That is only if you use MLC which frankly as I linked to above is kinda shit ATM. Whereas if you use enterprise quality SLC (more expensive but if you are really running machines pumping so much IOPS that they need MultiTb scratch then you should have the $$$) have a MTBF if you write full blast of 5-7 years, with some rating 10+. And as another pointed out there are 15k SAS drives out there already as well.
So in the end this simply makes NO sense at all. Everything you OC is electrons through silicon, which can be cooled down easily enough. Here we are talking about a motor spinning at insane rates already with a pubic hairs worth of distance between functional and screeching death. It gains you nothing, as it isn't like there is some huge price difference between drives based on speed and you certainly will NEVER get a 7200RPM drive anywhere close to SAS speeds as they simply don't have motors that can take the stress.
In the end this is about as pointless as that Killer NIC, which for several hundred dollars at launch you too could gain a whole 2% if the moon was right and the ISP played along. Only this is worse as the Killer NIC would at least continue functioning even if it didn't speed you up, here you are pushing a motor beyond its operating limits and actually trusting data to it. That is Forest Gump levels of dumbshit right there.
Hey look everybody it is Alex a KNOWN DOUCHEBAG! See how easy that is to make insults, especially when one has NO DEFENSE to what is being written? I love how the average Linux users acts like a 8 year old going "Nigger faggot" to everyone that doesn't kiss his ass, only instead of nigger and faggot it is shill and astroturfer.
For your info Mr Douche, I'm your worst fucking nightmare...I'm a retailer. I actually have REAL WORLD CUSTOMERS not some kids in their basements trying to stick it to "teh man". I have people that COUNT on their machines to...oh what is the word?....oh yeah ACTUALLY WORK not shit themselves and die because torvalds decided to Goatse the kernel again.
So you go wrap yourself in your little Tux blankie and pretend it is all just a conspiracy, Pretend that all those retailers in the entire USA don't avoid your crap because...well its driver model is crap...no it must be a secret cabal involving Bill Gates and the Illuminati. oh and don't forget to write M$ so you can be just like this guy which is who you sound like.
Run along pup, the grown ups have real work to do. Hey why don't you go compile something or send your pics of your "leet Linux desktop yo!" to KDELook and let the real men talk, okay junior?
Uhhh...if one goes by your standard then there is NO rights since even your right to exist can be taken away by the state through the death penalty, yet I would think that most judicial scholars would say that you do have certain unalienable rights but many more which can only be touched if specific actions are taken, such as getting a warrant before searches or the right to a speedy trial if you are arrested.
As for TFA I think everybody here is missing the forest for the trees in that the majority said it wasn't right to single out one form of entertainment and exclude all the others. The movie ratings? Entirely voluntary as is not allowing kids to see R and NC17 movies. What CA wanted to do was give the movies a pass while busting the big bad video game industry. The reason they gave movies a pass wouldn't be...oh I don't know....maybe the fact they are the movie capital of most of the world?
But in this case SCOTUS hit the nail on the head, you can't say Bob's business gets a free pass and Mary's business gets fucked because you don't like the format. Violence is violence, whether in a comic or a book, whether in a movie or a game. Saying this format is all well and good and that format sucks just doesn't cut it as far as the law is concerned. If they want the law so bad maybe they should place the same restrictions on movies and books? Yeah lets see how quick they can sell that one in Hollywood.
I'll take the hit, I got more karma than God and therefor don't give a crap. unless you are a programmer Linux is COMPLETELY pointless. Its driver model is more than a decade behind everyone else which causes drivers to shit themselves with regularity, Hardware support for cutting edge? Fugetaboutit and for everything less than 3 years old spotty at best, Low resource? not since Ubuntu came along and frankly if you really cared about that TinyXP runs great on a 400MHz and uses just 64Mb of RAM for a full desktop.
The ONLY place Linux makes sense is to programmers. programmers can automate the entire process with scripting (to be fair Windows has gotten much better at this with Powershell) there are plenty of IDEs as well as OSes designed for HPC and scientific programming. So yes for programmers Linux makes sense. For the other 99.9995% of the planet that is NOT programmers? Honestly the driver situation alone makes it suck the big wet titty.
Finally most gamers actually care about performance and Linux GPU drivers are just...well they are shit. The FOSS ones are miles behind on features and rarely work with decent games, the proprietary ones drop support for older hardware while being seriously behind on the latest and greatest. maybe when the ATI FOSS drivers get up to snuff things will be different but for a game company to target Linux as a platform now would have to be insane. DirectX ties everything up all nice and neat whereas OpenGL is a bunch of GPU specific shims and is frankly a mess.
So I'm sorry but unless you are a programmer Linux just doesn't make sense ATM. Maybe when old Torlvalds retires you will quietly get an ABI and then drivers won't be such a clusterfuck but expecting users to keep up with every make/model/rev of hardware so they can go with their hat in their hand to some forum and ask "please sir, can I has sound?" only to be told "RTFM or go back to Winblowz noob!" simply doesn't cut it. Windows is only $100 and well worth that not to deal with the bullshit.
The really sad part? There is a BUTT SIMPLE way they could fix it. Simply have all their OEM Windows discs on a server somewhere so you pay them $10 and get a download link to the.ISO. Just imagine how much easier it would be for you as the user, for me as a small shop, for everybody. Don't have the disc? pay $10 and have an.ISO that you can download forever. You burn, you install. Easy peasy.
What really scares me on this bug is the encryption thing. According to my bud in the crime lab CP pushers have been using infected machines more and more as file dumps and this fits right in with their MO. The way he explained it is like this: I'm a CP pusher, I have several Gbs of CP porn but I sure as fuck don't want it on MY computer. So I hire Mr malware who infects thousands of machines. We spread my CP crap to these machines with plenty of redundancy so that if any are offline my customers can still get to the filth, then I sell keys to the botnet for those that want to view my garbage. According to him we are talking $30,000 a month on up with some making a cool quarter million a month easy.
So it is THIS which makes me think restore partitions are a BAD idea. Most are filled with trialware garbage that most users wouldn't even notice if the malware were to remove it since they never used that shit anyway, and when you are talking $30k a month you have a damned good reason to hang onto those boxes as long as they can. Hell they could even wipe the restore partition and replace it with encrypted CP and have an extra 5Gb+ worth of filth on every box! it is just a bad design that ignores the reality of modern malware IMHO.
Oh and if you haven't tried Tuneup utilities you really should. They have a trial version and if you look around the net they often offer last years version for free hoping you'll like it and upgrade. The last 3 versions work great on Win 7 so no worries and it takes the BS out of keeping a PC clean and fresh. It really is worth the $30 and I highly recommend it and combined with Comodo Dragon browser and Avast free I have yet to see a PC with that combo cross my desk again for anything but hardware upgrades. they just keep on purring, no hassles, no bugs, and they are simple enough that anybody can run them. hell with tuneup you don't even have to do anything as it schedules its own one click maintenance every three days silently. really sweet and you should give it a whirl.
Well if you completely break a system it is immune to bugs, is that what you are proposing? Because I have YET to see a SINGLE distro that survives the 6 month upgrade death march without at LEAST 1, usually many, drivers that shit themselves and die. that is why everyone else in the free world, Solaris, BSD, OSX, Windows, OS/2 even, have a stable hardware ABI as it takes the bullshit out of drivers.
Windows 2k/XP driver model? 14 YEARS of working drivers. Vista/7 driver model? 4 years so far and has support until at LEAST 2020 so that is another 14 YEARS of driver support. Linux? Doesn't last 6 months. Even if you go LTS you currently have less than a year and a half before you're fucked.
Look as a retailer I WANT Linux to succeed, I really do. I don't like paying for licenses, nor do I like the fact I'm staring at 4 1.4Ghz AMD PCs with 512Mb of RAM I'm gonna have to shitcan because XP licenses would cost more than they are worth. But until you Linux users get together and tell Torvalds to fuck right off and quit using the kernel as his personal play toy? Well then nobody is gonna take your little "advice" seriously.
I'm suppose to tell my customers to learn about EVERY single piece of hardware on their system, learn Man pages and how to recompile drivers, how to tweak "fixes" for said drivers, and finally to have a list of every make/model/rev/firmware of every thing on or attached to their system, so they can go with their hat in their hand to some forum and go "please sir, I can has sound?" only to be told "RTFM Noob or go back to Winblowz LOL!".
Yeah right, your driver model is shit. YOU know it, I know it, hell everyone knows it but nobody has the balls to stand up to Torvalds and tell HIM that. Well I'm saying it here...Linus you are NOT smarter than every OS manufacturer, okay? Your little "No ABI" shit make make it easier for YOU to fiddle with the kernel but you know what? It ain't 1993 anymore, and you ain't passing the new build on IRC to a couple of tweakers. It is a multimillion dollar OS with a hell of a lot of people that need drivers TO JUST WORK which they don't without an ABI. Don't like ABIs? hell I don't care if you use an ABI or sell your first born to Satan to get it to work just FIX THE FUCKING THING.
Excuses are like assholes, everyone has them and they all stink. That is all I've ever gotten from the community when I point out as a retailer why I can't carry your product. Fix the drivers? I'll agree with your advice. Don't? Then you are completely full of shit because the world isn't gonna go through that suffering just for Linux,sorry.
The core of all three buildings were huge amounts of SOLID steel. This isn't some Mickey Mouse job here, even if you cut corners structural integrity strong enough to take the winds at that height would have caused it to take a little bit of fire here. Remember we aren't talking about it getting hit by a plane we are talking about a few pieces that flew over a block and landed on the building. THAT IS IT. And the sprinkler system had been checked fully functional. You honestly telling me that I hit a building that is 45 stories tall with the equivalent of a burning Yugo its gonna hit the ground?
Bullshit and I would argue they KNEW it was bullshit, which is why the MSM broadcast the first two all over the world and then mostly ignored the third. To every person I've pointed this out to their first reaction is always "But only two buildings fell" and when I point out no, three fell, including one that was supposedly just hit by a small amount of burning debris their reaction is always the same "What a load of shit.,that doesn't make ANY sense!" and THAT is why they didn't broadcast it all over the planet. They knew there was a limit to the BS they could push and the third tower went over the limit, but they needed the Worldcom investigation to go away so they decided to push it.
But if you look at the data contained in their "investigation" you'll see it has more holes than Swiss cheese. Why was their no investigation of someone at the Pentagon shorting AA BEFORE the first plane was reported missing? Why was their no investigation of the owner of the towers, who more than doubled his insurance for terrorist attack and ONLY terrorist attack less than 3 months before the hit? Why no investigation of how a 45 story building dies because some pieces of burning debris which according to the report were roughly the size of a couple of pick ups? Why no investigation on how with ALL the military bases we have on the east coast how NOT A SINGLE ONE could get so much as a single F15 in the air in the 90 minutes between the first hit and the last? Why no investigation on why the multi-billion dollar defense systems we've had in the DC area since the Cold War wasn't able to stop something the size of a 737?
I'm sorry but if you look at the facts anyone who can read and think would have to call bullshit. Do I know who did it? No because nobody bothered to attempt to find out. But I can say that there is NO way in hell a handful of jihadis were able to pull off this little miracle, or cripple the entire US defense system simultaneously while dropping three buildings with two planes and driving a 737 into downtown DC without so much as a crop duster to oppose them. its bullshit, it stinks, and the only reason anybody buys it is the MSM, same as sadly many Americans still believe we attacked Iraq because of 9/11.
But then you should be dealing with SSDs or Raptors. In the end it doesn't change the fact that unlike CPUs and GPUs and RAM where you are just pushing electrons through silicon with a HDD you are dealing with a mechanical device that has been built and testing for a certain rotational speed with a certain MTBF and by pushing that you are in essence redlining your car and hoping the engine doesn't blow.
So it doesn't make any sense. With GPU, CPU and RAM you can use better cooling to drop the temp and allow more electrons through without damage. No matter what kind of fins you add with a HDD you still aren't gonna get close enough to that motor to matter and you are already talking 10,000RPM on a performance drive. There is a GOOD reason why we don't see 20,000RPM drives and that is because we are already at the limit and increasing spin is simply gonna add instability and increase risk of failure.
And how many other than you use Multi-TB scratch drives? I bet its a teeny tiny niche at best. Not to mention if you are running machines that actually need multi-Tb scratch drives then I bet you have the money for 15k RPM drives or SSDs as machines running that much data through them are making serious $$$ for a company. So in the end this just doesn't make a lick of sense. It can't in any real way be used practically as it increases the risk of failure too much so at best you can say its a "for shits and giggles" test like running your AMD quad on liquid helium to reach 7.6GHz. Sure it might be impressive for a few seconds but it isn't like you are gonna use it for anything worth doing, now is it?
Actually if Win 8 turns into another Vista it may actually be good for MSFT, and here is why: There is no law saying they can't sell both, just as they did with XP and Vista, and Windows 7 is supported until at LEAST 2020 and that is if they don't pull a couple of extensions like they did with XP.
So here we are with literally hundreds of tons of late P4 XP boxes floating around hell I bet you may even have some in your home or at a relative's place. You know the ones, 2.0GHz-3.6Ghz P4, most with 512Mb of RAM, 40Gb to 160Gb hard drive, typical office box hand me downs. Now XP is gonna finally be EOL and frankly it'll cost more than they are worth to buy RAM and an AGP GPU to upgrade these dinosaurs. So there is no reason why MSFT can't say "Hey want the bling bling touch web 3.0 freaky wow? Buy Win 8. Want a nice normal experience? buy Windows 7" and let the OEMs sell both.
As for your other points? Nobody who is honest is gonna say with a straight face that LO/OO is a suitable replacement in any real capacity with MS Office as it turns.doc into word salad on any but the simplest of formatting, the X360 has the highest sell through of ANY of the current consoles (8 at last check) and is raking in the dough, and of course Windows doesn't have any real competition on the desktop. Sure if you are arty and can afford a 500% markup you can get a MBP, but when even Dell has to host their own repos because otherwise the fucked up driver situation in Linux causes a big fucking mess? Not ready for prime time.
And finally for all the jokes I bet the Skype is gonna go down as one of the smartest business moves made by MSFT, why? One word...integration. Skype gives them an easy way to offer a nice VoIP solution that ties right into AD and can be controlled with GPOs and "just works" no matter what routers are in between. With so many companies having "road warrior" employees this gives them a nice cheap way for their WinPhone (by Nokia naturally) to hook right into the Intranet and have everything all nice and neat. It saves businesses money, makes it easier for admins to manage, what's not to like? I bet it'll sell a LOT of WinPhones to those that used to buy RIM who is all but DOA and whom I'm betting will be either bought by MSFT or Google.
So I'd say the only real weakness they have at MSFT is the CEO is a raving fanboi of black turtlenecks and artsy fartsy design. I can just hear his motivational speeches "Today with the new WinPhone we'll finally be as cool and hip as Apple! We really will! Yes we will! STOP LAUGHING AT ME!" and is why I say the Borg icon needs to go. Instead we need an icon of Ballmer in an "I Heart Apple" beanie with his tongue sticking out. Perfect image for a perfectly shitty CEO. Every single success in that company has been DESPITE him, not because of him.
You want proof? One where I have YET to hear ANY even slightly plausible explanation? here goes...how does TWO airplanes take out THREE buildings WITHOUT one of the buildings falling on the other? You telling me a couple of pieces of burning plane are gonna knock down a 45 story building, which has been otherwise undamaged and therefor should have a completely functional sprinkler system? Oh and that the building in question just so happened to have ALL the papers with regards to the Worldcom investigation?
I'm sorry but the whole thing stinks. Do I believe the president did it? No I do not. Do I believe that there are several multinationals that would think nothing of causing that amount of loss of life if it meant billions in profits? You betcha. The fact that NOBODY investigated such an obvious connection as shorting the stock of the company involved BEFORE anybody knew anything? Tell mes that someone high up WAS involved in it. Remember it doesn't take hundreds of people here, probably less than a dozen in key positions could have set the thing in motion.
It reminds me of the video "The Men Who Killed Kennedy" which if you haven't seen it has one scene that says it all. As was SOP a SS agent gets ready to get on the back of the limo before the president is brought out. There you clearly see the chief on the ground order the guy off whom you actually see the guy pulled turn and say "What the fuck?" before being drug off to another assignment. It didn't take the entire SS agency, it only took one guy in charge of positioning to make sure the president didn't have adequate protection. The amount of money made by certain corps since 9/11 dwarfs what was made during the Vietnam war, and as we have seen everyone has a price.
I have a much better question....why? While I don't know if it is the same with Linux (I gave up messing with it around Ubuntu 10.4, but I'll assume it is) with Windows and the frankly insane amounts of cache one gets on a drive nowadays combined with Superfetch one will rarely notice your drive! In fact lately I've been using 5900RPM drives as OS drives because with 64Mb caches and plenty of RAM there just isn't enough of a difference in speed to deal with the extra noise and heat, especially if the customer wants it as an HTPC.
So honestly I don't get it. you OC a CPU (or in the case of AMD unlock cores as well as OC) because you get a more expensive CPU at a cheaper price. Same thing with RAM or flashing an HD4830 into an HD4850 which I have done a couple of times so far and works well. But with HDDs you simply add a second in RAID 0 or if you don't mind dealing with the hot/crazy scale and the possibility you may be spending several hundred a year on replacements and be risking data? Well then go SSD. But it isn't like OCing that EcoDrive is gonna turn the thing into a Velociraptor, it is just gonna wear the thing out quicker for less gain than you would have seen adding a RAM stick. I just don't get it, folks with more time on their hands than they know what to do with I guess.
I think what he is talking about is waaaay back in the old days, we are talking 286/386 old days here, some of the business class boards came with what was known as "BIOS Lock" or something similar. what it would do is keep the BIOS read only so that a BIOS bug couldn't write to it.
Now I saw a few where that you could turn it on and off from insides BIOS (not sure how that worked, but if you could turn it off I assume the BIOS bug could too) but most would have a jumper on the board. jumper set? no BIOS tweaks for you and no writing for BIOS bug. Of course the downside and why they most likely fell out of favor (along with how big a PITA it was to write a BIOS bug instead of a DOS/WinBug) was that unless you were in corporate where no cards were ever added most add ons back then were fiddly little bastards that required all kinds of IRQ tweaking and other BIOS fiddling, and having to switch a jumper every time something needed fiddling was a PITA.
As for TFA, how long before the user CAN'T restore, simply because the cheap bastard OEMs use "restore partitions" which the bug should be able to get at? from the first time I saw a restore partition I thought "what bean counting dipshit thought this up" as marking a partition as hidden doesn't magically make it bug proof. All I can figure is that like most criminals malware writers are lazy bastards and haven't bothered cooking up a bug that infects the restore partition the way they infect system restore. But I wouldn't be surprised if in the future using the restore partition simply wipes the user's programs while restoring the malware.
I'll answer that...don't load the taskbar with always running crapola, don't use IE, have a decent AV like Avast Free that doesn't suck resources like a Bangkok whore sucking Japanese businessmen, and finally and most importantly use a decent tool to keep the registry cleaned of leftover third party cruft.
I recommend Tuneup Utilities, as it has some excellent features like Turbo mode for gaming, a process monitor that will keep a program from slamming your CPU to 100% and making the machine unresponsive, and unless you tell it not to its one click maintenance will run silently once every three days to clean the cruft and ensure the health of the machine, such as checking for fragmentation. That said if you balk at paying a whole $30 for a program that takes all the work out of it there is WinUtilities Free or Glary Utilities, but neither of those are full featured or automatic, as automatic cleaning is only for those that buy the pro versions, which if you are gonna pay tuneUp IMHO has the better tools.
So there you go. Follow the above along with keeping your machine updated with WU and you're good to go, your Windows PC will remain clean and fresh smelling and will NOT need any annual reinstalls.
That said if a machine is completely pwned like TFA nuking from orbit is the ONLY way to be sure, but I've found if you follow the above (Both Avast Free and Comodo IS Free have JavaScript scan before load and sandboxing, so either choice will work. I prefer Avast as its less fiddly than Comodo and I like not having to fiddle) and have a decent AV like Avast or Comodo only the most herp derp PEBKAC bullshit will cause you to get infected.
I have had exactly ONE customer get infected after following the above (and I ended up having to tell him to take his business elsewhere as he refused to listen and became belligerent) and that was because he 1.-first tried to disable the AV and then when he couldn't he 2.-uninstalled the AV, all so he could get the "new Limewire" which I had already told him was nothing but a Trojan package. Well he got it alright, more than 70 infections. He actually had the balls to get mad and try to demand a free repair becuase he said the AV must be defective since it wouldn't let him install Limiewire. Finally I said "Look dumbass, you tried to install A VIRUS. The whole POINT of an AV is to keep viruses OFF the PC, not let them on because you like the name of the virus, moron."
So a little common sense and the above instructions will keep your PC running for the life of the machine. The only work I have to do on those that follow my instructions above is the occasional hardware upgrade and I have several that have been running in the field for over 7 years, same install.
Then to use a popular meme "ur doin it wrong" my friend. If you install a lot of software then a simple registry cleaning will keep your Windows running well (I recommend Tuneup Utilities, but for those wanting a free alternative WinUtilities works decently but isn't as nice or full featured as tuneup) and Avast Free with its default sandboxing and JavaScript scan before load will keep all but the most herp derp PEBKAC caused infections away.
Honestly despite all the jokes and FUD passed around here by certain fanboys it really is pretty simple to keep Windows running quite well for the life of a machine. Don't load up the taskbar with tons of always running bullshit, don't be clicking on email attachments, keep the machine up to date with Windows Update, a decent registry cleaner to get rid of dead reg links left by crap third party software, just basic common sense.
The machine I'm typing this on has been running Win 7 HP since RTM which is 2 years, my netbox has been running XP since it came out in 04, same install, and I have several customers with XP boxes that are more than 8 years old, again same install. It really ain't that hard folks, just a teeny tiny bit of TLC and common sense.
Then that is NOT a false flag, but simply an excuse for ramming through an agenda. A false flag is something like 9/11, where you have someone in DC dumping AA stock more than 90 minutes BEFORE the first plane, how the entire MSM told us with a straight face there was nothing to keep an object the size of an airliner from hitting the Pentagon, when we all know DC has been armed to the teeth since the Cold War, or that there was not a single American military aircraft on the Eastern seaboard and not a single one could reach New York in under two hours. The only two logical conclusions is either a false flag or a military so damned incompetent that they couldn't tie their shoes, much less perform even standard military maneuvers. Since that level of inconsistence in performance is simply wholly unbelievable you are left with a single conclusion...false flag. Considering how much $$$ was made by corps like Haliburton, or how the guy that owned the towers suddenly doubled down on insurance for that SPECIFIC kind of attack? yeah bullshit, false flag.
What we have here is a classic "wag the dog" where you use something completely unconnected to what you are trying to do to ram something through. Saudi terrorists attack New York? Blow up Iraq. What does one have to do with the other? Not a fucking thing except the first event was helpful in getting an agenda pushed.That is the difference my friend.
Thank you, but I never thought what I did was that big a deal honestly. How could someone look down at two innocent little faces, the oldest not even 2 and the youngest barely 6 months old, and not step up?
Sadly their father could, as he got one taste of meth on a construction job he was working and has spent the rest of his life chasing highs instead of even knowing where his kids were. When my sister died a lousy $200 from me was all it took to get him to sign away his rights without a second thought. Last I heard he is back in jail for getting high and beating up an ATM and he has gotten Hep C on top of it. I figure in another year or two they'll find him in a ditch somewhere. The oldest just shakes his head and looks at him with pity, the youngest doesn't give a shit if he lives or dies, even though I tried to keep them from becoming estranged knowing my sis wasn't gonna be here for long. I did think it was nice that last Father's day I got a card and a pizza, when I said I wasn't a dad they said "close enough for us, and a hell of a better one than our real dad".
So I just did what I thought any decent human being would do when faced with two young boys with no parents, I busted my ass and did everything I could to give them as much of a normal life as I could with their mother slowly dying in the next room. I got lucky though as in the final stage I met a truly wonderful woman who didn't give a shit that the boys weren't mine or that the youngest was gay, who took time off work to stay with us during the funeral and give the boys a shoulder to cry on. She has become the mother that my sister always wanted to be and if she wasn't gun shy from two abusive exs I would have already put a ring on her finger. In the end you do what you have to, give it 110%, and if your heart is in the right place it will all work out in the end.
Don't know if Anons can see their posting history (as I have never posted as Anon, I stand by my comments) but if you do see this PHB is from Dilbert and stands for "Pointy Haired Boss" which is a completely clueless moron who knows just enough buzzwords to be a cockblock and doesn't know shit about how things actually work, which sadly I've found in corporate settings is pretty much 85%+ which is why I ran away from corporate before it drove me into an early grave. Now I ONLY deal with SOHOs and SMBs, where the people actually KNOW they don't understand the tech and are just happy to have someone knowledgeable and will defer to your judgement.
As for the poster above you getting sick from working corp? Come join us in the wonderful world of PC building and repair. you'll never make 6 figures but you WILL have a hell of a lot less stress, get to meet nice folks that actually appreciate you (hell I even met my current GF of 3 years this way) and won't have to deal with anymore impossible problems with no budget thought up by total idiots. I don't know how many times in corporate I'd see everything turned into a clusterfuck and then be expected to fix said clusterfuck with NO money and no help. Yeah and if I can't pull off a trick worthy of Chris Angel? The I get bitched out for the problem I didn't cause in the first place!
Well fuck that shit, working in a little shop you may never get rich but you won't have to worry about ulcers or a heart attack either. People actually listen to you (for the most part and those that try for even a second to act like a PHB I show the door) and you are able to implement best practices without any cockblocking or bullshit. my customers all have backup drives, all make disc images, all have the Av I approved up, everything runs nice and smooth and I don't have to deal with anymore herp derp corporate bullshit. Well worth the lower pay, and you meet a hell of a lot nicer folks as a bonus.
Don't know if they have it everywhere in the USA but at least here in the south we have what we call "Walmart Phone' as that is where you get it, $45 a month for unlimited talk and text. Signal is pretty damned good and I'm seriously thinking of switching as Wifi is everywhere here so there really isn't a point in tethering so all I ever use the phone for is talk and text anyway.
So maybe the answer is to sic one evil corp against another in a battle to the death. Kinda sad when you actually have to root for Walmart huh? But considering I live in AT&T land and after dealing with them on behalf of customers and being told "We don't care if our DSL speeds suck we aren't spending a dime in that area, so pay up or piss off" in nicer language of course, and watching the cableco take advantage of their not giving a shit to make crazy money (currently $130 for their basic cable+Net+phone bundle and that is the cheapest price they have) anyone that causes pain to the shitastic monopoly that is AT&T I'm ALL for. There used to be SBC here, and they were actually good. Since being swallowed back into AT&T they have gone back to being the absolute shite on a roll that is the hallmark of AT&T.
Exactly. For those that don't know Al Gore, or Rev Al as I call him for his Lear jet riding rampant hypocrisy, is setting himself up to be a carbon billionaire by getting the government to jump on board and force folks and businesses to buy indulgences...err I mean credits, so that they can sin...whoops meant pollute to their hearts content.
If you wanna see someone that is for treating the planet better that isn't a complete self serving douche the ONLY one I've seen so far is Ed Begely Jr, who actually walks the walk and sacrifices himself to show that one can live without polluting, and then used his own money to do a tour showing ways to cut down on pollution. He is a stark contrast to Rev Al farting around in his personal jet or 10MPG limo while having the brass balls to say he is carbon neutral because he pays himself from his own company carbon credits which is like taking money from your right pocket and putting it in your left and calling it wealth redistribution and demanding a tax break for it.
Frankly BOTH sides of this debate have been beseeched by the Rev Al types, those that have figured out ways to make assloads of money if AGW comes out one way or the other and are therefor trying to make it come out their way. Then add in the leeches like Goldman Sachs have already set themselves up to blow some really big bubbles if carbon credits manages to pass? The whole thing just stinks on ice on BOTH sides. It is sad to see science turned into a practice bought and sold, but when you are talking about billions upon billions of profits to be made by the winner I guess one shouldn't be surprised.
There is a BIG difference between you running an SMTP server, even if you send out a daily newsletter to a couple of hundred folks, and a spambot cranking out several hundred thousand emails an hour. Not to mention most ISPs have it in their TOS that if you want to run a server you need to be on a business line anyway, so in either case the ISP has reason to dump you.
As for TFA as a guy who actually fixes the thing for a living it used to be you could actually clean a machine, but not anymore. The rootkits, trojans, all the nasties have gotten so infectious it is pretty much nuke from orbit. Considering how big a bunch of cheap bastards the OEMs are and how everyone ends up with "restore partitions" instead of actual discs I'm just waiting on a bug that infects the restore partitions first thing. Personally that would give me a big happy as it might force the OEMs to actually hand over a disc once in awhile.
As for it being "indestructible" where have they been? The nasties have been getting sneaky as hell for the past couple of years. Ultimately unless as another poster said they are using them as Bitcoin miners they are gonna HAVE to use the infected person's bandwidth and THAT is where you'll catch them.
The only thing that worries me about bugs like this using encryption is a friend that works state crime lab says more and more CP pushers are using infected machines as file dumps. With all this encryption it wouldn't surprise me if whomever cooked this up ends up renting out space to the CP scum. Having your door kicked in by the FBI because some fed traced a CP download back to your machine? Not a nice way to spend a weekend I think.
Meh it don't phase me. half my posts are modded as insightful, the other half flamebait or troll and I never do anything different than I always do, which is call it as I see it.
As for Amazon I just ignore the top guys and look for the MOR written by average folks. you can usually spot them pretty easy as they do the classic newegg Pro/Con layout and give a nice general overview. Working in retail I know you simply can't please everyone, and what works great for one person might be shit for another. I also know that you will get the occasional bad device, we've all gotten the drive that was DOA or the motherboard that was flaky. When you are cranking things out like flapjacks it happens.
So just ignore the bullshitters and look for the average folks. by doing that so far knock on plastic I've never gotten burnt, even on some of the cheaper junk I've gotten there like my little Zoom Bass Pedal which I absolutely love. Its cheap but it has a nice compressor and a fat fuzz and the built in wah pedal makes it easy to change sweep or level of an effect. But when I looked at the reviews there were a handful at the top that made it out like the second coming, and a few at the bottom that acted like it gave them an STD. The guys in the middle were "Nothing fancy, a few effects are cheese, but as long as you don't stomp the crap out of it the thing is low noise and has some good basic effects" which is all I wanted it for.
So just keep it MOR and ignore the ass kissers and the haters. There are always apple polishers in every bunch, whether they are paid or not, just as there are always those that will find everything to be shit. The key is to stick with the normal Joe reviews and ignore the rest, at least that is what works for me.
Uhhhh...you don't actually USE a Windows OS, do you MR AC? On the x64 versions you get BOTH the 32bit and 64bit IE, you don't have to download anything at all. Just pick which IE (which are clearly labeled 32bit and 64bit) and away you go.
That said here in the shop I've found that old joke becomes more true every day...IE is what you use to download a better browser. Up until recently that better browser was Firefox but after their version jumping killing plugins mess I've been switching my customers to Dragon and I've noticed more and more folks coming in off the street have Chrome set as default.
So while I wish the IE guys luck (ANYTHING is better than IE 6) with the exception of locked down business boxes I frankly just don't see IE users anymore, and the businesses have an old version of IE (thankfully not 6, most I see are on 7) and will stay on it until the last possible second because of the PITA that is testing. So good luck IE guys, you're gonna need it.
Well MY Mozilla users cared when their plugins broke because with the FF 5 bullshit I got plenty of emails saying "I don't like this, is there something else I can use?" and I sent them straight to Comodo Dragon where plugins don't break on update. See that whole "its free" shit sandwich attitude is kinda a double edged sword since you are free to walk away and I believe you will be seeing quite a few do that. I personally was using Mozilla since the beginning but have now moved myself and my family over to Dragon (except for the oldest who has been and always will be on Opera, but he is just weird) because their bad attitude and plugin breaking were simply the last straw after the CPU and mem hogging of late. After all if it is free I really have nothing invested in staying either, right?
As for TFA reading the comments here I still don't think there are enough companies running 2011 software on 2005 hardware to justify the hoopla. Maybe it is different in Sunland but in the places I dealt with those that were sticking with older hardware stuck with the older OS that came with the hardware as well. Why would you want to slow down your 6 year old machine by trying to run the latest and greatest on it?
Besides Oracle is a DB company and I don't see many DB houses that need the speed of an Oracle DB and are willing to pay the crazy Oracle prices for it running old tech. There has just been too many advances since then (such as another poster pointed out built in hardware encryption and virtualization which isn't supported on these old chips) to be wasting cycles on old gear. in these places it is all about the IOPS from what I've been told and new gear frankly runs rings around even 5 year old chips.
Maybe I'm getting "too old for this shit" but frankly it still blows my mind how quickly we are advancing when it comes to chips. I remember paying frankly crazy money at the turn of this century for a whole 1Ghz CPU and now you have multicore monsters everywhere for peanuts compared to what I was paying just a decade ago. I know the price thing don't count in servers but the equivalent there is the totally insane amounts of data one can process now which would have required 5 times the time and an entire floor just a decade ago. Truly amazing stuff we have now and I just don't see very many Oracle houses caring about this, not when the new gear can crank out the IOPS and Oracle has the current record when it comes to DB throughput.
Oh please! While you will ALWAYS have a few racist asshats I bet you'll find the majority are just like me and don't give a damn what color he is, we care that he is a lying asshole and a shitty president! Just about every. single. promise. he made on the trail he pulled a 180 on when he walked through the door. get us out of the two wars? nope in fact he started a third! get us out of Gitmo? nope. Warrantless wiretapping? All for it now. The Bush era abuse of authority? Now he says that the office of the president has the right to assassinate Americans on American soil and that this "right" can't even be revoked by congress! hell even Nixon didn't have the balls to pull that shit!
As for TFA it reminds me of a saying I heard years ago (I think it was old Joe Bob Briggs) that went "In America you can't show a tit unless it has a knife in it". For some reason we here in the states have never had a problem with mass slaughter but heaven forbid little Billy knows where his penis goes. Personally I wasn't hung up about any subject when it came to my boys but that was because I actually talked to them and encouraged them to ask questions. Both boys played violent video games if they wanted but after showing how games were actually constructed I wasn't worried about them mistaking reality for GTA. Of course this had the humorous side effect of my oldest having strange "cursing" when playing, such as "You call this level design? I've seen mods with better layouts! And who wrote the AI scripts? Barney? This is awful!"
Sadly picking up my boys from their friends houses on occasion I saw why America is fucked. I saw homes where not a single book resided and where the kids were NEVER read to (while others read kid stories or worse nothing at all my boys got "best Sci Fi of 1975" just like I got when I was a kid) and where the ONLY interaction they got was a few words before the parents went to their idiot box and the kid sat down in front of his. But no matter how many stupid laws you pass (and I agree with SCOTUS you can't have movie access be voluntary and games not, that is discrimination based on format) you ultimately can't have the government raise the kids. Sooner or later the people in the home, that is the PARENTS actually have to get off their collective asses and interact with the child.
Maybe that whole "have to have a license to have a kid" thing isn't such a bad idea. What I saw from watching my boys grow up is there are a hell of a lot of folks out there that are simply letting the boxes raise their kids and don't know shit about their kids, what they are doing, what they are playing/watching, etc. Be it the decline of the west, the fact that so many are single parent households now, that everyone is too tired from working shitty jobs, whatever, there just seems to be a lot of folks out there expecting the government to do their job because they refuse to. But you can't babyproof the planet and you can't send social workers to teach little Billy in his home what is what because the parents are too busy watching their reality TV.
If your 2005 server is doing its job why would you slow it down with a new OS in the first place? I have known a few places that kept a server until the paint fell of but it ran the OS it came with and I don't see how just because it is SPARC it is gonna magically run a 2011 OS on 2005 hardware without slowing it down.
As another pointed out in this thread the newer machines have hardware encryption and virtualization so that alone will slow your 2005 era machine down, as the OS is optimized for hardware the machine doesn't have, and of course overhead doesn't go down when they add new features.
So I stand by my statement. I really don't see "New OS on old hardware" as being that big of a use case and obviously Oracle doesn't see it being that big of a use case either. Of course if it IS that big a use case it isn't like the free market doesn't offer you options, there is POWER and X86-64, and plenty of vendors that will be happy to sell you a server with Windows or Linux or Unix to take the place of that SPARC box. I just don't see very many fortune 500 companies trying to run the latest and greatest on 6 year old hardware. maybe I'm wrong, maybe Oracle is too. I guess we'll find out if we see a mass migration away but I honestly doubt that will be the case.
Slashdot Mirror
That is only if you use MLC which frankly as I linked to above is kinda shit ATM. Whereas if you use enterprise quality SLC (more expensive but if you are really running machines pumping so much IOPS that they need MultiTb scratch then you should have the $$$) have a MTBF if you write full blast of 5-7 years, with some rating 10+. And as another pointed out there are 15k SAS drives out there already as well.
So in the end this simply makes NO sense at all. Everything you OC is electrons through silicon, which can be cooled down easily enough. Here we are talking about a motor spinning at insane rates already with a pubic hairs worth of distance between functional and screeching death. It gains you nothing, as it isn't like there is some huge price difference between drives based on speed and you certainly will NEVER get a 7200RPM drive anywhere close to SAS speeds as they simply don't have motors that can take the stress.
In the end this is about as pointless as that Killer NIC, which for several hundred dollars at launch you too could gain a whole 2% if the moon was right and the ISP played along. Only this is worse as the Killer NIC would at least continue functioning even if it didn't speed you up, here you are pushing a motor beyond its operating limits and actually trusting data to it. That is Forest Gump levels of dumbshit right there.
Hey look everybody it is Alex a KNOWN DOUCHEBAG! See how easy that is to make insults, especially when one has NO DEFENSE to what is being written? I love how the average Linux users acts like a 8 year old going "Nigger faggot" to everyone that doesn't kiss his ass, only instead of nigger and faggot it is shill and astroturfer.
For your info Mr Douche, I'm your worst fucking nightmare...I'm a retailer. I actually have REAL WORLD CUSTOMERS not some kids in their basements trying to stick it to "teh man". I have people that COUNT on their machines to...oh what is the word?....oh yeah ACTUALLY WORK not shit themselves and die because torvalds decided to Goatse the kernel again.
So you go wrap yourself in your little Tux blankie and pretend it is all just a conspiracy, Pretend that all those retailers in the entire USA don't avoid your crap because...well its driver model is crap...no it must be a secret cabal involving Bill Gates and the Illuminati. oh and don't forget to write M$ so you can be just like this guy which is who you sound like.
Run along pup, the grown ups have real work to do. Hey why don't you go compile something or send your pics of your "leet Linux desktop yo!" to KDELook and let the real men talk, okay junior?
Uhhh...if one goes by your standard then there is NO rights since even your right to exist can be taken away by the state through the death penalty, yet I would think that most judicial scholars would say that you do have certain unalienable rights but many more which can only be touched if specific actions are taken, such as getting a warrant before searches or the right to a speedy trial if you are arrested.
As for TFA I think everybody here is missing the forest for the trees in that the majority said it wasn't right to single out one form of entertainment and exclude all the others. The movie ratings? Entirely voluntary as is not allowing kids to see R and NC17 movies. What CA wanted to do was give the movies a pass while busting the big bad video game industry. The reason they gave movies a pass wouldn't be...oh I don't know....maybe the fact they are the movie capital of most of the world?
But in this case SCOTUS hit the nail on the head, you can't say Bob's business gets a free pass and Mary's business gets fucked because you don't like the format. Violence is violence, whether in a comic or a book, whether in a movie or a game. Saying this format is all well and good and that format sucks just doesn't cut it as far as the law is concerned. If they want the law so bad maybe they should place the same restrictions on movies and books? Yeah lets see how quick they can sell that one in Hollywood.
I'll take the hit, I got more karma than God and therefor don't give a crap. unless you are a programmer Linux is COMPLETELY pointless. Its driver model is more than a decade behind everyone else which causes drivers to shit themselves with regularity, Hardware support for cutting edge? Fugetaboutit and for everything less than 3 years old spotty at best, Low resource? not since Ubuntu came along and frankly if you really cared about that TinyXP runs great on a 400MHz and uses just 64Mb of RAM for a full desktop.
The ONLY place Linux makes sense is to programmers. programmers can automate the entire process with scripting (to be fair Windows has gotten much better at this with Powershell) there are plenty of IDEs as well as OSes designed for HPC and scientific programming. So yes for programmers Linux makes sense. For the other 99.9995% of the planet that is NOT programmers? Honestly the driver situation alone makes it suck the big wet titty.
Finally most gamers actually care about performance and Linux GPU drivers are just...well they are shit. The FOSS ones are miles behind on features and rarely work with decent games, the proprietary ones drop support for older hardware while being seriously behind on the latest and greatest. maybe when the ATI FOSS drivers get up to snuff things will be different but for a game company to target Linux as a platform now would have to be insane. DirectX ties everything up all nice and neat whereas OpenGL is a bunch of GPU specific shims and is frankly a mess.
So I'm sorry but unless you are a programmer Linux just doesn't make sense ATM. Maybe when old Torlvalds retires you will quietly get an ABI and then drivers won't be such a clusterfuck but expecting users to keep up with every make/model/rev of hardware so they can go with their hat in their hand to some forum and ask "please sir, can I has sound?" only to be told "RTFM or go back to Winblowz noob!" simply doesn't cut it. Windows is only $100 and well worth that not to deal with the bullshit.
The really sad part? There is a BUTT SIMPLE way they could fix it. Simply have all their OEM Windows discs on a server somewhere so you pay them $10 and get a download link to the .ISO. Just imagine how much easier it would be for you as the user, for me as a small shop, for everybody. Don't have the disc? pay $10 and have an .ISO that you can download forever. You burn, you install. Easy peasy.
What really scares me on this bug is the encryption thing. According to my bud in the crime lab CP pushers have been using infected machines more and more as file dumps and this fits right in with their MO. The way he explained it is like this: I'm a CP pusher, I have several Gbs of CP porn but I sure as fuck don't want it on MY computer. So I hire Mr malware who infects thousands of machines. We spread my CP crap to these machines with plenty of redundancy so that if any are offline my customers can still get to the filth, then I sell keys to the botnet for those that want to view my garbage. According to him we are talking $30,000 a month on up with some making a cool quarter million a month easy.
So it is THIS which makes me think restore partitions are a BAD idea. Most are filled with trialware garbage that most users wouldn't even notice if the malware were to remove it since they never used that shit anyway, and when you are talking $30k a month you have a damned good reason to hang onto those boxes as long as they can. Hell they could even wipe the restore partition and replace it with encrypted CP and have an extra 5Gb+ worth of filth on every box! it is just a bad design that ignores the reality of modern malware IMHO.
Oh and if you haven't tried Tuneup utilities you really should. They have a trial version and if you look around the net they often offer last years version for free hoping you'll like it and upgrade. The last 3 versions work great on Win 7 so no worries and it takes the BS out of keeping a PC clean and fresh. It really is worth the $30 and I highly recommend it and combined with Comodo Dragon browser and Avast free I have yet to see a PC with that combo cross my desk again for anything but hardware upgrades. they just keep on purring, no hassles, no bugs, and they are simple enough that anybody can run them. hell with tuneup you don't even have to do anything as it schedules its own one click maintenance every three days silently. really sweet and you should give it a whirl.
Well if you completely break a system it is immune to bugs, is that what you are proposing? Because I have YET to see a SINGLE distro that survives the 6 month upgrade death march without at LEAST 1, usually many, drivers that shit themselves and die. that is why everyone else in the free world, Solaris, BSD, OSX, Windows, OS/2 even, have a stable hardware ABI as it takes the bullshit out of drivers.
Windows 2k/XP driver model? 14 YEARS of working drivers. Vista/7 driver model? 4 years so far and has support until at LEAST 2020 so that is another 14 YEARS of driver support. Linux? Doesn't last 6 months. Even if you go LTS you currently have less than a year and a half before you're fucked.
Look as a retailer I WANT Linux to succeed, I really do. I don't like paying for licenses, nor do I like the fact I'm staring at 4 1.4Ghz AMD PCs with 512Mb of RAM I'm gonna have to shitcan because XP licenses would cost more than they are worth. But until you Linux users get together and tell Torvalds to fuck right off and quit using the kernel as his personal play toy? Well then nobody is gonna take your little "advice" seriously.
I'm suppose to tell my customers to learn about EVERY single piece of hardware on their system, learn Man pages and how to recompile drivers, how to tweak "fixes" for said drivers, and finally to have a list of every make/model/rev/firmware of every thing on or attached to their system, so they can go with their hat in their hand to some forum and go "please sir, I can has sound?" only to be told "RTFM Noob or go back to Winblowz LOL!".
Yeah right, your driver model is shit. YOU know it, I know it, hell everyone knows it but nobody has the balls to stand up to Torvalds and tell HIM that. Well I'm saying it here...Linus you are NOT smarter than every OS manufacturer, okay? Your little "No ABI" shit make make it easier for YOU to fiddle with the kernel but you know what? It ain't 1993 anymore, and you ain't passing the new build on IRC to a couple of tweakers. It is a multimillion dollar OS with a hell of a lot of people that need drivers TO JUST WORK which they don't without an ABI. Don't like ABIs? hell I don't care if you use an ABI or sell your first born to Satan to get it to work just FIX THE FUCKING THING.
Excuses are like assholes, everyone has them and they all stink. That is all I've ever gotten from the community when I point out as a retailer why I can't carry your product. Fix the drivers? I'll agree with your advice. Don't? Then you are completely full of shit because the world isn't gonna go through that suffering just for Linux,sorry.
The core of all three buildings were huge amounts of SOLID steel. This isn't some Mickey Mouse job here, even if you cut corners structural integrity strong enough to take the winds at that height would have caused it to take a little bit of fire here. Remember we aren't talking about it getting hit by a plane we are talking about a few pieces that flew over a block and landed on the building. THAT IS IT. And the sprinkler system had been checked fully functional. You honestly telling me that I hit a building that is 45 stories tall with the equivalent of a burning Yugo its gonna hit the ground?
Bullshit and I would argue they KNEW it was bullshit, which is why the MSM broadcast the first two all over the world and then mostly ignored the third. To every person I've pointed this out to their first reaction is always "But only two buildings fell" and when I point out no, three fell, including one that was supposedly just hit by a small amount of burning debris their reaction is always the same "What a load of shit.,that doesn't make ANY sense!" and THAT is why they didn't broadcast it all over the planet. They knew there was a limit to the BS they could push and the third tower went over the limit, but they needed the Worldcom investigation to go away so they decided to push it.
But if you look at the data contained in their "investigation" you'll see it has more holes than Swiss cheese. Why was their no investigation of someone at the Pentagon shorting AA BEFORE the first plane was reported missing? Why was their no investigation of the owner of the towers, who more than doubled his insurance for terrorist attack and ONLY terrorist attack less than 3 months before the hit? Why no investigation of how a 45 story building dies because some pieces of burning debris which according to the report were roughly the size of a couple of pick ups? Why no investigation on how with ALL the military bases we have on the east coast how NOT A SINGLE ONE could get so much as a single F15 in the air in the 90 minutes between the first hit and the last? Why no investigation on why the multi-billion dollar defense systems we've had in the DC area since the Cold War wasn't able to stop something the size of a 737?
I'm sorry but if you look at the facts anyone who can read and think would have to call bullshit. Do I know who did it? No because nobody bothered to attempt to find out. But I can say that there is NO way in hell a handful of jihadis were able to pull off this little miracle, or cripple the entire US defense system simultaneously while dropping three buildings with two planes and driving a 737 into downtown DC without so much as a crop duster to oppose them. its bullshit, it stinks, and the only reason anybody buys it is the MSM, same as sadly many Americans still believe we attacked Iraq because of 9/11.
But then you should be dealing with SSDs or Raptors. In the end it doesn't change the fact that unlike CPUs and GPUs and RAM where you are just pushing electrons through silicon with a HDD you are dealing with a mechanical device that has been built and testing for a certain rotational speed with a certain MTBF and by pushing that you are in essence redlining your car and hoping the engine doesn't blow.
So it doesn't make any sense. With GPU, CPU and RAM you can use better cooling to drop the temp and allow more electrons through without damage. No matter what kind of fins you add with a HDD you still aren't gonna get close enough to that motor to matter and you are already talking 10,000RPM on a performance drive. There is a GOOD reason why we don't see 20,000RPM drives and that is because we are already at the limit and increasing spin is simply gonna add instability and increase risk of failure.
And how many other than you use Multi-TB scratch drives? I bet its a teeny tiny niche at best. Not to mention if you are running machines that actually need multi-Tb scratch drives then I bet you have the money for 15k RPM drives or SSDs as machines running that much data through them are making serious $$$ for a company. So in the end this just doesn't make a lick of sense. It can't in any real way be used practically as it increases the risk of failure too much so at best you can say its a "for shits and giggles" test like running your AMD quad on liquid helium to reach 7.6GHz. Sure it might be impressive for a few seconds but it isn't like you are gonna use it for anything worth doing, now is it?
Actually if Win 8 turns into another Vista it may actually be good for MSFT, and here is why: There is no law saying they can't sell both, just as they did with XP and Vista, and Windows 7 is supported until at LEAST 2020 and that is if they don't pull a couple of extensions like they did with XP.
So here we are with literally hundreds of tons of late P4 XP boxes floating around hell I bet you may even have some in your home or at a relative's place. You know the ones, 2.0GHz-3.6Ghz P4, most with 512Mb of RAM, 40Gb to 160Gb hard drive, typical office box hand me downs. Now XP is gonna finally be EOL and frankly it'll cost more than they are worth to buy RAM and an AGP GPU to upgrade these dinosaurs. So there is no reason why MSFT can't say "Hey want the bling bling touch web 3.0 freaky wow? Buy Win 8. Want a nice normal experience? buy Windows 7" and let the OEMs sell both.
As for your other points? Nobody who is honest is gonna say with a straight face that LO/OO is a suitable replacement in any real capacity with MS Office as it turns .doc into word salad on any but the simplest of formatting, the X360 has the highest sell through of ANY of the current consoles (8 at last check) and is raking in the dough, and of course Windows doesn't have any real competition on the desktop. Sure if you are arty and can afford a 500% markup you can get a MBP, but when even Dell has to host their own repos because otherwise the fucked up driver situation in Linux causes a big fucking mess? Not ready for prime time.
And finally for all the jokes I bet the Skype is gonna go down as one of the smartest business moves made by MSFT, why? One word...integration. Skype gives them an easy way to offer a nice VoIP solution that ties right into AD and can be controlled with GPOs and "just works" no matter what routers are in between. With so many companies having "road warrior" employees this gives them a nice cheap way for their WinPhone (by Nokia naturally) to hook right into the Intranet and have everything all nice and neat. It saves businesses money, makes it easier for admins to manage, what's not to like? I bet it'll sell a LOT of WinPhones to those that used to buy RIM who is all but DOA and whom I'm betting will be either bought by MSFT or Google.
So I'd say the only real weakness they have at MSFT is the CEO is a raving fanboi of black turtlenecks and artsy fartsy design. I can just hear his motivational speeches "Today with the new WinPhone we'll finally be as cool and hip as Apple! We really will! Yes we will! STOP LAUGHING AT ME!" and is why I say the Borg icon needs to go. Instead we need an icon of Ballmer in an "I Heart Apple" beanie with his tongue sticking out. Perfect image for a perfectly shitty CEO. Every single success in that company has been DESPITE him, not because of him.
You want proof? One where I have YET to hear ANY even slightly plausible explanation? here goes...how does TWO airplanes take out THREE buildings WITHOUT one of the buildings falling on the other? You telling me a couple of pieces of burning plane are gonna knock down a 45 story building, which has been otherwise undamaged and therefor should have a completely functional sprinkler system? Oh and that the building in question just so happened to have ALL the papers with regards to the Worldcom investigation?
I'm sorry but the whole thing stinks. Do I believe the president did it? No I do not. Do I believe that there are several multinationals that would think nothing of causing that amount of loss of life if it meant billions in profits? You betcha. The fact that NOBODY investigated such an obvious connection as shorting the stock of the company involved BEFORE anybody knew anything? Tell mes that someone high up WAS involved in it. Remember it doesn't take hundreds of people here, probably less than a dozen in key positions could have set the thing in motion.
It reminds me of the video "The Men Who Killed Kennedy" which if you haven't seen it has one scene that says it all. As was SOP a SS agent gets ready to get on the back of the limo before the president is brought out. There you clearly see the chief on the ground order the guy off whom you actually see the guy pulled turn and say "What the fuck?" before being drug off to another assignment. It didn't take the entire SS agency, it only took one guy in charge of positioning to make sure the president didn't have adequate protection. The amount of money made by certain corps since 9/11 dwarfs what was made during the Vietnam war, and as we have seen everyone has a price.
I have a much better question....why? While I don't know if it is the same with Linux (I gave up messing with it around Ubuntu 10.4, but I'll assume it is) with Windows and the frankly insane amounts of cache one gets on a drive nowadays combined with Superfetch one will rarely notice your drive! In fact lately I've been using 5900RPM drives as OS drives because with 64Mb caches and plenty of RAM there just isn't enough of a difference in speed to deal with the extra noise and heat, especially if the customer wants it as an HTPC.
So honestly I don't get it. you OC a CPU (or in the case of AMD unlock cores as well as OC) because you get a more expensive CPU at a cheaper price. Same thing with RAM or flashing an HD4830 into an HD4850 which I have done a couple of times so far and works well. But with HDDs you simply add a second in RAID 0 or if you don't mind dealing with the hot/crazy scale and the possibility you may be spending several hundred a year on replacements and be risking data? Well then go SSD. But it isn't like OCing that EcoDrive is gonna turn the thing into a Velociraptor, it is just gonna wear the thing out quicker for less gain than you would have seen adding a RAM stick. I just don't get it, folks with more time on their hands than they know what to do with I guess.
I think what he is talking about is waaaay back in the old days, we are talking 286/386 old days here, some of the business class boards came with what was known as "BIOS Lock" or something similar. what it would do is keep the BIOS read only so that a BIOS bug couldn't write to it.
Now I saw a few where that you could turn it on and off from insides BIOS (not sure how that worked, but if you could turn it off I assume the BIOS bug could too) but most would have a jumper on the board. jumper set? no BIOS tweaks for you and no writing for BIOS bug. Of course the downside and why they most likely fell out of favor (along with how big a PITA it was to write a BIOS bug instead of a DOS/WinBug) was that unless you were in corporate where no cards were ever added most add ons back then were fiddly little bastards that required all kinds of IRQ tweaking and other BIOS fiddling, and having to switch a jumper every time something needed fiddling was a PITA.
As for TFA, how long before the user CAN'T restore, simply because the cheap bastard OEMs use "restore partitions" which the bug should be able to get at? from the first time I saw a restore partition I thought "what bean counting dipshit thought this up" as marking a partition as hidden doesn't magically make it bug proof. All I can figure is that like most criminals malware writers are lazy bastards and haven't bothered cooking up a bug that infects the restore partition the way they infect system restore. But I wouldn't be surprised if in the future using the restore partition simply wipes the user's programs while restoring the malware.
I'll answer that...don't load the taskbar with always running crapola, don't use IE, have a decent AV like Avast Free that doesn't suck resources like a Bangkok whore sucking Japanese businessmen, and finally and most importantly use a decent tool to keep the registry cleaned of leftover third party cruft.
I recommend Tuneup Utilities, as it has some excellent features like Turbo mode for gaming, a process monitor that will keep a program from slamming your CPU to 100% and making the machine unresponsive, and unless you tell it not to its one click maintenance will run silently once every three days to clean the cruft and ensure the health of the machine, such as checking for fragmentation. That said if you balk at paying a whole $30 for a program that takes all the work out of it there is WinUtilities Free or Glary Utilities, but neither of those are full featured or automatic, as automatic cleaning is only for those that buy the pro versions, which if you are gonna pay tuneUp IMHO has the better tools.
So there you go. Follow the above along with keeping your machine updated with WU and you're good to go, your Windows PC will remain clean and fresh smelling and will NOT need any annual reinstalls.
That said if a machine is completely pwned like TFA nuking from orbit is the ONLY way to be sure, but I've found if you follow the above (Both Avast Free and Comodo IS Free have JavaScript scan before load and sandboxing, so either choice will work. I prefer Avast as its less fiddly than Comodo and I like not having to fiddle) and have a decent AV like Avast or Comodo only the most herp derp PEBKAC bullshit will cause you to get infected.
I have had exactly ONE customer get infected after following the above (and I ended up having to tell him to take his business elsewhere as he refused to listen and became belligerent) and that was because he 1.-first tried to disable the AV and then when he couldn't he 2.-uninstalled the AV, all so he could get the "new Limewire" which I had already told him was nothing but a Trojan package. Well he got it alright, more than 70 infections. He actually had the balls to get mad and try to demand a free repair becuase he said the AV must be defective since it wouldn't let him install Limiewire. Finally I said "Look dumbass, you tried to install A VIRUS. The whole POINT of an AV is to keep viruses OFF the PC, not let them on because you like the name of the virus, moron."
So a little common sense and the above instructions will keep your PC running for the life of the machine. The only work I have to do on those that follow my instructions above is the occasional hardware upgrade and I have several that have been running in the field for over 7 years, same install.
Then to use a popular meme "ur doin it wrong" my friend. If you install a lot of software then a simple registry cleaning will keep your Windows running well (I recommend Tuneup Utilities, but for those wanting a free alternative WinUtilities works decently but isn't as nice or full featured as tuneup) and Avast Free with its default sandboxing and JavaScript scan before load will keep all but the most herp derp PEBKAC caused infections away.
Honestly despite all the jokes and FUD passed around here by certain fanboys it really is pretty simple to keep Windows running quite well for the life of a machine. Don't load up the taskbar with tons of always running bullshit, don't be clicking on email attachments, keep the machine up to date with Windows Update, a decent registry cleaner to get rid of dead reg links left by crap third party software, just basic common sense.
The machine I'm typing this on has been running Win 7 HP since RTM which is 2 years, my netbox has been running XP since it came out in 04, same install, and I have several customers with XP boxes that are more than 8 years old, again same install. It really ain't that hard folks, just a teeny tiny bit of TLC and common sense.
Then that is NOT a false flag, but simply an excuse for ramming through an agenda. A false flag is something like 9/11, where you have someone in DC dumping AA stock more than 90 minutes BEFORE the first plane, how the entire MSM told us with a straight face there was nothing to keep an object the size of an airliner from hitting the Pentagon, when we all know DC has been armed to the teeth since the Cold War, or that there was not a single American military aircraft on the Eastern seaboard and not a single one could reach New York in under two hours. The only two logical conclusions is either a false flag or a military so damned incompetent that they couldn't tie their shoes, much less perform even standard military maneuvers. Since that level of inconsistence in performance is simply wholly unbelievable you are left with a single conclusion...false flag. Considering how much $$$ was made by corps like Haliburton, or how the guy that owned the towers suddenly doubled down on insurance for that SPECIFIC kind of attack? yeah bullshit, false flag.
What we have here is a classic "wag the dog" where you use something completely unconnected to what you are trying to do to ram something through. Saudi terrorists attack New York? Blow up Iraq. What does one have to do with the other? Not a fucking thing except the first event was helpful in getting an agenda pushed.That is the difference my friend.
Thank you, but I never thought what I did was that big a deal honestly. How could someone look down at two innocent little faces, the oldest not even 2 and the youngest barely 6 months old, and not step up?
Sadly their father could, as he got one taste of meth on a construction job he was working and has spent the rest of his life chasing highs instead of even knowing where his kids were. When my sister died a lousy $200 from me was all it took to get him to sign away his rights without a second thought. Last I heard he is back in jail for getting high and beating up an ATM and he has gotten Hep C on top of it. I figure in another year or two they'll find him in a ditch somewhere. The oldest just shakes his head and looks at him with pity, the youngest doesn't give a shit if he lives or dies, even though I tried to keep them from becoming estranged knowing my sis wasn't gonna be here for long. I did think it was nice that last Father's day I got a card and a pizza, when I said I wasn't a dad they said "close enough for us, and a hell of a better one than our real dad".
So I just did what I thought any decent human being would do when faced with two young boys with no parents, I busted my ass and did everything I could to give them as much of a normal life as I could with their mother slowly dying in the next room. I got lucky though as in the final stage I met a truly wonderful woman who didn't give a shit that the boys weren't mine or that the youngest was gay, who took time off work to stay with us during the funeral and give the boys a shoulder to cry on. She has become the mother that my sister always wanted to be and if she wasn't gun shy from two abusive exs I would have already put a ring on her finger. In the end you do what you have to, give it 110%, and if your heart is in the right place it will all work out in the end.
Don't know if Anons can see their posting history (as I have never posted as Anon, I stand by my comments) but if you do see this PHB is from Dilbert and stands for "Pointy Haired Boss" which is a completely clueless moron who knows just enough buzzwords to be a cockblock and doesn't know shit about how things actually work, which sadly I've found in corporate settings is pretty much 85%+ which is why I ran away from corporate before it drove me into an early grave. Now I ONLY deal with SOHOs and SMBs, where the people actually KNOW they don't understand the tech and are just happy to have someone knowledgeable and will defer to your judgement.
As for the poster above you getting sick from working corp? Come join us in the wonderful world of PC building and repair. you'll never make 6 figures but you WILL have a hell of a lot less stress, get to meet nice folks that actually appreciate you (hell I even met my current GF of 3 years this way) and won't have to deal with anymore impossible problems with no budget thought up by total idiots. I don't know how many times in corporate I'd see everything turned into a clusterfuck and then be expected to fix said clusterfuck with NO money and no help. Yeah and if I can't pull off a trick worthy of Chris Angel? The I get bitched out for the problem I didn't cause in the first place!
Well fuck that shit, working in a little shop you may never get rich but you won't have to worry about ulcers or a heart attack either. People actually listen to you (for the most part and those that try for even a second to act like a PHB I show the door) and you are able to implement best practices without any cockblocking or bullshit. my customers all have backup drives, all make disc images, all have the Av I approved up, everything runs nice and smooth and I don't have to deal with anymore herp derp corporate bullshit. Well worth the lower pay, and you meet a hell of a lot nicer folks as a bonus.
Don't know if they have it everywhere in the USA but at least here in the south we have what we call "Walmart Phone' as that is where you get it, $45 a month for unlimited talk and text. Signal is pretty damned good and I'm seriously thinking of switching as Wifi is everywhere here so there really isn't a point in tethering so all I ever use the phone for is talk and text anyway.
So maybe the answer is to sic one evil corp against another in a battle to the death. Kinda sad when you actually have to root for Walmart huh? But considering I live in AT&T land and after dealing with them on behalf of customers and being told "We don't care if our DSL speeds suck we aren't spending a dime in that area, so pay up or piss off" in nicer language of course, and watching the cableco take advantage of their not giving a shit to make crazy money (currently $130 for their basic cable+Net+phone bundle and that is the cheapest price they have) anyone that causes pain to the shitastic monopoly that is AT&T I'm ALL for. There used to be SBC here, and they were actually good. Since being swallowed back into AT&T they have gone back to being the absolute shite on a roll that is the hallmark of AT&T.
Exactly. For those that don't know Al Gore, or Rev Al as I call him for his Lear jet riding rampant hypocrisy, is setting himself up to be a carbon billionaire by getting the government to jump on board and force folks and businesses to buy indulgences...err I mean credits, so that they can sin...whoops meant pollute to their hearts content.
If you wanna see someone that is for treating the planet better that isn't a complete self serving douche the ONLY one I've seen so far is Ed Begely Jr, who actually walks the walk and sacrifices himself to show that one can live without polluting, and then used his own money to do a tour showing ways to cut down on pollution. He is a stark contrast to Rev Al farting around in his personal jet or 10MPG limo while having the brass balls to say he is carbon neutral because he pays himself from his own company carbon credits which is like taking money from your right pocket and putting it in your left and calling it wealth redistribution and demanding a tax break for it.
Frankly BOTH sides of this debate have been beseeched by the Rev Al types, those that have figured out ways to make assloads of money if AGW comes out one way or the other and are therefor trying to make it come out their way. Then add in the leeches like Goldman Sachs have already set themselves up to blow some really big bubbles if carbon credits manages to pass? The whole thing just stinks on ice on BOTH sides. It is sad to see science turned into a practice bought and sold, but when you are talking about billions upon billions of profits to be made by the winner I guess one shouldn't be surprised.
There is a BIG difference between you running an SMTP server, even if you send out a daily newsletter to a couple of hundred folks, and a spambot cranking out several hundred thousand emails an hour. Not to mention most ISPs have it in their TOS that if you want to run a server you need to be on a business line anyway, so in either case the ISP has reason to dump you.
As for TFA as a guy who actually fixes the thing for a living it used to be you could actually clean a machine, but not anymore. The rootkits, trojans, all the nasties have gotten so infectious it is pretty much nuke from orbit. Considering how big a bunch of cheap bastards the OEMs are and how everyone ends up with "restore partitions" instead of actual discs I'm just waiting on a bug that infects the restore partitions first thing. Personally that would give me a big happy as it might force the OEMs to actually hand over a disc once in awhile.
As for it being "indestructible" where have they been? The nasties have been getting sneaky as hell for the past couple of years. Ultimately unless as another poster said they are using them as Bitcoin miners they are gonna HAVE to use the infected person's bandwidth and THAT is where you'll catch them.
The only thing that worries me about bugs like this using encryption is a friend that works state crime lab says more and more CP pushers are using infected machines as file dumps. With all this encryption it wouldn't surprise me if whomever cooked this up ends up renting out space to the CP scum. Having your door kicked in by the FBI because some fed traced a CP download back to your machine? Not a nice way to spend a weekend I think.
Meh it don't phase me. half my posts are modded as insightful, the other half flamebait or troll and I never do anything different than I always do, which is call it as I see it.
As for Amazon I just ignore the top guys and look for the MOR written by average folks. you can usually spot them pretty easy as they do the classic newegg Pro/Con layout and give a nice general overview. Working in retail I know you simply can't please everyone, and what works great for one person might be shit for another. I also know that you will get the occasional bad device, we've all gotten the drive that was DOA or the motherboard that was flaky. When you are cranking things out like flapjacks it happens.
So just ignore the bullshitters and look for the average folks. by doing that so far knock on plastic I've never gotten burnt, even on some of the cheaper junk I've gotten there like my little Zoom Bass Pedal which I absolutely love. Its cheap but it has a nice compressor and a fat fuzz and the built in wah pedal makes it easy to change sweep or level of an effect. But when I looked at the reviews there were a handful at the top that made it out like the second coming, and a few at the bottom that acted like it gave them an STD. The guys in the middle were "Nothing fancy, a few effects are cheese, but as long as you don't stomp the crap out of it the thing is low noise and has some good basic effects" which is all I wanted it for.
So just keep it MOR and ignore the ass kissers and the haters. There are always apple polishers in every bunch, whether they are paid or not, just as there are always those that will find everything to be shit. The key is to stick with the normal Joe reviews and ignore the rest, at least that is what works for me.
Uhhhh...you don't actually USE a Windows OS, do you MR AC? On the x64 versions you get BOTH the 32bit and 64bit IE, you don't have to download anything at all. Just pick which IE (which are clearly labeled 32bit and 64bit) and away you go.
That said here in the shop I've found that old joke becomes more true every day...IE is what you use to download a better browser. Up until recently that better browser was Firefox but after their version jumping killing plugins mess I've been switching my customers to Dragon and I've noticed more and more folks coming in off the street have Chrome set as default.
So while I wish the IE guys luck (ANYTHING is better than IE 6) with the exception of locked down business boxes I frankly just don't see IE users anymore, and the businesses have an old version of IE (thankfully not 6, most I see are on 7) and will stay on it until the last possible second because of the PITA that is testing. So good luck IE guys, you're gonna need it.
Well MY Mozilla users cared when their plugins broke because with the FF 5 bullshit I got plenty of emails saying "I don't like this, is there something else I can use?" and I sent them straight to Comodo Dragon where plugins don't break on update. See that whole "its free" shit sandwich attitude is kinda a double edged sword since you are free to walk away and I believe you will be seeing quite a few do that. I personally was using Mozilla since the beginning but have now moved myself and my family over to Dragon (except for the oldest who has been and always will be on Opera, but he is just weird) because their bad attitude and plugin breaking were simply the last straw after the CPU and mem hogging of late. After all if it is free I really have nothing invested in staying either, right?
As for TFA reading the comments here I still don't think there are enough companies running 2011 software on 2005 hardware to justify the hoopla. Maybe it is different in Sunland but in the places I dealt with those that were sticking with older hardware stuck with the older OS that came with the hardware as well. Why would you want to slow down your 6 year old machine by trying to run the latest and greatest on it?
Besides Oracle is a DB company and I don't see many DB houses that need the speed of an Oracle DB and are willing to pay the crazy Oracle prices for it running old tech. There has just been too many advances since then (such as another poster pointed out built in hardware encryption and virtualization which isn't supported on these old chips) to be wasting cycles on old gear. in these places it is all about the IOPS from what I've been told and new gear frankly runs rings around even 5 year old chips.
Maybe I'm getting "too old for this shit" but frankly it still blows my mind how quickly we are advancing when it comes to chips. I remember paying frankly crazy money at the turn of this century for a whole 1Ghz CPU and now you have multicore monsters everywhere for peanuts compared to what I was paying just a decade ago. I know the price thing don't count in servers but the equivalent there is the totally insane amounts of data one can process now which would have required 5 times the time and an entire floor just a decade ago. Truly amazing stuff we have now and I just don't see very many Oracle houses caring about this, not when the new gear can crank out the IOPS and Oracle has the current record when it comes to DB throughput.
Oh please! While you will ALWAYS have a few racist asshats I bet you'll find the majority are just like me and don't give a damn what color he is, we care that he is a lying asshole and a shitty president! Just about every. single. promise. he made on the trail he pulled a 180 on when he walked through the door. get us out of the two wars? nope in fact he started a third! get us out of Gitmo? nope. Warrantless wiretapping? All for it now. The Bush era abuse of authority? Now he says that the office of the president has the right to assassinate Americans on American soil and that this "right" can't even be revoked by congress! hell even Nixon didn't have the balls to pull that shit!
As for TFA it reminds me of a saying I heard years ago (I think it was old Joe Bob Briggs) that went "In America you can't show a tit unless it has a knife in it". For some reason we here in the states have never had a problem with mass slaughter but heaven forbid little Billy knows where his penis goes. Personally I wasn't hung up about any subject when it came to my boys but that was because I actually talked to them and encouraged them to ask questions. Both boys played violent video games if they wanted but after showing how games were actually constructed I wasn't worried about them mistaking reality for GTA. Of course this had the humorous side effect of my oldest having strange "cursing" when playing, such as "You call this level design? I've seen mods with better layouts! And who wrote the AI scripts? Barney? This is awful!"
Sadly picking up my boys from their friends houses on occasion I saw why America is fucked. I saw homes where not a single book resided and where the kids were NEVER read to (while others read kid stories or worse nothing at all my boys got "best Sci Fi of 1975" just like I got when I was a kid) and where the ONLY interaction they got was a few words before the parents went to their idiot box and the kid sat down in front of his. But no matter how many stupid laws you pass (and I agree with SCOTUS you can't have movie access be voluntary and games not, that is discrimination based on format) you ultimately can't have the government raise the kids. Sooner or later the people in the home, that is the PARENTS actually have to get off their collective asses and interact with the child.
Maybe that whole "have to have a license to have a kid" thing isn't such a bad idea. What I saw from watching my boys grow up is there are a hell of a lot of folks out there that are simply letting the boxes raise their kids and don't know shit about their kids, what they are doing, what they are playing/watching, etc. Be it the decline of the west, the fact that so many are single parent households now, that everyone is too tired from working shitty jobs, whatever, there just seems to be a lot of folks out there expecting the government to do their job because they refuse to. But you can't babyproof the planet and you can't send social workers to teach little Billy in his home what is what because the parents are too busy watching their reality TV.
If your 2005 server is doing its job why would you slow it down with a new OS in the first place? I have known a few places that kept a server until the paint fell of but it ran the OS it came with and I don't see how just because it is SPARC it is gonna magically run a 2011 OS on 2005 hardware without slowing it down.
As another pointed out in this thread the newer machines have hardware encryption and virtualization so that alone will slow your 2005 era machine down, as the OS is optimized for hardware the machine doesn't have, and of course overhead doesn't go down when they add new features.
So I stand by my statement. I really don't see "New OS on old hardware" as being that big of a use case and obviously Oracle doesn't see it being that big of a use case either. Of course if it IS that big a use case it isn't like the free market doesn't offer you options, there is POWER and X86-64, and plenty of vendors that will be happy to sell you a server with Windows or Linux or Unix to take the place of that SPARC box. I just don't see very many fortune 500 companies trying to run the latest and greatest on 6 year old hardware. maybe I'm wrong, maybe Oracle is too. I guess we'll find out if we see a mass migration away but I honestly doubt that will be the case.