Insightful? Really people? hell why didn't he just add a fangirl squee while he was at it! he likes Webkit NOT for any features or design choices but "I've liked it since it's debut under Google's name" which means as long as its google he be a squeeing, and he hates Windows and "I don't believe that I'll ever think that "Windows is a "good" operating system" so billions of people are idiots but of course it would be better...if its done by google or uses a google browser.
Good God/. you are getting as bad as reddit or Digg with all the fangirl bullshit, we are supposed to be geeks and back shit up with legitimate arguments not "I realize it's not Google's invention, but webkit is cool." fangirl squeeing crap.
Ahhh I see the flaw in your logic, you are only looking at the cost of the machine itself, I too used to think that way before I started going to legislature hearings and the like and found out there is a "hidden benefit" that you don't see, and that's all the tax breaks and kickbacks given to the corps by the politicians who in turn get to brag they "brought jobs to our (insert district, city, state, etc)" which tilts the balance ATM in favor of the human.
Watch this video and be sure to take a good look at the graphs starting around the 3 minute mark. you see all those kickbacks and tax breaks? Those are all gonna come to a screeching halt when that bubble pops, which will make 1929 look like a "flash crash" by comparison. When they can no longer get "free money" thanks to the government subsidizing the wokers along with giving them all kinds of tax breaks and other graft suddenly those machines? REALLY not that expensive. Again we already have one example in history, the autoworkers. they unionized and demanded living wages and what do you know? the robots sudden;y look a WHOLE lot better even at a million a pop, why? Because you look at the wages and benefits and the life of the machine and the machine will come out cheaper, just simple math.
Ever since the microchip boom more and more jobs could quite frankly be easily switched for robots, they aren't because the cost of the bot plus the loss of the kickbacks and tax breaks math wise make the bot more expensive, when the corps have to pay a living wage and lose the graft? The math for hiring the human just won't work anymore.
As I said we simply have to face the fact that capitalism, like every other ism before it, is doomed, another 20 years, maybe less, and you'll have Honda bots that will be able to do anything a basic human laborer can do and will cost $25k a pop, why would they hire you then? As I said a lot of the jobs the poor work now are mainly "make work" thanks to government hand outs, how long can those last? Not long, I figure within our lifetime we will get to see capitalism fall, just as we watched communism die before our eyes, its simply progress and cannot be stopped.
What you are talking about? It has a name you know, look up "The Monkey Sphere" and you'll see what you are describing, which is basically we monkeys can only relate to about 50 people at any one time, any more than that and our level of giving a shit drops quickly, why? Because we are still those little tribal chimps and for most of our evolution we lived in groups of less than 50, hence why nature didn't bother giving us the ability to relate to more.
Doesn't change the fact that our elections are as fake as any third world country though, its still just two prefab shills talking kayfabe to rile up the peasants while going to dinner with the same lobbyist and laughing about how fucking dumb the peasants are.
Not to mention when a building gets busted down and unsafe the city will condemn it, a corp will just slap some duct tape on that ancient POS software system and keep using it. I don't know how many times when I was working corporate I'd have to work some miracle because "the entire company depends on" this piece of garbage that frankly shouldn't be considered software written by "Bob" in VB 2 if you were lucky, fricking Excel and Access if you were not, and which like this fungus just kept growing until it became this big rotting mound of trash held together with string and prayers.
If the "Java Enterprise" software out there is anything like the other corporate software I've seen frankly its no wonder why Java gets pwned, the shit is probably so badly written it can ONLY run on version Foo which hasn't be supported in ages, maybe even running on a long dead OS like WinNT, and its just a pwning or crash waiting to happen.
Uhhh...how EXACTLY are we supposed to " take responsibility for the laws" when our election cycle is as fake and rigged as pro wrestling? If you aren't from the USA let me break down how it works, in the primary you are given a choice of 4 to 5 shills, you may get one "dark horse" that isn't a shill but the MSM is owned by the megacorps and will make sure nobody knows they exist. See the video on Ron Paul by Jon Stewart where Paul was literally "He who shall NOT be named" when they would announce the first, second, and FOURTH place winners in a contest.
Then after the corp owned MSM has made sure "the people's choice" is two shills they already own you then are given a bunch of "hot button issues" that the corps don't give a fuck about and therefor don't care which way they go, abortion, gay rights, shit that won't affect their bottom line, and then you can "choose" from shill A or shill B, either of which will keep passing corporate friendly laws that benefit the rich old fucks that have been ruling this country for a good 150+ years now, your JP Morgans, your Goldman Sachs, the whole 7 media conglomerates that own every single thing you see, hear, and read, its the same names over and over and OVER getting their way, and if anything goes wrong they just get another "too big to fail" like Golman Sachs who used Wall Street like Las Vegas and when the bubble busted got 125 cents on every dollar out of the pockets of every American, nice.
You see friend you simply can't change a corrupt system by working within that system and the reason why should be fairly obvious...because its corrupt! So I would like to hear how EXACTLY the American people are supposed to "control" or "change" anything when the entire media is owned by a handful of uber-rich, when you have "free speech zones" and every movement ends up with 2 fed infiltrators for every 5 people, how EXACTLY are we supposed to "take responsibility" when we have less of a voice now than we did before the revolution?
Uhhh...wouldn't the smartest move just to be to get away from using the software that is a security fucking nightmare in the first place?
This is what I don't get, I actually support Flash because the alternative (HTML V5) is COMPLETELY BROKEN and doesn't run worth a piss, it sucks cycles, its performance is like a bad joke, I don't care which engine you run it on put it side by side with a Flash at the same resolution and it'll crap through twice the resources, so I GET why we should hang onto Flash until HTML V5 gets its shit together, but with Java Its not like we don't have other frameworks that work folks, and Java has always been a security nightmare from hell, its security was terrible when Sun had it, its still terrible now that Oracle has it, so why in the hell keep using it?
If you are gonna stick with Java put a rubber on the damned thing and stick it into a VM with rollbacks, don't run that damned buggy POS on actual production machines, I mean how many times you gotta get pawned before you learn? I'm so damned glad I got out of ancient corporate crap, I haven't had to deal with Java in over 5 years now and my life is better for it. I can understand if some moron spent a couple of million on a system based on Java and you're trapped, but honestly you really shouldn't be surprised by this as Java has ALWAYS been a malware writers wet dream.
Correct on IE, it is just using some weird design choices but I don't see how anybody can argue that Win 8 isn't wrong when this is the average user response I saw at the shop. When the user needs a fricking training course to use your damned OS like its 1986 all over again? Something has gone HORRIBLY wrong. IE's biggest problem isn't the UI, its the giant fucking bullseye painted on it by hackers because they know the clueless rubes that are still running that 30 day Norton trialware from 6 years ago and think that works is using IE. Add to that the fucking braindead choice to not port back to their supported OSes so that the ONLY way you can use the same browser across XP/Vista/7 is to NOT use IE and you have a browser made of fail.
As for TFA lets call a spade a spade, shall we? google needs their asses spanked for the redirect bullshit they have been pulling of late. If MSFT made all THEIR websites dump you into shitty mode if you didn't use the latest IE we'd be hearing screams of antitrust, but Google can pull the same shit and not a peep? bullshit, utter bullshit. I was against the "works best in IE" horseshit and I'm against the "works best in Webkit" horseshit, Google is making billions off the ads and data-mining they do in Chrome and this should be treated as what it is noncompetitive behavior. If the browser supports the features then they should work PERIOD and having to hack strings like its 1999 all over again is bullshit.
I use a webkit based browser (Comodo Dragon) but even I don't want a world where the only engine we have is webkit, that is how we get nasty zero days that can infect the whole damned planet. Did we not learn anything from IE 6?
As others have rightly pointed out "the flame that burns brightest also burns the quickest" and when they are writing specs at 14 years old you can expect a burn out. Some go nuts, some end up junkies, but when you are THAT driven THAT young you can pretty much count on a major flameout, just a shame his flameout was fatal.
As for copyrights, i have an ironclad argument that pretty much obliterates any pro copyright trolls and I think the more people point this out to the average folks the quicker we can get this scam taken out...Do you realize that many of Walt Disney's FIRST works, made when cars were started with a crank, airplanes were made out of cloth, and antibiotics were but a dream are STILL under copyright? The man has been dead for longer than most of us have been alive and they will STAY under copyright until most of us are dead, now how does that in ANY way shape or form promote sciences and the arts as the founding fathers intended?
All our insane copyrights and patents are doing is making sure that Asia becomes the next superpower as you won't be able to get anything done here without getting screwed by all the tollbooths. Most of the games I grew up with are now in copyright limbo, so many of the 80s companies went under yet you can't do anything with the games because the copyrights, that won't expire for over a century, are just hanging there like a sword of Damocles over them, and any cool idea you can possibly think of will have a dozen bullshit vague patents that will break you if you aren't a megacorp.
The point was the games were BANNED in all of Australia before, just as you can't get the walking dead game in Germany now because you aren't allowed to kill anything human in a game there, they label killing zombies as desecration of a corpse. At least the Germans do have a bit of an excuse, what with them causing the deaths of millions and all, Australia was nothing but big brother deciding what the peasants could and could witness.
I always thought Bill Hicks should have been given a LOT more fame and credit than he did, comedians are still ripping his bits even to this day and the man has been gone nearly 20 years.
But if you ever wanted to hear truth spoken about politics and the corporate fascism that gets waved around as "the free market" Bill was your guy, he could make you laugh and then go home and realize every thing he was saying was doses of pure truth.
And the reason I equate politicans to wrestlers is Ventura said that was exactly what he found when he got into politics, they would kayfabe in front of the camera and each pick one side of a hot button issue that neither gave a shit about but which was sure to rile up the peasants, then they would go to lunch together once the cameras were off. Its all just kayfabe, the same lobbyists owns both sides so it really doesn't matter who wins. Why does everybody think its always "the lesser of two evils" when they vote? Its because they are BOTH sell outs and the actual differences between the sides really don't amount to much. Do you think the corporate masters give a wet fuck about abortion or gay marriage? Nope and THAT is why they let the peasants have those issues, because they don't make money off either of those issues and so don't give a shit.
Yep until the feds kick down your door and hogtie you because some guy across the street is downloading kiddy porn. Sorry I don't have time to look it up but I remember a case in FLA where a guy spent 6 months in jail and over $100,000 in legal fees to clear his name because his laptop was infected and somebody used it as a CP proxy,so all you would be doing is painting a giant bullseye.
In the end the great once free and open internet will simply come to a close, to be replaced by a corporate run mix of social media and the home shopping network. The governments of the world hate the fact that people can air their dirty laundry (see Assange for an example of how much they hate that shit) and the corps aren't happy unless they can squeeze every single cent out of every property so they will just work together and shut it down. After all what good is high speed if you can't actually use it?
I just think its sad that Australians have been treated like infants so long by their politicians...why did they put up with that shit? As a parent just give me the same kind of info they give for a TV program "This game contains scenes of (insert violence, sex, drug references, whatever)" and let ME decide what is and is not appropriate for my boys. Its called parenting and just because some are too fucking lazy to do their damned jobs as parents does NOT mean that as an adult I shouldn't be able to play whatever kind of game that I want.
But there is a CRUCIAL difference that both You and Ballmer are missing which is IE only won when Netscape fucked themselves and we have seen NO indication that is EVAR gonna happen with Apple or Google.
If you look at their ENTIRE history you'll notice their supposedly "evil plans" really only worked when the other company fucked itself and left them a big fat opening. Take Netscape, NS 3 was good, NS 4 was alpha quality shit that crashed every 10 minutes and often managed to take the whole OS down with it. There is a REASON why they wouldn't FOSS the NS 4 code but instead did a rewrite first, and that is because NS 4 was a giant flaming turd. Myself and many others actually went and sought out IE, downloading it from the net, because NS 4 frankly didn't work.
And over and over to the very beginning of the company you see this, DR didn't want to port CP/M to Intel chips, gave the market to MSFT. Wordperfect saw Win95 as just another flash in the pan and tried to release the DOS version with a piss poor Win32 wrapper that made it crash prone,, gave the market to MSFT. BeOS stuck with the PPC which was too high even then and Apple was mismanaged during Jobs' absence, with 2 dozen overlapping models at widely different price points, gave the market to MSFT.
In this case its the exact opposite, neither Apple nor Google are putting out any lackluster broken releases and with the inroads they have it would have to be VERY broken, because as long as it runs their apps most folks will put up with either company putting out a release that is just more of the same.
So I would argue the "IE trick" simply doesn't work if the other company doesn't shoot themselves in the foot and i think if you were to look at the sales figures for Win 8 (PC sales dropped 13% even with the economy improving) and Surface (MSFT had to cut the orders in half because they haven't even been able to sell a million units in 5 months) that in this case it is MSFT shooting themselves in the foot. And in all those other cases they didn't destroy what they had to try to get the new market, they simply expanded. This time its just not gonna work, and Win 8 will actually redeem Vista by doing MUCH worse, mark my words.
"Well I believe the puppet on the left has MY interests at heart, well I believe the puppet on the right shares MY beliefs...hey wait a minute, there is one guy working both puppets!" Bill Hicks.
ANY of you that believe that left/right bullshit is anything more than kayfabe put on by the rulers of this country to keep the peasants too busy arguing to notice they are ALL getting fucked should really try this little game i have, its called three card monty and I'm sure you'll find the lady!
Even though I'm a socialist and never cared for libertarians I recognize truth when I see it and urge all to watch the truth about voting and just remember you cannot change a corrupted system by working within that system, anymore than playing a game of three card monty a million times is gonna make you a winner. The game is rigged folks, you are given 2 pre-approved shills who'll make a LOT of noise about this program or that program that "the other side" is sure to hate when in reality the same power brokers that have been leeching off this country for decades still get to have their way. Why do you think that Mr "hope and change" kept or extended every single thing the left hated about dubya's watch? Because just like the wrestler he does what he's told and reads from the cue card.
Uhhh...Billy? You DO have a license number of XP Pro lying around...yes? if so then "TinyXP" is NOT pirated, its just a preconfigured XP. It takes less than 3 minutes to switch their key for your own legit key and there you go, a 100% legit XP that has just had all the cruft ripped out. they also give you a nice little txt file listing everything they changed if you want to DIY but since you can just switch keys why bother?
Remember Billy its not piracy if you already own the thing, you are merely "format shifting" in this case from an installed OS to a VM.
Riiight, Linux is gonna save you money long term....how exactly? Lets look at the OS breaking moves just in the past 5 years, ALSA for a broken Pulse, KDE 3 and Gnome 2 just getting really good and stable....only to get shitcanned for alpha quality replacements, oh and lets not forget all the kernel twiddling by Linus "I'm an arrogant ass" Torvalds and the entire WiFi subsystem getting a serious rewrite that broke as much as it fixed. Quick, what do BSD, OSX,iOS,Windows,Solaris and even OS/2 have in common that Linux DON'T? A stable driver ABI so when one subsystem gets futzed with the whole thing don't shit itself and die, that's what.
As for backwards compatibility...uhhh, hello? XP Mode? Comes with Win 7 Pro? Lets you make a nice little locked down XP install while still having all the security and benefits like a better memory subsystem that is Windows 7? I've set up several businesses on Win 7 with XP Mode and frankly it runs great, the employee just clicks the desktop link just like they would have in XP and the VM runs the program easy peasy. the ONLY thing its not good for I've found is graphics heavy stuff like gaming which lets face it most businesses aren't gonna be allowing you to run your old Win9X games anyway. ironically I've not had a bit of trouble running ALL my win9X games on win 7 X64...as long as I pirate them thanks to the old shitty 16 bit DRM they used to use. But the games themselves? Run fine.
But its really not hard for a business to set up a test bed with Win 7 and XP Mode to test their old software, hell you can get dual core machines now for less than $200 so there really is no excuse not to have a test bed and the things gained by switching, better security, faster workflow (jumplists and breadcrumbs...I still don't know how we lived without those) a MUCH better and actually sane memory subsystem that will have all the programs they use daily loaded into RAM and ready to go when they are, and finally the frankly insane amount of money you are pissing away by hanging onto those old P4s and CRT monitors, I've had business owners tell me that after I switched over their office their electric bill went down a good 35% just from not blowing all the juice on feeding and cooling those old power hogs. It just doesn't make any kind of sense, not from a security, economic, nor business sense, to keep old hardware.
The difference we have here is the price, you seem to think that the corps would pay, I believe that the ONLY reason you have minimum wage jobs at all is because that makes people cheaper than the machine so they hire people. Lets take fast food as an example...what job is there in Mickey D's that couldn't be done BETTER by a fully automated assembly line? After all its less than a dozen ingredients all told being used and probably a good 85% of their sales are the preset combos, so why would they need ANY humans in Mickey D, or Wendy's or any of those pre-fab fast food joints?
The answer is the same answer as to why there are more Chinese working than Americans right now, which is they DON'T need the humans at all they are just cheaper so to maximize profits the smart move is to go with the cheaper resource which is the human. but the only reason those humans are cheaper is because of government subsidy, without that the machine would win. Look at the auto industry, unions got a living wage, the humans got replaced by robots.
Now do I think this is right? No but then again i think the entire system is doomed and all those rich cocksuckers living like Gods now will end up hanging from a tree in a not too distant future. Remember the words of Lenin "A capitalist will sell you the rope you intend to hang him with" and we have seen time and time again that its true, the short term greed will always be more important than their long term survival. The corps will keep rigging the elections, sending jobs overseas, and doing everything they can not to pay even the pittance that they owe, like Google funneling all its money into the Cayman islands, but I take heart in the simple fact that the poor outnumber the rich by a good 50,000 to 1 and growing everyday, so eventually the people WILL rise up, the only question to me is whether it'll be peaceful like the former USSR or like the Arab Springs.
As for what will take its place? Probably a combination of socialism and meritocracy, because that was one thing that Roddenberry got right in that once the tech reaches a certain point money? Really doesn't work. But I think you are wrong that "if the jobs could be done by machines they would be" because the corps know that if they fire 100,000+ people there goes their tax breaks and congress ass kissing, but if the "free labor" given to them by the welfare state ever ends? Just like the auto industry I'm sure you'll see "New" Mickey D's popping up across the street from the old and it'll be built from the ground up to be automated. They'll just have a truck come drop off raw material and pick up the money once a day, they'll even brag about how the food is "free of human hands" so no more food poisoning. Of course only the rich will have any money to buy, but again that would take long term thinking which our rich have proven they just aren't capable of.
But would you support them raising the minimum wage to a living wage if the corps said we are just gonna replace the workers with machines then so you get a handful making a living wage and tens of thousands out of a job?
The one who compared it to the seamstress smashing the sewing machine is just completely mistaken, after all you couldn't just hand the cloth to the sewing machine and have a finished product come out the other side. For the first time in our entire history you have the ability of a product to go from raw material to finished product with no human hands involved and THAT is why I have been arguing capitalism is dead. After all what IS capitalism? Its the trading of labor for capital...so what happens to the system if labor is worthless?
Even China is seeing this happen because despite how cheaply the workforce is willing to trade their labor for capital the machines will come out ahead in the end. The machine never gets sick, never needs breaks, doesn't eat or go to the bathroom...I bet if you forced all the corps to go to say a $15 an hour payscale that a good 80% of the jobs that are currently low wage would be taken by the machines. As I said you could probably run an entire Walmart supercenter with just a dozen people for the entire store!
So we are just gonna have to accept that capitalism is dead, either the government just cuts all those whose labor isn't needed a check or like Walmart subsidizes "make work" for the masses. If they can get a machine that will run for 5-10 years for the same price as your salary for a single year, why would they hire you?
Actually its worse than that Billy as XP still has the old WinNT 4 memory manager which frankly was designed in an era when memory was worth its weight in gold so it'll pimpslap the living hell out of swap LONG before you've even used half the RAM in the system. So in actuality you aren't saving any memory, you are just swapping more. Compare this to Win 7 where I have 500MB of my 8GB free right now, am I running something intensive? Nope its merely caching all my most used programs and Windows features so if I click on them its instant. if I do launch something intensive like my shooters Win 7 will just dump the cache and hand it over and when finished it refills the cache which is a MUCH smarter and saner design choice. Now anything I use day to day loads with ZERO disc access, just click and done.
So if you look at the internals of WinXP there really isn't much they can do to make it run any better or safer, like that 7 year old graphics card every drop of performance has done been squeezed out and you can't fix it, the lack of non admin users, the lack of low rights mode, the inability to protect the memory or keep it from using swap when you have memory free, these things are part of the core and just can't be fixed without dumping the whole, they just can't do it.
Win 7 is supported until 2020 at the very least (since it has become the new XP I have a feeling it'll get an extension or two) and HAS all the extra security and core OS features that make it capable of handling the multiple cores and multiGB of RAM we have today. When XP was released I can tell you the average system was a 300MHz PII with 64MB-128MB of RAM, hell those $50 cheap tablets have better specs than high end PCs ran under XP RTM. Its time to let the old thing go, like Win9X it served its purpose at the time but now it should just rest in peace and everyone move on. Even XP X64 (in reality 2K3 Workstation 64) had lousy memory management, it could take a lot of memory but it was up to the individual programs to use it wisely.
Oh man! Thanks a lot for ruining the surprise jerk, and here I was getting ready to shock players around the world when I smacked them with "pretty kitty big boom boom" when the beta rolls, next time put spoiler alert first okay?
Walmart to me is the canary in the coal mine and a perfect example of what I have been arguing for years, which is that without government funded "make work" jobs capitalism would be just as dead as communism or any other ism of the past.
For those that don't know one of the first "training videos" you are shown when hired by Walmart is how to get on government assistance, because you simply can't survive on Walmart wages. Why that is just the evil dirty corp screwing the workers...right? Well it IS true they are screwing the workers but in reality most jobs could be done by machines now so I would argue that the vast majority of the service industry jobs aren't even needed anymore. With RFIDs, robot stockers, and camera systems that can allow a couple of guys to monitor the whole store frankly you wouldn't need more than a dozen people to run a Supercenter because the machines can do it better. same thing goes for all the fast food joints like Mickey D's, you could have an automated assembly line that would never make mistakes and it would be as simple to the end user as "push button to get food".
At the end of the day we are playing IQ musical chairs and fewer and fewer will ever get a seat, just look at how many student loan defaults we are having as students go straight from graduation to the unemployment line, you could wipe out half the people on this planet and not only would the quality of life not go down, it would actually go up as the people left would be valued for their labor! We just have to face the fact that like in Star Trek the age of trading labor for capital is coming to a close, the machines don't need living wages, never get sick or tired, don't need health insurance, etc. I predict the next decade will be ugly as the financial bubble finally pops and those at the top violently struggle to hold onto the system that gave the ability to live like Gods but with the difference between the top and the bottom growing by the minute the starving masses will outnumber them by such a huge amount they simply won't be able to win.
As for TFA its probably too little too late but it is nice to see the OLPC project finally growing a brain. I would argue that not only would the netbook still be alive today if they would have done like myself and many suggested and sold it to the first world the economy of scale they would have gotten would have allowed them to put a LOT more XO-1s in the hands of third world kids by dropping cost to manufacture and giving them healthy profits to pay for more units to give away. Maybe it will work, who knows, but considering how simple Android ICS is to use and the fact you can get an Android ICS 7 inch tablet for less than $80 complete with several games? i kinda doubt it.
So pointing out that words like "muzzie" and "towelhead" are being used as placeholders for nigger "doesn't hold water anymore", is that right? Pretending something doesn't exist doesn't make it go away ya know, and living in the deep south I can tell you there is a LOT of hatred on BOTH sides, with blacks calling Romney "that dumb cracker" and whites calling Obama "muzzie" or "towelhead" because most know that they can't say nigger in polite company anymore.
I would be the first to agree that the race card is played too often, especially blacks who want to blame everything that has ever gonna wrong in their life to YT but on the flipside it doesn't do any good to outright ignore racism when it is frankly fairly obvious. Hell the ultra right has been using code words to appeal to the more racist ring wing elements for years, phrases like "forced busing" and "welfare queens" being just 2 off the top of my head. Trying to pretend that doesn't exist simply lets it fester and get more blatant like with the "muzzie" crap.
Of course I don't think that but you have to agree that the costs to print and store and ship actual books is NOT cheap and by cutting all that out they can lower the price and still make as much or more than they were before. Again this lets the authors get stuff out there that would never fly IRL, short stories of a couple of chapters and episodic content for just a couple of examples.
But again I say look to the RIAA, because if its one thing we have seen over and over its the greed of the publishers that usually cock things up. Take CDs for example, the price hasn't gone down in nearly 20 years even though they are cheaper than ever to produce and at a fricking buck a song many artists have albums that is cheaper to buy the hard copy and rip it yourself than to just buy the damned songs. Of course as we found out with Cheap trick and Meatloaf (who don't get a cent from digital sales and is suing the record companies) these higher prices are NOT because of the artist, its the publishers slitting their own throats by trying to wring every penny they can out of each sale instead of using economy of scale to make more money. Short sighted PHB bullshit as usual.
And finally look at again at Steam that has done it right. Not 6 years ago frankly I didn't know a single gamer who WASN'T a pirate, they'd buy a few titles they wanted the MP on and a few from the bargain bin but a good 90% of their games came from P2P, now in my area it is the complete opposite, Steam has given everyone so many good games at dirt cheap prices that its been a couple of years since i seen a gamer box in my shop with cracks loaded up on it but I've seen more Steam installs than I can even count.
Digital gives these publishers a chance to make more money than they ever have thanks to the "checkout sale" by using recommendations and bundles to move more product than they ever could in store but again I bet they cock the whole thing up. And I wish and hope you are right, frankly its a lovely sentiment to think that the consumer will ultimately win by having the small publishers that listen take over, but I would say just look at the record industry. We have had cheap access to recording studios and the power of the Internet working in favor of your idea for over a decade when it comes to music yet the same old megacorps still fuck the artist and consumers and get all the money...why? Because they learned the key was controlling the gateway, you can't get radio play or TV or print without sucking the corporate cock and I have a sad sinking feeling the same will be true of the big book publishers, they'll just partner up with their friends the MSM and you will never get your book talked about or advertised if you don't bend over and get fucked.
Sorry about that, the site where I read it has taken it down but you might be able to find it under just "Windows Blue" or Windows 9. the closest I was able to find to the original memo is this article that talks about the yearly update schedule but it doesn't have the memo. Frankly it doesn't surprise me as i figured that being a MSFT internal memo they would DMCA and C&D anybody that printed the thing as it was obviously a leaked internal document. if I'd have realized it was gonna be taken down i would have saved a copy and put it in a dropbox or something, I just figured "nothing is ever erased from the web" but I guess this memo wasn't newsworthy enough, my bad. I'll keep looking and if I find the full text again i'll be sure to save the page as a PDF and put it in a nice anon dropbox somewhere.
But I can tell you reading it has me looking at exit strategies and I've been selling and servicing MSFT products since Win 3.x, yes the plan is THAT dumb. it talked about how MSFT was gonna go full tilt into hardware, MSFT laptops and desktops and tablets and phones, that windows was gonna switch to a $40 yearly upgrade schedule that would tie into the appstore, how everything MSFT related was gonna be tied together to the appstore, from GFWL to your Windows login for a "seamless experience", and that it was gonna continue using ads in their product to "show application developers the ease of using the Microsoft advertising API" or some shit, by then I was looking for an Apr 1st date on the thing but nope, it was real.
Believe me if there was anybody that wanted Win 8 to just be another Star Trek Rule like Vista it was me, i've been making money with MSFT software for over 25 years now, but its obvious from reading that memo that the ultimate goal is to kill DIY and the OEMs and make MSFT into just another Apple complete with stores and pricing to match. I personally think its gonna go over about as well as WinPhone but I'm already watching Valve like a hawk to see how they solve the DirectX gaming problem in Linux and if they figure it out I'm gonna take a long hard look at the next Ubuntu LTS. MSFT has already put so damned many hoops on their licenses its getting harder and harder to make a buck and if the Blue memo comes to pass the money for anybody but MSFT will just dry up.
While this is true its also true that the Apple method of "We tell you what you want, you don't tell us" really only works with high end boutique brands like Apple, Nike Air Jordans, Prada, and the like. For companies like Lenovo (and MSFT but that won't happen as long as the sweaty retard is in the big chair) they can greatly benefit from listening to their customers and giving them what they want. After all you want brand loyalty and giving the customer what they really desire breeds loyalty.
I have seen this first hand which is why I don't even advertise anymore as I get enough repeat customers and referrals to keep me busy while the other shops seem to spend most of their time sitting on ass. The reason I'm busy and they are not is I sit down and actually LISTEN to the customers and build the products I sell to their needs which makes it a perfect "fit" for want of a better term which makes for happy loyal customers. As one of my customers put it "After having you build and set up my machine trying to use a Dell just seemed painful, it always felt laggy and like I was fighting it. With yours I just push the button and everything does what I want nice and smooth, I would much rather have that than fight the thing".
Frankly its really not hard and its not like they can't have "trendy models" as well, just don't crap all over the Thinkpad name and rep to do so. I have known several Thinkpad users over the years and frankly Lenovo shouldn't have a hard time listening to them and building Thinkpads they want to buy, they want good solid quality in the build, they want the clitmouse, they want decent hardware but not the gamer stuff that makes it sound like an F15 taking off, good screens, they are a pretty conservative bunch if you ask me.
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Insightful? Really people? hell why didn't he just add a fangirl squee while he was at it! he likes Webkit NOT for any features or design choices but "I've liked it since it's debut under Google's name" which means as long as its google he be a squeeing, and he hates Windows and "I don't believe that I'll ever think that "Windows is a "good" operating system" so billions of people are idiots but of course it would be better...if its done by google or uses a google browser.
Good God /. you are getting as bad as reddit or Digg with all the fangirl bullshit, we are supposed to be geeks and back shit up with legitimate arguments not "I realize it's not Google's invention, but webkit is cool." fangirl squeeing crap.
Ahhh I see the flaw in your logic, you are only looking at the cost of the machine itself, I too used to think that way before I started going to legislature hearings and the like and found out there is a "hidden benefit" that you don't see, and that's all the tax breaks and kickbacks given to the corps by the politicians who in turn get to brag they "brought jobs to our (insert district, city, state, etc)" which tilts the balance ATM in favor of the human.
Watch this video and be sure to take a good look at the graphs starting around the 3 minute mark. you see all those kickbacks and tax breaks? Those are all gonna come to a screeching halt when that bubble pops, which will make 1929 look like a "flash crash" by comparison. When they can no longer get "free money" thanks to the government subsidizing the wokers along with giving them all kinds of tax breaks and other graft suddenly those machines? REALLY not that expensive. Again we already have one example in history, the autoworkers. they unionized and demanded living wages and what do you know? the robots sudden;y look a WHOLE lot better even at a million a pop, why? Because you look at the wages and benefits and the life of the machine and the machine will come out cheaper, just simple math.
Ever since the microchip boom more and more jobs could quite frankly be easily switched for robots, they aren't because the cost of the bot plus the loss of the kickbacks and tax breaks math wise make the bot more expensive, when the corps have to pay a living wage and lose the graft? The math for hiring the human just won't work anymore.
As I said we simply have to face the fact that capitalism, like every other ism before it, is doomed, another 20 years, maybe less, and you'll have Honda bots that will be able to do anything a basic human laborer can do and will cost $25k a pop, why would they hire you then? As I said a lot of the jobs the poor work now are mainly "make work" thanks to government hand outs, how long can those last? Not long, I figure within our lifetime we will get to see capitalism fall, just as we watched communism die before our eyes, its simply progress and cannot be stopped.
What you are talking about? It has a name you know, look up "The Monkey Sphere" and you'll see what you are describing, which is basically we monkeys can only relate to about 50 people at any one time, any more than that and our level of giving a shit drops quickly, why? Because we are still those little tribal chimps and for most of our evolution we lived in groups of less than 50, hence why nature didn't bother giving us the ability to relate to more.
Doesn't change the fact that our elections are as fake as any third world country though, its still just two prefab shills talking kayfabe to rile up the peasants while going to dinner with the same lobbyist and laughing about how fucking dumb the peasants are.
Not to mention when a building gets busted down and unsafe the city will condemn it, a corp will just slap some duct tape on that ancient POS software system and keep using it. I don't know how many times when I was working corporate I'd have to work some miracle because "the entire company depends on" this piece of garbage that frankly shouldn't be considered software written by "Bob" in VB 2 if you were lucky, fricking Excel and Access if you were not, and which like this fungus just kept growing until it became this big rotting mound of trash held together with string and prayers.
If the "Java Enterprise" software out there is anything like the other corporate software I've seen frankly its no wonder why Java gets pwned, the shit is probably so badly written it can ONLY run on version Foo which hasn't be supported in ages, maybe even running on a long dead OS like WinNT, and its just a pwning or crash waiting to happen.
Uhhh...how EXACTLY are we supposed to " take responsibility for the laws" when our election cycle is as fake and rigged as pro wrestling? If you aren't from the USA let me break down how it works, in the primary you are given a choice of 4 to 5 shills, you may get one "dark horse" that isn't a shill but the MSM is owned by the megacorps and will make sure nobody knows they exist. See the video on Ron Paul by Jon Stewart where Paul was literally "He who shall NOT be named" when they would announce the first, second, and FOURTH place winners in a contest.
Then after the corp owned MSM has made sure "the people's choice" is two shills they already own you then are given a bunch of "hot button issues" that the corps don't give a fuck about and therefor don't care which way they go, abortion, gay rights, shit that won't affect their bottom line, and then you can "choose" from shill A or shill B, either of which will keep passing corporate friendly laws that benefit the rich old fucks that have been ruling this country for a good 150+ years now, your JP Morgans, your Goldman Sachs, the whole 7 media conglomerates that own every single thing you see, hear, and read, its the same names over and over and OVER getting their way, and if anything goes wrong they just get another "too big to fail" like Golman Sachs who used Wall Street like Las Vegas and when the bubble busted got 125 cents on every dollar out of the pockets of every American, nice.
You see friend you simply can't change a corrupt system by working within that system and the reason why should be fairly obvious...because its corrupt! So I would like to hear how EXACTLY the American people are supposed to "control" or "change" anything when the entire media is owned by a handful of uber-rich, when you have "free speech zones" and every movement ends up with 2 fed infiltrators for every 5 people, how EXACTLY are we supposed to "take responsibility" when we have less of a voice now than we did before the revolution?
Uhhh...wouldn't the smartest move just to be to get away from using the software that is a security fucking nightmare in the first place?
This is what I don't get, I actually support Flash because the alternative (HTML V5) is COMPLETELY BROKEN and doesn't run worth a piss, it sucks cycles, its performance is like a bad joke, I don't care which engine you run it on put it side by side with a Flash at the same resolution and it'll crap through twice the resources, so I GET why we should hang onto Flash until HTML V5 gets its shit together, but with Java Its not like we don't have other frameworks that work folks, and Java has always been a security nightmare from hell, its security was terrible when Sun had it, its still terrible now that Oracle has it, so why in the hell keep using it?
If you are gonna stick with Java put a rubber on the damned thing and stick it into a VM with rollbacks, don't run that damned buggy POS on actual production machines, I mean how many times you gotta get pawned before you learn? I'm so damned glad I got out of ancient corporate crap, I haven't had to deal with Java in over 5 years now and my life is better for it. I can understand if some moron spent a couple of million on a system based on Java and you're trapped, but honestly you really shouldn't be surprised by this as Java has ALWAYS been a malware writers wet dream.
Correct on IE, it is just using some weird design choices but I don't see how anybody can argue that Win 8 isn't wrong when this is the average user response I saw at the shop. When the user needs a fricking training course to use your damned OS like its 1986 all over again? Something has gone HORRIBLY wrong. IE's biggest problem isn't the UI, its the giant fucking bullseye painted on it by hackers because they know the clueless rubes that are still running that 30 day Norton trialware from 6 years ago and think that works is using IE. Add to that the fucking braindead choice to not port back to their supported OSes so that the ONLY way you can use the same browser across XP/Vista/7 is to NOT use IE and you have a browser made of fail.
As for TFA lets call a spade a spade, shall we? google needs their asses spanked for the redirect bullshit they have been pulling of late. If MSFT made all THEIR websites dump you into shitty mode if you didn't use the latest IE we'd be hearing screams of antitrust, but Google can pull the same shit and not a peep? bullshit, utter bullshit. I was against the "works best in IE" horseshit and I'm against the "works best in Webkit" horseshit, Google is making billions off the ads and data-mining they do in Chrome and this should be treated as what it is noncompetitive behavior. If the browser supports the features then they should work PERIOD and having to hack strings like its 1999 all over again is bullshit.
I use a webkit based browser (Comodo Dragon) but even I don't want a world where the only engine we have is webkit, that is how we get nasty zero days that can infect the whole damned planet. Did we not learn anything from IE 6?
As others have rightly pointed out "the flame that burns brightest also burns the quickest" and when they are writing specs at 14 years old you can expect a burn out. Some go nuts, some end up junkies, but when you are THAT driven THAT young you can pretty much count on a major flameout, just a shame his flameout was fatal.
As for copyrights, i have an ironclad argument that pretty much obliterates any pro copyright trolls and I think the more people point this out to the average folks the quicker we can get this scam taken out...Do you realize that many of Walt Disney's FIRST works, made when cars were started with a crank, airplanes were made out of cloth, and antibiotics were but a dream are STILL under copyright? The man has been dead for longer than most of us have been alive and they will STAY under copyright until most of us are dead, now how does that in ANY way shape or form promote sciences and the arts as the founding fathers intended?
All our insane copyrights and patents are doing is making sure that Asia becomes the next superpower as you won't be able to get anything done here without getting screwed by all the tollbooths. Most of the games I grew up with are now in copyright limbo, so many of the 80s companies went under yet you can't do anything with the games because the copyrights, that won't expire for over a century, are just hanging there like a sword of Damocles over them, and any cool idea you can possibly think of will have a dozen bullshit vague patents that will break you if you aren't a megacorp.
The point was the games were BANNED in all of Australia before, just as you can't get the walking dead game in Germany now because you aren't allowed to kill anything human in a game there, they label killing zombies as desecration of a corpse. At least the Germans do have a bit of an excuse, what with them causing the deaths of millions and all, Australia was nothing but big brother deciding what the peasants could and could witness.
I always thought Bill Hicks should have been given a LOT more fame and credit than he did, comedians are still ripping his bits even to this day and the man has been gone nearly 20 years.
But if you ever wanted to hear truth spoken about politics and the corporate fascism that gets waved around as "the free market" Bill was your guy, he could make you laugh and then go home and realize every thing he was saying was doses of pure truth.
And the reason I equate politicans to wrestlers is Ventura said that was exactly what he found when he got into politics, they would kayfabe in front of the camera and each pick one side of a hot button issue that neither gave a shit about but which was sure to rile up the peasants, then they would go to lunch together once the cameras were off. Its all just kayfabe, the same lobbyists owns both sides so it really doesn't matter who wins. Why does everybody think its always "the lesser of two evils" when they vote? Its because they are BOTH sell outs and the actual differences between the sides really don't amount to much. Do you think the corporate masters give a wet fuck about abortion or gay marriage? Nope and THAT is why they let the peasants have those issues, because they don't make money off either of those issues and so don't give a shit.
Yep until the feds kick down your door and hogtie you because some guy across the street is downloading kiddy porn. Sorry I don't have time to look it up but I remember a case in FLA where a guy spent 6 months in jail and over $100,000 in legal fees to clear his name because his laptop was infected and somebody used it as a CP proxy,so all you would be doing is painting a giant bullseye.
In the end the great once free and open internet will simply come to a close, to be replaced by a corporate run mix of social media and the home shopping network. The governments of the world hate the fact that people can air their dirty laundry (see Assange for an example of how much they hate that shit) and the corps aren't happy unless they can squeeze every single cent out of every property so they will just work together and shut it down. After all what good is high speed if you can't actually use it?
I just think its sad that Australians have been treated like infants so long by their politicians...why did they put up with that shit? As a parent just give me the same kind of info they give for a TV program "This game contains scenes of (insert violence, sex, drug references, whatever)" and let ME decide what is and is not appropriate for my boys. Its called parenting and just because some are too fucking lazy to do their damned jobs as parents does NOT mean that as an adult I shouldn't be able to play whatever kind of game that I want.
But there is a CRUCIAL difference that both You and Ballmer are missing which is IE only won when Netscape fucked themselves and we have seen NO indication that is EVAR gonna happen with Apple or Google.
If you look at their ENTIRE history you'll notice their supposedly "evil plans" really only worked when the other company fucked itself and left them a big fat opening. Take Netscape, NS 3 was good, NS 4 was alpha quality shit that crashed every 10 minutes and often managed to take the whole OS down with it. There is a REASON why they wouldn't FOSS the NS 4 code but instead did a rewrite first, and that is because NS 4 was a giant flaming turd. Myself and many others actually went and sought out IE, downloading it from the net, because NS 4 frankly didn't work.
And over and over to the very beginning of the company you see this, DR didn't want to port CP/M to Intel chips, gave the market to MSFT. Wordperfect saw Win95 as just another flash in the pan and tried to release the DOS version with a piss poor Win32 wrapper that made it crash prone,, gave the market to MSFT. BeOS stuck with the PPC which was too high even then and Apple was mismanaged during Jobs' absence, with 2 dozen overlapping models at widely different price points, gave the market to MSFT.
In this case its the exact opposite, neither Apple nor Google are putting out any lackluster broken releases and with the inroads they have it would have to be VERY broken, because as long as it runs their apps most folks will put up with either company putting out a release that is just more of the same.
So I would argue the "IE trick" simply doesn't work if the other company doesn't shoot themselves in the foot and i think if you were to look at the sales figures for Win 8 (PC sales dropped 13% even with the economy improving) and Surface (MSFT had to cut the orders in half because they haven't even been able to sell a million units in 5 months) that in this case it is MSFT shooting themselves in the foot. And in all those other cases they didn't destroy what they had to try to get the new market, they simply expanded. This time its just not gonna work, and Win 8 will actually redeem Vista by doing MUCH worse, mark my words.
"Well I believe the puppet on the left has MY interests at heart, well I believe the puppet on the right shares MY beliefs...hey wait a minute, there is one guy working both puppets!" Bill Hicks.
ANY of you that believe that left/right bullshit is anything more than kayfabe put on by the rulers of this country to keep the peasants too busy arguing to notice they are ALL getting fucked should really try this little game i have, its called three card monty and I'm sure you'll find the lady!
Even though I'm a socialist and never cared for libertarians I recognize truth when I see it and urge all to watch the truth about voting and just remember you cannot change a corrupted system by working within that system, anymore than playing a game of three card monty a million times is gonna make you a winner. The game is rigged folks, you are given 2 pre-approved shills who'll make a LOT of noise about this program or that program that "the other side" is sure to hate when in reality the same power brokers that have been leeching off this country for decades still get to have their way. Why do you think that Mr "hope and change" kept or extended every single thing the left hated about dubya's watch? Because just like the wrestler he does what he's told and reads from the cue card.
Uhhh...Billy? You DO have a license number of XP Pro lying around...yes? if so then "TinyXP" is NOT pirated, its just a preconfigured XP. It takes less than 3 minutes to switch their key for your own legit key and there you go, a 100% legit XP that has just had all the cruft ripped out. they also give you a nice little txt file listing everything they changed if you want to DIY but since you can just switch keys why bother?
Remember Billy its not piracy if you already own the thing, you are merely "format shifting" in this case from an installed OS to a VM.
Riiight, Linux is gonna save you money long term....how exactly? Lets look at the OS breaking moves just in the past 5 years, ALSA for a broken Pulse, KDE 3 and Gnome 2 just getting really good and stable....only to get shitcanned for alpha quality replacements, oh and lets not forget all the kernel twiddling by Linus "I'm an arrogant ass" Torvalds and the entire WiFi subsystem getting a serious rewrite that broke as much as it fixed. Quick, what do BSD, OSX,iOS,Windows,Solaris and even OS/2 have in common that Linux DON'T? A stable driver ABI so when one subsystem gets futzed with the whole thing don't shit itself and die, that's what.
As for backwards compatibility...uhhh, hello? XP Mode? Comes with Win 7 Pro? Lets you make a nice little locked down XP install while still having all the security and benefits like a better memory subsystem that is Windows 7? I've set up several businesses on Win 7 with XP Mode and frankly it runs great, the employee just clicks the desktop link just like they would have in XP and the VM runs the program easy peasy. the ONLY thing its not good for I've found is graphics heavy stuff like gaming which lets face it most businesses aren't gonna be allowing you to run your old Win9X games anyway. ironically I've not had a bit of trouble running ALL my win9X games on win 7 X64...as long as I pirate them thanks to the old shitty 16 bit DRM they used to use. But the games themselves? Run fine.
But its really not hard for a business to set up a test bed with Win 7 and XP Mode to test their old software, hell you can get dual core machines now for less than $200 so there really is no excuse not to have a test bed and the things gained by switching, better security, faster workflow (jumplists and breadcrumbs...I still don't know how we lived without those) a MUCH better and actually sane memory subsystem that will have all the programs they use daily loaded into RAM and ready to go when they are, and finally the frankly insane amount of money you are pissing away by hanging onto those old P4s and CRT monitors, I've had business owners tell me that after I switched over their office their electric bill went down a good 35% just from not blowing all the juice on feeding and cooling those old power hogs. It just doesn't make any kind of sense, not from a security, economic, nor business sense, to keep old hardware.
The difference we have here is the price, you seem to think that the corps would pay, I believe that the ONLY reason you have minimum wage jobs at all is because that makes people cheaper than the machine so they hire people. Lets take fast food as an example...what job is there in Mickey D's that couldn't be done BETTER by a fully automated assembly line? After all its less than a dozen ingredients all told being used and probably a good 85% of their sales are the preset combos, so why would they need ANY humans in Mickey D, or Wendy's or any of those pre-fab fast food joints?
The answer is the same answer as to why there are more Chinese working than Americans right now, which is they DON'T need the humans at all they are just cheaper so to maximize profits the smart move is to go with the cheaper resource which is the human. but the only reason those humans are cheaper is because of government subsidy, without that the machine would win. Look at the auto industry, unions got a living wage, the humans got replaced by robots.
Now do I think this is right? No but then again i think the entire system is doomed and all those rich cocksuckers living like Gods now will end up hanging from a tree in a not too distant future. Remember the words of Lenin "A capitalist will sell you the rope you intend to hang him with" and we have seen time and time again that its true, the short term greed will always be more important than their long term survival. The corps will keep rigging the elections, sending jobs overseas, and doing everything they can not to pay even the pittance that they owe, like Google funneling all its money into the Cayman islands, but I take heart in the simple fact that the poor outnumber the rich by a good 50,000 to 1 and growing everyday, so eventually the people WILL rise up, the only question to me is whether it'll be peaceful like the former USSR or like the Arab Springs.
As for what will take its place? Probably a combination of socialism and meritocracy, because that was one thing that Roddenberry got right in that once the tech reaches a certain point money? Really doesn't work. But I think you are wrong that "if the jobs could be done by machines they would be" because the corps know that if they fire 100,000+ people there goes their tax breaks and congress ass kissing, but if the "free labor" given to them by the welfare state ever ends? Just like the auto industry I'm sure you'll see "New" Mickey D's popping up across the street from the old and it'll be built from the ground up to be automated. They'll just have a truck come drop off raw material and pick up the money once a day, they'll even brag about how the food is "free of human hands" so no more food poisoning. Of course only the rich will have any money to buy, but again that would take long term thinking which our rich have proven they just aren't capable of.
But would you support them raising the minimum wage to a living wage if the corps said we are just gonna replace the workers with machines then so you get a handful making a living wage and tens of thousands out of a job?
The one who compared it to the seamstress smashing the sewing machine is just completely mistaken, after all you couldn't just hand the cloth to the sewing machine and have a finished product come out the other side. For the first time in our entire history you have the ability of a product to go from raw material to finished product with no human hands involved and THAT is why I have been arguing capitalism is dead. After all what IS capitalism? Its the trading of labor for capital...so what happens to the system if labor is worthless?
Even China is seeing this happen because despite how cheaply the workforce is willing to trade their labor for capital the machines will come out ahead in the end. The machine never gets sick, never needs breaks, doesn't eat or go to the bathroom...I bet if you forced all the corps to go to say a $15 an hour payscale that a good 80% of the jobs that are currently low wage would be taken by the machines. As I said you could probably run an entire Walmart supercenter with just a dozen people for the entire store!
So we are just gonna have to accept that capitalism is dead, either the government just cuts all those whose labor isn't needed a check or like Walmart subsidizes "make work" for the masses. If they can get a machine that will run for 5-10 years for the same price as your salary for a single year, why would they hire you?
Actually its worse than that Billy as XP still has the old WinNT 4 memory manager which frankly was designed in an era when memory was worth its weight in gold so it'll pimpslap the living hell out of swap LONG before you've even used half the RAM in the system. So in actuality you aren't saving any memory, you are just swapping more. Compare this to Win 7 where I have 500MB of my 8GB free right now, am I running something intensive? Nope its merely caching all my most used programs and Windows features so if I click on them its instant. if I do launch something intensive like my shooters Win 7 will just dump the cache and hand it over and when finished it refills the cache which is a MUCH smarter and saner design choice. Now anything I use day to day loads with ZERO disc access, just click and done.
So if you look at the internals of WinXP there really isn't much they can do to make it run any better or safer, like that 7 year old graphics card every drop of performance has done been squeezed out and you can't fix it, the lack of non admin users, the lack of low rights mode, the inability to protect the memory or keep it from using swap when you have memory free, these things are part of the core and just can't be fixed without dumping the whole, they just can't do it.
Win 7 is supported until 2020 at the very least (since it has become the new XP I have a feeling it'll get an extension or two) and HAS all the extra security and core OS features that make it capable of handling the multiple cores and multiGB of RAM we have today. When XP was released I can tell you the average system was a 300MHz PII with 64MB-128MB of RAM, hell those $50 cheap tablets have better specs than high end PCs ran under XP RTM. Its time to let the old thing go, like Win9X it served its purpose at the time but now it should just rest in peace and everyone move on. Even XP X64 (in reality 2K3 Workstation 64) had lousy memory management, it could take a lot of memory but it was up to the individual programs to use it wisely.
Oh man! Thanks a lot for ruining the surprise jerk, and here I was getting ready to shock players around the world when I smacked them with "pretty kitty big boom boom" when the beta rolls, next time put spoiler alert first okay?
Walmart to me is the canary in the coal mine and a perfect example of what I have been arguing for years, which is that without government funded "make work" jobs capitalism would be just as dead as communism or any other ism of the past.
For those that don't know one of the first "training videos" you are shown when hired by Walmart is how to get on government assistance, because you simply can't survive on Walmart wages. Why that is just the evil dirty corp screwing the workers...right? Well it IS true they are screwing the workers but in reality most jobs could be done by machines now so I would argue that the vast majority of the service industry jobs aren't even needed anymore. With RFIDs, robot stockers, and camera systems that can allow a couple of guys to monitor the whole store frankly you wouldn't need more than a dozen people to run a Supercenter because the machines can do it better. same thing goes for all the fast food joints like Mickey D's, you could have an automated assembly line that would never make mistakes and it would be as simple to the end user as "push button to get food".
At the end of the day we are playing IQ musical chairs and fewer and fewer will ever get a seat, just look at how many student loan defaults we are having as students go straight from graduation to the unemployment line, you could wipe out half the people on this planet and not only would the quality of life not go down, it would actually go up as the people left would be valued for their labor! We just have to face the fact that like in Star Trek the age of trading labor for capital is coming to a close, the machines don't need living wages, never get sick or tired, don't need health insurance, etc. I predict the next decade will be ugly as the financial bubble finally pops and those at the top violently struggle to hold onto the system that gave the ability to live like Gods but with the difference between the top and the bottom growing by the minute the starving masses will outnumber them by such a huge amount they simply won't be able to win.
As for TFA its probably too little too late but it is nice to see the OLPC project finally growing a brain. I would argue that not only would the netbook still be alive today if they would have done like myself and many suggested and sold it to the first world the economy of scale they would have gotten would have allowed them to put a LOT more XO-1s in the hands of third world kids by dropping cost to manufacture and giving them healthy profits to pay for more units to give away. Maybe it will work, who knows, but considering how simple Android ICS is to use and the fact you can get an Android ICS 7 inch tablet for less than $80 complete with several games? i kinda doubt it.
So pointing out that words like "muzzie" and "towelhead" are being used as placeholders for nigger "doesn't hold water anymore", is that right? Pretending something doesn't exist doesn't make it go away ya know, and living in the deep south I can tell you there is a LOT of hatred on BOTH sides, with blacks calling Romney "that dumb cracker" and whites calling Obama "muzzie" or "towelhead" because most know that they can't say nigger in polite company anymore.
I would be the first to agree that the race card is played too often, especially blacks who want to blame everything that has ever gonna wrong in their life to YT but on the flipside it doesn't do any good to outright ignore racism when it is frankly fairly obvious. Hell the ultra right has been using code words to appeal to the more racist ring wing elements for years, phrases like "forced busing" and "welfare queens" being just 2 off the top of my head. Trying to pretend that doesn't exist simply lets it fester and get more blatant like with the "muzzie" crap.
Of course I don't think that but you have to agree that the costs to print and store and ship actual books is NOT cheap and by cutting all that out they can lower the price and still make as much or more than they were before. Again this lets the authors get stuff out there that would never fly IRL, short stories of a couple of chapters and episodic content for just a couple of examples.
But again I say look to the RIAA, because if its one thing we have seen over and over its the greed of the publishers that usually cock things up. Take CDs for example, the price hasn't gone down in nearly 20 years even though they are cheaper than ever to produce and at a fricking buck a song many artists have albums that is cheaper to buy the hard copy and rip it yourself than to just buy the damned songs. Of course as we found out with Cheap trick and Meatloaf (who don't get a cent from digital sales and is suing the record companies) these higher prices are NOT because of the artist, its the publishers slitting their own throats by trying to wring every penny they can out of each sale instead of using economy of scale to make more money. Short sighted PHB bullshit as usual.
And finally look at again at Steam that has done it right. Not 6 years ago frankly I didn't know a single gamer who WASN'T a pirate, they'd buy a few titles they wanted the MP on and a few from the bargain bin but a good 90% of their games came from P2P, now in my area it is the complete opposite, Steam has given everyone so many good games at dirt cheap prices that its been a couple of years since i seen a gamer box in my shop with cracks loaded up on it but I've seen more Steam installs than I can even count.
Digital gives these publishers a chance to make more money than they ever have thanks to the "checkout sale" by using recommendations and bundles to move more product than they ever could in store but again I bet they cock the whole thing up. And I wish and hope you are right, frankly its a lovely sentiment to think that the consumer will ultimately win by having the small publishers that listen take over, but I would say just look at the record industry. We have had cheap access to recording studios and the power of the Internet working in favor of your idea for over a decade when it comes to music yet the same old megacorps still fuck the artist and consumers and get all the money...why? Because they learned the key was controlling the gateway, you can't get radio play or TV or print without sucking the corporate cock and I have a sad sinking feeling the same will be true of the big book publishers, they'll just partner up with their friends the MSM and you will never get your book talked about or advertised if you don't bend over and get fucked.
Sorry about that, the site where I read it has taken it down but you might be able to find it under just "Windows Blue" or Windows 9. the closest I was able to find to the original memo is this article that talks about the yearly update schedule but it doesn't have the memo. Frankly it doesn't surprise me as i figured that being a MSFT internal memo they would DMCA and C&D anybody that printed the thing as it was obviously a leaked internal document. if I'd have realized it was gonna be taken down i would have saved a copy and put it in a dropbox or something, I just figured "nothing is ever erased from the web" but I guess this memo wasn't newsworthy enough, my bad. I'll keep looking and if I find the full text again i'll be sure to save the page as a PDF and put it in a nice anon dropbox somewhere.
But I can tell you reading it has me looking at exit strategies and I've been selling and servicing MSFT products since Win 3.x, yes the plan is THAT dumb. it talked about how MSFT was gonna go full tilt into hardware, MSFT laptops and desktops and tablets and phones, that windows was gonna switch to a $40 yearly upgrade schedule that would tie into the appstore, how everything MSFT related was gonna be tied together to the appstore, from GFWL to your Windows login for a "seamless experience", and that it was gonna continue using ads in their product to "show application developers the ease of using the Microsoft advertising API" or some shit, by then I was looking for an Apr 1st date on the thing but nope, it was real.
Believe me if there was anybody that wanted Win 8 to just be another Star Trek Rule like Vista it was me, i've been making money with MSFT software for over 25 years now, but its obvious from reading that memo that the ultimate goal is to kill DIY and the OEMs and make MSFT into just another Apple complete with stores and pricing to match. I personally think its gonna go over about as well as WinPhone but I'm already watching Valve like a hawk to see how they solve the DirectX gaming problem in Linux and if they figure it out I'm gonna take a long hard look at the next Ubuntu LTS. MSFT has already put so damned many hoops on their licenses its getting harder and harder to make a buck and if the Blue memo comes to pass the money for anybody but MSFT will just dry up.
While this is true its also true that the Apple method of "We tell you what you want, you don't tell us" really only works with high end boutique brands like Apple, Nike Air Jordans, Prada, and the like. For companies like Lenovo (and MSFT but that won't happen as long as the sweaty retard is in the big chair) they can greatly benefit from listening to their customers and giving them what they want. After all you want brand loyalty and giving the customer what they really desire breeds loyalty.
I have seen this first hand which is why I don't even advertise anymore as I get enough repeat customers and referrals to keep me busy while the other shops seem to spend most of their time sitting on ass. The reason I'm busy and they are not is I sit down and actually LISTEN to the customers and build the products I sell to their needs which makes it a perfect "fit" for want of a better term which makes for happy loyal customers. As one of my customers put it "After having you build and set up my machine trying to use a Dell just seemed painful, it always felt laggy and like I was fighting it. With yours I just push the button and everything does what I want nice and smooth, I would much rather have that than fight the thing".
Frankly its really not hard and its not like they can't have "trendy models" as well, just don't crap all over the Thinkpad name and rep to do so. I have known several Thinkpad users over the years and frankly Lenovo shouldn't have a hard time listening to them and building Thinkpads they want to buy, they want good solid quality in the build, they want the clitmouse, they want decent hardware but not the gamer stuff that makes it sound like an F15 taking off, good screens, they are a pretty conservative bunch if you ask me.