Not true, again look at Valve which i hold up as the gold standard in how to do DRM right. Just today my youngest had his Internet down for a day, it never fails that when somebody moves in on that floor some jackass will hack into the cable to get free TV and fuck up his internet but thanks to Offline Mode he was able to play his Steam games until the cable guy could chop up the hacker's line and restore his Internet.
So I'm sorry but the "offsite storage" as you call it is NOT worth the trade off, just ask those that played SW galaxies how much that offsite storage is benefiting them now whereas i can fire up Half Life 1 from...what, 1997? and if I want to play MP no problem, i have plenty of choices but if my net goes down the game STILL WORKS in single player, no hassles, no fuss.
If you are gonna lie at least try to make your lies believable, okay Miss Coward? So far I've slammed MSE, Windows 8 and 8.1, Zune, Kin, Sidekick, XBL, the Windows Appstore, and Vista.
So if you consider saying a whole THREE products out of a dozen released in the past decade are good is "promoting" a company I'd say get your head out of your behind, because i call it as I see it and if a company puts out a good product, even if most of their products are shit? I'll be happy to give them props when they do something right, because unlike you Miss Coward I stand by my positions and always have.
As for the other guy that points out MSE doesn't score dead last but kinda in the middle...and? If there are FREE products that score BETTER than MSE why on earth would you want the inferior product? Don't get me wrong, just because its not a great AV doesn't mean it doesn't have its uses, since my gaming system is really only used for gaming and movies i have MSE on it and for just scanning the occasional game patch or downloaded video? It works just fine for that. But on my netbox I have Avast Free because it consistently scores higher than MSE and since i surf on that box I want the better protection that Avast Free gives me over MSE. the only positive MSE really has is how low resource it is but I'd argue that its so low resource because frankly it don't do much. When all the stink about MSE flunking the AV tests came out I fired up a box at the shop and decided to do some tests of my own and went to known infected sites like topsites...know how many pages MSE stopped from loading? NONE, zip zero zilch, in fact i never got MSE to block a single infected webpage from loading. After restoring from a disc image I ran the same test with both Comodo IS and Avast Free and they stopped the web pages from loading and warned that malware had been detected on them.
So I'd say if all you really need is a file scanner like ClamAV? Then MSE works great in that role, if you need real time protection? Stick with Avast Free and Comodo IS, hell of a lot better at stopping the nasties and like MSE both are free so why take worse protection when you don't have to?
I have a better question....why? Why would you go to this much trouble when you can use the free Stellarium and know where pretty much everything visible (and not visible unless you have a big ass telescope) and just call it a day? It can even control a telescope for you, just slap it on a netbook, wire it to the telescope and there ya go, easy peasy.
Who knows, maybe the guy didn't have anything better to do with his time but for everybody else you can do the same thing by just installing Stellarium and the extra chart packs. Hell if something you want to track isn't in any of their charts just tell 'em on the forums and i bet it'll be whipped off in no time at all, they just love adding more objects to the packs.
Well if she cares more about "looking dorky" than her own personal safety? Maybe you need to sit her down and tell her how much her getting hurt bothers you.
But my late sis used a walker and my grandma a cane and I got them both that light and I can tell you it works REALLY great, the beam is focused well while allowing her path to be well lit, its of course hands free so no need for them to try to balance a light and their walking aid, and its very reliable. Honestly if she is gonna be out in the dark this beats the outdoor lighting by a country mile because what happens if she need to walk anywhere besides the yard? What if your lights go out?
Having a good flashlight on hand to make sure she can see the obstacles ahead isn't dorky friend, its just good old common sense.
Well I got to say most of us little shop guys certainly profit from McCrappy, we get paid to remove that shit because its fricking worse than the malware! You want to see a laptop grind to a fricking halt use McCrappy or Norton and just watch the cycles get wasted.
So TFA really doesn't surprise me that they are pulling shady shit as their products are frankly more of a PITA than a lot of the infections I've seen of late. You want to know which AVs to avoid? Norton, McCrappy, and I'll get hate for saying this but I'd add MSE to that list. what I've found is that MSE is really more of a placebo, you give it to those that already follow best practices and it'll make them feel more comfortable but it really doesn't do much and usually scores at the bottom of most tests. Honestly that shouldn't be a surprise to anybody as it was originally called Giant AntiSpy and was made to keep spyware and toolbars off, NOT worms and rootkits and viruses.
If you want a good AV that doesn't cost a dime? Here in the shop I've both tested the AVs myself as well as seen how well they work based on my customers and I'd say Comodo Internet Security and Avast Free are both REALLY good. Comodo is for your geeks as it has really REALLY fine grained controls and you can customize the hell out of it, although frankly you don't have to as for the past few years the defaults have been sane and well thought out. For your non geeks, your average Joes and Janes? Avast Free works really well, it holds their hand with info bubbles in English instead of geek speak, has a built in software updater that will warn you when your third party stuff is out of date, and its UI is REALLY simple and straightforward.
So do us all a favor and don't reward bad behavior by buying McCrappy, not only are they pulling numbers out their behinds but their AV ties a boat anchor on the system.
Don't worry old Hairy has you covered, here you go friend. With this it doesn't matter where your wife is she'll be able to see, indoors, outdoors, no matter where she goes she'll have the path in front of her illuminated.
That was the F-22 and the bigger problem is that all the MIC has been able to build since the early 90s is large clusterfucks and huge bills, the tech has been crap!
If the USAF wasn't run by brown-nosing MIC asskissers they would scrap the F35, use the F22 for as long as its worth using then dump THAT turkey as well and take a page from the Israelis and buy more F-15s, F-16s, and F-18s. The lines are still popping them out and they even have the Stealth Eagle if you decide you HAVE to have stealth but frankly the enemies we are likely to face? stealth isn't gonna matter, goat herders in caves aren't using advanced radar, in fact nearly all of our realistically possible enemies are using old as hell Soviet era stuff, just look at North Korea getting busted trying to buy old surplus Mig 21s from Cuba.
Sadly I look at the current "strategy" of our armed forces and you know what it reminds me of? The Axis powers in WWII. The USAF like The Germans is betting waaay too much on "Wonder weapons" that spend more time on the ground than flying, are incredibly expensive so we can only afford a handful (thus making sure you can NEVER get economies of scale on planes or parts like we have on the Teen series, and because of the crazy price per unit most likely won't be flown against anybody where its tech can be useful for fear of losing it) and take a hell of a lot to maintain. Compare this to the fact you can get the SU27 at 30 mil a pop, the MiG 29 at 27 mil a pop which means any enemy with real resources will be able to spam us.
Then you have the USN which seems to be taking a page straight from the IJN in that just as the IJN stuck with outdated tactics and weapons (didn't have much choice really) likewise the USN is acting like its the late 50s and going carrier batshit. I mean when the next nearest potential enemy has a grand total of two (and last I checked one of the Chinese carriers was nothing more than a hulk) and you have ELEVEN? That is fricking dumb and it gets even worse when you realize that the Chinese have a sea skimmer now that will reach out 900 miles at 1 foot off the water (thus making the Phalanx useless) and they are already working on a 1200 mile version. Again unless you are going after goat herders which aren't a threat to carriers so no more than five TOPS would be needed carrier groups will be sitting ducks, the enemy could just spam sea skimmers and turn the task force into nothing but debris without risking a single pilot.
At the end of the day we need to go back to the pre WWII way of buying weapons, where we put out a spec and they weren't getting shit until a prototype was available for testing, stop giving the MIC blank checks for turkeys like the F-35, and finally use some of that money they have been throwing at the MIC to offer ALL of our brave men and women better pay, thus increasing the chance to get pilot butts to put in those seats.
And how much piracy did the companies that didn't use ANY DRM end up with? I remember reading the company that made the huge space simulator (sorry i can't remember the name, solar empire maybe
? Not into space sims much) said they were looking at 90% piracy rates and other companies that have gone 100% DRM free have reported similar numbers. And all you have to do is look on any P2P to find the GOG installers all over the place, all it takes is one douchebag to ruin it for everybody, in fact I just used a couple of P2P search engines and typed "GOG" and found there is a couple of guys offering entire genres from GOG on.ISOs, so it is obvious their "honor system" doesn't work. ironically the very first thing that came up on every search? Red Projekt's own Witcher games.
So I'm sorry but the numbers simply don't back up your assertion because we have ample evidence if there is ZERO cracking required, no matter how good the game, the piracy numbers just shoot through the roof. Does this mean the DRM has to be nasty? of course not, Valve has doubled their profits SEVEN YEARS in a row and they have one of the easiest to crack DRM schemes out there, in fact you can go to gamecopyworld and hack any game in minutes...which misses the point. The point is humans are LAZY and easily discouraged and even a simple DRM scheme can turn losses into sales, believe me I know as I've been selling PCs to average Joes since the VIC-20 was being hawked by The Shat and you'd be surprised how many are reluctant to use a crack even for interoperability, such as those i use when a person has an older game with a 16bit installer or 32bit DRM and they've bought a 64bit PC from me, so I have seen it with my own two peepers.
With triple A games costing 50 million plus you simply can't afford 90% loss rates, you just can't. no DRM is fine for ancient games that have made back their money like on GOG, its fine for little indie games (although I would argue that losses hurt them more than say Gearbox or EA) but as we have seen time after time if people can get it for free without any real effort? THEY WILL.
I mean if you need any further proof just look at TFA? The poster is bleeding to death thanks to piracy, so if your theory held water shouldn't he be just fine? Or are you gonna use the "If his stuff was better I wouldn't steal it" excuse the pirates use?
And how many of the GOG games have been put on P2P? oh yeah...all of them.
But if you honestly think you can make triple A games today and not end up bleeding to death if you do ZERO about piracy? Then i have a bridge you might be interested in. I like GOG (although of late frankly I've been burned several times on games they SAID work...but they don't) but that is NOT a viable model for a triple A gaming house to have long term, there are just too damned many that will take it for free if it involves zero effort.
You want to see what the GOG model gets you with modern games? MMOs that's what, and I don't know about everybody else but I LIKE not having to be online just to play, I LIKE not having my progress trashed because my net lost connection, but that is what you get with no copy protection at all, MMOs.
Not only that there are plenty of PDF password strippers out there that if you have a quad or better (and considering you can get AMD quads for like $70 its kinda nuts not to have at least a quad) can go through entire rainbow tables in no time at all, just set it to use dual cores and you can keep doing other stuff while it runs in the background.
I'd say the best bet is the watermarks but they'll have to be well hidden as its too easy to strip a watermark out if its obvious, maybe have an obvious personalization watermark and a second hidden one with a code that can be traced back to the purchaser, that way you go after the source without punishing your readers.
And I'd like to say how proud I am of this community right now, here is a legitimate small business trying to stay alive and instead of the usual "Just accept getting ripped off, information wants to be free!" bullshit instead there is actual discussion on how best to protect his content while still giving the customers a good experience. If everyone would work together and find compromises like this maybe we could actually show its possible to sell digitally without nasty DRM schemas like SecuROM, we've had Steam show us the way for games but there is still a lot of work that needs doing for e-books and other works and its just nice to see it being discussed like rational adults instead of breaking down into dogmas and bullshit.
And I bet my last dollar that would be completely UNPLAYABLE on a 1970s TV, which is what the original ran on. Look at how tiny he had to make the "dots" which frankly look like sticks, with NO way to tell except for light flashing which is the super pellet (which again on a 70s TV set? they'd ALL flash) and just like the original he has to make ALL the chars that aren't Pac-Man flicker, again because the hardware simply wasn't designed to have multiple characters doing different things and all be on screen.
Finally how long did that take? How many programmers worked on it? because i couldn't find squat and the original had NINETY DAYS from being told "you have to make this" to having the code loaded onto carts.
If you want more just look up the man's history, he is NOT an engineer he is a MARKETER, going all the way back to their funny vids of him doing infomercials for Win 1.0, THAT is what he knows, THAT is what he went to school for and THAT is all he'll ever be.
I mean have you even SEEN the numbers? An engineer or a nerd could see when a plan isn't gonna work and change direction, what has Ballmer done? Zune,Kin, killing plays for sure for the DOA Zune Market, shoving out the X360 with a 2+ billion dollar flaw that most likely doomed the X360 to break even at best (don't show me that article saying when X360 became profitable as it does NOT count R&D, The RRoD costs, nor the R&D on Xbox 1 so they are bull, if I stuffed all my losses on another division i'm sure i could show that Zune and surface were huge money makers too) the crazy amount spent on a search company that was worthless, the insane amount of money spent on the Win 8 megabomb, the insane amount of money they are about to shit with the 8.1 megabomb...these are NOT the actions of a nerd, unless the definition of nerd is crazy or retarded.
So you can claim a LOT of things about Ballmer, egomaniac,tries to run a company by "PPT Math", refuses to look at their own figures, but nerd? i'm sorry but I gotta throw a flag, BS on the field. I KNOW nerds, nerds are friends of mine and Mr Ballmer is NO nerd.
I'll get hate but the irony is so moist i honestly don't care...can we all LOAO now? I mean storing IN PLAIN TEXT? What good is that "vaunted Linux security" if the forums are being run by goobers that store fricking passwords in plain text! This is a PERFECT example of what I've been saying for years, its NOT the OS, any OS can be as secure or as insecure as can be, it ALL comes down to what is sitting between keyboard and chair.
Please please PLEASE tell me at the very least the fools in charge of that site has been told to hit the bricks, yes? After all if ANY other company or place did something THAT stupid you'd be calling for their heads, right? But just the fact that you are saying "It's good the Ubuntu Forums has alerted us that this breach has occurred" makes me feel the community is using their "do as I say NOT as I do strategy" because if this were Sony or Apple or MSFT, even if the service was free, every Linux user would be screaming about how fricking pathetic storing in plain text in 2013 is and how they needed to be shown the door.
So I'll be personally interested if the screaming about bad security practices and vile towards foolish behavior will be directed toward their own, or if the community will just pretend that its totally okay when THEY do it, just not when anybody else does it.
Oh please! Haven't you read ANYTHING in the past 30+ years? ALL of the major powers are spying their asses off, on each other, on their own people, hell where do you think the Chinese got their stealth tech? They bought the wreck of the wobbly goblin that went down in Kosovo, had it boxed up and shipped, and the rumor is they also paid for access to the stealth drone Iran caught.
Why not? You can always go back to the old way if it goes tits up down the line. If the thing gives you X+Y and our current system gives you X and it costs nothing to implement this, as no new hardware or days reprogramming the software to use why not go for it?
As long as it doesn't require weeks to switch the network back if this doesn't work down the line I see no reason not to give it a shot, not like we couldn't all use a free speed boost, right?
Notice you got modded down for DARING to point out fucking reality? THIS is why I think political correctness and all who support it really need to diaf, I mean for the love of god do I REALLY have to provide a weekly body count here? For every ONE you have of ANY other group you have THREE HUNDRED Muslim attacks for shit's sake!
And notice not a damned one dared say shit about the Latino bit, you know why? Because even THEY know looking for illegal Swedes at the Mexican fucking border is RETARDED, yet THAT is what they expect the cops to do! Maybe a little words from their prophet saying what they should do to infidels might bitchslap some truth in them but sadly those that are PC are about as damned clueless as flat earthers, look how many of them saying every damned business cutting hours in half has nothing to do with Obamacare. For Christ sake, cause and effect is apparently an alien concept to the politically correct!
Quran 4:89: They (infidels) desire that you should disbelieve as they have disbelieved, so that you might be (all) alike; therefore take not from among them friends until they fly (their homes) in Allah's way; but if they turn back, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them, and take not from among them a friend or a helper.
Quran 8:12: Instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers;
Quran 2:191: kill the disbelievers wherever we find them
Quran 22:19-22: for them (the unbelievers) garments of fire shall be cut and there shall be poured over their heads boiling water whereby whatever is in their bowels and skin shall be dissolved and they will be punished with hooked iron rods.
Quran 8:12: Your Lord inspired the angels with the message: I will terrorize the unbelievers. Therefore smite them on their necks and every joint and incapacitate them. Strike off their heads and cut off each of their fingers and toes.
Quran 8:7: Allah wished to confirm the truth by His words: Wipe the infidels out to the last.
Quran 8:59: The infidels should not think that they can get away from us. Prepare against them whatever arms and weaponry you can muster so that you may terrorize them. They are your enemy and Allah's enemy.
Quran 8:60: Prepare against them whatever arms and cavalry you can muster that you may strike terror in the enemies of Allah, and others besides them not known to you.
Quran 9.29 Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Apostle have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection.
While I don't really care for the phone home crap either last I checked the remote chrome thing worked just as good in Comodo Dragon which does NOT have the phone home to Google crap, so its not like you HAVE to take phone home to use this feature.
that said I tried it and...meh, It doesn't really work as well as remote assistance on Win 7, its kinda laggy, mouse is jerky, and it just wasn't as pleasant to use as remote assistance. Say what you will about MSFT but that feature is a fricking lifesaver, don't know how many times I've had to remote into a customer or family member to fix something in the middle of the night.
I'll get hate for saying this but if ALL of your bombings and attacks are ONLY coming from ONE group, a group that rhymes with "Buslim"? Then it is NOT profiling to throw an extra glance at those that are part of that group!
THIS is why I fricking hate political correctness, because it DEMANDS that sanity be thrown out the window! Like how they had a shitfit at cops in Arizona targeting Latinos looking for illegals...uhh...when you are against the border with MEXICO I don't think illegal Swedes are gonna be a fucking problem!
Oh and before anybody brings up OKC? You have ONE time, ONE attack, versus how many attacks just this month by those who follow the certain religion again? Like it or not the vast majority of the OTHER religions grew the fuck up, whereas Islam is still living in the dark ages. Do you see the OTHER religions chopping off hands and stoning rape victims? NO, just the backwards ass Muslims. So it is NOT profiling to look extra hard if you are part of a group that causes the majority of terror attacks every. single. year. that is just common damned sense!
You are correct, they didn't even have the 8Kb carts so he had to squeeze it onto a 4KB cart, the same size used for games like Combat and Missile Command. And again you are talking about a system that was NEVER built to run ANYTHING as complex as Pac-Man, it was made for 2 squares and a sprite ball, and in 90 days flat, using a cart less than half the size the original game ran on, with zero access to the code you manage to cook up a game that not only keeps the core gameplay but becomes the biggest hit of the system, with 7 million sold?
I don't care what anybody else says, he should be up there with the greats, what the guy did with such little time and weak hardware is fricking AMAZING!
Because it adds complexity and bullshit for ZERO gains for the user? I mean take something which was sooo damned simple, safe mode. Win2K-Win 7? Push F8 at start. One button, simple. Win 8? Push Alt+F8, go through 2 submenus and then and ONLY then can you get safe mode...WTF?
And despite Ballmers "focus groups" which I have NO doubt was filled with the families of Yes men under orders to match the results they wanted, most folks have a LOT of programs installed, they just don't use them as often. Have you EVER seen what Metro looks like with a lot of programs installed? It looks like a menu at Denny's that's what, page after page of fucking pointless little icon that just gets in the damned way. Compare this to all programs, a nice neat little line that doesn't even take up a quarter of the screen and which is all laid out alphabetical, couldn't be neater and cleaner. You ever try walking somebody over the phone through finding a specific damned program on metro? Good luck buddy. And relying on search is just a crutch that quickly gets old, especially if they have programs with a similar first couple of letters, it just makes more of a jumble.
And that isn't even getting into the fact the OS? Its BROKEN. I'm sorry but it is. You know how many times I've been paid to "refresh my PC" on Windows 8? So damned many times I could do that shit in my sleep. Know how many times I've had to reinstall Win 7 on a system where the user hadn't done something stupid and gotten infected? NONE, zip zero nada squat. Hell my own system has had Win 7 since RTM, its gone through 1 MB, 2 RAM upgrades, 4 HDDs, and 2 GPUs...nothing. I thought for sure swapping out the board would need a reinstall but nope, just 10 seconds to reactivate Win 7 and that was that, purred like a kitten.
That is why I'm convinced that "refresh my PC" was NOT put in there to help users, but to be a band aid to cover a serious bug they couldn't pin down. Now if its related to certain chipsets or CPU I don't know, I have noticed that it happens more with sub $500 units than with those expensive units but that may just be I haven't seen too many idiots paying $1K+ for Windows 8 systems, but in any case i personally think its all the Metro and DRM bullshit they bolted on top, because if you kill Metro with start8 or ClassicShell? The incident rate goes waaaay down. Doesn't cure it completely, only replacing with Win 7 does that (so don't say its the hardware, the same systems that I switched for Win 7 and purring just fine) but it DOES seem to help the "refresh my PC" incidents by a decent amount.
So the keyboard commanders and apologists can waste mod points all they want, I've been using alternate shells since BBox for Win, used even the funkier Linux shells, so it ain't got a damned thing with it just "being different" it has to do with the fact that it adds complexity, makes things harder for the user, and for what? So they can cater to touch, which less than 3% of the PCs ON THE PLANET even has? That's like making Windows only function well on polka dot PCs, do YOU have a polka dot PC? Rest my case. Watch this video because he cites experts, provides citations, but in the end he says the same thing I do, its BROKEN.
More likely the company is trying to make itself more "family friendly" because they have seen that Ballmer is completely batshit insane and with the Yahoo Search deal going out soon are hoping to get daddy Ballmer to open that big fat wallet to either buy Tumblr or the whole thing.
Personally if the sweaty one gets his mitts on yahoo some programmer here needs to set up a free email with the yahoo look and a similar chat as they'll slaughter, all that Skype bullshit has caused a LOT of folks to go running to Yahoo (seen that sudden bounce Yahoo had a few months back? Well there ya go) and if the ballmernator replaces Yahoo with "Windows Live Bing 3.0 powered by Skype" you are gonna have a HUGE audience that will be happy to come to you, just charge for a couple of extras and enjoy the money truck that backs up to your place every month.
Oh and if you do this and make a mint? For a small fee you can have "help powered by Da Feet" which while not always helpful at the very least it'll be entertaining.
Dude the guy given the job of writing the first Pac-Man was given NINETY DAYS, just ninety days from being handed the job to handing the finished code to be slapped onto carts. Given THAT tiny amount of time, such limited hardware, and a "dev team" that was one guy? I'd say it was a fucking miracle that he pulled off.
It would be like handing you and two other guys a game like Far Cry 3 and telling you you've got from now until Oct 15th to have it completely ready to go for the X360, oh and you do NOT have access to the original code, you have to make it from scratch. I'd love to see anybody today pull that shit off, in fact look at a game under similar constraints...ET, the most hated 2600 game ever. The dev was given just 6 weeks to get the game done and even with a blank slate to work with he ended up with an unplayable mess, compare this to Pac-Man where not only is it playable but again most of the core gameplay was 100% intact. again its a fricking miracle and the guy deserves props for pulling that off with such a weak system with so little time to work with.
Thank you, with all the pundits screaming "Teh PC is gonna be replaced by tablets ZOMFG!" its nice to see somebody else seeing what should be fucking obvious.
I'm sure the local rent-a-center loves me as i send anybody that comes in wanting a pad to them first, saying "Go rent an iPad for 2 weeks and if you find it REALLY is the device for you? Then we'll see about getting you a good tablet at a decent price' and they always come back a week or two later...to buy or upgrade their desktop/laptop. Its the same thing you said, too big to replace the smartphone, too weak and small to replace the desktop/laptop, a couple of days after the "new toy" wears off they find they don't have a use for the thing and send it back. You'd think me sending customers away would cost me customers but it actually gains me customers as they say "hey that guy just saved me hundreds of dollars when he could have sold me a thing I didn't really need" so they have good feelings towards me and my shop which translates to sales and good word of mouth which is the lifeblood of a small shop.
I'm also seeing exactly what you described with the iPad along with something else, buyer's remorse and excuses trying to justify the thing. Just a couple of weeks ago i thought a girl was gonna slap me right in the middle of the grocery store as i saw her struggling with an iPad she was using for a grocery list while trying to steer a cart and said out loud "Trying to find a justification for buying the thing huh?" and had half the aisle laughing their behinds off. The look in her face told me all I needed to know as it was EXACTLY that, she spent all this money on this thing she now had no damned clue what to do with and is now trying to find a use for it. I go to my local Craigslist and the thing is FULL of fricking iPads but since they are trying to get as much of their money back as possible (and bought the "Apple retains its value" bullshit) they never fucking sell so you just see the number of iPad ads pile up daily, with many trying to trade for laptops or anything they could actually use.
So unless MSFT wants to get into the bargain basement tablet biz and compete with all those Cheapo Chinese Android pads they can give it up, those that bought them to show off already have iPads and MSFT will NEVER be a hipster product, the bottom is owned by cheap ass Android pads, and more and more folks are waking up to the fact that between their smartphone and their laptop/desktop they have pretty much every use case covered, the tablets is really a device in search of a use that only a few niches, inventory, medical, the few jobs where you spent your day with a clipboard on your arm, really require.
I know talking to my fellow shop owners that anything that looks like Win 8 is being treated like the plague because of how much consumer backlash there has been. Sigh, we beta testers TRIED to warn them, tried to tell them turning everything into an iPad ripoff wouldn't fly, that nobody was gonna jump through all these hoops, did they listen? Nope Ballmer just gave us the finger and did it anyway and what did it get them? Sales nosediving, Surface pads piling up in the warehouse, Windows becoming the butt of jokes, it just goes to show Forbes was right, Ballmer has earned that Worst CEO title only instead of trying to fix things he seems to be wearing the mantle with pride and fishing for "Worst CEO EVAR!" to go along with it.
BTW whomever designed the spellcheck in Chromium? Congrats, the fact that every time I write Ballmer it wants to replace it with embalmer is quite apt and always gives me a little smile, thanks.
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Not true, again look at Valve which i hold up as the gold standard in how to do DRM right. Just today my youngest had his Internet down for a day, it never fails that when somebody moves in on that floor some jackass will hack into the cable to get free TV and fuck up his internet but thanks to Offline Mode he was able to play his Steam games until the cable guy could chop up the hacker's line and restore his Internet.
So I'm sorry but the "offsite storage" as you call it is NOT worth the trade off, just ask those that played SW galaxies how much that offsite storage is benefiting them now whereas i can fire up Half Life 1 from...what, 1997? and if I want to play MP no problem, i have plenty of choices but if my net goes down the game STILL WORKS in single player, no hassles, no fuss.
If you are gonna lie at least try to make your lies believable, okay Miss Coward? So far I've slammed MSE, Windows 8 and 8.1, Zune, Kin, Sidekick, XBL, the Windows Appstore, and Vista.
So if you consider saying a whole THREE products out of a dozen released in the past decade are good is "promoting" a company I'd say get your head out of your behind, because i call it as I see it and if a company puts out a good product, even if most of their products are shit? I'll be happy to give them props when they do something right, because unlike you Miss Coward I stand by my positions and always have.
As for the other guy that points out MSE doesn't score dead last but kinda in the middle...and? If there are FREE products that score BETTER than MSE why on earth would you want the inferior product? Don't get me wrong, just because its not a great AV doesn't mean it doesn't have its uses, since my gaming system is really only used for gaming and movies i have MSE on it and for just scanning the occasional game patch or downloaded video? It works just fine for that. But on my netbox I have Avast Free because it consistently scores higher than MSE and since i surf on that box I want the better protection that Avast Free gives me over MSE. the only positive MSE really has is how low resource it is but I'd argue that its so low resource because frankly it don't do much. When all the stink about MSE flunking the AV tests came out I fired up a box at the shop and decided to do some tests of my own and went to known infected sites like topsites...know how many pages MSE stopped from loading? NONE, zip zero zilch, in fact i never got MSE to block a single infected webpage from loading. After restoring from a disc image I ran the same test with both Comodo IS and Avast Free and they stopped the web pages from loading and warned that malware had been detected on them.
So I'd say if all you really need is a file scanner like ClamAV? Then MSE works great in that role, if you need real time protection? Stick with Avast Free and Comodo IS, hell of a lot better at stopping the nasties and like MSE both are free so why take worse protection when you don't have to?
I have a better question....why? Why would you go to this much trouble when you can use the free Stellarium and know where pretty much everything visible (and not visible unless you have a big ass telescope) and just call it a day? It can even control a telescope for you, just slap it on a netbook, wire it to the telescope and there ya go, easy peasy.
Who knows, maybe the guy didn't have anything better to do with his time but for everybody else you can do the same thing by just installing Stellarium and the extra chart packs. Hell if something you want to track isn't in any of their charts just tell 'em on the forums and i bet it'll be whipped off in no time at all, they just love adding more objects to the packs.
Well if she cares more about "looking dorky" than her own personal safety? Maybe you need to sit her down and tell her how much her getting hurt bothers you.
But my late sis used a walker and my grandma a cane and I got them both that light and I can tell you it works REALLY great, the beam is focused well while allowing her path to be well lit, its of course hands free so no need for them to try to balance a light and their walking aid, and its very reliable. Honestly if she is gonna be out in the dark this beats the outdoor lighting by a country mile because what happens if she need to walk anywhere besides the yard? What if your lights go out?
Having a good flashlight on hand to make sure she can see the obstacles ahead isn't dorky friend, its just good old common sense.
Well I got to say most of us little shop guys certainly profit from McCrappy, we get paid to remove that shit because its fricking worse than the malware! You want to see a laptop grind to a fricking halt use McCrappy or Norton and just watch the cycles get wasted.
So TFA really doesn't surprise me that they are pulling shady shit as their products are frankly more of a PITA than a lot of the infections I've seen of late. You want to know which AVs to avoid? Norton, McCrappy, and I'll get hate for saying this but I'd add MSE to that list. what I've found is that MSE is really more of a placebo, you give it to those that already follow best practices and it'll make them feel more comfortable but it really doesn't do much and usually scores at the bottom of most tests. Honestly that shouldn't be a surprise to anybody as it was originally called Giant AntiSpy and was made to keep spyware and toolbars off, NOT worms and rootkits and viruses.
If you want a good AV that doesn't cost a dime? Here in the shop I've both tested the AVs myself as well as seen how well they work based on my customers and I'd say Comodo Internet Security and Avast Free are both REALLY good. Comodo is for your geeks as it has really REALLY fine grained controls and you can customize the hell out of it, although frankly you don't have to as for the past few years the defaults have been sane and well thought out. For your non geeks, your average Joes and Janes? Avast Free works really well, it holds their hand with info bubbles in English instead of geek speak, has a built in software updater that will warn you when your third party stuff is out of date, and its UI is REALLY simple and straightforward.
So do us all a favor and don't reward bad behavior by buying McCrappy, not only are they pulling numbers out their behinds but their AV ties a boat anchor on the system.
Don't worry old Hairy has you covered, here you go friend. With this it doesn't matter where your wife is she'll be able to see, indoors, outdoors, no matter where she goes she'll have the path in front of her illuminated.
That was the F-22 and the bigger problem is that all the MIC has been able to build since the early 90s is large clusterfucks and huge bills, the tech has been crap!
If the USAF wasn't run by brown-nosing MIC asskissers they would scrap the F35, use the F22 for as long as its worth using then dump THAT turkey as well and take a page from the Israelis and buy more F-15s, F-16s, and F-18s. The lines are still popping them out and they even have the Stealth Eagle if you decide you HAVE to have stealth but frankly the enemies we are likely to face? stealth isn't gonna matter, goat herders in caves aren't using advanced radar, in fact nearly all of our realistically possible enemies are using old as hell Soviet era stuff, just look at North Korea getting busted trying to buy old surplus Mig 21s from Cuba.
Sadly I look at the current "strategy" of our armed forces and you know what it reminds me of? The Axis powers in WWII. The USAF like The Germans is betting waaay too much on "Wonder weapons" that spend more time on the ground than flying, are incredibly expensive so we can only afford a handful (thus making sure you can NEVER get economies of scale on planes or parts like we have on the Teen series, and because of the crazy price per unit most likely won't be flown against anybody where its tech can be useful for fear of losing it) and take a hell of a lot to maintain. Compare this to the fact you can get the SU27 at 30 mil a pop, the MiG 29 at 27 mil a pop which means any enemy with real resources will be able to spam us.
Then you have the USN which seems to be taking a page straight from the IJN in that just as the IJN stuck with outdated tactics and weapons (didn't have much choice really) likewise the USN is acting like its the late 50s and going carrier batshit. I mean when the next nearest potential enemy has a grand total of two (and last I checked one of the Chinese carriers was nothing more than a hulk) and you have ELEVEN? That is fricking dumb and it gets even worse when you realize that the Chinese have a sea skimmer now that will reach out 900 miles at 1 foot off the water (thus making the Phalanx useless) and they are already working on a 1200 mile version. Again unless you are going after goat herders which aren't a threat to carriers so no more than five TOPS would be needed carrier groups will be sitting ducks, the enemy could just spam sea skimmers and turn the task force into nothing but debris without risking a single pilot.
At the end of the day we need to go back to the pre WWII way of buying weapons, where we put out a spec and they weren't getting shit until a prototype was available for testing, stop giving the MIC blank checks for turkeys like the F-35, and finally use some of that money they have been throwing at the MIC to offer ALL of our brave men and women better pay, thus increasing the chance to get pilot butts to put in those seats.
And how much piracy did the companies that didn't use ANY DRM end up with? I remember reading the company that made the huge space simulator (sorry i can't remember the name, solar empire maybe ? Not into space sims much) said they were looking at 90% piracy rates and other companies that have gone 100% DRM free have reported similar numbers. And all you have to do is look on any P2P to find the GOG installers all over the place, all it takes is one douchebag to ruin it for everybody, in fact I just used a couple of P2P search engines and typed "GOG" and found there is a couple of guys offering entire genres from GOG on .ISOs, so it is obvious their "honor system" doesn't work. ironically the very first thing that came up on every search? Red Projekt's own Witcher games.
So I'm sorry but the numbers simply don't back up your assertion because we have ample evidence if there is ZERO cracking required, no matter how good the game, the piracy numbers just shoot through the roof. Does this mean the DRM has to be nasty? of course not, Valve has doubled their profits SEVEN YEARS in a row and they have one of the easiest to crack DRM schemes out there, in fact you can go to gamecopyworld and hack any game in minutes...which misses the point. The point is humans are LAZY and easily discouraged and even a simple DRM scheme can turn losses into sales, believe me I know as I've been selling PCs to average Joes since the VIC-20 was being hawked by The Shat and you'd be surprised how many are reluctant to use a crack even for interoperability, such as those i use when a person has an older game with a 16bit installer or 32bit DRM and they've bought a 64bit PC from me, so I have seen it with my own two peepers.
With triple A games costing 50 million plus you simply can't afford 90% loss rates, you just can't. no DRM is fine for ancient games that have made back their money like on GOG, its fine for little indie games (although I would argue that losses hurt them more than say Gearbox or EA) but as we have seen time after time if people can get it for free without any real effort? THEY WILL.
I mean if you need any further proof just look at TFA? The poster is bleeding to death thanks to piracy, so if your theory held water shouldn't he be just fine? Or are you gonna use the "If his stuff was better I wouldn't steal it" excuse the pirates use?
And how many of the GOG games have been put on P2P? oh yeah...all of them.
But if you honestly think you can make triple A games today and not end up bleeding to death if you do ZERO about piracy? Then i have a bridge you might be interested in. I like GOG (although of late frankly I've been burned several times on games they SAID work...but they don't) but that is NOT a viable model for a triple A gaming house to have long term, there are just too damned many that will take it for free if it involves zero effort.
You want to see what the GOG model gets you with modern games? MMOs that's what, and I don't know about everybody else but I LIKE not having to be online just to play, I LIKE not having my progress trashed because my net lost connection, but that is what you get with no copy protection at all, MMOs.
Not only that there are plenty of PDF password strippers out there that if you have a quad or better (and considering you can get AMD quads for like $70 its kinda nuts not to have at least a quad) can go through entire rainbow tables in no time at all, just set it to use dual cores and you can keep doing other stuff while it runs in the background.
I'd say the best bet is the watermarks but they'll have to be well hidden as its too easy to strip a watermark out if its obvious, maybe have an obvious personalization watermark and a second hidden one with a code that can be traced back to the purchaser, that way you go after the source without punishing your readers.
And I'd like to say how proud I am of this community right now, here is a legitimate small business trying to stay alive and instead of the usual "Just accept getting ripped off, information wants to be free!" bullshit instead there is actual discussion on how best to protect his content while still giving the customers a good experience. If everyone would work together and find compromises like this maybe we could actually show its possible to sell digitally without nasty DRM schemas like SecuROM, we've had Steam show us the way for games but there is still a lot of work that needs doing for e-books and other works and its just nice to see it being discussed like rational adults instead of breaking down into dogmas and bullshit.
And I bet my last dollar that would be completely UNPLAYABLE on a 1970s TV, which is what the original ran on. Look at how tiny he had to make the "dots" which frankly look like sticks, with NO way to tell except for light flashing which is the super pellet (which again on a 70s TV set? they'd ALL flash) and just like the original he has to make ALL the chars that aren't Pac-Man flicker, again because the hardware simply wasn't designed to have multiple characters doing different things and all be on screen.
Finally how long did that take? How many programmers worked on it? because i couldn't find squat and the original had NINETY DAYS from being told "you have to make this" to having the code loaded onto carts.
Dude, yeah dude?...Zune Squirt. Rest my case.
If you want more just look up the man's history, he is NOT an engineer he is a MARKETER, going all the way back to their funny vids of him doing infomercials for Win 1.0, THAT is what he knows, THAT is what he went to school for and THAT is all he'll ever be.
I mean have you even SEEN the numbers? An engineer or a nerd could see when a plan isn't gonna work and change direction, what has Ballmer done? Zune,Kin, killing plays for sure for the DOA Zune Market, shoving out the X360 with a 2+ billion dollar flaw that most likely doomed the X360 to break even at best (don't show me that article saying when X360 became profitable as it does NOT count R&D, The RRoD costs, nor the R&D on Xbox 1 so they are bull, if I stuffed all my losses on another division i'm sure i could show that Zune and surface were huge money makers too) the crazy amount spent on a search company that was worthless, the insane amount of money spent on the Win 8 megabomb, the insane amount of money they are about to shit with the 8.1 megabomb...these are NOT the actions of a nerd, unless the definition of nerd is crazy or retarded.
So you can claim a LOT of things about Ballmer, egomaniac,tries to run a company by "PPT Math", refuses to look at their own figures, but nerd? i'm sorry but I gotta throw a flag, BS on the field. I KNOW nerds, nerds are friends of mine and Mr Ballmer is NO nerd.
I'll get hate but the irony is so moist i honestly don't care...can we all LOAO now? I mean storing IN PLAIN TEXT? What good is that "vaunted Linux security" if the forums are being run by goobers that store fricking passwords in plain text! This is a PERFECT example of what I've been saying for years, its NOT the OS, any OS can be as secure or as insecure as can be, it ALL comes down to what is sitting between keyboard and chair.
Please please PLEASE tell me at the very least the fools in charge of that site has been told to hit the bricks, yes? After all if ANY other company or place did something THAT stupid you'd be calling for their heads, right? But just the fact that you are saying "It's good the Ubuntu Forums has alerted us that this breach has occurred" makes me feel the community is using their "do as I say NOT as I do strategy" because if this were Sony or Apple or MSFT, even if the service was free, every Linux user would be screaming about how fricking pathetic storing in plain text in 2013 is and how they needed to be shown the door.
So I'll be personally interested if the screaming about bad security practices and vile towards foolish behavior will be directed toward their own, or if the community will just pretend that its totally okay when THEY do it, just not when anybody else does it.
Riiight, because Linux doesn't have problems which is why it did so well on netbooks, but that is to be expected with Linux having such a well thought out roadmap. Of course to have remote assistance you'd have to have functional hardware acceleration but who needs that, right? Why Linux is so secure and so much more stable than Windows why even needing that feature is unthinkable!
Oh please! Haven't you read ANYTHING in the past 30+ years? ALL of the major powers are spying their asses off, on each other, on their own people, hell where do you think the Chinese got their stealth tech? They bought the wreck of the wobbly goblin that went down in Kosovo, had it boxed up and shipped, and the rumor is they also paid for access to the stealth drone Iran caught.
Why not? You can always go back to the old way if it goes tits up down the line. If the thing gives you X+Y and our current system gives you X and it costs nothing to implement this, as no new hardware or days reprogramming the software to use why not go for it?
As long as it doesn't require weeks to switch the network back if this doesn't work down the line I see no reason not to give it a shot, not like we couldn't all use a free speed boost, right?
Notice you got modded down for DARING to point out fucking reality? THIS is why I think political correctness and all who support it really need to diaf, I mean for the love of god do I REALLY have to provide a weekly body count here? For every ONE you have of ANY other group you have THREE HUNDRED Muslim attacks for shit's sake!
And notice not a damned one dared say shit about the Latino bit, you know why? Because even THEY know looking for illegal Swedes at the Mexican fucking border is RETARDED, yet THAT is what they expect the cops to do! Maybe a little words from their prophet saying what they should do to infidels might bitchslap some truth in them but sadly those that are PC are about as damned clueless as flat earthers, look how many of them saying every damned business cutting hours in half has nothing to do with Obamacare. For Christ sake, cause and effect is apparently an alien concept to the politically correct!
Quran 4:89: They (infidels) desire that you should disbelieve as they have disbelieved, so that you might be (all) alike; therefore take not from among them friends until they fly (their homes) in Allah's way; but if they turn back, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them, and take not from among them a friend or a helper. Quran 8:12: Instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers; Quran 2:191: kill the disbelievers wherever we find them Quran 22:19-22: for them (the unbelievers) garments of fire shall be cut and there shall be poured over their heads boiling water whereby whatever is in their bowels and skin shall be dissolved and they will be punished with hooked iron rods. Quran 8:12: Your Lord inspired the angels with the message: I will terrorize the unbelievers. Therefore smite them on their necks and every joint and incapacitate them. Strike off their heads and cut off each of their fingers and toes. Quran 8:7: Allah wished to confirm the truth by His words: Wipe the infidels out to the last. Quran 8:59: The infidels should not think that they can get away from us. Prepare against them whatever arms and weaponry you can muster so that you may terrorize them. They are your enemy and Allah's enemy. Quran 8:60: Prepare against them whatever arms and cavalry you can muster that you may strike terror in the enemies of Allah, and others besides them not known to you. Quran 9.29 Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Apostle have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection.
Religion of peace my southern ass!
While I don't really care for the phone home crap either last I checked the remote chrome thing worked just as good in Comodo Dragon which does NOT have the phone home to Google crap, so its not like you HAVE to take phone home to use this feature.
that said I tried it and...meh, It doesn't really work as well as remote assistance on Win 7, its kinda laggy, mouse is jerky, and it just wasn't as pleasant to use as remote assistance. Say what you will about MSFT but that feature is a fricking lifesaver, don't know how many times I've had to remote into a customer or family member to fix something in the middle of the night.
I'll get hate for saying this but if ALL of your bombings and attacks are ONLY coming from ONE group, a group that rhymes with "Buslim"? Then it is NOT profiling to throw an extra glance at those that are part of that group!
THIS is why I fricking hate political correctness, because it DEMANDS that sanity be thrown out the window! Like how they had a shitfit at cops in Arizona targeting Latinos looking for illegals...uhh...when you are against the border with MEXICO I don't think illegal Swedes are gonna be a fucking problem!
Oh and before anybody brings up OKC? You have ONE time, ONE attack, versus how many attacks just this month by those who follow the certain religion again? Like it or not the vast majority of the OTHER religions grew the fuck up, whereas Islam is still living in the dark ages. Do you see the OTHER religions chopping off hands and stoning rape victims? NO, just the backwards ass Muslims. So it is NOT profiling to look extra hard if you are part of a group that causes the majority of terror attacks every. single. year. that is just common damned sense!
You are correct, they didn't even have the 8Kb carts so he had to squeeze it onto a 4KB cart, the same size used for games like Combat and Missile Command. And again you are talking about a system that was NEVER built to run ANYTHING as complex as Pac-Man, it was made for 2 squares and a sprite ball, and in 90 days flat, using a cart less than half the size the original game ran on, with zero access to the code you manage to cook up a game that not only keeps the core gameplay but becomes the biggest hit of the system, with 7 million sold?
I don't care what anybody else says, he should be up there with the greats, what the guy did with such little time and weak hardware is fricking AMAZING!
Because it adds complexity and bullshit for ZERO gains for the user? I mean take something which was sooo damned simple, safe mode. Win2K-Win 7? Push F8 at start. One button, simple. Win 8? Push Alt+F8, go through 2 submenus and then and ONLY then can you get safe mode...WTF?
And despite Ballmers "focus groups" which I have NO doubt was filled with the families of Yes men under orders to match the results they wanted, most folks have a LOT of programs installed, they just don't use them as often. Have you EVER seen what Metro looks like with a lot of programs installed? It looks like a menu at Denny's that's what, page after page of fucking pointless little icon that just gets in the damned way. Compare this to all programs, a nice neat little line that doesn't even take up a quarter of the screen and which is all laid out alphabetical, couldn't be neater and cleaner. You ever try walking somebody over the phone through finding a specific damned program on metro? Good luck buddy. And relying on search is just a crutch that quickly gets old, especially if they have programs with a similar first couple of letters, it just makes more of a jumble.
And that isn't even getting into the fact the OS? Its BROKEN. I'm sorry but it is. You know how many times I've been paid to "refresh my PC" on Windows 8? So damned many times I could do that shit in my sleep. Know how many times I've had to reinstall Win 7 on a system where the user hadn't done something stupid and gotten infected? NONE, zip zero nada squat. Hell my own system has had Win 7 since RTM, its gone through 1 MB, 2 RAM upgrades, 4 HDDs, and 2 GPUs...nothing. I thought for sure swapping out the board would need a reinstall but nope, just 10 seconds to reactivate Win 7 and that was that, purred like a kitten.
That is why I'm convinced that "refresh my PC" was NOT put in there to help users, but to be a band aid to cover a serious bug they couldn't pin down. Now if its related to certain chipsets or CPU I don't know, I have noticed that it happens more with sub $500 units than with those expensive units but that may just be I haven't seen too many idiots paying $1K+ for Windows 8 systems, but in any case i personally think its all the Metro and DRM bullshit they bolted on top, because if you kill Metro with start8 or ClassicShell? The incident rate goes waaaay down. Doesn't cure it completely, only replacing with Win 7 does that (so don't say its the hardware, the same systems that I switched for Win 7 and purring just fine) but it DOES seem to help the "refresh my PC" incidents by a decent amount.
So the keyboard commanders and apologists can waste mod points all they want, I've been using alternate shells since BBox for Win, used even the funkier Linux shells, so it ain't got a damned thing with it just "being different" it has to do with the fact that it adds complexity, makes things harder for the user, and for what? So they can cater to touch, which less than 3% of the PCs ON THE PLANET even has? That's like making Windows only function well on polka dot PCs, do YOU have a polka dot PC? Rest my case. Watch this video because he cites experts, provides citations, but in the end he says the same thing I do, its BROKEN.
More likely the company is trying to make itself more "family friendly" because they have seen that Ballmer is completely batshit insane and with the Yahoo Search deal going out soon are hoping to get daddy Ballmer to open that big fat wallet to either buy Tumblr or the whole thing.
Personally if the sweaty one gets his mitts on yahoo some programmer here needs to set up a free email with the yahoo look and a similar chat as they'll slaughter, all that Skype bullshit has caused a LOT of folks to go running to Yahoo (seen that sudden bounce Yahoo had a few months back? Well there ya go) and if the ballmernator replaces Yahoo with "Windows Live Bing 3.0 powered by Skype" you are gonna have a HUGE audience that will be happy to come to you, just charge for a couple of extras and enjoy the money truck that backs up to your place every month.
Oh and if you do this and make a mint? For a small fee you can have "help powered by Da Feet" which while not always helpful at the very least it'll be entertaining.
Dude the guy given the job of writing the first Pac-Man was given NINETY DAYS, just ninety days from being handed the job to handing the finished code to be slapped onto carts. Given THAT tiny amount of time, such limited hardware, and a "dev team" that was one guy? I'd say it was a fucking miracle that he pulled off.
It would be like handing you and two other guys a game like Far Cry 3 and telling you you've got from now until Oct 15th to have it completely ready to go for the X360, oh and you do NOT have access to the original code, you have to make it from scratch. I'd love to see anybody today pull that shit off, in fact look at a game under similar constraints...ET, the most hated 2600 game ever. The dev was given just 6 weeks to get the game done and even with a blank slate to work with he ended up with an unplayable mess, compare this to Pac-Man where not only is it playable but again most of the core gameplay was 100% intact. again its a fricking miracle and the guy deserves props for pulling that off with such a weak system with so little time to work with.
Thank you, with all the pundits screaming "Teh PC is gonna be replaced by tablets ZOMFG!" its nice to see somebody else seeing what should be fucking obvious.
I'm sure the local rent-a-center loves me as i send anybody that comes in wanting a pad to them first, saying "Go rent an iPad for 2 weeks and if you find it REALLY is the device for you? Then we'll see about getting you a good tablet at a decent price' and they always come back a week or two later...to buy or upgrade their desktop/laptop. Its the same thing you said, too big to replace the smartphone, too weak and small to replace the desktop/laptop, a couple of days after the "new toy" wears off they find they don't have a use for the thing and send it back. You'd think me sending customers away would cost me customers but it actually gains me customers as they say "hey that guy just saved me hundreds of dollars when he could have sold me a thing I didn't really need" so they have good feelings towards me and my shop which translates to sales and good word of mouth which is the lifeblood of a small shop.
I'm also seeing exactly what you described with the iPad along with something else, buyer's remorse and excuses trying to justify the thing. Just a couple of weeks ago i thought a girl was gonna slap me right in the middle of the grocery store as i saw her struggling with an iPad she was using for a grocery list while trying to steer a cart and said out loud "Trying to find a justification for buying the thing huh?" and had half the aisle laughing their behinds off. The look in her face told me all I needed to know as it was EXACTLY that, she spent all this money on this thing she now had no damned clue what to do with and is now trying to find a use for it. I go to my local Craigslist and the thing is FULL of fricking iPads but since they are trying to get as much of their money back as possible (and bought the "Apple retains its value" bullshit) they never fucking sell so you just see the number of iPad ads pile up daily, with many trying to trade for laptops or anything they could actually use.
So unless MSFT wants to get into the bargain basement tablet biz and compete with all those Cheapo Chinese Android pads they can give it up, those that bought them to show off already have iPads and MSFT will NEVER be a hipster product, the bottom is owned by cheap ass Android pads, and more and more folks are waking up to the fact that between their smartphone and their laptop/desktop they have pretty much every use case covered, the tablets is really a device in search of a use that only a few niches, inventory, medical, the few jobs where you spent your day with a clipboard on your arm, really require.
I know talking to my fellow shop owners that anything that looks like Win 8 is being treated like the plague because of how much consumer backlash there has been. Sigh, we beta testers TRIED to warn them, tried to tell them turning everything into an iPad ripoff wouldn't fly, that nobody was gonna jump through all these hoops, did they listen? Nope Ballmer just gave us the finger and did it anyway and what did it get them? Sales nosediving, Surface pads piling up in the warehouse, Windows becoming the butt of jokes, it just goes to show Forbes was right, Ballmer has earned that Worst CEO title only instead of trying to fix things he seems to be wearing the mantle with pride and fishing for "Worst CEO EVAR!" to go along with it.
BTW whomever designed the spellcheck in Chromium? Congrats, the fact that every time I write Ballmer it wants to replace it with embalmer is quite apt and always gives me a little smile, thanks.