Really? I thought we lived in America where slavery in all forms was alive and well, we just call them illegals. After al you can work them like dogs, give them unsafe work conditions the "freemen" won't touch, and if they get injured its even better than slavery because you aren't out the large investment of buying a slave, you can just kick 'em out in front of an ER and grab another off the street corner easy peasy.
Oh and thanks to the joke of a border according to my friends in law enforcement old fashioned slavery is alive and well too, they say you can buy a girl from the coyotes for as little as $5k in cash, $10k and they'll deliver.
Obviously you've never loaded one of the "aggressive" flash ads with a bunch of buttons and clickable crap built into the animation? Because I have seen one of those drag a 3GHz quad down to a crawl thanks to all the crap its trying to render being spread like the clap across a dozen CDNs, half of whom take forever and a day to respond or time out, which causes it to call the next CDN in its list...yeah sorry but the new ads are even nastier than you can imagine.
If you want to see it for yourself just surf some "mainstream" sites like CNN, AOL, Yahoo "News" and the like for a couple hours with no adblocking, just be sure to have an offline disc image so you can blast the OS and restore from images. Hell I used to use a VM at the shop to let an image get the latest drive bys to test various AVs and stay up to date on removal methods but not anymore, with the latest bloated mess called "interactive ads" I had to quit because even with a C2D doing nothing but running the VM those bastards would slam it so hard I'd be lucky if I could kill the VM, it would just redline the cores to the firewall, nasty shit. Maybe if I slapped in a C2Q and limited the VM to only 2 or 3 cores I could do it again but frankly articles like this only prove my theory correct, back any precious memories, nuke the OS, and make sure they have a choice of browsers with ABP loaded into all of them.
Oh and just FYI since insisting that my customers only use browsers I've preloaded with ABP? I've watched infections disappear, even my most clueless click happy customers only have to call me for hardware or networking issues. Of course it turned out just as I told my clueless former boss it would, because I'm "the guy that builds PCs so they don't mess up" I get referrals up the ying yang so I don't have to worry about repeat business, they are happy to tell everybody and their dog the ONLY place they should get a PC fixed or have one worked on is from/by me.
Well to be fair to the SWAT they were told they had a hostage situation and having friends that are ex-cops I can tell you those calls are the ones they always feared because one wrong move and you have to explain to somebody why their wife or kid is in a body bag, so they naturally are gonna go heavy when you have hostages. the fact that there are so many absolute douchebags on this earth that "SWATting" could actually become a word? Just shows why you have to assume asshattery anymore when it comes to anything and everything, too many wastes of space on this planet.
And the simple fact that long term Linux professionals, the kind that write articles for major sites and are called on for expert Linux advice actually suggest that having a separate home partition and blowing away the whole OS, including programs and settings, every year and a half is a "viable solution" just shows why I call 'em FOSSies, because like Moonies and Scientologists there is a serious fucking disconnect between what they consider normal and reality! I mean can you imagine me selling customers a PC and telling them they are gonna have to blow away their OS every year and a half and that they only have X number of months before they have to wipe and start over? I'd be out of business before the year was out! But that just shows how cult like their thinking has become, because Torvalds has made it clear as long as he has a pulse the whole "stick it all in the kernel" bullshit is NEVER gonna go away so instead of going "Welp that's fucked up, lets go somewhere else" they cook up these elaborate workarounds just to give them a bare semblance of what Windows and OSX have had for the better part of a decade!
Finally as for WinME...wanna know what killed WinME? The douchebag at MSFT who said that WinME could run VXD drivers. If you had a WinME system with ONLY WDM drivers? It was solid as a rock, in fact I had a customer who didn't retire his WinME system until it died in 2009 because it worked perfectly all that time. But Lord have mercy if you mixed WDM and VXD as loading both made WinME an unstable mess of an OS, but I'd rather be trapped on a system that had only WinME and Win 8 in a dual boot than deal with Linux as like you I have better things to do than spend my time trying to fix Torvalds' fuckups.
I simply think they know what is coming, we are about to hit (if we haven't already) the singularity, that moment in history where the world is completely changed forever, like the invention of the engine and the airplane but the coming one? Its NOT gonna be nice if the "Ayn Randiates" in the halls of power have their way.
So what is the new singularity? Simple its the day when human labor is no longer needed to maintain and advance the world. Its the day when everything from picking beans to paving roads can all be done by machines that never get paid, never ask for days off, its the corporate idea of heaven!Its the dark reality of John Henry, that no matter how hard you work, even if you work yourself to death, the machine will just keep on working and will run you down without a bit of remorse.
When that day comes there is really only 3 paths, one of which we partially do now which is 1.- "make work" where you pay somebody for doing a pointless "job". We do that now at fast food joints, if you raised the minimum wage to a living wage and quit letting the corps hand out "how to get government handout" videos to new employees? You'd find within a year all the fast food workers replaced with an automated system that not only wouldn't get paid but would probably have a better track record than the underpaid overworked employees do know when it comes to getting orders correct.
The second option would be the "Star Trek Socialist paradise" which would be the most humane of the three, basically give everyone a basic wage and let them do what they will with their free time while giving extra benefits and credits to those that choose to "serve the greater good" by devoting themselves to science and medical research. It sounds now but sadly too many greedy bastards at the top would rather burn the forest down than share the trees which brings us to #3 which is what I think all the 3 letter agencies are ramping up for..
A fascist dictatorship where the elite rule with an iron boot using fear and violence where those at the top commit systematic genocide by forcing the "useless people" to live in ever worsening squalor, probably while claiming they are just "lazy" because they can't compete with the Asian slaves building our electronics. You would need the 3 letter agencies for several jobs in such a shift, to inspire fear and paranoia, to monitor and allow you to remove anybody that could possibly lead the peasants in an uprising, and to get enough dirt on those with weaker stomachs to insure they "get with the program".
Considering how much we have been seeing the mask fall off when it comes to those in power, how they just ignore any and all promises without fear of punishment and how many in power seem to get almost sadistic glee at the thought of stomping on the poor? Sadly I have a feeling its gonna be the third option. They'll use a major false flag to excuse "extraordinary measures" that will simply never end and get worse...war on terror anyone?
THIS, this right here, is what royally pisses me off with the "Linux is ready for the desktop" crowd, because its fucking trivial to show that even the most basic consumer hardware just DOES NOT WORK while basic common sense features, like having a way to roll back drivers when an update hoses them or roll back the system when something goes wrong, that Windows has had for a decade and a fricking half just do not exist. I mean how bad would the FOSSies be laughing if you had to wipe and reinstall Windows every year to year and a half just to get the latest security updates? Well I get that trotted out as a viable "solution" to the fact that no Linux distro can pass the Hairyfeet challenge, which boils down to "get 5 years worth of updates without shitting yourself". Last time I saw that level of shitty in Windows was WinME!
And its sad but I realized years ago that most security problems, both on and offline, could be solved by merely applying the "douchebag rule". Act like the world is filled with vicious trolling POSes that will do something nasty even when they don't gain from it? Watch your issues disappear. Its sad that we have come to that point but we have so many worthless excuses for human beings with nothing better to do than cause grief and misery because they can that this is the world we live in. Hell did you see that article in yahoo about SWAT kicking down the door of a COD player and coming within a hair of killing the kid? Turned out somebody he beat online got butthurt and deciding to call SWAT on him just to be a giant fucking prick, THAT is the world we live in now.
Bono is a douchebag hypocrite who says that somebody who downloads a song on P2P should be given jail time while he has no problem with his band ripping off other artists wholesale. See "U2 rips off song" in any search engine to find more examples than I can count.
I have found being a fucking hypocrite can generate more hatred than pretty much anything else and seeing how fucking reviled Bono is I'd say his hypocrisy must rub a lot of folks the wrong way. If U2 disappeared from the face of the earth tomorrow? I'd have no problem with that and the music scene would probably be a better place.
Sigh...how about constantly shifting in game ads to pummel you where you can't escape or use adblock? How about selling your playing habits to advertisers because "hey hardcore players do the dew!" or how about disappearing expansions so if you want to play with everybody else better whip out that CC, because "its only good for x number of days!"
All one has to do is look at EA and Activision to see if there is a douchey way to turn players into walking ATMs some game company WILL do it.
THANK YOU, as it doesn't matter if you can squeeze a driver set down to 1Kb if the damned things don't work or work half assed which is what I found trying random printers on Linux at the shop last year. Some would print but NOT scan, some would scan but came out lousy, and frankly NONE of them worked OOTB without seriously fiddling. Compare this to a Windows printer install...1.- Put CD in driver, 2.- Follow instructions....there is no step three! And the driver is 30 Mb, oh noes...who fricking cares? What kind of garbage are you dumpster diving where 30Mb or even 300Mb makes a damned bit of difference? Hell the cheapest shittiest used towers I keep around just to have something under $99 have 160Gb drives so who cares about drivers in the Mb range?
As for TFA...is anybody REALLY surprised, I mean really? These corps never think about security until it bites them square on the ass so while I'm glad its a white hat and not a black pulling this I really wouldn't be surprised if all consumer printers with net features is equally shitty, its just not something they even bothered considering. It reminds me how there was zero security on faxes until assholes started spamming black faxes, most of these companies just don't think "What would a giant douchebag do?" which sadly today is EXACTLY what you have to consider right off the bat.
If you trust SMART I have a bridge you may be interested in as I have dealt with drives at the shop where you could literally hear the head slamming that SMART said was just hunky dory. You also can't trust any kind of "old age" metric because that ignores the simple fact that some companies build better products, it would be like judging the reliability of all cars based on what the bottom of the line Kia is like in 5 years. Hell when it comes to reliable I will take a used or refurb Samsung over a brand new Seagate consumer line drive as I've found everything above 500GB on the consumer line is buggy firmware and flimsy as hell, I swear you can look at a Seagate 1.5Tb funny and it'll commit suicide.
At the end of the day surely to God it can't be THAT hard to put in a simple helium gauge so you would know its going down and by how much, in fact the only reason I could see not putting one in is to fuck folks over on the warranty.
Does it come with some sort of gauge, so you can know when its getting close to running out? Because I don't want a drive with a time limit where I don't have a way to keep up with the countdown.
I'm sure I'll hear a bunch of analogies but I've dealt with more drives in the shop than most guys have had hot meals and with modern drives? Unless you drop the thing you usually get plenty of warning before failure, not to mention that having to get 8TB worth of data off while the drive dies does NOT sound fun so having plenty of warning would be good. Heck I've had 1TB drives in the shop that was a race to get the data off before they croaked, 8-10TB sounds like a nightmare.
Show me where thousands were murdered over a non religious statue or building and I'll concede your point, until then we hairless monkeys have shown that religion is the equivalent of handing a 3 year old a loaded gun...while I would prefer that nothing be destroyed there are some cases when you simply have to accept some things are just too dangerous to be left out.
And I would be happy to accept having the best historical copies of each locked in a bunker somewhere for historians to study except we have seen where that leads, the Catholic church.
Ya know I always thought it was hilarious how badly the west got their panties in a wad over the SCUD when its just a really REALLY crude rocket, not much better than the Katyusha of WWII. Every time old Saddam tried to improve the things all he did was make 'em more likely to fall apart or blow up, tests we did on captured ones showed you'd be damned lucky to land within 4 football fields of your target, and that was with the Russian ones, Saddams were much worse because his "rocket scientists" just kept making the cases thinner to increase range, they were right up there with the Asad Babil on the POS scale.
Like it or not getting rid of old Saddam and crazy MoMo was VERY stupid, because just like in Vietnam with the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem we didn't have a damned clue as to what to do after. And just like with Ngo Dinh Diem it gave the enemy the field as all it did was sow chaos and instability and replace a bad leader with a giant question mark, leaving the place easy pickings. Was MoMo and Saddam evil? yep they were total scum but they were containable scum, whereas the Islamist extremists build training camps and export their evil all over the planet.
If there is any lesson we should take from Libya and Iraq its that we should NOT do anything to topple Assad, because any attempt to replace him with a western stooge will only end up being a disaster, instead if the people of Syria replace him all on their own we should try to have a dialog with that person but not to try to ramrod in our own puppet because in the long run it comes and bites us on the ass.
I think one should make Disney pay dearly for extending copyrights but since we can't fight them via the law, maybe we should try some culture jamming instead?
For an example we need to fill the net with links and images so if somebody uses a search engine for "Mickey Mouse" instead of the clean sanitary Disney version they get the broken down whored out Taco-Man version? Bonus if they come with his catch phrase "I'll suck your dick for $10".
Its obvious that Disney will just keep buying congresscritters until copyrights last for eternity so it looks like the only thing left to do is just shit all over the mouse, make the mouse so lame Disney can't reap endless profits without penalty by whoring the mouse out for eternity.
Ignoring some fact there, aren't ya Sparky? BTW they have a name for the kind of fallacy you're trying to pull, its called Tu quoque, also known as the "You lynch negroes" fallacy for the fact that it was used often by Stalin's supporters to cover over his atrocities...nice company you keep.
As for what you are selectively ignoring is the fact that Israel has attempted to broker a cease fire with hamas several times only to be met with more rockets filled with nails aimed at civilian centers, the last of which was last week BTW, it lasted all of 42 minutes before iron Dome was activated by incoming shells. I won't even bother with your hypothetical Christians, because I can find a whacko or two that calls for the killing of any race and that is frankly a fucking joke compared to the murder of rape victims and cutting the hands off alleged thieves, but lets go straight to your "majority of Muslims are peaceful...shall we? Boy I'm betting after this you'll wish you can kept your mouth shut because the facts? NOT on your side. Try reading a little bitbefore you speak because it will frankly make you look less foolish.
The second link BTW even explains WHY Muslims are violent, its because unlike the Torah and the Bible it was written extremely vague, so that its easy for Mullahs to continue the violence, quote" God commanded the Hebrews to kill Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusitesâ"all specific peoples rooted to a specific time and place. At no time did God give an open-ended command for the Hebrews, and by extension their Jewish descendants, to fight and kill gentiles. On the other hand, though Islam's original enemies were, like Judaism's, historical (e.g., Christian Byzantines and Zoroastrian Persians), the Qur'an rarely singles them out by their proper names. Instead, Muslims were (and are) commanded to fight the people of the book "until they pay the tribute out of hand and have been humbled"and to "slay the idolaters wherever you find them."
But of course you will likely ignore the facts because it isn't from a site like HuffyPo that fits your preconceived (most likely ultra left) biases, just like how the ultra left was making for some hilarious entertainment by the way they kept tapdancing trying to continue to support their theory that Brown was "executed by teh man" despite ever mounting evidence he was a violent criminal. Just like them I'm sure you'll ignore the evidence and continue to pretend that Islam and the other religions are equal, which is as delusional as saying crime is the same in poor and rich neighborhoods because once, five years ago, a rich woman killed her cheating husband on the nice side of town! Shock!
Meanwhile anybody with more than 2 functioning braincells will be able to see through your bullshit by simply turning on any news outlet from any place on the planet and watch the beheading of the week, maybe enjoy a few stonings...BTW since the religions are equally violent, perhaps you can show me the Christian equivalent of Farfur? Because I have seen a LOT of western kid's shows over the years and I don't remember EVER seeing one teaching lovely songs like how I should get into heaven with the heads of Jews and Muslims on my belt...perhaps you can provide a link to that show?
Key word? Intended because how long you think its gonna be before some employee figures out with the high cost of mushrooms there is profits to be made?
It is how Neil Degrasse Tyson said when talking about how religion can kill progress "The Arab world was the center of science and mathematics for centuries, and then came Islam", you simply cannot compare Islam to any other major religion as the other religions grew up, Islam didn't. When was the last time you heard of Jews stoning rape victims? Read about any Christians chopping the hands off thieves lately? But it wouldn't take me even 5 minutes worth of Googling to wallpaper this page with horror after horror, not only not condemned but condoned by Islamic states.
At the end of the day the other religions went through this centuries ago and that time was rightly called the dark ages, and until Muslims stand up and refuse to accept such atrocities committed in the name of their God all we can do is get as much of history as we can out of their hands and document all that we can't. As we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan anything that doesn't have the name of the prophet on it WILL end up destroyed just as religious leaders during the dark ages took priceless ancient Greek books and reused the pages to make prayer books to their God.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, the best thing anybody could ever do for humanity is take every single religious text and destroy them, the evil they cause far outweighs the good.
What I don't get is WHY? Why in the fuck would you worship a fricking corporation? Its not like they have stock in the company, hell the company doesn't even give them iFanboy discounts or anything, so why?
Are there products that I like? Sure but I'll drop their asses like a bad habit if they screw me over, take Nvidia, I used to LOVE Nvidia cards...until I got fucked over by bumpgate. Now? I use and sell nothing but ATI/AMD cards. And I sure as hell ain't trying to cover when a company fucks their customers, see the diatribes I wrote about MSFT when they released Windows "LULZ I Iz A Cellphone LULZ" Mist8ke Edition.
The Anon Coward can't provide one because he is one of the faithful iFanboys protecting his God by any means, truth or no. I have seen this same claim made on multiple sites and every single time when somebody asked for a citation? Nothing but silence.
This is why iFanboys scare me, as the closest analogy is a Scientologist, they both have this insane devotion to their cause and will happily lie and mislead if it furthers their religon.
Well if you were wanting just playback and not transcoding I'd suggest the Socket AM1 Athlon quads, at 25w I've been using it for HTPCs and it works great in that role but for what you are wanting to do? honestly I'd probably stay away from the APUs, the "bang for the buck" just isn't there yet. Now please remember that with these recommendations I'm having to work without a LOT of the data I require, for example i don't know how many streams you are wanting to process, budget, etc so I'm just gonna throw some things out there with pretty wide parameters because of this.
That out of the way lets talk parts. For an HTPC with transcoding I'd probably go for an AM3+, you can get a board for just $25 and use the money you save to get FX6300. if you need to go cheaper you can get an FX 4130 Black Edition for $72 or an Athlon X3 450 and if you spent a little more on the board to get one with AAC I've been seeing more than 80% unlocks on that chip, so for $51 for the used you could have an Athlon X4 at 3.2GHz, can't beat that, in fact my youngest has an unlocked 450 and it plays pretty much any game he desires so its got the strength required for transcoding.
Now for graphics I bet you are wondering "Why should I go discrete instead of APU?" and the answer is simple...bandwidth.Remember when you are multitasking, like say watching a video while doing a transcode lets say, that with an APU your RAM is gonna have to be doing double duty by being the buffer for the GPU as well as being the working memory for the CPU that is gonna end up bottlenecking on ya friend, not to mention 4K is seriously heavy on the bandwidth so having a discrete is just a better call. If you are not gaming I'd go with something like this HD6450 for $37 or if you want to go dirt cheap and silent this HD5450 for $20 after MIR. in both cases you get plenty of GPU memory for video buffering, the AMD drivers not only come with codecs that allow hardware acceleration of most formats but also allow drag and drop transcoding to H.264 or VC1, and most importantly you are leaving your options open. Need to process more streams? Well if you started with the X3 you could go to an X6 or even X8 when you spot one on sale. new video format becomes popular? Get a new GPU that has hardware acceleration of that format.
Again remember I'm doing this without a lot of the data I'd normally work with, also remember that the 95w rating when it comes to AMD is the MAX RATING, I've found IRL its a LOT lower. For example my X6 has a TDP of 95w but acording to asrock IES which measures what the board is feeding the CPU with 8 tabs open in Dragon along with several background programs like Steam my chip is pulling between 8.4w-18w and the reason why is simple, more cores means no waiting for jobs so the chip can idle more often. BTW if you want to save even more power? Spend a little more and get an Asrock board as not only do they come with IES which drops the number of phases when idle but they also come with excellent OCing/UCing ability and its trivially easy to underclock an AMD CPU which will naturally lower the power and heat. There are plenty of forums which will show you how to UC an AMD chip, some guys are running sub 1 volt on their AMD quads which can drop a 95w CPU into 45w territory.
WTF good is that gonna do when the "find my iPhone" feature allowed for unlimited password tries with NO TIME LIMIT as has been reported on several sites? You can have the best password ever created and if I can just brute force the site all day long without penalty then you be fucked friend, after all you can throw together an AMD octocore box for a couple hundred bucks that can crank out attempts in the millions if not tens of millions if you have a big enough pipe!
Lets face it, somebody at Apple done fucked up REAL bad and instead of admitting it they are doing a "you're holding it wrong" level of BS spinjob trying to cover it up.
That is the dirty little secret both sides don't want to talk about and why guys like me have branched into home theater and networking setups as there really isn't any reason to upgrade if you aren't one of the 5% or so that push a system to the limit and even they are finding it harder to justify.
What neither chip maker wants to admit is that from 1993 to 2006 what we had was a BUBBLE, no different than the real estate or dotbomb bubbles. The MHz race meant that a 2 year old PC would be seriously struggling to run the latest software and a 3 year old PC probably wouldn't run half of the new programs. In one 4 year stretch I went from 300Mhz to 2200MHz, over 7 times the clockrate while having the memory and storage space just about double with each of the 4 systems between 300Mhz and 2200MHz. Since I too am a gamer during this period I was having to chunk my system almost yearly just because of how quickly the raw power was growing, it was insane.
Now compare to the system I have now....the system is nearly 5 years old, with a 4 year old hexacore and a GPU that has been out nearly 2 years....but why would I build a new one? Thanks to Turbocore my system has no problems playing the latest games, most of which only use a couple of cores, while the RAM is slower DDR2 I have 8 GB of it so games and videos are buttery smooth and with 3TB of HDD space and room for an SSD I'm certainly not hurting on the storage front. All I did was slap in a $100 HD7750 to replace my aging HD4850 (which frankly still played the newer games just fine, it was just a heat monster) and everything plays great, with more bling than I can pay attention to in the heat of battle.
And of course the gamers are the minority...what about the majority? Luckily I have just about the most perfect "Joe Average" test case any PC shop guy could ask for in my dad, his PC usage is about as ordinary and middle of the road as one can get. Webmail, video chat, watching movies, web surfing, you can't get more average when it comes to test cases. When the Phenom IIs dropped right before the Bulldozer release I thought "Ya know, its been awhile since I built him that $199 Phenom I quad special**, now that the prices have dropped maybe its time to upgrade his system" so I ran a log for a couple weeks on his home and office systems just to see how hard they were being slammed...the result? That Phenom I quad was maxing out at 35% and the Pentium Dual at work was maxing out at just 45%!
So there really isn't any reason to upgrade any longer, systems went from "good enough, but just barely" to "fire breathing funny cars that spend more time idling than working". This is also why I have no problem remaining an AMD exclusive shop, as it really doesn't matter if AMD releases on the smallest nm or even comes out with new chips as the ones they have is so overpowered it just isn't funny, and my customers just love how much power I can give them for very little $$$.
**- Man those that missed jumping on the Phenom I don't know what they missed, thanks to the TLB bug I was grabbing those chips for $30 a triple and $45 a quad and to this day they make great desktops, even have a customer that does 3D robotics design on a Phenom I X3 and it works great. The best "bang for the buck" deals right now for those that want a real steal? If you want an HTPC the socket AM1 quads are just nuts, you can grab the APU and the board for less than $100 and if you need an ULV server you can save $15 by swapping the Athlon quad for the Sempron. On the desktop front the Athlon X3s and Phenom X3 on AM3 are just highway robbery, with those chips easily found in the $45 range and paired with a cheap AAC board I'm seeing close to 80% unlocks on these. A 3GHz+ quad for less than $50? You just can't beat that. For the gamers many are recommending the Athlon 750K for FM2 but I'm bucking the trend and saying grab the FX6300 AM3 because you can grab an X6 with a turbo of 4.1 GHz for just $106 shipped. With the FX you are getting two chips in one, a really fast triple for your single threaded games and a hexacore for your multitasking...at $106? Its a steal.
So let me get this straight...I can spend $200+ on thumbsticks that I will most likely never see again, or buy a 50 pack of blank DVDs off of Newegg for $6...hmmm....sorry, not really a hard choice pal. Not to mention how the hell am I gonna reproduce 20 thumbsticks when I need to hand out Windows updates to customers whose net is dodgy or who have shitty captastic cellular net? With DVD I simply push the "make another copy" button and tell it how many I want, then I can just slap in another disc when the drawer opens and not even pay attention to it...how am I supposed to do that with thumbsticks?
Yeah and believe me a lot of people were PISSED, as Skype really is a piss poor replacement. On a positive note many of those left for other services, thus showing what I've said all along that Steve Ballmer was a cancer upon MSFT and brought nothing but dwindling numbers and failure with him. Hell if the rumors are true the only reason they were able to get Win 7 out the door without him shitting all over it was he was busy squirting the zune on all the talk circuits (boy THAT worked well) and couldn't be arsed with the flagship product.
So here's hoping that the new guy has a brain, a market with only Apple and Google doesn't sound very nice to me as it would probably be locked down and online only and at least with MSFT you can skip versions you don't like.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh and thanks to the joke of a border according to my friends in law enforcement old fashioned slavery is alive and well too, they say you can buy a girl from the coyotes for as little as $5k in cash, $10k and they'll deliver.
Systemd...its the Metro of Linux!
Obviously you've never loaded one of the "aggressive" flash ads with a bunch of buttons and clickable crap built into the animation? Because I have seen one of those drag a 3GHz quad down to a crawl thanks to all the crap its trying to render being spread like the clap across a dozen CDNs, half of whom take forever and a day to respond or time out, which causes it to call the next CDN in its list...yeah sorry but the new ads are even nastier than you can imagine.
If you want to see it for yourself just surf some "mainstream" sites like CNN, AOL, Yahoo "News" and the like for a couple hours with no adblocking, just be sure to have an offline disc image so you can blast the OS and restore from images. Hell I used to use a VM at the shop to let an image get the latest drive bys to test various AVs and stay up to date on removal methods but not anymore, with the latest bloated mess called "interactive ads" I had to quit because even with a C2D doing nothing but running the VM those bastards would slam it so hard I'd be lucky if I could kill the VM, it would just redline the cores to the firewall, nasty shit. Maybe if I slapped in a C2Q and limited the VM to only 2 or 3 cores I could do it again but frankly articles like this only prove my theory correct, back any precious memories, nuke the OS, and make sure they have a choice of browsers with ABP loaded into all of them.
Oh and just FYI since insisting that my customers only use browsers I've preloaded with ABP? I've watched infections disappear, even my most clueless click happy customers only have to call me for hardware or networking issues. Of course it turned out just as I told my clueless former boss it would, because I'm "the guy that builds PCs so they don't mess up" I get referrals up the ying yang so I don't have to worry about repeat business, they are happy to tell everybody and their dog the ONLY place they should get a PC fixed or have one worked on is from/by me.
Well to be fair to the SWAT they were told they had a hostage situation and having friends that are ex-cops I can tell you those calls are the ones they always feared because one wrong move and you have to explain to somebody why their wife or kid is in a body bag, so they naturally are gonna go heavy when you have hostages. the fact that there are so many absolute douchebags on this earth that "SWATting" could actually become a word? Just shows why you have to assume asshattery anymore when it comes to anything and everything, too many wastes of space on this planet.
And the simple fact that long term Linux professionals, the kind that write articles for major sites and are called on for expert Linux advice actually suggest that having a separate home partition and blowing away the whole OS, including programs and settings, every year and a half is a "viable solution" just shows why I call 'em FOSSies, because like Moonies and Scientologists there is a serious fucking disconnect between what they consider normal and reality! I mean can you imagine me selling customers a PC and telling them they are gonna have to blow away their OS every year and a half and that they only have X number of months before they have to wipe and start over? I'd be out of business before the year was out! But that just shows how cult like their thinking has become, because Torvalds has made it clear as long as he has a pulse the whole "stick it all in the kernel" bullshit is NEVER gonna go away so instead of going "Welp that's fucked up, lets go somewhere else" they cook up these elaborate workarounds just to give them a bare semblance of what Windows and OSX have had for the better part of a decade!
Finally as for WinME...wanna know what killed WinME? The douchebag at MSFT who said that WinME could run VXD drivers. If you had a WinME system with ONLY WDM drivers? It was solid as a rock, in fact I had a customer who didn't retire his WinME system until it died in 2009 because it worked perfectly all that time. But Lord have mercy if you mixed WDM and VXD as loading both made WinME an unstable mess of an OS, but I'd rather be trapped on a system that had only WinME and Win 8 in a dual boot than deal with Linux as like you I have better things to do than spend my time trying to fix Torvalds' fuckups.
So what is the new singularity? Simple its the day when human labor is no longer needed to maintain and advance the world. Its the day when everything from picking beans to paving roads can all be done by machines that never get paid, never ask for days off, its the corporate idea of heaven!Its the dark reality of John Henry, that no matter how hard you work, even if you work yourself to death, the machine will just keep on working and will run you down without a bit of remorse.
When that day comes there is really only 3 paths, one of which we partially do now which is 1.- "make work" where you pay somebody for doing a pointless "job". We do that now at fast food joints, if you raised the minimum wage to a living wage and quit letting the corps hand out "how to get government handout" videos to new employees? You'd find within a year all the fast food workers replaced with an automated system that not only wouldn't get paid but would probably have a better track record than the underpaid overworked employees do know when it comes to getting orders correct.
The second option would be the "Star Trek Socialist paradise" which would be the most humane of the three, basically give everyone a basic wage and let them do what they will with their free time while giving extra benefits and credits to those that choose to "serve the greater good" by devoting themselves to science and medical research. It sounds now but sadly too many greedy bastards at the top would rather burn the forest down than share the trees which brings us to #3 which is what I think all the 3 letter agencies are ramping up for..
A fascist dictatorship where the elite rule with an iron boot using fear and violence where those at the top commit systematic genocide by forcing the "useless people" to live in ever worsening squalor, probably while claiming they are just "lazy" because they can't compete with the Asian slaves building our electronics. You would need the 3 letter agencies for several jobs in such a shift, to inspire fear and paranoia, to monitor and allow you to remove anybody that could possibly lead the peasants in an uprising, and to get enough dirt on those with weaker stomachs to insure they "get with the program".
Considering how much we have been seeing the mask fall off when it comes to those in power, how they just ignore any and all promises without fear of punishment and how many in power seem to get almost sadistic glee at the thought of stomping on the poor? Sadly I have a feeling its gonna be the third option. They'll use a major false flag to excuse "extraordinary measures" that will simply never end and get worse...war on terror anyone?
THIS, this right here, is what royally pisses me off with the "Linux is ready for the desktop" crowd, because its fucking trivial to show that even the most basic consumer hardware just DOES NOT WORK while basic common sense features, like having a way to roll back drivers when an update hoses them or roll back the system when something goes wrong, that Windows has had for a decade and a fricking half just do not exist. I mean how bad would the FOSSies be laughing if you had to wipe and reinstall Windows every year to year and a half just to get the latest security updates? Well I get that trotted out as a viable "solution" to the fact that no Linux distro can pass the Hairyfeet challenge, which boils down to "get 5 years worth of updates without shitting yourself". Last time I saw that level of shitty in Windows was WinME!
And its sad but I realized years ago that most security problems, both on and offline, could be solved by merely applying the "douchebag rule". Act like the world is filled with vicious trolling POSes that will do something nasty even when they don't gain from it? Watch your issues disappear. Its sad that we have come to that point but we have so many worthless excuses for human beings with nothing better to do than cause grief and misery because they can that this is the world we live in. Hell did you see that article in yahoo about SWAT kicking down the door of a COD player and coming within a hair of killing the kid? Turned out somebody he beat online got butthurt and deciding to call SWAT on him just to be a giant fucking prick, THAT is the world we live in now.
Bono is a douchebag hypocrite who says that somebody who downloads a song on P2P should be given jail time while he has no problem with his band ripping off other artists wholesale. See "U2 rips off song" in any search engine to find more examples than I can count.
I have found being a fucking hypocrite can generate more hatred than pretty much anything else and seeing how fucking reviled Bono is I'd say his hypocrisy must rub a lot of folks the wrong way. If U2 disappeared from the face of the earth tomorrow? I'd have no problem with that and the music scene would probably be a better place.
Sigh...how about constantly shifting in game ads to pummel you where you can't escape or use adblock? How about selling your playing habits to advertisers because "hey hardcore players do the dew!" or how about disappearing expansions so if you want to play with everybody else better whip out that CC, because "its only good for x number of days!"
All one has to do is look at EA and Activision to see if there is a douchey way to turn players into walking ATMs some game company WILL do it.
THANK YOU, as it doesn't matter if you can squeeze a driver set down to 1Kb if the damned things don't work or work half assed which is what I found trying random printers on Linux at the shop last year. Some would print but NOT scan, some would scan but came out lousy, and frankly NONE of them worked OOTB without seriously fiddling. Compare this to a Windows printer install...1.- Put CD in driver, 2.- Follow instructions....there is no step three! And the driver is 30 Mb, oh noes...who fricking cares? What kind of garbage are you dumpster diving where 30Mb or even 300Mb makes a damned bit of difference? Hell the cheapest shittiest used towers I keep around just to have something under $99 have 160Gb drives so who cares about drivers in the Mb range?
As for TFA...is anybody REALLY surprised, I mean really? These corps never think about security until it bites them square on the ass so while I'm glad its a white hat and not a black pulling this I really wouldn't be surprised if all consumer printers with net features is equally shitty, its just not something they even bothered considering. It reminds me how there was zero security on faxes until assholes started spamming black faxes, most of these companies just don't think "What would a giant douchebag do?" which sadly today is EXACTLY what you have to consider right off the bat.
If you trust SMART I have a bridge you may be interested in as I have dealt with drives at the shop where you could literally hear the head slamming that SMART said was just hunky dory. You also can't trust any kind of "old age" metric because that ignores the simple fact that some companies build better products, it would be like judging the reliability of all cars based on what the bottom of the line Kia is like in 5 years. Hell when it comes to reliable I will take a used or refurb Samsung over a brand new Seagate consumer line drive as I've found everything above 500GB on the consumer line is buggy firmware and flimsy as hell, I swear you can look at a Seagate 1.5Tb funny and it'll commit suicide.
At the end of the day surely to God it can't be THAT hard to put in a simple helium gauge so you would know its going down and by how much, in fact the only reason I could see not putting one in is to fuck folks over on the warranty.
Does it come with some sort of gauge, so you can know when its getting close to running out? Because I don't want a drive with a time limit where I don't have a way to keep up with the countdown.
I'm sure I'll hear a bunch of analogies but I've dealt with more drives in the shop than most guys have had hot meals and with modern drives? Unless you drop the thing you usually get plenty of warning before failure, not to mention that having to get 8TB worth of data off while the drive dies does NOT sound fun so having plenty of warning would be good. Heck I've had 1TB drives in the shop that was a race to get the data off before they croaked, 8-10TB sounds like a nightmare.
Show me where thousands were murdered over a non religious statue or building and I'll concede your point, until then we hairless monkeys have shown that religion is the equivalent of handing a 3 year old a loaded gun...while I would prefer that nothing be destroyed there are some cases when you simply have to accept some things are just too dangerous to be left out.
And I would be happy to accept having the best historical copies of each locked in a bunker somewhere for historians to study except we have seen where that leads, the Catholic church.
Ya know I always thought it was hilarious how badly the west got their panties in a wad over the SCUD when its just a really REALLY crude rocket, not much better than the Katyusha of WWII. Every time old Saddam tried to improve the things all he did was make 'em more likely to fall apart or blow up, tests we did on captured ones showed you'd be damned lucky to land within 4 football fields of your target, and that was with the Russian ones, Saddams were much worse because his "rocket scientists" just kept making the cases thinner to increase range, they were right up there with the Asad Babil on the POS scale.
Like it or not getting rid of old Saddam and crazy MoMo was VERY stupid, because just like in Vietnam with the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem we didn't have a damned clue as to what to do after. And just like with Ngo Dinh Diem it gave the enemy the field as all it did was sow chaos and instability and replace a bad leader with a giant question mark, leaving the place easy pickings. Was MoMo and Saddam evil? yep they were total scum but they were containable scum, whereas the Islamist extremists build training camps and export their evil all over the planet.
If there is any lesson we should take from Libya and Iraq its that we should NOT do anything to topple Assad, because any attempt to replace him with a western stooge will only end up being a disaster, instead if the people of Syria replace him all on their own we should try to have a dialog with that person but not to try to ramrod in our own puppet because in the long run it comes and bites us on the ass.
I think one should make Disney pay dearly for extending copyrights but since we can't fight them via the law, maybe we should try some culture jamming instead?
For an example we need to fill the net with links and images so if somebody uses a search engine for "Mickey Mouse" instead of the clean sanitary Disney version they get the broken down whored out Taco-Man version? Bonus if they come with his catch phrase "I'll suck your dick for $10".
Its obvious that Disney will just keep buying congresscritters until copyrights last for eternity so it looks like the only thing left to do is just shit all over the mouse, make the mouse so lame Disney can't reap endless profits without penalty by whoring the mouse out for eternity.
Ignoring some fact there, aren't ya Sparky? BTW they have a name for the kind of fallacy you're trying to pull, its called Tu quoque, also known as the "You lynch negroes" fallacy for the fact that it was used often by Stalin's supporters to cover over his atrocities...nice company you keep.
As for what you are selectively ignoring is the fact that Israel has attempted to broker a cease fire with hamas several times only to be met with more rockets filled with nails aimed at civilian centers, the last of which was last week BTW, it lasted all of 42 minutes before iron Dome was activated by incoming shells. I won't even bother with your hypothetical Christians, because I can find a whacko or two that calls for the killing of any race and that is frankly a fucking joke compared to the murder of rape victims and cutting the hands off alleged thieves, but lets go straight to your "majority of Muslims are peaceful...shall we? Boy I'm betting after this you'll wish you can kept your mouth shut because the facts? NOT on your side. Try reading a little bit before you speak because it will frankly make you look less foolish.
The second link BTW even explains WHY Muslims are violent, its because unlike the Torah and the Bible it was written extremely vague, so that its easy for Mullahs to continue the violence, quote" God commanded the Hebrews to kill Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusitesâ"all specific peoples rooted to a specific time and place. At no time did God give an open-ended command for the Hebrews, and by extension their Jewish descendants, to fight and kill gentiles. On the other hand, though Islam's original enemies were, like Judaism's, historical (e.g., Christian Byzantines and Zoroastrian Persians), the Qur'an rarely singles them out by their proper names. Instead, Muslims were (and are) commanded to fight the people of the book "until they pay the tribute out of hand and have been humbled"and to "slay the idolaters wherever you find them."
But of course you will likely ignore the facts because it isn't from a site like HuffyPo that fits your preconceived (most likely ultra left) biases, just like how the ultra left was making for some hilarious entertainment by the way they kept tapdancing trying to continue to support their theory that Brown was "executed by teh man" despite ever mounting evidence he was a violent criminal. Just like them I'm sure you'll ignore the evidence and continue to pretend that Islam and the other religions are equal, which is as delusional as saying crime is the same in poor and rich neighborhoods because once, five years ago, a rich woman killed her cheating husband on the nice side of town! Shock!
Meanwhile anybody with more than 2 functioning braincells will be able to see through your bullshit by simply turning on any news outlet from any place on the planet and watch the beheading of the week, maybe enjoy a few stonings...BTW since the religions are equally violent, perhaps you can show me the Christian equivalent of Farfur? Because I have seen a LOT of western kid's shows over the years and I don't remember EVER seeing one teaching lovely songs like how I should get into heaven with the heads of Jews and Muslims on my belt...perhaps you can provide a link to that show?
Key word? Intended because how long you think its gonna be before some employee figures out with the high cost of mushrooms there is profits to be made?
It is how Neil Degrasse Tyson said when talking about how religion can kill progress "The Arab world was the center of science and mathematics for centuries, and then came Islam", you simply cannot compare Islam to any other major religion as the other religions grew up, Islam didn't. When was the last time you heard of Jews stoning rape victims? Read about any Christians chopping the hands off thieves lately? But it wouldn't take me even 5 minutes worth of Googling to wallpaper this page with horror after horror, not only not condemned but condoned by Islamic states.
At the end of the day the other religions went through this centuries ago and that time was rightly called the dark ages, and until Muslims stand up and refuse to accept such atrocities committed in the name of their God all we can do is get as much of history as we can out of their hands and document all that we can't. As we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan anything that doesn't have the name of the prophet on it WILL end up destroyed just as religious leaders during the dark ages took priceless ancient Greek books and reused the pages to make prayer books to their God.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, the best thing anybody could ever do for humanity is take every single religious text and destroy them, the evil they cause far outweighs the good.
Are there products that I like? Sure but I'll drop their asses like a bad habit if they screw me over, take Nvidia, I used to LOVE Nvidia cards...until I got fucked over by bumpgate. Now? I use and sell nothing but ATI/AMD cards. And I sure as hell ain't trying to cover when a company fucks their customers, see the diatribes I wrote about MSFT when they released Windows "LULZ I Iz A Cellphone LULZ" Mist8ke Edition.
So i just don't fucking get it, I really don't.
Then what we need is a group of mathematicians to get together and come up with a standard, just as we have the IEEE give us so many IT standards.
The Anon Coward can't provide one because he is one of the faithful iFanboys protecting his God by any means, truth or no. I have seen this same claim made on multiple sites and every single time when somebody asked for a citation? Nothing but silence.
This is why iFanboys scare me, as the closest analogy is a Scientologist, they both have this insane devotion to their cause and will happily lie and mislead if it furthers their religon.
Well if you were wanting just playback and not transcoding I'd suggest the Socket AM1 Athlon quads, at 25w I've been using it for HTPCs and it works great in that role but for what you are wanting to do? honestly I'd probably stay away from the APUs, the "bang for the buck" just isn't there yet. Now please remember that with these recommendations I'm having to work without a LOT of the data I require, for example i don't know how many streams you are wanting to process, budget, etc so I'm just gonna throw some things out there with pretty wide parameters because of this.
That out of the way lets talk parts. For an HTPC with transcoding I'd probably go for an AM3+, you can get a board for just $25 and use the money you save to get FX6300. if you need to go cheaper you can get an FX 4130 Black Edition for $72 or an Athlon X3 450 and if you spent a little more on the board to get one with AAC I've been seeing more than 80% unlocks on that chip, so for $51 for the used you could have an Athlon X4 at 3.2GHz, can't beat that, in fact my youngest has an unlocked 450 and it plays pretty much any game he desires so its got the strength required for transcoding.
Now for graphics I bet you are wondering "Why should I go discrete instead of APU?" and the answer is simple...bandwidth.Remember when you are multitasking, like say watching a video while doing a transcode lets say, that with an APU your RAM is gonna have to be doing double duty by being the buffer for the GPU as well as being the working memory for the CPU that is gonna end up bottlenecking on ya friend, not to mention 4K is seriously heavy on the bandwidth so having a discrete is just a better call. If you are not gaming I'd go with something like this HD6450 for $37 or if you want to go dirt cheap and silent this HD5450 for $20 after MIR. in both cases you get plenty of GPU memory for video buffering, the AMD drivers not only come with codecs that allow hardware acceleration of most formats but also allow drag and drop transcoding to H.264 or VC1, and most importantly you are leaving your options open. Need to process more streams? Well if you started with the X3 you could go to an X6 or even X8 when you spot one on sale. new video format becomes popular? Get a new GPU that has hardware acceleration of that format.
Again remember I'm doing this without a lot of the data I'd normally work with, also remember that the 95w rating when it comes to AMD is the MAX RATING, I've found IRL its a LOT lower. For example my X6 has a TDP of 95w but acording to asrock IES which measures what the board is feeding the CPU with 8 tabs open in Dragon along with several background programs like Steam my chip is pulling between 8.4w-18w and the reason why is simple, more cores means no waiting for jobs so the chip can idle more often. BTW if you want to save even more power? Spend a little more and get an Asrock board as not only do they come with IES which drops the number of phases when idle but they also come with excellent OCing/UCing ability and its trivially easy to underclock an AMD CPU which will naturally lower the power and heat. There are plenty of forums which will show you how to UC an AMD chip, some guys are running sub 1 volt on their AMD quads which can drop a 95w CPU into 45w territory.
Anyway I hope
WTF good is that gonna do when the "find my iPhone" feature allowed for unlimited password tries with NO TIME LIMIT as has been reported on several sites? You can have the best password ever created and if I can just brute force the site all day long without penalty then you be fucked friend, after all you can throw together an AMD octocore box for a couple hundred bucks that can crank out attempts in the millions if not tens of millions if you have a big enough pipe!
Lets face it, somebody at Apple done fucked up REAL bad and instead of admitting it they are doing a "you're holding it wrong" level of BS spinjob trying to cover it up.
That is the dirty little secret both sides don't want to talk about and why guys like me have branched into home theater and networking setups as there really isn't any reason to upgrade if you aren't one of the 5% or so that push a system to the limit and even they are finding it harder to justify.
What neither chip maker wants to admit is that from 1993 to 2006 what we had was a BUBBLE, no different than the real estate or dotbomb bubbles. The MHz race meant that a 2 year old PC would be seriously struggling to run the latest software and a 3 year old PC probably wouldn't run half of the new programs. In one 4 year stretch I went from 300Mhz to 2200MHz, over 7 times the clockrate while having the memory and storage space just about double with each of the 4 systems between 300Mhz and 2200MHz. Since I too am a gamer during this period I was having to chunk my system almost yearly just because of how quickly the raw power was growing, it was insane.
Now compare to the system I have now....the system is nearly 5 years old, with a 4 year old hexacore and a GPU that has been out nearly 2 years....but why would I build a new one? Thanks to Turbocore my system has no problems playing the latest games, most of which only use a couple of cores, while the RAM is slower DDR2 I have 8 GB of it so games and videos are buttery smooth and with 3TB of HDD space and room for an SSD I'm certainly not hurting on the storage front. All I did was slap in a $100 HD7750 to replace my aging HD4850 (which frankly still played the newer games just fine, it was just a heat monster) and everything plays great, with more bling than I can pay attention to in the heat of battle.
And of course the gamers are the minority...what about the majority? Luckily I have just about the most perfect "Joe Average" test case any PC shop guy could ask for in my dad, his PC usage is about as ordinary and middle of the road as one can get. Webmail, video chat, watching movies, web surfing, you can't get more average when it comes to test cases. When the Phenom IIs dropped right before the Bulldozer release I thought "Ya know, its been awhile since I built him that $199 Phenom I quad special**, now that the prices have dropped maybe its time to upgrade his system" so I ran a log for a couple weeks on his home and office systems just to see how hard they were being slammed...the result? That Phenom I quad was maxing out at 35% and the Pentium Dual at work was maxing out at just 45%!
So there really isn't any reason to upgrade any longer, systems went from "good enough, but just barely" to "fire breathing funny cars that spend more time idling than working". This is also why I have no problem remaining an AMD exclusive shop, as it really doesn't matter if AMD releases on the smallest nm or even comes out with new chips as the ones they have is so overpowered it just isn't funny, and my customers just love how much power I can give them for very little $$$.
**- Man those that missed jumping on the Phenom I don't know what they missed, thanks to the TLB bug I was grabbing those chips for $30 a triple and $45 a quad and to this day they make great desktops, even have a customer that does 3D robotics design on a Phenom I X3 and it works great. The best "bang for the buck" deals right now for those that want a real steal? If you want an HTPC the socket AM1 quads are just nuts, you can grab the APU and the board for less than $100 and if you need an ULV server you can save $15 by swapping the Athlon quad for the Sempron. On the desktop front the Athlon X3s and Phenom X3 on AM3 are just highway robbery, with those chips easily found in the $45 range and paired with a cheap AAC board I'm seeing close to 80% unlocks on these. A 3GHz+ quad for less than $50? You just can't beat that. For the gamers many are recommending the Athlon 750K for FM2 but I'm bucking the trend and saying grab the FX6300 AM3 because you can grab an X6 with a turbo of 4.1 GHz for just $106 shipped. With the FX you are getting two chips in one, a really fast triple for your single threaded games and a hexacore for your multitasking...at $106? Its a steal.
So let me get this straight...I can spend $200+ on thumbsticks that I will most likely never see again, or buy a 50 pack of blank DVDs off of Newegg for $6...hmmm....sorry, not really a hard choice pal. Not to mention how the hell am I gonna reproduce 20 thumbsticks when I need to hand out Windows updates to customers whose net is dodgy or who have shitty captastic cellular net? With DVD I simply push the "make another copy" button and tell it how many I want, then I can just slap in another disc when the drawer opens and not even pay attention to it...how am I supposed to do that with thumbsticks?
Yeah and believe me a lot of people were PISSED, as Skype really is a piss poor replacement. On a positive note many of those left for other services, thus showing what I've said all along that Steve Ballmer was a cancer upon MSFT and brought nothing but dwindling numbers and failure with him. Hell if the rumors are true the only reason they were able to get Win 7 out the door without him shitting all over it was he was busy squirting the zune on all the talk circuits (boy THAT worked well) and couldn't be arsed with the flagship product.
So here's hoping that the new guy has a brain, a market with only Apple and Google doesn't sound very nice to me as it would probably be locked down and online only and at least with MSFT you can skip versions you don't like.