Insightful? Really mods? We ARE talking about Java ya know, a language run by company that infests its customers with shit like the Ask toolbar when they update the thing.
And if what you are saying is true Nerdfest, where is all the C attacks? Obj-C? Visual C++? Hell that last one is probably on more machines than even Java as pretty much every Windows box that has play a stand alone game in the last 5 years has had to install VC++.
Like it or not you hit closer to home than you think with the Active-X comparison, because like Active-X Java is frankly not very good at security. It was written by Sun who wrote shitty code, see the mess that is Open Office for an example, and when Oracle bought it they certainly didn't raise the quality level of the code. There is a reason why you see more people with VC++ or with Chrome browsers yet Java is the one targeted, crooks always good for the easy mark.
They can bitch about "Waaah how can we make money on our websites, waah" but since I started making adblock plus mandatory? The rate of customers bringing PCs back infected has dropped right off the map.
I USED to allow websites who asked nicely to have an exception but I found they abused the goodwill every. single. time. without fail. I consider an ad to be unacceptable if 1.- Its served by flash, too many zero days for flash to allow it s a delivery vehicle. 2.- No Java, see rule 1. 3.- NO THIRD PARTIES, this is a sticking point for some but it really comes down to responsibility. If you use some fly by night third party you can pass the blame and in reality you have no damned clue from minute to minute what is even running on your site when you give space to third parties. YOU might tell your readers "Oh we won't use flash or java for ads" but do you think the third party will care about your pledge? Not a chance.
Until sites come up with a way to serve ads without cranking up the risk to my customers? they can fuck right off. Your "right" to make a living of your dumb ass blog does NOT trump my customers right to have a virus free PC and considering what a nightmare ID theft is I feel zero guilt for blocking your malware spewing third party flash crap. Even Ars Technica, who made a big deal about begging and making their case for unblocking....what did they do with 3 days of me unblocking? they broke rules 1 and 3, showing their ads to be just as dangerous as anybody else. So there will be no exceptions and I'll be happily spreading ABP to everyone who brings a PC through my door.
But this is just a bunch of Atom cores....who wants that? I've had plenty of Intel Atoms and AMD Bobcats go through the shop and...while they are good at your basic websurfing and the Bobcats make good media tanks thanks to the better GPUs....sigh...I really REALLY wouldn't want to do any heavy lifting with 'em.
Maybe things have changed since i was working SMB but back in my day the servers were doing heavy number crunching, something I wouldn't want to do on an Intel Atom, i don't care how many of them you jam together. Now maybe if you had a Xeon to pass off the heavy jobs to...but in that case an ARM chip to do the light work would make more sense. Sigh, sounds like another "tech demo for shit you'll never see IRL" like their Laredo or whatever it was called.
And how many people are gonna actually HAVE a Pentium 3 rig lying about? Not many, hell I run a little PC shop and I don't have a single P3 left thanks to bad caps and shitty PSUs over the years taking 'em out.
Look IF you happen to have a P3 lying about and IF its not a power piggie parts wise and IF its not in danger of blowing a cap any day now? Congrats, you are in a teeny tiny minority when it comes to computing, whereas my way? Anybody with $120 to spare can have a nice low power server, less if they have any parts lying around. Heck you can grab one of those $69 Bobcat boards along with a PCI to IDE adapter and voila! You can turn any old P4 office box into a nice low power dual core. I have done this to quite a few older P4s in office buildings and with a 2Gb RAM stick, 4Gb if they are willing to go 64bit you are looking at MAYBE $100 worth of parts.
Now any way you slice it you just can't beat that, not for a dual core that takes less than 18w under full load AND does 1080P AND has hardware acceleration for Flash and most codecs, that is frankly a steal.
Not to mention we've had a recent kinda nasty VP that requires pacemakers and whom would have probably been a target if the info would have leaked and you have one more bullet point in the "this smells funny" column. Reminds me of that reporter whose family aid he had a phobia about blood and would pass smooth out when he saw a drop of the stuff supposedly slit his wrists to kill himself.
Frankly it should be so trivial to tell if he was a druggie, the stuff ends up in the hair, nails, hell with heavy users they practically sweat drugs so finding out shouldn't take any time at all...wanna bet nobody runs anymore tests? After all we have learned from Manning and Snowden the past couple of years frankly I trust the mob more than I trust my own government so call me paranoid but I'd like a second opinion please.
Personally I liked SC 1 over SC 2, but maybe that's just me but I'd say a giant 50 foot flaming HELL YEAH! to another Starflight! That was a damned deep game and I'd LOVE to see it done with today's graphics if and ONLY IF they kept the depth! Sadly too many games lose a lot of the depth in favor of bling, a good example being Deus Ex HR which I still enjoyed but no way did it have the level of depth that the original had.
Now if we can only get somebody to buy the rights to the No One Lives forever franchise so I can have some funny in my FPS, please? I mean how could you not love a game that had kitten bombs and ninja chicks trading tips on how much poison to use to keep their man loyal?
If in 2014 there is a real chance that you won't have a GUI that is functional? Then frankly your Mickey Mouse OS really isn't ready for the public. Seriously dude its TWENTY FOURTEEN, there is ZERO excuse for not having a functional GUI on the desktop, none. Hell Windows has had automatic GPU driver recovery since Vista RTM and that was seven years ago, if you honestly can't even guarantee a VGA level display? Then you really shouldn't be considered anything more than a hobbyist toy like Raspberry Pi, because that is just pathetic.
And I'm not gonna waste my breath arguing over what date Win9X came out because honestly? We shouldn't even have to have this discussion because the GUIs should have evolved by now, only Linux didn't. How long ago did WinXP come out again? 2001? Yet it STILL looks better and has more features, like an easy GUI to rollback drivers and to restore the system if something goes wrong, than 2014 Linux? Seriously WTF people! To steal a line from Tron I stand for THE USERS and Joe and Sally Average, you know, the ones driving billions in sales, whom will make or break your OS? Yeah they don't give a rat's ass about CLI and again, its 2014 so they SHOULD NOT NEED CLI to have a functional OS. There is NO excuse, nobody cares about how "powerful" your disco era GUI is, nobody is gonna be dealing with cheat sheets and typing Bash commands into a 5 inch touchscreen or their brand new laptop, its just not gonna happen.
Except that sucks your battery dry and this? DOES NOT. I can cold boot a dozen times into EG to check my email or do a look up and STILL have over 90% on the battery because it doesn't require leaving the system sucking battery juice whereas suspend is just keeping everything in RAM.
UHHH...You DO know that is still 3-5 times more than an Atom or Bobcat, yes? Or that the amount of useful work per watt is several orders of magnitude higher with the Atom and Bobcat, yes? And that most of the parts that go with that P3 are gonna be horribly inefficient because power usage was just not a concern, right?
I mean if you just hate to throw that old P3 in the dumpster and want to repurpose it, sure I can see that, but you are gonna be wasting more juice over the long run than if you just grabbed one of those $69 Bobcats and stuck it in the same case. And that isn't even taking into account the fact that both the Atom and the Bobcat are dual cores so can do twice as much work per watt and if you were to benchmark that P3 the amount of useful work you are getting when its balls out at 30w would be less than what you get from the Bobcat or Atom at 6w.
Sorry friend but the old stuff? Just wasn't real good when it came to power. you are just lucky its a P3, if it would have been a P4 the only thing it would have been good for is a space heater.
Not if you shop around as you can get an Intel Atom or an AMD Bobcat and both of those average single digits what it comes to watts. As a nice bonus not only do they make good routers but they make great file servers, WAPs, DNS servers, you can do a lot with one of these.
THANK YOU! Jesus Tap Dancing Christ I have never seen so much TRUTH condensed down and served up so straightforward, thanks.
The really sad part? The poster you are responding to is a prime example of what is wrong with Linux, and doesn't even know it! You look at your average distro on distrowatch and sadly waaay too many of the "programs" that come with it are exactly as he described, a half assed thrown together win9X level "GUI" that is doing nothing but piping input to a CLI. And God help you if you ever come up with a task that isn't the most mundane obvious task you can possibly think of because guess what? The "GUI" only has a handful of buttons for the most obvious use case, anything else? Well you better break out the Man pages and learn some arcane gibberish pal, because its CLI for you!
So many here hate my guts because I point out bullshit where I see it and more importantly I AM the 99%, that is my customers that I work for every single day, your Joe and Sally average. And I hate to break the news to them but Joe and Sally don't give a shit about "The power of CLI" or how many think its the fricking force, nor will they put up with fugly as hell Win9x level GUIs thrown together that just call on CLI and poorly at that, no they want a modern OS that has functional, easy to use, and well designed GUIs and sadly Linux is a good decade behind in that regard.
Mark my words, with Google making OEMs sign non compete clauses, moving more and more of the important bits of Android into their proprietary appstore, and refusing to allow anything GPL V3 anywhere near Android there WILL come a day when they lock it down. And when they do? When there is nothing but game consoles, locked down and corporate controlled? I hope the Linux community takes a good hard look in the mirror and realizes its THEIR fault! They COULD have pushed for a new GUI centric model, they COULD have gotten ahead of the curve, they COULD have listened to retailers like me that are begging for a real choice instead of corp A,B,or C,but instead they refused to let go of a 40+ year old GUI and instead of treating CLI for what it is, a niche that should only be used in certain limited use cases, they treated it as the fricking force and a right of passage.
Well the people have spoken and the future won't be Bash commands on a 5 inch touchscreen, it'll be intuitive easy to use GUIs...that sadly will al be locked down, will datamine the shit out of the user, and lock them into a proprietary appstore. Its a damned shame, so much potential just wasted, a damned shame.
Yes and that is why the GUI has been stagnant in Linux for the better part of a decade. hate on me ALL you want but anybody who is honest will admit its true, look at the file managers for just one example. The default is deep fried ass across the board. Fugly as fugly can be fonts, incredibly shitty icons...its like they went out of their way to make the GUI as ugly and nasty as they possibly could. And the whole OS has a disjointed "Meh lets just throw shit together" look as its pretty damned obvious nobody gives a rat's ass about the human interface guidelines. As much shit as Shuttleworth gets at least he tried to have a look stick across the system, its just too damned bad he gives Steve Ballmer a run for his money in the "no damned taste at all" dept because everything Jobs said about MSFT goes doubly true for Ubuntu. Ubuntu, an ancient word that means "We are totally colorblind".
Having a great CLI is fine and dandy but sadly its become a crutch, you can completely remove CLI access from Windows and OSX and ya know what? The user would be fine,most wouldn't even notice that it was gone. Try removing access to the CLI for just one year in the Linux of your choice, I DARE you. You can't because 1.- Many of the distros won't even function without user access to the shell, as too many things are depending on CLI, and 2.- The first time you run into a problem the ONLY CHOICE you will have to fix it is "Open up Bash and Type"...that's it, that is all. Hell just ask for a non Bash solution and watch the howls of impotent rage! As an experiment I tried that very thing on a dozen forums with a wireless problem that would have taken all of 30 seconds to solve with the GUI in Windows. I was called every name in the book, had a dozen guys preach to me about how wonderful the church of CLI is, until finally one guy had the balls to admit the truth, there simply wasn't a GUI way to fix the problem!
If there is anything that Android and ARM should have taught it is that the future is NOT some 40+ year old throwback to the age of disco UIs, its intuitive, easy to discover,and easy to learn is THE way of the future! Nobody but nobody is gonna want to sit there and type a bunch of arcane gibberish using a touch keyboard into a 5 inch screen,they are gonna want simple yet powerful GUIs to control these new marvels in their pockets. Linux SHOULD be at the forefront of this GUI revolution, after all its beholden to no corp, doesn't have to maintain backwards compatibility to please the masses, no reason why the next great GUI shouldn't come from Linux....except that too many have taken CLI as their religion, their way to "test the faith" and see if the user is "worthy" to be part of the little club.
CLI will always have its place, in high performance servers where every byte counts, but even there the cost of a GUI is so trivial compared to what resources the boxes have it isn't funny. And you'll probably never come up with a better way to automate repetitive tasks than simply writing a script and letting the computer run, but its 2014 guys, time to accept that disco is dead and that if you aren't administrating a pile of servers or batch processing a thousand files there really should be NO reason to use a CLI at all. It should be there if you WANT to use it, but it should never ever be the case that you HAVE to use it, not on a modern OS anyway.
Ask Assange, the answer is YES. If you truly believe that simply having a press that is owned by the government BTW, will save your ass? I have a bridge you might be interested in. Again look at Assange where the story was instantly changed to "He's a rapist! Terrorist!"instead of all the evidence that the government supported scum, even bailing out a PMC that sold children as fucktoys to seal arms deals.
If either Snowden or Assange EVAR lave their little protected spaces they wil be given rendition rides so fast it'll make your had swim, and the entire time our whored out pres will cheer and say how wonderful big mommy is for doing it.
Actually in some moist delicious irony Windows does NOT store the WiFi unencrypted, the last one that did was WinXP which was depreciated and is all but abandoned by MSFT, the rest? Store it in an encrypted XML file which the system and NOT the user has the keys for so the only way for them to get it would be to somehow corrupt the WiFi password file AND disconnect the session so the user would be forced to re-input the password while they were monitoring.
And it is very MUCH relevant as I was attempting to point out that a good 9 times out of 10 the weakest link is NOT the operating system, its the user. Apparently you didn't follow the narrative for whatever reason, so I will elaborate. See this how to write a Linux virus in 5 easy steps page? It works the exact same way that pretty much every current bit of malware on Windows, from the "free porn codec" to the security tool and FBI porn bug variants work and that is by fooling the user in order to get them help the malware writer past the defenses.
Go look at the top 10, hell the top 50 malware infections and guess what? They ALL work the same way, get the user to help lower the defenses. All TFA shows is that once a malware writer gets a Linux user to lower the defenses the system will be that much trivial to pwn, that's all. But at the end of the day the vaunted "Linux security" is worth a bucket of piss against the top 20 malware writers because they all know where the weakest link in the security chain, as those million Android infections show Linux security PEBKAC.
Except with it stored unecrypted they don't NEED physical access, they merely need you to follow a few simple instructions and download their "free codec" or similar trick.
Linux fanboys can scream bloody murder and waste modpoints but that won't change reality and reality is its almost never the OS that is the weakest link, its PEBKAC. Hell look at Windows from Vista on up, you have the user running as a user and requiring elevation for anything more than trivial changes (sound familiar?) and it goes even one better than Linux by having the browser by default run with the lowest possible privileges, yet systems STILL get pwned, why? PEBKAC.
Linux users, like the Mac users before them got away with not having to worry about such things thanks to security by obscurity, but just as MacDefender signaled the end of that perk in OSX so too has the million Android infections signaled the end of SBO for Linux. I've seen Linux machines pwned in a week (look up the "KDE Look" bug for just one example) and I've seen Win2K boxes go from RTM to EOL without a single bug because at the end of the day its not the OS, although storing passwords in plain text is just stupid, but ultimately whether a system is secure or not comes down to whether the user has common sense and follows best practices.
Remember folks no matter how hard you work to foolproof a system the world will always come up with a bigger fool.
Click on the top 10 in the appstore, don't care which category, and you'll find the permissions are all identical and waaay over what a program should need. And you might want to look up "Android persistent malware" as you'll find out that the crooks? Are already finding ways to jump out of the sandbox.
But hey, stick your head in the sand, it'll make the Target sized Code Red of Android all the more funny. We shop guys are already making bets on how long until Android gets a netsky or Code red, most are figuring early summer. personally I'm gonna LMAO at all the people getting pwned while claiming "Linux is more secure"...yeah and I have a 20 foot dick named Irving.
Correct but there is A REASON why sales are down, something that none of the pundits seem able to grasp and the reason is thus: The PC went from being "good enough" to insanely overpowered while the user's jobs? They didn't change.
I mean look at the kits I sell on the low end, we're talking triples and quads with 4Gb of RAM, GPUs that do 1080P, and 500Gb HDDs....now how many of your average folks is gonna be able to slam that chip hard enough to require an upgrade, much less a new PC?
The PC industry (and MSFT) got spoiled by what was a bubble, the MHz war created a bubble because increased single core performance? Trivial for a programmer to take advantage of while taking advantage of an 8 thread CPU? Insanely HARD and many jobs simply don't scale across cores well. The same will happen to tablets, we are already seeing quad tablets in the sub $150 range so it won't be long until everyone has an insanely overpowered tablet that wants one, which will be followed by smartphones.
What will happen to the industry then? Who knows but the days of just throwing a new PC on the market and having it sell itself are over, the industry is just gonna have to adapt and try to come up with new markets.
Take a closer look at those shareware licenses friend, because as someone who studied them closely, even talked to a lawyer or two, I can tell you that while they give you the right to USE the software almost none of them gave rights to redistribute.
With the GPL you have the exact opposite of the shareware scene, pretty much the first thing written was redistribution rights so while a company could refuse to allow future versions under GPL there would be no way to stop you from forking the code. That said in the end it really doesn't matter WHAT a license says as it comes down to what you are willing to pay in court fighting a lawsuit. With GPL you have the FSF who will go into court on your behalf to fight for your right to share whereas with the shareware we'd have spent the next half a decade in and out of court...again unless we made it in China, then all the IP BS disappears:-(
The same thing that stops it on Windows, or are you actually trying to argue that Android is more primitive and therefor simply can't handle fine grained permissions? Because that certainly is what it sounds like from here.
And you DO know that thanks to Android having a severe lack of fine grained controls that malware DOES NOT NEED to have root,yes? That they can have access to ALL of a users data, contacts, any CC data they've input, because thanks to the fucked up design that encourages the user to click yes no matter what because EVERYTHING asks for complete access, that its as trivial to infect as Win9X,yes? I mean where did you think those million infections came from? That over a million people rooted their phone so they could go to dodgy appstores?
Waste modpoints and AC bomb ALL YOU WANT, it won't change reality and reality is that while MSFT at least learned from their mistakes Google seems bound and determined to repeat them. Of course why should Google give a fuck, they re just an advertising company, as long as they have your eyeballs the rest doesn't matter.
Sorry, gotta throw a flag, bullshit on the field. if anything Linux (which the community is quick to claim Android as their own) is MORE vulnerable than Windows as Android has reached over a million infections a full decade faster than Windows reached that milestone BTW, and unlike Windows which has several damned good sandboxing antivirus packages, including some really good free ones, Google has made sure that antivirus on android is useless as they have no way to uninstall or even stop a malicious app.
Of course the whole thing just proves what many of us has been saying for years, that Linux is just as easy to infect if not more so than Windows and OSX and that once Linux gained any popularity, so that it was no longer benefiting from security by obscurity that it would pay the price. Oh and before anybody chimes in with the totally pointless tidbit about Linux servers? You see those are actually administered by these things called...wait for it..."server admins" that have had years of education and experience before being let loose on those systems. Linux benefited from security by obscurity in the consumer space because so few actually used it in that arena, Google ended that with android.
So ironically the act that Windows has functional sandboxing antivirus may actually help to keep these android systems from getting infected, instead of the other way around.
For proof of that just look at how McAfee was treated like a celeb after spending the weeks leading up to the murder of his neighbor in a drug fueled haze banging underage girls and championing bath salts, all evidence points to him killing the father of three but is treated like a hero? Or the IIRC DuPont heir that managed to get acquitted of murder even though he had the decapitated head in a bowling bag in his closet. I mean for fucks sake, he had a HUMAN HEAD in his fricking closet! What does the guy have to do, upload a "Here is how you kill those you don't like using my ex wives as examples" to FB or something?
This guy cost millions that could have gone to drugs that showed REAL promise and the fact that all he got was a lousy 3 year ban just shows how completely fucked up and frankly worthless scientific research is ATM. I mean what incentive do they have not to falsify results or insure the results are what momma gov or corp wants to hear when the worst they'l get is a slap on the wrist if they get caught and if they don't its a million dollar gravy train? With so little consequences for faking I honestly wouldn't be surprised to find more new articles with iffy data than without, there is just no reason not to and millions of reasons in favor.
Actually as a retailer I can tell you not only WHY the Chromebooks had a good year but WHY MSFT had a shit year, ready? The answer to the first is PRICE and the answer to the second is WIN 8 SUCKS.
The Chromebook is proof that MSFT fucked themselves right out of the netbook market. Remember all those "The netbook is a fad/death of the netbook" articles? Well let this shop owner let you in on a secret most didn't know, which is MSFT killed it on purpose because Ballmer decided that Windows should cost Apple money while at the same time having a 4 alarm fire's worth of smoke blown up his ass by Intel who was frankly tired of all those Atom and AMD Bobcat chips cutting into their high margin sales. In less than 24 months netbooks went from $179 to $499 and believe me it was NOT the customer asking for features that jacked up the price, as i was having to hunt my ass of to get my hands on the sub $350 netbooks, especially the AMD bobcats, but when the price jumped? Sales died. The fact that MSFT killed a big selling market because it wasn't making "iPad Money" frankly should be no surprise as "I want to work in Cupertino!" has been Ballmer's cry for a good half a decade. All Google did was take that business and as we can see its good business indeed. That is what you get for not listening to your retail channel you fat sweaty bastard Ballmer.
As for the second i could wallpaper this page with "Wow Win 8 REALLY REALLY sucks" articles, but do i even need to do that anymore? Fuck common sense should point out the gaping hole in the premise, Windows 8 is made to be a tablet/cellphone OS and sucks without a touchscreen, people buy Windows for the billions of dollars in legacy Windows programs they have....which are NOT designed for a touchscreen and are as easy to use with a touch UI as trying to touchtype on a 4 inch smartphone while wearing oven mitts. The entire concept is stupid, pointless, and thanks to MSFT having a REALLY shitty "designed by committee" style UI that takes the worst out of both the desktop AND the tablet while taking almost nothing good combined with a "We're smarter than you, you'll take this 'innovation' and learn to like it you lazy luddite" bad attitude? People have made it loud and clear than Win 8 is a giant DO NOT WANT. Hell myself and most of the little shops in my area won't even carry the thing anymore, and all the e-stores have big "We have Win 7" signs so no damned wonder sales are tanking, they might as well have put out "Win 8 Goatse Edition" for all the appeal it has Joe and Jane Normal.
This just goes to show what we retailers have been saying for years...give people what they want (or what they think they want) while giving them the impression you are listening and care about what they want? Watch your sales grow year in and year out. treat the customer like shit, ignore their complaints, and act like you really don't give a rat's ass about them either way like MSFT has been doing? Watch them stay away in droves. Even with the inertia of Windows folks are happily trying Chromebooks NOT because they want some locked down thin client, but because Ballmer and Co has been giving them the bird and have made it clear they ONLY want Apple customers with Apple money and Apple margins. Well I hate to break the news to ya Steve, but Apple customers wouldn't piss on a Surface if it was on fire and Windows customers? they never LIKED Windows, they TOLERATED Windows. Your jacking the price while flipping them the bird over the UI was enough for a large chunk of 'em to go "fuck this bullshit" and start looking for the exits.
Problem is those rights were given by company A which no longer exists and company B, which may or may not own the game, refuses to honor that agreement.
Again if we just made it in China? All our problems would have went away. Its just sad that the USA is simply unsuitable for anything other than lawsuits:-(
How about they have made 100% sure they are gonna get their collective asses sued? At THAT size we aren't talking about just the small fry here, you can bet your last buck there will be some Sega and Nintendo ROMs and they sue at the drop of a hat!
That said its still a dickish move as there is a lot of folks that have bandwidth caps, probably more folks in the world with caps than without. Hell even I would hesitate at a 43gb ROMset without having a list of what is inside, I'd hate to waste that much bandwidth only to find its a bunch of games I really didn't care for.
I can vouch for this as me and a programmer friend looked into recreating the days of shareware for the current gen. What we found was a minefield where even if the company closed its doors you had pieces of the company going here and there and nobody knew who the fuck, what the fuck, or where the fuck some 20+ year old game went. The few we did find wanted more money for the rights to distribute the SHAREWARE version of their game than a triple A title from the period could ever hope to make, we are talking about $100K+ for just the limited locked shareware even though we were doing it non profit. That is of course if they would even speak to you, we got many that were like "Oh we have zero plans for it but we might do something someday" so they refused to allow anybody to sell or distribute the shareware version.
The saddest part? We were told flat footed if we would just make it in China all our problems would go away. this is why i think China will be the next hotbed of innovation, as unlike the USA you can actually make things without having to spend the majority of your capital on lawyers.
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Insightful? Really mods? We ARE talking about Java ya know, a language run by company that infests its customers with shit like the Ask toolbar when they update the thing.
And if what you are saying is true Nerdfest, where is all the C attacks? Obj-C? Visual C++? Hell that last one is probably on more machines than even Java as pretty much every Windows box that has play a stand alone game in the last 5 years has had to install VC++.
Like it or not you hit closer to home than you think with the Active-X comparison, because like Active-X Java is frankly not very good at security. It was written by Sun who wrote shitty code, see the mess that is Open Office for an example, and when Oracle bought it they certainly didn't raise the quality level of the code. There is a reason why you see more people with VC++ or with Chrome browsers yet Java is the one targeted, crooks always good for the easy mark.
They can bitch about "Waaah how can we make money on our websites, waah" but since I started making adblock plus mandatory? The rate of customers bringing PCs back infected has dropped right off the map.
I USED to allow websites who asked nicely to have an exception but I found they abused the goodwill every. single. time. without fail. I consider an ad to be unacceptable if 1.- Its served by flash, too many zero days for flash to allow it s a delivery vehicle. 2.- No Java, see rule 1. 3.- NO THIRD PARTIES, this is a sticking point for some but it really comes down to responsibility. If you use some fly by night third party you can pass the blame and in reality you have no damned clue from minute to minute what is even running on your site when you give space to third parties. YOU might tell your readers "Oh we won't use flash or java for ads" but do you think the third party will care about your pledge? Not a chance.
Until sites come up with a way to serve ads without cranking up the risk to my customers? they can fuck right off. Your "right" to make a living of your dumb ass blog does NOT trump my customers right to have a virus free PC and considering what a nightmare ID theft is I feel zero guilt for blocking your malware spewing third party flash crap. Even Ars Technica, who made a big deal about begging and making their case for unblocking....what did they do with 3 days of me unblocking? they broke rules 1 and 3, showing their ads to be just as dangerous as anybody else. So there will be no exceptions and I'll be happily spreading ABP to everyone who brings a PC through my door.
But this is just a bunch of Atom cores....who wants that? I've had plenty of Intel Atoms and AMD Bobcats go through the shop and...while they are good at your basic websurfing and the Bobcats make good media tanks thanks to the better GPUs....sigh...I really REALLY wouldn't want to do any heavy lifting with 'em.
Maybe things have changed since i was working SMB but back in my day the servers were doing heavy number crunching, something I wouldn't want to do on an Intel Atom, i don't care how many of them you jam together. Now maybe if you had a Xeon to pass off the heavy jobs to...but in that case an ARM chip to do the light work would make more sense. Sigh, sounds like another "tech demo for shit you'll never see IRL" like their Laredo or whatever it was called.
And how many people are gonna actually HAVE a Pentium 3 rig lying about? Not many, hell I run a little PC shop and I don't have a single P3 left thanks to bad caps and shitty PSUs over the years taking 'em out.
Look IF you happen to have a P3 lying about and IF its not a power piggie parts wise and IF its not in danger of blowing a cap any day now? Congrats, you are in a teeny tiny minority when it comes to computing, whereas my way? Anybody with $120 to spare can have a nice low power server, less if they have any parts lying around. Heck you can grab one of those $69 Bobcat boards along with a PCI to IDE adapter and voila! You can turn any old P4 office box into a nice low power dual core. I have done this to quite a few older P4s in office buildings and with a 2Gb RAM stick, 4Gb if they are willing to go 64bit you are looking at MAYBE $100 worth of parts.
Now any way you slice it you just can't beat that, not for a dual core that takes less than 18w under full load AND does 1080P AND has hardware acceleration for Flash and most codecs, that is frankly a steal.
Not to mention we've had a recent kinda nasty VP that requires pacemakers and whom would have probably been a target if the info would have leaked and you have one more bullet point in the "this smells funny" column. Reminds me of that reporter whose family aid he had a phobia about blood and would pass smooth out when he saw a drop of the stuff supposedly slit his wrists to kill himself.
Frankly it should be so trivial to tell if he was a druggie, the stuff ends up in the hair, nails, hell with heavy users they practically sweat drugs so finding out shouldn't take any time at all...wanna bet nobody runs anymore tests? After all we have learned from Manning and Snowden the past couple of years frankly I trust the mob more than I trust my own government so call me paranoid but I'd like a second opinion please.
Personally I liked SC 1 over SC 2, but maybe that's just me but I'd say a giant 50 foot flaming HELL YEAH! to another Starflight! That was a damned deep game and I'd LOVE to see it done with today's graphics if and ONLY IF they kept the depth! Sadly too many games lose a lot of the depth in favor of bling, a good example being Deus Ex HR which I still enjoyed but no way did it have the level of depth that the original had.
Now if we can only get somebody to buy the rights to the No One Lives forever franchise so I can have some funny in my FPS, please? I mean how could you not love a game that had kitten bombs and ninja chicks trading tips on how much poison to use to keep their man loyal?
If in 2014 there is a real chance that you won't have a GUI that is functional? Then frankly your Mickey Mouse OS really isn't ready for the public. Seriously dude its TWENTY FOURTEEN, there is ZERO excuse for not having a functional GUI on the desktop, none. Hell Windows has had automatic GPU driver recovery since Vista RTM and that was seven years ago, if you honestly can't even guarantee a VGA level display? Then you really shouldn't be considered anything more than a hobbyist toy like Raspberry Pi, because that is just pathetic.
And I'm not gonna waste my breath arguing over what date Win9X came out because honestly? We shouldn't even have to have this discussion because the GUIs should have evolved by now, only Linux didn't. How long ago did WinXP come out again? 2001? Yet it STILL looks better and has more features, like an easy GUI to rollback drivers and to restore the system if something goes wrong, than 2014 Linux? Seriously WTF people! To steal a line from Tron I stand for THE USERS and Joe and Sally Average, you know, the ones driving billions in sales, whom will make or break your OS? Yeah they don't give a rat's ass about CLI and again, its 2014 so they SHOULD NOT NEED CLI to have a functional OS. There is NO excuse, nobody cares about how "powerful" your disco era GUI is, nobody is gonna be dealing with cheat sheets and typing Bash commands into a 5 inch touchscreen or their brand new laptop, its just not gonna happen.
Except that sucks your battery dry and this? DOES NOT. I can cold boot a dozen times into EG to check my email or do a look up and STILL have over 90% on the battery because it doesn't require leaving the system sucking battery juice whereas suspend is just keeping everything in RAM.
UHHH...You DO know that is still 3-5 times more than an Atom or Bobcat, yes? Or that the amount of useful work per watt is several orders of magnitude higher with the Atom and Bobcat, yes? And that most of the parts that go with that P3 are gonna be horribly inefficient because power usage was just not a concern, right?
I mean if you just hate to throw that old P3 in the dumpster and want to repurpose it, sure I can see that, but you are gonna be wasting more juice over the long run than if you just grabbed one of those $69 Bobcats and stuck it in the same case. And that isn't even taking into account the fact that both the Atom and the Bobcat are dual cores so can do twice as much work per watt and if you were to benchmark that P3 the amount of useful work you are getting when its balls out at 30w would be less than what you get from the Bobcat or Atom at 6w.
Sorry friend but the old stuff? Just wasn't real good when it came to power. you are just lucky its a P3, if it would have been a P4 the only thing it would have been good for is a space heater.
Not if you shop around as you can get an Intel Atom or an AMD Bobcat and both of those average single digits what it comes to watts. As a nice bonus not only do they make good routers but they make great file servers, WAPs, DNS servers, you can do a lot with one of these.
THANK YOU! Jesus Tap Dancing Christ I have never seen so much TRUTH condensed down and served up so straightforward, thanks.
The really sad part? The poster you are responding to is a prime example of what is wrong with Linux, and doesn't even know it! You look at your average distro on distrowatch and sadly waaay too many of the "programs" that come with it are exactly as he described, a half assed thrown together win9X level "GUI" that is doing nothing but piping input to a CLI. And God help you if you ever come up with a task that isn't the most mundane obvious task you can possibly think of because guess what? The "GUI" only has a handful of buttons for the most obvious use case, anything else? Well you better break out the Man pages and learn some arcane gibberish pal, because its CLI for you!
So many here hate my guts because I point out bullshit where I see it and more importantly I AM the 99%, that is my customers that I work for every single day, your Joe and Sally average. And I hate to break the news to them but Joe and Sally don't give a shit about "The power of CLI" or how many think its the fricking force, nor will they put up with fugly as hell Win9x level GUIs thrown together that just call on CLI and poorly at that, no they want a modern OS that has functional, easy to use, and well designed GUIs and sadly Linux is a good decade behind in that regard.
Mark my words, with Google making OEMs sign non compete clauses, moving more and more of the important bits of Android into their proprietary appstore, and refusing to allow anything GPL V3 anywhere near Android there WILL come a day when they lock it down. And when they do? When there is nothing but game consoles, locked down and corporate controlled? I hope the Linux community takes a good hard look in the mirror and realizes its THEIR fault! They COULD have pushed for a new GUI centric model, they COULD have gotten ahead of the curve, they COULD have listened to retailers like me that are begging for a real choice instead of corp A,B,or C,but instead they refused to let go of a 40+ year old GUI and instead of treating CLI for what it is, a niche that should only be used in certain limited use cases, they treated it as the fricking force and a right of passage.
Well the people have spoken and the future won't be Bash commands on a 5 inch touchscreen, it'll be intuitive easy to use GUIs...that sadly will al be locked down, will datamine the shit out of the user, and lock them into a proprietary appstore. Its a damned shame, so much potential just wasted, a damned shame.
Yes and that is why the GUI has been stagnant in Linux for the better part of a decade. hate on me ALL you want but anybody who is honest will admit its true, look at the file managers for just one example. The default is deep fried ass across the board. Fugly as fugly can be fonts, incredibly shitty icons...its like they went out of their way to make the GUI as ugly and nasty as they possibly could. And the whole OS has a disjointed "Meh lets just throw shit together" look as its pretty damned obvious nobody gives a rat's ass about the human interface guidelines. As much shit as Shuttleworth gets at least he tried to have a look stick across the system, its just too damned bad he gives Steve Ballmer a run for his money in the "no damned taste at all" dept because everything Jobs said about MSFT goes doubly true for Ubuntu. Ubuntu, an ancient word that means "We are totally colorblind".
Having a great CLI is fine and dandy but sadly its become a crutch, you can completely remove CLI access from Windows and OSX and ya know what? The user would be fine,most wouldn't even notice that it was gone. Try removing access to the CLI for just one year in the Linux of your choice, I DARE you. You can't because 1.- Many of the distros won't even function without user access to the shell, as too many things are depending on CLI, and 2.- The first time you run into a problem the ONLY CHOICE you will have to fix it is "Open up Bash and Type"...that's it, that is all. Hell just ask for a non Bash solution and watch the howls of impotent rage! As an experiment I tried that very thing on a dozen forums with a wireless problem that would have taken all of 30 seconds to solve with the GUI in Windows. I was called every name in the book, had a dozen guys preach to me about how wonderful the church of CLI is, until finally one guy had the balls to admit the truth, there simply wasn't a GUI way to fix the problem!
If there is anything that Android and ARM should have taught it is that the future is NOT some 40+ year old throwback to the age of disco UIs, its intuitive, easy to discover,and easy to learn is THE way of the future! Nobody but nobody is gonna want to sit there and type a bunch of arcane gibberish using a touch keyboard into a 5 inch screen,they are gonna want simple yet powerful GUIs to control these new marvels in their pockets. Linux SHOULD be at the forefront of this GUI revolution, after all its beholden to no corp, doesn't have to maintain backwards compatibility to please the masses, no reason why the next great GUI shouldn't come from Linux....except that too many have taken CLI as their religion, their way to "test the faith" and see if the user is "worthy" to be part of the little club.
CLI will always have its place, in high performance servers where every byte counts, but even there the cost of a GUI is so trivial compared to what resources the boxes have it isn't funny. And you'll probably never come up with a better way to automate repetitive tasks than simply writing a script and letting the computer run, but its 2014 guys, time to accept that disco is dead and that if you aren't administrating a pile of servers or batch processing a thousand files there really should be NO reason to use a CLI at all. It should be there if you WANT to use it, but it should never ever be the case that you HAVE to use it, not on a modern OS anyway.
Ask Assange, the answer is YES. If you truly believe that simply having a press that is owned by the government BTW, will save your ass? I have a bridge you might be interested in. Again look at Assange where the story was instantly changed to "He's a rapist! Terrorist!"instead of all the evidence that the government supported scum, even bailing out a PMC that sold children as fucktoys to seal arms deals.
If either Snowden or Assange EVAR lave their little protected spaces they wil be given rendition rides so fast it'll make your had swim, and the entire time our whored out pres will cheer and say how wonderful big mommy is for doing it.
Actually in some moist delicious irony Windows does NOT store the WiFi unencrypted, the last one that did was WinXP which was depreciated and is all but abandoned by MSFT, the rest? Store it in an encrypted XML file which the system and NOT the user has the keys for so the only way for them to get it would be to somehow corrupt the WiFi password file AND disconnect the session so the user would be forced to re-input the password while they were monitoring.
And it is very MUCH relevant as I was attempting to point out that a good 9 times out of 10 the weakest link is NOT the operating system, its the user. Apparently you didn't follow the narrative for whatever reason, so I will elaborate. See this how to write a Linux virus in 5 easy steps page? It works the exact same way that pretty much every current bit of malware on Windows, from the "free porn codec" to the security tool and FBI porn bug variants work and that is by fooling the user in order to get them help the malware writer past the defenses.
Go look at the top 10, hell the top 50 malware infections and guess what? They ALL work the same way, get the user to help lower the defenses. All TFA shows is that once a malware writer gets a Linux user to lower the defenses the system will be that much trivial to pwn, that's all. But at the end of the day the vaunted "Linux security" is worth a bucket of piss against the top 20 malware writers because they all know where the weakest link in the security chain, as those million Android infections show Linux security PEBKAC.
Except with it stored unecrypted they don't NEED physical access, they merely need you to follow a few simple instructions and download their "free codec" or similar trick.
Linux fanboys can scream bloody murder and waste modpoints but that won't change reality and reality is its almost never the OS that is the weakest link, its PEBKAC. Hell look at Windows from Vista on up, you have the user running as a user and requiring elevation for anything more than trivial changes (sound familiar?) and it goes even one better than Linux by having the browser by default run with the lowest possible privileges, yet systems STILL get pwned, why? PEBKAC.
Linux users, like the Mac users before them got away with not having to worry about such things thanks to security by obscurity, but just as MacDefender signaled the end of that perk in OSX so too has the million Android infections signaled the end of SBO for Linux. I've seen Linux machines pwned in a week (look up the "KDE Look" bug for just one example) and I've seen Win2K boxes go from RTM to EOL without a single bug because at the end of the day its not the OS, although storing passwords in plain text is just stupid, but ultimately whether a system is secure or not comes down to whether the user has common sense and follows best practices.
Remember folks no matter how hard you work to foolproof a system the world will always come up with a bigger fool.
Click on the top 10 in the appstore, don't care which category, and you'll find the permissions are all identical and waaay over what a program should need. And you might want to look up "Android persistent malware" as you'll find out that the crooks? Are already finding ways to jump out of the sandbox.
But hey, stick your head in the sand, it'll make the Target sized Code Red of Android all the more funny. We shop guys are already making bets on how long until Android gets a netsky or Code red, most are figuring early summer. personally I'm gonna LMAO at all the people getting pwned while claiming "Linux is more secure"...yeah and I have a 20 foot dick named Irving.
Correct but there is A REASON why sales are down, something that none of the pundits seem able to grasp and the reason is thus: The PC went from being "good enough" to insanely overpowered while the user's jobs? They didn't change.
I mean look at the kits I sell on the low end, we're talking triples and quads with 4Gb of RAM, GPUs that do 1080P, and 500Gb HDDs....now how many of your average folks is gonna be able to slam that chip hard enough to require an upgrade, much less a new PC?
The PC industry (and MSFT) got spoiled by what was a bubble, the MHz war created a bubble because increased single core performance? Trivial for a programmer to take advantage of while taking advantage of an 8 thread CPU? Insanely HARD and many jobs simply don't scale across cores well. The same will happen to tablets, we are already seeing quad tablets in the sub $150 range so it won't be long until everyone has an insanely overpowered tablet that wants one, which will be followed by smartphones.
What will happen to the industry then? Who knows but the days of just throwing a new PC on the market and having it sell itself are over, the industry is just gonna have to adapt and try to come up with new markets.
Take a closer look at those shareware licenses friend, because as someone who studied them closely, even talked to a lawyer or two, I can tell you that while they give you the right to USE the software almost none of them gave rights to redistribute.
With the GPL you have the exact opposite of the shareware scene, pretty much the first thing written was redistribution rights so while a company could refuse to allow future versions under GPL there would be no way to stop you from forking the code. That said in the end it really doesn't matter WHAT a license says as it comes down to what you are willing to pay in court fighting a lawsuit. With GPL you have the FSF who will go into court on your behalf to fight for your right to share whereas with the shareware we'd have spent the next half a decade in and out of court...again unless we made it in China, then all the IP BS disappears :-(
The same thing that stops it on Windows, or are you actually trying to argue that Android is more primitive and therefor simply can't handle fine grained permissions? Because that certainly is what it sounds like from here.
And you DO know that thanks to Android having a severe lack of fine grained controls that malware DOES NOT NEED to have root,yes? That they can have access to ALL of a users data, contacts, any CC data they've input, because thanks to the fucked up design that encourages the user to click yes no matter what because EVERYTHING asks for complete access, that its as trivial to infect as Win9X,yes? I mean where did you think those million infections came from? That over a million people rooted their phone so they could go to dodgy appstores?
Waste modpoints and AC bomb ALL YOU WANT, it won't change reality and reality is that while MSFT at least learned from their mistakes Google seems bound and determined to repeat them. Of course why should Google give a fuck, they re just an advertising company, as long as they have your eyeballs the rest doesn't matter.
Sorry, gotta throw a flag, bullshit on the field. if anything Linux (which the community is quick to claim Android as their own) is MORE vulnerable than Windows as Android has reached over a million infections a full decade faster than Windows reached that milestone BTW, and unlike Windows which has several damned good sandboxing antivirus packages, including some really good free ones, Google has made sure that antivirus on android is useless as they have no way to uninstall or even stop a malicious app.
Of course the whole thing just proves what many of us has been saying for years, that Linux is just as easy to infect if not more so than Windows and OSX and that once Linux gained any popularity, so that it was no longer benefiting from security by obscurity that it would pay the price. Oh and before anybody chimes in with the totally pointless tidbit about Linux servers? You see those are actually administered by these things called...wait for it..."server admins" that have had years of education and experience before being let loose on those systems. Linux benefited from security by obscurity in the consumer space because so few actually used it in that arena, Google ended that with android.
So ironically the act that Windows has functional sandboxing antivirus may actually help to keep these android systems from getting infected, instead of the other way around.
For proof of that just look at how McAfee was treated like a celeb after spending the weeks leading up to the murder of his neighbor in a drug fueled haze banging underage girls and championing bath salts, all evidence points to him killing the father of three but is treated like a hero? Or the IIRC DuPont heir that managed to get acquitted of murder even though he had the decapitated head in a bowling bag in his closet. I mean for fucks sake, he had a HUMAN HEAD in his fricking closet! What does the guy have to do, upload a "Here is how you kill those you don't like using my ex wives as examples" to FB or something?
This guy cost millions that could have gone to drugs that showed REAL promise and the fact that all he got was a lousy 3 year ban just shows how completely fucked up and frankly worthless scientific research is ATM. I mean what incentive do they have not to falsify results or insure the results are what momma gov or corp wants to hear when the worst they'l get is a slap on the wrist if they get caught and if they don't its a million dollar gravy train? With so little consequences for faking I honestly wouldn't be surprised to find more new articles with iffy data than without, there is just no reason not to and millions of reasons in favor.
Actually as a retailer I can tell you not only WHY the Chromebooks had a good year but WHY MSFT had a shit year, ready? The answer to the first is PRICE and the answer to the second is WIN 8 SUCKS.
The Chromebook is proof that MSFT fucked themselves right out of the netbook market. Remember all those "The netbook is a fad/death of the netbook" articles? Well let this shop owner let you in on a secret most didn't know, which is MSFT killed it on purpose because Ballmer decided that Windows should cost Apple money while at the same time having a 4 alarm fire's worth of smoke blown up his ass by Intel who was frankly tired of all those Atom and AMD Bobcat chips cutting into their high margin sales. In less than 24 months netbooks went from $179 to $499 and believe me it was NOT the customer asking for features that jacked up the price, as i was having to hunt my ass of to get my hands on the sub $350 netbooks, especially the AMD bobcats, but when the price jumped? Sales died. The fact that MSFT killed a big selling market because it wasn't making "iPad Money" frankly should be no surprise as "I want to work in Cupertino!" has been Ballmer's cry for a good half a decade. All Google did was take that business and as we can see its good business indeed. That is what you get for not listening to your retail channel you fat sweaty bastard Ballmer.
As for the second i could wallpaper this page with "Wow Win 8 REALLY REALLY sucks" articles, but do i even need to do that anymore? Fuck common sense should point out the gaping hole in the premise, Windows 8 is made to be a tablet/cellphone OS and sucks without a touchscreen, people buy Windows for the billions of dollars in legacy Windows programs they have....which are NOT designed for a touchscreen and are as easy to use with a touch UI as trying to touchtype on a 4 inch smartphone while wearing oven mitts. The entire concept is stupid, pointless, and thanks to MSFT having a REALLY shitty "designed by committee" style UI that takes the worst out of both the desktop AND the tablet while taking almost nothing good combined with a "We're smarter than you, you'll take this 'innovation' and learn to like it you lazy luddite" bad attitude? People have made it loud and clear than Win 8 is a giant DO NOT WANT. Hell myself and most of the little shops in my area won't even carry the thing anymore, and all the e-stores have big "We have Win 7" signs so no damned wonder sales are tanking, they might as well have put out "Win 8 Goatse Edition" for all the appeal it has Joe and Jane Normal.
This just goes to show what we retailers have been saying for years...give people what they want (or what they think they want) while giving them the impression you are listening and care about what they want? Watch your sales grow year in and year out. treat the customer like shit, ignore their complaints, and act like you really don't give a rat's ass about them either way like MSFT has been doing? Watch them stay away in droves. Even with the inertia of Windows folks are happily trying Chromebooks NOT because they want some locked down thin client, but because Ballmer and Co has been giving them the bird and have made it clear they ONLY want Apple customers with Apple money and Apple margins. Well I hate to break the news to ya Steve, but Apple customers wouldn't piss on a Surface if it was on fire and Windows customers? they never LIKED Windows, they TOLERATED Windows. Your jacking the price while flipping them the bird over the UI was enough for a large chunk of 'em to go "fuck this bullshit" and start looking for the exits.
Problem is those rights were given by company A which no longer exists and company B, which may or may not own the game, refuses to honor that agreement.
Again if we just made it in China? All our problems would have went away. Its just sad that the USA is simply unsuitable for anything other than lawsuits :-(
How about they have made 100% sure they are gonna get their collective asses sued? At THAT size we aren't talking about just the small fry here, you can bet your last buck there will be some Sega and Nintendo ROMs and they sue at the drop of a hat!
That said its still a dickish move as there is a lot of folks that have bandwidth caps, probably more folks in the world with caps than without. Hell even I would hesitate at a 43gb ROMset without having a list of what is inside, I'd hate to waste that much bandwidth only to find its a bunch of games I really didn't care for.
I can vouch for this as me and a programmer friend looked into recreating the days of shareware for the current gen. What we found was a minefield where even if the company closed its doors you had pieces of the company going here and there and nobody knew who the fuck, what the fuck, or where the fuck some 20+ year old game went. The few we did find wanted more money for the rights to distribute the SHAREWARE version of their game than a triple A title from the period could ever hope to make, we are talking about $100K+ for just the limited locked shareware even though we were doing it non profit. That is of course if they would even speak to you, we got many that were like "Oh we have zero plans for it but we might do something someday" so they refused to allow anybody to sell or distribute the shareware version.
The saddest part? We were told flat footed if we would just make it in China all our problems would go away. this is why i think China will be the next hotbed of innovation, as unlike the USA you can actually make things without having to spend the majority of your capital on lawyers.