CraigHB

I mainly use a desktop computer, but I have a laptop I use when traveling. I have my cell phone set up to do dial-up for the laptop via Bluetooth. It works really well as far as dial-up goes, but the speeds aren't really high enough for anything other than email. I rarely use it since I don't travel that much and can almost always get WiFi access when I do. It's pretty much just a last ditch. I would need to see an increase in speeds at least 10 fold before I would consider connectivity through my cell a viable alternative. I don't know where the bottleneck comes from, whether it's the network or the driver, but even if my provider upgraded their network, I imagine I would need a new phone and driver to take advantage of it. Sounds like something that isn't going to happen any time soon, at least for me. Another consideration is the cost, WiFi is usually free. I'm paying $10 a month for unlimited data connectivity through the cell. At this point, it's not really worth it and I'm debating whether or not I should even carry the service.

A couple comments based on my understanding which may or may not be correct; most motherboards don't have x16 slots available for add-on cards other than video. Some have x8 or x4 slots but the majority only provide x1 slots. Current high-end solid state drives are seeing burst read rates of 250MB/s. A raid set with just 2 of those drives would be heavily bottlenecked by an x1 slot. The SATA 6Gb standard has been released and we'll probably see that implemented soon. As the costs go down and speeds go up for SS drives, they'll become more popular. They'll have the capability to saturate 3Gb SATA and take full advantage of 6Gb SATA. In that case, it would require at least an x8 slot to support just a few of those drives in a raid set. Unless, of course, there's a standard in the works to improve the speed of the PCIe bus. In any case, I would want to use at least an x8 add-on card requiring a motherboard that can accept it. That limits choices quite a bit, a lot more than chipset raid which is pretty common these days.

That's the main reason I use a wired network in my house. I have an AP on my network for the laptop, but I only turn it on when I need it (not often) and it's secured. What a security hole for people who don't know what they're doing.

I'd like to see an episode showing the forensics and recovery related to this incident. Good real world stuff.

I wonder about PCIe bus considerations when using an add-on card. Wouldn't there be a difference in bandwidth comparing the chipset interface with the PCIe interface of an add-on card? I would expect to see better perfomance with chipset raid.

Things were screwy when I visited the site the other day and could tell right off something was wrong. I've had compromised web sites plant malicious code on my machine before and I was concerned about that. Doesn't surprise me this happened. What better target for someone trying to prove something than a site that covers both sides of the security issue. I've learned a lot already from the forum and episodes. It's a great resource for just being aware of what malicious users are capable of. Half the battle is knowing. Thanks for the heads up and it has prompted me to rethink my password security all around.

Oh, yea, photoshop. I'm just a computer user, not a graphic artist or developer so that's my viewpoint. My only exposure to Adobe is the products I've used or have been forced to use so that's my reference. But, I don't know, with my impressions after Acrobat Reader and Flash Player, I would probabably look elsewhere for a graphic suite if I had to use one. I know there's others out there and some are even open source.

Been doing electronics soldering for years, haven't had a problem with the fumes from the fluxes I use. Probably a good idea to use good ventilation, but you're not going to fall out of your chair if you catch a wiff of the flux burning off. It's certainly less noxious than solvents like acetone and MEK. For fine electronics soldering, I use a Weller WESD51 station with an ETS tip. I use Kester 285 core .015" 63/37 solder. I run the soldering temps 550-650F. I get really good results with that and have been able to solder .5mm pitch TQFP components without issue. If you over-solder something, try a desoldering braid like Tech-Spray Pro-Wick #1. That stuff works really good with 63/37 solder. For flux cleanup, I use plain-ol' 99% isopropyl alchohol from the drugstore. You can pay more for 99.9% from an electronics supplier and it's safer for components, but I haven't had any trouble using the more inexpensive stuff.

Umm, what products? I detest their Flash player and PDF reader. I use Foxit reader, but since Flash is proprietary AFAIK, there's no option, at least none that I've found.

I'm not a gun collector, but I own a couple handguns. I have S&W 357 long barrel I really like. I live in the desert so I can go shooting a few minutes drive from my house. The 357 is really fun to fire. With the long barrel it's a great target shooting gun. I also have a Llama 45 that's pretty much a Colt knock-off. That gun is fun to fire too. It's pretty well made for how inexpensive it was and almost never jams, I think it jammed once. Compared to the 357, it's like a cap gun, but it's fun to shoot. Though, hard to hit anything at any range. It's my home protection gun, great for that with large caliber and relatively low muzzle velocity.

I don't pirate movies or music, but not because of principle. I'm really into movies, but not music so much. Netflix along with my TiVo provides everything I need legitimately in that regard. Software is a different story. Some of the software I run is pirated. A lot of times I do the torrent thing on stuff first to check it out. When I come accross well done software I have a use for, I generally buy it. I like to support smaller makers that offer good products. The demons like Microsoft and Adobe can go to hell. I go out of my way to avoid giving any money to them.

Thanks, your engaging reply makes me want to stick around. Yes, thanks to nVidia. Their driver seems to work very well. That *is* kinda lame the kernel squaks about that, I agree it's uncalled for. nVidia is doing a big service for the community. They shoudn''t *have* to release their source if they don't want to. And, it makes sense, there's just too much proprietary stuff in there they don't want competitors getting ahold of. Glad to hear I'm not the only one who feels this way. The VM route would be the most viable. I may look into that one of these days. Thanks for the recommendation. True, a stock install with some distros on supported hardware is actually easier and much faster than a Windows install. My Debian install is totally scripted and I can reload to a fully configured system in about 5 minutes (apps and all), no exaggeration. My Windows install is fully unattended using a custom slipstreamed installation disk and it takes a good 20 minutes. Then I still need to load and configure applications. Definitely, sometimes you can change something easily in a simple text file, other times it takes a recomplie after spending hours pouring over configuration scripts and cryptic flat files. I've even had to tweak on the code a little in some instances. Yea, it probably is a bad example, but it has really pissed me off at times. Even so, IE won't display some pages properly with ActiveX disabled. Either web developers are still using it quite a bit or shutting it off breaks something else in IE. At this point, I run it off in my internet zone and on in my trusted zone and trust sites I normally visit. Also, there are some local ActiveX controls and scripts Windows trys to run on some occasions. I've had trouble with those disabled as well. That sounds like a bit of a kludge. If Apple released a commercial version of OSX for PC, I'd probably give it a try just to see what all the hoopla is about. Otherwise, I have zero experience with Apple/Mac. That's probably a bad thing, but Windows and Linux keep my hands full on PC as it is.

That link was a real slam for no reason. I thought someone would be willing to answer me in coversation. I see where people on this forum are coming from. See ya.

So I'm watching my first few episodes of Hak.5 and I hear this term FAIL bus and I'm thinking, gee I know a fair amount about computer architecture and I've never hear of a FAIL bus. Is that some newfangled communications architecture? Then I realized they were talking about fail as in failure not FAIL as in an acronym, and bus as in 4 wheels not bus as in a collection of wires, well, whaduyaknow... So I'm curious, where did this expression come from?

Hello, I'm new to Hak5 and this is my first post here. I've watched a few episodes on my TiVo and desktop computer. I've found the shows interesting so far. I'd like to post with regard to comments earlier in this thread (if you don't mind). I've been a Linux user for a long time. I did my first install in the early '90's with a distribution called Slackware. Linux pretty much sucked back then, but it's come a long way (OTOH, so did Windows). I'm now using Debian 4.0 and have been since 1.0. I think Debian is outstanding. It's probably the most low level of the distros. You can really get down to the finest details. Debian installs can be unwieldy if you don't know what you're doing, but nothing rivals their package tools and vast selection. Hardware support can be an issue, but I build my own kernels with monolithic support for my particular hardware, makes the system fast and compact. The latest kernel source includes an array of hardware support that's pretty impressive. All the off-the-shelf hardware I used on my current system is fully supported with one caveat, I had to use nVidia's driver package which taints the kernel by violating the the open source license, haven't found any other option to get my X desktop working. Setting up a Debian install with a custom kernel is not something your average computer user would ever want to deal with so I would consider myself unusal in that regard. Even after my glowing comments about Debian and Linux, I still use Windows primarily for one reason, a lot of the software I use is not available for Linux. I suppose I could go the dual boot or emulation route, but I don't really feel like switching back and forth between operating systems or setting up an environment with all its pitfalls. At this point, I use a swapable boot drive. I'll pop in the Linux drive when I feel like playing with it, but mostly, I run Windows. I find Linux to be a RPITA to configure at best, but once it's set up right, it's way faster and somewhat more reliable than Windows. It's worlds more configurable and you can really customize things down to the nitty-gritty. Linux is way more secure too. Nothing's worse than that evil covert-malware-installing ActiveX. If I could get Linux versions of all the software I use, I'd run it full time in a heartbeat. So, it's really the software industry that's driving me to use Windows more than anything else. As far as OSX, I'd be even more limited with the proprietary hardware. If there was a PC port for OSX, that might be something worthwhile for me, but even then, I'd still have the same software availability problem I do with Linux, but maybe to a lesser degree, I don't know.