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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
(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.