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Comment: simple encrypted dmg file saved in dropbox (Score 1) 445

by elliott666 (#46308053) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How Do You Manage Your Passwords?

the way i do it is i create a small DMG file, turn on good encryption and save it in Dropbox. Put a simple text file in there. done. Just eject it when you're done and make sure to not store the password in your keychain. OS X only, but if you need in you can get into DMGs with 7-ZIp on Windows or just mount it under linux.

Comment: Re: Windows 2.0 also sucked (Score 1) 616

by elliott666 (#44945267) Attached to: Why Is Microsoft Setting More Money On Fire With Surface 2?

WordPerfect didn't botch the transition to a graphical interface, Microsoft held back access to the API's in Windows 3.1 from the competition until Word 6 was finished leaving WordPerfect and Lotus 123 a year behind them.

As the dude might say,
"No, you're not wrong (microsoft), you're just an asshole!"

Comment: Samsung Chromebook (Score 3, Informative) 263

by elliott666 (#42787475) Attached to: What Will The Expanding World of ChromeOS Mean For Windows?

I just picked up a Chromebook yesterday and am fast at work getting Ubuntu running on it. It's a great little machine, fast, light, great battery, cheap as heck. It's perfect for just getting online fast.

These things are going to really slice away at the low cost PC market which in turn will take a real dig at Windows. When I see the market share numbers for where Windows is at I see most of it as just people picking up the cheapest thing they can find to get online. These Chromebooks are perfect for that and undercut the price by a huge amount. This Samsung was $215 from Best Buy. All the Windows 8 machines they had there were several hundred dollars more.

Comment: Kingston drives are junk (Score 1) 510

by elliott666 (#41672763) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How Do SSDs Die?

About a year ago I had a new vendor ship about twenty computers to my company. They were supposed to contain Intel SSD's but instead contained Kingston drives. All of those drives failed within a year. As they fail I have been swapping them out with Intel drives and they just chug along nicely after that. I even took one of the RMA'ed Kingston drives and put it in my laptop to see how it did. It made it four months and failed just last week.

Here's what that failure looked like. It started off where the aystem would just freeze up for a couple of seconds about once a day or so. After a week that started happening more like once an hour, but the system would always come to life again, it would just pause for 10 seconds or so. Then after about another week it started hanging completely. First once a day, then several times a day requiring holding the power button down and restarting the system. Then I RMA'ed it.

The original drive was a kingston ssdnow 100, and lasted 11 months, the replacement was a ssdnow v200, it lasted 4 months. They just shipped me a replacement today, we'll see. It may go straight on ebay!

Comment: Re:Infighting, not developers killed Linux (Score 1) 933

by elliott666 (#41169073) Attached to: How Apple Killed the Linux Desktop

That is exactly how I feel. I used a brand new Ubuntu install a week ago on a friends computer. The sound didn't work. It was like a flashback to 2005 when I stopped using Linux... it's too bad really, I did love tooling around with Linux but now I get all the Unix I want from my OS X install.

Comment: Vote by Mail (Score 1) 198

by elliott666 (#40496073) Attached to: 7,000 Irish e-Voting Machines To Be Scrapped

I think the problem here is the approach. I live in Oregon in the US and we have a vote by mail system. I get my ballot in the mail and then when I have time I sit down with my laptop and a glass of wine and slowly go over the thing, looking up all the ballot measures on my computer. I have three weeks to do this in. I have never had to make a special trip into a voting station and I'm glad, it sounds like about as much fun as going to the DMV or something. My point is, electronic voting? Screw that. Vote by mail.

As for the issue at hand. If it ain't open source I ain't trusting it.

Comment: Removal Instructions (Score 2) 429

by elliott666 (#39589341) Attached to: Flashback Trojan Hits 600,000 Macs and Counting

Does anyone have any suggestions for getting rid of the damn thing?

Instead of flaming each other maybe we can skip to the part where we say how to remove it completely. Same goes for Windows Malware. If we put in one tenth of the energy documenting the removal of these things that we do into flaming there wouldn't be malware to speak of. Removing the stuff is a pain and every tech I know has a different set of tools they use to do the job.

In regard to this piece of malware I have scanned computers with Integro's VirusBarrier X6 and it takes days to complete a scan and doesn't seem to be able to remove it anyway. How it takes days is beyond me, there's only a handful of malware for macs and it seems like a full scan would take seconds, but hey, that's just me.

Comment: Here's where I see Windows 8 failing (Score 1) 630

by elliott666 (#39342619) Attached to: Can Microsoft Afford To Lose With Windows 8?

Take a look at the Control Panel from Windows XP on. They set up this categories view as the default. The problem was they didn't think it through so that even their own programs, think Outlook, didn't have a place there.

So in order to get to the Mail icon, or Java, or any other 3rd party icon you have to switch views to the icon view to find things.

Now look at Windows 8. It's going to be like that for everything. They have this new whiz-bang interface, but it's half-assed, not thought through and it's going to be inconsistent with every application that comes along. It's going to be a god-damned mess from the get go.

It might look good on a brand new tablet/notebook hybrid but as soon as you install anything on there other than what it came with it's going to start looking like crap.

It's not going to work on a domain. I doubt it'll work for gamers. No DIY enthusiast is going to be making anything for it. The best Microsoft can hope for is that they siphon off some money that would have gone into Apple, but in the long run their trajectory is headed straight down hill. All the company can do is flail around like a wounded pig as it slowly dies. Every chance the company has had for the last 10 years to make a move in the right direction they have stuffed it up.

The should have fired Steve Balmer a decade ago. They should have made a bitchin' linux distro in the late 90's instead of battling it tooth and nail. They never should have thought of the Zune. Plays-for-sure? stupid. Xbox? good job guys, you killed Sega, happy now? BTW, how's that working out, made any money yet? Bing? Oh yeah? You didn't watch much Monty Python did you? Vista? dear god. Windows 7? It's just vista but with a couple of mild interface tweaks. Office 2007? Everyone hates the ribbon so what do you do, put it on everything. Idiots. Office 2010? Really, you moved the tabs to the left in the Options dialog and charged for it? Screw you too Microsoft.
