But frankly we wouldn't be having this problem if the US and other government would step in and deal with the hogs. last time I saw the figures we are talking less than 30% of IPV4 was being utilized with the rest being taken up by squatters and hogs that got huge blocks back in the old days. If the unused addresses were to be put back into the pool it would give us most likely a good 5 to 6 years to do a nice orderly IPV6 rollout instead of the mess we are in now.
So I propose a simple answer: Each address costs you $1 a month. The hogs want to sit on them and then sell them for a fat profit like it was rare property? Enjoy the property tax. At just $1 a month it wouldn't hurt the little guy but would make those sitting on huge blocks to either "piss or get off the pot" and since we would be treating the addresses as property if they give the block back they get a one time tax credit of $1 per address as incentive.
Because if we don't do something "radical" like this the whole thing is gonna be a massive clusterfuck. I'd said a good 85%+ of the routers being sold this very minute are IPV4 only, the dead economy has caused plenty of layoffs and under-staffing in IT depts, especially in the flyover states which I predict will end up with massive outages when we do flip the switch due to staff with little training in IPV6 and simply not enough hands on deck, I've yet to hear how we are suppose to deal with the privacy concerns of having everyone tied to a unique address which is the *.A.As idea of heaven, not to mention nosy governments, and finally we still haven't seen a plan proposed that won't end up causing massive eWaste in the consumer section when the above routers and switches aren't given any IPV6 firmware upgrades thanks to the router companies looking at IPV6 as a perfect way to sell new routers to everyone.
So I say my proposal would buy us the time we need to fix the above problems and make the IPV6 transition a nice slow methodical orderly change over rather than the "Oh shit what are we gonna do?" mess that we have now. Whether it be from greed or apathy IPV4 has been allowed to be massively abused and neglected and the IPV6 gear and training simply isn't there on the consumer side nor in SMBs. Everyone laughs now about how when Y2K hit nothing happened, well I'm betting that if we don't do something the IPV6 switchover has the potential to be the total clusterfuck that Y2K was supposed to be, only worse. As someone in one of the flyover states I can tell you most places simply ain't ready, and since all of y'all on the coasts have some of your data pass through our area getting to point b from point a having the flyovers fail could cause a major outage, who knows, maybe ven a domino effect. So have the hogs pay $1 a month per address and we'll see if they want to hang onto those addresses or not.
Sorry, just have to chime in here. Uhhh...you DO know that Apple is bringing the app store to OSX via lion, yes? So frankly any arguments of iOS VS OSX are about to be made moot anyway. Apple WILL lock down OSX, just as they have iOS, Apple WILL control the whole smash, again just as with iOS, and Apple fanboys WILL declare that locking them into a walled garden is the greatest thing since sliced bread and we're all haters who just "don't get Steve's vision".
So frankly you can make all the flaming logic hoops you want friend, OSX in 2 years will be nothing but iOS in a different package. The only thing that worries me is seeing screencaps of Win 8 it looks like if someone doesn't fire Ballmer but quick Windows will be nothing but a WinPhone in a different case. In BOTH cases the future goal is pretty clear, a machine which you have about as much control over as your average ATM. You push the button, that's it. Frankly I'd say the only ones who'd benefit would be the Linux guys, but my guess is the way congress whores itself out for garbage like the PROTECT IP laws in all likelihood by 2015 all the devices will have Fritz chips in them and Linux won't run on anything but highly expensive dev boards and little ARM crap chips.
So wouldn't it simply be smarter to go to two factor, aka 'something you have, something you know" for access? lets face it, flash drives are uber cheap and small enough you can put one on your keyring that would be able to hold authentication for dozens of systems.
Frankly in my mind it just doesn't make sense in this day of sub $500 quads and being able to go quad crossfire for less than $1200 on the GPU to not use two factor authentication. If we expect people to keep up with their ATM card frankly I don't see why they couldn't do the same with a little flash stick on a keyring. It just seems silly to me that when we have so much computing power like in TFA that people still expect simple passwords to keep the bad guys out.
And slightly OT, but is there any actual GP-GPU software out there that isn't for black hats? Because it seems to me that is all I ever hear of when there is a hell of a lot of GPUs out here in home user land that could put that GP-GPU power to good use if there were only some programs for it. I've searched and all I found was a couple of demos on the AMD website, nothing really useful that can do actual work like in TFA. Where are the programs that say let me volume level my entire MP3 collection in 30 seconds, or let me run Audacity effects on the GPU?
While I like the idea of a GP-GPU being this specialized co-processor I can do actual work with other than a drag and drop transcoder for video that frankly doesn't give a really good picture I can't seem to find any non blackhat code, at least not for the AMD GPUs.
That is why one should have reviews NOT force everyone on the planet who is horribly broken to suffer for years, sometimes decades, in agony! I mean everything CAN be abused, look at the politicians that wanted to ban pain patches and oxycotin because kids were stealing them to get high even though they are some of the few drugs that help with bone pain.
I personally have a simple little rule that I think should be applied: Would you make your dog go through that? If whatever it is is nasty enough you would show pity on an animal in that condition and put them down then by God people should be given the same consideration you would show the damned dog!
I think everyone that thinks it is wrong should be forced to spend a week, just a single week, in the company of someone who has an aggressive untreatable illness like my sister. They should get to hear the sound of the bones snapping as one of the nerves in her legs fire and cause a violent jerk that shatters the bones, listen as each breath is a struggle that causes great pain, see the kind of agony these people go through.
Too damned many in this country thinks modern medicine if it can't help will at least be able to deal with the pain, but that is total horseshit. When you get into nerve damage and cancers you can give up doing anything for the pain, all the drugs in the world simply wouldn't be able to stop it. I am only grateful that in the end we had a doc that was decent enough to "snow" her, which is a nice way of saying give her a fatal dose of painkillers, because otherwise she would have slowly suffocated to death. It would have been like someone sitting on her chest and slowly pushing down, a slow and horrifying ending.
Frankly NO family should have to go through that and I seriously doubt there would be very many that would want to snow grandma just because they don't want to deal. in reality they would find as I am finding out with my mom, that in the end there is only so much a family is physically capable of doing for someone who is in pain and whose mind is going, and thanks to local and state laws that say as long as she has the ability to say "no" she can't be put in a home. In the end most likely I'll have to abandon her and hope that when she falls she hurts herself but not fatally so that the police will intervene because I've been told until she is a danger to herself there is nothing anyone can do.
Can you even IMAGINE having to make a decision like that about your own mother? That you have to hope she hurts but doesn't kill herself simply because you can't stay awake 24/7/365 to deal with a woman that is frequently becoming combative and paranoid? To hear the woman that raised you curse the day you were born because you won't let her eat nothing but candy like some sort of junkie? Until you have lived through something like this one simply cannot judge or understand, and I appreciate what old Jack did to bring folks like my mom and sis to light.
Yes because how dare they bring medical supplies and food to help out them niggers...err I mean Arabs, whom the sky bully says must be kept under boot or else Jebus won't come back, praise Jebus! Funny how the right wing wouldn't care if the Israelis had them an old fashioned lynching party for them poor bastards on the strip as long as there remains a Jew standing there to fulfill that "when the Jews return to Zion" line which IIRC wasn't even in the King James version. Don't you think it is kinda sad that our ME peace policy is based on a line written on a sheepskin by a 1800 year dead goat herder about a 2000+ year dead mystical figure?
As for TFA, as someone who still has a scar on the back of his head from a cop who said, and I quote "Fucking niggers and God damned hippies, i don't which makes me more sick" I can tell you that most cops I have encountered touring the south has been roid raged bastards going out of their way to start shit.
I have found for every decent cop you got a half a dozen or more roid raging, crooked, vicious, nasty, all around mean motor scooters. That is what happens when your police for cares more about its code of silence than it does in keeping out the dirty and the mean, but what truly makes them dangerous is they know they can get away with murder and that a good 95%+ of the time the laws simply won't apply to them. I know in my own area they actually got the coroner to testify that two teens that died by being hit by a train had passed out 'due to marijuana intoxication' even though the engineer said repeatedly that the kids were covered by a police tarp BEFORE he hit them and that neither body lying under the tarp so much as twitched even with the horn blowing full blast, and that the same coroner testified a year later a body found under a bridge in the same area belonged to someone who 'committed suicide'. Yeah he beat, shot, stabbed, AND strangled himself before jumping off a bridge in an area where it is pretty common knowledge that most of the cops are running meth.
So frankly is anyone surprised? When folks take videos of the cops acting like SA what does the prosecutors do? Oh yeah go out of their way to arrest the one who took the pics while the cops get a small suspension WITH pay, if they get anything at all. Funny how some many on the right scream that we are becoming 'socialists' when it actuality we are becoming (I would argue we are already there for the most part) fascist totalitarian.
But if anyone thinks this is shocking they should watch The Largest Street Gang in America and see how 'aggressive looking for a fight SA style' intimidation and oppression are the SOP for the blue shirts.
Riiiight, and if the protocol was completely open like SIP we wouldn't have the problems with Robodialers like SIP because? The problem with mass communication protocols is there are plenty of assholes in legal nowherelands that can and WILL use anything and everything they can get their slimy hands on to hack, harass, spam, and generally act like giant fucking douchebags without regards to anyone but themselves.
One should never forget the universal truth that is Gabriel's Greater Internet Theory and then add in the ones that would be acting like douchebags because they could make money doing so ON TOP of the ones just being dicks for the sheer fun of being a fucktwit? It would be a damned mess and you KNOW this. The reason why everyone uses Skype is that it "just works" without having to worry about your video chat window suddenly popping up with someone's junk in it or getting called every two seconds from some automated voice trying to sell you herbal Viagra. While I think FOSS is fine in some places, in others it would be a BAD idea, and I'd say this here is one of the latter.
Re:In b4 losers asking why he didn't kill himself
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Jack Kevorkian Dead at 83
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Well as someone who lost his sister in 07 to a long and horribly drawn out illness, watching as she slowly but surely fell apart with nothing the doctors could do to even stop the pain (she had a rare degenerating nerve disorder) I appreciate the work that Mr Kevorkian did and the price he paid to bring the rights of the suffering to the national spotlight.
Despite our advances in medicine the are plenty of times where all medical interventions are useless and the pain simply can NOT be in any way controlled. While my sister wouldn't have taken the option no matter how much she suffered (she wanted to live long enough to see her oldest start college, she unfortunately died 6 months before he began) the simple fact is as intelligent creatures it should be our right to choose whether we wish to endure the suffering or not.
The way I've always looked at it is this: if you would put an animal down rather than making it endure that kind of hellish suffering, then why in God's name would you make a human being go through that? By the end my sis's lungs were failing, she could no longer speak more than a word or two, couldn't eat or drink because her ability to swallow was failing, her nerves were lit up like pins and needles, and just the act of turning her could easily break bones. Why would anyone force someone to live through that? They should have the choice as intelligent beings to decide if that is how they want to be or not. To have it any other way is simple cruelty.
Funny you should mention bloated and slow in the same breath as OO.o, which I've found to be FAR slower than any MS Office version.
But what surprises the hell out of me is that nobody seems to want to admit and talk about that giant sickly elephant in the room, mainly How will OO.o/ LibreOffice keep up with MS Office now that they have no corporate sponsors anymore? Whether the community wants to admit it or not when you are talking a massive complex codebase spanning what? 2 Decades or so now? You really need top notch coders that have been working with it for years, as just getting up to speed will take ages for any new guys. I mean have you looked at the OO.o source? Its fricking massive!
Looking at where the money came from it appeared to be about 80% sun and the rest Novell. Well Sun is DOA and Novell go bye bye, so who is gonna shell out the bucks to pay the salaries of the coders that have been working on OO.o all this time? my guess is nobody, oh sure they may have a fundraiser or two but with "free as in beer" trumping all and the economy dead i don't see them keeping the OO.o developers for even a single year. Most likely they will start bleeding experienced coders if they haven't already, so how will they keep up?
Neither Apple nor MSFT is having ANY trouble in the money dept, which means plenty for R&D, bug fixing, QA, focus groups, and general polish for iWork and MS Office respectively, meanwhile you are gonna have this massive codebase with most likely nearly all the experience leaving if they haven't already. This is why I think ultimately "free as in beer" will have to DIAF and instead a new license that allows free as in freedom without the beer. Because making top notch programs sure as hell ain't cheap, and its gonna get more expensive not less as time rolls on.
Nobody is gonna want to use OO.o if it is stuck at 2010 when everyone else is at 2015, but I just don't see where they are gonna get the funds to keep up with the competition, I just don't. IBM is using their own fork so they don't need it and RH is about servers so I don't see them stepping up. I truly believe that as we see more and more Linux companies die or get bought out we are gonna be seeing this scenario play out again and again, with projects that everyone counts on ending up losing their funding and slowly but surely dying. Sorry to be a downer, but you can't keep top notch developers by offering them a 6 pack and an autographed RMS T-Shirt.
Uhhh...maybe they can't, because of cost or the company who sold them the program is out of business? I have a graphics designer that I keep a new old stock machine running for because for certain jobs he simply has to have Macromedia Xres. jobs that would take him 40 minutes in PS he can do in less than 5 in Xres. I have also had to set up several XP Modes for those running Quickbook pro 2005, as that POS program will NOT run unless you have Flash 7, not the latest flash mind you ONLY Flash 7. Have you priced the higher end versions of QB lately? Cheap it ain't.
Now in both my cases I was able to cook up work arounds, like the NOS box being on a KVM switch along with his new triple core i just built him, with a nice share folder between them so when he runs into a job he needs Xres for he can just drag the file to the other machine and use the KVM. With the QB customers I set them up XP Mode in Windows 7 so the QB girl (and for some reason it is ALWAYS a girl, you'd think they had a union or something) could still run QB 2005 while having a modern OS.
But what if these options for one reason or another simply won't work? I had to use a NOS for Xres because that thing will NOT run in a VM, nor on anything faster than a PATA or 2Ghz single core. it just won't. And finally let us not forget now that the antitrust has blown over MSFT is back to tying IE to Windows version again, such as IE10 is supposed to be for Win 7 only.
So as long as Google is willing to support older machines with chrome I don't see a problem with it, but there are tons of single core Athlons and P4s that surf the web just fine and I'd hate to see Google ending up pushing the "throw away working gear" attitude simply because they only want to support the new hotness. I'm typing this on a 1.8Ghz Sempron that makes a great little nettop, low power and quiet as a churchmouse. With an HD4350 AGP I even have hardware accelerated video. So I'd hate to see the upgrade treadmill end up causing myself and other to dump perfectly functioning machines not because of it not being able to do the job, but because Google don't want to support anything older.
And if this doesn't show the fix is in and serious money and or bribes is changing hands I don't know what does. I mean what other reason would a corp go "Hey, you know that place with suicide bombers and rockets raining down from the sky? Yeah lets build our new factory RIGHT THERE". The fact that otherwise sane companies are building in the middle of a warzone smells like some AIPAC/ US government meddling to me. I mean what moron builds in the middle of a place that has been pretty much in perpetual conflict for nearly 60 years?
Alright you want something serious? How about this: What are the odds that something like this would EVER ever ever make even enough profit to break even much less be worth the incredible amounts of resources you'd need to pull this off? Getting that far out with anything big enough to haul a decent load sure ain't cheap, and building it a hell of a lot less so. Considering how much the energy and resources are needed here on Earth, what are the odds this will be anything but someone talking out their ass?
Frankly I think this pie in the sky crazy crazy stuff, while fun to dream like FTL travel and transporters, is so far away from being even slightly practical it isn't even funny. Hell even the ability to mine our own moon or reclaim the junk that is choking our orbit is beyond us right now, and we're supposed to pull this off?
If scientists want us to go to the stars they need to worry about fixing our energy problems here on Earth first. Superconductors, extremely efficient solar capture, perhaps sats that concentrate and beam solar energy directly to solar collectors here on Earth. If we can fix the need for fossil resources here on Earth then I have a feeling the rest will come, and come a hell of a lot faster at that. We can't really worry about seeing if there are any neighbors until after we keep our own house from collapsing under our ever growing need for resources.
Did you try Spinrite? I have had a few over the years that died on customers (usually they got a really cheapo drive like the Maxtors and then abused it by putting it in a lousy spot, or crowding their PC into a corner with lousy ventilation and slamming the hell out of it) and I found that while Spinrite couldn't save the drives themselves it would get it to go at least long enough to pull the data. the only one I found it couldn't was one where a girl had her cat knock her laptop off the desk and it suffered a head crash. But I have found Spinrite is one of those apps you won't hardly need, but when you do you'll be damned glad you have that CD in your toolbox.
But again a situation like that is pretty far from the norm when it comes to HDDs, as I have seen plenty of drives get worn out by years of use and abuse, especially those i built for construction sites, and as I said you got PLENTY of warning before the drives died. you'd get SMART errors, the classic "Windows has had a delayed write fail" error, etc. But the problem with SSDs is apparently the norm is to die hard with ZERO warning or chance to back up data!
Now I don't know if it is the switch from SLC to MLC, as I've heard that when a SLC SSD dies it will usually become read only thus allowing you to get your data, or whether they are trying to cram too many chips in too small a space, or controller issues, frankly I don't care. the fact that they can't even design it so the drive fails gracefully is simply inexcusable in my book. if you want to take the chance go right ahead, but I have customers working on projects that cost several hundred thousand and if they even lost a few hours worth of work it could really screw with a deadline. Even my gamers weren't too happy about it being 3 days for one and 6 days for the other since they ran a backup, so all that gaming was lost.
Call me weird, call me old fashioned, but when it comes to storage I expect at LEAST 3 years of reliability barring abuse. that isn't too much to ask for is it? If I can get several times that off my flash sticks I don't see why they can't at least give me a drive that lasts 3 years and gives me a heads up before it dies. Speed is nice, but unless you have the money to have a spare sitting in a drawer waiting for the first to die along with backups every 20 minutes to me the risk is too high compared to the price and rewards.
The little apps model is great for admins and CS grads and abolsute shite on a shingle for everyone else! Can you imagine if people were given a choice of MS Word, or having to use some kludge between LaTex and a small image app and a spellcheck and a half a dozen other tiny programs and pipe the data, that it would get ANY traction at all?
And just because mobile is small does NOT mean you have tiny snippets or relatively simple code,. which is what the pipe system uses. I just read a really great anecdote by one of the original developers of iDVD on OSX. he said they had come up with all these mockups, with different layouts, and Steve just walked in and completely ignored everything they had done and walked up to a white-board and drew a box. he said 'This is what I want. you have a box. you drop a movie in it, you have a button that says burn and that's it" and walked out.
Now do you have ANY idea how much work it takes to make an app with THAT level of user simplicity and intuitiveness? Where it does ALL the complex work FOR you and the user has a simple easy to understand GUI? Hell my 68 year old dad got impatient and installed Windows 7 all by himself which I figured would be a mess. Was anything, anything at all, screwed up? Nope because the most complex question it asked was whether he was at home or work and everything from downloading and configuring drivers to patches and updates were all done FOR him. It even pointed out he didn't have an AV at first boot and pointed him to a page with several free and pay choices!
Linux guys just refuse to face the facts that it is THAT which you are competing against. Look at Windows 7 and OSX and see how much of the work is all done behind the scenes, everything is intuitive, all is simple. Now THAT level of intuitiveness takes serious R&D, it takes a mountain of QA and focus groups, it takes a hell of a lot of work in shine and polish.
You mention RH but did you know that fully 1/3rd of the webservers out there are running CentOS, a ripoff designed by a company that used to buy RH for their appliances but where too cheap to pay the licenses? Or that last I checked Canonical had yet to make a single profitable quarter, much less pay back the money Shuttleworth invested? You simply can't compete with MSFT and Apple with half ass homebrew, you just can't. And before you mention Android I'd point out that is Google's show, they are investing serious $$$ in it, and I predict the carriers and Google will lock it down ala TiVo by Xmas.
So I still say if you want a world class OS, one that can proudly be shown besides OSX and Win 7 and have positive comparison, then serious, and I do mean SERIOUS, amounts of money is gonna have to be spent on R&D, QA, bug fixing, and general polish. And the fact that even the top Linux houses like RH make peanuts compared to apple and MSFT just shows why "free as in beer" ultimately hurts the community. If all those webservers running CentOS had to pay just $25 to RH the amount of progress made would be amazing, as RH has always (and I find this true for most FOSS groups) invested the bulk of their profits back into the project. But the competition isn't resting, both MSFT and Apple are spending insane amounts on polish and R&D. If Linux can't come up with the funds in 5 years i could easily see it getting stuck farther behind with each passing quarter. progress costs, and ideals don't feed developers. Sorry.
Hey as long as MSFT keep this "idea" to tablets I'm fine and dandy with it, but they can fuck right off if they try to lock down the X86 desktop and laptop market. IMHO what has made PCs so great is that anybody can find something they can afford, you can DIY or go whitebox or find a sale, there is a niche for everybody.
I know old Ballmer has a hardon for the other Steve (I still think the MSFT Gates borg should be replaced with Ballmer in a beanie with his tongue out and "I heart Apple!" written on the beanie) and cutting down version on the tablet will let them get it out the door quicker, but the last thing we need is the PC landscape to be as locked down as Apple, with only a small handful of models to choose from.
Of course on the other hand if Ballmer really does get THAT stupid then we might actually see some serious R&D spent on Linux on the desktop as those companies that don't want to limit themselves to only a couple of models try to make Linux more user friendly.
Frankly I don't even get WTF MSFT is thinking ATM anyway, I mean Windows on ARM? WTF? Yeah I could see Win 8 on one of those new ULV AMD APUs, with the nice Radeon chips and dual cores, but ARM? The whole selling point of Windows is third party programs, 99% of which don't work on ARM! WTF is Ballmer thinking? Does he think people will pay the MSFT tax just to stare at the desktop? Maybe use WMP? Give me a break! If all my third party Windows programs don't work then WTF do I need Windows for when I could go Android or iOS?
See? That is EXACTLY what I'm talking about! To me the problem with SSDs isn't so much that they fail, although if they can't give you at least 3 years of reliable service I'd say the price is too high, but its the fact you get NO warning that something is about to go it is just "Pop, no drive" and that is it. With the gamers neither they nor myself could even get their game saves off the drives, they just worked one day and the next they didn't. No warning, no SMART heads up, nothing.
So I could see SSDs being used in a case like yours where it is simply a high speed cache and thus doesn't matter when it dies (although again if you can't even get 3 years? price too high for what you get) but to get ZERO warning that you are about to lose your data? To me that is simply unforgivable.
If someone wants the speed I'd recommend what I ended up doing with my gaming customers and just putting a couple of Velociraptors in RAID 0 with a large 5400 RPM for backups, but to not give the user ample time before dying hard without the drive even being abused to me says this tech simply isn't at a mature enough stage to make it usable by the masses. While there may be a few "speed at all costs!" types that are willing to let their drives be a money and data sink, most folks are not gonna be willing to shell out $$$ for a drive that might not even make a year. Frankly that is just nuts, especially when fast HDDs with plenty of cache are so cheap and RAID comes on just about every board made nowadays.
Really? I figured with a name like "IO.com" it would be the perfect name for a tech company selling SANs, SSDs, Fibre Channel, etc. Hell the ad writes itself "For all your high performance data needs, just think IO!"
This is the same "but it only infects the user files" argument and frankly it stinks. Protip: Users DO NOT CARE if it is XSS, trojan, worm, viruses, etc, all that matters to them is can they trust their data on this machine and if can't your AV is frankly pointless.
And as far as "bloatware" I already pointed out that Avast uses less resources than MSE and from what I've seen by often quite a lot. On average I've seen Avast with a fully loaded default config take between 60-80Mb of RAM and anywhere from 4-45% CPU when scanning, of course depending on the chip. I have rarely seen MSE drop below 100Mb and have seen MSE slam a CPU to 100% and leave it there for over 20 minutes, and this was on a 2.8GHz quad.
Now is it because like many MSFT products it wasn't developed in house for the OS, in this case they just bought Giant Antispyware and rebranded? Who knows, but my point still stands. If the price is the same an AV that only protects you from offline infection when the VAST majority of infections come from the net? kinda pointless. I personally have witnessed a box infected with a Security tool variant that still had MSE happily running in the background, didn't stop shit in that case.
So far knock on wood I have yet to see that with either Comodo or Avast and with their default sandboxing it makes it so no matter where the nasty is coming from it stops it dead. The only reason ATM I recommend Avast over Comodo (both seem to use the same amount of resources and have the same features) is that Avast seems less "fiddly" when it comes to asking questions or bugging the user. Combined with Comodo Dragon using low rights mode it makes for a really solid machine without the hassles or risks.
Or maybe YOU would like to explain to the users why nobody will accept emails from them anymore and they are constantly being told by Yahoo to reset their passwords, all because they wanted to see some boobies? Didn't think so. I have even set up a spam Yahoo address on a newly imaged machine and clicked on every link on every Youporn style site and saw absolutely nothing. Avast killed any nasties running on site and Dragon blocked any funny domains before Avast even got a chance to act. If the price is free for both, why would you want the worse protection?
But how long does it ACTUALLY last. I'm not talking those MTBF numbers that the manufacturers pull out their butt, but some cold hard "lets see how long it'll go" kind of in the trenches numbers.
Because from what I've seen while SSDs may be satanically fast they also seem to die pretty damned quick. Even Jeff Atwood at coding horror has posted you need to use a "Hot/Crazy scale" for SSD, as in how much money and data/downtime are you willing to risk for the crazy speeds.
Frankly between all the horror stories and watching my two gamer customer blow several hundred on drives that barely lasted them two years I've been telling my customers unless there is a specific reason for needing SSD, such as mobile devices that are gonna get slung around a lot, not to bother with the SSDs at this time. Frankly the HDD tech has gotten so good that often I'm pulling perfectly working drives as people upgrade for increased space long before they kill the drive, hell I have a drawer full from 20Gb on up to 200Gb, all working perfectly.
Also if the article I linked to and the gamers I worked for are any indication SSDs don't "fail gracefully" or give you plenty of advanced warning like HDDs do. With every HDD I've had fail short of being dropped there was plenty of time to get the data off as SMART gave warning long before the point of no return. With both of the gamers it was "flip the switch and its gone" no warning at all.
So does anybody out there have some real world experience and not just the MTBF numbers? I'm sure there are plenty of geeks here at/. that have pounded the hell out of SSD looking for boosted performance, how did they hold up? Are they still running? If not did you get warning before they died? Because if the drive can't be counted on to last at LEAST 3 years reliably in my book it isn't worth messing with or giving to my customers.
Frankly if you are gonna give someone a free AV I'd recommend Avast over MSE any day of the week. MSE is great for someone who is ONLY going to relatively safe sites and preferably has ABP to keep malicious JavaScript at bay, because frankly I have seen XSS attacks get through MSE, such as a nasty one going around the Youporn sites that will spam everyone in the person's Yahoo address book .
Avast sandboxes the browser and scans the page BEFORE it loads and seems to kill that and other JavaScript bugs dead, it also has the optional messenger shield and P2P shield if they use those programs and it seems (at least in my experience) to use less RAM and CPU overall than MSE.
So while I would personally not mind if MSFT gave some sort of AV as a pack in just to help cut down on the bugs, actually seeing it in action I just don't think very highly of it compared to Avast or Comodo. As for TFA allow me to say...Welcome to the club Apple users! Meetings are on Tuesdays and Thursdays, coffee and donuts are in the back.
Seriously now that there is blood in the water the sharks will come, and it will only get worse. they saw they were able to get some good numbers with MacDefender and now MacGuard, and thanks to Hackentosh they don't even need to buy an Apple to test their code on! The first Windows bugs were pretty primitive and easy to kill too. I remember when a simple booting into safe mode and tossing the files would kill a great number of bugs. Mark my words this is just the beginning, within 6 months I predict we'll be seeing our first really nasty deep buried Apple malware. Who knows, we may even see an Apple Code Red style mass infection!
Either way it will be quite interesting to see how Apple handles it. Their "don't say the M word" attitude at the beginning doesn't fill me with confidence, Apple seems to care about its image too much when weighed against helping their customers. How long did it take them to cook up a tool for this "simple to remove' bug? How are they gonna handle getting a real deep Windows style nasty? Should be quite interesting to watch and see.
Bingo! Whether the FOSS advocates here wish to accept it or not most of the code written on these big projects isn't cooked up in someone's basement on their own time, it is paid for by corporations who if they cut off the funds the developers which have the much needed experience with the code go with it. Same thing is what I figure will happen with Open Office...err I mean Liber office (which is what I've heard everyone call it so far) now that sun has cut it loose.
If you look at the history of LibreOffice before the changeover a good 80%+ was paid for by sun, most of the rest Novell. Now sun is DOA and Novell is bye bye, who is gonna pay those developers to work on that code? Answer: Nobody. oh I'm sure they'll be some fundraising drives but since "free as in beer" trumps all i doubt they'll get enough to even pay a quarter of the developers for 6 months, and while some will try to volunteer what little time they have good coders are usually swamped.
So despite all the "You can fork it!" posts we have I bet if you look at the history of FOSS you'd find most if not all of the successful forks were of projects that weren't huge sprawling masses of code like Xorg. While I haven't looked at the code for QT I have looked at the code for OO.o and frankly it would take ages to get someone up to speed on that huge mess, and i'm sure QT is the same. No what will happen is while they'll try valiantly they'll fall farther and farther behind the competition, be it MS Office or GTK, until one day they give up. Maybe KDE will take the bits they need and just work on those (my guess) but I doubt they have the funds to completely take over development, not and actually keep the coders.
Sorry to be a bummer, but you can't feed programmers on ideals. They've got wives and kids, house and car payments, and guys with that much experience usually have no trouble finding another job, probably for an increase in pay. Ultimately I believe if Linux is really gonna compete then someone is gonna have to come up with a new license, one that allows "free as in freedom" without allowing 'free as in beer" because otherwise I have a feeling you are gonna see more and more of this as the economy sours. Imagine if everyone who used the QT toolkit had to shell out even $2 a piece for it, you'd have no problems with R&D and keeping the most experienced devs. Otherwise you'll have to go back to the "bunches of very little apps" model, where to get anything done you pipe from one small program to the other, so that you have code small and simple enough to easily maintain for free. because big apps cost big money for R&D and QA, and as time goes on that price will only be going up.
BeOS was brilliant, wasn't it? I can't even remember where I got that machine (I think one of my relatives picked it up while out on the truck somewhere) but IIRC it was a PPC running BeOS and wow, it made Win95 and Win98 look like a really bad joke. Shame I don't still have that machine, because i used to wow folks by showing them how i could play video while multitasking and this was in 1997 when Win95 would shit itself and die if you looked at it funny!
The sad part was it was the same with OS/2, I had a relative bring me in an IBM machine running OS/2 in I believe it was 93 or 94, and frankly it made Win 3.1 look like a really bad joke. Again it could multitask (the closest Win had at the time was TSRs) and could actually play audio and video without skipping, it was really sharp.
If you haven't read it you should really read the link I posted it is really good. It is a timeline showing how Bill with his giant brass balls was able to hold back an entire industry for over half a decade simply with his magical brass balls and total bullshittery, give the man credit! He managed to keep an entire industry from switching away from his steaming pile of poo until he could bring in Dave Cutler to make an actual decent OS.
Now with Windows 7 they frankly have a world class OS but in the early 90s all they had was a bad DOS shell while BeOS and OS/2 had actual multitasking fully functional OSes. Of course he doesn't deserve the only credit, JLG at Be turning down the sackful of money Apple offered for Be, and IBM trying to lock everyone into their overpriced hardware helped a hell of a lot.
In fact I wonder if the reason why the industry was so easily bullshitted is because they would rather have bullshit than be locked down with either Apple or IBM, both known for charging a premium on their gear. They knew with Windows they'd be able to run it on all of the clones of the IBM and that the competition between them for marketshare would be good for everyone. I have NO doubt if Apple would have won the starting price on a PC today would be over $1000, that's just the way they roll. Like it or not Windows really changed the landscape, making cheap hardware plentiful.
Same here, 40FPS on an AMD 925 quad and HD4850. Maybe they have it capped at 40FPS? Either way with no strafe and the horrible sound (I experienced this weird canned delay, as much as 3 to 4 seconds from the time I pulled the trigger to the time the sound played) with the most awful compression and video artifacts it was pretty unenjoyable.
I'd say it is okay just to say they did it but frankly the original ran better on my Celeron 300A OC with my old Voodoo 1 than it did on a modern quad through the browser. pretty lame.
The word you are looking for isn't FUD it is vaporware and frankly one should give credit where credit is due as it turned out to be a bloody brilliant strategy. MSFT knew at the time they were years behind and had some serious trouble, so Bill had the occasional screenshot and mockup cooked up and through the sheer power of his giant brass balls and ability to bullshit got the press to believe it was real.
This managed in a one two punch to not only keep OEMs buying MSFT for fear that they would be left out when the "next new thing" hit, but also killed competitors who couldn't make their real products able to do the miraculous things Bill's non existent OS could do. Frankly it was bloody brilliant. If you had run BeOS or OS/2 at the time (I ran both) you'd know that Win pre 98 was like a joke compared to them, but Bill and his magical brass balls kept them both at bay with nothing but bullshit and some phony screencaps.
But as for why he won the OS battle I'd argue its the same reason you don't see Linux getting any traction on the desktop: The combination of ease of use and availability of programs. I know this shocks the shit out of Linux users, even have one moron here who can't read a sentence that put it as his sig, but as far as Windows users are concerned THERE IS NO CLI IN WINDOWS since they will never ever have to use it, ever. Windows has spent untold millions in research and work making sure every single thing is "clicky clicky" simple, whereas Linux is to this day more often than not a screen scraper on top of a CLI app and if you need to do anything more than the absolute basics (such as install a driver or change wireless settings) you will often have to drop to term.
The other reason for winning is why I gave up on OS/2 and BeOS around the Win98 era, the availability of programs There are literally millions of programs, from games and video editing to office software and every niche of business under the sun, both free and commercial and the one OS you can be assured it runs on is Windows thanks to its network effect and backwards compatibility. Hell Windows 7 seems to get several patches a month that are nothing but new shim settings for older programs, MSFT really does put in the work when it comes to backwards compatibility. While Linux too has plenty of apps, the simple fact is all the decent ones run on Windows while there is tons of specialized software that has no Linux equivalent and never will. Sure you have 50 million text editors and programmers tools, but what about medical transcription? CAD and engineering programs that will work with the big name software like SolidWorks?
In the end while Bill's ability to bullshit got them through the dark times of Win 1/2/3 it was all the money spent on ease of use and the whole "developers developers developers" meme that allowed MSFT to win the whole ball of wax.
Uhhh...hadn't tried GOG have you? Not only do they split the games into 1Gb chunks if you desire, but they also have an Adobe AIR app that lets you set bandwidth speeds, and resume broken downloads from where you left off, so even if you have an intermittent connection you can still buy from GOG.
That said if your net is so shitty you can't even download a single game you might seriously want to upgrade or even move. So much is becoming based around the net that not having a reliable broadband connection is becoming like not having electricity in that you are relegated to second class citizen status. Hell if I in the middle of BF Arkansas can download the thing surely you can too.
I'll be the first to admit I still buy plenty of games off Amazon but in those cases it is simply to pad out an order to make the $25 free shipping (they have tons of games under $10) or because I just add a cheap game to an order just to give me something new to play. But considering how big of a difference buying from GOG makes (No DRM, no hassle backup, unlimited installs for any machine you own, no worry about it not running on new OSes, etc) it really is nuts to not buy from GOG when given the choice and I never buy retail if there is a GOG version. The extras and DRM free trumps the buck or two I might be able to save at Amazon.
Oh please let it be true! I can't be the only one that is sick of the Call of Dookie/ Medal of Humping "hey lets all run like chickens with our heads cut off!" style of MP gameplay along with the 50 bazillion ripoff thereof. I swear I thought it was bad when Halo 1 came out and you had dozens of games suddenly going pew pew with brightly colored laser crap, but I swear Activision and their "beat the dead horse and sell whatever oozes out" model is bringing frat boy MP BS to a whole new level!
Oh please MSFT, come out with a new Halo to give all the frat boys of the world something else to play! I only hope Bioshock: Infinity doesn't get infected by the "everything MUST have teh MP fragfest!" bullshit, it really is getting out of hand. As for what will happen IRL though, sadly they will probably make a mint by offering "balance changers" where if you shell out the $$$ you get the BFGs and other balance breakers, so anybody that wants to have any chance at all will have to shell out the $$$. Activision is too greedy to only sell a service, Kotick will have to 'rape the IP for every dime its worth!" and that means bleeding the users AFTER they have already payed.
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But frankly we wouldn't be having this problem if the US and other government would step in and deal with the hogs. last time I saw the figures we are talking less than 30% of IPV4 was being utilized with the rest being taken up by squatters and hogs that got huge blocks back in the old days. If the unused addresses were to be put back into the pool it would give us most likely a good 5 to 6 years to do a nice orderly IPV6 rollout instead of the mess we are in now.
So I propose a simple answer: Each address costs you $1 a month. The hogs want to sit on them and then sell them for a fat profit like it was rare property? Enjoy the property tax. At just $1 a month it wouldn't hurt the little guy but would make those sitting on huge blocks to either "piss or get off the pot" and since we would be treating the addresses as property if they give the block back they get a one time tax credit of $1 per address as incentive.
Because if we don't do something "radical" like this the whole thing is gonna be a massive clusterfuck. I'd said a good 85%+ of the routers being sold this very minute are IPV4 only, the dead economy has caused plenty of layoffs and under-staffing in IT depts, especially in the flyover states which I predict will end up with massive outages when we do flip the switch due to staff with little training in IPV6 and simply not enough hands on deck, I've yet to hear how we are suppose to deal with the privacy concerns of having everyone tied to a unique address which is the *.A.As idea of heaven, not to mention nosy governments, and finally we still haven't seen a plan proposed that won't end up causing massive eWaste in the consumer section when the above routers and switches aren't given any IPV6 firmware upgrades thanks to the router companies looking at IPV6 as a perfect way to sell new routers to everyone.
So I say my proposal would buy us the time we need to fix the above problems and make the IPV6 transition a nice slow methodical orderly change over rather than the "Oh shit what are we gonna do?" mess that we have now. Whether it be from greed or apathy IPV4 has been allowed to be massively abused and neglected and the IPV6 gear and training simply isn't there on the consumer side nor in SMBs. Everyone laughs now about how when Y2K hit nothing happened, well I'm betting that if we don't do something the IPV6 switchover has the potential to be the total clusterfuck that Y2K was supposed to be, only worse. As someone in one of the flyover states I can tell you most places simply ain't ready, and since all of y'all on the coasts have some of your data pass through our area getting to point b from point a having the flyovers fail could cause a major outage, who knows, maybe ven a domino effect. So have the hogs pay $1 a month per address and we'll see if they want to hang onto those addresses or not.
Sorry, just have to chime in here. Uhhh...you DO know that Apple is bringing the app store to OSX via lion, yes? So frankly any arguments of iOS VS OSX are about to be made moot anyway. Apple WILL lock down OSX, just as they have iOS, Apple WILL control the whole smash, again just as with iOS, and Apple fanboys WILL declare that locking them into a walled garden is the greatest thing since sliced bread and we're all haters who just "don't get Steve's vision".
So frankly you can make all the flaming logic hoops you want friend, OSX in 2 years will be nothing but iOS in a different package. The only thing that worries me is seeing screencaps of Win 8 it looks like if someone doesn't fire Ballmer but quick Windows will be nothing but a WinPhone in a different case. In BOTH cases the future goal is pretty clear, a machine which you have about as much control over as your average ATM. You push the button, that's it. Frankly I'd say the only ones who'd benefit would be the Linux guys, but my guess is the way congress whores itself out for garbage like the PROTECT IP laws in all likelihood by 2015 all the devices will have Fritz chips in them and Linux won't run on anything but highly expensive dev boards and little ARM crap chips.
So wouldn't it simply be smarter to go to two factor, aka 'something you have, something you know" for access? lets face it, flash drives are uber cheap and small enough you can put one on your keyring that would be able to hold authentication for dozens of systems.
Frankly in my mind it just doesn't make sense in this day of sub $500 quads and being able to go quad crossfire for less than $1200 on the GPU to not use two factor authentication. If we expect people to keep up with their ATM card frankly I don't see why they couldn't do the same with a little flash stick on a keyring. It just seems silly to me that when we have so much computing power like in TFA that people still expect simple passwords to keep the bad guys out.
And slightly OT, but is there any actual GP-GPU software out there that isn't for black hats? Because it seems to me that is all I ever hear of when there is a hell of a lot of GPUs out here in home user land that could put that GP-GPU power to good use if there were only some programs for it. I've searched and all I found was a couple of demos on the AMD website, nothing really useful that can do actual work like in TFA. Where are the programs that say let me volume level my entire MP3 collection in 30 seconds, or let me run Audacity effects on the GPU?
While I like the idea of a GP-GPU being this specialized co-processor I can do actual work with other than a drag and drop transcoder for video that frankly doesn't give a really good picture I can't seem to find any non blackhat code, at least not for the AMD GPUs.
That is why one should have reviews NOT force everyone on the planet who is horribly broken to suffer for years, sometimes decades, in agony! I mean everything CAN be abused, look at the politicians that wanted to ban pain patches and oxycotin because kids were stealing them to get high even though they are some of the few drugs that help with bone pain.
I personally have a simple little rule that I think should be applied: Would you make your dog go through that? If whatever it is is nasty enough you would show pity on an animal in that condition and put them down then by God people should be given the same consideration you would show the damned dog!
I think everyone that thinks it is wrong should be forced to spend a week, just a single week, in the company of someone who has an aggressive untreatable illness like my sister. They should get to hear the sound of the bones snapping as one of the nerves in her legs fire and cause a violent jerk that shatters the bones, listen as each breath is a struggle that causes great pain, see the kind of agony these people go through.
Too damned many in this country thinks modern medicine if it can't help will at least be able to deal with the pain, but that is total horseshit. When you get into nerve damage and cancers you can give up doing anything for the pain, all the drugs in the world simply wouldn't be able to stop it. I am only grateful that in the end we had a doc that was decent enough to "snow" her, which is a nice way of saying give her a fatal dose of painkillers, because otherwise she would have slowly suffocated to death. It would have been like someone sitting on her chest and slowly pushing down, a slow and horrifying ending.
Frankly NO family should have to go through that and I seriously doubt there would be very many that would want to snow grandma just because they don't want to deal. in reality they would find as I am finding out with my mom, that in the end there is only so much a family is physically capable of doing for someone who is in pain and whose mind is going, and thanks to local and state laws that say as long as she has the ability to say "no" she can't be put in a home. In the end most likely I'll have to abandon her and hope that when she falls she hurts herself but not fatally so that the police will intervene because I've been told until she is a danger to herself there is nothing anyone can do.
Can you even IMAGINE having to make a decision like that about your own mother? That you have to hope she hurts but doesn't kill herself simply because you can't stay awake 24/7/365 to deal with a woman that is frequently becoming combative and paranoid? To hear the woman that raised you curse the day you were born because you won't let her eat nothing but candy like some sort of junkie? Until you have lived through something like this one simply cannot judge or understand, and I appreciate what old Jack did to bring folks like my mom and sis to light.
Yes because how dare they bring medical supplies and food to help out them niggers...err I mean Arabs, whom the sky bully says must be kept under boot or else Jebus won't come back, praise Jebus! Funny how the right wing wouldn't care if the Israelis had them an old fashioned lynching party for them poor bastards on the strip as long as there remains a Jew standing there to fulfill that "when the Jews return to Zion" line which IIRC wasn't even in the King James version. Don't you think it is kinda sad that our ME peace policy is based on a line written on a sheepskin by a 1800 year dead goat herder about a 2000+ year dead mystical figure?
As for TFA, as someone who still has a scar on the back of his head from a cop who said, and I quote "Fucking niggers and God damned hippies, i don't which makes me more sick" I can tell you that most cops I have encountered touring the south has been roid raged bastards going out of their way to start shit.
I have found for every decent cop you got a half a dozen or more roid raging, crooked, vicious, nasty, all around mean motor scooters. That is what happens when your police for cares more about its code of silence than it does in keeping out the dirty and the mean, but what truly makes them dangerous is they know they can get away with murder and that a good 95%+ of the time the laws simply won't apply to them. I know in my own area they actually got the coroner to testify that two teens that died by being hit by a train had passed out 'due to marijuana intoxication' even though the engineer said repeatedly that the kids were covered by a police tarp BEFORE he hit them and that neither body lying under the tarp so much as twitched even with the horn blowing full blast, and that the same coroner testified a year later a body found under a bridge in the same area belonged to someone who 'committed suicide'. Yeah he beat, shot, stabbed, AND strangled himself before jumping off a bridge in an area where it is pretty common knowledge that most of the cops are running meth.
So frankly is anyone surprised? When folks take videos of the cops acting like SA what does the prosecutors do? Oh yeah go out of their way to arrest the one who took the pics while the cops get a small suspension WITH pay, if they get anything at all. Funny how some many on the right scream that we are becoming 'socialists' when it actuality we are becoming (I would argue we are already there for the most part) fascist totalitarian.
But if anyone thinks this is shocking they should watch The Largest Street Gang in America and see how 'aggressive looking for a fight SA style' intimidation and oppression are the SOP for the blue shirts.
Riiiight, and if the protocol was completely open like SIP we wouldn't have the problems with Robodialers like SIP because? The problem with mass communication protocols is there are plenty of assholes in legal nowherelands that can and WILL use anything and everything they can get their slimy hands on to hack, harass, spam, and generally act like giant fucking douchebags without regards to anyone but themselves.
One should never forget the universal truth that is Gabriel's Greater Internet Theory and then add in the ones that would be acting like douchebags because they could make money doing so ON TOP of the ones just being dicks for the sheer fun of being a fucktwit? It would be a damned mess and you KNOW this. The reason why everyone uses Skype is that it "just works" without having to worry about your video chat window suddenly popping up with someone's junk in it or getting called every two seconds from some automated voice trying to sell you herbal Viagra. While I think FOSS is fine in some places, in others it would be a BAD idea, and I'd say this here is one of the latter.
Well as someone who lost his sister in 07 to a long and horribly drawn out illness, watching as she slowly but surely fell apart with nothing the doctors could do to even stop the pain (she had a rare degenerating nerve disorder) I appreciate the work that Mr Kevorkian did and the price he paid to bring the rights of the suffering to the national spotlight.
Despite our advances in medicine the are plenty of times where all medical interventions are useless and the pain simply can NOT be in any way controlled. While my sister wouldn't have taken the option no matter how much she suffered (she wanted to live long enough to see her oldest start college, she unfortunately died 6 months before he began) the simple fact is as intelligent creatures it should be our right to choose whether we wish to endure the suffering or not.
The way I've always looked at it is this: if you would put an animal down rather than making it endure that kind of hellish suffering, then why in God's name would you make a human being go through that? By the end my sis's lungs were failing, she could no longer speak more than a word or two, couldn't eat or drink because her ability to swallow was failing, her nerves were lit up like pins and needles, and just the act of turning her could easily break bones. Why would anyone force someone to live through that? They should have the choice as intelligent beings to decide if that is how they want to be or not. To have it any other way is simple cruelty.
Funny you should mention bloated and slow in the same breath as OO.o, which I've found to be FAR slower than any MS Office version.
But what surprises the hell out of me is that nobody seems to want to admit and talk about that giant sickly elephant in the room, mainly How will OO.o/ LibreOffice keep up with MS Office now that they have no corporate sponsors anymore? Whether the community wants to admit it or not when you are talking a massive complex codebase spanning what? 2 Decades or so now? You really need top notch coders that have been working with it for years, as just getting up to speed will take ages for any new guys. I mean have you looked at the OO.o source? Its fricking massive!
Looking at where the money came from it appeared to be about 80% sun and the rest Novell. Well Sun is DOA and Novell go bye bye, so who is gonna shell out the bucks to pay the salaries of the coders that have been working on OO.o all this time? my guess is nobody, oh sure they may have a fundraiser or two but with "free as in beer" trumping all and the economy dead i don't see them keeping the OO.o developers for even a single year. Most likely they will start bleeding experienced coders if they haven't already, so how will they keep up?
Neither Apple nor MSFT is having ANY trouble in the money dept, which means plenty for R&D, bug fixing, QA, focus groups, and general polish for iWork and MS Office respectively, meanwhile you are gonna have this massive codebase with most likely nearly all the experience leaving if they haven't already. This is why I think ultimately "free as in beer" will have to DIAF and instead a new license that allows free as in freedom without the beer. Because making top notch programs sure as hell ain't cheap, and its gonna get more expensive not less as time rolls on.
Nobody is gonna want to use OO.o if it is stuck at 2010 when everyone else is at 2015, but I just don't see where they are gonna get the funds to keep up with the competition, I just don't. IBM is using their own fork so they don't need it and RH is about servers so I don't see them stepping up. I truly believe that as we see more and more Linux companies die or get bought out we are gonna be seeing this scenario play out again and again, with projects that everyone counts on ending up losing their funding and slowly but surely dying. Sorry to be a downer, but you can't keep top notch developers by offering them a 6 pack and an autographed RMS T-Shirt.
Uhhh...maybe they can't, because of cost or the company who sold them the program is out of business? I have a graphics designer that I keep a new old stock machine running for because for certain jobs he simply has to have Macromedia Xres. jobs that would take him 40 minutes in PS he can do in less than 5 in Xres. I have also had to set up several XP Modes for those running Quickbook pro 2005, as that POS program will NOT run unless you have Flash 7, not the latest flash mind you ONLY Flash 7. Have you priced the higher end versions of QB lately? Cheap it ain't.
Now in both my cases I was able to cook up work arounds, like the NOS box being on a KVM switch along with his new triple core i just built him, with a nice share folder between them so when he runs into a job he needs Xres for he can just drag the file to the other machine and use the KVM. With the QB customers I set them up XP Mode in Windows 7 so the QB girl (and for some reason it is ALWAYS a girl, you'd think they had a union or something) could still run QB 2005 while having a modern OS.
But what if these options for one reason or another simply won't work? I had to use a NOS for Xres because that thing will NOT run in a VM, nor on anything faster than a PATA or 2Ghz single core. it just won't. And finally let us not forget now that the antitrust has blown over MSFT is back to tying IE to Windows version again, such as IE10 is supposed to be for Win 7 only.
So as long as Google is willing to support older machines with chrome I don't see a problem with it, but there are tons of single core Athlons and P4s that surf the web just fine and I'd hate to see Google ending up pushing the "throw away working gear" attitude simply because they only want to support the new hotness. I'm typing this on a 1.8Ghz Sempron that makes a great little nettop, low power and quiet as a churchmouse. With an HD4350 AGP I even have hardware accelerated video. So I'd hate to see the upgrade treadmill end up causing myself and other to dump perfectly functioning machines not because of it not being able to do the job, but because Google don't want to support anything older.
And if this doesn't show the fix is in and serious money and or bribes is changing hands I don't know what does. I mean what other reason would a corp go "Hey, you know that place with suicide bombers and rockets raining down from the sky? Yeah lets build our new factory RIGHT THERE". The fact that otherwise sane companies are building in the middle of a warzone smells like some AIPAC/ US government meddling to me. I mean what moron builds in the middle of a place that has been pretty much in perpetual conflict for nearly 60 years?
Alright you want something serious? How about this: What are the odds that something like this would EVER ever ever make even enough profit to break even much less be worth the incredible amounts of resources you'd need to pull this off? Getting that far out with anything big enough to haul a decent load sure ain't cheap, and building it a hell of a lot less so. Considering how much the energy and resources are needed here on Earth, what are the odds this will be anything but someone talking out their ass?
Frankly I think this pie in the sky crazy crazy stuff, while fun to dream like FTL travel and transporters, is so far away from being even slightly practical it isn't even funny. Hell even the ability to mine our own moon or reclaim the junk that is choking our orbit is beyond us right now, and we're supposed to pull this off?
If scientists want us to go to the stars they need to worry about fixing our energy problems here on Earth first. Superconductors, extremely efficient solar capture, perhaps sats that concentrate and beam solar energy directly to solar collectors here on Earth. If we can fix the need for fossil resources here on Earth then I have a feeling the rest will come, and come a hell of a lot faster at that. We can't really worry about seeing if there are any neighbors until after we keep our own house from collapsing under our ever growing need for resources.
Did you try Spinrite? I have had a few over the years that died on customers (usually they got a really cheapo drive like the Maxtors and then abused it by putting it in a lousy spot, or crowding their PC into a corner with lousy ventilation and slamming the hell out of it) and I found that while Spinrite couldn't save the drives themselves it would get it to go at least long enough to pull the data. the only one I found it couldn't was one where a girl had her cat knock her laptop off the desk and it suffered a head crash. But I have found Spinrite is one of those apps you won't hardly need, but when you do you'll be damned glad you have that CD in your toolbox.
But again a situation like that is pretty far from the norm when it comes to HDDs, as I have seen plenty of drives get worn out by years of use and abuse, especially those i built for construction sites, and as I said you got PLENTY of warning before the drives died. you'd get SMART errors, the classic "Windows has had a delayed write fail" error, etc. But the problem with SSDs is apparently the norm is to die hard with ZERO warning or chance to back up data!
Now I don't know if it is the switch from SLC to MLC, as I've heard that when a SLC SSD dies it will usually become read only thus allowing you to get your data, or whether they are trying to cram too many chips in too small a space, or controller issues, frankly I don't care. the fact that they can't even design it so the drive fails gracefully is simply inexcusable in my book. if you want to take the chance go right ahead, but I have customers working on projects that cost several hundred thousand and if they even lost a few hours worth of work it could really screw with a deadline. Even my gamers weren't too happy about it being 3 days for one and 6 days for the other since they ran a backup, so all that gaming was lost.
Call me weird, call me old fashioned, but when it comes to storage I expect at LEAST 3 years of reliability barring abuse. that isn't too much to ask for is it? If I can get several times that off my flash sticks I don't see why they can't at least give me a drive that lasts 3 years and gives me a heads up before it dies. Speed is nice, but unless you have the money to have a spare sitting in a drawer waiting for the first to die along with backups every 20 minutes to me the risk is too high compared to the price and rewards.
The little apps model is great for admins and CS grads and abolsute shite on a shingle for everyone else! Can you imagine if people were given a choice of MS Word, or having to use some kludge between LaTex and a small image app and a spellcheck and a half a dozen other tiny programs and pipe the data, that it would get ANY traction at all?
And just because mobile is small does NOT mean you have tiny snippets or relatively simple code,. which is what the pipe system uses. I just read a really great anecdote by one of the original developers of iDVD on OSX. he said they had come up with all these mockups, with different layouts, and Steve just walked in and completely ignored everything they had done and walked up to a white-board and drew a box. he said 'This is what I want. you have a box. you drop a movie in it, you have a button that says burn and that's it" and walked out.
Now do you have ANY idea how much work it takes to make an app with THAT level of user simplicity and intuitiveness? Where it does ALL the complex work FOR you and the user has a simple easy to understand GUI? Hell my 68 year old dad got impatient and installed Windows 7 all by himself which I figured would be a mess. Was anything, anything at all, screwed up? Nope because the most complex question it asked was whether he was at home or work and everything from downloading and configuring drivers to patches and updates were all done FOR him. It even pointed out he didn't have an AV at first boot and pointed him to a page with several free and pay choices!
Linux guys just refuse to face the facts that it is THAT which you are competing against. Look at Windows 7 and OSX and see how much of the work is all done behind the scenes, everything is intuitive, all is simple. Now THAT level of intuitiveness takes serious R&D, it takes a mountain of QA and focus groups, it takes a hell of a lot of work in shine and polish.
You mention RH but did you know that fully 1/3rd of the webservers out there are running CentOS, a ripoff designed by a company that used to buy RH for their appliances but where too cheap to pay the licenses? Or that last I checked Canonical had yet to make a single profitable quarter, much less pay back the money Shuttleworth invested? You simply can't compete with MSFT and Apple with half ass homebrew, you just can't. And before you mention Android I'd point out that is Google's show, they are investing serious $$$ in it, and I predict the carriers and Google will lock it down ala TiVo by Xmas.
So I still say if you want a world class OS, one that can proudly be shown besides OSX and Win 7 and have positive comparison, then serious, and I do mean SERIOUS, amounts of money is gonna have to be spent on R&D, QA, bug fixing, and general polish. And the fact that even the top Linux houses like RH make peanuts compared to apple and MSFT just shows why "free as in beer" ultimately hurts the community. If all those webservers running CentOS had to pay just $25 to RH the amount of progress made would be amazing, as RH has always (and I find this true for most FOSS groups) invested the bulk of their profits back into the project. But the competition isn't resting, both MSFT and Apple are spending insane amounts on polish and R&D. If Linux can't come up with the funds in 5 years i could easily see it getting stuck farther behind with each passing quarter. progress costs, and ideals don't feed developers. Sorry.
Hey as long as MSFT keep this "idea" to tablets I'm fine and dandy with it, but they can fuck right off if they try to lock down the X86 desktop and laptop market. IMHO what has made PCs so great is that anybody can find something they can afford, you can DIY or go whitebox or find a sale, there is a niche for everybody.
I know old Ballmer has a hardon for the other Steve (I still think the MSFT Gates borg should be replaced with Ballmer in a beanie with his tongue out and "I heart Apple!" written on the beanie) and cutting down version on the tablet will let them get it out the door quicker, but the last thing we need is the PC landscape to be as locked down as Apple, with only a small handful of models to choose from.
Of course on the other hand if Ballmer really does get THAT stupid then we might actually see some serious R&D spent on Linux on the desktop as those companies that don't want to limit themselves to only a couple of models try to make Linux more user friendly.
Frankly I don't even get WTF MSFT is thinking ATM anyway, I mean Windows on ARM? WTF? Yeah I could see Win 8 on one of those new ULV AMD APUs, with the nice Radeon chips and dual cores, but ARM? The whole selling point of Windows is third party programs, 99% of which don't work on ARM! WTF is Ballmer thinking? Does he think people will pay the MSFT tax just to stare at the desktop? Maybe use WMP? Give me a break! If all my third party Windows programs don't work then WTF do I need Windows for when I could go Android or iOS?
See? That is EXACTLY what I'm talking about! To me the problem with SSDs isn't so much that they fail, although if they can't give you at least 3 years of reliable service I'd say the price is too high, but its the fact you get NO warning that something is about to go it is just "Pop, no drive" and that is it. With the gamers neither they nor myself could even get their game saves off the drives, they just worked one day and the next they didn't. No warning, no SMART heads up, nothing.
So I could see SSDs being used in a case like yours where it is simply a high speed cache and thus doesn't matter when it dies (although again if you can't even get 3 years? price too high for what you get) but to get ZERO warning that you are about to lose your data? To me that is simply unforgivable.
If someone wants the speed I'd recommend what I ended up doing with my gaming customers and just putting a couple of Velociraptors in RAID 0 with a large 5400 RPM for backups, but to not give the user ample time before dying hard without the drive even being abused to me says this tech simply isn't at a mature enough stage to make it usable by the masses. While there may be a few "speed at all costs!" types that are willing to let their drives be a money and data sink, most folks are not gonna be willing to shell out $$$ for a drive that might not even make a year. Frankly that is just nuts, especially when fast HDDs with plenty of cache are so cheap and RAID comes on just about every board made nowadays.
Really? I figured with a name like "IO.com" it would be the perfect name for a tech company selling SANs, SSDs, Fibre Channel, etc. Hell the ad writes itself "For all your high performance data needs, just think IO!"
This is the same "but it only infects the user files" argument and frankly it stinks. Protip: Users DO NOT CARE if it is XSS, trojan, worm, viruses, etc, all that matters to them is can they trust their data on this machine and if can't your AV is frankly pointless.
And as far as "bloatware" I already pointed out that Avast uses less resources than MSE and from what I've seen by often quite a lot. On average I've seen Avast with a fully loaded default config take between 60-80Mb of RAM and anywhere from 4-45% CPU when scanning, of course depending on the chip. I have rarely seen MSE drop below 100Mb and have seen MSE slam a CPU to 100% and leave it there for over 20 minutes, and this was on a 2.8GHz quad.
Now is it because like many MSFT products it wasn't developed in house for the OS, in this case they just bought Giant Antispyware and rebranded? Who knows, but my point still stands. If the price is the same an AV that only protects you from offline infection when the VAST majority of infections come from the net? kinda pointless. I personally have witnessed a box infected with a Security tool variant that still had MSE happily running in the background, didn't stop shit in that case.
So far knock on wood I have yet to see that with either Comodo or Avast and with their default sandboxing it makes it so no matter where the nasty is coming from it stops it dead. The only reason ATM I recommend Avast over Comodo (both seem to use the same amount of resources and have the same features) is that Avast seems less "fiddly" when it comes to asking questions or bugging the user. Combined with Comodo Dragon using low rights mode it makes for a really solid machine without the hassles or risks.
Or maybe YOU would like to explain to the users why nobody will accept emails from them anymore and they are constantly being told by Yahoo to reset their passwords, all because they wanted to see some boobies? Didn't think so. I have even set up a spam Yahoo address on a newly imaged machine and clicked on every link on every Youporn style site and saw absolutely nothing. Avast killed any nasties running on site and Dragon blocked any funny domains before Avast even got a chance to act. If the price is free for both, why would you want the worse protection?
But how long does it ACTUALLY last. I'm not talking those MTBF numbers that the manufacturers pull out their butt, but some cold hard "lets see how long it'll go" kind of in the trenches numbers.
Because from what I've seen while SSDs may be satanically fast they also seem to die pretty damned quick. Even Jeff Atwood at coding horror has posted you need to use a "Hot/Crazy scale" for SSD, as in how much money and data/downtime are you willing to risk for the crazy speeds.
Frankly between all the horror stories and watching my two gamer customer blow several hundred on drives that barely lasted them two years I've been telling my customers unless there is a specific reason for needing SSD, such as mobile devices that are gonna get slung around a lot, not to bother with the SSDs at this time. Frankly the HDD tech has gotten so good that often I'm pulling perfectly working drives as people upgrade for increased space long before they kill the drive, hell I have a drawer full from 20Gb on up to 200Gb, all working perfectly.
Also if the article I linked to and the gamers I worked for are any indication SSDs don't "fail gracefully" or give you plenty of advanced warning like HDDs do. With every HDD I've had fail short of being dropped there was plenty of time to get the data off as SMART gave warning long before the point of no return. With both of the gamers it was "flip the switch and its gone" no warning at all.
So does anybody out there have some real world experience and not just the MTBF numbers? I'm sure there are plenty of geeks here at /. that have pounded the hell out of SSD looking for boosted performance, how did they hold up? Are they still running? If not did you get warning before they died? Because if the drive can't be counted on to last at LEAST 3 years reliably in my book it isn't worth messing with or giving to my customers.
Frankly if you are gonna give someone a free AV I'd recommend Avast over MSE any day of the week. MSE is great for someone who is ONLY going to relatively safe sites and preferably has ABP to keep malicious JavaScript at bay, because frankly I have seen XSS attacks get through MSE, such as a nasty one going around the Youporn sites that will spam everyone in the person's Yahoo address book .
Avast sandboxes the browser and scans the page BEFORE it loads and seems to kill that and other JavaScript bugs dead, it also has the optional messenger shield and P2P shield if they use those programs and it seems (at least in my experience) to use less RAM and CPU overall than MSE.
So while I would personally not mind if MSFT gave some sort of AV as a pack in just to help cut down on the bugs, actually seeing it in action I just don't think very highly of it compared to Avast or Comodo. As for TFA allow me to say...Welcome to the club Apple users! Meetings are on Tuesdays and Thursdays, coffee and donuts are in the back.
Seriously now that there is blood in the water the sharks will come, and it will only get worse. they saw they were able to get some good numbers with MacDefender and now MacGuard, and thanks to Hackentosh they don't even need to buy an Apple to test their code on! The first Windows bugs were pretty primitive and easy to kill too. I remember when a simple booting into safe mode and tossing the files would kill a great number of bugs. Mark my words this is just the beginning, within 6 months I predict we'll be seeing our first really nasty deep buried Apple malware. Who knows, we may even see an Apple Code Red style mass infection!
Either way it will be quite interesting to see how Apple handles it. Their "don't say the M word" attitude at the beginning doesn't fill me with confidence, Apple seems to care about its image too much when weighed against helping their customers. How long did it take them to cook up a tool for this "simple to remove' bug? How are they gonna handle getting a real deep Windows style nasty? Should be quite interesting to watch and see.
Bingo! Whether the FOSS advocates here wish to accept it or not most of the code written on these big projects isn't cooked up in someone's basement on their own time, it is paid for by corporations who if they cut off the funds the developers which have the much needed experience with the code go with it. Same thing is what I figure will happen with Open Office...err I mean Liber office (which is what I've heard everyone call it so far) now that sun has cut it loose.
If you look at the history of LibreOffice before the changeover a good 80%+ was paid for by sun, most of the rest Novell. Now sun is DOA and Novell is bye bye, who is gonna pay those developers to work on that code? Answer: Nobody. oh I'm sure they'll be some fundraising drives but since "free as in beer" trumps all i doubt they'll get enough to even pay a quarter of the developers for 6 months, and while some will try to volunteer what little time they have good coders are usually swamped.
So despite all the "You can fork it!" posts we have I bet if you look at the history of FOSS you'd find most if not all of the successful forks were of projects that weren't huge sprawling masses of code like Xorg. While I haven't looked at the code for QT I have looked at the code for OO.o and frankly it would take ages to get someone up to speed on that huge mess, and i'm sure QT is the same. No what will happen is while they'll try valiantly they'll fall farther and farther behind the competition, be it MS Office or GTK, until one day they give up. Maybe KDE will take the bits they need and just work on those (my guess) but I doubt they have the funds to completely take over development, not and actually keep the coders.
Sorry to be a bummer, but you can't feed programmers on ideals. They've got wives and kids, house and car payments, and guys with that much experience usually have no trouble finding another job, probably for an increase in pay. Ultimately I believe if Linux is really gonna compete then someone is gonna have to come up with a new license, one that allows "free as in freedom" without allowing 'free as in beer" because otherwise I have a feeling you are gonna see more and more of this as the economy sours. Imagine if everyone who used the QT toolkit had to shell out even $2 a piece for it, you'd have no problems with R&D and keeping the most experienced devs. Otherwise you'll have to go back to the "bunches of very little apps" model, where to get anything done you pipe from one small program to the other, so that you have code small and simple enough to easily maintain for free. because big apps cost big money for R&D and QA, and as time goes on that price will only be going up.
BeOS was brilliant, wasn't it? I can't even remember where I got that machine (I think one of my relatives picked it up while out on the truck somewhere) but IIRC it was a PPC running BeOS and wow, it made Win95 and Win98 look like a really bad joke. Shame I don't still have that machine, because i used to wow folks by showing them how i could play video while multitasking and this was in 1997 when Win95 would shit itself and die if you looked at it funny!
The sad part was it was the same with OS/2, I had a relative bring me in an IBM machine running OS/2 in I believe it was 93 or 94, and frankly it made Win 3.1 look like a really bad joke. Again it could multitask (the closest Win had at the time was TSRs) and could actually play audio and video without skipping, it was really sharp.
If you haven't read it you should really read the link I posted it is really good. It is a timeline showing how Bill with his giant brass balls was able to hold back an entire industry for over half a decade simply with his magical brass balls and total bullshittery, give the man credit! He managed to keep an entire industry from switching away from his steaming pile of poo until he could bring in Dave Cutler to make an actual decent OS.
Now with Windows 7 they frankly have a world class OS but in the early 90s all they had was a bad DOS shell while BeOS and OS/2 had actual multitasking fully functional OSes. Of course he doesn't deserve the only credit, JLG at Be turning down the sackful of money Apple offered for Be, and IBM trying to lock everyone into their overpriced hardware helped a hell of a lot.
In fact I wonder if the reason why the industry was so easily bullshitted is because they would rather have bullshit than be locked down with either Apple or IBM, both known for charging a premium on their gear. They knew with Windows they'd be able to run it on all of the clones of the IBM and that the competition between them for marketshare would be good for everyone. I have NO doubt if Apple would have won the starting price on a PC today would be over $1000, that's just the way they roll. Like it or not Windows really changed the landscape, making cheap hardware plentiful.
Same here, 40FPS on an AMD 925 quad and HD4850. Maybe they have it capped at 40FPS? Either way with no strafe and the horrible sound (I experienced this weird canned delay, as much as 3 to 4 seconds from the time I pulled the trigger to the time the sound played) with the most awful compression and video artifacts it was pretty unenjoyable.
I'd say it is okay just to say they did it but frankly the original ran better on my Celeron 300A OC with my old Voodoo 1 than it did on a modern quad through the browser. pretty lame.
The word you are looking for isn't FUD it is vaporware and frankly one should give credit where credit is due as it turned out to be a bloody brilliant strategy. MSFT knew at the time they were years behind and had some serious trouble, so Bill had the occasional screenshot and mockup cooked up and through the sheer power of his giant brass balls and ability to bullshit got the press to believe it was real.
This managed in a one two punch to not only keep OEMs buying MSFT for fear that they would be left out when the "next new thing" hit, but also killed competitors who couldn't make their real products able to do the miraculous things Bill's non existent OS could do. Frankly it was bloody brilliant. If you had run BeOS or OS/2 at the time (I ran both) you'd know that Win pre 98 was like a joke compared to them, but Bill and his magical brass balls kept them both at bay with nothing but bullshit and some phony screencaps.
But as for why he won the OS battle I'd argue its the same reason you don't see Linux getting any traction on the desktop: The combination of ease of use and availability of programs. I know this shocks the shit out of Linux users, even have one moron here who can't read a sentence that put it as his sig, but as far as Windows users are concerned THERE IS NO CLI IN WINDOWS since they will never ever have to use it, ever. Windows has spent untold millions in research and work making sure every single thing is "clicky clicky" simple, whereas Linux is to this day more often than not a screen scraper on top of a CLI app and if you need to do anything more than the absolute basics (such as install a driver or change wireless settings) you will often have to drop to term.
The other reason for winning is why I gave up on OS/2 and BeOS around the Win98 era, the availability of programs There are literally millions of programs, from games and video editing to office software and every niche of business under the sun, both free and commercial and the one OS you can be assured it runs on is Windows thanks to its network effect and backwards compatibility. Hell Windows 7 seems to get several patches a month that are nothing but new shim settings for older programs, MSFT really does put in the work when it comes to backwards compatibility. While Linux too has plenty of apps, the simple fact is all the decent ones run on Windows while there is tons of specialized software that has no Linux equivalent and never will. Sure you have 50 million text editors and programmers tools, but what about medical transcription? CAD and engineering programs that will work with the big name software like SolidWorks?
In the end while Bill's ability to bullshit got them through the dark times of Win 1/2/3 it was all the money spent on ease of use and the whole "developers developers developers" meme that allowed MSFT to win the whole ball of wax.
Uhhh...hadn't tried GOG have you? Not only do they split the games into 1Gb chunks if you desire, but they also have an Adobe AIR app that lets you set bandwidth speeds, and resume broken downloads from where you left off, so even if you have an intermittent connection you can still buy from GOG.
That said if your net is so shitty you can't even download a single game you might seriously want to upgrade or even move. So much is becoming based around the net that not having a reliable broadband connection is becoming like not having electricity in that you are relegated to second class citizen status. Hell if I in the middle of BF Arkansas can download the thing surely you can too.
I'll be the first to admit I still buy plenty of games off Amazon but in those cases it is simply to pad out an order to make the $25 free shipping (they have tons of games under $10) or because I just add a cheap game to an order just to give me something new to play. But considering how big of a difference buying from GOG makes (No DRM, no hassle backup, unlimited installs for any machine you own, no worry about it not running on new OSes, etc) it really is nuts to not buy from GOG when given the choice and I never buy retail if there is a GOG version. The extras and DRM free trumps the buck or two I might be able to save at Amazon.
Oh please let it be true! I can't be the only one that is sick of the Call of Dookie/ Medal of Humping "hey lets all run like chickens with our heads cut off!" style of MP gameplay along with the 50 bazillion ripoff thereof. I swear I thought it was bad when Halo 1 came out and you had dozens of games suddenly going pew pew with brightly colored laser crap, but I swear Activision and their "beat the dead horse and sell whatever oozes out" model is bringing frat boy MP BS to a whole new level!
Oh please MSFT, come out with a new Halo to give all the frat boys of the world something else to play! I only hope Bioshock: Infinity doesn't get infected by the "everything MUST have teh MP fragfest!" bullshit, it really is getting out of hand. As for what will happen IRL though, sadly they will probably make a mint by offering "balance changers" where if you shell out the $$$ you get the BFGs and other balance breakers, so anybody that wants to have any chance at all will have to shell out the $$$. Activision is too greedy to only sell a service, Kotick will have to 'rape the IP for every dime its worth!" and that means bleeding the users AFTER they have already payed.