But who is to say that life HAS to function by DNA? That is how we developed, sure, but just because one planet in one spot with one kind of conditions developed that way does NOT mean that all life HAS to evolve that way.
This is one of the reasons Neil DeGrasse is pushing for better exploration of Mars and Europa, as he says until we find actual alien life, even if its just the size of a single flea, we just won't know if life follows a single 'roadmap" or if there are many ways to get to the same place just depending on conditions.
Hell we can't even say for certain that life on this planet originated here, since we know that Mars had a primal soup earlier than we did and that multiple large impacts did occur between the Earth and Mars so its very possible our DNA didn't start out here,but started out as bacteria on Mars and was carried here on an asteroid. Until we do a more complete exploration of Mars we simply can't know and that is on our own planet and we are gonna assume that we can guess whether a planet can or can't based on the teeny tiny bit of information we can get from out telescopes? With the current way of detecting planets in other systems I don't know if that would even work for anything less than a couple of sizes larger than Earth, I doubt anything smaller would cause enough shift for us to even detect it.
And look up that video comparing a MSFT store to an Apple store (I think it was called Apple and Microsoft side by side) where they just picked a day and had one guy stand outside the MSFT store and one stand outside the Apple store and film along with asking questions of the people coming out, what did they find?
The Apple store was PACKED, in fact they said the store never got less than half full, the MSFT store? No more than 8 people at a time max. The Apple store sold more than a dozen iPads, and at least a half a dozen MacBooks and iPods, they couldn't keep a precise count because there was too many people for one guy to talk to them all, the MSFT Store? They had just 6 sales the entire 4 hours the guy stood there and they were ALL X360 games. and this was the weekend after the Surface release!
So they can TRY all they want, hell the Ballmernator can click his heels three times and say "There is no place like Cupertino" until his ankles are raw, won't change reality and the reality is high end MSFT products is a DO NOT WANT when it comes to consumers. hell all they had to do was ask me or any other retailer and we would have told 'em that $400-$650 is the sweet spot for selling MSFT OS gear, the lower the better, and above $650 other than the occasional gamer rig (which those guys usually like to go DIY) you really don't see many sales at all above $650. Intel learned this the hard way too when they tried to push $1000 Macbook Air wannabes and the OEMs ended up with piles of the things unsold.
MSFT is just gonna have to face the fact, they can't slap a paintjob on a Pinto and sell it for Porsche money, they just can't. MSFT reaped the profits from the massive economies of scale of being a commodity OS and after 20+ years they can't just turn back the clock and sell themselves as a premium brand, nobody is gonna buy it. Like him or hate him Jobs spent the better part of 30 years building the "Apple equals quality and luxury" identity and there were several lean years when that strategy didn't go over well, but now that the shoe is on the other foot MSFT can't just pull a 180 and be Apple, its really just a waste of time and money to try.
Yeah I been making some nice money wiping Win 8 for 7, just like I did Vista for XP, but in this case i really wish i wasn't. Oh don't get me wrong, Win 8 is still a POS and I can totally understand why folks want me to put win 7 on these laptops, and I still think that "refresh my PC" added "feature" was put in to keep people from noticing they had a show stopping corruption bug they couldn't get a handle on before RTM, nope its the fact that I'm seeing a shitload of Worst Buy and Wally world "specials" which are AMD E1800 laptops.
Now this is coming from somebody that has built AMD exclusively for over 5 years and has his whole family on AMD but putting Win 8 on an E1800? Let me put it this way...if you thought Vista capable was bad, you ain't seen shit until you see how Win 8 "performs" on a Bobcat dual core. You wanna talk about painful, the poor things just whine and whirr and drag and drag and draaaag along. If you want to put an end to the "Win 8 is faster" bullshit just hand them one of those E1800 laptops and say "here ya go Sparky, have fun". take that exact same system and put on Win 7? its quite nice. oh it won't win any speed records but it makes a good netbook whereas Win 8 on one of those is in permanent slo-mo.
I think you are wrong and here is why...While MSFT has enough cash to survive 2, hell maybe even 3 Vistabombs the OEMs can't and they can't afford to just sit on the sidelines for another year without shit to sell.
So either the OEMs have a living shitfit and get Win 7 licenses to sell, like they did with XP when Vista cratered, or they will have no choice but to go with another OS, probably a mix of ChromeOS and Android. They really don't have a choice and as much as Ballmer would like to pretend he works in Cupertino and that MSFT can just ditch the OEMs and sell MSFT hardware with MSFT OSes tied into a MSFT ecosystem the reality is its the OEMs and their cutthroat pricing that has kept Windows in the mainstream, no way in hell folks are gonna start paying a grand a pop for a MSFT branded PC, not gonna happen.
Oh there was more wrong with Vista than just UAC and a few flaky drivers and SP1 didn't fix jack shit on that OS, in fact IME it caused at least 1 problem for every 2 that it fixed. And I wasn't running a machine that should have ANY trouble with it, while it wasn't the cutting edge a 3.6GHz P4 with HT, 3GB of RAM and a 7600GS was a pretty nice system in 07 and Vista still ran like shit.
That is why I'm quick to call bullshit on those that try to claim that Win 7 is just Vista SE, if you had actually ran Vista you would know that is NOT the case. I ran Vista and even after the SPs they just couldn't fix the issues with that OS, the "senior moments" where the UI would just hang up for a second or two, the way it would just "forget" about network shares and refuse to see them until a restart, its lousy file transfers, its just a bad OS no matter how you slice it. Contrast this with Win 7 which was the first OS from MSFT since Win2K where I could say without hesitation "This upgrade is worth it, no hesitation or reservation", those two OSes are like night and day and trying to say win 7 is Vista SE is like saying XP is WinME SE since they both have desktops.
But Win 8 is a puzzler, how they could go from such a solid release with Win 7 to such a clusterfuck is beyond me. You'd think that the point of having public alpha and beta builds would be to get feedback and fix the problems but not on Ballmer's watch, MSFT didn't have a single positive metric, not one, the beta testers hated it, the tech reviewers hated it, and these aren't haters, we're talking about guys like Bott and Thurott that can usually be counted on for a good review so when even the "go to" guys hate it? You'd think that would have sent up a red flag.
If Ballmer doesn't pull his head out of his ass (or the board fire his sweaty behind) and actually listen to their customers? Well i have a feeling that the EOL of Win 7 in 2020 will only be a footnote, a "Hey, remember when we used Windows?" story that nobody but a few legacy customers gives a crap about.
Aw hell, you didn't even include the REALLY costly fuckups, like 1.-Pushing out the X360 with a 2 billion dollar hardware flaw, 2.-Killing playsforsure (that was not only gaining against iTunes but had created a whole new media rental model that would have given them a better foothold in the living room) for the DOA Zune market, 3.-8 billion for Skype, 4.-6 billion for that ad company they had to write down, 4.- I can't remember how much Ballmer pissed away buying the Kin and Sidekick but they weren't cheap...is there any more I'm missing?
What SJVN is missing is the big picture which is thus...the SECOND that it was reported that Apple was the largest company the ballmernator totally flipped his shit and since then has been in total panic mode. What you see happening with MSFT is NOT a company trying to innovate, because if that were the case they would LISTEN to all the feedback they are getting and use that info to make their products better,what we are seeing instead is "ZOMFG teh press says teh phone and tablet is teh hotness and we ain't got no hotness! Quick, no matter what it costs get us teh hotness!" while ignoring the facts which are that MSFT has NEVER been the cool and trendy company and its X86 software that has given them a monopoly and its the reason people buy Windows NOT because they feel fuzzy about the WinFlag or give a rat's ass about the "Microsoft ecosystem" that Win 8 tries so pathetically to shove onto users.
I think the next release will be the turning point, I really do, either they listen to their customers or everyone is gonna start looking at exit strategies. I honestly never thought I'd see the day but look at the evidence, you got the OEMs on the phone with Google and putting out Chromebooks. This is a bad indicator for MSFT right here as you haven't been able to get non Windows X86 from the mainstream OEMs since OS/2 was canceled because to do so was the kiss of death. Then you have Valve, which has doubled their profits 7 years in a row and the biggest gaming service by far not only publicly saying Win 8 is shit but actually releasing a client for Linux, Finally you got no less than chipzilla itself talking about its $200 ANDROID laptops. Intel and MSFT was bestest of friends, remember? when even Intel doesn't have their backs you know MSFT is in deep shit.
So Ballmer better be ready and willing to suck it up and listen to the customers because i don't think they can survive two bombs in a row, i really don't. After all the OEMs have to have an OS that will move hardware and Win 8 is a giant DO NOT WANT when it comes to consumers. i mean for fucks sake they spent more than 2 BILLION on ads for Win 8 and got less than 4 million sales, and that was with them practically giving it away at a lousy $40! It should be obvious to everyone that his idea of turning Windows into a premium brand has failed, the Ultrabooks didn't sell for squat and the touchscreen laptops sold even less, so this is it, sink or swim time.
Then you better throw out the constitution and burn any papers by the founding fathers because what you are calling sedition was a right of the people they supported..
"But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security"....Thomas jefferson
But you gotta give the dude credit as he managed to sell a product and keep it at the same time, walking away with the code, the customers AND a big fat check. How he managed to get those fools to buy it without making him sign a non compete I don't know but he pulled it off, hell you might as play the WB "sucker" music when you talk about Oracle and MySQL.
So lets here it for old Monty, his balls are big and plentiful.
On what, a 486DX? I haven't used HOSTS files in awhile (prefer my recursive DNS) but it never took me more than a minute and a half to load mine and that was on an anemic 1.1GHz Celeron I kept at the shop for such jobs.
So I have to wonder how little your knowledge of networking is if it takes you THAT long to load a single HOSTS file, hell even if you went the long way around and converted it into peerguardian format and loaded it up that way it shouldn't take more than 10 minutes tops.
Hell my mom is real civic minded so went and did jury duty when she was called up...only to come in white as a sheet. She had spent 3 days hanging a jury on an arson case where even the investigator admitted on the stand he didn't know what caused the fire and that it didn't make sense for the defendant to burn it down as he didn't have enough insurance to even cover what he owed but the jury was 11 to 1 wanting to convict, why? "Because he is Italian and Italians are in the mob and burn things, haven't you ever seen Goodfellas?". That's right a guy was gonna get 10 years because of a scene in a Ray Liotta movie.
My faith in the human race needless to say went down several notches that day but you sir are correct, sadly many out there can't tell the difference between facts and what they have seen on screen.
Watch The end of America by Naomi wolf and you'll see they didn't just pick that name out of a hat, the government is using the same playbook that goes all the way back to Stalin, Franco, the crazy Austrian, etc. Her premise is that if you want to change a society from free to non free you can't just wave a magic wand, there are steps that have to be taken before you can make the shift but once those steps have been taken the shift can happen VERY fast.
I urge everybody to watch that video as she compares what is happening now with historical examples and she doesn't use hyperbole, in fact i think she is being more conservative than she should be looking at the evidence, but she lays out the multi-stage roadmap on turning a free society into non free and its both enlightening and fucking scary.
Exactly as you'd be hard pressed to find an XP+IE6 set up even at your poorer libraries, I know that in our local library they are running first gen C2D with Vista Business and IE 8 so it would be impossible to use this system there and I wouldn't be surprised to hear that most UK libraries are about the same tech wise.
So while I can understand them not wanting to spend the money to update the program having it on such an out of date platform is probably more useless than not having it at all.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few...there is NO point in adding yet more bloat and complexity to a browser, not to mention giving malware writers one more attack vector in said browser, all to support a teeny tiny niche that would probably just as well if not better supported by using a browser plug in to a real language like Java.
At the end of the day making everybody put up with a more bloated browser just to keep a couple of percent from getting their panties in a wad just isn't worth it, like it or not that is just the way things are.
And how many NORMAL users are gonna be going to OpenGL ref pages? This is no different than the guy a few weeks back that said AMD chips weren't useful at any price because they bog down on acoustical wave simulations...how many users actually do acoustical wave simulations?
Of course I see this as a symptom of "In ur butt" syndrome. Just like the old Eddie Murphy song the devs are trying to jam everything up the butt of your browser, the problem is not only is jamming all that stuff up the browser gonna make it bloat but its gonna offer just one more way to pwn the system through the browser. Maybe I'm just getting old but this seems like something better suited to an optional plugin rather than an always on built in browser component.
Yeah i think old billy got his ACID tests mixed up, which is why i think its stupid to call this ACID instead of something like ML-Test or Math Tester. But I ran the test on both Comodo Dragon (Based on Chromium stable) and Pale Moon and it was a total mess and considering how long it took IE to get ACID support I'm seriously doubting he got IE 8 to pass, nor do i believe that FF ESR passed as that is a couple of years old.
But again I really don't see a point in the MathML tests, the vast majority won't ever be going to a site that depends on MathML so saying its not supporting MathML means squat, like saying a CPU should be judged strictly by how well it runs Folding At Home. Hell Folding is a hell of a lot bigger niche than MathML, can anybody even name a popular site in the top 20 page ranking that uses it? Top 50? So far web designers can't even get HTML V5 up and running without it sucking cycles like a drunk sucking down free drinks so MathML should rightly be at the bottom of the "to do" list.
You are 100% correct, it'll be the Sony rootkit all over again. Anybody here remember that? That was legit anti piracy software but once word got out about it every malware writer was using it as a backdoor into the system. We'll see the exact same thing in this case, it won't be a month before tests looking for the "bacon backdoor" will come standard with metasploit and any AV found to support the bacon backdoor will be worth less than nothing.
At the end of the day you just can't give SOME rootkits a pass because they have "The Big Brother Seal of Approval" because malware is a billion dollar business and the malware writers are constantly on the look out for tricks that will give them more prey. Of course just like Sony it sounds like these LEOs think they are special little creatures and their shit don't stink, but I'd love to see the look on their faces if they end up getting a class action lawsuit over malware writers using their bacon backdoor as an AV free master key.
And can we give a hand to the AV companies? Its nice to see somebody stand for the users, self interest or no, instead of bowing down the second a badge is flashed their way.
But how many of your average users are gonna be going to pages where MathML would be useful? if it was 3% I'd be amazed. If Google isn't gonna be spending time working on it right now its probably better to remove it entirely as that makes one less vector for a browser exploit.
I went with a 1035T myself when those hit $100. Runs at 2.6 when all cores are in use and ramps up to 3.1 when I'm playing most games so i get the best of both worlds, a fast triple for gaming and a full hexacore for video transcoding or editing my multitrack recordings. of course the fact that I can (and have on several occasions) play a game AND transcode a video AND burn a DVD certainly helped make up my mind;-)
But I see no point in going with the "half core" chips, i really don't, as the bang for the buck just isn't there and as you noted they are power pigs. in tests they had to get the half cores a full 1GHz higher than the Phenom II chips to beat the Phenom and of course adding that kind of OCing makes it just belch heat and go through power like a drunk hitting a free minibar. honestly i'm glad that they got the game console gigs because hopefully that will give them the needed capital to get rid of the half core design and get something better, maybe as that article I posted suggested and going back to the K8 the way Intel went back to the P3 to make the Core.
Luckily thanks to the long life of the AM socket neither me nor my customers HAVE to go with the half core, as there is plenty of AM3 and AM3+ Phenoms and Athlons for sale and frankly THAT is where the bang for the buck is right now not only in AMDLand but IntelLand as well, you can get an Athlon triple for around $45 that has a better than 3 in 4 chance of unlocking the fourth core. I mean a triple with a great chance at getting a quad, for less than $50? Not to mention the 1045T chips are selling for just $89, that is crazy cheap for 6 full cores.
BTW if you ever decide you'd like a faster chip check out StarMicro as I can't say enough good things about them. Been buying chips from them for a couple of years now, never a bad chip and fast shipping, in fact I have an Athlon X2 ULV coming the first of next week from them so I can retire that aging Sempron I use as a nettop at the shop. as you can see they sell both Intel and AMD and go back several sockets so its easy to take an older machine and give it a nice kick in the pants.
But I agree that while APUs have their place they just aren't suitable for every task and Intel is trying to stuff those things into places where they do NOT belong just so they can squeeze more $$$ out of the consumer. Considering the lead they have on chips trying to bleed more money out of the consumer seems extra dickish to me, but then again Intel has never been a nice company.
I don't "hate" the APUs in any way, as I said I have an E350 APU netbook and for the tasks I perform on a service call, checking wired and wireless networks, downloading drivers, hell even watching videos on it is just fine.
I think the problem people have with the APUs is that they are being pushed, especially by Intel, into places where they just don't belong. For example if one is building a gamer PC then the GPU on that new Intel chip is not only pointless it is hamstringing the rest of the chip by adding heat and limiting how far you can OC, they have found the same to be true of AMD APUs where the CPU clocks are being hampered by how fast the GPU can go.
But the problem with both the X720 and PS4, and this is coming from somebody who owns and builds AMD exclusively and have for over 5 years is NOT that its an APU, its what KIND of APU they chose. if they would have chosen the A series which was based on Liano and then piledriver? Sure it would be great, those chips make great HTPCs and with some GDDR 5 would make sweet gaming consoles. The problem is they went with Jaguar which...its just not made to do that, its like trying to pull a boat with a Kia. Look up the specs on Jaguar yourself and prepare to go WTF as it is based on Bobcat which is a VERY limited APU designed to go up against Atom and nothing else, its cores are MUCH more primitive than even a K8 which means a first gen Athlon X2 is gonna best it when it comes to number crunching...and you are gonna put that in a system that requires 1080P and heavy physics?
Second of all its using the same mistake of a layout for their chips that the "now infamous" bulldozer used which is a "half core" design. All you have to do is read any review of the bulldozer to see that its a SERVER chip that AMD had to force out as a desktop because the previous CEO did a slash and burn and fired nearly all the engineers so he could get a stock bounce and cash out. but here we are talking about a console...can you think of ANYTHING that is more unlike a typical server load than playing video games? BD makes a great server chip because a good 90% of the work a server has to do is highly threaded integer heavy loads, most games hit one or two cores very hard and are heavy on floating point which is the weakest part of the half core design.
Finally you have the fact that because they went the bulldozer route of "half cores" what you have is NOT an octocore but a quad core with hardware assisted hyperthreading, which again would be curbstomped by that $65 Athlon quad and which makes no sense when it comes to video games as you are taking a lightly threaded FP heavy load and sticking it on a chip designed for heavily threaded integer loads. So the whole thing makes no damned sense!
But as far as Intel goes...don't buy 'em, ever since i heard about how Intel was bribing OEMs and rigging their compiler I've been avoiding them like an STD and have never been happier. I have found that MAYBE 5% of the population are doing jobs that require every cycle they can get, the rest are just as well served by that $45 Athlon triple (that just FYI I've been seeing better than 75% core unlocks with) so I not only take every chance to tell folks they don't need Intel's douchebaggery but i put my money where my mouth is, 5 desktops a laptop and a netbook in my family and they are ALL AMD. Hell Tigerdirect has been selling the 1045T hexacores for just $89, that is cheaper than the bottom of the line crippled Pentium Dual. The bang for the buck from AMD is just awesome ATM, better than it has ever been, and thanks to how long they stick with the AM socket you get plenty of upgrade options down the road.
But lets face it Intel should have been busted for antitrust over both AMD and how they locked Nvidia out of the chipset market so they could keep the whole thing for themselves, so Intel using this to force APUs where they don't belong and adding a price raise to boot really shouldn't be surprising as they are a pretty douchey company. I'm just glad we still have AMD to give us choice and at such cheap prices to boot.
Again look at the thermal vents, if you would have asked any scientists before we found those worms if anything could live in such a hellish place they would have told you "only in sci/fi" because of the insane pressures and the water being so extremely hot....yet life found a way. Hell we recently found creatures at the bottom living on methane which again until we found them was something straight out of sci/fi, yet life found a way.
Sure it may not be the kind of life you can sit down and discuss the laws of physics with but it IS life and to say we know for sure what planets can and can't support life when we haven't even explored the planets in our own solar system well enough to say for sure there is no life on them? That isn't science, that is arrogance.
Both Sony and MSFT chose the APU because of PRICE because they plan on it being another pricing slugfest and you watch, it'll bite them both right in the ass. Don't get me wrong, for something like a netbook or a tablet where there literally is no room for a fan to move any air? Then an APU makes perfect sense, it also makes perfect sense on an office box where all they will be doing is non graphics intensive tasks like spreadsheets.
Mark my words it won't take game devs a year and a half to totally max out the Jaguar APU and then for the rest of the life of the console it'll be hamstringed by the APU, because the jaguar is based on bobcat which was AMD's answer to the ATOM, it was NOT designed to perform heavy lifting, nope it was built to be cheap and run at a low enough power it could be used in netbooks and tablets while still besting Intel Atom in just about every way.
Again don't get me wrong, I own an Asus EEE that has the E350 Bobcat APU and it does beat atom pretty badly, hell i can even play games like Torchlight and L4D on the thing, but compare it to anything other than an Atom, even as low as a Celeron, and its just gonna get creamed. Again this isn't a big deal in a portable, but in a game console where its gonna have to do 1080P with ragdolls and physics? yeah its not gonna take long at all for the game devs to be hamstringed by the jaguar APU and its lack of performance. Hell friend check out this comparison chart of the E450 (which the jaguar is based on) and other chips, even the 1.2GHz Celeron beats it by nearly 10%.
So I don't know WTF Sony and MSFT were thinking except "We gotta get the cheapest thing we can so we don't lose our shirts in the price war" because that quad core A series APUs you find in the $399 Worst Buy specials will be able to cream their brand new console on launch day. Only the fact that a console OS is so tiny compared to a full OS (although to be fair the console OSes have been bloating up with all the new features both sides has been bolting on) and the fact the game devs can optimize the living shit out of their code will buy them some time but if it takes even 2 years to max out those chips it'll be a miracle.
Hell you can even go farther than that Hoss, I have used XP drivers in compatibility mode for devices that a company no longer supports and as long as its the same bit (32bit or 64bit) then most of the time they work just fine. that is THIRTEEN YEARS worth of drivers and as you pointed out the kernel hasn't been standing still in that time.
The most telling thing to me is that NOBODY does things Torvalds way, BSD, Solaris, Windows, OSX, iOS, Android, ALL of the above have a stable ABI to build drivers upon so that changes to the kernel don't break drivers and its ONLY Torvalds that has set it up so drivers and even software has to state "for kernel x.xx" because again he set it up all stupid.
The simple fact is Torvalds is OLD and sadly like many guys when they get old has gotten set in his ways. the reasons he gave for doing it that way in the early 90s like memory usage and the need to constantly change with the times no longer applies, yet he insists on keeping things the way he set them up 20+ years ago, which is stupid and no different than if Windows would have stuck with VXDs all these years instead of moving on.
But as long as Torvalds is in the driver's seat things will never get better in Linux land because you are building your house upon the shifting sand. The way Torvalds does things actually cripples Linux adoption, if he would stop being such a stubborn ass and give the hardware OEMs an ABI you could send grandma into any B&M and just have her look for the penguin logo, just as Apple users and Windows users do now but instead he'd rather force the users to play hardware roulette than just make it easier for OEMs to support Linux. Sorry but that is dumb any way you slice it.
Then either you suck or you have a BOFH that has tweaked the shit out of Windows too damned much and the drivers can't load properly. Sorry to be blunt but its true, i had a customer who kept getting BSODs and it turned out the last admin they had was a BOFH and had locked down the systems so damned badly that the drivers couldn't load properly.
but since i'm just an amazing human being and all around great guy let old hairyfeet show you how to fix that problem Hoss, just go grab Dependency Walker and slap that puppy on a stick, even better get one of those teeny tiny metal sticks and keep it in your wallet like I do, and then when you run into that again? Run dependency walker on the main executable and see what it says. 5 will get you 10 that either 1.- you are missing some core piece of the driver because something it depends on is missing, or 2.- the system is not allowing a key module to load. DW will highlight both problems with little red flags so 5 minutes in google and voila! problem solved.
Which was why Roddenberry did it that way, I saw an interview with him once where he was asked why all his aliens were forehead aliens instead of anything exotic and he pointed out 1.-The exotic aliens on Dr Who looked like crap, and 2.-90% of an actor's craft is done with his face and when you can no longer see the actor's face he can no longer convey emotion. Joss Whedon said the same thing when asked why he got rid of the cool "American Werewolf" in the first season for a classic wolfman, he said all the animated wolf could do was snarl, it couldn't be scared or show pain or any emotions whereas Seth Green could make you feel for the monster by putting bits of the man into the performance.
As for TFA, to quote Ian Malcolm "Life finds a way". Just look at how there is life on this planet in some of the most hellish places, like thermal vents on the bottom of the ocean. I remember reading an article talking to the guys that went down so deep in the Marianas trench and one of the things they were talking about was how you had flat fish even down that deep. To say that our planet is so far unique for supporting our monkey asses is fine and dandy but anybody who thinks that means there couldn't be life on those because we wouldn't survive is just being arrogant. This is why i support exploring the oceans of Europa with a probe, from what we saw the oceans under the ice are warm and flowing, if there is any place in our own solar system that would have life my money would be on Europa.
The problem isn't that there may or may not be life out there, the problem is even in our own galaxy the space is just so damned vast that just saying hello could take 10 million years. Until we can find a way around that pesky little relativity thing we are just pulling ideas out of our asses because with our best telescopes its the equivalent of stepping out a single inch, our reach is just too small when compared to just what is in our own galaxy, much less the thousands of other galaxies, that for all we know earth like planets are a dime a dozen, there just aren't any in the few feeble inches we can reach out with our current tech.
Or to just cut past all the damned metaphors just because you teach your programmers not to have Bobby Drop Tables size screw ups doesn't mean there isn't a bazillion other ways they can screw up.
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But who is to say that life HAS to function by DNA? That is how we developed, sure, but just because one planet in one spot with one kind of conditions developed that way does NOT mean that all life HAS to evolve that way.
This is one of the reasons Neil DeGrasse is pushing for better exploration of Mars and Europa, as he says until we find actual alien life, even if its just the size of a single flea, we just won't know if life follows a single 'roadmap" or if there are many ways to get to the same place just depending on conditions.
Hell we can't even say for certain that life on this planet originated here, since we know that Mars had a primal soup earlier than we did and that multiple large impacts did occur between the Earth and Mars so its very possible our DNA didn't start out here,but started out as bacteria on Mars and was carried here on an asteroid. Until we do a more complete exploration of Mars we simply can't know and that is on our own planet and we are gonna assume that we can guess whether a planet can or can't based on the teeny tiny bit of information we can get from out telescopes? With the current way of detecting planets in other systems I don't know if that would even work for anything less than a couple of sizes larger than Earth, I doubt anything smaller would cause enough shift for us to even detect it.
And look up that video comparing a MSFT store to an Apple store (I think it was called Apple and Microsoft side by side) where they just picked a day and had one guy stand outside the MSFT store and one stand outside the Apple store and film along with asking questions of the people coming out, what did they find?
The Apple store was PACKED, in fact they said the store never got less than half full, the MSFT store? No more than 8 people at a time max. The Apple store sold more than a dozen iPads, and at least a half a dozen MacBooks and iPods, they couldn't keep a precise count because there was too many people for one guy to talk to them all, the MSFT Store? They had just 6 sales the entire 4 hours the guy stood there and they were ALL X360 games. and this was the weekend after the Surface release!
So they can TRY all they want, hell the Ballmernator can click his heels three times and say "There is no place like Cupertino" until his ankles are raw, won't change reality and the reality is high end MSFT products is a DO NOT WANT when it comes to consumers. hell all they had to do was ask me or any other retailer and we would have told 'em that $400-$650 is the sweet spot for selling MSFT OS gear, the lower the better, and above $650 other than the occasional gamer rig (which those guys usually like to go DIY) you really don't see many sales at all above $650. Intel learned this the hard way too when they tried to push $1000 Macbook Air wannabes and the OEMs ended up with piles of the things unsold.
MSFT is just gonna have to face the fact, they can't slap a paintjob on a Pinto and sell it for Porsche money, they just can't. MSFT reaped the profits from the massive economies of scale of being a commodity OS and after 20+ years they can't just turn back the clock and sell themselves as a premium brand, nobody is gonna buy it. Like him or hate him Jobs spent the better part of 30 years building the "Apple equals quality and luxury" identity and there were several lean years when that strategy didn't go over well, but now that the shoe is on the other foot MSFT can't just pull a 180 and be Apple, its really just a waste of time and money to try.
Yeah I been making some nice money wiping Win 8 for 7, just like I did Vista for XP, but in this case i really wish i wasn't. Oh don't get me wrong, Win 8 is still a POS and I can totally understand why folks want me to put win 7 on these laptops, and I still think that "refresh my PC" added "feature" was put in to keep people from noticing they had a show stopping corruption bug they couldn't get a handle on before RTM, nope its the fact that I'm seeing a shitload of Worst Buy and Wally world "specials" which are AMD E1800 laptops.
Now this is coming from somebody that has built AMD exclusively for over 5 years and has his whole family on AMD but putting Win 8 on an E1800? Let me put it this way...if you thought Vista capable was bad, you ain't seen shit until you see how Win 8 "performs" on a Bobcat dual core. You wanna talk about painful, the poor things just whine and whirr and drag and drag and draaaag along. If you want to put an end to the "Win 8 is faster" bullshit just hand them one of those E1800 laptops and say "here ya go Sparky, have fun". take that exact same system and put on Win 7? its quite nice. oh it won't win any speed records but it makes a good netbook whereas Win 8 on one of those is in permanent slo-mo.
I think you are wrong and here is why...While MSFT has enough cash to survive 2, hell maybe even 3 Vistabombs the OEMs can't and they can't afford to just sit on the sidelines for another year without shit to sell.
So either the OEMs have a living shitfit and get Win 7 licenses to sell, like they did with XP when Vista cratered, or they will have no choice but to go with another OS, probably a mix of ChromeOS and Android. They really don't have a choice and as much as Ballmer would like to pretend he works in Cupertino and that MSFT can just ditch the OEMs and sell MSFT hardware with MSFT OSes tied into a MSFT ecosystem the reality is its the OEMs and their cutthroat pricing that has kept Windows in the mainstream, no way in hell folks are gonna start paying a grand a pop for a MSFT branded PC, not gonna happen.
Oh there was more wrong with Vista than just UAC and a few flaky drivers and SP1 didn't fix jack shit on that OS, in fact IME it caused at least 1 problem for every 2 that it fixed. And I wasn't running a machine that should have ANY trouble with it, while it wasn't the cutting edge a 3.6GHz P4 with HT, 3GB of RAM and a 7600GS was a pretty nice system in 07 and Vista still ran like shit.
That is why I'm quick to call bullshit on those that try to claim that Win 7 is just Vista SE, if you had actually ran Vista you would know that is NOT the case. I ran Vista and even after the SPs they just couldn't fix the issues with that OS, the "senior moments" where the UI would just hang up for a second or two, the way it would just "forget" about network shares and refuse to see them until a restart, its lousy file transfers, its just a bad OS no matter how you slice it. Contrast this with Win 7 which was the first OS from MSFT since Win2K where I could say without hesitation "This upgrade is worth it, no hesitation or reservation", those two OSes are like night and day and trying to say win 7 is Vista SE is like saying XP is WinME SE since they both have desktops.
But Win 8 is a puzzler, how they could go from such a solid release with Win 7 to such a clusterfuck is beyond me. You'd think that the point of having public alpha and beta builds would be to get feedback and fix the problems but not on Ballmer's watch, MSFT didn't have a single positive metric, not one, the beta testers hated it, the tech reviewers hated it, and these aren't haters, we're talking about guys like Bott and Thurott that can usually be counted on for a good review so when even the "go to" guys hate it? You'd think that would have sent up a red flag.
If Ballmer doesn't pull his head out of his ass (or the board fire his sweaty behind) and actually listen to their customers? Well i have a feeling that the EOL of Win 7 in 2020 will only be a footnote, a "Hey, remember when we used Windows?" story that nobody but a few legacy customers gives a crap about.
Aw hell, you didn't even include the REALLY costly fuckups, like 1.-Pushing out the X360 with a 2 billion dollar hardware flaw, 2.-Killing playsforsure (that was not only gaining against iTunes but had created a whole new media rental model that would have given them a better foothold in the living room) for the DOA Zune market, 3.-8 billion for Skype, 4.-6 billion for that ad company they had to write down, 4.- I can't remember how much Ballmer pissed away buying the Kin and Sidekick but they weren't cheap...is there any more I'm missing?
What SJVN is missing is the big picture which is thus...the SECOND that it was reported that Apple was the largest company the ballmernator totally flipped his shit and since then has been in total panic mode. What you see happening with MSFT is NOT a company trying to innovate, because if that were the case they would LISTEN to all the feedback they are getting and use that info to make their products better,what we are seeing instead is "ZOMFG teh press says teh phone and tablet is teh hotness and we ain't got no hotness! Quick, no matter what it costs get us teh hotness!" while ignoring the facts which are that MSFT has NEVER been the cool and trendy company and its X86 software that has given them a monopoly and its the reason people buy Windows NOT because they feel fuzzy about the WinFlag or give a rat's ass about the "Microsoft ecosystem" that Win 8 tries so pathetically to shove onto users.
I think the next release will be the turning point, I really do, either they listen to their customers or everyone is gonna start looking at exit strategies. I honestly never thought I'd see the day but look at the evidence, you got the OEMs on the phone with Google and putting out Chromebooks. This is a bad indicator for MSFT right here as you haven't been able to get non Windows X86 from the mainstream OEMs since OS/2 was canceled because to do so was the kiss of death. Then you have Valve, which has doubled their profits 7 years in a row and the biggest gaming service by far not only publicly saying Win 8 is shit but actually releasing a client for Linux, Finally you got no less than chipzilla itself talking about its $200 ANDROID laptops. Intel and MSFT was bestest of friends, remember? when even Intel doesn't have their backs you know MSFT is in deep shit.
So Ballmer better be ready and willing to suck it up and listen to the customers because i don't think they can survive two bombs in a row, i really don't. After all the OEMs have to have an OS that will move hardware and Win 8 is a giant DO NOT WANT when it comes to consumers. i mean for fucks sake they spent more than 2 BILLION on ads for Win 8 and got less than 4 million sales, and that was with them practically giving it away at a lousy $40! It should be obvious to everyone that his idea of turning Windows into a premium brand has failed, the Ultrabooks didn't sell for squat and the touchscreen laptops sold even less, so this is it, sink or swim time.
Then you better throw out the constitution and burn any papers by the founding fathers because what you are calling sedition was a right of the people they supported..
"But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security"....Thomas jefferson
But you gotta give the dude credit as he managed to sell a product and keep it at the same time, walking away with the code, the customers AND a big fat check. How he managed to get those fools to buy it without making him sign a non compete I don't know but he pulled it off, hell you might as play the WB "sucker" music when you talk about Oracle and MySQL.
So lets here it for old Monty, his balls are big and plentiful.
On what, a 486DX? I haven't used HOSTS files in awhile (prefer my recursive DNS) but it never took me more than a minute and a half to load mine and that was on an anemic 1.1GHz Celeron I kept at the shop for such jobs.
So I have to wonder how little your knowledge of networking is if it takes you THAT long to load a single HOSTS file, hell even if you went the long way around and converted it into peerguardian format and loaded it up that way it shouldn't take more than 10 minutes tops.
Hell my mom is real civic minded so went and did jury duty when she was called up...only to come in white as a sheet. She had spent 3 days hanging a jury on an arson case where even the investigator admitted on the stand he didn't know what caused the fire and that it didn't make sense for the defendant to burn it down as he didn't have enough insurance to even cover what he owed but the jury was 11 to 1 wanting to convict, why? "Because he is Italian and Italians are in the mob and burn things, haven't you ever seen Goodfellas?". That's right a guy was gonna get 10 years because of a scene in a Ray Liotta movie.
My faith in the human race needless to say went down several notches that day but you sir are correct, sadly many out there can't tell the difference between facts and what they have seen on screen.
Watch The end of America by Naomi wolf and you'll see they didn't just pick that name out of a hat, the government is using the same playbook that goes all the way back to Stalin, Franco, the crazy Austrian, etc. Her premise is that if you want to change a society from free to non free you can't just wave a magic wand, there are steps that have to be taken before you can make the shift but once those steps have been taken the shift can happen VERY fast.
I urge everybody to watch that video as she compares what is happening now with historical examples and she doesn't use hyperbole, in fact i think she is being more conservative than she should be looking at the evidence, but she lays out the multi-stage roadmap on turning a free society into non free and its both enlightening and fucking scary.
Exactly as you'd be hard pressed to find an XP+IE6 set up even at your poorer libraries, I know that in our local library they are running first gen C2D with Vista Business and IE 8 so it would be impossible to use this system there and I wouldn't be surprised to hear that most UK libraries are about the same tech wise.
So while I can understand them not wanting to spend the money to update the program having it on such an out of date platform is probably more useless than not having it at all.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few...there is NO point in adding yet more bloat and complexity to a browser, not to mention giving malware writers one more attack vector in said browser, all to support a teeny tiny niche that would probably just as well if not better supported by using a browser plug in to a real language like Java.
At the end of the day making everybody put up with a more bloated browser just to keep a couple of percent from getting their panties in a wad just isn't worth it, like it or not that is just the way things are.
And how many NORMAL users are gonna be going to OpenGL ref pages? This is no different than the guy a few weeks back that said AMD chips weren't useful at any price because they bog down on acoustical wave simulations...how many users actually do acoustical wave simulations?
Of course I see this as a symptom of "In ur butt" syndrome. Just like the old Eddie Murphy song the devs are trying to jam everything up the butt of your browser, the problem is not only is jamming all that stuff up the browser gonna make it bloat but its gonna offer just one more way to pwn the system through the browser. Maybe I'm just getting old but this seems like something better suited to an optional plugin rather than an always on built in browser component.
Yeah i think old billy got his ACID tests mixed up, which is why i think its stupid to call this ACID instead of something like ML-Test or Math Tester. But I ran the test on both Comodo Dragon (Based on Chromium stable) and Pale Moon and it was a total mess and considering how long it took IE to get ACID support I'm seriously doubting he got IE 8 to pass, nor do i believe that FF ESR passed as that is a couple of years old.
But again I really don't see a point in the MathML tests, the vast majority won't ever be going to a site that depends on MathML so saying its not supporting MathML means squat, like saying a CPU should be judged strictly by how well it runs Folding At Home. Hell Folding is a hell of a lot bigger niche than MathML, can anybody even name a popular site in the top 20 page ranking that uses it? Top 50? So far web designers can't even get HTML V5 up and running without it sucking cycles like a drunk sucking down free drinks so MathML should rightly be at the bottom of the "to do" list.
You are 100% correct, it'll be the Sony rootkit all over again. Anybody here remember that? That was legit anti piracy software but once word got out about it every malware writer was using it as a backdoor into the system. We'll see the exact same thing in this case, it won't be a month before tests looking for the "bacon backdoor" will come standard with metasploit and any AV found to support the bacon backdoor will be worth less than nothing.
At the end of the day you just can't give SOME rootkits a pass because they have "The Big Brother Seal of Approval" because malware is a billion dollar business and the malware writers are constantly on the look out for tricks that will give them more prey. Of course just like Sony it sounds like these LEOs think they are special little creatures and their shit don't stink, but I'd love to see the look on their faces if they end up getting a class action lawsuit over malware writers using their bacon backdoor as an AV free master key.
And can we give a hand to the AV companies? Its nice to see somebody stand for the users, self interest or no, instead of bowing down the second a badge is flashed their way.
But how many of your average users are gonna be going to pages where MathML would be useful? if it was 3% I'd be amazed. If Google isn't gonna be spending time working on it right now its probably better to remove it entirely as that makes one less vector for a browser exploit.
I went with a 1035T myself when those hit $100. Runs at 2.6 when all cores are in use and ramps up to 3.1 when I'm playing most games so i get the best of both worlds, a fast triple for gaming and a full hexacore for video transcoding or editing my multitrack recordings. of course the fact that I can (and have on several occasions) play a game AND transcode a video AND burn a DVD certainly helped make up my mind ;-)
But I see no point in going with the "half core" chips, i really don't, as the bang for the buck just isn't there and as you noted they are power pigs. in tests they had to get the half cores a full 1GHz higher than the Phenom II chips to beat the Phenom and of course adding that kind of OCing makes it just belch heat and go through power like a drunk hitting a free minibar. honestly i'm glad that they got the game console gigs because hopefully that will give them the needed capital to get rid of the half core design and get something better, maybe as that article I posted suggested and going back to the K8 the way Intel went back to the P3 to make the Core.
Luckily thanks to the long life of the AM socket neither me nor my customers HAVE to go with the half core, as there is plenty of AM3 and AM3+ Phenoms and Athlons for sale and frankly THAT is where the bang for the buck is right now not only in AMDLand but IntelLand as well, you can get an Athlon triple for around $45 that has a better than 3 in 4 chance of unlocking the fourth core. I mean a triple with a great chance at getting a quad, for less than $50? Not to mention the 1045T chips are selling for just $89, that is crazy cheap for 6 full cores.
BTW if you ever decide you'd like a faster chip check out StarMicro as I can't say enough good things about them. Been buying chips from them for a couple of years now, never a bad chip and fast shipping, in fact I have an Athlon X2 ULV coming the first of next week from them so I can retire that aging Sempron I use as a nettop at the shop. as you can see they sell both Intel and AMD and go back several sockets so its easy to take an older machine and give it a nice kick in the pants.
But I agree that while APUs have their place they just aren't suitable for every task and Intel is trying to stuff those things into places where they do NOT belong just so they can squeeze more $$$ out of the consumer. Considering the lead they have on chips trying to bleed more money out of the consumer seems extra dickish to me, but then again Intel has never been a nice company.
I don't "hate" the APUs in any way, as I said I have an E350 APU netbook and for the tasks I perform on a service call, checking wired and wireless networks, downloading drivers, hell even watching videos on it is just fine.
I think the problem people have with the APUs is that they are being pushed, especially by Intel, into places where they just don't belong. For example if one is building a gamer PC then the GPU on that new Intel chip is not only pointless it is hamstringing the rest of the chip by adding heat and limiting how far you can OC, they have found the same to be true of AMD APUs where the CPU clocks are being hampered by how fast the GPU can go.
But the problem with both the X720 and PS4, and this is coming from somebody who owns and builds AMD exclusively and have for over 5 years is NOT that its an APU, its what KIND of APU they chose. if they would have chosen the A series which was based on Liano and then piledriver? Sure it would be great, those chips make great HTPCs and with some GDDR 5 would make sweet gaming consoles. The problem is they went with Jaguar which...its just not made to do that, its like trying to pull a boat with a Kia. Look up the specs on Jaguar yourself and prepare to go WTF as it is based on Bobcat which is a VERY limited APU designed to go up against Atom and nothing else, its cores are MUCH more primitive than even a K8 which means a first gen Athlon X2 is gonna best it when it comes to number crunching...and you are gonna put that in a system that requires 1080P and heavy physics?
Second of all its using the same mistake of a layout for their chips that the "now infamous" bulldozer used which is a "half core" design. All you have to do is read any review of the bulldozer to see that its a SERVER chip that AMD had to force out as a desktop because the previous CEO did a slash and burn and fired nearly all the engineers so he could get a stock bounce and cash out. but here we are talking about a console...can you think of ANYTHING that is more unlike a typical server load than playing video games? BD makes a great server chip because a good 90% of the work a server has to do is highly threaded integer heavy loads, most games hit one or two cores very hard and are heavy on floating point which is the weakest part of the half core design.
Finally you have the fact that because they went the bulldozer route of "half cores" what you have is NOT an octocore but a quad core with hardware assisted hyperthreading, which again would be curbstomped by that $65 Athlon quad and which makes no sense when it comes to video games as you are taking a lightly threaded FP heavy load and sticking it on a chip designed for heavily threaded integer loads. So the whole thing makes no damned sense!
But as far as Intel goes...don't buy 'em, ever since i heard about how Intel was bribing OEMs and rigging their compiler I've been avoiding them like an STD and have never been happier. I have found that MAYBE 5% of the population are doing jobs that require every cycle they can get, the rest are just as well served by that $45 Athlon triple (that just FYI I've been seeing better than 75% core unlocks with) so I not only take every chance to tell folks they don't need Intel's douchebaggery but i put my money where my mouth is, 5 desktops a laptop and a netbook in my family and they are ALL AMD. Hell Tigerdirect has been selling the 1045T hexacores for just $89, that is cheaper than the bottom of the line crippled Pentium Dual. The bang for the buck from AMD is just awesome ATM, better than it has ever been, and thanks to how long they stick with the AM socket you get plenty of upgrade options down the road.
But lets face it Intel should have been busted for antitrust over both AMD and how they locked Nvidia out of the chipset market so they could keep the whole thing for themselves, so Intel using this to force APUs where they don't belong and adding a price raise to boot really shouldn't be surprising as they are a pretty douchey company. I'm just glad we still have AMD to give us choice and at such cheap prices to boot.
Again look at the thermal vents, if you would have asked any scientists before we found those worms if anything could live in such a hellish place they would have told you "only in sci/fi" because of the insane pressures and the water being so extremely hot....yet life found a way. Hell we recently found creatures at the bottom living on methane which again until we found them was something straight out of sci/fi, yet life found a way.
Sure it may not be the kind of life you can sit down and discuss the laws of physics with but it IS life and to say we know for sure what planets can and can't support life when we haven't even explored the planets in our own solar system well enough to say for sure there is no life on them? That isn't science, that is arrogance.
Both Sony and MSFT chose the APU because of PRICE because they plan on it being another pricing slugfest and you watch, it'll bite them both right in the ass. Don't get me wrong, for something like a netbook or a tablet where there literally is no room for a fan to move any air? Then an APU makes perfect sense, it also makes perfect sense on an office box where all they will be doing is non graphics intensive tasks like spreadsheets.
Mark my words it won't take game devs a year and a half to totally max out the Jaguar APU and then for the rest of the life of the console it'll be hamstringed by the APU, because the jaguar is based on bobcat which was AMD's answer to the ATOM, it was NOT designed to perform heavy lifting, nope it was built to be cheap and run at a low enough power it could be used in netbooks and tablets while still besting Intel Atom in just about every way.
Again don't get me wrong, I own an Asus EEE that has the E350 Bobcat APU and it does beat atom pretty badly, hell i can even play games like Torchlight and L4D on the thing, but compare it to anything other than an Atom, even as low as a Celeron, and its just gonna get creamed. Again this isn't a big deal in a portable, but in a game console where its gonna have to do 1080P with ragdolls and physics? yeah its not gonna take long at all for the game devs to be hamstringed by the jaguar APU and its lack of performance. Hell friend check out this comparison chart of the E450 (which the jaguar is based on) and other chips, even the 1.2GHz Celeron beats it by nearly 10%.
So I don't know WTF Sony and MSFT were thinking except "We gotta get the cheapest thing we can so we don't lose our shirts in the price war" because that quad core A series APUs you find in the $399 Worst Buy specials will be able to cream their brand new console on launch day. Only the fact that a console OS is so tiny compared to a full OS (although to be fair the console OSes have been bloating up with all the new features both sides has been bolting on) and the fact the game devs can optimize the living shit out of their code will buy them some time but if it takes even 2 years to max out those chips it'll be a miracle.
Hell you can even go farther than that Hoss, I have used XP drivers in compatibility mode for devices that a company no longer supports and as long as its the same bit (32bit or 64bit) then most of the time they work just fine. that is THIRTEEN YEARS worth of drivers and as you pointed out the kernel hasn't been standing still in that time.
The most telling thing to me is that NOBODY does things Torvalds way, BSD, Solaris, Windows, OSX, iOS, Android, ALL of the above have a stable ABI to build drivers upon so that changes to the kernel don't break drivers and its ONLY Torvalds that has set it up so drivers and even software has to state "for kernel x.xx" because again he set it up all stupid.
The simple fact is Torvalds is OLD and sadly like many guys when they get old has gotten set in his ways. the reasons he gave for doing it that way in the early 90s like memory usage and the need to constantly change with the times no longer applies, yet he insists on keeping things the way he set them up 20+ years ago, which is stupid and no different than if Windows would have stuck with VXDs all these years instead of moving on.
But as long as Torvalds is in the driver's seat things will never get better in Linux land because you are building your house upon the shifting sand. The way Torvalds does things actually cripples Linux adoption, if he would stop being such a stubborn ass and give the hardware OEMs an ABI you could send grandma into any B&M and just have her look for the penguin logo, just as Apple users and Windows users do now but instead he'd rather force the users to play hardware roulette than just make it easier for OEMs to support Linux. Sorry but that is dumb any way you slice it.
Then either you suck or you have a BOFH that has tweaked the shit out of Windows too damned much and the drivers can't load properly. Sorry to be blunt but its true, i had a customer who kept getting BSODs and it turned out the last admin they had was a BOFH and had locked down the systems so damned badly that the drivers couldn't load properly.
but since i'm just an amazing human being and all around great guy let old hairyfeet show you how to fix that problem Hoss, just go grab Dependency Walker and slap that puppy on a stick, even better get one of those teeny tiny metal sticks and keep it in your wallet like I do, and then when you run into that again? Run dependency walker on the main executable and see what it says. 5 will get you 10 that either 1.- you are missing some core piece of the driver because something it depends on is missing, or 2.- the system is not allowing a key module to load. DW will highlight both problems with little red flags so 5 minutes in google and voila! problem solved.
Which was why Roddenberry did it that way, I saw an interview with him once where he was asked why all his aliens were forehead aliens instead of anything exotic and he pointed out 1.-The exotic aliens on Dr Who looked like crap, and 2.-90% of an actor's craft is done with his face and when you can no longer see the actor's face he can no longer convey emotion. Joss Whedon said the same thing when asked why he got rid of the cool "American Werewolf" in the first season for a classic wolfman, he said all the animated wolf could do was snarl, it couldn't be scared or show pain or any emotions whereas Seth Green could make you feel for the monster by putting bits of the man into the performance.
As for TFA, to quote Ian Malcolm "Life finds a way". Just look at how there is life on this planet in some of the most hellish places, like thermal vents on the bottom of the ocean. I remember reading an article talking to the guys that went down so deep in the Marianas trench and one of the things they were talking about was how you had flat fish even down that deep. To say that our planet is so far unique for supporting our monkey asses is fine and dandy but anybody who thinks that means there couldn't be life on those because we wouldn't survive is just being arrogant. This is why i support exploring the oceans of Europa with a probe, from what we saw the oceans under the ice are warm and flowing, if there is any place in our own solar system that would have life my money would be on Europa.
The problem isn't that there may or may not be life out there, the problem is even in our own galaxy the space is just so damned vast that just saying hello could take 10 million years. Until we can find a way around that pesky little relativity thing we are just pulling ideas out of our asses because with our best telescopes its the equivalent of stepping out a single inch, our reach is just too small when compared to just what is in our own galaxy, much less the thousands of other galaxies, that for all we know earth like planets are a dime a dozen, there just aren't any in the few feeble inches we can reach out with our current tech.
Or to just cut past all the damned metaphors just because you teach your programmers not to have Bobby Drop Tables size screw ups doesn't mean there isn't a bazillion other ways they can screw up.