But how much of that is the company's fault and how much is feature creep by the government agency that wanted the work done? Because every time I talk to folks online that work with a company doing work for a government agency I always seem to get the same story "They told us it needed to do X, then a third of the way in suddenly it has to do Y which we hadn't even thought of, and then as the alpha is getting ready suddenly here comes a huge list of "must have" features that basically mean torching the whole thing and starting over".
Time and time again its the same story, that they keep tacking on more and more things they expect it to do and then complain when its triple over budget after the company already had to start over twice just to add all the extra shit they suddenly demanded!
Am I saying HP are saints in all this? No not at all but after hearing that story a billion times i want to hear from somebody who was on the project from the start to see if they were hit with a case of featuritis.
Then you haven't kept up on current events and how the new GCN cores work. you see when you are in "multimedia mode" like say watching netflix or streaming video or even playing your "cut the rope" style games? it shuts down the powerful GPU and switches to the weaker APU to save a LOT of power. Then when you are playing your CoD or Crysis what it does is hand all the GPU work to the bigger chip and the APU does physics and other tasks that can be handled by a GP-GPU.
You should really look up some of the in depth articles on the GCN design, its really smart and gives AMD some serious advantages. Basically the OS decides what work to send where and the chip adapts while having a much more streamed pipeline than the previous VLIW based chips, its really interesting.
but you are basing the stutter and lag on the older VLIW design which had a tendency to stall if the code wasn't optimized just right, the new vector cores are like having truly independent GPUs that can just do other work while say thread C which needs the output of thread B is handled by itself, no longer can one thread choke the pipe like that. again its a really good read, Anandtech and Tom's hardware IIRC both have good articles on the subject. i bet when you read them it'll be a lightbulb going off over your head because when you see how the new design really works it makes a LOT of sense to split the load between a full bore GPU and an APU as the APU can handle multimedia, AI, pathfinding, physics, while the full bore GPU does the heavy lifting. Its just a really smart design.
Bimbo Newton Crosby, if Cook has so little control as CEO that the desires of the dead former CEO trumps his wishes? Then frankly he doesn't deserve to be in the big chair. Sadly too often we have seen "upward failure' let people that never should have had the big chair sit in it, take Ballmer who would have been a fine VP of marketing or something but just doesn't have what it takes to truly run the company.
But Jobs has been gone for awhile now, if he can't even wrest control from the guy when he is cold and gone then he really needs to step down and give the reins to somebody who can. I have to wonder how much of this is CYA to give Wall street excuses for when the iWatch fails though. After all he can say "Hey it was Steve's idea, we were honoring the man by following his final wishes even though I didn't agree, yada yada yada" and deflect some of the blame when it goes tits up.
Nice to see somebody remembers. As one of the poor bastards that was trying to use NetScape during that period i can tell you it was deep fried ass, AOHell let it fall apart so we basically only had TWO, count 'em two choices at the time, either use Opera which hit you with a big bandwidth sucking ad banner if you didn't cut them a check or IE which was banner free, not hard to see why IE won as they honestly didn't have anybody else on the field.
How is it not replaceable? none of my customers, family, nor myself has IE on Windows as i uninstalled it and gave them their choice of Dragon or IceDragon. All that is left when you toss IE is the parts of the rendering engine used by HTML based help files that won't run without the IE engine but other than that little part its like IE never existed on our systems. And as others pointed out you no longer need crossover to run IE on Linux or mac, they have a pre-packed version you can easily run on those platforms and even do things a normal Windows user can't like run IE 7-9 beside themselves without later versions overwriting the previous one.
So by your own metrics it already qualifies just shows how little you've kept up with things. And quit harping about fricking XP okay? Does Debian still backport everything to Debian 1? Its a soon to be 12 year old OS that ends support next year so no shit they can't backport the latest and greatest IE as XP is just too damned old to make it worth all the trouble.
The PS4 is NOT a rumor as dev kits have already been sent, its using an "octo-core" (I put quotes because in the AMD arch the new modules work more like HT than full cores so IRL its a quad with HT) Jaguar based APU at 1.7GHz, the specs are already out there and they all say the same thing.
As for the 720 if the rumors are true then it IS using a similar jaguar octo-core, its simply also using an AMD graphics chip (but no discrete graphics memory other than a little bit of SRAM which makes it even more likely its an onboard IGP and an APU in hybrid crossfire) on top of the jaguar APU. Again look up Xbox Next Dev kits" to see all the nitty gritty details but the APUs in both systems are essentially identical, AMD jaguar.
And I SAID that 3 used the GPU and 2 the APU, The wii U uses an AMD GPU and a PPC CPU, which is exactly the approach they did for the Wii. Several devs at Sony have already admitted Cell was a dead end, too hard to code for and too niche to get lower prices thanks to lousy economies of scale so going AMD APU cuts their costs significantly which considering how many billions they lost on PS3 is totally understandable. with MSFT it also makes sense as MSFT has been wanting better integration with the PC for awhile now and an AMD APU will likewise cut costs while making it easy for devs to port to/from the PC.
Look above you, browsers are already using Safari prefixes just as Opera and other had to lie using the useragent to get sites built for IE to run. Also if you think there is no fees go ask Mozilla who wanted to bundle H.264 so that FOSS users could watch h.264 videos. They basically got told "pay your $699 license fee" which considering we are talking about one of the biggest patent trolls out there, one where they have patents so vague that you'd be hard pressed to make any video without tapdancing into their patent minefield? really not surprising. frankly to me what IS surprising is how many bent to kiss the ring at Cupertino without noting the obvious conflicts of interest in killing Flash and FOSS codecs, after all it gives them complete control of casual gaming on Apple products thanks to games having to be tied to the appstore, whereas with a FOSS codec or Flash the ability to make games with it would have allowed folks to host their games on their own sites and thus bypassing iTunes.
Oh and one final note, Google didn't have to reverse engineer shit, they bought the codecs from On2 tech a couple of years back, no point in reverse engineering when you own the code.
Straw man as the law doesn't say they need a specific number only that they are able to assert undue influence on other markets and WTF do you call dictating to the HTML V5 committee that the will be using H.264 whether they like it or not if not undue influence? They are already busted for trying to set prices in eBooks, We lost the open format video as a baseline due to Apple, I'm sorry but you are full of shit as they are undue influencing all over the damned place.
Oh and just FYI in the PMP market, which one could argue is overlapped with the iPhone/iPad since they too can function as PMP and use itunes? They already have 90% of the PMP so by they would have a monopoly and deserve an antitrust investigation.
Nice to see I'm not the only one saying diversity is a GOOD thing. I hated when we had "Works best in IE 6" and I'll rail against "Works best in Webkit" because its bad for everybody...well except the malware writers, the day Webkit is the only one standing they'll probably be popping champagne corks because it will give them a big juicy target that runs everywhere.
While I haven't used IE since the days of the Mozilla Suite beta (I hated the UI of IE and having a giant target painted on it didn't make it any more appealing) I haven't used Opera and I'm not glad to see either of them go, the more diverse the system is the better and the closer we get to "one browser to rule them all" the closer we get towards another Code Red or NetSky only this will be worse as they'll be able to pwn the mobile AND the desktop.
Did this guy find significant problems in webkit? Probably, i have found EVERY browser has serious quirks and none of them seem to even be consistent on what those quirks are. But to me the more disturbing thing is how people just don't seem to care we appear to be just trading one master for another and for the health of the web that's just a bad idea.
One sentence "Jon Stewart Ron Paul" go and look it up. There in video taken straight from the networks you will see with your own eyes the MSM influencing the direction of the primaries by making Paul "he who shall NOT be named" and they even go so far as to name the first, second, and FOURTH place finishers, making sure the name Ron Paul is NEVER spoken in the places having a primary. Since the majority get their "news" from the MSM this makes it easy to rig.
And while i never supported Ron Paul or Alex Jones for that matter you can also goes to Jones' website and see the behind the scenes video of the "voice count" on whether Paul's delegation will be heard, in the video you can CLEARLY see and hear the vote is too close to call yet there on the teleprompter before the vote is ever called the outcome is decided and the speaker simply read what was written.
i'm sorry but there is a REASON why so few vote in the primaries and general election, its because they can see its a waste of time. in my own state our "primaries" had a corporate owned pair of DINOs that sucked big corp cock VS a couple of corporate owned RINOs that suck corporate cock, tell me friend how EXACTLY are we given "choice" when all the choices are all long time players of the game with big money already owning their asses? Again do you think it an accident that Obama ended up supporting or even expanding every policy the left hated under Dubya? Its all kayfabe, you get what the corp says you can have, nothing more. this is why the "debates" will ALWAYS be about either vague subjects like "jobs" or about subjects like gays and abortion, its because the corps don't give a rat's ass about those topics so no matter how they go they don't care. when was the last time you saw a politician that had a snowball's chance talking about breaking up the relationship between big gov and the corps? or ending corporate welfare? or doing anything other than paying lip service to our leaking borders?
so you go to the primaries and waste your time voting for whichever shill the corps decide you can choose from, the rest of us can see the truth. money equals speech and unless your last name is Buffet or Gates you don't have a voice anymore.
See? i have NO problem with that, you clearly laid out your reasoning for supporting Java in that situation and its obviously thought out and done from an educated perspective.
Now as someone who mainly supports SMBs and home users I can tell you in THAT particular userbase java is like a damned STD in that it keeps reinfecting and can be a major operation to get rid of (Thanks a lot, asshole who invented minecraft) but then again my users aren't having to support 1000 transactions and processes at once so maybe it works great there, don't know as that was never my field.
But sadly we have seen too many cases where something doesn't make sense to use but "Well so and so uses X so it must be good" or in the case of java "Well these billion dollar corps use java so we should too" and I would argue that is a choice from ignorance which is why I was pointing out the flaw in the logic. if Java or flash or SL or.NET or C++ or whatever is right for you because you looked at your options and it was the best fit? i'm glad, I really am. Hell I still write the occasional VB 6 app because for one single function (making a front end to a local DB) it works great with the least footprint and cost. But I would never say "So and so used VB 6 so we should" as that isn't a justification, that is just bandwagon hopping.
Uhhh...yeah, kinda what I was talking about, you just don't include anything that isn't gonna be specifically need ed for the limited functions you are gonna support, hence a lower memory and space footprint. Just as you wouldn't build Windows Embedded with support for calc and WiFi and Windows sharing if its running in a Kiosk so too would you not include anything in embedded linux except the kernel and what module you need to support the specific hardware and perform the specific task you had in mind.
Kinda fucking sad I apparently have to spell every damned little thing out now as otherwise people get so God damned anal retentive when it comes to phrasing its insane. At least you didn't do the whole "Linux is a kernel" horseshit like most do, I'll at least give you credit for that but since we were talking about embedded OSes and not just the kernel i figured most could follow the conversation, i guess not, my bad.
Well at the time it sounded like you were betting it all on the HOSTS which sounded like magical thinking and as you know that is something I'm VERY strongly against but now I know its just part of a larger security plan I can see it has its place. I still prefer to run it at the DNS level since I have a low power Sempron at the shop that is perfect for the task and don't have to rely on MSFT's as you know increasingly badly done networking choices but not everybody has the luxury of a building handyman that hands piles of laptops and desktops for free so you use what you have. I really need to find somebody around here that does ebay as the laptops that need work are really starting to pile up and it'd probably be better to part most of 'em out anyway,gotta say i'm tickled pink though he brought me a barely 3 year old C2D loaded with RAM and a 500GB HDD that just needed a keyboard, looks like daddy is gonna have a netbook AND a full size.
And as you know I'm mainly a windows guy (If you know what you are doing frankly all OSes are equal) but I found the Quake 3 bug especially telling as it showed how much blind trust downstream repos have and how little "many eyes" is useful for catching actual bugs, if I can come across the link again I'll post it.
Finally as for Linus I get plenty of hate for saying it but he is a douchebag, he really is. If his little asshole rant wasn't proof enough the simple fact that every. other. OS. on. the. planet. has a stable ABI but jerkwad Torvalds won't allow it because of religious reasons? Sorry but that is douchebaggery. and yes its religious because ALL of their arguments break down to "ZOMFG somebody might release...gasp...non free drivers ZOMFG!" and then in the next breath they say "Use nvidia"..Well WTF do you think Nvidia drivers are? The only damned graphics drivers that work consistently are the NON FREE DRIVERS!
But I learned a long time ago you'll never get a FOSSie to admit Linux is an OS with bugs like everybody else anymore than getting a young earther to admit the world is billions of years old so I don't bother. I have all Linux articles filtered now so i don't even see them, the posts end up a FOSSie circle jerk anyway, why waste time. Now I only chime in when obvious magical thinking is being spewed because I've seen first hand that people that have recently gotten a virus will try anything if it promises them a magical virus free life and it often leads to disaster because instead of learning how not to get viruses they change to a system they know less than nothing about and end up in worse shape, like the guy i know who went out and spent nearly 20k replacing every system in his office for Macs only to get DNSChanger and MacDefener infections.
at the end of the day all we can do is show them the first steps while making it clear that using any one tool won't magically make you immune, be it DNS or HOSTS or AVs (which I saw an article recently that said on average AVs only catch around 6% of bugs) but that its a process they have to learn and will have to stay on top of. Sadly those that aren't geeks will be happy to take a quick fix even if it sounds too good to be true so we must be vigilant and point out when such falsehoods are spewed...peace.
Did I SAY he was in any way a journalist? he simply compiled how obviously rigged the media was, which again go watch the video, judge for yourself. it is so fucking bad that in several cases they name who got first, second AND FOURTH while never saying third place even exists...wanna know who came in third? Fuck you he's not a pre-bought shill. And remember we are talking about RON PAUL here which Stewart made clear he did NOT support nor believes in any way with any part of the libertarian agenda, he just thought it was sorry the primary was so obviously rigged.
You simply can't change a corrupt system by working within that system, why? Well the answer is self evident, its because its a corrupted system! And that is EXACTLY what we have, a handful of major corps own what more than 70% of Americans will EVER hear, read, or see, and those same corps own multiple companies that make insane amounts of money off the current system. do you HONESTLY think they are gonna let ANYBODY that could be a threat to that be heard?
You might as well go park your ass in that "free speech zone" 4 miles away from the cameras with your little sign for how much your voice will be heard in this country, voting is the biggest waste of time and will never change shit.
Isn't it funny how we are replacing one asshole company with one that is an even bigger asshole? I hates the way MSFT pushed IE onto everybody and frankly what we are seeing now is even worse, as at least before you could just lie with the UserAgent and get around a bunch of the bullshit, but now instead of Redmond dictating we got Cupertino and Apple makes MSFT look like big sweaty care bears by comparison.
I mean we went from having an open format be the baseline in HTML V5 to patent troll MPEG-LA getting to stick a tollbooth with H.264, thanks to Apple making it clear "We don't give a fuck what YOU choose, its not running on iPhone/iPad PERIOD" and then to add insult to injury they also pretty much single handedly killed mobile flash where Adobe was at least nice enough to pay the license fees and let any browser or distro run H.264. Now try to bundle H.264 in a free product and see how quick you get a cease and desist, just ask Mozilla.
So if you wanna cheer MSFT losing power? Right there with ya, in fact I championed breaking up the company when they lost the antitrust. But what we are seeing is we are kicking the old lame dog while ignoring the two fucking lions that are saying "kick the dog" while they get ready to take a bite out of our collective asses. say what you want about MSFT but I could take any laptop or desktop and have their shit gone and well on my way to installing any damned thing I wanted in minutes, try that with a Chromebook and see how far you get. The web won't fare any better thanks to Cupertino dictating everything, If Apple has their way the only browser will be Webkit and only Apple approved formats will be on the web and sadly? Its seriously looking like they are gonna get their wish, Flash gone, Opera dropping their engine so they can get on iToys (and I wouldn't be surprised if moz goes to as they won't get on the iPhone/iPad if they don't bow to Cupertino's wishes) and video controlled by a patent troll...where is things getting better again? This is like saying "Instead of the guy on the corner kicking us in the face the guy across the street just hits us with a brick!"...uhhh, how about neither guy hitting us at all? How about being able to choose none of the above? wouldn't that be better?
If there is one thing we need to protect its an open web but all we are doing is replacing one master for another and that's just not the way we should be going, we should be trying for no masters at all.
Because the original HTML V5 spec called for an open format, Theora was the main contender but WebM was being looked at too until Apple made it clear they would only allow H.264 on iPhone/iPad and made a call to Redmond and got MSFT on board and that put an end to that. Ask Mozilla how friendly MPEG-LA is to open source.
Also remember both Apple and MSFT have a stake in MPEG-LA and since both are closed companies the fees are trivial to them, hence why windows has had H.264 drivers since Vista. But you try to bundle H.264 with a FOSS browser or distro and see how quick you get a cease and desist. But if the fact that apple can decide what formats HTML V5 uses for video isn't undue influence on the market i'd like to hear what qualifies, I bet if you were to talk with one of the Opera devs off the record they'd say the only reason they are walking away from presto is they can't get permission to run it on iPad/iPhone.
say what you will about MSFT, at least i could run whatever the fuck i wanted on windows, even products that competed with theirs like browsers and Open/Libre Office, Apple is turning out to be worse than MSFT in every way when it comes to monopolistic behavior.
You forgot the infected Quake 3 that was served from nearly every repo for a year and a half. i especially like that one, as it shows there is too much trust by downstream repos and if you get a bug into an upstream you can just kick back and let it spread.
But this is why I rail against magical thinking, I have seen guys who spent thousands of dollars on systems because "this product doesn't get bugs!" only to find that magical thinking doesn't work and they spent all that money for nothing.
That is what is really sad about these "just use Linux!" types as many are probably infected now and because they know so little about their OS they probably don't even know how to check. security isn't an OS, its not a button that can be pushed, its a process that takes time to learn and requires the user be vigilant to new threats. This is why i'll always call out magical thinking when i see it being used, because there are too many that don't know better that might actually believe it and end up losing big time. I have seen a vicious hacker completely wipe out 3 years worth of family pics and videos, just to be a douchebag. So better to nip magical thinking in the bud before somebody gets hurt.
I hate to break the news to ya sparky but in case you ain't kept up on current events the courts ruled "money equals speech" so your ballot box is worth jack and squat.
You honestly think the best candidates anybody could come up with were Obama and Romney? Even though I don't believe in libertarianism you might want to look up "Jon Stewart Ron Paul" to see how badly the media is rigged, they treated Paul as "he who shall not be named" and the video ends with a reporter talking to an anchor and the reporter says "Here we are talking about Palin and Christie, who aren't even running, and not saying anything about paul who is doing good in the polls here" and the anchor gets a douchebag smirk and says "if you get any footage of Christie or Ppalin send it in, you can keep the Paul stuff"
And THAT, that right there, is why your vote isn't worth used toilet paper. the media chooses which two shills you get, its coke in a can VS Coke in a bottle, because only pre-bought shills need apply. if you think voting would ever do anything ask yourself these questions: How many protested against the wars? How many sat out there in the cold during occupy? Think those people don't vote? of course they do but when your choice is Coke in a can VS in a bottle it don't really matter who you choose, its just different corporate masters. Obama is owned by the media cartels and his VP is the biggest media shill in DC, Romney was owned by Wall Street, 6 of one, half dozen of the other, either way you are fucked.
It was originally a skit on SNL, yet you won't find it ever shown after the original air in reruns, nor is it in any box sets. The corporate masters really weren't too thrilled with a show having a piece pointing out how they get corporate welfare or use PACs and soft money to get away with crimes like dumping PCBs and making the state pick up the tab, hence they just cut it out. you go look for it on the corporate owned SNL site and its like it never existed, poof!
But there is a fault in everyone's logic when it comes to java. from what I have seen the statement is basically "Well big business and financial corps use it so it must be good". This of course ignores the fact that many of those same corps have IE Intranet apps, VB apps and Excel apps and even Access apps and just because some big corps use something doesn't magically make it "good" or right or wrong or anything other than software that big corps use.
Ahh yes, security by obscurity works so well, doesn't it? Meanwhile Android which so many here proudly proclaim is Linux is on its way to the one millionth infected system by summer, macs have had multiple bugs in the past year and a half, hell nearly every repo on the planet served up a malware infected Quake 3 for months!
Magical thinking DOES NOT WORK, and any OS short of one that is air gapped is gonna have weaknesses. A modern OS is one of the most complex creations man has ever written and since man is fallible it WILL have bugs. In the end it comes down to common sense, using best security practices like least privilege and as you say not sticking the whole place on one big network, but saying that "Use Distro X!" will magically do jack shit about malware is just magical thinking. Android proved without a shadow of a doubt that Linux is just as weak as any other OS and all it takes is it becoming popular for it to have as many bugs as a Bangkok whore after coupon day.
The simple fact that apple can decide what runs and what doesn't and by doing so affect the market means they really need to be looked at for antitrust. remember the laws do NOT say you need a monopoly, only that you have "undue influence' and the fact that Apple can kill Flash with a word, get companies like Opera to drop their engines, even as we saw affect the price of media on the web, shows that they have too damned much power.
I was all for busting up MSFT in the 90s, I'd be for busting up the hardware and software divisions of Apple now as NO company should have the power to change what runs on the web simply by saying "you can't have that on an iPhone".
What do you mean "when"? Most people ALREADY know this, its the simple fact that thanks to "money equals speech" there isn't a damned thing they can do about it short of full on violent revolution. How many protested the wars? How many wated their time with occupy? didn't change shit did it? hell we get years worth of documents about the governments of the world doing dirty deeds and since the MSM is in bed with the gov it is focused not on the corruption, but whether Assange is an asshole.
Everything you see on TV, hear on the radio, and if the corps have their way read on the Internet WILL be controlled by the handful at the top. It isn't an accident that the ones controlling the ISPs are the same ones buying media companies, they want to turn the net into the home shopping network, where they use caps to steer the cattle by the nose where they want them to go. We are already seeing this in the caps, if I use Vonyage? Goes against the cap, cableco's VoIP? No cap. I watch netflix? Cap. watch their PPV? No cap.
Sadly there isn't a damned thing you can do about this new facist/corporatist system short of violent revolution because you have the whole system rigged to keep the status quo. throw out the bums? They get cushy lobbyist jobs which lets them hand checks to the new guys who then follow the same path. Its no accident that even though the left is VERY much against the policies dubya started Obama signed off on damned near every one, its all as fake as pro wrestling. They hand him a big fat check and tell him to sign what laws the lobbyists have written, that's all.
And that is different from the other side...how exactly? look at how the debt exploded under Dubya and Reagan, the God of the right, is the one who said "deficits don't matter". in case you haven't noticed when it comes to spending we really only have two sides of the same coin, well with the exception the stiffie the right gets when they can fuck the poor, see Jindal trying to replace income taxes (which affect the wealthy more than the poor) with a massive sales tax (which will royally fuck the poor) which is as reverse robin hood as you can get.
As far as climate change I will happily vote against ANYBODY, no matter the side, if they support carbon credits without MASSIVE trade tariffs on China as without massive tariffs all you will do is send what few jobs there are left here to china which has already said they won't play our little carbon games. Also even those that are for fighting global warming should be against carbon credits as the same scum at the center of credit default swaps are writing the rules on carbon credits which means it'll have a million loopholes for the wealthy and be a leecher's paradise. for an example of how a parasite can scam the system look to rev Al Gore, the preacher for the AGW camp, who pays HIMSELF carbon credits from HIS OWN COMPANY which he then gets back in tax free capital gains and with this scam he says his Lear jet and gas sucking SUV (not to mention McMansion with indoor basketball court) are "carbon neutral". It would be like moving money from your left pocket to your while taking money from MY pocket to add to it and getting a tax break for it! What a fucking scam!
So if you want to cut down pollution? Hey I'm right there with ya, and I have several ideas that would serious cut down on pollution without giving leeches plenty of ways to scam, such as a "people's car/truck" made to run on diesel (so we can look at fuels like switchgrass and algae based) that gets a minimum of 40MPG and costs less than $25k. You could then offer incentives to the poor to switch which would more than double our average MPG (which is a pathetic 14MPG because of all the poor driving old clunkers) but of course we'll never see things like this because they would work without a billion ways for the rich to leech more money from the poor and middle class.
As it is the laws we pass might as well be called the "poison to the third world" laws, because there is zero penalty for simply closing your factory here and moving to Mexico or China and polluting all you want. All we are doing is exporting sickness and misery and I honestly wouldn't blame the Chinese for looking at us like the jihadists do now, after all their farmland is toxic from our factories.
But you can't fix the problem of toxins in a fishbowl by simply pushing those toxins to one side of the bowl, its a closed system and you haven't cleaned anything, just moved it. that is pretty much our environmental policies to date, just move everything nasty to the third world so lots of yellow and brown people can get sick and die, after all who gives a fuck about yellow and brown people?
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But how much of that is the company's fault and how much is feature creep by the government agency that wanted the work done? Because every time I talk to folks online that work with a company doing work for a government agency I always seem to get the same story "They told us it needed to do X, then a third of the way in suddenly it has to do Y which we hadn't even thought of, and then as the alpha is getting ready suddenly here comes a huge list of "must have" features that basically mean torching the whole thing and starting over".
Time and time again its the same story, that they keep tacking on more and more things they expect it to do and then complain when its triple over budget after the company already had to start over twice just to add all the extra shit they suddenly demanded!
Am I saying HP are saints in all this? No not at all but after hearing that story a billion times i want to hear from somebody who was on the project from the start to see if they were hit with a case of featuritis.
Then you haven't kept up on current events and how the new GCN cores work. you see when you are in "multimedia mode" like say watching netflix or streaming video or even playing your "cut the rope" style games? it shuts down the powerful GPU and switches to the weaker APU to save a LOT of power. Then when you are playing your CoD or Crysis what it does is hand all the GPU work to the bigger chip and the APU does physics and other tasks that can be handled by a GP-GPU.
You should really look up some of the in depth articles on the GCN design, its really smart and gives AMD some serious advantages. Basically the OS decides what work to send where and the chip adapts while having a much more streamed pipeline than the previous VLIW based chips, its really interesting.
but you are basing the stutter and lag on the older VLIW design which had a tendency to stall if the code wasn't optimized just right, the new vector cores are like having truly independent GPUs that can just do other work while say thread C which needs the output of thread B is handled by itself, no longer can one thread choke the pipe like that. again its a really good read, Anandtech and Tom's hardware IIRC both have good articles on the subject. i bet when you read them it'll be a lightbulb going off over your head because when you see how the new design really works it makes a LOT of sense to split the load between a full bore GPU and an APU as the APU can handle multimedia, AI, pathfinding, physics, while the full bore GPU does the heavy lifting. Its just a really smart design.
Bimbo Newton Crosby, if Cook has so little control as CEO that the desires of the dead former CEO trumps his wishes? Then frankly he doesn't deserve to be in the big chair. Sadly too often we have seen "upward failure' let people that never should have had the big chair sit in it, take Ballmer who would have been a fine VP of marketing or something but just doesn't have what it takes to truly run the company.
But Jobs has been gone for awhile now, if he can't even wrest control from the guy when he is cold and gone then he really needs to step down and give the reins to somebody who can. I have to wonder how much of this is CYA to give Wall street excuses for when the iWatch fails though. After all he can say "Hey it was Steve's idea, we were honoring the man by following his final wishes even though I didn't agree, yada yada yada" and deflect some of the blame when it goes tits up.
Nice to see somebody remembers. As one of the poor bastards that was trying to use NetScape during that period i can tell you it was deep fried ass, AOHell let it fall apart so we basically only had TWO, count 'em two choices at the time, either use Opera which hit you with a big bandwidth sucking ad banner if you didn't cut them a check or IE which was banner free, not hard to see why IE won as they honestly didn't have anybody else on the field.
How is it not replaceable? none of my customers, family, nor myself has IE on Windows as i uninstalled it and gave them their choice of Dragon or IceDragon. All that is left when you toss IE is the parts of the rendering engine used by HTML based help files that won't run without the IE engine but other than that little part its like IE never existed on our systems. And as others pointed out you no longer need crossover to run IE on Linux or mac, they have a pre-packed version you can easily run on those platforms and even do things a normal Windows user can't like run IE 7-9 beside themselves without later versions overwriting the previous one.
So by your own metrics it already qualifies just shows how little you've kept up with things. And quit harping about fricking XP okay? Does Debian still backport everything to Debian 1? Its a soon to be 12 year old OS that ends support next year so no shit they can't backport the latest and greatest IE as XP is just too damned old to make it worth all the trouble.
Really? I ran IE 6 in Crossover no problem back in the day and i would be surprised if later versions aren't supported now.
The PS4 is NOT a rumor as dev kits have already been sent, its using an "octo-core" (I put quotes because in the AMD arch the new modules work more like HT than full cores so IRL its a quad with HT) Jaguar based APU at 1.7GHz, the specs are already out there and they all say the same thing.
As for the 720 if the rumors are true then it IS using a similar jaguar octo-core, its simply also using an AMD graphics chip (but no discrete graphics memory other than a little bit of SRAM which makes it even more likely its an onboard IGP and an APU in hybrid crossfire) on top of the jaguar APU. Again look up Xbox Next Dev kits" to see all the nitty gritty details but the APUs in both systems are essentially identical, AMD jaguar.
And I SAID that 3 used the GPU and 2 the APU, The wii U uses an AMD GPU and a PPC CPU, which is exactly the approach they did for the Wii. Several devs at Sony have already admitted Cell was a dead end, too hard to code for and too niche to get lower prices thanks to lousy economies of scale so going AMD APU cuts their costs significantly which considering how many billions they lost on PS3 is totally understandable. with MSFT it also makes sense as MSFT has been wanting better integration with the PC for awhile now and an AMD APU will likewise cut costs while making it easy for devs to port to/from the PC.
Look above you, browsers are already using Safari prefixes just as Opera and other had to lie using the useragent to get sites built for IE to run. Also if you think there is no fees go ask Mozilla who wanted to bundle H.264 so that FOSS users could watch h.264 videos. They basically got told "pay your $699 license fee" which considering we are talking about one of the biggest patent trolls out there, one where they have patents so vague that you'd be hard pressed to make any video without tapdancing into their patent minefield? really not surprising. frankly to me what IS surprising is how many bent to kiss the ring at Cupertino without noting the obvious conflicts of interest in killing Flash and FOSS codecs, after all it gives them complete control of casual gaming on Apple products thanks to games having to be tied to the appstore, whereas with a FOSS codec or Flash the ability to make games with it would have allowed folks to host their games on their own sites and thus bypassing iTunes.
Oh and one final note, Google didn't have to reverse engineer shit, they bought the codecs from On2 tech a couple of years back, no point in reverse engineering when you own the code.
Straw man as the law doesn't say they need a specific number only that they are able to assert undue influence on other markets and WTF do you call dictating to the HTML V5 committee that the will be using H.264 whether they like it or not if not undue influence? They are already busted for trying to set prices in eBooks, We lost the open format video as a baseline due to Apple, I'm sorry but you are full of shit as they are undue influencing all over the damned place.
Oh and just FYI in the PMP market, which one could argue is overlapped with the iPhone/iPad since they too can function as PMP and use itunes? They already have 90% of the PMP so by they would have a monopoly and deserve an antitrust investigation.
Nice to see I'm not the only one saying diversity is a GOOD thing. I hated when we had "Works best in IE 6" and I'll rail against "Works best in Webkit" because its bad for everybody...well except the malware writers, the day Webkit is the only one standing they'll probably be popping champagne corks because it will give them a big juicy target that runs everywhere.
While I haven't used IE since the days of the Mozilla Suite beta (I hated the UI of IE and having a giant target painted on it didn't make it any more appealing) I haven't used Opera and I'm not glad to see either of them go, the more diverse the system is the better and the closer we get to "one browser to rule them all" the closer we get towards another Code Red or NetSky only this will be worse as they'll be able to pwn the mobile AND the desktop.
Did this guy find significant problems in webkit? Probably, i have found EVERY browser has serious quirks and none of them seem to even be consistent on what those quirks are. But to me the more disturbing thing is how people just don't seem to care we appear to be just trading one master for another and for the health of the web that's just a bad idea.
One sentence "Jon Stewart Ron Paul" go and look it up. There in video taken straight from the networks you will see with your own eyes the MSM influencing the direction of the primaries by making Paul "he who shall NOT be named" and they even go so far as to name the first, second, and FOURTH place finishers, making sure the name Ron Paul is NEVER spoken in the places having a primary. Since the majority get their "news" from the MSM this makes it easy to rig.
And while i never supported Ron Paul or Alex Jones for that matter you can also goes to Jones' website and see the behind the scenes video of the "voice count" on whether Paul's delegation will be heard, in the video you can CLEARLY see and hear the vote is too close to call yet there on the teleprompter before the vote is ever called the outcome is decided and the speaker simply read what was written.
i'm sorry but there is a REASON why so few vote in the primaries and general election, its because they can see its a waste of time. in my own state our "primaries" had a corporate owned pair of DINOs that sucked big corp cock VS a couple of corporate owned RINOs that suck corporate cock, tell me friend how EXACTLY are we given "choice" when all the choices are all long time players of the game with big money already owning their asses? Again do you think it an accident that Obama ended up supporting or even expanding every policy the left hated under Dubya? Its all kayfabe, you get what the corp says you can have, nothing more. this is why the "debates" will ALWAYS be about either vague subjects like "jobs" or about subjects like gays and abortion, its because the corps don't give a rat's ass about those topics so no matter how they go they don't care. when was the last time you saw a politician that had a snowball's chance talking about breaking up the relationship between big gov and the corps? or ending corporate welfare? or doing anything other than paying lip service to our leaking borders?
so you go to the primaries and waste your time voting for whichever shill the corps decide you can choose from, the rest of us can see the truth. money equals speech and unless your last name is Buffet or Gates you don't have a voice anymore.
See? i have NO problem with that, you clearly laid out your reasoning for supporting Java in that situation and its obviously thought out and done from an educated perspective.
Now as someone who mainly supports SMBs and home users I can tell you in THAT particular userbase java is like a damned STD in that it keeps reinfecting and can be a major operation to get rid of (Thanks a lot, asshole who invented minecraft) but then again my users aren't having to support 1000 transactions and processes at once so maybe it works great there, don't know as that was never my field.
But sadly we have seen too many cases where something doesn't make sense to use but "Well so and so uses X so it must be good" or in the case of java "Well these billion dollar corps use java so we should too" and I would argue that is a choice from ignorance which is why I was pointing out the flaw in the logic. if Java or flash or SL or .NET or C++ or whatever is right for you because you looked at your options and it was the best fit? i'm glad, I really am. Hell I still write the occasional VB 6 app because for one single function (making a front end to a local DB) it works great with the least footprint and cost. But I would never say "So and so used VB 6 so we should" as that isn't a justification, that is just bandwagon hopping.
Uhhh...yeah, kinda what I was talking about, you just don't include anything that isn't gonna be specifically need ed for the limited functions you are gonna support, hence a lower memory and space footprint. Just as you wouldn't build Windows Embedded with support for calc and WiFi and Windows sharing if its running in a Kiosk so too would you not include anything in embedded linux except the kernel and what module you need to support the specific hardware and perform the specific task you had in mind.
Kinda fucking sad I apparently have to spell every damned little thing out now as otherwise people get so God damned anal retentive when it comes to phrasing its insane. At least you didn't do the whole "Linux is a kernel" horseshit like most do, I'll at least give you credit for that but since we were talking about embedded OSes and not just the kernel i figured most could follow the conversation, i guess not, my bad.
Well at the time it sounded like you were betting it all on the HOSTS which sounded like magical thinking and as you know that is something I'm VERY strongly against but now I know its just part of a larger security plan I can see it has its place. I still prefer to run it at the DNS level since I have a low power Sempron at the shop that is perfect for the task and don't have to rely on MSFT's as you know increasingly badly done networking choices but not everybody has the luxury of a building handyman that hands piles of laptops and desktops for free so you use what you have. I really need to find somebody around here that does ebay as the laptops that need work are really starting to pile up and it'd probably be better to part most of 'em out anyway,gotta say i'm tickled pink though he brought me a barely 3 year old C2D loaded with RAM and a 500GB HDD that just needed a keyboard, looks like daddy is gonna have a netbook AND a full size.
And as you know I'm mainly a windows guy (If you know what you are doing frankly all OSes are equal) but I found the Quake 3 bug especially telling as it showed how much blind trust downstream repos have and how little "many eyes" is useful for catching actual bugs, if I can come across the link again I'll post it.
Finally as for Linus I get plenty of hate for saying it but he is a douchebag, he really is. If his little asshole rant wasn't proof enough the simple fact that every. other. OS. on. the. planet. has a stable ABI but jerkwad Torvalds won't allow it because of religious reasons? Sorry but that is douchebaggery. and yes its religious because ALL of their arguments break down to "ZOMFG somebody might release...gasp...non free drivers ZOMFG!" and then in the next breath they say "Use nvidia"..Well WTF do you think Nvidia drivers are? The only damned graphics drivers that work consistently are the NON FREE DRIVERS!
But I learned a long time ago you'll never get a FOSSie to admit Linux is an OS with bugs like everybody else anymore than getting a young earther to admit the world is billions of years old so I don't bother. I have all Linux articles filtered now so i don't even see them, the posts end up a FOSSie circle jerk anyway, why waste time. Now I only chime in when obvious magical thinking is being spewed because I've seen first hand that people that have recently gotten a virus will try anything if it promises them a magical virus free life and it often leads to disaster because instead of learning how not to get viruses they change to a system they know less than nothing about and end up in worse shape, like the guy i know who went out and spent nearly 20k replacing every system in his office for Macs only to get DNSChanger and MacDefener infections.
at the end of the day all we can do is show them the first steps while making it clear that using any one tool won't magically make you immune, be it DNS or HOSTS or AVs (which I saw an article recently that said on average AVs only catch around 6% of bugs) but that its a process they have to learn and will have to stay on top of. Sadly those that aren't geeks will be happy to take a quick fix even if it sounds too good to be true so we must be vigilant and point out when such falsehoods are spewed...peace.
Did I SAY he was in any way a journalist? he simply compiled how obviously rigged the media was, which again go watch the video, judge for yourself. it is so fucking bad that in several cases they name who got first, second AND FOURTH while never saying third place even exists...wanna know who came in third? Fuck you he's not a pre-bought shill. And remember we are talking about RON PAUL here which Stewart made clear he did NOT support nor believes in any way with any part of the libertarian agenda, he just thought it was sorry the primary was so obviously rigged.
You simply can't change a corrupt system by working within that system, why? Well the answer is self evident, its because its a corrupted system! And that is EXACTLY what we have, a handful of major corps own what more than 70% of Americans will EVER hear, read, or see, and those same corps own multiple companies that make insane amounts of money off the current system. do you HONESTLY think they are gonna let ANYBODY that could be a threat to that be heard?
You might as well go park your ass in that "free speech zone" 4 miles away from the cameras with your little sign for how much your voice will be heard in this country, voting is the biggest waste of time and will never change shit.
Isn't it funny how we are replacing one asshole company with one that is an even bigger asshole? I hates the way MSFT pushed IE onto everybody and frankly what we are seeing now is even worse, as at least before you could just lie with the UserAgent and get around a bunch of the bullshit, but now instead of Redmond dictating we got Cupertino and Apple makes MSFT look like big sweaty care bears by comparison.
I mean we went from having an open format be the baseline in HTML V5 to patent troll MPEG-LA getting to stick a tollbooth with H.264, thanks to Apple making it clear "We don't give a fuck what YOU choose, its not running on iPhone/iPad PERIOD" and then to add insult to injury they also pretty much single handedly killed mobile flash where Adobe was at least nice enough to pay the license fees and let any browser or distro run H.264. Now try to bundle H.264 in a free product and see how quick you get a cease and desist, just ask Mozilla.
So if you wanna cheer MSFT losing power? Right there with ya, in fact I championed breaking up the company when they lost the antitrust. But what we are seeing is we are kicking the old lame dog while ignoring the two fucking lions that are saying "kick the dog" while they get ready to take a bite out of our collective asses. say what you want about MSFT but I could take any laptop or desktop and have their shit gone and well on my way to installing any damned thing I wanted in minutes, try that with a Chromebook and see how far you get. The web won't fare any better thanks to Cupertino dictating everything, If Apple has their way the only browser will be Webkit and only Apple approved formats will be on the web and sadly? Its seriously looking like they are gonna get their wish, Flash gone, Opera dropping their engine so they can get on iToys (and I wouldn't be surprised if moz goes to as they won't get on the iPhone/iPad if they don't bow to Cupertino's wishes) and video controlled by a patent troll...where is things getting better again? This is like saying "Instead of the guy on the corner kicking us in the face the guy across the street just hits us with a brick!"...uhhh, how about neither guy hitting us at all? How about being able to choose none of the above? wouldn't that be better?
If there is one thing we need to protect its an open web but all we are doing is replacing one master for another and that's just not the way we should be going, we should be trying for no masters at all.
Because the original HTML V5 spec called for an open format, Theora was the main contender but WebM was being looked at too until Apple made it clear they would only allow H.264 on iPhone/iPad and made a call to Redmond and got MSFT on board and that put an end to that. Ask Mozilla how friendly MPEG-LA is to open source.
Also remember both Apple and MSFT have a stake in MPEG-LA and since both are closed companies the fees are trivial to them, hence why windows has had H.264 drivers since Vista. But you try to bundle H.264 with a FOSS browser or distro and see how quick you get a cease and desist. But if the fact that apple can decide what formats HTML V5 uses for video isn't undue influence on the market i'd like to hear what qualifies, I bet if you were to talk with one of the Opera devs off the record they'd say the only reason they are walking away from presto is they can't get permission to run it on iPad/iPhone.
say what you will about MSFT, at least i could run whatever the fuck i wanted on windows, even products that competed with theirs like browsers and Open/Libre Office, Apple is turning out to be worse than MSFT in every way when it comes to monopolistic behavior.
You forgot the infected Quake 3 that was served from nearly every repo for a year and a half. i especially like that one, as it shows there is too much trust by downstream repos and if you get a bug into an upstream you can just kick back and let it spread.
But this is why I rail against magical thinking, I have seen guys who spent thousands of dollars on systems because "this product doesn't get bugs!" only to find that magical thinking doesn't work and they spent all that money for nothing.
That is what is really sad about these "just use Linux!" types as many are probably infected now and because they know so little about their OS they probably don't even know how to check. security isn't an OS, its not a button that can be pushed, its a process that takes time to learn and requires the user be vigilant to new threats. This is why i'll always call out magical thinking when i see it being used, because there are too many that don't know better that might actually believe it and end up losing big time. I have seen a vicious hacker completely wipe out 3 years worth of family pics and videos, just to be a douchebag. So better to nip magical thinking in the bud before somebody gets hurt.
I hate to break the news to ya sparky but in case you ain't kept up on current events the courts ruled "money equals speech" so your ballot box is worth jack and squat.
You honestly think the best candidates anybody could come up with were Obama and Romney? Even though I don't believe in libertarianism you might want to look up "Jon Stewart Ron Paul" to see how badly the media is rigged, they treated Paul as "he who shall not be named" and the video ends with a reporter talking to an anchor and the reporter says "Here we are talking about Palin and Christie, who aren't even running, and not saying anything about paul who is doing good in the polls here" and the anchor gets a douchebag smirk and says "if you get any footage of Christie or Ppalin send it in, you can keep the Paul stuff"
And THAT, that right there, is why your vote isn't worth used toilet paper. the media chooses which two shills you get, its coke in a can VS Coke in a bottle, because only pre-bought shills need apply. if you think voting would ever do anything ask yourself these questions: How many protested against the wars? How many sat out there in the cold during occupy? Think those people don't vote? of course they do but when your choice is Coke in a can VS in a bottle it don't really matter who you choose, its just different corporate masters. Obama is owned by the media cartels and his VP is the biggest media shill in DC, Romney was owned by Wall Street, 6 of one, half dozen of the other, either way you are fucked.
It was originally a skit on SNL, yet you won't find it ever shown after the original air in reruns, nor is it in any box sets. The corporate masters really weren't too thrilled with a show having a piece pointing out how they get corporate welfare or use PACs and soft money to get away with crimes like dumping PCBs and making the state pick up the tab, hence they just cut it out. you go look for it on the corporate owned SNL site and its like it never existed, poof!
But there is a fault in everyone's logic when it comes to java. from what I have seen the statement is basically "Well big business and financial corps use it so it must be good". This of course ignores the fact that many of those same corps have IE Intranet apps, VB apps and Excel apps and even Access apps and just because some big corps use something doesn't magically make it "good" or right or wrong or anything other than software that big corps use.
Ahh yes, security by obscurity works so well, doesn't it? Meanwhile Android which so many here proudly proclaim is Linux is on its way to the one millionth infected system by summer, macs have had multiple bugs in the past year and a half, hell nearly every repo on the planet served up a malware infected Quake 3 for months!
Magical thinking DOES NOT WORK, and any OS short of one that is air gapped is gonna have weaknesses. A modern OS is one of the most complex creations man has ever written and since man is fallible it WILL have bugs. In the end it comes down to common sense, using best security practices like least privilege and as you say not sticking the whole place on one big network, but saying that "Use Distro X!" will magically do jack shit about malware is just magical thinking. Android proved without a shadow of a doubt that Linux is just as weak as any other OS and all it takes is it becoming popular for it to have as many bugs as a Bangkok whore after coupon day.
The simple fact that apple can decide what runs and what doesn't and by doing so affect the market means they really need to be looked at for antitrust. remember the laws do NOT say you need a monopoly, only that you have "undue influence' and the fact that Apple can kill Flash with a word, get companies like Opera to drop their engines, even as we saw affect the price of media on the web, shows that they have too damned much power.
I was all for busting up MSFT in the 90s, I'd be for busting up the hardware and software divisions of Apple now as NO company should have the power to change what runs on the web simply by saying "you can't have that on an iPhone".
What do you mean "when"? Most people ALREADY know this, its the simple fact that thanks to "money equals speech" there isn't a damned thing they can do about it short of full on violent revolution. How many protested the wars? How many wated their time with occupy? didn't change shit did it? hell we get years worth of documents about the governments of the world doing dirty deeds and since the MSM is in bed with the gov it is focused not on the corruption, but whether Assange is an asshole.
Everything you see on TV, hear on the radio, and if the corps have their way read on the Internet WILL be controlled by the handful at the top. It isn't an accident that the ones controlling the ISPs are the same ones buying media companies, they want to turn the net into the home shopping network, where they use caps to steer the cattle by the nose where they want them to go. We are already seeing this in the caps, if I use Vonyage? Goes against the cap, cableco's VoIP? No cap. I watch netflix? Cap. watch their PPV? No cap.
Sadly there isn't a damned thing you can do about this new facist/corporatist system short of violent revolution because you have the whole system rigged to keep the status quo. throw out the bums? They get cushy lobbyist jobs which lets them hand checks to the new guys who then follow the same path. Its no accident that even though the left is VERY much against the policies dubya started Obama signed off on damned near every one, its all as fake as pro wrestling. They hand him a big fat check and tell him to sign what laws the lobbyists have written, that's all.
And that is different from the other side...how exactly? look at how the debt exploded under Dubya and Reagan, the God of the right, is the one who said "deficits don't matter". in case you haven't noticed when it comes to spending we really only have two sides of the same coin, well with the exception the stiffie the right gets when they can fuck the poor, see Jindal trying to replace income taxes (which affect the wealthy more than the poor) with a massive sales tax (which will royally fuck the poor) which is as reverse robin hood as you can get.
As far as climate change I will happily vote against ANYBODY, no matter the side, if they support carbon credits without MASSIVE trade tariffs on China as without massive tariffs all you will do is send what few jobs there are left here to china which has already said they won't play our little carbon games. Also even those that are for fighting global warming should be against carbon credits as the same scum at the center of credit default swaps are writing the rules on carbon credits which means it'll have a million loopholes for the wealthy and be a leecher's paradise. for an example of how a parasite can scam the system look to rev Al Gore, the preacher for the AGW camp, who pays HIMSELF carbon credits from HIS OWN COMPANY which he then gets back in tax free capital gains and with this scam he says his Lear jet and gas sucking SUV (not to mention McMansion with indoor basketball court) are "carbon neutral". It would be like moving money from your left pocket to your while taking money from MY pocket to add to it and getting a tax break for it! What a fucking scam!
So if you want to cut down pollution? Hey I'm right there with ya, and I have several ideas that would serious cut down on pollution without giving leeches plenty of ways to scam, such as a "people's car/truck" made to run on diesel (so we can look at fuels like switchgrass and algae based) that gets a minimum of 40MPG and costs less than $25k. You could then offer incentives to the poor to switch which would more than double our average MPG (which is a pathetic 14MPG because of all the poor driving old clunkers) but of course we'll never see things like this because they would work without a billion ways for the rich to leech more money from the poor and middle class.
As it is the laws we pass might as well be called the "poison to the third world" laws, because there is zero penalty for simply closing your factory here and moving to Mexico or China and polluting all you want. All we are doing is exporting sickness and misery and I honestly wouldn't blame the Chinese for looking at us like the jihadists do now, after all their farmland is toxic from our factories.
But you can't fix the problem of toxins in a fishbowl by simply pushing those toxins to one side of the bowl, its a closed system and you haven't cleaned anything, just moved it. that is pretty much our environmental policies to date, just move everything nasty to the third world so lots of yellow and brown people can get sick and die, after all who gives a fuck about yellow and brown people?