Julien Voisin blogs:
Today, I updated my Firefox, and had a new icon on my toolbar: pocket. I took at quick look at the ToS and privacy policy; here is my tl;dr:
Read it Later, Inc. is collecting a lot of intimate information and is tracking you.
When you share something through Pocket with a friend, the emails contains spying material using malware-like techniques to track your friends.
They are sharing those information with trusted third parties (Could be anyone they are doing business with.).
The policy might change, and it's your responsibility to check Pocket's website to see if it has.
[...] The Pocket implementation is not an extension (while it was available as an extension), it's implemented in Firefox. You can not remove it, only disable it, by going in about:config, since this option is not available in the preferences menu.
What the hell is pocket? on Mozilla's site:
The Pocket for Firefox button lets you save web pages and videos to Pocket in just one click. Pocket strips away clutter and saves the page in a clean, distraction-free view and lets you access them on the go through the Pocket app. All you need is a free account, an Internet connection and the Pocket button.
Original Submission
Related Stories
I always found the denials of this to be bizarre:
Given the intrusive nature of government surveillance, Mozilla—with its dedication to privacy and independence from corporate and government interests—should be more vital than ever. But in the age of social media and mobile devices, it has struggled to maintain relevance and failed to transition to a world where the desktop browser is fading in importance. Mozilla hasn't even dented the mobile market with mobile versions of its browser or its Firefox OS smartphone operating system. And the organization has done little to counteract Facebook's expanding influence. What's more, its foothold on the desktop continues to slip as Google Chrome grows in popularity.
[...] The good news is Mozilla has found some partnerships to supplement its search revenue. For example, the company quietly integrated the "read-it-later" service Pocket into Firefox along with a video conferencing feature powered by European telco Telefonica earlier this year. Although the company emphasizes that Pocket and Telefonica didn't pay for placement in the Firefox browser, Mozilla Corp. chief legal and business officer Denelle Dixon-Thayer told WIRED that Mozilla has revenue sharing arrangements with both companies.
takyon: Mozilla retires Firefox's sponsored tiles, hunts for new revenue streams
Previously: Mozilla Integrates Proprietary Pocket Plugin
Warning - Firefox Has You in the Pocket
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Monday July 13 2015, @12:54PM
tl;dr
For saving page snapshots (and more), use https://www.zotero.org/ [zotero.org] instead.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @12:57PM
Have you been able to get zotero working with pale moon? Firefox is self destructing, time to abandon ship.
(Score: 1) by TheMessageNotTheMessenger on Monday July 13 2015, @04:06PM
What is the alternative? Chrome is pretty bad from a privacy perspective :( Also not as extensible.
Hello! :D
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @05:06PM
I expect the most popular alternative to end up being Pale Moon. Chrome is the same as firefox, no reason to switch between the two for me.
(Score: 4, Informative) by AndyTheAbsurd on Monday July 13 2015, @07:25PM
Pale Moon is the alternative - it was forked to avoid the pointless UI changes that started a couple of years ago; most extensions are still compatible, and the devs are pretty much committed to not making changes that are "crap" (like the recent directive from Mozilla management to remove FTP functionality from the Firefox "platform" [mozilla.org] (note that this may not remove FTP functionality from Firefox entirely - but it will end up being implemented as a JavaScript thing like PDF-inside-Firefox is today)).
Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.
(Score: 1) by TheMessageNotTheMessenger on Monday July 13 2015, @08:03PM
FTP is terribly insecure and you shouldn't be using it. I had no idea FF still supported it.
How up-to-date is Pale Moon? Since it's a fork and not just a custom build, how well does it get tested and what about security updates?
Hello! :D
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @08:29PM
This is what the main dev has to say:
https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=5075 [palemoon.org]
Of course those are just words. What evidence are you looking for?
(Score: 4, Informative) by fnj on Monday July 13 2015, @09:01PM
Do you have any idea whatsoever what you're talking about? Using anonymous FTP to download files is "insecure" how? It's the de facto file transfer protocol of the internet. It is very efficient. Granted browser client implementations are pretty much all shitty. For anything serious, wget is much preferred, but for simple stuff it's been taken for granted forever that you can browse and casually download from FTP servers in a browser.
If you had said telnet was complete garbage for a long time now, that would be different. With telnet's clear text password transfer, it's not conceivable that there is any safe use for it. Anonymous FTP is not like that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2015, @01:38AM
FTP's insecure because it's unencrypted?
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday July 14 2015, @02:21AM
Who cares??! When I use FTP I am downloading some file, not exchanging information with my bank.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2015, @05:47AM
Even the most mundane communications should be encrypted, to provide cover for those who truly need it.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2015, @07:12AM
So is HTTP.
Which is STILL regarded by Firefox as more secure than HTTPS with self-signed certificates (when they are closer to being equal).
(Score: 1) by mvdwege on Wednesday July 15 2015, @09:58AM
That's because an unverified cert is more insecure than a totally unauthenticated, unencrypted connection that announces to the user that it is in fact insecure. An unverified cert announces to the user that it is secure, while not being secure at all.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday July 14 2015, @02:27AM
Hey, browser devs, want a fast track to my bit bucket? Keep removing useful features and replacing them with useless eye candy.
Geez. I use FTP in the browser all the bloody time. Just today I used it to wander around some linux repository looking for the ISO that I wanted. And as I said to the other bloke, who cares if FTP is secure or not? We're using it to view and download random shit, not to communicate with our banks. FTP has about as much need to be secure as a textfile does.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Francis on Monday July 13 2015, @10:43PM
How is it any less secure than www? If you need security, there's sft, scp and various other methods.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Tuesday July 14 2015, @12:38AM
Luckily it isn't like the old days, we DO have plenty to choose from, here is just a small list that doesn't even include half of our choices today..
There is Comodo Dragon [comodo.com] (what I use, better security features and no phone home to Google) and if you want more privacy focused they also offer Chromodo [comodo.com], there is Chromium [chromium.org], SWIron [srware.net], and Opera [opera.com] which my oldest boy swears is the greatest thing ever (but he went back to the last one using presto) and on the gecko side there is Firefox [mozilla.org], PaleMoon [palemoon.org] (the other browser I use, I prefer the UI over IceDragon and it seems snappier), SeaMonkey [seamonkey-project.org], IceDragon [comodo.com], if you need really low resource there is always Kmeleon [sourceforge.net] which runs really well even on a P3 running Win98SE and if you want to avoid BOTH the Chromium and Gecko engines you can go with QTWeb [qtweb.net] which is just what it says on the tin, a cross platform browser that uses Webkit and the QT framework...quite nice actually and of course Safari [apple.com] if you are into Apple. There is one other....what was it? Oh yeah the big blue E thing. ;-)
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 1) by TheMessageNotTheMessenger on Tuesday July 14 2015, @02:12AM
Which one of these is very secure and does addons like tree style tabs?
It can't be closed source, for obvious reasons.
I've played with SRWare Iron, which had a start page with ads linking to malware on it.... I'm not sure if that was a quality control issue. I like the idea behind it, a Google Chrome clone that has all the Google stripped.
Hello! :D
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Tuesday July 14 2015, @02:38AM
Palemoon does, though you will have to get version 0.14 . Later ones do get installed but don't seem to work.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Tuesday July 14 2015, @10:22AM
Well I use 2 browsers, I prefer it this way as I've yet to find a "one size fits all" WRT the web. On the Chromium side I use Comodo Dragon, it has some REALLY nice security features like malware site blocking and Comodo Secure DNS (which uses their enterprise DNS, works great and I have yet to see a single malware site load but you can choose to use the OS DNS if you prefer) and if you REALLY want a "secure as you can possibly get" you can pair it (as well as Chromodo and IceDragon) with their free Comodo AV which will then give you the option of launching your browser in a virtual machine, complete with sandboxed download folder. I give this to all my customers at the shop, its dropped malware infections right off the chart, heck Comodo AV even comes with the option of running a "virtual desktop" where everything on the PC is locked down and sandboxed, great for my business customers (and I use it myself when I have to go to a dodgy site to find some old driver). BTW all the Comodo browsers by default start off with the Yahoo home page, whether you consider that malware or not is up to you ;-)
As for the Gecko side while IceDragon works great I'm just not a fan of its GUI so I use PaleMoon, it uses the old Firefox GUI while the dev team has made it clear that all the crap choices that have come to FF these past few years will NOT be coming to PM. They have set up their own sync servers (and of course you have the option of using your own) and just as Comodo Dragon/Chromodo lets you use all the Chrome plugins so too does PaleMoon allow you to use all your F plugins so having a tree view in either browser? Easy Peasy. But hell man, all the ones I listed above are all free, why not give a few a spin and see which one fits YOU best? I doubt you'll have much trouble with any of the ones I have listed so it really shouldn't be hard to find one that you are really comfortable with.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2015, @02:38AM
Lol at Comodo Dragon. "the world's leading online security and trust assurance innovator" seems to want both cookies and javascript to use their website? Oh, and grand abstract claims instead of actual citations and or details.
After allowing their stupid java-script to use their UI I determined they have 4 features:
1. Has privacy enhancements that surpass those in Chromium's technology
2. Has Domain Validation technology that identifies and segregates superior SSL certificates from inferior ones
3. Stops cookies and other Web spies
4. Prevents all Browser download tracking to ensure your privacy
The last one is impossible (the provider of the downloads can at least count them no matter what you do), 1 and 2 are horribly unspecific, and #2 is pretty unspecific (chrome already does that, and they don't offer details beyond what chrome does).
And really, if your focus is security/privacy, why advertise windows XP support no linux or BSD variants?
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday July 14 2015, @02:39AM
Damn, they've done nice things with KMeleon since last I looked at it. And I hadn't heard of QTWeb. I'm a SeaMonkey type myself, but think it's normal to have 20 different browsers installed. :)
If you want tiny, portable, leaves-zero-tracks, and will run from a floppy, there's Off-By-One. A bit primitive, but handy. Unfortunately the website seems to be kaput. :/
But wait! there's more!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers [wikipedia.org]
Holy... you can sure spot the version-madness with this Handy Flowchart:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Timeline_of_web_browsers.svg [wikimedia.org]
(Can anyone convert this into a fullsize image? the small images are useless, and SVG doesn't save gracefully. Gods, I hate how Wiki changed how images work.)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday July 14 2015, @04:15AM
In SeaMonkey, press F11 (not quite fullscreen but close), then use CTRL (numpad)+ or - to resize. You can always take a screenshot when you're happy with it. Unluckily here, when scaled to full scree, it is unreadable.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday July 14 2015, @04:25AM
CTRL +/- doesn't seem to work here (SM 2.5) ... guess if I want the durn thing in one piece I'll have to stitch screenshots.
Hadn't realised about F11 tho, so thanks for that!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday July 14 2015, @05:36AM
Might have to play with the numlock button and if using a laptop, who knows. You can always press ALT-V, Z and zoom in/out from there.
I take it you mean SM 2.25? The zoom function has worked here since SM 2 or 2.1 and the F11 worked in Netscape.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday July 14 2015, @05:57AM
Nope. v2.5 (what the whole rest of the software world would call v2.05; browsers cause version madness), but good guess about turning on Numlock -- hate having that on (I use the keypad for navigation too much, and never as a keypad, and I'm so used to font size control on Prefbar....) so didn't even think of it!
However.... works fine on text, doesn't touch the SVG. Ya know, if they're supposed to be scalable, they need to be a bit more graceful about it!!
I tend to not 'upgrade' browsers until nothing works anywhere anymore, because I get so tired of "improvements" breaking shit. I have a fresh new SM 2.33 on the "new" linux box, and the first thing I noticed is that wheel-click on a tab no longer closes it, and offhand I couldn't find a setting to change that... a trivial feature, but one I use all day long!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2015, @07:21AM
What whole rest of the software world? Mainframe people?
Linux is currently at 4.1.2. When Microsoft one in a while uses version numbers (rather than years or random letters), they use numbers like 3.1 and 8.1.
Or did you mean 2.0.5?
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Tuesday July 14 2015, @10:54AM
It looks fine in Comodo Dragon, which has a handy zoom function to scale in and out. Its unreadable though if you shrink it enough to fit on a single screen though. In PaleMoon its ctrl+ and - but again once shrunk becomes unreadable.
If you haven't tried QTWeb give it a spin, comes with ABP by default and renders nicely, I simply prefer Comodo as I use their AV and it has some really nice integration features WRT the browser like sandboxing and the ability to launch the browser (or even a desktop instance) in an isolated virtual machine, which since I often have to go to some dodgy sites looking for drivers I find this to be a "killer app" in my line of work. But another one you may not have heard of is Kmeleon CCF ME [blogspot.com], its not updated very often but its crazy fast on older systems and also comes with ABP, great for older laptops.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday July 14 2015, @01:02PM
Crazy-fast always appeals to me. I was raised on Netscape 3 (still keep it installed, specifically for when I want to trawl an FTP because it is SO much better at handling a bunch of quick downloads) and that experience ruined me -- I have ZERO tolerance for laggy browsers. I put SeaMonkey's cache on a ramdisk partly because otherwise I can't stand its performance! (And partly cuz of how bad it fragments the disk. I've never seen such bad coding zen ANYWHERE else. There's absolutely no excuse for the cache to consist of .. right now mine has 330 files, 886 folders. Cache structure appears to be most of the reason for its galloping memory usage.)
So, downloaded to look at, and thanks!
So QTWeb can basically do its own VM?
Is Comodo based on Chrome? Chrome makes me want to hurt Google.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Tuesday July 14 2015, @07:04PM
nooo, QTWeb is just a web browser, its the Comodo Browsers (Comodo Dragon and Chromodo are based on Chromium, IceDragon based on Firefox) that when used in conjunction with Comodo AV has the ability to launch in a sandboxed virtual machine.
I have been giving Comodo AV to customers ever since Avast started pulling "We'll switch the free version to a trial of the pay version if you click the wrong spot" on damned near every update, so about 3 years now and its a damned good AV. As I said I often have to go to some seriously dodgy sites looking for drivers for funky hardware and Comodo AV has made sure not a single dodgy link or malware infected site will load and when combined with their secure DNS (it asks you on browser install if you want to use it but you can switch it on/off at will) and the browser running in a VM (which is as easy to use as clicking a single button in the AV widget, you can also use the virtual browser icon on the desktop) makes for a system that...well its pretty damned hard if not impossible to infect. Just for shits and giggles I took one of the fresh installs and purposely went to a bunch of badly infected topsites, just to see if Comodo would let some of the nasties through and let the system get pwned and...nope, the few pages that weren't instantly blocked by the Secure DNS (which you can override if you want to risk it, but they will tell you why it was blocked and what was detected so you can make an informed choice) had all the malware links killed by Comodo AV. Even when I bypassed the DNS and tried downloading infected files the AV wiped them out and thanks to the VM when I closed the browser? Like it never happened..poof. So if you need your system to hardened to the ninth degree? Combine a Comodo Browser with Comodo AV. I've been using this combo at the shop for years and not a single nasty has ever gotten through and I've scanned with everything from Malwarebytes to Housecall, not a single thing ever shows up.
As for QTWeb and Kmeleon CCF ME? Kinda what it says on the tin really, QTWeb is a QT GUI over Webkit, pretty responsive last time I ran it and comes with ABP which is nice, can also be run from a flash so when I need a browser to get past nasties on a customer's infected box I usually break it out, it does the job nicely. Kmeleon CCF ME is simply Kmeleon with a more modern GUI (lets face it, the original Kmeleon still looks like it came with Win 95) and ABP baked in. Not quite as fast as the original but pretty damned close which makes it fly compared to most browsers so its worth a spin. As for my own browsers I use Comodo Dragon at the shop as the main browser since I need the extra security along with IceDragon as the backup, and on the home system since its mainly used for gaming, YouTube, and A/V work I use Chromodo with PaleMoon as the backup.
Anyway if you want to give any of the above a spin? Go for it, its all 100% free. Hell Comodo even gives the AV away to businesses, they make their money on the server version and on "Geekbuddy" which is an optional install that lets you have a geek remote in and fix things when they break. Its great if you have some grandma type in another city you don't want to do tech support for but my customers are happy to just pay me $20 an hour to set up a remote assistance session. But I never recommend anything I haven't used myself, especially when it comes to security, so feel free to give 'em a spin and see how you like it.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday July 14 2015, @08:03PM
Ah, okay, all good info. Always worth knowing this shit!
Yeah, KMeleon's interface was still pretty primitive, last I looked. But I'd rather have plain and primitive and normal menus, than pretty and modern and WHERE THE FUCK DID THEY HIDE EVERYTHING??
I don't think I've been down to the topsites world since Netscape3 was still viable, and with JS off it was pretty much immune to anything nasty, since it would just ignore everything it didn't understand. But good to know about Comodo... I have a "new" frankenputer in progress and that'll be a good job for it, checking out all these browsers that I haven't used. Thanks!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday July 15 2015, @06:12AM
You remember what Seamonkey looked like around 2.0, or some of the early FF "modern" packs? Yeah that is what Kmeleon CCF ME looks like, they added some slightly nicer icons and ABP and...yeah that's about it, still flies low and like QTWeb you can just unzip it and fire it up so if you want something really small and light to load onto a CD/Flash/Ramdisk? Well there ya go. As for the topsites? They are frankly great for security testing, you click on the links from one of the console ROM sites or Redbook/YouPorn and you'll find more malware per square link than you can imagine and unlike those "simulated" tests a lot of AV sites use you are testing against what is actually in the wild which of course is the kind of things my customers could face. I even made sure the browsers I used had Flash support just to give it a good beating and nothing, nada zip zero zilch. One of the advantages of the shop is I always have extra boxes lying around that I can just blow away and re-image with no user info on them so tests like that are easy and risk free.
Anyway good luck on your new Frankenputer and if you need any advice on parts feel free to drop me a line.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday July 15 2015, @02:42PM
That's a pretty good way of doing realworld testing, considering that's exactly where some of your customers will head to the moment you're out of sight.
I appreciate being able to just unzip and go. I always install portable versions if I have a choice (especially since when I can get away with it, I copy existing installs from one machine to the next rather than reinstalling stuff).
Actually 3 "new" frankenputers... got gifted 3 decent Asus motherboards and enough odd parts all at once. :) The best of 'em is a quad-core Intel (I put XP64 on that one -- newest mobo of the bunch but doesn't support Win7!) that's going to be the new everyday box, and the other two are dual-core AMDs (one presently has Win7 which I've decided I hate, and the other linux Mint which looked really promising for two whole days as everything worked out of the box and nothing terribly annoyed me... then some admin tool locked up so hard I had to use the reset button, and that nuked the boot loader... FAIL!!)
On Win7, how the heck do you change workspace and windowtrim colors? some parts no longer seem to be user-settable -- if it's now using XML for everything as I kinda suspect, that might be the problem. Even with Classic Shell, I really want to hurt whoever fucked with both window appearance/trim and Windows Explorer (I live in the file manager). I've tried various WinExplorer replacements but none of 'em has ever really suited me. Powerdesk comes closest but I don't really like it. But Win7's incarnation of WinExplorer is just too broken for everyday use.
The #3 box (that got assigned the job "test linux distros") is the oldest of the three, but seems to run a little faster than #2 -- #3 was a higher-end motherboard in its day. But it doesn't like XP64 -- it installs, but the video driver boils over when it goes to load the GUI. This box has dual video cards which appears to be the problem. Haven't got around to pulling one to see if XP64 will load with just one.
Now if someone would gift me a motherboard to match this 7GB of DDR3 someone gave me that none of the above can use (and *seven* 1GB sticks? WTF??) .... maybe I'd get from the medieval period of computing to somewhere near the modern era. :D
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday July 15 2015, @10:31PM
Okay I'm gonna need more info, by changing colors are you talking about themes, or are you talking a classic shell style full rewrite? If you are just talking themes the way to go is use UX theme patcher [howtogeek.com] and then download one of the bazillion themes out there or design your own, hell you can even go back to Luna or Win2K grey if you want once the UX is patched. me personally? Feel free to laugh at me but I'm using Vista Black for Win 7 [askvg.com] as I've always liked dark themes and Vista Black is sleek, easy on the eyes, and the white on black/black on white text? Just easier on the eyes IMHO, but there is literally hundreds you can pick from once your UX is patched so find what you like best.
Now if you are talking about ripping out the whole shell? While there are a few like Classic Shell IMHO they are really one trick ponies in that you don't like THEIR way of doing things? Tough shit. If YOU want 100% total control over the shell? It isn't free but your best bet is Aston Shell [astonshell.com]. With Aston you can turn that Windows system into anything from Win95 to OSX, just head over to their themes [astonshell.com] section and see if any suit your fancy, and of course if they don't they have easy to follow tutorials which will let you make your own theme any way you want. I never did like the look of WinXP so when I was on that OS I always used Aston and when some of my customers were trapped on Windows 8 (a few companies "cough Lenovo cough" refuse to release drivers for the previous version so if it came with Win 8? No Win 7 drivers for you) they had me switch them to Aston and it was just as easy to set up and solid as I remembered.
Finally as for replacing the file explorer? I've never personally had a problem with it but if you want more control awhile back I was given Xplorer 2 [zabkat.com] which was frankly more power than I needed but if you want total control over everything to do with files? Well there ya go, this thing will do it all short of making you breakfast in the morning. Both it and aston are pretty lightweight which should help with you running older gear and have free trials. Also last I checked if you look around there are sites offering the older version of Aston and Xplorer2 for free, which works just fine with Win 7. Also keep an eye on GiveawayOftheDay, they have given both away several times in the past.
BTW can I ask a question....what EXACTLY on the C2Q board doesn't support Windows 7? Frankly I've found most of the time its pretty easy to get Win 7 running on older hardware, hell I've run XP drivers in 7 before, it ain't no thang. Usually you just need to get the drivers from somebody besides the OEM, just use a tool like speccy [piriform.com] to find out the exact make/model and grab the drivers...now this next bit? You did NOT hear from me,mmkay? If you got older hardware and want to run Windows on it? Pop on the net and find you a copy of "Tiny (insert Windows version)" as its a stripped down gamer version of Windows that runs like a scalded dog on older hardware! They have Windows Tiny versions of 2K/XP/2K3 (no XP X64 sadly) Vista and Win 7...no Win 8/8.1 as the guy that was making them lost his ass in the downturn from what I was told and is too busy trying to keep above water to fuck with it ATM. So how tiny we talking? Whole OS fits on a CD, fully loaded desktop is just 145Mb for Win 7, just 22 running processes total. Its crazy fast even on ancient hardware.
Anyway if you need any help with the frankenputers feel free to holler, throwing boxes together, finding weird drivers and OS issues is kinda what I deal with a good 90% of the time.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday July 16 2015, @01:10AM
I'll try the UX theme patcher, might be it does what I need and someone already made one I like. That Vista-black theme looks great. I'd download it cuz it looks like a good starting point for me, but DeviantArt won't give me the file, dunno what its trip is.
I lied, one board is Intel and two are Asus. Don't want to drag things around just to check exactly but I've snagged the manuals and drivers so I have those model numbers to hand.
#1: Intel DQ965GF (CPU: Intel quad core 2.x GHz). Nice board, nice feature set. Benchmarks just below the i3 so not bad for the price. :) 6GB DDR2 cuz that's what I had to hand but it maxes out at 8GB. Anyway I figured, board is only about 6-7 years old, should support Win-anything, right? So I didn't check first. Installed Win7 and that went fine. Until it went to bring up the full desktop... and stalled. And I'm like, WTF? So I break down and check the specs and sure enough, it says flat out this motherboard does not support Win7. (You'd think Win7 could have noticed this *before* it spent an hour installing.) Hmmph. So I installed XP64 instead, and it's happy as a pig in shit and everything works. Just as well since if I ever catch up with the Win7 UI design team, I'm gonna smack their heads square. Anyway this one is going to be my next everyday box, once I get done dinking with everything.
#2: Asus M2N68-AM Plus (CPU: AMD 4xxx but IIRC that's a dual core 2.5GHz. Supposedly the board only supports up to 2.0GHz but it sees this CPU just fine with no effort on my part, so maybe previous owner updated BIOS.) This doesn't strike me as an expensive board. 2GB DDR2 cuz that's what I had left over but maxes out at 8GB. Installed Win7-64bit on this one for no particular reason other than I hadn't really looked at Win7 yet, and it seems to run fine. Still need to install a couple drivers, not sure what the bang mark is in Device Mangler ("unknown device") but everything seems to work that I've looked at so far, so might be some chipset thing, or gigabit support for ethernet. Dunno what its mission in life will be, other than using the UI to irritate myself. :P~
Those two are both just using the onboard video which is good enough for everyday Windows, but maxes out at 256mb RAM. I have a Sapphire Radeon HD4670 1GB vidcard I could stick in the Intel, not sure how much better that would be than the onboard video, or if it's a troublesome card in XP64 -- your thoughts?
#3: Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe (CPU: AMD64-3200, IIRC). Maxed out at 4GB DDR (tho it can't seem to see it as DDR400 if there's more than 2GB, and is using it as DDR333 -- four matched sticks, also I had to add #3 and #4 one at a time and reboot to get it to see them all and stop beeping about it). Doesn't have onboard video, but does have two vidslots. And someone gift me a matched pair of "ATI Radeon X300 128MB 8960 ver 130" which it likes, so I figure it can have them.... installed XP64 and it went fine til it went to start the GUI, then I got the exploded-video-driver type screen, so I figure its generic vid driver barfed on the dual cards. Didn't care that much (I mean, how many WinXP machines do I need?) so decided it could be the linux tester instead... 3 out of the 4 in this week's distro pile never got as far as running properly, the 4th (Mint) looked great til it suicided at the tender age of two days. *sigh*
Someone gift me a PATA SSD too that is one cranky SOB, only way it would agree to even show up in BIOS was slaved to a WD-40GB but with the WD set to master and the SSD set to CS. (Would not play with a Seagate at all, nor with a WD-600GB.) By itself, IF it did come up (which it generally did not), it disabled the 2nd IDE channel! Well, if it wants to live its life as a slave, so be it. It's a Transcend, you've been warned! Might try it in my "new" laptop (P3-1GHz 340mb RAM, "new", hahaha) and see if it's less cranky in there.
Yep, I dragged home the Tiny versions I could find, thanks for the tip! -- right now the "new" laptop has TinyXP on it, which runs like the wind and uses some piddly amount of RAM, like 60mb. Only big drawback I can recall offhand is USB mouse does not work. It sees random USB flash drives fine, but not the USB mouse. (I loathe touchpads.) TinyWin7 installer I found wouldn't run, tho I'm not sure I care. :) I found a newer TinyXP but forget what went wrong with it, or if I just didn't get around to trying it yet.
I finally got around to playing with a Hirens Boot CD and it runs a mini-XP that's slicker'n shit... I'm thinkin' a person might peel it out of there and run it off a USB stick, or even as an everyday OS.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Thursday July 16 2015, @04:05AM
Shoot me an email to my gmail, and I'll just send it to you. the Vista black I have already comes with the UX patcher for X86 and X64, all ready to go. Just shoot me an email and I'll attach it, no prob. As for that board? Yep old Hairy has dealt with that sucker, the trick is to use VISTA 64 drivers. You go to the Intel website, download the Vista 64 drivers for the board, and on that first boot you push F8 and boot into safe mode and install the Vista 64 drivers. They will actually run pretty decently on win 7 once you do that little trick, AAMOF the guy that is doing the roof work on my place this weekend is running one of those, I needed a little floor work done and he wanted a desktop that would play his flying games. I just drug one of those boards out my board box, slapped in a C2Q along with 4GB of RAM, a 500Gb HDD, and my old HD4850 and he is happy as a hog in slop. Now his laptop needs cleaning and I need roof work, sometimes timing is on your side ;-)
As for the second board....I've had one or two of those pass through the shop. Its not a fancy board but its really solid and run Windows 7 great. the bang is probably related to the Nvidia chipset, install the drivers here [asus.com] and you'll be good to go. That board supports Phenom II quad, but I can't tell if the CPU you have is a dual or a quad without the other 3 digits. You can find the Phenom I quads for that board hella-cheap on eBay, you can find those chips as low as $20-$25 for a 2.2 quad so if you want a good second quad unit? Its a good board.
As for the HD4670? It will make videos smoother if you download the Klite Codec Pack (Ninite has it silent installer) and turn on DXVA and having a GB to buffer and my wife had the HD4650 for a good year and it ran just fine in Win 7, and before that I had the HD4650 in XP X64, again no problems. You of course won't be doing any hardcore gaming with it but it will take a little load off the CPU when you are watching videos, especially at 720P or better.
As for the last board..wow, 939, I hadn't see one of those in ages! The Windows issue is probably due to having 2 cards instead of one, those older ATI cards were fussy as fuck when it comes to Crossifre, I wonder if Linux is actually using both boards. as for Linux on older hardware...LOL you are asking the guy that came up with "the Hairyfeet Challenge" just to show how shite their driver model is! If given the choice I'd take WinXP, hell Win2K, over the latest and greatest Linux distro for one simple reason...Linux craps on its own drivers. You update? Crap. You dare upgrade, which with the average distro only lasting a year and a half wrt support? Its gonna super crap!
BTW if you can't get TinyXP running with support for something you need? There are several similar stripped down versions of Windows, especially XP. Besides XP Tiny there is XP Micro, XP Black Edition, XP Beast Edition, and ALL of them are frankly faster than defauly XP. You'd probably like XP Black as it is what it says on the tin, its XP with a Vista Black style theme. Its a little less stripped down than Tiny and IIRC its USB support is better. Anyway just give the different versions a spin, even on older hardware it averages less than 20 min from start to desktop so it won't take long for you to find one that does what you need, and if you want Vista black just shoot me an email and its yours..Peace.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday July 16 2015, @05:41AM
I'll shoot you an email tomorrow, since we're about 10,000 miles off topic here now and I gotta go do late chores yet.
Yeah, the linux driver model is just nuts, and IMO was wrongheaded from the git-go, it's no damn wonder it's such an Adventure. -- Didn't *look* like Mint found the 2nd vidcard, but I'll bet that's why when I went to look in video config, it locked up tighter'n Fort Knox.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Saturday July 18 2015, @03:37PM
Just FYI I got this link [deviantart.com] for Vista Black to work by right clicking on it and picking "save as". Just use UX Patcher followed by this theme and tada! As a nice bonus this runs as a non Aero theme which cuts down on resources used, great for older systems. Oh and FYI but you can score a quad core for your AMD board for insanely cheap [ebay.com] off of eBay. I have gotten them for as little as $12 off eBay and if you get the "E" series they use much less power than the regular chips. The one I linked to is a 65w max but according to my kill-a-watt the average on this chip is in the mid 20s. If you want a really good netbox that doesn't heat the place up? These are great chips.
BTW these Phenom quads? Make pretty damned good HTPCs, just slap on OpenELEC [openelec.tv] if you want XBMC, or Windows with Mediaportal and add a $10-$20 GPU (keep an eye on Tiger sales, they often sell the low end DDR 3 cards in the $10 range) and voila! You have a bad ass HTPC that will play any format at 1080P just smooth as melted butter. But good luck on your frankenputers, if you have any hang ups or need any advice feel free to drop me a line.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday July 18 2015, @04:04PM
My preference when starting with a nice motherboard is to upgrade everything as far as it will go rather than pitch it out. So that's a good tip about the better CPU. Will it work in any of that socket, or is BIOS support critical? I've seen Intel sockets that would support literally any CPU that fit in the socket, and others that had a hard limit. Haven't messed much with AMDs because most of what show up in salvage are deaders, either the board or the CPU or both. (Conversely I have *never* encountered a dead Intel CPU, and I've seen some abused to the smoke point.)
Got the Vista-Black theme, thanks for that! I've been using up brain cells faster'n I can grow 'em on another project (busy on that all day yesterday), and apparently doing the obvious is no longer obvious. :)
I don't even have TV service here, well, I suppose there's some signal (not great judging by the size of the analog antenna in the attic) but I never bought a digital TV or converter box, so you can tell how motivated I am on that front. I have enough DVDs to keep me a while. -- I've got an old dual Xeon 750 (with RAMbus!) with no present mission in life that I wonder if might make a good DVD ripper box. It weighs 55 pounds so anything to avoid having to haul it to the curb. :)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Saturday July 18 2015, @05:53PM
The M2N68-AM PLUS will run the Phenom X4 just fine, in fact pretty much any of the Athlons and Phenoms up to the Phenom II X4 will work without issue. I would just avoid the 140W Phenom IIs and the X6s as board support for those are spotty but everything else, especially the dirt cheap Phenom Is? Just drop it in and fire it up.
BTW the reason you saw a lot of dead AMD units? Yeah it didn't have anything to do with the chip design, it was scum bums scamming users by OCing the living fuck out of the CPUs. The old AMD chips were able to be "modded" using solder (some even with the old pencil trace trick) to show up as a different more expensive CPU, this was because AMD would build just one chip and then if say that Athlon didn't measure up in tests they would just change the CPUID register and sell it as a lower tier. Scammers figured out how to mod these Durons and low tier Athlons to report in BIOS as the high tier chips and then just OC the shit out of them to match the high tier CPUs rated speed and then sell them to the unsuspecting. I don't know how many times folks brought me their $1500 system because it was "acting flaky" and I'd go into the BIOS and find that the $800 Athlon chip they thought they had was really a modded $200 Duron.
As for TV service? Honestly the thought hadn't even crossed my mind, never did like dealing with those capture cards. No what I was thinking was more along the lines of a media tank, turning your TV into a "one stop shop" entertainment center. You can find just about every show ever aired on the net anyway, just keep an eye on the sales and throw a cheap TB in there if you want to be able to save your DVDs or what have you, otherwise thanks to YouTube and the various streaming sites you can have endless entertainment and with those Phenom E series its low power to boot.
Finally as for the 750? Yeah it'll work just fine, I'd probably just grab a cheap KVM switch so I wouldn't need to waste a screen on it and let 'er rip.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday July 18 2015, @06:38PM
The dead AMDs I've seen were not OC'd, and it was as much mobos as CPUs -- the mobos just don't seem to have the longevity. What I've had my hands on were all OEM and business units and a couple DOA NiB, never overstressed gaming boxes (we never got any old gaming boxes in the donations pile, it was mostly business upgrade chuck-outs and a few home-office types). Of the two live AMDs I've got right now, I know the shop who built the older one and he does not OC anything, and I left it set as it was since I know it had been stable for the former owner. The other I've had all apart cuz it came with a good case of smoke inhalation, but no solder or funny marks; just left that one set how it came, too.
Ah, entertainment center. First I might have to break down and acquire a TV. :) I have a 27" monitor on the main box and that's more than good enough. Just not enough video out there I care about nowadays. -- That Xeon is astonishingly fast for as old as it is; it was Jerry Pournelle's "Regina" before I got it. Ripped is just handier than DVDs, and a hedge against hard-to-find discs going bad.
Just cured a dead Dell (Foxconn) mobo by laying on hands... Came to me as a dead box, dismantled for parts, thought I'd give the apparently-dead mobo one more try before I chucked it. And this time the lights came on (that's new) but no power up. Hmm. Tried two different PSU (it made one of 'em play dead), and with the 3rd one up it came and self-tests perfect. Must be fussy about voltage on one line or something, tho the other two PSUs test good and this one it likes is nothing special. Fucking Dells! Oh well, I'm sure I can find it a job, considering it's got a quad-core 2.5GHz on it.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Saturday July 18 2015, @11:07PM
Dude seriously take old Hairy's advice...buy this tester [amazon.com] you will NOT regret it! I don't know how many times I've been given "dead systems" and slapped this on the PSU only to find it had a dead or severely underpowered rail. As for AMD board? Hmmm, never really saw that here at the shop and I've had AMDs going back to 2001 cross my desk so I have to wonder....could there be bad power in your area? One thing that Intel has is their chips tolerate sags and spikes better than AMD chips do. Uhhh this is a thought, are the boards Abit and Biostar by any chance? I saw a LOT of dead boxes from both chip makers from those two OEMs, both used shit caps and weak as fuck traces. Next bad AMD board you get look at the caps and see if they blew.
Finally as far as ripping? Good old Handbrake has never let me down, average DVD compresses down to 1GB and looks damned good.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday July 19 2015, @01:48AM
Yeah, saw lots of dead Abit and Biostar boards, lots of bad caps there. Wasn't impressed with either brand even when they were alive and well. I'm kind of a Tyan bigot, on those exceedingly rare occasions when I actually buy a new board.
I've been meaning to get a newer PSU tester, mine is from back before LED screens (I've had it 13-14 years now) and it just does "good" or "not good" but it's a little more fussy than the average motherboard -- the tester has sometimes nixed a PSU that seems to work fine, but I take that as meaning it's a bit weak around the edges and might be goofy under a heavy load. That's a good price on that tester, tho, and having the exact voltage right there in black and white would be nice. Thanks for the tip!
I can't even remember what I was using as a ripper, just that it worked okay but was slower than snot, the box doing the job was an eMachine from their last days and bad caps got it. I'll check out Handbrake when I get everything set back up. I'm still living out of bottles and cans after the great cross-country move that ended up taking 2.5 years.
BTW sent an email to your bass beast (at least I hope I did!), would come from doomgold.com (which I own).
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Sunday July 19 2015, @04:24AM
Yeah I got the email, sent you a reply so you'd know I got it. I USED to use one of those PSU testers like you describe but I had the same problem, PSUs that were perfectly find would come up "no good" and without a screen you had fuck all way of telling what it was bitching about. What I like about the one I linked to (other than the fact its cheap of course) is that it will tell you EXACTLY what you are getting from the main system as well as from the PCIe and the molex. I've had issues with PSUs that just would black screen when a GPU was plugged in and it would turn out they just didn't put enough juice on the PCIe to pull the monster card the customer wanted. Take the same PSU and stick it in an office box? Works perfectly fine. I don't know if its been the same for you but I've found a huge chunk of the supposedly "dead" systems come down to poorly performing PSUs.
As for Handbrake the reason I recommend it? Its one of the few that will use as many cores as you have, a lot of those rippers just won't scale or will only use two cores max, whereas with Handbrake it'll split the load across as many cores as you got. Works pretty damned fast too, on a 2.4Ghz C2Q I can rip a DVD in under 20 minutes.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday July 19 2015, @05:13AM
Got it, you're "almost live" as my friend in Searcy used to say :)
I remember at one of Novell's seminars (this was in a previous century), one of their guys was bitching up a storm about marginal power supplies and intermittent network fails, and I think that's when I started paying attention to PSUs... and noticed there's a real strong correlation between not quite enough PSU and dead motherboard without a mark on it. I have a theory that borderline PSU stresses the electronics, maybe just micro-corrosion (like a brown circuit will eventually trash a relay cuz it sparks instead of making good contact) but whatever it does, it's enough that the mobo fails long before it should.
And mass matters. In fact I've found you can make a prediction thus: put the PSU on a scale. If it weighs less than 3 pounds, expect the attached motherboard to live less than 5 years. If more than 3 pounds, it will last forever. (And I like Enermax, who unlike most, make all their own shit.)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday July 19 2015, @01:06PM
While I'm at it, you got a preferred POST tester? Mine is so old it's ISA. Works great but today's motherboard designers are SO biased against ISA it's pitiful. ;)
Was looking at this one cuz plugging into an external port seems like a useful feature:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005J1SUIO?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=ox_sc_act_title_1&smid=A32TTM625NL69S [amazon.com]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Sunday July 19 2015, @03:56PM
If you wanna get one of those? I'd suggest just buying whichever is cheapest but I warn ya....IMHO the new ones are about as useful as throwing darts at a dartboard when it comes to telling you what is actually wrong with a board. I went through 3 different ones about 5 years ago trying to find one that actually worked before being told by an engineer friend of mine to give it up, if the board is too fucked to give you the standard beep codes it was beyond fixing. Every one I tried had the same two problems which were 1.- No manual or a manual in bad Chingrish with no real explanation as to "code equals problem" and 2.- They always seem to default to a single code that usually is provably wrong. What I mean by that is they will often give you a code of "bad BIOS" yet you can reset the CMOS and will get the same error code, even if the board will post! I'd also had them spit out an error code on a perfectly functioning board I used to test the thing, giving me codes from bad BIOS to damaged RAM when everything is working beautifully.
So if you wanna get one to play with? Get this one [amazon.com] but like all of the new ones you'll have to go to the BIOS makers website to find out what code means what for each individual board you test. But in my experience either the board will beep, in which case you can simply look up the error code for that BIOS manufacturer yourself, or it won't in which case the board is too badly damaged to be salvaged by a layman. Nearly every bad board at the shop can be traced by to one of two failures, which are bad traces (which you just aren't gonna fix) or blown caps, which you should be able to see by eye and if you have the time and patience to replace blown caps good luck, never had steady enough hands and keen enough eyes to do solder work myself. With boards being able to be found so cheap off of places like Craigslist and eBay I find its really not worth spending too much time with a bad board, especially considering that if you get an iffy board to work it can just as easily turn around and cook,, often taking any RAM and CPU installed along with it.
But don't be afraid of any AMD board AM2 or better, while the socket A and 754 boards you had to watch the temps by the time socket AM2 came out all the bugs had been worked out and with a few exceptions (cough foxconn and biostar cough) most AM2/AM2+ boards you are gonna find are gonna be pretty reliable if nothing fancy. I personally love when one of those boards lands in my lap because as I showed you there are a ton of good chips that will fit them that are dirt cheap, it reminds me of the mid 00s with the LGA775 boards where you could fit anything from a netburst celery to a C2Q in 'em.
Oh and as for PSUs? I like Lepa myself for my gaming builds as well as my own PC, they are modular, come with a rubber jacket that goes around the edges of the PSU to damp vibration, really top notch. For the cheap builds I like Apevia models like this one [amazon.com]. Now you may scoff at old Hairy but here is a little "trick" when it comes to the cheaper PSUs...if you make sure the max the system can pull is only around half what the unit is rated for? The cheap PSUs will often last as long as the good PSU. The reason being that most of those PSUs are full of shit when it comes to its output...think that Apevia is 700w? Bullshit its 550w max if that. So if you were to slap it in a system that could never draw more than 400w-450w? It still has plenty of headroom and its pulling right at its maximum that blows those cheapie PSUs. this rule works whether its Apevia or Rosewill or HongFong fakery, just look at how the unit is put together and figure it'll be around half plus 50w-75w what its rated for and you're good to go. Sure it'd be nice if I could just slap a Lepa bronze in everything but if a used unit is only gonna get $200? it makes no sense putting a $85+ power supply in the thing.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday July 19 2015, @04:55PM
I usually pick up a used Enermax PSU off eBay for $25 or so, they run forever and you can load 'em right up to the edge of their stated capacity without a hitch. I have a boxful of salvaged lesser PSUs, useful for this and that, like you say good for when you're not really using all that much juice (and maybe don't care about longevity -- motherboards don't last so well when the PSU is crap). But my everyday systems get an Enermax. My UPS shows actual draw and it's interesting that at idle, the others wander all over the place, but an Enermax will be totally steady. And an Enermax will be made =by= Enermax, not a rebadged gods-know-what.
BTW if you ever need an AT PSU, TOPower still makes one (you can order it direct) and for $65 it's still top-notch. The one in my old everyday box got lightning-fried (thru two layers of surge protection and a UPS) and since I still needed that box ... can't tell the new PSU from the 300W I'd bought 15 years before (and ran 24/7 at max load all those years, replaced the fan a few times), except being a 400W it has more connectors. It weighs just under 5 pounds, honkin' big capacitors and heatsink.
That's unfortunate about the POST testers now. I've gotten assloads of use out of my old one. Works great for pinpointing an invisible problem, or when the system doesn't get as far as ANY beeps or looks dead to the naked eye but really isn't. And when I've bothered to dig deeper, the POST tester has always proved right. Yep, usually nothing we can fix, but handy as hell when the problem isn't something obvious like bad caps. Or when it's bad caps that don't *look* bad. 15 seconds to pinpoint the problem, instead of half an hour connecting and disconnecting shit to find what's being cranky, what's not to like? Also great when you're trying to get an RMA, they believe you right off instead of wasting your time making you check shit you know ain't the problem but is in the tech's script. Well, being it's about $10 for fresh one, not like it's a major investment, and I'll bet my old codebook still matches current codes. Doesn't need to be any more specific than, say, "06 = IDE channel" or whatever. (I used the old one so much I had all the codes memorized, but have since forgotten 'em.)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Monday July 20 2015, @09:48AM
Sadly I rarely get the luxury of using a "used PSU" because the customer doesn't care if its a $120 PSU you are getting them for $35, all they care about is the "used" part. I've had a customer turn down a $100+ Coolermaster gamers PSU used for $30 to to take a shitty $40 550w HongFong fuckery because the crappy was NIB. That is why I grab the Apevia, you can get their "850W" (translation 550W max) for $40 and lets me show the customer its NIB. Most of those types are using some Athlon X3 or C2Q box that ain't gonna pull more than 300W max for its entire lifetime so if they want only NIB and won't shell out for decent parts? Meh here ya go, take some pretty shit with the blue LEDs and crap LOL.
And yeah it sucks but I think what happened is shops went from testing gear to just tossing it and when combined with the race to the bottom mentality most of the good tester gear either quit being made or went to the ultra high dollar server market. the last shop I did some work on the side for had a fucking bad ass board tester, this thing would not only test the unit but plugged into the 24 pin and CPU pin slots and would power the board as it tested it (to give it clean power) and had a tester for both PCI and PCIe. Sounds nice huh? It was....cost nearly $900! for the thing too. Considering I can get new boards for most sockets under $50 spending that much on a tester when its gonna tell me that 90% of the boards are just junk? Yeah just not worth it. the one I linked to will read off the standard BIOS error codes but with everything going UEFI I don't know how long it'll be useful to ya, but its only $7 so if it only helps on a couple boards a year you'll get your moneys worth.
On new boards I stick with Amazon and Tiger as I've never had a bit of trouble getting an RMA without jumping through any hoops. This is why I try not to buy anything from Newegg I can't afford to just chunk in the trash, they can be the worst when it comes to getting an RMA. That said I fucking looooove the case I got for Xmas [newegg.com] as its a fucking beast, toolless everything, sound dampening on the drive cages, and big fat fans that keep everything icy without having to spin fast and whine. I got an FX8320E (love them E CPUs ya know) with 16GB of RAM on an Asus board, R9 280 and 6TB of HDD with an SSD boot stuff in that thing, quiet as a churchmouse. Of course Rosewill is a Newegg brand so I had no choice but when it comes to cases for myself I like big solid tanks with tons of elbow room and the reviewers were right, its solid.
As far as AT goes? I'm lucky in that I get tons of PCs from the building super (who also works for the city so can grab anything he wants from the recycling center) so I'm usually just swimming in parts. The download box I use at the shop? Fricking nice HP Pro 3000 with 4GB of DDR3, C2Q and 500GB HDD that was still in the plastic some rich bitch was tossing, the reason? Hubby got her a Macbook. Ran HDDTune and checked the drive time and the thing had run for less than 30 minutes since it has been bought,never underestimate the ability of rich folks to waste money. Oh well makes a damned good office box and like a lot of parts at the shop cost me $0.00 LOL, gotta love it. Need to contact my buddy across the state that takes my old junkers, starting to get a few too many P4s in the pile and I won't touch those pigs, even the Pentium Ds I instantly drop on the scrap pile as netburst was just too fucking slow and power sucking, I HATED those damned things. He has no problem selling cheapo "granny boxes" so I let him haul off my junk just to keep it from getting dumped in the garbage.
Anyway that one tester is just $7, its worth a shot even if they aren't as good as they used to be. Just be sure to get that PSU tester as that thing works perfectly and getting more than a "pass/fail" really helps you decide whether it needs chunking or just needs put in an office box, well worth the $12 IMHO.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday July 20 2015, @01:40PM
I don't imagine you'll have a customer who needs AT unless they're running some industrial equipment that only speaks to stone-age hardware. AT is otherwise so long gone that after the P233s junked by the local school system we never got any at the user grope. My old Tyan boards swing both ways but are happier with AT than ATX, and they're special so what they want, they get. :)
Yeah I figure for under ten bucks, if I get a couple good uses out of the POST tester then it's paid for itself. Ordered that and the PSU tester, added some cable adapters I needed anyway so I'd get free shipping, then discovered I had a $25 gift card from gods know where plus a $10 coupon I don't recognise either, and my whole order was just about paid for. :)
Me, I'll take the good used part over the crappy new part any day, and as someone once said of cars they all run on used parts. Just picked up another lightly-used Enermax 600W PSU for cheap (the last "used" one I bought off eBay was shiny-new, this one isn't much worse), could use one or two more of these when they come along at the right price but no big rush.
I have cases coming out my ears, when I moved I only kept the ones with lots of drive bays and easy to work in, and still have more than I need. I'm not a big fan of what I've seen in toolless, don't have the control over exactly where things line up that I like to have. But speaking of fans that's another thing I need to order a few of... down to no extra case fans and need to replace this Sunon that's where I can hear it; the durn Sunon fans NEVER fail (great for putting in somewhere that's a bitch to get to), but they sure are noisy. What's reliable, cheap, and quiet nowadays?
Good to know about the RMAs. Tiger used to be the worst in the business, but from what I've been hearing they seem to have turned things around.
In my museum I have a Mac G4 someone paid $4000 for and far as I can tell, never used AT ALL... yeah, makes you wonder. (Except that given the MacOS9 interface, I really don't wonder. They probably were utterly baffled and that was the end of trying to use the damn thing.)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday July 20 2015, @04:04PM
Found my notes on the CPU on the M2N68-AM Plus.... AMD 4850e 2.5GHz. 45W so not bad there!
Someone's comparative benchmarks:
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/K8/AMD-Athlon%20X2%204850e%20-%20ADH4850IAA5DO%20%28ADH4850DOBOX%29.html [cpu-world.com]
Doesn't look like I'd gain much by replacing it, and everything else drinks more juice.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Sunday July 26 2015, @08:50PM
If it were me I'd look at an AMD Phenom X4 9150e [ebay.com] As that would only raise the power by 20w (and that is max, I've found daily usage on one of these to be in the 20w-25w range according to kill-a-watt) and if you keep an eye on ebay you can score them for as low as $10-$15. The 4850e is an okay chip if all you are doing is web surfing but if you actually want to do any heavy lifting, DVD conversion, transcodes, A/V work, then you will quickly run out of oomph with the dual cores.
And I'm glad the POST tester worked out, between that and the PSU tester you should be good to go.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday July 26 2015, @09:26PM
Well, the AMD box isn't intended for everyday regardless... the two Intel quad-cores are 30-40% faster than the best that AMD socket supports, per CPU-world's benchmarks and per checking 'em with Everest. But I'll keep an eye out for a freebie that it can use. :)
I thought the quad would eat more, but my UPS shows actual draw, and with 3 IDE HDs, two opticals, floppy, card reader, 6GB RAM, the 1GB Radeon, and two extra fans -- 89W at idle, 165W running the CPU full-bore.
For comparison, idling:
AMD3200+ (one optical, one FDD, one IDE HDD, one SSD, 4GB RAM): 96W
AMD4850e (2 opticals, one FDD, one IDE HDD, card reader, 2GB RAM): 64W
Intel Q8300 (2GB RAM, nothing else attached or running except the CPU fan): 56W
(Need to find that Q8300 a better mobo... Dell's Foxconn mobo's onboard video maxes out at 8mb!! probably any mobo picked from the trash would be an upgrade.)
That Radeon vidcard sure has stupid fan design, the fan just hangs from the bearing race (blade unit isn't actually mounted on anything!) so it rattles something awful. Disconnected it and tap-screwed an old 486 CPU fan to the heatsink, and it's no worse off for heat and a hella lot quieter.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Monday July 27 2015, @12:12AM
That "30%-40%" is not surprisingly almost exactly what the Intel Cripple Compiler slows down the AMD chips by thanks to using X87 math ONLY instead of using the SSEs and other new math paths. You fire up programs that aren't cripple compiled? You find that until you get to the Intel chips that cost over $600 a pop the average difference is between 3%-6%, on the chips you have its even closer, we're talking 2%-5%. For an example of how fucking badly Intel has been rigging things just check out the Linux benches [phoronix.com] or the ones from Tek Syndicate [youtube.com].
The moral of the story? Unless you are ONLY gonna run benches and programs run through ICC (which luckily for the world the majority of programs are not compiled with the crippler) then you are gonna find that 30%-40% just does not exist and the difference between that C2Q you have and that Phenom X4 I linked to are practically nonexistent. Last I checked handbrake is compiled with GCC so if you wanna run a little informal test yourself encode a video with HB and time it, either cutting the time in half on the 4850e due to it being 2 cores short or even easier just turn off half the C2Q cores by setting the affinity on HB before running it.
And if the Q8300 board has a PCIe the answer is obvious, just watch Tiger for one of those $10 GPU deals. if its an AGP then ebay is your best bet, the Radeon 2400 can be had for around $8 and that is great for just running video, or a Geforce 6200 will likewise be better than onboard while being dirt cheap.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday July 27 2015, @01:21AM
Actually I was going by CPU-world's benchmarks, which use a broad range of tests. For hands-on I use Everest, but it's always pretty much reflected realworld performance (I can detect differences as small as 3% myself, just eyeballing -- I have a ridiculously accurate internal clock). And it's a good match for what I've observed among the "new" frankenputers, to where I'd say CPU-world's marks are dead on.
That Foxconn board has one PCI and one PCIe, probably anything that comes along would be better'n its onboard video (tho I'll give it this, it has good color) but a better motherboard entirely would be better yet! Or could be it'll get some grunt job like ripping discs or serving video over the network, where no one cares if it can even make a picture. That's what I did with the last OMG-this-is-junk-but-it's-fast-junk mobo, made it useful til it died.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Monday July 27 2015, @06:57AM
Well I know Everest and Sandra are paid by Intel to use the crippler so are frankly worthless for testing, don't know what compiler CPU-World uses but if they do not list the compiler I would consider it suspect. If you haven't looked up the tests on how bad the crippler rigs tests you really should, one researcher managed to get a low end Via to "magically" score 35% higher on Sandra benchmarks by simply changing the CPU-ID from centaur hauls to genuine intel. this is why I refuse to sell new Intels in my shop, because if you win fair and square? You deserve the rewards and accolades for a job well done. If you OTOH rig the outcome? Then they should be treated like plague blankets, as rigging benefits nobody but the one doing the rigging. Just look at the price of the i7s trading blows with the FX8350 I linked to, if the tests weren't rigged in most places Intel would not be able to keep their prices 300% higher on those chips.
As for the GPU? Keep an eye on ebay and newegg for the Geforce 210/310 units. They can usually be had for $10-$20, most are silent, and with a GB of DDR 3 they are really great for cheap boxes that lack decent video. Of course if you want to spend nothing just slap on a copy of Win 7 Tiny and use her up. the only thing I didn't care for design wise with the C2Q Q series was the lack of multiple speedstep levels, the box I have at the shop for general purpose is a Q6600 and with an HP mobo its only got 2 speed states, 1600 and 2400 mhz which translates to 119f and 140f when running full bore doing transcodes and that is despite having an aftermarket heatpipe installed. Say what you want about the AMD E series but the temps were a good 10f-15f cooler when I had one of those...man I really shouldn't have sold it LOL.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday July 27 2015, @01:14PM
Methinks the CPU ID compiler flag is being mistaking for deliberate crippling. And it just ain't so. It compiles to reflect a given CPU type's instruction set. AMDs lack some of the Intel instruction set, and have some of their own. You can set the flag however you like. Surely there's some opensource test suite a person could experiment on using the GCC (opensource) compiler and prove that for themselves. Hell, just use GCC and some big ugly codebase like Mozilla as the test case, that ought to take long enough to test basics with, no need for a benchmark app.
As to benchmark twiddling, AMD has hardly been a saint there. They've lied about mathco performance since day one, that being where they generally fall down compared to Intel (and still do). And somehow they always do fantastically better than Intel on gaming-related marks even if they're way behind everywhere else (noticed this on CPU-world too). This leads me to strongly suspect AMDs offload some of their work to the GPU on the sly, being one of the tricks of gaming performance coding, but the benchmark can't see it happen cuz it still passes through the CPU.
And comparing errata (once AMD finally started making theirs available, which they didn't for years) is always an educational experience. (just search for the CPU name plus 'errata'. First example I came to: http://support.amd.com/TechDocs/48671.pdf [amd.com] ) AMD's errata list is generally 3x as long as Intel's, and "no fix planned" seems to be their main response to their own bugs. The erratum that cured me of buying AMD caused 32bit OSs to run in 16bit mode, talk about a performance hit!! mind you this was 1997 so that was pretty durn late to have that be excusable as an early bug, and they never did officially admit to it (I had insider info about it).
This here Q6600 is running at 100 to 120 degrees, depending which sensor you look at (apparently between CPU and mobo, it has four). The mobo is an Intel DQ965GF, Intel stock CPU HSF, PSU has two fans and case has an extra intake fan, plus the unused upper front drive bays are open (which improves the average box by about 10 degrees all by itself). Most of the heat comes from the Radiator, er, Radeon, which has several sensors and runs at 120 to 180 degrees depending which one you look at (prolly was worse with the cover on and the stock fan). The two AMD CPUs are in the same temp range also with stock HSFs, no big advantage there either way.
That Dell mobo doesn't even have IDE or FDD ports, but is fairly smart about booting from USB, so at least it's not devoid of virtue. But what's with having four SATA, 0, 1, 4, 5 but ports 2 and 3 are missing? can Foxconn not count to six without missing a few??
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Monday July 27 2015, @06:16PM
Nope sorry, that was already proven false, how? The very first crippler targeted the Pentium III and NOT the AMD! That is right, before they turned the crippler on AMD they used it on their own chips first! Why would they do that? Because the Pentium III was scoring nearly 40% higher on most benches while costing less than the Pentium IV, they released the crippler, paid the major benchmarking companies to use it and wadda ya know, now with the exact same chips suddenly the Pentium IV is scoring nearly 40% above the chip that was stomping it! Amazing huh?
If you do a little research into the crippler you'll find its been documented by researchers going back to 2000. It was evidence of the crippler that got Intel to shell out 1.25b to AMD (which I still think was a travesty, they should have gotten antitrust like MSFT did) and the P III is not only a smoking gun, but is also evidence of just how badly the crippler cripples code. You see there hasn't been a single chip released by either company that doesn't have SSE 1,2,3 in over a decade which are standardized and identical specs with both companies, right? Well guess what the crippler uses when it detects AMD by CPUID? NOT SSE 3, nor 2, nor even 1, it uses X87 math paths which was depreciated nearly 3 years before the crippler even came out!
So they aren't just rigging friend, they are rigging the living fuck out of the tests as the X87 code path was written waaaaay back when CPUs used an X87 co-processor. This is literally as low as they can possibly go and still put out code that will run, and between that and the fact that the crippler will not even check for the standard SSE extensions? yeah there is no doubt, it was made for the express purpose of rigging, no different than "quack.exe" back in the day.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday July 27 2015, @07:28PM
See, the problem I have with that is there are assloads of compilers, some have CPU-specific optimization and some don't. And you can't count on everyone using the same optimization flags just on Intel's say-so, far from it. (Imagine linux fanboys, most of 'em being AMD fans to boot, doing any such thing... whoops, which OS wouldn't run at all on those buggy AMD chips, back-when? yeah, linux.) If you've got links I'll be happy to read 'em, but I'll also take into consideration whether the source knows what the hell they're talking about, cuz it sounds to me like they're misinterpreting what compiler optimization routines DO, never mind having any clue how many compilers there are to choose from. You can't optimize using a path your host CPU doesn't know how to do, or does so buggy that it's best avoided. Anyway, like I said I'd be glad to read whatever you can point me at, won't hurt my feelings either way, but I'll chase down my old programmer buddy over at OpenWatcom and get his opinion before I take any of it too seriously.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Tuesday July 28 2015, @12:55AM
But SSE 1-3 was written by Intel so to have that standard it HAS to be identical. Now if they have to have SSE as documented by Intel to say its an SSE chip...why would they use X87, which is literally the slowest code path they can choose and still make functional code? The answer why is obvious, its to rig benchmarks. BTW you might like to know Intel admitted to rigging benchmarks [youtube.com] WRT to Pentium 4 as part of a class action settlement. If the company comes right out and says "yep we did it" I really don't know what more proof you need, they flat out admitted they rigged the benches to make P4 beat Athlon when they knew P4 was a dog.
Oh and you might want to check out the various "remove compiler bug" patches out there, researchers have simply patched out the CPUID check on several programs and found the programs run perfectly with the standard SSE codepath with ZERO penalty or crashes, whether its on AMD or Intel. So again why do it, if its only purpose is to slow down the competitor OTHER than you want to make sure any contest is rigged? You can take any FOSS program, compile with ICC and GCC and even though GCC is frankly not nearly had the money sunk into it that ICC has you'll find that the scores? Damned near identical between Intel with ICC and Intel with GCC, we are talking maybe 4%, low enough to be margin for error. So ICC isn't making Intel chips run any faster, all its doing is making AMD chips run slower which is why I hope the current EU investigation nails Intel to the wall, because everything indicates they have been rigging benches since the first P4 release.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday July 28 2015, @02:03AM
Well, that guy in the video is pretty durn vague, not what I'd call definitive. I don't come up with anything for "remove compiler bug" (someone consolidating a GPU driver was the closest match, otherwise nothing). And I've had a whole range of P3/P4 to compare and I'm not seein' what they're bitching about. There's a bigger performance jump between 2GHz and 3GHz than it looks like there oughta be, but you kinda expect a tech to improve as it matures, yes? first few iterations of anything sucks. Sometimes there's no fixing the suck and you back up and start over. But you never admit that in marketing, cuz that's kiss-of-death even if it was the best thing to do.
Back-when I did see AMDs bench well but fall down badly in actual everyday use, the last one I was stuck using myself being (now I feel old) a K6-2 450MHz, and it wasn't even close to the supposedly-equivalent P2/P3, in fact my old P233 ran rings around it, it was embarrassing... and as I recall there was a lot of question about how they got those K6-2 benchmarks to look so good.
Anyway, I don't think anyone is simon-pure here, they're all out for their own advantage, but it's got a ways to go to convince me there's that kind of wrongdoing, and convincing me the performance I can see with my own damn eyes is wrong? That's a real tough sell. I've got my own questions on the current AMDs benchmarks, cuz like I said it looks to me like they're cheating at certain points themselves, there's no way they're suddenly that much faster on gaming-specific functions but simultaneously that much slower at heavy math, but offloading to the GPU and counting it as CPU performance? could be.
Tho truth is I don't care that much who's truly faster than whom, cuz nowadays I'm about as likely to buy a new CPU off the shelf as I am to win the lottery, so whatever comes along as salvage and runs stable is fine with me! Too bad you're not close enough to pillage your scrap heap, prolly lots of stuff I'd cheerfully haul off and put to good use. :)
As the W.D. drive capacity class action suit should have amply demonstrated, the courts are not a quality place to determine blame or truth when it comes to tech stuff, especially when juries are cherrypicked for ignorance and swayability and tech ain't the judge's field either. And what comes out of the EU courts is sometimes a whole different class of crazy.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Tuesday July 28 2015, @07:35AM
It looks like my post didn't go through, so sorry if it ends up being a dupe but here is the article [pcworld.com] and you can even click on the link and get your $15 as part of the settlement. I already filed for mine BTW.
They have been caught multiple times rigging, one Toshiba exec admitted the kickbacks they were getting not to sell AMD chips was "like cocaine" and Michael Dell himself admitted that there was quarters during the great PC price wars where the only Dell profits were Intel kickbacks and that was in court during the discovery phase of the AMD lawsuit which they shelled out 1.25 BILLION to quash...what more proof do ya need?
I myself was a diehard Intel+Nvidia guy...UNTIL it came out how badly the two corps was rigging, now not a single chip by either corp will be bought by my shop! Did AMD have some bad runs in the past? Sure, so did Intel, anybody that had an Abit or MSI will tell ya that, and I have to wonder how many of AMD's problems were because Intel had rigged the market so badly that no board OEMs were willing to spend top dollar developing AMD boards knowing no OEM sales would come from it? I know that in their SCC filing they stated that one of the big reasons for buying ATI was to have control of the quality of the chipsets, and if you were dealing with K6-2s you know how bad those were. Remember those Via chipsets? Shudder.
But I can tell ya right now I'll happily take the Pepsi challenge against any Intel chip 2 to 3 times the price of my FX8320E and have zero doubt I'll win, just sitting here watching Judas Priest in concert while typing this AND using Handbrake to transcode a bunch of old vids for my mom convinces me of that. Know what the highest wattage I've gotten my board to is? 67w and that is with all 8 cores slammed to the firewall, on regular usage I'm only pulling between 8w and 16w. Oh video just got done, current pull for 8 tabs with a 1080P YouTube vid going? 23w at 1400Mhz.
If you wanna support a company that admits they are rigging the game? That is your choice, but I believe in a free market and a fair game, so Intel is brought to task (hopefully by the Eu antitrust investigation) and is forced to stop stacking the deck? No new Intel chips will cross my door. But if you decide you wanna max out that 4850E board on the cheap? Keep an eye out for the Phenom I quad Es on ebay, or hell grab one of the first gen Phenoms, I've gotten them for as low as $8 thanks to the TLB bug and I can tell ya from selling dozens of those that you got better odds hitting the powerball than hitting that bug. Heck when that bug was announced and the Phenom IIs hit I was buying those chips by the fistload and making everything from office boxes to gaming systems out of 'em, never once did I hit the bug.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday July 28 2015, @03:14PM
I read the PDF. Looks damning on the surface, but it's all undocumented allegations and quotes out of context. That it's a class action suit and not an actual investigation causes me to eye its credibility and interpretation-of-events well-salted and from a safe distance.
It's important to remember that class action suits are not about exposing wrongdoing or making things right. They are entirely about making lawyers rich (one plaintiff gets rich as a byproduct, everyone else gets a token settlement and ultimately higher prices -- where d'you think the money comes from to pay for all this??) Remember that the lawyer got 30-50% of the core settlement, in cash. As a rule the lawyer picks the target (here being Intel), then basically hires someone to be the plaintiff (get 'em to claim they were wronged and they both make out like bandits... funny how sometimes a given lawyer and plaintiff have an ongoing relationship). Class action suits are so inherently crooked as to invalidate whatever they're supposedly meant to redress. Remember there is no one investigating whatever evidence is presented, other than the defense's lawyers. There's absolutely no independent corroboration of anything. There's no way of knowing if maybe AMD and the lawyer had an understanding on the side, either. You sue them, we look good in the marketplace.
Intel was the target because they had the deep pockets. If AMD had the deeper pockets, they'd have been the target instead (doesn't take much to give a class-action suit an opening that will hold up in court, because it's not about proof as we'd think of it, only about convincing the court to make someone pay, not so hard in today's legal climate). Consider that this is about events going on 15 years ago, and if that's really relevant to anything today. One reason you do class-action over old events is that by now a lot of the evidence that could nix your suit is gone to the bit bucket -- makes it hard to disprove even if what you've got is totally out of context. Sometimes it comes out years later that the evidence presented was bogus, too (eg. Erin Brockovich case).
And once there's a class action suit, the company being sued *cannot* admit wrongdoing, even if they might otherwise, cuz that would be legal suicide.
I suspect if you had access to the same level of documents out of AMD, you'd be twice as shocked (especially considering how much massaging of their gaming benchmarks was going on back in the K6/K7 era, tho looks like more of same today, to me). I can tell you for a fact they hid fatal bugs like the won't-do-32bit-OS bug I mentioned before. Ever wonder why Windows insisted on running in 16bit mode on some AMD boards? That was it. I wouldn't know about it either except a 13 year old friend had nothing better to do than harass AMD engineers til he got an explanation (and a replacement chip) ... under the table. "You didn't hear it from us." Back then, AMD didn't publish errata at all.
That there wasn't as much effort put into AMD boards? Not so from what I saw -- when you get high-end companies like Tyan supporting AMD in their server-class boards, well, that argument kinda breaks down. Cheaper tends to attract cheaper, and AMD was pursuing the lower end, so we got all those AMD+VIA pieces of shit to satisfy the cheapskate end of the market, but that's the same market force that puts cheap all in the same box together everywhere, not just tech. Go to Walmart and look at cheap tools, you won't find any German carbide tips in the made-in-China set.
Dunno if it's the bug you're talking about but about 5-6 years ago I was at a friend's shop and he was having hell's own time with an AMD64, not sure what model but whatever was their top-of-the-line at the time, on a primo Tyan server board ... put a high-end nVidia card on it and use Windows magnifier, and the thing would lock up every time. Put an AMD32 on the board, or anything but an nVidia, and the problem went away.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday July 29 2015, @01:59AM
Hey! got the power tester. Works a treat. Applied it to my whole boxful, weeded out a couple, nodded a couple times on units I'd thought were iffy (oho, that one I'd marked "iffy" is spiking, that's what's wrong with it.. and that one I'd marked "weak" can barely do 10v on the 12v rail). Became even more of an Enermax bigot... runs closest to spec across the board, and it's more stable under load than with nothing on it (was handy to check with a couple HDs plugged in, so I did). Now to spend an hour cannibalizing fans out of the rejects. Well, I needed a few fans...
Anyway thanks for pointing me at it -- dandy little tool. You're a pal. Have a beer!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday July 29 2015, @11:32AM
Sorry I can't touch alcohol, gives me a headache :-(
The bug I was talking about is the "TLB Bug" which like the old Pentium II floating point bug you have better chance of hitting the lotto, only in the AMD case it was even harder to hit. Basically certain kinds of math (the kind a normal person will never use BTW, as I was never able to hit it even doing heavy transcodes) will cause the TLB buffer to dump which slows down cache look ups...big fricking whoop, especially when that bug meant you could buy quads for under $40 then and less than $12 now!
And its a hell of a slog but if you want all the proof you'll ever need that Intel rigs? Look up the court transcripts for the AMD VS Intel case. During the discovery phase they interviewed a LOT of high level guys from the big OEMs and they all gave the same story, Intel threw them shitloads of money to NOT carry anything but low tier AMD chips, likewise they paid the big benchmarking groups (which they still do to this day BTW, all the DoJ required is they stick a "warning" in ICC that basically says it sucks for anything but Intel chips) piles of cash in "advertising incentives" to only use ICC with their suites. this is why the Linux sites had wildly differing scores then and now, they use GCC as a matter of course so no ICC rigging.
And the bug your friend ran into was NOT with AMD, it was the fact that a lot of the tools in XP were using crap code from the Win9X days and 16bit code didn't work on 64bit CPUs. This is why I pushed a lot of clients to XP X64, it was 100% legacy free thanks to being Server 2K3 X64 with an XP skin. Now of course we don't have to worry about that since MSFT ditched the legacy crap with Vista, we only have to worry about the frankenstein mess that is the Win 10 settings/control panel monster LOL.
Anyway glad the tool worked out for ya, you'd be surprised at how many weird errors can be traced back to crap power. The nice thing about that model is unlike your old "pass/fail" you'll find a LOT of PSUs that it would give a "pass" to IRL were right on the line or suffering from serious drops. Have fun ripping apart all those PSUs LOL!
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday July 29 2015, @12:20PM
The client needed 64bit. The common factor for any lockup was the AMD64 chip. Couldn't MAKE the system fail without it. Could lock it up 100% reliably with it. With the AMD64 on there, pretty much any messing with the video would lock up but the magnifier was a quick and easy test that didn't fuck with anything (like configuration stuff).
I put XP64 on the "new" box, cuz, 6GB RAM that fell on my head. Some things are definitely better'n XP, tho I find myself missing small fixes from SP3 here and there, and I'm gonna have to find some solution less awkward than DOSBox for a few old apps I still need.
Well, if I can't buy ya a beer, how about an ice tea or a lemonade? :)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday July 29 2015, @07:30PM
Then I bet it was a bad chip, look at the errata on either Intel or AMD sometime, a lot of little "quirks" means that bad chips DO come off the line sometimes. I once had a customer whose computer was constantly corrupting, turned out his particular P4 was bad. Basically any math more complex than your basic maths would cause all kinds of weird returns you could put in a complex equation in the thing and it would give you a different answer every.single.time. Weirdest shit. Ran into a similar problem with an AM2 Sempron owned by my former landlady, everything else worked beautifully but that Sempron would corrupt the OS over time. tossed it for an Athlon dual? She is still using it to this day.
Funny that you should mention tea as that is what I'm having right now, we southerners gotta have our sweet tea ya know ;-)
And have ya tried virtualbox? Its been awhile since I ran Win9X on it but VB worked perfectly with 98SE last time I needed it and Win98 was so light on resources pretty much any box in the last decade can run multiple Win98 instances without breaking a sweat. Of course if you are always getting old boxes you might want to just slap together an Win9X box, you should already have a KVM (and if you haven't got one, why? They are fricking GREAT!) and pretty much any old thing will run Win98 which gives you native DOS as well as all those Win9x programs that don't run anymore. For years I kept a SFF Compaq 733MHz with a TNT 2 for a Win9x box, it was small enough it could be propped on its side behind a desk and was ready for whenever I felt like a little Mechwarrior 3. You can pick up a 4 port PS2 KVM for a little of nothing and its certainly easier than dealing with DOSBox.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday July 29 2015, @08:55PM
Yeah, it's probably time to try VirtualBox. With 6GB RAM in the XP64 box I have no excuse not to, haha. Actually I'd like to clone my entire old Win98 setup, DOS utils and all, and have that available in a VM. I still have its hardware (for that matter I still have my Win95 box intact, among others) but seriously, how many machines do I need running at once? :)
DOSbox makes me crazy, what with the mount/unmount crap. I guess there's an easier way to make it load stuff automagically, but I'll have to look it up again.
I've had a Belkin 4-holer KVM since forever, must be 25 years old, it has both PS/2 and AT keyboard ports! but it won't speak to these newfangled flatscreen monitors at all, not even the ones that still do regular analog VGA.
Have had a couple cheapie KVMs since but one issue or another with 'em, like can get video and mouse to work but not keyboard. And seems they are actually USB devices despite being connected via PS/2 and vidports, and draw a LOT of power, didn't realise that til one day Windows bitched that "a USB device is drawing power beyond its specs" and shut down the KVM! My old KVM has a wall wart, but these newer cheapies don't.
Need to get one that will speak to a USB-wireless mouse, and a 4-holer, but don't want to spend a fortune on it. ConnectPro are supposed to work best but I really don't want to spend that much. Had in mind more like this price range but no idea if the unit is any good.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/390773804184 [ebay.com]
With regular USB connectors, I've found you can power ANY device that's on a hub with a wall wart and everything on the hub will draw from it, so that might be a workaround if that drawing-too-much-juice is a chronic issue. (Figured that out when my unpowered hub was suddenly powering everything hooked to it even when it wasn't connected to the PC... cuz the one USB HD has its own wall wart and the hub was evidently drawing off that.)
Always possible that AMD64 was a bad chip, but when they're still an $800 chip you don't exactly keep spares in inventory, so that theory was kinda hard to test on the spot. But as it happens he went looking online and turns out he wasn't the only one affected; it was indeed a known bug. Much swearing ensued. I don't know what he finally ended up doing about it.
I've read some of the errata sheets, and sometimes you wonder how the hell something so obvious sneaked past the engineers!!
And now I think I'll have a cup of min tea in your honor :)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Thursday July 30 2015, @05:36AM
Well if you find a good 4 port USB KVM, will ya let me know? Everyone I've looked at under $100 has serious "gotchas" like not picking up the EDID so your screen is boned every time you switch or Windows not reading on boot or complaining something is unplugged when you switch. I have a couple year old PS2 KVM, Trendnet I think (not crawling back there to look LOL) that works perfectly with my 1080P monitor, so much so I'm seriously thinking of plunking down $30 for a USED gaming mouse so I can have more than 3 buttons supported by PS2. you would not believe how fricking hard it is to find a PS2 mouse that has more than the standard 3 buttons, just nuts.
BTW you will want to AVOID that unit unless you have space on your deck for it! I had one just like it, ended up giving it away as they do NOT have hotkey support! I don't know about you but I have enough shit on my desk so if I can't go "scrolllock scrollock (numberkey)" its just not worth a piss to me. For some damned reason the USB KVMs are kinda notorious for being buggy, why its so damned hard for them to simply emulate a keyboard and mouse is beyond me but I've looked at a couple dozen so far and its all the same, hassles and BS.
And yeah not having a testing unit does suck, I would have probably gone to my nearest repair shop and seen if they had one they'd let me use. You'd be surprised how easy it is to get help from most shop guys if you just bullshit with us for a bit, we are usually bored so somebody that can talk the lingo? Will usually get extra consideration.
But if you have any luck finding a decent USB KVM let me know, been running KVMs for 20 years and just can't go back to running singles, ya know?
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday July 30 2015, @04:30PM
You gave away one like the cheapie KVM I linked to, or the ConnectPro? I can live without a hotkey -- if there's gotta be just one or the other I prefer having the switch, cuz that still works if for some reason it's lost track of a keyboard (my old KVM has both). It's gonna go behind my monitor regardless, not so far to reach. Might help the small clutter stop accumulating there, haha. Cables reproducing like snakes instead, that's the ticket. What lies behind every great computer? A mess of wires! :)
I thought it might be that the antique KVM doesn't know over 1024x768, but that's the default on my workbench flatscreen, and it doesn't like that one any better. It's just not getting some signal it expects, I guess. And if it doesn't get video, it assumes there's nothing there, so can't use it just for keyboard.
Right now I've got 3 keyboards, two wireless mice, one monitor with a cable dangling and 3 cables from the 3 in-use boxen (so when I switch I'm only wearing out the end of a cable that's handy in reach, not a port on something valuable I have to do contortions to get at) which is a nuisance compared to a good KVM, for sure, but a KVM that only half works was worse.
The guy fighting with the AMD64 *was* the repair shop, only one left for about an hour in any direction, not counting Worst Buy. It's a dying industry. Life was better when there was a clone shop on every corner, and everyone could afford to keep a broad inventory in stock. The Chinese mob put a lot of the orientals' shops out of business in California (and probably elsewhere), and disposables and phones are doing for the rest of it. I'm not even tripping over many knowledgeable amateurs anymore. PC user groups are a thing of the past, or populated by octogenarians. Here's hopin' you stay in business, long and profitable.
I don't use the mouse for gaming, makes my wrist hurt, so I'm no help to ya there.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Friday July 31 2015, @03:25AM
It was one of the cheapies, I really hate spending $$$ on something that should be a simple build like a KVM. I mean its just a fricking switch that lies to a PC and says something is hooked when it isn't, why is that so damned hard to get right? I'll probably end up biting the bullet and just getting the $30 mouse as it'll end up cheaper than having to buy a new KVM switch AND a new keyboard AND a new mouse. If somebody wants me to work on their USB only PC? Well I got a couple spare 16x9 monitors in the back, I'll just slap one on.
And the shops that died? Did so because they were DUMB, they tried to pretend the world doesn't change instead of changing with it! Now instead of the big sellers being office boxes its HTPCs, home theater installs, and service calls. You'd be surprised how many are willing to pay $40 an hour (plus $25 service call fee) just to have their PC worked on at home so they don't have to drag the thing in. Hell I have one customer that pays me at least every other month just to do dumb little shit like show him how to do some browser settings or clear his cache. He says "I'd rather just pay to have you come out so I know that it works where I'm at, rather than bring it in and then get it home and find I don't know how to get it going"...customer is always right LOL! I'm lucky in that a lot of my HTPC customers aren't snobs, as long as its a decent price and lets them watch YouTube and BS on FB from their big comfy chair? They couldn't care less if I built the thing in some no name black case I had laying around.
You should probably try a little of that on the side bud, pretty much anything from a Pentium D on up makes for a decent HTPC as long as you optimize and install the right software. Got a customer downstairs with an old 2.6GHz Pentium D I just threw together out of the parts pile and all he does is rave to anybody who will listen about the thing, I showed him how to download concert videos from YouTube so he had me get him a 2TB and put in it and now he has every live show from AC/DC to The Wall just blasting on his 40 inch, showing it off to anybody who'll look. That is another mistake too many shops make, you have to get folks excited about what they are getting, show 'em the cool shit they can do. Folks are happy to shell out when they can show off their purchases, and they are happy to shell out when they feel you are treating 'em right. Show 'em how MediaPortal works, show 'em how to download a YouTube video, simple shit like that makes a big impression. The shop down the street charged HALF what I did...he is out of business, I'm still here, why? Because he always did the bare minimum, didn't install an AV, didn't install the patches, all he would do is remove the bug or fix the problem and hand it back with a bill, not even attempting to help them avoid that problem in the future. People get frustrated with PCs, make 'em feel at ease, make 'em feel like it could happen to anybody so they don't feel stupid, little things like that.
Anyway if you have any luck with the USB KVM let me know. If your wrist hurts have you tried one of the "handshake" style mice? the kind you use in the handshake position? My former boss had RSI and used one of those, he could frankly kick your ass at Q3 Deathmatch and he could use that all day without hurting his wrist. I've been trying to use a big ass flightstick... its setting in the box because I can't get the hang of the damned thing LOL. I guess I've used KB and mouse so long trying to go back to stick is hell, I guess I'll have to dload one of the flightstick profiles from one of the YouTubers that are good at it, because damned if I can get the thing set up right. BTW sorry if there is errors in grammar or spelling, the little one had me up at the crack o dawn looking at furniture...groan. She hates living in an apt so we are fixing up a little 3 bedroom singlewide that belonged to my late sister. Managed to swap out nearly all the painting, carpentry, and plumbing, once its all done all we have to do is slap in the furniture and turn on the cable...man I am soooo not looking forward to having to move 10 years worth of fricking stuff LOL!
But good luck on the search, need any tips or tweaks you know where to holler.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday July 31 2015, @04:14AM
Yeah, I know what you mean -- back when I was doing housecall PC repairs and custom builds, my customers were so loyal they'd wait forever rather than call someone else, mostly cuz I made 'em feel like they could use their shit how they wanted to use it, instead of leaving 'em with this mystery beige box they didn't understand. While back one of 'em sent me $300 out of the blue, cuz that's what she felt like she owed me for misc. service and help over the years. (Way more than I ever charged her.) How's that for tangible appreciation! Been out of that business a long time, tho, and haven't kept up on new tech.
Having watched the clone industry fall apart around Los Angeles -- mostly it was the cheap disposable PCs, got real tough even at the low end to compete with $300 HPs from Worst Buy, and there was never enough volume of custom work to make up the difference. The survivors had networking contracts that paid the rent, cuz custom boxes and components for DIYers wasn't enough anymore.
I suspect with a handshake mouse, my shoulder would be killin' me instead of my wrist. It ain't that hard to make a game be keyboard-friendly, and if they're not, well, I can't claim I'm all that interested in most of 'em anyway.
Hey, I'd take the singlewide over an apartment any day, at least you don't have to share walls with your neighbor!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Saturday August 01 2015, @07:10AM
you sound like the wife, she has been over there painting at night just trying to rush it along a little faster. I don't know which has her more wound up, having a full kitchen with a dishwasher instead of a kitchenette or the fact she is getting one of the two spare bedrooms for her photography, the other is gonna be a little mini-studio for me. I've lived in apts most of my life so it really doesn't phase me, but losing my dad in May and mom having declining health means living closer would probably be wise and with the singlewide literally being next door if there is a problem i can just walk across the way and be there when I'm needed.
And it sounds like they did the same dumb shit in LA that many of 'em tried to do here, which was compete on price...NEVER a good idea, they will always have economies of scale on their side. Instead you compete with quality of service and offers they don't have like integrating with home theater setups and doing service calls. And you're right they are VERY loyal because they know I'm gonna make sure its doing everything they want it to do, if it takes 5 minutes or 5 hours. I always tell 'em "If you want a cheap pile of junk? Feel free to grab a 'Walmart Special', just don't be surprised when it drags thanks to all the crapware and 'service' is one guy in India that keeps telling ya to reboot". Hell I WISH there was a Worst Buy here, I had a shop down the street from a Worst Buy once, made a mint off their irate customers bringing their 'fixed' PCs to me LOL. But I got tired of the hour long commute through crazy traffic and came back home. Now the only "competition" I have is the phone place down the street and I get along with them fine, if somebody needs phone work I send them their way, if their customer asks about computers or home theaters they send 'em my way, works nicely.
But if you ever decide you want to make a little extra scratch just check out mediaportal, its crazy easy to set up, has hundreds of drop in plug ins so you can easily customize it to their tastes, and it'll run on pretty much any PC made in the last decade. You can take pretty much any black box, slap on MP and add a cheap $20 Lenovo wireless keyboard and voila! Instant HTPC. With every TV coming with HDMI its plug and play, just pop into the GPU control panel and set TV mode and you're done. You'd be surprised how many folks are sick of watching YouTube on their little screens but have no clue how to get it on their TVs and they quickly find all those little "sticks" like Roku just too limited. Once you've set up a couple HTPCs word of mouth takes care of the rest, easy peasy.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday July 26 2015, @07:40PM
Got the new POST tester (stuff is trickling in from Amazon practically one gadget at a time) and happy as hell with it. Initial check shows it's reporting accurately. Good documentation booklet too, has all the codes. It'll earn its keep.
Now eyeing the CPU from the resurrected Dell and wondering if it's worth swapping onto the better mobo ... two different Intel quad cores.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday July 14 2015, @03:59AM
There's always the suite, SeaMonkey. Same Gecko engine as Firefox, most extensions just work, and the UI is much more lightweight then Firefox as well as stable.
It's sad that now the lightweight browser is the suite that Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox was meant to replace.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @01:00PM
Yes, thanks for the suggestion, even though i'm not going to use any of these services. Since pocket can't be removed, it'll still be there. Mozilla is a sell out. Pocket should not be included by default and it should be removable, and hiding the disable switch is just low. Mozilla is free to recommend anything, but forcing you to have pocket is the evil deed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @01:22PM
Zotero can manage your snapshots completely locally. You can get an account on their server and store your stuff there, but you're not required to.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @02:24PM
If you do the config:about and search for Pocket, you can do more than just toggle the setting for the task bar. Edit all the properties including the oAuth token and the URL to call back to and just blank all of them. Same for Loop, which is for the Hello app.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @01:51PM
Seems that, like Pocket (formerly ReadItLater), Zotero also reports back to the mothership.
I currently use Scrapbook [mozilla.org] which is local only.
I'm thinking about trying Wallabag [mozilla.org] which sounds like it will report back to your mothership if you so choose.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheMessageNotTheMessenger on Monday July 13 2015, @04:15PM
You can host your own Wallabag instance on your own machine, it's written in PHP.
Supposedly all these 'read-it-later' services use a similar protocol, which is why the mozilla org claims they should have it be part of FF.
Which makes sense if they didn't hook it up to Pocket by default but instead asked you to choose a service the first time you pressed the button.
Hello! :D
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @06:16PM
Yes, I did notice that you can config the web address of pocket.
(Score: 5, Informative) by pkrasimirov on Monday July 13 2015, @12:55PM
Once a fresh new app (Phoenix), nowadays I see Firefox only as a steam train out of control. It defaults to more and more bloatware like Mozilla at the time. The very reason Phoenix was created.
(Score: 5, Informative) by ikanreed on Monday July 13 2015, @12:58PM
Not to worry: open source means that firefox has non-shitty forks.
I, personally, use Pale Moon now. Which is basically firefox sans the corporate bullshit.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @01:10PM
I'd try Pale Moon, but guess what! The download is on sourceforge! AAAAAAAAAAAAA
http://www.palemoon.org/ [palemoon.org]
(Score: 4, Informative) by ikanreed on Monday July 13 2015, @01:19PM
No, it isn't.
http://relmirror.palemoon.org/release/palemoon-websetup.exe [palemoon.org] - that's pretty clearly not sourceforge.net.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @01:27PM
That may be true, but the Linux download page takes me here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pm4linux/ [sourceforge.net]
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday July 13 2015, @01:35PM
Oh, right, linux. That's important too.
But then again, the best way to get pale moon on linux is your distro's preferred variation on apt.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @01:40PM
What if your distro doesn't have a package manager? Ok, I know, I know. :)
I'm building it from source (http://gnu.mirror.vexxhost.com/gnuzilla/) now.
(Score: 2) by kadal on Monday July 13 2015, @08:23PM
On the forum, they said that they were going to move from SF soon.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 13 2015, @04:57PM
http://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=8515 [palemoon.org]
Pale Moon for Linux is moving!
Postby Moonchild » Fri Jun 12, 2015 7:48 am
Pale Moon for Linux will be moving from SourceForge to our own in-house server soon. Version 25.5.* will be the last version that is offered on SourceForge.
We are moving away from SourceForge for a few reasons:
Pale Moon includes strong encryption methodology that would be subject to US cryptography export laws on SourceForge. Since we have no intention to compromise on user security, we are currently using SourceForge in the "grey area" of still being condoned as-such, but it's not exactly correct.
SourceForge has been very unscrupulous in its applying of stub installers to Open Source software to bundle "offers"; even going as far as hijacking abandoned accounts to plant their stub installers in place or otherwise control previous projects' sites without consent. We cannot condone that kind of behavior.
SourceForge is too advertisement-heavy these days to be a comfortable place to host Pale Moon.
We will be posting more details as the new site/server is being set up.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @01:11PM
Just installed Pale Moon and trying a first submit with it.
(Score: 3, Funny) by nitehawk214 on Monday July 13 2015, @03:01PM
Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moon light?
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 3, Informative) by Kell on Tuesday July 14 2015, @12:23AM
Yes: it turns out the dude has rhythm.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 1) by xorsyst on Monday July 13 2015, @01:38PM
Is there any way to get the tab bar on the side in Palemoon?
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday July 13 2015, @01:48PM
Not that I'm aware of. They initially forked because of UI disagreements, like about where tabs go along the top and whatnot. But I personally switched because Mozilla added the third unwanted plugin and I decided I was done.
(Score: 4, Informative) by TK on Monday July 13 2015, @01:57PM
I use Tree Style Tabs [sakura.ne.jp] in Palemoon. Works great.
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @03:00PM
You should put a proper attribution to your sig.
(Score: 3, Funny) by JNCF on Monday July 13 2015, @11:22PM
You should put a proper attribution to your sig.
The mind that wrote those words, in turn, had greater minds to go on,
While these again had greater still, and greater still, and so on.
(Score: 2) by TheB on Monday July 13 2015, @03:57PM
Can't browse without Tree Style Tabs anymore.
70+ open tabs would be unmanageable without it.
That and All-in-One Sidebar make full use of a widescreen monitor.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @04:17PM
If you have 70+ tabs open, you have different problems
(Score: 2) by zugedneb on Monday July 13 2015, @08:05PM
6+ months uptime...
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
(Score: 2) by GoonDu on Tuesday July 14 2015, @01:22AM
B-but I may read them later! Sure, I opened that tab 6 months ago, but I will get back to it! Just let me finish this wikipedia article...
(Score: 2) by zugedneb on Tuesday July 14 2015, @01:38AM
manuals, articles, anime, manga, youtube + various shit. it ads up.
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
(Score: 3, Funny) by Popeidol on Tuesday July 14 2015, @08:40AM
You might be interested in a new browser feature designed to let you close the tabs down now while putting them in list for you to read later
It's called Pocket...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2015, @07:24AM
That Firefox memory management sucks?
Apart from that problem, 70+ tabs works just fine, and has done so at least since Opera 6.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @02:09PM
The version in this post works: http://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=7269#p47076 [palemoon.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2015, @01:49AM
I keep going to download Pale Moon, but every time I check they claim OSX in development.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2015, @07:11AM
Trying it out, but FF is still functionally better. I burned my 'warranty' with about:config and messed up the settings, urls, etc for pocket. This is getting really sad for me as I have used FF since before v1.0.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday July 13 2015, @12:58PM
The technology is old. I remember an addon for my palm pilot III in '98 or so that did the same deal, download a web page and put it on a hand held device with some reformatting for later viewing. The problem is there was nothing I knew now that I wanted to download and look at an old version of in the future, and if there is anything like that it would probably be a PDF on dropbox, anyway. Since then the idea won't die, its a moth to the flame because its so easy to implement technologically, yet so useless. I predict this technology will continue to be re-invented and pushed for as long as we still have hand held media consumption devices.
The business model of monitoring everything you do with it and sell the data to the highest bidder is somewhat new when combined with the above, so that is "startup innovative", however unsavory.
There is an interesting marketing aspect that its easy to come up with historical events where, if I could predict the future, I'd have saved something for later portable viewing. Well, not many events but it has happened. So sell that experience as why you need it today, ignoring the little problem of needing to be able to predict the future.
(Score: 2) by AndyTheAbsurd on Monday July 13 2015, @01:01PM
I don't know about anyone else, but I don't see any added value to Pocket over just being able to sync bookmarks and tabs, and share links with my friends and collegues over any of the dozen or so communications media that we may already share (e-mail, Skype chat, Twitter, IRC, Facebook, Facebook chat, Google Plus, Google Hangouts, HipChat, Slack, etc...hell, I used to have Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger accounts but I have no idea if I could sign in to them anymore since I haven't used them in years). Am I just missing something? Or is Firefox trying to (finally!) add features to differentiate itself from Chrome, instead of seeming to just blindly copy what Chrome has done?
(Yes, I'm a grumpy old man. Get off my lawn!)
Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @01:10PM
The added value is all your personal information they can sell to line their pockets.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by KBentley57 on Monday July 13 2015, @01:01PM
I hate to hate on companies, but FF has been dying a slow death for years in my opinion. As with all companies, it seems like they are at their best / most trustworthy in their 'build' phase, where they are up and coming. Remember the FF 3-4 era? What more could a person have wanted from a web browser. Features are nice, html5, sync, ect... but once the constant UI changes started, search engine switching, all those small things add up to bother users. Not to mention the deviation from what should be a single focused task - FF OS. I like the idea of firefox, just not the direction it has taken in the last few years.
I am glad they put thunderbird on maintenance. It's my fav. desktop email client, and it's complete. It doesn't need anything else to be added, and it's being left alone, as it should be.
Chromium on linux has been the browser of choice for about a year. Like all good things, it has its own set of problems. However, it gives the best browsing experience for me at the moment.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday July 13 2015, @01:27PM
The giant advantage of open source, though, is that if an organization becomes a problem, there is always the option to say "Fork you!", take the code, and the only thing lost will be the brand name and marketing. This has already happened numerous times: OpenOffice->LibreOffice, Xfree86->X.org, Ubuntu->Mint, green site->SoylentNews/Pipedot, etc.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by KBentley57 on Monday July 13 2015, @01:42PM
In concept I agree, the source is there and can at least be preserved.
However, a huge open source project is still a huge project. Because we have the source doesn't mean a fork is easy. Look at the backers of the projects you mentioned. Mint(http://www.linuxmint.com/sponsors.php), LibreOffice( AMD, Google, Red Hat, SUSE, Intel...more), X.org(basically same as LO), and others. I'm actually very surprised to see SN continually up and running with the low level of funding, low number of devs, and so on.
The barrier of entry/modification makes it highly improbable that even a internet-community driven effort could evolve FF into something significantly different that what it is now. Palemoon is an example, but even that project has a crap level of documentation/build details. Iceweasel isn't different than FF, though I suspect that it would have the best chance of survival with the large debian ecosystem.
It takes money for large projects, and without it, they do not change.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by zugedneb on Monday July 13 2015, @08:11PM
What you say is the reason for me never donating money to any project, although I would like to.
With "sufficient" resources, the projects just grow until a spoon is not a spoon any more.
Also, the better economy, the more psychos in the staff...
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Tuesday July 14 2015, @02:46AM
This exactly. It always strikes me as a huge shame when a team refuses to release their freeware as OSS, as the people involved are almost guaranteed to become busy or bored at some point and let the project fade away (or be bought out by a company uninterested in it).
However, I wouldn't include OpenOffice/LibreOffice in that list... AFAICT, the only 'crime' that OpenOffice.org committed was refusing to let a subset of the developers change the direction of development to suit their own preferences. (I'm glad they didn't agree to it, as the add-ons integrated into LO aren't useful for me and eat up markedly more resources, causing it to run more slowly & struggle on my Core2Duo laptop to handle files OO works with smoothly.)
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @01:49PM
> FF has been dying a slow death for years in my opinion
Netflix confirms it.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Monday July 13 2015, @05:26PM
Hmm... on my setup, Netflix kills FF really quickly. But I thought that was a Siverlight on Linux issue.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @06:45PM
Whoosh.
(Score: 1) by NullPtr on Monday July 13 2015, @06:54PM
You're joking. I've recently switched back to firefox, having used chrome for years. What swung it was firefox dropping their old, bizarre, shitty, tedious syncing system and going with the obviously superior "username and password" model. Also, the android app is far improved from the first naff effort. And chrome doesn't support plugins, so you have to look at adverts. Also, chrome is slow on android, and a memory hog on the desktop. Firefox has come on in leaps and bounds since I last used it maybe 6 or 7 years ago.
Also, what's all this bollocks about Pocket spying on you? If you use it, which is optional, then obviously it knows what you're reading. Duh! That's the whole point. Again, I have it installed on desktop/phone and when I go on holiday I use Calibre to dump all the stored articles into a .mobi and send to my kindle for offline reading. If you don't want to be tracked, pull your finger out and get tails and use tor.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @10:18PM
Also, what's all this bollocks about Pocket spying on you? If you use it, which is optional,
It's not optional when it's opt out instead of opt in. I've used FF for years and this was the first I'd heard of Pocket.
(Score: 1) by NullPtr on Thursday July 16 2015, @07:32AM
If you can opt out, it's optional. Also, unless you sign up for an account, it's not adding links and therefore not tracking you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @01:03PM
I just noticed that my firefox was updated to 39.0 even though i did not update it myself, atleast not intentionally. If they did that, then i'm removing this shit immediately. FUCK!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @01:09PM
Windows?
Go to the start menu and type in "add remove", go to "Add or remove programs" and find "Mozilla update service" and uninstall that trash.
When you install Firefox, on its installer stub's first page there's an "options" thing that you should always make sure to click on to disable the update service and IIRC some telemetry gathering trash.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @01:22PM
I had that update thingy telling me there's a new version and i'm pretty damn sure that i clicked 'tell me later' every time. Now i see it's 39.0. But like i put in another post, it's not EME free version anymore. I had EME free version before, so the update just took away my choise too.
Fuck this. First thing is to downgrade, second is to start looking for something else.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @01:26PM
That, and never go to help/about. It will automatically pull an update. I forget if it is kind enough to tell you what you had prior to forcing new changes upon you.
I switched to Pale Moon after trying a few alternatives. I otherwise have FF still installed, but I am using the 24.x ESR version. There are few things out there that do not work in the browser, despite all the doom and gloom some sites announce (You're in an outdated browser!") The verison is from Dec 2013 I think -- this is not ancient. My life hasn't changed so much I need to be on version 39...
Pale Moon has been incredibly reliable and there are forks to work on older 32 bit OSes as well (XP/2003 and atom processors). It works great on systems that have little CPU power--little being a relative term, as it runs OK on some pentium 3/pentium 4 hardware I have that provide services I haven't replaced with a raspberry pi yet...
It's not perfect and I don't claim it is; there will probably always be a need to have Lynx installed (or to set the user agent to it).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @01:54PM
Man, am I glad that I'm on Linux where this shit is simply impossible. Separate root/user accounts FTW!
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 13 2015, @04:46PM
"Separate root/user accounts FTW!"
I have multiple instances of Firefox, and muliple profiles. Root only knows about SOME of those instances. Nightly, for instance, runs out of a folder in my home folder. I haven't used Nightly in quite a long while, and I suspect that it's hung up at v 35 or 36. Nightly never asks if you want to update - it just pulls the update, installs it, then informs you that it wants to be restarted for updates to take effect. Ice Weasel won't update unless/until root authorizes it.
Pale Moon, on the other hand, sits quietly on my desktop, waiting for me to tell it what to do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @01:18PM
Also, it was EME free, it's not anymore.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @01:31PM
EME free?
Evil Modification/Extenstion?
Egregious Malice Embedding?
Or what?
PEYA!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @02:21PM
EME, Encrypted Media Extensions.
https://hsivonen.fi/eme/ [hsivonen.fi]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2015, @10:34AM
Guess what, they did force update my firefox, again. I downgraded to 38.0.1 EME FREE and today it crashed and when i restarted, it was 39.0 NON EME FREE again.
FUCK YOU MOZILLA YOU MOTHERFUCKING POWER TRIPPING ASSHOLES!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @01:21PM
At least Google is consistently evil. You know what you are getting. This FireFox move is akin to what happens with the favorite brand of your pet food: you pay for the quality because you want your pet to live a long and healthy life. Then one day it has a "new improved formula" sign on the package, which is marketing-speak for "we built consumer base on quality of our product, and now we want to milk this cow till it dies." I so detest this garbage.
I suppose the real issue is that such underhand tactics work with sheeple all the time. Damn sheeple...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by ikanreed on Monday July 13 2015, @02:04PM
I think the only solution is to continue to be an early adopter of the not-shit stuff. Which requires painful vigilance, and tons of effort.
But then at least you can be the unlikable martyr who gives unsolicited advice about what to use.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by nitehawk214 on Monday July 13 2015, @03:03PM
My problem with this is it is hard to tell what is "non-shit" when you are an early adopter.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday July 13 2015, @02:04PM
I don't think Google is consistently (or even frequently) evil, but their potential for it is massive; probably even beyond that of Microsoft. They have the overriding concern that for their business to work, they musty keep you data to themselves. Most other companies have far less data about you, but for them the data is more profitable if they actually sell it rather than using it themselves. Firefox falls into this category, but has the potential to gather rather a lot of data about an individual.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TheGratefulNet on Monday July 13 2015, @06:04PM
you miss a major point about google being evil. lets agree, just for now, that they don't sell YOUR info to others. how sure are you that the so-called anonymous data they have is truly not able to point to who you are?
that aside, do you not worry that the government (ALL of them, sigh) are salivating at google's data store and, like pirates on the old sea, they have the might and they will take what they want! they're happy to let folks like you believe that google is keeping your data safe, when its the governments that ALLOW google to grow to its size.
google is a proxy. a government proxy. 'private enterprise' is the new way for governments to spy on people. they learned this and they got VERY good at it.
no, google is evil because of who made them that way. I have lots of suspicions that google has always (since day 1) been in bed with the government. doesn't it seem odd to you that they'd get so big, so fast, and with so much power on 'search, alone' ? that does not pass the smell test to anyone who thinks about it.
google was supported and encouraged to do what its doing. again, its a pet proxy for all governments. direct line to google's data (if you believe there is calea procedures in place, again, that is jus for show. the real back doors don't need to have permission or a court order to have data flow to washington).
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @08:34PM
that does not pass the smell test to anyone who thinks about it.
Why not? Do big numbers confuse you?
Google became popular because they were a hell of a lot better than the competition when they started. I remember the bad old days of Alta Vista. They were really a lot better than any of the other search engines, and that is all they really needed. Ok, they also needed to figure out the advertising, or they would have died out. But they did that well too.
If Google had no redeeming features when they became popular, then that would be suspicious, but that wasn't the case.
(Score: 2) by khedoros on Monday July 13 2015, @09:17PM
doesn't it seem odd to you that they'd get so big, so fast, and with so much power on 'search, alone' ?
Not particularly. They came along when there were a dozen commonly-used search engines, each of which provided somewhat "meh" results. I remember searching for things across multiple engines because different ones tended to index different pages. Google was the first engine that I knew that tended (even at the beginning) to have what I wanted in the first couple pages of results, and they continued to get better over time, relative to their competition. When most other engines provided a "web portal", Google stuck to search, built up their name, and then started adding extra crap. And if it hadn't been Google that hit that trajectory of success, it would've been whichever other engine had made similar advancements the fastest (or, at least, marketed themselves the best). I think we're just looking at a case of selection bias.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday July 13 2015, @11:29PM
As far as I'm aware, Google data on you is not anonymous. They know *exactly* who you are. They just don't sell the data, they use it to target ads at you.
Yeah, government is a separate matter, and unavoidable unless they move all operations out of the US. I'm kind of surprised they haven't started. Even in that case, the uS government is trying to force companies to release data even for foreign data stores (Microsoft in Ireland). It needs to be a complete exit.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday July 14 2015, @04:17PM
They just don't sell the data, they use it to target ads at you.
There are lots of ways around this. One example where someone tried this academically involved running a discount coupon ad for pizza. They asked Google to show it to gay people in a certain area. If they fill in the coupon, then you have their name and address, even if they don't then you can add a tracking cookie and watch them on any web sites that you control if they click the ad.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Tuesday July 14 2015, @04:33PM
True, although I'm not sure you could trust the data to be completely accurate, although in general it probably would tend to be.
(Score: 2) by GoonDu on Tuesday July 14 2015, @01:37AM
I would like to put a tinfoil on you but I have to put one on myself as well. The problem is that you may trust the Google of today not to sell or share private data, but what about the Google of tomorrow? The biggest problem is still the potential that Google has over you and the need for more transparency, I trust them now not to share my data but a policy change, a government push or some sociopaths (does not have to be the CEO) who has access to product's data (the users) is all it need to get the ball rolling. It's too risky.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Alfred on Monday July 13 2015, @01:24PM
I have FF and I have seen Pocket but I don't use it. If it is not a privacy problem unless I use it then good. If it is nosy and reports everything then it has to go. Since I don't use it I will be killing it via about:config anyway but how much difference does this make?
All web/browser related news I see is further proof that there is no anonymity on the internet.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @02:06PM
> Does Pocket report back info for every site you visit or just the one you invoke Pocket on?
> If it is not a privacy problem unless I use it then good. If it is nosy and reports everything then it has to go
The mozilla guys have been saying that if you remove the icon from your toolbar it doesn't even load the pocket libraries into memory much less execute the code. If they are misrepresenting the truth that will be the last straw for me and I will start looking into the various forks.
Either way, this is still a stupid, stupid, stupid PR move. They keep pulling features out of the user-interface claiming that stuff that isn't widely used shouldn't clutter-up/confuse the users and then they embed what, at most, should have been a bundled extension. They are starting to suffer from ivory-tower syndrome and are out of touch with the perception on the ground.
(Score: 2) by tempest on Monday July 13 2015, @06:28PM
That's part of my biggest annoyance with Firefox now, they pull useful shit off the default UI, but then pack in gimmicky garbage they want to push. They still have a microscopic bookmark button, and worse still have the "bookmark this page" star right next to it and the two can't be divorced. The claim this is all in the name of usability loses credence every time they pull a stunt like this.
(Score: 1) by OrugTor on Monday July 13 2015, @01:32PM
I turn off automatic updates for everything, first thing I do when installing. I can't understand why one would do otherwise. The program works just fine on install. Except for fixing a crippling bug any update can only break it, mess up the UI or introduce unwanted features. If the program actually improves over time I'll re-install.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Monday July 13 2015, @01:53PM
Programmed obsolescence my friend...
Older versions of the browser still work fine, but web pages are slowly becoming unviewable on them because they're designed to be viewed with newer browser features.
There's nothing earth-shatteringly novel in web browsing that requires these newer features most of the times, but if you want to keep viewing certain websites, you have to switch to the latest and not-so-greatest bloatware-du-jour. That's the problem I'm having more and more often with Palemoon - which is basically a cleaned-up, older version of Firefox.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @01:54PM
I can't understand why one would do otherwise
I turn it on for *everything* I dont directly control but have to work on. That computer my wifes grandpa is not sure what to click on to get it to update? Automatically updated. That is who this is targeted for.
A vulin shows up and then people pop up out of the wood work screaming 'you should of updated'.
I would rather go thru the trouble of turning off some bit of bloatware then trying to get rid of a full on virus infection. The dudes out there that make exploit kits dissect all of the updates out there and add it into their kit. Just for people like you.
Some stuff you can keep 'behind the curve'. But a browser is not one of them. You update that crap to the latest version you can get.
You run everyone at a lower privilege than admin and you make sure everything is up to date. Getting rid of a virus infection is a massive PITA. I would rather do something *else* with my Saturday than reinstall yet another copy of an OS with all of the patches and flotilla of programs. Because during that time I can not do much else other than watch the scroll bar wizz away at updating things. As everything I want to do is on my computer...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @08:38PM
A vulin shows up and then people pop up out of the wood work screaming 'you should of updated'.
At which point you should scream back "It's 'you should have updated', you moron! Did you not learn correct English at school" ;P
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2015, @08:50AM
Well, he said that people will scream it after a vulin shows up. A vulin is a demonic creature that does severe damage to anyone who says "have" in its vicinity. Therefore it is good advice to avoid saying "have" when a vulin shows up. Since "of" is similar enough that people will understand you, but different enough that it won't cause the demon to target you, it is a good replacement for "have" when a vulin is around. Of course people who don't know it already, will learn that the hard way when the vulin shows up, so they quickly will adapt and avoid saying "have", too. Therefore when a vulin shows up, people will not say "you should have updated" because that would make them the target of the vulin. Rather to protect themselves from the vulin, they will say "you should of updated", just as claimed in the post you replied to.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Monday July 13 2015, @02:09PM
The program works just fine on install
As far as you can tell. Who knows what bugs are being exploited in the background without having any impact on your experience?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @04:32PM
Well, just don't let it connect to the internet. Oh, wait … ;-)
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Monday July 13 2015, @08:32PM
They never seem to update about:blank any more...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @01:32PM
Once they start out with a goal, the goal to develop and maintain Firefox.
And they succeeded, hiring bunch of people.
Soon enough, the goal changes to maintain and expand themselves. And Firefox? What about it?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by pendorbound on Monday July 13 2015, @01:49PM
"emails contains spying material using malware-like techniques"
Overreact much? They put web beacon images in their emails. Like every single other "you're not the customer you're the product" service out there does. If you as a receiver of said emails don't want to be tracked, configure your email client to not load remote images. Done.
As far as how to avoid this horrific scourge? Simple. Remove the Pocket button from your toolbar & don't share anything with it. Done.
If you're worried about your friends invading your privacy... If they're already the type of people who share things through third-party cloud services instead of just sending you a (preferably encrypted) email directly... Well... I've got bad news for you. Your friends are broken. It's unlikely you'll be able to fix them. They've probably already uploaded pictures of you to Facebook, and even if you don't have an account, the facial recognition is doing its thing on you.
Granted, it would have been nice if Firefox hadn't gone the "supported" bloatware route, but TFA is a wee bit out of touch with reality in describing the consequences of having this included.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @02:34PM
They've probably already uploaded pictures of you to Facebook
Extremely unlikely because:
1) Any 'friend' who would do that is not a friend at all.
2) I don't let people take pictures of me. Ever.
3) Going to party-like events is pointless, and as such, it is unlikely someone will snap a picture of you, because you will not be present.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @03:17PM
I agree that the description of "malware-like" is sensational, but there used to be a time when no one would let something that did these very things onto their computer.
This is an erosion or privacy that you are justifying.
I do not care to monetize their offering, I don't care to use it, I don't want to have to be inconvenienced to do all of the things you listed simply because you don't care if they make money off me or not. I should not have to take such protective measures in order to not use a product I did not ask to be included to begin with.
Granted, I am not paying for the browser. But I can't seem to find a retail copy of a browser that doesn't do these things that I can pay for and expect to continue provided a great experience with the ability to add plug-ins like this and worry about the various requirements/privacy trade-offs if and when I choose to interact with the software.
Your being an apologist for them is by no means an acceptable answer to the question of why they are doing this to the few users that promote their products.
The masses will accept it as they almost always do, presuming they accidentally had FF Installed or some friend of theirs put it on and said it was better than Chrome at some point in time. The people that care will continue to seek out alternatives. If this gets pushed through, more is certainly to follow. They should at least provide an easy to download default option of it not included, with a user selectable at time of download version with it integrated. If not enough people get it, then maybe that means not many want it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @04:26PM
They put web beacon images in their emails.
I take that as an admission of guilt.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @02:09PM
Mozilla got rid of that evil $X-ophobe and that means they're the good guys!!!!
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @03:17PM
I agree. I'm glad that they put technology in the back seat, and put the cause of social justice in the front seat.
It is more important for a company to be in line with the Democratic Party ideals than it is to make decent tech.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @03:36PM
Not really. Brendan Eich was OK with DRM as a necessary evil [brendaneich.com] even though he recognized that it sucks for freedom. He thought they needed it to avoid losing users. He's gone, DRM is in and firefox is still losing users.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Monday July 13 2015, @06:49PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @09:22PM
[citation needed]
(Score: 2) by Tork on Monday July 13 2015, @09:56PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2015, @02:51AM
Where there's a whip, there's a way...
People have been made to work for the man for a long time.
(Score: 2) by Refugee from beyond on Monday July 13 2015, @04:38PM
At first I used Opera and it was good. Until it wasn't. Then I understood it's time to move on and tried Chromium… barely has any UI and when I tried some extensions one inserted damn Facebook scripts in its configurtion page, the hell (don't remember which one now). Well, Firefox then… OH SHH~ And considering Chromium already had an issue with downloading some binary blob it's not an option to try again at all…
Instantly better soylentnews: replace background on article and comment titles with #973131.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @10:17PM
Check out Vivaldi. New project from old Opera people. Technical preview working fine for me.
(Score: 2) by zafiro17 on Tuesday July 14 2015, @08:35AM
Plus one for Vivaldi. I tried a few recent builds on Linux and they were pretty great. I was a diehard Opera user until about a year ago (two, already?) when it jumped the shark - new management decided to make it more Chrome than Chrome. Vivaldi was started by the original Opera creator, and is building what Opera used to be before it ran off the tracks. Great featureset.
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 2) by Refugee from beyond on Tuesday July 14 2015, @08:40PM
Yeah, I've seen it. Tried in VM before. It needs some work at the moment, but who knows, maybe…
Instantly better soylentnews: replace background on article and comment titles with #973131.
(Score: 5, Informative) by kbahey on Monday July 13 2015, @05:02PM
Go to about:config, search for "pocket", then turn "browser.pocket.enabled" to "false". Done!
Now, I have another problem with Firefox that started only with the latest 39 version. Every few minutes, one CPU will be pegged at 100%, and Firefox will stall for 10 or 15 seconds, accepting no input, mouse or otherwise. It happens very regularly.
I did not install any new extensions. Only got the 39 version update via Ubuntu's repos.
This is on Kubuntu 14.04.
Any help appreciated.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning [2bits.com].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @06:48PM
FF used to hang due to Flash. I noticed that this seems to have re-started with the last update of Flash; I have no idea if Adobe re-enabled one of their screw-ups with the recent Hacking Team 0-day fixes. I have flash but only on demand, not enabled by default. I'm not sure if that matters anymore - some software just screws things up.
Maybe FF just found a new way to mess things up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @06:59PM
Sounds like a broken addon. Try running a clean profile in comparison.
If the clean profile doesn't get the same problem, then disable all addons, enable the most popular ones (they should be well-tested), and then test if the problem persists and enable more addons if it doesn't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @07:31PM
Thnx, I had same issue and instead of fixing I switched to Chrome.... now I shall just uninstall FF though.
(Score: 2) by kbahey on Tuesday July 14 2015, @04:38PM
I downgraded by getting Firefox ESR 38.0, and the issue went away. Same extensions, same flash.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning [2bits.com].
(Score: 1) by TheMessageNotTheMessenger on Monday July 13 2015, @05:21PM
Is there an alternative firefox build without all this 'cloud' stuff?
No sync, no pocket, no hello, no WEBRTC, no social network integration.
I want just a browser. all these things are attack vectors and/or privacy leaks: https://twitter.com/incloud/status/619624021123010560 [twitter.com]
There's Chrome, but that one has no proper addon support, so there's no real tree style tabs. Also it's owned by google so that has all sorts of privacy implications.
Hello! :D
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Monday July 13 2015, @06:13PM
Pale Moon [palemoon.org] is mentioned above.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by curunir_wolf on Monday July 13 2015, @08:46PM
Pale Moon actually does include sync (although it has an option to use an alternate sync server instead of Pale Moon's). But, it's off unless you enable it.
Frankly, I cannot get by without sync, but I'm still using the old sync, which clearly encrypts locally. I just can't tell what the new (all you need is a user id and password) sync does, but don't trust it. I'm looking at switching to Pale Moon, but I'll be setting up my own sync server if I do.
I am a crackpot
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday July 14 2015, @05:22AM
Well, there is still the suite (SeaMonkey), hasn't changed much and while it does have sync, you don't have to enable it. As it uses the same Gecko engine as Firefox, it is mostly compatible (the odd shitty site will check the UI string instead of features) including most add-ons.
Of course it is kind of plain so if you like eye candy...
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday July 13 2015, @06:41PM
I didn't realize that they actually added a new "feature". I just thought it was some random UI re-design and hadn't checked it. I removed it now. Why people can't just save the page and stick it in their dropbox is beyond me.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @06:53PM
I am seriously losing faith in the interwebs. The utility is constantly being reduced. When I search to find help for a problem, all I get are links to ads or retail sites offering a deal on the thing I have a problem with (google, duck-duck-go, whatever) The signal to noise ratio is plummeting overall. And almost everything is spyware. It took less than twenty years to go from useful to crap.
Sigh... what next?
If I was a bazzillionaire, I'd fund a router-to-router based web that bypasses all ISPs and makes it difficult for governments to control. Then I'd be arrested cause terrorists. Isn't democracy wonderful - it gives us the freedom to see everything turn to shit.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TheMessageNotTheMessenger on Monday July 13 2015, @07:15PM
Welcome to the free market, where everything is targeted at the lowest common denominator.
If you're not that, well, sucks cuz you're in the minority.
Hello! :D
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @08:56PM
Mod all these posts up. I think the Internet is dead, at least, how I used to understand it.
It's about like Cable TV for me --500 channels and nothing on.
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Tuesday July 14 2015, @02:41AM
I feel the same way; I search for info on something and mostly what I get from any search engine is reviews on something that you can buy, that might be related to what I searched on; or outright sales based sites.
it seems that the almighty dollar is all that matters to most of humanity. this really depresses me. search for information to learn, to grow, to become more creative, to build things - and all the engines want to do is tell you how to spend MORE money on worthless china junk.
I do remember when google had a great search engine. or, wait. maybe they NEVER did and it was just that the web was mostly signal and not heavy in noise. now that its oversaturated with 'salesman', its hard for search engines to actually function well.
google results are no better than anyone else's, at this point. either they gave up trying or they gave up and just see dollar signs and nothing else.
either way, its not a very good thing to say about the state of humanity. it seems that anytime we create something good, we always ALWAYS turn it into something evil.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2015, @04:53AM
Like the words of an old Eagles' song: "Call some place paradise, kiss it goodbye."
I think that any attempt at creating a search engine will be undermined by the profiteers seeding the search results by finding weaknesses in the system. At one time, it was just creating lots of links to their site. Now they are more sophisticated. Either way, we lose.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2015, @10:40AM
I Agree
(Score: 4, Informative) by panachocala on Monday July 13 2015, @07:29PM
It seems over the years FF chopped a ton of useful things using the argument that the functionality belongs in an add-on. Well.... uhh... so, about all this new shit that I never asked for that keeps adding icons on the navigation bar.... Why doesn't THAT belong in an add-on?
Probably because add-ons get hosed by API changes every 1-2 years but their precious cloud shit is totally important and needs to be compiled in. At least they could have the decency to let you remove it without hacking about:config... I mean, it's a fucking addon - put it on the addon page.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 14 2015, @05:04AM
Pocket WAS an add-on. [getpocket.com] They must have been bought by Mozilla.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Informative) by elixir on Monday July 13 2015, @08:12PM
If you are having issues with your browser, you should give Midori a try. It is a lightweight, open-source browser released under the GNU Lesser GPL.
One of my favorite features about it is that you can directly edit the information you send to servers. So here I am posting this on my AIX server running Firefox 83.6.
http://midori-browser.org/ [midori-browser.org]
(Score: 2) by kadal on Monday July 13 2015, @08:31PM
Midori is great but it kept crashing on me. There have been a couple of updates since, so I guess I should look at it again.
(Score: 2) by novak on Monday July 13 2015, @08:53PM
I've been using midori for several years; it used to be a bit unstable but it's improved lately. I still prefer firefox (or iceweasel or palemoon) for most things butit now has an extension called nojs which is pretty great. I intend to use it more as firefox increasingly kills itself.
novak
(Score: 1) by elixir on Tuesday July 14 2015, @07:52PM
Midori is much, much more stable now. Crashing was the reason I quit using it in the past as well. I have been using it for over a month now with no crashes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2015, @11:05AM
Too bad i can't seem to change the language of it. I want english, but there does not seem to be an option to change it anywhere. And it crashed when i tried to stop google from injecting a cookie on my machine. I'll keep an eye out for it though.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2015, @08:51PM
Remember kids. Don't let it happen to you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2015, @01:50AM
That's the reality. Instead of sticking to the original intent, stopping down Mozilla into a usable browser, the project team has decided to go full-tilt, let's generate some buzz about Firefox with these cool new features! Never mind whether the features are worthwhile, it's all about looking cool.
I miss the days when Firefox was a lean-mean alternative to IE, without the bloated ActiveX controls....
(Score: 1) by wirelessduck on Tuesday July 14 2015, @06:03AM
You'd think with all these new features that they might find a small amount of time to finally implement HTML5 Forms UI support [miketaylr.com]. How many years have they been without a native datepicker? I'm betting that even IE12 will beat them to this one.