The truth? You can't handle the truth! If we were speaking truth it would be thus: Apple is run by a control freak, Android is fragmented to hell and one of several products the parent company plays fast and loose with the rules for, WinPhone is dead last and will probably stay there, WebOS is nowhere to be seen ATM, and RIM is dead, they just don't know it yet!
In actuality you'll get "Android is teh shit because it is teh FOSS and thus is good (though not really, just the kernel and even then Google hasn't released the latest version) and isn't nor has it ever been fragmented (ignore those 4 versions on the shelves!)" "iOS invented everything and Steve is a God, never an asshat (ignore the arbitrary rules that don't seem to apply to itself) and their prices are NEVER high and are competitive with the other products (if you don't count the 60%+ profit margins that is) and is great!" and of course "WinPhone is a completely new idea and thus will take time (ignore all those WinCE versions behind the curtain!) to find an audience (who will run over WinPhone to get the latest iShiny) who will appreciate its ease of use and synergy (Oh God, if we don't get Halo running on this thing we're fucked! Is my resume up to date?) and like previous products simply needs to build momentum (like Zune) and find its niche (like Kin)" and finally RIM "We're not dead yet! we feel better, we really do! we feel happy, we feel happy" (bashes in back of head and throws on the cart)
So as you can see, reality and fanboyism and bullshit rarely do meet in the middle. So expect praise of the latest iShiny, Google Honeycomb Hideout, and WP7 which like WinCE will later be known as WiPe, as in you wipe your ass with it before finding an iPhone.
I've had the same problem with FF since the 3.6.xx branch, and it don't seem to be any better on FF 4. I have a little Sempron nettop I use for daily browsing as it uses almost no power and is whisper quiet and after 3 to 4 hours FF will suck up all 1.5Gb of RAM and start hitting the swap.
That is just unacceptable in this day and age, so I've decided to switch to Comodo Dragon which if you don't trust Chrome or want the phoning home junk maybe you ought to try. It is based on Chromium, has some really nice security features like domain validation and the option to use Comodo DNS if you like, and unlike FF when I close tabs I get the memory they were using back, and has the ability to run all the Chrome extensions like ABP and ForecastFox. So give it a try, it is 100% free, runs good, and seems to be pretty solid.
As for TFA while I'm glad MSFT is improving IE, simply because so many use it so improvements to IE power consumption will have a big impact, frankly if it only used a single watt I wouldn't touch IE with a 50 foot pole. After spending years cleaning up the mess that was IE 6 thanks to MSFT just walking away and leaving all those users boned I'm afraid I just can't bring myself to use it. Fool me once and all that. Funny though how much Opera blows through on startup, I thought Presto was supposed to be pretty light?
They rolled out a new feature and...surprise surprise! There was bugs! Some of the islands in the South Pacific were also affected IIRC, are they having revolutions and someone forgot to tell us?
As for why there, well duh! You are talking about a whole bunch of different languages, most of which I'm betting really aren't that high on their "spend resources on QA" checklist. And if they were doing it intentionally, they wouldn't have left it trivial to turn back on by either checking a checkbox on startup or using a simple FF plugin. And this was what...six days from bug found to bug fixed, with workarounds announced at the time of the bug? Paranoid much?
So if you want to blame them for not doing as much QA as they should before they rolled out the update? Total agreement, they should have done more testing before flipping the switch. But trying to say this was some nefarious plot is a little too much tinfoil hattery friend. I mean I thought everyone here agreed that MSFT 1.0 equals seriously buggy? Isn't that why "Wait for SP1" is practically a mantra?
I hate to say it, but personally I feel when it gets to the rioting portion of the fall the feds will just quit pretending and accept our fate to be the next "bad guys" on the world's stage. Germany got to go twice, now its our turn. The bitch is a smart leader could probably pull it off with almost ZERO interference. How? Deals baby, deals.
The Chinese want Africa, its resources would help China a lot...so give it to them. Help yourselves our Chinese friends. Taiwan? Fuck 'em, help yourself. in return you stay our buddy or stay out of the fight, your choice. That leaves our former enemy mother Russia and the Eu, and we could take care of both with one shot. Old Putin is a classic Ruskie, and would just loove the old USSR back...so let him have it. Hey Putin buddy, its ALL yours, help yourself. in return you stay on our side or stay out, you choice again. The Eu will be too busy shitting itself over the return of the USSR to say much of anything. Seriously what are they gonna do? They have what...maybe 4 aircraft carriers put together? We got 11 baby, you lose!
So what does the USA get, to quell those rioting mobs? Why the whole damned north and south hemispheres of course! We'll tell the Canadians to keep those oil sands pumping if they don't want to say hello to Mr air strike, they'll STFU. And there are a HELL of a lot of resources in South America, more than enough to make the USA fat with wealth and give the poor plenty of "bread and jobs". Cue the patriotic music, wave the flag, stick a fork baby!
Who would stand against us if China and the USSR are sticking with us? England...ha! They're on an island, wolf packs showed how to shut them down. The French will bitch, who cares, same for Italy. Germany will be too busy trying to control the western EU and worrying about old grudges from the east to deal with us.
Sad to say that is what I figure we'll end up doing. I can't see those in power going silently into that good night, not with all that killer hardware, and I don't see them being stupid enough to roll the tanks here and start another French revolution. So they'll need resources to quell the masses but quick, and a false flag blaming one of our old enemies (Hi Chavez!) would be just the excuse to rally folks around the flag. Then once the big three have what we want, we can split the middle east and anything left over. Combine the Chinese Army with the USA and USSR? Make the Axis look like third stringers.
Well to be fair, and while personally I think it will be Android/iOS neck and neck with WP7 or WebOS third, the key to whether or not MSFT can pull this off will be bundle deals. if MSFT gets Nokia to put out a WinPhone with a kick ass GPU by holiday season AND manage to tie Halo in, like say having a Halo Phone Game that boosts your characters and earns achievements for the game at home? THEN they might be able to pull this off.
Because to be fair Windows 7 plays REAL nice with the X360. I've set up the Win 7/X360 combo for a couple of customers and it really is butt simple to make it a kick ass multimedia setup, so if they can "pull an Apple" and tie everything together, so say your WinPhone can watch anything you have at home by using the WinPC as a slingbox, while tying gaming between X360 and WinPhone together? Then yes I can see MSFT taking second place, especially if their successor to the X360 kicks ass.
But that is gonna be a hell of a big IF and will depend on the suits at MSFT not cocking things up. MSFT has a history of screwing the pooch and not "getting it", see Zune, Kin, Vista, etc, but the basic parts they need are there, the question is can they bundle them together in a smooth and easy to use package. While they do have a shot, and Android proves you can come along and change the game if you are in the right place with the right product, I frankly wouldn't bet the farm on it.
My personal prediction is thus: Android will burn enough folks with CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) that they won't be able to hold first, and Apple's traditionally high prices will make a nice opening for someone in the middle, but if HP can keep from screwing the pooch WebOS could be the one to take that slot, at the very least with their rep with businesses they could be the one to finish off RIM and take over the business phone market. So final call...Apple and Android, followed by either WebOS or WinPhone with Blackberry DOA.
See it is THAT, that right there, that made me have to quit corporate. They would have the thing running like a Swiss watch, have a guy that really knew his shit and had it running good, and what would they do? They would fire him or let him get away by not paying him decently and then have to bring in consultants at three times what it would have cost to simply pay the first guy and then waste just as much trying to bring another guy up to speed.
I knew it was time to get out when I just couldn't plaster a smile and lie my ass off anymore. I found myself saying things like "Is the point of this exercise to waste truckloads of cash? because if so you're doing a bang up job, bravo!" which needless to say didn't go over every well, but the endless mountains of stupid was just more than I could take.
And it wasn't like you had plan A, they had plan B, and both had their merits. Nope it was "We'll royally fuck the company by firing everyone with any experience, thus saving money on salaries!" and when you'd point out that the reason they got paid well is because they made money for the company and now that they were gone you had fuck all in the way of experienced workers and the place was quickly going to shit, you'd just get this blank fucking look on their face like the thought there was a day after today was too much of a concept for them to grasp. Un-fucking-believable.
And we've seen huge corps destroy the entire company with that same logic fault, like how Circuit City when faced with competition from Best Buy fired ALL the experienced sellers and thus saved money for a single quarter while giving all the business to Best Buy thanks to THEIR VERY OWN WORKERS which were simply snatched up by BB.
So if you are still in Dilbert land you have my sympathies my friend. But being cursed with an IQ of 156 and a severe case of logic made me just unsuitable for doing Dilbertisms. I couldn't just dig a hole on Mon to fill in back in on Tues because some PHB thought it would develop synergy or be 6 sigma or some other tripe, I just couldn't take it.
The funny (or sad, depending on how you very tons of tax dollars wasted) is that the whole child porn things is a red herring as well, at least according to a friend that works at the state crime lab in charge of dealing with the child porn busts (he keeps trying to recruit me, but there ain't enough brain bleach to take THAT job) as according to him all they bust on the net are social retards that frankly haven't touched anyone but themselves and are wanking off to the same old shit that has been floating around since the days of BBS.
So what do the actual child molesters, the sick bastards you really want to catch to actually save and protect kids use? Why its USPS that's right, the fucking mail. They only use the net long enough to set up a few contacts (which according to my friend they have set up the "entrance fee" in a way no cop will be able to pass, like abuse a kid in the manner they describe with an object they tell you to get and you only have X number of days to provide the video) and from them on its encrypted DVDs and mail drops all the way. if they don't receive word from a contact in X number of time they consider that link dead and move on, no trails.
He said all the cops KNOW about it, thanks to an ex cop they busted that had tons of the stuff unencrypted on his drive. Of course knowing and being able to do shit are two different things, we are talking DVDs with 2048 bit encryption, drives set up with Truecrypt inside Truecrypt, drive wiping on X number of wrong login attempts, pretty slick stuff.
But he said the only thing they get on the net anymore is the Chris Hansen total morons and a whole shitload of social retards that have literally mountains of DVDs full of Internet porn and have watched so damned much porn they can't even get a hard on to anything but the sickest shit. According to him the feds care about stuff like Tor because they figure your "hillbilly homegrown terrorist type" would probably use it, but figure any seriously hardcore bunch is probably using what the CP guys use.
Personally I think its a shame so much taxpayer money is wasted on catching the social retards and the Chris Hansen morons instead of trying to set up global networks to track down and bust the ones actually raping kids, but the politicians like seeing big numbers so there you go. I don't see how the guy does it myself, having to sit 8 hours a day and look at that shit? Not enough brain bleach in the world to take that job, and I sure as hell couldn't be all calm and shit when testifying against some guy who had actually raped his 6 year old and filmed it like my friend had to do last year, personally my urge to beat the shit out of him would be too great.
But if you run a Tor exit node or Freenet on a home connection you're bug fucking nuts, as the cops SOP is to kick down your door, charge you based on the IP logs, haul away ALL your shit, which you may or may not get back three to four years from now when they get around to it, that is if it doesn't get lost, and meanwhile the papers have already run your name as "suspected kiddie fiddler" so everyone thinks your a monster. In this red scare climate when it comes to CP you'd have to be insane to touch that software, at least if you live in the USA. Maybe things are saner in Europe, I don't know.
Oh that's why I don't work corporate anymore. All the Dilbert bullshit had me pounding my logical head against a wall too damned much. I don't make as much running my own little shop but I don't have the ulcers and headaches anymore either.
A perfect example of Dilbert bullshit was that law office. I told them I didn't have the time to manage their network and pointed them towards not one, not two, but THREE different IT guys, all with years of experience and know how, that could do a bang up job, so what do they do? Some bean counter decides actual IT guys are "a waste of the budget" and hires some ass clown his cousin knows that is a "whiz with computers". Let me tell you what I find when I'm called in a year or so later after they fire this joker, you'll LOL!
I get there and find the clown has thrown away ALL the PCs that I had purchased for them not two years ago as "too slow junk" (They were standard HP business machines, and NOT cheap ones I might add, just good quality office boxes) and replaced them with home built gaming rigs yes you read that right, home built Tigerdirect gaming rigs, with not a SINGLE part identical on ANY of them, so you can give up imaging or pushing updates. I had to shitcan the whole lot. Then to top it off he apparently didn't understand the standard corporate network setup I had left (Cisco Router hooked into standard switches, classic corporate setup) so he again shitcanned the whole thing and replaced the network with....get this shit.... over a dozen home ISP accounts and Dlink routers, you know, the shitty blue POS ones you'd get at Staples? Yeah those things. Over a DOZEN different ISP accounts with FOUR, count them four, different ISPs, as he'd run out of bandwidth he'd just add another Dlink and another ISP account. Dumbass!
So final damage? probably $50,000 worth of machines and hardware I'd originally setup GONE, just tossed in the trash, braintrust didn't even have enough sense to keep or sell any of it even though it was ALL still under warranty, and then another $50,000 to shitcan ALL of his gaming junk (which I kept and sold, after I explained how fucked they were they didn't want it nor did they want to pay me to auction it off (surprise) so into my truck it went) and rebuild the network. Did anyone besides the clown get fired? Nope, from what I understand the original beancounter got a raise for "savings on the budget" LOL and then they passed the costs of the TWO networks onto their clients. And before I left they were already bitching about how much a real IT manager cost so I wouldn't be surprised if they did the dance ALL over again!
It was shit like that that made me get out of corporate. I felt like the cave painter in "History of the World: Part 1" where he would paint this masterpiece and then some retard would come along and piss all over it. The levels of short sightedness, waste, and just mind numbing stupid were just too much for this logical brained IT guy to take anymore. Now I strictly fix boxes and deal with people that actually listen to me which while it don't pay as well is a hell of a lot less headache inducing.
Good thing to know I'm not the only one preaching max RAM. I became a convert when 512Mb of PC100 fell into my lap like manna from heaven (a corporate client with more money than brains bought two 256Mb sticks, not knowing they won't fit in his machine, and rather than send them back just handed them to me, sweet!) at a time when 128Mb was the norm. The difference in Win2K Pro (old faithful. I miss old Win2K) was like night and day. That machine is still going BTW, upgraded it to WinXP 5 years ago and sold it and last I heard the checkout girl at the local grocery store is using it as her daily machine. You couldn't hardly kill those old 1.1Ghz P3s.
As for gaming RAM unless you are gonna seriously OC it is just a waste of money. Funny thing is I got 2 2Gb sticks of gaming RAM on the cheap and it actually slowed down my machine since it uses funky non spec RAM timings, so instead of running it at 800Mhz I'm having to run it at something like 766Mhz as that was the only timing I could get it to sync up with my 2Gb of "normal" RAM. But I got 4Gb for $35 on sale so I can't complain, and the heat spreaders do look cool.
As for GPUs I've been recommending the HD48xx series, they are going for insanely cheap right now and with a 256Mb memory bus they can get some serious FPS. Hell Newegg was selling the 1Gb HD4850 for just $43 after MIR! Hell you can't get a x5xx card for THAT cheap! If you're a Linux guy you might want to check them out, as they were released with Linux support and full specs OOTB and from what I understand the support for them has gotten pretty good.
Which is what I find seriously scary about TOR and Freenet. Has anyone even tried the "plausible deniability" defense that Freenet brags about? because from what I've seen of CP laws (IANAL of course) the problem is it doesn't say you have to have specifically viewed it to be distributing it. If they trace CP coming from your machine I haven't seen ANY statute that says you can't be charged if you didn't view it, you simply have to have facilitated its distribution.
So has anyone tested this in court? How much did the poor soul that got to be the test case end up out in lawyer fees? Because as much as I support freedom of speech I also have a family and while I probably have enough spare bandwidth at the shop to run it spending the next three years in a cell waiting on a court date or trying to come up with a couple of hundred thousand to get a decent lawyer while sitting in said cell doesn't seem like a good way to spend my time, thanks anyway.
To me this is the problem with relying on IP addresses as the laws and reality don't match when it comes to the tech, and while we all support helping those in oppressive regimes all it takes is one asshat or troll pushing CP with the current witchhunt climate to give you a seriously bad day. Hell I wouldn't trust the average jury to even understand what an IP address is, much less onion routing or distributed computing. And the fact that Freenet uses some of your HDD for data you have NO control over just makes this stuff even scarier IMHO, as you can't even honestly claim there is no CP on your PC, as you honestly don't know.
Not to mention how much oversight and protection is there from a MITM working on the inside of your local ISP? I had to clean up the mess at a law office once where one of the asshat IT guys had set up his own file sharing and Quake server on the backend, and frankly if he hadn't been caught surfing pron by having a PHB literally walk in on him he'd be there today and frankly I think he had more oversight than many of the contract guys at my local ISPs.
While we'd all like to think our ISP is at least run in a professional manner, especially when we are talking about shit like this that can drag you into court for years or even throw you in PMITA prison, actually having contact with some of the guys working local offices makes me believe this is about as far from the case as can be. Most of the ones I've dealt with are contract hires that frankly really don't give a fuck WHAT is going on, as long as they get their check.
Would it surprise me if one of these guys wanted to do something illegal and just set himself up a little box in the back? Not at all and it would probably be damned hard to prove where the IP address in question terminated 4 years ago last Tuesday and THAT I find scary as hell. How many times does your dynamic address change? Mine changes practically every time the wind blows and my local ISP wants ass raping prices for a static address.
But considering I've had to deal with these guys for some of my business clients and got told "And?" when I pointed out more than a dozen illegal splices in his line frankly I wouldn't trust these guys to give me an honest bill, much less hand over evidence that is supposed to stand up in a court of law. There is just too little oversight and too much lowest bidder going on, at least in my area.
I mean for the love of Pete I've had to deal with a WISP that saw nothing wrong in ALL PCs on a node showing up in network neighborhood and having all shares accessible and we are supposed to trust these people to give data that could cost you years of court and/or prison time?
But you see that is what makes it so nice as it is completely your choice as you have a simple button the gives you shutdown/sleep/logoff and nobody forces you to choose one over the other. So if you know you're not coming back? Go for shutdown. Need to get back quickly? go for hybrid sleep.
And if the reason you don't use Windows is because you have a Mac, hey they do make nice designs, old Steve always had good taste in industrial design. If it is because you use Linux? I'm glad you have all that free time to deal with the fiddly bits but I don't. I get paid to deal with fiddly bits 8 to 10 hours a day, I sure as hell ain't doing it on my free time. Maybe if they'd give Linus "The kernel isn't designed it grows like a virus LOL!" Torvalds a good firing and gave it a stable ABI for drivers like every other OS from Solaris to OS/2 has had for a decade it wouldn't be such a PITA, but when you buy a Dell Ubuntu netbook and you can't even use the standard repos because the drivers break? Dude that is seriously fucked up.
Hybrid sleep is kinda like the way Macs do it in that it writes the RAM to HDD but unlike the Mac which only writes to the HDD if the battery is getting low (IIRC) the hybrid sleep on Win 7 dumps the contents of RAM to a file like hibernate while keeping just the used pages alive in RAM while powering everything else down.
What this does is it gives you the instant on of sleep while making power failures a non issue because you can literally yank the cord or pull the battery and it STILL gives you an advantage over a cold boot by only having to reload the previous state. When you combine this with Readyboost and Superfetch it makes cold boots pointless and it will intelligently decide which to do based on your situation. Like if you are out and on battery it will most likely simply hibernate, if you are plugged in it will go to sleep, pull the plug and it is back to hibernate, all with no user intervention.
So you really ought to give it a try, as the new memory management is frankly top notch. And this is coming from someone that HATED the fisher price UI of XP and the way it would waste RAM by leaving it free while hitting swap and thought Vista sucked the big wet titty. In fact I advise users if they are still on XP to buy a RAMDrive program which lets you map Swap to RAM thus keeping XP from wasting it by leaving huge swaths idle for no good reason.
Nice side effect is that the one I recommend allows you to beat the 3.2GB XP 32bit barrier by using PAE to map swap to the unused memory, thus letting you have more than 4Gb of RAM in XP. It is nice for those that need to dual boot for some ancient legacy app that don't play nice with modern OSes. I use it myself to keep my old copy of Cubase which doesn't like X64. If you would like to check it out the link is here and they have a free trial to let you see if it works for you.
That said the new stuff in Win 7 frankly rocks and the memory management is just the tip of the iceberg. of course i wouldn't be surprised if MSFT cocks it up for Windows 8, heaven forbid they put out two good OSes in a row, hell the world would probably spin backwards.
Hey I'll be the first to admit these are about 60 pounds to far the wrong way, but sadly in our society ATM there NEVER seems to be a middle ground anymore. I mean look at what the fashion industry pushes as "sexy". They used to call it "crack sheik" until it turned out to many of the models were actually doing crack to keep that death camp look.
Personally I think we should be supporting that there are a multitude of colors in the rainbow, and just like it there are a multitude of different shapes of the female form that can look good. And the way they try to force feed that death camp look onto women, pushing frankly dangerous diets in every magazine geared to women while plastering the images of bony women all over the place is frankly obscene.
I mean you see guys in the "medium chubby" size as I call it all the time, you never see anyone making a big deal about it. Look at the dark haired one from "Shaun of the Dead" (Sorry I can't remember his name ATM) if it would have been a woman it would have been wall to wall fatty jokes, but his were all the fact he was a goof off.
So I say as long as the doc says you're healthy then leave things well enough alone. I'm about 60 over myself and the doc says I have better bloodwork than he does, had a full work up and am tip top. Sadly I still have to argue with my little Cherokee princess about this even though she is less than 50 over and likewise in tip top health simply because of all the stigma and negative light thrown onto women that don't follow the Hollywood skin n' bones standard.
So I think the rest of the world especially Hollywood needs to STFU and stop treating women like plastic Barbie dolls and more like people that comes in all sizes. And if Nimoy recreating the old masters in film highlights the problem and makes even one person not buy the bullshit? The I say you go Nimoy!
Well then allow me to retort: The ONLY errors and crashes I've seen with the new ATI is when you are going bleeding edge and you know what? The same goes for Nvidia. Bleeding edge isn't called that for nothing you know, and the smart money stay at least 3 months behind on BOTH sides to let them sort the driver issues out of new revs. But hell show me ANY place where the bleeding edge isn't flirting with disaster, that just goes with the course.
That is why I usually advise my customers to stick with the "sweet spots" which are usually a generation or two behind. I've just now started selling the HD5xxx cards and if a customer asks for best bang for the buck I recommend the HD48xx, especially the HD4850 which again i put my money (or in this case my GF's money, thanks sweetie!) where my mouth is. I don't sell ANY product I wouldn't use myself, period. I use myself as beta tester for all the hardware and software I recommend that way if anybody gets burned it is me and NOT the customer.
As for why not Nvidia? Two reasons: Bumpgate and power management. The Nvidia reaction to the bad rev was just sorry, no two ways about it. Instead of manning up to their problem like I give MSFT credit for with the 360, they first lied, then ignored, then tried to cheat and slip it under the rug by using "patches" that did dirty tricks like crank the fans up to 100% and leave them there in the hopes the card would get past warranty before shitting itself. If you like them as a company and they work for you I'm happy for you, but I have yet to hear anyone with a straight face claim Nvidia treated their customers well on that mess. hell they even tried to dump the chips in the channel by relabeling them, just sorry.
As for the second Nvidia has a problem with the arch IMHO, one I don't see them fixing anytime soon and which is one of the reasons IMHO they got out of the chipset business and is pushing themselves as GP-GPUs. You see an Nvidia chip is pretty much "all or nothing" in that it is blasting full bore (with the associated heat) or isn't doing anything at all, there really isn't much of anything in between.
With the ATI design they can flip stream processors on or off at will, which lets them scale up to meet demand and scale back when not required. This has been pretty well documented on various forums and developer sites if you wish to look it up. What this means is that laptops can ramp up and down to save power without needing two GPUs ala optimus, and on the desktop it brings lower electrical and cooling bills. When you look at the power draw of the new Nvidia chips and compare them to the same in AMD in many cases the differences can be pretty extreme, you really need to get into dual GPUs for AMD chips to be slamming down the juice like the Nvidia does.
But hey if it works for you I'm happy for you. I NEVER said Nvidia cards were shit, or weren't up to the task like a shill would. I simply listed as well as I could my reasons for using product A over product B and pointing out what I think the advantages are. But hell I used to be an Intel+Nvidia man, was for years, so I know that combo works. I just don't like the corporate policy behind one (Intel) and the way they deal with bad chips and power management with the other(nvidia) but I never said it didn't work, just that it doesn't work for me and those I support.
I don't know where you get your info from but we are talking family packs which...get this...are for your family! I know, what a concept. And if you can show me a SINGLE citation of MSFT banning or in ANY way hassling someone with an OEM I'll be happy to retract.
Because I have talked to MSFT support and was told as long as you don't try to drag the license from machine to machine (since OEM is tied to a particular box unlike retail) then all is golden. I figure if the guy on the support line says its good, its good. I have been using OEM since XP and NEVER had a single problem, not in the ones I kept nor in the ones I sold. Hell I was told as long as you are keeping the majority of the parts any upgrades or alterations is all good. I've switched the board and CPU while keeping the HDD and GPU and after a few minutes reactivating on the net all was good.
So don't blame us if your product doesn't compare favorably to Windows unless Windows costs hundreds, maybe that is a personal problem. Linux is the ONLY bunch I've ever seen that gets their ass handed to them year after year and NEVER ONCE asks themselves fundamental questions like "What is my competitors doing right that I'm doing wrong?" (Hint it is NOT a conspiracy) but instead just do a circular logic dance and delude themselves into thinking next year people will give up working drivers and GUIs for forums and CLI, yep that'll happen...when pigs fly south for the winter.
Yep like the pair we have in my state why would anyone live there with the big beautiful lake, large forest filed with nature like large herds of free roaming deer, yep just horrible.
Seriously it just shows how out of touch these CEOs are to what they run as I've been to the one in my home state and frankly it is a beautiful place. I have also met and talked to some of the guys that work there and they are incredibly serious when it comes to security and safety, the company even has a full reactor sim set up on the premises similar to a shuttle sim where they can run every kind of failure scenario until the worker reactions are automatic.
But if the CEOs are NIMBY, why would they expect any different from the public?
It isn't just a regular schedule thing! Let me give an example, while I have probably 30 games installed on my game drive at any one time I'll usually only be focused on one or two at a time, the rest are deals like Steam's midweek madness where I couldn't beat the price and I'll get around to them when I can.
Windows 7 knows this about me and has the essential.DLLs loaded for the games I'm using, so that when I'm watching the developer screens (that sadly are more and more becoming unskippable ) it quickly loads the chunks of the game into RAM to minimize HDD access. And I bet if you were to actually look at what you launch and when you have more habits than you'd care to admit, like when you like to check your mail or when you watch videos or listen to music.
So I'm telling you don't "bite the bullet" jump on Windows 7 with both feet and I bet you'll quickly love it. And this is from someone who HATED the fisher price XP UI and thought Vista looked like a bad DeviantArt theme and handled worse. I don't know how they managed to pull it off, and it wouldn't surprise me if they cocked it up for Windows 8, but Win 7 seems to be that rare mix between friendly for noobs while being even easier for old hands like myself.
Now as far as memory goes? If you have 2Gb it'll run fine and be responsive as hell, 4Gb it'll be great and crazy responsive, and 8Gb is just like nirvana IMO, and 2Gb stick are pretty reasonable as long as you aren't trying for say DDR 1. When I say "max out" I mean within reason, I don't mean go crazy ePeen money on it. I mean theoretically my board will hold 16Gb if I was to come up with 4 4Gb DDR 2 800MHz sticks, but the price/performance ratio just isn't worth it. If your board can take 4 2Gb sticks cool, get that . if not just put as many 2Gb sticks as it'll hold.
Oh a final word of advice for when you switch...Readyboost: Use it. Flash drives are so incredibly cheap now NOT using it is frankly just stupid, you are throwing away free performance for the price of a cheapo flash stick. I picked up an 8Gb flash on sale for $8.99 at Tigerdirect and I CAN tell the difference. What it does is turns any flash stick you assign to Readyboost into a poor man's SSD for random reads. Since random reads are where an SSD shines and where HDDs suck this in effect turns ANY HDD into a hybrid for cheap and with the size of the cache determined by you. It'll speed up your boot and shutdown as well as making random reads of often used files just crazy fast, and like Superfetch the more it has available for cache the more it can do for you. But with 8GB drives so dirt cheap it is an easy way to boost your machine on the budget.
So try Windows 7, the new memory management and better UI with breadcrumbs (man that is sweet, instantly hopping anywhere in a tree structure) and Explorer remembering the last 10 folders and making them one click away on the desktop is just too damned nice. And don't go nuts with the RAM, just look at the sweet spot on chips and max out on those. As I said 4Gb will give Win 7 plenty to work with (with all the bling and Aero on I'm using less than1GB for the OS) and 8Gb will just let it go nuts when it comes to caching. And as I said in the other post NO DRIVE will touch RAM in the foreseeable future, period.
Maybe I'm just too stuck in my ways, but after trying my ePeen 'must have benchmarks!' customers "gaming" mice I went back to my plain old boring ass Logitech 3 button and was happy. I find trying to keep up in my head what button is mapped to what too distracting, especially when I have most keyboard setups are all mapped the same and I know by feel where I am on the board. It is just easier for me to reach out a finger and pop the button on the keyboard while keeping the mice buttons the same three (shoot M1, reload M3, Zoom M2) on every game. Maybe its just me but I find that better than having funky buttons all over the mouse.
Now if I could just find a keyboard mapping routine that would let me set up Just Cause I to my beloved Just Cause 2's keyboard setup I'll be a happy camper. Otherwise trying to mentally remap from the JC 2 control Scheme is just too jarring so I'll have to wait until I'm done with 2 to pick up 1 which is a shame, as 1 has some cool features of its own and it'd be nice to switch back and forth.
But this and any other problems I've had with games in the past I doubt could be solved by piling buttons on my mouse. The keyboard is just more natural for this old greybeard. Now get off my lawn!
Well and I'd argue that on modern Windows the extra expense really isn't worth it for a lot of regular users. RAM is cheap and Windows 7 Superfetch will quickly learn what programs you launch and when, and lets face it no SSD beats RAM.
I maxed my board out at 8GB and with Superfetch frankly everything I normally use launches as fast as I click it since with my predictable behavior Windows 7 simply loads it into RAM at the appropriate time. Considering maxing out most boards costs less than $100 and hybrid sleep makes shut downs kinda pointless unless you have a program that requires serious I/O for the average user there simply isn't a point in going SSD, not when 2TB drives can be had for $80.
Too bad SSDs didn't come out 10 years ago as it would have been most welcome when everyone was stuck on IDE with tiny caches and lousy memory management, for the "Average Joe" with plenty of RAM, big caches on the HDDs, and Superfetch preloading programs into RAM based on time and usage patterns? Kinda pointless IMHO especially at the prices per GB.
The only ones I've sold have been to my ePeen "Must have the highest benchmarks!" gamer customers and playing with their PCs other than bootup I really couldn't feel a difference. That is why I've been telling my regular customers and those wanting new builds to max out on RAM first and then if they still have money to blow after getting the rest of their wish list get an SSD for an OS drive, because frankly if their choice is RAM or SSD I'd always advise the most RAM as it'll get more use.
Personally I think the loonies have pushed the sane out of the tent, kinda like what we have seen with politics. I mean I used to be able to come here and being a Windows builder have a nice discussion on the pluses/minuses of Windows and other OSes (my personal plaything, I even have an old G3 i got just to play with OSX on PPC) and even when we disagreed the posts were always thoughtful and you really needed to think.
Now you can have an article about Windows or OSX or hell even OS/2 and the "FOSSies" as I call them come out of the woodwork to thump their GNUBibles and spout the most unbelievable horseshit that even true believers would have trouble with the stench. For a good laugh go to this site TM Repository and see how many of these cliches you have run into here because frankly you'll be surprised how much of the FOSSie speak is so cliche they have a TM. Sadly the FOSSie RDF has long surpassed the one Jobs built, and frankly the worst Windows fanboi on his worst day can't even touch these guys.
So I have to agree 110% the quality here is severely going down. I've started hanging out at OSNews and other tech sites just hoping to find wherever the old/. crowd went to, it is like watching MySpace die its slow death here now. Instead of interesting arguments like NTFS VS EXT3 or POWER VS ARM VS x86-64 we get "U Suxorz! Our (insert product) is awesome and u sux!". Hell I like a good deep discussion but things here are now about as deep as a kiddy wading pool.
So if you find a place with decent OS discussions, let me know okay? Between fixes at the shop frankly I'd like something better to do than play Solitaire. And I'd support your honeypot idea 110%, the shillbots are getting pretty thick around here and are like having commercials dumped in the middle of the comments section,. And you can't even ABP them out because fanbois will mod down anyone that doesn't follow groupthink so if you don't stick with -1 you end up missing the good but controversial posts, although sadly those like every other intelligent post have been fewer and fewer of late. Where did everybody go, and can I go there too?
Ya know, up until Windows 7 I agreed 110% with old Steve, but not now. Maybe it was an accident, maybe it was the whole 1000 monkeys thing, but Windows 7 somehow has just the right mix of being friendly and intuitive for the noobs like my dad while still letting old hands like me work faster.
Damned if I can figure out how they did it, but while I hated the WinXP fisher price crap, and Vista just looked like a bad DeviantArt skin and behaved worse, Win 7 has my dad using more features in less than a month than he EVER did from XP, while making my work and play faster. Frankly I just love the breadcrumbs, the WMC, and WMP 12, and finally they got memory management right after all these damned years with Superfetch. It is just so damned nice to have 8Gb of RAM and actually be able to feel it in action because Win 7 preloads all my apps at the times I always use them so it is just click and go. Man that's nice. Frankly playing with a friends Macbook I don't think OSX SL is nearly as nice, and that's the first time I've ever thought that, so maybe old Steve just ain't got it anymore? hell it wouldn't surprise me if they completely bone Windows 8, heaven forbid they get two right in a row.
Which is why I just don't get the shilling. Shilling has always been an act of desperation in my book, a company on the ropes trying to drum up buzz, which just don't make any sense in this case. Sure WinPhone is DOA, but Win 7 is damned nice and doing great and the X360 pretty much owns this generation, so I just don't get it. I mean they have VS which has tons of developers locked up, a great OS for once, the 360 has finally got them in the living room, so NOW you shill? Where were they when Vista was stinkin up the joint?
Maybe you're right and it is some sort of bot software from MSFT R&D, because frankly it makes no damned sense, not only from the timing but from the posts themselves. They are ALL over the place, not really pushing any brand or trying to generate any buzz for a particular product. I mean usually even the lamest corporate shilling stays on message, like the Galaxy Tab crap, or the fake reviewer for bad movies, or the ultra lame-o PSP rap crap. But to me this is just head scratching weird and not the usual corporate shill. Maybe it is a bot hell I don't know.
It reminds me of those weird spams I would get a couple of years back where it was just some stream of consciousness haiku with no actual links in it so it was COMPLETELY pointless. Hell I even looked up the unadulterated spams on a couple of servers I was managing at the time to see if there were links being stripped but nope, just weird word salad, like poetry written by someone really stoned. Hell maybe that is what this is, someone at MSFT has gotten some really good shit and is just giggling at all the "WTF?" posts he is generating.
And they sure as hell don't give their friends Linux, not as long as MR "the kernel isn't designed, it grows like a virus LOL!" Linus Torvalds is in control, so your point is....you should spend $4000 to buy them Macbooks?
Don't forget the National Guard, we have a huge Armory in damned near every small town with frankly insane amounts of military hardware. Never in the history of this country have you had active soldiers taking oaths to turn and fight against the government if they ignore the constitution which is EXACTLY what you'd have if they rolled the tanks here.
Now what do you think all those soldiers at those armories would do, with the military being ordered to turn against their families? I'll tell what, because we are ALREADY seeing it right now. Where do you think those militias are getting all that nice hardware they are stocking up on? They are getting it from the National Guard, from patriots that are disgusted by the evil corporatist regime that is spreading through the halls of power like a cancer.
The democratic process is broken, irretrievably I'd argue, as the top 1%ers have rigged the laws, stacked the courts, and control the media, all to ensure their ever increasing wealth and power, laws that are so flagrantly against the constitution are passed without the batting on an eye, and the treasonous bribery is done now right out in the open because the wealthy are so drunken with their power they believe nobody can touch them.
But look to Egypt, Look to the October Russian Revolution, to see the future of America. You can't stomp on the masses while robbing them blind forever. While the average working poor pays something like 60%+ in taxes when you figure in all the excise taxes these pigs can't even stand the thought of paying their fair share on billions in profits which they use to further rig the process.
Never in our history has taxes been lower on the top 1% and the misery gets worse by the day as their eternal greed grows ever worse. Look up your history in times of high taxes on the rich you have growth of the entire economy because without the ability to hoard without being taxed they invest it and cause the economy to grow. Despite what the Repubs spew with lower taxes on the wealthy comes suffering across the economy as the desire to hoard overwhelms all and you end up with "double dutch" and other schemes to make sure they get to keep every cent.
But it is coming folks, look to the east, watch as it spreads. Look to your history never has huge wealth imbalances such as we see now ever been sustained for very long. It is simple math, the poor outnumber the rich by millions and their numbers increase by the minute, they have stopped believing in your system and see it for the sham that it is. just look at the polls to see how few believe in the sham that is voting anymore. Even your soldiers take oaths to turn against the country, to burn the village in order to save it. Look to the east, for it is coming my friends,look to the east.
I'd say it is the fault of the nuclear industry for failing to educate the masses that there are choices now besides the big ass clunky reactors like Japan has.
With the small Thorium reactors you can have a reactor in a shipping crate, just bury it when you are finished with it and which would power a decent medium sized city easily and you can simply add more as needed. With the smaller size comes much less risk and they would be much easier to harden to survive even the kind of unpredictable catastrophes like struck Japan, and they also need to be showing how well our current reactors are doing even though most are 40+ years old.
So if you want someone to blame blame the nuclear industry, because if they were educating the masses on their options instead of singing "oh poor me" or completely ignoring the public they might have a more favorable outlook.
Also having a CEO that isn't a greedy pussy and bragged about having his family home in sight of the reactor might do wonders, as it never ceases to amaze me how many CEOs talk about how nice their plants are and then live as far away from them as possible. Putting their asses with their mouths are certainly wouldn't hurt their image none.
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The truth? You can't handle the truth! If we were speaking truth it would be thus: Apple is run by a control freak, Android is fragmented to hell and one of several products the parent company plays fast and loose with the rules for, WinPhone is dead last and will probably stay there, WebOS is nowhere to be seen ATM, and RIM is dead, they just don't know it yet!
In actuality you'll get "Android is teh shit because it is teh FOSS and thus is good (though not really, just the kernel and even then Google hasn't released the latest version) and isn't nor has it ever been fragmented (ignore those 4 versions on the shelves!)" "iOS invented everything and Steve is a God, never an asshat (ignore the arbitrary rules that don't seem to apply to itself) and their prices are NEVER high and are competitive with the other products (if you don't count the 60%+ profit margins that is) and is great!" and of course "WinPhone is a completely new idea and thus will take time (ignore all those WinCE versions behind the curtain!) to find an audience (who will run over WinPhone to get the latest iShiny) who will appreciate its ease of use and synergy (Oh God, if we don't get Halo running on this thing we're fucked! Is my resume up to date?) and like previous products simply needs to build momentum (like Zune) and find its niche (like Kin)" and finally RIM "We're not dead yet! we feel better, we really do! we feel happy, we feel happy" (bashes in back of head and throws on the cart)
So as you can see, reality and fanboyism and bullshit rarely do meet in the middle. So expect praise of the latest iShiny, Google Honeycomb Hideout, and WP7 which like WinCE will later be known as WiPe, as in you wipe your ass with it before finding an iPhone.
I've had the same problem with FF since the 3.6.xx branch, and it don't seem to be any better on FF 4. I have a little Sempron nettop I use for daily browsing as it uses almost no power and is whisper quiet and after 3 to 4 hours FF will suck up all 1.5Gb of RAM and start hitting the swap.
That is just unacceptable in this day and age, so I've decided to switch to Comodo Dragon which if you don't trust Chrome or want the phoning home junk maybe you ought to try. It is based on Chromium, has some really nice security features like domain validation and the option to use Comodo DNS if you like, and unlike FF when I close tabs I get the memory they were using back, and has the ability to run all the Chrome extensions like ABP and ForecastFox. So give it a try, it is 100% free, runs good, and seems to be pretty solid.
As for TFA while I'm glad MSFT is improving IE, simply because so many use it so improvements to IE power consumption will have a big impact, frankly if it only used a single watt I wouldn't touch IE with a 50 foot pole. After spending years cleaning up the mess that was IE 6 thanks to MSFT just walking away and leaving all those users boned I'm afraid I just can't bring myself to use it. Fool me once and all that. Funny though how much Opera blows through on startup, I thought Presto was supposed to be pretty light?
They rolled out a new feature and ...surprise surprise! There was bugs! Some of the islands in the South Pacific were also affected IIRC, are they having revolutions and someone forgot to tell us?
As for why there, well duh! You are talking about a whole bunch of different languages, most of which I'm betting really aren't that high on their "spend resources on QA" checklist. And if they were doing it intentionally, they wouldn't have left it trivial to turn back on by either checking a checkbox on startup or using a simple FF plugin. And this was what...six days from bug found to bug fixed, with workarounds announced at the time of the bug? Paranoid much?
So if you want to blame them for not doing as much QA as they should before they rolled out the update? Total agreement, they should have done more testing before flipping the switch. But trying to say this was some nefarious plot is a little too much tinfoil hattery friend. I mean I thought everyone here agreed that MSFT 1.0 equals seriously buggy? Isn't that why "Wait for SP1" is practically a mantra?
I hate to say it, but personally I feel when it gets to the rioting portion of the fall the feds will just quit pretending and accept our fate to be the next "bad guys" on the world's stage. Germany got to go twice, now its our turn. The bitch is a smart leader could probably pull it off with almost ZERO interference. How? Deals baby, deals.
The Chinese want Africa, its resources would help China a lot...so give it to them. Help yourselves our Chinese friends. Taiwan? Fuck 'em, help yourself. in return you stay our buddy or stay out of the fight, your choice. That leaves our former enemy mother Russia and the Eu, and we could take care of both with one shot. Old Putin is a classic Ruskie, and would just loove the old USSR back...so let him have it. Hey Putin buddy, its ALL yours, help yourself. in return you stay on our side or stay out, you choice again. The Eu will be too busy shitting itself over the return of the USSR to say much of anything. Seriously what are they gonna do? They have what...maybe 4 aircraft carriers put together? We got 11 baby, you lose!
So what does the USA get, to quell those rioting mobs? Why the whole damned north and south hemispheres of course! We'll tell the Canadians to keep those oil sands pumping if they don't want to say hello to Mr air strike, they'll STFU. And there are a HELL of a lot of resources in South America, more than enough to make the USA fat with wealth and give the poor plenty of "bread and jobs". Cue the patriotic music, wave the flag, stick a fork baby!
Who would stand against us if China and the USSR are sticking with us? England...ha! They're on an island, wolf packs showed how to shut them down. The French will bitch, who cares, same for Italy. Germany will be too busy trying to control the western EU and worrying about old grudges from the east to deal with us.
Sad to say that is what I figure we'll end up doing. I can't see those in power going silently into that good night, not with all that killer hardware, and I don't see them being stupid enough to roll the tanks here and start another French revolution. So they'll need resources to quell the masses but quick, and a false flag blaming one of our old enemies (Hi Chavez!) would be just the excuse to rally folks around the flag. Then once the big three have what we want, we can split the middle east and anything left over. Combine the Chinese Army with the USA and USSR? Make the Axis look like third stringers.
Well to be fair, and while personally I think it will be Android/iOS neck and neck with WP7 or WebOS third, the key to whether or not MSFT can pull this off will be bundle deals. if MSFT gets Nokia to put out a WinPhone with a kick ass GPU by holiday season AND manage to tie Halo in, like say having a Halo Phone Game that boosts your characters and earns achievements for the game at home? THEN they might be able to pull this off.
Because to be fair Windows 7 plays REAL nice with the X360. I've set up the Win 7/X360 combo for a couple of customers and it really is butt simple to make it a kick ass multimedia setup, so if they can "pull an Apple" and tie everything together, so say your WinPhone can watch anything you have at home by using the WinPC as a slingbox, while tying gaming between X360 and WinPhone together? Then yes I can see MSFT taking second place, especially if their successor to the X360 kicks ass.
But that is gonna be a hell of a big IF and will depend on the suits at MSFT not cocking things up. MSFT has a history of screwing the pooch and not "getting it", see Zune, Kin, Vista, etc, but the basic parts they need are there, the question is can they bundle them together in a smooth and easy to use package. While they do have a shot, and Android proves you can come along and change the game if you are in the right place with the right product, I frankly wouldn't bet the farm on it.
My personal prediction is thus: Android will burn enough folks with CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) that they won't be able to hold first, and Apple's traditionally high prices will make a nice opening for someone in the middle, but if HP can keep from screwing the pooch WebOS could be the one to take that slot, at the very least with their rep with businesses they could be the one to finish off RIM and take over the business phone market. So final call...Apple and Android, followed by either WebOS or WinPhone with Blackberry DOA.
See it is THAT, that right there, that made me have to quit corporate. They would have the thing running like a Swiss watch, have a guy that really knew his shit and had it running good, and what would they do? They would fire him or let him get away by not paying him decently and then have to bring in consultants at three times what it would have cost to simply pay the first guy and then waste just as much trying to bring another guy up to speed.
I knew it was time to get out when I just couldn't plaster a smile and lie my ass off anymore. I found myself saying things like "Is the point of this exercise to waste truckloads of cash? because if so you're doing a bang up job, bravo!" which needless to say didn't go over every well, but the endless mountains of stupid was just more than I could take.
And it wasn't like you had plan A, they had plan B, and both had their merits. Nope it was "We'll royally fuck the company by firing everyone with any experience, thus saving money on salaries!" and when you'd point out that the reason they got paid well is because they made money for the company and now that they were gone you had fuck all in the way of experienced workers and the place was quickly going to shit, you'd just get this blank fucking look on their face like the thought there was a day after today was too much of a concept for them to grasp. Un-fucking-believable.
And we've seen huge corps destroy the entire company with that same logic fault, like how Circuit City when faced with competition from Best Buy fired ALL the experienced sellers and thus saved money for a single quarter while giving all the business to Best Buy thanks to THEIR VERY OWN WORKERS which were simply snatched up by BB.
So if you are still in Dilbert land you have my sympathies my friend. But being cursed with an IQ of 156 and a severe case of logic made me just unsuitable for doing Dilbertisms. I couldn't just dig a hole on Mon to fill in back in on Tues because some PHB thought it would develop synergy or be 6 sigma or some other tripe, I just couldn't take it.
The funny (or sad, depending on how you very tons of tax dollars wasted) is that the whole child porn things is a red herring as well, at least according to a friend that works at the state crime lab in charge of dealing with the child porn busts (he keeps trying to recruit me, but there ain't enough brain bleach to take THAT job) as according to him all they bust on the net are social retards that frankly haven't touched anyone but themselves and are wanking off to the same old shit that has been floating around since the days of BBS.
So what do the actual child molesters, the sick bastards you really want to catch to actually save and protect kids use? Why its USPS that's right, the fucking mail. They only use the net long enough to set up a few contacts (which according to my friend they have set up the "entrance fee" in a way no cop will be able to pass, like abuse a kid in the manner they describe with an object they tell you to get and you only have X number of days to provide the video) and from them on its encrypted DVDs and mail drops all the way. if they don't receive word from a contact in X number of time they consider that link dead and move on, no trails.
He said all the cops KNOW about it, thanks to an ex cop they busted that had tons of the stuff unencrypted on his drive. Of course knowing and being able to do shit are two different things, we are talking DVDs with 2048 bit encryption, drives set up with Truecrypt inside Truecrypt, drive wiping on X number of wrong login attempts, pretty slick stuff.
But he said the only thing they get on the net anymore is the Chris Hansen total morons and a whole shitload of social retards that have literally mountains of DVDs full of Internet porn and have watched so damned much porn they can't even get a hard on to anything but the sickest shit. According to him the feds care about stuff like Tor because they figure your "hillbilly homegrown terrorist type" would probably use it, but figure any seriously hardcore bunch is probably using what the CP guys use.
Personally I think its a shame so much taxpayer money is wasted on catching the social retards and the Chris Hansen morons instead of trying to set up global networks to track down and bust the ones actually raping kids, but the politicians like seeing big numbers so there you go. I don't see how the guy does it myself, having to sit 8 hours a day and look at that shit? Not enough brain bleach in the world to take that job, and I sure as hell couldn't be all calm and shit when testifying against some guy who had actually raped his 6 year old and filmed it like my friend had to do last year, personally my urge to beat the shit out of him would be too great.
But if you run a Tor exit node or Freenet on a home connection you're bug fucking nuts, as the cops SOP is to kick down your door, charge you based on the IP logs, haul away ALL your shit, which you may or may not get back three to four years from now when they get around to it, that is if it doesn't get lost, and meanwhile the papers have already run your name as "suspected kiddie fiddler" so everyone thinks your a monster. In this red scare climate when it comes to CP you'd have to be insane to touch that software, at least if you live in the USA. Maybe things are saner in Europe, I don't know.
Oh that's why I don't work corporate anymore. All the Dilbert bullshit had me pounding my logical head against a wall too damned much. I don't make as much running my own little shop but I don't have the ulcers and headaches anymore either.
A perfect example of Dilbert bullshit was that law office. I told them I didn't have the time to manage their network and pointed them towards not one, not two, but THREE different IT guys, all with years of experience and know how, that could do a bang up job, so what do they do? Some bean counter decides actual IT guys are "a waste of the budget" and hires some ass clown his cousin knows that is a "whiz with computers". Let me tell you what I find when I'm called in a year or so later after they fire this joker, you'll LOL!
I get there and find the clown has thrown away ALL the PCs that I had purchased for them not two years ago as "too slow junk" (They were standard HP business machines, and NOT cheap ones I might add, just good quality office boxes) and replaced them with home built gaming rigs yes you read that right, home built Tigerdirect gaming rigs, with not a SINGLE part identical on ANY of them, so you can give up imaging or pushing updates. I had to shitcan the whole lot. Then to top it off he apparently didn't understand the standard corporate network setup I had left (Cisco Router hooked into standard switches, classic corporate setup) so he again shitcanned the whole thing and replaced the network with....get this shit.... over a dozen home ISP accounts and Dlink routers, you know, the shitty blue POS ones you'd get at Staples? Yeah those things. Over a DOZEN different ISP accounts with FOUR, count them four, different ISPs, as he'd run out of bandwidth he'd just add another Dlink and another ISP account. Dumbass!
So final damage? probably $50,000 worth of machines and hardware I'd originally setup GONE, just tossed in the trash, braintrust didn't even have enough sense to keep or sell any of it even though it was ALL still under warranty, and then another $50,000 to shitcan ALL of his gaming junk (which I kept and sold, after I explained how fucked they were they didn't want it nor did they want to pay me to auction it off (surprise) so into my truck it went) and rebuild the network. Did anyone besides the clown get fired? Nope, from what I understand the original beancounter got a raise for "savings on the budget" LOL and then they passed the costs of the TWO networks onto their clients. And before I left they were already bitching about how much a real IT manager cost so I wouldn't be surprised if they did the dance ALL over again!
It was shit like that that made me get out of corporate. I felt like the cave painter in "History of the World: Part 1" where he would paint this masterpiece and then some retard would come along and piss all over it. The levels of short sightedness, waste, and just mind numbing stupid were just too much for this logical brained IT guy to take anymore. Now I strictly fix boxes and deal with people that actually listen to me which while it don't pay as well is a hell of a lot less headache inducing.
Good thing to know I'm not the only one preaching max RAM. I became a convert when 512Mb of PC100 fell into my lap like manna from heaven (a corporate client with more money than brains bought two 256Mb sticks, not knowing they won't fit in his machine, and rather than send them back just handed them to me, sweet!) at a time when 128Mb was the norm. The difference in Win2K Pro (old faithful. I miss old Win2K) was like night and day. That machine is still going BTW, upgraded it to WinXP 5 years ago and sold it and last I heard the checkout girl at the local grocery store is using it as her daily machine. You couldn't hardly kill those old 1.1Ghz P3s.
As for gaming RAM unless you are gonna seriously OC it is just a waste of money. Funny thing is I got 2 2Gb sticks of gaming RAM on the cheap and it actually slowed down my machine since it uses funky non spec RAM timings, so instead of running it at 800Mhz I'm having to run it at something like 766Mhz as that was the only timing I could get it to sync up with my 2Gb of "normal" RAM. But I got 4Gb for $35 on sale so I can't complain, and the heat spreaders do look cool.
As for GPUs I've been recommending the HD48xx series, they are going for insanely cheap right now and with a 256Mb memory bus they can get some serious FPS. Hell Newegg was selling the 1Gb HD4850 for just $43 after MIR! Hell you can't get a x5xx card for THAT cheap! If you're a Linux guy you might want to check them out, as they were released with Linux support and full specs OOTB and from what I understand the support for them has gotten pretty good.
Which is what I find seriously scary about TOR and Freenet. Has anyone even tried the "plausible deniability" defense that Freenet brags about? because from what I've seen of CP laws (IANAL of course) the problem is it doesn't say you have to have specifically viewed it to be distributing it. If they trace CP coming from your machine I haven't seen ANY statute that says you can't be charged if you didn't view it, you simply have to have facilitated its distribution.
So has anyone tested this in court? How much did the poor soul that got to be the test case end up out in lawyer fees? Because as much as I support freedom of speech I also have a family and while I probably have enough spare bandwidth at the shop to run it spending the next three years in a cell waiting on a court date or trying to come up with a couple of hundred thousand to get a decent lawyer while sitting in said cell doesn't seem like a good way to spend my time, thanks anyway.
To me this is the problem with relying on IP addresses as the laws and reality don't match when it comes to the tech, and while we all support helping those in oppressive regimes all it takes is one asshat or troll pushing CP with the current witchhunt climate to give you a seriously bad day. Hell I wouldn't trust the average jury to even understand what an IP address is, much less onion routing or distributed computing. And the fact that Freenet uses some of your HDD for data you have NO control over just makes this stuff even scarier IMHO, as you can't even honestly claim there is no CP on your PC, as you honestly don't know.
Not to mention how much oversight and protection is there from a MITM working on the inside of your local ISP? I had to clean up the mess at a law office once where one of the asshat IT guys had set up his own file sharing and Quake server on the backend, and frankly if he hadn't been caught surfing pron by having a PHB literally walk in on him he'd be there today and frankly I think he had more oversight than many of the contract guys at my local ISPs.
While we'd all like to think our ISP is at least run in a professional manner, especially when we are talking about shit like this that can drag you into court for years or even throw you in PMITA prison, actually having contact with some of the guys working local offices makes me believe this is about as far from the case as can be. Most of the ones I've dealt with are contract hires that frankly really don't give a fuck WHAT is going on, as long as they get their check.
Would it surprise me if one of these guys wanted to do something illegal and just set himself up a little box in the back? Not at all and it would probably be damned hard to prove where the IP address in question terminated 4 years ago last Tuesday and THAT I find scary as hell. How many times does your dynamic address change? Mine changes practically every time the wind blows and my local ISP wants ass raping prices for a static address.
But considering I've had to deal with these guys for some of my business clients and got told "And?" when I pointed out more than a dozen illegal splices in his line frankly I wouldn't trust these guys to give me an honest bill, much less hand over evidence that is supposed to stand up in a court of law. There is just too little oversight and too much lowest bidder going on, at least in my area.
I mean for the love of Pete I've had to deal with a WISP that saw nothing wrong in ALL PCs on a node showing up in network neighborhood and having all shares accessible and we are supposed to trust these people to give data that could cost you years of court and/or prison time?
But you see that is what makes it so nice as it is completely your choice as you have a simple button the gives you shutdown/sleep/logoff and nobody forces you to choose one over the other. So if you know you're not coming back? Go for shutdown. Need to get back quickly? go for hybrid sleep.
And if the reason you don't use Windows is because you have a Mac, hey they do make nice designs, old Steve always had good taste in industrial design. If it is because you use Linux? I'm glad you have all that free time to deal with the fiddly bits but I don't. I get paid to deal with fiddly bits 8 to 10 hours a day, I sure as hell ain't doing it on my free time. Maybe if they'd give Linus "The kernel isn't designed it grows like a virus LOL!" Torvalds a good firing and gave it a stable ABI for drivers like every other OS from Solaris to OS/2 has had for a decade it wouldn't be such a PITA, but when you buy a Dell Ubuntu netbook and you can't even use the standard repos because the drivers break? Dude that is seriously fucked up.
Hybrid sleep is kinda like the way Macs do it in that it writes the RAM to HDD but unlike the Mac which only writes to the HDD if the battery is getting low (IIRC) the hybrid sleep on Win 7 dumps the contents of RAM to a file like hibernate while keeping just the used pages alive in RAM while powering everything else down.
What this does is it gives you the instant on of sleep while making power failures a non issue because you can literally yank the cord or pull the battery and it STILL gives you an advantage over a cold boot by only having to reload the previous state. When you combine this with Readyboost and Superfetch it makes cold boots pointless and it will intelligently decide which to do based on your situation. Like if you are out and on battery it will most likely simply hibernate, if you are plugged in it will go to sleep, pull the plug and it is back to hibernate, all with no user intervention.
So you really ought to give it a try, as the new memory management is frankly top notch. And this is coming from someone that HATED the fisher price UI of XP and the way it would waste RAM by leaving it free while hitting swap and thought Vista sucked the big wet titty. In fact I advise users if they are still on XP to buy a RAMDrive program which lets you map Swap to RAM thus keeping XP from wasting it by leaving huge swaths idle for no good reason.
Nice side effect is that the one I recommend allows you to beat the 3.2GB XP 32bit barrier by using PAE to map swap to the unused memory, thus letting you have more than 4Gb of RAM in XP. It is nice for those that need to dual boot for some ancient legacy app that don't play nice with modern OSes. I use it myself to keep my old copy of Cubase which doesn't like X64. If you would like to check it out the link is here and they have a free trial to let you see if it works for you.
That said the new stuff in Win 7 frankly rocks and the memory management is just the tip of the iceberg. of course i wouldn't be surprised if MSFT cocks it up for Windows 8, heaven forbid they put out two good OSes in a row, hell the world would probably spin backwards.
Hey I'll be the first to admit these are about 60 pounds to far the wrong way, but sadly in our society ATM there NEVER seems to be a middle ground anymore. I mean look at what the fashion industry pushes as "sexy". They used to call it "crack sheik" until it turned out to many of the models were actually doing crack to keep that death camp look.
Personally I think we should be supporting that there are a multitude of colors in the rainbow, and just like it there are a multitude of different shapes of the female form that can look good. And the way they try to force feed that death camp look onto women, pushing frankly dangerous diets in every magazine geared to women while plastering the images of bony women all over the place is frankly obscene.
I mean you see guys in the "medium chubby" size as I call it all the time, you never see anyone making a big deal about it. Look at the dark haired one from "Shaun of the Dead" (Sorry I can't remember his name ATM) if it would have been a woman it would have been wall to wall fatty jokes, but his were all the fact he was a goof off.
So I say as long as the doc says you're healthy then leave things well enough alone. I'm about 60 over myself and the doc says I have better bloodwork than he does, had a full work up and am tip top. Sadly I still have to argue with my little Cherokee princess about this even though she is less than 50 over and likewise in tip top health simply because of all the stigma and negative light thrown onto women that don't follow the Hollywood skin n' bones standard.
So I think the rest of the world especially Hollywood needs to STFU and stop treating women like plastic Barbie dolls and more like people that comes in all sizes. And if Nimoy recreating the old masters in film highlights the problem and makes even one person not buy the bullshit? The I say you go Nimoy!
Well then allow me to retort: The ONLY errors and crashes I've seen with the new ATI is when you are going bleeding edge and you know what? The same goes for Nvidia. Bleeding edge isn't called that for nothing you know, and the smart money stay at least 3 months behind on BOTH sides to let them sort the driver issues out of new revs. But hell show me ANY place where the bleeding edge isn't flirting with disaster, that just goes with the course.
That is why I usually advise my customers to stick with the "sweet spots" which are usually a generation or two behind. I've just now started selling the HD5xxx cards and if a customer asks for best bang for the buck I recommend the HD48xx, especially the HD4850 which again i put my money (or in this case my GF's money, thanks sweetie!) where my mouth is. I don't sell ANY product I wouldn't use myself, period. I use myself as beta tester for all the hardware and software I recommend that way if anybody gets burned it is me and NOT the customer.
As for why not Nvidia? Two reasons: Bumpgate and power management. The Nvidia reaction to the bad rev was just sorry, no two ways about it. Instead of manning up to their problem like I give MSFT credit for with the 360, they first lied, then ignored, then tried to cheat and slip it under the rug by using "patches" that did dirty tricks like crank the fans up to 100% and leave them there in the hopes the card would get past warranty before shitting itself. If you like them as a company and they work for you I'm happy for you, but I have yet to hear anyone with a straight face claim Nvidia treated their customers well on that mess. hell they even tried to dump the chips in the channel by relabeling them, just sorry.
As for the second Nvidia has a problem with the arch IMHO, one I don't see them fixing anytime soon and which is one of the reasons IMHO they got out of the chipset business and is pushing themselves as GP-GPUs. You see an Nvidia chip is pretty much "all or nothing" in that it is blasting full bore (with the associated heat) or isn't doing anything at all, there really isn't much of anything in between.
With the ATI design they can flip stream processors on or off at will, which lets them scale up to meet demand and scale back when not required. This has been pretty well documented on various forums and developer sites if you wish to look it up. What this means is that laptops can ramp up and down to save power without needing two GPUs ala optimus, and on the desktop it brings lower electrical and cooling bills. When you look at the power draw of the new Nvidia chips and compare them to the same in AMD in many cases the differences can be pretty extreme, you really need to get into dual GPUs for AMD chips to be slamming down the juice like the Nvidia does.
But hey if it works for you I'm happy for you. I NEVER said Nvidia cards were shit, or weren't up to the task like a shill would. I simply listed as well as I could my reasons for using product A over product B and pointing out what I think the advantages are. But hell I used to be an Intel+Nvidia man, was for years, so I know that combo works. I just don't like the corporate policy behind one (Intel) and the way they deal with bad chips and power management with the other(nvidia) but I never said it didn't work, just that it doesn't work for me and those I support.
I don't know where you get your info from but we are talking family packs which...get this...are for your family! I know, what a concept. And if you can show me a SINGLE citation of MSFT banning or in ANY way hassling someone with an OEM I'll be happy to retract.
Because I have talked to MSFT support and was told as long as you don't try to drag the license from machine to machine (since OEM is tied to a particular box unlike retail) then all is golden. I figure if the guy on the support line says its good, its good. I have been using OEM since XP and NEVER had a single problem, not in the ones I kept nor in the ones I sold. Hell I was told as long as you are keeping the majority of the parts any upgrades or alterations is all good. I've switched the board and CPU while keeping the HDD and GPU and after a few minutes reactivating on the net all was good.
So don't blame us if your product doesn't compare favorably to Windows unless Windows costs hundreds, maybe that is a personal problem. Linux is the ONLY bunch I've ever seen that gets their ass handed to them year after year and NEVER ONCE asks themselves fundamental questions like "What is my competitors doing right that I'm doing wrong?" (Hint it is NOT a conspiracy) but instead just do a circular logic dance and delude themselves into thinking next year people will give up working drivers and GUIs for forums and CLI, yep that'll happen...when pigs fly south for the winter.
Yep like the pair we have in my state why would anyone live there with the big beautiful lake, large forest filed with nature like large herds of free roaming deer, yep just horrible.
Seriously it just shows how out of touch these CEOs are to what they run as I've been to the one in my home state and frankly it is a beautiful place. I have also met and talked to some of the guys that work there and they are incredibly serious when it comes to security and safety, the company even has a full reactor sim set up on the premises similar to a shuttle sim where they can run every kind of failure scenario until the worker reactions are automatic.
But if the CEOs are NIMBY, why would they expect any different from the public?
It isn't just a regular schedule thing! Let me give an example, while I have probably 30 games installed on my game drive at any one time I'll usually only be focused on one or two at a time, the rest are deals like Steam's midweek madness where I couldn't beat the price and I'll get around to them when I can.
Windows 7 knows this about me and has the essential .DLLs loaded for the games I'm using, so that when I'm watching the developer screens (that sadly are more and more becoming unskippable ) it quickly loads the chunks of the game into RAM to minimize HDD access. And I bet if you were to actually look at what you launch and when you have more habits than you'd care to admit, like when you like to check your mail or when you watch videos or listen to music.
So I'm telling you don't "bite the bullet" jump on Windows 7 with both feet and I bet you'll quickly love it. And this is from someone who HATED the fisher price XP UI and thought Vista looked like a bad DeviantArt theme and handled worse. I don't know how they managed to pull it off, and it wouldn't surprise me if they cocked it up for Windows 8, but Win 7 seems to be that rare mix between friendly for noobs while being even easier for old hands like myself.
Now as far as memory goes? If you have 2Gb it'll run fine and be responsive as hell, 4Gb it'll be great and crazy responsive, and 8Gb is just like nirvana IMO, and 2Gb stick are pretty reasonable as long as you aren't trying for say DDR 1. When I say "max out" I mean within reason, I don't mean go crazy ePeen money on it. I mean theoretically my board will hold 16Gb if I was to come up with 4 4Gb DDR 2 800MHz sticks, but the price/performance ratio just isn't worth it. If your board can take 4 2Gb sticks cool, get that . if not just put as many 2Gb sticks as it'll hold.
Oh a final word of advice for when you switch...Readyboost: Use it. Flash drives are so incredibly cheap now NOT using it is frankly just stupid, you are throwing away free performance for the price of a cheapo flash stick. I picked up an 8Gb flash on sale for $8.99 at Tigerdirect and I CAN tell the difference. What it does is turns any flash stick you assign to Readyboost into a poor man's SSD for random reads. Since random reads are where an SSD shines and where HDDs suck this in effect turns ANY HDD into a hybrid for cheap and with the size of the cache determined by you. It'll speed up your boot and shutdown as well as making random reads of often used files just crazy fast, and like Superfetch the more it has available for cache the more it can do for you. But with 8GB drives so dirt cheap it is an easy way to boost your machine on the budget.
So try Windows 7, the new memory management and better UI with breadcrumbs (man that is sweet, instantly hopping anywhere in a tree structure) and Explorer remembering the last 10 folders and making them one click away on the desktop is just too damned nice. And don't go nuts with the RAM, just look at the sweet spot on chips and max out on those. As I said 4Gb will give Win 7 plenty to work with (with all the bling and Aero on I'm using less than1GB for the OS) and 8Gb will just let it go nuts when it comes to caching. And as I said in the other post NO DRIVE will touch RAM in the foreseeable future, period.
Maybe I'm just too stuck in my ways, but after trying my ePeen 'must have benchmarks!' customers "gaming" mice I went back to my plain old boring ass Logitech 3 button and was happy. I find trying to keep up in my head what button is mapped to what too distracting, especially when I have most keyboard setups are all mapped the same and I know by feel where I am on the board. It is just easier for me to reach out a finger and pop the button on the keyboard while keeping the mice buttons the same three (shoot M1, reload M3, Zoom M2) on every game. Maybe its just me but I find that better than having funky buttons all over the mouse.
Now if I could just find a keyboard mapping routine that would let me set up Just Cause I to my beloved Just Cause 2's keyboard setup I'll be a happy camper. Otherwise trying to mentally remap from the JC 2 control Scheme is just too jarring so I'll have to wait until I'm done with 2 to pick up 1 which is a shame, as 1 has some cool features of its own and it'd be nice to switch back and forth.
But this and any other problems I've had with games in the past I doubt could be solved by piling buttons on my mouse. The keyboard is just more natural for this old greybeard. Now get off my lawn!
Well and I'd argue that on modern Windows the extra expense really isn't worth it for a lot of regular users. RAM is cheap and Windows 7 Superfetch will quickly learn what programs you launch and when, and lets face it no SSD beats RAM.
I maxed my board out at 8GB and with Superfetch frankly everything I normally use launches as fast as I click it since with my predictable behavior Windows 7 simply loads it into RAM at the appropriate time. Considering maxing out most boards costs less than $100 and hybrid sleep makes shut downs kinda pointless unless you have a program that requires serious I/O for the average user there simply isn't a point in going SSD, not when 2TB drives can be had for $80.
Too bad SSDs didn't come out 10 years ago as it would have been most welcome when everyone was stuck on IDE with tiny caches and lousy memory management, for the "Average Joe" with plenty of RAM, big caches on the HDDs, and Superfetch preloading programs into RAM based on time and usage patterns? Kinda pointless IMHO especially at the prices per GB.
The only ones I've sold have been to my ePeen "Must have the highest benchmarks!" gamer customers and playing with their PCs other than bootup I really couldn't feel a difference. That is why I've been telling my regular customers and those wanting new builds to max out on RAM first and then if they still have money to blow after getting the rest of their wish list get an SSD for an OS drive, because frankly if their choice is RAM or SSD I'd always advise the most RAM as it'll get more use.
Personally I think the loonies have pushed the sane out of the tent, kinda like what we have seen with politics. I mean I used to be able to come here and being a Windows builder have a nice discussion on the pluses/minuses of Windows and other OSes (my personal plaything, I even have an old G3 i got just to play with OSX on PPC) and even when we disagreed the posts were always thoughtful and you really needed to think.
Now you can have an article about Windows or OSX or hell even OS/2 and the "FOSSies" as I call them come out of the woodwork to thump their GNUBibles and spout the most unbelievable horseshit that even true believers would have trouble with the stench. For a good laugh go to this site TM Repository and see how many of these cliches you have run into here because frankly you'll be surprised how much of the FOSSie speak is so cliche they have a TM. Sadly the FOSSie RDF has long surpassed the one Jobs built, and frankly the worst Windows fanboi on his worst day can't even touch these guys.
So I have to agree 110% the quality here is severely going down. I've started hanging out at OSNews and other tech sites just hoping to find wherever the old /. crowd went to, it is like watching MySpace die its slow death here now. Instead of interesting arguments like NTFS VS EXT3 or POWER VS ARM VS x86-64 we get "U Suxorz! Our (insert product) is awesome and u sux!". Hell I like a good deep discussion but things here are now about as deep as a kiddy wading pool.
So if you find a place with decent OS discussions, let me know okay? Between fixes at the shop frankly I'd like something better to do than play Solitaire. And I'd support your honeypot idea 110%, the shillbots are getting pretty thick around here and are like having commercials dumped in the middle of the comments section,. And you can't even ABP them out because fanbois will mod down anyone that doesn't follow groupthink so if you don't stick with -1 you end up missing the good but controversial posts, although sadly those like every other intelligent post have been fewer and fewer of late. Where did everybody go, and can I go there too?
Ya know, up until Windows 7 I agreed 110% with old Steve, but not now. Maybe it was an accident, maybe it was the whole 1000 monkeys thing, but Windows 7 somehow has just the right mix of being friendly and intuitive for the noobs like my dad while still letting old hands like me work faster.
Damned if I can figure out how they did it, but while I hated the WinXP fisher price crap, and Vista just looked like a bad DeviantArt skin and behaved worse, Win 7 has my dad using more features in less than a month than he EVER did from XP, while making my work and play faster. Frankly I just love the breadcrumbs, the WMC, and WMP 12, and finally they got memory management right after all these damned years with Superfetch. It is just so damned nice to have 8Gb of RAM and actually be able to feel it in action because Win 7 preloads all my apps at the times I always use them so it is just click and go. Man that's nice. Frankly playing with a friends Macbook I don't think OSX SL is nearly as nice, and that's the first time I've ever thought that, so maybe old Steve just ain't got it anymore? hell it wouldn't surprise me if they completely bone Windows 8, heaven forbid they get two right in a row.
Which is why I just don't get the shilling. Shilling has always been an act of desperation in my book, a company on the ropes trying to drum up buzz, which just don't make any sense in this case. Sure WinPhone is DOA, but Win 7 is damned nice and doing great and the X360 pretty much owns this generation, so I just don't get it. I mean they have VS which has tons of developers locked up, a great OS for once, the 360 has finally got them in the living room, so NOW you shill? Where were they when Vista was stinkin up the joint?
Maybe you're right and it is some sort of bot software from MSFT R&D, because frankly it makes no damned sense, not only from the timing but from the posts themselves. They are ALL over the place, not really pushing any brand or trying to generate any buzz for a particular product. I mean usually even the lamest corporate shilling stays on message, like the Galaxy Tab crap, or the fake reviewer for bad movies, or the ultra lame-o PSP rap crap. But to me this is just head scratching weird and not the usual corporate shill. Maybe it is a bot hell I don't know.
It reminds me of those weird spams I would get a couple of years back where it was just some stream of consciousness haiku with no actual links in it so it was COMPLETELY pointless. Hell I even looked up the unadulterated spams on a couple of servers I was managing at the time to see if there were links being stripped but nope, just weird word salad, like poetry written by someone really stoned. Hell maybe that is what this is, someone at MSFT has gotten some really good shit and is just giggling at all the "WTF?" posts he is generating.
And they sure as hell don't give their friends Linux, not as long as MR "the kernel isn't designed, it grows like a virus LOL!" Linus Torvalds is in control, so your point is....you should spend $4000 to buy them Macbooks?
Don't forget the National Guard, we have a huge Armory in damned near every small town with frankly insane amounts of military hardware. Never in the history of this country have you had active soldiers taking oaths to turn and fight against the government if they ignore the constitution which is EXACTLY what you'd have if they rolled the tanks here.
Now what do you think all those soldiers at those armories would do, with the military being ordered to turn against their families? I'll tell what, because we are ALREADY seeing it right now. Where do you think those militias are getting all that nice hardware they are stocking up on? They are getting it from the National Guard, from patriots that are disgusted by the evil corporatist regime that is spreading through the halls of power like a cancer.
The democratic process is broken, irretrievably I'd argue, as the top 1%ers have rigged the laws, stacked the courts, and control the media, all to ensure their ever increasing wealth and power, laws that are so flagrantly against the constitution are passed without the batting on an eye, and the treasonous bribery is done now right out in the open because the wealthy are so drunken with their power they believe nobody can touch them.
But look to Egypt, Look to the October Russian Revolution, to see the future of America. You can't stomp on the masses while robbing them blind forever. While the average working poor pays something like 60%+ in taxes when you figure in all the excise taxes these pigs can't even stand the thought of paying their fair share on billions in profits which they use to further rig the process.
Never in our history has taxes been lower on the top 1% and the misery gets worse by the day as their eternal greed grows ever worse. Look up your history in times of high taxes on the rich you have growth of the entire economy because without the ability to hoard without being taxed they invest it and cause the economy to grow. Despite what the Repubs spew with lower taxes on the wealthy comes suffering across the economy as the desire to hoard overwhelms all and you end up with "double dutch" and other schemes to make sure they get to keep every cent.
But it is coming folks, look to the east, watch as it spreads. Look to your history never has huge wealth imbalances such as we see now ever been sustained for very long. It is simple math, the poor outnumber the rich by millions and their numbers increase by the minute, they have stopped believing in your system and see it for the sham that it is. just look at the polls to see how few believe in the sham that is voting anymore. Even your soldiers take oaths to turn against the country, to burn the village in order to save it. Look to the east, for it is coming my friends,look to the east.
I'd say it is the fault of the nuclear industry for failing to educate the masses that there are choices now besides the big ass clunky reactors like Japan has.
With the small Thorium reactors you can have a reactor in a shipping crate, just bury it when you are finished with it and which would power a decent medium sized city easily and you can simply add more as needed. With the smaller size comes much less risk and they would be much easier to harden to survive even the kind of unpredictable catastrophes like struck Japan, and they also need to be showing how well our current reactors are doing even though most are 40+ years old.
So if you want someone to blame blame the nuclear industry, because if they were educating the masses on their options instead of singing "oh poor me" or completely ignoring the public they might have a more favorable outlook.
Also having a CEO that isn't a greedy pussy and bragged about having his family home in sight of the reactor might do wonders, as it never ceases to amaze me how many CEOs talk about how nice their plants are and then live as far away from them as possible. Putting their asses with their mouths are certainly wouldn't hurt their image none.