But it is the placing of the verbs that always seem to throw me. for example you would say in English "I am going to the store" but in many languages the verb comes LAST IIRC, so the sentence would be "I, to the store am going" which is not so hard on simple sentences but when you are trying to convert a complex English sentence in your head? NOT easy my friend.
I bet you started with something OTHER than English first yes? Everyone I've known that was great with languages usually got to English late. I think English (especially American English) is such a messed up hodge podge with no real rules that once learning it as a first language it really messes you up trying to pick up others. And one can usually pull some really bad English and still get their point across, but something like bad German? You sound like a total loonie.
But anyway if you have an x360 give it a shot. Windows 7 will actually run quite sweet on a P4 3GHz with 1.5GB or better, and WMC will plug right into most capture cards (especially the ATI TV Wonder, which is why I recommend them) and stream to the x360 very well. With the setup I described you can capture on the PC while you sleep or are at work like a DVR, stream it to your 360 like a media box, but unlike either of those you can save and burn your shows for later viewing.
When it comes to media it is one of my best selling combos, the only thing that sells faster are Nbox Media Players which if you have clueless family or relatives that aren't good with tech or kids are like a Godsend. These puppies will run off thumbstick, MMC, or USB HDD. Just load a cheap 250GB portadrive with cheap movies off of Amazon and hand them the remote. That's it. Low power, simple controls with nothing to screw up, just rip your movies on your PC and transfer them to your media tank. I love these suckers so much I got my dad one for Xmas. I just picked up some great classic westerns and loaded them up, and now whenever he can't find anything on TV he just flips the button and voila! Insta-movies. And if you have kids or family that has kids they will look at you like a God if you give them one loaded with some kid DVDs. You can even offer to rip their kids DVD collection for them as a nice gesture.
Anyway if you have a room you just want to have movies and music in (also plays MP3, WMA, JPG, and BMP) or relatives that you need to give a nice gift that won't break your wallet, give one a try. Folks around here just love them to death and I haven't had a single complaint yet. I even have the girls at the checkout stopping me asking "Hey, aren't you the guy that sells them TV Box things? If I bought one would you show me how to use it?" which of course takes a whole 15 minutes counting setup. Easy money my friend, they're happy, I'm happy, gotta love those win/wins!
Ohhhh...sounds like the abyss has given you the finger as well. And to be fair we are talking about 14 pages of badly written VB4 with about half of the pages nothing but fricking GOTOs bouncing all over the place.Now I'll admit when I've had to do something quick and dirty I've thrown in the occasional GOTO but the GOTOs all went to the same place whereas this massive pile of shite had more twists and turns than a bad detective novel!
But since you have seen the "true horror" of IT I'm sure you can see why I sometimes want to bash my head on the desk when dealing with FOSSies. They always seem to think "All you have to do is replace Windows and Office, and all will be hearts and flowers!" when it is NEVER Windows and Office that is the problem. Hell most companies can't even upgrade to the latest windows version for fear of that giant reeking mess of garbage code they've come to depend on will come falling down like a house of cards in a hurricane.
And while I agree 110% that the goal should ALWAYS be KISS, the problem is the PHBs at these places will never ever in a million years shell out what it costs to actually get all the data out and build a REAL solution, not until they have the crap they are depending on fall apart like some giant train wreck from hell. Like that VB4 app I mentioned early on, I ended up just jamming the thing in a Win2K VM and letting it rot for the next guy. Not because that is what I wanted to do, but because you couldn't pay a college kid what they wanted to pay to have it rewritten, much less get a REAL programmer of any skill.
And that to me is the problem in a nutshell and why the shit isn't gonna get any better for the foreseeable future. It is because businesses in the USA can't pull their heads out of the stock page to realize that working long term solutions cost money no different that decent roads or schools, and look how well THOSE are faring here in the US. IT has it even worse because as long as the thing works that day they don't care if it is a single power surge away from taking down the whole company. To them ANY expense related to IT is just a "waste" unless it is something like an iShiny for themselves or the CEO. That is why I ended up getting out of dealing with corporate, because I frankly got tired of people with impossible problems that wanted to pay pennies to fix years worth of neglect. I mean with the corporate attitude in the USA, is it any wonder nobody young is going into IT anymore? You'd have to be nuts!
And lets be honest folks: There is probably a damned good reason why they were looking at MS products only, and it was most likely because they have an assload of MS Stuff that would cost a mint to convert. I mean if they require Exchange and Sharepoint, they have a metric ton of VBA stuff being used, and Windows desktops everywhere, why in the hell should they be forced to accept bids that won't work? If Google wanted to submit bids on MS products as a VAR that is one thing, but Google docs ain't no MS Word.
It would be like forcing a design house to accept bids from some guy who wanted to rip out all their Macs and replace it with Ubuntu desktops running the Gimp. Does ANYBODY think that is a useful bid? Would they ever in a million years give up all that experience and custom in house code written for Photoshop just to use the Gimp? of course not.
By the same token I bet if we walked into the DOI tomorrow and did an audit on what they are running you'd find a bazillion Windows desktops, with tons of VBA macros, everything controlled by Active directory, with Exchange and Sharepoint. What good will come of having to waste tax dollars on a bid for a solution that won't actually solve anything? Is Google gonna pay to rewrite all that code for free? Are they gonna spring for the cost of retraining everyone out of the goodness of their hearts? No in the end they'll make the DOI jump through hoops before they finally hand them a list that says "These are the MS products we require, because all our stuff is tied into that and we will NOT pay for a complete overhaul!" and then Google will say "Uhhh...sorry we don't sell MS Products" and the money will have been blown for exactly jack and squat. If the DOI had said only MSFT was allowed to bid that would be one thing, but this is just stupid. It is trying to force a product that the customer does not want because they don't want a competitor to sell them a product they DO want. And in the end it is just that more added to the debt for absolutely nothing gained.
Pitiful actions and bad form Google, and from someone that has as much marketshare as you do it just comes off as looking petty and vengeful.
Which is why I don't understand why some entrepreneur with a brain isn't buying up those old Titan II missile silos in north AR. Talk about the perfect data centers! You have an ambient temp of 55 degrees F in the lower levels, plenty of wind up top to pull away heat, simply add racks to the silo tubes with side venting at the top, a big fan blowing up at the bottom, and the chimney effect will take care of the rest. they also have plenty of fiber backbone run through that area thanks to AT&T and the US Military, so hooking into the backbone wouldn't be anything, cost of living is cheap, and no unions to worry about.
While I think TFA is a good experiment, it seems like it would be cheaper in the long run to use structures already built with inherent cooling properties. There are missile silos being closed all over the place and having been in one the ambient temp in those lower levels stays pretty damned chilly. All one would have to do is use a big fan to pull it through grates set into the silo itself to have racks of servers that would stay nicely chilled for the cost of a large fan. Just seems stupid to let them rot or worse end up filled in when nobody buys 'em.
No Mark, you aren't seeing what I'm getting at. Picture a RAM chip, with 16 chips in it, but only 4 of those chips are actually being used. What I'm talking about is powering down the other 12 since they are just wasting energy. It is the same way that most of the time that new ATI card will NOT be 320 stream processors, or whatever you paid for, it will instead be 24 or 48 or 72. That is because ATI selectively turns off nodes that aren't needed, lowering power requirements. that is also why the new Nvidia chips are "little piggy space heaters" because from what I've been told the NV chips are "all or nothing" with no in between.
RAM that isn't be used is simply wasted power. Now on a desktop that means nothing but on a mobile that means a hell of a lot. With my idea you could say have the cell phone have lots of RAM and high performance when using apps, but turn off most of that RAM when it is in your pocket waiting for a call. if one was to pair this with some high speed SSD so that all but a tiny core could be paged to SSD when not needed? Well I bet we would finally have all day devices even with those lousy iSliver batteries everyone seems to end up with.
Oh Please! That is SUCH an easy one to fix! You either run XP Mode in Pro or just load up XP VMs. No you want to talk about "IT debt" try some of the places I walk into, where there is ALWAYS a "mission critical app" that is this horribly mangled piece of badly coded VB+Access mess of no comments anywhere junk, and then they expect YOU to deal with it! Hell one place I walked into in mid 09 had a NT 4 box running a VB3 "app" because each guy they brought in took one look at that beast and said "fuck that!".
Man I can hear the real programmers right now screaming out in pain just at the thought! You want to watch a "real" programmer wet his pants in fear you hand him a huge 14 page VB mess written by a half a dozen guys over the years, NONE of whom ever heard of a comment, with shit all over the place and nothing indented or even calling in a logical order, unless "insane band aid" is considered logic.
You want to know why there is an ever increasing IT debt I'd say that is a BIG part of it. All across the country you have this huge mess of apps written by some Joe Schmo that was bought ages ago and nobody knows how to live without and it DON'T run on anything but what it was written for and even then it is fussy as hell. And that of course don't even take into account the lovely crap like that ISA C&C controller written for DOS 3 that runs a $75,000 piece of machinery made by a company that has been DOA for a decade plus! I have stared into the abyss pal, and not only did it stare back it gave me the finger to boot!
Sorry about that, probably shouldn't post after finding a nail in a BRAND NEW TIRE &^$&%$&^%$&^$! Now, are you talking Xbox 1, or the X360? Because the xbox one is pretty worthless without being modded first.
And what I was explaining was having ALL of them together...the X360, your cable/sat TV, and your PC, all working as one. It is really quite simple and quite cheap. 1.- add a cheapo $40 TV Tuner, either PCI or USB, 2.-connect X360 to network. 3.-Allow X360 to stream from PC, 4.-voila! You have a fully networked home! I leave the TV plugged into one of the PCs just to give the customer something to play with, then when they are interested I give them the spiel about how if they have the x360 Windows 7 will play nicely with it, thus giving them a networked home. This gives them the advantage of recording from the cable if it is in the clear, as well as having their fat home PC HDD to fill with movies to stream.
And 6 languages, how in the hell do you keep up with all the rules? But if you have an X360 then wiring it into Windows 7 is a piece of moist and delicious cake. Here is a nice tutorial that will give you the steps. I'd be happy to recommend a tuner, but it would depend on whether you ran x86 or x64. Personally they are getting a little hard to find but I prefer the ATI TV Wonder USB 600. You just have to make sure to get the 600 if you are on Windows 7 x64, as the 650 and 700 really don't care for anything but x86.
But now I have hopefully explained it clear enough. you can have ONE TV hooked to the PC in one room, another TV hooked to the X360, and basically move around your house with video or music piped anywhere you are. Very cool. The 10 foot UI of Win 7 is a dream to use and is simple enough even dad can record his shows with it just by feeding the analog out of his cable box straight into the Win 7 box. Makes it REAL simple to have your favorite shows always recorded and waiting on you when you get home!
What I said was QUITE simple. It is that when exposed to the 10 foot UI of the new WMC it is such an easy sell because it is well designed, then I point out it will ALSO allow instant connection and streaming to any X360? Here comes the money.
So for you and the clueless mod who I'm sure based their mod on the fact you didn't get it, THIS IS EXACTLY what it has to do with TFA: If they use the SAME INTERFACE that they have ALREADY PERFECTED along with the SAME CONNECTIVITY which they have ALREADY PERFECTED then this will be a slam dunk, because their new WMC design is so simple my mom can use it. Is that REALLY SO HARD to understand?
And as for why NO, simply updating the X360 won't do, it is because you have a LARGE segment of the population that will NOT BUY anything that has the word GAME connected to it. It won't matter if you explain that you can do other things besides gaming on it, they won't touch it. Same reason they will walk right past the PS3 while looking for a Blu Ray player. That is because in their minds the PS3 is a GAME MACHINE and what they want is a PLAYER. Now you may or may not agree with that, but I deal with the public in retail 6 days a week, and that is how they think, period. You could offer them the X360 for $100 and they would walk right past it for the $200 PLAYER that does the exact same thing.
So I'm sorry if you don't seem to follow, I take it from reading your post English is not your first language, yes? From what I understand it is one of the more difficult languages to deal with so it is understandable if you have trouble if not a native speaker. But I hopefully have made it VERY clear what I was talking about, which as you can see is VERY much ON TOPIC.
Which is why I think the next big breakthrough (which will make someone Bill Gates rich) will be the ability to selectively turn memory cells off just as we can turns parts of the CPU/GPU off in AMD and Intel chips (from what I understand Nvidia is pretty much "all or nothing" except on Tegra). what one would have to develop is a "smart controller" most likely on the RAM module itself, one that knew which cells were in use and when given the "we are in low power mode" signal by the OS would have the ability to electrically isolate the running cells and power down the non working set.
IMHO it is that which will make the next big leap, not all this DDR slight decreases which IMHO just serve to keep the price of RAM raised. I mean we are just now getting to where DDR 3 is affordable! Besides unfortunately all the mobile devices try to rip off Apple with their iSliver batteries so the public have been pretty well trained to keep a charger handy. Even if you are talking a 20% gain with these micro ultra thin batteries that really won't be much. But the ones that figure out how to selectively turn off cells, they will be the ones to make incredible amounts of money especially if they patent the hell out of it. After all it will be able to have an assload of RAM, yet use almost nothing when sleeping. Who wouldn't want that?
Or maybe, just maybe, it could be because the bug is in the graphics rendering subsystem which had been changed and tweaked a lot for Win 7, and is therefor unaffected. Do you have ANY idea how many apps call upon the Windows graphics subsystems? And we are also talking about WinXP here, aka "hey lets all run as admin" which means apps can REALLY hook into the graphics subsystem and when the patch tweaks that?
Don't forget that the big selling point of Windows is its backwards compatibility which means when you are gonna patch it damned well better be tested! Can you imagine the royal shitfits if everyone came to work on Wednesday after Patch Tuesday and found their PS Pro, Photoshop, Picasa, and many of the other apps that use graphics went tits up? Hell the support lines would be hit so hard it would be a miracle if the lines didn't melt.
So don't blame on malice what can easily be explained by just requiring a shitload of work. imagine YOU were tasked to fix a graphics subsystem in 10 year old code that the original designers have done skipped off to greener pastures? Where if you don't patch it just right you can break thousands of third party app s that you have NO control over but which your customers depend on? man I wouldn't want that job, no way in hell. I bet those guys have ulcers and are bald by 30 just from the stress.
Which is why I think URL shortening should be banned. I mean what if some troll decides a rick roll or Goatse isn't nasty enough, and decides to trollbomb with CP instead? Nowadays your browser cache and history can and will be used against you in a court of law, which I'm sure gives many trolls a pitter patter of glee in their twisted little hearts.
So as long as we have shortening of URLs and allow the cops to use browser cache as "evidence" then trolls are gonna be a hell of a lot worse threat than ever before. I mean how many average folks can even tell you how to delete much less secure delete, the browser cache and search history? Hell I'm constantly trying out new browsers and don't have a clue on how to do a secure delete on Chromium based like Dragon or the more funky rare browsers like Kmeleon CCF Me, do you?
And as anyone who has used WMC on windows 7 will tell you they know how to make a damned good 10 foot UI now. if they make it as butt simple and user friendly as WMC? Yeah they could grab some decent share. People see that easy peasy WMC interface and it really isn't a hard sell, one of my biggest sellers is USB TV Tuners thanks to having a box in the corner running WMC broadcasting the cable in the shop. when folks say "How did you do that?" and "Is that a PC running the TV?" I just hand them the remote and let them play awhile, easy sell. Then you point out that Win 7 and the X360 play REALLY nice together? No problem getting them to open their wallets.
So if they keep the UI of Windows 7 WMC and the easy X360 connect? Yeah it could be a hit. And don't forget the WMV Janus DRM has yet to be reasonably hacked which will make content owners a lot less spooked about dealing with MSFT. Finally MSFT looks to be finally getting that the key to the home is "easy peasy" without the layers of submenus and options MSFT has been known for in the past. By getting WMC, WMP and the x360 all playing nice with each other the initial setup of the new MSFT stuff has pretty much been "plug in and go" which really appeals to the average Joe.
Of course it will all depend on whether MSFT can keep from shooting themselves in the foot which is always a big risk with them. Just look at how they were changing code damned near until Gold on the Vista subsystems which broke many drivers and pissed off the OEMs. So I'd say whether it has a shot will largely depend on whether MSFT can resist the urge to do something mind numbingly stupid, which is anyone's guess at this point.
The problem with your logic is this: In just 30 days that $60 game will be $40 on PC, still $60 on consoles. At 2 months it will be at $30 and at 3 it will most likely be at $20. Meanwhile if you are lucky the game at 3 months will be at $40 on the consoles, and that is if you can find it new or have to deal with the screwjob that is Gamestop.
Then figure in the fact that the PC can do several other jobs besides gaming, and unless you bought the Shitty Worst Buy special you are looking on an average of a decade or more of use. Hell I have just recently retired my circa 99 733MHz P3 into the spare PC bin, after it had gone through my hands, both the kids, and finally my mom, who just got a 3.06GHz Celeron hand me down from one of the boys who got a Pentium D with an HD4830 hand me down.
The problem with consoles is the ONLY way the increased price comes out ahead for consoles is in a VERY specific and small niche, the multiplayer in the same room niche, which frankly is nearly DOA. All the newer games are requiring play over the net, which means you are all stuck buying more games only on the consoles you will shell out more for them. The only one bucking that trend is the wii, which frankly has given up on gamers and become the "casual platform" for when grandma comes over.
So I'm sorry but like the Macbook Pro with a certain group (graphic designers) your solution only comes out ahead in certain specific circumstances that are in the case of consoles frankly becoming as rare as 8 tracks and will only get worse as time wears on, simply because the game designers have figured out that "multiplayer = multiple copies" means more $$$ for them. Sorry.
Or maybe, just maybe, these "doctors" that everyone uses to allow assholes to have cell phones and ruin movies and other public entertainment could just do what we did before cell phones and leave the number of the place they'll be at with their service?
Lets be honest folks: It ain't the doctors that cause us to need cell phone jamming, it is Latisha and Randy that want to fucking bullshit for a damned hour on their fricking phone REALLY LOUDLY in the middle of everything!
Personally unless you are of the "I'm entitled!" set I think we should allow businesses to decide for themselves whether they want to jam and let the free market handle it. After all if the doctors are more important then the business that doesn't block will do better than the one that does, yes? But what I think would happen IRL is that the theaters and restaurants that don't block will end up ghost towns as everyone runs away from the cell phone douchebags. What happened to free choice people? Let the market and businesses decide! As long as there is a sign right up front that says "we jam cell phones" I don't see any problem. Let the market handle it.
That is because you have, and it is even less relevant now. I mean so what if we haven't hit the wall on Moore's Law yet, we sure as hell hit it when it came to speed VS heat. So now everyone is having to trade more cores for raw speed only problem? It does not actually work beyond a couple of cores for 95%+ of the population. They just don't have enough jobs for the cores to do and most jobs are still depending on single threaded performance.
So they can reprint this article every year like Moore's Law is the gospel of Gordon or something but to the average folks it just doesn't matter. Trying to increase performance by constantly adding more cores (what are we up to, 6 each for AMD and Intel?) is putting band aids on the bullet wound. Most jobs simply don't benefit from more cores, and we can't figure out how to fix the heat problem above 3.6GHz.
It is a shame we are down to just two CPU manufacturers, because if someone could find a way to make a 5GHz+ CPU triple core that doesn't get so hot you could cook your lunch on it? Well THAT would be a real breakthrough. But at the way we are going we are gonna end up with everyone and their grandma on an octacore CPU that spends most of its time twiddling its thumbs.
If you have an older machine it is still VERY affordable to "max out" the RAM nowadays. for example many of those late P4/early Pentium D era machines would be maxed out on 2GB of DDR RAM, which you can get for around $58 at Newegg. With DDR 2 the 2GB sticks are naturally higher but again most except the last boards released before DDR 3 will max out on the cheaper 2GB sticks and even if your PC will take 4GB sticks they are usually overkill for anything but CAD. My boys are playing their MMOs on a couple of early Pentium D systems and frankly with XP 2GB of RAM is plenty. Hell after running the benchmarks in PCWizard I found that even with only 1GB it was the youngest GPU that was the bottleneck (an old X1650 Pro) so instead of maxing the box I simply added an HD4830 and now the only thing that constrains his game is his latency.
Even on newer machine DDR 2 can be quite affordable as long as one doesn't go for the max chips. Last year at this time when the annual slump hit I filled mine with 2 more 2GB DDR 2 800MHz chips bringing the total to 8GB and frankly with Superfetch everything already runs in RAM and did so when I was at 4GB so it was more because I wanted to fill out the board than anything else. Since this is a late model AMD AM2+ board it will take the 4GB chips, but what would be the point other than ePeen bragging rights? Win 7 X64 is already using 6.5GB for superfetch and even when I game I don't see any games running into memory as the bottleneck. With anything above 3GB one finds it is nearly always the GPU and HDD that is the bottlenecks so why buy the more expensive chips?
And finally what does consoles have to do with anything? All the consoles are frankly long past prime and using seriously old tech in them which certainly isn't gonna be affected by falling PC prices. Considering if you DIY (which is so simple nowadays I let the 15 year old build his own and frankly the only thing he needed from me was to borrow my screwdriver) you can build a really nice triple core AMD for around $400 why would you not simply have both? It isn't like you can't find a bazillion other uses for that PC when not gaming on it, whereas good luck finding a use for that Gamecube or PS2 you don't play anymore. And frankly the price of games on the consoles are just ridiculous when compared to the PC. I buy really good games all day long for less than $15 each from places like GOG and Steam, where you gonna find that for consoles?
Actually I'd argue the respawning guards actually made it better as well, and here is why: In the original once you became proficient with a couple of weapons (the silenced 9mm and sniper silenced) even on the harder level it was simply TOO easy. Throw coin, lure guards, pop in head with dum dum, lather rinse repeat. But with NOLF 2 you had to actually take time to learn the patterns because those guards you popped would eventually come back.
This really cranked up the stealth mechanic for me, as you REALLY needed to be a silent killer. With the right moves one could even use this to your advantage, by having the sneak and search skills raised it was like Xmas for goodies from all the corpses, and if one left the bodies in the right places one could use them as breadcrumbs to lure the guards right where you wanted them, while having said guards clean up the bodies for you since they always seemed to have body remover.
So while you may not have liked it if one is into the stealth (which to me was a MAJOR selling point of NOLF, just look how many levels had a "NO ALARMS" condition) it really gave one a good challenge, whereas once you got good with coins and head shots the Baron Dumas office level was the only one that was really hard in NOLF I (and even that could be beaten with a simple trick...make a fire in the waste basket in the first place you duck in and use it as a diversion) but don't take my word for it, install both games and switch back and forth. You'll find that once you are "in the groove" you will blow through NOLF whereas with NOLF 2 one has to take your time, learn the guards routines (especially on the nighttime Russian base level) and use the cover wisely. When one beat a level in NOLF 2 it gave a great sense of accomplishment because you knew you were a stealth killing badass.
I'd add No One Lives Forever 2 VS Contract J.A.C.K to that, as NOLF 2 made every single thing in the game BETTER while at the same time sticking to what made the game fun with a capital F, namely the cool gadgets and stealth mixed with the silly humor.
Then Monolith decided that since NOLF 2 hadn't sold like they had hoped (I would argue it was pacing...they should have dropped the player into the thick quicker and then backed off, rather than such a slow build up) so it must be because the lead wasn't a macho he man type so they put out Jack which as you put it pissed in the face of the fans. Generic hero meets generic bad guys with generic guns...yawn. The closest they got to an original idea was the space attack, which was just a rail shooter in the end.
But in the end it comes down to keeping what the audience liked and building on it, not "pulling a Lucas" and trying to cover the stench with SFX. I mean I play some of these sequels like Deus Ex II and think "Did the designers even bother to WATCH, much less play the first one?" because it is like they brought in a completely unrelated team and just through a few basic ideas from the first in a Hollywood "high concept" fashion instead of actually knowing and caring about the franchise.
Actually I hate to say it but in the case of your first video Correlation != Causation. You see I have done that little experiment myself and found the real culprit of the CPU spikes. You see when you are dealing with huge numbers of files and folders like that Windows 7 tries to load all the metadata for those files on the fly if you are in icon view, and of course loading all that info WILL cause a serious spike.
To see for yourself switch between the different icon views along with list and detailed view and see the difference. You will see that in icon view it will try to load the metadata as well as read the folder's contents, which results in high CPU. In list or detail that simply doesn't happen and in my own tests the CPU went from 54% to less than 7% simply by changing the view. Since WinXP doesn't change the icons appearance based on what is inside nor does it try to load the metadata for a file unless asked it has lower usage which appears to be based on the GDI+ but in actuality is simply the fact that one OS is loading data the other just ignores. Whether one considers it better to use or ignore the data is a design decision but at least in that case doesn't have anything to do with GDI from what I can see.
And the funny part is the pirates did better at stripping down their own OS than MSFT did. Look up "Tiny XP Rev 09" for a nice uber light version of XP that takes just 45MB on the desktop and runs a good 80%+ of Windows apps, or even thinner is "MicroXP Rev 03" which uses less than 32MB. If you have an older P4 you want to try Win 7 on for shits and giggles download "Tiny7" and be amazed at a Windows 7 that just uses 145MB of RAM! They also have a "Tiny Vista" but of course it really isn't very popular. If you have valid WinXP or Windows 7 licenses you can use them instead of the included key and have a nice stripped down desktop that is just CRAZY fast. I recently installed the "Tiny XP" for a customer that needed XP uber light for a low powered laser cutter C&C. I used his provided legal key and now he has a 1GHz with 256Mb of RAM that barely sips power and runs his laser cutter like a champ.
As for TFA, is anyone surprised? Like XP Windows 7 is just a good OS, and I have yet to have anyone switched that didn't take to 7 like a duck to water. Hell my dad is about as clueless as they come when it comes to tech, he still can't figure out how to work more than half of his cell phone, but he has gotten more use out of his PC and laptop since I got him the family pack of HP in Oct than he did in nearly a decade of XP. What amazed me was being the impatient sort when I told him after dropping off the family pack at his work that it would be the weekend before I could install it he took it upon himself to install. I figured when I heard that and finally got a chance to come over the PC would be a big mess and cause me to start over but nope, it has done all the work and set it up for him, even pointing him to a free AV on first boot. All I had to do was show him how to get to Ninite to install his Firefox and MS Messenger and that was it. When he got a little headset mike to talk to his friends on chat it even asked him "You have a headset plugged in, would you like to learn about and use speech recognition?" so he is trying that out as we speak. A nice touch to a nice OS.
Well then, as someone who has been converting SMBs and SOHOs away from XP allow me to add a few. 1.-Windows Superfetch, which if your customers use specific apps day in and day out will have those apps loaded for them in RAM and ready to go instantly. It will even learn the times of day you use them, so if you use one particular app pre lunch and another after they will be loaded at the appropriate time. 2.- The file and registry virtualization tech that started with Vista is much more mature now, and when combined with WinXP Mode means just about any app will run no matter which versions of Windows it was written for. This is nice when you have an old app that is required and you want to move up to 64 bit.
3.-The security system is much better than the pretty much "everything is admin all the time!" XP way of doing things. To lock down XP you really needed to go in with GPOs and lock the OS down, and you would often find apps that needed serious "massaging" to work in a non admin environment. with 7 and the above file and registry tweaks built in that is no longer the case, now you can stick with a normal user, and the most risky part of your PC, the browser, can be run in low rights mode if you use IE or one of the webkit based browsers like Chrome or my favorite Comodo Dragon. 4.-Once shown how it works I've found my users to be MUCH faster using the new breadcrumb navigation system that the old panels and trees way of navigating the OS. The new breadcrumb makes it simple to jump anywhere in the tree, and will also remember the places they go to the most. This along with the new jumplists makes much faster access to common tasks and folders. 5.- Despite the tests posted, which are all of the Vista version, I've found adding a 4GB flash to Readyboost makes makes a machine MUCH snappier, especially if you are dealing with customers that run a lot of heavy apps and bog down their machines often. This is because the 4GB flash thanks to Readyboost turns any HDD into a hybrid and uses the 4GB for random reads, which are of course much faster than any spinning disc.
So as you can see just from naming the ones off the top of my head my customers are pleased with you have several reasons to upgrade. That doesn't even count the other niceties like the new printers and devices stage which makes managing everything from network printers to webcams and backup devices simple, the built in Windows disc imaging which is quite nice and very simple for users to operate, the ease with which new devices can be added thanks to MSFT incorporating more and more drivers into Windows Update and accessed via Action Center, Action Center which makes most administrative tasks quite simple for SMBs and SOHOs to keep up with, the new performance monitoring which will point out problem drivers and bottlenecks that would ordinarily be hard to catch such as the malfunctioning HDMI driver on a customer's machine which was causing it to not drop into low power mode as often as it should, heck I could go on all day.
So I'd have to say after the disaster of Vista MSFT really outdid themselves with this one. I have been running Windows 7 hard since Beta 2 and never have had a single crash no matter how hard I stress the system. It all "just works" and all the little features and rock solid design like I named above really do make it a worthwhile upgrade, and this is from someone who hung onto Win2K until 6 months after XP SP2 had been out.
And if I give them a magical LOLCat infections rates will go down by 10,000% and magic pixies will appear to rub their little footies and...wait a tick, that is a what you call it, oh yeah an anecdote and doesn't prove jack which is why I put a disclaimer at the front instead of trying to pass it off as proof like you do Petey, but you KNOW this, don't you?
poor wittle APK, also know as "Petey, the idiot HOPES file guy" As in you HOPES that one of the 300,000+ constantly changing array of websites that are infected doesn't happen to be the one you visit today? Or that you HOPES that nobody notices after repeatedly being asked you have FAILED to show even the tiniest shred of mathematical proof that your magical woobie can scale? That you HOPES nobody notices your only "proof" is anecdotes, often by your own sock puppets like Kingsjester?
Remember Petey I'm not the ponce making outrageous claims so it is up to you to show the math instead of wasting everyone's time waving your little shriveled winkie around by making claims with no mathematical proof and nothing but anecdotes as "evidence". After all those that the earth is only 6000 years old have a full boat of anecdotes to back up THEIR claims as well, but we still think they are just as batshit as you, now don't we?
The simple fact is this: no matter how many times trollie says "1+1 = 3" the math simply proves you wrong and THAT is why all you can do is throw insults. You have 190,000 to 340,000 infected websites at this very moment and that list will change by the thousands per minute as sites are cleaned, new sites are infected, new vulnerabilities found, etc. Now for your HOPES file to actually be a REAL protection and not just a woobie? It will have to dynamically scale and keep up with that ever changing list of infections. Now even if you had twenty fingers and subscribed to every security list on the planet your HOPES file will ALWAYS BE OUT OF DATE and behind the curve. Always. Don't like those numbers? Use the ones from Securina, Grisoft, Symantec, any reputable security site. YOU CHOOSE. I have shown mathematically you are full of shit, now lets see you math that proves me wrong PETEY.
Now if you have a mathematical proof that shows how a static.txt file dropped into system 32 can magically scale dynamically? Lets see it. Otherwise it is NOTHING more a magical LOLCat pic backed up by anecdotes. That is the nice thing about math, it doesn't lie or believe in anecdotes. So it is all on Petey and your magical HOPES woobie now. YOU made the extravagant claims, back them up with the math. If you can't? Well then you are full of shit, case closed. Notice how ALL YOU CAN DO is throw insults and trollbomb? Why is that? I'll tell you why, because math doesn't lie and you just can't show the math you just can't do it or you would have by now, but it would be like trying to mathematically prove you are not an idiot PETEY. It just can't be done.
So please, keep posting APK, I do so enjoy pointingoutthe totaluber fail of your magical woobie so. I also personally consider it a public service to point people to solutionsthat actuallywork instead of relying on magical woobies and anecdotes. And of course bitch slapping your around is also quite fun!
Apparently you've never been to AR, have you? Any excuse for firing off fireworks is a good one here, and the party will usually start at dark and continue until the wee hours. Usually they'll start with the small stuff and then work their way up, so by the time we are talking they should have worked up to some of the louder whistling cluster bees and color showers.
So you can't really go by the time when it comes to fireworks in AR. We like them too much to stick to any silly schedule. Hell you ought to come around here the week of the fourth, we have many that buy truly insane amounts of rockets and will fire them off the entire week of the fourth. Here one doesn't expect peace and quiet the week of the fourth until after midnight, and with New Years it starts at dark and finally fizzles out around 1AM.
Well I'm happy to help. Dealing with quite a few senior customers I found there really isn't any way to break them of their trusting nature, I guess because they grew up in a time when there weren't so many douchebags. But I would like to point out there are a couple of things you'll have to do, although I doubt it will affect any clueless family members.
1.-Comodo Time Machine does not like dual boots with Win 7. Linux, win9x, win2k, not a problem. But if you install windows 7 to anywhere but the C: drive it changes itself to C: on startup, for example I am running Windows 7 and even though I installed on my D: it currently says it is on C: and my XP which is on C: is on E:. it does this because win 7 file and registry virtualization requires the C: drive letter but as a side effect it freaks Time Machine out. it won't hurt anything, it just won't run.
2.-after first install and scan it will take Comodo Av or Comodo Internet Security (on XP I prefer CIS, and on Vista/7 I prefer Comodo AV, as the firewall in XP doesn't block outbound like Comodo AV and Vista/7 does) about a week to learn their usage habits. By that I mean it will ask them "Did you mean to launch this?" for the first week until it learns their apps. If you know which apps they use most often you can launch them yourself, otherwise they will have to click yes when they first launch an app. Once it has learned their patterns it is pretty unobtrusive and doesn't require an email address or constantly hit the with pop ups wanting to upsell them either. It also has a well designed control system so if someone knowledgeable such as yourself wants you can customize everything to your tastes or the desired security level, for example setting a rule that all browsers MUST run in the sandbox. It also has an excellent whitelist so once the PC is declared clean essential windows services won't cause a permission pop up.
But if you have clueless relatives or those you have to support that live a good distance the Comodo one two punch along with Ninite and Filehippo Update Checker really are a Godsend. Ninite gives you a simple way to give them the latest of the most popular apps and codecs, so if say they call and say "It says I need Flash" you can send them to Ninite and tell them after running it if it still asks for Flash it is a virus. With Ninite it is easy as "check box, run installer" since it does a full web based unattended with NO TOOLBARS or other crap. And with Filehippo it will put a little icon that uses just a few dozen KB of RAM in the tray and will alert them if a third part app is out of date, because as we know third party apps like Adobe Reader when out of date (which I just give them Foxit from the Ninite site) are one of the biggest sources of malware drive bys.
But with these plus those two Comodo apps I linked to earlier you can take the hassle and guesswork out of admin duties for family PCs. Comodo AV keeps them clean, Time Machine gives you a way to restore easily by phone even if they manage to BSOD the box, Ninite gives you an easy secure way to get them the latest apps, and Filehippo lets them keep them updated so YOU don't have to. Believe me with nearly 2 decades supporting home and small business users there really is no easier way to keep a Windows box up and running smooth.
I would also point out to support your theory we had an unseasonably warm period followed by a rapid cold snap with a large drop in pressure and there were several quick flash storms with heavy lightning close to the area where the birds annually nest, and the path of the storms would have taken it right over where they found the drum. Also as is tradition several large fireworks were shot off for New years. Talking to someone from the area this afternoon they figured the fireworks scared the birds who took off and then either the flock got hit by hail or lightning, as they were pretty beat up.
So this isn't HAARP or some other conspiracy theory, just some birds and fish getting caught in the wrong conditions at the wrong time. And as for the thousands my source said it looked closer to 900-1800 and this is in an area where several thousand of these birds nest at this time of year. So it wasn't even the entire flock but everyone is playing it safe and have sent a couple hundred of the carcasses for analysis anyway. It must be a slow news day here at/. because the local news spent maybe 60 seconds on it in a "BTW ain't this weird?" kind of manner.
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But it is the placing of the verbs that always seem to throw me. for example you would say in English "I am going to the store" but in many languages the verb comes LAST IIRC, so the sentence would be "I, to the store am going" which is not so hard on simple sentences but when you are trying to convert a complex English sentence in your head? NOT easy my friend.
I bet you started with something OTHER than English first yes? Everyone I've known that was great with languages usually got to English late. I think English (especially American English) is such a messed up hodge podge with no real rules that once learning it as a first language it really messes you up trying to pick up others. And one can usually pull some really bad English and still get their point across, but something like bad German? You sound like a total loonie.
But anyway if you have an x360 give it a shot. Windows 7 will actually run quite sweet on a P4 3GHz with 1.5GB or better, and WMC will plug right into most capture cards (especially the ATI TV Wonder, which is why I recommend them) and stream to the x360 very well. With the setup I described you can capture on the PC while you sleep or are at work like a DVR, stream it to your 360 like a media box, but unlike either of those you can save and burn your shows for later viewing.
When it comes to media it is one of my best selling combos, the only thing that sells faster are Nbox Media Players which if you have clueless family or relatives that aren't good with tech or kids are like a Godsend. These puppies will run off thumbstick, MMC, or USB HDD. Just load a cheap 250GB portadrive with cheap movies off of Amazon and hand them the remote. That's it. Low power, simple controls with nothing to screw up, just rip your movies on your PC and transfer them to your media tank. I love these suckers so much I got my dad one for Xmas. I just picked up some great classic westerns and loaded them up, and now whenever he can't find anything on TV he just flips the button and voila! Insta-movies. And if you have kids or family that has kids they will look at you like a God if you give them one loaded with some kid DVDs. You can even offer to rip their kids DVD collection for them as a nice gesture.
Anyway if you have a room you just want to have movies and music in (also plays MP3, WMA, JPG, and BMP) or relatives that you need to give a nice gift that won't break your wallet, give one a try. Folks around here just love them to death and I haven't had a single complaint yet. I even have the girls at the checkout stopping me asking "Hey, aren't you the guy that sells them TV Box things? If I bought one would you show me how to use it?" which of course takes a whole 15 minutes counting setup. Easy money my friend, they're happy, I'm happy, gotta love those win/wins!
Ohhhh...sounds like the abyss has given you the finger as well. And to be fair we are talking about 14 pages of badly written VB4 with about half of the pages nothing but fricking GOTOs bouncing all over the place.Now I'll admit when I've had to do something quick and dirty I've thrown in the occasional GOTO but the GOTOs all went to the same place whereas this massive pile of shite had more twists and turns than a bad detective novel!
But since you have seen the "true horror" of IT I'm sure you can see why I sometimes want to bash my head on the desk when dealing with FOSSies. They always seem to think "All you have to do is replace Windows and Office, and all will be hearts and flowers!" when it is NEVER Windows and Office that is the problem. Hell most companies can't even upgrade to the latest windows version for fear of that giant reeking mess of garbage code they've come to depend on will come falling down like a house of cards in a hurricane.
And while I agree 110% that the goal should ALWAYS be KISS, the problem is the PHBs at these places will never ever in a million years shell out what it costs to actually get all the data out and build a REAL solution, not until they have the crap they are depending on fall apart like some giant train wreck from hell. Like that VB4 app I mentioned early on, I ended up just jamming the thing in a Win2K VM and letting it rot for the next guy. Not because that is what I wanted to do, but because you couldn't pay a college kid what they wanted to pay to have it rewritten, much less get a REAL programmer of any skill.
And that to me is the problem in a nutshell and why the shit isn't gonna get any better for the foreseeable future. It is because businesses in the USA can't pull their heads out of the stock page to realize that working long term solutions cost money no different that decent roads or schools, and look how well THOSE are faring here in the US. IT has it even worse because as long as the thing works that day they don't care if it is a single power surge away from taking down the whole company. To them ANY expense related to IT is just a "waste" unless it is something like an iShiny for themselves or the CEO. That is why I ended up getting out of dealing with corporate, because I frankly got tired of people with impossible problems that wanted to pay pennies to fix years worth of neglect. I mean with the corporate attitude in the USA, is it any wonder nobody young is going into IT anymore? You'd have to be nuts!
And lets be honest folks: There is probably a damned good reason why they were looking at MS products only, and it was most likely because they have an assload of MS Stuff that would cost a mint to convert. I mean if they require Exchange and Sharepoint, they have a metric ton of VBA stuff being used, and Windows desktops everywhere, why in the hell should they be forced to accept bids that won't work? If Google wanted to submit bids on MS products as a VAR that is one thing, but Google docs ain't no MS Word.
It would be like forcing a design house to accept bids from some guy who wanted to rip out all their Macs and replace it with Ubuntu desktops running the Gimp. Does ANYBODY think that is a useful bid? Would they ever in a million years give up all that experience and custom in house code written for Photoshop just to use the Gimp? of course not.
By the same token I bet if we walked into the DOI tomorrow and did an audit on what they are running you'd find a bazillion Windows desktops, with tons of VBA macros, everything controlled by Active directory, with Exchange and Sharepoint. What good will come of having to waste tax dollars on a bid for a solution that won't actually solve anything? Is Google gonna pay to rewrite all that code for free? Are they gonna spring for the cost of retraining everyone out of the goodness of their hearts? No in the end they'll make the DOI jump through hoops before they finally hand them a list that says "These are the MS products we require, because all our stuff is tied into that and we will NOT pay for a complete overhaul!" and then Google will say "Uhhh...sorry we don't sell MS Products" and the money will have been blown for exactly jack and squat. If the DOI had said only MSFT was allowed to bid that would be one thing, but this is just stupid. It is trying to force a product that the customer does not want because they don't want a competitor to sell them a product they DO want. And in the end it is just that more added to the debt for absolutely nothing gained.
Pitiful actions and bad form Google, and from someone that has as much marketshare as you do it just comes off as looking petty and vengeful.
Which is why I don't understand why some entrepreneur with a brain isn't buying up those old Titan II missile silos in north AR. Talk about the perfect data centers! You have an ambient temp of 55 degrees F in the lower levels, plenty of wind up top to pull away heat, simply add racks to the silo tubes with side venting at the top, a big fan blowing up at the bottom, and the chimney effect will take care of the rest. they also have plenty of fiber backbone run through that area thanks to AT&T and the US Military, so hooking into the backbone wouldn't be anything, cost of living is cheap, and no unions to worry about.
While I think TFA is a good experiment, it seems like it would be cheaper in the long run to use structures already built with inherent cooling properties. There are missile silos being closed all over the place and having been in one the ambient temp in those lower levels stays pretty damned chilly. All one would have to do is use a big fan to pull it through grates set into the silo itself to have racks of servers that would stay nicely chilled for the cost of a large fan. Just seems stupid to let them rot or worse end up filled in when nobody buys 'em.
No Mark, you aren't seeing what I'm getting at. Picture a RAM chip, with 16 chips in it, but only 4 of those chips are actually being used. What I'm talking about is powering down the other 12 since they are just wasting energy. It is the same way that most of the time that new ATI card will NOT be 320 stream processors, or whatever you paid for, it will instead be 24 or 48 or 72. That is because ATI selectively turns off nodes that aren't needed, lowering power requirements. that is also why the new Nvidia chips are "little piggy space heaters" because from what I've been told the NV chips are "all or nothing" with no in between.
RAM that isn't be used is simply wasted power. Now on a desktop that means nothing but on a mobile that means a hell of a lot. With my idea you could say have the cell phone have lots of RAM and high performance when using apps, but turn off most of that RAM when it is in your pocket waiting for a call. if one was to pair this with some high speed SSD so that all but a tiny core could be paged to SSD when not needed? Well I bet we would finally have all day devices even with those lousy iSliver batteries everyone seems to end up with.
Oh Please! That is SUCH an easy one to fix! You either run XP Mode in Pro or just load up XP VMs. No you want to talk about "IT debt" try some of the places I walk into, where there is ALWAYS a "mission critical app" that is this horribly mangled piece of badly coded VB+Access mess of no comments anywhere junk, and then they expect YOU to deal with it! Hell one place I walked into in mid 09 had a NT 4 box running a VB3 "app" because each guy they brought in took one look at that beast and said "fuck that!".
Man I can hear the real programmers right now screaming out in pain just at the thought! You want to watch a "real" programmer wet his pants in fear you hand him a huge 14 page VB mess written by a half a dozen guys over the years, NONE of whom ever heard of a comment, with shit all over the place and nothing indented or even calling in a logical order, unless "insane band aid" is considered logic.
You want to know why there is an ever increasing IT debt I'd say that is a BIG part of it. All across the country you have this huge mess of apps written by some Joe Schmo that was bought ages ago and nobody knows how to live without and it DON'T run on anything but what it was written for and even then it is fussy as hell. And that of course don't even take into account the lovely crap like that ISA C&C controller written for DOS 3 that runs a $75,000 piece of machinery made by a company that has been DOA for a decade plus! I have stared into the abyss pal, and not only did it stare back it gave me the finger to boot!
Sorry about that, probably shouldn't post after finding a nail in a BRAND NEW TIRE &^$&%$&^%$&^$! Now, are you talking Xbox 1, or the X360? Because the xbox one is pretty worthless without being modded first.
And what I was explaining was having ALL of them together...the X360, your cable/sat TV, and your PC, all working as one. It is really quite simple and quite cheap. 1.- add a cheapo $40 TV Tuner, either PCI or USB, 2.-connect X360 to network. 3.-Allow X360 to stream from PC, 4.-voila! You have a fully networked home! I leave the TV plugged into one of the PCs just to give the customer something to play with, then when they are interested I give them the spiel about how if they have the x360 Windows 7 will play nicely with it, thus giving them a networked home. This gives them the advantage of recording from the cable if it is in the clear, as well as having their fat home PC HDD to fill with movies to stream.
And 6 languages, how in the hell do you keep up with all the rules? But if you have an X360 then wiring it into Windows 7 is a piece of moist and delicious cake. Here is a nice tutorial that will give you the steps. I'd be happy to recommend a tuner, but it would depend on whether you ran x86 or x64. Personally they are getting a little hard to find but I prefer the ATI TV Wonder USB 600. You just have to make sure to get the 600 if you are on Windows 7 x64, as the 650 and 700 really don't care for anything but x86.
But now I have hopefully explained it clear enough. you can have ONE TV hooked to the PC in one room, another TV hooked to the X360, and basically move around your house with video or music piped anywhere you are. Very cool. The 10 foot UI of Win 7 is a dream to use and is simple enough even dad can record his shows with it just by feeding the analog out of his cable box straight into the Win 7 box. Makes it REAL simple to have your favorite shows always recorded and waiting on you when you get home!
What I said was QUITE simple. It is that when exposed to the 10 foot UI of the new WMC it is such an easy sell because it is well designed, then I point out it will ALSO allow instant connection and streaming to any X360? Here comes the money.
So for you and the clueless mod who I'm sure based their mod on the fact you didn't get it, THIS IS EXACTLY what it has to do with TFA: If they use the SAME INTERFACE that they have ALREADY PERFECTED along with the SAME CONNECTIVITY which they have ALREADY PERFECTED then this will be a slam dunk, because their new WMC design is so simple my mom can use it. Is that REALLY SO HARD to understand?
And as for why NO, simply updating the X360 won't do, it is because you have a LARGE segment of the population that will NOT BUY anything that has the word GAME connected to it. It won't matter if you explain that you can do other things besides gaming on it, they won't touch it. Same reason they will walk right past the PS3 while looking for a Blu Ray player. That is because in their minds the PS3 is a GAME MACHINE and what they want is a PLAYER. Now you may or may not agree with that, but I deal with the public in retail 6 days a week, and that is how they think, period. You could offer them the X360 for $100 and they would walk right past it for the $200 PLAYER that does the exact same thing.
So I'm sorry if you don't seem to follow, I take it from reading your post English is not your first language, yes? From what I understand it is one of the more difficult languages to deal with so it is understandable if you have trouble if not a native speaker. But I hopefully have made it VERY clear what I was talking about, which as you can see is VERY much ON TOPIC.
Which is why I think the next big breakthrough (which will make someone Bill Gates rich) will be the ability to selectively turn memory cells off just as we can turns parts of the CPU/GPU off in AMD and Intel chips (from what I understand Nvidia is pretty much "all or nothing" except on Tegra). what one would have to develop is a "smart controller" most likely on the RAM module itself, one that knew which cells were in use and when given the "we are in low power mode" signal by the OS would have the ability to electrically isolate the running cells and power down the non working set.
IMHO it is that which will make the next big leap, not all this DDR slight decreases which IMHO just serve to keep the price of RAM raised. I mean we are just now getting to where DDR 3 is affordable! Besides unfortunately all the mobile devices try to rip off Apple with their iSliver batteries so the public have been pretty well trained to keep a charger handy. Even if you are talking a 20% gain with these micro ultra thin batteries that really won't be much. But the ones that figure out how to selectively turn off cells, they will be the ones to make incredible amounts of money especially if they patent the hell out of it. After all it will be able to have an assload of RAM, yet use almost nothing when sleeping. Who wouldn't want that?
Or maybe, just maybe, it could be because the bug is in the graphics rendering subsystem which had been changed and tweaked a lot for Win 7, and is therefor unaffected. Do you have ANY idea how many apps call upon the Windows graphics subsystems? And we are also talking about WinXP here, aka "hey lets all run as admin" which means apps can REALLY hook into the graphics subsystem and when the patch tweaks that?
Don't forget that the big selling point of Windows is its backwards compatibility which means when you are gonna patch it damned well better be tested! Can you imagine the royal shitfits if everyone came to work on Wednesday after Patch Tuesday and found their PS Pro, Photoshop, Picasa, and many of the other apps that use graphics went tits up? Hell the support lines would be hit so hard it would be a miracle if the lines didn't melt.
So don't blame on malice what can easily be explained by just requiring a shitload of work. imagine YOU were tasked to fix a graphics subsystem in 10 year old code that the original designers have done skipped off to greener pastures? Where if you don't patch it just right you can break thousands of third party app s that you have NO control over but which your customers depend on? man I wouldn't want that job, no way in hell. I bet those guys have ulcers and are bald by 30 just from the stress.
Which is why I think URL shortening should be banned. I mean what if some troll decides a rick roll or Goatse isn't nasty enough, and decides to trollbomb with CP instead? Nowadays your browser cache and history can and will be used against you in a court of law, which I'm sure gives many trolls a pitter patter of glee in their twisted little hearts.
So as long as we have shortening of URLs and allow the cops to use browser cache as "evidence" then trolls are gonna be a hell of a lot worse threat than ever before. I mean how many average folks can even tell you how to delete much less secure delete, the browser cache and search history? Hell I'm constantly trying out new browsers and don't have a clue on how to do a secure delete on Chromium based like Dragon or the more funky rare browsers like Kmeleon CCF Me, do you?
And as anyone who has used WMC on windows 7 will tell you they know how to make a damned good 10 foot UI now. if they make it as butt simple and user friendly as WMC? Yeah they could grab some decent share. People see that easy peasy WMC interface and it really isn't a hard sell, one of my biggest sellers is USB TV Tuners thanks to having a box in the corner running WMC broadcasting the cable in the shop. when folks say "How did you do that?" and "Is that a PC running the TV?" I just hand them the remote and let them play awhile, easy sell. Then you point out that Win 7 and the X360 play REALLY nice together? No problem getting them to open their wallets.
So if they keep the UI of Windows 7 WMC and the easy X360 connect? Yeah it could be a hit. And don't forget the WMV Janus DRM has yet to be reasonably hacked which will make content owners a lot less spooked about dealing with MSFT. Finally MSFT looks to be finally getting that the key to the home is "easy peasy" without the layers of submenus and options MSFT has been known for in the past. By getting WMC, WMP and the x360 all playing nice with each other the initial setup of the new MSFT stuff has pretty much been "plug in and go" which really appeals to the average Joe.
Of course it will all depend on whether MSFT can keep from shooting themselves in the foot which is always a big risk with them. Just look at how they were changing code damned near until Gold on the Vista subsystems which broke many drivers and pissed off the OEMs. So I'd say whether it has a shot will largely depend on whether MSFT can resist the urge to do something mind numbingly stupid, which is anyone's guess at this point.
The problem with your logic is this: In just 30 days that $60 game will be $40 on PC, still $60 on consoles. At 2 months it will be at $30 and at 3 it will most likely be at $20. Meanwhile if you are lucky the game at 3 months will be at $40 on the consoles, and that is if you can find it new or have to deal with the screwjob that is Gamestop.
Then figure in the fact that the PC can do several other jobs besides gaming, and unless you bought the Shitty Worst Buy special you are looking on an average of a decade or more of use. Hell I have just recently retired my circa 99 733MHz P3 into the spare PC bin, after it had gone through my hands, both the kids, and finally my mom, who just got a 3.06GHz Celeron hand me down from one of the boys who got a Pentium D with an HD4830 hand me down.
The problem with consoles is the ONLY way the increased price comes out ahead for consoles is in a VERY specific and small niche, the multiplayer in the same room niche, which frankly is nearly DOA. All the newer games are requiring play over the net, which means you are all stuck buying more games only on the consoles you will shell out more for them. The only one bucking that trend is the wii, which frankly has given up on gamers and become the "casual platform" for when grandma comes over.
So I'm sorry but like the Macbook Pro with a certain group (graphic designers) your solution only comes out ahead in certain specific circumstances that are in the case of consoles frankly becoming as rare as 8 tracks and will only get worse as time wears on, simply because the game designers have figured out that "multiplayer = multiple copies" means more $$$ for them. Sorry.
Or maybe, just maybe, these "doctors" that everyone uses to allow assholes to have cell phones and ruin movies and other public entertainment could just do what we did before cell phones and leave the number of the place they'll be at with their service?
Lets be honest folks: It ain't the doctors that cause us to need cell phone jamming, it is Latisha and Randy that want to fucking bullshit for a damned hour on their fricking phone REALLY LOUDLY in the middle of everything!
Personally unless you are of the "I'm entitled!" set I think we should allow businesses to decide for themselves whether they want to jam and let the free market handle it. After all if the doctors are more important then the business that doesn't block will do better than the one that does, yes? But what I think would happen IRL is that the theaters and restaurants that don't block will end up ghost towns as everyone runs away from the cell phone douchebags. What happened to free choice people? Let the market and businesses decide! As long as there is a sign right up front that says "we jam cell phones" I don't see any problem. Let the market handle it.
That is because you have, and it is even less relevant now. I mean so what if we haven't hit the wall on Moore's Law yet, we sure as hell hit it when it came to speed VS heat. So now everyone is having to trade more cores for raw speed only problem? It does not actually work beyond a couple of cores for 95%+ of the population. They just don't have enough jobs for the cores to do and most jobs are still depending on single threaded performance.
So they can reprint this article every year like Moore's Law is the gospel of Gordon or something but to the average folks it just doesn't matter. Trying to increase performance by constantly adding more cores (what are we up to, 6 each for AMD and Intel?) is putting band aids on the bullet wound. Most jobs simply don't benefit from more cores, and we can't figure out how to fix the heat problem above 3.6GHz.
It is a shame we are down to just two CPU manufacturers, because if someone could find a way to make a 5GHz+ CPU triple core that doesn't get so hot you could cook your lunch on it? Well THAT would be a real breakthrough. But at the way we are going we are gonna end up with everyone and their grandma on an octacore CPU that spends most of its time twiddling its thumbs.
If you have an older machine it is still VERY affordable to "max out" the RAM nowadays. for example many of those late P4/early Pentium D era machines would be maxed out on 2GB of DDR RAM, which you can get for around $58 at Newegg. With DDR 2 the 2GB sticks are naturally higher but again most except the last boards released before DDR 3 will max out on the cheaper 2GB sticks and even if your PC will take 4GB sticks they are usually overkill for anything but CAD. My boys are playing their MMOs on a couple of early Pentium D systems and frankly with XP 2GB of RAM is plenty. Hell after running the benchmarks in PCWizard I found that even with only 1GB it was the youngest GPU that was the bottleneck (an old X1650 Pro) so instead of maxing the box I simply added an HD4830 and now the only thing that constrains his game is his latency.
Even on newer machine DDR 2 can be quite affordable as long as one doesn't go for the max chips. Last year at this time when the annual slump hit I filled mine with 2 more 2GB DDR 2 800MHz chips bringing the total to 8GB and frankly with Superfetch everything already runs in RAM and did so when I was at 4GB so it was more because I wanted to fill out the board than anything else. Since this is a late model AMD AM2+ board it will take the 4GB chips, but what would be the point other than ePeen bragging rights? Win 7 X64 is already using 6.5GB for superfetch and even when I game I don't see any games running into memory as the bottleneck. With anything above 3GB one finds it is nearly always the GPU and HDD that is the bottlenecks so why buy the more expensive chips?
And finally what does consoles have to do with anything? All the consoles are frankly long past prime and using seriously old tech in them which certainly isn't gonna be affected by falling PC prices. Considering if you DIY (which is so simple nowadays I let the 15 year old build his own and frankly the only thing he needed from me was to borrow my screwdriver) you can build a really nice triple core AMD for around $400 why would you not simply have both? It isn't like you can't find a bazillion other uses for that PC when not gaming on it, whereas good luck finding a use for that Gamecube or PS2 you don't play anymore. And frankly the price of games on the consoles are just ridiculous when compared to the PC. I buy really good games all day long for less than $15 each from places like GOG and Steam, where you gonna find that for consoles?
Actually I'd argue the respawning guards actually made it better as well, and here is why: In the original once you became proficient with a couple of weapons (the silenced 9mm and sniper silenced) even on the harder level it was simply TOO easy. Throw coin, lure guards, pop in head with dum dum, lather rinse repeat. But with NOLF 2 you had to actually take time to learn the patterns because those guards you popped would eventually come back.
This really cranked up the stealth mechanic for me, as you REALLY needed to be a silent killer. With the right moves one could even use this to your advantage, by having the sneak and search skills raised it was like Xmas for goodies from all the corpses, and if one left the bodies in the right places one could use them as breadcrumbs to lure the guards right where you wanted them, while having said guards clean up the bodies for you since they always seemed to have body remover.
So while you may not have liked it if one is into the stealth (which to me was a MAJOR selling point of NOLF, just look how many levels had a "NO ALARMS" condition) it really gave one a good challenge, whereas once you got good with coins and head shots the Baron Dumas office level was the only one that was really hard in NOLF I (and even that could be beaten with a simple trick...make a fire in the waste basket in the first place you duck in and use it as a diversion) but don't take my word for it, install both games and switch back and forth. You'll find that once you are "in the groove" you will blow through NOLF whereas with NOLF 2 one has to take your time, learn the guards routines (especially on the nighttime Russian base level) and use the cover wisely. When one beat a level in NOLF 2 it gave a great sense of accomplishment because you knew you were a stealth killing badass.
I'd add No One Lives Forever 2 VS Contract J.A.C.K to that, as NOLF 2 made every single thing in the game BETTER while at the same time sticking to what made the game fun with a capital F, namely the cool gadgets and stealth mixed with the silly humor.
Then Monolith decided that since NOLF 2 hadn't sold like they had hoped (I would argue it was pacing...they should have dropped the player into the thick quicker and then backed off, rather than such a slow build up) so it must be because the lead wasn't a macho he man type so they put out Jack which as you put it pissed in the face of the fans. Generic hero meets generic bad guys with generic guns...yawn. The closest they got to an original idea was the space attack, which was just a rail shooter in the end.
But in the end it comes down to keeping what the audience liked and building on it, not "pulling a Lucas" and trying to cover the stench with SFX. I mean I play some of these sequels like Deus Ex II and think "Did the designers even bother to WATCH, much less play the first one?" because it is like they brought in a completely unrelated team and just through a few basic ideas from the first in a Hollywood "high concept" fashion instead of actually knowing and caring about the franchise.
Actually I hate to say it but in the case of your first video Correlation != Causation. You see I have done that little experiment myself and found the real culprit of the CPU spikes. You see when you are dealing with huge numbers of files and folders like that Windows 7 tries to load all the metadata for those files on the fly if you are in icon view, and of course loading all that info WILL cause a serious spike.
To see for yourself switch between the different icon views along with list and detailed view and see the difference. You will see that in icon view it will try to load the metadata as well as read the folder's contents, which results in high CPU. In list or detail that simply doesn't happen and in my own tests the CPU went from 54% to less than 7% simply by changing the view. Since WinXP doesn't change the icons appearance based on what is inside nor does it try to load the metadata for a file unless asked it has lower usage which appears to be based on the GDI+ but in actuality is simply the fact that one OS is loading data the other just ignores. Whether one considers it better to use or ignore the data is a design decision but at least in that case doesn't have anything to do with GDI from what I can see.
And the funny part is the pirates did better at stripping down their own OS than MSFT did. Look up "Tiny XP Rev 09" for a nice uber light version of XP that takes just 45MB on the desktop and runs a good 80%+ of Windows apps, or even thinner is "MicroXP Rev 03" which uses less than 32MB. If you have an older P4 you want to try Win 7 on for shits and giggles download "Tiny7" and be amazed at a Windows 7 that just uses 145MB of RAM! They also have a "Tiny Vista" but of course it really isn't very popular. If you have valid WinXP or Windows 7 licenses you can use them instead of the included key and have a nice stripped down desktop that is just CRAZY fast. I recently installed the "Tiny XP" for a customer that needed XP uber light for a low powered laser cutter C&C. I used his provided legal key and now he has a 1GHz with 256Mb of RAM that barely sips power and runs his laser cutter like a champ.
As for TFA, is anyone surprised? Like XP Windows 7 is just a good OS, and I have yet to have anyone switched that didn't take to 7 like a duck to water. Hell my dad is about as clueless as they come when it comes to tech, he still can't figure out how to work more than half of his cell phone, but he has gotten more use out of his PC and laptop since I got him the family pack of HP in Oct than he did in nearly a decade of XP. What amazed me was being the impatient sort when I told him after dropping off the family pack at his work that it would be the weekend before I could install it he took it upon himself to install. I figured when I heard that and finally got a chance to come over the PC would be a big mess and cause me to start over but nope, it has done all the work and set it up for him, even pointing him to a free AV on first boot. All I had to do was show him how to get to Ninite to install his Firefox and MS Messenger and that was it. When he got a little headset mike to talk to his friends on chat it even asked him "You have a headset plugged in, would you like to learn about and use speech recognition?" so he is trying that out as we speak. A nice touch to a nice OS.
Well then, as someone who has been converting SMBs and SOHOs away from XP allow me to add a few. 1.-Windows Superfetch, which if your customers use specific apps day in and day out will have those apps loaded for them in RAM and ready to go instantly. It will even learn the times of day you use them, so if you use one particular app pre lunch and another after they will be loaded at the appropriate time. 2.- The file and registry virtualization tech that started with Vista is much more mature now, and when combined with WinXP Mode means just about any app will run no matter which versions of Windows it was written for. This is nice when you have an old app that is required and you want to move up to 64 bit.
3.-The security system is much better than the pretty much "everything is admin all the time!" XP way of doing things. To lock down XP you really needed to go in with GPOs and lock the OS down, and you would often find apps that needed serious "massaging" to work in a non admin environment. with 7 and the above file and registry tweaks built in that is no longer the case, now you can stick with a normal user, and the most risky part of your PC, the browser, can be run in low rights mode if you use IE or one of the webkit based browsers like Chrome or my favorite Comodo Dragon. 4.-Once shown how it works I've found my users to be MUCH faster using the new breadcrumb navigation system that the old panels and trees way of navigating the OS. The new breadcrumb makes it simple to jump anywhere in the tree, and will also remember the places they go to the most. This along with the new jumplists makes much faster access to common tasks and folders. 5.- Despite the tests posted, which are all of the Vista version, I've found adding a 4GB flash to Readyboost makes makes a machine MUCH snappier, especially if you are dealing with customers that run a lot of heavy apps and bog down their machines often. This is because the 4GB flash thanks to Readyboost turns any HDD into a hybrid and uses the 4GB for random reads, which are of course much faster than any spinning disc.
So as you can see just from naming the ones off the top of my head my customers are pleased with you have several reasons to upgrade. That doesn't even count the other niceties like the new printers and devices stage which makes managing everything from network printers to webcams and backup devices simple, the built in Windows disc imaging which is quite nice and very simple for users to operate, the ease with which new devices can be added thanks to MSFT incorporating more and more drivers into Windows Update and accessed via Action Center, Action Center which makes most administrative tasks quite simple for SMBs and SOHOs to keep up with, the new performance monitoring which will point out problem drivers and bottlenecks that would ordinarily be hard to catch such as the malfunctioning HDMI driver on a customer's machine which was causing it to not drop into low power mode as often as it should, heck I could go on all day.
So I'd have to say after the disaster of Vista MSFT really outdid themselves with this one. I have been running Windows 7 hard since Beta 2 and never have had a single crash no matter how hard I stress the system. It all "just works" and all the little features and rock solid design like I named above really do make it a worthwhile upgrade, and this is from someone who hung onto Win2K until 6 months after XP SP2 had been out.
And if I give them a magical LOLCat infections rates will go down by 10,000% and magic pixies will appear to rub their little footies and...wait a tick, that is a what you call it, oh yeah an anecdote and doesn't prove jack which is why I put a disclaimer at the front instead of trying to pass it off as proof like you do Petey, but you KNOW this, don't you?
poor wittle APK, also know as "Petey, the idiot HOPES file guy" As in you HOPES that one of the 300,000+ constantly changing array of websites that are infected doesn't happen to be the one you visit today? Or that you HOPES that nobody notices after repeatedly being asked you have FAILED to show even the tiniest shred of mathematical proof that your magical woobie can scale? That you HOPES nobody notices your only "proof" is anecdotes, often by your own sock puppets like Kingsjester?
Remember Petey I'm not the ponce making outrageous claims so it is up to you to show the math instead of wasting everyone's time waving your little shriveled winkie around by making claims with no mathematical proof and nothing but anecdotes as "evidence". After all those that the earth is only 6000 years old have a full boat of anecdotes to back up THEIR claims as well, but we still think they are just as batshit as you, now don't we?
The simple fact is this: no matter how many times trollie says "1+1 = 3" the math simply proves you wrong and THAT is why all you can do is throw insults. You have 190,000 to 340,000 infected websites at this very moment and that list will change by the thousands per minute as sites are cleaned, new sites are infected, new vulnerabilities found, etc. Now for your HOPES file to actually be a REAL protection and not just a woobie? It will have to dynamically scale and keep up with that ever changing list of infections. Now even if you had twenty fingers and subscribed to every security list on the planet your HOPES file will ALWAYS BE OUT OF DATE and behind the curve. Always. Don't like those numbers? Use the ones from Securina, Grisoft, Symantec, any reputable security site. YOU CHOOSE. I have shown mathematically you are full of shit, now lets see you math that proves me wrong PETEY.
Now if you have a mathematical proof that shows how a static .txt file dropped into system 32 can magically scale dynamically? Lets see it. Otherwise it is NOTHING more a magical LOLCat pic backed up by anecdotes. That is the nice thing about math, it doesn't lie or believe in anecdotes. So it is all on Petey and your magical HOPES woobie now. YOU made the extravagant claims, back them up with the math. If you can't? Well then you are full of shit, case closed. Notice how ALL YOU CAN DO is throw insults and trollbomb? Why is that? I'll tell you why, because math doesn't lie and you just can't show the math you just can't do it or you would have by now, but it would be like trying to mathematically prove you are not an idiot PETEY. It just can't be done.
So please, keep posting APK, I do so enjoy pointing out the total uber fail of your magical woobie so. I also personally consider it a public service to point people to solutions that actually work instead of relying on magical woobies and anecdotes. And of course bitch slapping your around is also quite fun!
Apparently you've never been to AR, have you? Any excuse for firing off fireworks is a good one here, and the party will usually start at dark and continue until the wee hours. Usually they'll start with the small stuff and then work their way up, so by the time we are talking they should have worked up to some of the louder whistling cluster bees and color showers.
So you can't really go by the time when it comes to fireworks in AR. We like them too much to stick to any silly schedule. Hell you ought to come around here the week of the fourth, we have many that buy truly insane amounts of rockets and will fire them off the entire week of the fourth. Here one doesn't expect peace and quiet the week of the fourth until after midnight, and with New Years it starts at dark and finally fizzles out around 1AM.
Well I'm happy to help. Dealing with quite a few senior customers I found there really isn't any way to break them of their trusting nature, I guess because they grew up in a time when there weren't so many douchebags. But I would like to point out there are a couple of things you'll have to do, although I doubt it will affect any clueless family members.
1.-Comodo Time Machine does not like dual boots with Win 7. Linux, win9x, win2k, not a problem. But if you install windows 7 to anywhere but the C: drive it changes itself to C: on startup, for example I am running Windows 7 and even though I installed on my D: it currently says it is on C: and my XP which is on C: is on E:. it does this because win 7 file and registry virtualization requires the C: drive letter but as a side effect it freaks Time Machine out. it won't hurt anything, it just won't run.
2.-after first install and scan it will take Comodo Av or Comodo Internet Security (on XP I prefer CIS, and on Vista/7 I prefer Comodo AV, as the firewall in XP doesn't block outbound like Comodo AV and Vista/7 does) about a week to learn their usage habits. By that I mean it will ask them "Did you mean to launch this?" for the first week until it learns their apps. If you know which apps they use most often you can launch them yourself, otherwise they will have to click yes when they first launch an app. Once it has learned their patterns it is pretty unobtrusive and doesn't require an email address or constantly hit the with pop ups wanting to upsell them either. It also has a well designed control system so if someone knowledgeable such as yourself wants you can customize everything to your tastes or the desired security level, for example setting a rule that all browsers MUST run in the sandbox. It also has an excellent whitelist so once the PC is declared clean essential windows services won't cause a permission pop up.
But if you have clueless relatives or those you have to support that live a good distance the Comodo one two punch along with Ninite and Filehippo Update Checker really are a Godsend. Ninite gives you a simple way to give them the latest of the most popular apps and codecs, so if say they call and say "It says I need Flash" you can send them to Ninite and tell them after running it if it still asks for Flash it is a virus. With Ninite it is easy as "check box, run installer" since it does a full web based unattended with NO TOOLBARS or other crap. And with Filehippo it will put a little icon that uses just a few dozen KB of RAM in the tray and will alert them if a third part app is out of date, because as we know third party apps like Adobe Reader when out of date (which I just give them Foxit from the Ninite site) are one of the biggest sources of malware drive bys.
But with these plus those two Comodo apps I linked to earlier you can take the hassle and guesswork out of admin duties for family PCs. Comodo AV keeps them clean, Time Machine gives you a way to restore easily by phone even if they manage to BSOD the box, Ninite gives you an easy secure way to get them the latest apps, and Filehippo lets them keep them updated so YOU don't have to. Believe me with nearly 2 decades supporting home and small business users there really is no easier way to keep a Windows box up and running smooth.
I would also point out to support your theory we had an unseasonably warm period followed by a rapid cold snap with a large drop in pressure and there were several quick flash storms with heavy lightning close to the area where the birds annually nest, and the path of the storms would have taken it right over where they found the drum. Also as is tradition several large fireworks were shot off for New years. Talking to someone from the area this afternoon they figured the fireworks scared the birds who took off and then either the flock got hit by hail or lightning, as they were pretty beat up.
So this isn't HAARP or some other conspiracy theory, just some birds and fish getting caught in the wrong conditions at the wrong time. And as for the thousands my source said it looked closer to 900-1800 and this is in an area where several thousand of these birds nest at this time of year. So it wasn't even the entire flock but everyone is playing it safe and have sent a couple hundred of the carcasses for analysis anyway. It must be a slow news day here at /. because the local news spent maybe 60 seconds on it in a "BTW ain't this weird?" kind of manner.