What we need is a "sad but true" mod as that has been the MO of Ballmer's tenure at MSFT, buy up companies that are either has beens or just starting out and proceed to completely cock them up and ruin anything that may have been good about them by trying to shape them into a half baked ripoff of whatever was hip. See Kin, Zune, Sidekick, that ad company they bought trying to ape Google, I swear the shareholders would see a better ROI if they replaced Ballmer with a monkey throwing poo at a copy of the business section of the Times and had the company buy whatever stock the monkey covered in the most shit.
I only hope that whomever they get to replace the sweaty one has a brain and quits trying to turn Windows into a sailphone because we really don't have a viable replacement for Windows on the desktop yet. Linux has and will have driver issues as long as Torvalds is in charge, Android is frankly at Win9X level when it comes to stability, with everyone I know including myself experiencing sleep of death, random hangs and crashes, and Apple is too locked down with too little choice and ALL of it overpriced.
Actually its pretty much impossible, if our solar system is similar to your average alien civilization.
For those that may have missed it a few years back when the Voyager probe hit the heliopause what they found was the heliopause works like a giant radio backwash, it just trashes any radio waves in this big giant white noise that made it pretty damned difficult to communicate with the probe. I remember reading at the time that researchers looked at the amount of interference they were getting and crunched the numbers and based on the data concluded that just about ALL of the signals we have EVER sent in the 80 years we used radio and analog TV was "eaten" by the white noise of the helkiopause, they figured that the Sagan signal of the 70s MAY have gotten through but everything else? Trashed.
So unless an alien civilization used an incredibly strong signal like the Sagan message AND had it being broadcast in a range that wouldn't be trashed by their heliopause AND broadcast it continuously for several decades, because otherwise it would literally be just a blip? You can give it up. If you go by the only civilization we know of, our own, and look at how in our tiny and now closing window of broadcasting signals that could leave the planet we have made only ONE single broadcast and that broadcast was targeted at only a single system in the whole universe? Then you probably have better odds of winning the powerball 5 times in a row while being struck by lightning than we have of ever picking anything up, sad to say.
I switched to Bing after Google starting screwing users by changing their privacy policies and bugging the shit out of me to tie everything into my RealID through the craptastic G+ and I have to say....its pretty nice actually. I find its image search to be a HELL of a lot better than Google's, I don't know if its because SEOs have figured out how to game Google or what but with Google I always seem to get a lot more unrelated crap than I do with Bing.
I also noticed there seems to be a lot more malware and spam links on Google as of late, they are easy enough to spot and avoid as it will have your search term mixed in with a bunch of unrelated crap. For example looking up reviews and benches for the HD7770 I got a LOT of results on Google that read "nude girls kardashian hurricane HD7770 washington shooting"etc where its obviously just spamming whatever is trending along with your search term and these seemed to be getting pretty high front page ranks. Again I don't know if the SEOs have figured out how to game Google or what but I just didn't see that nearly as often with Bing.
Finally I find the Bing rewards to be nice, if you are gonna be making money off my searches the least you can do is cut me a little slice. With the Bing rewards I get amazon gift cards which I use to get all those little things at the shop I'm always needing like CD sleeves and adapters and my fiance uses hers for all kinds of little knick knacks. Its only like $10 a month but that's a hell of a lot more than you get from Google.
All Google seems to be doing as of late is making their terms nastier and trying to force G+ every damned where (Seriously Google when I say i DO NOT WANT my realID on YouTube you should STFU and quit bugging the shit out of me, its pretty bad when i have to have a "YouTube browser" just to get you to quit bugging me) and its really a shame as once upon a time Google was the shit, always coming out with cool new things and trying new ideas. Now I have to have a Gmail just for my android phone so I can look at Youtube on it without being hassled, a browser on my desktop for the same reason, and every time I turn around I have Google bugging the piss out of me to use G+. Man I hope the MozPhone turns out to be decent as Google is REALLY starting to irk me, the quicker I can lose any association with Google the better..
What do you expect, most of the MSFT bashing here is based on shit that ended with XP. As someone who works on Windows systems 6 days a week i can say that a modern Windows system (Vista on up) with automatic updates and a browser that recognizes low rights mode (IE or any Chromium based) is one tough nut to crack, in fact the only infections I see with any regularity are ones where the writer used social engineering to get the user to bypass the OS security. Sadly no matter how well MSFT hardens the OS you can't fix PEBKAC as those million infected Android devices can attest to.
As for TFA no matter what the security risk I'd GLADLY take SL and Flash over the fucking trainwreck that is HTML V5! Sure having a plug in may not be the most "elegant" way to do things but ya know what? At least it doesn't gobble down RAM and CPU like a fat guy at an all you can eat buffet! While I'd be the first to admit that we could and should be able to do better than Flash and SL I'm sorry but HTML V5 isn't the way, measure it any way you like and you'll find it scores WORSE than Flash and SL by a long shot, RAM, CPU, hell if the mobile device doesn't have hardware acceleration for H.264 all you are gonna get is a slideshow.
I don't know if its still up on Wikileaks but there was an actual CP producer who posted a "how to" as a way to give a big flying middle finger to the cops and its pretty fucking amazing how intricate and organized the shit is.
1.-They rent servers in bumfuckistan using stolen IDs and either stolen cards are something else hard/impossible to trace like bitcoins or those Walmart Visas. 2.- They set up encrypted VMs with a minimal Linux that just has a desktop and a folder, the folder is filled with CP. 3.- The encrypted VMs are then "rented" which is easy enough to cover with shell corps, after all how many "here today gone later today" cloud services have we seen the past few years? This has the added bonus that it gives them a front that shows up like a legit biz on the customer's CC, something like "XYZ data services" or the like. 4. The money laundering part is easy enough, you bounce it around the planet a few times, the drug lords have whole networks dedicated to this, see RBN as an example.
And there you go, you end up with a guy who can make boatloads of money doing any damn thing he wants while he sits in a place with the cops on his payroll like a little Baron or Duke from the feudal days. Those who are interested in the minds of criminals really should read it as the guy comes off as VERY sociopathic, he even laughs about how he'll pick some random schmuck that just has an infected PC (he has contacts in the malware scene) and dump some CP on his PC and point the cops to it just to waste the cops time and get off on being able to destroy some random nobody. You really get the feeling reading this guy's writing that he was the kind that threw cat's out of cars at 70MPH or dumped bricks off of overpasses just to see a wreck, a smart but REALLY twisted guy.
As a final note, for those that are for going after those that look at the pics? I have a friend that has been doing that for the past 7 years at the state crime lab and says its the biggest waste of time he has seen so far in law enforcement. he says the ones they catch in these "TV headline busts" are not only NOT molesters but are porn addicts that aren't a threat to anybody. He brings up one as a perfect example of what they get, some guy that hadn't left his house since the late 90s and had ZERO contact with the outside world, he had everything set up so he could pay it online or by slipping the check under the welcome mat. He said they had to tranc him like a wild animal to get him out of the house, he was so agoraphobic that even having somebody in his home caused him to howl like an animal and throw things. He is probably gonna cost the state a good 20 million plus for all the drugs and solitary for the next 50-70 years.
He'd love nothing more than to focus on the ones actually making it but since that would likely cross state and country borders which means the state prosecutors wouldn't have a soundbyte to use on their runs for gov? Not gonna happen. Needless to say he is looking for a way to get out of there, frustration being your daily diet isn't good for your health. he has tried to recruit me several times but fuck that noise, I have too big a mouth to take that much shit from superiors without telling them where they could go.
But I have to add we have years of brain scans showing...yep...sick minds don't function the same as a normal person's mind. Now there is still a debate as to whether its cause and effect or if the behavior changes the mind, for example there has been at least one study I'm aware of where they had actors with normal brains scans act out the symptoms of various mental illnesses and their brain scans ended up VERY different than when they started.
But no matter whether its one or the other the one thing one cannot argue with is the fact that you take a scan of a predator's brain, whether they hunt adults or children, and their brain scans are NOT like the average person.
If the data came from the government I'd say its completely fucking worthless.
After all this is the same government whose AG tried to turn a minor op into a false flag with fast and furious and has lied repeatedly to congress under oath, where many of the crime stats are rigged by putting everyone that isn't African American down as white,and its the same government that has been fudging unemployment and inflation data so badly to make those figures nothing but fairy tales.
So I'm sorry but after all the shit we've been finding out about the government and data the only data I'd believe from the US gov is that they are monitoring you and I, everything is made politically correct before usage.
Why don't you try kolibri and find out? I tried on an old junker Pentium D with a GB of RAM and I swear it was faster than either Win 7 or Ubuntu on a Phenom II X4.
Ya know I keep hearing all this about "PPT hosed my presentation" or "Word ate my homework" or whatever but frankly I've never run into a more backwards compatible or well behaved program than MS Office, not by a longshot. I have 2K7 on my main system, the fiance has 2K3 and on my netbook I have the truly ancient 2K and sharing files between them what do I get? Perfect files every time.
So I have to wonder how much of it is PEBKAC because one blessing and curse about MSFT software is the fact it will let you go waaay overboard when it comes to formatting, even if the final result of said formatting is a mes that won't open. Because I've handled huge docs, PPTs with embedded pics and Access DBs and more programs made from Access than I are to count and no matter which version I use or my customers have it always seems to "just work"
But you are missing the point in that it should be YOUR choice and NOT Google's as to which is default.
Lets face it, it would be insanely easy to have a simple checkbox on first install or upgrade that simply asks "Would you like us to be the default PDF viewer?" so that those like yourself that don't have a preference can simply leave the box checked and those of us that do have a preference (in my case its Sumatra for the home users and Foxit or Adobe depending on the business) wouldn't have to go mucking about in some about:config PITA.
I don't know about everybody else but I'm really getting tired of companies deciding I can't even be trusted with a simple yes/no question. Maybe its just me but every time i see something like this to me it just reeks of condescension, this "You are too fucking dumb to make choices so take what you are given" bad attitude too many companies have.
I just hope that Comodo Dragon disables this and just asks the user, so far they have been pretty good about leaving choices to the user with their chromium fork so far.
The problem with using "a PC and Linux" as a router is even if you are picky about the hardware its still gonna suck several times the amount of power a piece of dedicated hardware would and in most emerging markets power is anything but cheap. Now sure if the router is gonna be doing other jobs, such as the AMD Bobcat I set up that was a combo router/media server? it might make sense but you go with the traditional "just use this no longer useful P4 PC" route you'll be blowing through the juice.
As for the NSA...who cares about the hardware? Any company that gives 2 shits about privacy is gonna avoid the USA like an STD and the NSA also put the brakes on the whole "just use the cloud!" bullshit as we now know anything you put into a USA based cloud becomes the NSA's to snoop as they like. I'm sure the amount of money all this business avoiding the USA is just insane but sadly getting an exact dollar figure would be next to impossible.
If you wanna know how badly in denial the FOSSies are about the current state of Linux just think about this....I could answer EVERY REPLY HERE using ONLY cliches from TMRepo, know why that is? Because its the same bullshit excuses that FOSSies have been using for the past 20 years! "Oh its all marketing" "Oh Linux is ready for the desktop" "Oh its a conspiracy"....know what excuses and assholes have in common, yes? As a retailer and system builder MSFT treats me like shit yet I will happily pay full retail price rather than take your product for free....why? Because its shit, the drivers suck, updates crap all over the system, and within the typical 5 year life cycle of a system you'll spend more time on forum hunts and "open up Bash and type" than any other system BAR NONE.
As long as Torvalds has a pulse things just won't get any better as he refuses to let go of his POS driver model that he came up with in the early 90s. If Windows would have stuck with VXD you'd have laughed, right? Well the Linux driver model is even older and shittier. I'll say of him what RMS said of Jobs I won't be glad when he'd dead but I'll be glad when he's gone and until then Linux will be nothing but a TMRepo joke.
At the end of the day if EVERY SINGLE RETAILER ON THE PLANET avoids your product like an STD even though it would allegedly save them piles of money? Then the problem isn't a conspiracy, its the simple fact that YOUR PRODUCT SUCKS. Want more links? How about over 200 current show stopping bugs with all major hardware from realtek to Nvidia? And I've found the "much vaunted" hardware "support" ends up being a bunch of bullshit and half baked crap so yet again point for Windows.
At the end of the day there is a REALLY easy way to prove this one way or the other, put your money where your mouth is and take the Hairyfeet challenge and post the video of you taking the challenge to YouTube. But of course you won't because you'd find out the truth, that even with only having HALF the Windows support cycle Linux FAILS. Linux...good for servers and embedded, deep fried ass on the desktop.
Is this 1998? Maybe you should make a DOS joke while you are at it?
Like it or not but the reason why Linux is lower than the margin for error on the desktop is because WINDOWS is stable and LINUX IS NOT. For example here we are about to go into 2014 and the sound subsystem in Linux is still a heap of ass and fail. Pulse behaves like Win 3.1 when it comes to stability, sneeze and it will get crashy, and this isn't counting the piss poor wireless situation, or the fact that you want to break a Linux system all you have to do is update the thing.
Personally I wish the guy all the luck in the world because if he can get a system that is as easy to use and rock solid as Windows 7? Then maybe Linux wouldn't be below JavaME when it comes to userbase. But anyone that thinks Linux is stable is free to take the hairyfeet challenge and post it to Youtube, Go ahead, I dare you, because what you will end up with is a mess of broken. Go ahead and make BSOD jokes all you want but there is a REASON why MSFT can put out the most hated version since MSBob and get more users in a month than Linux has in 20+ years and that is because under the fugly Win 8.x GUI its still a rock solid OS while Linux is still the same, same crashes, same bad design choices, same old same.
I'd rather see how much of the traffic is from the new "pirate tubes" like viooz because at least in my area more and more have simply started going to them and watching online instead of using BT.
Not to mention the rotting elephant in the room is the ISPs are all going with worse data caps and as Onlive found out one huge Internet bill because you ran over your cap and that is a customer you'll never get back and this doesn't even take into account latency.
So there really is no upshot for the user and the cons outweigh the pros..yeah..good luck with that.
The bigger question is how long are we gonna keep this broken system we call capitalism? Like it or not Star Trek had it right in that once the tech reaches a certain point capitalism doesn't work and I'd argue that for the majority we are already there.
Lets face facts, the entire basis of capitalism, trading labor for capital, is already dead. Like it or not the true moral of John Henry was that you could work yourself into a grave and still not beat the machine because it never gets tired, never hurts or gets sick, doesn't take bathroom breaks, it will work 24/7. Its quite obvious that we are already reaching the point that the majority simply isn't required to work as their labor is worthless when compared to the machine. Hell we are already at the point that corps like Walmart and Mickey D's have their wages paid by the government in the form of aid, why? Because if they had to pay a living wage they could just replace the workers with machines and end up better off, less errors, better performance, the human will always be at a disadvantage compared to the machine. You could replace the entire staff at a Mickey D with a modern computer controlled assembly line and it would run like Swiss watch, the people just aren't needed.
We have already seen the "just educate the masses herpa de derp" is a failure, the massive student loan defaults drive a stake through that particular lie, so what to do? I would argue the only thing one CAN do without having massive revolts is to simply pay the masses not to work, just as we pay farmers not to grow, because like it or not we are quickly reaching a point where the tech has made us humans obsolete.
The ONLY really quiet HSF that actually works is the Zalman coolers and they are big, bulky, and expensive, but its that or water cooling. And speaking of money you REALLY should buy a low end Asrock board as those X3 chips have really really REALLY good unlock rates. Hell my youngest is gaming on an Athlon X3 that we unlocked to a Phenom X4 with a cheap asrock board, got a 3.3GHz X3 for $65 and turned it into a 3.3Ghz quad core gaming beast. Paired with an HD7750 it just sips power while tearing through the games, just a sweet system.
Look its REALLY simple, Ballmer lost his shit because Apple became the largest company and instead of accepting that PCs had gotten "good enough" for most folks and that he should be trying to sell value add to the OS he instead....makes a sailphone OS. A sailphone OS that admins don't want, and gamers don't want and to top it off OEMs don't want it either.
Ya wanna know the REAL reason Android is selling? Its NOT because of mobility, its because Android IS WINDOWS, its Windows as it USED to be. Its simple to use,yet still easy to get to the system settings. It has an appstore sure, but it takes a single click to allow programs from anywhere. Its as easy to customize for Joe and Jane Average as changing a Windows wallpaper was, and it runs quite well on a multitude of devices. At the same time Android was rising MSFT was putting out the bloated piggie that was Vista and while 7 did well instead of learning and listening somebody decided that they could just "be Apple" and put out locked down high priced hardware...nope, I got better odds of winning the powerball.
You give folks what they want and they buy, give them shit and tell them "you don't need that" and watch them walk away...what is so hard to understand?
Oooorrrrrr..I could NOT BUY THEIR PRODUCT and along with millions of others refuse to be dictated to and told "You don't need that" and watch it go down in flames and wadda ya know, that is exactly what is happening as folks refuse to buy new PCs or switch to android devices.
Huh, a company treats the users like crap, refuses to listen and has their flagship product go down the shitter, who'd have thunk it?
What pissed me off the most is how they pushed the "bringing back the start button" in the press when in reality all it is is a shortcut for the fucking Metro start screen. This is why I call it "WinGoatse" as like a Goatse it was all just a trick to get you to go for it and isn't what you were expecting at all.
What I have found here in the trenches is the only "work" folks want done on Win 8 is to remove the thing, I haven't seen this level of hatred from the public since WinME, even Vista wasn't THIS hated. They can give 1-100 SPs but until they let users have the choice of REALLY getting rid of the "LULZ I Iz A Cellphone LULZ, check out me appstore LULZ" bullshit I have a feeling my best business is gonna be in getting rid of 8 and selling Win 7 units.
BTW just FYI but if you wanna go back to Win 7 download the trial of Driver Magician and choose "update drivers" followed by Win 7 X64, they usually have access to drivers for just about any piece of hardware and so far I have yet to run into a piece of hardware that I couldn't "downgrade" to Win 7..
You should look at an HD7750, they will most likely be sub $75 in a few weeks and it uses nearly 30% less than the 240 while being MUCH faster when it comes to pixel and texel rate, source.
My youngest got one and I have to say I'm impressed, curbstomps my HD4850 while being whisper quiet and putting out VERY little heat. You could probably pair that with an ULV AMD or Intel and get a sub 150w gaming system pretty easily.
I'm throwing a flag, bullshit on the field. The ones using the most wasteful energy can WELL afford any bullshit price hikes you an come up with, won't stop Rev Al Gore from farting around in a one man lear jet or having a fleet of SUVs like he's El Presidente, the ONLY ONES that price hikes hurt are the ones who can least afford it and who AL.READY CONSERVE and that is of course the poor.
I've said it before and I'll say it again the answer is NOT price hikes, just the opposite in fact, its making better choices cheap enough the masses can easily afford it. Why does the USA use so much gas? Because the average MPG is just 14 here, but why? Because the poor can only afford used cars for the most part and the cheapest ones are also piggies. What you need is a "people's car/truck" that runs on diesel so you can switch to biofuels when they are viable, gets a minimum of 40MPG and cots no more than $20K and then use "cash for clunkers" style program along with subsidies to get the poor out of the old gas hogs.
But I just love how the greenies want to fuck everybody with price hikes because THEY can afford them while ignoring that even a 40c a gallon gas hike raises the cost of food enough that more Americans will be going hungry. When you add to that a right wing owned by the "let 'em die!" teabaggers trying to gut food stamps and any other aid to the poor a price hike is the LAST fucking thing we need, too many are already going hungry as it is.
How did I get modded "troll" when if anybody would have bothered to RTFA they would have seen that OSNews got their info from Ars Technica who got it straight FROM FUCKING GOOGLE!!!
1 CLICK, 4 SECONDS. either the mods are the laziest slobs on earth or "don't be evil" is some sort of RDF that even shields Google from their own fucking press releases. Jobs would be proud, even he couldn't create an RDF that fucking strong.
Slashdot Mirror
What we need is a "sad but true" mod as that has been the MO of Ballmer's tenure at MSFT, buy up companies that are either has beens or just starting out and proceed to completely cock them up and ruin anything that may have been good about them by trying to shape them into a half baked ripoff of whatever was hip. See Kin, Zune, Sidekick, that ad company they bought trying to ape Google, I swear the shareholders would see a better ROI if they replaced Ballmer with a monkey throwing poo at a copy of the business section of the Times and had the company buy whatever stock the monkey covered in the most shit.
I only hope that whomever they get to replace the sweaty one has a brain and quits trying to turn Windows into a sailphone because we really don't have a viable replacement for Windows on the desktop yet. Linux has and will have driver issues as long as Torvalds is in charge, Android is frankly at Win9X level when it comes to stability, with everyone I know including myself experiencing sleep of death, random hangs and crashes, and Apple is too locked down with too little choice and ALL of it overpriced.
Actually its pretty much impossible, if our solar system is similar to your average alien civilization.
For those that may have missed it a few years back when the Voyager probe hit the heliopause what they found was the heliopause works like a giant radio backwash, it just trashes any radio waves in this big giant white noise that made it pretty damned difficult to communicate with the probe. I remember reading at the time that researchers looked at the amount of interference they were getting and crunched the numbers and based on the data concluded that just about ALL of the signals we have EVER sent in the 80 years we used radio and analog TV was "eaten" by the white noise of the helkiopause, they figured that the Sagan signal of the 70s MAY have gotten through but everything else? Trashed.
So unless an alien civilization used an incredibly strong signal like the Sagan message AND had it being broadcast in a range that wouldn't be trashed by their heliopause AND broadcast it continuously for several decades, because otherwise it would literally be just a blip? You can give it up. If you go by the only civilization we know of, our own, and look at how in our tiny and now closing window of broadcasting signals that could leave the planet we have made only ONE single broadcast and that broadcast was targeted at only a single system in the whole universe? Then you probably have better odds of winning the powerball 5 times in a row while being struck by lightning than we have of ever picking anything up, sad to say.
I switched to Bing after Google starting screwing users by changing their privacy policies and bugging the shit out of me to tie everything into my RealID through the craptastic G+ and I have to say....its pretty nice actually. I find its image search to be a HELL of a lot better than Google's, I don't know if its because SEOs have figured out how to game Google or what but with Google I always seem to get a lot more unrelated crap than I do with Bing.
I also noticed there seems to be a lot more malware and spam links on Google as of late, they are easy enough to spot and avoid as it will have your search term mixed in with a bunch of unrelated crap. For example looking up reviews and benches for the HD7770 I got a LOT of results on Google that read "nude girls kardashian hurricane HD7770 washington shooting"etc where its obviously just spamming whatever is trending along with your search term and these seemed to be getting pretty high front page ranks. Again I don't know if the SEOs have figured out how to game Google or what but I just didn't see that nearly as often with Bing.
Finally I find the Bing rewards to be nice, if you are gonna be making money off my searches the least you can do is cut me a little slice. With the Bing rewards I get amazon gift cards which I use to get all those little things at the shop I'm always needing like CD sleeves and adapters and my fiance uses hers for all kinds of little knick knacks. Its only like $10 a month but that's a hell of a lot more than you get from Google.
All Google seems to be doing as of late is making their terms nastier and trying to force G+ every damned where (Seriously Google when I say i DO NOT WANT my realID on YouTube you should STFU and quit bugging the shit out of me, its pretty bad when i have to have a "YouTube browser" just to get you to quit bugging me) and its really a shame as once upon a time Google was the shit, always coming out with cool new things and trying new ideas. Now I have to have a Gmail just for my android phone so I can look at Youtube on it without being hassled, a browser on my desktop for the same reason, and every time I turn around I have Google bugging the piss out of me to use G+. Man I hope the MozPhone turns out to be decent as Google is REALLY starting to irk me, the quicker I can lose any association with Google the better..
What do you expect, most of the MSFT bashing here is based on shit that ended with XP. As someone who works on Windows systems 6 days a week i can say that a modern Windows system (Vista on up) with automatic updates and a browser that recognizes low rights mode (IE or any Chromium based) is one tough nut to crack, in fact the only infections I see with any regularity are ones where the writer used social engineering to get the user to bypass the OS security. Sadly no matter how well MSFT hardens the OS you can't fix PEBKAC as those million infected Android devices can attest to.
As for TFA no matter what the security risk I'd GLADLY take SL and Flash over the fucking trainwreck that is HTML V5! Sure having a plug in may not be the most "elegant" way to do things but ya know what? At least it doesn't gobble down RAM and CPU like a fat guy at an all you can eat buffet! While I'd be the first to admit that we could and should be able to do better than Flash and SL I'm sorry but HTML V5 isn't the way, measure it any way you like and you'll find it scores WORSE than Flash and SL by a long shot, RAM, CPU, hell if the mobile device doesn't have hardware acceleration for H.264 all you are gonna get is a slideshow.
I don't know if its still up on Wikileaks but there was an actual CP producer who posted a "how to" as a way to give a big flying middle finger to the cops and its pretty fucking amazing how intricate and organized the shit is.
1.-They rent servers in bumfuckistan using stolen IDs and either stolen cards are something else hard/impossible to trace like bitcoins or those Walmart Visas. 2.- They set up encrypted VMs with a minimal Linux that just has a desktop and a folder, the folder is filled with CP. 3.- The encrypted VMs are then "rented" which is easy enough to cover with shell corps, after all how many "here today gone later today" cloud services have we seen the past few years? This has the added bonus that it gives them a front that shows up like a legit biz on the customer's CC, something like "XYZ data services" or the like. 4. The money laundering part is easy enough, you bounce it around the planet a few times, the drug lords have whole networks dedicated to this, see RBN as an example.
And there you go, you end up with a guy who can make boatloads of money doing any damn thing he wants while he sits in a place with the cops on his payroll like a little Baron or Duke from the feudal days. Those who are interested in the minds of criminals really should read it as the guy comes off as VERY sociopathic, he even laughs about how he'll pick some random schmuck that just has an infected PC (he has contacts in the malware scene) and dump some CP on his PC and point the cops to it just to waste the cops time and get off on being able to destroy some random nobody. You really get the feeling reading this guy's writing that he was the kind that threw cat's out of cars at 70MPH or dumped bricks off of overpasses just to see a wreck, a smart but REALLY twisted guy.
As a final note, for those that are for going after those that look at the pics? I have a friend that has been doing that for the past 7 years at the state crime lab and says its the biggest waste of time he has seen so far in law enforcement. he says the ones they catch in these "TV headline busts" are not only NOT molesters but are porn addicts that aren't a threat to anybody. He brings up one as a perfect example of what they get, some guy that hadn't left his house since the late 90s and had ZERO contact with the outside world, he had everything set up so he could pay it online or by slipping the check under the welcome mat. He said they had to tranc him like a wild animal to get him out of the house, he was so agoraphobic that even having somebody in his home caused him to howl like an animal and throw things. He is probably gonna cost the state a good 20 million plus for all the drugs and solitary for the next 50-70 years.
He'd love nothing more than to focus on the ones actually making it but since that would likely cross state and country borders which means the state prosecutors wouldn't have a soundbyte to use on their runs for gov? Not gonna happen. Needless to say he is looking for a way to get out of there, frustration being your daily diet isn't good for your health. he has tried to recruit me several times but fuck that noise, I have too big a mouth to take that much shit from superiors without telling them where they could go.
But I have to add we have years of brain scans showing...yep...sick minds don't function the same as a normal person's mind. Now there is still a debate as to whether its cause and effect or if the behavior changes the mind, for example there has been at least one study I'm aware of where they had actors with normal brains scans act out the symptoms of various mental illnesses and their brain scans ended up VERY different than when they started.
But no matter whether its one or the other the one thing one cannot argue with is the fact that you take a scan of a predator's brain, whether they hunt adults or children, and their brain scans are NOT like the average person.
If the data came from the government I'd say its completely fucking worthless.
After all this is the same government whose AG tried to turn a minor op into a false flag with fast and furious and has lied repeatedly to congress under oath, where many of the crime stats are rigged by putting everyone that isn't African American down as white,and its the same government that has been fudging unemployment and inflation data so badly to make those figures nothing but fairy tales.
So I'm sorry but after all the shit we've been finding out about the government and data the only data I'd believe from the US gov is that they are monitoring you and I, everything is made politically correct before usage.
Why don't you try kolibri and find out? I tried on an old junker Pentium D with a GB of RAM and I swear it was faster than either Win 7 or Ubuntu on a Phenom II X4.
Ya know I keep hearing all this about "PPT hosed my presentation" or "Word ate my homework" or whatever but frankly I've never run into a more backwards compatible or well behaved program than MS Office, not by a longshot. I have 2K7 on my main system, the fiance has 2K3 and on my netbook I have the truly ancient 2K and sharing files between them what do I get? Perfect files every time.
So I have to wonder how much of it is PEBKAC because one blessing and curse about MSFT software is the fact it will let you go waaay overboard when it comes to formatting, even if the final result of said formatting is a mes that won't open. Because I've handled huge docs, PPTs with embedded pics and Access DBs and more programs made from Access than I are to count and no matter which version I use or my customers have it always seems to "just work"
But you are missing the point in that it should be YOUR choice and NOT Google's as to which is default.
Lets face it, it would be insanely easy to have a simple checkbox on first install or upgrade that simply asks "Would you like us to be the default PDF viewer?" so that those like yourself that don't have a preference can simply leave the box checked and those of us that do have a preference (in my case its Sumatra for the home users and Foxit or Adobe depending on the business) wouldn't have to go mucking about in some about:config PITA.
I don't know about everybody else but I'm really getting tired of companies deciding I can't even be trusted with a simple yes/no question. Maybe its just me but every time i see something like this to me it just reeks of condescension, this "You are too fucking dumb to make choices so take what you are given" bad attitude too many companies have.
I just hope that Comodo Dragon disables this and just asks the user, so far they have been pretty good about leaving choices to the user with their chromium fork so far.
The problem with using "a PC and Linux" as a router is even if you are picky about the hardware its still gonna suck several times the amount of power a piece of dedicated hardware would and in most emerging markets power is anything but cheap. Now sure if the router is gonna be doing other jobs, such as the AMD Bobcat I set up that was a combo router/media server? it might make sense but you go with the traditional "just use this no longer useful P4 PC" route you'll be blowing through the juice.
As for the NSA...who cares about the hardware? Any company that gives 2 shits about privacy is gonna avoid the USA like an STD and the NSA also put the brakes on the whole "just use the cloud!" bullshit as we now know anything you put into a USA based cloud becomes the NSA's to snoop as they like. I'm sure the amount of money all this business avoiding the USA is just insane but sadly getting an exact dollar figure would be next to impossible.
Lets see..help me out here, would that be a case of moving the goal post or you don't need the last version or maybe its just the circle of loon?
If you wanna know how badly in denial the FOSSies are about the current state of Linux just think about this....I could answer EVERY REPLY HERE using ONLY cliches from TMRepo, know why that is? Because its the same bullshit excuses that FOSSies have been using for the past 20 years! "Oh its all marketing" "Oh Linux is ready for the desktop" "Oh its a conspiracy"....know what excuses and assholes have in common, yes? As a retailer and system builder MSFT treats me like shit yet I will happily pay full retail price rather than take your product for free....why? Because its shit, the drivers suck, updates crap all over the system, and within the typical 5 year life cycle of a system you'll spend more time on forum hunts and "open up Bash and type" than any other system BAR NONE.
As long as Torvalds has a pulse things just won't get any better as he refuses to let go of his POS driver model that he came up with in the early 90s. If Windows would have stuck with VXD you'd have laughed, right? Well the Linux driver model is even older and shittier. I'll say of him what RMS said of Jobs I won't be glad when he'd dead but I'll be glad when he's gone and until then Linux will be nothing but a TMRepo joke.
Would you like citations? Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it. How about no browser acceleration for Linux (but yes to Windows) because X is too fucking buggy? Not good enough? How about the head of OSNews having Ubuntu shit itself because..gasp..he tried to do TWO things at once! Still not famous enough? How about one of the fathers of the FOSS movement having to spend hours on what takes seconds in Windows?
At the end of the day if EVERY SINGLE RETAILER ON THE PLANET avoids your product like an STD even though it would allegedly save them piles of money? Then the problem isn't a conspiracy, its the simple fact that YOUR PRODUCT SUCKS. Want more links? How about over 200 current show stopping bugs with all major hardware from realtek to Nvidia? And I've found the "much vaunted" hardware "support" ends up being a bunch of bullshit and half baked crap so yet again point for Windows.
At the end of the day there is a REALLY easy way to prove this one way or the other, put your money where your mouth is and take the Hairyfeet challenge and post the video of you taking the challenge to YouTube. But of course you won't because you'd find out the truth, that even with only having HALF the Windows support cycle Linux FAILS. Linux...good for servers and embedded, deep fried ass on the desktop.
Is this 1998? Maybe you should make a DOS joke while you are at it?
Like it or not but the reason why Linux is lower than the margin for error on the desktop is because WINDOWS is stable and LINUX IS NOT. For example here we are about to go into 2014 and the sound subsystem in Linux is still a heap of ass and fail. Pulse behaves like Win 3.1 when it comes to stability, sneeze and it will get crashy, and this isn't counting the piss poor wireless situation, or the fact that you want to break a Linux system all you have to do is update the thing.
Personally I wish the guy all the luck in the world because if he can get a system that is as easy to use and rock solid as Windows 7? Then maybe Linux wouldn't be below JavaME when it comes to userbase. But anyone that thinks Linux is stable is free to take the hairyfeet challenge and post it to Youtube, Go ahead, I dare you, because what you will end up with is a mess of broken. Go ahead and make BSOD jokes all you want but there is a REASON why MSFT can put out the most hated version since MSBob and get more users in a month than Linux has in 20+ years and that is because under the fugly Win 8.x GUI its still a rock solid OS while Linux is still the same, same crashes, same bad design choices, same old same.
I'd rather see how much of the traffic is from the new "pirate tubes" like viooz because at least in my area more and more have simply started going to them and watching online instead of using BT.
Not to mention the rotting elephant in the room is the ISPs are all going with worse data caps and as Onlive found out one huge Internet bill because you ran over your cap and that is a customer you'll never get back and this doesn't even take into account latency.
So there really is no upshot for the user and the cons outweigh the pros..yeah..good luck with that.
The bigger question is how long are we gonna keep this broken system we call capitalism? Like it or not Star Trek had it right in that once the tech reaches a certain point capitalism doesn't work and I'd argue that for the majority we are already there.
Lets face facts, the entire basis of capitalism, trading labor for capital, is already dead. Like it or not the true moral of John Henry was that you could work yourself into a grave and still not beat the machine because it never gets tired, never hurts or gets sick, doesn't take bathroom breaks, it will work 24/7. Its quite obvious that we are already reaching the point that the majority simply isn't required to work as their labor is worthless when compared to the machine. Hell we are already at the point that corps like Walmart and Mickey D's have their wages paid by the government in the form of aid, why? Because if they had to pay a living wage they could just replace the workers with machines and end up better off, less errors, better performance, the human will always be at a disadvantage compared to the machine. You could replace the entire staff at a Mickey D with a modern computer controlled assembly line and it would run like Swiss watch, the people just aren't needed.
We have already seen the "just educate the masses herpa de derp" is a failure, the massive student loan defaults drive a stake through that particular lie, so what to do? I would argue the only thing one CAN do without having massive revolts is to simply pay the masses not to work, just as we pay farmers not to grow, because like it or not we are quickly reaching a point where the tech has made us humans obsolete.
The ONLY really quiet HSF that actually works is the Zalman coolers and they are big, bulky, and expensive, but its that or water cooling. And speaking of money you REALLY should buy a low end Asrock board as those X3 chips have really really REALLY good unlock rates. Hell my youngest is gaming on an Athlon X3 that we unlocked to a Phenom X4 with a cheap asrock board, got a 3.3GHz X3 for $65 and turned it into a 3.3Ghz quad core gaming beast. Paired with an HD7750 it just sips power while tearing through the games, just a sweet system.
I provide citations you provide...bullshit. Either back up your statements with citations or please quit wasting my time, thx.
Uh huh, that is why its selling so well and folks have so much "fun" with it is because they really wanted a sailphone for a PC, right.
Look its REALLY simple, Ballmer lost his shit because Apple became the largest company and instead of accepting that PCs had gotten "good enough" for most folks and that he should be trying to sell value add to the OS he instead....makes a sailphone OS. A sailphone OS that admins don't want, and gamers don't want and to top it off OEMs don't want it either.
Ya wanna know the REAL reason Android is selling? Its NOT because of mobility, its because Android IS WINDOWS, its Windows as it USED to be. Its simple to use,yet still easy to get to the system settings. It has an appstore sure, but it takes a single click to allow programs from anywhere. Its as easy to customize for Joe and Jane Average as changing a Windows wallpaper was, and it runs quite well on a multitude of devices. At the same time Android was rising MSFT was putting out the bloated piggie that was Vista and while 7 did well instead of learning and listening somebody decided that they could just "be Apple" and put out locked down high priced hardware...nope, I got better odds of winning the powerball.
You give folks what they want and they buy, give them shit and tell them "you don't need that" and watch them walk away...what is so hard to understand?
Oooorrrrrr..I could NOT BUY THEIR PRODUCT and along with millions of others refuse to be dictated to and told "You don't need that" and watch it go down in flames and wadda ya know, that is exactly what is happening as folks refuse to buy new PCs or switch to android devices.
Huh, a company treats the users like crap, refuses to listen and has their flagship product go down the shitter, who'd have thunk it?
What pissed me off the most is how they pushed the "bringing back the start button" in the press when in reality all it is is a shortcut for the fucking Metro start screen. This is why I call it "WinGoatse" as like a Goatse it was all just a trick to get you to go for it and isn't what you were expecting at all.
What I have found here in the trenches is the only "work" folks want done on Win 8 is to remove the thing, I haven't seen this level of hatred from the public since WinME, even Vista wasn't THIS hated. They can give 1-100 SPs but until they let users have the choice of REALLY getting rid of the "LULZ I Iz A Cellphone LULZ, check out me appstore LULZ" bullshit I have a feeling my best business is gonna be in getting rid of 8 and selling Win 7 units.
BTW just FYI but if you wanna go back to Win 7 download the trial of Driver Magician and choose "update drivers" followed by Win 7 X64, they usually have access to drivers for just about any piece of hardware and so far I have yet to run into a piece of hardware that I couldn't "downgrade" to Win 7..
You should look at an HD7750, they will most likely be sub $75 in a few weeks and it uses nearly 30% less than the 240 while being MUCH faster when it comes to pixel and texel rate, source.
My youngest got one and I have to say I'm impressed, curbstomps my HD4850 while being whisper quiet and putting out VERY little heat. You could probably pair that with an ULV AMD or Intel and get a sub 150w gaming system pretty easily.
I'm throwing a flag, bullshit on the field. The ones using the most wasteful energy can WELL afford any bullshit price hikes you an come up with, won't stop Rev Al Gore from farting around in a one man lear jet or having a fleet of SUVs like he's El Presidente, the ONLY ONES that price hikes hurt are the ones who can least afford it and who AL.READY CONSERVE and that is of course the poor.
I've said it before and I'll say it again the answer is NOT price hikes, just the opposite in fact, its making better choices cheap enough the masses can easily afford it. Why does the USA use so much gas? Because the average MPG is just 14 here, but why? Because the poor can only afford used cars for the most part and the cheapest ones are also piggies. What you need is a "people's car/truck" that runs on diesel so you can switch to biofuels when they are viable, gets a minimum of 40MPG and cots no more than $20K and then use "cash for clunkers" style program along with subsidies to get the poor out of the old gas hogs.
But I just love how the greenies want to fuck everybody with price hikes because THEY can afford them while ignoring that even a 40c a gallon gas hike raises the cost of food enough that more Americans will be going hungry. When you add to that a right wing owned by the "let 'em die!" teabaggers trying to gut food stamps and any other aid to the poor a price hike is the LAST fucking thing we need, too many are already going hungry as it is.
How did I get modded "troll" when if anybody would have bothered to RTFA they would have seen that OSNews got their info from Ars Technica who got it straight FROM FUCKING GOOGLE!!!
1 CLICK, 4 SECONDS. either the mods are the laziest slobs on earth or "don't be evil" is some sort of RDF that even shields Google from their own fucking press releases. Jobs would be proud, even he couldn't create an RDF that fucking strong.