Oh please. Every single time there is anything political you bring out that "metagovernment" crap, which not only has LESS of a chance than electing 50 non crap senators, in fact has about as much odds of winning as the entire USA military being taken on by 40 guys from Alabama where the biggest weapon they have is grandpaw's hunting rifle.
Here is what you would have to accomplish to pull off metagovenrment, please pay attention: You will have to simultaneously get the entire population to turn off ALL forms of propaganda, which of course will be pounding into their collective heads what a complete nutter you are, while at the same time get the ENTIRE senate and congress to essentially vote to disband themselves and stop the money train.
I hate to break the news to you but there is a reason why you can pull crap like metagovernment in say Paduka nowhere Alaska and can NOT even get it state wide. Know why? Because the MILLISECOND you try that shit at anything above nowhere city council level you awaken the megacorps, which then point their WMD known as the MSM at you and then you are well and truly fucked. I'd love to see a poll to see what the public thinks of Wikileaks right now, I'll bet my last dollar they'll say something like "a terrorist hangout for rapists" or something of the sort. You seem to think that We, The People are actually in control and can just decide things should be different when that hasn't been the case in probably a century, if it ever was. You have corporations making billions on the endless wars and stupidity and frankly people and ideas have been killed for far less. You keep waving your little metagovernment flag, but I don't care if it is the best damned idea in the history of ideas, unless you have a couple of billion lying around to run counter propaganda with it has about as much chance as ice cream in hell.
As for TFA, it really is a shame we don't have 50 Frankens, but IRL they'll let him rant while the telecos pay off....err use their lobbyist influence, to add to the election coffers of the right people and they'll get a wish list of "how can I screw Americans" like big business has been getting for decades. See healthcare reform, see DMCA, see the Mickey Mouse copyright extensions, for examples. If big teleco wants net neutrality dead, then dead it shall be. It isn't like most of us have a choice and can vote with our dollars anyway.
But with what formats? See you really have to watch out for what I call "Intel speak" and I'll give an example: For years their chips could play high def MPG 1-2, but any other format would peg the CPU at 100% and bog the living hell out of the system. The Intel IGPs always seem to end up like those little Broadcom "HD" chips, in that it'll play one or two formats, that are perfectly encoded to a set standard, very very well. Everything else will cause it to choke and throw it to the CPU.
Now last I checked both the AMD and Nvidia IGPs because they have actual GPUs with programmable shaders can be updated to play newer formats via driver updates. It has been a couple of months since I checked the specs so my data may be a little old, but IIRC over a half a dozen formats are supported by the AMD and Nvidia IGPs, including pretty much every popular format there is.
Lets be honest, there is a reason why Intel IGPs are dirt cheap. It is because there really isn't a lot to them. they always will skimp on shaders, memory, anything that will save a penny. It is like how for years while everyone else had moved to hardware T&L Intel had T&L on the CPU. Sure it saved probably 10c a chip, but the performance was bloody awful and made playing Half Life I or watching newer than MPG 2 video formats like dealing with a PPT presentation. And you NEVER hear someone bragging about how well their Intel IGP handles, the best "praise" you get is "Meh, it works alright I guess". Faint praise indeed.
Anyway I've found the price difference between an AMD Neo machine and an Atom machine to be negligible, especially when you figure in how much better the machines handle with a real CPU+GPU plus having a real Windows with WMC instead of Starter. I have yet to have a customer unhappy with their new Neo machine.
Sigh, do you work at Best Buy? Because I frankly only deal with THIS level of stupid when I have to fix what the geek squad fucks up. BTW nice to see when you take your meds you can STOP putting CAPS all over the PLCE. Now I'm gonna use little words, do try to keep up. The reason why nobody recommends HOSTS file for anything more than keeping Little Billy off the chat sites? Well you see there is this little thing called privilege escalation. you know that HOSTS file? Yeah, you know who ALWAYS has access to it? THE SYSTEM. And hey, guess how the bugs drop their payload in your system folder? Why with system rights of course! Dumbass.
So I really hate to whizz all over your precious HOSTS file fantasy, but the malware writers figured out in....ohh around 1997, that an easy way to steal data was to infect THE VERY FILE YOU ARE DEPENDING ON so that when you go to mail.google. com you instead go to maill.google.com which presents you with a shiny google login, which since the HOSTS file troll has bet his ass on his HOSTS file, will promptly give away his data and enjoy a good pwning. And don't even bring Linux into this, we are not talking security by obscurity but thinking a HOSTS file will protect Windows. News Flash...it won't. All a HOSTS file does is put you in an endless race with malware writers, which since you are looking at around 100,000 new pieces of nasty a week, and around 2000-3000 infected websites, which changes constantly? Yeah you WILL lose. And of course the first piece of malware to get in will use a privilege escalation bug in...ohh lets say Adobe, because everyone forgets to update and new bugs are found in that shite daily, and then will promptly teabag your precious HOSTS file while flinging poo.
But please, don't believe me. Hang onto your HOSTS file like a magical woobie that protects you from all the nasties. Both the repair guys like me and the malware writers and botnet herders just LOOOOOVE when you believe in magical thinking. Because it makes us lots of $$$. Of course we repair guys are nice enough to laugh at you behind your back and call you PEBKAC and ID10T, whereas the botnet herder will blow through your bandwidth like shit through a goose if you are lucky, if not he will use your PC for illegal activity in which case please enjoy the conversation with the nice men in dark suits with crewcuts and large black guns.
I have a few of the moron crowd, and yeah Comodo doesn't give a crap. That said maybe you ought to offer them Windows 7 Home Premium for $50? You can pick up the three pack for around $119 now, so you can convert three pirates into legit machines and STILL make $30 on the deal. But if all you want is a free AV that will keep that old XP Corporate from getting pwned? Yeah Comodo is the way to go.
All that proves is those sites need to be busted (BTW, for those at work it is emo porn...shudder) and not the need to nanny the planet. I mean if I start selling "Romex watches" is it the fault of watch manufacturers that they didn't somehow keep me from coming up with a fake? Hell no! We have laws against the KIRF bunches and can drop the banhammer and grab their stuff. The SAME THING should apply to typo squatters, which is exactly what that is.
ANY site that gets a name close to a legitimate target that isn't IN SOME WAY connected with the target site (for example if your above link was a game review or game store) then they should have the domain snatched and any proceeds sued right out from under them. Have THAT happen a couple of times and this bogey man would dry up and blow away like a fart in the wind.
Yeah, why should they have running water and electricity, those filthy hillbillies! Let them shit in buckets and use candles! Oh wait a tick, could it be that increasingly the US government, as well as the states, are moving everything online because it is cheaper than printing and mailing crap, not to mention dealing with the sorting and filing of said crap?
If you wanted to cut a day or two out of mailing letters fine, but I just had to help a nephew fill out all the paperwork for him to start college. We are talking tons of electronic forms and PDF and tons of other eCrap that with dialup would have been frankly impossible to accomplish. That of course doesn't count the fact that having an infrastructure that isn't from the fricking stone age opens up all kinds of new opportunities, like using Netflix instead of blowing through gas going to the nearest Redbox, eLearning and other ways to better yourself like virtual classrooms, and the ability top start new businesses and save on greenhouse gases by the way of eCommerce and Telecommuting.
So lets please step off the "corporation yay!" bandwagon for a minute, shall we? We have been kissing the telecoms booties here in the USA for damned near 30 years now, and even our largest cities have broadband speeds that are honestly shameful compared to the rest of the planet, and much of our rural areas have land lines laid down when fricking Ike was president. If we wait for the "free market" in the case of nationwide broadband we will ALL end up on the short bus to crappytown, left behind while the world advances, while all we will have to show for it is some crappy quality Youtube videos of Telecom CEOs snorting coke off of $1000 hooker asses while having their balls tickled with $100 bills. It is time we treat broadband no different that electricity or water, take the last mile AWAY from the telecoms by laying OUR OWN LINES, and then if they want to compete they can get off their asses and offer better service for less money. That is what the free market is supposed to be about, competition, right?
You want to know the sad part? MSFT has the fricking source code and doesn't do as well as the pirate hackers with their own shit. look up "Tiny7" and you'll find a version of Windows 7 that'll run anything a regular Win7 will and just takes 145MB of RAM and almost 0% CPU on the desktop. For even crazier numbers look up "TinyXP Rev 09" which uses just 45MB! on the desktop or MicroXP A03" which uses just 32MB.
MSFT needs to hire the pirate hackers and have THEM design the lightweight versions, because trying them out they'll play any game or office app you throw at them and feel fast even on 10 year old crap. Which considering the Atom is in order crap that is like a hyper P3 would mean you'd actually have a Windows that was snappy on one. Personally I'll wait until some come out with the AMD Neo, as it pairs an actual AMD CPU, which means out of order dual cores with virtualization and x64 support as well as DEP, with a nice Radeon GPU so the videos will all be unskippy and smooth.
Playing with Atom based netbooks here at the shop it always amazes me people buy these things, as I have 7 year old laptops that feel smoother and handle better than the Atom single cores everyone keeps using. I guess it just proves folks will buy just about anything if it is cheap enough. Hell I should have known that when the local Walgreen's sold out of the $99 Android tablet, which felt so anemic that even launching a fricking browser felt like you needed to pack a lunch first.
You want me to disprove something that EVERYONE ON THE PLANET already knows? How about the fact that EVERY SINGLE VIRUS in the free world can trivially change the HOSTS file dipshit. Want examples? Here are 18 billion of them.
You're like the idiot that thinks your computer is a "magic box" and by saying the right incantation you can protect yourself. Well I hate to break the news to ya kid, but this isn't your MMORPG and buffs don't actually work in real life. You trick actually worked for about 4 weeks in 1997 and after that every virus and his retard cousin blows through your precious HOSTS like you blow through tissues reading Master Chief fan fics.
But of course such things are beyond your tiny immature brain, because then you would have to learn about things like layered security and least permissions instead of blinding hanging onto HOSTS as a woobie to protect you from the big bad world out there. But please, keep insulting the paper degree I had to get to get the bank to approve my business loans (which BTW my shop is doing VERY well, thanks) while thinking a HOSTS file, shit everyone with a brain dropped in 1998, will protect you. The spammers I'm sure have already made your PC their bitch. May I suggest your local repair shop? They'll have to charge you extra because of the ID10T error, but I assure you those are VERY hard to fix.
Hey everybody, I'd like you to meet my new pet, please excuse the smell or the fact it seems to piddle on itself a lot.
This is the HOSTS file troll, which is a fourteen year old Halo player that recently discovered HOSTS files (you remember, those things we used in the mid 90s before EVERY single virus on the planet figured BUTT SIMPLE ways to get around them? Yeah those) and now, since he is so hopped up on Mountain Dew and hormones because he never gets laid, has taken it upon himself to have a HOLY CRUSADE where he uses lots of leet speak and weird CAPS IN SENTENCES to spread the gospel of the HOSTS file, which is older than Betty White and frankly isn't nearly as interesting.
But I hate to break the news to you, poor little lost LEAVE THE FUCKING CAPS LOCK ALONE! latchkey child, but this isn't Digg, or one of your gaming forums populated by little clueless I SAID PUT IT DOWN! hopped up basement dwellers such as yourself, you see this is/. where not only does everybody already know about your new religion, the HOSTS file, but we actually wrote the thing you now clutch like a security blanket because you soiled your regular one. And you know what? We gave up on that lame shit around the time of WinME.
I know trying to educate a moronic youth such as yourself is like pissing in the wind, because you've had all your opinions beaten into you by the MSM but what the hey, it is close to Xmas and the Feet isn't a complete grinch, so I'll try. You see grasshopper, your precious HOSTS file leaves you in what is known as an "arms race" which to explain that in little words you can understand, it is like CTF in Halo. You see all it takes is ONE, just one, bad guy to NOT be on your precious static text file and the next thing you know he is teabagging you while all his friends throw up gang signs and rip off all your stuff. The rest of us have long moved on to things we don't have to manually update where these good people known as "security professionals" constantly update and configure so we don't have to.
But don't worry, we understand. when your DSL is just too laggy for some DM and you have rubbed your little winkie raw to fan fic of Master Chief you really need something to do, so I suppose letting you play with the HOSTS file is better than letting a cretin like yourself anywhere near system32. BTW did you know putting in deltree C:/ in command line will speed up your HOSTS file by 500%? Try it! But thinking just because one of your butt buddies on the Army of Two match ladder thingie told you about HOSTS makes it the newest thing since the x360 doesn't mean it isn't as old as...well that pair of your mother's panties you keep sniffing which is wrong on SO many levels. All you do is make yourself look like an absolute tard by constantly spouting off about HOSTS like it is some new hotness. On second thought God only know what else your pathetically limited mind would speak about if you didn't blather on about HOSTS, so carry on.
Oh Lord, its you, the crazy hosts file troll. What do you think this is, 1997? What are you on Win98 First Edition or something? I mean WTF, nobody uses your tired old crap anymore, okay? We have things like Privoxy and Comodo Secure DNS and Peerblock, we don't need some tired old text file bullshit. And don't bring up resources because nobody gives a good wet fart. We have more RAM than God and CPUs with gold plated dangling bits so we really don't give a crap about saving a whole 30KB of resources.
so why don't you go push your tired old leet speak and equally tired old text file down at the goodwill where there are machines old enough that editing text files to save a couple of KB of RAM and CPU might actually be worth it. The rest of us grownups have better things to do, okay junior? I know you think that just because you have found out about a HOSTS file recently makes it the greatest thing since sliced bread, but the rest of us outgrew that shit when you were still sitting in a nappy full of your own poo.
Sure you can, just get it from Ninite and off you go. Of course if you are running a pirated version of Windows it won't work even without WGA, since it will call home on first run, which is when I guess it'll go ahead and check your key. You ARE running a legal copy and not just being a filthy pirate, yes MR AC? Anyway I've checked and no WGA on my XP machine, so if it is a principle thing no worries.
As for TFA, allow me to throw a couple of extra letters and say BS. I just run the update check on BOTH WinXP and Windows 7 X64 and both find new updates to the scanning defs but do NOT update to 2.0. So I'll wait until tomorrow and if it still doesn't update I guess I'll have to do the old fashioned uninstall and reinstall bit.
Personally I like it for myself, as I know I'm just going to places like/. and checking my email. Whereas with my waaaay too click happy customers who may or may not be searching for the pron I prefer Comodo Internet Security, which while being a little more talkative during the learning phase has an excellent sandbox with file and registry virtualization. If you have those kinds of people that can pick up more viruses than a Bangkok Whore I heartily recommend Comodo. It actually uses less RAM than MSE, especially during scanning, which you would think since MSE does less than Comodo would be the opposite. Oh well, I have gobs of RAM and like the fact that MSE never asks me shit, especially when I'm typing, which is when Comodo seems to think is a good time for a nice chat.
Have you given Comodo SSL? Their main office is in India so I doubt it would be as quick to roll over for the USA, but hell you never know anymore. Anyway they offer a free 90 day SSL so you can try before you buy, and their certs go from 128/256 all the way up to 2048 bit, so you have plenty of choices. Prices start at $69 a year and go from there depending on how many extras you want.
Since it has a free try before you buy this would be a great chance to see where they stand without spending any $$$. I don't see a downside really, either they don't cave and you buy it, or they do and you don't.
Oh Good Lord, its the HOSTS file troll. I thought you only irritated people on Opera and other browser threads? For the rest of us you can either just use the free Comodo Dragon browser and pick the "yes I'd like to use the secure Comodo DNS" box on install, or if you are attached to your browser one can just go here for simple instructions on switching over to Comodo Secure DNS.
Either way you'll have real time blacklists that you don't have to maintain, phishing and DNS cache poisoning protection, and most importantly don't have to play "whack a mole" by futzing with HOSTS files. I mean jeez, what do you think this is, 1997?
The other poster listed Opera, so allow me to give you the one for Comodo Dragon and other Chromium browsers...install this extension and then just add/remove anything you want. I kind of like how Dragon does everything by extension, it leaves the default slim and one can simply add what they need/want.
I still miss my FF just because I had grown used to it, but I won't use a browser I won't give to my customers and with FireFox taking the "don't care, won't fix" attitude with low rights mode it is simply too unsafe to use on Vista/Windows 7. I mean what's the point of having all that extra security if Mozilla promptly punches a gaping hole in it and then waves their dinosaur winkie in your face?
But if you haven't given it a go and don't mind trying new things give the Dragon a spin. I'm running it right now and their secure DNS seems to be a little faster than both OpenDNS and my ISP DNS, and the browser really handles nicely. I just added ABP and Forecast and it has sync built in, so that pretty much covers the FF extensions I required. Give it a spin, it's nice!
Hey now. Personally I think we should thank Britain. Thank you, o British people, for no matter how big of a bunch of douchebags our government in the USA becomes, you will ALWAYS end up so much worse we here in America will always have something to feel good about. You are to us what Mississippi is to the south. At least we can point at you, with your fifty bazillion cameras and nanny state BS and go "Well at least we aren't them!". So thank you Britain, for always stepping up to the plate.
Seriously, I thought the religious ninnies in the USA were bad. When did the British become more uptight about sex than the USA? I thought being a giant bunch of prudes was OUR gig! And wouldn't you just looooove to snatch the PCs of the ones pushing this? You know they probably need TB sized drives just to hold all the kink.
What I don't get is why all this money is being spent to look for some planet we will never ever reach in the far side of Alpha who the fuck knowswheresville, when there are plenty of things we could be doing closer to home that doesn't have enough funding like...ohh I don't know...looking for the big ugly rocks that can KILL US ALL very very dead if they hit? Or detecting and cataloging which big ugly rocks have resources we could use, along with testing ways we could snatch said resources to help with our dwindling resources down here?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of these "spend everything on the ground!" types, and know that many cool things we use every day was cooked up by NASA (although I DO think NASA shouldn't be allowed to be affected by congress, because then we end up with clusterfucks like the Shuttle having a bazillion pieces being built all over the place so congressman dumbfuckus can bring home the bacon) it just seems to me we always blow money on the "holy shit, that's cool" kind of stuff while ignoring the "shouldn't we be doing this instead?" kinds of things. I mean last I heard something like less than 30% of the sky is actively monitored for nasties headed our way. I'd say until that number was damned close to 100% we shouldn't even be caring if some star a bazillion light years away has a hot Jupiter or not. Am I missing something here?
That's weird, maybe it is your version of Chromium? I've recently switched to Comodo Dragon thanks to Mozilla with their "don't care, won't fix" attitude with regards to low rights mode in Vista and Win 7. It is also based on Chromium, has all the "phone home" crap cut out, and as a nice bonus offers you the choice of using the Comodo secure DNS which black holes the IP addresses of malicious spammers, scammers, and other nasties. If you are on Windows I would heartedly recommend it, it is quite nice and Adblock for Chrome works beautifully.
As for TFA, while I wish Opera nothing but luck something about their UI has always struck me as being...off. I don't know how to describe it, my oldest loves it so every time a new one comes out I give it a try on his machine but just never have been able to "get" Opera. It always feels like I'm fighting the thing. Maybe it is just one of those "love it or hate it" kind of things with no middle ground. Frankly with Chrome and Chromium I have a feeling both Opera and FireFox are gonna be in for a serious fight, Firefox because of their "cross platform or GTFO" attitude with regards to codecs and low rights mode. I mean why should I risk my customer's security just so Firefox can sit on their high horse about an OS that doesn't bloody need low rights mode anyway? And as for Opera their big selling point was speed, which frankly IMHO is mattering less and less daily. Mozilla is gonna have crazy JavaScript speed in Firefox 4, Chromium based browsers are already crazy fast, really how much fricking faster can we get? You still have to depend on a person to push the button, which means my Dragon is already faster than this old greybeard.
And allow me to finish since I'm already in my old and crotchety mode, that FF and Opera speeding up JavaScript without increasing security by using things like low rights mode seems horribly irresponsible to me. I mean we see time and time again that "JavaScript malware o' the day" is quickly getting right up there with Adobe products on the list of "things to bite you in the ass" and just means by cranking the JavaScript to 11 you are gonna make the machine get pwned really really REALLY fast, which just doesn't seem like a useful feature IMHO. At least IE and Chromium based browsers like Chrome, SWIron, Dragon, all use low rights mode to isolate the browser from the rest of the system. It just seems to me as Windows 7 replaces XP with tech like UAC, DEP, ASLR, and file and registry virtualization, the browser by virtue of it being so close to "bare metal" with the net will become the #1 attack vector if it isn't already. Anything the browser maker can do that limits the ability to be attacked is great in my book. And I apologize if Opera managed to sneak low rights mode in, but after doing a Yahoo Search all I found was folks complaining about FF and Opera not having it.
Actually I'd say slavery would have continued maybe another 20 years, because the machines of the north would have made slaves worthless since you don't have to feed, clothe, house, and provide medical care for the machine which also doesn't need rest. For an example look at how nearly all work required the use of a horse and then suddenly almost overnight horses simply weren't needed, or how much of the jobs on assembly lines are being taken by robots. As for what happened afterward I really wouldn't have been surprised if without the animosity that came from losing a war if the south would have supported one of the "freedmen for Africa" movements which were quite popular at the turn of the 20th century, and one could argue whether or not the blacks of America would have been better off in their own country but one can't argue it could have been worse than Jim Crow or even life in the slums today. How sad that MLK has his name attached to a street that even the cops won't go down in most cities.
As for TFA as someone with a gay child I was actually for DADT, simply because it gave at least one (the other is in med school and should be there for quite awhile) from being possibly drafted. Anybody who thinks this will actually give gays any real rights like civil unions is delusional, this is simply a way for the corporation....errr...I mean the government, to help deal with losses thanks to two wars the public doesn't support. I have friends in the military and some are looking at 6th and 7th deployments. Whereas before if you got hit it was a purple heart and a trip home they now have soldiers with artificial limbs still on active duty. They can talk about recruitment during a recession but the local recruiters are hitting the streets every damned day and offering every incentive short of hookers and blow and simply can't make their numbers. This and the talk of allowing illegals in in return for citizenship is nothing but a way to deal with depleted manpower thanks to Bush giving us Viet Nam x2 and Obama being more wishy washy than Carter.
But if you think this gets us even a millimeter closer to allowing civil unions or anything else that would actually benefit gay people I have a really nice bridge to sell you. As long as the evangelicals stand on their pulpits and spew hate for anyone that isn't like them you can give that up. Funny how that is THE SAME PLACE where we saw so much "God made us better than the nigger!" speech against civil rights, huh?
Uh huh...hey you remember the XKCD comic where they showed reality VS fantasy of cracking passwords? You are falling into that trap friend. Most laptops, like most anything else that is stolen, is stolen by junkies. Junkies by their very nature aren't the brightest of creatures, and sure as hell ain't gonna be pulling off the fancy tricks you're talking about. No what will happen if this switch gets popular is a hell of a lot of unscrupulous PC repair shops is gonna have a windfal of spare parts to sell on eBay. Screens, RAM, HDDs, disc drives, hell it will be like Xmas for them.
So I hate to burst your bubble, but thieves don't do major hacks like that. A junkie will try to turn whatever they get their filthy hands on ASAP for a fix, first to their fellow junkies/dealers, and then to pawn shops, flea markets, anywhere they think they can turn it. Since the machines will be "dead" and thus can't be sold to dealers or other civilians they'll quickly learn which repair shop down the street doesn't ask questions about "broken" laptops and that will be the end of that.
So has the Yahoo staff you've become friends with start mailing out their resumes? Because THIS, this right here exemplified in your post, is why Yahoo is on life support and fighting for breath. They pay frankly insane prices for properties like Geocities or Delicious and then have NO CLUE as to what to do with them afterward. None at all. No business plans, no plans to grow or move the company forward, no advertising plans, just a "buzzword bingo" shopping list they have no damned clue what to do with once they "win" the property in question.
Frankly I haven't seen a company this badly mismanaged since the glory days of AOHell and their great "buzzword bingo" shopping spree. And we all know how well THAT turned out, with AOL nearly destroying Time Warner and losing..what? 80% of their value? Frankly I'm waiting for the place to slide a little further down towards the basement and then MSFT will snatch them up. The portal and the email are still worth money for eyeballs and data mining, but it is pretty obvious that the mismanagement at Yahoo would take a goose that laid golden eggs and serve it up with a side of mashed potatoes.
I'm afraid you are wrong, and here is why: The "big money" for the telecos is NOT in scamming customers from each other, it is in ridiculous "butt raped to the 900th power" long term contracts that they offer with the latest iShiny. If they were to leech massive amount of customers from another, why then they'd have to build new infrastructure, and that would cut into the quarterly earnings which is bad. No instead just like how ALL FOUR TELECOS raised the price of SMS at the exact same time, they will simply get together and set a date for the raping to commence.
No you can scream anti-trust all you want, nobody in Washington gives a shit anymore, and hasn't in decades. If they did the telecos/cablecos would have been busted a LONG time ago for their sleazy tactics and ass raping of customers. Instead a couple of the fringe politicians will give lip service to doing something about it, will have some meetings in some committee, where it will promptly die hard thanks to bribes....err I mean lobbyist suggestions.
So I'm sorry friend, but your premise hinges on having a "free market" which hasn't actually existed in a long time, if it ever did in the telecommunications industry. In reality most have their own little monopolies, where the competitors if you want to call them that have truly shitastic service if you can even get a signal. Look up something like "teleco cherry picking" to see how they only really compete with each other in a few really juicy markets, whereas everywhere else is lock in city. And the simple fact is they can compete in the cherry pick areas by offering nicer iShiny phones than the other guy while STILL ass raping on the contract, so it will be profit city! Meanwhile we will get farther and farther behind everyone else, the equivalent of the short bus on the information superhighway. Welcome to corporatist Amerika! Please enjoy your free groping on the way in and out!
Hi MR AC! A few questions: A, how do you explain Quicktime, which anyone is free to use in OSX? B, If Firefox is "more native" why do over and over people ask for Low Rights mode and get told "Not cross platform, won't fix" by the devs? C, you DO know that the Moz devs have been hiding behind the "not cross platform" mantra, yes? D, You DO know as well that they can't claim size or resources since MSFT has a quite large developer base on staff and I'm quite sure if Mozilla was to request help in implementing low rights mode MSFT would be happy to provide it, as it makes Windows Vista and 7 safer and less prone to attack?
Frankly it all comes down to "Cross platform or GTFO" which is hamstringing FF compared to other browsers. There is NO REASON why Mozilla couldn't use DirectX on Windows, QT on Apple, and GStreamer on Linux and have fully accelerated functionality across OSes with NO licensing issues AT ALL, they simply refuse to do so. Likewise they could provide MUCH greater security by providing low rights mode on Windows Vista and 7, but instead refuse to implement it unless Apple and Linux does, which frankly don't need it due to a complete different underlying arch. Again because it is in their best interests I'm sure MSFT would be happy to help, so it wouldn't cost them a penny. It is just bad atitude on the devs part, which is why I'm now running Chromium based Comodo Dragon. Because I can't risk my customers security just to allow the Moz developers to stick to their high horse.
Hi, Mr Coward, or may I call you cow? You see Cow, some of us are willing to stand by our words instead of being little trolls hiding behind AC, and I'll even be happy to retort.
What your little "We have no choice! Waaah!" speech seems to forget is over and over the public has been GIVEN the Linux choice and thanks to decisions by the Linux devs that makes the AI in an EA game look like Stephen Hawking it has been rejected by the masses by a long shot. Walmart, Best Buy, MSI, all have sold Linux machines to the public at one time, and what did they get? An 80%+ return rate. Now I don't know if you have ever sold machines at retail like I have (doubtful) but allow me to point out that those figures mean that they lost money on 8 out of every 10 sales since those units will now have to be sold as used or refurb by state law.
But what do you expect from an OS whose leader says Linux isn't designed but instead "evolves like a virus" LOL, while sites are happy to point out what needs to be fixed, as well as guys like me, but instead will be responded to with "shill! MSFT lackey! All must love teh goodness!" like a typical nutter. Hell the fanboi bullshit is so thick in Linux land they actually have a site dedicated to listing all the different ways Linux fans spout total bullshit, instead of...ohh I don't know....actually listening to users?
Finally think about this...your old pal hairyfeet is gonna give you an example of why your OS is so low on the totem pole you brag when you reach 1% like it is an actual achievement. But of course I'm sure after a really big swig of FOSSie koolaid you'll find a way to label it a shill, or not reality, or some other BS. Be sure to pick the right TM from TM repo so we can know which BS you intend to use, okay? Here goes:
Here we have two OSes, the latest Ubuntu and Windows 7: Here is the installation of Windows 7...stick in DVD, answer three questions, the hardest of which is "are you at home or at work?" (for the network settings) and at first boot the OS will check if there is anything without drivers and pop up a little box that says "Hey, I don't have a driver for this, can I go and fetch one for you?" and if you say yes and the device is less than 5 years old (the majority of consumer gear) it WILL find a driver, install it, and off you go. It will even point out you don't have an AV and give you a page with several free ones to choose from. Hell my 67 year old dad installed Windows 7 by himself, and he still can't figure out how to work his cell phone.
Now let us compare Ubuntu, the flagship for "Linux for humans" and the supposedly easy (to the point fanbois call it dumbed down) Linux, ready? Install OS, get asked a half a dozen questions, although to be fair it is getting better in that regard. Upon first startup OS will NOT tell you if anything doesn't work because of drivers, you have to figure that out yourself. Is there a "find drivers" button, like Windows has had since 2000? Nope, because lack of a hardware ABI means that shit that worked in Ubuntu 9 will NOT work in Ubuntu 10, lovely. So AFTER you find where the fuck the version of device manager is you have to go trawl some forum (which NO user is likely to find easily since nobody puts a fucking button to it anywhere) looking for "fixes" which require you to know which firmware/hardware rev you had (yeah, good fucking luck on a user knowing THAT) and then "tweak said fix" because it was written for firmware A rev b and you have firmware d rev f (again good fucking luck). Follow that by using an interface called Bash that looks like a 1979 reject without autocomplete or spellc
While what you say is true, what you and the other "just switch to IPV6 already" folks seem to be missing out on is if everyone was to switch at noon tomorrow in all likelihood you would be looking at MASSIVE outages, which would go on for weeks if not months. Why? Multiple reasons:
One, thanks to offshoring IT has been a dying field for quite awhile now, with fewer and fewer new blood coming in. What that means is in the flyover states you have most if not all the backbones being run by old guys who haven't kept up on the tech, and from the ones I've talked to most are looking to get out of IT if at all possible. That means the experience just isn't there, it isn't gonna be there, and many will take early retirement or just get out rather than deal with the IPV6 mess. That in turn means things that take minutes to fix in IPV4 will take days in IPV6 simply because nobody knows how to use the new tools.
Two: Infrastructure. There is a hell of a lot of VERY expensive equipment out there that either cannot be upgraded to IPV4, or could be but is no longer "supported" by the OEM, which means a MASSIVE amount of money will have to be spent in a dead economy. Now considering these cableco/teleco duopoly sure as hell ain't gonna take a CEO pay cut, that either means pay for it by gouging the customers even deeper, which in most flyover areas Internet usage is declining thanks to price gouging, or make it up by screwing the workers even harder, which results in number one above. Then add in the fact a good 90%+ of the routers and firewalls and other network devices in consumer homes WILL NOT support IPV6, and in fact most of the routers sold today STILL DON'T support IPv6 and the ones that do are triple price compared to the others, means you are talking MASSIVE amount of eWaste is about to be hitting the environment. You are talking truckloads of routers, modems, all having to be shitcanned. Again this will raise cost that the consumer WILL get stuck with in a dead economy.
So you see, there is a damned good reason that they are gonna string along IPV4 for every last second they can. They will do so because it is gonna be a massive clusterfuck when the switchover comes, with complaining customers because NOTHING in their house works, no IT guys with experience enough to fix even the simplest of problems, and warehouses worth of gear, both dirt cheap and ridiculously expensive, all having to be taken straight to the dump. Frankly it is NOT gonna be pretty, not at all.
Uhhh...did you miss this part? That at the time period that WMA was default (2001-2007) huge fat HDDs were NOT the norm. And you are looking at this from an audiophile perspective and might I remind you we are talking about audio being ripped and played on a PC here, not some digital studio. I mean sure, you rip everything to 320k MP3 or similar AAC (which I don't even think existed in 2001 when XP came out) and run it through some great speakers it'll sound head and shoulders better than WMA but you know what? That is nowhere near the default PC setup even today,and it sure as hell wasn't the default setup in the time period we are speaking of.
So while there are plenty of things you can complain about WMA for, such as lower battery life on MP3 players, please remember both the time period and the target audience we are talking about. Those people that really care about the high fidelity at that time probably wasn't even running Windows, as most DAWs were based around OSX at the time. And in the time period we are speaking of (2001-2007) large HDDs were NOT the norm, so it really doesn't matter if you got better sound from higher bitrates because with a 40GB HDD nobody had room for the larger sizes anyway. As someone who lived through that time I can tell you MP3, WMA, and MP3 Pro were pretty much the choices you had, and MP3 Pro didn't play on anything thanks to the crazy licensing prices the group in charge of MP3 Pro wanted for support. That left WMA and MP3 and at lower bitrates WMA sounded better, especially on the speakers that most people had at the time. So while it might have been nice to have a pro audio setup then I can assure you that was NOT typical.
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Oh please. Every single time there is anything political you bring out that "metagovernment" crap, which not only has LESS of a chance than electing 50 non crap senators, in fact has about as much odds of winning as the entire USA military being taken on by 40 guys from Alabama where the biggest weapon they have is grandpaw's hunting rifle.
Here is what you would have to accomplish to pull off metagovenrment, please pay attention: You will have to simultaneously get the entire population to turn off ALL forms of propaganda, which of course will be pounding into their collective heads what a complete nutter you are, while at the same time get the ENTIRE senate and congress to essentially vote to disband themselves and stop the money train.
I hate to break the news to you but there is a reason why you can pull crap like metagovernment in say Paduka nowhere Alaska and can NOT even get it state wide. Know why? Because the MILLISECOND you try that shit at anything above nowhere city council level you awaken the megacorps, which then point their WMD known as the MSM at you and then you are well and truly fucked. I'd love to see a poll to see what the public thinks of Wikileaks right now, I'll bet my last dollar they'll say something like "a terrorist hangout for rapists" or something of the sort. You seem to think that We, The People are actually in control and can just decide things should be different when that hasn't been the case in probably a century, if it ever was. You have corporations making billions on the endless wars and stupidity and frankly people and ideas have been killed for far less. You keep waving your little metagovernment flag, but I don't care if it is the best damned idea in the history of ideas, unless you have a couple of billion lying around to run counter propaganda with it has about as much chance as ice cream in hell.
As for TFA, it really is a shame we don't have 50 Frankens, but IRL they'll let him rant while the telecos pay off....err use their lobbyist influence, to add to the election coffers of the right people and they'll get a wish list of "how can I screw Americans" like big business has been getting for decades. See healthcare reform, see DMCA, see the Mickey Mouse copyright extensions, for examples. If big teleco wants net neutrality dead, then dead it shall be. It isn't like most of us have a choice and can vote with our dollars anyway.
But with what formats? See you really have to watch out for what I call "Intel speak" and I'll give an example: For years their chips could play high def MPG 1-2, but any other format would peg the CPU at 100% and bog the living hell out of the system. The Intel IGPs always seem to end up like those little Broadcom "HD" chips, in that it'll play one or two formats, that are perfectly encoded to a set standard, very very well. Everything else will cause it to choke and throw it to the CPU.
Now last I checked both the AMD and Nvidia IGPs because they have actual GPUs with programmable shaders can be updated to play newer formats via driver updates. It has been a couple of months since I checked the specs so my data may be a little old, but IIRC over a half a dozen formats are supported by the AMD and Nvidia IGPs, including pretty much every popular format there is.
Lets be honest, there is a reason why Intel IGPs are dirt cheap. It is because there really isn't a lot to them. they always will skimp on shaders, memory, anything that will save a penny. It is like how for years while everyone else had moved to hardware T&L Intel had T&L on the CPU. Sure it saved probably 10c a chip, but the performance was bloody awful and made playing Half Life I or watching newer than MPG 2 video formats like dealing with a PPT presentation. And you NEVER hear someone bragging about how well their Intel IGP handles, the best "praise" you get is "Meh, it works alright I guess". Faint praise indeed.
Anyway I've found the price difference between an AMD Neo machine and an Atom machine to be negligible, especially when you figure in how much better the machines handle with a real CPU+GPU plus having a real Windows with WMC instead of Starter. I have yet to have a customer unhappy with their new Neo machine.
Sigh, do you work at Best Buy? Because I frankly only deal with THIS level of stupid when I have to fix what the geek squad fucks up. BTW nice to see when you take your meds you can STOP putting CAPS all over the PLCE. Now I'm gonna use little words, do try to keep up. The reason why nobody recommends HOSTS file for anything more than keeping Little Billy off the chat sites? Well you see there is this little thing called privilege escalation. you know that HOSTS file? Yeah, you know who ALWAYS has access to it? THE SYSTEM. And hey, guess how the bugs drop their payload in your system folder? Why with system rights of course! Dumbass.
So I really hate to whizz all over your precious HOSTS file fantasy, but the malware writers figured out in....ohh around 1997, that an easy way to steal data was to infect THE VERY FILE YOU ARE DEPENDING ON so that when you go to mail.google. com you instead go to maill.google.com which presents you with a shiny google login, which since the HOSTS file troll has bet his ass on his HOSTS file, will promptly give away his data and enjoy a good pwning. And don't even bring Linux into this, we are not talking security by obscurity but thinking a HOSTS file will protect Windows. News Flash...it won't. All a HOSTS file does is put you in an endless race with malware writers, which since you are looking at around 100,000 new pieces of nasty a week, and around 2000-3000 infected websites, which changes constantly? Yeah you WILL lose. And of course the first piece of malware to get in will use a privilege escalation bug in...ohh lets say Adobe, because everyone forgets to update and new bugs are found in that shite daily, and then will promptly teabag your precious HOSTS file while flinging poo.
But please, don't believe me. Hang onto your HOSTS file like a magical woobie that protects you from all the nasties. Both the repair guys like me and the malware writers and botnet herders just LOOOOOVE when you believe in magical thinking. Because it makes us lots of $$$. Of course we repair guys are nice enough to laugh at you behind your back and call you PEBKAC and ID10T, whereas the botnet herder will blow through your bandwidth like shit through a goose if you are lucky, if not he will use your PC for illegal activity in which case please enjoy the conversation with the nice men in dark suits with crewcuts and large black guns.
I have a few of the moron crowd, and yeah Comodo doesn't give a crap. That said maybe you ought to offer them Windows 7 Home Premium for $50? You can pick up the three pack for around $119 now, so you can convert three pirates into legit machines and STILL make $30 on the deal. But if all you want is a free AV that will keep that old XP Corporate from getting pwned? Yeah Comodo is the way to go.
All that proves is those sites need to be busted (BTW, for those at work it is emo porn...shudder) and not the need to nanny the planet. I mean if I start selling "Romex watches" is it the fault of watch manufacturers that they didn't somehow keep me from coming up with a fake? Hell no! We have laws against the KIRF bunches and can drop the banhammer and grab their stuff. The SAME THING should apply to typo squatters, which is exactly what that is.
ANY site that gets a name close to a legitimate target that isn't IN SOME WAY connected with the target site (for example if your above link was a game review or game store) then they should have the domain snatched and any proceeds sued right out from under them. Have THAT happen a couple of times and this bogey man would dry up and blow away like a fart in the wind.
Yeah, why should they have running water and electricity, those filthy hillbillies! Let them shit in buckets and use candles! Oh wait a tick, could it be that increasingly the US government, as well as the states, are moving everything online because it is cheaper than printing and mailing crap, not to mention dealing with the sorting and filing of said crap?
If you wanted to cut a day or two out of mailing letters fine, but I just had to help a nephew fill out all the paperwork for him to start college. We are talking tons of electronic forms and PDF and tons of other eCrap that with dialup would have been frankly impossible to accomplish. That of course doesn't count the fact that having an infrastructure that isn't from the fricking stone age opens up all kinds of new opportunities, like using Netflix instead of blowing through gas going to the nearest Redbox, eLearning and other ways to better yourself like virtual classrooms, and the ability top start new businesses and save on greenhouse gases by the way of eCommerce and Telecommuting.
So lets please step off the "corporation yay!" bandwagon for a minute, shall we? We have been kissing the telecoms booties here in the USA for damned near 30 years now, and even our largest cities have broadband speeds that are honestly shameful compared to the rest of the planet, and much of our rural areas have land lines laid down when fricking Ike was president. If we wait for the "free market" in the case of nationwide broadband we will ALL end up on the short bus to crappytown, left behind while the world advances, while all we will have to show for it is some crappy quality Youtube videos of Telecom CEOs snorting coke off of $1000 hooker asses while having their balls tickled with $100 bills. It is time we treat broadband no different that electricity or water, take the last mile AWAY from the telecoms by laying OUR OWN LINES, and then if they want to compete they can get off their asses and offer better service for less money. That is what the free market is supposed to be about, competition, right?
You want to know the sad part? MSFT has the fricking source code and doesn't do as well as the pirate hackers with their own shit. look up "Tiny7" and you'll find a version of Windows 7 that'll run anything a regular Win7 will and just takes 145MB of RAM and almost 0% CPU on the desktop. For even crazier numbers look up "TinyXP Rev 09" which uses just 45MB! on the desktop or MicroXP A03" which uses just 32MB.
MSFT needs to hire the pirate hackers and have THEM design the lightweight versions, because trying them out they'll play any game or office app you throw at them and feel fast even on 10 year old crap. Which considering the Atom is in order crap that is like a hyper P3 would mean you'd actually have a Windows that was snappy on one. Personally I'll wait until some come out with the AMD Neo, as it pairs an actual AMD CPU, which means out of order dual cores with virtualization and x64 support as well as DEP, with a nice Radeon GPU so the videos will all be unskippy and smooth.
Playing with Atom based netbooks here at the shop it always amazes me people buy these things, as I have 7 year old laptops that feel smoother and handle better than the Atom single cores everyone keeps using. I guess it just proves folks will buy just about anything if it is cheap enough. Hell I should have known that when the local Walgreen's sold out of the $99 Android tablet, which felt so anemic that even launching a fricking browser felt like you needed to pack a lunch first.
You want me to disprove something that EVERYONE ON THE PLANET already knows? How about the fact that EVERY SINGLE VIRUS in the free world can trivially change the HOSTS file dipshit. Want examples? Here are 18 billion of them.
You're like the idiot that thinks your computer is a "magic box" and by saying the right incantation you can protect yourself. Well I hate to break the news to ya kid, but this isn't your MMORPG and buffs don't actually work in real life. You trick actually worked for about 4 weeks in 1997 and after that every virus and his retard cousin blows through your precious HOSTS like you blow through tissues reading Master Chief fan fics.
But of course such things are beyond your tiny immature brain, because then you would have to learn about things like layered security and least permissions instead of blinding hanging onto HOSTS as a woobie to protect you from the big bad world out there. But please, keep insulting the paper degree I had to get to get the bank to approve my business loans (which BTW my shop is doing VERY well, thanks) while thinking a HOSTS file, shit everyone with a brain dropped in 1998, will protect you. The spammers I'm sure have already made your PC their bitch. May I suggest your local repair shop? They'll have to charge you extra because of the ID10T error, but I assure you those are VERY hard to fix.
Hey everybody, I'd like you to meet my new pet, please excuse the smell or the fact it seems to piddle on itself a lot.
This is the HOSTS file troll, which is a fourteen year old Halo player that recently discovered HOSTS files (you remember, those things we used in the mid 90s before EVERY single virus on the planet figured BUTT SIMPLE ways to get around them? Yeah those) and now, since he is so hopped up on Mountain Dew and hormones because he never gets laid, has taken it upon himself to have a HOLY CRUSADE where he uses lots of leet speak and weird CAPS IN SENTENCES to spread the gospel of the HOSTS file, which is older than Betty White and frankly isn't nearly as interesting.
But I hate to break the news to you, poor little lost LEAVE THE FUCKING CAPS LOCK ALONE! latchkey child, but this isn't Digg, or one of your gaming forums populated by little clueless I SAID PUT IT DOWN! hopped up basement dwellers such as yourself, you see this is /. where not only does everybody already know about your new religion, the HOSTS file, but we actually wrote the thing you now clutch like a security blanket because you soiled your regular one. And you know what? We gave up on that lame shit around the time of WinME.
I know trying to educate a moronic youth such as yourself is like pissing in the wind, because you've had all your opinions beaten into you by the MSM but what the hey, it is close to Xmas and the Feet isn't a complete grinch, so I'll try. You see grasshopper, your precious HOSTS file leaves you in what is known as an "arms race" which to explain that in little words you can understand, it is like CTF in Halo. You see all it takes is ONE, just one, bad guy to NOT be on your precious static text file and the next thing you know he is teabagging you while all his friends throw up gang signs and rip off all your stuff. The rest of us have long moved on to things we don't have to manually update where these good people known as "security professionals" constantly update and configure so we don't have to.
But don't worry, we understand. when your DSL is just too laggy for some DM and you have rubbed your little winkie raw to fan fic of Master Chief you really need something to do, so I suppose letting you play with the HOSTS file is better than letting a cretin like yourself anywhere near system32. BTW did you know putting in deltree C:/ in command line will speed up your HOSTS file by 500%? Try it! But thinking just because one of your butt buddies on the Army of Two match ladder thingie told you about HOSTS makes it the newest thing since the x360 doesn't mean it isn't as old as...well that pair of your mother's panties you keep sniffing which is wrong on SO many levels. All you do is make yourself look like an absolute tard by constantly spouting off about HOSTS like it is some new hotness. On second thought God only know what else your pathetically limited mind would speak about if you didn't blather on about HOSTS, so carry on.
Oh Lord, its you, the crazy hosts file troll. What do you think this is, 1997? What are you on Win98 First Edition or something? I mean WTF, nobody uses your tired old crap anymore, okay? We have things like Privoxy and Comodo Secure DNS and Peerblock, we don't need some tired old text file bullshit. And don't bring up resources because nobody gives a good wet fart. We have more RAM than God and CPUs with gold plated dangling bits so we really don't give a crap about saving a whole 30KB of resources.
so why don't you go push your tired old leet speak and equally tired old text file down at the goodwill where there are machines old enough that editing text files to save a couple of KB of RAM and CPU might actually be worth it. The rest of us grownups have better things to do, okay junior? I know you think that just because you have found out about a HOSTS file recently makes it the greatest thing since sliced bread, but the rest of us outgrew that shit when you were still sitting in a nappy full of your own poo.
Sure you can, just get it from Ninite and off you go. Of course if you are running a pirated version of Windows it won't work even without WGA, since it will call home on first run, which is when I guess it'll go ahead and check your key. You ARE running a legal copy and not just being a filthy pirate, yes MR AC? Anyway I've checked and no WGA on my XP machine, so if it is a principle thing no worries.
As for TFA, allow me to throw a couple of extra letters and say BS. I just run the update check on BOTH WinXP and Windows 7 X64 and both find new updates to the scanning defs but do NOT update to 2.0. So I'll wait until tomorrow and if it still doesn't update I guess I'll have to do the old fashioned uninstall and reinstall bit.
Personally I like it for myself, as I know I'm just going to places like /. and checking my email. Whereas with my waaaay too click happy customers who may or may not be searching for the pron I prefer Comodo Internet Security, which while being a little more talkative during the learning phase has an excellent sandbox with file and registry virtualization. If you have those kinds of people that can pick up more viruses than a Bangkok Whore I heartily recommend Comodo. It actually uses less RAM than MSE, especially during scanning, which you would think since MSE does less than Comodo would be the opposite. Oh well, I have gobs of RAM and like the fact that MSE never asks me shit, especially when I'm typing, which is when Comodo seems to think is a good time for a nice chat.
Have you given Comodo SSL? Their main office is in India so I doubt it would be as quick to roll over for the USA, but hell you never know anymore. Anyway they offer a free 90 day SSL so you can try before you buy, and their certs go from 128/256 all the way up to 2048 bit, so you have plenty of choices. Prices start at $69 a year and go from there depending on how many extras you want.
Since it has a free try before you buy this would be a great chance to see where they stand without spending any $$$. I don't see a downside really, either they don't cave and you buy it, or they do and you don't.
Oh Good Lord, its the HOSTS file troll. I thought you only irritated people on Opera and other browser threads? For the rest of us you can either just use the free Comodo Dragon browser and pick the "yes I'd like to use the secure Comodo DNS" box on install, or if you are attached to your browser one can just go here for simple instructions on switching over to Comodo Secure DNS.
Either way you'll have real time blacklists that you don't have to maintain, phishing and DNS cache poisoning protection, and most importantly don't have to play "whack a mole" by futzing with HOSTS files. I mean jeez, what do you think this is, 1997?
The other poster listed Opera, so allow me to give you the one for Comodo Dragon and other Chromium browsers...install this extension and then just add/remove anything you want. I kind of like how Dragon does everything by extension, it leaves the default slim and one can simply add what they need/want.
I still miss my FF just because I had grown used to it, but I won't use a browser I won't give to my customers and with FireFox taking the "don't care, won't fix" attitude with low rights mode it is simply too unsafe to use on Vista/Windows 7. I mean what's the point of having all that extra security if Mozilla promptly punches a gaping hole in it and then waves their dinosaur winkie in your face?
But if you haven't given it a go and don't mind trying new things give the Dragon a spin. I'm running it right now and their secure DNS seems to be a little faster than both OpenDNS and my ISP DNS, and the browser really handles nicely. I just added ABP and Forecast and it has sync built in, so that pretty much covers the FF extensions I required. Give it a spin, it's nice!
Hey now. Personally I think we should thank Britain. Thank you, o British people, for no matter how big of a bunch of douchebags our government in the USA becomes, you will ALWAYS end up so much worse we here in America will always have something to feel good about. You are to us what Mississippi is to the south. At least we can point at you, with your fifty bazillion cameras and nanny state BS and go "Well at least we aren't them!". So thank you Britain, for always stepping up to the plate.
Seriously, I thought the religious ninnies in the USA were bad. When did the British become more uptight about sex than the USA? I thought being a giant bunch of prudes was OUR gig! And wouldn't you just looooove to snatch the PCs of the ones pushing this? You know they probably need TB sized drives just to hold all the kink.
What I don't get is why all this money is being spent to look for some planet we will never ever reach in the far side of Alpha who the fuck knowswheresville, when there are plenty of things we could be doing closer to home that doesn't have enough funding like...ohh I don't know...looking for the big ugly rocks that can KILL US ALL very very dead if they hit? Or detecting and cataloging which big ugly rocks have resources we could use, along with testing ways we could snatch said resources to help with our dwindling resources down here?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of these "spend everything on the ground!" types, and know that many cool things we use every day was cooked up by NASA (although I DO think NASA shouldn't be allowed to be affected by congress, because then we end up with clusterfucks like the Shuttle having a bazillion pieces being built all over the place so congressman dumbfuckus can bring home the bacon) it just seems to me we always blow money on the "holy shit, that's cool" kind of stuff while ignoring the "shouldn't we be doing this instead?" kinds of things. I mean last I heard something like less than 30% of the sky is actively monitored for nasties headed our way. I'd say until that number was damned close to 100% we shouldn't even be caring if some star a bazillion light years away has a hot Jupiter or not. Am I missing something here?
That's weird, maybe it is your version of Chromium? I've recently switched to Comodo Dragon thanks to Mozilla with their "don't care, won't fix" attitude with regards to low rights mode in Vista and Win 7. It is also based on Chromium, has all the "phone home" crap cut out, and as a nice bonus offers you the choice of using the Comodo secure DNS which black holes the IP addresses of malicious spammers, scammers, and other nasties. If you are on Windows I would heartedly recommend it, it is quite nice and Adblock for Chrome works beautifully.
As for TFA, while I wish Opera nothing but luck something about their UI has always struck me as being...off. I don't know how to describe it, my oldest loves it so every time a new one comes out I give it a try on his machine but just never have been able to "get" Opera. It always feels like I'm fighting the thing. Maybe it is just one of those "love it or hate it" kind of things with no middle ground. Frankly with Chrome and Chromium I have a feeling both Opera and FireFox are gonna be in for a serious fight, Firefox because of their "cross platform or GTFO" attitude with regards to codecs and low rights mode. I mean why should I risk my customer's security just so Firefox can sit on their high horse about an OS that doesn't bloody need low rights mode anyway? And as for Opera their big selling point was speed, which frankly IMHO is mattering less and less daily. Mozilla is gonna have crazy JavaScript speed in Firefox 4, Chromium based browsers are already crazy fast, really how much fricking faster can we get? You still have to depend on a person to push the button, which means my Dragon is already faster than this old greybeard.
And allow me to finish since I'm already in my old and crotchety mode, that FF and Opera speeding up JavaScript without increasing security by using things like low rights mode seems horribly irresponsible to me. I mean we see time and time again that "JavaScript malware o' the day" is quickly getting right up there with Adobe products on the list of "things to bite you in the ass" and just means by cranking the JavaScript to 11 you are gonna make the machine get pwned really really REALLY fast, which just doesn't seem like a useful feature IMHO. At least IE and Chromium based browsers like Chrome, SWIron, Dragon, all use low rights mode to isolate the browser from the rest of the system. It just seems to me as Windows 7 replaces XP with tech like UAC, DEP, ASLR, and file and registry virtualization, the browser by virtue of it being so close to "bare metal" with the net will become the #1 attack vector if it isn't already. Anything the browser maker can do that limits the ability to be attacked is great in my book. And I apologize if Opera managed to sneak low rights mode in, but after doing a Yahoo Search all I found was folks complaining about FF and Opera not having it.
Actually I'd say slavery would have continued maybe another 20 years, because the machines of the north would have made slaves worthless since you don't have to feed, clothe, house, and provide medical care for the machine which also doesn't need rest. For an example look at how nearly all work required the use of a horse and then suddenly almost overnight horses simply weren't needed, or how much of the jobs on assembly lines are being taken by robots. As for what happened afterward I really wouldn't have been surprised if without the animosity that came from losing a war if the south would have supported one of the "freedmen for Africa" movements which were quite popular at the turn of the 20th century, and one could argue whether or not the blacks of America would have been better off in their own country but one can't argue it could have been worse than Jim Crow or even life in the slums today. How sad that MLK has his name attached to a street that even the cops won't go down in most cities.
As for TFA as someone with a gay child I was actually for DADT, simply because it gave at least one (the other is in med school and should be there for quite awhile) from being possibly drafted. Anybody who thinks this will actually give gays any real rights like civil unions is delusional, this is simply a way for the corporation....errr...I mean the government, to help deal with losses thanks to two wars the public doesn't support. I have friends in the military and some are looking at 6th and 7th deployments. Whereas before if you got hit it was a purple heart and a trip home they now have soldiers with artificial limbs still on active duty. They can talk about recruitment during a recession but the local recruiters are hitting the streets every damned day and offering every incentive short of hookers and blow and simply can't make their numbers. This and the talk of allowing illegals in in return for citizenship is nothing but a way to deal with depleted manpower thanks to Bush giving us Viet Nam x2 and Obama being more wishy washy than Carter.
But if you think this gets us even a millimeter closer to allowing civil unions or anything else that would actually benefit gay people I have a really nice bridge to sell you. As long as the evangelicals stand on their pulpits and spew hate for anyone that isn't like them you can give that up. Funny how that is THE SAME PLACE where we saw so much "God made us better than the nigger!" speech against civil rights, huh?
Uh huh...hey you remember the XKCD comic where they showed reality VS fantasy of cracking passwords? You are falling into that trap friend. Most laptops, like most anything else that is stolen, is stolen by junkies. Junkies by their very nature aren't the brightest of creatures, and sure as hell ain't gonna be pulling off the fancy tricks you're talking about. No what will happen if this switch gets popular is a hell of a lot of unscrupulous PC repair shops is gonna have a windfal of spare parts to sell on eBay. Screens, RAM, HDDs, disc drives, hell it will be like Xmas for them.
So I hate to burst your bubble, but thieves don't do major hacks like that. A junkie will try to turn whatever they get their filthy hands on ASAP for a fix, first to their fellow junkies/dealers, and then to pawn shops, flea markets, anywhere they think they can turn it. Since the machines will be "dead" and thus can't be sold to dealers or other civilians they'll quickly learn which repair shop down the street doesn't ask questions about "broken" laptops and that will be the end of that.
So has the Yahoo staff you've become friends with start mailing out their resumes? Because THIS, this right here exemplified in your post, is why Yahoo is on life support and fighting for breath. They pay frankly insane prices for properties like Geocities or Delicious and then have NO CLUE as to what to do with them afterward. None at all. No business plans, no plans to grow or move the company forward, no advertising plans, just a "buzzword bingo" shopping list they have no damned clue what to do with once they "win" the property in question.
Frankly I haven't seen a company this badly mismanaged since the glory days of AOHell and their great "buzzword bingo" shopping spree. And we all know how well THAT turned out, with AOL nearly destroying Time Warner and losing..what? 80% of their value? Frankly I'm waiting for the place to slide a little further down towards the basement and then MSFT will snatch them up. The portal and the email are still worth money for eyeballs and data mining, but it is pretty obvious that the mismanagement at Yahoo would take a goose that laid golden eggs and serve it up with a side of mashed potatoes.
I'm afraid you are wrong, and here is why: The "big money" for the telecos is NOT in scamming customers from each other, it is in ridiculous "butt raped to the 900th power" long term contracts that they offer with the latest iShiny. If they were to leech massive amount of customers from another, why then they'd have to build new infrastructure, and that would cut into the quarterly earnings which is bad. No instead just like how ALL FOUR TELECOS raised the price of SMS at the exact same time, they will simply get together and set a date for the raping to commence.
No you can scream anti-trust all you want, nobody in Washington gives a shit anymore, and hasn't in decades. If they did the telecos/cablecos would have been busted a LONG time ago for their sleazy tactics and ass raping of customers. Instead a couple of the fringe politicians will give lip service to doing something about it, will have some meetings in some committee, where it will promptly die hard thanks to bribes....err I mean lobbyist suggestions.
So I'm sorry friend, but your premise hinges on having a "free market" which hasn't actually existed in a long time, if it ever did in the telecommunications industry. In reality most have their own little monopolies, where the competitors if you want to call them that have truly shitastic service if you can even get a signal. Look up something like "teleco cherry picking" to see how they only really compete with each other in a few really juicy markets, whereas everywhere else is lock in city. And the simple fact is they can compete in the cherry pick areas by offering nicer iShiny phones than the other guy while STILL ass raping on the contract, so it will be profit city! Meanwhile we will get farther and farther behind everyone else, the equivalent of the short bus on the information superhighway. Welcome to corporatist Amerika! Please enjoy your free groping on the way in and out!
Hi MR AC! A few questions: A, how do you explain Quicktime, which anyone is free to use in OSX? B, If Firefox is "more native" why do over and over people ask for Low Rights mode and get told "Not cross platform, won't fix" by the devs? C, you DO know that the Moz devs have been hiding behind the "not cross platform" mantra, yes? D, You DO know as well that they can't claim size or resources since MSFT has a quite large developer base on staff and I'm quite sure if Mozilla was to request help in implementing low rights mode MSFT would be happy to provide it, as it makes Windows Vista and 7 safer and less prone to attack?
Frankly it all comes down to "Cross platform or GTFO" which is hamstringing FF compared to other browsers. There is NO REASON why Mozilla couldn't use DirectX on Windows, QT on Apple, and GStreamer on Linux and have fully accelerated functionality across OSes with NO licensing issues AT ALL, they simply refuse to do so. Likewise they could provide MUCH greater security by providing low rights mode on Windows Vista and 7, but instead refuse to implement it unless Apple and Linux does, which frankly don't need it due to a complete different underlying arch. Again because it is in their best interests I'm sure MSFT would be happy to help, so it wouldn't cost them a penny. It is just bad atitude on the devs part, which is why I'm now running Chromium based Comodo Dragon. Because I can't risk my customers security just to allow the Moz developers to stick to their high horse.
Hi, Mr Coward, or may I call you cow? You see Cow, some of us are willing to stand by our words instead of being little trolls hiding behind AC, and I'll even be happy to retort.
What your little "We have no choice! Waaah!" speech seems to forget is over and over the public has been GIVEN the Linux choice and thanks to decisions by the Linux devs that makes the AI in an EA game look like Stephen Hawking it has been rejected by the masses by a long shot. Walmart, Best Buy, MSI, all have sold Linux machines to the public at one time, and what did they get? An 80%+ return rate. Now I don't know if you have ever sold machines at retail like I have (doubtful) but allow me to point out that those figures mean that they lost money on 8 out of every 10 sales since those units will now have to be sold as used or refurb by state law.
But what do you expect from an OS whose leader says Linux isn't designed but instead "evolves like a virus" LOL, while sites are happy to point out what needs to be fixed, as well as guys like me, but instead will be responded to with "shill! MSFT lackey! All must love teh goodness!" like a typical nutter. Hell the fanboi bullshit is so thick in Linux land they actually have a site dedicated to listing all the different ways Linux fans spout total bullshit, instead of...ohh I don't know....actually listening to users?
Finally think about this...your old pal hairyfeet is gonna give you an example of why your OS is so low on the totem pole you brag when you reach 1% like it is an actual achievement. But of course I'm sure after a really big swig of FOSSie koolaid you'll find a way to label it a shill, or not reality, or some other BS. Be sure to pick the right TM from TM repo so we can know which BS you intend to use, okay? Here goes:
Here we have two OSes, the latest Ubuntu and Windows 7: Here is the installation of Windows 7...stick in DVD, answer three questions, the hardest of which is "are you at home or at work?" (for the network settings) and at first boot the OS will check if there is anything without drivers and pop up a little box that says "Hey, I don't have a driver for this, can I go and fetch one for you?" and if you say yes and the device is less than 5 years old (the majority of consumer gear) it WILL find a driver, install it, and off you go. It will even point out you don't have an AV and give you a page with several free ones to choose from. Hell my 67 year old dad installed Windows 7 by himself, and he still can't figure out how to work his cell phone.
Now let us compare Ubuntu, the flagship for "Linux for humans" and the supposedly easy (to the point fanbois call it dumbed down) Linux, ready? Install OS, get asked a half a dozen questions, although to be fair it is getting better in that regard. Upon first startup OS will NOT tell you if anything doesn't work because of drivers, you have to figure that out yourself. Is there a "find drivers" button, like Windows has had since 2000? Nope, because lack of a hardware ABI means that shit that worked in Ubuntu 9 will NOT work in Ubuntu 10, lovely. So AFTER you find where the fuck the version of device manager is you have to go trawl some forum (which NO user is likely to find easily since nobody puts a fucking button to it anywhere) looking for "fixes" which require you to know which firmware/hardware rev you had (yeah, good fucking luck on a user knowing THAT) and then "tweak said fix" because it was written for firmware A rev b and you have firmware d rev f (again good fucking luck). Follow that by using an interface called Bash that looks like a 1979 reject without autocomplete or spellc
While what you say is true, what you and the other "just switch to IPV6 already" folks seem to be missing out on is if everyone was to switch at noon tomorrow in all likelihood you would be looking at MASSIVE outages, which would go on for weeks if not months. Why? Multiple reasons:
One, thanks to offshoring IT has been a dying field for quite awhile now, with fewer and fewer new blood coming in. What that means is in the flyover states you have most if not all the backbones being run by old guys who haven't kept up on the tech, and from the ones I've talked to most are looking to get out of IT if at all possible. That means the experience just isn't there, it isn't gonna be there, and many will take early retirement or just get out rather than deal with the IPV6 mess. That in turn means things that take minutes to fix in IPV4 will take days in IPV6 simply because nobody knows how to use the new tools.
Two: Infrastructure. There is a hell of a lot of VERY expensive equipment out there that either cannot be upgraded to IPV4, or could be but is no longer "supported" by the OEM, which means a MASSIVE amount of money will have to be spent in a dead economy. Now considering these cableco/teleco duopoly sure as hell ain't gonna take a CEO pay cut, that either means pay for it by gouging the customers even deeper, which in most flyover areas Internet usage is declining thanks to price gouging, or make it up by screwing the workers even harder, which results in number one above. Then add in the fact a good 90%+ of the routers and firewalls and other network devices in consumer homes WILL NOT support IPV6, and in fact most of the routers sold today STILL DON'T support IPv6 and the ones that do are triple price compared to the others, means you are talking MASSIVE amount of eWaste is about to be hitting the environment. You are talking truckloads of routers, modems, all having to be shitcanned. Again this will raise cost that the consumer WILL get stuck with in a dead economy.
So you see, there is a damned good reason that they are gonna string along IPV4 for every last second they can. They will do so because it is gonna be a massive clusterfuck when the switchover comes, with complaining customers because NOTHING in their house works, no IT guys with experience enough to fix even the simplest of problems, and warehouses worth of gear, both dirt cheap and ridiculously expensive, all having to be taken straight to the dump. Frankly it is NOT gonna be pretty, not at all.
Uhhh...did you miss this part? That at the time period that WMA was default (2001-2007) huge fat HDDs were NOT the norm. And you are looking at this from an audiophile perspective and might I remind you we are talking about audio being ripped and played on a PC here, not some digital studio. I mean sure, you rip everything to 320k MP3 or similar AAC (which I don't even think existed in 2001 when XP came out) and run it through some great speakers it'll sound head and shoulders better than WMA but you know what? That is nowhere near the default PC setup even today ,and it sure as hell wasn't the default setup in the time period we are speaking of.
So while there are plenty of things you can complain about WMA for, such as lower battery life on MP3 players, please remember both the time period and the target audience we are talking about. Those people that really care about the high fidelity at that time probably wasn't even running Windows, as most DAWs were based around OSX at the time. And in the time period we are speaking of (2001-2007) large HDDs were NOT the norm, so it really doesn't matter if you got better sound from higher bitrates because with a 40GB HDD nobody had room for the larger sizes anyway. As someone who lived through that time I can tell you MP3, WMA, and MP3 Pro were pretty much the choices you had, and MP3 Pro didn't play on anything thanks to the crazy licensing prices the group in charge of MP3 Pro wanted for support. That left WMA and MP3 and at lower bitrates WMA sounded better, especially on the speakers that most people had at the time. So while it might have been nice to have a pro audio setup then I can assure you that was NOT typical.