first place) or giving each guy the workload of 5 until they all burn out or jump ship, but gutting IT looks good on the quarterly earnings so nobody gives a fuck until the shit blows up in your face but by then the geniuses that thought gutting IT was a swell idea have taken their bonuses and moved on. It is a real problem with corps here and I frankly don't see it getting any better despite LULSec spanking so many companies.
Uhhh...AC dude? they were running unpatched servers with no firewall with access to the big bad web. You HONESTLY think a 3+ year old out of date unpatched Linux server with NO firewall or IPS would have done ANY better? I don't care what OS you use if you don't follow best practices and let Forest Gump run the network your ass is grass, the only question is when. If they had used a zero day you may have had a legitimate argument but this was script kiddie 101 crap, the kind of crap you see grandmas hit with NOT giant corps who are actually supposed to have admins to...well administer. WTF were their admins doing? Playing Little Big Planet?
As for TFA this is something in America we really really REALLY need to address: The way insurance companies are happy to take the payments, only to weasel out when it comes time to pay the bill. We see this happen every day in America, where a person pays for years, sometimes decades, for their insurance only to find when they actually need it to serve its intended purpose the company throws lawyers who pick through the forms with a fine toothed comb until they find a way to get out of paying.
Its a really nice scam these insurance companies have got going, you pay ever rising fees for a service you can't actually ever use. To use a/. car analogy it would be like you paying 20 years on a mint state Mustang I claim to have in my garage only to have a lawyer tell you that you can't have the car when the last payment arrives because you were 2 hours late on a payment in 1996. In both cases you end up paying for the illusion you have something that you don't.
If it was one of them then they rightly deserve to go down with Jobs and Gates in the "bloody brilliant bastard" hall of fame, because like Jobs and his "one more thing" and hipster persona or Gates with his "I'm just a little nerd" act while behind the scenes in the 90s making Darth Vader look like a Care Bear it has to be one of the most simple yet fucking brilliant pieces of marketing ever created.
hell I bet tomorrow they could announce they are sending every drop of data they've ever collected to the NSA while simultaneously replacing the background of all Google apps with Goatse and there would be thousands of posts all over the web screaming "But but but...they do NO evil, so it must all be a misunderstanding!". Hell old Jobs would kill for an RDF that powerful!
I'd love to know EXACTLY how is it a troll to point out the obvious, that MSFT is going for the casual audience with the Kinect. I mean is anyone seriously think the GoW/CoD/MoH/Halo crowd is gonna put down their controllers to do a "pew pew' dance?
No it is simple math. MSFT has seen they have gotten just about all the hardcore gamers they are gonna this round and while the Sony fanboy keeps bringing up the Japanese numbers I would point out NEVER in history has a US console EVER sold in Japan, their tariffs make that an impossibility. In the other markets MSFT has gotten just about all the hardcore gamers they are gonna get, they have plenty of machines and the RRoD problem fixed, so where to go now?
Two words: Casual gamers. The Wii has shown that market is a good market but the one place the Wii comes up short is connectivity which MSFT with the PC extensions and XBL is quite good at. By sinking resources into Kinect they give all those soccer mom/ family fun time users a reason to look at the X360 and from the numbers of Kinects selling I'd say it was a smart move. The PS3 is still waaay overpriced compared to the X360 which starts at just $150, The Wii has virtually zero third party support outside of shovelware, so there is a serious opportunity for growth in this market if they play their cards right.
Will it work? I'd say it all depends on how well they can get quality third party support. They seem to have the connectivity down but without real quality third party support MSFT will have an uphill battle getting kinect to have legs. Only time will tell but I'd say it is anj excellent start.
That would be a GREAT way for us to have our own Arab spring, along with some nice looting and murder of the rich and...oh wait, that is a BAD idea. In case you've missed the memo thanks to congress critters handing bailouts and tax breaks with NO strings attached we have lost 41,000 FACTORIES in just the past decade, the business districts of many places are ghost towns, and thanks to inflation and congress freezing cost of living adjustments many are barely above starving.
Frankly the ONLY thing keeping the USA from the massive rioting being seen by other countries is the safety net that is honestly keeping many Americans alive. In my own town you see signs painted on cars saying "looking for work call xxx" because there simply aren't jobs to be had, the last major factory went to Mexico last year since they can pay a Mexican pennies and get NO penalty when they bring it across the border thanks to NAFTA, and as we have seen many in congress are paying their own "Maria Imigra" illegals to do their dirty work.
So personally with the "let them eat cake" attitude by the tea baggers I wouldn't be surprised if instead of raising taxes on the 1%ers (BTW GE not only paid NO taxes for most of the decade but actually got a tax BREAK, which they used to send one of their last USA plants to India. You PAID for that,happy?) they gut the safety net but mark my words, masses of starving and homeless have NO reason not to riot, NO reason not to loot, NO reason not to burn the place to the ground. Hell look at the guy in NC that held up a bank for $1 just so he could get healthcare in jail. THAT is how bad things are out there right now and cutting what little safety net there is risks lighting the powder-keg and starting our own revolution as the ME is having now.
No reason to be depressed at having experience and I bet when stuff breaks you'd rather have an "old fart" that knows what they are doing than some wet behind the ears green ass kid. You'd be surprised how many setups I've seen borked by having some hot shit kid brought in who goes "buzzword bingo" all over the place instead of having a well thought out plan.
As for TFA DOS was one of those things like WFW 3.11 and the Intel 386 that just wouldn't die. For kiosks DOS with a simple GUI was quite popular for years after DOS left the mainstream just as OS/2 was on ATMs long past IBM giving up and moving on. And why not? For a single tasking application DOS ran fine, used practically no CPU or memory,and was butt simple to code for.
What amazes me is how quickly the general public lost the ability to deal with a command line. DOS was the underpinning for Windows as late as Windows ME in 2000 yet I'd say the vast majority of the population couldn't even tell you what a command line was anymore much less how to launch one in windows. It is like the second solid GUIs came along everyone just erased their collective memories of ever having dealt with a CLI.
So here's to you DOS, you may be long gone now from the public's mind but you are not forgotten and your legacy lives on in DOSBox and FreeDOS which powers many a geek tool such as Spinrite. Even to this day if sat in front of a blanked machine with a DOS prompt I'm sure I'd remember the old "Win9X dump to hard drive" trick and the DOS based speed hacks we'd use to squeeze that last drop out of an old 286/386/486 back in the day. Happy BDay old gal.
Oh wow, proof that from the very beginning/. had total whackjobs! And I noticed you are TOO SCARED to post anymore unless it has left the front page. Whats the matter Alex, karma starting to suck? I guess we "super sekret M$ ninjas" smack the shit out of little blankie huggers like you. But since you like being cock slapped by the truth so much, as a public service I show your failure yet again! Enjoy!
Isn't it sad, how like a frightened child afraid to look under the bed, you cower at the truth? if your driver model isn't shit then why does Dell have to run their own repos even though we are talking a teeny tiny subset of hardware? Oh right because Linux shits itself and dies if you use the default repos! Man that is some excellent product you got there! you think I can get better QA than the third largest OEM on the planet? What, you expect me to tell paying customers "Go to the forum, kiss some loser ass, and maybe, just maybe, in a few days someone will have mercy and give you a big pile of bullshit that may or may not make your sound work again"?
So you go hide now mama's boy, you hide with your Tux blankie and keep saying your magical nigger nigger faggot, or should I say shill shill astroturfer, like it is a magical word that will make all the bad go away. But it won't change reality and the reality is your driver model is shit and more than 15 years behind everyone else and that is why retailers like me wouldn't piss on it, not some mythical money truck that sneaks up to my door in the middle of the night. So go compile something and leave the men to talk about the real world, okay little girl?
Not to mention probably more than half the posts on every site that runs this story will be "ZOMG! Google does NO evil!" with rushes to explain away everything they did while ignoring if it wasn't for the Germans demanded to see what data was collected in the first place nobody would have even found out how much Google was snatching.
I just hope that whomever at Google came up with that stupid slogan got a free car and a hell of a bonus check, because that thing seems to work like a magic shield that makes old Jobs RDF look like a lite brite. Hell I bet if it came out tomorrow that Google was shipping everyone's data straight to the NSA there would be a thousand posts saying "But but...they do NO evil!". Gotta give whomever came up with it credit, it is a fucking brilliant piece of marketing.
That's easy to explain, we haven't yet HAD our collapse as we have been throwing money at it trying to keep the inevitable from becoming. You still have the student loan bubble yet to burst, and with so many students going from graduation to the unemployment line I figure it won't be long now, and then there is all the old retirees that got their nest eggs eaten up by Wall Street to deal with.
Another poster talks about "never ending social programs" but I would argue that is the ONLY thing keeping us from our own Arab spring. When you have NO job, NO prospects,NO savings, and a pile of debt you will NEVER get out from under? you have the makings of our very own Arab spring but the government checks are keeping people from starving and thus rioting. I have a feeling when the student loan bubble bursts we are gonna have to write off a hell of a lot more than 700 billion as the piling debt on our young workers will take an entire generation effectively out of the game.
As for TFA? maybe we should just man rate the Delta IV if we wanna get back out there, or hell just buy a Soyuz or two from the Russians, I'm sure they'd be willing to cut a deal. But frankly until we stop the bleeding we shouldn't even be thinking about space. We have lost more than 41,000 factories in a SINGLE decade, if you look at the REAL numbers not the shit the fed feeds you you're looking at close to 25% unemployment, and meanwhile we have the republicans marching out of talks at just the thought of raising taxes on the 1%ers. We just ain't got the money folks, sorry.
Uhhhh...they are thinking they ALREADY have the hardcore audience down pat and now here's something for the casuals? It isn't like MSFT is gonna quit getting piles of GoW/CoD/Halo style games so that audience will be happy slappy. Kinect is more for the casual/soccer mom/ family fun time demographic.
Personally, and as much as I hate this stupid buzzword its the only thing I can think of ATM to describe it, I am hoping that MSFT will finally get that "synergy" between products is a good thing. Everything should connect to everything, everything should be butt simple and seamless, it should all "just work". Now they have been getting pretty good about the home, with Win 7 and the X360 butt simple to connect to each other, now what they need is the Nokia WinPhone to have DirectX and an easy way to have mini-games or other time wasters connect with the X360 and affect your PC/X360 games. Then all they have to do is make Skype work with all of the above and they have a real shot at taking the #3 slot in mobile. No way they can beat the Droid/iOS juggernauts but a solid third will still be a shitload of cash.
So I'd say this is just MSFT finally growing a brain. They have the hardcore market, not much growth there anymore for them, so they need to grab the casuals. Considering everyone I know with a Wii has maybe 3 games for the thing and most of the time its gathering dust I'd say they can pull it off. The PS3 was waaay too expensive at launch and now the one two punch of the hack all over the news for weeks and Netflix making Blu Ray for most folks a non starter I'd say they are never gonna pull out of dead last this round.
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Nice rant, except the gamers bought 2Tb drives to use while the RMA happened and are currently using those to backup the RAID 0 Raptors. Raptors like SSDs aren't really made for storage, the one with the best times is just 74Gb so even RAID 0 they are only looking at about 140Gb after formatting.
My point still stands though. even with RAID with a decent controller (not that onboard crap) you get ample warning before failure. The drive starts making noise or running hot, you get Windows delayed write errors, you get SMART warnings. None of which you get on the SSD, with the SSD you just get...poof! Bye Bye data. and it isn't the fact they have backups, big fucking whoop, it is the time required to restore that quickly becomes a royal PITA since most folks are doing weekly backups. How much has changed since YOUR last backup sir? I back mine up on a biweekly basis and even then I'd probably have several hours getting everything back just as I had it.
It is a PITA, it ruins your day, and for what? So your apps can launch quicker? so you can theoretically boot crazy fast, even though nobody really boots anymore? it just isn't worth the bullshit IMHO and until they at least figure out how to give warning before failure i'll tell my customers to avoid them. No sale.
Simple: The market starts free, a few groups become uber-powerful, then buy the laws to ensure their monopoly never has to deal with competition. See "forever minus a single day" copyright extensions, DMCA, and a million other examples.
Sadly, and as much as I thought Rand was a looney, someone should cue up her "making criminals" line because with THIS much data they can make anyone they want into a criminal at ANY time. If they pull up a log that says you visited X server on date Y 2 years ago, how do you disprove it? Hell how do you even prove the data on server Y is the same as what was on server Y 2 years ago? Look at the old Whitehouse.com to see how squatters can take a domain and turn it.
This isn't getting a warrant to access someone's PC to look for child porn, this is entirely "guilty until proven innocent" wholesale data collection. And the truly fucking sad part? I have a friend that actually works busting CP in the state crime lab and he says the child pornographers don't use the net since that dragnet that made the news a couple of years back. What do they use now? Encrypted DVDs they send each other by USPS. That's right, the fricking mail.
So I urge everyone here to vote Green or New Whig straight down the line in 2012, and to urge everyone you meet to do the same. It is obvious that BOTH the Ds and the Rs damned near to a man have been bought by the corps, and the will of the people as well as the constitution is being completely ignored by these traitors. our last hope before having our own Arab Spring is to have real third and even fourth parties in this country, and a vote for a D or an R is now a "wasted vote" because they simply no longer listen to the people anymore.
Well considering that the failure rates are bad enough Atwood at Coding Horror says SSDs should be judged on a hot/crazy scale I'd say that is a pretty bad sign. Note that he still buys them even though they keep failing, but this is a guy that spends $400 on a pair of headphones.
My problem with SSDs and why I won't recommend them to anyone but a few edge use cases (those that doing a lot of traveling with their laptop, servers where IOPS is the #1 goal) is because when they DO fail in my experience there is no warning at all and that is simply unacceptable. I have a couple of "Must rule teh benchmarkz!" gamer customers and both went SSD. These guys ain't cheap and bought the baddest SSDs they could find, price be damned. With both guys both drives failed with NO warning, not even SMART. They just turned on their machines one day and poof! Bye bye SSD. One I was able to get a small amount of the data back, the other couldn't even be detected in BIOS. Sure they both had warranties but so what? it isn't like the warranties covered downtime or the HDDs they had to buy to replace it while they waited on the RMA. both ended up selling their SSDs and going with a pair of Raptors in RAID 0.
So until they fix this major flaw I will simply tell my customers to avoid them. With HDDs I don't think I can remember a time I've had a HDD fail without ample warning. Windows delayed write failures, SMART, noise and temp of the drive, in all cases you were given ample time to get your data off the failing drive. Not so with SSD, when it goes it just goes poof! Having that risk hanging like the sword of Damocles over your head just isn't worth the speed IMHO.
Actually I can easily explain it. You see China has one of the highest rates of Windows piracy bar none and I have no doubt those machines on the floor putting the little free crap they always seem to put on drives (like backup software, or those little app launcher thingies) are running "Windows XP Corporate SP2 Reloaded Edition" and haven't seen a single patch since they downloaded the .ISO.
So all it takes is someone playing an infected CD, surfing on the thing, or even being paid by some malware group to plug in an infected drive and the Windows is pwned. After that any drive plugged into it gets infected and voila! hell it wouldn't surprise me if they made an image to flash the drives and the machine doing the imaging has more viruses than a Bangkok whore on a Saturday night. stupid is as stupid does I suppose.
They actually get infected at the factory. They have pirated Windows for the most part in China, some floor PC that does the controls for the SD duplicator is a "XP Pro Corp SP2 Reloaded" PC and they surf on it at lunch or bring in a CD from home that has a bug (Or get paid by a malware bunch to put a bug on there) and voila! Instant virus duplicator. There was a bug that went around my area recently and I traced it back to a cheapo "digital picture frame keyring" that many of the discount stores were selling at the check outs for $10. It was a security tool variant and a royal PITA. Those people found out the hard way that having autorun was stupid and those $10 keyrings cost them $60 for me to clean them.
Now as for WSUS it isn't about being able to plug in the camera, it is about plugging the giant security holes your GF has on her PC right now. Many of these malware variants used reverse engineered Windows exploits to bury themselves deep down into the OS so you really don't want to have an unpatched machine period. And as I said most likely sooner or later she will probably get on one of the cheaper DSL or WISP providers and having an unpatched machine is a disaster waiting to happen.
An ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure and WSUS Offline is free, it is simple, it is easy, and it is so brainless even your grandma can run it. Simply get a cheapo $5 4Gb flash stick and use it as a dedicated Windows update stick. When you come by to visit you simply launch it and check the box that says "reboot automatically" and hit the go button, that's it.
Finally here is an easy way to get the GF off the stink that is Norton. Simply print off the results of the latest Info World or PC World AV roundup, which will show her that in the top 5 you have no less than 3 free AVs, Adaware Free, Avast Free, and Comodo IS, and that Norton rarely even cracks the top 5 on results. You can also then point out that not only do Avast and Comodo (I'd use Comodo as Avast wants the Internet to register her free license and Comodo will give you a string that will let your register her PC offline if you simply contact them by email or phone) always land in the top 5 time after time but that the license is free for life. If she is on SS she will appreciate not shelling out $30 a year for Norton.
So listen to your old pal hairyfeet and your GF will not only have a safe PC, ready for anything the world can throw online or off, but your will look like a "Super PC Ninja" for being able to set it all up for her and will have saved her $$ and made her PC better to use as well. I can tell you as a guy with more than 20 years in the PC biz that both Comodo and Avast use less than 1/3rd the amount of CPU and RAM Norton does while giving her better security. getting her off the Norton crapfest will make it feel like a free PC upgrade!
I'm just glad my grandfather who fought against this kind of shit in WWII isn't around to witness this shit. WTH has happened to this country? When you have BOTH parties voting AGAINST the people while at the same time practically tripping over themselves to give away the future of this country to special interests for literally pennies on the dollar?
This is why I'm making a call out to every one here at /. since WE are the geeks, the smart ones, the ones our friends and relatives and coworkers listen to I urge EVERY SINGLE ONE HERE to not only vote Green and New Whig straight down the ticket but do everything in your power to get everyone you possibly can to do so as well.
A true multi party system is the only chance this country has short of our own Arab Spring and it is clear that BOTH the Ds and the Rs are not gonna listen to the will of the people. The New Whig Party is made of Iraq vets thinking we should get our boys home and the Greens believe in a true safety net for the poor along with affordable housing and health care, things I bet many here would support.
So let us change the system, so that horseshit like this won't be the status quo. I'll even give out a slogan for free "A vote for a Democrat or Republican is a wasted vote" because that is EXACTLY what it is, as they no longer listen to the will of the people. So vote Whig and Green, and push everyone in your sphere of influence to do so as well. Let 2012 be a REAL case of "Hope & Change" and not just more empty slogans!
Uhhh...dude? You DO realize that MicroSD cards, like say the one in that camera, coming with viruses is quite common nowadays, yes? And having Autorun enabled is seriously fucking dumb? And I gave one of those Kodaks to my now ex and I can tell you the reason why it asked for a net connection is it has a nice feature in the software where she could push a single button and it'll upload to FB, email family or friends, it really is a nice little feature.
Now if you know enough about tech to be hanging on a geek site like /. these instructions shouldn't be difficult so let your old pal hairyfeet show you what to do. first off you need to go to WSUS Offline and make her an offline updater. Really simple, just check the box by which OS she has and it'll download the updates from MSFT. Simply check the box by "copy updates for selected OS into" and choose where your flash stick is located and voila! An easy to carry windows update on a stick. Now for the AV I'd suggest either Comodo or Avast free, both have the ability to be updated by file and both have by default sandboxing so she shouldn't have to worry about an infected microSD or CD she gets from a friend. Simply disable the looking for updates in the options and when you come by to visit her bring the latest update on your flash. if she is offline once or twice a month should do it, no need for daily updates since she won't be dealing with zero days.
but don't think just because she isn't on the net she can't get pwned. i have senn cameras, those cheap digital frames, flash sticks, basically if it has memory and a way to launch an exe it can be infected. but follow the simple tips above and she'll have a nice safe up to date PC so if she does get the net back later on down the line (she might want to look at DSL, they don't advertise it but most have a very basic 756k hookup for sub $20 a month) she'll be ready to go and she'll be safe in the meantime.
Frankly I just wish the producers would quit taking a big old dump on the comics and games. Ghost Rider? They took an anti-hero and made him the tragic hero! And how in the fuck did they screw up Doom? Take Aliens and mix with Event Horizon and tada! Spiderman the first was good but then took a right turn into shittytown, I will give them credit for Iron Man and Nolan's Batman, both of those have been damned good.
I just have a feeling just like they are now digging through the D list movies for remakes (Rise Of The Planet of The Apes? WTF?) they will start digging out the comics that are a hell of a lot harder to translate to screen and taking a big fat dump on them trying to get another Iron Man. The one thing Hollywood has been consistent with is not knowing when to quit.
The funny part is if anything I find Spinrite even MORE useful now than under the days of the DOS, thanks to how shitty Seagate drives have gotten. You'd be surprised how many times I've had to use Spinrite 6 to "fix" a Seagate drive long enough to get the data off. When I heard that Samsung was selling out I wanted to cry, they and Hitachi were the "go to" sources for drives of late as Seagate has turned into shite on a crusty roll. If you spot one snatch yourself a Samsung EcoDrive as I have the 1Tb model and at 5900 RPM stomps the dogshit out of the Seagate 7200RPM it replaced. really top notch gear.
But its nice to see someone still remembers the old days of DOS hacking. I can still recall all the basic DOS commands in my sleep, as well as the old "Copy win9X in DOS and install from the drive" trick. You really could do some cool tricks in DOS back then thanks to having low level access. Now the closest I get to that is the fun of unlocking cores on AMD boxes, but frankly with Tigerdirect selling quads for $199 there ain't really a point in doing that anymore either. Hell at prices that cheap i'm building one just as a spare for my dad so when he or one of his friends bork their PC they can just use the spare quad while I fix their box.
So here is to DOS, to 486s, to hardware hacking, and all the other tricks these kids will never know or understand. Frankly it blows my mind that I can buy monster quads for less than the cost of my first HDD, which was a grand total of 5Mb and was heavy enough you could kill someone by dropping it on their head. Remember the old Bigfoot drives? Damn that bitch was heavy! The hilarious part is my very first "gamer" PC is still running 5 days a week as a C&C controller for a lathe at a lumber place. It was a whopping 60MHz 486 with a 200Mb HDD and a Voodoo I. damned thing still runs DOS 3 and does its job cranking out custom columns 5 days a week using a huge ass ISA card. They just don't build 'em like that anymore!
Nice to see I'm not the only one that does that, makes me think I'm not a dumbass for doing so. I'm up to something like 35 games in GOG right now and I've played MAYBE 12 of those, most for less than an hour if that. Between Amazon, Steam, and GOG I've bought more games in the past 6 months than I had in the ENTIRE 5 years beforehand. Like you thanks to being DRM free I have no worries (I keep all the files on an external 1Tb drive so they are always on hand) and their sales prices as you said are a full game for less than a Big Mac and a coke.
I just don't understand why publishers don't get this. Impulse buying is an incredibly powerful force that will often garner you sales you would have NEVER gotten before. look at me with Kane & Lynch II. Here is a game with absolutely horrible reviews, yet I still whipped on my CC and bought it, why? Because at $4 it was so cheap I couldn't resist and it is THAT effect they need to be shooting for.
All this "Lets see how badly we can fuck our customers LOL!" bullshit just isn't gonna cut it anymore. Frankly in the last 3 years I haven't bought a single game for $50 and I have NO intention of ever doing so again. Why should I, when there are so many games out there I haven't played in the under $20 impulse buy column frankly there aren't enough hours in the day to even play them all.
So stop being greedy twats game publishers and watch the money truck back up to your door. Continue trying to assrape your customers? Well there are plenty of companies happy to take my $5 that I don't need you and I have a feeling the market well show this to be the case. $50 in a dead economy isn't just greedy, its insulting.
Yeah I have to wonder how many sales they are gonna lose with this BS. I was REALLY looking forward to this game, simply because it had so many of the classic muscle cars of my childhood including my old Pontiac Le Mans. I would have been happy to pick this up on Steam, but always on DRM? Screw that. The hilarious part is 3 weeks after it comes out I'm sure there will be the Reloaded version on TPB with NO DRM, just as they figured a way around ass creed.
Ya just got to love how these megacorps don't ever seem to get it. The nasty DRM only hurts the customer and runs off potential sales, it NEVER hurts the pirates who are frankly ass deep in games as it is and have no problem waiting the whole 3 weeks for the Reloaded version. Stupid move Ubisoft but frankly with you we expect no less. But unlike many who will say "I would have bought it" ever since the trailer came out with the Le Mans I'd been waiting by Steam with my CC ready to go. Man I miss my Le Mans, sure it was a gas sucking piggy but dammit! It was FUN to drive. i miss that. With a Positrac and Quadrajet she was a sweet car to drive.
Yes but in BOTH cases you are cutting out 95% of your potential audience by being a greedy twat! Look at how when Valve sold L4D for $2 they made more profit than the entire release had made up to that point simply because EVERYBODY bought it. With digital distribution bringing unit costs to zero one can sell at an impulse buy price and rake in mountains of cash, simply by not being greedy twats.
Hell I'll give an example from my own experience: I bought Kane & Lynch II. Why would I do that when one reviewer said "It sucks so much dicks it breathes spunk instead of air"? I bought it because it was $4 and at that price I figured I could easily get more than my money's worth if no other way than laughing at it like a bad movie. And you know what? I didn't feel ripped off, in fact I thought it was worth the money and got my $4 out of it in MP and once I put in the hack that got rid of the stupid censoring of nudity and headshots I felt I got my $4 out of SP too.
If you set the price low enough you can make mountains of cash but the sheer greed of the industry, their "Lets see how much we can bleed these fuckers for!" attitude is frankly cutting off their own noses to spite their faces. Digital distribution opens up a whole new world of profit to game publishers which allows them to have infinite copies for zero added cost. If more would stop being greedy twats and put games at impulse prices, I would say $20 or less for a start and below $10 after 6 months, then frankly they would see their profits skyrocket just as Valve did on L4D as the games would be so popular practically everyone would have it. This not only makes you mountains of money on the game itself but gives you an audience for sequels and other properties which you can make even more mountains of cash off of.
But instead they'll charge $50+ for the game, nickel and dime the living shit out of the player by wanting another $30-$40 to get all the DLC, most of which was ripped from the game, and then when the games sells a pittance compared to projections they'll blame it all on "piracy" instead of accepting the fact that trying to assrape your customers in a dead economy isn't a sound business plan.
While that might be true in the corporate world in the consumer world it is the opposite. Take a look at Newegg, Tigerdirect, etc and what do you see? Nothing but IPV4 routers as far as the eye can see. Frankly the ONLY IPV6 router I've seen is the overpriced Apple one that is frankly overkill for 99% of the average home with features they'll never use!
What I want to know is why the government hasn't put a big screeching halt to this "designed for the dump" eWaste being shipped in. We did it with TVs, making sure they had digital support for a couple of years before we switched, yet here it is when we've already run out of IPV4 addresses (technically, in reality less than 35% are actually being used, the rest are squatters and old companies sitting on insane amounts of IP addresses they got grandfathered at the beginning) and yet the market is if anything piling on MORE IPV4 routers which will all have to be shitcanned.
Lets be honest folks most of the routers being released now will NEVER get so much as a single update and frankly I'd be amazed if they even have the CPU and memory capable of IPv6. These routers will all go straight into the garbage unless something is done about it because as it is now nobody is gonna buy the Apple one when they can have their choice of IPV4 wireless routers for less than a third of the Apple model and their ISPs go "IPV6? What's that?". We need to have ALL routers being sold now be dual support or not allowed to come in off the boat.
Uhhh...how EXACTLY is that flamebait? Just because someone is a scientist doesn't make them magically immune to money ya know. If carbon credits get forced upon the west (which BTW WILL destroy what little industry we have left, as China and India has already said they won't play the carbon game) we are talking a multi BILLION dollar industry, and those that support it will get mucho funds for more papers that say "You're doing the right thing!"
Conversely putting scrubbers on the ancient coal plants on the east coast and putting hard limits on the amount of carbon allowed will cost several corporations BILLIONS of dollars so they are naturally gonna likewise make sure that those that make papers that say "That's a stupid fucking idea!" get lots of money to continue making papers that say its bullshit.
The whole damned thing has become so politicized and so many leeches like Goldman Sachs are lining up to empty wallets and blow bubbles that frankly if a scientist told me it was raining outside I'd want to stick my arm out the door just to make sure. When you are talking billions of dollars to the winner? Well frankly nobody is immune to those kinds of numbers.
Where have YOU been? Thought Crime is alive and well in the USA and has been for quite awhile. For a couple of examples just look at the guy sitting in prison for writing the "pro pedo" book, which while I disagree with the man's views arresting him for putting his thoughts on paper is a pretty text book definition of Thought crime. Then there was the guy arrested for doing as his therapist told him to and writing his fantasies down in a journal, and then there was the Russian afraid to come here because he dared to write about encryption covered by the DMCA.
So you see Thought Crime is alive and well here in the USA. How sad is it that we went from "I may not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it" to actually throwing people in jail over words on a page.
This. This is why I got out of corporate, because it got to the point one was given impossible problems with NO budget and more often than not if you managed to pull it off they would just fire half the guys and expect YOU to take up the slack.
I'd say the problem is what I call "failing upwards" in that they get rewarded for fucking IT because you "Saved X on the company budget" by firing everyone that knew WTF they were doing, or cutting their budget to the bone, and then when the shit hits the bladed cooling device they have moved up either through promotion or using their "track record" to get a job at another corp thus they NEVER get the blame.
Having competent IT staff costs money that the PHBs never want to spend, so they end up firing everyone with a brain (if they ever hired them in the first place) or giving each guy the workload of 5 until they all burn out or jump ship, but gutting IT looks good on the quarterly earnings so nobody gives a fuck until the shit blows up in your face but by then the geniuses that thought gutting IT was a swell idea have taken their bonuses and moved on. It is a real problem with corps here and I frankly don't see it getting any better despite LULSec spanking so many companies.
Uhhh...AC dude? they were running unpatched servers with no firewall with access to the big bad web. You HONESTLY think a 3+ year old out of date unpatched Linux server with NO firewall or IPS would have done ANY better? I don't care what OS you use if you don't follow best practices and let Forest Gump run the network your ass is grass, the only question is when. If they had used a zero day you may have had a legitimate argument but this was script kiddie 101 crap, the kind of crap you see grandmas hit with NOT giant corps who are actually supposed to have admins to...well administer. WTF were their admins doing? Playing Little Big Planet?
As for TFA this is something in America we really really REALLY need to address: The way insurance companies are happy to take the payments, only to weasel out when it comes time to pay the bill. We see this happen every day in America, where a person pays for years, sometimes decades, for their insurance only to find when they actually need it to serve its intended purpose the company throws lawyers who pick through the forms with a fine toothed comb until they find a way to get out of paying.
Its a really nice scam these insurance companies have got going, you pay ever rising fees for a service you can't actually ever use. To use a /. car analogy it would be like you paying 20 years on a mint state Mustang I claim to have in my garage only to have a lawyer tell you that you can't have the car when the last payment arrives because you were 2 hours late on a payment in 1996. In both cases you end up paying for the illusion you have something that you don't.
If it was one of them then they rightly deserve to go down with Jobs and Gates in the "bloody brilliant bastard" hall of fame, because like Jobs and his "one more thing" and hipster persona or Gates with his "I'm just a little nerd" act while behind the scenes in the 90s making Darth Vader look like a Care Bear it has to be one of the most simple yet fucking brilliant pieces of marketing ever created.
hell I bet tomorrow they could announce they are sending every drop of data they've ever collected to the NSA while simultaneously replacing the background of all Google apps with Goatse and there would be thousands of posts all over the web screaming "But but but...they do NO evil, so it must all be a misunderstanding!". Hell old Jobs would kill for an RDF that powerful!
I'd love to know EXACTLY how is it a troll to point out the obvious, that MSFT is going for the casual audience with the Kinect. I mean is anyone seriously think the GoW/CoD/MoH/Halo crowd is gonna put down their controllers to do a "pew pew' dance?
No it is simple math. MSFT has seen they have gotten just about all the hardcore gamers they are gonna this round and while the Sony fanboy keeps bringing up the Japanese numbers I would point out NEVER in history has a US console EVER sold in Japan, their tariffs make that an impossibility. In the other markets MSFT has gotten just about all the hardcore gamers they are gonna get, they have plenty of machines and the RRoD problem fixed, so where to go now?
Two words: Casual gamers. The Wii has shown that market is a good market but the one place the Wii comes up short is connectivity which MSFT with the PC extensions and XBL is quite good at. By sinking resources into Kinect they give all those soccer mom/ family fun time users a reason to look at the X360 and from the numbers of Kinects selling I'd say it was a smart move. The PS3 is still waaay overpriced compared to the X360 which starts at just $150, The Wii has virtually zero third party support outside of shovelware, so there is a serious opportunity for growth in this market if they play their cards right.
Will it work? I'd say it all depends on how well they can get quality third party support. They seem to have the connectivity down but without real quality third party support MSFT will have an uphill battle getting kinect to have legs. Only time will tell but I'd say it is anj excellent start.
That would be a GREAT way for us to have our own Arab spring, along with some nice looting and murder of the rich and ...oh wait, that is a BAD idea. In case you've missed the memo thanks to congress critters handing bailouts and tax breaks with NO strings attached we have lost 41,000 FACTORIES in just the past decade, the business districts of many places are ghost towns, and thanks to inflation and congress freezing cost of living adjustments many are barely above starving.
Frankly the ONLY thing keeping the USA from the massive rioting being seen by other countries is the safety net that is honestly keeping many Americans alive. In my own town you see signs painted on cars saying "looking for work call xxx" because there simply aren't jobs to be had, the last major factory went to Mexico last year since they can pay a Mexican pennies and get NO penalty when they bring it across the border thanks to NAFTA, and as we have seen many in congress are paying their own "Maria Imigra" illegals to do their dirty work.
So personally with the "let them eat cake" attitude by the tea baggers I wouldn't be surprised if instead of raising taxes on the 1%ers (BTW GE not only paid NO taxes for most of the decade but actually got a tax BREAK, which they used to send one of their last USA plants to India. You PAID for that,happy?) they gut the safety net but mark my words, masses of starving and homeless have NO reason not to riot, NO reason not to loot, NO reason not to burn the place to the ground. Hell look at the guy in NC that held up a bank for $1 just so he could get healthcare in jail. THAT is how bad things are out there right now and cutting what little safety net there is risks lighting the powder-keg and starting our own revolution as the ME is having now.
No reason to be depressed at having experience and I bet when stuff breaks you'd rather have an "old fart" that knows what they are doing than some wet behind the ears green ass kid. You'd be surprised how many setups I've seen borked by having some hot shit kid brought in who goes "buzzword bingo" all over the place instead of having a well thought out plan.
As for TFA DOS was one of those things like WFW 3.11 and the Intel 386 that just wouldn't die. For kiosks DOS with a simple GUI was quite popular for years after DOS left the mainstream just as OS/2 was on ATMs long past IBM giving up and moving on. And why not? For a single tasking application DOS ran fine, used practically no CPU or memory,and was butt simple to code for.
What amazes me is how quickly the general public lost the ability to deal with a command line. DOS was the underpinning for Windows as late as Windows ME in 2000 yet I'd say the vast majority of the population couldn't even tell you what a command line was anymore much less how to launch one in windows. It is like the second solid GUIs came along everyone just erased their collective memories of ever having dealt with a CLI.
So here's to you DOS, you may be long gone now from the public's mind but you are not forgotten and your legacy lives on in DOSBox and FreeDOS which powers many a geek tool such as Spinrite. Even to this day if sat in front of a blanked machine with a DOS prompt I'm sure I'd remember the old "Win9X dump to hard drive" trick and the DOS based speed hacks we'd use to squeeze that last drop out of an old 286/386/486 back in the day. Happy BDay old gal.
Oh wow, proof that from the very beginning /. had total whackjobs! And I noticed you are TOO SCARED to post anymore unless it has left the front page. Whats the matter Alex, karma starting to suck? I guess we "super sekret M$ ninjas" smack the shit out of little blankie huggers like you. But since you like being cock slapped by the truth so much, as a public service I show your failure yet again! Enjoy!
Isn't it sad, how like a frightened child afraid to look under the bed, you cower at the truth? if your driver model isn't shit then why does Dell have to run their own repos even though we are talking a teeny tiny subset of hardware? Oh right because Linux shits itself and dies if you use the default repos! Man that is some excellent product you got there! you think I can get better QA than the third largest OEM on the planet? What, you expect me to tell paying customers "Go to the forum, kiss some loser ass, and maybe, just maybe, in a few days someone will have mercy and give you a big pile of bullshit that may or may not make your sound work again"?
Bleeding yet douchey? want some more? nice thing about having the truth on your side, you can keep throwing punches all day! How about how a decade old Windows beat the shit out of Linux on netbooks or how ASUS has given up on your bullshit or how about Walmart running away from linux as fast as it can? You got the crazy koolaid drunk enough to say they ALL are paid shills because they won't do your forum dance or CLI horseshit? Meanwhile your "hero" Torvalds the great says Plans? We don't need no steenkin plans!. Why don't you tell them that at work next week, see how quick you get a pink slip? More? How about you actually have the balls to celebrate getting a whole 1% market share while you are actually lower than JavaME and there is a whole website dedicated To your bullshit and excuses .
So you go hide now mama's boy, you hide with your Tux blankie and keep saying your magical nigger nigger faggot, or should I say shill shill astroturfer, like it is a magical word that will make all the bad go away. But it won't change reality and the reality is your driver model is shit and more than 15 years behind everyone else and that is why retailers like me wouldn't piss on it, not some mythical money truck that sneaks up to my door in the middle of the night. So go compile something and leave the men to talk about the real world, okay little girl?
Not to mention probably more than half the posts on every site that runs this story will be "ZOMG! Google does NO evil!" with rushes to explain away everything they did while ignoring if it wasn't for the Germans demanded to see what data was collected in the first place nobody would have even found out how much Google was snatching.
I just hope that whomever at Google came up with that stupid slogan got a free car and a hell of a bonus check, because that thing seems to work like a magic shield that makes old Jobs RDF look like a lite brite. Hell I bet if it came out tomorrow that Google was shipping everyone's data straight to the NSA there would be a thousand posts saying "But but...they do NO evil!". Gotta give whomever came up with it credit, it is a fucking brilliant piece of marketing.
That's easy to explain, we haven't yet HAD our collapse as we have been throwing money at it trying to keep the inevitable from becoming. You still have the student loan bubble yet to burst, and with so many students going from graduation to the unemployment line I figure it won't be long now, and then there is all the old retirees that got their nest eggs eaten up by Wall Street to deal with.
Another poster talks about "never ending social programs" but I would argue that is the ONLY thing keeping us from our own Arab spring. When you have NO job, NO prospects,NO savings, and a pile of debt you will NEVER get out from under? you have the makings of our very own Arab spring but the government checks are keeping people from starving and thus rioting. I have a feeling when the student loan bubble bursts we are gonna have to write off a hell of a lot more than 700 billion as the piling debt on our young workers will take an entire generation effectively out of the game.
As for TFA? maybe we should just man rate the Delta IV if we wanna get back out there, or hell just buy a Soyuz or two from the Russians, I'm sure they'd be willing to cut a deal. But frankly until we stop the bleeding we shouldn't even be thinking about space. We have lost more than 41,000 factories in a SINGLE decade, if you look at the REAL numbers not the shit the fed feeds you you're looking at close to 25% unemployment, and meanwhile we have the republicans marching out of talks at just the thought of raising taxes on the 1%ers. We just ain't got the money folks, sorry.
Uhhhh...they are thinking they ALREADY have the hardcore audience down pat and now here's something for the casuals? It isn't like MSFT is gonna quit getting piles of GoW/CoD/Halo style games so that audience will be happy slappy. Kinect is more for the casual/soccer mom/ family fun time demographic.
Personally, and as much as I hate this stupid buzzword its the only thing I can think of ATM to describe it, I am hoping that MSFT will finally get that "synergy" between products is a good thing. Everything should connect to everything, everything should be butt simple and seamless, it should all "just work". Now they have been getting pretty good about the home, with Win 7 and the X360 butt simple to connect to each other, now what they need is the Nokia WinPhone to have DirectX and an easy way to have mini-games or other time wasters connect with the X360 and affect your PC/X360 games. Then all they have to do is make Skype work with all of the above and they have a real shot at taking the #3 slot in mobile. No way they can beat the Droid/iOS juggernauts but a solid third will still be a shitload of cash.
So I'd say this is just MSFT finally growing a brain. They have the hardcore market, not much growth there anymore for them, so they need to grab the casuals. Considering everyone I know with a Wii has maybe 3 games for the thing and most of the time its gathering dust I'd say they can pull it off. The PS3 was waaay too expensive at launch and now the one two punch of the hack all over the news for weeks and Netflix making Blu Ray for most folks a non starter I'd say they are never gonna pull out of dead last this round.