Nope, didn't see a single bondi blue buttplug or anything else for that matter because as I already said nobody gave a shit about the iMac but the macheads because at the time Apple was half dead and all but the most faithful to St. Steve had left the building, hence why they had to bring St Steve back.
And the ONLY reason why it hadn't taken over by 97/98 was the simple fact that Windows 98 couldn't do plug and play as the famous video of Win98 BSODing on Bill Gates demonstrated all too well. Now those of us who did business as well as consumer sales? We had a ton of USB devices because WinNT did do plug and play because the drivers were isolated from the kernel so if the driver crapped it didn't take out the whole OS. Considering the iMac was running 8.1 they weren't much better off anyway.
But when the USB ports exploded was around 2001 when...drumroll...WinXP came along and made plug and play a reality. They had gained in the business sector before that thanks to NT/2K but XP is what really made it explode. But just FYI Apple wasn't even the only one doing the whole "all in one USB only" bit as Gateway had the Astro line targeted at SMBs and SOHOs which only had a CD-ROM and USB ports, early 98 IIRC as I'm pretty sure it wasn't 98SE. One of our big sellers at the time was a USB burner and USB hubs to add to the Astro as the way it was built one couldn't change out the drive without taking a dremel to the front and it didn't have enough ports for the keyboard AND mouse AND a burner.
At the time I was working at the state capital and got to play with all the latest gear and frankly the iMac? It wasn't even on the radar NOBODY had it, in fact I never even got to see one until several years later when I spotted one at a yard sale in a college town. I did end up being given the B&W G3 tower which I have in the closet at the shop, I really need to get off my ass and either throw it away or do as I originally planned and gut it to build a nice dual or triple core in the case, as it is a pretty case.
But seriously dude nobody but the faithful gave a rat's ass about Apple until the iPod exploded, before that any Apple systems were as rare as hen's teeth in the flyover states. maybe you are on the coast, i heard they were big there, but in the heartland they didn't sell for shit, and they sure as hell wasn't driving USB adoption, that was the shitty floppies and the OEMs killing expensive ports for dirt cheap USB ports. Ironically now even the PS/2 port is starting to become endangered as these companies try to wring every last penny they can from the margins,I have to keep a USB setup at the shop just to deal with the cheap Dells and HPs because they don't come with anything but USB now and they won't take a USB to PS2 adapter, neither will the G3 BTW which is why its sitting in the closet instead of being played with at the shop.
Some use is, some use ain't, the statement is the same either way and if one was gonna be a grammar nazi you think you'd be bitching about using ain't, although as a southerner I ain't got a problem with that word;-)
Hit by a fricking wall of water several times larger than anybody had ever planned for and if it weren't for the fact that they put the generators in the basement there is a good chance it wouldn't have had an accident at all?
Yeah I'd call that pretty damned good, especially when our choices are that or burning fossil fuels..no renewables will NOT cut it, even the most pie in the sky estimates won't give us even 30% of the energy we are using NOW, much less give us jack shit for growth.
Does that mean we shouldn't build safer nuclear plants? Or sink money into R&D on renewables? Of course not, in fact I think we should be sinking more money into both instead of blowing cash playing the world's policeman, but you have to face reality and the reality is unless you are gonna wipe out a good 70% of the population on planet earth you are gonna need power and so far we haven't come up with anything that fills that need as good as nuclear.
Of course that is ignoring the fact that the USA has been crippled by the NIMBYs, you name it they cockblock it, in fact China will have a couple of dozen plants built before we can even get a single one built thanks to the NIMBYs. You name the source NIMBYs will find a reason to bitch, nuclear? "It'll make us glow in the dark ZOMG!" hydro? "ZOMG you'll kill teh fishes!" wind? "ZOMG its noisy and you'll kill teh birds!" and so on and so on. This is why I actually enjoyed watching California suffer their "energy crisis" and get buttraped by Enron because they have more NIMBYs per square mile than any place on the planet. I mean where do the NIMBYs think all that power they are blowing on their little laptops and AC units is gonna come from if they don't allow any plants to be built? Its just gonna be dropped by the power fairy?
It comes down to TINSTAAFL and the question is simply how you are gonna pay and what you are getting for it. If using FB and Twitter is enough of a "payment" for you to give them all your personal info? I have NO problem with that as long as you know what you are paying and realize that you ARE paying for it, you are just paying for it with data instead of dollars.
Sorry tbit that you don't like the fact that like communism the entire premise of FOSS is built on a flaw, don't blame me that the emperor's balls swing in your face bothers you.
Do I ultimately give a shit WHY Wikipedia changed? Not really, anybody who has had a run in with the "Wikitards" and the deletionists really doesn't give a shit if Jimmy's toy goes down in flames.
What I DO care about is when politics and religion are allowed to overrule common sense, we saw that with communism then, see it now with libertarians not seeing how the end result will ALWAYS be feudalism, and we see it badly with FOSS because as one wise sage put it "Linux is always 3 to 5 years from being ready for the masses...only the 3 to 5 years never changes" and like it or not that is a fact and it ALL comes down to the busted shitter problem. That is why you see systems that are finally getting stable thrown out for alpha quality shit like Pulse and tossing KDE 3 for 4, why amateur hour bugs never seem to go away, why new versions just add new bugs to the old bugs, and why you will find placeholders where important docs should be...it ALL comes down to shitty jobs and the fact that humans just won't take truly shitty jobs for free.
I don't see why the FOSSie faction has a shitfit when i point that out, how often do we see a little guy manage to totally fuck over a big corp just by having the big brass balls to pull it off?
That is why i say give the man some credit folks, he managed to pull a scam worthy of "The Sting" on a huge corp and got a big fat check AND got to keep the thing he was selling! That is fucking brilliant! Give old Monty credit, his balls are big and plentiful to pull something like that off and walk away scott free with a big fat bank account, big and plentiful indeed.
So the answer is beyond simple, just pick up an OEM copy of Win 7 HP and if you really love Linux so much you can dual boot, problem solved. Hell HTPCs are the ONE and ONLY ONE use where I can say Windows 8 is actually good, those fat ass tiles that are so irritating on a desktop are easy as hell to hit with a remote and it makes a nice 10 foot UI for widescreens and on both you can use XBMC as a front end if you really like that UI, personally I prefer WMC but whatever floats your boat.
The only ones that don't have a choice is the Android users which surprise! Was the whole fricking point, sell Joe and Jane Average a kindle over an Android...which I bet works damned well, i bet the sales of kindle will get a bounce after this thus showing what I've been saying for years which is that DRM works great if your goal is to steer consumers where you want them to go. Stopping piracy was a red herring to keep the public from having a shitfit as they couldn't just say "We want to steer you by the nose and this makes that easy" without John and Jane public naturally getting pissed, so making a bogey man named piracy and blaming it all on the bogey man worked out wonderfully.
Wow, way for Linux users to miss the fucking POINT of DRM. The DRM is NOT to stop piracy, its to make that Android device fucking useless to Joe and Jane average so they will buy a Kindle, duh!
I mean the way guys here talk you'd think that all these companies are so damned stupid they have never heard of TPB but I have news for ya, they already know about TPB, P2P, even USENET which you seem to think is off the radar but it ain't. The DRM has never and will never be for stopping the actual pirates, instead it real purpose is to make it just enough of a PITA that the corp can get you to do what they want.
But its really no different than how my ISP uses caps to keep me using their services over the other guy (Netflix counts, their PPV doesn't) because they know that for every user that will go through the hassle of finding the shit on TPB, risk getting a strike, download that shit, hope they don't get slapped by a cap, and watch the show there are gonna be 300+ that say "fuck that, that is too much work" and just buy a Kindle. That is the point, that is why they don't give a rat's ass about the 2% or whatever that are using Linux because you aren't giving them Kindle money so why SHOULD they give a shit about you, at the end of the day the DRM is doing exactly what its intended to do, raise sales of the Kindle.
Anyone want to bet we'll see a spike in Kindle sales for the next couple of quarters?
But you see to pull something like that off you have to be smart enough to add a layer of sarcasm and self parody to make something like that work.
Now prepare to be depressed...the * Movie franchise, Epic, Date, etc has made nearly half a BILLION dollars so far. If you have ever watched one you know that they can be used by the CIA for torturing prisoners, it is actually painful to sit through.
But that is sadly the world we now find ourselves in, a world where the "non jokes" of the * Movies are considered comedy gold. you watch the latest Simpsons and Futurama its damned near that bad, all the jokes are just bottom of the barrel toilet humor or the level of an SNL skit, just pathetic.
You know who I blame? Michael Bay, the man that I honestly believe is trying to "punk" the planet and is sitting in his office dejected that nobody caught him or called him out on it. I mean how could anybody look at Skids and Mudflap, which are right out of 1940s blackface comedy, and not realize Bay is trying to see how far he can go before he gets called out on it?
I have a feeling he is sitting there going "God damn it! I give them 3D ass, giant robo-nuts, and an hour of Shia Lebeef and the "bad joke parents" and everybody thinks I'm fucking serious? Fuck it next movie will have TWO HOURS of wacky parents and a character called "hong fong ching chong" and I will swear its a serious film...surely to God somebody will call me out on it next time!"
This is why I actually feel a little sorry for Bay, I think sarcasm just drips from his pen but his audience is so damned STUPID that they don't get the joke, man that HAS to hurt.
And what is wrong with that? Give old Monty some credit, the man managed to sell the product and keep it at the same time so at the end of the day all the corp ended up with was a now worthless name! That is fucking brilliant! How he managed to get the corp to agree to buy without a non compete clause i don't know, probably by being just that fucking slick, but its a trick worthy of playing the WB "sucker!" music at Oracle, damned smart if you ask me.
Sadly that is true and why FOSS will ALWAYS suck for anything bigger than a project that can be done by a handful in a garage, its a problem I noted years ago and gave the name "Busted shitter problem".
You see if I ask for somebody to paint me a picture or sculpt me a bust or write a song for free? I will get several offers, some of which might even be really good. If I ask someone to come fix that overflowing shitter for free? Well I better get used to pissing in the sink.
What does that have to do with FOSS? Its actually quite simple in that for every decent programming job you have a dozen shitty jobs which is why companies like Apple, MSFT, and even Red Hat have to offer competitive salaries, because nobody wants to do a shitty job for free. But sadly when you are talking about a project run SOLELY with volunteers you just won't see those jobs get done, nobody wants to fix the busted shitters. Don't take my word for it, go look at the bug tracker of any major distro...do you have bugs that are TWO years old? THREE years old? Do I hear FOUR? The bug tracker will have bugs as old as the distro itself because those bugs are shitty and would take a hell of a lot of work to fix and thus don't get done.
In a way its a lot like communism in on the surface communism sounds great, I mean everybody working together to make their their lives and the world a better place? How could that be bad? Well what you end up with is a billion artists and nobody doing the job cleaning up the puke at the Chuck E Cheese. It got so bad that the USSR had to actually assign soldiers to "potato duty" which was all the shitty jobs they couldn't get the people to do, but large FOSS projects don't have that luxury.
I'm sure every programmer here will instantly mod me down because they don't like to think that their job is shitty, but c'mon dudes, it really is. Bug hunts, regression testing, writing docs, dealing with those little weird errors that just seem to pop up in corner cases and are maddening to track down...those are shitty jobs. This is why you see so many new releases in FOSS when the previous one hasn't even had half the bugs fixed so they are adding new bugs onto old bugs because writing new programs? That is enjoyable, making something with your own two hands is something we humans have enjoyed and took pleasure in for thousands of years, being the guy that has to widen the ditch because the sewage is backing up? Not so much.
Nice to see I'm not the only one to think that, because 1.-They weren't using Oracle in the first place, they were using their own fork of MySQL, and 2.- They didn't have any reason to give a crap since again, they had their own fork which its not like Oracle can send them a C&D for forking a FOSS program.
So if they would have said "Look we are switching because the features we made the fork for are being included in MariaDB thus saving us money" or something like that? Cool, makes sense, smart move. But doing this because of political bullshit? Let old Jimmy pay for that shit, because that is just stupid.
Wow, you REALLY don't know squat, do you? What made USB explode was NOT Jobs or that funky iMac, which FYI nobody but MacHeads bought or gave a crap about which is why Apple is a consumer electronics company and not a major PC company, it was the fact that it made a butt simple replacement for gameports and serial ports which meant there was two less (VERY expensive to wire BTW) ports that the OEMs had to include and thus let them undercut the competition. By as early as 97 I was seeing Gateway and eMachine systems with neither a gameport nor a serial port and by 99 parallel ports were gone for most of the systems that weren't targeted at enterprise like Optiplex.
So sorry, St. Steve of Cupertino didn't have jack diddle shit to do with USB, if he did he would have pushed FW as he was making a buck a port and Apple was seriously hurting at the time, nope what made USB explode was it was a hell of a lot cheaper to just slap a couple of USB ports on than it was to put on a gameport AND a serial AND a parallel. In fact the only change that one can even kinda sorta give credit to the iMac was ending floppies but even then I think it had more to do with the fact that all the OEMs outsourced floppies to China which turned them into shit than anything else. Hell in 03 I paid like $300 for a 64Mb flash stick just to get the fuck away from floppies because thanks to outsourcing we were throwing away 6 out of a 10 pack of floppies on first use, they were THAT shitty.
Haven't messed with XP Mode I take it? Its more like an application level VM, so the ONLY way they are gonna launch anything is by launching that particular app and frankly with group policy you can make XP as locked down as you want, want ONLY that program to run? Really not a problem.
Guys here can bitch and whine about MSFT all damned day but the simple fact is there is NOBODY that offers what they do for the small business market, nobody. To get the kind of fine grained control you have on even a 13 year old OS like XP on Linux you have to just throw out the default install (IMHO the entire Linux design is fucked, R-W-E isn't fine grained enough and the replacement is a hack) and build your own OS from scratch based around SELinux and since nearly every app in Linux is built around the R-W-E model and not SELinux you'll be dealing with bugs and workaround until hell freezes over. And of course once you FINALLY get everything working right? Well here comes a half a dozen critical security updates that break more than they fix and are again based on R-W-E and thus shit all over SELinux...FUCK!
So if you are talking about Linux? Yeah not possible, Windows? Actually VERY easy to do, hell I could teach my 19 year old how to set up group policies, its very easy to do.
Like what? Brand names please? Because all I've been able to find is the Apple Airport which is not only 3 times what an IPV4 consumer router costs but is insanely overkill for 99% of the consumer market.
I've been looking because I know sooner or later I'm gonna have to switch everybody to IPV6 but frankly the hardware? Just not there for anybody other than enterprise, hell 90%+ of the routers sold at Tiger and Newegg are IPV4 ONLY. So lets see some non Apple brand names, otherwise thou art talking out thy behind.
But WinNT was 32bit so we are right back to the hair splitting again.
What MATTERS is why you and I can go out and buy 4GB and even 8GB of RAM on a single stick without having to take out a loan and that? That was all AMD, before that there really wasn't a point in large RAM sticks because the market was too nice, but with XP X64 and Athlon X2 and Pentium D you finally had a way for anybody to run more than 4GB of RAM and thus RAM sizes exploded.
If it weren't for Win 7 I'd still be running XP X64 BTW, that was a truly great OS and if I wanted to set up a system that needed every cycle for the program like Folding I'd probably go XP X64 over Win 7, it was insanely low resource which made programs just fly on it. Hell I was running it on a Pentium D805 which was a shitty chip and it was just zippy, damned good workstation OS.
Fuck ground water, have you looked at how many fricking earthquakes AR has had in the last 15 years and then compared it to what the state saw for a century? You can just go yanking shit deep underground without causing serious problems the the stability of the ground above it, you just can't.
Oh and I have dealt a little with the wildcatters and what you need to know is they can get away with anything because they set their businesses up from the start to be liability proof, which frankly ought to tell you something. The wildcatters OWN NOTHING as they have it set up so the least their gear, down to the last stapler, from a shell corp they have set up overseas. Its all bullshit, same guys own both corps, its set up that way so if they poison a town or seriously fuck shit up someplace they can just "burn" the original company (with zero penalty) and then make a new one the same day with a different name but the same people and equipment because that gear is owned by the shell corp.
Its a great scam, we had some wildcatters disappear owing more than a quarter mil to several businesses and I got some nice deals picking through their corpses at auction but the wildcatters themselves? They just burnt the company and the next town over set up anew with the new name, hell of a scam they got going, practically free money and no risks.
Thunderbolt will be just as dead as Firewire, sorry. I mean do you see the mainstream OEMs slapping TB ports into everything? Hell do you see any other than Apple using them in any significant amounts?
Like it or not Apple simply doesn't have the numbers to force through a change simply because they use it, you can argue whether this is by design and Steve Jobs wanted Apple to be an elite brand like Prada or if they just like the really high margins for even old hardware more than they want customers but honestly it don't matter, what matters is that every laptop and desktop under the sun comes with USB ports and you'd be hard pressed to walk into any retailer and find a non Mac that uses TB. Thanks to Jobs overcharging on FW ports USB has become a billion dollar business so you REALLY need to have a mega popular port just to overcome inertia and we just aren't seeing it down here on the retail level, sorry.
I predict that just as we saw with FW other than a couple of vendors who'll make you pay out the nose for a device that works with TB only Apple will use it in any amount and even then only until USB catches up and then like FW they will quietly let it die.
Please elaborate because i'm not seeing the problem here. the VM will be behind NAT and have a firewall ONLY letting it contact the place required for work so unless the server on the other end gets hacked (which if that happens its really a moot point) I don't see what kind of threat you'd have to worry about.
Of course this is why I think the guys that set up IPV6 are morons as NAT is VERY useful for keeping local devices local EXCEPT in a few use cases that you define, nothing I've seen in IPV6 would allow that fine of a control without spending a shitload on a pro firewall appliance but as long as they have the VM behind NAT and a firewall i really don't see what the threat is. After all its not like they are gonna be surfing on the thing, you could even use something like NLite if you are really paranoid and get rid of anything you don't need at the OS level.
But maybe you know something I don't, I have a headache so I may just be missing something here, but I just don't see how the VM is gonna magically get infected by only running a single program with very limited Internet access,
And how many people actually owned a SPARC, POWER, or Itanic for that matter? Then it really doesn't matter does it as we can play this game all damned day with chips.
What matters is not only did AMD bring 64bit to the masses, thus paving the way for having large amounts of RAM without bad hacks like PAE or using RAMdisks but they also paved the way for making large RAM sticks for the masses which is why so many of us have oodles of RAM,hell even my netbook has 8GB of RAM which before 64bit went mainstream was unheard of outside the enterprise.
So lets hear it for AMD, if it weren't for them you'd be stuck on the Itanic.
Question: why do you think repairs under XP are not allowed? because I've done it a bazillion times and the worst I've had to do is 5 minutes on the phone with a MSFT rep. I simply say "The board blew out a cap so I replaced it" and that is pretty much the end of that, as long as you have the sticker on the side so you can prove you bought the OS if you get a BSA audit its really not a big whoop.
Hell I'm typing this on my home machine which is OEM Win 7 and pretty much the ONLY original part left is the case, I didn't even need to use the phone number, just let it call the activation servers. So I really don't know why you'd think you can't fix a broken system as even their EULA only mentions not transferring the license to another system, I doubt seriously a "no repair" clause would even stand up in court.
IIRC and its been a couple of years since I had to set up XP Mode on Win 7 for a business as most of my business customers switched within 6 months of release, but I do believe that XP mode adheres to the Win 7 firewall rules which means you can get as fine grained as you want and only allow the software running on XP Mode access to just the site/sites it requires.
That is one thing I really have to hand to the Win 7 devs, they made it easy to be as coarse or fine as you needed with the firewall instead of the useless XP "on or off" way of doing things.
Sure it does, if its a local VM and isn't allowed on the net how is it gonna get infected?
I had a lot of small businesses that took a "if it ain't broke" attitude until I showed them just how much all those P4s running XP really costs, you'd be surprised how many think "A PC is a PC" and don't realize how truly shit the Pentiium 4 really was. between Intel just not giving a shit about power usage (to the point that many of the low end chips even had speedstep disabled so they run full blast 24/7) to the amount of wasted cycles due to truly shitty performance (whomever designed a 31 fricking stage pipeline should have been shot) that is so bad that an Atom or Bobcat dual core can beat it. If there is one chip that can't go to the dump fast enough it is the Pentium 4 and hopefully the death of XP will finally put all those Pentium 4s onto the junk heap where they belong.
There isn't any reason if they have specialized software they can't just slap it on an XP VM, there is even software that will just clone the existing and turn that into a VM which really comes in handy when you are talking about a system with years of software accumulation or software that is a royal PITA to get set up. If its like the last doctor's office I switched out you are talking about 8 to 20 Prescott and Cedar Mill P4s, swapping those out for ULV Athlon duals made a pretty big difference when it came to the heat, noise, and electricity.
And that statement is as stupid as saying if you play three card monty a thousand more times you are sure to win.
For voting to actually do jack shit you have to have something to vote FOR and what we have in the states isn't even Coke V Pepsi anymore, its Coke in a bottle V Coke in a can. Any and all attempts at a grass roots movement on a national level WILL be quashed by the MSM, for an example look up "Jon Stewart Ron Paul" which even though Stewart doesn't agree with Paul on squat (and neither do i, I find libertarianism quite nasty) even he was quick to point out using the MSM footage just how badly it was rigged. The amount of sentence tap dancing they had to do to keep Paul "He who would not be named" would have been comical if not for the fact that you were watching the primary being tilted by the corporate masters of the MSM, it got to the point one of the reporters even says "We are talking about Palin and Christie, who aren't even running, and nobody is talking about Paul who is doing great in the polls here" and the anchor got a douchebag smirk and says "If you get footage of Palin or Christie send it in, you can keep the Paul stuff"
So it is NOT "mindless cynicism" to face reality and reality has shown time and time again that all you can do in American politics anymore is change the figureheads, the power behind the throne is still making the calls no matter which lackey is in the seat. As the late great Bill Hicks said more than 20 years ago " I believe the puppet on the left shares MY beliefs, well i believe the puppet on the right has MY interests at heart...hey there is one guy controlling both puppets!"
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Nope, didn't see a single bondi blue buttplug or anything else for that matter because as I already said nobody gave a shit about the iMac but the macheads because at the time Apple was half dead and all but the most faithful to St. Steve had left the building, hence why they had to bring St Steve back.
And the ONLY reason why it hadn't taken over by 97/98 was the simple fact that Windows 98 couldn't do plug and play as the famous video of Win98 BSODing on Bill Gates demonstrated all too well. Now those of us who did business as well as consumer sales? We had a ton of USB devices because WinNT did do plug and play because the drivers were isolated from the kernel so if the driver crapped it didn't take out the whole OS. Considering the iMac was running 8.1 they weren't much better off anyway.
But when the USB ports exploded was around 2001 when...drumroll...WinXP came along and made plug and play a reality. They had gained in the business sector before that thanks to NT/2K but XP is what really made it explode. But just FYI Apple wasn't even the only one doing the whole "all in one USB only" bit as Gateway had the Astro line targeted at SMBs and SOHOs which only had a CD-ROM and USB ports, early 98 IIRC as I'm pretty sure it wasn't 98SE. One of our big sellers at the time was a USB burner and USB hubs to add to the Astro as the way it was built one couldn't change out the drive without taking a dremel to the front and it didn't have enough ports for the keyboard AND mouse AND a burner.
At the time I was working at the state capital and got to play with all the latest gear and frankly the iMac? It wasn't even on the radar NOBODY had it, in fact I never even got to see one until several years later when I spotted one at a yard sale in a college town. I did end up being given the B&W G3 tower which I have in the closet at the shop, I really need to get off my ass and either throw it away or do as I originally planned and gut it to build a nice dual or triple core in the case, as it is a pretty case.
But seriously dude nobody but the faithful gave a rat's ass about Apple until the iPod exploded, before that any Apple systems were as rare as hen's teeth in the flyover states. maybe you are on the coast, i heard they were big there, but in the heartland they didn't sell for shit, and they sure as hell wasn't driving USB adoption, that was the shitty floppies and the OEMs killing expensive ports for dirt cheap USB ports. Ironically now even the PS/2 port is starting to become endangered as these companies try to wring every last penny they can from the margins,I have to keep a USB setup at the shop just to deal with the cheap Dells and HPs because they don't come with anything but USB now and they won't take a USB to PS2 adapter, neither will the G3 BTW which is why its sitting in the closet instead of being played with at the shop.
Some use is, some use ain't, the statement is the same either way and if one was gonna be a grammar nazi you think you'd be bitching about using ain't, although as a southerner I ain't got a problem with that word ;-)
Hit by a fricking wall of water several times larger than anybody had ever planned for and if it weren't for the fact that they put the generators in the basement there is a good chance it wouldn't have had an accident at all?
Yeah I'd call that pretty damned good, especially when our choices are that or burning fossil fuels..no renewables will NOT cut it, even the most pie in the sky estimates won't give us even 30% of the energy we are using NOW, much less give us jack shit for growth.
Does that mean we shouldn't build safer nuclear plants? Or sink money into R&D on renewables? Of course not, in fact I think we should be sinking more money into both instead of blowing cash playing the world's policeman, but you have to face reality and the reality is unless you are gonna wipe out a good 70% of the population on planet earth you are gonna need power and so far we haven't come up with anything that fills that need as good as nuclear.
Of course that is ignoring the fact that the USA has been crippled by the NIMBYs, you name it they cockblock it, in fact China will have a couple of dozen plants built before we can even get a single one built thanks to the NIMBYs. You name the source NIMBYs will find a reason to bitch, nuclear? "It'll make us glow in the dark ZOMG!" hydro? "ZOMG you'll kill teh fishes!" wind? "ZOMG its noisy and you'll kill teh birds!" and so on and so on. This is why I actually enjoyed watching California suffer their "energy crisis" and get buttraped by Enron because they have more NIMBYs per square mile than any place on the planet. I mean where do the NIMBYs think all that power they are blowing on their little laptops and AC units is gonna come from if they don't allow any plants to be built? Its just gonna be dropped by the power fairy?
It comes down to TINSTAAFL and the question is simply how you are gonna pay and what you are getting for it. If using FB and Twitter is enough of a "payment" for you to give them all your personal info? I have NO problem with that as long as you know what you are paying and realize that you ARE paying for it, you are just paying for it with data instead of dollars.
Sorry tbit that you don't like the fact that like communism the entire premise of FOSS is built on a flaw, don't blame me that the emperor's balls swing in your face bothers you.
Do I ultimately give a shit WHY Wikipedia changed? Not really, anybody who has had a run in with the "Wikitards" and the deletionists really doesn't give a shit if Jimmy's toy goes down in flames.
What I DO care about is when politics and religion are allowed to overrule common sense, we saw that with communism then, see it now with libertarians not seeing how the end result will ALWAYS be feudalism, and we see it badly with FOSS because as one wise sage put it "Linux is always 3 to 5 years from being ready for the masses...only the 3 to 5 years never changes" and like it or not that is a fact and it ALL comes down to the busted shitter problem. That is why you see systems that are finally getting stable thrown out for alpha quality shit like Pulse and tossing KDE 3 for 4, why amateur hour bugs never seem to go away, why new versions just add new bugs to the old bugs, and why you will find placeholders where important docs should be...it ALL comes down to shitty jobs and the fact that humans just won't take truly shitty jobs for free.
I don't see why the FOSSie faction has a shitfit when i point that out, how often do we see a little guy manage to totally fuck over a big corp just by having the big brass balls to pull it off?
That is why i say give the man some credit folks, he managed to pull a scam worthy of "The Sting" on a huge corp and got a big fat check AND got to keep the thing he was selling! That is fucking brilliant! Give old Monty credit, his balls are big and plentiful to pull something like that off and walk away scott free with a big fat bank account, big and plentiful indeed.
So the answer is beyond simple, just pick up an OEM copy of Win 7 HP and if you really love Linux so much you can dual boot, problem solved. Hell HTPCs are the ONE and ONLY ONE use where I can say Windows 8 is actually good, those fat ass tiles that are so irritating on a desktop are easy as hell to hit with a remote and it makes a nice 10 foot UI for widescreens and on both you can use XBMC as a front end if you really like that UI, personally I prefer WMC but whatever floats your boat.
The only ones that don't have a choice is the Android users which surprise! Was the whole fricking point, sell Joe and Jane Average a kindle over an Android...which I bet works damned well, i bet the sales of kindle will get a bounce after this thus showing what I've been saying for years which is that DRM works great if your goal is to steer consumers where you want them to go. Stopping piracy was a red herring to keep the public from having a shitfit as they couldn't just say "We want to steer you by the nose and this makes that easy" without John and Jane public naturally getting pissed, so making a bogey man named piracy and blaming it all on the bogey man worked out wonderfully.
Wow, way for Linux users to miss the fucking POINT of DRM. The DRM is NOT to stop piracy, its to make that Android device fucking useless to Joe and Jane average so they will buy a Kindle, duh!
I mean the way guys here talk you'd think that all these companies are so damned stupid they have never heard of TPB but I have news for ya, they already know about TPB, P2P, even USENET which you seem to think is off the radar but it ain't. The DRM has never and will never be for stopping the actual pirates, instead it real purpose is to make it just enough of a PITA that the corp can get you to do what they want.
But its really no different than how my ISP uses caps to keep me using their services over the other guy (Netflix counts, their PPV doesn't) because they know that for every user that will go through the hassle of finding the shit on TPB, risk getting a strike, download that shit, hope they don't get slapped by a cap, and watch the show there are gonna be 300+ that say "fuck that, that is too much work" and just buy a Kindle. That is the point, that is why they don't give a rat's ass about the 2% or whatever that are using Linux because you aren't giving them Kindle money so why SHOULD they give a shit about you, at the end of the day the DRM is doing exactly what its intended to do, raise sales of the Kindle.
Anyone want to bet we'll see a spike in Kindle sales for the next couple of quarters?
But you see to pull something like that off you have to be smart enough to add a layer of sarcasm and self parody to make something like that work.
Now prepare to be depressed...the * Movie franchise, Epic, Date, etc has made nearly half a BILLION dollars so far. If you have ever watched one you know that they can be used by the CIA for torturing prisoners, it is actually painful to sit through.
But that is sadly the world we now find ourselves in, a world where the "non jokes" of the * Movies are considered comedy gold. you watch the latest Simpsons and Futurama its damned near that bad, all the jokes are just bottom of the barrel toilet humor or the level of an SNL skit, just pathetic.
You know who I blame? Michael Bay, the man that I honestly believe is trying to "punk" the planet and is sitting in his office dejected that nobody caught him or called him out on it. I mean how could anybody look at Skids and Mudflap, which are right out of 1940s blackface comedy, and not realize Bay is trying to see how far he can go before he gets called out on it?
I have a feeling he is sitting there going "God damn it! I give them 3D ass, giant robo-nuts, and an hour of Shia Lebeef and the "bad joke parents" and everybody thinks I'm fucking serious? Fuck it next movie will have TWO HOURS of wacky parents and a character called "hong fong ching chong" and I will swear its a serious film...surely to God somebody will call me out on it next time!"
This is why I actually feel a little sorry for Bay, I think sarcasm just drips from his pen but his audience is so damned STUPID that they don't get the joke, man that HAS to hurt.
And what is wrong with that? Give old Monty some credit, the man managed to sell the product and keep it at the same time so at the end of the day all the corp ended up with was a now worthless name! That is fucking brilliant! How he managed to get the corp to agree to buy without a non compete clause i don't know, probably by being just that fucking slick, but its a trick worthy of playing the WB "sucker!" music at Oracle, damned smart if you ask me.
Sadly that is true and why FOSS will ALWAYS suck for anything bigger than a project that can be done by a handful in a garage, its a problem I noted years ago and gave the name "Busted shitter problem".
You see if I ask for somebody to paint me a picture or sculpt me a bust or write a song for free? I will get several offers, some of which might even be really good. If I ask someone to come fix that overflowing shitter for free? Well I better get used to pissing in the sink.
What does that have to do with FOSS? Its actually quite simple in that for every decent programming job you have a dozen shitty jobs which is why companies like Apple, MSFT, and even Red Hat have to offer competitive salaries, because nobody wants to do a shitty job for free. But sadly when you are talking about a project run SOLELY with volunteers you just won't see those jobs get done, nobody wants to fix the busted shitters. Don't take my word for it, go look at the bug tracker of any major distro...do you have bugs that are TWO years old? THREE years old? Do I hear FOUR? The bug tracker will have bugs as old as the distro itself because those bugs are shitty and would take a hell of a lot of work to fix and thus don't get done.
In a way its a lot like communism in on the surface communism sounds great, I mean everybody working together to make their their lives and the world a better place? How could that be bad? Well what you end up with is a billion artists and nobody doing the job cleaning up the puke at the Chuck E Cheese. It got so bad that the USSR had to actually assign soldiers to "potato duty" which was all the shitty jobs they couldn't get the people to do, but large FOSS projects don't have that luxury.
I'm sure every programmer here will instantly mod me down because they don't like to think that their job is shitty, but c'mon dudes, it really is. Bug hunts, regression testing, writing docs, dealing with those little weird errors that just seem to pop up in corner cases and are maddening to track down...those are shitty jobs. This is why you see so many new releases in FOSS when the previous one hasn't even had half the bugs fixed so they are adding new bugs onto old bugs because writing new programs? That is enjoyable, making something with your own two hands is something we humans have enjoyed and took pleasure in for thousands of years, being the guy that has to widen the ditch because the sewage is backing up? Not so much.
Nice to see I'm not the only one to think that, because 1.-They weren't using Oracle in the first place, they were using their own fork of MySQL, and 2.- They didn't have any reason to give a crap since again, they had their own fork which its not like Oracle can send them a C&D for forking a FOSS program.
So if they would have said "Look we are switching because the features we made the fork for are being included in MariaDB thus saving us money" or something like that? Cool, makes sense, smart move. But doing this because of political bullshit? Let old Jimmy pay for that shit, because that is just stupid.
Wow, you REALLY don't know squat, do you? What made USB explode was NOT Jobs or that funky iMac, which FYI nobody but MacHeads bought or gave a crap about which is why Apple is a consumer electronics company and not a major PC company, it was the fact that it made a butt simple replacement for gameports and serial ports which meant there was two less (VERY expensive to wire BTW) ports that the OEMs had to include and thus let them undercut the competition. By as early as 97 I was seeing Gateway and eMachine systems with neither a gameport nor a serial port and by 99 parallel ports were gone for most of the systems that weren't targeted at enterprise like Optiplex.
So sorry, St. Steve of Cupertino didn't have jack diddle shit to do with USB, if he did he would have pushed FW as he was making a buck a port and Apple was seriously hurting at the time, nope what made USB explode was it was a hell of a lot cheaper to just slap a couple of USB ports on than it was to put on a gameport AND a serial AND a parallel. In fact the only change that one can even kinda sorta give credit to the iMac was ending floppies but even then I think it had more to do with the fact that all the OEMs outsourced floppies to China which turned them into shit than anything else. Hell in 03 I paid like $300 for a 64Mb flash stick just to get the fuck away from floppies because thanks to outsourcing we were throwing away 6 out of a 10 pack of floppies on first use, they were THAT shitty.
Haven't messed with XP Mode I take it? Its more like an application level VM, so the ONLY way they are gonna launch anything is by launching that particular app and frankly with group policy you can make XP as locked down as you want, want ONLY that program to run? Really not a problem.
Guys here can bitch and whine about MSFT all damned day but the simple fact is there is NOBODY that offers what they do for the small business market, nobody. To get the kind of fine grained control you have on even a 13 year old OS like XP on Linux you have to just throw out the default install (IMHO the entire Linux design is fucked, R-W-E isn't fine grained enough and the replacement is a hack) and build your own OS from scratch based around SELinux and since nearly every app in Linux is built around the R-W-E model and not SELinux you'll be dealing with bugs and workaround until hell freezes over. And of course once you FINALLY get everything working right? Well here comes a half a dozen critical security updates that break more than they fix and are again based on R-W-E and thus shit all over SELinux...FUCK!
So if you are talking about Linux? Yeah not possible, Windows? Actually VERY easy to do, hell I could teach my 19 year old how to set up group policies, its very easy to do.
Like what? Brand names please? Because all I've been able to find is the Apple Airport which is not only 3 times what an IPV4 consumer router costs but is insanely overkill for 99% of the consumer market.
I've been looking because I know sooner or later I'm gonna have to switch everybody to IPV6 but frankly the hardware? Just not there for anybody other than enterprise, hell 90%+ of the routers sold at Tiger and Newegg are IPV4 ONLY. So lets see some non Apple brand names, otherwise thou art talking out thy behind.
But WinNT was 32bit so we are right back to the hair splitting again.
What MATTERS is why you and I can go out and buy 4GB and even 8GB of RAM on a single stick without having to take out a loan and that? That was all AMD, before that there really wasn't a point in large RAM sticks because the market was too nice, but with XP X64 and Athlon X2 and Pentium D you finally had a way for anybody to run more than 4GB of RAM and thus RAM sizes exploded.
If it weren't for Win 7 I'd still be running XP X64 BTW, that was a truly great OS and if I wanted to set up a system that needed every cycle for the program like Folding I'd probably go XP X64 over Win 7, it was insanely low resource which made programs just fly on it. Hell I was running it on a Pentium D805 which was a shitty chip and it was just zippy, damned good workstation OS.
Fuck ground water, have you looked at how many fricking earthquakes AR has had in the last 15 years and then compared it to what the state saw for a century? You can just go yanking shit deep underground without causing serious problems the the stability of the ground above it, you just can't.
Oh and I have dealt a little with the wildcatters and what you need to know is they can get away with anything because they set their businesses up from the start to be liability proof, which frankly ought to tell you something. The wildcatters OWN NOTHING as they have it set up so the least their gear, down to the last stapler, from a shell corp they have set up overseas. Its all bullshit, same guys own both corps, its set up that way so if they poison a town or seriously fuck shit up someplace they can just "burn" the original company (with zero penalty) and then make a new one the same day with a different name but the same people and equipment because that gear is owned by the shell corp.
Its a great scam, we had some wildcatters disappear owing more than a quarter mil to several businesses and I got some nice deals picking through their corpses at auction but the wildcatters themselves? They just burnt the company and the next town over set up anew with the new name, hell of a scam they got going, practically free money and no risks.
Thunderbolt will be just as dead as Firewire, sorry. I mean do you see the mainstream OEMs slapping TB ports into everything? Hell do you see any other than Apple using them in any significant amounts?
Like it or not Apple simply doesn't have the numbers to force through a change simply because they use it, you can argue whether this is by design and Steve Jobs wanted Apple to be an elite brand like Prada or if they just like the really high margins for even old hardware more than they want customers but honestly it don't matter, what matters is that every laptop and desktop under the sun comes with USB ports and you'd be hard pressed to walk into any retailer and find a non Mac that uses TB. Thanks to Jobs overcharging on FW ports USB has become a billion dollar business so you REALLY need to have a mega popular port just to overcome inertia and we just aren't seeing it down here on the retail level, sorry.
I predict that just as we saw with FW other than a couple of vendors who'll make you pay out the nose for a device that works with TB only Apple will use it in any amount and even then only until USB catches up and then like FW they will quietly let it die.
Please elaborate because i'm not seeing the problem here. the VM will be behind NAT and have a firewall ONLY letting it contact the place required for work so unless the server on the other end gets hacked (which if that happens its really a moot point) I don't see what kind of threat you'd have to worry about.
Of course this is why I think the guys that set up IPV6 are morons as NAT is VERY useful for keeping local devices local EXCEPT in a few use cases that you define, nothing I've seen in IPV6 would allow that fine of a control without spending a shitload on a pro firewall appliance but as long as they have the VM behind NAT and a firewall i really don't see what the threat is. After all its not like they are gonna be surfing on the thing, you could even use something like NLite if you are really paranoid and get rid of anything you don't need at the OS level.
But maybe you know something I don't, I have a headache so I may just be missing something here, but I just don't see how the VM is gonna magically get infected by only running a single program with very limited Internet access,
And how many people actually owned a SPARC, POWER, or Itanic for that matter? Then it really doesn't matter does it as we can play this game all damned day with chips.
What matters is not only did AMD bring 64bit to the masses, thus paving the way for having large amounts of RAM without bad hacks like PAE or using RAMdisks but they also paved the way for making large RAM sticks for the masses which is why so many of us have oodles of RAM,hell even my netbook has 8GB of RAM which before 64bit went mainstream was unheard of outside the enterprise.
So lets hear it for AMD, if it weren't for them you'd be stuck on the Itanic.
Question: why do you think repairs under XP are not allowed? because I've done it a bazillion times and the worst I've had to do is 5 minutes on the phone with a MSFT rep. I simply say "The board blew out a cap so I replaced it" and that is pretty much the end of that, as long as you have the sticker on the side so you can prove you bought the OS if you get a BSA audit its really not a big whoop.
Hell I'm typing this on my home machine which is OEM Win 7 and pretty much the ONLY original part left is the case, I didn't even need to use the phone number, just let it call the activation servers. So I really don't know why you'd think you can't fix a broken system as even their EULA only mentions not transferring the license to another system, I doubt seriously a "no repair" clause would even stand up in court.
IIRC and its been a couple of years since I had to set up XP Mode on Win 7 for a business as most of my business customers switched within 6 months of release, but I do believe that XP mode adheres to the Win 7 firewall rules which means you can get as fine grained as you want and only allow the software running on XP Mode access to just the site/sites it requires.
That is one thing I really have to hand to the Win 7 devs, they made it easy to be as coarse or fine as you needed with the firewall instead of the useless XP "on or off" way of doing things.
Sure it does, if its a local VM and isn't allowed on the net how is it gonna get infected?
I had a lot of small businesses that took a "if it ain't broke" attitude until I showed them just how much all those P4s running XP really costs, you'd be surprised how many think "A PC is a PC" and don't realize how truly shit the Pentiium 4 really was. between Intel just not giving a shit about power usage (to the point that many of the low end chips even had speedstep disabled so they run full blast 24/7) to the amount of wasted cycles due to truly shitty performance (whomever designed a 31 fricking stage pipeline should have been shot) that is so bad that an Atom or Bobcat dual core can beat it. If there is one chip that can't go to the dump fast enough it is the Pentium 4 and hopefully the death of XP will finally put all those Pentium 4s onto the junk heap where they belong.
There isn't any reason if they have specialized software they can't just slap it on an XP VM, there is even software that will just clone the existing and turn that into a VM which really comes in handy when you are talking about a system with years of software accumulation or software that is a royal PITA to get set up. If its like the last doctor's office I switched out you are talking about 8 to 20 Prescott and Cedar Mill P4s, swapping those out for ULV Athlon duals made a pretty big difference when it came to the heat, noise, and electricity.
And that statement is as stupid as saying if you play three card monty a thousand more times you are sure to win.
For voting to actually do jack shit you have to have something to vote FOR and what we have in the states isn't even Coke V Pepsi anymore, its Coke in a bottle V Coke in a can. Any and all attempts at a grass roots movement on a national level WILL be quashed by the MSM, for an example look up "Jon Stewart Ron Paul" which even though Stewart doesn't agree with Paul on squat (and neither do i, I find libertarianism quite nasty) even he was quick to point out using the MSM footage just how badly it was rigged. The amount of sentence tap dancing they had to do to keep Paul "He who would not be named" would have been comical if not for the fact that you were watching the primary being tilted by the corporate masters of the MSM, it got to the point one of the reporters even says "We are talking about Palin and Christie, who aren't even running, and nobody is talking about Paul who is doing great in the polls here" and the anchor got a douchebag smirk and says "If you get footage of Palin or Christie send it in, you can keep the Paul stuff"
So it is NOT "mindless cynicism" to face reality and reality has shown time and time again that all you can do in American politics anymore is change the figureheads, the power behind the throne is still making the calls no matter which lackey is in the seat. As the late great Bill Hicks said more than 20 years ago " I believe the puppet on the left shares MY beliefs, well i believe the puppet on the right has MY interests at heart...hey there is one guy controlling both puppets!"