I concede that he's not a household name, but Rex has been blogging for a long time and he's been profiled and quoted in the mainstream media. He has a pretty good following, and is not some anonymous guy. His legal name is Rex, and he often details the problems that go along with being mononymous.
SOPA and PIPA might not pass, but something will, and whatever passes in their place will no doubt be worse. We know the intent of these companies, and we know that they will not give up. Still, we give them our money. We give them our money knowing that they will use that money to try and take away certain freedoms that we hold dear.
Imagine any other industry doing that. Telling their customers to their face that they want to censor them, and expecting those customers to keep patronizing them. For some reason, the big media companies don't seem care, though. They openly sponsor these bills, and they don't fear any retribution from the consumer.
Face it, as long as consumers continue to give these companies their heard-earned cash, these companies will continue funneling that hard-earned cash into lawyers, legislators, and laws designed to benefit them and harm us.
Miles/points and other gimmicks mean nothing to me.
Oh, but they do.
They mean something to all of us, even those of us without credit cards.
I used to be a small business owner, and I stopped taking "points" credit cards altogether.
Do you know who pays for those points and gives you the cash back?
The merchant. That's right, points cards always cost the merchant a larger percentage in transaction fees, and the credit card companies offer this difference (usually only a fraction of the difference) as THEIR GIFT TO YOU... which they take from me.
Swell guys, eh?
Sheeple spending points is like sheeple spending tax "refund" checks. They think it's free money from the heavens above, but it comes about only through their own assfucking.
Points/rewards credit cards are a pretty big factor behind the increasing costs of goods/services. The credit card companies take it from the merchant, take a slice for themselves, and give you whats left.
In turn, the merchants raise their prices to cover the "rewards", and prices go up for everyone, regardless of how they pay. Next time you take you credit card to the store, prices have gone up 20% to cover this atrocity, but you gladly buy it anyway because you get more points on your card. And the cycle continues.
Rewards/points cards are in the top 10 scams of the century.
But hey, enjoy your 49 cents cash back. You earned it.
Contrary to popular belief, democracy can never truly work. At least not for a large population.
In order for democracy to work, the populace must be of sufficient intellect to make the best decisions for itself. The masses cannot do this, and this reality is unchangeable.
That which we call "critical" or "abstract" thinking generally requires an IQ of 110 or greater. The average IQ of the U.S. citizen is 98. This means that the majority of Americans have an IQ of less than 100. Those with IQs of less than 100 tend to make decisions based on repetition and consensus rather than critical analysis, and even "smart" people have a difficult time resisting the lure of basing conclusions on "common knowledge".
As such, people can be fairly easily persuaded to vote against their own interests time, and time, and time again.
Democracy as a means of preventing tyranny and corruption is fairly useless, for democracy is 3 geniuses, 20 bright people, and 500 idiots voting on a course of action. The numbers are made up, but you get the gist, and they are probably not far off. When someone with an IQ of 65 has an equal influence on important matters as does a person with an IQ of 140, the Achilles heel of of democracy becomes evident.
A benevolent dictatorship, to whatever extent one can truly exist, would be a far better, more fair, more efficient, more humane form of government than is democracy.
GoDaddy will be fine, because even though Slashdotters know what SOPA is, 90% of people have no clue as to what is going on.
Despite nearly 18 months of seeming outrage over the TSA's backscatter and groping, airline travel was up this holiday season. Bloggers and talking heads were pissed, but Joe and Jane Soccermom remained oblivious. Were it put to a vote tomorrow, the TSA's groping policy would be overwhelmingly approved by American voters.
Similarly, when SOPA or a SOPA-like law is passed, and it will be, Slashdot will blow up with comments, but the legislators who pass it will be re-elected without issue.
3 geniuses, 20 bright people, 500 idiots.
The government will once again act against the interest of the citizens, while 3 people scream, 20 people complain on Slashdot, and 500 people watch Monday Night Football.
I own several Android devices, and TouchWiz is by far my favorite interface.
I don't expect that love to be universal, though. Arguing interfaces is like arguing flavors of ice cream.
I have a Galaxy Tab, and while I love it most of the time, it memory leaks like hell. I use it a great deal, which means that at a minimum, I have to reboot once daily. I can somewhat see that the 512MB of RAM is too tight for any more candy.
It seems pathetic, though, considering that 20 short years ago my PC had 4MB of RAM and ran Windows 3.1 just fine (well, not "fine", but I'm sure you get the point). Now, I've got 128x that, and I can barely run a mobile operating system with a pretty shell.
Exactly. The iPhone has been around for a long time, is insanely popular, and it does not run Flash. There will always be more iPhone and iPod Touch users than iPad users.
This OS and these devices are not new. If these companies were that concerned about iPeople, they would have made the transition to an iPhone OS compatible technology long ago.
By the time the settlement or judgment is made -- assuming Microsoft doesn't go to trial and win -- the damages would probably amount to a few bucks per end-user anyway.
This is why large companies often preferclass action suits over individual suits.
Class action suits mean that, if the company loses, they never have to litigate over the matter again.
If they lose an individual suit, every consumer on the planet is free to chase the same reward the original litigant won, and they are not bound by any $5 off coupon settlements.
It also means that noone else is bound by the outcome, and is free to sue individually.
If Microsoft loses the individual suit, you could potentially see 10,000,000 more individual suits using this case as a precedent for an easy win. That would cost MS significantly more money.
Lack of class certification COULD be a disaster for Microsoft... especially if they lose and the award is substantial.
Or maybe people don't feel like joining real life out of High School. Maybe they just want to drink lots of beer, smoke pot from a bong made out of a toilet paper roll, root for the school sports team, and have bitchin' spring break parties while going into debt for the extended vacation.
Then again, maybe it is about all of that altruistic shit.
A large number of people in the industry (especially "qualified" ones, who haven't been selected for skill) have no idea how to work with computers. People plagiarize at university, get friends to sit their exams, and lie on resumes. There is no better indicator than an on-site, in-person coding test.
True.
Which begs the questions, why is a college degree even relevant?
You can be saddled with student loans, and still know less than the guy who checked out a "Systems Administration for Dummies" book at the local library.
I have seen that happen myself.
One place I worked preferred self-taught, non-college-degreed people, because they tended, in many cases, to know more, be more current (many college IT courses are dated by the time they are taught), and said employees had no need to hide behind a piece of paper or an acronym of certifications.
Too many people do use said degrees and certs as shields. I have worked under people with Master's Degrees who couldn't wipe their own ass.
Any of us who have been "certified" are well aware that it is complete economic and promotional bullshit, and you know what... more and more employers are becoming aware of this as well.
Some 18 year old kid straight out of high school is as likely to know as much about computers as the guy who paid for 15 different certs trying to show that he knows about computers.
Those who can.... do. People don't want to pay a premium for degrees anymore, they just want the task to be completed so they get paid by the client. The paradigm is slowly shifting.
Fancy papers as indicators of knowledge are slowly being shown as the fools gold that they often were.
The most brilliant people I know never finished college, and some of the most obtuse people I know have doctorates.
As the "education emperor" continues to be shown wearing no clothes, expect more of this testing.
Seriously. I'm going to contact *My* senators and tell them that if they wast a second on catering to people with cottages on cape cod instead of the 5 billion other pressing problems in this country they can kiss their own ass goodbye.
Guess what?
You're already paying for it.
Why didn't you have them pucker up and kiss their ass goodbye over the USF?
Part of the program makes the following claim: The USF ensures that consumers in all regions of the nation have access to and pay rates for telecommunications services that are reasonably comparable to those in urban areas.
So, whether the people on Cape Cod get it or not... you're still going to pay for it.
If they charge me $5 to download music and movies, you can bet your sweet ass I will download all of the movies and music that my hard drive will hold... and then some.
If I have to pay, I'm going to play.
It could backfired in the RIAA lawsuits as people will be able to legitimately claim "I did pay for it".
Re:Shorting AMD stock: NASDAQ figures
on
Is AMD Dead Yet?
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· Score: 1
Often a company's stock price reflects market manipulation rather than any sensible estimate of the true value of the company. This Slashdot story is very likely to drive the price down, as short sellers want. Check the price after the market opens.
It's been up.10 to.20 most of the day.
The stock has been beaten, whipped, and been forced to eat the corn out of Intel's shit. It's down over 80% in little more than a year.
It's got 6 bucks to go until zero... you really think another bashing article on the Internet is going to do anything?
Once it hits $5, it will become harder to short.
It made sense to short AMD at $40, but at $6-$7, the risk/reward ship has sailed.
I don't think anyone is going to make any more money by bashing AMD. It's been done ad-nauseum. The stock price is that of a battered company.
All of the reasons mentioned are the reason that the stock is DOWN OVER 80%.
Nobody is telling anyone anything they don't already know here.
I have been trading AMD since the late 90's. In the interest of full disclosure, I am bought some AMD calls at this level. Not many, but enough to give me some play. And I am not here to pump it. I didn't start this thread. I bought calls because I lose less if I am wrong, and don't think AMD is going to $40 again anytime soon. But... any reasonably good news will cause a short squeeze, as the stock is heavily shorted now. I don't believe that AMD is worth less than half today than what it was 6 months ago.
I also don't think it is dead.
AMD has hit $3 before. This isn't uncharted territory for AMD. It gets beaten on a cyclical basis, and the stock prices goes straight to hell.
If anything, it will get bought out before it goes bankrupt. I am sure you have hard the chatter about IBM buying AMD, but I don't think that will happen.
They need to get their shit together, and it may take awhile. ATI graphics are going in all kinds of things (like video game machines), and the new platform is being adopted. AMD may not be the king of performance again for some time, , but I don't see AMD going anywhere
Expert testimony from an RIAA witness also showed that a wireless router was not used, casting doubt on her defense that a hacker lurking outside her apartment window with a laptop might have framed her, he said.
I never download music. It is always a hacker lurking outside of my apartment window.
What you actually have is a no-name box with the same CPU and graphics card as a Mac Pro, which, as a subsequent comment of your own proves, isn't a Mac Pro:
But you have the same hardware. The point is the Apple doesn't create this mystery hardware out of magic purple elephant poop. It's pretty standard stuff. One can have the hardware that Apple uses (or better) at will. And you and I both know that people can get OSX to run on it, but given that they try to proprietarily lock the software to the hardware, I doubt I will ever use it like that.
The distinguishing feature of a (modern) Mac is its ability to run a non-hacked version of MacOS X, and software written for MacOS X, so any system that can''t do this isn't a Mac, irrespective of what its owner may say. It isn't a HP or Dell either, so it won't run one of their special registration-free versions of Windows that ship with their systems, and use proprietary BIOS ID information to ensure that they can't be installed on computers made by someone else.
True, but is the hardware of any higher or lower quality? That is debatable. Most of the hardware used by all of these folks are obtained from the same or similar vendors. One may get a headstart on the other here or there, but for the most part it's all the same, save for locking out people who may want to use a project on a machine they built themselves.
Of course the magic pixie dust and butterfly tears are hard for the average consumer to come by, but I know this Mexican guy that lives in an underpass in Los Angeles who sells the stuff pretty cheap. Just go to Los Angeles and ask for "Jose'". Everyone will know who you are talking about, and he will hook you up. But whatever you do, don't buy the bottle of Unicorn flatulence that he will try to push on you. I can confirm that it does not double RAM capacity. As the saying goes... screw me once it's your fault Jose', but screw me twice... I won't get fooled again.
Linux is not OS X, or even a reasonable facsimile thereof, because it cannot run software written specifically for OS X. An arbitrary white box with Linux is not therefore a Mac, irrespective of whether its has the same CPU and graphics card some Macs.
Take that unwashed masses of Linux users! I spit on your NextStep-like window managers! Posers!
Quite a bit of Linux stuff doesn't run on the Mac either, so I guess it's pretty much a wash.
Seriously, the differences in what you are able to do between the different OS's, IMHO, are getting slimmer as time goes on. Do you REALLY think that some of these folks on./ can't make OSX run on that whitebox? If they do, is it a true "Mac"? If it isn't, does it matter? What if they use superior 8800 cards instead of the somewhat dated 7300 cards that Apple uses? What if they get RAID working? Can the argument be made that they have a better "Mac" than Apple makes?
Mac hardware as some kind of machine that is superior to all others simply because it has the pixie dust to run a specific OS is somewhat specious reasoning to me. Is OS X nice? Hell yes it's nice.
Then again, so is Ubuntu running Beryl. It makes both Mac and Windows look terribly dated. And it will do it on consumer hardware that you can buy at Newegg for reasonable prices, and the hardware will probably chug along for 20 years given reasonable assembly.
A computer is what you make it. And most people can make it pretty much whatever they want to.
I still think it would make sense for Apple to sell OSX to the filthy riff-raff, like they sell the iPod to the filthy riff-raff, as long as they state what hardware will and won't work.
But it's not my call, and it probably won't happen. Nobody will blow their brains out over it. Life goes on.
I got Vista Home Premium for the first time 2 weeks ago. It came pre-installed on a machine I purchased.
2 weeks and some 100+ hours later, I still don't get it. What it is, why it was created, what it does that XP didn't do, etc.
I can confirm that it is quite a bit more resource intensive, and appears to be somewhat slower than XP. The interface is odd and counter-intuitive. I had to turn off UAC because it asked me to confirm every time I wanted to fart. When I turned off UAC, all of my application settings were reset, which means I had to re-configure pretty much everything. The mouse settings won't stick between reboot. I have to reconfigure the pointer evertime I boot the machine.
I have 4 gigs of memory (only 2.5 gigs are visible), and the disk thrashes every moment that the machine is on. Even when sitting idle at the desktop doing nothing. Some programs don't work, or work in an odd manner. Adobe Premiere dumps on my with a cryptic error message, and I have had one BSOD. Something about could not get driver_power_state. Unplugging the external firewire drive seems to have stopped that.
I thought FSX would really fly on Vista compared to XP, but the framerates are the same, even with the significant bump in hardware (From an AMD FX-55 to a Intel QX6800 and 6800 to 8800 video cards).
I am trying to love the thing. I really am. Does it have some positives? I suppose. The little "Aero View" thing is marginally cool. Visually, the window manager theme is nicer. It runs MOST of my applications fine and allow me to get things done similar to XP. The drivers for the X-Fi card sound just incredible, and this is the best audio I have ever had. The drivers for the 8800 cards produce very nice and sharp images and go back and forth between quad monitors and SLI with a simple reboot.
But does it do one thing that XP didn't do? For me... no. At least nothing that I have come across. It does the same stuff as XP, sligthly slower than XP... and seems to pound the living shit out of my hard drive. I am looking at the drive light right now and the thing is flashing constantly. It never stops.
I still have my Ubuntu machine beside this one, and would love to install Ubuntu on this QX6800. But until Creative releases a driver from the X-FI card (which I am not willing to give up), I'm pretty much screwed on front.
Once Ubuntu 7.10 is released, which will probably have native 8800GTX drivers on the live disk, and hopefully will have some kind of driver for the X-Fi card, this is going to become a Ubuntu machine very quickly, with a 50gb Vista partition for FSX. I am a heavy multi-tasker and have used every manner of OS release since DOS. I was a Unix admin for several years. So I am not exactly Joe and Jane Soccermom when it comes to screwing around with new OS's
Until I can get some better Linux drivers for my current hardware, I will be spending more hours with my new buddy Vista, and I will be trying my best to figure out what Redmond was doing for the last 5 years.
I keep telling myself that it just has to be something more than a window manager update... but as of this typing, that is about all I have been able to find. XP with a new, slower, but prettier Window Manager.
I am not sure what that point of upgrading from anything to Vista would be. Maybe I will figure it out in time, but don't know why anyone would bother right now.
Okay, okay, I forget the pixie dust and pink elephant droppings. Other than that it's pretty close. For fuck's sake, Apples even says that their machines are based on BSD, and the window manager is not that terribly hard to emulate in *nix.
Application compatibility is another issue.
In a word: yes. If you ever have the misfortune to have to use a 3rd party driver for, say, a networking device on Mac OS X - whether on a real Mac or because you need it to run Mac OS X on your generic x86 box - you will come to understand quite quickly the difference in quality between Apple's efforts and those of basically everyone else.
I don't disagree. Fairly static hardware is infinitely easier to support and perfect that a hodgepodge of differing hardware.
Still, I have some 12 year old PC's that are still chugging along doing inane things like firewalling, etc. My 7 year old P3 Laptop still runs like the day I bought it... using Firefox instead of IE.
Quality, bulletproof, non-Mac computers can and are made. Maybe Macs are 98% satisfactory and PC's are 85% satisfactory, but the overwhelming majority of computers will pretty much hum along forever unless you stick them in the microwave or something.
Agreed, especially as they aren't in a position of strength compared to Microsoft in computer operating systems. What makes OS X special is the synergy with Apple's hardware
The only issue with that is that the specs of Apple's hardware can now be easily spec'ed in a white box. It is no longer a mysterious liquid-cooled Power PC.
Want a high-end Mac Pro? Get a couple of Xeon's (the speed of your choice), throw a somewhat dated 7300GT graphics card in there, a couple gigs of ECC Memory, and the Sata Hard Drive of your choosing.
There, you have a Mac Pro.
I can get a Mac machine from just about anywhere.
What I cannot get is the OS to run on said machine because of some proprietary things thrown into the Macs that would not allow it to run.
Slashdot Mirror
I concede that he's not a household name, but Rex has been blogging for a long time and he's been profiled and quoted in the mainstream media. He has a pretty good following, and is not some anonymous guy. His legal name is Rex, and he often details the problems that go along with being mononymous.
http://www.seattlerex.com/confessions-of-a-newfound-sopa-supporter/
SOPA and PIPA might not pass, but something will, and whatever passes in their place will no doubt be worse. We know the intent of these companies, and we know that they will not give up. Still, we give them our money. We give them our money knowing that they will use that money to try and take away certain freedoms that we hold dear.
Imagine any other industry doing that. Telling their customers to their face that they want to censor them, and expecting those customers to keep patronizing them. For some reason, the big media companies don't seem care, though. They openly sponsor these bills, and they don't fear any retribution from the consumer.
Face it, as long as consumers continue to give these companies their heard-earned cash, these companies will continue funneling that hard-earned cash into lawyers, legislators, and laws designed to benefit them and harm us.
Eventually, they are going to get their way.
Miles/points and other gimmicks mean nothing to me.
Oh, but they do.
They mean something to all of us, even those of us without credit cards.
I used to be a small business owner, and I stopped taking "points" credit cards altogether.
Do you know who pays for those points and gives you the cash back?
The merchant. That's right, points cards always cost the merchant a larger percentage in transaction fees, and the credit card companies offer this difference (usually only a fraction of the difference) as THEIR GIFT TO YOU ... which they take from me.
Swell guys, eh?
Sheeple spending points is like sheeple spending tax "refund" checks. They think it's free money from the heavens above, but it comes about only through their own assfucking.
Points/rewards credit cards are a pretty big factor behind the increasing costs of goods/services. The credit card companies take it from the merchant, take a slice for themselves, and give you whats left.
In turn, the merchants raise their prices to cover the "rewards", and prices go up for everyone, regardless of how they pay. Next time you take you credit card to the store, prices have gone up 20% to cover this atrocity, but you gladly buy it anyway because you get more points on your card. And the cycle continues.
Rewards/points cards are in the top 10 scams of the century.
But hey, enjoy your 49 cents cash back. You earned it.
In order for democracy to work, the populace must be of sufficient intellect to make the best decisions for itself. The masses cannot do this, and this reality is unchangeable.
That which we call "critical" or "abstract" thinking generally requires an IQ of 110 or greater. The average IQ of the U.S. citizen is 98. This means that the majority of Americans have an IQ of less than 100. Those with IQs of less than 100 tend to make decisions based on repetition and consensus rather than critical analysis, and even "smart" people have a difficult time resisting the lure of basing conclusions on "common knowledge".
As such, people can be fairly easily persuaded to vote against their own interests time, and time, and time again.
Democracy as a means of preventing tyranny and corruption is fairly useless, for democracy is 3 geniuses, 20 bright people, and 500 idiots voting on a course of action. The numbers are made up, but you get the gist, and they are probably not far off. When someone with an IQ of 65 has an equal influence on important matters as does a person with an IQ of 140, the Achilles heel of of democracy becomes evident.
A benevolent dictatorship, to whatever extent one can truly exist, would be a far better, more fair, more efficient, more humane form of government than is democracy.
GoDaddy will be fine, because even though Slashdotters know what SOPA is, 90% of people have no clue as to what is going on.
Despite nearly 18 months of seeming outrage over the TSA's backscatter and groping, airline travel was up this holiday season. Bloggers and talking heads were pissed, but Joe and Jane Soccermom remained oblivious. Were it put to a vote tomorrow, the TSA's groping policy would be overwhelmingly approved by American voters.
Similarly, when SOPA or a SOPA-like law is passed, and it will be, Slashdot will blow up with comments, but the legislators who pass it will be re-elected without issue.
3 geniuses, 20 bright people, 500 idiots.
The government will once again act against the interest of the citizens, while 3 people scream, 20 people complain on Slashdot, and 500 people watch Monday Night Football.
Democracy. It doesn't work.
It never did.
It never will.
I don't expect that love to be universal, though. Arguing interfaces is like arguing flavors of ice cream.
I have a Galaxy Tab, and while I love it most of the time, it memory leaks like hell. I use it a great deal, which means that at a minimum, I have to reboot once daily. I can somewhat see that the 512MB of RAM is too tight for any more candy.
It seems pathetic, though, considering that 20 short years ago my PC had 4MB of RAM and ran Windows 3.1 just fine (well, not "fine", but I'm sure you get the point). Now, I've got 128x that, and I can barely run a mobile operating system with a pretty shell.
It does seem wrong on so many levels.
In other other new, bad looking women don't seem to notice the change.
Leave your mother out of this.
just sayin
Are about to get run over en-masse.
This OS and these devices are not new. If these companies were that concerned about iPeople, they would have made the transition to an iPhone OS compatible technology long ago.
This is why large companies often preferclass action suits over individual suits.
Class action suits mean that, if the company loses, they never have to litigate over the matter again.
If they lose an individual suit, every consumer on the planet is free to chase the same reward the original litigant won, and they are not bound by any $5 off coupon settlements.
It also means that noone else is bound by the outcome, and is free to sue individually. If Microsoft loses the individual suit, you could potentially see 10,000,000 more individual suits using this case as a precedent for an easy win. That would cost MS significantly more money. Lack of class certification COULD be a disaster for Microsoft ... especially if they lose and the award is substantial.
Or maybe people don't feel like joining real life out of High School. Maybe they just want to drink lots of beer, smoke pot from a bong made out of a toilet paper roll, root for the school sports team, and have bitchin' spring break parties while going into debt for the extended vacation.
Then again, maybe it is about all of that altruistic shit.
Anything's possible.
True.
Which begs the questions, why is a college degree even relevant?
You can be saddled with student loans, and still know less than the guy who checked out a "Systems Administration for Dummies" book at the local library.
I have seen that happen myself.
One place I worked preferred self-taught, non-college-degreed people, because they tended, in many cases, to know more, be more current (many college IT courses are dated by the time they are taught), and said employees had no need to hide behind a piece of paper or an acronym of certifications.
Too many people do use said degrees and certs as shields. I have worked under people with Master's Degrees who couldn't wipe their own ass.
Any of us who have been "certified" are well aware that it is complete economic and promotional bullshit, and you know what ... more and more employers are becoming aware of this as well.
Some 18 year old kid straight out of high school is as likely to know as much about computers as the guy who paid for 15 different certs trying to show that he knows about computers.
Those who can .... do. People don't want to pay a premium for degrees anymore, they just want the task to be completed so they get paid by the client. The paradigm is slowly shifting.
Fancy papers as indicators of knowledge are slowly being shown as the fools gold that they often were.
The most brilliant people I know never finished college, and some of the most obtuse people I know have doctorates.
As the "education emperor" continues to be shown wearing no clothes, expect more of this testing.
Guess what?
You're already paying for it.
Why didn't you have them pucker up and kiss their ass goodbye over the USF?
Part of the program makes the following claim:
The USF ensures that consumers in all regions of the nation have access to and pay rates for telecommunications services that are reasonably comparable to those in urban areas.
So, whether the people on Cape Cod get it or not ... you're still going to pay for it.
Have a great day.
If I have to pay, I'm going to play.
It could backfired in the RIAA lawsuits as people will be able to legitimately claim "I did pay for it".
It's been up .10 to .20 most of the day.
The stock has been beaten, whipped, and been forced to eat the corn out of Intel's shit. It's down over 80% in little more than a year.
It's got 6 bucks to go until zero ... you really think another bashing article on the Internet is going to do anything?
Once it hits $5, it will become harder to short.
It made sense to short AMD at $40, but at $6-$7, the risk/reward ship has sailed.
I don't think anyone is going to make any more money by bashing AMD. It's been done ad-nauseum. The stock price is that of a battered company.
All of the reasons mentioned are the reason that the stock is DOWN OVER 80%.
Nobody is telling anyone anything they don't already know here.
I have been trading AMD since the late 90's. In the interest of full disclosure, I am bought some AMD calls at this level. Not many, but enough to give me some play. And I am not here to pump it. I didn't start this thread. I bought calls because I lose less if I am wrong, and don't think AMD is going to $40 again anytime soon. But ... any reasonably good news will cause a short squeeze, as the stock is heavily shorted now. I don't believe that AMD is worth less than half today than what it was 6 months ago.
I also don't think it is dead.
AMD has hit $3 before. This isn't uncharted territory for AMD. It gets beaten on a cyclical basis, and the stock prices goes straight to hell.
If anything, it will get bought out before it goes bankrupt. I am sure you have hard the chatter about IBM buying AMD, but I don't think that will happen.
They need to get their shit together, and it may take awhile. ATI graphics are going in all kinds of things (like video game machines), and the new platform is being adopted. AMD may not be the king of performance again for some time, , but I don't see AMD going anywhere
How much money does a plane ticket cost these days???
All this "funding" stuff seems like a bunch of crap to me used for purposed other than security.
Tim McVeigh used a Ryder truck full of cow shit for crying out loud.
Expert testimony from an RIAA witness also showed that a wireless router was not used, casting doubt on her defense that a hacker lurking outside her apartment window with a laptop might have framed her, he said.
I never download music. It is always a hacker lurking outside of my apartment window.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
And really, isn't that punishment enough?
Why not simply nail her and have the best of both worlds?
Thanks for debunking the rationale that gets me though the day.
Can't you people let me have anything ...
But you have the same hardware. The point is the Apple doesn't create this mystery hardware out of magic purple elephant poop. It's pretty standard stuff. One can have the hardware that Apple uses (or better) at will. And you and I both know that people can get OSX to run on it, but given that they try to proprietarily lock the software to the hardware, I doubt I will ever use it like that.
The distinguishing feature of a (modern) Mac is its ability to run a non-hacked version of MacOS X, and software written for MacOS X, so any system that can''t do this isn't a Mac, irrespective of what its owner may say. It isn't a HP or Dell either, so it won't run one of their special registration-free versions of Windows that ship with their systems, and use proprietary BIOS ID information to ensure that they can't be installed on computers made by someone else.
True, but is the hardware of any higher or lower quality? That is debatable. Most of the hardware used by all of these folks are obtained from the same or similar vendors. One may get a headstart on the other here or there, but for the most part it's all the same, save for locking out people who may want to use a project on a machine they built themselves.
Of course the magic pixie dust and butterfly tears are hard for the average consumer to come by, but I know this Mexican guy that lives in an underpass in Los Angeles who sells the stuff pretty cheap. Just go to Los Angeles and ask for "Jose'". Everyone will know who you are talking about, and he will hook you up. But whatever you do, don't buy the bottle of Unicorn flatulence that he will try to push on you. I can confirm that it does not double RAM capacity. As the saying goes ... screw me once it's your fault Jose', but screw me twice ... I won't get fooled again.
Linux is not OS X, or even a reasonable facsimile thereof, because it cannot run software written specifically for OS X. An arbitrary white box with Linux is not therefore a Mac, irrespective of whether its has the same CPU and graphics card some Macs.
Take that unwashed masses of Linux users! I spit on your NextStep-like window managers! Posers!
Quite a bit of Linux stuff doesn't run on the Mac either, so I guess it's pretty much a wash.
Seriously, the differences in what you are able to do between the different OS's, IMHO, are getting slimmer as time goes on. Do you REALLY think that some of these folks on ./ can't make OSX run on that whitebox? If they do, is it a true "Mac"? If it isn't, does it matter? What if they use superior 8800 cards instead of the somewhat dated 7300 cards that Apple uses? What if they get RAID working? Can the argument be made that they have a better "Mac" than Apple makes?
Mac hardware as some kind of machine that is superior to all others simply because it has the pixie dust to run a specific OS is somewhat specious reasoning to me. Is OS X nice? Hell yes it's nice.
Then again, so is Ubuntu running Beryl. It makes both Mac and Windows look terribly dated. And it will do it on consumer hardware that you can buy at Newegg for reasonable prices, and the hardware will probably chug along for 20 years given reasonable assembly.
A computer is what you make it. And most people can make it pretty much whatever they want to.
I still think it would make sense for Apple to sell OSX to the filthy riff-raff, like they sell the iPod to the filthy riff-raff, as long as they state what hardware will and won't work.
But it's not my call, and it probably won't happen. Nobody will blow their brains out over it. Life goes on.
2 weeks and some 100+ hours later, I still don't get it. What it is, why it was created, what it does that XP didn't do, etc.
I can confirm that it is quite a bit more resource intensive, and appears to be somewhat slower than XP. The interface is odd and counter-intuitive. I had to turn off UAC because it asked me to confirm every time I wanted to fart. When I turned off UAC, all of my application settings were reset, which means I had to re-configure pretty much everything. The mouse settings won't stick between reboot. I have to reconfigure the pointer evertime I boot the machine.
I have 4 gigs of memory (only 2.5 gigs are visible), and the disk thrashes every moment that the machine is on. Even when sitting idle at the desktop doing nothing. Some programs don't work, or work in an odd manner. Adobe Premiere dumps on my with a cryptic error message, and I have had one BSOD. Something about could not get driver_power_state. Unplugging the external firewire drive seems to have stopped that.
I thought FSX would really fly on Vista compared to XP, but the framerates are the same, even with the significant bump in hardware (From an AMD FX-55 to a Intel QX6800 and 6800 to 8800 video cards).
I am trying to love the thing. I really am. Does it have some positives? I suppose. The little "Aero View" thing is marginally cool. Visually, the window manager theme is nicer. It runs MOST of my applications fine and allow me to get things done similar to XP. The drivers for the X-Fi card sound just incredible, and this is the best audio I have ever had. The drivers for the 8800 cards produce very nice and sharp images and go back and forth between quad monitors and SLI with a simple reboot.
But does it do one thing that XP didn't do? For me ... no. At least nothing that I have come across. It does the same stuff as XP, sligthly slower than XP ... and seems to pound the living shit out of my hard drive. I am looking at the drive light right now and the thing is flashing constantly. It never stops.
I still have my Ubuntu machine beside this one, and would love to install Ubuntu on this QX6800. But until Creative releases a driver from the X-FI card (which I am not willing to give up), I'm pretty much screwed on front.
Once Ubuntu 7.10 is released, which will probably have native 8800GTX drivers on the live disk, and hopefully will have some kind of driver for the X-Fi card, this is going to become a Ubuntu machine very quickly, with a 50gb Vista partition for FSX. I am a heavy multi-tasker and have used every manner of OS release since DOS. I was a Unix admin for several years. So I am not exactly Joe and Jane Soccermom when it comes to screwing around with new OS's
Until I can get some better Linux drivers for my current hardware, I will be spending more hours with my new buddy Vista, and I will be trying my best to figure out what Redmond was doing for the last 5 years.
I keep telling myself that it just has to be something more than a window manager update ... but as of this typing, that is about all I have been able to find. XP with a new, slower, but prettier Window Manager.
I am not sure what that point of upgrading from anything to Vista would be. Maybe I will figure it out in time, but don't know why anyone would bother right now.
Okay, okay, I forget the pixie dust and pink elephant droppings. Other than that it's pretty close. For fuck's sake, Apples even says that their machines are based on BSD, and the window manager is not that terribly hard to emulate in *nix.
Application compatibility is another issue.
In a word: yes. If you ever have the misfortune to have to use a 3rd party driver for, say, a networking device on Mac OS X - whether on a real Mac or because you need it to run Mac OS X on your generic x86 box - you will come to understand quite quickly the difference in quality between Apple's efforts and those of basically everyone else.
I don't disagree. Fairly static hardware is infinitely easier to support and perfect that a hodgepodge of differing hardware.
Still, I have some 12 year old PC's that are still chugging along doing inane things like firewalling, etc. My 7 year old P3 Laptop still runs like the day I bought it ... using Firefox instead of IE.
Quality, bulletproof, non-Mac computers can and are made. Maybe Macs are 98% satisfactory and PC's are 85% satisfactory, but the overwhelming majority of computers will pretty much hum along forever unless you stick them in the microwave or something.
The only issue with that is that the specs of Apple's hardware can now be easily spec'ed in a white box. It is no longer a mysterious liquid-cooled Power PC.
Want a high-end Mac Pro? Get a couple of Xeon's (the speed of your choice), throw a somewhat dated 7300GT graphics card in there, a couple gigs of ECC Memory, and the Sata Hard Drive of your choosing.
There, you have a Mac Pro.
I can get a Mac machine from just about anywhere.
What I cannot get is the OS to run on said machine because of some proprietary things thrown into the Macs that would not allow it to run.
But I suppose all of this is what Linux is for ...