Sadly I have to agree APC was once a good company, now they lowball the shit out of everything and they suck. Now as far as power? Double it. I know, sounds like a bullshit way to raise rates but I have found they ALL vastly overestimate what the unit will take so if you need 300w? Buy a 600w. Need a Kilowatt? Buy 2. Yes it sucks but you have to play the game and that I've found is a good hard fast rule that works for pretty much any company in the UPS business. Now if its a home user you can often get by with "power and a half" like say buying a 450w when they need a 300w but when it comes to business better safe than sorry, and all my happy customers tell me that I made the right call.
The bitch is now I'm seeing the same thing from PSUs, a unit rated at 300w will be lucky if it isn't a smoking wreck if you pull more than 180w so now I'm starting to do the "power and a half for home, double business" rule for PSUs as well and so far it seems to work. that is what happens when companies can get buy with selling substandard because everybody is doing it, you end up having to buy more than you need because their ratings are all lies.
Not to mention Apple cancels products no different than any other company, they also make drastic changes, just like any other company. I'd say the real moral of the story is short of DIY, where you just take a shell and put in what you need, you are truly at the mercy of the company and I don't care if that's Apple, Google, MSFT, Dell, whomever, its all the same.
Personally I'd be very surprised if Apple even stays in the X86 business, when you look at cost VS profit X86 takes more work for less reward than any other branch at Apple. With the consumer lines they don't really have to refresh except when they need the "bounce" that comes from a new product,after all the iPods and iPads from previous generation still sell just fine. With X86 even though the X86 MHz war is over both Intel and AMD do a hell of a lot of chip turnover and folks will only pay top dollar for older X86 tech for so long so there a refresh is mandatory and really out of their hands.
So when you add this to the fact that Apple loves having control of the pipe (who wouldn't, its just smart business) short of Apple buying AMD (doubtful) I frankly would be surprised if Apple was selling X86 based products in 5 years. More likely at some point they'd tout some ARM multi-core with keyboard snap on (ala the Asus Transformer) as the "future of Macs" and kill the X86 line, it just doesn't fit well with their current business strategy.
And Linux runs on my router...who gives a shit? Sure Linux works on disposable devices, you don't update them so the drivers don't break. Desktops, laptops, and you bring up tablets but they do NOT run Linux, they run ANDROID. Android has ONLY the Linux KERNEL and even that is controlled by GOOGLE. Think they take shit from Torvalds? Nope you'll get the kernel after Google decides its worth doing and not one second earlier and they sure as fuck isn't shitting out a new kernel every couple of months like Torvalds.
The FOSSies can waste mod points but there is a REASON why Linux is dead on everything but servers, that is because the entire FOSS model ONLY WORKS when you are talking about small projects. on big projects you get a bunch of fiefdoms run by douchebags like Drepper that won't work together, which gives you Pulse, KDE 4 and GnomeShell, they don't listen to users, don't listen to OEMs, its strictly all about THEM. Well fuck them, their product works on disposables and that is it. Servers are running a stripped down embedded version (No Sound, Wireless, most don't even have a full DE) and they still have to pay some guy a high five figure salary to deal with the breakage...I'm sorry but its shit, its NOT getting better, just different, and the numbers reflect that.
You get rid of the welfare state and the rich would be swinging from a tree before the month is out Hoss and the congress knows it. The welfare state is the ONLY thing keeping the USA from having our own Arab Spring. You can bitch about welfare all you want but there just ain't no jobs to be had in the USA Crosshair, years of offshoring have turned the manufacturing districts of most towns into ghost towns, my home town the business disctrict looks like Escape From New York. it is ONLY the welfare state that keeps the poor from revolting, because as long as they have food in their belly and TV/The Internet (Bread and Circuses) they'll STFU about how bad they have it in this country. If that ends? Well I hope you like war, because we'll all be turning our trucks into technicals and its gonna be a free for all.
Best be ready for it,the shit IS gonna hit the fan, and when it does best have a plan B. Everybody likes the guy that can make the machines go, so I'm not worried about what comes next, but a lot of folks are gonna be SOL if they are betting the farm that shit will stay like it is forever. I just can't figure out whether we will end up going socialist or fascist, signs point to either outcome but I think what we have now will be gone by 2020.
I have a 20 year old college kid son, I asked him about those two as well as the ones I named...had no fucking clue who they were. He knew who Bill Gates and Gabe Newell was, that was it, nobody else named here got a bit of recognition from him.So I would have to say like Carmack and Romero they are strictly old farts as far as recognition, the young crowd don't know them from Adam.
Uhhh...we solved this problem ages ago with UPS. If you care about your data put the machine on a UPS. I've had my business customers on UPS systems for years, showed them how to test the batteries and swap 'em when they get worn out, no problems. I just had to swap the PSU and HDD out of my netbox at the shop because a transformer blew on my block and managed to give the old gal enough of a shock even through a surge protector that it cooked the PSU and the HDD, but since its just a netbox I don't care enough about it to waste money on a UPS. I just slapped in some parts from my parts box, slapped the disc image and was back up in less than an hour, no biggie.
At the end of the day if the unit has data you care about? UPS, just like the one I have at home is running on. If its something you don't give a shit about, like my 8 year old netbox at the shop? Just use a surge protector and be ready with a disc image if anything craps out. Really folks this ain't rocket science, a little common sense goes a long way.
Actually YOU ARE WRONG it HAS done something, it has just taken time. Proof? EA is for sale, Activision is being restructured....hmmm....those are the two biggest dickwad game companies, are they not?
Meanwhile more and more games are coming to GOG and Steam, SecuROM and StarFuck are all but dead, I'd say we have plenty of proof that voting with your dollars WORKS, its just not gonna magically happen overnight which is why you have to keep reminding our ADHD populace that like any change voting with your dollars takes time. When you are talking about a billion dollar company it takes time to turn the ship, you can bleed them for a couple of years before the bank accounts start to empty. Look at MSFT, I figure it'll take another 2 years of Windows "LOL I Iz A Cellphone" bombing before the board fires Ballmer and splits mobile off from desktops but it WILL happen if people refuse to buy their shitty product.
So he is right, voting with your dollars WORKS, it just isn't magic, it takes time to really hurt a super sized corp. I've refused to buy any "phone home" games or games infected with crap like StarFuck, now I have a Steam library full of great games at affordable prices, and I didn't compromise my beliefs AT ALL. I don't have a problem with DLC as long as its not "pay to win" like the silly hats in TF2, the vehicles in Saints Row 3, or if they offer full expansion packs like Gearbox did with Borderlands? I got NO PROBLEM paying $10 for an expansion that keeps the game going past the end of the story. It took me around 14 hours to do all the stuff in General Knoxx, which at $10 is damned cheap for the amount of fun I had, so no problem.
But voting with your dollars is simple and easy...don't buy shit. That's it, don't buy shit, if it treats you bad, treats you like a chump, its shit so don't buy shit. Is that SO hard?
I thought Franco came later? After all he didn't become the "dear leader' until 1936 which by then both Hitler and Mussolini had their systems pretty locked down.
But Mussolini and his black shirts were the real innovators, everything from force feeding laxatives to making people just disappear in the middle of the night Il Duce had his viciousness down to a science. Some say Stalin was the master but I would argue a LOT of his came from being paranoid, just look at how he crippled his own military with the purge on the eve of war, if he wouldn't have had millions to use as cannon fodder he would have been screwed.
Sadly the problem is, as the video shows, how much of the programs of Franco and Mussolini have been enacted right here in America. Places set up to allow the government to torture people without oversight, private para-military goon squads allowed to operate on American soil, hell they are even stealing some of the old language like "homeland", its the same plays being run here today and as ms Wolf points out if we don't do something we could wake up tomorrow and be in a locked down state, the shifts are THAT quick.
But we ALREADY have that capability WITHOUT shitting a couple billion on an untested (and from the looks of it more bullshit than fact) weapons platform. For the VERY few true high value targets you use the B-2 which has a MUCH bigger payload and distance and then you send in SEAD teams, either jamming them like we did with the Sparkvark in Desert Storm or going Wild Weasel where if they are dumb enough to try to lock on their ass gets a HARM shaped can of ass whupping.
When you are trillions in debt,have one party that would sooner eat broken glass than raise taxes by a single % on the top 5%, and are looking at 25%+ REAL unemployment? that is NOT the time to be pissing billions down the crapper on stuff you just don't need. And the Stealth Eagle could do the same damned job at half the price! Half the price friend, which you watch if we stick with the F35 the price will continue to skyrocket until we end up just like with the F22, an overpriced show piece nobody will fly into battle because they cost too damned much to risk and which will spend more time parked than they will in the air.
And a better question would be "How ELSE are they gonna get kids to listen?" Lets face it coding isn't exactly a '"rock star/athlete" kind of profession so you could name top coders all day long and most would go "Who the heck is that?"
I mean do YOU know the names of ANY of the coders of your favorite games? Software? Lets face it the only names that are even kinda sorta well known are all the old guys that probably don't code anymore, Newell, Gates, hell I LOVE video games but if you'd have offered to give me a thousand bucks for every game coder i could name the only ones I can remember off the top of my head is Romero, Carmack, and Ken Silverman who made the BUILD engine, that's it.
So if you wanna get kids interested in coding you are gonna have to come up with people they have heard of and most coders never get known as far as name recognition. Hell the only reason I can remember Romero is that stupid "make you his bitch" ad that ran before his DNF levels of ubersuck game came out. Kinda sad but off the top of my head I can remember more game reviewers than I can the guys that actually made the things. so you do what you gotta do and if mentioning them gets kids interested? All for it.
Well that and the fact that they make products that don't suck. It doesn't really help to have "Made In America" on something if its total crap. For an example I have to LMAO at the crazy prices those that don't know any better will pay for 80s-mid 90s American Fenders when frankly unless you got custom shop they were just junk, especially their basses which weighed a ton and had lousy tone, just dead sounding. At that time frankly the Made In Korea Squires sounded a HELL of a lot better, in fact if the rumors are true Fender canceled the Squire Pro Tone series because people were buying them over MIA Fenders because the MIK Pro Tones played and sounded better. As someone who had both I have to agree, i sold the MIA and kept the Pro Tone 5 because of how nice it played and sounded, the MIA? It was like playing with dead strings, just a dull lifeless sound.
So while i agree having some protection is just common sense, i mean look at how the Chinese protect their markets, but protection won't help if the quality just isn't there. Now I'm not saying the old "Americans can't do good work" because that is bullshit spewed by the globalists, but if the company chiefs lowball everything and try to make 1 guy do the work of 4? Then quality is gonna go down, no way around that.
So you don't buy from, in no particular order...Dell, HP, Toshiba, Apple, MSFT, and Intel...yes? because i can give you a laundry list of citations, everything from Dell taking bribes to make the P4 the chip in Dell system even though the Athlon was faster AND lower powered, Apple and MSFT patent trolling, and HP and Toshiba taking bribes, so you buy from NONE of them, yes?
And Linux is a bad joke, I'm sorry but it is. There is a REASON why Linux has been free for 20 years and hasn't gained shit, its because Linux is NOT an OS, its a bunch of little fiefdoms run by douchebags that don't talk to each other much less work together. Tossing the finally stable KDE 3 and gnome 2 for alpha quality garbage, tossing ALSA for the shitpile that is pulse, hell look up "The Hairyfeet challenge" and know that NO LINUX SYSTEM has EVER passed that test in the six years I've been giving it, not one. And sadly its a test that frankly Windows has passed since Win2K more than a decade ago!
Frankly MSFT could put out Windows Goatse with smell-o-vision and would get more share than Linux ever will, because "free as in freedum herpa derpa" has become a crutch, its an excuse to hand out shit sandwiches and say "Its free, you have no right to complain" well bullshit, I have EVERY right to complain when your product is run by a douchebag that thinks he's God's gift to programming (quick, what do BSD, Solaris, Windows,OSX,iOS and even Os/2 have in common that Linux don't? A stable ABI so everytime somebody gets an itch the drivers don't break, but to hear Torvalds talk everybody in the free world is an idiot but him. Fuck you Torvalds your ideas on driver design SUCKS BALLS) and has all the userspace controlled by dickbags that think only of themselves. Wanna see what is wrong with Linux? Look up "Ulrich Drepper asshole" and see for yourself, he is the perfect example of a Linux asshole dev, a self important douchenozzle that doesn't give a shit what YOU think, you'll take it and like it bitch.
And sorry if it comes off a little ranty but as a Linux survivor I've learned that a simple statement covers the nasty shit stained pile of sick that is Linux "Linux is always 2 years away from ready for the masses, it was 2 years away a decade ago, it'll be 2 years away a decade from now". If YOU wanna waste your time jumping through hoops and fixing shit Torvalds and friends break? Good for you, the rest of the planet has better thing to do than deal with his bullshit.
This is why I think the ARM bubble, just as the X86 bubble before it, WILL burst...where else can you go? Samsung is testing a hexa-core SoC, Nvidia has a 5 core and Apple making "thin and light" the ONLY form factor you can frankly sell anymore means there is a VERY limited amount of room to fit the parts as well as a ridiculously small power envelope you gotta hit. Finally the average user won't "feel" any difference between a dual core and a hexacore, in the shop I've tested this with X86 and less than half could tell just doing everyday tasks which was which and that was in a multi-tasking environment. In a single tasking cellphone environment they'll use that power even less.
So I truly believe the bubble is gonna burst in less than 2 years which is why i have to shake my head at the way MSFT is fucking the sacred cow of Windows and Office trying to grab share in a market that will be flatline in less than 2 years, maybe a little longer in places like the third world which won't be buying Lumia phones anyway. The whole thing is retarded, they should be pushing media centers and making deals with big content to sell services on Win 7 and 8, instead we see this total dumbshit moves. Just proves what I've been saying for years, Gates was a leader and all Ballmer knows how to do is copy the other guy.
Frankly both the F15 and F18 as well as the F16 would be better choices for America than the F35. Like the F22 the F35 is a lame duck, its gonna spend more time on the ground than it will in the air, and its designed to fight an adversary that doesn't even exist anymore. Tell me who EXACTLY have we fought since the end of the cold war that a fleet of overpriced stealth planes, which have VERY limited range and armament because you can't mount anything external without making the stealth go away, but name ONE enemy we've had where a fleet of techno turkey stealth ships would have made a difference? Iran? NK? We would be able to blow their radars all to shit before they were even able to scramble their fighters when in the case of Iran is a home built ripoff of the F-5 Freedom Fighter which frankly wasn't state of the art when we sold it to them in the 70s and in the case of NK the biggest portion of their fleet is MiG-17s and 19s, 40+ year old designs that wouldn't survive 3 minutes in a modern battle.
Nope this is just a way for the DoD to hand their asshole buddies in the MIC a big fat check for basically half assing a job. If we HAVE to have some more stealth buy the Silent Eagle and as for the other teen series Israel has shown these planes still kick just about anything that you can throw against them and most importantly the production lines are still going so we could replace our aging fleet with little muss and with proven designs. How much did we spend on the F22 again? And how often has it been grounded? The F35 is a lame duck, take it out back and put a bullet in its head and move on.
Well if they gave him a speedy trial they wouldn't have been able to torture him with solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, and all that kind of "fun" now could they? Remember when the USA was SUPPOSED to be the good guys that didn't torture people? Sadly the PTB are running the how to close a society playbook that has actually be around since the days of Mussolini. I'm sure many would think the crazy Austrian was the innovator there but most of his stuff he ripped off of Mussolini. Watch the video and see how many of the warning signs have already come to pass here, scary shit..
Bullshit its because we have ZERO competition in a good chunk of the USA. If we had actual free markets, not this backdoor bribery, cherry picking duopoly horseshit we have now I have NO doubt that we'd have faster speeds and at competitive prices, but because they know they have most customers by the short hairs the money that would be spent on infrastructure goes to bonuses. After all what are you gonna do, go dialup? Go DSL which at least here in the south is several times WORSE (average 3-4Mbps in my area with lows as bad as 700Kbps) than the 8Mbps-20Mbps the average cableco offers?
My city has grown by over a third in the last decade and its a college town to boot...know how many new lines have been laid? ZERO. They know AT&T ain't gonna lay shit for new DSL around here so they just gouge their existing customers and keep the money. it really distorts the whole area because you can have two apt buildings side by side and one will be three times as much and have a waiting list while the other is never more than half full, why? Because you can get high speed at the first one, all you get across the street is the shitty local WISP.
The worst part is if a city gets tired of the bullshit and decides to lay their own lines they can look forward to spending the next decade in court, can't be having competition now can we? I've never been one of those "the free market can fix anything" types but what we have now is so far from a free market it ain't even funny so frankly anything that opened up the country to competition would be good in my book.
Actually I'd say its more a self fulfilling prophecy, if TWC is like most cablecos. In my area the top tier? $200 a month. Would i LIKE to have that speed? Oh fuck yes, am I willing to drop 2 c-notes a month on it? Not a snowball's chance in hell.
If the difference between top and bottom is $20, $30, even $50? Then maybe they'd have a point. if its double the cost? Then they are full of shit, they have priced their product so high nobody will buy it other than businesses.
Why? Not trying to be a smartass, I'm honestly curious. From what I saw of the 920 specs they weren't using anything really exotic, no cutting edge CPUs, no strange exotic screens so I am honestly curious as to what EXACTLY makes the Lumia harder to make than any other phone Nokia makes. Did I miss something? They using some weird size SSDs? Maybe a funky Wireless chip?
So you don't buy from Intel, Dell, Toshiba, Apple, MSFT, IBM, and HP...correct? After all every one of those either took bribes from either MSFT, or Intel, or both to make sure that wintel was the only game in town or in the case of Apple patent trolling to kill competition so you are gonna have a hell of a short list of hardware to choose from if you don't buy from any abusers.
Oh bullshit, that's just fanboy wanking. A SMART person uses the right tool for the job, and if that tool is BSD or Windows or iOS or whatever then fuck the fanboy bullshit and just use the right tool.
Case in point I won't say Win 8 is bad on a phone, i don't know as i haven't tried Win 8 on a phone or tablet yet, but I can say on the desktop its the WRONG tool for the job unless you are one of those 1% that have a touchscreen desktop or laptop. If you do have a touchscreen and only use your PC as a way to get to FB? I'm sure Win 8 would be just fine, but my customers don't have touchscreens so its right out.
If BSD, Solaris, Linux,OSX or Win 7 does the job for you, hell if win 8 does the job for you? Then just use it, but all this fanboy circle jerking frankly needs to come to a screeching halt. I mean is this Slashdot or Reddit?
Why is this modded offtopic? he is simply pointing out, complete with citation i might add, that the carriers have been treating Android rather poorly and that Apple and MSFT have rules against carrier crapware. I mean who didn't know the carriers treat Android like a black billboard to splatter crap trying to lock you in or sell you shit?
This is why I frankly wouldn't be surprised if we only end up with three major phone carriers, you'll have MSFT/Nokia in last place, and Google/Motorola and Apple switching back and forth for first place. I honestly would not be surprised if Google gets tired of Android being treated badly by the carriers and end up just pushing their own phones, the carriers left will probably end up on MozPhone which they will pile on the crap and treat like shit like they do Android now. Since Moz has made it clear they'll work with the carriers to set up carrier controlled appstores you can bet that Moz will be a carrier darling.
final prediction? Big three each have their own hardware/software ecosystem that cuts out the carriers and all the cheap phones will be MozPhones so the carriers can milk those pennies.
Dude Win 8 is deep fried ass, i'm sorry but it is. There are so damned many brain dead decisions that were made that make it not worth having frankly it just staggers the mind. i could sit here all morning typing out all the problems with Win 8 but this video says it better than I ever could. All I will add is this is the first time since WinME that I am NOT carrying MSFT's latest OS in the shop because frankly? Nobody wants it. I had people passing up a really sharp system that was running Windows 8 to take a less powerful system running Win 7, THAT is how much the public don't like Windows 8. as one of the little old ladies that walked into the shop put it so perfectly "Why would I want my computer to look like a cellphone?".
Its just not a desktop OS, its a cellphone/tablet OS that MSFT is trying to force on the desktop hoping folks will "get used to it" and they can steal some of Apple's customers...ha! you'd have better luck strapping wings to Ballmer's ass and getting him to fly south for the winter than to make Windows a "premium" brand. To use a/. car analogy MSFT is trying to slap a paint job on a Pinto and sell it for Porsche money and the public? they ain't buying it.
Which part of MASSIVE BUBBLE do you not comprehend? Are you being obtuse on purpose, or are you just trying to troll? Because I handed you the graphs which clearly show that even during the biggest boom the USA EVER HAD, the post WWII manufacturing boom, the stock market stayed pretty stable. Reagan comes along and pumps everybody's retirement into wall Street? Suddenly we have this huge bubble, we've had to throw billions more in just to keep it propped up a little longer but it WILL blow, all bubbles do. And when it does you can be as fucking obtuse as you want, you'll be able to wipe your ass with $100 bills because frankly TP will be all they are good for. Ever hear of Zimbabwe, or is that a little over your head?
Actually I would put that under "tin cup" since if a game is truly FTP then one doesn't have to buy just to play. If it is "pay to win" then frankly it should be looked at as fraud in my book, you are telling players they can play "for free' but then once they have time invested springing the trap.
That is why if you are gonna add that crap I'd say either do it like Saints Row 3 or Borderlands. With SR 3 you could play the whole game just fine without buying the crap but the crap added to the 'fucking off factor" so many bought to go nuts. I bought the laser shooting tank and Genki mobile (sucks up pedestrians and shoots them out the cannon) just for how silly it looked. i could have not bought a thing and it wouldn't have changed the gameplay, but having the DLC made the game sillier which I enjoyed.
The flip side of that is BL, with BL you have 4 expansion packs that continue the story (this I have no problem with, after all we bought expansion packs back in the day as well) and the few "fuck off" items were just that, silly shit or crazy guns that really didn't give you an edge, they are just fun to play with.
But if they all start pounding me with ads and trying to sell me trinkets? Well its not like there isn't hundreds of good games I've never played, they could stop making games tomorrow and it would take me a decade to go through all the good stuff. This is why I always say "vote with your wallet" as EA is on the selling block and Activision is looking at a restructure, that is what happens when you treat the customers like shit. Compare to valve which has doubled their profits 7 years in a row by treating their customers right.
Then answer the question: If there is no government what is to keep me from using the luck of being born from the right womb to take my wealth, hire a goon squad, and just come take any damned thing I want? Because frankly history is written in blood, this is a dance that is older than the bible. The kings of old ruled by the goon squad, feudalism was controlled by the goon squad, even in modern times you had the Pinktertons and now Blackwater as the goon squads for hire, so how EXACTLY are you gonna stop me without a government?
Those who learn nothing from history are truly doomed to repeat it and libertarians apparently have VERY short memories when it comes to history. All those government regs they bitch about? Who in the fuck do you think BOUGHT those regs in the first place? America was originally practically lawless, other than English common law you could do pretty much as you please. Slaves, underage hookers, dumping toxic waste in the river...it was ALL wide open and you could do as you pleased. It was the RICH that bought those laws, because after they had built their monopolies and signed deals with each other (the trusts) they sure as fuck didn't want any competition, now did they?
So what magical device is gonna keep that from happening all over again? What is to keep me from taking my wealth, which it wouldn't matter how I made it since no government remember? So what is to keep me from hiring a merc army and declaring myself "King of the new confederacy" and making everyone bow before me? After all it don't take much to get the peasants to STFU, a few bodies hanging in the trees works wonders as history shows, so what is to stop me?
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Sadly I have to agree APC was once a good company, now they lowball the shit out of everything and they suck. Now as far as power? Double it. I know, sounds like a bullshit way to raise rates but I have found they ALL vastly overestimate what the unit will take so if you need 300w? Buy a 600w. Need a Kilowatt? Buy 2. Yes it sucks but you have to play the game and that I've found is a good hard fast rule that works for pretty much any company in the UPS business. Now if its a home user you can often get by with "power and a half" like say buying a 450w when they need a 300w but when it comes to business better safe than sorry, and all my happy customers tell me that I made the right call.
The bitch is now I'm seeing the same thing from PSUs, a unit rated at 300w will be lucky if it isn't a smoking wreck if you pull more than 180w so now I'm starting to do the "power and a half for home, double business" rule for PSUs as well and so far it seems to work. that is what happens when companies can get buy with selling substandard because everybody is doing it, you end up having to buy more than you need because their ratings are all lies.
Not to mention Apple cancels products no different than any other company, they also make drastic changes, just like any other company. I'd say the real moral of the story is short of DIY, where you just take a shell and put in what you need, you are truly at the mercy of the company and I don't care if that's Apple, Google, MSFT, Dell, whomever, its all the same.
Personally I'd be very surprised if Apple even stays in the X86 business, when you look at cost VS profit X86 takes more work for less reward than any other branch at Apple. With the consumer lines they don't really have to refresh except when they need the "bounce" that comes from a new product,after all the iPods and iPads from previous generation still sell just fine. With X86 even though the X86 MHz war is over both Intel and AMD do a hell of a lot of chip turnover and folks will only pay top dollar for older X86 tech for so long so there a refresh is mandatory and really out of their hands.
So when you add this to the fact that Apple loves having control of the pipe (who wouldn't, its just smart business) short of Apple buying AMD (doubtful) I frankly would be surprised if Apple was selling X86 based products in 5 years. More likely at some point they'd tout some ARM multi-core with keyboard snap on (ala the Asus Transformer) as the "future of Macs" and kill the X86 line, it just doesn't fit well with their current business strategy.
And Linux runs on my router...who gives a shit? Sure Linux works on disposable devices, you don't update them so the drivers don't break. Desktops, laptops, and you bring up tablets but they do NOT run Linux, they run ANDROID. Android has ONLY the Linux KERNEL and even that is controlled by GOOGLE. Think they take shit from Torvalds? Nope you'll get the kernel after Google decides its worth doing and not one second earlier and they sure as fuck isn't shitting out a new kernel every couple of months like Torvalds.
The FOSSies can waste mod points but there is a REASON why Linux is dead on everything but servers, that is because the entire FOSS model ONLY WORKS when you are talking about small projects. on big projects you get a bunch of fiefdoms run by douchebags like Drepper that won't work together, which gives you Pulse, KDE 4 and GnomeShell, they don't listen to users, don't listen to OEMs, its strictly all about THEM. Well fuck them, their product works on disposables and that is it. Servers are running a stripped down embedded version (No Sound, Wireless, most don't even have a full DE) and they still have to pay some guy a high five figure salary to deal with the breakage...I'm sorry but its shit, its NOT getting better, just different, and the numbers reflect that.
You get rid of the welfare state and the rich would be swinging from a tree before the month is out Hoss and the congress knows it. The welfare state is the ONLY thing keeping the USA from having our own Arab Spring. You can bitch about welfare all you want but there just ain't no jobs to be had in the USA Crosshair, years of offshoring have turned the manufacturing districts of most towns into ghost towns, my home town the business disctrict looks like Escape From New York. it is ONLY the welfare state that keeps the poor from revolting, because as long as they have food in their belly and TV/The Internet (Bread and Circuses) they'll STFU about how bad they have it in this country. If that ends? Well I hope you like war, because we'll all be turning our trucks into technicals and its gonna be a free for all.
Best be ready for it,the shit IS gonna hit the fan, and when it does best have a plan B. Everybody likes the guy that can make the machines go, so I'm not worried about what comes next, but a lot of folks are gonna be SOL if they are betting the farm that shit will stay like it is forever. I just can't figure out whether we will end up going socialist or fascist, signs point to either outcome but I think what we have now will be gone by 2020.
I have a 20 year old college kid son, I asked him about those two as well as the ones I named...had no fucking clue who they were. He knew who Bill Gates and Gabe Newell was, that was it, nobody else named here got a bit of recognition from him.So I would have to say like Carmack and Romero they are strictly old farts as far as recognition, the young crowd don't know them from Adam.
Uhhh...we solved this problem ages ago with UPS. If you care about your data put the machine on a UPS. I've had my business customers on UPS systems for years, showed them how to test the batteries and swap 'em when they get worn out, no problems. I just had to swap the PSU and HDD out of my netbox at the shop because a transformer blew on my block and managed to give the old gal enough of a shock even through a surge protector that it cooked the PSU and the HDD, but since its just a netbox I don't care enough about it to waste money on a UPS. I just slapped in some parts from my parts box, slapped the disc image and was back up in less than an hour, no biggie.
At the end of the day if the unit has data you care about? UPS, just like the one I have at home is running on. If its something you don't give a shit about, like my 8 year old netbox at the shop? Just use a surge protector and be ready with a disc image if anything craps out. Really folks this ain't rocket science, a little common sense goes a long way.
Actually YOU ARE WRONG it HAS done something, it has just taken time. Proof? EA is for sale, Activision is being restructured....hmmm....those are the two biggest dickwad game companies, are they not?
Meanwhile more and more games are coming to GOG and Steam, SecuROM and StarFuck are all but dead, I'd say we have plenty of proof that voting with your dollars WORKS, its just not gonna magically happen overnight which is why you have to keep reminding our ADHD populace that like any change voting with your dollars takes time. When you are talking about a billion dollar company it takes time to turn the ship, you can bleed them for a couple of years before the bank accounts start to empty. Look at MSFT, I figure it'll take another 2 years of Windows "LOL I Iz A Cellphone" bombing before the board fires Ballmer and splits mobile off from desktops but it WILL happen if people refuse to buy their shitty product.
So he is right, voting with your dollars WORKS, it just isn't magic, it takes time to really hurt a super sized corp. I've refused to buy any "phone home" games or games infected with crap like StarFuck, now I have a Steam library full of great games at affordable prices, and I didn't compromise my beliefs AT ALL. I don't have a problem with DLC as long as its not "pay to win" like the silly hats in TF2, the vehicles in Saints Row 3, or if they offer full expansion packs like Gearbox did with Borderlands? I got NO PROBLEM paying $10 for an expansion that keeps the game going past the end of the story. It took me around 14 hours to do all the stuff in General Knoxx, which at $10 is damned cheap for the amount of fun I had, so no problem.
But voting with your dollars is simple and easy...don't buy shit. That's it, don't buy shit, if it treats you bad, treats you like a chump, its shit so don't buy shit. Is that SO hard?
I thought Franco came later? After all he didn't become the "dear leader' until 1936 which by then both Hitler and Mussolini had their systems pretty locked down.
But Mussolini and his black shirts were the real innovators, everything from force feeding laxatives to making people just disappear in the middle of the night Il Duce had his viciousness down to a science. Some say Stalin was the master but I would argue a LOT of his came from being paranoid, just look at how he crippled his own military with the purge on the eve of war, if he wouldn't have had millions to use as cannon fodder he would have been screwed.
Sadly the problem is, as the video shows, how much of the programs of Franco and Mussolini have been enacted right here in America. Places set up to allow the government to torture people without oversight, private para-military goon squads allowed to operate on American soil, hell they are even stealing some of the old language like "homeland", its the same plays being run here today and as ms Wolf points out if we don't do something we could wake up tomorrow and be in a locked down state, the shifts are THAT quick.
But we ALREADY have that capability WITHOUT shitting a couple billion on an untested (and from the looks of it more bullshit than fact) weapons platform. For the VERY few true high value targets you use the B-2 which has a MUCH bigger payload and distance and then you send in SEAD teams, either jamming them like we did with the Sparkvark in Desert Storm or going Wild Weasel where if they are dumb enough to try to lock on their ass gets a HARM shaped can of ass whupping.
When you are trillions in debt,have one party that would sooner eat broken glass than raise taxes by a single % on the top 5%, and are looking at 25%+ REAL unemployment? that is NOT the time to be pissing billions down the crapper on stuff you just don't need. And the Stealth Eagle could do the same damned job at half the price! Half the price friend, which you watch if we stick with the F35 the price will continue to skyrocket until we end up just like with the F22, an overpriced show piece nobody will fly into battle because they cost too damned much to risk and which will spend more time parked than they will in the air.
And a better question would be "How ELSE are they gonna get kids to listen?" Lets face it coding isn't exactly a '"rock star/athlete" kind of profession so you could name top coders all day long and most would go "Who the heck is that?"
I mean do YOU know the names of ANY of the coders of your favorite games? Software? Lets face it the only names that are even kinda sorta well known are all the old guys that probably don't code anymore, Newell, Gates, hell I LOVE video games but if you'd have offered to give me a thousand bucks for every game coder i could name the only ones I can remember off the top of my head is Romero, Carmack, and Ken Silverman who made the BUILD engine, that's it.
So if you wanna get kids interested in coding you are gonna have to come up with people they have heard of and most coders never get known as far as name recognition. Hell the only reason I can remember Romero is that stupid "make you his bitch" ad that ran before his DNF levels of ubersuck game came out. Kinda sad but off the top of my head I can remember more game reviewers than I can the guys that actually made the things. so you do what you gotta do and if mentioning them gets kids interested? All for it.
Well that and the fact that they make products that don't suck. It doesn't really help to have "Made In America" on something if its total crap. For an example I have to LMAO at the crazy prices those that don't know any better will pay for 80s-mid 90s American Fenders when frankly unless you got custom shop they were just junk, especially their basses which weighed a ton and had lousy tone, just dead sounding. At that time frankly the Made In Korea Squires sounded a HELL of a lot better, in fact if the rumors are true Fender canceled the Squire Pro Tone series because people were buying them over MIA Fenders because the MIK Pro Tones played and sounded better. As someone who had both I have to agree, i sold the MIA and kept the Pro Tone 5 because of how nice it played and sounded, the MIA? It was like playing with dead strings, just a dull lifeless sound.
So while i agree having some protection is just common sense, i mean look at how the Chinese protect their markets, but protection won't help if the quality just isn't there. Now I'm not saying the old "Americans can't do good work" because that is bullshit spewed by the globalists, but if the company chiefs lowball everything and try to make 1 guy do the work of 4? Then quality is gonna go down, no way around that.
So you don't buy from, in no particular order...Dell, HP, Toshiba, Apple, MSFT, and Intel...yes? because i can give you a laundry list of citations, everything from Dell taking bribes to make the P4 the chip in Dell system even though the Athlon was faster AND lower powered, Apple and MSFT patent trolling, and HP and Toshiba taking bribes, so you buy from NONE of them, yes?
And Linux is a bad joke, I'm sorry but it is. There is a REASON why Linux has been free for 20 years and hasn't gained shit, its because Linux is NOT an OS, its a bunch of little fiefdoms run by douchebags that don't talk to each other much less work together. Tossing the finally stable KDE 3 and gnome 2 for alpha quality garbage, tossing ALSA for the shitpile that is pulse, hell look up "The Hairyfeet challenge" and know that NO LINUX SYSTEM has EVER passed that test in the six years I've been giving it, not one. And sadly its a test that frankly Windows has passed since Win2K more than a decade ago!
Frankly MSFT could put out Windows Goatse with smell-o-vision and would get more share than Linux ever will, because "free as in freedum herpa derpa" has become a crutch, its an excuse to hand out shit sandwiches and say "Its free, you have no right to complain" well bullshit, I have EVERY right to complain when your product is run by a douchebag that thinks he's God's gift to programming (quick, what do BSD, Solaris, Windows,OSX,iOS and even Os/2 have in common that Linux don't? A stable ABI so everytime somebody gets an itch the drivers don't break, but to hear Torvalds talk everybody in the free world is an idiot but him. Fuck you Torvalds your ideas on driver design SUCKS BALLS) and has all the userspace controlled by dickbags that think only of themselves. Wanna see what is wrong with Linux? Look up "Ulrich Drepper asshole" and see for yourself, he is the perfect example of a Linux asshole dev, a self important douchenozzle that doesn't give a shit what YOU think, you'll take it and like it bitch.
And sorry if it comes off a little ranty but as a Linux survivor I've learned that a simple statement covers the nasty shit stained pile of sick that is Linux "Linux is always 2 years away from ready for the masses, it was 2 years away a decade ago, it'll be 2 years away a decade from now". If YOU wanna waste your time jumping through hoops and fixing shit Torvalds and friends break? Good for you, the rest of the planet has better thing to do than deal with his bullshit.
This is why I think the ARM bubble, just as the X86 bubble before it, WILL burst...where else can you go? Samsung is testing a hexa-core SoC, Nvidia has a 5 core and Apple making "thin and light" the ONLY form factor you can frankly sell anymore means there is a VERY limited amount of room to fit the parts as well as a ridiculously small power envelope you gotta hit. Finally the average user won't "feel" any difference between a dual core and a hexacore, in the shop I've tested this with X86 and less than half could tell just doing everyday tasks which was which and that was in a multi-tasking environment. In a single tasking cellphone environment they'll use that power even less.
So I truly believe the bubble is gonna burst in less than 2 years which is why i have to shake my head at the way MSFT is fucking the sacred cow of Windows and Office trying to grab share in a market that will be flatline in less than 2 years, maybe a little longer in places like the third world which won't be buying Lumia phones anyway. The whole thing is retarded, they should be pushing media centers and making deals with big content to sell services on Win 7 and 8, instead we see this total dumbshit moves. Just proves what I've been saying for years, Gates was a leader and all Ballmer knows how to do is copy the other guy.
Frankly both the F15 and F18 as well as the F16 would be better choices for America than the F35. Like the F22 the F35 is a lame duck, its gonna spend more time on the ground than it will in the air, and its designed to fight an adversary that doesn't even exist anymore. Tell me who EXACTLY have we fought since the end of the cold war that a fleet of overpriced stealth planes, which have VERY limited range and armament because you can't mount anything external without making the stealth go away, but name ONE enemy we've had where a fleet of techno turkey stealth ships would have made a difference? Iran? NK? We would be able to blow their radars all to shit before they were even able to scramble their fighters when in the case of Iran is a home built ripoff of the F-5 Freedom Fighter which frankly wasn't state of the art when we sold it to them in the 70s and in the case of NK the biggest portion of their fleet is MiG-17s and 19s, 40+ year old designs that wouldn't survive 3 minutes in a modern battle.
Nope this is just a way for the DoD to hand their asshole buddies in the MIC a big fat check for basically half assing a job. If we HAVE to have some more stealth buy the Silent Eagle and as for the other teen series Israel has shown these planes still kick just about anything that you can throw against them and most importantly the production lines are still going so we could replace our aging fleet with little muss and with proven designs. How much did we spend on the F22 again? And how often has it been grounded? The F35 is a lame duck, take it out back and put a bullet in its head and move on.
Well if they gave him a speedy trial they wouldn't have been able to torture him with solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, and all that kind of "fun" now could they? Remember when the USA was SUPPOSED to be the good guys that didn't torture people? Sadly the PTB are running the how to close a society playbook that has actually be around since the days of Mussolini. I'm sure many would think the crazy Austrian was the innovator there but most of his stuff he ripped off of Mussolini. Watch the video and see how many of the warning signs have already come to pass here, scary shit..
Bullshit its because we have ZERO competition in a good chunk of the USA. If we had actual free markets, not this backdoor bribery, cherry picking duopoly horseshit we have now I have NO doubt that we'd have faster speeds and at competitive prices, but because they know they have most customers by the short hairs the money that would be spent on infrastructure goes to bonuses. After all what are you gonna do, go dialup? Go DSL which at least here in the south is several times WORSE (average 3-4Mbps in my area with lows as bad as 700Kbps) than the 8Mbps-20Mbps the average cableco offers?
My city has grown by over a third in the last decade and its a college town to boot...know how many new lines have been laid? ZERO. They know AT&T ain't gonna lay shit for new DSL around here so they just gouge their existing customers and keep the money. it really distorts the whole area because you can have two apt buildings side by side and one will be three times as much and have a waiting list while the other is never more than half full, why? Because you can get high speed at the first one, all you get across the street is the shitty local WISP.
The worst part is if a city gets tired of the bullshit and decides to lay their own lines they can look forward to spending the next decade in court, can't be having competition now can we? I've never been one of those "the free market can fix anything" types but what we have now is so far from a free market it ain't even funny so frankly anything that opened up the country to competition would be good in my book.
Actually I'd say its more a self fulfilling prophecy, if TWC is like most cablecos. In my area the top tier? $200 a month. Would i LIKE to have that speed? Oh fuck yes, am I willing to drop 2 c-notes a month on it? Not a snowball's chance in hell.
If the difference between top and bottom is $20, $30, even $50? Then maybe they'd have a point. if its double the cost? Then they are full of shit, they have priced their product so high nobody will buy it other than businesses.
Why? Not trying to be a smartass, I'm honestly curious. From what I saw of the 920 specs they weren't using anything really exotic, no cutting edge CPUs, no strange exotic screens so I am honestly curious as to what EXACTLY makes the Lumia harder to make than any other phone Nokia makes. Did I miss something? They using some weird size SSDs? Maybe a funky Wireless chip?
So you don't buy from Intel, Dell, Toshiba, Apple, MSFT, IBM, and HP...correct? After all every one of those either took bribes from either MSFT, or Intel, or both to make sure that wintel was the only game in town or in the case of Apple patent trolling to kill competition so you are gonna have a hell of a short list of hardware to choose from if you don't buy from any abusers.
Oh bullshit, that's just fanboy wanking. A SMART person uses the right tool for the job, and if that tool is BSD or Windows or iOS or whatever then fuck the fanboy bullshit and just use the right tool.
Case in point I won't say Win 8 is bad on a phone, i don't know as i haven't tried Win 8 on a phone or tablet yet, but I can say on the desktop its the WRONG tool for the job unless you are one of those 1% that have a touchscreen desktop or laptop. If you do have a touchscreen and only use your PC as a way to get to FB? I'm sure Win 8 would be just fine, but my customers don't have touchscreens so its right out.
If BSD, Solaris, Linux,OSX or Win 7 does the job for you, hell if win 8 does the job for you? Then just use it, but all this fanboy circle jerking frankly needs to come to a screeching halt. I mean is this Slashdot or Reddit?
Why is this modded offtopic? he is simply pointing out, complete with citation i might add, that the carriers have been treating Android rather poorly and that Apple and MSFT have rules against carrier crapware. I mean who didn't know the carriers treat Android like a black billboard to splatter crap trying to lock you in or sell you shit?
This is why I frankly wouldn't be surprised if we only end up with three major phone carriers, you'll have MSFT/Nokia in last place, and Google/Motorola and Apple switching back and forth for first place. I honestly would not be surprised if Google gets tired of Android being treated badly by the carriers and end up just pushing their own phones, the carriers left will probably end up on MozPhone which they will pile on the crap and treat like shit like they do Android now. Since Moz has made it clear they'll work with the carriers to set up carrier controlled appstores you can bet that Moz will be a carrier darling.
final prediction? Big three each have their own hardware/software ecosystem that cuts out the carriers and all the cheap phones will be MozPhones so the carriers can milk those pennies.
Dude Win 8 is deep fried ass, i'm sorry but it is. There are so damned many brain dead decisions that were made that make it not worth having frankly it just staggers the mind. i could sit here all morning typing out all the problems with Win 8 but this video says it better than I ever could. All I will add is this is the first time since WinME that I am NOT carrying MSFT's latest OS in the shop because frankly? Nobody wants it. I had people passing up a really sharp system that was running Windows 8 to take a less powerful system running Win 7, THAT is how much the public don't like Windows 8. as one of the little old ladies that walked into the shop put it so perfectly "Why would I want my computer to look like a cellphone?".
Its just not a desktop OS, its a cellphone/tablet OS that MSFT is trying to force on the desktop hoping folks will "get used to it" and they can steal some of Apple's customers...ha! you'd have better luck strapping wings to Ballmer's ass and getting him to fly south for the winter than to make Windows a "premium" brand. To use a /. car analogy MSFT is trying to slap a paint job on a Pinto and sell it for Porsche money and the public? they ain't buying it.
Which part of MASSIVE BUBBLE do you not comprehend? Are you being obtuse on purpose, or are you just trying to troll? Because I handed you the graphs which clearly show that even during the biggest boom the USA EVER HAD, the post WWII manufacturing boom, the stock market stayed pretty stable. Reagan comes along and pumps everybody's retirement into wall Street? Suddenly we have this huge bubble, we've had to throw billions more in just to keep it propped up a little longer but it WILL blow, all bubbles do. And when it does you can be as fucking obtuse as you want, you'll be able to wipe your ass with $100 bills because frankly TP will be all they are good for. Ever hear of Zimbabwe, or is that a little over your head?
Actually I would put that under "tin cup" since if a game is truly FTP then one doesn't have to buy just to play. If it is "pay to win" then frankly it should be looked at as fraud in my book, you are telling players they can play "for free' but then once they have time invested springing the trap.
That is why if you are gonna add that crap I'd say either do it like Saints Row 3 or Borderlands. With SR 3 you could play the whole game just fine without buying the crap but the crap added to the 'fucking off factor" so many bought to go nuts. I bought the laser shooting tank and Genki mobile (sucks up pedestrians and shoots them out the cannon) just for how silly it looked. i could have not bought a thing and it wouldn't have changed the gameplay, but having the DLC made the game sillier which I enjoyed.
The flip side of that is BL, with BL you have 4 expansion packs that continue the story (this I have no problem with, after all we bought expansion packs back in the day as well) and the few "fuck off" items were just that, silly shit or crazy guns that really didn't give you an edge, they are just fun to play with.
But if they all start pounding me with ads and trying to sell me trinkets? Well its not like there isn't hundreds of good games I've never played, they could stop making games tomorrow and it would take me a decade to go through all the good stuff. This is why I always say "vote with your wallet" as EA is on the selling block and Activision is looking at a restructure, that is what happens when you treat the customers like shit. Compare to valve which has doubled their profits 7 years in a row by treating their customers right.
Then answer the question: If there is no government what is to keep me from using the luck of being born from the right womb to take my wealth, hire a goon squad, and just come take any damned thing I want? Because frankly history is written in blood, this is a dance that is older than the bible. The kings of old ruled by the goon squad, feudalism was controlled by the goon squad, even in modern times you had the Pinktertons and now Blackwater as the goon squads for hire, so how EXACTLY are you gonna stop me without a government?
Those who learn nothing from history are truly doomed to repeat it and libertarians apparently have VERY short memories when it comes to history. All those government regs they bitch about? Who in the fuck do you think BOUGHT those regs in the first place? America was originally practically lawless, other than English common law you could do pretty much as you please. Slaves, underage hookers, dumping toxic waste in the river...it was ALL wide open and you could do as you pleased. It was the RICH that bought those laws, because after they had built their monopolies and signed deals with each other (the trusts) they sure as fuck didn't want any competition, now did they?
So what magical device is gonna keep that from happening all over again? What is to keep me from taking my wealth, which it wouldn't matter how I made it since no government remember? So what is to keep me from hiring a merc army and declaring myself "King of the new confederacy" and making everyone bow before me? After all it don't take much to get the peasants to STFU, a few bodies hanging in the trees works wonders as history shows, so what is to stop me?