That they make their money off of ads and RHEL users probably have ABP? Lets face it the way Google datamines it can probably tell you to the cent how much each particular OS makes them and I bet RHEL doesn't even make a blip on the big board.
But why does anybody even care? I thought the whole point of FOSS is not being beholden to the corps for support, right? so why hasn't somebody just compiled Chromium from source and slapped it out there as a replacement, or does the phone home add ons Google sticks in somehow increase its value to the community?
Frankly this is one thing the community shouldn't give two shits about because browsers are plentiful, you have choices and pretty much all of them will render the majority of the web the same. If Google drops you from Chrome fuck 'em, you got FF and Chromium and QTWeb (pretty nice cross platform that even runs off a flash stick, its nice) and a ton of variants to Gecko and Chromium, so why worry? Why care? Give Google the finger and move on, not like its hard to move your bookmarks over and keep right on truckin.
This is why you just GOTTA love this, the irony is so moist and delicious. I mean here you have the guy the libertarians practically worship as a god...and he's trying to pull an eminent domain rather than pay the market value for something he wants!
To me this just shows the true stripes of many of those that claim to be libertarians as its all about greed. Most of the time they think they can get more wealth by getting governments out of the way but if it works in their favor? Fuck it they want more and more and MOAR!
Does WebM support games? animation? Nope, sorry you fail. Also again you name the browser i'll put the same video in flash and WebM and we'll take screencaps of CPU and RAM usage and I can tell you WebM will suck MORE juice than Flash at the same res.
So try again, the world isn't all C2Ds with GPU acceleration, there are a ton of low power devices and on those HTML V5 and WebM are made of suck and fail.
Well if you'll show me HTML V5 running on ANY of those under Linux I'll be happy to agree. But you are trying to claim that because Adobe doesn't support FOURTEEN YEAR OLD chips that this makes HTML in some way a better choice? How EXACTLY when I've found you name the browser, FF, Chrome, Safari,IE, Opera, doesn't matter which HTML V5 video is a slideshow on anything less than a dual core with GPU acceleration.
Completely different sitch as there you had the designers specifically advising you NOT to incrementally update but to skip straight to the end. in a case like that if their advice bricks i figure it wouldn't be hard to sue, after all you are following explicit instructions by the maker of the hardware and by doing so the device was ruined.
But what I've found, especially when it comes to motherboard BIOS, is you check the readme and all you find is a list of changes from the last firmware release to this one with jack squat said about previous versions or whether they can be skipped. Since they aren't talking about anything but the release before current its pretty safe to assume that is what they focused on NOT going straight from RTM to the latest and greatest.
There is an old saying that begins "fool me once" that is applicable here, if you keep buying from a vendor that repeatedly screws you then frankly you DESERVE to be screwed.
Now when I say "never" does that mean i wouldn't give the company a second chance if its reported they have worked to fix their bad rep? Of course not, companies can change hands, new management can clean up a place that behaved badly in the past, situations CAN change. But that doesn't mean you should just blindly go back without doing your homework. In the cases i cited Abit (now defunct because of bad rep) never showed any signs of changing while Biostar can be a great board....as long as you remember you can ONLY use chips that were released BEFORE the board was as their CPU lists are full of shit. With Nvidia after we learned that they had a whole rev that was garbage and they KNEW it was garbage and shipped anyway? AMD would have to do as least as big a fuck up before i gave them a second look because that level of crooked is hard to get out of a company culture, finally Seagate frankly hasn't figured out how to make large drives worth a crap yet so until they do they'll be on my avoid list.
At the end of the day all you can do is avoid the companies that are screwing customers while watching to see if they clean up their act. But if you don't bother seeing if things are different and just blindly continue to buy then another saying that starts "a fool and their money" is applicable.
Funny you should mention that as while the doctors and doctor's assistants seemed to have embraced the tech the rest of the nurses? Really seem to dislike them. When I asked it was because of all the hand sanitizers they have to use which makes the screens nasty quick so they prefer the keyboard with the usual medical software which from what I've seen is pretty much all old VB 6 style "fill in the blank/ pull down the list" kind of stuff.
Again this is just what I've seen and learned from talking with nurses but you are right about the docs and iPads, even my doc who is a bit of a Luddite ended up going to an iPad. His assistant on the other hand uses a Win 7 Tablet and when i asked he said the software that he needs isn't on iPad yet but if it ever came out for an iPad he would switch in a heartbeat, for the same reason you cited which is the battery.
I just don't get WTF they are thinking putting an i5 in the thing, talk about a battery killer. A MUCH better choice IMHO would be something like the AMD jaguar "quad" (which is really a dual with HT) as that is a lot lower battery requirements and would let them get closer to having a full day on the thing than the 3.4 hours it gets now. as much as i love X86 full blown X86 chips just need too much power and generate too much heat to go for a thin and light tablet with good battery life, as you said you end up with a brick.
I was just trying to find a place it would make sense, I have been told it may make sense in doctor's offices but frankly I've serviced several doctor's offices and the touchscreens they got from a previous vendor? they never use the things as the hand sanitizers they have to use all day quickly make the screens nasty.
But I figured that if i could name a positive at least it wouldn't look like I was trying to bash but honestly one simple fact leads me to believe the Surface pro is full of fail and it is thus: You can buy a nice AMD quad or Core i3 laptop for $400 with win 7, that runs the old software great, gets good battery life, hell they'll even do 1080P over HDMI so slapping it into any screen if you need even more real estate is trivial. You can pick up a Kindle Fire for IIRC $200, that gives you a thin and light tablet with tons of apps and is well supported. by going this route not only do you have the ability to use both devices at the same time or can replace one without replacing the other but you also save $300 and that is if you get the low end Surface pro that is frankly starved for space. The laptop will come with a minimum of 320GB and most come with 500GB so all those older Windows programs you want to run will have plenty of space while the kindle fire has the "grab and go" thing down pat.
So I just don't see an upside to the surface pro, I really don't. It would be like replacing the steering wheel on a car with bike handlebars. Sure handlebars are great...on the small and light bike form factor but on a car it would be a worse interface than the one you had and looking at the Surface pro that is what it feels like to me. They are bragging it'll run Windows programs but Windows programs aren't made for touch, they are made for keyboard and mouse and frankly the metro appstore just isn't very nice or have a lot of business apps, it feels more like "Tweets for twits and FB shit" which is fine for home users...who won't pay $900 for a Surface pro when they can get a laptop and Kindle fire and save a pile of cash.
But ultimately it comes down to the fact that MSFT is either gonna have to learn to accept less revenue per OS to get people to adopt (oh and kill Metro with Fire as most really hate the damned thing) like say $35 for Home and $70 for Pro or they are gonna have to get the bulk of their revenue from things like the Xbox instead of Windows and Office. Because the simple fact is the MHz wars are over, PCs are insanely overpowered and most folks won't need to replace but once every 5-7 years if that, most folks simply can't stress out even a first gen Phenom triple or Core Duo so the systems are lasting longer than ever. The same goes for the Office cash cow as most of my customers have stopped upgrading at 2K3 or 2K7 and are happy to stay where they are, the new bells and whistles on later versions just have no appeal.
Hi Mrs AC shill? How is the pay from MSFT these days? in case you want to know what gave it away its the fact that you said Win 8 "launched" only 2 days ago. We all know that is a crock of shit but MSFT in its memos have been calling the release of Surface pro a "relaunch" of Win 8 so only those that are following the "reboot" theory, which is pretty much confined to Redmond, are buying that bullshit.
I mean do I REALLY have to wallpaper this page with all the figures showing win 8 has been bombing since it flopped onto the market in Oct, how the MSFT team is trying to blame OEMs for not building a pile of $1000 WinTabs that the OEMs rightly pointed out would sell about as well as the few $1000 Tablets they had which is to say none at all, so they would have ended up in the same warehouse the failed ultrabooks is now rotting in. I can also of course paste link after link of OEMs saying the same thing, win 8 is a flop that makes the Vista launch look like Win95, and of course the press have dubbed it "Windows Frankenstein" and written articles that say "Windows 8 yes its THAT bad". and even the tech writers are uninstalling it. Of course some of us and some tech sites pointed out this would happen awhile ago because it ignores even basic user conventions. while giving ZERO context or even hints as to WTF the user is supposed to do. in my own experience this is what I saw in my shop only with more frustration and cursing involved.
So if you need more links Mrs AC shill please feel free to ask, not like anything I've been saying is exactly new or radical. Nice thing about speaking the truth, you can provide plenty of citations. and just for the record i have been a Windows user and seller since 3.1 and there have only been TWO, count 'em two, times I've not stayed with and sold a version of Windows. First was WinME which was inferior in every way to Win98, the second is Windows 8. Yes I ran Vista and sold Vista units until I saw it was gonna take MSFT ages to fix the bugs I kept running into but with both winME and Win 8 the experience was just too nasty for me to dump on users, I'm sorry but they sucked the big wet titty.
Not with the Yahoo porn bug as I took one of the spare boxes at the shop and decided to do a little test to see how it basically worked.
What it did was hide in the ads or in the page itself, as I saw it keep happening even if ABP was installed and it called a hidden iFrame that would load the yahoo login page and if the person didn't have a master password set that would have to be input to unlock the password auto fill (which most folks don't) it would use the auto fill to log in to the person's yahoo page and send spam through the entire address book. I even uninstalled Flash to see if its a Flash bug (I don't install Java on any systems) and it still works just fine without Flash as its in the pages themselves.
It was and is actually a pretty smart little trick. they aren't sending any data to themselves directly as the messages are just a single hyperlink so its hard for many AVs to catch it, auto fill is something everyone takes for granted with modern browsers so nearly everybody will have it, its a smart little hack. I know the only way I was able to make my users immune was to switch them from FF to Comodo Dragon because dragon like the other Chromium based runs in low rights mode in Win 7 which seems to kill their ability to call the hidden iFrame. For those on XP I had to give them a separate browser from what they used daily that is used for porn and ONLY porn so it has no yahoo mail addresses to call.
Except we are talking about a system that processes in base 2 so what some standard says means jack and squat. You build me a computer that processes in base 10 instead of binary? Then I'll be happy to support base 10 being the standard when it comes to computers. But since the days of those giant tube monsters that helped win WWII the machines have been binary, on/off, yes/no, however you want to call it, and its stupid to try to stick base 10 rules on a base 2 system.
Besides fellow geeks let us not forget this horseshit was started by marketing specifically the hard drive manufacturers during the race to 1GB. I remember before it became a "race" that it was listed in base 2 but once the HDD companies realized they could charge a premium if they got past certain metrics then anything they could do to make those metrics happen were just fine.
So please don't buy into marketing bullshit okay? Base 10 works great for standards in the living world because we are base 10 creature and have been since we started counting on our fingers and toes soon after climbing down from the trees. But what we are talking about here isn't a human, its a computer, and computers are binary. Trying to stick base 10 rules on a base 2 world just makes no sense and the whole point of it was deception to allow marketing to say they reached a metric they hadn't and we lose more each year to this.
You went to a site like Redtube or XHamster and watched a porn video didn't you? Frankly this bug has been going on for awhile, it seems to be an "on again off again" kind of cat and mouse game between the guys writing the bug and yahoo. I wrote in my journal nearly a year ago about the "Yahoo porn bug" and how it would send spam from the entire address book (including to the person who hit the bug so they always end up with spam from themselves) and it sounds like the NZ folks are running into it now just by clicking a link in their email.
In any case it sounds like the same bug I have been seeing folks get off and on for nearly a year just ramped up. Maybe the porn bug was an early test?
The sad part if Cook really has no choice in the matter when you think about it. The way steve jobs was able to keep the Apple premium so high for so long is he would find new markets so they were always cutting edge and thus could charge a premium while they are the only game in town or the competition is behind. if Apple sticks with one market too long they risk taking a trip to commodity land which is someplace Apple just doesn't want to go. i mean look at how few Macbooks they sell compared to laptops, or how Android is exploding with a bazillion competitors in the phone and tablet space.
No if Cook wants to keep that Apple premium they have no choice but to find new markets or end up trapped with their competitors racing to the bottom. Will it work with a watch? i kinda doubt it, watches tend to come off as nerdy not to mention i'm seeing more and more young folks not even bothering with watches because they have a smartphone that they use for everything. But its not like Cook has a choice as the longer they stay in a market the more it will sour. sure there will always be iFans that will buy the latest and great iAnything but as a retailer i can tell you when everything starts becoming equal the customers starts looking at price. Android up to 2.x just wasn't in the same ballpark and now that's not the case, now Cook has to find them a new market so they can keep that trendsetter image and keep the premium high.
That is one of the reasons i love my old Ranger, while it won't run on all the stuff yours will run on frankly it isn't picky about gas or octane, I could probably run moonshine and it wouldn't care.
But as they keep raising the required MPG there isn't gonna be many that can tolerate like the old vehicles can and that is gonna lead to a LOT of burnt motors and cars ending up scraped before their time. I have a friend that is a mechanic at a small shop and he says they are seeing a LOT more burned rings and other problems that can be traced back to ethanol running too hot in those engines. Our old Fords have big old cast iron blocks, take a lot of heat those can, but these little lightweight motors just can't tolerate it like we can.
if I had my way I'd ban ethanol and instead put that money into building a "peoples car/truck" that got at least 40MPG and ran on diesel, then I would subsidize the poor to get them moved over so we can get all those used cars that suck gas off the road. If we were to do this we could then look at alternatives like switchgrass or biodiesel or any number of choices while at the same time cutting our gas usage by more than half (average MPG in the states thanks to the poor driving old cars is just 14MPG) and helping the poor keep more money in their pocket. It would be a win/win but of course that is why it'll never happen, no way to hand out lots of kickbacks like you can with ethanol.
Wanna know what is sad bbsalem? we are gonna end up missing the hell out of MSFT when its all over. Looked at how locked down a ChromeBook is lately? How you have to do "dev mode" and wipe the drive and ONLY use a hacked bootloader version of Ubuntu just to use what is bog standard X86 hardware? have you looked at how locked down Apple devices are, how they have to be Jailbroke to do shit?
personally I think MSFT has made some good products and they made some bad products. Win2K was good, XP X64 was good, Win 7 was good, and they also made plenty of stinkers and as you say they aren't a nice company...but at least i could do WTF I wanted with my hardware. if I don't like Vista I can put on any MSFT OS or Linux or BSD or half a dozen other choices but if things continue the way they have been its gonna be consoles all the way down and I think that's really sad.
Its honestly because the MSM and the government are hand in glove now is EXACTLY why we get so "distracted" its because its by design! I mean why do you think our "news" now looks like the Inquirer and even our presidential "debates" are about issues like gays in the military or other fluff shit that ultimately don't mean jack shit?
Its because decades of money and pandering have made the government and big business one and the same so the only "issues" you'll be given are those that won't affect the corporate bottom line, like abortion or gays. Think the big corps give a rat's ass about either of those?
If you want people to start thinking and questioning friend here is one little fact that will help open their eyes: Why is it that somebody from Goldman Sachs has run the fed almost from the day it was started, no matter if there was a D or an R in the White House? Its because of this Mayer Amschel Rothschild quote: "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws".
The easiest way I've found to explain it to people is this: Why can you not fix a corrupt system by working within that system? Because its corrupt! To think you can fix the system by electing somebody is as silly and insane as thinking if you play craps with loaded dice against you that if you play long enough you'll win. How many years have people asked for less wars? For smaller government? For less spying and more freedom? Its no accident that Obama and Bush are so much alike when it comes to policy, they have the same master who told them STFU and read the cue card.
No because remember the designers only test going from 1.3 to 1.4 and for all you know they had some significant changes to the way that data is stored in the BIOS (No devices do a full clean wipe when you update firmware, some settings are saved) so that when you go from 1.1-1.4 which was never tested you end up corrupting some data because X was supposed to be stored in Y but that was only placed there in V 1.3, before that X was stored in W which just got shit on so you are SOL and enjoy your new doorstop.
Again in theory your point is logical, you just have to remember the business side of things. The guys writing 1.4 may not be the guys that wrote 1.1 and 1.2 and thus have no idea that before the 1.3 change that X was stored in W, they are just going by 1.3 which says X is stored in Y so THAT is what they are expecting.
When you remember you are dealing with guys that may not have had jack shit to do with any firmware pre 1.3 and are on a tight schedule and have to get 1.4 out the door you can see why they just expect everyone to be on 1.3 as it makes their job a hell of a lot easier. is this the right way, or the smart way to do it? Nope but that is just how it goes sometimes so better safe than sorry.
Yeah you would THINK that would be the case, but it ain't. The way I had it explained to me when talking to a high tier tech support one day is that the firmware devs ONLY test going from the last release to this one, they don't test what about going from RTM to the new release and THAT is what bites you in the ass.
Like I said by only going through each firmware to get current I have NEVER had a brick, but I've worked at plenty of places where that wasn't the policy and about 1 in 3 firmware updates ended up with bricks. Is that smart? is that best software practices? Nope but its human nature, these guys are only getting paid to make an update from F to G, not do regression testing from A-G so it don't get done. of course this is why I also try to buy boards that have BIOS backups so if they ever put out a shitty release i can recover but knock on plastic so far its not been needed..
Dude what are you typing this on? The Internet, the place that never forgets. hell I've found drivers for Win 3.1 hardware, took awhile but damned if some place in India didn't have the Win 3.1 and Win95 drivers i need to get that old CNC up and running.
if you can't call it up on the net call Dell and have a royal bitchfit until they get you a higher tier of support, threaten to buy a shitload of HP gear and see how quick they give you somebody with a little authority. demand and don't get off the phone until the in between revs are sitting in your inbox with a "please leave us alone now" note attached. trust me it DOES work, sometimes you just gotta be a prick. that is one thing I miss about the shop I worked at in the state capital, I had a little Indian girl working there with a fiery temper that I would hand the phone to if they tried dicking me around at tier 1. You wanna watch them change their tune just put a pissed off girl cursing in Hindi on the line to Indian tech support and you'd be amazed at how quickly I'd be talking to Joe in Oregon who actually knew WTF I was talking about and who had access to the company FTP server.
Actually it will NOT sell except to a few niches like taking inventory and here is why: Business runs on OLD SOFTWARE. Check any business, be they large or small, and look at the age of the software. Business has tons and tons of old software because the cost of replacing it all would be insane and "if it ain't broke?".
What does that have to do with Surface pro? simple what UI was all that old software written for? A mouse and keyboard. ever try to use mouse and keyboard software on a touchscreen? sucks big hairy balls as the software either has too small a target to hit or it doesn't know WTF you are trying to do and it becomes a guessing game to figure out WTF it'll take to get what you want in using the touchscreen.
But this comes down to the core of what MSFT has a serious problem with and why they need to try to stop aping Apple and Google and ape IBM instead. You see Apple and Google? Its all Apple and Google software on Apple and Google hardware and backwards compatibility don't mean shit to them, this is the exact opposite of the MSFT situation where ALL they have going for them is backwards compatibility. Nobody buys MSFT OSes to look at the wallpaper, they buy it because they have an assload of older software not written by MSFT they need to run and all that software, billions of dollars worth, wasn't designed for touchscreens.
Apple is ultimately a consumer electronics company, no different than those that sell TVs or consoles. Google is an ad company that don't have to worry about anything other than making sure the browser takes you to Google, MSFT is a 30 year old company with a shitload of software written by others that had damned well better "just work" and it just won't on a slab. This is why IBM makes a better company to ape, sell services to go with that software, but Ballmer can click his heels and say "There is no place like Cupertino" all he wants and he will never turn MSFT into Apple, its just two different business models that just don't work together.
Not to mention if you have a fine tuned motor it'll turn it to shit. Some old Ford frankly can be run on moonshine and it won't care, but drop that into a BMW or Mercedes and watch how soon it ends up in the shop.
at the end of the day its just another scam, just like how the government pays some rich farms not to grow (It came out several years ago David Letterman gets like 3 million a year to let some land of his just be a weed field thanks to the government) its just one of a billion kickbacks to the big corps that support the politicians with checks. They don't give a shit if it damages cars or makes it harder for poor people to eat anything made with corn, cause 'fuck them, when did they cut us a check?" is the order of the day in DC. you follow the money and the ones championing ethanol are the ones getting big fat checks by those that benefit.
If they purposely understocked the Nexus to make it look hotter than it was then they need to be called out on it, just as we are seeing sites call MSFT out for understocking to try to make Surface look like less of a fail.
We already know SurfaceRT and Win 8 have bombed HARD, not only did MSFT not get the traditional Xmas bounce like they have had for every previous release for ages but sales actually went down 12%, and we've seen the WinPhone fail, MSFT blaming the OEMs because they wouldn't build $1000 WinTabs to join the Ultrabooks in the big pile of unwanted shit, look we ALL know the score here. But as a small shop owner there is one thing that made my mind up for anything Win 8 not to be had in my shop (The first since WinME) and that was the fact I had a beautiful Athlon triple system running win 8 for nearly 7 months and not ONE offer, not one. Nobody wanted it. I put win 7 on? It sold in 3 days.
Will they sell SOME Surface pro units? Sure, there is a Zune owners club you know, in today's market you can find a small niche for just about any product. Look at what WinXP and Win 7 tablets sold and that will probably be what Surface pro sells, but at the end of the day Ballmer is bound and determined to make Windows a "premium" brand and that just isn't gonna happen, it would be like doing a re-release of the Pinto and having it priced to compete with Ferrari, it just ain't gonna happen. If he believes in metro so much he should spin it off and let THAT be the premium brand and Windows be the regular brand, but at the end of the day it just isn't gonna work this way. after all WHAT is the selling point of Surface pro? "You can use all your windows programs on it!". Really, so it is magically gonna make those millions of programs that were designed around a keyboard/mouse UI work on a touch UI?
While I don't own any Apple products, I think they are overpriced and have too much control by Apple, i have to give credit where credit is due and they were SMART to not jam OSX on a tablet and call it an iPad. Trouble for MSFT is X86 backwards compatibility is really their only selling point. Nobody buys Windows because they LIKE MSFT or want to stare lovingly at a WinFlag, they buy it because they have a ton of software NOT written by MSFT they want to run. Apple didn't have that problem as the biggest apps like iTunes were owned by Apple. So at the end of the day while I'm sure they'll sell a few it sure as fuck isn't gonna "save the company" or be any kind of "iPad/Android killer" and they can lowball the units all they want, at the end of the day i predict it'll be another Zune.
Dude its Slashdot. The catch phrase should be "Slashdot: news for nerds who can put up with bad TFAs because they probably won't read 'em anyway".
As for TFA, I'm sorry but he is full of shit. why is he full of shit? Simple because every Flash replacement we have is broken that is why. the ONLY replacement I've seen heralded is HTML V5 which is a pile of ass and fail, you pick any size and I'll show you HTML V5 using at LEAST 40% more resources than flash, in fact i have several machines like my nettop and netbook that play SD flash just fine, even low res HTML V5 is a slideshow. Again name the browser, it'll suck balls compared to Flash.
Then you have the fact that its pretty much useless for anything other than video, so Flash games and animation aren't even covered by this "Flash replacement" and you have a giant pile of fail and suck. i mean sure the OEMs like Apple want you using it, not only does it give them the lucrative casual gaming market but its resource sucking means it'll sell more hardware. it would be like "Canyonero by Shell, gets 2 MPG but does so in STYLE" would you buy that? Then why are you buying a Flash replacement from companies like fricking Apple that have serious conflicts of interest?
Show me a format that is 100% patent and copyright unencumbered that does the same jobs Flash does in the same footprint? I will climb to the tallest tower and sing its praises. But what we are doing now is just fucking retarded, we are letting one of the most closed control freak companies on the planet dictate what format the web is gonna run on...you HONESTLY think they ain't gonna tilt things in their favor? Who was it that blocked drac and Theora from being the HTML V5 video format? why I believe that was Apple and MSFT...gee, i wonder why?
Wake the fuck up people and stop drinking the iKoolaid. yes Adobe hasn't got even a good much less great security track record but one thing that have an EXCELLENT record on is letting you run it anywhere. want to put it in your distro? Go right ahead. H.26x? Cut us a check bitch. You want to make a FOSS version of Flash called Gnash? help thyself. try that with H.264 and see how quick your ass ends up in court.
We are taking an okay format and trading it for golden handcuffs folks, its fucking stupid and needs to be stopped. Want to kill Flash? Great then give us something that can do the same jobs that isn't controlled by Apple and MSFT, two companies with frankly appalling track records when it comes to fucking people over. Don't let yourself end up in worse shape than you were before just because something is buggy. Bugs can be fixed or we can go a new way but just handing the web to two douchey companies is anything but smart, hell both Apple and MSFT are the 2 most sue happy companies around and have a stake in MPEG-LA, you think they want an open anything?
You're welcome. I know money can be tight and this way you have a low cost to get started yet you have plenty of room to upgrade down the line. my PC started with an Athlon X2 with 2GB of RAM and a 400GB HDD and just by getting a part here and a part there I'm up to a Phenom II X6 and 8GB of RAM and 3TB of HDD space.
The key with buying is to just make sure you have options down the line. you get a board that supports a LOT of CPUs, has plenty of RAM slots and SATA slots and then it doesn't matter if you have to use an X2 or 2GB RAM stick NOW as you can just add a part here and a part there as money becomes available.
One bit of advice though, when it comes to AMD I recommend the Hyper 212 (around $14) or the N520 (around $30) coolers over the stock, one thing AMD is bad about is sticking weak HSFs on systems to save money. Nice thing about either of those coolers is they both will fit just about any mATX case (especially the N520 as its compact and uses 92mm fans) and you can keep the cooler when you upgrade. I've found the 212 will drop it a good 12 degrees minimum while the N520 shaves nearly 20 degrees F off the system. Since heat is the killer of CPUs its a good investment and will extend the life of the system.
Moral of the story: If a company screws you NEVER buy from them again. Abit screwed me on their CPU support list which turned out if the chip wasn't released prior to the board? They didn't test squat, just looked at the voltage which of course doesn't magically tell you if the CPU will work so I never bought from them again, same thing with Biostar when I had to buy a new board because their CPU support list said the X6 was supported and it turned out that like Abit they were ONLY looking at the watts on the box and ignoring that later Phenoms have turbocore which requires a boost to wattage when it activates.
At the end of the day all you can do is not buy from them again and warn others, just as I was warning others before it came out Nvidia had made a batch with faulty solder or how I warn people now that Seagate drives over 500GB seem to be having crazy high failure rates.
I DO have a question though, what was the firmware number you were on and which did you try to upgrade to, if you remember? As I stated in an earlier posting a lot of those devices can NOT have in between firmware skipped without serious risk of bricking so I am curious whether you applied the previous updates and it still bricked, or if you tried to go straight to the latest and that is when it crapped out.
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That they make their money off of ads and RHEL users probably have ABP? Lets face it the way Google datamines it can probably tell you to the cent how much each particular OS makes them and I bet RHEL doesn't even make a blip on the big board.
But why does anybody even care? I thought the whole point of FOSS is not being beholden to the corps for support, right? so why hasn't somebody just compiled Chromium from source and slapped it out there as a replacement, or does the phone home add ons Google sticks in somehow increase its value to the community?
Frankly this is one thing the community shouldn't give two shits about because browsers are plentiful, you have choices and pretty much all of them will render the majority of the web the same. If Google drops you from Chrome fuck 'em, you got FF and Chromium and QTWeb (pretty nice cross platform that even runs off a flash stick, its nice) and a ton of variants to Gecko and Chromium, so why worry? Why care? Give Google the finger and move on, not like its hard to move your bookmarks over and keep right on truckin.
This is why you just GOTTA love this, the irony is so moist and delicious. I mean here you have the guy the libertarians practically worship as a god...and he's trying to pull an eminent domain rather than pay the market value for something he wants!
To me this just shows the true stripes of many of those that claim to be libertarians as its all about greed. Most of the time they think they can get more wealth by getting governments out of the way but if it works in their favor? Fuck it they want more and more and MOAR!
Does WebM support games? animation? Nope, sorry you fail. Also again you name the browser i'll put the same video in flash and WebM and we'll take screencaps of CPU and RAM usage and I can tell you WebM will suck MORE juice than Flash at the same res.
So try again, the world isn't all C2Ds with GPU acceleration, there are a ton of low power devices and on those HTML V5 and WebM are made of suck and fail.
Well if you'll show me HTML V5 running on ANY of those under Linux I'll be happy to agree. But you are trying to claim that because Adobe doesn't support FOURTEEN YEAR OLD chips that this makes HTML in some way a better choice? How EXACTLY when I've found you name the browser, FF, Chrome, Safari,IE, Opera, doesn't matter which HTML V5 video is a slideshow on anything less than a dual core with GPU acceleration.
Completely different sitch as there you had the designers specifically advising you NOT to incrementally update but to skip straight to the end. in a case like that if their advice bricks i figure it wouldn't be hard to sue, after all you are following explicit instructions by the maker of the hardware and by doing so the device was ruined.
But what I've found, especially when it comes to motherboard BIOS, is you check the readme and all you find is a list of changes from the last firmware release to this one with jack squat said about previous versions or whether they can be skipped. Since they aren't talking about anything but the release before current its pretty safe to assume that is what they focused on NOT going straight from RTM to the latest and greatest.
There is an old saying that begins "fool me once" that is applicable here, if you keep buying from a vendor that repeatedly screws you then frankly you DESERVE to be screwed.
Now when I say "never" does that mean i wouldn't give the company a second chance if its reported they have worked to fix their bad rep? Of course not, companies can change hands, new management can clean up a place that behaved badly in the past, situations CAN change. But that doesn't mean you should just blindly go back without doing your homework. In the cases i cited Abit (now defunct because of bad rep) never showed any signs of changing while Biostar can be a great board....as long as you remember you can ONLY use chips that were released BEFORE the board was as their CPU lists are full of shit. With Nvidia after we learned that they had a whole rev that was garbage and they KNEW it was garbage and shipped anyway? AMD would have to do as least as big a fuck up before i gave them a second look because that level of crooked is hard to get out of a company culture, finally Seagate frankly hasn't figured out how to make large drives worth a crap yet so until they do they'll be on my avoid list.
At the end of the day all you can do is avoid the companies that are screwing customers while watching to see if they clean up their act. But if you don't bother seeing if things are different and just blindly continue to buy then another saying that starts "a fool and their money" is applicable.
Funny you should mention that as while the doctors and doctor's assistants seemed to have embraced the tech the rest of the nurses? Really seem to dislike them. When I asked it was because of all the hand sanitizers they have to use which makes the screens nasty quick so they prefer the keyboard with the usual medical software which from what I've seen is pretty much all old VB 6 style "fill in the blank/ pull down the list" kind of stuff.
Again this is just what I've seen and learned from talking with nurses but you are right about the docs and iPads, even my doc who is a bit of a Luddite ended up going to an iPad. His assistant on the other hand uses a Win 7 Tablet and when i asked he said the software that he needs isn't on iPad yet but if it ever came out for an iPad he would switch in a heartbeat, for the same reason you cited which is the battery.
I just don't get WTF they are thinking putting an i5 in the thing, talk about a battery killer. A MUCH better choice IMHO would be something like the AMD jaguar "quad" (which is really a dual with HT) as that is a lot lower battery requirements and would let them get closer to having a full day on the thing than the 3.4 hours it gets now. as much as i love X86 full blown X86 chips just need too much power and generate too much heat to go for a thin and light tablet with good battery life, as you said you end up with a brick.
I was just trying to find a place it would make sense, I have been told it may make sense in doctor's offices but frankly I've serviced several doctor's offices and the touchscreens they got from a previous vendor? they never use the things as the hand sanitizers they have to use all day quickly make the screens nasty.
But I figured that if i could name a positive at least it wouldn't look like I was trying to bash but honestly one simple fact leads me to believe the Surface pro is full of fail and it is thus: You can buy a nice AMD quad or Core i3 laptop for $400 with win 7, that runs the old software great, gets good battery life, hell they'll even do 1080P over HDMI so slapping it into any screen if you need even more real estate is trivial. You can pick up a Kindle Fire for IIRC $200, that gives you a thin and light tablet with tons of apps and is well supported. by going this route not only do you have the ability to use both devices at the same time or can replace one without replacing the other but you also save $300 and that is if you get the low end Surface pro that is frankly starved for space. The laptop will come with a minimum of 320GB and most come with 500GB so all those older Windows programs you want to run will have plenty of space while the kindle fire has the "grab and go" thing down pat.
So I just don't see an upside to the surface pro, I really don't. It would be like replacing the steering wheel on a car with bike handlebars. Sure handlebars are great...on the small and light bike form factor but on a car it would be a worse interface than the one you had and looking at the Surface pro that is what it feels like to me. They are bragging it'll run Windows programs but Windows programs aren't made for touch, they are made for keyboard and mouse and frankly the metro appstore just isn't very nice or have a lot of business apps, it feels more like "Tweets for twits and FB shit" which is fine for home users...who won't pay $900 for a Surface pro when they can get a laptop and Kindle fire and save a pile of cash.
But ultimately it comes down to the fact that MSFT is either gonna have to learn to accept less revenue per OS to get people to adopt (oh and kill Metro with Fire as most really hate the damned thing) like say $35 for Home and $70 for Pro or they are gonna have to get the bulk of their revenue from things like the Xbox instead of Windows and Office. Because the simple fact is the MHz wars are over, PCs are insanely overpowered and most folks won't need to replace but once every 5-7 years if that, most folks simply can't stress out even a first gen Phenom triple or Core Duo so the systems are lasting longer than ever. The same goes for the Office cash cow as most of my customers have stopped upgrading at 2K3 or 2K7 and are happy to stay where they are, the new bells and whistles on later versions just have no appeal.
Hi Mrs AC shill? How is the pay from MSFT these days? in case you want to know what gave it away its the fact that you said Win 8 "launched" only 2 days ago. We all know that is a crock of shit but MSFT in its memos have been calling the release of Surface pro a "relaunch" of Win 8 so only those that are following the "reboot" theory, which is pretty much confined to Redmond, are buying that bullshit.
I mean do I REALLY have to wallpaper this page with all the figures showing win 8 has been bombing since it flopped onto the market in Oct, how the MSFT team is trying to blame OEMs for not building a pile of $1000 WinTabs that the OEMs rightly pointed out would sell about as well as the few $1000 Tablets they had which is to say none at all, so they would have ended up in the same warehouse the failed ultrabooks is now rotting in. I can also of course paste link after link of OEMs saying the same thing, win 8 is a flop that makes the Vista launch look like Win95, and of course the press have dubbed it "Windows Frankenstein" and written articles that say "Windows 8 yes its THAT bad". and even the tech writers are uninstalling it. Of course some of us and some tech sites pointed out this would happen awhile ago because it ignores even basic user conventions. while giving ZERO context or even hints as to WTF the user is supposed to do. in my own experience this is what I saw in my shop only with more frustration and cursing involved.
So if you need more links Mrs AC shill please feel free to ask, not like anything I've been saying is exactly new or radical. Nice thing about speaking the truth, you can provide plenty of citations. and just for the record i have been a Windows user and seller since 3.1 and there have only been TWO, count 'em two, times I've not stayed with and sold a version of Windows. First was WinME which was inferior in every way to Win98, the second is Windows 8. Yes I ran Vista and sold Vista units until I saw it was gonna take MSFT ages to fix the bugs I kept running into but with both winME and Win 8 the experience was just too nasty for me to dump on users, I'm sorry but they sucked the big wet titty.
Not with the Yahoo porn bug as I took one of the spare boxes at the shop and decided to do a little test to see how it basically worked.
What it did was hide in the ads or in the page itself, as I saw it keep happening even if ABP was installed and it called a hidden iFrame that would load the yahoo login page and if the person didn't have a master password set that would have to be input to unlock the password auto fill (which most folks don't) it would use the auto fill to log in to the person's yahoo page and send spam through the entire address book. I even uninstalled Flash to see if its a Flash bug (I don't install Java on any systems) and it still works just fine without Flash as its in the pages themselves.
It was and is actually a pretty smart little trick. they aren't sending any data to themselves directly as the messages are just a single hyperlink so its hard for many AVs to catch it, auto fill is something everyone takes for granted with modern browsers so nearly everybody will have it, its a smart little hack. I know the only way I was able to make my users immune was to switch them from FF to Comodo Dragon because dragon like the other Chromium based runs in low rights mode in Win 7 which seems to kill their ability to call the hidden iFrame. For those on XP I had to give them a separate browser from what they used daily that is used for porn and ONLY porn so it has no yahoo mail addresses to call.
Except we are talking about a system that processes in base 2 so what some standard says means jack and squat. You build me a computer that processes in base 10 instead of binary? Then I'll be happy to support base 10 being the standard when it comes to computers. But since the days of those giant tube monsters that helped win WWII the machines have been binary, on/off, yes/no, however you want to call it, and its stupid to try to stick base 10 rules on a base 2 system.
Besides fellow geeks let us not forget this horseshit was started by marketing specifically the hard drive manufacturers during the race to 1GB. I remember before it became a "race" that it was listed in base 2 but once the HDD companies realized they could charge a premium if they got past certain metrics then anything they could do to make those metrics happen were just fine.
So please don't buy into marketing bullshit okay? Base 10 works great for standards in the living world because we are base 10 creature and have been since we started counting on our fingers and toes soon after climbing down from the trees. But what we are talking about here isn't a human, its a computer, and computers are binary. Trying to stick base 10 rules on a base 2 world just makes no sense and the whole point of it was deception to allow marketing to say they reached a metric they hadn't and we lose more each year to this.
You went to a site like Redtube or XHamster and watched a porn video didn't you? Frankly this bug has been going on for awhile, it seems to be an "on again off again" kind of cat and mouse game between the guys writing the bug and yahoo. I wrote in my journal nearly a year ago about the "Yahoo porn bug" and how it would send spam from the entire address book (including to the person who hit the bug so they always end up with spam from themselves) and it sounds like the NZ folks are running into it now just by clicking a link in their email.
In any case it sounds like the same bug I have been seeing folks get off and on for nearly a year just ramped up. Maybe the porn bug was an early test?
The sad part if Cook really has no choice in the matter when you think about it. The way steve jobs was able to keep the Apple premium so high for so long is he would find new markets so they were always cutting edge and thus could charge a premium while they are the only game in town or the competition is behind. if Apple sticks with one market too long they risk taking a trip to commodity land which is someplace Apple just doesn't want to go. i mean look at how few Macbooks they sell compared to laptops, or how Android is exploding with a bazillion competitors in the phone and tablet space.
No if Cook wants to keep that Apple premium they have no choice but to find new markets or end up trapped with their competitors racing to the bottom. Will it work with a watch? i kinda doubt it, watches tend to come off as nerdy not to mention i'm seeing more and more young folks not even bothering with watches because they have a smartphone that they use for everything. But its not like Cook has a choice as the longer they stay in a market the more it will sour. sure there will always be iFans that will buy the latest and great iAnything but as a retailer i can tell you when everything starts becoming equal the customers starts looking at price. Android up to 2.x just wasn't in the same ballpark and now that's not the case, now Cook has to find them a new market so they can keep that trendsetter image and keep the premium high.
That is one of the reasons i love my old Ranger, while it won't run on all the stuff yours will run on frankly it isn't picky about gas or octane, I could probably run moonshine and it wouldn't care.
But as they keep raising the required MPG there isn't gonna be many that can tolerate like the old vehicles can and that is gonna lead to a LOT of burnt motors and cars ending up scraped before their time. I have a friend that is a mechanic at a small shop and he says they are seeing a LOT more burned rings and other problems that can be traced back to ethanol running too hot in those engines. Our old Fords have big old cast iron blocks, take a lot of heat those can, but these little lightweight motors just can't tolerate it like we can.
if I had my way I'd ban ethanol and instead put that money into building a "peoples car/truck" that got at least 40MPG and ran on diesel, then I would subsidize the poor to get them moved over so we can get all those used cars that suck gas off the road. If we were to do this we could then look at alternatives like switchgrass or biodiesel or any number of choices while at the same time cutting our gas usage by more than half (average MPG in the states thanks to the poor driving old cars is just 14MPG) and helping the poor keep more money in their pocket. It would be a win/win but of course that is why it'll never happen, no way to hand out lots of kickbacks like you can with ethanol.
Wanna know what is sad bbsalem? we are gonna end up missing the hell out of MSFT when its all over. Looked at how locked down a ChromeBook is lately? How you have to do "dev mode" and wipe the drive and ONLY use a hacked bootloader version of Ubuntu just to use what is bog standard X86 hardware? have you looked at how locked down Apple devices are, how they have to be Jailbroke to do shit?
personally I think MSFT has made some good products and they made some bad products. Win2K was good, XP X64 was good, Win 7 was good, and they also made plenty of stinkers and as you say they aren't a nice company...but at least i could do WTF I wanted with my hardware. if I don't like Vista I can put on any MSFT OS or Linux or BSD or half a dozen other choices but if things continue the way they have been its gonna be consoles all the way down and I think that's really sad.
Its honestly because the MSM and the government are hand in glove now is EXACTLY why we get so "distracted" its because its by design! I mean why do you think our "news" now looks like the Inquirer and even our presidential "debates" are about issues like gays in the military or other fluff shit that ultimately don't mean jack shit?
Its because decades of money and pandering have made the government and big business one and the same so the only "issues" you'll be given are those that won't affect the corporate bottom line, like abortion or gays. Think the big corps give a rat's ass about either of those?
If you want people to start thinking and questioning friend here is one little fact that will help open their eyes: Why is it that somebody from Goldman Sachs has run the fed almost from the day it was started, no matter if there was a D or an R in the White House? Its because of this Mayer Amschel Rothschild quote: "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws".
The easiest way I've found to explain it to people is this: Why can you not fix a corrupt system by working within that system? Because its corrupt! To think you can fix the system by electing somebody is as silly and insane as thinking if you play craps with loaded dice against you that if you play long enough you'll win. How many years have people asked for less wars? For smaller government? For less spying and more freedom? Its no accident that Obama and Bush are so much alike when it comes to policy, they have the same master who told them STFU and read the cue card.
No because remember the designers only test going from 1.3 to 1.4 and for all you know they had some significant changes to the way that data is stored in the BIOS (No devices do a full clean wipe when you update firmware, some settings are saved) so that when you go from 1.1-1.4 which was never tested you end up corrupting some data because X was supposed to be stored in Y but that was only placed there in V 1.3, before that X was stored in W which just got shit on so you are SOL and enjoy your new doorstop.
Again in theory your point is logical, you just have to remember the business side of things. The guys writing 1.4 may not be the guys that wrote 1.1 and 1.2 and thus have no idea that before the 1.3 change that X was stored in W, they are just going by 1.3 which says X is stored in Y so THAT is what they are expecting.
When you remember you are dealing with guys that may not have had jack shit to do with any firmware pre 1.3 and are on a tight schedule and have to get 1.4 out the door you can see why they just expect everyone to be on 1.3 as it makes their job a hell of a lot easier. is this the right way, or the smart way to do it? Nope but that is just how it goes sometimes so better safe than sorry.
Yeah you would THINK that would be the case, but it ain't. The way I had it explained to me when talking to a high tier tech support one day is that the firmware devs ONLY test going from the last release to this one, they don't test what about going from RTM to the new release and THAT is what bites you in the ass.
Like I said by only going through each firmware to get current I have NEVER had a brick, but I've worked at plenty of places where that wasn't the policy and about 1 in 3 firmware updates ended up with bricks. Is that smart? is that best software practices? Nope but its human nature, these guys are only getting paid to make an update from F to G, not do regression testing from A-G so it don't get done. of course this is why I also try to buy boards that have BIOS backups so if they ever put out a shitty release i can recover but knock on plastic so far its not been needed..
Dude what are you typing this on? The Internet, the place that never forgets. hell I've found drivers for Win 3.1 hardware, took awhile but damned if some place in India didn't have the Win 3.1 and Win95 drivers i need to get that old CNC up and running.
if you can't call it up on the net call Dell and have a royal bitchfit until they get you a higher tier of support, threaten to buy a shitload of HP gear and see how quick they give you somebody with a little authority. demand and don't get off the phone until the in between revs are sitting in your inbox with a "please leave us alone now" note attached. trust me it DOES work, sometimes you just gotta be a prick. that is one thing I miss about the shop I worked at in the state capital, I had a little Indian girl working there with a fiery temper that I would hand the phone to if they tried dicking me around at tier 1. You wanna watch them change their tune just put a pissed off girl cursing in Hindi on the line to Indian tech support and you'd be amazed at how quickly I'd be talking to Joe in Oregon who actually knew WTF I was talking about and who had access to the company FTP server.
Actually it will NOT sell except to a few niches like taking inventory and here is why: Business runs on OLD SOFTWARE. Check any business, be they large or small, and look at the age of the software. Business has tons and tons of old software because the cost of replacing it all would be insane and "if it ain't broke?".
What does that have to do with Surface pro? simple what UI was all that old software written for? A mouse and keyboard. ever try to use mouse and keyboard software on a touchscreen? sucks big hairy balls as the software either has too small a target to hit or it doesn't know WTF you are trying to do and it becomes a guessing game to figure out WTF it'll take to get what you want in using the touchscreen.
But this comes down to the core of what MSFT has a serious problem with and why they need to try to stop aping Apple and Google and ape IBM instead. You see Apple and Google? Its all Apple and Google software on Apple and Google hardware and backwards compatibility don't mean shit to them, this is the exact opposite of the MSFT situation where ALL they have going for them is backwards compatibility. Nobody buys MSFT OSes to look at the wallpaper, they buy it because they have an assload of older software not written by MSFT they need to run and all that software, billions of dollars worth, wasn't designed for touchscreens.
Apple is ultimately a consumer electronics company, no different than those that sell TVs or consoles. Google is an ad company that don't have to worry about anything other than making sure the browser takes you to Google, MSFT is a 30 year old company with a shitload of software written by others that had damned well better "just work" and it just won't on a slab. This is why IBM makes a better company to ape, sell services to go with that software, but Ballmer can click his heels and say "There is no place like Cupertino" all he wants and he will never turn MSFT into Apple, its just two different business models that just don't work together.
Not to mention if you have a fine tuned motor it'll turn it to shit. Some old Ford frankly can be run on moonshine and it won't care, but drop that into a BMW or Mercedes and watch how soon it ends up in the shop.
at the end of the day its just another scam, just like how the government pays some rich farms not to grow (It came out several years ago David Letterman gets like 3 million a year to let some land of his just be a weed field thanks to the government) its just one of a billion kickbacks to the big corps that support the politicians with checks. They don't give a shit if it damages cars or makes it harder for poor people to eat anything made with corn, cause 'fuck them, when did they cut us a check?" is the order of the day in DC. you follow the money and the ones championing ethanol are the ones getting big fat checks by those that benefit.
If they purposely understocked the Nexus to make it look hotter than it was then they need to be called out on it, just as we are seeing sites call MSFT out for understocking to try to make Surface look like less of a fail.
We already know SurfaceRT and Win 8 have bombed HARD, not only did MSFT not get the traditional Xmas bounce like they have had for every previous release for ages but sales actually went down 12%, and we've seen the WinPhone fail, MSFT blaming the OEMs because they wouldn't build $1000 WinTabs to join the Ultrabooks in the big pile of unwanted shit, look we ALL know the score here. But as a small shop owner there is one thing that made my mind up for anything Win 8 not to be had in my shop (The first since WinME) and that was the fact I had a beautiful Athlon triple system running win 8 for nearly 7 months and not ONE offer, not one. Nobody wanted it. I put win 7 on? It sold in 3 days.
Will they sell SOME Surface pro units? Sure, there is a Zune owners club you know, in today's market you can find a small niche for just about any product. Look at what WinXP and Win 7 tablets sold and that will probably be what Surface pro sells, but at the end of the day Ballmer is bound and determined to make Windows a "premium" brand and that just isn't gonna happen, it would be like doing a re-release of the Pinto and having it priced to compete with Ferrari, it just ain't gonna happen. If he believes in metro so much he should spin it off and let THAT be the premium brand and Windows be the regular brand, but at the end of the day it just isn't gonna work this way. after all WHAT is the selling point of Surface pro? "You can use all your windows programs on it!". Really, so it is magically gonna make those millions of programs that were designed around a keyboard/mouse UI work on a touch UI?
While I don't own any Apple products, I think they are overpriced and have too much control by Apple, i have to give credit where credit is due and they were SMART to not jam OSX on a tablet and call it an iPad. Trouble for MSFT is X86 backwards compatibility is really their only selling point. Nobody buys Windows because they LIKE MSFT or want to stare lovingly at a WinFlag, they buy it because they have a ton of software NOT written by MSFT they want to run. Apple didn't have that problem as the biggest apps like iTunes were owned by Apple. So at the end of the day while I'm sure they'll sell a few it sure as fuck isn't gonna "save the company" or be any kind of "iPad/Android killer" and they can lowball the units all they want, at the end of the day i predict it'll be another Zune.
Dude its Slashdot. The catch phrase should be "Slashdot: news for nerds who can put up with bad TFAs because they probably won't read 'em anyway".
As for TFA, I'm sorry but he is full of shit. why is he full of shit? Simple because every Flash replacement we have is broken that is why. the ONLY replacement I've seen heralded is HTML V5 which is a pile of ass and fail, you pick any size and I'll show you HTML V5 using at LEAST 40% more resources than flash, in fact i have several machines like my nettop and netbook that play SD flash just fine, even low res HTML V5 is a slideshow. Again name the browser, it'll suck balls compared to Flash.
Then you have the fact that its pretty much useless for anything other than video, so Flash games and animation aren't even covered by this "Flash replacement" and you have a giant pile of fail and suck. i mean sure the OEMs like Apple want you using it, not only does it give them the lucrative casual gaming market but its resource sucking means it'll sell more hardware. it would be like "Canyonero by Shell, gets 2 MPG but does so in STYLE" would you buy that? Then why are you buying a Flash replacement from companies like fricking Apple that have serious conflicts of interest?
Show me a format that is 100% patent and copyright unencumbered that does the same jobs Flash does in the same footprint? I will climb to the tallest tower and sing its praises. But what we are doing now is just fucking retarded, we are letting one of the most closed control freak companies on the planet dictate what format the web is gonna run on...you HONESTLY think they ain't gonna tilt things in their favor? Who was it that blocked drac and Theora from being the HTML V5 video format? why I believe that was Apple and MSFT...gee, i wonder why?
Wake the fuck up people and stop drinking the iKoolaid. yes Adobe hasn't got even a good much less great security track record but one thing that have an EXCELLENT record on is letting you run it anywhere. want to put it in your distro? Go right ahead. H.26x? Cut us a check bitch. You want to make a FOSS version of Flash called Gnash? help thyself. try that with H.264 and see how quick your ass ends up in court.
We are taking an okay format and trading it for golden handcuffs folks, its fucking stupid and needs to be stopped. Want to kill Flash? Great then give us something that can do the same jobs that isn't controlled by Apple and MSFT, two companies with frankly appalling track records when it comes to fucking people over. Don't let yourself end up in worse shape than you were before just because something is buggy. Bugs can be fixed or we can go a new way but just handing the web to two douchey companies is anything but smart, hell both Apple and MSFT are the 2 most sue happy companies around and have a stake in MPEG-LA, you think they want an open anything?
You're welcome. I know money can be tight and this way you have a low cost to get started yet you have plenty of room to upgrade down the line. my PC started with an Athlon X2 with 2GB of RAM and a 400GB HDD and just by getting a part here and a part there I'm up to a Phenom II X6 and 8GB of RAM and 3TB of HDD space.
The key with buying is to just make sure you have options down the line. you get a board that supports a LOT of CPUs, has plenty of RAM slots and SATA slots and then it doesn't matter if you have to use an X2 or 2GB RAM stick NOW as you can just add a part here and a part there as money becomes available.
One bit of advice though, when it comes to AMD I recommend the Hyper 212 (around $14) or the N520 (around $30) coolers over the stock, one thing AMD is bad about is sticking weak HSFs on systems to save money. Nice thing about either of those coolers is they both will fit just about any mATX case (especially the N520 as its compact and uses 92mm fans) and you can keep the cooler when you upgrade. I've found the 212 will drop it a good 12 degrees minimum while the N520 shaves nearly 20 degrees F off the system. Since heat is the killer of CPUs its a good investment and will extend the life of the system.
Moral of the story: If a company screws you NEVER buy from them again. Abit screwed me on their CPU support list which turned out if the chip wasn't released prior to the board? They didn't test squat, just looked at the voltage which of course doesn't magically tell you if the CPU will work so I never bought from them again, same thing with Biostar when I had to buy a new board because their CPU support list said the X6 was supported and it turned out that like Abit they were ONLY looking at the watts on the box and ignoring that later Phenoms have turbocore which requires a boost to wattage when it activates.
At the end of the day all you can do is not buy from them again and warn others, just as I was warning others before it came out Nvidia had made a batch with faulty solder or how I warn people now that Seagate drives over 500GB seem to be having crazy high failure rates.
I DO have a question though, what was the firmware number you were on and which did you try to upgrade to, if you remember? As I stated in an earlier posting a lot of those devices can NOT have in between firmware skipped without serious risk of bricking so I am curious whether you applied the previous updates and it still bricked, or if you tried to go straight to the latest and that is when it crapped out.