TARP and the bailouts were started under BUSH not Obama, Obama just did what he was told just like Bush did. Oh don't get me wrong they can throw a little more scratch to their friends, see Cheney and the energy bill or how "green" tech was a codeword for cutting checks for Obama's buddies, but a good 90% of the actual policies are written at the fed from the likes of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and all the other old money banksters. There is a REASON why Goldman Sachs got 125% on the dollar when the housing bubble popped, its because they controlled the ones who write the checks and have since the fed was ramrodded into existence 100 years ago.
Personally I wouldn't use the one built into a laptop, they ALL suck ass when it comes to bandwidth. I use a little USB dual antenna unit for my customers, works great on desktops and laptops and gets better throughput than the frankly weak units they build into laptops. You have to remember laptops are all about cutting costs and one easy way to cut costs is to have weaker antennas and Wifi chips. Here is the unit I use and sell and I can tell you that unless an area is heavily congested i can usually get pretty close to the max their Internet can handle through one of these, and its small enough you can just slap it in a bookbag no problem.
Exactly, the 12 inch form factor is alive and well, its just nobody wants the shitty Atom CPU that Intel tried to give us nor do they want a teeny tiny keyboard like the 10 inchers had. I have a couple of customers that bought 10 inch Atom dual core netbooks and I have to say its just painful to use, the Atom feels slower than a Pentium 3 and everything just lags like mad.
The other reason you are seeing less netbooks is frankly AMD is having seriously supply issues, the AMD Bobcat chips are getting used more and more in full size laptops and with a limited supply there simply isn't enough to go around. I'm glad i got my EEE E350 netbook when i did because frankly less than 4 months after release you just couldn't find one, when you looked up E350 under Asus they had a half a dozen full size using the chip instead.
But in the end i think its gonna be MSFT that did the most to cock things up, its pretty common knowledge that Ballmer is currently shooting the company in the face trying to force Windows to be an "upscale" brand which will frankly never work and so to please Wall Street has been raising the price to the OEMs. Since the biggest selling point of netbooks like my EEE was an easy to carry notebook at a very affordable price (mine was just $350 with 8GB of RAM and Win 7 HP) the OEMs simply can't make the price point with MSFT assraping their wallets and so are switching to Android tablets and Chromebooks over the traditional netbook. Hell MSFT doesn't even have a Win 8 Basic do they? Last I looked all anybody had was Win 8 Pro which I'm sure MSFT is fucking the OEMs royally to get to fund Ballmer's going full retard with the Surface, WinPhone, and in 2013 the Microsoft desktops and laptops, yep you read that right, Microsoft is gonna make their own overpriced hardware, just like a certain fruit company.
So all those that hated MSFT rejoice! Your day has come! All hail Ballmer, the retard that will price Windows right out of the market and hand it on a silver platter to Android! All those that want netbooks will just buy an Android dual core tablet with BT keyboard case, those that need Windows (which will become fewer and fewer as Ballmer runs off all the customers with high prices) will buy a full size, and it will end with Apple owning the high, Google the low, and MSFT? Well look at RIM to see what a Ballmer future will lead to, nothing but legacy customers looking for an exit strategy. the netbook is alive and well, it just doesn't run on Windows or use X86, that's all.
Bimbo Newton Crosby, it all comes down to the neighbors. in areas where nobody else is running.N hardware? I've been able to get speeds for my customers on their wireless networks that were as fast as the cable could go, whereas in places where multiple people are using? They are lucky to get 200k in some places.
The problem is just too damned many people are jumping on the wireless bandwagon and even the ISPs have started handing out wireless routers (at least in my area) so the whole thing is just too crowded. I would say we need another channel but considering how much wireless spectrum goes for good luck with that, I'm shocked some company hasn't bought from the government one of the channels we already have.
Why Slashdot can't add a simple "are you sure?" is frankly beyond me, hell there are plenty of rinky dink sites that have an "are you sure' dialog box, surely it wouldn't be that hard to simply have the mod give a simple "yes/no" before applying their mod.
But anybody who thinks they can "fix" a corrupt system by working within that system needs to ask themselves one question...why haven't we had any major political investigations since Abscam? the closest we ever got was the repubs having a fit over Willy getting a BJ, yet we see all these frankly blatant bribes such as the one on the committee deciding what rules ISPs should have to follow leaving her post...to go work for Comcast after she railroaded a pro ISP rulebook through, why no investigations? Hell we had a president outright lie to the American people and give false statements that led us into a war! Yet there is NO investigations at all? Why?
The answer is simple, its because BOTH sides are as crooked as snakes! Both sides take insane amounts in money, gifts, and cushy lobbyist jobs when their term as a "servant of the people" is over so the whole thing is as kayfabe as pro wrestling, they pick topics to get the people riled up over ignorant shit and then they go to dinner together...paid for by a lobbyist of course. That is why bitching about who is president is a joke, it would be like wanting to hunt Ronald down to complain when you got a bad burger, the POTUS is now more of a figurehead than the British queen, the real power is the corps behind the throne writing the laws and controlling the money supply.
Feeling fine, and sadly what we have seen is a shitload of "passing the buck" between the distro makers and kernel maintainers which is why only a few seem to have their shit together enough to figure this out.
At the end of the day let me make this perfectly clear NOT HAVING SECUREBOOT IS A BAD IDEA because with modern chips being sooo fucking powerful AND having full VM capability frankly its getting easier and easier for blackhats to use a bootloader hack to just fucking lie to the OS or even dump the whole thing in a VM where no scanner, online or off, will ever touch it. Don't believe me? Go to TPB and download "Win 7 SP1 all versions" in your choice of 32bit or 64bit, its using a bootloader hack that lies to the OS and tells it that whatever board you have is actually an OEM board from the same maker, it'll even dump a nice wallpaper from the board OEM on the desktop on first boot. The OS passes WGA, no way to catch it since its loading before the OS and lying to the OS about the hardware underneath.
So yeah, Intel didn't just pull this out of their ass or as a favor to MSFT, its because they went to black hat and saw how it was becoming trivial to use their own VM tech built into the chips against them. With Secureboot its baked into the hardware so there isn't any way short of managing to rewrite the firmware on the board to bypass it and if they just allowed anybody to add their own keys then all the malware would have to do is "Would you like to win an iPod? just run this and click "yes" to enter" and the whole thing would be pointless.
Remember folks the weakest link has ALWAYS been PEBKAC and we have had 20 years to educate them and its obvious that is never gonna work. Why isn't anybody bitching about Google and the Chromebooks? With each release they are making it harder and harder to bypass the ChromeOS bootloader too because they know once the malware can bypass the bootloader that is it, they can pwn the whole system. if anybody doesn't like this they can blame the countries that allow hacking like eastern EU and Nigeria which have allowed malware to become a billion dollar business, Secureboot is simply a way to fight back.
Is there a way to display a facepalm that is so mega it covers an entire group? because if so i need to know how...sigh...let me break this down, okay? Intel is going to SOLDERED ON CHIPS so frankly? Too late. Also if you don't like UEFI? Then DO NOT BUY INTEL, its called voting with your wallet, is that REALLY so hard? Everyone forget that AMD embraced FOSS and was switching to Coreboot (probably have on the FM series but I'm still building Am3+ ) so again just DON'T BUY IT!
Lets cut the bullshit and get straight to the point, FOSS has become "you are free...to do things my way" and God fucking help you if you don't because Good Christ will the FOSSies squeal. You've never had it so damned good, Android everywhere, MSFT is in a downward spiral, its obvious desktops are gonna end up a "replace when it dies" kinda product like a washer or dryer yet is that enough? Nope because God fricking forbid that fucking electron Jesus Linus primadonna Torvalds should actually have to adopt a fricking sane release schedule, why how dare you interfere with the code pope!
Do NOT BUY IT, why is that SOOOO fucking hard to understand? hell for the first time in ages you can even buy plug PCs and netbooks and all kinds of shit that can't even fricking run Windows because its a completely different arch, so quit your damned whining already! Jesus what a bunch of self important entitled twerps.
I thought Slashdot was SUPPOSED to lean Libertarian? Now Libertarian means "as long as you agree to do it my way"? You have TWO companies, one went one way, one the other, if you don't like Intel's UEFI then either get the code pope to stop shitting out kernels every 5 damned minutes so the fricking things can get signed, which not one but TWO Linux distros have already done, or just stop buying Intel and go AMD instead. Frankly I shouldn't HAVE to spell this out, as long as there is a market then SOMEBODY will fill it. Considering how many years we have had FOSSies saying ARM was a legit platform well here ya go, switch to ARM where all your stuff runs and just get fricking over it.
"Well I believe the puppet on the left shares MY beliefs, well I believe the puppet on the right has MY interests at heart...hey wait a minute, there is one guy controlling both puppets!"...Bill Hicks. The man has been gone more than 20 years and its even more true now than it was back then.
I urge all of those who think "If only my party got control things would be better" to watch the truth about voting and ask yourself some simple questions like : How many decades have been people voting for less government intrusion? less war? Less handing out billions to third world thugs? hell how many years have we been complaining and voting about the horribly broken borders? the corruption? the influence of lobbyists?
At the end of the day you can NEVER change a corrupt system by working within that system, why? Well the answer is obvious, its corrupt! That would be like handing a petition to some corrupt police force demanding they stop taking bribes...why would they care what you think? Like pro wrestling its all kayfabe and thanks to the revolving door between the corps and government today's senator will be tomorrow's lobbyist so by voting him out all you are doing is giving him a pay raise while letting someone else get a shot at the money!
Actually I'd say they learned from the Japs, after all the Japs made the crazy Austrian look like a humanitarian when it came to human experiments. The worst part is unlike the Nazis we let most of the monsters left in Japan walk to get their data whereas with the Nazis we mainly went after the eggheads making rockets and jet engines, not the guys doing human testing.
as for TFA we tried that kind of stuff before, it was called a lobotomy, made the symptoms go away alright and left a broken doll in place of a human being. We are talking about obliterating the pleasure center of the brain so they will NEVER feel pleasure again, i bet a good 70%+ end up committing suicide in 5 years or less. Hell it would be more humane to just take them out back and treat them with a 45cal to the back of the head.
Which is why I just don't get why the FOSS zealots, or FOSSies as i call 'em, had such a shitfit over the surface...how many FOSSies were gonna be buying a fucking MSFT tablet? try NONE, so WTF was the point of bitching? It would be like me bitching about the looks of a Hummer...am I EVER gonna buy a Hummer? Not a chance in hell so why in the hell should I care?
Lets face reality okay? the surface is overpriced, underfeatured compared to the competition, and has practically no apps...so who gives a rat's ass if you can run Linux on it when you can buy an Android tablet for less than half the price with multiple cores and more features? hell even MSFT had to cut orders from the supplier in half because they can't move the damned thing, so bitching that an overpriced flop can't run a niche OS that the users of said niche OS would rather scratch their balls with a running chainsaw than give the company making the flop a dime MAKES NO DAMNED SENSE and is the biggest waste of fucking time and energy for no damned purpose I've seen in awhile.
Just let the fucking thing die already, along with the WinPhone and the "LULZ I Iz A Cellphone" disaster that is Win 8 and move the hell on already. Sheesh the FOSSie faction has never had it so good, Android devices are fricking everywhere and you can add whatever you want to the damned things, yet even after all these years they are STILL bitching about a company that frankly is becoming less relevant by the day thanks to the PHB at the helm. What's next, wanna bitch about how Commodore didn't do to suit ya either?
This is where you and I differ friend, for while I say there will always be a few bad apples frankly the amount of "support" someone on government help gets is so damned low in most places if there was a choice most would rather work. Ever see what somebody on disability gets in this country? in my state its $7800 a YEAR on average, would you be able to live in any way other than in grinding poverty on that little? I know the number because i have a relative trapped on disability, he could probably work but the meds that make him capable of working cost $110,000 a year (the same drug in mexico or Canada? $13k) so he's stuck in a catch-22 where he would like to work but if he does he can't have his meds and won't be able to work.
I believe as my grandfather, who was a card carrying socialist believed, that NO MAN should go without food in their belly, a roof over their head, clothes on their back, or access to medical help when they are sick. If they want more than what frankly should be considered universal human rights? Then he has to work, simple as that.
Of course the thing you miss in the whole debate is that capitalism, like communism and fascism and every other ism, is simply doomed, why? what is the basis for capitalism, the trading of labor for capital, correct? Well what are you gonna do when the majority of labor isn't needed because technology makes it worthless? I would argue that if the US government removed those handouts you rail against we would hit 60% unemployment within 3 years because frankly without the government making those service industry jobs viable they wouldn't exist. What in Mickey D's couldn't be done just as good or better by robots and assembly lines? Nothing, same with much of the jobs at Walmart and Wendy's and a billion other places. you can't make an entire country of rocket scientists and even if you magically could the simple fact is the world wouldn't need them anyway. So unless you support massive sterilizations and a police state to implement it the simple fact is there are people in this country right now being born that will NEVER have a job without government "make work" because their labor is just no longer required.
The machines don't get sick, don't ask for a living wage, never take breaks. you could wipe out half the population tomorrow, I'm talking the wholesale slaughter of half the people on this planet, and thanks to our technological advances not only would the quality of life not go down but it would raise the quality of life because the people left would have value again. So either you accept that the days of trading labor for capital or over and you pay the masses to sit at home or create "make work" jobs for them, or you deal with huge masses of starving peasants that outnumber you 10,000 to 1 and will be quite susceptible to any radical religion or belief system that comes along and promises them a better life, just look at Germany in the 30s which was once a thriving democracy until their economy collapsed.
You get 5 years on average with AMD, most GPUs frankly aren't gonna be switching more than 1 OS so that covers it. As for your particular chip download the Win 7 Driver packs, they have one specifically for mobile, or you can use compatibility mode to install a previous driver. I don't know how many drivers in the past few years I've had to use compatibility mode on, in fact I went with the Vista cap card drivers over the Win 7 ones because the cap card company removed some features in later drivers that i liked, works fine.
But you have to remember that when it comes to laptops that NOBODY supports the damned things more than a few months past release, hell my Asus EEE netbook is still running great after 3 years but Asus only released a single update to the BIOS and that was it, not a peep since. laptops are treated as one off throwaways, you're supposed to use whatever OS came with it until the unit dies and then get another one. Considering how many of the OEMs put little "tweaks" in the boards and hardware? Can't really blame all the chip makers from saying "Use what the OEMs give you" because they are just too big of a PITA to support. that is why I always advise my customers to buy the cheapest unit that will do the job they want and spend the rest on a powerful desktop, you can support the desktop for far longer and get more bang for the buck than you ever will from a laptop.
Doing a little research it appears you have the same chip that is used on a Toshiba Satellite, specifically the L505D-GS6000 model, so the drivers from that unit should work just fine on your unit. If worse comes to worse simply unzip the driver and rub Windows nose in the thing, that should get Windows to recognize the chip. But you have to remember that is nearly a 6 year old chip, in laptop years that thing might as well be from the 80s. Do I think that its right they do that? Nope but I DO understand the reason, people are a hell of a lot less likely to upgrade the OS on a laptop than they are a desktop and frankly not many upgrade the desktop so we are talking MAYBE 4% of the people on the planet ever bother to upgrade the OS on a laptop. With numbers that low a company that is resource limited like AMD just can't afford to keep backwards compatibility forever. My HD4850 is also out of support but its long enough in the tooth I'm getting ready to slap it in the spare parts bin and snatch an HD6850 so no harm no foul.
BTW what was wrong with the OS the netbook came with? Was it Vista?
Rootkits and the ability to use the built in VM capabilities of modern chips to put malware in a hypervisor? Might want to look up some of the recent black hats, "blue pill" would be a good place to start, where a researcher created malware that using the VM features of the chips made it pretty much impossible to detect or remove since while the OS thought it was running on the chip itself it was actually running on a VM.
People seem to act like its still the early 90s and most malware is just geeks being douchebags...nope, its a billion dollar business supported everything from spam and email scams to child porn. Yep you read that right, some scumbags are using malware as a way to make distributed stores for their child porn so they can sell access to these stores without risking getting caught with incriminating video on machines they own, sick shit.
And the part that pisses me off is there is NO REASON why Linux can't work perfectly fine in secureboot, all it will take is Torvalds and friends not scratching fucking itches every 3 damned minutes and instead have a more sane schedule, like say 1 kernel release every 2 years. that way they can simply get the kernel signed and the key added to secureboot and tada! You're done. Companies like red hat that don't shit out a new kernel every 10 minutes aren't gonna have a problem with this, but God fucking forbid that things in Linux not be so fucking bleeding edge that the CDs have stigmata, can't have that.
Here are the facts, 1.- You can get the kernel signed just like RH and SUSE to allow secureboot, 2.-If you want to be bleeding edge you can always turn it off, 3.-The ARM systems are subsidized by MSFT and are no different than an Apple product in that you can't run other OSes on them, who gives a shit as WinRT is a failwhale and there is so many multicore Android units you can do what the fuck you want to do on it ain't funny.
In the end its a tempest in a teacup, you can bypass if you don't want the feature, if you do quit shitting out new kernels every 10 minutes...what is so hard about that? Is Linux so damned rickety and unstable the whole ecosystem will fall apart if Torvalds can't shit out a new kernel every couple of months? After his little primadonna rant the other day I say Torvalds can either play by the rules or bypass secureboot and STFU, last thing the world needs is another entitled ass making things worse for the rest of us because God fucking forbid he might actually have to change the way HE does things..
And how long did it take to type that primadonna douchebag rant of his? The exact same amount of time it would have taken to be civil and simply answered the fucking question, THAT is how long.
Look I'm the first that will royally tear you a new asshole if you act like a fucking douchenozzle and deserve it, but reading the entire thread this guy clearly DID NOT deserve this bullshit. he has a very complex problem, with a LOT of drivers suffering an issue. he points out that these drivers WILL BREAK PULSE so his change didn't break Pulse, it was Pulse's locking behavior that causes the drivers to fail. Now if Torvalds wanted to say "This is why we do it this way" and the guy then kept harping? Fine and dandy, tear him a new asshole but that is not the case here, and frankly other than the error value one could make an argument supporting either Pulse or the driver developers and both would have merit.
At the end of the day it would have taken EXACTLY the same amount of time to simply say "You are wrong in this case, here is why" that it did to act like a 14 year old Halo player, Linus chose the latter and I don't give a fuck if you are the Pope or Joe nobody when you act like a prick you should be called out for it, NOBODY has the right to just be a douchebag just because of who they are.
If this article would have been identical but the name attached had been Gates or Ellison, do you think people would have rushed to defend it? if the answer is no then the ones defending this are nothing but fanbois, simple as that.
I did RTFA but they fucked up by splitting them, that would be like giving one slot to laptops and another to desktops, it made no fucking sense. the Lumia/Surface/Win 8 trio of fail was all under ONE umbrella and that was Ballmer's "high prices and cellphone UIs equal Apple"" delusion. All three were advertised by the same marketing groups, I don't know how many ads I saw pushing the three as a coherent strategy, lets face it it was three sides to the same die and that was the whole "We're hip now so buy our overpriced shite!" mantra.
And if that were me I probably would have told her the truth on the last day of the contract, no point in letting the poor thing get her hopes up only to end up sitting all alone like the ugly girl at the prom. I would tell people that were foolish enough to buy Vista "I'm sorry" with a tsk tsk and shake of my head, i knew that was a bomb from the beta, same as I knew after fighting Win 8 for a month and a half that the thing was gonna be a trainwreck. And who in the fuck thought people would want to buy a Windows that don't run X86 programs? That would be like saying "How do you like this new iPad copy? It doesn't actually run any programs, but it does look just like an iPad" well what fucking good is that? Did they honestly think people buy Windows because they LIKE the brand? That they get hard or moist from seeing the WinFlag? Talk about a fucking disconnect with reality.
But I do apologize, I should have made my position more clear as I don't think you can judge any of those as a separate device as its all part of Ballmer's "master plan" to have people using a WinPhone while playing with a WinTab and going home to their WinPC, if you look at their roadmap for next year you will see I'm right in this belief. after all they are gonna try to fuck all the OEMs so you'll have to go to a MSFT store where you'll have MSFTPhone with MSFTTab next to MSFTDesktop and MSFTLaptop thereby finally putting any last shreds of dignity or differences with Apple to rest, it'll be "Welcome to MSFTWorld!" with nothing but overpriced shite in stores that look like ghost towns, truly pathetic and this is coming from somebody that has sold and serviced Windows system since 3.x and even I'm looking at exit strategies.
Again another example of the "Ballmer disconnect", push products people don't want and prices they won't pay, push "buzzwords" like cloud and then make them completely undesirable with retarded prices and licensing schemas designed not to let the customer buy what they need but to wring every last cent out of every property, and then be SHOCKED! Shocked i tell you, when the stock tanks and the products go down in flames.
Mark my words fostware, if they don't give Ballmer's fat ass a good kicking the next 3 years are gonna make the past "lost decade" look like the release of Win95, he is practically destroying every business they have left in a foolish delusion that high prices = Apple market. they are fucking their OEMs who I have NO doubt are in talks with Google right now about what features they need the ChromeOS to have to push it over Windows, they are fucking the living hell out of SMBs and enterprise with crazy prices and trying to shove everything into SaaS so many of them will also be talking to Google about an exit strategy to get away from this mess, and they are fucking the consumer by trying to push overpriced shit the consumer doesn't want so Apple and Google will be taking a good chunk of THAT market as well.
Frankly not since RIM have I seen a company that had so much going for it stick a gun to its own head and kill itself so completely. Look up "Windows Blue" to see Ballmer's full retard roadmap for the next 5 years, hell they might as well have called it "See what Apple is doing? We're just gonna ape that but shitty and half baked" for all the good its gonna do. For fuck's sake MSFT give ME the job and I'll right the fucking ship in less than 3 years or you won't owe me a fucking dime!
For all of you that feel that way (and I personally agree) you might enjoy this rant by Jim Sterling at the Escapist that we have entered into this black is white land where while PCs are getting better, less DRM, cheaper prices, the consoles are getting worse as they seem to embrace the worst parts of PC gaming, long downloads, online passes and other crap,but without the lower prices, cheaper DLC, or in the case of Xbox free MP.
Sadly its not a shill, shills can at least be funny because they always end up slipping into marketing drone talking points like "synergy" and vertical integration" and all the other buzzword bingo terms that make marketdroids happy.
Nope what we have here is just another pathetic console fanboi, who has tied his entire identity into some piece of hardware that was made by a company that wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire, we've seen this same shit going back to "blast processing" vs "Mode 7" during the 16bit era. It was pathetic and sad then, its pathetic and sad now.
All that really matters is what the public at large says and I seriously doubt you'd find any Joe and Jane average that can tell jack shit when it comes to the X360 VS the PS3, same games, same looking graphics, this is why neither could take the market as its really 6 of one a half dozen of the other and neither could really top the other. the Cell was a bad idea that was hard to program for, the fan design on the X360 was a bad idea that gave us RRoD, again both equally suck and both equally look the same, which is seriously long in the tooth.
Frankly I'll be glad when both the X360 and the PS3 are gone, too long has the major game houses been sitting on new engines because they won't run on hardware that old and while the PC games of today still have a high wow factor i can't wait to see what comes out when the 2 major consoles aren't hamstringing game development.
But for those that haven't noticed you might want to look at the high UID accounts agreeing with the fanboi, all made close together today and the only posts they've had is to agree with the fanboi, between them and the anon sockpuppets its pretty sad actually, this loser has his ego so wrapped up in fanboyism that he had to make a chorus of puppets to say "Yes you are so right, the PS3 is better than $10k hookers" just to keep his little world from crashing down.
Your citations are very informative but I would just like to add one little thing, to those that keep talking about how many Wii units sold? How many of you know several people with Wii units gathering dust or sitting in the closets somewhere? Show of hands?
Because while I don't really have a horse in this race (been a PC gamer for over a decade now) I have a LOT of customers that do have consoles for gaming and talking to folks what i've found is the Wii tends to get bought for one or two big games and then gets shoved in a closet, never to be used again, while they have either an X360 or a PS3 for their actual gaming. This is also how its gone with my own family, with one nephew and 2 cousins all having wiis gathering dust while they play either PC games or one of the other consoles for their main gaming.
Uhhh...feel free to correct me if I'm wrong but I always got the impression the reason why Sony kept Japan while the X360 took the USA was that the Japanese have...well lets be honest, some seriously fucking WEIRD tastes when it comes to games and western developers don't really cater to all the dating sims and soap opera plots that seem to go big over there, its just a different culture.
Holding back the PS3 probably wouldn't have helped because it had two major design flaws that ultimately kept it from taking the same place of its sibling, I'm of course talking about the cell and the BD drive. The cell is notorious for being a serious PITA to get any kind of performance out of without being just incredible when it comes to programming, similar to the Itanium in that regard, and while IBM tried for a little while to get the cell in more devices (such as the cell based PCIe video conversion cards) it was simply too hard to program for and two expensive and it never took off. Nintendo and MSFT both stuck with the PPC which was well known and simpler to program for which meant more games and the cheaper price of the PPC also allowed them to get the MSRP down quicker.
Then came the Blu Ray...sigh. I can see what they were trying to do with it, but they should have known that the cost was just too damned high. they should have stuck with DVD and then went BD as an option down the line but the price of blue lasers kept the price of the PS3 noncompetitive for far too long and allowed their rivals to drop prices much quicker even as Sony bled money on the PS3. What is worse is frankly a LOT of the AV buffs simply bought PS3s for BD players and then never bothered with the gaming which made their numbers when it came to sell through even worse.
That said and before someone accuses me of being "for" somebody like MSFT and coming down on Sony? I think the PS4 is gonna be a pretty damned interesting design and I look forward to see how it is gonna change the landscape. After all for the first time in years you are gonna have a 4 way race, MSFT, Sony, Nintendo, and Valve, and 2 of the 4 at least are gonna be running X86, an AMD APU for the PS4 and if the rumors are correct an i3 and Nvidia card for Valve, so I'm looking forward to seeing how well the new X86 multicores work in this contest and if nothing else it should make games being ported to and from the PC easy peasy.
Really? I have over 100 in the field right now, not a single problem. if I was called into your place the first thing I'd do is see WTF the admin did when it comes to GPOs, as one thing that has been true for over a decade is that Windows has VERY powerful GPOs and if you just go in and start flipping shit without any thought to the ramifications of changes? Well you can totally break the OS.
This of course isn't saying anything bad about Windows, after all the Linux guys brag all day long about how powerful the CLI is even though it has zero mechanisms for stopping a bad admin from breaking the OS with a bad command, but its one of those things that you really do need to know WTF you are doing before you go mucking about. I have been called into businesses having similar problems in the past and it always traced back to some BOFH that locked down the system so damned tight half the software he installed didn't have the permissions required to run fully, then he'd put in some nasty AV like Norton or McCrappy and try to lock the fuck out of that too, and pretty soon you ended up with a mess.
In the right hands a hammer can be used as part of a toolkit to build a beautiful home, but if handed to a chimp that is then let loose in a bomb factory? you really shouldn't be surprised if shit blows up, just saying.
Oh the fun of laughing at the FOSSies, whose logic make the Mad Hatter look sane. I point out a cheap system and it MUST be FUD, I point out that both RHEL and SUSE require server contracts and it MUST be FUD, why anything that doesn't say "Nothing ever breaks and RMS' farts fix the ozone layer" MUST be FUD, because all you can do is guzzle koolaid.
Oh one thing I WILL point out I was wrong about, even a 4 year old chipset won't save you, see the post below you where someone who has the Radeon 3000 points out that its broken from Ubuntu 12.4 on with a "will not fix" label attached. So yet again i'm right, yet again you're crazy, yet again your "product" shits itself and dies, even on old hardware....why am I not even surprised anymore? Your product makes the Yugo look like a benz and the only one who gives a shit anymore are the crazies like yourself. Enjoy your 1% loonie, hell I'd rather taken the mess that is Win 8 over that trainwreck.
Well I've never cared for libertarians, it to me smells too much like the age of the robber barons and the raping of the commons, but no matter WHAT you believe the simple fact that with Paul people actually tried to work within the system to change the system and got completely shit upon should have made it clear that you can't change a corrupt system by working within the system.
And while I'm no fan of libertarians, in fact I lean more socialist than anything, I will be the first to point out truth when it is spoken and here is a great video on voting that speaks to the truth of the complete sham that is voting and I hope you watch it. After all as he points out in the video, how many decades have people been voting for a smaller government? for less war? For stopping the bribery and influence of money on our officials? yet nothing changes, the reason being the choices are made before you ever get to the polls, if anybody that doesn't toe the line like Paul manages to sneak in they WILL be crushed by the MSM and the officials in the party, the corrupt simply won't allow the non corrupt to stop their gravy train.
Thanks as you just PERFECTLY illustrated the problem with Ballmer's MSFT! Ballmer has it in his head that the ONLY difference between a Walmart brand and a Macy's brand is the price, while being completely fucking clueless that for a brand like Apple it literally took decades to build up the brand identity and get the products perceived the way the are. A perfect example of the "Ballmer Disconnect" is this little gem from earlier this year when it was announced they were pulling the plug on Windows Home Server "We have all those features in Windows SBS now so its not that we are leaving the market, I'm sure everyone will just switch to SBS"...hmmm...lets look at the numbers, shall we? Windows Home Server? $40, and that's OEM retail price, more like $25 to the OEMs themselves. Windows SBS? $400!!!! And that is for the OEMs!
This is why the Ballmer reign is gonna go down as a bigger disaster than the Pepsi guy at Apple, because while the Pepsi guy simply pout out too many similar products with price points all over the place Ballmer thinks he can slap a paintjob on a Pinto and it will magically compete with a Porsche. You see Windows 8 and Surface is NOT MADE FOR YOU the consumer, nope its made for WALL STREET, to please the stock jockies that love to see high prices as an indicator of a high end product. But that doesn't work if nobody buys the product and the consumer doesn't consider the brand worth the money, it would be like raising the price of coke to 1 million dollars for a 2 liter. Sure if they manage to sell one they make plenty of profits but when you look at the lost sales and the warehouses full of rapidly expiring products (because just like Cola PCs have a shelf life, nobody is gonna want to buy the old chips when the new chips come out, not without STEEP discounts) they end up losing their shirts. This is the exact same thing that Ballmer is doing and if you'll look at the last link he is going "full retard" by putting MSFT into the hardware business, selling grossly overpriced laptops and desktops as well...why? Well that what Apple does isn't it?
If your customers won't buy the product as it is jacking the price 50% isn't gonna make it more valuable, its gonna torpedo it. Instead of cutting the shit out of the prices so they could get people to use Metro and the new Windows design they jacked the living shit out of prices (higher than an iPad? Are you shitting me?) and he is gonna fucking kill the company. I think the only real hope MSFT has is if the board quits smoking weed and fires Ballmer's fat ass and brings in one of the old guard, since Gates won't come back I'd try to get Allchin or Ozzie, and have them LISTEN TO THE CONSUMER and put out products that people want, not what Wall Street wants to hear.
This is why I think Lumia, Surface and Win 8 deserve the top spot, as its a multi-billion dollar disaster that is a perfect illustration of Wall Street and Madison Avenue thinking over common sense.
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TARP and the bailouts were started under BUSH not Obama, Obama just did what he was told just like Bush did. Oh don't get me wrong they can throw a little more scratch to their friends, see Cheney and the energy bill or how "green" tech was a codeword for cutting checks for Obama's buddies, but a good 90% of the actual policies are written at the fed from the likes of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and all the other old money banksters. There is a REASON why Goldman Sachs got 125% on the dollar when the housing bubble popped, its because they controlled the ones who write the checks and have since the fed was ramrodded into existence 100 years ago.
Personally I wouldn't use the one built into a laptop, they ALL suck ass when it comes to bandwidth. I use a little USB dual antenna unit for my customers, works great on desktops and laptops and gets better throughput than the frankly weak units they build into laptops. You have to remember laptops are all about cutting costs and one easy way to cut costs is to have weaker antennas and Wifi chips. Here is the unit I use and sell and I can tell you that unless an area is heavily congested i can usually get pretty close to the max their Internet can handle through one of these, and its small enough you can just slap it in a bookbag no problem.
Exactly, the 12 inch form factor is alive and well, its just nobody wants the shitty Atom CPU that Intel tried to give us nor do they want a teeny tiny keyboard like the 10 inchers had. I have a couple of customers that bought 10 inch Atom dual core netbooks and I have to say its just painful to use, the Atom feels slower than a Pentium 3 and everything just lags like mad.
The other reason you are seeing less netbooks is frankly AMD is having seriously supply issues, the AMD Bobcat chips are getting used more and more in full size laptops and with a limited supply there simply isn't enough to go around. I'm glad i got my EEE E350 netbook when i did because frankly less than 4 months after release you just couldn't find one, when you looked up E350 under Asus they had a half a dozen full size using the chip instead.
But in the end i think its gonna be MSFT that did the most to cock things up, its pretty common knowledge that Ballmer is currently shooting the company in the face trying to force Windows to be an "upscale" brand which will frankly never work and so to please Wall Street has been raising the price to the OEMs. Since the biggest selling point of netbooks like my EEE was an easy to carry notebook at a very affordable price (mine was just $350 with 8GB of RAM and Win 7 HP) the OEMs simply can't make the price point with MSFT assraping their wallets and so are switching to Android tablets and Chromebooks over the traditional netbook. Hell MSFT doesn't even have a Win 8 Basic do they? Last I looked all anybody had was Win 8 Pro which I'm sure MSFT is fucking the OEMs royally to get to fund Ballmer's going full retard with the Surface, WinPhone, and in 2013 the Microsoft desktops and laptops, yep you read that right, Microsoft is gonna make their own overpriced hardware, just like a certain fruit company.
So all those that hated MSFT rejoice! Your day has come! All hail Ballmer, the retard that will price Windows right out of the market and hand it on a silver platter to Android! All those that want netbooks will just buy an Android dual core tablet with BT keyboard case, those that need Windows (which will become fewer and fewer as Ballmer runs off all the customers with high prices) will buy a full size, and it will end with Apple owning the high, Google the low, and MSFT? Well look at RIM to see what a Ballmer future will lead to, nothing but legacy customers looking for an exit strategy. the netbook is alive and well, it just doesn't run on Windows or use X86, that's all.
Bimbo Newton Crosby, it all comes down to the neighbors. in areas where nobody else is running .N hardware? I've been able to get speeds for my customers on their wireless networks that were as fast as the cable could go, whereas in places where multiple people are using? They are lucky to get 200k in some places.
The problem is just too damned many people are jumping on the wireless bandwagon and even the ISPs have started handing out wireless routers (at least in my area) so the whole thing is just too crowded. I would say we need another channel but considering how much wireless spectrum goes for good luck with that, I'm shocked some company hasn't bought from the government one of the channels we already have.
Why Slashdot can't add a simple "are you sure?" is frankly beyond me, hell there are plenty of rinky dink sites that have an "are you sure' dialog box, surely it wouldn't be that hard to simply have the mod give a simple "yes/no" before applying their mod.
But anybody who thinks they can "fix" a corrupt system by working within that system needs to ask themselves one question...why haven't we had any major political investigations since Abscam? the closest we ever got was the repubs having a fit over Willy getting a BJ, yet we see all these frankly blatant bribes such as the one on the committee deciding what rules ISPs should have to follow leaving her post...to go work for Comcast after she railroaded a pro ISP rulebook through, why no investigations? Hell we had a president outright lie to the American people and give false statements that led us into a war! Yet there is NO investigations at all? Why?
The answer is simple, its because BOTH sides are as crooked as snakes! Both sides take insane amounts in money, gifts, and cushy lobbyist jobs when their term as a "servant of the people" is over so the whole thing is as kayfabe as pro wrestling, they pick topics to get the people riled up over ignorant shit and then they go to dinner together...paid for by a lobbyist of course. That is why bitching about who is president is a joke, it would be like wanting to hunt Ronald down to complain when you got a bad burger, the POTUS is now more of a figurehead than the British queen, the real power is the corps behind the throne writing the laws and controlling the money supply.
Feeling fine, and sadly what we have seen is a shitload of "passing the buck" between the distro makers and kernel maintainers which is why only a few seem to have their shit together enough to figure this out.
At the end of the day let me make this perfectly clear NOT HAVING SECUREBOOT IS A BAD IDEA because with modern chips being sooo fucking powerful AND having full VM capability frankly its getting easier and easier for blackhats to use a bootloader hack to just fucking lie to the OS or even dump the whole thing in a VM where no scanner, online or off, will ever touch it. Don't believe me? Go to TPB and download "Win 7 SP1 all versions" in your choice of 32bit or 64bit, its using a bootloader hack that lies to the OS and tells it that whatever board you have is actually an OEM board from the same maker, it'll even dump a nice wallpaper from the board OEM on the desktop on first boot. The OS passes WGA, no way to catch it since its loading before the OS and lying to the OS about the hardware underneath.
So yeah, Intel didn't just pull this out of their ass or as a favor to MSFT, its because they went to black hat and saw how it was becoming trivial to use their own VM tech built into the chips against them. With Secureboot its baked into the hardware so there isn't any way short of managing to rewrite the firmware on the board to bypass it and if they just allowed anybody to add their own keys then all the malware would have to do is "Would you like to win an iPod? just run this and click "yes" to enter" and the whole thing would be pointless.
Remember folks the weakest link has ALWAYS been PEBKAC and we have had 20 years to educate them and its obvious that is never gonna work. Why isn't anybody bitching about Google and the Chromebooks? With each release they are making it harder and harder to bypass the ChromeOS bootloader too because they know once the malware can bypass the bootloader that is it, they can pwn the whole system. if anybody doesn't like this they can blame the countries that allow hacking like eastern EU and Nigeria which have allowed malware to become a billion dollar business, Secureboot is simply a way to fight back.
Is there a way to display a facepalm that is so mega it covers an entire group? because if so i need to know how...sigh...let me break this down, okay? Intel is going to SOLDERED ON CHIPS so frankly? Too late. Also if you don't like UEFI? Then DO NOT BUY INTEL, its called voting with your wallet, is that REALLY so hard? Everyone forget that AMD embraced FOSS and was switching to Coreboot (probably have on the FM series but I'm still building Am3+ ) so again just DON'T BUY IT!
Lets cut the bullshit and get straight to the point, FOSS has become "you are free...to do things my way" and God fucking help you if you don't because Good Christ will the FOSSies squeal. You've never had it so damned good, Android everywhere, MSFT is in a downward spiral, its obvious desktops are gonna end up a "replace when it dies" kinda product like a washer or dryer yet is that enough? Nope because God fricking forbid that fucking electron Jesus Linus primadonna Torvalds should actually have to adopt a fricking sane release schedule, why how dare you interfere with the code pope!
Do NOT BUY IT, why is that SOOOO fucking hard to understand? hell for the first time in ages you can even buy plug PCs and netbooks and all kinds of shit that can't even fricking run Windows because its a completely different arch, so quit your damned whining already! Jesus what a bunch of self important entitled twerps.
I thought Slashdot was SUPPOSED to lean Libertarian? Now Libertarian means "as long as you agree to do it my way"? You have TWO companies, one went one way, one the other, if you don't like Intel's UEFI then either get the code pope to stop shitting out kernels every 5 damned minutes so the fricking things can get signed, which not one but TWO Linux distros have already done, or just stop buying Intel and go AMD instead. Frankly I shouldn't HAVE to spell this out, as long as there is a market then SOMEBODY will fill it. Considering how many years we have had FOSSies saying ARM was a legit platform well here ya go, switch to ARM where all your stuff runs and just get fricking over it.
"Well I believe the puppet on the left shares MY beliefs, well I believe the puppet on the right has MY interests at heart...hey wait a minute, there is one guy controlling both puppets!"...Bill Hicks. The man has been gone more than 20 years and its even more true now than it was back then.
I urge all of those who think "If only my party got control things would be better" to watch the truth about voting and ask yourself some simple questions like : How many decades have been people voting for less government intrusion? less war? Less handing out billions to third world thugs? hell how many years have we been complaining and voting about the horribly broken borders? the corruption? the influence of lobbyists?
At the end of the day you can NEVER change a corrupt system by working within that system, why? Well the answer is obvious, its corrupt! That would be like handing a petition to some corrupt police force demanding they stop taking bribes...why would they care what you think? Like pro wrestling its all kayfabe and thanks to the revolving door between the corps and government today's senator will be tomorrow's lobbyist so by voting him out all you are doing is giving him a pay raise while letting someone else get a shot at the money!
Actually I'd say they learned from the Japs, after all the Japs made the crazy Austrian look like a humanitarian when it came to human experiments. The worst part is unlike the Nazis we let most of the monsters left in Japan walk to get their data whereas with the Nazis we mainly went after the eggheads making rockets and jet engines, not the guys doing human testing.
as for TFA we tried that kind of stuff before, it was called a lobotomy, made the symptoms go away alright and left a broken doll in place of a human being. We are talking about obliterating the pleasure center of the brain so they will NEVER feel pleasure again, i bet a good 70%+ end up committing suicide in 5 years or less. Hell it would be more humane to just take them out back and treat them with a 45cal to the back of the head.
Which is why I just don't get why the FOSS zealots, or FOSSies as i call 'em, had such a shitfit over the surface...how many FOSSies were gonna be buying a fucking MSFT tablet? try NONE, so WTF was the point of bitching? It would be like me bitching about the looks of a Hummer...am I EVER gonna buy a Hummer? Not a chance in hell so why in the hell should I care?
Lets face reality okay? the surface is overpriced, underfeatured compared to the competition, and has practically no apps...so who gives a rat's ass if you can run Linux on it when you can buy an Android tablet for less than half the price with multiple cores and more features? hell even MSFT had to cut orders from the supplier in half because they can't move the damned thing, so bitching that an overpriced flop can't run a niche OS that the users of said niche OS would rather scratch their balls with a running chainsaw than give the company making the flop a dime MAKES NO DAMNED SENSE and is the biggest waste of fucking time and energy for no damned purpose I've seen in awhile.
Just let the fucking thing die already, along with the WinPhone and the "LULZ I Iz A Cellphone" disaster that is Win 8 and move the hell on already. Sheesh the FOSSie faction has never had it so good, Android devices are fricking everywhere and you can add whatever you want to the damned things, yet even after all these years they are STILL bitching about a company that frankly is becoming less relevant by the day thanks to the PHB at the helm. What's next, wanna bitch about how Commodore didn't do to suit ya either?
This is where you and I differ friend, for while I say there will always be a few bad apples frankly the amount of "support" someone on government help gets is so damned low in most places if there was a choice most would rather work. Ever see what somebody on disability gets in this country? in my state its $7800 a YEAR on average, would you be able to live in any way other than in grinding poverty on that little? I know the number because i have a relative trapped on disability, he could probably work but the meds that make him capable of working cost $110,000 a year (the same drug in mexico or Canada? $13k) so he's stuck in a catch-22 where he would like to work but if he does he can't have his meds and won't be able to work.
I believe as my grandfather, who was a card carrying socialist believed, that NO MAN should go without food in their belly, a roof over their head, clothes on their back, or access to medical help when they are sick. If they want more than what frankly should be considered universal human rights? Then he has to work, simple as that.
Of course the thing you miss in the whole debate is that capitalism, like communism and fascism and every other ism, is simply doomed, why? what is the basis for capitalism, the trading of labor for capital, correct? Well what are you gonna do when the majority of labor isn't needed because technology makes it worthless? I would argue that if the US government removed those handouts you rail against we would hit 60% unemployment within 3 years because frankly without the government making those service industry jobs viable they wouldn't exist. What in Mickey D's couldn't be done just as good or better by robots and assembly lines? Nothing, same with much of the jobs at Walmart and Wendy's and a billion other places. you can't make an entire country of rocket scientists and even if you magically could the simple fact is the world wouldn't need them anyway. So unless you support massive sterilizations and a police state to implement it the simple fact is there are people in this country right now being born that will NEVER have a job without government "make work" because their labor is just no longer required.
The machines don't get sick, don't ask for a living wage, never take breaks. you could wipe out half the population tomorrow, I'm talking the wholesale slaughter of half the people on this planet, and thanks to our technological advances not only would the quality of life not go down but it would raise the quality of life because the people left would have value again. So either you accept that the days of trading labor for capital or over and you pay the masses to sit at home or create "make work" jobs for them, or you deal with huge masses of starving peasants that outnumber you 10,000 to 1 and will be quite susceptible to any radical religion or belief system that comes along and promises them a better life, just look at Germany in the 30s which was once a thriving democracy until their economy collapsed.
You get 5 years on average with AMD, most GPUs frankly aren't gonna be switching more than 1 OS so that covers it. As for your particular chip download the Win 7 Driver packs, they have one specifically for mobile, or you can use compatibility mode to install a previous driver. I don't know how many drivers in the past few years I've had to use compatibility mode on, in fact I went with the Vista cap card drivers over the Win 7 ones because the cap card company removed some features in later drivers that i liked, works fine.
But you have to remember that when it comes to laptops that NOBODY supports the damned things more than a few months past release, hell my Asus EEE netbook is still running great after 3 years but Asus only released a single update to the BIOS and that was it, not a peep since. laptops are treated as one off throwaways, you're supposed to use whatever OS came with it until the unit dies and then get another one. Considering how many of the OEMs put little "tweaks" in the boards and hardware? Can't really blame all the chip makers from saying "Use what the OEMs give you" because they are just too big of a PITA to support. that is why I always advise my customers to buy the cheapest unit that will do the job they want and spend the rest on a powerful desktop, you can support the desktop for far longer and get more bang for the buck than you ever will from a laptop.
Doing a little research it appears you have the same chip that is used on a Toshiba Satellite, specifically the L505D-GS6000 model, so the drivers from that unit should work just fine on your unit. If worse comes to worse simply unzip the driver and rub Windows nose in the thing, that should get Windows to recognize the chip. But you have to remember that is nearly a 6 year old chip, in laptop years that thing might as well be from the 80s. Do I think that its right they do that? Nope but I DO understand the reason, people are a hell of a lot less likely to upgrade the OS on a laptop than they are a desktop and frankly not many upgrade the desktop so we are talking MAYBE 4% of the people on the planet ever bother to upgrade the OS on a laptop. With numbers that low a company that is resource limited like AMD just can't afford to keep backwards compatibility forever. My HD4850 is also out of support but its long enough in the tooth I'm getting ready to slap it in the spare parts bin and snatch an HD6850 so no harm no foul.
BTW what was wrong with the OS the netbook came with? Was it Vista?
Rootkits and the ability to use the built in VM capabilities of modern chips to put malware in a hypervisor? Might want to look up some of the recent black hats, "blue pill" would be a good place to start, where a researcher created malware that using the VM features of the chips made it pretty much impossible to detect or remove since while the OS thought it was running on the chip itself it was actually running on a VM.
People seem to act like its still the early 90s and most malware is just geeks being douchebags...nope, its a billion dollar business supported everything from spam and email scams to child porn. Yep you read that right, some scumbags are using malware as a way to make distributed stores for their child porn so they can sell access to these stores without risking getting caught with incriminating video on machines they own, sick shit.
And the part that pisses me off is there is NO REASON why Linux can't work perfectly fine in secureboot, all it will take is Torvalds and friends not scratching fucking itches every 3 damned minutes and instead have a more sane schedule, like say 1 kernel release every 2 years. that way they can simply get the kernel signed and the key added to secureboot and tada! You're done. Companies like red hat that don't shit out a new kernel every 10 minutes aren't gonna have a problem with this, but God fucking forbid that things in Linux not be so fucking bleeding edge that the CDs have stigmata, can't have that.
Here are the facts, 1.- You can get the kernel signed just like RH and SUSE to allow secureboot, 2.-If you want to be bleeding edge you can always turn it off, 3.-The ARM systems are subsidized by MSFT and are no different than an Apple product in that you can't run other OSes on them, who gives a shit as WinRT is a failwhale and there is so many multicore Android units you can do what the fuck you want to do on it ain't funny.
In the end its a tempest in a teacup, you can bypass if you don't want the feature, if you do quit shitting out new kernels every 10 minutes...what is so hard about that? Is Linux so damned rickety and unstable the whole ecosystem will fall apart if Torvalds can't shit out a new kernel every couple of months? After his little primadonna rant the other day I say Torvalds can either play by the rules or bypass secureboot and STFU, last thing the world needs is another entitled ass making things worse for the rest of us because God fucking forbid he might actually have to change the way HE does things..
And how long did it take to type that primadonna douchebag rant of his? The exact same amount of time it would have taken to be civil and simply answered the fucking question, THAT is how long.
Look I'm the first that will royally tear you a new asshole if you act like a fucking douchenozzle and deserve it, but reading the entire thread this guy clearly DID NOT deserve this bullshit. he has a very complex problem, with a LOT of drivers suffering an issue. he points out that these drivers WILL BREAK PULSE so his change didn't break Pulse, it was Pulse's locking behavior that causes the drivers to fail. Now if Torvalds wanted to say "This is why we do it this way" and the guy then kept harping? Fine and dandy, tear him a new asshole but that is not the case here, and frankly other than the error value one could make an argument supporting either Pulse or the driver developers and both would have merit.
At the end of the day it would have taken EXACTLY the same amount of time to simply say "You are wrong in this case, here is why" that it did to act like a 14 year old Halo player, Linus chose the latter and I don't give a fuck if you are the Pope or Joe nobody when you act like a prick you should be called out for it, NOBODY has the right to just be a douchebag just because of who they are.
If this article would have been identical but the name attached had been Gates or Ellison, do you think people would have rushed to defend it? if the answer is no then the ones defending this are nothing but fanbois, simple as that.
I did RTFA but they fucked up by splitting them, that would be like giving one slot to laptops and another to desktops, it made no fucking sense. the Lumia/Surface/Win 8 trio of fail was all under ONE umbrella and that was Ballmer's "high prices and cellphone UIs equal Apple"" delusion. All three were advertised by the same marketing groups, I don't know how many ads I saw pushing the three as a coherent strategy, lets face it it was three sides to the same die and that was the whole "We're hip now so buy our overpriced shite!" mantra.
And if that were me I probably would have told her the truth on the last day of the contract, no point in letting the poor thing get her hopes up only to end up sitting all alone like the ugly girl at the prom. I would tell people that were foolish enough to buy Vista "I'm sorry" with a tsk tsk and shake of my head, i knew that was a bomb from the beta, same as I knew after fighting Win 8 for a month and a half that the thing was gonna be a trainwreck. And who in the fuck thought people would want to buy a Windows that don't run X86 programs? That would be like saying "How do you like this new iPad copy? It doesn't actually run any programs, but it does look just like an iPad" well what fucking good is that? Did they honestly think people buy Windows because they LIKE the brand? That they get hard or moist from seeing the WinFlag? Talk about a fucking disconnect with reality.
But I do apologize, I should have made my position more clear as I don't think you can judge any of those as a separate device as its all part of Ballmer's "master plan" to have people using a WinPhone while playing with a WinTab and going home to their WinPC, if you look at their roadmap for next year you will see I'm right in this belief. after all they are gonna try to fuck all the OEMs so you'll have to go to a MSFT store where you'll have MSFTPhone with MSFTTab next to MSFTDesktop and MSFTLaptop thereby finally putting any last shreds of dignity or differences with Apple to rest, it'll be "Welcome to MSFTWorld!" with nothing but overpriced shite in stores that look like ghost towns, truly pathetic and this is coming from somebody that has sold and serviced Windows system since 3.x and even I'm looking at exit strategies.
Again another example of the "Ballmer disconnect", push products people don't want and prices they won't pay, push "buzzwords" like cloud and then make them completely undesirable with retarded prices and licensing schemas designed not to let the customer buy what they need but to wring every last cent out of every property, and then be SHOCKED! Shocked i tell you, when the stock tanks and the products go down in flames.
Mark my words fostware, if they don't give Ballmer's fat ass a good kicking the next 3 years are gonna make the past "lost decade" look like the release of Win95, he is practically destroying every business they have left in a foolish delusion that high prices = Apple market. they are fucking their OEMs who I have NO doubt are in talks with Google right now about what features they need the ChromeOS to have to push it over Windows, they are fucking the living hell out of SMBs and enterprise with crazy prices and trying to shove everything into SaaS so many of them will also be talking to Google about an exit strategy to get away from this mess, and they are fucking the consumer by trying to push overpriced shit the consumer doesn't want so Apple and Google will be taking a good chunk of THAT market as well.
Frankly not since RIM have I seen a company that had so much going for it stick a gun to its own head and kill itself so completely. Look up "Windows Blue" to see Ballmer's full retard roadmap for the next 5 years, hell they might as well have called it "See what Apple is doing? We're just gonna ape that but shitty and half baked" for all the good its gonna do. For fuck's sake MSFT give ME the job and I'll right the fucking ship in less than 3 years or you won't owe me a fucking dime!
For all of you that feel that way (and I personally agree) you might enjoy this rant by Jim Sterling at the Escapist that we have entered into this black is white land where while PCs are getting better, less DRM, cheaper prices, the consoles are getting worse as they seem to embrace the worst parts of PC gaming, long downloads, online passes and other crap,but without the lower prices, cheaper DLC, or in the case of Xbox free MP.
Sadly its not a shill, shills can at least be funny because they always end up slipping into marketing drone talking points like "synergy" and vertical integration" and all the other buzzword bingo terms that make marketdroids happy.
Nope what we have here is just another pathetic console fanboi, who has tied his entire identity into some piece of hardware that was made by a company that wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire, we've seen this same shit going back to "blast processing" vs "Mode 7" during the 16bit era. It was pathetic and sad then, its pathetic and sad now.
All that really matters is what the public at large says and I seriously doubt you'd find any Joe and Jane average that can tell jack shit when it comes to the X360 VS the PS3, same games, same looking graphics, this is why neither could take the market as its really 6 of one a half dozen of the other and neither could really top the other. the Cell was a bad idea that was hard to program for, the fan design on the X360 was a bad idea that gave us RRoD, again both equally suck and both equally look the same, which is seriously long in the tooth.
Frankly I'll be glad when both the X360 and the PS3 are gone, too long has the major game houses been sitting on new engines because they won't run on hardware that old and while the PC games of today still have a high wow factor i can't wait to see what comes out when the 2 major consoles aren't hamstringing game development.
But for those that haven't noticed you might want to look at the high UID accounts agreeing with the fanboi, all made close together today and the only posts they've had is to agree with the fanboi, between them and the anon sockpuppets its pretty sad actually, this loser has his ego so wrapped up in fanboyism that he had to make a chorus of puppets to say "Yes you are so right, the PS3 is better than $10k hookers" just to keep his little world from crashing down.
Your citations are very informative but I would just like to add one little thing, to those that keep talking about how many Wii units sold? How many of you know several people with Wii units gathering dust or sitting in the closets somewhere? Show of hands?
Because while I don't really have a horse in this race (been a PC gamer for over a decade now) I have a LOT of customers that do have consoles for gaming and talking to folks what i've found is the Wii tends to get bought for one or two big games and then gets shoved in a closet, never to be used again, while they have either an X360 or a PS3 for their actual gaming. This is also how its gone with my own family, with one nephew and 2 cousins all having wiis gathering dust while they play either PC games or one of the other consoles for their main gaming.
Uhhh...feel free to correct me if I'm wrong but I always got the impression the reason why Sony kept Japan while the X360 took the USA was that the Japanese have...well lets be honest, some seriously fucking WEIRD tastes when it comes to games and western developers don't really cater to all the dating sims and soap opera plots that seem to go big over there, its just a different culture.
Holding back the PS3 probably wouldn't have helped because it had two major design flaws that ultimately kept it from taking the same place of its sibling, I'm of course talking about the cell and the BD drive. The cell is notorious for being a serious PITA to get any kind of performance out of without being just incredible when it comes to programming, similar to the Itanium in that regard, and while IBM tried for a little while to get the cell in more devices (such as the cell based PCIe video conversion cards) it was simply too hard to program for and two expensive and it never took off. Nintendo and MSFT both stuck with the PPC which was well known and simpler to program for which meant more games and the cheaper price of the PPC also allowed them to get the MSRP down quicker.
Then came the Blu Ray...sigh. I can see what they were trying to do with it, but they should have known that the cost was just too damned high. they should have stuck with DVD and then went BD as an option down the line but the price of blue lasers kept the price of the PS3 noncompetitive for far too long and allowed their rivals to drop prices much quicker even as Sony bled money on the PS3. What is worse is frankly a LOT of the AV buffs simply bought PS3s for BD players and then never bothered with the gaming which made their numbers when it came to sell through even worse.
That said and before someone accuses me of being "for" somebody like MSFT and coming down on Sony? I think the PS4 is gonna be a pretty damned interesting design and I look forward to see how it is gonna change the landscape. After all for the first time in years you are gonna have a 4 way race, MSFT, Sony, Nintendo, and Valve, and 2 of the 4 at least are gonna be running X86, an AMD APU for the PS4 and if the rumors are correct an i3 and Nvidia card for Valve, so I'm looking forward to seeing how well the new X86 multicores work in this contest and if nothing else it should make games being ported to and from the PC easy peasy.
Really? I have over 100 in the field right now, not a single problem. if I was called into your place the first thing I'd do is see WTF the admin did when it comes to GPOs, as one thing that has been true for over a decade is that Windows has VERY powerful GPOs and if you just go in and start flipping shit without any thought to the ramifications of changes? Well you can totally break the OS.
This of course isn't saying anything bad about Windows, after all the Linux guys brag all day long about how powerful the CLI is even though it has zero mechanisms for stopping a bad admin from breaking the OS with a bad command, but its one of those things that you really do need to know WTF you are doing before you go mucking about. I have been called into businesses having similar problems in the past and it always traced back to some BOFH that locked down the system so damned tight half the software he installed didn't have the permissions required to run fully, then he'd put in some nasty AV like Norton or McCrappy and try to lock the fuck out of that too, and pretty soon you ended up with a mess.
In the right hands a hammer can be used as part of a toolkit to build a beautiful home, but if handed to a chimp that is then let loose in a bomb factory? you really shouldn't be surprised if shit blows up, just saying.
Oh the fun of laughing at the FOSSies, whose logic make the Mad Hatter look sane. I point out a cheap system and it MUST be FUD, I point out that both RHEL and SUSE require server contracts and it MUST be FUD, why anything that doesn't say "Nothing ever breaks and RMS' farts fix the ozone layer" MUST be FUD, because all you can do is guzzle koolaid.
Oh one thing I WILL point out I was wrong about, even a 4 year old chipset won't save you, see the post below you where someone who has the Radeon 3000 points out that its broken from Ubuntu 12.4 on with a "will not fix" label attached. So yet again i'm right, yet again you're crazy, yet again your "product" shits itself and dies, even on old hardware....why am I not even surprised anymore? Your product makes the Yugo look like a benz and the only one who gives a shit anymore are the crazies like yourself. Enjoy your 1% loonie, hell I'd rather taken the mess that is Win 8 over that trainwreck.
Well I've never cared for libertarians, it to me smells too much like the age of the robber barons and the raping of the commons, but no matter WHAT you believe the simple fact that with Paul people actually tried to work within the system to change the system and got completely shit upon should have made it clear that you can't change a corrupt system by working within the system.
And while I'm no fan of libertarians, in fact I lean more socialist than anything, I will be the first to point out truth when it is spoken and here is a great video on voting that speaks to the truth of the complete sham that is voting and I hope you watch it. After all as he points out in the video, how many decades have people been voting for a smaller government? for less war? For stopping the bribery and influence of money on our officials? yet nothing changes, the reason being the choices are made before you ever get to the polls, if anybody that doesn't toe the line like Paul manages to sneak in they WILL be crushed by the MSM and the officials in the party, the corrupt simply won't allow the non corrupt to stop their gravy train.
Thanks as you just PERFECTLY illustrated the problem with Ballmer's MSFT! Ballmer has it in his head that the ONLY difference between a Walmart brand and a Macy's brand is the price, while being completely fucking clueless that for a brand like Apple it literally took decades to build up the brand identity and get the products perceived the way the are. A perfect example of the "Ballmer Disconnect" is this little gem from earlier this year when it was announced they were pulling the plug on Windows Home Server "We have all those features in Windows SBS now so its not that we are leaving the market, I'm sure everyone will just switch to SBS"...hmmm...lets look at the numbers, shall we? Windows Home Server? $40, and that's OEM retail price, more like $25 to the OEMs themselves. Windows SBS? $400!!!! And that is for the OEMs!
This is why the Ballmer reign is gonna go down as a bigger disaster than the Pepsi guy at Apple, because while the Pepsi guy simply pout out too many similar products with price points all over the place Ballmer thinks he can slap a paintjob on a Pinto and it will magically compete with a Porsche. You see Windows 8 and Surface is NOT MADE FOR YOU the consumer, nope its made for WALL STREET, to please the stock jockies that love to see high prices as an indicator of a high end product. But that doesn't work if nobody buys the product and the consumer doesn't consider the brand worth the money, it would be like raising the price of coke to 1 million dollars for a 2 liter. Sure if they manage to sell one they make plenty of profits but when you look at the lost sales and the warehouses full of rapidly expiring products (because just like Cola PCs have a shelf life, nobody is gonna want to buy the old chips when the new chips come out, not without STEEP discounts) they end up losing their shirts. This is the exact same thing that Ballmer is doing and if you'll look at the last link he is going "full retard" by putting MSFT into the hardware business, selling grossly overpriced laptops and desktops as well...why? Well that what Apple does isn't it?
If your customers won't buy the product as it is jacking the price 50% isn't gonna make it more valuable, its gonna torpedo it. Instead of cutting the shit out of the prices so they could get people to use Metro and the new Windows design they jacked the living shit out of prices (higher than an iPad? Are you shitting me?) and he is gonna fucking kill the company. I think the only real hope MSFT has is if the board quits smoking weed and fires Ballmer's fat ass and brings in one of the old guard, since Gates won't come back I'd try to get Allchin or Ozzie, and have them LISTEN TO THE CONSUMER and put out products that people want, not what Wall Street wants to hear.
This is why I think Lumia, Surface and Win 8 deserve the top spot, as its a multi-billion dollar disaster that is a perfect illustration of Wall Street and Madison Avenue thinking over common sense.