However, operating systems like Windows 7 will degrade video quality if they detect a non HDMI cable for blue-Ray content in the RC releases so this way MPAA can make people think DRM HDMI is better.
I use HDMI on my machine due to convenience of less cables and I hate the sound on my mobo. Not because I believe it is better video quality.
But it is just a cable and nothing else. The DRM HDCP is dependent on OS support.
I use it to reduce cables and clutter and to improve sound quality.
Reason being is I have ugly shipping tape on the back of my desk and I HATE CABLES! My realtek sound chip is a POS that used to require reboots to get skype working. After an embarrasing interview where I had to reboot I switched to HDMI.
I have a nice ATI 7850 GPU with a better sound ship on it not to mention a digital signal all the way to the monitor means better audio quality (speakers are in monitor). True I might not notice an audible difference but I hated my buggy sound on my mobo. Audio enthusiats might care with a real system though.
Oh and I paid $10 at BigLots for it as another slashdotter recommended that. Do not go anywhere else where you will be ripped off.
By switching to gold connectors how many more bits will magically teleport and ECC themselves over the standard bandwidth compared to 1.4 that the highly qualified GeekSquad HDMI experts at BestBuy keep telling me about for $120?
See the fear, anger, and sillyness for the mere suggestion of change gets people all rallied up!
This my friends is why Linux wont ever take off, let alone something more modern for PC users but that is totally another topic. The point here is people fear change and their comfort zone soo much they will defend their right to use 12 year old insecure operating systems even when confronted with facts. It is like they need to find something to be afraid of to justify their actions and beliefs.
The older you get the worse it gets. People want to watch TV, not invest in their careers on the weekends. People sometimes do the same boring old trips every year because taht is what they always do. They order the same food at restuarants. Restaurant Impossible has chef Irvine come in with new items and some old timers like the frozen crap because that is what they always order after he makes changes to attract new customers.
Multiple that for anything more drastic and you have people whine about their lives, where they live, and be envious of those who take risks, change careers, move, and do things in life that require lots of work and a step waaay out of their comfort zone. Oh it must be luck etc. It is not luck. They worked hard and did not fear change.
Sometimes it is not extreme examples of phobias listed or liberties like what this article is about, but rather small changes most today will not do and then be shocked when they do not get their desired results.
Funny how the geeks here who knew our stuff bought lower speced AthlonXPs because I knew my athlonXP1800 at 1200 mhz would cream a pentium III of that same speed quite easily for 1/2 the price.
But Joe six packs saw that mhz tag and purchased pentium IVs instead.
It is annoying MS still makes 32-bit software in addition to not supporting 16 bit software through WOW32 in 64 bit versions of Windows. I guess running wow daisy chained to wow 32 is banned. Wow stands for win16 on win32 so your corporate VB 5 app circa 1996 can still run on Windows 7 (the 32-bit version).
I am not a developer, but they tell me it is a simple recompile unless you are working in assembly or device driver development. 64-bit is much more efficient as it has compiler flags for the extra registers on a modern post pentium IV in addition to SSE 3 and other extra instructions added to chips in the last 10 years. Windows 7 also has a crippled MBR that does not check for signed bootloaders so a rootkits like allueron can execute. So you get more performance if you compile it for 64 bit besides the extra ram.
I think modern versions of linux can use these extra instructions depending on how it is compilied by default too and just not use it on an older Pentium IV so the difference is not quite so stark. But XP reaks in comparison as most users feel it is faster, but in reality does not take advantage of any processor made in the last 10 years!
MS really should just port the 2 WOWs and kill 32 bit OS development as it gives a developer no incentive to upgrade his or her code as XP is still a huge market where many users have old DOS apps that require it.... regardless 32 bit operating systems support threading and processing well if not better than 64 bit and have for many years. a multi core is nice for heavy multitaskers even if you have memory your single core and even dual core will glitch with 5 apps and +40 tabs in Chrome.
If you are smart enough to master master, and real science, then couldn't you earn about 3X as much as a teacher?
Alaska pays up to $70,000 a year for someone with a masters degree plus 10 years of exprience and this includes a pension for life after 25 years!
So why would anyone with a masters do this? They get to bring the middle finger to corporate america and over time retire early with $70,000 a year with free health insurance for life!
Even starting out you get $44,000 a year which is excellent for an undergrad degree. Teachers used to get paid shit, but that is changing and maybe just maybe not everyone goes to jobs that pay the most and look for other areas of job satisfaction like taking the same time off as their kids, going kayaking and camping in the summer, getting decent vacation time, not having a PHB breathing down your neck all the time, pension taken care off.
Teachers can also become counselors, principals, coaches (sports or subject), trainers, start education related companies, or stay in academia too with nice discounts for advanced degrees with a guaranteed pay rise which is nice if you are an undergrad.
However, some states like Alabama and Louisiana pay just above Walmart wages so it varies. I would refuse to teach in these states but Georgia and Alaska pay very well so your mileage varies.
You need at least a bachelors degree required by federal law in No Child Left Behind in mathematics or one of its disciplines like mine in Business Statistics and Finance. Even then you need to pass a test. Geometry was difficult as accounting classes do not use it and I have not seen it in years! Took a month to study for that portion but there are federal safe guards requiring the major and not just a test like the old days where an English major could teach math if she just passed a single test.
The problem is most education professionals are not so good at understanding Math, and many really do not trust is.
You go to any college and talk to education majors, and ask them why they didn't major in other majors, after they repeat the normal BS, about wanting to help children yadda yadda, It comes down to the fact that many of the other majors that has a clear career path requires much more Math study, and they don't like Math.
Sure we have a few educators like Math and Science teachers who get it, but they are the minority, and the ones who seems to get promoted to positions where they can make decisions, are usually History and English teachers. So they don't know about this research is because they are not looking for it, and they really don't want to find it, because the numbers may contradict what you opinion is, and no one likes that.
We have the State and Unions fighting over these details and little focus on what works.
Math teacher here. Actually a trainee to become a teacher in a program but already working in the school system.
First off thanks to No Child Left Behind every teacher must be highly qualified to teach. This means they need to have a major to match the subject matter, plus pass a competency exam, in addition to the the professional educators exam (you can teach 1 year without this in an emergency teaching credential depending on your state.) Not have someone who took algebra I in college who majored in Elementary education actually teach Calculus honors.
I have a career in I.T. and tried to teach computers and they would not even let me because of this requirement. I could pass the test but I will never be hired to ever teach this without going back to school with a computer science degree or an education degree with a technology specialty. I can only teach math as I has an associates in IT and switched to a business statistics major and perhaps economics at a highschool level if I choose to take the later test.
Education majors can only teach elementary school level work by federal law. Unless they are in a special education specialty major such as education math, or education biology, etc. That is what many highschool teachers do if they get a teaching degree but want to specialize in that area so they take calculus I, college statistics, and other classes that other slashdotters took for their technical degrees.
Let me tell you I thought the math test would be easy. Well the actual math portion was, but many questions were Johnny had this quadratic formula and this was his answer (a wrong one.) What did he do wrong and which instructional method would you use with this student? Without my pre-service work I was clueless as I could guess if putting enough time trying to purposefully get a problem wrong, but why did he do this I have no idea? That is what I am learning now.
It is hard to be a teacher. Your students do not want to be there. You are expected to move mountains and your metrics are not to lead the horse to the water, but how many gallons of water per hour your horses drink. I am not whining here as there are ways to motivate students but it is not like the kids actually want to be there unlike college or a workplace environment where if a worker doesn't give a shit and shows disrespect you fire him. Can't do that in this profession.
I regret the union fighting for teachers more than students as I do not want to see bad teachers keep their jobs and abuse sick days and whine all the time. But, they are a guild like the Bar Association so I do like my training and networking with other professionals. Not all teachers are bad and I am in favor of eliminating tenure. Surprisingly contrary to popular opinion is that 50% of teachers quit within 5 years. So not all bad apples stay. It is just a hard demanding job but worth it for those who are good at it and enjoy the challenges.
I still have an old Abit BP6 system sitting next to my desk gathering dust if you want it. I even have 4 extra celeron processors for it!
Back when men where men, and dual core meant two processors!
Sadly other than specialized software, most are still only designed for single core anyway, making the performance gains negligible for most people, which means other than an expensive marketing ploy to a small enthusiast market, not much of a market advantage for any company to do so...
That is radically changing. Notice Samsung has an 8 core phone coming out soon. Most people outside of moms use Chrome and IE which both have a thread per tab and also have a half dozen apps and even more files open. Geeks like us probably run VirtualBox or VMWare to test Windows Server and Linux with XP and Windows 7 clients. Any IT geek with his or salt does this and let me tell you my old crappy 6 core phenom II came in handy when I started doing this when I want to learn push installation testing. Games are now using this too as even xbox ports from the Xbox one have multithreading built in due to more than 1 core being used.
With people leaving XP slowly but surely they use more than 8 gigs of ram which enables them to open more apps at once which will utilize this. Chrome is the biggest use of this as when you have +40 tabs open can slow just a dual core system very quickly even if you have the ram! Maybe not scale linear wise but Windows 8 leaves open too when you close them just like iOS and Android. Having the extra cores helps this.
Because the only Multi Chip processors are still 4 years behind this. Why dont they just enable the ability for me to drop 4 of these on a single motherboard so I can have my 24 core monster for editing and rendering 4K video?
You can. Asus makes a workstation version of its Server and gamer sabertooth lines. They have 2 sockets. With 2 of these things in there you can have a 24 core system (assuming Asus updates its WS board to support this soon.) They are not as popular as 10 years ago when geeks put 2 athlonMPs together because extra cores do the same thing for a fraction of the cost without a specialty and premium motherboard.
They are pricey at +$400 per board though, but a gamer grade 1200 watt PSU and you can get a medium grade Firepro which is as fast as an ATi 6670 for $350 bucks now and that would be fine for this if you have the cash for a $2000+ system.
Your post is 100% true... back in the phenom II/core 2 days. Maybe the 1st generation i3 and i5s vs a phenom II and I would agree with you. If you run heavily threaded VMWare Workstation, Sony Vegas, or +60 tabs of Chrome (Not firefox due to the lack of 1 thread per tab) + 6 apps at the same time, then you get great value with AMD back in 2010.
But today, Intel is creaming them and I see these posts as a bunch of desperate panics from AMD fans trying to be defensive against the Intel posters. It is not a personal attack. Right now sadly AMD is losing and most general use an i3 is a better buy.
FYI I am typing this on a 2010 era AMD 6 core 2.6 ghz system with an ATI card. It runs Virtualbox VMs great and I do like to leave stuff up where it multitasks. However, it is starting to show its age. It has its moments with javascript even in Chrome and SWTOR does have FPS drops where the fans blow like crazy even with an upgrading ATi 7850!
A less 4 core i5 would be smooth in such a situation sadly even under multitasking and especially single tasking.
You're full of it. There's no reason you can't keep running the same OS kernel as long as you want to, not breaking anything. It's YOUR decision to upgrade to the latest shiny new kernel. If you're THAT worried about keeping up to date then this is the price you pay. I mean, it's fun to blame Linux for this. It really is. But all those Android tablets are running it just fine with driver issues.
If you REALLY wanted to see Linux be better-supported by driver creators, then you'd pressure them more, not Linux. A stable ABI isn't the answer you're looking for when simply recompiling the driver is good enough for most bleeding-edge users to play with it. The kernel simply doesn't change THAT much, so extensive testing isn't necessary as often as people seem to think it is.
Look my system runs fine when I install it. Then Ubuntu update comes in and it goes black. I am the user at this point and not technical at all. In real life I know to alt F-key another tty and run a kill -9 to run a shell terminal to fix it, but good luck with that for 99% of all other users.
Well I would still be using Linux now otherwise. Android is stable as each minor release has the same ABI. Hairyfeet said the same thing why he does not sell Linux at his shop. He puts it in and the customer always comes back saying their screen or printer mysteriously stops working. The only way around this is to use an enterprise kernel like Redhat/CENTOS that never updates and live back in 2009/2010. I do this in VMWare to get unix work done now.
Why should ATI keep rewritting and supporting drivers based on Linus and others changing things all the time? Isn't that the point of an ABI so you do not have to worry about that? Yes the does change very fast.
I write these things because I would like to see Linux used full time and it is frustrating. ATI does make ok drivers. Its just the situation with them.
Most sales are from big name OEMs these days like HP and Dell. They only have intel lines as customers see the stickers and it is a name they are familiar with. Worse, geeks who go to slashdot or its Redmond fanboy version aka neowin.net have been warning them of AMD for a few years now if they users ask them for advice.
There are still some who homebrew systems but they are almost all performance oriented folks who buy Intel anyway. Even a cheap i3 build will cost $200 more than buying one from Dell where you can turn it on and get to work right away due to volume discounts. $350 vs $550 is a big difference from an identical computer spec wise. If HP or Dell make any and I mean any non intel units let me know and I will retract. It is 2am and I am too lazy to look it up now.
You ask why they don't keep pushing prices up(could ask that until infinity dollars) as if you think Intel's pricing is reasonable for their top end CPUs and you think they are doing consumers a favor for not asking more.
Comparing to top end graphics cards (Nvidia Titan, for example), the top end Intel chips (3970x) are relatively unsophisticated compared to their cheaper line ($300). That is, they are already inflating their margins by astronomical amounts because they have no competition at the top end.
And just wait to think what will happen if AMD liquidates and closes it doors if it can't get a competitive CPU? We most certainly will accelerate into a post PC world as the costs of all notebooks and desktops at the low end will double very quickly.
Please AMD do not mess this one up. My phenom II is begining to show its age and in 2 years I am planning on replacing it perhaps with this new chip?
I've been using ATI parts with X since mid-90s, and never had any complaints about driver support (execpt that for around 2 years, I was forced to use a non-free x server [not by ATI; I don't remember who made it, but I ripped it from RedHat, and used it with Slackware] for the GPU on my laptop, in the 90s). It is better now than it ever was. The only real complaint is that the newer free drivers for AMD (e.g., radeon driver) rely on non-free firmware-- but, of course, there are folks working to remedy this issue..
The only company making a GPU that is in the same class of commitment to supporting free software on their GPUs as AMD is Intel.
Oh, you are running some binary blob. Try the free radeon driver. It works quite well-- esp with a 3.11+ kernel, so you get power saving in GPUs using the radeon driver (way cooler running on my laptop, and you won't have to run a -rc kernel in about a week or two when 3.11 is released for real). If you need open-cl, well then you are forced to the binary blob for now, but I expect this will change within a couple years, at the most.
The bashing for me is Linux SUCKS with driver support! I had an ATI 5750 and can only run 2009 era distros and not run update on them as Linux lacks a stable ABI because socailists like RMS feel binary blobs are evil and that all should be opensourced and recompiling them enforces this freedom.
I call that slavery as I loose the freedom to run the OS and XORG I want. Every other os including other free ones like FreeBSD have an ABI and because it is stable you can even add them as kernel modules in newer versions. Just select FBSD 6.x compat in./sysinstall etc. Viola. Works!
As a result I can not recommend standard users switch from Windows yet. If Linux users really want to have me and others use your OS again you need a stable ABI so drivers can materialize and companies like ATI do not have to rewrite their damn drivers on a monthly basis.
According to Tomshardware an Icore3 can fucking beat that 8 core. Especially in Skyrim and Crysis.
FYI I am typing this on an AMD phenom II sadly as I am not an intel troll. The FX really is a crappy chip and there is no sense trying to defend it as the people who play games or do any graphics work use dedicated graphics anyway. The intel integrated crap is fine for Office work and web browsing in this day and age.
Here is hoping this next generation one fixes the problems.
An unnecessarily overpowered chip will be delayed, so more of the hardware features no one asked for will be delivered to a market that usually works in symbiosis with the Microsoft inefficiency treadmill but is now being destroyed entirely by that same company.
Why don't you wait for it to come out before criticizing it. AMD is in trouble and it would hurt us all including the intel fan boys who are reading these comments if AMD is gone.
I noticed Intel is already raising prices on the newer I7s for no other reason that they think there is no competition as everyone bashes them in every tech website.
Steamroller is actually slower than the older Phenom II per clock cycle and is a crappy chip. That is true. I still own a phenom II but my crappy mobo is showing its age as it is downclocked to only 2.6 ghz. But it runs VMWare Workstation with its x6 core processor very competitively! I mean it can trounce a x4 icore7 easily from the same time period 2010ish in parrallel processing!
Want hardware virtualization iwth that intel processor? Oh, you need a special bios unlocked for $$$ more money (as much as my whole machine at $599!) AMD would never do this.
Remember Intel fanboys that even Intel had crappy chips out there such as 486sx, buggy pentiums, and of course the Pentium IV. The mistake for Steamroller were 1. Everyone would be using a tablet by now and would like smooth graphics like the Iphone has had for 5 years in which PCs still do not do right with smooth scroll thanks to XP support and crappy integrated chipsets 2. The APU would be faster than any 7990 as the ram controller would be on the card with instant low latency! Turns out that wasn't true as complications got in the way of that 3. AMD had done right iwth the Phenom II was great multicore and parrallel performance. SteamRoller has all its cores share cache and a central FPU:-( FYI they are not true cores like Intels or the older Phenom IIs.
I was hoping these last 2 issues would be fixed in Kaveri. AMD is in trouble and its ATI cards can't keep them afloat forever. Nvidia is being very aggressive with Kepler in that department.
Either he is a troll, or is jealous and envious at the thought of you kicking back in a nice car and him serving you fries in 30 years as he did not save anything and has to work at McDonalds at age 68 to pay his rent.
I do not know if I will be rich, but I made stupid mistakes with money and lost a marriage over that and a combination of bad luck:-(
But I will say this. Even if you and I do not become rich the next time a great recession hits, a big medical bill, early retirement, or whatever the hell comes bye you and I will be better off than if we did not and have to go back in debt all over again.
It is nice knowing I have a cushion and it is not easy being frugal. You still need to make bets with your money (not expensives) for things that may or may not pay off like more college, homes, taking a risk for a better paying job in a different field, and other things.
Keep up the good work regardless if you get rich or not! Savers should get encouragement from other savers.
This is a bit off-topic but your calculation shows us the issues surrounding a fair minimum wage.
Fair means to me your days labour pays for a day's life, not a day of suffering.
That day's life should include savings for later, including savings for the future of your kids.
If your income cannot support this your job is not only useless for you but to society as a whole, your boss/employer might seem to make money over your back but at the end of the day/week/month/year/life we as a society are stuck with a family that needs support to survive, forget about advancing the pool of society.
A fair and sufficient minimum wage might initially look like a burden for the company or employer but in the long term it helps us all.
A day's work that cannot pay for a workers life and future is by definition inefficient and in the longer term will cost us all.
Lets flip the tables and examine your argument? Do you have any idea what you are asking for?
I am for raising the minimium wage in the US by the way. But a fair wage would devestate the economy. Case in point in the US there is a strike of fast food workers wanting to unionize. I make the same about 2x minimium wage for I.T. work doing admin work and desktop support for a fortune 1,000 company. Why the hell should I after investing $30,000 in school and $9,000 in Microsoft certification make the damn same amount as someone who dropped out of school and has no debt! Fuck that!... back to economic argument (relates to my rant) You talk about savings? How much savings would you make if your Starbucks coffee would cost $8? Hungry for lunch, that subway sandwhich is now $11. The gas is 15% higher which means your monthly savings take a hit too.
Now lets look at the long term? Billly Gates making the same as a McDonalds worker? Oh hell no! Me and my coworkers will walk if we cant get $23 an hour. Oh my gf works as a teacher and she makes $18/hr and has all the debt? What she makes just $3/hr above the McDonalds worker? Think she will put up with that? No teachers will quit unless they too get a raise etc. Now you have real inflation and rents go up, food goes up, consumables go up, your savings take a hit and so does your purchasing power each month because you want to be fair right?
In the end if harms the economy as McDonalds closes half its stores as people are not willing to pay $10 for a Big Mac combo. Starbucks shuts down its stores too as people think "hmm I can brew my own coffee at work rather than pay $8 instead." Worse if you are retiring you are now fucked as you wont be getting that raise to make up for the spike in the cost of living.
Unemployment now doubles in proportion to the doubling of the minimium wage.
A small $2/hr increase I am in favor and think would help. But a fairwage you are looking at $15- $17 an hour which is insane. I think for those of us who worked hard we should make more money. We are more important as our wage reflects our value of what we contribute. Artificially raise it and society has to share more which in return hurts others and takes away jobs.
I've noticed gas stations start new people at almost double minimum wage. I made minimum wage - for about two months. Then I got raise because I reliably showed up for my shift - I was stoned out of my mind, but I was there. If you're over 16 1/2 and making minimum wage, start showing up on time. Flipping burgers is like a training bra to get prepared for an actual job, it's not a career for raising a family.
> 1/8th of their income
Do you not see that 1/8th of your income on soda is an INCREDIBLY stupid idea? Yet, I just spoke to someone who makes those kinds of decisions regularly. She literally buys several fountain drinks per day and she's on welfare. My ex-wife will always be broke because those are the decisions she makes.
Where are these great employers out there because I made double the minimum wage for years doing I.T work. Why? There were more computer science graduates and out of work people than jobs who were happy to make $15/hr. Still require MCSA or MCSE that costs $7,000 but pays well under $30,000 a fucking year.
That does not make economic sense to pay that much for gas station work as any of the 60% who did not finish their degree are at mercy for any job. To make sure they do not steal anything or not show I would up it to $9/hr or $10/hr but no more. That still is well within poverty that I can not see how anyone can survive that unless they have a house already paid for.
It's a common trope in USA that most poor people are poor because they're lazy or just inherently bad with money.
FTFY.
Otherwise, I have seen plenty of rich people who were also pretty bad with money.
There are plenty of rich people who go bankrupt. Their wives love to spend $400,000 a year or more on shoes. They want faster cars, larger homes, eat out all the time etc.
Doctors and CEO's like Donald Trump have big spending problems and often times money amplifies problems. Someone working at Walmart who livers over his or her needs gets $5,000 in credit card debt and takes years to recover or goes bankrupt while Donald Trump declares bankruptacy a 2nd or 3rd time after spending $190 million more than he earns.
What is unfair is we all attack poor people for being all sooo stupid and irresponsible with money! But, the banks have no problems loaning cash to repeat rich offenders who are part of the good old boys club.
Donald Trump was born rich too, but others like Warran Buffet, Bill Gates, and Jobs earned their money.
I do give MS kudos for releasing a new OS every year. They do not want another XP where the longer corps, developers, and users use something the more resistant to change they become and harder it is to leave.
Windows 8.1 is a smaller release for sure but you can't criticize them for waiting on their ass. DirectX and WDDM have minor updates and some api changes do mean QA is required from ISV and OEMs to test their shit.
But sadly it looks to be Windows 9 to see if MS truly makes it usable. I think tablets are "a" future rather than "Thee" future and perhaps MS went a little overboard?
There are a very vocal minority of XP loyalists I see who want to install it on new machines. I am sure your shop see these or people come in and buy them and then try to install XP on them at home and get pissed when they can't find drivers.
Some people can't handle a UI change and look at any OS after XP as a change for the sake of change.
But the future is these other oses and I think Windows 8 could have been successful if metro was made as a desktop background with full a full start menu and the ability stack applets just like regular apps in the taskbar if Balmer wanted familiar with Windows Phone. But who am I kidding when 40% of users think Windows 7 aero is too radical from the ugly blue and green UI of XP and can't handle any deviation whatsoever?!
Can't happen because as long as we support Israel and refuse to live under Sharia we'll be "The Great Satan" and your "help" will be rewarded with jihad. Like it or not the countries of the ME have been stuck in a time warp since their "great prophet" showed up and while the other religions of the world have, for the most part at least, grown the fuck up and become more civilized with Islam they still party like its 1499 and refuse to change.
When you couple that to the almost constant propaganda against Jews that frankly would make Hitler go "Dude that is a little extreme" you can give the fuck up on the idea that ANY intervention won't result in more jihad against us. Look at Iraq, we are still digging up killing fields from Saddam, the guy was a real monster that even slaughtered family members when they didn't do to suit him, yet what do we see? the ONE time that Shia and Sunni are in agreement is when it comes to killing American soldiers.
The war between Sunni and Shia has been going on for over 400 years now, its the height of arrogance to think we can walk into the middle of a holy war, kill a bad guy like Assad and then say "love me!" and have them do anything but call a truce long enough to attack you.
Not all arabs are monsters just like not all Americans are servants of the Christian coalition and Southern Baptist, yet these folks make up the bulk of one our parties. Same is true with muslims. I met an Arab muslim during an exchange training workshop for a few weeks. He was cultural a muslim but was more similiar to that of someone who goes to church occasionally but is not all anti abortion, Obama is a communist, world is less than 6,000 year old types. There are shades is what I am trying to say.
In Egypt a good 40% protesting agaisn't the Muslim Brotherhood. But conservatives just like here are very vocal over there too. Many arabs want to modernize believe it or not and it is not fair to brand them as such as they would find such a post as yours offensive.
Remember in 1500 if you said anything about against the pope you would be dead within 48 hours so we once lived like that too.
Back on topic In Iraq we invaded their country! Plundered their natural resources. Re-ignited hatred between conservatives of 2 different versions of Muslims that lived in peace for centuries and even used to be friends and invited each other to their weddings and so on. Killed more people than Saddam either directly with strikes or through igniting Shia and Sunni insurgents.
Saddam was evil but he would not deliberating murder just Shias and do the tribalism game, though he did favor his tribe a little more.
Syria they are already doing this. The revolution started there as a way for Syrians to want freedom. THey petitioned peacefully and Assad was begining to open up already with some local elections. Christians were given a promise of peace. Sunni's were considered as much citizens as Alowites Shia as long as they didn't propagate rebellion against Assad.
I am not for invading per say. I am trying to get slashdotters to think rather than bow to the popular opinion of what 90% of people think? This is a nerd website after all and both opinions should be discussed.
There reason for not being pacifist is 1. The extremists have hijacked the rebels and most are not even Syrian but foreigners and Al Quada members looking for another Afghanistan 2. Humantarian
I think we wont be seen as invaders except to the Alowites as the Syrians are begging for help and it already is turning into a holy war as Assad is taking advantage of this by just targetting the liberal militias and leaving hte extremist ones so he can have a told you so moment and feed his propaganda as proof that only extremist oppose him.
But there is a risk it will get ugly. I do not want to support a radical sunni extreme new government but that could happen anyway at this rate if we do nothing. IF anything think other Arab countries should be involved, but what about Shia led Iraq and Iran? They certainly wont like that!
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No it is not manditory.
However, operating systems like Windows 7 will degrade video quality if they detect a non HDMI cable for blue-Ray content in the RC releases so this way MPAA can make people think DRM HDMI is better.
I use HDMI on my machine due to convenience of less cables and I hate the sound on my mobo. Not because I believe it is better video quality.
But it is just a cable and nothing else. The DRM HDCP is dependent on OS support.
I switched to HDMI.
I use it to reduce cables and clutter and to improve sound quality.
Reason being is I have ugly shipping tape on the back of my desk and I HATE CABLES! My realtek sound chip is a POS that used to require reboots to get skype working. After an embarrasing interview where I had to reboot I switched to HDMI.
I have a nice ATI 7850 GPU with a better sound ship on it not to mention a digital signal all the way to the monitor means better audio quality (speakers are in monitor). True I might not notice an audible difference but I hated my buggy sound on my mobo. Audio enthusiats might care with a real system though.
Oh and I paid $10 at BigLots for it as another slashdotter recommended that. Do not go anywhere else where you will be ripped off.
By switching to gold connectors how many more bits will magically teleport and ECC themselves over the standard bandwidth compared to 1.4 that the highly qualified GeekSquad HDMI experts at BestBuy keep telling me about for $120?
That was extreme.
Want to see a real life example? Geeks might think this is funny or frustrating sad to read the comments at the bottom of this article?
See the fear, anger, and sillyness for the mere suggestion of change gets people all rallied up!
This my friends is why Linux wont ever take off, let alone something more modern for PC users but that is totally another topic. The point here is people fear change and their comfort zone soo much they will defend their right to use 12 year old insecure operating systems even when confronted with facts. It is like they need to find something to be afraid of to justify their actions and beliefs.
The older you get the worse it gets. People want to watch TV, not invest in their careers on the weekends. People sometimes do the same boring old trips every year because taht is what they always do. They order the same food at restuarants. Restaurant Impossible has chef Irvine come in with new items and some old timers like the frozen crap because that is what they always order after he makes changes to attract new customers.
Multiple that for anything more drastic and you have people whine about their lives, where they live, and be envious of those who take risks, change careers, move, and do things in life that require lots of work and a step waaay out of their comfort zone. Oh it must be luck etc. It is not luck. They worked hard and did not fear change.
Sometimes it is not extreme examples of phobias listed or liberties like what this article is about, but rather small changes most today will not do and then be shocked when they do not get their desired results.
Funny how the geeks here who knew our stuff bought lower speced AthlonXPs because I knew my athlonXP1800 at 1200 mhz would cream a pentium III of that same speed quite easily for 1/2 the price.
But Joe six packs saw that mhz tag and purchased pentium IVs instead.
It is annoying MS still makes 32-bit software in addition to not supporting 16 bit software through WOW32 in 64 bit versions of Windows. I guess running wow daisy chained to wow 32 is banned. Wow stands for win16 on win32 so your corporate VB 5 app circa 1996 can still run on Windows 7 (the 32-bit version).
I am not a developer, but they tell me it is a simple recompile unless you are working in assembly or device driver development. 64-bit is much more efficient as it has compiler flags for the extra registers on a modern post pentium IV in addition to SSE 3 and other extra instructions added to chips in the last 10 years. Windows 7 also has a crippled MBR that does not check for signed bootloaders so a rootkits like allueron can execute. So you get more performance if you compile it for 64 bit besides the extra ram.
I think modern versions of linux can use these extra instructions depending on how it is compilied by default too and just not use it on an older Pentium IV so the difference is not quite so stark. But XP reaks in comparison as most users feel it is faster, but in reality does not take advantage of any processor made in the last 10 years!
MS really should just port the 2 WOWs and kill 32 bit OS development as it gives a developer no incentive to upgrade his or her code as XP is still a huge market where many users have old DOS apps that require it. ... regardless 32 bit operating systems support threading and processing well if not better than 64 bit and have for many years. a multi core is nice for heavy multitaskers even if you have memory your single core and even dual core will glitch with 5 apps and +40 tabs in Chrome.
If you are smart enough to master master, and real science, then couldn't you earn about 3X as much as a teacher?
Alaska pays up to $70,000 a year for someone with a masters degree plus 10 years of exprience and this includes a pension for life after 25 years!
So why would anyone with a masters do this? They get to bring the middle finger to corporate america and over time retire early with $70,000 a year with free health insurance for life!
Even starting out you get $44,000 a year which is excellent for an undergrad degree. Teachers used to get paid shit, but that is changing and maybe just maybe not everyone goes to jobs that pay the most and look for other areas of job satisfaction like taking the same time off as their kids, going kayaking and camping in the summer, getting decent vacation time, not having a PHB breathing down your neck all the time, pension taken care off.
Teachers can also become counselors, principals, coaches (sports or subject), trainers, start education related companies, or stay in academia too with nice discounts for advanced degrees with a guaranteed pay rise which is nice if you are an undergrad.
However, some states like Alabama and Louisiana pay just above Walmart wages so it varies. I would refuse to teach in these states but Georgia and Alaska pay very well so your mileage varies.
You need at least a bachelors degree required by federal law in No Child Left Behind in mathematics or one of its disciplines like mine in Business Statistics and Finance. Even then you need to pass a test. Geometry was difficult as accounting classes do not use it and I have not seen it in years! Took a month to study for that portion but there are federal safe guards requiring the major and not just a test like the old days where an English major could teach math if she just passed a single test.
The problem is most education professionals are not so good at understanding Math, and many really do not trust is.
You go to any college and talk to education majors, and ask them why they didn't major in other majors, after they repeat the normal BS, about wanting to help children yadda yadda, It comes down to the fact that many of the other majors that has a clear career path requires much more Math study, and they don't like Math.
Sure we have a few educators like Math and Science teachers who get it, but they are the minority, and the ones who seems to get promoted to positions where they can make decisions, are usually History and English teachers. So they don't know about this research is because they are not looking for it, and they really don't want to find it, because the numbers may contradict what you opinion is, and no one likes that.
We have the State and Unions fighting over these details and little focus on what works.
Math teacher here. Actually a trainee to become a teacher in a program but already working in the school system.
First off thanks to No Child Left Behind every teacher must be highly qualified to teach. This means they need to have a major to match the subject matter, plus pass a competency exam, in addition to the the professional educators exam (you can teach 1 year without this in an emergency teaching credential depending on your state.) Not have someone who took algebra I in college who majored in Elementary education actually teach Calculus honors.
I have a career in I.T. and tried to teach computers and they would not even let me because of this requirement. I could pass the test but I will never be hired to ever teach this without going back to school with a computer science degree or an education degree with a technology specialty. I can only teach math as I has an associates in IT and switched to a business statistics major and perhaps economics at a highschool level if I choose to take the later test.
Education majors can only teach elementary school level work by federal law. Unless they are in a special education specialty major such as education math, or education biology, etc. That is what many highschool teachers do if they get a teaching degree but want to specialize in that area so they take calculus I, college statistics, and other classes that other slashdotters took for their technical degrees.
Let me tell you I thought the math test would be easy. Well the actual math portion was, but many questions were Johnny had this quadratic formula and this was his answer (a wrong one.) What did he do wrong and which instructional method would you use with this student? Without my pre-service work I was clueless as I could guess if putting enough time trying to purposefully get a problem wrong, but why did he do this I have no idea? That is what I am learning now.
It is hard to be a teacher. Your students do not want to be there. You are expected to move mountains and your metrics are not to lead the horse to the water, but how many gallons of water per hour your horses drink. I am not whining here as there are ways to motivate students but it is not like the kids actually want to be there unlike college or a workplace environment where if a worker doesn't give a shit and shows disrespect you fire him. Can't do that in this profession.
I regret the union fighting for teachers more than students as I do not want to see bad teachers keep their jobs and abuse sick days and whine all the time. But, they are a guild like the Bar Association so I do like my training and networking with other professionals. Not all teachers are bad and I am in favor of eliminating tenure. Surprisingly contrary to popular opinion is that 50% of teachers quit within 5 years. So not all bad apples stay. It is just a hard demanding job but worth it for those who are good at it and enjoy the challenges.
I still have an old Abit BP6 system sitting next to my desk gathering dust if you want it. I even have 4 extra celeron processors for it!
Back when men where men, and dual core meant two processors!
Sadly other than specialized software, most are still only designed for single core anyway, making the performance gains negligible for most people, which means other than an expensive marketing ploy to a small enthusiast market, not much of a market advantage for any company to do so...
That is radically changing. Notice Samsung has an 8 core phone coming out soon. Most people outside of moms use Chrome and IE which both have a thread per tab and also have a half dozen apps and even more files open. Geeks like us probably run VirtualBox or VMWare to test Windows Server and Linux with XP and Windows 7 clients. Any IT geek with his or salt does this and let me tell you my old crappy 6 core phenom II came in handy when I started doing this when I want to learn push installation testing. Games are now using this too as even xbox ports from the Xbox one have multithreading built in due to more than 1 core being used.
With people leaving XP slowly but surely they use more than 8 gigs of ram which enables them to open more apps at once which will utilize this. Chrome is the biggest use of this as when you have +40 tabs open can slow just a dual core system very quickly even if you have the ram! Maybe not scale linear wise but Windows 8 leaves open too when you close them just like iOS and Android. Having the extra cores helps this.
Because the only Multi Chip processors are still 4 years behind this. Why dont they just enable the ability for me to drop 4 of these on a single motherboard so I can have my 24 core monster for editing and rendering 4K video?
You can. Asus makes a workstation version of its Server and gamer sabertooth lines. They have 2 sockets. With 2 of these things in there you can have a 24 core system (assuming Asus updates its WS board to support this soon.) They are not as popular as 10 years ago when geeks put 2 athlonMPs together because extra cores do the same thing for a fraction of the cost without a specialty and premium motherboard.
They are pricey at +$400 per board though, but a gamer grade 1200 watt PSU and you can get a medium grade Firepro which is as fast as an ATi 6670 for $350 bucks now and that would be fine for this if you have the cash for a $2000+ system.
Sigh
I can't tell if you were being sarcastic or not?
Your post is 100% true ... back in the phenom II/core 2 days. Maybe the 1st generation i3 and i5s vs a phenom II and I would agree with you. If you run heavily threaded VMWare Workstation, Sony Vegas, or +60 tabs of Chrome (Not firefox due to the lack of 1 thread per tab) + 6 apps at the same time, then you get great value with AMD back in 2010.
But today, Intel is creaming them and I see these posts as a bunch of desperate panics from AMD fans trying to be defensive against the Intel posters. It is not a personal attack. Right now sadly AMD is losing and most general use an i3 is a better buy.
FYI I am typing this on a 2010 era AMD 6 core 2.6 ghz system with an ATI card. It runs Virtualbox VMs great and I do like to leave stuff up where it multitasks. However, it is starting to show its age. It has its moments with javascript even in Chrome and SWTOR does have FPS drops where the fans blow like crazy even with an upgrading ATi 7850!
A less 4 core i5 would be smooth in such a situation sadly even under multitasking and especially single tasking.
You're full of it. There's no reason you can't keep running the same OS kernel as long as you want to, not breaking anything. It's YOUR decision to upgrade to the latest shiny new kernel. If you're THAT worried about keeping up to date then this is the price you pay. I mean, it's fun to blame Linux for this. It really is. But all those Android tablets are running it just fine with driver issues.
If you REALLY wanted to see Linux be better-supported by driver creators, then you'd pressure them more, not Linux. A stable ABI isn't the answer you're looking for when simply recompiling the driver is good enough for most bleeding-edge users to play with it. The kernel simply doesn't change THAT much, so extensive testing isn't necessary as often as people seem to think it is.
Look my system runs fine when I install it. Then Ubuntu update comes in and it goes black. I am the user at this point and not technical at all. In real life I know to alt F-key another tty and run a kill -9 to run a shell terminal to fix it, but good luck with that for 99% of all other users.
Well I would still be using Linux now otherwise. Android is stable as each minor release has the same ABI. Hairyfeet said the same thing why he does not sell Linux at his shop. He puts it in and the customer always comes back saying their screen or printer mysteriously stops working. The only way around this is to use an enterprise kernel like Redhat/CENTOS that never updates and live back in 2009/2010. I do this in VMWare to get unix work done now.
Why should ATI keep rewritting and supporting drivers based on Linus and others changing things all the time? Isn't that the point of an ABI so you do not have to worry about that? Yes the does change very fast.
I write these things because I would like to see Linux used full time and it is frustrating. ATI does make ok drivers. Its just the situation with them.
They wont flock to AMD.
Most sales are from big name OEMs these days like HP and Dell. They only have intel lines as customers see the stickers and it is a name they are familiar with. Worse, geeks who go to slashdot or its Redmond fanboy version aka neowin.net have been warning them of AMD for a few years now if they users ask them for advice.
There are still some who homebrew systems but they are almost all performance oriented folks who buy Intel anyway. Even a cheap i3 build will cost $200 more than buying one from Dell where you can turn it on and get to work right away due to volume discounts. $350 vs $550 is a big difference from an identical computer spec wise. If HP or Dell make any and I mean any non intel units let me know and I will retract. It is 2am and I am too lazy to look it up now.
You ask why they don't keep pushing prices up(could ask that until infinity dollars) as if you think Intel's pricing is reasonable for their top end CPUs and you think they are doing consumers a favor for not asking more.
Comparing to top end graphics cards (Nvidia Titan, for example), the top end Intel chips (3970x) are relatively unsophisticated compared to their cheaper line ($300). That is, they are already inflating their margins by astronomical amounts because they have no competition at the top end.
And just wait to think what will happen if AMD liquidates and closes it doors if it can't get a competitive CPU? We most certainly will accelerate into a post PC world as the costs of all notebooks and desktops at the low end will double very quickly.
Please AMD do not mess this one up. My phenom II is begining to show its age and in 2 years I am planning on replacing it perhaps with this new chip?
I've been using ATI parts with X since mid-90s, and never had any complaints about driver support (execpt that for around 2 years, I was forced to use a non-free x server [not by ATI; I don't remember who made it, but I ripped it from RedHat, and used it with Slackware] for the GPU on my laptop, in the 90s). It is better now than it ever was. The only real complaint is that the newer free drivers for AMD (e.g., radeon driver) rely on non-free firmware-- but, of course, there are folks working to remedy this issue..
The only company making a GPU that is in the same class of commitment to supporting free software on their GPUs as AMD is Intel.
Oh, you are running some binary blob. Try the free radeon driver. It works quite well-- esp with a 3.11+ kernel, so you get power saving in GPUs using the radeon driver (way cooler running on my laptop, and you won't have to run a -rc kernel in about a week or two when 3.11 is released for real). If you need open-cl, well then you are forced to the binary blob for now, but I expect this will change within a couple years, at the most.
The bashing for me is Linux SUCKS with driver support! I had an ATI 5750 and can only run 2009 era distros and not run update on them as Linux lacks a stable ABI because socailists like RMS feel binary blobs are evil and that all should be opensourced and recompiling them enforces this freedom.
I call that slavery as I loose the freedom to run the OS and XORG I want. Every other os including other free ones like FreeBSD have an ABI and because it is stable you can even add them as kernel modules in newer versions. Just select FBSD 6.x compat in ./sysinstall etc. Viola. Works!
As a result I can not recommend standard users switch from Windows yet. If Linux users really want to have me and others use your OS again you need a stable ABI so drivers can materialize and companies like ATI do not have to rewrite their damn drivers on a monthly basis.
According to Tomshardware an Icore3 can fucking beat that 8 core. Especially in Skyrim and Crysis.
FYI I am typing this on an AMD phenom II sadly as I am not an intel troll. The FX really is a crappy chip and there is no sense trying to defend it as the people who play games or do any graphics work use dedicated graphics anyway. The intel integrated crap is fine for Office work and web browsing in this day and age.
Here is hoping this next generation one fixes the problems.
An unnecessarily overpowered chip will be delayed, so more of the hardware features no one asked for will be delivered to a market that usually works in symbiosis with the Microsoft inefficiency treadmill but is now being destroyed entirely by that same company.
Why don't you wait for it to come out before criticizing it. AMD is in trouble and it would hurt us all including the intel fan boys who are reading these comments if AMD is gone.
I noticed Intel is already raising prices on the newer I7s for no other reason that they think there is no competition as everyone bashes them in every tech website.
Steamroller is actually slower than the older Phenom II per clock cycle and is a crappy chip. That is true. I still own a phenom II but my crappy mobo is showing its age as it is downclocked to only 2.6 ghz. But it runs VMWare Workstation with its x6 core processor very competitively! I mean it can trounce a x4 icore7 easily from the same time period 2010ish in parrallel processing!
Want hardware virtualization iwth that intel processor? Oh, you need a special bios unlocked for $$$ more money (as much as my whole machine at $599!) AMD would never do this.
Remember Intel fanboys that even Intel had crappy chips out there such as 486sx, buggy pentiums, and of course the Pentium IV. The mistake for Steamroller were :-( FYI they are not true cores like Intels or the older Phenom IIs.
1. Everyone would be using a tablet by now and would like smooth graphics like the Iphone has had for 5 years in which PCs still do not do right with smooth scroll thanks to XP support and crappy integrated chipsets
2. The APU would be faster than any 7990 as the ram controller would be on the card with instant low latency! Turns out that wasn't true as complications got in the way of that
3. AMD had done right iwth the Phenom II was great multicore and parrallel performance. SteamRoller has all its cores share cache and a central FPU
I was hoping these last 2 issues would be fixed in Kaveri. AMD is in trouble and its ATI cards can't keep them afloat forever. Nvidia is being very aggressive with Kepler in that department.
Look at his grammar?
Either he is a troll, or is jealous and envious at the thought of you kicking back in a nice car and him serving you fries in 30 years as he did not save anything and has to work at McDonalds at age 68 to pay his rent.
I do not know if I will be rich, but I made stupid mistakes with money and lost a marriage over that and a combination of bad luck :-(
But I will say this. Even if you and I do not become rich the next time a great recession hits, a big medical bill, early retirement, or whatever the hell comes bye you and I will be better off than if we did not and have to go back in debt all over again.
It is nice knowing I have a cushion and it is not easy being frugal. You still need to make bets with your money (not expensives) for things that may or may not pay off like more college, homes, taking a risk for a better paying job in a different field, and other things.
Keep up the good work regardless if you get rich or not! Savers should get encouragement from other savers.
This is a bit off-topic but your calculation shows us the issues surrounding a fair minimum wage.
Fair means to me your days labour pays for a day's life, not a day of suffering.
That day's life should include savings for later, including savings for the future of your kids.
If your income cannot support this your job is not only useless for you but to society as a whole, your boss/employer might seem to make money over your back but at the end of the day/week/month/year/life we as a society are stuck with a family that needs support to survive, forget about advancing the pool of society.
A fair and sufficient minimum wage might initially look like a burden for the company or employer but in the long term it helps us all.
A day's work that cannot pay for a workers life and future is by definition inefficient and in the longer term will cost us all.
Lets flip the tables and examine your argument? Do you have any idea what you are asking for?
I am for raising the minimium wage in the US by the way. But a fair wage would devestate the economy. Case in point in the US there is a strike of fast food workers wanting to unionize. I make the same about 2x minimium wage for I.T. work doing admin work and desktop support for a fortune 1,000 company. Why the hell should I after investing $30,000 in school and $9,000 in Microsoft certification make the damn same amount as someone who dropped out of school and has no debt! Fuck that! ... back to economic argument (relates to my rant)
You talk about savings? How much savings would you make if your Starbucks coffee would cost $8? Hungry for lunch, that subway sandwhich is now $11. The gas is 15% higher which means your monthly savings take a hit too.
Now lets look at the long term?
Billly Gates making the same as a McDonalds worker? Oh hell no! Me and my coworkers will walk if we cant get $23 an hour. Oh my gf works as a teacher and she makes $18/hr and has all the debt? What she makes just $3/hr above the McDonalds worker? Think she will put up with that? No teachers will quit unless they too get a raise etc. Now you have real inflation and rents go up, food goes up, consumables go up, your savings take a hit and so does your purchasing power each month because you want to be fair right?
In the end if harms the economy as McDonalds closes half its stores as people are not willing to pay $10 for a Big Mac combo. Starbucks shuts down its stores too as people think "hmm I can brew my own coffee at work rather than pay $8 instead." Worse if you are retiring you are now fucked as you wont be getting that raise to make up for the spike in the cost of living.
Unemployment now doubles in proportion to the doubling of the minimium wage.
A small $2/hr increase I am in favor and think would help. But a fairwage you are looking at $15- $17 an hour which is insane. I think for those of us who worked hard we should make more money. We are more important as our wage reflects our value of what we contribute. Artificially raise it and society has to share more which in return hurts others and takes away jobs.
> working at a minimum wage job
I've noticed gas stations start new people at almost double minimum wage. I made minimum wage - for about two months. Then I got raise because I reliably showed up for my shift - I was stoned out of my mind, but I was there. If you're over 16 1/2 and making minimum wage, start showing up on time. Flipping burgers is like a training bra to get prepared for an actual job, it's not a career for raising a family.
> 1/8th of their income
Do you not see that 1/8th of your income on soda is an INCREDIBLY stupid idea? Yet, I just spoke to someone who makes those kinds of decisions regularly. She literally buys several fountain drinks per day and she's on welfare. My ex-wife will always be broke because those are the decisions she makes.
Where are these great employers out there because I made double the minimum wage for years doing I.T work. Why? There were more computer science graduates and out of work people than jobs who were happy to make $15/hr. Still require MCSA or MCSE that costs $7,000 but pays well under $30,000 a fucking year.
That does not make economic sense to pay that much for gas station work as any of the 60% who did not finish their degree are at mercy for any job. To make sure they do not steal anything or not show I would up it to $9/hr or $10/hr but no more. That still is well within poverty that I can not see how anyone can survive that unless they have a house already paid for.
It's a common trope in USA that most poor people are poor because they're lazy or just inherently bad with money.
FTFY.
Otherwise, I have seen plenty of rich people who were also pretty bad with money.
There are plenty of rich people who go bankrupt. Their wives love to spend $400,000 a year or more on shoes. They want faster cars, larger homes, eat out all the time etc.
Doctors and CEO's like Donald Trump have big spending problems and often times money amplifies problems. Someone working at Walmart who livers over his or her needs gets $5,000 in credit card debt and takes years to recover or goes bankrupt while Donald Trump declares bankruptacy a 2nd or 3rd time after spending $190 million more than he earns.
What is unfair is we all attack poor people for being all sooo stupid and irresponsible with money! But, the banks have no problems loaning cash to repeat rich offenders who are part of the good old boys club.
Donald Trump was born rich too, but others like Warran Buffet, Bill Gates, and Jobs earned their money.
I do give MS kudos for releasing a new OS every year. They do not want another XP where the longer corps, developers, and users use something the more resistant to change they become and harder it is to leave.
Windows 8.1 is a smaller release for sure but you can't criticize them for waiting on their ass. DirectX and WDDM have minor updates and some api changes do mean QA is required from ISV and OEMs to test their shit.
But sadly it looks to be Windows 9 to see if MS truly makes it usable. I think tablets are "a" future rather than "Thee" future and perhaps MS went a little overboard?
There are a very vocal minority of XP loyalists I see who want to install it on new machines. I am sure your shop see these or people come in and buy them and then try to install XP on them at home and get pissed when they can't find drivers.
Some people can't handle a UI change and look at any OS after XP as a change for the sake of change.
But the future is these other oses and I think Windows 8 could have been successful if metro was made as a desktop background with full a full start menu and the ability stack applets just like regular apps in the taskbar if Balmer wanted familiar with Windows Phone. But who am I kidding when 40% of users think Windows 7 aero is too radical from the ugly blue and green UI of XP and can't handle any deviation whatsoever?!
Can't happen because as long as we support Israel and refuse to live under Sharia we'll be "The Great Satan" and your "help" will be rewarded with jihad. Like it or not the countries of the ME have been stuck in a time warp since their "great prophet" showed up and while the other religions of the world have, for the most part at least, grown the fuck up and become more civilized with Islam they still party like its 1499 and refuse to change.
When you couple that to the almost constant propaganda against Jews that frankly would make Hitler go "Dude that is a little extreme" you can give the fuck up on the idea that ANY intervention won't result in more jihad against us. Look at Iraq, we are still digging up killing fields from Saddam, the guy was a real monster that even slaughtered family members when they didn't do to suit him, yet what do we see? the ONE time that Shia and Sunni are in agreement is when it comes to killing American soldiers.
The war between Sunni and Shia has been going on for over 400 years now, its the height of arrogance to think we can walk into the middle of a holy war, kill a bad guy like Assad and then say "love me!" and have them do anything but call a truce long enough to attack you.
Not all arabs are monsters just like not all Americans are servants of the Christian coalition and Southern Baptist, yet these folks make up the bulk of one our parties. Same is true with muslims. I met an Arab muslim during an exchange training workshop for a few weeks. He was cultural a muslim but was more similiar to that of someone who goes to church occasionally but is not all anti abortion, Obama is a communist, world is less than 6,000 year old types. There are shades is what I am trying to say.
In Egypt a good 40% protesting agaisn't the Muslim Brotherhood. But conservatives just like here are very vocal over there too. Many arabs want to modernize believe it or not and it is not fair to brand them as such as they would find such a post as yours offensive.
Remember in 1500 if you said anything about against the pope you would be dead within 48 hours so we once lived like that too.
Back on topic
In Iraq we invaded their country! Plundered their natural resources. Re-ignited hatred between conservatives of 2 different versions of Muslims that lived in peace for centuries and even used to be friends and invited each other to their weddings and so on. Killed more people than Saddam either directly with strikes or through igniting Shia and Sunni insurgents.
Saddam was evil but he would not deliberating murder just Shias and do the tribalism game, though he did favor his tribe a little more.
Syria they are already doing this. The revolution started there as a way for Syrians to want freedom. THey petitioned peacefully and Assad was begining to open up already with some local elections. Christians were given a promise of peace. Sunni's were considered as much citizens as Alowites Shia as long as they didn't propagate rebellion against Assad.
I am not for invading per say. I am trying to get slashdotters to think rather than bow to the popular opinion of what 90% of people think? This is a nerd website after all and both opinions should be discussed.
There reason for not being pacifist is
1. The extremists have hijacked the rebels and most are not even Syrian but foreigners and Al Quada members looking for another Afghanistan
2. Humantarian
I think we wont be seen as invaders except to the Alowites as the Syrians are begging for help and it already is turning into a holy war as Assad is taking advantage of this by just targetting the liberal militias and leaving hte extremist ones so he can have a told you so moment and feed his propaganda as proof that only extremist oppose him.
But there is a risk it will get ugly. I do not want to support a radical sunni extreme new government but that could happen anyway at this rate if we do nothing. IF anything think other Arab countries should be involved, but what about Shia led Iraq and Iran? They certainly wont like that!