Well as a PC repairman I can't comment on the Chinese but I CAN comment on why there is all these "WinXP Razr1911 SP2 corp edition" with no patches...WGA. The pirates KNOW how to update without getting WGA'ed. The people they sell the boxes to? So don't have a clue. So the pirates simply disable all the updates and there ya go. The user thinks their PC is getting slower because it is getting older when in reality it is getting ever increasing piles of malware.
The current record for malware on a single box at the shop was a Compaq desktop which had 2836 pieces of malware and took over an hour and a half to boot. Yeah I could have just wiped it but I wanted to see if I beat my old boss' record of 1931 bugs on a single box, which I did. It was a whitebox that had Razr1911 SP2 on it and this was last year, not a single update since SP2 was released.
So I wouldn't be surprised that the locals are getting Razr'd and are simply clicking on "The big blue E" which they believe means Internet. I actually had an argument once with a girl who wanted to know why she couldn't check her email because the machine I sold her "had the Internet in it!" and when I asked WTF she was talking about she actually thought the big blue E would magically give her the Internet without needing anything else.
As my old boss used to say "Boy you may think you've seen the dumbest computer user but trust me, every time you think the stupidity couldn't get any deeper someone will happily come and prove you wrong" and no truer words have been spoken. Expecting these folks who haven't even updated IE to know about alternative browsers? Yeah and pull this leg it plays jingle bells.
Funny you should mention that as Windows 7 is easier to pirate than XP ever was. In fact not only is Windows 7 easier to pirate ( the hacked version floating around doesn't even need a code, and has all versions from Starter to Ultimate on the disc) but if you look up "Tiny7 Rev 09" you'll find a version of Windows 7 that uses less memory than XP while keeping most of the bling except the see through taskbar. How the hell those guys did it I don't know, but I decided to give it a spin on an old off lease office box I was gonna have to wipe anyway. We're talking about a 1.6Ghz with 512Mb of old SDRAM and damned if the OS isn't fricking peppy!
As for TFA maybe someone in China can answer this next question: Is your banking tied to IE 6 like Korea? I know Korea has been stuck on IE 6 for awhile due to using ActiveX to get around the crypto export rules. Maybe China has the same problem?
Well I would agree with you IF the unit was in the $100-$150 range, then putting up with loss of functionality would be expected. But this things is $500 which can buy you TWO Atom netbooks or a really nice AMD netbook and leave nearly $200 in your pocket.
I'm sorry but the thing ain't THAT cute. I'm willing to bet Samsung ends up with a warehouse full of these things as guys who know what ChromeOS is will have enough skills to simply install it on that $250 netbook, and the ones who don't know what ChromeOS is will pass it by for that shiny new AMD netbook running WoW for $180 less.
Having to put up with less powerful hardware and a machine that is pretty useless without a net connection shouldn't equal a price premium folks. Samsung ur doin it wrong.
Ohhhh, you got so close and then WHOOSH ya missed it. The problem isn't "its da regulationz!" although I would argue that some of the regs are dumbshit. The problem is a lie that has been pushed for 20+ years, starting with a Dem by the name of Clinton. Ready for the revelation? here goes...THERE IS NO FREE TRADE!
To call treating as equals a country that literally lets corps use their storm drains as toxic waste dumps, where the air and water are so bad that 9 out of 10 highest cancer rates are all in a single area, and where children need masks to go outside to play as "free trade" is as asinine as saying a football game between your local HS and the Denver Broncos is a "fair test of athletic skill".
The hilarious part? It does NOT work both ways. India is sinking billions into Aerospace rather than buy from us, China buys one or two then reverse engineers or just steals, like digging up the F117 that crashed in Kosovo to steal our stealth tech.
But you see our "give us more MONIES nom nom nom" party (which is quickly becoming the ONLY party) just gets a sly grin and says "Oh they're nationalists" like that is just cute for them, but then go on to rail about how being nationalist or isolationist is "ZOMFG EVIL!" when it comes to us.
Well fuck them and fuck their bullshit. THERE IS NO FREE TRADE and the quicker we lock down the borders and tariff the living hell out of those that pollute the planet the better! Oh and those companies that move to China? Should have to take their headquarters with them. No more house in the Hamptons for you, hope you like the air in China. don't let the door hit you on the way out!
Didn't bother to actually READ my post before responding huh? Kinda missed the relevant part? here I'll highlight it for you " you are looking at as much as a year and a half of backlog sometimes"
Now let me make this perfectly clear: The odds of finding a judge to let you walk out before they have actually scanned your PCs for porn involving children? Oh about ZERO. And even in my little state you are talking a year and a half backlog, in the bigger states you may be looking at 2 to 3 YEARS. Now that is before they even know whether you've done anything or not, okay?
And if you don't think innocents get railroaded if you say the magic word you might want to talk to Michael Fiola that was handed a laptop where the AV didn't work and had been rooted BY HIS EMPLOYER and when a routine check of the laptop turned up CP? He was fired, arrested, and it cost him $250,000+ to clear his name. Sure he can sue them now, good luck with that number one, and number two that isn't gonna bring back the two years in hell he suffered.
So tell me Jane, do YOU have $250,000 lying around to defend yourself? Can YOU survive without a job and with everyone calling you "suspected child pornographer' for the next 2 years? Because I can tell you if the answer is NO to either one you'll be looking at about a year and a half in county waiting for the scan, while getting a public pretender whose only "advice' to you is "plead guilty" so he can move on to the next loser. I don't make this nasty world Jane, I just live in it.
Oh but we haven't gotten to the REALLY nasty part yet! What is the REALLY nasty part? the student loan bubble that is about to burst. For years the pols have pushed "get an education!" while the corps shipped more than 20,000 factories overseas in less than a decade and brought H1-Bs over as fast as they could stuff them on a plane.
Now we have students going straight from graduation to the unemployment line, saddled with debt in all likelihood they will NEVER ever pay back. As these debts pile up they not only put a drain on the students but the economy as a whole and it won't be too long before they turn toxic just like the mortgages. The only way I foresee this stopping will be to take a bath as you have to allow students that have been without work for X number of months to write these things off or drop them to interest free at some token amount like $5 a month to get them off their backs because more and more employers are also looking at credit ratings and bad student loans obliterate credit.
Mark my words when THIS one turns it'll make the housing bubble look like a pleasant Sunday afternoon. Because at least with the bad houses folks could walk away and with the current setup there is NO ever walking away from bad student loans. What we will end up with is the best educated Micky D's workforce on the planet, bar none.
Ya know you'd think that would be the case, wouldn't you? But I guess since the malware guys have gotten so good at tricking users with "Iz_Not_Viruz_Iz" social engineering stuff like "The new Limewire" (I've seen that one quite a lot lately) and the security tool "ZOMG U Got Viruz!" trick that honestly I haven't seen an infected reg file in awhile.
Most of the reg files are written in human readable format with nice little readmes that you can use to check what it is supposed to do with the description. I've found most of the reg files are written by.....well by guys like me, little repair shop guys that find a niggler of a problem and write a reg file to deal with it and then when they find others on some forum with the same problem they drop it on mediafire. I have one I found that way that is frankly a little lifesaver for fixit guys, it is a little reg file that tosses the Windows Sound Server settings and then replaces them with the default values. If you have ever installed Windows or installed a sound driver only to have "No Device" show up under the Sound CPL applet? This fixes it, no matter which kind of soundchip you have. Just clicky clicky reboot and if anybody needs it feel free to email me.
So while I'm sure you'll probably see one or two assholes, after all what is the Internet without assholes, like Goatse trolls they are just part of the experience, like TPB I'm sure the good reg files will quickly rise to the top through word of mouth and will be written in an easily read format complete with comments. There are just too many little fixit guys like me that hate to see the government fuck up something as fundamental as DNS so the RIAA can show how their little PPT says if they made X last year then they should make X*Y this year, regardless of the economy or whether their product is extra shitty this year or not.
Mark my words, after they pull this shit and their sales don't go through the roof? First they'll claim it is Darknets, that Joe average has hooked into this vast dark web and THAT is how they are keeping from buying the *.AA precious, and then they'll most likely have themselves declared "Too big to fail" and along with perpetual copyrights they'll just take the money straight from your check each month. Isn't capitalism grand?
Did you miss the earlier article on how Apple got iOS rooted in a single day? Or maybe the KDELook malware that went around a couple of years back? How about hot to write a Linux virus in 5 easy steps?
Protip: ALL OSes can and WILL be pwned simply because they are extremely complex interacting systems and nobody, not even Torvalds and the heads of Apple and MSFT engineering can tell you EXACTLY what every possible interaction with each subsystem will output simply because our computers do more than ever before with multicores, GPUs made up of dozens to hundreds of stream processors, and tons of third party code running on top of it all.
As someone who fixes infected PCs 6 days a week and just got done cleaning out another security tool variant let me give you this observation from experience on where most of the malware gets into the PC...PEBKAC.The big attack vectors i'm seeing day after day, in no particular order, is: 1.- The "you want teh hot lesbos? you need to run our Iz_not_Viruz_iz_codec.exe to play teh vidz!" 2.- The "ZOMG you got teh viruz! To fix run our Iz_not_Viruz_iz_cleanerz.exe to get rid of it ZOMG!" 3.-The "Use the new Limewire (Iz_not_Viruz_iz_Limewirez) to download teh latest Titney_Spearz.mp3.exe tunez today!" and 4.-"Hey my BFF sent me a funny cat video! It says I should run Iz_not_Viruz_iz_LOLCatz to see teh kittiez!"
As you will notice with ALL of the above you simply don't have to bother with an exploit for ANY of those, as the user IS the exploit and is the weakest link. The last major "WTF?" that MSFT had, the "Hey lets run everybody as admin!" officially died with Vista and since 7 doesn't bug the crap out of folks with "Cancel/allow?" boxes every three seconds UAC has been left on and along with low rights mode in IE and Chromium based is doing a good job, as we saw by the numbers released the other week where there are only 4 per 1000 7 machines infected VS 14 for XP.
But as long as you have people willing to ignore or even turn off their AV (as I had the other week with a customer and the "Iz_Not_Bug_Iz_Limewire") because a malware writer waved a cookie in front of them then frankly I don't see what else can be done besides what MSFT is already doing with the free MSRT and MSE. And as we have seen with first MacDefender and now MacGuard (which doesn't even need the password anymore) on OSX and the nasty Android trojan apps it doesn't matter whether you are on an alternative OS or not, all that matters is whether or not the bad guys want in bad enough to do the work and whether you have any users who'll run "Iz_Not_Bug_Iz" style apps. sadly I've found that WAAAY too many are more than happy to do just that. Will this bounty crap work? Who knows, I think the money would be better served paying researchers to tear the botnet's guts apart and trace their way back, but they say there is no honor among thieves.
And I apologize about the length, I just find it incredibly ridiculous that anyone still believe ANY company, be it Apple, Google, or MSFT, can wave a magic wand and make PEBKAC disappear. There have been attempts at education (MSFT puts out plenty warning about email attachments and other major attack vectors) there have been attempts to lock the user away from anything bad (Apple) and using Linux to stop malware (Google with Android) and ALL HAVE FAILED. All you can do is cut down the risks as best you can and be ready to clean up the mess when Forest Gump ignores you to "see teh tittiez!"
Yes but you see they are NOT gonna rule in your favor until they check your machine, after all for all they know you have several Gbs of child pron just sitting there. So you will get your hearing in ohhh...about two years during which you will be in county dealing with the methhead looking for trouble and the wife beater that needs a new punching bag.
Look folks I don't like this anymore than you but the problem is everyone here is making the classic is ought fallacy where everyone is saying "it OUGHT not to be like this!" and I'm simply pointing out that with our current hysteria and overloaded court system that is the way it IS right now. As I said my friend Adam is in the state crime lab doing this 5 days a week. I have lunch with him probably 3 or 4 times a year when I'm in that area, so I know what kind of time you would be looking at before they could even complete their investigation. And this is a small state that isn't having a budget crisis, imagine how long your wait would be in say California?
You don't want this? Then get off your butts and get out there! Go to the conventions and public gatherings where the state and federal congress critters show up and MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD. Start a FB page pointing out that this "think of teh childrenz ZOMG!" bullshit has gone too far, get people to see any law that has the world children in it doesn't automatically make it a good law.
But for final proof of what I say I point you to the case of Michael Fiola that was given a company laptop turned out to be rooted. even though there were several viruses running on the PC and the company AV had obviously failed when a standard audit turned up CP he was fired, jailed, and ultimately had to pay over $250,000 in legal fees to clear his name. How many of you have a spare $250k lying around, hmmm?
So while I'm glad Mr Schneier has the money and the name to hopefully clear himself if this were to happen to him, for the average Joe on/. you'd be looking at 1 to 2 years in jail with no income waiting on the results and dealing with a public pretender whose only advice would be "plead guilty". I'm not making this stuff up folks, I wish I was.
Well anyone who has watched Pwn to own or read the article posted on OSNews on OSX knows that security in the Apple camp as largely been a gift of security through obscurity which the incredible numbers put up by the iPhone and iPad killed pretty damned dead. Oh and before someone chimes in (as they always do) that they go after the Mac over the WinBox because the Mac is nicer? Protip: The first one to drop ANY machine gets $10,000 so risking that amount on trying to get a Macbook one could easily buy with the check would be dumb and those guys ain't dummies.
I'd say the real problem for Apple is they have both the white and black hats trying to crack them, the whites to jailbreak their iShiny while the blacks want to pwn the iShiny. Maybe they should take the whites out of the equation by offering a "void warranty and jailbreak now" button?
That would leave just the black hats which admittedly will be a MUCH harder problem, just look at how many years it took for MSFT to get Windows from the crazy 19 infections per 1000 boxes with WinXP to the 4 per 1000 with 7. They had to harden the OS with improvements to DEP, ASLR, process isolation, hell if that isn't enough for you you can do what I did with my customers and add Structured Exception Handling Overwrite Protection which works beautifully without any programs hanging.
But what Apple has ended up with is gonna be more than a bit of a puzzler, as the devices iOS runs on aren't really powerful enough to deal with the overhead of the above security features, yet people still expect to be able to install and run programs on the things like a laptop. Short of ripping out support for most functions and instead having everything go through Apple's servers in a thin client kind of way I just don't see how they are gonna stop the malware guys. The malware guys have seen the numbers of sales, have seen there is blood in the water, and now the sharks are coming wanting a bite. It doesn't help I've had conversation with Apple users that still believe the "Apple is immune to malware" meme, at least the Windows and Linux users see and accept the web is a dangerous place.
Perhaps the thin client model is the way to go for Apple. They certainly have the server capacity now and it would fit right in with their walled garden approach, the only question is would streaming everything client server style clog the networks worse than they are. Doesn't Opera already do this with their mobile browser BTW? Maybe taking a page from their book wouldn't be such a bad idea.
Oh friend you wouldn't even need instructions! Since the vast majority is on Windows and DNS settings can be changed by the registry all one would have to do is post a zipped reg files to mediafire and the like and voila! The majority can bypass the bullshit as easy as "clicky clicky reboot". I'm sure there are plenty of guys like me if they break DNS with this bullshit that will be happy to flood the download hosts with re files set up to switch the clueless to functionality again.
But what do we expect when the government has been whoring itself to big business without pretense for over a decade and a half now. The will of the people is no longer being heard or listened to, only the will and desires of the rich elites. Hell look at how the right wing's answer to everything is "give teh rich more MONIES nom nom nom" when data shows that higher taxes on the rich leads to lower unemployment and increased job growth yet those writing the checks don't want that, so we get the "give teh rich more MONIES nom nom nom" policy.
So it doesn't matter how many of you wrote, sign petitions, all the things one was taught to do to change the system, because all you got was the same form letter I did from my congress whores which was bullshitese for "I don't listen to peasants".
Despite your desire for Star Trek the simple fact of the matter is with current tech it is pointless because for anything farther than the moon the amount of supplies required to keep meatbags in space is simply too much due to the amount of distance and time we are talking about. The last figures I saw on the possibility of Mars with current tech would take TWO rockets as big or bigger than Saturn V, simply to ensure they had enough food and fuel for the return voyage and to be able to stay long enough to actually get anything done.
Now compare that to New Horizons. For the same price as sending meatbags into LEO for two weeks we will be getting data for over a decade, probably over two and possibly three thank to the amount of power its RTG cranks out which of course couldn't be used around us meatbags without tons of shielding.
Hey I understand your frustrations, hell I wanted to be Buck Rogers when I was a kid (Did you see Wilma Deering? HOT) but as it is now other than having a meatbag shoot golf balls off the moon as a stupid human trick it simply isn't practical using current tech. It would be like saying we should drive a Model A up Everest. Sure it is theoretically possible, but it would be dangerous, expensive as hell, and in the end more than a little pointless.
The probes can do more and better science than the meatbags at like 1/20th of the cost. Are you gonna seriously argue that spending 20 times the cost and not getting back 1/1000th of the data in return is worth it simply to have a meatbag working the camera?
And the sad part? For over 30 years all we have heard from the Rs is "Give teh rich more MONIES" nom nom nom when the data clearly shows that higher taxes on the wealthy leads to lower unemployment and higher growth but all they can do is say "Its da poor with teh entitlements! You should give teh rich more MONIES nom nom, nom" because surprise, they are rich.
Sorry Anubis but Steve designing overheating computers goes back waaaay before the Cube. I was talking about the mid 80s Apple (III or Lisa, can't remember which ATM) where they actually advised customers to "raise the unit three to four inches off the table and drop the unit" as Steve hated fans and thus had created a machine that would get so hot the chips would literally unseat themselves and picking up the box and dropping it would sometimes (not always) reseat the chips.
But that is just how Jobs was, is, and always will be. For him design is everything and form will ALWAYS trump function. He has always cared about aesthetics more than what the user thinks and apparently that is the way to go by looking at Apple's market cap. I just don't understand why so many would pay such a hefty markup (last I checked Apple has the highest profit margins per unit in the business) for the device only to turn around and hack into it. If you want to run what you want there are choices, so choose them!
With all due respect to Mr Schneier', whom I respect greatly for his knowledge on security, I'd argue he is making a common mistake that could cost him dearly.....he is thinking rationally like a geek and assuming the world will think like him which sadly it rarely if ever does. His biggest risk is if someone uses his connection to look at child porn, or even attempts to look at non existent child pron, since the FBI is known to set up "honey pots" of fake files and then not bother to record the referrer so today that URL shortened link could actually get your door kicked in and you arrested if you click on it.
You see he thinks he can simply speak rationally to the cops and they will see their mistake and with a tip of their hat kindly go away. Bullshit. I have a friend in the state crime lab and even in a small state like mine you are looking at as much as a year and a half of backlog sometimes. Guess where you'll be while you wait for your confiscated machines to be scanned? Judges don't like handing out bail for anything like that for fear they'll be seen as soft on perverts.
So while I wish the world truly worked like Mr Schneier thinks it would, and hell maybe he is famous enough it might work that way, for most of us and probably himself as well betting the next couple of years of your life on it is foolish IMHO. This isn't rational times, there is a witchhunt going on where even the mention of that word can have you arrested. Look at the guy that wrote the "pro pedo" book. No pics, just his thoughts on a page sent him to jail, aka Thoughtcrime. The same with the guy busted for writing his fantasies in his diary which his therapist had suggested. Hell depending where you are a crudely drawn Lisa Simpson cartoon could have you thrown in PMITA prison!
I would argue in such a hysterical climate that simply leaving your door open like that is inviting disaster. Mr Schneier talks about "people parking in front of his house but depending on where his AP is a cantenna could nail it from quite a distance away and he would be none the wiser. That is until he is face down with a gun in his back being held by the nice man with the riot gear on.
Did I say throw away the meaning? Show me where I said that. What I said was there is ABSOLUTELY NO POINT in having over 20 damned posts just rehashing that same damned grammar correction!
So you explain to me how EXACTLY having over 20 damned posts needlessly nitpicking over three fucking words helps anyone, or the flow of discussion, or anything at all? There are so damned many anal retentive asshole grammar nazis here now that the second one picks up on any mistake you might as well just change the rest of the thread to "LOL I farted!" because for all intents and purposes ( I was tempted to write all intensive purposes just to watch them trip over themselves correcting it, but they are still busy with wafting around the "Could/couldn't" fart last I checked) the discussion is OVER. That's it, nothing but 50 posts of "LOL I farted!".
"Sure, the boys in Steve's lab can make it hack-proof. But that don't mean we ain't gonna hack it.". All we need now is someone to come out with a jailbreak that depends on the success of a plumbing minigame and we're in business!
Seriously why don't folks just accept if you want Steve's toys you have to play with them Steve's way? If you want freedom to do what you want with YOUR device you do NOT want an Apple iShiny, what you want is this little thing called an Android. Hell even the WinPhone is more open last I checked, as they made it butt simple to load third party apps.
Not to say old Steve don't make good gear, hell the man is famous for cutting out the bullshit and making things simple that "just work". But surely by now everyone has to know Steve has always been a control freak, going back to that Apple that would overheat because Steve hated the sound of fans.
Apple will ALWAYS be the most locked down walled garden approach, that is how Steve makes sure things are just the way he likes it, and as a side effect it'll make it so Apple doesn't have to worry about malware without actually hardening the OS, just make it so only pre-approved apps run and there you go. If that doesn't appeal to you? Get Android or WinPhone or WebOS devices, it isn't like there isn't plenty of choices out there.
I just don't get why people would pay for the Apple markup only to turn right around and look for ways to break into the thing. it just seems like a lot of work when there are plenty of other choices. Vote with your wallets people, if design and simplicity matters? Buy Apple. If being able to control your device and do as you please matters to you? Get something else. Why is that so hard?
Uhhh...been there done that. Didn't you ever see "Black Hawk Down"? That was the USA trying to keep enough order that famine relief could be brought in to help the starving. Instead every warlord and jihadist snatched everything that wasn't nailed down for their troops and for good measure used the US soldiers as target practice.
If the EU wants to go in there fine, but we kinda have our hands full with trying to keep the reps from tossing our credit rating in the hopes of stomping on the poor and elderly some more by making sure they don't get their checks next month (I swear they need to change their logo from an elephant to the monopoly guy lighting a $100 bill while standing on the poor) not to mention the THIRD war the president now has us involved in, showing us that "Hope & Change (TM)" had fine print that read "I Hope nobody notices the only Change was from a R to a D on the door".
Finally, and I'm sure I'll get hate for pointing it out but I don't give a fuck, the truth is the truth, everything I've seen proposed with regards to "climate change" (I love how they switched it from global warming, so no matter what happens the name fits) has been a GIANT SCAM like carbon credits, led by Rev Al Gore who has set himself up to be a carbon billionaire and just to show his balls are REALLY big has the nerve to claim farting around on his Lear jet and having a home so large it has its own basketball court indoors is "carbon neutral" since he pays himself credits from his own company which would be like moving money from your left to right pocket and claiming its "wealth redistribution" and demanding a tax break for it!
Oh and it might interest some here to know one of the chief architects of credit default swaps, you know the thing that helped slaughter the economy? Well guess who is writing the rules on cap & trade? Yep from the very same people who brought you "lets treat the market like Las Vegas baby!". And I would also point out that NEVER, not even once, have you seen Rev Al Gore come out for increased tariffs on China or India, two of the biggest growing polluters on the planet and who have already said they won't play the carbon swap game. Why? Because he and his friends MAKE MONIES off of them silly!
So I'm sorry but until we see a plan that doesn't consist of "hey you should give large chunks of money to me and my friends, while helping China and India to completely bury your economy!" then I say they can all fuck right off. We have three wars, an economy that has lost more than 20,000 FACTORIES to outsourcing not jobs mind you, whole factories, and a shamefully porous border that is killing Americans daily. So frankly we have bigger things to worry about that guarding some probes. Let the EU do it.
Ugh.Seriously I just have to say this to ALL grammar nazis...WTF people? Could you not understand what the man said? Is the post he placed so God damned important the Ruskies will launch if the text isn't correct? no? Then WTF!
Get ready to shit thyselves and get thy panties in a twist because "could care less" is probably used by a good 60% of the population, most of whom couldn't give a flying fuck about grammar crap! I mean Jesus Christ we're in the first generations of the kids that grew up texting so just be damned glad it isn't a whole stream of "BRB WTFOMGBBQ!" style bullshit, okay?
There ain't no damned reason to get your panties in a wad over a meaningless post on a fricking forum, and yes ain't is a word and if you don't like we southerners say go piss up a rope, especially when the whole damned thing has fuck all to do with TFA! If this were an article about spelling bees or English grammar between countries? Then I could see it. But TFA is at over 20+ posts now of nothing but panty twisted grammar nazis! Give it a fricking rest people!
Now as for TFA this is yet another example of why I think the GPL needs to be changed to have a "free for non commercial use" clause in it, although I have a feeling it may be too late. The original idea may have been an "OS of the people" but now just a handful of megacorps pretty much control the whole smash. I would also argue this is why desktop Linux has to deal with lack of a hardware driver ABI, because Red Hat and MSFT and the other corps don't really need one for servers as the hardware almost never changes and they have admins that can recompile, so if it doesn't affect them why should they care?
But sadly I think the time to do any meaningful changes to the GPL has already passed. Why is that? One word: TiVo. TiVo showed the megacorps that with GPL V2 they can get all the hard work of the community for nothing and can then turn it proprietary ANY time they desire, simply by adding code signing or eFuses. This is why corps like Google won't allow any GPL V3 code anywhere near anything they are working on as it would take away their option to lock up the code later.
As it is now MSFT sure as hell isn't paying a developer to make Linux a better desktop, RH doesn't care as servers are where their bread is buttered, and Canonical doesn't give squat back to the community. So who does that leave? A bunch of broke ass coders trying to work on FOSS on the weekends while keeping a roof over their heads with a 9 to 5 and it just ain't right. If all these coders whose work is being used by these megacorps actually got a few bucks kicked their way imagine how quickly the code would improve with so many guys working full time on it?
The asteroid in question is called Apophis and I'd say the bitch of the thing is not that it could hit us in 2029 (very very unlikely) but that it could swing close enough to earth in 2029 as to have its orbit nudged thus setting us up for an impact in 2036.
This to me would seem like a perfect cause to get the government to invest in NASA as per the earlier article posted here, as having a beacon placed on Apophis to keep track of the sucker and ensure we are able to accurately predict its orbit would be a smart move. Its next pass will be in 2013 which isn't a lot of time but should be time enough to prep a probe to land on it and plant a beacon.
Actually I'd say if you have back problems, like a serious crick in your neck from say...hunching over PCs all day? Then they are fricking great for that. I went to one last year and after 40 minutes of adjustment I haven't needed to go back and the constant neck cracking and stiffness is gone. Anything else? yeah they are full of shit but I've found that true of EVERY medical profession. I mean have you noticed how your doc will push whatever the big pharma guy is offering the vacation package for this year? I can always tell which big pharma rep has been by by what the doc is preferring.
As for TFA? Jesus tap dancing Christ for the love of all that is good and holy DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE RESPONSIVENESS please please please!
I've had to end up ditching Firefox for the moment because after the 3.6 branch frankly I've found it unusable on anything less than a 3GHz P4 with HT. Since I have to support customers from ALL walks, from the latest multicores to netbooks and the standard 1.8Ghz-3.2GHz office boxes I need a browser that will at least give basic functionality on netbooks and MOR office boxes and FF? Doesn't do that, not even close.
A good example is the 1.8GHz Sempron with 1.5Gb of RAM I use as a nettop. This is more powerful and has more RAM than your average Atom netbook yet just launching a tab can slam the CPU to 100% and take away control from the user for up to a minute and Lord help you if that tab has a flash video because you are talking a couple of minutes of CPU slamming. A browser should NEVER take control away from the user! And I have noticed you can launch FF and walk away and a couple of hours later the memory usage will have doubled and will eventually cause the machine to hit swap even when you haven't done anything. Again this is unacceptable.
Compare this to the Chromium based browsers on the same nettop (I prefer Comodo Dragon as it has some extra security features not found in Chrome/Chromium) and I can surf for hours and NEVER lose control or responsiveness and I can launch a video tab and have it slam the CPU for only a couple of seconds before returning to normal and again NEVER lose control of the browser. I didn't believe there could be THAT big a difference as the Chrome guys were always crowing about....until I tried it myself. Monitoring the CPU and RAM usage as well as how long the browser took to respond was like night and day, and I had the same two extensions on both, ForecastFox and ABP, so one can't blame it on extensions, it is the browser.
So please FF devs, fix the responsiveness and CPU/memory usage, okay? Going 64bit is nice and all but there are literally tens of millions of machines from the P4 era happily doing their jobs, not to mention brand new Atom single cores being put into netbooks as we speak. Firefox is simply unsuitable for purpose on these machines and until this problem is fixed I've had to replace FF with Dragon on my default install CDs, even though I've been with FF for years and years. It really is a shame but one can see it for yourself by simply monitoring CPU usage or typing about: memory in any Chromium based while having FF running. Check the numbers yourself. Pretty jarring.
Well I would say it depends on what kind of investing we are talking about. If it is like the dawn probe which just pulled alongside vesta and will read the asteroid belt for us, giving us huge insights into not only what is out there but possibly how the planets were formed in our system? Then yes lets do this, by all means lets do this.
But if we are talking about/turns on reverb and echo/ "Meatbags in spaaace!"/end effects/ then no lets NOT do that, as it is stupid and pointless and a giant money pit. Humans need all this shielding and food and water and a shitter, cause a giant very expensive investigation if they get blown up, and are generally only really even slightly practical at LEO with current tech.
Our engine tech simply hasn't gotten far enough to make meatbags in space a worthwhile endeavor For the same price as sending a couple of meatbags into LEO for a couple of weeks one can send a probe to the farthest reaches of our system, gathering data for years or possibly even decades, learning much MUCH more than we could with even a hundred meatbags shot into LEO.
So while I believe in investing in NASA, and would much prefer it to the three giant toilets we are flushing billions into...errrm...I mean "wars for national interest" we are currently blowing cash on like drunken sailors in Vegas one needs to invest wisely to make that money count. I believe a perfect example of what NOT to invest in is the Webb telescope. It is years behind and waaaaay over budget and while whomever is building it will most likely make out like a bandit if we finish the thing, encouraging projects to look at NASA as a blank check and a way to keep a job for years past its due date is NOT the way to go.
TLDR? Invest in NASA by all means, simply be smart about it and quit wasting money on meatbags in LEO.
Well if anyone can provide a website for said judge, or an email address I think we all need to send that judge a thank you note. It is so damned rare in this "the corps are always right" atmosphere to see a judge use good old fashioned common sense and apply simple fairness when it comes to the little guy dealing with supermegacorp he really does deserve to know he is appreciated.
I just wish we had judges like that in MY area, instead they are bending over backwards here for these natural gas wildcatters who are causing all kinds of tremors and tearing shit up all over the place, and we all know once they've gotten what they desire they'll disappear and leave the state the cleanup bill. But it is nice to know there are still a few good judges using plain old common sense out there, even if they are few and far between. You sir have my heartfelt thanks.
Sure thing friend, all you had to do was ask. Allow me to quote some of the relevant text for you " Microsoft indemnifies its Windows Phone 7 licensees against patent infringement claims," the company said. "We stand behind our product, and step up to our responsibility to clear the necessary IP rights" end quote.
So I would say that Google refusing to go to bat for Android OEMs plays right into MSFT's hand. MSFT will point to these lawsuits and say "See? It is like we told you. if you sign up for WinPhone you wouldn't be putting your business at risk, because we've got your back and stand beside OUR OS, unlike the other guy" and when you are talking about the incredible amount of money you have to spend nowadays in court fees and lawyers even if you win? That could easily make the cost of the WinPhone license WELL worth it. Damned shame though, as I really like the droid OS from what I've seen of it.
The sad irony is we won the cold war only to become the enemy by taking the absolute worst parts of their system!
Now we have socialism, only unlike what the republicans want you to think it doesn't have shit to do with giving the poor anything. Instead it is socialism for the rich, where they can gamble like the market is Las Vegas and if they win? Massive profits they then won't pay taxes on by using tricks like the double dutch which is favored by Google btw, and if they lose? Well then they are "too big to fail" and We, the people get left holding holding the bag.
Just as the Russians had we too have a small group of party elite, that through bribery, graft, and corruption shall always come out ahead no matter what happens to the country. Also like the Russians the will of the people is completely ignored, the military sucks down ever larger chunks of our GDP, and they can take you from the street and label you "an enemy of the people" and throw you down a hole and then forget about the hole or even have you executed without trial.
That is why I truly believe that just like the Soviet system we are destined for our own little revolution, perhaps in the form of our very own Arab spring. it is obvious voting now might as well consist of a ballot with two slots "Check here to vote for graft and corruption" and "Let the guys in DC know how you feel...vote for graft and corruption!".
And no matter what the people say, be it an end to the two wars (now three wars! Yay for the MIC! Extra hookers and blow this Xmas!), the securing of our borders and the tossing of those that entered illegally, the protection of medicare/caid and aid to the poor, legalization of pot, stopping of spying and abuses on Americans, increased taxes and the ends of loopholes for the top 5%, no matter what the people time and time and time again say they want they are repeatedly ignored by both parties for the desires of their cronies and those that can offer them bribes.
When it came to the cold war history will most likely record America won the battle but lost the war, becoming as big of a corrupt cabal of insiders as the old USSR before finally collapsing under the weight of all the graft and desire of those at the top to ever enrich themselves at the cost of the people.
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Well as a PC repairman I can't comment on the Chinese but I CAN comment on why there is all these "WinXP Razr1911 SP2 corp edition" with no patches...WGA. The pirates KNOW how to update without getting WGA'ed. The people they sell the boxes to? So don't have a clue. So the pirates simply disable all the updates and there ya go. The user thinks their PC is getting slower because it is getting older when in reality it is getting ever increasing piles of malware.
The current record for malware on a single box at the shop was a Compaq desktop which had 2836 pieces of malware and took over an hour and a half to boot. Yeah I could have just wiped it but I wanted to see if I beat my old boss' record of 1931 bugs on a single box, which I did. It was a whitebox that had Razr1911 SP2 on it and this was last year, not a single update since SP2 was released.
So I wouldn't be surprised that the locals are getting Razr'd and are simply clicking on "The big blue E" which they believe means Internet. I actually had an argument once with a girl who wanted to know why she couldn't check her email because the machine I sold her "had the Internet in it!" and when I asked WTF she was talking about she actually thought the big blue E would magically give her the Internet without needing anything else.
As my old boss used to say "Boy you may think you've seen the dumbest computer user but trust me, every time you think the stupidity couldn't get any deeper someone will happily come and prove you wrong" and no truer words have been spoken. Expecting these folks who haven't even updated IE to know about alternative browsers? Yeah and pull this leg it plays jingle bells.
Funny you should mention that as Windows 7 is easier to pirate than XP ever was. In fact not only is Windows 7 easier to pirate ( the hacked version floating around doesn't even need a code, and has all versions from Starter to Ultimate on the disc) but if you look up "Tiny7 Rev 09" you'll find a version of Windows 7 that uses less memory than XP while keeping most of the bling except the see through taskbar. How the hell those guys did it I don't know, but I decided to give it a spin on an old off lease office box I was gonna have to wipe anyway. We're talking about a 1.6Ghz with 512Mb of old SDRAM and damned if the OS isn't fricking peppy!
As for TFA maybe someone in China can answer this next question: Is your banking tied to IE 6 like Korea? I know Korea has been stuck on IE 6 for awhile due to using ActiveX to get around the crypto export rules. Maybe China has the same problem?
Well I would agree with you IF the unit was in the $100-$150 range, then putting up with loss of functionality would be expected. But this things is $500 which can buy you TWO Atom netbooks or a really nice AMD netbook and leave nearly $200 in your pocket.
I'm sorry but the thing ain't THAT cute. I'm willing to bet Samsung ends up with a warehouse full of these things as guys who know what ChromeOS is will have enough skills to simply install it on that $250 netbook, and the ones who don't know what ChromeOS is will pass it by for that shiny new AMD netbook running WoW for $180 less.
Having to put up with less powerful hardware and a machine that is pretty useless without a net connection shouldn't equal a price premium folks. Samsung ur doin it wrong.
Ohhhh, you got so close and then WHOOSH ya missed it. The problem isn't "its da regulationz!" although I would argue that some of the regs are dumbshit. The problem is a lie that has been pushed for 20+ years, starting with a Dem by the name of Clinton. Ready for the revelation? here goes...THERE IS NO FREE TRADE!
To call treating as equals a country that literally lets corps use their storm drains as toxic waste dumps, where the air and water are so bad that 9 out of 10 highest cancer rates are all in a single area, and where children need masks to go outside to play as "free trade" is as asinine as saying a football game between your local HS and the Denver Broncos is a "fair test of athletic skill".
The hilarious part? It does NOT work both ways. India is sinking billions into Aerospace rather than buy from us, China buys one or two then reverse engineers or just steals, like digging up the F117 that crashed in Kosovo to steal our stealth tech.
But you see our "give us more MONIES nom nom nom" party (which is quickly becoming the ONLY party) just gets a sly grin and says "Oh they're nationalists" like that is just cute for them, but then go on to rail about how being nationalist or isolationist is "ZOMFG EVIL!" when it comes to us.
Well fuck them and fuck their bullshit. THERE IS NO FREE TRADE and the quicker we lock down the borders and tariff the living hell out of those that pollute the planet the better! Oh and those companies that move to China? Should have to take their headquarters with them. No more house in the Hamptons for you, hope you like the air in China. don't let the door hit you on the way out!
Didn't bother to actually READ my post before responding huh? Kinda missed the relevant part? here I'll highlight it for you " you are looking at as much as a year and a half of backlog sometimes"
Now let me make this perfectly clear: The odds of finding a judge to let you walk out before they have actually scanned your PCs for porn involving children? Oh about ZERO. And even in my little state you are talking a year and a half backlog, in the bigger states you may be looking at 2 to 3 YEARS. Now that is before they even know whether you've done anything or not, okay?
And if you don't think innocents get railroaded if you say the magic word you might want to talk to Michael Fiola that was handed a laptop where the AV didn't work and had been rooted BY HIS EMPLOYER and when a routine check of the laptop turned up CP? He was fired, arrested, and it cost him $250,000+ to clear his name. Sure he can sue them now, good luck with that number one, and number two that isn't gonna bring back the two years in hell he suffered.
So tell me Jane, do YOU have $250,000 lying around to defend yourself? Can YOU survive without a job and with everyone calling you "suspected child pornographer' for the next 2 years? Because I can tell you if the answer is NO to either one you'll be looking at about a year and a half in county waiting for the scan, while getting a public pretender whose only "advice' to you is "plead guilty" so he can move on to the next loser. I don't make this nasty world Jane, I just live in it.
Oh but we haven't gotten to the REALLY nasty part yet! What is the REALLY nasty part? the student loan bubble that is about to burst. For years the pols have pushed "get an education!" while the corps shipped more than 20,000 factories overseas in less than a decade and brought H1-Bs over as fast as they could stuff them on a plane.
Now we have students going straight from graduation to the unemployment line, saddled with debt in all likelihood they will NEVER ever pay back. As these debts pile up they not only put a drain on the students but the economy as a whole and it won't be too long before they turn toxic just like the mortgages. The only way I foresee this stopping will be to take a bath as you have to allow students that have been without work for X number of months to write these things off or drop them to interest free at some token amount like $5 a month to get them off their backs because more and more employers are also looking at credit ratings and bad student loans obliterate credit.
Mark my words when THIS one turns it'll make the housing bubble look like a pleasant Sunday afternoon. Because at least with the bad houses folks could walk away and with the current setup there is NO ever walking away from bad student loans. What we will end up with is the best educated Micky D's workforce on the planet, bar none.
Ya know you'd think that would be the case, wouldn't you? But I guess since the malware guys have gotten so good at tricking users with "Iz_Not_Viruz_Iz" social engineering stuff like "The new Limewire" (I've seen that one quite a lot lately) and the security tool "ZOMG U Got Viruz!" trick that honestly I haven't seen an infected reg file in awhile.
Most of the reg files are written in human readable format with nice little readmes that you can use to check what it is supposed to do with the description. I've found most of the reg files are written by.....well by guys like me, little repair shop guys that find a niggler of a problem and write a reg file to deal with it and then when they find others on some forum with the same problem they drop it on mediafire. I have one I found that way that is frankly a little lifesaver for fixit guys, it is a little reg file that tosses the Windows Sound Server settings and then replaces them with the default values. If you have ever installed Windows or installed a sound driver only to have "No Device" show up under the Sound CPL applet? This fixes it, no matter which kind of soundchip you have. Just clicky clicky reboot and if anybody needs it feel free to email me.
So while I'm sure you'll probably see one or two assholes, after all what is the Internet without assholes, like Goatse trolls they are just part of the experience, like TPB I'm sure the good reg files will quickly rise to the top through word of mouth and will be written in an easily read format complete with comments. There are just too many little fixit guys like me that hate to see the government fuck up something as fundamental as DNS so the RIAA can show how their little PPT says if they made X last year then they should make X*Y this year, regardless of the economy or whether their product is extra shitty this year or not.
Mark my words, after they pull this shit and their sales don't go through the roof? First they'll claim it is Darknets, that Joe average has hooked into this vast dark web and THAT is how they are keeping from buying the *.AA precious, and then they'll most likely have themselves declared "Too big to fail" and along with perpetual copyrights they'll just take the money straight from your check each month. Isn't capitalism grand?
Did you miss the earlier article on how Apple got iOS rooted in a single day? Or maybe the KDELook malware that went around a couple of years back? How about hot to write a Linux virus in 5 easy steps?
Protip: ALL OSes can and WILL be pwned simply because they are extremely complex interacting systems and nobody, not even Torvalds and the heads of Apple and MSFT engineering can tell you EXACTLY what every possible interaction with each subsystem will output simply because our computers do more than ever before with multicores, GPUs made up of dozens to hundreds of stream processors, and tons of third party code running on top of it all.
As someone who fixes infected PCs 6 days a week and just got done cleaning out another security tool variant let me give you this observation from experience on where most of the malware gets into the PC...PEBKAC.The big attack vectors i'm seeing day after day, in no particular order, is: 1.- The "you want teh hot lesbos? you need to run our Iz_not_Viruz_iz_codec.exe to play teh vidz!" 2.- The "ZOMG you got teh viruz! To fix run our Iz_not_Viruz_iz_cleanerz.exe to get rid of it ZOMG!" 3.-The "Use the new Limewire (Iz_not_Viruz_iz_Limewirez) to download teh latest Titney_Spearz.mp3.exe tunez today!" and 4.-"Hey my BFF sent me a funny cat video! It says I should run Iz_not_Viruz_iz_LOLCatz to see teh kittiez!"
As you will notice with ALL of the above you simply don't have to bother with an exploit for ANY of those, as the user IS the exploit and is the weakest link. The last major "WTF?" that MSFT had, the "Hey lets run everybody as admin!" officially died with Vista and since 7 doesn't bug the crap out of folks with "Cancel/allow?" boxes every three seconds UAC has been left on and along with low rights mode in IE and Chromium based is doing a good job, as we saw by the numbers released the other week where there are only 4 per 1000 7 machines infected VS 14 for XP.
But as long as you have people willing to ignore or even turn off their AV (as I had the other week with a customer and the "Iz_Not_Bug_Iz_Limewire") because a malware writer waved a cookie in front of them then frankly I don't see what else can be done besides what MSFT is already doing with the free MSRT and MSE. And as we have seen with first MacDefender and now MacGuard (which doesn't even need the password anymore) on OSX and the nasty Android trojan apps it doesn't matter whether you are on an alternative OS or not, all that matters is whether or not the bad guys want in bad enough to do the work and whether you have any users who'll run "Iz_Not_Bug_Iz" style apps. sadly I've found that WAAAY too many are more than happy to do just that. Will this bounty crap work? Who knows, I think the money would be better served paying researchers to tear the botnet's guts apart and trace their way back, but they say there is no honor among thieves.
And I apologize about the length, I just find it incredibly ridiculous that anyone still believe ANY company, be it Apple, Google, or MSFT, can wave a magic wand and make PEBKAC disappear. There have been attempts at education (MSFT puts out plenty warning about email attachments and other major attack vectors) there have been attempts to lock the user away from anything bad (Apple) and using Linux to stop malware (Google with Android) and ALL HAVE FAILED. All you can do is cut down the risks as best you can and be ready to clean up the mess when Forest Gump ignores you to "see teh tittiez!"
Yes but you see they are NOT gonna rule in your favor until they check your machine, after all for all they know you have several Gbs of child pron just sitting there. So you will get your hearing in ohhh...about two years during which you will be in county dealing with the methhead looking for trouble and the wife beater that needs a new punching bag.
Look folks I don't like this anymore than you but the problem is everyone here is making the classic is ought fallacy where everyone is saying "it OUGHT not to be like this!" and I'm simply pointing out that with our current hysteria and overloaded court system that is the way it IS right now. As I said my friend Adam is in the state crime lab doing this 5 days a week. I have lunch with him probably 3 or 4 times a year when I'm in that area, so I know what kind of time you would be looking at before they could even complete their investigation. And this is a small state that isn't having a budget crisis, imagine how long your wait would be in say California?
You don't want this? Then get off your butts and get out there! Go to the conventions and public gatherings where the state and federal congress critters show up and MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD. Start a FB page pointing out that this "think of teh childrenz ZOMG!" bullshit has gone too far, get people to see any law that has the world children in it doesn't automatically make it a good law.
But for final proof of what I say I point you to the case of Michael Fiola that was given a company laptop turned out to be rooted. even though there were several viruses running on the PC and the company AV had obviously failed when a standard audit turned up CP he was fired, jailed, and ultimately had to pay over $250,000 in legal fees to clear his name. How many of you have a spare $250k lying around, hmmm?
So while I'm glad Mr Schneier has the money and the name to hopefully clear himself if this were to happen to him, for the average Joe on /. you'd be looking at 1 to 2 years in jail with no income waiting on the results and dealing with a public pretender whose only advice would be "plead guilty". I'm not making this stuff up folks, I wish I was.
Well anyone who has watched Pwn to own or read the article posted on OSNews on OSX knows that security in the Apple camp as largely been a gift of security through obscurity which the incredible numbers put up by the iPhone and iPad killed pretty damned dead. Oh and before someone chimes in (as they always do) that they go after the Mac over the WinBox because the Mac is nicer? Protip: The first one to drop ANY machine gets $10,000 so risking that amount on trying to get a Macbook one could easily buy with the check would be dumb and those guys ain't dummies.
I'd say the real problem for Apple is they have both the white and black hats trying to crack them, the whites to jailbreak their iShiny while the blacks want to pwn the iShiny. Maybe they should take the whites out of the equation by offering a "void warranty and jailbreak now" button?
That would leave just the black hats which admittedly will be a MUCH harder problem, just look at how many years it took for MSFT to get Windows from the crazy 19 infections per 1000 boxes with WinXP to the 4 per 1000 with 7. They had to harden the OS with improvements to DEP, ASLR, process isolation, hell if that isn't enough for you you can do what I did with my customers and add Structured Exception Handling Overwrite Protection which works beautifully without any programs hanging.
But what Apple has ended up with is gonna be more than a bit of a puzzler, as the devices iOS runs on aren't really powerful enough to deal with the overhead of the above security features, yet people still expect to be able to install and run programs on the things like a laptop. Short of ripping out support for most functions and instead having everything go through Apple's servers in a thin client kind of way I just don't see how they are gonna stop the malware guys. The malware guys have seen the numbers of sales, have seen there is blood in the water, and now the sharks are coming wanting a bite. It doesn't help I've had conversation with Apple users that still believe the "Apple is immune to malware" meme, at least the Windows and Linux users see and accept the web is a dangerous place.
Perhaps the thin client model is the way to go for Apple. They certainly have the server capacity now and it would fit right in with their walled garden approach, the only question is would streaming everything client server style clog the networks worse than they are. Doesn't Opera already do this with their mobile browser BTW? Maybe taking a page from their book wouldn't be such a bad idea.
Oh friend you wouldn't even need instructions! Since the vast majority is on Windows and DNS settings can be changed by the registry all one would have to do is post a zipped reg files to mediafire and the like and voila! The majority can bypass the bullshit as easy as "clicky clicky reboot". I'm sure there are plenty of guys like me if they break DNS with this bullshit that will be happy to flood the download hosts with re files set up to switch the clueless to functionality again.
But what do we expect when the government has been whoring itself to big business without pretense for over a decade and a half now. The will of the people is no longer being heard or listened to, only the will and desires of the rich elites. Hell look at how the right wing's answer to everything is "give teh rich more MONIES nom nom nom" when data shows that higher taxes on the rich leads to lower unemployment and increased job growth yet those writing the checks don't want that, so we get the "give teh rich more MONIES nom nom nom" policy.
So it doesn't matter how many of you wrote, sign petitions, all the things one was taught to do to change the system, because all you got was the same form letter I did from my congress whores which was bullshitese for "I don't listen to peasants".
Despite your desire for Star Trek the simple fact of the matter is with current tech it is pointless because for anything farther than the moon the amount of supplies required to keep meatbags in space is simply too much due to the amount of distance and time we are talking about. The last figures I saw on the possibility of Mars with current tech would take TWO rockets as big or bigger than Saturn V, simply to ensure they had enough food and fuel for the return voyage and to be able to stay long enough to actually get anything done.
Now compare that to New Horizons. For the same price as sending meatbags into LEO for two weeks we will be getting data for over a decade, probably over two and possibly three thank to the amount of power its RTG cranks out which of course couldn't be used around us meatbags without tons of shielding.
Hey I understand your frustrations, hell I wanted to be Buck Rogers when I was a kid (Did you see Wilma Deering? HOT) but as it is now other than having a meatbag shoot golf balls off the moon as a stupid human trick it simply isn't practical using current tech. It would be like saying we should drive a Model A up Everest. Sure it is theoretically possible, but it would be dangerous, expensive as hell, and in the end more than a little pointless.
The probes can do more and better science than the meatbags at like 1/20th of the cost. Are you gonna seriously argue that spending 20 times the cost and not getting back 1/1000th of the data in return is worth it simply to have a meatbag working the camera?
And the sad part? For over 30 years all we have heard from the Rs is "Give teh rich more MONIES" nom nom nom when the data clearly shows that higher taxes on the wealthy leads to lower unemployment and higher growth but all they can do is say "Its da poor with teh entitlements! You should give teh rich more MONIES nom nom, nom" because surprise, they are rich.
Sorry Anubis but Steve designing overheating computers goes back waaaay before the Cube. I was talking about the mid 80s Apple (III or Lisa, can't remember which ATM) where they actually advised customers to "raise the unit three to four inches off the table and drop the unit" as Steve hated fans and thus had created a machine that would get so hot the chips would literally unseat themselves and picking up the box and dropping it would sometimes (not always) reseat the chips.
But that is just how Jobs was, is, and always will be. For him design is everything and form will ALWAYS trump function. He has always cared about aesthetics more than what the user thinks and apparently that is the way to go by looking at Apple's market cap. I just don't understand why so many would pay such a hefty markup (last I checked Apple has the highest profit margins per unit in the business) for the device only to turn around and hack into it. If you want to run what you want there are choices, so choose them!
With all due respect to Mr Schneier', whom I respect greatly for his knowledge on security, I'd argue he is making a common mistake that could cost him dearly.....he is thinking rationally like a geek and assuming the world will think like him which sadly it rarely if ever does. His biggest risk is if someone uses his connection to look at child porn, or even attempts to look at non existent child pron, since the FBI is known to set up "honey pots" of fake files and then not bother to record the referrer so today that URL shortened link could actually get your door kicked in and you arrested if you click on it.
You see he thinks he can simply speak rationally to the cops and they will see their mistake and with a tip of their hat kindly go away. Bullshit. I have a friend in the state crime lab and even in a small state like mine you are looking at as much as a year and a half of backlog sometimes. Guess where you'll be while you wait for your confiscated machines to be scanned? Judges don't like handing out bail for anything like that for fear they'll be seen as soft on perverts.
So while I wish the world truly worked like Mr Schneier thinks it would, and hell maybe he is famous enough it might work that way, for most of us and probably himself as well betting the next couple of years of your life on it is foolish IMHO. This isn't rational times, there is a witchhunt going on where even the mention of that word can have you arrested. Look at the guy that wrote the "pro pedo" book. No pics, just his thoughts on a page sent him to jail, aka Thoughtcrime. The same with the guy busted for writing his fantasies in his diary which his therapist had suggested. Hell depending where you are a crudely drawn Lisa Simpson cartoon could have you thrown in PMITA prison!
I would argue in such a hysterical climate that simply leaving your door open like that is inviting disaster. Mr Schneier talks about "people parking in front of his house but depending on where his AP is a cantenna could nail it from quite a distance away and he would be none the wiser. That is until he is face down with a gun in his back being held by the nice man with the riot gear on.
Did I say throw away the meaning? Show me where I said that. What I said was there is ABSOLUTELY NO POINT in having over 20 damned posts just rehashing that same damned grammar correction!
So you explain to me how EXACTLY having over 20 damned posts needlessly nitpicking over three fucking words helps anyone, or the flow of discussion, or anything at all? There are so damned many anal retentive asshole grammar nazis here now that the second one picks up on any mistake you might as well just change the rest of the thread to "LOL I farted!" because for all intents and purposes ( I was tempted to write all intensive purposes just to watch them trip over themselves correcting it, but they are still busy with wafting around the "Could /couldn't" fart last I checked) the discussion is OVER. That's it, nothing but 50 posts of "LOL I farted!".
"Sure, the boys in Steve's lab can make it hack-proof. But that don't mean we ain't gonna hack it.". All we need now is someone to come out with a jailbreak that depends on the success of a plumbing minigame and we're in business!
Seriously why don't folks just accept if you want Steve's toys you have to play with them Steve's way? If you want freedom to do what you want with YOUR device you do NOT want an Apple iShiny, what you want is this little thing called an Android. Hell even the WinPhone is more open last I checked, as they made it butt simple to load third party apps.
Not to say old Steve don't make good gear, hell the man is famous for cutting out the bullshit and making things simple that "just work". But surely by now everyone has to know Steve has always been a control freak, going back to that Apple that would overheat because Steve hated the sound of fans.
Apple will ALWAYS be the most locked down walled garden approach, that is how Steve makes sure things are just the way he likes it, and as a side effect it'll make it so Apple doesn't have to worry about malware without actually hardening the OS, just make it so only pre-approved apps run and there you go. If that doesn't appeal to you? Get Android or WinPhone or WebOS devices, it isn't like there isn't plenty of choices out there.
I just don't get why people would pay for the Apple markup only to turn right around and look for ways to break into the thing. it just seems like a lot of work when there are plenty of other choices. Vote with your wallets people, if design and simplicity matters? Buy Apple. If being able to control your device and do as you please matters to you? Get something else. Why is that so hard?
Uhhh...been there done that. Didn't you ever see "Black Hawk Down"? That was the USA trying to keep enough order that famine relief could be brought in to help the starving. Instead every warlord and jihadist snatched everything that wasn't nailed down for their troops and for good measure used the US soldiers as target practice.
If the EU wants to go in there fine, but we kinda have our hands full with trying to keep the reps from tossing our credit rating in the hopes of stomping on the poor and elderly some more by making sure they don't get their checks next month (I swear they need to change their logo from an elephant to the monopoly guy lighting a $100 bill while standing on the poor) not to mention the THIRD war the president now has us involved in, showing us that "Hope & Change (TM)" had fine print that read "I Hope nobody notices the only Change was from a R to a D on the door".
Finally, and I'm sure I'll get hate for pointing it out but I don't give a fuck, the truth is the truth, everything I've seen proposed with regards to "climate change" (I love how they switched it from global warming, so no matter what happens the name fits) has been a GIANT SCAM like carbon credits, led by Rev Al Gore who has set himself up to be a carbon billionaire and just to show his balls are REALLY big has the nerve to claim farting around on his Lear jet and having a home so large it has its own basketball court indoors is "carbon neutral" since he pays himself credits from his own company which would be like moving money from your left to right pocket and claiming its "wealth redistribution" and demanding a tax break for it!
Oh and it might interest some here to know one of the chief architects of credit default swaps, you know the thing that helped slaughter the economy? Well guess who is writing the rules on cap & trade? Yep from the very same people who brought you "lets treat the market like Las Vegas baby!". And I would also point out that NEVER, not even once, have you seen Rev Al Gore come out for increased tariffs on China or India, two of the biggest growing polluters on the planet and who have already said they won't play the carbon swap game. Why? Because he and his friends MAKE MONIES off of them silly!
So I'm sorry but until we see a plan that doesn't consist of "hey you should give large chunks of money to me and my friends, while helping China and India to completely bury your economy!" then I say they can all fuck right off. We have three wars, an economy that has lost more than 20,000 FACTORIES to outsourcing not jobs mind you, whole factories, and a shamefully porous border that is killing Americans daily. So frankly we have bigger things to worry about that guarding some probes. Let the EU do it.
Ugh.Seriously I just have to say this to ALL grammar nazis...WTF people? Could you not understand what the man said? Is the post he placed so God damned important the Ruskies will launch if the text isn't correct? no? Then WTF!
Get ready to shit thyselves and get thy panties in a twist because "could care less" is probably used by a good 60% of the population, most of whom couldn't give a flying fuck about grammar crap! I mean Jesus Christ we're in the first generations of the kids that grew up texting so just be damned glad it isn't a whole stream of "BRB WTFOMGBBQ!" style bullshit, okay?
There ain't no damned reason to get your panties in a wad over a meaningless post on a fricking forum, and yes ain't is a word and if you don't like we southerners say go piss up a rope, especially when the whole damned thing has fuck all to do with TFA! If this were an article about spelling bees or English grammar between countries? Then I could see it. But TFA is at over 20+ posts now of nothing but panty twisted grammar nazis! Give it a fricking rest people!
Now as for TFA this is yet another example of why I think the GPL needs to be changed to have a "free for non commercial use" clause in it, although I have a feeling it may be too late. The original idea may have been an "OS of the people" but now just a handful of megacorps pretty much control the whole smash. I would also argue this is why desktop Linux has to deal with lack of a hardware driver ABI, because Red Hat and MSFT and the other corps don't really need one for servers as the hardware almost never changes and they have admins that can recompile, so if it doesn't affect them why should they care?
But sadly I think the time to do any meaningful changes to the GPL has already passed. Why is that? One word: TiVo. TiVo showed the megacorps that with GPL V2 they can get all the hard work of the community for nothing and can then turn it proprietary ANY time they desire, simply by adding code signing or eFuses. This is why corps like Google won't allow any GPL V3 code anywhere near anything they are working on as it would take away their option to lock up the code later.
As it is now MSFT sure as hell isn't paying a developer to make Linux a better desktop, RH doesn't care as servers are where their bread is buttered, and Canonical doesn't give squat back to the community. So who does that leave? A bunch of broke ass coders trying to work on FOSS on the weekends while keeping a roof over their heads with a 9 to 5 and it just ain't right. If all these coders whose work is being used by these megacorps actually got a few bucks kicked their way imagine how quickly the code would improve with so many guys working full time on it?
The asteroid in question is called Apophis and I'd say the bitch of the thing is not that it could hit us in 2029 (very very unlikely) but that it could swing close enough to earth in 2029 as to have its orbit nudged thus setting us up for an impact in 2036.
This to me would seem like a perfect cause to get the government to invest in NASA as per the earlier article posted here, as having a beacon placed on Apophis to keep track of the sucker and ensure we are able to accurately predict its orbit would be a smart move. Its next pass will be in 2013 which isn't a lot of time but should be time enough to prep a probe to land on it and plant a beacon.
Actually I'd say if you have back problems, like a serious crick in your neck from say...hunching over PCs all day? Then they are fricking great for that. I went to one last year and after 40 minutes of adjustment I haven't needed to go back and the constant neck cracking and stiffness is gone. Anything else? yeah they are full of shit but I've found that true of EVERY medical profession. I mean have you noticed how your doc will push whatever the big pharma guy is offering the vacation package for this year? I can always tell which big pharma rep has been by by what the doc is preferring.
As for TFA? Jesus tap dancing Christ for the love of all that is good and holy DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE RESPONSIVENESS please please please!
I've had to end up ditching Firefox for the moment because after the 3.6 branch frankly I've found it unusable on anything less than a 3GHz P4 with HT. Since I have to support customers from ALL walks, from the latest multicores to netbooks and the standard 1.8Ghz-3.2GHz office boxes I need a browser that will at least give basic functionality on netbooks and MOR office boxes and FF? Doesn't do that, not even close.
A good example is the 1.8GHz Sempron with 1.5Gb of RAM I use as a nettop. This is more powerful and has more RAM than your average Atom netbook yet just launching a tab can slam the CPU to 100% and take away control from the user for up to a minute and Lord help you if that tab has a flash video because you are talking a couple of minutes of CPU slamming. A browser should NEVER take control away from the user! And I have noticed you can launch FF and walk away and a couple of hours later the memory usage will have doubled and will eventually cause the machine to hit swap even when you haven't done anything. Again this is unacceptable.
Compare this to the Chromium based browsers on the same nettop (I prefer Comodo Dragon as it has some extra security features not found in Chrome/Chromium) and I can surf for hours and NEVER lose control or responsiveness and I can launch a video tab and have it slam the CPU for only a couple of seconds before returning to normal and again NEVER lose control of the browser. I didn't believe there could be THAT big a difference as the Chrome guys were always crowing about....until I tried it myself. Monitoring the CPU and RAM usage as well as how long the browser took to respond was like night and day, and I had the same two extensions on both, ForecastFox and ABP, so one can't blame it on extensions, it is the browser.
So please FF devs, fix the responsiveness and CPU/memory usage, okay? Going 64bit is nice and all but there are literally tens of millions of machines from the P4 era happily doing their jobs, not to mention brand new Atom single cores being put into netbooks as we speak. Firefox is simply unsuitable for purpose on these machines and until this problem is fixed I've had to replace FF with Dragon on my default install CDs, even though I've been with FF for years and years. It really is a shame but one can see it for yourself by simply monitoring CPU usage or typing about: memory in any Chromium based while having FF running. Check the numbers yourself. Pretty jarring.
Well I would say it depends on what kind of investing we are talking about. If it is like the dawn probe which just pulled alongside vesta and will read the asteroid belt for us, giving us huge insights into not only what is out there but possibly how the planets were formed in our system? Then yes lets do this, by all means lets do this.
But if we are talking about /turns on reverb and echo/ "Meatbags in spaaace!" /end effects/ then no lets NOT do that, as it is stupid and pointless and a giant money pit. Humans need all this shielding and food and water and a shitter, cause a giant very expensive investigation if they get blown up, and are generally only really even slightly practical at LEO with current tech.
Our engine tech simply hasn't gotten far enough to make meatbags in space a worthwhile endeavor For the same price as sending a couple of meatbags into LEO for a couple of weeks one can send a probe to the farthest reaches of our system, gathering data for years or possibly even decades, learning much MUCH more than we could with even a hundred meatbags shot into LEO.
So while I believe in investing in NASA, and would much prefer it to the three giant toilets we are flushing billions into...errrm...I mean "wars for national interest" we are currently blowing cash on like drunken sailors in Vegas one needs to invest wisely to make that money count. I believe a perfect example of what NOT to invest in is the Webb telescope. It is years behind and waaaaay over budget and while whomever is building it will most likely make out like a bandit if we finish the thing, encouraging projects to look at NASA as a blank check and a way to keep a job for years past its due date is NOT the way to go.
TLDR? Invest in NASA by all means, simply be smart about it and quit wasting money on meatbags in LEO.
Well if anyone can provide a website for said judge, or an email address I think we all need to send that judge a thank you note. It is so damned rare in this "the corps are always right" atmosphere to see a judge use good old fashioned common sense and apply simple fairness when it comes to the little guy dealing with supermegacorp he really does deserve to know he is appreciated.
I just wish we had judges like that in MY area, instead they are bending over backwards here for these natural gas wildcatters who are causing all kinds of tremors and tearing shit up all over the place, and we all know once they've gotten what they desire they'll disappear and leave the state the cleanup bill. But it is nice to know there are still a few good judges using plain old common sense out there, even if they are few and far between. You sir have my heartfelt thanks.
Sure thing friend, all you had to do was ask. Allow me to quote some of the relevant text for you " Microsoft indemnifies its Windows Phone 7 licensees against patent infringement claims," the company said. "We stand behind our product, and step up to our responsibility to clear the necessary IP rights" end quote.
So I would say that Google refusing to go to bat for Android OEMs plays right into MSFT's hand. MSFT will point to these lawsuits and say "See? It is like we told you. if you sign up for WinPhone you wouldn't be putting your business at risk, because we've got your back and stand beside OUR OS, unlike the other guy" and when you are talking about the incredible amount of money you have to spend nowadays in court fees and lawyers even if you win? That could easily make the cost of the WinPhone license WELL worth it. Damned shame though, as I really like the droid OS from what I've seen of it.
The sad irony is we won the cold war only to become the enemy by taking the absolute worst parts of their system!
Now we have socialism, only unlike what the republicans want you to think it doesn't have shit to do with giving the poor anything. Instead it is socialism for the rich, where they can gamble like the market is Las Vegas and if they win? Massive profits they then won't pay taxes on by using tricks like the double dutch which is favored by Google btw, and if they lose? Well then they are "too big to fail" and We, the people get left holding holding the bag.
Just as the Russians had we too have a small group of party elite, that through bribery, graft, and corruption shall always come out ahead no matter what happens to the country. Also like the Russians the will of the people is completely ignored, the military sucks down ever larger chunks of our GDP, and they can take you from the street and label you "an enemy of the people" and throw you down a hole and then forget about the hole or even have you executed without trial.
That is why I truly believe that just like the Soviet system we are destined for our own little revolution, perhaps in the form of our very own Arab spring. it is obvious voting now might as well consist of a ballot with two slots "Check here to vote for graft and corruption" and "Let the guys in DC know how you feel...vote for graft and corruption!".
And no matter what the people say, be it an end to the two wars (now three wars! Yay for the MIC! Extra hookers and blow this Xmas!), the securing of our borders and the tossing of those that entered illegally, the protection of medicare/caid and aid to the poor, legalization of pot, stopping of spying and abuses on Americans, increased taxes and the ends of loopholes for the top 5%, no matter what the people time and time and time again say they want they are repeatedly ignored by both parties for the desires of their cronies and those that can offer them bribes.
When it came to the cold war history will most likely record America won the battle but lost the war, becoming as big of a corrupt cabal of insiders as the old USSR before finally collapsing under the weight of all the graft and desire of those at the top to ever enrich themselves at the cost of the people.