There seems so much wrong with your post.... the first thing this "old dog" would have checked is if these new boxes had a standard BIOS or running UEFI. Sounds like you have a lot of incompetent people working in your shop. I probably would have questioned the move back to XP in the first place... why? Was it a legacy software issue? Was it something that could not be solved by using compatibility mode or re-compiling the software? Did anybody bother to do a proper business case, and perform a risk assessment, including the possibility that the newer hardware may not have suitable drivers, for example?
Also, at 22, perhaps you still don't understand how stupid you sound when you make sweeping generalizations about "old dogs" and their ability to cope with new technology.
Your office also sucks. If that is what passes for IT, I'd suggest HR purge them and hire former Geek Squad employees, as they are probably better at the work (and I say that seriously, though I am loathe to ever let them touch a PC of a friend or family).
...so it will only run a single core, single thread, and use up memory exponentially every minute it is on, requiring a complete reboot after three calls, right?
Maybe you should call your support desk or talk to your commanding officer?
A LOT of money has been spent by the government to give you a secure environment, with thousands of pages of STIGs to comply with, encryption, and other safeguards.
It sounds like you want to do an end-run around the regulations and security imposed on your shipboard environment. The policies in place have been shaped over the last two decades.
Do you have the slightest idea of the issues involved? We got in trouble for pinging ONCE A REBOOT from PCs that were shipboard (to check to see if they had rejoined the land-side networks), as the Naval side saw it as an attack on their network. There are real bandwidth issues on board a ship, as well as a whole slew of security issues. Just tunneling through a VPN connection is not a solution at all.
Quick Launch, yes, it might be available still on Vista, but it was removed in Windows 7 and still not back for WinMetro. In order to get it back, you must "create new toolbar" and enter in a specific location path. It is no longer easily accessible via the taskbar's context menu, as it is in XP (Vista still has it? Not sure, as I only have one Vista machine here, my company PC - and once you create it, it does show up)
Removing it did nothing to "improve" my user experience, and in fact, it had a negative impact - forcing me to look up that location to recreate the functionality. Removing the Start Button has an even bigger impact, unless I can get it back with the same features Win7's has (vistart works alright, but is a bit of a throwback to XP in features)
Microsoft, for almost three decades has performed an enormous amount of R&D in user interfaces, and everything they've discovered has been thrown out to bolt a tablet interface into a desktop OS. That is what is wrong here, and Microsoft employees have been out in droves to counter the criticisms of it. All of this misguided effort in order to bring users into a new Walled Garden (Metro Apps) and leverage this across multiple form factors. User Interfaces do not work well across different form factors!!! I don't design a game the same for a tablet as I do for the desktop or a console. There can be some overlap, sometimes the same thing works for a phone app vs a tablet app.... or a console game vs a PC game, but there are often tradeoffs that can hurt the app on every platform. Microsoft seems to have forgotten this simple truth.
Getting rid of the Quick Launch toolbar was a step off a slippery slope that Microsoft seems to be plunging down with great abandon, all the while telling us it was a perfectly legitimate thing to do.
First they came for my Quick Launch Bar, and I said nothing, because I could reclaim it.... then they took away my Start Button, but I found vistart, a reasonable facsimile.... when they came for my Windowed, open source free apps, I was unable to finally speak out with my Skype client, because I neglected to pin it to my Metro start screen!
I feel I should add to this with something more substantive - Windows 7 and Vista "removed" the QukcStart bar; it still exists, but you have to use some magic incantations to get it back. I use that for 80% of my "most used apps" - 20% of my most used apps are pinned. The remainder are easily accessible through my Start Menu, organized into program groups. Of COURSE I rarely use my Start Menu, but the fact remains that I DO USE IT.
Likewise, I don't keep all of my summer and winter clothes scattered across my bed year-round... I put non-seasonal clothes away, and keep most of seasonal clothes in my dresser, and maybe hang a few ready-to-use things out.
Metro is all about forcing you to have everything up, and being able to find nothing else without using keyboard commands - a VERY BAD PRACTICE for a UI, yet, judging by the Microsoft employees trying to inject the "use a simple keyboard shortcut" answer into every discussion from here to Fark, they seem to have all been hit (repeatedly) on the head with a blunt object when it comes to proper UI design.
WTF? That makes no sense. How does publishing a PAPER somehow unleash the virus? The research and work has already been done. Censoring or publishing the paper does nothing to affect, one way or another, whether the virus will mutate in this fashion.
As for potential terrorism uses, there are plenty of other virulent diseases that can be weaponized, far easier, in crude labs.
Frankly, I'd be more afraid of terrorists creating some disease that acts slowly, while spreading rapidly, across a narrow genotype. Think of the damage a virus that shuts down your kidneys completely, followed by other organs... over a couple of years time, while spreading as an airborne pathogen. Our health systems would be overtaxed, productivity would drop, it would be an economic disaster for the targeted areas.
That's the main problem here... the Federal government offered up "free" security services to airports, what else were they going to do? Now we seem to be stuck with the stellar service that is the TSA - government managed security theater.
You want to stop internet censorship? Stop sending them smartphones. Don't send them another cell, send them U-Hauls. Send them a guy that says, "You know, we've been coming here giving you smart phones for about 10 years now and we were driving through the desert, and we realized there wouldn't BE censorship if you people would live where the FREE INTERNET IS! YOU LIVE IN A DESPOTIC COUNTRY!! UNDERSTAND THAT? YOU LIVE IN A FUCKING AUTHORITARIAN REGIME!! NOTHING IS FREE HERE! NOTHING'S GONNA BE FREE HERE! Come here, you see this? This is sand. You know what it's gonna be 100 years from now? IT'S GONNA BE SAND!! YOU LIVE IN A FUCKING AUTHORITARIAN REGIME! We have tyrants in America, we just don't re-elect them, assholes!"
Somebody nuke it from orbit before the madness spreads to the rest of the country.
I'm no Apple fan, but somebody on another forum made a great point... Apple doesn't force iOS-like interfaces on desktop users... so WTF is Microsoft so hell bent to do this? It's like they have a perpetual hard on for anything Metro now.
Is there something I'm missing here? I do not want Metro on my desktop. Windows 7 does everything pretty well, and Windows 8 adds NOTHING that I would care to add to Windows 7.
Windows 8 is not an enhancement, it's a terrible compromise that isn't needed in the first place.
Now we developers are being forced to wallow into the mind-numbing Metro-style crap, just to use the latest tools, even if we stick with Win7. Really?
Is he supposed to say: "Apple's interface will surely be much better than the one we've spent the last 10 years working on and we expect to lose much if not all of our customers to the Apple juggernaut."
I doubt that their shareholders would be very pleased with such pronouncements.
Of course! The Followers of the Book of Jobs demand that all potential competitors bow down before the greatness of all that is Apple and its greatness, surrender to the forces of the inevitable, and acknowledge they are powerless to stop the Cupertino Juggernaut.
but... considering Apple has been trying to do this for years, already, and failed so far... and no longer enjoys the presence of the Best Leader to guide the holy jihad against regular TV... AND most consumers prefer buffet pricing for things like media, the DirectTV guy might have a point, too.
Why is anybody excited over an overpriced TV and pay-per-view pricing (that pretty much only works well for Wrestling, Boxing and Porn), just because it's got an Apple brand name?
Windows 7 is still good, and it's the next "XP" - the version Enterprise customers will be keeping until Microsoft finally shuts the doors on it, so we have a good 10 years or so left - and Microsoft has time to pull its collective head out of its collective ass and being back a GUI that makes sense in a desktop world.
If the Linux world can deliver an operating system that won't give my mother fits to use, maybe it can make inroads while Microsoft tries to shove WinMetro down people's throats, but I gave up holding my breath for that years ago.
Ah... never mind then. The Win8 SDK does not include these. Interesting, and I wonder if the Win7 SDK could be installed first to get hose compiler tools (I don;t see any real problem, unless Win8 SDK required new compiler features)
I do not see any note for the WDK 8 that tools have been removed, however. This may be a way for developers to get the latest Compiler for "free" development.
Hmmm... yet from what I see on the Windows SDK features page:
Visual C++ 2010 Compilers and C Runtime (CRT)
"The new Windows compilers and CRT for the x86, x64, and Itanium (IA64) operating systems are included in the Windows SDK and integrated into its command-line build environment. These compilers and CRT are the same as those that are included in Visual Studio 2010."
According to their own feature page, the compilers are included in the SDK./Have MSDN Sub, but won't be worrying about Win8 development for some time, if ever, as an enterprise developer.
It seems like with this move and generally the Metro and Windows 8 walled garden stuff, Microsoft is going more and more "the Apple way". Is it really in their best interest? Is it just me, or hasn't the open-ish (compared to Apple) Intel + Microsoft Windows ecosystem served a desktop market niche that is different from the Apple universe? Does Microsoft have an exit strategy in case they fail in closer competition with Apple at Apple's game?
I wish I had mod points today....
This nails the point EXACTLY.
Microsoft is in such a rush to try and capture their own share of the mobile market and stay relevant, they are dumping 30 years of solid R&D in desktop user interfaces for an unintuitive tablet-centric UI, and in an effort to drive developers into the walled garden, they are now enforcing Metro development with their free tools.
The short-sighted idiots driving this nonsense at Microsoft are forsaking the desktop world with this move, though. As bad as we thought Vista was, it still sold well enough (tied to new systems) - but the user furor over Windows 8 will make the Vista flap seem like a blip in comparison. It's a wrong-headed approach to try and shove the genie back into the bottle, Microsoft... and worse, trying to do it by creating a hybrid UI that does no specific job particularly well for users of either environment. Compromises that sacrifice millions of dollars of very good research into user interfaces will end up costing you far more in the long run.....and if consumers will be rebelling against Windows 8, what do you think will happen in the enterprise world? It's just starting to deploy Windows 7 desktops, warily approaching it after the nightmare that was Vista. Windows 8 demands retraining that will cost some organizations MILLIONS to implement. The introduction of Metro will also likely introduce a whole new firestorm of exploits for IT admins to face.
Congrats, Microsoft, for turning into a dumbass company overnight.
Do yourselves a big favor, Microsoft.... dump everybody in the company who thought Win8 Metro was a good decision for the desktop. FIRE THEM, and scrap the launch before it's too late. Pretend it never happened and begin working on Win9 with a Start Button and the improvements users WANT (like a new file system, for example, DLNA that works, improved stability and app fault recovery), instead of forcing limitations and touchscreen UIs down their throats.
By "Sweet Spot" I mean the highest capacity, decent performance, non-enterprise drives... i.e. 7200rpm 4TB drives (at this point). It's also a target, as there will be retailers who will sell these for $20~40 less.
This has always been the general rule, though the extended period the industry clung to 2TB consumer drives as the high end drove those drives (7200rpm) down into the $100~130 range.
The platter drive makers simply can't stand around if they intend to stay in the consumer market. SSD tech is quickly catching up in capacities, and the insane competition, combined with the Sandforce SF-2281 debacle, are driving prices down in an accelerating curve (though realistically, they should have hit $1/GB before last year's Black Friday).
There might only be a handful of platter drive makers still around, but they should not forget that they are competing against a (seeming) million hungry SSD makers..
This is all reminiscent of the Sumitomo event in the early 90s... when RAM prices tripled overnight. Forget the fact that there was a 6 month stockpile at the plant of the epoxy resin they could not produce until the plant was rebuilt... forget the fact that the manufacturers also had their own months-to-years supplies of the resin, and that the resin was a small fraction of the cost of RAM... prices TRIPLED OVERNIGHT. RAM manufacturers took their sweet time getting back to normal pricing, even though the factory being offline had ZERO EFFECT on the costs and ability to make RAM chips. They did so because they could make record profits after their margins had been cut to a sliver pre-Sumitomo.
The lesson learned and implemented by the HD manufacturers from that incident was that you could use the supposed "recovery" period to raise your margins and gain enormous profits.
Sadly, it's a short-sighted strategy, because the higher prices have pushed more consumers to spend the extra money on SSDs, which have now come down low enough in price and are available in large enough capacities to satisfy most consumers. Does an average consumer really NEED 2TB on their desktop? Most of the people that needed that sort of storage already purchased it before the floods, and those that still do are probably willing to hold off a bit longer. The SSD market is a virtual shark tank, and the format has gained miles on the platter drives' market share.
Meanwhile, the HD manufacturers are probably re-tooling their plants to handle even higher density platters, pushing up platter drive capacities above 6TB. The "sweet spot" will always be $200 for these drives in the consumer market, which drives down the price of those 2TB drives considerably (back down to pre-flood prices).
No price fixing really needed, though.... just a lesson learned and reduced pressure from the competition as they all decide to take a breather from the normal competitive price wars they've been engaged in. They can't ignore the SSD market for long though... $/GB is the only real benchmark that sets them apart from SSDs now, and the Hare is spending way too much time napping!
Not really. The problem is that political parties have their agendas. If a Republican is giving an argument against something, and couching it in terms that seem to have a liberal bent, it is significant. If the speaker doesn't truly believe in the argument they are making, why should we?
It doesn't matter to me what the party of the speaker is, if they believe the argument they are selling to the people.
If a used car salesman approaches you in the lot, as if he was a customer and chatted up how he was interested in the same vehicle you were, while his buddy moved in for the sale, isn't that rather dishonest?
Maybe in simpler terms: If a duck starts barking, WTF is going on, exactly?
The issue here isn't how "unfair" this is to local retailers, but rather how the tax is being paid back to Amazon, in defiance of the law that was written (though there is nothing illegal about it, and it's quite a common practice). Their argument is a misdirection - they'd like you to believe that they feel for the poor local retailers, and in a happier world, those retailers wouldn't pay sales tax (here's another hint: they don't pay sales tax - consumers do). The argument is a play to the conservative base, since the liberal base already has no problem with taxation; but it's a false argument. The speakers don't believe it, and it doesn't stand a thoughtful analysis.... however, for the majority who here it, their response will be knee-jerk (or at least the speakers hope for that reaction)
Lenny Goldberg is upset that the laws he's worked so hard to enact (funny how a "tax reform" organization wants MORE taxes imposed, too) are being "perverted" by the cities' sweetheart deals with Amazon. He's using an argument he doesn't actually believe in.... because his "side" has no problems opposing this deal, but conservatives need a different argument than "they are ruining our internet tax bill!!!"
The tax deals are nothing new. I live in the Flint, Michigan area, and that sort of thing is still done in this state to attract business.
OK, so this California Tax Reform Association seems to be set up by a Democrat (warning bells here) who seems to be solely focused on Internet Sales Tax and enforcement of that tax.
In the interest of full disclosure, the summary should mention this fact, as well as the political affiliation of the Senator who is complaining (yes, he too is a Democrat)
Opinions one way or the other of this move to grab a sliver of Amazon's tax revenues notwithstanding, the inclusion of quotes from a decidedly rabid pair of opponents is far from an even-handed treatment of the story.
Twenty seconds...that's too much for you to suffer through?
Fuck, get a drink or take a piss. You probably won't have time to do either.
If this is the level of inconvenience that would cause anyone to get upset, they need to see a shrink because they have issues.
20 seconds might be plenty of time for you to do all of that, including fuck, but the rest of us usually sit down to watch a movie after we've done all that (and I for one, last a lot longer than your few seconds... ask your Mom when you see her Sunday).
I'd prefer not to sit there for 20 seconds to be annoyed by messages that, by PAYING FOR THE MOVIE, do not actually apply to me.
Wind speeds are meaningless at the density of atmosphere on Pluto (or even Neptune, for that matter).
Airspeeds could be thousands of miles an hour, and there would still be no appreciable effect of friction. Indeed, that is part of the reason airspeeds are so fast to begin with.
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There seems so much wrong with your post.... the first thing this "old dog" would have checked is if these new boxes had a standard BIOS or running UEFI. Sounds like you have a lot of incompetent people working in your shop. I probably would have questioned the move back to XP in the first place... why? Was it a legacy software issue? Was it something that could not be solved by using compatibility mode or re-compiling the software? Did anybody bother to do a proper business case, and perform a risk assessment, including the possibility that the newer hardware may not have suitable drivers, for example?
Also, at 22, perhaps you still don't understand how stupid you sound when you make sweeping generalizations about "old dogs" and their ability to cope with new technology.
Your office also sucks. If that is what passes for IT, I'd suggest HR purge them and hire former Geek Squad employees, as they are probably better at the work (and I say that seriously, though I am loathe to ever let them touch a PC of a friend or family).
...so it will only run a single core, single thread, and use up memory exponentially every minute it is on, requiring a complete reboot after three calls, right?
Maybe you should call your support desk or talk to your commanding officer?
A LOT of money has been spent by the government to give you a secure environment, with thousands of pages of STIGs to comply with, encryption, and other safeguards.
It sounds like you want to do an end-run around the regulations and security imposed on your shipboard environment. The policies in place have been shaped over the last two decades.
Do you have the slightest idea of the issues involved? We got in trouble for pinging ONCE A REBOOT from PCs that were shipboard (to check to see if they had rejoined the land-side networks), as the Naval side saw it as an attack on their network. There are real bandwidth issues on board a ship, as well as a whole slew of security issues. Just tunneling through a VPN connection is not a solution at all.
Quick Launch, yes, it might be available still on Vista, but it was removed in Windows 7 and still not back for WinMetro. In order to get it back, you must "create new toolbar" and enter in a specific location path. It is no longer easily accessible via the taskbar's context menu, as it is in XP (Vista still has it? Not sure, as I only have one Vista machine here, my company PC - and once you create it, it does show up)
Removing it did nothing to "improve" my user experience, and in fact, it had a negative impact - forcing me to look up that location to recreate the functionality. Removing the Start Button has an even bigger impact, unless I can get it back with the same features Win7's has (vistart works alright, but is a bit of a throwback to XP in features)
Microsoft, for almost three decades has performed an enormous amount of R&D in user interfaces, and everything they've discovered has been thrown out to bolt a tablet interface into a desktop OS. That is what is wrong here, and Microsoft employees have been out in droves to counter the criticisms of it. All of this misguided effort in order to bring users into a new Walled Garden (Metro Apps) and leverage this across multiple form factors. User Interfaces do not work well across different form factors!!! I don't design a game the same for a tablet as I do for the desktop or a console. There can be some overlap, sometimes the same thing works for a phone app vs a tablet app.... or a console game vs a PC game, but there are often tradeoffs that can hurt the app on every platform. Microsoft seems to have forgotten this simple truth.
Getting rid of the Quick Launch toolbar was a step off a slippery slope that Microsoft seems to be plunging down with great abandon, all the while telling us it was a perfectly legitimate thing to do.
First they came for my Quick Launch Bar, and I said nothing, because I could reclaim it.... then they took away my Start Button, but I found vistart, a reasonable facsimile.... when they came for my Windowed, open source free apps, I was unable to finally speak out with my Skype client, because I neglected to pin it to my Metro start screen!
I feel I should add to this with something more substantive - Windows 7 and Vista "removed" the QukcStart bar; it still exists, but you have to use some magic incantations to get it back. I use that for 80% of my "most used apps" - 20% of my most used apps are pinned. The remainder are easily accessible through my Start Menu, organized into program groups. Of COURSE I rarely use my Start Menu, but the fact remains that I DO USE IT.
Likewise, I don't keep all of my summer and winter clothes scattered across my bed year-round... I put non-seasonal clothes away, and keep most of seasonal clothes in my dresser, and maybe hang a few ready-to-use things out.
Metro is all about forcing you to have everything up, and being able to find nothing else without using keyboard commands - a VERY BAD PRACTICE for a UI, yet, judging by the Microsoft employees trying to inject the "use a simple keyboard shortcut" answer into every discussion from here to Fark, they seem to have all been hit (repeatedly) on the head with a blunt object when it comes to proper UI design.
WTF?
...by my focus group, those drivers I observe leaving parking lots or changing lanes.
Let's get rid of them for ALL drivers!
Microsoft R&D has gone full retard. Seldom-used feature does not equate to NEVER used feature, nor does it equate to NOT NEEDED feature.
WTF? That makes no sense. How does publishing a PAPER somehow unleash the virus? The research and work has already been done. Censoring or publishing the paper does nothing to affect, one way or another, whether the virus will mutate in this fashion.
As for potential terrorism uses, there are plenty of other virulent diseases that can be weaponized, far easier, in crude labs.
Frankly, I'd be more afraid of terrorists creating some disease that acts slowly, while spreading rapidly, across a narrow genotype. Think of the damage a virus that shuts down your kidneys completely, followed by other organs... over a couple of years time, while spreading as an airborne pathogen. Our health systems would be overtaxed, productivity would drop, it would be an economic disaster for the targeted areas.
That's the main problem here... the Federal government offered up "free" security services to airports, what else were they going to do? Now we seem to be stuck with the stellar service that is the TSA - government managed security theater.
Get rid of it. Problem solved.
You want to stop internet censorship? Stop sending them smartphones. Don't send them another cell, send them U-Hauls. Send them a guy that says, "You know, we've been coming here giving you smart phones for about 10 years now and we were driving through the desert, and we realized there wouldn't BE censorship if you people would live where the FREE INTERNET IS! YOU LIVE IN A DESPOTIC COUNTRY!! UNDERSTAND THAT? YOU LIVE IN A FUCKING AUTHORITARIAN REGIME!! NOTHING IS FREE HERE! NOTHING'S GONNA BE FREE HERE! Come here, you see this? This is sand. You know what it's gonna be 100 years from now? IT'S GONNA BE SAND!! YOU LIVE IN A FUCKING AUTHORITARIAN REGIME! We have tyrants in America, we just don't re-elect them, assholes!"
Somebody nuke it from orbit before the madness spreads to the rest of the country.
I'm no Apple fan, but somebody on another forum made a great point... Apple doesn't force iOS-like interfaces on desktop users... so WTF is Microsoft so hell bent to do this? It's like they have a perpetual hard on for anything Metro now.
Is there something I'm missing here? I do not want Metro on my desktop. Windows 7 does everything pretty well, and Windows 8 adds NOTHING that I would care to add to Windows 7.
Windows 8 is not an enhancement, it's a terrible compromise that isn't needed in the first place.
Now we developers are being forced to wallow into the mind-numbing Metro-style crap, just to use the latest tools, even if we stick with Win7. Really?
Is he supposed to say: "Apple's interface will surely be much better than the one we've spent the last 10 years working on and we expect to lose much if not all of our customers to the Apple juggernaut."
I doubt that their shareholders would be very pleased with such pronouncements.
Of course! The Followers of the Book of Jobs demand that all potential competitors bow down before the greatness of all that is Apple and its greatness, surrender to the forces of the inevitable, and acknowledge they are powerless to stop the Cupertino Juggernaut.
but... considering Apple has been trying to do this for years, already, and failed so far... and no longer enjoys the presence of the Best Leader to guide the holy jihad against regular TV... AND most consumers prefer buffet pricing for things like media, the DirectTV guy might have a point, too.
Why is anybody excited over an overpriced TV and pay-per-view pricing (that pretty much only works well for Wrestling, Boxing and Porn), just because it's got an Apple brand name?
Windows 7 is still good, and it's the next "XP" - the version Enterprise customers will be keeping until Microsoft finally shuts the doors on it, so we have a good 10 years or so left - and Microsoft has time to pull its collective head out of its collective ass and being back a GUI that makes sense in a desktop world.
If the Linux world can deliver an operating system that won't give my mother fits to use, maybe it can make inroads while Microsoft tries to shove WinMetro down people's throats, but I gave up holding my breath for that years ago.
Did the press release contain hard-coded Dutch subtitles?
Ah... never mind then. The Win8 SDK does not include these. Interesting, and I wonder if the Win7 SDK could be installed first to get hose compiler tools (I don;t see any real problem, unless Win8 SDK required new compiler features)
I do not see any note for the WDK 8 that tools have been removed, however. This may be a way for developers to get the latest Compiler for "free" development.
Hmmm... yet from what I see on the Windows SDK features page:
Visual C++ 2010 Compilers and C Runtime (CRT)
"The new Windows compilers and CRT for the x86, x64, and Itanium (IA64) operating systems are included in the Windows SDK and integrated into its command-line build environment. These compilers and CRT are the same as those that are included in Visual Studio 2010."
According to their own feature page, the compilers are included in the SDK. /Have MSDN Sub, but won't be worrying about Win8 development for some time, if ever, as an enterprise developer.
It seems like with this move and generally the Metro and Windows 8 walled garden stuff, Microsoft is going more and more "the Apple way". Is it really in their best interest? Is it just me, or hasn't the open-ish (compared to Apple) Intel + Microsoft Windows ecosystem served a desktop market niche that is different from the Apple universe? Does Microsoft have an exit strategy in case they fail in closer competition with Apple at Apple's game?
I wish I had mod points today....
This nails the point EXACTLY.
Microsoft is in such a rush to try and capture their own share of the mobile market and stay relevant, they are dumping 30 years of solid R&D in desktop user interfaces for an unintuitive tablet-centric UI, and in an effort to drive developers into the walled garden, they are now enforcing Metro development with their free tools.
The short-sighted idiots driving this nonsense at Microsoft are forsaking the desktop world with this move, though. As bad as we thought Vista was, it still sold well enough (tied to new systems) - but the user furor over Windows 8 will make the Vista flap seem like a blip in comparison. It's a wrong-headed approach to try and shove the genie back into the bottle, Microsoft... and worse, trying to do it by creating a hybrid UI that does no specific job particularly well for users of either environment. Compromises that sacrifice millions of dollars of very good research into user interfaces will end up costing you far more in the long run. ....and if consumers will be rebelling against Windows 8, what do you think will happen in the enterprise world? It's just starting to deploy Windows 7 desktops, warily approaching it after the nightmare that was Vista. Windows 8 demands retraining that will cost some organizations MILLIONS to implement. The introduction of Metro will also likely introduce a whole new firestorm of exploits for IT admins to face.
Congrats, Microsoft, for turning into a dumbass company overnight.
Do yourselves a big favor, Microsoft.... dump everybody in the company who thought Win8 Metro was a good decision for the desktop. FIRE THEM, and scrap the launch before it's too late. Pretend it never happened and begin working on Win9 with a Start Button and the improvements users WANT (like a new file system, for example, DLNA that works, improved stability and app fault recovery), instead of forcing limitations and touchscreen UIs down their throats.
By "Sweet Spot" I mean the highest capacity, decent performance, non-enterprise drives... i.e. 7200rpm 4TB drives (at this point). It's also a target, as there will be retailers who will sell these for $20~40 less.
This has always been the general rule, though the extended period the industry clung to 2TB consumer drives as the high end drove those drives (7200rpm) down into the $100~130 range.
The platter drive makers simply can't stand around if they intend to stay in the consumer market. SSD tech is quickly catching up in capacities, and the insane competition, combined with the Sandforce SF-2281 debacle, are driving prices down in an accelerating curve (though realistically, they should have hit $1/GB before last year's Black Friday).
There might only be a handful of platter drive makers still around, but they should not forget that they are competing against a (seeming) million hungry SSD makers..
This is all reminiscent of the Sumitomo event in the early 90s... when RAM prices tripled overnight. Forget the fact that there was a 6 month stockpile at the plant of the epoxy resin they could not produce until the plant was rebuilt... forget the fact that the manufacturers also had their own months-to-years supplies of the resin, and that the resin was a small fraction of the cost of RAM... prices TRIPLED OVERNIGHT. RAM manufacturers took their sweet time getting back to normal pricing, even though the factory being offline had ZERO EFFECT on the costs and ability to make RAM chips. They did so because they could make record profits after their margins had been cut to a sliver pre-Sumitomo.
The lesson learned and implemented by the HD manufacturers from that incident was that you could use the supposed "recovery" period to raise your margins and gain enormous profits.
Sadly, it's a short-sighted strategy, because the higher prices have pushed more consumers to spend the extra money on SSDs, which have now come down low enough in price and are available in large enough capacities to satisfy most consumers. Does an average consumer really NEED 2TB on their desktop? Most of the people that needed that sort of storage already purchased it before the floods, and those that still do are probably willing to hold off a bit longer. The SSD market is a virtual shark tank, and the format has gained miles on the platter drives' market share.
Meanwhile, the HD manufacturers are probably re-tooling their plants to handle even higher density platters, pushing up platter drive capacities above 6TB. The "sweet spot" will always be $200 for these drives in the consumer market, which drives down the price of those 2TB drives considerably (back down to pre-flood prices).
No price fixing really needed, though.... just a lesson learned and reduced pressure from the competition as they all decide to take a breather from the normal competitive price wars they've been engaged in. They can't ignore the SSD market for long though... $/GB is the only real benchmark that sets them apart from SSDs now, and the Hare is spending way too much time napping!
Not really. The problem is that political parties have their agendas. If a Republican is giving an argument against something, and couching it in terms that seem to have a liberal bent, it is significant. If the speaker doesn't truly believe in the argument they are making, why should we?
It doesn't matter to me what the party of the speaker is, if they believe the argument they are selling to the people.
If a used car salesman approaches you in the lot, as if he was a customer and chatted up how he was interested in the same vehicle you were, while his buddy moved in for the sale, isn't that rather dishonest?
Maybe in simpler terms: If a duck starts barking, WTF is going on, exactly?
The issue here isn't how "unfair" this is to local retailers, but rather how the tax is being paid back to Amazon, in defiance of the law that was written (though there is nothing illegal about it, and it's quite a common practice). Their argument is a misdirection - they'd like you to believe that they feel for the poor local retailers, and in a happier world, those retailers wouldn't pay sales tax (here's another hint: they don't pay sales tax - consumers do). The argument is a play to the conservative base, since the liberal base already has no problem with taxation; but it's a false argument. The speakers don't believe it, and it doesn't stand a thoughtful analysis.... however, for the majority who here it, their response will be knee-jerk (or at least the speakers hope for that reaction)
Lenny Goldberg is upset that the laws he's worked so hard to enact (funny how a "tax reform" organization wants MORE taxes imposed, too) are being "perverted" by the cities' sweetheart deals with Amazon. He's using an argument he doesn't actually believe in.... because his "side" has no problems opposing this deal, but conservatives need a different argument than "they are ruining our internet tax bill!!!"
The tax deals are nothing new. I live in the Flint, Michigan area, and that sort of thing is still done in this state to attract business.
OK, so this California Tax Reform Association seems to be set up by a Democrat (warning bells here) who seems to be solely focused on Internet Sales Tax and enforcement of that tax.
In the interest of full disclosure, the summary should mention this fact, as well as the political affiliation of the Senator who is complaining (yes, he too is a Democrat)
Opinions one way or the other of this move to grab a sliver of Amazon's tax revenues notwithstanding, the inclusion of quotes from a decidedly rabid pair of opponents is far from an even-handed treatment of the story.
Twenty seconds...that's too much for you to suffer through?
Fuck, get a drink or take a piss. You probably won't have time to do either.
If this is the level of inconvenience that would cause anyone to get upset, they need to see a shrink because they have issues.
20 seconds might be plenty of time for you to do all of that, including fuck, but the rest of us usually sit down to watch a movie after we've done all that (and I for one, last a lot longer than your few seconds... ask your Mom when you see her Sunday).
I'd prefer not to sit there for 20 seconds to be annoyed by messages that, by PAYING FOR THE MOVIE, do not actually apply to me.
That can't be good for sales. If I was buying an airliner, I'd have to pass on this one.
I used this wallpaper on my desktop, and now my wifi no longer works.
Took me a while to figure it out, but I've since switched back to my old wallpaper, and everything is fine now.
Wind speeds are meaningless at the density of atmosphere on Pluto (or even Neptune, for that matter).
Airspeeds could be thousands of miles an hour, and there would still be no appreciable effect of friction. Indeed, that is part of the reason airspeeds are so fast to begin with.