Somebody needs to get with the last decade since MSFT made Kerberos the preferred authentication method waaaaay back in Win2K, so if you are still using NTLM for authentication after it has been depreciated for 13 years? I'd say you have bigger problems than NTLM being hacked.
Has anybody tried running these in compatibility mode? And if worse comes to worse billy you might want to look up "TinyXP" on TPB as it makes an excellent VM for older software, uses less than 65Mb of RAM on the desktop so it makes a perfect VM with low overhead for Windows software that won't run on Win 7 X64.
Like you I have Win 7 X64 but I'm gonna download it anyway as I can always slap it on a spare box or fire up a TinyXP VM. Thanks Adobe, damned nice of you.
The easiest way to get Paint.NET is NOT from the actual devs but from Ninite which is about as easy as you can get. Simply send 'em a link to Ninite, tell 'em which boxes to check, then run it, its THAT simple. Oh and no toolbars or crapware like what many companies push, just sane defaults and an icon dropped on the desktop. You can even use it as an updater as it will skip any software you choose that is already up to date.
But you don't destroy profitable businesses, this is business 101 and Ballmer is burning the place down around them in the hopes he can move into a nicer house that frankly isn't for sale. MSFT has NOTHING to offer on ARM because without X86 its pretty worthless, they are also screwed without the OEMs because that is hundreds of millions of low end desktops and laptops that are being sold with anytime upgrade ability and MS Office trials
I think MSFT is making the same mistake as the press, thinking "its a mobile world" when in reality nobody is getting rid of their PC for a smartphone, they are adding TO their PC with a smartphone. They could be making so much money off of this it isn't funny by selling the world on a "connected office/home" built around the PC where everything automagically syncs to it and is ready to go. Imagine your phone contacts automagically backing up to your PC just by walking into the room, or having your MS Office instantly sync between mobile and desktop so whatever you were working on is instantly on either device ready to go.
Again there is billions yet to be made in X86 but Ballmer is too damned stupid to see anything but Cupertino. he should take Job's own words to heart "Microsoft doesn't have to lose for Apple to win" and the reverse is also true but if they burn the company down and end up killing X86 Windows and MS Office on X86 in the process then they might as well close the doors and give the money back to the shareholders as its all over. hell put ME in charge of that company for 3 years and if I don't double the profits they don't owe me a dime, there is so many ways to monetize Windows without burning the customers but Ballmer is gonna kill the goose laying the golden eggs because swans are hip and trendy, except the swans don't want nothing to do with Ballmer's ugly ass.
I'm afraid its true, look up "Windows Blue" which is straight from Redmond, the goals are 1.- Yearly upgrades with software tied to you running the latest version, 2.- MSFT hardware designed to target the "high end experience" ala Apple, basically they are consigning the OEMs to the bottom tier only and are gonna gouge the fuck out of them so I have no doubt they are having meetings with Google as we speak, 3.- Everything tied to your account and an appstore, so you won't be doing squat that MSFT won't know about and get a cut of. Oh and of course ADS built right into the OS, 4.- A MSFT store in every big city selling MSFTPhones, MSFTLaptops and desktops, and MSFTTabs, again shamelessly ripping off Apple.
But "Lunix" as you put it won't save anybody, its a corpse and worthless for home users thanks to its horribly fragmented design model where the kernel devs don't listen to the driver devs who ignore the DE devs who don't give a fuck about the X-Server and Pulse devs, etc which is why its so easy to kill on update, its not an OS, its just a bunch of little programs that are SUPPOSED to work seamlessly together but reality shows that to be bullshit.
For awhile I had hopes Google would save us but just as I predicted "do no evil" was nothing but "think different" for FOSSies and with their browser redirects and locking the fuck out of Chromebooks they are turning out to be just as douchey as MSFT and Apple. I have a feeling that historians are gonna look back on the teen years as "the death of the open system, where all hardware was replaced by glorified game consoles" because its all about the lock in and controlling the unit after sale now, you watch in 5 years you'll have PCs with everything soldered to the board that you have to toss when you need more performance or the company stops supporting it because like that old GameCube in the closet it'll be worthless, with no upgrades nor software to run on it since "this appstore requires v 4.6 and you have v 3.4, please buy a new system" and that will be the end of that unit. Damned shame as powerful hardware has never been cheaper but hardware baked DRM means you'll never get to do anything with it except use it to hand the corp more money through an appstore.
While this is true, same as the most stolen car is the Camry because the parts are worth more than the car, you DO have to admit that its pretty funny that even a thief wouldn't touch Win 8 or Surface. Maybe they could turn that into a marketing slogan? "Afraid of data theft? Use Win 8, its so nasty even thieves won't take it!"
Uhhh...yeah, kinda knew that already as the EU space agency does all their launches from there. Still doesn't answer my question though, which is Space-X getting paid by the US government to build in the USA over using a more logical place such as Centre Spatial. After all as we saw with Solyndra it wouldn't be the first time the US gov cut a fat check to have something located here that didn't make any sense.
I think this article linked through TFA reviewing the WOA appstore sums it up nicely "But for now, x86 compatibility isn't just a check box: It's a doorway back to a land of sanity.". Kinda sad they are actually charging more than iPad for Surface when its quite obvious just from reading the reviews their appstore is completely broken and worthless.
BTW it may be a little petty of me, but since i called it months ago that the WOA and Win 8 appstore would be a trainwreck, since they couldn't make GFWL functional after years and a competitor that would be easy enough to copy they sure as hell wouldn't be able to pull off an appstore for a different arch so I'd like to say "I told you so" to those that doubted me and do the dance of smug superiority.
Actually the reason they locked it down was because "What does Apple do? Well do that and charge 20% more because we are better than them dammit!". If you want to know more look up the "Windows Blue" memo which makes it clear the ultimate goal of Win 8 and above is to have only MSFT approved software running on MSFT hardware sold at MSFT stores for MSFT profit margins and...well that's pretty much it.
Windows Blue shows any original thought left the company ages ago and now they are gonna try their favorite gag of using their position in one market to force their way into another, the old IE trick, only they just don't have the power of the monopoly anymore as people don't rush out to buy the latest version like they did during Win 9X.
Of course the bigger question of TFA is why, why would anybody care? WOA is a complete and total failure, they had to call the factory and cut their order in half to keep from having a warehouse full of surface units so what is the point? The hope that all these surface units will end up on Woot! for $99? I think with the Ballmernator's ego he'd bury them in a landfill in NM rather than admit its a flop, just as he counted every Vista downgrade as a Vista sale to pad the numbers.
Why would they even build it in the US, unless they are basically getting paid to do so? Hell there are plenty of South American countries closer to the equator that would let you have plenty of land dirt cheap and as we all know the closer to the equator you can get the cheaper the cost of getting into LEO.
Apple's iPhone is subsidized up the ass, I don't see MSFT subsidizing the Surface or WinPhone, not that it'd help as when they got AT&T to offer the WinPhone at $50 even after 4 billion in MSFT advertising they didn't sell shit.
The simple fact is you just don't kill a multibillion dollar business just for the opportunity to maybe get in on a better business, that is stupid and suicidal. If they were smart MSFT would spin off mobile so they could get out from under the Windows legacy, they could still sell them at MSFT stores and talk up about how nicely they integrate but you just don't blow up your warehouse in the hopes that you might get a shot at a better locale down the street.
And the biggest point that MSFT is missing is they are trying to push the customers into yearly upgrades when the simple fact is that PCs passed good enough several releases ago so if anything people are gonna be buying and upgrading LESS, not more. i mean 5 years ago my low end PCs were Phenom X3s and X4 with 4GB of RAM...what average user is gonna stress that unit? None, so they are simply keeping the PC they have and ADDING an iPhone or iPad. Does that mean they are getting rid of their PCs? Nope, just means it does what they want it to do so they see no reason to replace it.
It would be so easy to make money from that attitude but Ballmer is too fucking stupid, instead of trying to force a UI that nobody wants and upgrades that nobody cares about they should be selling services and support, let those companies that want to keep XP past 2014 pay a yearly service contract and sell all those home users on Win 7 new features by backporting the appstore. You could for example sell something similar to GoToMyPC leveraging MSFT servers to make logging into your home PC from work and vice versa trivial and easy, you could make deals with all the content providers to sell ala carte plug ins for WMC that would give you various channels like the networks, Hulu Free, etc and have it all integrated into WMC and automatically updated so you have the latest schedules.
There is so many ways to monetize Windows without slitting their throats or pissing off their customers it ain't even funny, yet because Ballmer can only see Cupertino from the big chair he's gonna cock the whole thing up.
That is fine for photos in your phone, not so much for older photographs you would like a copy of as most people don't have a good quality scanner at home.
Whatever happened to that company that was gonna make a luxury zeppelin? Sounds like a perfect fit to me, and I bet there is a lot of rich people that would pay to fly in style like that, the proposal I saw basically was like an airborne cruise liner which would be even nicer than first class on an airplane.
That was actually something I find fascinating about the cold war, how much blatant theft was going on between the superpowers. You had Israel having one of their spies sleep with an Arab Christian pilot for nearly 3 years, just to get their hands on the MiG-21 (Steal The Sky has a good if watered down account), you had the Soviets actually buying a dud Sidewinder that had gotten lodged in the wing of a Chinese MiG 17 and using it to make copies so good of Sidewinder that you could mix and match parts from their Atoll and our Sidewinder and it would work perfectly, and when my grandfather was stationed in West Germany in the 50s and 60s he said if the Soviets ever wanted to take out our forward bases all they would have to do is send a single plane with a nuke as they had orders DO NOT FIRE if they detected a single Soviet plane as we had spread the word through our spy networks behind the curtain that there was a large bounty for each new MiG or Sukov and they didn't want to risk possibly shooting down somebody trying to collect the reward.
Yeah I'd personally be scared shitless to take over any property that was built before the 80s, no telling what kind of toxic crap you'll end up with. We had several older factories set abandoned for years until the city finally tore them down, everybody was "Why destroy nice factories like that? surely somebody would be willing to buy if the price was right" and I told them about Superfund but they didn't believe me...until the guys wearing hazmat were tearing the buildings down because of the asbestos and toxic chemicals that had been in use and still contaminated the property.
People just don't realize how truly toxic many places were before the EPA started cracking down, in those old factories they found PHB and dioxin contamination and more asbestos than you would believe so I can only imagine what a place used to build fricking rockets from the 60s would be like, probably a toxic nightmare.
Yeah but if I like a book I can say "Here check this out" and they are cheap enough I don't have to worry about getting it back any time soon, they still haven't really worked the whole sharing thing out yet. Also the pricing structure sucks, I've seen too many books that were as high or even higher than the paperback which is just retarded, the digital don't cost shit to make or ship so why would I pay the same or higher than a hard copy? Steam is the only service that has gotten this right so far, their prices are usually 10%-25% lower on anything that isn't brand new and of course they have the crazy Steam sales to boot. I've just not been seeing that in e-books, the only thing I've seen that is even slightly appealing is it has allowed some of the horror and sci-fi writers to get their short story collections published.
So I'm sorry but while I think the e-reader was a good idea from an environmental standpoint I just don't think its gonna make any real dent in book sales. remember this is the SECOND wave of e-readers,l they had an e-reader craze in the run up to the dotbomb as well and again it was never able to carve out more than a small niche. if it were handled better, marketed aggressively, with really good prices on content? Yeah it could take some share but if its one thing we've learned from the *.A.A its that never underestimate the greed of publishers to cock things up.
Uhhh...because it IS a bad thing? We're talking BILLIONS of dollars worth of software that REQUIRES WIndows, niches that will NEVER be served by OSX and Linux, so yeah, MSFT slitting their own throats is a BAD thing. I think even most FOSS advocates would agree the problem isn't the average worker in Redmond, its the douchebag corporate attitude, if you fired the guys at the top and made it a more open company? Then I'm sure they'd have no problem with it.
Sadly that was what Ozzie and Allchin were doing, they made MSFT shared source and was working with more FOSS groups but then they saw Steve Ballmer's master plan, aka "We're just gonna be Apple, people will pay us crazy money instead" and saw the company was heading over a cliff and bailed.
So you should stop and really picture a world without Windows, first of all every place you interact with that has Windows software is gonna raise their prices about 40%, you like the idea of every place handing you a 40% higher bill? Well it'll happen, after all you are talking about billions in custom software that is gonna have to be tossed and rewritten for something else and they sure as fuck ain't gonna eat that cost, so they WILL pass it to YOU, and for a good decade its gonna be a fucking mess as previously stable software becomes alpha quality, again billions of dollars and hundreds of millions of programs down the drain, and of course about 25 years worth of legacy software will NOT be getting a rewrite since those companies don't exist anymore so you just pissed all THAT money down the drain too.
The smart move would be to NOT kill Windows, but to bring someone in who is not an idiot who can only see Cupertino from the big chair, sell support for the legacy versions like XP while slowly transforming the company into a services as well as software house ala IBM. Instead we got full retard ahead and its gonna be bad, if all the OEMs dump them I could see MSFT being on life support in less than 6 years. After all the X720 isn't gonna be enough to keep a company that size afloat and with no OEMs that will be pretty much all they have.
But have you ever used one? They all really sucks ass, at least the ones I've tried. Walmart are giant asses when it comes to old prints, we tried to get a copy of a third grade photo of my late sis, they refused and said we would have to "get permission from the copyright holder"...uhh dumbasses? Yeah the photographer has been dead over 20 years so how EXACTLY am I supposed to do this? Have a fricking seance? No answer. Walgreen? "There is the machine in the corner, figure it out" was basically the attitude that I got, oh and the card reader only half the slots worked, the half that nobody ever uses because nothing uses those cards...niiice.
So yeah they have a shot if it has actual customer service and decent prices, I know plenty of people that would love to have better than inkjet prints of their family photos but like me have gotten turned off by the attitude of the only 2 in town, so why not? After all its not like its gonna make the company worse off than they already are.
Personally I'd support it, as long as they also brought Dubya up to the Hague to be tried for war crimes. But this is why you can't change a corrupted system by working within that system, because both sides are completely corrupt!
And I bet my last dollar you won't see the right going after a Dem for having his fly unzipped like they did with old Bill after they got a couple of their reps caught doing pages and rent boys, I'm sure they got the message loud and clear. basically if Nixon were elected today and pulled Watergate you'd see both sides rushing to defend him and Woodward and Bernstein would be out of a job, if they were lucky, if not they'd be in jail. Welcome to Amerika comrade, be sure not to question our dear leaders.
Ya know, I never understood why folks have a fit when Nvidia and AMD drop support, as you pointed out they are several years old now and simply can't do WDDM 1.2 which is required for all the features of Win 8. MSFT has always had legacy drivers built in so you probably won't need a driver at all for an Nvidia 7 or 8, and on the AMD side 2, 3, and 4, so what is there to complain about?
Hell my HD4850 has had support dropped for nearly a year but Win 7 and all my games run fine so why should I care? Its not like these cards are gonna magically have more performance squeezed out of them via software, all the bugs are pretty much worked out by now, so what good would new drivers do? Considering the fact you can buy an Nvidia 210 for like $20 that will run rings around the old 7 series if he really wants to run win 8 he'd be better off just getting a new card and if he is on XP-7 it should run just fine with the drivers he has.
The only place i could see it being a problem is Linux but until Torvalds joins the rest of the world and has a stable ABI so older drivers can work on the latest kernel its either the hacked together FOSS drivers or you're SOL. Neither Nvidia nor AMD will ever be able to fully open their drivers thanks to HDCP, AMD were able to give around 65% but that's it and with Nvidia you run a supported card or give it up. But you can't blame the GPU companies for that, when its no longer supported that's it and if the old drivers won't run tough luck, you can't expect them to pay a team of devs to support cards they aren't even selling anymore.
This is what is blowing my fucking mind...you have PC sales down 13% over the same 4th quarter year before last, even though the economy was worse which clearly indicates the reason that sales are plummeting is Win 8 is a DO NOT WANT. I can tell you as a little shop owner I've had people calling me up going "I don't like that funky new Windows, can you sell me a (insert desktop/laptop) with the old Windows?" so its even worse than Vista on the bomb scale. Then you have the Surface, which they spent over a billion and a half marketing mind you, selling less than a million units and in fact sales were so bad they called their supplier and halted production so the warehouse wouldn't be overflowing, what does that tell you?
It tells me that this is the WRONG MOVE, hell Ray Charles could see its the wrong move, but what does Ballmer do? He goes full retard and by doing so is pretty much putting the final nail in the coffin of the Windows X86 business, their largest fricking money maker! I mean do you think the OEMs are gonna put up with his price gouging, knowing that every dime they give MSFT is gonna be used to try to put them out of business? Oh hell no, they are probably talking to Google even as we speak to start ramping up ChromeTops and ChromeBooks!
I don't get it, I really really don't. sure MSFT wasn't making Apple money but they were still making billions of dollars with Windows, to just completely fucking destroy what Bill took nearly 30 years to build....and for what? NOBODY is gonna pay Apple money for a MSFT Laptop or desktop, they'll just buy an iMac or a Macbook Air! He is destroying the company for NOTHING, WinPhone has flopped twice, Win 8 is a megaflop, and they can't even sell enough Surface units to keep the product line rolling...WTF?
Never before in my 25+ years of tech have I ever seen a billion dollar company just up and commit suicide like that. I mean do you realize that just the past 7 years MSFT has blown something like 40 billion fricking dollars on failed ventures? 40 billion dollars! Now is NOT the time to do something stupid, the economy is bad, their competitors are firing on all cylinders, so they kill their relationship with the OEMs to become a more expensive Apple? Does ANYBODY think that will work?
What a fucking trainwreck, if the board doesn't get his fat stupid ass out of the big chair and do a 180 but quick they are gonna end up like RIM, with nothing but legacy business customers and even they will be looking for an exit.
Not to mention they ignore that there is more to a book than just the data, there is the feel, the texture, after trying a couple of e-readers i find reading a paperback is frankly more relaxing. something about those displays always seems to give me a little more strain than a good old fashioned paperback.
So i don't think the comparison to candle makers is very apt, after all the vast majority switched to electric light whereas I don't see the majority switch to e-readers, they just aren't as nice as curling up with a good book.
This is what always made me LMAO at these chuckleheads, they can't say what they really want which is "He's a nigger!" so they try to find another reason to get rid of him, even if that reason MAKES NO SENSE. The law could NOT be clearer on the fact, as long as the mother is an American who has not renounced her citizenship then the baby is an American PERIOD. If the father is of another country the baby can be of dual nationality but that does NOT change or remove his American citizenship in the process.
I mean its so fucking simple and fucking obvious why things are set up this way, otherwise pregnant women would be afraid to get on a boat or a plane because 'ZOMFG the kid wasn't born on American soil!". Now if you wanna argue that the laws need to be fixed, so that so called "anchor babies" don't count? I'd agree with you, no other country lets you just sneak a pregnant woman across their border and suddenly gives the kid of an illegal invader full citizenship and benefits, that would be stupid, but giving the child of an American citizenship isn't stupid, its common fucking sense, especially in a world where you can go across the planet in less than a week.
As for TFA? They couldn't lie to us any worse than our corporate owned MSM so I'm all for it, as we saw with Wikileaks all that matters to the MSM is US corporate and government interests. I didn't see a single news service say a fucking word about the revelation that Blackwater was selling kids as fuck toys to get better deals in both Kosovo and Afghanistan, all we heard was "Assange is a rapist pervert that should be shot for daring to post the truth!" so honestly they really can't tell us any more bullshit than we are already being fed. To quote the late Bill Hicks "Go back to sleep America, everything is fine, here is more stupid mind numbing television. Your leaders are in control and all is well, go back to sleeep"
Because when MSFT heard about it they were more than happy to jump on board, just as they jumped on board with palladium project for using the TPM chips for DRM. Remember MSFT has had a BIG problem with piracy the last several versions, there are versions out there of XP and Win 7 that WILL pass WGA even though they are pirated and MSFT knows this. For an example you can look up "Win 7 SP1 All Versions" on TPB, it uses a bootloader hack to bypass WGA by appearing to be an OEM install, short of a tech from MSFT setting down and going through the hard drive they won't find out that its pirated. in fact its so good that on first install a note from the pirates pops up that says "If you paid money for this you got ripped off" because even they know you can't tell the difference. This lets them kill piracy and fuck FOSS at the same time, a win/win as far as MSFT is concerned.
So this is just MSFT jumping on somebody else's bandwagon, something they've been doing since the beginning of the company. MSFT may not have anybody innovative at the company anymore but they got NO problem jumping on somebody else's bandwagon. Again look at palladium, that was all Intel but MSFT quickly jumped on board when they released they could sell it to the media companies as a way to stop piracy and make Windows THE streaming media OS. Again not what it was originally built for, Intel designed the TPM chip for the enterprise market to let you lock down laptops in case they got lost or stolen, MSFT just jumped on the wagon.
That still doesn't explain how in the fuck you get below zero movement, how can you move less than none? For those that haven't seen it I suggest the excellent PBS documentary "The search for absolute zero" which is easy enough to find on the web where the second half deals with nothing but the attempts to reach absolute zero. in that video the scientists explain quite plainly that the reason its so damned hard to get those last couple of degrees out of the system is because you ALL movement from the medium has to be removed, not a single atom can move because movement is energy and absolute zero is the absolute absence of ALL energy.
So sorry, still don't get it, its not like you can magically remove something from nothing. Absolute zero is absolute nothing, no energy left it the system at all, so how in the fuck are you gonna get less than nothing?
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Somebody needs to get with the last decade since MSFT made Kerberos the preferred authentication method waaaaay back in Win2K, so if you are still using NTLM for authentication after it has been depreciated for 13 years? I'd say you have bigger problems than NTLM being hacked.
Has anybody tried running these in compatibility mode? And if worse comes to worse billy you might want to look up "TinyXP" on TPB as it makes an excellent VM for older software, uses less than 65Mb of RAM on the desktop so it makes a perfect VM with low overhead for Windows software that won't run on Win 7 X64.
Like you I have Win 7 X64 but I'm gonna download it anyway as I can always slap it on a spare box or fire up a TinyXP VM. Thanks Adobe, damned nice of you.
The easiest way to get Paint.NET is NOT from the actual devs but from Ninite which is about as easy as you can get. Simply send 'em a link to Ninite, tell 'em which boxes to check, then run it, its THAT simple. Oh and no toolbars or crapware like what many companies push, just sane defaults and an icon dropped on the desktop. You can even use it as an updater as it will skip any software you choose that is already up to date.
But you don't destroy profitable businesses, this is business 101 and Ballmer is burning the place down around them in the hopes he can move into a nicer house that frankly isn't for sale. MSFT has NOTHING to offer on ARM because without X86 its pretty worthless, they are also screwed without the OEMs because that is hundreds of millions of low end desktops and laptops that are being sold with anytime upgrade ability and MS Office trials
I think MSFT is making the same mistake as the press, thinking "its a mobile world" when in reality nobody is getting rid of their PC for a smartphone, they are adding TO their PC with a smartphone. They could be making so much money off of this it isn't funny by selling the world on a "connected office/home" built around the PC where everything automagically syncs to it and is ready to go. Imagine your phone contacts automagically backing up to your PC just by walking into the room, or having your MS Office instantly sync between mobile and desktop so whatever you were working on is instantly on either device ready to go.
Again there is billions yet to be made in X86 but Ballmer is too damned stupid to see anything but Cupertino. he should take Job's own words to heart "Microsoft doesn't have to lose for Apple to win" and the reverse is also true but if they burn the company down and end up killing X86 Windows and MS Office on X86 in the process then they might as well close the doors and give the money back to the shareholders as its all over. hell put ME in charge of that company for 3 years and if I don't double the profits they don't owe me a dime, there is so many ways to monetize Windows without burning the customers but Ballmer is gonna kill the goose laying the golden eggs because swans are hip and trendy, except the swans don't want nothing to do with Ballmer's ugly ass.
I'm afraid its true, look up "Windows Blue" which is straight from Redmond, the goals are 1.- Yearly upgrades with software tied to you running the latest version, 2.- MSFT hardware designed to target the "high end experience" ala Apple, basically they are consigning the OEMs to the bottom tier only and are gonna gouge the fuck out of them so I have no doubt they are having meetings with Google as we speak, 3.- Everything tied to your account and an appstore, so you won't be doing squat that MSFT won't know about and get a cut of. Oh and of course ADS built right into the OS, 4.- A MSFT store in every big city selling MSFTPhones, MSFTLaptops and desktops, and MSFTTabs, again shamelessly ripping off Apple.
But "Lunix" as you put it won't save anybody, its a corpse and worthless for home users thanks to its horribly fragmented design model where the kernel devs don't listen to the driver devs who ignore the DE devs who don't give a fuck about the X-Server and Pulse devs, etc which is why its so easy to kill on update, its not an OS, its just a bunch of little programs that are SUPPOSED to work seamlessly together but reality shows that to be bullshit.
For awhile I had hopes Google would save us but just as I predicted "do no evil" was nothing but "think different" for FOSSies and with their browser redirects and locking the fuck out of Chromebooks they are turning out to be just as douchey as MSFT and Apple. I have a feeling that historians are gonna look back on the teen years as "the death of the open system, where all hardware was replaced by glorified game consoles" because its all about the lock in and controlling the unit after sale now, you watch in 5 years you'll have PCs with everything soldered to the board that you have to toss when you need more performance or the company stops supporting it because like that old GameCube in the closet it'll be worthless, with no upgrades nor software to run on it since "this appstore requires v 4.6 and you have v 3.4, please buy a new system" and that will be the end of that unit. Damned shame as powerful hardware has never been cheaper but hardware baked DRM means you'll never get to do anything with it except use it to hand the corp more money through an appstore.
While this is true, same as the most stolen car is the Camry because the parts are worth more than the car, you DO have to admit that its pretty funny that even a thief wouldn't touch Win 8 or Surface. Maybe they could turn that into a marketing slogan? "Afraid of data theft? Use Win 8, its so nasty even thieves won't take it!"
Uhhh...yeah, kinda knew that already as the EU space agency does all their launches from there. Still doesn't answer my question though, which is Space-X getting paid by the US government to build in the USA over using a more logical place such as Centre Spatial. After all as we saw with Solyndra it wouldn't be the first time the US gov cut a fat check to have something located here that didn't make any sense.
I think this article linked through TFA reviewing the WOA appstore sums it up nicely "But for now, x86 compatibility isn't just a check box: It's a doorway back to a land of sanity.". Kinda sad they are actually charging more than iPad for Surface when its quite obvious just from reading the reviews their appstore is completely broken and worthless.
BTW it may be a little petty of me, but since i called it months ago that the WOA and Win 8 appstore would be a trainwreck, since they couldn't make GFWL functional after years and a competitor that would be easy enough to copy they sure as hell wouldn't be able to pull off an appstore for a different arch so I'd like to say "I told you so" to those that doubted me and do the dance of smug superiority.
Actually the reason they locked it down was because "What does Apple do? Well do that and charge 20% more because we are better than them dammit!". If you want to know more look up the "Windows Blue" memo which makes it clear the ultimate goal of Win 8 and above is to have only MSFT approved software running on MSFT hardware sold at MSFT stores for MSFT profit margins and...well that's pretty much it.
Windows Blue shows any original thought left the company ages ago and now they are gonna try their favorite gag of using their position in one market to force their way into another, the old IE trick, only they just don't have the power of the monopoly anymore as people don't rush out to buy the latest version like they did during Win 9X.
Of course the bigger question of TFA is why, why would anybody care? WOA is a complete and total failure, they had to call the factory and cut their order in half to keep from having a warehouse full of surface units so what is the point? The hope that all these surface units will end up on Woot! for $99? I think with the Ballmernator's ego he'd bury them in a landfill in NM rather than admit its a flop, just as he counted every Vista downgrade as a Vista sale to pad the numbers.
Why would they even build it in the US, unless they are basically getting paid to do so? Hell there are plenty of South American countries closer to the equator that would let you have plenty of land dirt cheap and as we all know the closer to the equator you can get the cheaper the cost of getting into LEO.
Apple's iPhone is subsidized up the ass, I don't see MSFT subsidizing the Surface or WinPhone, not that it'd help as when they got AT&T to offer the WinPhone at $50 even after 4 billion in MSFT advertising they didn't sell shit.
The simple fact is you just don't kill a multibillion dollar business just for the opportunity to maybe get in on a better business, that is stupid and suicidal. If they were smart MSFT would spin off mobile so they could get out from under the Windows legacy, they could still sell them at MSFT stores and talk up about how nicely they integrate but you just don't blow up your warehouse in the hopes that you might get a shot at a better locale down the street.
And the biggest point that MSFT is missing is they are trying to push the customers into yearly upgrades when the simple fact is that PCs passed good enough several releases ago so if anything people are gonna be buying and upgrading LESS, not more. i mean 5 years ago my low end PCs were Phenom X3s and X4 with 4GB of RAM...what average user is gonna stress that unit? None, so they are simply keeping the PC they have and ADDING an iPhone or iPad. Does that mean they are getting rid of their PCs? Nope, just means it does what they want it to do so they see no reason to replace it.
It would be so easy to make money from that attitude but Ballmer is too fucking stupid, instead of trying to force a UI that nobody wants and upgrades that nobody cares about they should be selling services and support, let those companies that want to keep XP past 2014 pay a yearly service contract and sell all those home users on Win 7 new features by backporting the appstore. You could for example sell something similar to GoToMyPC leveraging MSFT servers to make logging into your home PC from work and vice versa trivial and easy, you could make deals with all the content providers to sell ala carte plug ins for WMC that would give you various channels like the networks, Hulu Free, etc and have it all integrated into WMC and automatically updated so you have the latest schedules.
There is so many ways to monetize Windows without slitting their throats or pissing off their customers it ain't even funny, yet because Ballmer can only see Cupertino from the big chair he's gonna cock the whole thing up.
That is fine for photos in your phone, not so much for older photographs you would like a copy of as most people don't have a good quality scanner at home.
Whatever happened to that company that was gonna make a luxury zeppelin? Sounds like a perfect fit to me, and I bet there is a lot of rich people that would pay to fly in style like that, the proposal I saw basically was like an airborne cruise liner which would be even nicer than first class on an airplane.
That was actually something I find fascinating about the cold war, how much blatant theft was going on between the superpowers. You had Israel having one of their spies sleep with an Arab Christian pilot for nearly 3 years, just to get their hands on the MiG-21 (Steal The Sky has a good if watered down account), you had the Soviets actually buying a dud Sidewinder that had gotten lodged in the wing of a Chinese MiG 17 and using it to make copies so good of Sidewinder that you could mix and match parts from their Atoll and our Sidewinder and it would work perfectly, and when my grandfather was stationed in West Germany in the 50s and 60s he said if the Soviets ever wanted to take out our forward bases all they would have to do is send a single plane with a nuke as they had orders DO NOT FIRE if they detected a single Soviet plane as we had spread the word through our spy networks behind the curtain that there was a large bounty for each new MiG or Sukov and they didn't want to risk possibly shooting down somebody trying to collect the reward.
Yeah I'd personally be scared shitless to take over any property that was built before the 80s, no telling what kind of toxic crap you'll end up with. We had several older factories set abandoned for years until the city finally tore them down, everybody was "Why destroy nice factories like that? surely somebody would be willing to buy if the price was right" and I told them about Superfund but they didn't believe me...until the guys wearing hazmat were tearing the buildings down because of the asbestos and toxic chemicals that had been in use and still contaminated the property.
People just don't realize how truly toxic many places were before the EPA started cracking down, in those old factories they found PHB and dioxin contamination and more asbestos than you would believe so I can only imagine what a place used to build fricking rockets from the 60s would be like, probably a toxic nightmare.
Yeah but if I like a book I can say "Here check this out" and they are cheap enough I don't have to worry about getting it back any time soon, they still haven't really worked the whole sharing thing out yet. Also the pricing structure sucks, I've seen too many books that were as high or even higher than the paperback which is just retarded, the digital don't cost shit to make or ship so why would I pay the same or higher than a hard copy? Steam is the only service that has gotten this right so far, their prices are usually 10%-25% lower on anything that isn't brand new and of course they have the crazy Steam sales to boot. I've just not been seeing that in e-books, the only thing I've seen that is even slightly appealing is it has allowed some of the horror and sci-fi writers to get their short story collections published.
So I'm sorry but while I think the e-reader was a good idea from an environmental standpoint I just don't think its gonna make any real dent in book sales. remember this is the SECOND wave of e-readers,l they had an e-reader craze in the run up to the dotbomb as well and again it was never able to carve out more than a small niche. if it were handled better, marketed aggressively, with really good prices on content? Yeah it could take some share but if its one thing we've learned from the *.A.A its that never underestimate the greed of publishers to cock things up.
Uhhh...because it IS a bad thing? We're talking BILLIONS of dollars worth of software that REQUIRES WIndows, niches that will NEVER be served by OSX and Linux, so yeah, MSFT slitting their own throats is a BAD thing. I think even most FOSS advocates would agree the problem isn't the average worker in Redmond, its the douchebag corporate attitude, if you fired the guys at the top and made it a more open company? Then I'm sure they'd have no problem with it.
Sadly that was what Ozzie and Allchin were doing, they made MSFT shared source and was working with more FOSS groups but then they saw Steve Ballmer's master plan, aka "We're just gonna be Apple, people will pay us crazy money instead" and saw the company was heading over a cliff and bailed.
So you should stop and really picture a world without Windows, first of all every place you interact with that has Windows software is gonna raise their prices about 40%, you like the idea of every place handing you a 40% higher bill? Well it'll happen, after all you are talking about billions in custom software that is gonna have to be tossed and rewritten for something else and they sure as fuck ain't gonna eat that cost, so they WILL pass it to YOU, and for a good decade its gonna be a fucking mess as previously stable software becomes alpha quality, again billions of dollars and hundreds of millions of programs down the drain, and of course about 25 years worth of legacy software will NOT be getting a rewrite since those companies don't exist anymore so you just pissed all THAT money down the drain too.
The smart move would be to NOT kill Windows, but to bring someone in who is not an idiot who can only see Cupertino from the big chair, sell support for the legacy versions like XP while slowly transforming the company into a services as well as software house ala IBM. Instead we got full retard ahead and its gonna be bad, if all the OEMs dump them I could see MSFT being on life support in less than 6 years. After all the X720 isn't gonna be enough to keep a company that size afloat and with no OEMs that will be pretty much all they have.
But have you ever used one? They all really sucks ass, at least the ones I've tried. Walmart are giant asses when it comes to old prints, we tried to get a copy of a third grade photo of my late sis, they refused and said we would have to "get permission from the copyright holder"...uhh dumbasses? Yeah the photographer has been dead over 20 years so how EXACTLY am I supposed to do this? Have a fricking seance? No answer. Walgreen? "There is the machine in the corner, figure it out" was basically the attitude that I got, oh and the card reader only half the slots worked, the half that nobody ever uses because nothing uses those cards...niiice.
So yeah they have a shot if it has actual customer service and decent prices, I know plenty of people that would love to have better than inkjet prints of their family photos but like me have gotten turned off by the attitude of the only 2 in town, so why not? After all its not like its gonna make the company worse off than they already are.
Personally I'd support it, as long as they also brought Dubya up to the Hague to be tried for war crimes. But this is why you can't change a corrupted system by working within that system, because both sides are completely corrupt!
And I bet my last dollar you won't see the right going after a Dem for having his fly unzipped like they did with old Bill after they got a couple of their reps caught doing pages and rent boys, I'm sure they got the message loud and clear. basically if Nixon were elected today and pulled Watergate you'd see both sides rushing to defend him and Woodward and Bernstein would be out of a job, if they were lucky, if not they'd be in jail. Welcome to Amerika comrade, be sure not to question our dear leaders.
Ya know, I never understood why folks have a fit when Nvidia and AMD drop support, as you pointed out they are several years old now and simply can't do WDDM 1.2 which is required for all the features of Win 8. MSFT has always had legacy drivers built in so you probably won't need a driver at all for an Nvidia 7 or 8, and on the AMD side 2, 3, and 4, so what is there to complain about?
Hell my HD4850 has had support dropped for nearly a year but Win 7 and all my games run fine so why should I care? Its not like these cards are gonna magically have more performance squeezed out of them via software, all the bugs are pretty much worked out by now, so what good would new drivers do? Considering the fact you can buy an Nvidia 210 for like $20 that will run rings around the old 7 series if he really wants to run win 8 he'd be better off just getting a new card and if he is on XP-7 it should run just fine with the drivers he has.
The only place i could see it being a problem is Linux but until Torvalds joins the rest of the world and has a stable ABI so older drivers can work on the latest kernel its either the hacked together FOSS drivers or you're SOL. Neither Nvidia nor AMD will ever be able to fully open their drivers thanks to HDCP, AMD were able to give around 65% but that's it and with Nvidia you run a supported card or give it up. But you can't blame the GPU companies for that, when its no longer supported that's it and if the old drivers won't run tough luck, you can't expect them to pay a team of devs to support cards they aren't even selling anymore.
This is what is blowing my fucking mind...you have PC sales down 13% over the same 4th quarter year before last, even though the economy was worse which clearly indicates the reason that sales are plummeting is Win 8 is a DO NOT WANT. I can tell you as a little shop owner I've had people calling me up going "I don't like that funky new Windows, can you sell me a (insert desktop/laptop) with the old Windows?" so its even worse than Vista on the bomb scale. Then you have the Surface, which they spent over a billion and a half marketing mind you, selling less than a million units and in fact sales were so bad they called their supplier and halted production so the warehouse wouldn't be overflowing, what does that tell you?
It tells me that this is the WRONG MOVE, hell Ray Charles could see its the wrong move, but what does Ballmer do? He goes full retard and by doing so is pretty much putting the final nail in the coffin of the Windows X86 business, their largest fricking money maker! I mean do you think the OEMs are gonna put up with his price gouging, knowing that every dime they give MSFT is gonna be used to try to put them out of business? Oh hell no, they are probably talking to Google even as we speak to start ramping up ChromeTops and ChromeBooks!
I don't get it, I really really don't. sure MSFT wasn't making Apple money but they were still making billions of dollars with Windows, to just completely fucking destroy what Bill took nearly 30 years to build....and for what? NOBODY is gonna pay Apple money for a MSFT Laptop or desktop, they'll just buy an iMac or a Macbook Air! He is destroying the company for NOTHING, WinPhone has flopped twice, Win 8 is a megaflop, and they can't even sell enough Surface units to keep the product line rolling...WTF?
Never before in my 25+ years of tech have I ever seen a billion dollar company just up and commit suicide like that. I mean do you realize that just the past 7 years MSFT has blown something like 40 billion fricking dollars on failed ventures? 40 billion dollars! Now is NOT the time to do something stupid, the economy is bad, their competitors are firing on all cylinders, so they kill their relationship with the OEMs to become a more expensive Apple? Does ANYBODY think that will work?
What a fucking trainwreck, if the board doesn't get his fat stupid ass out of the big chair and do a 180 but quick they are gonna end up like RIM, with nothing but legacy business customers and even they will be looking for an exit.
Not to mention they ignore that there is more to a book than just the data, there is the feel, the texture, after trying a couple of e-readers i find reading a paperback is frankly more relaxing. something about those displays always seems to give me a little more strain than a good old fashioned paperback.
So i don't think the comparison to candle makers is very apt, after all the vast majority switched to electric light whereas I don't see the majority switch to e-readers, they just aren't as nice as curling up with a good book.
This is what always made me LMAO at these chuckleheads, they can't say what they really want which is "He's a nigger!" so they try to find another reason to get rid of him, even if that reason MAKES NO SENSE. The law could NOT be clearer on the fact, as long as the mother is an American who has not renounced her citizenship then the baby is an American PERIOD. If the father is of another country the baby can be of dual nationality but that does NOT change or remove his American citizenship in the process.
I mean its so fucking simple and fucking obvious why things are set up this way, otherwise pregnant women would be afraid to get on a boat or a plane because 'ZOMFG the kid wasn't born on American soil!". Now if you wanna argue that the laws need to be fixed, so that so called "anchor babies" don't count? I'd agree with you, no other country lets you just sneak a pregnant woman across their border and suddenly gives the kid of an illegal invader full citizenship and benefits, that would be stupid, but giving the child of an American citizenship isn't stupid, its common fucking sense, especially in a world where you can go across the planet in less than a week.
As for TFA? They couldn't lie to us any worse than our corporate owned MSM so I'm all for it, as we saw with Wikileaks all that matters to the MSM is US corporate and government interests. I didn't see a single news service say a fucking word about the revelation that Blackwater was selling kids as fuck toys to get better deals in both Kosovo and Afghanistan, all we heard was "Assange is a rapist pervert that should be shot for daring to post the truth!" so honestly they really can't tell us any more bullshit than we are already being fed. To quote the late Bill Hicks "Go back to sleep America, everything is fine, here is more stupid mind numbing television. Your leaders are in control and all is well, go back to sleeep"
Because when MSFT heard about it they were more than happy to jump on board, just as they jumped on board with palladium project for using the TPM chips for DRM. Remember MSFT has had a BIG problem with piracy the last several versions, there are versions out there of XP and Win 7 that WILL pass WGA even though they are pirated and MSFT knows this. For an example you can look up "Win 7 SP1 All Versions" on TPB, it uses a bootloader hack to bypass WGA by appearing to be an OEM install, short of a tech from MSFT setting down and going through the hard drive they won't find out that its pirated. in fact its so good that on first install a note from the pirates pops up that says "If you paid money for this you got ripped off" because even they know you can't tell the difference. This lets them kill piracy and fuck FOSS at the same time, a win/win as far as MSFT is concerned.
So this is just MSFT jumping on somebody else's bandwagon, something they've been doing since the beginning of the company. MSFT may not have anybody innovative at the company anymore but they got NO problem jumping on somebody else's bandwagon. Again look at palladium, that was all Intel but MSFT quickly jumped on board when they released they could sell it to the media companies as a way to stop piracy and make Windows THE streaming media OS. Again not what it was originally built for, Intel designed the TPM chip for the enterprise market to let you lock down laptops in case they got lost or stolen, MSFT just jumped on the wagon.
That still doesn't explain how in the fuck you get below zero movement, how can you move less than none? For those that haven't seen it I suggest the excellent PBS documentary "The search for absolute zero" which is easy enough to find on the web where the second half deals with nothing but the attempts to reach absolute zero. in that video the scientists explain quite plainly that the reason its so damned hard to get those last couple of degrees out of the system is because you ALL movement from the medium has to be removed, not a single atom can move because movement is energy and absolute zero is the absolute absence of ALL energy.
So sorry, still don't get it, its not like you can magically remove something from nothing. Absolute zero is absolute nothing, no energy left it the system at all, so how in the fuck are you gonna get less than nothing?