I wouldn't even say that as most of my customers are simply following the lead of the businesses and sticking with Windows 7 that works great.
As for how to save the company? Simple, break it up. you have too many PHB trying to jam products that don't go together into mashups, see slapping office on their tablets as a selling point (like you are really gonna care about office on a touchscreen?) and this is seriously holding the company back. The company would be better off if the mobile and business divisions could do their own things without having to worry about "vertical integration" and the OS division would be better off if they could listen to the customers instead of being shoehorned into devices where it just doesn't fit well.
Right now there is just too many marketing droids playing buzzword bingo there and not enough thought put into whether tie ins make sense or not, Split the company into business, mobile, desktop operating systems and entertainment and the ONLY integration should be a "it just works" mantra so that each product can work easily with the others but can still concentrate on giving their customers what they want.
Toshiba Satellite, can't give you the model ATM as its 4 AM and I'm not gonna go down to the shop, hell i wouldn't be up if it wasn't for the damned headache, the eMachine "Worst Buy Special" but again I can't bring the number up off my head as those emachine "names" are just a bunch of numbers with a letter but its the one with a AMD Liano dual core, the Toshiba has the AMD Bobcat chip in it but I've seen the same stuff with a couple of the i3s.
And how is that the reverse of squat? if the drivers don't work one way they sure as fuck ain't gonna work the other, especially since MSFT supposedly didn't change the driver ABI (yeah my ass, you can't turn the OS from a cold boot to a hybrid caching boot without serious tweakage) and whereas before I was able to even use XP drivers on Win 7 on occasion as long as both the driver and the OS were the same bit now its frankly a coin flip as to whether its gonna be stable or not. I believe this is why they baked in that "refresh your PC" which frankly shows what they think of Win 8, when Winrot is not only not avoided but a tool to do the Windows reinstall shuffle is baked in.
And if you want to know what it does that is easy, in fact it reminds me a lot of the same shit i saw with Vista. First comes the "senior moments" which is where the OS hangs for a few seconds randomly, you could be doing something heavy, you could be just looking at the start screen, don't seem to matter as it seems to happen for no particular reason. From there you get into the hangs, then the freezes, and then finally you begin having problems with boot such as booting to a frozen PC where the keyboard and trackpad don't do squat and right about then is when its time to "refresh the PC".
I know you are gonna try to blame hardware but nope, did full burn ins and diagnostics on every bit of the hardware and when I bypassed the OEM drivers and went straight to those that made the chips? Purrs like a kitten. But as Win 9 or Blue or whatever they call it comes out i have a feeling more are gonna find out what my customers that were foolish enough to buy a laptop without talking to me first found out, you go to the forums to ask for a driver only to get told "The laptop is a (insert Windows version) exclusive, we suggest you use the restore partition" which considering how fast the OEMs abandon laptops (even mine only ended up with a single driver update 4 months after it came out before the OEM quit updating it) if they don't love the Windows it came with or it actually survives long enough for the next Windows to come out they are SOL, no support for you.
They paid for a good amount of the work actually done on it, try looking at wikipedia sometime. As for the rest of my post? Would YOU listen to this guy or base a good portion of FOSS on a license he wrote? hell Ballmer couldn't have asked for a better example of the crazy basement troll, when he has so few social skills as to think that is acceptable.
Actually its even worse than that, the DMCA is so badly tilted towards the copyright holders its beyond rigged. For example they can send as many takedowns as they want, no matter how tenuous their connection because there is ZERO penalty. This is why only huge corps like Google can really do shit against DMCAs because they can just spam them without penalty.
You go right ahead and try it buddy, take the driver disc from any of those sub $500 laptops that are "Windows 8 exclusive" and see how stable they are after installing windows 7. you forget they are trying to push their new Metro programming model and that they have done a shitload of tweaking under the hood to make it be faster than the old and those changes are not helping when it comes to drivers.
Hell Windows 8 doesn't even do a normal boot unless you go CLI, it uses "hybrid boot" which is more like half a boot and half hibernate..and you think drivers that are made to support that are gonna be just fine on win 7 which doesn't do anything of the sort in its boot? Yeah hold on to that dream pal, but I learned the hard way that unless the drivers specifically say they support Win 7 your ass had better go straight to the OEM that made the chip and get a Win 7 driver, if you don't you damned well better teach 'em how to use the "repair your PC" trick because they will need it. Its even worse using a Win 7 driver on 8, thanks to that hybrid boot some shit wakes up some of the time, some doesn't wake up at all, and others become flaky after a couple weeks of hybrid boot.
Trust me dude, i do this shit 6 days a week, I've probably dealt with more Win 8 crap this past week than you have had hot meals in the same period and the way things are shaping up wiping Win 8 for 7 is gonna bring me more business than wiping Vista for XP did and that is saying something so dealing with drivers is pretty much an all day job every day for me.
And they think Prada and Jordans are worth the high price...your point? Fashion is fashion and since so little has changed design wise the poor can buy the ebay Apple and pretend they have more money than they do, just like the guy with $4k rims on his car that goes home to a tar paper shack.
I never understood why the Appleites find the idea they like fashion so offensive, fashion is a billion dollar industry and only a handful of companies ever make it to the top of that pile. Look at how pathetic MSFT looks trying to browbeat the OEMs into offering $1200 touch laptops for a "premium Windows experience" when the OEMs have done said they can't sell the ones they have already made. Its gotten so bad MSFT is having Intel bring back the Atom netbook so they can sell a $250 touch enabled netbook in the hopes of getting people to take Win 8...not gonna work, I have a feeling they'll hack the Start screen and ignore the appstore, but that is how desperate they are to get people to take it.
but there is a REASON why Apple never jumped on netbooks and why Jobs was so against sub 9 inch tablets, its because he knew price is a BIG part of their appeal. Now look at Apple, first time in years the stock has dropped below $400 and I would argue it is because Cook has been cheapening the brand by continuing to sell older models at discounts and putting out a cheap 7 inch tablet. We saw the same thing happen to Porsche in the early 90s, they put out a cheap model to get some of the Camaro and Mustang buyers and instead nearly killed their sales. After all if just any old rabble can own one why would you want a Porsche? Same thing, expensive equals exclusive which equals sales.
Not to mention if that were true why would Apple have given so much back to BSD like CUPS or Webkit? with BSD you don't HAVE to give back but simple logic will show how the "ZOMG they'll close it ZOMG" is complete and utter strawman bullshit.
First of all they can't "take" anything, they can only get a copy same as everyone else so the original is still there and will keep growing as long as devs care enough to keep developing it. Second unlike GPL if all you need is a single library and don't need updates? You can do what you want but you don't have to stick a gun to their head like the GPL because if they want updates and their changes to be included in future releases its in their best interest to share.
But in the interest of full disclosure i don't like the GPL because i think RMS is petty, vindictive, and I would argue is jealous of those that can make a good living as a programmer since his only two projects ended up being forked away from him and I think his extreme left worldview (which is really pro communism which you can see by the glowing articles he has written on Chavez and Castro) also has something to do with his dislike of programmers making a living.
What this has to do with the GPL is simple, we got to see the petty and vindictive parts when he decreed TiVo was an "evil" company (even though they were following the letter of the GPL) and his myopic "you are with me or against me" worldview affects everything he does, see his brass balls on making a "Windows Sins" website like he is the fucking pope and all that ends up going into the GPL and making it more divisive and turning more developers off of FOSS. A rational person would see that GPL usage is dropping like a stone and ask "What changed that devs don't like?" and would actually have a sit down with devs and make the GPL more user friendly for EVERYBODY but in RMS' mind he is ALWAYS right and you are ALWAYS wrong if you don't follow him so compromise simply will never happen.
So to paraphrase the arrogant statement he made before Steve Jobs body was even cold "I won't be glad when RMS is dead but I'll be glad he's gone" as frankly i think both the GPL and FOSS in general will end up better off without him, he is just too polarizing and comes off as a religious loonie...oh and the fact he let himself be filmed on fricking stage eating toe cheese like a crazy homeless guy certainly doesn't leave a great impression.
He really does seem to have a hard on for making programmers live like dirt, don't he? i used to just think he was an old school communist, all that fawning he did about how wonderful Chavez and Castro were but as somebody pointed out he doesn't say doctors or CEOs or the janitor shouldn't get paid ONLY programmers. For a perfect example of this there is how when asked how a programmer could make a living if the software was given away he said they should make money on documentation...what happens when some of the programmers don't put the docs under GPL and instead charges for them? "Documentation should be free!".
I don't know, maybe its because he had to "bless" the programmers who forked his own projects away from him, who knows, but he REALLY don't seem to like the idea of programmers getting paid for their years of education and hard work.
I get hate for daring to point this out but you know why Apple is so big...Air Jordans, its the same thing, its fashion and status. Does anybody think a pair of Jordans is REALLY worth what they charge? nope but that is part of the appeal, it shows you can drop several hundred on sneakers like it was nothing. its the same thing with Apple, living in a college town i run into Apple users all day and you'd be amazed when talking to them how quickly what they paid for the thing shows up in conversation. nobody brags about the price of Windows unless they got a hell of a deal but thanks to years of VERY well done marketing by Jobs Apple products are looked at in the same vein as Prada and Jordans, its a way to easily show you have money.
Wow...congrats to the old dude, you sir pretty much demolished that argument with a couple of well written sentences, bravo sir. I guess I'm a little too passionate to pull something similar off, I was raised with a deep love of individual freedoms and all the jack booted bullshit we've seen for quite awhile really burns me up.
In fact the only thing that will piss me off quicker is the "you better love Murrica or GTFO" crowd because they make it clear the US government could slaughter brown and yellow people like cattle as long as they waved the flag, its the whole "America fuck yeah!" bullshit taken to its logical conclusion. How anybody could buy that bullshit when they saw the pics of soldiers with "Be very quiet, I'm hunting iwackis" patches posing with corpses like they nailed a 4 point buck is beyond me, I know my grandfather that fought against that kind of evil shit in WWII must be spinning in his grave at the sight of that.
Look at how many use FF or a Chromium based over IE because its easy to do so. if the code was handed out then the user wouldn't have to do more than install the new OS, which would come with an easy to follow howto, because it would make it trivial for guys like the FirefoxOS team to add support for your device.
As it is now they pretty much have to have a copy of every device they intend to support and even that sometimes don't help because the OEMs will put out devices under the same names but with different hardware under the hood.
Because Apple is making insane margins on their products and Samsung isn't? That is like asking why Dell doesn't have something like Applecare across the product lines when their best sellers give them exactly $8 profit per unit.
So again if you strictly go by the free market its in their best interests to cut off support as soon as they can, after all unlike Apple they aren't selling previous gen hardware alongside the new stuff so they are spending money on old stuff without any real ROI because length of patches and warranty really doesn't show up very high on Joe and Jane Average's list, its cost and features they are looking at.
Citation please? Because i haven't heard any of the BSD guys saying bad things about the GPL on this thread, quite the opposite as its the GPL guys using "doom scenarios" as a scare tactic and appeal to emotion whereas the BSD guys are simply stating they want more freedom for the developers which is really all GPL VS BSD comes down to, one favors developers and the other end users.
Ya know I never understood all the hate so many seem to have for the BSD license since all it does is make giving back an act of volunteerism instead of force.
Can you close the code on github? Nope because no matter what you do the original code is there for all to use, and if they try to make a proprietary fork they will find it costs them more and more as the original gets farther away from the proprietary one thus costing them more than if they just gave back to the mainline.
So I really don't see the reason for all the hate and teeth gnashing, after all Apple uses BSD and has given back a ton of improvements in return, in fact i can't think of any company using BSD that hasn't given back, they just aren't forced to give back like GPL. If you think GPL works better for you? Great, wonderful, that is fine and dandy, but the GPL like any other license doesn't work for everybody and everything which is why we have a pile of copyleft licenses.
BTW has anybody else noticed that if you take a GPL lovers rant against BSD and just change a few words you get a classic MPAA/RIAA rant? Both cook up "doom scenarios" that never seem to materialize and both insinuate that anybody who doesn't support them must be a thief. I just find it interesting that their rants against BSD sound so similar to *.A.A rants, but maybe its just me.
The reason why I think it needs to be a button is as we have seen with UPnP something that was made to make life easier can come back to bite us on the ass. as someone who actually has to do troubleshooting of networks when shit breaks i want to have a button I can flip so that when I need to figure out what has gone wrong I can see what its doing. Now if you want to make the button default to on instead of off? i have NO problem with that, but we need to be able to turn it off when we want.
There isn't one and if you look at the chart on the middle of this page provided by a previous poster you'll see that BOTH Obama and Romney are practically on top of each other in the hard right authoritarian end of the political spectrum. Its like I said its not even Coke VS Pepsi, its Coke in a can VS Coke in a bottle, same product, just slightly different looking container.
But you missed the other point I was talking about which is we can change that just as we got Joe and Jane talking about SOPA/PIPA by having all the little Internet personalities and bloggers making vids and doing stunts to promote awareness.
More and more folks are getting a good chunk of entertainment NOT from the corporate controlled media but from all these little Internet personalities, the Angry Joes and Film Brains of the world so if we get THOSE guys to promote the hell out of making the public aware and spreading the word we CAN change this just as we did with SOPA/PIPA. I mean i had folks that are about as anti-politics as you can get coming into the shop and asking me "What is SOPA/PIPA?" and when I asked them how they heard of it the answer would always be some funny little Internet personality they like to watch was posting links to petitions and urging viewers to write congress.
So we CAN change things, we simply have to think outside the box and avoid the corporate owned mainstream media.
Because the invisible hand is only good for taking your wallet? i mean how you forgotten how many busts for collusion we have seen the past few years? RAM, LCD panels, i personally think HDD and SSD manufacturers should be investigated as I have a feeling you'll find price fixing there to.
You see the flaw in your logic is VERY simple and easy to spot and is thus: If I am one of the companies with shitty support and the little guy is cutting into my bottom line? Then its in my best interests NOT to become like the little guy but instead buy out the little guy or rig the market so I can keep my hold on the market without changing my ways. For a perfect example of this look at how Intel passed off the piece of shit that was netburst onto the planet by just bribing the OEMs not to deal with the other guy. They made billions and billions on the deal, let them pretty much kill Via and cripple AMD so badly they really have never recovered.
So you see your free market just doesn't work because it doesn't exist, what DOES exist is a bunch of companies that would rather just rig the market in their favor and call it a day. After all you think the OEMs will make MORE money or less by having the devices become obsolete quicker? if you strictly go by the market its in their best interests to give you as little support as possible and with so few players it really isn't hard to do exactly that, as TFA points out.
Because all the mobile crap they are bolting on is causing changes in the driver model? Lately I have been looking closer at why a lot of the new Windows 8 laptops seem to need the "refresh your PC" option a LOT and I'm seriously starting to think its WinME all over again.
For those that don't know WinME was supposed to help bridge the gap between Win9X and WinNT and one of the ways it was supposed to do that was supporting both the old VXD driver model and the newer WDM driver model but IRL it turned out if your drivers were WDM the OS was more stable than Win9X, if it was a mix of VXD and WDM it was buggy as shit. Looking closer at these laptops the drivers appear to be Windows 7 built and Windows 8 just doesn't like them as much as native drivers, at least from what I'm seeing, hence the instability.
So I would be 100% in agreement with you if this was the MSFT of old that really cared about backwards compatibility but from what I'm seeing those days are gone. If what you are saying is true then I wouldn't be having to hunt down Win 7 drivers for all these "designed for Windows 8" only systems but I am because Win 7 just doesn't like those drivers anymore than Win 8 really likes Vista drivers. Oh sure they'll install but you can watch the system stability start dropping from the moment you start using them. Combine this with a "take it or leave it" attitude by the OEMs when it comes to laptops and you end up with a lot of folks that just won't be able to find drivers.
As someone who actually has to do the cleaning when viruses get in there is a serious problem with MSE, which just for full disclosure I use myself on my netbook and gamer box, and it is thus: It works well IF and ONLY IF you are already using best practices and not going anyplace risky.
Now the reason why is actually VERY simple, and its why MSE is so much lower resource than other AVs out there...its not really an AV in the traditional sense at all. You see it was originally Giant AntiSpy which like most anti-spyware had limited AV capability but wasn't really made to be a full fledged AV and MSFT simply bought it and improved upon it somewhat. How many of you here have ever had MSE block an infected website from loading? anybody? I've been running it for ages and have yet to see it block a page before load and if you look at its resource usage when you are surfing it really doesn't do much more than scan files after you download them, kinda like an automated ClamAV.
Now don't get me wrong, that doesn't mean MSE is bad or doesn't have uses, its just a very limited AV which is why its so low on resources. As I said I use it on 2 out of 3 PCs that I own but on those systems I'm not really doing anything risky and I have the browser in low rights mode and sandboxed along with Comodo DNS filtering infected sites so its not easy for a bug to get in my system in the first place, but if you have someone who maybe doesn't follow best practices or is not very careful? Then I would NOT give them MSE, Avast Free or Comodo Internet Security free would be better choices, again thanks to scan before load and sandboxing of the browser.
But if you already have decent security measures in place and only really need to scan downloaded files? Then its really great, lower resource usage than any other, fast and free. For that use case its a really great tool, you just have to accept like most tools there are places where its a good idea and places where it isn't.
Not to mention that is completely ignoring the fact that X86 was in the middle of a bubble at the time so that 400MHz with 64Mb of RAM that came with Win98 was just too slow to run much of anything when WinXP came out because the CPU clock speeds had jumped so much in that short span of time.
I'm not really seeing much other than games that couldn't run reasonably well on that Android 2.x hardware and unlike Win98 that died pretty damned fast when XP came out we are still seeing plenty of places selling brand new Android 2.x devices right now. heck go to the Walmart home page and look up their straight talk pre-paid phones, i don't think they even have an Android 4.x prepaid yet, its ALL 2.x phones. as others have said when more than 40% of your userbase is on a previous version you really should be patching that version.
Besides if he wanted to compare to an OS Windows wasn't the right one to pick, MSFT made 10 years worth of patches standard several years ago. show me any other OS where they support previous versions for that length of time, even after multiple new releases. heck Vista was a flop that only has 5% of the Windows PC market share yet its still getting updates until 2017, we could only dream to have our mobile devices supported that long.
I would say 5 years for any device that costs $500 or less, 7 years for any device that costs between $500-$800, and 10 years for any device that costs $1000 and above.
They should also be forced to put the driver code in escrow which must be provided by the hardware manufacturer so if they refuse to update and patch that code can be handed out so a different OS can support it. That way if a company wants to keep it proprietary? fine then YOU have to provide patches and updates. Don't want to do that? Then you hand out the code so somebody else can. Sounds pretty straightforward to me.
Actually I'd say its more about how the corps are trying to treat durable goods as disposable goods. I mean some of these phones are anything but cheap yet by the way these OEMs just abandon the things you'd think they cost the same as those cheapo flash stick you see at checkout lines. If the rumors of Windows Blue are true even MSFT will be getting in on the act, with a new version of Windows being put out every year. If this happens you'll see $1500 laptops treated like $50 tablets because "Your laptop only has drivers for Windows 10 and we are now on Windows 12, go buy a new one".
So what I think needs to be done is minimum support times need to be written in stone, say a minimum of 5 years of updates from time of sale and any company that refuses to honor the support time should be forced to open up the device and hand over the driver code so another OS can be loaded that is patched.
That is EXACTLY what I was saying, the only "differences" is on kayfabe bullshit that corps don't give a rat's ass about like gays or whether more money will be pissed down a rathole giving to "green" asshole buddies of the POTUS or big oil friends of the POTUS.
But if you follow the money, start looking at just the obvious bribes like SuperPACs? these guys win either way, that is the beauty of it for them. and its not even the top 1%, the ones making out like gods on this kayfabe are the top 0.01%, the kind of guys that can pick up the phone at 3 AM and have the POTUS on the other line in 20 minutes. There are the "too big to fails", those that keep power through multiple presidents, like how Goldman Sachs has had one of their boys running the fed almost every year since it was built and it didn't matter if it was a supposedly "left" or "right" guy in the white house, its THOSE guys that have thrown so much money into the system that no matter who loses they win.
This is also why we no longer have a left wing, you have far right and extreme far right, because more control, more spying, less freedoms, this works out REAL well for them as these laws don't apply to them, just us peasants. But anybody who can call Obama a lefty with a straight face is either clueless to what left is or just trolling as our democratic party would be labeled far right on the rest of the western world's measuring stick but because you can't have fake drama and fighting without 2 people you get the kayfabe we have now. Honestly I could probably take the policies of the last 4 presidents, jumble them up, and just read off the policies and nobody would even be able to tell if I was talking about dems or reps, as its not even two sides of a coin anymore, its just a game of three card monty meant to keep the peasants off the 0.01% while they plunder.
I'm sure i'll get hatred for saying this but...who cares? you just KNOW what this will be ended up used for, if we ever see it at all, and that will be to make "iSliver" phones so God damned thin that a fart can blow the damn thing across the room and of course it'll be that much easier to lose the stupid thing while not giving us one second more run time because "Thin is in daddy-o" even though everybody I know wishes they had better battery life instead of a CC thick phone.
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I wouldn't even say that as most of my customers are simply following the lead of the businesses and sticking with Windows 7 that works great.
As for how to save the company? Simple, break it up. you have too many PHB trying to jam products that don't go together into mashups, see slapping office on their tablets as a selling point (like you are really gonna care about office on a touchscreen?) and this is seriously holding the company back. The company would be better off if the mobile and business divisions could do their own things without having to worry about "vertical integration" and the OS division would be better off if they could listen to the customers instead of being shoehorned into devices where it just doesn't fit well.
Right now there is just too many marketing droids playing buzzword bingo there and not enough thought put into whether tie ins make sense or not, Split the company into business, mobile, desktop operating systems and entertainment and the ONLY integration should be a "it just works" mantra so that each product can work easily with the others but can still concentrate on giving their customers what they want.
Toshiba Satellite, can't give you the model ATM as its 4 AM and I'm not gonna go down to the shop, hell i wouldn't be up if it wasn't for the damned headache, the eMachine "Worst Buy Special" but again I can't bring the number up off my head as those emachine "names" are just a bunch of numbers with a letter but its the one with a AMD Liano dual core, the Toshiba has the AMD Bobcat chip in it but I've seen the same stuff with a couple of the i3s.
And how is that the reverse of squat? if the drivers don't work one way they sure as fuck ain't gonna work the other, especially since MSFT supposedly didn't change the driver ABI (yeah my ass, you can't turn the OS from a cold boot to a hybrid caching boot without serious tweakage) and whereas before I was able to even use XP drivers on Win 7 on occasion as long as both the driver and the OS were the same bit now its frankly a coin flip as to whether its gonna be stable or not. I believe this is why they baked in that "refresh your PC" which frankly shows what they think of Win 8, when Winrot is not only not avoided but a tool to do the Windows reinstall shuffle is baked in.
And if you want to know what it does that is easy, in fact it reminds me a lot of the same shit i saw with Vista. First comes the "senior moments" which is where the OS hangs for a few seconds randomly, you could be doing something heavy, you could be just looking at the start screen, don't seem to matter as it seems to happen for no particular reason. From there you get into the hangs, then the freezes, and then finally you begin having problems with boot such as booting to a frozen PC where the keyboard and trackpad don't do squat and right about then is when its time to "refresh the PC".
I know you are gonna try to blame hardware but nope, did full burn ins and diagnostics on every bit of the hardware and when I bypassed the OEM drivers and went straight to those that made the chips? Purrs like a kitten. But as Win 9 or Blue or whatever they call it comes out i have a feeling more are gonna find out what my customers that were foolish enough to buy a laptop without talking to me first found out, you go to the forums to ask for a driver only to get told "The laptop is a (insert Windows version) exclusive, we suggest you use the restore partition" which considering how fast the OEMs abandon laptops (even mine only ended up with a single driver update 4 months after it came out before the OEM quit updating it) if they don't love the Windows it came with or it actually survives long enough for the next Windows to come out they are SOL, no support for you.
They paid for a good amount of the work actually done on it, try looking at wikipedia sometime. As for the rest of my post? Would YOU listen to this guy or base a good portion of FOSS on a license he wrote? hell Ballmer couldn't have asked for a better example of the crazy basement troll, when he has so few social skills as to think that is acceptable.
Actually its even worse than that, the DMCA is so badly tilted towards the copyright holders its beyond rigged. For example they can send as many takedowns as they want, no matter how tenuous their connection because there is ZERO penalty. This is why only huge corps like Google can really do shit against DMCAs because they can just spam them without penalty.
You go right ahead and try it buddy, take the driver disc from any of those sub $500 laptops that are "Windows 8 exclusive" and see how stable they are after installing windows 7. you forget they are trying to push their new Metro programming model and that they have done a shitload of tweaking under the hood to make it be faster than the old and those changes are not helping when it comes to drivers.
Hell Windows 8 doesn't even do a normal boot unless you go CLI, it uses "hybrid boot" which is more like half a boot and half hibernate..and you think drivers that are made to support that are gonna be just fine on win 7 which doesn't do anything of the sort in its boot? Yeah hold on to that dream pal, but I learned the hard way that unless the drivers specifically say they support Win 7 your ass had better go straight to the OEM that made the chip and get a Win 7 driver, if you don't you damned well better teach 'em how to use the "repair your PC" trick because they will need it. Its even worse using a Win 7 driver on 8, thanks to that hybrid boot some shit wakes up some of the time, some doesn't wake up at all, and others become flaky after a couple weeks of hybrid boot.
Trust me dude, i do this shit 6 days a week, I've probably dealt with more Win 8 crap this past week than you have had hot meals in the same period and the way things are shaping up wiping Win 8 for 7 is gonna bring me more business than wiping Vista for XP did and that is saying something so dealing with drivers is pretty much an all day job every day for me.
And they think Prada and Jordans are worth the high price...your point? Fashion is fashion and since so little has changed design wise the poor can buy the ebay Apple and pretend they have more money than they do, just like the guy with $4k rims on his car that goes home to a tar paper shack.
I never understood why the Appleites find the idea they like fashion so offensive, fashion is a billion dollar industry and only a handful of companies ever make it to the top of that pile. Look at how pathetic MSFT looks trying to browbeat the OEMs into offering $1200 touch laptops for a "premium Windows experience" when the OEMs have done said they can't sell the ones they have already made. Its gotten so bad MSFT is having Intel bring back the Atom netbook so they can sell a $250 touch enabled netbook in the hopes of getting people to take Win 8...not gonna work, I have a feeling they'll hack the Start screen and ignore the appstore, but that is how desperate they are to get people to take it.
but there is a REASON why Apple never jumped on netbooks and why Jobs was so against sub 9 inch tablets, its because he knew price is a BIG part of their appeal. Now look at Apple, first time in years the stock has dropped below $400 and I would argue it is because Cook has been cheapening the brand by continuing to sell older models at discounts and putting out a cheap 7 inch tablet. We saw the same thing happen to Porsche in the early 90s, they put out a cheap model to get some of the Camaro and Mustang buyers and instead nearly killed their sales. After all if just any old rabble can own one why would you want a Porsche? Same thing, expensive equals exclusive which equals sales.
Not to mention if that were true why would Apple have given so much back to BSD like CUPS or Webkit? with BSD you don't HAVE to give back but simple logic will show how the "ZOMG they'll close it ZOMG" is complete and utter strawman bullshit.
First of all they can't "take" anything, they can only get a copy same as everyone else so the original is still there and will keep growing as long as devs care enough to keep developing it. Second unlike GPL if all you need is a single library and don't need updates? You can do what you want but you don't have to stick a gun to their head like the GPL because if they want updates and their changes to be included in future releases its in their best interest to share.
But in the interest of full disclosure i don't like the GPL because i think RMS is petty, vindictive, and I would argue is jealous of those that can make a good living as a programmer since his only two projects ended up being forked away from him and I think his extreme left worldview (which is really pro communism which you can see by the glowing articles he has written on Chavez and Castro) also has something to do with his dislike of programmers making a living.
What this has to do with the GPL is simple, we got to see the petty and vindictive parts when he decreed TiVo was an "evil" company (even though they were following the letter of the GPL) and his myopic "you are with me or against me" worldview affects everything he does, see his brass balls on making a "Windows Sins" website like he is the fucking pope and all that ends up going into the GPL and making it more divisive and turning more developers off of FOSS. A rational person would see that GPL usage is dropping like a stone and ask "What changed that devs don't like?" and would actually have a sit down with devs and make the GPL more user friendly for EVERYBODY but in RMS' mind he is ALWAYS right and you are ALWAYS wrong if you don't follow him so compromise simply will never happen.
So to paraphrase the arrogant statement he made before Steve Jobs body was even cold "I won't be glad when RMS is dead but I'll be glad he's gone" as frankly i think both the GPL and FOSS in general will end up better off without him, he is just too polarizing and comes off as a religious loonie...oh and the fact he let himself be filmed on fricking stage eating toe cheese like a crazy homeless guy certainly doesn't leave a great impression.
He really does seem to have a hard on for making programmers live like dirt, don't he? i used to just think he was an old school communist, all that fawning he did about how wonderful Chavez and Castro were but as somebody pointed out he doesn't say doctors or CEOs or the janitor shouldn't get paid ONLY programmers. For a perfect example of this there is how when asked how a programmer could make a living if the software was given away he said they should make money on documentation...what happens when some of the programmers don't put the docs under GPL and instead charges for them? "Documentation should be free!".
I don't know, maybe its because he had to "bless" the programmers who forked his own projects away from him, who knows, but he REALLY don't seem to like the idea of programmers getting paid for their years of education and hard work.
I get hate for daring to point this out but you know why Apple is so big...Air Jordans, its the same thing, its fashion and status. Does anybody think a pair of Jordans is REALLY worth what they charge? nope but that is part of the appeal, it shows you can drop several hundred on sneakers like it was nothing. its the same thing with Apple, living in a college town i run into Apple users all day and you'd be amazed when talking to them how quickly what they paid for the thing shows up in conversation. nobody brags about the price of Windows unless they got a hell of a deal but thanks to years of VERY well done marketing by Jobs Apple products are looked at in the same vein as Prada and Jordans, its a way to easily show you have money.
Wow...congrats to the old dude, you sir pretty much demolished that argument with a couple of well written sentences, bravo sir. I guess I'm a little too passionate to pull something similar off, I was raised with a deep love of individual freedoms and all the jack booted bullshit we've seen for quite awhile really burns me up.
In fact the only thing that will piss me off quicker is the "you better love Murrica or GTFO" crowd because they make it clear the US government could slaughter brown and yellow people like cattle as long as they waved the flag, its the whole "America fuck yeah!" bullshit taken to its logical conclusion. How anybody could buy that bullshit when they saw the pics of soldiers with "Be very quiet, I'm hunting iwackis" patches posing with corpses like they nailed a 4 point buck is beyond me, I know my grandfather that fought against that kind of evil shit in WWII must be spinning in his grave at the sight of that.
Look at how many use FF or a Chromium based over IE because its easy to do so. if the code was handed out then the user wouldn't have to do more than install the new OS, which would come with an easy to follow howto, because it would make it trivial for guys like the FirefoxOS team to add support for your device.
As it is now they pretty much have to have a copy of every device they intend to support and even that sometimes don't help because the OEMs will put out devices under the same names but with different hardware under the hood.
Because Apple is making insane margins on their products and Samsung isn't? That is like asking why Dell doesn't have something like Applecare across the product lines when their best sellers give them exactly $8 profit per unit.
So again if you strictly go by the free market its in their best interests to cut off support as soon as they can, after all unlike Apple they aren't selling previous gen hardware alongside the new stuff so they are spending money on old stuff without any real ROI because length of patches and warranty really doesn't show up very high on Joe and Jane Average's list, its cost and features they are looking at.
Citation please? Because i haven't heard any of the BSD guys saying bad things about the GPL on this thread, quite the opposite as its the GPL guys using "doom scenarios" as a scare tactic and appeal to emotion whereas the BSD guys are simply stating they want more freedom for the developers which is really all GPL VS BSD comes down to, one favors developers and the other end users.
Ya know I never understood all the hate so many seem to have for the BSD license since all it does is make giving back an act of volunteerism instead of force.
Can you close the code on github? Nope because no matter what you do the original code is there for all to use, and if they try to make a proprietary fork they will find it costs them more and more as the original gets farther away from the proprietary one thus costing them more than if they just gave back to the mainline.
So I really don't see the reason for all the hate and teeth gnashing, after all Apple uses BSD and has given back a ton of improvements in return, in fact i can't think of any company using BSD that hasn't given back, they just aren't forced to give back like GPL. If you think GPL works better for you? Great, wonderful, that is fine and dandy, but the GPL like any other license doesn't work for everybody and everything which is why we have a pile of copyleft licenses.
BTW has anybody else noticed that if you take a GPL lovers rant against BSD and just change a few words you get a classic MPAA/RIAA rant? Both cook up "doom scenarios" that never seem to materialize and both insinuate that anybody who doesn't support them must be a thief. I just find it interesting that their rants against BSD sound so similar to *.A.A rants, but maybe its just me.
The reason why I think it needs to be a button is as we have seen with UPnP something that was made to make life easier can come back to bite us on the ass. as someone who actually has to do troubleshooting of networks when shit breaks i want to have a button I can flip so that when I need to figure out what has gone wrong I can see what its doing. Now if you want to make the button default to on instead of off? i have NO problem with that, but we need to be able to turn it off when we want.
There isn't one and if you look at the chart on the middle of this page provided by a previous poster you'll see that BOTH Obama and Romney are practically on top of each other in the hard right authoritarian end of the political spectrum. Its like I said its not even Coke VS Pepsi, its Coke in a can VS Coke in a bottle, same product, just slightly different looking container.
But you missed the other point I was talking about which is we can change that just as we got Joe and Jane talking about SOPA/PIPA by having all the little Internet personalities and bloggers making vids and doing stunts to promote awareness.
More and more folks are getting a good chunk of entertainment NOT from the corporate controlled media but from all these little Internet personalities, the Angry Joes and Film Brains of the world so if we get THOSE guys to promote the hell out of making the public aware and spreading the word we CAN change this just as we did with SOPA/PIPA. I mean i had folks that are about as anti-politics as you can get coming into the shop and asking me "What is SOPA/PIPA?" and when I asked them how they heard of it the answer would always be some funny little Internet personality they like to watch was posting links to petitions and urging viewers to write congress.
So we CAN change things, we simply have to think outside the box and avoid the corporate owned mainstream media.
Because the invisible hand is only good for taking your wallet? i mean how you forgotten how many busts for collusion we have seen the past few years? RAM, LCD panels, i personally think HDD and SSD manufacturers should be investigated as I have a feeling you'll find price fixing there to.
You see the flaw in your logic is VERY simple and easy to spot and is thus: If I am one of the companies with shitty support and the little guy is cutting into my bottom line? Then its in my best interests NOT to become like the little guy but instead buy out the little guy or rig the market so I can keep my hold on the market without changing my ways. For a perfect example of this look at how Intel passed off the piece of shit that was netburst onto the planet by just bribing the OEMs not to deal with the other guy. They made billions and billions on the deal, let them pretty much kill Via and cripple AMD so badly they really have never recovered.
So you see your free market just doesn't work because it doesn't exist, what DOES exist is a bunch of companies that would rather just rig the market in their favor and call it a day. After all you think the OEMs will make MORE money or less by having the devices become obsolete quicker? if you strictly go by the market its in their best interests to give you as little support as possible and with so few players it really isn't hard to do exactly that, as TFA points out.
Because all the mobile crap they are bolting on is causing changes in the driver model? Lately I have been looking closer at why a lot of the new Windows 8 laptops seem to need the "refresh your PC" option a LOT and I'm seriously starting to think its WinME all over again.
For those that don't know WinME was supposed to help bridge the gap between Win9X and WinNT and one of the ways it was supposed to do that was supporting both the old VXD driver model and the newer WDM driver model but IRL it turned out if your drivers were WDM the OS was more stable than Win9X, if it was a mix of VXD and WDM it was buggy as shit. Looking closer at these laptops the drivers appear to be Windows 7 built and Windows 8 just doesn't like them as much as native drivers, at least from what I'm seeing, hence the instability.
So I would be 100% in agreement with you if this was the MSFT of old that really cared about backwards compatibility but from what I'm seeing those days are gone. If what you are saying is true then I wouldn't be having to hunt down Win 7 drivers for all these "designed for Windows 8" only systems but I am because Win 7 just doesn't like those drivers anymore than Win 8 really likes Vista drivers. Oh sure they'll install but you can watch the system stability start dropping from the moment you start using them. Combine this with a "take it or leave it" attitude by the OEMs when it comes to laptops and you end up with a lot of folks that just won't be able to find drivers.
As someone who actually has to do the cleaning when viruses get in there is a serious problem with MSE, which just for full disclosure I use myself on my netbook and gamer box, and it is thus: It works well IF and ONLY IF you are already using best practices and not going anyplace risky.
Now the reason why is actually VERY simple, and its why MSE is so much lower resource than other AVs out there...its not really an AV in the traditional sense at all. You see it was originally Giant AntiSpy which like most anti-spyware had limited AV capability but wasn't really made to be a full fledged AV and MSFT simply bought it and improved upon it somewhat. How many of you here have ever had MSE block an infected website from loading? anybody? I've been running it for ages and have yet to see it block a page before load and if you look at its resource usage when you are surfing it really doesn't do much more than scan files after you download them, kinda like an automated ClamAV.
Now don't get me wrong, that doesn't mean MSE is bad or doesn't have uses, its just a very limited AV which is why its so low on resources. As I said I use it on 2 out of 3 PCs that I own but on those systems I'm not really doing anything risky and I have the browser in low rights mode and sandboxed along with Comodo DNS filtering infected sites so its not easy for a bug to get in my system in the first place, but if you have someone who maybe doesn't follow best practices or is not very careful? Then I would NOT give them MSE, Avast Free or Comodo Internet Security free would be better choices, again thanks to scan before load and sandboxing of the browser.
But if you already have decent security measures in place and only really need to scan downloaded files? Then its really great, lower resource usage than any other, fast and free. For that use case its a really great tool, you just have to accept like most tools there are places where its a good idea and places where it isn't.
Not to mention that is completely ignoring the fact that X86 was in the middle of a bubble at the time so that 400MHz with 64Mb of RAM that came with Win98 was just too slow to run much of anything when WinXP came out because the CPU clock speeds had jumped so much in that short span of time.
I'm not really seeing much other than games that couldn't run reasonably well on that Android 2.x hardware and unlike Win98 that died pretty damned fast when XP came out we are still seeing plenty of places selling brand new Android 2.x devices right now. heck go to the Walmart home page and look up their straight talk pre-paid phones, i don't think they even have an Android 4.x prepaid yet, its ALL 2.x phones. as others have said when more than 40% of your userbase is on a previous version you really should be patching that version.
Besides if he wanted to compare to an OS Windows wasn't the right one to pick, MSFT made 10 years worth of patches standard several years ago. show me any other OS where they support previous versions for that length of time, even after multiple new releases. heck Vista was a flop that only has 5% of the Windows PC market share yet its still getting updates until 2017, we could only dream to have our mobile devices supported that long.
I would say 5 years for any device that costs $500 or less, 7 years for any device that costs between $500-$800, and 10 years for any device that costs $1000 and above.
They should also be forced to put the driver code in escrow which must be provided by the hardware manufacturer so if they refuse to update and patch that code can be handed out so a different OS can support it. That way if a company wants to keep it proprietary? fine then YOU have to provide patches and updates. Don't want to do that? Then you hand out the code so somebody else can. Sounds pretty straightforward to me.
Actually I'd say its more about how the corps are trying to treat durable goods as disposable goods. I mean some of these phones are anything but cheap yet by the way these OEMs just abandon the things you'd think they cost the same as those cheapo flash stick you see at checkout lines. If the rumors of Windows Blue are true even MSFT will be getting in on the act, with a new version of Windows being put out every year. If this happens you'll see $1500 laptops treated like $50 tablets because "Your laptop only has drivers for Windows 10 and we are now on Windows 12, go buy a new one".
So what I think needs to be done is minimum support times need to be written in stone, say a minimum of 5 years of updates from time of sale and any company that refuses to honor the support time should be forced to open up the device and hand over the driver code so another OS can be loaded that is patched.
That is EXACTLY what I was saying, the only "differences" is on kayfabe bullshit that corps don't give a rat's ass about like gays or whether more money will be pissed down a rathole giving to "green" asshole buddies of the POTUS or big oil friends of the POTUS.
But if you follow the money, start looking at just the obvious bribes like SuperPACs? these guys win either way, that is the beauty of it for them. and its not even the top 1%, the ones making out like gods on this kayfabe are the top 0.01%, the kind of guys that can pick up the phone at 3 AM and have the POTUS on the other line in 20 minutes. There are the "too big to fails", those that keep power through multiple presidents, like how Goldman Sachs has had one of their boys running the fed almost every year since it was built and it didn't matter if it was a supposedly "left" or "right" guy in the white house, its THOSE guys that have thrown so much money into the system that no matter who loses they win.
This is also why we no longer have a left wing, you have far right and extreme far right, because more control, more spying, less freedoms, this works out REAL well for them as these laws don't apply to them, just us peasants. But anybody who can call Obama a lefty with a straight face is either clueless to what left is or just trolling as our democratic party would be labeled far right on the rest of the western world's measuring stick but because you can't have fake drama and fighting without 2 people you get the kayfabe we have now. Honestly I could probably take the policies of the last 4 presidents, jumble them up, and just read off the policies and nobody would even be able to tell if I was talking about dems or reps, as its not even two sides of a coin anymore, its just a game of three card monty meant to keep the peasants off the 0.01% while they plunder.
I'm sure i'll get hatred for saying this but...who cares? you just KNOW what this will be ended up used for, if we ever see it at all, and that will be to make "iSliver" phones so God damned thin that a fart can blow the damn thing across the room and of course it'll be that much easier to lose the stupid thing while not giving us one second more run time because "Thin is in daddy-o" even though everybody I know wishes they had better battery life instead of a CC thick phone.