Sadly TFA is from March and thus probably not. As someone who has hung around cops at the shop and got them to tell some of their favorite "dumbass criminal" stories this frankly doesn't surprise me, hell let me add one of my favorites the cops told me:
This Einstein, which actually gained a little celebrity by ending up on "World's stupidest criminals" decides he is gonna rob this bank so he comes up with the cunning disguise of a bag over his head while wearing his work shirt with the company and his name in bold letters on the front. Not only that but he writes the note on a personal check he left behind at the scene! The cop I was talking to was one of the arresting officers and he had to let his partner do the talking during the arrest he said because he was too busy laughing at the criminal who was damned sure his disguise was perfect! He argued with them all the way to the station that there was NO WAY they could have seen him through the bag!
So a terrorist group with the brains of a bag of rocks really doesn't surprise me. from talking with the cops that come in my shop one thing I've learned is that for most crimes you sure as hell don't need Colombo, because the criminals make Homer Simpson look like Stephen Hawking.
Yeah you'd think with so many greybeards around here they could come up with better, like their OMG Ponies they had a few years back. So in the interest of furthering the irritation that is April first, allow your old pal Hairyfeet to come up with some suggestions:
Piss off your users day. Since that is what you do on this day anyway, why not embrace it? make every other link go to something like Badgerbadgerbadger or get on my horse, just to fuck with people. Hell if you are gonna piss them off anyway, do it with style I say.
Make the admins have horrible flashbacks day. Since there are so many greybeards here, why not make them suffer? I'm sure with a little clever scripting one can bring back the horror of Bonzi Buddy and Comet Cursors to give all of those that survrived the horror a nice Vietnam moment. Add in clippy going "You're making a comment on/. would you like some help?" just to ramp up the pain. bonus points if you can come up with an accurate representation of the infamous "snot clock" pocketwatch fob comet cursor and double Internets if you can make it slow even the baddest multicore to a crawl like what the original did to your baddest P3. Make sure you have the long chain and swing, as that was what REALLY pissed with everyone!
Is your keyboard broken? This would screw with people trying to make comments by substituting commonly mistyped letters, like say s in place of a and p instead of or next to o, when typing comments. Make it so that the user can correct, only to have the next one of the gotcha letters bite them in the ass again. If you are gonna bring the pain, then bring the pain people!
So please/. editors (if you actually exist and haven't been replaced by Indian shocky monkeys) take these ideas as a starting off point for next years "festivities". And I'm sure my fellow/. readers can come up with even better ideas, so instead of wasting space on the lame TFA lets see who can come up with the best "gotcha" for next year.
Yep it wasn't in the standard, it was a wholly owned NS "invention" and part of what I called the "trilogy of terror" back then, Blink, Geocities, and Comet Cursor.
Since you remember those days I'm sure you remember the "fun" of having your PC damned near melt because a link took you to an "OMG Ponies!" Geocities page, where every third word blinked its puke purple text on a hideous pea soup green background and your CPU slammed into the red zone thanks to the giant fricking pocketwatch that suddenly appeared on the end of your cursor swinging like a giant snotball in the breeze...eeek!
I just hope the wayback archive backed up the whole thing complete with comet cursors so future generations will know how bad things really were! Anybody who think those stupid "punch the (blank) to win a (blank)" ads are irritating don't know shit unless they have witnessed the trilogy of terror! Back then I had one of those OCed to hell Celeron 300a chips, that bad boy was nearly double the speed at 550Mhz and rock solid, with an unheard of 96Mb of RAM and it STILL would scream and cry if I landed on a trilogy page!
So NS deserved its fate, for not only putting out a huge buggy POS that was slow as a slug and crashy as hell (another poster wrote his took 51 seconds just to get to the start page on his!) but for giving the evil that was the blink tag to millions of Geocities "artists" you deserved everything you got and THEN some. And I hope the idiot that actually wrote that code has to spend the rest of his life at Rent A Coder fixing buggy VB 6 crap for the rest of his days!
The sad part is if you read TFA (I know, but I got bored) then you'll see they paid for backups as part of their service agreement but the ISP lied and hadn't actually bothered to back up shit.
Now considering how we have a "fuck everything but the quarterly earnings report!" attitude going on in businesses right now I have to wonder: How widespread is this? After all backup and the tapes or HDDs to put them on cost a pretty penny, so not actually spending that money makes your bottom line look good, at the same time saying you have a backup solution (which you charge extra for) is equally good for your bottom line.
Now considering the fact that if these clowns would have followed best practices and changed the passwords when they fired this guy they probably STILL be getting away with charging for a service they don't actually have to incur the expense of actually providing I have to wonder, how many others are doing the same right now? I mean how many are actually gonna set up a test to see if their hosting company has the backups they say?
It sounds to me like backup services are just one more way to cut expenses while making extra money, and sounds like it is ripe for abuse like in TFA.
I wonder how much of the "death of the arcades" was due to home PCs and consoles getting better, vs a decline safety and conditions? I know they ended up closing all of the local arcades in my area because the dealers had taken to living in the arcades and by the last year of their existence just to get in and out of the things you had to run a maze of tweakers pushing everywhere.
To me the arcades always struck me one of those "this is why we can't have nice things" situations as the places would start out nice but quickly the dealers would descend like vultures and then here would come the violence and bullshit. Kinda like if you want to find hookers in any place in the country just go to any truckstop as there will ALWAYS be hookers at the truckstop.
Funny part is according to my friends that are in law enforcement you know where the hotspot for violence and bullshit is now that the arcades are gone? Chuck E Cheese of all things. According to them they have become a haven for the really scummy "baby's mamas" type that are just looking to start shit and will throw down if anyone even looks at their little ankle biter sideways. they said they get more calls to the Cheese in a week than most places see in 6 months, so it wouldn't surprise me if they are the next place to go. Kinda sad, but this is why we can't have nice things.
But I wish them all the luck in the world. I still remember racking up such a high score on Vanguard and Pleiades I'd end up just handing them off to some kid because I could have kept going forever, or laughing when my dad accused me of burning in the TV set only to crook my finger at him and lead him into the den where my mom had been on DK JR on my ColecoVision and had gotten into the zone and would play for hours.
I still hear the sounds of DK JR or Yar's Revenge in my sleep sometimes from where my mom would play those in the wee hours of the morning, Dad ended up having to get a second set and let mom keep that one for gaming. Now she sits at my old 3GHz Celeron hand me down playing Age Of Empires 1 (I still haven't figured THAT one out. I swear that game is like catnip to females, they all just love it) along with her match three and CSI games. I even managed to get old dad to play, even though he hadn't touched a game since my old Tiger Handheld football (remember THAT one? With the LEDs?) by putting the latest Deer Hunter on his office quad, so when he is sitting waiting for a call he'll do some Mule Deer bow hunting.
Funny but I would have NEVER thought playing games would end up mainstream all those years ago when I was playing Tapper or Defender at the local pool hall. Now even my GF who takes one look at me playing Just Cause II and says "That's just TOO scary!" will give me "the look" and make me move over so she can play a little Frontierville or do one of her murder mystery games before getting ready for work. I'd say from the days of the smoky pool halls are dark arcades gaming has finally become an activity EVERYBODY does, young and old, males and females. Certainly has come a long way from the days of Dig Dug and other twitch games.
Actually I figure if there are aliens it'll be more like a combination of Gorillas in the Mist and one of those African safari tours. Something like "And here with us today is Gee-tain, expert on the TeegeAck hairless monkeys, take it away Gee-tain"
Thanks GuFom, as we get closer you can see the hairless monkeys involved in one of their favorite activities, throwing shit at each other. While this looks amusing from this distance let me assure you the shit they throw is VERY dangerous, and in fact gets more dangerous not less as time goes on. You'd think they'd learn, but hey they're hairless monkeys right?/crowd laughs/ From my first expedition to the crazy planet they have gone from rocks and sticks to sharpened rocks ON sticks, to their current inclination to make primitive projectile weapons based on sticking explosives in tubes.
Now for those with weak third stomachs I suggest turning away as we are gonna swing by one of their warmer regions so we can show you those monkeys engaged in their typical mating rituals. Notice how the male approaches the female in one of their primitive vehicles and waves green paper to entice the female. We still haven't figure out what the females do with the green papers, we think they line their nests with them. Notice how the vehicle with the flashing lights comes every so often to beat on one of the monkeys and drag him away, we believe this is the way the tribe singles out the inferior males. Moving right along we'll next go to one of their areas where a great tribal battle is occurring so you can see the incredible effort the monkeys expend fighting over females and resources...
So if there are any out there I'm sure they look forward to sitting down and talking to a hairless ape like we would look forward to walking up to a Silver-back and poking it with a stick. Any race with the capability to pop all over the known universe would have about as much in common with us as we have to Cro Mags, and with the abundance of resources interstellar travel would bring would have no reason to interact or even visit for anything more than what the English call "shits and giggles".
BTW did they even bother to explain HOW they did it? Because just screaming FAKE is about as completely pointless as screaming COVER UP in cases like this. I read TFA and didn't find squat about how videos taken at so many different elevations and angles was faked. Were they all in it together? Was there a third party creating a light show for the others to film? What? How about giving us a little more than "Shooped!" please?
Nope sorry, read it right. You see without ABP and NoScript (the only two extensions I had at the time) I was just a bog standard Firefox on a bog standard XP Home with the bog standard Flash and WMV plugins. That made me a needle in a needle factory simply due to the huge installed base of FF, XP Home, and Flash/WMV. There simply aren't that many using what I was using at the time PLUS ABP PLUS NoScript, which made me a MUCH easier target to find.
It is like the difference between having a fully patched and up to date XP with Av and MalwareBytes VS being one of the tens of millions with an XP machine that hasn't updated since XP Sp2 and has an out of date trial of Norton running. Those that actually care enough about security to deal with the hassle of looking up these programs, applying these programs, and dealing with the quirks simply are a tiny minority compared to those that simply stick with the defaults. That is why having sane defaults is so important because a good 85%+ of users will NEVER deviate from whatever the default settings are.
Afraid to actually back up your words with a UID? I'd say look in the mirror to see a troll, or more likely a "FOSSie" which like a Moonie stubbornly goes "LA LA LA" if anyone points out a flaw in their religion, but I'll try to use small words, kay?
It is actually quite simple AC, do try to keep up: You have two competitors, lets call them A and M. Now A&M have X+Y to spend thanks to sales, which gives them MORE developers, MORE R&D, MORE QA, MORE...notice a pattern here?
You see it is actually quite simple and why I would argue RH is a classic example of the free rider problem. Too keep up with MSFT and Apple they need to spend X+Y, but because such a huge number are riding free on CentOS they simply can't afford to put out the same level of money for R&D and developers. Since RH gives a good chunk of their output straight back into the community in the form of code the freeloaders hurt everyone else by costing code and QA that would have otherwise been spent to simply not exist.
Is that REALLY that hard to understand, or does your religion keep you from being able to understand math and basic economics 101? Despite the total bullshit the FOSSies like to spew bug fixes and QA by and large DO NOT come from some guy in his basement scratching an itch, which is why I would argue the desktop is so far behind the competition. Without a big company focusing serious resources bugs simply don't get fixed, as someone coding for free would rather work on new code than sit in front of mountains of old sifting for bugs, because it is boring and tedious. Both Apple and MSFT have the resources to PAY to have this done, RH simply doesn't have that luxury.
Is that REALLY so hard to grasp, or has your love of the idea of communism (which lost BTW) simply kept you from understanding the most basic of economic principles?
But their code was absolute shite until they forked it as F/OSS as Mozilla. I know the theory loved by the tinfoil hat wearing crowd here is poor wittle Netscape beaten to death by the big bad MSFT, but you know what? Speaking for myself and the countless greybeards that had been actual customers of NS (hell I probably still got my NS4 disc in one of my storage lockers somewhere) who all ended up switching to IE I can tell you that it wasn't that we liked IE per se, it was that NS 4 was shit. It wasn't even a good hearty morning log, it was a weak runny stream of foul smelling shit after a bad illness kind of shit.
Here, let me do my impression of running NS4 for all those that didn't have the "enjoyment" of running it back in its day: "Oh look I got my shotgunned modems all screaming, I got Win98 stripped down and humming like a tweaked out Chevy, i'm good to go baby yeah! Let me just fire up my new NS4.../NS4 crashes hard/...Huh. Probably just a glitch, it happens. So I'll just fire up NS4 and head to my favorite.../NS4 locks up/...Motherfucker! Maybe the site just has some bad code on it, wouldn't surprise me. So I'll just relaunch and choose a different site and.../NS4 crashes hard and BSODs OS with it/ $&^%$^%$&^$&^$!
And THAT, that right there, is why IE won. NS4 was a buggy pile of total shit and by the time they got the bugs ironed out enough for the product to actually be usable nobody used it anymore. Just like the old DBase II they released half assed not ready for alpha testing code and paid the price.
Was MSFT douchebags? Yep, old Bill was a nerd that had been shoved into too many lockers and took everything as a "kill crush destroy!" mandate, but NS wouldn't have disappeared so quickly if it had actually been anything but poo. look up MSFT talking about IE 4, which was before they had bundled anything, and you'll see them talking about how it was a fight to keep the server from overloading and how they were sending out over 150,000 copies on CD weekly. They were getting slammed because people were going out of their way to get IE and get off NS because the simple fact is in EVERY single way hat counts to an end user IE was better. It was faster, it was more stable, it used less memory at a time when 16Mb was common, and for awhile there it was even more standards compliant (anybody remember the NS blink tag?).
So lets give credit where credit was due, it was the Moz foundation that took the steaming pile of poo that was NS and hammered it into something usable by the masses. It took them awhile, and they had some serious growing pains like the 2.x.x branch memory leaks, but thanks to them we now have a wealth of choices, all for free. We have the Gecko based like Seamonkey, FF, and Kmeleon, we have the Chromium/Webkit based like Chrome, Comodo Dragon, SWIron, Chromium, Safari, and finally we have Presto in Opera that most people forget before Mozilla made third party browsers free was a for pay product.
So thanks Moz, while my users are in the process of being switched over to Chromium based Dragon for performance and security reason you still made non IE browsers free for the masses and gave us a wealth of choice. Thanks.
I'd actually argue that RH is a hell of a lot worse off than they should be, thanks to the "free as in beer!" brigade actively fucking them over. I mean here is a company that puts its money where its mouth is and donates more code than most other companies combined yet thanks to the "Free beer!" brigade nearly 30% of the web servers are running not RH but CentOS, which was originally created by a hardware company that wanted to use RH's tools but were too greedy to give RH a dime.
So I'd argue that RH and the rest of the F/OSS companies will never be more than a blip on the radar because GPL lets the "free beer!" brigade screw over any company that dares go GPL. Look at how many GPL companies have died or gone on life support simply because the "free beer!" brigade can't stand the thought of paying a cent even if it ultimately hurts them and the community by leaving less vendors, developers, QA, etc.
I'd say F/OSS is a classic example of the tragedy of the commons and the free rider problem, and while a few companies like RH managing to survive thanks to PHBs that don't like having ANY software without a license doesn't negate the fact that the reason F/OSS has less resources for...well pretty much everything, is because there are so many free riders compared to paying customers. Hell I wouldn't be surprised if MSFT or Apple makes more in a month than RH does in a two year period, there are simply too many leeching and not enough paying.
Don't forget the Windows 7 Sins which you have just GOT to love! If this isn't proof that RMS and pals sees F/OSS not as simply an alternative software model but a religion I don't know what does.
While personally I respected the reasons why RMS did what he did, such as writing the GPL because he couldn't modify a printer driver and believed that users should have a "fitness of purpose" right where if the software didn't do what was needed the user could modify or pay someone to modify said software until it was fit for purpose, I think he is starting to reach the PETA "Sea Kittens" phase of overboard crazy.
I mean what happened to the freedom to choose which license you wanted, and the users freedom to choose whether to accept it or not? it isn't like anyone is forcing those millions upon millions of users to use Google services. Lately it seems that "Its a Trap!" should be the catch phrase for RMS as he sees EVERYTHING that isn't 100% F/OSS as a trap.
I mean for the love of Pete the man uses some rare POS Loongson netbook because the fricking OLPC wasn't "free" enough for him because it had firmware in the wireless! There is such a thing as going overboard and hurting the cause, and I think RMS screaming "Trap!" to everything that doesn't follow his line is hurting more than it is helping the F/OSS movement by making it look like a bunch of extremists.
Because it is "just a religion" in the same way that ethnic cleansing is just "gentrification of the neighborhood". Sharia is a barbaric throwback to the days of stonings and if you will look at the countries that have instituted Sharia you will see there is ZERO respect or tolerance for those that aren't believers, which is a cornerstone of western democracy.
So if you want to live in a world where gays are given the choice of death or sexual reassignment, where those that don't follow the "true path" are Dhimmi (look it up) and you can cheat and abuse to your heart's content, where women and children are treated with less respect than cattle, then sure its "just a religion".
Personally I believe that sooner or later there WILL be a battle between the west and Islam as a whole, there is simply no other choice as "live and let live" is as much of a fantasy of Islam as is the "religion of peace" angle. Try looking at the Hadiths while keeping this rule in mind: there are NO contradictions in Islam because the prophet made it clear that Hadiths that come later overrule Hadiths that came before. You'll then notice that the only peaceful Hadiths are the early ones which have been canceled out by the "jihad the infidels!" Hadiths that came later.
Islam and democracy that respects the rights of minorities are simply mutually exclusive. In Islam there is ONE way and that is Sharia, period. The Koran makes it clear that the goal of ALL Muslims is a Sharia planet. Again there is no compromise with this, it is "God's Law" and MUST be obeyed. Unlike those that came before the Muslims are being very careful NOT to integrate or accept western views, which is why you have "Sharia Ghettos" all over Europe. If you truly believe the militants in those ghettos are just gonna wake up and embrace democracy I have a bridge you might be interested in.
There can be NO PEACE with an enemy that refuses to accept your right to exist, full stop. Until Islam stands together and announces that ALL FAITHS are allowed the same rights as those afforded to Muslims there can simply be no middle ground, as you can't have a dialog with someone whose faith teaches that you are less than human, which is exactly what a Dhimmi is, no different that the 3/5ths rule the USA had for blacks.
He is a known troll and malware writer who follows around and trollbombs anyone who points out that even simple math shows his "invention" doesn't work.
There is a reason why everyone abandoned HOSTS files in the late 90s, and that is because they slow your PC down while giving NO protection from malware. it is simple math really, you have a large (estimates at 1.5 million+) dynamically shifting target, where sites become infected, cleaned, reinfected, thousands by the day, sometimes thousands by the hour, yet this loon is convinced that a static HOSTS file will magically protect you from malware.
Sadly this person is also a paranoid schizophrenic with a serious persecution complex who will follow you around, sometimes for months on end, so he can "trollbomb" any posts you place while calling anyone who doesn't join his AC sockpuppet army a "shill post" or a sockpuppet, while quoting from people that frankly wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire like Bruce Perens, and then quotes them in completely unrelated matters to boot.
So don't be surprised if Crazy Petey follows you around for a few days friend, you dared to say something that goes against his "I'm a leet hacker that everyone fears!" delusion, just as I have been followed off and on for months, with everyone that points out what a batshit loonie Petey is being accused of being part of some vast super HB Gary sockpuppet army controlled by me and the Illuminati. I used to think the guy was just a Twitter style troll, now sadly I think he seriously needs some help. It is a shame nobody can track this guy down and do an intervention, as just from his writing style you can tell he is coming off the rails.
The really funny part is this makes you even more identifiable since so few will opt in. it is like that site that checks how identifiable you are by what your browser sends back (so sorry I can't think of the site, maybe someone has it bookmarked?) and with ABP and NoScript there were less than 8000 with my particular string which is a pretty small niche out of the billions of web users, but with ABP and NoScript turned off I was one of 1,2 million with the same string so it was like trying to find a particular needle in Dodger stadium filled to the brim with needles.
So while I'm all for more privacy I'd worry about the unintended consequences of things like DNT. After all it isn't like telemarketing where it bitch slaps you in the face so everyone looks for the DNC registry, so many have accepted that ads are just a part of the web experience and have NO clue that they are being tracked.
But on a positive note it makes it easy for me to switch people away from IE thanks to ABP, first on FF and now with Comodo Dragon on my handy freeware CD. When people see the difference killing those "punch the (blank) win a (blank)" ads has on their connection it is an easy sell to migrate them away from IE. It has gotten my customers so hooked on staying away from IE I've had them call me to ask how to "Fix" their relatives PC over the phone, when it turns out they don't have Firefox or Dragon.
Oh it goes farther than that my friend, it goes back to the OSS covering up the fact that there are Nazis on the moon!
In all seriousness while I'm glad they solved that niggler you can understand why some would have latched onto a "the math don't work" hypothesis, and that is because....well at the incredible sizes of great and small we are talking about in space the math doesn't work which is why we have no grand unified theory yet.
So while I'm glad we don't have a red herring steering us away I bet on our way to the grand unified theory we will have more than one "holy shit!" moment where we find out the way we think things work is full of shit. We are like Archimedes trying to figure out the universe with a hole and a stick. The one thing I'm sure of is there is a hell of a lot we just don't know yet.
Didn't he also narc out the original captain crunch for a reward? I seem to recall reading that somewhere. I just loove how a fanboi had to jump in and call the game fuck over (which as another poster noted was breakout. Money from game? $5000. Amount of Woz's "half"? $375. yep, big douche) a "rumor". it never ceases to amaze me that nobodies will jump in to 'defend' some rich twat because he made some shiny they like.
News Flash to fanbois" all successful CEO are sociopaths full stop. I don't care if it is Gates, Jobs, Ellison, or the guy that invented Little Caesar's Pizza, if they are a successful CEO they are a sociopath because we glorify and reward sociopathic behavior in both business and politics. We label them as "ruthless" and "cutthroat" and give them this image of Gordon Gecko in a finely tailored suit.
Maybe if we didn't reward douchebag behavior we wouldn't have this "damn everything but the quarterly earnings report!" attitude in this country and wouldn't be royally fucked in the middle of another depression right now. But taking up for someone who even after making billions still hasn't given his old partner Woz his fair share of that $5000 just shows that fanbois don't care as long as you make something iShiny.
Because they want the land, which would glow in the dark for a couple of generations? The simple fact is they know that they are gonna win if current trends continue, simply because they are having 8 kids to the average Israeli 1.
I believe it was old crazy MoMo of Libya who said something to the effect with regards to Europe: " Attacking Europe now is simply foolish since we are merely destroying our future property because the west will simply die out thanks to low birth rate when compared to Islam."
And you know what? Sadly he is right. Thanks to Muslims not integrating into western society and instead forming "Sharia ghettos" they keep not only the militancy but also the traditional high birthrate of a third world citizen, even when they are in the west. Now it is simply a numbers game which the west is losing badly, hell I wouldn't be surprised if all of Europe is under Sharia by 2025, since IIRC by then the Muslims will have a strong majority across the continent.
ABP in Dragon or any other Chromium based seems to take care of the "problem" as well. And WTF is up with Gizmodo? Are they TRYING to run everyone off with that bloated POS? I thought the new/. layout (aka porky platypus) was bad, but this crap reminds me of some geocities "artistic expression"in the way it slams the CPU and gobbles RAM. Whomever designed that mess needs a good firing.
As for TFA...uhhh...they used different filters. Big whoop dee doo. look at Africa and you'll see anywhere that is supposed to be green is now red thanks to the filters. I don't see why the Giz guy is blathering on about how much more "real" it is compared to the NASA shots when the filters make the planet look like the desert wasteland at the end of Alien 4.
Get some help Petey and once again correlation != causation, and you have to show your work because I'm not the one making outrageous claims If someone claims they can stretch their dick into a giant slingshot and shoot themselves to Scotland it is not the readers job to prove them wrong but the posters job to back that up with real proof, not an anecdote that says "well my cousin Joey saw me do it last Halloween!".
I have also shown repeatedly that at the absolute reported minimum number of new pieces of malweare and infections, which you are free to pick whichever reputable website you like Securina, MSFT's malware reports, AVG, which ever, that at an absolute minimum we are talking about 1.2 million sites PER DAY with that number changing by 15,000+ PER HOUR which means even if you typed at 1 IP address PER SECOND, and never slept, and had a perfect list (which doesn't exist) you would be 14 days behind by the very first day with that number growing linearly every single day, making Petey farther and farther behind.
But if you weren't completely batshit insane Petey I wouldn't have to explain this, because this is why everyone makes fun of you. It is so obvious it is like someone arguing gravity is actually invisible pants gnomes trying to steal your underwear. It is the classic "default allow" which has NEVER EVER worked. Because if a piece of malware isn't in magical HOPES file Petey you are royally fucked, and yet again I have shown that it is simply a roll of the dice whether you get creamed or not, simply because you will always be behind.
So it is all on you Petey and your magical HOPES woobie now. You made the extravagant claims, back them up with the math. If you can't? Well then you are full of shit, case closed. Notice how ALL YOU CAN DO PETEY is throw insults and trollbomb? Why is that? I'll tell you why, because math doesn't lie and you just can't show the math You just can't, it would be like trying to mathematically prove you are not an idiot. It just can't be done.
Uhhhh...WHAT attitude? The "I don't want to have to throw away working machines so I better find something else" attitude? That one? Just because you haven't tripped the condition doesn't mean the condition doesn't exist you know.
Both me and the OP has hit it, and dealing with probably a dozen or more customers a week I've been getting more and more complaints of "Firefox is acting slow" My machine keeps flashing the front light (HDD) when I have FF on for any length of time" and "FF is making my machine act sluggish". Now what do you want me to tell these people? Worksforme(TM)?
All I can tell you is I just had to shut FF 3.6.whatever the latest is on my Nettop(I'd be happy to tell you the V number but since I had to shut FF down on it I went ahead and started a backup) because after 4 hours it had used up all 1.5Gb of RAM and had begun to hit swap. Now maybe it is the fact I usually have about a dozen tabs and switch between them, maybe it is as I suspect that FF doesn't give back RAM on video tabs if you switch away THEN close it, maybe Flash doesn't play nice in the new Gecko sandbox, who knows.
So if FF works great for you hey, I'm happy for you friend. But I've gotten enough complaints since FF went to the 3.6.x branch (and I've found the same behavior on FF 4 BTW) that I've been trying different browsers to find a good substitute for my customers, and the winner is Comodo Dragon.
Not only does Dragon not have the memory problem (if I close a tab in Dragon I can watch the memory fall, which doesn't seem to happen but about half the time in FF) nor the phone home "feature" of Chrome, but on my modern Windows users (which since the release of Win 7 has been growing rapidly) Dragon is much safer than Firefox since after 4, count them 4 years FF STILL doesn't support low rights mode in Vista/7, it has some extra security features like domain name validation and the option to use Comodo secure DNS which blackholes known malware sites.
So I'm glad that it WorksForYou(TM) but there are plenty of us where it don't. There is also an easy way to keep an eye on FF and see how much memory it is REALLY using if you have Chrome or Dragon or any other Chromium based, just use this trick.
Having the SAME tabs open and using the SAME extensions (ABP and ForecastFox) I have FF 4 using more than double the RAM of Dragon at 293Mb VS 132Mb, on this Win 7 X64 machine I'm typing on while I wait for the nettop to finish backup. So you can say WorksForME all day long, sitting here watching FF's memory slowly creep up on this machine I can say I've had enough, thanks anyway.
Oh it wasn't just him, I remember a story about how Jobs fucked Woz out of something like $1500 by saying that the game that Woz wrote that Jobs sold to Atari had only netted $300 (and thus making Woz's half $150) when it actuality it had sold for something like $3000, and this was supposed to be his friend..
I bet if someone did a full psyche work up on most successful CEOs you'd find that damned near every single one is a sociopath because to reach that level of success and power one has to be willing to fuck EVERYBODY, friends, family, workers, everyone they come in contact with. So is it any surprise that Gates did what probably every other top CEO did and fucked his colleague? Sadly we reward sociopaths when it comes to business.
Doesn't make him any less of a douche, it just gives him a hell of a lot of company, Jobs, Ellison, I bet every major tech CEO that has reached the billionaires club has a hell of a lot of fucked over friends left in their wake.
Wow ACs as far as the eye can see...does nobody have an account besides me anymore? While I'm not the crazy OP I'd say a good target would be GPUs, which now support running more generalized code thanks to Streams and CUDA, and while I can't say about CUDA since I haven't bought or sold Nvidia in awhile I know ATI installs the Streams SDK and support OOTB with the latest GPUs.
Now considering the amount of horsepower and RAM built into the new GPUs I'd say that one is just waiting for a blackhat to exploit, oh and the fact nearly every X86-64 CPU now supports hardware VM acceleration, which if IIRC there has already been a demonstration called blue pill that showed that code hooking into the hardware VM was undetected by the OS.
So while the OP does sound a "little off" I'd say...yeah, with all the crazy amounts of power the average machine has in all the support chips hardware nastiness is doable. And that of course don't count rogue governments, like say if China decided to plant a backdoor at the router factory for instance. How many of your average folks have ANY idea what the hell their router is doing? As long as they can hook to the net they're happy. So I'd say it is more a matter of when than if it will happen, and if someone cooks up a good GPU nasty I could see it spreading like a Code Red all over the damned place.
Does it activate? Yes. Can you show me A SINGLE CITATION where the BSAA, MSFT, or anyone else for that matter, have done a SINGLE THING over an OEM? Nope. And if you read your own link the whole thing is a CYA by MSFT to keep from having to support system builders. Well duh, you built it YOU support it. That is the whole point of system builders. And so far not a single court has upheld little niggler clauses in EULAs yet, so MSFT can say they want your first born to have the WinFlag tattooed on their ass, that don't mean they're gonna get it.
I've been to more TechNets than I care to count, I've sat there and talked to the guys that actually built the things, and you know what? Most of them use system builders too. It is common knowledge that is one of those where MSFT goes "wink wink" to keep Linux from gaining a toe hold in the DIY market, and as long as they're cool with it so am I.
Kinda doubt it, as in my case we are talking four, count them four, different machines with THREE different OSes, in this case XP32, XP64, and Windows 7.
Now considering all four machines and all three OSes have completely different CPUs/GPUs/HDDs AND software? I kinda doubt your works for me (TM) in this case. May I suggest that perhaps YOU have just gotten lucky? After all if we want to share anecdotes I have one customer for whom Vista runs great and even have a single person who loves and still uses WinME daily, but that don't make either one great products.
But since I've seen this problem on S754 Sempron,S478 P4, S775 Pentium Dual, S-AM2+ Phenom II, I can say it isn't the arch, and I've seen it as I've said on 3 different OSes so no goal there, and the extensions I use are the pretty universal ABP and ForecastFox, so no dice. My guess is they have a fundamental leak somewhere in the Gecko engine started in 3.6.xx that is tripped quite easily, condition for trip unknown but possibly due to the new plugin sandbox as I have noticed it will NOT give back RAM after playing videos in tabs.
Poster is known malware writer and troll who is advocating slowing your machine to a crawl with a 15Mb HOSTS file which will ONLY stop static ad banners.
Much better solution is to simply blacklist the Comodo certs if you aren't on Windows, and if you are on Windows you should have already been given the cert blacklist update, checkable by going MMC...add snap in...certifications and looking under untrusted certificates. Funnily enough if one is using the Comodo browser Comodo Dragon this is also not a problem, as the extremely short TTL they use on certs had these certs dead just a couple of hours after the hack and before the attacker could use them.
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Sadly TFA is from March and thus probably not. As someone who has hung around cops at the shop and got them to tell some of their favorite "dumbass criminal" stories this frankly doesn't surprise me, hell let me add one of my favorites the cops told me:
This Einstein, which actually gained a little celebrity by ending up on "World's stupidest criminals" decides he is gonna rob this bank so he comes up with the cunning disguise of a bag over his head while wearing his work shirt with the company and his name in bold letters on the front. Not only that but he writes the note on a personal check he left behind at the scene! The cop I was talking to was one of the arresting officers and he had to let his partner do the talking during the arrest he said because he was too busy laughing at the criminal who was damned sure his disguise was perfect! He argued with them all the way to the station that there was NO WAY they could have seen him through the bag!
So a terrorist group with the brains of a bag of rocks really doesn't surprise me. from talking with the cops that come in my shop one thing I've learned is that for most crimes you sure as hell don't need Colombo, because the criminals make Homer Simpson look like Stephen Hawking.
Yeah you'd think with so many greybeards around here they could come up with better, like their OMG Ponies they had a few years back. So in the interest of furthering the irritation that is April first, allow your old pal Hairyfeet to come up with some suggestions:
Piss off your users day. Since that is what you do on this day anyway, why not embrace it? make every other link go to something like Badgerbadgerbadger or get on my horse, just to fuck with people. Hell if you are gonna piss them off anyway, do it with style I say.
Make the admins have horrible flashbacks day. Since there are so many greybeards here, why not make them suffer? I'm sure with a little clever scripting one can bring back the horror of Bonzi Buddy and Comet Cursors to give all of those that survrived the horror a nice Vietnam moment. Add in clippy going "You're making a comment on /. would you like some help?" just to ramp up the pain. bonus points if you can come up with an accurate representation of the infamous "snot clock" pocketwatch fob comet cursor and double Internets if you can make it slow even the baddest multicore to a crawl like what the original did to your baddest P3. Make sure you have the long chain and swing, as that was what REALLY pissed with everyone!
Is your keyboard broken? This would screw with people trying to make comments by substituting commonly mistyped letters, like say s in place of a and p instead of or next to o, when typing comments. Make it so that the user can correct, only to have the next one of the gotcha letters bite them in the ass again. If you are gonna bring the pain, then bring the pain people!
So please /. editors (if you actually exist and haven't been replaced by Indian shocky monkeys) take these ideas as a starting off point for next years "festivities". And I'm sure my fellow /. readers can come up with even better ideas, so instead of wasting space on the lame TFA lets see who can come up with the best "gotcha" for next year.
Yep it wasn't in the standard, it was a wholly owned NS "invention" and part of what I called the "trilogy of terror" back then, Blink, Geocities, and Comet Cursor.
Since you remember those days I'm sure you remember the "fun" of having your PC damned near melt because a link took you to an "OMG Ponies!" Geocities page, where every third word blinked its puke purple text on a hideous pea soup green background and your CPU slammed into the red zone thanks to the giant fricking pocketwatch that suddenly appeared on the end of your cursor swinging like a giant snotball in the breeze...eeek!
I just hope the wayback archive backed up the whole thing complete with comet cursors so future generations will know how bad things really were! Anybody who think those stupid "punch the (blank) to win a (blank)" ads are irritating don't know shit unless they have witnessed the trilogy of terror! Back then I had one of those OCed to hell Celeron 300a chips, that bad boy was nearly double the speed at 550Mhz and rock solid, with an unheard of 96Mb of RAM and it STILL would scream and cry if I landed on a trilogy page!
So NS deserved its fate, for not only putting out a huge buggy POS that was slow as a slug and crashy as hell (another poster wrote his took 51 seconds just to get to the start page on his!) but for giving the evil that was the blink tag to millions of Geocities "artists" you deserved everything you got and THEN some. And I hope the idiot that actually wrote that code has to spend the rest of his life at Rent A Coder fixing buggy VB 6 crap for the rest of his days!
The sad part is if you read TFA (I know, but I got bored) then you'll see they paid for backups as part of their service agreement but the ISP lied and hadn't actually bothered to back up shit.
Now considering how we have a "fuck everything but the quarterly earnings report!" attitude going on in businesses right now I have to wonder: How widespread is this? After all backup and the tapes or HDDs to put them on cost a pretty penny, so not actually spending that money makes your bottom line look good, at the same time saying you have a backup solution (which you charge extra for) is equally good for your bottom line.
Now considering the fact that if these clowns would have followed best practices and changed the passwords when they fired this guy they probably STILL be getting away with charging for a service they don't actually have to incur the expense of actually providing I have to wonder, how many others are doing the same right now? I mean how many are actually gonna set up a test to see if their hosting company has the backups they say?
It sounds to me like backup services are just one more way to cut expenses while making extra money, and sounds like it is ripe for abuse like in TFA.
I wonder how much of the "death of the arcades" was due to home PCs and consoles getting better, vs a decline safety and conditions? I know they ended up closing all of the local arcades in my area because the dealers had taken to living in the arcades and by the last year of their existence just to get in and out of the things you had to run a maze of tweakers pushing everywhere. To me the arcades always struck me one of those "this is why we can't have nice things" situations as the places would start out nice but quickly the dealers would descend like vultures and then here would come the violence and bullshit. Kinda like if you want to find hookers in any place in the country just go to any truckstop as there will ALWAYS be hookers at the truckstop.
Funny part is according to my friends that are in law enforcement you know where the hotspot for violence and bullshit is now that the arcades are gone? Chuck E Cheese of all things. According to them they have become a haven for the really scummy "baby's mamas" type that are just looking to start shit and will throw down if anyone even looks at their little ankle biter sideways. they said they get more calls to the Cheese in a week than most places see in 6 months, so it wouldn't surprise me if they are the next place to go. Kinda sad, but this is why we can't have nice things.
But I wish them all the luck in the world. I still remember racking up such a high score on Vanguard and Pleiades I'd end up just handing them off to some kid because I could have kept going forever, or laughing when my dad accused me of burning in the TV set only to crook my finger at him and lead him into the den where my mom had been on DK JR on my ColecoVision and had gotten into the zone and would play for hours.
I still hear the sounds of DK JR or Yar's Revenge in my sleep sometimes from where my mom would play those in the wee hours of the morning, Dad ended up having to get a second set and let mom keep that one for gaming. Now she sits at my old 3GHz Celeron hand me down playing Age Of Empires 1 (I still haven't figured THAT one out. I swear that game is like catnip to females, they all just love it) along with her match three and CSI games. I even managed to get old dad to play, even though he hadn't touched a game since my old Tiger Handheld football (remember THAT one? With the LEDs?) by putting the latest Deer Hunter on his office quad, so when he is sitting waiting for a call he'll do some Mule Deer bow hunting.
Funny but I would have NEVER thought playing games would end up mainstream all those years ago when I was playing Tapper or Defender at the local pool hall. Now even my GF who takes one look at me playing Just Cause II and says "That's just TOO scary!" will give me "the look" and make me move over so she can play a little Frontierville or do one of her murder mystery games before getting ready for work. I'd say from the days of the smoky pool halls are dark arcades gaming has finally become an activity EVERYBODY does, young and old, males and females. Certainly has come a long way from the days of Dig Dug and other twitch games.
Actually I figure if there are aliens it'll be more like a combination of Gorillas in the Mist and one of those African safari tours. Something like "And here with us today is Gee-tain, expert on the TeegeAck hairless monkeys, take it away Gee-tain"
Thanks GuFom, as we get closer you can see the hairless monkeys involved in one of their favorite activities, throwing shit at each other. While this looks amusing from this distance let me assure you the shit they throw is VERY dangerous, and in fact gets more dangerous not less as time goes on. You'd think they'd learn, but hey they're hairless monkeys right? /crowd laughs/ From my first expedition to the crazy planet they have gone from rocks and sticks to sharpened rocks ON sticks, to their current inclination to make primitive projectile weapons based on sticking explosives in tubes.
Now for those with weak third stomachs I suggest turning away as we are gonna swing by one of their warmer regions so we can show you those monkeys engaged in their typical mating rituals. Notice how the male approaches the female in one of their primitive vehicles and waves green paper to entice the female. We still haven't figure out what the females do with the green papers, we think they line their nests with them. Notice how the vehicle with the flashing lights comes every so often to beat on one of the monkeys and drag him away, we believe this is the way the tribe singles out the inferior males. Moving right along we'll next go to one of their areas where a great tribal battle is occurring so you can see the incredible effort the monkeys expend fighting over females and resources...
So if there are any out there I'm sure they look forward to sitting down and talking to a hairless ape like we would look forward to walking up to a Silver-back and poking it with a stick. Any race with the capability to pop all over the known universe would have about as much in common with us as we have to Cro Mags, and with the abundance of resources interstellar travel would bring would have no reason to interact or even visit for anything more than what the English call "shits and giggles".
BTW did they even bother to explain HOW they did it? Because just screaming FAKE is about as completely pointless as screaming COVER UP in cases like this. I read TFA and didn't find squat about how videos taken at so many different elevations and angles was faked. Were they all in it together? Was there a third party creating a light show for the others to film? What? How about giving us a little more than "Shooped!" please?
Nope sorry, read it right. You see without ABP and NoScript (the only two extensions I had at the time) I was just a bog standard Firefox on a bog standard XP Home with the bog standard Flash and WMV plugins. That made me a needle in a needle factory simply due to the huge installed base of FF, XP Home, and Flash/WMV. There simply aren't that many using what I was using at the time PLUS ABP PLUS NoScript, which made me a MUCH easier target to find.
It is like the difference between having a fully patched and up to date XP with Av and MalwareBytes VS being one of the tens of millions with an XP machine that hasn't updated since XP Sp2 and has an out of date trial of Norton running. Those that actually care enough about security to deal with the hassle of looking up these programs, applying these programs, and dealing with the quirks simply are a tiny minority compared to those that simply stick with the defaults. That is why having sane defaults is so important because a good 85%+ of users will NEVER deviate from whatever the default settings are.
Afraid to actually back up your words with a UID? I'd say look in the mirror to see a troll, or more likely a "FOSSie" which like a Moonie stubbornly goes "LA LA LA" if anyone points out a flaw in their religion, but I'll try to use small words, kay?
It is actually quite simple AC, do try to keep up: You have two competitors, lets call them A and M. Now A&M have X+Y to spend thanks to sales, which gives them MORE developers, MORE R&D, MORE QA, MORE...notice a pattern here?
You see it is actually quite simple and why I would argue RH is a classic example of the free rider problem. Too keep up with MSFT and Apple they need to spend X+Y, but because such a huge number are riding free on CentOS they simply can't afford to put out the same level of money for R&D and developers. Since RH gives a good chunk of their output straight back into the community in the form of code the freeloaders hurt everyone else by costing code and QA that would have otherwise been spent to simply not exist.
Is that REALLY that hard to understand, or does your religion keep you from being able to understand math and basic economics 101? Despite the total bullshit the FOSSies like to spew bug fixes and QA by and large DO NOT come from some guy in his basement scratching an itch, which is why I would argue the desktop is so far behind the competition. Without a big company focusing serious resources bugs simply don't get fixed, as someone coding for free would rather work on new code than sit in front of mountains of old sifting for bugs, because it is boring and tedious. Both Apple and MSFT have the resources to PAY to have this done, RH simply doesn't have that luxury.
Is that REALLY so hard to grasp, or has your love of the idea of communism (which lost BTW) simply kept you from understanding the most basic of economic principles?
But their code was absolute shite until they forked it as F/OSS as Mozilla. I know the theory loved by the tinfoil hat wearing crowd here is poor wittle Netscape beaten to death by the big bad MSFT, but you know what? Speaking for myself and the countless greybeards that had been actual customers of NS (hell I probably still got my NS4 disc in one of my storage lockers somewhere) who all ended up switching to IE I can tell you that it wasn't that we liked IE per se, it was that NS 4 was shit. It wasn't even a good hearty morning log, it was a weak runny stream of foul smelling shit after a bad illness kind of shit.
Here, let me do my impression of running NS4 for all those that didn't have the "enjoyment" of running it back in its day: "Oh look I got my shotgunned modems all screaming, I got Win98 stripped down and humming like a tweaked out Chevy, i'm good to go baby yeah! Let me just fire up my new NS4.../NS4 crashes hard/...Huh. Probably just a glitch, it happens. So I'll just fire up NS4 and head to my favorite.../NS4 locks up/...Motherfucker! Maybe the site just has some bad code on it, wouldn't surprise me. So I'll just relaunch and choose a different site and.../NS4 crashes hard and BSODs OS with it/ $&^%$^%$&^$&^$!
And THAT, that right there, is why IE won. NS4 was a buggy pile of total shit and by the time they got the bugs ironed out enough for the product to actually be usable nobody used it anymore. Just like the old DBase II they released half assed not ready for alpha testing code and paid the price.
Was MSFT douchebags? Yep, old Bill was a nerd that had been shoved into too many lockers and took everything as a "kill crush destroy!" mandate, but NS wouldn't have disappeared so quickly if it had actually been anything but poo. look up MSFT talking about IE 4, which was before they had bundled anything, and you'll see them talking about how it was a fight to keep the server from overloading and how they were sending out over 150,000 copies on CD weekly. They were getting slammed because people were going out of their way to get IE and get off NS because the simple fact is in EVERY single way hat counts to an end user IE was better. It was faster, it was more stable, it used less memory at a time when 16Mb was common, and for awhile there it was even more standards compliant (anybody remember the NS blink tag?).
So lets give credit where credit was due, it was the Moz foundation that took the steaming pile of poo that was NS and hammered it into something usable by the masses. It took them awhile, and they had some serious growing pains like the 2.x.x branch memory leaks, but thanks to them we now have a wealth of choices, all for free. We have the Gecko based like Seamonkey, FF, and Kmeleon, we have the Chromium/Webkit based like Chrome, Comodo Dragon, SWIron, Chromium, Safari, and finally we have Presto in Opera that most people forget before Mozilla made third party browsers free was a for pay product.
So thanks Moz, while my users are in the process of being switched over to Chromium based Dragon for performance and security reason you still made non IE browsers free for the masses and gave us a wealth of choice. Thanks.
I'd actually argue that RH is a hell of a lot worse off than they should be, thanks to the "free as in beer!" brigade actively fucking them over. I mean here is a company that puts its money where its mouth is and donates more code than most other companies combined yet thanks to the "Free beer!" brigade nearly 30% of the web servers are running not RH but CentOS, which was originally created by a hardware company that wanted to use RH's tools but were too greedy to give RH a dime.
So I'd argue that RH and the rest of the F/OSS companies will never be more than a blip on the radar because GPL lets the "free beer!" brigade screw over any company that dares go GPL. Look at how many GPL companies have died or gone on life support simply because the "free beer!" brigade can't stand the thought of paying a cent even if it ultimately hurts them and the community by leaving less vendors, developers, QA, etc.
I'd say F/OSS is a classic example of the tragedy of the commons and the free rider problem, and while a few companies like RH managing to survive thanks to PHBs that don't like having ANY software without a license doesn't negate the fact that the reason F/OSS has less resources for...well pretty much everything, is because there are so many free riders compared to paying customers. Hell I wouldn't be surprised if MSFT or Apple makes more in a month than RH does in a two year period, there are simply too many leeching and not enough paying.
Don't forget the Windows 7 Sins which you have just GOT to love! If this isn't proof that RMS and pals sees F/OSS not as simply an alternative software model but a religion I don't know what does.
While personally I respected the reasons why RMS did what he did, such as writing the GPL because he couldn't modify a printer driver and believed that users should have a "fitness of purpose" right where if the software didn't do what was needed the user could modify or pay someone to modify said software until it was fit for purpose, I think he is starting to reach the PETA "Sea Kittens" phase of overboard crazy.
I mean what happened to the freedom to choose which license you wanted, and the users freedom to choose whether to accept it or not? it isn't like anyone is forcing those millions upon millions of users to use Google services. Lately it seems that "Its a Trap!" should be the catch phrase for RMS as he sees EVERYTHING that isn't 100% F/OSS as a trap.
I mean for the love of Pete the man uses some rare POS Loongson netbook because the fricking OLPC wasn't "free" enough for him because it had firmware in the wireless! There is such a thing as going overboard and hurting the cause, and I think RMS screaming "Trap!" to everything that doesn't follow his line is hurting more than it is helping the F/OSS movement by making it look like a bunch of extremists.
Because it is "just a religion" in the same way that ethnic cleansing is just "gentrification of the neighborhood". Sharia is a barbaric throwback to the days of stonings and if you will look at the countries that have instituted Sharia you will see there is ZERO respect or tolerance for those that aren't believers, which is a cornerstone of western democracy.
So if you want to live in a world where gays are given the choice of death or sexual reassignment, where those that don't follow the "true path" are Dhimmi (look it up) and you can cheat and abuse to your heart's content, where women and children are treated with less respect than cattle, then sure its "just a religion".
Personally I believe that sooner or later there WILL be a battle between the west and Islam as a whole, there is simply no other choice as "live and let live" is as much of a fantasy of Islam as is the "religion of peace" angle. Try looking at the Hadiths while keeping this rule in mind: there are NO contradictions in Islam because the prophet made it clear that Hadiths that come later overrule Hadiths that came before. You'll then notice that the only peaceful Hadiths are the early ones which have been canceled out by the "jihad the infidels!" Hadiths that came later.
Islam and democracy that respects the rights of minorities are simply mutually exclusive. In Islam there is ONE way and that is Sharia, period. The Koran makes it clear that the goal of ALL Muslims is a Sharia planet. Again there is no compromise with this, it is "God's Law" and MUST be obeyed. Unlike those that came before the Muslims are being very careful NOT to integrate or accept western views, which is why you have "Sharia Ghettos" all over Europe. If you truly believe the militants in those ghettos are just gonna wake up and embrace democracy I have a bridge you might be interested in.
There can be NO PEACE with an enemy that refuses to accept your right to exist, full stop. Until Islam stands together and announces that ALL FAITHS are allowed the same rights as those afforded to Muslims there can simply be no middle ground, as you can't have a dialog with someone whose faith teaches that you are less than human, which is exactly what a Dhimmi is, no different that the 3/5ths rule the USA had for blacks.
He is a known troll and malware writer who follows around and trollbombs anyone who points out that even simple math shows his "invention" doesn't work.
There is a reason why everyone abandoned HOSTS files in the late 90s, and that is because they slow your PC down while giving NO protection from malware. it is simple math really, you have a large (estimates at 1.5 million+) dynamically shifting target, where sites become infected, cleaned, reinfected, thousands by the day, sometimes thousands by the hour, yet this loon is convinced that a static HOSTS file will magically protect you from malware.
Sadly this person is also a paranoid schizophrenic with a serious persecution complex who will follow you around, sometimes for months on end, so he can "trollbomb" any posts you place while calling anyone who doesn't join his AC sockpuppet army a "shill post" or a sockpuppet, while quoting from people that frankly wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire like Bruce Perens, and then quotes them in completely unrelated matters to boot.
So don't be surprised if Crazy Petey follows you around for a few days friend, you dared to say something that goes against his "I'm a leet hacker that everyone fears!" delusion, just as I have been followed off and on for months, with everyone that points out what a batshit loonie Petey is being accused of being part of some vast super HB Gary sockpuppet army controlled by me and the Illuminati. I used to think the guy was just a Twitter style troll, now sadly I think he seriously needs some help. It is a shame nobody can track this guy down and do an intervention, as just from his writing style you can tell he is coming off the rails.
The really funny part is this makes you even more identifiable since so few will opt in. it is like that site that checks how identifiable you are by what your browser sends back (so sorry I can't think of the site, maybe someone has it bookmarked?) and with ABP and NoScript there were less than 8000 with my particular string which is a pretty small niche out of the billions of web users, but with ABP and NoScript turned off I was one of 1,2 million with the same string so it was like trying to find a particular needle in Dodger stadium filled to the brim with needles.
So while I'm all for more privacy I'd worry about the unintended consequences of things like DNT. After all it isn't like telemarketing where it bitch slaps you in the face so everyone looks for the DNC registry, so many have accepted that ads are just a part of the web experience and have NO clue that they are being tracked.
But on a positive note it makes it easy for me to switch people away from IE thanks to ABP, first on FF and now with Comodo Dragon on my handy freeware CD. When people see the difference killing those "punch the (blank) win a (blank)" ads has on their connection it is an easy sell to migrate them away from IE. It has gotten my customers so hooked on staying away from IE I've had them call me to ask how to "Fix" their relatives PC over the phone, when it turns out they don't have Firefox or Dragon.
Oh it goes farther than that my friend, it goes back to the OSS covering up the fact that there are Nazis on the moon!
In all seriousness while I'm glad they solved that niggler you can understand why some would have latched onto a "the math don't work" hypothesis, and that is because....well at the incredible sizes of great and small we are talking about in space the math doesn't work which is why we have no grand unified theory yet.
So while I'm glad we don't have a red herring steering us away I bet on our way to the grand unified theory we will have more than one "holy shit!" moment where we find out the way we think things work is full of shit. We are like Archimedes trying to figure out the universe with a hole and a stick. The one thing I'm sure of is there is a hell of a lot we just don't know yet.
Didn't he also narc out the original captain crunch for a reward? I seem to recall reading that somewhere. I just loove how a fanboi had to jump in and call the game fuck over (which as another poster noted was breakout. Money from game? $5000. Amount of Woz's "half"? $375. yep, big douche) a "rumor". it never ceases to amaze me that nobodies will jump in to 'defend' some rich twat because he made some shiny they like.
News Flash to fanbois" all successful CEO are sociopaths full stop. I don't care if it is Gates, Jobs, Ellison, or the guy that invented Little Caesar's Pizza, if they are a successful CEO they are a sociopath because we glorify and reward sociopathic behavior in both business and politics. We label them as "ruthless" and "cutthroat" and give them this image of Gordon Gecko in a finely tailored suit.
Maybe if we didn't reward douchebag behavior we wouldn't have this "damn everything but the quarterly earnings report!" attitude in this country and wouldn't be royally fucked in the middle of another depression right now. But taking up for someone who even after making billions still hasn't given his old partner Woz his fair share of that $5000 just shows that fanbois don't care as long as you make something iShiny.
Because they want the land, which would glow in the dark for a couple of generations? The simple fact is they know that they are gonna win if current trends continue, simply because they are having 8 kids to the average Israeli 1.
I believe it was old crazy MoMo of Libya who said something to the effect with regards to Europe: " Attacking Europe now is simply foolish since we are merely destroying our future property because the west will simply die out thanks to low birth rate when compared to Islam."
And you know what? Sadly he is right. Thanks to Muslims not integrating into western society and instead forming "Sharia ghettos" they keep not only the militancy but also the traditional high birthrate of a third world citizen, even when they are in the west. Now it is simply a numbers game which the west is losing badly, hell I wouldn't be surprised if all of Europe is under Sharia by 2025, since IIRC by then the Muslims will have a strong majority across the continent.
ABP in Dragon or any other Chromium based seems to take care of the "problem" as well. And WTF is up with Gizmodo? Are they TRYING to run everyone off with that bloated POS? I thought the new /. layout (aka porky platypus) was bad, but this crap reminds me of some geocities "artistic expression"in the way it slams the CPU and gobbles RAM. Whomever designed that mess needs a good firing.
As for TFA...uhhh...they used different filters. Big whoop dee doo. look at Africa and you'll see anywhere that is supposed to be green is now red thanks to the filters. I don't see why the Giz guy is blathering on about how much more "real" it is compared to the NASA shots when the filters make the planet look like the desert wasteland at the end of Alien 4.
Get some help Petey and once again correlation != causation, and you have to show your work because I'm not the one making outrageous claims If someone claims they can stretch their dick into a giant slingshot and shoot themselves to Scotland it is not the readers job to prove them wrong but the posters job to back that up with real proof, not an anecdote that says "well my cousin Joey saw me do it last Halloween!".
I have also shown repeatedly that at the absolute reported minimum number of new pieces of malweare and infections, which you are free to pick whichever reputable website you like Securina, MSFT's malware reports, AVG, which ever, that at an absolute minimum we are talking about 1.2 million sites PER DAY with that number changing by 15,000+ PER HOUR which means even if you typed at 1 IP address PER SECOND, and never slept, and had a perfect list (which doesn't exist) you would be 14 days behind by the very first day with that number growing linearly every single day, making Petey farther and farther behind.
But if you weren't completely batshit insane Petey I wouldn't have to explain this, because this is why everyone makes fun of you. It is so obvious it is like someone arguing gravity is actually invisible pants gnomes trying to steal your underwear. It is the classic "default allow" which has NEVER EVER worked. Because if a piece of malware isn't in magical HOPES file Petey you are royally fucked, and yet again I have shown that it is simply a roll of the dice whether you get creamed or not, simply because you will always be behind. So it is all on you Petey and your magical HOPES woobie now. You made the extravagant claims, back them up with the math. If you can't? Well then you are full of shit, case closed. Notice how ALL YOU CAN DO PETEY is throw insults and trollbomb? Why is that? I'll tell you why, because math doesn't lie and you just can't show the math You just can't, it would be like trying to mathematically prove you are not an idiot. It just can't be done.
Uhhhh...WHAT attitude? The "I don't want to have to throw away working machines so I better find something else" attitude? That one? Just because you haven't tripped the condition doesn't mean the condition doesn't exist you know.
Both me and the OP has hit it, and dealing with probably a dozen or more customers a week I've been getting more and more complaints of "Firefox is acting slow" My machine keeps flashing the front light (HDD) when I have FF on for any length of time" and "FF is making my machine act sluggish". Now what do you want me to tell these people? Worksforme(TM)?
All I can tell you is I just had to shut FF 3.6.whatever the latest is on my Nettop(I'd be happy to tell you the V number but since I had to shut FF down on it I went ahead and started a backup) because after 4 hours it had used up all 1.5Gb of RAM and had begun to hit swap. Now maybe it is the fact I usually have about a dozen tabs and switch between them, maybe it is as I suspect that FF doesn't give back RAM on video tabs if you switch away THEN close it, maybe Flash doesn't play nice in the new Gecko sandbox, who knows.
So if FF works great for you hey, I'm happy for you friend. But I've gotten enough complaints since FF went to the 3.6.x branch (and I've found the same behavior on FF 4 BTW) that I've been trying different browsers to find a good substitute for my customers, and the winner is Comodo Dragon.
Not only does Dragon not have the memory problem (if I close a tab in Dragon I can watch the memory fall, which doesn't seem to happen but about half the time in FF) nor the phone home "feature" of Chrome, but on my modern Windows users (which since the release of Win 7 has been growing rapidly) Dragon is much safer than Firefox since after 4, count them 4 years FF STILL doesn't support low rights mode in Vista/7, it has some extra security features like domain name validation and the option to use Comodo secure DNS which blackholes known malware sites.
So I'm glad that it WorksForYou(TM) but there are plenty of us where it don't. There is also an easy way to keep an eye on FF and see how much memory it is REALLY using if you have Chrome or Dragon or any other Chromium based, just use this trick.
Having the SAME tabs open and using the SAME extensions (ABP and ForecastFox) I have FF 4 using more than double the RAM of Dragon at 293Mb VS 132Mb, on this Win 7 X64 machine I'm typing on while I wait for the nettop to finish backup. So you can say WorksForME all day long, sitting here watching FF's memory slowly creep up on this machine I can say I've had enough, thanks anyway.
Oh it wasn't just him, I remember a story about how Jobs fucked Woz out of something like $1500 by saying that the game that Woz wrote that Jobs sold to Atari had only netted $300 (and thus making Woz's half $150) when it actuality it had sold for something like $3000, and this was supposed to be his friend..
I bet if someone did a full psyche work up on most successful CEOs you'd find that damned near every single one is a sociopath because to reach that level of success and power one has to be willing to fuck EVERYBODY, friends, family, workers, everyone they come in contact with. So is it any surprise that Gates did what probably every other top CEO did and fucked his colleague? Sadly we reward sociopaths when it comes to business.
Doesn't make him any less of a douche, it just gives him a hell of a lot of company, Jobs, Ellison, I bet every major tech CEO that has reached the billionaires club has a hell of a lot of fucked over friends left in their wake.
Wow ACs as far as the eye can see...does nobody have an account besides me anymore? While I'm not the crazy OP I'd say a good target would be GPUs, which now support running more generalized code thanks to Streams and CUDA, and while I can't say about CUDA since I haven't bought or sold Nvidia in awhile I know ATI installs the Streams SDK and support OOTB with the latest GPUs.
Now considering the amount of horsepower and RAM built into the new GPUs I'd say that one is just waiting for a blackhat to exploit, oh and the fact nearly every X86-64 CPU now supports hardware VM acceleration, which if IIRC there has already been a demonstration called blue pill that showed that code hooking into the hardware VM was undetected by the OS.
So while the OP does sound a "little off" I'd say...yeah, with all the crazy amounts of power the average machine has in all the support chips hardware nastiness is doable. And that of course don't count rogue governments, like say if China decided to plant a backdoor at the router factory for instance. How many of your average folks have ANY idea what the hell their router is doing? As long as they can hook to the net they're happy. So I'd say it is more a matter of when than if it will happen, and if someone cooks up a good GPU nasty I could see it spreading like a Code Red all over the damned place.
Does it activate? Yes. Can you show me A SINGLE CITATION where the BSAA, MSFT, or anyone else for that matter, have done a SINGLE THING over an OEM? Nope. And if you read your own link the whole thing is a CYA by MSFT to keep from having to support system builders. Well duh, you built it YOU support it. That is the whole point of system builders. And so far not a single court has upheld little niggler clauses in EULAs yet, so MSFT can say they want your first born to have the WinFlag tattooed on their ass, that don't mean they're gonna get it.
I've been to more TechNets than I care to count, I've sat there and talked to the guys that actually built the things, and you know what? Most of them use system builders too. It is common knowledge that is one of those where MSFT goes "wink wink" to keep Linux from gaining a toe hold in the DIY market, and as long as they're cool with it so am I.
Kinda doubt it, as in my case we are talking four, count them four, different machines with THREE different OSes, in this case XP32, XP64, and Windows 7.
Now considering all four machines and all three OSes have completely different CPUs/GPUs/HDDs AND software? I kinda doubt your works for me (TM) in this case. May I suggest that perhaps YOU have just gotten lucky? After all if we want to share anecdotes I have one customer for whom Vista runs great and even have a single person who loves and still uses WinME daily, but that don't make either one great products.
But since I've seen this problem on S754 Sempron,S478 P4, S775 Pentium Dual, S-AM2+ Phenom II, I can say it isn't the arch, and I've seen it as I've said on 3 different OSes so no goal there, and the extensions I use are the pretty universal ABP and ForecastFox, so no dice. My guess is they have a fundamental leak somewhere in the Gecko engine started in 3.6.xx that is tripped quite easily, condition for trip unknown but possibly due to the new plugin sandbox as I have noticed it will NOT give back RAM after playing videos in tabs.
Poster is known malware writer and troll who is advocating slowing your machine to a crawl with a 15Mb HOSTS file which will ONLY stop static ad banners.
Much better solution is to simply blacklist the Comodo certs if you aren't on Windows, and if you are on Windows you should have already been given the cert blacklist update, checkable by going MMC...add snap in...certifications and looking under untrusted certificates. Funnily enough if one is using the Comodo browser Comodo Dragon this is also not a problem, as the extremely short TTL they use on certs had these certs dead just a couple of hours after the hack and before the attacker could use them.