That is what is happening in my area, people are getting fed up with the climbing costs and the contracts from hell and are just getting one of those $85-$150 android phones and Straight Talk. I will probably do the same as soon as my contract is up, I sat down and figured and the cost of my home phone and my cell is nearly triple what I'd pay if I bought the Straight talk, and that is figuring at their $50 a month price and not the discounts you can get for buying 3 month or 6 month cards.
Lets just clear something up right now, gun bans have NEVER worked and will NEVER work because of one simple flaw in the logic. you see criminals? DON'T FOLLOW LAWS which is why they are called criminals, fucking duh!
Take Mexico, a country with a 100% ban on guns, you can't even one a 22 in that country...are the criminals throwing rocks at each other? Nope they do like all the other criminals with connections and buy from the former USSR where you can buy a crate of RPGs for the cost of a used BMW and where you can get a case of AK47s thrown in with every purchase over $50k.
This is as fucking retarded as trying to regulate or ban copper pipes because somebody might make a zip gun. I mean have you SEEN this "gun"? You are gonna be lucky if it fires even a single clip before being just trashed, in fact I've seen zip guns that make better weapons than this thing, and it took a $50,000 3D printer to make a gun that had less quality than what you can make in any machine shop for less than $200!
I'm sorry but this entire thing is just fucking retarded, every major city like Chicago where they have made it practically impossible for a law abiding citizen to own a gun has become a criminal paradise and why not? Don't have to worry about prey fighting back when even the cops in these areas tell you "don't resist, just beg real nice after they are done raping and looting and maybe they won't kill you". Its fucking disgusting is what it is, we should be teaching people how to defend themselves from these fucking scum and instead we are creating a nation of prey, that is ALL they are, they are prey and the wolves will feed and feed well.
To steal a line from Mel Brooks "Bullshit, bullshit, aaaaannnnnddd bullshit". Here are the facts, 1.-The "cell phone gun" has a NON WORKING SCREEN because naturally there is no room to put electronics into it and still have room for the firing mechanism. 2.- It looks like a real cell phone ONLY FROM A DISTANCE as things like fake screen and cheap plastic keypad makes it look like one of the $1 toys you get in stores like Family Dollar for little kids, no way somebody is gonna mistake or be unable to tell the difference if they are close enough to knock it out of your hand.
As for TFA and the suggestions to use things like IMEI to makes phones easy to trace? It might catch the criminal after he tried to pawn it but it won't stop them from beating or even killing somebody for their iPhone because...well lets face it folks, criminals aren't the brightest of bulbs at the best of times. I mean how many times have we seen a criminal who has killed somebody and stolen their CCs and bank cards just standing at an ATM with the cards, no trying to hide their face or anything? With the cameras practically staring them right in the face?
So while various tracing measures can be used to bust the criminal after expecting to lower crime by tracing won't work because criminals are morons that are attracted to shiny objects, period the end.
Actually I used to work at a shop down the street from a Worst Buy and surprisingly that didn't happen as often as you'd think, not because they wouldn't do such a thing but because with their shitty wages the guys they'd get would be fucking lost if it wasn't something that followed their little script i mean you have NO idea how many times i saw things like floppy drives hammered in upside down or with the power for something like the CD ROM not even plugged in.
But I heard about this place from a guy that used to work there and he said that they would take systems that people traded in or kept for a month and returned and after doing a basic check, make sure all the keys work, drives show up, etc they would bag 'em and put them on Cowboom.
Anyway as long as you don't mind minor blemishes like a scratch on the back of the lid? You can get some crazy cheap deals there. A friend picked up a Dell Mini 9 from there for like $95 and its been running solid for him for the past 2 years and I've pointed several people to cowboom over the years and never heard a complaint. its one of those sites where you have to check back every couple of days because the gear and prices can change often, one week you have a ton of netbooks at$125 and next week they'll have some at $95.
I'd say their best deal ATM would be the $190 AMD Acer netbook as the AMD C60 is a great netbook chip, the APU thanks to DXVA can do hd video over HDMI, gets around 6 and a half hours on the 6 cell (my dad got his GF one for Xmas year before last which is how i know) and can easily be upgraded to 4GB of RAM, its a pretty nice little unit.
Maybe I don't know the correct term for it but what you linked to? NOT what I was talking about. with this (I thought for sure it was Readycache but who knows) what it does is load most used programs into unused RAM as a cache so that programs launch instantly.
For example on the system I'm typing on has 8GB of RAM and during the weekends only has light program usage so I'm only using 4.2Gb of RAM as a cache instead of my usual 6.5GB, but that memory is filled with my most used programs along with the.DLLs so that when i click its as close to instant as one can get. On my netbook once the OS has booted up as long as i don't decide to play media off the HDD the drive stays parked because all my programs are already in RAM just waiting on me to click the icon.
This of course makes perfect sense and is the exact opposite of XP which would hit swap before using the RAM a lot of time because "free memory is better" but in reality it isn't, an empty memory cell takes the same amount of power as a full cell so you might as well use those cells for caching.Again reading what WD had to say it sounds like they are gonna have RAM>SSD>HDD in a three level fast and small to slow and big, which again makes sense as even the Tiger and best Buy specials now come with 4GB+ of RAM,might as well use it.
Sorry I can't think of the correct term but I'm typing this with only one eye open thanks to a splitting headache so thinking up the correct terms to use in Google to find the info is just beyond me ATM, not to mention on my best day my Google Fu ain't great to begin with.
I don't know how it is in your area but in mine the growing trend is the Walmart straight talk prepaid "all you can eat" plan (yes I know its actually 2GB before they start throttling, but many users don't use their phones for web kiosks) with Android smartphones. I can't say as i blame 'em, after trying out a friend's I may end up switching myself as his phone was just $70, the screen was clear and CPU powerful enough it was pretty decent at doing search by voice as well as being a PMP, all in all I'd say for $50 a month including unlimited talk and text it was a decent deal.
The only shill here is you Alex. How much is RMS paying you again? Did he let you share some of his toe jam? Because nobody that isn't being paid can be so God damned retarded that he honestly thinks saying a company has run off the rails is saying something fucking positive about the company.
Steve Ballmer must thank God every day for fart sniffing retards like you "championing" Linux, it does as much good to have batshit morons like you praising it as to have Skids and Mudflap champion Black History month. No go compile something bitch, don't make me throw up the looong list of Linsux fails to make your girly ass cry again.
Hell spend a few months in windows 8 to see what marketing gone amok is REALLY like friend!
You have this fugly garish primary color mess, probably because somebody told them "that will draw eyes to your marketing" which is ALL the "Start screen" (fuck you MSFT, its a task panel. Can I start anything I need from the start screen? No? then its a fucking task panel) is in a nutshell, its MARKETING. Its MSFT "apps" that give you MSFT ads and is designed to try to ram the "MSFT Ecosystem" down your damned throat, even the most basic of functionality like mail and media player has been dumbed down and designed to try to drive you to buy from the MSFT "appstore" which BTW, are you fucking SICK of the word "apps" yet? I've gotten to the point that when i hear "app" I just want to bitchslap the living fuck out of them and say "Its a fucking PROGRAM you hipster douchebag!"
But anybody that doesn't believe that the engineers were run off by marketing monkeys at MSFT only has to spend a few days in Win 8 to be cockslapped with so damned much buzzword bingo it'll make you wanna fucking puke. I mean how God damned pathetic do you have to be to let the marketing drone build fricking ADS into your flagship product you expect people to pay money for? The entire company has gone off the rails IMHO and as long as the marketing drones are running the show every product is gonna be made of suck and fail.
But doesn't that just illustrate his and my points, that you had hamfisted marketing driven crap instead of actual thought going into making products people would want to own? I mean you have a device that is gonna be your flagship...and you don't even do a code audit to make sure there isn't show stopping bugs on it? Really?
To me it just shows what I've been saying for years, MSFT under Ballmer is being run by the marketing dept, not engineering like under Gates, and the lack of quality shows. Hell if the rumors are true the only reason Win 7 got to be good was Ballmer was too busy squirting with his Zune to care so he left Sinofsky alone and let him do what he wanted. I used to blame Sinofsky for Win 8 but as time goes on its coming out more and more that he got overruled by Ballmer and the drones and basically was told to sign his name on a product he didn't want and that tension is eventually what drove the guy out, he wanted to make a better Win 7 and Ballmer wanted iOS and look at what we got, yet another marketing driven trainwreck.
I agree as that was pretty much the attitude i got from these corps, even though their old products wouldn't even run on a modern system without DOSBox or being rebuilt from the ground up, they hadn't even attempted to do anything with it in the years or even decades since acquiring the property, and obviously had no desire to sink the amount of resources required to get anything out of the property.
Yet time and time again what i got was these companies expecting you to shell out like they won the lotto or they would let it rot and they'd get nothing, even with me pointing out that they are currently making $0 on the property and i would be dividing all the sales equally among the companies without them spending a single cent, basically they were getting free money but because it wasn't "iMoney" they wouldn't even take free money. Hell I had companies demanding 6 figures for games that probably didn't make 5 figures during their initial release! That was the part that blew my damned mind, we were talking Wolfenstein here, hell we weren't even talking Redneck Rampage or Codename Tenka here, we were talking about the fifth and sixth tier games that were used to fill space on shareware titles which was the whole point of wanting them, I wanted kids to see what it felt like when we got these shareware CDs when we were kids,how it would be this weird mix of indie games from match three to shooters to weird card games, all packed onto this cheap CD so while the games by themselves weren't really worth hardly anything you just had this huge variety. Sadly they wouldn't even let us use the ORIGINAL shareware, which if you remember was already not much more than demos in a lot of cases, not without writing these huge checks that wouldn't be worth it. Frankly we calculated and to put out one of those shareware titles like you used to get for $3 at Wally world would have cost us more than a mid tier shooter costs to make today, we are talking millions of dollars!
The part that makes me sick is they have fucked up copyrights so damned badly that by the time a game from the dawn of PC gaming becomes public domain not only will the code not exist but no system will be able to actually run the code if you could even find it. With each year that passes it gets harder and harder to run games designed for such weak and limited systems on modern hardware but we can't even try to preserve this history for the future without being sued out of existence...its fucking disgusting is what it is, its the destruction of our childhood memories by greedy pigs.
Not to mention HOW many billions have they pissed away in the past 6 years? 40? 50? Hell they paid 8 fricking billion for Skype so I'd say probably at LEAST 50 billion dollars has been crapped away on stupid ideas that had little to no ROI or like in the case of forcing the X360 out before a serious hardware flaw had been fixed actually seriously hurt the company while blowing billions.
Finally you have to look at the basics, like that old saying about having to know a thing and its nature to fully understand it. Well lets do that with MSFT, where does their profits traditionally come from? sales of Windows and Office...which they have cratered Windows sales thanks to forcing a tablet OS onto the desktop, even though their testers, critics, hell everybody was pointing out it had ZERO chance and made Vista look good by comparison, and then you have office which thanks to the downturn a lot of companies? NOT upgrading. I mean why should they? Office 2K3 and 2K7 work just fine for them and MS Office is pretty much a mature tech, not really any extras you can add that is really gonna be a "killer app" that it doesn't already have, and just like Windows their UI changes are pissing many off who are now sticking to old versions or looking at alternatives. Hell I support SMBs and SOHOs primarily and I can honestly say I don't have a single customer on even 2K10 much less the latest and greatest, its all 2K3 and 2K7 and a few of those are currently testing LO in case MSFT stops support on the version they have without putting out a new version they feel is worth the crazy cost of Office pro licenses.
So I don't see how they can keep this up, I really don't. I mean they have been able to do this shit in the past, like losing money hand over fist with the Xbox 1 and X360 because the Windows and Office division could cover the losses, but now its the Windows and Office sacred cows that MSFT has gone and trashed enough that many just aren't buying, yet they are still pissing away billions on Bing and a ton of other projects which show zero signs of bringing a dime of ROI into the company. As you said its not infinite, eventually they have to have some positive flow or the accounts will run dry yet MSFT not only shows no signs of reining their spending but if anything they are blowing it faster than ever. If I was a shareholder i'd be pissing my pants right now, the sacred cows aren't selling and one of them is hated yet instead of trying to fix it MSFT seems to be doubling down and blowing more while continuing down a path with zero positive metrics, not a single positive in sight...that's bad, any way you slice it that is bad.
The sad part is right before Zune came out...that is EXACTLY what you had. you have not one company controlling the entire thing like Apple whom as another pointed out was only really interested in selling their overpriced PMPs. No you had over a dozen websites, all facing good old free market competition for every user so they were fighting like tigers with better prices, cheaper sales, right before Zune announced no PFS support which destroyed the market i remember IIRC Napster was offering "all you can eat" for just $10 a month and gave you 10 MP3s a month to boot! I mean can you imagine instead of a buck a song whole catalogs for $10 a month? And fan generated playlists and the ability to share your own on multiple sites so you could buld communities around the fans?
And on the hardware side is was just as wonderful and varied, you had the little MP3 players like my Sandisk M260 (which I love and still have, built like a tank, takes a single AAA so if it goes dead while I'm out 5 minutes in any store and I'm back up, and 4GB is more than I'm gonna have time to listen to when I'm out and about) to the little 4 inch screen PMPs in the $75 range all the way up to the huge storage big screens by Cowon and a dozen other companies. And it didn't matter if you had a $300 iRiver and I had my $50 Sandisk as we could still share playlists and check out each others favorite tunes, just plug it into any USB port and push a button and there ya go.
But I think if you look at MSFT's history two things become clear. 1.-Every major success was preceded by "and then the competition did something REALLY stupid" and 2.-That if the competition doesn't make an obviously boneheaded move that just basically gives MSFT a free shot then MSFT will happily shoot themselves in the foot and destroy all their efforts because they just can't be happy with SOME of the market, they HAVE to have the vast majority or nothing.
Sadly PFS fits those rules perfectly because while PFS was growing at a decent clip Apple wasn't just gonna torpedo their own company with a really dumb move so MSFT killed any chance they had because SOME growth and SOME gains are never enough, they want all or nothing, its what I call the "iMoney or nothing" fallacy where a company will destroy something trying to make a supermega hit yesterday instead of just letting it grow naturally or taking second place.
So while I agree with you 100% that your strategy would have worked and given MSFT a good chunk of the market they wouldn't have been making iMoney on each and every MP3 player sale and they just couldn't stand not making iMoney so they just HAD to trash it, in the end the greed for having it all was too much.
They want something to pull users in, like how Apple has...drumroll...iTunes, but so far all their attempts at ANY real presence in media has been a giant FAIL, which again look at the products I listed.
And "Motard" which if you aren't purposely being obtuse in the hopes of stirring shit I'm gonna have to think having "tard" in there is rather telling, one is not being "dismissive" if the ENTIRE HISTORY IS NOTHING BUT FAILURE in a particular market. they have been trying for 10 fucking years to get into mobile devices and its ALL been fails, not ONE hit, not one. And you say its "dismissive" to point out the entire fucking history of the company has been one hamfisted move after another to get into a market they obviously understand about like IBM understands hip hop?
I'm sorry but you are being obtuse or leaning a little too close to the tard part of your UID, because pointing out a company that has had a laundry list of failures which just FYI left users time and time again with unsupported devices? that is reality. If you wanna wave the WinFlag fine, but don't try to sell us bullshit or pretend that MSFT has a fucking prayer in this arena because unless they fire 2/3rds of the company including the CEO? Not gonna happen. they don't understand the consumer market when it comes to mobile, they have no damned clue about how to even take a semi popular device in that arena and even keep it selling at the level it was when they bought it instead of just fucking cratering the the sales, like it or not motard MSFT has a history of NOTHING but failures in this market so pointing that out? Simply shows i have a functional brain and can remember history. WinCE, Zune,Sidekick, Kin, Zune Market, WinRT...are you REALLY gonna sit there and tell us you don't see a pattern here? Really?
This is why we need to build reprocessing plants and reuse the fuel, power would only be a secondary benefit the first would be lowering the radiation of the waste to the point it can be dealt with safely and would be worthless to "bad guys".
Because lets face it, thanks to the NIMBYs making sure all our reactors end up with tons and tons of spent rods just sitting in pools the bad guys wouldn't need to steal the stuff to cause major damage, just attack the pools and spread the shit. Whether we like it or not we need reactors, its that or coal belching out greenhouse gases so we are gonna have to have reactors so we really need to use up as much of the rods as possible instead of just letting more and more rods pile up while we try to figure out someplace that will take it, which protip: Never gonna find one.
Sadly as somebody who dealt with too damned many of those corps when I tried to bring a way for those old shareware titles to be played on modern systems their attitude basically is "If I can't make a shitload of money off it I'll destroy it, because if somebody figures out how to make a cent on it I'll look stupid".
Its a damned shame but at least from what I saw that is the attitude, they would rather something die out than let anybody possibly make a single cent off of it.
And anybody who doesn't think MSFT is a failing company need only look to the history of playsforsure, which for the rest of this I'll call PFS for short.
At the time PFS was the only real competition that iTunes had and thanks to MSFT taking an open approach to Apple's walled garden was actually growing at a fairly good clip. Not only did just about every PMP other than the iPod have PFS support but there was a whole new market opened up in the "all you can eat" rental model where you were basically given the money you paid for the service each month back in free MP3s and the device only had to be hooked to a PC once a month to re-authorize which let you change out the songs you downloaded through the services. This was actually even getting talk of creating a popular alternative to iTunes as it allowed anybody for $10-$15 a month to have all the songs their PMP could hold while adding more features, such as playlists made by fans of the genres so you could just hook up and get an "all metal" or "just top 40" or whatever playlist loaded to your system with a single touch.
So what happened? Just as we are seeing now in other arenas MSFT's management couldn't stand the thought of "only" getting a few cents for each MP3 and PMP player sold and instead wanted the entire thing (like Apple surprise surprise) so they killed it figuring "well if they bought from the other guys they will pay us more for the same service, right?" and instead of growing the market, having a real competitor to iTunes, and even having a way to get a toehold into the living room by adding a video plays for sure they instead totally wiped out the entire market almost overnight. In less than a year all the services that used PFS was shuttered, iTunes had no real competition until Amazon came along, and they went from getting a few cents for every MP3 and PMP sold on the planet to getting $0 for each.
To me this perfectly illustrates how the leadership at MSFT doesn't even understand the market or their strengths but instead are so damned focused on doing things like Apple that they are just killing the company. MSFT is NOT Apple, will never BE Apple, and trying to shoehorn them into that market would be like trying to make IBM popular with hip hop fans, it just isn't gonna work.
Uhhh..that would be two sentences long friend. Why is MSFT interested? iTunes. What are the ups and downs? The ups are the existing customers and the down is they will all be gone in less than 2 years as MSFT hamfistedly tries to force them into a poorly made MSFT ecosystem that costs more than the more popular Apple and Google offerings.
There ya go Motard, I have covered the entire thing in two sentences. Anybody who says anything other than "Don't buy until we see where they are going with this" can be argued to be a fanboy as the track record on MSFT and consumer products is beyond abysmal, Zune,Kin,Sidekick,Zune market, WinRT, winPhone 7, their track record is poorly thought out products that kill any fan base of the product they buy because they just don't know how to make a compelling product or service in the consumer space.
Dear Lord save us from those that don't know their history! The whole book of revelations wasn't accepted as canon for quite awhile because it was written by a guy having fever dreams who basically sat down in a cave when he was burning up with fever and wrote down what he saw. Now if I wrote down what i saw tripping on Peyote, would you think me a prophet?
Even if you take the rest of the book as gospel and not simply as a book of parables on how to live a better life i don't see how anybody in their right mind could take the ramblings of a guy burning up with fever as a "vision from God" because if that is true? well I bet half the guys here have had a vision from god at least one time in the past.
Because they think its like the old days and don't know how cheap and easy it is now to get an HTPC? You'd be surprised how many people when i show them that dirt cheap Athlon Triple or Quad and how easy it is to hook up think "Won't that be expensive? and won't I have to buy constant upgrades?" which back in the day was true, but since they switched from MHz wars to core wars is no longer the case. I can build them a damned nice gaming PC for less than $500 and make a decent profit and it'll game for years, its just most folks don't know that.
But I think Valve is gonna change all that, from what I've read they are gonna do a "plays for sure" with the Steambox where if a system meets the minimum specs it can load SteamOS and run as a console or even dual boot so lots of system builders like me will be selling Steamboxes and once folks see that its easy and cheap? they'll be happy to buy.
Thanks for the heads up, didn't know they were easy to make into an android tablet. I have been noticing in previous weeks that Nooks have been showing up a LOT on sites like IceMonkey and Woot! so I figured something had to be going on with B&N, I just figured they were gonna walk away after losing their shirt against Amazon.
While I feel sorry for anybody who bought a Nook at full price i can't blame B&N for getting what they can by selling it to MSFT, its just a damned shame that you can say goodbye to the cheap Nooks and Nook Colors as MSFT will probably pull the plug and try to "monetize" the customers by making it a service that only runs on those $$$ Surface pads they can't give away.
But now that I know they can run Android (Which version? ICS?) I'll have to keep an eye out as i missed out on the cheap Playbooks and Touchpads and the hardware on the Color looks nice, thanks again.
Uhhhh...because like those that bought playsforsure devices, Kin and Sidekick he has EVERY right to believe that MSFT will kill support for the existing devices and try to force the owners into a "Microsoft Ecosystem" where the devices cost more than Apple's and the media is more expensive to boot?
While i'm 100% against rampant flag waving and fanboyism and am quick to call them to the carpet when they do so anybody who owns a device that is bought out by MSFT has every right to seriously think about dumping it before it becomes worthless, just ask those that had a Toshiba beat (which is what became the Zune) how much support they got after MSFT bought it.
This is coming from somebody who has built, owned, and supported Windows hardware since Win 3.11FW and NT 3 and frankly I wouldn't trust the company either when it comes to the consumer space, their track record is pathetic.
I think you missed the point which is that as a business strategy that can work IF you understand the market you are buying into, but with Zune, Sin, Sidekick, Zune market, and WinRT I don't think its a stretch to say MSFT doesn't have a damned clue about consumer media so they will just burn it like they burned so many others.
Nope, nothing alike. This one stands up the person which not only gives them a MUCH smaller profile and helps them get around better but it also helps circulation. Sorry i can't remember the name but this one was cooked up by a guy working with Israeli soldiers that had been crippled by IEDs and he was getting frustrated as a lot of them were dying not from the injury itself, but because the human body wasn't made to never stand up so they were getting clots and circulation problems that eventually killed them.
Readyboost disables itself but Readycache does NOT, because RAM will ALWAYS be faster than an SSD. Like I said from looking at the thing it looks like WD is going 3 tier, RAM cache, SSD cache, HDD, which makes perfect sense if you think about it as each level gets slower but gives you more space. Smart if you ask me.
Anyway I'm glad you didn't pay for Vista as i used to say to folks bringing in Vista machines "I'm sorry" because it never failed to all their problems boiled down to being on Vista, they either had to pay for XP or later pay for Win 7 but there was plenty of bugs in that OS that just couldn't be fixed by us mere PC shop guys.
Slashdot Mirror
That is what is happening in my area, people are getting fed up with the climbing costs and the contracts from hell and are just getting one of those $85-$150 android phones and Straight Talk. I will probably do the same as soon as my contract is up, I sat down and figured and the cost of my home phone and my cell is nearly triple what I'd pay if I bought the Straight talk, and that is figuring at their $50 a month price and not the discounts you can get for buying 3 month or 6 month cards.
Lets just clear something up right now, gun bans have NEVER worked and will NEVER work because of one simple flaw in the logic. you see criminals? DON'T FOLLOW LAWS which is why they are called criminals, fucking duh!
Take Mexico, a country with a 100% ban on guns, you can't even one a 22 in that country...are the criminals throwing rocks at each other? Nope they do like all the other criminals with connections and buy from the former USSR where you can buy a crate of RPGs for the cost of a used BMW and where you can get a case of AK47s thrown in with every purchase over $50k.
This is as fucking retarded as trying to regulate or ban copper pipes because somebody might make a zip gun. I mean have you SEEN this "gun"? You are gonna be lucky if it fires even a single clip before being just trashed, in fact I've seen zip guns that make better weapons than this thing, and it took a $50,000 3D printer to make a gun that had less quality than what you can make in any machine shop for less than $200!
I'm sorry but this entire thing is just fucking retarded, every major city like Chicago where they have made it practically impossible for a law abiding citizen to own a gun has become a criminal paradise and why not? Don't have to worry about prey fighting back when even the cops in these areas tell you "don't resist, just beg real nice after they are done raping and looting and maybe they won't kill you". Its fucking disgusting is what it is, we should be teaching people how to defend themselves from these fucking scum and instead we are creating a nation of prey, that is ALL they are, they are prey and the wolves will feed and feed well.
To steal a line from Mel Brooks "Bullshit, bullshit, aaaaannnnnddd bullshit". Here are the facts, 1.-The "cell phone gun" has a NON WORKING SCREEN because naturally there is no room to put electronics into it and still have room for the firing mechanism. 2.- It looks like a real cell phone ONLY FROM A DISTANCE as things like fake screen and cheap plastic keypad makes it look like one of the $1 toys you get in stores like Family Dollar for little kids, no way somebody is gonna mistake or be unable to tell the difference if they are close enough to knock it out of your hand.
As for TFA and the suggestions to use things like IMEI to makes phones easy to trace? It might catch the criminal after he tried to pawn it but it won't stop them from beating or even killing somebody for their iPhone because...well lets face it folks, criminals aren't the brightest of bulbs at the best of times. I mean how many times have we seen a criminal who has killed somebody and stolen their CCs and bank cards just standing at an ATM with the cards, no trying to hide their face or anything? With the cameras practically staring them right in the face?
So while various tracing measures can be used to bust the criminal after expecting to lower crime by tracing won't work because criminals are morons that are attracted to shiny objects, period the end.
Actually I used to work at a shop down the street from a Worst Buy and surprisingly that didn't happen as often as you'd think, not because they wouldn't do such a thing but because with their shitty wages the guys they'd get would be fucking lost if it wasn't something that followed their little script i mean you have NO idea how many times i saw things like floppy drives hammered in upside down or with the power for something like the CD ROM not even plugged in.
But I heard about this place from a guy that used to work there and he said that they would take systems that people traded in or kept for a month and returned and after doing a basic check, make sure all the keys work, drives show up, etc they would bag 'em and put them on Cowboom.
Anyway as long as you don't mind minor blemishes like a scratch on the back of the lid? You can get some crazy cheap deals there. A friend picked up a Dell Mini 9 from there for like $95 and its been running solid for him for the past 2 years and I've pointed several people to cowboom over the years and never heard a complaint. its one of those sites where you have to check back every couple of days because the gear and prices can change often, one week you have a ton of netbooks at$125 and next week they'll have some at $95.
I'd say their best deal ATM would be the $190 AMD Acer netbook as the AMD C60 is a great netbook chip, the APU thanks to DXVA can do hd video over HDMI, gets around 6 and a half hours on the 6 cell (my dad got his GF one for Xmas year before last which is how i know) and can easily be upgraded to 4GB of RAM, its a pretty nice little unit.
Maybe I don't know the correct term for it but what you linked to? NOT what I was talking about. with this (I thought for sure it was Readycache but who knows) what it does is load most used programs into unused RAM as a cache so that programs launch instantly.
For example on the system I'm typing on has 8GB of RAM and during the weekends only has light program usage so I'm only using 4.2Gb of RAM as a cache instead of my usual 6.5GB, but that memory is filled with my most used programs along with the .DLLs so that when i click its as close to instant as one can get. On my netbook once the OS has booted up as long as i don't decide to play media off the HDD the drive stays parked because all my programs are already in RAM just waiting on me to click the icon.
This of course makes perfect sense and is the exact opposite of XP which would hit swap before using the RAM a lot of time because "free memory is better" but in reality it isn't, an empty memory cell takes the same amount of power as a full cell so you might as well use those cells for caching.Again reading what WD had to say it sounds like they are gonna have RAM>SSD>HDD in a three level fast and small to slow and big, which again makes sense as even the Tiger and best Buy specials now come with 4GB+ of RAM,might as well use it.
Sorry I can't think of the correct term but I'm typing this with only one eye open thanks to a splitting headache so thinking up the correct terms to use in Google to find the info is just beyond me ATM, not to mention on my best day my Google Fu ain't great to begin with.
I don't know how it is in your area but in mine the growing trend is the Walmart straight talk prepaid "all you can eat" plan (yes I know its actually 2GB before they start throttling, but many users don't use their phones for web kiosks) with Android smartphones. I can't say as i blame 'em, after trying out a friend's I may end up switching myself as his phone was just $70, the screen was clear and CPU powerful enough it was pretty decent at doing search by voice as well as being a PMP, all in all I'd say for $50 a month including unlimited talk and text it was a decent deal.
The only shill here is you Alex. How much is RMS paying you again? Did he let you share some of his toe jam? Because nobody that isn't being paid can be so God damned retarded that he honestly thinks saying a company has run off the rails is saying something fucking positive about the company.
Steve Ballmer must thank God every day for fart sniffing retards like you "championing" Linux, it does as much good to have batshit morons like you praising it as to have Skids and Mudflap champion Black History month. No go compile something bitch, don't make me throw up the looong list of Linsux fails to make your girly ass cry again.
Hell spend a few months in windows 8 to see what marketing gone amok is REALLY like friend!
You have this fugly garish primary color mess, probably because somebody told them "that will draw eyes to your marketing" which is ALL the "Start screen" (fuck you MSFT, its a task panel. Can I start anything I need from the start screen? No? then its a fucking task panel) is in a nutshell, its MARKETING. Its MSFT "apps" that give you MSFT ads and is designed to try to ram the "MSFT Ecosystem" down your damned throat, even the most basic of functionality like mail and media player has been dumbed down and designed to try to drive you to buy from the MSFT "appstore" which BTW, are you fucking SICK of the word "apps" yet? I've gotten to the point that when i hear "app" I just want to bitchslap the living fuck out of them and say "Its a fucking PROGRAM you hipster douchebag!"
But anybody that doesn't believe that the engineers were run off by marketing monkeys at MSFT only has to spend a few days in Win 8 to be cockslapped with so damned much buzzword bingo it'll make you wanna fucking puke. I mean how God damned pathetic do you have to be to let the marketing drone build fricking ADS into your flagship product you expect people to pay money for? The entire company has gone off the rails IMHO and as long as the marketing drones are running the show every product is gonna be made of suck and fail.
Is Disney's hall of presidents a slave show? Of course not, the problem is thinking of these things as anything but a hammer or screwdriver.
But doesn't that just illustrate his and my points, that you had hamfisted marketing driven crap instead of actual thought going into making products people would want to own? I mean you have a device that is gonna be your flagship...and you don't even do a code audit to make sure there isn't show stopping bugs on it? Really?
To me it just shows what I've been saying for years, MSFT under Ballmer is being run by the marketing dept, not engineering like under Gates, and the lack of quality shows. Hell if the rumors are true the only reason Win 7 got to be good was Ballmer was too busy squirting with his Zune to care so he left Sinofsky alone and let him do what he wanted. I used to blame Sinofsky for Win 8 but as time goes on its coming out more and more that he got overruled by Ballmer and the drones and basically was told to sign his name on a product he didn't want and that tension is eventually what drove the guy out, he wanted to make a better Win 7 and Ballmer wanted iOS and look at what we got, yet another marketing driven trainwreck.
I agree as that was pretty much the attitude i got from these corps, even though their old products wouldn't even run on a modern system without DOSBox or being rebuilt from the ground up, they hadn't even attempted to do anything with it in the years or even decades since acquiring the property, and obviously had no desire to sink the amount of resources required to get anything out of the property.
Yet time and time again what i got was these companies expecting you to shell out like they won the lotto or they would let it rot and they'd get nothing, even with me pointing out that they are currently making $0 on the property and i would be dividing all the sales equally among the companies without them spending a single cent, basically they were getting free money but because it wasn't "iMoney" they wouldn't even take free money. Hell I had companies demanding 6 figures for games that probably didn't make 5 figures during their initial release! That was the part that blew my damned mind, we were talking Wolfenstein here, hell we weren't even talking Redneck Rampage or Codename Tenka here, we were talking about the fifth and sixth tier games that were used to fill space on shareware titles which was the whole point of wanting them, I wanted kids to see what it felt like when we got these shareware CDs when we were kids,how it would be this weird mix of indie games from match three to shooters to weird card games, all packed onto this cheap CD so while the games by themselves weren't really worth hardly anything you just had this huge variety. Sadly they wouldn't even let us use the ORIGINAL shareware, which if you remember was already not much more than demos in a lot of cases, not without writing these huge checks that wouldn't be worth it. Frankly we calculated and to put out one of those shareware titles like you used to get for $3 at Wally world would have cost us more than a mid tier shooter costs to make today, we are talking millions of dollars!
The part that makes me sick is they have fucked up copyrights so damned badly that by the time a game from the dawn of PC gaming becomes public domain not only will the code not exist but no system will be able to actually run the code if you could even find it. With each year that passes it gets harder and harder to run games designed for such weak and limited systems on modern hardware but we can't even try to preserve this history for the future without being sued out of existence...its fucking disgusting is what it is, its the destruction of our childhood memories by greedy pigs.
Not to mention HOW many billions have they pissed away in the past 6 years? 40? 50? Hell they paid 8 fricking billion for Skype so I'd say probably at LEAST 50 billion dollars has been crapped away on stupid ideas that had little to no ROI or like in the case of forcing the X360 out before a serious hardware flaw had been fixed actually seriously hurt the company while blowing billions.
Finally you have to look at the basics, like that old saying about having to know a thing and its nature to fully understand it. Well lets do that with MSFT, where does their profits traditionally come from? sales of Windows and Office...which they have cratered Windows sales thanks to forcing a tablet OS onto the desktop, even though their testers, critics, hell everybody was pointing out it had ZERO chance and made Vista look good by comparison, and then you have office which thanks to the downturn a lot of companies? NOT upgrading. I mean why should they? Office 2K3 and 2K7 work just fine for them and MS Office is pretty much a mature tech, not really any extras you can add that is really gonna be a "killer app" that it doesn't already have, and just like Windows their UI changes are pissing many off who are now sticking to old versions or looking at alternatives. Hell I support SMBs and SOHOs primarily and I can honestly say I don't have a single customer on even 2K10 much less the latest and greatest, its all 2K3 and 2K7 and a few of those are currently testing LO in case MSFT stops support on the version they have without putting out a new version they feel is worth the crazy cost of Office pro licenses.
So I don't see how they can keep this up, I really don't. I mean they have been able to do this shit in the past, like losing money hand over fist with the Xbox 1 and X360 because the Windows and Office division could cover the losses, but now its the Windows and Office sacred cows that MSFT has gone and trashed enough that many just aren't buying, yet they are still pissing away billions on Bing and a ton of other projects which show zero signs of bringing a dime of ROI into the company. As you said its not infinite, eventually they have to have some positive flow or the accounts will run dry yet MSFT not only shows no signs of reining their spending but if anything they are blowing it faster than ever. If I was a shareholder i'd be pissing my pants right now, the sacred cows aren't selling and one of them is hated yet instead of trying to fix it MSFT seems to be doubling down and blowing more while continuing down a path with zero positive metrics, not a single positive in sight...that's bad, any way you slice it that is bad.
The sad part is right before Zune came out...that is EXACTLY what you had. you have not one company controlling the entire thing like Apple whom as another pointed out was only really interested in selling their overpriced PMPs. No you had over a dozen websites, all facing good old free market competition for every user so they were fighting like tigers with better prices, cheaper sales, right before Zune announced no PFS support which destroyed the market i remember IIRC Napster was offering "all you can eat" for just $10 a month and gave you 10 MP3s a month to boot! I mean can you imagine instead of a buck a song whole catalogs for $10 a month? And fan generated playlists and the ability to share your own on multiple sites so you could buld communities around the fans?
And on the hardware side is was just as wonderful and varied, you had the little MP3 players like my Sandisk M260 (which I love and still have, built like a tank, takes a single AAA so if it goes dead while I'm out 5 minutes in any store and I'm back up, and 4GB is more than I'm gonna have time to listen to when I'm out and about) to the little 4 inch screen PMPs in the $75 range all the way up to the huge storage big screens by Cowon and a dozen other companies. And it didn't matter if you had a $300 iRiver and I had my $50 Sandisk as we could still share playlists and check out each others favorite tunes, just plug it into any USB port and push a button and there ya go.
But I think if you look at MSFT's history two things become clear. 1.-Every major success was preceded by "and then the competition did something REALLY stupid" and 2.-That if the competition doesn't make an obviously boneheaded move that just basically gives MSFT a free shot then MSFT will happily shoot themselves in the foot and destroy all their efforts because they just can't be happy with SOME of the market, they HAVE to have the vast majority or nothing.
Sadly PFS fits those rules perfectly because while PFS was growing at a decent clip Apple wasn't just gonna torpedo their own company with a really dumb move so MSFT killed any chance they had because SOME growth and SOME gains are never enough, they want all or nothing, its what I call the "iMoney or nothing" fallacy where a company will destroy something trying to make a supermega hit yesterday instead of just letting it grow naturally or taking second place.
So while I agree with you 100% that your strategy would have worked and given MSFT a good chunk of the market they wouldn't have been making iMoney on each and every MP3 player sale and they just couldn't stand not making iMoney so they just HAD to trash it, in the end the greed for having it all was too much.
They want something to pull users in, like how Apple has...drumroll...iTunes, but so far all their attempts at ANY real presence in media has been a giant FAIL, which again look at the products I listed.
And "Motard" which if you aren't purposely being obtuse in the hopes of stirring shit I'm gonna have to think having "tard" in there is rather telling, one is not being "dismissive" if the ENTIRE HISTORY IS NOTHING BUT FAILURE in a particular market. they have been trying for 10 fucking years to get into mobile devices and its ALL been fails, not ONE hit, not one. And you say its "dismissive" to point out the entire fucking history of the company has been one hamfisted move after another to get into a market they obviously understand about like IBM understands hip hop?
I'm sorry but you are being obtuse or leaning a little too close to the tard part of your UID, because pointing out a company that has had a laundry list of failures which just FYI left users time and time again with unsupported devices? that is reality. If you wanna wave the WinFlag fine, but don't try to sell us bullshit or pretend that MSFT has a fucking prayer in this arena because unless they fire 2/3rds of the company including the CEO? Not gonna happen. they don't understand the consumer market when it comes to mobile, they have no damned clue about how to even take a semi popular device in that arena and even keep it selling at the level it was when they bought it instead of just fucking cratering the the sales, like it or not motard MSFT has a history of NOTHING but failures in this market so pointing that out? Simply shows i have a functional brain and can remember history. WinCE, Zune,Sidekick, Kin, Zune Market, WinRT...are you REALLY gonna sit there and tell us you don't see a pattern here? Really?
This is why we need to build reprocessing plants and reuse the fuel, power would only be a secondary benefit the first would be lowering the radiation of the waste to the point it can be dealt with safely and would be worthless to "bad guys".
Because lets face it, thanks to the NIMBYs making sure all our reactors end up with tons and tons of spent rods just sitting in pools the bad guys wouldn't need to steal the stuff to cause major damage, just attack the pools and spread the shit. Whether we like it or not we need reactors, its that or coal belching out greenhouse gases so we are gonna have to have reactors so we really need to use up as much of the rods as possible instead of just letting more and more rods pile up while we try to figure out someplace that will take it, which protip: Never gonna find one.
Sadly as somebody who dealt with too damned many of those corps when I tried to bring a way for those old shareware titles to be played on modern systems their attitude basically is "If I can't make a shitload of money off it I'll destroy it, because if somebody figures out how to make a cent on it I'll look stupid".
Its a damned shame but at least from what I saw that is the attitude, they would rather something die out than let anybody possibly make a single cent off of it.
And anybody who doesn't think MSFT is a failing company need only look to the history of playsforsure, which for the rest of this I'll call PFS for short.
At the time PFS was the only real competition that iTunes had and thanks to MSFT taking an open approach to Apple's walled garden was actually growing at a fairly good clip. Not only did just about every PMP other than the iPod have PFS support but there was a whole new market opened up in the "all you can eat" rental model where you were basically given the money you paid for the service each month back in free MP3s and the device only had to be hooked to a PC once a month to re-authorize which let you change out the songs you downloaded through the services. This was actually even getting talk of creating a popular alternative to iTunes as it allowed anybody for $10-$15 a month to have all the songs their PMP could hold while adding more features, such as playlists made by fans of the genres so you could just hook up and get an "all metal" or "just top 40" or whatever playlist loaded to your system with a single touch.
So what happened? Just as we are seeing now in other arenas MSFT's management couldn't stand the thought of "only" getting a few cents for each MP3 and PMP player sold and instead wanted the entire thing (like Apple surprise surprise) so they killed it figuring "well if they bought from the other guys they will pay us more for the same service, right?" and instead of growing the market, having a real competitor to iTunes, and even having a way to get a toehold into the living room by adding a video plays for sure they instead totally wiped out the entire market almost overnight. In less than a year all the services that used PFS was shuttered, iTunes had no real competition until Amazon came along, and they went from getting a few cents for every MP3 and PMP sold on the planet to getting $0 for each.
To me this perfectly illustrates how the leadership at MSFT doesn't even understand the market or their strengths but instead are so damned focused on doing things like Apple that they are just killing the company. MSFT is NOT Apple, will never BE Apple, and trying to shoehorn them into that market would be like trying to make IBM popular with hip hop fans, it just isn't gonna work.
Uhhh..that would be two sentences long friend. Why is MSFT interested? iTunes. What are the ups and downs? The ups are the existing customers and the down is they will all be gone in less than 2 years as MSFT hamfistedly tries to force them into a poorly made MSFT ecosystem that costs more than the more popular Apple and Google offerings.
There ya go Motard, I have covered the entire thing in two sentences. Anybody who says anything other than "Don't buy until we see where they are going with this" can be argued to be a fanboy as the track record on MSFT and consumer products is beyond abysmal, Zune,Kin,Sidekick,Zune market, WinRT, winPhone 7, their track record is poorly thought out products that kill any fan base of the product they buy because they just don't know how to make a compelling product or service in the consumer space.
Dear Lord save us from those that don't know their history! The whole book of revelations wasn't accepted as canon for quite awhile because it was written by a guy having fever dreams who basically sat down in a cave when he was burning up with fever and wrote down what he saw. Now if I wrote down what i saw tripping on Peyote, would you think me a prophet?
Even if you take the rest of the book as gospel and not simply as a book of parables on how to live a better life i don't see how anybody in their right mind could take the ramblings of a guy burning up with fever as a "vision from God" because if that is true? well I bet half the guys here have had a vision from god at least one time in the past.
Because they think its like the old days and don't know how cheap and easy it is now to get an HTPC? You'd be surprised how many people when i show them that dirt cheap Athlon Triple or Quad and how easy it is to hook up think "Won't that be expensive? and won't I have to buy constant upgrades?" which back in the day was true, but since they switched from MHz wars to core wars is no longer the case. I can build them a damned nice gaming PC for less than $500 and make a decent profit and it'll game for years, its just most folks don't know that.
But I think Valve is gonna change all that, from what I've read they are gonna do a "plays for sure" with the Steambox where if a system meets the minimum specs it can load SteamOS and run as a console or even dual boot so lots of system builders like me will be selling Steamboxes and once folks see that its easy and cheap? they'll be happy to buy.
Thanks for the heads up, didn't know they were easy to make into an android tablet. I have been noticing in previous weeks that Nooks have been showing up a LOT on sites like IceMonkey and Woot! so I figured something had to be going on with B&N, I just figured they were gonna walk away after losing their shirt against Amazon.
While I feel sorry for anybody who bought a Nook at full price i can't blame B&N for getting what they can by selling it to MSFT, its just a damned shame that you can say goodbye to the cheap Nooks and Nook Colors as MSFT will probably pull the plug and try to "monetize" the customers by making it a service that only runs on those $$$ Surface pads they can't give away.
But now that I know they can run Android (Which version? ICS?) I'll have to keep an eye out as i missed out on the cheap Playbooks and Touchpads and the hardware on the Color looks nice, thanks again.
Uhhhh...because like those that bought playsforsure devices, Kin and Sidekick he has EVERY right to believe that MSFT will kill support for the existing devices and try to force the owners into a "Microsoft Ecosystem" where the devices cost more than Apple's and the media is more expensive to boot?
While i'm 100% against rampant flag waving and fanboyism and am quick to call them to the carpet when they do so anybody who owns a device that is bought out by MSFT has every right to seriously think about dumping it before it becomes worthless, just ask those that had a Toshiba beat (which is what became the Zune) how much support they got after MSFT bought it.
This is coming from somebody who has built, owned, and supported Windows hardware since Win 3.11FW and NT 3 and frankly I wouldn't trust the company either when it comes to the consumer space, their track record is pathetic.
I think you missed the point which is that as a business strategy that can work IF you understand the market you are buying into, but with Zune, Sin, Sidekick, Zune market, and WinRT I don't think its a stretch to say MSFT doesn't have a damned clue about consumer media so they will just burn it like they burned so many others.
Nope, nothing alike. This one stands up the person which not only gives them a MUCH smaller profile and helps them get around better but it also helps circulation. Sorry i can't remember the name but this one was cooked up by a guy working with Israeli soldiers that had been crippled by IEDs and he was getting frustrated as a lot of them were dying not from the injury itself, but because the human body wasn't made to never stand up so they were getting clots and circulation problems that eventually killed them.
Readyboost disables itself but Readycache does NOT, because RAM will ALWAYS be faster than an SSD. Like I said from looking at the thing it looks like WD is going 3 tier, RAM cache, SSD cache, HDD, which makes perfect sense if you think about it as each level gets slower but gives you more space. Smart if you ask me.
Anyway I'm glad you didn't pay for Vista as i used to say to folks bringing in Vista machines "I'm sorry" because it never failed to all their problems boiled down to being on Vista, they either had to pay for XP or later pay for Win 7 but there was plenty of bugs in that OS that just couldn't be fixed by us mere PC shop guys.