You and everybody else is making jokes but did you forget we thought "radiation is your friend" and even looked at using nukes to make harbors in the 50s and in the 40s nearly every boat and a lot of the tanks used asbestos "for the safety of the men" because of its fireproof qualities?
I'll never forget a lecture I saw by Neil Tyson where he said "All great scientists work at the edge of ignorance" and he's right, if its one thing that science has taught us is that we REALLY don't know as much about how everything works as we THINK we do. Now is this happening? I do not know which is why i look forward to his findings, it would explain why we seem to have a lot more cases of cancer, at least from what I've seen. Maybe some people are more sensitive to this than others, like how some people can smoke all their lives and never get cancer while somebody else smokes 5 years and gets it, who knows? All I DO know is if it turns out to be true it wouldn't surprise me, anymore than it surprises me we knew so little about radiation and asbestos back in the day. We still have so much to learn about how everything works, especially hard to study things like lightning.
Nooo.. the movies do it for the same damned reason the game devs do it, its to top the other guy and show off NOT for the story. if you want to make a crazy Rube Goldberg puzzle? Fine then do that just don't leave a much simpler obvious answer slapping the gamer in the face. like I said with Red Faction, ten lousy seconds was all it took to change the texture from wood to steel but that one little change makes all the difference because the gamer will go "Oh, its steel, my little RPG can't punch through that, I'm gonna need a key".
This isn't like a pun or doing stupid on purpose, its just lazy design, that is ALL it is. Its the difference between Q giving James a cool car with cool gadgets and James Bond just grabbing a car off the street and having it do that shit. It takes just a couple of moments to fix these obvious puzzle problems, hell just don't give the character a screwdriver until he's past the stupid puzzle, make it have an alarm that will go off if you try to pry it, fuck man just give us something...this is just wanking for the sake of wank.
Again quit while you are behind dude. You are actually comparing stopping an asteroid that is 5+ miles across to taking out what is MAYBE 50 tons, REALLY? Surely to God you didn't honestly think about that comparison or were high when you wrote it because even 3 seconds worth of thought would have shown you the flaw in your logic. One is a million plus tons of solid iron and nickel moving at 36,000 miles an hour and carries enough force to make a crater the size of the gulf of Mexico, the other doesn't weigh squat by comparison, is fragile as hell, and again you have THREE DAYS to intercept.
I'm sorry dude but you can tapdance all you want but we have gotten to see pretty much ALL of the major crazy cold war plans by both sides since the wall fell, everything from nuclear bombs used to power rockets to actually building solid telephone pole sized rods of tungsten to throw at people from orbit so the freefall would generate enough speed it would be like a non nuclear nuclear bomb, and yet with ALL those crazy ideas on BOTH sides you won't find a single memo even floating the idea of missiles on the moon....why? Because it would be pointless, that's why.
The problem I've always had with those games is its obvious playing a few that the devs get so enamored with their crazy Rube Goldberg treasure hunts that they miss what any normal person would see in 2 seconds. Its what I call "Dr Evil Logic" where they come up with an elaborate trap and the son is going "You know we can just shoot them, I have a gun in my room, it'd take me like 30 seconds to go grab it" because the common sense solution just slaps you in the face.
The best example I can give of that, and don't ask me the title as it was ages ago, was where there was this key or coin or something at the bottom of a grate that you had to get. Now what the devs wanted you to do was go get some gum or some other sticky thing, like I said its from a looong time ago, get a stick and basically spear the thing and pull it up. But I look at this thing for like 2 seconds and I go "uhhh..its a grate, it has 2 screws holding it on and I HAVE a screwdriver..hell I also have a fricking prybar if the screws stick ". i mean if you would have grabbed ANYONE off the street, gave them the same tools the character had and the same obstacle? I bet you my last dollar they would have ALL said "Just take the grate off" as its THAT obvious.
I have to wonder if that kind of shit killed the genre, because I know it turned me off of the games because it seemed to me the longer they went on the worse the Dr Evil logic got, kinda like how a movie might be good for the first sequel or the second but they just keep pushing it and deciding they have to top the last one until it just gets to be such bullshit it ruins it, like what they did to Die Hard. Its like these devs kinda forget that its a GAME and games are supposed to be FUN, not an excuse to show how you can six degrees of Kevin Bacon a fricking puzzle.
The reason why we don't improve humans is the same reason there is no 6 million dollar man (would that be $600 million with inflation?) and that is because our immune systems suck. When you try to improve the human you end up with their immune system attacking the improvements, hell there are dozens of diseases that all come down to "their immune system fucked up" such as arthritis and if you are gonna have a human that can function well in space cyborg will be the way to go.
As for fear of AI? Totally justified IMHO. I'll never forget a little Q&A I read once with one of the guys that was building drones and robots for the military, he said "So we get invited into this meeting with a bunch of brass and one of them says 'so we asked you hear to find out what something would cost' so he slides over a picture...and its the T-800 from the Terminator. At first i thought it was some gag, just pulling our leg before they got down to what they really wanted but...nope, they saw the Terminator like a tech demo and just wanted it built". Coincidentally the same thing was said by the director of Blue Thunder who said he was shocked when the movie came out and his secretary started getting calls from every military and SWAT on the planet, all saying the same thing...how much do you want for it? So yeah, as long as militaries have a bigger hard on for guns than common sense any true AI will probably end up being misused. Hell even what we already have is being misused, I had to shake my head and say "Did nobody watch Robocop?" when it was reported they had a robot go nuts on a test in South Africa and shoot up the stands, it was pretty obvious like ED-209 they were more concerned by how big a gun they could mount than in safety.
And finally "meatbags in spaaace!" just doesn't make sense with current tech. Sure if you were to go "New World Order" so that one group ruled the planet so you could split the costs? Yeah you COULD do it, but why? For the SAME costs as sending 3 meatbags to the moon you could send a robot to the outer reaches and get a LOT more hard science done that will broaden our understanding of our system a LOT more than the meatbags will. I mean just look at all the data we have gotten from the Voyager probes, can you even imagine what it would cost to even go to half the places its gone with just a single meatbag? hell just to give the one schmuck enough supplies so that it isn't a suicide mission you'd probably need a ship the size of the Empire State Building, and that is just sending one poor bastard out there and back.
So I'm sorry but with our current level of tech its just not worth doing, it'd be like saying you had to build a 747 in 1912, the amount of resources it would take would be just insane and in this case we can get more done with less by just ditching the meatbags.
Well you have to remember that the systems we were using in the Win9X era were frankly weaker than a $60 tablet is today, we are talking 300MHz-750MHz, with 600MHZ and 733MHz seeming to be the most popular, at least from what I saw working on PCs at the time and the GPUs were weaker than what you'd find in those cheap pre-paid Droid phones at the Wally world.
So its really no surprise those guys used every trick in the book (including many hacks that weren't) because they were really pushing the hardware to its limits and thanks to Win9X being a 16/32 bit hybrid with DOS underneath it was easier to go "bare metal" and get to the underlying hardware than it is today. This is why I never understood nostalgia for hardware, hell you can buy a Bobcat APU mounted on a board for $70 that will not only be able to run rings around that old PII but actually use less power under load than the old PII systems did idling.
But I wish you luck with the VM, I'm just trying to give you a heads up into some of the shit you may encounter. I too thought a VM would be a perfect solution but while I found running old software wasn't a problem a LOT of the old games used quirks that the VM just doesn't simulate. What we really need is a "Win9X Box" that gives you a simulation of the perfect Win9X hardware, I'd say a P3 733MHz with a GeForce 4 and Soundblaster card would be ideal, because a LOT of the old Win9X games are gonna end up lost to history as the old hardware dies and folks find the VMs just won't run it stably. I mean just try to fire up MW 3 or i76 or FF VII in a VM and watch how buggy and unstable the whole thing becomes. Back then nobody even thought about what would happen when the Win9X OS and hardware died because back then so few were playing 80s games nobody expected games to be played past their shelf life. Most XP and later games run fine in Windows 7, and of course DOSBox makes DOS games pretty easy to run, but that period between 95-2001 there was a LOT of good games released and we just don't have an easy to use and reliable way to run them.
Personally I think its a damned shame, games like i76, FF VII and MW 3 were games that gave me endless hours of enjoyment but I no longer care enough to keep dedicated hardware just for Win9X and the amount of time spent trying to get these games to run right in a VM quickly ends up sucking more time and causing more hassles than they are worth.
The fact that you felt the need to add "in a perverse sort of way" frankly tells me all I need to know, insane troll logic. This is the same kind of bullshit that always pissed me off with shooters and RPGs, here is a door you have to get through...okay, its a flimsy door made out of wood and I have both an AK47 and an RPG, that isn't gonna be a problem, or in the RPG they have a flimsy wooden door and I have an AXE, fricking axes are used to this very day for just that purpose by firefighters, yet your shitty wooden door will ONLY open if I have some damned key I have to backtrack half a mile to get...WHAT THE FUCK?
All I'm asking for is a LITTLE sanity, that's all. Not a lot, just a little teeny tiny bit of fricking sanity. That is why I recommended the first Red Faction game to all my friends because if you ran into a door that needed a key? It was a good 6 inches of plate steel. At least with that I could go "Okay my little RPG sure as hell ain't punching a hole in that thing, I better go find a key" and it didn't ruin my immersion in the game. Same thing could easily be applied in RPGs, hell Hero was making big stone doors 2000+ years ago and castles were made to take sieges so its not even historically inaccurate.
And WWI was great for the defense industry, not so great for those sucking mustard gas...your point? the stats most use, including yourself, simply ignore the poor and working poor like they don't exist at all.
Lets take just one thing you cited, manufacturing increased...but what KIND of manufacturing? Was it good paying full time work, or were they simply filling rolls with part timers which they paid shit because they could? After all if you simply go by the figures here in the USA Walmart has been hiring and growing which on the surface makes for a good soundbyte...until you bother actually looking into the details and find out the majority of their workers are living on foodstamps and government handouts so that each and every Walmart ends up COSTING the country more than they are worth, you'd actually be better off hiring those workers directly as at least then their labor could be used for better roads and fixing our decaying infrastructure instead of making Sam Walton's kids more money than they can ever spend on hookers and blow.
You really have to watch it with figures as they are so easy to manipulate and even if not manipulated they can easily mislead by not giving you the whole story. while I personally can't stand libertarians (I personally think they come down to 2 camps, one wants a government to whip the slaves for them while the other wants to be able to hire a goon squad to do the whipping) in this case i don't have to believe a word he says, there are links provided which lets you look at the data and make up your own mind. if you were to go by just the data the government hands out it would appear the 07 slump is over and we are recovering but when you start looking at the actual details? its all smoke and mirrors and in reality we are 13 million job fewer than we were in 07 and more people than ever are underemployed or unemployed, but just by leaving out a detail here, a metric there...hell if you based it ONLY on the performance of the top 1%? Both the USA and UK have never been better, those at the top have been making money hand over fist. But when you then look at the details and see that you could put the entire top 1% in your average HS gym and have seats left over its plain to see that this metric really isn't a useful indicator is it?
Oh please stop with the bullshit! I'm so fucking tired of the ring winger buttplugs trying to blame unions because "OMG the peasants won't work for a bowl of rice and a beating a day!" and then using them as an excuse to do what you were gonna do anyway because with a few bribes you can treat the third world as disposable people.
Wanna know why the west is dying? Its simple FREE TRADE IS A LIE, its about as fair as putting your HS football team against the Denver Bronco and then just to make sure they don't score a single point bribing the refs. you go to these third world hellholes and the workers are practically drowning in fucking carcinogens, toxic waste just gets poured into the drain like something out of Victorian England, and if the workers get sick from all the poison they have been exposed to? Well fuck them yellow and brown people, a nigger by any other name right?
When the whole thing collapses and it will, collapse is inevitable at this point, you and all the other job creators better damned well pull an Arnie and "get to the chopper!" as fast as you fucking can because the peasants WILL kill you, and personally? I won't shed a single tear. Its the greedy fucks at the top that have made nearly 20% of China's farmland so toxic its unfit for even animal consumption, killed millions with their toxic wastes, poisoned everything in their path and for what? So they can hoard a little more money, that's all. I'm sorry but capitalism, like communism and every other ism before it WILL die and when it does there is gonna be a lot of pricks dragged from their comfy beds and lined against the wall. And I'm sorry but honestly? The world will be a better place once they are gone, they are a cancer and need to be removed for the good of all.
Actually I think you nailed it about "not dumbing down" but I would put the era all the way to the early/mid 00s. After all the late 90s gave us such games as Half Life (can you imagine anybody putting in something like the opening tram sequence without Michael Bay-ing the shit out of it today?) and No One Lives Forever series, the Descent games and Freelancer, these games cared about making their worlds, no matter how real or unreal they were, come alive for the player. Today all the games act like you have the attention span of a hamster and if shit isn't shooting and you or exploding for longer than 20 seconds you'll fall asleep. I remember in Freelancer just exploring for new places to mine for just hours, other than the occasional tense run in with raiders i could just explore this rich galaxy (and with the mods out there the universe is now insanely huge, with dozens of systems) all I wanted with ZERO hand holding. None of this "You must do X-Z before you can go here" leading by the nose crap.
I do have to wonder though how much of this hand holding and noise is because of Michael Bay and how many truckloads of money he makes each picture as I've noticed that movies and TV likewise throw jump cuts and explosions like jangling keys in front of your face, its like they think we simply can't pay attention if they don't constantly throw shit at us. I bought the Kane & Lynch games (hey they were a buck a piece on Amazon) just to see what was so horrible and frankly 10 minutes in I was thinking "A video game by Michael Bay" as it was nothing but camera effects, shit blowing up, and foul mouthed one dimensional characters we couldn't give a shit about, classic Michael Bay.
So I have to wonder how much of the "dumbing down" and hand holding with an emphasis on set pieces is the changing taste of the devs and gamers and how much of it is a cynical attempt to rip off the Michael Bay style of doing things.
Good luck with the Win98 VM friend, as I've tried that in the past and found too many of the games simply won't run correctly unless they are on real hardware. This is why we need a "Win9X Box" like DOSBox but supporting all the quirks the game designers used in Win9X, for example i76 used to use the hardware clock for timing events and on a modern system even with MoSlo it just doesn't work right.
So good luck with Win9X as I found its hit or miss with just as many misses as hits. if it were me you can get the DOS version of Dungeon keeper over at GOG and not have to mess with a VM, or you can look for a "Compaq Deskpro EN SFF" which is a mini-PC they used in offices back in the day, you can usually find them in the $35 range and with a $10 KVM switch its a cheap and easy way to have a Win9X box for gaming. Slap in something like a Geforce 4 and there ya go, a Win9X box you can run all your old games on that won't take up a bunch of space.
Bullshit. You wanna know the truth the answer is VERY simple: Because they just didn't have the ability to fall back on bling they had no choice but to focus on the gameplay which lets face it folks its a GAME and PLAYING should be the focus in the first place!
Now while I was never into the adventure games (thought they smoked too much weed to come up with them batshit puzzles) I have been a fan of the FPS genre going all the way back to the first time I played Battlezone and you CAN tell the difference in quality of gameplay. Now I'm not some old fuddy duddy wearing rose colored glasses, There are plenty of new games I adore like the Borderlands and Bioshock series you can really see the difference when say comparing maps between the old and the new. Since they couldn't wow you with bling back in the day it all went down to level design, you'd get these huge maps with tons of hidden rewards that made replay FUN. I don't know how many hours I spent in something like Duke Nukem 3D or Redneck Rampage or Blood just clearing out the bad guys quickly so I could do more exploring and when you found that hidden life or gun or other goodie it made you feel great. Compare this with so many of the new games dragging you by the nose from one set piece to the next, hell you feel more like a passive observer of the action that an actual participant in the game.
So no its not nostalgia, its just that modern designers have focused on bling above and beyond anything including the most important thing which of course in a game is gameplay. I mean how many games have YOU played that this sentence applies: "Game had great graphics but just wasn't fun" because I find myself saying that a LOT more than I used to. Maybe its the cost of the games, maybe its because its easier to sell with big set pieces, who knows, what I DO know is the newer games more often than not seem to be focused on look first and gameplay? Doesn't feel like its even in the top five honestly.
Well there is always more than one way to skin the kitty as I always say and I used a couple of Via boxes for low power servers for an SMB that needed their data encrypted, having AES hardware accelerated made them have decent performance without heating up the closet I had to put them in.
Don't look at the C7 though friend, its too old and they have MUCH better models out. Instead check out their Pico-ITX embedded as you can get a nano dual core based unit for around $200-$250, has lower power, better support for crypto, fanless, and they are built like tanks. My buddy that does carputers has used some and says they are top notch, really take a beating and run well. Hell I just spent 3 minutes in Google and found one ready to go for $160 so its really not any more expensive than the E350 and the Nano dual core has AES support baked in. Look up "Via Padlock" if you want to know more about it but if you need low power crypto that would be the way to go.
But it just goes to show what I was saying was correct, with X86 there are a dozen ways to do the same task so its simply a matter of finding the right tool for the job. E350 won't do it? Here is a Via that will without blowing the power budget. Money no object? They have Intel CULV that just sip power but those bitches are expensive with a capital E so if you are on a budget it wouldn't be the first choice. But as you can see here on this overview that if crypto is a major requirement the Via has it covered, hell it says it can get 12.8 Gbps throughput encode/decode which would be more than plenty and at roughly the same power budget as the E350, and I can tell ya it makes for a great low power server box with crypto.
This is why I don't get people trying to fit ARM into every project, it reminds me of those guys that tried to make everything with VB. ARM works best with helper DSPs in the PMP/handheld space, once you start needing any kind of real IPC ARM quickly runs into a wall. As you can see there are just so many different X86 chips out there somebody will have one that will cut the mustard without giving up performance. i don't even want to know how hard you'd have to slam a Pi to get it to do a crypto dashcam, poor little thing would probably melt. You could take that Zotac box, slap a stripped down Linux or Windows install and there ya go, hell it even has an SD card slot so you could take the data out of the unit without taking it out the trunk, easy peasy.
Oh don't even get me started on MSFT and mobile, for years I was saying "WTF are you doing? Do you REALLY think an itsy bitsy start menu on a low res cellphone is gonna work?" so what do they do...they put the fucking low res shitty cellphone GUI on the desktop instead! Talk about a fucking facepalm. I work in the trenches and here is something the press will never tell you...nobody LIKES their cellphones, they TOLERATE them because NO company has invented the perfect thumb driven OS yet, its still got too many problems but people put up with them to get the programs they DO want.
But never before in all my years of computing have I seen a company just smile and blow their brains out like this, its almost like watching something from faces of death where you know what is coming but you just can't believe anybody would not be able to see what is gonna happen if they keep doing that dumb shit...I mean name ONE positive metric they've had with WinPhone/WinTab/Win 8? Just one? You can't because their aren't any. I saw an article where right after the release of WinRT a couple of guys went to your average mall, one filmed in front of the Apple store and the other a MSFT store and they asked folks what they bought. Know what they found? The MSFT store was a ghost town, less than a dozen sales all afternoon and ALL of the sales were Xbox games, they didn't sell a single WinRT tablet. The Apple store was packed and they quit counting iPads after the first dozen because there was too many people coming and going for one guy to talk to everybody.
And the bitch is it would soooo fucking easy to fix the desktop, just go back to Win 7 and make TIFKAM OPTIONAL, so that those with touchscreens (which as I said is less than 2% of the entire market and the OEMs have stopped cranking out touchscreen laptops because they just sit on shelves, nobody wants to poke their laptop or desktop) can have it and those that don't won't have that slapped in their faces. I swear Windows 8 feels like its fucking insulting you, it seems openly hostile to non tablet users because the stupid shit just gets in your face. Take those stupid gestures, know how many laptops I've removed Win 8 off of because people aren't precise enough with their trackpads and the stupid OS decides they are using gestures and just starts doing shit the user doesn't want?
But I think you are wrong on the desktop as what I'm seeing in the trenches is just the opposite, most folks have a ton of PCs and use them all the time. Its simply the fact that even a Best Buy special has a triple or quad and ALL of the laptops are dual core which is honestly much MUCH more power than the average user needs so they just aren't buying as often. I mean what is your average user doing that needs more than a quad core? hell most users barely multitask! Same thing goes with laptops, unless you drop the thing what kills laptops is heat cycling but folks just aren't slamming these crazy powerful Turion X2s and Core2Duos so they just aren't dying. Hell I'm "Mr Multitasker" and used to change out my gear every year and a half, now? My Phenom X6 is going on 3 years old, my Asus EEE AMD netbook is pushing 4 years old but when I'm mobile I'm testing networks and downloading drivers, the EEE works fine for that and at home the X6 just blows through any task I can come up with, hell I've played a FPS while burning DVDs AND transcoding and not managed to choke it, why would I need more?
This is why I'm telling folks to just stick with Win 7, either MSFT will fire Ballmer between now and 2020 or Google and Valve will end up taking over the desktop and that will be that. Hell fricking Alienware is coming out with an Ubuntu based gaming box with Steam pre-loaded, even the OEMs are looking at exit strategies which when you look at how good Windows 7 is is just a damned shame. If they would have stayed on that track they could try anything they wanted with mobile and still have the desktop revenue to count on, instead Ballmer is lighting a match to the whole company and just burning the thing to the ground, damned shame.
And THIS is why I never got into that genre, you could smoke a big fat bong and still not figure out WTF the insane troll logic they were looking for with their puzzles.
I remember one where you had to get past this place by stealing a passport from a guy, getting some scotch tape so you could get hair off a cat to make a fake mustache and jump through a bunch of hoops to get a black magic marker so you could draw a mustache on the passport...because the guy whose passport you stole didn't have a fucking mustache in the first place!
So while I like puzzles those damned games seemed to have a bit of a contest going on to see who could make the most batshit sequence of hoops to jump through to get from point A to point B. I never understood the appeal of games that went so far out of their way to make no damned logical sense when it comes to their puzzles.
Uhhh..and I'd have to have a CLI in Windows 7...WHY exactly? You don't and the fact that "keyboard commanders" are the only ones who can use MSFT's new TOUCH TABLET OS without wanting to shoot the thing just shows what a failwhale the design is. You have to give MSFT credit, only MSFT would decide they needed a more tablet friendly OS...only to make it so you had to rely on a keyboard to get anything done, its about as logical as putting P4s into laptops, its so damned dumb you almost have to admire anybody who can fail that spectacularly.
Oh good God man, do you know NOTHING about how MAD even works? It is NOT a credible threat because you would have THREE DAYS to knock the damned things down, with that much lead time hell they could afford to miss every other shot and still knock out every missile in the bunch.
What you are attempting to describe, horribly wrongly I might add, is what is known as a "got you last" which again does NOT work if the things take up to a fricking week to get here! For an example of how a REAL "got you last" works you might want to read up on the US nuclear sub strategy or the Russian "dead hand" system but in BOTH of those cases they work as a deterrent because the enemy knows no matter how fast they are they WILL be hit. With the Dead Hand System if you nuked Moscow, managed to kill every single leader all of the missiles WILL launch and start raining on your cities in less than an hour. with the US "Nuclear Sub Strategy" there are nuclear subs constantly patrolling in the Atlantic and Pacific, even to this very day. If you managed to take out Washington, kill every leader from the POTUS to the most junior member of congress all it takes is a single American base to send the alert and when the subs can't contact Washington because its gone? Well no matter how well you bomb the land bases there are still enough sub based ICBMs to wipe out every major city in Russia.
So just quit while you're behind dude, because there is no way a moon base attack would fit into any kind of MAD strategy, fuck you could literally send up rockets filled with pebbles and just shred the damned things before they even got close. The ONLY reason why orbital platforms were a threat, and why everyone agreed not to build them, was with even a weak rocket you could use the Earth's gravity well to increase the speed and the first bombs would be blowing up in under 20 minutes flat which is why they were banned, both sides wouldn't even have the 30-45 minutes to make the call that they would have with an ICBM making it much more likely for one side to launch "just in case" thus making it too risky.
I'm sorry but other than Dr Evil nobody with a brain would build a nuclear moon base except to maybe attack another moon base, it would be just too easily defeated. The whole point of MAD is to have a weapon the enemy can't stop so if they attack you they too will be destroyed, the moon is just too damned far away for that to be the case. Hell you might as well say "What if they build nukes on Europa?" as it would make the same amount of sense there, in both cases you'd give the enemy so much reaction time it would just be completely pointless.
More like "I'd rather not have software that hates me" because lets be honest folks, if you are not on a tablet or thrown out your nice LCD for some little touchscreen? Then Win 8 is NOT FOR YOU and neither will Windows Blue be for you because guess what a good 90% of the talk coming out about it from Redmond is? If you said "Shit nobody owns nor cares about" then you'd be right.
I have a feeling you'll see a lot moving up but NOT to Windows "LOL We're a hip cellphone company yo!" 8 but to Windows 7. The rest? Well if it ain't broke, not like MSFT has been worth a piss when it comes to timely security patches anyway, you are better off with a firewall and decent AV. You can download a browser right now that still runs on Win98 (Kmeleon) so considering how many XP systems there are out there I doubt finding software that will run will be a problem.
I don't get MSFT right now folks, I really don't. Its not like Nokia where years of infighting had left them without a viable OS so their backs was against the wall, they are still making pretty damned good money. Its not like Apple where they had painted themselves into a corner and ended up with an OS so damned old and creaky they had no choice but to buy out NeXT, Windows 7 is a damned good product, good enough I think it belongs right beside XP X64 and Win2K on any best of list, and its not like their market has disappeared, despite the horseshit that the press shovels (who all seem to sleep with their iPhones) there are still hundreds of millions of PCs being sold and still a LOT of room for growth...what the fuck?
I swear the new attitude at MSFT seems to be just giving the finger, from Windows 8 to the X720 supposedly being online only and banning used games it seems like Ballmer thinks if he burns the company to the ground and says "No we ONLY are a premium brand like Apple" that this will magically give them Apple's market...which just ain't happening folks, it took Jobs 20+ years to build the Apple name into a premium brand, whereas Ballmer is sticking a new paintjob on a Pinto and expecting it to beat Porsche in sales, just complete fucking reality disconnect.
The sad part is it would be crazy simple to make PCs explode again, all it takes is a teeny tiny bit of common sense which sadly seems to be lacking at Redmond. Never before has it been easier to plug a PC into a TV, damned near every desktop and laptop coming out today has HDMI which is piss easy to set up and never before has 1080P capable computers been so damned cheap, so why the fuck aren't you promoting that MSFT? Hell you could even use it to get your foot in the door of mobile by adding cool features that make the WinPhone easy peasy to use as everything from a remote to a streaming media player with the PC as the central hub, you could then make deals with the media companies to make any PC, Vista-9 that has WMC into a powerhouse that is soooo simple to work it isn't even funny.
In a way I find it kinda sad, I really do. they could make something truly fucking awesome, you have all this power with the desktop PC that when tied together with the X720 and the WinPhone/WinTab could do some truly incredible stuff, but because Steve Ballmer is such a shitty CEO and has such an Ahab like focus on being just like Apple they are just pissing it all away. The death of XP will be IMHO a milestone worth noting as MSFT will NEVER have those kinds of numbers again, not because they didn't jump into the "ZOMFG smartphone!" market in the right way, not because they can't make a decent product, but because the company ONLY cares about a single niche that frankly will never ever EVER be a big deal on X86. Touchscreens on laptops and desktops is like putting handlebars on a pickup truck, while handlebars may be great for biking it just doesn't translate to anything with wheels and is worse than what we had before...too bad MSFT is too blinded by iMoney to see that.
Probably to get around filters, I've seen a lot of filters that are just that easy to fool and honestly I wouldn't be surprised if somebody who writes prose THAT badly was stupid enough to be doing that shit at his job.
Please God tell me you are joking, you are...right? Missiles on the moon would be the most RETARDED MOVE EVAR because by the time the fucking missiles reached earth the war would have been over for a couple of days. I don't know what the flight time to reach China is but I remember during the cold war that to reach pretty much anywhere in the USSR was less than an hour flight time and using the best rockets we have today a missile from the moon would take a MINIMUM of 3 days, and that is if everything was in perfect alignment.
So no Dr Evil, putting missiles on the moon would be beyond pointless. The whole point of nukes is MAD and MAD don't work if your shit won't get there for 3-4 days after the war is over. Hell you could wipe out China and then just send up some ICBMs to waste the nukes in space, they would be pretty damned useless as a threat or defense strategy.
If he can get enough food to feed his fat face i have no doubt he'd be able to get enough to feed his double.
There is actually a lot of precedent for this, from Saddam which supposedly had no less than 4 doubles he'd use to make "appearances" in places that weren't strictly Baathist all the way back to Hitler whose use of a double was well known enough the Soviets had their soldiers scour the German countryside to find Hitler's dentist just to make sure the body they found was his and not the double.
Well yes and no. Yes in at this moment there really isn't a point, we simply don't have the tech to make going to the moon worth doing right now. Back then it was more about beating the USSR so the fact that they couldn't do much more than pick up a couple hundred pounds or rocks and doing a couple of basic experiments was fine, no reason for the flag waving today. If China or India want to blow a pile of money to say they did it? Knock yourselves out, been there and done that. As for the no part we know that Helium 3 is found to be plentiful there and since helium 3 looks like it might be good for fusion reactors in the future WHEN we can set up a base THEN it would be worth going, with a permanent base (most likely all robotic) one could make the case for the trip.
Frankly the one thing I see NO point in though is "meatbags is spaaace!" because the amount of resources you have to use to get a fragile meatbag into space with today's tech? Really not worth it. The robot doesn't need food, air, water, toilets, can be powered for decades with an RTG, its just better to send a machine to do it. Does that mean we shouldn't work on making new engines capable of moving us meatbags out there? Of course not, but as of right now with the tech we have the machines are just a better choice.
You ain't the only one AC, I have gotten to the point that if a site doesn't support paying through Amazon I don't buy from them as i'm tired of having so damned many places having too much data. I've had my card replaced something like 3 times in the past 2 years because of some dumbass at some website screwing the pooch and I'm just sick of it.
And i'm not giving the OS jack shit, Ballmer can jerk off at the thought of a 30% cut of all software all he wants I'm following my business customers and hanging onto win 7 like a drowning man hanging onto a log, hopefully by the time 2020 rolls around the board will punt Ballmer like a 30 yard field return and we can has some sanity brought back to the desktop. Until then they can all get stuffed as far as I'm concerned, i'm a customer NOT a walking ATM for them to try to squeeze more sales out of.
Dude that was my POINT, that the ONLY reason Linux has jack squat when it comes to servers is that MSFT is thumb up their ass retarded when it comes to licenses.
As I said you make me the head of MSFT and I could wipe Linux off the map in under 2 years simply by getting rid of CALs and going to flat pricing, which your links just show why Linux has any decent share. It is for THIS reason why Linus can be a prima donna prick, he knows that MSFT is bug fucking stupid when it comes to licensing which means he can do anything he wants and will still get paid, the market has NO CHOICE but either put up with his bullshit or bend over for MSFT.
This is why I'm not holding out much hope for MSFT as long as Ballmer is in charge, he cares more about what Wall Street thinks than in owning markets and this shows in everything he does, from fucking the Windows desktop to try to force a foot into mobile (because Wall Street likes Apple so we have to ape them!) to the rumor that the Xbox 720 is gonna be online only DRM fest (Wall Street likes lock in so we need lock in even if it runs off customers!) to braindead moves like killing the market gaining playsforsure to replace it with a badly done copy of the Apple appstore the entire company is being run by Dilbert's PHB, spending all their time reading the financial times and looking to play buzzword bingo instead of running the damned company. if you were to put me in charge? I could double the share in 2 years or you wouldn't owe me a dime, I'd crush Linux like a bug, make the 720 as easy to use and user friendly as Steam, I'd make PC gaming and console gaming one big experience, I'd fucking OWN the planet by the time I'm through...but as long as its run by those that only care about stock price? Well Linus can do what he pleases, he really doesn't have any competition.
Slashdot Mirror
You and everybody else is making jokes but did you forget we thought "radiation is your friend" and even looked at using nukes to make harbors in the 50s and in the 40s nearly every boat and a lot of the tanks used asbestos "for the safety of the men" because of its fireproof qualities?
I'll never forget a lecture I saw by Neil Tyson where he said "All great scientists work at the edge of ignorance" and he's right, if its one thing that science has taught us is that we REALLY don't know as much about how everything works as we THINK we do. Now is this happening? I do not know which is why i look forward to his findings, it would explain why we seem to have a lot more cases of cancer, at least from what I've seen. Maybe some people are more sensitive to this than others, like how some people can smoke all their lives and never get cancer while somebody else smokes 5 years and gets it, who knows? All I DO know is if it turns out to be true it wouldn't surprise me, anymore than it surprises me we knew so little about radiation and asbestos back in the day. We still have so much to learn about how everything works, especially hard to study things like lightning.
Nooo.. the movies do it for the same damned reason the game devs do it, its to top the other guy and show off NOT for the story. if you want to make a crazy Rube Goldberg puzzle? Fine then do that just don't leave a much simpler obvious answer slapping the gamer in the face. like I said with Red Faction, ten lousy seconds was all it took to change the texture from wood to steel but that one little change makes all the difference because the gamer will go "Oh, its steel, my little RPG can't punch through that, I'm gonna need a key".
This isn't like a pun or doing stupid on purpose, its just lazy design, that is ALL it is. Its the difference between Q giving James a cool car with cool gadgets and James Bond just grabbing a car off the street and having it do that shit. It takes just a couple of moments to fix these obvious puzzle problems, hell just don't give the character a screwdriver until he's past the stupid puzzle, make it have an alarm that will go off if you try to pry it, fuck man just give us something...this is just wanking for the sake of wank.
Again quit while you are behind dude. You are actually comparing stopping an asteroid that is 5+ miles across to taking out what is MAYBE 50 tons, REALLY? Surely to God you didn't honestly think about that comparison or were high when you wrote it because even 3 seconds worth of thought would have shown you the flaw in your logic. One is a million plus tons of solid iron and nickel moving at 36,000 miles an hour and carries enough force to make a crater the size of the gulf of Mexico, the other doesn't weigh squat by comparison, is fragile as hell, and again you have THREE DAYS to intercept.
I'm sorry dude but you can tapdance all you want but we have gotten to see pretty much ALL of the major crazy cold war plans by both sides since the wall fell, everything from nuclear bombs used to power rockets to actually building solid telephone pole sized rods of tungsten to throw at people from orbit so the freefall would generate enough speed it would be like a non nuclear nuclear bomb, and yet with ALL those crazy ideas on BOTH sides you won't find a single memo even floating the idea of missiles on the moon....why? Because it would be pointless, that's why.
The problem I've always had with those games is its obvious playing a few that the devs get so enamored with their crazy Rube Goldberg treasure hunts that they miss what any normal person would see in 2 seconds. Its what I call "Dr Evil Logic" where they come up with an elaborate trap and the son is going "You know we can just shoot them, I have a gun in my room, it'd take me like 30 seconds to go grab it" because the common sense solution just slaps you in the face.
The best example I can give of that, and don't ask me the title as it was ages ago, was where there was this key or coin or something at the bottom of a grate that you had to get. Now what the devs wanted you to do was go get some gum or some other sticky thing, like I said its from a looong time ago, get a stick and basically spear the thing and pull it up. But I look at this thing for like 2 seconds and I go "uhhh..its a grate, it has 2 screws holding it on and I HAVE a screwdriver..hell I also have a fricking prybar if the screws stick ". i mean if you would have grabbed ANYONE off the street, gave them the same tools the character had and the same obstacle? I bet you my last dollar they would have ALL said "Just take the grate off" as its THAT obvious.
I have to wonder if that kind of shit killed the genre, because I know it turned me off of the games because it seemed to me the longer they went on the worse the Dr Evil logic got, kinda like how a movie might be good for the first sequel or the second but they just keep pushing it and deciding they have to top the last one until it just gets to be such bullshit it ruins it, like what they did to Die Hard. Its like these devs kinda forget that its a GAME and games are supposed to be FUN, not an excuse to show how you can six degrees of Kevin Bacon a fricking puzzle.
The reason why we don't improve humans is the same reason there is no 6 million dollar man (would that be $600 million with inflation?) and that is because our immune systems suck. When you try to improve the human you end up with their immune system attacking the improvements, hell there are dozens of diseases that all come down to "their immune system fucked up" such as arthritis and if you are gonna have a human that can function well in space cyborg will be the way to go.
As for fear of AI? Totally justified IMHO. I'll never forget a little Q&A I read once with one of the guys that was building drones and robots for the military, he said "So we get invited into this meeting with a bunch of brass and one of them says 'so we asked you hear to find out what something would cost' so he slides over a picture...and its the T-800 from the Terminator. At first i thought it was some gag, just pulling our leg before they got down to what they really wanted but...nope, they saw the Terminator like a tech demo and just wanted it built". Coincidentally the same thing was said by the director of Blue Thunder who said he was shocked when the movie came out and his secretary started getting calls from every military and SWAT on the planet, all saying the same thing...how much do you want for it? So yeah, as long as militaries have a bigger hard on for guns than common sense any true AI will probably end up being misused. Hell even what we already have is being misused, I had to shake my head and say "Did nobody watch Robocop?" when it was reported they had a robot go nuts on a test in South Africa and shoot up the stands, it was pretty obvious like ED-209 they were more concerned by how big a gun they could mount than in safety.
And finally "meatbags in spaaace!" just doesn't make sense with current tech. Sure if you were to go "New World Order" so that one group ruled the planet so you could split the costs? Yeah you COULD do it, but why? For the SAME costs as sending 3 meatbags to the moon you could send a robot to the outer reaches and get a LOT more hard science done that will broaden our understanding of our system a LOT more than the meatbags will. I mean just look at all the data we have gotten from the Voyager probes, can you even imagine what it would cost to even go to half the places its gone with just a single meatbag? hell just to give the one schmuck enough supplies so that it isn't a suicide mission you'd probably need a ship the size of the Empire State Building, and that is just sending one poor bastard out there and back.
So I'm sorry but with our current level of tech its just not worth doing, it'd be like saying you had to build a 747 in 1912, the amount of resources it would take would be just insane and in this case we can get more done with less by just ditching the meatbags.
Well you have to remember that the systems we were using in the Win9X era were frankly weaker than a $60 tablet is today, we are talking 300MHz-750MHz, with 600MHZ and 733MHz seeming to be the most popular, at least from what I saw working on PCs at the time and the GPUs were weaker than what you'd find in those cheap pre-paid Droid phones at the Wally world.
So its really no surprise those guys used every trick in the book (including many hacks that weren't) because they were really pushing the hardware to its limits and thanks to Win9X being a 16/32 bit hybrid with DOS underneath it was easier to go "bare metal" and get to the underlying hardware than it is today. This is why I never understood nostalgia for hardware, hell you can buy a Bobcat APU mounted on a board for $70 that will not only be able to run rings around that old PII but actually use less power under load than the old PII systems did idling.
But I wish you luck with the VM, I'm just trying to give you a heads up into some of the shit you may encounter. I too thought a VM would be a perfect solution but while I found running old software wasn't a problem a LOT of the old games used quirks that the VM just doesn't simulate. What we really need is a "Win9X Box" that gives you a simulation of the perfect Win9X hardware, I'd say a P3 733MHz with a GeForce 4 and Soundblaster card would be ideal, because a LOT of the old Win9X games are gonna end up lost to history as the old hardware dies and folks find the VMs just won't run it stably. I mean just try to fire up MW 3 or i76 or FF VII in a VM and watch how buggy and unstable the whole thing becomes. Back then nobody even thought about what would happen when the Win9X OS and hardware died because back then so few were playing 80s games nobody expected games to be played past their shelf life. Most XP and later games run fine in Windows 7, and of course DOSBox makes DOS games pretty easy to run, but that period between 95-2001 there was a LOT of good games released and we just don't have an easy to use and reliable way to run them.
Personally I think its a damned shame, games like i76, FF VII and MW 3 were games that gave me endless hours of enjoyment but I no longer care enough to keep dedicated hardware just for Win9X and the amount of time spent trying to get these games to run right in a VM quickly ends up sucking more time and causing more hassles than they are worth.
The fact that you felt the need to add "in a perverse sort of way" frankly tells me all I need to know, insane troll logic. This is the same kind of bullshit that always pissed me off with shooters and RPGs, here is a door you have to get through...okay, its a flimsy door made out of wood and I have both an AK47 and an RPG, that isn't gonna be a problem, or in the RPG they have a flimsy wooden door and I have an AXE, fricking axes are used to this very day for just that purpose by firefighters, yet your shitty wooden door will ONLY open if I have some damned key I have to backtrack half a mile to get...WHAT THE FUCK?
All I'm asking for is a LITTLE sanity, that's all. Not a lot, just a little teeny tiny bit of fricking sanity. That is why I recommended the first Red Faction game to all my friends because if you ran into a door that needed a key? It was a good 6 inches of plate steel. At least with that I could go "Okay my little RPG sure as hell ain't punching a hole in that thing, I better go find a key" and it didn't ruin my immersion in the game. Same thing could easily be applied in RPGs, hell Hero was making big stone doors 2000+ years ago and castles were made to take sieges so its not even historically inaccurate.
And WWI was great for the defense industry, not so great for those sucking mustard gas...your point? the stats most use, including yourself, simply ignore the poor and working poor like they don't exist at all.
Lets take just one thing you cited, manufacturing increased...but what KIND of manufacturing? Was it good paying full time work, or were they simply filling rolls with part timers which they paid shit because they could? After all if you simply go by the figures here in the USA Walmart has been hiring and growing which on the surface makes for a good soundbyte...until you bother actually looking into the details and find out the majority of their workers are living on foodstamps and government handouts so that each and every Walmart ends up COSTING the country more than they are worth, you'd actually be better off hiring those workers directly as at least then their labor could be used for better roads and fixing our decaying infrastructure instead of making Sam Walton's kids more money than they can ever spend on hookers and blow.
You really have to watch it with figures as they are so easy to manipulate and even if not manipulated they can easily mislead by not giving you the whole story. while I personally can't stand libertarians (I personally think they come down to 2 camps, one wants a government to whip the slaves for them while the other wants to be able to hire a goon squad to do the whipping) in this case i don't have to believe a word he says, there are links provided which lets you look at the data and make up your own mind. if you were to go by just the data the government hands out it would appear the 07 slump is over and we are recovering but when you start looking at the actual details? its all smoke and mirrors and in reality we are 13 million job fewer than we were in 07 and more people than ever are underemployed or unemployed, but just by leaving out a detail here, a metric there...hell if you based it ONLY on the performance of the top 1%? Both the USA and UK have never been better, those at the top have been making money hand over fist. But when you then look at the details and see that you could put the entire top 1% in your average HS gym and have seats left over its plain to see that this metric really isn't a useful indicator is it?
Oh please stop with the bullshit! I'm so fucking tired of the ring winger buttplugs trying to blame unions because "OMG the peasants won't work for a bowl of rice and a beating a day!" and then using them as an excuse to do what you were gonna do anyway because with a few bribes you can treat the third world as disposable people.
Wanna know why the west is dying? Its simple FREE TRADE IS A LIE, its about as fair as putting your HS football team against the Denver Bronco and then just to make sure they don't score a single point bribing the refs. you go to these third world hellholes and the workers are practically drowning in fucking carcinogens, toxic waste just gets poured into the drain like something out of Victorian England, and if the workers get sick from all the poison they have been exposed to? Well fuck them yellow and brown people, a nigger by any other name right?
When the whole thing collapses and it will, collapse is inevitable at this point, you and all the other job creators better damned well pull an Arnie and "get to the chopper!" as fast as you fucking can because the peasants WILL kill you, and personally? I won't shed a single tear. Its the greedy fucks at the top that have made nearly 20% of China's farmland so toxic its unfit for even animal consumption, killed millions with their toxic wastes, poisoned everything in their path and for what? So they can hoard a little more money, that's all. I'm sorry but capitalism, like communism and every other ism before it WILL die and when it does there is gonna be a lot of pricks dragged from their comfy beds and lined against the wall. And I'm sorry but honestly? The world will be a better place once they are gone, they are a cancer and need to be removed for the good of all.
Actually I think you nailed it about "not dumbing down" but I would put the era all the way to the early/mid 00s. After all the late 90s gave us such games as Half Life (can you imagine anybody putting in something like the opening tram sequence without Michael Bay-ing the shit out of it today?) and No One Lives Forever series, the Descent games and Freelancer, these games cared about making their worlds, no matter how real or unreal they were, come alive for the player. Today all the games act like you have the attention span of a hamster and if shit isn't shooting and you or exploding for longer than 20 seconds you'll fall asleep. I remember in Freelancer just exploring for new places to mine for just hours, other than the occasional tense run in with raiders i could just explore this rich galaxy (and with the mods out there the universe is now insanely huge, with dozens of systems) all I wanted with ZERO hand holding. None of this "You must do X-Z before you can go here" leading by the nose crap.
I do have to wonder though how much of this hand holding and noise is because of Michael Bay and how many truckloads of money he makes each picture as I've noticed that movies and TV likewise throw jump cuts and explosions like jangling keys in front of your face, its like they think we simply can't pay attention if they don't constantly throw shit at us. I bought the Kane & Lynch games (hey they were a buck a piece on Amazon) just to see what was so horrible and frankly 10 minutes in I was thinking "A video game by Michael Bay" as it was nothing but camera effects, shit blowing up, and foul mouthed one dimensional characters we couldn't give a shit about, classic Michael Bay.
So I have to wonder how much of the "dumbing down" and hand holding with an emphasis on set pieces is the changing taste of the devs and gamers and how much of it is a cynical attempt to rip off the Michael Bay style of doing things.
Good luck with the Win98 VM friend, as I've tried that in the past and found too many of the games simply won't run correctly unless they are on real hardware. This is why we need a "Win9X Box" like DOSBox but supporting all the quirks the game designers used in Win9X, for example i76 used to use the hardware clock for timing events and on a modern system even with MoSlo it just doesn't work right.
So good luck with Win9X as I found its hit or miss with just as many misses as hits. if it were me you can get the DOS version of Dungeon keeper over at GOG and not have to mess with a VM, or you can look for a "Compaq Deskpro EN SFF" which is a mini-PC they used in offices back in the day, you can usually find them in the $35 range and with a $10 KVM switch its a cheap and easy way to have a Win9X box for gaming. Slap in something like a Geforce 4 and there ya go, a Win9X box you can run all your old games on that won't take up a bunch of space.
Bullshit. You wanna know the truth the answer is VERY simple: Because they just didn't have the ability to fall back on bling they had no choice but to focus on the gameplay which lets face it folks its a GAME and PLAYING should be the focus in the first place!
Now while I was never into the adventure games (thought they smoked too much weed to come up with them batshit puzzles) I have been a fan of the FPS genre going all the way back to the first time I played Battlezone and you CAN tell the difference in quality of gameplay. Now I'm not some old fuddy duddy wearing rose colored glasses, There are plenty of new games I adore like the Borderlands and Bioshock series you can really see the difference when say comparing maps between the old and the new. Since they couldn't wow you with bling back in the day it all went down to level design, you'd get these huge maps with tons of hidden rewards that made replay FUN. I don't know how many hours I spent in something like Duke Nukem 3D or Redneck Rampage or Blood just clearing out the bad guys quickly so I could do more exploring and when you found that hidden life or gun or other goodie it made you feel great. Compare this with so many of the new games dragging you by the nose from one set piece to the next, hell you feel more like a passive observer of the action that an actual participant in the game.
So no its not nostalgia, its just that modern designers have focused on bling above and beyond anything including the most important thing which of course in a game is gameplay. I mean how many games have YOU played that this sentence applies: "Game had great graphics but just wasn't fun" because I find myself saying that a LOT more than I used to. Maybe its the cost of the games, maybe its because its easier to sell with big set pieces, who knows, what I DO know is the newer games more often than not seem to be focused on look first and gameplay? Doesn't feel like its even in the top five honestly.
Well there is always more than one way to skin the kitty as I always say and I used a couple of Via boxes for low power servers for an SMB that needed their data encrypted, having AES hardware accelerated made them have decent performance without heating up the closet I had to put them in.
Don't look at the C7 though friend, its too old and they have MUCH better models out. Instead check out their Pico-ITX embedded as you can get a nano dual core based unit for around $200-$250, has lower power, better support for crypto, fanless, and they are built like tanks. My buddy that does carputers has used some and says they are top notch, really take a beating and run well. Hell I just spent 3 minutes in Google and found one ready to go for $160 so its really not any more expensive than the E350 and the Nano dual core has AES support baked in. Look up "Via Padlock" if you want to know more about it but if you need low power crypto that would be the way to go.
But it just goes to show what I was saying was correct, with X86 there are a dozen ways to do the same task so its simply a matter of finding the right tool for the job. E350 won't do it? Here is a Via that will without blowing the power budget. Money no object? They have Intel CULV that just sip power but those bitches are expensive with a capital E so if you are on a budget it wouldn't be the first choice. But as you can see here on this overview that if crypto is a major requirement the Via has it covered, hell it says it can get 12.8 Gbps throughput encode/decode which would be more than plenty and at roughly the same power budget as the E350, and I can tell ya it makes for a great low power server box with crypto.
This is why I don't get people trying to fit ARM into every project, it reminds me of those guys that tried to make everything with VB. ARM works best with helper DSPs in the PMP/handheld space, once you start needing any kind of real IPC ARM quickly runs into a wall. As you can see there are just so many different X86 chips out there somebody will have one that will cut the mustard without giving up performance. i don't even want to know how hard you'd have to slam a Pi to get it to do a crypto dashcam, poor little thing would probably melt. You could take that Zotac box, slap a stripped down Linux or Windows install and there ya go, hell it even has an SD card slot so you could take the data out of the unit without taking it out the trunk, easy peasy.
Oh don't even get me started on MSFT and mobile, for years I was saying "WTF are you doing? Do you REALLY think an itsy bitsy start menu on a low res cellphone is gonna work?" so what do they do...they put the fucking low res shitty cellphone GUI on the desktop instead! Talk about a fucking facepalm. I work in the trenches and here is something the press will never tell you...nobody LIKES their cellphones, they TOLERATE them because NO company has invented the perfect thumb driven OS yet, its still got too many problems but people put up with them to get the programs they DO want.
But never before in all my years of computing have I seen a company just smile and blow their brains out like this, its almost like watching something from faces of death where you know what is coming but you just can't believe anybody would not be able to see what is gonna happen if they keep doing that dumb shit...I mean name ONE positive metric they've had with WinPhone/WinTab/Win 8? Just one? You can't because their aren't any. I saw an article where right after the release of WinRT a couple of guys went to your average mall, one filmed in front of the Apple store and the other a MSFT store and they asked folks what they bought. Know what they found? The MSFT store was a ghost town, less than a dozen sales all afternoon and ALL of the sales were Xbox games, they didn't sell a single WinRT tablet. The Apple store was packed and they quit counting iPads after the first dozen because there was too many people coming and going for one guy to talk to everybody.
And the bitch is it would soooo fucking easy to fix the desktop, just go back to Win 7 and make TIFKAM OPTIONAL, so that those with touchscreens (which as I said is less than 2% of the entire market and the OEMs have stopped cranking out touchscreen laptops because they just sit on shelves, nobody wants to poke their laptop or desktop) can have it and those that don't won't have that slapped in their faces. I swear Windows 8 feels like its fucking insulting you, it seems openly hostile to non tablet users because the stupid shit just gets in your face. Take those stupid gestures, know how many laptops I've removed Win 8 off of because people aren't precise enough with their trackpads and the stupid OS decides they are using gestures and just starts doing shit the user doesn't want?
But I think you are wrong on the desktop as what I'm seeing in the trenches is just the opposite, most folks have a ton of PCs and use them all the time. Its simply the fact that even a Best Buy special has a triple or quad and ALL of the laptops are dual core which is honestly much MUCH more power than the average user needs so they just aren't buying as often. I mean what is your average user doing that needs more than a quad core? hell most users barely multitask! Same thing goes with laptops, unless you drop the thing what kills laptops is heat cycling but folks just aren't slamming these crazy powerful Turion X2s and Core2Duos so they just aren't dying. Hell I'm "Mr Multitasker" and used to change out my gear every year and a half, now? My Phenom X6 is going on 3 years old, my Asus EEE AMD netbook is pushing 4 years old but when I'm mobile I'm testing networks and downloading drivers, the EEE works fine for that and at home the X6 just blows through any task I can come up with, hell I've played a FPS while burning DVDs AND transcoding and not managed to choke it, why would I need more?
This is why I'm telling folks to just stick with Win 7, either MSFT will fire Ballmer between now and 2020 or Google and Valve will end up taking over the desktop and that will be that. Hell fricking Alienware is coming out with an Ubuntu based gaming box with Steam pre-loaded, even the OEMs are looking at exit strategies which when you look at how good Windows 7 is is just a damned shame. If they would have stayed on that track they could try anything they wanted with mobile and still have the desktop revenue to count on, instead Ballmer is lighting a match to the whole company and just burning the thing to the ground, damned shame.
And THIS is why I never got into that genre, you could smoke a big fat bong and still not figure out WTF the insane troll logic they were looking for with their puzzles.
I remember one where you had to get past this place by stealing a passport from a guy, getting some scotch tape so you could get hair off a cat to make a fake mustache and jump through a bunch of hoops to get a black magic marker so you could draw a mustache on the passport...because the guy whose passport you stole didn't have a fucking mustache in the first place!
So while I like puzzles those damned games seemed to have a bit of a contest going on to see who could make the most batshit sequence of hoops to jump through to get from point A to point B. I never understood the appeal of games that went so far out of their way to make no damned logical sense when it comes to their puzzles.
Uhhh..and I'd have to have a CLI in Windows 7...WHY exactly? You don't and the fact that "keyboard commanders" are the only ones who can use MSFT's new TOUCH TABLET OS without wanting to shoot the thing just shows what a failwhale the design is. You have to give MSFT credit, only MSFT would decide they needed a more tablet friendly OS...only to make it so you had to rely on a keyboard to get anything done, its about as logical as putting P4s into laptops, its so damned dumb you almost have to admire anybody who can fail that spectacularly.
Oh good God man, do you know NOTHING about how MAD even works? It is NOT a credible threat because you would have THREE DAYS to knock the damned things down, with that much lead time hell they could afford to miss every other shot and still knock out every missile in the bunch.
What you are attempting to describe, horribly wrongly I might add, is what is known as a "got you last" which again does NOT work if the things take up to a fricking week to get here! For an example of how a REAL "got you last" works you might want to read up on the US nuclear sub strategy or the Russian "dead hand" system but in BOTH of those cases they work as a deterrent because the enemy knows no matter how fast they are they WILL be hit. With the Dead Hand System if you nuked Moscow, managed to kill every single leader all of the missiles WILL launch and start raining on your cities in less than an hour. with the US "Nuclear Sub Strategy" there are nuclear subs constantly patrolling in the Atlantic and Pacific, even to this very day. If you managed to take out Washington, kill every leader from the POTUS to the most junior member of congress all it takes is a single American base to send the alert and when the subs can't contact Washington because its gone? Well no matter how well you bomb the land bases there are still enough sub based ICBMs to wipe out every major city in Russia.
So just quit while you're behind dude, because there is no way a moon base attack would fit into any kind of MAD strategy, fuck you could literally send up rockets filled with pebbles and just shred the damned things before they even got close. The ONLY reason why orbital platforms were a threat, and why everyone agreed not to build them, was with even a weak rocket you could use the Earth's gravity well to increase the speed and the first bombs would be blowing up in under 20 minutes flat which is why they were banned, both sides wouldn't even have the 30-45 minutes to make the call that they would have with an ICBM making it much more likely for one side to launch "just in case" thus making it too risky.
I'm sorry but other than Dr Evil nobody with a brain would build a nuclear moon base except to maybe attack another moon base, it would be just too easily defeated. The whole point of MAD is to have a weapon the enemy can't stop so if they attack you they too will be destroyed, the moon is just too damned far away for that to be the case. Hell you might as well say "What if they build nukes on Europa?" as it would make the same amount of sense there, in both cases you'd give the enemy so much reaction time it would just be completely pointless.
More like "I'd rather not have software that hates me" because lets be honest folks, if you are not on a tablet or thrown out your nice LCD for some little touchscreen? Then Win 8 is NOT FOR YOU and neither will Windows Blue be for you because guess what a good 90% of the talk coming out about it from Redmond is? If you said "Shit nobody owns nor cares about" then you'd be right.
I have a feeling you'll see a lot moving up but NOT to Windows "LOL We're a hip cellphone company yo!" 8 but to Windows 7. The rest? Well if it ain't broke, not like MSFT has been worth a piss when it comes to timely security patches anyway, you are better off with a firewall and decent AV. You can download a browser right now that still runs on Win98 (Kmeleon) so considering how many XP systems there are out there I doubt finding software that will run will be a problem.
I don't get MSFT right now folks, I really don't. Its not like Nokia where years of infighting had left them without a viable OS so their backs was against the wall, they are still making pretty damned good money. Its not like Apple where they had painted themselves into a corner and ended up with an OS so damned old and creaky they had no choice but to buy out NeXT, Windows 7 is a damned good product, good enough I think it belongs right beside XP X64 and Win2K on any best of list, and its not like their market has disappeared, despite the horseshit that the press shovels (who all seem to sleep with their iPhones) there are still hundreds of millions of PCs being sold and still a LOT of room for growth...what the fuck?
I swear the new attitude at MSFT seems to be just giving the finger, from Windows 8 to the X720 supposedly being online only and banning used games it seems like Ballmer thinks if he burns the company to the ground and says "No we ONLY are a premium brand like Apple" that this will magically give them Apple's market...which just ain't happening folks, it took Jobs 20+ years to build the Apple name into a premium brand, whereas Ballmer is sticking a new paintjob on a Pinto and expecting it to beat Porsche in sales, just complete fucking reality disconnect.
The sad part is it would be crazy simple to make PCs explode again, all it takes is a teeny tiny bit of common sense which sadly seems to be lacking at Redmond. Never before has it been easier to plug a PC into a TV, damned near every desktop and laptop coming out today has HDMI which is piss easy to set up and never before has 1080P capable computers been so damned cheap, so why the fuck aren't you promoting that MSFT? Hell you could even use it to get your foot in the door of mobile by adding cool features that make the WinPhone easy peasy to use as everything from a remote to a streaming media player with the PC as the central hub, you could then make deals with the media companies to make any PC, Vista-9 that has WMC into a powerhouse that is soooo simple to work it isn't even funny.
In a way I find it kinda sad, I really do. they could make something truly fucking awesome, you have all this power with the desktop PC that when tied together with the X720 and the WinPhone/WinTab could do some truly incredible stuff, but because Steve Ballmer is such a shitty CEO and has such an Ahab like focus on being just like Apple they are just pissing it all away. The death of XP will be IMHO a milestone worth noting as MSFT will NEVER have those kinds of numbers again, not because they didn't jump into the "ZOMFG smartphone!" market in the right way, not because they can't make a decent product, but because the company ONLY cares about a single niche that frankly will never ever EVER be a big deal on X86. Touchscreens on laptops and desktops is like putting handlebars on a pickup truck, while handlebars may be great for biking it just doesn't translate to anything with wheels and is worse than what we had before...too bad MSFT is too blinded by iMoney to see that.
Probably to get around filters, I've seen a lot of filters that are just that easy to fool and honestly I wouldn't be surprised if somebody who writes prose THAT badly was stupid enough to be doing that shit at his job.
Please God tell me you are joking, you are...right? Missiles on the moon would be the most RETARDED MOVE EVAR because by the time the fucking missiles reached earth the war would have been over for a couple of days. I don't know what the flight time to reach China is but I remember during the cold war that to reach pretty much anywhere in the USSR was less than an hour flight time and using the best rockets we have today a missile from the moon would take a MINIMUM of 3 days, and that is if everything was in perfect alignment.
So no Dr Evil, putting missiles on the moon would be beyond pointless. The whole point of nukes is MAD and MAD don't work if your shit won't get there for 3-4 days after the war is over. Hell you could wipe out China and then just send up some ICBMs to waste the nukes in space, they would be pretty damned useless as a threat or defense strategy.
If he can get enough food to feed his fat face i have no doubt he'd be able to get enough to feed his double.
There is actually a lot of precedent for this, from Saddam which supposedly had no less than 4 doubles he'd use to make "appearances" in places that weren't strictly Baathist all the way back to Hitler whose use of a double was well known enough the Soviets had their soldiers scour the German countryside to find Hitler's dentist just to make sure the body they found was his and not the double.
Well yes and no. Yes in at this moment there really isn't a point, we simply don't have the tech to make going to the moon worth doing right now. Back then it was more about beating the USSR so the fact that they couldn't do much more than pick up a couple hundred pounds or rocks and doing a couple of basic experiments was fine, no reason for the flag waving today. If China or India want to blow a pile of money to say they did it? Knock yourselves out, been there and done that. As for the no part we know that Helium 3 is found to be plentiful there and since helium 3 looks like it might be good for fusion reactors in the future WHEN we can set up a base THEN it would be worth going, with a permanent base (most likely all robotic) one could make the case for the trip.
Frankly the one thing I see NO point in though is "meatbags is spaaace!" because the amount of resources you have to use to get a fragile meatbag into space with today's tech? Really not worth it. The robot doesn't need food, air, water, toilets, can be powered for decades with an RTG, its just better to send a machine to do it. Does that mean we shouldn't work on making new engines capable of moving us meatbags out there? Of course not, but as of right now with the tech we have the machines are just a better choice.
You ain't the only one AC, I have gotten to the point that if a site doesn't support paying through Amazon I don't buy from them as i'm tired of having so damned many places having too much data. I've had my card replaced something like 3 times in the past 2 years because of some dumbass at some website screwing the pooch and I'm just sick of it.
And i'm not giving the OS jack shit, Ballmer can jerk off at the thought of a 30% cut of all software all he wants I'm following my business customers and hanging onto win 7 like a drowning man hanging onto a log, hopefully by the time 2020 rolls around the board will punt Ballmer like a 30 yard field return and we can has some sanity brought back to the desktop. Until then they can all get stuffed as far as I'm concerned, i'm a customer NOT a walking ATM for them to try to squeeze more sales out of.
Dude that was my POINT, that the ONLY reason Linux has jack squat when it comes to servers is that MSFT is thumb up their ass retarded when it comes to licenses.
As I said you make me the head of MSFT and I could wipe Linux off the map in under 2 years simply by getting rid of CALs and going to flat pricing, which your links just show why Linux has any decent share. It is for THIS reason why Linus can be a prima donna prick, he knows that MSFT is bug fucking stupid when it comes to licensing which means he can do anything he wants and will still get paid, the market has NO CHOICE but either put up with his bullshit or bend over for MSFT.
This is why I'm not holding out much hope for MSFT as long as Ballmer is in charge, he cares more about what Wall Street thinks than in owning markets and this shows in everything he does, from fucking the Windows desktop to try to force a foot into mobile (because Wall Street likes Apple so we have to ape them!) to the rumor that the Xbox 720 is gonna be online only DRM fest (Wall Street likes lock in so we need lock in even if it runs off customers!) to braindead moves like killing the market gaining playsforsure to replace it with a badly done copy of the Apple appstore the entire company is being run by Dilbert's PHB, spending all their time reading the financial times and looking to play buzzword bingo instead of running the damned company. if you were to put me in charge? I could double the share in 2 years or you wouldn't owe me a dime, I'd crush Linux like a bug, make the 720 as easy to use and user friendly as Steam, I'd make PC gaming and console gaming one big experience, I'd fucking OWN the planet by the time I'm through...but as long as its run by those that only care about stock price? Well Linus can do what he pleases, he really doesn't have any competition.
Don't know how it is where YOU live, where I live they all come from prestigious firms and live in country club circle with the other richies.