I don't care if he's a Hindi, HE brought it up, its not like reporters were hunting him down for his view on the subject. Like Mel Gibson he's the one that dropped his drawers and waved his ass at the world and now he has to live with the consequences.
And I thought Slashdot was supposed to be a libertarian leaning site? What do you want to do FORCE people to buy products made by people they don't like because you support his views? This has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with free speech because the government hasn't said a word its the CONSUMERS that have made it clear "I won't buy products by this person" and the retailers are just doing what is basic common sense and not stocking books that their customers don't want. How is this in ANY way, shape, or form, anything but how a truly free society works?
I'm sure he hates Robert Maplethorpe's art so he doesn't have to buy it yes? So how is that ANY different than me not buying HIS book because I don't like HIS views? Its called common sense folks, he has the right to say whatever he wants just as the rest of us have the right not to buy his products. And for those using the "But he is a Mormon" excuse? I can show you letters from mainstream churches saying blacks deserve what they get in the 1950s, they even used a bible passage "The curse of Ham" to excuse any and all mistreatment of blacks...didn't make it right though, did it? There are still churches that teach white privilege, hell in some Muslim countries the rape victim is the one that is punished...does that make it right?
The difference is here in this country we have the right NOT to support such views or to give people that hold such views our money and its pretty damned obvious the public has spoken on this matter. Would it have been better if they put out the book and it tanked? Or paid him for the book and threw it in the dumpster? If the public doesn't want it, just as they didn't want to support Chik Fil A then they are 100% right not to spend their money on it, unless you think he should get a check just because he said something you agreed with?
With HDDs I've found it always seems to be in batches, I truly believe like Nvidia with Bumpgate that the manufacturers KNOW that a batch is bad but don't want to eat the cost of shitcanning an entire run so they just put them out there and take the hit. After all if you make a million drives and have a 65% replacement rate on a batch that means you still got 35% of the units cleared whereas if they shitcan the bad batches they would see 100% losses on that batch.
Everyone has heard of the IBM Deathstar but frankly there has probably been a couple dozen bad batches since then, Maxtor diamondmax in 02-04 was failure city, WD had a batch I believe it was 06-07 (probably when you got burnt) that had crazy failure rates and even as we speak I'd buy and trust my data to a refurb Samsung EcoGreen before I'd trust it to a Seagate over 1TB, I've seen enough new machines brought in because the HDD shit itself that I won't mess with Seagate over 500GB in the shop. The 1.5TB and 2TB are especially bad from what I'e seen and been told,which is why you keep seeing those drives on sale everywhere, its because they want to unload them. One guy I was talking to bought 10 of the 2TB and 12 of the 1.5TB and not a single one of those was running at the year and a half mark, not a single one. That is why I'll buy Samsung, Toshiba, or WD before I'll touch a large capacity Seagate, there are just too many failures in the current batch.
I had something similar with a customer who was complaining that the "nice TV computer" he had bought from a competitor worked great UNTIL he'd go to play movies on his TV and then it would shit all over itself, know what I found? the cheap bastard had put a 180w PSU in a system with a video card that said quite plainly under minimum specs a 400w PSU. Sure enough I swapped out the PSU for a decent 500w and tada! Now I get a ton of business from that customer's family because he knows I can do the work.
But I honestly haven't seen a BSOD caused by the CPUs since the days of the non thermal sensor Athlons and even in those it was unscrupulous PC sellers that would OC the shit out of the chip and sell the unit as a higher performance system than it really was. I had one guy come in during that time complaining that his $1200 "high performance" 1700MHz was crashing constantly. I set the BIOS back to defaults and said "The answer is simple, this is only a 1200MHz chip that they had cranked up so high an OC that it was cooking. Needless to say he was pissed because a PC with that chip was less than half the price of what he ended up paying for his "high performance" PC.
As far as CPUs causing BSODs? he's full of shit, 90% of BSODs can be traced back to shitty RAM and the other 10% are pretty evenly divided between bad PSUs, bad HDDs, and the occasional failing cap but you see that less and less since they switched to solid caps. CPUs don't even show up in the top 10 since they all put in thermal sensors as the unit will shut itself down before it overheats enough to start spitting out serious errors, he just doesn't know what he is talking about.
If you found out that every time you bought a PC from me that part of that money was going to hate groups, would you continue to buy PCs from me? This has NOTHING to do with democracy and free speech, I'm so fucking sick of people thinking that because you are ALLOWED to speak that we have to PAY YOU for that speech, it doesn't work that way. He is free to be as big a bigot as Mel Gibson, he is also free to see his career take a big old shit just like Mel Gibson because we don't want to give our money to bigots, why is that so hard to understand? he is still free to stand on a corner with WBC and a "God hates fags" sign if he wants, but he is NOT entitled to a salary from the public to support that endeavor.
Want a good example? Jeffery Jones. I think he's a great actor, loved him in Hunt For Red October, yet you never see him anymore, why? Because he was caught with a PC full of kiddie porn while soliciting a 14 year old boy for sex. Since most folks would be none to happy to know part of their ticket money would be going to support a guy that chases little boys naturally he doesn't get the work. Now he is free to stand on a street corner with a NAMBLA sign, nobody is stopping him, they just aren't paying him to stand there with the sign.
Its really not a hard concept folks, freedom and democracy means you can say what you want but it doesn't give you a "consequences free" card, same as if I hung a sign that said "Hey lets go back to slavery, put them negros where they belong" in my shop I really shouldn't be surprised if I don't get any work.
Actually Drinkypoo if you read the articles that came out before the Itanic it was a classic case of "built by marketing". You see the whole Itanic design was gonna be tied to the compiler, the compiler would set everything up so that the Itanic would just stream all this code right through it and on paper? the chip looked to be a LOT faster than X86 at the time. The problem was you would have to have each and every program compiled in just the right order to hit every single mark and they found that writing a compiler that could take just any code (instead of code specially crafted to be optimized for the Itanic way of doing things) was damned near impossible. But if you look at the articles its ALL about killing the competition, most even mention AMD which was stomping Intel with the Athlon at the time.
But as someone who loved oddball arches and read up on it before release it was easy to see that the chip had NOT been built because they saw something that needed a chip better than X86, it was strictly a way to lock out AMD and Via from making chips and giving Intel a monopoly. From the lawsuits over 486 to bribing the OEMs, from rigging their compiler to forcing Nvidia out of the chipset business when even today their GPUs don't measure up it has NEVER been about what is best for their customers at Intel, its ALWAYS been about monopoly and cornering a market. Intel just isn't a nice company and love lock in as much as Apple, the fact that they make good X86 chips doesn't matter to them, they want 100% of the market and I bet my last dollar if AMD and Via were to close shop tomorrow so the ONLY source was Intel for X86? You'd never hear another peep about different arches from Chipzilla. of course a Pentium Dual would probably cost $600 and quads would start at a grand which is why I put my money where my mouth was and became an all AMD shop.
But do you honestly think somebody THAT bigoted won't drag that bigotry into the comic? And let us not forget these are the same arguments that were used against interracial marriage in the 50s, in fact replace gay with negro or jew and its the same old song and dance.
Besides...isn't this the very point of capitalism? Voting with your dollars? Chick Fil-A didn't change their stance because the government forced them, its because people quit buying their product. he can be as big a bigot as he wants, hell let him Mel Gibson all over the net if it makes him happy, but that doesn't mean I as a consumer have to support him or as a retailer do I have to stock products made by him. Personally I'd say it works, if enough people support his views he'll get more customers and if more people don't support his views then he'll get less, simple as that.
What are you babbling about? I haven't seen a system in years that has crashed because of the CPU, the last systems I saw do that were the AMD chips that didn't have a thermal sensor. I'd say from looking at what comes through the shop a good 90% of your hard crashes can be counted on to be shitty RAM followed by viruses and rootkits installed by the customer. The CPU is frankly not even on the radar as far as crashes go,its not even in the top 10.
Nope, I couldn't get the keywords to stick for some reason from my news feed, I found a new one that I could choose only the sites I like that would let me filter any and all keywords from headlines. I put in KDE, Gnome, Debian, Linux, Ubuntu, I would have put Red hat but the way it works I would have not gotten any article with the word red in it so I'll just have to ignore than one, same as Mint which is also too commonly used in headlines to block.
So please go back to circlejerking over a bash script, the numbers have spoken and Linux can enjoy the company of BeOS and OS/2 and all the other failed operating systems throughout the years, for I have learned common sense will never be applied. Its a damned shame that Shuttleworth didn't just choose BSD as Jobs did, his company might not have ended up bleeding to death but that is what he gets for walking into the monkey house and not expecting all the poo flinging. Enjoy your failure, me I'll be trying to find an easy to automate DE for Windows 9 that can be deployed en masse in case ballmer's fat stupid ass is still in the big chair in 2014.
Use RTF then, hell use.TXT if all you need is the raw data, the point is making an office format "open" isn't a magic bullet and makes no God damned sense. And frankly the current state of affairs proves it...how many offices you see using ODF? I don't see any, I see yet another failed format that nobody cares about.
I think the problem is what people SAY they want and what they ACTUALLY want are often two different things, as many a company has found out the hard way. Anybody who dreamed of juicy government contracts for converting to ODF has gotten a rude awakening by now and I bet if one were to take a survey that ODF wouldn't even crack 5% and neither would opendoc. Just because MSFT rammed through their little format so they could have a bullet point on the box didn't make ODF disappear ya know, its still free to use, its just nobody is using it because we already HAD formats that could do the job they said ODF was required for and the infrastructure was already built so why switch?
Not to mention everybody misses the point, the move away from X86 was NOT about the customer or because they had a better design, it was because they wanted a monopoly and the courts had ruled they couldn't cockblock AMD and Via. If they could have waved a wand and made themselves the sole supplier of X86, think they would have come up with Itanic?
Look at and learn from your history folks, Intel makes MSFT look like the Care Bears. They bribed all the OEMs, rigged their compilers, they aren't nice people. X86 has higher IPC than any other arch out there when you look at amount of work done per watt, the new i series is just fricking insane when it comes to how much work they can do per cycle, so why would Intel have wanted to move away, when they can simply strip it down like they are doing with Atom and still have a very powerful chip? Because they have dreams of monopoly and have had since the day the courts ruled that they couldn't block AMD from making reverse engineered 486 chips.
I think the point he is trying to make is that you would move it such a tiny amount that you would need to get to it years or even decades before the mother hit earth and as we saw with Russia not too long ago? We really ain't THAT good at detecting hunks of space rock heading at us.
Now I may only be a layperson but i think there is a flaw in Mr Tyson's logic, his entire premise is we'll "Blow the sucker up" like something from Michael Bay but frankly that just wouldn't be logical for the reason he points out, you just make a bigger mess. but what he isn't figuring on is we have variable yield nukes that will let you dial in EXACTLY how much force you want coming from your nuke and we also have nukes designed to penetrate to a set depth THEN blow up, so called "bunker buster" weapons. Now since from what we have seen the truly big nasty rocks are pretty much giant hunks of iron and rock there is no reason why you couldn't use a bunker buster to carve out a little cavity to put the nuke in which would then work similarly to Project Orion and be used NOT for destructive force to "blow the sucker up" but instead be used like a giant thruster to steer the asteroid away from the planet. While Mr Tyson is right that it won;t take much if you catch it early enough frankly betting all life on catching it early enough doesn't sound like the best choice IMHO. This way you have a workable "plan B" that would at least let you move it over enough to keep it from impacting without worrying about turning one big chunk into a shitload of little chunks.
I don't have to say anything, the test if filmed can't be faked since you won't have access to making new time stamps on the video and i doubt you'll be good enough at editing for everyone not to see the jump cuts. You have a simple measure, easy to show as a dipstick on a car, so why are you afraid? Just fire up the hardware manager in whatever DE you have chosen at first boot to show all the hardware is working, then apply the updates, then show the list to see its still working....what is hard about that? And I haven't moved the goalposts, i haven't accused anyone of working for sekret orgs you and your batshit buddies have done that, so the proof is on you. I have given you the most simple test in the world, one frankly rigged in your favor, yet you fear it...is it because you know what will happen? Because taking bog standard laptops from Dell, HP, and Acer i can tell you EXACTLY what happened with over a dozen distros, a broken mess.
You know what is truly sad? here is every rebuttal ever written here to me...note what its called? the circle of the loon, because its a circular argument that never ends. But don't worry I've removed Linux from both my RSS feeds and now from/. as well so please, go back to your giant circlejerking. Won't change the facts, Linux is flatline, nobody wants it, its numbers haven't moved in years Android is owned by Google, and MSFT could put out windows Goatse with smell-o-vision and still have ten times your share because you won't listen, not to users nor OEMs, nope its all circlejerking about how "Nobody knows how to be leet!" They are teh noobs for teh lusers, we are leet!"
So please, enjoy your little fantasy world where anybody gives a rat';s ass, because after 5 years of dealing with the monkey house I sure as fuck don't, If Linux were a company it would have been chap 11 a decade ago, its badly run, no central planning AT ALL, nobody cares about anything but their own little fiefdoms, you should be proud as you copied old Soviet style communism better than I thought anybody ever could, must give the squatter a big old stiffie. Meanwhile the big three will turn the world into locked down cellphones and the people will take it because its the choice of a locked down corporate controlled device that WORKS...or your product. Given that choice is it any wonder Apple is bigger than God now?
The ONLY one moving goal posts is YOU. I chose that system simply because its from 2007 and since the tests if for 5 years that would be about as bog standard and typical as you can get. Don't like that system, which would you prefer? I have an AMD quad, an Intel Pentium D, even a couple P4s in the back, which one do YOU want to use?
And YOU are the one that says your OS is ready NOT ME. I have given you a simple test, one that has cost me $300 in bandwidth charges BTW to apply, that PROVES YOU ARE FULL OF SHIT so if you say I'm lying? Here is your chance, take ANY system, YOUR CHOICE, film it and upload...scared? you should be because in the 6 years not a SINGLE UNIT PASSED, not one. Not Debian nor the *Buntus or derivitavies, not Fedora nor PCLOS, not Knoppix or any other supposedly "user friendly distro".
so here is your chance, put up or STFU and sit down because frankly i'm tired of the community's lies and bullshit. Here is a simple test ANYBODY can do with ANY SYSTEM they desire, why won't you step up? I'll tell you why because you KNOW what will happen, you'll apply the updates and Pulse will shit itself, the DEs will get wonky and wireless will go buy bye. Your entire system is a house of cards and this test shows your lies for what they all, total bullshit. Step up or STFU.
Oh you can bet your last dollar they are getting a juicy cut of that content money, why else would they offer it? Sure they may make MORE money from their ISP sales but that doesn't mean you give up the extra money of bringing content, especially when you see how much that can bring in.
But this highlights the REAL problem and that is collusion . All these megacorps have long term business relationships and as we've seen time and time again its "You scratch my back I'll scratch yours" which inevitably leads to conflicts of interest. But I agree that the cablecos are probably the worst at this because they own the content delivery so its against their best interests for you to use anything other than their services and thanks to caps they can steer you by the nose where they want you to go. i know I no longer use netflix because I kept running into the cap and the ISPs offerings are cap free so they have already begun steering me where they want me to go but sadly its them or AT&T in my area and AT&T DSL is beyond crap here, we are talking max speeds of 5Mbps and lows as low as 700Kbps, too low to be usable to me.
So quit using the crap DVRs that came with your contract and go DIY? You can get a Phenom low power quad for $68 at Starmicro and VCR style cases that will hold a mATX board really ain't that hard to find friend. I've built a couple of DVRs using this chip and they are low heat while giving you plenty of CPU for processing video and with a DIY you can choose to either have a DVD burner in the system or a second HDD, you can take a 32GB-64GB SSD and use that as a temp drive which will give you plenty of throughput for video and then simply move the recording to the larger 5400 RPM internal.
Frankly building a DVR has never been easier and cheaper, hell it one of the few places where Windows 8 actually makes sense as metro makes a great 10 foot UI for a DVR and its optimized for speed, its really not hard and at the end of the day you'll have a much nicer system that YOU control and can do with what you will.
Uhhh...my gaming PC is using 5400 RPM drives and ya know what? With plenty of RAM frankly they work just fine and lower the temps a good 20 degrees F on the drives in the unit which is a pretty damned big difference as we know heat is a killer. Sure i could have added more cooling but I like to hear my games, not my fans whining so this gives me 3TB of space for all my games and videos without all the noise and heat so i gotta agree with Seagate on this one.
BTW if you want the a lot of the benefits of SSDs without the higher cost and smaller capacity? Buy a cheap 32GB-64GB SSD and use it as a caching drive in Readyboost. I have a customer that did this and after playing with his system as soon as things slow down a little at the shop I'm gonna do this as well because thanks to Readyboost all the most used files of the OS, applications and games are kept on the 32GB SSD as part of the cache so he gets a lot of the benefit with ZERO risk as Windows just rebuilds the cache if you yank the drive no problem. The only benefit that I saw he doesn't get is the faster boot times, the Readyboost cache shaves about 20% but no more off the boot because Readyboost has to have the OS initialized before it can work but other than this frankly his system just flies. With a cache that big most of the stuff he uses daily fits into the cache so loads insanely fast but since its just a cache and not the original files which are safely on the HDD he gets most of the upside with none of the down.
My only advice would be if you do this use Readyboost and NOT the caching software that comes with some of these drives as it bypasses windows caching and I just don't know how trustworthy their software is or what happens if it dies, with readyboost a backup is always on the HDD so even if the SSD drive dies tomorrow it won't affect the system as a whole other than the speed. I'm not sure if the same can be said of their caching software as from what I've seen its pretty low level stuff.
OMG did you compare Linux to a sailcar? Maybe built by crazy Earl in his basement. And if you want details? happy to give them. Its a CONSUMER OS challenge so only CONSUMER OSES will be used, that means NO Server 2Kx on the Windows side and no RHEL or SLED on the Linux side...simple enough? And the reason i added the camera requirement is because I once had a bozo supposedly "prove" he could beat the challenge with some screencaps...until somebody pointed out the wireless card he was using wasn't even supported in 2007 so it obviously wasn't working in the beginning which then he suddenly talked about how "anybody can use the forums" thus showing what he did was play "google for fixes" and thus failed the challenge.
But the only place its apples to oranges is in your own mind, you say Linux is ready? here is your chance, we'll take ANY consumer version of Linux YOUR choice and put it head to head on the SAME HARDWARE so that there can be NO BIAS. And the reason I don't name the distro is simple, every time I did I got the standard use distro x excuse. Oh Ubuntu doesn't pass? use Knoppix, Knoppix don't pass? use debian, round and round and round it goes there is over 500 distros on distrowatch so a game of use distro x could go on for a dozen years and never get through all the choices for X.
As for why I let you do it? I'm tired of paying for bandwidth so i can rub the truth, which is the current OS model in Linux is TOTALLY BROKEN, into the nose of the community like rubbing a puppy's nose in its mess. As I have said, you want to pay for the bandwidth? I'll be happy to take a Sunday and do it on live cam, I'll take some random laptop out of the shop and do the challenge right there on a live cam for all to see. you can watch as i format, install the OS, make sure the drivers all work, then update and watch it crap itself. But where I live bandwidth costs $1.50 a GB over the cap and since "use distro x" is an endless excuse i have no intention of throwing more money away only to hear "Oh that one didn't work? Well that is YOUR FAULT for not using distro x! See we win" bullshit you have just moved the goalposts just as they do when they scream paid M$ Shill to try to deflect away from the fact they can't pass the challenge.
Again this is about as simple a test as you can come up with, NO multiple monitors, NO funky hardware like capture cards, just a random laptop from any of the major OEMs with the consumer Linux OF YOUR CHOICE. What could be more simple? the fact that you try to make it sound more complex than it is just tells me you know in your heart whichever distro x you choose won't pass muster either.
But your OWN ARGUMENT makes no damned sense! If its for "record keeping" why in the fuck would you use an ALTERABLE format at all, unless you want to selectively "change" anything you don't like down the road? We DO have this thing called PDFs you know, we have the specs to several revs of PDF and frankly a bazillion companies make basic PDF readers that will run on just about any damned thing with a screen and a CPU, so why in the hell use ANY alterable format?
And YES I use MS Office, I have MS Office 2K installed on my 64bit netbook (I like how light it is and it supports the latest formats with the converter pack) and 2K7 on the desktop and they run great. More importantly I have probably 200 business customers using MS office RIGHT NOW and frankly its one of the most hassle free pieces of software there is. i get a dozen times more calls for support because their browser broke than I do over any MS Office problems, its frankly a damned good piece of software....which is both a blessing and a curse for MSFT because I don't know a single customer who has moved beyond 2K7 yet, they are happy and it does what they want so why buy the latest and greatest?
Nice to see somebody who isn't a fanboy and can see the risk here. And I'm so damned sick of everyone screaming "M$ Shill" if I don't drink the iKoolaid or kiss Google's ring. Who was calling for MSFT to be broken up when the evidence came to light in the antitrust trial? Oh yeah that was ME, same as i thought Intel deserves a hell of a lot more than a couple billion bribe to AMD to make a decade of backdoor bribery go away.
Why is it that nobody can see that being the biggest corp on the planet brings with it serious dangers to the web and openess? It was wrong and I screamed bloody murder when MSFT tried to control the web through IE 6, and I'm gonna scream just as fucking loudly now that Apple is controlling the web by saying "Do what we say or it don't run on the iPad" as they did with HTML V5 video. for what its worth, know who I was rooting for? NOT MSFT who simply aped Apple, I thought and still do that a minimum of Drac or Theora should have been mandatory. But apparently its totally okay to stick a "pay your $699 license fee" troll as the "standard" for video across the web as long as it was blessed by St. Jobs of Cupertino. A good rule of thumb...if MSFT would have pulled the exact same shit, would you be cool with it? I sure as hell wouldn't and just because Apple builds for hipsters doesn't magically give them a "be a douchebag free" card.
You and the other AC ought to take a look at AR, prices are cheap, the air is clean, as long as you don't live in LR or Pine Bluff frankly the crime rate is crazy low, the prices are so cheap you could have a McMansion for what a 3 bedroom goes for in Tampa and you'll have it on a couple of dozen acres with an incredible view of mountains and valleys, just some really beautiful country. Oh and the temps are warm, most of the time its practically like living in the tropics as we only have one or two weeks of really cold weather a year, its just really nice.
I can walk out my door and walk down the side streets at 3AM and the worse that will happen is maybe a cop ask if I've had a breakdown or somebody be walking the other way and ask if i have a cig,where you gonna find that kind of "leave it to beaver" levels of peace in this day and age?
Do you HONESTLY think if only ODF would have been approved it would have made a damned bit of difference? Like them or hate them MSFT did get a few things right, one of them is MS Office. With LO it feels like what it is, a mish mash of separate programs bolted together that don't really belong together and for the longest time Writer was the only program that got any love, the rest didn't get squat comapred to Writer. with MS Office its an actual suite, with everything working together and honestly Excel and Access are pretty impressive in the amount of work you can do with them and the entire ecosystem that has built up around them.
There are some places where FOSS got it right, browsers being a damned good example. Office Suites? Not so much. The other field where MSFT really doesn't have any competition of note is groupware which they also do REALLY well but frankly I don't know why MSFT wasted that money getting OpenDoc or whatever the hell its called pushed through because everybody has stuck with Doc(X) so neither ODF or OpenDoc really made a dent and when you compare the latest MS Office, hell MS Office 2K3 or 2K7 even to the latest LO you can see why, MS Office is the better product. I wish it weren't so because lord knows the market works better with real competition but LO is AMD to MSFT's Intel, they ain't even in the same ballpark.
Allow me to quote from Wikipedia under products and services, emphasis mine: "Verizon launched its FiOS Video service in Keller, Texas on September 22, 2005. FiOS TV uses an optical fiber network to deliver more than 500 total channels, more than 180 digital music channels, more than 95 high-definition channels, and 10,000 video-on-demand titles.
What did I say the first reason was again? Because they were not liking competition with their content services? Well there ya go, there is your reason, if you are using Hulu and netflix and Steam you ain't buying their TV channels and PPV, can't have that. How much you wanna bet THEIR services don't count against your cap?
Band Aids on bullet wounds friend, Band Aids on bullet wounds. what we NEED is for Java to die on the consumer desktop until oracle has enough sense to rewrite the thing from the ground up, looking at the OO.o source you can see Sun seriously sucked when it came to code for the desktop and the trouble Java is having now goes back to Sun and the trouble THEY had and the simple fact is ITS NOT NEEDED as you can do the same damned thing in Visual C++ as far as games go and not force home users to get stuck with Java.
Java has its place and that is the enterprise backend NOT the consumer desktop. When practically everybody and their dog and their dog's chewtoy has C++ runtimes already sticking with Java which has so many zero days is irresponsible and bad practice, I don't see how anybody could argue different. in the enterprise Java is too deeply used for anybody to change and from what I've been told its ability to handle so many users at once reliably makes the risk bearable and hey, I get that, I really do. But forcing consumers to install Java just to play a video game? bad form game devs, bad form.
So you wasted the time to post "La la la I'm not listening" and you wonder why I have started calling Linux zealots like yourself FOSSies? Because like Moonies the ONLY answer that you accept is "Hey Biff, isn't Linux doubleplusgood? It sure is Skip and RMS farts cure global warming". Meanwhile your adoption? FLATLINE. Stolen Windows actually has MORE THAN FIVE TIMES what you have! Does that not ring ANY bells? or are they just noobs who aren't leet enough to see that shit sandwich tastes like watercrest?
Its a simple challenge that frankly gives Linux multiple advantages over the competition yet you won't take because you KNOW you can't pass it, you can't. I have given the challenge to, in no particular order, the *buntus, PCLOS, Debian, Fedora (I know but a FOSSie swore it would pass...it didn't) Knoppix, pretty much EVERY distro that at one time or another was touted as "user friendly". Well riddle me this...how "user friendly" is a distro you can't update without drivers dying? How "user friendly" is an OS with such piss poor design that features Windows has for over a decade, common sense features like rolback drivers, update drivers, and system restore by simple GUI aren't even implemented? Those technologies came out with Windows fucking ME and you STILL haven't caught up and you have the brass plated balls to lecture ME about trolling? Anybody who pushes such a horribly broken mess as ready for the masses is the fucking King God of Troll Mountain!
Ubuntu 11 new enough for you? And after shelling out all the bandwidth charges doing the Hairyfeet challenge for doubters frankly if you want me to run the test on all mainstream distros again we'll have to set up a way so the Linux guys who think their distro won't shit the bed can donate $100 to pay for the bandwidth but I have a perfect test bed sitting right here, a circa 2007 Vista Business laptop I got for cheap because they broke a key on it.
That is the PERFECT AGE for the Hairyfeet Challenge as that would be about as bog standard for 5 years ago as you can get, C2D 3GB of RAM, and a 500GB HDD. If somebody pays for the bandwidth I'll be happy to take a Sunday at the shop with a video camera rolling and you can watch from start to finish and you'll see that the distros DIE HARD and that at LEAST one or more drivers WILL BE FUCKED in the 5 years worth of updates.
Again if the average user can't apply 5 years worth of updates without having a spare box to Google for fixes? your OS just isn't ready end of story. But don't take my word for it, you can buy a 5 year old laptop off of Craigslist for around $50, feel free to take the challenge and post the video. For SIX YEARS I have been issuing the challenge, not a single taker, why? I'll tell you why, because when the rubber meets the road you know it won't pass THAT is why. And I have NO doubt you've forgotten about the forum hunts and Google fixes you've applied over the years, which is something you average user simply wouldn't be able to do.
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I don't care if he's a Hindi, HE brought it up, its not like reporters were hunting him down for his view on the subject. Like Mel Gibson he's the one that dropped his drawers and waved his ass at the world and now he has to live with the consequences.
And I thought Slashdot was supposed to be a libertarian leaning site? What do you want to do FORCE people to buy products made by people they don't like because you support his views? This has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with free speech because the government hasn't said a word its the CONSUMERS that have made it clear "I won't buy products by this person" and the retailers are just doing what is basic common sense and not stocking books that their customers don't want. How is this in ANY way, shape, or form, anything but how a truly free society works?
I'm sure he hates Robert Maplethorpe's art so he doesn't have to buy it yes? So how is that ANY different than me not buying HIS book because I don't like HIS views? Its called common sense folks, he has the right to say whatever he wants just as the rest of us have the right not to buy his products. And for those using the "But he is a Mormon" excuse? I can show you letters from mainstream churches saying blacks deserve what they get in the 1950s, they even used a bible passage "The curse of Ham" to excuse any and all mistreatment of blacks...didn't make it right though, did it? There are still churches that teach white privilege, hell in some Muslim countries the rape victim is the one that is punished...does that make it right?
The difference is here in this country we have the right NOT to support such views or to give people that hold such views our money and its pretty damned obvious the public has spoken on this matter. Would it have been better if they put out the book and it tanked? Or paid him for the book and threw it in the dumpster? If the public doesn't want it, just as they didn't want to support Chik Fil A then they are 100% right not to spend their money on it, unless you think he should get a check just because he said something you agreed with?
With HDDs I've found it always seems to be in batches, I truly believe like Nvidia with Bumpgate that the manufacturers KNOW that a batch is bad but don't want to eat the cost of shitcanning an entire run so they just put them out there and take the hit. After all if you make a million drives and have a 65% replacement rate on a batch that means you still got 35% of the units cleared whereas if they shitcan the bad batches they would see 100% losses on that batch.
Everyone has heard of the IBM Deathstar but frankly there has probably been a couple dozen bad batches since then, Maxtor diamondmax in 02-04 was failure city, WD had a batch I believe it was 06-07 (probably when you got burnt) that had crazy failure rates and even as we speak I'd buy and trust my data to a refurb Samsung EcoGreen before I'd trust it to a Seagate over 1TB, I've seen enough new machines brought in because the HDD shit itself that I won't mess with Seagate over 500GB in the shop. The 1.5TB and 2TB are especially bad from what I'e seen and been told,which is why you keep seeing those drives on sale everywhere, its because they want to unload them. One guy I was talking to bought 10 of the 2TB and 12 of the 1.5TB and not a single one of those was running at the year and a half mark, not a single one. That is why I'll buy Samsung, Toshiba, or WD before I'll touch a large capacity Seagate, there are just too many failures in the current batch.
I had something similar with a customer who was complaining that the "nice TV computer" he had bought from a competitor worked great UNTIL he'd go to play movies on his TV and then it would shit all over itself, know what I found? the cheap bastard had put a 180w PSU in a system with a video card that said quite plainly under minimum specs a 400w PSU. Sure enough I swapped out the PSU for a decent 500w and tada! Now I get a ton of business from that customer's family because he knows I can do the work.
But I honestly haven't seen a BSOD caused by the CPUs since the days of the non thermal sensor Athlons and even in those it was unscrupulous PC sellers that would OC the shit out of the chip and sell the unit as a higher performance system than it really was. I had one guy come in during that time complaining that his $1200 "high performance" 1700MHz was crashing constantly. I set the BIOS back to defaults and said "The answer is simple, this is only a 1200MHz chip that they had cranked up so high an OC that it was cooking. Needless to say he was pissed because a PC with that chip was less than half the price of what he ended up paying for his "high performance" PC.
As far as CPUs causing BSODs? he's full of shit, 90% of BSODs can be traced back to shitty RAM and the other 10% are pretty evenly divided between bad PSUs, bad HDDs, and the occasional failing cap but you see that less and less since they switched to solid caps. CPUs don't even show up in the top 10 since they all put in thermal sensors as the unit will shut itself down before it overheats enough to start spitting out serious errors, he just doesn't know what he is talking about.
If you found out that every time you bought a PC from me that part of that money was going to hate groups, would you continue to buy PCs from me? This has NOTHING to do with democracy and free speech, I'm so fucking sick of people thinking that because you are ALLOWED to speak that we have to PAY YOU for that speech, it doesn't work that way. He is free to be as big a bigot as Mel Gibson, he is also free to see his career take a big old shit just like Mel Gibson because we don't want to give our money to bigots, why is that so hard to understand? he is still free to stand on a corner with WBC and a "God hates fags" sign if he wants, but he is NOT entitled to a salary from the public to support that endeavor.
Want a good example? Jeffery Jones. I think he's a great actor, loved him in Hunt For Red October, yet you never see him anymore, why? Because he was caught with a PC full of kiddie porn while soliciting a 14 year old boy for sex. Since most folks would be none to happy to know part of their ticket money would be going to support a guy that chases little boys naturally he doesn't get the work. Now he is free to stand on a street corner with a NAMBLA sign, nobody is stopping him, they just aren't paying him to stand there with the sign.
Its really not a hard concept folks, freedom and democracy means you can say what you want but it doesn't give you a "consequences free" card, same as if I hung a sign that said "Hey lets go back to slavery, put them negros where they belong" in my shop I really shouldn't be surprised if I don't get any work.
Actually Drinkypoo if you read the articles that came out before the Itanic it was a classic case of "built by marketing". You see the whole Itanic design was gonna be tied to the compiler, the compiler would set everything up so that the Itanic would just stream all this code right through it and on paper? the chip looked to be a LOT faster than X86 at the time. The problem was you would have to have each and every program compiled in just the right order to hit every single mark and they found that writing a compiler that could take just any code (instead of code specially crafted to be optimized for the Itanic way of doing things) was damned near impossible. But if you look at the articles its ALL about killing the competition, most even mention AMD which was stomping Intel with the Athlon at the time.
But as someone who loved oddball arches and read up on it before release it was easy to see that the chip had NOT been built because they saw something that needed a chip better than X86, it was strictly a way to lock out AMD and Via from making chips and giving Intel a monopoly. From the lawsuits over 486 to bribing the OEMs, from rigging their compiler to forcing Nvidia out of the chipset business when even today their GPUs don't measure up it has NEVER been about what is best for their customers at Intel, its ALWAYS been about monopoly and cornering a market. Intel just isn't a nice company and love lock in as much as Apple, the fact that they make good X86 chips doesn't matter to them, they want 100% of the market and I bet my last dollar if AMD and Via were to close shop tomorrow so the ONLY source was Intel for X86? You'd never hear another peep about different arches from Chipzilla. of course a Pentium Dual would probably cost $600 and quads would start at a grand which is why I put my money where my mouth was and became an all AMD shop.
But do you honestly think somebody THAT bigoted won't drag that bigotry into the comic? And let us not forget these are the same arguments that were used against interracial marriage in the 50s, in fact replace gay with negro or jew and its the same old song and dance.
Besides...isn't this the very point of capitalism? Voting with your dollars? Chick Fil-A didn't change their stance because the government forced them, its because people quit buying their product. he can be as big a bigot as he wants, hell let him Mel Gibson all over the net if it makes him happy, but that doesn't mean I as a consumer have to support him or as a retailer do I have to stock products made by him. Personally I'd say it works, if enough people support his views he'll get more customers and if more people don't support his views then he'll get less, simple as that.
What are you babbling about? I haven't seen a system in years that has crashed because of the CPU, the last systems I saw do that were the AMD chips that didn't have a thermal sensor. I'd say from looking at what comes through the shop a good 90% of your hard crashes can be counted on to be shitty RAM followed by viruses and rootkits installed by the customer. The CPU is frankly not even on the radar as far as crashes go,its not even in the top 10.
Nope, I couldn't get the keywords to stick for some reason from my news feed, I found a new one that I could choose only the sites I like that would let me filter any and all keywords from headlines. I put in KDE, Gnome, Debian, Linux, Ubuntu, I would have put Red hat but the way it works I would have not gotten any article with the word red in it so I'll just have to ignore than one, same as Mint which is also too commonly used in headlines to block.
So please go back to circlejerking over a bash script, the numbers have spoken and Linux can enjoy the company of BeOS and OS/2 and all the other failed operating systems throughout the years, for I have learned common sense will never be applied. Its a damned shame that Shuttleworth didn't just choose BSD as Jobs did, his company might not have ended up bleeding to death but that is what he gets for walking into the monkey house and not expecting all the poo flinging. Enjoy your failure, me I'll be trying to find an easy to automate DE for Windows 9 that can be deployed en masse in case ballmer's fat stupid ass is still in the big chair in 2014.
Use RTF then, hell use .TXT if all you need is the raw data, the point is making an office format "open" isn't a magic bullet and makes no God damned sense. And frankly the current state of affairs proves it...how many offices you see using ODF? I don't see any, I see yet another failed format that nobody cares about.
I think the problem is what people SAY they want and what they ACTUALLY want are often two different things, as many a company has found out the hard way. Anybody who dreamed of juicy government contracts for converting to ODF has gotten a rude awakening by now and I bet if one were to take a survey that ODF wouldn't even crack 5% and neither would opendoc. Just because MSFT rammed through their little format so they could have a bullet point on the box didn't make ODF disappear ya know, its still free to use, its just nobody is using it because we already HAD formats that could do the job they said ODF was required for and the infrastructure was already built so why switch?
Not to mention everybody misses the point, the move away from X86 was NOT about the customer or because they had a better design, it was because they wanted a monopoly and the courts had ruled they couldn't cockblock AMD and Via. If they could have waved a wand and made themselves the sole supplier of X86, think they would have come up with Itanic?
Look at and learn from your history folks, Intel makes MSFT look like the Care Bears. They bribed all the OEMs, rigged their compilers, they aren't nice people. X86 has higher IPC than any other arch out there when you look at amount of work done per watt, the new i series is just fricking insane when it comes to how much work they can do per cycle, so why would Intel have wanted to move away, when they can simply strip it down like they are doing with Atom and still have a very powerful chip? Because they have dreams of monopoly and have had since the day the courts ruled that they couldn't block AMD from making reverse engineered 486 chips.
I think the point he is trying to make is that you would move it such a tiny amount that you would need to get to it years or even decades before the mother hit earth and as we saw with Russia not too long ago? We really ain't THAT good at detecting hunks of space rock heading at us.
Now I may only be a layperson but i think there is a flaw in Mr Tyson's logic, his entire premise is we'll "Blow the sucker up" like something from Michael Bay but frankly that just wouldn't be logical for the reason he points out, you just make a bigger mess. but what he isn't figuring on is we have variable yield nukes that will let you dial in EXACTLY how much force you want coming from your nuke and we also have nukes designed to penetrate to a set depth THEN blow up, so called "bunker buster" weapons. Now since from what we have seen the truly big nasty rocks are pretty much giant hunks of iron and rock there is no reason why you couldn't use a bunker buster to carve out a little cavity to put the nuke in which would then work similarly to Project Orion and be used NOT for destructive force to "blow the sucker up" but instead be used like a giant thruster to steer the asteroid away from the planet. While Mr Tyson is right that it won;t take much if you catch it early enough frankly betting all life on catching it early enough doesn't sound like the best choice IMHO. This way you have a workable "plan B" that would at least let you move it over enough to keep it from impacting without worrying about turning one big chunk into a shitload of little chunks.
I don't have to say anything, the test if filmed can't be faked since you won't have access to making new time stamps on the video and i doubt you'll be good enough at editing for everyone not to see the jump cuts. You have a simple measure, easy to show as a dipstick on a car, so why are you afraid? Just fire up the hardware manager in whatever DE you have chosen at first boot to show all the hardware is working, then apply the updates, then show the list to see its still working....what is hard about that? And I haven't moved the goalposts, i haven't accused anyone of working for sekret orgs you and your batshit buddies have done that, so the proof is on you. I have given you the most simple test in the world, one frankly rigged in your favor, yet you fear it...is it because you know what will happen? Because taking bog standard laptops from Dell, HP, and Acer i can tell you EXACTLY what happened with over a dozen distros, a broken mess.
You know what is truly sad? here is every rebuttal ever written here to me...note what its called? the circle of the loon, because its a circular argument that never ends. But don't worry I've removed Linux from both my RSS feeds and now from /. as well so please, go back to your giant circlejerking. Won't change the facts, Linux is flatline, nobody wants it, its numbers haven't moved in years Android is owned by Google, and MSFT could put out windows Goatse with smell-o-vision and still have ten times your share because you won't listen, not to users nor OEMs, nope its all circlejerking about how "Nobody knows how to be leet!" They are teh noobs for teh lusers, we are leet!"
So please, enjoy your little fantasy world where anybody gives a rat';s ass, because after 5 years of dealing with the monkey house I sure as fuck don't, If Linux were a company it would have been chap 11 a decade ago, its badly run, no central planning AT ALL, nobody cares about anything but their own little fiefdoms, you should be proud as you copied old Soviet style communism better than I thought anybody ever could, must give the squatter a big old stiffie. Meanwhile the big three will turn the world into locked down cellphones and the people will take it because its the choice of a locked down corporate controlled device that WORKS...or your product. Given that choice is it any wonder Apple is bigger than God now?
The ONLY one moving goal posts is YOU. I chose that system simply because its from 2007 and since the tests if for 5 years that would be about as bog standard and typical as you can get. Don't like that system, which would you prefer? I have an AMD quad, an Intel Pentium D, even a couple P4s in the back, which one do YOU want to use?
And YOU are the one that says your OS is ready NOT ME. I have given you a simple test, one that has cost me $300 in bandwidth charges BTW to apply, that PROVES YOU ARE FULL OF SHIT so if you say I'm lying? Here is your chance, take ANY system, YOUR CHOICE, film it and upload...scared? you should be because in the 6 years not a SINGLE UNIT PASSED, not one. Not Debian nor the *Buntus or derivitavies, not Fedora nor PCLOS, not Knoppix or any other supposedly "user friendly distro".
so here is your chance, put up or STFU and sit down because frankly i'm tired of the community's lies and bullshit. Here is a simple test ANYBODY can do with ANY SYSTEM they desire, why won't you step up? I'll tell you why because you KNOW what will happen, you'll apply the updates and Pulse will shit itself, the DEs will get wonky and wireless will go buy bye. Your entire system is a house of cards and this test shows your lies for what they all, total bullshit. Step up or STFU.
Oh you can bet your last dollar they are getting a juicy cut of that content money, why else would they offer it? Sure they may make MORE money from their ISP sales but that doesn't mean you give up the extra money of bringing content, especially when you see how much that can bring in.
But this highlights the REAL problem and that is collusion . All these megacorps have long term business relationships and as we've seen time and time again its "You scratch my back I'll scratch yours" which inevitably leads to conflicts of interest. But I agree that the cablecos are probably the worst at this because they own the content delivery so its against their best interests for you to use anything other than their services and thanks to caps they can steer you by the nose where they want you to go. i know I no longer use netflix because I kept running into the cap and the ISPs offerings are cap free so they have already begun steering me where they want me to go but sadly its them or AT&T in my area and AT&T DSL is beyond crap here, we are talking max speeds of 5Mbps and lows as low as 700Kbps, too low to be usable to me.
So quit using the crap DVRs that came with your contract and go DIY? You can get a Phenom low power quad for $68 at Starmicro and VCR style cases that will hold a mATX board really ain't that hard to find friend. I've built a couple of DVRs using this chip and they are low heat while giving you plenty of CPU for processing video and with a DIY you can choose to either have a DVD burner in the system or a second HDD, you can take a 32GB-64GB SSD and use that as a temp drive which will give you plenty of throughput for video and then simply move the recording to the larger 5400 RPM internal.
Frankly building a DVR has never been easier and cheaper, hell it one of the few places where Windows 8 actually makes sense as metro makes a great 10 foot UI for a DVR and its optimized for speed, its really not hard and at the end of the day you'll have a much nicer system that YOU control and can do with what you will.
Uhhh...my gaming PC is using 5400 RPM drives and ya know what? With plenty of RAM frankly they work just fine and lower the temps a good 20 degrees F on the drives in the unit which is a pretty damned big difference as we know heat is a killer. Sure i could have added more cooling but I like to hear my games, not my fans whining so this gives me 3TB of space for all my games and videos without all the noise and heat so i gotta agree with Seagate on this one.
BTW if you want the a lot of the benefits of SSDs without the higher cost and smaller capacity? Buy a cheap 32GB-64GB SSD and use it as a caching drive in Readyboost. I have a customer that did this and after playing with his system as soon as things slow down a little at the shop I'm gonna do this as well because thanks to Readyboost all the most used files of the OS, applications and games are kept on the 32GB SSD as part of the cache so he gets a lot of the benefit with ZERO risk as Windows just rebuilds the cache if you yank the drive no problem. The only benefit that I saw he doesn't get is the faster boot times, the Readyboost cache shaves about 20% but no more off the boot because Readyboost has to have the OS initialized before it can work but other than this frankly his system just flies. With a cache that big most of the stuff he uses daily fits into the cache so loads insanely fast but since its just a cache and not the original files which are safely on the HDD he gets most of the upside with none of the down.
My only advice would be if you do this use Readyboost and NOT the caching software that comes with some of these drives as it bypasses windows caching and I just don't know how trustworthy their software is or what happens if it dies, with readyboost a backup is always on the HDD so even if the SSD drive dies tomorrow it won't affect the system as a whole other than the speed. I'm not sure if the same can be said of their caching software as from what I've seen its pretty low level stuff.
OMG did you compare Linux to a sailcar? Maybe built by crazy Earl in his basement. And if you want details? happy to give them. Its a CONSUMER OS challenge so only CONSUMER OSES will be used, that means NO Server 2Kx on the Windows side and no RHEL or SLED on the Linux side...simple enough? And the reason i added the camera requirement is because I once had a bozo supposedly "prove" he could beat the challenge with some screencaps...until somebody pointed out the wireless card he was using wasn't even supported in 2007 so it obviously wasn't working in the beginning which then he suddenly talked about how "anybody can use the forums" thus showing what he did was play "google for fixes" and thus failed the challenge.
But the only place its apples to oranges is in your own mind, you say Linux is ready? here is your chance, we'll take ANY consumer version of Linux YOUR choice and put it head to head on the SAME HARDWARE so that there can be NO BIAS. And the reason I don't name the distro is simple, every time I did I got the standard use distro x excuse. Oh Ubuntu doesn't pass? use Knoppix, Knoppix don't pass? use debian, round and round and round it goes there is over 500 distros on distrowatch so a game of use distro x could go on for a dozen years and never get through all the choices for X.
As for why I let you do it? I'm tired of paying for bandwidth so i can rub the truth, which is the current OS model in Linux is TOTALLY BROKEN, into the nose of the community like rubbing a puppy's nose in its mess. As I have said, you want to pay for the bandwidth? I'll be happy to take a Sunday and do it on live cam, I'll take some random laptop out of the shop and do the challenge right there on a live cam for all to see. you can watch as i format, install the OS, make sure the drivers all work, then update and watch it crap itself. But where I live bandwidth costs $1.50 a GB over the cap and since "use distro x" is an endless excuse i have no intention of throwing more money away only to hear "Oh that one didn't work? Well that is YOUR FAULT for not using distro x! See we win" bullshit you have just moved the goalposts just as they do when they scream paid M$ Shill to try to deflect away from the fact they can't pass the challenge.
Again this is about as simple a test as you can come up with, NO multiple monitors, NO funky hardware like capture cards, just a random laptop from any of the major OEMs with the consumer Linux OF YOUR CHOICE. What could be more simple? the fact that you try to make it sound more complex than it is just tells me you know in your heart whichever distro x you choose won't pass muster either.
But your OWN ARGUMENT makes no damned sense! If its for "record keeping" why in the fuck would you use an ALTERABLE format at all, unless you want to selectively "change" anything you don't like down the road? We DO have this thing called PDFs you know, we have the specs to several revs of PDF and frankly a bazillion companies make basic PDF readers that will run on just about any damned thing with a screen and a CPU, so why in the hell use ANY alterable format?
And YES I use MS Office, I have MS Office 2K installed on my 64bit netbook (I like how light it is and it supports the latest formats with the converter pack) and 2K7 on the desktop and they run great. More importantly I have probably 200 business customers using MS office RIGHT NOW and frankly its one of the most hassle free pieces of software there is. i get a dozen times more calls for support because their browser broke than I do over any MS Office problems, its frankly a damned good piece of software....which is both a blessing and a curse for MSFT because I don't know a single customer who has moved beyond 2K7 yet, they are happy and it does what they want so why buy the latest and greatest?
Nice to see somebody who isn't a fanboy and can see the risk here. And I'm so damned sick of everyone screaming "M$ Shill" if I don't drink the iKoolaid or kiss Google's ring. Who was calling for MSFT to be broken up when the evidence came to light in the antitrust trial? Oh yeah that was ME, same as i thought Intel deserves a hell of a lot more than a couple billion bribe to AMD to make a decade of backdoor bribery go away.
Why is it that nobody can see that being the biggest corp on the planet brings with it serious dangers to the web and openess? It was wrong and I screamed bloody murder when MSFT tried to control the web through IE 6, and I'm gonna scream just as fucking loudly now that Apple is controlling the web by saying "Do what we say or it don't run on the iPad" as they did with HTML V5 video. for what its worth, know who I was rooting for? NOT MSFT who simply aped Apple, I thought and still do that a minimum of Drac or Theora should have been mandatory. But apparently its totally okay to stick a "pay your $699 license fee" troll as the "standard" for video across the web as long as it was blessed by St. Jobs of Cupertino. A good rule of thumb...if MSFT would have pulled the exact same shit, would you be cool with it? I sure as hell wouldn't and just because Apple builds for hipsters doesn't magically give them a "be a douchebag free" card.
You and the other AC ought to take a look at AR, prices are cheap, the air is clean, as long as you don't live in LR or Pine Bluff frankly the crime rate is crazy low, the prices are so cheap you could have a McMansion for what a 3 bedroom goes for in Tampa and you'll have it on a couple of dozen acres with an incredible view of mountains and valleys, just some really beautiful country. Oh and the temps are warm, most of the time its practically like living in the tropics as we only have one or two weeks of really cold weather a year, its just really nice.
I can walk out my door and walk down the side streets at 3AM and the worse that will happen is maybe a cop ask if I've had a breakdown or somebody be walking the other way and ask if i have a cig,where you gonna find that kind of "leave it to beaver" levels of peace in this day and age?
Do you HONESTLY think if only ODF would have been approved it would have made a damned bit of difference? Like them or hate them MSFT did get a few things right, one of them is MS Office. With LO it feels like what it is, a mish mash of separate programs bolted together that don't really belong together and for the longest time Writer was the only program that got any love, the rest didn't get squat comapred to Writer. with MS Office its an actual suite, with everything working together and honestly Excel and Access are pretty impressive in the amount of work you can do with them and the entire ecosystem that has built up around them.
There are some places where FOSS got it right, browsers being a damned good example. Office Suites? Not so much. The other field where MSFT really doesn't have any competition of note is groupware which they also do REALLY well but frankly I don't know why MSFT wasted that money getting OpenDoc or whatever the hell its called pushed through because everybody has stuck with Doc(X) so neither ODF or OpenDoc really made a dent and when you compare the latest MS Office, hell MS Office 2K3 or 2K7 even to the latest LO you can see why, MS Office is the better product. I wish it weren't so because lord knows the market works better with real competition but LO is AMD to MSFT's Intel, they ain't even in the same ballpark.
Allow me to quote from Wikipedia under products and services, emphasis mine: "Verizon launched its FiOS Video service in Keller, Texas on September 22, 2005. FiOS TV uses an optical fiber network to deliver more than 500 total channels, more than 180 digital music channels, more than 95 high-definition channels, and 10,000 video-on-demand titles.
What did I say the first reason was again? Because they were not liking competition with their content services? Well there ya go, there is your reason, if you are using Hulu and netflix and Steam you ain't buying their TV channels and PPV, can't have that. How much you wanna bet THEIR services don't count against your cap?
Band Aids on bullet wounds friend, Band Aids on bullet wounds. what we NEED is for Java to die on the consumer desktop until oracle has enough sense to rewrite the thing from the ground up, looking at the OO.o source you can see Sun seriously sucked when it came to code for the desktop and the trouble Java is having now goes back to Sun and the trouble THEY had and the simple fact is ITS NOT NEEDED as you can do the same damned thing in Visual C++ as far as games go and not force home users to get stuck with Java.
Java has its place and that is the enterprise backend NOT the consumer desktop. When practically everybody and their dog and their dog's chewtoy has C++ runtimes already sticking with Java which has so many zero days is irresponsible and bad practice, I don't see how anybody could argue different. in the enterprise Java is too deeply used for anybody to change and from what I've been told its ability to handle so many users at once reliably makes the risk bearable and hey, I get that, I really do. But forcing consumers to install Java just to play a video game? bad form game devs, bad form.
So you wasted the time to post "La la la I'm not listening" and you wonder why I have started calling Linux zealots like yourself FOSSies? Because like Moonies the ONLY answer that you accept is "Hey Biff, isn't Linux doubleplusgood? It sure is Skip and RMS farts cure global warming". Meanwhile your adoption? FLATLINE. Stolen Windows actually has MORE THAN FIVE TIMES what you have! Does that not ring ANY bells? or are they just noobs who aren't leet enough to see that shit sandwich tastes like watercrest?
Its a simple challenge that frankly gives Linux multiple advantages over the competition yet you won't take because you KNOW you can't pass it, you can't. I have given the challenge to, in no particular order, the *buntus, PCLOS, Debian, Fedora (I know but a FOSSie swore it would pass...it didn't) Knoppix, pretty much EVERY distro that at one time or another was touted as "user friendly". Well riddle me this...how "user friendly" is a distro you can't update without drivers dying? How "user friendly" is an OS with such piss poor design that features Windows has for over a decade, common sense features like rolback drivers, update drivers, and system restore by simple GUI aren't even implemented? Those technologies came out with Windows fucking ME and you STILL haven't caught up and you have the brass plated balls to lecture ME about trolling? Anybody who pushes such a horribly broken mess as ready for the masses is the fucking King God of Troll Mountain!
Ubuntu 11 new enough for you? And after shelling out all the bandwidth charges doing the Hairyfeet challenge for doubters frankly if you want me to run the test on all mainstream distros again we'll have to set up a way so the Linux guys who think their distro won't shit the bed can donate $100 to pay for the bandwidth but I have a perfect test bed sitting right here, a circa 2007 Vista Business laptop I got for cheap because they broke a key on it.
That is the PERFECT AGE for the Hairyfeet Challenge as that would be about as bog standard for 5 years ago as you can get, C2D 3GB of RAM, and a 500GB HDD. If somebody pays for the bandwidth I'll be happy to take a Sunday at the shop with a video camera rolling and you can watch from start to finish and you'll see that the distros DIE HARD and that at LEAST one or more drivers WILL BE FUCKED in the 5 years worth of updates.
Again if the average user can't apply 5 years worth of updates without having a spare box to Google for fixes? your OS just isn't ready end of story. But don't take my word for it, you can buy a 5 year old laptop off of Craigslist for around $50, feel free to take the challenge and post the video. For SIX YEARS I have been issuing the challenge, not a single taker, why? I'll tell you why, because when the rubber meets the road you know it won't pass THAT is why. And I have NO doubt you've forgotten about the forum hunts and Google fixes you've applied over the years, which is something you average user simply wouldn't be able to do.