Hell I don't own any Apple products or even care much for the company but even I can see buying a ChromeBook at that price is just dumb, the Macbook Air will have better resale value and retain its worth for a lot longer than a thinclient ChromeBook Pixel will, in fact I bet you'd be lucky to even get half of what you paid in a year whereas I've seen 5 year old Macbooks going for nearly $400.
Like it or not when you get over the $1K price mark frankly Apple makes a lot of sense if for no other reason how long they retain their value.
Dude do you know ANYTHING about how graphics work? you DO know that shitty Intel GPU is gonna have to draw that big ass pixel hog of a screen...right? I mean sure a Geforce 5200 can draw a 2048x1536 screen but that don't make it a good idea hoss, and with a GPU that weak trying to draw that big a screen it pretty much HAS to be a thin client like ChromeOS because you try doing HD video on that thing and its gonna be a stuttering slideshow. No thanks.
Riiight because making us play "Guess WTF Microsoft called that" is soooo much more modern than two clicks with a mouse...I'm sorry but search boxes are a giant sign that says "We don't know how to make a GUI so just deal with this".
As others have said if you are gonna do that you might as well just replace the cycle sucking FB tweeting twitter shitting live tile mess with a Powershell prompt and call it a day, after all it'll do the same thing your "much more modern" search box will AND let you use pipes and flags so...hey! It must be the most super duper modern way to do things, right?
Oh and BTW how in the fuck is your search box gonna be worth shit on a tablet which MSFT obviously designed TIFKAM for? you gonna have to play "poke at the virtual keyboard" every time you need anything?
TIFKAM, which MSFT has said repeatedly "is the future" as in "the desktop is on borrowed time" is NOT DESIGNED for multitasking, the best it can do is one program taking 3/4s of the screen and the other stuffed in a strip. The reason for this is simple..TIFKAM is a bad design which not only doesn't follow tablet or cellphone conventions frankly it doesn't follow ANY conventions that I can see, unless "try to piss off the user" is a convention I've never heard of.
I used WinME for nearly 8 months, used Vista for over a year, Win 8 frankly had me ready to pull my hair out at barely the two month mark. When I got rid of Win 8 for Win 7 it was like a weight lifting off my chest, and I honestly wouldn't take that OS if you paid me. In fact as buggy as it was I'd take Vista over Win 8 because at least with Vista with enough tweaking you could get it to behave, no matter what you do Win 8 is always gonna suck, suck more resources, suck more cycles, just plain suck period because its not designed for desktops and laptops, its designed for cellphones and tablets. Nobody else is stupid enough to stick a cellphone UI on their desktop, gotta at least give MSFT credit for that "innovation". Still doesn't make it any less stupid.
But if you have invested considerable time and effort into that property frankly you'd take a lot of shit from the baron before just walking away. Take sharecroppers, they tended the land, worked on their homes, they put a lot of time and effort into property that wasn't there and while the landowner could at any time turn the screws they still stayed.
Look at how long people will put up with an MMO going to absolute shit rather than walk away and lose all that time they had invested in a character, even though those characters and goods aren't real and they can just walk away they often won't. Much like the old boiling frog myth if the site turns to shit in small degrees instead of all at once you'd be surprised how much crap you can impose on people even when they could just walk away.
Let me give you some advice friend when you run into another one of these keyboard commanders, just say this..."So we should have to print cheat sheets for the OS like its 1986? THAT is innovation?" and watch how quick they STFU because that is EXACTLY what they expect, that Bob the builder and Sally the Secretary and little Mrs Pipkin and all those other normal folks who have been using computers 17+ fucking years now (Win 95-Win 7) are gonna throw ALL that fucking learning and muscle memory away for....what? What do they fucking gain from being a damned keyboard commander?
NOTHING, they gain NOTHING, all being a keyboard commander does is make what WAS a couple of clicks a couple of clicks AGAIN only now they have to keep a God damned list handy so they can ctrl-alt-whatever just to do what was "clicky clicky" and done before!
So you be sure to remember that little bit friend, because as much as I hate saying shill there IS a pretty large force posting the exact same posts, word for word, trying to derail any and all talks about how TIFKAM is really fucked up and stupid and one of their big excuses is the keyboard commander bit. I even had one pop in when I pointed out it was retarded to put shutdown under settings (because what normal person is gonna think shutdown is in control panel?) with a "You don't need that, just use WinKey+R=Shutdown -(time in seconds)"...really? Did he HONESTLY believe that bunch of bullshit was better than 2 damned clicks with a mouse before?
That is why we all need to point out how damned stupid it is to expect the world to go back to the DOS way of doing things because again that is EXACTLY what it is, using the same old keyboard commander crap we used in DOS just to make up for their pitiful design choices.
And there is a good reason for it, not to be blunt you could could probably hire a dozen coders in Vietnam for the cost of a single American. Do I think this is right? Nope and I think we should be a lot more protectionist like China and India but until that day comes one has to face reality and the reality is most CS is gonna end up either overseas (or thanks to scams like "How not to hire an American") or H1-Bs. That's just the way it is.
Ya know what pisses ME off about Metro/Win 8 way of doing things? Not only does it give you NO fucking choice in the matter but things that took one click now take 3 or more, and things that take a couple takes a shitload of submenu bullshit! Take safe mode, push F8 and there ya go, right? WRONG, now its shift PLUS F8 PLUS 3 fucking pages of extra options to get through when all you want is safe mode!
I get the "fun" of finding drivers for a Toshiba that was "made for Win 8" therefor doesn't fricking have drivers for anything else. i tried warning the guy but he was all "How bad can it really be?"...snicker...he called me 3 weeks later saying "Take this God damned thing OFF my PC! I hate this stupid thing!" and frankly he IS the target audience, has little exp with computers and needs lots of hand holding but win Metro is laid out so damned stupid and has so much extra shit running (like the live tiles mess, which seriously sucks ass on wifi with limited bandwidth) its slowing his little Bobcat laptop to a fricking crawl. When he asked "Does Win 7 REALLY make that big of a difference?" all I had to do was hand him my Bobcat netbook and say "our chips are virtually identical, try it and see" and it didn't take him 10 minutes before he said "That's it, I've had it, make that damned Win 8 go away".
This is NOT hyperbole, this is NOT from someone who has trouble picking up new OSes, hell I can run a half a dozen including the more esoteric Linux DEs along with Android and iOS but this...its just fucking stupid, it makes assumptions and acts like its on a damned cellphone, expects touch (which will NOT be coming to a good 95%+ of desktops and laptops because holding your arm out like that isn't pleasant and the cost is too high for large touchscreens) and frankly tries its damned best to get in your way and treat you like a moron. this is the first MSFT OS since WinME I will NOT have in my shop and if they refuse to listen to their customers and give us the option of killing this shit dead I predict MSFT will be the next RIM, a company that USED to be a big deal but only has legacy customers that are looking for the exit.
And if on the off chance any MSFT bigwigs read this? Hi, I'm your customer, I sell and support your product and you are ROYALLY FUCKING UP if you think you can use the damned desktop to EEE your way into the cellphone market, you can't, it won't work, it would be like putting a bubble on a moped and calling it a car hoping to break into the 2 wheeler market off the backs of your car buyers. If you want to compete with Apple in mobile? Then SPIN OFF MOBILE and let them sink or swim on their own, you have hundreds of millions of customers that are either hanging onto what will soon be a two release behind OS of yours or looking at your competitors and that is NOT the way to do business. The desktop is NOT touch, will not BE touch, and nobody wants their PC to be a giant smartphone. Hell watch the video, even usability experts, you know, the people actually PAID the big bux to design UIs? Yeah even they say your design is stupid. The PC is designed for content CREATION and you are trying to push a content CONSUMPTION only design and ya know what? Not gonna work, hell Win 8 has worse numbers than fricking Vista.
So please MSFT, just stop it, its not gonna work, you can't "pull an IE" and jam your OS into a space where nobody wants it, not like this. All you are doing now is making yourselves look like a bunch of idiots run by marketing drones...which sadly really isn't far off if you look at the output. You are NOT Apple, Redmond is NOT Cupertino, just stop it already because you are just embarrassing yourself.
Good point, although if one really wanted to split hairs what is being described I would say is more akin to feudalism, where you have all these little kingdoms but unlike IRL you can instantly move to a kingdom with a ruler that you are more in agreement with.
Exactly. I ran a chat board for PC problems back in the day and while i tended to fall upon the "use common sense" rule there were still rules, it was just MY rules. It was simply the fact that we were more tolerant back then, basically as long as they were staying on topic and not being a complete douchebag I let it slide, after all we were talking about PC problems which of course usually come with frustration so I expected some people getting really pissed off when everything they try didn't work. Many other places had even more lax rules but I didn't want the topic to stray too far as the place did have a theme so as long as it stuck to the theme it was pretty much whatever.
Now frankly the corps have shat in the punchbowl, you have to worry about DMCA and liability and shit like that so many of us old guard just quit dealing with the bullshit. Now its all run by those wanting to "monetize" who use focus groups and SEOs and have a shitload of rules to minimize risk which is why it sucks more now. I quit hosting mine thanks to the fucking cops, when that "to catch a predator" shit first started I'd have cops all fucking day long talking dirty in the damn forum when it wasn't even a social forum. I finally had to threaten lawsuits and harassment charges but you'd get rid of one douchebag from one precinct and then here would come another, and before anybody asked I did do IP traces and yes they were LEO, they were just stupid LEOs and back then there was less places for them to troll so they trolled pretty much anywhere that got any traffic at all. I ended up dealing with more complaints from them fucking up boards with their trolling fucking up threads than I did with actually helping people so I gave it up.
So yes things were better before and shittier now, that is what happens when big bux start changing hands, it all becomes about risk and reward instead of about the users. I'm sure if I would have kept mine up I could have sold it out by the time the dotbomb was in full swing but since I wasn't in it for the money but to help people I honestly didn't care, many of those that were around then did sell out and are gone now, went the way of Geocities, bought by a corp that didn't know WTF to do with a property, just that it was "hot" so it MUST be good for making money somehow, then run it into the ground trying to figure out how to make a ROI on something never built for that purpose. Its a shame but when large sums start changing hands? Bullshit WILL be coming right behind, that is just the way of the world.
I would have no problem sending those comments to my mother because she has a spine, unlike spineless cowards who don't have the balls to stand by what they say, you for example.
That is why I have said that any innovation in this area will come from Asia, because the USA has become such a minefield you can't get anything done. Ironically that is exactly how the USA got a leg up on the old world in the industrial revolution, we ignored their patents and our guys could see what worked and what didn't and improve upon it, not anymore.
Just another example of why Slashdot needs to get rid of ACs, if they don't have the balls to stand by their comments they should probably STFU.
And I'm sorry to the Google fanbois but anybody who had taken more than a minute to glance at the MPEG patents could have told you this, short of inventing an entire new way to encode and decode video you are royally fucked because those MPEG patents cover pretty much every way we know to encode and stream video, as much as I think they are a douchebag company MPEG-LA pretty much has and the patents are specific enough that I doubt the courts will knock 'em down.
Now if you just want to complain how it sucks? hey I'm right there with ya, patenting software is retarded but as long as that is the law of the land MPEG-LA is gonna control video for quite a few years.
Dude, shooters were a BIG hit looooong before goldeneye, hell the first X86 PC I ever owned was given to me by a guy who owed me $150 bucks and gave me a $1000 computer because it wouldn't play Hexen and he wasn't gonna have no computer that won't play Hexen. Look at the games that came out around Doom, the two I mentioned, Blake Stone, all those great Doom and BUILD engine games...hell it was so big a genre then they even had the cheap cash grabs like PO'ed where you fought farting butts by a company just whipping out a quick one to cash in on the craze, just like how when fighting games hit it big there were a million street Fighter and Mortal Kombat knockoffs. And the Sega Genesis had a couple of FPS on it even with that weak tech, zero tolerance and one with these big bouncing smiley faces, can't remember the name.
I was selling PCs based on how good it would play shoooters back in 94-96, and of course 1998 gave us Half Life and Deus Ex which just changed everything, you had a billion shooters by then. 1994 was 19 years ago man,a kid born in 94 will be college age now so I'd say it passes the nostalgic test.
Bite me, if someone acts like an ass they should be called an ass, and if a woman acts like a grade A prima donna wicked bitch of the west? Then damned straight they need to be called on it, maybe if she wouldn't have been spoiled all her damned life and coddled by people like you she might actually know how to deal with public situations instead of running to her little online world to whine like an emo.
It would have taken her...what, 2 fucking seconds to tell them to chill, if that? But noooooo, because that would have been the end of that, those two geeks would have said "my bad" and that would be the end of it, oh fuck no, can't have that, gotta act like a wounded bird, be a whiny wuss so she can score some victim points...fucking pathetic, that is what it is pathetic. And I have no problem with WOMEN because unlike this whiny brat WOMEN actually have spines and aren't afraid to speak up, unlike this irritant.
Well sorry but I'm fucking sick of it, its called having some damned civility and common fucking sense. I've lived off and on in an apt for years....how fucking hard is it just to tell some to politely chill? Its not. How hard is it to tell someone in public to tone it down a notch? Again its not, takes 2 fucking seconds of your time and 99 out of a 100 all you are gonna get is a "sorry my bad, didn't know" and then IF you get that 100 THEN you can think about turning it up a notch.
You know what those like the PC priss are? babies, they are fucking infants that haven't even learned how to act in public, they have spent their lives in little spoiled rotten bubbles and when they find anything that isn't clean enough for their little bubble they just lose their damned minds.
Fuck that, we should NOT be coddling or putting up with that shit, if I'd have done something like that my dad would have been "What, are you four years old? You couldn't tell the dude to tone it down, you gotta act like a little whiny brat?" and THAT is the EXACT attitude we need to take with these spoiled rotten prisses, we need to make it clear the world does NOT revolve around their self absorbed asses and when they are in public they are gonna have to actually fucking DEAL with the public, no go running to their little web pages to whine like an emo brat.
First Person Shooters should be in classic as well, shooters go all the way back to Wolfenstein and Doom which is 20 years ago so I'd say that is pretty vintage. I still remember the "fun" of setting IRQ channels and fiddling with game settings to get sound in various shooters like Redneck Rampage and Blood so its not like the FPS is a modern thing here, sure the graphics get better but its still "See bad guy? Shoot bad guy" gameplay that goes back to the days of shooting gallery games.
We really need to stand up and say "this shit is NOT gonna cut it" because a guy was FIRED for telling a joke TO HIS FRIEND and was overheard by a member of the politically correct brigade who then blasted their picture all over the interwebs with a "look at the dirty men" kind of deal.
Now imagine getting fired for telling a joke to your friend because some bitch you never even met took your picture and decided she was offended by something not directed TO her or AT her...that is fucked up folks and we need to tell the PC bitch and her ilk to STFU and get the 2x4 out of their asses. Since they were in CA which is a two party state he really needs to sue the bitch, I'd take every damned cent the woman has just to make a lesson for those that don't know how to act like a fucking civilized human being. All she had to do was tell the guys they were disturbing her and that would have been that, but oh hell no, then she couldn't play the victim...fuck her, I hope she has serious difficulty finding a job and ends up having to take a shit job for reduced pay, because she is a good example of what is wrong with the world right now.
I still use my clicky clack PS2 keyboard because I can tell the difference in my games, the USB keyboard has more of a "jerky" quality, its not fluid no matter how high you crank the polling.
So you say but I primarily play 5 string bass and I'm picky as hell about the sound, it can be damned hard to get the nice fat round tone that comes from that 20 year old swamp ash P5 playing through my Trace Elliot and get it reproduced perfectly in digital. Once you do get it recorded well though I honestly couldn't hear a difference between 192k and 44.1k, both on individual and band tracks and that was with a pretty damned sweet setup, nicer than most audiophiles will ever have.
But to me the perfect example of how its mostly if not all placebo is the picture in TFA, you had the audiophile playing back his music...on a fricking tube headphone amp. Now anybody who knows shit about amps will tell you that while tubes have a nice warm tone accurate reproduction is NOT their strong suite yet this guy is saying how he can tell the difference in all these little variations while playing it through what is frankly probably the most inaccurate system he could possibly get. Hell tube amps sound different depending on the room temp and even the amount of humidity so how does he know what he is hearing isn't just the way the tubes are acting that day?
Well I live in an apt so I consider the DAC in my system "good enough" for the volume levels I'm playing at. Hell I have a brand new Audigy soundcard sitting in the closet a customer gave me but the DAC built onto my board sounds fine as far as I'm concerned, and while I'll be the first to admit the DACs of the late 90s weren't great (which is why I always had soundblaster back then, those AC97 chips were just shitty) the ability to have everything at my fingertips 24/7 just outweighs the possible sound losses in my case. Hell the last few years I've gotten rid of all my consumer electronics like TVs and stereos and just do everything through the PC, its just easier to have one unit that takes care of everything.
Well they should really try to post to the right person because something like that seriously derails a discussion. To use the/. car analogy it would be like talking the merits of various trucks and somebody chimes in "My boat gets great gas mileage!"...uhhh...okay? Now everybody is wondering WTF that has to do with anything and the entire chain of thought is derailed.
What is worse is they were actually arguing with me when I AGREED with their position, if you are strictly talking about what is better to OWN, not what is better to listen to? I keep all my band's multitracks in FLAC so that we lose nothing and can re-edit or compress at any time from source, just makes sense. but that is a completely different ball of wax than whether you can hear a difference between those FLAC files and the same tracks in MP3 320K.
Lives on a farm in the middle of BF nowhere so no EM or vibrations, I finally said go get an electrician because its a new place, he was living in a rinky dink apt but his boss owns a farm and is often away on business for a couple of months at a time so paid to have a little 3 room cottage built on the property that he could live in rent free in return for keeping the animals while the boss is gone.
What is throwing me is the damned PSUs, you'd THINK that if it was electrical it'd blow the PSU as well, but I have his last PSU here and its running fine and you'd think if he was getting voltage spikes THAT damned bad it'd fry the netbook because its a bottom of the line Atom, as cheap as cheap can be, but that thing along with his late GF's laptop both run fine, its ONLY the desktops that blow.
Anyway once the electrician gives a thumbs up I'll throw away the case, board, and CPU along with keyboard and mouse, surely to God that will have eliminated enough variables i can either stop it or at least figure out WTF is going on. I hate to do it and like I said I'm not even charging the guy labor anymore, all he is paying for is parts because i feel sorry for the bad run he's had, but damned if i can figure out what else to do. Its really frustrating and makes me feel like an idiot because i can fix all these systems and build boxes all damned day but can't get this one fucking unit to keep working no matter what I do.
Nope, this is the second case although the cases were similar no name black box cases. I already have a silver eMachine case sitting in the corner I'll let him have with the next board, i figure if he's gonna have to swap boards anyway its time to change the CPU and the case while I'm at it, i have a really nice older AM2 board I pulled from a guy that wanted to put in a quad the board wouldn't support but with the kind of games he's playing an Athlon X2 will be cheap and better than the Pentium D he has now.
Like I said its a puzzler, frankly the only thing I haven't changed is the keyboard so i guess I'll tell him to shitcan that while I'm at it, I just hate having to tell a guy on a limited income to keep tossing gear while i grab at straws but honestly? Don't know what else to do. like I said no obvious damage, hell no damage at all to the boards I can see, they just stop working. Never seen that before, usually when a board goes it'll fry a trace or blow a cap or roast the northbridge, but with these? Nothing.
Well like I said he is trying to play flight sims, at the end of a hard day up to his ass in grease and busted car parts making believe he is a WWII fighter ace makes him happy. I can get that, nothing I enjoy more on the weekends than firing up some Borderlands and playing a few missions with my boys, its a nice bonding experience and fun and funny as hell.
and while I'm glad FLOSS works for you obviously it doesn't work for most. Oh and FYI? windows uses LESS RESOURCES than FLOSS you are just using the wrong version. Look up "Windows 7 Tiny" which was cooked up by gamers who wanted an ultra small desktop for gaming, thing uses less than 192MB fully loaded. XP Tiny only uses 58MB, win2K3 uses 87MB and Vista uses 340MB...hey they are gamers, not miracle workers LOL. But just for shits and giggles i slapped Win 7 Tiny on a first release P4 with 384Mb of RAM and while it took a little bit to find a sound driver the thing just flew. they really need to give the Windows Tiny team a job at Redmond because frankly they kick both the embedded and WINFLP teams square in the ass while having more than 90% compatibility with vanilla windows.
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Hell I don't own any Apple products or even care much for the company but even I can see buying a ChromeBook at that price is just dumb, the Macbook Air will have better resale value and retain its worth for a lot longer than a thinclient ChromeBook Pixel will, in fact I bet you'd be lucky to even get half of what you paid in a year whereas I've seen 5 year old Macbooks going for nearly $400.
Like it or not when you get over the $1K price mark frankly Apple makes a lot of sense if for no other reason how long they retain their value.
Dude do you know ANYTHING about how graphics work? you DO know that shitty Intel GPU is gonna have to draw that big ass pixel hog of a screen...right? I mean sure a Geforce 5200 can draw a 2048x1536 screen but that don't make it a good idea hoss, and with a GPU that weak trying to draw that big a screen it pretty much HAS to be a thin client like ChromeOS because you try doing HD video on that thing and its gonna be a stuttering slideshow. No thanks.
Riiight because making us play "Guess WTF Microsoft called that" is soooo much more modern than two clicks with a mouse...I'm sorry but search boxes are a giant sign that says "We don't know how to make a GUI so just deal with this".
As others have said if you are gonna do that you might as well just replace the cycle sucking FB tweeting twitter shitting live tile mess with a Powershell prompt and call it a day, after all it'll do the same thing your "much more modern" search box will AND let you use pipes and flags so...hey! It must be the most super duper modern way to do things, right?
Oh and BTW how in the fuck is your search box gonna be worth shit on a tablet which MSFT obviously designed TIFKAM for? you gonna have to play "poke at the virtual keyboard" every time you need anything?
TIFKAM, which MSFT has said repeatedly "is the future" as in "the desktop is on borrowed time" is NOT DESIGNED for multitasking, the best it can do is one program taking 3/4s of the screen and the other stuffed in a strip. The reason for this is simple..TIFKAM is a bad design which not only doesn't follow tablet or cellphone conventions frankly it doesn't follow ANY conventions that I can see, unless "try to piss off the user" is a convention I've never heard of.
I used WinME for nearly 8 months, used Vista for over a year, Win 8 frankly had me ready to pull my hair out at barely the two month mark. When I got rid of Win 8 for Win 7 it was like a weight lifting off my chest, and I honestly wouldn't take that OS if you paid me. In fact as buggy as it was I'd take Vista over Win 8 because at least with Vista with enough tweaking you could get it to behave, no matter what you do Win 8 is always gonna suck, suck more resources, suck more cycles, just plain suck period because its not designed for desktops and laptops, its designed for cellphones and tablets. Nobody else is stupid enough to stick a cellphone UI on their desktop, gotta at least give MSFT credit for that "innovation". Still doesn't make it any less stupid.
But if you have invested considerable time and effort into that property frankly you'd take a lot of shit from the baron before just walking away. Take sharecroppers, they tended the land, worked on their homes, they put a lot of time and effort into property that wasn't there and while the landowner could at any time turn the screws they still stayed.
Look at how long people will put up with an MMO going to absolute shit rather than walk away and lose all that time they had invested in a character, even though those characters and goods aren't real and they can just walk away they often won't. Much like the old boiling frog myth if the site turns to shit in small degrees instead of all at once you'd be surprised how much crap you can impose on people even when they could just walk away.
Let me give you some advice friend when you run into another one of these keyboard commanders, just say this..."So we should have to print cheat sheets for the OS like its 1986? THAT is innovation?" and watch how quick they STFU because that is EXACTLY what they expect, that Bob the builder and Sally the Secretary and little Mrs Pipkin and all those other normal folks who have been using computers 17+ fucking years now (Win 95-Win 7) are gonna throw ALL that fucking learning and muscle memory away for....what? What do they fucking gain from being a damned keyboard commander?
NOTHING, they gain NOTHING, all being a keyboard commander does is make what WAS a couple of clicks a couple of clicks AGAIN only now they have to keep a God damned list handy so they can ctrl-alt-whatever just to do what was "clicky clicky" and done before!
So you be sure to remember that little bit friend, because as much as I hate saying shill there IS a pretty large force posting the exact same posts, word for word, trying to derail any and all talks about how TIFKAM is really fucked up and stupid and one of their big excuses is the keyboard commander bit. I even had one pop in when I pointed out it was retarded to put shutdown under settings (because what normal person is gonna think shutdown is in control panel?) with a "You don't need that, just use WinKey+R=Shutdown -(time in seconds)"...really? Did he HONESTLY believe that bunch of bullshit was better than 2 damned clicks with a mouse before?
That is why we all need to point out how damned stupid it is to expect the world to go back to the DOS way of doing things because again that is EXACTLY what it is, using the same old keyboard commander crap we used in DOS just to make up for their pitiful design choices.
And there is a good reason for it, not to be blunt you could could probably hire a dozen coders in Vietnam for the cost of a single American. Do I think this is right? Nope and I think we should be a lot more protectionist like China and India but until that day comes one has to face reality and the reality is most CS is gonna end up either overseas (or thanks to scams like "How not to hire an American") or H1-Bs. That's just the way it is.
Ya know what pisses ME off about Metro/Win 8 way of doing things? Not only does it give you NO fucking choice in the matter but things that took one click now take 3 or more, and things that take a couple takes a shitload of submenu bullshit! Take safe mode, push F8 and there ya go, right? WRONG, now its shift PLUS F8 PLUS 3 fucking pages of extra options to get through when all you want is safe mode!
I get the "fun" of finding drivers for a Toshiba that was "made for Win 8" therefor doesn't fricking have drivers for anything else. i tried warning the guy but he was all "How bad can it really be?"...snicker...he called me 3 weeks later saying "Take this God damned thing OFF my PC! I hate this stupid thing!" and frankly he IS the target audience, has little exp with computers and needs lots of hand holding but win Metro is laid out so damned stupid and has so much extra shit running (like the live tiles mess, which seriously sucks ass on wifi with limited bandwidth) its slowing his little Bobcat laptop to a fricking crawl. When he asked "Does Win 7 REALLY make that big of a difference?" all I had to do was hand him my Bobcat netbook and say "our chips are virtually identical, try it and see" and it didn't take him 10 minutes before he said "That's it, I've had it, make that damned Win 8 go away".
This is NOT hyperbole, this is NOT from someone who has trouble picking up new OSes, hell I can run a half a dozen including the more esoteric Linux DEs along with Android and iOS but this...its just fucking stupid, it makes assumptions and acts like its on a damned cellphone, expects touch (which will NOT be coming to a good 95%+ of desktops and laptops because holding your arm out like that isn't pleasant and the cost is too high for large touchscreens) and frankly tries its damned best to get in your way and treat you like a moron. this is the first MSFT OS since WinME I will NOT have in my shop and if they refuse to listen to their customers and give us the option of killing this shit dead I predict MSFT will be the next RIM, a company that USED to be a big deal but only has legacy customers that are looking for the exit.
And if on the off chance any MSFT bigwigs read this? Hi, I'm your customer, I sell and support your product and you are ROYALLY FUCKING UP if you think you can use the damned desktop to EEE your way into the cellphone market, you can't, it won't work, it would be like putting a bubble on a moped and calling it a car hoping to break into the 2 wheeler market off the backs of your car buyers. If you want to compete with Apple in mobile? Then SPIN OFF MOBILE and let them sink or swim on their own, you have hundreds of millions of customers that are either hanging onto what will soon be a two release behind OS of yours or looking at your competitors and that is NOT the way to do business. The desktop is NOT touch, will not BE touch, and nobody wants their PC to be a giant smartphone. Hell watch the video, even usability experts, you know, the people actually PAID the big bux to design UIs? Yeah even they say your design is stupid. The PC is designed for content CREATION and you are trying to push a content CONSUMPTION only design and ya know what? Not gonna work, hell Win 8 has worse numbers than fricking Vista.
So please MSFT, just stop it, its not gonna work, you can't "pull an IE" and jam your OS into a space where nobody wants it, not like this. All you are doing now is making yourselves look like a bunch of idiots run by marketing drones...which sadly really isn't far off if you look at the output. You are NOT Apple, Redmond is NOT Cupertino, just stop it already because you are just embarrassing yourself.
Good point, although if one really wanted to split hairs what is being described I would say is more akin to feudalism, where you have all these little kingdoms but unlike IRL you can instantly move to a kingdom with a ruler that you are more in agreement with.
Exactly. I ran a chat board for PC problems back in the day and while i tended to fall upon the "use common sense" rule there were still rules, it was just MY rules. It was simply the fact that we were more tolerant back then, basically as long as they were staying on topic and not being a complete douchebag I let it slide, after all we were talking about PC problems which of course usually come with frustration so I expected some people getting really pissed off when everything they try didn't work. Many other places had even more lax rules but I didn't want the topic to stray too far as the place did have a theme so as long as it stuck to the theme it was pretty much whatever.
Now frankly the corps have shat in the punchbowl, you have to worry about DMCA and liability and shit like that so many of us old guard just quit dealing with the bullshit. Now its all run by those wanting to "monetize" who use focus groups and SEOs and have a shitload of rules to minimize risk which is why it sucks more now. I quit hosting mine thanks to the fucking cops, when that "to catch a predator" shit first started I'd have cops all fucking day long talking dirty in the damn forum when it wasn't even a social forum. I finally had to threaten lawsuits and harassment charges but you'd get rid of one douchebag from one precinct and then here would come another, and before anybody asked I did do IP traces and yes they were LEO, they were just stupid LEOs and back then there was less places for them to troll so they trolled pretty much anywhere that got any traffic at all. I ended up dealing with more complaints from them fucking up boards with their trolling fucking up threads than I did with actually helping people so I gave it up.
So yes things were better before and shittier now, that is what happens when big bux start changing hands, it all becomes about risk and reward instead of about the users. I'm sure if I would have kept mine up I could have sold it out by the time the dotbomb was in full swing but since I wasn't in it for the money but to help people I honestly didn't care, many of those that were around then did sell out and are gone now, went the way of Geocities, bought by a corp that didn't know WTF to do with a property, just that it was "hot" so it MUST be good for making money somehow, then run it into the ground trying to figure out how to make a ROI on something never built for that purpose. Its a shame but when large sums start changing hands? Bullshit WILL be coming right behind, that is just the way of the world.
I would have no problem sending those comments to my mother because she has a spine, unlike spineless cowards who don't have the balls to stand by what they say, you for example.
That is why I have said that any innovation in this area will come from Asia, because the USA has become such a minefield you can't get anything done. Ironically that is exactly how the USA got a leg up on the old world in the industrial revolution, we ignored their patents and our guys could see what worked and what didn't and improve upon it, not anymore.
Just another example of why Slashdot needs to get rid of ACs, if they don't have the balls to stand by their comments they should probably STFU.
And I'm sorry to the Google fanbois but anybody who had taken more than a minute to glance at the MPEG patents could have told you this, short of inventing an entire new way to encode and decode video you are royally fucked because those MPEG patents cover pretty much every way we know to encode and stream video, as much as I think they are a douchebag company MPEG-LA pretty much has and the patents are specific enough that I doubt the courts will knock 'em down.
Now if you just want to complain how it sucks? hey I'm right there with ya, patenting software is retarded but as long as that is the law of the land MPEG-LA is gonna control video for quite a few years.
Dude, shooters were a BIG hit looooong before goldeneye, hell the first X86 PC I ever owned was given to me by a guy who owed me $150 bucks and gave me a $1000 computer because it wouldn't play Hexen and he wasn't gonna have no computer that won't play Hexen. Look at the games that came out around Doom, the two I mentioned, Blake Stone, all those great Doom and BUILD engine games...hell it was so big a genre then they even had the cheap cash grabs like PO'ed where you fought farting butts by a company just whipping out a quick one to cash in on the craze, just like how when fighting games hit it big there were a million street Fighter and Mortal Kombat knockoffs. And the Sega Genesis had a couple of FPS on it even with that weak tech, zero tolerance and one with these big bouncing smiley faces, can't remember the name.
I was selling PCs based on how good it would play shoooters back in 94-96, and of course 1998 gave us Half Life and Deus Ex which just changed everything, you had a billion shooters by then. 1994 was 19 years ago man,a kid born in 94 will be college age now so I'd say it passes the nostalgic test.
Bite me, if someone acts like an ass they should be called an ass, and if a woman acts like a grade A prima donna wicked bitch of the west? Then damned straight they need to be called on it, maybe if she wouldn't have been spoiled all her damned life and coddled by people like you she might actually know how to deal with public situations instead of running to her little online world to whine like an emo.
It would have taken her...what, 2 fucking seconds to tell them to chill, if that? But noooooo, because that would have been the end of that, those two geeks would have said "my bad" and that would be the end of it, oh fuck no, can't have that, gotta act like a wounded bird, be a whiny wuss so she can score some victim points...fucking pathetic, that is what it is pathetic. And I have no problem with WOMEN because unlike this whiny brat WOMEN actually have spines and aren't afraid to speak up, unlike this irritant.
Well sorry but I'm fucking sick of it, its called having some damned civility and common fucking sense. I've lived off and on in an apt for years....how fucking hard is it just to tell some to politely chill? Its not. How hard is it to tell someone in public to tone it down a notch? Again its not, takes 2 fucking seconds of your time and 99 out of a 100 all you are gonna get is a "sorry my bad, didn't know" and then IF you get that 100 THEN you can think about turning it up a notch.
You know what those like the PC priss are? babies, they are fucking infants that haven't even learned how to act in public, they have spent their lives in little spoiled rotten bubbles and when they find anything that isn't clean enough for their little bubble they just lose their damned minds.
Fuck that, we should NOT be coddling or putting up with that shit, if I'd have done something like that my dad would have been "What, are you four years old? You couldn't tell the dude to tone it down, you gotta act like a little whiny brat?" and THAT is the EXACT attitude we need to take with these spoiled rotten prisses, we need to make it clear the world does NOT revolve around their self absorbed asses and when they are in public they are gonna have to actually fucking DEAL with the public, no go running to their little web pages to whine like an emo brat.
First Person Shooters should be in classic as well, shooters go all the way back to Wolfenstein and Doom which is 20 years ago so I'd say that is pretty vintage. I still remember the "fun" of setting IRQ channels and fiddling with game settings to get sound in various shooters like Redneck Rampage and Blood so its not like the FPS is a modern thing here, sure the graphics get better but its still "See bad guy? Shoot bad guy" gameplay that goes back to the days of shooting gallery games.
If she was like nosy bitch let me say...yay!
We really need to stand up and say "this shit is NOT gonna cut it" because a guy was FIRED for telling a joke TO HIS FRIEND and was overheard by a member of the politically correct brigade who then blasted their picture all over the interwebs with a "look at the dirty men" kind of deal.
Now imagine getting fired for telling a joke to your friend because some bitch you never even met took your picture and decided she was offended by something not directed TO her or AT her...that is fucked up folks and we need to tell the PC bitch and her ilk to STFU and get the 2x4 out of their asses. Since they were in CA which is a two party state he really needs to sue the bitch, I'd take every damned cent the woman has just to make a lesson for those that don't know how to act like a fucking civilized human being. All she had to do was tell the guys they were disturbing her and that would have been that, but oh hell no, then she couldn't play the victim...fuck her, I hope she has serious difficulty finding a job and ends up having to take a shit job for reduced pay, because she is a good example of what is wrong with the world right now.
I still use my clicky clack PS2 keyboard because I can tell the difference in my games, the USB keyboard has more of a "jerky" quality, its not fluid no matter how high you crank the polling.
So you say but I primarily play 5 string bass and I'm picky as hell about the sound, it can be damned hard to get the nice fat round tone that comes from that 20 year old swamp ash P5 playing through my Trace Elliot and get it reproduced perfectly in digital. Once you do get it recorded well though I honestly couldn't hear a difference between 192k and 44.1k, both on individual and band tracks and that was with a pretty damned sweet setup, nicer than most audiophiles will ever have.
But to me the perfect example of how its mostly if not all placebo is the picture in TFA, you had the audiophile playing back his music...on a fricking tube headphone amp. Now anybody who knows shit about amps will tell you that while tubes have a nice warm tone accurate reproduction is NOT their strong suite yet this guy is saying how he can tell the difference in all these little variations while playing it through what is frankly probably the most inaccurate system he could possibly get. Hell tube amps sound different depending on the room temp and even the amount of humidity so how does he know what he is hearing isn't just the way the tubes are acting that day?
Well I live in an apt so I consider the DAC in my system "good enough" for the volume levels I'm playing at. Hell I have a brand new Audigy soundcard sitting in the closet a customer gave me but the DAC built onto my board sounds fine as far as I'm concerned, and while I'll be the first to admit the DACs of the late 90s weren't great (which is why I always had soundblaster back then, those AC97 chips were just shitty) the ability to have everything at my fingertips 24/7 just outweighs the possible sound losses in my case. Hell the last few years I've gotten rid of all my consumer electronics like TVs and stereos and just do everything through the PC, its just easier to have one unit that takes care of everything.
Well they should really try to post to the right person because something like that seriously derails a discussion. To use the /. car analogy it would be like talking the merits of various trucks and somebody chimes in "My boat gets great gas mileage!"...uhhh...okay? Now everybody is wondering WTF that has to do with anything and the entire chain of thought is derailed.
What is worse is they were actually arguing with me when I AGREED with their position, if you are strictly talking about what is better to OWN, not what is better to listen to? I keep all my band's multitracks in FLAC so that we lose nothing and can re-edit or compress at any time from source, just makes sense. but that is a completely different ball of wax than whether you can hear a difference between those FLAC files and the same tracks in MP3 320K.
Lives on a farm in the middle of BF nowhere so no EM or vibrations, I finally said go get an electrician because its a new place, he was living in a rinky dink apt but his boss owns a farm and is often away on business for a couple of months at a time so paid to have a little 3 room cottage built on the property that he could live in rent free in return for keeping the animals while the boss is gone.
What is throwing me is the damned PSUs, you'd THINK that if it was electrical it'd blow the PSU as well, but I have his last PSU here and its running fine and you'd think if he was getting voltage spikes THAT damned bad it'd fry the netbook because its a bottom of the line Atom, as cheap as cheap can be, but that thing along with his late GF's laptop both run fine, its ONLY the desktops that blow.
Anyway once the electrician gives a thumbs up I'll throw away the case, board, and CPU along with keyboard and mouse, surely to God that will have eliminated enough variables i can either stop it or at least figure out WTF is going on. I hate to do it and like I said I'm not even charging the guy labor anymore, all he is paying for is parts because i feel sorry for the bad run he's had, but damned if i can figure out what else to do. Its really frustrating and makes me feel like an idiot because i can fix all these systems and build boxes all damned day but can't get this one fucking unit to keep working no matter what I do.
Nope, this is the second case although the cases were similar no name black box cases. I already have a silver eMachine case sitting in the corner I'll let him have with the next board, i figure if he's gonna have to swap boards anyway its time to change the CPU and the case while I'm at it, i have a really nice older AM2 board I pulled from a guy that wanted to put in a quad the board wouldn't support but with the kind of games he's playing an Athlon X2 will be cheap and better than the Pentium D he has now.
Like I said its a puzzler, frankly the only thing I haven't changed is the keyboard so i guess I'll tell him to shitcan that while I'm at it, I just hate having to tell a guy on a limited income to keep tossing gear while i grab at straws but honestly? Don't know what else to do. like I said no obvious damage, hell no damage at all to the boards I can see, they just stop working. Never seen that before, usually when a board goes it'll fry a trace or blow a cap or roast the northbridge, but with these? Nothing.
Well like I said he is trying to play flight sims, at the end of a hard day up to his ass in grease and busted car parts making believe he is a WWII fighter ace makes him happy. I can get that, nothing I enjoy more on the weekends than firing up some Borderlands and playing a few missions with my boys, its a nice bonding experience and fun and funny as hell.
and while I'm glad FLOSS works for you obviously it doesn't work for most. Oh and FYI? windows uses LESS RESOURCES than FLOSS you are just using the wrong version. Look up "Windows 7 Tiny" which was cooked up by gamers who wanted an ultra small desktop for gaming, thing uses less than 192MB fully loaded. XP Tiny only uses 58MB, win2K3 uses 87MB and Vista uses 340MB...hey they are gamers, not miracle workers LOL. But just for shits and giggles i slapped Win 7 Tiny on a first release P4 with 384Mb of RAM and while it took a little bit to find a sound driver the thing just flew. they really need to give the Windows Tiny team a job at Redmond because frankly they kick both the embedded and WINFLP teams square in the ass while having more than 90% compatibility with vanilla windows.