And what IS the Kin? A product of Ballmer and the marketing droids who want to work at Cupertino so bad it hurts. if what the rumors coming out of Redmond is true then i have to apologize to Sinofsky because he got fired for going AGAINST the marketing droids, while Ballmer was spewing buzzwords like "synergy" and "vertical integration" Sinofsky gave him the bird and said "fuck that, the desktop isn't a smartphone" and got shut down and fired for his trouble.
So until win 7 hits EOL in 2020 at least there is a product with an obvious support cycle although to be fair Win 8 has a 2022 EOL date that is published and so far MSFT has NEVER cut a product off before their EOL, always later than or on the date but never before.
Now compare that to Google...what is the EOL for this product? For Gmail? Google+? Hell what is the metric they use to decide what stays and goes? Do YOU know what the metric is? because i sure as hell don't, at least with MSFT business products I know before I spend a dime or a minute of time what I'm looking at. Imagine if you wanted to go shopping and a grocery store covered all the shelf life dates so you have no clue if what you are buying has a day or a month on the shelf life...would you continue to shop there? So why would you give Google a free pass for doing the same thing?
If you don't trust your doctor to have access for more than a week? you got bigger problems buddy. me thinks the amount of hoops you are having to jump through to build this straw man ought to tell you how fucking pointless it is. You name the DRM? Its been cracked, don't hurt the pirates one single bit, it ONLY hurts those that paid.
That is what I call "the batshit brigade" as these people treat corps like fucking ballclubs. I've noticed its primarily the big three, Apple, Google, and MSFT, but to a lesser extent you get the pro *.A.A "Anything a corp does is great because free market herpa derp!" and the pro gov "America Fuck Yeah!" types but not nearly as bad as the big three, you'd think they were a fucking ballclub.
Now as far as Google...why SHOULD you trust them for a service you depend on after Reader? Its quite obvious there is a metric that if a service doesn't hit Google pulls the plug but they won't tell the user what the metric is, so why should I trust them? As much as I think Windows 8 is a flaming turd this is one thing I have to give MSFT credit for as I can tell you to the day when XP dies, when Vista dies, when 7 dies, and when their Office suites die so I really don't have to give a shit about the metrics. I just look at the date of EOL and that is that. Of course since their software works just fine after EOL (I should know as i had to support several Win2K units until last year) I don't even have to worry about that if I don't want to, but its nice to know.
If Google wants us to depend on their services then they need to give us SOMETHING, anything, that will let us gauge what the support cycle is gonna be. A minimum support date like MSFT, publishing the current userbase along with the minimum number required for them to support it (which would have fixed the Reader problem as those that like Reader could have tried to drum up enough converts to fulfil the metric) or some other gauge so we have a damned clue as to how long its gonna be supported. As it is any service they have could disappear tomorrow because some PHB decides it doesn't meet a metric which we don't even know about and that stinks.
I don't think its the age, I think the new owners have tilted the mod system to the point that it encourages modbombing and trolling so damned much nobody bothers. It would be like you go to a coffee shop for nice conversation and good coffee but then the owners start letting panhandlers and junkies hang out there and bug the piss out of the patrons...would you continue to go there?
Same thing here, i had a stalker for over a year that would answer everything I posted with "I hope you die you fat fuck" and would wait until his sockpuppets had mod points and then ONLY mark down the posts I had that were at +1 or +2, frankly it was quite obvious it was a stalker but would the admins do anything about it, even after one of the mods pointed out it was ALL coming from the same IP address? Nope, didn't care.
Now I refused to let the crazy fuck win by running me off, but how many would put up with shit like that? I've talked with some of the old guard that doesn't come around here anymore and they have said the same thing, that they were getting obvious abuse from a member of the batshit brigade,with one female poster that was getting even creepier stalking than I was which naturally made her uncomfortable but in every case the admins just didn't give a fuck, as long as the site is generating any income they don't give a rat's ass.
Same thing happened to Madville which is now just a domain parking site, the gal that was the main mod sadly passed away from cancer and the owners just quit giving a fuck and let the site go to shit, by the last few months it was nothing but spammers and trolls. I could easily see the same thing happen here, look at how once Anons were the rarity and used for trolling only, now nearly every thread is a good 80%+ anons and most of that obviously done for flamebait or starting shit, its clear the new owners just don't give a fuck. I'd love to see the figures of those with UID VS anons and how many viewers the site has as I really wouldn't be surprised to see the views going down with the rise of the anons. Like I said if you let a site turn to shit you really shouldn't be surprised if all those that don't like rolling in shit walk away.
The skeeters are down in the bottoms, stay out of the bottoms and the skeeters ain't any worse than any other place. of course the upside of those skeeters is the feed some monster bass, you can go down in the bottoms and watch them jump out of the water gulping up skeeters so its a trade off, cover yourself with deep woods off and you can get some damned nice fish for a nice fry up but I sure as fuck wouldn't live in the bottoms, I stick with the hill country, beautiful man made lakes like Greer's Ferry and its nice and warm.
As far as dog breeding? As long as you don't mistreat the animals or raise them in filth which you don't strike me as the type to do that kind of cruel shit you'd have no worries here. My mom had a couple of dog breeders shut down over the years but in both cases they were just being fucking monsters to the animals, one mom rescued was a little pekipoo that had half a dozen broken ribs and teeth filed down to the nerves, just evil shit. But we have plenty of breeders here, especially the prize winning hunting dogs and quarter horses and as long as the animals are treated well? Its all good, we are VERY anti-government here. That is why many can't understand why we elect dems for local politics and we're a red state, but our dems make most national reps look like liberals, only difference here is the dems do care more for the poor which we here in AR support but we do NOT care for government getting in our faces and the dems here know that so they STFU and do what we put 'em there for, fixing roads and other basic services.
So good luck in MT but that is just too damned cold for me, here it stays warm enough I can still bebop around on stage and play rock star on the weekends but no way in hell could i take them MT winters, my left knee is just too shot. Here if you get more than a week of sub 40f temps people act like its the end of the world, I swear you can't move in the grocery stores as you'd think we were about to be hit by something the magnitude of Katrina LOL. But our "cold snaps" like we are having now are in the high 40s/low 50s and a good 10 months out of the year its above 55f, lots of sun, just lovely weather.
What the fuck do you think industry is dude? Its the same fucking thing now, we have 4 lobbyists for every member of congress, you got corps writing laws and just handing them to the congress critters, hell look at how quickly the entire MSM tripped over themselves to change the conversation from the actual DATA that Wikileaks had to "Is Assange an asshole?" because God fucking forbid they do anything to hurt mommy government, after all the same companies that own big media own the defense industry.
From SOPA/PIPA to AT&T making backrooms for the NSA you see industry and government working hand in glove together to maintain the status quo and gain more control over the people, this is why I have argued against dumb laws for ages because governments NEVER get more free only LESS free and once you get a bullshit law passed good fucking luck getting rid of it. Remember how laws like PATRIOT were ONLY supposed to be used against foreign terrorists and ended up being used against groups like occupy? Well what do you think would happen if you gave corps and by extension the government the right to ban free speech on the net?
And fuck Snopes, somebody creates a website and says "this is true, this is not" and we are supposed to believe them? Fuck that, I tust them about as much as Wikipedia, IE none. All I need is the fact several feds testified that it was a false flag op, if the guys actually implementing the order think its a false flag? Its a false flag. And remember this is the same government that murdered 56,000 of your fellow Americans for a false flag called the Gulf Of Tonkin Incident which whoops, never happened, so trust these clowns? When hell freezes over. If they put on trial those that had previously lied, like Bush and his aides showing the obviously faked yellowcake docs? Then maybe, but right now if they said it was raining I'd want a second opinion.
Because you will have no choice but to ban Linux or lock it down? Frankly I've been predicting this one for a couple of years, its why both Apple and MSFT were quick to jump on H.26X over WebM or Theora because they both know the future is locked down media that the masses want and FOSS by its very design isn't DRM friendly.
But the reason why it can't work on Linux without some sort of code signing and/or hardware based enforcement is actually rather simple, for DRM to work it has to have some way to trust the system is enforcing its rules. with Apple and MSFT the kernel can't be altered by the user therefor the DRM can see that the kernel isn't altered and "trust" it for lack of a better term. With FOSS you can recompile any part of the system to "lie" to the DRM and say "Sure its going straight to the screen, no worries" while in actuality the "screen" is really a file. This again was by design as RMS made the GPL to be USER not developer friendly, if the developers like it fine and if not tough shit because ultimately with FOSS the user has the most rights.
So while I can see why many are getting their panties in a twist as this will make media content pretty much limited to the big three (I predict Google will lock down Android so they can play the content, Google has been very careful to only allow GPL V2 which has the TiVo loophole) I hate to say this but...you deserve it. I'm sorry but you do, when the public made Apple the biggest corp on the planet while they had some of the most user unfriendly policies you said to the corps "Hey we'll put up with anything that is hip and shiny" and now they are just giving you what you voted for with your dollars. See how MSFT has become a bad Apple clone, everyone is tripping over themselves to crank out iPad ripoffs, hell even Canonical has gotten in on the game with UbuntuPhone.
So while I wish it wasn't so, I personally screamed bloody murder at H.264 replacing Flash instead of an open codec like Theora or WebM honestly? its too late, you are wasting your breath, the masses have spoken and the future is gonna be glorified game consoles. The corps will decide what you can do and when you can do it and the masses will slurp it up because it means they never have to think or care about what they run and whether it has a viruses because mommy corp will take care of things for you. Frankly the future is REALLY gonna suck guys, the web that was free and open is gonna go the way of Gopher and BBS and in its place? A giant home shopping network. Man its fucking depressing but when people are willing to hand over billions to those that are control freaks like Apple...what do you expect?
Actually the thing I do with those sites is to post about the DRM in the comments and if it doesn't get banhammered? Then I figure the reviewer just didn't have the problems. Remember that when the reviewers are handed the game its MAYBE in beta with RTM code, so they just ain't seeing the server swamping that an end user sees. Now if it were me reviewing I'd refuse to review any online only games until it went live with the general public for just that reason but since these sites are competing with each other for stories i can see why some want to rush to print the story first.
At the very least you should take ALL reviews with a big fat grain of salt because the reviewer may just have different tastes, for example Yangtze at ZP gave shit reviews for both the Borderlands series and Bioshock II whereas I think Borderlands if fricking brilliant and I thought the Minerva's Den DLC for Bioshock II had a story as strong as Bioshock I and should have been the main story. If I would have listened to him I wouldn't have bought but luckily i make up my own mind when it comes to games and enjoyed the hell out of 'em.
Sorry friend but in this case always online IS DRM, it serves no fucking purpose to the end user, the ONLY "benefit" always online gives is to EA. If the SP would have been offline or on and the MP online only? Would have agreed with you but that is not what happened here, here its all about DRM and it sucks hairy balls.
And I have NO problem with a game that is primarily online because that is what it is, I still fire up TF2 occasionally (even though I suck it it while my oldest wins prizes in TF2 contests) because it is what it is, basically a team based fragfest. those just don't work worth a shit with computer controlled characters so i can see why that would be more about online play, but we are talking the fucking Simcity franchise here. There is NOTHING in the Simcity franchise that gains by having online SP, not like you are gonna want some stranger fucking with your layout or wandering through your city and judging it, fuck off all I want is to build and that doesn't need online.
Which is why I urge everyone to vote with their dollars and not buy shit like this. Look at D3, instead of buying D3 I pumped the living shit out of Torchlight II and bought extra copies some my friends and family could have it and I have to say it was one of my better calls, its a great fucking game by the guys that made D2 and unlike D3 they treat you like a valued customer, they gave away T1 with every pre-order while only charging $20 a pop for the game (I thought they could have easily charged twice that) and they even support modding! How is THAT for being user friendly, support modding which lets games have real staying power in this day and age? Fucking awesome.
So if you don't like being treated like shit? Please for all that is good and decent in gaming DO NOT BUY IT so these douchebags can see this kind of shit won't be tolerated. Also be sure to spread the word, i've been all over the forums to warn those that haven't heard about the nasty DRM to avoid it. You CAN make a difference, just remember its not magic and takes time but voting with your wallet DOES work.
But you are missing a couple of key points. For one like 'em or hate 'em (I thought Win 2K, XP X64, and Win 7 were brilliant, everything else? Flaming ass) MSFT has trained the users that videos go in the videos folder, pictures go in the pictures folder. I ask every user before I start working on a system if there is any files they want backed up and its always those two folders. So its not like you have to search the entire hard drive. Second you are forgetting that with modern systems? More RAM than the users know what to do with. Hell I've been selling 4GB as standard for a good 5 plus years now and while I still run into plenty of 2GB systems you could split off 25% of that RAM and the user would never notice. So as far as the PC goes it was not be hard to do, have it load the files into memory when the user isn't using the HDD and work on them from there, that way it would only have a single read and single write so it would even be SSD friendly.
Now I'm sure you'll disagree and probably give me a little shit for saying it, most advocates of FOSS do, but I'm sorry but Linux has gone off the rails the past couple of years. KDE 4, Gnomeshell and Pulse all suck balls, not as good as what they had before and sucks more resources for less features and stability. And don't get me started on the wireless sitch, that is a fucking mess. The problem with Linux is its too damned divided, its become a bunch of little fiefdoms that don't speak to each other. Linus don't care what the DEs do, the DEs don't care what the app devs do, app devs don't talk to the subsystem devs, and none of them seem to give a shit about what the users want. I fought with Linux in the consumer desktop space for 5 years before finally realizing what one of the guys here said was true...its NOT getting better, its JUST getting different. He said "Linux is always 3 years away from mainstream" and he was right, every God damned time they start getting rock solid stability and reliability the devs get fucking bored and start breaking shit or throwing it out, again KDE, Gnome and Pulse for examples.
Considering how tightly this would have to interact with all the various subsystems and the kernel? Sorry, not gonna happen. I mean there is a reason why you ONLY see Linux gaining numbers in embedded and server, they gain in server because most of the desktop shit isn't even included and because guys get paid 6 figures to deal with the breakage and with embedded you never really have to update and its also stripped down so you can just leave out the wonky bits. this product would be a smash hit on the consumer desktop which is one thing Linux does incredibly poorly so I just don't see it happening there, even if they could magically raise the money which of course they can't.
Sadly I think MSFT or Apple could whip this off in less than 2 years but since both care about mobile more than users it just won't happen, now its all about nickel and diming through appstores and Nazi-ish levels of control, things that would actually change computing for the better? Really not on the landscape.
Uhhh...how EXACTLY is that informative? How is that ANY different than Nielsen, who as I said made it VERY clear they wanted to know whatever I was doing, be it listening to MP3s or playing Borderlands or whatever?
The only thing I'd say they are behind the times on is they layout of the books, if it were me I'd send the paper book and a spreadsheet or word doc that you can just fill in the blank. Oh and they need to have larger blanks for non traditional shows....that's it, that is all I can think of to complain about. Other than those 2 nitpicks they seemed quite happy to learn about non-traditional viewing. In fact they call every couple of months wanting me to go for another round but I just haven't had the time, i think now that my nephew is down the hall I'll hand it to him and let him fill it out since he likes a lot of the same games and YouTube videos I do.
And you would trust THIS government, the same ones that refused to arrest the AG for pulling a false flag that got Americans killed, you are gonna trust THESE clowns with who is allowed to use the net and computers and who is not? FUCK THAT BULLSHIT I'd take a million infected boxes over giving our government who already dreams of jack booted big bro bullshit that kind of power. never ever even fucking joke about giving these clowns that kind of power, EVAR.
I would be saying the same thing about that corporate lackey Dubya BTW, the net is one of the last places where we can have true freedom of expression, no fucking way would I let the government decide who can and who can't be here, because if you think political correctness sucks now, you should see it after they get done. The final test would end up with more questions about whether you kiss the ring than whether you know WTF an antivirus is, oh fuck no.
Well I don't know about him but you can have my Sandisk M260 when you pry it from my cold dead fingers. The thing is built like a tank, been dropped i don't know how many times and everything still works, gets around 27 hours on a single AAA battery, decent EQ, and of course since it runs on triple A if I go dead while I'm out 2 minutes in any store and I'm back up and running again. its a damned shame they don't still make 'em but you can often find them on eBay or Amazon.
Sorry, been in PC retail for nearly 25 years and I can tell you training the grunts? NEVER works. Now training the IT staff? Sure send 'em to blackhat, pay for security classes, those ARE good investments that will see return, but Sally the secretary, that sees the PC as a magic black box that lets her do her work? Sorry but its gonna go in one ear and out the other.
It would be like trying to teach me how to rebuild cars, i don't like cars, never cared about what model I drove, I just don't give a damn as long as it gets me from A to B and THAT is how many of your employees see the PC. They don't want to know about the thing, couldn't care less what its doing as long as they can get their work done and punch out, they have not the slightest interest in PCs which if you don't have any desire to really learn? Not gonna stick.
So i have to agree that paying to train the regular staff is just a waste of time and energy. Much better to make sure you have well trained IT staff that can minimize the risk that your end users will have because frankly you are just wasting your breath when you try to teach somebody who doesn't care about PCs how to securely use one.
Off an on for years, single parents I guess is a demographic they care about but they make it VERY clear that it is NOT just OTA TV anymore. if you are playing games, watching YouTube, whatever? They want you to fill that in. I even told them last time they asked me "You DO know I don't even watch OTA TV anymore? that everything I enjoy is online?" and they said "That's fine, just write down at the bottom of the page what you were doing instead of OTA TV" and I guess it made them happy as I was asked to do it again about 6 months ago.
You ought to look at AR and TN, we pretty much hate politics and we make it clear that other than fixing roads and shit we prefer our politicians to STFU and get out of the way.
Of course the downside is places where you actually need the government to step in, like our frankly shitty broadband coverage? not gonna happen. That is why we'll get fiber 20 years after everybody else gets it.
But if I was going in any direction it would be farther south, I hear Costa Rica is quite nice and warm year round. No way I could stand being in a place that even had 30f temps for any length of time, much less -50f. Of course having a couple of blown joints from a bike wreck that don't react well to cold or wet certainly weighs in, being born and raised in the south me and cold? Not ever gonna be friends.
Sorry about the lateness of the response but the oldest was having serious game connection issues so guess who was doing tech support?
But I think you are wrong and here is why: when i first came here threads that went over 50 were common, 100 not as much but not rare, and 200 if it was a heavy subject with a lot of differing viewpoints was seen at least once or twice a month. I remember one where we all ending up talking the merits of various filesystems that must have went over 300 posts.
Now? Now its like fucking reddit or digg, if a single post gets a dozen responses its rare and 2 dozen practically unheard of, its all just little snarky sniping at each other and flag waving, NO real discussions on the subject, NO debates on the merits or hassles of a position, its ALL just catty snarky bullshit. I mean this is SUPPOSED to be a site for geeks and nerds, so where in the fuck is the talks about geeky and nerdy things? It all ends up being slashvertisements or plugs for this or that product and even when its on a subject that many feel strongly about like DRM or spying it just doesn't build any steam, its always ends in just snarky fanboi bullshit.
To me the most telling thing is how many of the old guard has walked away, you are the first sub 6 UID I've seen in ages and even the sub 7 UIDs like mine are becoming rare because the old guys get tired of the bullshit and walk away. I'd love to see a spreadsheet showing hard numbers on sub million UIDs because I bet in the last couple of years you'd see sub 1 million UIDs dropping like flies because this site has just become another Digg or Reddit, there just isn't the depth anymore.
Damn when you'd rather walk in -20f weather (how in the hell do you even stand that man? When its 30f outside we are bundled like Eskimos and only go out when we have no choice) than ride the bus? Them is some shitty buses. Never rode the city to city bus, where I'm at that bus stops at 2 dozen little podunk towns between here and the state capital so I hear its a 2 hour drive to the capital whereas if the traffic isn't too bad i can be in the center of the capital in under 45 minutes. Plus you can't smoke on a bus and I want a cigarette dammit LOL!
But you are a brave man to live in ND, that is just too fucking cold for this southern boy. Where I'm at we are actually listed as a sub tropic climate zone, we get less than 3 weeks a year of sub 40f weather (and we hate every damned minute, while kids were cheering how we had a white Xmas every adult was going "WTF? This isn't supposed to happen!") and the rest of the time its hot and sunny. You gotta learn to deal with the humidity but since a side effect of all that humidity is excellent crops and these great farmer's markets where you can go get fresh fruits and veggies that were picked that morning for cheap? Meh the AC can always cut down on the wetness of the air.
As I tell my yankee friends when they are shocked at out 115f summers "It really ain't hard to cool off on a scorching day, you got shade, sweet tea, AC in your car,lake not 30 minutes away, its not hard at all. When its -20f outside I don't give a shit how much you bundle up you ARE gonna be fucking cold and miserable, no way around that." Hell of a lot easier to cool off when its hot than it is to stay warm when its bitter cold which is why I could never understand why anybody would choose to live in a place THAT fucking cold.
I think you are wrong and here is why: As a retailer I've found the VAST majority of PCs? Spend most of their lives in idle. I'm not shitting you, I have run performance logs on customers and found all those duals,triples, and especially quads and hexas spend most of their time in idle just waiting for something to do. There should be no reason why you couldn't use say 30% of that idle time to be processing this in the background. This would be one of those things like Windows caching where it takes awhile for the PC to "learn" and fill in the blanks (perhaps give the user the choice of how much idle time it uses) but with all those wasted cycles you could have this run in the background and the vast majority? wouldn't ever even notice it running....until they asked a question and had the PC just hand them the correct file.
As far as who could pull it off? as much as I hate them as a company Apple would be the only ones i could see pulling this off, NOT Linux or Windows. Not Linux because you are gonna need access to too many subsystems which frankly get fucked with too damned often to make this thing stable, you got everything from the kernel to the DEs constantly changing shit which just wouldn't work for this, as long as the Ballmernator is running MSFT they won't be doing shit that Apple doesn't do first and Google wants your ass on the web so sure as fuck isn't gonna do anything that would make the desktop nicer...so that just leaves Apple. If they could take the genesis of the Siri idea and merge that with the desktop FS? It would fucking be awesome. Imagine no more need for keyboards and mice, you'd just tell the machine what you wanted it to do or find you and it'd do it...THAT would be awesome.
But as much as I'd love to see a FOSS dev come up with this first frankly it would probably cost a good 50-75 million in R&D to get this thing capable of reading videos by facial recognition and pattern matching and lets face it the redistribution clause means most Linux devs are gonna be toiling away in grinding poverty, not the kind of conditions that are conductive to coming up with world changing software. This also doesn't fit into the "blessed three" way of making money with FOSS, 1.-Selling software/services, 2.-Selling hardware, 3.-Tin cup begging, so there wouldn't be any way to really raise the needed capital.
Well we just have different definitions of vaporware. To me if it is never sold? Its vaporware. DNF may be a POS game but its not vaporware because eventually they DID sell the game, whereas WinFS as you pointed out was only shown to a handful of devs that went to some trade show in who the fuck knows where on one occasion? Sorry but that is vaporware to me, especially when MSFT was hyping the shit out of it in press releases that general public sites like CNet was covering.
But in ANY case it doesn't change the fact that with consumer PCs being so insanely overpowered now, with even low end laptops having dual cores and most desktops being sold having triples or quads that something like WinFS would be VERY doable now and would be a game changer. We have too much data and not enough time and having the OS do all the grunt work so we could just "talk" to the PC and tell it what we want, say "Videos with my ex in it" and have it go "Oh here you go" would seriously change the way we interact with PCs for the better.
Nope sorry, you are not looking at the big picture. Those "record breaking" sales were because of PREORDERS which when calculated would make the product SEEM like its destined to be another megahit but when the game hit the ground and the "DRM in a dress" as one poster put it caused another D3 disaster the sales fell right off the chart. That is why you have EA handing out free copies of $30 games with a "We're sorry" because they are seeing those that WERE recommending the game are saying now "My friend bought it and his city got wiped, fuck this noise" and the sales fell right off the map.
Exactly, lets put an end to this myth right now because as a retailer I can tell you that a good 95%+ of the buying public doesn't know that nerd culture even exists much less WTF the nerds are pissed about this week. when the whole SOPA/PIPA thing was going on I'd ask people that came into my shop to help shoot it down. Know what I got every single time I mentioned it? "WTF is SOPA/PIPA?" It was ONLY when I started spamming FB and encouraging everybody to spam FB with links pointing out WTF SOPA/PIPA was that people started going "Oh yeah, that stupid Internet screwing law".
Voting with your dollars works because it hits these corps where it hurts, right in the wallet. They ain't giving out bonuses and patting themselves on the back with raises if the big properties are tanking, nope they are shitting themselves and going "WTF did we do wrong? Isn't this a big franchise? Why isn't it selling?" and THAT is why it works. The nerds can rage until the end of time and the public will never know about it, they might as well be farting in a hurricane for all the good it did, but when everyone says "Fuck that, I'm not buying that" then the corps have no choice but to pay attention because they are seeing that bottom line go into freefall, they are seeing their coffers start to empty, they are looking at future projections and the numbers are all bad...that scares the shit out of them, as the CEO firing proves.
Just remember folks that voting with your dollars takes time to affect the company, it takes months of those sales figures not matching projects before some suit goes into a meeting with the figures and goes "so what is this about? Why are the numbers not there?" but it DOES work as long as more people refuse to buy the bullshit than the previous release.
Allow me to say that this is further proof that VOTING WITH YOUR DOLLARS WORKS and it works VERY well, its just not magical or instant.
Remember folks this is NOT just about SImcity, its about how under his watch sales have gone down as he ran off more and more customers with douchebag behavior, from gouging on DLC to bad DRM schemes to bad services like Origin John Riccitiello has done for EA what Steve Ballmer has done for MSFT, run it into the ground. And I'm proud to say many folks have voted with their wallets and refused to buy these "DRMapaloza" games that treat the customer as a criminal, just look at how hard Activision and Ubisoft had their sales hit for this kind of shit, with Ubisoft going so far as to remove it from their games and apologize for it.
So just don't buy products that treat you like crap, vote with your wallet and you CAN change things, just not overnight. EA under John Riccitiello has been widely derided for bad behavior so its really no surprise that people voted with their wallets, we need to continue to refuse to buy products that treat us like crap. As long as D3 is always online I won't have it, i instead bought my friends and family Torchlight II instead, I refuse to buy any game that treats me badly and encourage everyone to do the same as we CAN make a difference, it just takes time.
This is why one can't simply have a good idea anymore, one has to sell out to a supercorp just to deal with all the lawsuit bullshit.
This is why I have argued for years that we REALLY need court reform, when our system was designed nobody ever even thought about what would happen when companies would become bigger than some third world countries or the law so complex that it could take years just to deal with all the appeals and counterclaims. This court design now frankly gives too much of an advantage of the big guy over the little so as in thius case whether the little guy is right or not is irrelevant, you can just bleed them to death in court fees.
What we need is a "lawyer pool" in both civil and criminal cases to where the money both side were planning to spend on lawyers and paralegals gets dumped into a pot and split 50/50, that way in civil you couldn't "lawyer to death" a company or person and in criminal the state couldn't force pleas by piling on every possible charge they can think of knowing that while the state has infinite resources the defendant will have his lawyer fees shoot up with each charge piled on until they can't afford to fight back.
But of course since the current system enriches lawyers while making things as rigged as a game of three card monty? I doubt things will ever change. But we need to accept the current system has jack squat to do with justice or the law, its all about how much money you can afford to spend.
But should we be mad at the troll, or the government that encourages and rewards patent trolling?
I mean take for example the stock market, from the turn of the 20th century all the way up to the mid 80s most companies were working towards long term growth and stability and then we suddenly go to this crazy batshit "flip this stock" kind of situation where its all about the short term, what happened? The government injected massive amounts of money into the market and distorted the system so that you were penalized for long term slow growth and rewarded for any kind of short term bounce to the stock even if the cause of that bounce would kill the company later, such as stuffing the channel or selling off the assets.
Yes patent trolls are fucking bad, we all know this but how do we change it? Going after the trolls does nothing because a dozen more will be ready to play lawsuit lotto and take a shot at the big time, no what we need is serious patent reform to take the incentives for trolling out of the equation. Then and ONLY THEN will things get better, until then companies like Cisco are just playing whack a mole.But since it gives Cisco and other companies an easy way to set up a tollbooth to kill competition or leech money from it, look at MSFT and Android for example, that even when they get dinged occasionally by a troll they write it off as a business expense and keep the status quo.
So what we need to do is similar to what we did with SOPA/PIPA, get a grass roots movement for fixing this mess going so that these corps won't get rewarded for trolling.
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And what IS the Kin? A product of Ballmer and the marketing droids who want to work at Cupertino so bad it hurts. if what the rumors coming out of Redmond is true then i have to apologize to Sinofsky because he got fired for going AGAINST the marketing droids, while Ballmer was spewing buzzwords like "synergy" and "vertical integration" Sinofsky gave him the bird and said "fuck that, the desktop isn't a smartphone" and got shut down and fired for his trouble.
So until win 7 hits EOL in 2020 at least there is a product with an obvious support cycle although to be fair Win 8 has a 2022 EOL date that is published and so far MSFT has NEVER cut a product off before their EOL, always later than or on the date but never before.
Now compare that to Google...what is the EOL for this product? For Gmail? Google+? Hell what is the metric they use to decide what stays and goes? Do YOU know what the metric is? because i sure as hell don't, at least with MSFT business products I know before I spend a dime or a minute of time what I'm looking at. Imagine if you wanted to go shopping and a grocery store covered all the shelf life dates so you have no clue if what you are buying has a day or a month on the shelf life...would you continue to shop there? So why would you give Google a free pass for doing the same thing?
If you don't trust your doctor to have access for more than a week? you got bigger problems buddy. me thinks the amount of hoops you are having to jump through to build this straw man ought to tell you how fucking pointless it is. You name the DRM? Its been cracked, don't hurt the pirates one single bit, it ONLY hurts those that paid.
That is what I call "the batshit brigade" as these people treat corps like fucking ballclubs. I've noticed its primarily the big three, Apple, Google, and MSFT, but to a lesser extent you get the pro *.A.A "Anything a corp does is great because free market herpa derp!" and the pro gov "America Fuck Yeah!" types but not nearly as bad as the big three, you'd think they were a fucking ballclub.
Now as far as Google...why SHOULD you trust them for a service you depend on after Reader? Its quite obvious there is a metric that if a service doesn't hit Google pulls the plug but they won't tell the user what the metric is, so why should I trust them? As much as I think Windows 8 is a flaming turd this is one thing I have to give MSFT credit for as I can tell you to the day when XP dies, when Vista dies, when 7 dies, and when their Office suites die so I really don't have to give a shit about the metrics. I just look at the date of EOL and that is that. Of course since their software works just fine after EOL (I should know as i had to support several Win2K units until last year) I don't even have to worry about that if I don't want to, but its nice to know.
If Google wants us to depend on their services then they need to give us SOMETHING, anything, that will let us gauge what the support cycle is gonna be. A minimum support date like MSFT, publishing the current userbase along with the minimum number required for them to support it (which would have fixed the Reader problem as those that like Reader could have tried to drum up enough converts to fulfil the metric) or some other gauge so we have a damned clue as to how long its gonna be supported. As it is any service they have could disappear tomorrow because some PHB decides it doesn't meet a metric which we don't even know about and that stinks.
I don't think its the age, I think the new owners have tilted the mod system to the point that it encourages modbombing and trolling so damned much nobody bothers. It would be like you go to a coffee shop for nice conversation and good coffee but then the owners start letting panhandlers and junkies hang out there and bug the piss out of the patrons...would you continue to go there?
Same thing here, i had a stalker for over a year that would answer everything I posted with "I hope you die you fat fuck" and would wait until his sockpuppets had mod points and then ONLY mark down the posts I had that were at +1 or +2, frankly it was quite obvious it was a stalker but would the admins do anything about it, even after one of the mods pointed out it was ALL coming from the same IP address? Nope, didn't care.
Now I refused to let the crazy fuck win by running me off, but how many would put up with shit like that? I've talked with some of the old guard that doesn't come around here anymore and they have said the same thing, that they were getting obvious abuse from a member of the batshit brigade,with one female poster that was getting even creepier stalking than I was which naturally made her uncomfortable but in every case the admins just didn't give a fuck, as long as the site is generating any income they don't give a rat's ass.
Same thing happened to Madville which is now just a domain parking site, the gal that was the main mod sadly passed away from cancer and the owners just quit giving a fuck and let the site go to shit, by the last few months it was nothing but spammers and trolls. I could easily see the same thing happen here, look at how once Anons were the rarity and used for trolling only, now nearly every thread is a good 80%+ anons and most of that obviously done for flamebait or starting shit, its clear the new owners just don't give a fuck. I'd love to see the figures of those with UID VS anons and how many viewers the site has as I really wouldn't be surprised to see the views going down with the rise of the anons. Like I said if you let a site turn to shit you really shouldn't be surprised if all those that don't like rolling in shit walk away.
The skeeters are down in the bottoms, stay out of the bottoms and the skeeters ain't any worse than any other place. of course the upside of those skeeters is the feed some monster bass, you can go down in the bottoms and watch them jump out of the water gulping up skeeters so its a trade off, cover yourself with deep woods off and you can get some damned nice fish for a nice fry up but I sure as fuck wouldn't live in the bottoms, I stick with the hill country, beautiful man made lakes like Greer's Ferry and its nice and warm.
As far as dog breeding? As long as you don't mistreat the animals or raise them in filth which you don't strike me as the type to do that kind of cruel shit you'd have no worries here. My mom had a couple of dog breeders shut down over the years but in both cases they were just being fucking monsters to the animals, one mom rescued was a little pekipoo that had half a dozen broken ribs and teeth filed down to the nerves, just evil shit. But we have plenty of breeders here, especially the prize winning hunting dogs and quarter horses and as long as the animals are treated well? Its all good, we are VERY anti-government here. That is why many can't understand why we elect dems for local politics and we're a red state, but our dems make most national reps look like liberals, only difference here is the dems do care more for the poor which we here in AR support but we do NOT care for government getting in our faces and the dems here know that so they STFU and do what we put 'em there for, fixing roads and other basic services.
So good luck in MT but that is just too damned cold for me, here it stays warm enough I can still bebop around on stage and play rock star on the weekends but no way in hell could i take them MT winters, my left knee is just too shot. Here if you get more than a week of sub 40f temps people act like its the end of the world, I swear you can't move in the grocery stores as you'd think we were about to be hit by something the magnitude of Katrina LOL. But our "cold snaps" like we are having now are in the high 40s/low 50s and a good 10 months out of the year its above 55f, lots of sun, just lovely weather.
What the fuck do you think industry is dude? Its the same fucking thing now, we have 4 lobbyists for every member of congress, you got corps writing laws and just handing them to the congress critters, hell look at how quickly the entire MSM tripped over themselves to change the conversation from the actual DATA that Wikileaks had to "Is Assange an asshole?" because God fucking forbid they do anything to hurt mommy government, after all the same companies that own big media own the defense industry.
From SOPA/PIPA to AT&T making backrooms for the NSA you see industry and government working hand in glove together to maintain the status quo and gain more control over the people, this is why I have argued against dumb laws for ages because governments NEVER get more free only LESS free and once you get a bullshit law passed good fucking luck getting rid of it. Remember how laws like PATRIOT were ONLY supposed to be used against foreign terrorists and ended up being used against groups like occupy? Well what do you think would happen if you gave corps and by extension the government the right to ban free speech on the net?
And fuck Snopes, somebody creates a website and says "this is true, this is not" and we are supposed to believe them? Fuck that, I tust them about as much as Wikipedia, IE none. All I need is the fact several feds testified that it was a false flag op, if the guys actually implementing the order think its a false flag? Its a false flag. And remember this is the same government that murdered 56,000 of your fellow Americans for a false flag called the Gulf Of Tonkin Incident which whoops, never happened, so trust these clowns? When hell freezes over. If they put on trial those that had previously lied, like Bush and his aides showing the obviously faked yellowcake docs? Then maybe, but right now if they said it was raining I'd want a second opinion.
Because you will have no choice but to ban Linux or lock it down? Frankly I've been predicting this one for a couple of years, its why both Apple and MSFT were quick to jump on H.26X over WebM or Theora because they both know the future is locked down media that the masses want and FOSS by its very design isn't DRM friendly.
But the reason why it can't work on Linux without some sort of code signing and/or hardware based enforcement is actually rather simple, for DRM to work it has to have some way to trust the system is enforcing its rules. with Apple and MSFT the kernel can't be altered by the user therefor the DRM can see that the kernel isn't altered and "trust" it for lack of a better term. With FOSS you can recompile any part of the system to "lie" to the DRM and say "Sure its going straight to the screen, no worries" while in actuality the "screen" is really a file. This again was by design as RMS made the GPL to be USER not developer friendly, if the developers like it fine and if not tough shit because ultimately with FOSS the user has the most rights.
So while I can see why many are getting their panties in a twist as this will make media content pretty much limited to the big three (I predict Google will lock down Android so they can play the content, Google has been very careful to only allow GPL V2 which has the TiVo loophole) I hate to say this but...you deserve it. I'm sorry but you do, when the public made Apple the biggest corp on the planet while they had some of the most user unfriendly policies you said to the corps "Hey we'll put up with anything that is hip and shiny" and now they are just giving you what you voted for with your dollars. See how MSFT has become a bad Apple clone, everyone is tripping over themselves to crank out iPad ripoffs, hell even Canonical has gotten in on the game with UbuntuPhone.
So while I wish it wasn't so, I personally screamed bloody murder at H.264 replacing Flash instead of an open codec like Theora or WebM honestly? its too late, you are wasting your breath, the masses have spoken and the future is gonna be glorified game consoles. The corps will decide what you can do and when you can do it and the masses will slurp it up because it means they never have to think or care about what they run and whether it has a viruses because mommy corp will take care of things for you. Frankly the future is REALLY gonna suck guys, the web that was free and open is gonna go the way of Gopher and BBS and in its place? A giant home shopping network. Man its fucking depressing but when people are willing to hand over billions to those that are control freaks like Apple...what do you expect?
Actually the thing I do with those sites is to post about the DRM in the comments and if it doesn't get banhammered? Then I figure the reviewer just didn't have the problems. Remember that when the reviewers are handed the game its MAYBE in beta with RTM code, so they just ain't seeing the server swamping that an end user sees. Now if it were me reviewing I'd refuse to review any online only games until it went live with the general public for just that reason but since these sites are competing with each other for stories i can see why some want to rush to print the story first.
At the very least you should take ALL reviews with a big fat grain of salt because the reviewer may just have different tastes, for example Yangtze at ZP gave shit reviews for both the Borderlands series and Bioshock II whereas I think Borderlands if fricking brilliant and I thought the Minerva's Den DLC for Bioshock II had a story as strong as Bioshock I and should have been the main story. If I would have listened to him I wouldn't have bought but luckily i make up my own mind when it comes to games and enjoyed the hell out of 'em.
Sorry friend but in this case always online IS DRM, it serves no fucking purpose to the end user, the ONLY "benefit" always online gives is to EA. If the SP would have been offline or on and the MP online only? Would have agreed with you but that is not what happened here, here its all about DRM and it sucks hairy balls.
And I have NO problem with a game that is primarily online because that is what it is, I still fire up TF2 occasionally (even though I suck it it while my oldest wins prizes in TF2 contests) because it is what it is, basically a team based fragfest. those just don't work worth a shit with computer controlled characters so i can see why that would be more about online play, but we are talking the fucking Simcity franchise here. There is NOTHING in the Simcity franchise that gains by having online SP, not like you are gonna want some stranger fucking with your layout or wandering through your city and judging it, fuck off all I want is to build and that doesn't need online.
Which is why I urge everyone to vote with their dollars and not buy shit like this. Look at D3, instead of buying D3 I pumped the living shit out of Torchlight II and bought extra copies some my friends and family could have it and I have to say it was one of my better calls, its a great fucking game by the guys that made D2 and unlike D3 they treat you like a valued customer, they gave away T1 with every pre-order while only charging $20 a pop for the game (I thought they could have easily charged twice that) and they even support modding! How is THAT for being user friendly, support modding which lets games have real staying power in this day and age? Fucking awesome.
So if you don't like being treated like shit? Please for all that is good and decent in gaming DO NOT BUY IT so these douchebags can see this kind of shit won't be tolerated. Also be sure to spread the word, i've been all over the forums to warn those that haven't heard about the nasty DRM to avoid it. You CAN make a difference, just remember its not magic and takes time but voting with your wallet DOES work.
But you are missing a couple of key points. For one like 'em or hate 'em (I thought Win 2K, XP X64, and Win 7 were brilliant, everything else? Flaming ass) MSFT has trained the users that videos go in the videos folder, pictures go in the pictures folder. I ask every user before I start working on a system if there is any files they want backed up and its always those two folders. So its not like you have to search the entire hard drive. Second you are forgetting that with modern systems? More RAM than the users know what to do with. Hell I've been selling 4GB as standard for a good 5 plus years now and while I still run into plenty of 2GB systems you could split off 25% of that RAM and the user would never notice. So as far as the PC goes it was not be hard to do, have it load the files into memory when the user isn't using the HDD and work on them from there, that way it would only have a single read and single write so it would even be SSD friendly.
Now I'm sure you'll disagree and probably give me a little shit for saying it, most advocates of FOSS do, but I'm sorry but Linux has gone off the rails the past couple of years. KDE 4, Gnomeshell and Pulse all suck balls, not as good as what they had before and sucks more resources for less features and stability. And don't get me started on the wireless sitch, that is a fucking mess. The problem with Linux is its too damned divided, its become a bunch of little fiefdoms that don't speak to each other. Linus don't care what the DEs do, the DEs don't care what the app devs do, app devs don't talk to the subsystem devs, and none of them seem to give a shit about what the users want. I fought with Linux in the consumer desktop space for 5 years before finally realizing what one of the guys here said was true...its NOT getting better, its JUST getting different. He said "Linux is always 3 years away from mainstream" and he was right, every God damned time they start getting rock solid stability and reliability the devs get fucking bored and start breaking shit or throwing it out, again KDE, Gnome and Pulse for examples.
Considering how tightly this would have to interact with all the various subsystems and the kernel? Sorry, not gonna happen. I mean there is a reason why you ONLY see Linux gaining numbers in embedded and server, they gain in server because most of the desktop shit isn't even included and because guys get paid 6 figures to deal with the breakage and with embedded you never really have to update and its also stripped down so you can just leave out the wonky bits. this product would be a smash hit on the consumer desktop which is one thing Linux does incredibly poorly so I just don't see it happening there, even if they could magically raise the money which of course they can't.
Sadly I think MSFT or Apple could whip this off in less than 2 years but since both care about mobile more than users it just won't happen, now its all about nickel and diming through appstores and Nazi-ish levels of control, things that would actually change computing for the better? Really not on the landscape.
Uhhh...how EXACTLY is that informative? How is that ANY different than Nielsen, who as I said made it VERY clear they wanted to know whatever I was doing, be it listening to MP3s or playing Borderlands or whatever?
The only thing I'd say they are behind the times on is they layout of the books, if it were me I'd send the paper book and a spreadsheet or word doc that you can just fill in the blank. Oh and they need to have larger blanks for non traditional shows....that's it, that is all I can think of to complain about. Other than those 2 nitpicks they seemed quite happy to learn about non-traditional viewing. In fact they call every couple of months wanting me to go for another round but I just haven't had the time, i think now that my nephew is down the hall I'll hand it to him and let him fill it out since he likes a lot of the same games and YouTube videos I do.
And you would trust THIS government, the same ones that refused to arrest the AG for pulling a false flag that got Americans killed, you are gonna trust THESE clowns with who is allowed to use the net and computers and who is not? FUCK THAT BULLSHIT I'd take a million infected boxes over giving our government who already dreams of jack booted big bro bullshit that kind of power. never ever even fucking joke about giving these clowns that kind of power, EVAR.
I would be saying the same thing about that corporate lackey Dubya BTW, the net is one of the last places where we can have true freedom of expression, no fucking way would I let the government decide who can and who can't be here, because if you think political correctness sucks now, you should see it after they get done. The final test would end up with more questions about whether you kiss the ring than whether you know WTF an antivirus is, oh fuck no.
Well I don't know about him but you can have my Sandisk M260 when you pry it from my cold dead fingers. The thing is built like a tank, been dropped i don't know how many times and everything still works, gets around 27 hours on a single AAA battery, decent EQ, and of course since it runs on triple A if I go dead while I'm out 2 minutes in any store and I'm back up and running again. its a damned shame they don't still make 'em but you can often find them on eBay or Amazon.
Sorry, been in PC retail for nearly 25 years and I can tell you training the grunts? NEVER works. Now training the IT staff? Sure send 'em to blackhat, pay for security classes, those ARE good investments that will see return, but Sally the secretary, that sees the PC as a magic black box that lets her do her work? Sorry but its gonna go in one ear and out the other.
It would be like trying to teach me how to rebuild cars, i don't like cars, never cared about what model I drove, I just don't give a damn as long as it gets me from A to B and THAT is how many of your employees see the PC. They don't want to know about the thing, couldn't care less what its doing as long as they can get their work done and punch out, they have not the slightest interest in PCs which if you don't have any desire to really learn? Not gonna stick.
So i have to agree that paying to train the regular staff is just a waste of time and energy. Much better to make sure you have well trained IT staff that can minimize the risk that your end users will have because frankly you are just wasting your breath when you try to teach somebody who doesn't care about PCs how to securely use one.
Off an on for years, single parents I guess is a demographic they care about but they make it VERY clear that it is NOT just OTA TV anymore. if you are playing games, watching YouTube, whatever? They want you to fill that in. I even told them last time they asked me "You DO know I don't even watch OTA TV anymore? that everything I enjoy is online?" and they said "That's fine, just write down at the bottom of the page what you were doing instead of OTA TV" and I guess it made them happy as I was asked to do it again about 6 months ago.
You ought to look at AR and TN, we pretty much hate politics and we make it clear that other than fixing roads and shit we prefer our politicians to STFU and get out of the way.
Of course the downside is places where you actually need the government to step in, like our frankly shitty broadband coverage? not gonna happen. That is why we'll get fiber 20 years after everybody else gets it.
But if I was going in any direction it would be farther south, I hear Costa Rica is quite nice and warm year round. No way I could stand being in a place that even had 30f temps for any length of time, much less -50f. Of course having a couple of blown joints from a bike wreck that don't react well to cold or wet certainly weighs in, being born and raised in the south me and cold? Not ever gonna be friends.
Sorry about the lateness of the response but the oldest was having serious game connection issues so guess who was doing tech support?
But I think you are wrong and here is why: when i first came here threads that went over 50 were common, 100 not as much but not rare, and 200 if it was a heavy subject with a lot of differing viewpoints was seen at least once or twice a month. I remember one where we all ending up talking the merits of various filesystems that must have went over 300 posts.
Now? Now its like fucking reddit or digg, if a single post gets a dozen responses its rare and 2 dozen practically unheard of, its all just little snarky sniping at each other and flag waving, NO real discussions on the subject, NO debates on the merits or hassles of a position, its ALL just catty snarky bullshit. I mean this is SUPPOSED to be a site for geeks and nerds, so where in the fuck is the talks about geeky and nerdy things? It all ends up being slashvertisements or plugs for this or that product and even when its on a subject that many feel strongly about like DRM or spying it just doesn't build any steam, its always ends in just snarky fanboi bullshit.
To me the most telling thing is how many of the old guard has walked away, you are the first sub 6 UID I've seen in ages and even the sub 7 UIDs like mine are becoming rare because the old guys get tired of the bullshit and walk away. I'd love to see a spreadsheet showing hard numbers on sub million UIDs because I bet in the last couple of years you'd see sub 1 million UIDs dropping like flies because this site has just become another Digg or Reddit, there just isn't the depth anymore.
Damn when you'd rather walk in -20f weather (how in the hell do you even stand that man? When its 30f outside we are bundled like Eskimos and only go out when we have no choice) than ride the bus? Them is some shitty buses. Never rode the city to city bus, where I'm at that bus stops at 2 dozen little podunk towns between here and the state capital so I hear its a 2 hour drive to the capital whereas if the traffic isn't too bad i can be in the center of the capital in under 45 minutes. Plus you can't smoke on a bus and I want a cigarette dammit LOL!
But you are a brave man to live in ND, that is just too fucking cold for this southern boy. Where I'm at we are actually listed as a sub tropic climate zone, we get less than 3 weeks a year of sub 40f weather (and we hate every damned minute, while kids were cheering how we had a white Xmas every adult was going "WTF? This isn't supposed to happen!") and the rest of the time its hot and sunny. You gotta learn to deal with the humidity but since a side effect of all that humidity is excellent crops and these great farmer's markets where you can go get fresh fruits and veggies that were picked that morning for cheap? Meh the AC can always cut down on the wetness of the air.
As I tell my yankee friends when they are shocked at out 115f summers "It really ain't hard to cool off on a scorching day, you got shade, sweet tea, AC in your car,lake not 30 minutes away, its not hard at all. When its -20f outside I don't give a shit how much you bundle up you ARE gonna be fucking cold and miserable, no way around that." Hell of a lot easier to cool off when its hot than it is to stay warm when its bitter cold which is why I could never understand why anybody would choose to live in a place THAT fucking cold.
I think you are wrong and here is why: As a retailer I've found the VAST majority of PCs? Spend most of their lives in idle. I'm not shitting you, I have run performance logs on customers and found all those duals,triples, and especially quads and hexas spend most of their time in idle just waiting for something to do. There should be no reason why you couldn't use say 30% of that idle time to be processing this in the background. This would be one of those things like Windows caching where it takes awhile for the PC to "learn" and fill in the blanks (perhaps give the user the choice of how much idle time it uses) but with all those wasted cycles you could have this run in the background and the vast majority? wouldn't ever even notice it running....until they asked a question and had the PC just hand them the correct file.
As far as who could pull it off? as much as I hate them as a company Apple would be the only ones i could see pulling this off, NOT Linux or Windows. Not Linux because you are gonna need access to too many subsystems which frankly get fucked with too damned often to make this thing stable, you got everything from the kernel to the DEs constantly changing shit which just wouldn't work for this, as long as the Ballmernator is running MSFT they won't be doing shit that Apple doesn't do first and Google wants your ass on the web so sure as fuck isn't gonna do anything that would make the desktop nicer...so that just leaves Apple. If they could take the genesis of the Siri idea and merge that with the desktop FS? It would fucking be awesome. Imagine no more need for keyboards and mice, you'd just tell the machine what you wanted it to do or find you and it'd do it...THAT would be awesome.
But as much as I'd love to see a FOSS dev come up with this first frankly it would probably cost a good 50-75 million in R&D to get this thing capable of reading videos by facial recognition and pattern matching and lets face it the redistribution clause means most Linux devs are gonna be toiling away in grinding poverty, not the kind of conditions that are conductive to coming up with world changing software. This also doesn't fit into the "blessed three" way of making money with FOSS, 1.-Selling software/services, 2.-Selling hardware, 3.-Tin cup begging, so there wouldn't be any way to really raise the needed capital.
Well we just have different definitions of vaporware. To me if it is never sold? Its vaporware. DNF may be a POS game but its not vaporware because eventually they DID sell the game, whereas WinFS as you pointed out was only shown to a handful of devs that went to some trade show in who the fuck knows where on one occasion? Sorry but that is vaporware to me, especially when MSFT was hyping the shit out of it in press releases that general public sites like CNet was covering.
But in ANY case it doesn't change the fact that with consumer PCs being so insanely overpowered now, with even low end laptops having dual cores and most desktops being sold having triples or quads that something like WinFS would be VERY doable now and would be a game changer. We have too much data and not enough time and having the OS do all the grunt work so we could just "talk" to the PC and tell it what we want, say "Videos with my ex in it" and have it go "Oh here you go" would seriously change the way we interact with PCs for the better.
Nope sorry, you are not looking at the big picture. Those "record breaking" sales were because of PREORDERS which when calculated would make the product SEEM like its destined to be another megahit but when the game hit the ground and the "DRM in a dress" as one poster put it caused another D3 disaster the sales fell right off the chart. That is why you have EA handing out free copies of $30 games with a "We're sorry" because they are seeing those that WERE recommending the game are saying now "My friend bought it and his city got wiped, fuck this noise" and the sales fell right off the map.
Exactly, lets put an end to this myth right now because as a retailer I can tell you that a good 95%+ of the buying public doesn't know that nerd culture even exists much less WTF the nerds are pissed about this week. when the whole SOPA/PIPA thing was going on I'd ask people that came into my shop to help shoot it down. Know what I got every single time I mentioned it? "WTF is SOPA/PIPA?" It was ONLY when I started spamming FB and encouraging everybody to spam FB with links pointing out WTF SOPA/PIPA was that people started going "Oh yeah, that stupid Internet screwing law".
Voting with your dollars works because it hits these corps where it hurts, right in the wallet. They ain't giving out bonuses and patting themselves on the back with raises if the big properties are tanking, nope they are shitting themselves and going "WTF did we do wrong? Isn't this a big franchise? Why isn't it selling?" and THAT is why it works. The nerds can rage until the end of time and the public will never know about it, they might as well be farting in a hurricane for all the good it did, but when everyone says "Fuck that, I'm not buying that" then the corps have no choice but to pay attention because they are seeing that bottom line go into freefall, they are seeing their coffers start to empty, they are looking at future projections and the numbers are all bad...that scares the shit out of them, as the CEO firing proves.
Just remember folks that voting with your dollars takes time to affect the company, it takes months of those sales figures not matching projects before some suit goes into a meeting with the figures and goes "so what is this about? Why are the numbers not there?" but it DOES work as long as more people refuse to buy the bullshit than the previous release.
Allow me to say that this is further proof that VOTING WITH YOUR DOLLARS WORKS and it works VERY well, its just not magical or instant.
Remember folks this is NOT just about SImcity, its about how under his watch sales have gone down as he ran off more and more customers with douchebag behavior, from gouging on DLC to bad DRM schemes to bad services like Origin John Riccitiello has done for EA what Steve Ballmer has done for MSFT, run it into the ground. And I'm proud to say many folks have voted with their wallets and refused to buy these "DRMapaloza" games that treat the customer as a criminal, just look at how hard Activision and Ubisoft had their sales hit for this kind of shit, with Ubisoft going so far as to remove it from their games and apologize for it.
So just don't buy products that treat you like crap, vote with your wallet and you CAN change things, just not overnight. EA under John Riccitiello has been widely derided for bad behavior so its really no surprise that people voted with their wallets, we need to continue to refuse to buy products that treat us like crap. As long as D3 is always online I won't have it, i instead bought my friends and family Torchlight II instead, I refuse to buy any game that treats me badly and encourage everyone to do the same as we CAN make a difference, it just takes time.
This is why one can't simply have a good idea anymore, one has to sell out to a supercorp just to deal with all the lawsuit bullshit.
This is why I have argued for years that we REALLY need court reform, when our system was designed nobody ever even thought about what would happen when companies would become bigger than some third world countries or the law so complex that it could take years just to deal with all the appeals and counterclaims. This court design now frankly gives too much of an advantage of the big guy over the little so as in thius case whether the little guy is right or not is irrelevant, you can just bleed them to death in court fees.
What we need is a "lawyer pool" in both civil and criminal cases to where the money both side were planning to spend on lawyers and paralegals gets dumped into a pot and split 50/50, that way in civil you couldn't "lawyer to death" a company or person and in criminal the state couldn't force pleas by piling on every possible charge they can think of knowing that while the state has infinite resources the defendant will have his lawyer fees shoot up with each charge piled on until they can't afford to fight back.
But of course since the current system enriches lawyers while making things as rigged as a game of three card monty? I doubt things will ever change. But we need to accept the current system has jack squat to do with justice or the law, its all about how much money you can afford to spend.
But should we be mad at the troll, or the government that encourages and rewards patent trolling?
I mean take for example the stock market, from the turn of the 20th century all the way up to the mid 80s most companies were working towards long term growth and stability and then we suddenly go to this crazy batshit "flip this stock" kind of situation where its all about the short term, what happened? The government injected massive amounts of money into the market and distorted the system so that you were penalized for long term slow growth and rewarded for any kind of short term bounce to the stock even if the cause of that bounce would kill the company later, such as stuffing the channel or selling off the assets.
Yes patent trolls are fucking bad, we all know this but how do we change it? Going after the trolls does nothing because a dozen more will be ready to play lawsuit lotto and take a shot at the big time, no what we need is serious patent reform to take the incentives for trolling out of the equation. Then and ONLY THEN will things get better, until then companies like Cisco are just playing whack a mole .But since it gives Cisco and other companies an easy way to set up a tollbooth to kill competition or leech money from it, look at MSFT and Android for example, that even when they get dinged occasionally by a troll they write it off as a business expense and keep the status quo.
So what we need to do is similar to what we did with SOPA/PIPA, get a grass roots movement for fixing this mess going so that these corps won't get rewarded for trolling.