I know this was meant to be sarcastic, but it may be more true that you think.

I have been an avid Linux supporter for use on servers for a long time, however, I refused to use it as a desktop OS for a couple of reasons:

* There was no distro that I didn't have to open a shell for SOME reason -- to get something to work. I do systems administration for a living. I don't want to have to fucking tweak my box when I get home.
* It was butt ugly. That may seem like a poor reason to not use an OS, but it is my opinion and I am entitled to it. I refuse to use Windows 8.x primarily for this reason -- it is fucking hideous. Monochrome? Really Microsoft?

Both of those issues have now been addressed, and I am now completely MS free. I will be converting my parents, and my brother, and I will be spreading the word to my friends that aren't technically inclined.

As a developer of one of the WoW emulators, I am curious if Blizzard made a conscious decision to randomize the opcodes used by WoW (and the many other protections that were put in place). Up until the Cataclysm expansion, there was no real protection against reverse engineering the WoW client. As of Cata, blizz seems to have gone out of their way to prevent any emulation of WoW. Cata, and MoP take a lot of work, but we will still be able to provide decent emulation *eventually*. Also, why hasn't Blizzard removed GRUNT? That would completely eliminate ALL emulation of WoW as Battle.net has yet to be broken.

-- Brian

This is on Lavabit?!? YOU are what is wrong with this country. Get the FUCK out.

You are delusional if you live in a big city in the US and think your water *that you drink* is clean

Are you out hunting and killing your own food? Even then it is debatable since you don't know where they have been drinking. But I guarantee you that anything you buy in the store is not safe.

Most times, but the power grid in the US is so unstable to the point that might not always be the case (need a citation -- LOOK IT UP FOR YOUR FUCKING SELF)

No, I can not. I am on a blacklist because I happened to speak out against this SHIT HOLE FUCKING GOVERNMENT that is is the USA

I hear music, but I sure as hell don't hear "voices". I think you may need to seek some professional help.

This country (The good ol' US of A) is FUCKED. You need to get that through your thick, fucking, skull.

-- Brian (Proud member of TOCB -- Take Our County Back)

"At the end of the day the only foolproof way to get rid of malware is to take away the user's right to control their own machine, to instead stick them in a walled garden where only approved apps get run."

That is exactly what I had to do for my parents. I created four non-admin accounts:

1 - Games (this is for my mom to play online games)
2 - Mom (This is the account my mom uses for email (whitelisted), and dumping pics, etc). This account has no access to a web browser.
3 - Dad (ditto for this account).
4 - Bank (This account has a browser that is pointed at a simple web proxy that has a whitelist of addresses. They can only get to their bank, and various other bill pay sites)

I trained them to use the "Games" account if they want to browse the web for "fun". I told them to feel free to click on anything they want. If it prompts for an admin password, not only do they not have it, but if they did, they know they should hit cancel.

This setup has worked great. I was stopping by to check their machine about once a week just to be sure, but I haven't even had to wipe the "Games" account in a LONG time, but when I do the rest of the machine is clean.

Is this overkill? Maybe, but they are 70+ years old, and it makes my life a WHOLE lot easier.

Windows 7 is an outstanding OS, it is real shame that MS is fucking it all up with Win 8.

-- Brian

Damit, I meant to login. Re-posting so that it is clear that I do not need to hide behind AC for my thought on this piece of shit.

"This is an effing joke, right? Early April fools? Looks like 2012 will be the year of Linux on the desktop. Not because it got better, but because Windows will be the joke OS. I know I sure will laugh at anyone I see running it...

This looks like something my 5 year old came up with in MS Paint.

*sigh*, better to get started now than to wait for MS to release this hideous 8bit color OS. Not to mention that Win 8 has far more problems than just the fact that it is butt f**king ugly. In the past I wouldn't switch to Linux for my *DESKTOP* OS because it was (is) butt ugly, no other reason, it was (is) just God awful to look at. This is worse...

If you look at my post history, I have *HAVE* been an avid supporter of Windows for my desktop OS .. even Vista (never had a chance to run ME because NT kernel OS that had DirectX (win2k) was released, I jumped on it).

Are there people out there that actually _like_ the 8bit hideousness that is Win8?"

In the past week, I have had two CFL bulbs "explode". I put that in quotes because I wasn't around when it happened, so I am not sure what caused them to fail or if there was an "explosion". These lights were not on at the time. One was in my garage -- I came home and found glass all over the garage floor since it was in an open socket. For the other one, it was in my bathroom. I came home and went to turn the light on and when I unscrewed the housing a second one had busted. I was concerned about the mercury that had been released, but had no clue what to do about it other than open all my windows.

Suffice it to say, that hit just a little too close to home (no pun intended), and I won't be buying CFLs anymore. I could handle a failure a year, but I bought these bulbs when I bought the house -- and that wasn't quite a year ago.

Well here is some more for you...

I have Brighthouse cable in the Tampa, FL area, and I get ~4.8MB/sec (yes that is a big M for mega and a big B for bytes).

On a different note, I would suggest anyone that has Netflix streaming to check out VuDu. I don't know if it is available for anything other than the PS3, but they offer 9Mb (that would be a little b for bit) streams that look great. There is still the occasional pixelation on real high speed scenes, but I have to guess they are using h264.

Bottom line, there are plenty of providers out there that can stream HD (well what Netflix / VuDu call HD) in real time. AND there are some that could stream *real* HD in real time.

Fuck you very much....

It is all about risk versus reward, and let's see, risk: major oil spill that is really going to fuck the eco system up for a long time (potentially world wide). Reward: none. Yep, ZERO reward. Oil should just go away already. As long as it sticks around, the longer we are NOT going to have alternative fuel sources taken seriously.

Now I am not some eco-nut that is against everything that could damage the environment. Hell, come build another 10 or so nuke plants in my backyard and I will be a happy camper. Risk: when using a breeder reactor -- none (well so close to zero that it might as well be zero). Reward: 100% clean energy.

Bottom line, have oil wash up on your beach and then tell me that you would be cool with them "drill baby drilling".

On the flip side, if one of our nuke plants in the state I live in went Chernobyl, I would most assuredly change my opinion of nuke plants.

Two things:

1 - Why would I care about "global" market share when I live in the US? I only care about phones that I can buy and use here. Is that hard to comprehend? I have no idea why Nokia doesn't have more of a market presence in the US, but again, it doesn't matter to me.

2 - Nokia puts Symbian OS on ALL their phones. So while it may be a "smartphone OS", installing it on barebones basic hardware doesn't make it a "smartphone"...

When I first saw the new WinMo 7 interface, I thought that the UI was chopping off parts of words because it wasn't finished, or wasn't quite designed for the phone they were demonstrating it on. Now that I know that is how they WANT it to look, this has fail written all over it. It is ugly and cluttered, and given that this was *supposedly* a ground up re-write, I don't know WHAT they were thinking.

Bottom line, this sucks. There are 4 (maybe 5) major "smartphone" players:

Apple - iPhone - I have one, and I LOVE it as long as I can keep it jailbroken. But every new firmware release Apple wants to make it harder.

Google - Android - Google had a good idea, but the potential downfall of that good idea has come to fruition -- market fragmentation. I won't be getting an Android phone until I am sure that things will become(remain?) stable.

RIM - Blackberry - A couple of problems with these for me. 1 - They are mainly business phones, and therefore not my forte. 2 - I *like* the touch interface, and RIM doesn't have a decent Blackberry with a touch interface.

Microsoft - WinMo series - It wasn't until WinMo 6.5 that they *finally* got an OK touch only interface. I don't want to have to use a pointer to use my phone. Unfortunately there is still a lot of software that needs that pointer -- so MS came out with WinMo 7, with no backwards compatibility (that has been seen yet -- and I don't think there will be any), but the interface is aweful even for alphaware.

Palm - Pre - This was my "maybe" 5th contender. Palm has a great phone here IMHO, however, they haven't released a GSM version, so it is useless to me. People in other marker areas may hate AT&T, but in the market I am in I can consistently get 2.5megs/sec down and never have a dropped call. So, until Palm releases a Pre for AT&T, they are useless to me.

It must have been a very long time ago that you tried a private server, or you happened to pick a really crappy one that disabled LoS processing to save ram / cpu.

The "terrain" issues that you speak of are a lack of 3D data in the maps (vmaps). This problem has been solved for a long time. However (at least on Trinity and MaNGOS) you can disable vmaps processing on certain maps -- this will save you some memory and cpu usage. By default only map 369 (the deeprun tram) is ignored since it has no 3D data in the maps -- we aren't sure HOW blizz handles LoS (line of sight) issues on that map.

I would say that I am one of other scenarios ... the one that blizz doesn't like. I liked running my own server with just me and my wife playing that I quit playing on blizz's servers, and hell even started developing the database that drove the server I was using.

The later 1050 used double density disks (but could read and write single density disks with a lower capacity).

You had to get the doubler ROMs to get true double density 180k, otherwise the drive did some weird 1 1/2 density 160k...

-- Brian