I have had fairly smart phones (bluetooth, data etc) from T-Mobile, Edge Wireless, and AT&T. Each one has had all features enabled. Furthermore, except for my RAZR V3i from Edge, each phone was free. Right now I have an HTC Fuze which was free. The GPS works great with Garmin (which I added) and even the AGPS functionality works great.
The thing is, going to hit up the car analogy here, is that we should not have to deal with all the BS that the carriers do. It is as if I went online and found that the car I really wanted to buy was a Toyota Prius. But then when I went to DealershipX I found out that the AC was going to be disabled when I bought it. DealershipY of course sells the Prius' with AC but if I then want to get my service from them I'm going to have to drive 100m every time.
A crude example but you can see my point I'm sure. The fact is that from nearly start to finish getting anything but a basic cell phone and using it to talk only is an awful process. Full of all sorts of convoluted issues designed to confuse the buyer such that they just give up on trying to actually understand it all and just sign on the dotted line.
My thing is this when dealing in our capitalistic society: When looking at the profit that someone is going to make off me I don't mind helping put their kids though college. I do however draw the line at buying them a boat at the same time. Sell me what I want at a fair price and it's all good. Currently however walking into a cell phone store makes me feel like I'm walking up to a carnie booth with that 'Mark' glowing ink on my forehead.
The whole cell phone market and carriers is overall pretty twisted and generally nasty. I kept myself willfully ignorant of most of it until recently. (I was happy in my ignorance too...sigh.) But my old Palm IIIc was not going to live forever so I thought it was time to finally update my knowledge on ultra-mobile computing.
What I found out right away was that what I really wanted was a Nokia n810 but that it was not going to be a phone. Nor was it going to be online unless I was tethered or on Wifi. Not a huge deal given that those were the only real major downsides. And to make a long story short I did finally end up with a n810 which I love. My biggest complaint is that it is a little big & heavy but overall I'm very pleased.
But at a point the new n810's were out of stock everywhere. I looked around for a used one but it was slow going so I thought I should look at a smartphone option vs my old setup, dumbphone & PDA. Both setups have their pros and cons and at some point I might go smartphone & tablet (I guess calling the Nokia devices PDAs felt passe.) but I digress.
Finally getting to my point here when I looked at the options with smartphones I got pretty annoyed pretty quick. The fact that they mask the price of the devices with rebates and contract requirements is not good. The fact that not only are not all of the devices available on all the carriers but that each carrier can have their own set of rules on how the devices will function is annoying. Nevermind that even if you do have a device that can be used by multiple carriers most if not all of them won't turn it on unless it has their tag on it.
None the less I eventually found a smartphone that I thought I could live with and set about trying to negotiate upgrading my old phone to that with my carrier. I felt like I had walked into the sleezyest of used car dealerships with 'Mark' written on my forehead in glowing ink. The idea that I did not want to upgrade to a plan that was 2 to 3 times what I was currently paying for the privilege of using this phone resulted in political levels of feigned outrage.
In fact when I would be asked about what I was looking for and outline my needs the idea that I don't spend half my day texting seemed downright shocking to these reps. The fact that what I really wanted was a block on all texting on my account had them looking for wooden stakes. For kicks I went to an AT&T rep at one point and worked in the term 'jailbreaking' as often as I could into our conversation. To his credit he did what he could to sell me but developed an unhealthy tick in his left eye.
To me the whole cell carrier/phone business needs a lot of work because from top to bottom it's a mess right now. Hopefully that a light is being shown on some of their nonsense will clean some of it up.
What strikes me most about a subject like this is what I see as a mass denial by many: life is inherently risky.
At some point there may be a method to keep birds away from aircraft. Or aircraft might operate such a different way that birds are not a threat to them. But that is not the point. Rather so many people seem to think that life should be totally risk free.
One of the things that was cool about Futurama was it broke the Simpsons 'family animated sitcom' mold. Giving it a different feel and of course many different options for the writers.
Since there is always the comparison to Family Guy keep in mind that Family Guy was just another family animated sitcom. In fact many people have gone far out of their way to point this out as if other non-animated sitcoms have not been doing the same thing for many years. We just had virtually no other points of reference when looking at prime time animation.
As an example look at American Dad. It's a family animated sitcom but it changes up the: dad is fat and does wacky stuff all the time, mom is very well intentioned and ignores all the flaws of her dysfunctional family, kids do stuff, blah blah. Instead, due to some...suggestions...from Fox they made the dad a wacky wing-nut, the mother a blond ditz wing-nut enabler, and the kids who do stuff with the added fact that like the Simpsons the girl is the token left wing voice. (And I don't want to get into the politics of American Dad but there is plenty more to be said about it's dynamic but that is beyond the scope of what I'm trying to say here. Suffice to say I find it hilarious how they have left politics alone in S4.)
The uniqueness of Futurama's sitcom environment made it very open and different than the other 3 prime time family centered ones. We can all only hope that the writers working on it's return will embrace that as well as the original ones did.
If you read the article, it says the money is coming from people making micropayments adding up to $50/month each.
Exactly. I actually did read some of TFA, don't tell anyone!, and was not shocked to see that number really. Those who are playing the game for free are being subsidized by those who are paying more than what the game is likely worth.
Of course that last bit is so highly subjective that I'll qualify that by adding it's not my place to say what anyones entertainment should be worth. Rather just that as you pointed out, and the point I was making in my OP, the money that is spent via micro-payments can get out of hand with a quickness.
I've not played a lot of the free/micro-payment MMOs but the ones I have fooled around with act the same way. That being if you want to have any real power in the game your forced to pay. And it's not that I'm saying that paying for an MMO service itself is bad. Rather that paying a flat rate subscription MMO is a better deal.
As such I either want to a) play for free when online; such as when playing a FPS, RTS, or even back in the day with a RPG like NWN. (A philosophy I supported by writing/hosting Stick a Fork in Me.) Or b) pay a subscription that covers everything, save for legitimate-not one every 3 months-xpacks, such that I don't get sucked into some micropayment black hole.
I think it's cool that the model exists and all the more power to those implementing it but I find it unlikely that it will be as good a model as subscription based MMOs. Too many ways that micro-payments can be 'shady' methinks.
Why do I get the feeling that this statement is purely for the benefit of the cable, one cable 'news' channel in particular, news cycle.
Furthermore that any company, let alone a convicted monopolist, that thinks that not supporting the US via taxes should really get the hell out anyway. The idea that large corporations should be entitled to the benefits of the US infrastructure without having to support it is absurd.
It has already come up in this thread but I think it warrants another post on the subject. And just some quick background: I used Opera as my main browser since right around IE3. Looking it up now I see that IE3 came out in Aug 96' and Opera was released to the public in 96 as well. One of the main reasons I liked it was how they supported the nix platforms, albeit just with binaries, as well as Win32.
Anyway suffice to say I used Opera for a long time, recommended it to friends who I thought were advanced enough to use it (Bit of a backhanded statement I know but oh well.), and even was sad when I moved away from it late last year. And the reason I finally did move away from it was that Firefox + Ablock + Noscript simply is a better overall experience.
And yes I know Opera has/has had it's own content blocking for ages now, that is not the point. It is not nearly the same thing as plugging in Adblock, picking your list, and then you just go. I also say this having already used, and continue to use, my hosts file as a filter as well.
As good as Opera is, and I still think it does a lot of things better/faster than anything else, the again overall experience with Firefox when you have it's addon support makes it better. And Firefox is also a much better replacement when moving an end user away from IE.
Opera, unless they do some really bad things, will always have a home on my PCs but right now Firefox is better for day to day usage.
If Google with all it's resources want's to help standardize the FOSS tools then they should invest in making whatever tools they have issues with to make them the best. It seems painfully obvious to me because if any given tool in the FOSS arena works best most distos will use that one.
That will make the big tools of importance to Google, and others, 'standardized' in effect. There still would be obscure distros or people who might use forked and or alternative versions of major parts of the OS but that would be fine too.
Back for more? Well no problem, I'll point out your flaws again.
If there is no grand Linux plan or movement, as you have stated in your original post...
My OP was: They are treating FOSS as if it is a corporation that has some master plan.
Your confusion seems to stem from the fact that FOSS, or 'Linux', is a single entity. It is far from that. It is rather a collection of managed projects. And not only can each managed project have it's own set of goals but each individual dev can as well. This vs the idea of a corporation that will almost always have a 'grand plan'. Or to put it better a profit motive.
I went on to say: Canonical or RH have goals that they want to do...
Now here we actually do have corporations that have profit motives. Nothing wrong with that but they are not what FOSS is either. Seeing the layers of nuance here yet?
I could go on but I'm quite sure that your already pretty confused and just wanting to spread more FUD instead of actually educating yourself.
These tech writers just don't seem to get it. They are treating FOSS as if it is a corporation that has some master plan. Granted there are parts of FOSS groups that have plans. Canonical or RH have goals that they want to do but 'Linux' or the FOSS idea works on different overall principals than deals with hardware vendors.
Of course writing about all that nuance would require actual thought and work so...
CPU Intel Core 2 Quad Q8400 $185 GPU EVGA 260 GTX Core 216 SSC $235 Mobo ASUS P5Q SE Pro $97 Mem OCZ 2 x 2 GB DDR2-800 $39 HDD WD Caviar Blue 250GB $43 Optical Sony Optiarc 20x DVD+/- RW $25 Case/PSU Cooler Master 534 $75 OS Windows Vista Home Premium x64 $100 Total $799
And a bit about why the Intel vs AMD:
Another alternative is to go all AMD. You could build an $800 gaming rig based on a Phenom II X4 840 and 1GB Radeon HD 4870. That would be close in performance to our $800 system, but would probably fall just a little short overall.
I personally like to support AMD given that the alternative is to have Intel monopolize the market. But shrug unless AMD is the clear winner most sites will always push Intel so no real surprise. (My feeling is it goes back to the old, "Nobody every got fired for buying Intel," type of mentality.)
The AC troll here forgets to mention that that table is benchmarked at 1680x1050 with 4AAx16AF.
Crysis can work just fine on all types of video cards when your not trying to run it at the highest settings. Just like nearly every damn FPS shooter since we started this video card race.
I don't know why Crysis has gotten such a rep as being unplayable unless you have a supercomputer but my guess is that it has to do with epeening.
I played Crysis from start to finish on my I'd say average gaming machine with modest, which still looked damn good, settings and it was just fine. Only a few noticeable slowdowns. That vs say something like Fallout 3 which very much did slow down when I would go into VATS.
No kidding! Adblocking makes web use orders of magnitude better. Before I finally switched to FF from Opera for my main browser I used, and still do, my hosts file for blocking ads. However it's not the same as having Adblock that cleans up the webpage.
Put Noscript on top of Adblock and FF runs away from even Opera for the most part. And that's saying something because Opera as a rule is hell on wheels fast.
I've read a few comments here that talk about Wladimir Palant's desire, in writing Adblock, to restore some sort of parity to website advertising. A rather noble goal and pretty logical idea.
However...
The goals of the vast majority of people who are running website ads are not noble. And their only logic is to get you to either view and click on that ad. The parity that websites provide content even thou it's our bandwidth that we use to view them does not really matter to them. How many times have I seen plays on this same theme: "If your not viewing our ads your stealing content."
Gah, with that mentality there is little room for parity. They, the collective they, are going to try to screw me over with as many ads as they can get away with in exchange for the content. They have been doing it, and are very comfortable with that model, for many years now in media.
But the catch is with my internet I get to control what I see by in large. And as such I'm blocking everything I can. Via my hosts file, plugins, or whatever other means I can utilize. Until content providers understand that it's my time that they get to compeat for with their content. "If your showing me obnoxious ads during the content your stealing my time." Is what they have to learn.
Of course that will never really happen imo. The public by in large are too complacent to really put up a fight against the media. But in my little corner of the world they get nothing. Nothing.
I've seen a number of comments in this thread about people, who seem like pretty reasonable geeks (Which I mean as a compliment.), have had or have Alienware PCs.
I just always assumed that those of us in the know knew that something like an Alienware PC would be at best an overpriced custom build basically. The idea that actual geeks were buying them instead of building their own or having someone they knew build them a custom rig makes me a little sad.
Sure there are the Apple geeks...really geeks-lite.;) And if your in need of a laptop well I don't expect you to build one of those but a desktop PC. Really?
Freedom is great. However, freedom requires choices. Choices impede adoption. Imagine there was one Linux distro. Well, now to convince people to try it out, they have to partition their drive and set up a dual-boot. Icky, but a well-written setup program can accomidate this. So, let's say you can make a Windows installer that re-partitions the drive, and installs Linux, sets up the dual-boot properly. Now, you can convince people to download and try Linux.
Now, every choice you make means I have to try to research what I want, and every bit of extra time you ask for me to make a choice between two things, I have three options. A, B or screw it.
The thing that I see wrong with your argument is that your acting like each Linux distro is hugely diffrent. When in fact that is far from the case. Gimp runs just fine on not only different flavors of Linux but even on Gnome vs KDE or heck even something like Fluxbox.
So, KDE + Gnome slows adoption by quite a bit, which means that fewer people write apps, which has a chilling effect, etc.
And yes there is a bit of a chilling effect due to this variation but not nearly to the degree that you seem to be implying.
I think most devs would tend to agree that having uniformity is a good thing indeed. It's why the Linux kernel is popular and nobody really cares about Hurd. Linux is good, people know it, and so for the vast majority of people it's the way to fun FOSS.
However there is nothing wrong with some flexibility. Is it a bad thing that we have both Gnome and KDE? I'd further argue that the MS platform is, as the GP said, filled with a ton of little issues that can make working with it not as much as a 'finite learning curve' as you think. Digging to see why some API call is not working correctly because MS wants to obscure it for whatever reason is no fun.
I am continually astonished at the number of people with cable or DSL to their home who think they need a third-party ISP on top of the ISP they already have, by definition, with their broadband service.
I see it in mostly older people who don't fully understand 'teh internet' and think that somehow that without AOL that they won't be able to do...something.
I've noticed that if I end up in a house that has plastic covers on it's furniture the likelihood of them having AOL just went up.
...you really think that 48% or whatever of Americans are anti-intellectual xenophobic racist apes?
The thing is your quoting one number, the % of people who voted GOP in the last presidential race, as the litmus test of the number of people who would identify themselves as members of the GOP.
In reality there is a whole lot more nuance than that. That number includes a large amount of moderates who for whatever reason decided that they wanted McCain/Palin controlling the executive branch over Obama/Biden. Does that mean those people are a part of the GOP's 'core'? Or to put it another way that they always vote the GOP ticket?
It may be galling but keep in mind that people like Glen Beck are out there supporting the GOP/right wing on national TV these days. Until the right can come to grips with the fact that putting such a...well anti-intellectual xenophobic racist ape as part of the standard bearer for the party might not be such a good idea your going to have to deal with such labels.
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Some rights need more 'help' than others.
You do know that the 2nd Amendment has this whole group called the NRA 'helping' it out right?
For the ACLU, some rights are more equal than others.
Horribly disingenuous. The ACLU says in it's title it's about Civil Liberties.
I have had fairly smart phones (bluetooth, data etc) from T-Mobile, Edge Wireless, and AT&T. Each one has had all features enabled. Furthermore, except for my RAZR V3i from Edge, each phone was free. Right now I have an HTC Fuze which was free. The GPS works great with Garmin (which I added) and even the AGPS functionality works great.
The thing is, going to hit up the car analogy here, is that we should not have to deal with all the BS that the carriers do. It is as if I went online and found that the car I really wanted to buy was a Toyota Prius. But then when I went to DealershipX I found out that the AC was going to be disabled when I bought it. DealershipY of course sells the Prius' with AC but if I then want to get my service from them I'm going to have to drive 100m every time.
A crude example but you can see my point I'm sure. The fact is that from nearly start to finish getting anything but a basic cell phone and using it to talk only is an awful process. Full of all sorts of convoluted issues designed to confuse the buyer such that they just give up on trying to actually understand it all and just sign on the dotted line.
My thing is this when dealing in our capitalistic society: When looking at the profit that someone is going to make off me I don't mind helping put their kids though college. I do however draw the line at buying them a boat at the same time. Sell me what I want at a fair price and it's all good. Currently however walking into a cell phone store makes me feel like I'm walking up to a carnie booth with that 'Mark' glowing ink on my forehead.
The whole cell phone market and carriers is overall pretty twisted and generally nasty. I kept myself willfully ignorant of most of it until recently. (I was happy in my ignorance too...sigh.) But my old Palm IIIc was not going to live forever so I thought it was time to finally update my knowledge on ultra-mobile computing.
What I found out right away was that what I really wanted was a Nokia n810 but that it was not going to be a phone. Nor was it going to be online unless I was tethered or on Wifi. Not a huge deal given that those were the only real major downsides. And to make a long story short I did finally end up with a n810 which I love. My biggest complaint is that it is a little big & heavy but overall I'm very pleased.
But at a point the new n810's were out of stock everywhere. I looked around for a used one but it was slow going so I thought I should look at a smartphone option vs my old setup, dumbphone & PDA. Both setups have their pros and cons and at some point I might go smartphone & tablet (I guess calling the Nokia devices PDAs felt passe.) but I digress.
Finally getting to my point here when I looked at the options with smartphones I got pretty annoyed pretty quick. The fact that they mask the price of the devices with rebates and contract requirements is not good. The fact that not only are not all of the devices available on all the carriers but that each carrier can have their own set of rules on how the devices will function is annoying. Nevermind that even if you do have a device that can be used by multiple carriers most if not all of them won't turn it on unless it has their tag on it.
None the less I eventually found a smartphone that I thought I could live with and set about trying to negotiate upgrading my old phone to that with my carrier. I felt like I had walked into the sleezyest of used car dealerships with 'Mark' written on my forehead in glowing ink. The idea that I did not want to upgrade to a plan that was 2 to 3 times what I was currently paying for the privilege of using this phone resulted in political levels of feigned outrage.
In fact when I would be asked about what I was looking for and outline my needs the idea that I don't spend half my day texting seemed downright shocking to these reps. The fact that what I really wanted was a block on all texting on my account had them looking for wooden stakes. For kicks I went to an AT&T rep at one point and worked in the term 'jailbreaking' as often as I could into our conversation. To his credit he did what he could to sell me but developed an unhealthy tick in his left eye.
To me the whole cell carrier/phone business needs a lot of work because from top to bottom it's a mess right now. Hopefully that a light is being shown on some of their nonsense will clean some of it up.
What strikes me most about a subject like this is what I see as a mass denial by many: life is inherently risky.
At some point there may be a method to keep birds away from aircraft. Or aircraft might operate such a different way that birds are not a threat to them. But that is not the point. Rather so many people seem to think that life should be totally risk free.
One of the things that was cool about Futurama was it broke the Simpsons 'family animated sitcom' mold. Giving it a different feel and of course many different options for the writers.
Since there is always the comparison to Family Guy keep in mind that Family Guy was just another family animated sitcom. In fact many people have gone far out of their way to point this out as if other non-animated sitcoms have not been doing the same thing for many years. We just had virtually no other points of reference when looking at prime time animation.
As an example look at American Dad. It's a family animated sitcom but it changes up the: dad is fat and does wacky stuff all the time, mom is very well intentioned and ignores all the flaws of her dysfunctional family, kids do stuff, blah blah. Instead, due to some...suggestions...from Fox they made the dad a wacky wing-nut, the mother a blond ditz wing-nut enabler, and the kids who do stuff with the added fact that like the Simpsons the girl is the token left wing voice. (And I don't want to get into the politics of American Dad but there is plenty more to be said about it's dynamic but that is beyond the scope of what I'm trying to say here. Suffice to say I find it hilarious how they have left politics alone in S4.)
The uniqueness of Futurama's sitcom environment made it very open and different than the other 3 prime time family centered ones. We can all only hope that the writers working on it's return will embrace that as well as the original ones did.
If you read the article, it says the money is coming from people making micropayments adding up to $50/month each.
Exactly. I actually did read some of TFA, don't tell anyone!, and was not shocked to see that number really. Those who are playing the game for free are being subsidized by those who are paying more than what the game is likely worth.
Of course that last bit is so highly subjective that I'll qualify that by adding it's not my place to say what anyones entertainment should be worth. Rather just that as you pointed out, and the point I was making in my OP, the money that is spent via micro-payments can get out of hand with a quickness.
I've not played a lot of the free/micro-payment MMOs but the ones I have fooled around with act the same way. That being if you want to have any real power in the game your forced to pay. And it's not that I'm saying that paying for an MMO service itself is bad. Rather that paying a flat rate subscription MMO is a better deal.
As such I either want to a) play for free when online; such as when playing a FPS, RTS, or even back in the day with a RPG like NWN. (A philosophy I supported by writing/hosting Stick a Fork in Me.) Or b) pay a subscription that covers everything, save for legitimate-not one every 3 months-xpacks, such that I don't get sucked into some micropayment black hole.
I think it's cool that the model exists and all the more power to those implementing it but I find it unlikely that it will be as good a model as subscription based MMOs. Too many ways that micro-payments can be 'shady' methinks.
Why do I get the feeling that this statement is purely for the benefit of the cable, one cable 'news' channel in particular, news cycle.
Furthermore that any company, let alone a convicted monopolist, that thinks that not supporting the US via taxes should really get the hell out anyway. The idea that large corporations should be entitled to the benefits of the US infrastructure without having to support it is absurd.
It has already come up in this thread but I think it warrants another post on the subject. And just some quick background: I used Opera as my main browser since right around IE3. Looking it up now I see that IE3 came out in Aug 96' and Opera was released to the public in 96 as well. One of the main reasons I liked it was how they supported the nix platforms, albeit just with binaries, as well as Win32.
Anyway suffice to say I used Opera for a long time, recommended it to friends who I thought were advanced enough to use it (Bit of a backhanded statement I know but oh well.), and even was sad when I moved away from it late last year. And the reason I finally did move away from it was that Firefox + Ablock + Noscript simply is a better overall experience.
And yes I know Opera has/has had it's own content blocking for ages now, that is not the point. It is not nearly the same thing as plugging in Adblock, picking your list, and then you just go. I also say this having already used, and continue to use, my hosts file as a filter as well.
As good as Opera is, and I still think it does a lot of things better/faster than anything else, the again overall experience with Firefox when you have it's addon support makes it better. And Firefox is also a much better replacement when moving an end user away from IE.
Opera, unless they do some really bad things, will always have a home on my PCs but right now Firefox is better for day to day usage.
If Google with all it's resources want's to help standardize the FOSS tools then they should invest in making whatever tools they have issues with to make them the best. It seems painfully obvious to me because if any given tool in the FOSS arena works best most distos will use that one.
That will make the big tools of importance to Google, and others, 'standardized' in effect. There still would be obscure distros or people who might use forked and or alternative versions of major parts of the OS but that would be fine too.
Back for more? Well no problem, I'll point out your flaws again.
If there is no grand Linux plan or movement, as you have stated in your original post...
My OP was: They are treating FOSS as if it is a corporation that has some master plan.
Your confusion seems to stem from the fact that FOSS, or 'Linux', is a single entity. It is far from that. It is rather a collection of managed projects. And not only can each managed project have it's own set of goals but each individual dev can as well. This vs the idea of a corporation that will almost always have a 'grand plan'. Or to put it better a profit motive.
I went on to say: Canonical or RH have goals that they want to do...
Now here we actually do have corporations that have profit motives. Nothing wrong with that but they are not what FOSS is either. Seeing the layers of nuance here yet?
I could go on but I'm quite sure that your already pretty confused and just wanting to spread more FUD instead of actually educating yourself.
Congratulations! The level of FUD you just wrote would impress even IBM in it's hayday.
These tech writers just don't seem to get it. They are treating FOSS as if it is a corporation that has some master plan. Granted there are parts of FOSS groups that have plans. Canonical or RH have goals that they want to do but 'Linux' or the FOSS idea works on different overall principals than deals with hardware vendors.
Of course writing about all that nuance would require actual thought and work so...
Here is the parts list for the PC they built:
And a bit about why the Intel vs AMD:
Another alternative is to go all AMD. You could build an $800 gaming rig based on a Phenom II X4 840 and 1GB Radeon HD 4870. That would be close in performance to our $800 system, but would probably fall just a little short overall.
I personally like to support AMD given that the alternative is to have Intel monopolize the market. But shrug unless AMD is the clear winner most sites will always push Intel so no real surprise. (My feeling is it goes back to the old, "Nobody every got fired for buying Intel," type of mentality.)
The AC troll here forgets to mention that that table is benchmarked at 1680x1050 with 4AAx16AF.
Crysis can work just fine on all types of video cards when your not trying to run it at the highest settings. Just like nearly every damn FPS shooter since we started this video card race.
I don't know why Crysis has gotten such a rep as being unplayable unless you have a supercomputer but my guess is that it has to do with epeening.
I played Crysis from start to finish on my I'd say average gaming machine with modest, which still looked damn good, settings and it was just fine. Only a few noticeable slowdowns. That vs say something like Fallout 3 which very much did slow down when I would go into VATS.
No kidding! Adblocking makes web use orders of magnitude better. Before I finally switched to FF from Opera for my main browser I used, and still do, my hosts file for blocking ads. However it's not the same as having Adblock that cleans up the webpage.
Put Noscript on top of Adblock and FF runs away from even Opera for the most part. And that's saying something because Opera as a rule is hell on wheels fast.
I said as much in my OP.
I however also saw a number of posts where people were clearly talking about desktop PCs.
I've read a few comments here that talk about Wladimir Palant's desire, in writing Adblock, to restore some sort of parity to website advertising. A rather noble goal and pretty logical idea.
However...
The goals of the vast majority of people who are running website ads are not noble. And their only logic is to get you to either view and click on that ad. The parity that websites provide content even thou it's our bandwidth that we use to view them does not really matter to them. How many times have I seen plays on this same theme: "If your not viewing our ads your stealing content."
Gah, with that mentality there is little room for parity. They, the collective they, are going to try to screw me over with as many ads as they can get away with in exchange for the content. They have been doing it, and are very comfortable with that model, for many years now in media.
But the catch is with my internet I get to control what I see by in large. And as such I'm blocking everything I can. Via my hosts file, plugins, or whatever other means I can utilize. Until content providers understand that it's my time that they get to compeat for with their content. "If your showing me obnoxious ads during the content your stealing my time." Is what they have to learn.
Of course that will never really happen imo. The public by in large are too complacent to really put up a fight against the media. But in my little corner of the world they get nothing. Nothing.
I've seen a number of comments in this thread about people, who seem like pretty reasonable geeks (Which I mean as a compliment.), have had or have Alienware PCs.
I just always assumed that those of us in the know knew that something like an Alienware PC would be at best an overpriced custom build basically. The idea that actual geeks were buying them instead of building their own or having someone they knew build them a custom rig makes me a little sad.
Sure there are the Apple geeks...really geeks-lite. ;) And if your in need of a laptop well I don't expect you to build one of those but a desktop PC. Really?
MS was found guilty of abusing their monopoly in the OS market because they 'integrated' IE the system.
Yet for years we have had to deal with the consequence of that because of any value was done because of it.
Telling people that they need to go spend more money on software seems to really be missing the point.
Freedom is great. However, freedom requires choices. Choices impede adoption. Imagine there was one Linux distro. Well, now to convince people to try it out, they have to partition their drive and set up a dual-boot. Icky, but a well-written setup program can accomidate this. So, let's say you can make a Windows installer that re-partitions the drive, and installs Linux, sets up the dual-boot properly. Now, you can convince people to download and try Linux.
Now, every choice you make means I have to try to research what I want, and every bit of extra time you ask for me to make a choice between two things, I have three options. A, B or screw it.
The thing that I see wrong with your argument is that your acting like each Linux distro is hugely diffrent. When in fact that is far from the case. Gimp runs just fine on not only different flavors of Linux but even on Gnome vs KDE or heck even something like Fluxbox.
So, KDE + Gnome slows adoption by quite a bit, which means that fewer people write apps, which has a chilling effect, etc.
And yes there is a bit of a chilling effect due to this variation but not nearly to the degree that you seem to be implying.
I think most devs would tend to agree that having uniformity is a good thing indeed. It's why the Linux kernel is popular and nobody really cares about Hurd. Linux is good, people know it, and so for the vast majority of people it's the way to fun FOSS.
However there is nothing wrong with some flexibility. Is it a bad thing that we have both Gnome and KDE? I'd further argue that the MS platform is, as the GP said, filled with a ton of little issues that can make working with it not as much as a 'finite learning curve' as you think. Digging to see why some API call is not working correctly because MS wants to obscure it for whatever reason is no fun.
I am continually astonished at the number of people with cable or DSL to their home who think they need a third-party ISP on top of the ISP they already have, by definition, with their broadband service.
I see it in mostly older people who don't fully understand 'teh internet' and think that somehow that without AOL that they won't be able to do...something.
I've noticed that if I end up in a house that has plastic covers on it's furniture the likelihood of them having AOL just went up.
...you really think that 48% or whatever of Americans are anti-intellectual xenophobic racist apes?
The thing is your quoting one number, the % of people who voted GOP in the last presidential race, as the litmus test of the number of people who would identify themselves as members of the GOP.
In reality there is a whole lot more nuance than that. That number includes a large amount of moderates who for whatever reason decided that they wanted McCain/Palin controlling the executive branch over Obama/Biden. Does that mean those people are a part of the GOP's 'core'? Or to put it another way that they always vote the GOP ticket?
It may be galling but keep in mind that people like Glen Beck are out there supporting the GOP/right wing on national TV these days. Until the right can come to grips with the fact that putting such a...well anti-intellectual xenophobic racist ape as part of the standard bearer for the party might not be such a good idea your going to have to deal with such labels.
Thanks for the back story but seriously, this is /. not 4chan. You can curse here and please use paragraphs.
Thanks.