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  1. Re:Hell on power supplies on USB SuperSpeed Power Spec To Leap From 10W To 100W · · Score: 1

    And then you can marvel at your support costs shooting through the roof because 'I bought this TV because it has 4 ports but only 2 work at a time!"

    This is why I think every geek and engineer should have to work at a job directly supporting the consumer at least once because you really wouldn't say things like that if you had actually had to support consumers before. The nice thing about USB is its so brain dead simple to use but this is gonna take what was simple and easy and make it a complex PITA unless the OEMs just ignore it.

  2. Re:or firewire? on USB SuperSpeed Power Spec To Leap From 10W To 100W · · Score: 2

    Apple fucked Firewire which is why its dead now. For anybody that wondered why Firewire never went anywhere, even at a time when it could just curbstomp USB, the reason why was simple in that Apple charged a buck a port to the OEMs and peripheral manufacturers while Intel practically gave away USB. When you are talking about razor thin margins every dime counts so they went with the "good enough and cheap" over the "fast and expensive" solution.

    So I'm sorry but Firewire is as dead as floppies, USB won ages ago and isn't going anywhere.

  3. Re:Souls crushed, while you wait! on Futurama Cancelled (Again) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That is easy to explain, the constant bashing of your skull with reality shit like Honey Boo Boo has left you brain damaged so that even half ass jokes are funny.

    But if you compare the first couple of season of both shows to recent episodes there really is no comparison as it was MUCH funnier and written better in those first seasons than it is now. You are simply so horribly pummeled by the reality dreck that honestly anything actually written and having a punchline will seem like the best of Richard Pryor compared to the white trash fights and farting that is considered humor today.

    Personally I'm waiting for "Ass:The Movie" or "Oww my balls" to air because it feels like we have just about dumbed down that damned far.

  4. Re:Slippery slope? on Bruce Schneier On the Marathon Bomber Manhunt · · Score: 1

    WTF has the Boston bombing got to do with a damned thing? Are you fucking stoned? Nobody even mentions the fucking Boston bombing in the thread and just as we have seen TFA be about security and the thread be about cars just having something in the title does NOT man that is what we are gonna discuss and here you are...what? Trying to get some karma points for bringing up shit nobody is even talking about?

    Since you seem to have the inability to follow a conversation allow me to spell it out, 1.-Poster says closing the state cost the state more than it saved, 2.- I pointed out thanks to there being so many Darwin award candidates that will sue if you don't keep their dumb asses from doing something stupid its quite possible they SAVED more than they lost because of not only the cost of the first responders but also of the huge pile of lawsuits that ALWAYS happen, 3.- You go off into a tangent about tort reform that has fuck all to do with shit as NOBODY said a God damned thing about tort reform, merely pointing out a problem DOES NOT MEAN that they are gonna support a half baked "solution" that again NOBODY BROUGHT UP IN THE FIRST PLACE...got it now?

    The entire conversation didn't have jack shit with tort reform, you might as well have posted "And I like bunnies!" for all it had to do with the thread, unless of course you were trying to show with your posts what a Darwin award candidate looks like, in that case congrats, great job. still doesn't have a fucking thing to do with what me and the others were discussing.

  5. Re:Come on CEO... on Microsoft CFO Quits · · Score: 1

    The bitch is it wouldn't be hard at all to fix the company if you had a CEO with just a sliver of common sense. make TIFKAM completely optional and give Win 8 and Win 9 a full Win 7 desktop for those that don't want TIFKAM and that would solve the major hurdle for Windows 8, take a page not from Apple but from IBM and sell services to go with the software, and either spin off or isolate mobile and entertainment from Windows and Office so that there won't be any pressure to try to sell Windows and Office where they just don't fit.

    And I did come up with an analogy after thinking of it for awhile...AOL. The former head of Nullsoft talked about how AOL just killed the forward momentum of WinAmp by trying to tie everything to "the service" which was not only stupid as WinAmp users weren't gonna want nor use AOHell dialup but by trying to jam it down their throats caused them to abandon WinAmp en masse.

    We are seeing the same thing with MSFT, they are trying to tie their WinPhone UI to a desktop where it not only isn't wanted but likewise is running off customers en masse but you have them trying to fit everything into that Windows/Office mindset, just look at how they thought bundling Office into WinRT would be a selling point when consumers don't give a rat's ass about MS Office. No matter how you slice it though they had better change direction because the current path has them being RIM in less than 5 years.

  6. Re:Good news everyone! on Futurama Cancelled (Again) · · Score: 1

    Compared to the first couple of seasons? Yeah they were pretty terrible. I didn't keep up with the show enough to know what was going on behind the scenes, did they lose their writers or was it a case of them just running out of gas?

    In any case if the quality is gonna keep falling like that maybe its better just to let it go rather than drag the Futurama name through the mud.

  7. Re:Come on CEO... on Microsoft CFO Quits · · Score: 2

    Allchin or Ozzie or Russinovich. frankly any of those could run the company better, they know the products inside and out (hell Russinovich frankly knows the guts of Windows better than a good chunk of their engineers which is why MSFT bought Sysinternals) and I have NO doubt any of those could do a better job than the Ballminator.

  8. Re:Come on CEO... on Microsoft CFO Quits · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Its not that, its the fact that time and time again he has ignored all the data including their testers, the press, and most importantly their customers, and its cost the company billions.

    I mean why in the fuck even HAVE a beta tester program if you are gonna go "LA LA LA" to every single problem the testers point out? And while you certainly can't always go by the press, as for one thing they all seem enamored so much with smartphones they actually believe people are gonna give up their desktops and laptops for them, but when you have virtually the entire press and blogosphere saying "THIS REALLY SUCKS!" ya know what? it probably DOES really suck and needs to be fixed.

    Yet time and time again he has given the finger to all that aren't drinking the koolaid and its cost them billions.They blew billions of the Vista launch only for it to become the punchline of jokes when all they needed was to fix the more serious issues before launch, blew 8 billion on Skype only to realize they had no damned idea how to monetize it and to make matter worse forced a good chunk of their most loyal users to switch (see the recent uptick in yahoo, I can tell you its the former Hotmail and Windows messenger users jumping ship) because they tried to hamhandedly jam Skype in where it just didn't fit, and of course the billions spent on windows 8 ads when practically every single beta tester and tech blogger was saying its gonna fricking bomb, which what do you know, it did.

    Honestly i don't even know who to compare Ballmer to as i can't think of a CEO that completely ignored everything they were being told, never before have I seen a company so large just whip out a gun and shoot themselves in the head like that. Everyone said Elop was a plant but look at who he learned from folks, Ballmer could be the subject of textbooks dedicated to showing how NOT to run a successful company. When he took over from Gates they were on top of the world, had a monopoly and money to burn, but under Ballmer it became a "lost decade" because he simply didn't know what to do with the company.

  9. Re:Dream on. on Omnidirectional Treadmill: The Ultimate FPS Input Device? · · Score: 2

    I wish I could remember the damned name of the show so I could look up the video online, because the reason i said "uncanny valley" is because that is what the programmer called it as he said with the test subjects if they "dumb down" the graphics to Quake 3 levels the testers didn't feel pukey, even with rocket jumping and fast running, but when they cranked it up to a more modern level THAT is when the testers started getting all pukey.

    So maybe there is a minimum quality level that has to be hit before the motion sickness kicks in, maybe its like the programmer said that when you get to a certain level of realism the fact that your senses aren't getting what you would normally get in that situation, such as wind and the heat of the sun, throws the brain enough of a curveball to make you get sick, fuck if I know. all i know is the guy was kicking ass when it was on the big projector and not getting pukey but the same level of the same game with the glasses and treadmill had him green around the gills in under a half an hour.

    Oh and as an interesting little side effect he noted that those with any kind of heart problem or anxiety problems should REALLY not use one, as he said he can play a shooter with shit jumping out all day long and not be phased but with this thing he was getting full "fight or flight" like he really was in combat. 30 minutes in the thing had him completely worn out.

  10. Re:Come on CEO... on Microsoft CFO Quits · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Sorry Taco but he really IS the problem. I mean look at their track record under his watch, how many hits have they had? One and a half, Win 7 and X360 (which should only count as a half thanks to the 2.4 billion the RRoD cost) and now lets look at just a PARTIAL list of the failures...Zune, Kin, killing a growing playsforsure market for the DOA Zune market, Sidekick, Vista, 6 billion pissed away for that ad company that went nowhere, more money pissed away for Yahoo Search, 4 billion blown on the Windows 8 launch to get less than 4 million takers (which figures up to $500 for every $40 copy sold,hell he could have just gave everyone $50 for taking it and came out ahead) and WinRT.

    You wanna know the part that REALLY pisses me off? If the rumors are true thanks to Ballmer getting on his knees and begging Intel to save his behind there is a damned good chance Intel can save the Win 8 Vistabomb which will keep his fat ass in the big chair for at least one more release, thanks a fricking lot Intel. For those that haven't heard the rumor is a dual core Atom tablet with Windows 8 for just $225. If they manage to hit that price point you are gonna see a hell of an uptake simply because you won't be able to get anything that will run your Windows software for cheaper and if the new Atom's sub 2w power usage is correct we may actually finally get an all day laptop since they'll most likely sell a keyboard with extra battery ala the transformer.

    But even if Intel manages to save his fat hide it won't change the fact that windows 8 is DOA on desktops and laptops, hell its bad enough all the major hardware sites have "Not ready to switch? We have Windows 7!" ads...the guy is a trainwreck of a CEO, no doubt about it. You could have hired a monkey to throw poo at the stock page and had a better ROI than Ballmer had, he must have blown 20 billion plus these past 6 years and didn't have squat for a ROI.

    Frankly the only positive is if Intel manages to save his fat ass and give him a tablet that sells maybe he will STFU and let Windows 9 be Windows 7.1 but if he sticks to the road he has the company on he can kiss those piles of money they get from X86 desktops and laptops bye bye as all the OEMs are looking at exit strategies. You know that your CEO is made of suck when he actually loses share in a monopoly situation, hell my mom could run the company better than he has.

  11. Re:Bashing? on Happy Hardware Freedom Day · · Score: 1

    Really? MSFT already owns more than 90% of the desktop market so pretty much their ONLY real shot at growth will be by wiping out the pirates. hell in some countries you are looking at over 50% Windows piracy figures.

    Now is this the way I personally would have went after it? Fuck no, i think there is a MUCH easier way and what is more being a little shop guy i could see it actually working here on the ground and that was Win 7 HP for $50 (or the equivalent in whatever country you are talking about) only I would have even went one further by offering Win 7 Starter for $35 to encourage those with older machines to switch As long as Windows Home was offered at $50 I saw piracy disappear, all the boxes crossing my desk were 100% legit. The SECOND Windows Home went back up to $100? I started seeing $200 PCs with $400 copies of Windows Ultimate installed.

    Secureboot is just MSFT's way to try to fuck the pirates while keeping prices high, Secureboot lets the BSA spot which systems need a closer look at the license quickly and easily (because your average Windows user isn't gonna kill SB as it doesn't affect them) but without it I could sit 100 boxes in front of you and tell you that 30% are pirate versions and it would take ages to figure out which was what because as I said the modern pirate version not only passes WGA but will silently hide any updates to WGA so that the end user will frankly never know they are using a pirated OS. This is a pretty large problem when it comes to small shops and online sellers, your average guy simply has no way to tell if its legit or fake, I saw an interview once where Ballmer held up a pirated version they seized off a boat and even the holo-sticker looked 100% legit.

    But if you think Linux is gaining squat I have some magic beans you might be interested in as its been flatline for more than 3 years now. the reason why is simple, Linux devs are prima donna assholes that not only don't talk to each other but have the WORST timing ever, look at how right as Vista was being released they killed the feature rich and stable KDE 3 and Gnome 2 for some buggy as shit replacements along with gutting ALSA for Pulse that to this very day is more likely to break sound on update as not. This is why NO B&M store carries a single Linux unit and why everyone from Asus to Walmart who have tried offering Linux on retail machines ended up walking away. Hell even I tried my hand at it, figuring a new Linux would be better than a decade old WinXP..its really not, sorry. I ended up losing money on the deal because of all the after sale support due to shit breaking. The final straw was when I went to the forums and was told several times to disable all updates including security patches.

    Honestly the only place Ballmer has to worry about Linux is in the server room and its his own damned fault as they have been gouging the living shit out of the business market (as one poster noted here not too long ago for the datacenter edition he is paying over $16,000 for a single license and then crazy prices for CALs on top of it) which leads to corps being willing to pay some Linux guru 6 figures to deal with the bullshit that is Linux, not to mention the fact that since most servers are run headless all the BS that goes with Linux such as the buggy sound and graphics drivers and DE flip flopping really doesn't come into play.

    But even with all the money Google has spent and OEMs offering the entry models at HALF of what their entry Windows models are ChromeOS hasn't gained shit, Ubuntu hasn't gained shit, if you want I could post the netstat charts for the last 4 years and show you Linux has been dead in the consumer space but I have a feeling you already know this. Nope Secureboot makes it easier to spot the pirates while giving the BSA something to look for in audits, again not the way I would have gone after pirates but its a free country and if MSFT wants to risk losing customers or having Win 8 flop thanks to DRM? That is their choice and as long as its trivial to disable who cares.

  12. Re:Dream on. on Omnidirectional Treadmill: The Ultimate FPS Input Device? · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I saw something similar on a future tech show and the problem you are gonna run into is the "puke factor".

    Basically there is an uncanny valley for environments just as there is for bots and when you get beyond a certain point your brain senses that something is "off" about a place and you'll start feeling pukey. The guy trying it on the future show was big into both 3D and FPSes but when they put him in this game, complete with plastic gun that let him aim and fire in game? Within 30 minutes he had to get off because he was getting sick at his stomach, there was enough little things wrong with the computer environment that even though it looked like the latest Call Of Duty realistic shooter it still gave him something akin to vertigo.

    So I have a feeling that unless you dumb down the graphics enough that your brain goes "Bah it is just a game" you are gonna have a lot of folks that did like the reviewer on that show and have to hang onto the walls until the queasy sick feeling goes away. The brain knows its fake when you are just sitting on your ass playing a game, when you integrate movement that is when you start throwing the brain a curveball.

  13. Re:Slippery slope? on Bruce Schneier On the Marathon Bomber Manhunt · · Score: 1

    Hey dumbass? Before you go beating your leftist drum you might want to find out if there is even a point which hey! What do you know? there really isn't. I don't give a flying rat fuck about tort reform because like too many ideas from malpractice reform to class actions its too blunt of an instrument, its saying the patient has a broken toe so you cut the leg off, its just fucking stupid.

    No what I advocate is common fucking sense which sadly thanks to those like yourself that try to turn every God damned problem into a part of your myopic black and white world really is becoming a damned superpower. Just as I thought judges shouldn't be hamstringed by mandatory sentencing so too do i think judges should have a LOT more leeway to toss out the obviously dumb cases. Did I say anything about the Mickey D case? Nope that was you, that case is a perfect example where a judge looking at the evidence should let it go to jury because the answer wasn't cut and dried. Did other companies serve their coffee close to that temp? Did the cups need to be better designed? These are questions that rightly should be decided by a judge and jury.

    Now compare that to the Darwin award winner which is probably gonna end up costing the state a good million just fighting the thing, you have a guy caught literally red handed robbing a place, shoots at the cops, and while running from the cops sees another cop car headed his way and tries to recreate that scene from Jackass where they jumped the car only to end up a hood ornament. A judge should be able to look at that and trivially say "get the fuck out of here" and throw that shit out, they should also be able to stick the ambulance chasers that file such bullshit with a fine every time they bring in a really fucking dumb case like that. This would be a hell of a lot better than a corp friendly tort reform but sadly because that doesn't fit into a black and white world it'll never happen and for every legit case you'll have a hundred lawsuit lottos.

  14. Re:Bashing? on Happy Hardware Freedom Day · · Score: 1

    Except Secureboot isn't a threat to shit, it even says clearly that it has to be able to be turned off it X86. Wanna know the REAL reason for Secureboot? Go to TPB and look up "Win 7 all versions" and you'll see why there is Secureboot, its because the pirates have managed to come up with a version of Win 7 that not only passes WGA but even changes the wallpaper on install so that to the end user its just another OEM box. Now will it work? Kinda doubt it, they had all kinds of nasty DRM in Vista and all it did was help make Vista unpopular.

    But if its about the makers then it should focus on the makers and have a name that tells you who the target is. the fact that the one i was responding to was lamenting that nobody on /. seemed to care makes me think they WANT to have broad appeal but they simply haven't given it enough thought.

  15. Re:Deep on The Eternal Mainframe · · Score: 2

    Well last I checked, and its been awhile so it may have changed, the big difference (which also ramped up the price) is all the extra layers of error checking and failover in a mainframe so you absolutely can be 100% positive you are getting the right answer 100% of the time. which when you consider that they are often used for finances...yeah i can see why that would be of importance.

    But that is why you have a lot more companies using server farms than using mainframes anymore, there is just more work that doesn't have to have five nines levels of precision and commodity hardware means that you can get some crazy levels of number crunching for cheap.

  16. Re:Low response very disturbing on Happy Hardware Freedom Day · · Score: 1

    Maybe because too many have turned it into as another poster put it "Hey lets bash" day although I would say it goes further than just bashing MSFT and UEFI but pretty much bashing anybody that doesn't follow the teaching of the great GNUcious himself RMS.

    If you want people to care you have to stress the positives, we hear enough negative shit all damned day, last thing we want is to hear it on the weekend. What does open hardware do for ME, how does it help ME, what advantages are there to open hardware when its damned rare that my hardware actually last longer than the OS is supported?

    Frankly every time I've seen an article on open hardware it quickly goes negative, it ends up being about "doom scenarios" like the way the GPL guys bash the BSD guys with these "ZOMFG they'll take ur stuff!" scenarios that never happen. I mean if all you care about is staying off of UEFI just buy a board off the coreboot list and call it a day. Pretty much all the AMD boards and chipsets are covered but support for Intel and Via is climbing so you have plenty of choices.

    But if the ONLY positive you can come up with is hacking, something done by less than ohh..I'd say MAYBE 2% of the population if that? Well give it up Chuck, as the other 98% really don't give a shit. I mean why should they when the thing they bought does what they want or they wouldn't have bought the thing?

    Put yourself in the role of selling this idea, I'm the public...what do you have to offer me? My netbook is 4 years old, my desktop is 3 years old and both do what I want, why would I risk possibly bricking the thing by hacking the hardware? And why would I care about hacking the Xbox? After all it plays games which is what we want it to do, what advantages does it give me?

    Because frankly I think this whole thing isn't really well thought out, not if you expect the public to give a crap. After all they are more than happy to buy apple devices which are some of the most locked down, especially compared to Android, so you REALLY gotta sell this if you want anybody to care and from as few hits as this page got even geeks really don't give a shit.

  17. Re:Slippery slope? on Bruce Schneier On the Marathon Bomber Manhunt · · Score: 1

    WRONG its written by lobbyists who thanks to SCOTUS saying money is speech can and are just buying any laws they want. This is why I have to laugh at libertarians talking about how "big bad government crushing the market"...well who do you think paid for those laws?

    The simple fact is big business doesn't believe in a free market, they believe in a RIGGED market and are happy to pay for laws that give them an advantage while fucking the little guy and those lawsuit lotto players to them are just the cost of doing business. Hell if it looks like its gonna cost them more than pocket change they'll just dump it on the people through the state, look at how Halliburton was able to dump all those asbestos superfund sites onto the people while they kept the profits.

  18. Re:It's dead Jim on Blackstone Drops Dell Bid, Cites Declining PC Market · · Score: 1

    So tablets are a sunset business now? Me think doth hate the company too much if you are trying to claim tablets are a sunset business. oh and FYI PCs ARE NOT GOING AWAY they simply were in a bubble from 94-07, to say its a sunset business is just as stupid as saying houses are a sunset business sense they aren't being flipped like before. the modern PC, even the cheap ones at Worst Buy, are multiple core with plenty of RAM and HDD space. I mean they are selling AMD quad laptops for just $400 and quad desktops for around $300 now...who is gonna need more than that? Very VERY few that is who.

    And for the one who seems confused by the "Haswell Atom" it does not mean it is actually Haswell, it means it took a lot of its design cues from Haswell, such as its out of order processing and its GPU. The reason why they did this is obvious, Haswell is a power sipping monster so if you are wanting to build a ULV chip for the embedded and tablet markets taking some cues from a winning design just makes sense.

    But it just shows how Slashdot has become another Reddit, filled to the brim with religious loonies, because if the rumor was exactly the same, word for word, but the OS was supposed to be ubuntu? The batshit brigade would be tripping over themselves to praise it. Well lucky for the rest of the planet nobody else cares about ubuntu because I'd say a tablet that gets all day battery life AND lets you run all your Windows programs, and all for less than $250? I could easily see this being the hot new device to have and I sure as hell would be in line to buy one and I fricking hate Windows 8, but all day battery life and compatibility with all my software? sign me up!

  19. Re:Slippery slope? on Bruce Schneier On the Marathon Bomber Manhunt · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Lawyers removed the right to be an idiot by suing the state every time a moron hurts themselves, see my previous post on the "lawsuit lotto" as an example. why do you think it feels like the state is trying to baby proof the planet? because the relatives of every Darwin award winner promptly sues the state for not keeping Cleetus from hurting his poor dumb ass.

  20. Re:Slippery slope? on Bruce Schneier On the Marathon Bomber Manhunt · · Score: 1

    Actually considering how much gets handed out in your average "lawsuit lotto" payout? Sadly it is probably cheaper just to shut down the roads than to risk the lawsuits when people too damned stupid to live hurt themselves and blame the state.

    This is just a sad side effect of our lawyer heavy system in that nobody is a moron, nobody has any personal responsibility, its all the fault of somebody else which you can then sue. I saw one not too long ago in NYC I believe that was a perfect example, mother sues cops for the "wrongful death" of her son..well lets see, the son was caught robbing a place, shot at the cops, and then to win his Darwin award shot out of a side alley and tried to jump a cop car racing to the scene like something out of Jackass and needless to say became a hood ornament. In a sane world no judge would allow something that fucking dumb to enter a courtroom and no lawyer would take the case but nope, she had a lawyer filing motions before junior could be scraped off the grill. I don't know if its gone to trial or not but if he gets less than high 6 figures I'll be amazed, after all she is poor and the state has the money, right?

    So yes i can see rescuing the morons costing more than just shutting down the state because every moron that slips in the snow will be suing the state for 20 million bucks. it only takes a couple of wins at lawsuit lotto for it to really add up and just looking at the costs of all those lawsuits on the state? yeah they probably came out ahead by just shutting it down. After all every lawyer trying to help his client win the lawsuit lotto would have probably used "Why didn't you close down the road if you knew it was dangerous?" as the opening attack and thus made the state look like monsters if they didn't.

  21. Re:Slippery slope? on Bruce Schneier On the Marathon Bomber Manhunt · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I have to agree the Boston PD acted rationally and with the exception of not reading him his Miranda (somebody needs to be FIRED for screwing that up) they acted VERY professionally.

    For an example of cops more dangerous than the bad guy see the LAPD when that former cop was shooting cops, how many innocent people did they shoot again? 3? 4? I lost count it was bad enough that bloggers in the area were saying if you were a black man or drove a blue truck you had better stay indoors because they were emptying the gun first THEN seeing if it was the guy. Compared to that thumbs up Boston PD.

  22. Re:Not Owning Your Hardware... on ACLU Asks FTC To Force Carriers To 'Patch Or Replace' Android Devices · · Score: 1

    I get paid $35 an hour, most folks aren't gonna pay me to sit around running process monitor to find EXACTLY what syscalls are hanging. They don't give a rat fuck WHY it does that all they want is the problem to go away, which surprise surprise it does when i get drivers specifically made for the OS.

    So maybe you got nothing better to do than sit around monitoring syscalls, me I have a CPU upgrade, a virus cleaning and a service call I gotta get done.

  23. Re:It's dead Jim on Blackstone Drops Dell Bid, Cites Declining PC Market · · Score: 0

    If the rumors are true...and i really REALLY hate to say this as I fricking HATE Windows 8, but if the rumors are true? Dell and MSFT may actually be able to pull a win out of their ass, shocking yes but it looks like they really have a shot.

    For those that haven't heard? Haswell based Intel Atom tablet for less than $250, rumors have it at $225, possibly even lower. Intel has a ton of leftover capacity and the Atom duals are dirt cheap to make and the new Atom is supposed to be able to do 1080P over HDMI due to the new graphics engine. MSFT of course is so desperate not to have Windows 8 go the way of Vista they have to be practically giving the OS away to get the price that low, but if they pull it off?

    Honestly this thing could just explode and be the hot new thing if marketed right. All they'd have to do is sell an optional keyboard, ala the Asus Transformer, you'd have a laptop that runs all day and can run your Windows software and at the end of the day you can just pop the keyboard off and use it as a tablet. If the sub 2w power usage is true we are talking about an all day portable that can take the place of your laptop AND your tablet for less than the cost of a netbook...who wouldn't want that?

    Its gonna be ironic as hell if old sweaty monkey ends up pulling a win out of his ass when it comes to windows 8, sure it won't be the "premium experience" market which he was wanting but it could really pull their asses out of the fire and give them that foot in the mobile door they have been trying so hard to get. I know that no matter how much I dislike metro I'd snatch one of those up in a heartbeat, I mean a touchscreen laptop that gets 9+ hours and when I'm just gonna be stuck somewhere i could leave the keyboard at home and have a tablet that all my stuff runs on, at less than $250 what's not to like?

  24. Re:Lenovo - a collector of IBM garbage on IBM In Talks To Sell x86 Server Business To Lenovo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And considering the figures on Levovo last I saw them they are on to something as they seem to be able to do just fine with the lower profit margins that IBM scoffs at.

    Of course i believe this is part of a larger disease that is infecting the west and is really gonna bite us in the ass, I call it "iMoney or bust". What happens is a company will just throw away a successful business because it isn't making double digit profits like iToy and end up hurting the company in the long run. the best example of this right now is MSFT, as PCs are still selling hundreds of millions a year (or at least they were before Win 8 came out) and making billions but because they aren't making iMoney on them MSFT will happily burn that entire business rather than accept low margin high sales business is still good business.

    This is one thing I have to give the Asian companies a LOT of credit for, they realize that consistent single digit profits? Is still fucking PROFITS and are more than happy to gobble up businesses where they can make a solid 4%-10% profit whereas thanks to the stock market being badly distorted by speculators here in the west a company that makes profits but not iMoney is punished by falling stock prices. This is why Dell wants to take it private, if you look at their stats they are actually back to making what they were before the 07 downturn yet because that ain't iMoney their stock still sucks.

    You watch Lenovo will buy it, make solid single digit profits with it quarter after quarter and use that money to better their business. that is fucking smart but sadly being smart in business is punished here in the west, either you make iMoney or you watch the stock burn. Ironic as even Apple isn't able to keep making iMoney, hence why they are still selling previous versions and came out with a cheaper 7 inch.

  25. Re:Shrug... on Windows: Not Doomed Yet · · Score: 1

    Does being batshit run in your family, or is being batshit a prerequisite for becoming a FOSSie? its a company, not satan, yet you FOSSIes live in your black and white world where the great and wise RMS is always correct and everybody that isn't embracing your religion is wrong.

    Give it the fuck up sparky, Linux has been free for 20 years and done exactly jack and shit, I can wallpaper this page with Linux systems being hacked so your magical security by obscurity isn't even helping, and the ONLY success that Linux has seen AT ALL is when Google gave the community the finger and forked the whole damned thing and even RMS says Android and ChromeOS are BAD for the Linux community but in the ultimate irony the ONE time you don't listen to the whacko is when he's right about something.

    So please go back to the Linux articles where you can join in the circlejerk about how having less than 1% of the market makes you leet, this is a Windows article here, we don't want your crazy, we ain't buying.