You CREATE an email, you CREATE content that goes into FB. Now you can debate whether that "content" you created is worth anything but LOLCats has shown that just because something is dumb doesn't mean it has no value.
But again if we go by the definition in TFA, which seems to think pretty much anything with a screen, a CPU, and RAM is a "PC" then you have to count every game console ever created, after all they have screens, either built in or plug in, they have memory, they have CPUs that run software. Hell by that definition most modern TVs are now PCs, those little cheap media tanks like WDTV and Nbox are now PCs, pretty much anything built with electronics in it in the last few years would fit under that umbrella.
And while you CAN create art on a tablet, by that definition you CAN create art on a console, after all there is a "chiptunes" community that does nothing but hack old systems and use their chips to make music, but it would be hard to argue that the vast majority or even a significant minority did this, same with tablets. With a desktop or laptop everybody creates with it, even my LOL customers and young customers create with a PC, they create emails, they post to various websites, they make their little book reports or make their little recipe printouts, I would find it hard to argue that the majority of the time on a PC wasn't used creating something with it.
But just from watching and speaking with customers, and since I get folks from all walks of life i kinda doubt this place is any different from any other in this regard, I've found the vast majority of time spent on cellphones and tablets is passive or more akin to a game console. They watch the video, they play the little physics games, that's about it. the most I've ever seen a customer use a touchscreen keyboard for is looking up on IMDB who some actor is and where they know him from and other than typing the character or show name even that is passive, its poking through a couple of screens until you get the info you want. you don't add to that info, or edit that info, or create new info, you just consume.
And to me that is the difference in a nutshell, non PCs are more passive, PCs are more active.
Well like I said I'm happy to disagree and debate the points of this or that and I'm open to change my opinion, that to me is the whole point of tech sites, a place where geeks can get together and discuss things that most couldn't care less about but which we find interesting. But when he came up with this delusion that I am actually dozens of people in dozens of professions all posting against him? Who in the fuck would go to all that trouble?
Anybody who has read jack squat that I have posted know that you can spot my writing style a mile away, there was a couple of old sites that I used my original gamertag on before the whole "hairyfeet" thing stuck (that is what I get for reading LOTR while trying to find a UID that/. would take, stupid me) and it wouldn't be 3 posts before they would say "You sound like hairyfeet from/." so its not like I'd be any good at pretending to be somebody else, I'm too set in my ways and my language too obvious.
As for why Linux never goes anywhere after bashing my head against the wall for 7 years dealing with the devs and the "community" I now truly believe its not an Operating System at all, its a collection of little fiefdoms where everybody ignores everybody else and does their own thing and then the distros just slap all this shit that was made with zero consideration of what anybody else was doing into a pile, calls it an "OS" and shoves it out the door. I mean look at all the major guttings we've seen in the last 6 years, think ANY sane company would rip out so many pieces at once or willy nilly like that?
This is why Google with Android and ChromeOS can succeed despite the fact they being more locked down and intrusive, because Google actually puts someone in charge that says "You can't do that, it has to be thus so it'll work" and they listen. With Linux Torvalds is ignoring the DE guys who don't care about the audio guys who don't talk to the networking guys and nobody cares one bit about the application guys so what you get is it manages to work on ONE install (the developer's system) and they go "fuck it, that'll do" and there you go, a rough pile of little programs thrown together that collapses if you look at it wrong. this works in server because most of it is frankly never installed, a lot easier to get something working if you don't need a GUI or wireless or sound, it works in embedded because nobody is gonna update the thing and like server they strip it down to the least amount they can use and still have it work, but on a modern desktop or laptop people expect a working GUI, they expect the sound to work, they expect that new wireless card they got to function, yet all these things are run by little groups with zero interaction...is it any wonder it goes nowhere?
Oh I agree completely, just look at how VB 6 even after all these years of abandonment by MSFT is still the #3 language. But the poster I was responding to was making it sound that being "big in enterprise" somehow made something "good" and that just isn't the case. if something is big in enterprise its just big in enterprise, not like they have a panel of "experts" that judge various software and declare "yes this IS good enough for the enterprise, blue ribbon". Be nice if that were so but all the badly written Excel and Access "apps" show that is far from the case.
Frankly I don't give a rat's ass if Assange's favorite sport is kicking little old ladies down the stairs because all these "articles" are just plants (see the post above you with an expose on where a LOT of them come from) trying to get us away from the truth which is its not about anybody at Wikileaks its about THE DATA which nobody has ever claimed is less than 100% genuine, even the governments who dirty laundry was aired.
I mean here you have this huge pile of docs that show corruption, dirty dealing, even human trafficking by a PMC yet we are supposed to ignore ALL that and pay attention to whether Assange is an asshole or not? Does anybody else feel a "ignore the man behind the curtain" going on here? At the end of the day I don't give a shit if Assange walks around in slippers made from freshly killed puppies, because he AIN'T the one dropping bombs, hiring PMCs, and stirring shit up all over the world causing countless deaths, is here? I mean if he is the biggest douchebag in the history of douchebags, so what? focus on the data, THAT is what is important!
That would be a legitimate argument IF Oracle didn't have Java re-enable the damned plug in (along with providing crapware) every time you run the latest security update. So whether the Java fans like it or not if you didn't install java there wouldn't be the constant security updates that re-enable the plugin that then leaves a door you could drive a truck through ready for the next malware.
Thanks for the info, I'll be sure to tell customers that are thinking about SSDs about TrueCrypt. I wonder how well that CPU load would be handled on a netbook? I have plenty of customers with AMD and ION based netbooks and I always thought slapping an SSD in one of those might give it a good kick in the pants.
I just think its kinda sad myself. I mean can you imagine having so little life that you would spend hours on a search engine, just trying to find one guy you've NEVER met and who wouldn't know you from Adam if you ran into each other, and go through all that trouble just to throw some pointless insults that affect him not at all, all because you have so damned much of your self esteem tied into of all things...an OPERATING SYSTEM? Really?
As I told him when he first started his batshit crazies "I have dozens of brands that I like, feel free to insult them all day long as I DO NOT CARE, I don't have stock in these companies, they have never done anything but sell me a product, my self esteem is not phased in the slightest by somebody saying a product i like is shit, or even having childish insults thrown at me. Life is good for the most part, seeing bad words said about me on a page affects me not at all."
Just sad that somebody can waste so much of their life over a "crusade" that is even more pointless than jousting windmills.
I just think its asinine that ALL of us must pay for what probably not even 5% of the PC buyers even use. Do YOU have a BD in your PC? Out of all my customers I have exactly ONE, just one, that has a BD in his PC...he uses it for backups.
So I think its just insane that AMD can't hand out something as basic and required as basic video decode for fear of getting in trouble with the media cartels and that they have to bake this DRM in if you are gonna use it or not. Make the media cartels support a simple DRM PCI card or even a USB DRM dongle and sell those with BD players, the rest of us just want to watch our videos with hardware acceleration, thanks.
And I don't know why the iFanboys get so mad at that fact. Hell look at how much Nike makes off of Air Jordans, would you call that anything OTHER than fashion?
Apple has spent years cultivating the "toy of the rich" culture and it has made them the largest company on the planet, why should anybody get pissed that its about fashion? some of the biggest names on the planet are all about fashion and they are doing great, Prada, Porsche, Ferrari, heck I've seen 7 year old Ferraris getting sold for less than $15k, why? Because owning a used Ferrari destroys the entire point of owning a Ferrari, which is the "I am wealthy" vibe that comes with the car.
Let me put it THIS way: Do you think a $1000 app that just put a red jewel on the front and called "I am rich" would have sold even a single copy on Android or Windows?
Thank you, you said it better than I ever could. This is why I call them PMP because that is pretty much the model that the corps have adopted for these devices, no different than a game console or any other locked down device designed to primarily sell you content to run on it. I mean would we call a Wii or Playstation a "PC" now? After all they also have chips and can run software approved by corporate. If it has to have a screen, what about the DS? The gameboy? Again they have software, a chip, memory, if that is all that is gonna be needed to call something a "PC" the list is gonna end up quite long.
I don't see MSFT adding support in VPC, after all the want to shove people onto their latest and greates and sell 'em apps from the appstore, using old software doesn't support that goal. What we need is a free VM like Virtualbox that will do GPU acceleration in Win9X and XP guests, some sort of pass through or translation to OpenGL, as win9X was when the first games that truly required decent GPUs appeared.
As far as ReactOS win 7 for both 32bit and 64bit would probably be the better target, you could integrate VirtualBox for XP mode and not only are they only having to build and debug one OS but if they went XP they'd need to backport a lot of stuff, support for modern SSDs for example. I agree that Win 7 is a "good enough" Windows that Win 7 64bit would cover pretty much any foreseeable hardware so that should probably be the main goal.
Actually it took a president that was rich enough to not be bribed AND idealistic to stop the robber barons, Teddy "busted the trusts" and used the bully pulpit to pass laws that curbed the power of the robber barons.
Sadly most of those laws were watered down or outright abolished under Ronnie Raygun, or "Mr De-Reg" as I call him, The reps may worship at an altar to Raygun but most of us that grew up during the era of Raygun saw he was basically handing the rich a blank check, see the vets sleeping in tents while Raygun set up 401Ks and 403Bs to funnel ever more money into the stock market.
Why was this labeled troll? I've been saying since the ODF took control that we frankly shouldn't judge LibreOffice until they had time to excise Java (which Sun jammed in all over the place) and modularize the code, until then they are gonna be busy cleaning up the mess that Sun made.
But considering how risky Java is and how much of LO depends on having Java it should really be looked at as just writer with some WIP stuff that really won't be useful until its rebuilt. If you don't install java there is just a lot of LO that doesn't work, sorry but its true unless they've managed to do a rewrite since 3.4 which i kinda doubt.
To me the difference is really quite trivial. Is it created for primarily consumption or does creation play a large part to its existence? If its the former its not a PC, its more of a PMP, whereas the second has always been the domain of the PC. Can you easily create content on an iMac or Macbook? yep so those are PCs. Is that the primary purpose of a tablet like the iPad? Well when looking at the biggest products on the platform, which is primarily time wasters like Angry Birds and of course plenty of media from iTunes I would say that's a no, its a PMP.
Its really not that hard folks and if we are gonna start counting tablets and phones then pretty much anything with a chip and a way to hook to a screen or having a built in screen would count as a "PC". But I really don't see too many people saying that $60 Kindle or $100 Android tablet is a full fledged "PC".
Look if the fanboys wanna brag that Apple is the biggest company, or ships the most products? I really have no problem with that, whatever makes you happy. But don't start twisting the language all to hell just to make Apple look even better, they really don't need the help.
Actually, and while I agree 100% that a free market can never exist (and when we got close to one we got "the age of the robber barons") one could reasonably argue that the reason the US corps have become so damned short sighted is the fact that the government has blown a MASSIVE stock market bubble using instruments like 401K and 403B and even pumping cash directly into the system.
What is wrong with that? Its actually quite simple, as the video i linked to demonstrates, what happens is by throwing all this money into the stock market you change it from an investor market to a speculator market. The reason this is bad is an investor market rewards companies that plan long term, that produce real growth and which grow their bottom line through actual growth.
The speculator market is all about the "quick flip" so it doesn't care if the company will even exist tomorrow, its all about the short term bump. For examples of the damage this can cause just look at Westinghouse, where the CEO brought in to "save the company" just sold all the valuable assets, got a short term bounce and cashed out, or Circuit City where the CEO simply fired everybody that was making a decent wage while ignoring that was their best sales staff. Again short term bounce and cash out, final result the company left in ruins. We'll see if that ends up the final fate of AMD who according to a former engineer had a similar slash and burn pulled by a previous CEO who fired all their chip designers and replaced them with computer layouts with predictable results. But again this doesn't matter if all you are looking for is a short term bounce that will allow you to cash out, you can then walk away with a big fat check while the company burns.
So as long as you have the government flooding ever larger sums of money into such a small market, so that you have more and more money chasing fewer and fewer stocks, then short term gains are the only gains that will really matter. Wall Street has gone from its roots as a place where a company could show a sound business plan and get much needed capital into Las Vegas with nicer outfits and sadly the only way to fix it is gonna hurt no matter how you slice it. I'd say a good 40%+ of our "financial district" doesn't need to exist and wouldn't if not for all the money flowing from DC to wall Street, that is a LOT of people that are gonna end up out of work but frankly it has to be done, otherwise like the housing bubble eventually you won't be able to keep feeding the monster and the bubble will blow. Be sure to look at the graphic at around the 3.20 mark, look at how much of our GDP was in there right before the 29 crash (which took a world war crushing our competition and still took until 53 to dig out of) and how much is in there today, its truly frightening how many life savings are sitting there waiting to evaporate.
I don't see how the DoJ could say squat when all MSFT would have to do is point to how Apple and Google both sell services to their respective OSes and Apple pretty much has a monopoly on the PMP and have a good sized chunk of the mobile market. Remember that to be labeled a monopoly you do NOT have to have 100%, or even close to 100%, you merely have to "be able to leverage your existing market to influence other markets" and we have perfect examples of that with Apple affecting the price of eBooks with iTunes.
But I agree that they can not longer count on users replacing all their gear every 3 years, the MHz bubble has burst and now X86 is so powerful and has so many cores, even on the low end, that even the bottom of the line systems being sold today are insanely overpowered compared to what users actually do. During the MHz war we saw that users really had no choice, software was released to take advantage of those faster clocks (because making software to take advantage of single core performance is trivial, taking advantage of multiple threads and cores is anything but) so that the 3 year old PC they had simply couldn't run the latest and greatest without a serious struggle. Now the only real gains made by both AMD and Intel are in the realm of power management, because with so many cores cranking the clocks just wastes too much heat, so that 6 year old Phenom X3 has no problem running the latest software. even we gamers just don't upgrade like we used to because the games just can't keep up anymore. from 93-06 I built myself a new PC just about every year, after 06? I've built exactly 2, and the second was really just an excuse so I could give my youngest my Deneb quad and get a Thuban 6 core for myself, its not that I NEDED 2 more cores, I just wanted it. Now I don't even feel a need to go higher even though my board supports 8 cores, what do I need more power for anyway?
Ahhh, the classic "True Scotsman" argument, hadn't seen that one in awhile. the simple fact is if you really read up on the age of the robber barons, and there are several really excellent books on the subject, you'll see that the robber barons didn't start bending government to their will until they had already cornered the markets and then realized that by adding regulations written by them they could rape the public land (see the superfund sites which we got stuck with, most are as poisoned as the Nevada bomb range) and at the same time make things easier for them while making a higher barrier to entry for anybody else.
But if you look at your history the robber barons were a perfect example of how its not the government MAKING the rich, it happens but is quite rare, no its the rich bending the government so they can become MORE rich. ironically when you see all these "free market" types saying there is government interference they are NEVER talking about laws which benefit the big corps, only the ones that try to reign in their worst excesses. But if you think that if we got rid of all regulation tomorrow we wouldn't end up with a repeat of the robber barons while having air and water quality on the level of Victorian London I have a bridge you might be interested in.
One final point, how do you "have the option of not doing business with them" when they use their power to create monopolies? Ask all those businesses like Huffy bikes that were crushed by Walmart if they had the "option" of not doing business with them, when Walmart can simply move into an area and sell below cost anything they have competition in while passing off paying the workers to the state in the form of government assistance? The government didn't "create" Walmart, it was Sam Walton's kids ruthless business tactics that gave them a de facto monopoly in many parts of the country.
Uhhh...that would be great, if it were 2003. On the last Steam sale i bought a ton of games and many clocked in at 35GB+ which even with my 10Mbps connection took quite a long while and many people aren't lucky enough to live in an area that has 10Mbps connections. Then of course you have to look at the caps, which at 20GB-35GB a game really isn't hard to hit anymore. Borderlands 1 is from what? 2009? Yet when i picked it up along with the DLC it clocked in at 37GB. Look at how much the Dawn of War or THQ Humble Bundle weighed in at and you'll see 1.5Gb is really nothing for a modern game. Heck I've only been on steam 2 years and I'm already over 300GB in my game folder and I honestly don't buy that many games, that is around 50 AAA titles.
Sorry, didn't make myself clear. I DO NOT consider you a stalker, you actually use a UID and will post a counter-argument if you disagree with someone, i have NO problem with that.
No what I'm talking about is a FOSSie, or FOSS zealot if you prefer, that has been following me across the net for awhile now. he used to use various UIDs at sites until most of them got banned for...well stalking, he got so bad at one point that on a thread where we were discussing differences between file systems he left no less than 16 posts just saying "Die you fat fucker die!" over and over again, needless to say kinda freaked out a few of the other posters as it was so out of left field and had absolutely nothing with file systems, but I'm used to it. about every 3 months one of his sock puppets will get mod points and you can ALWAYS tell when its him, as he goes out of his way to pick posts that have nothing to do with anything important and therefor are only at +1 or +2, he doesn't want to shoot his wad on the +4s and +5s you see.
If you were a subscriber you could see my posting history where every 3-4 months like clockwork you'll suddenly see a bunch of +4s and +5 surrounded by 0s, this is my little stalker friend. The only time he takes a break from stalking me is when he goes to stalk another user, which he claims are ALL ME even though its obvious we have different professions and sometimes aren't even from the same country. for about 5 months he went after APK, again claiming he was me (even though he and I had a 3 month argument about best security practices until we just agreed to disagreed) and about a year and a half ago it was Barbara who is a Linux admin and of course female, neither of which describes me in the slightest.
But again sorry for the misconception as I have NO problem with those that disagree with me, even when those disagreements are heated. i'm the first to admit I can't know everything about everything and am more than open to change my views on the subject at hand if presented actual evidence to the contrary. But when it comes to my little stalker he has NO evidence or links to back up his rabid beliefs, unless you consider "fuck you and die pig" to be a compelling argument, no instead he just spits out little bits of "wisdom" like "Linux is immune to viruses" and "all eyes mean Linux never crashes or has buggy software" and when anybody dares contradict his little platitudes with actual evidence you "must be teh M$ Ninja shill!" and in my case I apparently work in a sekret bunker in Redmond with an endless army of sock puppets that in many cases have actually been here longer than I have and obviously lead very different lives than me.
so sorry for the confusion, feel free to tell me I'm wrong when you have a differing opinion and i'll be more than happy to debate the subject at hand,I just point out when my little stalker is back so I don't have to answer 50 "Why are you suddenly getting modded down?" and "Why does somebody keep telling you to die?" posts.
Well considering that even MSFT ended support for SP2 over 2 years ago I think a minimum of SP3 would be sensible, and since we are talking AV here and we all know how script kiddies use the patches to reverse engineer new hacks I think expecting the OS to be kept up to date really wouldn't be out of line.
Of course this is all ignoring the elephant in the room when it comes to XP, which is the rampant piracy of that OS. Damned near every out of date XP system that comes into my shop is running "XP Pro Corp Razr1911 Edition" with updates turned off by the guy that installed the hot copy of Windows. But I don't think its up to the AV companies to condone and support piracy so they should expect the OS to have the latest security patches and warn the user if it does not. If they choose to ignore that warning then its on them and like with any other unsupported piece of software if it works it works and if it don't it don't.
Then you got lucky friend, as I had not one, not two, but three great games bite me in the ass on XP. FFVII will spend more time crashing to desktop than running, MechWarriors 3 will suffer from the "bouncing APC" bug where your support craft (required for several missions) will "bounce" hundreds of feet into the air and be unusable in game, And finally i76 has several spots where in game events simply won't happen as they "tuned" that game to Win9X to squeeze every drop of performance and on XP it just doesn't work, there are several timed events that just don't happen.
But it would be nice to have a totally free version of Windows 7, but seeing as how ReactOS isn't even in beta yet I'm not gonna hold my breath. they really need a big corp like Google behind them so they can hire enough devs to get things done on a reasonable timeline, as it is now they are going awfully slowly. After all the original goal was to give us a free version of Win95 and when each new Windows comes out they just move the bar that much further out.
Actually as we've seen here in articles for the past few weeks it looks like they are gonna go Google and NOT Linux, which sadly I can't say as I blame 'em. when Dell had to run their own repo and keep their own fork of Ubuntu just to keep the drivers working when we are talking only a handful of devices? That is pretty sad.
I'll get hate from the zealots for pointing this out but truth is truth, the current Linux driver model is deep fried ass. Quick, what do BSD, Solaris, OSX, iOS, Windows, and even OS/2 have in common that Linux does not? A stable driver ABI. Now are you are seriously sit here and argue that Linus Torvalds is smarter and knows better than ALL those development teams COMBINED? Really?
And please don't waste both yours and my time posting that RELIGIOUS RANT from one of the kernel devs, and yes it IS a religious rant when he actually puts in his rant "And I hope that all non free drivers break often!" that shows he is more of a "true believer" than a developer and obvious cares more about his religious fanaticism than about making sure the users have a working OS.
At the end of the day the ONLY argument I've seen against a stable ABI is "ZOMFG, they might actually...gasp!...make NON FREE drivers ZOMFG!" yet this very article and all the "Just buy Nvidia" postings prove that argument to be stupid and moot because they ALREADY MAKE non free drivers and guess what? Apparently they work better for most than the free drivers, go figure.
If you truly want to compete then you have to make a BETTER PRODUCT than the other guy, simple as that. Windows has a 10 year support cycle so most folks never have to worry about ever upgrading, the hardware will be so damned old by the time Windows hits EOL most users will have moved to newer hardware with a new Windows pre-installed. So to beat that you are gonna have to either 1.- get Torvalds and company to stop crapping out new kernels and slow Linux development to a 6-8 year cycle, this is doubtful, or 2.- Make a stable ABI so no matter how many new kernels and underpinnings come out the drivers "just work" and continue working after the users upgrade.
Never before in history have you had a better opportunity, MSFT has shot themselves in the face with Windows 8 and burnt a LOT of OEMs with licensing costs as well as pissed off their userbase with that damned shitty Metro UI. The field is wide open folks, the finish line is right there, the only question is what are you gonna do about it? Are you gonna make the changes that will give users and OEMs a true "third way" and claim all that share? or are you gonna sit down in the middle of the field to write a bash script while Google comes along and makes a more locked down and privacy invading choice the next big thing? Its all up to you.
Sadly its doubtful you will ever see the video decode hardware used in the Radeon free without reverse engineering and its no fault of AMD as they simply don't have the rights to hand that out. You see the video decode hardware is tightly tied in with HDCP which is owned by a subsidiary of Intel.
At the end of the day its just not their to give, since AMD doesn't have access to the smaller processes that Intel does AMD has had to save die space in other ways and one of those ways was tying their video decode to the HDCP decode to save space, if you look up the layouts on any of the APUs where all the components are listed it will illustrate this pretty well, but AMD can't hand out anything that would compromise HDCP without risking getting blacklisted and possibly sued.
Its a shame but blame needs to be directed where it belongs, the media cartels that insist on all this DRM crap being baked in before they will let you play a Blu Ray, which IIRC still isn't even legal to play on Linux so you are paying for hardware you'll never use. Fun huh?
Yes a little explanation is probably in order for those that haven't kept up with GPU arches, which frankly has been pretty interesting as of late. For every card up to and including the HD6xxx the graphics cores were based on VLIW, this gives great performance in games but is very difficult to use efficiently for GP-GPU work like video decoding/transcoding which of course means more power used in those applications.
Starting with the 7xxx series AMD went to a new design called Graphics Core Next or GCN. GCN is based not on VLIW but on Vector units, this allows it to have good gaming performance but gives an additional advantage when it comes to GP-GPU work. If you will scroll down to the bottom of the page I linked to you will see an illustration that sums it up nicely, in their illustration you can see a job that would take 6 cycles due to dependencies in VLIW would only take 4 cycles in GCN thanks to the way it can split up the loads more efficiently.
So while IRL its doubtful you'll get every load to split up that nicely you are still looking at anywhere from 20%-30% less cycles required to do the same amount of useful work, which should be better for both desktop and especially mobile users as it means less power and time required for the same load.
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You CREATE an email, you CREATE content that goes into FB. Now you can debate whether that "content" you created is worth anything but LOLCats has shown that just because something is dumb doesn't mean it has no value.
But again if we go by the definition in TFA, which seems to think pretty much anything with a screen, a CPU, and RAM is a "PC" then you have to count every game console ever created, after all they have screens, either built in or plug in, they have memory, they have CPUs that run software. Hell by that definition most modern TVs are now PCs, those little cheap media tanks like WDTV and Nbox are now PCs, pretty much anything built with electronics in it in the last few years would fit under that umbrella.
And while you CAN create art on a tablet, by that definition you CAN create art on a console, after all there is a "chiptunes" community that does nothing but hack old systems and use their chips to make music, but it would be hard to argue that the vast majority or even a significant minority did this, same with tablets. With a desktop or laptop everybody creates with it, even my LOL customers and young customers create with a PC, they create emails, they post to various websites, they make their little book reports or make their little recipe printouts, I would find it hard to argue that the majority of the time on a PC wasn't used creating something with it.
But just from watching and speaking with customers, and since I get folks from all walks of life i kinda doubt this place is any different from any other in this regard, I've found the vast majority of time spent on cellphones and tablets is passive or more akin to a game console. They watch the video, they play the little physics games, that's about it. the most I've ever seen a customer use a touchscreen keyboard for is looking up on IMDB who some actor is and where they know him from and other than typing the character or show name even that is passive, its poking through a couple of screens until you get the info you want. you don't add to that info, or edit that info, or create new info, you just consume.
And to me that is the difference in a nutshell, non PCs are more passive, PCs are more active.
Well like I said I'm happy to disagree and debate the points of this or that and I'm open to change my opinion, that to me is the whole point of tech sites, a place where geeks can get together and discuss things that most couldn't care less about but which we find interesting. But when he came up with this delusion that I am actually dozens of people in dozens of professions all posting against him? Who in the fuck would go to all that trouble?
Anybody who has read jack squat that I have posted know that you can spot my writing style a mile away, there was a couple of old sites that I used my original gamertag on before the whole "hairyfeet" thing stuck (that is what I get for reading LOTR while trying to find a UID that /. would take, stupid me) and it wouldn't be 3 posts before they would say "You sound like hairyfeet from /." so its not like I'd be any good at pretending to be somebody else, I'm too set in my ways and my language too obvious.
As for why Linux never goes anywhere after bashing my head against the wall for 7 years dealing with the devs and the "community" I now truly believe its not an Operating System at all, its a collection of little fiefdoms where everybody ignores everybody else and does their own thing and then the distros just slap all this shit that was made with zero consideration of what anybody else was doing into a pile, calls it an "OS" and shoves it out the door. I mean look at all the major guttings we've seen in the last 6 years, think ANY sane company would rip out so many pieces at once or willy nilly like that?
This is why Google with Android and ChromeOS can succeed despite the fact they being more locked down and intrusive, because Google actually puts someone in charge that says "You can't do that, it has to be thus so it'll work" and they listen. With Linux Torvalds is ignoring the DE guys who don't care about the audio guys who don't talk to the networking guys and nobody cares one bit about the application guys so what you get is it manages to work on ONE install (the developer's system) and they go "fuck it, that'll do" and there you go, a rough pile of little programs thrown together that collapses if you look at it wrong. this works in server because most of it is frankly never installed, a lot easier to get something working if you don't need a GUI or wireless or sound, it works in embedded because nobody is gonna update the thing and like server they strip it down to the least amount they can use and still have it work, but on a modern desktop or laptop people expect a working GUI, they expect the sound to work, they expect that new wireless card they got to function, yet all these things are run by little groups with zero interaction...is it any wonder it goes nowhere?
Oh I agree completely, just look at how VB 6 even after all these years of abandonment by MSFT is still the #3 language. But the poster I was responding to was making it sound that being "big in enterprise" somehow made something "good" and that just isn't the case. if something is big in enterprise its just big in enterprise, not like they have a panel of "experts" that judge various software and declare "yes this IS good enough for the enterprise, blue ribbon". Be nice if that were so but all the badly written Excel and Access "apps" show that is far from the case.
Frankly I don't give a rat's ass if Assange's favorite sport is kicking little old ladies down the stairs because all these "articles" are just plants (see the post above you with an expose on where a LOT of them come from) trying to get us away from the truth which is its not about anybody at Wikileaks its about THE DATA which nobody has ever claimed is less than 100% genuine, even the governments who dirty laundry was aired.
I mean here you have this huge pile of docs that show corruption, dirty dealing, even human trafficking by a PMC yet we are supposed to ignore ALL that and pay attention to whether Assange is an asshole or not? Does anybody else feel a "ignore the man behind the curtain" going on here? At the end of the day I don't give a shit if Assange walks around in slippers made from freshly killed puppies, because he AIN'T the one dropping bombs, hiring PMCs, and stirring shit up all over the world causing countless deaths, is here? I mean if he is the biggest douchebag in the history of douchebags, so what? focus on the data, THAT is what is important!
That would be a legitimate argument IF Oracle didn't have Java re-enable the damned plug in (along with providing crapware) every time you run the latest security update. So whether the Java fans like it or not if you didn't install java there wouldn't be the constant security updates that re-enable the plugin that then leaves a door you could drive a truck through ready for the next malware.
Uhhh...you DO know that various flavors of VB, "programs" written in Excel and Access and IE 6 only Intranet apps are ALSO big in the enterprise, yes?
Just because something is "big in enterprise" doesn't make it good or even right, it just makes it big in enterprise, that's all.
Thanks for the info, I'll be sure to tell customers that are thinking about SSDs about TrueCrypt. I wonder how well that CPU load would be handled on a netbook? I have plenty of customers with AMD and ION based netbooks and I always thought slapping an SSD in one of those might give it a good kick in the pants.
I just think its kinda sad myself. I mean can you imagine having so little life that you would spend hours on a search engine, just trying to find one guy you've NEVER met and who wouldn't know you from Adam if you ran into each other, and go through all that trouble just to throw some pointless insults that affect him not at all, all because you have so damned much of your self esteem tied into of all things...an OPERATING SYSTEM? Really?
As I told him when he first started his batshit crazies "I have dozens of brands that I like, feel free to insult them all day long as I DO NOT CARE, I don't have stock in these companies, they have never done anything but sell me a product, my self esteem is not phased in the slightest by somebody saying a product i like is shit, or even having childish insults thrown at me. Life is good for the most part, seeing bad words said about me on a page affects me not at all."
Just sad that somebody can waste so much of their life over a "crusade" that is even more pointless than jousting windmills.
I just think its asinine that ALL of us must pay for what probably not even 5% of the PC buyers even use. Do YOU have a BD in your PC? Out of all my customers I have exactly ONE, just one, that has a BD in his PC...he uses it for backups.
So I think its just insane that AMD can't hand out something as basic and required as basic video decode for fear of getting in trouble with the media cartels and that they have to bake this DRM in if you are gonna use it or not. Make the media cartels support a simple DRM PCI card or even a USB DRM dongle and sell those with BD players, the rest of us just want to watch our videos with hardware acceleration, thanks.
And I don't know why the iFanboys get so mad at that fact. Hell look at how much Nike makes off of Air Jordans, would you call that anything OTHER than fashion?
Apple has spent years cultivating the "toy of the rich" culture and it has made them the largest company on the planet, why should anybody get pissed that its about fashion? some of the biggest names on the planet are all about fashion and they are doing great, Prada, Porsche, Ferrari, heck I've seen 7 year old Ferraris getting sold for less than $15k, why? Because owning a used Ferrari destroys the entire point of owning a Ferrari, which is the "I am wealthy" vibe that comes with the car.
Let me put it THIS way: Do you think a $1000 app that just put a red jewel on the front and called "I am rich" would have sold even a single copy on Android or Windows?
Thank you, you said it better than I ever could. This is why I call them PMP because that is pretty much the model that the corps have adopted for these devices, no different than a game console or any other locked down device designed to primarily sell you content to run on it. I mean would we call a Wii or Playstation a "PC" now? After all they also have chips and can run software approved by corporate. If it has to have a screen, what about the DS? The gameboy? Again they have software, a chip, memory, if that is all that is gonna be needed to call something a "PC" the list is gonna end up quite long.
I don't see MSFT adding support in VPC, after all the want to shove people onto their latest and greates and sell 'em apps from the appstore, using old software doesn't support that goal. What we need is a free VM like Virtualbox that will do GPU acceleration in Win9X and XP guests, some sort of pass through or translation to OpenGL, as win9X was when the first games that truly required decent GPUs appeared.
As far as ReactOS win 7 for both 32bit and 64bit would probably be the better target, you could integrate VirtualBox for XP mode and not only are they only having to build and debug one OS but if they went XP they'd need to backport a lot of stuff, support for modern SSDs for example. I agree that Win 7 is a "good enough" Windows that Win 7 64bit would cover pretty much any foreseeable hardware so that should probably be the main goal.
Actually it took a president that was rich enough to not be bribed AND idealistic to stop the robber barons, Teddy "busted the trusts" and used the bully pulpit to pass laws that curbed the power of the robber barons.
Sadly most of those laws were watered down or outright abolished under Ronnie Raygun, or "Mr De-Reg" as I call him, The reps may worship at an altar to Raygun but most of us that grew up during the era of Raygun saw he was basically handing the rich a blank check, see the vets sleeping in tents while Raygun set up 401Ks and 403Bs to funnel ever more money into the stock market.
Why was this labeled troll? I've been saying since the ODF took control that we frankly shouldn't judge LibreOffice until they had time to excise Java (which Sun jammed in all over the place) and modularize the code, until then they are gonna be busy cleaning up the mess that Sun made.
But considering how risky Java is and how much of LO depends on having Java it should really be looked at as just writer with some WIP stuff that really won't be useful until its rebuilt. If you don't install java there is just a lot of LO that doesn't work, sorry but its true unless they've managed to do a rewrite since 3.4 which i kinda doubt.
To me the difference is really quite trivial. Is it created for primarily consumption or does creation play a large part to its existence? If its the former its not a PC, its more of a PMP, whereas the second has always been the domain of the PC. Can you easily create content on an iMac or Macbook? yep so those are PCs. Is that the primary purpose of a tablet like the iPad? Well when looking at the biggest products on the platform, which is primarily time wasters like Angry Birds and of course plenty of media from iTunes I would say that's a no, its a PMP.
Its really not that hard folks and if we are gonna start counting tablets and phones then pretty much anything with a chip and a way to hook to a screen or having a built in screen would count as a "PC". But I really don't see too many people saying that $60 Kindle or $100 Android tablet is a full fledged "PC".
Look if the fanboys wanna brag that Apple is the biggest company, or ships the most products? I really have no problem with that, whatever makes you happy. But don't start twisting the language all to hell just to make Apple look even better, they really don't need the help.
Actually, and while I agree 100% that a free market can never exist (and when we got close to one we got "the age of the robber barons") one could reasonably argue that the reason the US corps have become so damned short sighted is the fact that the government has blown a MASSIVE stock market bubble using instruments like 401K and 403B and even pumping cash directly into the system.
What is wrong with that? Its actually quite simple, as the video i linked to demonstrates, what happens is by throwing all this money into the stock market you change it from an investor market to a speculator market. The reason this is bad is an investor market rewards companies that plan long term, that produce real growth and which grow their bottom line through actual growth.
The speculator market is all about the "quick flip" so it doesn't care if the company will even exist tomorrow, its all about the short term bump. For examples of the damage this can cause just look at Westinghouse, where the CEO brought in to "save the company" just sold all the valuable assets, got a short term bounce and cashed out, or Circuit City where the CEO simply fired everybody that was making a decent wage while ignoring that was their best sales staff. Again short term bounce and cash out, final result the company left in ruins. We'll see if that ends up the final fate of AMD who according to a former engineer had a similar slash and burn pulled by a previous CEO who fired all their chip designers and replaced them with computer layouts with predictable results. But again this doesn't matter if all you are looking for is a short term bounce that will allow you to cash out, you can then walk away with a big fat check while the company burns.
So as long as you have the government flooding ever larger sums of money into such a small market, so that you have more and more money chasing fewer and fewer stocks, then short term gains are the only gains that will really matter. Wall Street has gone from its roots as a place where a company could show a sound business plan and get much needed capital into Las Vegas with nicer outfits and sadly the only way to fix it is gonna hurt no matter how you slice it. I'd say a good 40%+ of our "financial district" doesn't need to exist and wouldn't if not for all the money flowing from DC to wall Street, that is a LOT of people that are gonna end up out of work but frankly it has to be done, otherwise like the housing bubble eventually you won't be able to keep feeding the monster and the bubble will blow. Be sure to look at the graphic at around the 3.20 mark, look at how much of our GDP was in there right before the 29 crash (which took a world war crushing our competition and still took until 53 to dig out of) and how much is in there today, its truly frightening how many life savings are sitting there waiting to evaporate.
I don't see how the DoJ could say squat when all MSFT would have to do is point to how Apple and Google both sell services to their respective OSes and Apple pretty much has a monopoly on the PMP and have a good sized chunk of the mobile market. Remember that to be labeled a monopoly you do NOT have to have 100%, or even close to 100%, you merely have to "be able to leverage your existing market to influence other markets" and we have perfect examples of that with Apple affecting the price of eBooks with iTunes.
But I agree that they can not longer count on users replacing all their gear every 3 years, the MHz bubble has burst and now X86 is so powerful and has so many cores, even on the low end, that even the bottom of the line systems being sold today are insanely overpowered compared to what users actually do. During the MHz war we saw that users really had no choice, software was released to take advantage of those faster clocks (because making software to take advantage of single core performance is trivial, taking advantage of multiple threads and cores is anything but) so that the 3 year old PC they had simply couldn't run the latest and greatest without a serious struggle. Now the only real gains made by both AMD and Intel are in the realm of power management, because with so many cores cranking the clocks just wastes too much heat, so that 6 year old Phenom X3 has no problem running the latest software. even we gamers just don't upgrade like we used to because the games just can't keep up anymore. from 93-06 I built myself a new PC just about every year, after 06? I've built exactly 2, and the second was really just an excuse so I could give my youngest my Deneb quad and get a Thuban 6 core for myself, its not that I NEDED 2 more cores, I just wanted it. Now I don't even feel a need to go higher even though my board supports 8 cores, what do I need more power for anyway?
Ahhh, the classic "True Scotsman" argument, hadn't seen that one in awhile. the simple fact is if you really read up on the age of the robber barons, and there are several really excellent books on the subject, you'll see that the robber barons didn't start bending government to their will until they had already cornered the markets and then realized that by adding regulations written by them they could rape the public land (see the superfund sites which we got stuck with, most are as poisoned as the Nevada bomb range) and at the same time make things easier for them while making a higher barrier to entry for anybody else.
But if you look at your history the robber barons were a perfect example of how its not the government MAKING the rich, it happens but is quite rare, no its the rich bending the government so they can become MORE rich. ironically when you see all these "free market" types saying there is government interference they are NEVER talking about laws which benefit the big corps, only the ones that try to reign in their worst excesses. But if you think that if we got rid of all regulation tomorrow we wouldn't end up with a repeat of the robber barons while having air and water quality on the level of Victorian London I have a bridge you might be interested in.
One final point, how do you "have the option of not doing business with them" when they use their power to create monopolies? Ask all those businesses like Huffy bikes that were crushed by Walmart if they had the "option" of not doing business with them, when Walmart can simply move into an area and sell below cost anything they have competition in while passing off paying the workers to the state in the form of government assistance? The government didn't "create" Walmart, it was Sam Walton's kids ruthless business tactics that gave them a de facto monopoly in many parts of the country.
Uhhh...that would be great, if it were 2003. On the last Steam sale i bought a ton of games and many clocked in at 35GB+ which even with my 10Mbps connection took quite a long while and many people aren't lucky enough to live in an area that has 10Mbps connections. Then of course you have to look at the caps, which at 20GB-35GB a game really isn't hard to hit anymore. Borderlands 1 is from what? 2009? Yet when i picked it up along with the DLC it clocked in at 37GB. Look at how much the Dawn of War or THQ Humble Bundle weighed in at and you'll see 1.5Gb is really nothing for a modern game. Heck I've only been on steam 2 years and I'm already over 300GB in my game folder and I honestly don't buy that many games, that is around 50 AAA titles.
Sorry, didn't make myself clear. I DO NOT consider you a stalker, you actually use a UID and will post a counter-argument if you disagree with someone, i have NO problem with that.
No what I'm talking about is a FOSSie, or FOSS zealot if you prefer, that has been following me across the net for awhile now. he used to use various UIDs at sites until most of them got banned for...well stalking, he got so bad at one point that on a thread where we were discussing differences between file systems he left no less than 16 posts just saying "Die you fat fucker die!" over and over again, needless to say kinda freaked out a few of the other posters as it was so out of left field and had absolutely nothing with file systems, but I'm used to it. about every 3 months one of his sock puppets will get mod points and you can ALWAYS tell when its him, as he goes out of his way to pick posts that have nothing to do with anything important and therefor are only at +1 or +2, he doesn't want to shoot his wad on the +4s and +5s you see.
If you were a subscriber you could see my posting history where every 3-4 months like clockwork you'll suddenly see a bunch of +4s and +5 surrounded by 0s, this is my little stalker friend. The only time he takes a break from stalking me is when he goes to stalk another user, which he claims are ALL ME even though its obvious we have different professions and sometimes aren't even from the same country. for about 5 months he went after APK, again claiming he was me (even though he and I had a 3 month argument about best security practices until we just agreed to disagreed) and about a year and a half ago it was Barbara who is a Linux admin and of course female, neither of which describes me in the slightest.
But again sorry for the misconception as I have NO problem with those that disagree with me, even when those disagreements are heated. i'm the first to admit I can't know everything about everything and am more than open to change my views on the subject at hand if presented actual evidence to the contrary. But when it comes to my little stalker he has NO evidence or links to back up his rabid beliefs, unless you consider "fuck you and die pig" to be a compelling argument, no instead he just spits out little bits of "wisdom" like "Linux is immune to viruses" and "all eyes mean Linux never crashes or has buggy software" and when anybody dares contradict his little platitudes with actual evidence you "must be teh M$ Ninja shill!" and in my case I apparently work in a sekret bunker in Redmond with an endless army of sock puppets that in many cases have actually been here longer than I have and obviously lead very different lives than me.
so sorry for the confusion, feel free to tell me I'm wrong when you have a differing opinion and i'll be more than happy to debate the subject at hand,I just point out when my little stalker is back so I don't have to answer 50 "Why are you suddenly getting modded down?" and "Why does somebody keep telling you to die?" posts.
Well considering that even MSFT ended support for SP2 over 2 years ago I think a minimum of SP3 would be sensible, and since we are talking AV here and we all know how script kiddies use the patches to reverse engineer new hacks I think expecting the OS to be kept up to date really wouldn't be out of line.
Of course this is all ignoring the elephant in the room when it comes to XP, which is the rampant piracy of that OS. Damned near every out of date XP system that comes into my shop is running "XP Pro Corp Razr1911 Edition" with updates turned off by the guy that installed the hot copy of Windows. But I don't think its up to the AV companies to condone and support piracy so they should expect the OS to have the latest security patches and warn the user if it does not. If they choose to ignore that warning then its on them and like with any other unsupported piece of software if it works it works and if it don't it don't.
Then you got lucky friend, as I had not one, not two, but three great games bite me in the ass on XP. FFVII will spend more time crashing to desktop than running, MechWarriors 3 will suffer from the "bouncing APC" bug where your support craft (required for several missions) will "bounce" hundreds of feet into the air and be unusable in game, And finally i76 has several spots where in game events simply won't happen as they "tuned" that game to Win9X to squeeze every drop of performance and on XP it just doesn't work, there are several timed events that just don't happen.
But it would be nice to have a totally free version of Windows 7, but seeing as how ReactOS isn't even in beta yet I'm not gonna hold my breath. they really need a big corp like Google behind them so they can hire enough devs to get things done on a reasonable timeline, as it is now they are going awfully slowly. After all the original goal was to give us a free version of Win95 and when each new Windows comes out they just move the bar that much further out.
Actually as we've seen here in articles for the past few weeks it looks like they are gonna go Google and NOT Linux, which sadly I can't say as I blame 'em. when Dell had to run their own repo and keep their own fork of Ubuntu just to keep the drivers working when we are talking only a handful of devices? That is pretty sad.
I'll get hate from the zealots for pointing this out but truth is truth, the current Linux driver model is deep fried ass. Quick, what do BSD, Solaris, OSX, iOS, Windows, and even OS/2 have in common that Linux does not? A stable driver ABI. Now are you are seriously sit here and argue that Linus Torvalds is smarter and knows better than ALL those development teams COMBINED? Really?
And please don't waste both yours and my time posting that RELIGIOUS RANT from one of the kernel devs, and yes it IS a religious rant when he actually puts in his rant "And I hope that all non free drivers break often!" that shows he is more of a "true believer" than a developer and obvious cares more about his religious fanaticism than about making sure the users have a working OS.
At the end of the day the ONLY argument I've seen against a stable ABI is "ZOMFG, they might actually...gasp!...make NON FREE drivers ZOMFG!" yet this very article and all the "Just buy Nvidia" postings prove that argument to be stupid and moot because they ALREADY MAKE non free drivers and guess what? Apparently they work better for most than the free drivers, go figure.
If you truly want to compete then you have to make a BETTER PRODUCT than the other guy, simple as that. Windows has a 10 year support cycle so most folks never have to worry about ever upgrading, the hardware will be so damned old by the time Windows hits EOL most users will have moved to newer hardware with a new Windows pre-installed. So to beat that you are gonna have to either 1.- get Torvalds and company to stop crapping out new kernels and slow Linux development to a 6-8 year cycle, this is doubtful, or 2.- Make a stable ABI so no matter how many new kernels and underpinnings come out the drivers "just work" and continue working after the users upgrade.
Never before in history have you had a better opportunity, MSFT has shot themselves in the face with Windows 8 and burnt a LOT of OEMs with licensing costs as well as pissed off their userbase with that damned shitty Metro UI. The field is wide open folks, the finish line is right there, the only question is what are you gonna do about it? Are you gonna make the changes that will give users and OEMs a true "third way" and claim all that share? or are you gonna sit down in the middle of the field to write a bash script while Google comes along and makes a more locked down and privacy invading choice the next big thing? Its all up to you.
Sadly its doubtful you will ever see the video decode hardware used in the Radeon free without reverse engineering and its no fault of AMD as they simply don't have the rights to hand that out. You see the video decode hardware is tightly tied in with HDCP which is owned by a subsidiary of Intel.
At the end of the day its just not their to give, since AMD doesn't have access to the smaller processes that Intel does AMD has had to save die space in other ways and one of those ways was tying their video decode to the HDCP decode to save space, if you look up the layouts on any of the APUs where all the components are listed it will illustrate this pretty well, but AMD can't hand out anything that would compromise HDCP without risking getting blacklisted and possibly sued.
Its a shame but blame needs to be directed where it belongs, the media cartels that insist on all this DRM crap being baked in before they will let you play a Blu Ray, which IIRC still isn't even legal to play on Linux so you are paying for hardware you'll never use. Fun huh?
Yes a little explanation is probably in order for those that haven't kept up with GPU arches, which frankly has been pretty interesting as of late. For every card up to and including the HD6xxx the graphics cores were based on VLIW, this gives great performance in games but is very difficult to use efficiently for GP-GPU work like video decoding/transcoding which of course means more power used in those applications.
Starting with the 7xxx series AMD went to a new design called Graphics Core Next or GCN. GCN is based not on VLIW but on Vector units, this allows it to have good gaming performance but gives an additional advantage when it comes to GP-GPU work. If you will scroll down to the bottom of the page I linked to you will see an illustration that sums it up nicely, in their illustration you can see a job that would take 6 cycles due to dependencies in VLIW would only take 4 cycles in GCN thanks to the way it can split up the loads more efficiently.
So while IRL its doubtful you'll get every load to split up that nicely you are still looking at anywhere from 20%-30% less cycles required to do the same amount of useful work, which should be better for both desktop and especially mobile users as it means less power and time required for the same load.