I probably shouldn't respond to an AC, but here goes: If this were a few "rogue" sites then yes, your point would be valid. But when you are talking the VAST majority on a domain, something to the tune of over a half a million sites of malware and spam? Then any legitimate company would be wise to head for the hills and should probably thank Google if they didn't already know.
To complain this might actually hit an innocent is like saying the one Nigerian prince who really does want to give someone money is being discriminated against thanks to the spam filters. This isn't just some accidental hacking here, this bunch has been courting the malware and phishing groups similar to that colo that got shut down last year.
According to the full posting Google gave they and several others have complained repeatedly only to get ignored. If you are a slum lord repeatedly warned about all the crack dealing and you just go back to counting your money? Well don't be surprised or shocked when the buildings get damaged when the cops raid the place. It isn't like there isn't plenty of places offering cheap hosting, the big difference is this one didn't care how many complaints they got for bad behavior. Bad behavior can have consequences in the cyber world as well as the real, and they have reaped what they have sown.
Am I the only one that is starting to think this default thing might not be so bad? We've tried bailouts, the banks said "thanks" and promptly foreclosed, we bailed out the ultracorps like GE who said "thanks!" and promptly sent the jobs to India, meanwhile the government is building new aircraft carriers and pissing money into the F35 black hole like the cold war was scheduled to restart next Tuesday and Americans are living in tents because they can't find work. Did I miss anything?
Maybe if we default we won't be able to keep borrowing money, imports will fall off the face of the planet, and we might actually have to start manufacturing things again? Just a thought. But so far we have done everything the bankers wanted and while they got a couple more yachts it certainly hasn't helped this country out, if anything their trickling on the American people has made things MUCH worse.
I really am starting to wonder if it is time for the fall, if it is time for our own Arab spring. it is obvious the elected officials will no longer listen to or obey the will of the people, not on the three wars killing our kids, not on the border leaking like a sieve, not on H1-Bs when there are 100 Americans or more applying for every job, not on anything anymore. maybe it is time for this system to go away and a new one to replace it, one that listens to the people. Because frankly I don't see how we can continue down this path without almost certain full scale class war.
Ahhh so here we have proof that when confronted with the truth a Linux zealot can only grab his Tux blankie and scream "nigger faggot" or in Linux terms "Troll shill astroturfer." Perhaps a little more truth to choke on?
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"?
You see you whiny little delusional mama's boy, I'm your worst fucking nightmare...a retailer that still believes. I believe that the community doesn't have to take Torvalds shit sandwiches, I believe that things can be made better, I believe Linux can be something for more than douchebags like you that will happily take a cock slapping from linus as long as you can say you are sticking to "teh man". I believe that there can be Linux boxes on actual shelves and penguins on boxes.
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?
So your answer is...what? "Drive the Jews into the sea" (quote from the president of Iran) and bow before Sharia? News Flash: Appeasement NEVER works, it has NEVER worked and will NEVER work since it mearly emboldens the one being appeased while making the appeaser look like a weakened enemy with no will to fight.
Want proof? Look to Europe. They have been following a path of appeasement for over a decade now. has the violence gone down? Are the Muslims there living happily in harmony with others? NO, instead you have women attacked in London for not wearing the Burqa and if anything MORE attacks and MORE terrorism, not less.
I have said it before and I will say it again: Until Islam as a religion, through the Mullahs and the teachings of the Mosques acknowledge the right for those of differing views and sexual orientations and creeds to exist? There can BE NO PEACE. To say that there can be would be like saying intellectuals could make peace with Pol Pot or Jews and gypsy with the SS. As long as you are seen as a Dhimmi (look it up) and considered a subhuman? Then there can never be peace because you are but a dog in the eyes of their religion, which controls everything there.
Perhaps you might wish to read The Hadiths and then perhaps you might understand. And realize this is taught almost from the time of birth, just as the Japanese were taught the emperor was divine and they were the pure and chosen race. A few choice quotes " slay the idolaters, wherever you find them, and take them captive and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush. " "And fight with them until there is no more persecution, and all religions are for Allah.
Again how EXACTLY is your appeasement plan gonna work when all that are not for Allah are fair game? How can your plan work without driving Jews into the sea? How can your plan work when even in countries that are 100% Muslim they slaughter each other over whether they are Sunni or Shia? The other religions grew up, Islam stayed with stonings and chopping off of body parts. Other religions through their priests accepted that other faiths have the right to exist, Islam hasn't. How can your appeasement change these things?
Wow, you are STILL an idiot, I should be amazed but considering you think a beta OS which is so bleeding edge it should have stigmata, aka Ubuntu, is ready for noobs? Naah. If you are gonna use my quote at least use the entire sentence dipshit. THERE IS NO COMMAND LINE IN WINDOWS FOR THE USERS and I stand by that statement. Has your grandma ever had to launch.cmd? little Suzy down the street? The checkout girl at Walmart? Of course not because unlike your moronic OS the answer to every fucking question ever asked isn't "open up bash and type". If you don't like the fact that Linux is a CLI OS, change it. That IS the point of it, yes? Otherwise STFU when someone points out other OSes like Windows and OSX have no need for a CLI if you are not an admin of several machines or a programmer. IS that REALLY so hard to understand, or do you need someone to write a bash script to explain this to you?
As for TFA the big selling point of FF was extensions. We all know this. Mozilla has been changing the guts (and the developer TFA on/. a couple of months back announced more with regards to memory and CPU usage) means there will be even more. They have also by changing from 4.01 to 5 have done a fundamental change as 4.01 would be security fixes, whereas a major release would include feature changes. Now one can't test and plan ahead simply because there is no way to tell when things will break as the next release may be bug fixes, may be gut changes, you just won't know until you try it and see what breaks.
This is simply unacceptable both to the enterprise and to the extension developers, many of whom do it in their spare time for donations, so naturally they are gonna to Chrome where they don't seem to have this problem. We shall see if their strategy works but I bet the only winners in this will be Chrome, who will gain momentum through the increased adoption by business and added extensions.
Actually if you read the Moz dev's blog when the stink first hit he said they are pushing for a six week turnaround so I honestly don't see how you could say it is less rapid. We aren't talking minor point releases here, we are talking about extension breaking serious alterations to the underlying code.
Watching the backlash after this stupidity I'd say there was one clear winner...Chrome. After pulling this BS I noticed the extensions for Chrome started going up as developers started jumping ship. Most of these developers are either working for donations or on their spare time and trying to keep their code working with a 6 week release schedule simply isn't possible and the Chromium codebase doesn't seem to be broken with their extensions with regards to updates. I myself have upgraded from Comodo Dragon 6 through to Comodo Dragon 12 with ZERO broken extensions, compared to more than a third of my extensions broken on the single update from 4 to 5 with Firefox.
And finally lets get to the meat of the matter...testing. With a schedule so fast testing simply is NOT possible, not on extensions, not on the codebase itself. With the push to Intranet and Internet based applications having no way to see if your organization is gonna end up crippled by an update really is inexcusable. And when they talk about "standards" everyone's bullshit o' meter should shoot off the charts. What standards? HTML V5 is still a draft at best yes?
Final prediction...the Google juggernaut will crush Firefox thanks to their own stupidity. Many people use at home what they learned at work and no admin with a brain is gonna touch FF now. Chrome offers.MSIs and GPO controls and don't seem to be planning any major ripping out of the internals (We saw here a few months ago one of the devs talking about how there was gonna be serious work on the memory and CPU usage, which will mean major guts ripping) and more importantly you can write an extension for it and it "just works" between updates.
The only thing FF had going for them anymore was the extension framework IMHO. The GUI was more and more becoming a Chrome ripoff, in most performance tests both Chrome and Opera usually stomped all over them, the only real difference was the extensions. by adopting this "fuck you, get on board or piss off" attitude they have succeeded in running off a LOT of extension writers to the greener pastures of Chrome. Out of the extensions I use the ONLY one left exclusive to FF is NoScript and I hear the Chromium guys are working on giving the NoScript guy an API that will give him the hooks he needs.
So goodbye Mozilla, it was great while it lasted but after breaking a third of mine and my customers extensions I have removed FF from my standard installs and replaced it with Dragon. You are quickly becoming like Netscape before you, arrogant while having a codebase not able to back up that arrogance. So goodbye Moz and thanks for all the fish.
Uhhhh...haven't heard about the minerals reports from Afghanistan have you? You might want to read this then simply replace oil with mineral rights. of course We, the People won't see any of that, it'll go to groups like Halliburton.
You see you haven't figured out how the "banana scam" works. here is how it goes: Company A wants land for bananas but country B doesn't want to play ball. A few big fat checks are written to the right people and suddenly it becomes a "national interest" and country B is now the enemy. When all is said and done the USA loses a ton of money but Company A gets their banana and with them massive amounts of MONIES. Yay for massive profits woo hoo!
And THAT is how it works my friend and has been since the end of WII when the MIC saw their massive MONIES were gonna dry up at the end of hostilities and needed a way to keep the cash flowing. The way it is now they make money on both ends, by supplying the weapons AND by picking the corpse of the enemy clean for "national interests".
"the Viet Cong has been defeated" and that "He can't get food and he can't recruit. He has been forced to change his strategy from trying to control the people on the coast to trying to survive in the mountains."....Gen Westmoreland before the Tet Offensive.
The problem is there really isn't any way to "win" against religious wackos short of wiping out the religion. We won WWII by basically wiping out the religions of our enemy, Nazism and by removing Shintoism as the dominant religion in Japan which was decreed by the state. Compare this to Islam, where they have been slaughtering each other for over 700 years over which of Muhammad's relatives should have led when he bought the farm. And I'm sure I'll get hate for pointing this out but as long as the moderates tolerate and give shelter and aid to the extremists there is NO "religion of peace" when it comes to Islam, as it is the tolerance of hatred and aid to killers that gives Islamist extremists their power.
So with all due respect to Panetta I don't see it happening, not as long as hatred is allowed to be taught in mosques and tolerated by the masses, as long as having a different belief system is not a protected right on Muslim soil, not as long as basic human rights are ignored. You simply can't make peace with a group the refuses to acknowledge your right to exist and that is what we have now with Islam.
Read the Hadiths, read what the Mullahs are preaching, for they make it quite clear: There shall be NO PEACE until Muhammad is acknowledged as the prophet and Sharia as the law of Allah upon the entire earth. This is in direct opposition to our western right to believe as you will and the protection of minorities under the law. Personally I believe it is only a matter of time before a terrorist gets the bomb (which they WILL use) and then the west will turn in mass against Islam and it will be total war as in WWII.
Uhhhh...while it is a cool little thing, although how many things you'll be able to make with a playdough circuit is debatable....don't they still make those little cheap "X in One" kids hobby kits anymore?
When I was a kid all the little geeky kids (like me) had these little "X in One" like 24 in One, 40 in One, etc little electronic kits that let you make really cool stuff, like a radio, a little LED counter, I think the bigger ones even let you make a walkie talkie. And just about any kid 7 and up could use those which if they are below 7 I doubt they are gonna understand much with the playdough circuit either.
So why would you want to do this rather than sit with your kid and one of those X in One kits? Are those just not cool anymore?
Except we aren't talking about booze but about a service that most can't avoid because everything from jobs to friends to government services all use this medium. Need a map? A way to keep in touch cheaply with a distant friend? Use government services or apply for a job? Internet.
So I would agree with you if it were something most could avoid and never be impacted but the net is quickly becoming like electricity and water and phone, an essential service needed to survive in a modern world. i know this is true as I have a neighbor that needs a job that has been coming over for the past few nights to use my net. He has had more leads in two nights on the net than he got for a month of pounding the pavement.
Exactly if he is acting compulsive and against his best interests with the Internet it isn't the big bad Internet that is the problem the problem is control which I would argue is more important and running away from the issue won't help.
I would suggest that instead of pulling the plus, which would also deny him many useful things like access to maps, government websites, email, etc he use a timer, either one built into his router or here are some free ones to choose from. If he pays attention to the timer and actually sticks with it he won't have time to pisslefart all over the Internet and will have to use his limited time wisely.
So I think he simply is going about the problem all wrong. Being able to access the Internet from a coffeehouse won't make him waste less time, hell just hang out there if he really does have a problem. But by having a timer one can get used to having a set time to get what one wants accomplished done and will be more helpful. When my nephews first started playing MMOs I set a 2 hour time limit on their router so they couldn't wear themselves out and now without the timer they typically use around 2 hours a night, one hour for email and YouTube and an hour on their games.
Now correct me if I'm wrong, as I've not studied mesh networking more than just a few glances at it, but couldn't one use a distributed hash table like Kad and other P2P systems use? After all one of the key features in those systems is they scale and are hard to kill, and isn't that what one would want in a mesh network?
If you use a little bank instead of a mega bank? Then yes they are.
I use my debit online often simply because I have a great bank and don't have to worry, because if anyone overcharges or double dips I just walk in and go "Hey Karen guess what? Somebody double dipped when I bought a part online" and she'll go "Ooooh don't you just hate that? My husband bought some tools online last month and that tried that, that's so irritating! Here just let me bring this up...is it this one where there is two back to back? Okay just let me type this...voila! your money is back where it belongs!" and I thank Karen and go on about my way.
So yeah you can find trustworthy banks out there, it just takes a little more work. I can't use ATMs in most places without paying the fee since my bank is a little local shop, but having hassle free banking with friendly folks is worth it to me. It is also nice to go into a bank and have them know you by name and ask about your family, and treat you like a person instead of a walking cash register.
As for TFA after getting burnt by Paypal if I had to trade in goats heads and cheese instead of money to keep from doing business with that bunch of scammers I would. every person I've talked to has been burnt at least once by them and got basically told "We got paid so fuck right off" and promptly ignored. Not if they were the last source of money on earth and were giving away hookers and blow with each new account.
Uhhhh...did you READ what you linked to? Former pres Carter said comparing Obama to Hitler or saying they should have buried Obama when they buried Ted Kennedy is going too far and you know what? He is right. You want to say he is a shitty POTUS? Fine I agree with you as a matter of fact, but comparing him to one of the biggest mass murderers in history is not only ridiculous but an insult to all those that suffered to get rid of the Nazis in WWII. There is a difference between dissent and being a troll, and I think most of us would agree the Bushhitler and Obamahitler posters were just that, trolling.
As for TFA well surprise surprise to quote Gomer Pile, you send all the manufacturing overseas to a country that has been artificially lowering the value of ITS currency to make sure imports tank and exports rise, a not nice thing to do in the first place, and then you're shocked they may be doing other not nice things like pwning the gear they sell you? Can we get a DUH boys and girls? The very same country that was paying dirt farmers in Kosovo to dig up our crashed F117 so they could steal the tech, THAT country? Naaah, what makes you think they'd do anything naughty?
To paraphrase a line from one of my favorite movies "Why do you think they are so big? Its because they fucking steal, every idea that ain't nailed down" and what better way to steal ideas that put a bunch of backdoors, rootkits, and other nasties on the products that we are hooked on like crack?
Nooo...it was so that you didn't raise others offspring instead of your own, thus ensuring the survival of your DNA. this is why many creatures actually have penises designed to remove the sperm of potential rivals, thus ensuring that THEY get to reproduce.
While I agree that religion has caused lots of BS in this world monogamy isn't one of them. It is simply natural selection to try to keep your potential source of replication out of the hands of rivals.
Now as for TFA? Considering the huge amount of crap people put on their FB and Twitter pages? frankly it wouldn't surprise me if people would be happy to have that info shred. hell they share everything else so much its the source of jokes so why not this too? I do predict though that this company will be sued out of business by the first one caught cheating, after all this is America and we sue anybody for anything here. Its the American way!
So the discs don't get scratched? Manuals don't get lost? Cover art don't get screwed up? Wow good to know. Oh wait, that's right...bullshit.
Lets be honest folks, if they want to do that for someone online service they are paying for? no problem there though I would argue a well designed game shouldn't need a corp to run the server in the first place, but okay, still roll with it. But when you kill the single player through your DRM BS just to force another sale? Yeah please go fuck yourself Mr Game dev.
Off the top of my head games I still have installed and play on my Win 7 HP gamer PC at home...No One Lives Forever I&II, Freelancer, Freespace, hell after seeing the shitastic Duke Nukem Forever I even dug out my old Duke Nukem Atomic edition to enjoy some good Duke.
So if you want to charge for your online service? Go right ahead, servers cost money and we understand (even if that shows your design sucks) even if it isn't the best situation for the customer. But killing single player is like setting a self destruct on books to make sure nobody can check them out at the library. companies go out of business, tits do go up on occasion.
I would also add if they are gonna do this BS then games should have expiration dates no different than milk, since it is gonna go bad and I don't want to have to research just to buy a game without getting screwed.
Yeah uhhhh...no. The tech is still simply too fragile compared to 100 year old tech where we have seen just about every disaster and have overbuilt the thing. My area was one of those hit during the April "super tornado" that blew through the south and the cells quickly became overloaded and then went tits up. The POTS? Kept right on humming through the entire mess. When you are digging through homes looking for survivors the last thing on anyone's mind is fixing the towers so those areas stayed down for over a week, but the POTS? Was often the ONLY way to get info in or out of those areas.
Today i look on POTS like I do HAM operators...you don't notice them until the shit hits the fan but when it does? you'll be DAMNED GLAD they are there!
The problem with your theory is this...they will simply bring out a little PPT no matter what you do and list the losses as "piracy" because their Quants have told them that if they made X last year they should make X+Y this year.
Or are you forgetting that big writeup we saw all over the place a couple of years ago on "the rise of darknets" dum dum dum...eeek! wanna know where that came from? it was because some RIAA toady had found that the data showed sales were going down and piracy was going down as well so rather than admit that in a down economy acting like douchebags wasn't a smart idea he found some article on darknets and said "that's it! They must have invented a super duper secret way to get our precious!" and was putting it in the PPTs, hence all the articles.
But don't worry peasant, if you and everyone else keep not buying and not copying they'll just have themselves declared "too big to fail" and take the money straight from your checks before you even get to touch it. Ain't capitalism grand?
But where are you when the other great memes are dying sir? Do you know how long it has been since I saw a "Pay your $699 license fee" troll or even a classic Natalie Portman post? The Goatse is the TOS Star Trek, sure it doesn't get the airtime it once did but it will never truly go away, while there are true classic like Penisbird and cocksmoker that are truly on the verge of going extinct! So if you want to do your part save one of the rare trolls for future generations. Maybe someday you'll make it into the big leagues yourself, like being the head of Comcast!
As for TFA when all those thousands upon thousands like my mom that both the DSL and cable companies refuse to serve, even though she is a lousy TWO BLOCKS away from the junction are served? I'll be all for it. But thanks to monopolies and cherry picking there are plenty like my mom that get a "choice" of crappy satnet or a WISP that is often down for a week or more at a time, and thanks to the valley cell is spotty at best.
What are you gonna do, tell a 68 year old woman that has worked for more than 30 years to pay off her dream house "Sorry but ur old and POTS suxor so move LULZ!" ? If anything in this dead economy the cable/DSL duopoly is spending LESS money on rollouts than the meager movements they were before, and thanks to cherry picking many just don't give a fuck. I know that when I lived there a few years ago there were places in downtown Nashville that didn't have anything but POTS, you gonna tell me in the middle of Music Row is considered the sticks?
I'd agree if we had universal broadband but we don't, not by a looooooong shot. Where my mom is is exactly 2 BLOCKS from where the cable and DSL ends. Gues how far they have advanced in 20 years since her house was built? Zero, nada, not an inch. The WISP out there is spotty at best, with several days a month with ZERO service and since they are in a valley half the time the cells won't pick up shit either.
So if they would use the fund to pay for at least a basic 200Kb DSL line to all those like my mom, or at least get our 200 billion we gave the ISPs in the 90s for nationwide broadband (where all we got was the finger) and use that to make sure all the old folks like my mom can get a reliable service? ALL for it. But until then the alternatives are just too spotty and unreliable compared to POTS.
Uhhh...probably because that is SOP for cops everywhere? About 9 blocks from my house is a little white church and every Friday at about 6 PM you can go there and watch one of the local cops count his bribes. First he goes to the dope dealer's house (which everybody knows, it isn't like there is any other reason for cars to pop in and out all night) and gets his little yellow envelope, does this 4 or 5 more times, then goes to the church to count out the take.
It has been that way for years and years, nothing changes. Everyone knows what happened to the last snitch (the cops gave him to one of the dealers who fed him feet first through a chipper ALIVE so needless to say ain't nobody saying shit) so the half that takes bribes live like Tony Montana and the other won't say shit because of said chipper.
So I don't know if its the same in the UK but bribery is just a part of doing business here in the good old US of A. Everybody knows, hell there is a road called the "meth highway" running from Mexico to at least as far as KC, and others have told me from there it goes to NYC, LA, and Phili. You can buy anything you want on the meth highway, from smack to a 14 year old Mexican girl for the right price, everybody knows, nobody does shit. It is just SOP and the cops get a cut of every transaction so they don't give a fuck.
Yeah but I predict the 3DS is this gen's virtual boy. I have several people that picked one up and they have all said after the 3D novelty wears off they turned off the 3D as keeping their heads in the right position gave them neck strain. When I heard that all I could think of was virtual boy and how it had a timer so you'd be warned to walk away!
So I don't think we should compare to the 3DS but the original DS and DSi, which IIRC was 10-12 hours on a battery. And finally lets not forget we are talking about a PHONE here, not something you want to carry around dead in your pocket. If the games kill the battery and everybody starts missing calls I can see the popularity take a nosedive but quick when it comes to gaming on the things.
But like I said while old Steve makes nice gear even he can't defeat the laws of physics, even though some here seem to think he can. Small battery+sleek and sexy design+ HD+ 3D+ pushing big textures = dead battery but quick. So unless we abandon Steve's sleek and sexy design aesthetic (doubtful) I just don't see folks willing to put up with sub 3 hour battery lives to play HD games on a phone. I mean having Halo III in your pocket would be nice, but not if it costs you your job because your boss can't call or gets your balls in a sling because your GF can't get a hold of you.
Everybody here seems to be missing a big factor....THEY ARE A CARTEL and as such control the gateway to the airwaves!
The little 5 piece I was playing with was quite popular in the region, and had been asked several times by local DJs to come onto their shows and play. But they couldn't play our albums, not a single track, why? "Because we are only allowed to play what is on the list and that is passed down from corporate" which is why they'd have to invite bands they liked to play live, as it was the only loophole that let them keep their jobs.
And it is THAT, that right there, that gives them the power to fuck kids over on contracts. I actually held one of those contracts in my hand and not even being a lawyer could smell the stench. We hired a lawyer who was like "Yeah...if you don't mind not owning any of your songs, having zero control of anything, and probably owing them money when its all done? Go right ahead" so needless to say we walked away. our opening act signed, what happened to them? They had to break up to get out of their contract after the label decided to "change direction" before the first album was even released, they got left holding the bag to the tune of $100,000 for an album they had paid to record themselves for "various promotion expenses" which believe me, they didn't get shit for promo.
So yeah its a scam, but they own the radio, they own the TV, and the fact that they do NOT own the Internet is why they want to shut it down. These are the same pricks that claimed with a straight face that Bat Out Of Hell I, an album that actually set a world's record for length on the top 200, didn't make a cent. Meatloaf ended up filing for bankruptcy while fighting them because he didn't get shit.
So please, rip them off. Copy your asses off, don't pay for shit, because they certainly aren't! Why they aren't busted for RICO is only because of the bags of money they pay congress critters.
While I agree with you 110%, sometimes the customer simply isn't willing to pay the costs of having ALL their data backed up, which on some of these machines can take hours. We are talking multiple users with multiple docs and videos and music and....well that can take a hell of a lot of time.
So you do what you can, you warn them there is no way to be 100% sure, then you do what you have to do. With the economy in the toilet there is a lot of folks out there that simply can't afford my $35 an hour to sit there and back up tons of crap and put it all back. This is why I stress the importance of backups and USB HDDs but if they are coming from another shop? Well sadly i've found most places won't even put any AV on, just get them done and out the door.
But other than I agree with you completely. well except for the firewall, while the XP firewall was shit the Vista/7 firewall is actually pretty nice. For XP users I usually give them Comodo IS which comes with a better firewall, and for Vista/7 I use Avast free. Both work well and help keep the machine clean, along with tossing IE for Comodo Dragon with ABP to keep out the malware carrying ads.
So trust me friend there is nothing I'd rather do than just nuke the thing, but some of these folks haven't done a backup in years. You really don't nuke those without doing a seriously through sweep, after all if you wipe their late grandma's pics which they had NO backup for they won't be happy. Even if I clone the drive you are still talking hours to clean the gunk and reinstall all the files, and as I said that ain't cheap,whereas I can do a cleaning for just $75 as I have much of that automated. I don't really like to do it, but I can't afford to spend a half a day working on a machine for free, I got bills to pay too ya know?
Oh you haven't seen them? Sorry bud let old hairyfeet help a brother out. What I'm talking about is something like this that plays everything from NES and GBA to SNES and Genesis for $75, but as you can see here they have all different kinds with lots of different feature sets, going from a low of $40 to a high of $200 so there is something for every taste.
So if you don't want to give your CC out to some Chinamart (I haven't bought from them yet, so I can't say one way or another how good they are) I'd suggest you find the one you want and then look for it on Amazon. I've found most of these are also on Amazon under "MP4 players" which seems to be the code word for emulators from China. But if you like classic games it is a hell of a lot cheaper than anything else out there and a single $10 8gb MicroSD will load the thing up with literally thousands of great classics like Castlevania and Eternal Champions right in your pocket.
Like I said I'll be picking me up one ASAP, but this is the worst time of year for me, what with two kids BDays and my GFs next month it seems my summers are spent buying prezzies for everybody but me:-(
But if you pick one up how about returning the favor and shooting me an email telling if you like it? it is so hard to get honest reviews on the funky stuff.
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I probably shouldn't respond to an AC, but here goes: If this were a few "rogue" sites then yes, your point would be valid. But when you are talking the VAST majority on a domain, something to the tune of over a half a million sites of malware and spam? Then any legitimate company would be wise to head for the hills and should probably thank Google if they didn't already know.
To complain this might actually hit an innocent is like saying the one Nigerian prince who really does want to give someone money is being discriminated against thanks to the spam filters. This isn't just some accidental hacking here, this bunch has been courting the malware and phishing groups similar to that colo that got shut down last year.
According to the full posting Google gave they and several others have complained repeatedly only to get ignored. If you are a slum lord repeatedly warned about all the crack dealing and you just go back to counting your money? Well don't be surprised or shocked when the buildings get damaged when the cops raid the place. It isn't like there isn't plenty of places offering cheap hosting, the big difference is this one didn't care how many complaints they got for bad behavior. Bad behavior can have consequences in the cyber world as well as the real, and they have reaped what they have sown.
Am I the only one that is starting to think this default thing might not be so bad? We've tried bailouts, the banks said "thanks" and promptly foreclosed, we bailed out the ultracorps like GE who said "thanks!" and promptly sent the jobs to India, meanwhile the government is building new aircraft carriers and pissing money into the F35 black hole like the cold war was scheduled to restart next Tuesday and Americans are living in tents because they can't find work. Did I miss anything?
Maybe if we default we won't be able to keep borrowing money, imports will fall off the face of the planet, and we might actually have to start manufacturing things again? Just a thought. But so far we have done everything the bankers wanted and while they got a couple more yachts it certainly hasn't helped this country out, if anything their trickling on the American people has made things MUCH worse.
I really am starting to wonder if it is time for the fall, if it is time for our own Arab spring. it is obvious the elected officials will no longer listen to or obey the will of the people, not on the three wars killing our kids, not on the border leaking like a sieve, not on H1-Bs when there are 100 Americans or more applying for every job, not on anything anymore. maybe it is time for this system to go away and a new one to replace it, one that listens to the people. Because frankly I don't see how we can continue down this path without almost certain full scale class war.
Ahhh so here we have proof that when confronted with the truth a Linux zealot can only grab his Tux blankie and scream "nigger faggot" or in Linux terms "Troll shill astroturfer." Perhaps a little more truth to choke on?
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 .
You see you whiny little delusional mama's boy, I'm your worst fucking nightmare...a retailer that still believes. I believe that the community doesn't have to take Torvalds shit sandwiches, I believe that things can be made better, I believe Linux can be something for more than douchebags like you that will happily take a cock slapping from linus as long as you can say you are sticking to "teh man". I believe that there can be Linux boxes on actual shelves and penguins on boxes.
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?
So your answer is...what? "Drive the Jews into the sea" (quote from the president of Iran) and bow before Sharia? News Flash: Appeasement NEVER works, it has NEVER worked and will NEVER work since it mearly emboldens the one being appeased while making the appeaser look like a weakened enemy with no will to fight.
Want proof? Look to Europe. They have been following a path of appeasement for over a decade now. has the violence gone down? Are the Muslims there living happily in harmony with others? NO, instead you have women attacked in London for not wearing the Burqa and if anything MORE attacks and MORE terrorism, not less.
I have said it before and I will say it again: Until Islam as a religion, through the Mullahs and the teachings of the Mosques acknowledge the right for those of differing views and sexual orientations and creeds to exist? There can BE NO PEACE. To say that there can be would be like saying intellectuals could make peace with Pol Pot or Jews and gypsy with the SS. As long as you are seen as a Dhimmi (look it up) and considered a subhuman? Then there can never be peace because you are but a dog in the eyes of their religion, which controls everything there.
Perhaps you might wish to read The Hadiths and then perhaps you might understand. And realize this is taught almost from the time of birth, just as the Japanese were taught the emperor was divine and they were the pure and chosen race. A few choice quotes " slay the idolaters, wherever you find them, and take them captive and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush. " "And fight with them until there is no more persecution, and all religions are for Allah.
Again how EXACTLY is your appeasement plan gonna work when all that are not for Allah are fair game? How can your plan work without driving Jews into the sea? How can your plan work when even in countries that are 100% Muslim they slaughter each other over whether they are Sunni or Shia? The other religions grew up, Islam stayed with stonings and chopping off of body parts. Other religions through their priests accepted that other faiths have the right to exist, Islam hasn't. How can your appeasement change these things?
Wow, you are STILL an idiot, I should be amazed but considering you think a beta OS which is so bleeding edge it should have stigmata, aka Ubuntu, is ready for noobs? Naah. If you are gonna use my quote at least use the entire sentence dipshit. THERE IS NO COMMAND LINE IN WINDOWS FOR THE USERS and I stand by that statement. Has your grandma ever had to launch .cmd? little Suzy down the street? The checkout girl at Walmart? Of course not because unlike your moronic OS the answer to every fucking question ever asked isn't "open up bash and type". If you don't like the fact that Linux is a CLI OS, change it. That IS the point of it, yes? Otherwise STFU when someone points out other OSes like Windows and OSX have no need for a CLI if you are not an admin of several machines or a programmer. IS that REALLY so hard to understand, or do you need someone to write a bash script to explain this to you?
As for TFA the big selling point of FF was extensions. We all know this. Mozilla has been changing the guts (and the developer TFA on /. a couple of months back announced more with regards to memory and CPU usage) means there will be even more. They have also by changing from 4.01 to 5 have done a fundamental change as 4.01 would be security fixes, whereas a major release would include feature changes. Now one can't test and plan ahead simply because there is no way to tell when things will break as the next release may be bug fixes, may be gut changes, you just won't know until you try it and see what breaks.
This is simply unacceptable both to the enterprise and to the extension developers, many of whom do it in their spare time for donations, so naturally they are gonna to Chrome where they don't seem to have this problem. We shall see if their strategy works but I bet the only winners in this will be Chrome, who will gain momentum through the increased adoption by business and added extensions.
Actually if you read the Moz dev's blog when the stink first hit he said they are pushing for a six week turnaround so I honestly don't see how you could say it is less rapid. We aren't talking minor point releases here, we are talking about extension breaking serious alterations to the underlying code.
Watching the backlash after this stupidity I'd say there was one clear winner...Chrome. After pulling this BS I noticed the extensions for Chrome started going up as developers started jumping ship. Most of these developers are either working for donations or on their spare time and trying to keep their code working with a 6 week release schedule simply isn't possible and the Chromium codebase doesn't seem to be broken with their extensions with regards to updates. I myself have upgraded from Comodo Dragon 6 through to Comodo Dragon 12 with ZERO broken extensions, compared to more than a third of my extensions broken on the single update from 4 to 5 with Firefox.
And finally lets get to the meat of the matter...testing. With a schedule so fast testing simply is NOT possible, not on extensions, not on the codebase itself. With the push to Intranet and Internet based applications having no way to see if your organization is gonna end up crippled by an update really is inexcusable. And when they talk about "standards" everyone's bullshit o' meter should shoot off the charts. What standards? HTML V5 is still a draft at best yes?
Final prediction...the Google juggernaut will crush Firefox thanks to their own stupidity. Many people use at home what they learned at work and no admin with a brain is gonna touch FF now. Chrome offers .MSIs and GPO controls and don't seem to be planning any major ripping out of the internals (We saw here a few months ago one of the devs talking about how there was gonna be serious work on the memory and CPU usage, which will mean major guts ripping) and more importantly you can write an extension for it and it "just works" between updates.
The only thing FF had going for them anymore was the extension framework IMHO. The GUI was more and more becoming a Chrome ripoff, in most performance tests both Chrome and Opera usually stomped all over them, the only real difference was the extensions. by adopting this "fuck you, get on board or piss off" attitude they have succeeded in running off a LOT of extension writers to the greener pastures of Chrome. Out of the extensions I use the ONLY one left exclusive to FF is NoScript and I hear the Chromium guys are working on giving the NoScript guy an API that will give him the hooks he needs.
So goodbye Mozilla, it was great while it lasted but after breaking a third of mine and my customers extensions I have removed FF from my standard installs and replaced it with Dragon. You are quickly becoming like Netscape before you, arrogant while having a codebase not able to back up that arrogance. So goodbye Moz and thanks for all the fish.
Uhhhh...haven't heard about the minerals reports from Afghanistan have you? You might want to read this then simply replace oil with mineral rights. of course We, the People won't see any of that, it'll go to groups like Halliburton.
You see you haven't figured out how the "banana scam" works. here is how it goes: Company A wants land for bananas but country B doesn't want to play ball. A few big fat checks are written to the right people and suddenly it becomes a "national interest" and country B is now the enemy. When all is said and done the USA loses a ton of money but Company A gets their banana and with them massive amounts of MONIES. Yay for massive profits woo hoo!
And THAT is how it works my friend and has been since the end of WII when the MIC saw their massive MONIES were gonna dry up at the end of hostilities and needed a way to keep the cash flowing. The way it is now they make money on both ends, by supplying the weapons AND by picking the corpse of the enemy clean for "national interests".
"the Viet Cong has been defeated" and that "He can't get food and he can't recruit. He has been forced to change his strategy from trying to control the people on the coast to trying to survive in the mountains."....Gen Westmoreland before the Tet Offensive.
The problem is there really isn't any way to "win" against religious wackos short of wiping out the religion. We won WWII by basically wiping out the religions of our enemy, Nazism and by removing Shintoism as the dominant religion in Japan which was decreed by the state. Compare this to Islam, where they have been slaughtering each other for over 700 years over which of Muhammad's relatives should have led when he bought the farm. And I'm sure I'll get hate for pointing this out but as long as the moderates tolerate and give shelter and aid to the extremists there is NO "religion of peace" when it comes to Islam, as it is the tolerance of hatred and aid to killers that gives Islamist extremists their power.
So with all due respect to Panetta I don't see it happening, not as long as hatred is allowed to be taught in mosques and tolerated by the masses, as long as having a different belief system is not a protected right on Muslim soil, not as long as basic human rights are ignored. You simply can't make peace with a group the refuses to acknowledge your right to exist and that is what we have now with Islam.
Read the Hadiths, read what the Mullahs are preaching, for they make it quite clear: There shall be NO PEACE until Muhammad is acknowledged as the prophet and Sharia as the law of Allah upon the entire earth. This is in direct opposition to our western right to believe as you will and the protection of minorities under the law. Personally I believe it is only a matter of time before a terrorist gets the bomb (which they WILL use) and then the west will turn in mass against Islam and it will be total war as in WWII.
Uhhhh...while it is a cool little thing, although how many things you'll be able to make with a playdough circuit is debatable....don't they still make those little cheap "X in One" kids hobby kits anymore?
When I was a kid all the little geeky kids (like me) had these little "X in One" like 24 in One, 40 in One, etc little electronic kits that let you make really cool stuff, like a radio, a little LED counter, I think the bigger ones even let you make a walkie talkie. And just about any kid 7 and up could use those which if they are below 7 I doubt they are gonna understand much with the playdough circuit either.
So why would you want to do this rather than sit with your kid and one of those X in One kits? Are those just not cool anymore?
Except we aren't talking about booze but about a service that most can't avoid because everything from jobs to friends to government services all use this medium. Need a map? A way to keep in touch cheaply with a distant friend? Use government services or apply for a job? Internet.
So I would agree with you if it were something most could avoid and never be impacted but the net is quickly becoming like electricity and water and phone, an essential service needed to survive in a modern world. i know this is true as I have a neighbor that needs a job that has been coming over for the past few nights to use my net. He has had more leads in two nights on the net than he got for a month of pounding the pavement.
Exactly if he is acting compulsive and against his best interests with the Internet it isn't the big bad Internet that is the problem the problem is control which I would argue is more important and running away from the issue won't help.
I would suggest that instead of pulling the plus, which would also deny him many useful things like access to maps, government websites, email, etc he use a timer, either one built into his router or here are some free ones to choose from. If he pays attention to the timer and actually sticks with it he won't have time to pisslefart all over the Internet and will have to use his limited time wisely.
So I think he simply is going about the problem all wrong. Being able to access the Internet from a coffeehouse won't make him waste less time, hell just hang out there if he really does have a problem. But by having a timer one can get used to having a set time to get what one wants accomplished done and will be more helpful. When my nephews first started playing MMOs I set a 2 hour time limit on their router so they couldn't wear themselves out and now without the timer they typically use around 2 hours a night, one hour for email and YouTube and an hour on their games.
Now correct me if I'm wrong, as I've not studied mesh networking more than just a few glances at it, but couldn't one use a distributed hash table like Kad and other P2P systems use? After all one of the key features in those systems is they scale and are hard to kill, and isn't that what one would want in a mesh network?
If you use a little bank instead of a mega bank? Then yes they are.
I use my debit online often simply because I have a great bank and don't have to worry, because if anyone overcharges or double dips I just walk in and go "Hey Karen guess what? Somebody double dipped when I bought a part online" and she'll go "Ooooh don't you just hate that? My husband bought some tools online last month and that tried that, that's so irritating! Here just let me bring this up...is it this one where there is two back to back? Okay just let me type this...voila! your money is back where it belongs!" and I thank Karen and go on about my way.
So yeah you can find trustworthy banks out there, it just takes a little more work. I can't use ATMs in most places without paying the fee since my bank is a little local shop, but having hassle free banking with friendly folks is worth it to me. It is also nice to go into a bank and have them know you by name and ask about your family, and treat you like a person instead of a walking cash register.
As for TFA after getting burnt by Paypal if I had to trade in goats heads and cheese instead of money to keep from doing business with that bunch of scammers I would. every person I've talked to has been burnt at least once by them and got basically told "We got paid so fuck right off" and promptly ignored. Not if they were the last source of money on earth and were giving away hookers and blow with each new account.
Uhhhh...did you READ what you linked to? Former pres Carter said comparing Obama to Hitler or saying they should have buried Obama when they buried Ted Kennedy is going too far and you know what? He is right. You want to say he is a shitty POTUS? Fine I agree with you as a matter of fact, but comparing him to one of the biggest mass murderers in history is not only ridiculous but an insult to all those that suffered to get rid of the Nazis in WWII. There is a difference between dissent and being a troll, and I think most of us would agree the Bushhitler and Obamahitler posters were just that, trolling.
As for TFA well surprise surprise to quote Gomer Pile, you send all the manufacturing overseas to a country that has been artificially lowering the value of ITS currency to make sure imports tank and exports rise, a not nice thing to do in the first place, and then you're shocked they may be doing other not nice things like pwning the gear they sell you? Can we get a DUH boys and girls? The very same country that was paying dirt farmers in Kosovo to dig up our crashed F117 so they could steal the tech, THAT country? Naaah, what makes you think they'd do anything naughty?
To paraphrase a line from one of my favorite movies "Why do you think they are so big? Its because they fucking steal, every idea that ain't nailed down" and what better way to steal ideas that put a bunch of backdoors, rootkits, and other nasties on the products that we are hooked on like crack?
Nooo...it was so that you didn't raise others offspring instead of your own, thus ensuring the survival of your DNA. this is why many creatures actually have penises designed to remove the sperm of potential rivals, thus ensuring that THEY get to reproduce.
While I agree that religion has caused lots of BS in this world monogamy isn't one of them. It is simply natural selection to try to keep your potential source of replication out of the hands of rivals.
Now as for TFA? Considering the huge amount of crap people put on their FB and Twitter pages? frankly it wouldn't surprise me if people would be happy to have that info shred. hell they share everything else so much its the source of jokes so why not this too? I do predict though that this company will be sued out of business by the first one caught cheating, after all this is America and we sue anybody for anything here. Its the American way!
So the discs don't get scratched? Manuals don't get lost? Cover art don't get screwed up? Wow good to know. Oh wait, that's right...bullshit.
Lets be honest folks, if they want to do that for someone online service they are paying for? no problem there though I would argue a well designed game shouldn't need a corp to run the server in the first place, but okay, still roll with it. But when you kill the single player through your DRM BS just to force another sale? Yeah please go fuck yourself Mr Game dev.
Off the top of my head games I still have installed and play on my Win 7 HP gamer PC at home...No One Lives Forever I&II, Freelancer, Freespace, hell after seeing the shitastic Duke Nukem Forever I even dug out my old Duke Nukem Atomic edition to enjoy some good Duke.
So if you want to charge for your online service? Go right ahead, servers cost money and we understand (even if that shows your design sucks) even if it isn't the best situation for the customer. But killing single player is like setting a self destruct on books to make sure nobody can check them out at the library. companies go out of business, tits do go up on occasion.
I would also add if they are gonna do this BS then games should have expiration dates no different than milk, since it is gonna go bad and I don't want to have to research just to buy a game without getting screwed.
Yeah uhhhh...no. The tech is still simply too fragile compared to 100 year old tech where we have seen just about every disaster and have overbuilt the thing. My area was one of those hit during the April "super tornado" that blew through the south and the cells quickly became overloaded and then went tits up. The POTS? Kept right on humming through the entire mess. When you are digging through homes looking for survivors the last thing on anyone's mind is fixing the towers so those areas stayed down for over a week, but the POTS? Was often the ONLY way to get info in or out of those areas.
Today i look on POTS like I do HAM operators...you don't notice them until the shit hits the fan but when it does? you'll be DAMNED GLAD they are there!
The problem with your theory is this...they will simply bring out a little PPT no matter what you do and list the losses as "piracy" because their Quants have told them that if they made X last year they should make X+Y this year.
Or are you forgetting that big writeup we saw all over the place a couple of years ago on "the rise of darknets" dum dum dum...eeek! wanna know where that came from? it was because some RIAA toady had found that the data showed sales were going down and piracy was going down as well so rather than admit that in a down economy acting like douchebags wasn't a smart idea he found some article on darknets and said "that's it! They must have invented a super duper secret way to get our precious!" and was putting it in the PPTs, hence all the articles.
But don't worry peasant, if you and everyone else keep not buying and not copying they'll just have themselves declared "too big to fail" and take the money straight from your checks before you even get to touch it. Ain't capitalism grand?
But where are you when the other great memes are dying sir? Do you know how long it has been since I saw a "Pay your $699 license fee" troll or even a classic Natalie Portman post? The Goatse is the TOS Star Trek, sure it doesn't get the airtime it once did but it will never truly go away, while there are true classic like Penisbird and cocksmoker that are truly on the verge of going extinct! So if you want to do your part save one of the rare trolls for future generations. Maybe someday you'll make it into the big leagues yourself, like being the head of Comcast!
As for TFA when all those thousands upon thousands like my mom that both the DSL and cable companies refuse to serve, even though she is a lousy TWO BLOCKS away from the junction are served? I'll be all for it. But thanks to monopolies and cherry picking there are plenty like my mom that get a "choice" of crappy satnet or a WISP that is often down for a week or more at a time, and thanks to the valley cell is spotty at best.
What are you gonna do, tell a 68 year old woman that has worked for more than 30 years to pay off her dream house "Sorry but ur old and POTS suxor so move LULZ!" ? If anything in this dead economy the cable/DSL duopoly is spending LESS money on rollouts than the meager movements they were before, and thanks to cherry picking many just don't give a fuck. I know that when I lived there a few years ago there were places in downtown Nashville that didn't have anything but POTS, you gonna tell me in the middle of Music Row is considered the sticks?
I'd agree if we had universal broadband but we don't, not by a looooooong shot. Where my mom is is exactly 2 BLOCKS from where the cable and DSL ends. Gues how far they have advanced in 20 years since her house was built? Zero, nada, not an inch. The WISP out there is spotty at best, with several days a month with ZERO service and since they are in a valley half the time the cells won't pick up shit either.
So if they would use the fund to pay for at least a basic 200Kb DSL line to all those like my mom, or at least get our 200 billion we gave the ISPs in the 90s for nationwide broadband (where all we got was the finger) and use that to make sure all the old folks like my mom can get a reliable service? ALL for it. But until then the alternatives are just too spotty and unreliable compared to POTS.
Uhhh...probably because that is SOP for cops everywhere? About 9 blocks from my house is a little white church and every Friday at about 6 PM you can go there and watch one of the local cops count his bribes. First he goes to the dope dealer's house (which everybody knows, it isn't like there is any other reason for cars to pop in and out all night) and gets his little yellow envelope, does this 4 or 5 more times, then goes to the church to count out the take.
It has been that way for years and years, nothing changes. Everyone knows what happened to the last snitch (the cops gave him to one of the dealers who fed him feet first through a chipper ALIVE so needless to say ain't nobody saying shit) so the half that takes bribes live like Tony Montana and the other won't say shit because of said chipper.
So I don't know if its the same in the UK but bribery is just a part of doing business here in the good old US of A. Everybody knows, hell there is a road called the "meth highway" running from Mexico to at least as far as KC, and others have told me from there it goes to NYC, LA, and Phili. You can buy anything you want on the meth highway, from smack to a 14 year old Mexican girl for the right price, everybody knows, nobody does shit. It is just SOP and the cops get a cut of every transaction so they don't give a fuck.
Yeah but I predict the 3DS is this gen's virtual boy. I have several people that picked one up and they have all said after the 3D novelty wears off they turned off the 3D as keeping their heads in the right position gave them neck strain. When I heard that all I could think of was virtual boy and how it had a timer so you'd be warned to walk away!
So I don't think we should compare to the 3DS but the original DS and DSi, which IIRC was 10-12 hours on a battery. And finally lets not forget we are talking about a PHONE here, not something you want to carry around dead in your pocket. If the games kill the battery and everybody starts missing calls I can see the popularity take a nosedive but quick when it comes to gaming on the things.
But like I said while old Steve makes nice gear even he can't defeat the laws of physics, even though some here seem to think he can. Small battery+sleek and sexy design+ HD+ 3D+ pushing big textures = dead battery but quick. So unless we abandon Steve's sleek and sexy design aesthetic (doubtful) I just don't see folks willing to put up with sub 3 hour battery lives to play HD games on a phone. I mean having Halo III in your pocket would be nice, but not if it costs you your job because your boss can't call or gets your balls in a sling because your GF can't get a hold of you.
Everybody here seems to be missing a big factor....THEY ARE A CARTEL and as such control the gateway to the airwaves!
The little 5 piece I was playing with was quite popular in the region, and had been asked several times by local DJs to come onto their shows and play. But they couldn't play our albums, not a single track, why? "Because we are only allowed to play what is on the list and that is passed down from corporate" which is why they'd have to invite bands they liked to play live, as it was the only loophole that let them keep their jobs.
And it is THAT, that right there, that gives them the power to fuck kids over on contracts. I actually held one of those contracts in my hand and not even being a lawyer could smell the stench. We hired a lawyer who was like "Yeah...if you don't mind not owning any of your songs, having zero control of anything, and probably owing them money when its all done? Go right ahead" so needless to say we walked away. our opening act signed, what happened to them? They had to break up to get out of their contract after the label decided to "change direction" before the first album was even released, they got left holding the bag to the tune of $100,000 for an album they had paid to record themselves for "various promotion expenses" which believe me, they didn't get shit for promo.
So yeah its a scam, but they own the radio, they own the TV, and the fact that they do NOT own the Internet is why they want to shut it down. These are the same pricks that claimed with a straight face that Bat Out Of Hell I, an album that actually set a world's record for length on the top 200, didn't make a cent. Meatloaf ended up filing for bankruptcy while fighting them because he didn't get shit.
So please, rip them off. Copy your asses off, don't pay for shit, because they certainly aren't! Why they aren't busted for RICO is only because of the bags of money they pay congress critters.
While I agree with you 110%, sometimes the customer simply isn't willing to pay the costs of having ALL their data backed up, which on some of these machines can take hours. We are talking multiple users with multiple docs and videos and music and....well that can take a hell of a lot of time.
So you do what you can, you warn them there is no way to be 100% sure, then you do what you have to do. With the economy in the toilet there is a lot of folks out there that simply can't afford my $35 an hour to sit there and back up tons of crap and put it all back. This is why I stress the importance of backups and USB HDDs but if they are coming from another shop? Well sadly i've found most places won't even put any AV on, just get them done and out the door.
But other than I agree with you completely. well except for the firewall, while the XP firewall was shit the Vista/7 firewall is actually pretty nice. For XP users I usually give them Comodo IS which comes with a better firewall, and for Vista/7 I use Avast free. Both work well and help keep the machine clean, along with tossing IE for Comodo Dragon with ABP to keep out the malware carrying ads.
So trust me friend there is nothing I'd rather do than just nuke the thing, but some of these folks haven't done a backup in years. You really don't nuke those without doing a seriously through sweep, after all if you wipe their late grandma's pics which they had NO backup for they won't be happy. Even if I clone the drive you are still talking hours to clean the gunk and reinstall all the files, and as I said that ain't cheap,whereas I can do a cleaning for just $75 as I have much of that automated. I don't really like to do it, but I can't afford to spend a half a day working on a machine for free, I got bills to pay too ya know?
Oh you haven't seen them? Sorry bud let old hairyfeet help a brother out. What I'm talking about is something like this that plays everything from NES and GBA to SNES and Genesis for $75, but as you can see here they have all different kinds with lots of different feature sets, going from a low of $40 to a high of $200 so there is something for every taste.
So if you don't want to give your CC out to some Chinamart (I haven't bought from them yet, so I can't say one way or another how good they are) I'd suggest you find the one you want and then look for it on Amazon. I've found most of these are also on Amazon under "MP4 players" which seems to be the code word for emulators from China. But if you like classic games it is a hell of a lot cheaper than anything else out there and a single $10 8gb MicroSD will load the thing up with literally thousands of great classics like Castlevania and Eternal Champions right in your pocket.
Like I said I'll be picking me up one ASAP, but this is the worst time of year for me, what with two kids BDays and my GFs next month it seems my summers are spent buying prezzies for everybody but me :-(
But if you pick one up how about returning the favor and shooting me an email telling if you like it? it is so hard to get honest reviews on the funky stuff.