* Posts by kb

224 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jun 2008

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Windows XP support ends two years from now

kb

Re: For your amusement

Mind a little advice friend? Install Comodo Dragon for her. i have a nettop i keep at the shop because its really low power, a 1.8Ghz Sempron with 1.5gb of RAM and an old TNT Vanta card running XP and FF was like mud after V5 so i switched and...wow, its like night and day. i can have a half a dozen tabs open WHILE having a couple of other apps running and ZERO slowdown. just add the ABP for Chrome and you are golden, and check the checkboxes to copy over her bookmarks/passwords/settings and you are golden...enjoy!

kb
Happy

Re: Migrate before ...

Actually you are wrong about the last part as you can actually SAVE electricity (and thus money) by going to a low power Win 7 unit. I have done this for several shops, replacing their old Pentium 4s for AMD Brazos APUs and the amount of power and AC they saved by switching is just nuts. those Brazos units only use 18w under load for the APU and can handle most jobs your average worker does and if they needed anything more powerful (such as the print shop that needed some more powerful units for editing prints) then you can get a Phenom II or Core i3 unit that turns off phases when in idle to save more power.

Frankly the XP era boards just really didn't care about power, it was the MHZ wars after all and the answer to everything was 'moar power!".

kb

Re: Will be with us for a while

I actually had to build a DOS 3 machine in 2005, that was a trip down memory lane. the poor kid came in looking like he was gonna have a heart attack because the CNC PC has finally died and the CNC would ONLY run with an ISA card and DOS 3..They had a $50k+ order and without the custom columns the deal was off. Lucky for him i still had a couple of my old gamer PCs back in the shed so I cloned his HDD and sold him a P100 and a P233. Made a pretty nice profit on those.

Last I heard the P100 is still running that CNC 5 days a week and he boots up the P233 once a month just like I told him just to make sure the spare is running alright. gives me the warm fuzzys to think the machine i originally used to play DOOM on is still chugging away.

kb
Happy

Re: MS - their own worst enemy.

Because Win 7 has support until 2020 MINIMUM and that is if they don't extend it like they did with XP. i predict Win 7 will be the new XP and Win 8 the new Vista. you watch Win 8 will finally be the straw that gets the board to fire Gates' little buddy and then we'll get someone from the business side to run the company.

Just as many skipped WinVista completely (for the most part I skipped XP as well, going from Win2K to WinXP X64 which is just server 2K3 with an XP skin to win 7 X64 ) if you go with win 7 you can get some frankly insanely powered kit now for little money (built two hexacores and a quad for me and the boys for a little over $1300 after MIR) which will be more than powerful enough to let you skip win 8 and Win 9 as well if they don't straighten up.

But I wouldn't bet the farm on XP getting another extension, its just too long in the tooth to continue supporting. i mean how many patches is it up to now, something like 4 digits? The fact that MSFT quietly extending support for ALL versions of Win 7 until 2020 tells me they are planning on keeping win 7 for all those that won't take metro. mark my words win 7 WILL be the new XP. Besides most machines that are running XP are P4s or dual cores as best, how long do you think that will be able to keep up with all the bloat the web designers are adding to their pages? Using a P4 on today's web is just painful and a dual frankly isn't a whole lot better.

kb
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Re: No Problem

People wouldn't take Linux when Vista was out, what makes you think they will take Linux when XP is EOL? they'll just "call a friend" who'll give them a "wink wink" copy of Win 7 which frankly is even easier to pirate than XP and that will be that. The problem with Linux is there is ZERO stability, what works in version Foo may be completely broken by version foo+1 and as long as Linus Torvalds has a pulse that is the way it'll be because the man won't allow Linux to have what every. other. OS in the free world, BSD, Solaris, OSX,Windows, even OS/2, has had for decades, a stable driver ABI. Do Linux followers REALLY believe Linus is smarter than the entire OS teams of ALL those OSes?

As for why XP lasts this long that is simple...its Ballmer's fault. When MSFT was offering Win 7 home for $50 and the triple pack for $100 I had tons of orders for conversions of existing XP machines, price went back to $100 for Win Home?...none. it was also wiping out piracy and now I see classified ads all over the place with $100 PCs running $400 Win 7 Ultimate..I didn't see that when home was $50.

If Ballmer were to go with $50 Win 7 Home and $100 Win 7 Pro you'd see those XP machines converted, but as long as he charges too much they will stick with XP or go pirate. I bet he'll try the $50 price point when win 8 comes out but since Win 8 is a turkey it won't sell anymore than Vista did, in fact i still have a pile of Vista discs, nobody wants 'em and nobody is gonna want a cell phone UI on the desktop.

But they won't go to linux friend, its just too much of a mess, what with pukeaudio, the DE wars, Linus and his kernel breaking, nope instead Win 7 will be the new XP, mark my words. Considering win 7 is supported until 2020 i know i've switched all my family and we are battening down the hatches, we'll stick with what 'just works" and that is Win 7.

Windows 3.1 rebooted: Microsoft's DOS destroyer turns 20

kb

Re: I had WfW3.11

Its a combo of the software and the hardware friend. Do you have any idea how many drivers Windows has to initialize on your average desktop? Sound, third party video (with taskbar apps for both usually), NB/SB, SATA, USB devices, its a lot of stuff to load. Then are all the startup programs, the services, loading the apps you use into superfetch. Frankly windows just does a whole lot more than it had to do back then. I mean you could fit the entire contents of the HDDs AND the memory of the first 8 machines i owned strictly into RAM on my PC and still have room left over!

As for Win 3.1 it made a great embedded OS, it was so low frankly it would run on just about anything. i remember seeing a couple of kiosks a few years back still running win 3.1, you could tell because the place got a surge and they rebooted. But if you want that kind of boot speed today you'd really need something like one of the embedded OSes where you don't ever update anything, its all just "there" and ready to go. for example most ASUS boards and netbooks have ExpressGate, my EEE will boot into EG in less than 6 seconds and gives me all the music on my HDD, flash games, browsing and chat. its pretty nice if all you want is the web.

Microsoft takes down ZeuS botnets

kb
Facepalm

Re: I'd buy them a drink.

What is sad is as someone who fixes and sells Windows PCs frankly it isn't Windows fault, its PEBKAC. you see the malware guys have figured out the "dancing bunnies' tactic, whereby you offer the victim something they REALLY want, be that pron, free software, even something as unlikely as a chance to win an iPod, and then the user will happily disable their own security and infect their own machines!

The only time I ever had to throw someone out of my shop was over a dancing bunny, where this person refused to listen to me when i told him that Limewire had been dead for years, so instead he takes his brand new PC and when he finds some malware listed as "the new limewire' he first tries to disable and then when that doesn't work REMOVES the AV AND UAC protections and then had the gall to complain because "The machine shouldn't have gotten infected like that" and demand i repair it for free. When i threw him out of my shop he was yelling "It says right there it is the new Limewire so you MAKE IT WORK!"

Sad that Windows so often gets blamed when I'd say a good 99% of the infections I see are just from mind numbing stupidity. I've seen users give up their passwords, lower their security, do whatever the malware writers ask them to, all to get some "prize' which of course only is a trojan package. You can design the most secure OS on the planet and when you have the user actively trying to dismantle your security you're as good as doomed.

Paedophiles ‘disguise’ child abuse pages as legit websites

kb
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Re: "digital path"...

They still need to give at least a very rough explanation of what a "digital path" is because that is so vague it could be frankly anything. the article might as well read 'pervs show pics if you do some stuff with a thing" for all the sense it made.

AMD swings to a loss in Q4

kb
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They did make a BIG mistake

IMHO they did make one SERIOUS error in 2011 and that was killing the AM3 socket instead of consolidating it. Lets face it most users aren't even stressing dual cores much less triples, quads, and sextacores, so AMD could have kept AM3 while cutting it down to one or two Thuban chips which then could have had cores disabled to cover the lower markets and get close to 100% yields on wafers. There is a pretty big market in those that need more than the E series and Bulldozer frankly scores worse than Thuban pretty much across the board. there are also many that don't want an APU because they plan on adding their own discrete so that GPU would be just wasting cycles. Finally because AM3 was a mature socket boards for AM3 are dirt cheap while having plenty of features that appeal to the DIY crowd.

So while cranking up the E series was a smart move giving up the DIY and low midrange market by only having BD is a dumb move IMHO. At the current price difference when I can no longer get AM3 chips I'll be seriously looking at Intel because the higher price of BD and worse benchmarks make it not very competitive which is a shame because Thuban was a really nice chip and with Zosma they could have just sold the ones with bad cores as Phenom II Quads. dumb move AMD, dumb move.

Thanksgiving menaced by virus-laden fake iTunes vouchers

kb
Facepalm

PEBKAC

If you run ANY OS as admin and run attachments from anybody? Well enjoy your malware. Since switching my customers over to Windows 7 I haven't seen a bit of malware, zip zero none. In fact since Vista there was only one bonehead customer who after I told him flat footed "There is NO Limewire anymore, that was shut down 2 years ago, anything that says its Limewire is malware!" promptly went home, downloaded "the new limewire" and when the AV did its job and put a screeching halt to the install he UNINSTALLED THE AV because it "wouldn't let me install my program" and then had the nerve to want me to fix it for free since "it got infected in a single day" Well duh, that's because you're an idiot!

If you want to know why Windows has the most bugs, see my customer above. if they want something they WILL install it, they'll ignore or even uninstall the AV if that is what it takes. i wonder how many geniuses uninstalled their AV because it wouldn't let them get at "my free iTunes gift card!" that they wanted?

ARM+GPU = dream super?

kb
WTF?

What I want to know..

Is why now that we have this incredibly fast bus on all machines why we aren't using it to get the best of both worlds? With HT you could put an ARM CPU+GPU for the low intensity stuff ARM is good at and power down the X86 to its lowest levels when not needed and fire it up when the load gets above a certain threshold. this would give you much of the power sipping of ARM and the number crunching power of X86 all in a single package! Why isn't anyone jumping on this?

Now Barracuda bitten by Thai disk drought disaster

kb
Paris Hilton

Simple

Cheap labor and lax regulations, the same reason 9 out of the 10 most cancer causing cities are all within a short bus ride from each other in China. In Thailand you had cheap assembly workers, a country with lax regs, and low taxes (and probably plenty of ways to weasel out of paying even those) so you had a "perfect storm" of HDDs companies racing to the bottom and ALL using the same small amount of critical suppliers ina single area!

Paris because even she would have been smart enough not to put all her eggs in one basket!

AMD rides Bulldozers into the x86 server chip war

kb
Thumb Up

While its true

That if you want absolute top performance you go Intel, frankly that 30% gain comes at an 80% to as high as 150% markup when all the parts are added up, such as boards. and don't forget to get ALL the features on an Intel CPU you often have to buy the most expensive chips as Intel cripples the lower SKUs, whereas ALL AMD chips support the features, from the lowest C50 netbook chips up to the biggest Opteron.

personally I'd say where AMD has the big winner (and where the CEO seems to agree as he has slowed down the desktop output to crank up the mobile) is in the Brazos line with chips like Zacate and Ontario. I've been selling netbooks and laptops based on Zacate as fast as i can get them through the door and the customers love the things and with good reason. great performance and 6 hours of HD video on a single charge in a machine that weighs less than 4 pounds for the lappy and just 3 pounds for the netbook. I was impressed enough i put my money where my mouth was and sold my MSI wind for a Zacate EEE and i see why they love it, it is a wonderful chip.

The only real problem AMD has ATM IMHO is they can't seem to keep up with the demands for the mobile chips! you go to any PC retail site like tigerdirect or Newegg and you'll see the OEMs are using the Brazos chips in EVERYTHING, from netbooks and laptops to all in ones and HTPCs, the things are everywhere. and on the server front I know a few admins and they've told me they went AMD because the bang for the buck was nicer. with AMD they were able to load their servers with more RAM and faster SSDs at the same price compared to Intel and when you are running heavily threaded loads the AMDs do the job well enough for the price.

So i say stick with AMD, but maybe hang back on Bulldozer. it looks like another Phenom I where they'll need a rev to get the kinks worked out. stick with Deneb and Thuban on the desktop and go Brazos of Phenom II Quad on the laptop and by the time those get long in the tooth the chip after Piledriver, where they will have switched to the vector based GPU (which will seriously kick up FP performance) will be out and the prices will be nicer. On the server magny cours is a great bargain and for most loads works quite well at a very cheap price.

NEWSFLASH: Chips cheaper than disks

kb
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Allow me to add

My own anecdote. I build PCs for a living and had several "Must win teh benches!" gamer customers that refused to listen and went for the SSDs. now these guys are NOT cheap, heck one has his granny on a Skulltrail because he goes through machines trying to stay on top of the benches that was the slowest machine he had!

Well they bought top o' the line SSDs and not a single one made it to the two year mark! Not one! In fact 3 died within a year! And in EVERY case it was "flip the switch and nothing" no warning, no SMART error, zipola. i service a heck of a lot of customers and can't remember the last time i had a HDD fail i didn't get a heads up and could get their data off before they went (one I had to do the fridge trick after she dropped her lappy, but I still got it) but those SSDs? poof. sure they got replacements but who cares when your data is gone bye bye!

let the gamers and others be the beta testers, i have HDDs a decade old that still run. i'll stick with old reliable, thanks ever so.

Microsoft wants slower flash chips

kb
Happy

that is simple, AMD.

The new AMD chips give incredible bang for the buck and with everyone jumping on OpenCL, even Nvidia is gonna support OpenCL, that just makes the bang even higher. ARM just doesn't give you the processing power since it is a MUCH simpler design, I mean i could probably deliver a machine that only used a couple of watts total if I used a 6502 as the CPU but it wouldn't really be useful as a server now would it?

The elephant in the room for ARM is the 30+ years of X86 code already written. it would cost billions to rewrite all that code to run on the ARM CPU whereas the CULV AMD and Intel chips get lower every year while gaining more abilities. personally i'd rather have a machine built around brazos that can give me full hardware accelerated 1080P and give me 6 hours on a bettery than an ARM based that can't run a single program i use daily but gives me 12 hours of...what I'd actually run on it is anybody's guess.

As for TFA if MSFT can get the chip fabs to give us 128gb SSDs for $30 USD? yes please, i'll take two.

Dell disk drive prices soar as rivals hold firm

kb
Alert

Funny thing is...

We USED to know this, before outsourcing and the race to the bottom. heck its why AMD exists in the first place as IBM and several others in the early days would not have ANY part in their machines that they didn't have a reliable second source for. Thanks to that if Intel goes nuts on prices one easy board change out and AMD chips are in its place, we have multiple sources for LCDs, RAM, but I have to wonder how much of that is likewise in danger of a single disaster in some third world country taking out the whole chain?

Narcissistic, greedy: What Wikipedia says about its appeal

kb
FAIL

Agreed

Between the Wikitards that "claim" pages and guard them like treasure and ban anyone who dares to touch "their" property and the Deletionists i gave up on Wikipedia awhile back. The last straw for me was being banned for a month for daring to ask "What exactly IS noteworthy?" when I found a simple error in a page about a TV show. It said backstory for character A was A, I simply added a small foreword that it was changed to A by executive meddling and posted links to both the writer AND director saying this, as well as gave the minutes:seconds of where the writer and the actor playing the character complain about this in the DVD commentary, only to watch it magically turn back in under 10 minutes as "not noteworthy" when i asked what exactly IS noteworthy I was banned.

Frankly Wikipedia was a nice idea but jumbo has let it turn to poo. Since it is GPL someone really ought to fork the thing and make it a true crowdsourced source of knowledge like the original goal was supposed to be.

Seagate's Luczo: 'Expect a year of misery'

kb
Thumb Up

Because of the speed diff?

Most externals are 5200RPM or 5400RPM while the bare drives are 7200RPM? There is also another way to save a royal ton of money, and that is refurbed drives. To makes sure it is good simply take a basic HDD test program (I personally use Spinrite on lvl II, this bypasses the firmware and does a basic read/write cycle on each sector and then reports the results) and if it passes you are good to go. I've bought several and using this test above the 2 that were actually bad were sent back and quickly replaced by good drives, the rest are still running happily, some after 5+ years.

That said your trick works fine if you don't mind a small boot speed hit. i personally am using a 5400RPM 1Tb Samsung as a boot drive and the benches show it 38% FASTER than the 400Gb Seagate it replaced. i'm just glad that right before this happened i bought 3Tb worth of Samsung drives to load in my desktop. I'll be able to ride this out just fine and dandy now!

Kindle Fire: An open letter to Jeff Bezos

kb
FAIL

Astroturf is the new marketing

And as we can see Apple and many others have embraced it. i'd love to see what their budget is for such things, as it is pretty obvious that in at least the last year and a half (when i first started to really notice the blatant ones) that astroturf by corps is the order of the day. Here is just a list of a few I've seen doing it, Apple, MSFT, Oracle, EA, Dell, Intel, HP. But as you pointed out they have gotten lazy about it, creating an account for a single post followed by promptly tossing it and then making another next time. I don't know if we should be insulted or happy the PHB astroturfing is so easy to spot.

AMD beats analysts' bets with profitable quarter

kb
Thumb Up

Their Brazos chips are also awesome for netbooks, I have one (E-350) and can watch 3 HD movies before needing a charge and that is from a 6 cell unit that weighs just 3 pounds and only cost me $350 USD maxed out with 8Gb of RAM!

I think AMD should concentrate more on the mobile side as ATM when power is no consideration the Intel chips can just OC too high compared to AMD. But with Brazos for the netbooks,Llano for the laptops and maybe Phenom II Mobile for the desktop replacements (my nephew has one in his 17 incher and loves it) I think they have a winning hand here. Frankly I couldn't care less if it beats a Core whatever, what matters to me is a combination of price and usability and for me AMD wins hands down using that metric,my EEE is snappy, multitasks well, gives me a great picture, and I couldn't find anything that would hold plenty of RAM anywhere close to that price, go AMD!

ARM specs out first 64-bit RISC chips

kb

That is why I think AMD has the right idea

Not with Bulldozer but with Brazos and the Fusion APUs. By giving you "good enough" X86 while giving fast and lower powered GPU cores you can speed up a heck of a lot of math thanks to openCL. And just to remind everyone that is while they are still using VLIW, they are in the process to switching to vector based GPU cores which should be even faster and allow the GPUs to be like super FP cores. Currently doing double precision FP takes as much of a hit as slowing the GPU to 1/4th, whereas the first gen vector units will be less than half and the goal is to get full DP FP by the third generation.

while I can see a niche for the ARM in the server room I think there is still too much code based on X86 for it to take a big bite, oh and I'm bettin g win 8 (MSFT's bid for ARM) will make Vista look light as a feather and fast as a rocket!

AMD CEO vows 'maniacal' chip-baking fix

kb
Thumb Up

The key to the future of AMD

Is NOT Bulldozer but Brazos, which is why the CEO wisely slowed desktop production to fill the orders on mobile. I myself have recently managed to snatch up one of the EEE Brazos netbooks (A 1215B if anyone is interested) and it is sweeeeeeet! Dual core, radeon 6310, 720p screen with 1080p HDMI and VGA outputs, I was able to watch THREE HD movies on the 6 cell before needing to recharge, that's nearly 6 hours, and the thing barely got warm. oh and with an upgrade to 8Gb of RAM (Yeah I know its overkill, it was on sale and I couldn't resist!) and a nice briefcase to carry it in I got the whole smash for just $350 USD! heck there are even videos of guys playing L4D and other shooters on it with decent framerates.

So the key is NOT Bulldozer, which i'm sure they'll fix in the next rev like they did with the Phenom (Sold a lot of Deneb Phenom II desktops at my shop, they are quite nice and VERY affordable) but IMHO they need to be concentrating on Brazos and Fusion, both for the crucial mobile market AND for the low end desktop line. HP and a few others are now using Brazos for "all in one" PCs built into nice flatscreens and that is making those chips just that much harder to get. better to focus on Fusion and Brazos than worry about trying to get the high end gamer market which has traditionally been Intel's anyway.

Malware not man blamed in child abuse download case

kb
Flame

In Response

To Colin Guthrie; I don't know how it is there in the UK,but here in the Southern USA we had to put these giant cages around overpass walkways because jerks were killing people by throwing bricks off of them onto passing cars. Never underestimate someone's desire to do anonymous evil. There are some truly vicious people out there that love the idea they might be destroying someone's life "just for kicks".

That said,I have worked in PC and network repair since the days of DOS and can tell you that putting a backdoor so they can serve their KP filth without risk is more common than you think. That is why when I am presented with a serious infection I always warn the customer about that risk and suggest nuking it WITHOUT checking to make sure,because by US law if I was to actually find any I would have to report it. And as we have seen here the "guilty until YOU can prove YOUR innocent" is just too big a risk to take. But I can tell you from my experience it happens a lot more than you think.

I have actually helped my state police crime lab a few times with such investigations and believe me it is quite easy to tell the difference. The pervs will almost always save it in REALLY dumb places like the "My Documents" folder while trying to hide it by burying it several folders deep. I even saw one who had saved in a folder in my pictures and then forgot and turned on the XP My Pictures screensaver! Whereas the driveby downloaders will put in a shared folder,usually in the webcache or system32 folders. One even had it pretty well hidden using the old "administrative shares" trick.

My friend in the investigative branch told me a single website they were after was making $99 USD a month per user hiding 3Gb of this garbage in this manner and that they believed that website had over 8000 subscribers! Now that is nearly $800K USD a month. With that kind of profit to be had you are going to find plenty of scumbags who will take the money while passing on the risk to the uneducated users out there. Lets get real here: people have been tortured to death for a WHOLE lot less money than 800K tax free a month. Do you really think the kind of people who traffic in this kind of garbage would really care that they destroyed an innocent man's life and career? And I do apologize for the length,but I thought it would be prudent to share that this is a VERY real and sadly all too common occurrence with modern infections,which are almost always about profit from illegal activities anymore.

kb
Flame

I can tell you how this works

As I have hung out with enough grey and black hats to tell you how it works. here is how it goes down: Joe is a hacker,and Joe infects your pc,either by getting you or a member of your family to go to a page where he hits the pc with a nice quiet driveby downloader. Joe is contacted by a child pr0nographer,Mr. Scumbag. He can make mad money selling access to his scummy pics but naturally doesn't want to get caught.

So Joe puts a nice little backdoor into your machine,and creates a share or folder someplace the average person never looks,like say,the cache folder. Joe then sends Mr. Scumbag the links so he can drop his sleaze onto you and Joe gets paid. The fact that he had four times the Internet usage is the tipoff. Usually a sleaze grabbing through a proxy will hit hard and fast-get in and get out,as it is less likely to leave traces.

The fact that the guy racked up that kind of a bill tells me that in all likelihood he had a backdoor planted on him and was being used as a server for somebody else's sleaze. Which is why folks shouldn't be "guilty until proven innocent",especially in these life destroying kind of cases. These sleazebags can make insane amount of money off this garbage,and as we have all seen with spambots and mass mailing trojans,anywhere there is big bucks to be made illegally you'll find someone who will try to get the cash while passing off the risk to someone else. But that is my 02c,YMMV

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